"Do you hate me?"
No answer. There was a sharp crack of bone against bone followed by a barely audible hiss of pain, more like a sigh than anything.
"Do you think I'm evil?" Ragyo again raised her fist, threatening. "Be a good girl and answer me."
"Yes."
"Hm," She chuckled, fist opening into a hand that leisurely reached out to tease the skin over her daughter's hip. "Do you think I was born evil, the devil incarnate?"
"No." Surprised and amused, Ragyo stilled the motion of her hands and gripped Satsuki around the ribs, thumbs digging up and under the ridge of the bone. Satsuki's stomach heaved as she held in a cough, but her face remained neutral, eyes shut.
"No? So you still have some affection for your dear old mother?"
"No." Satsuki tossed her head up and opened her eyes, her natural charisma pouring through her words like a fierce light streaming from her body. "If you were born evil, then you would not be at fault for the atrocities you have committed. You would not be responsible for your vile nature. You could blame fate or the gods or your bloodline; but no, Ragyo, you have made yourself what you are, you have no one to blame but yourself, and one day you will bear the full brunt of the conseque-" Satsuki was silenced by a punishing blow to her face that cracked her head back and made her ears ring.
Her mother laughed coolly, reaching around to lift Satsuki's head with uncharacteristic gentleness. Softly, she pressed their mouths together, relishing the taste of blood.
"Who taught you to speak that way to your mother?" she murmured, her lips against Satsuki's cheek. Her voice grew deep and husky as she twined her arms around her daughter, a hand sliding down between her legs. "What am I going to do with you?"
Satsuki didn't bother trying to press her legs together. It was time to face the music. With tremendous effort, she flexed her stiff, cold hands before lightly twitching the index finger on her right hand.
C
She heard the note boom out in her mind, the beginning of a sweet, familiar melody. Not allowing the tones in her mind outpace her hands, she stroked another imaginary key.
E
Her other hand slowly eked out the left-hand part of the piece in time to the slow motion of her right.
G
Her hands ached under the pressure of her weight against the shackles, but as her body was set aflame and her breathing grew ragged under her mother's touch, she never ceased to softly play the only piece of music she had ever learned.
She thanked merciful heaven that Nonon had taught it to her.
xxx
One year ago.
When they were with the other elites, Jakuzure Nonon was nothing if not dutiful. She saluted, bowed, and spoke with the appropriate honorifics. But when they were alone, the pretence of society was dissolved by old friendship and they would sit together on Nonon's pink couch, each attending to their own activities in companionable silence.
Nonon sat with her head back, face set in quiet awe as she listened to the last notes of the piece played through her headphones fade into exquisite silence. With a sigh, she removed the headset and let it rest around her neck and turned to look at her friend. Satsuki was sitting with her legs crossed on the edge of the couch, brow furrowed as she followed a particularly difficult line in her small book. Still staring at the page, she reached for her notepad and scribbled a hasty set of notes before her face relaxed again.
Nonon looked curiously at the stack of books beside Satsuki. The smallest one on top proclaimed its title to be The Bones. Nonon smirked, pleased. Satsuki was always reading books that could only serve to turn the brain into a crazy, scattered mush. Books with titles like The Phenomenology of Spirit, or Meditations on first Philosophy. Nonon stuck out her tongue. Gross. A book with the title of The Bones, however, held promise. Such a title spoke of a mystery novel with light romance and chilling humor. Nonon was always trying to tell her friend that her brain needed to relax sometimes - maybe she had finally taken the hint.
Nonon reached over the pile of stuffed animals on the middle of the couch to snatch the book. Satsuki didn't notice. She was deep in concentration, her lips fiddling absently against the edge of her pencil. Nonon opened the book and thumbed through it, but was immediately and greatly disappointed. There was nothing but short lines of text and small diagrams of geometric propositions. Disgusted, she flipped to the cover and realized with horror that she had just picked up a book summarizing Euclid's Elements.
"Satsuki!?" She all but screeched, tossing the book back to the other side of the couch. Startled, Satsuki looked up, pencil dangling from her mouth as her hand instinctively shot out and grabbed the book out of the air to softly lower it back onto its pile. Regaining her composure, she adjusted the reading glasses slipping down her nose and arched an eyebrow at her friend who looked like a sad smear of bubblegum on the oversized couch.
"Yes?"
"There's more to life than math, you know!"
"Of course." Satsuki blinked. "There's also-"
"If you say 'philosophy,' I swear I'll shave your head while you're sleeping."
"Hmm..." Satsuki frowned, though her hand reached up subconsciously to stroke her own hair, as she considered her answer. Sitting up straight, she used the two middle fingers on her right hand to push her glasses up onto the top of her head. "Mathematics describes the universe, philosophy tells us how to interpret it. What more could anyone ask for?" Nonon groaned loudly and flopped onto the arm of the couch before turning suddenly to take Satsuki by the hand.
"Look, I know you're in love with Carter-"
"Descartes."
"-and get off on staring at locust problems all day,"
"Locus."
"But you've got to start feeling things! Really feeling them! You'll go crazy if you stay in your mind twenty-four-seven and never come out long enough to feel your heart beat." Nonon put a hand over her own heart, but immediately blushed at her unusually poetic turn of phrase. She put her hand down and let go of Satsuki's (which had gone cold) and folded her arms over her chest. "You're gonna go crazy..." She muttered, pursing her lips and looking away.
