If the plot points don't exactly conform to the way Gou-Sotsu went, too bad. I'm not rewatching it, not even for fic accuracy.
I will never not be petty about how the anime adaption went, at least, especially when it seemed like this sort of slow priority-shift is what they were AIMING for. While I'm obviously not going to claim that I'm better than published and accredited writers, I'll definitely say that the anime adaption fell miserably short of their goal, if that was indeed the case. To be brutally honest, that's where most of my frustration with Gou-Sotsu stems from –from my perspective, it seems like they MEANT to have a grand message about how sometimes even friends can miscommunicate and that can cause agonizing rifts, but friendship is something that will always still be a part of you and it has a power all its own (which I would have been SO on board with, by the way), but that premise was executed so BADLY it ended up being "actually gaslighting your traumatized best friend to maintain your unhealthy levels of codependence is fine, abusers can be redeemed, and uhhhh we can totally forgive torturing all your other friends because of a few last-second platitudes."
Oh, and Satoko was quoting the Phantom of the Opera musical when the chandelier fell, to the surprise of absolutely no one.
June 25th, 2022
The first time it happens, Satoko doesn't think much of it.
Well, to be precise, she thinks to herself What an odd dream that was, and moves on with her life –a trifle uneasily, to be admitted, but dismissive of those memories nonetheless. They mean nothing. They must mean nothing. Rika would never toss her aside like that, suddenly start treating her like an inconvenient stranger. Rika knew her best of all. Rika was her dearest friend. The idea of her acting like that cold, primly refined teenager –preposterous. Ridiculous. Obviously.
But then Rika had turned to her with shining eyes in the bookshop, and showed Satoko that study book, and her heart had dropped like a stone. Satoko recognized that book, recognized all those long, nostalgic nights and days that she and Rika had worked to complete it together. She recognized the joy and the farewells at the train station, as they chugged off with Doctor Irie's money to that hoity-toity private academy.
The only problem was, this was the first time she'd seen that book cover.
But she'd swallowed her suspicions and her fears, knitting them anxiously into the air with her fingers as Rika bought the textbooks and the study guides and they stepped outside into the dying swampy heat of August, carrying the plastic bags carefully. Maybe Satoko was just…overacting, a little. There was a word for that, wasn't there? Déjà vu, where you thought you'd seen something before you ever did. It was a common problem. This was fine.
But then, St. Lucia's. She was back to pleated skirts and stuffy ironed shoes and dress shirt collars that were always on the wrong side of too tight, and watching Rika swish by with a coterie of fawning followers as Satoko lagged and lagged behind.
Something spiteful had lodged in Satoko's heart, then. Maybe that strange, eccentric woman in an abyss filled with the shattered shards of a temple hadn't been a fevered dream. Maybe Satoko did have powers that no one else could even conceive of. And it would serve Rika right, too, be a nice sharp wakeup call to remind her that she had a best friend already, one she'd known for way longer than these silly huffing young misses. People didn't know what they had until it was gone, right?
And besides…besides, Satoko's life here was so miserable that it wasn't really worth living anymore.
So Satoko had taken the biggest gamble of her life –and it had paid off, as she awoke back in Hinamizawa, back before they had ever gone to St. Lucia's. This time, she had determined to give Rika a proper chance. Satoko knew what was going on, now, knew that she had an incredible set of second chances. She'd explain how much she hated St. Lucia's, how uncomfortable she felt there, and Rika would understand. She always understood. Rika was her dearest friend, who knew Satoko's heart better than anyone else. Of course she would understand.
Satoko had explained, and Rika had clasped her hands and smiled into her eyes and promised –that she wouldn't let Satoko fall behind. Not that she wouldn't go, not that she understood. Satoko had smiled, and indeed felt grateful, but the shadow of uncertainty still lay over her heart. Rika…hadn't promised the way she wanted her to. Thinking of how Rika was at St. Lucia's, Satoko wasn't sure she would keep the promise that she had made.
And sure enough, she didn't.
