Valjean was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a decent Senshi. Or, at least, by his own estimation, he wasn't. He put effort in, certainly--it wasn't in his nature to neglect things--but it was easy to let the war slip from his mind when more mundane concerns reared their heads. A relationship, a degree, everything that he had going on. But the relationship was over, and the degree was coming to an end, and he was doing his best to put in the effort to actually be a goddamn Sailor Senshi. So he was out more and more often, which was good for him, he knew--there was much to do, and he was getting to meet people and see more of the war.

Truth be told, his encounter with Celadonite hadn't left his mind since it had happened, and it wasn't exactly strange or surprising, he thought, that he was a bit stuck on the way he'd been flirted with by an enemy. Or the way that Cela had fit so nicely against him, and how pretty he was, and how Valjean just could not get his face out of his head.

Ugh. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he was so stupid. There was nothing that could ever possibly come of it, unless one of them changed sides, and Valjean wasn't eager to go running to the people that turned teashops into traps and drained innocent civilians of their energy. That was not something he wanted any part of.

And anyway, there was something he needed to do, and he couldn't just sit around contemplating beautiful boys who apparently thought he was pretty too.

He was a Senshi, after all--and there was, supposedly, a world out there, waiting for him to visit.

That was the purpose of him coming out, initially, before he'd let himself get derailed by all sorts of pointless introspective contemplation. He'd found a nice rooftop, and sat there, and pulled out his Senshi phone, and stared at the app that would allegedly take him off planet for a long moment before shoving it, indecisively, back into subspace. At first, he wasn't sure why he was avoiding it, but the more he thought, the more reasons he came up with; it was his world, somewhere he wanted to see, but at the same time... he wasn't exactly eager to see what the world of the Senshi of Revolution looked like. There were so many possibilities--his own outfit suggested 1800s France, a bloody period that left a trail of death behind it in pursuit of a political freedom that was...technically successful, but had echoes from then to today, and that had left far, far too many innocent people dead in its pursuit of revolutionary purity and the advancement of people like Robespierre.

But if that was what his world was, then he needed to know. Needed to confront it, and accept it, and perhaps he would find that all his fears were silly and it was a fantastical utopia that didn't need Madame Guillotine because they had evolved past that, with a constant pressure to revolutionize and revolutionize and revolutionize again.

That was the world he wanted. The one where Revolution meant progress, meant hope, rather than the one where it meant blood and death and suffering.

A naive hope, perhaps, but he was literally magical, so he thought he was allowed a few naive hopes. There could, perhaps, be a world like that, where its people pushed for progress on their terms, for a world that they had made with their ownd reams, rather than some horrible cycle of violence and oppression.

So he pulled out his Senshi phone again, fidgeting with it nervously for a moment before he finally closed his eyes and pressed the button that would, allegedly, spirit him off to space.

It worked. There was no denying that.

And he had been much more right with the guess based on his outfit.

The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was a crumbling cobblestone street, pieces broken and wrenched out of the ground, surrounded by buildings that were falling apart.

The second thing he noticed was the blood--or, at least, he assumed it was blood. Ancient stains, seeped into the stones and splattered on the walls.

And then he noticed the bodies.

Skeletons, on the street and in the houses.

Valjean stumbled to the side of the street and vomited up everything he had eaten that day. And as he retched, he heard-felt-was dragged into a strange half-vision, half-audio play; he wasn’t looking at the street, so he couldn’t see, but—

He didn’t need to see.

There was a hue and cry, there were people screaming and shouting, the crash of steel and the wails of the dying, and above it all,a voice he knew somehow was his own, shouting "ONWARD! THEY WILL NOT STOP US HERE!"

And he knew.

He knew in his very core that all the death around him was his fault.

Or the fault of the last Senshi, at least.

There was no doubt in his mind--that was what he had heard, been cast into the middle of for a brief flash of an instant. A revolt, led by the previous Sailor Valjean. He had no idea if it was just or unjust. The state of the place reminded him enough of revolutionary France for him to take a guess, but it might have been that his past self was less noble champion of the people and more aggrieved pretty princeling, and he wasn't sure there was ny way for him to know that.

He didn't want to explore any further. Didn't want to know anything else about this world. It was dead--it had clearly died in fire and pain--and there was nothing he could do about that. So he took a breath, and fumbled out his phone, and pressed the button to send him home.

That was, in his opinion, quite enough space for the moment. Possibly quite enough space for the forseeable forever.

[WC: 1013 words]