Additional warnings for: explicit/derogatory language, implied child sexual abuse. This is also cross-posted on AO3.
Men stare. Boys try not to.
—It's the opposite with women, and girls.
(Momoi Satsuki's tits are the subject of universal acclaim.)
She dreams, viciously and indulgently, of double mastectomies, of what she would be then, Momoi Satsuki of the fantastic-tits-no-longer, and if, finally, death would come to claim her and not her breasts. She dreams of all the fantastic sex she is never going to have.
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She finds Daiki on the rooftop as usual, curled against the railing like a sleepy soft-shelled invertebrate.
He's not actually asleep. There's a fag between his lips oozing smoke and gravure magazine slumped in his lap. He's thumbing a lighter, her lighter, the lavender ones that only Family Marts carry, and she hates how that makes her feel. If it's her lighter in his hands, why can't it be her? If it's her lighter in his hands, why can't he be hers too? Her and hers, him and his—Satsuki feels that the grammar of ownership is fundamentally unfair.
She crouches down next to him.
Smoke is crawling from his nostrils with a dreamy type of languor Satsuki will never be able to replicate. Satsuki smokes aggressively and efficiently. Her brain can't help it. Satsuki's brain is a hedonist and her heart—well, her heart is a muscle made to beat, not to love. This is what she tells herself so that the pain she inflicts on herself comes from her chest and not her psyche. Satsuki's heart is a masochist.
"Fuck off," Daiki says tonelessly, but she only cocks her head and holds her hand out.
He spits the fag out, over the ledge. There's no wind, but it floats anyways; they twist to watch it fall together, their little secret of dissatisfaction, disillusionment, dis-everything.
"Fuck you," says Satsuki, and if it's a little more intense than she normally manages—well, Daiki shrugs.
It's just a fag.
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Momoi Satsuki converts to Christianity so she can one-up her court-mandated therapist.
"I've found God," she informs her one afternoon, patently unable to keep the glee from seeping into her voice. She sounds a little shrill. "Do you want to know what He said to me?"
The therapist crosses her legs and gives a small, dubious nod.
Satsuki pitches forward and says her next bit matter-of-factly: "Well, He says I'm a whore, I'm a bitch, I'm a slut, I'm just a hole to be fucked, I'm—"
"Momoi-san!"
The woman's mouth is hanging open, lip gloss congealing in pinkish strings at the corners of her lips.
Satsuki wonders how wide they can stretch.
(It's a shame they won't ever have to. It would make her a better therapist.)
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After practice, they go to the Family Mart up the street for ramen and cigarettes; the cashier there will card Daiki, but never her.
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In retrospect, Satsuki is probably going to Hell. She knows this but doesn't believe it—doesn't believe it in the way that doctors will still eat junk food, chain smoke, and drink too much. Satsuki sins, but she's not a sinner. She knows this like she knows water is wet.
It's true, she isn't a very good Catholic, not by any definition.
She doesn't believe in God, for starters.
What she does believe in, is irony; is Hegelian dialectic, is an absolute gleaned from the subjective and not. Is dichotomy, is juxtaposition, is the seesaw, the scales, the balance of unbalance.
She still goes to Mass like clockwork, and every time she receives Holy Communion she is thinking fuck you fuck you fuck you, I'm already in Hell you worthless piece of shit, fuck you fuck you fuck you—
She confesses, too, just not of her own sins, of which there are arguably none. She is a fucking saint, she is Christ the Deceiver, the Deceived, she is no one at all. She mutters an apology to Daiki, and spins his life into a long litany of transgressions to keep the priest busy while she leers at the dark ceiling of the confessional, silently daring God to strike her down, if He should be so obliged.
No such blessing arrives. Satsuki receives her forgiveness on her knees.
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For the same reason that she's a Catholic, Satsuki studies diligently and earns grades that rival—and occasionally better—Akashi's. She especially excels in mathematics, visibly preening when she is the only one in her class to write a correct proof of Laplace's equation in cylindrical coordinates.
(Daiki: "Laplace? What place?")
She will not be the dumb bimbo.
She will not be a dumb bimbo.
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She's got a crush on Kuroko Tetsuya; why wouldn't she. She fawns over him in public, touches him even though he never touches her, goads him, even, with her affection. She can be his girlfriend all she likes. They both know he will never be her boyfriend, and that suits the both of them perfectly fine.
They were both Sunday appointments, Kuroko the three o'clock and Satsuki the four o'clock—a particularly horrible strain of fate. They never spoke to each other, not then.
She remembers watching his metamorphosis from third-stringer to sixth man for the Generation of Miracles; remembers being fascinated by it, by his inability to chart a straight course in life, and she remembers being repulsed by it all the same.
(Why love what you will lose?)
She doesn't even like him as a person. Passivity disagrees with her.
If Tetsu is shadow, then she is ash.
She's pretty sure he knows about her feelings, or lack thereof. Her sessions have run their course, and they attend different schools. She doesn't have the time to be traipsing around Tokyo when she has her studies, basketball, and the paralysing conundrum that is Aomine Daiki to worry about.
