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“I’m sorry you had to see that.”
The words were delivered flatly, almost harsh. Not harsh with anger or resentment or any of the million other things that Himiko would’ve found easier to tolerate at that moment. No, instead they were harsh in their utter lack of emotion. An apology given out of a sense of obligation, of social niceties.
The emptiness reminded her of herself, or of them, back when things were much worse. If she was being honest, perhaps that was the reason it made her so angry to hear.
“I’m sure you are,” she replied, not holding back with the scathing tone. Her whole body felt like a taut wire, strung between two rooftops and trembling. She clasped her hands together tight against the kitchen table, desperately seeking out some kind of groundedness, some kind of perspective on this. If she was still in high school, still vulnerable to Angie’s well-intentioned manipulation, maybe she’d be praying. She did it discreetly, trying to hide the way her arms were trembling, but it didn’t matter. Korekiyo wasn’t looking at her anyway.
“I am,” they repeated, with more conviction this time, and she wondered who they were trying to convince.
“Okay,” she said.
It was quiet. The tension thickened. All she could hear was the drip drip drip of the leaky faucet (god, that sink was in need of fixing since forever), and Korekiyo’s ragged breathing, and the pounding of her own heart in her ears. She hated this feeling, this anxiety and dread that made her want to crawl out of her skin.
“Are you going to call Saihara?” They were turned away from her, leaning on crossed arms against the counter like they couldn’t even muster the effort to stand up straight. She couldn’t see their face, but she could tell from their voice that they were crying, or close to it.
They were getting blood on the nice granite. Someone would have to clean that. It was absurdly, stupidly ridiculous to be worried about stains on the counter right now. Himiko realized that with the sensation of stepping out of her own life and peering in through a window, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Her mind was stuck on loop, alternately thinking about the counter and thinking about thinking about the counter, and it was only when she heard a choked-back sob that she realized she was supposed to be answering a question.
“No. I’m not calling him.” She should. Shuichi was at work, reading and re-reading files, working on a hunch that there was a connection in a string of murders that spanned years and continents. He was one of her best friends, fighting the good fight for justice, and she was lying to him.
She was a dirty, immoral liar. A lying liar who’d probably get at least a few years in prison if she decided to stop now. She made her choices years ago and now she had to live with them, phone sitting facedown on the table like it was mocking her. Her chair grumbled against the tile as she got up.
She crossed the room in a few steps; measured, precise. Walked over to the fridge. Leaned up on tiptoe to grab the canister of Clorox wipes on top of it. The click when she opened it felt louder than anything.
“Why?” they asked.
“What do you mean, why? You know.” A few more steps from the fridge to the counter where they were standing. One, two, three, four, five. Like this was all just one of her shows and all she had to do was follow the routine. It was the only way she could stay in control.
Himiko pulled one (1) antibacterial wipe from the canister. She nudged her elbow into Korekiyo’s side, between their ribs, not hard enough to hurt. Said “move” with all the glacial apathy she wished she had. (She’d never have an imposing, commanding aura of the sort Shinguuji Sumire did, nor would she want to. But this was close enough, compared to her usual demeanor, and she hated herself a little for it.)
Quiet and obedient, they straightened up and shuffled a few steps back, curling their arms around themself in an embrace instead. She sighed, now faced with the red splotches on the stone. None of it was theirs, she knew that much. They were good like that. She spared one, two, three seconds to feel sick relief.
She scrubbed at the bloodstains in silence. They were still damp, so they were getting wiped up rather easily. She wished it required more effort, if only so she’d have something to focus on. With every breath she took, she half expected to hear her phone vibrating, like Shuichi could telepathically sense her guilt.
“You don’t have to do that, Himiko.”
“Well, I am.” Unsaid: ‘I need to do something or I’m going to have a total meltdown.’ She threw the red-stained wipe in the trash, got a clean one. Best to be thorough. Korekiyo was normally thorough — she knew that because she’d never done this before. Her walking in must have really thrown them for a loop.
“Don’t you want—”
“What I want is for you not to leave blood everywhere. Just...go take a shower or something, please.” The ‘I can’t be in the same room as you right now’ went unsaid, but she knew they heard it in her voice anyway. They’d known each other too long.
They nodded, a barely-there gesture she caught in her peripheral vision, and left the kitchen.
