Prologue

Lillian Academy is an elite, private, Catholic school for girls located in Musashino, Tokyo, Japan. It is considered to be one of the top three academic institutions for the children of the country's wealthiest and most politically well connected. Lillian is renowned for historically turning out ladies of education and culture that could mingle with the best of high society as well as successfully manage their own business, political, or professional careers. The school offers classes from kindergarten through university and is unique in that it is the only school in Japan whose high school division is run on the Soeur System.

The Soeur ("sister" in French) System provides a means by which older girls can take younger girls under their wings and teach them how to behave properly. It is the job of the older girl, or "grande soeur," to properly mentor and guide the younger girl, or "petite soeur," in such things as manners, etiquette, style, posture, speaking and grammar, ethics and morals. It is also the responsibility of the grande soeur to properly discipline her petite soeur when she gets out of hand or acts improperly. By this method the school has been able to do away with the strict rules and heavy discipline that most schools in Japan rely upon to keep the peace on a daily basis.

Petite soeurs are chosen by the older girls through the offer of their rosary in a brief but solemn ceremony where the grande soeur offers her rosary and, if accepted, places it around her new petite soeur's neck or wrist. Most such relationships are based on sisterly love between the two girls. Becoming a grande or petite soeur to another girl is not a mandatory requirement, but at any given time approximately eighty percent of the high school girls are in a soeur relationship.

While it is the general rule of thumb that the girls attending Lillian are of the rich and powerful variety, there is an old stone building at Lillian Academy, located behind the Chapel, that is home to the few students at the school that do not have homes of their own. At any given time there are between eight and ten students living in the twelve dorm rooms. Four rooms on the first floor are given over to the elementary aged girls that attend grade school at Lillian. The remaining eight rooms, located on the second floor, are for the middle and high school aged students. A common bathroom is located at the end of each of the four hallways which are shared by the inhabitants of the dorm. The first floor also contains a large eat-in kitchen and a common room for the girls to get together to talk, read, play, or sing along with the music produced by the ancient upright piano, assuming anyone currently living there can play the instrument. A large, two-story conservatory attached to the back of the dorm is accessed through the central common room. The conservatory houses hundreds of different varieties of dwarf trees, plants, and flowers along with the one construction that every student (and Sister) that has ever stayed in the dorm was woe to leave behind when they graduated: a heated, circular pool four meters in diameter.

The Catholic Sister that acts as the dorm mother also has a room on the first floor just inside the front door so that she can keep an eye on the comings and goings of her charges and their friends. The Sister chosen to this posting must be strict but loving considering that she is a surrogate mother to the students being raised there. The current dorm mother, Sister Agatha, is relatively young at the age of thirty-three, but is fully up to the task. She herself was the oldest in a family of ten, with seven brothers and sisters, so living with and guiding a large number of children between the ages of seven and eighteen is not new to her.

Sister Agatha has been in her current posting for the past five years, ever since Sister Bernadette retired at the age of seventy-five, and she dearly loves each and every one of the girls under her care. Watching as the older girls graduate and move on to college or careers brings both joy and sadness, just as it does with any parent whose child grows up and eventually leaves the nest. But there are always new students coming along to replace those that graduate.

All of the girls in her care are orphans taken in by the church. Funds from surviving family members that were unable for one reason or another to take care of the girls themselves help to offset the costs of classes, meals and housing, but not all of the children are so lucky as to have family outside of the school. The church sees that these particular children do not go without. They get new clothes each year and presents on their birthdays and at Christmas, but still it is often not enough to make up for the difference between those with families and those without. The children know and are usually very good about not treating a girl differently just because they do not have any living family, but as with all families arguments occur and words are said that can cut to the bone. The arguments are usually short, and the kids make up quickly, but the hurtful words, the reminder that they have no one else in the world to watch over them and care about them . . . those are not so easily forgotten and can leave deep scars.

Sister Agatha knows that she is not supposed to care more about one child over another, but she is human and there is one girl that both shines brighter and concerns her more than any of the others.

Even now, sitting at her desk with a cup of tea and taking a break from filling out the forms to record the food and supplies used during the previous week and preparing this week's requisitions to be submitted to the Office of Administration, she can just imagine the girl with her brown hair pulled up in pigtails and tied with ribbons, her mocha brown eyes scrunched up as she attends to the days homework, her soft, pretty lips pressed tightly together as she works through a particularly difficult math problem or English translation. She is a very cute first-year high school girl but by no means a classic beauty. She works hard every day to try to do her best to repay the kindness that the church has bestowed on her by allowing her to live in the dorms and attend classes here at Lillian.

Despite being one of the quietest girls in the dorm, Yumi Fukuzawa, with her shy smile and sweet, clear laugh, is probably one of the most popular; although she would never believe it if you tried to tell her. Although loved by everyone, she has a severe lack of self confidence and low self-esteem. All of the younger girls love her and look up to her, while the girls of her own age and older try their best to shield her from some of the worst of life's happenings. Even still, those hurtful words can and do occur on occasion, with devastating results for poor Yumi.

