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i.
She sees him for the first time when they are five years old, each clinging to their fathers' hands.
The adults talk about things that neither of them understand, but he oozes confidence, even that young. Mina is scared, and for good reason: the boy with silver eyes seems to glare at her from beneath his thick lashes. She tries to look away, but then she sees a man in a dark suit watching her from the trees, a man who somehow doesn't even seem human — and it is all too much. It is all too soon. There are too many eyes staring out at her from the darkness, and in the end, Mina clings to her father's sleeve and buries her face in his hakama until everyone is gone.
ii.
His parents keep taking him to the shrine, though they don't really know what's wrong with him, or if really anything is wrong at all. Father lies to them. He plays the bumbling priest, the exorcist eager to soothe the fears of Soma's superstitious parents. He says that Soma's cruel heart is a simple matter of misfortune, that certain rites need to be performed.
Only one of these things is true, but Mina is smart enough to tell no one what she knows.
She sees him outside, one day, when the adults have locked themselves behind the sliding doors again, and the paper wards tell Mina that she isn't allowed to interrupt. It's not as though Soma appears before her wreathed in darkness, or anything so dramatic — but when she rounds a corner, looking for a way to pass the time, the boy is there, sitting on the shrine collection box. He swings his legs. He stares too serenely at the sunset beyond the torii gate. When she steps closer, he snaps the remnants of a popsicle stick between his hands.
Mina thinks of guns. The sound of cracking wood reminds her of a warning shot.
All the same, rules take precedence over fear, and she has spoken before she can stop herself. "You can't sit there," Mina whispers meekly.
Soma looks at her, and his eyes are cold. He is placid indifference and elegant cruelty; his fingers are too long for his age. He can't possibly be only five years old, like Mina, and suddenly, she remembers what she heard the adults whispering inside the haiden: Dracula's vessel hastens toward completion. The Hakubas must reinforce the seals, and soon.
"I'll do what I want," Soma replies, boyishly defiant. But then he looks at her — at her, not through her, the way the adults look at her — and he smiles. "You should try it sometime."
iii.
When Mina is twelve, she decides that she loves Soma. She loves him despite the fact that she has not seen him in years. Soma is an ocean away, in the United States, but that doesn't matter. It's not like they don't talk. They text, they type, they call each other — they even send old-fashioned packages in the mail, from time to time, when they have saved enough allowance money to buy each other gifts.
Together, they talk of childish nothings, frustrations with classmates. Middle-school drama. Arguments and resolutions and the chafing confines of school. Their problems are always mirrored: Soma doesn't have any friends to call his own, but Mina has too many.
Soma sends pictures, but never of his face. He sends photos of the food he eats, of new clothes, of cute animals that he thinks she will like. In the corners of some of these photos, Mina sees his hands, his shoes, and she imagines that through these glimpses, she knows what he looks like now. Her image of him is pieced together from his texts and filled in by her imagination, but even so, she convinces herself that she loves him. She has been told all her life that it is the nature of girls to love the boys they knew in childhood.
Self-obsession is the crux of adolescence, and Mina embraces it wholly. One day, she imagines, she and Soma will be married. And then they will live happily ever after, because in books, and manga, and TV shows, the lives of women always end with their marriages.
In the meantime, there is the Hakuba shrine to maintain, and she is its keeper's daughter. Mina has duties, now that she is older. After her schoolwork is completed, she learns the traditional dances. Her father teaches her how to draw basic seals. Her mother teaches her how to wear a shrine maiden's regalia with grace and poise.
Other times, her duties are far simpler. At the height of summer, when everything is in full bloom, Mina's mother sends her out to pick honeysuckle from the shrubs behind the shrine. It is a duty Mina can be trusted with because she knows what is required of her. The white and gold open flowers can be used to scent the house; the green buds will be kept so that her mother can dry them, and use them to make medicine. Mina keeps the results of her flower-picking in three neatly organized baskets: one for white flowers, one for gold flowers, and another for buds.
