freshprints | IC Inbox

Well, if the evidence (however circumstantial) points in that direction...

Is this Hierophant-kun? How clever of you to find a way to contact me directly.

I'll go look in my bag to see if I'm surprised by something there that shouldn't be.

some of the evidence is direct for example my confession however the circumstantial evidence includes the fact that white day was this month and that my accomplice has demonstrated an understanding of the process of chocolate making unfortunately i am not able to provide commonly cited examples of circumstantial evidence as i do not leave finger, foot or tentacle prints asterisk stop newline asterisk i understand tentacle prints are not a commonly cited form of circumstantial evidence however the prints of other limbs are and thus it seemed necessary to include stop

[ Inside Kirigiri's bag are two very nicely wrapped boxes. One addressed to 'Sakura' and another addressed to 'Seiko'. Unfortunate. ]

[The problem is really rooted in the fact that it's Hierophant-kun that contacted her about this. Maybe if it'd been Noriaki Kakyoin, she wouldn't have decided to be so indulgent, or casually sentimental. But she's intrigued by Hierophant, generally speaking, and he seems earnest enough in the way that he contacts her — clarifying things, making jokes, texting in a way that's absolutely atrocious and yet somehow endearing — so before she turns her attention to her bag, she takes her device and sets it up at a distance, adjusting the angle and switching on the video so that he can see her reaction firsthand as she checks the bag.

In retrospect, she shouldn't have been surprised. Hierophant said something about White Day; she should've expected it.

People wrap gifts. She should've expected it.

The paper is cute. She should've expected it.

They're too small to have bones in them.

She should've expected it.

She didn't look. She should've looked. Maybe there would've been clues to what she'd done, how she'd killed him. All of the executions were horrific, tailored to their recipient. How did she kill him? The headmaster is still inside the school, Alter Ego had said. He was. He was still there. He was gathered up and stuffed in a box to wait for her.

The box was inside the hidden room protected by the password and the password was her name and did he confess it before he died or did she just know did she just know that he would've used her name did everyone know he used her name except her and

stop it
stop it, kyoko
get hold of yourself, kyoko
there's no use for emotions like that!

There's a buzzing in her ears. Tunnel vision. Her hands feel a little numb, like they don't quite belong to herself, but to someone else instead. She doesn't know it, but she's gone paler than she usually is, even; there's sweat on her brow and her eyes are unfocused, and the camera is catching it all without even her realizing it.

She presses her lips together. Get control of it, Kyoko. Stop it. Stop it.
It's just a stupid box. It's just paper. How mortifying to react like this over something so stupid.

She sets her bag down. Makes her hands reach into it like piloting the claws of a crane game, grabbing things that are an extension of her will rather than a part of her, and finds the pretty pink paper-wrapped box with its soft pastel flowers and its cute ribbon that must must must belong to Sakura-chan.

It's just a stupid box and stupid paper and there are no bones inside.

Her father is dead and she doesn't care doesn't care doesn't care doesn't care.]

Arigatō gozaimasu, Hierophant-kun.

[Funny. Her voice sounds as robotic as his telegram-style texting.]

please inform me if you have any allergies before consuming any surprises you may find inside your bag so that i can ensure that wrong

[ She can't see it, of course, the long thin tendril poking out of her phone like a headphone cord. But it's there, like a string between two cans, carrying messages. Until now it's been carrying - fuck, he'd struggle to define it. His impatience while he waits for Kirigiri to notice that the weight of her bag has changed slightly, because he knows that she will notice sooner or later but it's been about four minutes since Hierophant snuck the boxes into her apartment and he's bored and wants to be caught already. Subconscious thoughts. The bits and pieces of himself that make up Hierophant.

And then Kirigiri looks in the bag.

Now it carries something back. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. ]

wrong wrong wrong incorrect erroneous mistake regrettable sorry ashamed ashamed concerned apology contrition concerned concerned concer

[ Hierophant untangles himself from the workings of the phone. Somewhere a few blocks away, a platformer character runs directly into a pit as Kakyoin freezes, trying to make sense of the sudden rush of information.

Something coils around Kirigiri's finger. ]

[Oh, she realizes dimly, the odd sensation like a knife through the fog that's descended around her thoughts and her senses. Hierophant is here. How did he get here?

