I was caught off guard by how sudden and intense my desire was to leap out of bed and go to Hina. I was possessed of the urge, for just a moment, to flood my muscles with Flame enough to stand under my own power in spite of the egregious harm I’d already inflicted on them, to rip the intravenous needle from my arm heedless of the pain it would bring. She was hurting, and she needed me. I wanted to feel her touch, press my forehead against hers until she felt better, tangle our limbs together until our heartbeats matched—
Logic caught the urge by the scruff. What an absurd emotional response; pushing my body past its currently much-reduced limits was a terrible idea, especially because Hina definitely did not need me there that urgently. I did have to talk to her, but in the sense that we should talk, not the primal need I had just experienced. What a drug she was. But she could wait; I was in the middle of something here.
“It’s…fine,” I told the room, glaring slightly at Ebi in particular for apparently snooping on my text messages. “As for—what did you call it? Inscrutable egg mania? That has nothing to do with undoing whatever the fuck Sugawara did. It’s just the right thing to do.” Ebi’s perfectly controlled digital face betrayed nothing, so I shifted my gaze to Takagiri. “Say more. He only has access to what your mantle experiences? But we destroyed that, didn’t we? Before you even, uh, betrayed him. So even if he can still get that info from you next time you sleep, as far as he’s concerned, the last thing you were doing was trying to kill us, so all’s good—no betrayal, no need for blackmail or explosion. Right?”
Takagiri made a soft, choked sound, and I realized my mistake in casually bringing up the destruction of her mantle like that. In all practical senses, the construct was her proper body, her ideal form, and without it, she was trapped in the flesh of a balding samurai. My own dysphoria—which I was still coming to terms with labeling as such—must have paled in comparison. Regret and awkwardness made my stomach twist as I watched her take a breath and blink away the trauma we’d inflicted on her, straightening up to meet my eyes.
“It is not just my experiences. It is also knowledge, thoughts, feelings. He will know what I have done. It is all—his.”
Her voice broke in that horrible way, the sound of violation and despair and terror. It tore at my heart. I had to help her, to free her from this—while my mind raced, Yuuka stood from her chair and crossed the room toward her. Despite Takagiri’s currently masculine body, the misandrist Heliotrope Radiance showed no revulsion, and instead, gently touched the woman’s arm, speaking more softly than I’d ever heard her. I couldn’t understand the Japanese, but from the tender tone and steady voice I knew she was talking down her former enemy from the verge of a panic attack.
If only I could be half as helpful. My bedside manner was shit; I was not equipped for this the way Yuuka was. For all her abrasiveness, she was also Amane’s best friend, fiercely loyal, and so knew how to gently guide somebody out of the long shadows of cruelty and abuse. I couldn’t do the same; my job was to fix the larger magical crisis. But Ai had already been working Takagiri’s no-sleep problem for two days straight—and was probably therefore running on fumes herself by now—and I doubted there was anything I could come up with in these next few moments that she hadn’t already ruled out with all her genius and software and instrumentation.
So that left me stuck. Maybe I actually was better off just trusting that the Radiances would see Takagiri through this nightmare, and my time would be better spent having the dreaded talk with Hina? I ran through what Takagiri had said, the particular nature of how she was trapped. We weren’t in a position to defuse the literal bomb attached to her Flame, or the metaphorical one that was the blackmail, so all we had to do for now was just find a way to let her get some sleep without letting Sugawara into her head. And with her mantle destroyed, that might already be the case—the issue was that we couldn’t take that risk.
And when I thought of it like that, I had it.
“Yuuka.”
She turned back to me. “Ezza.”
“Taking risks is stupid. Can’t we just check the future? See whether any information transfer would actually take place if she went to sleep?”
Yuuka froze. Her mouth worked, as though she were searching for words and discarding everything she found, until eventually her shoulders slumped. “You dipshit.”
“What? Does it not work?”
“Fuck,” Ebi groaned. “You said that in front of a data conduit straight to Sugawara.”
The beeping of my heart monitor accelerated again. “Oh. Oh shit. Fuck, right, opsec, sorry—”
“It’s…whatever,” Yuuka decided. “The whole point is to make sure he can’t get in her head anyway. Stop shaking. Actually—Ebi?”
“Yeah, on it.” The android snapped her slender, carbon-fiber fingers, and the beeping went silent.
I took a deep breath. “Sorry. I should know better.”
“You should, but it’s fine.” Yuuka shrugged. “I mean, she already knows about Ebi, and that’s a hell of a cat to be letting out of the bag.”
“And we already suspected that your power was yochi,” Takagiri put in.
“There ya have it,” Yuuka sighed. “As for the idea—yeah, let’s do it. I’m not getting any good signal about how it’d turn out right now, but if you do the Statue of Liberty thing, I bet it’ll work.”
