This was written for FiliusMartis at Beyond the Camera's Lens, who has been my best nagger about writing the things I say I will. ^_^
Fair warning, this fic contains references to violence and (canon) incest.
When his father came out into the hall, and You saw Sakuya's face, tear-stained and pale in the gloom of the study, he knew she'd told the truth. He supposed he must have expected it, because it didn't surprise him in the least. He didn't have to look up at his father's face, didn't have to see the involuntary spasm of disgust that twisted it, to know their greatest secret was no longer a secret.
Better this way, he thought dully. Better for them to know what we did than think some nobody from the mainland got to put his hands all over my sister. The thought made him clench his fists.
"I don't even want to look at you just now," his father said, in a flat voice that was much worse than anger. "But since I can't trust you alone with Sakuya, you're going to come with me to the hospital. We'll collect some equipment and take care of this."
For a moment, You didn't understand what take care of this meant. Then he did. He'd known there'd be consequences, but for some reason he'd never considered that his father might just get rid of the baby.
Before he'd even realised he meant to speak, he was shouting in his father's face. "No! I won't let you. You can't!"
His father regarded him coolly through this outburst, and when it was over, spoke in a calm voice. "If you have any sense, you will keep silent."
"I won't let you," You spat. "Never." He was thinking back to his childhood games – insects, spiders, frogs, once a seagull, once a feral cat; the feel of small bones cracking, blood under his fingernails. He was young and small for his age, his father big and powerful, but if he were angry enough, he thought he could do it. And he was angry enough.
"You, don't," Sakuya cried. She had come to the study door. "Please don't make things worse."
The red film over his vision faded at the sound of her voice, and he straightened slowly from the half-crouch he'd fallen into when he'd been ready to spring at his father. There was blood in his mouth from biting his tongue. He swallowed it. "Please," he said, forcing himself to sound humble, "please don't. We'll keep it a secret. Please. Sakuya's almost done with school anyway. Nobody will know. Please."
Sakuya joined in. "Yes, father, please, we can keep it a secret. I'll study at home when it starts to show. I'll never leave the house again if you don't want me to."
"A pregnancy is one thing," Shigeto snapped. "A child is quite another, not that I'd expect either of you to understand."
But he wasn't dismissing the idea outright, You realised, and that meant on some level he was considering it. Sakuya met his eyes, and he knew she was thinking the same thing. Their father was strict, but if they worked on him together, they could often get him to relent.
"It's your family too," Sakuya said, covering her belly with both hands, even though there was scarcely anything there yet; it was such a quietly, wickedly manipulative gesture that You might have kissed her, if the circumstances had been different. "Father, it'll be your grandchild. An heir for the family, maybe. We can bring it up any way you like."
"If you let her have the baby I'll do anything you want," You said, the moment Sakuya had stopped speaking. "And if anyone gossips, I'll kill them."
He meant it, and he thought his father knew that, because the look he gave You was cold and quelling. "You're only fifteen, and it's showing," was all he said.
"After I've finished school I'll come and live at home," Sakuya said. "I'll keep house. You need someone to do that, you're at work all the time."
Shigeto shook his head, his expression incredulous. "You are such children. How in the world did you ever – " His jaw snapped shut, and he grimaced. "If I allow this," he said to You, "you have to leave the island as soon as you're old enough. I'll help you study and get started as a doctor, but not here. You won't have anything to do with the child. Is that understood?"
You started to protest, but Sakuya overrode him. "Yes. He'll do it."
Their father gave a curt nod. "It should go without saying, but this, between you two, stops now. Right now. If I have to supervise you at all times, so be it. No more running wild across the island. If one of you is out, the other will be at home; if both of you are at home, you'll stay in my sight." He fixed his eyes on You. "If I so much as suspect you of continuing this – this – " He groped for a word, and couldn't find one. "You'll never sleep under this roof again. Am I understood?"
Again, Sakuya spoke before You could open his mouth. "Yes. We promise."
Shigeto kept his gaze on his son, eyes unblinking. "I want to hear your brother say it."
It was the look Sakuya sent him, clear-eyed and pleading, that made him nod. "I promise."
"Then go to your room and stay there. If I see you again this evening, I'm apt to change my mind." He turned away, saying almost to himself, "I'm glad your mother isn't here to see this."