Then, a door had slammed in Satoko's heart. Rika could not come to St. Lucia's anymore. This place was like poison to her, making her forget everything of who she was. Satoko couldn't let her come here again, become this smooth, simpering stranger. She hated this Rika with every ounce of her being, and it hurt, to think of how this Rika had used to be her friend, how she hadn't used to look down on Satoko like she was some plebian.
This time, Satoko had taken her cues from a certain well-thumbed paperback in the back of St. Lucia's library, a battered old white-cover book with an oil-painting on the cover, one that showed a black-cloaked man with a strange hat pulled down low over his greenish face. It was translated from some European language –French or English, she could never remember– but Satoko hadn't really cared, beyond what it could teach her about traps.
Still, one of those scenes had quite inspired her, and she had called Rika out to the center of the great hall of the academy, when everyone was passing by and they had the largest audience. Satoko told her everything she had done, everything that was wrong, and there and then, in her heart, Satoko had made a vow.
She smiled viciously and snapped her fingers, and the chandelier had come crashing down on her and Rika with every ounce of its several tons of weight as that one thought, that one quote from the well-thumbed book filled Satoko's mind.
Let it be war upon you both.
As one would expect from someone with such a masterful command of traps, Satoko was a methodical person. To prevent Rika from entering St. Lucia's, obviously, she had to disrupt the groundwork that Rika was laying by all that studying and preparing. Once Satoko did that, a labyrinth of options opened up in front of her, and she could choose whichever ones she needed to in order to ensure their happiness.
The only problem was –Rika wasn't cooperating.
Satoko didn't understand it. What was so important about St. Lucia's? Why did Rika want it so much? She'd never so much as expressed interest in any high school before, and suddenly, almost literally out of nowhere, Rika was acting like her world would crumble on the spot if she didn't get into that one stupid, ridiculous school!
Still, just because she didn't understand it didn't mean that Satoko couldn't stop it. She used every ounce of her cunning and strategy –to no avail, as Rika studied with a desperate ingenuity. Satoko pled, she threatened, she ordered, she screamed –and still Rika clung stubbornly to her position, not budging an inch. That was the most frustrating part of all: no matter what Satoko said or did, Rika didn't waver for even a fraction of a second. Where was she getting that conviction from? Why was going to that one damn school more important to her than Satoko's friendship? Was Satoko really just- just a friend of convenience for her, someone Rika could throw away like an outgrown wardrobe the moment she found a "better" life for herself?
Thoughts like that gnawed Satoko as she slept, and drove the fury in her hands as she and Rika thrashed at the verge of a road and plunged to drown in the nearby dikes, or shoved each other out into the path of an oncoming truck. It wasn't fair. Why should Rika care more about those places than her best friend? Satoko needed to teach her a lesson.
The fact she was killing her best friend over and over again disturbed her, sometimes, but Satoko couldn't help it. Rika needed to understand, needed to become the person she knew again. Satoko would cry and hug her and apologize for all this awfulness then, but not before, because this person that Rika was now, this selfish person that wanted to throw Satoko and all their life in Hinamizawa away, didn't deserve Satoko's apologies. She should apologize to Satoko.
As much as she hated to admit it, Satoko was hitting a roadblock with Rika's stubbornness, slowing her forward momentum –and then that strange woman, Eua, had dropped a comparative bombshell.
Satoko wasn't the only person who had been looping through time in Hinamizawa.
Rika had been doing it too, and Eua had been kind enough, after that revelation, to give Satoko those important missing pieces.
She had emerged from that nightmarish cacophony nauseous, sickened, and furious. Satoko had been prepared to forgive Rika, to understand a little when she saw all that her best friend had been through…but then she had seen how often Rika gave up. Satoko's heart was tugged when she saw all the suffering she and the other club members had gone through, all those horrible deaths and torments, but then her heart had been fired with rage when she saw how Rika coasted carelessly through most of those visions. Rika gave up. She had this amazing, endless, fathomless power, and she kept giving up.
