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Description
All the light and sound and color in the world had begun to fade out of Alice's purview again as she fell, surrounded by the empty cold of space, and the fading smoke of the demon that had worn her mutilated face. Her shoulder throbbed with pain and yet, there was no blood, no tear in her uniform where the monster had bitten her. She told herself the wound was all in her thoughts, that the creature itself had only been an illusion and shut her eye against the dizzying sight of the city rushing up from below to meet her. It was comforting, in a way, to think that the thing she had seen was not real. Perhaps it had been a test of character, or some sort of trick to be sure that Alice could be trusted as a Ranger-- that she would not so easily give up her humanity and Fall as had her doppelganger.

When she looked again, the city was palpably closer, and in the periphery of her vision she spotted another figure falling beside her, strangely, almost painfully familiar.

This, too, was a doppelganger, and she realized that, as soon as those oddly familiar words escaped this dour other self's lips: "To never be forgotten."

Alice had spent a lifetime alone already, rarely meeting friends and abandoning her family, as she had already been abandoned. She had met and parted with so many of the Starlight Rangers that sometimes, she could not put names to all the faces. Even so, even with the memory fresh and painful in her mind of sending Elizabeth back to Earth, of locking the door so she would not come back for Alice and get trapped on Mars as well, Alice had never felt as lonely as the voice that spoke to her.

So she pulled her doppelganger closer, and pressed her lips to those dour lips in a panic. You are not alone, she tried to say, with no words at all. We are not alone.

I am not alone, after all.

One or the other of them was shaking when they broke apart, and her eye stung, even though she laughed to see her serious-faced counterpart looking so startled. Maybe all this really was just an illusion, and-- as she had feared before-- Alice was simply sitting in the glass of her farm's cool dome, dying. Maybe this brilliant city, neon-bright and sharp as a knife, was the instant of death, and she was almost upon it. Maybe the last neurons were finally firing, and she would be dead.

"I'm sorry," she said, and tried to keep a smile on her face. She thought that she would rather die smiling. "Could you forgive me for taking so long to do that? I'm so sorry."

The fantastic lights of the eerily silent city below them gleamed and glittered off of the golden armor her doppelganger wore, seeming almost to form winglike patterns. Alice wondered if she was an angel of Mercy, as she disentangled herself from their embrace and laid one gauntleted hand upon Alice's jaw, her cold thumb tracing the line of the jagged scar where once an eye had been.

In a voice almost too soft to hear, she said, "I forgive you" and suddenly exploded into a thousand golden dragonflies, which immediately scattered and fluttered away.

Below them, Alice screamed, trying to reach back up into the sky and claw her way out of the nightmare of death that was almost upon her. One dragonfly clung to her outstretched fingertip, and then she felt her weight shifting, her shoulder sliding down and to the right. The city seemed to snap up at her like crooked jaws clamping shut, a spear-like skyscraper looming up to impale her.

She was skewered upon it-- just for an excruciating instant-- and the city and the world and the sky itself shattered apart, breaking into great big chunks of crystal and splintering again and again until the only thing that penetrated the darkness was a faint glimmer of fairy dust, like stars off in the distance. Where before she had been falling so fast she could feel the wind going up her nose, now Alice felt almost as if she had been frozen, sinking sluggishly through the empty void on her inertia.

When even the fairy dust had disappeared and only darkness remained, it began to ooze over her like the waves of a sable ocean, swallowing her up. She inhaled a lungful of cold blackness, another, and then dizziness and exhaustion finally took their toll, and Alice sank into oblivious unconsciousness.

In that place of rest, she might have slept for centuries and never known it. She lay there unmolested by dreams or demons, and when she woke the darkness was slow to part, lingering almost reluctantly about her, rippling. She pushed herself up and staggered to her feet, conscious of the peculiar lack of sound around her as the sky began to brighten, turning the vivid orange of midday on Mars.

With light to guide her, it became suddenly obvious where she stood and Alice stumbled.

All around her, all the way to a cliff's edge, there stood tombstones and statues and tiny monuments, neatly lined up in rows. They were misshapen and strange, some far too big and others far too small, but there was no mistaking them for anything else. She shook her head to clear it, until the incongruous orange of a Martian afternoon faded into a friendlier sky blue, and staggered forward, catching her balance on the tombstones as she passed them by. The mountains off in the distance weren't quite right, and the trees were weeping willows, not the oaks she remembered, but she knew this cemetery too well to be fooled by its little inconsistencies.

