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“Dear?”
“Yes?”
“Where did you learn that hairstyle?”
Tsukino Kenji pauses, looking down at his young daughter. Usagi looks back up at him, her wide blue eyes blinking.
“I don’t know,” he says.
Two tight yet comfortable buns wrap their daughter’s naturally fast growing hair up, the excess spilling out in small pigtails. They make her look even more like the rabbit she was named for.
“I’m surprised she even sat for it,” Ikuko says tiredly, sighing. “We must be spoiling the girl, she’s so fussy.”
“I don’t think so,” Kenji replies, smiling. “Maybe she should be spoiled a little.”
Usagi giggles, hugging his arm.
“Papa!”
Her voice is like music. It always has been.
(But when? And why do memories flash as though she’s ever had silver hair, or run around in floor length white dresses without endless trips and stains.)
“Can play?” Usagi asks. Kenji nods. It only took him a few tries to get it right without—
(The buns built into the head, wrapped the once with gentle care as he prepares his only daughter to meet the solar system and its people.)
Without it falling down. Ikuko sighs.
“I hope she doesn’t keep asking for it now,” she says.
“It can stay in a few days without falling,” Kenji says. “…probably.”
“You still didn’t answer where you found it, you know,” Ikuko points out.
“You’ll laugh.”
“Remember the woman who came to my dreams, right before we found out I was pregnant?”
Ikuko pauses.
“…No,” she says.
“Yeah.” Kenji says. “That’s what she looked like.”
Kenji sighs. He doesn’t want to admit the rest. That it’s more than that, and the dreams we’re talking to a stranger. That he…
“Oh!”
Kenji was not a lucid dreamer, before, but somehow he instantly knows this is not real, each and every time. Maybe it has something to do with the body, he supposes, a slim and feminine figure, silver bangs out the corner of his eyes.
The girl looks just like Usagi, except that her hair is much closer to silver. She fell on the floor, and she looks up at him with tears in her bright blue eyes.
“Mama,” she says, and Kenji smiles, softly. He picks up his little girl, sighing.
“Serenity,” he says, his voice smooth and soft and lilting. “What did I say about running?”
“But I wanted to be with Mama,” the girl says, eyes still full of tears. Kenji sighs. Running a finger through the girl’s loose and wavy hair.
He—
(Unfamiliar emotions fill him, and he remembers a woman who looks vaguely like Ikuko, save for the dark expression on her face.)
…He’s glad her hair straightens, when it’s all tied up around her buns.
“I know,” Kenji says. “You’re a very sweet girl, my Serenity.”
The girl smiles, slowly, wrapping her arms around Kenji’s slender shoulders.
(This is probably the part he hates the most. His body and the one here are so very different, and he put a lot of work into that fact. But it’s just as easy to lift up this tiny not-Usagi, and he thinks her mom loves her just as much as he loves his daughter.)
“Mama’s always working,” Serenity says. “I can sit and watch if Mama wants.”
Kenji considers.
“…alright,” he says. “And please tell me your Senshi know where you are, Serenity.”
Serenity nods.
“They got studies,” she says. “So I went to find Mama.”
Kenji makes it to doors he by now knows. His office. He goes inside, setting Serenity down on a chair, and grabbing a brush. He’s always so busy, but he might as well get her hair back up, while they’re alone for a moment…
But surely, it’s just strange dreams. His Usagi is a normal girl. Who will live a happy life.
That’s all he’s ever wanted for her, after all.