InuYasha Fan Fiction / Sailor Moon Fan Fiction ❯ Prismatic ❯ Renascence ( Chapter 17 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

It wasn't until she woke up the next day that Kagome really processed all that had happened. It felt like a dream and, if she were quite honest, she hoped that at least some of it had been at first. She buried her face in her pillow with a grumble. Judging by the light that filtered in through her window it was already afternoon and she knew she really ought to get up.

She didn't want to, but she couldn't hide in bed all day. She couldn't hide from the frightening reality of the night before. She couldn't hide from her duty to the jewel anymore.

Kagome grimaced, lazily kicked the blankets off, and reluctantly sat up. So much had happened in such a short amount of time. They'd barely had a chance to breathe. The bloodshed of a ruined Sumidagawa hadn't even been allowed to age a day before she'd been violently reminded of the conflict that awaited her on the other side of the well. A hand drifted up to touch her throat and her gaze drifted over to the little jar that sat on her desk, the shards glistening almost mockingly at her.

Usagi had saved the day twice that weekend. She'd hoped they would at least get a break after that last fight with Jadeite. The errant thought struck her suddenly and Kagome straightened so quickly that she nearly fell off the bed. 'Jadeite!'

She had forgotten all about him and in all the chaos also forgotten about broaching the topic with Usagi. This made her plans to focus on the feudal era a bit more complicated. While she'd planted a few ofuda around the guest room, there was still a danger in him waking up while she was hiking through the past. He was no mindless demon, after all.

Kagome dragged a hand over her face with a groan. Maybe she could get Kaede to make him a rosary, or teach her how to do it. 'Well, may as well go check on him. Hopefully the ofuda will hold if he wakes up in the meantime…'

The room was still, silent but for the quiet sounds of breathing from the still unconscious Jadeite. Her mother must have checked in on him earlier, Kagome realized. Judging by the dust wand that had been left leaning against the foot of the bed, it had likely been forgotten in the chaos of the previous evening.

Kagome paused to collect it with a sigh, feeling yet another twinge of guilt at the thought of how she must have frightened her mother.

Her eyes drifted back down to the man as she approached the side of the bed, and she almost felt a bit envious of the peaceful expression on his face. She couldn't remember the last time she'd gotten a truly decent night's sleep. Shoving the bitter thought away, she lifted a hand to press her palm to his forehead. There was a bit more color to his face than there had been before, but he didn't seem feverish at least.

In hindsight, Kagome would realize that she should have noticed the pause in his otherwise rhythmic breaths. But as it stood, she didn't, and so when her fingertips left his brow to check his pulse, she was not prepared for the way the room rapidly turned upside down.

"What the-ack!" Kagome landed hard, the air knocked from her lungs beneath the weight that was suddenly on top of her. Her hands reflexively darted up to claw at the fingers wrapped around her throat.

When his eyes landed on her face his expression faltered with a flicker of surprise. As his grip slackened, Kagome seized her chance. With a gulp of air and a flare of adrenaline, Kagome bucked. The hand gripping her throat fell away to flail for balance instead. With the weight gone from her chest, she twisted towards the bed, scrambling to grab at the footboard to pull herself free.

One of his hands caught her by the calf to halt her movements, and Kagome yelped. She turned to level him with a glare, clenched her fingers, and realized that she had somehow held onto the dust wand in their tumble.

"Get back!" Kagome reeled back and promptly smacked him in the face with it.

He tumbled backwards into the side table, coughing and muttering what was probably a swear. He fumbled to find purchase, clearly still unsteady. Kagome might have felt a little bad if he hadn't just tried to choke her. She got to her feet just as he managed to get a grip on the edge of the bed.

Deciding not to risk giving him the chance, she shoved him back down, her foot planted firmly in his gut to keep him there.

"Alright, buddy," Kagome thrust her makeshift weapon into his face and watched as he went cross-eyed. When he tilted his head back to look up from the duster to her, surprise colored his expression. She narrowed her eyes and jabbed him in the chest with a huff. "Now, I want answers."

