disclaimer: hanyuu furude & rika furude © [07th Expansion]. Written for entertainment, not profit.
spirals.
Stay not your hand, daughter.
Red blots the white of her shirt, the pool of blood spreading wider as the crows tear at the wounds in the body that is at once hers and not hers.
A murder.
No. A necessity.
Hanyuu pushes herself to a kneeling position, taking care not to disturb the limbs but heedless of her hands passing through the smears of blood and emerging clean. She bites back the urge to cry, letting the cicadas around her sound their sharp sorrow into the air instead, while the odor of death is etched into her once more.
She is a ghost, a powerless god, and so her soul is stained in place of her flesh. That is what she feels unraveling, bit by agonizing bit, as Rika dies again and again—an endless loop glistening with pain and slaughtered hopes, wrapping around her in coils like the intestines strewn about the entrance to the shrine.
The shrine to her.
For happiness.
Oyashiro-sama.
She will not accept it. She never has, because this is no offering, but the power of a mortal will flung back at her, daring her to defy what has become fate itself. But that small defiance is always crushed; nine hundred ninety nine times, to this ever-repeating date. When only fear and suspicion remain, strength begins to slip away, until there remains nothing but the sound of faint footsteps and whispers of a curse—one both using her name and not at the same time.
Because that hateful woman has discovered the secret: a god can be silenced when there is no one to believe.
Believe in me.
Except Rika. The reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama, who had forced herself to keep her eyes open as she was being killed so she could burn the identity of her murderer into her mind. Who had struggled against the inevitability of her death, until the moment when it was too late.
What good will it do?
Over almost one thousand years ago, Hanyuu Furude had walked into the Watanagashi ceremony with her head held high, calm as she prepared to die for the sake of Hinamizawa. And now, almost a thousand years later, Rika Furude had met death in exactly the same way.
What does happiness become if you have to (kill) die for it?!
The tears threaten again, and Hanyuu shuts her eyes. Two memories—more glimpses than anything—come to her then, borne upon the silence in the wake of the cicadas: Rika reaching out in the darkened room, her fingers hovering over Hanyuu's transparent ones as she speaks. Flickering torchlight illuminating the figure of a girl as Hanyuu reaches up to stroke her face, a quiet smile on her lips as the bittersweet words tumble forth.
It is the future we are saving, not the past.
Something warm touches her skin. She opens her eyes to see Rika with that same sad smile, as ghostly as herself, hands clasped tightly on hers.
It is time.
The flash of a blade, and then the world disappears.