Disclaimer: I don't own School Days, any of the Days franchise nor any of 0verflow's franchises, or anything else referenced here. I'm just a guy writing silly and sometimes disturbing fanfiction.
Life goes on.
To say that the living room of the Ito apartment in Haramihama was cramped with people could be somewhat of an understatement.
"Tell me, son," Moeko Ito said sternly, "being the son of a nurse and the fact that high schools do have sex ed in class, did it occur to you that there are things such as contraceptives?" The eye with the beauty mark underneath twitched crossly.
Said son felt like a lump was stuck in his throat, sitting on the sofa beside his girlfriend and lover, with an equally guilty look on her face, while twiddling her idiot hair between a thumb and forefinger. They had arrived from the hospital, papers indicating that the student and part-time waitress Sekai Saionji was pregnant, lying on the sofa table.
The other mother, a manager of a beach restaurant, beside the nurse, tried to be more understanding, but had to admit that Moeko had a point there actually and noted: "Birth control pills, morning-after pills, condoms, cervical caps, diaphragms and other stuff." Youko Saionji winced a bit after finishing that sentence, suddenly remembering her own troubled past. She made a furious mental note of giving a certain man, she once loved, a powerful bronco kick to the spine the next time she saw him, despite what her friend and colleague would say, or possibly just hogtie him and whip him dominatrix style with her and the others, in some shady basement, and make him their personal sex slave for a change. It was one thing to betray all of their trust that fateful summer years ago, it was quite another to seduce them and weakening their minds and breaking their will to his without them having a say in the matter, telling them that it was for their own protection when finally releasing his hold on them, heavily pregnant with his children, to their horror. They could have instead asked the police desperately - even the yakuza for help, or gathered all the good people in town, like the powerful Ashikaga family and their followers, to aid them and probably save the two innocents who were taken from them by a devil who planned for them a fate far worse than death, but he instead went insane and enslaved them and indulged in his darkest fantasies giving them no choice at all, making him no better than that monster. The two of them had fled back to Motehara, leaving the others behind, in stark fear and barricaded themselves inside the familiar roadside restaurant and pension for days. It took years, before they even let him get near their daughters, and only when at least one of them was constantly keeping watch over him...
"Eh... can we blame it on raging hormones and being madly in love that we forgot about the condoms a few times?" queried Makoto Ito sheepishly and desperately.
Youko's mind snapped back to the present, realizing there were more important things than reminiscing on the nightmares, betrayals and heartbreaks of the past.
"Irresponsible, that's what the two of you are. What were you thinking constantly having unprotected sex? Trying to make a baby and not caring about consequences?"
"Well, uh.." Sekai Saionji was currently at a loss for words and released the lock of hair.
Makoto, who sat on the right side of the sofa laid his left hand reassuringly on her slightly shaking right hand.
"Makoto?" Her head turned to look at him.
"Sekai, I'm there for you. We'll manage somehow." His voice was gentle, his look comforting. She calmed down a bit.
His mother wasn't done yet. "But most importantly: what are you going to do about it?"
Makoto turned his head towards where his mother sat, in the adjacent couch, turned to look at Sekai's mother, who sat beside her, a few seconds, choosing to finally look at both of them.
"I want to keep the child, but if Sekai doesn't, I'll respect her choice." A look of determined sincerity on his face as he voiced his choice.
(I'm not a beast like you, father, at least I'll try to choose to be a real father unlike you ever were to me and the others!) was a furious thought running through Makoto's mind.
"And what about you, Sekai?" Youko asked her conflicted daughter as gently as she could.
"I-I..." the girl took a deep breath and closed her eyes, placing her left hand on her stomach. It seemed like an eternity, despite it only lasting seconds, before she opened her eyes. Her look was determined, a sad smile on her lips. "I want to keep it as well. It's my baby as well as the baby of the boy I love."
(My own mother could have aborted or abandoned me as revenge for what my father had done to her, but she chose to bring me forth into the world, loved and raised me despite of my father's blood and sins...) Sekai thought sadly.
"You know that's a lot of responsibility for teenagers of your age." stated Moeko with a serious tone in her voice.
"Why not? I know that I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, mother. I know that I have my faults, that I'm flawed – but it makes me human." Makoto interjected sincerely to his mother.
"Well, I can't say that I'm a higher-up in the brains department either," Sekai then added swiftly, "But if me and Makoto stick together through thick and thin, we can raise the baby, even if we still do stupid things."
"That's very brave of you." Setsuna Kiyoura said softly to her best friend, having remained quiet in the living room, standing still as a small statue bearing witness to the discussion with a worrying look on her otherwise mostly expressionless face. She hid her suppressed tinge of jealousy well, not letting her voice nor her body expression betray her. If only she had made the choice not to step aside out of loyalty, it could have been her who would have been by his side as his beloved and with his child growing inside her womb.