---

Jadeite wasn't certain what he had expected to wake to, but it certainly wasn't the pastel walls of an unfamiliar bedroom. Everything about it was odd, a strange contradiction to the palace quarters that he knew. For all the luxury afforded to them as respected generals within the Dark Kingdom, their dwellings had never been quite so underwhelming. This was a modest room. It was plain, unremarkable, and overall strangely homey. It was everything that the Dark Kingdom decidedly was not.

'The Kingdom…' As the memories filtered in, he found himself wondering how he had woken at all.

The queen had been quite clear about the price for failure.

And yet, he woke to a sense of warmth rather than the ice of eternal sleep. It was comforting enough to be suspicious. There was nothing warm about the Dark Kingdom. He closed his eyes and must have drifted off again, because the next thing he knew was the warmth of a hand pressed to his forehead.

It was too small to be Nephrite's. Kunzite was never so doting for anyone but Zoicite, and Zoicite wouldn't be so gentle, even if he did opt to heal him. Even if he had been brought back to the Dark Kingdom, this was not the way he would have been received in the wake of defeat.

This was not the Dark Kingdom.

This was not one of his fellows.

This was a soldier.

The moment that followed was a blur of instinct and, as the haze lifted, a rapid transition between realization and further confusion. His gaze cleared enough to see the girl he'd pinned and he wavered, somehow startled yet unsurprised to see the odd little human. 'This girl?'

He'd suspected her, surely. After the encounter at Shapely, Clock Look, and then that damnable cruise, it seemed far too obvious. She lurched beneath him then, startling him back from his attempt to reconcile exactly what was happening. His hand blindly gripped at her leg, grasping at her calf to still her and steady himself. Then she spun a glare on him and he froze, struck by the familiar blue of her eyes.

She didn't give him the chance to process the thought further.

By the time he had caught his breath enough to realize what had just happened, he found himself on the ground again. His head jerked back when she shoved something into his face and he was granted no time to even be offended by the fact that she had apparently slapped him in the face with a feather duster. She hissed a demand for answers and Jadeite felt his heart skip a beat uneasily. He'd been planning to demand the same of her.

This, he thought, could be a problem.

---

Whatever answers either of them had been expecting, it wasn't quite what became of their exchange.

After a somewhat tense standoff -brief as it was- the girl hauled him back onto the bed and took the chair adjacent to cross her arms and stare at him in what she likely hoped was an intimidating expression. Luckily for her -and probably himself, all things considered- Jadeite had been more interested in figuring out what was going on than pointing out that she only looked like an angry cat.

Instead, he told her that he was a general for the Dark Kingdom, tasked with gathering energy from the masses. She rolled her eyes and muttered that she knew that already. He relented that he supposed a soldier ought to have been informed at least that much. He wasn't sure why the thought left such a bitter taste in his mouth.

The conversation only spiraled from there.

For every question she had, he was torn between surprise at her knowledge and her ignorance at the same time. Eventually, her attempt at interrogating him fizzled out and their discussion shifted to one of a more curious nature. She questioned what happened that night, during the fight at the amusement park, and he couldn't help the way he tensed. His lips thinned and he was distracted by echoes of an order to recover one strange little soldier if he desired to keep his head. His jaw clenched as he recalled the queen's ultimatum and the unease that had stayed his hand when he had very nearly succeeded. Unfortunately, when it came down to what transpired afterwards, he didn't really have an answer to give her. What he did remember only paved the way for more uncertainty.

He remembered luring them out.

He remembered their struggle and her distraction when they'd nearly gotten Sailor Moon.

He remembered the way she surrendered herself to save her comrades.

He remembered the flicker of movement that caught his attention before they'd been engulfed. For a moment, he could feel the flames lick at his skin all over again. He could feel the flesh melt from his body. The pain had been intense and all-encompassing as the world fell away beneath them, and then nothing.

"Hey, are you okay?" Jadeite came back to himself with a jolt as she reached over to touch his arm. She jerked away, mumbled an apology, and tucked her hands back into her lap. "I guess I can't really blame you for not knowing, since I think you might have turned into a rock."

