Shu-Qi had told her everything. How they found the crash site, and that the few pieces of wreckage that were still there had evaporated even as they were looking at them. Even without seeing pictures, she could picture it in her mind, and she'd felt numb even before he'd finished talking.
"There was nothing left alive," he'd said.
With a mournful groan, Hana tossed the pillow away and sat up. For once she wanted to do nothing but sleep, and she couldn't force herself to. The day's conversations with Tama-jii kept playing back in her mind, over and over again.
"... N-nothing?"
"I'm afraid not. I searched quite thoroughly. If anyone was inside the vessel on impact then, save for you, they are certainly gone now."
Hana had wanted to protest, shout that she lived so it was possible, but she'd felt a horrible tightness that stopped her from saying anything. Like she'd been about to lie. When she'd chased it down, it hadn't gone anywhere, it was just another dead end in her head. But the feeling was so real, and it didn't feel wrong. It made her sick, threatened to make her burst into tears. So she'd run away from it, and from him.
Her eyes hesitantly swerved over to the small desk where she did her reading and homework by herself, and the framed picture she'd propped up on a kickstand there. It was a big portrait, a drawing of her family and closest friends. She'd made it earlier that day, hoping Shu-Qi would like it and just wanting to see her family again somewhere other than her head.
Maybe she'd hoped it would help him understand her better? She didn't know. It was all so frustrating, and she had no-one to ask for help. It hadn't worked. She'd done all this talking, letting everything out and telling him about her home and he'd asked her a lot of questions, but never about her feelings or her family. Just about things. Machines. Concepts she barely understood, like who was in charge of what.
And Shu-Qi? He didn't like to talk about home, not even when she tried to copy his questions.
Swallowing hard, she walked over and picked up the picture, stroking it with her thumbs and reminding herself it was real. She'd been happy just to finish the portrait, regardless of Shu-Qi's response. It was a bit ugly, she knew. She wasn't all that good at drawing, and it didn't look like it had in her imagination. The colors were all skewed, but at least the lines were right and everyone looked recognisable.
She'd put herself in the centre of the drawing, of course, then put all the members of her family next to her. Mom and Dad, and Cocona of course, but also Parsnip, with Carrot--not really a member--holding a badly-shaped, near-orange hand on Parsnip's shoulder. Behind them she'd added some friends, like Carrot herself, Potato and Brocco—er, Iona, and Mom's friends who sometimes came by, like Turnip and Asparagus. And Cocona's, but…
She hadn't wanted to draw Sasha, so she hadn't, but now she wondered if maybe she should. Sasha wasn't a bad person, not really, just way too head-pattingly huggy at times. If she ever got back, she'd never complain about her again.
She hadn't drawn Aoto, but that was because she'd tried several times to draw the patterns on his arm and got them wrong every time. She hadn't drawn Peach, because Saki without Aoto was just wrong.
And then there was Walnut. Haruna, who always wanted to protect her. Standing in the back, staring ahead with a blank gaze, her long blonde hair hanging loose behind her, and the lower half of her face concealed behind the high collar of her elaborate black ceremonial coat with red and gold vine patterns all over it.
She looked exactly like Hana remembered.
She looked bored.
Hana hadn't even remembered her yesterday.
She'd started drawing her portraits for fun, really, as something to do while she told Shu-Qi random tidbits about her life after he'd asked her to draw a map of the stars around her home. Which she'd done, in just a few minutes, and then she'd still had the drawing program up.
"There was this one time I went to the library in Elemia." She'd barely paid attention to what she was saying. "Oh, because Mom was going somewhere to talk to her friend, Mrs. Spica, and she left me there so I'd have something to do and wouldn't mess with all of Spica's things." Hana paused for a second, focusing so she'd get Dad's eyes correct.
"I wandered around for awhile by myself and found a staircase to the second floor. All of a sudden, Turnip came tumbling down the stairs without her armor on, and I caught her! I was really surprised to see her!"
