"Don't I have enough problems?"
There are many people who would give different answers to that question.
Suika had, after the others had left the meeting with their own problems in mind, done the same, slowly, and made her way back 'home.' Her mind was in conflict, a battlefield of emotions she'd only recently come to know holding their ground against her wishes. It wasn't until she was standing in front of the door that she realized how her pace had been slowed to its old normal. The sun had already set, its light seeming to mirror the weed's disposition.
It wasn't as if her aunt and uncle were unused to their niece returning home late, but after the past few weeks... well, it certainly felt like months to Suika, the duo had begun paying more attention to her actions. And so when her hand made contact with the doorknob, absentmindedly twisting it, she felt a surge on her magical radar from beyond it.
A melody of feelings with the theme of 'concern' made the girl stop before actually opening the door. Great, that had to be Tsubomi's aunt. Which meant she was waiting for her, and had heard the doorknob move. Was it worth it to continue just to get into bed? Maybe it would be better to go back out into the night.
As if it were a whisper on the edge of her hearing, Suika knew what Tsubomi would say to her. While the bud hadn't reappeared since she gained functional emotions, the invader had, against her will, obtained Tsubomi's memories. Ironic, given that Tsubomi would have had a field day if she saw it happen to someone else. 'Do memories make the person' was a question the girl had been intimately familiar with, months of thought poured into its mold with no real result.
To answer the question from her point of view, Suika would give a resounding 'kind of.' It really was like hearing one's child self speaking to their current incarnation, but it was likely nothing more than the brain spawning garbage data in the shape of a statement. A thought in and of itself from the current 'person,' masquerading as one from the past 'self.' A new thing, built in the image of what one's memories claimed the thinker used to be, regardless of accuracy. Perhaps the introduction of literal magic changed that paradigm?
... Great, even her thinking was becoming like Tsubomi's, the newfound speed those thoughts moved at only making the realization even more worrying in its rejection of what Suika had known for most of her existence.
This flew through her mind, loud enough that she missed what she believed to be the old Tsubomi's words, needing to take a moment to remember them. She'd already let go of the doorknob.
It was something about 'shadows,' right? Mm, yeah, something Tsubomi would have said after becoming a Magical Girl, not before.
'If you're conflicted, do something obvious. For a Magical Girl, that's easy. Go and purge the shadows. Save someone, now or later on. It's your job.' That's what she'd say to Suika now, if she was someone other than the weed that choked her out, right?
Yeah, it was. It didn't matter if the words were actually an echo of Tsubomi or just Suika's mind constructing something out of the memories she'd stolen, because those very memories were enough for her to confirm their accuracy.
With the empty coldness of fear in her chest, Suika slouched her shoulders and turned away to walk into the night.
"Too slow, once again."
It's hard to outrun the wind.
Acid Drop had been too late, it seemed, because there were no Miseria to be found. She idly wondered if this was due to the Club's resident hunting-obsessed lightning bolt, but she couldn't bring herself to care about the reason. If there were no Miseria to sort out, how was she going to sort out her own feelings?
Once more, she knew what Tsubomi would say in response.
'Figure them out yourself. It's not like Miseria are literally your inner demons or anything, not like you were to me.'Acid Drop felt a single laugh escape her. Even with Tsubomi gone, regressed, and/or missing, she
still could verbally abuse the vine. But that was fitting, wasn't it? A haunting from the person she may have killed, a perfect punishment for her. 'Never forget I was here, because I won't let you.'
"Man, that's great! What kind of face should I be making right now, then!? C'mon director, give some direction! Bad actors need more of it, you know!?" She could almost taste the bitterness of her own words.
The world around her gave no response. After a few seconds of wasted time, silence filled only with her anger, she could just hear what her victim would have said.
'What does that matter? Doing what you're told is boring; shows that follow the script and never deviate are boring. Obediently following orders will kill you.'Okay, but that's the goal, isn't it? Acid Drop mindlessly kicked the rock that was unfortunate enough to be in her path.
You wanted me dead, but you stopped that. Was that because you would have gone with me, or because it was what you wanted to do?There was no reply. Despite absorbing Tsubomi's memories, the answer eluded her, as if they had been locked away as a parting shot.
Acid Drop was unable to continue her train of thought, not for lack of desire, but because there was a rustling from the bush the rock had landed in.
She paused, glaring at the foliage as it continued its shaking. Maybe she'd hit a stray animal? The thought instantly made her eyes soften. If she had, she'd only feel even worse.
