Fandom: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon: Sailor Stars (anime)
Date Finished:
Classification: Alternate Universe, Romance, Angst
Pairing: Seiya/Yaten, Taiki/Ami, Mamoru/Usagi, Haruka/Michiru  
Rating: NC-17

The Long Road
By Elsewhere
elsewherecw@shaw.ca

All other information in Part One.

Part Eight: Should’ve Listened

Glossary:
miko - priestess; shrine maiden

*****
No I don’t
Well no I don’t find faith in your forced feelings
Not fooled by your misleadings
Won’t buy this line you’re selling
Tired of this lie you’re telling
*****

They lay in bed together, tangled snugly under the covers. He was listening to her breathing, his fingers tracing absent-minded patterns over the still-bare skin of her back as he continued to consider his questions in silence. She had her eyes closed but he knew she wasn’t sleeping; she was still breathing a bit tensely, as though she was waiting, or listening.

His thoughts were kind of like a rat race, moving through an endless maze searching for some kind of reward at the end. He kept turning down different corridors whenever he found branches or was abruptly reminded of something from earlier, and that was how he finally stumbled on something that seemed significant.

"So, this guy Taiki…" he began, a soft, sleepy voice breaking through the stillness.

"Mm? What about him?" she asked, her own voice really soft, as though she too was on the edge of sleep but keeping herself awake for his sake.

"Do I…you know…know him? Or does he know me, I mean?" he said, his voice falling close to a whisper as he asked. For some reason the question made him a little nervous. He wasn’t sure what he had to be afraid of. Did he want the answer to be yes? No? Did he think she wouldn’t answer?

"Yes…" she murmured, and he glanced down when she tilted her chin up. He met her eyes and was surprised by the strong but unreadable emotion in her gaze. "You know Taiki. Very well, actually."

"Oh," he said, and then he fell quiet for a few moments. His hand absently rubbed against her arm while he tried to think of what to say.

"Well…can I see him sometime?" he asked finally, a bit hesitantly.

She let out a little sound, kind of like a chuckle but a bit too bitter to be laughter.

"Of course you can, Seiya…you’re a free person."

"Oh…yeah," he said, sheepishly.

They were both quiet for a long time after that---he wasn’t sure how long, but it felt like ages.

She was the one who spoke, finally, her voice a bit firmer than before, though still breathless with exhaustion.

"I had a cancellation tomorrow so I’m getting off work earlier than expected," she said matter-of-factly, and he turned to look down at her, blinking at the somewhat stony expression on her face. "I was thinking perhaps we could get started."

"Get started…?"

"Yes. On your memory," she clarified, glancing up at him.

"Oh…right," he said, quickly swallowing back the sense of fear that slid sickeningly up his throat. "What…what do you want to do?"

"I thought we would start at the beginning…or rather, one of many beginning points…and go on from there," she said evenly, turning onto her back and resting against his arm. She glanced over to him and lifted an eyebrow. "Unless of course you have a better idea. It’s not as though I’m an expert."

"Um…no," he said, resting his hand against his stomach, trying to calm the roiling that had started down there. "I think I’d better leave this in your hands."

"I appreciate the trust that takes, Seiya," she said quietly, her eyes fixed steadily on his face for a moment before she let out a long breath, then turned over onto her other side and seemed to settle in. After a few minutes he heard the slow, even sound of her breathing and knew she’d managed to fall asleep.

He, on the other hand…ended up staring at the ceiling for most of the night, unable to stop the fear that swelled and peaked in his mind and body at the thought of what tomorrow might bring.

*****

Words couldn’t describe the way he felt by the time he heard her quiet, familiar knock on his door that afternoon. He’d spent the day alternately sitting by the window and pacing the apartment, trying to keep himself from shaking, hardly able to eat or drink…basically falling apart. And the thought that this was just the beginning…that would send him into a whole new round of trembling.

She took one look at him and sighed, running a hand through her hair.