You went, seething, and threw himself on his bed, staring at the ceiling so fiercely he almost expected two smoking holes to appear in it. He wanted to talk to Sakuya. He wanted to break things. He wanted to wrap his hands around his father's throat and watch as his face turned black and his eyes filled with blood and the life went out of him.
He was wondering whether he dared try and see Sakuya that night, when something whispered underneath his door, and he looked up to see a piece of paper lying there. You nearly tripped in his haste to get it.
I had to say yes or he wouldn't have let me keep the baby. 3 years is plenty to talk him round. Don't come to my room tonight. Anyway you'll be an adult in 3 years and then what can he do.
You lay back on the bed, the folded note pressed between his palms like a talisman. It was true; soon he wouldn't need to listen to his father any more. Perhaps they could live together, him and Sakuya and the baby. It would be hard at first; no doubt their father would refuse to provide them with any financial help, but You could work as a doctor, or at least a physician's assistant, and make enough to support their little family.
Three years, though. Could he wait that long?
Stupid. Of course he could. It had been four years between realising his feelings for Sakuya and actually confessing, and this time he'd have the comfort of knowing she felt the same, and was waiting for him too.
Three years. He smiled. It might almost be easy, knowing that at the end of it they'd be together.
In his office at the hospital, Shigeto worked beneath the gaze of his forebears, who watched everything from their photographs high on the wall. He liked to think about them, the things they had achieved, the jobs they had left undone that he was now doing, the traditions they had let lapse that he was now uncovering. Thinking of that gave him a sense of pride; lately, it had the added appeal of distracting him from the actions of his own progeny.
It had been three months since Sakuya had come to him and confessed everything, and he still felt a helpless wave of nausea and anger when he thought about it. He didn't know which annoyed him more: their carelessness, or the fact that he hadn't known. Had not, in fact, had the slightest idea.
He'd always expected there to be some trouble with You before the boy reached adulthood. You had a restlessness that had to act out before it could allow him to settle into a productive life. Shigeto had been the same. But he had never expected it of Sakuya. He had always thought her sensible, steady, almost placid, like her mother had been.
He'd really hoped that whatever youthful indiscretion You would choose as his defining act, it would be something Shigeto would be able to cover up without excessive trouble. His own father had managed to turn that incident with the mainland girl into a minor nuisance. At the time he had warned Shigeto that the consequences of his mischief might follow him the rest of his life, but it was a father's job to give dire warnings, and then to ensure they wouldn't come to pass. Nobody remembered that girl's name now, or if they did, they knew better than to mention her.
Shigeto looked down at his notebook and discovered he'd been doodling. This problem was weighing on his mind, and would, he supposed, until the child was born and the real damage control could begin. He wished You could stay here to watch how it was done, but he couldn't allow that. It was bad enough that he'd been foolish enough to make the child in the first place; he wasn't going to be there to influence it with reckless ideas.
A knock came at the door. Shigeto started, then closed his notebook. "Yes?"
The new nurse, Kariya Junko, poked her head in apologetically. "I'm sorry to interrupt you, Director, but we're having trouble with Mr. Kanehara. Would you – "
He got up. "Lead the way, nurse."
Kanehara was an older man, one of the patients participating in the latest experiment Shigeto had devised.
"It was the singing bowls, sir," the nurse explained as they walked. "At first he seemed to be responding well; the sound calmed him and he was watching the water, like the others, but then it was as if he saw something he didn't like. He moved so suddenly we couldn't stop him. He knocked the bowl off the table, pushed the doctor over and charged out. Now he's in the laundry room trying to get onto the roof, and he won't let anyone near him."
Shigeto took the stairs, judging them to be quicker than the old, clanking elevator, and sent Nurse Kariya to fetch a sedative from one of the treatment rooms. He could hear Kanehara now, shouting and banging and causing as much of a racket as possible. Shigeto was used to that, but then came a colossal crash that made him break into a run. He found the door to the roof open, and Kanehara outside, looking up at the sky with his arms spread. When he noticed Shigeto, he took a step forward, his posture belligerent.
"Why would you take it from me?" he bellowed. "Why would you do that, when it was all I had? Where did you hide it?"
All the patients carried on like this in their worst moments, railing against people who cared about them, making accusations of treachery and theft. Most of them had decided, as much as they could decide on anything, that their memories depended on some vital object which had been stolen; even the ones who hardly knew they were alive would occasionally rouse themselves to mutter, "Give it back." Shigeto had seen it hundreds of times.
