Chapter Text
I don’t know what it feels like to be satisfied.
When I look at the world, sometimes it feels like I’m completely cut off from it. I look at everyone around me and they all seem so absorbed in their lives. I don’t mean that in a negative way. They care about what’s going on. If something bad happens, they feel sad or angry or confused. If something good happens, they feel joy and excitement. They know how it feels to be enraptured, to have goals and dreams and desires.
I don’t.
I don’t remember if I ever did. All I know is that one day I realised that I felt numb to almost everything. I tried, I really did. I tried so hard to find something that I felt passionate about. I took up track. I tried gardening. I learned how to knit. I took cooking classes. I studied harder than anyone else in my class. I went walking near really pretty gardens and shrines. I read books and manga, went to the cinema and watched anime, played way too many computer games and stayed up way too late browsing through internet chat rooms.
Nothing worked.
Eventually, I just settled into a comfortable routine. I went to school, did my extracurricular activities, and studied. If I had too much time on my hands, I would hang out with my sister. She dragged me to go shopping and visit little cafes. I appreciated it, really. My sister was trying her best to make me happy, and I wasn’t unhappy. So I could pretend that everything was fine. I was a good girl. There was nothing wrong with me and my life was fulfilling, even though I was always so eager to get to bed so I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t horribly bored by my life.
From an outside perspective, things couldn’t have been better. I was doing really well in school and my best friend was nagging me for not putting in any effort with her. Our parents were friends, and we had known each other for so long that it didn’t matter how disconnected I was, Osana would come and try to get me to hang out with her. I guess it was her way of trying to make sure things were still fine. So she came to give me her usual tsundere as hell speech about how she didn’t care what I did but could I please not be rude, and I noticed something weird. There was this girl hiding behind the tree close to the fountain. I barely caught a glimpse of her face as she peeked out and hid again. I stared blankly and gave no indication that I had seen her, but I was curious. Had I seen her before? No, I would’ve remembered. I was so sure that I didn’t know her.
Throughout the week I noticed her appearing out of the corner of my eye. It was never for long. If I stopped suddenly or made to turn around she would disappear. For a little while I wondered if my stalker was a ghost. Maybe the occult club had managed to dredge up something interesting after all. The thought of being haunted by some unknown spirit made me smile. At least it was something interesting, right?
Well, not quite. I eventually managed to get a better look at my stalker. Near the end of the week, I noticed her sneaking into the Cooking Club. I mean properly sneaking. She was crouched and moving carefully around the counters. Her dark hair was swept up into a tight pony tail and her gaze was a blank mask of concentration. I kept out of her line of sight and watched in fascination as she quietly swiped a knife from the knife stand. I noticed as her hand grasped around the knife’s handle that she was wearing these weird white gloves, like the drama club sometimes used. She quickly concealed the blade and crept back towards the door.
I sprinted to the courtyard. My heart was thudding as I sat by the fountain and caught my breath, wondering why I wasn’t more afraid. I wondered why the thought of that girl coming after me with a knife didn’t make me want to phone the police or tell a teacher. Instead, a part of me – a big part of me – wanted her to come find me. I wanted to see what she would do. I wanted to know what exactly was going on inside her head.
The minutes ticked by as I waited for her to find me. I was greeted by a tranquil silence and nothing else. I couldn’t understand what was taking her so long. Was she stupid? Had she just not seen me? Or, and I thought about this with a weird kind of anticipation, maybe I wasn’t her target. I waited until fifteen minutes before school closed before I gave up and went back to my locker. I saw the cooking club file out… and then I heard a scream from outside.
I dropped my books and ran to the sound of the disturbance. There, lying face-down in a pool of blood was Osana. I stood frozen and watched as one of the cooking club girls ran off to get a teacher. I couldn’t yell or scream or do any of the things the other girls were doing. I just stood there looking at the body and wondering why the hell I couldn’t feel anything at the death of a girl I had known my whole life. One of the cooking club girls put her arm round me and led me away, telling me not to look. I think she was trying to be supportive, but there was nothing she could do. Osana was dead, and I didn’t care. I think I looked horrified, but I couldn’t tell.
As the cooking club girl took me away from Osana’s body, I noticed a flash of light from the ground beside the pool of blood. I knew. I knew before I heard anything from any of the police officers that it was a knife. I didn’t need to wait for the police to tell me that the knife had the fingerprints of one of the cooking club girls on it and that it was the murder weapon.
