CW: Gender Dysphoria/Abuse

Once upon a time, I might have been cracking jokes about the “coarse, irritating and gets everywhere” joke regarding sand, but a few minutes of trudging through the stuff was more than enough for me to start sympathizing with Anakin Skywalker on the subject.

The winds batted at us, forcing me to raise my arm to cover my face, lest I get an eyeful of sand particulate and be forced to blink it out.

For the eight millionth time.

I saw that Maya, with her hijab integrated into her outfit, actually seemed to be handling it better than the rest of us and took point. Lani and Pallas had tried to use their water powers to tamp down on the sands, but found that they just weren’t up to the task. There was just too much of the stuff and the air was too dry.

And even so… there was a quality about this realm that I noticed the moment we had stepped in.

Everything about it felt hungry. As if just standing here was draining our energy bit by bit. Maybe it was the fact that we were, metaphysically, standing in a black hole. It could be Chaos itself doing it. Regardless, standing here was slowly and surely sapping us of our strength.

Someone started screaming and I froze. I cast my gaze around and the silhouettes of all the other Senshi seemed to be accounted for. Nao made waving motions to draw us all in and we gathered together in a huddle.

It helped diminish the sands and winds somewhat and we were then able to talk over the weather.

“We should be close now,” said Nao, her face grim. “We need to watch our step because the twin rivers are nearby. Remember, in this storm you might mistake it for sand, but the moment you step into it, you plunge into it like water.”

I nodded. “And forget everything, right? For instance… how to swim? That water isn’t breathable?”

“It depends how strong your sense of identity is,” said Nao, shrugging. “You can retain fragments… I think.”

“You think?” intoned Rita, audibly irritated.

“Look, the little brat sort of skipped this part when Sailor Cosmos… future Mom, dragged her into the Crystal garden,” sighed Nao impatiently, “And… uh… she kind of died in front of the Galaxy Cauldron. Didn’t get to see much. I don’t have much in the way of retained memories of this place. So I’m working off of what Mom told me.”

“She died?” gasped Maya, horrified.

“All of us did,” said Homura, smiling, “Though, to be fair, we came back.”

“WHAT?!’ shouted Maya, even more alarmed.

“Eh, it happens,” said Liv, shrugging as she put an arm over Maya’s shoulder, “I mean… it’s like a superhero's rite of passage. Going all the way back to the first superhero, Jesus…”

Maya seemed to be about to object, but I held up my hands to silence them. This was the last place we should be getting into a theological debate.

“I really wish we had the older Senshi joining us,” I sighed, shaking my head. “Yeah, I know they needed to cooperate to open the gate, but they couldn’t jump in after us?”

“They will need to be available to open it from the outside,” insisted Homura.

“And I… I think Mom can’t stand the idea of losing them again… here,” said Nao, her face hard. “When she was here last time… she lost everything. She lost her friends, her love, her child… this place broke her. I… I don’t think she wants to admit it, but I don’t know if she even could come back here after what this place did to her.”

“You’re her daughter, though, right?” said Lani, raising an eyebrow. “She was willing to send you?”

“She… uh… she got really upset when I stole her brooch to become Sailor Moon,” said Nao grimly. “I’d never seen her get that mad. She told me that she didn’t ever want me to do it again. She said that becoming Sailor Moon robbed her of a childhood and that she didn’t want it for me… But I kept doing it and… eventually she allowed it. But… she told me that I would have to bear the responsibilities of being Sailor Moon.” She looked over her shoulder towards the howling sand wastes. “I… I guess this was one of them. She was kind of a wreck when she saw Chaos appearing in the skies above us.”

“We all were,” I said, frowning, “I mean, this is the threat that even Usagi couldn’t completely defeat. And even with all of us working together… can we seriously do this?”

“What happened to all that fire you were breathing back in the Watchtower?” grumbled Liv. “I want that Sailor Moon back.”

