Sureiyazu

Episode 51: Wondering

"If you could have one wish granted, what would you wish for?" 

Akuma rested her elbows on the table, propping her head up with the palm of her right hand. She would wish for a lot of things, if she could. But if she only had one . . . ? 

It had been Ryou, on the other side of the dining table, who had asked the question, and Mizuki, next to him, seemed to have just as much trouble answering it. 

"Sheesh, I'm just trying to lighten the mood," Ryou laughed. "Ya know - getting to know you activities, like little kids do in school." 

"I didn't go to school," Akuma said bluntly. "Small village." 

"Me neither," Mizuki added. "Assassins' training." 

"Oh," Ryou said awkwardly. "There's a first time for everything, right?" 

"First time for you to shut up," Mizuki muttered. 

"Anyway," Akuma said before anything got worse, "if I had one wish, I think I'd wish for there to be peace between demons and humans. There." 

Ryou coughed, picked up a cup on the table and swirled the water around inside. "You wouldn't . . . I don't know, wish for them to not exist or something?" 

Akuma thought about this. "No." 

"But . . ." 

"Look, I don't know why," she said. "It'd be all off-balance if demons didn't exist. And besides, mine's more realistic." 

Ryou raised his eyebrows. "Okay, fine." 

"Mizuki?" Akuma gestured to her friend, feeling that she had sufficiently defeated Ryou for the current span of five minutes. 

"I'd wish that everyone's lives were fair," said Mizuki. "Not . . . equal, really, not the same, just fair." 

Akuma nodded. 

"And what do you think fair is?" Ryou asked. 

"For me to not have to answer an endless barrage of stupid  questions," Mizuki said. 

"Oh . . . kay. Fine," said Ryou slowly, but then interrupting himself: "Hey, Akuma, can I ask you something random?" 

"Sure," Akuma shrugged. 

"I . . . I don't know, I was just wondering . . . what's it like having a Spirit Eye?" He tried to ask casually, but made it plain that it wasn't a casual question in the process. 

Akuma sighed. "It's - awful. Because . . . I know I can see people who are gone, but they hardly ever show up. Once their spirits are in Yurei, they can move freely and navigation is all weird - nothing like here. And it's so much bigger, and only a fraction of it overlaps with Sekai. They could be somewhere that doesn't even exist in our world, so I can't see them . . . And then it's my fault, because no one else can either." 

Ryou tried several times to say something, but he couldn't seem to think of anything to say. "I . . . didn't know it was like that." 

"No one ever does," said Akuma. 

"I'm sorry," said Ryou hastily. "It's just - I could never ask Yuuto about it because he's so touchy, and I've just wondered . . ." 

"Don't apologize." Akuma shook her head. "I don't blame you for wondering." 

"I wouldn't have thought it was that bad," said Mizuki, but there was no sarcasm behind her voice like there usually was. "I didn't know." 

"Yeah, well . . ." Akuma trailed off. "It's not something that really comes up in casual conversation." And suddenly she felt her thoughts wandering away to people who she'd lost and never seen again, even through her Spirit Eye - Hikari, whose body still lay somewhere in Jufuku from that day, probably rotting away, while her soul wandered the seemingly infinite space in Yurei; and her parents, who didn't know where she was now, who had probably thought her dead but had left her everything they owned anyway, and whose dying wishes had been for her to hear a few simple sentences . . .