I resisted the urge to ask why she couldn’t go down the chain of events to see the hypothetical silver ripple exposed by my Flame’s illumination via the silver she could see now—probably just too noisy, I guessed. It’d be decoherent mush rather than anything resembling useful information. That was an obvious candidate to improve upon, though; if we were to reverse engineer exactly how her eye worked and give it some proper testing—
While the magic-enjoying part of my mind was chewing on that, Ebi was yelling.
“No open Flame! Not when we’ve got Amethyst on critical alert down the hall. I can’t believe I have to tell you of all people that’s a shit fucking idea, miss best friend.”
Yuuka made an annoyed sound. “I know exactly how bad of an idea it is—it’s not, and it’s worth it. She’ll agree. She’d say so herself if she were up.”
“And she is not here to consent to it, bitchface.”
“Go wake her up and ask her yourself, then.”
“Uh,” I broke in. “If it’s that much of a concern, can’t we just take this somewhere a bit further from her? Down to the…”
I trailed off before I could blurt out “the ripple-shielded room in the basement.” I wasn’t sure it was classified per se, but I had set myself on edge with my previous fuckup. Takagiri raised her eyebrows anyway as Yuuka shook her head.
“Nah, moving you or her is a pain in the arse. Ebi, if you’re that worried, go on over to her and have the TXA ready. It’ll only take a sec.”
“Don’t fucking tell me how to do my job,” Ebi spat, but to my surprise, she stomped out the door rather than argue further—insofar as an android without real feet could stomp, anyway. It was more like angry clicking that receded down the hall.
Takagiri looked guilty. “That is also my shame. That Ishikawa-chan must be cared for. I knew and did nothing.”
“Nah, it’s not. Sugawara’s a cunt, and we’ll kill him. Ezza?”
I thought for a moment. “I mean, part of what we agreed was that I wouldn’t be obligated to participate in murder, justified or otherwise. But in principle, yeah, I think everyone’s better off if he’s—”
“Flame.” She looked like she wanted to hit me, which was warranted. She was in the process of taking off her eyepatch entirely, shaking out her hair as she did. She fixed me with a glare of crimson crystal, and I flinched involuntarily under the baleful magi-organ.
“Uh—yeah, on it.”
I tried to call forth my Flame. Heatcold trickled out of my chest and down my arm—but the feeling just pooled in the scars on my forearm, no ignition into the blinding white fire. I didn’t have any pain of my own to feed it, too swaddled in the comfortable coziness of whatever painkiller regimen I was on. I also didn’t have the frustration I’d felt with Hina, or the desperation of when I’d saved Yuuka.
But I did have anger on Takagiri’s behalf, far more than I expected.
My hand burst into a swirl of fire, painting the room in white glare splashed by ultra-black shadows everywhere the light could not reach as well as a few places it ought to have been able. I gasped at my first trickle of real pain, strong enough to reach me even through the medicated numbness. Takagiri flinched at the burst of raw magic, which made me feel unaccountably guilty. Was I unknowingly following in the footsteps of something Sugawara had done to her? Or was that just because the last time we’d done this had been when we’d beaten the shit out of her?
But she met my eyes, and I saw that my anger at what had been done to her was a shallow reflection of the ocean of her own rage. She’d been abused beyond belief by Sugawara’s violation of her Flame, his intrusion into her mind and soul—the invasion of sleep was a realm of horror I’d hoped to never directly encounter.
We would set it right. It was in that shared fury that I found the energy to feed my Flame and keep my arm aloft for Yuuka. My arm shook slightly from even that simple exertion, a sign of how badly I’d overworked my muscles, growing worse with each second. But all I had to do was keep my arm where Yuuka could see it as she alternated between staring into the blinding cascade and looking at Takagiri.
After ten or twenty very long seconds of turning her head to and fro, a frown crossed Yuuka’s face, then a wince. She hurriedly waved for me to put my arm down. I extinguished my flame, and the unnatural light evaporated off the walls, the spots of abyssal shadow re-normalizing as the overhead LEDs reasserted their neutral, medical glow. I opted to bring in my other hand to gently lower my trembling, exhausted arm and give it a little nerve-stimulating shake, rather than let it flop haphazardly.
“Well?”
“Transmission would still take place. And it’s…” she shifted her weight, rubbing her head. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him.”
“Uh. Is that a prophecy?” I sort of hoped it was.
“I’ll make it one.” The anger was in her, as well, which I found oddly relieving. She put the eyepatch back on. “But as for what I saw…yeah, no, we gotta stop this. I think we can, is the good news.” She put a hand on Takagiri’s shoulder. “We’re gonna go talk to Ai. I’ve got an idea.”
