Chapter 16: The Departure

Elsewhere

Simultaneously

Far away, the keeper of the Lighthouse stood up.

There was no sound, but there was an echo of the stranger's pain as she was struck by the Reaper's scythe. The echo traveled far beyond time, beyond space, beyond every boundary known to mankind... it was a ripple through the waters of the multiverse, a ripple that expanded out and out and out at the speed of thought, until the keeper felt her agony just as fresh and raw as the stranger herself did.

No...! The keeper's eyes searched across the worlds for the glow of the stranger's life, saw it waver from an unfathomable distance.

No, not you too...! Please... please, you have to get up!

There was no answer. The stranger's glow dimmed.

Two hands slammed the crystalline interface set in the console in front of the keeper's chair. When they withdrew, the gleaming surface was marred by indentations in the shape of those hands, as if it were nothing more than soft dough. The Lighthouse responded to its keeper's outburst in an instant... a substance like liquid diamonds filled the indentations and solidified, leaving the console smooth as glass once more.

The keeper's hands could once reach across galaxies in mere heartbeats. They could once reshape the tempero-spatial dimensions like clay, build life from mere atoms, unleash the fury of God... but now, with the stranger's life in jeopardy, the keeper's hands could do nothing but break the interface in helpless frustration. Even that was undone in seconds. It was futile, pointless.

As pointless as continuing the struggle would be, should the stranger die or be taken. As pointless as their struggle was in general, really... against an unkillable madman with one of the fundamental forces of nature on his side, what good would fighting possibly do? Even if the Three could be gathered safely here, even with the Three and all the greatest champions of the light on their side, how could the war ever be won?

There was a simple answer to that: it couldn't.

The current war was an extension of a conflict older than time: day versus night. Hope versus despair. Light versus dark. In a thousand eternities of battle, the light was always supposed to win in the end, every time...

Not this time.

This time, the dark would win, because it had all gone wrong.

It's all gone wrong. Heaven help us, thought the keeper. It's all gone wrong...

The hands that once rivaled God's clasped together in prayer. It was an act that many might consider hypocritical, even blasphemous: the keeper of the Lighthouse seeking help from a higher power when there were no powers higher than the keeper... or at least, that was the way it used to be.

But the keeper had not always been stationed at the Lighthouse. The keeper had not always called the Lighthouse home...

Long, long ago, once upon a time, the keeper's hands had been nothing more than human. And once upon a time, long, long ago, the keeper believed in something greater, something higher... Perhaps not the same idea of "God" that many humans favored, but something close enough.

It was to that entity, to that higher power, whoever or whatever He, She, It, or They were, that the keeper prayed... if He, or She, or It, or They, were even there. It was a desperate plea, a tiny message in a bottle tossed into the fathomless oceans of the multiverse.

Please, thought the keeper. Hear my prayer. Bring her home... I can't lose her too, I'm not strong enough.

Let her live. Bring her home. Bring her home.

Bring her home...

-VERTEX ONE: 15.556984-

Juuban Shopping District

Outside of Osa-P

Everyone still awake and aware was lapsed into shocked silence, even Joker.

Whatever Chibi-Chibi ... no, the stranger... had done, her magic had banished the nightmarish labyrinth entirely. All the dense fog that clouded the block funnelled away, and one by one the gash(es) that the Witches crawled through shrank and sealed themselves. The Senshi were right back where they started, in front of the Osa-P jewelry store... those few of them that were left.

With the Witches no longer concentrated in a small area, each fled from the real world it despised, back into its own personal labyrinth to wait for more victims. The one Pseudo-Witch, however, had no labyrinth of her own, no place to hide. The wretched creature that had been Sailor Jupiter flailed in the dark in the tatters of her Senshi fuku, terrified and confused. Her body and mind twisted and deformed as they warred...

Part of her, the part that was still Makoto Kino, still Jupiter, demanded her body to stand and return to the fight. To stand proud in the moonlight, to help her friends, protect her Princess, avenge what was done to Mercury. That part raged and strained, refusing to surrender, fighting tooth and claw for control of a self that was no longer entirely her own.

The other part, the part that stemmed from the Evil Nut embedded in her flesh... she was laid bare by the moonlight, driven close to madness by fear of it. All that mattered was getting away, but only the darkest shadows provided any refuge from that light. Everywhere else was too bright, too sharp, too painful... The light was all around her, blistering her skin, seeping into her bones, there was no escape...

