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 Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 5:59 pm
When Ares slipped in through the bathroom mirror of the guest bedroom in her mother’s condo, the first thing she noticed was the temperature. Cold. No, not just cold. Frigid, tundra conditions even. The air prickled with ice. The windows fogged from it. Outside, snow lingered in the gutters, slowly melting as spring drew near. Most families curled themselves around their fireplaces or cranked up the heat until the thermostat whistled. Most families snuggled up on couches and sipped at the edges of their chipped coffee mugs on cocoa and tea and cider, whispering of how much they wanted spring to come.
But Iva Novette-Naim had chosen to keep her condo freezing cold that evening, which meant that she was somewhere past her fifth martini and floating in an ether of alcohol and olives.
If Iva was drinking, then it meant that something was wrong, very wrong.
And if something was wrong, then it meant Fallon would need to pick up the pieces.
Drawing in a long breath, the girl slipped free from her fuku, letting it dissolve in smoky trails as she flowed back into the teenage girl who lurked beneath the warhawk senshi dressed in blood and lace. The transition always felt staggering to Fallon. Lately, she had begun to conceptualize the transformation from girl to senshi and then back again less as a metamorphosis and more as a possession. That was it – possession. Ares possessed her. There were days when Fallon felt strong in that knowledge, and then there were times that it terrified her.
Tonight, though, Fallon knew that she needed to deal with Iva. She just didn’t know what sort of war zone she would be walking into once she left that bathroom. So she delayed, going through her nightly post-battle ritual as she always did instead. There was sweat to peel from her skin, blood to wash down the drain, cuts to be rinsed clean so that her senshi healing could patch them together without infection. After every battle, this was how Fallon remembered how to breathe. She fought, she killed, and then she came home to scour it from her flesh.
Stripping down, Fallon started the shower. That would not be a surprise to her mother. Fallon had a history since childhood of the unexplained need to clean herself at odd hours, sometimes multiple times a day. As far as her mother knew, Fallon had been fast asleep in the guest bedroom, door locked, for the past five hours, only to rise unexpectedly at 2AM with the unbearable urge to shower.
The tall, slender girl was not the waif she had once been. Her frame bore the marks of strenuous daily training. Fallon had, in fact, developed a six-pack. The lines of her arms deepened with small but hard muscles that swelled when flexed. She had gone from Zoe Saldana to Michelle Rodriguez in what felt like record time. Her mother had commented on it over dinner two nights ago. She speared a piece of asparagus with a fork and then fixed her cool green eyes on her only daughter. “Fallon, dear, have you joined a sports team?” Fallon shook her head ‘no.’ “No? Well. You look as though you have.” It wasn’t a criticism to the outside observer, but Fallon knew her mother too well. Iva had never wanted her daughter to do much of anything seen as bizarre -- a French elitist suddenly becoming a body builder? The thought stifled Iva.
Fallon thought of this as she pulled open the clear door of the shower, stepping both feet onto the cool stone tiles inside. The faucet hung overhead, designed to feel more like rain than plumbing. The water had already warmed up, grew hotter and hotter still until it brought angry red marks flaring across her otherwise dark skin. The scent of lavender and rose water filled the bathroom. Fallon dragged soap after scrub after salve over her beaten and bruised skin. It was as if she believed she could cleanse her soul as surely as she could bathe her skin.
Would it ever be that easy? The burden she bore was heavy on her soul, but she carried it because there was no other choice. Someone had to do it. Someone had to be the one willing to lead the people through the parted sea. Fallon had begun to believe that this was her true calling. She had to be the eyes for those who could not see. She had to be the legs for those too weak to walk the untamed path. She would do the things that others feared because she was afraid of nothing. Fallon would be the bastion of the senshi, and the battering ram, and the punching bag. It was a cross that she slung over her own shoulders, a burden she felt born to bear.
Beneath the layers of clothing and makeup, the teenager looked ragged. The blackened crescent on her wrist from Tanzanite’s bite was bad -- but not the worst. There was the jagged scar tracing its way from her inner thigh up to where her leg joined with her hip. It looked like barbed wire, or fish hooks, or some other kind of nasty, painful tool had carved it there into her thigh as surely as some might carve a steak or whittle wood. Then there were the bruises layered on top of bruises -- purple darkening to green, yellow around the edges, and in some places, black as though burned. Her body was a battlefield of scars, scars that she worked to conceal everyday. But none were more prominent than the self-inflicted wound above her heart: the brand of the Blood Moon.
