Forever My Mother
Fate knew that everyone she loved hated her mother.
She was good at lying for everyone's convenience, and carefully shifting the way she addressed her mother out loud until she was calling her only "Precia". She saved "Okaa-san" for Lindy now, and Fate truly meant it when she called her new mother that. She truly did.
But woven deep into her heart, Fate still thought of Precia when she said mother.
Mother had loved her when she was little. She had loved Alicia, but that far back in her memories, Fate was Alicia. That love was undeniable, and Fate could never turn her back on that strong, unyielding core of love inside her childhood. Fate knew that love, that powerful foundation of her character at a time when it was most important, was responsible for making her the person that she was today.
Kind. Caring. Clever and gentle and loyal…Fate owed all of that to her mother. All of her great achievements made through her strength of soul…that came from the wellspring of love her mother gave her.
Mother had hated her, Fate knew. Even if the scars inside her head faded, she would know from the gouges on her skin. Sometimes, Fate forgot, but she was always reminded immediately, when Nanoha shivered with sorrowful rage every time she traced the lines with a gentle finger.
But love doesn't leave so easily.
Fate loved her mother.
She loves her mother.
But she could never tell the ones she loved, the people all around her who make up her family, her friends. None of them understood what it meant to love someone cruel and broken, love them so much that any number of transgressions would be forgiven immediately. Yet they did, in a way…no matter how angry the ones you love made you, you still loved them when crisis struck, didn't you? For Fate though, she knew that they wouldn't understand her case, because to them, what her mother had done to her was unforgiveable in their eyes.
Fate had forgiven her mother. She wondered, sometimes, what would have happened if mother had accepted her offer of help in the Garden of Time.
Fate never wondered what her decision would have been.
But she wondered sometimes about what would have happened next.
There were too many bloody, edged memories in Fate's head…by herself, the nine-year old child that she was then would have died on them. She wouldn't have had even Arf, if that was the case, and Linith was gone. And Mother…
And yet her mother had to live with her own bloody memories…no wonder she had broken. Fate understood.
She knew.
She could feel that same truth inside her, in the silent warmth of her happiest moments. From love came the deepest strains of madness.
Like mother…
Even if Fate was a fake, Precia was still her mother.
And even if Fate never said it out loud in her new life, she knew love's resilience against all odds. She had to believe it, she did believe it, when she learned all the faces that love wore. Fate could never stop in her loving.
Fate could never be ashamed of being her mother's daughter.