What I didn’t tell the police was that I knew exactly who the real killer was. There was no way to prove it, and in any case, I didn’t really want to do anything about it. My regular shadow was back, and her presence made me feel warmth inside. I wasn’t sure why the hell she was interested in me, or why she had wanted to kill Osana. But I knew in my gut that I wanted to know more than anything, and I wasn’t going to get any answers by telling someone that I had seen the girl take the murder weapon. Nobody questioned my silence, and it turned out that the girl from the cooking club whose finger prints were on the blade had spilled soy sauce on her shirt and had left to change into her gym wear. She didn’t have an alibi, and with no cameras to back up her insistence that she had gone straight to the locker room to wash up and change, she looked guilty. I didn’t tell them that the girl with the bright yellow hair was the one to hug me and lead me away from the body. I didn’t tell them that she had been so very, very gentle and kind as she sat with me and tried her best to give me comfort I didn’t need. There was no point. Not when I had something more interesting to contend with.
_
Osana’s death was sudden, bloody and violent. I lay awake at night for the next week thinking about it. The memory of her blood on the ground left me captivated. I couldn’t stop thinking about that girl either – the killer, the real killer. I stuck to my normal routine, and yet I didn’t see her for the rest of the week. Occasionally I thought I saw a ponytail disappearing behind a corner, but that was all. With everything so quiet, I began to wonder if I had imagined her. Things went back to normal surprisingly quickly. Osana’s conspicuously empty seat next to mine was the only real reminder that she was dead. That aside, everything felt disappointingly normal. I felt the same old dissatisfaction creeping up on me.
For the next few weeks, things were relatively quiet. I overheard a cluster of girls talking about a classmate missing a lot of school, which was an indication that the rumour mill was out of news. The only other piece of gossip that seemed to be fluttering around was that another girl had struck up a relationship with some guy. Then, three weeks after the death of Osana, I noticed this girl following me. She wasn’t my regular stalker. I knew this girl, or at least I knew of her. Her name was Kokona Haruka. She was in my year. It would be hard to miss her. Kokona had dark pink hair styled into two drill curls and a pair of massive breasts. There was more to her than that, of course. She was the president of the drama club and an incredible social butterfly. We weren’t friends, but she spoke to me sometimes and always seemed friendly enough. In any case, I noticed that Kokona was spending a lot of time around me. I noticed her taking lunch breaks near the fountain I liked to sit at and creeping behind the tree in the courtyard to peek out at me. That was really strange, but I came to the damn fountain for peace and I wasn’t going to go elsewhere just because someone else wanted to creep around.
Kokona spent the next few days eating lunch at her bench near me. Occasionally I would look up and see her eating happily. She was cute, I supposed. There were worse girls to have in my personal space. Creep or no, she was quiet.
At least, Kokona was quiet until she started choking.
I watched, rooted to the spot as Kokona coughed and spluttered and caught at her throat. Her eyes bulged wide as she tried in vain to cough up whatever had stuck in her throat, but to no avail. She fell to her knees and then her body gave way as she passed out, hands falling limply to her side. I breathed in slowly as I tried to process what I had just seen. There was no way Kokona was alive, not now. I gripped the edge of the fountain as I looked around. Was she here? I wondered. Was the girl with the pony tail here? My breath caught in my throat as I heard what sounded like giggling coming from a short distance away. Yes, it was her. I knew in my gut that it was her. I felt a warm, genuine smile of delight stretch across my mouth. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I never for a moment doubted that Kokona’s death was for me. It was a gift, or a warning, or both. However it was intended, to me it felt like an act of possession. She was like a cat, killing and dropping the corpse in front of her human. I didn’t allow myself to wonder exactly how she had managed it. The urge to run after her and demand answers was overwhelming. Instead, I took in another deep breath and screamed as loudly as I could. I bolted to the nearest classroom, screaming incoherently about a dead body. When the teacher finally made sense of what I was telling her, she followed me back to the body and called the police. She sent me to the nurse’s office to be comforted by the very attractive nurse on duty. I cried into her chest as she comforted me and told me, “Shhh, it’s going to be okay.”
I had to keep crying hysterically to stop myself from laughing. Where was all of this joy coming from? I hadn’t known that it would feel so good to watch people die for me. Someone, some awful, amoral person was killing people who got too close to me. I didn’t have to lift a finger. The thought of someone having that much devotion for me, of having that much obsession for me as to kill for me… was it love? Was the way my heart was beating fast and the colour in my cheeks love? It wasn’t the kind of love people spoke about, not to me.