Sailor Jupiter roared with frustration. The moonlight could never harm her, it was her strength. She had to go back, it could fix her if she could only bathe in its glow! She had to protect the moonlight, that was her purpose-

The Witch moaned in terror. The moonlight was pain, exposing herself to more of it only meant agony and certain death. No going back, no returning to the fray... she had to run away, into the deepest darkness she could find, to lick her wounds and heal... only once she healed could she return to the hunt. Hunt, kill, eat, that was her purpose-

Two opposing natures clashed against each other, trapped in the same wildly distorting form. Both Jupiter and the Witch attempted to scream, but the sound that emerged from their mouth was an amalgam, a nightmarish blend of a human voice and an animal's strangled howl...

Gone. They were gone. In a matter of minutes, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus had been taken from her... just like what happened at D Point. Only the two Marses, Neptune, and the stranger left, and the Mars in her lap was barely clinging to life...

"Sailor Moon!" said Neptune through gritted teeth as she grasped her shoulder with her bad arm, squeezing tight. "Princess, you have to get up!"

Sailor Moon stared right through her. "Not again," she whispered, clutching Mars 1's hand tight. "Please, not again. I can't-"

Everyone always thought they had her figured out. They thought of her as simple-minded, and perhaps in some ways she was. The crybaby Usagi, who never met a problem that couldn't be forgotten about after a good bawl.

How wrong they were. So many battles, so much pain, so many terrible things she had seen... things that still woke her up in the night, drenched in cold sweat with a scream on her lips.

Those terrible things usually stayed deep in her subconscious, underneath the layers of happy, cheerful, simple-minded Usagi, and were further buried by the five years of peace. What was happening now was enough to unearth those memories... and few memories were more traumatic than the horrible battle at D Point in the Arctic, the bloodbath that claimed the lives of her friends and loved ones one by one...

Sailor Moon's mind flew back in time, to herself as a terrified fourteen-year-old shivering in the frigid wind of the Arctic Circle. That bitter wind bit at her skin as if it were happening all over again...

No-

Jupiter smiling, suspended in a frozen tomb, her words trailing off as her head lolled to one side.

No-

The stinging pain on her cheek as Mercury ran to her fate, and the terrible blasting heat moments later that dispelled even the chill of the Arctic's cold.

No-

Venus vanishing into a molten hole in the ice, pulled down by the DD Girls' vines, and the hideous screams that followed as Mars dragged her away.

No-

Mars, bloodied and broken minutes later, using the last of her strength to incinerate the Youma leader, and departing with a whisper of regret.

No-

And her precious Endymion cradled in her lap, telling her to leave all this behind with his last breath.

No!

Ami. Rei. Makoto. Minako. Mamoru. Chibi-Usa. She had seen them all die... more than once, thanks to this strange, endless, timeless cycle of violence, death, and rebirth that was her existence. Going through it so many times should have dulled her to the pain, to the loss...

It should have, but it never hurt any less.

Now it was all happening again... after she thought she had finally, finally escaped it for good, it was happening again...

"Sailor Moon!" said Neptune, shaking her harder. "Sailor Moon! Damn it..." No response, no bringing her out of it. Only one other option... Neptune turned to the motionless Mars 2, grasped her chin, and pierced her with her gaze. "Protect them," she said, willing the words to reach her. She didn't know if this other Mars was a dream, a clone, an illusion, or something else, but it hardly mattered. If any part of her was really Rei Hino, or really Sailor Mars... she would listen, and fight to the last.

Just as Neptune knew she had to do. She stood up, raised the Deep Aqua Mirror above her head, and cast a new barrier over all the survivors with everything she had left. A bone shifted in her broken arm, it swelled with liquid fire...

Protect them. Still in a daze, Mars 2 reached out to take her duplicate's other hand. It was growing cold.

Protect them...

Luna and Artemis peeked out from behind a hydrant, their eyes on the unmoving body of the little stranger, still in Chibi-Chibi's form. For all the mayhem and tragedy of the last few minutes, it was the stranger that now held their full attention. There was something bright and swirling leaking from the scythe wound across her back. Not blood or any sort of liquid, it was too ethereal for that. Almost like watery light from within her body, but light didn't behave like that... Whatever it was transfixed the two, it was impossible to look away.

"You..." Luna began, struggling to find words. Her mouth felt... thick. "You see her too, right, Artemis...?"

Artemis nodded, transfixed. "She looks... like Chibi-Chibi, but she can't be. Usagi told us after the final battle, Chibi-Chibi was-"

Both finished the sentence in different ways, their words overlapping.

"- Galaxia's lost Star Seed-"

"- a Sailor Senshi from the far future-"

They stopped, dumbfounded, for they were both quite sure that neither answer was wrong.

"We..." said Luna, her fur standing on end. "W-we should take her somewhere safe, out of the line of fire..."