It was like, it was like as soon as something was too much effort, as soon as it required her to actually do anything but offer her sympathies, Rika withdrew quietly away and waited to die. All those times that Keiichi-san had gone mad and beaten Mion and Rena-san to death with his bat –Rika could have helped him, she knew exactly what was wrong with him, knew exactly where the serum to calm the symptoms was stored. How hard would it have been for Rika to do something as ridiculously simple as tug Doctor Irie's sleeve and warn him about Keiichi-san's condition, let the adult take care of all the nasty business and leave Rika to lounge about like she always did?
Or like how it was with Shion-san, when she went mad over Ni-Ni. Rika knew about the switch in the twins, could go and alert Oishi-san with little more than a vague warning that Mion-san had been acting oddly and a reminder that the Sonozakis were twins who could easily replace each other if something untoward happened. Rika hadn't even bothered warning anyone about the deathtrap they were walking into –especially her. Satoko's intangible fingers had clenched, nails digging into her ghostly hands, as she watched Shion-san use her for target practice. Rika had died at that point, most of the time, but all she had to do to spare Satoko such torture was tell her that something was off at the Sonozaki house and that Satoko should call someone for help if Rika didn't make it back. She could warn Satoko, instead of letting her step blithely into the lion's den.
Rika hadn't even bothered to do that.
And Rena-san –oh, the last loop of that fragment had ended with Keiichi and Rena-san standing on the roof of the school with their hands joined and raised high to the sky, shouting their defiance to the unknown author of these tragedies, but every other iteration had ended in blackened posts and cracked foundations, of sad tiny skeletons that were too charred and melted to be identified by anyone. All Rika had to do was whisper a word of warning, lift a single cautionary finger, and everyone else in the class would have been spared that suffering.
She never did.
She never had.
Satoko realized, as she came back gasping from those visions of horror, that Rika had always been like the girl Satoko had seen for the first time at St. Lucia's. Selfish, self-absorbed, and self-important. Rika didn't think beyond herself and what mattered to her. Rika didn't bother trying anything but the most lukewarm strategies to save her friends, because she couldn't be bothered to spend the effort on them. They weren't important enough to focus on. Rika had never been anything but that girl Satoko had seen at the wealthy academy, too wrapped up in herself to care about her friends who needed her.
Fine. Fine. If Rika was ruthless, she couldn't blame Satoko for being heartless. Those memories had told Satoko one thing –selfish brat that she was, Rika hated being trapped, hated being forced to dance to someone else's tune. If Satoko wanted the friend she'd had back, she needed to chip away the haughty veneer that had covered it. She needed to break Rika's spirit and strip all her well-worn defiance away from her.
Eua was a useful ally to have. She promised to preserve Rika's memories, too, as they traveled from fragment to fragment together, and then laughed, settling back expectantly in her chair, as Satoko snapped herself back to the real world.
Satoko needed to go about this scientifically. If she wanted to utterly destroy this pseudo-Rika's spirit, she needed to play the long game, slowly and carefully tending the seeds of despair in her best friend's mind. Only when Rika's pride was broken, would she admit how happy she had been in Hinamizawa, with all her true and proper friends.
Speaking of which, their friends would be invaluable throughout this whole process. Satoko chose Rena-san as her initial gambit –firstly because her path would clash delightfully with Keiichi-san's building paranoia, and secondly, because…because Satoko wasn't as close with Rena-san as she was with the others. She didn't like the thought of tempting Shion-san into madness, not when that madness took the shape of her own brother. Mion-san would be too much of a surprise, at this juncture. Keiichi-san was the predictable path, and Rika had already endured hundreds of years of watching the same pattern unroll before her eyes. Another iteration would barely make her blink.
The way Rena and Keiichi-san had slaughtered each other had shocked Rika, made her falter, but she hadn't broken. Satoko hadn't expected her to, and took them to the next fragment quickly once the shock had properly set in.
Over and over again, Satoko reset their lives, going back to the beginning and choosing a new victim, a new pattern to subject Rika to. Every time, she arranged enough of the same to lull her into –not a sense of security, but a sense of expectation. Rika thought she knew how this would go, and Satoko was pleased to prove her wrong every time.