At the thought of it, Fallon let painted nails stray to the mark, tracing its shape. She thought of what that painful mark meant, and of all those senshi who believed in her and their cause enough to bear it too. A smile warmed her face. Together, they could not fail. Her parallel family had been lost to her, almost entirely, and so the girl who had always felt alone in this life and the one before was determined to construct a family around her -- to build a circle of acceptance brick by brick, promise by promise. Fallon believed, truly believed, that the Blood Moon Court would be the salvation of the Senshi, of Earth, and of the Universe.
It was only after she had finished washing all of the conditioner out of her hair, running hands through the long, silken strands in methodical strokes, that Fallon noticed her mother standing just on the other side -- crying hysterically at the sight of her beaten and broken little girl framed in the clear glass of the shower door.
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 8:56 pm
The prospect of having her mother walk in on her while she was in the shower was already uncomfortable for Fallon. They did not have the mother-daughter closeness that some enjoyed. Nudity was not common practice between the duo because comfort had never been common practice between them. It was something that Fallon knew her mother regretted, and in recent times, Iva had said as much. But words could not change eighteen years of actions.
Iva loved Fallon, but she had never been a nurturing mother. And she had never understood why her daughter was the way she was. If she couldn’t understand Fallon before, then there was no hope for her to ever understand the hybrid of Fallon and Ares that her daughter had become.
Worse still was to know what her mother was looking at: a map of every battle Ares had ever fought and all the graphic evidence of the near-deaths and the near-losses.
Fallon swallowed hard, dropping her eyes to the smooth tile beneath her feet. She pushed the glass door open and reached for the plush white robe hanging on a hook just inches away. Her mother’s hand clamped down on her wrist before she could reach it, fingers slick with tears. “NO,” she said firmly. “No, Fallon, no, I can NOT pretend that I am seeing something else. I will not look the other way this time!” The middle-aged woman dissolved into tears abruptly, fighting to speak through a deluge of alcohol and sadness.
In that moment, Fallon wriggled her wrist free to grab the robe. She managed to get one arm into a sleeve before her mother had regained control of herself once more, gripping the other half of the robe and tugging it back. “No, Fallon! Do you hear me? I said no.” Red patches covered Iva’s cheeks and throat. Fallon had no idea how long her mother had been standing there. She had no idea how she had even gotten into the room. Fallon locked all doors, always had.
Still, the taller girl tried to ignore her mother. What could she say? Her mind tried to work fast enough to find an excuse, but nothing came to mind. Her silence only served to enrage Iva more. Two hands gripped Fallon’s shoulders, half her bare body still exposed to the icy air. “FALLON,” he mother shouted, hysteria brimming at the edges of her words. “What happened to your... to your body?” The two Novette-Naim women stood like that for a moment. Fallon couldn’t imagine what her mother must be thinking, all the terrible things that must be rambling through her head.
The thoughts were painful, and so she avoided them, shoving back her mother and finally closing the soft white robe around herself. Fallon made it so far as the doorframe before her mother grabbed on to her wrist again, spinning the girl about-face and shoving her back into the door. Iva was not the kind of mother who hit, but Fallon braced for it anyway. Instead, she got biting words: “Fallon, you are my daughter, and I love you. Now tell me, who did this to you? Is... is someone abusing you? Honey, you can tell me. Is it... is it your girlfriend? We will call the police! We will call the police and have her thrown in jail for life!”
Fallon stopped cold. “You think Eilian did this to me?” If the situation wasn’t so unbearably tense, she might have laughed. Tiny, wonderful Eilian -- some bruiser girlfriend from hell? It was not a picture that made any bit of sense. “Eilian could never hurt me,” she said flatly. Iva had bought the story that Eilian was Fallon’s girlfriend after one surprisingly pleasant dinner date. It had been the saving grace that helped her get out of the last compromising situation her mother had caught her in. Fallon didn’t think she could find any lie big enough to explain any the scarring on her body.
“Don’t worry about it, mother. I have everything under control.” She tightened the belt at her waist. “They will heal. The scars always heal.”
The tears streaking Iva’s cheeks couldn’t dry. Fresh ones sprang up in a steady flow, staining the pressed linen of her long cocktail dress. Where had her mother been that night? She was dressed up. She even had on her biggest diamonds, which she only wore when she was really trying to impress someone. Iva shook her head back and forth, tossing dark brown curls to and fro in a quickening torrent. She took several deep breaths and then whispered: “Honey, are you hurting yourself?”
