"NO!" Rika screamed her normal mature and reserved demeanor cut open like flesh by a shard of glass. All around her was darkness, emptiness, hollow, empty, "This isn't me! My name is Rika Sasaki! My best friends are Chiharu and Naoko! I cook better than anyone else in my class! Dear Yoshiyuki is the greatest, er, um, I mean Mr. Terada is a teacher of mine I look up to and admire!"
In spite of everything, Rika somehow still managed to blush. Her affection for her teacher managing for a few moments to trip up her melodrama and she began again.
"I am not a thing... I am not an automaton... I am alive! A person!"
"I've never seen you copy anyone you replaced before so flawlessly Mirror." It was Sword, it's voice a distant echoing but still audible.
Rika shivered within her mindscape as memories unbeckoned came forth. And she remembered.
'Find a human life,' Rika remembered, 'Find a human life that is happy but not significant, someone with a life that is full and joyous but most people wouldn't think twice about. Make my aura as identical to hers as possible. Bury my own memories as deep as possible, never be found, and escape having to be returned to the existence without existence.'
"A somewhat imaginative plan. I'm surprised, imagination was never a gift of yours Mirror, you could copy things."
"Stop it!" Rika snapped as the disembodied voice of her fellow Clow Card. She remembered more as she vainly struggled NOT to remember. Her creation. Impersonating person after person. Her beloved master's death. Her sealing... Rika stomped viciously on the memories rather than let full details come to the surface. She focused on other memories: the day she first met Mr. Terada, that accident at the bakery last year where she had to help her family make her own birthday cake as a result. That time she dressed up in that cupid costume when she was seven before finding out it was a boy's role.
"You really think you can just keep pretending you're human?"
"I am human!"
"Clinging to such fiction is absurd even for you Mirror."
"My name is Rika!"
"Pst. Believe what you want to believe. I only repaired your memories because we were family. Nothing more."
"You don't act like any family I'd accept!"
"Family is never chosen. We can talk in a minute after I have one of the girls as my puppet."
'No!' Rika snapped back into the real world in her living room. She looked around frantically and saw Sword still in the guise of a broach had fallen off her school uniform and was now on the rug. Barely a few seconds had past since she had put on the broach.
Sakura was looking at Rika with a slight level of confusion. Now that Rika was aware of what she herself was, Sakura felt a strange sense of wrongness about her. Sadly this was covering up Sword's presence. Tomoyo knelt down and reached for the sword pendant. "Oh Rika sorry. Let me get it for you."
Rika moved like a cobra, "No!" She quickly snatched up the disguised weapon before Tomoyo could touch it. Tomoyo and Sakura looked at her weird.
"That is, I mean, there's no need to do that."
Sakura asked, "Rika are you feeling okay?"
Rika shivered under Sakura's gaze, 'What is this... feeling?' Rika felt a heavy weight in the pit of her stomach as her friend's eyes were on her, a base feeling, like animal instinct telling her to run far away. "I, I'm fine Sakura. Thanks for asking. You know what? This broach looks so good, I think I've got to save it for a special location, be right back!"
'LET ME GO!' She heard sword snarl in her mind.
'No way!' Rika thought as she ran to her room, opened desk drawer, dropped in sword, then slammed the drawer shut and locked it.
'YOU CAN'T KEEP ME IN HERE FOREVER!'
'Just watch me!'
'You really think you can just keep pretending to be the human you killed now that you remember the truth? Sooner or later the Cardcaptor will find you. And you'll be sealed back into the nothing. Help me sister, and we can always be free.'
Rika didn't even reply as she walked out of her room closing the door behind her and returned to her two friends. Rika pasted on a smile, and asked, "So, how do the cookies taste?"
Read the comments on this episode
See other episodes by Alex Warlorn
(Posted Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:44)
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