What she didn't say was that she'd actually just broken Turnip's fall with her body. She'd panicked and hadn't tried to bring up her Klein field to catch her. It hadn't hurt, Turnip only weighed as much as a feather and she was pretty sturdy anyway, but… anyway… Tama-jii didn't need to know that. Nobody needed to know that.
Hmm... Speaking of Turnip...
"Does your 'Turnip' actually sparkle in the sunlight?" Shu-Qi had asked.
She'd looked up, making eye contact with him and his flat stare. Then she'd looked back down, examining the drawing, and lifted her pen off the explosions of sparkles surrounding Turnip's head in the form of a radiant aura.
"... I bet she could if she wanted to," she'd pouted, erasing the sparkles. She wished he wouldn't peek all the time… It was distracting.
"So anyway, we said hi, and then we wandered around the library together. Turnip was picking up a book to show Lyner, but she'd gotten lost after finding it without her armor to help her remember where she was going. I asked her why she didn't just put it on, and she said she was trying to be casual out in public and didn't want everyone to recognize her. I thought that was pretty cool, so I followed her around while she looked, and we talked for hours and hours about all sorts of things."
"What took your mother so long?" Tama-jii asked in what Hana thought was a mildly dissatisfied tone.
"Well, it wasn't actually hours, but apparently when she got to Spica's she got roped into some crazy hijinks with Mr. and Mrs. Elendia and these two really weird twins that follow them around all the time. I wanted to befriend them, but they're only interested in, like, what it's like to be human and ancient human weapons and stuff. Which is cool, but modern weapons are so much more interesting. One of 'em has a bow and arrow, and she doesn't even like to fight, keeps deliberately trying to miss. And the library was really big, so Turnip got totally lost."
Almost done, she'd touched up a few more details on Cocona's jeans before she'd set the tablet down and appraised her work.
"I could have told her how to get to the exit, but… I didn't," she'd admitted with a mildly embarrassed frown. "I wanted to spend time with her. I don't get to see her much. She's always working so hard, and lives so far away from Metafalss. I mean, I feel kinda bad now because I kept the goddess from getting back to work, but I was only six and a half, and she's a goddess! Who wouldn't want to spend time with her? Besides, she had fun too, and nothing bad happened afterwards."
Having assured herself that she did absolutely nothing wrong and anybody who said otherwise was mistaken, she'd finally decided she was satisfied with her portrait and turned it around to give it to Shu-Qi.
"Do you need me to tell you who's in it?"
"No, I'm sure you've told me enough about all of them already," he'd commented, before squinting his eye to examine something. Then he'd pointed a claw at the screen. "Though, perhaps I'm mistaken. I don't think you mentioned this one before."
"Hmm? Oh, this is…"
Which was where she'd made a complete embarrassment of herself.
Hana had stared. Her mouth had hung open, then slowly closed. She'd picked up the portrait and stared at the face of the person standing in the back behind everyone else, their blank and disinterested expression gazing off at nothing in particular, and had no idea at all who she was or why she was there.
"She's… Um…" Hana had struggled to pull something out, her mental fingers grasping at the memory but coming up empty every time.
She'd stared, and stared… and if it had been just that, she'd be curled up under her covers with her face flaming red, right now, but to think that she had forgotten something that important…
She sucked.
That was all.
Of course, it hadn't ended there.
"I… I'm sorry, I don't…" Hana stuttered, her insides seizing up as she felt a chilling numbness coming on. This was different from her crashes. The memory was right there, at the tip of her fingers, but it hurt.
"Hana?"
"I can't…" Her voice wouldn't come out.
If she pushed, she'd have another micro-crash, but that was okay. That was fine. She'd had a lot of them, and it practically never did anything worse than blank out a section of her mind for a fraction of a second. It didn't even interrupt her consciousness most of the time, though she didn't like it; it left her feeling frazzled. This would be an easy one. She could practically feel the memory already.
