While she was dreaming, Hitomi spoke to an angel.
It is slightly inaccurate to put it that way: misleading to call the being an angel, with the implications attached to the word, or to say that they spoke, and leave it at words, or sounds, or even communication. Rather, the two were the same; her dreaming, a communion with the soul, a physical incarnation of the process by which it sought to reason, to understand, to shape its destiny.
Using ordinary tenses with the eternal is likewise futile. Hitomi was dreaming; she dreams; she will always be dreaming. But there is (and always will be) a relationship between that eternal moment and certain points in a space-time manifold, and those points can be placed in a well-ordered sequence in all reference frames. In that shape, one could see a girl, sleeping in her bed in a place called Mitakahara, and one can speak of what she dreamed, a metaphor for the truth.
Hitomi, the girl, was in a place made of rough stone, and the angel sat on a wooden chair, with a loom and a spinning wheel beside her. She noted that the angel seemed bigger than she, and somehow very ancient; it was holding a distaff, as if in a painting from centuries past, collecting fibers, threads to be spun. In particular, she was trying to manage a terrible tangle.
See, it is a mess, and a huge mess, almost enough for for a simple garment by itself. The threads have been wound backwards, and have frayed again and again, and even where they are whole, blackened.
Perhaps it would be better simply to cut it off, start anew.
But the color, the luminous specks of rainbow light which fleck the darkness. Even pain would be precious, if it carried that light.
. . . . .
It was about two o'clock when she rose, restlessly, from bed, and softly made her way downstairs, though she wasn't quite sure what motive had brought her down there.
In the darkness, a voice called to her. "Hitomi?"
"Papa?" she asked.
"You're not sleepwalking, are you?"
"No," she replied, "I'm awake, I think."
"Is everything all right?" he asked. "Do you need to talk?" He turned on a low light, in the corner of the room.
She didn't say Yes, but she did walk over, and sat down next to him on the couch.
"What are you doing up so late?" she asked.
"I could ask the same thing", he noted.
She snuggled up and leaned her head on his shoulder. "I guess I can't really explain, but, it's sort of like deja vu. I thought maybe I'd find you waiting down here... even though I was surprised to find you down here."
"I see."
She said nothing, but she breathed in and out a few times, searching for words, searching for ... some kind of courage.
"My sweet little girl is growing up, and has fallen in love, and doesn't know what to do with herself," proposed Papa.
She considered that. "Maybe," she admitted.
A few more moments passed in silence.
"Is it someone I know?"
"Mmm," she said, and nodded her head yes.
"Is it a girl?"
Hitomi suddenly caught her breath, but she didn't say anything. Papa reached down to take her hand.
"But the love letters you were telling me about last week... those were all from boys. And you said that you didn't say that they were, but, they were."
Take deep breaths, she told herself.
"And it's a close friend, someone you talk about often. I've probably met her."
how do parents. how.
"It's Sayaka, isn't it?"
It seemed for a moment as if a spell had broken; Hitomi moved slowly, raising her head off her father's shoulder, and shook it No, gently.
He blinked a few times. "Oh. Oh, that's different. Not the tomboy, then... Madoka?"
Hitomi made a small, pathetic noise, and put her head down on Papa's lap, and tried to cry only a little.
Papa stroked her hair. "Ah, Hitomi, Hitomi, my little baby girl, she's not so little any more. She's growing up, and she's falling in love, and she's getting in trouble ... even if that last one's not really her fault, I guess."
"how," mumbled Hitomi.
"Hmm?" asked her father.
"am I just that transparent?"
He considered for a moment, gesturing to no one in particular with his free hand as he did so. "You're not that transparent. You just have a father who loves you, very dearly... and is also very, very good."
"Oh," she said.
"But," he added, "you should be careful. You know lots of ways to ask people things without asking them. You have little tricks you can use to influence how people feel, maybe even try to get your way. You probably learned most of them from your mother, and maybe a few from me too. They're not bad. They're not good. And you, to your credit, try and make peace, to people feel good, to urge people on to the best that they can be. But you need to be very careful, because even when people don't notice, they can almost always feel it on some level, and given enough time, they can learn to resent that feeling, and if you do it all the time, you get a reputation. So remember this. The Shizuki family name was not built on using clever tricks to get our way. It was built on a reputation for honesty and plain dealing."
He paused. "That means honesty with yourself, too. If you're not careful, if you don't know how to turn it off, you can find yourself putting on a face to the world that's not you, and you don't know how to take it off. And the point of this all that isn't to tell you that you need to be honest with your Papa, and tell him everything. The point is that you need to be honest with yourself."
He looked at her, but she wasn't quite sure what to say to that.
"Can you face your true feelings, Hitomi?"
She winced.
"Well?" Papa insisted.
"My t-true feelings, are ..." she stuttered, building up the courage to admit it, "are dirty, dirtier than I ever dreamed possible."
Papa tilted his head. "Oh. Oh, my goodness. Imagine that. It's almost as if my darling delicate baby girl is... going through puberty."
"P-Papa!"
"I know dear, I know," he said in a serious tone, "it heralds a change in our relationship. You're a woman now, and it would be inappropriate indeed for a married man of my age to speak of certain matters with you, doubly so should they involve another woman, especially when you are both so young. Far too many ways that I could take advantage of either of you. So we must grow more distant, my dear. If you need someone to speak with about all the things you dream of doing to that girl under the covers... you'll have to go and ask your Mama."
