Written for the Sailor Moon Monthly Fanfiction Challenge. July Challenge - Day Twenty-Two: Silver and Gold. This is something of a sequel to La Lumière d'Amour. It will probably make next to no sense until you've read that before this. The whole thing isn't up, but everything you need to know to get this has been posted.

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Make new friends,
But keep the old.
One is silver
And the other gold.

The old tune was stuck in her head again. Lord only knew where she'd heard it or what evil mastermind had first set pen to paper when it had gotten into his brain to inflict it on other people. Katarina only knew those four lines - she was almost certain that that was all there was to the song, full stop - and it was beginning to drive her batty.

This always happened at this time of night. When everything around her flat would go dead quiet and all she could hear was the clock ticking away each second with a speed Katarina found frightening. That was when the reminder was the heaviest. That she was alone. That there was no ring around her finger. That she had no photographs to fill the empty, broken frames stashed away in a box under her bed.

That Minako and Alan were out of her life forever.

She got upset with herself when she thought about them, either separately or in conjunction (though mostly in conjunction, given what had happened). She got even more upset when she felt pain or even sadness at the loss of those relationships. She shouldn't feel anything but anger towards either one of them. They had betrayed her in the worst way imaginable. She could never forgive them for that.

But it didn't change the fact that the bed was empty. It didn't change the fact that she had no one to write on her brand new stationary. It didn't change the fact that Katarina was, for all intents and purposes, completely isolated.

Sometimes, when she had had one too many glasses of wine or when she was deprived of sleep, she would find herself holding the phone up to her ear in the middle of dialing the only phone number she'd ever bothered to memorize. She'd slam it down immediately once she came to her senses. She hated phones. And she hated the person who would have been on the other end of the line.

And there were other times, like that night, when the silence was closing in around her and the space heater failed to eliminate the chill that hung about her shoulders and she found herself on the verge of tears for reasons she could not abide that she almost missed them. And she almost thought about ringing them up. She thought of tearful reunions or civil meetings over tea or even teaming up with Minako to fight evil in whatever form again.

But she never let herself dwell on that for very long.

“Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold,” Katarina sang under her breath. She paused for a moment afterward, staring off into space, remembering a time when a bright-eyed teenager had dragged her by the wrist through an amusement park right alongside a serious, bewildered young man she had thought very handsome at the time. She thought of carousels and Ferris wheels and lockets she pretended to have lost. She thought of being happy and tried to remember what that felt like.