His study was located in the main wing of the compound, a few doors down from the auditorium. Mizuki had gleaned from films and novels that studies were meant to have a specific atmosphere. Cozy, enveloping places, the light brown of a toasted marshmallow, filled to bursting with books and papers and file folders. Pictures of family on the walls, scattered ornaments and memorabilia. Whatever the essence of the human soul was, one was likely to find it in the study.
Dad's study did not fit any aspect of this description. It was bare of any book save for the Holy Testament of Starlight, and all his manila folders lay shunted off in metal filing cabinets, perfectly alphabetized.
He kept two pictures kept beside each other in small frames, quite easy to overlook. The first one was of Dad as a child of about nine or ten, decked out in a baseball uniform, bat in hand. If one had advanced knowledge, as Mizuki did, and peered closely at his subtle smile, one could see the point where the surgeon had stitched his top lip together. Underneath the photo, on a jagged red brushstroke graphic: Kazaki Tenma, #27.
The second one, taken a few years before Mizuki’s birth, had him standing beside a woman Mizuki had never met: his first wife. As far as Mizuki knew, she was ethnically Sinnohan like the rest of them, but in that time it had been in fashion to dye one's hair the same shade of blonde as the newly coronated Champion Shirona, contrasting with the natural midnight dark of her husband and daughter. A two-year-old Mizune clung to her father's leg, exhibiting an early manifestation of her camera phobia.
Stupid Mizune. Cameras never hurt anyone.
But, to their credit, they did look happy - well, the adults did, at least. They weren't. But they knew how to force it.
And the main fixture, of course: Dad in the flesh, reclining in his rolling chair, hands steepled across his chest. A few moments passed before he noticed her; he had fixed his gaze down at a file on his desk. When she hummed passively, he twitched, looked to her, and swiveled his chair around.
"Hello, my dear," he said. At the moment, he seemed to be putting on an impression of himself in the second picture. "What's wrong? You seem deflated."
"Nothing's - " Mizuki began, and then remembered who exactly she was speaking to. "I need to talk to you. About something important."
"Anything for my daughter."
The words were reluctant to budge from her throat. "At the beginning of the universe. Why did the world-dreamer create evil?"
From the sigh he gave her, she understood this was not his first time hearing the question.
"The world-dreamer is not a perfect being. It is not possible for an imperfect being to create perfection, just as it is impossible for a perfect being to create imperfection."
"But why isn't the world-dreamer perfect? If you say he's so powerful..."
"Mizuki," Dad said, "someday, it will come that you will be able to understand all the many issues with this universe. But, for now, this is my purpose. This is why I was created: to lead you, and all the others, to salvation. Leave it to me for the time being."
"But Daaad-"
"Leave it," Dad said, "all to me. This knowledge isn't something you should want."
Heavy is the head that wears the crown, she thought. How did Dad sleep at night knowing he was the only thing standing between humanity and a deep, vast, cold, empty universe? He must have felt he was standing on the bottom of the seafloor with all the ocean bearing down on his head. The crown of the ocean, and of all creation.
She thought of something he had told them once, in a sermon:
All roads lead to me. To truth. I am truth.
He was right, wasn't he? She knew for a fact he was right. But there was something else on her mind aching - something a little more worldly.
"Dad, Stage Zero's pretty scary, right? And I don't remember any kids going through it alone. So why does Lillie have to?"
"You're certainly correct that it isn't usual," Dad said. "But Lillie isn't like other children. She's an old soul."
...An old soul? A mature girl. A good girl with a sickness that made her bad, but only sometimes, and never in any way that truly mattered. A good girl, a wise girl, the perfect daughter.
No, she couldn’t be perfect. Ishmael wouldn't have taken up residence inside her if she was. Whatever her issue was, it must have evinced itself in her aura. That must have been the reason why he meant to put her through this - to clean out the most innate, deeply entrenched darkness within her. It was capable even of putting out the fires at the very bottom of the pit of hell: the ones burning since the beginning of time.
(And one more, she thought. The one that had ignited twelve years ago, when sperm met egg. And her heart broke.)
"Dad? Are you proud of me? Do I make you proud?"
("Hey, you don't really need another daughter, do you, Dad?")
"Dad, are you - are you really proud of me? Are you ashamed of me? I know it all, right? I’m good?"
For her faithfulness, her strength, her loyalty, her honesty. All those virtues she possessed and no one would ever tell her they meant anything, and she was starting to doubt they meant anything, and she was getting tired of playing pretend, the game was collapsing in on itself.
