(Pronouns) she/her, (Sexuality) aromantic-asexual. I typically hang around fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.com, but recently have slunk onto tumblr to acesss more of the fandom web. Feel free to message me and chat! Asks are open.
It occurs to me that it might be more helpful to offer permanent links instead of throwing out the occasional “hey, a fic!” post when I first publish said fics:
I saw ur carriage ride animation! It’s phenomenal! Are you gonna make animations for every chapter/every pivotal scene? Cause that would be so cool!! I could watch an entire series in your style (especially if it’s an accurate adaptation of Dracula)
hope you have a lovely day
-🐝
The Dracula project
The carriage ride animation was part of my class's end-of-the-year presentation on projects everyone had to work on. Now, most people just did it for the grade (understandable), but I changed my original plan mid-year because I realized this might be my opportunity to work on an adaptation of Dracula we might actually enjoy – because I'm actually trying to pitch it into a movie!
In November, I will attend, by grace of my school director, a convention where I will meet representatives of various animation studios and TV producers alongside fellow animation students.
So, me and @catsvrsdogscatswin have partnered to work on this, and have made extensive research (mostly on her end) and are writing scripts, making character sheets, drawing storyboards, and preparing for anything we might need. Everything I've posted up until now (with the exception of memes) will be in our portfolio.
Our selling point is that this will be an adaptation as accurate to the original story as possible, with the intended metaphors and narrative of the novel (we're quite read up on Stoker's personal life to try and see how he intended it to be read), AND as accurate to its era as possible - not just with the English characters, but the Eastern European ones as well. This way, it could even serve as an academic alternative for anyone that doesn't want to read the book (and would enjoy 2D animation).
Hand-drawn animation and gothic/vampire horror are the hot topic of the moment with recent successful movies, and people miss more serious animation like the iconic villains of older films as well as actual passion over cash-grabs. So we're not gonna pull any punches or try and spin it into a hallmark romantic tragedy and give it all the horror and dramatic suspense of the original novel. We will tackle subjects like Victorian gender roles, xenophobia, racism, male and female survivors of sexual violence, classism, the sociopolitical issues faced by Romani people, different aspects of Christianity, girlhood, ableism and the triumph of the human spirit, which will be the main metaphor. Also, as my dad helpfully added, rebelling against a powerful rich man, which might interest some viewers.
If everything goes very, very well, someone will be interested in picking up our project and making it into a reality!
Ok this is amv I made of Andercard after reading the fic “bound by red threads” of catsvrsdogscatswin which is one of my favorite Andercard fics ever , I haven’t edited amvs in eleven years so it kinda sucks but it was fun to make
Maxed out inventory for blood vials, bullets, throwing knives, and pebbles. I actually did that before leaving Central Yharnam, but I didn't really think it was worth mentioning until someone reminded me to stock up on items because the price jumps upwards upon defeating certain bosses.
Recognized the church with the lever, like, instantly so I had the Old Yharnam lamp lit before I even finished exploring the whole Cathedral Ward for the first time.
I met Alfred! He seems like a polite young man whose helpfulness definitely isn't a thin facade of charm atop a seething primordial well of religious zealotry.
Also met Arianna and the Suspicious Man, but I foolishly started talking to the latter before the area was clear so we were interrupted mid-conversation by the Large Huntsman with the rake just fucking bowling me over. Like, there should have been a cartoon strike sound effect. Very rude.
Took me way too many tries to squish that bonus critter by the giant with the wrecking ball. And for all my efforts I only get basic blood shards. Boo.
Took a few tries to unlock all the gates for Eileen to appear but I finally managed it! I had to speed through the bit between her and Henryk because I was on a time limit for using the gaming console but I'd already gotten that far, so…
Henryk makes me feel bad. Like obviously it sucks that we have to kill him because he went mad from seeing the slaughtered bodies of his friend/family, but also that guy is FAST. Zippy old coot.
He also killed me like four or five times so in retrospect my earlier success at boss fights was probably a mixture of being overlevelled and the wiki coming in clutch. Still killed him without killing/making an enemy of Eileen, though, so we'll call that a success.
My understanding of the Frenzy mechanic is that the Hunter has stared into the face of things man was not meant to know and gone temporarily insane, which makes it very weird that those two Church Hunters on the staircase can inflict Frenzy by just. fucking whacking me with their wooden crossbeams. I know they aren't crucifixes or crosses okay the joinery is wrong and the tops are too pointy. Even if they were crosses I still don't see how getting beaned with them is enough to drive me temporarily insane. What the heck is up with that.
If we don't count my initial discovery of them by literally falling off the roof at their feet and subsequently getting jumped, then I beat the two Yahar'gul hunters on my first run!
I actually first-try succeeded all the way to the church where the Amygdala that takes you to the Nightmare realms is, and I went oh! I know this interior from cutscenes! I better walk around the edges and avoid the center where it grabs me!
Turns out it can grab you from anywhere in this room and increasing my travel time across said room was The Worst Possible Choice I could've made. -38,000 Blood Echoes, oops.
(I GOT THEM BACK RIGHT AFTER DW)
At this point I have just fully given up on marksmanship. We are not using the gun. We are not equipping the gun. You know how "there is no spoon"? There Is No Gun. My poor lil' guy is facing The Horrors with a saw cleaver in one hand and absolutely fucking nothing in the other. Get wrecked.
Speaking of which, with my hunter now at Level 100, I will (temporarily) bid the Cathedral Ward adieu and go inflict new horrors on my hunter in Hemwick Charnel Lane for a bit.
New plan is to level all stats to 30 in Hemwick Charnel Lane before messing around with Old Yharnam. Five stat levels per each new area seems reasonable. I'll have all stats at 35 by the time I fight Vicar Amelia!
Rika did not always reincarnate at precisely the same time –nor did she appear in a new place suddenly, as if by magic. She rewound –a term coined mutually by her and Hanyuu. At any given moment in her early childhood, the Rika who knew she would have the memories of many attempts at her life, forewarned by Hanyuu, would recollect in an abrupt shuddering stream all the reincarnations she'd had up 'til now, and she would be herself again.
This method had its upsides and downsides. There was no sudden split in personality for other people to notice, which was nice, but Rika didn't always remember her past lives clearly. Her death was almost always shrouded by a foggy grey cloud of blurred thoughts, inarticulate and impossible to parse. Hanyuu said it was because recollecting the moments before death was tricky at the best of times, and trauma only made it worse. Rika suspected sometimes that Hanyuu could show her, but chose not to, out of a warped sense of mercy.
It was like reloading a game, in that way. Rika would try a route, and it would fail. She would adjust her parameters, and try again. That would fail too, but she might glean one more small shard of important information to be learned. She would place it with her meager treasure-horde of confirmed facts, and plan again, and try again, and fail –again.
Over and over and over.
It was frustrating. This was her life that she was reliving, not a mere few hours on a computer console. The curse alone took up five whole years –half of her single decade of lived experience– and every time Rika failed, she was sent hurling backwards, closer to the beginning of that decade than the end.
She tried for her friends, she tried so hard, but sometimes… it was infuriating.
Like now.
Rika was four years old again, or thereabouts, and she had just snapped and shattered her crayons in a fit of frustration, howling and smashing them against the paper, against her desk, against everything. She'd rewound midway through drawing in class, gaining centuries in a mere second, and her resulting fit of rage and despair had been unilaterally written off as a tantrum.
She sat now on the crisp white sheets of the tiny infirmary that served the school –once a former office– and fumed. It wasn't fair. Too tiny and too young once again, with teensy little baby fingers and a cherubic face no one took seriously. Even those precious few inches of height and gravitas she'd had by age ten were lost, again.
Unlike many girls her age, Rika would kill to make it to puberty. Even teenagers were treated a little like adults.
It was better than being a fucking toddler, at least.
Rika ground her teeth, fisted her hands in her hair, and screamed.
~*~
"Rika-"
"Shut up."
"Rika, this isn't safe-"
"Shut up!"
Rika bit a switchblade between her teeth as she slowly and stealthily crept through the undergrowth, heading for the cabin where the minister's grandson was. She hadn't bothered to check whether or not this was a world Akasaka travelled to Hinamizawa in: either way, if she saved the boy, she'd at least gain some credibility.
She slithered up to the window without anyone calling alarms, and cautiously tilted her head to peek through-
Gunshot.
