It is odd to tell the story now. Now, when it's all over, when the schoolchildren are taught it in the schools and it's a matter of history.

The histories, however, are incomplete. None of them tell all the story; indeed, I only know it because of what I am and what I may do.

I am - no. I will not tell you my name. You will doubtless identify me from my narrative, and if you don't, you may look upon the revelation as an anticipated treat. You would be wise to do so.

I am Sailor Pluto, and this is not my story.

Relena Darlian sat on the beach. The moon was a deep, burnished gold coin, flung into the sky and held there by some caprice of the Gods, adding its hue to the reflected sunlight it shone onto the earth. Pooling like golden ink on watered silk, the moonlight seemed to float on top of the ocean. The sight was a gently elegant contrast to the feel of the rough granules of sand caught between her bare toes.

She appreciated the beauty much more, now. Death had walked too close too many times for her to embrace it anymore. No longer did she need to feel the muzzle of an assassin's gun against her skin to be aware of the pulse of her own life.

Pulling her knees to her chest, she sighed. /Finally, I have everything I needed. Purpose, family - well, Milliard and Lucrezia call every week and Anne and Marimeia have adopted me as a niece and cousin, so I have more than a lot of others. More than he did./

Shaking her head, she abruptly stood. No, she would not think of him. She had done something she should have done a long time before, and let him go. He would probably not be back.

Walking into the moonlight, she tried to think of nothing: not politics, not her life and especially not her DOA lovelife.

Ironically, despite the fact that not a single original, profound, honest-to-God thought had ever graced her head before her fifteenth birthday, Relena had discovered the unwelcome fact that she was no longer able to switch her brain off. Even now, when she looked across the small bay, she couldn't help thinking of the report she'd gotten the day earlier, that a group of war orphans had set up camp in the ruins on the other side of the bay and were supporting themselves by a particularly nasty combination of theft, underage prostitution and drug trafficking.

A meteor streaked across the sky. It fell, down, down...

... and stopped half a handspan above the horizon. It waited a few moments (while Relena's eyes bugged out as she realized this wasn't a meteor) and then seemed to settle, gently floating, across the bay.

She struggled to the road at the top of the beach, rapidly relearning exactly why it isn't faster to run on loose dry sand, and, taking one look at the strappy, elegant high-heeled sandals she'd worn to the party she'd sneaked out of, ran barefoot along the road toward the strange meteor's landing site. She'd chance a possible cut foot against a certain broken ankle any day.

The glow had vanished by the time she had run across the bridge that crossed the bay. She couldn't see it anywhere.

If there was one thing Relena had learned during her seventeen years of life, it was that there comes a point when pursuit becomes futile. Whether or not she pursued the hunt beyond that point, however, was a different matter.

She sniffed the air. A strange perfume hung on the wind; it made her nerves shiver and her muscles tense. She tried to concentrate on it, finding it elusive. But it flirted with her nose and drifted away beyond her senses, until she couldn't smell it anymore.

She shook her head and turned to leave for the long walk back to the party, oblivious to the golden, uptilted crescent which had appeared for a moment between her eyebrows.

The next day, Relena asked her loyal butler, Pargin, about any unexplained phenomena in that area the night before.

"I will begin the search for information immediately, Lady Relena," Pargin bowed calmly, his thoughts hidden.

"Thank you, Pargin," she replied, her face equally blank. Some things she would never be able to share with Pargin, despite his proven loyalty. How she knew that the mysterious light and perfume from the night before were among them, she didn't know.

An empty office wasn't so very unusual during the lunch break, especially when she'd sent Pargin off on an errand. Relena smiled. Half an hour to herself! She could go shopping - or read a trashy, pointless novel. (Historical romances were good. Sweet no-brainers with gorgeous guys and great sex. Reading them was a reputation-saving substitute for the lack of such in her real life.) She could even stuff her face without finding an overenthusiastic member of the paparazzi at the table across from her.

