A/N:

Yes, I know that I need to kill my brain, but I'm severely depressed now, no questions asked. I did this to get my mind off of the topic and I researched what time was like during the 1920s (setting of this Fic) so I forced myself to work on this, so it's going to be pretty choppy, I think.

On another note: I'm giving up on One Chance. For now. I just can't come up with any ideas for it, I'm sorry, but if I can't come up with anything within the year or so, I may just get rid of it all together. I honestly don't even like it. . .

To help out a bit, the style is different (again), but not that much, I should hope. This is going to be a little confusing, but it'll clear up the more chapters I post, so please bear with me. To help simplify, I used my usual "xXx" that are paragraph breaks to show that it's in third person and line breaks to introduce a Characters POV, since I dislike having to read "So-and-so's POV", I'm thinking of doing the same to my other Fic Just My Luck, but that yet has to be seen. No worries, it'll make more sense the more I go on.

Warning: Long chapters, this'll roughly be about twenty chapters, maybe.

Disclaimer: Psh, I totally own Yamaha that helps fund the Vocaloids from every company. *sarcasm*

Ppoine remembered drowning.

"I know it happened, I'm sure of it."

"That's impossible," her Aunt Gumi would say to her with a slight frown and eyes that held a hint of worry in them. "It must have been a dream, a very bad dream. A nightmare."

Ppoine frowned and looked at her small hands. She would look back up at her Aunt and then scurry away. But Ppoine maintained that she drowned, insisted on it for years, even when she should have known better.

Gumi

Of course I lied to Ppoine. She was only a child, after all. What should I have said to her? That her mother had been reckless? That I'd had to rescue her, give her new life, raise her up as my own? There are things in life that children must not know, must never know, if one could help it.

I suppose people will say that it was my fault, that if I'd not gone home that March in 1919, Miki, my only sister, would not be dead. But I did go home. The way I saw it, I didn't have a choice.

Hmmmm. . . "March 27, 1919". That's a good place to start. That's what I wrote on the top right corner of my page. "Dear Miki". The pen shook as I raised it, splattering black ink all over the page. "March 27, 1919," I wrote on a fresh sheet of paper. "Dear Miki".

In the end, I didn't bother writing to her. I already knew that I'd be welcomed. After all, Miki had been begging me for months on end to come back. But what could I tell her? I had no explanation but the truth. And God knows I certainly didn't want to tell her that.

The truth is, the hospital that I stayed at had asked me to leave. Not permanently, of course.

"Of course we don't want you to go permanently, Miss Hiirone," Dr. Utatane said.

It wasn't clear who he meant by "we", since we were the only ones in his office. It made me nervous knowing that there were others who had talked about me, perhaps whispering in the hallways, ducking around corners when they see me coming. For all I know, they probably gathered in this very office, sipped coffee, shook their heads and tut-tutted me. Who were they?

Dr. Utatane moved some papers around on his desk. He didn't even look at me. "When this is over-" he cleared his throat, "-when you're yourself again, then we'll reconsider."

He was referring to my hallucinations, I think, although it could have been the fainting or even the accidents. He studied his desktop for a moment. After several minutes had passed, he sighed, saying it almost kindly, "You'll feel much better from this stink, trust me."

There was a stink in the hospital. A literal stink of gangrenous flesh and vile vomit, of ammonia, burnt oatmeal and camphor, of urine and feces. But a nurse gets used to these smells, the screams and the sight of men missing pieces of themselves.

And I was a brilliant nurse. I had the touch; everybody said so. The soldiers worshiped me. Those with faces lifted them towards me when I bent over their beds. Those with arms held them out to me.

I loved being an angel. But I had to give that up.

Dr. Utatane had a point. Somehow, I had lost control.

One morning I woke up sure, absolutely positive, that my legs had been sawn off of my hip, and although I quickly realized that I had only been dreaming-my legs were tight there, two ridges under the blanket-I couldn't move them. I couldn't rise no matter how hard I tried. My roommate, Lily Poid, had to pull me out of bed. Another time, I'm ashamed to say, I actually fainted across the chest of a soldier while giving him his sponge bath.

