Author's Notes: Um… Battle Royale, ever heard of it? The premise is gory and perfect, the allegorical implications just grand and the death scenes… well, I'm not that good by any stretch of the imagination. So… I finished it (the book) and couldn't stop thinking about it, there were two deaths I was particularly proud of, and one of them was Takako's, so I wrote this. It's Mitsuko's point of view, and while (never having read a single Battle Royale fanfiction in my long history of fanfiction) a lot of people may not agree with me on her personality or the circumstances of her life, I hope you like it anyway.
Disclaimers: Battle Royale and the characters thereof are not my property, they never will be. I own a copy of the book, (great translation by the way, you should read it) and I was sincerely curious, but aside from that, I hold no claim to the story. None whatsoever. That genius was one Koushun Takami – wish him well, he's in the process of, or finished with (I don't know, it's hard to gauge translation time) his second book.
Mitsuko
It's such an intimate thing, to kill, to be killed. To be so close to someone and rip them apart with only your god given talents and a few acquired weapons. I've been killing since I was a child – no, I don't think I ever became an adult. I slit my mother's throat with a kitchen knife and I haven't felt a thing since.
Four men, four fucking men – if you'll excuse the term – thirteen times they raped me, a memory like that is not something one forgets. It has stayed with me for six years. I died that day, I died on the inside and I may as well have died outside too. I didn't feel anything else, I didn't feel my teacher's betrayal, I didn't feel that of my best friend, I just stopped feeling. The only thing that kept me going was air, hope was a thing of the past, food seemed to turn to ash in my mouth, water was like drinking mercury, sex was a tool, only air seemed to keep me alive. Like if I sucked in enough of it, I could fly.
I spent more time working the streets than I spent in school, fucking, sucking, kissing, killing – whoring all my talents out to a bunch of men that I wouldn't recognize on the street. I learned faster than anything what it was to use someone to the best of my ability. Everything I had ever aspired to be had been wrenched away from me when I was nine, everyone I had ever known had betrayed my trust, and so when the time came, I betrayed theirs.
I've always said I had no father, but the truth is that he didn't treat me like a daughter, so I thought of him as nothing more than the provider of thirteen chromosomes. Every day for three years he took advantage of me, every night for three years I ignored the tears rolling down my cheeks and just played along. I killed him with rat poison – he was, after all, a rat.
I happen to love our government, and my father is why. When I killed my mother, everyone believed that it was a break in. They ate up every word of my sob story, giving me sympathetic looks every time they saw me. I hated the government back then, but I didn't mind so much when some unknown stranger took the blame for my mother's death. No one else thought to investigate. When my father died everyone had assumed it was suicide, the guilt of not rescuing his wife had reduced him to the most honorable exit possible. I inherited his estate – meager as it was – and I have adored this government ever since, our fucked up little country didn't even investigate their deaths. We weren't rich enough. At age twelve, I was a practiced whore and held murder in a light of amusement, how else was I supposed to view the world? Though a happy cloud of rainbows and sugarcanes? I think not.
Of course, from then on, death became a simple thing, a routine part of life. I saw women over dose on opium, I saw men lying in their rented beds, stabbed fifteen times with a hair pin because the whore couldn't take the demands on her life, I even initiated others into the bitter cycle that wasn't quite my life, but I never felt a qualm about it. They weren't my friends, they were my acquaintances, I didn't know what a friend was. I never have, perhaps I should have killed that bitch too.
That rumor, about the Yakuza thug's girlfriend, it was true I suppose, a little exaggerated, but for the most part accurate. I did kill the girl. She had done nothing specific to provoke me, she was just irritating and trivial, screaming at me for sleeping with her boyfriend – man she was a piece of work, fucking the second in command behind his back and she had the gall. She was disgusting. I didn't have enough money to hire a hit man, she didn't get run over by a car, but I do have that razorblade in my panties, and I know how to use it. The pair I wore that day were blue silk, she didn't know what hit her.
That was the first time I killed as an adult, or at least I considered myself an adult by then. It wasn't the last time I killed, certainly not, but it was a few years until I did. In the two years between her death and the beginning of the program, I forgot what it felt like. I forgot the thrill and the desperation of fighting for your life, I forgot how warm I felt – I forgot that I felt at all.
In the meantime I just lived between nights. Always alone, I made two 'friends' into something similar to me. I stole, I prostituted myself, I didn't pay attention in class, I was a devil with an angels face. I was so flattered when everybody thought, "she can't be all bad," but I'll tell you a secret – they were right. I'm not all bad, I'm not 'all' at all. Then the program started, and I knew that I could win it. I didn't have a reason to live, but I didn't necessarily feel like dying either.
The first girl I killed, Megumi, she was so frightened. I could feel her heart pounding through her ridiculous sailor fuku, like a scared little rabbit's, and I didn't feel any sympathy. I only felt disgust. This was a girl that wasn't willing to fight for her own life, she wasn't even capable of leaving her little shelter and seeking help. She was so innocent and trusting I wanted to vomit, it was easy to slit her throat. I suppose there were worse weapons than a sickle and the act was so profound, I could feel her die in my arms, and there was no turning back.
