June 19th, 2024

Hanyuu is both far older than and exactly as young as she looks. It is one of the curling, complicated, infinite facets of her existence, wherein all answers are both yes and no.

The closest she could get to explaining it in human terms is that she thinks older than she is. Cosmically, she is but a speck, a burgeoning almost-life that is reflected in her cherubic features and slight frame, but she has lived –or more accurately, existed– for centuries and centuries past her time.

So, despite the fact they are of a height, and despite the fact that Rika is the more assertive, Hanyuu is far older and more experienced than she is. This is an irrefutable fact, except when Hanyuu is caught up in reacting instead of thinking and behaves exactly like a flustered child.

She wants to be gentle with Rika, is the other thing. She wants to be kind. She knows that Rika is often deflected on account of her apparent age, and so she lets the girl belittle her and bully her and boss her around, in a kind of quiet reminder that Rika is a person worth paying attention to, that there can be someone underneath even her.

It helps, she thinks. It helps a little.

And Rika needs that help. Hanyuu started this cycle for selfish reasons, but Rika's reasons for accepting her offer were no less selfish –wanting to survive, after all, was a deeply personal goal.

But humans are not meant to endure this. Human minds can only stretch so far without breaking.

Hanyuu knows that, and so she tends to Rika's mind as carefully as she can, as carefully as she knows how to. She pours hope into her like watering a garden, encouragement like she is plucking weeds.

The difficulty is that Hanyuu is not accustomed to tending another's mind, and that too much hope is dangerous. Despair is like falling, and the higher hope builds that cliff, the more it will hurt when Rika crashes to the ground. Hanyuu has known that hurt herself; falling from the castles she and he family built in the air and crashing down into the muddy swamp as a corpse had been one of the most bitterly painful things she had ever undergone. She would not push that soul-deep despair onto her worst enemy.

And even aside from empathy, even aside from decency, Hanyuu cannot afford to let Rika despair too much. It is her willpower that pushes her forward, now, and nothing less; should she lose that, should her heart shatter completely and all the will to fight leave her, the Rika that Hanyuu knows will die.

Whether she meant to or not, Hanyuu tangled a web around her dearest friend, strings made of quantum theory and should-haves and might-nots and a thousand other things that humans have yet to discover, and it is Rika's focused mind, her concentrated will, that is forming the crystallized possibilities that surround them.

Without that, every fragment will shatter, and all of this will have never been. Rika Furude will have died on Watanagashi 1983 and that would have been the end of the matter, now and forevermore.

Hanyuu cannot bear the thought of that.

So while she encourages Rika to keep trying, to persevere, she tugs back when Rika starts to hope, when her eyes begin to gleam with suppressed excitement at the chance of freedom. They cannot afford to hope for the best and expect the worst.

The best they can do is simply endure until the end.

9.22 AM, USA Central Time