PANACEA.
That was what her words left me.
"How can my dumpling be so smart and adorable? You're healing my heart."
I didn't pull her into another embrace this time. Instead I rose from the mattress, lifted her by the armpits, and pressed my cheek against hers. I wasn't exaggerating for her benefit. The numbness that had lived in my chest for years—particular cold weight of a man who had made himself indifferent to everything—had come loose. What replaced it was warm and formless and embarrassing in the best possible way.
She believed me. She wanted my love.
That was the whole world. That was everything.
Put me down, Dad. I am a little tired.
I complied, reluctant.
There was a weary furrow between her brows, and her eyelids were losing the argument with sleep. She was more than a little tired.
I moved quickly, tucking the covers around her.
Dumpling, I murmured. Are you alright?
Sleepy. A pause, heavy with effort. When I could understand your thinking, there were so many words. So many pictures. It made me dizzy.
My fingertips brushed the top of her head.
Rest, then. Sweet dreams.
Can you pass me Meteor, Dad? I always sleep with him. He's a bear. In the corner of the bed.
I found the teddy bear with a quick glance, if one could even tell it was a teddy bear. Ragged and worn through, his curly brown fur matted with grime, the stuffing at his belly torn open in a long split. One of his button eyes was missing. The remaining one caught the little light reached the room and held it, glassy and patient.
I recognized him.
He had been the first gift I ever gave her, and maybe possibly the only one. This small bear was our connection, between a newborn who knew nothing yet and a father who had already started failing her.
Dumpling. My chest went tight. You've kept him all this time.
*
*
*
I was glad, a short while later, to hear her breathing even out into sleep.
I wouldn't let her see me cry again, and with whatever this telepathy was between us, I suspected keeping anything from her required her to actually be unconscious. I pressed my back to the wall outside her room and let my eyes burn in the dark for a moment.
The scope of what we shared was still clarifying itself to me. Thoughts, yes. But also emotions. Memory. Something bodily, too, something I was only beginning to figure out.
I had no ear for music. I had never had one. The karaoke boxes and bars of my past life had been a recurring social disaster, endured for the sake of substances rather than any actual interest. But sitting there in the quiet, half-familiar melodies of my past life, I found I could perceive them differently. Each note arrived with a colour. Not as metaphor. As fact.
Which meant Lumi was a synesthete.
I turned Meteor over in my hands.
If the telepathy runs through the body, I thought, then practice might too. If I improve, she improves. I could carry some of the work for her.
The arithmetic assembled itself without much prompting. Ten thousand hours was the figure most people cited for mastery, roughly eleven years at four deliberate hours a day. But our hours were not quite ordinary hours. There were two of us inside this strange loop, sharing what each learned. The timeline compressed accordingly.
Our wish doesn't seem as impossible as it did an hour ago, I murmured into the empty hall.
*
*
*
I returned with a sewing kit. Meteor's torn belly, missing eye, and fur that had gone stiff with years of grime needed fixing at all costs.
I had experience as a seamstress in my previous life, if nothing else. But what I did not have was an explanation for what I found when I came back.
I stopped in the doorway.
The bear on the pillow was Meteor, and was not. The grime was gone. The split belly had sealed itself into a clean zipper pouch. The missing eye had returned. His fur was full and soft-looking in a way it couldn't possibly be.
And he was glowing a faint, silver-white luminescence that had no business existing, steady as candlelight, making the dark room feel briefly sacred.
I looked at Lumi. Still asleep. Breathing soft and even.
I looked back at the bear.
I dropped the sewing kit. I picked him up with both hands and held him at arm's length.
"Hello," I said, because nothing else came to mind.
The silence that answered was not quite mocking, but it was not kind. I tried again.
"I'm not certain what you are. A wandering spirit, perhaps. Something that found its way into the fabric of an old toy and decided to stay." I adjusted my grip. "If you have any harmful intentions toward my daughter, I'd recommend setting them aside. I have very few competencies, but protecting her is becoming one of them."
No response. I exhaled and changed my approach.
"If you are something like a guardian spirit, then I have a request."
I glanced once more at Lumi. Her face in sleep was so open, so vulnerable, it was almost unbearable.
"My daughter is the kindest soul I have ever known, and I have spent most of my life not deserving to know her. She has endured things she should never have had to endure, and even now, she holds no resentment for any of it. She only holds a quiet, patient desire to be seen, to be loved by a world that gave up on her before she could understand what that meant."
I paused.
"Her voice was damaged. Her mother, her abusive mother, poured scalding water down her throat when she was very small. Her wastrel father was absent for all of it. If there is something you can offer, some grace, some healing, some gift toward the voice she deserves, then I am asking for it."
I lowered the bear slightly.
"That is my wish. That is our wish, oh wandering spirit."
I had expected nothing. I had been speaking more for myself than for any genuine audience, a kind of cordial greeting to whatever impossibility that had wandered into my lives next—first my rebirth, then the telepathy.
So when the zipper came undone on its own, I didn't drop him on first instinct.
I held the bear above my head. The zipper parted slowly, without hands, and through the small dark opening came not stuffing, not nothing, but a void, deep and speckled in the particular dark of a sky with too many stars to count.