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Whoo, back again! Higurashi Month 2019, because it has become one of my lowkey life goals to keep perpetuating this until it becomes a proper tradition for all three-and-a-half people in this graveyard of a fandom. And then keep doing it anyways, because tradition. Here's the first prompt, and if you wish to check out the rest, they're on my tumblr page under the same username.
June 1st, 2019
Mion looked at the words scrawled on her arm and wondered. They had been there ever since before she could remember, but they looked...wrong.
(Little does she know, Rika thinks as she catches Mion wordlessly staring at the words on her arm, that the words change in nearly every fragment.)
Stop...stop! STOP!
(In those worlds, Mion is stronger, yet more brittle, always expecting an attack against her and her soulmate, little dreaming that those words are screamed at her in the grips of madness, before Keiichi takes his bat in hand, and...)
No matter what happens, my image of Mion won't change.
(Mion is afraid in those worlds, afraid of what she has done, what she may do, and well she should be afraid, for they are what she hears faintly from the innermost depths of the Sonozaki torture chamber as she waits for the end of her sister's madness, alone and barely-clad, within a dirt-floored cell.)
See ya, Mion!
(She waits in terror for a mundane end to something magical, or a flippant betrayal, but hears it so many times, that the day Keiichi goes to make certain of his bloody crime and check the burial place of Teppei's body, Mion does not register, and only remembers when she is choking on death in the classroom that had once been her kingdom, betrayed by people she knows not for reasons she cannot comprehend.)
(There are times when Mion has no writing at all, and she is empty, as all Hinamizawa is empty. Rika loathes those pale, grey worlds, worlds in which Mion never encounters her soulmate at all, because Keiichi Maebara does not come and the Hinamizawa Club is left desolate, a missing piece of their puzzle so critical that the rest just fall away without its support, disarrayed and scattered.)
No! Just a little further, we can do this!
(Mion dreads the desperation, for well she should, because that one time when Rena is the only survivor, when their world doesn't end in flame and a frantic No, please! RENA! their world instead ends in gas and choking lungs and dragging themselves away, inch by inch, until they succumb, and Keiichi's desperate, dying face is the last thing she sees as she slides bonelessly to the floor and he tries to hold her up, drag her along, even as he falls, too. Those are the last words in worlds where the Great Hinamizawa Disaster happens, too.)
Sorry, but after my tough talk...looks like I'm the first out.
(Rika feared those words as Mion never had, in that world where everything seemed to go right, until it didn't, and Keiichi was left strewn over the forest floor like a broken rag doll, a bullet in his chest and blood leaking from his mouth. That one hurts, as it has never hurt before.)
(The last words, the last world, Mion kept hidden, to herself, and Rika didn't mind, for after the victory in June 1983, it was no longer any of Rika's business what her friends' soulmarks were. She never had to use them to predict the outcome of a world again, to check which and who would be killers and killed. Those days were behind her.)
AN: Not gonna lie, one of my favorite Soulmate AUs is the one where you have words from your soulmate written on your wrist, except that instead of being the first words you hear from them, they're the last words, so you don't know what you have until they're dead.
11.08 AM, USA Central Time