Fallon grew very still. “No, Mom, I... I haven’t done that in a very long time.” The worry in her mother’s eyes tugged at a softness inside the teenager that she had been building a wall around her entire life. She relented against it, if only for her mother’s heart. “Really, Mother, I’m so much stronger than I’ve ever been before. I don’t need to tap doorknobs anymore. Did I tell you that? And I am okay when people don’t stack their dishes properly. It has been two weeks since I last organized my marbles. Two weeks. I haven’t slept with the metronome by my bed for four months. Mom, I used to think that I would never be able to sleep without the metronome.” It was as if Fallon were giving a speech, concocting a list to prove to her mother just how okay everything was.
But Iva only shook her head. Wordlessly, she crossed to the wall and pulled the white cordless phone from the wall. “I wish that were true, honey, I do,” she murmured, tears still choking the words.
“Mother, what are you doing?”
“I wanted that for you, you know? I wanted you to get better. I always hoped you would just... move on one day. Like it was all a bad dream.”
“Mother. Who are you calling?”
Iva pressed the receiver to her ear. “Dr. Price.” The word felt like a curse. Fallon had stopped seeing her psychiatrist one month after Ares entered her life.
“Why would you do that?” Worry pricked in Fallon’s voice.
Her mother leaned against the wall, touching at her forehead. “This is all my fault. I knew you couldn’t do this. I should have never let you leave France. I should have certainly never let you stay in this cursed city after everything that has happened. An organ ring? A sleep sickness? All the muggings? Honey, you have been in the hospital more times than your grandmother was before her death.” The phone was ringing. Fallon could hear it chiming from a few feet away. It was like a death knell, signaling the end of her life as she had come to know it. “Now you are cutting and... branding yourself? I know you’ve been sneaking out. I’ve been checking on you every night, and I’ve been trying to plan the best way to approach this all and... it’s just...” Iva broke down again, the phone still ringing endlessly at her ear. It was the emergency line. It always took a long time for an answer.
“Baby, I know I wasn’t good to you -- not the way I should have been -- but that is all going to change. I’m not perfect, but I love you. I love you, you’re my little girl, and I’m going to make it all better. I’m going to take care of you,” her voice broke into a sob, “like I should have always done. We are leaving this goddamn city and -- yes, Dr. Price?”
Fallon crossed the room in a matter of seconds before she even realized what she was doing. She snatched the phone from her mother’s hand and whipped it across the room. It shattered on the far wall. Iva gasped, the hand that had held the phone curling protectively to her chest. “Fallon, you are out of control!” she said, shoving past her daughter and moving toward the shattered phone.
Iva bent to pick up the pieces, as if there were any hope to put it back together. She tried anyway. “I am your mother, young lady. You will do what I say, when I say it, because you are a child -- and I am the adult.” She straightened, tossing the ruined pieces of phone on the bed.
In spite of the situation and all the tension, Fallon laughed. Iva scowled at her. A child? Fallon had never felt like a child, and she sure wasn’t a child now. “You can’t just pick and choose to be my mother when it’s convenient for you, or when you’re bored, or when you and Dad are having a hard time -- so don’t pretend for a second that you know anything about what my life is like.” She slashed the air with her hand.
The last piece of broken phone fell to the bed. “Fallon Novette-Naim, you do not talk to your mother like that. I will go get another phone, I will call Dr. Price, he will give us a medical regiment for you, and we will leave this godforsaken city in the morning -- and that is FINAL.” Hysteria edged into Iva’s voice again. She believed that her daughter was self-mutilating and lost. She was only doing what she thought was best.
Fallon scowled. “I cannot leave Destiny City.” She curled her robe protectively around her frame, as if she could erase her mother’s memories of the scars that lurked beneath it.
Iva took one step forward, still wobbling from the martinis she had no doubt been slamming all night. “Give me one reason why,” she said, putting emphasis on each word.
For a moment, Fallon said nothing. Magenta eyes met her mother’s bright green and lingered there, as if she were reading some sort of subtle language printed in the woman’s irises. A long sigh escaped her lips. She had made a decision, and it wasn’t one that she seemed entirely happy with either.
A dark henshin pen lifted up into the air above her head. “Ares Black Moon Power, Make-Up!” In a swirl of smoke and black ribbons, Fallon transformed from the girl in the robe to the domineering figure of Super Sailor Ares.
And then Iva Novette-Naim began to scream.
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Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 10:52 pm
For the reveal of what took place after Ares revealed herself, please look here.
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