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“My life is yours to command, Oblivionis. For eternity.”
Doloris kneels before Oblivionis, taking her hand in her own. The briefest of touches, a flash of everything that Doloris has ever needed to become whole again. The knight of sorrow and the single savior that could grant her the chance to rewrite her sins into salvation.
The lace gloves that Oblivionis dons are a veil to her warmth, she knows, as she feels the fabric shift under her touch. The barrier between a girl and her veneer, a costume donned by a human who became more. More, always more, eternally more sacrosanct and immutable. Each time Doloris forgets herself, she returns in search of the light that could chase away the ghosts that haunt her memories, and the one who raised her from the grave.
She leans in, placing a kiss on the back of Oblivionis’s hand. An offering to the granter of forgetfulness, who once and forevermore gave her absolution from her sorrows. Who, each time they fall apart and crash together like celestial bodies bound for one another, gives her a clarity of mind to understand the world and her very being.
She remembers Oblivionis, and she forgets herself.
It shouldn’t surprise Hatsune, the effortless way she’s found of donning her stage outfit and crowning herself with a mask. Doloris’s performances are scripted for an audience, but in the backstage area of the concert hall, Hatsune’s lines are not yet written. As the guests wait for Ave Mujica’s first song, chanting their names loud enough to resound through the concrete walls, so too does Hatsune wait for Sakiko’s cue to take their places on stage.
Hatsune looks in the mirror in her dressing room, into the empty reflective glass. It’s a trick of the light, a black hole where there should be a heart, an empty page ready to be rewritten. In truth, what stares back is a monster, an empty doll, a shell of a human. An injury, an ache that festered into hurt.
A thing. A ruined, broken thing before Sakiko at once remade and renewed her, her goddess that she twisted into a devil, fraught with her own desires. A disgusting creature who felt the flames crawl up the stake she was born on and yet desperately sought out warmth. With a shift of syllables, a slip between the empty staves and stanzas of what she once was, Uika becomes Doloris.
And Hatsune—
(Hatsune should never have existed in the first place.)
How many times has she returned to her?
Doloris doesn’t know. Time is an abstract concept, something invented by humans that faced their own mortality and pretended they could instill the moments in-between birth and rebirth with meaning.
There is no purpose to her life before she meets Oblivionis. Perhaps that is why she finds her every time, magnetized, a sinner seeking her only saint. The gates of Heaven are waiting for her, up above and tantalizingly close, but her scarred hands cannot touch pearl without fear of burning.
Oblivionis baptizes her in light. She showers her in the blood of the redeemer, her words spilling of holy water to cleanse her being. It is in Oblivionis’s name that she claims her place in Heaven. A world above her, awaiting the only one who could provide the absolution she needs to be whole, to take a hollowed doll and impart upon it a soul.
The clock marches forward each time they meet, and the needles always point toward Oblivionis.
“You performed well for our debut, Uika. The audience was enraptured.”
From the dressing room’s mirrors, Hatsune watches as Sakiko approaches, the Oblivionis persona halfway removed: her hands bare, her mask dangling between her fingers. The reflection makes Hatsune think, for a brief moment, that she’d swapped Oblivionis’s mask for Doloris’s, the asymmetrical curve twisting under her touch.
“Even I was caught up in your performance. You were…” Sakiko looks down to the mask in her hands. Her thumb runs along the ridges of it, the gladiolus flowers sinking under her touch. “You played the Knight of Sorrow beautifully. I could not have imagined a better actress for the part.” Sakiko’s voice is quiet, but Hatsune cannot fathom from whom she needs to hide her confession before it spills.
Hatsune wrests her gaze away from the mirror to face Sakiko; her own eyes are half-obscured behind woven lace. “You wrote the lines, Saki-chan,” she says, feeling the hint of a smile blooming on her face. “I couldn’t become who I am without you.”
Oblivionis’s mask crumples in Sakiko’s hands. She plays at the threads, pulling the lace taut and loose and back again. “Does it truly suit you?” she asks. She isn’t looking at Hatsune, but at the mirror past her, at the afterimages of a phantom presence. “Do you truly feel comfortable acting out the part of a sorrowful knight on stage? Was it a role that I forced upon you?”
“The Knight of Sorrow doesn’t fear sorrow, right?” Hatsune stands up, her back to the mirror. “She’s given the chance to forget her past and start again. To become something she chooses with Oblivionis. Isn’t there beauty in that?”
Sakiko looks away from her. Whatever she sees there, in the mirror behind Hatsune, has siphoned the air from every living creature in the room. “I suppose there is,” Sakiko says, her breath stolen.
“I’ll play any part you ask me to, Saki-chan,” Hatsune says. Her chest rises and falls in even, steady beats. “Anything you want.”
How many times has she returned to her?
Doloris doesn’t know. Her existence is frozen until she prostrates herself before her goddess. Timoris, Amoris, and Mortis tell her time and time again that Oblivionis’s castle is long abandoned, but each time, she finds her way back like the ouroboros strangling her neck.
Doloris plays the part that she knows best: a snake in Oblivionis’s Garden of Eden, an unwelcome guest in paradise until her memories are sliced by the steel of Oblivionis's sword. It comes naturally to her, that kind of duplicity and grotesque cruelty. But as Oblivionis grants her freedom from her past, destroys her monstrous self and turns her into a blank slate, she knows that she will find her way here again, an ever-stalwart knight that she needs to be.
She forgets herself, but she knows that her place is at Oblivionis’s side.
