Chapter 5: In Wonderland

When the car came to a stop, Yumi braced herself for that final jerking motion, but it didn't come. In fact, the whole movement had been uncharacteristically smooth, with Sei giving the brakes a light tap and the car rolling hesitantly along the curb outside Yumi's house.

Sei looked out the window, and Yumi could see the sharp features of her profile reflected against the glass. "So we're here," Sei said. Her voice was casual, flat even—but there was something else underneath. Yumi had barely caught it; the inflection on the last word seemed unpunctuated, like she had left some empty space for other words to follow.

When she said nothing more, Yumi reached for the handle of the car door. "I'll see you later, Sei-sama," she said, but she paused just after she had opened it. She looked up at the shape of her house in the darkness, and she noticed that none of the windows seemed lit.

They're probably asleep, she thought.

She wondered if Sei was thinking the same thing she was.

"Sei-sama," Yumi whispered. She wasn't sure why she felt so hesitant; it wasn't like she was going to ask for anything unusual. "Would you like to come up for awhile?"

Even with the sudden blush that she could distinctly feel spreading over her face, she mustered up the courage to turn and look at Sei. In return, Sei was staring intensely at her with an expression that she couldn't read.

"No," Sei replied after a moment. "I don't think that's a good idea, Yumi-chan." She turned her attention back towards the road and brought her hand to the stick shift. As soon as Yumi stepped out, the car started to peel away, and Sei offered only half a smile and a brief wave goodbye before she disappeared around the corner.

Yumi stood alone on the curb, a cool wind billowing through the empty street. She's right, Yumi thought. It wasn't a good idea to be alone with Sei. Not tonight, not after the incident with Sachiko, not while the pain was still so fresh.

If Sei had come up to her room, something would have obviously happened between them. Yumi wasn't exactly sure what that would have been, but she wasn't so naive that she couldn't take a fairly educated guess. If they had done something, though, it would have been too early to tell if it was fueled perhaps a bit too heavily by Yumi's need for comfort, and Sei seemed to know this. Maybe this was why she had been leading her around to all of those public places, hardly allowing them a minute alone the whole night.

It was then that she realized what Sei's blank face had meant. Sei had clearly been tempted to indulge her in the end, especially after such an open invitation. She had been resisting the temptation, setting her mind into escape mode before she could accidentally say yes. It was that generous side of Sei again, the side that wanted to spare her pain, even if it meant forgoing touch. Yumi smiled to herself in the dark, then turned and walked towards her front door.

When she stepped through the threshold and started taking off her shoes, she was startled by a voice that burst out of the darkness.

"Yumi?"

She let out a yelp, dropping her outdoor shoes just short of the shoe rack and stumbling clumsily into the wall.

"Shhhh!" the voice hissed at her. "You're making a huge racket. Do you want to wake up Mom and Dad?"

Yumi looked up and saw the unmistakable face of her younger brother. She could just make out his features in the dim light. "Yuuki? What are you trying to do lurking in the dark like that, scare me half to death?"

"No, I was having trouble falling asleep and then I heard a car outside, so I came to see what was going on. What are you doing home so late? It's almost midnight," he said.

"I was out with...a friend." It was the truth, but for some reason Yumi felt like she was telling a lie. Maybe it was because the whole story could not possibly be encompassed by such a mundane sentence. After they had dropped Alice off, Sei had taken her on an unplanned date in the shopping district. At first it had seemed random to her, but as they walked to and fro—visiting arcades and karaoke places—it occurred to her that Sei was simply trying to tire her out.

It had worked. She had lost complete track of time, and was ready to plop into bed without a second thought about Sachiko or anything else that had occurred that day.

Yuuki took a step towards her. "Was that Satou Sei-san out there with you? It looked like her in the car." His tone was strange, like he actually cared what her answer was going to be.

Yumi gave him a weird look. "Yes, that was her. I was out with her. So what?" She wasn't trying to snap at him, but now that she was inside and the sleepiness had hit her all at once, she wasn't in the mood to be interrogated.

