It was a brand new sheet of white parchment paper - he had bought it at the art store down
the street from where he worked - and it was without a flaw or crease. He waited patiently for the
ink to dry, careful not to touch and smear it, and as he did, he read over the words one last time.
"Dearest Beauty,
You are more fragrant than a thousand roses.
More marvelous than an ancient castle,
More breath-taking than the sea at sunset.
You are as a Goddess,
One living, breathing, walking,
Floating above the masses.
Be mine, oh Goddess.
Live within my reality.
Bind me with your chains
And I will stay,
Forevermore."
He smiled and leaned on the countertop, admiring his work.
It was, in a word...perfect.
============
"Love Chain"
A Sailor Moon Fanfiction
Written by Kate "SuperKate" Butler and Heavenly Pearl
Link the First: "Furuhata Motoki"
============
He had been working on it for weeks. WEEKS. It had been his only project, his only joy,
the thing he had most focused on. His mother had scolded him for not eating; "You're worse now
than when Rika dumped you!" she hollered, scrutinizing his full pantry - too full for a growing
21-year-old, she had said - on her weekly visit to his apartment. He'd tried to lie his way out of
it, but in a way, she really HAD been right. So he had said nothing, and had eaten twice as much
that night to make up for it... But she still looked worried, even after that. As if that had
not been enough torture, his younger sister bothered him at work every day to see if he was
"alright" - he lied, of course, and said he was - and never seemed completely sure what to make of
his answer. His other friends came and went and questioned but never said much; after all, he and
Rika had only parted ways a month before after what had been a two-year relationship. No one was
going to hold a bad mood against him.... No, not after THAT.
But now, realized Furuhata Motoki as he wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, he had done
it. He had finished the perfect love letter, the perfect confession, the perfect poem. It was the
letter that would win him the love of one woman in particular, a woman he had admired from afar,
even when he had still been dating Rika. She wasn't the brightest, he knew, or the most beautiful,
but she was HIS brightest, HIS most beautiful, and HIS goddess. Now, all he had to do was sign
his name at the bottom and put it in the envelope and finally - FINALLY - he would -
"Ara, Motoki-kun, what's that you're writing?" questioned a nosy voice as he began to lower
his fountain pen to the paper, and he looked up to see a pair bright blue eyes staring at him. They
were familiar blue eyes, as well, and the familiarity of them caused him to give a start and
immediately hide the paper behind his back. Tsukino Usagi, a blonde, odango-headed girl who often
frequented Crown Game Room, frowned up at him, curious and confused at the same time. "You don't
need to freak out on me," she told him as he, as casually as he could, leaned up against the
small counter that was behind him and tried not to panic. "I was just curious, that's all."
He smiled at Usagi-chan and for a moment, said nothing. She was sixteen and not very bright by
book standards, but there was something about her that shone. Motoki had once teased his best
friend - Usagi's long-time beau and, currently, future husband, Chiba Mamoru - about why she shone
so much, and he just said that she had a light inside her heart. Light inside her heart? He hadn't
the foggiest what that meant, but he hadn't really wanted to ask Mamoru what it meant either.
Usagi continued to stare, however, and his face reddened. "Oh, it's just some notes for
class," he lied as eloquently as he could, his hands groping around on the counter behind him for
the novel he'd brought along to read at downtime. No, that was hardcover... And that was too
thin... Ah ha! He stuffed the note into his book and moved to stand closer to her, hoping he didn't
look too terribly suspicious. "We have a test, so I was working on writing out the kana for the
equations in chemistry, that's all."
"Really?" questioned the blonde, frowning slightly, one finger to her cheek as she pondered
the validity of his answer. "Mamo-chan didn't mention a chemistry test coming up, and I would have
thought that he'd want to." Then, she shrugged cutely. "Well, anyway, I'm not staying," she
explained, grinning toothily. "I just came to pick up the manga I left here. It's a Ramna 1/2
volume. Seen it around?"
