The Only Victory Is Contained Inside of Surrender

By Rob Morris

Outside the courthouse building, Kenjiro Hagiwara found himself face to face with his ex-wife's lawyer. The man shrugged.

"Please. Take a swing at me. I've earned it."

Kenjiro shook his head.

"You're not the one I wanna hit. The one I wanna hit, I wanna do a lot more than hit."

The lawyer looked down.

"Why didn't you have the girl placed in neutral custody? That would have proven her wrong and I wouldn't have to live with this verdict on my soul!"

Kenjiro started to walk away.

"I didn't want my daughter swallowed by the foster care system. It's corrupt. Like that orphanage in the mountains, the one they just shut down. The kids that survive in there become wolves. The attendants and guardians are little better."

The lawyer had the last word.

"But now Mayu will likely become like her."

Mayu's father had to hang on, and believe that her mother's illness was not passed on to the child. That one day, they could reunite.

"Even as a trophy, Shin will treat her right. Keep her safe. Even if just to keep up appearances."

Sadly, he would be proven right – and then horrifically wrong.

At their home, his new wife and one-time-sister-in-law Arika considered her options. She used a simple math game, but in this she found the hope so far absent in her existence of the past few years.

"If I say she is alive, then she may die in the interim so that fate may spite me yet again."

"If I say that she is dead, I am an unfaithful mother, when others have held on far longer and seen their children returned to them."

"If I make no choice in what to say, I am a coward, and that will never do."

So Arika arrived at her choice, and her helpful supportive new husband gave his two cents.

"Hell, No! That is the worst idea in the long sad history of bad ideas."

She pushed back, as she realized early on she would have to do.

"So why is it such a bad idea?"

He looked her in the eye.

"Because, dear wife, once dear sister by marriage, we are cursed, you and I. We don't need any further curses to stack on what we have."

Arika glanced below them.

"Does that look like a curse to you?"

He grabbed his own head.

"Of course not! But suppose we place our curses upon that tender-"

She grabbed his head – in a loving, supportive way. Their love started from desperation, but it was very much for real.

"Hear me. This must occur. That first girl, taken from me by shadows from on high? If she is alive, she will now come back to me, angry for giving away what should have been hers. If she is dead, her spirit may come to destroy me out of vengeance – and when it does – I will tell her how I always loved her, and plotted that I should so offend her ghost, it came to get me, and we could see each other one more time. Kenjiro, I want this curse, and I will have it!"

There were two girls, once. One was driven away from those that loved her by a manipulative, calculating monster. The other had been taken away by men who thought they were protecting the world, but in fact were aiding to set up a manufactured Judgement Day.

Fate, when it was taking a break from being spiteful, would place these two unknowing cousins in the same house with parents barely older than themselves, and there they would know their greatest happiness.

But in this time before all that, now there was a third girl. Born of two people once in-laws, who needed more than the dead or the insane could provide in their time of greatest need. In defiance of nervous tradition, she would be named Hana, and this time, the name would stick, until the day the three girls, all sisters, would meet at last.

Yet that day was far off for now.

For then and there, little Hana would grow older asking many questions, as she picked up on some hidden sadness they both held. Never was she told or made to believe she was responsible for this sadness.

On an island off the coast of Kamakura, Monitored Subject Seven was told at the start of every hard day to be obedient and strong in the face of her challenges. The man who told her this told himself he only did this to test how far he could take her, and see when she might finally try and lash out, as so many of the subjects did. This was a lie told to himself, and she never did, because 'Papa' had told her this was wrong.

In a small house Kenjiro had agreed never to visit (his heart couldn't bear it anyway) a woman once a great deal more Human in spirit waited for the child she had fought for (and now wondered why) to finally go to sleep. Leaving by an old rear delivery door no longer in use, she would be unseen as she departed.

"I am still a living breathing thing. Don't I merit companionship, instead of work and attending to that brat?"

So she, barely a week past waging all-out war for a goal she only wanted to thwart another's heart, headed for a tavern she knew, where she would find temporary companionship.

Sadly, she would one day find a supposedly more permanent one.