~*~
Rika called it in herself this time, not bothering to disguise her voice. Oishi was stubborn and had an incredibly keen eye for inconsistencies: he'd check her story, find the minister's grandson, and then contemplate and second-guess why and how Rika had allegedly been playing in that spot, when the club and its games had yet to exist.
Then, when he came to ask her questions, she could talk and warn him.
Her plan worked beautifully: Oishi and Akasaka (who was here this time) saved the boy, then brought her in for questioning not even a day later.
She had warned Akasaka about his wife, and was telling Oishi about what she knew of the curse between sips of water (talking so much was thirsty work) when the room suddenly started spinning before her eyes and she slipped sideways out of her chair.
Blackness.
~*~
Rika didn't drink her water the second time, and eyed the woman who brought it to her with eagle-eyed suspicion. It was just a simple paper cup, allegedly filled with water from the drinking fountain, but Rika wasn't stupid. She'd definitely been poisoned or drugged or something a few days ago, in the last cycle.
She didn't drink it this time.
Hanyuu whined and whimpered and worried over her shoulder as Rika told an openly-skeptical Oishi everything she knew about the curse, steadily not touching or looking at the water. He thanked her for her time, then stood and left to go write out a report about it.
…one of the terrible things about being stuck in a small child's body was that when an adult grasped you by the jaw and forced you to drink something, there was very little you could do to stop them.
~*~
Rika woke a day beforehand and swore.
Fine. Okay. The actual station itself was a bust. All she had to do in that case was not let Oishi actually grab her and take her in.
She dialed up her concerned citizen's report, then immediately left her home and plunged into the deep woods around it. As long as she kept out of people's sight, she could call in her actual report later, and have her mysteriousness drive the urgency even further home.
Rika didn't even make it to the phone booth at the end of that day before someone in a groundskeeper uniform grabbed her by the arm and stabbed a needle into her neck.
~*~
Rewind. Try again. Die.
Rewind. Try again. Die.
Rewind. Try again. Die.
Rewind. Try again. Die.
Rewind. Try again. Die.
Rewind. Try again. Die.
Rewind. Try again. Die.
Rika spent six months reliving the days of one week, over and over and over, until she finally gave up.
It was… something of an adjustment, now that there were eight of them –even if the pressures of education meant that there were only eight of them over the longer school breaks. The repurposed Hinamizawa classroom was meant to seat several dozen, of course, but cramming together chairs and tables in a way that let all of them fit and allowed the games to flow naturally was… a bit harder.
Satoshi didn't mind. He liked this new version of the club, where Mion and her sister got to be here, and he didn't have to worry about staying too late or forgetting any of his chores-
Ahem. Anyway.
The new club was much nicer. Everyone was much more relaxed –except when games were on, of course- something that Satoshi attributed to the sudden ending of the curse a few years ago. Rena didn't have a tense glint in her eyes, a mysterious air of gloom didn't press down on Rika-chan's shoulders, Shion could be here with her sister, and Satoko…
Satoshi did not have the words to express his relief at meeting this newer, older, more mature version of Satoko. No longer did she cling to the back of his knees when frightened, no longer was the club unified in their efforts to gently coax her out of her shell.
No, the Satoko he had come back to was a vivacious, boisterous, bold girl who wreaked havoc on Keiichi-san at the slightest provocation, whose mischievous antics were only barely held in check by Rika-chan and Satoshi alike. The club members were more likely to pray for mercy than attempt to liven Satoko up –or, again in Keiichi-san's case, swear furious and everlasting vengeance.
Having another boy was also new. Satoshi was used to spending time with boys his age thanks to the baseball team, of course, but having one in the club was another matter entirely. This was a shelter Mion had made for the Hojo children, their last shared bastion of joy and safety. Never before had any other boy joined; Rena had been the newbie in Satoshi's day, and her inclusion had been the first time they'd gotten a new member at all.
Mion had founded the club, Satoko had brought her best friend, and Satoshi, of course, went wherever his sister did. It was just the four of them, and then Rena had transferred in as a shy new student, and Mion had folded the transfer under her wing as easily as a hen matriarch would shelter a new chick.
Keiichi-san was another recent transfer (well, recent by the village's standards), so his membership wasn't too odd, but…
He had joined before Satoshi, in some strange way. The club had gotten a new member while he was in his coma, and looking at all the similarities and differences between them, it was hard not to feel replaced, just for a few moments.
Keiichi-san soon smoothed that over, of course. He didn't have his club nickname for nothing; his charisma was inescapable, his enthusiasm vibrant. He was pleased to not be the only boy facing off against the horde of harpies (his words: they had been eating in Angel Mort at the time, and Satoshi winced at the thought of the waitresses passing that tidbit along) and excited to share all he had experienced with the club so far.
Satoshi had never really been particularly close with his baseball teammates. Keiichi's direct attention was a little intimidating, compared to that: but it was nice to think of someone… almost like a brother, he supposed. The club forged ties closer than blood and stronger than steel, so having another boy to commiserate with seemed appealing. There were some things neither of them really felt comfortable talking to the girls about.
Most of those things had to do with one or both of the Sonozaki twins, actually.
Hanyuu-chan was… something. She felt familiar in a way Satoshi found hard to articulate; the best he could describe was that her presence was like the brush of cotton from hospital blankets, comforting and chilly all at once. He hadn't known Rika-chan had relatives, much less a cousin, but one look at the two Furudes' hair was certainly enough to confirm their shared blood.
She was timid and squeaky, but very intuitive, and good at patting his head in a comforting manner. Her tousled lilac curls were also soft and springy when he patted her head, not that it was a competition.
(Satoshi didn't dare voice the thought aloud for fear it would become a competition. Mion would definitely start rating who gave the best headpats, who received said headpats the best, who had the best hair, etc. etc. He'd learned his lesson with their rice-cooking competition.)
All in all, though the club was strange and new, it was still good. Satoshi was still more welcome here than he was welcome anywhere; it was still the place where he had the most fun; it was still the place where he saw his sister smile the brightest.
He just needed to adjust a little, reforming and growing his habits around the two new members, letting them do the same in turn as they all adjusted to one another and Satoshi readjusted to his changed, much-happier friends. Rena laughed more now. The Sonozaki twins were more comfortable with one another. Rika-chan smiled a lot.
And his sister, at last, was no longer a burden for him to bear, much less bear alone. She was her own person, healthy and happier than all the rest of them combined, for her family was finally whole again.
Satoshi stared at the confusing bolts and bobbins of brightly-colored satin in consternation. He'd rubbed a few between his fingers, and they were so sleek –how was he supposed to make one into a friendship bracelet? Even those with a ridged corduroy pattern were still tightly-woven slick polyester thread, thin and fine to give them that characteristic sheen.
In other words, it was all too slippery.
Satoshi wondered how on earth Shion kept that yellow ribbon tied in her hair. It was knotted into an elegant thin bow, but if his five minutes of experience standing before the store rack was any judge, that would be devilishly difficult to accomplish.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe Shion wore her ribbon like that to intimidate other girls, who would look upon the sheen and gape, awestruck. Here walked a greater mortal than they, for she could bend satin to her will without a flicker of effort or a glimpse of sweat. Cower and despair!
"Pick anything out yet?" Rena asked as she rounded the corner from where she'd been cooing over novelty buttons for the past ten minutes.
"Muu…" Satoshi hummed sheepishly, scratching his cheek with a finger. "It's all really… complicated."
Rena clapped her hands together, a glint of challenge in her eye, as she came to stand beside him, facing the rack.
"Well, let's uncomplicate it!" she said with great cheer. "What's our criteria?"
Satoshi looked at the toes of his shoes and blushed. "I want to get Shion something for when she goes away to university. Something we can match, so she knows I'm thinking of her, and, um…"
He blushed brighter.
"…so she can… still have me with her… kind of…" he continued, sinking into a bashful mutter as his shoulders hunched up around his red-tipped ears.
"Something matching that you both can wear," Rena summarized tactfully. "You wanted to try ribbons?"
"She has that one she wears in her hair, so I thought if I could get a matching one, I could wear it as a bracelet, sort of…" Satoshi replied, clasping and loosely twisting a set fingers around his opposite wrist. "Only, um… I just figured out that ribbons are really hard to tie."
"We'll deal with that part of it later; I know all kinds of knots," Rena said, and mimed rolling up her sleeves even when she had no real sleeves to roll. "You want a ribbon: what do we think about colors?"