Makoto then turned to Youko. "Could you get me a part-time job in your Radish restaurant, Ms. Youko. I need an income to take care of the baby as well as save money for an apartment for me and Sekai and our child."
"I'll see what I can do," Youko answered to the young man, with a small smile. "We could always use another cook or waiter, and a 'test subject' for our male Radish costumes."
He didn't like the sound of that; Sekai had told him about the new Chippendale-style male uniforms her mother was designing and arguing with HQ about allowing them in her restaurant, after forbidding her from letting the female waitresses wear the Blue Wind, Cat Waitress and the purple costume, only leaving Emerald Princess and Marine Paradise as allowable waitress uniforms there, much to the waitresses relief.
"And please give me your daughter's hand in marriage." Makoto blurted out of nowhere, and without flinching.
For some reason there was a great stillness in the living room, that seemed to last for minutes after those words were spoken.
"Well, this is certainly awkward," Sekai sighed and facepalmed with her left hand.
"Idiot." Setsuna commented to him. "Learn to read the mood better." The mostly expressionless, in speech and nature, girl had a minor tone of annoyance that even he could detect. At least she didn't kick him.
A door suddenly opened and a tiny girl stepped out a room in her pyjamas, rubbing her still sleepy eyes. "What's going on?" she inquired innocently.
"Hey, Itaru," Sekai smiled warmly at her, "me and your big brother are going to have a baby together."
"Yay, I'm going to be an aunt!" exclaimed Itaru Ito joyously as she rushed towards Sekai and laid her small, innocent head onto the older girl's stomach as if to listen to signs of the tiny life growing inside of her."
Sekai smiled as she lovingly embraced her tiny, future sister-in-law, pondering over how life would turn out for them all. Due to some stroke of luck, Makoto's mother had regained custody of her youngest child, probably the uncovering of bribes and forged documents being passed through the courts had something to do with it, and that Makoto's so-called "father" made a lot of enemies who were more than eager, probably desperate to counter anything that man did despite all the money being waved around discreetly. She even heard rumours that the police and even Interpol were investigating him more closely.
Hours had passed... and now it was almost the middle of the night.
He had gone with Sekai and her mother to their apartment in Motehara, he felt he owed it to his pregnant lover to stay with her this night. His mother had gotten a few days break from work to be with Itaru, so he didn't have to worry about his little sister.
They were in her room, both naked under the bedsheets, as they lay in bed, panting heavily, after having indulged in passionate intimacy, fuelled by their love for one another.
"Why did you choose to love me after the things I've done?" Sekai suddenly whispered out of the blue to him, eyes closed and feeling the warmth and love in his gentle embrace.
"What we've done," Makoto countered softly, "I was your disciple when you brought me and Kotonoha together and taught me about relationships and the courage to begin in one; and that tiny act of betrayal that day on the train station – the kiss taught me that love was never that simple. Student and mentor - lovers in treachery. I just hope that Kotonoha and Kokoro and their parents will find it in their hearts to forgive us for what we've done. I guess I will always be the dark disciple who wants to stand by your side."
"So does that makes us Sith?" she chuckled and hummed the The Star Wars theme..
"Well, as long as we don't betray each other and the child we'll have, and the children following it – I don't think so." Makoto smiled and then added: "But still we're only human."
"You're the worst," quipped Sekai sarcastically. "How many?"
"How many do you want?"
"Two, three, maybe even four, I guess. But, oh boy is our place gonna get cramped with all those kids. We probably have to get a house and a lifetime of mortgage."
Makoto chuckled a little. "Sometimes I get the feeling that I subconsciously want to become a father, have lots of children, with the one I love, and try to be there for them and show them love as a father and try to guide them to be good people."
Sekai smiled softly and then suddenly took on a melancholic face.
"What's the matter?"
"It's just that I never had a father who was there for me, and I hate his guts for being a faithless bastard who never loved my mother as his only love, and used her for his pleasure. Often I felt like it was just me and my mother against the world and society for being a child born out of wedlock. In my my darkest dreams I always stab him to death with a sharp kitchen knife for what he did to her." she admitted sorrowfully.
"But I didn't turn out like your father, did I?"
"No, you didn't." Sekai brightened as she uttered those words. "You're my flawed Prince Charming who chose me over a gorgeous princess like Kotonoha."
"Don't know about being a prince, and I don't think I'm that charming either, Sekai." Makoto laughed.
"You helped my best friend Setsuna when she was at her most lowest and frightened, Makoto, without asking anything in return. You gave her the courage to stand up for herself and become class representative. That's what made me attracted to you, made me see your good sides and bad sides as a person. In the end I fell in love with the kind man you are."
"I only did what any decent person would do, my love." he answered sincerely.
"Well, it seems that our high school is really lacking in decent people if you're the only one I know of to take a stand."