"You're mistaken, Mr. Kanehara," he said, keeping his voice soothing and placatory. "I haven't hidden anything of yours. I only kept it safe for you. Please, come inside, and you can have it back."
The man glared at him, mistrust at war with longing. "I can have it back?"
"Of course. Just come inside, please. It isn't safe up here."
Kanehara looked around in bewilderment, looked at the flapping white sheets and the wall of blue sky curving over them. He shook his head. "No, you're lying. You never had it. I lost it somewhere else. I know now. Where was that? I was so happy there, only I can't remember..." He staggered back and hit the railing. Shigeto's heart lurched.
He didn't like standing here on this rooftop; it reminded him too forcefully of his wife, and how she'd died. Even the billowing sheets reminded him of her white hospital gown spread out around her as she lay on the ground. There had been blood everywhere, but what he remembered was the one red finger of it trailing down the white page of her skirt. Standing among the sheets, part of him began to fear he'd see a thin line of blood running down one of them, and hear her voice under the crack of flapping cloth.
He supposed that idea's potency came from the memory of the mainland girl. He hadn't noticed until after, but her white scarf had had a scarlet stripe running along it from end to end. He wondered if destiny could be like that, running through one's life like a line of blood until it bloomed into something deadly.
A bellow brought him back to the present. He had Kanehara on the ground. He couldn't remember doing it; he must have had some sort of psychological lapse, brought on by the memories being up on this roof triggered. The nurse was running to him with a hypodermic needle in one hand and a small bottle in the other. When he saw it, Kanehara made a feeble attempt to break free, but he was too weakened by his illness to move Shigeto.
Once Kanehara was safely sedated, Shigeto stood, brushing the dust from his coat fastidiously.
"All right," he said, taking a slow, controlled breath. "The broken door will need to be sealed off, but that can wait. For now, take Mr. Kanehara down to the – " he was distracted; he'd almost said laboratory " – to my office. I think it's time to try something a little more drastic."
Kanehara moaned, but that was his only protest, and he went obediently enough with the nurse. Shigeto made himself wait awhile on the roof, struggling to master his irrational fears.
Thinking of his wife made him think of Sakuya; they were so alike it was almost impossible not to, so alike he had assumed there was nothing of himself in her, until this business with You. His wife would never have involved herself in anything like that. But now he realised there had been a delicacy in his wife that Sakuya had not inherited, a tendency towards self-sacrifice and self-effacement, so that when she began to lose her identity along with her memory, it had not seemed so strange.
But Sakuya knew who she was and what she wanted, and was not afraid of her desires. She had confessed to him, true, and been initially willing to do what he said; but then she had fought with him, and her will had been strong enough to match his. She knew how to make others not only do what she wanted, but want to do it. He thought she might be a good mother, given the chance.
When he came back to his office, he found Kanehara standing in the middle of the room, staring blankly at the clouded moon carving on Shigeto's shelf. Luna Sedata was another of those things that kept reappearing, in the history of the island and of the Haibaras, which, of course, were really the same thing. More like a recurrent flaw in the weave than a decorative feature, it marred what would otherwise have been perfect.
Kanehara was dribbling, he noticed with revulsion; a long, silvery thread of saliva drooped from his lips and broke off, making a little puddle on the floor.
"Come with me," Shigeto said in his kindliest voice, moving the cabinet aside to reveal the staircase. "Come with me, and I'll help you feel better."
Kanehara followed him, his feet dragging on the steps. He didn't protest when Shigeto made him lie down on the bed, didn't make any objection when Shigeto fastened the cuffs around his bony wrists and ankles and his bird-like neck, didn't show the slightest interest in the scalpel until it bit into his skin. Then he began to struggle, then he began to scream; just like the mainland girl, he begged and burbled, but by then, it was too late. By then, it always was.
Six months later You was perching in a chair in the kitchen, pretending to read a book about neurology, but really watching Sakuya. She was wearing a new blouse the colour of honey. She was too big to wear her old clothes comfortably now, but the new blouse wasn't quite the right size, and the collar dipped low. You was thinking how it would be to embrace her from behind and slip his hand below that low collar.
He shifted restlessly in the chair. It was no good thinking like that; he knew he wouldn't do it.
