Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction based on another work of fiction. This work is mine, the other one isn’t. That should do it, I think.

Chapter One: Turn a New Page (tear the old one out)

The shrine was quiet at this hour, save for the cawing of Phobos and Deimos. It was that cry that jerked Rei out of her meditation. Someone was coming.

Truthfully, Rei was a little embarrassed by their names; she only named the two crows after she became Mars, and only dared to call them when she knew the shrine was empty. Even more, they weren’t really her pets, either. For as long as she had been at the Hikawa shrine, the birds had been around, always alerting her when people were coming. Normally, they called only if that someone was important: Artemis, Luna, her father’s people, someone who needed help.

She left the fire room, and went outside. Her skin felt hot and raw, and it took her a moment for her eyes to adjust to the outdoors. Two black birds perch on the roof of the shrine. They had better not dragged her outside just so she could talk to her father.

Her stomach was beginning to feel weird. She ground her teeth to starve off the anticipation. Maybe it was Usagi, here to buy a charm for her newest attempt to buy a concert ticket, or one of the little kids. What was with this weird train of thought? She rolled her shoulders, trying to loosen them up. She could hear someone’s shoes clacking against the stone steps, could see a woman wearing an oversized hat and sunglasses… Oh.

“You.” Aino Minako, coming to the shrine? Rei didn’t know if that was better or worse than her father’s people. Maybe worse? Her skin was prickling, but that might just be the effects of sitting in front of a fire for an hour. “What are you doing here?”

“How rude,” said Minako lightly. “I had to come here all the way from Iwate, you know.”

“A shooting?”

“Something like that.”

Something like that… “A doctor, then?”

“Has Artemis been feeding you information?” But Minako was smiling. “I was visiting my old primary physician. He wanted to see how I was doing.”

Phobos and Deimos were peering down. It was oddly like having people watching them. Rei found herself desperately wishing for them to go.

“I see.” Breathe in, breathe out. Everything was okay. “How is your health?”

Minako tossed her head up, her long hair swishing in the air. “It’s fine,” she said. Rei had heard many variations of “it’s fine” over the years, ranging from, “I just collapsed again, but I’m not telling you that” to “I’m so hopped up on post-op meds that everything feels fine”. Mostly, this one felt like a real “it’s fine”, so Rei accepted it without bickering for the smaller details. These days, Minako’s health was better, anyway.

“That’s good,” she said, almost in a grunt. And she could feel the conversation dying, slowly, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. They hadn’t reached anything worth challenging each other over yet. She felt like a fish flopping underneath a kitchen knife.

Minako, maybe sensing the vacuum in their conversation, picked up the next thread. “Ah, I almost forgot.” She fished through her bag, and handed Rei a copy of a magazine. “Manager would like Mars Reiko-san to sign a few copies. Special edition.”

Rei scowled. She had done a few jobs for Minako as a favor while Minako recovered from the operation and the follow up treatments, but those jobs had been few and done mostly to keep Minako’s manager from sending her back to the hospital from overwork. “What is this?” she demanded, knowing full well what it was. So did Minako, because she only thumbed a few pages for Rei and shook it before her a few times, maybe to annoy her. Rei flushed a little, catching some glimpses of that particular shoot, and grabbed it away from Minako. “I did these ages ago.”

“It’s for their ‘best of’ collection. Manager thinks it would be nice if you signed.” Helpfully, Minako added, “I brought a free copy for you.”

“I don’t want it.”

“It has my picture in it. Several of them, in fact. I’ll even sign it for you.”

Was that supposed to make her want it more? “Where do I sign?”

“The cover.”

The cover had Minako’s face on it. Rei examined the magazine, for just a moment, and scrawled Mars’s name. She thrust it back at Minako, who duly handed Rei another copy. What was this, a joke? Even as Rei boggled, Minako was opening up her bag to reveal the contents: some odd twenty copies, waiting to be signed.

“This is ridiculous!” Sometimes she swore Minako enjoyed watching her suffer. Sadist. That was the proper word for it. Minako sat down on the shrine’s veranda, and Rei followed suit, using her lap as a board.

“You’re lucky since you’re still a new talent.”

“You call this ‘lucky’?” Mars Reiko, Mars Reiko, Mars Reiko. There was something about that name that bothered her, that got under her skin. Not under, exactly, but over, smothering and pressing down. Like it couldn’t settle entirely into herself, but it couldn’t leave her, either. Mars Reiko, Mars Reiko, Mars Reiko. A stupid name, she decided. She almost liked it.

“Manager asked me to sign two hundred of these. I’m halfway through my own pile.”

Rei frowned. She would have to give Minako that point. “I’m not a talent,” she said.

“I understand.” Minako was speaking in a way that made it clear that she was making fun of her, a little. A lot. “That’s why you have a record out, and why you’ve done all these photo shoots.” Rei stopped signing long enough to glare at Minako, but she could feel the glare coming out more of a pout. “Manager is thinking about having a charity concert as a lead in for a Japan tour.”

“It’ll be your first one since the operation, won’t it?” Rei was already worried. True to form, Minako sidestepped any concerns by blithely continuing on without even thinking about what Rei might say.

“He would like you to perform.”

“I—”

“I’m raising money for children with brain tumors.”

She couldn’t refuse. One-two punch. Rei had a soft spot for children, and the mention of brain tumors still made a sickness seep into her chest. Her mother… had died from a brain tumor. And so had Minako, in another world.