"Last time," Mizuki continued, "you never told me you were proud of me. I just want to hear it. I don't care. I don't care, I want to hear it, even if it's a useful lie."
Dad's breath hitched, and he made an odd squeaking noise... then, in a fragment of a moment, recomposed himself.
"A useful lie? What ever could you mean?"
"Nothing," Mizuki said, "nothing, nothing, nothing nothing nothing forget I ever said anything at all."
He relaxed.
"Correct," he said. "I am proud of you. You're so good at following directions."
It was similar enough to the answer Mizuki had been looking for that she didn’t protest… but her shoulders slumped forward. Before she knew it, Dad had come around the desk to embrace her, propping her chin up with his fingers to force eye contact with him.
“There’s one other thing I need to tell you," he said. There was a faraway look in his eyes. "It's good news. Wonderful news. We've found out the gender of your new little sibling..."
"Oh," Mizuki managed to force out. "Her?"
Dad smiled and readied the knife-words:
"Not a her. Mizuki, in three months you're going to have a new little brother by your side. Tenshida. Isn't that wonderful?"
"Isn't that wonderful?"
"Isn't that wonderful?"
Isn't that
wonderful isn't
that wo
nderful is that not
wonderful,
is it
not?
She blinked at the girl staring back at her in the mirror. The one with a bad case of acne and a worse case of bedhead. The one who looked like hell on earth. Long hours without sleep reading those useless strategy guides atop her honeycombed mattress had made the blood vessels in her eyes swell up and turn her sclera a pale rose-pink. Ragged, shallow breaths tore from her; she felt her lungs might collapse from the effort.
When she let Frostfire out, he gave her bare feet a cautionary sniff and widened his jaws slightly.
"This is the women's restroom," she said half-heartedly, "so you've gotta be good. You can be good, right? You’re capable?"
Frostfire looked up, seeming uncertain. Or disinterested.
"You've got to be good," she sighed again - for herself, mostly.
With no response to give, Frostfire dashed off into one of the stalls. Mizuki would have given chase, but given the way her legs were wobbling, she felt certain doing so would cause her to topple over. She kept herself upright with her palms on the counter, the cold granite all dressed up ornate, a diseased block of maroon glinting with prehistoric shards of amber.
She tossed her thoughts of the Litten aside. He was but a tool of a disappearing future.
In the olden days, in films and novels, those evergreen treachers, they placed bars of soap onto their tongues. They didn't have those here in the compound. She would have to make do with the soap bottle.
She unscrewed the top and
>this is what you deserve for telling her this is your punishment
flicked it bottoms up.
>there is nothing you could ever do to cleanse your sin it's done, it's done it's done it's done
But it was cleansing her, her tongue and her cells, burning burning burning so sweet and so acrid. She gagged and retched, trying to defy it, trying to regret it. The girl in the mirror became two and then merged into one. In a fever she thought about becoming exponential, parabolic, and you'd need ten thousand mirrors and eighty-three thousand words to contain all of her…
>You're a dishonor to your family. You're a disease, a virus, a plague. You're just like one of them. You're going to end up just like your sister.
Maybe I always have been just like my sister.
Her spit collected at the bottom of the sink, too thick and sludgy to filter down. She stood over it with her jaw wide, powerless to watch a string of saliva drip off her tongue. Her tongue was a pincushion.
>she'd be happy to see you like this
She wiped her mouth and spat again. Invisible mallets thumped and thumped and thumped the top of her head and she buckled over again thinking she would vomit, certain she would vomit. When she pressed her hand to her temple, she felt the thin blood vessel there, and thought of her blood cells carrying parabens and all her shame. For a moment, Mizune pressed her hand into the divot between Mizuki's ribs - painful. But when Mizuki forced her eyes open, it was only the squarish slanted edge of the counter. Only the counter.
The shredding of toilet paper in the stall. Her feet carried her and she smacked the door open to find Frostfire mewing in delight with the paper strewn all over the floor, his claws in the air; and all her anger fell loose.
"Frostfire! Frostfire, you can't do that, it's, it's..."
There it was. Nausea stole her words, and a second forgot to pass in the time Mizuki ran to the sink. Failed to run. The bile hit the wall, staining it the color of dead honeysuckle.
how did I let them make me like this
how did I let him make me like this
She stared at it, wide-eyed, planking on the floor. The stench hit her, and her face twisted, caught in some purgatorial state between recoiling and apathy.