"I think I did," he admitted, turning back toward the counter behind him and scrutinizing
the countertop. There were a lot of books - text books, novels, notebooks, manga - lying across
it, most of which had been dropped by visitors to the arcade. He'd tried to organize their little
make-shift lost and found before, but never very well; it seemed that people delighted in messing
it up.
Finally, after a moment of scanning, and moving things around, he found it, sitting right
beside the novel he'd brought to read for the day. "Here we are, Usagi-chan," he smiled, handing
her the volume with a smile. "You stay out of trouble, okay?"
"Because I get into so much of it," she winked before scampering out of the sliding glass
doors and down the sidewalk, waving all the way.
He smiled slightly as she left, his sigh of relief echoing through the building. "Thank
Kami-sama she didn't see that note," Motoki muttered to himself, raking a hand through his messy
hair as he spoke. Turning his back to the rest of Crown Game Room, he moved to pick up his
fountain pen. "Because I KNOW she would have conned me into telling her all about it, and then it
would only be a matter of MINUTES before - "
"Furuhata!" The brash, annoying voice of his boss boomed through the air, and he flinched
as he heard it, one hand on his book while the other was holding his pen. Halfway across the room
stood the balding man, an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and his apron - required garb
of all Crown workers - splotched with orange and yellow stains. "The fruit for the cafe is in and
we're short a stock boy. Come back here and work!"
Motoki glanced at his book, and his boss. His book, and the man. His book...
He sighed and hung his head, defeated. "Coming, sir..."
===
They had met, as far as he could recall, on a Friday afternoon just after Rika had gone to
Africa for the very first time. Usagi, of course, had brought in her newest friend - seemed to him
that, her last year of junior high school, she was ALWAYS making new friends to show off - and
introduced them. Perhaps it had been the intoxicating loneliness that came with saying goodbye to
Rika, or just the resonating of his male hormones as they pumped through his veins, but either
way, he had been struck down, speechless.
"Aino Minako desu!" she'd chirped, offering him a hand to shake in the typical American
fashion. He'd stared into her bright blue eyes as Usagi rattled off needless information about
her latest groupie. Not that he had listened. It was only later, over further conversations and
the occasional parfait at the Fruit Parlor (always as a group, of course) that he learned the
little intricacies that made up Aino Minako. Seems she had been born in Tokyo, in a house only a
few blocks from his apartment, but had been shuffled off to England with her family after a rather
harsh string of layoffs at her father's company. There, she had grown up, speaking both languages
almost fluently, the only Japanese girl in an international private school. Then, just after her
second year of junior high had finished up, she'd been dragged back to Japan, and ended up meeting
Usagi. Neither of the blondes - since day one, he'd nicknamed them the "dangerous duo," if only
behind their backs - ever explained the full story of their meeting, though that was probably for
the best. Strange things tended to happen when one was friends with Tsukino Usagi. Of this, he was
certain.
All this he pondered as he addressed the envelope carefully at his dinner table, several
crumpled first-drafts lying on the floor around him. Addressing it "Minako" or "Mina" or even
"Mina-chan" had seemed too casual, and "Aino-san" seemed clunky, especially when he had been
calling her Minako-chan for the last two years. After a brief battle of poetic license, he decided
on "Ai no Megami" - after all, his letter had basically outlined her as that much - and finished
up with the address, carefully copying the numbers from the napkin he had scribbled them on. "Next
time," he muttered as he tried to distinguish a one from a seven, "I shell out the five bucks for
a district phone book."
After deciding that, yes, it was a seven - he didn't often cross his ones...he thought - he
finished up, smoothing his fingers over the name and address. "Done!" he announced to his empty
studio apartment, laying a smooch on the front of the envelope. "Now, all I have to do is sign my name
and be done with it!"
He pranced across the apartment and gathered his Stephen King novel in his hands, twirling
it gaily. Mamoru had teased when he'd shared the good news over the phone that evening. "I realize
that Rika and I haven't been broken up all that long," he'd sighed, stirring his dinner of instant
broccoli-alfredo pasta as he'd spoken, "but this woman... She's amazing, Mamoru! I can't deal with
this suspense any more. I'm going to do it."
