FIFTY-SEVEN
She is supposed to be inspecting the flower fields, yet she finds herself wandering the halls of her childhood instead.
"Is it odd," she murmurs aloud, "that I keep thinking of this as a dream?"
Perhaps it is the house itself that is the dream: after all, the last time she stayed here was when that terrorist group had threatened her father—years upon years, when she and Maria had only recently met.
Yet Maria had stood up for her, had confronted her father.
Voice low, a heavy scowl on her face, and righteous indignation in every accusation thrown at Yatsuhiro Kazanari; Maria would have done the same with Fudou Kazanari if she had had the chance.
Outside of her old bedroom, she pauses.
It is empty now—has been empty since she and Maria moved into their apartment. When she slides open the door, however, she can recall quite clearly the mess she had left when she departed for the military. The mess that her father had kept meticulously clean no matter how long she had stayed away.
The mess that had persuaded Maria to approach her.
She thinks of it as she continues walking:
"I thought you were so aloof—but in a cool way, you know? You couldn't possibly have any interest in someone like me, who was so ordinary behind the terrorism. But I saw your room, and—and I realized that you were human, too. You were a person, just like me; it was just that you hid it so well behind your walls. Ha, literally in the case of your room!"
And so, it is almost a dream to be here, eons later, with the intent of starting her own family.
The teenager inside her resurfaces, marveling at the nigh-impossible changes.
"Not impossible, however. Was it not the death of Kanade that rendered everything impossible? Was it not the depression—my depression—that sought to condemn me to a half-life of bitter duty?"
Rounding a hall and arriving nearly at her starting point, she finds herself at an even older place.
It has housed no one since she changed her room to the one further out, by the courtyard.
Once upon a time it was a nursery; back when she believed the world was a simple place. But then she knew better, and she was angry, so she renounced the symbolism that had covered every inch of the nursery—which had been that of her father, and her grandfather, and all of the heads of the Kazanari before her.
Forlorn now, empty, abandoned.
It, too, feels like a dream. One of fairytales and nursery rhymes and the shackles of tradition.
This room will not be for Elfnein, or for any subsequent child that may grace the halls of the estate.
"I might not be a 57-year-old revolution, but I am progress."
a/n: Grasping at straws with that number -grimaces.-