At the cliff's edge, she found what she'd been looking for, and fell to her knees. Her grandmother's tomb stood largest of them all, bigger than the tree behind it and looming, made of solid gray stone, but the name, so delicately carved there, had worn off of the surface. All that remained were the years of her life, and even these were nearly impossible to make out.

Alice reached out to touch the tombstone, and rested her forehead against its surface, fighting the urge to sit there and cry.

"I still remember you." She bit her cheek until her eye stopped stinging, and took a shaky breath to steady herself before she stood again, running her hands over the smooth gray surface of the mockery this dreamscape had made of her grandmother's tombstone. "I wouldn't be so petty as that, I still remember you."

She would have said more, but found herself unceremoniously shoved aside by Sunny, who stalked up to the giant tombstone and, without so much as a side glance at Alice, grabbed its edges, pushing it forward as though it were some gigantic door. Indignant, embarrassed, and excited to see a familiar face that wasn't some weird parody of her own, Alice sorted herself out and stepped away from the statue she'd fallen into.

"Sunny?"

Not responding, Sunny kept pushing until a strange purple gleam spiked around the edges of the tombstone and it began to open. Instead of the view of the distant mountains Alice had expected, it mysteriously seemed to open into the belly of an abandoned train-station. The lighting on the other side was poor, but the acrid breath of cleaning fluid and the hot, rusty stink of an old water heater were unmistakable. The gray stone slid easily aside and when Sunny was done a portal stood open in its place, glimmering with purple energy at its edges.

"What are you doing?"

Still, Sunny didn't respond, dashing through the portal confidently, her flaming mace in hand. Alice followed unthinkingly, stepping into the dank room and suppressing a shudder of remembered fear. This seemed strikingly similar to the room where once she'd been held captive. It was just as dank and cold and its emergency exit was chained shut. The only good thing about it, she supposed, was the strangely pleasant reminder of her grandmother's grave-- the portal remained open behind them. Alice decided it wasn't all that strange to be grateful for it. Her grandmother's death had brought her grief, true, but it had been an end to her grandmother's suffering, too. This room, however, held only bad memories, discounting the one that had led Sunny to discover her inside of it, and rescue her.

Suddenly nervous, Alice tried to follow Sunny over to check the chains on the emergency exit door. She took a step into a puddle of blood and bile and flinched back, wincing.

"Sunny--"

Sunny turned around, at last, and Alice ducked her head, staring at the floor in remembered horror. Gory chunks of flesh and skeletal remains were scattered everywhere, and Alice felt completely immobilized by it, as if she were still bound and waiting for her executioner in the corner. She had nearly died in this room, once. She had been kept here for weeks by the Fallen Stars who'd found her.

"Let's- let's get out of here, okay?"

As if completely unfazed by the gore, Sunny put her hands on her hips and stared at Alice, squinting to make her out in the dark. "Well, hey there. You don't look too good."

"Let's just, let's just walk out of here and leave, and--"

Sunny stepped closer, and knelt beside her. Alice couldn't remember when she'd sat down. Her hands were bound behind her back and her head was pounding. "Hey, can you hear me?" Compassionately, Sunny reached out to push Alice's hair out of her face--

No, when first this had happened, Alice had been in her overalls and t-shirt, and they'd taken her hat. Here and now, Sunny gently took off Alice's helmet, and Alice let her. "Sunny, what's happening? Where are we? Have you seen Christine, or- or Hans?"

Laying her hand on Alice's forehead, Sunny hummed softly. "No fever...Who are you, anyway?"

Alice jerked back as if she'd been struck. She opened her mouth, and for a moment could make no sound. When she did, her voice broke. "Sunny?"

That familiar face stared down at her, kind and worried and brimming with the power of the sun. It was all as she remembered, as if she were fifteen years younger. Sunny's burning copper eyes held absolutely no recognition.

"It's-- it's me, it's Alice," she breathed, trying not to let her voice tremble. There was no flicker, at her name, no spark of remembrance. "Remember? We- I-- You saved me. Here, now, in this place, and- and- and you took me home."

Nothing.

"I stole your pants because you made me wash my clothes, after. You never asked but I hadn't washed them in probably a month. You let me eat everything in your kitchen, and I helped you fix up cars at your shop." She took a shaky breath, trying to keep her voice from rising in panic. Again, she searched Sunny's face for some sign. Maybe magic was suppressing her memories, or maybe it was all a cruel joke.

But there was nothing, as if Alice had never existed.

