The barren wasteland of his ‘home world’ had thrown him for a loop the first time he’d visited. It was disconcerting to be told somewhere was the home of your soul and then to find out that there was nothing there but rocks, dirt, and the ruins of another life. He hadn’t really felt attached to it since he had no real memories of anything that could have happened there but the feeling was still strange all the same. He’d felt like he was being shown something he should care about and knew that there were memories there but he couldn’t get at them. He was sure he would have a whole new appreciation for how Alzheimer’s patients felt after the experience.

After the first time he’d even told himself he wouldn’t come back but he found himself there again and again. Sitting on a dusty rock with any other life hundreds of thousands of miles away he could tell himself that it hadn’t always been like that but it was hard to see through the decay of centuries. The second time he’d come out to the asteroid he had explored what he could and eventually found the ruins of what must have been the major city. The third time he had refused to go anywhere near it but instead wandered around out over the rock face of his ‘home’.

He was used to looking at things from different angles and trying to figure out what the motivations behind others and his own emotions were but this one escaped him.

Seeing the wasteland of what he had been told was once a thriving civilization just made him angry and he wasn’t exactly sure why.

It had no connection to him really, not to the ‘him’ he knew, yet to know that something had destroyed this got under his skin. From the little bits of things he’d heard and picked up the world that the Senshi had originally hailed from hadn’t just fallen to something better it had been ruined. Yet whatever ruined it hadn’t created a better civilization. He didn’t understand any of it and wasn’t even sure he actually cared.

He wasn’t supposed to have misplaced emotions and yet that’s exactly what he felt like the ones he had for the broken down city were. Emotions he wasn’t supposed to have. Feelings tying him to some place he’d never been to before and to a life he couldn’t remember living.

It reminded him of how people in movies with amnesia said they felt. They could be told until people were blue in the face that something was the truth and that their lives were a certain way but they couldn’t tell themselves if it was the truth or not.

This was where he’d come from. This was where his soul called home and where his powers were granted to him from. Without it he would just be another normal kid living a normal life and he still couldn’t make sense of it. It was completely different than when his parents had taken him to Europe to see the ‘family history’. He hadn’t felt any connection to anywhere there but here on a cold hunk of rock hundreds of thousands of miles away from earth he did feel something.

The unsettling feeling had kept him from returning to the asteroid for weeks.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Sitting on the still slightly vertical end of a column that had been broken in half centuries ago he thought back to what he’d told himself last time he’d come out there. He’d told himself that he wasn’t going to bother anymore, that there wasn’t a point in it, and yet here he was staring out over the city’s ruins and into the black expanse of space. The remains of the city stretched out around him in all directions and out there among the stars there were dozens, possibly hundreds, of places just like it moldering away lost and forgotten. Yet despite the places being lost their guardians, or whatever the senshi really were, had started to be reborn onto another hunk of rock where they weren’t even wanted.

He didn’t know what it all meant or if it was even supposed to mean anything.

What were you supposed to feel when coming face to face with the fact that you were among the last remnants of what had been a glorious civilization? He knew he was angry about it but who was there really to be angry at and why should he even be angry in the first place? He didn’t know who’d done it or what had done it or why they’d done it. The exact circumstances could mean a lot in the end. If it had been the fault of the people who’d once lived here that they’d been relegated to the back pages of history then he didn’t have any reason to be upset about it. It shouldn’t really mean anything to him. Sure he might have had the same soul as some guardian of this broken down place but he wasn’t from here. It wasn’t his home.

Yet even though it felt slightly disconnected to him it also felt like it was his home. Some part of him, some part of Arachne, knew why he felt like this but it was out of his power to figure out what it all was. There were gaps, pieces missing, and he was left standing on one side of the bridge while the answers waved at him from the other side refusing to help him get any closer.

He knew there had to be other Senshi who’d had the same thoughts but the idea of a bunch of teenagers in outlandish costumes sitting around in a circle talking about their past was just absurd. They didn’t exactly seem to be all that friendly anyway, at least not the few he’d met, so he would bet they wouldn’t even want to talk about it. Some of them might not even care about what had happened to their lives before. He hadn’t even really cared before. Everything had just been something someone else said about where the senshi had come from until he’d actually come out here himself to see.

Talking about it still wasn’t even really anywhere near the top of his list of things he wanted to do. It would have been much easier if someone could just tell him if it actually mattered or not what had happened to this place. If it was just another causality of the same war they were still fighting then it didn’t really mean anything. There wasn’t anyone to give him that answer though.

The only answers he’d gotten (not that he’d really looked for any) seemed to just point him in the direction of this being pointless. Most of the population of Destiny City hated the senshi or agreed that they should be put in jail which ruined the whole joy of being a real super hero.

Even dusting the youma had been tainted. It had been so easy before. Find a monster, kill it, and rejoice. Now he’d found out that the youma used to be people. Had he not been awoken into whatever this life was he might have become one of them one day. Some pour soul who’d had everything drained out of them until they were just a husk.

The knowledge hadn’t really stopped him from dusting the things but coming to terms with what almost amounted to homicide wasn’t something a seventeen year old should have to deal with.

Sliding off the top of the column he landed on the remnants of a street with a small puff of dust. His fingers slid along the cold stone as he turned to walk deeper into the ruins lost in the thoughts of what had become of his life.

He didn’t pay much attention to it at first but as he walked it was almost like he could see another world on the edges of his vision. It seemed like buildings manifested themselves -just- as they were heading out of his sight but his mind wasn’t really paying attention to it. He’d seen plenty of movies about ancient Greece and Rome so it wouldn’t be odd to imagine that he could see what the buildings looked like.

A house here, shops there, and maybe even a theatre or two lined the roads. It was easy enough to pretend he knew what things had looked like and to pretend what he was just barely seeing was his own imagination.

The street he’d been following eventually turned into a city center, or at least something that had once been important, and wrapped around the base of a huge dais. There were remains of something there and he reached out to pick up a piece of white marble. Whatever it was hadn’t just fallen apart it had been destroyed, smashed into thousands of pieces.

“Just like this whole damn place.” He shook his head and wrapped his fingers around the piece of rock before taking himself back home.