When she was a small girl, trapped behind the gates of the prison her father sent her too, Eva refused to pray. Instead she made promises to herself: If I'm brave, if I build machines like the one Mom rode, he'll see, he'll know, he'll feel it, and he'll come back.

Then she would lift her eyes to the sky and refuse to wish. Because she'd know, with the same bone-deep conviction that had told her Maya was dead the instant fire had uncoiled from the engines that were meant to keep her afloat, that her Dad would never leave her. Not when he'd always been the first to scope her up into his arms, to nestle her into sleep with a story while her mother was late out practising the twists and turns of the road only she could see in the sky.

'And they would live happily together just like us,' he would state, finishing each book off with his customary refusal to say the words printed in bold letters below his thumb.

Eva was only just learning to read then but even so, she could see enough of the ink lines surrounding it to recognise the lie.

'That's not what it says, Daddy!'

'No?' he had asked, a fond quirk to his lips, similar to the one he wore when her mom burnt the toast and exclaimed, with a laugh to her voice, 'well, what did you expect? You married a racer not a cook!'

'No!' Eva had exclaimed stubbornly, feeling her cheeks rise into a pout. 'You're a naughty liar!'

'Well,' he said after a few moments, 'perhaps I prefer the lie to what someone's written down. I'd like to believe these characters you love could end up just as happy as we are.'

And we will be, she vowed, swallowing the lump that lay in her throat like a coiled snake, ready to rise up and bite at the memory of her mother scraping the black crust of rind from her toast. It won't be the same Dad. But if you come back, find me, take me away from here, I won't ever ask you to read me another story. We'll write our own.

What she realised years later of course, when she met his eyes under the shadow of a racing hanger and saw not a spark of recognition for her down within their oily depths, was that her dad had never needed her to continue onto the next chapter.

No, he had simply gone ahead and written his own.

Eva never believed in wishes until she saw her dad spread his arms across the sky, his limbs bent as though he could curve the bones into a bowl that could hold the beauty of the stars above.

'The power of the Avatar is absolute. He can grant the winner anything. Even,' he finished, no doubt choking on the thought that leapt up like a spark to Eva's, 'the loss of a loved one.'

And Eva realised in that one foul instant how wrong she was to rely on herself, to make promises no one else could hear. For her dad was no magical creature, no unicorn and had had no way of knowing those promises made inside her skull. But a wish, a wish made to a real magical being...well.

That was something worth placing her faith into.

'I lost you,' she told something that held the shape of her mother within the Temple of the Heart, weeks and races later 'and I know you can't be real, I haven't won and gotten the Avatar to bring you back yet. But still, even if it's careless of me...'

She sighed and pressed her head into her mother's chest, letting those arms, thin as the sticks from rotten bramble bushes and as insubstantial as wind, push their non-weight onto her shoulders.

'...let me believe it's you.'

Let me be happy, she had cried without knowing it for years, let me be happy.

And then just as Canaletto was about to use her to carve his happiness into the universe and slice out whole chunks from it, all the pieces that made it worth living inside, Jordon fell. He smiled, bright as a star, at her, and for the second time that day a man told her that he loved her.

Light burst across her vision, it trailed possibility in its wake, dashing up Canaletto's stagnant hopes, and his wish to the ground.

And then she floated, slept, and waited for Jordon to undo the spell, to refuse to let her take responsibility for ruining his own happiness.

'I'm just fine, Dad' she said, after they scattered flowers across Maya's grave, the way they always should have together. Back at Stern's boarding school, the headmistress hadn't even granted her visitation rights to the cemetery. 'I have nothing worth bargaining for anymore.'

'No?' he asked. But the fondness of years before, the thing that had tugged on the line of his mouth, had vanished, gone astray with her mother's ghost. The way he now looked at her was sad and knowing.

'No,' she answered, definitive and sharp. 'The only promises I'm going to make now, are for myself.'

Notes: Me, on re-watching Oban Star Racers, acknowledging how beautiful the show was/is and being forced to re-acknowledge how much Eva's life sucked.