Toaru Kuro no Honto
A Certain Black Truth
'Once upon a time there was a little dove. At a young age this dove was thrown out of its nest and left to fend for itself. For a short while the dove, hurt not only from the fall but from its time in the nest, stumbled around the woods until one day it came across a pond. In this pond the dove saw its own reflection. It called out to this reflection, desperate for someone, anyone.
And the reflection answered.
It was like this for a long time, with the dove speaking and the reflection listening. The dove told it's reflection how it wished to fly and the reflection tried to ensure that one day the dove would be able to do just that.
Then one day a swan landed in the pond. The dove had never seen a more beautiful sight than this swan and, ignoring its own reflection, it began to try and catch this swan's attention. And the more that she tried to catch the swans attention the more the swan swam around and disturbed the pond, making the dove's reflection weaker and weaker. Until one day when the reflection was broken altogether and the dove, in an attempt to reach the swan which was floating in the middle of the lake completely unaware of the little dove, drowned in the pond. The reflection had been its only barrier between it and the water and in chasing a dream the dove had broken this barrier that kept it safe and had doomed itself.'
Ever since Kuro had come into being, it had been one annoyance after another. She genuinely loved and cared for little Shiro, but at the same time she despised her. Shiro caused herself so many problems and left it up to Kuro to fix them.
In the beginning this had been easy enough. When Kuro had formed shortly after the dove had been thrown out of its nest and been thrust into the hell that was the power development program the first problem she had needed to solve was solved merely by her presence, the problem of companionship that the girl had, prior to that point, been almost continuously without.
Back home the young girl had had it easy. There were so many things around the house to distract herself with and her needs were met without a need for interaction. It was why the girls "first" words were "economic decline" spoken when she was 2 and picked up from a radio that was always left on in the study that basically functioned as Kuroko's playpen. Her "first" true sentence had not been until she was 4. This was not because she was slow, in fact she had spoken quite a lot before then, she had even written her own lullaby to lull her to sleep each night, but even with her impressive (for a 4 year old) vocabulary in both Japanese and English, she had never spoken to others. No one else was ever around to speak to.
Had this continued it would have probably affected her in a far more severe fashion than it did, but as it was she left to Academy City and the cornucopia of social interactions that awaited her there before it had truly traumatized her.
Kuro had formed at exactly the right time, just when Shiro was most in need of someone to talk to and someone who could push her on past all the pain and misery that the process of getting ESPer powers comprised of.
Of course that was not the only thing that Kuro had done. That alone would not have been enough to push her through; she needed motivation, a reason to be strong. Shiro needed someone to be strong for, or more easily, someone to be strong against. She needed someone to hate- a scapegoat that Kuro could use to manipulate Shiro and help to encourage her to push her past her greatest obstacles.
The obvious choice was the parents whose lack of presence had been the cause of Shiro's previous pain and difficulties, and the people whose decision it had been to put her through this process in the first place.
The fact that the parents deserved this hate and contempt factored little in Kuro's decision, all she cared about was Shiro. So, to help the girl that she cared about, Kuro poisoned the dove's mind against the people who had pushed it out of the nest and abandoned it to fend for itself. She convinced Shiro that her parents were her enemies, people to whom one must never show weakness, rivals that one must always strive to overcome, and opponents that one must one day destroy.
Getting rid of emotion was difficult, creating it was even more so, but directing it was easy and effective. All the fear, pain, and despair that Shiro had been feeling towards the trials that she was going through was turned to disgust, contempt, and hate towards her parents. Whereas before she had seen the Power Development Program as an obstacle that she was unsure she could overcome she now saw it as a hated enemy that she knew she must defeat.
This eased Shiro's trauma, it allowed her to repress some scars and erase others all together. However one scar was still left from the ordeal of her childhood, and in the process of this poisoning (or rather, the process of emotional redirection) it created another.
The scar that had been inflicted before was caused by a conversation Shiro had overheard shortly before she was shipped out to here. It had been a phone conversation of course, Shiro's parents were never at the house, between her mother and their butler who tended to the house and, theoretically if not in practice, the child in it as well.
The phone had been on speaker and she could quite clearly hear her mother's words as she said, "From what you tell me then, going to this Academy City thing would be a good move. It certainly sounds like the best way to get the child out of our hair without doing something disreputable. In fact having a child going to such a prestigious place might be a good thing politically. Let's hope she has some sort of use after all."