"Oh." Satoshi hadn't really gotten past his initial dismay. "Um… a yellow one, I think. She already wears yellow, so I know she'll like it."
His face flushed a little. It felt romantic, too, to give Shion something the same color as his hair: like he was giving her a piece of himself. Come to think of it, maybe that's why she had switched to yellow in the first place, during those years he was gone. A piece of Satoshi to carry with her always…
"Yellow," Rena said, breaking him out of his reverie. Her eyes had narrowed and sharpened, glaring down upon the inoffensive rack of ribbons as though she were a general about to announce the beheading of enemy troops. "What kind of yellow are we going for?"
Satoshi blinked.
"Um… yellow?"
Shaken out of her determination, Rena glanced at him sidelong for a moment. The exasperation in her gaze was very familiar, and Satoshi shrank, sheepishly.
"How about something meaningful," Rena said as she looked back at the rack with a sigh. "This is meant to be a present with heart, so…"
She frowned, rolling her lip between her teeth for a moment, then darted forward and snatched several spools from the rack. Stacking them atop the top shelf of red-colored ribbons, she pulled a small length from one of them and held it up, squinting at Satoshi through one eye.
"What?" he said, baffled. Rena was acting like a jeweler cutting a diamond, not a good friend helping him choose a cheap but heartfelt surprise going-away present for his girlfriend.
"Not this one," she replied mysteriously, rewinding the spool and replacing the yellow ribbon back in its proper slot. She unrolled another and held that ribbon up in the direction of his face, squinting at it with a frowning hum. "Not this one either."
Satoshi employed his instincts when dealing with all his female acquaintances and simply stood there, baffled, as Rena swiftly worked her way through her chosen selection of ribbons, narrowing them down to three options that she juggled between for several minutes, humming and tilting her had as she squinted back and forth at him and the ribbons. Eventually she put aside one of the three spools, but she still kept two, apparently unable to choose between them.
"Rena, what are you doing?" Satoshi asked as she stepped closer, almost pressing it against his face.
"I think Shi-chan would like a ribbon exactly the color of your hair the best," Rena said, still squinting. "And then maybe we can find one the exact color of her hair, and you can keep that one, and she can have this one."
Satoshi considered that. It was very romantic, which was his goal. Truly, there was a reason Rena was the best of his friends amongst his fellow club members. Maybe his best friend ever.
"That sounds nice," he said, and Rena beamed.
"Don't worry, Satoshi-kun. I'll make sure she'll love it."
The first time she ever grasped the hilt of the ceremonial hoe, Rika didn't even remember how old she was. It had been decades and decades and eons and centuries since she had been that young. But she still remembered how she had felt in that moment, because she revisited the ghost of that memory every time she held the worn wooden tool.
She'd been intimidated, certainly: no matter the ornamental filigree, the head of the hoe was broad and sharp, and it had to be, in order to cut through dense cotton and cloth. The weight of the cast bronze and the sturdy pole had made her wobble as she tried to lift it, the haft slipping from her baby-soft hands. She had been frightened, both by the slight clatter of such a sacred relic as it fell and the sudden realization of the enormity of the task she was shouldering. This was her responsibility, for now and for ever.
Rika soon grew older, of course, and jaded to the sacred burden of her ancestors –but the weight of that history still lingered, even when she could trace every step of the ritual dance blindfolded and deaf. In a much more practical way, she also still had to practice lifting it every year, in order to train her titchy little body to be able to wield a weapon nearly half her weight and almost exactly her size.
And then, the festival.
Always, the festival.
Rika technically had one year of grace, but it was not graceful at all, was it, to see the sunken-eyed shell of her best friend browsing the stalls, visibly counting the seconds until she could run home and burrow into her brother's protective embrace –and know that that embrace would soon be lost forever. Rika always performed that year's Watanagashi dance briskly, knowing her skill would silence the wagging tongues who saw this as her first offering ever, hoping that her speed would give Satoko some measure of solace.
Her village had a bloody history, and Rika knew well the symbolism behind her dance –the heavy guillotine swing as she plunged her sharp ceremonial hoe blade-first into a hapless futon, the dragging strokes as she pulled it back, raking open the innards. The gestures before and after were much more stylized end ceremonial, but Rika still knew the echoes of what she was doing as she broadcast her hoe at the crowd –as though sleeting off something wet and red and meaty that dangled from its butcher-like blade. She knew everything well enough that she thought she could enact a true Watanagashi, one where instead of cotton mattress it was a writhing victim tied before the altar.
She might only have access to her family's shrine after her father died, and that might only leave two years before June of 1983, but Rika still had decades to delve into all of her family's lore, read all the old scrolls that were still legible. She did, and she had. She knew all too well the nature of the sacrifice that had been overtaken by cleaner, kinder, softer practices.
No longer was this ceremony a desperate form of crude inoculation. Instead it was a ritual to cleanse sins, to forget, to wash away the filth that darkened the minds and hearts of the villagers.
It was ironic, that the filth and sins they so dreaded and despised would be sent drifting down the same slow, lazy current that later ended up pooling in Onigafuchi marsh, where somewhere deep, deep down there was the lingering bones of the Hanyuu. She was entombed with centuries upon centuries of filth and muck and mire from people desperate to cleanse themselves of crime.
Not that anyone knew. Not that anyone cared, for Oyashiro-sama was a god both masculine and fearful. But Rika knew.
That knowledge lent a strange timelessness to her ritual, one even worse than the usual drifting tupor in which Rika lived her days when not playing with the club. In the moments before her performance when she was not surrounded by cooing aunties, she would stand in the same ceremonial garb priestesses and shrine maidens had been wearing for hundreds of years, and she would look at the beams of a temple centuries old, and ready herself to enact a ceremony that was even older.
It got so bad it was a shock, sometimes, to climb up on stage and see villagers with t-shirts and jeans, and Tomitake snapping away with his camera, instead of peasants from the Kamakura period (or even earlier). The movements were the same, and the shrine was the same, and her garb was the same, so how dare the people change, and change so rapidly?
Rika wondered sometimes, privately, if it was some sort of subtle psychic bleedthrough from Hanyuu. Their tastebuds were connected, so why not more?
It didn't really matter. She had rewound the world a hundred times and she still performed the same ritual twice each cycle, once in 1982 and once in 1983, to the cheers and applause of the crowd. She thought of a thousand different things, whether they be plans or musings or glum recollection, her mind wandering everywhere except the stage.
But in the meantime, she danced her dance with a mask of serene indifference, and never put a foot wrong.
Higurashi Month 2026, Day 26: Fairytale Gone Wrong
Prompt archive: AO3
Once upon a time, there was a boy by the name of Satoshi. He was poor in mothers, having only the one ordained by birth, but quite rich in fathers, for he had many by way of his mother's marriages. He had a younger sister, and he loved her very much.
Their family was poor, but they were, if not happy, then at least moderately content. Satoshi was a young boy still, and his days were filled with school and mud and bugs, and the other happy adventures of childhood in a mountain village.
In his tenth year, however, the lords who ruled his land grew greedy and cruel. They planned to drown his village in water and send the people scattering to the four winds, so that they might profit by their absence. Satoshi thought nothing of it, at first –but his parents thought much of it.
For the lords had come with golden promises, telling of vast palaces that they would give to re-home the scattered people, and offering positions of high honor to help the, rebuild their lives. Satoshi's parents, poor but hopeful, looked upon these promises eagerly, as did many of their neighbors who likewise lived in poverty.
The rest of the village rose in an uproar, however, against the lords' demands, and shouted NO with one great voice. Violence, there was, and ranks upon ranks of chanting soldiers in protest, and a dozen eyewitnesses for every deed, to say that no criminal deed had been done.
Satoshi found himself buffeted and bewildered, for as the village howled with one voice, his parents were at the forefront of an urgent whisper that countered it, crying yes. They wished to better their lives and better the lives of those like them, and to that end pleaded against the village's will –and when pleading didn't work, resorted to violent shouting of their own.
It mattered not that his parents were twigs in a flood, or that those they spoke for and with were likewise but a few voices amongst that dreadful solidarity: as the Dam War dragged on, Satoshi's innocent days were torn and trampled and crushed, drowned in the whirlpool of hatred and solidarity raging around him.
From his eleventh year, Satoshi was not welcome in his own village.
From his twelfth year, he was not welcome in his own home.
