Adah’s mother leaned back into her chair as a clarity washed over her eyes. She seemed to realize, all at once, how loud her voice had gotten and how intense her expression had turned. After looking around the tavern’s dining room, she pushed her chair out from the table and stood up.
“Excuse me,” she said in her usual firm tone, and left in the direction of the restroom.
Adah pushed her own chair out to follow after her mother, but stopped when her father held up his hand and shook his hand. He had a serious look on his face, as well, though his was absent of the stress found in her mother’s.
“I think your mother would have liked to express herself to you in a different manner,” he said, “but I believe she got her meaning across. She doesn’t want an apology from you, Adah. She wants you to think about what she’s said. That’s why you should stay here—and think.”
“I wasn’t trying to worry you,” Adah said, unable to look her father in the eyes while she spoke. “It’s not like I’m trying to keep you out of my life, either.”
“We know that,” he replied. “That’s why there’s nothing to apologize for. Or, if that had been the case, I suppose it may have been us who owed you an apology. That said, your mother has told you how she feels. What we’d like to talk about is how you feel.”
Although Adah didn’t want to cut all ties with her parents, she had been trying to keep some distance from them. That wasn’t because she hated them or some irreconcilable difference existed between her and them. It all came down to what she’d been trying to do today: to stand firm as Twilight Heartbreak even in the face of the two people who knew her best as someone else.
Though, perhaps it wasn’t Heartbreak she wanted to be—at least, not the magical girl who acted all haughty on television or told her fans to take a knee around her. She still wanted to be Adah around her parents, but an Adah they were unfamiliar with. She knew that the spark in her personality that had allowed her to take that leap into Heartbreak’s character didn’t shine as brightly around her parents. She became more reserved, more risk-adverse around them. That had always been the case.
Any distance she kept from them was a means to feel more free from those restraints. Adah had an easier time feeling independent when she pretended her parents didn’t exist.
Putting her feelings into such words made her stomach go queasy. What kind of independence was that?
“I feel like I’m clinging onto a bad habit from when I was a kid,” Adah said after explaining those thoughts to her father. “It sounds so stupid when I say it out loud.”
The desserts they had ordered arrived while Adah had been thinking. Her father chipped away at his cheesecake while she explained herself, while her mother’s matching dessert waited untouched on her plate. Now that she’d spilled a bit of her heart to her father, Adah also claimed a bite of the berry tart Rika had ordered. The fruit topping was more sour than she expected.
“No well articulated feeling is ever stupid,” her father said. “If you can explain it, you can choose how you react to it. It’s the ones you can’t put into words that you need to be careful of. If you think that feeling doesn’t represent what you actually want, what about it is missing the mark?”
Adah bit the inside of her lip, but relaxed her jaw as soon as she realized what she was doing. This, too, was an old habit she’d picked up back when she lived at home. As she tried to clear her head and think about what her father was really asking her, she suddenly became more conscious of the girl sitting to her side.
Adah looked to Rika and said, “I’m sorry, this whole thing must be super awkward for you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Rika said, shaking her head. “Pretend I’m not here. Or, if there’s something I can do…”
“I imagine this wasn’t what you expected when we invited you to lunch,” her father said, also turning his gaze on Rika. “However, I think it’s good that you’re here. Assuming you two are serious about each other, you must have reached some understanding about the risks you both take. And about your priorities as you try to become the people you’d like to be. That may be helpful to think about before your mother returns.”
"With Rika, it’s different,” Adah said. “We’re in this together. Everything I do as a magical girl involves her in some way.”
“So you never disagree?” her father asked. “There’s never been a time when what one of you wants conflicts with what the other wants? Or when one of you has acted in a way the other would have rather you didn’t? I have a hard time believing you two have lived together this long without ever having to reconcile what you want with the reality of another person.”
Of course that wasn’t true. If the preferred tactic of Adah’s mother was to unleash her wishes as commands and statements of fact, then her father’s was to tie you up in a tangle of rhetorical questions that you’d have to seriously think your way out of. Adah wasn’t sure which of her parents was more difficult to deal with.
“I think what makes Adah easy to get along with is that she tries to find the overlaps,” Rika spoke up while Adah ruminated. “I mean, we don’t end up in a lot of ‘this or that’ situations as a team. If somebody feels that they need to do things a certain way for their own sake, Adah’s good about trying to find a way to fit what they want into what the team as a whole is trying to do. The Twilight tyrant thing is just for show—you’re always looking for how to build something bigger out of what we each want individually.”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Perhaps realizing she’d said more just now than Adah had throughout most of this conversation, Rika looked down at her plate and added, “At least, that’s what it seems like to me.”
Under the table, Adah pressed the side of her shoe against Rika’s—half for her partner’s sake and half for her own. Maybe her father was onto something; having Rika here did make this conversation easier on Adah.
What’s more, Rika had raised an interesting point. For as long as she’d been a magical girl, Adah had viewed her life at the agency as completely different from her life back home. The Adah before she moved out and the Adah afterward were two different people in her mind, but why did she need to think of herself that way? Her teammates were like another family to her, on both a practical and emotional level. They all lived together, after all.
If Adah had been trying to use her time at the agency to stand on her own two feet, to make her own decisions and distinguish herself based on those decisions, it would all be pointless if she couldn’t live that way beyond the walls of the agency office. To answer her father’s question: that was what she really wanted.
