Its very irritating to me that there are so many arcs that are game-only and therefore impossible for me to get my grabby mitts on anytime soon. (This refers to Hanyuu's backstory more specifically, since apparently there's a game-only arc that covers it in pretty exhaustive detail.)
June 24th, 2020
This is not your destruction.
This is your birth.
–Unknown
Rika Furude's eyes snap open, and she lurches up, gasping. It's like a nightmare is chasing her, grainy and dark and flickering around the edges as it creeps and slides across the floor like sentient goo, eager to seep inside her cracks and destroy her, dissolve her away.
But that's alright. Everything's alright. She just –she just had a bad dream. There's nothing in the waking world to chase after her, no fear in the bright golden light of the morning and the sleepy summer heat of June.
June…
Déjà vu is a strange thing, like a ripple in a pond, a brief ghost of familiarity that wisps against the senses before it is gone, gone forever, unable to be recovered. As brief as a whisper and as subtle as a spiderweb.
Rika shakes her head and gets up, throwing aside her cotton blanket and neatly rolling up her futon. Her mother will scold her if she leaves it out like a messy child.
"Rika."
Hanyuu's fretful voice makes her start, and Rika turns to see her ghostly friend drifting there near the window with a frightening expression. Its uncertainty and fear, no strangers to Hanyuu's face, but the depth of her emotion and the naked worry that stands in her eyes makes Rika gulp and clench the blankets.
"Rika, do you remember?" Hanyuu asks nervously, floating closer and putting a hand out.
"I don't-"
It was just a dream. Just- the sight of her bloody body splayed over the altar when she was older, the memory of a life years and years older than she is now, that's…
That's not.
It can't-
No.
Hanyuu's hand brushes her shoulder, and she enfolds Rika in a ghostly hug, the huge pink sleeves of her ceremonial outfit briefly blocking out the world.
Rika clings to that intangible weight and cries in confusion and fear, unaware that this is the first of many, that this is the first opening of her long, long life and the thousand cycles of pain that she and her friends must endure. That eventually the event of her death will cease to matter, becoming only a stopping point, the glitch and the Game Over before she goes back to the beginning to try again.
This is the first time Rika Furude is reborn, the first time she has been killed, and the moment Rika Furude is no longer an innocent child.
Golden child,
Lion boy;
Tell me what it's like to conquer
Fearless child,
Broken boy;
Tell me what it's like to burn.
–Unknown
Keiichi awakes, and when he awakes, it's like jumping off a cliff, a cold slap of water to the face and then plunging down, down, and drowning.
It's just a brief moment, once, like slumbering Father Time had stirred in his sleep, when his eyes open wide and he remembers.
He remembers paranoia clawing at his brain, remembers a world that seems to crowd and press in on him, looming with twisted, cackling shapes, remembers the restless itch of his skin and the pounding fear pulsing through his veins.
He remembers Rena, and Mion, his two most precious friends.
He remembers blood, and pain, and screaming, and death.
He remembers wielding the slippery bat in his hands.
And he remembers, like peering through a murky veil, Mion's gentle and not-twisted smile as she uncapped a marker to draw on his shirt to cheer him up, rather than a needle to kill him. He remembers the shock on her face at the first swing of the bat into her skull, the shock and the betrayal and confusion that twists a knife in Keiichi's heart now that he sees it again with clear eyes.
He remembers Rena, sitting slumped in his bloody bedroom with Mion lying dead beside her, Keiichi screaming and howling like a madman, clutching her broken arm, her forehead bleeding from what was probably a concussion, and she looked up at him and smiled, smiled gently, reaching for him, telling him it would be okay, and he didn't need to be afraid.
He remembers swinging the bat down through her outstretched arms, and how they crumpled as he delivered blow after blow to her skull.
Keiichi remembers and he howls from grief and confusion and rage, rage at his blind past self, collapsing like a puppet with his strings cut.
And though Rika watches him carefully, he is never not the same, like tiny flakes of past tragedies are building up in his heart, subtle but sure as cobwebs, guiding him away from the horrors and bad ends he and the others had suffered under so much.
Now, do not misunderstand me;
when I call myself a shell
I mean a used up bullet casing.
As in, the aftermath of something lethal,
As in, an echo of inflicted evil.
–Amrita Chakraborty
Rena sits in the water of her bathtub, quiet and motionless. It's in the small hours of the night, the dead hours, as she has sometimes thought to herself. The hours past midnight when nothing happens and no one is around, and those that are awake are isolated in a bubble of darkness and peaceful silence.
This holds true now. Her father- her father is asleep, and the house is dark except for the one lonely lightbulb here in the bathroom, a pale and watery light that pushes fragilely at the darkness around her, leaving Rena in splendid isolation in a weak pool of light with the soft black and crickets chirping of the world outside.
She sits naked in the bathtub, hands wrapped around her knees, knees pressed to her chest, staring ahead. Her shoulders quiver, a little, with leftover nervous shocks, but she does not move, except to blink, slowly. Her eyes are haunted.
It had felt so real.
