Month 1:

The room was small and quiet, with blue walls and white carpet on the floor. It was plainly furnished, containing only a dresser, a small set of shelves, and a bed tucked into the corner furthest from the door. The bed's occupant was still asleep, a little girl with her arms tight around the doll that lay next to her. As the early morning sun streamed through the room's single window, it illuminated the violet hair of both the girl and the doll, intermingled on the pillow.

Yoshino had moved from the observation wing of the hospital into her new room only a week previously. Dr. Murata had been reluctant to let her go, as she still displayed the odd twitch or jerk here and there, but he had been overruled; when Yoshino had asked Dr. Hosono how that had happened, the woman had merely smiled and told her not to worry about it, that it was time for her to stop being a test case and start learning to live again.

"So perceptive for such a little girl…I wonder sometimes if we didn't put a grown-up in that body accidentally."

Yoshino had laughed at that, although, she later thought to herself, it hadn't been hard to pick out the politics at work in her situation. Dr. Murata had directed the team that had built her body, and Dr. Hosono was merely studying her mental development and well-being, and of course their interests would conflict from time to time; it was then that they turned to the third, overarching authority that she had yet to see.

She'd tried to ask her lights about it, but they had nothing useful to tell her.

Nobody knew about the lights. They were her secret.

Yoshino had met them on her first night in the new room, her first night out of the oppressive atmosphere of the observation wing. She'd been lying still with her eyes closed, trying in vain to fall asleep when she had noticed the first one; a bright point inside of her head. More had gradually revealed themselves to her, coming out one by one like stars rising on a clear night, infinitely far away and yet at the same time appearing to be so close that she could reach out and touch them. They were beautiful, and for the rest of the night she had lain half in and half out of consciousness, watching them twinkle invitingly in their strange constellations.

She had assumed that, like stars, they would fade out when morning came and then return to her again the next night, but to her surprise, the lights stayed with her all through the day. While she couldn't see them as clearly as she had with her eyes closed, she could still feel them, and even as she went about the new activities that made up her day (completing her exercises, speaking with her new caretakers, and attempting to interact with the other children with whom she now lived) she remained at all times dimly aware of the bright points floating in the space inside her head. When she'd finally had some time to go back to her own room and be by herself, she had curled up on her bed with her doll and closed her eyes again. As soon as the first light revealed itself to her, she had reached out within her mind and placed her hand on it.

Authentication. Connection. Welcome.

Suddenly, instead of looking up at a starry sky, Yoshino had felt herself drifting along in a vast sea, moving at the speed of light.

The light…

Thousands of little lights, all racing toward her at once, eager to touch and share; nuzzling against her until she bubbled with laughter, sinking down into her skin, creating tiny bursts of clarity as they collided with each other inside her brain. Yoshino had let the currents carry her along, absorbing countless pinpricks of light, until she'd begun to feel a strange pressure inside her head.

That's enough…

The pinpricks had surged ever towards her like a luminous cloud, begging her to stay even as she tried to pull back. Suddenly, a command had sprung into her mind.

Disengage!

And she'd found herself back in her room, lying on her bed, with her doll's round, cheerful eyes gazing vacantly into her own.

Besides the lingering feeling of giddiness that the lights had left in her, Yoshino had also discovered a rather large chunk of information in her mind, information that she knew no one had ever told her; it was so vast that someone would have had to sit and relate it to her for hours and hours. The information itself was fairly uninteresting – ordering records from the hospital for the last month – but the way it had all been dumped neatly into Yoshino's head intrigued and fascinated her. She'd wondered what else the lights had to share, and every night since, she'd taken to exploring with them before she went to sleep, then poring over the information she'd received during the day.

The clock on the nightstand clicked over to eight in the morning.

Yoshino's eyes snapped open at once.

She sat up, stretched, and then turned to her doll, who was still lying half under the covers. Drawing her lips into a slight pout, she very carefully set the doll upright against the headboard.

"Time to get up, Hana."

