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“Are you happy?” Tsumuri asks. “Like this, are you happy?”
Melo sits, tied up and awaiting her pickup by the time police. She pouts as though she’s merely bored, not probably dead. Tsumuri wants to feel guilt, but mostly it’s anger, and a little bit sadness.
“Well, not right now,” she says. “Mela was fun. He made me feel… free. Not that you’d understand.”
And that was where the problems began, wasn’t it? They met as rivals, but there was a charm to the unassuming assistant with the wide glasses and still-there freckles that intrigued Tsumuri. Between seasons, she’d find herself seeking out the woman.
Because they were similar. They had a unique love for the people they followed. Melo, who back then was still Fuu, would talk for hours about the gods as people, and Tsumuri would listen. She wouldn’t say much, talk about how the goddess the DGP held was so different, a corpse that stole sparks…
Sometimes she would talk about the wishes.
Fuu hadn’t understood, even then. What it meant that all these ordinary people had lives, had dreams and families and the freedom to choose. Things neither of them had.
“Just because I chose to stay here,” Tsumuri says, in the present. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t choose.”
“Oh yeah?” Melo asks. “I saw it, didn’t you kill Geats yourself?”
“Not… not myself,” Tsumuri says. “A shadow of me. I am the Navigator of the Desire Grand Prix, and I help guide the Riders against the Jyamato, to their ideal world.”
“And when the world ends?” Melo asks. Tsumuri looks away.
“Maybe it won’t,” she says. “Maybe there are things more powerful than your fun.”
Melo laughs.
“I watched Mela kill the god I loved most, and things still went according to plan,” she says. “We changed things just yesterday, and Geats put it back.”
The god I loved most.
Than does that mean I’m…
No. Tsumuri doesn’t care.
That’s how it ended, isn’t it? Tsumuri stumbling back from an absolutely failure of a game and listening Fuu talk about the beauty of the end of the world, and she’d begged her to stop. But she hadn’t, so Tsumuri had stood, and apologized, and left.
When Melo appeared on the news, Tsumuri had recognized her.
“Maybe we’re too different to understand each other,” Tsumuri says. “You’re a selfish person, Fuu.”
“That’s not my name anymore!” Melo yells. Tsumuri flinches back. “I’m Melo, and I’m free. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I think you have to be a twisted person, to call destruction for another person freedom,” Tsumuri replies. “…I’m sorry.”
Melo sighs.
“I…”
Just like back then, Tsumuri stands, and she apologizes, and she runs. She doesn’t ask what happens to Melo, after.
“I had a girlfriend,” she says. Win blinks, sets down his soda.
“Oh?” He asks. “That’s unexpected - not the girl thing but the dating thing.”
“It wasn’t a relationship I like to dwell on,” Tsumuri says. “It did not end well. She worked on a rival production.”
“Ah, forbidden love,” Win says. “Is that just a thing for you navigators?”
“Maybe,” Tsumuri says. “But… you have seen her.”
“Oh yeah?” Win asks. “…Please say it wasn’t Samas. Or Beroba.”
Tsumuri glares. Win raises his hands.
“What?” He asks. “Those are the only women from your era that I know.”
“It was… Melo,” Tsumuri says. “She was strange even at the time. I didn’t understand why she felt… so little, for the people of the past. Was she just broken from the beginning?”
“Well, what did she feel about you?” Win asks.
“I don’t know,” Tsumuri replies. “I wonder if I could have prevented this disaster, though. I could have helped her instead of leaving.”
Win sighs.
“Look, Tsumuri,” he says. “I adore you; you care a lot, and you’re stronger than you look, but back then? You couldn’t have done shit. If there was something wrong with her, it wasn’t your job to fix.”
“You don’t know what the future is like.”
“And I don’t need to,” Win says. “Because no matter how designed, your people can still choose what kind of people they want to be. She chose wrong.”
Or did I?
She chose this, right? She loves being Navigator.
“…You’re right,” Tsumuri says.
She isn’t sure she believes it.