She is halfway to filling them all when she realizes that she is being watched.
But this isn't an unusual feeling, not anymore. Instinctively, Mina turns to her left, and sure enough, she finds Genya Arikado gazing at her from some distance away. Mina has grown accustomed to this. She does not bow — Genya Arikado never reciprocates such things — but she inclines her head in a gesture that might be a bow. "Arikado-san," she says, quietly. "Can I help you?"
"No," is his reply, which is so unfailingly honest that it is actually rude. And normally, she knows, Arikado would say nothing more or less than that. But today, he regards her for another long moment. "You have your mother's grace," the man says, quietly, and then he turns away.
iv.
Individualism loses its charm by the time Mina is fifteen. By then, she decides she understands her place in life, and it is not to be the heroine of any fanciful fairy-tale. The shrine, the church, the cults, the government — Mina knows everything because no one ever bothered to hide it from her. She knows the story of Dracula and the Belmont family; she pieced it together through the whispered words and wisps of smoke in the wisteria garden.
No one has ever thought it dangerous for her to know these things. In the eyes of the adults, Mina is still a child, an empty-headed infant who wears ribbons in her hair.
At fifteen, Mina is a girl surrounded by monsters, and Genya Arikado isn't even the most dangerous monster she knows. The politicians that drop by the shrine are even worse creatures — monsters with reason and rationalizations and pretty words to wash their hands clean of sin. Many have argued, over the years, that Soma ought to be killed. Not assassinated, but put down. For Japan. For the world. For the greater good.
Mina's father is a monster, too, but he is a monster of a different sort. Her father is human, and he has never done anything truly hateful, not to her or anyone else. And yet, even when he smiles, her father is like a dormant volcano — like a stark mountain in winter, or like snow piled high upon a precipice, primed for avalanche. He once sealed an entire world of darkness in a fragile slice of nature; he once locked evil inside the reflection of the moon in a still pool of water. He defies the laws of space and time.
When she sits to his left at the dinner table, each and every night, Mina listens to her parents' jokes and wonders why they even try to seem like a normal family.
At school, everyone else is fifteen, too, which means that all her friends are catty liars, and no one can be trusted. Mina keeps her head bowed, pure and ignorant, and in this way, she stays unsullied. It is difficult to accuse her of stealing anyone's boyfriend, or plotting to steal anyone's boyfriend, when it is a well-known fact that Mina has been in contact with a close childhood friend for years. As her friends put it, she has an Internet boyfriend. She's taken. She's not a threat, like the other girls.
Hi, Soma, she writes in the corners of her notebooks, the salutation of a letter she will never send. Are you tired of living like this, too?
iv.
When they are eighteen, everything is different.
He may finally be in Japan, by her side, but her friends from school don't get it. When they see her with Soma, they assume there's something more. That their relationship has to be something. They never take no for an answer. They claim that they can just tell from the way he looks at her. The way she smiles at him. They claim that the chemistry is just, like, soooo obvious.
Mina laughs, but she knows the truth: there's nothing going on between her and Soma. There never will be.
They love each other, but they'll never be together.
That's just the way it has to be sometimes.
They've never had a conversation about it — at least, not by Mina's recollection — but after what happened in Dracula's castle, they both understand. It would be impossible for them to spend their lives together. She is of a bloodline sworn to prevent Dracula's resurrection; he is Dracula incarnate. Several Church officials have had the audacity to tell her, more than once or twice, that it would not be advisable for Soma Cruz to father children, and that the continuation of the Hakuba line is a Code A3 priority, secondary only to the Belmont, Belnades, and Lecarde lines.
Even if they could marry, they might not even be happy together. Soma and Mina love each other too dearly to be honest with each other. He is always running away from her; she has never told him that she knows what she knows. Spontaneity in a relationship is one thing, but the way he disappears for days on end without telling her where he will be is something else entirely. The fact that she has been lying to him for thirteen years is worse.
No, Mina thinks, it isn't realistic for her to marry Soma.
All that they can really hope for is that they each fall in love with better people.
