DISCLAIMER: Vampire Miyu is the property of Narumi Kakinouchi. The italicized words at the beginning are excerpted from Rei's Poem, from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Please contact me if any part of this excerpt is incorrect.
NOTES: Kudos to all who recognized the main character for who she is.
Ice Dust
Renn Ireigh
…That which is mine. My life. My heart. I am a vessel for my thoughts. Who is this? This is me. What am I? What am I? What am I? What am I? I am I. This object that is, is myself. That which forms who is me. This is the self that can be seen and yet this is not which is myself. A strange feeling. My body feels as if it is melting. I can no longer see myself. My form, my shape, fades from view. Awareness dawns of someone who is not me…
I am Reiha, and I am alone.
I didn't use to be alone. Before, I had as much company as I required: just one other, one other who knew my thoughts as well as I did. One other who was me, or part of me.
But now he is gone, and I am alone.
My father was a traveling entertainer, as was his father before him, and his father before him. It had been a family tradition, one which the eldest male in the household would inherit by birthright to pass down to his oldest male. My family took great pride in their business, and swore that never would it leave the family. Nor, apparently, could it be passed to a female of the house, because I was never enough for my father. He always wanted a son. I heard him once, remarking to a friend of his when he thought I could not hear. "Better a sick and weakly son," he had said, "than no son at all."
Later, he wondered why I wasn't entirely sure of the meaning of 'self-esteem.'
I was much closer to my mother than to my father, despite the fact that touching her was akin to burying myself in ice. I remember how she used to say, with a twinkle in her dark eyes, "There will be snow tonight." And she would describe it to me: how the snow would form, how much of it there would be, how long the flakes would fall from heaven to earth and how cold they would be. She was always right, of course, and she always laughed when I would run to the window and look at the snow outdoors and ask her in astonishment how she knew.
I thought my mother was a goddess.
And then she left. I never knew the circumstances or her reasons for leaving – just that she came into my room one night with a bag packed with her things and kissed me while she thought I slept. Then she walked out of our house into the raging blizzard that bowed before her. I never saw her again.
I was forced, then, to become closer to Father. I had no other, but the soulless doll Matsukaze, to talk with. And interaction is necessary. Too long spent playing the game of solitaire, and one's mind invents other minds to talk with, and that is when you go insane.
I did not wish for insanity. And so I gritted my teeth and talked to Father.
Reluctantly, I could not help but to begin to like the man who so regretted the fact that I was me, and not the son he sometimes spoke of in his dreams. And he could not help but begin to like me.
My greatest mistake was to love him.
Then came Miyu.
She was the first other child I knew. Before, I had seen other children, of course. A traveling band of entertainers is a magnet for children. But I had never spoken with them, never played with them. I had grown up among a company of adults and porcelain dolls. The former were quietly patronizing, the latter silent, and the watching children rowdy and loud. Living among so much silence, I could not stand the noise, nor the general level of excitement at every smallest thing.
And yes, I was jealous of them, though I was as quiet in my jealousy as I was in everything else. I would watch them from behind the glass and silken screens as they ran off excitedly with their fathers and mothers and were given sticky spun webs of sugar to eat and little rag-dolls to clench with grubby hands, and took for granted all they were given and all that they shared. I would watch them through my window as the little girls ran into their rooms and took off their doll families from the shelves and held tea-parties with them to introduce them to the newcomer, and the girls would pour the weak tea from fine china and try to make their twenty-odd dolls drink it, and earn nothing but a brown splotch at the mouth for their pains. Then I would look at my one doll in my little room at the back of the traveling wagon and wonder why I couldn't be like them.
I could never be like them.
Miyu, though… she came from a similar background. One parent dead, the remainder taking little notice. She was never one to play with other children, either, but she had no dolls to talk to, and she was starved for conversation and attention. Father loved her more than he did me – I resented that, as any child would. He used to suggest that we play together, and she was perfectly cordial and understanding when I would not allow her to play with Matsukaze, but Father would watch from behind his juggling and disapprove because I should share.
Should I have shared my sole confidante?