She's pretty sure she knows why he lets her be, too. Lets her launch herself at him and walk all over him with nothing more than an expression of faint fondness glued to his tepid face.
She just doesn't like to think about it.
At the Winter Cup, after Tōō's loss and Daiki and Tetsu's reconciliation, Satsuki won't remember being jealous; she wasn't. She'll remember being happy because Daiki is happy, and it will be genuine. She'll remember being miserable, too, because he's happy again and she isn't. She's miserable. She's miserable and Daiki isn't, not anymore. He smokes less; so does she. And she hates him, a little.
(There is nothing else to love.)
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One week before exams, Satsuki invites Shintaro and Takao Kazunari over to her flat. Ostensibly to study, and certainly an improvement upon Daiki, who's spent most of the last week either stoned out of his mind or revising like a madman, but mostly because she's heard rumours about the two and is, naturally, curious.
The pair show up at her doorstep five minutes early, Takao with—is that a bottle of sake?—and Midorin with what appears to be —a panda, and it is, a stuffed giant panda hiding in the suit of a red panda, two fat pom-poms swinging from its chest. She laughs in spite of herself.
How charming.
"I wanted to make a good impression," says Takao when she plucks the sake out of his hands with a raised eyebrow. "Don't ask, don't tell." He winks at her, and she laughs again.
"Take it," says Midorin, arms stiff as boards, when she eyes the stuffed bear with a mix of delight and mild apprehension.. "Oha-Asa's lucky item for Taurus. Taurus is third today, so this will aid you in your studies."
How sweet.
Satsuki hugs the bear and coos over its cuteness. It is very cute. "Thanks, Midorin. It's so precious! You know you should stop giving me lucky items every time we see each other, though. I'm running out of space to put them."
Midorin frowns, and she resists the urge to reach up and ruffle his hair. Of all the members of the Generation of Miracles, Midorin is the most earnest. She loves him for it. "Why? Luck is—"
"Unlucky people should just die," explains Satsuki. She grins wolfishly at Takao. "Something Akashi-kun used to say, poor thing. Come inside, now. I've got so many snacks."
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No bed, no futon. Satsuki prefers to sleep on the floor.
Daiki catches her like this, once, when the team is in Osaka for a series of preseason scrimmages: she'd overslept, strangely enough. At the sight of her sprawled over her blankets, he'd said, "What the fuck, Satsuki?", eloquently as ever. (A mess of life and limb, bound together by cotton pyjamas like a packet of string.) "Are you a fucking caveman?!"
She gestured vaguely at her breasts. "It's better for my back, you know," she said, and he'd stared at her for a long time, jaw working silently. A laugh was wobbling on the tip of her tongue—she did so enjoy teasing Daiki, the lovable fool—until the clock blinked 10:25 at her. She blinked back, briefly stunned; she never slept past nine o'clock, usually. She stood up after that, stumbling with eyes half-closed into the bathroom.
"Dai-chan... get me a coffee!" she remembered to say, nudging the door shut with her foot.
It is a mistake. When she looks up she meets her disheveled reflection squarely in the eye—tousled hair, undone buttons, tired, tired—and she sees—she watches—
She wrenches herself away from the mirror with an aborted whisper-slash-scream, hands scrabbling for traction on tile, so unforgiving and so cold, exactly what she needs (exactly what she deserves), but it is, as they say, too late: she's throwing up on the toilet seat before she can get another thought into her head, on the floor, on herself, her hands, her hair, her beautiful hair, filthy little...
Daiki barrels through the door then, wild-eyed and cursing, and she can only gape at him because he wasn't meant to see, wasn't ever meant to know how much of a—filthy little cunt, dirty little thing, you are... little girl, little, little—
"I'm pregnant," she says dumbly, just as wild-eyed. "Morning sickness. Sorry. Congratulations. Very funny, Satsuki, very funny!"
She slams the door in his face and retches until nothing is left.
Later, she makes Daiki bleach the bathroom while she waits on the rooftop of the hotel. It's a point of pride for her, really, and a bit funny, that she spends so much time on rooftops and has never seriously considered jumping from one.
He joins her against the railing with an outstretched hand, and Satsuki faithfully plops a fag in his palm. She'll never not light him up. Then she fishes a freshly (and somewhat poorly) rolled joint from her pocket and tries to wink. He snorts and sends himself into a coughing fit.
"Fuck," he says, a bit hoarse, and Satsuki nods in assent.
After they share a joint, maybe two, Daiki asks, "So, Satsuki, who's the father?", a glimmer of a smile playing at his lips as he stares up at the stars, uncomprehending in their majesty.
She answers with a straight face: "God. Who else? I'm a virgin. Like Mary, you know. My womb is divine."
He laughs, a raspy, tired thing.
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Satsuki turns seventeen on the fourth of May and is promptly guilted into visiting her parents for the weekend. It's a short flight to Hakodate and a longer drive to the family residence just outside of Noboribetsu. The weather is humid and cool and pleasant.
Her gifts:
A slender book of poetry from her maternal grandmother, a retired English teacher.