Before Yuuka could lead her out of the room, Takagiri bowed to me. “Thank you.”
“It’s…fine? It’s the right thing to do. It’s what the Vaetna would do,” I decided. “Monsters die. And I was just, uh, the torch.” I gestured at Yuuka. “She did the hard stuff.”
Takagiri came up out of the bow. “Torch? There is a better word, I think.”
“…Lantern?”
“Lighthouse.”
—
I have no idea if Takagiri intended to set my thoughts so awhirl with that, but it stuck in my brain as they left, sending me teetering along a precarious tightrope of thoughts pertaining to the circumstances of my arrival at Todai, the fact that I was seemingly starting to fit in, and, of course, the “gender shit,” as I’d put it. I’d actually been intending to ask Takagiri about that, hadn’t I? Before I’d gotten sidetracked by her much more pressing issue, of course.
Latching onto that thought, thinking of my handful of interactions with “Kimura,” I realized I probably already knew where she stood—she had already been under the impression I was some flavor of not-cis at the BBQ. The way she’d repeatedly complimented my hair, her hesitant probing as to my pronouns, and most tellingly, what she’d spat at me right before Alice had revealed they were of a kind:
They won’t understand you. They will use it against you. It will end like this for you as well.
Grim. But she’d said all that under the misapprehension that none of the Radiances were trans themselves, that they would be so coldhearted as to hold my gender over me as Sugawara had done to her, and she seemed to have changed her mind in the sleepless days between then and now. Actually—had that been why she’d first sought me out, back when she’d simply been “my stalker?” To scope me out to see whether I was slipping into the same situation she’d been in for years?
I’d get a chance to talk to her more about it later, once we were both in better places…hopefully. I was glad that my combo trick with Yuuka seemed to have made a difference; moving the needle was both satisfying to my problem-solving brain and a salve for my justice-seeking brain.
Unfortunately, without that cognitive chew toy as a means of self-distraction, I was left staring at the text Hina had sent.
It felt plaintive and desperate, and I was no longer able to pretend I felt she deserved to be so miserable—censured, perhaps, and some guilt behooved her, but I could no longer deny the presence of that urge to go to her, to comfort her. Stupid, irrational animal-brain. We needed to have a serious talk about the pretenses under which she’d brought me to Todai, her own morality, the ethics of our relationship; instead, I was growing increasingly worried that, once we were face to face, I’d just…not do any of that and simply snuggle up against her and pretend everything was alright between us so that I could keep enjoying the animal comforts of her company. I liked having a girlfriend, and I liked even more that she was so…well, more. I didn’t want to give her up, so I was possessed of the desire to avoid the talk we needed to have.
I sent a message before I could give in to those feelings.
Ezzen: Hey, yeah, we should talk.
Where? Doing it over text would minimize the temptations and desires that came with being face-to-face with her, but…no. She needed my physical presence. Did I want her to come here to the 18th floor and sit on that chair Alice and then Yuuka had used, continue the parade of magical girls? That didn’t feel right, though it was certainly logistically simplest if I was still bedridden. My body still felt too weak to get up, and I didn’t want to try before consulting a medical professional. That would just be a mundane version of overloading my muscles with magic.
“Ebi?” I called out.
“Yeah,” came a voice from—I wasn’t really sure where. I looked around, then realized it was an intercom mounted into the wall next to my bed. I felt kind of stupid talking to it—I remembered the video feed of Amane she’d shown and looked up at the ceiling. Sure enough, there was a little black dome in the corner. I made eye contact with that; easier than with a human.
“What’s my, uh, status? Can I get up and walk around?”
“Not gonna ask how Amane is?”
“Uh. How’s Amane?”
“She’s alright, no thanks to you guys.”
“Oh. Yeah, that tracks. Sorry.” I resisted the urge to derail into arguing about the necessity of it. “So. Can I get up?”
“To go exchange fluids with your female?”
I bristled. “Dude, what’s with you?”
“Messing with you,” replied the voice from the terminal. “I think you can probably make the trip. On two conditions.”
I sighed. “No green to juice up my limbs, got it. And we will not be doing anything…untoward, relax, not a drop of red in sight. I’m sorry about Amane, really. Give her my apologies when she’s up.”
“Uh huh. Well, I’m tied up with her right now—literally, arm in her stomach—so you’re on your own. You know how to take out an IV?”
“Yeah.” Old memories. “I can manage, I think. Can I get, uh, crutches?”
“Cabinet to your left. Haven’t adjusted them since last time you used them.”
There was a click as the intercom disconnected. I went back to my phone.
Ezzen: Okay, coming to you, I think. Give me a few minutes.
