Phase 2: (Re-)introduction to Amu
Hinamori Amu had once been a perfectly normal, if spunky and assertive, unapproachable yet cool, nine year old girl. She had a little sister, a littler sister, a twin and an older sister, and she loved all of them with all her heart. Her parents as well, since you ask. She was on the student council in her school, though as the 'joker', with no fixed responsibilities. Her job was to fix whatever needed fixing.
Nearly all of that was some flavor of lie. Not the love, or her name—her mother really had named her Amu, then gone on to name her little sister Ami, which she felt sure would be trouble—but she wasn't at all normal. She didn't feel very assertive. She hated being unapproachable. And she'd stopped going to school when the world had ended.
Hinamori Amu was now ten years old, and until recently she'd been an official, student council-approved, card-carrying magical girl. Nothing had changed except her perception, but the end of the world had gotten in the way. She'd fought an evil corporation, she'd fixed children's dreams when they'd broken, and she'd had three dreams of her own take (tiny) corporeal form.
They'd been who she wanted to be, before all of that changed, and they'd been fairy-like miniature copies of her, but all of that had also become a lie. Ran, Miki and Su had their own lives now, and all of them could be her own size—though Su liked pretending she was a little older, Miki was determined to build her life from scratch, and Ran looked and acted like her identical twin.
A far more upbeat twin. If Su was the warm and caring one, and Miki the shy and artistic one, then Ran was the incredibly embarrassing for people around her one, especially her. Miki made her want to cuddle up to her and hug her, just by being her, but Ran was someone who'd tackle-hug her anywhere. Her, or anyone else.
They'd all been aspects of her, and she had to blushingly admit that Ran's antics were something she'd have liked to do.
Except… there was one way she was different from them, one difference they could never overcome.
Hinamori Amu was a chosen of the Unconquered Sun, a Dawn-caste Exalted, and she knew so because her exaltation shard had told her so, but they both knew that this was horribly, terribly wrong, because the Unconquered Sun was dead, Creation was dead, and it was only the shard's desperate search for a host that had led it all the way to her.
And if they weren't careful, then this world would end too. End more. Ender. But while she'd stopped that from immediately happening, that had just made things more complicated, and she was starting to wonder who had made her magical girl powers, and why, and…
Let's face it, though. If she were to tell you her story, then it would be around this point in the retelling that you'd tell her to sit down, breathe, stop chattering, and start over from the beginning.
She was a lot of things, none of which had very much to do with each other, and if it was confusing even to her then she couldn't complain about how it came off to others.
Hotsuin's office, late Tuesday afternoon
"—No? All right. Hinamoru Amu, age nine. File opened after a routine screening revealed moderate sorcerous and psionic potential… run by a French OCCINT service. I don't suppose you'd know why? Either of you?" He sighed. "All right."
She had just gotten back from her latest escapade, only to have Ran run up to her and latch on to her arm the moment she got back inside the Diet, like she was afraid she'd disappear if she let her go. As tired and battered as Amu felt, she thought that was pretty unlikely.
For a moment, though, she'd done a double take. With Ran dressed up in some of Amu's clothing, and Mum having even found a spare hairpin somewhere, it really was like looking into a mirror. A… clingy, nervous, not at all Ran-like, worried mirror. It was like looking at herself, even more than usual.
Then an underling had caught up to them and dragged them to Hotsuin's office. His less formal office, apparently, meant for small gatherings of people he didn't need to impress. It was really just a room with a few comfortable leather chairs, a computer, and a filing cabinet. The only one in there, besides her and Ran, was Hotsuin himself.
"—Presumably it's because of your ancestry," Hotsuin said dismissively, looking down at his papers. "This was forwarded to Japan's government a year ago. Passed to JPs three months ago, flag set for update and possible recruitment at a later date, when the world wasn't going to exist long enough for you to hit your majority." He glanced at her hair, and she instinctively checked—still brown, though a bit of Ran's red was visibly creeping in. Her stomach sank.
Ran did a double take, then squeezed her hand. She gratefully squeezed back. She wasn't alone, even if Hotsuin might be another one of those idiots—
"This isn't worth the ink I splurged on printing it," Hotsuin said, disgust obvious in his voice. "Wasteful at best, cruel at worst. I'll need to have another meeting later. Since I've already got you here, so that there aren't any more… misunderstandings like this… I think it's high time we update this file."
—It would have been odd for him reveal that now.
He wasn't, and it sounded like someone else was in trouble. She resisted the urge to gape. Ran didn't resist the urge to grin.
He'd forgotten to ask her what she'd been doing at the Tenmon-Tenjin shrine, and that couldn't last, but for now, this made her pretty happy.
"Misunderstandings." Right.
Amu was born a Japanese girl, and her parents were both Japanese—legally, at any rate. The reality was that she had two European grandparents, one Italian and one apparently French, though she'd never been outside Japan herself.
Her parents had spent their lives tip-toeing around their gaijin parents. The children in her old school hadn't had the same timidity. It rarely went any further than snubbing and cruel comments, and only from a few, but she was sensitive to that. Can't snub you if you don't try to participate…
She'd never consciously thought that way, but she'd definitely acted it. She'd hidden her foreign, brown-colored hair under dye, she'd pretended to be cool and unmoved by insults, and she'd kept that up even after changing schools, when no-one knew who she was and no-one at her new one had ever asked. She'd dyed her hair pink so they wouldn't pay attention to her height or her face.
