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Hatsune was alone. The small room around her was rough and unfamiliar. Perhaps she had been here before, but it was impossible to be certain in the low lighting that left the corners sodden with shadows. The only feature she could make out with confidence was the pile of rough blankets on which she was kneeling.
It was neither cold nor warm, and so quiet white static beat on her ears. An experimental tug on her arms produced no movement. Her whole body was stuck, actually. Some indistinct force had her completely immobilized. She couldn’t even turn around to see if there was an exit.
Although logically she knew the circumstances were dire, she felt hollow as the world around her. It was the same kind of numbness that overcame her when she saw a fishing boat tossed on the waves. Whatever was coming, there was no escape from it. There was no reason to fear it. It was inevitable.
A presence appeared behind her. She couldn’t see the person, but she felt confident it could only be one person: her father, Sadaharu.
She knew what he was here for. He took his time approaching. On silent footsteps he circled ever closer, like a snake coiling around its prey. His rough hand gripped her shoulder from behind. The other traced the path of her clavicle from left to right, meeting her skin directly where the neckline of her plain cotton shirt couldn’t protect her. Not that it would protect her for long.
Her perspective left her body, as it often did in moments of distress, and the sensation of his touch became mercifully distant. From ceiling height, she watched her father force her face down into the nest of dirty blankets.
It didn’t even feel like he took sadistic pleasure in this routine. It was almost… businesslike. Rote. Prescribed. A means, not an ends. The point was not to gratify himself, but to assert his power over her. Instinctively Hatsune struggled against her invisible restraints, but they didn’t give. She cried out for help, and he made no effort to stop her, because no help was coming.
Before the worst could happen, Hatsune woke up drenched in sweat. The instinct to fight free of her father’s grip took control, then there was a disorienting pull and the universe righted itself around her. She fell still. She was in her bedroom, not some dingy prison cell. It was just a dream.
Hatsune forced her eyelids to crack open. Something was off, but it took a few more blinks to clear the grit blurring her vision.
Her heart seized. There was a man standing over her. Her nightmare was real. It had been a warning, not a fabrication. From her spot immobile on the bed, she could tell he was over two meters tall and built broad. He was staring down at her without moving.
Her thoughts raced with adrenaline. What should she do? Pretend to still be asleep to buy herself time? Throw her blanket over him and flee while he was tangled in it? Try to get to the keychain alarm in her purse? She didn’t have any weapons in her bedroom, but maybe if she could get to the kitchen-
Hatsune tried to pull herself to her feet, to command her limbs to run or fight back or at least throw herself from the bed so that the pain could shock her from sleep, but her body wouldn’t obey. When she tried to scream a warning to Saki, nothing came out. Her thoughts were free to race, but every muscle remained paralyzed. She was imprisoned in her own body.
The man, for his part, simply observed her struggles motionless as a painting.
When it felt like her lungs were going to tear themselves in half, she woke up for a second time. Hatsune kicked off the suffocating blanket, finally free of the bonds. Her whole body was shivering despite the stifling heat.
It wasn’t real. It had just been a nested dream brought on by shallow sleep. The collection of shapes her mind had painted as the towering man was only her baseball jacket on its hook at the foot of her bed. She was alone in her bedroom (the one that her father had picked out and knew the address of) and he never did anything like that to her. No one had. She was safe. Her brain was just broken. It was just torturing her recreationally. That was what it always did.
A wave of disgust battered her. She was so sick. She was so fucking sick in the head for dreaming about these kinds of things. Why, because if she actually had been assaulted by him she’d have an excuse for the way she was? So she could kick back and throw up her hands and declare herself the latest link in a chain of familial violence stretching all the way back to that time Cain hefted a rock and looked at his brother with a twinkle in his eye? Hurt people hurt people. Abusers were victims. C'est la vie.
She dug her fingernails into her palms. She curled into a ball and screamed into her pillow. It wasn’t enough to drown out the angry voice in her head that flagellated her like a cherry-hot brand. She was such a rotten, evil person down to the last fragment of her soul. She should just stab a kitchen knife into her belly and be done with it. She could do it. It would be a favor to the world.
Her brain felt like it was being ripped apart by bloodstained rope.
Hatsune forced herself out of bed and towards the kitchen, tossing the nightmare fuel jacket to her dresser as she went to try and avoid repeating this incident. Ice water would help return her to the moment. Not that she deserved it. Not that it mattered.