Jadeite turned to look at her with a blink, and then another.

'...what?' It was such a strange thing to hear that it immediately derailed his spiraling thoughts.

He could only muster a request for her to repeat herself and every theory that he might have had on how he had gotten here, in the home of a little soldier, very quickly went out the window. Everything that he suspected of her was suddenly in question. She'd apparently had him at her mercy, the mercy of the sailor soldiers, unconscious for over a week. He hadn't been prepared for the admission she let slip when he pointed that out.

"They don't know you're here," she'd said. Jadeite was so flummoxed that he did not even attempt to press the topic.

It wasn't until he questioned her knowledge of demons that she looked nervous for the first time. The change caught his interest. She hadn't even looked bothered by his clear knowledge of her civilian identity or her moniker as a soldier. Yet, talk of demons -something she seemed fairly competent with as far as he could tell- was what made her bristle. She stared at him for a long moment, clearly debating something, before she heaved a sigh of defeat and slumped in her chair with an odd look of resolution. Surely, he'd thought, it couldn't have been that complicated.

He was wrong.

He wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but it was not time travel. While the concept of time magic was not unheard of, it was not the answer that he had been expecting. Jadeite thought he might do well not to bother making any expectations of this girl.

He found himself only able to sit there, dumbfounded as she ran through a clearly abridged story about a half demon and his priestess lover. He wasn't sure what the point of it was until she mentioned a jewel. Thoughts of the coveted silver crystal sprung to the forefront of his mind before he quashed them to refocus on her story. After she'd finished Jadeite leaned forward, steepling his fingers thoughtfully. For a few seconds he was silent, mulling over what she'd told him. The tale was imperfect in many ways, but much about her suddenly made quite a bit of sense.

After a beat, and he would question the impulse later, Jadeite told her of the Dark Kingdom once more, this time in depth. While his memory was lacking of what came before the conflict with the Moon Kingdom, or the life they'd been leading before Beryl had reawakened them, he told her what he knew this time.

He owed her that much, even if she did not seem to realize the debt he suddenly carried.

She was a good enough audience, listening attentively as he detailed what his mission had been. Something in the pit of his stomach twisted uneasily when she questioned who the Great Ruler was, because he found that he did not have an answer for her. Thinking on it, Jadeite wasn't even certain how he'd come to serve the queen. He had never questioned why he did not know before - none of them had.

When the topic circled back to the orders regarding her abduction, he did not miss the way she tensed.

"Relax." Jadeite frowned as he thought on his last encounter with the queen - or rather, Beryl, for she was certainly no longer his queen. The queen he had loyally served, willingly gone to his death to please, would have had his head, or at least allowed the Great Ruler to devour him, despite such loyalty and effort.

A soldier -who, for all intents and purposes, should have killed him- had given him his life instead. Since they'd theorized that it was Sailor Moon's healing incantation that had woken him, he supposed that he owed her too.

His lips thinned. "You certainly don't have to worry about my fealty to the Dark Kingdom now."

She eyed him skeptically, but didn't push the matter. After a moment she heaved a sigh and he looked up at the little noise of surprise that followed. "Oh, it's later than I thought. It's getting dark out."

A glance out the window proved her correct. The day had left them, lost in the hours spent sharing stories and discussing the sheer madness of their situation. Jadeite's gaze drifted over to the lamp that sat atop the dresser across from them. Lifting a hand, he idly flicked his fingers at the appliance.

And he watched, bewildered, as it promptly burst into a shower of glass and sparks.

The girl dove behind her chair with a shriek before slowly peeking her head up over the top to gape at the mess. She looked between him and the remnants of the lamp, slack-jawed for a moment before she scowled at him. "What was that for?!"

Jadeite stared at the shattered remains for a moment, his expression dumbfounded. "...I was trying to turn it on."

She came out from behind the chair to examine the mess before she set her hands on her hips and spun on him with a huff. "And you couldn't use the switch like a normal person?!"