For even when the dust of the Dam War had settled, his parents had been permanently tarred with the brush of traitors, shunned and hated by all who were not part of their minuscule faction. One day they sought to escape this hatred on the hour when it burned brightest, and that hatred had indeed been extinguished –drowned along with his parents in the icy waters of the river.
It was then that Satoshi and his sister came under the power of their kin –the brother of their father and his wife– and each, in their own way, loathed the children, so that their lives were made a misery. Too, Satoshi was faced with troubles above and below, for rather than standing at his side, his sister cowered behind him, letting him take every blow meant for her instead of standing tall on her own.
So it was with a millstone slung about his neck that Satoshi went about his life, until a kindly doctor took pity upon him and offered succor in the form of sport. Satoshi played with his friends, and grew hale and strong again –after a fashion.
And then, as the year turned towards the fateful festival around which so many hopes and fears were wreathed, a serpent of an idea slithered in through his ear and coiled around his brain. Death was said to stalk enemies of the village on that day, and yet, did the legend not name any details? Was it not possible, perhaps, to act as its agent, and rid himself and his sister of their tormentors?
It was a venomous idea, but one that nonetheless beguiled him, dancing before his eyes and in his mind with each night, whispering more temptations with each new bruise marked upon his flesh. Could he not, just this once, take up arms to defend himself?
That temptation at last bore fruit, and on the night of the Cotton Drifting, Satoshi took up the silvery sword gifted unto him by the kindly doctor, and he slew the monster that tormented him and his sister.
But the curse was more insidious than even he had guessed, and the serpent had its fangs in him, then, dripping more poison into the cracks of his mind with each day that passed. It was not long at all before Satoshi, too, vanished from the sight and knowledge of all men.
…or nearly all.
~*~
The tale is split: a river branching into a thousand rivulets, a thread spun into countless fibers, a jewel with innumerable glimmering facets.
Here is a warning; a second step limping along beside your own, a bloodied exhale washing across the back of your neck. It is the remnants of a boy like yourself –he is a bloodied echo; one who took every precaution you are taking, but still vanished into the maw of the same curse that even now stalks you. Only a few scattered whispers will attest to the fact that he ever even existed.
Here is a ripple –a strange discord in a familiar soul. A friend who never had any cause for anger now spits with venomous hatred upon the strangest of topics, and the thread of disquiet that sparks such unease is spun off the name of Satoshi, woven upon the loom of his family.
Here is a turnabout of thought as that which was once reviled now becomes praiseworthy. The coward who abandoned his family to flee his violent circumstances turns out to be a lie, a willful misunderstanding: he gambled his life upon the salvation of those he held dear, and perished rather than betray them. Another will take up his mantle, and time will tell if that tale, too, becomes a tragedy.
Here is the awful, swallowed-down hurt of a tragic first love: the tale of an exiled princess and her clumsy yet dauntless knight. He won her heart with his nobility, his courage, his gentleness, but then he vanished –stolen away by wicked and selfish schemers, slain by members of her own family to preserve their traditions. She remembers him still, in all her grief and madness, and there is not a day that passes that she does not pine for his memory.
Here lies a boy in white, hands clasped atop his stomach in the way of St. George. He has slain a monstrous beast, and waits for his sister's hour of need to awaken. But he will never do so, for a vine has overgrown his tomb; a parasite eagerly strangling the life from what it clings to and tearing down the walls that make up his shelter. He will meet his end, someday, under the cold scalpels of a white-coated angel.
Here is the last and rarest tale of all, for sometimes –just sometimes– his tomb does not become a prison, and the knight rises from his glass coffin to reunite with his love, the boy fulfills his promise to return to his sister, and the bloodied warning and discord vanish alike into mere could-have-beens.
Sometimes, they are allowed to live happily ever after.
It wasn't very often that Satoshi's parents got takeout food, but today was a very special day: his birthday, in point of fact. He was a whole five years old, and so his father took him to a restaurant in Okinomiya and let him gorge himself upon steamed buns and moon cakes –his mother had to stay home with Satoko, who was too young to be stuck in a cramped loud restaurant like this.
The waitress offered him a fortune cookie at the end of the meal, and even though the crunchy hard shell stuck painfully into his gums, Satoshi liked cracking fortune cookies open, and he liked reading the strange slips of paper inside.
He was a big kid now, so his father didn't have to help him break it open. The fortune wasn't very interesting, though: it was the usual vague, general well-wishing.
An exciting opportunity lies ahead of you.
Even though he was as superstitious as any other small child, Satoshi didn't think very much of it. At his age, life was full of fun new opportunities, and so there was no point in being excited for any one thing in particular.
~*~
"One, two, three, four, five!" chanted their surrounding classmates as Hinako stuck her tongue between her teeth, shifting the complex folds of the paku-paku in obedience to Satoshi's randomly-guessed number. It opened on a series of colors: red, green, blue, and yellow.
"Pick one!" she commanded, glancing up at him. Satoshi frowned, considered, and picked red.
"R-E-D!" the crowd of other school children cheered, counting along with as Hinako shifted it three more times. This time the folded, flower-like origami opened up onto eight folded quadrants, each with a chibified drawing of an animal.
"Pick one."
"Panda," Satoshi decided, and Hinako opened the flap.
"You will have a long rest," she announced, and his classmates cheered or jeered according to their nature.
"C'mon, that's stupid!" Kenji argued, all but elbowing a compliant Satoshi aside. "Of course the panda has a sleepy future –I bet the other animals are rigged too!"
"Why don't you find out?" Hinako challenged him as he sat across from her in Satoshi's recently-vacated chair, and Kenji grinned.
"You're on!"
Satoshi supposed it was a good future, in its own way. After all, there was no way it wouldn't end up being true.
~*~
Satoshi tried not to feel the stares being jabbed into his back, each one sharper and more hostile than a dagger. After all, a blade could only hurt you once in a very thin sort of way: these stares were hateful, ever-renewing, and bored into him with a molten heat that made him want to curl up somewhere and hide just to avoid being set aflame.
But he endured anyway, swallowing and making a point of striding up to the omikuji and dropping a 500-yen coin into the offering box. It was important that he was here, that he was seen faithfully attending Oyashiro-sama's festival. The Hojos may be the village pariahs now, but it was his job, while Satoko went on a trip with their parents to hopefully smooth some things over, to reassure the other villagers that his family hadn't randomly spawned horns or fangs or anything like that.
You never knew. They were hated enough, some people just might believe it.
Ignoring the whispers, Satoshi took his fortune –and then, because his nerves could only stand so much, he quickly retreated to a shadowy place under the trees. Once he was no longer flaunting himself, some of the glares died away, and he could actually read his fortune in something resembling peace.
He smoothed out the strip of paper, and winced. It was a kikkyō imada wakarazu –one of the more nerve-wracking fortunes to get, as whether his ultimate fortune would be good or bad depended on his own actions. Satoshi was terrible at picking the correct actions in any given crisis.
The fortune itself was quite simple, and yet Satoshi felt a strange chill of foreboding as he read it:
Great changes are coming.
~*~
Satoshi had always had an amiable nature, pliant and accepting of the things around him. Perhaps that was why he was so willing to take fortune-telling at face value: there was no reason why some superstitions couldn't be at least a little bit true, right?
Satoko, on the other hand, had scoffed at this sort of thing, saying that all fortunes came true eventually.
In a way, they both ended up being right –though neither ever had a chance to notice and appreciate this fact.
(AN: I appreciate its use in literature, but real-world fortune telling is always bogus: the fortunes are always so vague as to be meaningless.
Also, apparently paku-paku is the Japanese name for the cootie-catcher/paper fortune-teller often used in elementary schools. Omikuji are fortune-telling strips of paper at Shinto and Buddhist temples given out for offering money.)
"We have to practice," Satoshi said solemnly. His sister nodded, her wine-colored eyes aglint with excitement in the dim firefly glow of the evening.
They were sitting –crouching, rather, in her case– out in their backyard, dressed in pajamas with the dew-wet grass feathery against their bare limbs. The ground was still warm from the baked-in heat of the day, but the world had cooled, a little, under the silvery glow of the moon and stars.
Satoshi rummaged in the grass until he found a pebble roughly the size of his pinky fingernail.
"See this?" he said. Satoko's eyes widened as she nodded quickly. "You just throw it, like…"
He gave a vigorous overhand toss –then flushed as the pebble clattered off the side of their house, rather than skittering up over the roof.