“That was just enough to get me through the door,” I said glumly, eying the others, “Anyone else want to bring back hope now?”

We exchanged glances. Juno raised her hand.

“Uh… what’s going on?” she asked, looking around at all of us. “Why did we stop?”

“Oh… right… they don’t speak English?” I asked Nao.

She shook her head. “No… though Vesta speaks French… sort of.”

“What are you saying about moi!?” insisted Vesta, looking offended, “I heard my name!”

I looked at my own senshi. “I don’t suppose you all know any Japanese?”

Liv scoffed.

“No… just Arabic, French and English,” Maya said, “And learning English was the worst..”

Rita shook her head.

Lani shrugged their shoulders. “I mean… a little? It comes up back home sometimes…”

I forced out a sigh. We wouldn’t be able to work together if we didn’t understand each other readily. But then I remembered that trick that Jess had pulled with her power ring. The same ring that I now had. Looking down on it, I tried to focus my will.

It glowed a faint, flickering green, but nothing more seemed to happen. I tried to force the whole of my thoughts on one thing and one thing alone: Translation. Languages becoming one. Unscrambling the curse of Babel. Understanding.

The ring flashed green and I breathed a sigh of relief. “nuqjatlh? Qu'mey chenmoHlaH'a' Hoch?”

Everyone exchanged glances. “Nuqjatlh?” said Nao, frowning.

“QI'yaH!” I growled, trying to focus my thoughts more clearly.

I knew Japanese. I knew English. I knew the shared meanings between them. They were a part of my mind. I just had to get the ring to understand what I wanted. I thought of the years of watching anime, reading manga, pouring over dictionaries, working on my kana penmanship, studying grammar… all of that time and experience… all of the passion for making connections… all of it for…

Understanding.

The ring flashed again.

“Please tell me, that worked…” I sighed, wiping my brow of sweat.

“Nope,” sighed Nao, “You’re still speaking Japanese.”

“Uh… no?” said Rita, blinking in surprise. “You’re speaking English.”

“When did all of you learn Arabic?” asked Maya, frowning.

“Okay,” I said, nodding, breathing a sigh of relief, “We’re on the same page. So… we have a memory-erasing sand river to cross. And considering I don’t see anything but sand to work with, I think I have an idea…” 

“I swear to fuck if we do that stupid “everyone hold hands and moon jump” plan again, I’m going to kill you,” growled Liv.

“It wouldn’t work anyway,” said Lani, shaking their head. “The wind would blow us off course.”

I held out the ring again, now trying to focus my will into something more concrete. Something simple. A disc we could all float on over the river.

While it was a simple shape to imagine, it was also unbelievably hard to manifest it. It took a few tries to create something substantial and it took a few more to create something that could support all our weight. Until finally, I was able to create a sort of dish-shaped, glowing green platform to take us over the river. I gasped in exhaustion.

“How the fuck does Jess make this look so easy?” I breathed. I stepped into the disc, and while I felt my weight tax the ring’s power, it remained solid. 

The other senshi began to pile onto it, and while their presence gave me a throbbing headache of effort, the disc still remained solid as it sustained their weight. “Could… s-someone push us forward?!” I wheezed.

Homura nodded and, with her glaive, forced the disc forward. We slid a few feet at a time over the sand until, finally, something splashed and we began to float properly.

From the outside, it looked like we were still surrounded by sand, but the feel of our floating was precisely like we were on a river cruise. I screwed up my eyes slightly, trying to force a little more energy into the construct and was able to shift it into something more like the shape of a proper raft. An inner tube of air with the bottom supporting our weight. Letting buoyancy carry some of the weight made the effort less taxing. Homura snaked her glaive back and forth to propel us forward. Everyone else remained still and silent. Nobody wanted to “rock the boat” either literally or figuratively.

I did the best that I could to focus on keeping the glowing green raft afloat and corporeal. It was a strange feeling to have to hold the literal idea of a raft in my mind and to keep the will focused on sustaining it. It was terrifying, as I knew that a single momentary lapse of concentration would be enough to send us all into the river Oblivion and erase our memories.