No one was here apart from her. No one would come and see her shame. She had no one except for Frostfire, which, in a way, was almost as bad as having no one at all.
Was that relieving? Even Harmony had abandoned her. It must have been Harmony's idea to turn away, and he'd swindled poor Frostfire into sticking himself to a gangly wretch like her. Who'd have guessed the little defective weapon had it in him to be so black-hearted?
Finally she allowed herself to splay out and stretch out her limbs. To, shamefully, seek a little comfort in the midst of her current situation.
How had they made her like this. No, it was, beautifully, all her own fault. I am the captain of my soul, I write my own tales, I steer my own ship. I am what lies between the gaps.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
And she lay there, settling into those gaps, contented. Frostfire finally reached her and buried his snout into her nape, erecting his tail in curiosity; when no further sound or motion came from her, he padded off, free to immerse himself in toilet water.
Footsteps thundered in the hall outside, and she bolted to her feet, attacking the mess in a whirlwind of paper towels and soap. A blank in her memory told her she'd slept: somehow. It would be a sin to question the miracle.
With the nausea dissolved and the abomination cleansed from the wall, she could find it in herself to dwell on the needle-pricking why.
I can't believe I'm jealous of a fetus.
Last month, two, three months ago, the whole fifth-grade class had to learn about the body, about the hidden parts of the body, and she had forged her father's signature on the permission slip so she'd get to know. And she'd learned: her brother had started as a microscopic misshapen lump, and at this very moment his cells were splitting to make more of him, until he would be a baby-sized and -shaped lump. Maybe he'd never stop and he'd split himself until he was bigger than an infant, bigger than a man; maybe he'd grow to the size of a house, a skyscraper, the whole island, the whole world.
It was only right to loathe him, and Mirai, and herself, for being clay and returning to clay. It was only right to loathe him for being him, for having one more thing in common with Dad than her, and to loathe Dad for caring about that thing over anything that actually mattered.
She would watch her brother become the Spiritual Guide.
Like that: her whole future, her whole purpose, snapped out of existence.
Once she considered it in those terms, it sounded so easy, so painless, to suffer the death change brought. As though it could ever be conceived of at all.
Lillie's light was on. Mizuki hovered out in the hall by her door, wondering how worth it it would be to call for comfort, to let her lay her hands on her, to let her stick her finger on the needle of Mizuki's mind and stop her from vibrating, clicking, unraveling. She thought she might die if she couldn't have Lillie's touch on her shoulder to rejuvenate her.
No, no, no. Lillie had indulged in more than enough secrets for one day, and too many secrets would rot her teeth and make her sick. She was sick enough as it was. Better to let her convalesce.
It was past midnight by the time Mizuki managed to rest her eyes. Her ever-neurotic psyche burned with resistance, but sleep scraped down her broken will like Tapu Koko's talons down the side of 'Ale K-8 School, and she gave, and fell, and fell. And flew.
I remember when you made me like this.
I was young, and I was so happy when you came back for me at last. My stomach was rumbling, and you fed me good food. All my favorites: white rice and pickled red onions and nori and rounds of radishes and Mago berries. And when we were finished, a big bowl of konpeitō for everyone. I remember how my teeth cracked them open and ground them into sugar dust and you said, we'll all be dust someday too, so let's remember. Let's live while we're living.
Hey, when did you forget how to live?
I remember how you pressed your lips into my forehead and told me good night. I asked you for a bedtime story, but you said you didn't have one for me. Nothing I hadn't heard a thousand times before. When you said that, I wanted to cry. But I don't know how to cry, so I smiled.
I remember sleep. I slept, and it was heaven. From the clouds I watched the lava bubble up from the cone of Wela Volcano, and you were there at my side. Do you remember how we laughed at it together? You said it looked like an exploding star.
I dream of it. I dream of that perfection awaiting us past the clouds, where evil can never reach. I dream of starshine.
It might have been only a dream, but it was a good dream. It was a dream I was happy to have. I've never been happ
>
>
>
"Mizuki."
ier.
She was unclothed and the ground upon which she stood was slick with a thin layer of blood. She was enveloped by some sort of chapel, a cathedral they say it took eight hundred years to build, did you know? , an Enraptoran church, perhaps? If-then they'd ought to have pews, or sensical stained glass, not those squares up there - but it wasn't as if she would ever know what the inside of the eight-hundred-year-old cathedral looked like; she would never step foot in the region in which it stood, on the other side of the world.