Her plan for her future is set in stone. In some years' time, she will marry some polite young man of her father's choosing. Her fiancé will adore her — her father would not settle for less. She will not think of Soma. She will live in the shrine, she will bear her husband's children, and she will want for nothing, except for the way that she will always be inexplicably, implacably unsatisfied.
Other people don't understand. They expect her to be upset with this, to be angry. They think of her as a damsel in distress, pressured into some draconic, archaic arranged marriage. But Mina doesn't see it that way. This is just the most logical decision. This way, she isn't holding Soma down.
Still, her friends tell her she should be livid. That she should run away with Soma, that they should elope, that he would take her with him, if only she asked him to. And the truth is that she knows he would do it if she asked — but she won't. She's not selfish enough for that. And no one ever stops to think that the prospect of defiance is terrifying for a girl who has lived her entire life in a cage.
v.
At first, it's nothing, really. It's nothing that Mina would be concerned about if it came from anyone else, or if it involved any other person. At first, it's just the way Soma suddenly stops chewing in the middle of lunch and says, very calmly: "Arikado stayed over last night."
For a moment, Mina is absolutely certain she's misheard. "He did what?"
They are sitting in a quiet hallway during lunch break. Mina is balancing her homemade bento box against her thighs; her pleated skirt has been smoothed demurely over her knees. Soma is wolfing down a flaky curry bun from the school cafeteria, and crumbs are spilling down the collar of his shirt. His top two buttons are undone, and he isn't wearing a tie. The teachers aren't going to discipline him for it. All is as it should be in the world.
Soma shrugs. "Arikado came over when I was cooking," he explains around a mouthful of bread, "so I told him he could stay for dinner. At first, he acted like he didn't want to. He said he had shit to do, or something like that, but when I asked him if it was important, he didn't say yes, so... I don't know. He was gone when I woke up."
"Oh." Mina isn't sure what the point of the story is, or if indeed there was any point to Soma telling her this at all. "I've never known him to do anything like that before. Was it strange?"
"No, it was... I don't know." Soma stops his chewing to run a strangely frustrated hand through his hair. "You know something? It actually felt kind of nice. Familiar. Like he'd been there before."
Mina is quiet. There are things Soma isn't telling her, she realizes, despite his brutal honesty. He was gone when I woke up implies that they slept, in some fashion, and possibly together. She isn't tactless enough to ask about the specifics.
Her best friend looks vulnerable then, silver-blue eyes squinting in the sunlight, and Mina feels disgust rise in her throat, because Soma isn't — Soma shouldn't be allowed to look vulnerable for anybody but her —
But she bites her tongue and keeps her jealousy to herself.
Another time, a different day, Soma brings Arikado up again. "This fucking guy!" he swears one morning, slamming his schoolbag against his desk in a way that would make anyone but Mina jolt in fear. "Arikado comes to my apartment at three in the morning again, bleeding everywhere, right? And he has the nerve to act like, oh, it's nothing, he just needs to rest a while, like I had nothing to do with it — I mean, I didn't have anything to do with it, but you know he got into a fight with some demons or zombies or something because of me, somehow —"
It isn't wise to let Soma speak so loudly about demons and zombies at school, even if most of their classmates would assume that he's just talking about a video game, so Mina interrupts, serenely removing her notebooks and pens from her bag. "Arikado-san came to you again? What did you do?"
"I fixed him up and let him shower," is Soma's answer, brusque and strangely evasive, in the way that he always is when Mina asks about the things he does with Arikado. "And then I couldn't sleep at all — but seriously, what's his problem? Don't you think he'd have his own place?"
Mina doesn't respond. There are too many things threatening to spill out from her chest through her mouth. "I think you're a little too stressed out about this," she manages, forcing a laugh. "Breathe, Soma. Breathe. It'll be okay."
Soma shakes his head, fluffy locks of hair bouncing with the movement. "He drives me absolutely insane," he grumbles hoarsely, and Mina tries not to think about how much that sounds like love.