"Sorry," he muttered, his own hand in his hair, nervously running through the curls over and over.

"Never mind," she said, in that curt, somewhat annoyed way of hers, and then she reached up and snatched his hand away from his head. "And stop that."

She dragged him out the door by the hand she’d captured, barely giving him time to grab a jacket and close and lock his door. Out on the street, she still kept tugging him relentlessly along in her wake as though he was some kind of wayward kid that tended to get lost easily, and he was too shaky and uncertain just then to do anything about it. She finally let him go when they reached the nearest bus stop, and she stood there, hands in the pockets of her jacket, eyeing the cloudy grey sky doubtfully, her raised eyebrow seeming to challenge it to dare to rain on her. He stood as close to her as he dared, a bit hunched over, his eyes darting around self-consciously. He had the weirdest feeling that everyone was staring at him, at his exposed strangeness as he shook helplessly. It seemed like surely everyone could see his fear and nervousness, and that made him weak.

She must have heard the way he was starting to panic, his breath puffing out hard and fast into the high collar of his jacket. She turned and looked up at him, her big green eyes soft and calm, and held out one of her small, pale hands.

"Take it," she said, nodding down towards her hand, and he hesitated only briefly before he gripped her hand firmly in his, intertwining their fingers. She nodded again. "There. Now, listen to me. Breathe. Just breathe. You’re in no danger. You’re safe with me. You’re *safe*, Seiya. Just look at me, and believe me when I say you’re *safe*."

He held her eyes as she spoke to him, her voice low and soothing. By the time she’d finished speaking, the bus was pulling up beside them and his breathing was steady, matching her rhythm.

He followed her onto the bus and scrounged up enough change for himself---she didn’t seem to be feeling as generous today as she had been the day before---before he trailed after her towards the back of the bus. Sliding into the seat next to her felt so normal somehow, and it helped to calm him to be there, next to her, her warmth pressed against his side.

They had a long ride with a transfer in the middle, and after they’d gotten on the second bus and taken another seat in the back of the bus, she stared out the window and started to hum something just under her breath, so softly that he was sure nobody else but him could hear it. The melody was simple but for some reason it struck him as totally haunting; hearing it made his head hurt a bit, a kind of soft ache pressing against his mind. He rubbed at his temple and waited impatiently until the bus finally stopped in Juuban, dropping them off in front of some kind of shrine.

"This is a beginning point?" he asked, staring up at the ancient building before him. Of course he’d had no idea what to expect, but this…

"No," she said, and then she started to walk up the steps, hands in her pockets again, not looking back to see if he was following. He stopped just long enough to read the kanji on a stone near the entrance---Hikawa Jinja, it said---before he jogged to catch up with her.

"This is a stop-off point on the way," she said when he was finally walking beside her, and he didn’t respond to that, unsure of what to say.

They finally made it to the top of the long stone stairway and, while he stopped to look around, admiring the simple beauty of the temple, she walked forward. While he was peering around, he spotted a young woman, a shrine miko it looked like, just across the complex, cleaning the stones with a huge straw broom. The miko looked up, caught sight of her visitors, and put aside her broom, starting to walk towards Yaten. He decided he’d better catch up too.

He got there just in time to see Yaten reach boldly into the open booth on one side of the complex, the place where shrines like this usually sold charms and fortunes and stuff like that. His eyes widened as he watched Yaten snatch up a paper from one of the little shelves inside the booth and wriggle back down from the counter. He was pretty sure things like that were supposed to cost money. He glanced back to see if the miko would be mad, but she was just standing patiently by a big tree near the booth, waiting it seemed, with her arms crossed over her chest. When she caught his gaze, she smiled at him warmly, and he blinked before he hesitantly smiled back.

He followed Yaten up to the front of the temple and watched as she shook the thick red-and-white twined rope, listening to the dull sound of the bells. She somewhat curtly clapped and bowed before she checked the slip of paper she’d drawn. He realized as he watched the way her nose wrinkled that it was a fortune.

"How is it?" he asked.

