That was to be expected. Of the father, mother, and two daughters who once lived here, there was only one person left—and she was sealed in a special room, surrounded by machines on a special bed, never to leave again.
Asuna and Yuuki stared at the house in silence, its appearance lilac in the dying light of the day. Eventually, Yuuki said, “Thank you, Asuna, for taking me all this way…”
“Want to go inside?” Asuna asked, even though she knew it wouldn’t look good to anyone on the street who might see her break in. But Yuuki sent the lens whirring left and right.
“No, this is enough. Well…let’s get going, Asuna. You’ll be late.”
“If…if you want to stay here a bit longer, I don’t mind,” Asuna said automatically, then turned to look behind her. There was the park, bordered by narrow streets, with hedges set in stone beds running around it.
Asuna crossed the street and sat on one of the stone retaining walls at knee height. She turned so the probe could look right across the street at the hibernating little house. Yuuki could see the entire place clearly.
But after a brief silence, her companion quietly said, “It wasn’t even for a year that I lived in this house, but…I do remember each and every day so vividly. We lived in an apartment before that, so having our own yard was just wonderful. Mama didn’t like it because she was worried about infections, but Big Sis and I would run around on the grass…We ate barbecue on that bench, built a bookcase with Papa…They were fun times…”
“That’s nice. I’ve never done anything like that.”
Asuna’s house had an enormous yard, of course. But she couldn’t ever remember playing in it with her parents or brother. She was always playing house or drawing on her own. So she felt a longing for the family memories that Yuuki described.
“We should have a barbecue party at your cabin on the twenty-second floor then, Asuna.”
“Yeah! It’s a promise. We’ll get my friends, and Siune and the others…”
“Oh boy, you’d better have plenty of meat ready, then. Jun and Talken will eat you out of house and home.”
“Really? They don’t seem the type to me.”
The girls laughed, but then returned to gazing at the home.
“Actually…this house is causing a big rift among my extended family right now,” Yuuki admitted with a tinge of sadness.
“A big rift…?”
“Everyone has their own ideas about what to do with it: tear it down and build a convenience store, sell the empty lot, or rent it out. In fact, Papa’s older sister actually came and full-dived to talk with me about it. Which is funny, because they all avoided me in real life when they found out about my illness. She wanted me…to write a will…”
“…”
Asuna stopped breathing.
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to complain.”
“N…no. Go ahead. You go and get it all off your chest, if you want.” She barely managed to squeak it out, but Yuuki nonetheless made the lens nod on her shoulder.
“Okay. So…I told her, I can’t hold a pen or press a seal in real life, so how am I supposed to write a will? She had no idea what to say to that.” Yuuki giggled. Asuna cracked a brave grin.
“Instead, I told her that I wanted the house to stay as it is now. Papa’s trust has enough money to pay upkeep for about ten years. But…I don’t think it’ll work. I think they’re going to tear it down. That’s why I wanted to see it, one last time…”
Asuna could hear the fine servos buzzing as Yuuki zoomed in and out on various features of the home. It seemed to her that it was the sound of Yuuki’s memories being relived, and she felt her heart swelling to bursting, so she decided to just say what was on her mind.
“Okay…this is what we should do.”
“Huh…?”
“You’re fifteen, right? When you’re sixteen, you’re legally allowed to get married. Then you could have that person take care of the house for you…”
As soon as she said it, she saw the flaw. If Yuuki were in love with anyone, it would be one of the boys in the Sleeping Knights, but they were all dealing with fatal conditions of their own. Some of them had been given their final warning. So getting married wouldn’t change things for the better; if anything, it would just get more complicated. Not to mention that getting married required two people to be on the same page…
But after a brief silence, Yuuki burst into wild laughter.
“Aha-ha-ha-ha! Asuna, you come up with some crazy ideas! I see; I never considered that one. Hmm, maybe that’s not so bad. I bet I could try my hardest to fill out a marriage form! But sadly, I don’t think I have anyone to marry,” she said, still chuckling.
Asuna grimaced and said, “R-really…? You seemed to be awfully friendly with Jun.”
“Oh, no way, not a little kid like him! Let’s see…maybe…” She paused. Her voice grew mischievous. “Hey, Asuna…would you marry me?”
“Uh…”
“Oh, but you’ll have to be the bride and take my name. Otherwise I’d be Yuuki Yuuki!” she said, giggling, but Asuna panicked. It was true that Japan had followed America’s lead in engaging the same-sex-marriage debate—the topic arose in the media a few times a year—but no serious political proposals had emerged yet, as far as she knew.
Yuuki gleefully said, “Sorry, I’m just kidding. You already have a sweetheart of your own. It was him, right…? The one fiddling with the camera…”
“Er…uh…yes, that’s right…”
“You oughta be careful.”
“Oh…?”
“I have a feeling that he lives somewhere apart from reality, just not in the same way I do.”