Satsuki's frown deepened as her arm dropped limply back to her side. A violent clenching in her gut and the sudden cold in her limbs told her that allowing herself to feel wouldn't end very prettily. Still, she owed it to Nonon to return her friendship, so she decided to do what she had been doing for years: fake it. It's easy enough to pretend emotion while still firmly walled up in the castle of the mind. A sigh here, a tear there, all simple enough.
"What should I do, Nonon?" Nonon's eyes went suddenly bright, and she struck her hands together with a resounding clap, her mouth growing wide with a smile.
"Satsuki, what do you think of the piano?"
xxx
She had never been in so much pain. She was sure a rib had been broken, for her already labored breathing had turned to a sharp rasp as she struggled to work her lungs against her body. She lamented losing as much weight as she had insofar as it meant that her strength was ebbing away, but at the same time she wished she could lose much more so to ease the necessary struggling of her diaphragm.
She was alone again, and cold. The dusk had robbed her of the sunbeam that shone in on her in the early afternoons. Absent to the point of insanity, she wondered if she had tan lines in the shape of bars on her left side.
Heh... I could never go to the beach again.
The screech of her nails on the floor accosted her ears, but she didn't stop. She would never stop. She tried to tell herself that she needed to escape to save the world, to save her friends, but that need had descended into pure animal passion. She needed to breathe, she needed to eat, she needed to sleep.
Oh, God, sleep.
Her days of philosophizing seemed infinitely far away. Thinking seemed like a thing of the past. She needed something to ground her, something to keep her attached to the earth, to reality. With slow diligence, she moved her fingers again, occasionally brushing against the taut chain as she hummed almost inaudibly along to the music in her head. She felt immediately soothed, and she realized with sudden and fierce warmth that Nonon had been right all along.
She needed more music in her life.
xxx
Nonon handed her a sheet covered in notes.
"What is this?"
"It's Mozart's piano sonata K. 545." Nonon set her arms akimbo. "It was written specifically for people new to music, so you should be all right."
Satsuki felt dizzy looking at the notes crowded on the sheet. She wanted to whimper, but Kiryuin Satsuki does not whimper, so, instead, she slowly passed the papers back to Nonon.
"Play it for me, please."
Pleased, Nonon settled herself on the piano's bench and began the short sonata. Satsuki listened carefully. It was simple and repetitive, but stirring all the same, the notes sounding like a delicious ripple of fresh water. Nonon closed her eyes as she played, but kept her motions jaunty. When she was finished, she turned to her friend, grinning smugly.
"What did you think?"
"Beautiful."
xxx
"Beautiful."
Satsuki didn't hear her. She was playing the music louder, faster, skipping no measures or repeats, over and over, trying to drown out the sound of her own screaming, trying to force herself into that transcendental plane of the music-lover where nothing else exists but the trilling of the notes and the steady dripping of the chords.
"Your friends truly have your best interests in mind. It was so sweet of Ira to leave this here for me."
Satsuki opened one eye and forced herself to unclench the muscles in her stomach that were holding her knees to her chest. She let her legs drop, both proud and exhausted.
"Gamagoori is nothing if not noble," and she meant it, though she did wish that she had not allowed his seemingly harmless kinks go unchecked, or at least that she had required him to lock up his disciplinary paraphernalia instead leaving it all over the goddamn school where just anyone could pick it up.
She tried not to hate him as his custom-made lash flicked over her hips, leaving a line of raging fire under her navel. Her legs jerked, but she forced them to stay down just as she forced her irrational hatred to stay down. She knew Gamagoori would be devastated if he saw what was happening. He would definitely cry big, fat tears and probably try to kill himself. He would literally kiss her feet and grovel for forgiveness without really believing she would give it to him. "He is a greater soul than you have ever been." She hissed through clenched teeth, her own face soaked in tears, her bitten lips bloodying her mouth.
"Is that so? Well, your shield is doing an excellent job, I must say."
Satsuki removed herself again, beginning the first minor chords with a loud mental bang to drown out the sharp crack of leather against her skin, receding into the music that she had never stopped playing. All her elites, no, her friends, had always been there for her. To let her thoughts of them be poisoned would be to betray them, to defile them undeservedly.
Never.
xxx
Finally, her fingers, so agile at the sword but hopelessly clumsy at the ivory, had been able to peck out the notes of Mozart's sonata. She would sit, frustrated as she hit sour notes while Nonon leaned happily against the piano and rambled about chord progression and superkeys. Nonon had refused to let her actively participate in the mathematical (more interesting, she thought) aspect of music.
"Don't think the music, Satsuki. Feel it."
And slowly, begrudgingly, she did. She would play the same piece over and over again, this time slowly, then quickly. She would play until emotion rose in her chest and threatened to choke her, and then she would quickly bang the cover shut, taking several minutes to force the feelings down and to the side. Nonon would look concerned, then, but didn't say anything.
They held a little concert before the summer. A small meeting that mimicked the gathering of teens in high school normalcy. Soroi made them all tea and her friends listened to her play the simple piece. They all clapped politely, demure, but the pleasure on their faces was obvious. She was sure she saw Gamagoori wipe away a tear.
The actual music lasted only a few minutes, but pervaded the atmosphere with an unparalleled amicability that lasted well into the afternoon as Satsuki briefly allowed her friends to act as her equals.
The memory of that pleasant day got her through the summer.
xxx
And they were still with her, protecting her. Saving her from herself, from the lunacy of her own mind, the mind that she thought would protect her. She had thought that steel castles built with pure thought would save her, keep her safe.
But she had never been more wrong.
She was saved by music. She was saved by her friends.
xxx
I've always thought of Satsuki as a huge natural philosophy geek. *shrugs* hm...