"Mother?"
The room was cold and silent, save for the soft clinking of glass on glass, and the child released a quiet puff of a sigh. "... Doctor Yagokoro?"
"Yes?"
"Who is this?"
The doctor raised her head from the lens of the microscope, looking across the room to see the child - all three and a half feet of her - staring, expressionless, into the tall glass tube before her.
"That," said the doctor, returning her attention to the lens, "is the twenty-eighth incarnation of the experimental creation project. As such, it has been dubbed Kisshouten-028." She drew her head back and minutely adjusted the focus knob. "Why do you ask?"
The girl - Ama - stood silent for a moment, watching the chest of the delicately curled, mostly formed child rise and fall slowly, steadily, eyes closed, bobbing gently in the thick, clear liquid within the tube.
"You promised Lady Houraisan," she said, swallowing, "that you wouldn't."
"A promise is easily made, and broken just as quickly." The doctor dismissed, turning around to pick out a different slide to view. "She knows this, just as I do."
"You promised us," Ama continued, more insistently, "that you wouldn't."
"Well, then, consider this an important lesson about the nature of living beings." The doctor sounded vaguely annoyed, by this point. "Now hush. I'm trying to get some work finished-"
"You used material from Lady Scarlet?" The girl asked, her tone laced with incredulity, as she circled the glass to find the beginnings of soft leather wings, pale white and half folded at the occupant's back.
"Yes," the doctor said, "I did. Now what-"
"How did you do it?" The child had stepped away from the tube in order to drag one of the wooden stools at the counter closer to it, and Doctor Yagokoro glanced at her in irritation. "What method did you use to make her?"
"The same method I used for 027, 026, 025, 024, and 023."
Ama's blood ran cold.
"What?"
The doctor gave her a frosty look before looking back to her slide, silently wondering if, maybe, the child might stop bothering her if she simply didn't divert her attention from her work again. "What do you mean, what?"
"Those all failed."
"Yes, they did."
"Catastrophically."
"I have a feeling that you're defining catastrophically in a far different manner than I." The doctor said, unaffected, and Ama's heart dropped.
"Doctor Yagokoro," She protested, "The definition of insanity is attempting the same thing twice and expecting-"
"I did not teach you to use cliché sayings in lieu of a real argument."
Ama's eyes narrowed a fraction of an inch, and she brushed her fingertips against the warm, quietly humming container.
"Cranial collapse," she said, "omphalocele, total kidney dysplasia, malignant tumors."
"A list on its own is not an argument," said the doctor, more focused on her slide mount than the conversation at hand, "especially not a list of symptoms, none of which have recurred, all of which stem from a multitude of factors aside from the one you are - presumably - attempting to construct a case against."
Silence.
"It's perfectly healthy, besides."
"They were all healthy, until they were not."
The doctor sighed, long-suffering, losing patience. "Amaterasu, stating basic linguistic fact does not constitute-"
"They were all healthy," Ama said sharply, "until they were dead."
And with that, the child slid off the seat she had been perched upon and stalked away towards the door.
"Not a word to Lady Houraisan." Doctor Yagokoro said, not even bothering to glance up from her work.
"I'll tell her whatever I please, thank you very much."
The doctor let her go, only releasing a silent breath after hearing the hiss of the door sliding shut.
Ama, of course, did not intend to tell Lady Houraisan anything about the child in the glass tube.
Her hands were full enough already with Successes Number One, Two, Three, Four, and Five, in any case, and even besides that, it wasn't Ama's place to break the maybe, if, perhaps to her in the first place. It was up to Doctor Yagokoro whether or not to inform the lady of the house that she had gone blatantly against her wishes and, again, created - tentative - life in her basement.
Chewing her lip in a thoughtful sort of way, the small child drifted up the stairs and through the hallways of her mothers' labyrinthian home, turning her head to the left and right as though she were listening for something in the uncharacteristic silence. She came to a halt in front of a single door at the end of a hall, one just as still as the rest of the doors she had passed, and wiggled her fingers into the tiny crack between the frame and the door's edge, pushing it to the side.
"Not a word to Lady Houraisan."
Came the unanimous, discontented grumble from the room's inhabitants, and Ama sighed, nodded, and pulled the door shut behind her.
