June 21st, 2024
The thing is, Shion is used to being unwanted. In fact, being wanted –at all, by anyone except her sister– is a uniquely alien experience.
Her parents? No.
Her mother seemed to like her well enough, but want her? Not really. And her father, of course, would try to make Oni-Baba happy before considering Shion –and Oni-Baba's wishes were usually contradictory to Shion's very existence.
Kasai cares for her… probably. He's as reliable as the mountains and nothing she ever does makes him so much as blink, so he likes her well enough… she thinks. He's so inscrutable, she still can't tell what he feels and thinks sometimes, even though he's been at her side since she was little.
So when she breaks her way out of St. Lucia's and makes her way back to Hinamizawa –not home, not really, but almost– she has to do everything carefully. The apartment she rents has to be under a different name, Kasai has to be the one doing all the shopping, and she can't even leave the damn place without calling Mion and switching out identities.
It's… stifling. But it's a stifling that she chose, rather than the cloistered confines of that damn school she was locked away in, so Shion grits her teeth and bears it. This is her freedom, fractal and incremented as it is.
So she tugs her hair into a ponytail and pulls her shoulders back and her chin up when she has to leave, just to get some breathing space.
It's… different, being Mion. Like slipping back into an old, comfortable pair of shoes that she'd beaten in and then left behind for years. She remembers things before she remembers them, and every gesture, every word, feels… the same, but subtly off. Like she's moving through air that's just a touch more solid than it should be, or her bones are lighter than they are.
And she can feel every second ticking away, like watching an hourglass turned on its head. Mion can only be available for so long before Shion's sister has to be seen elsewhere, which means her time in the identity is so deeply, pressingly limited.
Anyone else going for a damn walk could take as long as they liked, and never worry about going a few minutes over the time. Shion has to count the seconds, because her alibi is Mion's alibi and if their timing doesn't match up, everything is screwed. They can never, provably, be more than one person.
Stifling isn't a good enough word for how that feels, for how much Shion sometimes wants to say fuck it and smash her own excuses to bits. She is here, she is Mion and she won't be denied. She will be Mion forever, she could be Mion forever.
In her deepest, darkest, most shameful moments, she imagines spinning that situation out to its end, when she's inevitably caught and dragged to Oni-Baba in not-so-metaphorical chains, and then telling Oni-Baba and everyone the truth.
In those moments just before sleep steals her mind away, she fantasizes telling them, I was the real one all along.
She tells them, we switched places YEARS ago and none of you, none of you ever noticed!
She tells them, we made fools of you all and you only caught us because I let you.
She asks them, so how does it feel, knowing you ostracized the wrong one?
She asks them, where are your precious, so-vaunted traditions now?
But of course, those are fantasies, and never get beyond the moment of stupefied horror on her relatives' faces. In real life, she knows, their reactions would go a lot further.
To the death, maybe.
She wants to –oh, she doesn't know what she wants. To be Mion for longer? To be able to be herself for longer? To have freedom? To have acceptance?
Whatever it is, she wants it badly, with an ache down deep in her soul.
12.40 PM, USA Central Time