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There was a photograph Rio liked to look at growing up, taken out and examined and re-examined so many times that she had every detail memorized, though the two people it showed were nearly strangers to her.
It was a picture of her parents on their wedding day, and there was a joy and hope in that photo that Rio found utterly alien. Her mother had the fragile beauty that tended to run in the Hikari line, and she must have already been feeling the effects of her illness, but it hadn't yet wasted her away into the woman Rio knew from her own shadowy memories. A cascade of pale curls, like Rio's own, flowed down her shoulders, and there was a smile on her face which had something defiant in its joy: as though she knew the world might rip such happiness away from her at any moment, and she was daring it to try. It was not the smile of a woman who was naive to suffering, but it was still almost shocking in how young and innocent it was. She had been only eighteen when they were married, after all, only nineteen when Rio was born, only twenty-one when…
Rio's father was beside her, broad and strong and handsome, and his smile was wide and confident. Thinking of a happy future which never came, perhaps.
In the years since that day, no curse had touched him, no magic had come to drain away his life. He was not a Hikari by blood, after all: their family's tainted legacy didn't flow through his veins. But he was no longer the same man in the photograph, all the same. It was as though the illness which had taken his wife had claimed him too, withered away that strength and confidence until there was only a husk of the man he had once been.
When Rio looked at the photo, she thought that both of the people it showed might as well have been dead.
The father she knew was a haunted and broken man, forever shattered by the loss of his wife. He never talked about those last days, about watching her mother fade and crumble into nothingness, but Rio knew that the memories were horrible. Sometimes she felt a guilt that she wasn't similarly affected by the loss: she had been too young when her mother died, and the memories were too distant for her to even say she truly missed the woman. It worried her sometimes - it must be heartless not to care about her mother's death, not to feel the pain that her father did. Did it mean she was incapable of love?
But when she was honest with herself, she knew that what she truly mourned was the world glimpsed in that photograph, the two vibrant and happy parents she had never known. She mourned the world where such a life would have been possible for a Hikari.
Her own life was a lonely one, and more often than not boring as well. Her father insisted that she go to school, telling her that it was healthy to meet people her age and that she should make friends, but Rio felt cold and isolated from everyone around her. Her classmates had no way of understanding the twisted legacy she had grown up with, or the yawning emptiness inside her, and she had no interest in the juvenile books and movies and schoolyard gossip they chattered about. Even commiserating over tests or homework was out of the question, since she found all of her schoolwork laughably easy.
She was also educated in the Hikari traditions, as her mother had made clear was her desire before she died. Sometimes her father helped her, poring over old manuscripts and supervising as Rio perfected new techniques, but she could tell that it was all strange and unfamiliar to him. He was doing his best to honor his late wife's wishes, but Rio suspected that if it was up to him, he would have done away with the whole thing entirely.
More knowledgeable than her father was the family caretaker, the strange being known as Elm Root, or Hiwatari-san, as he told Rio to call him, who visited sometimes to watch her progress and share what he knew. He had wanted Rio's education to be turned over to him entirely, but her father had refused.
Those arguments must have continued through the years, into Rio's childhood, because she could remember some of them with a clarity that her memories of the days after her mother's death lacked.
"The problem is that you think your daughter belongs to you," she remembered Hiwatari saying once, with a supercilious curl to his lips. "She doesn't: she belongs to something far greater. Something you can never understand."
Then all she could remember was the flash of her father's fist, the crack of glasses breaking and the glimpse of a body curled on the floor, and after that it had been a long time before Hiwatari-san was allowed in their house again.
Most often she ended up studying alone, curled up in dark corners with the yellowing pages that held the secrets of her family's lore, and then practicing on her own, learning to shape that magic into works of art. And she created: painting after painting, statue after statue. Her father told her they were beautiful, though there was a resigned sadness in his eyes when he looked at them, and even Hiwatari seemed pleased by her achievements on his occasional visits.
But Rio felt nothing for any of her creations. She knew it was what she was supposed to be doing, knew it on some deep and fundamental level, but it just felt like an endless stream of meaningless objects that she had absolutely no connection to. Every day she woke, and she studied, and she painted, and none of it felt like accomplishing anything at all.
Everything she made would no doubt be someday stolen away by Dark, anyway, or destroyed by Krad when he made his unwelcome return. So what was the point in getting attached? Why let herself care for something that would only be stolen from her?