Removing the intravenous needle was simple, just pressing some gauze over it and pulling it out carefully so as not to damage the vein too much. I’d done it a hundred times before, and the technology hadn’t advanced much in the past few years. As I reached for the roll of medical tape conveniently attached to the IV unit, I was pleased to find my arms were approaching something I could call regular function; though they still had that day-after-workout weakness, and would surely have the associated soreness once the medication left my system, they weren’t shaking. Slow movements were manageable.
After binding down the gauze with the tape, I gave the rest of my body an experimental stretch, quietly hoping that some of the superhuman speed and lightness had stuck around after my self-enhancement. No luck—I just felt weak all over, my core and my legs sharing my arms’ recalcitrance to exert themselves any further. But as I sat up a little more and extracted myself from the blanket, something did feel different: despite having slept for two full days, I didn’t feel stiff in the slightest. My muscles were mush, but the tendons were loose and relaxed. I tentatively put my legs in the butterfly position and tried to stretch my back. My forehead could now touch the mattress without effort.
That was new—and exciting. I tried a few more stretches of that sort and found the same, easily pushing all my joints to their maximum from a cold start. That seemed to be the whole of the changes, though—my foot had not magically grown back, my hand’s burn scars were the same as they’d always been, and I’d already established that my hair was still the new, mysteriously vibrant orange. Still, this one minor change was enough to set me abuzz with nerves as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed; proof undeniable that I’d been permanently altered by the ripple I’d commanded.
With a shimmy and a lean, I reached for the cabinet Ebi had indicated and pulled the door open. I found the crutches—plus, between them, my prosthetic foot sitting atop a new stabilizer module disc.
I grabbed the prosthetic first and gave it a look. It was the same one I’d been using, judging by the minor scuff marks on the underside of the toes. I’d broken the {AFFIX} lattice when I’d rewoven it to launch myself at Takagiri by anchoring it to the floor of Hina’s room instead of to my foot; it’d been useless after that, hanging loose in my sock for the remainder of the incident. It seemed Ai had repaired it, though, as the prosthetic attached to my amputation without issue.
The stabilizer module was entirely new, by the looks of it. The old one had been ruined beyond repair from Hina’s meteoric pounce upon the barbecue—and she’d made the old one, which meant this one was also her handiwork, put together while I was unconscious. Alice had said Hina hadn’t left her room at all, but her guilt evidently wasn’t just making her mope; she was already trying to atone, at least when it came to me specifically. The first stabilizer module had been much the same, an apology for feeling like she’d hurt me. She did her best work when she felt guilty.
That would make this conversation even more difficult.
—
The penthouse was vacant. With Ai in her workshop, Alice packed with meetings, and Amane and Yuuka in the medical ward under Ebi’s supervision, there was nobody around, and the common living space was showing its disuse. The midday sun shone through the panel of windows onto empty bean bag chairs and the empty easel. The dish rack next to the sink was empty, but the island was littered with takeout containers and empty bowls of instant ramen; Hina was the primary cook for the household, and with her staying exclusively in her room since our collective return from the disastrous barbecue, I suspected nobody had had the time or energy to cook real meals.
I’d only been able to distract myself for a few minutes by aimlessly wandering around the penthouse before my feet had dragged me inexorably to the threshold of Hina’s room to face the silly clip-art sapphire that dangled from the door by a lone piece of tape. I was a little nervous to once again enter this den of coziness and clove incense and candlelight; I feared it would suck me right in, such that I would be unwilling to have the conversation we both needed. But we’d managed to do it last time, after our crimes at the oil rig. I put my hand to the wooden door and knocked.
Nothing. I frowned.
“Hina?”
Still nothing. My frown deepened as I reached for my phone.
Ezzen: Hey, I’m outside. Can I come in?
Hina: always
I tested the doorknob and found the room unlocked. Swinging the door open revealed darkness; her flight simulator at the far end of the foyer sat inert, and no glow of candles shone from the archway into her bedroom. I gingerly stepped in, hobbling to where the rooms met and looking into her den. It was dark, blackout curtains drawn to repel the sun, and I debated whether I should leave the door open behind me just so I wouldn’t be drowned in darkness. But this conversation deserved due privacy, even with the penthouse as empty as it was; it was the principle of the thing. I closed the door behind me and called out.
“Uh. Hina?”
Still nothing. I scanned the darkness, looking suspiciously at the various lumpy blankets. Was she burrowed under one of those, nesting as deep as she could to shut out the world?
“Is this all just a prank? Are you about to pounce on me? Because I’m really not up for it.”
No movement and no reply. I went to my phone again.
Ezzen: ???? I’m in your room. Where are you?