Several times I had to run from the wards to vomit. My insides spewed out every morning. Whether it was bedpans and janitors' buckets, into hastily twisted newspaper cones, the snowdrift behind the hydrangea hedge. Twice I lost the hearing in my right ear and once I spent three hours sitting in the stairwell, waiting for my sight to return. Syringes flew out to stab my arms; glass vials shattered in my hands, file drawers pinched the tips of my fingers.

I forgot soldiers' names and the purposes for errands. Three days in a row I locked myself out of the room I shared with Lily. And always, I was so tired, so very tired, that I simply could not stay awake, no matter how often I splashed cold water on my face or the amount of coffee I drank. In the end, I finally caved in and fashioned myself a nest of towels in the supply room. I slept there every afternoon from one to two-thirty until the day Ward A ran out of soap and Stella Hoshine was fetched to get some. All in all, I had to admit that they were right-I was beginning to make a better patient than a nurse. My body had gotten the better of me and could not be trusted. To tell you the truth, I didn't even know myself anymore.

And so, I finally agreed to go home, not to the Serenada boardinghouse filled with unmarried nurses where Lily and I had to carefully split the freezing, tawny-colored room into her side and my side, but back to the farm where I had grown up. Back to the farm where the snowy hills where white as bleached linen and where my sister rocked her little girl to sleep beside the kitchen stove while she waited for her husband to get back from the war. I knew that, at home, I could set myself right again.

Outside of the train station, I drew the city's breath, yeasty from the breweries and bittersweet from the chocolate factories. The smells filled my lungs and I couldn't help but feel better already. The grip on my luggage was tight as I got off from the train. I wasn't late nor was I exceptionally early for my train. And now, for the first time in weeks, I was hungry, ravenous in fact. I went into the station and stopped by a counter to order a bag of roasted peanuts and a cup of coffee that didn't scald my tongue. When I had finished the nuts, I was still hungry.

"Would you wrap half of a turkey salad?" I asked the vendor again. "No, nevermind, make it a whole. And some of that ham, smoked. And maybe a slice of cake, the carrot one over there, please." I heard a noisy slurp. Someone down the counter was drinking a chocolate shake that looked awfully good, and I was tempted to order one of those, too.

"That's what I like," the counterman said, punching in the numbers into the register, "a woman who can eat!"

So I changed my mind about the shake. As I was getting ready to pay my bill, they called my train. I hurriedly gave him the money and got my food and quickly hopped onto the train.

"One way, miss? Goin' home?" the conductor asked, steadying himself his hip along the seat in front of me. I nearly began to explain that it wasn't right, really, to consider it home any longer, even though legally the farm was half of mine. Well, it really was rightfully Miki's since she lived there, had a family there, and I was just going back for a restorative visit because somehow my body had ended up making a mind of its own. I wanted to admit that I was banished because I had failed as a nurse, because nobody, including me, believed that I could coax soldiers back into proper shape when I was such a mess myself. But it wasn't in me to say such things aloud, to admit my failure.

"That's right," I said without a moments hesitation.

He winked at me. "Tickets!" he bawled and lurched down the way down the swaying car. Spring meant even less in the country than it did in the city that year, and by the time we pulled up to the icy platform in Serenada, the sky was dark and heavy with unfallen snow just waiting to flutter down. The wind bit at my face so that I had to duck my head. I watched the toes of my boots as I stepped down the slick platform stairs and picked my way over the snow that drifted across the street in long pulls like taffy. My steps took me one, two, three buildings down from the platform where I stopped at the door of Kagamine's Bait and Tackle-"A Dozen Grubs for a Penny." I went in.

The bell over the door gave a sweet jingle and the coals in the corner stove gave an answering glow to the sudden draft of frigid air. Then the curtains behind the counter parted and Rin Kagamine emerged from the back room. She grinned when she saw me, beamed, you could say, and wiped her hands on the front of her apron in that nervous way she had as she hurried toward me.

"Gumi! What are you doing home?" She put her hands on my shoulders and pressed her warm, smooth cheek against mine. "Ooh, you're frozen, a block of ice!" She held her warm palms to my face for a moment and then grabbed hold of my wrist and gave it a little tug without warning and led me to a seat to let me answer her question. "Come over near the stove. I can't believe it, just can't believe that it's you! I wondered-when I heard the bell-I wondered who it could have been, coming in at this hour, and I thought, It's probably Rook again, but of course, it couldn't have been, because he's with his sister Ruko on over at Menostown, and then I thought. . ."

