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Lucio has become quite good at projecting the outward appearance of devotion. Lucio knows, has it beaten into him, over and over, that loyalty and unfaltering precision will make him the perfect Textbook for Yoshihide, but feels a pit form in him whenever that epithet is thrown around. So flippantly, as if he’s not his own person anymore. Maybe he isn’t. He doesn’t know whenever he stares at the once tear-stained hands of his. Instead, he plots and listens. He hears drunken anguish, of rejection, of the metallic clangs of the Relic in her eye when she claws at it and curses it for her woes, her desperate attempts to blame anything other than herself for her faults. She swears at Yoshihide, her long-lost ticket out of hell, the string tied around her thumb that won’t stop yanking at her even though she hasn’t served her purpose and likely never will.
Rarely does she show emotion other than anger and vitriol, but Lucio hears a choked-out pitiful sob once, sealed away grief bubbling over as she screams about her Family, the ones who once praised her endlessly for her mastery of the sword, of her accomplishments in the Smoke War, deigning to give her the title of Sottocapo… Then not three days later, she’s cast out, like an unwanted tool who’s served its purpose. There is a whisper in his head, so faint it’s hard to grasp, that if she truly thought that way, why would she also treat everyone else who comes into her purview like this? What selfish act of hypocrisy allows her to think that she could simply discard her Ticket and Textbook the moment she claws her way back into the Thumb’s good graces, if such a thing is possible?
He pushes the thought away and continues patching up the burn marks.
Sora is so, achingly aware of her role in the Index. She feels so lonely, sometimes, that she even dares to listen to one of Master Rien’s Prescripts. She presses her ear against the door and hears the soft mourning of a child she never knew he had, one lost to the waves of time as the Prescript had stated. Of small, precious moments with his previous daughter, Yoshihide, and her childish whims turning into bitter, congealed resentment, how the sizzling sounds of the burns under the mask erupt whenever he recalls her getting colder and further away. Smoke seeps under the door and she almost jumps away. But she approaches again, ignoring the grit that makes her want to cough and hack out her lungs. Her curiosity consumes her, compels her to keep listening.
Sora has never seen nor heard Rien cry. She has always held him to the idea of a cog in the grand machine of the City, someone to idolize in terms of sheer, undying loyalty to the Prescript and their God that blesses them with their letter, their unfaltering command of what is right and what is wrong. She never would have imagined hearing the faintest tear from her master, but she does, over lost conversations on a beach, to playful banter about a spork, to quiet acceptance of an adopted child. She feels so, wrong, so selfish, but she wishes he thought of her in the same light, instead of just a tool to create his finale of a painting, but even then, she knows she’ll sacrifice herself to help, even the tiniest bit. She’ll gladly accept any sort of fate the Prescript and Rien weave for her, the final scapegoat of his magnificent plan to bring home Nihility, marked by the thread strangling his index finger.
Sora is nothing if not devoted, after all, so she steels herself and claws through everything else in her way.
Kira will adopt every single part of herself out, if she has to. She must, in order to be even spared a glance. Every time Papa leaves, she digs deeper into the franchises he once loved, finds new ones to be obsessed over, to rant and rave about to him, so that he’ll finally, for once, look at her like a father should look at his daughter. With nothing but pride and admiration. Maybe that faint detachedness of his gives way to her doubts, like when he complains to her about his biggest trauma (not being able to get the best limited edition model) and she excitedly agrees, knowing that she’s being treated as nothing more than a wall to rant at. But she does it too, so that has to make it fair, right? It must, because otherwise, she has to face the fact that there is nothing to him but selfish hedonism, and she could never bring herself to view her beloved papa like that.
There is a cartoonish comedy to the way he breaks down, the one time she has ever seen him show a sliver of remorse for what he’s done. He stares at the burning hot metal, blinding and incandescent with fury at him all of the time, as if it knows the horrible sins he’s committed that he won’t tell Kira. Maybe he is sad, or angry, Kira can’t tell. She can never tell. Everything feels so shallow, faker than the glaringly obvious plot twists in kids’ cartoons, and it bites at her. Is she not good enough of a daughter to be privy to this, will she ever meet the standards of Yoshihide, can she ever be treated as more than a vent through which he exhales? In comparison to the string that winds around his middle finger, she is nothing, and deep in the recesses of her mind, she knows that.
She doesn’t think she will ever be free of the tug on her own middle finger, but she drowns all of her doubts out with her favorite episode once more.
Albina is cold, detached, maybe too careless sometimes. She doesn’t feel a single dent or scratch on the metal that comprises her outer shell, but perhaps Fascia does, and that’s why she’s so squirmy. Once she listens closer to the gallery, however, she knows the true reason why Fascia is so agitated. Callisto has always been so passionate about his work, she has seen firsthand how to slice in such delicate ways that only the rending of skin and nothing else is achieved, to reach the muscle and adipose fat that truly start to form the corpus. The woes of her Master seem to be indeed something greater than simple rendering, and instead of the message he wishes to convey, the lone starving artist who struggles to even make a populated art exhibition. For someone befitting of a Maestro, his woes bring to mind pitiful students struggling to find proper inspiration, the classic artblock that every artist must suffer through.
Maybe she feels sympathy or some kind of emotion, or maybe Fascia does, but Albina wants to wince at seeing the Maestro seethe and rage at his once lovely artworks, reducing them to nothing but sad husks of the art they once could have been, mangled beyond the point of exhibition. Maybe he wants to cry, but these prosthetics aren’t made for that. Emotion must take a backseat in their form of art, to take a detached delight in the cries of their art but remain as objective as possible, and in this sense, Albina thinks that feeding bits of her brain to Fascia have numbed her into a more rational state than the Maestro. It’s a silly thought to entertain, but maybe she could surpass him and bring corporism back into the mainstream. Or the one tied to his ring finger will arrive for her homecoming and make the grandest art exhibition of them all.
She goes back to cleaning Fascia for her spectacle of a debut.
Ren must be obedient, for she is the one that graciously teaches him all that she knows, in order to become a Star that wanders alongside the ranks of the Pinky. He hears of her woes, behind tightly sealed doors, of a wish to be with her mother, the sorrowful mourning of a life she always sees and never truly has. Her misery at being chained to a place her mother should have freed her from, her gilded cage to sit in and to teach, never to enjoy dragon-beard candy nor play her guitar any longer, as if the faint memories of a childhood she can only see through the warping of time have only soured her further.
She still cries over Ryoshu, of course. Sometimes it’s eerily calm, as she quietly curses her for abandoning her, for leaving her to the confines of a gilded carriage where she can only futilely grasp at the threads of someone who once made a pinky promise to her. There is fear trailing through her voice, tangible and visceral, of entrapment and isolation, locked away for her own physical safety but feeling the tug at her brain that this is a torture for not being a good enough daughter. Sometimes it’s loud, as she regresses into childish anger, fuming and leaving ruffled mats in her rage, a sword carving through endless walls and corridors, bending space and time to vent her anger at a mother who never truly loved her and soon started to view her as the shackle keeping her from the outside world, moved far out of sight. She will later greet him as normal, as if he had never been listening to the all-consuming fire that she had gone through, and instruct him how to refine his technique. He pretends not to notice the swell of thread binding down her hands, most prominent on the pinky finger that should be too small to be on a grown woman.
He does as she says, and the idea solidifies in his mind that he wants to help her.