Chapter Six: An Old Enemy

"What is it, Bill?" Ami cradled me against her breast as I quaked in terror. I'd had that nightmare again - the one I hadn't had since a year into my therapy, over a year earlier. It was the only nightmare I ever had - the one where my ex-wife took on the appearance of a demonic spider and stalked me like a cat stalking a mouse while I was transfixed with horror.

As my paralysis broke, I sobbed against Ami, clutching her like a life preserver.

"It was her, wasn't it?" I looked up and broke into fresh tears at the expression of worry and understanding in her eyes. What had I done to deserve this angel in my life? "Bill, you're free of her. She can't hurt you any more."

Ami's communicator beeped, and she used a word I'd never expected to hear coming from her lips. I gently pushed her away and nodded, while mopping my face on the edge of the sheet.

"Ami?" Rei's voice came from the communicator. "Watch out, ok? I was just awakened by a very bad feeling - and it's centered around you or Bill."

"How bad?" Ami bit her lip as she looked back at me. I did my best to smile, but I know how weak that is after this nightmare.

"Remember the bad feeling I had the day Fiore came? Worse than that." Ami's expression fell, then she turned as focussed and businesslike as if she'd just transformed.

"Bill and I are coming over right now. We'll meet you by the fire in about twenty minutes."

"Do you want anyone else there?" Ami glanced at me at the question and I bit my lip as I thought, then drew a crescent in the air.

"Only Usagi, if you can wake her. No sense in ruining anyone else's sleep. How's Naru doing?" I wondered why she'd asked that, then realized she might be hoping my nightmare wasn't unique - that it was a general attack she could do something about, rather than something specific to me.

"She didn't even stir when I checked on her. She's just fine. I've got to prepare before you arrive. Be careful. Something feels wrong."

"We will be." She closed her communicator and turned to me. "Do you feel up to it?"

I nodded and crawled out of bed, took a deep breath to still my trembling, and moved to gather my clothes. With Rei's warning, I decided to dress in the new outfit Setsuna had helped me make from the MacManusite thread I'd created in that first batch a month before. Everything, from my shoes to my fedora, was made of woven, knit, or molded MacManusite. I'd even replaced my trenchcoat with a copy made of MacManusite fabric. Ami had slipped into a skirt and turtleneck and was sliding into her coat when I joined her at the door.

We took a cab to the shrine, so our arrival was within five minutes of Ami's estimate. Rei was waiting at the entrance, and led us to the Sacred Flame.

"What can you tell me about what happened?" she asked, looking directly at me.

"I had a nightmare." Ami shook her head, looking up at me, and I sighed. "OK, I had THE nightmare. The same one I've had three other times in my life. I thought I'd defeated it the last time it happened, but...it happened again."

"Tell me about it."

"It's always the same. I'm in an endless dark place, trying to escape from my ex-wife. She isn't human: she's an enormous black widow spider, and she's playing with me like a cat plays with a mouse. I always wake just as she's moving in for the kill...but I can still feel her presence, even after I wake."

"And when have you had these dreams?"

"The first time was...about a year before I met her. The second time was about two years after I married her, just before I started to realize how evil she is. The third time - the time I defeated her - was about a year after I'd left her, just before my divorce went through. This time...it was her again."

"How did you defeat her before?"

"I got mad. The same way I did the day I met all of you. I got so mad that I was willing to die, if that was what it took to destroy her. So I fought back, and she died - at least, I thought she did."

"Interesting. How did you fight her?" Rei's eyes lit up the way Ami's did at a new computer program. I realized the night was going to be even longer than I'd anticipated.

"With my bare hands. She transformed...into a humanoid shape...and I snapped her neck." As I described it, my hands went through the motions. Ami paled, but Rei nodded.

"That's a pretty advanced maneuver. How did you know it?"

"I..." I realized I didn't know how I'd known to do that. "I don't know. It just seemed like the right thing to do."

"Well, let's see what we can learn. Something still feels wrong, and...do you feel anything different since you woke?"

"My left shoulder's a little stiff. Not as bad as it used to be, but enough to notice."

"Your left shoulder?" Rei's eyes narrowed and she snapped out an ofuda with a growl. Suddenly, I felt a stab of pain, like a burning spear, through my shoulder. The gasp I emitted brought a look of worry to Ami's eyes, and she reached for me - only to be knocked away by Rei as she chanted rapidly and slapped the ofuda down in the exact spot the pain was focussed on.