She sighed at that thought. Was that what she was reduced to? A bar of chocolate a secret treat hidden in her desk drawer?

A hint of scent tickled at her nostrils. Relena blinked. She recognised that perfume! It was - it was the perfume from last night!

She turned to see a woman moving past the open office door.

Relena blinked. She'd never seen a woman with a blazing black cross on her forehead before. Blinking again, she stuck her head out the door, watching the woman. She passed one of the ubiquitious secretaries that inhabited the building, and the man simply nodded at her, not perceiving anything different about her.

Rubbing absently at the spot between her eyebrows, where she felt a tingle on her skin, she slipped after the strange woman.

The woman walked out of the hall and into the private courtyard where most of the employees were eating. Relena was close enough to hear her mutter "Perfect."

Producing out of nowhere a strange, sceptre-like staff topped with a black cross-like symbol, the same as the one on her forehead, the woman lifted it up and began to chant in a soft, musical language. Relena didn't recognise any of the words but slunk back behind the glass doors as fast as she could. There was something menacing in those words that ran up her spinal column and made her skin try to crawl off her bones. Whatever that woman was doing, it had to be stopped.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped out into the courtyard. "Hey you! Stop!"

The woman turned slowly. "Stop?" she enquired gently, her tone gently chiding the one who dared interrupt.

"Yes, stop! I don't know what you're doing here, but I require an explanation before I can permit you to continue!" Relena continued, before she could run out of nerve.

The woman smiled cruelly. "Permit me?" She shook her head, lifting her staff. "No, it is I who will not permit you to continue." A beam of light shot from the end of her staff.

It missed Relena, who had scrambled back when the woman had lifted her sceptre. She shrugged and aimed again.

Relena, for her part, was watching the sceptre. The woman wasn't terribly scary - Heero had been scarier when he tore up the invitation to her birthday party, and that was nothing to facing down a Gundam - but that stick of hers could hand out the damage.

She moved again. She had no intention of letting it hand it out to her... but none of the other people in the courtyard were moving! She spared the young man she was beside a glance, and saw that he couldn't move; he was unconscious.

Hiding behind a bush, she clenched her hands into impotent fists. That woman was standing in the open, so she couldn't take out the sceptre without getting hit, but the others here were going to be injured if she didn't do something...

"What can I do?" she muttered. "What *can* *I* *do*?"

|What will you give?|

Relena blinked at the thought. It was definitely not hers. "What?"

|You have the ability. There is, however, a price. Will you give the price demanded?|

"If I can," she muttered, watching the woman fry an innocent gardenia bush. "What is it?"

|Your life.|

Relena thought about her life. About the miles of paperwork. About her brother and sister-in-law, who called once a week when they had enough time to remember to. About the morals and standards she was forced to live up to. About the guy who'd never shown her whether or not he cared but she still couldn't forget anyway.

"Take it."

She felt the tingle between her eyebrows become an ache, and her right hand was clenched around - something. Opening it and looking down, she found herself holding a small, elegant cravat pin, set with a diamond that had been carved, very unusually, into an uptilted crescent.

|Repeat after me: Moon Crescent Power, Make UP!|

Relena frowned. Shouting those words would take forever, not to mention betray her location. She'd yell "Moo-" and be fried. Whispering them would have to do.

"Moon Crescent Power, Make-UP!" she muttered, projecting as much emotion into the words as she could.

The pin flared and a ribbon of light spun out from it, twisting around her body. She felt it settle against her skin, forming itself into boots and gloves, a leotard bodysuit and some kind of headdress. /I probably look perfectly ridiculous,/ Relena decided.

Deciding to go with the flow (and if she looked really silly, she could just deny everything anyway) she stood up.

"Hey you!"

The woman swung her whole body to face where Relena was suddenly standing up. She didn't do anything else, just stood there.