"Oh," he said. That single syllable hung in the air a bit longer than necessary, and Yumi couldn't help but wonder what his problem was.

Before long, though, he turned to leave, shuffling over towards the stairs. Then he stopped.

"Say, Yumi," he began. "Are you...I mean, is Satou-san…?"

Yumi stared at him in bewilderment. It simply wasn't like him to notice that sort of thing. Had he overheard their conversation outside? Even if he had, it seemed unlikely he could have understood such a short exchange out of context like that—unless the meaning of her awkwardness was universally readable.

She turned her attention back to her shoes and started to fumble them onto the rack. "No," she said, not looking at him. "Not really. Well, kind of." She steadied her shoes and looked back over at him. "No. No, we're not." She decided that this was the right answer for now. "Why do you ask?"

"Ah, no reason." He studied Yumi's face, and must have noticed that this answer was rather unsatisfactory, because after a moment he sighed and continued: "I was at the game center today. I was supposed to meet a friend there, but I saw Kashiwagi-san and Alice hanging around. The vibe was really weird, and I didn't want to get in the middle of it, so I avoided them. While I was getting ready to leave, I spotted you and Satou-san walking up and down the aisles holding hands. Well, I guess it was more like she was dragging you around by the hand and you were letting her."

"Yeah?" Yumi said, reaching for her house slippers. "So?" It wasn't weird for girls to hold hands, after all. She did it all the time with Sachiko.

"Nothing. It was...the way you were looking at her. It kind of surprised me. I just thought…." Again, he appeared to study Yumi for a few seconds. "Look, never mind. Forget I said anything." He turned again and started heading back up the stairs.

Yumi shuffled after him, keeping a certain distance, watching her feet with every step to keep from stumbling in the dark. When his footfalls came to an abrupt stop again, she looked up.

He was halfway up the stairs when he turned to her. "Yumi, even if the two of you were...together or something, it would be okay," he said. His eyes were wide with anxious energy. "It wouldn't bother me." His face seemed to say that he was trying to transfer some kind of information, but was totally unsure how to convey it delicately. Yumi thought with amusement that she wasn't the only one in the house who was completely readable. "Even if it wasn't her," he stuttered. "If it was, you know, some other woman, who wasn't her, I wouldn't care. I mean, I would care, but I'd only care if she was good to you. I mean, I wouldn't feel any differently about you if you were…."

He stopped there.

Yumi blinked. It was so quiet in the house that she could hear the growing moisture on her eyelids pop as she reopened her eyes.

"Yuuki…." A flood of emotion began to well up in her chest, something she had been avoiding since that morning, something she had never been very good at repressing. She looked down at her feet again and felt two or three heavy tears fall like raindrops onto the floor. "Yuuki," she said, "I...think that we'll never actually get any sleep if you keep stopping before we get to our rooms." A throaty laugh escaped her mouth, but it racked her body in a shudder, like a sob.

"Mm, yeah," he said in his typically non-committal way. Yuuki looked a little scared at first, but he seemed to calm down when she glanced up at him with a grateful smile.

"Thank you," she whispered.

When they were finally all the way up the stairs, and she had shut herself in her bedroom, she pressed her hands to her face and leaned against the door. This time, she couldn't stop herself. The few rays that were floating into the room from the streetlights outside became blurred smears, a mosaic of light. Her eyes grew hot, then the hands that were pressed to her eyes, then her wrists and the rest of her face.

"Thank you," she said again, this time to the empty room, as her tears flowed in many paths down her neck. Thank God that people like Yuuki and Satou Sei exist in the world.

But that wasn't enough. She didn't want to thank God only for the people who propped her up. She wanted to thank Him for the pain that was pulsing in her chest, the pain of that small thorn that Sachiko had planted nearly four years before that had grown into a splintery vine. It was a pain that she could feel bleeding out of her—trickle by trickle—and transmuting into love.

Alice opened her eyes. She could see half of her face reflected in the shining metal of her mother's favorite flower pot. It looked distorted, her features stretched queerly along the bulbous surface.