The sensation was a lot like being plugged into a high voltage line. My entire body stiffened - I tasted ashes on my tongue - my breathing stopped - I collapsed into Ami's arms as I felt something tear free and flee into the darkness.

**What...?**

**You already know the answer.**

**But I thought I'd destroyed her power.**

**You only weakened it. She's regained her strength, with the help of a new victim.**

**The mouse?**

**He's a bit more than that - but he worships her, giving her power.**

"That's...not good." I groaned.

"What isn't?" Ami brushed my hair back with a worried look in her eyes.

"My ex...she has a worshipper. Someone feeding her power...so she's more powerful than she was when I was married to her."

"Do you know her worshipper?"

"Yes. He worshipped her when we were married, and managed to convince himself that my fears of her were proof that I was deluded. Or worse." I grimaced at the memories. She'd toyed with him, in my presence, and used my concern for him as one of her weapons against me. I'd never understood why she was the way she was....

"Is she human, I wonder?" Rei was thinking out loud. "That kind of attack...and the haunting that followed it...You say you've felt that sensation in your shoulder before?"

"It was constant, from not long after I met her, until I died. The pain never went away...and it was always focussed in the exact spot you put your ofuda on."

"This should be interesting," Rei said with a cold smile. "She knows you're alive again."

"Who's she?" Usagi asked, wiping her eyes tiredly as she stumbled into the shrine.

"My ex-wife." I grimaced again at the look of shock on Usagi's face.

"Your...did you know this, Ami?"

"Yes, I knew it. He's never tried to hide it, but until tonight I'd always thought his descriptions of her were colored by his memories. Now...." She transformed and activated her visor, studying me through it intently. "I see torn threads of energy around you. It's a lot like the energy of the oni, but without the guiding purpose they have."

"That doesn't surprise me," I grumbled softly. "The only guiding purposes she has are selfishness and petty vindictiveness. I just...didn't think she had any real power."

"She may not," Rei said. "She may just be a conduit for another power. Some people are like that - their nature opens a path for energies that wouldn't otherwise have an expression."

"Kind of like silver doesn't have any real power on its own, but it makes a great electrical conductor?"

"Exactly. Unfortunately, the only way to know for certain which this is...." She trailed off and looked into the fire.

"Bill, you and I are going to talk," Usagi said firmly, dragging me away from Rei's meditation. Ami looked sympathetically at me, but didn't move to interfere. "All right, what's this about an ex-wife?"

"I was married before, Usagi. Twice, in fact. The first one, I divorced because she was violent and...well, what would you do if you were married to someone who threatened the Sprout by doing stupid things, like walking into traffic with the assumption that a car driving toward them at 100 klicks was going to stop just because they had a child with them?"

"I'd kill them!" Usagi gasped in shock. "I mean...uh...seriously? How could anyone be that stupid?"

"I don't know, but she did that, and other things just like it, with both of her children. Her only redeeming feature was that she looked - a little - like Ami. And, I was nineteen when I married her, and she was so oversexed she made Alex look like a prude...And let's face it, when I was that age, I was an asshole. As much as I dreamed of romance, sex was as close to it as I was ever going to get." I closed my eyes and grimaced as I felt a lump of self-loathing building in my gut. "I suppose, in some ways, I'm still an asshole. I don't know how Ami can tolerate me...."

The feeling of Usagi's hand across my cheek, and the echo of the slap through the shrine, shocked me out of myself; I looked at her in surprise as I reached up to touch the burning spot where her hand had landed.

"You may be an asshole, but you're our asshole." OK, I knew I'd made her mad - the idea of Usagi using that kind of language was as much a shock as the slap - but I deserved it. "And anyway, I don't think you are. You've made Ami happy, you're a part of our family now, and I will not allow one of my family to do to himself what you're doing. You're lucky it's me here, not Haruka. She'd kick your butt around the shrine and back again if she heard you talking like that. And you know she would, too."

I had to laugh, just a little. Usagi was right. Haruka would never tolerate my self-pity. It's amazing now, how I could lie to myself so easily and describe what I was feeling as self-pity....

"That's better. It's not good, but it's better. Ask yourself...how many boys that age aren't assholes? Can you name just one?"

"Mamoru." That was an easy question to answer. I was totally unprepared for Usagi's laughter.

