aiko's otter den

The Promise We Never Made Aloud - They never promised to protect each other. They never promised to wish for only good things. In a world where everything might just come to an end tomorrow, it’s surely okay to be a little bit selfish, isn’t it? Sonoko/Sumi.

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9.

The scolding only makes her sickened with herself.

Sumi’s response to this is to train for hours. Her fingers are bandaged and scarred from lost skin. Iona doesn’t train with her, but then she wouldn’t dare. She doesn’t feel the way about these things that Sumi does. This is surely life and death for her, but she doesn’t know what that means.

It’s up to her to teach her but she doesn’t really want to do that either. That’s effort she doesn’t have time to expend.

Still, she tries. “How are my shots?”

“You’ve missed less this go around, but you’re aiming too high.”

Sumi nods.

“There is no hurry.”

“Vertex hurry.”

“Vertex are parasites. They don’t think. They respond to a greater will.”

“How do you know?” She thinks about snapping, considers laughing until she dry heaves.

“I don’t. Just that their movements are predictable to be human.” Iona shakes her head, feathers moving. “Humans are only sometimes predictable.”

Sumi fires another arrow, not sure how she feels about that.

Then again, like Sonoko, Iona is very good at creating that uncertainty.

10.

Gin wakes her up—

Wait a minute how did she get into her house?

“Minowa-san!”

“Hi!”

Oh. No, no she had to be dreaming. She doesn’t say this. Instead she shrieks, remembering her adoptive father’s warning about people sneaking into her room out of nowhere. She didn’t even know either of the girls well enough for that to—

“Good morning.” Iona’s flat greeting cut Sumi from the potentially dangerous thought process. They were a team, after all. “Are we late?”

“Late to what?” Gin grins a bit wide and shakes her head no. “I’m up early for once! Sonocchi is still in the shower! Come on the mall is empty at this time of day! We can get some new cards!”

Cards, right. Accessories, powers. Signi. Familiars. Better ways to stay alive.

But of course they weren’t just gonna die were they?

She had completely forgotten about the well… game aspect of the situation, even though quite a few people in her year had fallen for the actual game that would save the world: WIXOSS.

If only they knew what it was. She was lucky to have that information.

She was, however, not lucky to have Gin dragging her down the bed to her holy water.

“Minowa— please wait! Minowa-san!”

“It’s so nice to have such a lively house,” she heard a servant say as she was dragged down the path.

11.

Iona-san is surprisingly talkative in the store. All the LRIGs are, in their own ways. Yuzuki and Minowa are chattering like no one is looking at them strangely and Nogi is nodding along to Piriluk and… picking the wrong cards anyway. Multiple times. It’d be annoying if Piriluk didn’t have a small smile plastered to her normally empty face.

“Are you listening?”

She meant to say yes, but Sumi felt her tongue lock up in her mouth. Iona sighed. “Of course not.”

The lack of disappointment made her eyes water a little with rage and pain. “I’m sorry… this is all a bit much.”

“They don’t teach you deck building in Vertex training,” Iona says without much change, like she hadn’t spoken at all. “You should learn what you can here. Play a game.”

Play? Talk to people. Try to win. Try to survive.

“They are not selected, like you.” Iona then shrugs, actually shrugs. “Mostly. You should be fine. Losing here doesn’t mean anything.”

“Losing means a lot,” she murmurs and finds Minowa-san is already playing. Each card is thrown down with a heavy flourish and Nogi…. Nogi-san watches and it hurts for whatever reason.

Sumi goes to find a game. It could be fun, after all.

12.

She loses twice in a row before her hair falls out of its neat array and she’s muffling screams of frustration into her bag. Iona isn’t laughing but she could still tell how amusing she had to look with her eyes watering and her face pale but for her cheeks full of red heat. She can’t even hear her opponent trying to — to what really? Comfort her? Scold her? Correct her techique? How could she save the world with such sloppy play?

“Wasshi!”

Nogi-san’s voice was an annoyance now, a hindrance. “Ooh,” she continues, her eyes likely alight on the board. “Not bad, Wasshi!”

She wants to stop the nickname, to correct it. But then, Minowa-san is clearer next to her. “Wow, it is, you really got close!”

Something unfurls in her stomach and she looks up. Her face is probably tear stained and undignified but she doesn’t mind. “What did I do wrong then?” She tries not to sniff at her comrades, tries to be earnest but right now her ego smarts.

They jump to her with tissues and affectionate touches and they honestly don’t help except to make her laugh. And then they’re all laughing because the chair topples over with the weight of three girls on it.