She turned and gave him a genuinely pleasant smile, shrugging as though now that she had done the fortune she could relax. She waved the little paper in the air as though it didn’t matter.

"Absolutely terrible," she said bluntly, and then she laughed softly and walked over towards the tree where the miko was standing, waiting for them.

"Not a good fortune, I take it?" the miko asked. Her voice was pleasantly soft and rough. He watched as she offered out a hand and Yaten placed her fortune into it without qualm, turning her fate over to the miko, who turned and tied the fortune onto one of the branches of the massive tree, along with hundreds of others.

"I didn’t expect one, really," Yaten said with a soft chuckle, and the miko joined in. It became obvious in that moment, seeing the relaxed way Yaten interacted with the miko, that the two women were friends. He felt a little bit left out, watching them stand there and laugh together while he stood there like an idiot.

"Well, good luck anyway, Yaten-chan," the miko said, reaching out to pat Yaten’s arm. "It’s always good to see you…you should come more often!"

Then the miko turned and looked at him, her dark purple eyes warm, and he blinked in surprise.

"And you too, Seiya-kun…you’re looking well," she said, and then she bowed, excused herself, and walked back across the complex towards where she’d left her broom.

He waited until he thought she was out of earshot before he turned to Yaten.

"Who was that?" he whispered.

"Hino Rei-chan," Yaten said, and then she gestured forward. They started the walk back towards the bus stop, and this time he managed to keep her pace. "She’s been running this shrine ever since her grandfather died last year."

"Does she know me?" he asked, thinking of the casual way she had addressed him.

"Yes, she used to be quite a fan," Yaten said ambiguously, a hand flipping her bangs back away from her face.

"She didn’t seem surprised to see me…" he remarked, another thing he’d found odd about her casual form of address. As though she saw him every day. As though he wasn’t supposedly some great celebrity who had suffered some kind of accident and kind of disappeared off the face of the planet.

"Events in her life over the past few years have made it so that it’s difficult to surprise her anymore," Yaten said, a bit stiffly.

"Oh…" he said, trailing off. That seemed like a subject he didn’t want to touch. Well, not that he didn’t know that he wasn’t the only one on Earth who suffered hardships. But it didn’t seem like this shrine maiden’s personal life was something Yaten was very much into the idea of talking about just then.

She led him back to the bus stop, but they didn’t get on a bus. This time she called a cab, and when he heard the instructions she gave the cab driver, his eyes widened with shock. They were headed almost totally to the other side of Tokyo, and moreover to the total outskirts of the city, so far on the outside of the metropolis that residential areas and suburbs started becoming sparse grass and greenery. It was going to be a long, expensive drive.

He didn’t argue, though; he had some time before work and if he backed out now he would look like a coward. He felt like a coward, and that was bad enough.

His stomach was rumbling with hunger by the time they got there. She paid the cab driver a lot of money, telling him to wait for them. She added in something about how if the cab wasn’t there when they got back, she was going to hunt the guy down and…after that Seiya only caught something about high heels and the guy’s ass, and even that was enough to make him wince in sympathy. So the driver agreed to wait; apparently even if Yaten’s threats weren’t good enough, her money was.

"Here…have a snack," she said, tossing him a chocolate bar as she walked up to him. He’d been waiting for her, standing uneasily on the side of the road, staring at the wooded area they’d parked next to.

He stared at the chocolate bar in his hands and then up at her questioningly.

"You’re hungry, right? This might take a while, so eat something now. We’ll get dinner afterwards," she said, and then she started walking purposefully towards the woods. He quickly followed her, fumbling the wrapper off of the chocolate bar and stuffing it into his mouth as quickly as he could as he tried to keep up with her relentless pace. Losing her in these woods would really suck.

He wanted to speak up…to ask why they were so way the hell out here in a miniature forest on the edge of Tokyo, trekking through mud and bushes and pushing aside clinging branches as they made their way towards some unknown destination. But at the same time…he was afraid to ask. The farther they went, the more the whole thing came to feel kind of ominous, and he felt his breath speeding up again, that sense of panic from earlier returning. Where the hell was she taking him…?