"You don't know the half of it...I love him, with all my heart...but some of the things we went through while we were finding each other...if he weren't my Prince, I'm not sure we'd have ever made it through. Of course, I was pretty hard on him, too." She touched my hand, where it touched my cheek. "What I'm trying to say, Bill, is that you're human. Part of being human is doing things you're not proud of. The important part is how you deal with it. Do you wallow in guilt and self-loathing, or do you use it to make yourself better?"

Damn, I hate it when she does the Princess thing. Especially when she's right. Of course, when she does the Princess thing, I haven't yet seen her be wrong. It's even worse when she echoes what my therapist spent nearly a year and a half trying to get me to understand.

"There's more to it than that," Ami said as she approached with her visor in place. "While you were talking, I saw some of the energy threads re-attach themselves. You have an enemy who is trying to destroy you. Or make you destroy yourself.

"And with what He told me...."

"It's very likely it's her."

"Her? But how could someone that stupid be a threat?" Usagi looked - and sounded - confused. I suppose I can't blame her. My life isn't the most straightforward of things to follow.

"We're talking about his second wife, Usagi. The one who programmed him to hate himself." I looked up at Ami in shock. That's almost exactly the way my therapist had described it. He'd said I had to learn to replace her programming with my own, or I'd always have trouble because of her.

"His...second wife?" Usagi asked, not quite as confused. "That's right...you did say you'd been married twice. What was your second wife like?"

"Imagine someone who gets pleasure out of dominating and inflicting pain on those around her...and the closer they are, the more pleasure she gets out of it. Imagine someone who believes that those around her exist only to serve her, and their right to existence is dependent entirely on how they please her." I took a deep breath and plunged ahead. Talking about her was harder than I'd thought. "Imagine someone who can appear beautiful and seductive, and once you've been snared can use your love for her to turn you into the thing you hate the most. Imagine someone who can use even a term of endearment as a reminder that you are vermin and exist only because she has some use for you. That's my second wife."

"That sounds like Beryl," Usagi said sadly, laying a hand gently on my shoulder. "If I didn't know I'd destroyed her, I'd be worried."

"This isn't youma energy, though." Ami peered at me closely, focussing on my left shoulder, which was starting to act up again. "It's closer to the energy of the oni we've been fighting the last couple months - or the energy Tomoe-sensei was consumed by."

"Oni or daimons; what a wonderful choice," Usagi muttered softly. "Why couldn't we have just some simple youma to fight? Those would be easy."

While Ami was analyzing the energy around me, Usagi was trying to come up with a plan, and Rei was searching for answers in the Sacred Flame, I decided to try an experiment. If it worked, I'd be protecting the others. If it didn't...well, I'd burn that bridge after I crossed it.

I closed my eyes and focussed inward, the same way I did when I was making MacManusite.

**Good. You're learning.**

**You could have told me, Lord.**

**I know you better than that. You had to learn this for yourself.**

**Is there anything else I should know before I do something stupid?**

**Only that, in this place, your imagination and your willpower are your strength.**

**Not my faith?**

**That's a given. I've never doubted that. It's the other qualities you need to look to, because they'll give you the strength and weapons that your faith will wield.**

**My imagination and my willpower. So if I imagine myself to be...?**

**That's right. Now go and fight your battle.**

My imagination, he'd said. Not anybody else's. In that case...the darkness around me was replaced by space, with the Earth above me and the moon below. I was enveloped in my Ravenfield, floating in the place where the pull of each orb was balanced by the other's. With a thought, I called up my tactical display, and suddenly I was deluged by data from all directions; the thing I was most interested in was in the process of being absorbed by my Ravenfield, feeding me energy the way it had been intended to feed my enemy.

The lines of power that trailed from the entity were easy to follow: I simply centered the strongest of those that controlled the empty husk that had once been a demon in my tactical grid and accelerated along it. This time, I was taking the fight to my enemy instead of waiting for it to attack me. I noted in passing the fading of the pain in my shoulder with the end of the demon.

My trip was faster than I'd expected - either I was accelerating at a higher rate than I'd imagined, or I'd miscalculated in my writing. Either was equally likely - and equally unimportant. The energy trail was joined by others, not far away; the pattern was like that of a cobweb, with strands going in all directions, some tangling with others, some strung alone, but all pulsing as they fed energy to the creature in their center.

