Sometimes she couldn't remember the happy times anymore.
She knew they existed, she knew they had been happy, even after their mother had passed and their father had to leave them to their own devices for increasingly longer stretches of time – but they had been happy enough. Touka just didn't quite remember those times anymore.
It was sad, really, how the day her father had told her that Mama wasn't coming home anymore was still as clear in her mind as it had always been, even though she had been so young back then, but her memories of her actual mother were almost completely faded. And now the same started to happen for the memories of her father.
There were a few things that had stuck with her, though. Her father had read to them every night before they fell asleep; fantastic stories of fantastic worlds, far beyond Touka's imagination and she and Ayato had soaked them in – as if they could wake up in a different world the next day, if they just knew enough about it.
They would play in the park, like normal people did, and sometimes one of the kids of the neighbourhood would dare to approach them and invite them to join in with whatever games the other kids were playing. They always accepted, until Arata had told them to be more careful around strangers, especially if they were much older than they were. Touka hadn't understood his worries back then, they were all people and just playing tag – there was no harm in it, was there?
She soon understood – as their father hadn't come home one night and they realised that their own neighbour, the nice lady who would cook for them sometimes, had sold them out to the Doves. She had realised that she couldn't trust humans, then. It didn't matter whether they were nice old ladies who needed walking aids or little children with tooth-gapped grins and runny noses.
Her childhood had been happy, sometimes at least., But the imprints her childhood had left on her, her vivid memories, weren't.