Limbs still uncertain with sleep selected a glass and filled it from the tap. Her hands cracked the ice cube tray stealthily as possible, but it was the sort of thing that could only be done so quietly.
”You’re up awfully early,” said a soft voice from up in the loft.
“Oh, sorry for waking you!” Hatsune whisper-called. Great, she had gone and made her problem Saki’s as well. That was just typical for her.
A single step brought her from the kitchen to the living space. Even though her field of vision was recovering from pinpoint-narrow, she still couldn’t see Saki because of the angle. The bars of the loft separated them. She had to take it on faith that Saki was still there.
“It’s alright. I always struggle to sleep when the moon is full,” said Saki.
“It’s pretty bright up there on clear nights, isn’t it? We can put up a curtain if you like!”
“The view is nice.” Saki’s voice had a little twinge to it.
The glass of mostly ice and a little water in Hatsune’s hands was sweating. The condensation-sweat mixed with the human-sweat on her palms to form a gross sweat slurry. Her pajamas needed to be changed anyways, so she wiped the whole messy thing on her shirt.
Saki appeared at the ledge of the loft, legs first. The ambient city light that made it past the swaying trees in the window let Hatsune see the outline of her God perched on the edge of the loft. Her face was hidden, but Hatsune could feel her concern.
Saki’s gaze found her at the edge of the kitchen. “What woke you?”
Hatsune wanted to lie (just another of her evil impulses), but she had already hurt Saki enough tonight. She settled on understating instead. Saki was trusting to a fault, but also perceptive and liable to see through a complete lie.
“Bad dream. I was back on the island,” said Hatsune, turning away ever so slightly. She hoped that would be enough for Saki.
It was not. Saki leaned down and propped her arms on her knees. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
“It’s not that big a deal. It was just a dumb dream. My biological father was there and I couldn’t run because my whole body was stuck, and then he was behind me… and then I was face down…” Hatsune trailed off.
“Was that a memory?” asked Saki. There was an unfamiliar flinty edge to her voice.
“No!! But it weirds me out that my brain is imagining that kind of stuff…” said Hatsune. It made her wonder if something like that had actually happened her. She’d forgotten about major things before courtesy the muffling wall of water between her and any specific memory of her childhood. Even though she knew it had happened regularly, she could not recall with clarity any particular time her mother had berated her. The crevices in her mind which lay beyond the sunlight of memory were large enough to conceal equally significant secrets.
“Do you need to analyze it? Forgetting isn’t bad. It can be the most complete way to heal from the wounds of the past,” said Saki.
“It seems dangerous to have a big blind spot like that…”
“But what would you do with that information? He did evil things to you. You’re safe from him now. What more is to be gained from interrogating the things you can’t change? It’s hurting you.”
This, Hatsune had an answer to. “I need to understand myself. I need to know what’s wrong with me.”
“Is it so urgent? Can’t you find that understanding after you’ve had more time to heal?” asked Saki, a frown in her voice.
”No! I can’t! I-I need to know what I’m capable of!”
“You’re afraid of something… it’s yourself, isn’t it?”
The nausea was back. That was it, wasn’t it? There was no hiding from the naked truth when it came from Saki’s mouth instead of her own blurry thoughts. She was afraid of herself — or more precisely, what she was destined to do.
“It’s in my nature,” said Hatsune. The fingers of her right hand gripped her opposite bicep. “I only exist because of what my father did to my mother. It’s not as though she was in a position to refuse him. I was tainted by sin the moment I was conceived.” She curled in on herself, ashamed, as though she could hide her crimes from the world by doing so. Perhaps she could. But she would never be able to hide them from herself.
“I’m coming down there,” said Saki. The hardwood floor creaked as she stood, and Hatsune looked up reflexively.
She was struck dumb. Looking directly at Saki was like staring into the sun — bright unto painful. She was blinding, her skin was flawless, her proportions perfect. She made pajamas and bedhead look like a considered stylistic choice. God had trusted the factory production line with the rest of them, but for Saki He had broken out His personal brush and pen.
The envious moonlight let in by the skylight above, not content to be outshone, chased after and stole the color from her hair, leaving it porcelain pale. Its efforts were in vain. A person virtuous as Saki could not be adulterated.
