Miwa is always asking questions. She asks why they have to put baking soda in the cakes, and why the crows eat garbage but the robins don't, and why the leaves turn colors in the fall. She asks so many that soon the others start to call her 'Question' as a nick-name.
Like the vast majority of haibane, she asks questions about their place in the village, why they have wings and why they're given halos and why they disappear eventually. Unlike most haibane, her questions don't wear out. She gets a job at the library, but she searches the stacks constantly for a hint of what their purpose might be or what may lie beyond the walls. She asks the older haibane until they outright refuse to answer any longer.
She finds it frustrating, the way the haibane around her hatch and ask and ask and ask but then fall into the rut of work and contentment. If they still wonder where the crows fly off to, they don't respond when she wonders aloud about it. If they still want to know why they can't touch the walls, they only give her vague answers.
Tarou says that they just tire of the lack of answers. "Nobody here knows, so what's the point of asking?" he points out during on of their long evening walks. "The only people who know what's on the other side of the walls don't tell us. And it doesn't matter why we can only wear second-hand clothes if that's the rule everyone obeys."
"But it does," Miwa snaps. "That's like saying we shouldn't care if the moon goes around the Earth or the sun because it will wax and wane the same either way. I just want to know."
It's the question of the place beyond the walls that bothers her the most. She can't touch them, which means no climbing. Tarou says that he knows a girl who once got very sick after touching them, and then was punished by the Renmei. So Miwa thinks through her long hours of waiting at the checkout desk and restocking the shelves. She checks out books on engineering and birds and flutters her useless wings, and she plans.
Tarou helps her only reluctantly. He says that they're going to get in trouble even if she doesn't approach the walls. She says it doesn't matter and if he's so scared, she won't care if he leaves her behind. They chat quietly by candlelight sewing sturdy stitches, and interrupt their walks to work with gears and bolts.
It's a strange-looking mechanism, when it's finished on a cloudy spring day. She tests it out at partial power. Then, satisfied, Miwa cranks the power all the way up. "You can still leave," she tells Tarou. "I won't care."
He shakes his head. Miwa smiles at him and goes to reflexively smooth the skirt she is not wearing – it's shorts, today, borrowed from a house-mate. She double-checks the buckles on her harness and all the bits and bobs that need to work out right. Then, with a last grin to Tarou's worried face, she steps on her machine and stops the 'go' button with one foot.
It propels her up and up and up, above the trees and the buildings and, in a second, the walls. Discombobulated by the acceleration, Miwa barely remembers to let her parachute out at the arc of her flight, and thank the heavens, it works. With that, she can look around.
It's not what she imagined. It's not endless fields or forests, dotted here and there with other towns in walls like Glie.
It's endless, infinite-
it's void and void-
it's beautiful and terrible-
it's everything, the whole world-
She falls back to the earth in a daze, craning her head as the eternal void disappears behind the walls and the sky. The wind blows her about, but Tarou manages to chase her down. Good thing, too, as her parachute tangles in a tree. He cuts her down, running his mouth the whole time about how they're going to be in so much trouble.
Nobody comes.
He asks, as Miwa finds her footing again and stumbles back down the path, what she saw.
"Nothing. Everything." That's all she can say.
Nobody back home seems to have noticed their escapade. They destroy the machine the next day and throw out the parachute. Nobody comes to chastise them, and Tarou relaxes bit by bit.
"I guess you got your answer," he says when several days have passed. Miwa nods, her eyes set to the horizon. "What next? You've stopped asking everyone about the rules and the wings."
"Oh, I don't know." She sighs and stretches out her legs. "I'm still processing what I saw. It was amazing. I wish you could have come with me. Oh, but I think it tells us so much about why we're here, though."
"Well, why?" he asks, and she gives him a few well-thought words of speculation. That this is a place between worlds for them to grow in spirit before moving on to new lives. Better lives than they would have otherwise lived, perhaps. That the walls are obstacles that they have to grow to overcome. Tarou nods along; it seems to make sense to him, as he doesn't ask too much about it.
The next day, he sees her repairing a bike. She asks him a question about one part, which he helps her to fix before heading out to the dry goods shop where he works. She wishes him a good day with a smile. It's the last anyone sees of her. When she doesn't come home that evening, the household finds her halo by moonlight, long since cold.
A/N: Written for oxfordRoulette for Parallels 2016; I apparently forgot to cross-post after authors were revealed. This was vaguely inspired by a documentary on Tibet I watched some years ago, which included, among other things, a section on what is thought to happen in-between death and reincarnation. Haibane Renmei reminded me of that, so this view of what is beyond the walls and the reason behind the Haibane is one of the interpretations I have of the series.