She would've gone on and on about what she's supposed and what she'd thought after that and what she'd done next, but I interrupted her. "I'm taking a vacation." I answered, simple as that. "A rest." I mean, it was true, in a way.

She gushed. "Miki will be so happy!" Just as soon as her grin came, it vanished and was replaced with a frown. "But why didn't she tell me? She was in here only two days ago."

"Miki doesn't know."

That was all I needed to say, because she broke in immediately. "A surprise! How wonderful! And Gumi," she leaned toward me and lowered her voice discreetly, though she really didn't need to, it was just the two of us and nobody else in the shop to hear. "I have a surprise, too." She waited until she was sure she had my undivided attention. "Len and I may have a little one coming along." She patted her apron front significantly.

I didn't know what to say. Rin had been pregnant every one of the five years they've been married and has lost every one of those babies, each when it was only several months along. A person ought to know when to give up, I thought; a person ought to not court with disaster. At the very least, she could at least be a bit more wary. She should hold some of her feelings back. But Rin was incapable of reticence, and she didn't have the advantage of scientific training, the way I did. She always acted as if nothing could possibly go wrong, as if this child's birth were written in the stars, and that she only needed to wait for the blessed event. Only her hands hovering protectively over her belly betrayed the worry underneath. What she thought was growing could so easily amount to nothing at all.

"It feels different this time," she said defensively, although I hadn't expressed my concern.

"I hope so." I mean, really, what else could I have said?

We agreed then that I should be on my way while there was still daylight. A few steps from the store knowing that she would be watching, I turned to look back. She held up her hand and, as I mirrored her, I thought of the time when we were just alike, Rin and I, both happy to be finished with school for the day, running and sliding along this very road, scanning the tower of St. Anzu for the lantern light that we believed signaled the escape of a lunatic, talking why Teto Kasane wasn't talking to Momo Momone, and how we knew that Mikuo Hatsune cheated on the math test, and what to do with the penny after you'd rubbed it on a wart, and sometimes singing.

Of course, that was before Miki. By the time Miki was old enough to go to school, Rin and I walked this same road decorously, with our books squeezed tight against our chests, but Miki ran ahead, pitching herself into snow banks, as we had once done.

"Watch me, Gumi! Watch me, Rin!" she'd cry.

Or she would linger behind to study the snowflakes pattering her mitten and summon me back imperiously. "Gumi, look at this one! Hurry up before it melts, you hafta see it!"

I could never make my sister understand that Rin and I had important matters to discuss. For five minutes of so, Miki would stay by my side, cocooned with me in a wool shawl, but inevitably she'd pull away and run and slide until she exhausted herself and begged me to carry her.

"Piggyback!" she demanded. Yes, demanded, although she was much too heavy.

"You're too big now, Miki." I protested. I sighed. I rolled my eyes at Rin, whose eight brothers and sisters were never so much trouble, even if they were all put together. But Miki stomped her little foot. She wailed and clung onto me, so that eventually, I bent my knees, and she jumped on my back and wrapped her slim arms around my neck, tight enough to strangle. Miki was always interrupting, always demanding, and I always gave in. I always did what she wanted. Always. Except that last time.

When Miki was born, I was eight years old and not, in the neighbor ladies opinion, a promising child.

"What a beautiful baby," Mrs. Vista said as she, Mrs. Akita and Mrs. Juon crowded around Miki's crib and cooed over her pretty lips, her lovely chin. With seventeen children among them, you would think that they would have seen enough babies. But Miki, apparently, was special.

"Gumi'll be jealous, won't she?" Mrs. Akita stated. "She has such a pretty little sister; I would've been, too!"

But my mother shook her head and said, "No, Gumi loves her sister." She laid the baby on my lap to prove it to them.

Why should I be jealous? Miki was mine. The baby that everybody wanted for herself belonged to me.

