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Language:
English
Series:
Part 3 of The Yougou series
Stats:
Published:
2022-10-05
Completed:
2022-12-16
Words:
37,275
Chapters:
11/11
Comments:
7
Kudos:
20
Bookmarks:
2
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269

"Where is the other boy?"

Summary:

"They diagnosed Mother with “erosion”, a condition in which the afflicted would slowly lose most of their cognitive function, all their memories, and in later stage, even their sense of self. Her Excellency Narukami Gongen said this condition is natural, but Mother wasn’t supposed to be developing it at her current age."

"The purpose of this journal is to record every of Mother’s memories and emotions from now on. Let this journal be her second brain, when hers became unusable."

Chapter 1: Prologue: "Where is the other boy?"

Summary:

Let your heartbeat be the rhythm.
Let the biting snow be our grand stage.
Let the howling wind be the music.
And, despite the piercing cold, let us dance.

Until winter finally melt away.
Until the sun finally wake up.
Until I can feel the warmth of your tears again.
And, until your heart cease to beat.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Lately (no, lately couldn’t be the right word), she has a favourite pastime of sitting in the backyard and just close her eyes for a minute or two. When she does so, either a boy, a young man, or an older man would appear before her. Sometimes, there would be another young man with horns appear beside him.

That person talks a lot, but she doesn’t understand most of the things he says. Still, she finds the need to nod along to encourage him. Because even when she doesn’t understand anything that comes out of his mouth, she still enjoys the sound of his voice. Why is that? She can’t say that she is too sure. Maybe because it has the same sweetness of warm milk in a dark, cold night. Maybe because it feels as warm as the first ray of sunshine after a long winter. Maybe because it shares the fragrance of the freshly dried, warm clothes. And she found that to be much more pleasant than the sharp sound of metal crashing at each other or the dull sound of the water dripping onto the ground.

What does that person call her again? Right, Mother. He calls her by Mother.

Everyday, she couldn’t help but wonder where that person is now. Closing her eyes to see him is nice but having him by her side would be much more comforting.

And she figures that if she wants to know anything, she should ask, right? So, one day, when that other young man with horns approaches her (he had been spending much more time with her now), she asks, still struggling to lift her heavy jaws:

“Where is the other boy?”

It feels like that moment was frozen in time.

And then the other young man’s expression broke into something she can’t understand, and something she doesn’t like.

She could hear the beating in her chest gets louder and louder as she pushed herself to find something that might help her, something that was hiding in a hidden corner of her mind, no, her heart.

Maybe I wasn’t being clear enough. She thought. A name. A name would help.

“Where is…Nagamasa?”

The salty water from the other young man’s crimson eyes fell onto her hands. It too, was warm, but she doesn’t like it.

Notes:

Okay so, alternate universe when basically everything is the same except Chiyo didn’t fight Ei at all. So, when she escaped from the beast's belly she just kneeled over and when her sons rushed in to check on her, they realized erosion got to her (we actually don’t know if Abyss cause erosion or not and we actually don’t know if youkai are affected by erosion or not but shhhhh).
I actually don’t know if this is a fix-it fanfic or just a canon divergence/alternate universe. I know that the situation is general just better over all but like, it’s still angsty.
But it is actually funny how much time I spent on thinking about the Mikoshi, I gave them the dedication that would normally be given to playable characters, with like, face (Only Chiyo has a face among three of them, but she also has no canonical lines). All of their personalities are speculative and with this new situation/alternate universe it almost feels like I’m writing OCs.
Right, right, I started writing this because I have too much brainrot about how Nagamasa calls Chiyo by “muqin daren” and how would the events in the game unfold if people didn’t treat Chiyo terribly (my conclusion is everything would get much better).