In the true spirit of St Val's Day...I don't know...Oo
Meiru remembers becoming a net saviour, eyes big and wide with the prospect of a dream long-awaited, finally bearing fruit. It was her dream, her raw, stripped-clean dream fulfilled with the promise of strength that had almost been given to Netto and Enzan. She had fought hard, spent many hours coated in tear-stained sleeves and rusty fingers drilling the manoeuvres into her head, battle-chip, slot in, sychro-chip, slot in, roll, duck, dodge, weave. She had scraped up the tally for feminism.
Only being a female Net Saviour had repercussions. Net-crime only got more violent, more dark and suddenly new tactics had to be employed by people who could flaunt the sneakiness that Netto would always drop from his mind. They needed spies. They needed a woman's touch.
Meiru was still a little girl, or she felt like one. But wasn't this what she wanted? She craved to touch success…but got the flesh and striving whip of prostitution. Only it wasn't quite like that. It was a duty and girls had things navis and people liked to take away from them.
Meiru let her lips sail over skin and suits, basked out her pink dress and hung it out to dry in all its bloody stains and lost dreams. Her youthful promises and her soppy illusion of her perfect wedding vanished from the whiteness of her eye and she locked herself in the caress of two strange, biting arms. Because they told her to.
She knew what she was. A whore some of her customers called her. And then they blabbed their weakness through their pleasure, their stupid, ugly pleasure and she would laugh at them through her crystallised pain and someone else's sword ran through their chest. They never let her fight. They just expected her to lie back, spread her lily woven legs and surrender something she had sought to give to Netto.
Spoiled goods. They never said it. But she knew and she almost wanted to scream at them, throw their precious information back at their bored faces as they dimmed beside the reflections of the shimmering monitors. Wasn't she worth enough? Where was her wedding cake? The pink fondant icing?
No one wanted to marry someone who held an invisible threat lurking in her womb. Her stomach was like a pearl, a cramped one ridden with things scientists had dared to dream of…and so she squeezed that disinfectant down her fleshy tube of teeth and cried and wheezed and tried to make herself clean….
Green, green, green. Then Netto pried it from her hand and promised to marry her after all. And then Raito was born. And she was still unclean, starching out her hands in the dishes and tea towels, a devalument to her sex.
And she didn't know if he loved her or if he loved the prospect of caring for a child that was the closet blend to his dead brother as could be. She wondered if she was just the shattered reflection in the mirror he broke out of her when he actually liked going to the park.
Sometimes she wishes he'd just let her fall those days. And sometimes she wishes he'd just let her heart break when she was twelve years old and he hadn't retained the only grip he had ever had on a true romantic. Which is why she was staring at the cradle, knitted out in her pink boots, Roll's arrow quivering at a child that was half unknown, born out of a part of her that was never supposed to tie in with another.
For the first time in her life, no Net Saviour was there to prevent Meiru Hikari from making her first kill. And no one was there to see her cry over the severed heart of a coldly shrinking babe.