Sidestory:
Dealing with Death
by Emiko
Sophie looked out across the forest. This was where it all began, the exact spot. Here she had been standing when she noticed the bird, here she had been when the bird spoke and presented her with her pendant, and so it was here that she now went to review everything that had happened.
Months ago, when she had started her third year of high school, Sophie would have considered herself a tough bitch. She could talk the talk and walk the walk. She and her friends had thrown around drugs and guns like toys, toys for little girls. Sophie held a joint now, rolling it in her fingers, but she was too preoccupied with the view around her to light it.
Fuck. Where had it all gone?
Sophie's friends were alienated. They still went to the mall and the movies every weekend, but now Sophie had other concerns that kept her continually distant. Her boyfriend was as good as gone, too. Rick had been fun, but now Sophie no longer had time to maintain the relationship, and she was planning on breaking it off. She could find other guys, of course, and rotate them around so she never became attached to one more than the others. That would prevent a boyfriend from discovering her senshi identity.
Sophie had decided to live with it. It was a war. Perdix had made that clear from the beginning. And at the beginning, Sophie had played war like a little girl. Then Acacia died, and suddenly it was more than just a game: it was a real war, something they were all embroiled in.
Why were they fighting? Sophie didn't care any more. War was supposed to be pointless, after all. People fight because if they don't fight they will die. Sophie vaguely recalled one of her history teachers touting the sentiment that the only good war was World War II. She was inclined to agree.
People die in war.
Sophie had never really thought about it before, but now she drew the conclusion that it was only her duty to do what she had done today. There was nothing personal in it. She and Draco might have been friends, but that was the way it went in all wars. In the Civil War, after all, brother fought against brother. Friends had fought against friends in the World Wars. They didn't do it out of spite. They did it out of duty. Sophie had a duty now, to her fellow senshi, to her past life, to herself. This wasn't a war about belief for her. It was simply a war. And in war, people fight and people die and it's not anyone's fault, really, just the way things go.
Hades had been killed. Draco killed Nathanael. Sophie killed Draco. No, not Sophie, Sailor Metis, a mere soldier in this war following the path set forth before her. There were international conventions about that kind of thing, how soldiers aren't responsible for the deaths at their own hands in times of war, because part of war was killing and being killed. So Sophie accepted this and flicked open her lighter, setting light to the end of her joint.
Up here in the forest, there was no war. There were no senshi, there were no names, only a human minds and the trees and birds and insects and leaves. Sophie admired the forest. She watched a train of ants drag the body of a grasshopper towards their nest. Were the ants truly responsible for the grasshopper's death? It was only in their nature. Killing was part of the nature of war.
Sophie shoved the joint into the rough bark of the log she was sitting on, extinguishing it before actually smoking it. She stood and picked up a nearby stick.
How nice it would be to have a hut out here in the woods, where no one would bother her. Sophie began to build.