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Mizuha was dying, but everything’s fine now. Her back was broken, now it’s straight. Her limbs bend in all the right directions as she stands up, trailing after Mama’s ghostly pale figure as she climbs higher and higher, towards their house shining white in the distance.
At the threshold of the door, Mizuha glances back behind her, at the two bodies lying on the blood-soaked ground. They look like strangers.
How lucky, to be able to die with someone you love. She follows Mama inside.
They pass through the entryway, with its polished-to-a-shine tile floor, and into the kitchen, with its see-through drawers. Every surface reflects Mizuha’s face back at her. “Content” is never a word she’s used to describe herself, but the proof is staring at her from all sides.
As Mama guides her past the counter, she leans down to whisper in her ear. “Welcome home, Mizuha.”
Papa is waiting at the dining table, reading his newspaper. As Mizuha and Mama near him, his face lights up and he casts the newspaper aside. “Welcome home,” he says.
“Welcome home,” a third voice repeats. Mizuha recognizes it, but can't believe that she's really hearing it.
Hanna stands in the middle of the room. She’s never been to Mizuha’s house before, but she fits in so perfectly it’s like she was made to belong there. Even the curve of her smile is exactly the same as Mama and Papa’s—a smile with no lines at the corners. Mizuha smiles back.
Grandpa is there, too—coming up to Mama and bringing her into a warm hug, which she reciprocates wholeheartedly.
Everyone gathers around Mizuha. Grandpa and Papa each have a hand on her back: Mama, a hand gently skirting her shoulder. Hanna laces their arms together. Every touch feels like it’s lifting Mizuha higher up into the air. If not for the weight of the baby in her hands, she thinks she might just float away.
It’s the strangest thing. Mizuha somehow hadn’t noticed until now, but there’s a baby cradled in her arms, its white hair fluffy and incredibly familiar. This shouldn’t be possible, and yet, it is.
She looks to Mama for guidance, but Mama is busy cooing over her new grandchild. Mizuha looks back to the baby, sleeping soundly. She’s never held a baby before. Is she doing it right?
Papa told her once, how when he held Mizuha for the first time, he cried because he was so happy. This baby must be hers, it has to be hers, but she looks at it and she doesn’t feel anything at all.
“You did very well,” Grandpa tells her. Only his voice is lower and smoother than usual, and his body is taller and slimmer, and he’s not Grandpa anymore. A woman with Mizuha’s face stands where her Grandpa was. Her eyes flicker to the baby and back, and suddenly it clicks in Mizuha’s mind. The baby is another trophy, a reward presented to her for doing a good job.
In that case, she’ll gladly accept.
The moment she thinks it, Mama, Papa, and even Hanna begin to change shape too. Their bodies split and morph into new forms—mostly young girls, a few adult women, and one boy with a smile that reminds her of someone whose name she forgot. All of them have Mizuha’s face. All of them look at her and the baby with prideful eyes.
Mizuha knows instinctively who they are. The tallest woman is Hayase, the little girl peeking out from behind her is Hisame. The boy is Kahaku, and beside him is Oumi, and also her daughter Ushio, and her granddaughter Chisui, and Mizuha’s Grandma Tsuyu, and countless others. But their names don’t matter. They all have the same blood in their veins.
Mama, Papa, Grandpa, and Hanna aren’t gone completely, they’ve just moved further away. They stand and watch from afar as Mizuha is swarmed by her new family, their arms wrapped around each other and smiling like they’re in a photograph.
Mizuha locks eyes with Hanna. She looks at Mizuha with unfiltered adoration, just the way she should. A memory presses to the front of Mizuha’s mind. The last time she saw Hanna: on top of the ledge, rapidly shrinking from view, hand outstretched and tears in her eyes.
This Hanna is incapable of crying. This Hanna can smile at Mizuha the way she does because this Hanna doesn’t remember anything. She's exactly the way Mizuha wants her to be: perfect.
The truth sits on the tip of Mizuha’s tongue, heavy and bitter. [...] had told her: people lie to the people they love, and he had lied to her again and again and again.
Mizuha is nothing like [...]. She's better. So even though she doesn’t want to, she spits the truth out anyway. “This isn’t real.”
Mama tilts her head curiously, not understanding. Hanna keeps smiling.
On her left, Hayase hides a chuckle. “Well, of course not. It’s better than what’s real.” She strokes the baby’s head. “But you can’t stay any longer.”
“I can’t?”
Hayase exchanges a look over her head with Kahaku. “No.” She sounds like she’s talking to a child. “You have a duty. To reincarnate, and fulfill your destiny as the Guardians’ nineteenth head. You must help Fushi.”
Fushi.
The name reverberates in Mizuha’s skull. How could she have forgotten Fushi? Yes—it was obvious now—everything she had seen until now was just a fantasy—the only thing that mattered was Fushi—she has to help Fushi—
Hayase takes the baby from her, and Mizuha realizes she had been about to drop it. On her other side, Kahaku pulls the feather hair tie loose from her hair. She’s not sure why it’s reappeared on her head after she threw it away, but when he hands it back to her, holding it quiets the roar of Fushi’s name in her head to a whisper.
Hayase casts it an unimpressed glance. “I’ve seen that before. It belonged to that girl…what was her name, again…?”
“Parona-san,” Kahaku supplies.
Mizuha cups the feather carefully in her hands. She used to liken its light yellow color to gold, but right now, surrounded by the gleaming white shades of her house, its glow is dim. “My friend gave it to me,” she says. “It’s my treasure.”
Hayase gives her a pitying smile. “Material things have no place here. Release it.”
Mizuha bows her head. She lifts the feather hair tie up, presses it to her lips, and lets it go. Only, instead of drifting in the air like all feathers do, the hair tie sinks down into the ground. The feather weighed nothing in Mizuha’s hands, but when it touches the floor, the tile cracks, and the cracks spread under her feet and break apart.
She falls, again. Her hand catches a nearby chair leg on her way down, but she doesn’t have the weight to pull herself up. Her feet dangle over the edge. The foundations of her house are built on top of nothing, the only thing below her is darkness.
“Mizuha!” Hayase reaches a hand towards her. “Take my hand. This is where you belong.”
Dozens of the same hand reach toward her. “Take my hand,” Mizuha’s own voice choruses at her. “This is where you belong.”
It is. Mizuha can feel her blood strain against her skin, aching to be with its like kind. But her traitorous hand falters right before they touch. She remembers where she left Hanna—the ledge—her hand—her tears. Mizuha remembers thinking that she wanted to take that hand more than anything.
She does want to help Fushi, to make up for everything she put him through. But she also wants to apologize to Mama, for not believing in her love. She wants to hug Papa and tell him she’s okay. She wants to eat food at Yuuki’s house every week. For once, Mizuha wants to make Hanna smile for real. She wants to put the work in. She wants to be there when Hanna cries, to wipe her tears instead of spilling them.
And it has to be her. It’s meaningless if it’s not her.
Mizuha lets go. She falls out of the house and back down into the darkness, where she and her substitute Mama lie together. She doesn’t look behind her to see her dream house fade from view, or the faces of her family continue to smile like she’s right beside them. The only thing she sees is the feather as it spirals lower and lower. Down to the real world.