Disclaimer: I have zero clue where this came from, but I just roll with my muses when they do this chaos and hope for the best.
I'm aware that this is most likely out-of-character, but still.
Ayano and Ayato are twins in this, with Ayano being the older one, and Ayato isn't a yandere.
There Is No Choice
It's funny...in a strange way, I suppose.
It's not the "belly-laugh" kind of funny like the internet and video game things that Midori-chan always shows us, nor is it the "haha" type of funny that Kuu-chan finds in books or movies. It isn't even the kind of "amused smile" breed of funny that people point out on the streets.
It's more...I would have to call it "cosmic horror" if I were to be truly pressed on the subject, I suppose.
What is "funny" is the circumstances that can make a human become a person...that "flair of sentience" that people claim only comes when someone has their first conscious thought. Most people would say that the moment is brought on at random, that they were playing or just staring into space when suddenly they had a thought and achieved "personhood". Others claim that it happens when you recall your first, or just earliest memory, and that, in that moment, you become a person. There are others who say that because someone has the capacity to gain that one moment (however it comes about) means that even a newborn, or earlier, counts as a person as well. All three arguments, conclusions, opinions, or whatever one wishes to call them, are valid, I suppose.
Myself? I do not know which to believe...so I suppose that I believe all of them.
I remember my own "flair of sentience".
My first memory was of my mother holding myself and my twin brother under the water of the bathtub when we were two years old. I remember the light fading in my brother's eyes as we both struggled in the water. I remember the cold of the water. I remember my father's screaming and pleading for mother to stop. I remember seeing my mother's face through the water and, in that moment, having my first true thought: I hate you.
What a thought for a toddler to have? Hate. In that moment, my first thought was realizing the concept of "hate".
The darkness that followed was so cold...but the hospital wasn't so bad. I don't recall as much of our stay there, beyond the too-clean smell, the beeping of machines, and seeing my younger brother (my sweet, gentle Ayato) laying in the bed next to mine. I remember our father petting our hair and whispering apologies to us both, just like I remember how our mother would smile at the doctors and thank them for saving our lives.
That moment, staring at my brother and my father, I had my next thought: I will save you.
What two-year-old makes a vow to protect people from one of the people whom they are supposed to be able to trust? A parent is supposed to be someone who loves you, teaches you, and protects you...and, because of mother, I had to be that two-year-old.
There was no choice.
Growing up, with mother telling me how "broken" I am...how this empty feeling is "normal" in our family and that I will be "fixed" once I meet my "one true love, my senpai"...my hate and desire to save my Ayato and my father only grew.
It's funny, isn't it? That "hate" and a "desire to protect" are the only concepts of feelings that I could understand? They are not "emotions", not in a traditional sense, yet they are still feelings...thoughts. I cannot feel emotions, yet thoughts still exist and create feeling or, for me, creates something that is a close enough approximation that I can acknowledge and recognize them through the numbness.
The numbness...
I hear what people say (I hear all of it loud and clear, especially what mother says) about how I'm "cold", "apathetic", "empty"...and, her personal favorite descriptor for me, "broken". If all of those words were not true back then, well...they've become so now...because there is no choice left. The only option is survival and the only way that I can survive, the only way that I can assure father and Ayato's survival, is by trying to embrace the numbness even though I don't want to. Mother is a monster looming over us, and the only way to fight a monster is to become an even worse kind of beast.
Do I wish that there were other options? Yes...but the world made it so there were none.
How could we be so surrounded by so many people and no one, not a single one, have the capacity to realize that something is wrong? That she is wrong?
Mother killed at least one girl and convinced this entire city, if not the world, that she was innocent. She drove at least one more girl to suicide. She bullied, stalked, harassed, threatened, lied, cheated, stole, tortured, and destroyed more lives than I wish to think about...even if I already know the total number. She is not as cunning as she thinks if she ever believed that she had hidden those journals and tapes in the basement; I found them and learned the whole truth when I was ten. What a time to find out that your father is an unwilling hostage and victim of a monster...what a time to find out that he was stolen from his family, his identity and life stripped from him as his name changed and he was forced into a waking nightmare of a marriage.
It wasn't hard to figure out that she forced him to participate in producing my sweet Ayato and myself.
This sickness, this psychopathic mockery of "love" that the Aishi family embraces...I hate it. I hate that she sees it as being so normal...and I hate seeing how she uses the love that our dear father has for us as a way to keep him in line.
Trying to kill us, threatening us...she knows that father loves Ayato and I, and that he is willing to cow to her just to assure that we are unharmed each day; I don't even want to think about what she forced him to agree to just so that she would let him call an ambulance after she attempted to drown us. She sees love as a tool for her to use to get what she wants, and all that she wants is father...Ayato and I are just extensions of the tool, and Ayato is the extension that she, seemingly gleefully, turns on me.
