Chapter Text
"Miss Shimizu," he addressed, pronouncing your surname with an affection that belied the words that followed, "You are not my wife, and no legal document or ceremony, nor absence of such, will change that Hinako is mine—has been mine since we were children."
What about you?
You were there, too. You saw the fox, too.
Consdering you had developed prenatally with Hinako, you must be destined to have some connection with him. Surely. It could not be that she was chosen—selected by nature and ancestry over you. Surely.
June 25, 1967
It only takes close to three months before you are dressed into a shiromuku: a white kimono, uchikake, and tsunokakushi. Your head does not adorn a wataboshi, no. Only Hinako had the right to wear such, to veil herself in purity and commit to new begginings, while you had to conceal your 'thorns of jealousy,' to suppress your 'envious nature' and profess to all attendees your oath of obedience, an obedience that would ground you in present, rather than overlay you with a process of transformation.
The attendees assume a story of cheating, of a sister murdered and disposed of, or of a sister long gone due to experienced anguish at the hands of a burried, unspoken familial betrayal. Still, they accept the invitations, scattering away the rumours and speculations; the Tsuneki name is an echantment that can overwrite all questions of morality to render the mind linear—functioning only from pleasure, where all else is not processed, left to be forgotten.
Over the top of your oiled and twisted hair, worn in the bunkin takashimada style, a servant delicately decorates it with wooden lacquered combs and delicate, golden kanzashi ornaments.
At the end, regardless of the doll you will be—of the white painted on your face, or of the face torn and gone—you will fall after you murder friends, your family, all to be reborn in his image, detached from the life that plagued the improper being that you were.
During the reception, you change into a colourful iro-uchikake, mainly of red, with gold and white, a display of your husband's wealth. As ancient customs dictate, you carry a dagger in discreet, prepared to protect yourself, lest something happens that leaves you either deceased or too 'tarnished' by usage to serve as his wife. No man wants to buy a sponge that has been pierced through, wearing after a thorough session and leaving behind unpleasant holes that cannot be stiched over like cloth to preserve the remainder of the sponge.
Even while you bathed and purified yourself at the temple, you feel... dirty, not because of anything physical that has left iself visible on you or through odour, but because of an imprint inside of you, on the skin and muscles.
Among this dirty feeling, you visualise him touching you, his hands traversing your legs first, before finding satisafcation in cupping your breasts. To justify your impractical, out-of-the-question fantasy, you dictate that he himself is undergoing his own fantasies, imagining you as Hinako, unleashing his frustration at you while secretly lusting after you. Something like that.
Blinking, you see your mother wearing a kuro-tomesode, while your father is nowhere in sight. Did he already leave? Is he possibly so repulsed by a marriage he proposed himself to carry on in the face of Hinako's disappearance?
Another option arises: he left to prepare for an ordeal greater than your marriage, and perhaps Hinako's, as well. From the letters you read, an exchange between your parents, you have acquired knowledge of your mother's dream: to visit every onsen in Japan, and once you are out of the home you were raised in, she will use the dowry to finally live her life, unburdened by you and the disappointment you bring to your father, a man who was first her husband before ever becoming anything other.
You feel a figure bump into you, his weight pressing against you in one moment, before he is away in the other, kneeling beside you, his face obscured as his head remains lowered. "You wear Hinako's name, but you are not her... Did you really think that this farce of a wedding would change anything between your sister and I? That a few inked signatures and a handful of incense burned before a god would be enough to sever my relationship with Hinako?"
Stored on a wooden shelf among various other, scattered books, beside a small table with a candle lit atop, is a book that faces upward, rather than having been laid down. At the front, it reads: 'the crimison spring gushing from the womb... deep within... is the Shimizu family.'
When you hear the creaking of a floorboard under the tatami mats, you rush out of the library are and enter the bridal chamber, laying down on to the futon placed at the centre, feigning a submissiveness that did not diverge, as though you are merely a bride awaiting her wedding night, rightful to her as it is rightful to the groom.
A man stands in the doorway, his silhouette framed by the candlelight spilling from the room. As he steps inside, the door clicks shut behind him with an air of finality. Your eyes widen as you take in his appearance—white, tied hair that reaches his back, with a fox mask that conceals half his face and merges with the skin on the sides, a long, ornate earring on his right ear that sits over his shoulder, and eyes that burn like molten gold surrounded by dark.
...You could have sworn he had shorter, black hair. And are those his eyes gazing at you, or a light coming from the mask, like the light shone by the front cars to get past the night road?
As he places the lantern on a shelf, your eyes trail down to his nails, painted black, reminiscent of Edo-period nobility, an assertion of class distinction as an order that cannot be disturbed and challenged, fixed to his body alone—a blood that cannot spill to be offered to others, a disease that cannot spread and infect others with its prosperity.
Not until today, when you, a village girl, had become a noblewoman without birthright.
But this man pays no heed to your trepidation. His gaze is intent, almost feverish, as it saunters over your form, taking in the details of your attire as if trying to discern some hidden code embedded in the expensive, silk fabric of your kimono—a secret dialect reserved for him to read. He takes a step closer, then another, until he stands before you, looming over your seated form.
"Miss Shimizu..." he murmurs, his voice seeming to echo in the stillness of the room, confining you to its sound in mantra. "Or should I say... my bride."
He reaches out, long fingers curling around your chin, tilting your face up to meet his gaze. Your breath hitches, hands secreting sweat at a speed you never imagined possible to your body, as you stare into the fathomless depths of those golden eyes, seeing your own frightened reflection mocking you. His thumb traces over your lower lip, a gesture that leads to an unwelcome vibration throughout your body, before he cuts the skin with a nail.
"I've been searching for you," he whispers with a pause, leaning down to enclose his own lips between your lower lip, drinking the small quantity of blood that pours from the minor cut, while his teeth refrain from touching you, from biting. You twitch as he moves back, releasing your lower lip, only to slowly drag his tongue across it, instead. "Believing that fate had dealt me a cruel hand in denying me my true bride. But perhaps this is not a denial, but rather... a different path to the same destiny."
His grip tightens a fraction, not enough to hurt, but enough for you to feel the strength in his fingers, to know that you are well and truly caught in the entrapment of his desire, a desire that takes total law over your body.
"You are Hinako's sister, are you not? Maidens, born of the same womb but of different blood, imbued with the same... potential." His voice drops to a murmur, almost a growl, as if the thought thrills him. "Tell me, do you dream of foxes? Of running through the mountains, wild and free, carried by a wind that beckons you to join along?"
You feel an orange whisk of fur rub sweep against your face.