"Sunny, please." Alice gave her chains a rattle, trying weakly to free herself. All her energy seemed to be draining right out of her, in the face of that blank look on Sunny's face. So many times she'd been forced to introduce herself to old friends as if they were complete strangers over and over again. But never so, with Sunny. Alice had gone to great lengths to cover her eyes in Sunny's presence, to preserve those fragile memories-- she'd considered it a mark of the life-debt she owed the other woman, and treasured their friendship even after she'd moved to Mars and left Sunny behind on Earth. To be stripped of that-- "Please, tell me you remember me. Please."

Shaking her head, Sunny clapped one hand to Alice's shoulder, reaching over with the other to drive a little metal rod into the lock of Alice's chains. She chewed on her lower lip, turning the ring with her tongue and laughing in a soft little huff, picking the lock, eyes squinted in concentration. All the while, she answered in a calm, conversational tone. "Alice, it's your memory. Of course I remember you in the future. We've fought together probably dozens of times. But answer me this: How can I remember you if we haven't met yet?"

The words served as a bizarre catalyst: from above, where it had been hiding on the ceiling, a twisted, mutilated Fallen Star fell to the ground, crouching and ready for battle. Alice knew this creature well, had spent many nights still haunted by the carnage it had forced her to watch, had found a great deal of peace and relief in seeing its death, so many years ago; simultaneously, the lock sprang open and Sunny swung about, blocking Alice from the creature's lashing tail; and finally, Alice found that she had a stupidly cocky smile on her face and couldn't shake it. She joined Sunny, standing up and rolling her injured shoulder until she realized the phantom wound's pain was completely gone. She could feel her smile turning into a vicious grin, and curled her fingers, calling the Staff of Stars back from the ether to her palm. She had felt curiously vulnerable without it.

Taking stock of herself, of this bizarre, memory landscape and of Sunny and the monster, Alice decided she didn't want to see this memory play out differently than it had before. This was a good memory, one she had always treasured, even if it came at the end of many, many bad ones. She might not be feeling up to a full battle, with her leg still aching from the wound Christine had so kindly bandaged, but neither had she been in perfect condition when Sunny had first arrived.

She said wryly, "You mind if I pitch in during the fight?"

Sunny only laughed. "Be my guest!"

Description
All the light and sound and color in the world had begun to fade out of Alice's purview again as she fell, surrounded by the empty cold of space, and the fading smoke of the demon that had worn her mutilated face. Her shoulder throbbed with pain and yet, there was no blood, no tear in her uniform where the monster had bitten her. She told herself the wound was all in her thoughts, that the creature itself had only been an illusion and shut her eye against the dizzying sight of the city rushing up from below to meet her. It was comforting, in a way, to think that the thing she had seen was not real. Perhaps it had been a test of character, or some sort of trick to be sure that Alice could be trusted as a Ranger-- that she would not so easily give up her humanity and Fall as had her doppelganger.

When she looked again, the city was palpably closer, and in the periphery of her vision she spotted another figure falling beside her, strangely, almost painfully familiar.

This, too, was a doppelganger, and she realized that, as soon as those oddly familiar words escaped this dour other self's lips: "To never be forgotten."

Alice had spent a lifetime alone already, rarely meeting friends and abandoning her family, as she had already been abandoned. She had met and parted with so many of the Starlight Rangers that sometimes, she could not put names to all the faces. Even so, even with the memory fresh and painful in her mind of sending Elizabeth back to Earth, of locking the door so she would not come back for Alice and get trapped on Mars as well, Alice had never felt as lonely as the voice that spoke to her.

So she pulled her doppelganger closer, and pressed her lips to those dour lips in a panic. You are not alone, she tried to say, with no words at all. We are not alone.

I am not alone, after all.

One or the other of them was shaking when they broke apart, and her eye stung, even though she laughed to see her serious-faced counterpart looking so startled. Maybe all this really was just an illusion, and-- as she had feared before-- Alice was simply sitting in the glass of her farm's cool dome, dying. Maybe this brilliant city, neon-bright and sharp as a knife, was the instant of death, and she was almost upon it. Maybe the last neurons were finally firing, and she would be dead.

"I'm sorry," she said, and tried to keep a smile on her face. She thought that she would rather die smiling. "Could you forgive me for taking so long to do that? I'm so sorry."

The fantastic lights of the eerily silent city below them gleamed and glittered off of the golden armor her doppelganger wore, seeming almost to form winglike patterns. Alice wondered if she was an angel of Mercy, as she disentangled herself from their embrace and laid one gauntleted hand upon Alice's jaw, her cold thumb tracing the line of the jagged scar where once an eye had been.

