Death and the Maiden | Miyu | Chapter 4
[ TW: Mention of bisection ]
By now, some of the students were surely growing used to this part of the cycle. A brief moment of respite from their pain would be offered, the festivities allowing everyone to spend just one day acting like the teenagers they were: Kids on a fun trip to another campus, taking part in another school’s traditions and studies. For just one day, they could forget about all the suffering that had brought them to this point.
Alas, the school wasn’t ready to let them have one full, uninterrupted day of peace. The trivia booth kept everyone on their guard, luring people in with promises of information and prizes, and then slamming them with invasive questions and horrific reminders. Death and betrayal were a recurring theme – and how could they not be, after the class had lost four students in only seventy-two hours? After just three students had undone weeks of progress and trust for everyone else?
It didn’t help that the trivia alerts showed two familiar students interacting with the games. Maybe it would have been more of a shock had the trial not featured testimony from beyond the grave, but this still presented several questions, such as: Were the other late students wandering about as spirits? Were ghosts able to interact with any of the festivities in a physically-inclined event? And…
And who the fuck invited her?
Rewind. Miyu awakened as a ghost all alone, walked herself up the stairs all alone, and wandered into the woods all alone. And she had avoided the castle ever since, only returning to check in on her belongings, or returning because the outdoors were off-limits as the festival was prepared.
Her exile was almost entirely self-imposed. Miyu Suzuki had convinced herself that she was no longer welcome among the class. And certainly, there hadn’t been any evidence disproving that. Even most of her clanmates averted their eyes or spoke awkwardly around her, during that brief time that she visited to exchange information for help moving out. Few people were happy to see her again, and they were preoccupied with nurturing and repairing their relationships with their other friends. Living friends.
Listless days melded into sleepless nights and back, and Miyu’s perceptions of herself and the world around her suffered for it. Her tactile sense was greatly diminished now that she couldn’t grasp most objects, and though she had never been a physically affectionate person, something about the way Mi-ke stared at her so tearfully when they realized they couldn’t even hug her had troubled her.
She was lesser than the others, now, in every aspect of the world. All of the wealth and status that Miyu had grown up in meant nothing so far removed from home – and if the fate of the odd ghost boy she had met had taught her anything, it was that she could be here for almost a century and still never see her home again.
Socially, she was a pariah, just as she had been in her old school in the months between her father’s arrest and her departure for Hope’s Peak. In those days, Miyu had convinced herself that she didn’t need to have friends in order to thrive; only now when it was too late did she realize what a lonely existence she had lived.
She was a phantom, some translucent echo of her former self that couldn’t even pick up a book without assistance from the living. Every little thing Miyu had taken for granted was suddenly gone, including her old standbys she used to cope whenever her hands ached with a need to create and destroy.
Would it have been better or worse if she had become an onryō, trading her identity for the ability to rend flesh and shake the earth?
Fast forward. The Labyrinth, somehow, had found a way to drag Miyu down even lower.
She had been split away from her clan, on the opposite side from them. They spoke worries for her safety, but the Labyrinth crept into her head and made her remember their scorn instead. Instead of help, she heard threats. She lashed out with a feint, trying to goad them into attacking her so she could justify her actions as self-defense, trying to justify her belief that she was so hated that everyone wanted to watch her die.
Miyu miscalculated, and the palette knife skid off the empty space of the painting and into a clanmate’s chest.
In hindsight, there was only one outcome this entire misadventure could have had: With Miyu on the other end of a knife, her portrait torn apart with a single strike, her blood flooding the opposite room completely and putting an end to the farce.
The most curious thing happened in the aftermath, however: The other Genbu students tried to clear up the misunderstandings that had been brewing for days. Miyu hadn’t been forgiven for what she did in the trial, of course. But that didn’t mean that she needed to be punished again and again. She was still a part of the Genbu clan, and if she still wished to contribute to their investigations or even just their lazy days together, there would still be a place reserved for her.
It wasn’t enough to pull Miyu out of the spiral. The Labyrinth had broken her in half, physically and psychologically. She still wasn’t ready to move back into the dorm again, and thus she returned to her hidden home in the Quidditch stadium, huddled sleeplessly with no outlet for her thoughts and emotions to bleed out of. They turned inwards and imploded, and it was in this state that her partners-in-crime found her.
Not her partners: Her siblings. In life, she had been a distant older sister to Tomohiko. In death, perhaps she could try again and be a better sister to Kris and Mi-ke… Even if so far it had been all about them trying to console her and keep her safe as she led them back into the Labyrinth. Their kind words and distractions had helped get her talking again, but distractions were just that, and once the day was done and they all had to part, it was back to sulking in the stadium.
No one could fix all of Miyu’s problems just by talking her out of self-defeating thoughts. At the end of the day, she was still stuck in a low period.
What all of them could do, however, was stop her from falling any further. It was still up to Miyu to carry the weight of responsibility and drag herself back into everyone’s good graces. And she would have to accept that some people never would forgive her, and that she had done things she couldn’t atone for. But for now, there were people who wouldn’t allow her to keep withdrawing from the world until she simply vanished.
And maybe there was hope that even someone like her could one day find purpose.
But in the present, there was a sports festival to attend to. Miyu had skipped out on most physical activity in her life, but she still participated wherever she could here, just to indulge in being able to hold objects for a little while. Sure, it only applied to very specific items like the beanbags and the game prizes, and it filled her with an exhaustion that persisted until she finally let go of the item, but it was still sensation, and she cherished that.
For just a little while, Miyu Suzuki could pretend that she was a normal teenager.