They end up not buying anything at all.

13.

Sonoko and Gin insist on their first names, insist with pride and fervor. They insist on hers too, like she matters, like she is a piece in their great puzzle. Like they are not put together by pride and duty and heroism. Like they’re friends.

Sumi trembles at the thought.

“She hesitated too.”

Sumi whirled to face Iona, who has her arms crossed casually, her black eyes without pity. “Who?” It’s too late to not be affected. She was too surprised by Iona, who had decided to talk out of nowhere again.

“Ruko.”

Sumi picks up Iona’s card, peering into Iona’s eyes as much as possible. “Ruko? Who is she?”

Iona looked at her as if through great pain. “A young, foolish hero. She’s probably dead.”

“Probably?”

Iona looks away. “I don’t remember. Yuzuki might.”

Sumi sits back on her bed. Then, with determined nonchalance, she turned around and went to pray to the Taisha for strength.

For some reason, it makes her stomach turn.

Eventually, however, she has to be nosy. There is no way she cannot. “How did you meet?”

Iona was quiet for a long time. If she hadn’t heard her snore before, Sumi would have assumed she was asleep. “…We fought. And she saved me. She saved us. She was so kind.”

Sumi didn’t imagine the crack in Iona’s voice, but she tried to pretend that the sobs that came after were fake.

She was so, so sorry she had asked.

14.

Everything feels wrong as they train. Sensei’s voice seems to warble, mixing with Sumi’s wonder. Does Sensei know? Does Taisha know?

Do the others know? That she wants to know more than anything. Iona had mentioned Yuzuki, not Piriluk. However, Piriluk was eccentric, special, terrifying. It was possible that she knew more than them.

Sumi, on a day when she could see without the universe spinning in terrifying directions, made herself ask with the promise of Udon. It was worth the slight lightness in her wallet.

“Iona knows someone named Ruko,” she begins without even taking a slurp of udon. (Sumi knows she will pay for that later.) “She said that Yuzuki-san would too.”

Sonoko takes a happy slurp and then looks over at Piriluk. Her own LRIG has gone quieter than usual, tracing a pattern on the floor of the card. Gin lifts Yuzuki’s card to squint at it.

“Is that true?”

Yuzuki looks all around her card, searching for an escape. Then Piriluk lets out a quiet sigh.

“You weren’t supposed to say anything, Iona,” she says flatly. “The Taisha will be cross.”

Iona lets out a snort. “Let them be.”

15.

Yuzuki settles on the floor of her card. Sumi takes a quick slurp of udon, watching Gin go back to hers. Sonoko sits on her heels in the chair, smiling because how else did you deal with a reveal like that? They don’t even know what was going on!

Gin leans Yuzuki against a water glass. The LRIG paces back and forth, a small pout on her face.

“Ruko was a Hero,” she says after a few moments as if giving up on something. “She fought for all of us LRIG, to change us. She implored herself to the gods.”

All three girls look at each other. Like a priestess? There weren’t many of those around these days, none that they had ever met.

Iona nods. “She wasn’t supposed to be, initially. She was supposed to be an ordinary girl with no wishes, no dreams. And she was made to fight, for a wish she wasn’t prepared with. And then she found one. To save us. To—” She pauss for a moment, struggling for words and chewing her lip to find any. “To end suffering.”

All three LRIG look at each other again. Piriluk licks her lips. Then, all of their phones chime at once.

Vertex.

Sumi resists the urge to slam her head onto a table.

16.

Flaming twin blades cut through air, missing the Vertex by a single hair. Sonoko writes that down in her head, that was a good one! Then she extends her umbrella, Piriluk whispering all sorts of tings in her ear. The cracks in the Vertex, the prayers to victory, Piriluk told her everything she could.

Except… she hadn’t told her something important. It was obvious there were previous heroes, she was descended from one, from the surviving one. However, there had been a girl before them, one the LRIG knew.

With a startled squeak. Sonoko ducks under a tree and the fireball crashes into the wood, eroding it in an almost gleeful manner. Gin roars as she soars past, jumping from Wasshi’s projectiles and it is story-worthy to watch but she can’t do that. She leaps after her, narrowly avoiding the barrage from behind them. Each shot rings with Sumi’s awful anger.

They can scold her later. Right now they have to survive, get answers, do something. Taisha have always been keeping something from them after all.

They have to know what if they were going to keep fighting like this.

In case someone ends up dying.

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