Yes, there was a river of Memory to repair the issue on the other side, but that was assuming that we remembered that. Or what a river was. Or who we were.

There was a faint buzz of the raft as it dimmed slightly and everyone gasped. I forced more will into the construct to reinforce its reality, panting in terror and effort. 

“Shit,” I said, through gritted teeth, “I didn’t realize this would be so hard. It’s like one moment of distraction and it all falls apart. Jesus, this ring is a pain in the ass.”

“Just be careful,” said Nao, pulling up her legs to her chest. “We lost three people here last time… the Sailor Starlights… they… they fell in and never woke up.” 

Behind me, I heard Homura falter in her paddling, but she resumed shortly.

I blinked, trying not to lose focus.

“Who are the Starlights?” asked Maya, drawing closer.

“They were Sailor Guardians from another planet,” sighed Nao, “Their princess fled to Earth after their world was destroyed. The Starlights were her bodyguards. They… helped us get here and tried to stop Queen Galaxia and Chaos so that nobody else would lose their planet the same way.” She pressed her lips together bitterly, wiping at her eyes. “They fell into the river… and forgot everything. Even when we got them out of the water… there was nothing left. They were comatose. And we couldn’t get them to drink the waters of Memory because they were so far gone.” 

Lani spat. “Fuck… just fuck this superhero bullshit… This is why I hate this shit so much.”

Rita put a hand on their shoulder, “Hey… we’ll be fine. Serena’s got us a magic boat and the river can’t be that wide… all we have to do is-”

Something jolted us suddenly forward.

We collided with solid sand, which upended us onto the opposite shore, piling onto the solid sands in a heap.  The raft evaporated as my concentration snapped, but as each of us took stock of ourselves, we seemed to have made it across.

Save for one person.

Homura was clinging for dear life to her glaive, stuck upright into the riverbed, above the sand-water. In the surprise of being ejected from the raft, she had been holding on to the spear and it was currently keeping her just barely above the waters of Oblivion.

“Homura-chan!” screamed Nao, trying to reach out for her. 

“Fuck!” I hissed, grabbing at Nao’s arm to keep her out of the water. “Watch it!”

It was difficult to gauge where the sand ended and the water began. It all looked like sand from our perspective. And gambling with our memories was a risk too heavy to bear.

“Let me go, Serena!” screamed Nao, furiously. “I’ll be fine! I’ve got 900 years of memories I don’t need! Just let me help her!”

“You’re not thinking straight!” I exclaimed.

“I’m slipping!” cried Homura, clinging tightly. The toe of her boot was scarcely a few inches above the surface of the “water” below. She couldn’t risk leaping off or moving, lest it cause her to topple over.

I might have been able to manifest something else with Jessica’s Green Lantern ring, but not with all the panic washing over me. I turned over my shoulder, pointing to Lani.

“Hey! Can you use your powers to freeze the water?” I asked.

Lani blinked in realization and nodded, stepping forward. They spread out their hands and, while I couldn’t see a difference, I could feel the sudden chill and hear the crackling of flash-frozen water. But their features seemed strained as they forced more power into the act.

“It’s… fighting me…” they hissed, sweat beading visibly off their forehead. “That’s not normal water. I can’t… hold it.”

Homura slipped, but landed on a hard surface as her grip on the glaive failed. I sighed in relief, but a fraction too soon as I heard ice beginning to crack under her weight.

“Move, Homu-chan!” screamed Nao, savagely. Still holding out her arms, “Run to me!”

A symphony of cracks rang out as she raced over the invisibly frozen waters. She leaped over to Nao and me, both of us ready to catch her.