"These people came here to enjoy the sunshine during their precious free time. Ruining it for them is an act of despicable cruelty! I, the Beautiful Soldier Sailor Moon, will not permit it!" /Wow, where did all *that* come from? And why wasn't she lopping my head off as soon as I said 'These'? Heero would have.../

"Sailor Moon?" The woman blinked, looking at Relena. "You are Sailor Moon?"

Relena had already moved, taking up a defensive stance near a thick-trunked fig tree. Staring at the other, she felt oddly at a loss. This wasn't the way battle went! You struck and parried. Words distracted opponents and flung smokescreens of speeches over actions. Relena might fight with laws and speeches and politics these days rather than bullets, but she was a warrior still; as much or more than a certain Gundam pilot with Prussian- blue eyes had ever been...

And, as a warrior, she knew that you don't debate over the crossfire. You attack, you defend, or you counter-attack. You shore up vulnerable positions and watch the enemy for vulnerable areas.

"I am," she finally returned, for lack of anything else to say. The evil genius that had inspired her first speech seemed to have evaporated. She stood, arms akimbo. Oddly, attacking the woman seemed... wrong, somehow. As if she should be allowed to prove herself.

The woman grinned wickedly. The cross on her forehead glowed a sickening shade of metallic green, the same colour as the walls of Marimeia's battlecruiser. Relena swallowed against the bile the memory of those hours brought up into her throat. Watching, she stared as the grin and the cross became the only constants in a hellish transformation.

Relena would later describe it as "a cross between a Gundam's transformation, a plastic surgeon's view of a facelift, and a three-year-old's first experience of Play-Doh". She stared in horror as skin peeled off muscles, bones stretched and features rearranged themselves between the burning symbol and that horrifying rictus that twisted the seeming-woman's lips. Her business suit lengthened, brightened and split into a neon-purple catsuit complete with boots, while her skin darkened to an olive- green shade. Her hair twisted up into a shock of blazing purple that stood completely on end. Her eyes blazed into orbs of orange-red that seemed about to burst from her skull.

Relena's sole thought was a strangely dispassionate acknowledgement that she wanted to vomit.

The thing which had been a woman stepped across the grass, reeking of the perfume which had lured Relena to the courtyard in the first place. Coupled with the retch-inducing sight she had just endured, Relena felt her gag reflex taking over.

The thing lifted its staff and blasted the grass where Relena had been standing. Cursing, it began to take aim again.

Living in the company of Gundams had its uses, Relena reflected soberly as she peered around the tree's trunk. If she hadn't been watching the thing, she might have been too busy throwing up to notice it beginning its attack and dodge.

/But honestly, this is a joke! It's like a bad teenage girl's TV show. Any minute now, a hero's going to appear on a stairway in midair, pull out a sword and utter some platitude about me being the Lost Legendary Angel from Heaven, and how I have the strength to save the day.../

PUTTTPUTTTPUTTTPUTTTPUTTTPUTTTPUTTTPUTTTPUTTT

Relena stared at the row of bulletholes that had appeared in front of the thing. Her eyes lifted slowly to the trenchcoat-clad figure that was perched on the windowsill of the building opposite the courtyard. His face was shadowed by his wide-brimmed hat as he unclipped the silencer from the barrel of the handgun, slipped it inside his coat and slid the gun into a holster strapped to his thigh.

"Well? Are you going to take all day, Sailor Moon?" the boy demanded. His voice was low and rich and oh so very familiar...

/Heero?/

"I can't be killed by bullets!" The creature exulted as it stepped over the line Trenchcoat Guy had drawn with his skill. "I will kill them, and you, and him..."

"No," Relena replied. A flat, complete denial that was neither emphatic nor loud but still allowed no possibility of refutation. "You will not."

"You can't stop me!" the woman thing continued, ignoring how Relena's expression blanked for a few seconds as though listening intently to someone. It didn't notice the way she stepped forward, fumbling with her tiara, lining it up with the new moon, visible in the sky on the western horizon. "I will gain your death-energy for my-"

"Moon Twilight Flash."

