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Their wing of the estate is quiet and still when Yuuka returns home after having sent Cross off. She briefly debates going to check if Tsurugi is home, but decides against it, not trusting her ability to stay composed in front of her brother.
Instead, she walks, silent as she can, to her mother’s room. When the door slides open, Mifuyu looks up at her and all she has to say is, “you’re home late.”
“Sorry,” Yuuka says. “You know how it is, missions and all…”
Yuuka wants to cry, suddenly. Turn back into being six years old and climbing into her mother’s lap, sobbing her little heart out. I’m going to die in six months, Mother, she wants to say, shifting on her feet. I’ll never make it to seventeen.
“Where’s Tsurugi?” Mifuyu asks with nary a change in expression. Yuuka shrugs, a helpless motion. She swallows. “In the future, don’t be out so late,” is what Mifuyu says in conclusion.
“Missions will keep both of us out late, Mother,” Yuuka mutters, suddenly wondering why she’s here at all. She can’t say Mifuyu was ever a loving and tender mother, but this distance—
I’m going to die, Mother, she thinks numbly.
Cross is good on his word, she can trust this. But if Maru finds out, he’ll never take it well, never mind Tsurugi, he’ll be sure to raise hell on earth. She can’t say it. She won’t say it.
She almost does say it, wondering, if she looked at her mother right now and said, I have a malignant tumor in my brain and the doctor gave me six months at most as an estimate, her icy blankness would crack. If she said, in the end, I was never strong enough to take the ring back from Tsurugi, and I have no more chances left, would it make Mifuyu hold out her arms and hold Yuuka?
Sometimes, Yuuka looks at her mother and she thinks, do you regret marrying into the Gojo clan?
Her mother is a hard woman, an unforgiving woman, married into the Gojo clan and first giving birth to a son with no cursed energy and then a daughter with the Zen’in’s ancestral technique. It was with the same clinical coldness with which she took the ring away from Yuuka that she sat her down and said, you are forbidden from using your cursed technique. This is a decree from the clan elders.
“Good night, Mother,” is all she can manage, throat tight and aching, walking just as quickly away.
This is the thing about belonging to the Gojo clan: there is no one who can live up to the shadow Gojo Satoru cast, and there is no one who can live up to the shadow Okkotsu Yuuta cast. You marry into one of the elite clans, and you sign your life away. Mifuyu was only good for the children she could birth, and—
Her brother and mother don’t tell her anything about her father, but she knows.
I am going to die, Mother.
Yuuka understands that her mother’s harshness is borne from the conditions and life thrust upon her, but at the end of the day, what else is Yuuka but a little girl who just wants to be held and comforted? It’s in moments like this that she misses her grandfather the most, because her grandfather always had kindness and love to offer her where her mother had none.
She has never asked her mother if she misses her father and mother-in-law.
I am going to die, Mother. Mifuyu will never know this.