Miyu barely remembers being carried, being wrapped in suffocating mess of a shock blanket. What she thinks she remembers, if she closes her eyes and focuses, is the faint sway of a breeze, touching part of her face, as she travelled out into a place wider and more colourful than the one she'd been forced inside for the last six months. She thinks – she hopes – she was brave enough at the time to sneak a peak, to open her eyes and see the cut of green grass below her, and the wide open plane of the sky filtered through the trees overhead. She hopes she felt a smidgen of joy.
But honestly, if she really strains her brain, all she can actually visualise is the grey whizz of concrete below her, before it transformed into the drab, dray floor of an ambulance. And her emotions at the time, were a similar storm of apathy.
The truth is; nobody understands.
For the first few days, her mother doesn't leave her room, transforming into a gaunt, lean demon with grey rings around her eyes. She doesn't even have enough of the strength needed to form a real presence, not even to resemble a panda, all of her too wire-like and stick-thin. Brittle, her fingers wrap over her handbag, pressing themselves into the creases they create there as she stares at Miyu hungrily, whispering strange stories, of 'it'll be alright, you're back here, you're safe.'
Miyu stares back at her and thinks, liar.
The word is distinct in her mind, clear as a bell.
Because back there, in that room of white, so plain and distinct in comparison to the jumble of colours and toys and flowers that now litter her room with sickly shades of plastic-like reds and yellows and pinks, well, she had to lie to herself all the time. Enough to recognise the feelings in others.
I'm not afraid, she had told herself every day, trembling, her skin still buzzing with the aftershock of electricity as it raced away over her bones. She had felt the same burn of pain as she crouched over, stomach rolling, barely anything left inside to throw up.
I'm brave. Like Aoi. She wouldn't shake and refuse to get up, if she were here. She might be shy and quiet. But she would still stand. She'd lie if she had to.
And I can do the same.
She breathes in the night now, replaying the scene as the nightmares capture her, force her into the same world that damned, ghastly VR headset did. And it's always the same. Her knees tremble. Her fingers shake, as they explore the VR landscape before her, the only place, within this room, apart from her skin and clothes, which has colour. The lines of the cards blur and shiver as her hands waver, before they land softly on their fake brown backs, ones she can't touch, not really.
They're as much of a lie as anything else here.
And when the electricity rolls through her once again, as it crackles and snaps at her flesh, causing her scream to fly out of her throat like a knife, she tells herself, Aoi would do so much better. And she has to be good, brave, if she ever wants to see her again.
She had never played Duel Monsters, not really. But Aoi had sometimes brought her cards, borrowed some from her brother who she had remarked, softly, with real admiration in her eyes, was a 'really great duellist'. They had seemed mostly scary to Miyu though.
How wrong she had been. It was the cards the computer held against her, that she really had to fear.
'Moooom,' she wails, after the dream ends, shaking and rocking under the covers she now has, the soft lining of the bed feeling like a torture to her spine. In that place that had been no softness, no cushions. She has learnt to sleep on her bruises, in a posture that her mattress now gives way beneath, no rigid floor tiles to hold it in place. 'Mooooooom.'
She isn't brave; not really, it's all a lie, as her Mom cradles and shushes her, smothering her sweat-slicked hair under her lips.
'Sssssh, sssh, you're here now, you're safe, and I'm never going to let them take you back….'
More lies. But ones Miyu clings to.
'When can I see Aoi?' she asks, breath rolling out under the covers, into the clammy skin of her mother's forearm. 'Please, I've been good.'
Her mother's grip tightens. 'You just need to focus on getting better,' she replies, something rigid in her voice, harsher than the cut of the jewel in her ring Miu had stupidly lost. 'Let me take you to talk to someone. You need people around who will actually help you, not drag you down. I know it's hard, but one day you'll thank me.'
Miyu listens and feels her heart sink.
The doctor stares at her. Miyu stares back. And starts giggling, nervously churning out words about the toys in her room and many more there are now than there were before. She has to fill this silence with words, anything that will ease the guilt over wasting her mother's money. She's already taken enough from her, first that ring she'd treasured, and now the daughter she still expects to see in Miyu's place when she looks at her.