The truth was, though, that it was not unlike what she saw when she stared long enough in the bathroom mirror. She could always look at herself and pick out small imperfections—or even see a totally different person, depending on where she focused.

My nose is like a girl's, she would think to herself, or My eyebrows are like a boy's. Sometimes she'd lose track of time turning her face back and forth against the mirror's gaze, trying not to see the young man that everyone around her seemed to be wishing into existence. After awhile, her face would look distorted, like it wasn't even her face anymore, like it belonged to somebody else.

"Kintarou?" Her mother said, breaking her from her stream of thoughts. She looked over at the couch across from her, where her mother was sitting with a book draped over her knee. "Is that tutor of yours coming? Today's Monday, right?"

"Yes, Mother," Alice said.

Her Mother sighed and looked back down at her book. "I'll have to have a talk with your father about that girl. I know he just loves her, but I have a bad feeling about this whole thing," she said. "Maybe she's not an appropriate match for you as a tutor after all."

Alice perked up, trying to read her expression. "How do you mean, Mother?"

The older woman shot her an irritated glance, then finally took the book between two hands and clapped it shut. "The other night, I saw her in the middle of the street." She paused for a beat, as if the next part was too vulgar to say without a show of hesitation. "...with another young woman."

Deep inside, Alice wanted to laugh out loud. She was well-practiced at suppressing such instincts, though. Instead, she merely stared at her mother, giving her half a shrug. "What's wrong with that? Satou-san has many friends."

"Are you going to make me state it plainly, Kintarou?" she said, the irritation growing. "She was in the midst of...an embrace—an unseemly embrace—with another young woman, right out in the open, in the middle of the street. I don't care what people do in private, but I don't know if that's the kind of person I want teaching you."

"She's not teaching me to display affection in public, Mother," Alice dared to say, though she averted her eyes a little. "She's teaching me English. Nothing more."

Of course, the irony was not lost on her that Satou Sei had actually given her a very hands-on lesson regarding that exact topic on the night they had met. She had to fight the heat that was growing on her cheeks even from just remembering it.

Her mother sighed again. "I only want what's best for you, Kin-kun. Don't you want to live a normal life? Don't you want to build the kind of future you can be proud of?"

"What does this have to do with Satou-san?" she asked.

"If you want to...overcome the things that hold you back from success, Kintarou, you have to surround yourself with the right people. You can't surround yourself with those who will enable poor behavior, no matter how comfortable you may feel around those people. It's for your own good. One day, you'll thank me for this advice."

Alice looked at her blankly, silently. Every time her mother mentioned it, even in this vague way that danced around the subject, it stung to know that her parents disapproved of who she was. Worse still, they understood her so poorly that they seemed to think that people like Satou-san had something to do with why she'd rather wear dresses instead of pants.

It's just clothes! she wanted to scream. No matter what she wore, it hardly changed the person she actually was inside, something that was completely unavoidable.

But she knew what the real problem was. It wasn't the clothes—it was what the clothes meant. They wanted her to grow up, wear a suit, and marry a nice girl. Ironically enough, she didn't have much of a problem with most of that in and of itself; it was more about the cage that all of those features came with. It was about how they wanted her to use those things to lie about herself to other people.

Once, when her mother had implied one too many times that she was afraid "Kintarou" wouldn't be giving her any grandchildren, Alice had snapped and shouted that she wasn't a homosexual.

But that was a lie, too. She was a girl who liked other girls, which obviously put her in the same category as people like Satou-san. It almost made her break out into fits of sardonic laughter whenever she thought about how her mother was trying to unknowingly push her into a future same-sex marriage.

Unbidden, an image of Satou-san wearing a formal suit flashed into her mind. It fits her better than me, she thought. She wondered idly if Satou-san was the type of woman who would wear a dress or a tuxedo to her own wedding. Maybe she'd wear a pair of jeans, Alice mused. Regardless, she'd spend most of the reception groping the bridesmaids.

