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Lightning has misplaced Jin.
This is one of the many frustrating things about her: she’s often unpredictable. Ditzy and distracted, flitting from one thing to the next like she’s a hummingbird, and drinking in information about the world around her with the wide-eyed innocence of a newborn fawn.
She is clever—Lightning’s Origin could be nothing else. It’s her motives that remain a mystery. Her brother leaves the apartment at daybreak, the sun climbs into the sky, and Jin doesn’t make her usual morning appearance. The bedroom, when Lightning checks, is empty. And they have no idea where she may have gone or why.
They wouldn’t care, of course, but one of the conditions of the fragile truce with the Hanoi is that—until further notice—they remain under Jin’s supervision, or at least that’s the idea. In practice, it’s Lightning who more often takes on the role of babysitter. They find Jin out on the balcony, in January, wearing only her pajamas and a robe while she clutches a mug of hot tea and snowflakes dust her hair.
“You ridiculous creature. What are you doing out here?” Another thing Lightning thinks is aggravating: the remark doesn’t cow her, doesn’t even seem to offend her. She just smiles like they wished her good morning and lifts the mug to her mouth with trembling hands, pale with cold. “You’re going to freeze. You’re not even wearing a proper coat. Are you stupid?”
“I mean, you’re not, either,” she says, which just makes Lightning scoff. They have no need of a coat and she knows this; they can wear one of SOLTech’s androids no matter how poorly it seems to fit, they can dance and play the part if it will keep them alive, but Lightning is not, and never will be, human. Unbothered, Jin continues, “I like how snow looks early in the morning. We don’t get a lot of it here, it usually just turns to sleet. It’ll all be rain and slush by this afternoon, and then it won’t be pretty anymore. So I want to enjoy it while I still have the chance. Did Niisan decide he still wanted to open today?”
“Of course he did. Your brother is stubborn as a mule. Don’t give me that look,” Lightning adds sharply when Jin tries and fails to hide a giggle in her tea. Their eyebrows knit—an expression they’re glad to be able to make now, admittedly—and she doesn’t even look bashful. “What does it matter, anyway? Rain, snow, sleet, it’s all frozen water in the end. I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t.” This look is much worse than the other one. Jin’s eyes are all warmth, despite being the same cloudy gray as the sky overhead, a mirror in which all of Lightning’s hidden thoughts and feelings are reflected. They don’t care for it, not one bit. “I just think snow is prettiest, really. Not everything is so complicated. And it’s nice, sometimes, doing simple things just because they make you happy. It’s healthy, even.”
“...You don’t make sense,” Lightning grumbles. When she tilts her head at them, like she’s doing now, it’s even harder not to see her as a delicate little bird, especially with the fluffy collar of her robe mixing in with her unbound hair. “Ridiculous girl.”
“I make sense to me,” Jin says, with a sweet smile like she’s won. Damn her. “That’s what’s most important, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.” It’s a noncommittal mutter, Lightning’s attempt to get Jin to return her attention to the cityscape. They really should know better by now.
She brushes flyaway strands of hair from her face, and asks, very simply, “Do you make sense to you?”
It’s such a Jin question, too, every part of it. The words strung together awkwardly, making it sound childish and unsophisticated, obscuring the deep meaning behind it. She’s a conundrum, Kusanagi Jin. An anomaly. Naïve, worldly, optimistic, dejected, excitable, timid. She’s too much of a contradiction in and of herself for even Lightning to figure out. In that way, she’s humankind personified.
That’s probably why they want to hate her, and why they’re so angry and annoyed that they don’t. That they can’t.
She’s patient as well, thanks to a lifetime of waiting. The sound of her sipping the last of her tea is very loud in the silence as she watches Lightning over the top of her mug, a simple ceramic piece hand-painted with flowers. Wind blows, and she shivers and wraps herself tighter in her robe; it’s more ornate than most of the clothing she owns, Lightning notices, even whiter than the snow she apparently loves so much with decorative trim at the collar and wrists that, to Lightning, seems to resemble feathers.
Maybe that’s who she is—the Swan Princess. The delicate and innocent maiden, cursed by the cunning sorcerer Rothbart, who can only be saved if someone who has never loved before swears to love her forever. Though there’s no Odile in that metaphor. And then Lightning reminds themself, firmly, that there’s no Siegfried, either. There can’t be; it wasn’t Jin at whom Lightning aimed their arrow, after all. And while they understand betrayal more intimately than they could any lover, they certainly wouldn’t die for her, or anyone, for that matter.
No, they turned their back on the other Ignis, who—in this unprecedented second life—are cordial but cold. And Lightning is fine with that. Lightning is content, and wants for nothing. And if there’s one thing they certainly don’t lack, it’s knowledge, or wisdom or whatever it is Jin’s getting at. So they scoff.
“What a ridiculous question,” they say. “Though I suppose that’s just like you. Of course I ‘make sense’ to myself. I would be lost if I didn’t; anyone would. If you don’t know yourself, what else could you possibly hope to know?”
“Well, it can be hard to know yourself,” Jin shrugs, still cradling her empty mug. “It’s such a vulnerable thing, you know?” The cold has increased the blood flow to her face, but Lightning thinks she blushes apart from that. “I didn’t feel safe enough to have some very important conversations with myself for a really long time. ...But you know the gist of all that already, you don’t want to hear all the details, I'm sure.”
Lightning, by their own admission, doesn’t understand gender. They’re as baffled as ever by humans’ insistence on placing themselves in boxes and attacking those who cross the invisible lines. They do suppose it’s brave, from that point of view, that Jin still chooses to categorize herself the way she sees fit. Lightning is a survivor; it stands to reason their Origin should have more of a backbone than meets the eye. And femininity suits her, they concede, at least in an archetypal sort of way. Ophelia, Cassandra, even Juliet, doe-eyed and sweet as she leans over the balcony and tries to separate the tangle of life and love.
Another breeze makes her shudder; her hair is damp from melted snow. Kusanagi Shoichi should be grateful Lightning is here to look after her, grudgingly or no.
“Come dry your feathers, Odette,” they tell her, and it’s her turn to balk in confusion, even as Lightning takes her by the wrist and leads her from the lake.