weialala leia; wallala leialala.
rust and stardust
sailor moon. ail/an. pg-13. 2200+
SO THIS IS A THING THAT HAPPENED. yes, sailor moon fic. yes, sailor moon fic about the alien filler arc, also known as DYNASTIC INCEST IN SPACE. i have no good excuse for this. it is a good thing you all are fond of me, isn't it.
When the children of the tree are laid open under the sword, you would think they would be full of light. Their veins are thin beneath the skin, green and pure. But when they are pierced, their blood turns rose-colored, too-bright, rusting in the air.
The children are born baptized in it.
Their births are bloodless, of course, grown like seeds inside their mother. Their mother does not survive long: she is killed by the next world on which they land. She steps outside and shrivels, lungs incinterated by an unfriendly atmosphere, body shriveling like a husk on the rock of the new planet. She yellows as she falls; she lightens, shrinks in on herself. When she is on the ground, she lies there like a leaf, curled and thin and empty. The children can walk and speak by then, can see.
They do not have a father: father is a word they learn later; their language has no analogue for such a role. Somewhere, in a memory that isn't theirs, their mother is pollinated and the male leaves her. And the female would have left her young, too, in the end. Her death disturbs the continuum: they have no time to meet her as an eventual enemy. It is a mad accident of fate that they are young enough to cry for her. But they do cry, and Ail buries his nose into his sister’s hair, its lush colors the turnabout mirror of his own. The hollow of her high, pointing cheek fits his, his sharp nose fitting against the curve next to her eye.
It is not their first death.
It will not be their last.
They watch their people slaughter themselves around them, huddling in the shadows of the tree.
An takes shelter among the old stories, poring in the cards over the bits and pieces of what they used to be. In the heart of the tree, they carry libraries the size of inferior planets: compact and delicate and stacked. They have planets catalogued in the cards, forgotten worlds in forgotten words inscribed in thousands of small pieces of bark made electric-sleek. There used to be poets, back when there was a planet. There were kings and queens and poets most of all, and their words bear the only echo of what came before. The language is rich, lush, strange; she does not understand them. Perhaps once, when she was younger, before she was concerned with the words. As she gets older, the feelings wrought in the glyphs become more and more foreign, inching further and further back into time: they are so reverent, so weighty, so solemn in their adoration.
Adoration: this is new. Adoration: this is ancient, borrowed.
She tests the concepts out on Ail that night, who lies back on a soft patch of moss, piping a slow song. The tree dropped a branch when he was younger; he has whittled the pipe over the years to fit his mouth, his fingers. It is a blessing. This too is a word she has learned from the cards.
An has no talent for music-she does not wish to learn, not while she has him-but she takes the pipe from his hands, rests her fingers in the matched hollows, lowers her mouth to the whistle shaped to his lips. It is cold with his breath, tastes clear and slightly tinny, like him. She blows a note, low, and he touches her in a place on her back that seems to correspond with it. A shiver for a song: she hands it back and watches him play, his eyes closing. This time she can feel the music humming over her skin, buzzing against his mouth and her neurons like a psychic accident. But there are no accidents.
“There used to be sacred things in our world,” she says.
He says, eyes still closed, “We are sacred.”
Two males and five females remain with them.
Three males and two females kill each other before they leave this world.
It does not take long. One night on a distant planet, a pale-blue world hulled with ice and skied in violet. A last quarrel. It cannot be called a battle; it is quiet in the end. Four bodies lie empty and broken on the ground. Then they are alone.
They are full-grown; they can transpose themselves in space, can rest in the air; they can fight and they can hide and they can take. They have everything in the world they need to survive. And they have each other, and that shall be enough; they whisper, wordlessly, into each other’s mouths, that this shall be enough.
They are not lonely.
They travel by light, by warmth. The tree sears through the sky toward any flicker of light, and they cling to its trunk, to each other’s hands.
They can transpose. Space is theirs, and they have each other. They do not fear; they have nothing to fear; there is no one here to betray them. So they are not lonely.