Alice decided finally that Satou-san was probably the type of woman who would never get married in the first place. Even if she'd make an attractive groom. Alice rubbed her face and sighed. It was best not to think along those lines. She was no doubt smitten with Satou-san, but besides the older girl's occasional teasing, it was obvious that Satou had rejected her.

Then again, there had been that kiss—that kiss that Satou had asked for out of nowhere.

"Kintarou-kun?" The voice of her mother snapped her out of her thoughts once again. Even in the refuge of her mind, where she retreated often, there were constant intruders. "Is there something wrong?"

It was then that Alice realized that her face was hot. She had been sitting there, staring at the floor and blushing. No wonder her mother was suspicious. "Uh...it's nothing," she replied.

When the buzzer rang, Alice nearly jumped out of her seat.

"Calm down, it's just someone at the gate, dear," her mother said, giving her a strange look. She turned and glanced towards the entrance of the house. "That's probably your tutor, isn't it? Why don't you go get it?"

Alice couldn't help but tilt her head up and look at the moonlight that streamed through the broad windows as she walked towards the front door. It was a full moon, but the light had an oddly orange tint, like it had been colored with a touch of fire—perhaps because the last bits of sun were still disappearing over the horizon. She swiped her hand against the gate controls before slipping outside through the half-open door.

The path spread out before her. She watched as the gates cracked open and seemed to let the rest of the world inside. She took a deep breath, her eyes naturally falling towards the silhouette that stood motionlessly near the entrance. Had she not recognized the young woman immediately, she might have assumed that she was a statue.

Alice's feet felt unusually light as she stepped across the garden. It was like she was on a treadmill that was moving in reverse, pushing her forward, closer to that wicked grin that she could see in the distance. Satou-san is like a cat, Alice thought, like the sly, meandering spirit of a back-alley cat.

When Alice had reached her, she noticed that Satou-san had stayed behind one of the open gates and hadn't made a move to come inside. They stared at each other, the metal bars between them blocking those final steps that would bring them together.

"Good evening," Alice said, with the tone of a good student. She gripped the cold iron of the gate unconsciously. Then she added, "What are you doing over there?"

Satou's smile hadn't faded. "Good evening," she replied in kind. She reached out and touched Alice's fingers with her own. "I've come to bust you out of here."

Alice had never run up to her room, then back down the stairs, so quickly before. Her school bag, still filled with textbooks on several irrelevant subjects, thunked loudly with each step she took as she dragged it along on her descent.

"Kin—Kintarou? Kintarou!" her mother called out to her. "What on Earth has gotten into you? Where is your tutor?"

She didn't know how to answer at first. The truth was, she wasn't quite sure what had gotten into her, either. The moment Satou-san had flashed that crazy smirk at her, she had been overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, with a sense that she needed to assert her freedom somehow—right now, in this exact moment.

Maybe she felt that if she didn't run off fast enough, something in the house would try to slow her down.

"Kintarou!" Her mother had stood up now, and was walking over to meet her near the front door. "Where are you going?"

"To the library!" she lied, much too easily for her own comfort. Well, she wasn't sure if it was a lie or not; she just had a hunch that Satou-san was taking her to no such place. "We're going to study at the university library. There are some books that my tutor wants to show me that I don't have at home."

Her mother stared at her for a moment, even as Alice was urgently unlatching the door. "All right, then," she said. "But bring back a list of those books when you come home tonight. We can easily buy them for you."

Alice glanced briefly over her shoulder. Was her mother calling her bluff? She supposed that it hardly mattered. It was all out in the open now. Alice had already shown too much enthusiasm, and it was clear that she liked Satou-san, which meant that her mother would probably double her efforts to find an excuse to let her tutor go.

When Alice sprinted past the gates, she almost kept going straight into the road through sheer inertia. She skidded to a halt when she noticed Satou-san standing at the edge of the sidewalk, and then she remembered that she wasn't just running away from something—she also had somewhere to go.

Satou-san grabbed her by the sleeve of her shirt and tugged her away from the open gates. She had a momentary sensation of deja vu as she remembered that night at the bar, and she could almost feel the skin of Satou-san's warm palm against her fingers again. Even with their relative physical distance now—the older girl was not touching her directly—she could still smell Satou-san's unique scent, and it made her chest tighten for some reason.

