Mundanity had always been a way of life — when trouble came knocking, she'd valued greater those seemingly eventless days, the calm that might drive those hot-blooded mad with boredom. A quiet life had always been one she was content with, never feeling a need for any thrill or thirst for adventure. After all, she was an ordinary teenage girl not meant for danger.
Sure, there was a certain high of adrenaline that everyday could not offer, a distraction from wandering thoughts led through a labyrinth of memories. At one time, such resilience of the past inflicted only pain, and the ability had not itself completely divorced the anchor. But long ago had Misaki accepted it a blessing — to cherish what might erode for others over time, to be an archivist of life, able to look backward and smile fondly as much as grieve. Recall, while there were holes, what once filled them — brilliant faces, tenacious spirits, embraced hearts.
Friends who had long parted Spirale and the city before it, where they belonged and free of the trials a questionable collective pushed onto them. As much she missed them, their well-being came above all else — and she lived, even if merely existing, as monument to those times, their influence. Days became weeks and rolled into seasons, then years. Many travelled on, some returned, and she remained the same teenager regardless that passage of time.
Never quite regressing to isolation, but loneliness would inevitably wear. She'd woven still ties so not to unravel — those she treated to lunch, by whose side she lost hours reading in the depths of Xalphina, phones she contacted when one of those tests were suddenly announced. People who never let her run empty, who gave her reason to keep her head up and concentrate on the good. People whose paths would one day diverge from her own — but that was for a future time. Her memories would not be plagued by dread of that eventuality and cast dark clouds over the sunshine with which they graced her skies.
They'd never make extravagant plans — she were a simple girl and needed no such thing. When she woke up in the mornings, she'd begin with a coffee and gaze at the scenery outside the kitchen window, deliberating what to do with this sun cycle, with the tranquillity afforded — that she'd never take for granted, not with the turbulence even before any Scientist or Star. When the night came, she took comfort in the privilege of a comfortable bed, a good book and Sub-Manager's purrs like a soothing white noise.
Her dreams were a mixture of past and present, and often blurring the border. Purgatory had not become torment, even when she might drift back to a home she'd been away from for the best part of a decade, her uncle's bumbling, her friends populating the store — not limited to those who would typically be there. Golds and blues, whites and greens — joys she could only meet again here. And by her side, a scarlet warmth which took her hand and held firm.
Her heart was never complete whenever he'd be away — each time as painful and uncertain as the first. She had come to bear with the transience of his existence, taking comfort that whenever he returned, he remembered every little thing, just as she. Whatever game those overseeing the island cared to play, she'd long grown tired, and stubbornly held tighter every second they shared.
Because, like here, in this shop with all the faces she cherished, in these dreams, he belonged. Here, with them — with him — she was home.