I did not willingly learn how to follow in the footsteps of the monsters that came before me. I had no choice.
Because of the drowning, and the drug that she gave both of us so that she could even hold us beneath the water without much struggle, my Ayato's heart was weakened...and she knows it. If I step out of line, Ayato is the one that she hurts because she knows that, whatever small fraction of love that I am capable of feeling, it is directed at both my Ayato and my father. I remember the bruises that my twin always has hidden under his clothes (bruises that teachers excused away as "boys will be boys") and how often he became ill when we were younger, how his heart problem (a heart problem that she had caused) became her plaything. If I yielded to her lessons in becoming a monster, a "yandere", and embracing the twisted "love" that she spoke of, Ayato was safe...for a while.
There was no choice.
Perhaps it is just some good fortune, or the universe deciding to mock humans further, but she has only threatened Midori-chan and Kuu-chan once. When Ayato and I made friends with them, all that mother said was to "never tell them the truth of our family or there will be consequences", but she never did anything else...because she knew that we would obey her. Keeping them distant is the only way that I can keep them safe as well...but I figured that "they are smart, their parents are smart...eventually, if Ayato and I are around them, they should see the truth, shouldn't they?"
Yet no one did. If they had suspicions then, like always, they let them go or ignored them.
Why is it that no one can see the truth without it having to be said? Were the bruises not enough? The behavior? The fear?
Even now, at seventeen, no one sees the truth. No one sees that my father is only a shadow of a person, too scared and irrevocably wounded to try to fight back beyond sacrificing himself every day and night just to buy one more day of safety for Ayato and myself. No one sees what Ayato's quiet and lack of socializing really is, too timid to voice an opinion or try to interact with others out of fear of being attacked or tied to the chair in the basement and threatened with a taser. No one sees that I am unfeeling, cold steel only because I am trying to shield them.
I don't want to be the shield anymore...I can't be the shield anymore.
Over dinner, mother says that she is taking father with her to America under the guise of a "second honeymoon" (better known as "what Ayato and you are to tell people if you know what is good for you") but she is really going to hunt down and murder some journalist who was responsible for her being caught and arrested years prior. It's funny how, even though she got off scott-free for her crimes and left the man's career and reputation in tatters, she apparently still has a grudge.
Father looks so afraid...even more so when mother walks behind Ayato and lays her hand on the back of his neck in a mockery of the gentle touch that I've seen Midori-chan and Kuu-chan's mothers use. Ayato is so still and pale that I almost think that he has died; staring into eyes that match my own only in their shade, I once again see just how much he wishes that he were dead just for the chance to escape from mother. My own grip tightens on my chopsticks; she taught me how to do so many things, yet I have to wonder if I can stab her in the neck with my utensils just in the blind wish that I can rid my father and brother of her.
Mother smiles and tells Ayato and I to "take care of each other and the house" while she and father are gone...then tightens her hand on the back of Ayato's neck; too many years of this "game" of hers is all that keeps my sweet brother from whimpering like he once would have. Mother looks straight at me and tells me to try to find my senpai before she gets back from America...because she was "already your age" when she "met your father"; father looks so scared and sick and, in all honesty, I cannot blame him considering how much of mother and this family's depravity that he has been forced to endure.
He never deserved this.
Mother releases Ayato and tells father to go upstairs and begin to pack. As soon as I hear the last sound of their retreating footsteps up the stairs, I see a lone tear slip from Ayato's eyes...I see how he is struggling to breathe and I know that his heart might well seize for the fear of her threat and the lingering feeling of our mother's touch on his skin. I let him come to me and wrap my younger brother up in my arms like I know that he craves, like how father held us both when we were little and he still had some will to fight left in him.
Neither my Ayato nor my father deserve this.
Ayato's whisper of "I hate her" and "don't become her" comes out as a plea, a far-too-familiar cry in the night, that would break my heart...if my heart had not already been broken beyond repair, into countless bloodless shards, a long time ago. Holding my twin and trying to calm him for his own health and safety, I know what I have to do now.
There is no choice.
I will find a "senpai" like what mother wants.
I will set myself up as the monster that mother wants.
And I will set myself up to fail so that mother and her evil will be exposed.
For my sweet, gentle brother...
For my kind, caring father...
I will sacrifice everything left of myself and become the monster that destroys mother.
All that I have to do is find someone popular enough that, the second that something "strange" happens, the school will have no choice but to stand up and take notice. I just have to be obvious enough that I am the culprit, but subtle enough that no one is stupid enough to go after Ayato for my actions. When they catch me, I will offer only the most token of a fight...and give them the truth, the whole unvarnished truth all the way down to the box of journals and tapes in the basement.
People will hate me, but it will all be worth it.
I have no choice.
If you got this far, thank you immensely for suspending your disbelief long enough to make it to the end and I hope that you enjoyed (even in some small way) the absurdity that is my having to write up my muses' latest incident report.