I stared at the screen, the only source of light in here, waiting for a reply. It took a solid fifteen seconds.
Hina: the other room
Oh. That made sense. For something like her, that was the ultimate refuge, entirely inaccessible to anyone but her fellow flamebearers. But I wasn’t going back out there; even if she’d sealed the room back up after its catastrophic breach—not a guarantee, knowing her—the idea of going back out there filled me with dread. Besides, I physically couldn’t. Did she expect me to just dive up and out of reality and swim right to her? I couldn’t recreate whatever I’d done to reunite with my spear; it was right here in my tattoo binding.
Ezzen: I can’t go back out there. If you and I are going to talk, it’s going to be right here, in your room in the building. Please?
“Okay,” she whispered.
I jumped at the lump on the floor that hadn’t been there a moment ago. I’d been expecting her to put up more of a fight, and the fact that she hadn’t was, frankly, worrying. And my intuition was right; she had bundled herself up, mummified in blankets and darkness.
“Hina? You…alright?”
“No.”
Well, it had been a stupid question. I carefully lowered myself down to the floor, setting the crutches beside me, and folded my legs. We sat in silence for what must have been two full minutes as I waited for her to say more. In that time, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and I saw that the room was a bit of a mess, wrappers and other trash scattered all across the floor. Next to Hina’s lump sat a fist-sized box. It was hard to tell the color in the darkness. Red? Maybe green?
When Hina did speak up, her voice sounded like crushed gravel.
“I hate this.”
My heart hurt, but I tried to keep stable, hear her out. “Which part?”
“I hate fucking up like this. I hate making Alice and Ai and Amane and Yuuka and Ebi and you all mad at me. You’re way too nice and forgiving to the…the fucking hazard I am. I hurt a lot of humans—a lot of people, and I didn’t care. All I could think about was that he—she—was going to hurt you, and I went so far beyond overkill. It happens every fucking time, because I’m just…broken. And I can’t stop myself, I don’t want to stop myself until it’s too late. And now you’re gonna break up with me and I deserve that.”
That was a pretty accurate assessment of the situation, and she’d reached the same conclusion I had: this was heading for a breakup. But as I’d feared, the depths of her remorse cut me and made it difficult to just come out and agree with her. I didn’t want to hurt her more than she was already hurting herself.
“I…I’d like to think we can make this work,” I muttered. “Keep going with this. With us. And there’s a…” I wanted to broach the gender stuff, the pretense, but I couldn’t, not yet. It wouldn’t matter anyway unless she was able to control herself better, to respect the wishes of her teammates and me before she caused disasters and hurt people. So that’s where this had to start. “You want to be better, yeah?”
“So fucking much. But I can’t. I can’t,” the lump cried. “It’s not—there’s no control over it at all.” She was quiet for a few moments. “Yuuka’s right. She’s always right. I’m a fucking monster who can’t do anything but hurt people and you’re insane to want anything to do with me. They’re fucking stuck with me now, but you can leave. You should.”
Perhaps I should. But I didn’t want to.
“I can’t—how many people did you kill?”
The Hina-lump was quiet for a few seconds.
“None.”
“Really?”
“That’s what Ai said, but she’s just trying to make me feel better. Waste of her fucking time.”
“I don’t think she would lie to you about that,” I reasoned, trying to keep my voice soft. “I mean…we did act fast, and Miyoko supposedly performed at least one miracle, to save the food. I’d be surprised if she did that before doing everything in her power to save her, uh, flock. I…can believe she and Hongo managed to keep anybody from dying. Begrudgingly. Ai definitely wouldn’t lie about that,” I repeated. It was so weird for me to be defending Hikanome’s decency and capabilities like this; this storm brought strange bedfellows indeed.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. I believe you,” she lied, voice dead.
“Hina,” I sighed. I had to switch tracks. “Just…so you want to be better, yeah?”
“Right now, sure. But it never lasts. I’ll just…run away again, find something to hunt until I feel better, and then it’s back to crazy kemono bitch. It’s just what I am. Not—not transcendent, not more, not a fairy. Just a really fucked up girl who’s better off staying right here where she can’t start hurting people again.”
I thought back to the ebb and flow of our encounters, how she’d fled from me on that first night, and more recently, how she had freaked out and run away to hunt Takagiri, the thing that had kicked off this whole debacle.
“That’s what happened after I, uh, hit you?”
“Mhm,” said the lump.
“Okay, uh…therapy?” That was the first thing that came to mind.
“Therapy is for humans.”
“Hina,” I groaned.
“I…” Her voice collapsed into a throaty whine that made my throat tighten. “Sorry. Sorry. I mean that literally, though. I’m just—yeah, I got a diagnosis from a psych. Borderline, bipolar. But I feel stuff so much stronger than a human does, so I can’t just…I can’t think my way out of it like you’re supposed to. Drugs don’t do shit either.”