A photographer came into our house to take a picture of us on the day of Miki's christening. They put me in the big green chair-already, my legs were long enough to touch the floor, if I didn't sit back all the way- and I held her, her dress spilling white down my front, one of her tiny wet fingers tangled in the end of my braid, while outside the April clouds chased each other across the sun so that the room was bright one moment and then shadowed the next.

"Smile!" the photographer pleaded with a strained smile of his own because I refused. At Rin's house, I had seen a picture of her holding onto her baby brother, Rinto, with a solemn look. I wanted to look like her, solemn, noble.

With the pop, the flash and the smoke, Miki began to cry. My mother started to lift her from me, but I was determined to hold onto my baby. I would be the one to comfort her. And Miki, for her part, wound her fingers more tightly in my hair. She wouldn't let go until my mother opened up those tiny hooks one by one.

I looked up at the signs and turned onto Tessa Road, which runs up a hill overlooking Seranada Lake. At the top, the wind hit me full force, scouring my cheeks and tearing up my coat. I gasped and struggled forward, head low, as far as the icehouse. There I rested, stamping my feet in the straw and flexing my fingers, unwinding my scarf and shaking it free of my frozen breath. I left the door partway open for light.

Before me now, as I stood looking out, the land fell away down the steep slope, and through the trees, the frozen lake lay like a white scar on the earth. I shifted right, adjusted my angle slightly, and the tree trunks parted to reveal the familiar dark stain amid the whiteness, a crescent crowned with the lace of leafless branches in the northeast corner of Seno's Bay, the island that had once been mine. I shifted again and could make out on the island the green roof of the house where Miki and Kaito had lived until the war.

Once I had thought this place was the only one like it in all the world, but now I knew better. Lakes were scattered all over this part of the country, their outlines different, but their innards just the same. They were drops and drips and splashes on the land. They were holes and craters lined with skin too thin to hold back the springs that rushed to fill them, and most of them were dotted here and there with stubborn little islands, knobs of land that refused to dip their heads under the water.

To the old farmer who'd sold my parents their land, my island had been nothing, or worse than nothing- a useless piece of soil. He never mentioned it to my parents when he pushed the deed toward them across the heavy oak table in what had only moments before been his kitchen and was now ours.

They didn't discover they owned the island until several years later. I was twelve and Miki was four the day my parents spread the papers out on that same kitchen table to determine whether a spring to the north that would have been handy for them really belonged to our neighbors, as the Vistas claimed.

"What's this here?" My mother tapped her index finger on a blob marked with an "X" that looked to be in the middle of nowhere.

My father studied the map. "Well, Mother," he said, "it looks like we own the island out in Seno's Bay."

Miki was standing close to him, as she always did, one arm crooked around his leg. He scooped her up and tossed her up and down towards the ceiling. "What do you think of an island, little Missy?"

"Again!" she shrieked. "Again!"

And so he tossed her up several more times, while she squealed in delight, until at last he lowered her to the ground, his fairly large hands rucking her dress under her arms.

"Do it again! Please!" she whined, tugging on his trousers. "Again! Please! Again!"

Finally he raised a warning finger, and she started to cry. He turned to me. "Take care of your sister," he said impatiently. "We're busy here." And then he and my mother went back to trying to bend the northern boundary.

After everyone else was in bed that night, I crept down the stairs and unrolled the map to examine the shape for myself. How oddly small and plain it looked, so different from the rocky, tangled place I knew. I rubbed at it with my finger. On paper, it might have been no more than a smudge of blackberry jam.

Under the rush of the wind now, I became aware of the ching-ching of sleigh bells coming up the road. I wrapped my muffler tight around my throat and lifted my bag. I was about to step outside and hail the driver, when the horse crested the hill and I saw just whose animal it was. I shrank back and pulled the door to. I had done something that I didn't want Nero Akita to know, something worse even than my dismissal, and I couldn't stand for him to see me with that shame in my heart.

In the darkness, I pressed against the straw-covered blocks of ice and, my eyes closed, my breathing stilled, waited for the bells to cease, for the sound of footsteps, for the light to flood against my eyelids, because surely he'd seen me, had at least seen something and would wonder. Nero wasn't the sort who could ignore a glimpse of an intruder or of someone who might need his help.