Then she pushed aside some branches, trampled her way through a bush, and burst out into some kind of clearing. He followed her, relieved to finally be out of the trees---he was covered in dirt and he had little scratches on his hands from where he’d been pushing the branches away, but he wasn’t half as pissed about it as she looked---and stopped to look around. It was a wide, roughly circular clearing, probably about thirty metres radius, surrounded by the trees, creating a nice private, enclosed space. It probably would have been pretty if the day had been nicer, but as it was, everything was so grey---the sky was grey and threatening rain, and the grass and leaves and dirt were all varying shades of grey, their vivid colors lost to the approach of winter.

Or actually…a closer look showed that a surprising amount of the leaves seemed to be more permanently darkened---blackened, more precisely. Some of them looked burned. Instantly suspicious, he turned and looked around at the trees, seeking evidence, and noticed some scorch marks. Forest fire, maybe?

He turned to look at her, puzzled. Why had she brought him here? Nature lessons?

"Okay, so…what are we doing here?" he asked, voicing his doubt. "What does this have to do with me?"

Her green eyes flickered. Her lips curled up a bit, an ironic little smile, and she gestured to the area surrounding them.

"This is where it happened," she said, her tone completely even; brutally blunt. She glanced around. "This is where you lost your memory."

He gaped at her silently for a moment before he turned, staring at the clearing around him with a new fascination.

"You’re telling me this…is where it happened? The accident?"

"Yes," she said, and by the time he looked back to her, she’d adopted an interesting posture. Her arms were folded over her chest, and she had one hand up against her chin, with her pointer finger raised and lying against her lips. It was an expression that implied that she was watching, and observing…and expecting.

He had to take a moment to calm his breathing and his racing heart, his hands against his chest. He stared around him, eyes again flicking to the burn marks, the scorched leaves.

"Okay…so now what?" he asked breathlessly, glancing at her, waiting for her command.

She lifted an eyebrow, her lips curling again.
 
"You tell me," she said quietly, and when he blinked, she smiled a bit more gently. "This is about you, Seiya. I can’t hold your hand through every step of the process."

Ouch.

"But I don’t even know where to begin…" he said, lifting his hands helplessly, and she sighed.

"Look," she said, lifting a hand to again gesture to the surrounding area. "Hear. Smell. Touch. Taste, even. If you think of anything or if anything occurs to you, talk about it---to yourself, to me. If anything seems strange, remark on it. If anything doesn’t occur to you or doesn’t seem strange, remark on that too. If nothing at all happens, remark on that. Any feelings, any thoughts, *anything*, make a note of it."

He watched her, trying to make notes in his mind of her instructions and adopting a stricken look when she suddenly stared at him, her eyes hard.

"And that’s the last time I’ll tell you that, Seiya. We’re going to be going to a lot of places where you’re going to have to do these things…and I can’t be an influence to you. I can be here…I can be a listening ear, and I can help in some ways, but I have to try to keep from influencing you. You have to do this on your own when you can," she said, her face all stony again, as though it was something she really didn’t like saying.

He swallowed and nodded before he turned, his eyes falling to the grass and leaves and his feet. He bent to pick up one of the burnt leaves, holding it in his shaking palm and bringing it up to his nose for a cautious sniff. It smelled like a burnt leaf looked like it should smell; nothing more and nothing less. He let out a quick breath, still trying to calm his heart, and decided to walk around a bit. She stayed in one place, the same place she had remained since they’d arrived in the clearing, and watched him, her eyes never once revealing any sign of emotion or reaction.