“You’re not beyond help. Nobody is.”
—is what I was supposed to say, but I could recognize that would get nowhere with her. Instead, I was quiet, trying to think through what I knew of her, all the weird inhumanity and screwed-up priorities. I wanted her to be better. I needed her to be better; so did her teammates. What could make her be better? What did she care about?
So what I actually said was:
“Leverage.”
The lump shifted wordlessly, and I sighed a little, crawling toward her over the rolling pillow-and-blanket landscape. My limbs were weak, but this was the most forgiving terrain imaginable, and I eventually laid down next to the lump, on my back, looking up at the ceiling.
“Leverage,” I repeated. “Lesson one. You were trying to teach me that because you thought it was important for me as a flamebearer. It’s your…philosophy, I guess, or something like it. And that means it works for you, right? Even when you were manic—and you sure as hell were that night—you recognized it, valued it. So…I think you can be better, if we have the right leverage over you. And we do, I think. Because you love us—all of us. Right?”
The lump moved slightly closer to me, blanket rustling in the quiet, until her back—at least I was pretty sure it was her back—pressed against my arm. I found myself smiling and took that as a sign to continue.
“Thought so. It’s sort of…all you care about, isn’t it? And that’s not good, but it gives us a lot of leverage over you. I’m sure that…Alice, probably, has tried this before, and it sounds like it hasn’t worked. But as for me…I’ve got some idea of what you want from me, and I think—I hope—that you want it badly enough to stop you from acting on your worst impulses. And I know that’s not really a viable long term solution. Hell, it’s not even a healthy one, but we have to start somewhere, and I do mean we. You brought me here, after all. And I think you’ve felt guilty about it the whole time.”
She whined again, loudly. She knew where this was going. I rolled over a little so that my chest was against her back and hugged her with one arm.
“Hina, why did you bring me here? To Todai, instead of the Spire? What’s the real reason?”
“We could help you here. That’s what Jason said. I shouldn’t have fucking listened. I knew I’d get hooked and push you too far, and—and…”
I rubbed her shoulder through the blanket. “Help me with being an egg, you mean.”
“Oh,” she choked out, “they talked to you.”
“Yeah. And—you didn’t,” I said sadly. “I…I wish you had. I think.”
The lump jerked away from me. “No. No you don’t. I woulda fucked it all up. I am fucking it all up. So fucking stupid to think I could have actually had anything with you without talking about it, but I was so scared you’d run off, and…I’m so fucking selfish,” she whimpered. “I mean, fuck, that first night? How—why the fuck did I think that was okay?”
“Hey.” I squeezed her shoulder, trying to stop the spiral. “I’m…you didn’t force anything on me. Not then and not since. You were the one who stopped, because you knew you’d go too far—hold on, didn’t we have this exact talk like a week ago?”
“Mm.”
“Huh. Yeah, we totally did. But it’s different now, isn’t it? Because—fuck,” I groaned, remembering something. “On the date, when we were at…the clothing place. Uniqlo?” That sounded right. “I was so nervous you’d fuckin’. Force me into a skirt. And not because of anything you said or did! That was all me. And there’s been…Christ, probably so many other little things I just forgot about because I thought they were normal to think.” I facepalmed with my free hand. “Hina, if you’re really scared of being overbearing with me, or of ruining me, you shouldn’t be.”
“Okay.”
I squeezed her closer. “You listening?”
“Yeah,” she muttered, more genuine. “Just…do I even like you because of who you are? Or do I just see…Alice in you? Or Jason? Do I just fucking chase trans people because they want to be something else like I do?”
I hesitated. That was a scary prospect, and one I’d been avoiding thinking about since Alice had gotten through to me. Of course I wanted Hina to want me—to love me—for me, not for a label she’d assigned me all by herself. That was the core of the problem, really, the thing that had been silently hanging over our relationship without my knowing: she’d been assuming what I wanted, that me being some flavor of not-cisgender was a foregone conclusion and conflating it with my desire to be more than human. That she had been right was immaterial; the communication was the problem.
Also, had she just confirmed to me that Jason was trans? I mentally pocketed that one for later, forcing my indolent arms and abs to help me sit up.
“I think…that’s for you to decide. But either way, it sounds like I have just…so much leverage over you. An amount that frightens me, honestly. So here’s…here’s what I’m thinking. I’ve already given you a second chance, back after what we did at Thunder Horse.” The stumbling corpse, that handful of pixels of guilt, flashed through my mind. “But that was…all under a pretense of how I thought our relationship worked, what you wanted from me. I had been under the impression you just wanted to make me ‘like you’ in the sense of being, well, violent and powerful and manic, and you were happy to play into that. But that’s not what you were really after. So—do you want to make me a girl? Is that your endgame? I…entertained some ideas that you did, but dismissed them for reasons that I’m now kicking myself for.”
