Nightmares (Usagi Tsukino)
| Nightmares (Usagi Tsukino) | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 22 January 2024 |
| Location: | Pikarigaoaka Ward |
| Synopsis: | Usagi's on week three of the nightmare's Gaitou promised to send, and it doesn't seem like they're going to stop anytime soon. She could tell people about them but - how could she ever bring herself to admit what they're truly about? |
| Cast of Characters: | Usagi Tsukino |
| Tinyplot: | Usagi's Abyssal Nightmare |
Usagi Tsukino jolts out of sleep to find herself sprawled on her back, lips parted and mouth dry, a crick in her neck that makes shifting to look around a literal pain in the neck, back covered in a cold sweat. She hadn't meant to sleep through the night - the idea, minimal as it was, had been for her and Mamoru to crash on the futon at Casa del Outers while Ami and Setsuna worked - she'd always intended to go back to her dorm.
Really! She had!
The futon had been really comfy, for a pull-out though, the blankets and sheets warm, the pillows fluffy, Mamoru a literal mass of comfort next to her, seeping contentment and affection in every place their skin touched -
And now here she was. Awake. Alone. In an unfamiliar house, with no around.
At least she had that going for her. There was no around - no one to know the nightmares hadn't stopped, no one to ask what they were about. She'd barely talked to Naru and Mamoru about them - she definitely didn't want to confess them to Setsuna, Michiru, or Haruka. It would just be - pathetic.
And Usagi had never really minded being pathetic - she was a lazy crybaby with no ambition, and she'd always been fine with that. But that was before. That was when Usagi Tsukino was just Usagi Tsukino, Kenji and Ikuko's daughter, Shingo's sister, a middle schooler with just one more year to go before she'd schmuck her way through high school and probably find a handsome, rich husband, and be a beautiful housewife.
Now she does mind, because she's more than just that girl. Now, she's Sailor Moon - the leader of the Inner Senshi. Now she's the wielder of the Phantom Silver Crystal, one of the most powerful artifacts the world had ever known.
Now she was... Princess Serenity, as she had once been, and Princess Serenity had never been pathetic a single day in her life.
Delicate, protected, rejoiced in, but never pathetic. Never a crybaby, never a coward.
So how could she possibly explain that half the time she was cranky, worn out, and just plain exhausted because she'd been having nightmares? Stupid, silly nightmares, that sounded dumb even to herself.
Because that was the thing. Ever since Gaito, Mr. King of the Deep Seas himself, had swanned into her dreams and declared that nightmares would plague her until she helped him, she had been plagued with nightmares. And at the time, still in the reality of her dreams, she hadn't really known what to expect - had been sure those dreams would be of Naru's heart crystal, popping out of her chest, Hematite's body, crumpling to the ground, the holy sword, held in her own hand, piercing her chest -
But her nightmares weren't about any of those things. Well - sometimes they were. Sometimes those things, those awful, memory-based things, slipped through and invaded her new, endlessly recurring nightmares, but they weren't the focal point, weren't the commonality.
No, her nightmares were much simpler. They weren't grounded in any kind of reality, didn't reflect any of the awful things that had happened to her, to Sailor Moon, to Serenity. They were about -
About Shingo.
About him being the older brother, about him being the one going to Radiant Heart Academy, living in the dorms and exploring the city by himself, making friends with her friends, fighting monsters as Cure Stars complete with his uniform of bright red and navy blue, of Luna being his cat, Mamoru being his -
About her being the little sister, the one who was still at home, safe and sheltered with their parents, knowing nothing about the world and yet screaming in her mind because she was still herself even as she was that naive nine year old who was befriended by the enemy without knowing it, who was kissed by a witch and drawn to a labyrinth without knowing what was happening, who caught flashes of monsters and lost their memory just as quickly, who couldn't fight back or even name the things she'd seen because the veil dragged tore the memories from her -
How could she tell anyone about those dreams, when at the core of them was the terror of being normal. When all she'd wanted, for months, was to be herself again, and these dreams, over and over and over, relentless and plaguing, made her realize, again and again and gain, that she wasn't normal.
That she didn't want to be normal.
That she could no longer properly imagine her life, without Sailor Moon?