She could feel it, and it hurt. She… her mind snapped back to the twins. There was a blank spot in her memories, a black silhouette where someone who'd been with her all the time had talked to them, and then told her that they're weird, and not to play with them, and she'd listened. Which was dumb. Asahi and… she'd told her that they're weird because they're light cruisers, but they insisted on pretending they were human. They shouldn't even be able to manifest mental models, and they couldn't, not without…
Wasn't she a light cruiser?
Light cruisers couldn't have mental models. Not and still be light cruisers.
She wanted to focus on the twins, because that was just her being a bad friend to someone she barely knew. It didn't make her hurt inside, not as much, but that was why she couldn't do it. Dad always told her to face the pain.
She had to remember what she was forgetting, even if it hurt, but that wasn't it. She could already hear Mom yelling at her, but that was nothing new. She imagined Mom yelling at her for poking at her insides all the time, despite knowing that she had to, and that Mom couldn't do it for her because they were both… it wouldn't come to her.
Her insides were just like they had been the last time, a constellation of neural networks and other software as dense as the night sky. A little thicker, maybe; better organised, more efficiently drawing conclusions from the memories and habits that defined who she was. It filled her core, leaving no room for anything else, except that dead spot in the middle that kept sending back "nobody's home". She couldn't be a ship even if she wanted, and she didn't. Then, how had she gotten here? Tama-jii had mentioned a crash.
Her vision got blurry. There had been—she'd never left—
She didn't seize up. If she had, she wouldn't have been able to slump down and hug herself. Haruna. Walnut. She never left, she was always somewhere nearby, and she was a battleship. There was no way she wouldn't have been able to rescue her! Not, not unless…
The mournful sobs she emitted didn't even sound human, let alone like they'd come from her.
"Hana? What is wrong?"
"It was her!" FIghting to speak between tortured gasps, Hana pointed a quivering finger at Haruna's face. "S-she was supposed to b-be with me and, and now she's d-dead!"
And so there she was. A ghost appearing from the fog, Walnut materialized in the strokes of Hana's pen, demanding to be remembered.
She sniffed back tears, letting out a sad giggle at the horrible pun she'd just made. It hurt her in so, so many ways...
Tama-jii had quickly decided that was to be the end of the day's lessons. She wasn't in any condition to argue with him, nor in any mood for it, quite frankly. She was told to lay down and rest after spending several minutes sobbing into his lap, and crying as he carried her all the way back to her room. He'd tried, staying with her until she'd calmed down to the point of mild hiccups, and she appreciated the effort, but she wouldn't be sleeping off her sorrows any time soon.
Hana put the photo down, resting her head in her arms and somberly replaying what few memories of Walnut she had. Being caught mid-air before she could ram a neighbour's house with her head. Explaining how to properly play a magical girl game after the battleship vaporized the monster without even transforming. Explaining how to properly play. She made a very bad Viole. Not that Hana made a great Cherry, but she tried.
Haruna was, was…
She wasn't her family, or her friend, for all that Hana wished she could be. She wasn't a loved one, not someone Hana would do anything for. She remembered trying to run away—hiding in the back alleys of Inferiare, making a game of finding Mom before Haruna could find her, not that she ever once succeeded without Iona's help. She wasn't someone Hana tried terribly hard to be nice to, because she was always there. Kind of like her sister.
...she'd taken Cocona for granted, hadn't she.
Haruna didn't hug her, or answer her questions, or play with her without being forced. She didn't eat with them, and Mom and Dad tried to keep her out of the house, even more so than with Parsnip. They'd gotten used to Parsnip. Haruna hadn't become a second sister. All she ever did was… stay there and protect her…
A clearing covered in shrapnel, the shattered innards of a Fog ship captured by the radiation-fogged cameras of a hundred drones, and there wasn't enough left even to make up a cruiser. She'd felt ill just at the sight.
