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When was the last time she even won a duel?
Aoi pondered her losing streak and drought of meaningful victories in the dark, with her cheeks still stained with tears and her heart heavy. The storm clouds around her head parted for no one. They only worsened with the blame that she felt.
If she had duelled a little better, if she had been a little luckier…
Would Akira be awake right now?
The doctors had turned her away from overstaying her welcome at his bedside. She was young. She deserved to sleep in a warm, comfortable bed and to eat meals at a proper table. They told her that Akira would want these things for her. She agreed. He would. He had spent his adolescence trying to secure those luxuries for her, she would be ungrateful to squander them even if it was in the name of love.
She wanted to be there for the rise and fall of his breath, of the wrinkle of his eyelashes as he slept so deep in the coma that Ai put him in. For now, she could only imagine but in the morning, she would return and keep vigil for him until Ai’s madness could be resolved.
But until then…
Aoi’s head was swamped with these thoughts. Her chest ached from how hard she had cried. She still felt drenched by the torrential wave of her defeat. She couldn’t even look at her Marincess cards right now, she couldn’t ask the idea of Aqua for advice.
They hadn’t been partners for very long but even so, they had meant the world to each other. It felt like the perfect interlocking of fate: the Ignis and the girl who inspired the Ignis, she was Miyu’s childhood friend and the reason that Miyu fought bravely during the Hanoi Project. That desire for truth and forgiveness was what had allowed Aqua to become Aqua but in the end…
It was all water through her hands.
If Miyu could be strong for Aoi, Aoi thought she could be strong for Miyu but that didn’t seem like it was the case. Their odds were insurmountable. Time and time again, Aoi lost. As Blue Angel, as Blue Girl, as Blue Maiden. Her last win was against Haru but Haru was a self-sacrificing soldier and so the victory rang hollow. The duel hardly showed off the depths of the ocean in which Marincess could fight.
So it made Aoi wonder: if she couldn’t win with Aqua’s cards, could she have won with her own? Maybe if she had used her once faithful deck, maybe the outcome could have changed. The Trickstars had done well to propel her up from a nobody on the social stage to one of the most brilliant Charisma Duelists but they had only gone on to serve her so well as her foes came from shadows darker than fame hogs and bullies. But still…
Aoi wanted to believe she could have changed the outcome if she had changed the preparation, or if she had been given a better hand as dealt by the shuffle.
These were all the thoughts that hounded Aoi as she blamed herself for her and her brother’s loss. It was all going down and down, like the battering of rain. It was so quiet except outside of her head as she tried to find the moment where she could have stopped Ai, where she could have stopped Bohman or Spectre, or even won against freaking Soulburner. Small things became big things and those big things weighed her down.
She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t get comfortable. The apartment felt bigger and lonelier than usual, even as Aoi hid herself away from it all in her bedroom until she couldn’t take it anymore. She needed someone to come down from the heavens itself to part the dark clouds and torrential rains and dry it all up but as if.
There was no such saviour.
There was only herself.
To think that there was someone like that for her would be foolish.
And yet, unable to bear how heartbroken and alone she was, she reached out for the trick of light anyway. From underneath the tangle of her doona, she emerged and she took her deck box off her bedside table. Through all her changes, her ups and downs, her innumerable losses, she still had someone and when she opened her deck box, she found who she was looking for: Trickstar Holly Angel.
Aoi hazarded a smile through blurry eyes when she saw her former ace monster. The foiled card caught a gleam of outside, fluorescent light and then, nothing. She was just pretty ink and colourful lines on printed cardboard but to Aoi, she was something sacred.
“I’ve missed you…” Aoi confessed out loud. “Have you… missed me?”
She hoped so.
It was silly to think such things about an inanimate card but truly, Trickstar Holly Angel had meant so much to her for so long. Trickstars were the first deck that Aoi ever truly labbed, she designed her first avatar around them, and she began her journey for all its good and all its peri. Together, they had taken on the Datastorms, viruses of the brain, and so much more. She hoped that Trickstar Holly Angel could forgive her for wanting to give the element of water a try but in all honesty, the attribute of light continued to beckon to her as she derived such comfort from Trickstar Holly Angel’s presence even in something so small as her card form.