Shiro's parents were nouveau riche, very nouveau in fact. They had made their fortune in a remarkably short amount of time just after entering the business world. Within eight months they had gone from middle class to wealthy, and they just continued getting richer.
It just so happened that this eight months was the time that Shiro's mother was pregnant with her. They had gone from two people ready for a child and excited to start a family to two people who were too busy to find time to bother with those things. By the time they realized that they didn't want the child anymore it was too far into the pregnancy to abort and giving her up for adoption would have had a poor effect on their reputation, so they kept her and simply saw to it that her basic needs were met and she did not destroy the house or their reputation.
It was at that point, when she had overheard that conversation between them, that Shiro had begun to hate the word "useless". If she was nothing but an inconvenience then it would prove them right, and that was one thing she could not allow. As long as her parents had no reason to despise her then it was their fault. But if they had a reason... She couldn't let herself believe that she was to blame for what had happened to her, for what she had gone through.
This is the version of her childhood that Shiro believed. It was not far from the truth actually, but Kuro had decided to alter a few things in order to streamline the emotional redirection and ensure that Shiro was not too hurt by it. All it took was some gentle insistence that the memory had gone a certain way, even if it hadn't. Memory was an easy thing to alter, especially when so much of it had simply been buried away.
It was all for Shiro's sake of course. The more she believed her parents deserved to be hated the less guilt she would feel over it after all. It was true that her parents didn't care about her but Shiro wouldn't have hated them for that without Kuro's insistence, despite all the pain it was causing her. The emotional redirection eased this pain, and that was the important thing. One way or another it had stopped the crying. Kuro hated crying, the sound of the sobbing, the feel of the damp tears and stinging eyes, and the pitifulness of the whole ordeal. It was why she had trained Shiro to associate crying with giving up, something that her stubbornness and pride would never let her do easily.
The second scar, the one that the emotional redirection itself had caused, had been a minor one. Shiro had become obsessed with growing up, feeling, rightly so, that she would not be free from her parents until she did so. But this forced upon her a maturity that would go on to help her later on in life so it was a positive effect overall with the only negative being that she became obsessed with having an "adult relationship" as soon as possible.
With this conditioning, Shiro had made it through the power development program with a determination stronger than when she had entered. After that she had entered schooling.
From the beginning Kuro knew about her social ineptitude Having Kuro had helped her a little bit but she was still unsure how to interact with other people. Kuro was someone without needs or feelings someone who didn't care for social niceties or norms, overall she was an easy friend to maintain. For a while Kuro had thought that this would be enough for the girl. She thought her friendship would be adequate to meet Shiro's needs.
But it turned out that Kuro was wrong. From the first day Shiro had begun to look at the other children playing around with others with longing eyes even as she huddled in the corner with a copy of Don Quixote. She began to yearn for friendship with another child, for human contact with someone her own age.
This posed a difficulty to Kuro. After all, if Shiro put herself out like that then there was a possibility that she could get hurt. She needed someone reliable who would never neglect her or voluntarily abandon her.
So Kuro dissuaded her from taking action until she could figure out how she would do this, but one day Shiro had disobeyed her to save another child from a bully. The other child was a shy little girl with striking blue eyes and beautiful white hair named Asura Soshi and later known to both of them as Jericho.
Kuro soon realized that she would be a perfect friend for Shiro. She was not sure of the shy little girl's reliability, but she realized that she would be an easy person to influence. All it took was a little bit of time to overcome the white haired girl's natural distrust for others and gain just a sliver of her trust.
After that it had been an easy matter to ensure that Shiro would never be hurt by her. Though Kuro did not understand emotions or feelings and had about as much knowledge of relationships as Shiro did, she did understand one type of relationship quite intimately: dependence.
Dependence was the strongest bond that could be formed between two people and the only one that grew stronger as time went by. Kuro understood that emotions were fragile things, that waxed and waned as often as the moon but with far, far less reliability. Kuro knew a relationship based on nothing but emotion would be subject to this ever-changing maelstrom and would soon be consumed by it. At this point the only safe option that Kuro saw was to base this relationship of Shiro and Jericho off of dependence.
