Written for elwing_alcyone for Yuletide 2019.
With Confidence
by EstiRose
Mayu first saw the girl in her dreams after she fell off the cliff and had to be rescued. The girl was dressed in a fancy kimono, as if she was going to a ceremony or whatever - Mayu didn’t care. Sometimes the girl stormed along like she was mad at something; sometimes she was laughing in ways that scared Mayu; sometimes she walked placidly, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. In Mayu’s dreams, this girl lived in an old village full of people who wore old-fashioned clothes. Mayu supposed that this was what she got for reading so many books set during ancient times.
“You’re like me,” the girl said often as she leaned against a wall. “You’re like me.” It didn’t matter if the girl was mad or happy; she seemed to take some sort of comfort that Mayu was there. She would stop her rampages when Mayu saw her in her dreams. She would ask thoughtful questions about Mayu and Mayu’s world as if she planned to visit it, and Mayu found herself explaining things like electricity to her. Mayu was sure that the girl was just her imagination running wild. After all, the girl visiting her world was something that would never happen.
And after a while, Mayu found comfort in the continued presence of the girl in her dreams, as if she was just there to soothe when Mayu felt lonely, when Mio wasn’t quite there like she should be. In fact, sometimes she swore the saw the girl in the real world, drifting down a street as if there was nothing else around. People had seemed to avoid her, though, as if they sensed her presence. Not Mayu; she would always be safe when the girl was around, as if the girl chased away anything that might scare her.
When she got older, Mayu realized the girl had a name: Sae. She didn’t know at first if she imagined the girl, created a name for her, or if Sae actually existed, far beyond anybody’s sight but her own. Sae was Mayu’s secret, a person she could confide in when she couldn’t confide in Mio, and she kept Sae a secret. After all, Mayu wasn’t sure Sae existed, and even if she did, she was Mayu’s and Mayu’s alone.
It was like that story that their mother had told her, about the girl who was so alone that she made her own friend from her dreams and desires because not even her foster mother would be close to her. It had ended in some kind of disaster - all the good stories did - but this time, Mayu was sure that there would be a happy ending.
At some point Mayu realized that she could see ghosts and spirits; Sae wasn’t the only one she could see, just the most persistent of the lot. She was sure it was Sae that protected her, sometimes calling her ‘little sister’. She addressed her diary entries to Sae, because maybe that way she’d create a happy ending for Sae too. The stories she’d heard said that was something that you weren’t supposed to do, but Mayu did them anyway.
And then Mayu grew up. There were just hints of Sae now, and they were more often dreams of destruction and anger rather than peace and contentment. “The time of the repentance is near,” Sae would say cryptically, and there was a dark red line around her neck that scared Mayu, as if an evil aura seeped out of it.”My sister… where has my sister gone?”
Of course Sae had a sister, just like Mayu had a sister, and Mayu felt that sometimes Mio was becoming more and more distant. It didn’t matter that Mio had promised to always be by her side; her Sae dreams told her that this could be a lie too. A lie borne out by whatever had happened to Sae, leaving her a restless spirit.
Maybe it was because she was worried that Mio would leave her alone just as Sae had been left alone. Seeing and feeling Sae’s loneliness, Mayu decided that would never happen to her. if one of them left the other, it would be Mayu, not Mio. She would not be the one left behind.
And thus it was Mayu who stepped into the woods, unafraid, barely limping as if Mio was there to support her leg. But this was not Mio; this was Sae, lending her strength. This was where she belonged, where Mio belonged. In these woods, the ones that shifted from light to dark in an instant, Mayu felt like she was coming home.
She ignored Mio’s pleas, stepped towards the gate and the girl that was crying next to it. Stepped through it, walked forward and stared at the village below as the torches flickered. The torches that illuminated buildings made of stone and roads made of dust. Mayu thought she saw four little kids - two girls, long-haired and identical; two boys, one with dark hair and one whose hair was so pale that it almost shimmered in the torchlight. And then the four were gone, lost to a memory that wasn’t her own.
Mayu had never been there, but she’d also always been there, for years and years. This was the village that Mayu had seen in her dreams, the place that Sae had grown up in, been part of and yet not part of, and died in. This was Sae’s home, the place where she waited for her sister. Her sister, Mayu dimly knew, that was sobbing on the other side of the gate.
Or was she? Mayu felt that her sister was near, and so was Sae’s. Maybe Mio had always dreamed of Sae’s sister Yae, just like Mayu had her dreams of Sae. She’d never asked, never thought that both of them could have been holding the same secret in their hearts.
Now the two of them had a destiny, shared in secret. They would do what Sae needed them to do to make everything right. Mayu would do it for Sae, for the world, for her sister. And nothing, not even Mio, would stop her.
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