"Back through that door of hers, maybe?" said Artemis, inclining his head toward the wooden door that still stood there by itself in the street. Worry turned his stomach... Venus was somewhere beyond that door right now, presumably with Naru, Umino, and Diana, but who knew if any of them were safe? The stranger wasn't talking... Who knew if poor Venus was even alive, after whatever Joker had done to her?

"I suppose that's the best option we have..."

The cats shifted to their humanoid forms, and Artemis gathered the little stranger's body into his arms, holding her tight. With Luna at his side, they moved back behind the three remaining Senshi. Luna turned the dented brass knob and opened the door...

Artemis felt the little stranger stir. "Don't worry," he said. "We'll take it from-"

Her eyes opened a crack, bleary with pain. Tiny fingers squeezed Artemis's hand-

His body tensed, and it was all he could do to keep from dropping her. A whirlwind of images spun through his mind: blood, death, encroaching darkness, a light shining out into the void... Somehow, she was speaking to him, not in words but in memories, though he didn't have the faintest idea what she was trying to tell him. Whatever she was saying, the feeling of the stranger's thoughts, the essence of her as her mind touched his, led him to one inescapable conclusion...

This isn't Chibi-Chibi.

Whoever Chibi-Chibi really was, a refugee from the far future or Galaxia's Star Seed (or a mix of both? Artemis wasn't sure anymore), the girl in his arms had Chibi-Chibi's face, her eyes, and her shape... but her essence underneath was something completely other from that of the mysterious little Senshi who appeared five years ago during the war against Galaxia's forces. Her essence was... the only word he could think of to describe her was... stranger. Wearing a familiar face and form, but stranger still...

"Artemis?" Luna's hand moved to his arm. "Artemis, what's wrong?"

"I couldn't explain it if I tried," he admitted. "We have to get her out of here, now... leave the door open, and hope that our Senshi can follow us through..."

"Putain..." Joker glared daggers at the little stranger and the cats, now vanishing through the open door. His fists clenched so tight that his claws drew blood-ink from his flesh. "Putain, merde, fils de pute!" The glowing X-shaped wound carved into his face sent sick tremors through him, he wobbled in mid-air... Fuming, he concentrated his energy on regenerating from the damage, but the only effect was the X-shaped tear in his mask extending tiny tendrils to knit itself back together. Another tremor, worse than the last, made his vision swim. Fresh trickles of blood-ink oozed from the wound. Fie on that Sailor Senshi and her damned Holy Blade, she never should have gotten that close... As much bile as he had for Venus, though, his outrage over the stranger's actions trumped it. All the Witches that it took so much effort to summon, gone in one attack, and now he couldn't even make her finish paying for it. Interfering with his revenge on the Smile Cures was infuriating enough, but this? "Is there nothing that will remove that chatte from my production for good?!"

The Time Reaper appeared confused, but it sensed what its master wanted. Resummoning its scythe, it floated to the edge of Neptune's barrier and raised the blade.

"No," Joker spat at it. "Save your strength for when you find and butcher her later. Madame Neptune is on her last legs, let's have her finished off in a properly poetic fashion." He snapped his fingers and put out the mental summons to the servant who broke Neptune's arm in the first place, the servant who gathered the Seeds of the Marses' familiars and demolished the Senshi's control room. A useful one, that one.

"World Shaking."

The familiar deep voice brought Sailor Moon out of her stupor. "Uranus...?" Against all odds, her spirits lifted. If Uranus was here, maybe they could still-

Something was wrong. The golden comet was aimed in the wrong direction. Instead of flying at Joker, it plowed a furrow in the street as it hurtled for the barrier... The comet broke through it like a brick through glass and kept going, slamming into Neptune with an ominous rumble-crack.

An awful scream echoed through the street, a scream not only of pain, but of heartbreak... Neptune crumpled, her strained, overtaxed body yielding to unrelenting force.

And Sailor Uranus, her partner, her lover, now moved to stand over her, her steely eyes frosted over like marbles, raising her fist to finish the job. The cold, blank expression she wore was so unlike her... devoid of spirit, devoid of feeling.

Crackles of residual energy danced over Neptune's body. "Haruka..." If only she could touch her one more time, she could wake her up from this nightmare. This wasn't her Haruka. The real Haruka had to be listening, she had to be. "Please..."

Uranus said nothing. Her fist pulled back.

"NOOOO!" The wild cry came from Sailor Moon. Stumbling forward, her gloves stained with Mars 1's blood, she wrapped her arms around Uranus's body... "Uranus, stop it! I know you would never hurt Neptune, no matter what! Please, Haruka-san, you have to stop!"

Neptune's vision fogged. Tears, or death overtaking her? There was no way to be sure which it was. "Princess, run..." The plea was all she could do before darkness claimed her consciousness.