She knew. Of course she did. Things — their relationship, and maybe even Korekiyo’s freedom — wouldn’t have gotten this far if she didn’t. They’d known each other for six years now. Three years of high school, and now the Hope’s Peak graduation ceremony was another three years in the past.
For the first few months of their first year, things were awkward. Mostly they snuck glances at each other across the classroom, talked about each other more than to each other. Once the ice was broken, though, their friendship was quick to blossom. Friendship melted effortlessly into romance, so gradually they barely even noticed it was happening. By the latter part of third year, none of their classmates were surprised to hear that they’d be moving in together after graduation.
They worked well together. They just...clicked. Even despite that, getting them to open up and trust her had been a long, slow road back then. She chipped away at their walls, but mostly made sure they knew how much she cared about them, no matter what.
It paid off. The two of them swapped secrets now and then, always late at night, smushed together in a dorm bed made for one. Some things could only be said in the dark.
Himiko remembered the first time they told her that they’d killed someone before, in their second year. She was sixteen and no one had ever taught her what to do in a situation like that. She remembered the tremors that wracked their frame, the way they struggled for breath through the panic of not knowing what she might do. The reason came out piecemeal, and it took time to sink in. She didn’t think they were serious at first.
In the daylight, she realized, and things were tense and distant for almost a month, but she didn’t tell anyone. They were so hurt already — she couldn’t hurt them more. She couldn’t be the one to inflict that pain.
(She already knew about their sister by then, even met the version of Her that dwelled within them, and she understood exactly how they’d been shaped into what they were. She couldn’t see them as evil, no matter how hard she tried.)
Their fight, if it could be called that, didn’t have any big, dramatic resolution. She just lost the willpower to stay away. She let herself into their room and was sitting on the bed when they came out of the bathroom, shirtless and hair damp from the shower. They hardly reacted to her presence, aside from the soft blush that spread across their face as they hurried to finish getting dressed, and she knew things were okay.
They traveled less and less. Their scars (pain helped them connect to Her, they claimed) kept fading. By the time they’d been out of Hope’s Peak for a year or so, she hardly ever had to let the word onee-san fall from her mouth. They were healing, slowly but surely. That’s what she thought.
So she’d known for years, but now she Knew, with a capital K, and that was different. She didn’t see the evidence before. She didn’t have concrete proof it was true, not really. Plausible deniability.
When she was done cleaning, she washed her hands, still feeling distant from herself. She could hear the shower running. That was good. It meant she had at least a few more minutes to collect herself. The problem was that she wasn’t sure what to do, and she didn’t think she could handle just idly sitting around.
She could go get their bloody shirt, get some stain remover on it before it sat too long. But she wasn’t sure if they’d want her to do that. They were perfectly capable of doing so on their own. Anyway, she wasn’t eager to be confronted with even more physical proof of what she already knew to be true. The whole scene was projected on the backs of her eyelids whenever she closed her eyes.
Blood didn’t bother her much on its own. Anything more than that though, and she was a bit squeamish. Her friends teased her for looking away during the goriest parts of horror films. And corpses, in real life? No way. That was way worse than a movie, even without any gore. She avoided funerals like the plague. She didn’t eat food that resembled the animal it used to be. Roadkill made her cringe.
And now there was
a body
buried behind
the flowerbeds
of their apartment complex.
Perhaps it was a blessing that the adrenaline had kicked in at the time and her priority had been being stealthy and non-suspicious. That urgency had overpowered any nausea that would have otherwise washed over her, stopped her from vomiting right there in the hydrangeas, or from just running away.
The apartment complex they lived in was owned by the university they both attended, populated by students who wanted an alternative to the on-campus dorms. Lots of people lived there. Anyone could have killed that girl, really. Anyone could have buried her there, at the edge of the woods bordering the property.
Himiko hadn’t seen her face, didn’t know her name. So really, when and if a dead student showed up on the news, it might not be a total lie to say she didn’t know anything about it. It might not be the same person. And even if it was a lie, the truth wouldn’t un-kill her, so did it make that much of a difference, in the grand scheme of things?
The mental gymnastics were exhausting even to her, but sometimes it was the only way to give herself some peace. Someone like Chabashira or Momota would probably tell her she had no moral backbone. Maybe she didn’t.
This was just a brief stumble though, she was sure of it. Had to be sure of it. They’d been doing so much better.
