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Chuuouku nights can be lonely, when you’re a girl all on your lonesome.
Nemu knows that well—so much better than she’d like. It was not her choice to come to Chuuouku. She came with no friends, no family, no cohort of classmates to offer her a helping hand, a shoulder to lean on when the days run long and the nights offer no comfort.
Cicadas cry loud to the heavens even as the sun grows faint overhead, a heavy buzz that disguises the subtle hum of the smaller insects, the mosquitoes and the flies that will eat you alive, should you give them the chance. They keep Nemu company as she walks, streetlights flickering over her bare shoulders, the damp summer breeze rustling her long skirt and hanging heavy in her lungs as she turns off the sidewalk and into a small little park, tucked away quiet between two buildings not quite government, not quite private. It is not the sort of place that people tend to frequent unless they want to be alone, and it is why Nemu knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she will find who she’s looking for here.
Nemu pauses in the shadow of a fragrant tree, glancing into the shadows, the small nooks hidden away behind each turn of the footpath. A lonely fountain here, a bare trellis there–
There.
Nemu approaches the bench with light steps, not quite a tiptoe, not quite silent. Still, she makes it closer than she’d expected before the woman sitting there finally glances up, starting as Nemu’s shadow falls over her.
“Paisen?”
Inori rubs at her eyes, a poor way to hide just how hard she’d been crying. Her eyes are red and lashes wet as she blinks up at Nemu, shaking herself out of her melancholy, processing just who it is that stands before her now. Realization flies a shock across her face, and in a split second she’s leapt to her feet, words falling out of her an incoherent tumble, “Is something the matter? Was there an alarm? Where do we have to–”
Nemu shakes her head, waves down at her casual clothes. It is a stark contrast to Inori, still in uniform, rumpled at the cuffs. “There’s no emergency. You can relax, Inori.”
The fight falls out of Inori all at once, and she slumps back down onto the bench with a swish and a ruffle of fabric. “How did you know I was here?”
Nemu hums. “I just had a feeling.”
“A feeling?”
Nemu nods. “A feeling.”
“What’s that mean?” Inori grumbles, but it lacks bite, more a child’s pout than a grown woman’s complaint.
Nemu understands. There are days she doesn’t quite feel like a grown woman herself despite her position, the responsibility on her shoulders. It’s funny how that happens, she thinks, how growing up makes you feel like a different person entirely without feeling much a day older at all.
Nemu sits down, presses herself into Inori’s side. For a stark moment Inori freezes, unsure what to do with the reassurance–and then she, too, leans into Nemu, resting her head on her shoulder and letting out a shaky exhale, wet with something that isn’t just the humidity.
“Everything will be okay, Inori,” she says, because she believes it, truly. It’s difficult to see how, right now. She’s not so much of an optimist that she can’t admit that. But she has to believe that there will be a happy ending for them all, because if she doesn’t, then what is there to keep fighting for?
Nemu turns her head and presses a soft kiss to the crown of Inori’s. It means nothing–not yet, not right now–but one day, perhaps, it will. When things are better. When they have the time to think, to slow, to consider what their futures might be in this uncertain world they call their own.
But for now.
“Let’s go to that cafe you like after work tomorrow, okay?”
Inori hums her affirmation, because what they can do–the small comforts of tomorrow in the face of the horrors of the future–feel powerful to both of them, reassurances that they are still here, still fighting, still standing on their own two feet.
Nemu offers her hand and Inori takes it, fingers twining together in nothing more than simple comfort, the chill of Nemu’s cool hands and the warmth of Inori’s, easier than words, better than worries.
And, as the streetlights wash over them, balmy but soft in the summer night–Nemu lets Inori cry soft into her shoulder, the best comfort she knows how to give.
“Hi there~” Honobono trills, peering through the bars at Oboro’s kneeling form, drenched in the moonlight creeping in from the cracks in her reinforced-glass window, a tiny square high up on the wall of her cell. Honobono is not supposed to be here, of course, though little rules like that hardly matter to her. Sanjoin is useless to her, but Shinonome, perhaps, might still have a bit of interest to give.
“Keitoin-san," says Oboro, turning back to glance at her but showing no interest in standing to greet her unexpected visitor, “Do you have a message for me?”
