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Rei does not remember her parents.
No, that’s a lie.
Rei wishes she didn’t remember her parents. The way her mother laughed, the way her father smelled, the way their fists felt as they landed on her jaw, her stomach, her everywhere. She wishes her body did not carry the pain, the bruises, the scars. But it does, and she is at peace with that, if only because she has to be.
She carries no ill will towards them. After all, they are dead, and she isn’t. And so the first and second and sixth and twelfth year after their passing she diligently lights the incense and presses her hands together and prays, prays that their journey to the afterworld has gone safely, and by then she actually believes in the prayers she recites because enough time has passed for her to let go of her resentment, no matter that fragments of it ever linger.
By then she is working at the department of medicine at Yumei, as unlikely as that is given her age, her sex, her everything.
By then she has Susato, and that is really what matters.
***
The smoke has turned white.
Haori sits on the dewy grass in front of the smoldering remains, the heap of burning charcoal that used to be her home. Everyone keeps walking past her. Men with pails of water come and go, come and go, and the smoke keeps on rising up, up to the skies above, dissolving into the grey. Haori’s toes are getting cold, and she wonders how funny that is — that one should feel cold after everything they have ever known has been lost to a sea of flames.
Actually, it’s not funny. But she’s not really sad about it either. She tugs on the grass, twirls two green strands between her thumb and forefinger. She doesn't know in the slightest how she feels.
“What a tragedy.”
The words carry a strange accent, a tone that is foreign to Haori. She looks up and sees an old lady, the kind that would smack you for calling her old to her face. Her features are refined, almost Japanese, and she’s dressed in silks, rich, but not pompously so.
“Say, whose house was this?” the lady asks one of the passing men. The question flits through the air like a Spring-born sparrow and catches the man off guard. Some of the water in his pails spills over, splashing onto the already wet grass.
“Oh, uh, the Murasame family,” he manages. “That’s their daughter there, the only survivor.”
He points to Haori and hurries on his way, whereas the lady turns slowly, ponderingly. She meets Haori’s mute stare and smiles, and the smile shows in the wrinkly creases by her eyes.
“What’s your name, little kitten?”
Nobody has ever called her that .
“Murasame Haori,” she mutters, and grips her knees to stop herself from shaking. The cold is quickly spreading from her toes, up her bare legs, and seeping into her spine. She would put on a coat, but alas she doesn’t have one anymore. She has nothing.
The lady clicks her tongue disapprovingly. “What a drab name,” she says. “You parents didn’t much care for you, did they, little kitten?”
They didn’t, but Haori doesn’t dare say so, not with their ghosts still lingering in the ash and smoke.
“Any other family?” the lady continues, and Haori shakes her head. “Any place to go?”
Haori considers it — considers how her father used to threaten to sell her to the red light district — then shakes her head again. She’ll rather let the river kami take her soul.
The lady hums in understanding. “Poor thing… All out of luck.” Then, suddenly, she grins. “All out? No, not quite so. Not with Madam Membami around.”
She chuckles. Haori doesn’t really understand the joke, but she knows it’s rude to question the elderly.
“Come along, little kitten,” says the lady, beckoning Haori to follow. Her wrists and fingers adorned with glass jewellery that jingles and jangles as her hands swirl elegantly in the air. “I’ll buy you a mochi for breakfast, and then we’ll talk.”
“About what?”
The question slips out before Haori can pause to think. The lady chuckles again.
“About your future, of course. Your future as Madame Membami’s one and only apprentice.” Her eyes twinkle. “I’ve been looking for a long time, you know?”
Haori doesn’t know, but she still gets up and runs after the the trail of her expensive silk
“Though, Haori, hmm…” Madame Membami makes a disgusted face that Haori barely catches as she reaches her side. “No, that name won’t do, won’t do at all…”
“Can I—” once again her tongue works faster than her mind. Madame Membami turns to her, curious, and Haori flushes under her scrutiny, swallows before she continues, “I mean, could I be… Rei?”
Rei, like a girl she once met at the matsuri. She was so beautiful in her kimono that she seemed to sparkle in the light of the bonfire. That’s what she wants to look like too, radiant in her sorrow.
“Rei,” Madame Membami repeats.
Haori waits with bated breath.
