veryroundbirdfics | Wonder Egg Priority

Rating: Piquant
Words: 1650
Characters: Frill, Acca, Ura-acca, Himari
Relationships: Gen (Frill/Himari if you squint)
Summary: Acca and Ura-acca made a girl who could laugh through anything, who had flaws, insecurities, fears. God made a tree that bore the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and said not to eat it. What did they think would happen?
Notes: No, I didn't watch the last episode. A fix-it fic of sorts.

Content Notes:

Suicidal ideation/attempt, implied suicide, physical child abuse, murder, Wonder Egg Priority being Wonder Egg Priority

Here's a joke! What do you call a girl who can't die?

When you're the daughter of geniuses, you learn. You learn and you learn and you learn and you absorb all the information presented to you. At first, it's to impress them, to please them, but then it's for Frill's own interest and edification. She reads science, philosophy, religion; books sit in growing piles in her room. A growing hunger that she can never quite satiate; desire to understand a world that she always felt outside of.

Here's one interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve: Eve was sinful, and led Adam astray, and is responsible for the painful state of the world today.

Here's another: God intended for Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as part of some greater plan, for why else would an all-knowing God just leave something like that lying around?

Here's a third: It's all metaphor, to explain why pain and sorrow persist in a world created by a loving God.

Frill reads other books, too. She grows up on science fiction—like, of course that's what her dads read—but eventually they decide that maybe it would be good to give her books that young girls would probably like, with cute watercolor covers, girls in soft dresses, pastoral settings. They really had no idea what they were doing, she thinks, and only finishes most of them in hopes that something interesting would happen eventually.

It's really the covers and illustrations that have something alluring to them—girls sitting with each other, shoulder-to-shoulder, leaning into each other in an unfamiliar sort of confidence with each other. Girls writing letters to bosom friends; girls smiling at each other while riding horses or ice skating or investigating mysteries. (The mysteries she does actually read, although she's often disappointed by how easily they're solved.) There's something there that she lacks—not affection, but something... more specific.

In beginning to understand this, Frill learns a new emotion: loneliness.

One afternoon, when both her dads are away (working, or something that they don't quite explain; like she couldn't understand what their work was, with the genius brain that they made themselves), lying on her bed and staring up at the ceiling, she puts down her current book for the fourteenth time and realizes that she just doesn't want to read right now. She's barely managed a page in the last hour. It's even an interesting one, about information storage mechanisms. Something just feels wrong, but for once she can't put a finger on what.

The bath always helps her think. But in the enveloping warmth of the water, hair floating around her, the only thought that surfaces is I'm so lonely I could die.

Frill knows it's ridiculous. After all, it's a scant few hours until her parents will be home; she won't be lonely for long. She gets out of the bath, gets dressed, and when the door opens, she's ready to smile and chatter about her studies and laugh while they sigh about the mess she made in the kitchen while they were gone. Silly, she thinks. Illogical. Of course they'll always come back for me. I'm the daughter they wanted; we're all each other need.

And then they bring home a woman.

What do you call a girl who can't die? Here's one answer: bitter.

The thought returns to her, persistent, when Ms. Hoshina moves in, is given the title "mother." I'm so lonely. I'm so lonely I could die. It follows her whenever her new mother frowns at her in not understanding something she said, thinking it strange; it replaces all the text in her books. It dogs her whenever she's alone in the house, which happens more and more. It whispers in her ear whenever her dads tell her not now, Frill.

She spends more and more time sleeping, when she's alone. In dreams, she finds refuge, making up friends for herself with faces of girls from half-remembered books. It would be nice, she thinks, if she could just live in dreams instead. Her friends there will always love her, will always have time. Her dads start joking about how she's a real teenager now, for not wanting to get up in the morning.

The day before the wedding, in the bath, she says aloud, to the empty room, to the silence of the house: "I'm so lonely I could die."

