Honest in Nightmares

Honest in Nightmares
Date of Scene:	07 November 2015
Location:	Usagi's House
Synopsis:	Usagi has a nightmare, and this time when the Prince dies, he has a face. She doesn't cope with this well.
Cast of Characters:	Mamoru Chiba, Usagi Tsukino

---

They'd taught him how to lucid dream, how to take the nightmares and wake up inside them and twist, turning them into what he wanted, turning them into dreams instead of memories relived over and over. It didn't always work, he didn't always know he was dreaming, and not all the dreams were the same. But for the most part, he hasn't died every night in months.

He's never lost control of a dream after conquering it before.

There's a first time for everything.

It's Mamoru Chiba in a cardigan and jeans, talking to the Princess, who turns around to see Beryl storming up the stairs with her sword raised, bearing down on the delicate girl made of ethereal curves and drifting, shining moonlight.

It's Mamoru Chiba who steps in front of her, half reflex and half decision, lifting an empty hand like it holds a sword.

---

It's Mamoru Chiba who wakes up gasping, clutching his chest, in Makoto's apartment, with a shriek ringing in his ears and the unmistakeable and relentless crush of Usagi's panic tearing at his soul, grasping and clutching and screaming and terrified.

He doesn't even think. Half a second later and he's leapt out Makoto's window in a rustle of silk and a rush of blinding, inhuman speed.

It's a dream, though she does not know this.

Serenity gasps, eyes wide, heart broken, as she watches him struck before her. Endymion drops to his knees and Serenity screams his name.

At least, for the moment, she can cradle his head in her lap.

His death is not sudden. Nor is it instant. Instead, he lingers in her arms, eyes gazing at her and--

Usagi's throat is raw with her scream.

She is out of bed, half tranformed yet not quite, suddenly staggering through her lawn and down the sidewalk.

At the end of a block, maybe two, she is curled within herself in ribbons and pyjamas, wondering if the searched for a familiar, warm glow is for naught. (She couldn't recognize it if she tried.)

She feels it, but doesn't, that decision of eternal subservience so long as he's okay, and all she can do in the waking world is shriek his name.

That endless feedback loop: he feels her panic and panics, and all she's getting from him is that same echo, and it tastes so much like hers that it's indistinguishable--

He hears her before he sees her, he hears her voice calling his name over and over, screaming like bloody murder, and his heart stops in his chest. There's such agony in her voice. It's on the descent on the approach to her house that he finally spots her, huddled on the sidewalk in a mess of ribbons and flyaway hair and nightgown, and his mind is racing a million miles an hour.

He lands at a dead run and in an instant his arms are around her, he's crouched there on the pavement next to her, cape pooled around them both, warm and close. Mamoru holds her to his chest, mask and gloves still on-- his lips to her forehead and a golden warmth tell him she's not injured at all, and he remembers to breathe.

She jumps a little at the sudden invasion, sure someone was around to rip them apart. There's always someone...

She wants to jerk away, to flee, but he is so warm. So...him.

"You were, but you weren't."

And her lips are on his, desperate.

"You were dead."

More hungry, now, because despite her...whatever, he is there, he is warm.

And she is crying still, sobbing, because even if this was a dream, it can still become relaity. "You can't."

Because if he did, if his life was lost to save hers, it would be better if they were gone together.

"Please."

Desperate words, desperate kisses, he can feel her on fire inside and out, and when she kisses him he tastes the salt of her tears.

All at once, he drops his transformation, leaving them both without the shield of his cape, but she's against his thin nightshirt now instead, and she's clinging to him and saying things that don't make sense, and kissing him when she isn't--

--so he lifts her up in his arms, despite how little he wants to move, and holds her close and starts carrying her back to her house. "I'm not dead. I haven't died a single time in this life," he says, smiling against her head, but the joke falls flat because of the qualifier. They both know. His voice is still quieter, but his heartbeat is strong and steady, right where she can feel it. "It's all right. It's just a dream. It was only a dream."

It would have made sense to stay in henshin, but something in him said that the contact was more important...

Mamoru whispers into her hair, "I'll stay with you."

Usagi clings to him as he picks her up, clings to everything that makes him Mamoru.

Unfortunately for her, what makes him Mamoru was also what had made him Endymion, in the moments she remembers that name.

