Work Text:
“Do you remember–”
A cold breeze on a night in late fall, her own terrified reflection looking back at her in a barrier of pure water. She remembers the feeling of fear, and of balling that fear into something so small she could throw it away and forget it exists.
This, she remembers. Other things, she does not. She has tried and failed to recall why she felt so terrified in the first place. The more she tries, the more it feels like she's gotten too close to a painting only meant to be understood from a distance.
“I know it's been a while, but–”
For months now, she's had this same dream. It's a conversation, she guesses, though she can only ever hear fragments of it. The conversation hasn't happened yet, but it will. That is, after all, the nature of astrologist’s dreams.
She catches herself waiting for it with baited breath. The person she's talking to in it compels her in ways she does not understand, and there is nothing she hates more than lacking a sense of understanding. That particular quality, according to her master anyways, is just as much her greatest virtue as it is her greatest vice.
“Listen, you and I were–”
She remembers being tangled up with someone else, but in a way that feels disconnected from herself. It's like she's been shown a photograph and told the girl in it, the girl who's so terribly sappy and in love, is her. Maybe it's true, but that girl doesn't feel like her. Mona is standing outside of her body, watching her like a voyeur.
She, traitorously, wants to be her again. Sometimes, she remembers without remembering– waiting at her door, pouring two cups of tea, going to stargaze and not being alone. She remembers rainy days and quiet smiles, eyes the color of the sky after a thunderstorm clears. Someone takes her by the arm, and the two of them laugh as they dance to the sound of a music box in the middle of her apartment. The music stops, and she reaches out to rewind it.
In her dream, all these memories come rushing back to her like doves back to their nest. She tries to catch them when she wakes, but they always slip away, leaving her with nothing but a handful of feathers if she's lucky.
~
The dream ends. She is, again, left only with her recollection of it. The two halves of a whole, her memories of a romance she never had and her glimpses of a conversation that has yet to occur, break apart and leave her in their ashes; the broken shell meant to hold the yolk and the white.
She hates to be like this. She hates to wait for the future to come to her. When fate has plans for her, she likes to be an active part, and more than once she's had to take hold of the future herself.
Today, this morning, she sits at her kitchen table and waits. She took special care to make herself look pretty when she dressed. Something, she knows, must be wrong with her, and she wonders if it's love.
Mona's unfamiliar with it. Her parents, her siblings, are only faint smears on the edges of her memories. She'd gone back to visit them not so long ago and none of them enjoyed it at all. It was strange, uncomfortable, a performance of a happy family that they all knew didn't exist. She'd been raised by her master, and though Barbeloth was not unkind she was firmly her master and not her mother.
So, she wonders, is this love. Is it love to reduce herself to an object, to a doll on a shelf waiting for her master to return. Is that what she's doing right now, as she sits here, or is it something else? Mona has never been one to care too much about philosophy, and she begins to regret that tendency.
Someone knocks on the door. She considers not answering even as she moves to open it. A version of her life where she leaves him waiting plays out behind her eyes– it's simpler, maybe happier; she never gets answers but also stops being plagued by strange dreams.
She already knows that she's going to answer. It's fate. Still, she entertains the fantasy, if only to keep her occupied as she approaches the door. With one final step, she brushes the last vestiges of that version of herself out of her mind like old cobwebs. This feels right, somehow. Deep inside, she feels that her current self should not exist, though she can't remember why this ought to be the case.
He knocks on the door again, somewhat shy. She already knows who's standing there, even though she hasn't opened it yet. He wants to be here, but he's nervous. He's afraid that she won't answer and more afraid that she will.
Mona opens the door before he can knock again, and she finally gets a look at the boy who's so thoroughly haunted her dreams. He's Inazuman, older and more powerful than he looks. He's got a pretty face, beautiful, really, that gives him an air of innocence he does not deserve to possess.
He swallows. His eyes are wide, and filled with a mixture of joy and grief.
“Do you remember me?” He asks. His voice is low, probably to disguise the wavering note in his tone that Mona picks up on anyways.
“A little,” she answers, because how else could she possibly put it?
He smiles, sort of sadly, like a woman on her wedding day thinking about how she'll never live with her siblings again, how things are going to change and will never go back to the way they used to be.
“Listen, I know it's been a while, but you do remember hearing about a false god in Sumeru?”
“... That was you, wasn't it?”
