View source for We Are The Dead (Black Moon Clan)

{{Cutscene Header
|Date of Scene=2025/04/28
|Location=Nemesis
|Synopsis=Izou, Rashmi, and Masato found the files on what happened to the Black Moon Clan. Izou handed them off to Saphir. This is what came after.
|Cast of Characters=NPC-BMC,107,38
|Tinyplot=Black Moon Clan
}}
[30th Century Crystal Tokyo, Outside of the Crystal Palace]

Crystal Tokyo's side of the story was far more detailed than the tales and stories and manifestos left behind for the children who had become the Black Moon Clan to decipher. There were investigative reports from a variety of sources. There were articles, demographics information, files on all who had been more than a year of age at the time of departure - 

Departure. It felt absurd to think such a mild word when ''banishment'' had been the reason named for their misery and tortures all his life, and yet, scanning these files, so detailed as to be mundane, filled with passenger logs and requisitioned provisions. 

Provisions. 

Provided to his ''people''. 

For their ''voluntary departure from the Earth'', destined for Io, and then for an asteroid with stable enough orbit to support a dome, to allow for a city, it had been ''offered'' to them, a ''future on a world where the water didn't want to devour you -''

Saphir, for the first time in his life, found that he wished to stop thinking. Wished for it so fervently he may as well have been praying.

His prayers were not answered. They had never been before, and the truth of his origins may have overturned everything he had ever imagined himself to know about his own history, but it had not changed ''that''.

It was night on Crystal Tokyo and the world was rotting, and soon so would Esmeraude, the remnants of her body, the magnificent wings of the oversized dragon form she had ''demanded'' he outfit her droid form with, as she laying dying in her own bed, her grip like iron on his hands and her eyes fever-bright - ''Make me something impossible,'' she had demanded, voice whisper-thin and hoarse from the way the energy tore at her soft tissues, devoured her from the inside out. ''Make me something even all their miracles could not give them''. 

And so he had, and so they had cut the wings from her body and brought her down to their Earth once more. 

The Earth that had once offered their family a home to make their own, instead of scorning them as they had been taught. As they had been ''indoctrinated'' to believe. 

He could not stop thinking. He could not stop imagining. 

Footsteps. A form that was not strange enough, from the corner of his eyes, seen in the memories of too many of the Specter Sisters. 

If he could not stop thinking, he would at least turn his thoughts to something more soothing, more familiar. The clinical bent of science, the mundanity of vivisection. 

The mystery of Sailor Chalcopyrite. 

[30th Century, Nemesis, Saphir's Lab ]

It was meditative for him. Familiar. An easy, old habit, to find something and begin the process of taking it apart, begin the process of understanding it, sorting it, categorizing it. Chalcopyrite herself was not of interest to him, save for the mystery of what she ''was'', for she was not a Senshi and she was not blighted, like the Black Moon Clan, filled with the Dark Energy of hate. 

She is an escape from his thoughts, from his ''emotions'', filling his brain and refusing to part ways from him. 

While he collected samples of her tissues, split flesh to scrape filings from her bones, slotted needles into place to collect cerebral and spinal fluids, he did not have the space to ''contemplate'' the enormity of what he had learned.

And yet even in science he could not fully escape his thoughts, even in questioning the girl he could not fully divest from his agonized questioning, could not stop himself from ''feeling''.

It was not his role to feel. It was not his place to endure the sentiments that now tore at him, especially when there were mysteries to be solved, data to be collected, understanding to claim, information to be presented and slotted into plans, it was ''Rubeus's'' job to feel this boiling, frothing, expanding ''rage'' that seemed to fill his chest and threatened to split his mind -

(It was Rubeus' job to be their anger, their frustration, their explosive rage, the one a hairs-breadth from explosion at any moment, every moment, towering fury but ''their'' fury, all of their rage and anger, all of it made manifest in his snarling mouth and snapping eyes and tense, hunched shoulders, he was their anger and it was his job to house it so that they could look upon him and be free of it, because Rubeus is Angry and there is no need for anyone else to be -)

He abandons Chalcopyrite to the ossuary, leaves her to panic and scream in the dark surrounded by those bones of the dead, lost not to the Moon's callous cruelty but to their own foolishness in placing trust in the wrong hands, and ventured deeper into the castle, stalking the silent halls, ignoring his Droids, impartial each and every one of them, built to serve and to guard and to monitor and none of them carrying the face of one beloved - no beloathed - no ''the face of one who is nothing, because he is Blue Saphir and he is implacable'' - 

he is not implacable. 

He is, as Petz would say, smiling in a manner that suited her and which Saphir had never confessed to liking, for it was irrelevant and pointless and he could never know if he had ''shaped her lips for that smile'' -

he is not thinking of her.

