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When Date…disappeared, she was still making her way towards her ideal self. Her hair was in that awkward stage of growing out, too long to really cut back, but too short to do anything with.
She looks at her reflection in the mirror.
Would he recognize her now? Would he still see her, and know it’s her, his daughter?
She’s needed to pick a name for a long time. Everyone’s said she could take her time, and with Date gone, the confusion around both of them being called by last name evaporated (even if it never lasted long in the first place), but she still doesn’t know what to choose.
She doesn’t know how to choose on her own, but the name her parents gave her feels like a wedge in her heart, and if she rips it out and bleeds she’ll be free.
She wishes he was here. He’d help her do it. Help her kill the part of her that still, still wants to be the good Okiura son she was raised to become.
That still wants, wants, wants their approval — even though they’re dead and she can’t have it, she’ll never have it, not without killing a bigger part of herself.
If she has a name, maybe she can kill him for good.
She looks at her reflection again, and puts her hair up into a ponytail. It’s not as long as she wants it to be, but when she looks in the mirror, she sees a girl standing there.
What will Date think of her if he comes back? Will he still see her the same way?
He was the first person she ever told about the feelings in her heart, about the part of herself screaming and clawing to be seen, to not be killed over and over.
Because that’s the thing — she only needs to kill him once, to rip out that wedge and be done with it. He had to kill her every day, over and over.
She can’t live with the wedge, but she can’t bear to let go, either. To cast aside everything that made her an Okiura.
They’re dead. She can’t let go of what they gave her, for better and for worse.
“Hello, Big Sis.” Kizuna looks kinda sad, like she has been for a while now. “How are you?”
“I…could be better,” she answers.
It’s been harder to talk to Kizuna for the last few months. She doesn’t know if it’s just because of the explosion (and the scars they got from it), or if it’s something else.
“Oh,” Kizuna says.
“But…I am kind of happy,” she continues. “My hair’s finally gotten long enough to tie up. But…do you think Date would still recognize me, if he came back?”
Kizuna finally takes a real look at her. “You look nice.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“Would you like to know why I began calling you Big Sis?”
She frowns. Where did that come from? Kizuna never answered her question. But…she is kind of curious. She’s six whole years younger than Kizuna, after all. “Sure.”
“You remind me a lot of her.” Kizuna looks out at the horizon. “My sister. She was one of the children at AIOEN, but we were closer than I was with anyone else. So, when we were nine, my father decided to foster her more closely. When you changed your presentation and came out, you…reminded me a bit of her. The resemblance has only grown stronger since then.”
Really? She’s like Kizuna’s sister?
But…
“What happened to her?”
“She isn’t dead.” Kizuna folds her hands on her lap. “When we were fifteen, she was adopted by someone else. I never saw her again.”
“Oh.” What can she say to that?
“Her name was Mizuki.”
“Mizuki.” She likes how it sounds. “Do…you think she’d care if Mizuki was my name, too?”
Kizuna turns to look at her, surprised. “I…doubt I will ever see her again to ask, but I do not believe she would have any major objections.”
“Mizuki.” It rolls off her tongue. Mizuki’s tongue. “Thanks, Kizzy.”
“Mizuki,” Kizuna echoes. “It suits you.”
Mizuki smiles.
The name is hers now. She can feel it.
Mizuki, Mizuki, Mizuki. She misses Date. She wishes he was here, so she could tell him, introduce herself for the first time.
If he’s out there somewhere…maybe he’ll get it. Maybe he’ll understand, and she won’t even need to say it. Iris would believe something like that. She’d tell Mizuki to keep having faith, and everything will be fine. Date will come back to her if she just believes.
Mizuki has her doubts, but the Sagans spent around six years waiting for him before. So she can try her best to do the same.
Before Date swapped back into his old body, Aiba was medicating him. Now that Aiba’s in her…
“Could you do the same thing for me?” she asks Aiba.
“I cannot synthesize hormones within my vessel,” Aiba tells her. “In order to administer Date’s dopamine medication, I was stimulating the portion of his brain that produced the hormone.”
