Despite six siblings, Koto's family was small compared to some demons' — she knew nothing of her parents' family, only the small, secluded world that they occupied deep in the forest until the days came when her father would take her exploring with him.
Now, that family was more distant than she liked to think at times. Perhaps she was afraid to face them, to find out that her growing siblings disapproved of her wandering ways just as much as their mother had. They were a tight-knit family, and Koto had been removed from that long ago.
Perhaps it was that loss that their mother regretted most. Maybe that was why she had—
The truth was that Koto didn't understand much about her mother. She had never been close enough to know her well. All she knew was what her father had once said: "Your mother is soft. She is weak. That's why I love her." Koto could never understand the value in such a thing. That weakness was why she had always hated her mother. It was a thing many demons despised, because strength was critical to survival. Her mother was quiet most of the time, but her displays of emotion that Koto glimpsed were usually more than she could comprehend, with more dramatics and weeping than she had ever seen.
The strongest she had ever seen her mother was when Koto herself had fallen apart for the first time. Why then? Why? She had asked herself a thousand times and never understood. That was what had made her the angriest.
Koto didn't know what would have driven her mother to much of the things she did, or why she preferred such a secluded life. She wondered sometimes if Taro knew, if perhaps their mother shared things with the son she was close to, but Koto never wanted to ask.
She wondered, too, if he still sat out at night waiting for her, but the guilt was not enough to overpower the fear and send her back.
She bought and sent things home frequently; though she didn't tell anyone, much of her clothes shopping was done for her sisters. Four girls was a lot to accommodate, and Koto didn't feel that a single girl having a better wardrobe than four was fair. Did they like her gifts? It didn't matter. The guilt, this time, was more than enough to keep her at it.
Koto hated to think that she was lonely, but despite all her traveling, she had always wanted to keep that connection with family. Quiet nature with family was her safe place, the place she had grown to know in her younger years as home, the place she dwelled on when she needed peace. Her life now had somehow become a torrent of excitement and life and little else. Fans were wonderful — fans helped fill the void — but they were not friends.
They certainly were not family.
Lately she had thought on family again, but not because of her own. It was because she saw family in the people around her — not for herself, but for each other. She saw it in the way they joked and smiled, the way they argued, the way they fought — but she recognized it most clearly when she spoke to Jin.
"A team is a back ta fight," he said to her once. That conversation had impacted her more deeply than he could know with something as simple as the joy he felt when he spoke of the bonds with his friends. His team.
They were his family now. She could sense that just as anyone with a brain could.
She sensed now that she wanted something to lean on when nothing could help her, to give her the strength to face the world again.
"Koto?"
There was only one person in the world that had been there for her in that way, someone who had never had the chance to before because Koto had always kept things together and hidden, someone who Koto had reached out to when she had no one else.
"What's the matter, Koto?"
She could picture the concern in her brilliant violet eyes as clearly as day, and few things had clenched her heart as much as knowing that she had someone she could call her best friend.
She had her sister away from sisters, her back to fight against, and she had never truly seen it until the moment came when she was hurting and that girl was the only one to pull her out of the wreckage.
She had her Juri.