"Muu…" he hummed embarrassedly as Satoko giggled. "Well, you see… that's why we have to practice."
"Okay, Ni-Ni!" she chirped, unfurling. Her usual beaming smile had a gap on the lower edge where she had lost her tooth –currently ensconced safely in Satoshi's breast pocket. His four-year-old sister slapped the grass with more enthusiasm than skill, raking her hands through it in search of an appropriately tiny pebble.
"Hah!"
Satoko found one and held it up with an excited cry, looking to him for approval. Satoshi smiled and nodded.
"Good job," he said. "Now try to throw it."
Insult to injury, his hyperactive baby sister very nearly managed to throw her pebble as high as he did his, even with her shorter limbs. Granted, Satoko wound it back like a baseball player and hurled it with a mighty cry, but still. Ouch.
He handed her another pebble, which Satoko took with a squint before throwing it again, with a louder cry. Satoshi pitched in too, chucking a pebble of his own as he tried to make it over the roof. He didn't want Satoko to work herself into a tantrum, and the best way to do that was to play this "game" alongside her until one of them won.
Preferably her.
Actually, it was going to be her. If Satoshi did make it over, he was going to play dumb and insist he hadn't –it would be easy to trick a four-year-old and say his pebble had dropped rather than flown. The whole point of this was for Satoko to do it, not him.
They hadn't woken their parents up for this. Satoshi had thought they were awake, when Satoko had come bounding into his room and shaken him into consciousness, gleefully announcing her lost tooth. Her gum had still been a little bloody when she'd pulled her lip down to show him, bouncing in place with excitement.
Satoshi had let her grab him by the hand and drag him outside, and only when he'd been hauled out into the backyard, green and glowing under the oppressive summer moon, had he realized that she'd bypassed their parents entirely –and by that point it was too late. To go back inside and wake them up for this momentous childhood occasion, Satoshi would have to detangle himself from his excited sister, and that would be impossible.
It would also, not to put too fine a point on it, cause a temper tantrum for sure.
So he had sighed and mentally apologized to his mother, promising that the next tooth Satoko lost, they would dispose of as a family. Hopefully next time they would have better aim, too; he and Satoko were not doing a very good job of tossing the pebbles up onto the roof.
He was a little worried that he wouldn't remember; it had been a while since he'd lost a tooth of his own, and this was more than a bit past his bedtime. Teeth from the bottom jaw went onto the roof, teeth from the upper jaw went under the porch, right? That was how it went?
His tongue probed his mouth as he tossed another pebble, which tinked off the gutter. Yes, top jaw to the porch, bottom jaw to the roof. They were teaching the new teeth how to grow, after all.
So he and Satoko searched the grass for pebbles and threw them up, practicing their aim until Satoko would be able to take her tooth from him and throw it up, perfectly, and plant her tooth on their roof with her first try.
(AN: Apparently, unlike the Western tradition of a tooth fairy, the Japanese ritual for childhood lost teeth is throwing them under the porch or over the roof, which shows the next tooth which direction it should grow in.)
Dying is like having a blindfold ripped off, oddly enough.
Satoshi doesn't mean this in the sense of grand epiphanies or cosmic truths: he simply can perceive better, think clearly, when it felt like his brain had been slogging through dark mud for months. The first breath he takes after he breathes his last –after Auntie shoves him and he falls and hits his head on the corner of a stone just wrong– feels like it goes all the way through his very soul, clearing out cobwebs and tidying up the jumbled mess of his memories.
Oh, wow.
Satoshi looks down at his body and is unable to suppress a wince as Auntie screams and hits him again. He doesn't feel the recovered bat slamming into his limbs, but that body had been his home for as long as he can remember, and seeing her bludgeon it is… uncomfortable. He gives a full-body flinch when she shatters his arm; there are bruises shadowed beneath from earlier beatings, and he rubs his wrists in aching recollection.
This isn't fair. This isn't fair; he worked so hard to lure her out here, to leave Satoko in good hands, and now just because he tripped and died, she's going to get away with everything…
Oh. Satoshi blinks again.
Maybe she won't get away with it. Auntie and Uncle never liked doing work, did they? And it was the night of the Cotton Drifting, so Detective Oishi would be all over the case.
Satoshi, paradoxically, felt much better as his aunt increasingly lost her composure, beating his long-dead corpse over and over with the bat he had intended to kill her with. Detective Oisihi would sort this out in no time flat.
~*~
Satoshi rubs his nose and sighs as he looks at what's left of his corpse. Auntie didn't do a lot of work in hiding it, true, but that's only because she shoved it off the edge of a ravine. A week of June sunshine and humidity –plus exposure to every insect and scavenger in the animal kingdom– is doing Satoshi's earthly remains no favors at all. At this point, he's just glad he no longer has any sense of smell.
He's not sure if Auntie has gotten away with it or not: Detective Oishi had police dogs roaming the woods looking for Satoshi's body, but nobody had gotten this far nor, quite frankly, would have been able to rappel down to find his corpse if they had.
He sighs.
Auntie has also disappeared, and people are already whispering about the curse. Uncle skipped town to go live with his mistress –good riddance– and Satoko has been left alone at last, but this isn't exactly the way Satoshi wanted that to happen.
There's some esoteric debate too, amusingly enough, on who was killed and who disappeared between him and Auntie. As far as Satoshi can tell from his occasional eavesdropping, Detective Oishi is almost sure his aunt was responsible for killing him, but he couldn't get any hard evidence before she disappeared.
Satoshi wonders if, as a spirit, he should start being a bit more… vengeful. Desiring justice for his murder and all that.
Assuming that Auntie is also dead, though, as per the usual curse formula, he's not really sure who he'd be vengeful against. Detective Oishi, maybe, for botching up Satoshi's case? But he'd done everything he could, and it wasn't his fault the prime suspect inexplicably disappeared. Uncle? But he's moved outside Hinamizawa, and however far Satoshi's ghostly tether stretched, he knew it definitely wasn't up to crossing prefectures.
On the whole, it probably wasn't a good idea to try and be too bitter. Malicious ghosts attracted bad karma.
~*~
Satoshi spends most of his time beside his body: call it a sentimental attachment or a supernatural bond, but he feels uncomfortable if he gets too far away from it.
So he is left to watch glumly as the days render him a skeletal mess, scavengers picking his bones clean and maggots liquefying what tissue remains. Seeing the scraps of his old clothes clinging to his skeleton is oddly mundane; Satoshi can still recognize his old shirt, see the broken fragments of his watch looped delicately around his decaying, snapped wrist. It's bizarrely comforting sometimes, and just melancholic at others.
He says hello to the occasional squirrel or chipmunk, though they don't seem to notice him, watches bugs crawl up and down the rocky walls, and just generally sits with his arms around his knees and his back to the cliff face, letting the constant humming buzz of the summer cicadas fill his ears with white noise.
It's hard to track the passage of time without a proper calendar or a reason to mark the days, but he knows it isn't too terribly long before he hears footsteps near the top of the ravine. The nights are still short, the leaves green, the air warm and sultry: it's not even autumn yet, so it had to be less than two months. It might even be less than one.
It's been more than a week, he knows that. He's not that bad at keeping time yet… probably.
The footsteps are dashing quickly over the ground, and Satoshi is drawn to his feet without thinking about it, some fourteen years of instinct shrieking at the idea of letting someone wander over the edge of the cliff he hears them so rapidly approaching.
He's spared trying to think of what on earth he could do to stop the unfortunate person from plummeting to their death when they plummet over the edge anyway with a shriek. Satoshi winces, but he is at least spared a fellow ghost: the person tumbling down the nearly-sheer wall of the cliff is fighting with every shrub, bush, and tuft of grass on the way –clutching, clinging, clawing for purchase. Bracken rustles and branches crack as they fight the forest the whole way down, leaves scattering like confetti, and the figure wins enough that when they crash to the ground a few meters away from Satoshi's sad corpse, they're still alive.
Satoshi blinks in astonishment as the dust and torn leaves start to settle atop the sprawled body.
He knows her.
It's one of the Sonozaki twins –her hair is loose, so he thinks it's Shion. But what a contrast from the polished, viper-pretty Shion-san he had known before!
