June 21st, 2022
The Sonozakis had an old naming tradition –the future heads of each family would contain the character for "demon" in their names. Thus were they named upon their birth, Mion and Shion: Mion, containing the character 魅, for the forest yokai, and Shion, containing the character 詩, for poem. Both of their names combined with the character for sound: the sound of the forest demon, the sound of poems.
The sound of poems, the chanting scripture of a temple.
It seemed like their very names dictated their fates, like some kind of historical drama about court intrigue and perfumed courtesans and knives hidden inside billowing furisode sleeves. Mion, the inheritor of the demon, was kept at home to learn by Oni-Baba's side, and Shion, the bearer of the temple name, was sent far, far away, to a private Catholic girls' school.
Shion hated it here with a passion. No one was her friend, and she was friend to no one, and yet that was such a painfully lonely existence that even when she showed her glares and her sneers and her confidently lifted chin (never let them see your weakness, girl, Oni-Baba would croak with her hand tight on Shion's shoulder, the harder something is the more effortless it must seem) in class and the hallways, she spent her nights curled on her bed, choking down tears. They were all the more bitter because this wasn't where she was supposed to be, this wasn't what was supposed to happen. Shion's future had been stolen from her, but she could bear no grudge. How could she, when her younger sister had come to her sobbing and apologizing, when her white face and scared eyes haunted the girl-who-was-now-Shion every time she closed her eyes.
It wasn't fair.
It wasn't fair, but there was no one for her to point her finger at.
With one incident, their fates had been reversed, and it was cruel how very poetic things seemed. The demon, once stripped of her true name, had been bestowed with a temple name and cloistered away, and the one who had previously carried that noble title had been forced to sharpen her eyes and hide her softness as she donned the painful cloak of the demon. Shion was sure she could find some kind of amusing irony in that, if she tried hard enough. But she didn't care enough to try.
She was alone. She was so very, very alone.
Cotton and fabric rustled as Shion turned over, looking outside the panes of glass at the moon, soaring high in the black sky and casting soft silvery light onto the floor. Outside, in the overly-manicured strip of grass that they called a lawn in the courtyard, bright green grass that was now pine-black with the coming of night, Shion could hear crickets. Farther away, she could hear the occasional calls of a night bird or the revving of a car engine, but that was all that penetrated through the thick walls of her pseudo-temple now that night had come. No chattering voices, bright and sharp with false glee, no gossip that hid sickly-sweet poison tongues beneath. Just silence, and the sounds of the world of night going by.
This was not her home. There was nothing in this that Shion liked, that she found contentment in, and she squeezed her eyes shut, her mind casting about, as it so often did, for comfort. She found none.
What did she have, if St. Lucia's was nothing but a glorified prison, a strict temple that kept her cloistered up like a European nun of the medieval era? Did she have the place that she was born, the only other place that she had ever been? But what was Hinamizawa to her? At least here, with the cold eyes and the sneers, Shion expected nothing and had nothing expected of her. These prissy, frilly girls –Shion wanted nothing to do with them or their families. They were shallow enough to mimic the mirrors they were constantly checking, concerned with nothing but baroque displays of status and refinement, like they wouldn't trip over their own feet and faceplant into the dirt the moment they accidentally strayed into the real world.
No, Shion held nothing but contempt for her classmates. What, then, should their opinions matter to her?
But Hinamizawa…in Hinamizawa, the cold eyes and harsh glances bit deep. Shion had drawn the cloak of this name over herself before –back before the tattoo, when it had been as simple and safe as plucking at her ponytail– and she had shrank under the way that her family's faces turned from her. She was Mion, she was Shion, and the comparison only made the differences sharper.
It was true that her family had never hit her, never hurt her. Her mother had never raised her hand, her father had never shouted at her. There was just the knowledge –the cool, calm, ever-present knowledge– that Shion was lesser. When twin heirs were born, the spare should have been strangled before the blood was even wiped away, and while Shion's family may have spared her –spared the her that carried the name at that time– they had not spared her for much.
You are not the child we want, said every word, every deed, every thought, every glance.
You should not have been.
You almost did not exist, and it was only our mercy that spared you.
To have such glances, such thoughts, directed towards a very little girl by her own family…well.
Hinamizawa was not her home, either. Shion had been born there, she had lived there, but the very walls of the Sonozaki home seemed to reject her. The crying of cicadas that filled the air every summer was not a sweet, nostalgic sound for her. It was the sound of Hinamizawa, true –inextricably and incestuously intwined with the very roots of her memory of the place– but it was not a rose-colored, bucolic sound for her. It was the sound of Hinamizawa: the sound of a place she was not supposed to be.
The kana-kana-kana of the chirruping cicadas reminded Shion of one thing and only one thing: the fact that she was in Hinamizawa and Hinamizawa did not welcome her. Even the chitter of insects seemed to warn her away. You do not belong, buzzed the thought that rise and fell with their droning. You do not belong here anymore.
But where else could she go? Her twin was there, Mion was there, and Shion had nowhere else to go. Nowhere else to be.
She did not belong in Hinamizawa, and she did not belong in the temple they had sent her away to, and so Shion drifted, alone and rudderless, in the world that did not want her.
8.16 AM, USA Central Time
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