freshprints | IC Inbox

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.

[ The normal thing to do would be to ask why. The more normal thing to do would be not to have this conversation in the first place. ]

Then the garbage chute is the point-

[ But they are not normal people and she has presented him with a mystery. ]

Garbage. Becoming garbage. Inevitably. The point is- The point is that it doesn’t matter if you fidget. No matter how perfectly you control yourself, you’ll end up at the same place. It doesn’t even slow it down. You can do everything right. You can control for everything that can be controlled for and you’ll still end up-

[ Oh. Is this projecting? Maybe this is projecting. ]

-...discarded.

[She doesn't even do it to try to psychoanalyze him, and yet look at Noriaki Kakyoin go, handing her a perfectly detailed report of...something. Not her, that much is for certain; too many of the aspects are wrong, and he doesn't try to relate aspects of the scenario to her own qualities or observed behaviors. He just lays out a foundation of one assumption after another, peppering in themes like futility and inevitability and uselessness. None of those are hers. She's never once given him any reason to think that she cares about her own efforts being meaningless.

They see two different things, when they look at the garbage chute. He sees becoming garbage. She sees thrown away.

For her, the garbage chute is a reminder of something that already happened, a last insult to injury, a tableau of a school setting where her father is the headmaster and she is thrown away.

For Noriaki Kakyoin, the garbage chute is a defining environment. His interpretation of the execution puts the victim there because it's where they belong.]

Is that what you're afraid of?

[ He doesn’t answer for a long time. Hierophant folds and twists another rose. ]

He gets married. After I die, he gets married. They have a kid.

I'm not having a child with you.

[The fact that she says it so instantly is...comical, almost. Certainly it's the first faint spark of something that feels human inside her since this whole mess started. She wonders what would set Noriaki Kakyoin off like the sight of those boxes had inexplicably, unexpectedly set her off. It's none of her business and she still wonders anyway.

Noriaki Kakyoin did everything right and still wound up with nothing. She wonders if "he" is the one the message was for, the man with the star on his shoulder. Hierophant likes stars best; it's only to be expected. Noriaki Kakyoin died wretchedly trying to send a message to the person that mattered most, and after he dies the person that mattered most gets married and has a child.

Discarded. Garbage. He'd called her in a panic needing her to be his girlfriend just so that he wouldn't look so pathetic by comparison.]

Marriage, we can negotiate.

[ He regrets it the second he says it, of course, the same way he regretted it instantly when he announced to Jotaro that he has a girlfriend. For fifty days he learned to be imperfect. To say that it's the best I can do and tolerate that and he can't put it back. He can't make himself perfect again and when he tries he keeps cracking at the edges. Letting things escape. You put garbage in the incinerator so that you never see it again. Garbage isn't meant to find out what happens after you don't need it anymore.

But then she responds immediately. Like it was a request instead of a breaking. And it's his turn to laugh. It's his turn to laugh and it comes out ugly and desperate and sad and Hierophant's rose comes out lopsided and so he puts it to one side to throw in the recycling when he leaves and he's still laughing. ]

I hate children anyway. [ He says eventually, still laughing. ] We'll be better off, not dealing with that hassle.

That's fine. I wouldn't put up with you being a deadbeat father.

[Little by little, reality is starting to seem like reality again. Color is seeping back in at the edges of a world gone gray. And as she does, she starts to notice little things again — little things that should have occurred to her before, but didn't because they were lost in the avalanche of sorrow and trauma and hyperfixation.

He broke into her apartment.

He picked the lock and broke into her apartment and he was out of breath when he came through the door, like he'd been running.

He tried to make her mad once and hurt her feelings and reveled in it. This time he wasn't trying and what he did about it was — was —

...

The opposite of throwing away garbage, maybe.

She sets the crane and rose down. It doesn't matter where, so she just puts them down onto the floor because that seems like a good idea. They'll be fine there. Hierophant-kun will probably pick them up and spirit them out of harm's way, anyway, if it comes to that.

She turns in place and walks directly into him, a car accident in slow motion, short enough that her face presses into his chest and her arms go around the part of him that's half flesh and half gemstone underneath his clothes and she just stands there, holding on to him, skinny gangly gawky thing that he is, and doesn't know whether it's for her sake or his.]

Garbage is garbage because it's unwanted. So I'll want you. If the definition doesn't fit anymore then it can't be accurate. That's just how it is.

[ It's not like this is the first time he's been hugged. It's not like this is the first time someone has thought that they wanted him. He's good at being wanted. He's good at doing everything right. ]

I'll want you, too. [ It starts out uncertain. Cautious. But he wraps his arms around Kirigiri. Around a girl whose name he never really needed to know. And the first few words feel awkward, but he falls into a rhythm. ] I'll put all your gifts in bags. And I'll only ever hurt your feelings on purpose. And baseball doesn't really have to involve baseballs, it's better when it's just a lot of spreadsheets.

[ She can't see Hierophant. She can almost see him, but she can't. It doesn't matter so much anymore. It doesn't even matter that much that she can nearly see him. She can see what he represents. She can see how fucked up he is. He wouldn't be able to hide it from her if he tried. He's told her that he's a dick and he's tried to piss her off and he just started laughing like a madman in a conversation about her dead father that he started by fucking up when trying to outdo her fake valentines gift and she's still willing to want him. ]

We can not be garbage together.

[He's bony and tall, like hugging a scarecrow. She's not even altogether sure if she's reassuring him or grounding herself, anymore. He makes promises that sound like he's doing set dressing on a stage before the curtain rises, sculpting a reality as false as Seiko's. I'll do this. You'll do this. It'll be like this. It'll be all right.

But maybe it's not so bad to lie to each other. And anyway, she's used to assuming promises are falsehoods so she can't be disappointed by them when they're broken — but sometimes they don't break. Abbacchio said I won't abandon you and didn't. Prompto Argentum said I'll protect you and did.

She wonders if he can manage it, Noriaki Kakyoin who wants a man who lived when he didn't, a man who went on to get married and have a daughter while his corpse was discarded like garbage. It's doubtful that he has any room to want anything else, when he's already preoccupied with wanting someone who's already lost to him so much.

But maybe he'll end up doing it, anyway.]

I want to apologize to Hierophant-kun. Will you tell me how to do that?

You don't need to. But yeah.

[ He doesn't want to let go. She's so small. It feels like if he lets go he won't be able to find her again. But he manages, slowly. Awkwardly. Untangles his too-long limbs from her.

One of the sheets of wrapping paper floats upward, then starts to wrap around something round. pattern side down, just in case. ]

He's shaped roughly like a human, right now. He can change. And since I'm here, he can use me to see. So it's okay if he-

[ The paper starts to push in. Flattens down against a surface, mapping out the nooks and crannies of a masked face. ]

You don't really need to apologise. He's not scared anymore. But he'd like it if you could see him. Just for now.

Oh. He's wearing a mask.

[It's sort of neat to watch, actually. Like rubbing graphite gently over a notepad and seeing the indentations of what was previously written on it coming to light. Hierophant, like this, is no longer the writhing blob of tentacles her imagination has always sort of inadvertently pictured him as; he's "roughly humanlike" now, with a head and a face and...shoulders and hands, presumably, if she were to get down far enough.

Well, that's another assumption to consider, isn't it? Just because he's human-shaped doesn't mean he's human-proportioned. Maybe he has horrifically long limbs like an urban legend cryptid. Maybe he's a head dragging behind his own entrails like a Southeast Asian vampire.]

...What color green are you, Hierophant-kun? Can you show me something the same color as you, so I can imagine you better?

IC Inbox | noctiumrp

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