She doesn't know where he is, of course. She can't see him move, and doesn't feel him until an unexpected pressure wraps around and around her gloved finger. But she knows the difference between he's here and he's not here, and it's just enough to jolt her back into some semblance of reason, like biting into a raw lemon just to shift her mind onto something other than its tempestuous memories.

She frowns a little, sluggishly. After a minute she thinks to look at her phone, where new text messages are waiting for her. The words all sort of blend together, except one.

Ashamed. That one stands out.]

Hierophant-kun.

[He'll be able to hear her, won't he? Maybe. It's not like she knows how it works, exactly, but — he'd heard her before, when she'd talked to him. Maybe Noriaki Kakyoin has to be there for him to tell; she doesn't know. Still, it's worth a try.

She doesn't feel like herself. Hates that she doesn't. Everything feels like it comes at a delayed reaction, from far away. Surreal. Even her voice comes in short sentences. Bitten-off statements. Just a little at a time, factual and brief.]

The paper is so pretty. But I don't want to tear it. So will you please take it off for me?

[ The pressure around her finger increases and then falls away, in the closest gesture he can manage to a nod.

Carefully, the weight of Sakura's box slips upward out of Kirigiri's hands. Like it's trying to sneak away from her. It pulls upward and then lays itself down on a surface. The bow unfurls. The ribbon sets itself aside. Something slices through the tape very precisely, leaving the paper untouched. It's a methodical process but each step is quick and it continues until the box is unadorned and open, revealing a set of chocolate discs decorated with lavender flowers. Seiko's box opens itself next. Colourful macarons. Delicately, each item removes itself from the two boxes to line themselves up like soldiers.

The boxes are divided into four parts now. Paper, contents, unadorned boxes and ribbons. They set themselves out a small distance from each other so any individual part can be avoided. Ribbons and treats in the middle. The former can be ruled out as the problem element, given the one in her hair. The latter can be ruled out based on her use of chocolate earlier, even if the macarons are more suspect.

The paper begins to fold itself away into flat squares. ]

[Deconstructed, there's nothing about the box that really bothers her, she finds. The paper is just paper. The box is just a box. In and of itself, none of these things strike that sudden jolt of panic that left her frozen a moment ago, and it feels a little like seeing a haunted house with all the lights turned on, all the workings exposed in such a way that there's no room to find any part of it frightening to begin with.

She breathes, in and out. The sweets are brightly-colored and pretty. A perfectly thoughtful gift from a fake boyfriend fixated on doing things correctly. He probably made sure the molds were properly dried before any of the chocolate poured in.

There was nothing terrible inside the boxes. But it was never really about the boxes to begin with, was it? It was all about that memory, that moment when she'd first stepped into the hidden room and seen the merry cheerful gift waiting for her on the table and known with a stab of horror what it was. That it was for her, because no one else would've wound up there to look.

She blinks, and all of a sudden all she sees is smudges of runny color. Something crawls slowly down her cheek and falls off somewhere in the vicinity of her chin.

She feels like a bottle with the contents shaken up to the point of bursting. Funny — she's Bottle-chan again. How appropriate, in such a completely different way than it'd originally been. Bottle-chan with her feelings all bottled up inside, forced down and shaken up and with only the cork in her fighting to hold it all back.]

Ah —

[She isn't expecting the laugh that bubbles out of her mouth. She isn't expecting the first burst of it to draw out a second one like a magician drawing endless handkerchiefs out of his sleeve. She isn't expecting to have to put her face down into her hands while she laughs at herself, at the stupid stupid chocolates, at the dumb nickname, at everything, and after a while the giggling turns wet and the breath she draws in turns to gasps and something all just comes spilling out of her, noise, all the cacophony of sounds she's never made and hasn't made in what feels like years, until her shoulders are shaking and her throat feels thick and she'll get control of herself soon, in just a minute.

Just a minute.]

[ It's funny, isn't it, how things backfiring has been the ongoing thread in everything recently. This was meant to be a stupid demonstration of superiority. An attempt to escalate a stupid thing that she did.

Hierophant works methodically, finishing one task before starting another. He's still folding paper when the laughing starts. That needs to be finished first. Then the ribbons need to be folded. The laughing is another task added to a list that hasn't been prioritised properly in the absence of Kakyoin or instructions.

The paper flattens itself down. Working becomes easier as Kakyoin gets closer, as Hierophant is no longer so stretched by distance. He gains more limbs. It makes the work of folding the ribbons into tidy little bundles easier.