Perhaps it would feel worth it if she could create a true masterpiece, something so spectacular that she wouldn't care if it was only temporary. A work of art like Kokuyoku: surely achieving that level of unprecedented creation would make her feel something.
It was that thought which led her to turn her attention to Kokuyoku itself: if she couldn't feel satisfied with her own creations, maybe she could find a way to restore her long-dead ancestor's masterpiece to its former glory.
The first time she came home, weak-headed from pain and with blood dripping down her arms, her father screamed in horror.
"Promise me you won't go near that thing again, Rio," he said. His voice shaking nearly as badly as his hands were, as he struggled to wrap a bandage around her arm.
Rio just shook her head. She already knew that she couldn't make such a promise, because it would have been one she could never keep.
Her work on Kokuyoku was the first thing to make her feel a sense of purpose, to give her any sort of satisfaction. She was unable to fully restore the work - she doubted that was even possible, without the return of Dark and Krad - but she felt as though she were close to a breakthrough. In the meantime, she found the pursuit fascinating. And perhaps someday, when Dark had been captured, the work she was doing now would allow Kokuyoku to be truly revived, and the curse ended once and for all.
She couldn't possibly give up now.
And so she returned, again and again, consumed with focus on her new goal.
Hours spent, lost in the haze of magic and obsession. More blood. More bandages on her arms.
"Please, Rio-chan. You're hurting yourself. You need to stop."
"Rio, you're scaring me. This isn't healthy."
"Rio. I'm your father, and I'm telling you to stop this."
She ignored all the warnings, brushed them off like a buzzing insect from her shoulders.
"I have to do this," she told him.
"No," he said, desperate, hollow. "No, you don't."
Hiwatari, on the other hand, was fascinated by the work she was doing, when he next came to visit. There was no word of reprimand, no caution about the danger or the risk to herself. Instead, he listened intently as she explained her theories to him, eyes lighting up in sudden understanding when she hit upon a crucial point. He contributed his own ideas in return, building off of hers with his greater store of knowledge, and it felt like a breath of fresh air to talk with someone who not only didn't judge, but who shared her newfound zeal. It felt as though at last, there was someone on her side.
Hiwatari's visits became more frequent, and her father's pleas grew more frantic.
Finally: "Rio, you're killing yourself."
She just shrugged. "I'm dying anyway."
It was probably months later when her father sat her down, but it felt as though it might have been years, or only a few weeks. Time seemed to have become fluid in the face of her new preoccupation.
She gazed at her father, wondering when the last time she had bothered to really look at him was. The deterioration she had always seen in him seemed to have accelerated, leaving him prematurely aged. There were mauve bruises under his eyes, and his haggard face was deeply lined and creased with sorrow. He was still years away from his fortieth birthday, but with a shock, she realized that he looked old. A sad, broken old man.
"I can't do this," he said softly.
Rio just stared, uncomprehending, waiting for him to continue.
"I watched your mother die," he went on, and there was a tremor in his voice. "It was like… like watching her decay, right in front of my eyes. She was skeletal by the end, she could barely talk. And I knew- I knew I would have to watch the same thing happen to you someday..."
He choked on a sob, tears rolling down his face, and Rio watched with an uncomfortable sense of detachment. She knew the sight ought to inspire some sort of feeling in her, sympathy or tenderness, but it was as though she had forgotten what such emotions felt like. All she could feel was a strange distance from the whole thing, as though she was watching a scene play out on a stage.
She wished the conversation would end already, so that she could get back to work.
"I was prepared for that," her father said. "I was prepared... to watch you die. To stay with you till the end, no matter how much it hurt. But I won't…"
He paused, gulping for a deep, shaky breath of air. His hands curled at his sides, trembling.
"I won't stay and watch you kill yourself," he said.
"That's not what I'm doing."
"Isn’t it?"
"No," Rio snapped, frustrated. She wanted to explain, wanted to tell him that her work on Kokuyoku was the first thing to make her feel truly alive, and that meant more to her than how many years she had left. She had always known she would die young, anyway: just as her mother had, just as every member of the Hikari line did. Wasn’t that all the more reason to make the most of what time she did have?
It was the unending stretch of meaningless, emotionless, empty days that had once been her existence that really felt like death to her. The thought of dying having never felt anything else was more terrifying to her than the inevitability of death itself.