Blonde pigtails shook back and forth. "I won't! I won't run or let anyone else get hurt!" Clutching Uranus's fuku for dear life, Sailor Moon squeezed her eyes shut. "Haruka-san may hurt me, but she won't hurt you! Nothing could ever make her do that!" Uranus writhed in her embrace, but she held on...

And incredibly, her motions slowed, her fist wavered. A glimmer of feeling flitted across Uranus's face as shadows gathered on her brow. In a husky voice, she spoke... "Bun... head...?"

Sailor Moon's head snapped up. That silly old nickname... Haruka was in there! "Uranus!"

Her features contorted in pain. Each word was halting, a struggle to force out. "Bun-head... I'm sorry... Take... care... of Michi-"

Sailor Moon was left clutching thin air as Uranus dissolved in a streak of black.

Joker now stood before her, his eyes aflame with hellish light. There was no trace of mirth, sadistic or otherwise, to be found in his expression now... only livid, murderous rage. "I knew I should have wiped her mind more thoroughly," he snarled. "Mental note: forcing one of the Sapphic Senshi to kill the other apparently requires nothing less than a complete erasure of the personality. I should probably do it at least twice next time, just to be sure."

"You-" Sailor Moon began.

Black claws bit into her stomach, his open palm slammed her with a savage blow that sent shockwaves through her body and drove all the air from her lungs. She dropped to the street like a stone.

"But what do you expect from the First of the Three?" said Joker, his tone deadly soft, a razor wrapped in silk. "Even without your Silver Crystal, you always manage to cheat your way to victory, undoing everyone's hard work. It's really quite unfair."

Gasping, on the verge of throwing up, Sailor Moon dragged herself forward by her fingertips, inch by inch until she lay across Neptune's body. At least she could still protect her...

"I knew your world would be a challenge, but..." The heel of one of his boots came down like a bolt of lightning on the Senshi's spine. "I never imagined you and your Senshi would put me through this much trouble." Another stomp. "Injuring my face, breaking my control of one of Dead End's best soldiers... your little stranger friend even drove off the Witches. Your reputation is well-deserved, lapin, you're a main character through and through. Clearly, no mere servant can finish you, no matter how talented. This requires a personal touch... Reaper, your scythe, s'il vous plaît."

Mars 2 watched in stupefied horror.

Her duplicate hovered on the edge of death. The other Senshi were gone... and Sailor Uranus, one of her allies, one of her friends, had stood ready to kill Sailor Neptune, her lover, in cold blood. Now Sailor Moon lay helpless before their enemy, barely able to breathe.

Nothing made sense.

It's all gone wrong...

No, thought Mars 2. This can't be the end. I won't let it be the end. I am Sailor Mars, dammit, and I will not just sit here while they die! I will...

Protect them!

By reflex, her hand squeezed Mars 1's limp one. A spark ignited inside her... and that spark traveled the length of her duplicate's arm, propelled by her faint, slowing pulse, and raced into her heart... Mars 1's hand squeezed back...

Protect them...

-static-

Pillars of fire erupted from the street, dancing and whirling with unnatural motion, moving so fluidly that it was as if they were alive. The figure that now stood bordered by those towering flames appeared to shimmer with heat haze. It was Sailor Mars... one of them, but it wasn't clear which. The long black hair was Mars's, as was the red Senshi fuku, and the cherry red heels, but both of them had those. This one seemed somehow sharper, clearer, more defined than either of them from seconds ago, and the wings... neither Mars ever had those before...

They sprouted from the glowing, fiery red strands now striping her hair: crackling, ever-shifting flames loosely molded into the shape of a great pair of burning wings... phoenix wings.

Mars raised her index fingers, pointing one at Joker, and one at the Reaper that floated close behind him, extending the scythe for its master. Her invocation was not a shout, but a whisper: "Holy Inferno."

The eyes of Joker's mask widened. "Oh, mer-"

That was all he was able to get out. Twin fiery cyclones erupted from the red Senshi's fingertips, swallowing both him and the Reaper, and casting the scythe to the winds. The harlequin was tossed about like a rag doll, whirled in superheated flames that scoured him from every direction. It was as if the cyclone was some great beast shaking its head back and forth, trying to break the neck of the prey held in its teeth. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw the Reaper ejected from the second firestorm at high velocity... it was quickly lost against the backdrop of the starry sky.

Seconds later, Joker joined it in a similar manner. It was five blocks before he touched solid matter again.

Smoke drifted from Mars's fingertips as her flames petered out. Puzzled, she stared at the wisps as they thinned. "Never done that one before," she said. Her voice sounded... funny. On one hand, it didn't sound like her own. On the other... it was somehow too much like her own.