She was good for one thing, I acquired a gun from her, the gun I used to kill Yoshimi Yahagi and Yoshio Akamatsu. She found love; that was cool. I didn't really know what love was so I couldn't empathize but hey, she was a nice kid, she could've been nicer but she needed the money. At least it didn't take her long to die, I was that benevolent. Ah yes, bow down to the benevolent queen, the survivor, the ultimate warrior. That sounded good.
My favorite though, without exception, was Takako Chigusa. She was such an athlete, she was strong, she had stamina, she was willing to fight and kill for her life. Kazushi Niida had a crossbow with steel arrows, she had nothing more than an ice pick and she was still willing to square off with him. She gouged his eyes out with her fingernails, she was covered in his blood and she still managed to be beautiful, the scratch on her face only heightened her beauty.
I meant everything I said when I said I regretted killing her. I envied everything about her, her pride, her ability to be proud, the sheer strength with which she exhibited herself, even the cold smile she wore when I found her. In another life we might have been friends. It almost felt cheap to shoot her down, and I just couldn't bring myself to finish her off, she deserved another chance at life – though that one mistake may have cost me the success of the game. Then Hiroki showed up chasing after dear Takako and the moment of regret was lost to me, I had to move on. I missed having the Colt .45 with me though, I liked that gun.
That was the first time in my current life that I felt shame over anything, the first time that I thought of being something other than me. That may have been the first time I realized that I was, in fact, a killer – someone that deserved to die in this game.
I felt remotely worse the day after I killed Takako. I felt distinctly guilty when I killed Yuichiro Takiguchi, I mean, he had sworn to protect me and he seemed so sincere. It may have been the first time in the history of my life that someone wanted to help me with nothing in return. That bastard Tadakatsu ruined it all with his paranoia. I almost had him when he was peeing, then again with the razor. They would have been simple deaths, a slit throat and a little bleeding but the asshole forced me to cave his head in with a baseball bat. By the time I finally got around to killing him, I was beginning to enjoy this game, he was so annoying.
Tadakatsu needed to die, he shot Yuichiro. Yuichiro who had tried to protect me, Yuichiro who, despite his weakness and his mild insanity (anime? Ew.), was a good guy, a rational, sincerely nice guy. Yuichiro was already on the way out by the time I finished him off, and I meant what I said about not forgetting him. I was actually sad that he was dead. Of course, I wasn't sad enough to sit down and cry over his corpse, it was only a corpse. So I dragged them both into a grove and left them there to rot, I had a game to win.
Once again I ran into Hiroki and I was just about to kill him. The jerk had stolen my firearms, he had forced me to resort to close combat, and as a direct result he made me feel guilty about killing Yuichiro! No one else in my entire life had ever made the effort to help me, and Hiroki took that away from me. Everyone I had ever met took something away from me until I had nothing left and Hiroki had done the same thing. Then again, maybe I was insane by that point. This game was stripping me of my sanity as surely as Tadakatsu had stripped me of my clothes.
I found Hiroki again because he needed to die so I could get off this godforsaken little island, not because I was especially furious, but he was already engaged in combat. He was already dead, he just didn't know it yet. I had absolutely no compunctions about killing off Kayoko Kotohiki, she was a flighty, idiotic little thing. Her eyes were too small, her nose was too short, and she had an insufferable crush on someone that was way out of her league. Maybe it was an act of kindness to end her personal soap opera, broadcast canceled on account of extreme bad taste. "Oh Hiroki, I'm so sorry… wah wah wha." It was pathetic, absolutely nauseating. There was no such thing as love or devotion; everyone gets what they deserve in the end.
And I mean everyone.
I didn't really hear the machine gun behind me. Somehow I knew it would come down to me and Kazuo, we were the only people with enough disregard for human life to willingly take it. I didn't want to stop breathing, I didn't want to stop taking in the air that might one day in an impossible future give me wings, so I fought for my right to life. Kazuo and I, we were two of the same animal. He was raised to money and privilege, I had to beg and scrape for every scrap I obtained, but neither of us really felt anything anymore. I'm sure he had his own reasons, just as I have mine, but I never thought he would actually kill me. I think I underestimated him, I didn't give him nearly enough credit – he was short, he was well groomed, he looked like he couldn't survive a night without his down comforter and his designer brand sheets. I guessed wrong. I should have known better, and I cursed myself for my own stupidity as my treacherous body died beneath me. But everyone gets what they deserve in the end.
**Mitsuko's face, once so beautiful, was torn up as if a strawberry pie had been flung into her face. This time her body was blown back – and the next moment she fell back onto the wet ground. By then she was dead. In fact, she may have been dead a while ago. Physically, several seconds ago, mentally, ages ago. **