But what walked out from the leaves wasn't a cat or a dog. Instead, a Miseria showed itself to the rainbow-haired Magical Girl.
Weird. Had it been hiding from whoever had swept the streets already? Were the monsters that intelligent? Maybe a Giga was, or their minions, but a random one? No way.
And she was correct. This Miseria hadn't been hiding, nor had it been doing anything. But now, now it would do something. It lunged at Acid Drop only to find its mouth wrapped around her arm. Somehow, this felt familiar to the girl.
The pain brought a new rush of emotion to her mind, something she expected would affect her much more than it was. Dealing with classmates? Difficult. Interacting with Regina? Hellish. Participating in a club meeting? Sisyphean. But getting her arm nearly bitten through was the easy one to ignore? How did that work!?
Acid Drop merely stood there, the Miseria continuing to gnaw at her at an increasingly slower pace, for what felt like hours.
'Now you just have to figure out how to replicate that and you'll be fine.'... So it seemed. In spite of her nerves sending their panicking signals to her brain, emotionally Suika felt fine. Better than fine, actually. Maybe the best she'd felt since Tsubomi disappeared.
But there was no way that this was healthy. No, Suika knew from Tsubomi's interest in psychology that replacing emotional pain with physical wasn't something even worth considering. And yet, she couldn't help but consider it for a moment. That was about when the Miseria stopped moving completely, and the painful payload of stimuli overwhelmed the numbness she'd grown from her past battles. This shit
really hurt.
The Miseria found itself pierced by the girl's Devil Arm, and the girl found herself staring at a rather gruesome wound. At least Magical Girls didn't retain damage between forms. Healing pretty quickly was an added bonus.
"Oh, hey, this sentence is about you."[Redacted]
When Suika returned to 'her home,' she once more felt the deep discomfort in her chest that sneaked its way in with her fears. She'd already discarded her rainbow wig shortly after the Miseria's death, but her empathic senses were still going strong. Similarly, so too were the emotions her aunt was feeling.
The tune had changed, the 'concern' becoming much deeper and fuller, now accented with notes of real fear and undertones of depression. It seemed that the vine had hurt yet another person with her existence.
Suika sighed and stood up straighter, trying to force into being the feeling she'd had when she was being chewed on. She failed.
She felt her fingernails digging into her palm; apparently she had balled her free hand into a fist without noticing.
Maybe if... No, she couldn't, or at least
shouldn't, do that. If for no other reason than Tsubomi deserving better than a scarred or mangled body when it was finally returned to her. Suika couldn't accept the idea of being the type to damage lent property. So with far more effort than it should have taken she managed to pry her fingers into a straightened position, and turned the doorknob.
The door opened slowly, as if the girl was trying to hide the noise as she returned home from a late night arcade trip. A decent cover story, if she desired one, but the pace was more due to not wanting to see the concerned face that was no doubt watching on the other side.
The door wasn't even halfway open when Suika's shoulder fell alongside her gaze, staring at the tiny bit of the floor she could see as if it would tell her the day she'd die.
Surely, Tsubomi's aunt deserved to be greeted with something better. Instead, what she saw was a preemptively dejected, overwhelmed face that was toeing the line of panic. This was not the too calm, unbothered by anything niece that she had come to know over the past year. This may as well have been a stranger, a skin-walker taking a familiar form to cause the most disturbance possible. Perhaps that wasn't too far off the mark.
The young girl went from moving her arm at a glacial pace to shooting down the entryway like a cannonball launched with too much gunpowder, even tripping over her own feet and going off-course like one. In an instant Suika had gone from just barely fully visible standing in the doorway to collapsed on the floor just past where her shoes were meant to lay.
Of course she had tripped and fallen. Why would she deserve anything else? She couldn't even get relief from the pain in her palms, the sting only adding to her emotional concoction. A shot of cinnamon with her disgusting mixture of lettuce and peanut. Feelings that only made one sick to even think about, and now anger was shoving its way in as well.
For her part, her aunt only felt even more worried, but unlike the weed she had years of experience dealing with her own thoughts and feelings, with other people.
"Tsubomi, dear, are you alright?" The question was as much rhetorical as it was genuine, given the state of her niece even before her fall.
The anger in Suika grew at the question, her still hurting hands curling into fists. She knew that the older woman genuinely wanted what was best, to help, but those desires were for
Tsubomi, not her, and rightfully so. If she knew the reality of Tsubomi's existence, she'd be mortified.