"Rei-chan...?" Sailor Moon's voice drifted up from the street, faint and feeble. "M-Mars, you're..."

Mars winked and gave her cheeriest smile. "Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry for the long nap." Then she stared, for Sailor Moon was looking up at her with an expression of total bafflement. Lots of things surprised Usagi, but the ones that left her speechless? Those were rare. "What's the matter? Too flashy?"

No answer, Sailor Moon just goggled.

Mars's nose wrinkled. "I wish you would stop gawking, I dislike being stared at," she said in a huff. "What is it?"

The Deep Aqua Mirror lay discarded a few feet from Neptune's hand. Mars leaned over and peered into it... and all the color drained from her face.

Her first indication that something was very wrong wasn't just the fiery wings, or the many red streaks in her hair, from which the wings apparently sprouted. When you were a Sailor Senshi, strange things tended to happen to you, especially when new powers manifested themselves. Her eyes, however... something was especially wrong with her eyes. Her pupils were red, and her violet irises were now streaked with color as well. No, not just red, but shifting from orange to yellow and back... and upon closer inspection, the streaks in her hair were phasing through the same colors.

Mars 1 reached for Mars 2's hand for support. "R-Rei...? What just-"

Mars 2 caught it, clasped it tight. "I... have no idea..."

It was only after a few seconds that she realized she was clinging to her own hand... The two separate Rei Hinos had merged into one inexplicable new whole.

Her knees buckled beneath her, and a few drops of smoking scarlet blood trickled from her nose, running down her upper lip.

"Conneries," Joker hissed. He lay in sprawled in a tangle of limbs, half-buried in a heap of rubble inside a shallow crater, both stemming from when his flight was interrupted by an inconvenient building. Most of his body was charred, blackened and smoking... he swatted himself to extinguish the lingering tongues of fire on his person. "C'est vraiment de conneries! Fine," he said. The wound from the Holy Blade throbbed. "If I must be the one to remove all these distractions..." A giant playing card materialized beneath him, and pivoted until he stood parallel to the street. Joker crouched and summoned his rapier, ready to slice this new(?) interloper into ribbons. The card flexed beneath him and rebounded, launching him like a living bullet toward his target, the red speck in the distance with the glowing wings...

... and he couldn't have been more than ten meters from skewering her before something fell streaking from the heavens, something that should have been much too small and delicate to do what it did: it struck the rapier's blade, tore it from his grasp, and fell with it to the asphalt.

Joker's charge came to a screeching halt. His rapier was now pinned to the street, the steel pierced through by, of all things, the stem of a single red rose. The eyes of his mask narrowed. Now how did that-

The light dawned. "No," Joker moaned, putting his face in his hands. "Viens m'enculer, not now...!"

A shadow stood atop the jewelry store, hidden in the folds of a long black cape. When the shadow turned into full sight of those below, the cape blew back and fluttered in the evening air, its underside bright with a scarlet silk lining. Beneath it stood a dashing man in classic evening dress: a black coat and top hat with a white tie and shirt, his eyes hidden by a pointed domino mask. His voice rang out strong and clear as a church bell: "Hold it! As guardian of the Earth, I will not allow you to harm this planet or her people any longer!"

And as they always did, his words reached into Sailor Moon's heart and gave her new strength. "Tuxedo Mask," she sobbed, looking up with grateful tears spilling from her eyes. "Thank God, you're alive... You're here...!"

"Always at your service, Princess," said Tuxedo Mask, giving her a smile and a quick tilt of his hat before he turned his gaze back to Joker. "Now, villain, Tuxedo Mask has arrived, and-"

"Gah, you people and your speeches!" Wrenching his sword from the ground with a savage growl, Joker raised the point and trained it on the masked man. Seething hatred dripped from his voice like acid as he ripped the rose from his blade and crushed it in his fist, ink-blood welling from between his fingers. "No one likes a stage hog, Monsieur Mask... and the audience is supposed to throw the roses after the performance!"

The masked man swooped down from on high, pulling a cane from his jacket. His heels had barely touched the ground before Joker lunged at him. In blurs of motion, the cane and rapier clashed together, sparks flew... Tuxedo Mask fought with all the elegance of a fencer, wielding the cane as his foil, parrying and deflecting the harlequin's frenzied thrusts. "You duel well enough, I'll give you that," he said with a grin that brought Joker's blood to a boil. "But I suppose even scum like you can learn a thing or two, with enough training!"