Hitomi's face was turning bright red.
"But you know, there is something that I can talk to you about, and I can and will tease you about, mercilessly. All for the right reasons, of course, to make sure you don't get the wrong sort of ideas in your head."
"What?" she asked.
"My dear little girl, I would have you tell me all the most exquisite detals, about..."
He paused for effect, then leaned down to whisper in her ear, and Hitomi tensed in fear.
"holding hands"
And with that, all her fear, and her tension, and her shame washed away, and she found herself defenseless, and small, and crying, but she was laughing too, and she was safe, and she held her Papa's hand, and smiled through the tears.
"Oh, P-Papa," she sputtered through the tearful laughter, as she began to recover, "you... you dirty old man," she teased back, playfully, "well if it's a scandal you want..."
And she told him of a dream, or maybe of a vision, or a memory, of stealing away to the ballet with a lovely girl, in the finest of fine dresses, and looking out over the Tokyo skyline, afraid but brave, and of holding hand in a soft, silken, sparkling elbow-length glove, and of nervously stepping out into the street to walk to the ballet. And he nodded, quietly, listening, and then he told her that it sounded like something very special.
"But how can you say that?" she asked him. "You're supposed to tell me all the serious things. About how I need to think about growing up and what I want to make of myself with my life, because it would basically ruin everything."
"Well, dear," he said, "it sounds like you already know to be thinking about that. And it's less important, and it's not the sort of thing that you figure out in one night anyway."
"I'm not sure I'll even get to figure it out at all," she said, quietly.
"You haven't talked with her about it?"
She shook her head no.
"You're not quite sure she likes you back the same way?"
She shook her head again.
"You're not even sure that she even likes girls that way," said Papa.
She took a deep breath.
"No, I think she likes Sayaka."
"Oh, Hitomi."
"And they've gotten really close, and you can tell that something's changed between them, and that it's changed them, but they're both really shy about it, and I can't even believe I'm telling you..."
He said nothing, but laid his hand on her shoulder.
"So when I came downstairs," she said, "and I said I felt deja vu, I wasn't even thinking of the parts where I wanted to run away with her. What I half-remembered was a different story. And it didn't make me feel any better. It made me feel a little worse. But it also made me feel like things could somehow be okay anyway."
"Hmm?"
She took her head from his lap, and sat back up against the sofa.
"Papa... tell me about the tomboy."
"Oh. I..., oh, sweetheart."
"I know," she said, "and I know I shouldn't even know to ask, and I don't even really know how I know..."
So her Papa told her a story about a girl her age who wasn't her Mama; the story of miss Yukari, a tomboy who would always wear roller skates everywhere, and wanted to save up to get a big tattoo on her arm, and sometimes snuck over to the high school to hang out with the older girls and talk them into giving her cigarettes; and how he never did understand why she ever took an interest in the shy, quiet boy in the class above her, except maybe that it was fun to get him in trouble.
"But what happened, Papa?" she asked.
"She went off to Heaven," he said, "and, well, I've fallen in love again since then - first with your mother, and then, in an entirely different way, with you, and with feelings far deeper and more profound. But sometimes, I suppose, it seems like she must be watching over us."
"You... you never got over her," realized Hitomi. "And here I was thinking you'd say something about how to get over a broken heart, but you never got over it yourself. And you did fall in love again, but you still do small things, things no one else would know, just to remind yourself sometimes."
Her father nodded, quietly.
"Does Mama know?"
"Your mother knows I lost someone very dear to me when I was young."
Hitomi blinked, realizing something.
"Did you at least tell Mama her name?"
Papa hesitated.
"Oh, Papa. Oh, I - Oh, I don't even know where to start. Oh, in the name of - in the name of Yukari Hitomi..."
"... darling," he began, "I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but if you worry I suffer the least bit of confusion -"
"You know what I think," interrupted Hitomi, standing up, "is that she would want you to change your passwords, and at least use her birthday, and not the day she died. June sixteenth, Papa? Honestly."
"I'll have you know the sixteenth is also the day I met your mother," said Papa, "and later, the day that I proposed to her. And what have you been doing poking around with other people's passwords, anyway?"
Take deep breaths, she reminded herself.
"I haven't so much as touched them," declared Hitomi, righteously, "They were given to me in a dream, or something, since you ask. When I ran away to Tokyo."
"Is that so, now," said Papa.
"Like when you told me about her the... first time."
He didn't reply to that.
She was maing a face, trying her best to be grumpy, and annoyed, but a smile kept wavering up around the sides of her mouth. In its own way, really, it was almost as funny as all that about holding hands. Oh, why did it have to ruin the moment like that? She sighed.
"Papa, I'm... actually quite annoyed with you right now, but ... it still meant... it meant an awful lot to me, to be able talk to you like this, with everything you said, and especially the way you said it, okay? So th- thank you."
She was dangerously close to tears, so she turned her back and started to head back upstairs, before she paused in the door, with her back to him.
"And I don't know if she's really watching over me, but I feel like someone must be. And," she swallowed, "I love you, Papa."
"I love you too, dear one."
"We should talk again soon, okay?"