She'd tried to act like someone else, someone she'd loved but who wasn't her, and she'd paid for it. It had gained her a reputation. Not a bad one, some would think, but she was tired—really, truly—of everyone from her family to her schoolmates to old ladies on the street thinking of her as 'cool'. She didn't want to be cool.
She'd changed schools, and then she'd met Ran, and everything had changed.
Hotsuin tapped his pen against the paper.
"Your 'charas', then. You agree that they are, or at least were, a manifestation of the collective unconscious…" He gave Ran a considering gaze. "Which makes them distinctly nonstandard, as such beings go. I wonder what else you could have done, if you hadn't had them."
She didn't care.
"Perhaps… ah, you said Tenmon-Tenji was involved in their creation, but this is hardly its usual modus. It's far too indirect. If the goal was to teach… hmm, no. It could simply have instilled the knowledge, even if as a set of goalposts."
She didn't care, and there was no way she'd ever complain that her sisters existed!
Amu breathed out, carefully. She'd gotten a bit too worked up there.
Perhaps sensing her mood, Hotsuin changed the subject. "—but it's provided an interesting ability set, yes. You realize your story sounds like the plot of a magical girl anime?"
Amu looked away. Well, yes, but… that was…
"Does that make me the mascot?" Ran asked, her head tilted. Hotsuin's expression momentarily blanked.
What would you do, if you woke up in the morning with three eggs in your bed? Frantically stuff them in your school bag, try your hardest not to think about it?
That's what Amu had done, and she'd failed.
Ran always made herself hard to ignore. Because that's what they were: The eggshells of Ran, Miki and Su, more idea than real but taking up space in her bag all the same, as she'd discovered when Ran woke up in the middle of the welcoming ceremony and made her confess to Tadase there and then.
Amu blushed fiercely as Ran described the scene to Hotsuin, who was dutifully taking notes, looking amused more than bored. And that…
She focused on the thought, because at least then she wasn't listening to what was Ran saying. Hotsuin. Hotsuin didn't make sense, because he was spending time on details like this when he had so many more important things to do. Hotsuin was strange. The same age as Ikuto, but far too adult to understand. Hotsuin was smiling, showing every sign of enjoying the conversation.
Still far less fun than Ikuto.
She tried not to blush, despite the direction her thoughts had taken, but it was hard to keep the smile those memories brought up entirely off her face. All the things that Ikuto had done for her… he'd been her opponent far more often than not, but she'd never felt that he disliked her. In retrospect, he might have been using her as a little sister-replacement.
Which sent her mood right back down into the gloom.
"And that time we got Nikaidou to quit fighting!" Ran said, pumping her fist in the air. "Mostly thanks to Su, I guess. He kidnapped her, but…" she shrugged. "Su will be Su."
Amu touched her arm. "Ran."
"She somehow talked him into not being such a meanie, and stop breaking kids' dreams…" Ran's monologue petered out, as she caught the gloomy look on Amu's face. "...next up was Utau-chan, though."
'Brainwashed him' might have been more accurate, Amu thought. That was okay, given her options, but it wasn't a thought she wanted Hotsuin—or anyone else—to have.
"I think you mentioned that before," Hotsuin said, still writing frantically.
Amu sighed. "She did. Utau-chan was… she kept popping up. First there were just a few children who lost their dreams on their own, and I turned those back for them, but I'm not sure how much good I did. With Nikaidou, at first I thought it was just more of the same. But Utau…"
She'd remember the scene forever. They'd all gone to one of Utau's concerts—her, Tadase, Yaya and Nadeshiko—and that was the first time she'd felt Utau's powers. The memory hurt, especially now that they were friends, because Utau had broadcasted her hurt to the entire concert hall.
But that had been so she could turn all of their dreams into x-eggs, every single child in the hall. It had been far beyond anything Nikaidou had done. It had even affected some adults.
Utau had never wanted to do that.
Amu squeezed her eyes shut, helplessly trying to squeeze back the tears in her eyes. She'd told Utau it was okay, but it wasn't. She'd saved some of the children, but not every one of them. It couldn't be okay. Utau wasn't the one who was hurting the most, it was just…
'It was just, she might be my best friend,' Amu admitted to herself, feeling a twinge of pain at the admission. They fitted together too well to be anything else. She couldn't abandon her, and she didn't want to. That, and… she didn't have many others these days, not really. That didn't seem like it should matter, but it did.
Hotsuin broke in. "Right, then you had another battle with Utau? I've said it before, your life really wouldn't be out of place in a magical girl anime."
He might have been trying for humor.
"I had to stop her," she said, her voice half-choked by the lump in her throat. "It wasn't her fault! Utau didn't have a choice, they were keeping her… keeping everything she cared about hostage. It wasn't the right thing.
But… I had to stop her. Easter were the ones who did it. Easter Company." At the time, she'd felt betrayed. Now she just felt sad.
"You've mentioned them before," Hotsuin prompted.
"They don't matter anymore…" 'They weren't important enough.'
After a while, it became obvious she wouldn't say anything else. Hotsuin sighed, and reorganised his notes.
"Which brings us up to date with last Friday, I guess. It feels like it's been years, not just four days. We'll have to talk about what happened today, and I should get your perspective on the last few days—" He looked at her. "But you look like you could use a rest, first. Unless there's anything particularly important?"
[ ] Inform him of the deal she struck with Tenmon-Tenjin.
[ ] Not yet.
[ ] Write-in.
"—Don't worry. There are no crises happening right at the moment."
