Sometimes Miles thinks he can remember her - his mother, that is. He knows, empirically, that it is impossible. Formation and recall of long-term memories at a few minutes old is far-fetched at best. So, he tells himself, it is just a fabrication. It must be.
But it's still there.
Not anything visual. Not even a sound. A smell, a very particular one, light sweat and musk with almost a milky sweetness to it. And gardenias, somehow behind all of it, tying it together. Underneath the sterile smell of hospitals that he has come to loathe. That, and warmth, and softness.
He can pick out where each part came from. Gardenias - his father had kept a bottle of her old perfume around, for sentimental reasons, and of course he had found it. The rest from basic conjecture. After, long after, when he had escaped von Karma's grip for the first time, he went through everything that had been packed up years before. Sold most of it. The journal had been a surprise, however. His father, with a lawman's dedication to the truth, had written down every detail of that day. Even the dialog between them. You've done it, love, you've done it. God, isn't he beautiful? How he was unashamed to cry. How she seemed so exhausted and the doctors started murmuring to themselves in hushed and worried tones as she seemed to get dizzier and dizzier. Something wasn't right. Surgery was mentioned. One of the doctors reached out with gloved hands to take the child (me, Miles reminds himself every time he reads it) from her and she refused. Her husband supported her.
Later entries would share his quiet anguish as he wondered if those few minutes would have been the crucial ones, about if he had been enormously cruel in his kindness to support a mother not wanting to be separated from her child.
Miles remembers the car-rides out near his birthday to a gravestone, and how the fresh gardenias perfumed the car for a week afterwards. He remembers, just barely, the looks everyone gave him in first grade when they had to write about their parents and he said, truthfully, that his mother was underground (everyone his age so confused, but the teacher's face twisted halfway to tears). He remembers, clearly, the first time his father tells him about the details. He is six and they are in the car and his father's hand reaches over the center console to hold his while they drive along back from the long country road to the gravestone.
"I never want you to blame yourself, Miles. Never. It wasn't your fault, and never will be, even in the slightest. All right?"
It all works out in the end, he figures, given that his father's death was indeed absolutely his fault.
There was a hand on his shoulder in the middle of the night, shaking him awake, and he was out of bed before realizing it. Father was in his best suit.
"Shi-Long, get up."
Father was not one to enforce his rule through violence, and similarly he was not one to act out and rebel, because he had seen time and time again that usually Father was right, even as a teenager. So he slid out of bed and rubbed at his eyes. Father quietly put a hand on each of his shoulders. They were nearly the same height, now.
"Little cub, you are the man of the house now. Look after your mother; your half-sister, too. Keep them safe and well for me."
His face scrunched up in sleepy thought. They'd divorced a year ago; the instructions didn't make sense. "Why would you…" No, not a good path of inquiry this late at night. "Where are you going?" He didn't get an answer. "…For how long? …Father? When are you going to come back?"
And again Father said nothing, just drawing Shi-Long's shoulders in close and planting a kiss on his forehead. A gesture he hadn't done since Shi-Long barely came up to his waist in height. He stood stock-still, frozen there until his father was halfway down the stairs.
"Why won't you answer me?"
His best suit. His best coat. Something was happening and the evidence was making his heart beat quick in his throat in nervousness.
"Shi-Long, if you love me, you will stay here and not ask any more questions. 'A pup must respect and follow the elder's instructions.'"
They'd had a fight yesterday - a rare but fierce one - when he called Shi-Long a 'pup'. He was a man, so he said, or on the cusp of becoming one. He deserved better than 'pup'. But the way Father said it now made him gulp down all of his objections, and simply nod.
He didn't know what to say until his father was already in the car, the motor purring. "Father? …Father, please - please be safe!" The car pulled out of the drive, and he stood at the threshhold as if tethered to the inside of the house, kept there by the invisible fence of a command he didn't dare obey. He watched the headlights go down the road before closing the door and going inside to make a pot of coffee and see what trash could be found on TV at that hour. No point in trying to sleep.
But he slept somehow anyway, passed out into a pile of throw pillows his mother had left behind in her hurry to escape the shame of the Lang name (at her father's urging, he suspected, with her dissatisfaction seeming flat and false, to go along with his hunch that his half-sibling was in actuality his full sibling, but there was no proper place for a pup to voice such things, so he did not). The morning news greeted him.