And now Haruna was dead. She hiccuped, her breath sounding harsh to her own ears. Haruna was dead. Haruna, who hadn't even wanted to be there—Hana was sure of that. She'd died, probably protecting her, and they'd never even gotten to be friends. No-one had welcomed her. She'd only been there because she had to be, because of orders, and then she'd died.
Hana trembled, her hands clenching on her bed-sheets.
She'd died, and then she'd left her all alone. Everyone she knew would die. Cocona, too…
Her mind shied away from the thought, that Cocona wouldn't—Cocona couldn't play with her the way she had, a year ago. Over three years now—
It was very much a relief when she got pulled out of it by a chime from the doorbell. Hana turned and looked at the door through her bleary eyes for several seconds, slowly pulling herself back into reality.
'Why is he back now?' She wondered. It was after dark.
The thought of getting up made her tired. She felt hollow and cold inside. She didn't want to spend time with someone who didn't really like her, and the one person who should have been around, even when nobody wanted her, was dead.
The bell rang again.
Well, if he was so worried, she wasn't going to leave him wondering.
"Coming," she announced, putting the portrait away and walking over to the door. With a tired sigh, Hana pushed the button to open it.
"I told you I'm fine," she muttered to the bottom half of Shu-Qi. "Really. You don't... have to… worry…"
Hana's assurances tapered off and died, leaving her staring blankly with her mouth hanging open as she processed what it was she'd encountered when opening the door. Slowly but surely it dawned on her that she wasn't seeing the dull greenish tint of Shu-Qi's coat of feathers nor the simple tunic and satchel-laden slacks he normally wore. Instead she was greeted with a brilliant crimson, shimmering brightly with a smooth sheen, nary a split-end or mussy feather out of place.
The face she found upon turning her eyes up, passing over a necklace of gold—no, a ring of golden feathers—was centered around a sharp black beak, straight and strongly curved at the tip. Two big black eyes looked back at her.
This wasn't Shu-Qi.
"Well, hello there." The new Chozo laughed, or so it sounded to Hana, but then quickly calmed. She crouched, meeting Hana's suspicious eyes. "And I certainly should have liked not to worry, but… that's not the case, is it? I heard what happened from Shu-Qi, and simply had to check on you."
"Ah…"
"I won't ask if you're okay. No-one would be, after that."
"I'm…" No. She wasn't okay, of course she wasn't. She'd thought she'd been abandoned here, or something horrible had happened, or both, and now she didn't even know what it was she was feeling.
"Do you want to talk about her?"
Hana grit her teeth in a tearful grimace and slammed her hand on the door button. The Chozo lady jerked back in surprise as the portal whooshed shut in her face.
"Go away," Hana choked out.
"... Alright. I'm not here to force you," she heard from the other side. Hana hung her head, letting her tears run downwards. "I'll still be here tomorrow. My name is Enza, by the way. I hope you have a good night, Hana."
It took a minute, then she heard Enza walking away. She stood there vibrating for as long as it took until she was sure the Chozo was really gone. Then she threw herself on her bed.
Hana cried herself to sleep that night.
Next morning, she slipped out of her room looking like the walking dead. Standing there with her hair an even bigger mess than normal and her eyes making their best attempt at looking like caves, she glanced both ways, straining to hear if anyone was nearby. She had half expected Enza to ambush her when she walked out. Thankfully no such surprise was in store, only the relative silence of the air moving through the halls and the quiet burbling of water from the garden atrium some distance away.
She made her way there, moving on autopilot. Like she usually did in the mornings before she went to to her lessons, she sat down in the grass and stared at the fish in the small pond. There were many different kinds of different colors and shapes, all of them different from ones she had seen in ponds or lakes back home. There was this long, thin one that looked like a big flat noodle, which she found really funny to watch with the way it undulated its whole body.