Footsteps thunder outside, getting closer. Hierophant perks up, leaves the second ribbon half folded as he slips into the mechanism of the lock instead. It clicks. The door opens. ]

-sorry. Fuck. I didn't. Are you. I swear I didn't-

[ Doesn't would be more accurate. He didn't know. He doesn't know. Fuck. He just wanted to demonstrate that he could make chocolate better and she's laughing like she's possessed, like she's half burned and she's just seen two perfectly identical rocks.

He just stands in the doorway. Hierophant coils around her shoulders. ]

[Naegi wouldn't say fuck. He's far too much of a sweetheart for that. And the lock on her door clicks when it shouldn't have, and that's not a sound her instincts will let her ignore, hysteria or not. It's as though the mania gathers up into a thick lump in her throat all at once, waiting for her to swallow it back down as she whirls to look at him standing there in her apartment, red-eyed and white-faced and blotchy in a way that no girl would ever want her boyfriend to see her look, fake or not.

There's something like a snake on her shoulders. That must be Hierophant again. Finger, foot, or tentacle prints.

She feels like an old rag that's been over-twisted trying to get all the moisture out of it. Wrung too tight. Grayed and limp and only barely functional. Nowhere close to decorative.]

Hello.

[Nobody's voice sounds right when it's recorded and played back on tape. That's how her own voice sounds to her now. Played-back. Unfamiliar.]

Is Hierophant-kun upset?

[It sounds stupid the instant it's out of her mouth. She feels a little stupid right now, really — sluggish, slow, incompetent. Everything she's never been able to be — gosh, she's really let herself go, hasn't she.]

[ It's strange, to hear her ask about Hierophant in that voice. That's the voice you use to say I'm sorry for making things up, I won't worry you anymore. ]

No. No, he's fine. He just got scared. You gave him instructions. He likes those.

[ He has to get his breath back. It doesn't take too long, not after 50 days of having to be ready to sprint around at a heartbeat's notice. The tentacle nudges her neck, stays there for a moment. Measures pulse the normal way. ]

You look like shit. You want to sit down?

What a terrible boyfriend.

[Nothing that Hierophant gauges feels correct. Her pulse is still rapid but she isn't showing a single outward sign of it; her skin is clammy but you wouldn't guess it from the way she's carrying herself. It's not that the physiological reactions have gone away, per se, because they haven't. Reflex and trigger responses aren't things that she has any conscious control over.

But there is something she does have control over, and that's the outward appearance she gives. She makes her body into a opaque container and locks the tempest away inside it, and so long as the container still moves correctly and smoothly and according to script, no one will know any different until eventually the storm loses all its violence and settles down again.

Of course, she's not used to the idea of a Stand being able to measure her vitals without her knowing. Not used to the invasiveness of a creature far better at penetrating defenses to gather information than any of her own detective skills could ever be.]

Even if I don't look my best, that doesn't give you the right to say I'm not beautiful.

[The problem is, she can't answer his question genuinely. Not when she's still fighting tooth and nail to get her raging emotions under control. Acknowledging they exist would mean letting her guard down, and they might all come spilling out again.]

Does he know how to fold paper cranes? I bet he would be good at it.

You're right. Sorry. It just shocked me a little, seeing your face without a smile.

[ It's the right words. And he's trying to act them out. It'd be enough to fool anyone else, even with the heavy breathing. It doesn't feel like it's sufficient. It isn't like before. He can't force her to be Seiko-chan, who presumably reacts better to surprises. She's Bottle-chan, a girl whose name he doesn't know and isn't going to ask. But she chooses a cassette tape from the collection of normal things to say and swallows it down and when it starts to choke her she presses play and asks about paper cranes. ]

Yeah. Come look.

[ As he enters and closes the door behind him, as he steps closer and cautiously guides her over to the little pile of patterned paper, Hierophant lifts from her shoulders. The paper rustles. Tears along the lines Hierophant folded into it until he has a square to work with. With the sort of slowness that looks more like care and an aim for precision than uncertainty, the paper begins to fold itself.

He doesn't know if it's the right thing, but it's something. Something hopefully more harmless than whatever went so wrong. ]

He likes these kinds of things. Detail work, where so long as he follows each instruction exactly it'll turn out the same way every time.

[She stares at Hierophant, who she can't see but can sense, and tries to imagine what he must look like as the paper begins to fold itself into shapes. She imagines a mass of writhing tentacles like something out of an alien film or a horror movie, wriggling and curling and delicately shaping a square of patterned paper into a crane.