Brambles and leaves are twisted through her dirty, mussed-up hair; her nails are torn, ragged and bloody from fighting the cliff; her bare arms are covered with mud and scratches; her clothes are torn; one of her legs is twisted awkwardly beneath her; and she is weeping disconsolately, with loud, ugly, racking sobs that shake her whole body.
"Shion-san…" Satoshi begins helplessly, before he crouches down and pats her head. His ghostly touch doesn't stir a single hair, but it's all he can do for her now, other than witness her pain. "Muu… it's okay…"
She cries louder, shoulders heaving. Eventually, her sobbing builds up into a howl of rage, and she fists both bloodied, broken-nailed hands and slams them into the dirt and leaf litter.
"Damn it, damn it, damn it!" she snarls, pounding her already-battered hands against the ground. "Damn you –both of you! Damn you all to hell!"
She punches the ground harder, like it can carry her rage and pain to the unknown offenders. Then she breaks into fresh sobs, her head dipping as her snarled hair drags against the disturbed earth.
"Satoshi-kun…" she weeps, and he freezes mid-pat. "I'm sorry… I tried so hard… I'm sorry…"
"Shion-san?" he asks, bewildered. She doesn't appear to hear him, and soon her crying turns the corner again into a fresh spasm of rage.
"Damn that Rena!" Shion chokes, and he blinks, baffled. "Why did she have to interfere… why did she have to go poking around?!"
Shion's head suddenly jerks upwards, and Satoshi flinches back, unnerved by the lack of focus and oddly feral intensity in her bright greenish eyes.
"It's all that Rena's fault…" she hisses, and suddenly she reminds him of a stray cat, all dirt and claws and violence wrapped up in a pair of feverish flickering eyes. "She did this… she put that damn bastard Oishi on my trail…"
Her hands curl into the dirt, and tears well up in her eyes again.
"Why… why…" Shion chokes, bowing her head a little. "Why did she have to interfere… didn't she care about Satoshi-kin too…?"
The aforementioned Satoshi, who is now slightly less than nose-to-nose with Shion, scratches his head in confusion as Shion devolves into weird mutterings again.
"No, that's it… that has to be it… she wants Satoshi-kun for herself… he entrusted Satoko-chan to me… his sister… his precious sister… she wants to steal that from me… she wants to be the one he trusts most, she wants to get me out of the way… that bitch… that traitorous bitch… I should have done it to her, I should have pulled her nails out one by one…"
"Shion-san," Satoshi says again, and it must surely be impossible for her to hear him –she hasn't at all thus far– and yet, somehow, her head jerks up again and their eyes meet. Satoshi blinks, stunned and a little intimidated by the shock, awe, and desperate tears welling up in her eyes again. "Er, Shion-san?"
"Satoshi-kun," she gasps, and it's only when she makes to move through him that Satoshi realizes she isn't looking directly at him: she's looking past him, at the sad remains of his body.
He winces.
"Satoshi-kun!" Shion sobs, trying to rise, except her definitely-broken leg undos her. She crumples to the ground again, but her crying seems more emotional than pained as she crawls desperately to reach him. Satoshi invents an entirely new level of cringe as he steps aside and she flounders through what's left of his corpse, wrapping his skull in her arms and cradling it close to her heart, rocking in place and sobbing his name over and over again.
That is so unsanitary.
Maybe this is a perspective gap: Satoshi has spent at least a week watching his flesh melt off his bones and become the breeding-ground for thousands of grubs and insects and maggots and who knew what else, whereas Shion has only now discovered what is technically clean bone, washed by the rain. It's probably not as gross for her.
And Shion's hardly in a stable mental state right now.
"I found you," she sobs, running her hand over the skull as though she's stroking his hair. "I found you, Satoshi-kun, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry…"
He gives a helpless little shrug, stuffing his hands in his ethereal pockets.
"I'm sure you did your best, Shion-san?" he offers, wondering if he should be more weirded-out by this. He supposes he appreciates how much she clearly cared about what happened to him, but…
Look, he's dead, so it's fine for him to be in a ravine with multiple shattered bones, but Shion is still stubbornly, messily alive, and he would feel really bad if that changed because of how she was obsessing over what was left of him.
His cheeks flush as Shion kisses his bare skull. It's on the top of the head, but still. His first kiss from a girl, and it's like this…
"It's okay, I took care of all of it for you," Shion sniffles, still curled protectively over his skull as she whispers to him. "She's dead; she can't touch you or your sister ever, ever again. I fixed her for you… I made sure it hurt, I made sure she hurt as much as everything she did to you…"
Satoshi's jaw drops as Shion goes on to explain how she was behind Auntie's disappearance –that the Sonozakis did, in fact, have a basement full of torture implements, and Shion had made absolutely sure all of them were functional. By stress-testing them on Auntie, mostly.
"But that Rena interfered," Shion grumbles, adjusting herself a little so she can curl up more comfortably beside his corpse. "I'm sure she told Oishi where to look… that meddling old bastard… why couldn't he just leave it alone?!"
She snarls, then huffs and cuddles closer to what's left of Satoshi. He's quite glad he is not actually housed in his body, considering how tightly his skull is pressed against her bosom right now. Having his face buried in her cleavage like this would be quite indecent.
"So now I'm on the run, I guess…" Shion tells him, and gives a watery sniffle. "Oni-Baba will probably delay the police for a bit, but not for long… I'm not really a member of the family, after all… they all hate me…"
She tilts his skull back to look into his eye sockets and give a tremulous smile, not made much better by her teary eyes.
"You'll let me stay here, won't you, Satoshi-kun?" she asks. "Then… maybe they'll find me… but maybe not? And we can be together, right? I-I'd like that."
Satoshi isn't sure if he likes that idea –but he has no way to voice his opinion to Shion, and so he merely sighs as she curls around his skull again, restlessly petting it as tears run down her face.
In the distance, police dogs start barking in the woods.
(AN: Spiritually, this is a sequel to Day 9 in 2022, where Satoshi fails to kill his aunt, gets killed in turn, and Shion subsequently snaps like a rubber band. The continuity's a bit fucky, since Irie explicitly tells Shion that Satoshi's body was recovered and autopsied in that one, but meh. This is Higurashi. There's nothing weird about the same thing happening again but just a little bit to the left.)
For all her desperate searching for a better future, Rika lived in a constant state of now. Spangled with the glittering radiance of a thousand failed fragments, she teetered on the tightrope walk of fate, wobbling, wavering, heart in her mouth, palms sweaty around her instrument of choice. To go back was impossible: she could only continue, step by faltering step, towards the future.
But she could not keep her eyes on it. She could only focus on now: now, when the slightest error meant a thundering crash and a plunge into icy darkness. She had no room to think of the future and no focus to spare on the past.
In that sense, her life was like a game of telephone. Here, Rika put her foot forward: but it landed wrong, or the wire was greased, or some other fucking thing, and down she crashed. That Rika died, but her memories continued, weaving another phantasmal acrobat that would catch up with the real one in a sudden blaze of understanding. Rika before her rewinds was limbering up backstage: at that moment, though, the spotlight snapped to her, and she had to climb the precarious ladder and start her graceful-awkward shuffle onwards into oblivion, again.
Again.
And again.
And once more.
She wanted to stop, but where to stop? On the tightrope, knowing that the net beneath her was the blank chill of an open grave, a death she would never climb out of, and that a section up ahead was wire-thin and slick with oil? As she was falling, a swan caught in the endless trembling terror of her final note, radiant and beautiful in the utter finality of her end? When the jaws of the grave snapped tight around her, sealing her in the fate she had escaped oh so long ago?
Or when she rewound, and looked back up at her immortal journey, her never-ending performance, and thought: please, not again.
No, she could not stop. There was no place for it in this performance.
Perhaps another person in her situation might be able to split herself apart, to think of before and after and during and then, but Rika couldn't. It was always her, always just her, a ghostly presence in the audience that would shout here! here! in warning when the acrobat was about to take a fatal step. A remembrance of what happened the last time she made that move.
Believing in past selves she had supplanted would be comforting, though. It would give her the illusion that she was not one actress struggling alone, but a part of a larger whole, of a great troupe of acrobats dancing their way through time. Her warnings would not be deja vu, but a call from ahead and behind, a notice that this step would be tricky, keep going, you've almost made it. Encouragement. Support. Things she was badly lacking.