"Who in the world is she?" the dark-haired man had pressed, voice urgent on the other end.
"You've only been talking about her constantly for a week and a half!"
"That's for me to know and you to find out," he had sniggered, and no amount of begging
otherwise could get him to divulge the secret.
He plopped down at the kitchen table with a big, goofy grin on his face as he began
flipping through the pages of his book. "Okay, my little masterpiece!" he cooed, nearly bouncing
in his seat as he spoke. "Come out, come out, wherever you are...."
He was, therefore, surprised when he got to the end of the book without anything to show
for it.
Now, Furuhata Motoki was, for the most part, a calm young man. He'd seen a lot of things
in his day, including youma and phages and whatever other monsters had wandered around the city of
Tokyo in Sailor Moon's glory days, and it really had never phased him much. In fact, more than
once, he'd joked to Mamoru that Usagi herself could come up to him and admit to being Sailor Moon,
and he would have shrugged it off. He even shrugged off the fact that, every time he DID make that
joke, Mamoru choked on his coffee.
This, however, was different. Worse than a youma. Worse than a phage. Worse than even
coming home with your shirt brown because your best friend had just spewed coffee all over you.
THIS was a matter of life and death! Or at least love and death. THIS... THIS...
"Where in the world is it?" Motoki hollered into the emptiness of his apartment as he
stood back up and rushed around, checking under the tables and chairs, in his room and even in the
bathroom, looking. He had come in from work, sweaty and tired, and set the book on the coffee
table before taking a shower. And there it had been until now. He'd been sure not to drop it -
people on the street had stared at him as he walked, always glancing behind him to make sure he
hadn't somehow lost the sheet of paper - and it's not like it could have walked off on its own.
Sinking into the couch, he stared blankly at the ceiling, his arms hanging, defeated, at
his sides. "What could have happened to it?" he groaned, trying to retrace his steps at the arcade
that afternoon. "What in the world could have happened to that letter? I stuck it in my book, and
that was that!" Then, he felt an overwhelming wave of nausea hit him as he remembered exactly
what had happened only a few hours before.
"Unless....."
===
Usagi laughed as she flipped the page in her manga, waiting patiently for the next plot
contrivance to pop up. Mamo-chan always teased her for reading Ramna 1/2 - he called it "a lesson
in deus ex machina," whatever THAT was supposed to mean - and tried to get her to read more
intelligent books, like "All's Quiet on the Western Front." She resisted firmly, though, proudly
stomping around with her manga in hand, grinning all the way. As she had two days earlier, when
she'd left her newest volume atop the Sailor V machine after a rather long day at the arcade.
"I don't see why Mamo-chan always complains about this manga," she giggled, rolling over
onto her back and staring up at a picture of boy-type Ramna getting thoroughly doused in cold
water. "It's not as - nani?"
The little slip of white paper, folded only in half, landed on her stomach, and she
frowned at it. She hadn't remembered tucking anything into her book, especially not nice paper
like what had just landed in her lap. She sat slowly up and opened it, almost immediately
recognizing the handwriting. "Motoki-kun's chemistry notes!" she gasped, reaching for the phone
as she skimmed what he'd written on the sheet. "I'd better call him and...tell...him...I..."
Her voice faded away her mind registered what the paper really did say. She swallowed
hard, recalling the medical student's surprise at her sudden appearance, and his super-suspicious
behavior.
Forgetting about the phone, and even about the manga, she raised her hand to her mouth
and tried to focus on breathing.
"Oh my..."
===
Motoki glanced warily at the throw pillow that was sitting beside him on the couch. For a
moment, he contemplated how painful death by smothering would be. After all, if some people did
it to their elderly relatives and such, could it be all THAT bad?
Then, he just whimpered slightly and buried his face in his hands. "I don't believe it,"
he moaned, his voice booming in his ears. "I just gave my love letter to USAGI!"