The doctor listens and nods, and asks questions Miyu doesn't know how to answer. Does she tell the truth? Lie?
'I feel better,' she chokes out. 'I have bad dreams about…the place I was taken to. But it's always better when I wake up.'
There. A fact. Immovable. No room for a lie to wiggle through.
The doctor doesn't press for more details. Instead they ask Miyu about the things she's glad to get back to when she wakes up, to draw pictures of them, of everything she wants now that she's out of the room.
Miu shakes the crayons. Shakily draws wobbly lines that make up her mother's hair and eyes, and the razor-sharp line of her mouth. Of her father's big head. And the round one of Aoi's pigtails flying out on either side. She smiles as she gives the curves of them an artistic flourish.
'Do you know, I think that's the first time you've smiled since you've been here,' the doctor remarks. 'Properly, I mean. It's like the sun came up behind you. When are you going to see her?'
The crayons halts in Miyu's hand. She licks her lips nervously. 'I don't know,' she presses out, hating how much the word sounds like the truth. 'My mom hates her.'
Just as her Mom ends up hating the doctor. Whatever they say to each other, as Miyu's left waiting in another room outside, bigger and nicer in some ways, with a potted plant in the corner, causes her mother to storm out and warp her hand round her own. Miyu feels the press of her ring-less finger against her own and flinches.
'A total waste of money,' her mother hisses out, and Miyu tries her best not to look guilty.
She still shakes when she leaves the house. She has to lie to herself in order to take a single step. But she manages, trips her way over the sun-baked path to the familiar steps when the swings glisten under the summer sky, the colour brightening into a sheer white reflection of light. She runs a hand over their worn edges, feels the bite of plastic and looks round.
No Aoi.
When the sun gets to be too much she crawls into the shelter of the play-frame, the shadows dripping over her face as she looks down at the ground and visualises the spread of Aoi's brother's trading cards. But there's no girl beside her to runs admiring eyes over their shapes to pick one up and say, 'they're kinda scary looking but my brother has this way of making them look really cool!'
You were the cool one, Miyu thinks, wrapping her hands around her knees and squeezing tightly. You. Never anyone else. You saved me.
She chances a glance at the open hole in front of her, the sunlight poring through to produce a halo of light over the ground. But still…
No Aoi.
Time passes without Aoi. Miyu learns to lie better, forces herself to go back to school, if only to force away the disappointment that crowds her mother's face, when she says, 'no, no, not today'. And eventually she slips back into normality. The dreams still happen, still shake her awake into heaving gasps, but they're not an overriding presence in her life anymore.
No, now there's homework, and Yuno from class who likes the same strawberry flavoured pocky she does, and a few other girls. As she grows, there's karaoke clubs to go to, and idol performance to wrap a whole afternoon's worth of time over.
Miyu's old enough now to search for Aoi properly, to ask questions, to seek her out. But…she hesitates. Aoi is older now, and what must she think of the cowardly little girl who let her take the fall for something she never did, who never bothered to tell her mother the truth, let her be branded a thief, a bad influence?
Isn't Aoi…better off without her in her life?
And Miyu knows theorically, that it could have been any girl who was chosen, picked to be tortured for six months with a game she has never really held any interest or love for. She knows, alright? But still, some days, most days, it feels like a punishment, one that still wrecks her nights with disturbed dreaming. A punishment for letting Aoi's lie remain undisturbed all these years.
The truth clutters her tongue, every now and again when she lets her eyes linger on her mother's finger, sees a new ring perched there, jewel gleaming brightly. But she swallows it down. It some perverse way it feels like she's protecting Aoi. From what, she can't quite verbalise.
And then it happens. She's working, fingers wrapped round a pen, scratching out the lines her teachers want her to memorise for some exam in the near future, when the light from the TV nearby catches her eyes. Miu blinks, running back through her memory, but can't recall leaving it on. And she swivels in her chair, and as she turns to look straight into the jaws of a new kind of hell, she sees the light clamber out of the television, sees it struggle and form into a ball of light that drifts closer and closer.