This wasn’t an even footing or a carefully built partnership or lust blossoming into something more. I wanted her, but I wanted her because she wanted me more than anything. She wanted me enough to prove how much she wanted me, and that made me want her more than anything. I thought about some of the romance novels I had read about knights who served their queens loyally, not because they were close but because they adored their queen more than anything. I had read about ‘courtly love’ before, and it seemed to be written off as a longing for an unattainable woman. This wasn’t the same thing, but it was impossible for my mind to ignore the connection. I was like a distant queen, and this woman was my protector. She would kill for me. She would methodically hunt anyone she deemed unworthy. Without knowing me she had decided that I was worthy of her longing. I felt that she had decided she wanted my love so much she was willing to do anything to get it.
Wasn’t that a kind of love? People said things like “I would do anything for you” all the time, but how often did they really mean it? How often was someone seriously willing to kill for another human being? I couldn’t imagine doing something like that. Not unless I wanted someone. Not unless I loved that person more than anything else. Not unless I felt that nothing mattered as long as I could be with that person.
That night, I lay awake once again. I stared at the ceiling and put my hand on my chest, feeling the way my heart thudded. I stifled a giggle and pressed my face into my pillow, smothering my grin. For the first time in my life, I was in love. I was in love with a ruthless woman who was willing to kill to keep me, and for the first time I could remember, I felt like I was closer to a complete human being than an empty shell.
_
The next few weeks were interesting, to say the least. Things were slowly becoming more and more chaotic around Academi High. The weird girl who ran the occult club – Oka Ruto, I thought her name was – committed suicide. I overheard the Basu sisters gossiping about how she was a creepy stalker and everyone had turned on her because someone posted information about Oka’s stalking habits online. Then, get this, the very next week a teacher was fired. Nobody could prove it, but the rumour mill was ablaze with stories passed on by suspicious students about affairs with female pupils and incriminating photographs. I had to admit, I would have given a lot to know exactly how that staff meeting went down. The week after was quiet, or at least it was until Friday. The Occult club disbanded after Oka’s suicide, so it took a little while for anyone to go into the old room they used to use and find the decapitated head just lying on the floor in the middle of a circle of candles. All of the previous Occult club members were officially suspects, and let me tell you, none of them could have pulled off something that brutal. They didn’t have the nerve. If the Occult club ever summoned a real demon, they wouldn’t know what to do with it.
Suffice to say, school was an interesting place to be. I had started smiling genuinely and found myself looking forward to the strange chaos each week would bring. Unfortunately, I fell ill. What a time to get sick. I dragged myself into school every day because I didn’t want to miss anything, but I kept getting sent to the nurse’s office. It wasn’t a bad place to be. She recognised me from before, and was flirtatious and friendly. Once upon a time, I would have gladly started a torrid affair with the school nurse. Now I was wondering what would happen to her. I smiled and chatted and played innocent. I saw the girl pass by the nurse’s office several times each day. She never stopped, but I knew she was here because of me. More than that, I knew that I had marked the school nurse for death, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to play out. How would she kill a faculty member with a witness in the room?
On a particularly quiet morning, I got my answer.
Slow, shuffling feet clumped along the corridor. They stopped outside the Nurse’s office door before it slid open and someone stumbled into the room. It took me a moment to recognise the girl, but I recalled listening to students talking about a missing student. This had to be her. Her eyes were dead and blank, as if somebody had drained all of her vitality. In her right hand she held a katana, a gleaming steel katana. The nurse screamed as the girl lunged towards her and stabbed her with the katana. Blood sprayed everywhere as the girl kept stabbing the nurse. Blood began to pool on the floor and the nurse, though she tried to struggle, eventually collapsed onto the bloody floor and stared at the ceiling lights with glassy, lifeless eyes. The girl took one second to look at the corpse before she pulled the katana from it and aimed the blade very carefully at her forehead. I stared at the girl as she rammed her head into the sword with as much force as she could muster. For a moment she stood there, blood trickling down her face and katana lodged through her skull. Then she fell, first to her knees, then on top of the nurse’s body.