“Huuuuh? What's that supposed to mean? I’m not on your side,” Honobono replies, a delighted shriek of mockery “No one is on your side.”
Only then does Oboro finally stand, pacing up to the bars slowly, deliberately. She lifts her chin with a certain sort of defiance, though Honobono doesn’t think she’s the type to forget her debts so quickly. It was Honobono, after all, that showed her exactly how to play her part to perfection.
But what she says is, so perfectly docile, a monotone that betrays the core of her belief–“Tsukuyomi-sama will save me.”
Honobono laughs. And laughs and laughs and laughs, hawkish and loud as it echoes off the thick metal walls of the prison. Oboro does not flinch, which Honobono will give her credit for. She’s a dumb one, blinded by her devotion, but at the very least she has guts. Anyone who wants to run around playing errand girl for the Tsukinone in the heart of the homeland has to, she supposes.
“You’re a dirty little traitor!" Honobono cries, a little shriek, a mockery of offense. Then, swift as a whistle, she leans in and whispers, a secret there is no one left to hear, “I like that, you know.”
The hope in Oboro’s eyes is palpable, leaning forward into the cell bars, a dog shoving its muzzle through the gap in hopes of reaching a treat dangled just out of reach. “So when Tsukuyomi-sama comes, you’ll–”
Honobono cackles. “If she comes for you, she’ll be an even bigger idiot than I thought!”
“She will come for me,” Oboro replies, so serene, reaching through the bars to snag Honobono’s hand, iron grip a mockery of something far more delicate, doubtless equally as empty at its core as this girl’s head without someone to fill it for her.
Disgusting, Honobono thinks, a terrible premonition beginning to well up within her like bile at the back of her throat.
“Tsukuyomi-sama?” she trills, watching the way Oboro lights up at the mere sound of her name, devilishly amused at her simplicity despite it all, “She tricked you, you poor little thing! She used you to win her freedom and left you locked up in her place! What a heartless girl, isn’t she? You gave her your everything! ...And she left you nothing in return.”
“No,” says Oboro, such devotion in her eyes, “She showed me her vision for our future. The true form that this world should take! She showed me what I could be. What we could be. Our future is there. And with your he–”
“Do you think she loves you?”
Honobono pulls back in disgust, snatching her hand away from the dog that’s lost her purpose with a snarl. Ugh. She hates these power of love romantic types. Too caught up in their own delusions to see anything but their rose-colored fantasies, too fixated on their savior to understand that they’re nothing more than a tool to be tossed when their usefulness reaches its end. It reminds her too much of–
“You bore me,” Honobono says abruptly, no longer concerned with this woman other than the way Honobono might love to ruin her, on the off chance her delusions are right, “I have someone much more fun to play with.”
She giggles as she leaves the forgotten chewtoy behind in her moonlight reverie, a skip in her step at the thought. She needs to pay a certain old friend a visit. It is, after all, so very horribly overdue.
“Do you have business with me?” Curt, blunt. It is polite as it is dismissive, the particular trappings of a woman of a certain status. You learn quickly to make it evident when someone is not wanted. Otome remembers those lessons–not in any classroom or instructed by any tutor, but written into the walls of the house, there for all with eyes to read–as well as any unpleasant memory from the days of her youth.
Confinement, Otome has read, is treating Sonoka well enough. She eats, she sleeps. She writes letters to old friends that will no longer read them now that her assets are government property and reads extensively, a preferred bit of leisure amongst the limited options provided for the Tsukinone holdouts.
She does not act out.
She does not so much as whisper a threat or unsavory insinuation, does not pretend to wield authority that she no longer possesses, stripped of status and riches like an old noble who's lost their crest.
She does not, even so much as once, request to see another living soul.
(Otome, out of the foolishness of her own, fragile heart, goes to see her anyway.)
“Sonoka–”
“Do not,” Sonoka intones, sharp as nails as she sits across from Otome, nothing but a pane of clear glass to separate them, “address me so casually, Sis–”
Sonoka’s eyes go wide, lips pursed in the matter of a noblewoman who’s misspoke and does not want to acknowledge her mistake. “Tohoten-sama.”