"…And back to our top story. Disgraced police investigator Dai-Long Lang has been found dead this morning after apparently running his car off a bridge. Officials say they suspect no foul play, as it seems a heart attack caused the crash…"
Later on, he'd stand stony-faced at the funeral. Later on, he'd unflinchingly carry the coffin despite so few showing up to help take the weight. He'd answer the sympathy cards and play the polite bereaved host so his mother did not have to do as such. And, prior to the funeral, at the viewing, he would lean over the casket and point out the injection mark on his father's neck and have to be dragged out screaming at the police who told him, very firmly, that his father died of natural causes and it was not up for discussion.
Then, however, all he was able to do was grab one of the throw pillows in misplaced fury, tearing it in half, letting out a howl of anguish before dropping to his knees and sobbing as the feather stuffing floated down around him.
It was always an accident until her thirteenth year.
Miles had just moved out. They had gone to see him off, of course, full of pride and hope. She'd gotten a taste of life outside the large German mansion (and the small German town almost attached to it), outside even the hustle of Berlin where the remains of the wall stood like a scar down the middle of the city. She'd been intoxicated by the warmth and vibrancy of this new place. It's so close to the sea, Papa. Imagine the trails you could ride a horse on, even right near the water. And through the vineyards, too, they say those are beautiful…
She talked all the way back on the airplane ride, full of a new-found courage and odd excitement she wasn't sure what to do with.
Papa knew what to do with it, though. She had unpacked her suitcase when he called her down, the bell ringing throughout the mansion, the house butler nodding as he showed her into her father's library.
"Yes, Papa?"
"Fifteen seconds slower than I expected, Franziska."
Oh. It was going to be one of those talks in the library. "I'm sorry, Papa."
"I don't want you to be sorry, I want you to do better."
"Yes, Papa."
"Now sit down." She did. "It is time I told you a truth of the world."
She considered, for a brief moment, making a weak joke about how she hoped this was easier than the time Papa decided to inform her about the gross and disgusting habits of female bodies and ways to counteract them with strange devices called tampons. Fortunately, she kept quiet.
"It is time to tell you the truth of how your mother died. Namely, that you killed her."
Her voice froze in her throat and her hands knit at the hem of her shirt. This had to be a joke. Surely it had to be. But Papa was a joking sort of man, and he was sincerely not in a joking mood. A little noise made it past her lips but she couldn't turn it into a word, because what sort of word would do?
"I've told you that it was an accident. She slipped and fell down the stairs, and subsequently broke her neck. That is not the entire truth of the situation. She slipped on something. One of your toys, in fact, that you had left out, despite my explicit instruction to pick it up."
I was barely a year old, she wanted to yell. The thought thundered in her mind and she kept quiet because the guilt told her it didn't matter.
"It has been by my grace that you have not been named as a murderer, Franziska. For this continued grace, I have only one small demand."
This is textbook blackmail, she thought, the idea rumbling low on the horizon like a storm, but the guilt was smothering and drowning it out in white noise. Oh God, oh God, she was a murderer, she was why Mama wasn't here. If she'd been better, if she'd been better, because she was never better, never good enough -
"You will cease your horse riding lessons immediately. The thrice-weekly two hour sessions will now be devoted to studying test cases, as to hasten your debut as a master prosecutor. Do you understand, Franziska?"
"Yes, Papa."
"Good. You may leave."
He'd come in his suit and hadn't noticed until someone else at the studio pointed it out. "Might wanna… change, maybe…?" At which point he had looked down at his sleeves and cuff-links and tie sitting flat on his belly and gone oh too softly to be heard.
"Heard about what happened to your parents, man," one of the others said, working at her pottery wheel. "Sucks. Sucks hard. I lost my aunt in a car accident like that. Fuckin' semis, you know?"
"If you need to talk, we're here," the willowy blonde said as she came around him, balancing a tray of pottery carving tools in her hands. A few others around the studio nodded sympathetically. Yeah. Anything he needed. Losing both parents like that, so sudden… Most could barely imagine it. Most were only there because their parents were content to spoil them enough to let them go to Ivy U. for a mere art degree.