“Oh.” Mizuki flops back on the couch, looking up at the ceiling. “Why can’t you do that with me?”
“It’s…a bit more complicated than that,” Aiba explains. “Dopamine production is centered in the brain, and more specifically, the hypothalamus. As I am directly connected to the brain, it is easy for me to stimulate the hypothalamus. The aromatization of testosterone into estrogen is a much harder process to control from my access to the brain, as there are multiple hormones and organs involved in the process.”
Mizuki frowns.
“However,” Aiba continues, “I have been providing a similar role to puberty blockers for you. I block the signals to your pituitary gland that would trigger the hormonal responses to puberty and advance the process. I have been blocking those signals since my installation.”
“You…really did that?” Mizuki asks.
“Of course. As your guardian, I am responsible for your well-being. Your experience with gender dysphoria would undoubtedly worsen if you began a male puberty. It has been proven by multiple studies that allowing children to pursue age-appropriate gender affirming care helps to boost overall mental health outcomes for transgender children.”
A wave of relief washes over her. She’s heard about puberty before at school, dreaded how her voice was bound to drop and her features would stick out and her body would grow hair in places she doesn’t want it to be really fast.
“The law in Japan is such that you will be able to start taking estrogen when you turn fifteen,” Aiba continues. “And, of course, I will aid you, as much as I am capable of doing so.”
“Thanks, Aiba,” Mizuki says. “I really…” She doesn’t know how to express how grateful she is.
“I understand,” Aiba says. “It is not necessary to thank me. It is simply my duty as your guardian. I have been tasked to look after you in Date’s absence, and I will.”
To everyone, she is Mizuki Date now. For her fourteenth birthday, Aiba changes her legal name for her — by hacking government records, of course.
She ends up settling on an all-girls high school — following in Iris’s footsteps at Sekiba High — and tries not to feel too much like a fraud. If she carries herself with confidence, with the assurance that she is a girl, then no one will question the little things. About how she purposefully pitches up her voice a little, or is shorter than average because she’s still technically pre-pubescent.
No one else is following her to Sekiba, anyways. No one will know who she used to be; to them, she’ll always have been Mizuki Date.
It’s a nice idea.
She starts a countdown to her fifteenth birthday. Aiba said then she can talk to the doctor about getting started on hormones, and she wants that more than anything right now.
It’s been almost two years since she became Mizuki, more than two and a half since she started acknowledging herself.
She’s more alive than she ever could’ve been if she hadn’t.
On the third anniversary of her father’s death, she’s not the only one there to visit him.
“Pewter?”
“Hello, Mizuki.”
“Uh…you were close with my dad, right?” She knows they were in a relationship, but she never got many details. She hasn’t asked, before now.
“He was the love of my life,” Pewter confesses.
Mizuki knows what her mother would do if she saw Mizuki as she is now. She would’ve hit Mizuki until she gave up on being a girl. It’s pretty close to what happened when she was growing up already. But…
“What do you think he would’ve thought of me now?” she asks.
“He wanted your happiness more than anything,” Pewter answers. “And beyond that, he never took issue with Mama. I suspect he would be shocked, but ultimately, he would have accepted you as his daughter. And…I believe he would be happy for you, too. That Date gave you the space to accept yourself.”
“I bet you don’t know much about Mom,” Mizuki says. “Because you only started dating Dad after the divorce, right? So you wouldn’t have known her.”
“I never met Shoko. But…I heard things.”
She can tell he’s choosing his words to be more respectful; she can’t tell if it’s because he’s talking to her or if it’s because Dad’s ghost is hovering between them.
“You can be honest with me,” Mizuki says. “I…already know. Mom wanted a normal family. She hated me because I wasn’t normal. Because I didn’t know how to be normal. I think…Dad wanted her version of normal, too.”
“You’re probably better off discussing that with Hitomi,” he admits. “But…I did get that feeling from him. I believe the divorce acted as a wake-up call for him.”
