Oh my god I’m so fucking hyped up I was expecting things to go really really badly but HE GOT THEM TO LISTEN AND HE DID SOME KIND OF NEXT LEVEL MENTAL HOODOO SHIT PLEASE LET THEM ACTUALLY FUCKING LISTEN AND APOLOGIZE TO GARNET FOR CRASHING HER RECEPTION
AND THEN GIVE HER A NICE NEW RECEPTION TO MAKE UP FOR IT
Rei is completely unsurprised, why is everyone not on their knees right now, excuse you.
Pride turns to a sinking feeling as she realizes there is more to this role than being adored. There is the knowledge that others will fight and die for you. People you love.
Rei does NOT have Usagi’s problem of inability to act–if anything, she is rash, she shoots first and asks questions later.
The energy between her and Mina, Venus, the commander, is palpable. And Rei is the princess, and can take what she wants.
This leads to deep conflicts between her and Usagi that are only intensified when Rei lets Michiru and Haruka kill Hotaru Tomoe.
Haruka spirals in the aftermath of that choice, always knowing she was bad, and tainted, but now she has the knowledge that she murdered a child, and even if it was the right choice, of course she was chosen, because she was bad enough to do it, and that is why she’s spent so much of her life running, so much of her life alone.
Michiru is rather unbothered by the whole incident, having made peace with the kind of person she knows herself to be, and the knowledge that someone has to be the bad guy, to save the world.
But it kills her to watch Haruka fraying.
There is no reconciliation or love between them, and Haruka pushes her further and further away, knowing she is unworthy of love. KNowing she could never be good.
Rei is the ruler Usagi could never be, and Galaxia does not run roughshod over this world, over Rei’s world, because Rei will never give up what is hers without a fight.
Haruka is lost in the fight with Galaxia. It’s the first time she knows peace, dying for her princess. Repaying the debt she owed Hotaru.
Michiru, who has never grown close with Rei, and who had no claim to Haruka but the call of her own heart, simply shuts herself up even tighter.
Crystal Tokyo comes with Venus at her side, more terrifying and fierce than ever, and with Usagi sitting at the bottom of the palace stairs, wishing Rei Hino would return.
I’m sorry, was I NOT supposed to read this as “GORE AT Great Clips”?
date a selkie, but don’t hide her cloak. let her go home and visit her family now and then, knowing that she’ll come back and hang her seal cloak in the closet like she always does. trust is important.
The first time she lets the redhead take her home, she’s diligent about hiding her cloak. She folds it carefully against tears and rips and abrasions, and hides it in a sea cave whose entrance is concealed by the tide.
She does the same, the second and third and fourth times, careful, wary, mindful of her mother’s lessons. Remembers the way her mother’s hands had chafed on her soft cheeks, rough with cooking and cleaning for her fisherman husband, the way her mother’s peat-dark eyes had been tense and harsh with the lesson.
“Mind me, Niahm. Never let them find your cloak.”
The way her mother’s mouth had curved, a sickle of dissatisfaction and relief and envy, as she had escaped into the waves.
So she minds her mother’s lesson, and she takes care with her cloak.
Would that she had taken as much care with her heart.
The fifth time, she wears the cloak to the girl’s door, clutched about her throat, dripping along the darkened lanes.
She enters the home, welcomed with soft kisses and gentle touches and kindling passion. She drapes the cloak, artful in her carelessness, across an old wooden chair, the one that creaks and tilts slightly if you don’t sit just right.
When she wakes, in the wee hours of the morning, even before her lover, the cloak still rests, supple and dappled by the sea, on the back of the chair.
She frowns into the softening dawn, dons the cloak, and returns to the sea.
And again, the sixth time. And the seventh.
The eighth time, she finally breaks, prickling and hurt with longing, gripping a handful of russet hair in her hand, firm with emphasis.
“Surely you know what I am,” she says to her lover, the cool froth of sea foam and the call of gulls curling around her voice.
“Of course,” her lover responds, soft and tender in the dawnlight, throat arched willingly, pale as the inner whorls of a shell. “You taste of the sea,” the girl whispers, reverently.
She shakes her lover’s head gently, fingers tangled still in russet locks. “Why?” she demands. “Why won’t you keep me?”
A long silence that waits and fills, like a tidepool, stretches between them. Cool as a current. Deep as the Channel.
Her lover’s eyes are dark and tender. “Must I trap you to keep you, my heart? Is that the shape of love that you desire?”
She sinks into the thought, struck and stymied, remembering her mother’s harsh hands, her cold eyes. Her hand eases into russet waves, caresses where her grip had punished. Her lips press cool and damp as the sea against the arching curve of her lover’s shoulder. “What shape of love will you give to me?”
The answer is easy, quick, certain. “Myself. Only myself, whenever you should wish it. Your cloak by the door, your body in my bed, and the freedom to go, whenever you must. As long as you wish.”
It’s not an answer a fisherman could ever give, nor would think to.
The ninth time, she hangs her cloak by the door, draped in careful dappled folds next to a drying oilskin jacket.
Wow hey DO I WANT THIS SO BADLY. WAY TO MAKE ME A MASSIVE SAILOR MERCURY FAN.
Kozue is not at all impressed by the future she’s been handed. She would rather be alone, be a wild thing, than be in thrall to whatever ‘princess’ she’s supposed to follow.
This whole ‘family togetherness’ garbage is just that. They’re bound together by duty, and that is that, whatever Usagi says.
But she thinks, for one moment: What if SHE’S the princess? What if SHE’S the one meant to rule–it makes sense to her, looking at her competition.
When Usagi as revealed as the princess, she rolls her eyes so hard she sprains something.
But Kozue has never believed in fate, and if she was not born to be the princess, perhaps she could become.
She walks into Beryl’s lair with a smile on her face. Usagi is so trusting.
Rhio's Tunglr Stuff 