She wanted to explain these things, but talking about her feelings had never come easily, and now the words seemed to fill her mouth and choke her, unspoken.
"I just want to do something that feels like it matters," was all she managed.
"Is this really the only thing that matters?"
Rio hung her head, a sudden ache filling her chest. "It's the only one I've ever known," she whispered.
Her father was quiet at that, and Rio kept her head bowed, gazing at her own hands as she twisted them in her lap. It was only when the silence finally became unbearable that she raised her eyes to meet his.
There was regret written on his face as he watched her, and sadness, but there was also something resigned. And Rio would later wonder if that was what made her heart give a sudden lurch of foreboding.
"I've been looking into some apartments in Yoyogi," her father said.
Rio blinked, taken off guard by the sudden turn in conversation. "We're moving?"
The pain in his eyes was still there, but he looked at her steadily, unflinching. "Would you come with me?"
The answer was already in her mind, in her heart, before she even needed to think for it. Her place was here, among the ruins of her family's creations, absorbed in the work that was the first and only thing to bring meaning to her life. Leaving was unthinkable.
Mutely, she shook her head.
Her father showed no surprise at the answer, but something in his face seemed to crumble.
"I'm leaving," he said. "With or without you."
The words were quiet and heavy, and utterly devastating in their simplicity.
Rio pressed her lips together against the sudden pain.
"Why?"
"Because if I stay and watch you destroy yourself, I think it might just kill me, too."
That was it, then. He would leave her to protect himself. She tried to imagine what it would mean. A life with no father. No mother. No family, no friends. Perhaps not a single person who cared for her existence. She had thought she was used to loneliness, but the idea sent a jolt of pure terror through her.
Why care for something that will only be stolen, Rio had wondered once. Her mother had been stolen. Her family's artwork had been stolen. Her chance at a normal life had been stolen.
But this was a thousand times worse, because her father was not being stolen from her. He was choosing to walk away.
"You’re a coward," she spat, with all the hurt and fear and anger of it, and her father flinched as though she had slapped him.
"Yes," he said, barely a whisper. "I am."
He reached out a quivering hand and ran it through her curls, and Rio felt as though she would break into smithereens at the touch.
"I'm sorry," he said, as though that meant anything, as though it would ever be enough. "I love you so much, Rio-chan, but …"
If you loved me, you would never do this, she wanted to scream. If you loved me, you wouldn't leave!
But she kept those words inside. If he wanted to leave her, she wouldn't lower herself to begging him to stay.
Instead she knocked his hand away and pulled herself to her feet, and looked down at her father with the air of a queen pronouncing a death sentence on one of her subjects.
"If you're going to leave, I see no point in prolonging things," she said coolly. "You may as well start packing now."
After her father left, Rio stopped going to school.
She had only ever gone at his insistence, and now that he was gone, there was no point in continuing the charade. Her teachers called desperately at first, since she hadn't bothered to officially drop out or give any sort of notification, but she ignored the calls, letting the phone ring over and over in the background until she could almost tune it out. Eventually they stopped.
She was free now to devote herself to the only work that really interested her, but she found it extremely sporadic going, to her surprise. Sometimes she worked for days on end, so consumed by her mission that she forgot to eat or sleep. Other times she would lie in her bed for long stretches, simply staring at the ceiling, unable to muster the energy for anything else. The world seemed to fade to nothingness around her, as though she were surrounded by a dense fog with only short bursts of light to penetrate it.
It was about two weeks into this that Hiwatari appeared at her door.
"I heard your father left," he said immediately, not bothering with any sort of greeting or pleasantries. Rio was glad for that, in a way. She didn't think she would have been up to dealing with anything resembling small talk.
She simply nodded in response.
"He was a fool," Hiwatari said. There was no particular venom in the words, nor was there sympathy for her. He just said it flatly, as though stating a fact. "A weak, pathetic imbecile."
It was so exactly what Rio had been thinking that she turned to look up at him in shock, but his face was similarly expressionless.
"Yes," she said simply. "He was."
"But I suppose love makes fools out of all of us," she added musingly. "When you love someone, you give them the power to destroy you."
She couldn't understand why that shattered his blank stoicism, brown eyes flying wide behind his glasses. It made him look almost human, for the first time.
"Exactly," he whispered.
For a moment they simply watched each other, considering. Then Hiwatari held out his hand.
"Shall we get to work?"
And Rio took it.