This was only the second time they'd been left alone together since their father had found out. The first time, he'd been called to the hospital unexpectedly. They'd been sitting in the living room, Sakuya listening to the radio, You doing school-work, and he'd met her eyes and known she wanted him to go to her. He'd also known that if he did that, he wouldn't be able to stop, and if their father came home and found them...
He'd left the room, left her sitting there by the radio looking hurt and confused, and hated himself for doing it. It was as if he'd taken his father's side instead of hers.
It was the same now. Their father was taking a phonecall in the study, but he could be back at any moment, and You knew perfectly well that once he had Sakuya in his arms, he wouldn't be able to hold back.
He became aware that she was no longer moving back and forth, only standing there at the work-surface with her back to him, looking down.
"You," she said, in a voice of such deliberate calm that he knew at once something was wrong. He shut his book.
"Yes?"
She turned, holding up a plum. Her hands were steady, but he could see the whites of her eyes, all the way round.
"Does this go in?" she said. "I can't remember the recipe."
Something thin and cold settled in his chest, but he tried to sound as calm as she was. "No, I don't think plums go in hotpot."
She looked at what she had in her hand for a long time. Her lips moved, silently shaping the word plum as if it were in some foreign tongue. Then her fingers tightened, biting into the flesh of the fruit and sending juice squirting onto the walls and the worktop. "Stop looking at me." Her voice rose. "Why are you looking at me? Stop!"
He lowered his eyes at once, and she turned back to the chopping board, wiping the juice from her fingers with a damp cloth. The juice left pink lines as it ran down the white plaster.
Don't tell father, his mind screamed at him. He'll want to put her in the hospital. It'll ruin everything.
But if it was Luna Sedata syndrome, it wouldn't stay secret for long. Luna Sedata was like pregnancy. It showed.
Did they have three years now? Impossible to say. The disease was unpredictable; it could progress quickly or slowly. It might be five or even ten years before Sakuya manifested anything more serious than memory lapses. Or she might deteriorate quickly: in twelve months, she might need constant care. Or six months. Or three.
It might be nothing. Everyone forgets things from time to time.
But not like this, and he knew it. He could remember his mother looking just that way, before she'd had to go to the hospital, staring at him with white eyes. He'd been chattering about some triviality, and finally she'd said, in that same voice of forced calm, "I'm sorry, but who are you?"
Most people who forgot something they knew they should remember tried to cover it up, but Luna Sedata seemed to strip away that capacity, showing the fear and anger that lay underneath, like the skull under the face.
Now Sakuya was humming to herself, chopping spring onions as if nothing had happened, and that, too, was like his mother, whose violent outbursts had passed like summer storms and left her sweet and good-tempered.
You laid his unread book aside without a word and padded down the hall to his father's study.
Through the door, he could hear his father's side of the telephone conversation, and he stood a moment, hand raised to knock, listening.
"If she's making a fuss, restrain her, nurse, is that so hard? ...Yes, it must be done tonight, it's essential to see the effects of the lunar... Well, fetch the doctor on duty and hold her down, then... For goodness' sake, I don't know, use the neck brace and clamp it on. If she won't stop screaming, gag her. And make sure to record everything, no matter how insignificant. You have the tape recorder set up? Good. I'll leave it in your hands."
You's hand had dropped to his side by then, and he was eavesdropping in earnest. He knew experiments were carried out at the hospital, sometimes unpleasant ones, sometimes deadly, but he'd never had any stirrings of conscience about them, and he didn't think his father had either.
Over the past months, he'd come to think of Shigeto as the enemy, but in his father's calm, implacable voice, he heard himself. They both understood that, when things were important, a man had to pursue them relentlessly, even if it meant crossing the moral lines laid down by others. This family had always pushed boundaries, moral, social and academic alike.
He wondered how many rules his father had broken over the course of his life, and how many had remained undiscovered.
He wondered how his child would turn out, with all this running in her blood.
That was a new thought. Until now, he'd thought of the child only as an extension of himself and Sakuya, not as another member of the family, partaking in the same collections of flaws and foibles. He wondered if destiny could be passed down from mother to daughter, from father to son, just like the colour of the eyes and the shape of the skull. He thought of Sakuya's fear-wide eyes, and this time the thought encompassed his mother, too, and his unborn daughter. What scarlet thread was twined around the family line, waiting to emerge in her?
He knocked on the door to his father's study, and went inside.