Hina whimpered again, then shifted around and rolled over to face me, though she was still a lump under the knot of blankets. I heard her take a deep breath.
“I just want you to be happy. Not…miserable, stuck. Same thing I wanted for Alice I don’t—fuck,” she sobbed. “But I don’t care whether that’s a boy shape or a girl shape or something else. I swear. And I…cutie, this is so fucking stupid. I’m fucking stupid.”
“I think we’re both really dumb,” I sighed, relief pushing away nerves and tension. I don’t know what I’d have done had she said that, yes, her endgame was simply to make me a girl. But this I could work with—I wanted to make it work. “Okay, okay,” I breathed, “let’s establish a new baseline. Last time, we said boundaries. And that—honestly, I think that worked?” I took lump-Hina’s lack of response as depressed affirmation and continued. I felt like I was about to drive a knife into her chest, but it had to be said. “But this time, about what you did at Hikanome’s barbecue…I want to give you a third chance, make us work. I really do. But.”
This time, I waited until she responded.
“What,” she rasped, tears in her voice.
“But we’re done if you fuck up like that again, make a mistake so big that your failure to control yourself is measured in human lives, lives I know you care about deep down. You—we—got so fucking lucky this time that nobody actually died, but there’s no way that’ll happen again. That’s my leverage. You can fuck up in smaller ways, even overstep with me personally, now that we’re on the same page with what you want from me. But you’ll lose me forever if you can’t rein in your mania when it counts most.”
It was harsh, and it hurt to say, but I got it out there without so much as a stumble. The words poured from somewhere inside me, really, rather than being consciously thought out; it was just the only way she and I could still work.
A sound split the following silence, an ugly, sniffling sob. Then another. Hina began to bawl under her protective layer of blankets. I desperately wanted to lie back down and hug her close, or better yet, squirm my way under the bedding myself and wipe away the tears, but I held my ground, blinking away my own tears. She needed me to say it. The sobs turned to a hoarse whine that split me open, and I just had to sit through it and wait for her to either cry it all out or run away again.
After a very long minute, one of the longest of my life, the heart-rending sounds settled into quiet sniffles, and she gave her reply.
“Fuck, I’m so dumb,” she sobbed, “I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve me, you deserve so much better. What—” she sniffled, seeming to compose herself. Her voice was a little clearer when she continued. “Cutie, yes, of course. Be something for me to lose, please, please, please. That’s all I need. I won’t fuck up again, I won’t disappoint you. Please don’t leave me.”
At last, that was enough to get me to start crying as well. I laid back down with her, cradling the lump of her form with my body so that we were facing each other. It would have been vaguely lewd if we were face to face, some kind of sixty-nine arrangement, but the veil of separation between us kept the emotional intimacy with none of the absurd horniness that could spoil the moment. I wept more quietly than she did, and I certainly didn’t whine, but they were tears all the same. We could work—she was at least willing to try, for my sake. That meant so much.
She eventually spoke again.
“Cutie?”
“Yeah?”
“I should have asked. What do you want to be?”
“A Vaetna.” The response was automatic, but it wasn’t the whole thing, and she waited for me to find the words to continue. “I mean…gender-wise, I have no idea. I’m like an hour or two into thinking about this. I talked to Yuuka and Ebi about what they thought of me, and…does ‘exotic cave lesbian’ sound like me?”
She didn’t giggle at that, but I did hear a smile in her voice, the first since…since I’d crushed her ribcage, a solid week ago, somehow. Was our relationship that fraught?
“Mm. Sorta? But I thought…you didn’t want me to define this for you.”
“I still value your advice. I mean, this would be, what, your third time?” I was putting the pieces together. “I mean, Alice explained her whole history with this, and it’s sounding like Jason is also trans. Trans man, specifically, yeah?”
“Mhm…”
“Which means you do not have a history of turning people to girls specifically. That’s a relief.”
“So…no girl?”
“I don’t know yet. Something in the middle, maybe,” I mused, “or something else altogether? I’m just throwing darts at the wall here.”
“I’ll help you with whatever it is. You deserve to be happy.” Her voice fell. “You don’t deserve me,” she repeated.
“Remains to be seen,” I countered. “Do you honestly think you can never be better, long-term, without the, uh, Sword of Damocles we just set up? Will it just be leverage forever? What if—hold on,” I said, an idea germinating. “You blamed your Flame for making you like this.”