She smiles. “Yes, Rei, my beautiful little kitten.”
And Rei cannot help but smile, too.
***
Haori hasn’t been to a school before.
She should’ve, because she once heard her father drunkenly ranting about the school reform, according to which all children must get an education. She hasn’t, because her father thought it nonsense, nobody else cared enough, and so she was stuck selling firewood with her mother day in and out.
But now mother and father have burned up along with the lumber, and she is no longer Haori.
Instead she is Rei Membami, and she stands in front of the class in her brand new hakama, trying not to fiddle with the bow, as twelve pairs of curious eyes take her in. The teacher, thankfully, speaks Japanese. Rei had heard during the meeting with Madame Membami and the school’s principal that the Themis School for Girls only hired the best, and the best usually came from abroad.
“Membami-san has moved here from… where was it? …Membami-san?”
Rei startles and snaps her neck up, back to attention. She is still trying to get used to the new name. “To-tottori,” she mumbles hastily, then remembers to add, “sensei.”
The teacher hums and nods. “Everyone, please show Membami-san around today and help her with anything she might need help with.”
Rei bends forward in a deep bow as the students chorus their affirmative reply. She only lifts her head back up when she hears the teacher’s voice instruct her to an empty seat in the second row from the back. She keeps her gaze glued to her tabi as she makes her way there, slips into the chair, and digs out her new textbooks.
The weight of the other girls’ stares is heavy and unfamiliar, and so she does what she has always known to do best and attempts to fade out of existence. It used to work whenever mother or father got too drunk and any reminder of Haori’s existence would have been cause for a beating. It similarly works now as the teacher begins her lecture, and soon enough every student finds their attention swept by the steady, studious atmosphere.
Every student but one. There is a gente, almost polite tap against Rei’s shoulder blade, and then another. Rei turns, careful not to rouse attention, and sees the girl sitting behind her, smiling kindly. Her eyes are the colour of maple bark, and her hair loops around her ears to a knot at the top of her head. She nods down ever so slightly and Rei follows the movement to notice a small slip of paper.
A small slip of paper with a few kana she recognises — Madame Membami had begun teaching her the day after they met — and a whole lot of kanji she doesn’t. She makes an apologetic face and shakes her head.
The girl’s smile falls, and for a moment she seems so dejected that it stings in Rei’s chest. Without making a conscious decision she grabs the slip for herself, turns it around, and with as much care as she can she writes in hiragana:
I don’t know kanji yet.
What’s your name?
She passes the note back and fully expects the girl to read it, stifle her laughter, and never talk to the illiterate country bumpkin ever again. Instead she hears her draw in a breath, and then the scratch of her pen on paper. When she passes the note back to Rei, it reads:
Mikotoba Susato.
You can call me Susato, if I can call you Rei.
Do you want me to teach you during lunch?
Rei stares at the note, stares until her eyes start to hurt and the world fades away, only the sound of her own heartbeat echoing in her ears. Something hot spreads all around her body on the inside, like the feeling after drinking hot tea on a cold November night, except it’s not November but August and she has not drank anything since the glass of room temperature water she had this morning.
The tip of her pen shakes as she writes her response, but if the blots of ink make it hard to read, her newest teacher is kind enough not to mention it:
I am in your hands, then, Susato.
***
Besides school, there are a lot of other things to get used to in her new life. Like not getting beaten black and blue every fortnight. Or having constant meals and a roof over her head that doesn’t leak water onto her bed when it rains. And being called “little kitten” by a woman whose real name Rei doesn’t know and dares not ask.
Madame Membami originally comes from China, that much Rei has learned simply by investigating the cabinet of curiosities she now calls her home. When she asks the Madame about it, she calls her a clever little snoop but refuses to elaborate, and so Rei continues her investigation.
The Madame prefers Chinese tea and Japanese wine and her favourite perfume carries the scent of agarwood. As improbable as it is, she has lived in Japan since before Emperor Mutsuhito’s ascension, because sometimes behind closed doors she will complain about his reign, comparing him to his father, reproaching his approach to westernisation. She tends to spend lavishly on new silks and cheap jewellery, and though her funds never seem to run out, Rei still takes it upon herself to figure out a more sustainable system to manage their finances.