"But imagine if I became some kind of crazy sex maniac, just addicted to the next fix like a hopeless crack addict, I'd probably deserve to be turned into a human knife block, and get my head sawed off and stuffed into a duffel bag and sail away in a nice boat." Makoto suddenly joked off-handedly.
"Sounds like my father; he'll probably end up like that in the end if he's still a good-for-nothing bastard like my mother's told me he still is."
"Let's just stop talking about father issues, Sekai. Both of us never grew up with fathers to look up to." Makoto suddenly got a grim look on his face as if he wanted to change the topic.
"You don't talk much about your father, do you, Makoto? I only know you don't want to talk about him, or what it's like to have a father?" Sekai questioned him.
"Sometimes it's better to not have a father and not knowing him at all," was the bitter response from her lover. She could hear the bile in him as uttered those words.
"Why?"
"I hate him," Makoto admitted openly.
"Why do you hate him?"
"My father's a monster! He likes to hurt others. It's like everything's a twisted game to him where he's the exception and not the rule to laws and human decency. The big bully in the school yard that is the world, always preying on those weaker than him while acting like he's strong, manipulating them like puppets on a string and laughing about it."
Sekai remained silent as Makoto continued.
"He wanted me to become like him, always tempting me with whispers and open boasts of what I could get if I let go of all my inhibitions, my humanity. But I refused to become like him."
She could feel him tremble and shake. Then she looked him into the eyes, seeing stark fear and horror.
"I don't want to become a monster, Sekai!" his voice was barely a whisper and filled with fear. "I've seen in my nightmares what I could become if I just dove into the abyss and thought only about myself without caring about those I hurt. I don't want to lose control!"
"You won't, Makoto," Sekai looked him straight in the eye. "I won't let let you." and then she kissed him tenderly.
She held him gently, comforting him, as he cried, until sleep fell upon him. He had a look of safety and content as he snored beside her, like a lover accepted by his beloved despite his many flaws..
Like her Makoto had his own inner demons and darkness within that he constantly had to hold at bay; it was always there lurking in the back of her mind and spirit, waiting for the chance to consume her and twist her into something cruel, something evil. And the guilt over betraying Kotonoha would probably haunt them for the rest of their lives, straining their relationship, because deep within both knew that what they had done was wrong.
Sekai brushed the dark thoughts aside and placed her hands on her belly. Would it be a boy or a girl growing within her? She knew that with Makoto by her side she could give the baby the chance she never had, growing up with a loving mother and father who would be there for it and protect it from cruelty and evil.
She also soon fell asleep, an arm around the waist of her future husband and father of her child.
(You are innocent, my child, and our sins have never touched you.) was the last thought before slumber and happy dreams overtook her. She knew that love may not conquer all, but love, mercy and compassion made life bearable in a world of betrayal, lies, lost innocence and nightmares, where losing your humanity balanced on a razor's edge and redemption nigh impossible...
Epilogue:
This unforeseen timeline had an happy enough ending, despite the sins committed in ignorance and innocence.
Other than that, the world seemed to have changed for the better.
Tomaru Sawagoe confined in prison, while judges and other officials, in secret, debated over the death penalty or lifetime imprisonment. Apparently one his top lackeys had a change of heart and leaked very sensitive information about his shady businesses to those in the police, who were not on his payroll, before hanging himself in his richly decorated penthouse, and mysteriously feasted upon by a murder of crows that had managed to crash through one of the windows. The clandestine investigation, gathering of evidence as well as testimonies from witnesses and victims willing to come forth, leading to search warrants being granted and hidden medical reports being uncovered by the forensics team along with DNA tests, finally resulted in police raids, a mass of arrests and uncovering more grisly, confiscated evidence of unspeakable things that the police and proper authorities refused vehemently to release to the press and public at large, omitting enough in order to confine him in prison for drug trafficking, prostitution rackets and tax evasion, and to protect the identities of the more sensitive of the victims. More victims and witnesses eventually came out of the woodwork to testify behind closed doors, and one police detective was suspended after suffering a complete mental breakdown, after spending days reviewing the compiled "Snow Radish dossier", as well as the also recent dossier about the Summer Radish restaurant called "Craster's Keep II", and numerous confiscated video recordings, and almost beat the suspect to death, in a drunken fit of inhuman rage, during an interrogation session. Several fellow officers had to violently restrain him as he screamed madly that he wasn't a human being and had to be wiped from the face of the earth. Future reports of increased alcohol abuse and even drug abuse among the those involved in the investigation was rising more and more. Some even committed suicide.