Normal, Jadeite thought, was the last descriptor he would use for any of this.

---

They came to something of an agreement that night. It was an odd agreement to be sure but there was little about their situation that wasn't odd to begin with. After a bit of experimentation following the destruction of the table lamp, Jadeite had quite quickly realized that while he still had power it was not the thrum of dark magic that he was so used to.

The Dark Kingdom could not know he was alive.

Thus, the sailor soldiers could not know he was alive. If they did, it would surely result in confrontation and, with his control of his power so unsteady, it would not be a quiet event. He mused that he might be able to convince Nephrite to hold a conversation on the matter, but if word got back to the others, to Queen Beryl, he was as good as dead and the sailor soldiers exposed at best.

They couldn't risk exposing him when he was so unstable. The fallout would be a problem for everyone involved. The girl, this Higurashi Kagome, wasn't thrilled with keeping the information from her friends, especially an Usagi that Jadeite presumed to be Sailor Moon, but relented eventually.

"Only until you're stable though," she'd insisted. "And if the others find out before then, I'm not lying to them!"

He was surprised she agreed so easily to that much. In fact, Kagome didn't ask for much -or really anything- in return. She brought him downstairs to meet her family, apparently aware of the supernatural and her involvement, whom he introduced himself to as Jed.

He didn't miss the way the girl snorted at the alias, but she looked away with a huff when he raised a brow at her, clearly understanding the unspoken retort. 'Come now, is Sailor T really any better?'

She watched on in amusement while her mother checked him over and snickered at his expense when the old man stuck an ofuda to his forehead. Every muscle in his body tensed, ready for the power that he knew her to carry, but it never came. Luckily, none of them had seemed to notice anything odd in his reaction. The boy -a younger brother he realized- grumbled some form of apology and casually peeled the offending talisman from his face.

Jadeite did not miss the way the boy's eyes sharpened, however, when Kagome proceeded with the limited backstory that they had agreed on. Admittedly, the cover story of escaping the Dark Kingdom and needing a place to stay was a bit more on the nose than they might have realized.

The woman, Kagome's mother, offered him the room without a moment's hesitation. Her grandfather grunted an agreement and shoved a broom in his hand the following morning. Jadeite supposed that assisting the old man in tending the shrine and minding that shop of his was quite a small ask, all things considered. It was mid-morning by the time the girl wandered out to look for him, looking confused to find him stocking a few window displays. She stared at him for a long moment before realizing she'd been caught and stammered that breakfast was ready before scurrying back inside. How amusing.

The domestic scene he walked into was strange. He also wasn't given a choice but to partake when Kagome's mother loudly invited him to join and ushered him to the table to sit beside the girl without waiting for a response. It was a perfectly warm, homey scene that contradicted everything he had grown used to. He ended up watching them interact more than actually eating the serving set in front of him.

And then the demon walked in.

Jadeite had noticed the way Kagome tensed first, a sudden look of alarm in her eyes that he didn't quite understand. For a moment the demon -or half-demon, according to her story- froze in the doorway and their eyes met. Jadeite had seen the man with the soldiers before, even if they had not really met directly. This half-demon, this Inuyasha, held his gaze with a scowl for a long moment. It was a challenge as much as it was an attempt to size him up.

Then, Jadeite watched as Inuyasha's nostrils flared in a short sniff of the air before he turned back to the girl perched beside him. "Who the heck is this guy?"

Jadeite wasn't sure why she looked so stunned.

It was her brother -Souta- who came to the rescue. "His name's Jed. Escaped the Dark Kingdom after that last big fight you guys had at the amusement park, right?"

Jadeite had arched a brow, but nodded easily enough, and the boy grinned with such an impish expression that he almost thought he was looking at Zoicite for a moment.

"Yeah, so he knows about demons and all and needs a place to hide out so the bad guys don't get 'em. Gonna help gramps out with the shop while sis runs around with you," Souta continued with a grin. "And he's gonna teach me some tricks too."