Of course the dependence would need to be one sided in case things did not work out. If a bond of mutual dependence was broken forcibly then both people, suddenly missing the link that was helping them to meet their needs, would be severely hurt by it, But if the dependence was one sided then only the dependent one would be severely hurt. The non-dependent one would still be hurt, but the loss would be that of a friend rather than that of someone who they relied on to fill their basic needs.
To Shiro Jericho was a good friend. She liked protecting her and in that protection she had found what she believed to be her calling. Jericho helped her feel useful and wanted. It was also Shiro's interaction with her which had allowed her to grow up to become a well-balanced individual without any crippling social problems.
So, at Kuro's insistence, under the guise of advice on how to build a friendship, Shiro had begun to learn how to strengthen her relationship with Jericho by forging and strengthening the bond of emotional dependence.
Shiro was surprisingly adept at gaining the Jericho's trust and soon the white haired girl had begun to trust her with everything. Shiro became her voice, speaking up for her when she was too shy to speak up herself. Shiro became her shield, defending her from bullies and dogs and everything else. Shiro became her confidant, the only person who she could talk freely with about anything.
Soon Jericho had found herself relying on Shiro for many things. It was a subtle change and the all around it was viewed as a positive thing, both by the teachers who were glad that the class's loners and top students had finally found friends in each other, and by the children themselves. At such a young age this dependence condition was completely disregarded, simply being seen as ordinary childhood behavior.
For two years it continued like this and it seemed like there would be no negative effects.
That turned out to be quite incorrect.
Jericho, perhaps expectantly, was impacted hard by this extended dependent relationship when the two separated. She never made any more friends. She did not know how. Shiro had been the only friend she had ever needed. Other people were too scary for her. This mindset caused her shyness to get worse and worse, eventually becoming the borderline Agoraphobia that it was now. The positive side of that was that it had introduced her to her true calling as an inventor.
Kuro had liked her and was admittedly regretful when she had seen how she had become. Shiro still did not truly understand what she had done, but Kuro knew.
But that was not Kuro's only reason for regret. That relationship had caused a big problem for Shiro later on and in a sense all of it could be traced back to Kuro's actions... and that incident...
It was the incident that had caused so many problems.
It had happened when Shiro was 8 years old. To be specific it happened on April 4th at exactly one minute past noon, 12:01. Shiro had been involved in a little altercation and had made a simple mistake and accidentally killed somebody.
Despite the minorness of the situation it had haunted Shiro ever since. What had haunted her even more was the fact that the entire situation was completely ignored. She had confessed to the police immediately, drenched in tears. But the day after that the entire case was buried deep, the only evidence that anything had happened had been buried the next day in the only cemetary in the city.
For the next five days Shiro undertook a campaign to destroy herself, seeking retribution for this perceived sin that she had committed. She began training herself into the ground, running until she collapsed. She didn't eat at all and the only sleep she got were the times when she passed out. For five days she attempted to push herself into the grave.
It was the first time she had not listened to anything Kuro had to say.
Eventually, a week after the incident had occurred, she was stricken with Hell and collapsed on the side of the road where she was soon found and brought to the hospital where she was forced to stay for another week.
In that week Kuro, who was finally being listened to again, had tried to return her to a functional, non-suicidal state of mind.
However she would not accept the fact that the incident was not her fault. Kuro couldn't alter the memory or repress it or do anything else.
So she had tried a different trick. Rather than trying to convince her that it wasn't her fault she assured Shiro that it was her fault but she was being selfish by trying to train herself to an early grave. Kuro told her that his death could not be taken back and she did need to make up for it, but she could not make up for his death with her own.
Kuro had used the guilt and transformed it into a selfless determination. Whereas before, joining Judgment and helping people had been a hope, now it was a duty.
She never stopped feeling guilt, nor did she ever stop her ridiculous self-persecution, but now she was not at a risk of killing herself which meant that Kuro could let time heal her wounds.
In the four years between that point and the day she joined Judgment she had improved greatly. The scars remained and her view of herself as a brave and valiant knight was forever shattered, but she slowly improved. Her self-destructive behavior dwindled down to almost nothing, but her daily training was a little too harsh for someone her age and any moment not devoted to training her body was devoted to training her mind and power instead, leaving her no free time to devote to her enjoyment and less time than was healthy for rest . Rather than seeing her power as the cause of the accident and vowing never to use it again, she instead blamed her own lack of control and vowed to learn to improve and control it.