She works on it after school for months, memorising the costs of everything they need and everything they don’t but will buy anyways, because not all of Madame Membami’s spending habits can be broken. When she finally introduces it to the Madame, a light sparks to life in the old woman’s gaze, something both impressed and self-satisfied.
“I knew you had a bright mind, little kitten,” she purrs, and Rei thinks she sounds just like the stray that keeps showing up on their doorstep whenever she feeds it fishscraps. “Your school must be going well for you to have the time to do something like this, no?”
Rei flushes. “I suppose.”
With Susato’s assistance she’d caught up with and even surpassed the rest in their kanjis before midterms, and when the teacher had read out her test score as the best in class, she’d hid her reddened face in her hands and wished for the ground to swallow her. That afternoon, some girls from their class had hidden her shoes. Rei had taken off her tabi and walked home barefoot without thinking twice about it, and the next morning Susato had called the bullies out to the teacher.
Walking past them as they stood with their buckets in the hallway, Rei had met their angry glares head on until they turned away first, because as meek as she may be she wasn’t easily intimidated.
Madame Membami chuckles contently, calling Rei back to the present. “Wonderful, little kitten, simply wonderful,” she praises. “You’re ready to learn the trade.”
The trade, it turns out, is acupuncture and traditional medicine, and the next day after school the Madame takes Rei along as she goes for a house visit. The patient is an elderly man, a banker, and as he lays on the table, relaxed by incense and warm tea, Madame Membami calls Rei closer, points out each muscle on his back and how they connect to one another, how they connect to bones, and how one can manipulate the body just so by knowing the correct spots.
It is endlessly fascinating, how the needles press into the skin, how the man doesn’t as much as hiss in pain, because he feels none of it. By the end, when the needles have been once more removed, he rises from the table more spry than before and showers the Madame with his thanks.
On the way home, Rei asks what else she can do, and the Madame lists all the skills she knows, every herbal remedy and ointment she had learned in her youth and brought with her across the sea. Rei keeps on asking for more answers, more elaborations, until finally the Madame stops her with a laugh.
“What I do works, because it works,” she says. “I do not question the gift my teacher passed onto me, the gift I’ll pass onto you if you’ll accept it.”
Rei nods and thanks her and falls silent, but within her mind the questions do not stop.
***
The bullying does not continue past that first incident, but neither does it ever actually stop. The girls in Rei’s class come to avoid her, all except Susato, and she is fine with it. She never used to have friends before, so one is already more than none.
But then Susato is not a friend, really.
She realises that gradually, over the four years they spend together in the Themis Academy for Girls. Because as much as the others avoid interacting with her, she can still observe them from afar, and through her observation she comes to learn the intricacies of female friendship, the jealousy and the competition, the caring and the fun.
Female friendship is like nothing Rei feels for Susato.
She continues to accompany Madame Membami to work, and on her own she compares the Madame’s practical teachings to the theoretical knowledge she can find in her textbooks and, finally, in the books on medicine at Susato’s house. Her father is a doctor, a Western one, who learned his trade abroad. In order to study his library, Rei has to learn English and Latin, and Susato studies with her, more apt in the former than the latter.
Sometimes, with a patient laid bare before her, with medical diagrams swirling through her mind, Rei thinks of Susato, of cutting her open and finding the source of her kindness, that unique quality that makes her so very appealing to Rei. She always shakes those thoughts off as soon as they come and berates herself for her perversion.
That is a term she learns in Doctor Mikotoba’s books, an anomaly of biology, the craving for the kindred sex.
And yet, she cannot stop it anymore than she can stop breathing. Cannot stop her thoughts from wandering on lonesome nights, alone in her bed, bathed in the moonlight streaming in through her window. Sometimes she swears she sees Susato’s face in the moon’s reflection, and when she does she has to pace around for a while, hot and cool, hot and cool all over.
Rei wants to touch her, to hold her, to feel her flesh against her own. She wants to devour or be devoured, she doesn’t even care so long as she can have her.
But of course she can’t.
Her wants are as forbidden as they are inappropriate, irrational, irregular. She’ll have to do — and by kami she will — by having Susato by her side. A friend. A companion.
But a lover? Never.