Miyu and I got along perfectly well. She was polite to me, and I was polite to her, and if we were more apt to sit and talk noncommittally about unimportant topics, then the adults could shrug it off and be proud of the fact that they had such mature daughters. But I did not like Miyu, and I am not certain that she liked me. I used to imagine that I saw a little twitch of condescension at the corner of her mouth when she thought that I was not looking, when I tried to get Father's attention because of whatever importance had hold of my mind and he brushed me off with an absent "Not now, Reiha" and went on talking to Miyu.
I hated her.
Once I lost my head entirely and argued about it with Father. I recall saying something along the lines of, "Since you love Miyu more than your own daughter, why don't I just leave so that you would be free to be with her without troubling yourself over my welfare?"
It was a dagger meant to wound, but it didn't. "Why don't you?" he inquired politely.
There was no response to that but to actually do so. I packed clothes and food, and with Matsukaze in my arms, I walked away. I imagined that I was following my mother's path.
Three days later I was brought home, shook, slapped, and shouted at. Apparently his request was meant only in jest, and I was a silly girl for imagining that he was actually serious.
One does not expect a seven-year-old girl who has just been asked to leave her house to consider that the request to do so was only a joke. But apparently, my father thought that this belief was reasonable. I was present at a conversation where he remarked about the incident in disbelief: "Reiha has never been a troublesome child before this. Why would she start now?"
One of the men – I do not know which – was blessed with a level head and inquired delicately as to the nature of my temporary departure. "She seemed to think that I told her to leave."
"And did you?" the man asked.
"Of course not," Father snorted.
"He did," I said softly to Matsukaze in my little corner. "I asked him whether I should leave so that he would not be troubled with my welfare and could be free to turn all his focus to Miyu. And he asked me why not. He asked me to leave. He doesn't want me."
The doll was silent.
I suppose that I may as well have been a doll during my pre-adolescent years. I spoke rarely, and when I did, I spoke softly; I did not move without reason. In essence, I hid, hid with my sole doll and spoke to him as if he were as human as I. Father may well have thought me mad, for speaking with a doll in this way. But by this point, I thought as much of my father as I did of a fly – a presence in my life, but no more.
He was always too busy for me. I might have come in limping with a broken leg, hobbling with blood streaming down my leg, screaming in agony, and he would glance at me exasperatedly without looking at me and say, "Not now, Reiha." I once briefly considered testing this theory, then decided it wasn't worth the trouble and enclosed myself in my room until I grew faint with hunger. Not once did he knock at my door, nor did he inquire about it when I finally emerged. He was too busy to take notice of me.
Busy with Miyu.
She might as well have lived with us, for all that she was at our residence. The quiet presence in those clear, wide eyes was enough to drive me mad, and though she never said anything overtly mocking, I thought I saw contempt written subtly upon her porcelain skin when she looked at me. She interceded once on my behalf, when my father was about to strike me for the crime of a question, but I felt it a ploy to make me feel in debt to her.
She might as well have tried to coax emotion from the ice. It was an apt comparison.
Finally she took my role in the plays my father put on. I was shunted to the back, playing the role of a child, given but one repeated line. It was an insult to my dignity – I, the daughter of the traveling entertainers, the true heir of the family business, who could and had memorized the lines of all of the actors, cast off into a child's part! And here was Miyu playing my role, and playing my mother to boot. If it weren't for the shame it would bring upon my family, I would have hurt her as she touched me.
She was not a bad actress, though; when it came to it, she was quite good. But she was playing my part, in both the family and the play.
Was it wrong, then, for me to loathe her?
And finally my father made the ultimate sacrifice for her, casting himself into death to save her life. He placed Matsukaze in my arms, telling me that a doll would be my father. Had I not been so entrenched in silence, I might have pointed out that a doll could have done a better job than he. But I could only look at him, expressionless, and accept the doll.
When the dust settled, there was blood staining the ground, and my father lay hacked to pieces. Miyu knelt in the middle of it, crying. She felt my father's loss more than I, and for good reason. He had loved her. Not so me.
He had died for her and left me, his true daughter, with a doll for a parent.
Is it any wonder that I hated her?