Self-Incineration by ViperInferno

Part I

Self-Incineration
By Viper Inferno
Part I
 
Fear, it’s something we all live with as human beings. Some cower to protect themselves from it, while others run away at the first sight of it. And many are reluctant to admit it even exists. Therefore many people like to hide it, to keep it buried deep. It’s because they are ashamed of it, ashamed of whatever it is that scares them. But fear is more than something that just scares the hell out of us. Some say fear is a part of us, a part of what makes us who we are, just like joy, just like love. Others say fear reminds us of our limits, reminds us that as humans we are frail and finite, and because of that it protects us from our careless selves.
 
My karate sensei once told me that fear is a challenge in our lives. And as a challenge, it is something we must one day face. It’s true that we keep our fears hidden away, deep within us so no one else knows of them. It’s also true that we hide from our fears so we never have to see them again. But my sensei was right in that no matter what, no matter how deep within us we hide them, we will have to face our fears in one way or another, even when we least expect it.
 
Now you wonder why a girl like me, one who would never back down from a challenge, one who lives life on the edge, one who is seemingly fearless, and one with a bitchy attitude like mine, would talk about fear all of a sudden. Well, it’s true that I seem fearless, always getting into fights and kicking some ass in my past. I was the one who actually invoked fear in others, something I was once proud of before I met Usagi.
 
As much as I loved athletics, as much as I admired my own strength, I tried to hide it by acting more feminine, not like I wasn’t. I even took on the feminine role of cooking and housecleaning.  I hid from my fearless nature to be more feminine, to be accepted by others. And like most people, I also hid from my fears.
 
Back to the subject of fear now: my fears were something I tried to stay away from. It seemed very easy because I felt that what I feared was something I could live without. Even if you think you could live without something you fear, you never know when you just can’t live without it, and you never know when what you fear will come to you, when it will meet you face-to-face.
 
Fear changes us when we come face-to-face with it. It can make us do things we never thought we could do. It can change our views of life, of the world, and even ourselves. It can make us act crazy; it can make us act stupid. It can strengthen us; it can hurt us, even kill us. The real reason I talk about fear now is because I myself have never once in my life come face-to-face with it.
 
You see, I am deathly afraid of airplanes. I would not dare step on one to save my life. You can see why it seemed so easy for me to avoid airplanes, there were always alternate modes of transportation.  I can live without ever having to fly somewhere on a plane. So I never faced my fear of airplanes, that is... until recently.
 
My name is Kino Makoto. I am 18 years old and out of high school.  The story I am about to tell you happened to me 3 years ago, when I was still fresh with my fearless and invincible persona. But before I tell you my story, I must tell you something else about me, something only a few of my closest friends know about me, since it has much to do with my story. I possess this gift you see, a gift of legendary proportions.  And the funny thing is that I wasn’t blessed with this gift until after I had met Usagi.
 
You see, the gift isn’t something you just present to someone in a box wrapped in decorative paper. Rather it is something about you, a talent as you may call it. But this is no ordinary talent, mind you, or it wouldn’t be so legendary. It’s a talent that instantly became a part of me, it became my identity, my alter ego.
 
So what is this gift so worthy of being called a legend? Well, I am none other than the sailor-suited pretty soldier known as Sailor Jupiter. What made this gift so great to me is that it fit me like a glove. With the power of thunder at my command, it gave me the perfect reason to be fearless, to be strong, to kick some ass, and not be the least bit shy about it all. I would say it was a blessing from God, it was such a great gift. With it, I could be myself.
 
Now, with that all said, my story can commence. And you’ll see from the very beginning where my identity as Sailor Jupiter comes into it.
 
It was a time of anxiety, a time of an imminent change in our lives. It was a time of preparation for high school entry exams. Grade 8 was drawing to a close, and much of my time and energy was spent with the other girls studying for our entry exams.
 