Her most embarrassing moment is when Doctor Mikotoba catches her crying one time. Susato has gone to brew some tea, and Rei thinks they’re alone, Susato’s brother having left some time earlier for his private lessons. Sitting in the kotatsu room, surrounded by the very books that condemn her, she allows herself to be overcome by misery, and as she sobs into her sleeve she fails to hear the approaching footsteps.
“Oh,” the gentle male voice calls, “whatever is the matter?”
She looks up and through her tears she sees Yujin Mikotoba, stern but kind, just like his daughter, and she knows that he will not pry, because neither does Susato, and somehow that is worse.
“I—” Rei starts and doesn’t know how to finish, because surely she cannot say what is actually on her mind, and so she says the first thing she can think of, “I want to be a doctor.”
She has not allowed herself to think of that either, but now it’s out, and there is no taking it back.
Doctor Mikotoba’s brows lift slightly. “That… is a remarkable goal,” he says, and then he smiles again, even kinder than before. “But why are you crying, then?”
Rei’s sob turns into a hiccup, and she hides her embarrassment into her sleeve. “Women can’t be doctors,” she mumbles.
“Of course they can,” Doctor Mikotoba says instantly, like there’s no question about, like it’s a fact, and that alone is enough to make Rei lift her head even despite the embarrassment. “Why, one of the most brilliant doctors I know is a woman.”
“Really?” Rei sniffles. “In… in Japan?”
A twinge of pain passes Doctor Mikotoba’s expression. “In Great Britain,” he responds. “But I don’t see why you couldn’t be the first great female doctor here.”
It is a little disheartening, and then again it’s not.
Rei swallows. “Would you… would you help me achieve my dream?”
Just then Susato walks in with a tray of tea, perfectly on time to hear her father make a promise.
***
It is in February, two months before Rei’s graduation, when Madame Membami falls ill.
It starts innocently enough, with a slight cough that she dismisses, going about her business as usual. Two days later it has gotten much worse, hacking and hurting, each inhale raspy, each exhale painful enough to rattle her ribs. Rei forces her to stay in bed, but she cannot lie down for fear of being asphyxiated, and so Rei brings in piles and piles of pillows, and the Madame props herself upon the pile, prone like a corpse, and Rei listens as her breaths barely scrape their way up her trachea, winding and frail.
Then come the shivers.
Rei covers her in blankets, brings all the heaters to her room, boils kettle after kettle of tea, and still the cold cannot be shaken. She coughs and shivers, coughs and shivers. The sound of her teeth clattering follows Rei day and night, until she cannot sleep, and that is when she finally breaks.
“Oh, Rei,” Susato breathes when she shows up at her door in the middle of the night, and Rei can do nothing but break down in her embrace.
When Doctor Mikotoba walks out of the Madame’s room the next morning, the expression on his face is solemn, but in his eyes Rei can see her own heartbreak mirrored.
Pneumonia. A disease with a name, yet no known cure. She either lives, or she doesn’t.
After a week in bed the Madame’s napkins become bloodsoaked. Rei ventilates her room, changes her clothes and linens, and washes her body. She uses all of the knowledge she has, brews her tea, rubs her chest with oils, and does not weep even when she can feel how weak her heart is beating.
She holds her hand and whispers her prayers into the skin of her fingers in between kisses, devoted and hopeless, and two weeks later Madame Membami is gone. At the funeral, Rei watches as her body goes up in flames, burns much like her mother and father, and like so she is Haori sitting in the dewy grass once more.
Afterwards she finds out that the Madame had debts, because of course she did, nothing Rei could do would ever stop her from living over her expenses if she so wanted. Rei settles them, counts and counts until she can count no more, and in the end she sells the house she had called home, all of its curiosities, and only then is she free. Homeless, but free.
She ends up living with the Mikotobas, at first until her graduation, then until next Autumn, then over the Winter. It’s a kindness, and Rei knows it is, she never forgets how much in their debt she must be, and yet she cannot help but think that this— this is not how she wanted to share a house with Susato.
In her most precious, most deeply guarded dreams she sees them, alone together in a home of their own. Those dreams always end with tears upon waking, but she is still glad for them, for the fantasy that might keep her alive no matter that she fails to reach it.