Just like their deaths were for her.
“Mom wouldn’t like who I am now. I’m not her version of normal.”
“From what you’ve said, I don’t believe Shoko’s version of normalcy was capable of being realized by any of you.” Pewter adjusts his glasses. “I’m glad you and Renju managed to get out. Over the last three years…forgive me if I’m stepping over boundaries, but you’ve developed into a fine young woman. Any parent should be proud to have you as their daughter.”
She’s not his daughter, and she’ll never be.
She smiles and says, “Thanks, Pewter.”
But she misses Date, too.
It aches, especially around this time of year. He was the first person who ever accepted her, and he’s not here to see her come into herself. All she has is his old left eye, his apartment, and four years worth of memories where she spent most of them pushing him away.
In another year, he’ll have been gone for longer than she knew him.
She has trouble believing he’s still out there most of the time. But everyone else believes, so she’ll try to. Maybe one day her faith will pay off.
Three years later, she’s officially part of ABIS. Agent Mizuki Date.
And her first big case is the appearance of Jin Furue’s other half, after six years.
Things always used to come in groups of six for Date. Hopefully, this time, it’ll be true again.
It’s not the only thing that’s coming back after six years, though. The bodies keep coming, and at the end of it all, Kizuna disappears again.
While searching for her, though, Mizuki gets a call from that woman in the mask. The same one who tried to shoot her at the stadium.
“Meet me at AIOEN.”
Mizuki knows she shouldn’t trust her, but somehow, she feels like she can. So she goes to AIOEN, and there the woman is, with her mask off.
The spitting image of Mizuki.
“Is Kizzy safe?” Mizuki asks. She has to know, first.
“She’s fine.” Her voice is lower than Mizuki’s. “I wanted to talk to you, one on one, in the place where it all started.”
“Huh?” Where…it all started?
“Figuring out what happened took me a while,” she admits, “but…we grew up here together. You were too young when the Okiuras adopted you to remember anything, but…”
“I’m…”
She’s adopted? But if Mom didn’t want her— she chose her— what?
“Horadori made us,” she continues. “He made me artificially first, enhancing my genes to make me super strong. But…there were some defects, too. So he had to make you.”
“But…” Does that make them the same, then? That both of them, across time and space, chose to be the girls they are? “If I’m a copy of you, then…”
“I told you, right? They thought I was defective.”
But Mizuki remembers something about the woman having a heart condition. “I thought that was for some other reason.” She frowns.
“I have a hormonal condition, too. I was supposed to be a boy. That’s what they designed me to be. But something went wrong, and my body developed more like a girl’s. So…you’re the person I was supposed to be, the first time around.”
Does that mean it was all just…fate, then? That she was always going to feel uncomfortable in her skin, always going to become Mizuki? Her clone’s a woman, and she was brought up that way, too. She’d always wished she was that way. But faced with the version of her that was raised a girl…
This was her journey, wasn’t it? It was the path she chose. Steps she took forward to shape herself, for an image that she wanted to make. But here she is, with a mirror that’s like her in a lot of ways, but different in ways that are important.
She’s…the girl Mizuki wants to be able to see someday.
Mizuki feels like she should say something, but she doesn’t know what to even say, or where to start untangling all of that. Shouldn’t it be nice to know that? To have the assurance that she was always supposed to be this way? That being a girl is her fate?
But she doesn’t want that. Maybe she was always a girl, but she doesn’t want to always have been a girl because her clone’s a girl.
She wants her identity to be hers.
“This has gotta be pretty overwhelming for you, huh?”
“Overwhelming doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Mizuki retorts. “Where do I even start?”
“I’ll start, then,” she says. “Why’d you choose Mizuki?”
“It was because of Kizzy,” Mizuki answers. “When my hair finally got long enough that I could tie it up…she told me I looked like her big sister, whose name was Mizuki. And I liked the sound of that. She told me she didn’t think her sister would care if I used it, or even that she’d see her again.” Wait a second. Someone who looks like Mizuki, associated with AIOEN, around Kizzy’s age— “That was you, wasn’t it? What the hell were you thinking?”