"Nique ta mere," snarled Joker in reply. "When I'm finished with you, I'll pin down your leading lady over there and-"

Another rose appeared at Tuxedo Mask's fingertips. A rush of red-

This time Joker was ready; he caught it by the stem, a millimeter from his eye socket. He smirked. "Repeating the same trick twice? How gauche. I'm disapp-"

Grinning wider, Tuxedo Mask jumped back and snapped his fingers.

And Joker's angry screech grated the ears as the rose went off like a bomb in his face, blanketing him in soot and black smoke...

"Mamo-chan!" Sailor Moon ran to her beloved and took his hand. "Mamo-chan, I thought-"

"Don't worry," he said, leaning down to briefly press her hand to his lips. A gentleman to the last. "It takes more than the likes of him to keep me away from you. What happened here?"

The words tumbled from her mouth in a rush. "I don't know what to do, the Silver Crystal's gone and he summoned these things that hurt Mars and took the others, h-he made Uranus try to kill Neptune-"

"We'll get them back." When he said it like that, no matter how dire the situation was, she believed him. "Whatever it takes, we'll get them back."

"And..." A fresh attack of the shivers ran through her. "And Neptune and Mars are-"

Tuxedo Mask saw. Mars was still mesmerized by her image in the mirror, her face drained of color... as he watched, she wavered like an image on a screen before snapping back into solid form. Her great phoenix wings shed a rain of glowing embers...

Neptune only now began to stir, grimacing as she made a hopeless attempt to sit up. "Ha," she moaned. "H-Haruka...?"

Tuxedo Mask grasped Sailor Moon's shoulder. "Usako, listen. I'll protect Mars and Neptune... You need to finish this fight."

"But my Crystal-"

"Crystal or no Crystal, you can do it, Usako." Deep blue eyes met hers through the domino mask. "I believe in you."

How many times? How many times had his mere presence bolstered her, had his words found strength in her that even she didn't know was there? When he looked into her eyes and told her of his faith in her... it made her believe that even impossible odds could be overcome. "Mamo-chan..."

He was already gathering Neptune carefully into his arms. "Hurry, start charging! The clown won't be distracted for long!" As he did so, her hand took hold of his lapel. Her grip was weak...

Next to them, Mars roused herself and rose shaking to her feet, keeping a tight hold on the mirror. The shock of... of whatever had happened to her would have to wait. "N-Neptune," she said. "Is she-"

"She's badly hurt, and whatever happened to you, you're in no condition to fight," said Tuxedo Mask. "Stay behind me, I'll keep you safe."

"No..." Neptune's whisper was faint, agonized. "Nowhere on Earth... is safe... the L-Lighthouse..."

"Lighthouse?"

"What-"

Both followed her eyes to the wooden door, standing open in the middle of the street, the frame filled with swirling, iridescent light...

Putting his face back together was hardly a problem... except for the Holy Blade scar, which still refused to heal. It was the gall of it that infuriated Joker, the insolence of anyone pulling such an amateurish trick on him, the trickster of all tricksters. His claws raked the smoke cloud in a bloody, steaming rage... if he managed to disembowel someone in the process, so much the better.

Something caught his eye as the smoke cloud began to clear. A shape made of blue and white cloth, lying a few inches from the curled tip of his boot. His claws snatched it up... and he smiled as he recognized what it was.

A simple hand puppet, with bead eyes and a black yarn smile, fashioned to look like Sailor Mercury. Marie Annette's special technique had worked after all... no wonder they all lost track of her in the heat of battle. Just to be sure the Witch's magic had indeed taken effect, Joker knelt and slipped his hand inside the puppet. "Can you hear me, Sailor Mercury?"

A small voice with a slight Kyoto accent spoke from the inert cloth face: "I can hear you." A pause, then, far more agitated: "J-Joker...! What... what happened?! How did you-"

Joker's smile split his face. "Non, non, cherie. I'll be asking you the questions from now on. And you'll be only too pleased to answer, isn't that right?"

The puppet answered calmly. "Yes, of course." Then, more afraid than ever: "What have you done to me?! Sailor Moon! USAGI!"

Joker withdrew his hand, and the Mercury puppet fell silent and lifeless once more. He rose with his prize, still grinning as he imagined the expression on Sailor Moon's face when he showed her his new toy...

The first thing he saw was the glowing horns of the crescent moon atop the Moon Stick, pointed directly at his face.

"Moon Healing..."

Cornered. Still wounded. Not enough time to teleport or move out of the way. Precious few options... a Card would have to do, the first one he could think of. It appeared as he called its name: "SHADOW!"

"... ESCALATION!"

Dark folds enveloped him, blanketed him in the split-second before the rays of light burst forth from the crescent moon... but even the tiniest shafts of that light leaking between SHADOW's folds bubbled his skin, scorching it like acid... that light was far hotter than Mars's flames, more painful than the steely kiss of the Holy Blade... By the darkest pits, if he hadn't thought to ensure she didn't have the Silver Crystal, the light would have dissolved him where he stood...