It wasn't enough, though. Rika still held on, desperate more than stubborn, and Satoko had to take a moment, sitting in the chair Eua had conjured for her in this other-space, to think things over. That had been Rika's mistake, always randomly rolling fate's dice and merely hoping for the correct odds to come to her. That was a ridiculous way to gamble: you had to count cards and gather advantages if you wanted to get anything out of it but sorrow. Satoko was a past master at stacking advantages, and she rather thought that she saw a new one.
This wasn't enough, because Rika had gone from incomprehension to suffering. She still thought, despite all the new and terrible ways her friends were dying around her, that she was playing by the same rules, that this was the same game as before. No, no. Rika needed to understand that this game was different, that it wasn't just fate that was toying with her, at this point.
Satoko needed to drive home just how selfish Rika had been, because now Rika had been deluged in a torrent of horrors and was in the prime frame of mind to receive such…chastisement. She hadn't been brought to her knees, but her legs were buckling, all the same. Satoko needed to sink a fist into her stomach, deal a body-blow to her spirit that Rika could not recover from.
She knew the perfect way to do it.
Accepting her uncle into the Hojo house had been a squeamish and painful task, but now Satoko went about it with something less than mere annoyance. He was so…flat. So pathetic. So laughably manipulatable. Was this what an adult was supposed to be like? Was this the man that had held her life in such terror, so long ago? He was more of an overgrown child than she was.
Satoko considered that. It didn't really matter, of course. None of it mattered. If she didn't like living with this man, she could simply restart a brand new world where she didn't have to deal with him. It was the same with all the members of her club –to be sure, Satoko was treating them badly in the fragments she was passing through, killing off some, tormenting the others, but that didn't matter. It wasn't like any of them would actually remember. And without memory, did something truly happen? Or was it just…ideas that Satoko had tossed against the wall?
Akasaka was Rika's most trusted confidant. What would happen if he went mad?
Everyone expected the twins to be the source of trouble from the Sonozaki house, but what if it was their mother?
Satoko kept playing this game of atrocities with herself, letting Eua cackle ecstatically from beside her as she slowly and patiently seeded the idea that Rika was the cause of all this turmoil and chaos through the loops. Truth be told, Satoko was beginning to prefer the odd void between fragments where Eua dwelled. It was so much less –distracting. The club was so needy, always trying to pull her into their games while Satoko was wrapped up in perfecting her plans.
Truth be told, Satoko didn't enjoy their company as much as she had used to. Like Teppei, her friends seemed so…flat, now. Unremarkable. They were like characters in a video game, stuck in the same roles, brainlessly repeating the same thoughts. Satoko would be glad to include them in the perfect world she envisioned and would eventually reach, but Rika was the only person who could truly understand her. Everyone else were just pawns, pieces Satoko was moving across this complex chessboard to give herself victory.
She had even gone to see her brother, some loops. Satoshi looked so…uninspiring. Almost pathetic. She couldn't ever remember what she had seen in him: Satoko was so much stronger now, so much better than him. Perhaps she always had been. At least she had never succumbed so totally to Hinamizawa Syndrome. And really, wasn't he rather useless? Satoko couldn't think of a good reason for him to ever wake up –except, of course, in her perfect world.
Yes, Satoshi could sleep in that glass coffin of his, the underground clinic, until she finished her work. Satoko would send someone to wake him when it was time –until then, it was better for such a useless piece to languish, forgotten. His absence was very useful in manipulating Shion.
Funny, how she had never thought so well.
Satoko closed her eyes and breathed in the indescribable air of the place between fragments, and smiled as her eyes gleamed red. This place truly must be sharpening her mind.
8.16 AM, USA Central Time
If you like my work(s), please consider supporting my book! The Business of Creation is a fluffy and wholesome collection of short stories in which the gods' process of creating their fantasy world is examined from the very moment of its beginning, and you can support it by moseying on over to my profile page and the link there to buy an electronic copy from one of several sites, or by just searching "Business of Creation by Anna Marcotte" on the web. You can leave a five-star review to boost the book's prominence in its category, if you don't want to spend money, but the more profits this book brings in, the more time (and less stress) I have to work on fanfiction!