I own nothing.

When she was a little girl, Natsuhi's father taught her how to deal with anger and sadness and all sorts of negative emotions.

Natsuhi's father was a Shinto priest, and he was the sort of man who didn't believe in letting his negative emotions lead him down the path to destruction. When he became aware of his own daughter's struggles, he imparted his wisdom onto Natsuhi.

This is what he told her. Gather all of your anger, all of your sadness and resentment, and write it down in a diary. All of it, dear; no one will ever read what you have written, so there is no need to fear the judgment of others. Write down everything you feel causes you suffering, and let the pages and the ink on them soak up your pain and your bitterness, until there is none of it left inside of you. When you have filled the diary, burn it. Hold a funeral service for all your anger and sadness and bitterness.

Natsuhi had been somewhat skeptical of this idea at the time; it didn't make a whole lot of sense to her. How could she know that it would work for her? But she tried to be an obedient daughter, so she did as her father told her.

Over the years, Natsuhi would write in resentment and bitterness of her poor grades and the way her brothers teased her. She catalogued her irritation at being made to get out of bed when her father acme home, no matter what the hour. Her bitterness over the poverty they, an aristocratic family, had to live in thanks to her father's bad business decisions. Natsuhi wrote all of it down, and though she didn't burn the diaries as her father told her to do, she did indeed feel better after confiding all her dark feelings in a companion who would always understand, and never judge.

Her father, he was crying as the chauffeur grabbed her arm and led her away. Natsuhi wondered what he would do. Would he write 'Natsuhi' in a diary until all the pages were full, and then set it on fire? Would her family treat this as her funeral pyre? Would her parents forget their second child? This was a sort of death, but Natsuhi didn't want to die, or be forgotten. Seventeen was too young for both.

"I am a hostage being imprisoned by the Ushiromiya family under the guise of marriage. However, if everything can be resolved this way…"

At seventeen, Natsuhi was given away, without consultation or consent, as a bride to the elder son of the Ushiromiya family patriarch. She knew what it was all about, to settle her family's debts in a way that wouldn't end with her father in prison and the rest of them on the streets. She was a trophy, a prize, a 'borrowed womb' in the words of her new husband's family.

Her new parents, Kinzo and Shizuka, were distant and had little to do with her. Her new sister, Eva, looked at her as though she was something pale and slimy and pulsating that had crawled out from under a rock in the garden. Her new brother, Rudolf, looked at her as though she was some cheap woman advertising from street corners. Her new sister, Rosa, looked at her with the uncomprehending eyes of a five-year-old girl, and had no understanding of her pain. The servants whispered in pity and contempt. Her new husband, Krauss, tried clumsily to make accommodations for her, but Natsuhi only felt more out of place at that.

She was a stranger on this island. All of these people were strangers. Natsuhi had come in a position of weakness, a member of a family who was beholden to the Ushiromiya family, and though she was Ushiromiya Natsuhi now, no one ever let her forget it, not in her heart. She was forbidden to see her family, or to contact them in any way, or even to speak of them, but no one would ever forget that she was one of them. For as long as she lived, no one would forget that she was a 'borrowed womb', good only as breeding stock, and unwanted otherwise.

There was no one here Natsuhi could talk to; she hadn't even been permitted to take one of her family's maidservants here with her as a companion. She was completely alone, listening to the wind howl and the waves crash against the shore, praying that she would become pregnant soon.

Natsuhi wrote in her diaries, her hand shaking in pain. She resented the circumstances that had brought her here, a hostage of the Ushiromiya family. Kinzo had run her family into the ground so that he could procure a daughter from it to marry into his own, and secure another connection between the Ushiromiya family and the traditional aristocracy. She was nothing to any of these people but a broodmare, intended to churn out heirs to the Ushiromiya family with no thought to her own happiness.

Her husband, he tried to be accommodating, but this did not alleviate Natsuhi's pain. It reminded her that she was a stranger, and that she would never really be considered a part of this family. She picked up on the flavor of pity in Krauss's words, and that flavor only stoked the fires of resentment in her belly. She wished he would look at her with respect. She wished that she was free again, to live her own life, live for herself, and not for this near-stranger whom she called her husband.

