“What is it like, Pluto?” asked Princess Serenity. She was a coltish thing, all long limbs and moon-silver hair, forming such a contrast to her elegant, blue-haired mother. Queen Serenity was beauty incarnate, the night gone walking. When the stars shone on her they seemed less bright. When the moonlight touched her hair it pulled blackness from its depths, because she was all the colors of the midnight sky. Her daughter, who would one day be Queen, was colder, the bone-pale, star-pale ghost of the sun bouncing off the Moon. The princess knew, as all princesses of the Moon had always known, that she would never match her mother for beauty, or for wisdom, or for grace.
Pluto knew better. Pluto also knew that it would make no difference to say so. The dance of princesses and queens was as complex as any minuet or cotillion, and just as closed to outsiders. “What was what like, my princess?”
“Living forever." Princess Serenity hit a snag in her hair and stopped her brushing, glaring at the instrument of her tortures. "How is my hair so tangled? I didn’t do anything!”
"Ah, but you see, your hair is the perfect answer,” said Pluto. She stood gracefully, moving to stand behind Serenity. “The brush, if you please.”
Princess Serenity handed the brush to Pluto, who tucked it between her elbow and her body as she began quickly, calmly removing the pins from the princess’s high moon buns. It was convenient, to have generation upon generation of royalty choosing the same hairstyle. She had adopted her variation upon it shortly after taking her post and seeing how what might have been a temporary fashion had endured. Her hair might be graced by a single orb, rather than the royal double, but it was enough to keep her fingers nimble and her memory of the style fresh.
The princess’s hair fell loose in a silver river. Calmly, with the ease of practice had and practice yet to come, Pluto began to brush.
“Time, and your hair, are very much the same, my princess,” said Pluto. “You smooth the strands. You take care to make sure that nothing is out of place, that all will flow easily and as it will. But somehow, still, the tangles still creep in. The faintest breath of wind will tie a knot. The smallest choice will change a timeline. Living forever is like that. Every day, the wind blows, and the future changes. Sometimes it can be changed back—you can brush the future’s hair.”
Princess Serenity giggled. It was a high, rare sound, and Pluto treasured it, for she knew how little it would be heard in these halls. “What a silly thought! To brush the future’s hair.”
“Yes,” agreed Pluto. “Very silly.”
“Will I be as beautiful as mama someday?”
Centuries of stillness kept Pluto’s hand from slipping. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart caught in her chest, beating too hard before it, too, calmed. “You will be…”
You will be my heart; you will be my silver-haired sun and my golden-voiced Moon. You will kiss me in three years time, after drinking too much at your mother’s funeral, and I will ache with the memory of that moment for the rest of this eternity. You will take lovers, and I will not be one of them, and you will grow cold and patient and terrible and wonderful, all at the same time. You will ask me what it is like to live forever five more times; you will ask me of your own beauty only once. You will die, but not before I love you. I will live forever. I will love you forever. I will love your daughter like she was my own, and had you been warmer, had you been more willing to share the magic of her making with another heart, she might have been. I will mourn you when the Moon is a fairy tale for silly children, and I will remember you when the stars go cold, until Saturn wakes to take my hand and allow me to forget. I have loved you for so long that I have forgotten the art of loving anyone else. It is not fair. Time never is. But what is to come is a snarl I could not brush away. The future will have its due.
“…beautiful,” finished the Senshi of Time, and pressed a kiss to the head of her princess, who would be her queen, who would never be her lover, and went back to brushing out the silver river of her hair.