Normally, this would be a fun thing for her. Today…
Hana kicked a pebble off the edge of the pond into the water, scaring all the fish away. She stared into the now-empty patch of water, nothing but her own miserable reflection there to greet her.
Why did this hurt so much? She'd tried to be friends with Haruna for two years without the battleship giving anything in return but her constant, unrelenting protection. It wasn't out of her own charity, either. She did it because Durian told her to. She wasn't her friend. She wasn't. Haruna had insisted on that.
"My duty comes before fraternization. I must protect you. Nothing else matters. So please, do not become attached to me."
So there. She had to let go like she was told, because, because Haruna wouldn't want— and Cocona wouldn't— no.
Hana choked back the sob and got up to leave. She didn't want to see the pond anymore. That little waterfall reminded her too much of home.
"Hana?"
She stopped, feeling that now-familiar tightness at the sound of Enza's voice. She looked up to the floor above, and saw her distinct, bright plumage leaning over the stone railing. Their eyes met.
She looked away, slumping back down to her seat, but footsteps told her she wasn't getting off so easily this time. Eventually they stopped, and she heard Enza sit down not too far away.
Nothing much happened for the next couple of minutes. Eventually she couldn't take it anymore, and peeked up at Enza. The Chozo was slowly and deliberately sipping some kind of drink.
Hana said, "I don't want to talk to you."
Enza didn't respond. She peeked back up at her again. Enza was still drinking.
"I said—" She bristled, and got halfway to her feet, pointing a finger. "I don't want to talk!"
She dropped back down, grumbling to herself, and looked away.
"Then don't," Enza said. "I won't force you. You don't have to say anything."
"W-well… Well, good!" She sniffed. Who cared what someone like Enza thought anyway? This was weird. Weird and annoying. There was a cold, fuzzy-bristly, painful feeling in her stomach, and she wished Enza would just go away.
Their detente lasted all of a couple of minutes. Enza kept up her drinking, occasionally humming a few bars of some melody that nagged at Hana's subconscious, and Hana kept staring at nothing at all. She stamped her foot out of frustration. What were these feelings, and why wouldn't they stop?
If Enza wouldn't go away on her own—
Hana stood up, took a pose, and pointed at her.
"Y-you! You big, stupid… busybody! What do you want?"
Enza closed her eyes, took another long sip, and calmly put her cup down before answering, "Right now, or in general?"
"I…"
"In general? I like learning. I want to find something no-one else knows, and then teach everyone about it. I want to make friends, I want to stop the Poison, and I want to make my family proud. Right now?" She hummed thoughtfully. "If I say 'I want you to be happy…' would you believe that? At the very least, I can't look at someone who's so obviously hurting and not want to help."
She looked sadly at Hana, or at least Hana thought that was what that expression meant.
"But I'm fine! I don't need your help!"
She didn't like this. She hated this, it was so… everything. Did that make sense? She didn't know what else she could describe it as but everything she didn't like to feel, and also other things that she didn't get. She wanted to run away, to cry, to scream, and there was that cold, fuzzy thing going on inside of her that threw her off. This was dumb. Enza was dumb and stupid and needed to leave her alone!
"I don't need your help! I don't even know you! Y-you think you can just show up and make me happy? I didn't ask you!"
Enza just sat there, waiting. Still sitting there, doing nothing. Just watching her.
"I don't want you to tell me how to feel! She's dead, I get it, and she left me all alone here for years and I just wanna go home! Cocona might be, too… They could all be..."
She didn't want to talk about this. She didn't want to think about this. She… Mom had to be fine, right? Mom had to be fine. She had to be. But there was a yawning pit inside her, just because she didn't remember. She didn't know how she'd gotten here. She just remembered Mom screaming at somebody, telling them to get away from her, and then, and then...
"I wanna go home now. Mom, please…"
And then the dumb tears were back again, her voice choked up and unreliable. She hugged her knees, crying silently and trying to pretend she wasn't. Cocona wouldn't cry.