"We're taking the bus today," Satou-san explained, rounding the corner and pulling Alice along with her. The street was empty and her voice projected carelessly in a light echo.

"Where are we going?" Alice finally thought to ask, though in truth she didn't care. She would go anywhere with Satou. The woman could lead her into a thrashing ocean in the middle of a typhoon and she would probably follow.

The smirk returned to Satou-san's face—or maybe it had never left in the first place. "We're going to Lillian, of course," she said.

They made it to the bus stop just in time, mere seconds after the monster hissed into the darkness and knelt down to accept passengers. They scanned their passes, slipping down the aisle to a random pair of empty seats in the relatively deserted bus.

At first, Alice trained her eyes on the window and watched the outside world flash by. Once she had mustered up the courage, though, she turned to look at Satou-san. The older woman was not looking at her, but the expression on her face surprised Alice. It was a dreamy, contented look. It was the look of a person being carried along without a care in the world, the look of a person who could have ridden the bus forever without an ounce of impatience.

Then it occurred to Alice that she felt the same way. She didn't want to go anywhere just then. She didn't want to be anything, either. She didn't care if she was Alice or if she was Kintarou. For some strange reason, on that ordinary bus that seemed to have been pulsing with some mysterious energy, both of those identities disappeared like mirages.

Keep moving, keep moving. She urged the rumbling engine to never stop. She could have sat next to Satou Sei for the rest of her life.

The bus spat them out just down the street from the Lillian campus. Hopping down the last step and onto the sidewalk was more of a jarring experience than Alice had expected, and the air outside seemed unusually empty and dry. She didn't mind it so much, though.

Alice started to walk towards the shadows of the Lillian University buildings, but a hand on her shoulder brought her to an abrupt stop. Satou-san gripped her waist and turned her forcefully in a slightly different direction. She shuddered against her senpai's touch.

"Not there," Satou-san whispered in her ear. "Here."

Alice looked up to see where Satou-san had pointed her, and finally noticed the looming gates that rose high above them. "The high school section?" she asked curiously.

She didn't ask why they were there, though. She had a strange feeling that it would reveal itself soon enough, so she merely followed closely behind Satou-san as they walked through those famous gates and wandered down a path lined with trees. She noticed that the branches on most of the plants were starting to fill back up with leaves, the rebirth of early spring nearly at its peak.

Once they had trudged along for awhile, through impressive gardens and past ancient fountains, Alice couldn't help but wonder if they had a destination at all. She hadn't cared about that—and she didn't really care now—but the idea that someone would see her there and notice that she didn't belong started to creep into her mind. It made her want to hide, to not saunter as freely and gaily as her companion did.

"Uh...Satou-san," she began to say, unable to suppress the uncertainty in her voice.

Satou-san stopped in the middle of the path right next to a vine of white roses. Her hands were stuffed into her pockets—in insolent contrast to the elegance of the surroundings—and she wore a silly grin on her face. "Now, now, don't call me that, Alice," she said. "Here in the garden of maidens, you are to refer to me as Sei-sama."

Alice stared at her, her eyes widening against her will. Satou's voice had sounded so serious that Alice had to look closely at her face again to surmise that she was joking. "Uh...ah...Satou-san," she tried again.

"Sei-sama," Satou-san corrected. "Call me Sei-sama." The grin had grown lop-sided, a show of twisted intent.

So she was mocking her own school tradition, Alice thought, and yet it seemed that she wanted Alice to play along just the same.

Alice sighed, averting her eyes from Satou-san's gaze. "Um...Sei-sama," she mumbled. She immediately blushed so furiously that her ears were burning like a pair of short-circuited batteries.

Sei-sama looked like she was about to laugh, but she didn't. Instead, she merely nodded slowly, in mock approval, then lay a hand on the top of Alice's head. "Good. Very good, Alice-chan," she said.

Somehow, Alice's blush deepened. She felt it spreading to her neck, and Sei-sama appeared suddenly alarmed.