===
Fin "Link the First."
the street from where he worked - and it was without a flaw or crease. He waited patiently for the
ink to dry, careful not to touch and smear it, and as he did, he read over the words one last time.
"Dearest Beauty,
You are more fragrant than a thousand roses.
More marvelous than an ancient castle,
More breath-taking than the sea at sunset.
You are as a Goddess,
One living, breathing, walking,
Floating above the masses.
Be mine, oh Goddess.
Live within my reality.
Bind me with your chains
And I will stay,
Forevermore."
He smiled and leaned on the countertop, admiring his work.
It was, in a word...perfect.
============
"Love Chain"
A Sailor Moon Fanfiction
Written by Kate "SuperKate" Butler and Heavenly Pearl
Link the First: "Furuhata Motoki"
============
He had been working on it for weeks. WEEKS. It had been his only project, his only joy,
the thing he had most focused on. His mother had scolded him for not eating; "You're worse now
than when Rika dumped you!" she hollered, scrutinizing his full pantry - too full for a growing
21-year-old, she had said - on her weekly visit to his apartment. He'd tried to lie his way out of
it, but in a way, she really HAD been right. So he had said nothing, and had eaten twice as much
that night to make up for it... But she still looked worried, even after that. As if that had
not been enough torture, his younger sister bothered him at work every day to see if he was
"alright" - he lied, of course, and said he was - and never seemed completely sure what to make of
his answer. His other friends came and went and questioned but never said much; after all, he and
Rika had only parted ways a month before after what had been a two-year relationship. No one was
going to hold a bad mood against him.... No, not after THAT.
But now, realized Furuhata Motoki as he wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, he had done
it. He had finished the perfect love letter, the perfect confession, the perfect poem. It was the
letter that would win him the love of one woman in particular, a woman he had admired from afar,
even when he had still been dating Rika. She wasn't the brightest, he knew, or the most beautiful,
but she was HIS brightest, HIS most beautiful, and HIS goddess. Now, all he had to do was sign
his name at the bottom and put it in the envelope and finally - FINALLY - he would -
"Ara, Motoki-kun, what's that you're writing?" questioned a nosy voice as he began to lower
his fountain pen to the paper, and he looked up to see a pair bright blue eyes staring at him. They
were familiar blue eyes, as well, and the familiarity of them caused him to give a start and
immediately hide the paper behind his back. Tsukino Usagi, a blonde, odango-headed girl who often
frequented Crown Game Room, frowned up at him, curious and confused at the same time. "You don't
need to freak out on me," she told him as he, as casually as he could, leaned up against the
small counter that was behind him and tried not to panic. "I was just curious, that's all."
He smiled at Usagi-chan and for a moment, said nothing. She was sixteen and not very bright by
book standards, but there was something about her that shone. Motoki had once teased his best
friend - Usagi's long-time beau and, currently, future husband, Chiba Mamoru - about why she shone
so much, and he just said that she had a light inside her heart. Light inside her heart? He hadn't
the foggiest what that meant, but he hadn't really wanted to ask Mamoru what it meant either.
Usagi continued to stare, however, and his face reddened. "Oh, it's just some notes for
class," he lied as eloquently as he could, his hands groping around on the counter behind him for
the novel he'd brought along to read at downtime. No, that was hardcover... And that was too
thin... Ah ha! He stuffed the note into his book and moved to stand closer to her, hoping he didn't
look too terribly suspicious. "We have a test, so I was working on writing out the kana for the
equations in chemistry, that's all."
"Really?" questioned the blonde, frowning slightly, one finger to her cheek as she pondered
the validity of his answer. "Mamo-chan didn't mention a chemistry test coming up, and I would have
thought that he'd want to." Then, she shrugged cutely. "Well, anyway, I'm not staying," she
explained, grinning toothily. "I just came to pick up the manga I left here. It's a Ramna 1/2
volume. Seen it around?"