It was also a time of conflict and terror, a time when daimons roamed the streets of Tokyo. Yes, I said daimons, monsters taking on various forms, feeding on the hearts of people. These are not the hearts that beat in our chests; rather they’re our essences, our spirits, the hearts of us, what makes us who we are. And so my story begins...
 
 
Haneda Airport...
 
We were in the middle of a battle with a rather fearsome daimon. This one had infiltrated the Haneda Airport and taken on the form of a jet engine, hiding itself perfectly on one of the airplanes. He was powerful too, probably the most aggressive we have faced yet. He had already beaten Sailor Moon and the other Sailor Senshi down. Even Tuxedo Kamen was no match for this jet-powered beast when he came to our aid.
 
Sailor Mars was pretty much scorched from head to toe. Her fuku was shredded below the bra-line, and her mini-skirt had almost burnt completely away. Sailor Venus also had had her fuku shredded, exposing her bare midriff. And on top of that, she’d sustained a bloody shoulder.  And Sailor Mercury was literally embedded into the outside wall of the terminal, leaving a perfect silhouette of her imprinted in it.
 
After this daimon had basked in his near orgasmic pleasure from inflicting pain on us, he turned his attention toward his intended target and the reason he existed, a young college intern.
 
Now how did we end up in this predicament, getting beaten down by such a powerful opponent. Hell, how did we even get mixed up in this in the first place? I mean we always showed up just about every time these daimons decided to wreak a little havoc, but it became a whole different battle when someone you or a friend cares for was the target of their cowardly attacks.
 
But why was today’s fight so emotional? Why did it affect us so much? Who was this young college intern? He was no one I knew, but he was a friend someone very close to me. He was Furuhata Motoki’s classmate and one of his closest college buddies. We all owed it to Motoki to help his closest friend, a complete stranger to us, as many times as he’s been there for us. It’s really too bad he never learned that the Sailor Team was us. He really would’ve appreciated it as something we’ve done for him, kind of a chance to thank him.
 
Anyway, so there we were beaten down and being laughed at by this ugly bastard of a daimon. Completely satisfied with our pain and suffering, it had turned on the young man and begun to extract his pure heart crystal. It’s really too bad that this stupid idiot couldn’t count; there were 5 Sailor Senshi after all. He thought he had us beaten, but no. I was still standing, with a mere tear in my fuku, pissed off at his sadistic and cocky attitude.
 
“Hey idiot,” I taunted, pulling his attention away from Motoki’s friend, “You still have me to fight.”
 
When he turned and got a good look at me, I could swear I saw this look in his eyes, that kind of look that peered deep into your soul, accompanied by a rather evil grin. I had a bad feeling about this.
 
“What?! One of you is still standing?! Damn, and I thought I had all of you pesky little insects swatted down,” he said, breaking me from my bad vibes. He sure wasn’t smiling as I thought I had seen. He actually looked rather disappointed at the fact I was still standing.
 
But then, as he paused, that look in his eyes seemed to pierce mine. Immediately, that bad feeling I had struck back like lightning, surging throughout my body. My God, what have I gotten myself into?
 
“You’re Sailor Jupiter,” he said, seemingly answering his own curiosity, “I know about you, and I was told to be on the lookout for you.”
 
‘What?’ I thought to myself, ‘I’m really that legendary?’
 
“Or should I call you ‘Kino Makoto’?” he continued, showing off that damned evil smirk.
 
That rather revealing comment struck me hard. I felt a burning sensation in my chest, as if someone had just stabbed me with that comment. How could this daimon know who I really am? The Death Busters didn’t know who we were at the time. In response, with the adrenaline surging through my veins, dropped my eyebrows and clinched my fists, practically begging for a fight. I wanted to kill this bastard before he even had the chance to spout out my alter ego out for all the world to hear.
 
“Such a fighter you are, fueled by anger and wrath. It does you well, seeing as you’re still standing. Funny how I didn’t notice you right off. I must’ve been too busy knocking the other bimbos around,” he taunted.
 