He cannot think of her.

He is filled with too many emotions to think of her, to think of Rubeus, to think of Esmeraude who ''threw him away from her and died and saved his life and it was only practical to aid her why did she sound so surprised why did she -''

It was muscle memory that guided him to the doors of brother's study, where he knew his brother would be standing on the balcony, looking up through the twisted mists that were the closest Nemesis' atmosphere could shape to clouds, and beyond them, to the stars and the blue-green planet that lay far beyond the viewing power of the naked eye, even one rebuilt to his own exacting specifications.

It was muscle memory that lead him to knock, but it was anger that led him to push open the doors without waiting to be granted entrance, it was grief that led to sweep the curtains aside and take a place at his brother's side on the balcony, and it was clearly madness that lead him to shove the files - downloaded to a more appropriately-sized and familiar tablet for his brother's perusal - into Demande's face and bark orders at him.

"''Read this.''"

In the small corner of his mind still predominantly composed of rational thought, Saphir believed that his brother must have been so surprised by his attitude that the natural and proper urge to put him in his place was overridden. 

Instead, the tablet was taken up in strong hands, violet eyes perusing the first pages - a report from the Crystal Palace's own archives summarizing what had been dubbed 'The Black Moon Incident'.

[ 30th Century Tokyo, Nemesis, Demande's Study ]

Nemesis was an ugly planet, cratered by meteorite collisions and hollowed out by their own efforts to extract the Malefic Black Crystal that was weapon and birthright both. 

For as long as they had been banished to its surface, the sky had been dim with mists of energy and dust-laden clouds, distant stars the only viable source of light, given that their variable orbit left the sun an inconsistent blur of light at the best of times. The atmosphere was thin, the air quality poor, the water a bitter poison only scarcely more tolerable than death by dehydration, and what edible plant-life grew was stringy and thin. There were beasts, and the necessity of hunting of those monstrosities had been the cause of more than one of the bodies in the ossuary. 

Demande contemplated all of this in the hours he stood alone on his balcony while the broken and beaten body of his enemy bled on the chill stone of his bedroom. He considered dragging that battered frame to one of those openings, those tombs that were not sealed, for on Nemesis even bodies had purpose and one could never be certain when the bright mind of his brother would recall a use for one of those cadavers. It would only be right for Endymion to suffer amidst the silent dead created by his malice and indifference. 

He quite liked the thought, actually. Endymion, now victim of Demande, lying supine amidst the victims he had created.

Well. 

He and Serenity.

Violet eyes drifted towards the pale light of the sun that shone weakly in the northwestern quadrant of the sky, noting not for the first time that the distance rendered its visage not unlike the sight of the Moon from the Earth. 

Had things gone according to plan, it would be the hateful Moon held here on Nemesis, not the wretched Earth. It would be Serenity's eyes, glowering into his own.

It wouldn't matter that the face would be younger, the eyes more naive, the hair bright blond instead of palest silver, it would be Serenity, the merciful goddess on Earth who had ever withheld her mercy from his people, and she would be where she belonged - 

Here. 

On Nemesis. 

Dying in the hell she had condemned them too, the goddess of life imprisoned by the dead.

In light of that, the capture of her husband is incomparably frustrating. Even beating the man had only been a fleeting satisfaction in comparison to what ''could have been'' - 

Vengeance. Desecration. Cruel and merciless delight. 

He has dreamed of her since childhood, the woman whose limitless power to ''better the world'' fell short only when it would have saved the lives of his people, his family. 

An entire system of worlds under her rule, well over a billion lives in her sway, planets, moons, asteroids, all under the banner of the Crystal Millennium, and Nemesis alone left in the cold, prey to the slavering jaws of death. 

Dreamed of her. Cursed her name. Envisioned her death at his hands, plotted for their revenge amidst the dying and the dead, worked through agonies lesser beings died to and rose from his brother's work table to get right back to it, and then - 

At the pinnacle of triumph, as the obelisk missile he had forged of the Malefic Black Crystal he had finally ''seen'' her, with the impertinent gold on her brow, the silver shine of her hair, the ''fathomless depths of hatred in her eyes'' and oh, he had fallen. How he had fallen. Excitement sparking through his nerves, electric in his sudden elation, his understanding, in the instant before she was encased in crystal, the vision torn away. 

''She hated him.''

''She hated him!''

A goddess of mercy and new beginnings, and she ''hated'' him, and he was alight with it, the revelation of her hatred akin to a religious experience and even now Demande tips his head back and exhales a sigh as he recalls the moment. 

All of that suffering, all of that misery, the death and decay and rot of it all, ''because she hated them''. 

Hated ''him.''

