"No? Then I am but your tool, bereft of my own agency and at the mercy of your personal risk assessment. I do not deny your skill at navigating crises, Mari—indeed I envy it—but I hope you understand why I will never be able to trust you again."
"I understand why my life means nothing to you," Snowflake spoke up as Kei fell silent. "It's a shallow, weightless life, and ours is a shallow, weightless bond. But Kei is supposed to mean the world to you!" Snowflake's hands clenched into fists. "All she wants, all she ever wanted, was for you to love her for who she was—not a tool, not a way to be a good person, not a jigsaw piece to fit into your picture of your perfect world, but her, this precious, fragile individual. You could not even do that. 'Team Mum' couldn't see her needs if seeing them meant having to face herself for real.
"What have you done about it, Mari? How far have you gone to fix what you broke, you, who aren't locked in by the Sage-damned Frozen Skein or by the mind of a girl who doesn't understand people or how they work? You are not perfect—I understand that, and I have no idea of your true capabilities because I am stuck seeing you through a borrowed prism of adoration—but you had one job. Did you have to do this? Could you not have stepped in Orochimaru's path yourself? Could you not have tempted him with Truth Lost in the Fog, a unique, extraordinary bribe that would probably not require anyone to be dissected? Could you not have drawn his attention by asking him about his research, or the Basement, or Jiraiya, or Akatsuki, or whatever? Yes, it would have been less reliable than throwing the mouse to the snake. He might have rebuffed you, even lashed out if you were persistent. But it was…" For a second, Snowflake choked up. "It was what a mother would have done!"
"Snowflake, enough."
Kei did not want to be defended. There was no point, and it was too late. Kei had not chosen to bare her soul, and though she was moved—perhaps even a little shaken—by Snowflake's actions, it was not Snowflake's place to do so for her.
"Mari, as part of your optimal scenario, you chose to sacrifice my trust in you. I do not have the power to undo that sacrifice any more than I do the other events that transpired, even should I conclude it to be the rational course of action. Our relationship is no longer a problem to be solved, or a scale to be rebalanced through apologies and atonement. It is over."
Kei walked away, and Snowflake with her.
At the last moment, before Mari was too far away to hear, Kei had two final words she could not make herself not say.
"Be well."
