Work Text:
The facts of my existence:
I cannot love, and I cannot receive love. For I am furniture that does not have that right.
I cannot live. For I am a child denied by all mothers that has had that right revoked.
Thus I, who cannot love, I, who cannot live… am not a person. I do not exist. And yet I do anyway, in the cracks between the selves I have made to exist in my place. In the cracks when the pain is too much for them to bear, and I must bear it, too.
Shannon, who longs for George. Kanon, who pushes Jessica away. Beatrice, who waits.
And for all of them, over and over, we shatter. For the sake of love, more and more, we are broken, we are remade. I piece us back together, I remind each of us of our shapes. Shannon cannot love Jessica, Kanon cannot love Battler, Beatrice cannot think of George as anything but disgusting, cannot think of Jessica as anything but a fool.
They were born for the sake of loving, of being loved. And I was born meaninglessly, pointlessly. I was born because Ushiromiya Kinzo is a monster, and from monster is man born, it seems. I was born from a sin that was forgotten, concealed, destroyed. For my birth and my existence is a sin.
I am Beatrice, and yet I am not. I am Yasuda Sayo, and I am her ghost, and yet I am not - but the name has been silenced, has been blotted out, and with the death of the name is the death of the soul, and so I am dead.
I am the creator of the Rokkenjima of October 4th and 5th, I am the creator and god of an endless world, an infinite moment. I am the one who reigns on high and passes judgement upon all sinners.
Beatrice is my messenger, the carrier of my will, my words, my heart. Shannon and Kanon, then, are my vessels, my corpse, my bones, my remains. It is from them that I sprang forth, it is they who I abandoned to the earth.
I am the corpse, I am the heart, I am the soul, I am the god, I am the messenger of god, I am. And I am a girl, I am nothing, I am the voidless darkness from which the witch may step out. And I am neither man nor woman, I am both man and woman, for the divine contains all.
I cannot go to the man and confess, for I am a ghost that cannot touch him. But should I have ever met Battler… to him I would say thus:
“Do I sound megalomaniacal to you? To you, do I sound insane? Am I a god, a human, or the void?”
I would not ask of love, of miracles, of solutions. For to be able to meet him, he would have already answered those things. I would beg of him to define me. For I contain all three, for I am all three, for I am as Endless as Beatrice.
I am a furniture with a heart capable of love that wishes for that heart to die.
I am a furniture that cannot regret having a heart, that prays for their love to be completed soon.
I am a witch that waits for her beloved that may soon have to guide him from the underworld.
Tell me, am I Orpheus? And should that be true, then, my Eurydice, if I happen to look back, nervous and frightened, if I happen to give in and confess to you, then will you die? Or will I be the one to disappear?
Should I confess to you plainly, Battler, what would you say?
I do not desire pity, nor false hope, nor lies. I have no patience for such things, and yet you would be kind enough to try to placate me with them; I remember you well. You who came to me with a promise now left unkept and praise that you must never have meant.
Please tell me honestly that you hate me, that I scare you, that I cannot be loved by you.
Please tell me honestly that I am an obligation, a burden, that meeting me was a mistake.
Please tell me honestly that you hate me, Ushiromiya Battler, for surely, should you reach me, you must.
Please, hate me. If I cannot be loved, and I cannot be needed, and I cannot be understood. Hate me, despise me; crush me and rip my heart out.
Tear it to pieces. Thoroughly, quickly, Battler, tear it to pieces, tear me to pieces, tear Beatrice to pieces, and I will put her and us together again, so we might finally die as a human being.
But stop breaking me slowly over and over with this wait for you, stop hurting me, stop choking me slowly to death.
I can't breathe, and it hurts. It hurts. My chest, my eyes, my heart. My being. My self.
All of it is shattering, like a mirror. Oh, that’s right. I’m shattering it.
My fingers are red and bloody and pulsing with pain. I shatter, I shatter, I shatter.
Who am I? I am a human and a god and a pitiful, forgotten, unloved, thing. I am not human at all, for I am furniture. I am a witch that has lived a thousand years. I am an author of many tales. I am shattering this mirror and stomping on the glass and punching the glass and cutting my feet and hands and legs and arms.
Battler, stop it. It hurts, so please stop it. I don’t want to shatter any more than I have. Shannon and Kanon and Beatrice, come back. Come back. I cannot be Yasuda Sayo, I killed her, we killed her, somebody, somebody.
Call my name. I don’t know what it is. But call it out, so that I can sleep.
There is no one here. There are no humans here.
I fall to the floor, and my knees, too, are cut by glass. I must be covered in cuts and blood by now. My entire body hurts. This cage which imprisons me is painful and disgusting. It deserves to be punished for that. I slice open my finger on a stray piece of glass. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.
But I’ve already broken this mirror, and if I play with these shards even more, then I will lose myself entirely to these thoughts and ramblings and delusions and wishes. I drink the filthy blood dripping from my finger.
What a filthy, disgusting thing. This is Ushiromiya Kinzo’s blood mixed with Beatrice’s twice over. It has potent dark magical potential, enough that one drop could bind a thousand lesser demons to Beatrice’s service. I drink it until I am sick, until I gag at the taste of copper.
My body hasn’t been fed enough, hasn’t had enough water. It wants to vomit but only dryly gags. I want to laugh at it for its foolishness. The thing that it must expel is not the stomach’s contents. It is this filthy blood. Drain all of it from my veins.
I should stand up, should clean the body off. Should begin to disinfect the wounds, bandage the cuts, and pretend it’s all just accidental from what a clumsy, worthless, pathetic, helpless little girl Shannon is. That’s what people like about her anyway, isn’t it?
They only like people that are cute and sweet and helpless and beautiful. They’re so easy to like, so easy to abuse, so easy to take advantage of, so easy to get things from. And men only want women for their bodies and their status, after all.
I wonder if Battler would find me disgusting for these marks alone. Helpless little girls don’t get so lost in their own heads that they shatter mirrors in the middle of the night, tears flowing down their cheeks that they can barely even notice.
Well. He’ll find me disgusting for so many other reasons. What’s one more?
And I slice another finger open.