“I—” She looks away, flustered. “It’s not that simple. I couldn’t risk Kizuna finding me again. I was supposed to be a secret.”
“Oh, so that’s why you wore that mask all the time.”
“It helped, though. Because I got to watch you and figure out who you were. I didn’t realize you were my clone at first. Because…my clone was…”
“Yeah,” Mizuki says, before she can say it. If she’s known Mizuki since she was born, then she has to know that Mizuki is transgender. “You don’t have to say it.”
“I never wanted to hurt you,” she says. “I just didn’t want you to get hurt, either.”
“It’s too late for that now,” Mizuki says. She’s been hurt a lot. By her parents, who were supposed to love her the most. By Tearer, who ripped Date away from her along with her left eye. “But…what do we do now? And what should I call you?”
“When we were kids…you used to call me Bibi,” she answers. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now. It depends on what you want. But…I want to be your sister again, and I’d like to get to know you as my sister, too.”
Mizuki smiles. “I’d like that.”
She follows Bibi to Brahman, where Kizuna supposedly is.
But they’re not alone.
“What the fuck?” Mizuki looks around. “What is going on right now? Why are you two here? Why’s there a dead body? And where did you come from?”
She turns towards Date, wearing Gen’s outfit.
“I’m…home?” he says.
She’s not done. “Why are you wearing that? What happened to Gen? Oh, and what the hell have you been doing for the last six years?”
She takes a deep breath.
“I’m…sorry,” he says. “What’s your name?”
Depending on how long he’s been pretending to be Gen, he probably already knows. But…she knows what he’s doing, too. He wants her to say it herself.
“It’s Mizuki,” she answers. She closes her eyes. “…welcome home, Date.”
“It’s good to be back,” he says.
There’s still a case to solve, and a dead body in Brahman, but at least Date’s back — and he knows her. He recognizes the girl she’s managed to become without him.
Mizuki sighs and reclines against the park bench. “I don’t get why Boss is having us go all over the place anyways. Is this surprise really that good?”
“I don’t know,” Bibi says, sitting next to her. “Need a break?”
“I…wanted to talk, before we headed anywhere else,” Mizuki says. “It’s about us, but…mostly you. I wanted to know more about the condition you said you had. The reason you’re a girl.”
“It’s because it’s…just how things turned out. It’s how I was raised, and I’m fine with it. As for the physical logistics, I dunno how much you know about fetal development, but…in development, the Y chromosome is generally supposed to determine what genitals a fetus gets, because it has the SRY region. This informs the development of sertoli cells that release anti-mullerian hormone. That’s what causes the paramesonephric ducts to degenerate. It also leads to the differentiation of androgen-producing Leydig cells, which stimulate the development of the mesonephric ducts. My body is naturally insensitive to those hormones, so…my development went a little differently from normal. Horadori decided I looked more like a girl than a guy, and tried to fix me to make me look as normal as possible.”
“Oh. I’m…sorry. You didn’t deserve to have that happen to you.” Mizuki looks down. All this information is a little overwhelming. She knows stuff about how hormones work, sure, but not how they work in fetuses. “If…you were born like I was, do you think we’d still be sisters?”
“I don’t know,” Bibi answers. “I like being a girl, but I don’t think I’d really mind being a guy either. What I really wish happened was Horadori never doing surgery on my genitals in the first place.”
“I just thought, back when we met…if you’ve been a girl the whole time, and I’m your clone, does that mean I was fated to become just like you?” Mizuki asks. Two sisters, two clones, that share the same name because they both know the same person. Was she always going to become “Mizuki”? Was it chosen for her?
“I don’t think so,” Bibi answers. “You came to that conclusion about who you are on your own. That’s what matters to me. I’m not your template. You’re your own Mizuki.”
Mizuki smiles. “You’re your own Mizuki, too.”
They get up from the bench without another word, and move on to the next place.