It's not important, she figures. Maybe it's even a little cute. Arikado doesn't make human attachments — of that much, she's certain — and he's a busy man, so maybe it was just easier for him to stay in Soma's home than to go back to wherever it is he sleeps at night. As for Soma, she doubts very much that her childhood friend thinks about Arikado in a romantic sense at all. It's hard not to be impressed by the man's ethereal good looks, but Soma's never seemed particularly interested in men. He likes her. She's long been aware of that.
All the same, as their homeroom teacher strides into the classroom to call the day's attendance, she can't help but wonder what I fixed him up and let him shower was supposed to mean.
The great irony of Soma's attachment to his ordinary life is that Mina knows it can't possibly last. He doesn't have the temperament for corporate life — all that bowing and scraping and the late nights working overtime — and Mina struggles to imagine him at job interviews, blandly summarizing his life for evaluation teams. She can't imagine him herded with other employment candidates to waiting rooms, like schools of fish being tagged by scientists. Soma can't possibly live in that world. He has always existed outside of it.
No, the best thing for Soma — and for the entire world — is probably for him to join Arikado's agency after university, and consign himself to a life of battling darkness.
It's not as though it's what she wants for him. It's just that he's good at it. It's the most pragmatic choice.
And yet, all through class, Mina resists the impulse to turn around and look Soma in the eyes. She wonders what he would look like by Arikado's side. Is that what would make you happy? she wants to ask. Is that what you want?
vi.
Not long after that conversation, Soma stops showing up to class.
Mina is worried, though she knows no one else is. Their teachers seem preternaturally afraid of Soma, perhaps due to Dracula's influence, and most of the faculty have already written Soma off as as some sort of troublemaker, even though he performs perfectly well on exams and his chief sin is an inability to speak politely. Still, Soma wouldn't miss class for no reason, especially without telling her, so something important must have happened. Maybe even something terrible.
At least, that's what Mina thinks before a female classmate of hers suddenly perches on her desk between class periods, abruptly thrusting her phone into Mina's field of vision.
"Hey, hey, Mina-chan!" the girl chirps, in a sing-song voice. "Who's this hottie?"
Mina pulls her face back ever so slightly. It takes her eyes a moment to focus on the picture through the girl's cracked phone screen; her gaze lands on bright white hair before all else. "That's Soma," she says, without thinking.
"No, no, not that hottie! Figures he's the first hottie you'd see, though. Look, Soma's pretty cute, but I mean, who's the guy next to him?"
Mina squints again, and then the rest of the image slides into place. The photo was taken at a crosswalk: Soma is leaning out of the window of a sleek black sedan, wind tousling his white hair and the fur collar of his trenchcoat. In the driver's seat, Arikado sits beside him, a handsome patience in his expression, no doubt telling Soma to get his head back in the car.
"Oh," Mina says, still unthinking. "That's Arikado-san."
"Arikado?" the girl exclaims, hungry as a wolf scenting blood on the air. "Weird name! He's crazy hot, though. So you know him? And you never told any of us? He's so pretty! Does he wear makeup? Is he a celebrity? Who is he?"
She should have thought twice about answering honestly — she doesn't need every girl in her school asking her if Arikado is single — but she can't possibly keep up with this barrage of questions, anyway. "He's, um — I don't know him very well," Mina says, which is somehow true and false at the same time. "He's a friend of my father's. He's not very nice," she adds hastily, before the girl can get any ideas.
"Yeah, with a face like that, I bet," her besotted classmate sighs. "First Soma, now this dude — you're just surrounded by sexy, scary guys, aren't you, Mina?"
Mina doesn't respond. There is an element of envy in that question she does not want to address, and she knows enough, by now, to avoid inviting trouble into her life.
Attractive men are not the only fixtures of the Hakuba Shrine. It is frequented by attractive women, too — Yoko Belnades chief among them. Yoko likes to sprawl out on the cushions in Mina's room whenever she visits, graceful as a cat and graceless as an overfed hamster. She doesn't drink sake, but instead chugs convenience-store beer; her blond hair is spilled out over the tatami mats, and the kimono she has borrowed is coming loose.