Around that time Susato’s brother, Kazuma, moves out of the house. He’s been accepted to Yumei University to study law. He plans on travelling abroad, and Susato wishes to follow him, to assist him on his quest. She tells Rei this one night when they’ve laid their futons next to one another, and Rei can barely focus on Susato’s words from their close proximity. She can count the individual lashes upon Susato’s lid, and she focuses on the task to distract herself from all other sensations.
It is only in the morning that she realises what it all means; Susato is leaving, inevitably, and just like a cicada she’ll be the shell left behind.
In a daze, she wanders downstairs and brews some tea, the Chinese way like the Madame used to, until the sound of the doorbell catches her from her thoughts. She creeps through the halls to the door, unsure if she is allowed to open it. The doorbell sounds again, and she hears no footsteps from within the house. She swallows, steps to the door, and pulls it open.
Before her stands a man she has never seen — a foreign man, with eyes just as kind as the Mikotobas’ with none of their sternness, and a smile that disappears beneath his greying moustache.
“Oh,” the man says in the Queen’s English and tips his hat. “How do you do?”
“H-how do you do,” Rei manages in response, her cheeks bursting aflame as she splutters on. “Are you a friend of Doctor Mikotoba’s?”
“Yes, we used to work together years ago in England,” he explains. “My name is John Wilson, Doctor. I used to teach dear Mikotoba back in England.”
Rei fails to say anything in response, but the man’s smile only widens.
“So… What is your name?”
And like so, unexpectedly, everything falls into place.
“My name is Rei Membami,” she says quickly, all in one breath, “and I, too, want to be a doctor!”
***
The first days are surreal.
As an esteemed visiting professor, Doctor Wilson’s housing is as extravagant as it gets. Rei doesn’t only have her own room, she has her own study, her own freedom. She tries to get up early, to prepare breakfast and clean around, but soon finds that she can’t. The servants rush her out of the kitchen, ban her from the utility room, and just like that she is jobless.
In the house, that is, but as soon as Doctor Wilson wakes she follows him to the university, and—
Well.
It’s a dream come true.
For weeks Rei works herself to the bone, afraid of losing it all, of the rug being pulled from under her… afraid of it all going up in flames and burning, burning, until naught but ash remained. She absorbs knowledge like a sponge, but at some point there comes inevitably the time she cannot absorb anymore, cannot continue to push her body to the limits.
After she has spilled benzyl chloride for the second time that week the Doctor pulls her aside. The whole lab smells pungent and acrid and Rei’s eyes sting and water from more than just the odour, but the Doctor’s expression is benevolent and blameless, and the tears just will not stop even after he pulls her against his chest and shushes her, rubs her shoulders soothingly.
She learns to pace herself after that, if only because the Doctor takes it upon himself to ask her to accompany him to whatever errands he might have in the midst of their workday. Some of them, she thinks, are mere excuses to get her away from the lab, but when she complains about losing precious work hours he just winks and his moustache quivers with his smile, and so she learns to appreciate it.
It is, she comes to think in her bed at night, a little bit like having a father, a real one, finally.
Being the head of the medical department, Doctor Mikotoba oversees their work. Sometimes they have dinner at his house, and Susato is there, while her brother most often isn’t. He’s been permitted to court, a practicing lawyer already at the beginning of his second year of university. Susato talks of him with pride, her eyes sparkling, but sometimes when she thinks nobody is looking, Rei catches the pain and longing that creeps into her expression.
She misses him. He is so near, but so far away, and she misses him, just like Rei misses Susato who is right there, in front of her, close enough to touch, and still… she can’t.
The funeral song of the cicadas carries them through the summer into autumn, and in the beginning of October a foreign exchange student is introduced to Doctor Wilson’s research faculty. She is a woman some ten years Rei’s senior, and initially Rei is a bit starstruck by her presence. She is studying a newly discovered toxin, and seems completely taken by her work, barely talking to anyone but Doctor Wilson.
When Rei asks him about her, he tells her that Miss Brett was commended by an old trusted acquaintance, and that he expects great things from her. Rei accepts his answer, and like so neither of them know to expect the opposite.
October turns to November, and exactly a week after Susato tells her that she’s leaving Doctor Wilson is murdered, and Rei is an orphan for the third time in her life.