She sat there for she didn't know how long.
Then she felt a soft sensation around her shoulders. Startled, she stumbled halfway to her feet and watched with wide, frightened eyes as Enza pulled back from her half-baked attempt at, at embracing her. With her wings.
Hana stared at Enza's concerned face, backing away as she clutched her arms where the feathers had touched her.
"I… I have to go." Yes, she did. She had to go. "I-it's time for… for lessons,"
That would put an end to it, right? For now? What about later? What about the next day? How long was Enza going to be here torturing her? Enza opened her beak to say something, but Hana turned and bolted, lifting off the ground and flying down the nearest hallway.
She'd lied. She didn't care. She didn't want to see him either. They just wanted to make her feel worse. They were all just evil bastards that, that probably had brains made of smelly rotting Nyo guts and… and… something about worms. Because birds.
"What the hell was that?"
Enza remained unperturbed in the face of Shu-Qi's intense displeasure, not that he was terribly intimidating as a small AR overlay in her visual space. She was far more concerned with her view of the security system that showed Hana using her spatial barrier to reach through a wall and trigger a hidden door switch. It was the very same that Shu-Qi had originally used to enter the living area of the temple. She couldn't help but smile at the girl's resourcefulness.
"Progress."
"You sent her wailing into the forest like a slashed lorka!"
"Progress is often painful."
"If there was any hope of her willingly giving us any useful information—"
"What she said was very much useful, I assure you."
"Are you going to explain precisely how?"
"Just trust me."
He gave her a level look, to which Enza responded with a noncommittal shrug.
"It'll be in my weekly report, once this is over and done with, but the scenario is going precisely the way I wanted. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to make sure I'm still there for when she gets back."
Enza cut off the call and found herself a seat before she went back to remotely operating her ongoing projects. Really, Shu-Qi was surprisingly easy to convince. She could trust him to act like Hana's emotions were real, but not to draw the right conclusions from that. She couldn't trust him to believe it. He was unfailingly dedicated to his ethics, however.
Perhaps he trusted her more than she'd thought?
Water. Lots and lots of water. Yep, it sure was a whole bunch of water.
The sun hovered high in the midday sky, a constant sea breeze blowing across the white, sandy beach. The waves lapped against the shore, carrying thousands and thousands of empty shells, making the sand nearest the water a crusted mass. Something rotten was on the wind, but that, too, was part of the charm of the beach.
That was how a human might describe it; it wasn't how a Chozo would.
No matter how far removed from their evolutionary origins, Kohinoor still maintained the ancient Chozo fear of wet feathers—they weren't descended from any breed of waterfowl, and had no reason to enjoy the stench. He didn't give it much thought, save to stay away from the water, but he'd never go here for fun. Enza would have called him foolish for retaining that fear, but such things were what made him Chozo. To defeat the water he simply needed a suit, remaining himself.
He wasn't here to go for a swim, regardless. Stepping off the exit ramp of his transport, he leisurely but purposefully marched into the sand and went straight for the target of his visit here.
The Subject, "Hana," had come from somewhere. There had been an autonomous Phazon construct on this planet since the initial crash, right under their beaks, with no one the wiser. He was decidedly, if quietly, furious about this. It had had substantial time to operate without being observed, an extreme security threat that demanded a response. So far this place was their only lead after the crash site. Just…
He scratched his head, looking at the evidence that now lay before him after his short walk.
A crude wagon made up the centerpiece. Surrounding it were an equally crude set of tools—a rusted, hammered-into-shape iron spade, a similarly rusty, manual drill, and some less badly-off wooden implements. The tools were mostly strapped to the outside of the wagon. The inside made even less sense. It was loaded with ceramic jars, scans revealing them filled with all manner of rocks, crushed plants, powders, nails, screws, nuts and bolts, natural adhesives, solvents, handmade cloth, and so on.