In a voice almost too soft to hear, she said, "I forgive you" and suddenly exploded into a thousand golden dragonflies, which immediately scattered and fluttered away.

Below them, Alice screamed, trying to reach back up into the sky and claw her way out of the nightmare of death that was almost upon her. One dragonfly clung to her outstretched fingertip, and then she felt her weight shifting, her shoulder sliding down and to the right. The city seemed to snap up at her like crooked jaws clamping shut, a spear-like skyscraper looming up to impale her.

She was skewered upon it-- just for an excruciating instant-- and the city and the world and the sky itself shattered apart, breaking into great big chunks of crystal and splintering again and again until the only thing that penetrated the darkness was a faint glimmer of fairy dust, like stars off in the distance. Where before she had been falling so fast she could feel the wind going up her nose, now Alice felt almost as if she had been frozen, sinking sluggishly through the empty void on her inertia.

When even the fairy dust had disappeared and only darkness remained, it began to ooze over her like the waves of a sable ocean, swallowing her up. She inhaled a lungful of cold blackness, another, and then dizziness and exhaustion finally took their toll, and Alice sank into oblivious unconsciousness.

In that place of rest, she might have slept for centuries and never known it. She lay there unmolested by dreams or demons, and when she woke the darkness was slow to part, lingering almost reluctantly about her, rippling. She pushed herself up and staggered to her feet, conscious of the peculiar lack of sound around her as the sky began to brighten, turning the vivid orange of midday on Mars.

With light to guide her, it became suddenly obvious where she stood and Alice stumbled.

All around her, all the way to a cliff's edge, there stood tombstones and statues and tiny monuments, neatly lined up in rows. They were misshapen and strange, some far too big and others far too small, but there was no mistaking them for anything else. She shook her head to clear it, until the incongruous orange of a Martian afternoon faded into a friendlier sky blue, and staggered forward, catching her balance on the tombstones as she passed them by. The mountains off in the distance weren't quite right, and the trees were weeping willows, not the oaks she remembered, but she knew this cemetery too well to be fooled by its little inconsistencies.

At the cliff's edge, she found what she'd been looking for, and fell to her knees. Her grandmother's tomb stood largest of them all, bigger than the tree behind it and looming, made of solid gray stone, but the name, so delicately carved there, had worn off of the surface. All that remained were the years of her life, and even these were nearly impossible to make out.

Alice reached out to touch the tombstone, and rested her forehead against its surface, fighting the urge to sit there and cry.

"I still remember you." She bit her cheek until her eye stopped stinging, and took a shaky breath to steady herself before she stood again, running her hands over the smooth gray surface of the mockery this dreamscape had made of her grandmother's tombstone. "I wouldn't be so petty as that, I still remember you."

She would have said more, but found herself unceremoniously shoved aside by Sunny, who stalked up to the giant tombstone and, without so much as a side glance at Alice, grabbed its edges, pushing it forward as though it were some gigantic door. Indignant, embarrassed, and excited to see a familiar face that wasn't some weird parody of her own, Alice sorted herself out and stepped away from the statue she'd fallen into.

"Sunny?"

Not responding, Sunny kept pushing until a strange purple gleam spiked around the edges of the tombstone and it began to open. Instead of the view of the distant mountains Alice had expected, it mysteriously seemed to open into the belly of an abandoned train-station. The lighting on the other side was poor, but the acrid breath of cleaning fluid and the hot, rusty stink of an old water heater were unmistakable. The gray stone slid easily aside and when Sunny was done a portal stood open in its place, glimmering with purple energy at its edges.

"What are you doing?"

Still, Sunny didn't respond, dashing through the portal confidently, her flaming mace in hand. Alice followed unthinkingly, stepping into the dank room and suppressing a shudder of remembered fear. This seemed strikingly similar to the room where once she'd been held captive. It was just as dank and cold and its emergency exit was chained shut. The only good thing about it, she supposed, was the strangely pleasant reminder of her grandmother's grave-- the portal remained open behind them. Alice decided it wasn't all that strange to be grateful for it. Her grandmother's death had brought her grief, true, but it had been an end to her grandmother's suffering, too. This room, however, held only bad memories, discounting the one that had led Sunny to discover her inside of it, and rescue her.