They are a thousand times less lonely than when they had more company, they would tell each other, if they chose to speak of such things. But they do not. They do not speak of such trivial things (such blood staining rosebright on the roots of the tree). Instead they name a thousand stars after each other and fall asleep, hand in hand. The tree sings its name to them as they sleep: makaiju, makaiju.
This is the first thing they learn call their own. By an accident of feelings, they call it mother.
By a trick of fate, their mother died before she could leave them, before she could return to them as adversary. By a trick, a lack of knowledge, they expect nourishment, comfort, somehow.
The tree thrums between them, around them, and finds them worlds. And they have a mother, and they have each other, and that is a family.
When all they have is each other, it is easy, too easy, to believe that they have come from something grand. There once were princes and princesses, after all; there once were kings and queens. As the last of their kind, the throne is theirs by default.
Even so, they do not ask the tree to make them crowns.
Space stretches around them. They are still children in the shadows, but now the shadows are wider than a thousand worlds, there is nothing but shadow, not a star to be seen in the velvet dark. Not a light, not a sigh: only the faint luminescence of the tree itself to guide them.
But they are not lonely, never lonely, never lonely at all.
There are monsters. Outside the span of the tree’s ineluctable light, there are monsters whenever, wherever they land.
At first they hide. Then, slowly, they stop. Increment by increment, they creep out of the tree’s shadow, they brave each new land. They measure distances, little ones, parceled out of their bravery.
Some of them are deserted. But more often and not, the monsters are as inevitable as the ground on which they walk, as the starred light by which they travel, as themselves.
The first time a creature bites Ail-sharp teeth breaking the skin of his arm-An leaps in its path; she has nothing, nothing in her hands, no knowledge of what to do, but she cracks her palm hard down against its nose and the thing roars and limps into a retreat. It is a peaceful world but for them, this one: forest, undisturbed, thick vines as orange as the sun looping over their heads. They could stay here, she thinks, were it not for the things that bite and the vines too thick to levitate into. Instead-she is shaking-she makes them leave that night. He languishes under the tree, which drops energy into the wound, and her own arm hangs sore and useless at her side until he is healed. The last of his blood falls into a rusted-rose puddle on the roots of the tree, which sucks it up like an exchange. She is glad: they do not have to look at it for long.
The next world is empty, air whistling across its flat planes, snow falling in sick yellow clumps; the land roils where they land and the tree shudders, roots dancing madly until they bid it back into space. Whole lonely worlds are not meant for them.
The third world is curved hollows of stone, blue basins in the ground and red mountains stretching to the sky, and creatures like lions carved out of the rock snarling and prowling around their perimeter of light.
An steps out first, brave. Her feet land heavily on the stone for a moment, before she levitates. The footstep echoes, and the monsters come
They are leonine but somehow rocklike as the world, as if carven from it; their fur is pale and their flesh is bright and vivid beneath. One of the creatures leaps at her, and she lashes out. She should skyrocket away. It is a choice that she doesn’t. A choice that leaves this creature not cowed, its mouth peeling back over rows of sharp teeth, digging into her neck before she has time to fly out of its grip.
Ail cries out and the creature raises its head, giving her time and space to push off into the air. She is bleeding; she can taste it on her lips, and her brother flies in, wraps his arms around her, cradles her. The world swings in and out of focus. She lays her head on his shoulder, against the crook of his arm, as they move back in toward the tree.
She lies down on the mossy tangle of its roots, tipping back her bleeding neck and shoulder. The flesh tears and she winces, and the tree shudders against her. Over her head it opens a flower for her, dripping energy bright as captured light. It sears through her veins; she can feel her skin slowly knitting up beneath it. Her throat tips back, sighing, and her eyes close.
Eventually Ail lets go of her hand.
Through her half-cracked eyelids, she can see the creatures prowling along the perimeter. Next to her, hip adjunct to her lolling head, her brother crosses his legs and begins to pipe, slowly and softly. Even prone, she feels herself moving imperceptibly with it, body pulled along a thousand musical strings. And the prowling creatures outside the tree’s ring of light settle.
She has an idea.
“Ail-”
Too quick, too quick, she is dizzy and he reaches out to cup her chin. Her vision steadies with his hand on her face, long fingers webbing against her cheek.