A lot of the fellow inmates in prison were also not very keen about this newcomer, nicknamed "Purple Man" by a sarcastic warden, learning pieces of what he had done through the criminal underworld, realizing that this was the "Motehara Monster" from the unsolved case thirty or more years ago, and one night the door to his high-security cell mysteriously opened and in stepped several figures in prison uniforms and it was not long before the occupant was viciously disfigured, violated indiscriminately and beaten into a permanent braindead coma and severe critical condition, with rumours about wardens, born and raised in Motehara, having looked another way, for prisoners with families from the same area, and none of the suspects discovered.
And then the life support, in his own hospital that subsequently held him, mysteriously malfunctioned.
"Craster" was no more.
Moeko Ito had a content smirk on her face, as she discarded her medical gloves and other things into a trash bin, and whistled parts of Valar Morghulis as she walked through the darkened hospital corridor. She would probably go to hell like most of his accomplices, but that moment of having him completely at her mercy, as he had countless others, she couldn't resist the temptation to seize the opportunity as he most certainly would have done.
She wondered how her grandchild would turn out in the future. Would the sins of the tainted blood of these cursed bloodlines doom it to madness and self-destruction like a "Targaryen"? Good or bad, the choice was always there. Every one of them was born with a choice despite the inherent madness inside and the consequences of their choices.
Speaking of choices, she, Youko and the others would spare Makoto, Sekai, Setsuna and the rest of the younger generations from the unspeakable truths that had to remain buried, and hopefully forgotten in the sands of time.
The shadow of the grand incubus, spreading madness and degeneracy, known to the world as, Tomaru Sawagoe, was finally going to be slowly lifted. Now she only had to pay some yakuza to spirit away the body and dissolve it in acid so that no trace would remain of him, she actually worried about someone would resurrect him by accident and wanted to take further precautions just to be sure. A stake through the heart and his throat slit from ear to ear would probably be overkill before that, but she could never be too sure when it came to him.
"I am the storm, my lord. The first storm, and the last." Those were the words quoth to her often by Tomaru, when drunk or drugged too much to care to conceal his true nature, when he took pleasure in gloating openly about his many sins and conquests.
Mokeo knew that the madness began with him, and it had to hopefully end with him, unless another of his cambion descendants, who became incubi in their own right, would pick up his mantle as the new grand incubus and continue the cycle of lunacy, pain and suffering. Keeping tabs on Wataru, Ayumu and Shun as well as having a list of the best male assassins to put an end to them would be a wise precaution indeed.
Kei had already been taken care of. Sekihata never forgave him for shaming his young daughter and had finally managed to scrape together enough money to afford an assassin who killed the young man by slamming his old, clunky computer screen through his head with the power turned on before smilingly saying, "Popcorn!"
She put those grim musings aside, having a wedding to plan, with Youko, for her son and future daughter-in-law, as well as the future of her grandchild.
After all the pain, all the humiliation, the future innocent generations deserved to grow up in blissful ignorance of the sins of the past...
End song: The Crypt Jam from Tales from the Crypt
Fic writers thoughts:
This good ending School Days Makoto has a gut feeling that if he falls further to the "dark side" and loses his moral compass and all inhibitions, he will turn into an inhuman monster like most of the 0verflow male main cast (as well as some of the female cast) turned out to be in the Days series 0verflow continuity, and that really frightens him. In this timeline his father either tried to groom him into becoming his true heir and supplant the (thrice disgraced) original heir of the family he married into or groom him to forge a marriage alliance with the Ashikaga family of Harihama and usurp the head of the family, like he usurped control of his family and their fortune, expanding his base of power even further by corrupting an influential religious community and bringing them under his sway, but instead it traumatized Makoto a lot and made him hate his father even more since he didn't want to become like that, and forced him to to try to keep himself in more control so that he wouldn't end up as Ayumu, Kei and Shun did canonically.
Funny enough, considering how Lovecraftian the 0verflow Mythos can be with its dark family secrets a la The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Lurking Fear, The Rats In The Walls and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, you may think that Y'golonac himself is the patron Great Old One of 0verflow or that they are Slaanesh worshippers and Warhammer 40K fans of Chaos, as well as how neo-noir it can be in that nothing is what it seems on the surface like The Black Dahlia, Chinatown and L.A. Confidential when uncovering the cesspool of corruption and filth as you dig through the dirt, making everyone cynical and disillusioned.
Even funnier, the anime adaptation could be interpreted as a Tales from the Crypt story where the unsympathetically portrayed main character(s) of this episode's story really gets what's coming to him/her. Would have been funnier if anime Makoto (who acts like he's stuck in Summer Days, when it's actually in School Days ) got the "Split Personality" treatment instead, while (the more sympathetically portrayed) manga Makoto views this with horror, and then the TV-screen starts playing the end credits of Tales from the Crypt with its catchy theme - and yandere-mode Kotonoha and Sekai slowly rises from behind the sofa he's sitting in and starts the chainsaw one of them is carrying, intending to share him...
And for the future I'll probably write a good ending Kotonoha-fic.