Miyu doesn't know what it is, youkai, a mutated virus that is somehow doing the impossible, but she chucks her pencil case at it anyway and flees down the stairs, out the house. Her senses scream at her, primal fear leaping into her limbs and forcing them to move. Her memory tugs at her and she ends up retracing steps she hasn't in years, following the pull of her heart back to place she let Aoi take the blame.
She doesn't know how long she stays, how long she hovers by the swings, not quite daring to touch the frame. She gets a few odd looks, until she decides enough is enough, that the youkai or whatever has probably chosen a new victim to haunt. Perhaps another girl, a braver girl, like Aoi would have gone to the police and risked ridicule. But Miyu is sensitive now, to the bleak moods of her mother, conscious of trying to appear normal and unafraid. She wears the lie all the time, lets it pull her back to her house.
I am not afraid, not scared, I am brave, it's no worse than my dreams…
But the lie dissolves, detaches itself from her in a scream, as light, very much like the creeping shadow in a horror movie, leaps out at her from the screen of a mobile phone nearby, held within the hand of a gormless staring boy. It catches her right in face, and for the next few months, Miyu doesn't have to lie anymore.
'I'll save you.'
A calm voice, and it rings out through the darkness. It touches Miyu, as she's lost in this darkness, in the waif-like dreamland the light has caused her to haunt.
'I'm not strong enough with just my own power. But I promise you, my partner, I'll bring the truth to light. You were the one who gave me that gift, and I'll put it to good use, I swear.'
It's probably nothing. But Miyu swears, in the midst of the rolling fog of black, that there's a cool press of something against her chest, and what feels like the slim features of a doll and its arms stroking her cheek, smoothing her hair away from her skin.
'I always thought you were better off without me. But just look what my negligence has caused…and Lightning slipped through the gap I left behind.'
Strange, fairytale words. And they vanish as Miyu is left fumbling her way though the dark.
Miyu does not wake in the same hospital. But the colours, the pastel green brings back memories she'd rather it didn't, a mother who frets just as badly as she did ten years ago. The hours pass and then a shadow falls over her bed, flowers detaching from wingers and pressing into her arms.
'Miyu-chan,' says a voice from ten years ago, but one that's lost its waver, that sounds calm and measured, with a hint of steel spiked through. 'I'm sorry it took me so long to find you.'
And Miyu shakes her head. Smiles. And when her mother finds them together, as she presses out her protests, tries to call security, Miyu raises her eyes, and finds her voice.
'Mom,' she says, Aoi's brown eyes watching, no hint of blame or scorn in their depths. 'Mom, I need you to stop and listen. Because I think it's time I told the truth.'
Aoi is like the prince from the fairytale, the knight from the legend, the magical girl who saves the world. She crumbles under Miyu's questions and talks of a world, a virtual one Miyu has never dared to go.
'I'm sorry I couldn't save her,' she says softly, fingers crinkled into her skirt – and it reminds Miyu of how her mother once wore her fingers into the lining of her handbag. 'She was so brave at the end…and she didn't blame me for any of it.'
Oh Aoi, Miyu thinks. You're the brave one. Truthfully she doesn't know what to make of the existence of Aqua, of the idea that someone has been born from her greatest pain. But she had mattered to Aoi, and so, in a sense, though she has never met her, not properly, she matters to Miyu.
She reaches out, strokes Aoi's hand, enfolds in with her weaker fingers, ones that have not so much as held a duel monsters card throughout the years. But Aoi still looks at her as though Miyu is the knight, the saviour, the magical girl who tried to save Link Vrains.
'There's nothing to blame you for,' says Miyu firmly, the truth ringing out in every word. 'The only one to blame is Lightning.' She breathes. And then she tells a little lie.
'Now…tell me more about Aqua. The goods parts without…all the dying.'
Miyu doesn't know how to feel about Aqua, not really. But she can see it, in Aoi's voice, her downcast eyes, how she feels about the Ignis. And she recognises the guilt that course through the other's girl's posture, that seep into her spine, makes her slouch slightly. How many times has she felt it within her own?
Miyu squeezes Aoi's fingers again. And braces herself to hear more of the truth.