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. If you wish to check out the prompt list, its on my tumblr page under the same username.

June 10th, 2019

There is an old house in the mountains near Okinomiya. Its nestled among them like the prize jewel of a porcelain Christmas village, the land around it for miles leading inwards, like a flower folded in on itself.

The house itself is the very image of rough, rustic luxury, a provincial mansion made and tended for years and years and years, generations of modern feudalism, with the family name cut deep into a plaque on the front gate in bold characters, a signal to all whose domain it was.

Sonozaki.

The inside of the house is quiet now –the inhabitants are not home, and the silence stretches on through the main house, out across the vast grounds and the artful ponds scattered about them, a pair of thick iron doors cut into the living rock of the mountain. The hinges look as if they have been blown off and replaced, at least once. The silence stretches on and on, throughout the inner depths of the sanctum guarded by these doors, past an antechamber made of wood, into a room filled with torture implements, and another with a bank of wooden steps against one wall, to be used as seats for a presumed show. There are several holes and screwed in the floor that show where some of the racks and tables from the implement room can be bolted down, to better serve for the performance, but they are empty now, and the stack of flat pillows to cushion the seats, piled neatly at the top right of the wooden platforms, is worn and old and undisturbed.

Farther in, deeper down, there are walls carved from the living rock, antechambers and passages and at the very back, a beehive of cells gouged into the rock and barred with iron in the front, with a dirt path winding up and up and around the lonely pockets of imprisonment, all empty now, all silent. At the back of a cell identical to the rest, on the ground level, is a deep, dark hole, and if one looks closely, one can see a railing bolted to the sheer wall, and shallow steps cut into the granite. These steps lead down into the hole, and at their bottom, though not the hole's bottom, one finds a tunnel that leads deeper into the mountains. But that tunnel is empty now, too, as is the dusty earth at the very depths of the round, gaping chasm that leads to the tunnel.

The house is full of secrets, empty secrets, family secrets, secrets of history, but there are some things that are not secret, less secret, and open to the public eye.

One such thing lies open on a futon, a leather-bound book with a half-hidden spine. The characters on it are embossed in gold, but cannot be read in the dim light and the lap of cotton fabric.

A scrapbook.

At the beginning are grainy, technicolor photos, bright, blurry smudges of color that still, albeit imperfectly, capture the images they are meant to commemorate. A group of schoolchildren, all grinning towards the camera, dirty and sweaty, exuberant and high-spirited, frozen forever in a moment of childish joy, with an arm flung here around white-clad shoulders, a hand scruffing there at mint-green hair, a grin with a single pointed tooth and another blindingly bright smile with gaps where white should be, a child still losing her baby teeth.

These same seven children are repeated throughout the book, in all seasons and all situations, with the pictures changing subtly from the professional, the candid, and the snapshot that develops on its own within a few moments (one is of them at a pool, and that picture is watermarked, colors around the edges turning into splotches of umbras in several spots, as if the children in the photo did not wait for it to develop before snatching it to look at) and eventually, an eighth child joins them, a thin boy with a pale smile that is no less bright for being so, and the smiles of the blonde girl and one of the green-haired twins become nothing short of radiant.

The pictures change as the book progresses, the children becoming older as the photos become clearer, colors sharper and less clumsily-saturated, more and more featuring schools, graduation, the crackling, dried stems of flowers and grass giving way to pasted-on copies of diplomas and silky tassels. The pictures become less inclusive, with fewer members, though all eight of the children still dance among the pages, here the boy with dark hair arm-in-arm with one of the twins, there the two girls with blue hair (she has all her teeth now, and her smile is blinding) and blond (she held hands with the other girl, but embraced her brother when the photo was done) laughing and saying farewell to childhood.

Older still, and older, and now there were photos of the men kneeling before women with hair the color of spring leaves before fireworks and flowers, and ink drawings of elegant circlets of gold and gems, drawings that spoke of reverent care. There were scraps of knitted pastel fabric and families that grew larger, kisses between two girls in an amber-lit pub (they don't photograph the ones at home, drunkenness and dares between childhood friends gives them only so much plausible deniability) and the eight children become eight men and women, and then more, more children in colors that mix those of their parents, the single threads of the eight unwinding to form many, countless tendrils that thread their way throughout the book, even as those eight slowly drop away from its pages, and eventually vanish altogether.

Cameras help us keep the moments that we wish to remember forever.
–Jiro Tomitake

AN: I really liked how Tomitake was portrayed in the manga version of Festival Music, it gave him some depth. Hence the added quote here that barely has anything to do with the rest of the snippet.

11.10 AM, USA Central Time