Work Text:
“Ryuji’s dead.”
Her father blinked, his mouth agape. Whatever greeting he might’ve been starting to speak dying in his throat at her words. His eyes drifted to the window behind her for a moment, landing on where Yoichi still sat in the yard. Then they shot back to her as he reached out and gripped her shoulder as gently as he could.
“When?” He questioned quietly, his voice coming out raspy from his shock. He hadn’t been particularly close with his former son-in-law, but he hadn’t seemed like a bad man. Not to his knowledge, at least. He knew Reiko’s separation from him had not been an easy choice. There had been a time when he’d made his daughter happy, despite how it’d ended.
Reiko shifted uncomfortably from where she sat, not knowing how to gracefully start this conversation. She swallowed. “He was found in his home yesterday by one of his students. He-”
She inhaled, and chanced a glance at her father. His brow was furrowed, looking directly at her, all his attention focused. She clenched her teeth for a moment before continuing.
“The favor… that I mentioned to you, over the phone. It’s not-it has to do with Yoichi. He…”
She cut herself off, frustrated. She didn’t know how to explain this. Not in a way that made sense. In a way that sounded plausible.
Maybe she just needed to cut straight to the point.
She reached over to her bag and pulled the tape out. She sat it on her lap and stared at it for a moment, her hands hovering above it. So much terror and heartache this thing had reeked on her family in less than a month. Tomoko. Ryuji.
And no matter how this conversation ended, her family would lose one more.
She began again.
“I know what I'm about to tell you sounds… not possible. But it’s why I’ve been out of touch so much this week. It’s why the favor I’m going to ask of you is a dire one and why I am not asking it lightly,” She gave the tape a shake. “This. It’s why Ryuji is dead. Why-why Tomoko is dead.”
She unclenched her hands from the edges of the tape, keeping her gaze on it, unable to look her father in the eye yet. Not until she explained.
“And it’s why Yoichi is in danger.”
The words started pouring out of her. Everything that had happened after Tomoko’s funeral. Going to the cabin, discovering the tape the girls had told her about, that her niece had watched. That she had watched. Showing Ryuji the tape the next day, giving him the copy. How she’d unknowingly sealed his fate and saved herself by doing that. Yoichi finding the tape and watching it before she could stop him. Going to the island, learning about Sadako, how they’d thought they were helping her and putting this curse to an end by finding her body in the well. And how painfully wrong they’d ended up being.
They sat in silence after that.
She glanced up at her father but couldn’t read his expression, his face tilted towards the tape in her lap.
She opened her mouth to try and force something even remotely explanatory or apologetic to the surface, The curse has already passed over me, I know I haven’t been a great mother to Yoichi but if we don’t do this I’ll never get the chance, but he beat her to it.
“If I make a copy of this and watch it…”
His words were tight, heavy with an impossible to grasp emotion.
“Yoichi will be safe?”
Reiko gave a slow, stiff nod.
He stared off into the distance, mind racing. A part of him wanted to demand that his daughter see reason. This was insane. Ludicrous. A tape was causing all this?
But the other half of him thought to his other daughter. The blankness of her gaze nowadays. How quietly she talked now. The gasping, sobbing phone call he’d gotten from her not long after she’d found Tomoko in her room.
Maybe Reiko was wrong. Maybe this was all some horrible, tragic coincidence.
He glanced at the window again, at Yoichi still outside.
But if it’s not...
He closed his eyes tightly. With a final, trembling breath, he looked back to his daughter, at the tape she had sat in her lap, and made his choice.