"AAAAAAAAHHH!!!!"

Relena tilted her head to one side, standing still as the thing's corpse sifted down into ash from the blast of light she'd managed to produce somehow, obeying the little voice's instructions. "Aren't I supposed to die now?"

|Whatever gave you that idea?|

"You asked for my life."

|So why do you offer your death?|

Relena blinked. She hadn't thought of it like that. "So - what happens now?"

|You take off the uniform and go home until next time.|

"Next time?"

|This wasn't a once-off, Relena. You are Sailor Moon, and you will fight for us. You agreed to, remember?|

"It will happen again?"

|Why do you think we asked for your life?|

Relena sighed. Looking down, she absently brushed her hand over the brooch in the centre of the bow on her chest. Her strange garments dissolved back into the business suit she'd put on an eternity ago when she'd gotten up that morning. Noting it in the back of her mind, she was more preoccupied with the fact that all the unconcious people around her were beginning to stir. Then her eyes drifted over the line of bulletholes Trenchcoat Guy had created.

Relena blinked. Trenchcoat Guy - who might be Heero - who had been in the building across the road -

She raced back into the building, ran through the corridors to the street entrance, dashed across the road (causing a minor prang as a motorist swerved to avoid her and failed to avoid a rubbish bin) and stopped at the locked and barricaded doors of the building Trenchcoat Guy had been standing in. A poster had been pasted to the glass doors.

BUILDING CONDEMNED DUE TO STRUCTURAL FAILURE, it read.

As she stood there, almost as a macabre punctuation mark, one of the doors on the internal corridor she could see from the street fell out of the wall into the corridor. The crash shivered through the empty shell of the structure.

Relena backed away from the building slowly.

Walking back to her own office very slowly, she tried hard to think. She had somehow vowed herself to fight on behalf of someone or something unknown, against something or someone that could send out things to fight that looked like people and somehow nobody else could see weren't. She had a maybe-ally who might or might not be able to fight, who might or might not be her ex-obsession (ex? Maybe not. 'Women Who Love Too Much' et al didn't seem to be working. Maybe she should get a cat?). She had a funky outfit that wasn't what anyone could call 'modest' by any stretch of the imagination, and she got into it by reciting a catrip while touching a crystal pin. Oh, and her method of destroying her enemies was by application of reflected moonlight through a gem on her headdress.

/Any minute now, I'm going to wake up,/ she thought half- heartedly, knowing she wasn't asleep. If she was, her knee wouldn't hurt, she wouldn't have a stitch in her side, and Trenchcoat Guy would have been Heero and he would have been waiting for her, holding a white rose.

Shaking her head, she tried to concentrate on her paperwork. It didn't work too well. A number of things got rubber-stamped that day that she would not have otherwise passed. (Which is why the entire delegation to L2 found themselves carrying their lunches in Hello Kitty bento boxes during the next set of treaty meetings. Relena was in quite a lot of trouble with them over that, and never could remember how she managed to do it to them.)

"He-*llo*," said a quiet voice. A warm baritone, it belonged to a youth, dressed in black and red, with a long braid that fell past his hips.

"What's up, Duo?" the other occupant of the office asked him. A girl, slightly younger than her companion, with feathery black hair cut short over her head and bright sky-blue eyes, she wore a wine-coloured tunic over black tights. Biting on a pencil while she sat at a table, heavy with papers and account books, doing the junkyard's accounts by hand, the image she presented was one that never failed to make Duo smile.

"Does this look familiar, Hilde?" he asked, rocking back in the chair, allowing his lover to see the computer monitor.

Hilde stood up, streching to get the kinks out of her back. Slipping under her lover's arm, she bent close to the screen. Habit made her glance at the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. "Duo, you really shouldn't be hacking Lady Anne's security profiles. What if she decided to hire Heero or Quatre to track the leaks?"

"If she can get Quatre to let Trowa go long enough to come and do it, I'll pay the fine myself. And if she can find Heero, I'll - I'll - I'll take a vow of silence."