He walked the perimeter, letting his hand rest on a few of the trees, letting himself touch. He kept his ears attuned to any sounds, listening to the rustling of the leaves in the light, chilly breeze. He was aware of the way his feet sank into the leaves on the ground, crunching them quietly, as he walked. He walked like that for ten minutes, and then fifteen, and still nothing odd occurred to him except for the burnt leaves and the few scorch marks on the trees. Well, he wasn’t the best logical thinker, but he was pretty sure that if you got stuck in a logic problem, it was best to go back to the last place where you’d found something and try again from there.

So he went back to the leaves. He crouched in the centre of the clearing and stared at the ground below him, willing something to occur to him, gathering some of the leaves into his hands, noticing the few that were blackened and that crumbled through his fingers into dust. Honestly, it really was like a fire had to have happened here, or some kind of disaster, for so many leaves to have been burned like that…and upon closer inspection, quite a few of them looked flattened, too.

Actually…a lot of them looked flattened. He turned on his heel, his eyes widened as he did a full swivel, staring at the leaves all around him. It wasn’t evident at first, because there was a fresh dusting of leaves from this year’s autumn, but looking past those leaves, almost all the leaves in the clearing looked as though they’d been pressed into the ground by some giant foot. The grass that poked out from beneath the leaves, too. But what could do that without affecting the nearby…

Hold that thought. He stopped where he was, midway through turning back around, when he spotted something odd about one of the trees on the outside of the clearing. It was one of the ones with a scorch mark, but that wasn’t the only strange thing about it. He stood up, dusted himself off, and approached the tree before crouching in front of it for a closer look. He was so stunned to see it up close that he reached out a hand to run along the trunk, confirming with this hand that what he was seeing wasn’t just some weird optical illusion.

Towards the base of the trunk, part of the tree had been caved in---or rather, it actually looked as though a large part of the tree had been scooped away totally cleanly, leaving the tree’s inner rings exposed to the air. The smoothness of the cut was totally impossible, but there was also no way it could be natural. It literally looked like a giant ice cream scoop had taken a piece out of the tree.

/Holy…/ he started to say to himself as he slowly turned around. Now he had an inkling of what he was looking for, and since it was already in his mind, he found it almost instantly. No longer caring about the state of his clothing or his skin, he crawled carelessly across the clearing to the other side until he was staring at the dirt at the base of one of the trees, his mind struggling to catch up with his hands as they felt around the shape of the dirt and grass. He sucked in a breath as he pulled his hands back, ignoring the mud under his fingernails, and turned around, on his knees, to look at the clearing, his eyes tracing its contours.

Shit.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed it offhandedly when he’d first walked into the place, of course. That the clearing was kind of shaped like a big bowl, that is. But it hadn’t occurred to him to take it as anything strange. Nature had created far stranger formations. But this was too much. For a radius of about thirty metres, just like he’d originally guessed, the area was totally *flattened*. Unlike the tree, however, the land didn’t look as though someone had taken a big scoop to it. It looked, instead, like someone had pressed a huge ball against it, so hard that it had caved in all the dirt and plants and parts of the surrounding vegetation in a perfect bowl shape. The shelf in the dirt, between where the bowl began and where it ended, changing into normal forest, was totally obvious.

Shit.

He got to his feet slowly, brushing his hands off on his jeans and trying to ignore the way his knees were shaking.

"Yaten…"

"Yes?" she said, in that same maddeningly calm voice.

"What happened here?" he asked her, wincing at the way his voice croaked uneasily.

She was silent for a moment, and then she took a breath.

"Why don’t you tell me your thoughts," she suggested quietly.

He stared at the ground, trying to will himself to stop shaking.

"Something big happened here," he told her, his voice trembling. "Something really big. The ground is totally caved in for a good thirty metres around us. I might not be the sanest person…but I’m not totally stupid. It would take a *major* impact to do this kind of thing. Like a meteor, or a bomb, or something. Something huge. And there was fire. Whatever this was…it was fast enough not to totally destroy this place, and it was hard enough to do this to the land…and it *did this*…"

He trailed off, staring at his hands before lifting them to his head, his eyes widening as he stared at the trees around him.