"Yeah, and even the Mac Monster should give you an extension. Extenuating circumstances…"
"If you need it. Just paint it out, man. Turn that grief into art and you'll be golden."
Around him the studio hummed - pottery wheels spinning, chalk scraping against canvas, brushes swirling in water.
"This is bullshit," he declared quietly.
The pottery wheel spun down to a stop. "What was that, Nick? Sorry, hon', I couldn't hear -"
"I said," he murmured calmly before breaking out into a full roar. "THIS - IS - BULLSHIT!"
To punctuate the sudden rage, he grabbed one of his canvases from where it had been pulled off to the side. The wooden frame splintered on the concrete floor, and just to help it, he kicked a hole through the painting itself. Part of an azalea bush in morning sunlight ended up on his dress shoes. He did not care.
"Nick, dude…"
"I mean, what the fuck am I even going to do with this? My dad asked me that every time I came home and I never had an answer for him. And I still don't!" The question hung over the room like a shroud. It was, after all, the thing they had all been avoiding. The rest of them had trust funds to go back to, and Nick was keenly aware of this, no matter how much of their closets came from Goodwill thrift stores out of sheer trendiness.
His voice was shaking dangerously. "It's bullshit. I don't even… I don't even enjoy it anymore." The kick he gave to a bit of spare canvas was less emphatic, now. After all, three months ago, his darling Dollie had been hanged. He'd been avoiding that. And the fact that so much of his portfolio was of her. Long, reclining nudes. Coquettish smiles captured on camera. Wire jewelry rings fit to her finger. An abstract sculpture focused on capturing the essence of her curves.
"Just worthless bullshit."
His eyes were stinging in earnest now, about to cry, and he reached up to sniff and wipe them on his jacket. "My dad was right, you know? He never said it like that. But he was right."
The other students had laid down their tools and were staring at him with a distressed sort of pity. The willowy blonde stepped forward first, despite her girlfriend throwing out a nervous hand to stop her, and put her hand on his arm. She left a clay print behind. "Nick, you're in a bad place right now… out of alignment… you really need to center yourself before -"
"Fuck you," he snapped back with a simpering near-tears sort of voice that made it obvious there were no real harsh feelings behind it, but just a general wounded anger and aching, fragile pain.
And he turned and walked out of the studio. The rest of them watched him go. One of them did a still-life study of the broken painting on the floor. Another turned her normal pot into something jagged and ferocious with a red clay glaze and melodramatically titled it Firebird's Anger and received a C+ from her teacher citing technical execution issues.
As for Phoenix, when he walked out, his goal was a new major under the broad category of 'not bullshit'. By the time he got to the campus offices, he had settled on Law.
The lone phone booth in Kurain has a light on at night, which she is very thankful for. It makes it much easier to pick out all the right numbers, and it keeps her company as she cradles the receiver to her ear and listens. It's a winter night - not that late, even though the sun is down. The voice on the other end of the phone still sounds exhausted.
"Hello?"
"Is this - is this Mr. Eugene Kim?"
"Yes, this is he. Look, before you get into your whole script, I don't take telemarketing calls, not even from kids. So find somebody else to sell the cookies or magazines to, okay, sweetheart, because -"
"No! No, I'm not doing that." She gulped solidly. "Mr. Kim, I'm your daughter."
Silence.
"Y-your daughter Pearl? You, um, you married my mom, Morgan Fey, but she's -"
"I don't have a daughter."
"But -"
He cut her off abruptly, yelling into the phone. "I don't have a daughter! I don't have any children, and if that bitch tells you otherwise, she can go to hell!" A ringing slam.
"Mr. Kim?" There was a silence she didn't quite understand. "Mr. Kim?!"
She dialed the number again, even when she ran out of quarters. She sobbed to him about how she was all alone now, they had taken her mother, please just talk to her, please say anything, anything at all…
Eventually Maya saw the light from the depths of Fey Manor. She shuffled out through the falling powder snow to scoop Pearl up. And by then she was tired enough to let herself be carried, even if she was a little too big and Maya a little too small, because that was what family did for each other.