I couldn’t stop staring at the macabre tableau in front of me. My blood was coursing through my body and I couldn’t make myself move. In its own way, the murder-suicide was beautiful. It had been meticulously planned out. No witnesses, except myself, and in theory nobody to know anything about the real culprit. All I had seen was one girl who had been missing for weeks turn up and stab the school nurse. It was the most elaborate declaration of love I had ever witnessed. Carefully, I peeled off my covers and stumbled to the councillor’s office. I had to tell someone what I had seen, but I could still barely walk without my head spinning. Anyone with any sense would be at home, I thought to myself as I collapsed in the doorway of the councillor’s office.
_
The police couldn’t understand how the missing girl had gone from a sweet high school student to a vicious killer in so short a space of time. Nobody knew where she had been, and the assumption was that the girl had been planning the attack for a long time before she acted. The rumour mill churned out one explanation after the next: they had been lovers, the nurse had stolen the girl’s boyfriend, the girl was having an affair with the nurse’s husband… they went on and on. I listened with interest to one sordid tale after another. I made sure that I always seemed to be concerned and horrified, even though I wanted to laugh at them all. There was only one person who had the power to pull something like that off, and she was keeping her distance. I spent a lot of time on my own, waiting to feel her watching me. Sometimes I could see her silhouette, leaning against the railings on the school roof. I knew she was watching me. I knew that she would strike if anyone came near me. I might not see it, but I would know. I would always know. I was hers, and although she might not have known it yet, she was mine.
We had a short grace period. Nothing much was going on, and then the impossible happened. My sister, who was well known for being more than a little bit clingy, announced to me that she had a date with a very handsome boy from school. I couldn’t believe it. Years of saying that she just wanted to hang out with her big sister and didn’t have time for boys had given way to asking for make-up advice and spending the money from her part-time job on sexy underwear. Stunned as I was, I at least had the sense of self to be happy for her. I was genuinely happy that my sister had found someone. “Love changes you.” I told her as we sat on her bed together, looking through clothes for her date. “You think that you’ll never find someone who’s just what you needed, and then you do and it changes everything.”
“Eh? Sis, don’t tell me you’ve found a boyfriend too?”
I shook my head. “No. Not a boyfriend.”
“A girlfriend?” My sister sounded shocked. “You know mum and dad are weird about that stuff.”
I shrugged my shoulders and picked up a blue dress to examine in better light. “They’re weird about lots of stuff.” I didn’t tell her that it didn’t matter what our parents thought. I was in love, and the person I was in love with would do anything for me. That wasn’t the kind of love I would get if I married some guy I met at college or found an ordinary woman to date. No normal person would slaughter everyone they met just for me. Nobody else would paint the ground red with the blood of anyone who stood in our way. Maybe that wasn’t what love was supposed to be. I didn’t care. This feeling, this longing and sheer joy, was worth more than any twee shojo manga romance I might find anywhere else. This was bloody and brutal and magnificent.
My sister still looked worried, but she was quickly distracted by the dress in my hands. “That’s perfect!” She said. She pulled the dress from my hands and yanked it over her head. “I look so pretty!”
The dress was wrinkled at the hem and needed ironing, but my sister’s face was radiant. Any boy would be lucky to have her. “He’ll fall in love with you at once.” I said. I meant it. I wanted my sister to be happy. Even if her happiness wasn’t the same as what I felt, I wanted her to know that she didn’t need to cling to me all the time. If I of all people could find overwhelming love, my sister definitely could. “Now, have you thought about what you want to do with your hair?”
_
In the week after my sister’s date, everything seemed quiet. My knight was still hiding from me, but I felt like she was becoming bolder now. She walked right past me when I was sitting at the fountain, and although she kept her head down I thought I could see her smiling. She really was pretty when she smiled. I thought about her smiling as she saw the destruction and death she had caused across the school.
As my knight passed by I imagined that she was walking past me covered in blood, a knife in her right hand and that same smile on her face. She would look beautiful in blood. If she turned to look at me with that smile, I knew I would kiss her, and I would tell her how wonderful she was. How glorious. How she was mine, and I was hers, and we were meant for each other. How I knew that she would drown everyone we knew in a pool of their own blood if it made us safe, if it meant that we could be together. How I knew this wasn’t how people were meant to love but that I loved her and I would gladly stand by and hold her secrets in my heart. How I knew with every fibre of my being that I would rather die than see her kill for anyone but us, and how I knew that she would rather die than see me with anyone else.
My knight knew that I was hers, and I knew that she would come to me soon. It was just a matter of time.