June 21st, 2021

A certain day in June 1982.

A few days after the cotton Drifting Festival, Satoshi Hojo went missing.

The following records are some notes I took to organize my thoughts, as well as a way to write down my remorse.

If I fail and meet with "Oyashiro-sama's curse," causing me to disappear, then I want you who are reading this to help me.

Help me, someone who is nothing more than a powerless little girl.

Shion Sonozaki hated being confined, hated being limited in any way. A lifetime of being pushed away, pushed down, shoved into corners and around walls –with only teasing, tantalizing hints of welcome and acceptance if she wore her sister's name– built up a hard shell of defiance and wrath within her, inexhaustible reserves of determination and fury to see her through her problems.

She hated more than anything to be helpless.

And yet, that was all she was in the face of Satoshi's disappearance. She could provide him a witness, an alibi, anything he needed, and yet when he was out from under her sheltering wing, she could do nothing at all to protect him.

Helpless, the twinges of pain in her three broken nails reminded her with every pulse, you couldn't save him.

At first on the dark nights, the black nights when she was sure that he could only be dead and Kasai left her sobbing into her pillow, Shion had sworn that she wouldn't be helpless. She would hunt him down, find his body, carry it back to the light of day and truth and see to it that he had a respectful burial. She might be Shion, but she was still a Sonozaki, and her father wasn't on the right side of the law. She could probe her fingers into the underworld and find secrets.

And at first, she had. She'd pulled her hair back like Mion and gone out like a soldier to war, battered sneakers and jeans and a hoodie replacing combat boots and fatigues and a bulletproof vest, a taser tucked into the back of her waistband to replace a gun. She'd been ready to not only raise hell, but chase it down and pin it beneath her foot, call up every memory of her own cold eyes staring back at her and pain and screaming in the underground Saiguden so that she could bring that intimidation to bear for herself.

Mion and Shion were like two right and left hands –thoughts of being complementary, of working together, didn't even enter their heads anymore. They just did. Shion and Mion were two halves of the same person, almost, two roles that they could both fit into as needed and abandon when they were alone together, leaving a comfortable sort of nonentity behind.

And because they were two halves, Shion knew exactly what to say and to do in the darker parts of Okinomiya, knew how to act as though she had the tsunami of the Sonozaki family's power behind herself. Treating with ruffians was a dangerous enough task for a young girl alone, especially an attractive young girl by herself, but Shion's needlelike glare was often enough to make the most cowardly ones back down, and if not, she had her taser.

She could use her family name. She could. But that was risky, it was so, so risky, that even now it was something she didn't dare to do. Forking over some of her hard-earned paycheck to people in dark corners of Okinomiya, at night when rain came pouring down, that was a risk Shion could accept –following ruffians who traded in human parts and lives to their lairs, that she could do. Shion knew even then that she was walking a tightrope, that if she kept risking her life and safety like this, eventually her luck would run out. She knew that even between her own skills and Kasai's, she could find herself neck-deep in the very grim consequences of her investigations with little to no warning.

But she couldn't stop.

The longer she went without scraps of information about Satoshi, the more desperate she got, tentatively probing into what her uncle knew between breaks at work, starting to dig into areas of the underworld in Okinomiya where she knew the Sonozaki family had sway. This wasn't just like walking a tightrope –it was walking a frayed tightrope, waiting and knowing that the ends were going to snap. Shion couldn't get away with poking at the many arms of the family business: they'd know, sooner or later. They'd know, and she'd already had ample experience with the severity of their punishment.

But what else was she to do? Let Satoshi fade into memory, into nothing, let him slip away through her fingers and into the inscrutable vastness of the world?

Now, on the dark nights, Shion wished he was dead, because at least if he was dead, then she wouldn't have hope. She knew that she'd search until she found him, and if she was dead, she'd avenge him, but her heart couldn't stand the pain of thinking he might be alive and beyond her reach. If he was dead, then at least he would be at peace, at least he wouldn't be hurt, at least he wouldn't be suffering. She'd see him again in heaven.

But if he was alive…

She'd squeeze her pillow tighter, quiet tears leaking out, instead of the wracking sobs of before.

No matter how hard she tried to cling to him, as time relentlessly dragged on, it got harder and harder to do so. None of his clothes, his personal possessions remained, and everyone else in Hinamizawa, even Coach, seemed focused on forgetting him as fast as possible, never speaking of him, going sad and quiet when she tried to insist. Despite being a very tangible presence in the village for all his life, as the months plodded by, more and more people spoke of him only in memory, in passing, like he was someone from a story told far away.

Shion hated it.

She didn't want to let go of Satoshi, clinging to the pain of her heartbreak because it was the only tangible thing she had left of him. But even heartbreak eased with time, and with nothing to remind her of him, no evidence to even say that he had ever existed, trying to hold onto Satoshi got harder and harder, relying solely on her memories, the only place that he remained whole.

Until eventually, almost a year later, she found herself no longer looking for him, no longer searching, no longer pushing the line or even investigating the curse itself. She found herself actually living her life instead of living only with him in her mind, found herself slowly opening up and spreading out to her sister and her sister's friends.

It was here that the worlds –the fragments of crystalized possibility– split, like a sudden crack in a mirror. In worlds where a certain competition didn't happen, in which a certain doll wasn't given away as a prize, Shion would continue, wrapped up in these mournful thoughts of Satoshi like a fading blanket of mist, yearning and insensible.

In other worlds, harsher worlds, full of the possibilities of madness, the knowledge of that doll and those tears and that jealousy awoke a demon in her, and it took many, many lives –including her own– before it was sated. At the end of those worlds, she tumbled down out of the sky with bloody hands and teary eyes, stained with laments both her own and others', speaking in vain to the moon, realizing all the things she had forgotten and left undone.

Satoshi-kun, I'm sorry I couldn't keep my promise.

I'm sorry, everyone.

I'm sorry.

My only wish…is that if I ever get another chance…

I won't screw it up like this again.

9.21 AM, USA Central Time