June 25th, 2024
Shion closed the door behind her, put her back to it, and did not panic.
Gone.
Gone.
She covered her face with both hands, sliding down the wood until she landed on the ground with a thump; loose, undignified, like she was a teenager again, like she had been when Satoshi died, when Mion-
She drew in a deep, stuttering breath through her nose, and did not panic.
Shion had been all iron when Kasai drove her back to rejoin the family, not even giving them the dignity of a silk glove. There had been assassins sent after her –her, the heir presumptive!– and this after she had gone and retrieved the handbell, after she proved that she was Oni-Baba's successor once and for all.
It wasn't the act of merely snatching an ancient relic that solidified her legitimacy, Shion knew. It was the ability to parse the ancient texts, know the family lore, and put just the right thing in just the right spot. To be the one who Oni-Baba had been grooming to learn, to summon up in every mind the specter of the old woman whispering instructions into her ear.
Her ability to carve through Mifune's men hadn't hurt either.
Shion had been done playing pretend, done dancing to politics. Kneel or die, she'd said to them, standing there like an upright lance with Kasai at her shoulder and unchecked fury simmering in her eyes. She didn't have the sword in her hand, but swords weren't hard to find, and hers had been bare and gleaming, just waiting for its first neck or belly.
Their family had always responded well to force.
They'd cowered from her, all of them, and Shion had swept through her organization like a storm, digging out the most obviously rotted roots and silently marking down the merely sickly ones for later pruning. She had cut, cauterized, cleaned, clasped –checking on her mother, waiting for her to wake up– and once all the fury had settled, Shion had retreated to a secure room and shut the door.
She did not panic.
A choked, fractured sob broke in her throat, too sharp and too bitter to swallow down.
How did one describe the absence of a ghost?
When the news had hit, when everyone else was running scared and wracked with horror, when stories of the Great Hinamizawa disaster had circulated and her sister's name been among the fallen, Shion had always felt curiously numb –like Mion wasn't really gone, not yet, not quite. It was like her heart had been swathed in deep, soft layers of bandages; she grieved, oh yes, but afterwards… part of her had never seemed to let go.
Mion's presence had always been with her, like a soft touch resting on her shoulder, the feeling of a warm friend in a room.
But now- now-
Shion ground the heels of her hands into her sockets until her eyeballs ached, trying to stifle another sob. Secure did not mean safe, did not mean that she couldn't be heard by the bodyguards in the hallway if she was loud enough or if they were eavesdropping hard enough, but she couldn't bear to move right now. She felt like a puppet whose strings had been cut, sprawling gracelessly on the floor, limbs akimbo and her ability to act forever frozen in time.
Gone.
All of them, all gone. There weren't even remnants of their memories left. No shrine to their spirit in Hinamizawa, no evidence left of their passing on the earth. Nature had already rotted the buildings, and within a few more years of cruel winters and hot summers, the very structure of their village would be gone without recovery.
She was never a member of Hinamizawa the way Mion was, the way Mion-
Shion choked, and like a flipped switch, finally found the energy to lurch forward and crawl across the floor on all fours, pathetic as any newborn, to grab a pillow from the couch with both hands and howl her belated grief, ten years late, into it.
Mion was dead. Mion was gone.
Gone.
Gone.
Shion wanted to claw at her own shoulder with one hand, grasping for the fingers that she had always sensed resting there, to turn and cry injustice at the empty space behind her that had once held the presence of her sister –but Mion wasn't there anymore.
Mion would never be there again.
Shion pounded her fist against the seat of the couch with impotent rage as I never asked you for this! blazed furiously across her mind. She had been handling things, when her sister's spirit had visited her dreams and told her to go home. Sure, the handbell gave her unprecedented security, but if the cost of ruling over a family she barely liked was the loss of the one person in it who-
Another hoarse, ragged, muffled scream into her impromptu silencer.
It wasn't worth the cost.
If she was composed, she would've laughed at the irony of being separated from her sister again because of a temple, because of legitimacy, because Shion's life seemed to run continuously on the tracks of isolation and loss.
But instead, she wept at the eternal loneliness awaiting her future.
11.46 AM, USA Central Time