"Uh, Alice, are you okay?" she asked, in her normal tone, abruptly breaking character.

Alice merely nodded. She was no stranger to putting on a show or playing a role, of course, but she had never tried to do it for fun before. With the exception of school plays, all her roles had been so serious to her, it was like her life depended on how well she wore the mask.

Still, she understood what Satou Sei-sama was trying to do.

"Sei-sama," she managed to say finally without stuttering, though her cheeks still felt like they were about to burst into flames. "Where are we going? What if we run into some of the high school students and they wonder who I am?"

"Relaaax," her senpai murmured. She made a fist and knocked it lightly against the side of Alice's head. "You look like a normal girl, even in those clothes. You even look young enough to pass as a high schooler. Besides, you're with me, right? If anybody sees you with me, they'll just giggle and run away without asking anything."

Alice gave her a curious look. "Is that so?"

"Of course," Sei-sama replied. She turned around and started to walk up the path once again. "They'll assume that we're on a date." She looked over her shoulder briefly, and upon seeing Alice's face she let out a rather unladylike laugh. "Good Lord, you embarrass quite easily, don't you? It's a good thing I didn't go with the first idea I had earlier, or your head might have exploded."

"What was that?" Alice dared to ask.

Sei-sama didn't look at her as she trudged forward, but even staring at the back of her head, Alice could somehow tell that she was still smiling to herself. "I was going to try to get you to call me Onee-sama," she said.

Alice felt the blood drain from her face.

They didn't stop walking until they reached a thicket of trees. In the dim evening light, Alice could see the top of a Western-style roof rising over the canopy as they approached, with a prominent cross hovering at the apex. It took Alice a moment to recognize that they were standing in front of a chapel.

This is a Catholic school after all, she thought. She couldn't help but find it a bit ironic that Sei-sama had been a student here, of all places. Nearly everything about her, besides perhaps her Western appearance, seemed decidedly unchristian. For a moment, she tried to imagine Sei-sama kneeling at a pew, praying the rosary or doing something equally Godly.

She just couldn't string those images together in her mind, though.

"Say," Alice said, gesturing towards the charming little building with the colorful windows, "isn't this where Catholic people go to tell a priest all of their secrets or something?" As soon as she said it, though, she couldn't help but wonder if she was coming off as totally ignorant and disrespectful. Having gone to a Buddhist school, she knew next to nothing about Christianity.

Thankfully, Sei-sama laughed. "You mean confession?" she asked. "I imagine that might be the case in some schools. For us, we use the chapel to have mass sometimes and to perform the entrance ceremony for new students. Other than that, hardly anyone is ever in this chapel. Confession happens at a different temple on the grounds."

"Did you have to…?"

"Every Saturday," she said. "Well, every Saturday until I learned how to excuse myself gracefully. I used to lie during confession, anyway, so I doubt it did me any good in the eyes of God or Maria-sama."

"Why would…," Alice began, but then stopped. She glanced at her companion awkwardly, wondering if she had perhaps led the conversation in too personal of a direction.

"Say it," Sei-sama told her. "Go ahead and ask it."

"Why would you lie?" Alice said. "Did you really do such terrible things that you needed to hide them?"

"No, actually," she said, sounding a bit nostalgic. "It was the opposite. I would lie and make up things that I didn't do. It made the confession more entertaining. The only thing I hid from others was…."

Sei-sama was quiet for awhile. After a moment, though, she pointed towards the front doors of the chapel. She was smiling vaguely, but her expression seemed a bit pained, almost like she was wincing at some long-forgotten memory that erupted inside of her mind just then.

"There," she said. She dropped her pointing hand and shoved it back in her pocket, gesturing instead with her chin. "Right in there. That's where I first kissed a girl."

Alice stared at her, completely bewildered. Had she taken her all the way out here to show her this? As much as she was honored, it all seemed so personal. So unlike the usual lighthearted Satou-san.

"Did she kiss you back?" Alice asked, before she could stop herself.