“…”
Asuna tried to consider what Yuuki was saying, but her head was spinning too fast to make sense of it. She rubbed her heated cheeks and glanced over at the lens. Yuuki said kindly, “Thank you, Asuna. Really. I’m so happy to have seen my old house again. Even if the house disappears, the memories will be here. The happy memories of Mama, Papa, and Big Sis will always be here…”
Asuna understood that when she said “here”—it was referring not to the place where the house was but inside of Yuuki’s heart. She nodded firmly, sending the message that the gentle, peaceful air of the house was already imprinted upon herself, too.
Her companion continued. “When Big Sis and I complained and cried that it was too hard to take our medicine, Mama would always tell us about Jesus. She said that Jesus would never put us through pain that was so hard that we couldn’t bear it. Then Big Sis would pray with Mama, but I would still be a bit upset. I always wanted Mama to talk to us in her own words, not the Bible’s…”
There was a brief pause. One big red star was blinking in the navy blue sky.
“But looking at the house again, I understand now. Mama was always talking to me as herself. It just wasn’t in words…She was enveloping me in her feelings. She was praying for me so that I would keep walking forward, straight forward, without losing my way…I finally understand that now.”
Asuna could imagine a mother and her two daughters kneeling at the window of the white house, praying to the starry sky. Guided by Yuuki’s quiet voice, she felt herself putting feelings that had been lodged deep inside of her heart for years and years into words.
“You know…I, too…haven’t heard my mother’s voice in years. We sit and talk face-to-face, but I don’t hear her heart. My words don’t reach her, either. Remember what you said earlier, Yuuki? There are some things you can’t get across without confronting them. How can I do it the way you do, Yuuki? How can I be as strong as you…?”
Perhaps they were cruel questions to ask of a girl who had lost her parents. Normally, Asuna would have simply been agreeable and not gone to the effort. But now, with Yuuki’s strength and gentleness coming through the probe on her shoulder, Asuna felt the wall around her heart melting away.
Yuuki paused, answering her question haltingly. “I…I’m not strong…at all.”
“Hmm…Actually, years ago, when I still lived in the outside world, I think I was always playing someone else. I could tell that Papa and Mama were secretly sorry that they had brought us into this world…So for their sake, I always had to be bright and energetic, to show them the sickness wasn’t getting me down. Maybe that’s why I can still only act that way in the Medicuboid. Maybe the real me would hate and blame everything, and spend all day crying about life.”
“…Yuuki…”
“But you know what I think? I don’t care if it’s an act…Even if I’m only pretending to be strong, I don’t mind at all, as long as it means more time that I’m smiling. You know I don’t have much time left…I can’t help but feel that whenever I interact with someone else, I’m wasting my time by holding back and trying to ascertain indirectly how they feel. It would be better to just throw myself directly at them. And if they decide they don’t like me, that’s fine. It won’t change the fact that I was able to get very close to their heart.”
“…You’re right…It’s because of that idea that we were able to grow so close in just a few days, Yuuki…”
“No, that wasn’t me. It was because you kept chasing, even when I ran away. When I saw and heard you in the monitoring room yesterday, I understood exactly how you felt about me. I knew that even after you learned about my sickness, you would want to see me again. I was…I was so happy, I could have cried.”
Her voice hitched for a second, and there was a pause before she proceeded again. “So…maybe you should try talking to your mother the way you did back then. I think that if you really try to make your feelings heard, you’ll get them across. You’ll do fine; you’re much stronger than I am. You are. If you don’t confront her, you won’t get your feelings across…And it was because you confronted me with your feelings that I felt safe in letting you know everything about me.”
“…Thanks. Thank you, Yuuki,” Asuna said, and tilted her head upward so the tears couldn’t pool up and drip down her cheeks. The night sky, which never got truly black in the city, was full of stars that twinkled bravely through mankind’s light.
Back at the train station, the battery alarm on the probe beeped. Asuna made a promise to Yuuki to take her to class again tomorrow, and then disconnected her phone.
By the time she had finished riding all the necessary trains back and was walking up to her home in Setagaya, it was after nine o’clock. The sound of the door unlocking echoed especially loudly in the chilly entryway.
Asuna took a deep breath. She could still feel the weight of Yuuki sitting on her right shoulder; she brushed it with her left hand to hold in the warmth, then took off her shoes and quickly headed for her bedroom.
As soon as she had changed out of her uniform, she exited into the hallway and walked to her brother Kouichirou’s room. Like her father, Kouichirou was almost never home, but despite this assumption, she knocked anyway. There was no response. Just as she had done on the day that SAO launched, she opened the door without permission.
In the center of the fairly empty bedroom was a large business desk. She found what she was looking for on the left side: the AmuSphere Kouichirou used for attending VR meetings.
Asuna grabbed the headgear, which was quite a bit newer than hers, and took it back to her room. She inserted a memory card with the ALO client installed on it into a slot on the side of the unit. Once the headgear was adjusted to fit her head, she put on Kouichirou’s AmuSphere and lay down on the bed.
After flipping on the power, the connection sequence booted up and took her to the login space for ALO. But Asuna chose to dive into ALfheim Online not with her usual account but a subaccount that she reserved for when she wanted to be somebody else.