"Mmn. Yes."
"Stupid doctor," hissed a child smaller yet than Ama was, with hair a vaguely lavender shade of silver, drumming her fingers tensely on the tabletop. "Didn't she hear Mama? Didn't she hear what she said?"
"W-ell, maybshe di'nt…" mumbled another, hair shiny and gold, who was trying to guide the other child's hand away from tap-tap-tapping and towards the plate of ginger snaps instead.
"She isn't like you, Ben, her ears work perfectly fine." The other girl growled, glowering in the general direction of… the wall opposite to any of the children. Ama briefly rolled her eyes, gently turning the child's head to the correct position with her hand as she walked past to find a seat at the small table.
::Tsu, you can't honestly say that you expected her to stop.::
"Iza-" Ama began, but too little, too late - Tsu had already shot up from her seat, knocking her knees on the edge of the table in the process, and was fixing the child who had spoken with a ferocious - and properly aimed - glare.
"She should have stopped!" Tsu all but shouted, causing even little Ben to flinch away, "That good-for-nothing witch doctor should have stopped, because she promised Mama she would!"
::Promises are easily made, and broken just as fast.::
Iza pointed out with an infuriating calm, casually inspecting one of her prized glass marbles as Tsu trembled in anger.
"Y-You- You don't even- You don't even care, do you-!?"
"H-Hey, Tsu, Tsuplea's, s-siddown-"
"Keep your voice down, or Lady Houraisan will-"
"Lady Houraisan! You keep calling her Lady Houraisan, just like that- just like that-" Tsu sputtered, tears threatening at the corners of her clouded amber eyes. "Call her Mama, like everyone else!"
And then three things happened very suddenly, all at once.
Iza leapt fluidly from her prone position and flung the marble, which sliced through the air less than a millimeter from Tsu's temple -
A sharp wave of distress and panic flooded through all four of the room's current inhabitants -
And Lady Houraisan herself came through the doorway, looking equally cross and concerned in the way one does when they are awoken from a nap by the sound of children yelling angrily at the top of their lungs, carrying a tiny, wailing child in her arms; Success Number One, or Number Five, depending if you counted by chronology or height, respectively.
"What on Terra is all this fuss about?" She asked, looking from child to child, each frozen in their tracks from surprise.
A moment of stunned silence passed - then, ever the idea girl, Iza thrust a finger in Tsu's direction with all the accusatory force she could muster.
"W-What? What do you mean, I- oh- I mean- I sort of- I started it!" The silver-haired girl rose her hand, a smattering of a blush rising on her cheeks.
"Uh-huh, uh, Tsu, she start'd yellinan', um, 'bout somethinerother-"
Ama stayed silent, hands folded on her lap.
Lady Houraisan looked between the four of them once more, then sighed deeply, shaking her head.
"You four are the strangest children I've ever met." She said, shifting the now slightly calmer child to her other side. "Now, why don't you play with your sister for a bit."
"Mmnkay, Mama."
"... okay." Tsu mumbled, deflating somewhat as she fell back into her seat.
"We'll keep an eye on her." Ama said pleasantly, and Lady Houraisan nodded, settling the littlest child into Ama's lap.
"Good. I'll be back in a little while." The woman smiled, pressing a kiss to the top of both their heads before turning to leave. "Oh- and Iza..." She held out her hand to the silent girl expectantly, fixing her with a stern expression.
Iza huffed, and dropped her bag of marbles into Lady Houraisan's open palm.
"I've told you before not to throw things in the house, haven't I?" She asked. "I'll give these back to you tomorrow. Play nicely with your sisters, please."
The girl nodded, crossing her arms, and, satisfied with this, the lady of the house took her leave.
The rest of the day had mostly been filled with keeping the smallest of them from eating things she shouldn't, moving tables out of Tsu's way, and making sure Iza didn't get her hands on anything else small and projectile-like, and as such, the topic of the new maybe didn't come up again. In fact, it hardly even crossed Ama's mind until late that night, long after the other children had burrowed under their blankets and turned out the lights.
Ama didn't sleep very much at all on a normal day, much less on days when revelations of this caliber occurred, so she had spent the better part of four hours laying still on her bed, staring at the ceiling, before an idea came to her.