Hilde laughed. "Don't say that! I'd miss your voice."

Duo lifted an eyebrow. "You sure know how to sweet talk a guy. A girl who likes my conversation, and they said nobody liked my natter! For that, I'll climb the gantries and send the message soaring to the stars-"

Pulling his face down to hers, Hilde silenced him with a gentle kiss that rapidly turned passionate. "Don't go up there," she whispered. "At least, not alone."

"I won't," he whispered back. They regarded each other for a long, quiet moment, then Hilde turned back to the screen. She studied it for a second, then turned back to Duo.

"It's Relena - in a gymnastics uniform?"

"It's someone calling herself 'Sailor Moon', according to the disc. Blasted some*thing* with some kind of energy blast that she - get this - generated herself out of reflected moonlight."

Hilde frowned, tapped the mouse and replayed the footage. "It's Relena."

"Is it? I mean, I know it looks like her-"

"It's Relena, Duo! I know her! We were on Libra together, I went to the Sanq Kingdom School with her and Dorothy when you and the rest were working on the Mars Terraforming Project, and I always stay with her whenever I go to Earth! I know the way Relena walks and the way she talks and the way she moves and *that* *is* *Relena*!"

"Okay, okay, it's Relena!" Duo replied. "I believe you!"

"Good," Hilde relaxed and returned her attention to the screen. "An energy blast? How'd she do that? Why didn't she do it with OZ?"

"Beats me," Duo opined cheerfully. He grabbed a copy of the file and quickly emailed it. But not quickly enough for Hilde to miss the address he sent it to.

"[email protected]? I thought you didn't know where Heero was," she asked suspiciously. "That's what you told Lady Anne last week. And me, just now."

"I don't know where he is," Duo said piously. "That's the beauty of webmail, he can pick it up anywhere. She didn't ask me if I could contact him. And nor did you," he said mischieviously, tapping her on the nose.

Hilde laughed. "Point," she conceded. "You don't lie, but nobody said you had to be honest..."

"I can be honest if I want to!" Duo protested.

Hilde stood up and stepped to him, twining her arms about his neck, pulling his face down to hers. "Show me?" she breathed, just before she kissed him.

He did.

*PING*

"You've got mail!" his computer announced in that horribly cheerful tone. One of these days he'd shoot the thing.

Opening the mail and noting its sender - Duo was a fervent correspondent. He wrote every three days, even if all he had to say was "Caught laryngitis, Hilde got her hearing checked."

Viewing the file -

- and spilling his coffee on himself as he watched Sailor Moon's attack.

It was Relena. The figure appeared as Sailor Moon, disappeared offscreen as Sailor Moon, but he knew it was Relena. Which meant others would, too.

Duo must know that. Why else would he send it? It was a warning of what was about to happen.

Heero Yuy flipped the power switch on his laptop and snapped it shut. Preparations had to be made.

End Part 1

Author's notes:

1) Yes, Heero and Duo are straight in this fic. Yes, Quatre and Trowa are a couple in this fic. So I don't know whether it qualifies as yaoi or not!

2) Fair warning here and now: the guys of Gundam Wing are going to be *very firmly* in the background of this fic. This is all about the girls. I like the girls. I like Hilde, I like Lucrezia, I like Relena. I even (Seiryuu help me) like Dorothy. So... please don't ask for more of the boys. You're very unlikely to get it.

3) "Moon Twilight Flash" *is* one of Sailor Moon's attacks - it's from the manga. It's actually *more* powerful than the Moon Tiara. She only uses it once, in the fourth chapter/issue of the manga, "Masquerade". It's in the first graphic novel, if you wish to see it for yourself.

4) Why isn't Relena a ditz? Because she isn't, in GW. She was living in her own little dreamworld at the beginning of the TV series, because Real Life had nothing to offer her. By the end of Endless Waltz, she was a very astute polititian with a *lot* of savvy.