Sister Agatha sighed as she remembered one particular day in Yumi's first year of middle school when, after more than six years of weekly piano lessons, one of the older girls who was just having a bad day told Yumi that she played like a baboon. Yumi ran out of the common room crying and, even after the girl got on her knees and apologized profusely for her comments and told her that she loved her piano playing, Yumi had never touched the piano again. Yumi's skill on the piano had actually been quite high but that one, unthinking comment had so devastated the young girl that she had never played again. She wouldn't even join the rest of the girls when they got together for a music night. She just stayed in her room and did her homework or read one of the many books she borrowed from the school's library.

Sister Agatha received regular reports from Yumi's teachers on her school work and conduct in class, just as she did for all of the girls she was in charge of, and they were all proud of her grades. Yet each of them also wished that she would speak up more in class or, even more importantly, try to make some friends. Yumi never really interacted with her school mates except to allow them to borrow her notes or help them with a problem. She always sat alone in class to eat the lunch she made for herself each morning at the same time she made lunches for all of the other girls living at the dorm. She never went to the milk hall even though she was given a meal card to cover her food expenses. When asked why she said that she did not want to cost the school or the church any more than it already spent on her.

And that fit Yumi's personality perfectly. The sweet, charming, kind girl would bend over backwards to help anyone in need. She was always the first to volunteer for the worst jobs just so someone else did not have to do them. She both cooked and cleaned the dishes for all ten of her current charges, despite the fact that there was a daily rotation roster for the chores. Instead, Yumi would take the opportunity to teach the younger girls how to cook so that they would be able to take care of themselves once they were out on their own.

Yumi would spend the small allowance the church gave her each month on things for the dorm or small gifts for the younger children and never buy a thing for herself that was not absolutely necessary for living. Her one extravagant purchase had been when she saved up half her money for three years to buy herself a used laptop computer and printer so that she could type up her school reports rather than having to write them out longhand. The rationale she gave was that her handwriting was not decent enough for her teachers and she wanted to make sure that they could read her work easily. Sister Agatha knew for a fact that the computer contained no games, no music, no movies, and no pictures. It had an operating system, device drivers, and free, public domain word processing and spreadsheet applications. It did not even contain any software for email. Yumi said she had no one to exchange emails with anyway. She did have a web browser, but she only used it for research for her school work. Yumi may have known that "YouTube" existed, but she saw no reason to go to the site. It would just take away from her time for homework or her duties around the dorm.

Yumi of course kept her room clean and spotless. She also helped to keep the common areas of the dorm – kitchen, bathrooms, and common room – clean and frequently took the time to help the younger girls with their homework. The one duty she kept strictly for herself, and loved more than anything else, was to take care of the plants in the conservatory. She pruned and weeded, fed and watered the plants and trees, but her favorites were the flowers and, among those, especially the roses. Yumi would spend at least an hour each day in the conservatory caring for the various plants, usually as a way to wind down from the events and trials of the day before she started on her homework. It was too early for the girls to take baths or play in the pool so she typically had the fifteen-by-fifteen meter glass room to herself.

Sister Agatha often watched her from a small, round, verdigris colored wrought iron table and chairs almost hidden in one corner near the wall of the dark grey stone dorm. It was the only time she saw a totally unguarded Yumi. She could read every emotion on the young girl's face as she went about her efforts and it told the story of everything that had happened to her that day as Yumi thought about all that had occurred in school. She would be watering a plant only to suddenly laugh out loud, or be pruning a flower with a shy smile on her lips, or feeding one of the dwarf trees with frown lines creasing her forehead. And only here, when she thought she was alone and away from prying eyes, would she allow herself the luxury of crying her silent tears, her shoulders shaking with her quiet sobs. Sister Agatha often wanted to go to the girl and console her at those times, but it would be the worst thing she could do for it would take away this one, single place of solitude for the young girl. She would forever after always worry if she was truly alone in the indoor garden and never allow herself to give her emotions free rein again.

Sister Agatha sighed and once again put pencil to paper to start tallying up the kilos of rice used the previous week and to figure out how much more they needed to have the school's Purchasing Department procure for them to refill their larder. Maybe she could make some fruit tarts for desert tonight. Yumi loved her fruit tarts. Sister Agatha smiled to herself and pulled out her calculator and started adding everything up.

Chapter 1

Yumi glanced out the window of her room into the star filled night above Musashino. She held the sweet peach tart Sister Agatha had made for desert in her left hand while she twirled her pencil with her right; a nervous habit she had picked up somewhere. Homework had been fairly light tonight, so she was torn between reading the romance novel she had checked out of the Lillian Library earlier in the week or trying to read ahead in her History textbook. She was already two chapters ahead in History and had an A in the class, so the romance novel was a strong option. However, as usual when she had these rare opportunities, she instead took her fruit tart and headed for the kitchen where she made herself a cup of jasmine tea. She then walked through the empty common room, everyone else being upstairs doing their own homework she assumed, and entered the darkened conservatory. Without turning on the lights and using only the starlight to guide her, she turned right and wended her way through the narrow path between the foliage until she found the small wrought iron table and chairs. She set her teacup and tart on the table, sat down on the cushioned chair and leaned her head back with a deep sigh of contentment. The stars visible through the glass roof overhead were slightly paled by the lights of the small city, but they were still better than the four blank walls of her dorm room.