“Very well,” Otome replies, inclining her head in a deference that should not be afforded a political prisoner, “Sanjoin-san.”
(She ignores the way another crack in her heart deepens and breaks as the name leaves her, a stranger in the home she keeps there. There is no time to cling to such foolish attachments. She cannot rule this country with nostalgia.)
“Do you have business with me?” Sonoka repeats, intonation the same, an emotionless replica. This is the polite society the Sonoka of Otome’s memories had never been suited for. Even now, she does not look Otome in the eyes as she says it. There is no hiding the emotion in her eyes–Sonoka has never known how to lie, never known how to wear the mask society demands of women like them–but selfishly, Otome chooses not to read it. Shouldering those burdens, she thinks, is far, far easier when the woman in question is a stranger.
“No,” Otome cedes, “I came only to check on your condition.”
“Is it quite dignified for the Prime Minister to visit her prisoners?” Sonoka insults more than asks, the barb clear in her words.
Sonoka does not understand, cannot understand. Otome did not want her to, for how could she break the hope in an idealist’s heart? How could she ever dare to do what had once been done to her, dreams warped and strangled by the very ones who should have been encouraging them?
(And yet. Has she not already come to face her unpleasant reality, same as the rest?)
“I feel it is important to see the woman who would have had my life as their prize.”
“Then I am afraid that your time would be more productively spent ascertaining the whereabouts of that Amatsumi woman, would it not?”
Otome cannot argue that. “That is not the sort of work that I handle personally.”
“You’ll have it done for you,” Sonoka replies, neither disappointed nor impressed, “of course.”
That was the sort of world they were raised in, the life of servants and leisure and studies of how to stand behind, but never beside or before, the men that had assumed they could control these bright-eyed girls with nothing but a ring and their word. And how they had both hated it. How they had both dreamed of better, of more, of the women they could be, free of the chains of that old world.
You are not the same woman I once knew, says the silence, and I have been entirely the fool.
“I will be taking my leave,” Otome says, knowing that this is merely another empty house in a long line of them, unfulfilled and razed by her own hand.
“Farewell,” Sonoka replies, with what Otome fears may be finality. But she cannot allow herself to wish otherwise. This is closure. Her apologies have been said, and if Sonoka will not accept them, then Otome cannot, will not force her.
I will not fail to save you the next time, Otome swears she hears Sonoka whisper as she departs, but perhaps it’s only a trick of the breeze, wishful thinking made manifest in the worst possible of ways.
But the door clicks closed behind her, and her chance to turn back vanishes, lost in the flutter of her hair as she walks.
“Otome-sama–”
“It is alright, Ichijiku-san.”
Otome takes a long breath, staying Ichijiku’s worried arm with a raised hand. She has not lied. She is alright. Everything is just fine. She is not the sort of woman that might cry over something as small as this. She gave up that right the moment she made her choice, since the moment she burned her way to the top of her house.
There is no fault with a woman that chooses to cry; there is no weakness in acknowledging to yourself your sadness. It is the men who cannot see that who are the fools, the men who look down on women as lesser for having reached this conclusion that are the scourge that have ruined this world for the women who have only ever been trying to survive under their senseless reign.
But Otome is not that woman. She cannot be, ever again.
“It is alright,” Otome repeats–and with the power to speak her own reality, Tohoten Otome makes it so.
(Somewhere distant, somewhere far, Amatsumi Itsuka stands alone beneath the blood red of the sun cresting over the ocean horizon, staining the sky a sailor’s omen. There is a storm brewing, and it is one she must herald. Crying to the moon like wolves in the night will no longer serve her ambitions. For all she has lost, all she has left behind–there will be just recompense, even if she has to wrench it loose from the beating heart of the rotting world herself.
It is a job she can entrust to no one else, one that she cannot allow herself to be swayed from. Mercy has no place in her plans, no room left to dwell in her heart. You cannot sew what is broken back together with kindness–you must throw it back to the flames and shape it from the ashes anew.
Yes, she thinks, Inori’s hands will be clean in the revolution that is to come. And with that thought, steadying the last of her resolve–Tsukuyomi slips off into the shadows of the dawn, into the darkness, into her light.)