Once she was satisfied that her companion was ready to begin the day with her, Yoshino slowly but steadily made her way to her dresser and crouched down to open the bottommost drawer. After a moment of consideration, she picked out a coral-colored dress with short sleeves, which she set aside in order to remove the top and pants she'd been sleeping in. As soon as she was free of her nightclothes, Yoshino bent forward and inserted her straightened arms into the sleeves of the dress, then sat up and let it fall down over her head. She stood, looking down at her body to examine her handiwork, and then smiled briefly in satisfaction. Next came a pair of slip-on shoes, and then finally, after smoothing her hair awkwardly into place with her wrists, she gathered Hana up into her arms and stepped out into the hallway.

As usual, Yoshino was the first to reach the common room; the nurse who supervised the group greeted her with a smile and a wave.

Ai Ohta, age 36. Holds level 4 personnel clearance.

"Good morning, Yoshino! And Hana," she added, nodding to the doll still tight in Yoshino's arms. "Did you sleep well?"

Yoshino nodded enthusiastically, smiling as she did so.

She'd discovered quickly that the more she smiled, the more the doctors left her alone.

Pleasantries exchanged, Yoshino headed straight for her favorite chair and climbed into it, settling Hana snugly in her lap. The nurse smiled indulgently and then went about her work, leaving the girl to watch as the rest of her housemates trickled in in ones and twos.

Keiko Mishima, age 7. Undergoing micromachine treatment for partial paralysis.

Noriko Uehara, age 9. Lost lower half of right leg in an automobile collision; adjusting to prosthetic replacement.

Kenji Wakabayashi, age 6. Both legs replaced with prosthetics below the knee due to birth defects.

Yuki Sakamoto, age 8. Adjusting to prosthetic left arm; original damaged beyond repair in domestic violence case.

Shouji Takahashi, age 7. Fitted with prosthetic right hand following injury sustained during accidental involvement with scene of gang violence.

The more time she spent with her lights, the more they were willing to show her. They trusted her now, taking her behind locked doors, into places she wasn't sure she was supposed to go, but they were so eager to share that she felt awful refusing them. Not to mention that the information she gathered from them was too interesting to resist.

A part of her even wondered if knowing more about the people by whom she was surrounded would help her understand and better coexist with them.

Maybe the problem was with her, and how little she gave them to work with.

Once she'd gone through the data on all of her peers, Yoshino had asked the lights for her own file out of curiosity. She wanted to know what all of the doctors and nurses saw when they looked at her.

The empty spaces where all of the other children had had reams of information had hit her almost like a physical blow. Her name was Yoshino and her body was entirely prosthetic – everything else was blank.

She wasn't anyone.

And she certainly hadn't been able to say anything to anyone about the matter. She'd just buried it in the back of her mind; maybe the lights had more information that was being kept somewhere separate.

There had to be more. She just needed to find it.

It was almost nine, and the rest of the children had since arrived in the common room, some of them (mostly those in the early stages of their treatment) trailing personal aides behind them. Yoshino had had one herself for the first couple of days after the move, but she'd quickly proved that she could handle herself and was in no danger of any sort of emotional outburst.

She did somewhat miss the company, but she had Hana for that, after all.

"Come on, everyone, time for breakfast!" called Miss Ohta, sliding aside a partition in one wall. Yoshino got down from her chair and filed into the room with everyone else to take her place at the table.

Even though Yoshino had almost no memory of the body she'd been born with, certain things caused her to long for it to a point that was almost unbearable, and the very worst was eating. Her new body wasn't capable of processing ordinary food (although Dr. Murata had told her that one day they hoped to create a kind of body that was), and when she'd first sat down to eat with her new housemates, a pang of envy had seared through her. Although it kept her body fueled, the synthetic food she ate had almost no discernable taste or texture; she would have given anything for even a simple bowl of rice and a body with which to enjoy it.

Again, she had locked those feelings away deep within her mind, where they wouldn't trouble her.