“You’ll do it?” Rei nodded, her head bobbing up and down almost involuntarily. Minako smile-smirked, and said, “Then I’ll let you know when, Mars Reiko-san.”

She stood. There seemed to be something else she wanted to say, but instead she walked away, leaving Rei to realize that she had been conned into becoming Mars Reiko once again.

--

Minako came back a week later, another magazine in hand. Rei was about to say, “I’m not signing it” when she realized it was the promised Minako-signed copy. She blushed a little when she received it. It had been signed in idol-writing, all loopy and so cute that it took Rei a moment to figure out what it said. ‘To Reiko-san, good luck with your career.’

What career? Minako was doing this on purpose, she swore she was.

“What’s with that scowl?”

“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” Rei accused, as if that mattered.

“I’m on the lam.” Lately, Minako had been acting more like a normal idol, sneaking out every now and then for no discernable reason other than ‘I wanted to’. And somehow Rei always wound up running into Minako when the idol went out on those excursions. There had to be some kind of general irony principle working against her.

She had the impression that Minako wanted to be invited in. So, Rei said, “I don’t think I should shelter a criminal.”

“How cruel. Would you turn away a friend?”

“It depends on the crime committed.”

“In this case, bribery, improper use of fire escapes, and escape from imprisonment.”

“I think at least one of those is a felony,” said Rei, but let Minako into the living quarters. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to give you your reward for doing tedious idol work.” The idol was doing it again, smiling and smirking at the same time.

Rei found that she kept trying to sneak a glance at the cover, and turned it over. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Water, thanks.”

Rei went to the kitchen and fetched two bottles. How long was Minako planning on staying, anyway? She rarely stayed longer than half an hour when she was ‘on the lam’, and every time she left, Rei would see big black cars zooming past the shrine.

“You’re a Christian, aren’t you?” asked Rei. Minako sipped her water thoughtfully.

“I don’t know. I like the atmosphere of a church. I go there to think.”

“About various things,” Rei said, remembering their first meeting.

“That’s right.” Sip, sip. Minako was staring at her. Maybe they were both thinking of their first meeting in that church. Rei couldn’t tell. She could only read Minako when Minako let her.

She pushed further. Now that the mission from the past life had been set aside, and considering Minako had given her so much grief over the past years, she felt justified in asking, “Like what?”

“About my career, about the future. About the past life.” Rei tensed. Minako’s smile was relaxed, but also disbelieving. “Do you still hate those words?”

Rei frowned. “So?”

“There’s no point in denying it happened,” she said, her voice all distant and detached, the way it got when she talked about the future or the past, or any of that ‘mission from the past’. Rei could feel the reflexive urge to snipe something nasty welling up. “Then again, you’ve always tended to look to the future, haven’t you? Artemis told me that you get visions in the fire.”

“I didn’t get those in the past life?”

“Yes, but you got them when you had the hiccups and were doing handstands. And only after painting your palms green.” Minako let Rei absorb that and then said, “Sorry, that was a joke.”

Getting the hint a beat late, Rei mumbled a sullen, “Ha, ha, ha.

“In the past life, circumstances were different. You got visions, but they were more unpredictable.” Minako was watching Rei closely now, as if testing her. Maybe watching to see if she might explode. “Do you remember anything about it?”

“A little.” The particular memory that just came up wasn’t particularly pleasant. “I… remember having a vision while swimming in the Sea of Serenity.”

“You almost drowned,” said Minako. “Your father had to rescue you.”

“My father…” So her relationship with her father had been better in the past life? Rei could feel a bit of jealousy towards her past self. “What was he like?”

“Not too different,” she decided. “But he loved you.”

They talked until Minako had drunk two thirds of the bottle. Then she left, coy as usual, and Rei watched her go and watched the familiar black cars speed by (she swore that Manager had attached a GPS device to Minako sometimes) and wondered when Minako had met her father.

--

Author’s Notes: Hello there. This is my first foray into the PGSM fandom, though not my first time writing fanfic. Nice to meet you. This set of notes is going to be a bit long while I get through the technical mucks. Er. It’s just for clarification, really.

The chapter title is from the song "How We Operate" by Gomez.

For the sake of narrative convenience (I am a horrible person, yes), Minako’s mysterious illness was not cured when Usagi brought back the world. There is no justification for this. Uh. Please endure it to the best of your ability.

The timeline given here is deliberately vague. That is a fancy way of saying ‘I am commanding artistic license for you to just assume it takes place sometime between the Final Act and the Special Act because I don’t want to deal with the actual nuisances of thinking it out’. Well, you know, things happen, aha.

I have, as of posting, written up to chapter nine. I am also experiencing massive continuity errors that are making my head hurt. Since the first three or so chapters can stand up alone, they should come out relatively quickly. And meanwhile, I have an internship to finish! It might take a while to get everything up, because doing internships are... really unglamorous, let's say.

Honorifics here are used in full, or in the fullness of my ability to use them correctly. Minako’s manager, Saito Sugao, is referred to as his title, Manager (shachou), rather than by name, for example, and Usagi will add the honorific –chan to many of her friends’ names. The lack of honorifics is just as important as having them there, as an omission can convey great familiarity or great disrespect, depending on the context. You may notice that some characters are more polite with their use of honorifics than others.

I think that’s all of it. Wow, I talk too much. Please enjoy.