This is all quite normal for one of Yoko's visits, and Mina casually steps over Yoko on her way to her desk. "Your boobies are hanging out, Yoko-chan," she chides in an innocent voice, with all the long-suffering affection of a younger sibling who lives with a slob of an older sister.
"Well, let them," Yoko sighs dramatically, lolling to one side. "I don't want to wear a bra today! And at the rate I'm going with men, it's like no one even wants to see them..." Despite her complaints, the woman rolls over like an obedient dog; the motion draws her kimono over her chest again. She props her cheek upon the crook of her arm, smiling. "How about you, Mina? Any boy troubles lately?"
The question takes Mina off-guard. "I think," she begins, a little uncertainly, but then she falters, and she stops. "I don't know," she confesses. "Arikado-san and Soma have been... close lately."
"Really? How?"
"I guess he goes over to Soma's house in the evenings. They have dinner together and then they sleep. Soma says he's always gone in the morning." Mina has to remind herself that she has work to do. Sighing, she reaches for a notebook and a mechanical pencil. "It's a little strange, isn't it? It doesn't sound like something Arikado-san would do."
"Hmmm. I wonder." There is something just a little too sharp in Yoko's tone. Mina recognizes it for what it is: the woman sobering up, ready to actually apply her considerable intellect. "Soma doesn't really have anyone in his life besides you, right? It's not a bad idea for boys to have some boy friends."
"But Arikado-san is... Arikado isn't human, is he?"
"I guess there's no point keeping it a secret from you. No, he's not human. He's a half-vampire, or a dhampir, if you prefer that term."
Mina tries to concentrate on the numbers in her textbook, but they fail to congeal into anything that makes sense. "Has he ever befriended a human before?"
"That's a good question! Honestly, even the Church officials don't really know. Rumor has it that he knew one of my ancestors, Sypha Belnades, in the 1400s. Some people in the Church also say that he might have been romantically involved with one of Julius's relatives, Maria Renard, around the 1800s. People who espouse that theory suspect that the Lecarde family might be descended from his children with her. But I don't buy it, personally. He's too angsty over his cursed bloodline to ever consider passing it on, no matter what kind of a bombshell Maria might have been."
Mina is sharper than most people give her credit for, and she puts half-vampire and cursed bloodline together all too quickly in her mind. "Arikado-san is Dracula's son, isn't he?" she asks.
"Oops!" Yoko giggles, as if accidentally revealing Church secrets to a civilian is something to laugh about. "Why do they trust me to keep my mouth shut again? Oh well. Don't get me in trouble with my bosses, Mina-chan. I blame it on the beer."
Mina shakes her head, long-suffering, and rolls her eyes. Yoko is never as stupid as she pretends to be, and secretly, Mina suspects that her self-styled older sister simply wanted her to know.
A rancher has 200 feet of fencing to enclose two adjacent rectangular pens...
She tries to concentrate on her schoolwork, but — but questions and doubts keep bumping up against her notes on optimization theory, and she can't work at all like this, not really. If everything Yoko has said is true — and Mina has no reason to suppose she would lie about anything — then Arikado should, by all rights, keep his distance from Soma. Arikado might even be repulsed by Soma. Soma is the reincarnation of his father, whom he has vowed to destroy, so it would be in Arikado's best interest to keep Soma at arm's length.
The problem with this line of thinking, she realizes, is that Soma isn't Dracula. Soma has spent the last two years telling everybody that he doesn't want to be Dracula. The father-son issue is a convoluted mess that exists in the abstract and makes everything strange, but — but it's a lie to say that Arikado should treat Soma like his father.
Besides, Soma's mortality is a tenuous thing. He is eighteen now, but he may still be eighteen a hundred years later. He might have been human when he was born, but no one really knows how human he may or may not be after the ordeal in Dracula's castle — and Mina still remembers how quickly he grew before her father performed the sealing rites. How he looked like a boy of seven or eight by the time they were both five.