Yumi had A's in all of her other classes as well – English, Japanese, Math, and Religion – but it was only what she expected of herself; only what she thought she needed to do to help show her thanks to the church that cared for her and had raised her since she was seven years old. She even had an A in Art, and her paintings and sketches were praised by her teacher, but she never brought any home with her. It was bad enough that the teacher framed and hung some of them on the classroom wall where anyone could see them. There was no way Yumi was going to bring any back to her dorm room to possibly be ridiculed by her fellow students. That was why she never signed her work or allowed the teacher to say who had created the art that was displayed. That was Yumi's one condition for letting her teacher hang her artwork. Supposedly her teacher thought that she was especially good at portraits, but Yumi just couldn't agree. All of the portraits she had seen in the museums the school visited, or in the art books in the library, were so much better than hers, she thought.

The only picture she had in her room was a tiny, stamp-sized framed photo of herself when she was little, before her parents had died. She had no photos of her parents and only the one of herself. Taken back when she had shorter hair, she was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and was holding a baby rabbit at what looked like one of the petting zoos near Tokyo. You could just make out the Tokyo Tower in the background and that was the only reason she knew the general area of where the picture had been taken.

Yumi remembered nothing of her life before the day she arrived at Lillian. She had absolutely no memories of her parents; their faces, their voices, the touch of their hands, nothing. She wasn't even exactly sure how she had ended up here at the school. While it might have been frustrating at first, she had learned to do without those memories. Who her parents were, or had been, had no bearing on what she did from here on out. At least that was what she tried to tell herself.

Yumi sighed and took a bite of her tart before taking a sip of tea. She loved Sister Agatha's fruit tarts, especially since she made them so rarely. She wondered what the special occasion was this time. Despite trying to savor each bite, the tart was gone too quickly and Yumi had to be satisfied with just the mildly sweet tea. She knew she did not have a lot of time before someone came down to use the pool, so she lay her head back on the back of the chair and closed her eyes, just enjoying the fresh, clean aromas of the flowers surrounding her. The sound of a tiny waterfall she had built into one of the larger plant basins gurgled in the background, lulling her to slough off all of the tension that had built up during the day.

She must have been almost dozing off when she heard the door from the common room open. She started and scraped the chair across the slate floor before she could still herself.

"Yumi-san, are you in here?" she heard a voice call out to her in the darkened room.

"Over here Katsura-san," she replied softly, not wishing to disturb the quiet atmosphere in the room, "at the table."

Katsura Nazuka was in her class and was one of the few girls in the school that she might almost be willing to call a friend. Does the fact that someone has never said anything negative about you constitute a good basis for friendship? she wondered.

"Why are you sitting here in the dark, Yumi-san?" Katsura asked as she slowly found her way to where Yumi sat. She pulled out the only other chair and joined her, putting her own cup of tea on the table after taking a quick sip.

"Look up and you will get your answer, Katsura-san," Yumi chuckled. The dark haired girl did as she was told and whistled in surprise.

"I can't believe all the stars you can see tonight," she said in an awed voice. "There are so many, I can't even find some of the constellations."

"Well, there is tsuzumi boshi, otherwise known as Orion," Yumi pointed at a grouping of stars, "you can just see the three stars of his belt. It's not quite as bright tonight, but you can still make it out."

"Your right as usual, Yumi-san," Katsura giggled, looking to where the brown eyed girl was pointing. "I can see why you like it here so much. It's quiet and peaceful, and the night sky is so beautiful, even when it's not always clear."

"Were you looking for me for any particular reason, Katsura-san," Yumi asked, somewhat piqued to have her alone time disrupted but not overly surprised.

"Oh, that's right, Sister Agatha wanted to make sure that you got one of the fruit tarts before they were all gone so she sent me to give you this one," Katsura-san said as she grinned and handed over a napkin-wrapped tart that she had been surreptitiously holding in her left hand.

Yumi smiled. Sister Agatha had herself handed Yumi a tart earlier so this was to make sure that Yumi got an extra helping. Now she knew what had prompted the good Sister to start baking. She must have been worrying about her again. Yumi thanked Katsura-san who, her duty done, was kind enough to leave Yumi to her solitude once more. She wondered if something in particular had started Sister Agatha worrying about her again or if this was a result of just her general concern. Either way she would have to make a concerted effort to ensure that the good Sister knew that Yumi was happy; or at least as happy as she ever was.

She slowly ate the second tart, wiping her fingers on the napkin and making sure that she had at least a sip of tea left to wash down the last bite. Sighing once more she pushed her chair back and stood up. She wandered the many pathways around the room, checking one last time on all of her babies, before she turned towards the kitchen to refill her teacup and head back upstairs to read one more chapter ahead in her History book.

A/N: As the summary says, this is a different kind of Yumi/Sachiko story. Still, I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to leave a review with your thoughts.

Take care.