"Mi - zu - ki."
A quick pass of the area revealed something odd: her eyes failed to focus on anything not in the direct center of her vision, and what they did focus on didn't make sense to her. Two parallel rows of TVs positioned to face each other. When she glided towards one she found her own haggard reflection darkened in the dead screen.
"Mizuki!"
At the altar stood a great king bed. A figure lay upon it, nearly swallowed in its entirety by the impossible mattress, the mattress so soft you could sink into it forever. At the sound of Mizuki's slow, cautious steps, it sat up.
A woman of about eighteen, raven-haired. Her face was a doll's; immaculate in its composition, as if the world-dreamer had pressed his very own fingers into her clay: somehow, this imperfect flesh held a perfect ratio. Below the collarbone, her body was a mere wisp. Translucent. Fractals in rainbow colors rippled in its place like a Finneon's wet scales, scattering luminosity.
Mizuki fell onto her knees.
"Mizune," she breathed. "Nene, I..."
She felt her sleep was a cage and she was rattling the bars, barrelling her whole self into them, but she wouldn't lose this. She wouldn't lose Mizune.
"Mizune, Nene, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I told her your secret - "
"Mizuki."
Mizuki's throat closed up. This authority, this hollowness, was one she'd never heard in her sister's voice before. Here it came - the condemnation -
"Lillie is good. It's good you told her. It's best if she knows."
A wavering beam of light pressed in through the roof, and in its light her sister phosphoresced. Mizuki, astonished, inclined her head to search for its entrance point... but it escaped her the same as everything else. Outside the stained-glass window, the blood-colored sky oozed its own hazy, miasmic light into the cathedral. The ancient pagan-song of Sinnoh buried into her brain, clicking its clockwork tempo, and her breathing slowed.
Mizune motioned for her to rise, come closer. Soon her grasp enveloped Mizuki, and her pallid fingers ghosted down her little sister's jaw. Caressing her. Her fractal-body burned with all the fire of a complete one, and when Mizuki pressed her palm to the space just below where her chest should be, a low thrumming met her.
Mizune brought her lips to her ear.
"Lillie is blessèd," she said. "Soon you will understand why fate brought her to you. She is its instrument."
"Wha..."
(The myopic girl was too tangled amongst the tendrils of her own illogic to notice as a television came to life, flickered a thought:
"It's, um, not really like you to joke around like that, Mizune," Mizuki mumbled after a moment. The scent of the kōshin ointment blessed her nostrils, as if Mizune had rubbed it over every square inch of her body. It was going to tug Mizuki away, she knew... she couldn't recall ever knowing scent in a dream. She cycled through a few odors ingrained in her memories: the smell of fish-food in Dad's old aquarium, the musty scent of the kitchen behind the school cafeteria, the dead-flower something else that had caused Mizune's eyes to turn red after school, the lavender hand-soap in the restrooms. The recollection of the last one triggered her to recoil, rear back.
"You are correct. I am not joking. And speak louder when you're talking to me."
Mizuki, incensed by the mandate, shouted her next sentence: "That doesn't make any sense. Lillie isn't like us at all."
"That's what you think. Don't think I summoned you here with the intent of confirming all your previously existing beliefs." There was nothing outwardly cruel about Mizune's smile, but Mizuki could tell it was not all benign. A chill ran down her spine. "Our father has forgotten his kindness... I know - though you may have pretended to turn a blind eye - you surely recognize this. You know he could have offered me grace..."
"He's kind to Lillie," Mizuki protested. "He brought her here - wants to help her - "
and you don't deserve grace, besides.
"He wants to break her, Mizuki. Can't you see it? He wants her to hate the dark parts of herself, so she'll stay with him believing he'll help her repress them. And you know what they're going to do to her. They've already got you trying to make sure she doesn't sleep, and they're going to decrease the amount of food they give her. They'll make her hungry and sick. Mizuki, you might not be able to do too much about her sleep, but you must ensure she eats. Sneak her food from the pantry."
Mizuki stepped off the mattress; shook her head. "No, no, I can't do that..."
"No. No, you can do it. It's merely that you don't want to do it. That you're afraid. Isn't that right?"
That got her to bristle. By reflex she squeezed her eyes shut.