So real, that she had awoken and stumbled to the bathroom, running the water as quietly as she could and scrubbing at her hands, before pulling them away as though the water burned when she realized that she was washing her clammy hands like she was trying to rid them of blood. That was when she ran the bath and stripped off her pajamas, climbing in and huddling into the water, hoping to wash away the scent of fear and sweat that had been branded into her skin.
So real, it felt like a mere gasp and a twitch separated her from that living nightmare, one moment of slipped control or lost effort.
Her arms tightened around her legs.
So real…
Her father was having the difficulties he had in her dream. That woman –she had yet to flaunt herself in the house as she had in the dream, but deep inside Rena knew it was only a matter of time.
Perhaps, even more than its vividness, that was what frightened her so about that dream: how plausible it was. Here she was, and here was that woman, and here were a hundred thousand other things that matched up to her life perfectly. And yet, she dreamed. And yet, it seemed like a natural progression of her life.
Murder. Bloodshed. And the stench of gasoline and swirling madness before-
She couldn't. She wouldn't.
…wouldn't she?
Lately, her thoughts kept straying to that dream, thinking about how easily that would solve all her problems. Something warned her away from it, some instinct deeper than thought, but the thoughts still crept in and nagged at her.
She would have to talk to Mi-chan about this in the morning. Mi-chan was the club leader, she would understand. She would know how to stop these dreams.
And if not, well, Mi-chan did have a yakuza group under her theoretical command…
You've seen my descent.
Now watch my rising.
–Rumi
Shion's last moments in many worlds, the worlds in which she had gone mad, were always strangely peaceful. She had not ever acted the martyr or the tragic hero: she was a stone-cold, ruthless, merciless killer, and she had known it, and she had played that part to perfection. The moment she had attacked and inadvertently killed Oni-Baba, there was no going back, and she had known it. So instead of hesitating or fluttering with her supposed tragedy, she had firmed her jaw and strode straight down the path she had made for herself, proud and strong and ready to kill all those who had harmed her beloved Satoshi-kun. Anything besides that revenge was irrelevant, and she would become the cruelest and most sadistic of demons to see it through without batting an eye.
But later, when she fell from the roof, she landed on her head on a balcony, and perhaps that crack and the blood oozing out did something, for all her hazy memories were of "Mion," her now-dead younger sister, crying and saying she'd wait for her behind the hill. And Shion wanted to come with, wanted to go and comfort her, and she turned over and plunged into open air again.
As she fell to her death, she saw what she had done and regretted it. Next time- next time, she would do better, she promised the hazy image of Satoshi-kun wavering against the moon. She would do better, be better, prove herself more worthy of him, of herself.
Whether she knew it or not, that wish drove her in her smothering and coddling of Satoko in those latter worlds. The memories, impulses, and dreams were dim and hazy at best, but the feelings connected with them were all too real. It frightened her. That she would forget the first and most precious thing her dearest Satoshi-kun asked of her…unthinkable. Did she not know, did she not suspect, that Satoshi-kun had committed murder to save Satoko-chan, even though he knew that no one in all of Hinamizawa would help him if he was caught? His sister meant more to him than the world, and out of all his friends, he entrusted Satoko-chan to Shion, knowing and trusting her more than all the rest. How could she betray him like that? How could she betray his trust in such a way?
Never.
Unthinkable.
It was a lesson beaten into her with blood, tears, pain, and madness, but the Shion of worlds after rose out of that tempering like shining steel, noble and clean.
That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale, over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.
–Deathless, Catherynne Valente
Hanyuu was not Hanyuu when she awoke. She went by a different name, was a different identity. But Hanyuu is the name she was and would be known by.
Sleep clung to her with thick, sludgy tendrils, like the warm oozing blackness that had pulled at her, something like and unlike a cocoon, a stifling pressure that was at the same time soft and malleable.
She remembered pain, and she remembered grief, and she remembered blood, and lightning flashing overhead. She remembered her daughter, and she remembered being struck down.
She was afraid, and felt small and scared. And when she looked at her hands, they were soft and petite, and they trembled. She was a child again, something frail and meek, in a tiny cherubic body that was easier to tuck away and hide. Reaching up, she felt her horns, and they were still there, and a pang hit her heart, remembering hatred and harsh words spat at her. She had died to recover the pain of those words, to wash clean the hearts and minds of her village and the people within it.
She had been offered as a sacrifice, and been reborn.
Hanyuu looked out over a swamp amidst a driving rain, and recognized the clinging, wet warmth that had enveloped her prior to her awakening. Her body had been struck down, and like an infant in the womb, this swamp had enveloped her, and when she had been released, she was in a new form.
She floated across the swamp, down towards the village, to see the remnants of her handiwork. And she breathed a great sigh of relief, for the people were calm and safe –but her relief turned to pain, for none of them could see her, not even her daughter who had struck her down, not even her daughter's daughter, not even her daughter's husband.
And Hanyuu wept, as she would weep throughout all the years she was unseen, and her tears would only come faster as her descendants began to commit atrocities upon her altar.
11.15 AM, USA Central Time