The doctors thought that her shaking fits had stopped because she had gained some measure of control over her body, but it was because she had learned how to control her mind, to forget the things that upset her.

Between her adventures with the lights during the night and her harsh management of her own thoughts during the day, Yoshino began to suspect that her body wasn't the only thing that had been altered.

She needed more information.

After breakfast it was time for the group's first round of exercises, after which they split off into smaller groups to work in more specialized areas. As Yoshino was already capable of walking unaided, she spent the time practicing fine motor coordination, manipulating her hands and fingers and adjusting to the way her body sent the delicate sensory signals to her brain.

It was even more frustrating than learning to walk had been; that, although far from easy, was, when she looked back on it, at least a relatively simple sequence of actions to memorize. The ways in which she could move her hands, even to complete the same action, varied into infinity, until trying to micromanage each of the systems and subsystems involved in the motion made her dizzy. It didn't help that, unlike her peers, she had no frame of reference; they all had natural arms and hands still attached to their bodies, or at the very least some memories of what it had been like to possess them. She had to start from the very beginning.

That was why she liked it best when she was able to go off by herself and sink back into her own mind, into the strange, vast world she shared with her lights.

The session ended; after struggling for a good ten minutes to pick them up in the first place, Yoshino had managed to snap four consecutive sets of the chopsticks she had been trying to learn to use into splinters. Everyone had stared at her, but that was only a secondary concern. Resignedly, she pushed the day's feelings of failure into the empty spaces of her brain and let them fade away.

After lunch, the children moved in a noisy group out to the little courtyard that stood between the wing of the facility in which they lived and the main hospital building. The groups of friends that had emerged separated into their gangs of threes and fours, racing each other around the grassy space or showing off how well they could use their prosthetics.

Yoshino sat with her back to the wall and Hana on her lap, watching.

From the very first day, Miss Ohta and the other nurses had encouraged her to talk to her peers and make friends, and she'd tried, if only just to placate them, but she'd always wound up off on her own again. The other children didn't seem especially eager to have anything to do with her anyway, and they were content to leave her alone.

"Nobody's giving you any trouble, though, are they?" Miss Ohta had said, her hand on Yoshino's shoulder.

"No," the girl had replied. "Everything's fine."

She had Hana and the lights to keep her company. That was all she needed.

She watched as the other children moved past her in their games, only half her mind focused on them; the other half was moving along the light paths she hadn't travelled yet in search of new information.

Makoto Takayama, age 7. Requires prosthetic left leg after bicycle accident.

Meiko Ohkawa, age 6. Being treated for spinal injuries.

Natsuko Amaha, age 11. Right shoulder replaced with prosthesis after sports injury.

Yoshino heard a set of footsteps approaching her from behind, precise and measured. She turned around.

Ritsuko Hosono, age 42. Holds level 2 personnel clearance.

"Dr. Hosono!" said Yoshino, standing up as quickly as she could manage.

"Hello, Yoshino. I figured it was about time I came to see you! Getting along all right?"

Yoshino nodded.

"That's good. How's Hana?"

Yoshino smiled and hugged the doll closer to her chest.

"I've told Houko about how you carry her everywhere – she's happy you like her so much."

"I think I'd like to see Houko again sometime too." said Yoshino. The young nurse had been the only one who had seemed to accept her patient's relative silence instead of trying to get her to talk, and a sort of unspoken friendship had grown between them because of it. "Could you tell her that?"

"Of course," said Dr. Hosono. "I'm sure she'd love to come visit when she gets the chance." The woman clapped her hands together. "Well, how about we go sit somewhere and catch up? I want to hear about everything you've been doing since the last time I saw you."

"Okay!" said Yoshino, and followed Dr. Hosono back inside. They sat down in the common room, Yoshino in her favorite chair and Dr. Hosono on the side of the sofa closest to it, and at the doctor's prompting, the girl began to relate the last week of her life, slowly and carefully. She talked about how much she liked the room she had to herself, and how nice all of the nurses were, and how even though she was still having trouble with her exercises, it was simply because they were more difficult now, and even so she was certain that she'd be able to master them with some practice.