Until, right before reaching the “shore,” she slipped on the wet ice which gave way under her weight…

It happened too fast for me to properly process. Both of us grabbed her arms as she struggled to keep from slipping off the crumbling ice floe and into the memory-obliviating waters. She was unbalanced and it took effort to drag her over and onto the sands. I had to adjust my footing to keep her from toppling over, and while it worked… my foot crunched through ice… and I fell instead.

A cacophony of shouts rang out into the dry air, and while I heard countless footsteps behind me, rushing to arrest my fall… none of them were quick enough. 

And I plunged, headfirst, into the icy waters of Oblivion.

___________________

“What are you writing?”

I blinked, looking over my shoulder. Kyle peered down at me, curiously. 

English class had just finished, and as the rest of the students were eagerly vacating their desks, I had remained unaware. Again.

I looked down at my spiral-ring notebook, covered in my chicken-scratch handwriting. It was a story I had been working on tirelessly, but not one I felt comfortable with sharing. I flipped it closed, feeling my face flush.

While it was just a color, my hot-pink spiral-ring bound collection of fanfiction was a source of extreme embarrassment.

“Just… a story,” I mumbled, sheepishly, as I stowed it away in my backpack. I wasn’t about to admit my addiction to Sailor Moon to Kyle, and I definitely wasn’t going to own up to writing some gender-swapped, self-insert, Mary-Sue garbage either.

He shrugged, shouldering his backpack as he made to leave the classroom. I got up to follow him, but stopped as I spotted the view outside our classroom window.

It was a foggy day, by the looks of it, with the second-story windows of our classroom shrouded in gray void. I wasn’t certain if the day had started like that… but I probably wouldn’t have remembered if it had. One day of high school always seemed to bleed into the other… a backdrop to the exciting world that lived only within my own head.

“You see the new Batman movie?” asked Kyle, keeping pace with me as we stepped into the crowded halls. The other students thankfully ignored us, which I preferred. They were a bunch of faceless strangers anyway. I didn’t have any other friends that came to mind.

“Not yet,” I said, shaking my head. “I dunno… I feel like the latest DC stuff has been pretty lame so far. All the grimdark bullshit kind of drags you down after a while, you know?”

Kyle shrugged. “I mean, what would you prefer? 1960’s Batman with the Shark-Repellant spray and dancing the Bat-tusi? Come on! Comics are supposed to be mature… serious.”

I sighed, walking over to my locker. I frowned as I tried to twist the dial, having difficulty remembering my combination. What class came after English, anyway? Was it Bio next? I had a schedule posted to the inner-door of my locker, but that required me to open the damn thing.

“Batman is realistic,” insisted Kyle, as he watched me struggle. “None of that goofy bullshit with colored spandex and guys running around with their underwear on the outside of their pants. No bullshit superpowers… because Batman actually earns his power.”

I snorted, sighing as I still couldn’t wrench the lock open. Why was this so hard? “Right… he just has a zillion dollars he was born with… totally earned, of course…” I grumbled.

“Well,” sighed Kyle, scratching at his head. “It would be boring if he was just like us! Like… superheroes have to have something special about them… powers or money… because normal people like you or me can’t become heroes!”

Something about that felt… wrong. Intrinsically. I turned to them, crossing my arms over my chest. “That’s not true! Plenty of heroes started from nothing! Like…” I gritted my teeth, trying to get my brain to cooperate. My memory was terrible… like that fog from outside had slipped in between my ears. A particular hero came to mind…

“That one guy…” I said, snapping my fingers impatiently, “Leather coat… scarf… pulled down hat… uses those nightstick things to fight… spray-paints… an X on them? No…” I brightened up in realization. “Cross!”

Kyle blinked in bewilderment. “Who the fuck is Cross? Sounds like one of your shitty OCs.”

“Like… he starts out as some street-level fighter and then he meets some other heroes and then… he…” I fell short. Something wrenched at my chest. Not a memory… but a feeling. A sense of… familiar longing.

The bell rang above us, and Kyle shook his head, turning to leave. “Whatever… Tell me about your stupid fanfiction later… we’re late for class…”

I didn’t move. Something was wrong. “It’s not stupid,” I whispered.

