Just about 1K words, set a while before Sailor V awakens.
“No!” she yelled as yet another man in a stuffy suit shut
yet another door in her face. “You have to listen!”
But they never did. Hitomi Akeno was going to be an
environmental lawyer, and she would sue all of them someday, but someday was
too far away. The world was dying now.
So many people had the power to slow it, to stop it, but none of them would
listen to anything but money, especially not an overzealous college freshman.
She put her hands in her pockets and slumped back towards
campus. She’d run student groups and protests and read studies and talked to
professors, and none of it did anything. To see the planet suffering, and be
unable to save it—that seemed to Hitomi to be the worst tragedy that might
befall her. A tragedy that felt familiar, somehow, but not one she could ever
accept.
“Pardon me, but are you Miss Hitomi Akeno?”
Hitomi gave a start. The speaker was a woman in a crisp
suit, clipboard in hand, hair cut into a sharp bob that framed her face.
“Yes, how—“
“I was just heading to campus to discuss your work, but
perhaps we could talk here” She indicated a coffee house across the street.
Hitomi followed her inside, hope growing in her like a flame. Someone would
listen, finally. Someone wanted to hear her out.
The woman asked questions, and let Hitomi make her
long-winded answers. She let her go on about why she cared, the state of the
planet, everything that stood in the way of making change.
It took a long while for Hitomi to realize she had
questions, too, questions that she ought to have started with. “Why are you
interested in me?” she asked. “Who are you?”
The woman smiled. “I was wondering when we’d get here.”
Hitomi felt trapped, suddenly, even in the busy café. She’d been too eager. She did not even know
what company the woman worked for, or if she worked for a company at all.
There was a glow in the woman’s eyes she could not be sure
was real or imagined. “This is not the first time you’ve made a futile stand
for your planet. But together, we could make it the last.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember, Beryl, Queen of the fallen kingdom.” The woman’s
voice turned strange and deep. The glow of her eyes went red. “You must
remember.”
Hitomi stood, frightened, ready to leave, but then something
burst open in the back of her mind. She’d had dreams, as a child, of a kingdom
long past. A childhood in a different time. The flowers of a palace garden, the
boy she was beholden to marry. Her consort, her prince who would become her
king when they wed. They were stories that entertained her parents when she
spoke of them, they’d said she should be a writer before she outgrew stories
and turned to fight the injustices of the world.
But as she looked at the woman across from her she
remembered further than the dreams. They weren’t stories at all. She had been a
princess, and then a queen, of a kingdom that ruled the planet she loved. And
there were monsters from the moon who threatened to destroy it all, and they
were terrifying and they were beautiful and they took everything she had.
She remembered the boy and the man he became, a man
bewitched away from his planet by the witchcraft of a different princess. She
remembered running him through in battle, she remembered the pain of weighing
her love of her people and her planet above her love for him.
There was more, she was more, and her hands shook as she sat
back down.
“I am Metalia. You met me once before.”
She had, in that life. Hitomi put her head in her hands.
Details were fuzzy, but she remembered the power, being granted the ability to
strike back against the enormous power of the moon people.
“She is coming again to strike your planet down, that vile
princess of the moon.”
Hitomi dug her fingers into her skin. She wanted to save her
world. That’s all she ever wanted. This was her home. These were her people.
“Do you want to see everything you love brought to
subjugation at her feet?”
She remembered, in a flash of clarity, the princess in that
life, and her soldiers, careless with power, leaving a wake of destruction on
earth as easily as a deer left footprints in mud. No, she would not let that
happen again. She would win the fight in full this time, and continue to win
every fight she needed to keep her planet whole.
“What must I do?”
The woman smiled. “Awaken your generals and find the silver
crystal before it can be restored to the Moon Princess. Only then may we lay
her low and keep what is ours.” She offered her hand.
Before she could think any better of it, Hitomi shook it.
Power swelled within her. Once again she would be a warrior for her planet. She,
Queen Beryl, would rise victorious.
Metalia’s grip tightened. “All I ask in exchange is you give
me the crystal to destroy it.”
It hardly seemed an unfair price to Beryl. She wanted it
gone anyway. She would not let the Moon use it to steal away her victory.
“It’s a deal,” she said, just as she had in an age gone by.
And then the power was hers, and she would not be stopped.
Beryl stepped back out into the street, a person born anew. She breathed in the
spring air, felt the sun on her skin. She would protect this place. She would
make it her kingdom once again, and no one, not businessmen and senators
drowning in money, not Moon guardians bathed in power, could take it away from
her.
She took a flower from a bush as she passed. The thorns did
not prick her fingers—the planet knew its Queen.
SittingOverHereDreaming 