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When Sora was small, as most children, he was told the tale of Kuchisake-onna. As his father told it.
“There was once a beautiful woman, so beautiful that none could resist her. She married a samurai and lived happily until she grew lonely while he was away. She was so beautiful and had so little loyalty that she ran to another man. So desperate, so vain, that she wouldn’t wait for her husband she’d promised to be with forever, that she’d run away to someone else for attention and approval.
“Eventually, her husband found out, and, as a punishment for her infidelity, he used his sword to slice both corners of her mouth. From each corner, all the way up to her ears, he cut her cheeks straight through to the other side. Then, he killed her, and then himself. Her beauty, her vanity, and lack of loyalty, they’d killed them both.
“And now, even after her death, she is so desperate for someone to acknowledge her beauty, so angry at her husband, so upset with the world, that she wanders as a vengeful spirit, wearing a surgical mask.
“Now, if she decides to prey on you, she’ll ask ‘Am I pretty?’. And seeing her beautiful eyes and hair, most people will say ‘yes’. But if you do, then she’ll take her mask down, and you’ll see her face, looking nothing like it should. The hideous scars extend from her smile. Once you’ve seen how terribly marred her face is, she no longer looks pretty at all. Her eyes, even, you realize, were deceptive. Now instead of beauty, all you see is sadistic malice.
“It’s enough to tempt anyone to scream. But if you do, angry, she’ll kill you where you stand. Chopping you in half. If you manage not to scream, instead, she’ll ask you another question. ‘Even now?’ she’ll say. And of course, she’s not beautiful. She’s terrifying! But if you tell her that, she’ll murder you right then and there, just like she would if you screamed in horror.
“So what can you do? Lie to her? Tell her she is beautiful. That’s what you’d think, isn’t it? But nope! If you tell her that, she’ll take out her knife and she’ll give you scars to match. You said they were pretty, didn’t you? She’ll pretend she’s only making you pretty!”
And, he’d go on to explain the only safe answers: Tell her she’s average, apologize for being impolite, but say that you have an appointment and that you have to be going, or distract her with candy or money, and run while she’s confused. Clever answers, as his father told him, but Sora wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a better answer. He was sure there was one, and he was fascinated. One after the other, he generated them. At first, Sora had asked his father about them, and he got some kind of answers.
“What if I tell her I think she’s pretty but that I don’t want to match her?” Sora would ask.
He’d say “No, she wouldn’t believe you really thought she was pretty then.”
“What if I tell her she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, but that girls should look different from boys?”
“She would think you were trying to date her if you made it about her being a girl, and that would make her angry because she thinks she’s too beautiful for you.”
“What if I tell her it’s what she thinks that matters?”
“She’d never accept that. She’s vain and wants validation from other people.”
But eventually, his father became irritated with his questions. He’d told one scary story when the mood struck, and now his child wouldn’t shut up, theorizing about it at all hours of the day and night, prompting him with question after question about some other way to win. One day he answered Sora’s question differently.
“What if I say before she even takes her mask down, that I’ve heard of her, and that I’m still gonna think she’s pretty when she takes it down, but that I’d really like for her not to hurt me, even though I really do think she’s pretty?”
“No, you can’t win. She doesn’t actually care whether you think she’s pretty. She just wants you to say it, and then to kill you or cut you up. Because she’s a vengeful spirit. She’s bad and she’s just here to hurt people now.”
His answer was terse, and acknowledged none of the details of Sora’s plan. And Sora picked up on his irritation. So he stopped asking. But he kept thinking about what he would do if one day, he really did meet Kuchisake-onna on the street. He fantasized about it. About what could he say, cleverer and more interesting than the safe answers, and maybe, he thought, with better results? It was like a game. A game to win. How to escape with his life and his face intact.
Kuchisake-onna was a girl, born exceptional, resented for her own good traits. She was bad. She’d chosen to care for herself over her husband. To tend to her own needs for love and attention and her own desire to be appreciated before caring about her duties. Something had been wrong with her. And now, with scars on her face, she was seeking validation from everyone she met. Trying desperately to get what she’d never had properly. Too good and also too bad for this world. There were always penalties in this game, Sora thought. Whether too good, or too bad, anything could make you lose. Maybe what he was searching for was a way to do more than just escape from her.
And after several years of fantasizing about how he would do that, he’d meet a girl much prettier and much more exceptional than kuchisake-onna, and he’d stop thinking so much about how to deal with her and focus on taking care of his baby sister, playing all of the most fun games with her.
And in the midst of a game in Disboard, with powers easily strong enough to call “bullshit”, one where the conditions had forfeited his Tet-given rights to be unharmed, when a girl (an NPC of sorts, although it wasn’t a video game), approached Sora and Shiro, wearing a beautiful kimono and carrying a fan, he was a bit alarmed, but, clinging to Shiro’s hand, he thought he could handle a simple conversation with a stranger. It was part of the game, after all.
Her eyes were brown, her hair was long, flowing black and silky over her shoulders. She held a beautiful pink fan with elaborate flowers in front of her face. Her voice was quiet and seemed somehow small.
“Excuse me, could I have a moment of your time, please?”
Shiro squeezed his hand and looked up at him. Supporting him, but also looking for direction.
“Of course you can! What can Blank do for you?”
“Am I… pretty?” Her eyes flashed and then stared vacantly into his. His heart dropped to his stomach in a moment of terror, Without the covenants during this game, his usual sense of safety was completely off kilter. Could it really be… ? His childhood answers flooded back to him in a rush, but his face and his voice betrayed none of his fear.