Sei-sama shook her head and looked away, at something far off that Alice couldn't see. "She slapped me in the face, actually. She pushed me away." The abrupt seriousness of her expression made Alice think that it couldn't have been a simple matter of someone rejecting her casual flirting. There was pain in the way the older woman's jaw tightened, in the way she stared hard into the distance, and then at the ancient wooden doors of the chapel.

Alice stood there and wordlessly studied her face.

Sei-sama had been in love. She found that she understood at least this much. Sei-sama's first love had been a heartbreak.

It was hard to imagine that now, with her provocative attitude and the way other girls openly admired her. Even her friend Katou-san, who on the surface seemed to merely tolerate her, was obviously taken with Sei-sama at least to some degree. It was hard to picture this woman rejected, heartbroken—and yet, for a moment, that's what Alice saw as she looked at her in the moonlight. The vulnerability made Alice want to look away, like she was gazing through the un-curtained window of a house and observing someone's most private moments.

Then again, wasn't it Sei-sama who had opened the curtains, even if unintentionally?

"Satou-san," Alice whispered. She took a step towards the older woman, and for the first time that night, she reached out to her. She pressed a comforting hand to her forearm. It was warm, even through the layers of her jacket.

Sei-sama's head snapped immediately towards her. Her eyes flicked in recognition, as if she were only just seeing Alice, as if she were awakening from a dream. "I told you before," she whispered back, a familiar smirk spreading on her face, "call me Sei."

But that wasn't what Sei had told her earlier at all.

Alice turned back to the chapel and for the first time noticed a flickering light that illuminated the windows from the inside. It cast interesting designs against the stained glass, but she couldn't see any objects through the opacity.

"There's a light," she said softly.

"Yes," Sei replied. Her tone sounded as if she already knew, as if she had been avoiding the subject. She was gazing at the chapel as well, a strange expression on her face. "There's somebody inside right now."

Alice followed the dancing rays of light with her eyes for a few seconds, a bit mesmerized, then turned towards Sei. "Should we leave?" she asked, a sense of urgency coming over her for some reason. She still couldn't shake the feeling that they shouldn't be there.

Sei didn't answer. Instead she appeared to stare down the small path that led to the doors. She seemed to be contemplating something.

Then she took Alice's hand. Together, they walked to the front of the chapel. Though Alice knew that it was Sei who was tugging her along, for a brief moment it almost felt as if she were the one who was leading Sei, slowly helping to inch her towards the entrance.

It was Sei who boldly pushed the doors open, though. It was she who pulled Alice in from the cool outside air and into the musty little building that smelled like centuries-old wood. Their footsteps echoed as they walked down the central aisle, filling the emptiness with what felt like vulgar noise, and it suddenly made Alice remember that she was wearing her outside shoes. Should we have taken them off? It's like a temple, isn't it? she thought.

Then her train of thought ended abruptly. There was a girl near the altar of the chapel.

She was sitting in the first row of pews in front of an array of lit candles, her silky long hair flowing like a black fountain over her shoulders. The girl heard them almost immediately; her locks whipped around as she turned to see who had stumbled into the room.

Sei skidded to a halt, which made Alice nearly run into her. Pressing her face to Sei's shoulder—to hide herself, perhaps, like a bashful child—she peered down the aisle at the young woman whose prayers they had clearly interrupted. It took her a moment to recognize the girl's features in the candlelight. What's more, the girl seemed to be busy recognizing them as well.

Alice blinked a few times, to let her eyes adjust. There was no question now. It was the pale and helpless face of Ogasawara Sachiko-sama that stared back at them.

A/N:

Hello again. As always, thank you for going on this silly journey with me into the life of Satou Sei and special thanks to Masane, MsgmSY, 30secondstoidealize, and sakuya112 for your kind reviews. More to come!

Another minor note for those who have only seen the anime: Sei was of course referring to Kubo Shiori in this chapter. In the anime, Shiori merely pushes Sei away from her when Sei tries to steal a kiss in the chapel. In the novel and manga, though, she actually slaps her across the face and tells her that "Maria-sama is watching." Ahhh, young love.