It was a hard time but Kuro worked hard to see Shiro through it. And for a while things looked like they would turn out all right. Then the pereskia got involved.
The pereskia had caused so many problems. Up to that point the only true relationship Shiro had had had been one of dependence, one that Kuro had orchestrated. But now Kuro's plans backfired. Because the previous relationship had been her only experience with those sort of things she thought that that was the norm and so she formed another one around this person who she had found out had saved her life before, this beautiful swan that from that moment on became everything to her. Shiro even went so far as to define her sexuality around this girl, from that day forth becoming a Misaka-sexual.
When handled carelessly dependent relationships were caustic to the dependent one. With Jericho Kuro had been careful not to step over the line but the pereskia didn't know about this line. She didn't know exactly how this other girl felt about her even when it was clear as day and still didn't understand exactly how her actions affected the infatuated little dove.
The pereskia did not know the meaning of gentle. She was harsh and destructive and knew only how to hurt. She still tried to be Shiro's friend despite the fact that such a compromise was completely one sided. She would push Shiro away but never far enough away to discourage anything.
Every time the pereskia pushed Shiro away it broke her down more and more. Yet Shiro would never complain. Her desire for persecution assured that she thought that she deserved this treatment. Her lack of relationship experience as well as her overwhelming desire to experience an adult relationship ensured a continuous cycle of overeager pursuit followed by an aggressive and harsh rebuke that she would learn nothing from and would simply use to reaffirm her belief that she did not deserve anything better.
It was a harmful process that lead to a slow erosion of Shiro's psyche. But it was a gradual process that provided enough momentary stability to allow Shiro to enjoy the good times. She was happy but not too happy.
This was a good thing and this was why this new, closer relationship she had now entered with Misaka scared Kuro. As long as she was at a low but constant level of happiness no event could topple her. A plateau was hard to fall off, and if you did fall then there wasn't far to go down. But these sharp peaks of happiness that she was now experiencing that rose and fell so suddenly left her a long long way to fall. As long as she was consistently unhappy she would grow used to it, but if great happiness was dangled in front of her only to be yanked away at the last second then it was worse than no happiness at all.
The once caustic cycle was broken and turned into a chain that the pereskia was constantly yanking, even when she didn't know it. Already it was at a time when their mind had been ravished and their brain itself was hurt. Already it was at a time when Shiro's psyche was at its weakest, when she was questioning her own sanity.
Her brain and her body were in shambles and every single minute she spent with the pereskia was like a boulder turning the broken glass shards that were her mind into a fine powder.
For 4 years Kuro had been free from the sound of sobbing and the horrid feel of tears coursing down their shared face. But the pereskia had ruined that, she had thrown Shiro, body and mind, into chaos.
Kuro hated the pereskia.
Kuro hated how Shiro loved her more.
Author's Note: "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of."
—Kurt Vonnegut, "Eight Rules for Writing Fiction"
This was an interesting chapter to write and I am extremely excited to see how opinions of Kuro change after this.
It was so interesting to look at the psychology of the whole situation and Kuroko's history through a non-emotional aspect. It is hard to examine the true inner workings of a character when emotion is distorting perceptions. By providing someone who can admit all these things that are happening without emotional justification it can help the audience to see the matter from an unbiased point of view and allow them to decide how they feel, rather than telling them how to feel through the characters.
Oh and if you're wondering how this has anything to do with last chapters "Coming soon" section… it doesn't. Soon is a relative term after all. The things in that section will eventually happen, I am not just typing some random words. Every event that I talk about is planned to happen sometime in the future, but sometimes quite far in the future. So have fun with that.
Edit: Oh and just so you know. I do not think murder is a minor thing at all. Kuro does, however. She only sees Shiro's life as being important and would consider murder a useful tool to prevent people from being able to hurt Shiro ever again if only it didn't upset Shiro so much (like in her introduction chapter "Toaru Kado no Hanten" where she would have murdered each and every one of the Skillout that attacked her if she felt like she could without distressing Shiro).
Dedications: I'd like to dedicate this chapter my wonderful beta reader: ThePolarisProject. I know I am kind of annoying to beta for since I like to post my chapters immediately after I finish writing them and edit them later when I (or someone else) notice typos or mistakes. So thank you for being patient and thank you for working hard on my behalf.