Kagome sputtered beside him but Jadeite found himself oddly unoffended. In fact, he was almost tickled by the brazen audacity. Zoicite, he realized, would get on far too well with this boy.

Inuyasha left them not long after that, after pinning him with one last suspicious glare for good measure. It wasn't until they'd gone to see the girl off at the old well that she finally brought the matter up. She shouldered her bag, an impressive feat to be sure given the size of it, stomped up to him, and prodded him in the chest with a huff.

"Don't think I won't be checking on you, buddy." She leaned in to hiss at him, prompting Jadeite to raise his brows in amusement. "And if you even think about teaching my little brother dark magic I'll make you wish you were still a rock, got it?"

Jadeite bit his cheek to keep from outright laughing, but he couldn't help the amused smirk that tugged at his lips. "I'm sure you will, little soldier."

---

True to her word, she came back the next day. She stayed only long enough to collect a change of clothes -a pitiful excuse given the amount it had seemed she'd already packed- before vanishing back down that well of hers again. This was the routine for several days, until a week had gone by. It wasn't until the weekend came back around that she stayed longer than a few hours and pulled him aside for an actual conversation.

"I'm surprised, you know," she eventually admitted. "That Inuyasha didn't recognize you, I mean."

When he questioned why that would be so odd given his own liberal use of glamours as a general, she tapped her nose.

"Inuyasha's part dog demon. And our scents- the sailor soldiers, I mean… they've never changed between forms, according to him."

Jadeite was still mulling over that tidbit of information when she left again that Monday morning. This time, she didn't return the following day. Now, it was approaching the end of the week once more and the girl had been gone for several days. That wasn't to say he was concerned, of course. He wasn't. She had proven herself perfectly capable of handling herself.

But she was still so green. Jadeite paused, finding himself standing in front of the well house as he came out of his thoughts. A quiet set of footsteps off to the left offered a welcome distraction in the form of the doting family matriarch.

"You're looking much better," she said, a smile on her lips as she strode up to him. "How are you feeling?"

This woman, this Higurashi Kunloon, baffled Jadeite just as much as her daughter. At least the girl -Kagome- had the sense to be wary of him. Her mother, on the other hand, was confoundingly welcoming. In fact, Jadeite was quite certain that given the chance, this woman would even invite the queen for a cup of tea without so much as batting an eye.

Jadeite still wasn't quite sure how he was supposed to respond to her. "I am…well."

"Hmm," she hummed in response, her gaze drifting over his head to the tree that loomed over them. "Has Kagome introduced you to Goshinboku yet?"

She didn't wait for his reply before she trailed past him. After a beat, Jadeite followed.

"The legend behind this tree is a very old one, and my father-in-law is more equipped to tell it properly." There was a fondness to her expression as she gazed up into the canopy, seeing something that he could not. "But it does have an air about it. Most who visit find a sense of peace in its presence."

Jadeite regarded the tree. It seemed unremarkable at first, despite its size. Under different circumstances, he might have chalked it up to the inane superstitions of the human populous. Now, without the lingering sensation of the dark magic that he'd grown so used to, he could feel it. The air around the shrine had seemed lighter, a fact that wasn't particularly notable by itself. The air around the tree was more than that.

There was a weightlessness to it, a veil of cleanliness that seemed to wrap around him, settling the uneasy flutter of the energy within him.

He had never realized how smothering the dark magic had been until he'd woken to find himself free of it. He couldn't remember a time that his power had been anything but dark. Yet here he sat, a well of power so deep that he floundered to control it. He had never needed more than a thought to control it before. He had never had so much to control before. He did not remember a time before he and his fellow kings had served the Dark Kingdom. But he knew that they had come to serve the kingdom because it had granted them power. It made no sense to find himself with more than he could control once his link to it had been broken. He had been purified, cleansed of his connection to the kingdom's power.

He should have been powerless.

He should have been mortal.

He should have been dead.