Now that I had my target, I added a visual overlay to my tactical display, and saw the enemy of my dreams. It - she - was an enormous black widow spider, easily five times my size. With a thought, I extended Raven's wings, boosted the leading edge of the field to disintegrate intensity, and dove for the creature. I'm almost embarrassed at how quickly it was over. When the creature saw/didn't see (with the Ravenfield, either is equally correct) my figure diving on it, it panicked. It displayed itself like a funnelweb spider, and when I didn't stop, it used its last defense - at least, the last defense I allowed it. It transformed into my ex-wife's appearance and opened its mouth to speak, just as I swept a wing through it, absorbing every last spark of its energy.

With the creature gone, the energy trails began to shrivel and fade like uprooted vines. I nodded in satisfaction and flew back into space. As I flew, I saw other webs scattered across the globe, and other focuses of energy like that of the thing I'd slain. I knew, without a doubt, that the rest of my life was going to be very busy.

"Bill! Wake up!" I felt someone shaking me and groaned, then remembered what had happened and pushed blindly to free myself, feeling a fuku beneath my hand.

"Stay back." My voice sounded strange, as if the energy I'd absorbed was affecting it. Apparently, it sounded strange to the others, too because I was suddenly surrounded by dead silence. "I don't know yet what effect my battle has had on me, and I don't want to risk you."

"You had a fight, and didn't invite us?" Haruka's voice asked with a slightly teasing lilt. "I should be annoyed, shouldn't I?"

I opened my eyes, to discover that they were all there, and the sun was streaming in through the front door. Sailor Mercury was laying sprawled beside me, where I'd pushed her back as I woke.

"Now you know, a little, what it's like to be me," Sailor Saturn said softly. "I'm sorry."

"It's my own fault," I told her gently, just before I felt the back of my head get a good solid thumping. "Well, it is! You were all so worried for me, and trying to hard to help me, I had to do something to help myself. So I went inside, and found the demon's trail...and I killed it. Permanently, this time."

At least my voice was returning to normal. I glanced back to see who'd thumped me, and saw Rei, who stuck her tongue out at me once she had my attention. I laughed and wagged a finger at her.

"Better make sure you plan to follow through, if you're going to issue an invitation like that, fire child." It was nice to see her blush in response to my teasing, and to hear Haruka's deep chuckle and Michiru's soft laugh. It took a moment, but soon the others were laughing along with us.

I offered my hand to Sailor Mercury, who returned to her mortal guise as she took it and snuggled against me. She is so wonderful.... As I looked up, I saw Setsuna watching me with a smile of approval.

**Something else I had to do for myself, eh?**

The look of surprise on her face was worth the effort. But with all this energy to burn, I could afford the trick.

**I didn't remem-I mean, this is something new, isn't it?**

**Yes, it is. I've understood the theory for a couple weeks, but it's a lot harder than making MacManusite. For me, at least. For Ami, it should be as natural as breathing. I wonder why she doesn't.**

**Perhaps because she doesn't remember how. If this is so difficult, why are you doing it now?**

**Because that demon had a lot of energy, and I'd rather not keep it inside me. It's...if this is what Hotaru feels, I understand why she's so sad.**

**It's similar, but not quite the same. The power of Saturn is blind, impersonal, without hostility. It simply is, the way a forest fire or a nuclear explosion is.**

**Unlike a demon, which is actively malevolent. How do we make her feel the difference, though?**

**You'll find a way.**

Her tone made it clear it was one of those things she couldn't tell me, so I turned my attention to Ami.

**Ami-chan? My Angel?**

**Yes, beloved? I-how are you doing this?**

**The formula is in my computer. It's really simple. At least, it should be for you. It's a lot harder for me. With all the walls I've built around my heart, it takes lots of energy to reach out like this. For you, it should be as natural as breathing.**

The others were shooting questions at me and each other, so rapidly and chaotically I had no hope of keeping up, until Usagi imposed order and looked directly at me with her most irresistible gaze.

"You want to hear the story, don't you?" I sighed in resignation as she nodded. Nothing to do but bite the bullet and explain it all from the beginning....

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Disclaimer: Sailor Moon, Sailor Senshi, and all terms, names, etc. associated with the series are copyrighted by Naoko Takeuchi and Kodansha. I make no claim to them and this work of fanfiction should not be seen as making a claim.