There was meaning to it, then. There was hatred, mutual, alight between in a spark of connection, and oh, hatred was but the flipside of love.

He has burned for it since, the utter devastation he could bring into those eyes, the last of that light begging to be snuffed out. The Rabbit's death would cause it, where the slow dying of the planet had not, and with the Silver Crystal in hand he would free the Queen who had haunted his thoughts for decades, and he would make her know the depths of his twisted love, his burning hate - 

Except he doesn't have Serenity. He doesn't even have her whining younger self, a timeline removed, to occupy himself with. All the hatred and planning, all the those dreams, they could be being fulfilled, the miserable deaths of their clan, two hundred and forty-five memories carried on the backs of eight remnants, all of it paid back, ''if only he had captured her''.

It's in the midst of these cyclical recriminations that the isolation of his study is breached, and Demande turns with cape flaring and mouth twisted, aware that only his advisor or his brother is ''left'' to disturb him, and ''neither'' should be willing - 

It is his brother, and Saphir is ''disturbed'', his hair in disarray, gloves marred by drying blood still clinging to hands clenched around a tablet, and before a word can be uttered, the tablet is shoved into his face, a terse command barked at him, and Demande obeys before he remembers that ''he'' is the one who barks the commands around here. 

But by then he has seen the first of the documents. 

By then he has begun to read, and thoughts of his marred pride and his brother's lack of obedience are far from him. 

[ 30th Century, Nemesis, Black Moon Clan's Ship ]

For the first time in his life, Saphir found himself unable to read his brother, and given the news he had forced upon him - that their entire lives were a lie, that their history was a manipulation, that everything they hade ever done had been not the righteous vengeance of those unjustly mistreated but the flailing of puppets to the tune of a master - he found himself... perturbed. 

Deeply, perturbed. 

Demande had read through the files with all the aching, emotional dramatism that Saphir had, in the darkest corners of his heart, hoped to evoke in his brother - he had flipped through the documents with agitation, magnified the photos, cursed the Crystal Millennium under his breath and demanded to know Saphir's sources, demanded that he show him the original documents that ''they'' possessed, that he give him every scrap of information that there was about their origins.

And Saphir had provided it all. Of course he had. Together, they had departed the castle and boarded their ship and Saphir had shown his brother everything, every file that they had both poured over in childhood, orphans amidst a dwindling band of orphans, desperate and eager to know everything they could, knowing that they alone would bear the legacy of those who died - 

And where once that proof had been solace and venom both, the wound and the cure, showing them ''why'' they suffered even as it invigorated their desire for revenge, now, with something to compare it too, they could only see the flaws. 

Gaps in dates, missing demographic information, emotional manifests in contrast to focused, cold-hearted reporting - 

Crystal Tokyo's people - from the palace, from Io, from reports collected from the Black Moon Clan's own founding members - 

all of it was more convincing than the evidence they had been raised to see as proof of their condemnation. 

Demande had grown quiet then, and it was unsettling, it was unnerving, it was ''far too normal''.

( This is how it worked, in the Black Moon Clan, for they were few in number and they had never in their lives been apart from one another:

they were each of them, pieces of the whole. none could be considered complete without the others, just as no one organ could alone support a body, or a single circuit hope to function as a computer. there were roles which each of them held, which each of them understood - this had never been explained to them, but developed naturally, as could only be expected from a small mass of adults who had once been a horde of sickly and dying children under the supervision of a madman. 

rubeus would be the expanding star of their rage, venting their fury on the landscape at large. 

the specter sisters would be their contradictory voices, four voices bickering as they covered the spectrum of opinions amidst the clan and shouted themselves hoarse to express them all, getting all the mania, all the fear, all the desperation out and into the open. 

esmeraude would be already clawing together new ambitions, new plots, new schemes, new ways that they could come out ''on top'', that they could make this work to their advantage, self-interested and greedy.

saphir would break down the situation, separating the facts from the emotional pleas, analyzing what occurred to them, transforming the world into spreadsheets and numbers, data, figures, cold and true and callous.

and demande would be the one to stand above it all, separate, unmoved, unprovoked. demande would be the clear-sighted vision, that condensed everything that they were - their rage and their fear and their sorrow and their ambition and their logic - into something that ''functioned''. something that survived. )

Demande was reacting as though everything about this were normal. Where Saphir could ''still'' not steady his voice, could not quell the shaking of his hands, the pounding of his pulse, the sickening ''anger'' in the pit of his chest, as he thought of their lives wasted on another man's ambitions, unable to play his part, ''Demande still stood apart''. 

<s>They were supposed to suffer together. They were supposed to splinter ''together'', how could they rebuild if only he -</s>

"Brother," Saphir croaked, and he loathed Rubeus and Koan for dying, loathed them for ''they'' were meant to be the ones aflame with anger and quaking with fear, ''not him'', "I cannot... I cannot disprove the evidence Saitou provided."

