A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, c41 - write in the second person narration. Freya, adressing Elda.

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Our Fate With Love

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One day, you'll also find someone you love.

One day...and I can only hope it won't end like this, but we weren't born lucky, you and I. We weren't born at all, but made, and human hands can't grant things like luck that the omnipresent God that defines both science and reason can.

One day, you'll find someone you love and chances are it will tear your soul apart. It will be someone you can't love, you shouldn't love, that someone else already loves and you love them almost as much. It will be someone you can't bear to tell, but you also can't not love. It will be someone who watches you crumble from the inside and begs of you to tell them the cure but you can't, you can't, because of what it will do to him. So you bear it in silence until you're about die but you won't be as lucky as me, because you'll be all alone.

I'm dying, Elda. And you'll follow in my footsteps some day. I know it, and we sisters will be gone, myths the world has forgotten about. Only Mama and Papa will know - and maybe the boy who gains your love as well.

But you won't be lucky, dearest Elda, because even if it's not like me, not a boy or man you simply can't love but love nonetheless, even if it's someone you could have otherwise been free to spend eternity with, you will realise that eternity is too short a time for us Chobits. We are special that way. Special and deadly. Poisons that seep into our family, into the ones we've fallen for uncontrollably, and there'll be another to add to that because you'll fall in love someday as well and poison that person too.

You might not want to, dearest Elda, but you will anyway. It's buried inside your very being: in your programming, in the artificial soul that even our parents can forget sometimes is very real. And I'm sure they'd do something to fix that flaw if I only told them, but I won't. I can't. I can't tell Mama or Papa that I love him, that I love Papa. So you will have to bear with this too.

Maybe I don't want to be alone like this. Maybe, as an elder sister, I want you to someday feel this too: this love, this heartache, this decay that will eventually steal my life and yours too... Humans feel this too, you know. Some humans die like this too. Maybe you won't, because it's not all humans, but we're not humans so we can't measure ourselves by their worth.

And even if we could, there's still that, that power in us that they don't know, but fear enough to follow our foosteps, to knock on our parents' door - and they'll still follow, even when you find the person you love and if he loves you back you'll be swept into this as well. They don't understand - but I do: you will give them, those incomplete dolls, the love and heartache we ourselves feel. You will give them the capacity, the heart and soul they lack so they can be as near as humans as machines can get. You will give them a meaningful life - but, in doing so, you will lose your own and it will be a price you will have no choice but to pay because you will lose your life anyway. It's not fair, but that is the nature of my love. That will be the nature of your love as well because we are not alive, not created by an omnipresent and lawless God, so we are not priveledged to have luck and chance and fortune and mercy...

And if Mama had had children of her own, we may never have been created at all.

It's sad, sometimes. Papa created me for Mama's sake, and I fell in love with Papa. Couldn't it have been anyone else? But, at least, you cannot choose a worse person to fall in love with, dearest Elda. You were created for me, and we did have a few happy years together but it won't last. This love is still eating me out from the inside and it will do the same to you.

At least the worst you can do is fall in love with Papa too, and it won't be as bad for you because you can't have him any more than I and I was the first so I take the heavy brunt of it. And maybe I envy you a little for that, dearest Elda. I may envy you more if you find someone else, someone who can love you for you, someone who can give you their entire being for what you've given them in return. I may envy you for all that and the longer life you'll get to have but in the end I'll be sad I couldn't spare you that eventual fate because I'm simply too deeply in love...

Maybe I'm just hoping you'll feel love the same as I have: the same depth, the same impossibility, the same anguish - feel it all so you'll understand what it felt like to me, so you can tell Mama and Papa in my place and watch their reactions: their disgust or their agony or their failure because how can they be happy when the daughter they created has found a love that could tear the family apart..?

This is our curse, because we're created with the ability to feel emotions unlike other persocoms. And that's fine, isn't it? Because we are also alive. I wouldn't take it back, and I think, when you find that one person that makes life unbearable, you also won't take it back. They will make life unbearable - but they will also make it having been worth living and that's more important. We're here. We're alive - or, at least, you will still be alive so you need to go out and live that life of yours and find some happiness before heartbreak swoops down to snatch you in its talon grip. I'll protect you like a good big sister should, but I'm afraid I won't be there as a shoulder for you to cry on when you do finally meet that fateful person in your life, because I'm going on ahead.

I'm broken, dearest Elda. I'm broken and I can't be made whole again, so I'm going to fade away instead. And you - you will either break or burst because that is the sad fate of yours, but maybe, there's a less than one percent chance that you'll get your happily ever after ending every child deserves. But fate doesn't smile on us persocoms, on us Chobits, so you will have to make that own future, Elda dear. I hope the person you love at least has enough luck and karma stored up for the both of you.