This is an absolutely horrible idea, my rational inner voice, which honestly must have been either the best sport in the world or a masochist to have not shut down years ago, reminded me. There is no scenario where viscerally reminding yourself of all the awful things that happened to you, let alone what you did yourself, is going to help you 'let go' of anything. It only works that way in dramas and books. This will make things exponentially worse for no reason.

I didn't listen to it. Partially because I didn't want to believe it was right, since this idea felt like the last piece of flotsam left to cling to in the ocean in which my sense of self was stranded, and partially because I was already on the airship, and the only way I could abort the plan at this stage was by parachute. I hadn't even brought my scepter, since that would have added extra paperwork and costs to what had already been an excessive amount of debt to make this booking just a day in advance.

I still couldn't believe I'd done it. I hadn't even really been able to explain myself to my parents. I'd made up some ridiculous story about a friend who'd been horrifically injured that I intended to visit, but of course my mother had asked if it was someone she knew and I'd had to fabricate the details of a person (female, not from school, met at a scripting contest, got closer over the logic sea after we met) wholesale. Why couldn't I have just told her I was feeling sentimental, or that I didn't want to talk about it? Why was my first impulse always to lie in the stupidest way possible?

I stared out the window next to my seating compartment, watching the clouds pass by while trying not to dwell on how completely fucked every part of my psyche was.

Under better circumstances, I might have enjoyed the novelty of the journey, since it was the first time I'd rode an airship in my adult life. They were a dying form of transportation. Most modern international transit - at least for humans - was done via a network of 'hybrid tunnels', extremely long and straight pipes with the air drained completely out of them, creating an artificial vacuum. They hosted lines for trains, and the word 'hybrid' was used because they could function, albeit with differing efficiency, whether the Power was available or not. When the line was running at high-speed, an arcanist would cast the World-Bending Arcana to transport the trains from tunnel to tunnel in the same vein as the Aetherbridge, while when they weren't, the lack of air resistance would still allow for movement at supersonic velocity. The only problem was the curvature of the Mimikos, which meant the pipes had to be built on stands significantly above ground and broken into segments intermittently to keep the line straight.

The other popular option, generally for journeys that would otherwise cross the entire continent, was taking a voidship out of the atmosphere and straight to ones destination at a ridiculous speed. I'd avoided doing this for my entire life because it sounded extremely unpleasant. I mean, why the hell would people even invent a method of transportation that would require physically feeling the pressure of leaving the atmosphere, instead of finding a way to circumvent it? Fuck that.

In contrast, airships were an archaic and simple technology. Modern ones were made of artificed wood that was ridiculously light and had biomancy-based engines which were so quiet that you'd think the vessel was being levitated through the air using the Power, but ultimately the design had changed little since the New Kingdoms era. They were oblong, pointed tubes with wide, unflapping wings largely made out of an extremely taut and tough filament of silk. In terms of traveling through the open air of an atmospherically enclosed environment, mankind had never come upon a better idea than just imitating a bird.

The only foundational development had been the invention of an artificed hydrogen variant that was inflammable and even more weightless than normal, which was incorporated into the upper part of the vessel to grant it a degree of natural lift, making landings and ascensions far more graceful. (A few hundred years ago there'd even been ones that pumped it throughout, resulting in a far higher passenger capacity, but this also made everyone's voices sound silly, so they'd fallen out of favor.)

The only reason I was taking one to Itan was because it was such a backwater that it didn't even have a hybrid tunnel. It'd been this or spend days on a regular boat, assuming there were any that even took passengers.

My flight had been early, at 7 in the morning, and it was about 9:30 when the island finally came into view on the horizon, clear against the blue sea and sky. It seemed so small and flat from up in the air that it felt like it shouldn't have been able to rise from the ocean at all, and with the weather being so nice, it looked deceptively like a pleasant place to live. Long, sandy beaches that reached far inland, open fields, spatters of marsh and forest. Somewhere you'd want to build a vacation resort, not somewhere that normally had the color palette of a soil composition chart.

Yet even so, just seeing it again was enough to fill me with a very particular sense of unease. There was an overpowering, almost physical sense that I was doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing, like the feeling when you stick your finger really hard into your belly button. Like I was violating some sort of geass, turning something inside out.

The phrase you're looking for is 'returning to the scene of the crime', the rational voice chimed in again, dryly.

But this was good. It was correct that I should feel this way.

I held on to my identity as my old self - in spite of feeling like many early memories of Shiko's childhood were my own, and in spite of the life which I now lived - because there was a clear separation, a before and after that defined my existence. It was like two separate worlds. I had been that person in Itan. Then I had taken a step through a kind of portal and become who I was now. A clean, unchallenged transformation of my reality.