Then, to her horror, Saki stepped onto the ladder that connected the living room to the loft.
“Stop! Stay up there!” cried Hatsune. Saki couldn’t come down. Not when Hatsune was in disarray like this. It would be a disaster! When the sun was up and her wits were about her, she could wrangle her heart into submission. Like this, she was liable to hurt Saki. She had to make sure that didn’t happen no matter what.
Saki ignored her pleas.
Their apartment was empty of means to stall Saki. Trying to shove her away would only bring them into contact. Panicked, Hatsune retreated to an old habit: plagiarizing the words of someone more eloquent than her. She’d never personally witnessed the hyper specific situation of someone trying to convince their ambiguous-maybe-lover to not descend from a balcony, but it had happened to one literary hero. If it worked for him…
“Wait! It’s easier if you stay up there!” said Hatsune.
“Why?” asked Saki. To Hatsune’s great relief, she paused her approach.
“I-It’s the dark! I want to talk where we can’t see each other! We never get the chance to speak this candidly. With me masked by darkness and you in that radiant dress of moonlight, it’s like being Doloris and Oblivionis.” Hatsune leaned against the ladder to the loft so that she might hide her face more naturally. “We’re touching at a distance like this. It’s… modest.”
“You fear injuring modesty itself.” Saki delivered the words with a teasing smile. That was a line from later in act three. The game was up before it had begun. “Don’t give me another’s words. I desire yours.”
“It’s not that easy… My words are ugly…” said Hatsune. She herself was ugly.
“Then will you present me a bouquet of roses when I crave a wild cluster?” asked Saki, throwing the protagonist’s words in her face.
“I could hurt you, okay? I could come up to the loft while you sleep and kill you or worse! Doesn’t that freak you out??” demanded Hatsune, shrill. The words describing the awful fear were dragged out of her like fishhooks. They carved bloody tracts into her throat as they exited and left her breathless with pain. She couldn’t bring herself to name the thing she was afraid she might do; her words contorted around it like an acrobat, but in the negative space was a meaning clear enough.
Saki’s straightened, taken aback. “I could say quite the same to you. Does it worry you that I could poison you with one of the meals I cook us?”
“But I know you wouldn’t!”
“Yes. Exactly. And I know you wouldn’t either.”
Of course Saki didn’t get it. Normal people didn’t have these kinds of thoughts. The fact that Hatsune worried about this in the first place was evidence that she was dangerous.
Hatsune hid behind her bangs. The apartment was entirely too cold with the glass of ice water sapping her body heat. She wished she brought her cardigan from her bedroom. This conversation was never going to go anywhere. No one could understand her. It was foolish to seek. A lifetime of torment in Sadaharu’s workshop had twisted and bent her into an entirely inhuman form, incomprehensible to anyone else.
Lately, she’d been mulling the concept of perdition. Eternal punishment for an unrepentant soul described her life pretty well.
Saki read her discontent. “Your face says you don’t believe me,” she said. Hatsune brought a hand to her lips. Oh, it was true, she was frowning. How could Saki tell? Her face was still hidden.
“It’s nothing. You’re right. It’s not a big deal. I should just stop thinking about it,” said Hatsune.
Saki took a step down the ladder. Hatsune took a step back.
“Stay away from me!”
“I’m not leaving you like this.”
“I just! I just feel like you don’t get it!” Hatsune’s voice rose in frustration. Saki was finally going to kick her out of the garden for it, but she had to say it. She had to make Saki understand just how much danger she was in. For her sake. Saki’s safety was what mattered, not her toxic obsession.
“I could do it. I had a vision of pushing Mutsumi down the stairs once. I really think I could hurt you. I wouldn’t mean it. It would be an impulse. I wouldn’t even realize what was happening, but I’d do it, and it’d be done forever. Everyone says I’m capable of it.”
She was sure Saki had seen the posts, too.
Ah, the way she looks at Oblivionis in Futatsu no Tsuki! It’s pure sex! I want Doloris to cut my throat and leave me to bleed out in the woods like that!