She finds herself identifying with the process, strangely. The visible paper twisting into a discernible shape because of invisible forces working to put it that way. She's the crane. Her will and her training are the tentacles moving around like curious snakes or prehensile vines.]

Someone killed my father and wrapped his corpse in a box and left it for me to find as a present.

[It's like she doesn't even notice the tone whiplash. He was just talking about paper cranes.]

I didn't know it would bother me. Please tell him I'm sorry I scared him. What a stupid thing to make a fuss over.

What a dick.

[ He’s still processing that sentence as he lets words fall out of his mouth. And he knows that they’re insufficient. That they’re nowhere near enough. But no words could be.

He wouldn’t want someone to be sorry for him. So he doesn’t say he’s sorry. Just insults whoever did it. Insults whoever did all the things he doesn’t plan to ask about. Hierophant finishes his perfect crane and it takes wing, because she can’t see the strings holding it up. It flies from the table, landing softly in her gloved hand. ]

I’m dead. Not trying to upstage you. Your thing is still way more fucked up.

Monster. You call someone like that a monster.

[Her hand is waiting palm-up when Hierophant gently deposits the little crane into it. She feels like she's standing next to herself in her own body. Wonders where his tentacles are now and reaches out her free hand to try to grasp for them, blindly.]

I know you're dead. I know it wasn't a car accident, either. Someone hit you so hard it went in.

[...]

I don't know how they killed him. The method, I mean.

[ It's not tentacles that Kirigiri's fingers graze against. Instead it's a cool, almost-smooth, solid surface. Curved, forming a long cylinder. When it curls around her finger, it does so around joints instead of wrapping around it like a ribbon. Knuckles. It's a finger, or at least plates of something in the shape of one. ]

He's decided to look weird. He has a hand. Just a hand, right now. The rest of him is tentacles.

[ It's a weird sort of aside, but it's not like she can see what's happening. It's probably important to let her know what the invisible hand is. ]

Through. But I'm impressed. It took me a while to figure it out, and I was- you know. There, mostly. The doctors came to the conclusion that I'd been impaled on a piece of wreckage.

[ To be honest, the striking thing about saying that is that it doesn't hurt. If anything it's just- nice would be an uncomfortable way to describe it. It's like watching a professional athlete perform, seeing how quick she is to figure these things out. Watching someone at the peak of their discipline work.

Which in turn means, of course- ]

You didn't try to figure it out, did you?

I didn't have to. The wound pattern wasn't consistent with a typical car accident injury, particularly not a fatal one. There's nothing inside a car that would make that sort of focused, penetrating injury except possibly the steering wheel column, which is already unlikely because it's not at the correct angle for that type of penetration, and you didn't have the frontal contusions that would necessarily have accompanied something like that.

Inside the car there would've been damage from an airbag deploying — a broken nose, facial bruising from where the bag tried to deploy and failed to prevent you from striking the column. If you'd been outside of the car as a pedestrian, the additional injuries would've been from getting knocked around by the car's force — you wouldn't have stayed in place, it would've thrown you back. You didn't suffer fractures to your pelvis, femur, or ribs — all of which should've taken comparable damage if you were struck so hard in the abdomen by something significantly bigger than you.

[It's strangely therapeutic to just...recite details and observations like this, like painting thin coats of sealant over something otherwise fragile. Doing her job is familiar. Drawing conclusions is familiar. Being a detective is familiar. And she's been compartmentalizing her feelings for the sake of detective work since she was seven years old and they told her that her mother was dying.]

I never tried to figure you out. It was enough to know that you were lying. But I've since seen a nearly identical injury on someone else and that person confirmed how it was done. So I...extrapolated.

[...Wait.]

...Oh. Did you mean — did I try to figure out how my father was murdered?

Holy shit.

[ He says it under his breath and it takes him a moment to say anything else. He doesn't like being outmatched. Doesn't usually like giving other people a chance to show off in the ways that he likes to show off, because that generally results in other people looking cooler than him. But maybe he should give the concept a chance more often. It's stunning, watching as she nudges every little fact just so and just lets everything fall perfectly into place without any of the advantages of an invisible, intangible spy for a partner. Just a complete enough understanding of all the parts, and-

-right. They're talking about her father's death. And his death, but it's way less weird to be intrigued by someone discussing your own death. ]

I did. But there was no point in asking, was there? Because if you'd wanted to know, you'd know.

