(wipposting) see her spin like that

Though most wouldn't know it, Wakamiya Shinobu can still remember a time when the housekeepers didn't call her the little lady. In fact, she still remembers a time when she didn't have housekeepers at all, though the memory's faint. It was just the two of them, Shinobu and Shiho, against the world, or at least against Shiho's creditors. Much later in life, Shinobu would wonder if those were the days her mother loved her best. Surely not, as back then Shinobu was a great inconvenience that pushed Shiho into returning to the immaculately maintained family estate where she spent her girlhood, begging--Shinobu knows her mother and knows, surely, that she must have begged, even though her grandmother hates to see grovelling and demands dignity in all things--to be taken back in, despite everything, for the sake of her little girl. Shinobu imagines--in truth, this may have happened; the scene is so burnished and blurry in her mind she can't distinguish it from early childhood memory--sitting on the tatami in the reception room she would later be scolded for practicing in, listening to her mother's pleading. Grandmother, her hair still black back then, said, You want me to take her in and raise her so she can leave and then come crying back, like you? Shiho, to her credit, didn't weep; she held fast. Look at her, mother. She's a sweet girl, and she's smart. You can raise her into anything you like. Shinobu might've been smart, then, perhaps even sweet, but she surely couldn't sit still, because Grandmother's gaze flayed her coolly before she murmured, Well, you'll teach her to sit seiza in my house before you teach her anything else.

Shinobu remembers, or perhaps just imagines, that's when Shiho wept. For her own deliverance from total disgrace, but perhaps also for Shinobu. In those days all they had was each other, and, though still a burden, Shinobu hadn't yet proven herself difficult to love.