Instead, he found himself with more strength than he could manage, floundering like a new recruit rather than a feared general. Clenching a fist, he wondered just how much the Dark Kingdom, be it Queen Beryl or the Great Ruler, had kept from him - from all of them. He'd never questioned the limited memory before. He'd always chalked it up to the seal that the queen had woken them from. Now, he wasn't so certain of that information either.

He was drawn from his spiraling thoughts when the woman beside him spoke again, providing a much-needed distraction.

"It seemed to help Kagome quite a bit when she first came into her own power," she said, a smile on her lips that seemed far too understanding.

Still, Jadeite glanced up at that piece of information, interest piqued. "I take it that development was unexpected?"

"Oh, yes. It seems so routine now and she's worked so hard to adjust," she murmured, her expression softening. "I do sometimes forget that it was only a few months ago…"

Jadeite froze, uncertain if he'd heard her correctly. "Months?"

'No, that can't be,' he thought. Surely, he'd misheard her. He might have thought her quite green as a soldier, but he hadn't expected her to be that inexperienced. Surely the little soldier that had held her own against him had more than mere months of experience.

The woman only hummed a sound of confirmation. "Yes, and on her birthday too, the poor thing."

She smoothed out her skirt, appearing perfectly oblivious to his turmoil as she took a seat on the little stone bench and patted the spot beside her invitingly. She seemed too oblivious to his bewilderment for it to be a farce and Jadeite was too dumbfounded to do anything but obey.

"It was a relief when she met Usagi," she said as he sat. Then she paused to look at him with a thoughtful expression. "I suppose you know who she is too?"

Grateful for the shift in conversation, Jadeite nodded. The technical aspects of magic were at least a subject he was confident in his understanding of. "Illusions depend on a lack of awareness. Glamours are only another type of illusion."

While he hadn't interacted with the girl, it hadn't been difficult to piece together that the bouncy little blonde he'd seen her with at Clock Look was Sailor Moon, even if Kagome hadn't confirmed it. When the woman inclined her head, he drew out of his musings to continue.

"The magic only works when the knowledge isn't there." Jadeite furrowed his brow, lifting a hand to rub his chin thoughtfully. "Though my own never seemed to work on Kagome."

She hummed and Jadeite could not tell whether the smile that tugged at her lips was one of fondness or sadness. "She always has had that insight."

That wasn't quite what he'd meant, but Jadeite got the impression that she knew that.

"She sees more in people than she does in herself at times, I think." She set a hand on his shoulder, the gesture so oddly affectionate that Jadeite tensed. If she noticed, she didn't mention it, and only smiled pleasantly when he turned to look at her. "You know, Inuyasha nearly killed her when they first met too."

As she gave him one last pat on the shoulder and stood to leave him to his thoughts, Jadeite idly mused that Kagome wasn't quite the only one with such uncanny insight.

---

It was late Friday evening when Kagome finally came back through the well. Jadeite sensed the flicker of magic first, a welcome sign that he was regaining a semblance of control. Still, curious to the unsociable hour, he headed out towards the well house to meet her. As it turned out, it was a good thing he had.

She looked awful.

Kagome staggered out of the door, barely managing to shut it behind her. She didn't even notice him standing mere feet away, a sign enough on its own that she was out of commission. Previously, she'd seemed almost annoyingly attuned to his presence. Instead, she stumbled and looked surprised to see him when he caught her before she could hit the ground.

Jadeite mercifully opted not to question what had occurred on the other side. Instead, he only heaved a sigh, plucked her from the ground -despite her protests- and brought her inside to deposit her in her room. When she sputtered indignantly at him, he only rolled his eyes and muttered for her to wash up and get some sleep.

He waited until he heard the water shut off and the quiet sound of her bedroom door shut before he returned to his own.

If he hadn't seen the state of her the night before, Jadeite might have thought her trip uneventful when he saw her interactions with the family the next day. She smiled and exchanged conversation with the others, looking absolutely content. She was bright and energetic as she recalled the most recent adventure, prompted by her eager little brother. Apparently, they'd met a pair of freshly trained priestesses and fought an ogre that they had been tricked into releasing. The old man was just as enraptured by the tale as the boy and even Jadeite would have to admit that she was a decent storyteller. When she came to the end of the tale to describe the ogre's narrow defeat, she giggled when the boy leapt up to cheer for their victory.