If everyone around you was fated to die, she thinks, wouldn't you tether yourself to the one person who might not?
But if Dracula is Arikado's father —
Yoko's voice interrupts her thoughts. "Mina-chan," the woman hums, "is it weird that I think I'm starting to like guys that remind me of my dad?"
The lead in Mina's pencil snaps against her page.
"I don't know, Yoko-chan," Mina replies. "That sounds like a personal problem."
vii.
By the time Soma has been gone for six days, Mina has made up her mind to call him. Even so, she deliberates over her decision for hours, pacing her bedroom until it's much too late at night to even bother calling. Her fingers hover awkwardly over her cellphone's confirmation button for far too long; when she finally presses it, it is an accident, and she thinks very briefly about canceling the call before someone picks up on the second ring.
The voice that answers is familiar and deep, but it isn't Soma's — it's Arikado's. "Mina," the agent says, flatly. "Why are you calling?"
This is not an outcome that Mina planned for. She can't adapt to it quickly enough. "I j-just — um, I wanted to talk to Soma," she stutters awkwardly. "Isn't he there?"
"He's asleep," Arikado says, almost too coldly. Perhaps he senses that he is being overly callous to a girl who has never treated him with anything but kindness; his tone softens so imperceptibly that perhaps only Mina would even notice it. "Has anything changed around the shrine?"
"No, nothing is different." Nervously, she winds one end of her blanket around her fingers as she holds her phone up to her ear. "I'm sorry for calling."
"He's fine," Arikado answers, which is rather odd, as it is the answer to a question Mina did not ask. "He's resting."
For a moment, she wonders if he is trying to reassure her, but then she remembers the incident in the classroom again. "It's just, um, Arikado-san?" Her voice is too high-pitched, too girlish. She wishes she could sound authoritative. "Some girls from my school saw you with Soma. Or, well — they saw Soma with you. And they thought it was funny, you know, so they took a picture... and they've been passing it around..."
She can almost hear Arikado raising a single brow in his usual icy way. "Is there anything unusual about the picture?"
"No. It's just... a photo of him in your car. You're not smiling or anything like that."
Arikado apparently does not pick up on her extremely subtle joke. "Then it shouldn't be an issue. My appearance is not a matter of national security. If it puts your mind at ease, I'll make sure that the photo doesn't circulate outside of your school."
"Thank you. Um, there's just one other thing..."
"Yes?"
"Well... you're very good-looking, so... the girls at school have been asking me a lot of questions about who you are, and things like that..."
"What did you tell them?"
"I said you were a friend of my father's."
"That should be fine."
"Well..." Mina hesitates again. "They want to know why you're with Soma," she lies, digging her nails into her palm.
Arikado is silent for a long time. He is quiet for so long that Mina actually pulls the phone away from her ear to see if the call dropped — and then, when she places it against her cheek again, his voice breaks the silence like a bullet through the night. "Tell them whatever you like," he says, finally, and then he hangs up.
viii.
Life at the shrine must continue regardless of whether or not Soma is in Mina's life. The mid-autumn festivals will not be postponed simply because he might be battling demons somewhere in the world. As such, Mina sheds her high school uniform after classes let out; she dons the garb of a shrine maiden, fixes ribbons in her hair. She is allowed to wear a modest degree of makeup — not too much — but the important thing is not that she looks beautiful, but that she is refined.
It is easy to mistake her practiced fragility for true uselessness. Frailty and femininity, Mina has long been taught, are oft disdained by those who do not understand that purity and innocence are things that must be manufactured. It takes effort, to conjure innocence the way she does. It takes thousands of silk cocoons to weave a single kimono.
As she concludes her preparations, her father interrupts her, quietly laying a hand upon the open doorway to her room. She thinks at first that he means to tell her something about the festival, but her father is silent for a little too long, and then she knows that he must be concerned about something else.