A set of kitchen knives from her paternal grandmother, a housewife. (Her favourite present, if only because she is more likely to murder someone with these knives than she is to cook something truly edible with them.)
And from her parents, a rich scarlet kimono embroidered with sky-blue dragons and gold clouds, alongside a bottle of Chanel No. 5. The kimono sets off her hair brilliantly, and she takes photos with her family in the courtyard, cherry trees just beginning to flower in the background, until her cheeks go numb.
It cannot be said that the Momois do not know how to give gifts.
When she comes home for summer vacation, the photos have been framed and scattered across every room like errant blossoms rotting on the pavement. She finds other photos, too, ones that haven't been displayed since she moved to Tokyo, ones that make her itch.
She waits until the middle of the night to stuff all the photos with her in them into a plastic grocery bag, and throws the bag into the dumpster down the road.
The next morning, she saunters into the kitchen, exclaiming about how famished she is and how much she's missed her mother's omurice. It really is something special, her cooking, and one of the only things she'll miss about her mother when she's cold in the ground.
Her mother just looks at her without replying, a familiarly pathetic expression on her face, and Satsuki has to bite her lip to keep from laughing.
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, I'm already in Hell, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you—
"I brought some honey lemons with me from Tokyo," Satsuki says brightly. "I'm sure you'd love them, mom. Right, mom?"
Her mother smiles weakly, and Satsuki smiles back, strong where her mother is not.
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No one calls her bluff.
Is it because no one wants to?
Is it because no one can?
Does she want to be called on it?
Does she know how?
But no one is there to teach her to learn how to have her bluff called, either.
She won't ask.
Why love what you will lose?
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"Hello, Momoi. You're well, I hope."
Even when he is the one to call her, Akashi never phrases anything as a question.
"Thriving, darling!" She pauses. Even to her own ears, her voice is excessively cheerful. It's physically painful to listen to herself talk, sometimes.
"Positively plant-like, over here," she says, slow and dry.
A chuckle, too crisp.
"How are you doing, Akashi-kun? Is Kyoto very fun?" She's been once. It's a bit stuffy for her, a weird amorphism of archaic tradition and crass tourism, but Akashi grew up there, as did the last hundred or so generations of his family, so she figures he either has no opinion or absolutely hates it.
She waits.
"Momoi. It's… it's been five years, now. One-third, as you might know. Our lawyers are—"
Then she hangs up.
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If you asked her about all the things in her life for which Momoi Satsuki is grateful, then she would write you a list. The list would be at least a page, less than three, and on it would be all the people who have made her life a brighter one, the ways in which they have done so, the privileges that have made her life an easier one, and the various experiences that have shaped her into who she is today.
But she would not feel grateful for anything on that list.
Gratitude does not come instinctively to Momoi Satsuki.
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Daiki is three months younger than Satsuki. Sometimes it feels like three years.
Nonetheless, on the morning of his birthday, she does her duty—wraps up the sake from Takao in shiny gold paper and stuffs it inside an empty shoebox of his, along with 5000 yen in cash. She decides last-minute to tack in the perfume from her parents, too; it'll come in handy for some unsuspecting girl down the line.
It cannot be said that the Momoi's do not know how to give gifts.
The sake—they drink it.
The money—they eat it.
The perfume is their drunken tip to the waiter.
Daiki is an uproariously energetic drunk—always less drunk than he seems—but Satsuki is lazy and apathetic: she holds on so hard to the memory of inhibitions they turn into inhibitions, again. So, at the end of the night, as dawn begins to break above them and they edge towards the tipsy side of sober, she watches Daiki drool and she thinks and she loves and she thinks, and follows that to its only logical conclusion.
She needs Daiki to be happy, but she doesn't need Daiki to be happy. She doesn't need to be happy. Satsuki doesn't know what to do with that—there are no practical applications to profundity—so she goes to sleep, vaguely satisfied with her growing ability to parse herself. In the morning, in the face of a cheese-and-ham-and-onion omelette that she and Daiki attack like wolves, it's all irrelevant again. Parsing herself is a million miles away from fixing herself.
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Four years have passed since Satsuki was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church. She is a teenager, but only just. Her friends, having fanned out across Japan for high school, are now fanning out across the world for university. Daiki is going to America on a basketball scholarship, as is Kagami. Akashi is coming to Tokyo—nothing less than Tōdai will do for their leader—and Midorima and Kuroko are staying. Well, Kuroko will be in Yokohama, but close enough, and Kise has already left for Europe for a modelling/backpacking trip. Satsuki, well—Satsuki is going to Fukuoka. Satsuki has never lived in a subtropical climate before.
She finds the excitement is slow in coming. Mostly she finds she is tired.
(Daiki: "The only one who can beat me, is me.")
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," she says.
"It has been one week since my last confession," she continues.
"My uncle was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but he's on parole now," she begins.
Notes.
' Why love what you will lose? / There is nothing else to love. ' is a quote by the sublime Louise Glück.
Strongly inspired by Tenebrae, a collection of poetry by Geoffrey Hill; and from within Tenebrae, especially The Pentecost Castle.