Surrounding all that—
The fort was an excellent example of pre-industrial engineering, if built to a scale several hundred times smaller than what one would expect. It could also be called artistically pleasing, though the shimmering discolorations were more likely a consequence of the raw material used than anything deliberate. It was also made of glass, and buried to its battlements in the sand that was the source of that glass.
Given all of that put together, it made more sense as a child's plaything than the effort of a rogue artificial intelligence. Granting, of course, that the child could sculpt molten glass like taffy. That possibility mattered little, however. The Subject's use was for what she represented, not what she was.
Kohinoor surveyed the excavation efforts, a half-dozen drones controlled by two of his subordinates. It wasn't truly stuck to anything, and was likely far more sturdy than the material suggested, but they were taking no chances here.
"Steady on. Make sure not to unbalance it."
He received a curt nod in return.
A wider-ranging effort had spotted nothing else within hundreds of kilometers. Considering their map of the planet, he'd noted that directly inland there was nothing but desert across the entire area searched so far, and anything there would have stood out like a lantern in a darkened room. Beyond that, many kilometers of open grassland, and then the densest jungle on the planet, which was also where the crash site was.
Eliminating the most likely place first would simplify things in the long run.
He would get to the bottom of this soon enough.
In the dead of night, in a forest droning with nocturnal insects filled by the howls of night hunters, sat Hana on a branch. There was no moon out that night, leaving the lonesome little girl sitting in near total darkness, the many thousands of stars above barely providing any visibility to normal eyes. Hana lay slumped against the trunk of the tree, looking at nothing in particular, her eyes half-lidded and tired. She barely acknowledged the fuzzy caterpillar that decided to crawl across her leg, and it moved on without bother.
She had been sitting on the branch for a long time, but not quite as long as she had been miserably wandering through the jungle, just trying to go anywhere. It didn't matter where, as long as it wasn't back to the temple. She'd had fitful thoughts of going to her treehouse and never coming back to the Chozo, but that only made her hurt more when that lead directly into thoughts about never leaving the treehouse and staying there her whole life. Then she'd forced herself to stop thinking.
Her head marginally lifted up when she heard the call of a large feline predator somewhere far away. After a moment, Hana frowned.
She really missed Melon, but he'd probably moved on by now. It was such a silly little kiddy thought she'd had, believing she could just go pick him up to take home. Assuming she ever did get home.
Home…
'If I don't go back, I'll never see my family again.'
A moment later she was curled up in a ball. She wasn't very good at not thinking anymore, not when she'd been so torn up inside, not when everything felt like a ragged wound. And it was a really obvious thought, because it was one she'd had repeatedly. It had been the reason she'd set out on this journey months ago.
And here she was, hiding from the only people who could help her, because they were trying to help her.
She felt her body flushing with a small flare of anger, tiny and pitiful compared to her earlier outbursts.
No, she didn't want their help that way. She didn't want them to make her feel better, didn't want to talk to them about her problems, didn't want them to try replacing her family. She just wanted to go home, to hug her sisters and read books with Mom and have Dad tell her everything would be all right. She didn't want… didn't want some stupid bird to hug her, especially one with wings who couldn't do it properly. Stupid strangers. She didn't want hugs. They weren't her family.
She grumbled, pouted and kicked the branch she was sitting on, but the cold fuzzy feeling wouldn't go away no matter how angry she got. And her anger didn't change the facts. She knew she had to go back, no matter how upset it made her.
There wasn't any other way.
… Why did it have to be like this?
With lethargic and reluctant slowness, Hana turned herself to the side and prepared to hop off the branch. Then, she paused, her brow scrunching up in thought. She had taken the briefest moment to recall her bearings so she could go back, but her mind had quickly wandered to the conversation with Enza.
"Wait… what's the Poison?"
Enza sat in front of the temple, eyes closed and feathers relaxed. She'd been sitting there quite a while, and she'd be staying there for quite some time further.