At length — during which time she does not turn around, not because she does not respect her father, but simply because she is blotting her lip gloss — he speaks at last. "You haven't been with Soma in a while," her father observes.
"He's away for a few weeks," Mina replies. Undoubtedly, her father knows more than she does on the topic of any trips Soma might have to take, any demons he might have to subjugate. "I don't know the details."
Her father simply looks at her for a long time.
"It would be better if you maintained this distance, Mina," he says finally, and it is then that Mina finally realizes that even after all these years, her father has never thought of Soma as anything more than Dracula's successor.
ix.
She calls again at night. One night, anyway. One night when she can't sleep — when she tries, she really does, but he's been gone for three weeks, three full weeks without his even once reaching out to her. He's never been gone for this long.
Her phone tells her that it's 4:32 AM when she picks it up, but Mina ignores that reasonable protest, indifferent to what it means, and to how tired she might be in the morning. She has to rub the sleep from her eyes to be able to navigate her considerable number of contacts. She's never kept Soma on speed dial, or anything like that. In her own way, she has done her best to maintain a distance. It's just that her best wasn't good enough.
It was pointless in the end, she thinks, as she listens to the dial tone drone over and over into her eardrum.
She's surprised, in a dull way, when he actually picks up.
"Mina?"
The sound of his voice after so long actually makes her heart beat just a little bit faster. "Soma," she says, relief too profuse in the tremble of her voice. She had a list of things she meant to say to him; she had plans for how this conversation was supposed to go. She has forgotten everything now. "I missed you," Mina says, a little hoarsely, because they are the only honest words pressing up against her throat.
"I missed you, too," he answers without hesitation. "Hey... look, Mina, I'm really sorry. I'm sure you already know why I'm gone, but... I know this is taking forever. We really didn't mean for it to drag on this long. I mean, we want this to be over, too."
She doesn't respond, not immediately. She doesn't like the way he says it, so easily — the way he says the word we.
Soma seems slightly discomfited by her silence. He tries to crack a joke. "The teachers at school must be about ready to expel me, huh?"
"We'll work it out," she promises, earnestly. And then — she knows she shouldn't ask it, but it just slips out: "Is Arikado with you right now?"
"Yeah," he replies, after a slight pause. And she doesn't like that. She doesn't like the strange tension in that pause, that strained silence that suggests he somehow didn't want to tell her that Arikado was with him.
And this isn't what she should say.
And there are a thousand things she should say before she says what she is going to say.
"Soma," Mina says, a cold flatness in her voice, "do you know what Arikado is?"
Again, the strained silence. Again, he is quiet for a longer time than he should be. "Yeah. I think I do."
"So you know he's been alive for a really, really long time, right?"
"Yeah."
And she knows, she knows that this is insane, she knows it doesn't matter, that it wouldn't even matter if Arikado were human, that she would hate for Arikado to be judged like this if he were another ordinary human woman like herself, if he were just the sort of person she always envisioned Soma being with. She knows this is cruel, this is pointless, this is childish and weak and selfish, and yet, and yet —
"It's just — he's had others, Soma. He's — you're not his first. There were others, you're not special — you're — when he looks at you, he sees other people — when he touches you, he thinks of other people — you could do better, you deserve better, and I hate him, I hate him —"
"Mina," Soma says, softly, with no reproach, and it is the way that he is kind in the face of even her ugliest thoughts that makes Mina feel like she was never worthy of him — like she never deserved him at all.
Pointless.
All of this was pointless.
She can't suppress the sob that tears itself through her throat, the one that she's been fighting to suppress ever since he answered the call with her name. The tears that rolled silently down her cheeks seem to burn now against her jawline, her chin, her throat. She wipes at her face with the edge of her sleeve, but it's too late. It's all too late.
Eighteen years, and she's finally showed him how ugly she really is.
"I just... I just want someone to love you the way I do," Mina whispers, and she hates that it is true.
"I know," Soma says. His voice is a crackle of static, a flicker of white flame on the other side of the world. "I'm sorry. I love you too, Mina. I love you too."