"I think I did," he admitted, turning back toward the counter behind him and scrutinizing
the countertop. There were a lot of books - text books, novels, notebooks, manga - lying across
it, most of which had been dropped by visitors to the arcade. He'd tried to organize their little
make-shift lost and found before, but never very well; it seemed that people delighted in messing
it up.
Finally, after a moment of scanning, and moving things around, he found it, sitting right
beside the novel he'd brought to read for the day. "Here we are, Usagi-chan," he smiled, handing
her the volume with a smile. "You stay out of trouble, okay?"
"Because I get into so much of it," she winked before scampering out of the sliding glass
doors and down the sidewalk, waving all the way.
He smiled slightly as she left, his sigh of relief echoing through the building. "Thank
Kami-sama she didn't see that note," Motoki muttered to himself, raking a hand through his messy
hair as he spoke. Turning his back to the rest of Crown Game Room, he moved to pick up his
fountain pen. "Because I KNOW she would have conned me into telling her all about it, and then it
would only be a matter of MINUTES before - "
"Furuhata!" The brash, annoying voice of his boss boomed through the air, and he flinched
as he heard it, one hand on his book while the other was holding his pen. Halfway across the room
stood the balding man, an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and his apron - required garb
of all Crown workers - splotched with orange and yellow stains. "The fruit for the cafe is in and
we're short a stock boy. Come back here and work!"
Motoki glanced at his book, and his boss. His book, and the man. His book...
He sighed and hung his head, defeated. "Coming, sir..."
===
They had met, as far as he could recall, on a Friday afternoon just after Rika had gone to
Africa for the very first time. Usagi, of course, had brought in her newest friend - seemed to him
that, her last year of junior high school, she was ALWAYS making new friends to show off - and
introduced them. Perhaps it had been the intoxicating loneliness that came with saying goodbye to
Rika, or just the resonating of his male hormones as they pumped through his veins, but either
way, he had been struck down, speechless.
"Aino Minako desu!" she'd chirped, offering him a hand to shake in the typical American
fashion. He'd stared into her bright blue eyes as Usagi rattled off needless information about
her latest groupie. Not that he had listened. It was only later, over further conversations and
the occasional parfait at the Fruit Parlor (always as a group, of course) that he learned the
little intricacies that made up Aino Minako. Seems she had been born in Tokyo, in a house only a
few blocks from his apartment, but had been shuffled off to England with her family after a rather
harsh string of layoffs at her father's company. There, she had grown up, speaking both languages
almost fluently, the only Japanese girl in an international private school. Then, just after her
second year of junior high had finished up, she'd been dragged back to Japan, and ended up meeting
Usagi. Neither of the blondes - since day one, he'd nicknamed them the "dangerous duo," if only
behind their backs - ever explained the full story of their meeting, though that was probably for
the best. Strange things tended to happen when one was friends with Tsukino Usagi. Of this, he was
certain.
All this he pondered as he addressed the envelope carefully at his dinner table, several
crumpled first-drafts lying on the floor around him. Addressing it "Minako" or "Mina" or even
"Mina-chan" had seemed too casual, and "Aino-san" seemed clunky, especially when he had been
calling her Minako-chan for the last two years. After a brief battle of poetic license, he decided
on "Ai no Megami" - after all, his letter had basically outlined her as that much - and finished
up with the address, carefully copying the numbers from the napkin he had scribbled them on. "Next
time," he muttered as he tried to distinguish a one from a seven, "I shell out the five bucks for
a district phone book."
After deciding that, yes, it was a seven - he didn't often cross his ones...he thought - he
finished up, smoothing his fingers over the name and address. "Done!" he announced to his empty
studio apartment, laying a smooch on the front of the envelope. "Now, all I have to do is sign my name
and be done with it!"
He pranced across the apartment and gathered his Stephen King novel in his hands, twirling
it gaily. Mamoru had teased when he'd shared the good news over the phone that evening. "I realize
that Rika and I haven't been broken up all that long," he'd sighed, stirring his dinner of instant
broccoli-alfredo pasta as he'd spoken, "but this woman... She's amazing, Mamoru! I can't deal with
this suspense any more. I'm going to do it."