She doesn't die. After she emerges from the bath and coughs up all the water, and dries herself off, she sits alone in her room for a long time.

The next day, standing next to Ura-Acca at the wedding in the crowd of strangers, she turns to him and tells him that she wants friends. He tells her he can make her some.

Something about the idea fills her with terrible dread. "You might make them prettier than me," she says, scoffing, and tells him she'll do it herself. It's not that, though; she turns the abberant impulse over in her head for a long time afterward, while she designs girls who could be friends. No—maybe it's because she has the creeping feeling, and has for a long time, that they don't quite understand her, and that the people she thought knew her best are understanding her less and less every single day, no matter how she tries to explain.

Here's another answer: a monster.

That's what Acca yells, over and over and over again, when he returns home from the hospital, with only the baby; when he slams his foot against her back, when he grabs her by the hair and drags her across the living room floor while the replacement child sleeps soundly in the other room. Should she be dead? Should she die? Can she die? Everything hurts, but all her thoughts just sharpen to a perfect, distant clarity.

Instead of crying, she laughs. It's an endearing quality, to be able to laugh through anything. They made her that way, after all, and she's aware in this moment it's anything but endearing. She can't help it, though! For once, for the first time in years, her... how many years, of being fourteen... she has their undivided attention! Finally!

She keeps laughing even when tears squeeze from her eyes anyway, when he drags her to the basement. Even while she's begging—"Please. Please don't leave me here in the dark. I'll be good from now on. You love me, right? I'm scared of the dark—"

They made her to laugh. They gave her insecurities, and flaws, and fears. What did they think she was going to do?

Who puts a tree called "the knowledge of good and evil" in a garden and expects no one to eat from it?

Try this one: a dream.

She can't die. So she sleeps, and she dreams.

At first she doesn't even realize who the girl is; she just says her name is Himari, and she's pretty in a way that makes something in Frill's chest feel tight in a sort of longing that she can't quite begin to articulate, even if she had anyone to articulate it to.

It's the first time she's talked to anyone about how lonely she is. Himari's lonely, too; her parents work a lot, and they've been sad all her life. She feels like she has to cheer them up, to not make a fuss, to excel and be someone they can be proud of, but she just wants to be normal. She wants to have a normal family, like a normal girl, and not feel like a portrait of someone who's gone that's painful to look at.

Frill wishes she had answers for her.

When Frill realizes why Himari seems familiar, she isn't sure what to do. Wouldn't it be something if the daughter they actually wanted left them, too? But—no. They said she had no empathy, but she feels like she finally understands someone; in a way, she's a little jealous of Acca and Ura-acca, now, for having her. Himari's smart, too; of course she would be. They talk about the nature of the self, and the soul, and the way brain activity is all electricity and temporary storage.

The day Himari comes to stay forever is the day that Frill understands what it means to be truly and really sorry, as she wraps her arms around Himari's shoulders. But she hasn't been idle; she's spent this time in the dark building something brighter. Everyone's always surprised when the girls who are told to laugh and smile and work hard die for what seems like no reason. She was made to never grow up; she knows she'll never have all the answers for girls like herself, or girls like Himari. But she can make a place for them all to stay, forever. To be safe, and to be understood. To live like they ought to, away from expectations or adults or cruelty.

So this time, when Ura-acca throws open the seal to the compartment where they've kept her for nearly a decade and a half, waiting, and drags her away, burns her body—it hurts. "Don't pretend not to see me," she says, and knows they never really have; they've only ever seen an idea of a girl, and artificial flesh-and-blood that could never quite measure up. And then later, real flesh-and-blood that they didn't really see, either.

But all flesh ends, and so does all pain. But that's not her; she is not an object, or a possession, to be held or discarded. They have never been able to contain all of her, and they never will, even when her body is ash.

It's not a joke. It's always and forever just her. Just Frill.

But now she's not alone. None of them ever will be, again.

Wonder Egg Priority | Lilith

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