That didn’t strike me at all as anything else he knew about me.  I was the bad ass of the Sailor Senshi. All that comment actually did was get the adrenaline flowing even faster. It wasn’t the stating of the obvious that fueled my rage, but that arrogant boasting over hurting my friends. “How dare you,” I snarled, assuming a battle stance.
 
“Yet, you contradict yourself. You hide yourself under that warrior’s pride. You became a fighter to hide something that had defeated you. I know all about you, Makoto. I know you hide your pain and hide your fear with your aggressive attitude. And I know you even hide that with your more feminine attitude and feminine duties,” he explained along with a few chuckles, ignoring the fact that I was ready to take my rage out on him.
 
That comment left me feeling naked. ‘How the hell does he know all that about me?’ I wondered, with my body filling with anxiety. Even my closest friends barely knew any of that about me. But I had to fight it. I wasn’t going to fall to mere words, even if they were revealing.
 
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I denied, clinching my fists even tighter, practically screaming out how pissed off I was and how badly I really wanted a fight.
 
“Oh you doubt me, do you?” he said, smiling at his own confidence, “Shall I share it with you? Maybe you won’t be so doubtful then, will you.”
 
I merely held my battle stance, though my anxiety factor was shooting through the roof as my heart wanted to beat out of my chest.  Still, I tried my best to fight it. “And what do you mean by that?” I retorted.
 
“You’ll see soon enough. I do know you were traumatized as a child. And because of that trauma, you feared it. You feared that it would come back to finish you off. That trauma became your fear, and all your life you used the wrath of a warrior’s attitude to bury it deep,” he explained.
 
This was going nowhere. All he was doing was speaking in metaphor, being too general and not telling me what he was talking about. “That’s it, I’ve had enough of your bullshit,” I interrupted.
 
But just as I had lashed forward to end this freak’s babbling, my eyes widened in awe as the sky suddenly fell dark and a jumbo jet sitting on the tarmac exploded into a ball of fire. Wondering what was happening, I looked around the flight line. Both the diamon and my fallen friends were nowhere to be seen. Then, the sound of sirens caught my attention. It was at the instant I heard them that I spotted the flashing lights of fire engines and ambulances speeding toward the raging inferno.
 
‘What the hell?’ I thought to myself. This had to have been some kind of hallucination, simply because all that I saw and heard were the explosion and the rescue vehicles.
 
This was why I hated airplanes so damned much. They’re unsafe and you didn’t make it out alive if one crashed. You just lied there in the rubble with your dead body smoldering from the blaze. Besides, I lost some people very dear to me in a plane crash. Sure people have told me flying was the safest way to travel, but tell that to those who have lost their loved ones to those damned machines.
 
But this next vision I had was what had brought on my fear of airplanes in the first place. I suddenly heard a knocking sound, as of that on a door. I turned around only to see a man and a woman, both dressed in police uniforms, accompanied by another man, a close friend of the family from long ago, all wearing sad faces. At that instant, my eyes began to water as I remembered this image all too well.
 
“Kino Makoto,” the policeman’s voice echoed, “I’m afraid I have some bad news. There was a plane crash last night. Your parents were in it, and they won’t be coming home. Your mother... your father... gone.  I’m so sorry.”
 
I had turned away halfway through that heart-ripping vision, shutting my eyes tightly as the tears cascaded down my cheeks. This was it. This was what had started it all along, why I had feared airplanes.  That echoing voice, along with the sounds of sirens had brought me to my knees, shuddering as I tried desperately to hold back the tears.
 
“Perhaps this is proof enough that I know all about you,” the daimon’s voice echoed in my mind. Amongst the horrifying images I had hoped I would never see again, the daimon himself reappeared in front of me, grinning at my own pain, feeding on it, satisfying his sadistic pleasure.
 
“Ever since your parents died, you feared that the same fate would fall upon you. It really is traumatizing, isn’t it? I bet seeing it again after hiding it from it for so long is bringing that trauma back, showing you that your warrior’s pride is all but a lie. You can’t hide from your pain; you can’t hide from your fears. It will only come back to haunt you... forever. Life is a bitch, isn’t it?”
 