...It would've been head trauma, I think. Blunt force or decapitation, probably. He was the headmaster of my school, so I expect it would've been something implicating that.

[It also would've had to be something that would've made him fit in a box. That suggests he was reduced somehow to his assorted parts, yet still constituted enough that seeing it would've made Naegi scream when he looked. He wasn't crushed, then — not a puddle of human goo. The room didn't smell, so either he was preserved or there must not have been flesh left to —

why is she thinking about this

why is she thinking about a man who was her father like this]

Senbon Nokku. Hung by the neck and pummeled by one thousand baseballs fired at high speeds from a modified pitching machine. They were all like that. Poetic theater.

All.

[ More than those two, she means. That's what 'all' means, in this context. More than two people killed in uncomfortably personalised ways.

He shouldn't be making her think about this. He's better than this at dealing with people, usually. He just doesn't like to. This is the opposite. He wants to keep talking to her. He just doesn't know how to do it without hurting her.

Hierophant's hand squeezes hers. It only feels a little like bone. ]

He's a musician, actually. People don't talk about him much these days.

Yes, I know. He said some controversial things.

[She stays still for a minute, not speaking. It's eerie how easy it is to talk about things that she normally keeps under wraps. That's a facet of the emotional aftermath, she muses clinically. The initial rush of emotion followed by a void of it, where nothing seems particularly to matter much because she can't assign any emotional weight to it. It's all just sentences and facts. It's comfortable to be so sterile, for all that she'll probably regret it later. Sterilized surgical steel: the perfect tool for one very specific job.]

There was one intended for me, too.

[ Another slice of giftwrap begins to fold itself. This set of folds is more complicated, folding and unfolding until it starts the look like a pinwheel. Then it keeps going, folding and twisting to form a kawasaki rose. Partially to show off. Mostly to give her something to observe. A sequence of steps to follow. ]

It didn’t happen, though. You’re alive.

[ She said she wanted to bring survivors here. In order to do that, she’d have interacted with the survivors. She must be alive. ]

...Hierophant-kun, is that for me?

[Stupid. How idle, how meaningless. If she felt better, she would've known better than to say that out loud. If she weren't so strung out on fading adrenaline with nothing left behind to replace it, she would've made the comment sound more scripted, more overtly targeted to sound like Seiko or Sakura or someone else speaking.

She doesn't, though. It's just a rose, and it's pretty. She's always liked flowers. It's nice to be reminded that she still has the capacity for liking things, right now.]

Someone else took my place in it. "Detention" — seated at a student desk and forced to pay attention to a grotesque lecture about sexual reproduction while the desk, positioned on a conveyor belt gradually moving backwards, progresses toward a trash compactor audibly crushing everything beneath it in an inescapable rhythm. Anything that remains following pulverization is then disposed of down a garbage chute.

Because the source of the peril is inevitable, the logical thing to do is to direct your attention elsewhere. And when faced with something repulsive and irrelevant, the logical thing to do is also to direct your attention elsewhere. The aim would be to take advantage of those dual instincts in order to trap you in a loop of shifting your attention between two things that are either irrelevant or entirely out of your control, thus rendering you incapable of controlling your own thoughts.

[ Maybe he shouldn’t be deconstructing what was intended to be a method of murdering her. But the alternative is focusing on ‘someone took my place’. Hierophant squeezes in answer, because it only has so many forms of communication available to it. It twists the rose into its final shape and places it in Kirigiri’s open hand, next to the crane. ]

The garbage chute just sounds unnecessarily vindictive, to be honest. It doesn’t add anything.

An internal instinctual conflict contained by the necessity of impeccable outward decorum. No Japanese student would fidget during detention.

[Hierophant must be manifesting all sorts of hands and tentacles at this point, she muses idly. He squeezes her hand and she squeezes lightly back, feeling a fresh wave of tears well up in her eyes at the sight of the finished flower. She blinks them away before they can fall, of course, but it still leaves her eyelashes wet and her vision stinging.

Maybe he'll understand better, now that he's seen the way she acted after being faced with a sight that unexpectedly triggered horrors in her. A calm outward facade containing frantic emotion within. He lays it all out so neatly, it's impossible not to see the metaphor.

Which is why she understands the garbage chute perfectly, and he doesn't.]

You're wrong. The garbage chute is the aspect that makes it indisputably mine.

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