June 28th, 2023
Three nails.
Mion counted them.
She counted them alongside the rest of her family, but she also counted each scream, each sob, each cry of pain, each panting, gasping, teary breath. They hit her between her tense shoulderblades like arrows aimed at her heart, no matter the perfect porcelain stillness of the mask she kept in place over her immobile features.
She counted each thin spray of blood, each dull tic-tic-tic of enamel spinning off to skid across the wooden table or onto the floor, each blood-freezing creak of fingernails being peeled forcefully away from their bed, a sound that the weighty thunk of the machine and the clack of the lever was unfortunately not able to entirely hide.
Mion had counted them all, face implacable and stance sure and firm, as sick misery twisted and turned like snakes in her gut. This was her sister. This was her family. And yet, and yet…
This sort of thing could not be allowed. Mion knew that, she'd thought that as she watched Shion rip off three fingernails to make her restitution, and yet horror chilled her heart when she thought of how she wasn't able to tell if she meant this –her twin sister being corralled and controlled like an animal as men Mion half-recognized put a bag over her head and grabbed her hand and forced her, writhing and shrieking, to continue the punishment– or if she meant what Shion had said, why she had been told to make restitution in the first place.
Guilt curdled, sour as nausea in her gut, after Shion was taken away. Mion was her sister. Mion was the heir. She should have put a stop to this –somehow. Shouldn't she?
Underneath her perfect poise, Mion's fists were clenched in the sleeves of her white kimono. Her nails dug into her palms, and yet each crescent of pressure was only another reminder of what she had done –and what she had failed to do.
What she had watched.
What she had counted.
It only took a day after the dramatic events in the underground torture chamber before Mion had steeled her nerve and asked a question of Batcha. She could've done it without permission, of course, but it wasn't like Batcha wouldn't notice. Missing nails were hard to, well, miss. Particularly when they seeped blood in the way that Shion's had…
Mion shook her head briskly, staring down with a clenched jaw at the brutal machine that her right arm was strapped into. No distractions. No flinching.
Shion had done this. She had been unfair to her sister, and made Shion do this without a shred of mercy or a scrap of hesitation. She deserved to put herself through the same torture. Whether or not it had been appropriate for Shion to shout those words at Batcha, she had essentially been punished for falling in love. Mion had no right to shiver as she looked at this cruel device of tight leather straps and ancient, solid iron.
She had pushed her sister to do this.
She needed to make restitution of her own.
Clenching her jaw so hard she was afraid that her teeth would crack, Mion slotted her pinky finger into the terrible, hollow groove of the device. It was uncomfortable, feeling the tiny flat tongue that would rip her nail up off its bed pressing gently into the crack between nail and finger, knowing in moments she would drive her fist into the lever and the metal would clamp down with hair-raising force as that tab would-
She swallowed thickly around a gasp. Nausea swirled in her gut, but Mion knew –she knew– she had no right to hesitate. None at all. Shion had endured far worse than this, and she had borne it dauntlessly through two out of the three nails. Shion, really, had had to rip them off four times, since the second was a misfire and the nail hadn't come off: only loosened to a terrible blood-bubbling crack.
Her fingers twitched, trembling faintly as the jitters rose up inside her once more. Mion swallowed once, twice more, and then hurled her fist high, before bringing it down with an anguished scream.
She would match her sister's terrible wounds, in restitution for letting –for making– them happen.
10.26 AM, USA Central Time