"Forgive us sinners and betrayers..."

She didn't feel guilty when the bracelets chained her body. Her heart will always belong to Haruka. Even with that glittering jewel that was half of her soul, it was only half of it. Her love, cut in half, her memories half-lived, and her loyalties... halved.

She knew her duties well. She was not like those cowards they had fought, who joined Galaxia for whatever reasons they had - she deduced it mostly to be fear or helplessness or both. They were far cleverer than that. So they had watched their people die, and they had watched their powers fail, but she had never been too attached to those who were not Haruka and she had never feared for anyone's safety so much as the women they had so briefly played house with.

But Hotaru and Setsuna had died. And Haruka, Sailor Uranus, stands beside her still. They're plan cannot fail.

"If it does fail, darling, we will still have each other in the after life..."

Michiru does not feel dirty standing on the other side, facing her future and supposed Queen. She does not feel that her hands are less because she had done more. To her, Haruka's hands are terribly white and pure, so much more than her own. Haruka is not dirty and neither is she. Playing both sides only meant that the chances of their survival will be more likely than fighting blind and stupid.

Her blue-eyed sovereign looked so betrayed and filled with disbelief. Why so betrayed? Could her future queen not look past the surface? Why must they die without having fought at all, always, waiting to be saved by a powerful rock and not the powers they had in their hands and in the minds they had cultivated.

Sailor Neptune looked down at her past comrades with a small smirk on her lips, a humorless smile filled with irony. Her eyes remained as cold as ice, unwavering and determined in the goals she had long set for herself. After all, she had never claimed to be perfect or a saint - saints did not always save the day and heroes were never as simple as the stories they were written into. People only wanted to see the surface, but there was always an underneath, always.

"Is there really a difference between killing a caterpillar and a butterfly?"*

This was their utopic future resting on the lines, after all. For that future, what worth would they put on the line to save it? For that brilliant Queen, what would they sacrifice?

And Michiru had long figured out the answer to that.

"Long live the Queen..."