Instead, though, Rika merely rewound. She was a clockwork mechanism –oh, how she hated clocks– rather than a copy of a copy of a copy of the original Rika, who had died. There was no one to repair her when she broke down but herself, and whenever that happened, her only recourse was to use Hanyuu's power as the key and wind, wind, wind herself back to the beginning, when she was whole and undamaged and so damnably young.
And then she would look at the tightrope, and start again.
The air was green –not the grey-green of an approaching storm, but the green-gold of a sultry summer afternoon by the stream, filled with the emerald glow of sunlit oak canopies and the deep glittering green of the water. If not for the exuberance of the laughing and shouting children splashing here and there among the time-smoothed rocks, kicking up ribbons of froth and fountains of bubbles, the surface would be placid and still, a glassy ribbon winding its way through the mountains.
Despite the piercing quality of his friends' joyful shrieks, Satoshi –tucked securely under an incongruous striped umbrella that had been wedged firmly into the riverbank– was lizard-eyed and drowsy. He'd had his fun thrashing about in the deep water like the others, but he had yet to regain his full stamina, and so it was that, bare-chested and streaming with water, he had retreated before any of the others to catch his breath.
The velvety duvet of the air pressed down on his exposed skin, but lazing underneath the shade as he was, that heat was pleasant rather than oppressive, a soporific addition to the support of the towel laid over the sand beneath him. It created quite a comfortable bed, to be honest, and Satoshi had long since given in to temptation, resting his chin on his folded arms and laying on his stomach as he watched his friends play and splash about through half-shut eyes.
The buzzing, clattering hiss of a thousand types of bug rose in the steamy air around him, signaling that every inch of the forest was not just teeming but overflowing with life, pulsing and vibrant. Satoshi could see a number of them now, if he cared to raise his eyes; the jeweled wisps of dragonflies darting about above the water, and the papery flutter of moths and butterflies even higher than that, dancing inquisitively through the canopy. Gnats and flies innumerable plagued the algae and scum-filled crevices of the rocky riverbank, but Satoshi wasn't looking too hard at those.
He thought the bugspray laced through his sunscreen was a sufficient guard against them –but apparently not, as he felt an insectile tickle over his lower back a few moments after that their. Teeny tiny legs paraded down his spine for a few inches, then there was a puff of air against his damn skin and the culprit was gone. Another landed on him a half-moment later, but when Satoshi twisted to brush it off, he saw a cobalt blue streak dart past him, faceted wings whirring.
A dragonfly, then, not a normal fly.
He supposed that was alright. Maybe there was something in the chemicals that smelled good to them, or maybe they were just curious.
Whatever the case, as his eyelids drooped further and he listened to the happy shouts of his friends amid the green-gold afternoon, he felt more wispy tracks prickle over his back and sides, like the tiniest and lightest massage in the world as the occasional dragonfly landed, explored, then took off again without a care.
He was happy here, like this. Despite –or perhaps because of– the persistent drowsiness, Satoshi felt warm and content, easily capable of just… staying like this forever. No pressure, no demands, no worry. Everything was completely and totally okay. Everything would stay that way, too, with no involvement or effort from him.
Everything was fine.
Everything was perfect.
And, as he saw quite clearly amidst the splashing and joyful shrieks, everyone he loved was happy.
Rika hummed a few notes in her throat, letting them climb and swoop along with the idle traces of her pencil across the page. She frowned a moment, then hummed the same passage again, shifting to a different key –and nodded in satisfaction, setting the tip of her pencil to the paper with actual purpose this time and pressing down as she sketched out the corresponding swirls and staves of another few notes.
Composition was not her greatest talent, but musical skill was a requirement at St. Lucia's, and if she wished to pass with her usual grace, she had best make a good attempt. Knowing this, Rika had spent quite some time preparing for her final year, in which she was expected to compose and perform her own song before her peers.
It was a holdover from her not-quite-younger years, when time had been a blurred record, swirling and repeating over and over again –with the occasional unpredictable needle-jump that forced her to veer off-course. Rika had been able to prepare for things because she knew they were coming, and the more she prepared, the more easily she could face them.
It was thus that, when she and Satoko went to St. Lucia's, one of the first things Rika had done after receiving an acceptance letter was to read through the syllabus –the entire syllabus, for every year and every class. She did not plan on taking all or even most of them, but she had filled one of her composition notebooks with loose plans for each, and been satisfied.
Rika already had experience with the four arts of a classical scholar, just by virtue of being raised as the Furude shrine maiden –her parents had drilled calligraphy into her since she was old enough to hold a brush, for example, and she had been given as thorough a grounding in painting as could be achieved in rural Hinamizawa. She and Satoko might have a somewhat unconventional grasp of Go, but all those afternoons playing with the club had ensured that either one of them could beat the pants off their classmates.
It was the last of the four arts that Rika had known she would have trouble with, for in all her years of looping time, of mindlessly practicing her calligraphy, of digging into her family's ancient manuscripts until she could recite them all by heart, she had never had the time or the opportunity to practice music. She'd pit herself against any calligraphy master in the world and expect to at least put up a fair fight, but when it came to playing or composing, she was scarcely better than her fellow classmates tootling along on shrill recorders.
Rika had therefore known exactly which problem to target, when she looked at St. Lucia's curriculum looming before her, and had metaphorically rolled up her sleeves and dove straight into the musical courses the moment she enrolled. She knew every form of Japanese calligraphy perfectly and could even do some oracle bone and seal script in Chinese, thanks to the more ancient scrolls in her family's keeping: she only paid enough attention in those classes to know what she was supposed to do before executing it flawlessly.
Too, all those long decades of practice had locked in a muscle-memory that made her brushstroke sharp and sure as a razor: there was a barely-perceptible learning curve when she'd started painting, and then her work was the talk of the art room. Rika had the technique and the tools: she just needed the lecture on style and history to make her talent blossom.
But music…
She had poured a not-inconsiderable amount of time and effort in learning music, as she had not had to do with any subject or lesson for quite some time. With most of the courses in St. Lucia's, Rika at least knew a few of the foundational aspects, if not the whole subject: music was almost entirely new.
But she was now, after some years, a modestly-successful musician. She did not play with the heart or the soul of a truly invested performer, but she was competent enough to play several instruments acceptably, and that was all that mattered.
That and the song, which she must now compose.
Rika hummed a few more bars, testing out the melody, as her eyes glanced over what she had already written. A precise series of notes stippled the elegant lines of the blank page of sheet music she had been drawing on: no erased smudges or crossed-out lines for her. She'd been tossing around concepts for this song in the back of her mind for years, and a thousand –or at least several dozen– cramped and clumsy practice pages had gone before it.
Whether the melody or the lyrics came first had been of lesser importance than getting either right, and many a composition notebook had had little couplets doodled into the margins, a few poetic staves that Rika thought worth remembering or trying. If a song she composed was to be any good at all, she had been told long ago, then it needed to have meaning for her, and there was one thing that had always meant more to Rika than anything else in the world.
She cleared her throat, and sang her first attempt at the chorus:
Break away, escape
Break away, escape
From this path that we've made
And this wicked fate
I still believe
That you can't be a flower of hell…
(AN: I took the lyrics from AmaLee's English dub, but the song Rika's composing is Flower of Hell, aka the opening for Higurashi's second season.
With the usual I'm-American-so-what-would-I-know caveat, the four arts are a Chinese invention, conventionally considered the mark of a true scholarly noble, which later spread to other parts of Asia. The four categories are mastery of the guqin (stringed instrument), calligraphy, painting, and Go/weiqi (game similar to chess). Calligraphy has multiple scripts with distinct rules/conventions/styles: oracle bone script is the oldest form of written Chinese, once used to record prophecies and divinations.)
Keiichi had starling wings –dark brown plumage tipped with white, so that when they were folded down against his back the cascade of feathers looked like a spangled star chart –or, as Mion joked in her less flattering moments, a half-plucked porcupine. He tended to fly with a distinct sense of purpose, plowing through the air on a direct path to his target.
He had a starling's curiosity, too, always willing to stick his nose in something if it might prove interesting. His vocal talents had earned him his moniker as Magician of the Mouth, but it was for charisma, not mere mimicry and chatter, as some of the other club members sometimes joked.
He was loyal to his friends and always ready to leap to their defense, if necessary, and his shorter wings facilitated that, allowing him to dart in and weave nimbly between other bodies on his way. Keiichi was always perched high, always looking, always reaching in a way his friends weren't, and the smog-free skies of Hinamizawa were pure revelation compared to his drab, isolated city-life of before.