***
She moves back in with the Mikotobas for the time being, though she no longer knows time or being. Her existence feels shattered, disjointed, and she can barely tell whether she is asleep or awake. Susato brings her meals to her room, and Rei hears her talking with her father in hushed tones, asking him what is wrong with Rei, asking if there is anything more she can do. Doctor Mikotoba tells his daughter that in matters of heart and hurt, the only thing that helps is mourning.
And so Rei mourns.
She mourns Doctor Wilson, yes, but that is not all. She mourns Madame Membami, she mourns her miserable parents, and most of all she mourns herself. She mourns the lives she has lived, and those she hasn’t, and at the end of it she rises late with the pale December sun and emerges from her room.
When she walks into the kitchen after weeks of being locked away, Susato drops the bowl she is holding, throws a hand to her mouth, and weeps. The bowl bounces on the tiles, once, twice, and breaks clean in half.
“I’m sorry,” Rei says as she pulls her in and allows herself to touch her finally, finally .
Susato laughs through her tears against her shoulder. “Don’t be,” she says. “We can still fix it. It’s not broken forever.”
Rei wonders whether she means the bowl or something else entirely.
That night they talk, talk all through the dark hours, and time slips away from them in a completely different manner than during Rei’s weeks of depression. They talk about all that they’ve shared and all that they haven’t.
Susato confesses how unsure she is, how helpless she feels at Kazuma’s side when she looks up and sees that his stare is fixed somewhere far away in the horizon, somewhere she cannot follow him. Rei listens and tells her that she is fine, that she is good enough, and that some day her brother will see that, too.
As long as she keeps trying, she cannot fail.
And with those words Rei, too, gathers all of her courage, fights against her very nature to speak aloud the request her life depends upon. It connects to Susato’s worries. How silly it is that they should both worry about the same things; to see, and be seen in kind. How silly, yes, but human, too.
“Don’t forget me, Susato,” Rei whispers as they lay their futons side by side like they used to and whisper to each other in the dark. She reaches over to the other side, finds Susato’s fingers, grips them tight, and refuses to let go. “Write to me, everyday if you can, and then when it’s all done… come back to me, okay?”
Susato smiles — Rei cannot see it, not quite, but she hears it in her response.
“I promise.”
***
In the end Susato is not gone for so very long, but before that Rei has to spend the entire spring alone with Doctor Mikotoba in the house where her presence lingers in every room. Her scent is stuck to the linens, her phantom instructions guide them in the kitchen, and on April mornings, when the sun grows brighter and the wind carries pink petals onto the engawa, Rei swears she can see her sitting there, blowing steam from her sencha and smiling at the passing sparrows.
It is a blessing and a curse, Rei thinks, to be so attuned to another that even in her absence a part of her remains. She closes her eyes, and she sees not only Susato, but Madame Membami and Doctor Wilson, feels them by her side, encouraging, telling her to keep moving forward.
She does. Two weeks after Susato’s departure, Rei returns to her research. She does her best to prepare herself mentally, and still she is not ready. Miss Brett looks up as she enters the laboratory, her lips twitch, and for the first time in her life Rei sees red, red like blood and violence and passion, and in that moment she understands what drives people to commit atrocities.
She wills herself to breathe, to calm her heartbeat, and then she walks past the woman without a word, without a look, and loses herself in her work.
It is maddening, those spring months, being forced to share air with her beloved guardian’s murderer. It is unjust, unfair, and unbelievable, and yet she bears it through the blank mask of feigned politeness. She doesn’t speak to Miss Brett, and she doesn’t expect Miss Brett to speak to her the way she never had before, so it is a shock when she does.
“Tell me,” she says, out of the blue, and Rei nearly drops the vial of epinephrine in her hands. “You clearly want to, so tell me. I’m all ears.”
Her tone is light and mocking and utterly infuriating, but when Rei throws her a glare, she catches a glimpse of her eyes, of her past, and suddenly it is not the cold-blooded killer in front of her, but a child, scared and alone, willing to do anything for survival.
Rei sighs, sets the vial down, and turns fully towards her. Miss Brett turns too, cocks her head in defiance that is as fake as everything else about her. Everything, except—
“When did you become interested in pharmacology?”
Miss Brett blinks in surprise. “Why would you—”
“Just answer the question, please.”
She stays silent for a while, regards Rei with a reserved curiosity, considering.
