Chapter Text
The Little Girl sits on a platform of jade, a breath-stealing height above the top floor of the castle. The sky is dark. The cosmos, or some imagining thereof, lean into forever around her. She is small; she is fragile. This is the first (and to her knowledge) the only time she has ever done this.
She is also okay. Deemo led her up here by the hand, and though she won’t stop getting further away from him, she sees him still. He is with her on this journey upwards. He is there with his piano on the roof of the dark place that held her—just like before, just as he’s always been. Deemo looks at the Little Girl for the briefest of moments. She looks back at him, wanting to wave, but her body freezes. She isn’t afraid, however. She tries very hard not to be, watching the checkered roof, cold space holding her body. Yes, it’s cold, and if she dares move on the polished stone she could fall again. She is still not afraid. Seeing Deemo and his friendly gaze makes her feel closer to home, here in the black of the starlight. Yes, he’ll be with her, won’t he? The Little Girl wonders how he might follow her through the window, but sets the question in the back of her mind. She’ll find out. She knows it like she knows the silhouette of the friend that first caught her, like she knows the living and delicate dissonance of Deemo’s first chords. How gentle a song. How sad, too.
The piano leaps into a flowing melody and shock dawns on the Little Girl. Everything under her—it’s all crumbling. She can’t hear it, but she knows it. She sees it without seeing it. The world she played through, laughed through, cried and napped in is falling to pieces; rocks crush Deemo’s other pianos, cut through the roots of the tree. The lamps shatter and the books tear. And Mirai! Mirai is still trapped there. The Little Girl’s breathing tenses in her throat. It freezes in her neck. She never thought homecoming would be like this. She didn’t think it would be so lonely, rising on a gemstone—but she isn’t lonely, no, not when she thinks about it. Deemo is playing for her. And part of her wants now to be on the rooftop still, or in one of the rooms now buried in darkness, listening to his lullaby. It won’t happen. She knows it won’t happen. This friend of hers has been working tirelessly to bring her home. Why would he stop now? The Little Girl has the nagging thought that she couldn’t stop him even if she wanted to, because a tree only ever gets bigger. The Masked Lady never seemed to understand that. But the more the Little Girl understands, the more the feeling crescendos within her; the more the song builds. This is goodbye.
Can’t it last a little longer? The dust and the rumbling reach the roof of the castle now, reaching even Deemo himself. The Little Girl watches the shadow come off him like sparks from a campfire. Light makes warm wooden brown of his hair and curves around his nose and at once the Little Girl sees it, sees those answers, that something hiding in plain sight all along—he’s going away. He’s going away. No! No, no, this can’t be true. All the cold times and the lonely times were for this? All the forgetting—all the beautiful exploring—led to this? Pressure builds behind the Little Girl’s eyes, bursting out of her in sobs. It’s warm on her cheeks and she can’t stop. She can’t have this! She, too, is crumbling. All she knew and all she used to know is a fading lullaby on a dreamlike rooftop. Hans looks up at her, and it is an icy sting to look back. He doesn’t stop playing. The Little Girl bows her head. There was never anything that could have been done to stop him or this—not now, and not before.
And still the song grows brighter. Hans grows smaller and smaller on the rooftop as the song soars in circling warmth. The Little Girl wipes her tears from her eyes. She clings to that sound within her. It’s a bit nice to have it surround her, like a snug spacesuit. It’s what she believes Hans means when he doesn’t say anything, only weaves more notes into a last chorus. There will be life on the other side of this. Where she is going, where she has to go, there is an entire universe. Traces of it wrap around her in cold light. The Little Girl stains her sleeves in warm saltwater. She is as heavy as a dead star, and the lovely world around her starts to truly go blank, and the Masked Lady is there on the rooftop—there isn’t even any fear on that face, now. All the laboured breathing is with the Little Girl herself. Still another world beckons. Still the end of this one is a quiet chord that has already mostly faded. Once again, she could never have said no to this in the first place—and so she turns her back, unknown white flooding her eyes. When Hans is gone, she does not turn around. She could not if she tried. She is her brother’s little sister.
Raising her head again, Alice rises through the window. Light floods her vision. She builds her future on a past that will keep singing inside her. The last arches of her dream collapse, and with them go a billion possibilities of death and sleeping—as well as the Little Girl she was, unnamed and so ignorant. Her stay here was beautiful. Now, it is time for something new.