“Ail,” she says, voice catching on air. She slips into his mind, the hot solitary electric current between them. What if we take them?
She waves her hand, hazy, toward the perimeter.
His mind is quizzical.
For protection.
His thoughts question; she composes her own. While she is silent, momentarily, thinking of words, he lowers his lips to his pipe again. He blows a note; the air seems to shiver around it. She lays a finger to his lips.
Look.
Outside the perimeter, the air is thrumming; the monsters stand, hypnotized into peace, at the perimeter.
Just like that.
What to do with them?
The same thing that their kind has always done, the same way they have taken stories, the same way they have taken planets.
She watches the monsters, draws them carefully on a card-in the bark of the tree, in the ink of its flowering heart. Her brother pipes them into peace, and she catalogues them in the blood and skin of their mother, the tree.
She calls it in the old language with a tongue that is rusty with it. But makaiju understands; makaiju takes her will in hand.
For a moment, she isn’t sure if it has worked-she holds her tongue inside her head and out, stares at her brother with wondering, beseeching eyes-and then the creature’s mouth splits its savage face, and it howls a sound in something like a language, something like a word, something she will keep. Light flashes, and the bark burns white in her hands.
And then there is one less monster in the world, and one more addition to the sleek catalogue of their immortal library; they have one more thing to call their own.
We’ll take them, her brother promises her, silently, we’ll take them all. Anything against us.
That night they take each other, hovering in the cold, silent air of the new world. The light of the tree burns behind them; the electric energy of it makes their veins sing from the inside out. When she puts her ear to his skin, she thinks she can hear it singing to her and her alone: her blood in harmony with his.
“Next time, let’s find somewhere civilized,” she says. “Somewhere full.”
Her voice is greedy; her eyes are beseeching. Let us not be alone in the universe, she thinks, almost like prayer, and he cups her hands in his own.
They never shall be.
Not as long as they have each other.
They shall never be lonely; they are king and queen of the vast, tetherless black kingdom around them.
The starlight crowns them as they set off, into the timeless dark.
sailor moon. ail/an. pg-13. 2200+
SO THIS IS A THING THAT HAPPENED. yes, sailor moon fic. yes, sailor moon fic about the alien filler arc, also known as DYNASTIC INCEST IN SPACE. i have no good excuse for this. it is a good thing you all are fond of me, isn't it.
When the children of the tree are laid open under the sword, you would think they would be full of light. Their veins are thin beneath the skin, green and pure. But when they are pierced, their blood turns rose-colored, too-bright, rusting in the air.
The children are born baptized in it.
Their births are bloodless, of course, grown like seeds inside their mother. Their mother does not survive long: she is killed by the next world on which they land. She steps outside and shrivels, lungs incinterated by an unfriendly atmosphere, body shriveling like a husk on the rock of the new planet. She yellows as she falls; she lightens, shrinks in on herself. When she is on the ground, she lies there like a leaf, curled and thin and empty. The children can walk and speak by then, can see.
They do not have a father: father is a word they learn later; their language has no analogue for such a role. Somewhere, in a memory that isn't theirs, their mother is pollinated and the male leaves her. And the female would have left her young, too, in the end. Her death disturbs the continuum: they have no time to meet her as an eventual enemy. It is a mad accident of fate that they are young enough to cry for her. But they do cry, and Ail buries his nose into his sister’s hair, its lush colors the turnabout mirror of his own. The hollow of her high, pointing cheek fits his, his sharp nose fitting against the curve next to her eye.
It is not their first death.
It will not be their last.
They watch their people slaughter themselves around them, huddling in the shadows of the tree.
An takes shelter among the old stories, poring in the cards over the bits and pieces of what they used to be. In the heart of the tree, they carry libraries the size of inferior planets: compact and delicate and stacked. They have planets catalogued in the cards, forgotten worlds in forgotten words inscribed in thousands of small pieces of bark made electric-sleek. There used to be poets, back when there was a planet. There were kings and queens and poets most of all, and their words bear the only echo of what came before. The language is rich, lush, strange; she does not understand them. Perhaps once, when she was younger, before she was concerned with the words. As she gets older, the feelings wrought in the glyphs become more and more foreign, inching further and further back into time: they are so reverent, so weighty, so solemn in their adoration.
