"Emmy got Bad once," Ferio says to Fuu after she's gone through her final Rights, after she's received her talisman, after her Familiar found her, after Celf smiled at her and Umi and Hikaru over that small fire in the woods five miles out from his apartment and twenty miles out from the city. They're lying out in the grass in the space between Clef's building and the neighboring building in the complex. They can't really see the stars, not like they could the night of the Right, but they can pretend. Ferio's head is on her stomach and she makes it a point to keep her gaze on the stars as he speaks–this is not an easy subject for him.
Ferio doesn't say anything for a long time at first, and neither does Fuu. Until finally, quietly, Ferio says, "I used to hear her crying."
He swallows, "She used to cry and say there was something rotten in her."
Fuu can almost hear it in the silence of the night, in the crickets' song–Emeraude on the phone with Alcyone, sobbing, trying so hard not to scream to her, "I'm rotten! I'm rotten! I'm rotten!"
And Ferio sitting outside of her door, hearing her, and trying so hard not cry with his sister or wanting to go to comfort her, but being unable to do anything.
A car's tires squeal in the parking lot, pulling Fuu from her vision. There's another long pause before Ferio cleared his throat and continued, "It was after she'd been through her Rights," he says quietly now, as if he were imparting a secret to her, "Clef used to say how rare it was for that to happen–something about what the Rights were supposed to do–but it happened anyway. She doesn't talk about what happened, what it was that let the dark in–I think she's scared of it, of…of talking about it."
Something Clef had warned about when they were going through one of their lessons–she barely remembered what he'd been teaching them about–they'd ask him a question, but he kept giving vague answers until Umi yelled at him about not giving them anything concrete, he'd looked at them gravely and had said, "There are some things you don't talk about for fear of bringing it back."
"She got better," Ferio says quickly, as if he were trying to make an excuse for her, to garner forgiveness from Fuu, "Something–she still won't tell us what that was either–something brought her back. She's…she's okay now."
Fuu nods into the grass, and absently pets his head. She doesn't know what in her brought out her courage to do that–she and Ferio had been dancing around their feelings of mutual, early budding attraction to each other but they hadn't said or done anything about it. But she could feel him relax as her fingers moved through his hair, heard him sigh and melt a little more into grass under them.
"I can see it." Fuu says carefully to him, her words hitching in her throat. She feels him tense again but continues, "You know how some of us can identify each other because of energy and all that? Emeraude's is bright and warm, but there's a…like a bruise on it. There's this dark, soft spot in it that–"
She stops herself and tries to find the right words to get him to understand. It's always so hard to get someone outside of your world to understand.
"She guards it." She finally says, "Some days it's bigger than others, and she…she folds into herself to hide it. And…and other days it's like it's not there at all."
After a moment, she says, smiling at the stars as they look down on them, "On the bad days she's very careful around us–around you. But on the good days…On those days, she's so bright it's hard to look at her."
She moves her head slightly to try and catch Ferio's eye as she added, "It's like I know who she really is."