Work Text:
Truly, you can never go home. The building remains. The people are the same. However, when you leave and when you come back, you have changed. Thus, the home you are searching for is gone forever because the you that left is not the you that returns.
I left because I had to leave, like my mother before me and like my daughter after me will one day do. We leave come into ourselves and then, like salmon towards the stream, we return to the location, but it is not the same. The familiar rooms and the paintings and the books and the belongings, but they are timeless, the people are changed and the way you see all these things is different. You will never look upon the images of your childhood the same way you did before you experienced life on your own.
My mother lay on the floor, broken and pitiful. Not the statuesque beauty that I knew she once was, but defeated. Time carries us all along and transforms us. I was stronger than her now, no longer the demure doll she dressed and sang to in the cradle, now I was the one with the power and the control. Her time was over and now it was my time. I approached her with care, looking at her withered face, her hair framing it.
"May your child show you the mercy you show me," she spat and I smiled at her, cupping her head with one hand and her shoulder with the other.
"I won't be as foolish as to hesitate like you, Mother Four," I purred and she glared at me as I lunged for her throat.
"Damn you, Five," she gurgled as my teeth plunged through her flesh. I pulled her power into my small body, bringing what was her into me. Her body writhed in the kimono I would soon burn, I would have hundreds of kimonos much finer than that. The restaurant would thrive and grow under me. I would rule and when Six finally was born of my flesh I would see to it she never came home.