"…and you’re telling me I was here when this happened and all I came away with was *this*?" he finished between gritted teeth, one hand clutching the scar at the side of his head.

Again, she was silent for a long time, leaving him to shake by himself, his eyes closed and hands still clutching his head. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft, and a touch regretful.

"Not ‘only this’, Seiya. You’ve suffered greatly for what happened here…we all have," she said, and then he felt her hand on his arm and opened his eyes, surprised to see her standing next to him. He hadn’t heard her move. She smiled at him. "Come on…let’s go. That’s enough for today."

He stared at her.

"But…what has this accomplished?" he said, a hint of desperation in his voice. "How has this helped? I looked, I listened, I touched and smelled…I thought and I talked…but I didn’t remember anything! It didn’t *mean* anything to me, Yaten!"

His voice was growing louder with frustration by the time she touched his cheek, forcing him to look at her, and shook her head.

"That’s not how it works, Seiya," she said, clucking her tongue lightly. She gave him a little smile and then she tilted her head thoughtfully. "Think of it like…a jigsaw puzzle. When you start to build a jigsaw puzzle, at first it can be frustrating because you have all these pieces and individually they might kind of look interesting, but they won’t *really* make sense until you’ve finished the puzzle and the whole picture is put together. Each little piece of information you learn on this journey we’re going to take is like a puzzle piece…it’s important on its own, but it probably won’t mean much until you can start putting the pieces together into something more coherent and whole."

He stared at her for so long that she must have assumed that he didn’t understand her metaphor, because finally she sighed and rubbed her forehead before looping her arm through his.

"Look…you thought about things. That’s an important first step," she said shortly, and then she gestured forward. "Can we go now? I’m hungry, and you *do* still have work tonight."

Now that she mentioned it, he was really hungry too, and there was always the matter of work as well. And the truth was…the puzzle thing…really made sense. He could probably live with a puzzle.

Well…truthfully he hated jigsaw puzzles. He was way too impatient for them and always ended up giving up long before the coherent whole had formed itself. But…he was hoping that that wasn’t any kind of omen for the future of this particular project. And besides, this time he had her by his side, and he had the feeling she wasn’t going to let him give up any time soon.

*****

When he got home from work early that morning, he had a little box tucked under his arm. He walked into his apartment just as noisily as he usually did, and Gigantor greeted him just as noisily as he usually did, but he quieted down as soon as he noticed Yaten asleep on the couch. She’d probably been waiting up for him, although he couldn’t imagine why.

He gingerly sat down on the couch near her feet, where he could just barely fit onto the remaining part of the cushion, and cleared off some space on his coffee table before opening his little box. He was just starting to remove some pieces when she stirred and finally sat up sleepily, leaning over his shoulder to have a look.

"Whassat?" she murmured groggily.

"Jigsaw puzzle," he murmured back, as he spread a few pieces out on the table. He sifted through the box looking for some edge pieces to put out.

"Oh?" She sounded a bit more interested and she reached out to take the box’s lid, turning it over to see what the picture would be. He was kind of proud of that, actually, since he thought it was quite remarkably pretty for something he’d managed to pick out from the nearest hobby shop. It was a picture of the stars out in space, and right there in the middle of the puzzle were three shooting stars---big, bright comets. It was probably going to be nearly impossible to do, with all those little stars and all, but it was the puzzle that he wanted to have, so it was the one he took home.

He heard her take a breath, and felt her hand against his neck, rubbing lightly. He blinked, a little surprised by the gesture of intimacy outside of bed, but shrugged and accepted it.

"Wow…it’s…beautiful, Seiya," she said softly, and then she placed the lid aside and leaned over his shoulder again.

"Yeah. I’m sure it will be, when the picture’s finished," he said, deliberately implying something---a kind of promise, really---with his tone. He glanced at her, just in time to see her give him a warm, genuine smile.

"Yeah," she said, and then she leaned over to kiss his cheek. "I’m sure it will be, Seiya. I *know* it will be."

*****

END PART EIGHT