The light disappeared. Through the cracks in the folds covering his eyes, he saw the reason why: the Time Reaper had thrown itself in the path of Sailor Moon's attack, taking the brunt on itself. Its cloak spread wide, the light illuminated the faint shape of the bleached white skull underneath its hood... the skull that now began to crack.

Sailor Moon held it as long as she could. Even if the Healing Escalation couldn't be rid of Joker, it could at least purify his awful Time Reaper... Her muscles howled in protest as the Moon Stick drew yet more power from her exhausted body for the third time that night. Radiant white beams swept the Reaper, one after another after another...

Something cracked.

And Sailor Moon dropped her wand in shock as the Time Reaper let out a hideous, mournful scream.

Joker emerged like a wraith from the dark shape that had shielded him, parts of his body pitted and glowing white hot.

Bracing herself for another attack, Sailor Moon's hand flew to her tiara...

To her further shock, Joker turned his back on her and wrapped his arms around the Reaper. The cloaked figure wept brokenly, clawing at itself... Sailor Moon was sure she saw tears fall from the empty eye sockets of the skull underneath its hood.

"Shh, shh," muttered the harlequin with astonishing tenderness, leaning over the hood. "Ne pleure pas, mon précieux. Je vais réparer vos chaînes, et vous aurez jamais besoin de blesser à nouveau..."

Sailor Moon stared, at a complete loss.

A dark and noxious flame lit in the eyes of Joker's mask as he slowly, slowly turned his gaze to her, withering and deadly, and she felt a pure, icy terror that trumped every other horrible thing she had seen tonight... There was no trace of his smile, his mouth was a thin, hard, livid line, somehow even worse. "Remember this, lapin," he said, every word frigid as night in midwinter. The X-shaped scar on his face burned with sizzling light. "This was a draw, not a victory. I shall return... and I will carve a bloody swath in your world that you'll see even from your palace on the moon, just to remind you of this moment, remind you of what it cost you..."

In a violet flash, both Joker and the Reaper vanished.

It was some time before Sailor Moon felt the hand on her shoulder. "Usako?" said Tuxedo Mask. "Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

"I'll..." She swallowed. Her throat was dry. "I'll... be fine. Mars and Neptune, are they-"

"Through there." He nodded toward the door, still open to its vista of swirling light. "In some place called the Lighthouse. Venus, the cats, and our mysterious little friend should be through there too... I saw them in Neptune's mirror, and it's never been wrong before."

She swallowed again. "We have to go, then. To the Lighthouse." Tugging at his hand, she moved for the door...

Tuxedo Mask shook his head. "I can't."

"What...?"

"I can't go with you, Usako. You heard Joker... you made him angry, and he intends to come back worse than before. I may not have the Golden Crystal... he took it somehow, just like he took yours... but if I stay in Elysion and focus my power with Helios and the Shittenou, I can still keep him off the planet."

"Th-then I'll stay with you, we'll fight him together-"

"Usako." His eyes bored into her, rooting her to the spot. "I don't know where or what this 'Lighthouse' is, but it's somewhere safe. Somewhere where Joker and Dead End can't find you. You saw how dangerous he is. He was able to bring back all the monsters you ever fought, summon those Witch things that hurt Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter and nearly killed you, turn Uranus against us... If he's able to control you, or worse, there's no hope for any of us."

"But Mamo-chan! If he controls you-"

There was that smile, the smile she loved so much. "You can save me. You've done it enough times before."

More tears welled up in her eyes. God, every time she thought she couldn't cry, couldn't hurt any more... Trembling, she wrapped her arms around him. "I'm scared, Mamo-chan," she whispered. "Really scared. It's all gone wrong..."

His cape curled around them as he embraced her. "You can make it right. You're the strongest of all of us, Usagi. You're Sailor Moon, the champion of justice... I believe in you."

When he said those words, it was impossible not to believe him. "Promise me," she said, setting her lip and giving him her most stubborn, defiant stare. "Promise you'll come back to me, no matter what happens!"

Gentle hands cupped her chin, and the moonlight shone down, two silhouettes joining into one as their lips met.

When the kiss broke, Tuxedo Mask smiled and patted her head, right between her twin odango. "You know I always do."

"... I love you, Mamo-chan."

"I love you, Usako."

She knew she had to say goodbye, but the words got stuck in her throat and wouldn't budge. So as she approached the door, she turned one last time and waved...

In true Tuxedo Mask style, her beloved swept his cape forward and bowed like a knight of old, seeing her off.

