I have this nagging feeling that if I don't post soon, Kerry may kill me for taking a pairing she wants written about and not writing anything. It's a good thing I have only heard of the atrocity done to this pairing by the infamous Oscar. I have no horrid phantom plaguing me while I write... If you're patient, you might see something interesting. Even though I'm in a reading binge that is keeping me away from most other things I also need to do... sigh

The stars hail brightly

Venus remembered sitting at her nurse's feet while the older woman spun her tales of her ancient world, and the worlds beyond. She recalled the splendid cities of the Sun, golden spires and floating palaces as the older woman placed illusion upon illusion between work-roughened hands, images now but memories. Her ancient cousins, floating ashes - if that - from the star that hosted no more life upon its burning surface. She was fascinated with the Martian queens and Jovian gladiators. Even Earth, sister to her own planet, that primitive world of uncivilized men and barbaric rituals, would keep her company on those nights when her world was only that of a room and the gardens outside her window. Her homeland, the metalic cities beneath her own floating castle, would glitter like a distant jewel whenever the gaseous clouds of Venus would part to allow her to see the clear domes, situated below.

Her nurse had been her only close companion then. The other servants kept in the palace were rarely seen and kept silent in her presence, should her path ever cross theirs. Her tutors, they had been harsh and exacting, demanding she be no less than perfect, a caliber she struggled with only because they never let her forget the cost of not being good enough. Childish and cruious, affable and wild, she rarely thought of how desolate and lonely her world really was. Sometimes, she thought back and realized that a part of her must have realized that desire she never quite recognized for what it was.

Hunger for that foreign voice, the one she knew from before her birth. The voice that would carry her from all that she knew and take her to what she was born for. That place beyond the distant blackness of space.

And she was a vessel waiting to be filled with the purpose of her birth. The innocent princess who she would be shadow to, mirror of her mirror, life of her life. But, it was kindness too, she sought. That foreign creature that she knew only from the nurse, who must have, as she thought back, resented her at least a little for the desolate life it must have been to be the caretaker of the Golden Senshi.

Her nurse spoke of Lunaria with awe, watched her with that same flickering distance that awe gives a person when she practiced her Lunarian speech. She wondered then if she was kindred to the lilthe, small boned people, with their paler skin than her own and their song-like consonants that was more musical than the soft rolling purrs that was characteristic of her own birth-tongue. She wondered of the Empress who united the universe, of the power it must have taken and the skills it must have been required to keep it all intact for so long. And what of the other Senshi, the legends passed from generation to generation, beyond the black sea overhead? Though she starved for the answers to her ponderings, to the stories of adventurous women, brave and distant, beautiful and strong. She could not place her own face amongst theirs, despite her heritage. Those glorious battles that she dreamed of, they were but dreams of chaos in her peaceful world, limited by what little she knew of chaos in the sufficating place of her birth.

She knew violence, but only in the courtyards of the training grounds. She knew coldness but only from the harsh wintery mask she wore before her tutors, beneath their cruel words that demanded her to conceal the weakness of her heart. She knew only the act and the play and her part in it, but it was not her, the legendary soldier whose armor she would one day wear and call her own.

They would not be able to prepare her for it, she realized, one cool evening. Her tutors with the hard eyes and the steady hands, would not be able to prepare her for the legend she would one day be. Hand picked by the Lunarian Queen herself or not, a queen whom Venus had never before met, they were not enough. Yet, she knew, one day she would be called by this distant goddess and ruler. So, upon the palace, like a demi-god herself, she waited with baited breath, an unsteady heart, and a mask that would hide her lackings before the ruler who would claim her life.

The stories, though, was her only connection to the people she would die for, the faceless millions that she was born to be both sword and shield for. There was one particular story she loved and anticipated for, more than all the others. Bred to be Serenity's shield and Serenity's sword, she was still a Venusian first. A romantic at heart, the incarnation of the Goddess of Love and Beauty herself. And it was a love story that she had heard of since her birth. Of a distant Venus, much like herself. A Venus with golden hair and golden eyes, who was the first to swear her allegiance to the Lunarian Queen, a thousand years ago.

That Venus, who met a Lunarian ambassador with hair, pale like moonbeams and skin white like the legendary snows of Lunaria, had fallen in love with him upon first sight. Venusians speak of this story with reverence, a hint of incomprehension. For he was a shapeshifter, his true form they say, was like that of a white tiger. And he had carried Venus, of a thousand years ago, from her palace to the skies.

"It came on a night like this," her nurse told her that evening, the same story she loved hearing since childhood. "See those stars, in the skies? They say, that they would still play out the first of that meeting, every one hundred years."

"The bright ones in the east?" she asked her first night.

"Ah, and that one in the west," her nurse supplied as they watched the velvet black. "See how they move closer to each other every night? In a few more decades they would meet again."

"They're falling," Venus sighed dreamily that night. "I wonder, if Lunarian snow is much like falling stars, hailing from the heavens like a white storm of lights."

"Nights like this, the people remember your palace, Princess. They remember it rising from the ground and into the sky that very first time. Not so much falling, that time, but a birth of many things to come." Her nurse smiled at her fondly and touched her golden brow. "Child, Venusians do not die. We remember what our ancestors have seen. One day, you may be able to tell your daughters the stories I've told you."

"One day," Venus continued that much remembered line with hope burning in her breasts with a growing intensity as her day approached. Time could not seem to dampen her passion to meet her destiny, no matter how tragic or wonderous, how difficult or simple it would be when she got there. "One day, the white tiger of Lunaria would come for me and I would know him when I see him!"

"Aye, child, you would."

"Would I love him, like I had a thousand years ago?" Venus asked eagerly, even if she knew what the answer would be, even if she had heard it a thousand times before, she never tired of the affirmation.

"Aye, you would."

She laughed, loud and delighted as her blue eyes swung to the black skies beyond her balcony, wide with pleasure. She finally closed them, at last only to sleep and dream of a man with hair long and white. She wondered if he would know her too, if memories lasted forever - as much as she believed it for herself. She dreamed of falling stars and snow covered grounds, the type that would lead her to that place beyond the blackness of space. The man who would deliver her from this golden, glittering world of lovely.