Kyle turned to face me. We were the only ones remaining in the hallway, flanked by an endless line of lockers stretching into infinity in both directions. His cold, empty eyes met my own.

“It’s not stupid!” I insisted, stomping a foot childishly. “It…” I floundered for a moment before I could continue. “It’s… important to me. It’s not just fanfiction… it’s… deeper than that. It… tells the story of-”

“A loser…”

I was roughly shoved to the ground, without any prelude. I landed on the cold floor, hard, and my head spun with the impact. Pushing myself unsteadily to my feet, I caught a glimpse of a tall shadow looming over me. I was kicked roughly in the ribs and toppled onto my back, my body exploding with even more agony as I found it hard to breathe.

A figure loomed over me, their shadow cut out of the buzzing fluorescent lights above us. A young man. College-aged. Shortly-cropped blonde hair, piercing blue eyes. Tall, dressed in a long leather jacket… a red scarf around his neck.

He pulled out a pair of… tonfa… wooden nightstick-like weapons out from his belt and twirled them lazily.

“Look at you…” he snarled, taking another step towards me. “Look at what you’ve become. What you’ve let yourself become.” He laughed, bitterly. “Fuck… I’m actually glad to forget all this. To lose it all… it makes me sick to see what a pansy-ass faggot you’ve become.”

“Cross…” I mumbled, stunned by the realization that I hadn’t imagined him and likewise that he was here kicking my ass. Something was wrong. There was a deeper story… one that I was forgetting.

This story… was familiar.

I reached for my backpack only to have him step over me, crushing my hand in the process. I screamed out in more agony as he stood there, grinding his heel into my fingers as he reached down to take my bag.

As I shrieked, he opened it with one hand, sheathing one of his weapons as he knelt down pressed the other tonfa into the back of my neck. I heard the rustling of pages and papers and I heard his voice speak above me:

“‘It had always been my dream to become a hero’” he read aloud, his voice dripping with disdain. “‘But, of course, there was always the crushing reality that most people just aren’t going to get superpowers.”

He laughed derisively. “Well, no shit, stupid…” he spat, “Superpowers aren’t real! The only real power is this!” He slammed the tonfa into my skull, filling my head with even more foggy pain. Why was he doing this?! What had I done to deserve this?!

“The power to make others fear you,” he said, forcing himself off of me. In his hands, he still held that pink, spiral-ring notebook, gesturing with it. “The power to hurt and not be hurt in return. The power to kill without hesitation… not this fucking faggot-shit.” He flipped lazily through the pages as he circled my fallen body.

I desperately tried to push through the pain, fighting to find my footing… but it felt hopeless. What was the point? How did I think I could win? Who was I to oppose a real hero? Just some worthless fanboy?

‘Boy’… that didn’t feel right. As I looked down at my comparatively frail body, it couldn’t be anything but male. Flat chest, short hair and ugly… so so so ugly. Girls were infinitely more attractive than me.

“Look at you… you fucking worthless faggot,” snapped Cross, spitting on me to punctuate his point, the hot, wet saliva splattering into my hair, “Wishing for this bullshit that will never come true! You’re always going to be a man… the only question is if you’re going to be a real man or a fucking pansy-ass loser.”

He threw down the pink notebook on the floor next to me. “What a waste of paper,” he snarled, stomping the notebook flat into the tiled floor. “You can’t even come up with your own fucking ideas, so you’re just going to steal it from someone else? Some worthless self-insert, wish fulfillment fanfiction garbage?! God, you’re so fucking pathetic…” He kicked at my arm, trying to knock me onto the ground again.

I caught it, grabbing his foot, and rolling with it. He toppled over me, landing onto the ground with a grunt.

“Fuck, you’re predictable,” I chuckled, pushing myself unsteadily to my feet, finally. “Taunt, attack, taunt, attack… for someone who thinks fanfiction sucks, you sure love your clichés.”