And then, “My mother died of consumption when I was fourteen.”
“I’m sorry,” Rei says, because she is. No matter her opinion on the woman, she knows better than most what it is like to lose a parent.
“The doctors couldn’t do a thing to help her, and even if they could, they wouldn’t. Not for free.” Miss Brett smiles humorlessly. “She was a courtesan, so I went around asking her former customers for help, for anything they could give to help the woman that had served them so well. But they gave me nothing, and she died.”
“What did you do?” Rei asks even though she can already guess the answer.
“I killed them.” Miss Brett’s voice is sure, almost proud. “I killed all those men corrupted by their power, and I did not stop there. I kept killing them, kept ripping them down from their pedestals, and I refuse to regret that. They deserved it, all of them, for what they did to me, to my mother, to the thousands of souls they trampled on their way up to their high horses.”
Her face twists with righteous malice, and Rei shudders and closes her eyes.
“Doctor Wilson wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t he?” Miss Brett asks. “Or is that just what you want to believe?”
Rei doesn’t know the answer, but she does know that hatred will only breed more, and that it might be too late for Miss Brett to escape the vicious cycle she has chosen.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” she says. “And a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. As many as it takes for you to become better than you once were.”
Miss Brett scoffs and marches out of the room, and they do not talk again. A month later Rei holds her bleeding body, unable to save her, and in her highly constricted pupils she sees the faintest flash of remorse.
***
There is a trial and a victory.
Her gallant and dashing knight rescues her in her cape and her uniform, pulling her through to the other side, and Rei can do nothing but marvel in her brilliance the way she once marveled in the brilliance of her own namesake.
And then, after everything, they are finally alone just the the to of them, Rei and Susato, and when Rei tries to splutter out her thanks, Susato simply laughs and takes her face between her hands and—
Oh.
Susato’s lips are soft, like the petals she is named after, and Rei worries that her own must be chapped and rough by comparison. And still, Susato does not let go, does not stop kissing her, and Rei lets herself be swept by it, by the fire that starts in the pit of her stomach, consumes her soul and body and mind until there is nothing but a ravaging inferno of need.
The next morning they wake up on futons that are not as much side by side as they are half on top of each other, much like Rei and Susato, and when Susato takes her hand and brings it to her lips, Rei thinks she must have died, must have finally been taken by the river and gone to the land of kami, because there is no other explanation for the euphoria she feels.
“I’m going back to England,” Susato tells her, later, when they’re both still a little sweaty, but the rush is gone, replaced by a lazy afterglow. “I have to know. For his sake, but also… for my own.”
Rei hums and pulls her closer, commits the warmth of her body into memory.
“I’ll wait for you,” she says. “For as long as it takes.”
Susato presses a kiss to her crown, a silent thank you. Rei trails her hands down her sides and past the dip of her waist, touches all of the naked skin that she used to think forever forbidden. She cannot get enough of it, doesn’t think she ever will. She wants this to be her eternity, Susato in her arms like she belongs, unhurried and happy and free.
“When you come back,” she starts, her mouth running with the idea that has barely even formed in her mind, “would you move in with me?”
Susato cranes her neck to look up at her, something wondrous in her gaze.
“You’ll get a place of your own?”
Rei smiles, timid but real, and her heart sings with joy.
“A place for you and me.”
***
Rei does not remember her parents, not like she remembers everything else, the good and the bad and the ugly.
They may have given her life, may have shaped her body into what it was and has become, determined her eye colour, the pout of her lips, and the length of her neck, her back, her gangly limbs. But they have not made her.
She has made her.
With every painstaking step she has taken, every ragged and difficult breath she has drawn. She and Madame Membami and Doctor Wilson, but mostly her. Together they have created a woman that is somehow more than the sum of her parts, more than anything that was ever expected of her, the poor lone orphan they thought was better off dead.
Instead she has survived. She has flourished . And she will continue to flourish, continue to grow her roots and entangle them with the roots of those around her, continue to bloom like the flower that she is — a daffodil to Susato’s sakura, a flower oft forgotten that weathers any wintry storm to bring about hope and happiness come spring.
In the kitchen of her very own home she looks out the window at the sky outside, cloudless and blue, and thinks that she will be alright.