She had very few unpleasant experiences to share, as she'd deleted most of them, but nobody had to know that.

Dr. Hosono, for her part, was pleased with Yoshino's general optimism, although like Miss Ohta, she seemed to be concerned with her lack of social interaction.

"I understand that you're, well…different, and that can cause problems….If anybody's been mistreating you because of it, you can tell me. You know that, right?"

Yoshino nodded.

"Everyone's been really nice to me."

She didn't understand why she needed to get along with her peers; she was happy enough on her own. If she wanted to sit by herself, lost in her lights, that was her business.

And if the other children wanted to leave her to it, that was theirs.

"All right, all right…" said Dr. Hosono. "I just…None of us want you to feel like you're missing anything..."

"I'm not," said Yoshino, putting on a smile for good measure.

"Okay, then….Anything else you want to talk about?"

Yoshino shook her head.

"All right; I'm glad you're doing so well, and I'll come visit you again soon, okay? I'll ask Houko to visit too."

"Thank you!" said Yoshino

"It's nothing," said Dr. Hosono, reaching out to pat the girl on the shoulder. "See you around."

Later that evening, after supper, Yoshino was finally able to get away from the main group and go back to her room; because of the extent to which she was prostheticized, she tired more quickly than her peers, and as a result she needed more rest than they did.

At least, she was supposed to tire more quickly, and as the nurses were aware of this, if she complained of fatigue at all, they excused her with no questions asked.

Usually when she said this, it was because she just wanted to be alone.

She sat on the side of her bed, her hands clamped awkwardly around Hana's waist to hold her steady.

She looked into the doll's eyes; they were brilliant red, just like her own.

Yoshino had been afraid of them at first, but eventually she'd just stopped thinking about them. When Houko had first given Hana to her, she hadn't even really registered that the doll was her exact miniature, down to the visible joints in her wrists and knees; it was just the way she was.

It was only when she'd been moved in with the rest of the children that she'd remembered how odd she must have looked to them.

She hadn't asked for any of it; it wasn't even as if her body was unattractive. More importantly, she could speak and think just the same as anyone else. She could walk and even run if she concentrated, and though she was still working out the issues with her hands, they weren't utterly debilitating.

She wondered what the body she'd been born with looked like, before it had died. She wondered what had happened to it.

She wondered if the other children would like it better.

Emotion surged inside her, spiking dangerously; desperately, she tried to shove it back to the far spaces where it would be deleted, but it was no use; it had come upon her too quickly for her to react in time.

"…It's not fair," she whispered to herself.

Her hands, shaking for the first time in weeks, gave an enormous jerk.

There was a loud crack.

"Hana!"

The doll's plastic body had shattered in her grip.

Yoshino watched in faint horror as the head, still smiling, tumbled backward onto the carpet.

"Hana…" she said again, achingly.

She looked at the doll's head, lying there with its vibrant hair fanned out around it in a cloud, and then at her own hands.

It wasn't fair.

(A/N: Gabriela is back in action, which means this story will resume updating as regularly as I can make myself write it ^_^ I'm hoping to pick up the pace a little from here, as we're moving out of the 'stuff I need to have happen' bits and into the 'stuff I really want to write about' bits.

I've heard of kids who are amputees getting dolls that have limbs missing to make them feel less uncomfortable about missing limbs themselves, so from there it was just a natural extension for Yoshino to get a doll that looked like her (plus I want to say that the one that gets smashed up in the "Inner Universe" OP animation has purple hair and red eyes...you'd think I'd remember for sure after having seen it a few hundred times.) Of course, this begs the question, was the person who designed her initial body high when they did so, and if so, why the hell did she keep that color scheme for so long? Maybe it's just because everything for kids has to have bright colors in Japan...I dunno.

Don't blame her for at least keeping the hair, though; I've got purple hair, and while I love it to death, I would love it even more if I didn't have to recolor it every month :D)