Going back there, seeing all those old places again through my current eyes would surely shatter that illusion, and force me to conceptualize myself as a new person. I would feel different, and that dissonance would free me.

Yes. That was what was going to happen.

It's not what's going to happen, my rational self repeated. When you get off the airship, it should be possible for you to buy another ticket without actually going to any of the lobby areas your old self ever visited. Get the first one you can, stay at the docks, and leave.

Then go back to school and never think about this again. That's the best thing you can do. Just never think about it again.

Once again, I didn't listen to it.

The airship slowed to a crawl as it entered the skies above the coast, then slowly descended over the course of about 10 minutes, touching down gently in one of the water-filled, U-shaped stone docks. When the bell from the captain's cabin tolled, I rose from my tackily-colored cushioned seat, slid open the door of the compartment, and - after politely letting the elderly Rhunbardic man I'd shared it with (who based on his age and the still proudly-adorned military honors on his cloak was probably some kind of war criminal) go first - grabbed my shoulder bag's worth of luggage and left, traversing the fresco-walled central walkway until I arrived at one of the open doors with a set of sprung steps leading down to the dock's surface. (Almost all airships were decorated with frescoes of homely, ground-level locations, supposedly because it helped people with a fear of heights, though I was skeptical that this actually worked and wasn't just a meaningless tradition.)

After that, I had my documentation stamped at the custom's office, and quickly noticed that part of the port weren't as I... or, well, specifically Shiko... recalled them.

Specifically, it looked like there'd been some effort in the intervening years to expand them by adding two extra docks, and this has required demolishing and rebuilding part of the structure, expanding it over what had previously been open ocean rather than the peninsula the port was built on. There was an entirely new Departures & Arrivals area that felt very modern, with a rounded, two-floor open area and a bunch of new shops.

I felt a bit of a sense of anticlimax at this, but fortunately ('fortunately' as in, 'fortunately for my ability to hurt myself'), this was only true for the rear of the port. The front, where anyone could wander into, was more or less unchanged. This was the first stop I'd planned to make, if probably the least important. A nice bucket of cold water to get me started.

It only took a few minutes to find it. The seating - filled with bored-looking people for whom this was just an ugly waiting lounge of no particular significance - was as I remembered it. The long window parallel overlooking the beach was as I remembered it, filling the room with pleasant morning light.

It was the last place we'd ever met. Where I'd found Shiko in my last desperate, misguided bid to convince her to be my friend.

I looked to the seat she'd sat on, three places from the end up the row facing the rear of the building. Though there was a snotty looking teenage boy reading some sort of military-themed novel two seats down, it was fortunately not occupied. I sat in it.

This is how I expected it to go: I'd see the scene, and be overcome with emotion as it all came back to me, more vividly than since I'd ceased to be my old self. I'd remember the crushing sense of hopelessness and despair as the one person who I cared about in the entire world, the one person who made me dare to hope for a happy future, severed all ties for me, leaving me feeling like a despicable broken insect for whom being cared for by someone so radiant was nothing but a pathetic delusion, etc.

I would let myself feel that pain again... But then I would consider that I was sitting where she'd sat, and remind myself of that side of the story, too. I'd consider the big picture. None of those hyperbolic feelings had been grounded in reality. It had just been two kids doing stupid kid shit. Like I'd always said to myself in retrospect.

I'd look at myself. I'd force myself to understand that I wasn't that person. And then I'd go to one of the shitty little stores and eat a burrito or something so I had a new memory of this spot to override the old one.

That was what I expected to happen.

That wasn't what happened. Perhaps I was in the wrong mindset, feeling too nervous and deliberate in my thinking-- Making too much of it all. Perhaps just being there was overstimulating. I did feel strange, even if it was a strangeness I couldn't quite put into words.

But the feelings just didn't come, even after I sat there, my hands in my lap and with probably a stupid expression on my face, for upwards for 30 minutes.

Instead, when I thought about how awful it had been - the moment I saw her disappear forever behind the alcove to my right - what I ended up feeling, in the end, was almost a sort of relief. Having just got off an airship myself, I saw the rest of the story play out in a way I normally didn't. How she, I, got held up at the custom's desk because of my dual Kutuyan/Oreskios citizenship. How I couldn't find a bathroom, and was flustered because I was still upset by what happened. The book I read on the airship. My father when he greeted me the port in the city.

And I... I felt...

I slapped myself on the side of the cheek. The snotty looking boy, who had been distracted from his book, by an Inotian woman with large breasts sitting against the window, side-eyed me.

No.

This isn't what you're supposed to feel right now.

Forget this. Let's just get moving.

I stood sharply up, and made for the exit from the port.