Chapter Text
"Ui, did you remember to pick up the eggs?" Mana calls to her wife as she hears the door open.
"They're here," Uika replies as she walks in. Mana gives her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. She takes some of the bags of groceries from her wife and helps bring them in.
"Oh, you got pudding too!" Mana says as she puts the food away.
"Yeah."
Mana finishes up with the groceries and pours two glasses of chilled hojicha. She hands one to her wife, who looks at it as if she doesn't know what it is.
"So how was the meeting?" Mana tries, as she leads them to sit.
"Oh. It was good. We're doing an ad."
"That's great! What's it for?"
"The Togawa group,"
Mana scrunches up her face at the name. That explains things. She'll have to get the rest of the details from their manager.
"How’s fried rice for dinner sound?" diverts Mana, "I was thinking of using up some of the leftovers we have in the fridge. We can have that pudding for dessert! That'll be nice, won't it, Ui?"
"Mm…" Uika replies distantly. "Sorry, what was that?"
"Ah… it's nothing, don't worry about it. Why don't you just get cleaned up and rest, you've worked hard today! I'll take care of dinner."
"... yeah. Thanks, Mana. I love you."
"Love you too, Ui!" Mana says, as her wife shambles to the bathroom. The door clicks shut and Mana heaves a sigh.
It's been long enough that Mana no longer asks her wife what's wrong when she sees that distant look in her eyes, but it's never stopped eating at her. It's as if she's somewhere else, and the person Mana thinks she's talking to just isn't there at all.
Uika sits on the edge of the bed and opens her dresser drawer, revealing an old lace mask. She picks it up and stares at it for long seconds as her mind wanders.
The thought of coming close to Saki again, even just for an ad that she'd never get personally involved with, is nearly enough to make Uika break down. Not that she'd ever let her wife see. It'd invite too many questions, tear open too many old wounds that haven't necessarily healed , but... well, they're doing alright? So she'll just keep going. What else is there she can do? It's not like she can manage more than just pretending. It's not like she ever could.
It's been twenty-five years since the disaster called Ave Mujica left its scars on one Uika Misumi. It is a cruel thing, to taste paradise for but a moment, only to be cast out, left longing for all eternity. All she has left is the memory and the regrets.
Uika has a career as a star musician and actress, a wife who loves her, fame and fortune and shattered dreams. It's more than she deserves. She would give it all up in a second just to go back to those halcyon days of Ave Mujica, with Saki so close to her. How did she fuck that up? How did she just… let Saki slip away from her like that? She was right there. And then she wasn't. But now she's the head of the Togawa group, rich and famous and living it up. She probably doesn't even remember Uika’s name, what with all the success she's enjoying. Hailed as a visionary, modernizing the stuffy old conglomerate into something fit for today. The brilliant Sakiko Togawa never needed her.
That's something she's had to come to terms with over the years, that Mana kept trying to get her to realize. Although she loved Saki, to the exclusion of all else, Saki barely even spoke to her outside of those few months when they were in Ave Mujica. It's almost embarrassing to recall how obsessed she was over that handful of milquetoast lines that Saki sent her to congratulate her debut. And then nothing! For more than a year it was just radio silence from her, not to mention all the years before and since. But when you're dying of thirst, any tiny droplet of water is precious. And she drank from that well until she was just licking up dirt.
No love can last forever like that, sustained by nothing but scraps and ragged memories. Left alone to languish in darkness, eventually that obsessive love rotted into black and bitter hatred. Eventually, with some coaxing, Uika came to realize that Sakiko never loved her, never appreciated her, never even saw her.
"Will you give me the rest of your life?"
It was the easiest question Uika had ever heard. She would have given her everything she had and more, but Sakiko didn't even want it. She vanished from Uika’s life without a word, and she never heard from her again. What a sick joke. But… despite all the pain and misery that Saki put her through she still wishes things could have gone differently. If she had tried harder, held on tighter, not let her slip away, right through her fingers…
Times like this it feels like she's more Doloris than Uika. That pathetic abandoned doll that committed the unforgivable crime of love beyond its station, and was rewarded with nothing but sorrow for the rest of its days. Longing for an ideal world that could never exist. How ironic, that the abandoned doll Sakiko wrote into existence was abandoned by none other than Sakiko herself! If only she was just a doll. If only she didn't have to feel.
Who knows how long later, Mana comes up to bed and gently takes the mask from Uika’s hand, putting it away before silently pulling her into bed and falling asleep wrapped around her. It's a long time before Uika follows.
342 unread emails
Sakiko Togawa, ascendant head of the illustrious Togawa group, collapses into her chair like a doll with cut strings.
She pulls out the second drawer of her grandfather's mahogany desk, takes out the meaningless notebooks and ledgers, and unlocks the false bottom revealing an old lace mask. She picks up that relic of a bygone age and sighs.
It's been twenty-five years since the failure called Ave Mujica collapsed around one Sakiko Togawa. It is a cruel thing, to bare your soul to the world only for it to be twisted into a mockery of itself, left bereft and meaningless for consumer enjoyment. How could anyone hope to stay true to herself after that?
The tabloids love her, the tragic orphan of disease and suicide who left home to form a failed goth band before returning to the fold as the prodigal daughter that revitalized the Togawa group, ushering it into the modern age. They always get the timeline wrong though, her father only killed himself after she came back. And they never understand how much of a failure she truly is. How much she despises herself and what she's become. How she just… ran.
But what else was she supposed to do? All she ever did was hurt the ones she loved, CRYCHIC and Ave Mujica showed her that in spades. She even broke Mutsumi, that stalwart rock who was always there for her. "Ave Mujica is all I have left", what a fucking joke. She was so blind to what she had. And now it's gone. It's all gone.
Any time she tried to open up, any time she tried to do love, it ended in tragedy. Broken hearts and broken masks. So she did what she had to do. She sealed away her heart and turned herself into her grandfather's doll, a perfect porcelain machine, the dutiful heir to the Togawa. And she did better than he ever could have dreamed. Profits through the roof, revolutionary developments in technology, and ruthless destruction of her competition. All it took was smothering her emotions and killing any hope she had left. Snuffed out, curtains drawn.
Sakiko puts the mask away, carefully slotting the false bottom back in and tidying up the contents of the drawers before taking a deep breath and looking at her screen. She scrolls past scores of worthless updates and approvals that she'll get her assistant to handle, when something catches her eye.
RE: RE: FW: New TGW Commercial with sumimi approval?
It always shocks her, the number of things she needs to rubber stamp even up in her ivory tower, but this is interesting. sumimi… Uika's seen nothing but success after the press got tired of the Ave Mujica rumour mill. The last thing Sakiko heard is that she's branched out into acting with her wife Mana. She's happy for them, she really is. The kind and gentle Uika is finally living the life she deserves. Without Sakiko. It's for the best, she tells herself. She even believes it.