"No," she said. "You're wrong about that. There's nothing in this whole world that'll scare me." She sighed, forcing herself to take deep breaths, calming breaths. "I'd even jump off a cliff if it would help her. You're right, you're right. I'll save her. I'll get her food. Just tell me exactly what to do, and I'll do it."
Mizune rewarded her with a knowing smile. "Good. Good. You're making the right decision. It's your duty to cleanse this world, and you need to start with the Children. Lillie's a red blood cell: born to carry the message. You're a white one, born to fight for it. Think of yourself as an agent of Truth's immune system, who needs to destroy the cancer before it kills it once and for all. Show our dear old Dad the light once more."
No, no, no, what was she thinking? This couldn't be. Dad couldn't be... Dad was...
Dad loved her, without fail. He was love incarnate.
But, then again, so was Nene.
"I..." Mizuki demurred. "I'll think about it."
"You'll think about it!"
Nene's voice fizzled through the chamber, at one moment loud, the next quiet; but never resolving. Her teeth crashed together and produced a subtle clack.
"You'll think about it! You'll stand by and let them do wrong while they twist her and break her will! While she wastes away. You'll think about it, and once you act it'll be too late. You'll have damned her. You'll have damned her with you!"
The televisions - the fire, the molten sinners, the tide of fluid armageddon, flared up, flickered on, howling, gnashing, swirling, undulating. Mizuki clasped her hands together and forced her back against the wall, pressing herself into the bitter chipped stone. On her back she could feel the many divots, the grooves where so many had run their hands over - the handprints of eight or eight hundred years.
"Okay! Okay! Nene, I'm sorry. I'll do whatever you ask of me."
Nene relaxed. Mizuki couldn't. The televisions still buzzed in the background, spewing their orange lifeblood. It would have fascinated her if it weren't her future.
She wiped the gloop her brain had melted into from her ear canal and thought of Lillie in her bed, unsleeping due to the lumps in her mattress. She thought of her own back aching from sleeping flat on the hard floor, as the holes in the inflatable mattress had rendered it unable to live up to its name; and her mind leaped to the reason she'd gotten so few hand-me-downs throughout her childhood: the ratty Mothim-eaten garments Mizune had been granted up until her teenage years hadn't been deemed acceptable for her younger sisters to wear. Mizuki had once been ecstatic to have her parents buy her new clothes every few months; but now that she could think, and feel pity…
"That's good. That's perfect. See? You do have a mind for good, Mizuki."
A mind for good, but not the tongue for it: it wouldn't be able to procure her the words to apologize. Absentmindedly she chewed at the inside of her cheek, canines and molars together displeased with their confinement.
"I wish," she said. "I wish I wish I wish."
It relieved her when Nene softened, and didn't address the root of the conflict itself.
"I know you don't intend for her to suffer. You want to know what you're getting yourself into. You remember the HERO'S Journey, don't you?" (She faintly recalled Nene relaying this to her, the monomyth, how they all were the heroes of their own stories. Dad had said some of them were eyes and some were ears and some were mouths, but here was someone claiming all of them were whole bodies. How disquieting.) "The Refusal of the Call? You should take that as evidence you're doing the right thing."
"I'm not a hero," Mizuki said, and these words had been spoken before.
Nene pulled her lips into a pout. "Fine, then. Go ahead and hate yourself. It won't make anyone happy except THE FORCES OF EVIL."
It wasn't that Mizuki wanted to resist. She'd been split by two upbringings: one had taken the care to nourish her logic; the other, to extinguish it. It seemed time and time again a contest between her logic and her foolhardiness to see which would outlast the other.
Her foolhardiness won out.
"I swear I'll cleanse it," Mizuki said. "I'll show Dad the light."
The moment the words left her lips, a starburst pattern bloomed on the floor: where it touched, the blood was cleansed, leaving the stone pure. The light refracted through Nene, progressing through shades of blue and purple and pink.
The televisions flashed:
YOU ARE A HERO
YOU ARE A SAVIOR
THERE IS NO ONE ELSE LIKE YOU
YOU HAVE WON: 144,000 RIGHTEOUS TICKETS!
BLESSED HOLY SACRED TRUTH LOVE LOVE LOVE
YOUR NAME WILL BE REMEMBERED FOREVER.
"Oh, Mizuki," Nene gasped. "You've done it! You've won!"
