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Aoi loves the stories her grandfather tells her. About those who lurk on the other side of humanity in the very school she walks through single every day.
The fantastical supernaturals that haunt her school are greater than any evils she knows.
For those brief moments when she hears such stories, she feels her burden has lightened and that she is fully human.
But when mundane life seeps back into her consciousness–the daily absence of her father at the dinner table, the ritualistic sobbing sessions of her mother in the later hours of the night, and the unnatural hatred that consumes her for exactly five minutes of her day, in the early hours of the morning when the school is empty–she is reminded that one very sad truth about her imperfect humanity.
Evil lurks in her heart and only she can ever know about it.
The warm beams of early sunlight filter through the window blinds and fall onto her, casting a long shadow from where she stands. With that, she gently tilts the watering can towards the blooming classroom plant and wards off the evil, cracked girl within.
"Aoi, good morning!" Nene will say when she finally arrives at school.
"Good morning, Nene!" Aoi will say back, in that saccharine voice of hers. She will smile until her cheeks hurt, step so carefully until her feet ache, and pretend until she cannot that all she wishes is to slap Nene Yashiro until her perfectly unblemished hands sting red and bruised.
She and Nene are not the same–her friend lacks the depth that gives Aoi's mind character, yet everyone speaks to Aoi as if she's equally as stupid. It is insulting to both Nene and Aoi that one could confuse Aoi to be just as cheerful, just as kind, and just as empty-headed. To rub salt in her wound, Aoi figures that Nene is withholding things from her. It's the trend those around her like to follow but it comes as a surprise that even Nene participates in it.
And so Aoi wonders with contempt at what Nene, whose deepest thoughts have to do with new crushes, could possibly want to hide from her.
Of course, Nene will know none of what she really thinks, and instead, that ditzy but sweet girl will beam back a smile to her supposedly wonderful friend.
And Aoi will braid her friend's hair during lunch to atone for those awful thoughts she's been having lately.
Grandfather loves her, but even he isn't infallible.
He loves her to the point he is willing to lie, in some bid to protect the girl who knows too much to be protected anymore.
"What can you tell me about our family history, grandfather?" Aoi says as she is caught rifling through old family archives. There must be a source of her rotten core and the rotting veneer of her happy family and she will find it in her family tree. "We were always a happy family, weren't we? Our ancestors?" she continues, lying through her teeth to see how much her dear grandfather does the same.
Her grandfather asks her to settle beside his lap, as if she's some little girl waiting for bedtime stories, and tells her a wonderful tale of the happy Akane family without the slightest hint of irony. Aoi doesn't know if he's the stupid one here, but she supposes he thinks of her easy enough to fool anyway. When he finally leaves the storage closet, she smiles and waves as if her mind is at peace with the lies he's told her.
As soon as he turns his back, she curses him and herself.
One for him, for falling into her trap.
One for her, for designing such a terrible scheme.
"Aoi, please go out with me!" Akane Aoi will say, for the thousandth-something time.
Aoi will smile with her sweetest of all smiles. "Good try," she will say back, or some variation borrowed from her much smaller library of confession-rejection responses. It's one of those things she will find repose in because it's one of the few honest things she can expect to meet with on a daily basis. She gives all the credit for honesty in Akane's daily confessions to herself, in her always-expected refusals because, honestly, Akane hardly knows what he's talking about.
But one day, there will be no confession and though it's for the best, Aoi's blackened heart will sometimes hurt to think of a time when she doesn't exist, when her childhood friend eventually moves on.
Aoi will resolve, in those rare moments of self-interest, that she will seriously accept Akane's love, even if it's meant for a nonexistent, perfect Aoi and not her, the pretender of innocence.
She will tell him her love back and play pretend.
Just like her mother and father and grandfather do when they about the existence of family happiness.
She will tell him.
One day she will ruin his life, all for a selfish fairytale.
She will tell him.
One day.
Class President Teru Minamoto tells her something interesting, and this time, he doesn't extract a favour from her in return.
It's also something that crushes her.
"Why should humans be protected from supernaturals, if they exist?" Aoi pokes, with great curiosity at the funny topic Teru brings to her today. She is only too glad that it isn't about DIY snack kits and having to become his midnight company to make them. Her late-night convenience store walks are over, and when she considers the parts they all played in that, she feels more resentful towards Teru Minamoto than the creepy cashier he's had the opportunity to rescue her from.
"Because you're human. We're human," Teru says, as they glide together through a crowd of awestruck students who act as though they've caught a sighting of a god and a goddess.
"And humans are good?"
Teru pauses for the briefest of a second and even if he doesn't intend for her to take notice, she does. "Yes."
"And the fantastical…evil?"
"Yes."
"Because the stories my grandpa tells, the stories we all tell, say so," she concedes.