"You were." The image is sharp in her mind, and she CLINGS to the golden glow that has been with her since...forever. She tries to draw it in, to make it her own, to ensure she's never without his glow again.

"You can't. I'm not-" Her teeth are sharp against his lips, legs around him, as familiar as the warmth of a summer day.

"I'd die."

Her fingers claw at his skin, trying to bury herself inside him. Something. Anything.

"You can't," Mamoru tells her fiercely when she pulls her mouth away from his, and he tastes the coppery almost-blood of his bitten lip, and he carries her into the yard, quicker-- around the side of her house, into the shadows the tree casts, away from the sight of the street and the lampglow. "You can't. You're stronger than that, Usako. What would that do to your friends? Your parents, your brother? You have so much, you're surrounded by love. And I don't want to die. I did that already and I didn't like it--"

The laugh sounds like a sob, but he's keeping it together, he's holding it together and he's warm, he's keeping the sun lit just for her, pouring everything he is into shoring her up, giving her his calm, his peace, his rock solid steadiness. He can do that for her. She can make him believe it and he can give it back.

She's scoring lines in his skin, and he only holds her closer, his own breathing getting ragged and his heart speeding up again. He leans his back against the tree, holding her to him, and he bends his head to kiss her neck, kiss the underside of her jaw. "I'm alive, Usako. I'm alive. And if I die, I'm counting on you to tell the world to fuck itself and bring me back. If you die you can't do that."

She's looking at him now, almost like she's trying to read him. To breath in his expression. To feel, that he is in fact, alive beneath her.

Her hands are on his face, his shoulders, assuring herself that what he says is true.

"Whoever I was."

Because she knows, now, that she'd been there. Maybe not the princess, or whatever, but she'd been there. "I followed you."

It's a secret confession, for his ears and that of the tree.

Her lips brush against his, hungry and desperate, and she wants him HERE. Even if it's not with her, she wants him here and alive and well.

"Don't leave me this time, even if...we aren't forever."

Whoever I was.

Mamoru's starting to get a headache, trying to think about what he remembers of his dreams of the Fall, of dying, and of the Princess and of Usagi. He doesn't have time for headaches. Usagi is still in the worst state-- and her small hands are on his face, in his hair, gripping his shoulders, pleading wordlessly for him to really be alive, to be real, to be there.

The headache and the worries wash away silently as he focuses on her, real and now and present and needing him, and he slides down the tree to sit on the ground with her legs around him, on his lap. He finally lets go so he can take her hands in his and place them on his chest to feel his heart beating quickly and furiously.

Mamoru kisses her back, fierce and determined, answering her hunger with his own -- his desperation's an echo of hers, ramped up by his own anxiety over her distress, and he leaves her hands on his chest and runs his fingers through her hair to cradle the back of her head.

When he pulls back, so slightly, his voice is soft and breathless, all tattered edges and shaking again from the oceans of feeling and the intensity of the kiss. "I won't leave you. No one can pull us apart forever, as long as you hold me close and never, ever give up." He leans forward, touches his forehead to hers, and his voice drops to a whisper.

"It's you I'm called to, over and over. It's you I need. And if you need me and I don't find you, you need to find me. You've already saved me from darkness so many times, pulled me out into the light-- Usako, Usako, you're so much stronger than I am, you always save me. Don't be afraid. I just want to be with you."

His heartbeat is fast and there beneath her shaking hands, the strongest of tethers. It strengthens the awareness of that warm glow, and she clings to it.

Her fingers curl against his chest, against his pulse, and she's kissed him like this before, she thinks. She's felt this ache in her chest before.

When he pulls back, just barely, she remembers to breathe. Her eyes flutter shut, absorbing his words and promises and he's never broken them before, has he. Not when it counts.

"There was a snap. This..." And she's trying to pull the warmth around her like a blanket. "It's always been there. I didn't notice until it was gone, and--"

She looks at him, then. Her eyes are fierce. Not quite that of a senshi, but of someone she used to be and doesn't know. A regal determination.

"I. Will always. Find you."

He says she's strong. She knows she only is because he's in her life.

She seals her vow with a kiss.

And then fingers, still desperate but for another reason, slide up to his hair, burying and tugging, as her lips move over his with a hunger that is new only in this life.