Adoration: this is new. Adoration: this is ancient, borrowed.
She tests the concepts out on Ail that night, who lies back on a soft patch of moss, piping a slow song. The tree dropped a branch when he was younger; he has whittled the pipe over the years to fit his mouth, his fingers. It is a blessing. This too is a word she has learned from the cards.
An has no talent for music-she does not wish to learn, not while she has him-but she takes the pipe from his hands, rests her fingers in the matched hollows, lowers her mouth to the whistle shaped to his lips. It is cold with his breath, tastes clear and slightly tinny, like him. She blows a note, low, and he touches her in a place on her back that seems to correspond with it. A shiver for a song: she hands it back and watches him play, his eyes closing. This time she can feel the music humming over her skin, buzzing against his mouth and her neurons like a psychic accident. But there are no accidents.
“There used to be sacred things in our world,” she says.
He says, eyes still closed, “We are sacred.”
Two males and five females remain with them.
Three males and two females kill each other before they leave this world.
It does not take long. One night on a distant planet, a pale-blue world hulled with ice and skied in violet. A last quarrel. It cannot be called a battle; it is quiet in the end. Four bodies lie empty and broken on the ground. Then they are alone.
They are full-grown; they can transpose themselves in space, can rest in the air; they can fight and they can hide and they can take. They have everything in the world they need to survive. And they have each other, and that shall be enough; they whisper, wordlessly, into each other’s mouths, that this shall be enough.
They are not lonely.
They travel by light, by warmth. The tree sears through the sky toward any flicker of light, and they cling to its trunk, to each other’s hands.
They can transpose. Space is theirs, and they have each other. They do not fear; they have nothing to fear; there is no one here to betray them. So they are not lonely.
They are a thousand times less lonely than when they had more company, they would tell each other, if they chose to speak of such things. But they do not. They do not speak of such trivial things (such blood staining rosebright on the roots of the tree). Instead they name a thousand stars after each other and fall asleep, hand in hand. The tree sings its name to them as they sleep: makaiju, makaiju.
This is the first thing they learn call their own. By an accident of feelings, they call it mother.
By a trick of fate, their mother died before she could leave them, before she could return to them as adversary. By a trick, a lack of knowledge, they expect nourishment, comfort, somehow.
The tree thrums between them, around them, and finds them worlds. And they have a mother, and they have each other, and that is a family.
When all they have is each other, it is easy, too easy, to believe that they have come from something grand. There once were princes and princesses, after all; there once were kings and queens. As the last of their kind, the throne is theirs by default.
Even so, they do not ask the tree to make them crowns.
Space stretches around them. They are still children in the shadows, but now the shadows are wider than a thousand worlds, there is nothing but shadow, not a star to be seen in the velvet dark. Not a light, not a sigh: only the faint luminescence of the tree itself to guide them.
But they are not lonely, never lonely, never lonely at all.
There are monsters. Outside the span of the tree’s ineluctable light, there are monsters whenever, wherever they land.
At first they hide. Then, slowly, they stop. Increment by increment, they creep out of the tree’s shadow, they brave each new land. They measure distances, little ones, parceled out of their bravery.
Some of them are deserted. But more often and not, the monsters are as inevitable as the ground on which they walk, as the starred light by which they travel, as themselves.
The first time a creature bites Ail-sharp teeth breaking the skin of his arm-An leaps in its path; she has nothing, nothing in her hands, no knowledge of what to do, but she cracks her palm hard down against its nose and the thing roars and limps into a retreat. It is a peaceful world but for them, this one: forest, undisturbed, thick vines as orange as the sun looping over their heads. They could stay here, she thinks, were it not for the things that bite and the vines too thick to levitate into. Instead-she is shaking-she makes them leave that night. He languishes under the tree, which drops energy into the wound, and her own arm hangs sore and useless at her side until he is healed. The last of his blood falls into a rusted-rose puddle on the roots of the tree, which sucks it up like an exchange. She is glad: they do not have to look at it for long.