Surprised somewhat, he nods. He looks as if he didn't know if he expected her to figure it out so quickly.
Her mind races, trying to fit this new information into what she already knows about him. It's complicated, though, and woefully incomplete; rather than fit a piece into a jigsaw she's trying to recreate a tapestry based only on its ripped out threads scattered around her memories. His godhood must be connected to the loss of her memories, must be–
She finds herself inviting him in, if only by holding open the door. He blinks in surprise, but comes inside slowly, his muscle memory of crossing the threshold rusty but there. Before she can play the hostess, he's already hanging his hat on the hook next to hers– she has wondered why she'd added a second one.
He drifts through the host like a ghost coming back to an old haunt. His eyes linger on all sorts of things she hasn't really noticed, hasn't been allowed to notice, probably, and she finds herself reevaluating every little thing she owns based on his appraisal.
She shouldn't think so highly of him. She has no reason to. She owes him nothing, really. He isn't anything more to her than the outline of a dance partner in a memory she was probably supposed to forget.
Or so he should be, but when she thinks of the space between them her heart aches. She steps forwards, and he turns back to look at her.
There are only two things she knows for sure about this man, this not quite stranger– he's a usurper god, and he looks at her like he loves her.
He swallows, smiling, looking like he's about to cry. Mona wonders, briefly, what the tears of a god must be worth. She'd do anything to keep them from falling. She decides not to think about why, knowing this is the kind of thing that defies rationality.
“Listen,” he says, quietly, the opening words of a eulogy for his forgotten past. She gets the feeling that this is not what he'd intended to say when he came here, that inviting him in has thrown him off completely. “You and I were–”
“Lovers,” she finishes. “Right?”
He stops. For a moment, he looks like someone else, a version of himself that she does not remember and who no longer exists.
“Yes,” he says quietly, confirming what she's known for as long as she's been dreaming of this moment. “I left you so that I could become a god, and after that failed, I erased myself from Irminsul because I thought it would make everyone happier.”
He looks up, his eyes begging her to come closer though his hands are curling in anxiously on themselves. She decides to take another step forward.
“Did it work?” He asks, his voice and heart breaking.
Mona thinks.
Her foresight ends here. Her answer is not railroaded by fate, and so needs to be as delicate as the boy before her. Still– whenever she tries to come up with something to say, the specter of her forgotten memories sticks itself in her throat. They, like molasses, threaten to drown her.
“Sometimes I think I remember loving you,” she answers. “Never well enough to remember you, though. Only to miss you.”
He breaks his gaze away from her, too ashamed of himself to keep looking. Slowly, he seems to wilt, like a sunflower facing away from the sun, and sinks into her couch. She gets the feeling he turned away on purpose, that he is no stranger to self inflicted punishment. He is, by any measure, a sinner– perhaps he imagines that by depriving himself of happiness he may atone for his great crime.
And yet, he'd come to speak with her. Perhaps this is a punishment, too, or perhaps he'd come solely for her sake. This does not make her as happy as she thinks it probably should.
She approaches him, and when he doesn't move away, takes the seat beside him. Something about it– about the feel of him beside her, about not being alone in her apartment which has felt oddly cavernous as of late– strikes her as deeply right.
“I never wanted you to suffer. Especially not for me,” he says quietly. She knows, somehow, that he means it, and not just because of the instincts she's honed as an astrologist.
“I haven't,” she says. “I've been curious, is all.”
It's as close to the truth as words can get. He, nonetheless, seems to understand her fully.
“You've missed me too, haven't you?”
He doesn't answer. Their fingers brush, and he reaches out to pull their hands together with a sense of poetic desperation. She, briefly, impossibility, sees a flash of a forgotten memory behind her eyes. He's different in it, someone she knows she ought to fear, but when he kisses her she doesn't pull away.
She, returning to the present moment, realizes that his hands are trembling.
“I won't beg you to take me back. I– you wouldn't want to see that, I'm sure.”
There's more to it, but he doesn't have to try and force his feelings into words. Mona can read him in the way his fingers curl against hers.
She's never concerned herself much with the past. For as long as she can remember, she has always been looking up at the stars and towards the fate they represent– that fate, however, is built inexorably on the past.
This man sitting next to her– she feared him, once, and then she loved him. He left, and failed to ascend to divinity, and rewrote all their memories, and now he's back. He's not the type of person who deserves a second chance, but then again–
“You should stay the night,” she offers.