Suddenly nervous, Alice tried to follow Sunny over to check the chains on the emergency exit door. She took a step into a puddle of blood and bile and flinched back, wincing.

"Sunny--"

Sunny turned around, at last, and Alice ducked her head, staring at the floor in remembered horror. Gory chunks of flesh and skeletal remains were scattered everywhere, and Alice felt completely immobilized by it, as if she were still bound and waiting for her executioner in the corner. She had nearly died in this room, once. She had been kept here for weeks by the Fallen Stars who'd found her.

"Let's- let's get out of here, okay?"

As if completely unfazed by the gore, Sunny put her hands on her hips and stared at Alice, squinting to make her out in the dark. "Well, hey there. You don't look too good."

"Let's just, let's just walk out of here and leave, and--"

Sunny stepped closer, and knelt beside her. Alice couldn't remember when she'd sat down. Her hands were bound behind her back and her head was pounding. "Hey, can you hear me?" Compassionately, Sunny reached out to push Alice's hair out of her face--

No, when first this had happened, Alice had been in her overalls and t-shirt, and they'd taken her hat. Here and now, Sunny gently took off Alice's helmet, and Alice let her. "Sunny, what's happening? Where are we? Have you seen Christine, or- or Hans?"

Laying her hand on Alice's forehead, Sunny hummed softly. "No fever...Who are you, anyway?"

Alice jerked back as if she'd been struck. She opened her mouth, and for a moment could make no sound. When she did, her voice broke. "Sunny?"

That familiar face stared down at her, kind and worried and brimming with the power of the sun. It was all as she remembered, as if she were fifteen years younger. Sunny's burning copper eyes held absolutely no recognition.

"It's-- it's me, it's Alice," she breathed, trying not to let her voice tremble. There was no flicker, at her name, no spark of remembrance. "Remember? We- I-- You saved me. Here, now, in this place, and- and- and you took me home."

Nothing.

"I stole your pants because you made me wash my clothes, after. You never asked but I hadn't washed them in probably a month. You let me eat everything in your kitchen, and I helped you fix up cars at your shop." She took a shaky breath, trying to keep her voice from rising in panic. Again, she searched Sunny's face for some sign. Maybe magic was suppressing her memories, or maybe it was all a cruel joke.

But there was nothing, as if Alice had never existed.

"Sunny, please." Alice gave her chains a rattle, trying weakly to free herself. All her energy seemed to be draining right out of her, in the face of that blank look on Sunny's face. So many times she'd been forced to introduce herself to old friends as if they were complete strangers over and over again. But never so, with Sunny. Alice had gone to great lengths to cover her eyes in Sunny's presence, to preserve those fragile memories-- she'd considered it a mark of the life-debt she owed the other woman, and treasured their friendship even after she'd moved to Mars and left Sunny behind on Earth. To be stripped of that-- "Please, tell me you remember me. Please."

Shaking her head, Sunny clapped one hand to Alice's shoulder, reaching over with the other to drive a little metal rod into the lock of Alice's chains. She chewed on her lower lip, turning the ring with her tongue and laughing in a soft little huff, picking the lock, eyes squinted in concentration. All the while, she answered in a calm, conversational tone. "Alice, it's your memory. Of course I remember you in the future. We've fought together probably dozens of times. But answer me this: How can I remember you if we haven't met yet?"

The words served as a bizarre catalyst: from above, where it had been hiding on the ceiling, a twisted, mutilated Fallen Star fell to the ground, crouching and ready for battle. Alice knew this creature well, had spent many nights still haunted by the carnage it had forced her to watch, had found a great deal of peace and relief in seeing its death, so many years ago; simultaneously, the lock sprang open and Sunny swung about, blocking Alice from the creature's lashing tail; and finally, Alice found that she had a stupidly cocky smile on her face and couldn't shake it. She joined Sunny, standing up and rolling her injured shoulder until she realized the phantom wound's pain was completely gone. She could feel her smile turning into a vicious grin, and curled her fingers, calling the Staff of Stars back from the ether to her palm. She had felt curiously vulnerable without it.

Taking stock of herself, of this bizarre, memory landscape and of Sunny and the monster, Alice decided she didn't want to see this memory play out differently than it had before. This was a good memory, one she had always treasured, even if it came at the end of many, many bad ones. She might not be feeling up to a full battle, with her leg still aching from the wound Christine had so kindly bandaged, but neither had she been in perfect condition when Sunny had first arrived.

She said wryly, "You mind if I pitch in during the fight?"

Sunny only laughed. "Be my guest!"