“Of course you are! Now why such a pretty girl is asking a virgin like me is beyond me but your eyes are lovely!” Shiro glared at him, but he placated her with three quick squeezes of her hand.
For her part, the girl in the kimono tilted her head to the side. He’d gone on a bit and she seemed a little confused.
“Is that so?”
“Absolutely! You’re gorgeous!” He flashed a grin and clung to Shiro’s hand.
When she lowered her fan, he was prepared to suppress a scream. They were obvious, the scars. They covered huge swaths of her face, artificially extending her smile with wide pale pink lines that raised above her skin. Each of her cheeks threatened to be swallowed up by them. And while Sora truly had been prepared to suppress a scream, he actually hadn’t been prepared at all to suppress his earnest response.
He gave a soft gasp, putting his hand involuntarily to his mouth. Tears stung at his eyes, immediately. At first he cursed his lack of forethought. He was always so good at masking his emotions, at always coming off cool and collected when it was necessary to project confidence, but here he’d let himself slip, ruining any chance of any of the answers he so wanted to pull off should this situation ever present itself. He looked at Shiro, who was unaffected, as always. All was not lost.
The girl was still simply staring at him, confused. It didn’t seem she’d interpreted his reaction as similar to a scream, so they were still in the game. Upon his eyes meeting her face again, she continued, still according to script.
“Even still?”
Since there was no turning back now, he ran with his instincts. His romance game instincts. He was highly likely to get them both killed, if he took the risk, but here he was, taking the risk anyway. He reached out his free hand, and he touched her cheek. The surrounding skin immediately reddened, throwing the pink scars from darker to much lighter than the rest of her cheeks. He brushed a thumb over it, much smoother and dryer than skin usually was and he cried.
“I am so, so sorry that someone ever hurt you. How could anyone, looking at this gorgeous face, ever see fit to mark it with scars for any reason? No one is worthy to hurt you, and I cannot believe that anyone, ever, would have the gall to do such a terrible thing. Miss, you deserve your face, your beautiful face, to be unharmed. It is a travesty that anyone thought they deserved to touch you for any reason other than to love you. But let me say this, even though someone with more entitlement than anyone should ever have decided to harm you, this face, scars and all, is still beautiful. It’s worth cherishing.”
He brushed her cheek and her eyes swam. She seemed stunned. Sora himself was kind of stunned. Sure, on purpose, he’d turned the charm up to 11, and he’d said the first, most validating, most romantic things he could think of to say, but he found himself feeling almost genuine. He never lied to himself, but what came out of his mouth was always the best thing he could identify to meet his ends, truth was not even considered. Sometimes what he said was true, but that was incidental. But he found himself speaking the truth, his truth, and then, when she didn’t respond except to blush and cry, cheek still in his hand he just kept talking. As though the floodgates had opened.
“I don’t know the details of your story, miss. And let me give you full disclosure: We’ve got an urban legend who is somewhat like you. And in the version of her story I heard, she was so beautiful, and she cheated on her husband, and he’s the one who hurt her. And yeah, maybe you shouldn’t go sleeping around and maybe we can’t blame cheating on loneliness and maybe it was a bad thing to do. So if that’s what you did, well, maybe you’re to blame for making a promise to a dude that you’d be with only him forever and not keeping it. But you’re not to blame for him hurting you. You’re definitely not to blame for him hurting himself. And you didn’t deserve to be punished. Not for being beautiful or for being vain about it, or for anything else. It’s not okay.
“And, if that’s not your story, that’s okay. No matter what you did, I’m still so, so sorry that someone ever touched your face without your consent. You can’t change the past. I can’t undo the hurt that was done to you, the harm it caused, or even get rid of the marks it put on you but I can tell you that you’re beautiful. And when they tried to ruin your face, love, they failed. They wanted these scars to horrify people, and listen, they did, but I’m not horrified by you and your still-beautiful face. I’m horrified by them. I’m disgusted at what they could do, at the way they could just hurt you like that.”
The tears were pouring down both of their faces now, and a confused Shiro was blinking up at them both. Her brother, having some sort of breakdown. She might have been a bit jealous, but she could see that whatever was going on was less romantic than it was therapeutic, and in any case, it didn’t threaten her role as little sister. So she simply stared as her brother kissed the large scars on the wet red cheeks of this girl they didn’t know and then put an arm around her and pulled her closer. She got roped into their hug, lifted by Sora, ending up in the middle, their arms around her to touch each other while they both sobbed wordlessly.
She was still confused by the girl, and by the strange rambling, tear-soaked rant her brother had gone on, but even so, it was extra comfortable to be smushed between two people who were both hugging her, it was a secure place that made it clear her own position wasn’t threatened even as Sora sobbed into and hugged and even kissed another girl. And she supposed it made sense that she would be party to whatever he’d decided. Sora had made it clear, even if the girl herself hadn’t, that she’d been addressing both of them. She looked between them, freed her arms by wiggling, and then patted the girl’s head, and then touched her cheek herself. She wasn’t exactly sure, but it seemed like a good time to contribute what she could to the social side of this situation, unless Sora stopped her.
“It’s okay… they’re pretty too... “ And then suddenly her face was being covered in kisses by her brother. So she’d guessed right. And the reward was higher than expected. She gloated and the girl smiled at her, though she didn’t respond except to continue crying.
“That’s right, baby sister! We’ll never let anybody hurt you again.”
Shiro nodded.
“Blank’s… got you now.”