“I can’t slow down or stop what I’m doing,” Adah said. “I’ve figured out how I want to live my life and what kind of magical girl I want to be, but it’s not something I’m doing just for myself. That battle against the hydra and what I’m doing with the Department of Magic now are both part of a larger goal. However dangerous what I’m doing may seem from the outside, I promise you things would get much worse if I didn’t do this.”
Adah’s father finished the last bite of his cheesecake and smiled.
“You don’t need to convince your mother or me of the value of what you’re doing,” he said. “Perhaps there was a stretch of time during which we worried, but it’s clear now that you’re working hard every day and learning from that work.”
Of course, there would have been no point to this conversation if her parents had thought she was wasting her time being a magical girl. The three of them needed some baseline of mutual understanding if they wanted to get along.
As Adah thought more about how to put her feelings into words, her mother returned to the table and took her seat. She grinned and thanked Adah’s father for not stealing any extra bites of her dessert, then turned to Adah with a more serious expression.
“I’m sorry for putting that on you all at once,” she said. “Concerned as I may be, that was not a fair way to explain myself to you. However, those are still my feelings. I won’t apologize for them, only the way they came out of me.”
At first, Adah wasn’t sure why she laughed in response to her mother’s words. Then it clicked—that was such a Heartbreak manner of apologizing. Adah could almost see the horns sprouting out of her mother’s head.
“Sorry, it’s not funny,” Adah said in between a couple of chuckles that contradicted her response. “It’s just… a lot of things are starting to make more sense after today.”
Her mother furrowed her brow and shoved a huge forkful of cheesecake into her mouth, which she chewed as vigorously as she probably wanted to chew Adah out. She returns to the table after composing herself and the first thing her daughter does is laugh at her? The nerve of this kid—or something like that.
“Dad said you weren’t interested in apologies,” Adah said, “but I do need to say I’m sorry, too. I want to live in my own way, but not on my own. I think it used to be possible to separate my life as a magical girl from my life back home. Maybe I wasn’t taking my job seriously enough in the past for it to matter. I could do my own thing out here, and it wasn’t something either of us ever had to think about. I understand it’s not that way anymore. Or maybe it never was, and I just never noticed.”
Her mother set her fork down on her plate and looked at Adah with her full attention.
“With that in mind, I’m not going to apologize for what I’ve done. I’d go fight that hydra every time out of one hundred, and the same goes for how I handled everything yesterday. But I will apologize for how I went about it. When you see me on the news, I want you to know what you’re about to see because I’ve told you about it. Instead of having to worry about what’s on the screen, I want you to be proud of your daughter. I don’t think I’d ever let you talk me out of a plan I was set on doing, but I want to be able to tell you why I’m doing it. If I can’t even do that much, well, maybe it wasn’t such a good plan in the first place.”
Adah’s mother closed her eyes and nodded. That could be considered one of her old habits. There hadn’t been many times growing up when Adah had caught her parents in some hypocrisy they couldn’t defend or had convinced them they had made a mistake, but whenever she had, this had been the face her mother would make. It was a look of understanding.
“What about the plans that aren’t so serious?” her father asked. “I didn’t like learning about your concert secondhand, either. I would have liked to watch you.”
Adah shuddered at the thought of her parents seeing her perform like she had at the carnival. There were levels to the intensity of her Heartbreak persona, and that concert had pushed her to the top of them.
“Watching me sing might take some more time,” Adah said. “That’s the most dangerous one of them all.”
Her mother shrugged and said, “If we stand in the back, you’ll never notice us. We’ll just keep an eye on your social media account, I suppose. It’s not like a concert will be something you can hide.”
Though, now that she knew her parents were watching, maybe Adah would try.
“So,” her mother continued, “the agreement is that you’ll call once a week. I think that will work.”
“I don’t remember there being an agreement at all!” Adah protested.
“I’ve just told you,” her mother said. The confused look on her face had to be a joke. It had to be.
“I’ll call you when I can, and I’ll visit you when I can,” Adah said. “But that’s not what matters. Can our agreement be that when you feel like you don’t know what direction I’m headed in, you’ll tell me, and when I feel like I need more space to make my decisions, I’ll tell you?”
“No,” her mother answered immediately. “You will need to bring Rika with you, too. Here’s our first time getting to spend some proper time with her, and we’ve ruined it with this dour conversation. Your father and I will need to repair our reputation with her.”
Rika waved her hands in front of herself and said, “Not at all! I have great impressions of both of you. I mean, it’s so clear that you care about Adah. Besides that, I’ve gotten to learn a lot about her from meeting you two.”
Adah and her parents all exchanged suspicious looks with each other after that last sentence. For Adah’s part, she’d have to grill Rika on what exactly that meant later.
“That’s a deal I can get behind,” Adah’s father said.
“It will work for me, as well,” her mother agreed. “We’ll see you at the spring festival at the latest, then?”
Adah leaned back in her seat in resignation. One thing that would never change, no matter how many conversations they had, was that her parents would move at their own pace.
“Sounds like a plan,” she said.
Her mother swallowed another bite of her cheesecake, then pursed her lips.
“With that all settled,” she said, “I would like to know more about those twins you work with. They’re quite the curious pair.”