~*~
The Sonozakis had been very, very pleased when Mion and her sister had molted their downy chick fluff for the first time –up until then, no one had been quite sure of what sort of wings the two of them would have. The family could make some educated guesses, based off of past members and the approximate shape of the downy wings themselves, but until their first pinfeathers had started cropping up, it hadn't at all been a certain thing.
Their first molt also, incidentally, proved that they were truly identical twins: both Mion and her sister had the soaring, pearlescent wings of a crane –and not just any crane, but the tanchōzuru, one of the most auspicious birds to exist. Snowy-white at the primaries, a dignified grey at the secondaries: everyone had made much of them and this good sign of the family's divine favor. It was one of the rare occasions when both twins had been equally congratulated, and Mion and her sister had preened, pleased, under all the attention.
As she'd gotten older, though, and… certain events had happened, Mion had become somewhat jaded by her own wings. Other girls had rich, fascinating, jewel-bright plumage, and while her wings were impressive, certainly, it was not at all rare or interesting or unique to have monochrome feathers. They were heavy with auspicious symbolism, of course, but… what if they looked boring? What if they weren't all that special in the way that really mattered?
~*~
Shion had mixed feelings on her wings. On the one hand, after… after the switch, her wings had been the one part of her the rest of the family hadn't completely despised –but on the other hand, her wings were a marker of all the arbitrary rules and regulations and values that she hated from that selfsame family. So she had crane wings, so what? Because it was an auspicious, traditional, venerated bird, she should be treated differently?
People's wings had nothing to do with personality –or if they did, it was because other people spent their whole lives telling that person that since they had this sort of wing, they should be acting in this sort of way. Shion hated those expectations with a fierce and enduring passion, and it only got worse once she was sent to St. Lucia's. There, she was surrounded by spoiled brats who puffed and preened and honked about how special and symbolic their wings were, sneering down their precious little noses at anyone who dared to be born mundane.
Like anyone cared. Like it mattered. Shion was safe from their sneers –at least in that respect– but it galled her to see some haughty ojou-sama with dainty hummingbird wings mocking another girl for having the plumage of a cardinal, for being a common songbird, when the former could barely fly at all thanks to the disparity in metabolism between herself and her own wings. Or swan-girls giggling behind their hands at a snowy-goose girl, when taxonomically the two birds were almost identical and only popular culture said otherwise.
~*~
Rena's wings were those of an albatross– vast, pure shimmering white with a few black flecks crisping the edges, long enough to span a room if she stretched them out to their full extent. They were the largest and longest of anyone in the club, and often the first thing people noticed when they saw her. Angelic, people would say, looking with admiration upon her splendid white plumage, the exaggerated size of her wings.
Rena knew better. Her wings were markers of guilt: for all her supposedly ethereal white plumage, there was that stubborn black fringe that clung to her wingtips and the bottom edge of her primaries and secondaries that most people ignored, a sooty reminder of the filthiness that lurked deep within her soul. She'd pulled out those horrible stains when she'd realized, until the orderlies had been forced to sedate her as she sat, weeping, on the hospital floor with two fistfuls of bloodied feathers.
And the fact that they came from an albatross of all creatures… did people not know their literature? Instead of the cross, the Albatross/About my neck was hung. The corpse slung about the Mariner's neck was a sign of guilt, of his sin, of how he had shot the salvation meant for him and his crew. And people called her wings good, and innocent, and angelic?
How little they knew.
~*~
Satoshi was in a similar boat to Rena, though not nearly so fraught: he simply had seabird wings as well, with the long, thin, silvery-grey feathers of a pelican. He, too, had black-tipped primaries, but his wings were much shorter and heavier –not clumsy, but sturdy. After all, the bird with whom he shared these wings was used to taking off with a heavy beak full of fish. He didn't mind the extra strength and endurance they gave him: Satoshi, poor boy, was often in need of it.
The closest he had ever come to feeling uneasy about his wings or the symbolism attached to them was one time after Doctor Irie had invited him onto the team. Satoshi had skidded onto a base more harshly than usual and needed to brake with his wings, beating them hard enough to shake a bit of down loose. Coach had looked startled, but hadn't said anything until later, until Satoko had come to… pick him up. Be picked up. Whatever.
Coach had looked at her small hand in his, and looked at Satoshi, and those kindly eyes of his had shadowed a little as he murmured "Ah. Pelican." as though that explained something –something sad. Satoshi hadn't been brave enough to ask, and Satoko had half-hidden behind his hip and beneath the shelter of his wing to glare at Coach, and so the incident had passed without comment.
But Satoshi still remembered it sometimes, and wondered, and worried.
~*~
Satoko had always viewed her wings as a hinderance and a nuisance, even when she had been too young to understand what they might mean to those who saw them. Unlike the heavy, sheltering wings of her brother, hers were nothing much –bright yellow undersides dappled by broad dark brown streaks– and of no particularly notable size, neither too big nor too small.
But she hated combing them and grooming them and fluffing up her feathers –her family was always conservative with their oil and increasingly as she grew older, she had to use vegetable oil from the kitchen to properly preen. It made her plumage feel heavy and greasy, and that combined with all her usual adventures running and jumping and climbing through the dirty woods of Hinamizawa often had her wings shockingly bedraggled.
And then when she'd got older, and Satoshi was gone, she learned about what kind of bird she shared her wings with, and she hated them more than ever. A cuckoo weaver –a nest parasite– alone in the house that had emptied of all her family. Satoko despised those canary-bright wings that fluttered at her back, markers of the kind of person –the kind of parasite– she was, who took everything from her family until there was nothing left but herself.
~*~
People were often surprised by Rika's wings when they met her for the first time. Powder-blue wings with delicate fawn undersides were not precisely drab, but it was hardly considered worthy of Oyashiro-sama's reincarnation, of the shrine maiden whose Furude family had watched over the village for so many generations.
Her father had had glistening black crow wings, often approvingly compared to a Karasu-Tengu. Her mother's plumage had been a beautiful deep cobalt blue –magpie wings, true, but the long-tailed mountain lady was sacred in at least three cultures, so that was alright, and certainly permissible for her to marry into the Furude family. Rika had inherited her corvid wings from both parents, but compared to their illustrious symbolism and storied heritage, hers had always been seen as somewhat… lacking.
Of course, Rika knew better. Magpies were great collectors, and although her collection was not precisely tangible, it certainly fit her to a tee. Thousands of shimmering crystalline fragments spun around her in the awful, gaping maw of uncertain time, a nest woven of broken possibilities and twisted knots of time. She hated to enlarge it, longed to lose her bejeweled collection, and was only too happy to smile upon those who commented on how unsuited she was to the bird whose feathers she shared.
~*~
Hanyuu had peacock wings –or, to be more precisely pedantic, peahen wings. Her plumage was an iridescent emerald shimmer melting into sapphire blue, tipped with white-barred greyish secondary feathers at the end of her wings. Regal, one might think, until one saw her flapping about in a panic behind Rika's shoulder. Despite the fact that she did not need her wings to hover, Hanyuu could squawk and flail like the best of them whenever Rika ruffled her composure –which was often.
There seemed to be no true connection between Hanyuu and her wings –but then again, the way Hanyuu looked was quite different from how she was. The dread god Oyashiro-sama manifested as a quivering, timid young girl: it was no real surprise, then, that her wings were equally-uninspiring. Nothing like her statues, which depicted a looming bronzed figure with vast crane wings, sacred and awe-inspiring.
Rika… almost saw different, sometimes. In all her centuries of repeated years, there were a handful of times –no more than a handful– when Hanyuu… became something like she was. Her flustering would smooth over, her shoulders would pull back, her chin would lift, the polished regality of a goddess sleeting over her timid figure. A flat red spark would glow within her stony eyes, and as her wings spread in benediction or threat, Rika could swear that there was something more in that iridescent shimmer, a sense of celestial weight matched by the starry glimmer caught along their edges.
(AN: Rena is referencing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1834. Pelicans were also historically thought to nourish their young with their blood by stabbing themselves in the chest with their beak, the relevance of which to Satoshi and Satoko’s whole situation I couldn’t possibly fathom. Karasu-Tengu (crow tengu) are a subtype of tengu, powerful yokai that can serve as guardian spirits: Rika's wings are based off the azure-winged magpie.)
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