She emerged in the living room of her forest cabin on the twenty-second floor. But this time she was not the familiar undine Asuna, but a sylph named Erika. She checked over her outfit, removing the double daggers she kept on her waist and stashing them in a storage chest. With that complete, she opened the menu and hit the temporary log-out button.
Just seconds after starting her dive, Asuna was back in her bedroom in the real world. She took off the AmuSphere, but the blue connection light was still blinking. This indicated that the connection to the VR world was in a suspended state, and if she hit the power switch with it on her head, she could return to the game without needing to log in again.
Asuna stood up with her brother’s AmuSphere in hand. Thanks to their high-powered home Wi-Fi router, she could keep a solid connection from one end of the house to the other. She opened the door and went back into the hallway, descending the stairs with a heavier heart this time.
She peered into the living room and dining room, but the table was perfectly clean already, and her mother was nowhere to be seen. Farther down, around a turn in the hallway, light was peeking through the crack of the door at the end of the hall: her mother’s study.
She stopped in front of the door and raised her hand, ready to knock, but hesitated multiple times before she could go through with it. Since when had it been so difficult for her to visit her mother’s room? The truth was, it probably had as much to do with Asuna as it did with her mother. Her feelings weren’t getting across because she wasn’t trying to relate them. Yuuki had helped her realize that.
She thought she felt a small hand push her on the right shoulder, along with a voice.
It’s all right, Asuna. I know you can do it…
Asuna nodded in agreement, sucked in a deep breath, and rapped on the door. She heard a faint voice beckon her in. She turned the knob, pushed her way through the doorway, and closed the door behind her.
Kyouko was sitting at her heavy teak desk, typing on the keyboard of a desktop PC. She continued tapping away for a time, then crisply smacked the return key and leaned back in her chair at last. When she pushed up her glasses and looked at Asuna, there was irritation there to a degree Asuna had never seen.
“…You came home late,” she said simply. Asuna lowered her head.
“I’m sorry.”
“I already cleaned up dinner. If you want to eat, you’ll need to get something out of the refrigerator. And the deadline for that transfer school I told you about is tomorrow. Fill out that form by the morning.”
She returned to the keyboard, signaling that the conversation was over, but Asuna had her statement ready.
“Actually, about that…I have something to say, Mother.”
“Say it, then.”
“It’s hard to explain here.”
“Then where can you explain it?”
Asuna walked up next to Kyouko rather than answering right away and handed her what she was carrying behind her back: the suspended AmuSphere.
“It’s a VR world…I just want you to come with me somewhere.”
Kyouko’s brow furrowed with disgust the instant she caught sight of the silver headgear. She waved her hand to say that there was no room for discussion. “Absolutely not. I have no interest in hearing you say something that you cannot do me the respect of saying to my face.”
“Please, Mother. I have to show you something. It will only take five minutes…”
Normally this was the point where Asuna would apologize and leave the scene, but this time she took a step forward, looking into Kyouko’s eyes up close and repeating, “I’m asking you. I can’t explain to you what I’m feeling and what I’m thinking while we’re here. Please, just this once…I want you to see my world.”
“…”
Kyouko glared at Asuna even harder, her lips tightly pursed. A few seconds later, she let out a long, deep breath.
“No more than five minutes. And no matter what you’re going to tell me, I will not have you attending that school another year. When we’re done, you will fill out that form.”
“
…Yes, Mother.” Asuna obeyed, and held out the AmuSphere. Kyouko grimaced as she touched it and awkwardly placed it on her head.
“What do I do with this, now?”
Asuna quickly readjusted the fit for her and said, “When I turn it on, it will automatically connect you. Once you’re inside, just wait until I show up.”
Kyouko nodded her understanding and leaned back in the desk chair, and Asuna hit the power switch on the right side of the AmuSphere. The net connection light turned on, and the brain connection light began to blink irregularly. All of the tension went out of Kyouko’s body.
Asuna rushed out of the study and ran up the hallway and the stairs back to her room. She plopped onto the bed and put on her own AmuSphere. When she touched the power switch, an array of light appeared before her eyes, ripping her mind from the physical world.
When she materialized in the wood-themed living room as her usual Asuna the undine, she looked around for Erika. Very quickly, she spotted the sylph girl with the short greenish hair standing next to the tableware cabinet, looking over her own appearance.
As Asuna approached, Erika/Kyouko glanced over her shoulder, glaring in the exact same way that she did in real life.
“It’s all rather strange, that this unfamiliar face moves exactly the way I want it to. Plus…” She bounced up and down on her toes. “My body feels too light.”
“Of course it does. That avatar’s body weight is less than ninety pounds. It should feel different,” Asuna said with a grin. Kyouko glared unhappily again.
“How rude. I’m not that heavy. Speaking of which…you seem to have the same face in here.”
“Well…yes.”
“But your real face is just a bit puffier in its outline.”
“Now who’s being rude, Mother? It’s exactly the same in every way.”
Asuna wondered how long it had been since she had a meaningless chat like this with her mother. She wanted to keep going for a bit longer, but Kyouko had her arms crossed in front of her chest, and meant business.
Mother's Rosary Page 16