Usagi Tsukino took a breath and stepped through the door frame...

... and into a swirling tunnel of incomprehensible light in all different colors... Reds, greens, blues, and yellows, flowing and swirling and bleeding into each other like river rapids, and a few colors she had never seen before... a dizzying, ever-shifting kaleidoscope stretching to infinity. The current caught her, hurled her forward... she screamed, but her voice was miles away...

... and then, with a snap and a short cry of surprise, she fell forward onto a smooth glass floor, flat on her face.

No, not glass. The floor was clear and smooth like glass, but it had a sort of rainbow shimmer to it, like a soap bubble... and so did the walls, and the ceiling, and the long, long hallway that stretched out before her, ending in a bright, faraway light...

She stared in awe as the glass-soap bubble structure around her rearranged itself, moving in ways that no substance on Earth or anywhere else could move. Like liquid being poured into an impossibly complex mold, it spread out into the shape of a street, a house, a driveway in the front, even a nameplate with the correct kanji on it...

In seconds, she was looking at a flawless, transparent, glass-soap bubble replica of the Tsukino family home, the home where she had spent her entire childhood and most of her teenage years. It branched off of the long hallway as if it had been grown there, as if it had always been there instead of forming just seconds before. She stood right in the spot where she once bawled hysterically as she said goodbye to her mother, suitcases in hand, preparing to move in with Mamoru...

Stunned, she reached out to touch the nameplate with its familiar etchings. It felt just like the nameplate back home, but she had just seen more than enough evidence that it wasn't made of anywhere near the same stuff... so how...?

"Usagi!"

"Usagi-san!"

Two familiar voices cried out from the light at the end of the long hallway. Shadows ran toward her... After everything she had seen tonight, she tensed, expecting another fight...

Two pairs of arms seized her in a hug. One belonged to a teenager with pointed odango like a rabbit's ears, and pink pigtails that were only started to grow straight instead of big and poofy. The other pair belonged to a girl the same age, raven-haired and pale-skinned, dressed all in black...

"Ch-Chibi-Usa...?" said Sailor Moon, trying to extricate herself. "Hotaru-chan? How did you two-"

"We came through the door, the same way you did," said Hotaru, wiping away a grateful tear. "Thank goodness you're here, Usagi-san, when the others came through without you, we were worried that the Reaper had caught you..."

"Where's Mamo-chan?" As was typical, Chibi-Usa looked over Sailor Moon's shoulder... easier now than it used to be when she was pint-sized. "Isn't... isn't he coming...?" All the joy and relief drained from her face at once. "Wh... what happened to him, why isn't he here? Is he...?"

A dagger tore at Sailor Moon's heart. "Mamo-chan had to stay behind..." The words tasted like vinegar as she spoke them. "In Elysion. To protect the world from Joker..."

To Chibi-Usa's credit, she suppressed the urge to blame Usagi for leaving without him... she wasn't always able to do that. "I..." Her throat was tight. "I understand. That monster already hurt so many people..."

"Mars," said Sailor Moon, gripping Chibi-Usa's shoulders. "Neptune, Venus! Are they here, are they all right?"

Hotaru looked back toward the white light at the end of the hallway. "Minako-san and Michiru-san are in the infirmary, with... well, her. The one that brought us here. Neither of them are awake right now. Rei-san doesn't seem to be injured, but she's still in shock... Luna and Artemis are trying to help her. And Naru-san and Umino-san-"

"Wait, they're here?!"

"- the last I saw them, they were with Diana, trying to get information from Fantine..."

Sailor Moon blinked. "Fantine? Who's Fantine?"

The voice that answered was calm, soft, but with unmistakable steel behind it, answering from everywhere... and yet from nowhere, from within every glass-soap bubble surface and from inside their own minds...

"Welcome, Usagi Tsukino, Sailor Moon, Princess Serenity," it said. "We are all in your debt for your courage in the fight against Joker and Dead End... your actions tonight have bought the multiverse more time, and every second is precious..."

Sailor Moon wasn't sure which way to look. "Wh-who are you...? What are you...?"

The voice chuckled softly, a sound like waves on the sand. "In many ways, I am the Lighthouse. This place is an extension of my self, a sanctuary for all who are lost in time and space."

Something made Sailor Moon draw Chibi-Usa and Hotaru closer to her. "Are you... are you the girl who helped us? The one who showed us the door?"

"No, the Stranger is more like a little sister, and a very dear friend," said the voice of the Lighthouse. "In simplest terms, she is the embodiment of those who have vanished from the normal flow of time... but I digress. For simplicity's sake, you may call me 'Fantine.'"

END OF CHAPTER 16

NEXT:

MADOKA