Author's Note: I pieced together the meaning of Kuramori's name what I could. "Amori," in general, means "protection," and "akurei" means "evil spirit." I liked the combination of those two ideas to form her cocoon dream, and took liberties in combining "akurei" and "amori" to make "kuramori."
/
Reki began to accept her position at Old Home as its outcast from sheer exhaustion from trying to fight this fact. This pained Kuramori more than it did Reki, however. Reki had one of those imaginations active enough to repel boredom even without the company of others, and once she'd relieved her mind of the worry about the other Haibanes, she found much more enjoyable things with which to occupy it. After finding an old painting in the attic of the road to town, Reki was inspired to enthusiastically pursue art. The walls of her room became a time-line of her artistic process– a moving carousel of paintings. Kuramori was her only critic, and couldn't really be trusted with such a job. She would coo at every painting and claim it was the most beautiful she'd ever seen, but Reki eventually learned to discern real praise from the encouraging fluff that Kuramori felt obligated to provide.
"It's just...," Kuramori reluctantly started one day.
"Just what?" Reki asked eagerly, attentively waiting criticism.
"It's just, they're so dark and... morbid," Kuramori sighed, fingers grazing the canvas before her, tracing the dark clouded sky with the swollen red moon as its centerpiece.
"Oh...," came Reki's low voice, deeper with the weight of disappointment. "Well, it's supposed to be. That was sort of what it was like. I remembered it from my dream."
"Your dream?" Kuramori straightened with new interest. "The moon is from your cocoon dream? That's wonderful, Reki."
"Well, the shading was hard– I don't think it's that especially good-"
"No, I mean that you remembered more of your dream. Well, it's a little late to change your name to 'red moon,' isn't it? I like 'Reki' more than 'Getsu,' anyway..."
"I wonder what the cocoon dreams mean..."
"Perhaps they're indications of a Haibane's personality, or maybe they're something like premonitions."
"They could be just dreams, like regular ones. The workings of an idle brain."
Kuramori smiled to soften her objection as she shook her head. "I like to think that they mean something very powerful. In my dream, I was being protected from an evil spirit. It instilled in me a feeling that something is always watching over me, protecting me."
"I suppose I would feel more strongly about the cocoon dreams and what they meant if I could remember mine."
"I'm sure you will!" Kuramori said hopefully. "Look, you've already remembered more of it. Do you think the painting is helping you?"
"I think it is. It gives me a place to dump my imagination, so that I can sort of turn it upside down like a drawer and look for pieces of my dream..."
"Well, once I read that people keep everything they've ever seen, heard, dreamed or felt in their minds– it's just a matter of pulling the right trick or turning the right corner to remember."
Reki looked doubtfully at the painting. Sometimes she thought she'd rather not remember her dream. All the Haibane seemed to have close, affectionate memories of their cocoon dreams, like memories of being in a mother's womb, but when Reki recalled what she could remember, it was not with pleasantness. She didn't tell Kuramori this, however, and it made her feel a little better to know she was carrying some of the weight of her general wretchedness herself.
"Maybe you're right," Reki tagged the words absently to her tongue.
/
Reki blinked against the corridor light, her eyelids trying to bat it away like the defensive wings of a cornered bird. She'd finished a new painting that had caused a bloom of pride in her that immediately demanded to be shared with someone else– she was looking for Kuramori. When she laid her open palm against Kuramori's door, however, the soft murmur of other voices caused her to pause and bring her face close to the slit where it was open in a thin margin of light.
"It's ridiculous that you're treating her this way. She's a Haibane, like the rest of us, thrown into a strange new world like the rest of us, and deserves our friendship the most for what she's going through. Odori, what if when you had been born, we had turned our backs on you?" Kuramori was saying to them, her voice unusually firm.
"It would have made me sad...," Odori admitted shamefully.