The belief that she was a threat had been planted the day she was old enough to understand the quiet meaning behind her mother’s warnings about hanging with girls like that accompanied by a disparaging nod at the girl from the other side of the island who liked running and playing with the boys, nurtured by hundreds of similar such, and coaxed into its present shape by Nyamu’s offhand comments about her “insane clingy ex who didn’t know how to take ‘no’’ for an answer”. The message came from all sides. Her foes, fans, and even her friends worked together to beat that message into her head: people like her were dangerous.
“The world doesn’t know you like I do. I worry even you don’t,” said Saki. She was halfway to the ground floor now, and Hatsune could clearly make out her brow furrowed in concern. How horrible it was that she had put such an unpleasant expression on Saki’s face.
“You’re not alone in these urges,” said Saki. “I have thoughts of killing my father.”
The trees outside stopped rustling in the wind. The ventilation fan went silent. The anguished thoughts that wailed through her head without pause like a force of nature itself held their breath. The world itself was appalled at Saki’s confession.
“You do??” Hatsune had to lean on the island counter for support. She lost her grip on the cup.
“I do. I idealized him. I did everything for him, and he betrayed me,” said Saki. She took a step down the loft ladder and, seeing Hatsune unable to flee, another.
“He could’ve offered even a single word of comfort, but he refused to. He believed that men have to be strong and stoic, and so he was. He was inflexible to the end. I want to hurt him like he hurt me. I picture myself going back to his shack in the middle of the night with one of our kitchen knives and stabbing him when he’s too drunk to fight back. I can feel his neck beneath my hand, pliable as one of Mutsumi’s plush rabbit’s. It would be so easy.”
Hatsune’s paralysis held. Saki descended further. Where a moment ago she had been a merciful angel drifting to the mortal realm to grace it with her blessings, she had distorted into a demon on the prowl for a deserving victim.
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to do it. It’s just a fantasy. It might be satisfying in the moment, but I doubt it would bring me lasting peace. To say nothing of ethics or the law.”
Saki completed her descent to the earth. She alighted with a silent slippered step.
Hatsune couldn’t reconcile Saki’s words with what she knew to be true about the universe. Her platonic ideal of kindness, gentle and sweet Saki, was talking of cold blooded murder considered in the kind of detail that was the sole domain of twisted creatures like serial killers and Hatsune herself. The contradiction was impossible.
Saki placed a hand over the center of Hatsune’s chest. It was wreathed in moonfire from the skylight above.
“You may write Doloris’s lyrics, but I write her dialog. I understand the pain that trembles within her. I don’t think feeling this way makes me evil, and I don’t think it makes you evil either.”
“Saki… I’m…”
For the first time that night, and perhaps for the first time since that fateful night a decade ago when they met, Saki seemed merely human. She was stripped of the halo and god rays and detail of trumpeting cherubs, not high up in the gilded cage in which Doloris wished to imprison her, but another regular girl struggling to pull herself through the muck here on earth.
No, it wasn’t Doloris. That urge was Hatsune’s. She could own that.
“I mean this in the most empathetic way possible: you’re not special. You could hurt me. So could any given person on the street.” Saki paused a moment. “Perhaps ‘you’re not alone’ would have been a kinder way of phrasing that, but you take my meaning. Everyone is capable of horrible things. What matters is not doing them. So raise your head? Look at me?” said Saki. The hand resting on her chest came up to cup her chin, nudging her whole head up. The soft under part of her jaw burned where Saki’s hand met it.
“Is this alright?” asked Saki.
“It’s fine,” Hatsune lied. Her voice wavered. She forced her arms to her side so they wouldn’t betray her.
“It’s not, is it,” said Saki, bending down so that she could see Hatsune’s face better. Hatsune shook her head no. She hated herself for refusing Saki’s touch, but she couldn’t. Just a moment of Saki was far beyond what she deserved or ever seriously thought she might obtain, so why was she running away now? What was she doing?
“You should get some more rest. We can finish this discussion, if there’s anything more to be discussed, in the morning,” said Saki. She paused to twirl a lock of hair, for a moment losing the confidence that had suffused her the whole conversation. “… Would you like to join me in the loft tonight?”
Hatsune flinched away. “No!”
“It’s perfectly fine by me if you do.”
”It’s too much… I can’t, not so quickly…”
“Very well. Another time, then. The offer stands.”
“I think I’ll ever be ready…”
Saki made to ascend. She got one foot on the ladder before turning to look down at Hatsune one last time. “You will. I trust you. Learn to trust yourself.”