HI I HOPE IT’S OKAY THIS INSPIRED ME. Usagi is not normally a thing I do, and neither is publishing Mystery and Shadow on the main blog but HERE WE ARE. 1000 words about.
“I want to take your portrait!” Usagi grinned as she sat across from Haruka, who fiddled with the baby on her lap and did not look up at Usagi as she smiled.
“I mean,” Haruka shrugged, “just me?”
“Yeah!” Usagi chirped, “just you!”
“Why?” It was a simple question, but even Haruka seemed afraid of the answer, cooing and touching Chibiusa’s little toes as if she could ignore it.
Usagi wanted to answer immediately, to have something fun and silly as the spilled over nachos that sat between them. It was nearly ten years since the war had ended. Since everything had changed, and they had all taken the rubble they were left with to build a better and stronger life. There had been so many snapshots of that old life she wanted to keep, so many things that she could no longer quite remember or had been colored or torn by age. Things she wished she could see in all the bright colors they had been, when she hadn’t known what the future would bring.
The camera had frightened her, for years. It had been her father’s, a loving gift when she’d graduated high school and full of possibility, but it seemed like too much weight, to be responsible for capturing all those memories, to try and take the firefly of love and make it live under glass forever.
Then the end of the war had come, and there were some lights that were snuffed out forever, and every light Usagi ever knew now had a filter that sharpened or dampened its shine, or turned it in a new tone, and things were so uncertain that she wasn’t sure she’d ever want to remember them again. Who could put this pain on paper? Who would long to remember this?
There was something that whispered that to bear witness was its own sort of tribute, but Usagi let the whispers die away, and put the camera on the shelf.
Seiya had been the first. Usagi had come to appreciate that the lights were different but no less beautiful, warmer and softer with the passage of time and the wear of life. She had come to love them, again, to see nothing but beauty in each of them. Seiya had wrapped her hand the wide back of the camera and smiled, her head cocked in that way that was sweetly charismatic, asking why she never used it. It was a nice camera.
Usagi hadn’t had the strength to say that she was afraid.
Afraid to admit she was happy, afraid to admit she was loved and loving, afraid to admit that her life swelled with beauty and contentment, as if, in some way, it might be a form of unfaithfulness to Ami, to Hotaru, to Taiki. To her marriage to Mamoru that had been ruined from the first, no matter how Usagi tried. To admit that she wanted to capture this life as she wished she’d captured the last one. That she’d spent so much of her youth looking to a future that never came, and so much of her adulthood looking to a past that was no longer.
But Seiya had not pressed on any of these points, simply slipped the camera into Usagi’s hands and jumped onto the couch, one arm over the back with that wide toothy smile of hers, eyes crinkling at the corners, telling Usagi to take a picture. Take a picture in their new house.
She’d clicked. It was an old camera, and she had to develop the film herself, in her father’s studio standing side by side, Kenji kindly saying nothing about how she’d been years without picking up so much as a roll of film. He simply looked over Usagi’s shoulder and mentioned it was a great picture of her young woman. They were all still so young to Kenji, no matter how old they felt to each other.
He was right. It was a great picture of her, effervescent joy bubbling off of her, the expressiveness of her body popping through the greys and blacks of the photo. It was Seiya, true as life, and Usagi loved her in the photo and in that moment and she remembered again why she had wanted to capture everything.
Rei had been the next, hair in a low but firm bun, looking off into the distance as if she could see it at all, knowing that it didn’t matter if she could or couldn’t because Rei had her own power now, given to her by no one, and she carried herself as if it were true, with none of the haughtiness or doubt of her youth because it was now a simple fact.
Usagi had bounced with joy developing it, feeling Rei held in her hands on that slim piece of paper.
Mina had smirked, choppy bob framing her face, giving a fingergun to the camera in her consistently playful way, her hips bounced to the side and just a trace of the sadness she tried to hide in her eyes, the slight tell that maybe she blamed herself for everything that had gone wrong, the way she refused to see what had gone right. The way she always had, and Usagi had pretended she didn’t notice, like she always had.
She loved these pictures. It helped wash away the girls they had been and made her love all the more powerfully the women they were now, to see that their powers were ever stronger, and all theirs. She loved them and she hung them in her long hallway to the bedroom, and she smiled brightly every time she added a new one to the wall, Seiya hammering in the nail and drawing an arm around her.
“Because I love you,” she said to Haruka, leaning across the table and patting her hand, “and you look so handsome in pictures. I want to have one of you with the rest of them.”
Haruka’s chest puffed up a little, smiling without meaning to, and she nodded at Usagi.
“Okay. Whenever you want to.”
Now. Everything Usagi had ever wanted was right now.
2087
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