But it didn't reach her eyes.

While Jadeite couldn't claim to know her terribly well as a person, certainly not as closely as her friends and family ought to have, perhaps that was the reason he noticed the difference. Even with her disguise in place, her eyes had remained the same. If she'd not seemed so skittish with him as a civilian, he might have made the connection a long time ago. For some reason, that prospect didn't sit very well with him.

If he hadn't woken to the frightened flutter of her energy at around two in the morning that night, he may have thought he'd misread her. If he'd been anyone else but a trained general, he might not have noticed the shaky pattern in her footsteps, or the quiet gasps of breath that echoed down the hall from someone clearly shaken by a nightmare. When he heard the distant click of the front door, he glanced out the window just in time to see her trudge into the courtyard, towards the tree.

After a moment of contemplation, he followed. She didn't seem to notice him when he approached, but shifted to make room for him as he took a seat on the bench beside her. She didn't spare him more than a glance, only hugging her sweater a little closer to her body and staring out at the empty courtyard. He watched her expression, and felt an odd niggling of guilt at the glint of fear in her eyes. He'd seen that look in her eyes only twice before, when he'd cornered her at Shapely and when Sailor Moon had been poisoned by the dark magic in their last fight.

Jadeite leaned forward, setting his chin atop his linked fingers to hide his frown. "..the youma?"

She jolted upright and looked at him with a startled blink. "Huh?"

Before he could clarify, she seemed to realize and Jadeite saw her eyes dim a little. "Oh… no. Not exactly. It's just… she got away. The dark priestess, I mean. Kaede called her Tsubaki."

Jadeite recalled the name from her tale of the ogre. While the woman did seem to present a problem, he was uncertain why she seemed quite so rattled when that Naraku of theirs was also at large and sounded far worse than one bitter priestess.

After a moment, Kagome bit her lip and spoke almost too quietly for him to hear. "I…remember what she made me do."

He thought back to that part of her story, recalling that the priestess had taken control of her body to attack her comrades, specifically her half-demon friend. As he understood, nothing had come of it but a near miss with an arrow and Sailor Moon had freed her quickly enough. The look in her eyes was far too haunted for it to be only that.

"But before that she had me…" Kagome trailed off, the expression on her face thoughtful in a way that said she was still not entirely certain what had happened, much less how to describe it. "Trapped in my mind, I guess."

He watched her swallow and blink a few times, frowning a little at the flicker of fear in her eyes.

"It was like none of it had ever happened. Like…" she trailed off and when a few little tears budded in the corners of her eyes, Jadeite felt a twinge of alarm. Thankfully, she did not cry, though the rasp of her voice suggested that she was close. "It was like I never met any of them."

She was quiet for a moment, and he watched the shifting emotions on her face as she strained to regain her composure. When she turned to look at him, Jadeite found himself uncomfortable with just how shaken she seemed.

"I didn't know who they were and I," she paused, her fingers clenching around the fabric of her pajamas as she looked back down at her lap. "I started to forget who I was."

Something about the quiet admission struck Jadeite uncomfortably. Idly, he realized that he had come to know far too well, just what it was to forget oneself.

Jadeite rose alongside her when she pushed herself back to her feet with a sigh. "Even after all this time it seems like I'm… still too weak."

Well that certainly wouldn't do. Jadeite turned to her with a scowl.

"Don't insult me," he huffed. "The soldier that outmaneuvered me isn't weak."

She didn't seem certain whether to be flustered or offended by the chastisement. After a moment of gawking at him, she managed to stammer a protest. "But I'm not even a real soldier!"

"Well," Jadeite drawled, his gaze trailing over her as he drew up behind her. "That's remedied easily enough."

He felt the tension in her shoulders, the way her breath hitched as his chest pressed flush to her back. Mercifully, he only reached around her, taking hold of her wrists to position them properly. "Hands up, soldier."