"There's a difference!" Kumo hissed sharply. "She's bad luck. We don't know why she's Sin-Bound. We shouldn't trust her."
"It could just as easily have been you, Kumo," Kuramori answered.
"I heard," Tobu interrupted, "that a Sin-Bound Haibane from Abandoned Factory kidnapped someone and drove knives through them to pin them to the wall."
"That's just an old horror story the Abandoned Factory Haibane tell," Kumo dismissed impatiently. "But it's based on the fact that Sin-Bound are untrustworthy. We have enough trouble here without someone like that. I say we hand her over to Abandoned Factory."
"We will not!" Kuramori said, stepping between the door and Kumo so that Reki could only see her back. "I'd rather send you! You have a bad attitude, and a cold, unforgiving heart."
Reki retreated from the door, pinning down the central joints of her middle fingers with her thumbs in two fists at her side. Discord among the Haibanes seemed so strange that Reki's guilt would not allow her to remember that it was actually a common occurrence among people. She needed suddenly to see the children, to insert herself stubbornly into her job and to distract herself from the others. Kuramori had always been with her when she took them outside, and when she opened the door and stood before them, they looked up expectantly at her, not trusting her lone authority.
"Who wants to play in the snow?" she asked, hoping to sound jolly and to excite them, but finding her voice teetering, like someone shuffling across an unreliable wooden bridge.
"Where's Kuramori?" one of the little boys asked.
"She's busy; I'm taking you out. It's my job to do it, the job I was given. You can go out with me. I'm a Haibane like the rest of them," she said briskly, expecting the words to sweep them out the door with their sharp authority. But the children recognized panic in her tone, and it further assured them that Reki wasn't suited to look after them.
The boy, who had assumed a position as their embassador, went back to the puzzle he was doing with another boy. "We'll go when Kuramori comes," he said with finality. His dismissive tone caused Reki's fists to tighten as she stepped into the middle of the room.
"No! You'll come with me. I said so, and it's my job!"
Now all the children looked up at her, round faces upturned in bubbles of fear and scorn that caused a sheet of warm anger to cling to Reki's skin.
"You're a Black Feather!" one of the boys shouted, throwing a crumpled piece of paper at her. This excited all their retained disrespect for her and gave them permission to exercise it. Laughter bubbled in a cruel boil and they danced around her in a smothering ring. Reki felt the fine, needle sting of her feathers being tugged.
"Black feather, black feather! It looks like mold!" one of the little girls squealed, and tucked her small hands fearfully to her chest after touching Reki's wings.
"Ew, you touched it, now you're gonna get moldy wings too!" one of the boys laughed.
"Mold!" another one shouted, grabbing Reki's wingtips and yanking at them. Reki whirled on him, snapped an arm back, and released the back of her hand like a sling-shot pebble on his cheek. The cracking sound silenced the children into open-mouthed sucks of breath. The boy's face crumpled like wet paper before he cried, then ran from the room shouting for Kuramori.
/
"Why didn't you tell me that they all hated me!" Reki shouted at Kuramori.
Kuramori frowned, lowering her voice to suggest to Reki to do the same. "They don't hate you, Reki. They're only afraid of what they don't understand. It's natural for people to feel that way."
"I heard you all talking," Reki snapped back, pointing toward the corridor. "I heard them saying that they wanted to send me to Abandoned Factory."
This surprised Kuramori into silence. Finally, she opened her mouth to hurriedly assure her, "You aren't going to Abandoned Factory."
Reki expelled a sharp breathy sound. "I might as well. Now I've given them a real reason to hate me, at least."
"I'll explain to them what happened. They all know it's easy to get frustrated with the children sometimes," Kuramori offered, beginning to feel small and useless under the weight of Reki's anger.
"Don't bother," Reki said bitterly, her voice so low and cold that, after she walked tensely, briskly from Kuramori's room with a swing of her black pigtails, Kuramori withered into a chair beside the window and smothered her tears in her hands.