Cross snarled as he flipped back up into a standing position. His features were contorted with an inhuman rage.

He stabbed a finger at me, furiously. “It’s a lie! None of your stupid-ass story is real! It’s all fucking fake! You’re not a girl, you’re not a hero and you are a weak-ass faggot who doesn’t deserve to live! It’s worthless and you’re just as worthless for wasting time and ink on it!”

I exhaled a breath. “Maybe you’re right… maybe it’s fake… just fiction or fairytale to make the cold reality of the world slightly more bearable,” I sighed, feeling the chill of icy waters press up against my skin.

He broke into a proud, victorious grin for a moment… but saw my own features.

Crying, but smiling all the same. “But it all starts with a lie. Something that isn’t real,” I continued, meeting his gaze, “Because how else can we begin to make it true if we don’t imagine it first?”

I reached down for the battered, pink, notebook, cradling it against my chest. “It’s a story of transformation,” I sighed, feeling the warmth of the words suffuse my body. “That was what Sailor Moon was always about. An ordinary girl becoming a hero. And even if there are no superpowers or magic or even hope… I’ll still fight every single day to make the world around me a little more super… magical… and hopeful…”

My body became suffused with light, cast from the light of the moon itself. Cross held up his arm to block the blinding brightness, hissing in fury. “It’s… not… real!”

“The hope was real,” I said, approaching him. “The hope was always real. I could forget this story… this world… everyone and everything around me… but the hope will always remain with me. As long as I have that hope… I can move forward, step by step…. To become the woman I know myself to be.”

He screamed in agony. It was too much for Cross to be subjected to this light. Because everything that he had ever been had been made of shadow. A mask. An amalgamation of shadowy, brooding and grim heroes without any real emotional depth. He had the audacity to call me a useless fake?! What a laugh…

I felt his pain as it burned away from him… underneath the shadows, fragments of lonely nights, empty sobbing and desperate denial flitted away like shards of a cocoon flying away as the butterfly within emerges. 

A lonely, sad girl… lashing out in fear.

“I understand…” I said, holding the poor child as their pain was torn from their body, layer by layer. “And I owe you a great deal for getting us this far… but we can’t keep doing this. This isn’t us… not really… We know what we really want, deep down. We just need to let go of the fear to claim it.”

“I’m afraid,” she whispered, her shivering body seemed so small as all of the shadows were burned away.

“It’s okay to be afraid, Serena,” I said, holding her close, “Just never forget who you are beneath the fear.”

“Remember… no matter what happens, you are still Serena.”

_________________________________________

I gasped for air, coughing and sputtering as water-filled lungs emptied themselves onto the ground. I felt the sandy ground against my knees and arms, as memory flooded into my mind once more.

The… vision… or whatever it had been… faded mostly from my mind, save for the last words echoing through my addled brain.

You are still Serena.

“Talk to me!” said Nao, kneeling beside me as I continued to cough up water. “Please tell me that Memory water worked!”

I coughed some more, but nodded as I did so, “Y-yeah…” I choked, feeling another senshi, Rita, judging by the force of the blows, pounding on my back.

“You shouldn’t have thrown her in like that!” insisted Lani, furiously. “She might have drowned!”

“She wasn’t drinking the water!” snapped Nao impatiently. “How else was I going to get the water of Memory into her!?”

“NOT DROWNING HER!” exclaimed Lani.

I held up an arm to silence them. I managed to take a long, uninterrupted breath and release it, slowly. 

“I’m… fine…” I mumbled, “Someone help me up so we can move forward…”

Maya and Liv on either side of me helped me to my feet. I put my arms over their shoulders and drew them close. Without needing any prompting, the other senshi, Rita and Lani followed suit. I cried… feeling the weight of what I’d nearly lost… but their presence, their warmth and their embrace was enough to wash away the bitter cold of Oblivion.