There was no one else, so she confided in the only companion she had who would always understand, and never judge.

-0-0-0-

Thirty years later, in a certain future of Natsuhi's, things had changed, and she was finding reason to regret never committing those changes to paper.

She couldn't get up. If she tried to get up, Eva would slam her foot into her gut, or simply backhand her until she fell onto her back, screaming abuse all the time. Her dress stank of stale tea, and there were tea leaves stuck in her hair. Her face and hands were scalded from when Eva had lobbed the boiling hot teapot at her face, and the salt of her tears made the marks on her face throb and burn all the more. Natsuhi knelt on the floor, surrounded by tea leaves and tea stains and her own hair, furiously ripped from her scalp. After repeated blows, her nose had begun to bleed, but she wasn't allowed to try and dab at it with a handkerchief. No one had said or done anything to help her as Eva vented her fury at her. Her entire body ached.

If she tried to stand, she was struck.

If she spoke too long, she was struck.

If she protested her innocence, she was struck.

If she breathed too loudly for Eva's liking, she was struck.

Natsuhi wondered how long Eva had been waiting to do something like this, if she had been waiting thirty whole years to kick, hit, bruise, scratch, claw, burn the sister-in-law she had always hated. She wondered, if Eva's husband and her son hadn't been killed, but Eva had somehow managed to become the next family head, if this still would have happened.

The self-satisfied sneer of the guest who should never have been welcomed roused Natsuhi from half-consciousness.

What was that Erika was holding?

It was one of her diaries.

All of them were here. Erika had convinced everyone in this room that Natsuhi had committed the murders that had taken place, the abuse, humiliation, and degradation had begun. Her room had been searched, overturned for "incriminating evidence". Natsuhi had watched as Eva crushed her grandfather's spirit mirror beneath her heel, slamming her foot into it over and over again with an ugly expression on her face. They had taken her diaries, all of the journals she had written in over the years.

Natsuhi…

She…

This was really the ultimate indignity.

A diary was sacred ground. It was so private, too private for other eyes to ever look upon their pages. It had always been considered truth that diaries contained thoughts too private to be shared. There, the writer could vent their frustrations without fear of judgment. They could abuse another person in words all they wanted without fear of being charged of any crime. A closed diary was a bit like the cat box from Schrodinger's experiment. There could be anything inside.

But that cat box was about to be forcibly opened.

All of Natsuhi's diaries had locks on them. She had taken this precaution when Jessica was a little girl; her daughter was so curious, and frankly nosy, and Natsuhi didn't want her stumbling over her diaries and reading them. Erika had taken a small screwdriver, and was now ramming it into the lock of the diary she was holding, ruthlessly breaking it so that she could break into Natsuhi's most intimate thoughts the same way. And oh, the thing she dragged into the light.

A lot of things could change in thirty years. People changed over the course of thirty years. When she was seventeen, Natsuhi never imagined that she would be able to love Krauss as her husband. When she was seventeen, Natsuhi never imagined that she would love and respect Kinzo as her own father. But she had, she had grown to love Krauss and had learned how to love Kinzo. She considered herself a part of this family, even if the only place she could ever wear the One-Winged Eagle was in her heart.

None of this mattered to Erika. Natsuhi hadn't written it down.

Did she need to prove in written words that she was in love?

Yes, apparently.

Did she need to prove in written words that she loved her family?

Yes, apparently.

Natsuhi was a different person now than she had been thirty years ago, but that didn't matter to Erika, nor, apparently, did it matter to any of the other people in the parlor. They listened raptly, lapping up the words that Erika assured them all was proof of Natsuhi's guilt. The words she had written as a lonely, isolated seventeen-year-old girl, those were the words with which the nails of her coffin would be crafted. It mattered to no one that these were words never meant to be shared or said aloud, nor that they had been written thirty years ago, when their writer was a very different person.

With every word read in that gloating tone, Natsuhi felt a piece of her heart die. Surely, that was her heart dying, as the truth was obscured, and the truth of thirty years ago was used to overwrite the truth of today.