In her peculiar gratitude, Aoi brought the card closer and she kissed it. It was silly but she felt such immense relief: a sensation so powerful that it could have singed her lips. Aoi’s brow twinged, she couldn’t decide if it were imagination or not but before the indecision could be broken, reality proved itself as stranger than fiction. There was a flash of light. The card burned up with a light which was divine and fey and then.
She was there, in the flesh, larger than life.
Aoi couldn’t believe her eyes but here she was: Trickstar Holly Angel.
But she had heard rumours about days past, of the extrasensory and the psychic and unreal. That on occasion, when a Duelist’s bond with their monster went above and beyond, it became real and supernatural.
Sure enough, this seemed to be the case as Trickstar Holly Angel preened for her. Her hand drew up and she tilted her head, she played with a strand of her blonde hair and blinked owlishly as she studied Aoi as though equally nonplussed that Aoi were real outside of her virtual avatar identities.
“H-How?” Aoi breathed, her voice all broken up and clogged with tears.
The how and why apparently didn’t matter to Trickstar Holly Angel. She couldn’t communicate in a human language but her body language more than made up for it. She swept Aoi up in a huge hug and though surprised at first, Aoi eased into it.
She held tight onto Trickstar Holly Angel’s arms. She buried her face in Trickstar Holly Angel’s bosom and she cried. She cried hard enough to dry out her throat and cry out her eyes with horrid sobs from deep inside of her. Trickstar Holly Angel observed in kind, however, she held Aoi close and allowed Aoi to mourn and rage and grieve.
“Holly Angel,” Aoi cried, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ve missed you so much.”
Trickstar Holly Angel chittered in response. Despite her human-like appearance, she was still a fairy and a monster and so, there was something odd and alien about how her language, both spoken and enacted. She stroked Aoi’s hair and held her close.
It was strange how everything about her was so angelic and divine. From the grace that she held for Aoi in her heart: the shiny toy no longer so shiny and new, now restored. The width and volume of her: she was real. She smelt like meadowland fields and luxurious perfume, she was soft and her clothing was taut. Her figure was voluptuous and full of undeniable heft to prove that she was no illusion. It was bizarre but it was everything that Aoi needed as she crashed out.
Gently, Trickstar Holly Angel put Aoi to bed. She lowered her down into the middle of her bed and she laid down next to her. She pulled up the sheet and snuggled next to Aoi. Through these wordless expressions of affection, Aoi understood what Trickstar Holly Angel wanted from her: to get some rest.
Distracted, Aoi obliged. She closed her eyes and let go of all the terrible thoughts that weighed on her mind. Now relaxed, Trickstar Holly Angel kissed Aoi good night.
Aoi’s heart fluttered, she inhaled suddenly. Trickstar Holly Angel’s lips were so warm. Too warm, even. She was like sunlight incarnate, both the good and bad. The overflowing energy of summer, the wild adventures and the dehydration and the crackle of a wildfire ignited in a spark. But Aoi liked it. Even when it scared her as Trickstar Holly Angel reminded her of how monstrous she was beneath the glitter and glam of her idol-like appearance.
Trickstar Holly Angel kissed her passionately, with tongue not just against Aoi’s mouth and lips but her cheeks, too. She licked up all the salt and caressed Aoi as she urged her to surrender the waters of failure that she had cried. In this rapture, Trickstar Holly Angel drew in closer and closer into the curve of Aoi’s thin body. She cradled Aoi like she was the most precious treasure of a human being, not just a little girl. She chittered like an insect in Aoi’s ear. The noise echoed in Aoi’s head over and over again, like a hypnotic spell that caused her to enter a strange and treacherous, deep sleep.
In that world of dreams, Aoi found herself as far, far away from water as she possibly could.
On the other side of all those tears and kisses, Aoi stood on an as yet unprepared stage in the middle of nowhere with the sun high and the temperatures higher. All around her was the expanse of the desert in the middle of the day. The sand dunes in the distance were high and sloped, the sand sparkled in the harshness of the spotlight like a sun which dried up all her tears. Or maybe, the sun and the spotlight was one in the same as from the desert came a great party: an idol’s grand concert.
“Aoi,” Trickstar Holly Angel called her, her hand extended forth with a slight curl to her fingers and mischief in her mouth, “hurry up, the show’s about to start.”