The bells came on, nearer, nearer, until I could hear the horse snort and the hiss of the runners on the snow, and then they passed by and jingled more and more faintly, until at last they were buried beneath the wind. He must have not seen me after all. But if the stranger I had recently become was relieved, some other part of me shuddered with despair, and I found myself weeping, the tears searing my frozen cheeks at the thought that I had to hide myself from a man I'd once loved.

And then, finally, I had to go on. One can only cry for so long and it would be dark soon and colder. Although the wind was fierce, I had only one more hill to climb. At the very last one, when I could see the yellow farmhouse and the smoke from the field stone chimney, I began to run, taking huge, wild steps, picking my feet up high out of the snow and throwing them down again, swinging my bag as if I were just a girl, propelled by the excitement of coming home.

I was about to knock on the kitchen door when it flew open. Out came the fiery red locks and a pair of brilliant ruby eyes that belonged to none other than my own little sister, Miki. She stood on her tiptoes; her cheeks flushed from sitting near the warm fire and broke out into a huge grin.

"Gumi! You've come back!" She had to lift her arms high to throw them around me. It took me a second to realize that I had grown into a tower while she had stayed tiny and delicate, like our mother, a little sprite.

I was pleased by her embrace, but I was less demonstrative than my sister, and I stood rather awkwardly, still holding my bag until she began to pull me inside.

"Wait, Miki. You don't want snow all over your clean floor." I protested while I stomped my feet and brushed my shoulders.

She laughed. "Bring it in! Bring it in! Bring all of you in!"

She poked me playfully in the ribs as she helped me take my coat off. "Getting a little stoat, aren't you? Too much carrot cake?" she teased and giggled to show that she was only joking.

"I'll be skin and bones again in no time eating your cooking." I shot back in a tone similar to hers.

"Oh, I'm not going to cook anymore, not now that you're here."

We laughed at this, knowing how right she was.

"Look at those boots! Those gorgeous boots!" she exclaimed, bending over to admire my city footwear, spoiled now with the wading through the drifts for which they were perfectly unsuited for.

That was my Miki, thrilled at a pair of new boots, not even thinking to ask uncomfortable questions about why I'd come or what I intended to do. She was simply pleased to have me here with her.

"And Ppoine? Where's my baby?" I asked.

"Right here, of course." She swooped down on a pile of rumpled quilts that lay on the rocker near the stove and plucked the little girl out. "Wake up, Ppoine, your Aunt Gumi is here."

I started to worry about the fuss I had already started. "Oh, please don't wake her up," I begged, but it was too late. Ppoine blinked at me and yawned.

Miki thrusted her into my arms. "Here, you hold her." she said with that familiar, confident smile.

The way things had been with me lately, I was afraid that the child might scream, but when I settled into the rocker, she nestled against my shoulder and went back to sleep. It was exactly as I'd hardly dared to hope it would be, the three of us warm in that familiar kitchen. I almost forgot about to ask after Kaito.

"He can see alright again," she said. "But there's some infection in the leg, and he still doesn't know when he'll be coming back." She told me in her letters about the gas that had blinded him and the shrapnel that had made a hole in his thigh practically big enough to stick a fist through. I assured her that a man was pretty certain to recover from those wounds, but she wanted to worry.

"You're here now, though," she said, raising her ruby eyes to meet my jade ones and tossed her head, almost defiantly and grinned.

So I would take care of her. That was all right then. That was something I knew how to do. For a moment or two I could almost believe that things were the way they had always been, before Kaito or anyone else had come between us.

A/N:

Well, I'm sorry if it's confusing (again), but it'll clear up a bit later on. I've actually thought this one through and I hope I can make this one come out pretty decently. As for Ppoine, if any of you don't know who she is, she's a UTAUloid (surprising? No.) and her whole name is Matsudappoine. Yep, you guessed it, she's Matsudappoiyo's sister. She's a year younger than him but she's actually taller, illustrated and voiced by the same creator, Matsuda. Anyways, she was the only one with blue hair(even though it's really light) and red eyes that seemed to have fit Kaito and Miki as their offspring. Sorry, but Ppoiyo won't be in this story (I love him to bits, though. . .).

Review if you like, but they're appreciated, as well as criticisms.