Seeing that plane exploding and hearing those dreadful words that had forever changed my life burned inside of me. I’d never forgotten it, the day Mother and Father died, but actually seeing it all again tore away at me, as if seeing the plane explosion wasn’t bad enough.  The tears were already shedding. I just wanted to let it go and cry right there.
 
But the daimon that was showing me all of this was still there, shredding away at my very soul with all that he knew about me. So I merely choked back the weeps, squeezed back the tears, and swallowed the pain. I had to shut this monster up before he could do any more to me. “Dammit, shut up. Just shut the hell up you candy-ass bastard,” I yelled as I summoned up my furious energy. Feeling the electricity surge through my body, I crossed my arms as lightning was striking my tiara.
 
“Supreme Thunder!” I screamed as I sent a powerful blast of lightning at the daimon. With all my wrath behind it, the blast struck the daimon hard and sent it flying onto one of the airport trucks.  There he lay, beaten down, weakened, yet still alive.
 
“Damn,” I cursed at my failure to kill this sadistic beast. A daimon always reverted back to the object it had possessed when it died, but this one didn’t. I had no idea how the hell this one had survived my furious attack.
 
“Are you okay, Mako-chan?” Sailor Moon’s voice ask from behind me, “You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
 
“I’m fine, Usagi-chan,” I evasively replied, “Just finish off the damned bastard.”
 
“Uh, okay,” she meekly acknowledged, probably wondering why I was shedding a few tears. So she grabbed her Spiral Moon Heart Rod and performed a few well-choreographed dance moves as she charged her attack.
 
“Moon Spiral Heart Attack!” she yelled as she fired a shower of hearts at the already weakened daimon. It screamed it’s last “Lovely” before it disintegrated into ashes, leaving behind only a mere jet engine. When I saw the ghastly entity that had possessed the jet engine fizzle away into nothingness, I let out a sigh of relief. He had finally been shut up for good, thanks to my dear friend. I swear, no one has ever made me feel so vulnerable, so weak, so naked before this bastard came along. How he knew so much about me still remains a mystery to me.
 
So with the daimon finally dead and Motoki’s friend saved, I began my trek away from the airport with that revelation still fresh on my mind.
 
“Mako-chan,” Usagi summoned, prompting me to turn my eyes to hers, “What’s wrong? No victory celebration? Not even a goodbye?”
 
I only smiled at her, reassuring her I was alright, “Yeah. I just got a little emotional, that’s all. I’m going back home, see if I can sleep it off.” That was putting it mildly.
 
Sailor Moon smiled back at me in response, “We all do sometimes.  I’m just glad you’re all right. I meant, you really looked like something had gotten to you, something that daimon said to you. But I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?”
 
I had already turned back right before she has reminded me about tomorrow’s study group, “Tomorrow, right.” And that was the last I saw of her that day.
 
When I arrived home, fatigue had already begun to take its toll on me. It wasn’t just the fight with the daimon, but mostly the anxiety and fear from seeing those horrifying images that had drained me of my usual energy, and then some. That and the whole revelation lingering in my mind left me feeling really down. So immediately, it was off with my clothes and into my pajamas.
 
I slowly and silently slid under the protection of my blanket. I glanced over at my alarm clock, 7:46pm. It was rather early for me to be going to bed, but this day had really taken a lot out of me. At least the sun was setting, though, so it wasn’t too unusual for me to be in bed. So I snuggled myself in and closed my eyes. I figured I would sleep this whole dreadful experience off...
 
 
 ...I was wrong, damn wrong...
 
It was like I wasn’t there, but then again was. I didn’t feel like I was there, I didn’t see my hands in front of me, and the people there didn’t even notice me. Yet I saw everything as if I really was there, like I was watching a movie happening all around me. If that wasn’t enough, all I saw were a bunch of chairs, most of them filled with people. Some were off in their own little worlds, some were talking amongst each other, while others read or slept. But then, one couple really caught my attention. I saw Mother and Father, sitting next to a window and enjoying the scenery outside.
 