"I've... won? What is this, a game show?" Mizuki craned her neck at the impossible ceiling, scanning for secret cameras. "A prank show, or something? Hey, where is this place, anyway? This must be a dream…"
Nene leaped from her position on the bed, startling Mizuki. At the points where she stepped, the blood dissolved and cleared itself. She ran to her, and latched onto her hands, and…
Mizuki blinked, and Nene was no longer; instead, it was Lillie holding her hands, an uncharacteristic haughtiness lurking in her expression. Her nerves coiled in her abdomen like a crushed spring: Lillie’s eyes were too dark; the familiar green almost obsidian...
"We'll be free soon," the not-Lillie promised her, leaning in too close. "Um, hey, uh, uh, Mizuki, Mi - Mizuki, don't you think the name 'Righteous Tickets' implies it's the tickets themselves that are righteous, and, uh, not that you earn them for being righteous?"
The impression was uncanny: almost a caricature. Lillie in a funhouse mirror. Mizuki's throat turned to ash.
"Nene? I want to talk to..."
Nene. Nene she was again, still on her wrists, flashing coffee-stained incisors.
"I'm done with you here," she cooed, "but you've pleased me, my little sister, you've made me so happy. I'll wake up thinking of you..."
She continued rambling, stumbling back to the mattress and collapsing head-first. The words on the television screens blinked away, and she seized, quieting at last.
Mizuki cleared her throat.
"Hey, um... Nene? Before you send me back - " if you really must send me back - "why... why won't you call me Ketchup? Like you always used to."
Mizune came upright and whirled back towards her. New disdain clotted her narrowed eyes.
"Oh, don't be childish, Mizuki. This is an assignment for mature girls. The world needs you to be one."
At last, the blood vessels on the inside of Mizuki's cheek gave way, leaking their ferrous contents. If Mizune wanted her response, she didn't show it; she turned away again, and the dream collapsed in on itself, cocooning Mizuki in a solemn blanket of numb.
The following morning, when Mizuki got up, it was Lillie's room she skipped over to first. Not with any intentionality: the part of her brain with the capacity for such had not awakened with the rest of her.
She pushed Lillie's door open to discover an empty bed. Sheets tossed aside, pillow askew. Pressing her hand into the mattress revealed it'd been cold a while. Bathroom empty.
Still without thinking, she wandered down the east wing, the central wing; stole a glance into every exposed room, at every disordered landscape painting, the children's drawings, the children drawing in the nursery room, the whirlwind of smoky green and verdant red, the alphabet banner skirting the top of the wall, a double helix by Misao Kazakami, age 3; the sliding glass door, hazy with a thin layer of cinnamon-powder dirt.
She hadn't been expecting to find Lillie there, and the sight halted her. All the way outside on the patio, Lillie sat across from Mizuki's wonderful father on a rocking chair, hugging a decorative blue velvet pillow. Behind them, in the garden, vines growing clusters of swollen Tamato Berries snaked around a row of long wooden stakes.
"I don't know what I can do," Lillie whimpered, the glass muffling her voice. "I don't know how to make her like me. I know it's selfish, but I wish I knew how to tell her what I really thought about her..."
Mizuki, curious as to the identity of this her, pressed her ear to the door. It scalded with the heat of the morning sun, but the pain didn't outstrip the perverse pleasure of watching Lillie's composure crumble in front of her father...
"I don't want to believe she's truly evil," Lillie continued. "I don't believe in true evil, anyway... I know, not in her soh... her soh..." the end of her sentence melted into a yawn.
"Here you are, at it again," Tenshiro said as Lillie rubbed her bloodshot eyes. "'I don't', 'I don't'... you're mired in this self-defeating mindset. Lillie, you'd feel so much freer if you told me exactly what it is you want out of life."
Lillie looked up and down; fiddled with her tag some more. "I want her to love me. That's all I've ever wanted."
"But there are so many here who love you unconditionally... why waste your time chasing after someone you don't know even has the capacity for love? And, in any case, if she's not aware of the Truth, she'll only lead you astray..."
"But she's my mother," Lillie said. "Of course she has the capacity for love. I know for a fact she does. Everyone does."
"Love," Tenshiro said, "is a much more complex concept than it may seem at first. Sometimes people put it on as they would a mask. They understand how to mimic it, but are not capable of knowing it genuinely. Or their heart has lost its ability to love, as all muscles lose their abilities when underused. My first wife, she..."
Lillie, her sleepless mind spiraling, could have sworn she spotted Mizuki in the glass door's reflection; when she blinked again, the girl, or the ghost of her, had gone.