They walk back together on the silent streets after the first performance of Ave Mujica’s revival, hand-in-hand. The road home from the theater is not a long one, and yet it feels like an eternity with Sakiko at her side, as if Sakiko could quiet the ticking of the clock to keep Hatsune hers in perpetuity. Their fingers brush together, Sakiko’s filling in the empty spaces between hers. Each time she holds Sakiko’s hand, she feels reborn anew, as if Sakiko’s touch alone could set her ablaze and raise her from the ashes.
Perhaps it was never the stars she was searching for; perhaps it was the light of a new constellation, to take what was never meant for her and give it a name. Perhaps it was someone that could shine down on her amidst the darkness.
She flicks on the lights to her apartment when they make it home, stepping out of her shoes as the darkness drips away from her vision. “I’ll make us some coffee,” Hatsune says, letting Sakiko’s hand go and feeling the chill return. “It’s too early to sleep yet, right?”
Behind her, Sakiko pauses. “Ui—Hatsune,” she says, and Hatsune isn’t sure if her heart leaps into her throat or sinks into her stomach. “Two sugars, please. To remove the bitterness.”
Her voice from Sakiko’s lips feels so much like a dream that Hatsune feels as though she has to burn her skin raw to know that it’s real. “Of course, Saki-chan,” she replies, scooping coffee grounds into the filter and tapping the power button. The coffee maker thrums to life, and its harsh aroma fills the air.
By the time that Hatsune pours their two cups of coffee, Sakiko has made her way to their shared couch, pulling a pillow to her chest. Ave Mujica performances are intense, and for Sakiko the exhaustion seeps into her slowly, like the sugar dissolving into her coffee: a burst of heat that melts bit-by-bit and transforms everything around her.
Hatsune puts their coffee mugs on the table in front of them and picks up her own to nurse. Sakiko won’t pick up her mug for precisely five minutes and twelve seconds, Hatsune knows, until it’s her preferred temperature, a mild aroma that won’t steal her attention to reality.
They don’t say much after they return from each performance, merely existing in the spaces between, a world from Sakiko’s own pen. But in the silence, Hatsune can let her throat mend itself with the taste of coffee at her lips. She sits next to Sakiko and pretends to deserve her, pretends that Sakiko’s touch wouldn’t ignite her very being.
Hatsune sips at her coffee too quickly, a parched girl in the desert finally finding her oasis. It scalds her throat, the way she wants it to, to remind her that this dream-world is a liminal space between fantasies. That Sakiko is here with her, sitting in her apartment, resting on her couch and clutching her pillow. That Sakiko is sharing her very existence with Hatsune, every breath of air she takes, every single thing that passes through her a war they wage together. On stage, Sakiko composes dirges to bring about the end of the world, but in their quiet apartment, her hymns bring Hatsune salvation.
To have Sakiko with her in sickness and in health, to fall asleep next to her and wake up at her side, to have her thoughts consumed by her—Hatsune would offer herself to oblivion if it meant the world would stay in stasis.
And so, as if she could forget herself, as if these moments of totality are something that she could call her own and not a life she stole, Hatsune lets herself be taken in by Sakiko. She watches as Sakiko picks up the cup of coffee like clockwork, watches as she brings it to her lips, watches as she sips the tiniest amount and puts it back on the table before her body forces her to breathe in. Watches, always, a devoted follower of everything Sakiko is.
Sakiko shifts on the couch unconsciously, and in turn, Hatsune moves toward her. Sakiko has always had the pull of gravity under her thumb, and Hatsune has always been captivated by her, ever since the stars hung above them so many years ago.
Hatsune’s hand finds Sakiko’s cheek. She feels her fingers burning like she’s bathed herself in holy water, and by instinct she holds Sakiko tighter, past the aching and shuddering and searing heat.
“Hatsune,” Sakiko says, half-mumbled beneath Hatsune’s touch, and Hatsune feels her mind slipping away from her.
How many times had Sakiko held Hatsune’s true name on the tip of her tongue, ignorant and somehow all-knowing of the mask she wore behind the curtain? How many times had she realized that Doloris was but another name in Hatsune’s repertoire of discarded identities, a life given to a girl whose heart never beat? How many times had she sought devotion and found only desperation?
Hatsune pulls forward, lets herself be taken in by Sakiko’s gravity—
And Sakiko closes the distance and kisses her, and Hatsune feels the flames of Hell at her feet and Heaven in her eyes, and her very being, her very soul is under the thrall of the goddess of oblivion and renewal.
Hatsune’s cup is empty, but she doesn’t wake up.
It could never be a dream, not after everything. She stepped into the shoes of another, a name and role that was never hers, and Sakiko is the only person—the only thing—that she could claim as her own. The compass directs her north each time they meet, and the needle always points toward her Polaris.
(As a beast always finds its beauty, as a monster always meets its hunter, so too would Hatsune always find Sakiko.)
She can’t breathe. She doesn’t want to breathe, as if it would force the clock to move again. But Sakiko pulls back, eyes half-lidded and exhausted, and Hatsune feels disgusted with herself for enjoying it. For a sinner to look in the eyes of her saint—she feels abhorrent, abnormal, absolved of everything she was and ever could be.
She needs—she needs—
She needs to offer herself in thanks for her blessing, for the divine girl who once and forevermore found meaning in her broken pieces. Who, each time they fall apart and crash together like celestial bodies bound for one another, collides with her and creates something anew.
Hatsune knows that she needs.
“Doloris said this to Oblivionis,” she whispers, “but the lines you wrote—I want to say them to you, Saki-chan.”
She thinks of Sakiko, and she forgets herself.
“I love you, Saki-chan. My life is yours. For eternity.”