"Because they're true." Teru is adamant in his response, even if he has stumbled just one moment ago.
Aoi gives one last try. "You know, sometimes I feel like I'm possessed by an evil spirit," she says playfully, all with a bright little smile.
To her disappointment, Teru doesn't even think of entertaining this idea. "You're not."
They part ways in the middle of the hall and Aoi is left chewing on the fact that Teru has confirmed what she has thought all along. The smile falls from her face as he turns a corner.
She is no better than those rumoured to haunt her school.
The crowds of students who have stalked her and Teru along the length of the hallway begin to disperse and she wonders if she could disperse from such an existence.
Most supernaturals are ugly.
Yet for all their physical shortcomings, she sees little in the way of a deeper evil. At least, evil beyond her human comprehension.
Lord No. 6 is neither kind nor evil, and even the potion he forces her to drink is nothing akin to the horrible effects she expects.
If anything, she appreciates the gradual removal of that stifling filter which has always weeded out her poison, which is now allowed to run free from her soul. It's cathartic to push Nene into that pit to Hell as she can finally physically distance herself from the girl she is not. Her attempt to do the same with Akane starts as a struggle and ends in failure as he pulls her in with him, proving once again that he will not allow her to distance herself from a love not meant for her, even if it means dying for such a fruitless cause.
It's a cause he forces her to face when they journey through the other world.
"I hate liars," she spits out. "I hate you." Again and again and again.
"No you don't," he says. He refuses, again, again and again.
He confines her against the ruins of a stone wall and presses so close that she cannot escape. To a passing stranger, he can only be a brute, and she, a lady in distress.
A passing stranger can never know that he's actually right. And she hates to admit that she's the liar, the biggest liar of them all. If she were Akane, she'd wear away at the patronising lies she has told thousands of times over. But it's Akane, of course, it's Akane–too good to be beaten down, too true to her to the extreme. Unlike her, he isn't fooled, and he takes her in stride as his lips draw up her neck and closes in on the mouth which lies, the mouth which leaks the poisonous thoughts of her mind.
He tells her she will not ruin him because…
He tells her he's always known of the cracked girl within and tells her he loves her.
So she can tell him what he already knows.
When she hears this, Aoi resolves to tell him the truth for once, because maybe there is a sliver of goodness buried deep in her heart and maybe, just maybe, she can draw it out. So she starts.
She will tell him.
She loves desserts. She loves video games. Card games too.
She will tell him.
She loves giraffes. She doesn't love the crowded zoo.
She will tell him.
But she loves hi–
She doesn't.
And like a ray of sunset light, Akane dips beneath the horizon and her world plunges into darkness.
How regrettable.
Aoi stands in a daze, weighed down by her heavy kimono sleeves and her soaked skirt. She cannot easily glide through the shallow waters this otherworldly place is covered in, and she cannot gage how much time has passed. The supernatural rush about her, away from the black space which is beginning to blot out the amber sky, and all she can do is observe their activities as she stays rooted and alone.
Some supernaturals may attack, and so she stands lost but guarded, her braceleted hand held to her chest. Should they spot her, like the aquatic supernaturals of earlier, she can only hope Teru's charm protects her against such evil.
But that sort of evil is one she's already familiar with. After all, alligators are brutal too, aren't they? Though she's never seen one in person… the thought of an out-of-reach trip to the zoo with Akane wanders back into her mind and threatens to seep her in sadness again.
There's a truth which has formed in her aimless thoughts and she sighs as she realises it.
The little mundane evils of her life have decorated her misery more than any sort of extraordinary ones. The real, ugly, supernatural monsters are no different than the ones that eat away at her every night, as she tosses and turns to the beat of her lies and the rhythm of her enduring hatred.
And so Grandfather's stories may have given her a temporary escape, but the truth can offer much more in acceptance.
It's what gives her the courage to say it out loud in front of Honourable No. 7, once he has uprooted her and whisked her away to the relative safety of the last train.
"I have a childhood friend. I love him," she says. Her courage wavers and falls to the overwhelming sadness which fills her decaying heart, one which she eventually cannot keep beating as the train drags her closer to the end.
She weeps.
As usual, it only takes a moment to wipe off the tears and tell him what the moral of her tale is. If only for Nene, the girl so like her in so many ways yet none at once, she will say it out loud to No. 7.
"We're the same, you see," she says as she thinks, as much human as he is and as much supernatural as she is. "We couldn–can't tell them our love…because we feel undeserving to claim theirs."
The expression on his face mirrors her earlier one when she first discovers this truth and she knows he's stricken with hidden grief.
Aoi smiles and for once, it's not the disingenuous one which the supposedly-innocent girl has worn in all of her short life.
The End
or…
No. 7 does not take Aoi's tale in vain. She promises herself she will do the same.
"I love you, Akane. And I love Aoi, too."