"Who in the world is she?" the dark-haired man had pressed, voice urgent on the other end.
"You've only been talking about her constantly for a week and a half!"
"That's for me to know and you to find out," he had sniggered, and no amount of begging
otherwise could get him to divulge the secret.
He plopped down at the kitchen table with a big, goofy grin on his face as he began
flipping through the pages of his book. "Okay, my little masterpiece!" he cooed, nearly bouncing
in his seat as he spoke. "Come out, come out, wherever you are...."
He was, therefore, surprised when he got to the end of the book without anything to show
for it.
Now, Furuhata Motoki was, for the most part, a calm young man. He'd seen a lot of things
in his day, including youma and phages and whatever other monsters had wandered around the city of
Tokyo in Sailor Moon's glory days, and it really had never phased him much. In fact, more than
once, he'd joked to Mamoru that Usagi herself could come up to him and admit to being Sailor Moon,
and he would have shrugged it off. He even shrugged off the fact that, every time he DID make that
joke, Mamoru choked on his coffee.
This, however, was different. Worse than a youma. Worse than a phage. Worse than even
coming home with your shirt brown because your best friend had just spewed coffee all over you.
THIS was a matter of life and death! Or at least love and death. THIS... THIS...
"Where in the world is it?" Motoki hollered into the emptiness of his apartment as he
stood back up and rushed around, checking under the tables and chairs, in his room and even in the
bathroom, looking. He had come in from work, sweaty and tired, and set the book on the coffee
table before taking a shower. And there it had been until now. He'd been sure not to drop it -
people on the street had stared at him as he walked, always glancing behind him to make sure he
hadn't somehow lost the sheet of paper - and it's not like it could have walked off on its own.
Sinking into the couch, he stared blankly at the ceiling, his arms hanging, defeated, at
his sides. "What could have happened to it?" he groaned, trying to retrace his steps at the arcade
that afternoon. "What in the world could have happened to that letter? I stuck it in my book, and
that was that!" Then, he felt an overwhelming wave of nausea hit him as he remembered exactly
what had happened only a few hours before.
"Unless....."
===
Usagi laughed as she flipped the page in her manga, waiting patiently for the next plot
contrivance to pop up. Mamo-chan always teased her for reading Ramna 1/2 - he called it "a lesson
in deus ex machina," whatever THAT was supposed to mean - and tried to get her to read more
intelligent books, like "All's Quiet on the Western Front." She resisted firmly, though, proudly
stomping around with her manga in hand, grinning all the way. As she had two days earlier, when
she'd left her newest volume atop the Sailor V machine after a rather long day at the arcade.
"I don't see why Mamo-chan always complains about this manga," she giggled, rolling over
onto her back and staring up at a picture of boy-type Ramna getting thoroughly doused in cold
water. "It's not as - nani?"
The little slip of white paper, folded only in half, landed on her stomach, and she
frowned at it. She hadn't remembered tucking anything into her book, especially not nice paper
like what had just landed in her lap. She sat slowly up and opened it, almost immediately
recognizing the handwriting. "Motoki-kun's chemistry notes!" she gasped, reaching for the phone
as she skimmed what he'd written on the sheet. "I'd better call him and...tell...him...I..."
Her voice faded away her mind registered what the paper really did say. She swallowed
hard, recalling the medical student's surprise at her sudden appearance, and his super-suspicious
behavior.
Forgetting about the phone, and even about the manga, she raised her hand to her mouth
and tried to focus on breathing.
"Oh my..."
===
Motoki glanced warily at the throw pillow that was sitting beside him on the couch. For a
moment, he contemplated how painful death by smothering would be. After all, if some people did
it to their elderly relatives and such, could it be all THAT bad?
Then, he just whimpered slightly and buried his face in his hands. "I don't believe it,"
he moaned, his voice booming in his ears. "I just gave my love letter to USAGI!"
===
Fin "Link the First."