Immediately, my heart filled with warmth as I saw them. I saw their eyes sparkle at the scenic view of what seemed to be overlooking a vast land. I saw them smiling, like they were enjoying each other’s company more than the scenery itself. A tear then came to my eye at the sight of my family, here, with me. I wanted to just throw myself into their arms, though they probably were oblivious to my being there just as everyone else seemed to be. Still, I wanted to hold them, snuggle up to them, tell them I love them, and tell them that I’ve missed them.  This was just too good to be true.
 
Then, a sound opened the way to the whole truth of what I was witnessing. “Attention passengers, this is your captain speaking. We are now making our final descent. Please fasten your seatbelts, fold your trays in the upright position, and prepare for landing.” Right then, the rest of the picture all flashed into place around me. I was on an airplane, or rather I was watching the inside of one. My heart had skipped a beat that instant before picking up pace. God, how I hated airplanes so damned much, I didn’t want to see this. I just wanted this vision to end now, so I could be away from this airplane and see my parents... on the ground.
 
But then, moments later, the plane began to shake, buck, and roll violently, sending all of its passengers including my parents into a furious panic. Everyone was screaming, even over the captain telling them of the turbulence they had run into. This was another reason I hated airplanes, the ride usually got so bumpy, so rough, so violent that you felt as if it would’ve been the end right there.
 
If I wasn’t frightened enough from the turbulence, what happened next spelled it all out for me. Suddenly, the plane took a wild roll, throwing loose every loose object about the cabin. Then, my heart stopped in awe as there was an explosion outside, one like the explosion I had seen last night. Then, the cabin lights went dark, with the only light coming from the fire outside the plane. As the plane began to plummet toward the ground, my heart kept on racing faster and faster, nearly jumping out of my chest. My body burned all over as fear had completely taken over my body. I felt myself shaking, even though I couldn’t see my shaking hands.
 
Soon, the fire burst thrpugh the cabin walls, consuming a number of the seats, and the frightened people sitting in them, that it touched. I turned back to my parents, who had been holding tightly onto each other throughout this horrifying ordeal, with the fire spreading swiftly through most of the cabin.
 
“Mako-chan!!!!!” my mother screamed in agony, just before the entire plane exploded in a raging ball of flames as it had finally augured into the ground.
 
------------------
 
 I immediately sprung up from my bed, sweating profusely and breathing heavily. I looked around and about to see that I was back in my room, in my apartment, and most of all, on the ground. My face felt cold, as if it were pale from the sight of that plane explosion. But it was all a dream, but damn did this dream scare the hell out of me. I’ve never had this dream before, never. But it seemed so real, as if that was what had really happened when my parents died.
 
I grasped my blanket tightly at that thought and pulled it close to my chest. Seeing Mother and Father, especially like that, drew tears to my eyes. They were so happy, so serene, so filled with joy, only for it to end all in fear, agony, and sheer terror.
 
“Mother... Father...” I whimpered before burying my face in the blanket. There I wept, the same way I had wept when I was told that they wouldn’t be coming home, that they had died, the same way I had wept at their funeral. I felt weak, torn, and empty all over again throughout the night, even after I had cried myself back to sleep.
 
...this was only the beginning...

end of part I

------------------

Disclaimer: As usual, Sailor Moon and most of the characters ain't mine, but belong to Naoko Takeuchi. And God bless that woman for creating such great entertainment for all of us with a lot of free time on our hands to enjoy. The English dub belongs to DiC Entertainment and Cloverway, and I only thank them for bringing' it to America, nothin' more. But Russell Hino/Hino Kyodai, Tuxedo Inferno, Titanius, and Deanna Kokorono/Kokorono Meijin are MINE (in a growling voice). So, please don't sue me. I'm just a lonely man who ain't got anythang but his pride. Well, y'all enjoy this fanfic and e-mail me.

Have fun Sailor Moon fans,
Viper Inferno
(Y2V)

Back to Summary Page