“Yeah. It makes me worse, pushes me too far,” she sighed, despondent. “Makes the mania like…a brain fog, or something, where I only have to care about one thing. I hate it, but not while it’s happening. It feels awesome while it’s happening.”
“So you want to be…normal? Or at least less extreme?”
“I guess. You’re going somewhere with this?”
“Well, if your Flame changed you to be like this, maybe it can change you back?”
I heard her breath catch. “No. No, no nono. Cutie, I can’t give up being what I am, I can’t go back to being just a human, it’d—”
“No, no,” I soothed. “I love your…physicality, the power, the way you just flit around like it’s nothing. I mean mentally. You’re more meshed into your Flame than…any flamebearer I know of, though I really still don’t have as good of a grasp on that as I’d like,” I griped. “Point is, being a flamebearer is to be changed. You’re practically the embodiment of that. If you want to become less…extreme, if you really want it badly enough, wouldn’t your Flame hear that?”
Hina was quiet for a moment, considering this. “Alice’s tail,” she sighed. “Sometimes the Flame just…does shit. Dramatic irony, Yuuka likes to call it. I might be the same.”
“Maybe,” I hedged. “But maybe not. Don’t you want to find out? Don’t you want to try?”
“So much,” she sobbed, voice breaking again. “Please. Why are you putting up with me? The others all just…you remembered lesson one.”
I gave this a moment’s proper thought. “…Because I like you,” I decided. “Despite everything. Because of everything? Ugh. Hold on.”
I sat up once more and crawled my way across the blankets once more, toward the blackout curtains. There was a little pulley, and I tugged with what little strength I could muster. Bit by bit, sunlight spilled into the room, playing over the peaks and valleys of bedding and scattering through the crumpled-up tissues. It felt a little cheesy, but I was tired of darkness, especially after my brief jaunt outside reality. I blinked repeatedly to help my eyes adjust as I ambled back toward the Hina lump, trying to find the seam of her little blanket pod. She didn’t resist as I raised it, and finally came face to face with those blue, blue eyes. They were bloodshot, and the entire mask around her eyes was red from crying.
“Hey. Sunlight’s good for you.” Hypocritical, honestly, given my history of indoorsmanship, but it was still correct.
Hina nodded, looking nervous, and shimmied out from under the blankets shyly, sapphire eyes glimmering in the sunshine. The moment I dropped the hem, she pounced forward, tackling me down onto the pillow I’d found myself on top of, and nuzzled my neck.
“Love you. Love you love you love you love you!”
I stroked her hair, taking in the scent—not a particularly good one, as she clearly hadn’t bathed, and whatever no-body-odor thing Alice had going on obviously didn’t extend to my feral girlfriend. That was okay. Her hand mirrored mine, flowing through my obnoxiously orange tresses, then rubbed around my chin and neck as a giggle fluttered through her.
“No beard, wow. Very cis. Soooo cis.”
“I…yeah.”
I found myself smiling—how could I not, really? She pressed something into my other hand, and I leaned away from her a little to get a look at it. It was a little red box—Valentine’s chocolate.
“You already gave me one of these.”
“That was Yuuka’s. I never gave you yours, and you soooo deserve it.”
I tried to force the stupid grin off my face for a moment of seriousness. “Hina, this will still be a process. It has to be. If this is you swinging back into mania…”
The mask of joy cracked on her face. Her shoulders hunched. “I know. I know, I know. Not yet. Just…I was ready for you to break up with me. I wanted you to. It feels kind of unfair that you didn’t, and I’m feeling good. Do…should we stop?”
“Maybe,” I thought. “I…I think you have to fix a bit more of what you broke, first, before we can go back into the swing of things. My libido hates me for saying that, by the way.”
“Okaaaay.” She was giving me the puppy eyes. “How can I help?”
“Uh. I’m sure Alice has an entire file folder about Hikanome and the government and all that. But on my end of things…you want to hunt? Together?”
From what she’d said, hunting was an isolation tactic, a punishment by way of depriving herself of the people she loved, giving herself something to fixate on until the mania kicked in again. But it didn’t have to be that; it could be something we shared, a way for me to be there with her, to indulge our mutual desire to be more, to destroy evil together.
As I’d hoped, she lit up. “Keep going,” she whispered gleefully.
“Sugawara’s alive, and he’s even more of a monster than we thought. He’s got Takagiri in a…I don’t know what to call it. Psychic stranglehold, horrible shit. Let’s stop the problem at the source.”
Author’s Note:
And that concludes the regular chapters of Arc 2: Trick Of The Light. There’s still the interlude to go, which will put a bit more of a bow on the events of this arc, but is mostly going to be lore. Yay! Also, there’ll be the big authors note post.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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