She found herself looking up statistics sometimes, facts about serial killers and their victims. It was a morbid, secret sort of habit, done alone in the digital confines of incognito windows. She didn’t know the exact number she should feel guilty about, didn’t want to know, but she knew the goal, and could puzzle out a rough, ballpark sort of number from her knowledge of Korekiyo’s travels.
She counted columns in Wikipedia tables, the roiling darkness growing inside her. Even with her wide, uncertain estimates, the results of her research were clear. She was in love with one of the most prolific serial killers in Japanese history. Within the top five at the low end, in contention for first at the high end. Maybe it was good that she couldn’t narrow things down any more than that.
It was just so absurd, the thought that Korekiyo of all people could be a monster of historic proportions. Korekiyo, the same person who held her hand in crowded hallways and got excited about ancient children’s books. It was so absurd that the words lost their meaning. Himiko could tell herself that over and over, only to feel numb to it. She couldn’t stop loving them.
She sometimes wondered what her life would have been like if she never met them. With every year that passed, it grew harder and harder to even fathom it.
In the midst of her thoughts, she’d shuffled off into the living room, curling into a ball on the couch. The sound of the shower running had stopped, but she didn’t notice.
One of her favorite blankets was draped over her — fluffy and seafoam green. She hadn’t even realized how cold she was. Only then did she open her eyes and look up, seeing Korekiyo looming over her. Himiko wrapped the blanket tighter around herself, raising an eyebrow, but they didn’t say anything.
They seemed so soft and nonthreatening like this. It was like night and day. Out in the world, they always had an imposing aura — impeccably dressed, well-spoken, feelings hidden behind so many different walls. They didn’t need to be splattered with blood to make people scared of them.
Here, now, things were completely different. They had changed into pajama pants and a t-shirt, topped off by a cardigan they wouldn’t be caught dead wearing in public, soft and on the verge of unraveling. Their face was bare of makeup, and they weren’t wearing their mask. Or their bandages, crisscrossing ladders of scar tissue still faintly pink from the hot water. She knew what the silence meant, and it hurt her. They were still just standing there, tense and uncertain.
“Your hair’s dripping on me,” she commented to break the silence, a crooked smile playing at her lips.
“Sorry.” As they started to take a step back from her, it was clear they weren’t talking about their wet hair.
“I’m not mad.” When she reached out a hand to stop them from retreating further, tugging them down onto the sofa with her instead, she wasn’t talking about their hair either.
Well, she was mad, but not exactly at them. And now was not the time to get into a deep conversation about their trauma, so it was best to keep all that inside.
They let her pull them closer, but still seemed rather stiff and uncomfortable, leaving it up to her to curl closer and lean her head on their shoulder, spreading part of her blanket over them. They smelled sweet, like the same brand of shampoo they’d been using for years, and not like blood. Pretending it never happened was always remarkably easy when she let herself.
“Are you really...?” Korekiyo trailed off, sounding pained. Himiko sighed, fidgeting with the edge of the blanket.
“I dunno. It’s complicated. I’d rather not talk about it right now.”
“I really am sorry, Himiko,” they said. If she was stronger, more steadfast in her morals, maybe she would respond with something like ‘sorry for doing it, or just sorry I was exposed to it?’ But she wasn’t, hadn’t been in a long time, and anyway, she already knew it was the second one. No point in making them say it out loud.
“I know,” she said instead, gentle. There was a difference between a reason and an excuse, objectively, but not here. It wasn’t that she thought their past made it right, it wasn't that she didn’t feel bad for the victims. It was just...Shinguuji Korekiyo could destroy the world, and she’d put a smile on her face and have a picnic in the wreckage if that’s what it took to keep them whole.
“Things have been going so much better than in high school.”
“I know.” She kissed their shoulder, started braiding a section of their damp hair.
“It’s just so hard not to listen to Her sometimes.”
Her, always audibly capitalized, like a demon or a goddess. Sumire, who apparently only Himiko had ever been ballsy enough to insult directly, once in their second year of high school. Who tried to strangle her the following night in response, and probably would have succeeded if not for the fact that even back then, Korekiyo’s love was too strong to be overpowered. After that, Himiko started forcing smiles and calling Her Onee-san, and She was placated. They almost got along sometimes. And regardless, She fronted less and less every year.
“I know.”
It was like a broken record in her head tormenting her — I know, I know, I know. She knew, and she was still there anyway.