Witches Don't Cry

Written for Poirot Cafe's "Super Short Contest #3: Tears"

The first time Akako hears the words, she's four years old, and she's weeping over the remains of the teddy bear that she accidentally ripped the head off of.

"Don't cry!" Mother chides sternly, slapping her on the wrist. "You won't be able to get away with that once you're older!"

But Akako, her hand now stinging and her friend still broken, only weeps harder.

"Don't cry," Mother says, when Akako is five and watching Mother dissect a still-twitching frog for potion ingredients absolutely terrifies her.

"Don't cry," Mother says, when Akako is six and she comes back home sniffling because the kids at school made fun of her hair color.

"Don't cry," Mother says, when Akako is seven and she wails from pain because she accidentally burnt her knee against the boiling hot cauldron.

Mother drills it into her. Don't cry even if you're sad, don't cry even if you get hurt. Don't cry, never cry, because once you finalize your contract with Lucifer, shedding even a single tear will mean losing your powers forever.

When Akako is eight, she doesn't cry anymore.

Mother has her perform the ritual to finalize her contract when she's twelve, and Akako revels in how magic seeps into her veins and burns beneath her skin as Lucifer bestows her with his full power. The next day at school, all the idiotic prepubescent boys are suddenly at her command, tripping all over themselves just to have the honor of doing her bidding—and for the first time in her life, Akako knows absolute control.

She decides that there is no way in hell she'll ever give this up.

Mother dies when Akako is sixteen. It's unexpected and unimpressive, honestly, for a witch to meet her end through something as absurdly normal as getting hit by a truck, but even their kind are not infallible to mundane dangers.

This leaves Akako as the last of her kind, the butler tells her immediately after reporting of Mother's passing. And as the sole remaining practitioner of red magic left in the world, it is now entirely her burden to maintain their family line—to choose one of her many suitors to breed with, and either bear a daughter who can be taught the craft, or dispose of the son and try again.

Akako wants to puke. This is the very last thing she needs to listen to in the midst of Mother's wake.

Don't cry, the memory of Mother's voice rings in her head, and Akako doesn't. She does, however, balk at the idea of taking any of her male peers to bed and, in open defiance, drops out of her high school.

A year later, she transfers to a different one.

The flower Kaitou Kid leaves her with is beautiful in its fragility and transience—but that's all it is. Fragile, transient, and weak. And so too will Akako be, if she lets him get to her.

So Akako blinks away her feelings, throws aside the flower, and uses her magic to burn both to ashes.

She hasn't cried in years, and she's not about to start for him.

Akako knew that if they came here, something great would be lost. It was more than instinct, it was hellish premonition, and she warned Kuroba but he didn't listen. He had finally pinned down his father's killers, and the accursed gem they sought, and this was his chance to end it, once and for all.

He went. She accompanied him.

Now, Kuroba is limp on the floor, unconscious and pale, a sickening red seeping out from his stomach and staining the pure white of his suit. With how rapidly he's bleeding out from the gunshot wound, Akako knows that if he doesn't get help fast, he will die. But all the members of the police-and-detective team they brought along are having a hard enough time holding their own against the black-clothed criminals, and Akako feels a heavy sense of hopelessness burn behind her eyes...

No! She can't let it win. Not now, not when Kuroba needs her.

It's dangerous, Akako knows, to attempt casting an immobility spell on so many targets simultaneously, and with no prior preparation. But even as Lucifer's power swells to peaks that she knows her mortal body can't handle, she presses on, filling to the brim with magic until it explodes out of her.

It hurts. Her muscles tremble from strain and her skin feels like it's on fire and her whole being cries out in agony, but Akako wills herself to shed no tears. Not until this is over.

Akako doesn't cry, but she does scream.

The bad guys all just…stopped moving, Hakuba tells Akako when she wakes up in the hospital two days later, and from there, the organization was easily defeated and she and Kuroba were sent straight to the hospital. Kuroba underwent a successful surgery and is now in stable condition, and the doctors determined that although Akako had passed out from exhaustion, nothing else was wrong with her.

The doctors are mistaken. Akako can feel that something's wrong with her.

Akako can feel that something's missing.

"…Did I cry?" Akako asks slowly, and Hakuba gives her a confused look but replies. Yes, he did see a drying tear on her cheek as they carried off her unconscious form, but what does that matter?

"It doesn't," Akako lies. Hakuba doesn't look like he believes her but drops it anyway.

Akako isn't a witch anymore but even still, she doesn't cry. Not until an hour later, when she finally gets to see Kuroba, and he's bedridden and in bandages but he's alive, and when utter relief floods her eyes, she doesn't even try to stop it from pouring out of her like a waterfall.

Her powers are gone forever, but she still has him—

("Thank you," Kuroba gasps, his smile fragile and delicate but so, so bright. "You really saved me.")

—and that is more than enough.