"I'm fine," she managed to force out through gritted teeth. Not waiting for a response, Suika took a shaky, deep breath and pushed herself up. Her forearms screamed at her, having done such an action less than a dozen times in Hibusa, but they still did their job to bring her from her prone position enough to get her feet under her. Without looking at the face of the older woman she turned around to face the still open door and closed it, then took her shoes off in a doomed attempt to act like nothing had happened.
The elder of the two sat quietly, watching her niece with tired, sad eyes. She didn't know what had happened to the poor child, so she didn't know how to try to alleviate her problems. She was in her home because she'd begun to act differently, starkly so, and now she was doing so again. Was she to ship her off to yet another relative, claiming that she could no longer care for her? She understood her sister's genuine inability to continue, but being in a financial position to do so would make the decision even worse. She wasn't going to abandon even a single member of her family if there was any way she could avoid doing so.
"Tsubomi," she began,
"can we talk for a bit?"Talking was perhaps the
last thing that Suika wanted to do. With her shoes thrown haphazardly on the floor near the entryway, she shakily stood and turned around with her head still bowed to stare at the ground.
"Maybe some other time, Oba-san." An empty platitude, an attempt to parry the older woman's concerned attempt to probe into Suika's mind and feelings.
As the girl tried to make her way upstairs, she noticed a shift in her aunt's emotions. That was the absolute last straw, she had decided. Tsubomi had not once in the time she'd been in their home referred to
anyone with
any honorific that she had heard. Things were worse than she had thought.
"I'm sorry, Tsubomi, but I insist. Come sit with me."Suika sighed inwardly, knowing both that she had no way to escape now, short of running somewhere else outside, and that she had once more messed things up somehow. With the pace of her old self, she turned and walked over to take a seat across from Tsubomi's aunt.
"Alright then, I guess..."Where to begin? In her fifty years of life, the woman couldn't think of a single time that she'd heard how to help a struggling teenager. With it being so long ago, she couldn't remember her own experiences as one either. What could she say to the girl who sat staring at the floor as if it would show her the secrets of the universe? She cleared her throat.
"Tsubomi... What happened?" May as well cut to the chase, she supposed.
"You've been acting strangely recently." Well, strangely in a different way, at least. She wouldn't be sitting there now if she hadn't been acting strangely already.
Ah, yes, the 'Old Days.' The days where she couldn't feel so shitty, the days were she at least appeared to get along with the Club, with those who she passed by in the flow of her life. It seemed so silly to segregate that time from the present when they were still so recent, but she couldn't justify lumping them all together as if nothing had changed.
"Ah... nothing happened. I've just... not felt right. I think I might not be getting enough sleep.""..." An obvious lie, yet another sign that things were worse than she knew. She couldn't say that Tsubomi probably never lied in her home, but at least until recently it was much harder to tell!
"If you can't tell me, I think... I think we need to take you to a psychiatrist."Right, that thing that Tsubomi had dreamed of becoming one day. The long away days she'd believed she knew the details of but would now never come true. Suika felt tears well in Tsubomi's eyes.
"I know it's not ideal, Dear, but I can't just watch you suffer like this without trying to help."Well why not? "So if I can't do it, I'll do whatever it takes to find you someone who can."How wonderful."But just know that I'm here for you. If you need anything, if you want to talk, just let me know, okay?"Moments passed, Suika hearing no sound but Tsubomi's heartbeat. Finally, she nodded slightly, once, and spoke.
"Okay."The weed stood and began once more toward the stairs.
"Tsubomi."'Tsubomi' stopped, standing in place.
"I love you, dear. Are you safe?"Suika blinked.
Huh? Was she...
safe? What a question. She knew what Tsubomi's aunt meant, but could she really answer honestly given that she'd nearly had an arm bitten off an hour earlier?
"... Yeah. Don't worry." Having said all she could, Suika began up the stairs.
When she arrived in Tsubomi's bedroom, Suika noticed something amiss. There was a note on the desk, and given the handwriting it was from Tsubomi's uncle. Hopefully he hadn't read the letter she'd written to Suki... No, it was still in between the same pages in the unread textbook in the drawer.
Still, it was odd for Tsubomi's uncle to do something like this. She hadn't felt his concern with her magical sense, but as she read the note, she could feel it through the words. It seemed that, in his own way, he cared about Tsubomi too.
'I don't know what happened a few weeks ago, but there's only one thing you can do regardless. You mustn't allow yourself to go astray. Find the road you want to walk and see it through to the end. That's all we humans can do.'Ha. Pretentious bastard. That was all Suika thought as she felt tears begin to stream down Tsubomi's cheeks.
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