Fourteen and still not feeling much different...

"No, it is an awkward age to be at, isn't it? You're growing and changing in all kinds of ways; oh, and you have lots to do. It's a wonder you can do anything at all! Oh, or act normal around the kids. By the way, how are Arisa-chan and Suzuka-chan and them doing? Good? Good. I'm glad. Your collar's uneven... There. Do you have everything?"

"I'm going to be late..."

"Oh! Sorry. Go on now; have fun!"

Fate felt herself being shoved out the door and scooted out onto the street. It was the start of the new term, the third year of junior high, and she was feeling positively awful. Why? To be living in peace and contentment without having the burden of such extreme circumstances placed on you, and on top of that to be forced to do impossible tasks? She was still being forced to do some difficult jobs, but being somewhere close to prodigy level on the magic scale, or so she had been told, had the ability to do that...somehow. So, then, why?

"Err, no, I don't think it's that..."

Nanoha was absentmindedly playing with Fate's loose hair. Having been recently freed from its restraining pigtails (because it made her look not like a fourteen-year-old), Nanoha still wasn't quite used to this strange new style. And besides, it made Fate look different, she had said.

"It makes you look older."

"Really?"

"Well, it's not a bad thing! It's...it's nice." Awkward smile. (She wasn't still nine, was she?)

"Oh."

Fourteen was somewhere in that fuzzy range between looking young and somewhat more mature. Mature, not old, though according to some people, Fate had looked mature when she was nine and hadn't changed much since then.

That would make sense, because she didn't feel much different after her "birthday". It might have been because it really wasn't her birthday, but...

"Isn't it sad that people don't always celebrate their birthdays here?"

Shouldn't I be saying that? Or... "Yeah...it is."

Nanoha noticed that Fate had never really changed, not even since then. She had grown so much more gentle and open—being around people that loved her and whom she truly loved had done her a world of good—but she always dragged that air of doubt and hopelessness behind her. She was a clone created through purely magical means, as that method of cloning was impossible otherwise, and that fact would never change. Nanoha had to admit she was more or less unusual herself, and that led to some surprising results in the world of magic, but she never felt terrificly bad about it.

Then again, Fate had started out "bad", and came out "good". In fact, she came out better than good; she came out great, but not feeling great about herself. It seemed she would never get better, and that disappointed and hurt Nanoha deeply. Sometimes she wanted to say, "It's not you; it's me." In fact, it was partially her, but not entirely, and the White Devil had a tendency to take everything into perspective other than herself.

In short, she knew she had never been quite a sympathetic person. It wasn't too late to change, either, but there wasn't much point in even trying to try, anyway. Sympathy was a little pointless when it came to Fate because she was stubborn enough to not be fended off with flighty words of fancy.

"You take care of yourself, all right?"

"OK."

It wasn't difficult to be sympathetic towards her at all.

For someone like Fate, though, falling down was an excellent way of learning to get back up—generally the only way. Getting preached to quite often didn't get the point across.

It didn't; it rarely did but to the most imaginative of thinkers, and when you're a clone you have a tendency to think you're a carbon copy of someone else. She was inferior, anyway; there wouldn't have been much of a difference between someone who thought she was inferior and someone who was actually inferior. Her mother Precia was talented in the arcane arts, so her daughter should have been quite the same. Fate was there, pretty much, especially when her mother was defeated and she went to live with the Harlaowns. She didn't have to be there all the way, and she wasn't, compared to Nanoha, but she didn't want to be like Nanoha.

Nanoha was Nanoha. She was tired of being someone else's clone.

To her, she was still fixated on what it meant to be friends with, and attracted in the strangest ways to, someone that had beat her nearly to death trying to understand her motives, if that made any sense. She guessed that since she hadn't changed, Nanoha was probably focused on something else at the moment, like saving the next world. Nanoha didn't bother her, but that did; she needed to catch up, at the very least. Asking questions like "Why?" were as useless, if not more than, the actual words themselves. It took physical somethings, someone had told her, to make a point.

"That's...I'm not sure..." Well, it's not impersonal, but it's not that personal. "Is that really the right thing to be doing?" It sounds a little odd, actually... "What am I supposed to do? Hug her?"

Hug. That was such a foreign word.

"Um..."

Shameless, aren't you?

Which was to say, she must have been still shuffling her feet instead of sprinting on like Nanoha did. That wouldn't be good, because she would ruin her shoes doing that.

"True, true!"

"Still..."

Nanoha would wear out her shoes eventually, too.

"Well, everyone does."

"They do."

"Does that mean I can't think anymore?"

"No, you have to look before you leap."

"Then...I'll think before jumping off that bridge like my friends told me to."

"Good."

I don't have to hug her then, do I?

Unfortunately for Fate, Nanoha was a very "hug" kind of person. She was an extremely physical person, in fact; if she hadn't told Fate already, she should have. The more she could do without words, the better.

Hug was such a feeble word, though. Terming it better...would be like calling it an "embrace". Embraces were more...visceral. Meaningful.

"No, you have to 'embrace' me."

"I...what? Wait, Nanoha..." Not here. Not now.

It was clumsy and awkward and a feeling she never wanted to have again.

She ended up returning it anyway.

"Nanoha," she whispered.

"Yes?"

"I hate you."

"Yeah...I hate you too."

A/N: I wrote this back in...March, but I wasn't so happy with it, so I ended up not posting it. Still, it's food for thought--takes into account a couple of matters you maybe wouldn't have thought about before, no? Sorry for the semi-coherent-ness... It's a bad habit of mine.