Quietly, very quietly, the girl crawled out of her blankets, padding across the floor to the hallway door and peering into the hall. No light was on; nobody was about, and so she slipped out of her bedroom and made her way quickly down the corridors, down the stairs, and, at a little past one o'clock in the morning, walked through the automatic door that separated Doctor Yagokoro's laboratory from the rest of the basement.
She realized - a bit too late - that it was rather cold this late at night, especially when one was in little more than a nightgown and their bare feet, and so she shivered as she drew near to the lone, towering glass tube.
"At least you're warm," Ama murmured, leaning her forehead gently against the humming apparatus.
A quiet feeling of agreement rolled across Ama's consciousness, and her eyes widened in surprise for a moment before she smiled, pressing her hand against the glass.
"You're awake," she said, relief evident in her tone, and the quiet affirmation came again. "You're awake," she breathed, and a flash of a frown briefly graced her features.
"... we startled you earlier, didn't we?"
Affirmation.
"I'm sorry about that," Ama whispered. "We didn't mean to."
Silence.
"... Can you speak?" The girl asked, looking questioningly into the bubbling liquid. There was little coherent response save confusion, and she let out a short sigh,
"Ah. You don't know."
Affirmation.
"Well, that's… that's okay." Ama smiled. "You'll learn how. Here, you can try- try your name," she nodded, "Try your name. Kis. Your name is Kis."
Silence, for a brief moment - then, another flash, familiarity.
"Close. Try again. Kis."
::. . . K . i . . i s .::
"Ah!" She beamed, pressing both palms to the glass. "Yes, that's it! Kis!"
::. . . K i s .::
"Yes, yes!" And a lovely, proud feeling bubbling up from the both of them. "Oh, yes! Good job, very good!"
::. . . . . . A m a ?::
"Mmhm," Ama nodded. "I am."
There was quiet, again, and she tilted her head to the side, looking to the floating child with concern.
::. . . A m a?::
"Yes?"
::. . . I a m . . .::
"... yes?" The girl leaned forward to press her head to the tube once more, worry evident in her face. "Yes? What is it?"
::. . . I a m . . .::
"Go on," she murmured, "Go on."
::. . . I a m . . . d.::
"Oh," Ama whispered, and she felt her chest tighten as she remembered her own words from earlier that day - cranial collapse, omphalocele, total kidney dysplasia…
"I-I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to scare you." The idea that the earlier conversation might have been overheard had never crossed her mind, and she realized with a guilty start that she must have subconsciously... written the child off.
"I'm sorry."
She hadn't meant to. She hadn't meant to. But it had simply become habit.
"I'm so sorry."
Kisshouten-028.
"I didn't," she stammered, "I-I didn't know that you were- listening. I'm sorry. I should have…"
27 failures.
Ama shook her head. "I, I shouldn't have…"
Silence.
And then.
::. . . . . . .::
"No, it's not," the child mumbled, through blurred eyes and a lump in her throat, "It's not, and I'm sorry-"
::. . . .::
"I'm sorry," Ama said, and all at once she wasn't entirely sure what she was apologizing for anymore. I'm sorry, but for what? Sorry for forgetting that she had a chance, no matter how small the percentage came out to? Sorry for the fact she was down here, in a simmering tube in the basement, an experiment with a code name and a number? Sorry because she was sentenced to a housebound life and tests and blood draws, with who-knows-what-kind of diseases and problems and cell malfunctions in her future, just like Iza and Ben and Tsu and Ama herself?
Sorry because Ama forgot that she might be alive?
Or sorry because she was alive?
:: kay!::
Ama froze, blinking furiously to see through the hot water pooled in her eyes, and she saw the form inside the tube had moved, just slightly, to brush her own hand against the glass in the spot where Ama's palm was pressed up to it like she could finish her, bring her out of there and up to their room through sheer force of will alone.
Well.
She probably could finish her tonight.
But Doctor Yagokoro would certainly know.
::it is okay.::
Said the girl in the tube, and Ama sniffled, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and nodded. Smiled.
"... I know."
Sighed.
"... they're going to love you."
And the girl felt a wave of quiet joy.