The next world is empty, air whistling across its flat planes, snow falling in sick yellow clumps; the land roils where they land and the tree shudders, roots dancing madly until they bid it back into space. Whole lonely worlds are not meant for them.
The third world is curved hollows of stone, blue basins in the ground and red mountains stretching to the sky, and creatures like lions carved out of the rock snarling and prowling around their perimeter of light.
An steps out first, brave. Her feet land heavily on the stone for a moment, before she levitates. The footstep echoes, and the monsters come
They are leonine but somehow rocklike as the world, as if carven from it; their fur is pale and their flesh is bright and vivid beneath. One of the creatures leaps at her, and she lashes out. She should skyrocket away. It is a choice that she doesn’t. A choice that leaves this creature not cowed, its mouth peeling back over rows of sharp teeth, digging into her neck before she has time to fly out of its grip.
Ail cries out and the creature raises its head, giving her time and space to push off into the air. She is bleeding; she can taste it on her lips, and her brother flies in, wraps his arms around her, cradles her. The world swings in and out of focus. She lays her head on his shoulder, against the crook of his arm, as they move back in toward the tree.
She lies down on the mossy tangle of its roots, tipping back her bleeding neck and shoulder. The flesh tears and she winces, and the tree shudders against her. Over her head it opens a flower for her, dripping energy bright as captured light. It sears through her veins; she can feel her skin slowly knitting up beneath it. Her throat tips back, sighing, and her eyes close.
Eventually Ail lets go of her hand.
Through her half-cracked eyelids, she can see the creatures prowling along the perimeter. Next to her, hip adjunct to her lolling head, her brother crosses his legs and begins to pipe, slowly and softly. Even prone, she feels herself moving imperceptibly with it, body pulled along a thousand musical strings. And the prowling creatures outside the tree’s ring of light settle.
She has an idea.
“Ail-”
Too quick, too quick, she is dizzy and he reaches out to cup her chin. Her vision steadies with his hand on her face, long fingers webbing against her cheek.
“Ail,” she says, voice catching on air. She slips into his mind, the hot solitary electric current between them. What if we take them?
She waves her hand, hazy, toward the perimeter.
His mind is quizzical.
For protection.
His thoughts question; she composes her own. While she is silent, momentarily, thinking of words, he lowers his lips to his pipe again. He blows a note; the air seems to shiver around it. She lays a finger to his lips.
Look.
Outside the perimeter, the air is thrumming; the monsters stand, hypnotized into peace, at the perimeter.
Just like that.
What to do with them?
The same thing that their kind has always done, the same way they have taken stories, the same way they have taken planets.
She watches the monsters, draws them carefully on a card-in the bark of the tree, in the ink of its flowering heart. Her brother pipes them into peace, and she catalogues them in the blood and skin of their mother, the tree.
She calls it in the old language with a tongue that is rusty with it. But makaiju understands; makaiju takes her will in hand.
For a moment, she isn’t sure if it has worked-she holds her tongue inside her head and out, stares at her brother with wondering, beseeching eyes-and then the creature’s mouth splits its savage face, and it howls a sound in something like a language, something like a word, something she will keep. Light flashes, and the bark burns white in her hands.
And then there is one less monster in the world, and one more addition to the sleek catalogue of their immortal library; they have one more thing to call their own.
We’ll take them, her brother promises her, silently, we’ll take them all. Anything against us.
That night they take each other, hovering in the cold, silent air of the new world. The light of the tree burns behind them; the electric energy of it makes their veins sing from the inside out. When she puts her ear to his skin, she thinks she can hear it singing to her and her alone: her blood in harmony with his.
“Next time, let’s find somewhere civilized,” she says. “Somewhere full.”
Her voice is greedy; her eyes are beseeching. Let us not be alone in the universe, she thinks, almost like prayer, and he cups her hands in his own.
They never shall be.
Not as long as they have each other.
They shall never be lonely; they are king and queen of the vast, tetherless black kingdom around them.
The starlight crowns them as they set off, into the timeless dark.