Something. Give him ''something''. 

"Saitou was among those who killed Calaveras, and then the four sisters and Rubeus, was he not?" 

"Yes - Calaveras, yes. We - do not have data on the events of Rubeus' final stand, but it is unlikely that he would have avoided the battle -"

"And yet, you have attempted to cultivate him as an asset."

The words were so unexpected as to be rendered near meaningless. For a moment, Saphir could only stare, wondering, for an instance, if his hearing had failed him altogether and the words were a product of his hallucinating mind. 

"He displayed an interest in me - I thought to use that to our advantage, to gain access to their camp, or lure him to us altogether, but I have clearly failed, and instead he has revealed -"

"Did you already have your suspicions? Is that why you kept this to yourself?" 

Saphir had been punched, kicked, stabbed, and defenestrated (all courteous of Rubeus), and each experience had been less bewildering, less winding, than this. He could not understand his brother's thought process at all. He could not understand how he could imagine that Saphir could have suspected ''any'' of this, and not come to him immediately!

"I came to you the very ''moment'' I had suspicions," he said sharply, finding that in his indignation his voice had steadied. "We have always acted with discretion -" 

"Towards each other," Demande said, "You, and Esmeraude, and Rubeus, yes, you have always hidden things from ''each other'', each of you trying to curry my favor, but you have never hidden things from me, Saphir, and given the magnitude of what you now reveal, are you surprised I have cause to question you?"

"Yes. Yes! Yes, I competed with Rubeus and Esmeraude and you always enjoyed that, which is a third of the reason we did it, all of us wanting ''your'' approval, wanting you to be pleased with us over the others, and it's because of that that I would have never hidden anything like this! Wiseman has played us for fools and puppets, lead us about as lambs to the slaughter, do you think I could suspect that and not tell you? Do you think I could suspect that he was manipulating ''you'', and not speak of it?" 

It was a blow that he would not tolerate, if it were true. If his brother's faith in him was so shallow as to think that Saphir could tolerate seeing ''his brother'', the strongest of them all, who could withstand even the strongest of the horror creatures native to the killing field they had been cultivated like ''crops'' in - 

"...No," Demande said finally, and Saphir could breathe again. 

Passion had flared and now it died and for a moment they were the two of them silent, breathing quiet, letting go of their emotion, for Nemesis was a planet of hateful passions, that devoured and kindled in turn, and neither of them were of an inclination to feed the planet that was womb and tomb both in this moment. 

"No," his brother repeated, "I don't think you could have hidden your suspicions. This is new. And yet... irrelevant."

"Irrelevant?! He ''lied'' to us!"

"And we believed him."

"He used as a pawns, for plans we have ''no idea'' of -"

"And we advanced at his command, even when we thought we were following our own ambition."

"We were children!"

"And now we are men. Saphir. We have come too far to turn back."

"Brother, that is a fallacy at work and you know it, the costs may have been sunk but there is nothing left for us on this path -"

"There is nothing left for us at all."

And the words were uttered in such a cold and final tone that Saphir shuddered and bowed his head. 

"There is nothing left for us," Demande repeated, and there was nothing in his eyes, there was nothing but flat emptiness. "Our people are dead. The Earth is dying. Endymion -"

Saphir thought of the young king to be, lying on the floor of their castle in Demande's own bedroom, in a pile of splintered and crushed bone, bruised and inflamed flesh. 

Saphir thought of the Earth, a planet he had visited only to bring death upon it, a death that even now spread by inches, rotting the planet from the outside in, feverish destruction spreading. 

"Endymion lies on my floor and bleeds. The other is a ghost who barely makes his presence known. Serenity is trapped in crystal, and the hatred she turned upon me was never the benediction I believed it was. And you ''know'' where the Rabbit is."

And so he did. 

Wiseman was not with either of them, because he was occupied with his ''newest'' creation, his newest puppet, their very own prey turned into the predator. 

Saphir thought of the rabbit who they had hunted, a child with round cheeks and clean attire and shining hair, and the woman she was now, with her insincere smile set in a face of sharp lines and her hungry eyes that watched and waited to destroy them. 

"There is nothing for it," Demande continued, and it was strange, for Saphir had held his brother's corpse, lifted the crystal-soul from his dissipating core, carved the meat from his bones to remake him, and still, he had seemed far more alive rendered nothing but meat and flesh and spirit on a table than he did ''now''. "We have been played the fool, but there is no other path before us but the grave, brother. We are the dead, and we have killed the only heaven humanity has ever known. We've brought them into hell with us, and we may as well enjoy the rest of the ride."