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Notes: This story is Post-BR, set largely in the UK. If memories need refreshing, Yuko is the Lighthouse girl with the poison, who caused the death of five other girls. This is movieverse with Yuko's background as per the manga (Yuko has lovely, normal, parents, has been a strong Catholic, and suffers appalling hallucinations). Needless to say, she does not kill herself.
Battle Royale does not own me...sorry, got mixed up. 'The Lion and the Mouse' I can partially claim–but thanks to Ceres Wunderkind and Aesop for inspiration.
Hell had to wait. All that her sins could deserve was Life.
She walked, bowing in all directions, passing the forms she couldn’t read, in careful order. Small, timid, and anyone she passed avoided her eyes and talked in whispers.
She passed the psych ward ‘airlock’ quickly, stopped at the front desk. The newspaper was there. The Indian desk orderly looked from her to the paper–she saw him look, when she forced her eyes up from the photo of herself, with a bar over her eyes. The orderly spoke in English to the nurse beside her, who nodded slowly, and gripped the desk too hard. Yuko Sakakai stopped crying. Being searched and unpacking–things she was good at.
After they finished, a tubby Chinese girl flew from a room down the corridor. She left off berating an orderly to welcome the newcomer with a smile, in appalling Mandarin.
Yuko looked up, and saw Haruka Tanizawa’s face. Shrilling away about rashes and soap as if everything were perf–she ducked her head in shame, and slipped past without a word in return to the door with her name on a sticker. The room was white, reeked of cleaning fluid, and the blood was there. Like the stain on her eyes from a light.
Yuko unpacked again, clothes and books, fast as soldier digging into enemy soil. She pulled the hospital blanket around her, and skimmed Luke 15, as always, to be able to sleep. Then she clasped hands and shut her eyes.
They opened. Too frightened to look at darkness, Yuko gabbled out a Hail Mary, and was silent. Cold air seeped through the communication grille.
“I’m sorry…”
No answer. Thank God. Yuko gazed up at the clock–Fourteen hours till visiting. Thirty gaping minutes till dinner–till she could find out if anyone here wasn’t afraid of her, or dead.
There might’ve been something before the lab, but I don’t remember that, so I begin there. One of the things I’ve had to learn is to trust memory.
I remember my cage. The darkness beyond, full of the strange lights and great noises that determined our deaths. The heaps of dead mice, purple under their fur. The dream-air. The Pit. And the Replicants, of which every cage knew within three minutes of the first test–the thing that made every cage, save for mine, into a mere cluster of mice; alone, fearful.
You've heard the worst; allowing that mice are the most kindly, foolish, trusting and selfless animals that exist. Made to be together, as I remember.
I will prove this by telling you what we thought about cats–)
“No.”
“Have you had any flashback experiences?”
“No.” Yuko glanced down as the translator spoke, chewed her ring finger. It wasn’t just exposing her demons to a shockingly-dressed 18yr old. The doctor, a bald, heavy man, had time after every single answer to be silent, and look at her with his metal-blue, lifeless eyes…
Do not be racist! Remember, it’s all a lying murder has over them…
Your country grew you wrong, evil from birth. Do not think.
“I’ve only recited.” Yuko let out, “Just said words to myself.”
“Not only the mad have voices in their head. I’ve heard prayer can involve listening as well as talking…”
“No–No.”
Yuko believed that God was in man. She didn’t cower, or flinch, just shrank awaywithin her skin.
“How do you relate God with what happened to you?”
“It wasn’t God’s will; what I did.”
“Do you think your actions were understandable by reason of what you knew at the time?”
“It was my demons.” There was silence after the translator stopped speaking.
“Then your friends were not responsible.” No. no. no. “Why not?”
“They weren’t. You stupid man, they didn’t know, they were scared and angry, they were the bes–!” Yuko’s breath stopped.
“What, before the incident, was the state of your own knowledge and emo–?”
“You…you don’t try to catch me out!” Her shoulders were curling in. “They, I, I should’ve known…” Silence.A drop of red fell onto Yuko’s skirt from her mouth.
“What were your friends like, Yuko?”
His eye filled the lattice of the net; I could no more have looked than at the sun, if there had been any sun in there. But the lion, the monstrous rat-eating beast was trapped, with nothing but poisoned meat. I could leave him, with the bodies of the demon Replicants, that were between me and the door.
I stumbled over the tail of the creature that had looked like Y-558. I had to get out; this wasn’t my tragedy, not my end. I was the victim, silent while the devils killed and killed.
All I'd done wasshake nonono, not me, no at the face of S-411. Robots, tiny possessing creatures, a mind-destroying drug, whatever things the humans had made totorment us–could they be sick of killing? She–it–looked sick. But grateful, for something, and I didn’t know what.
Y-558. Her face was beautiful and alien, like the lights outside our cage. My friend, her teeth in S-411’s face, friend and champion of all, blood crusted on her whiskers, the one who’d saved my live.
It wasn’t her. They had taken her, left a murdering Replicant demon…as I watched? The moment she saw C-536 as I saw her, throat spillingout, her friend…?
H-754. The Replicant S-411 had scattered things like thread from her belly. When had she turned into a monster? Standing up to S-411, angry and unafraid? Saying without shame–no, no, no, that was so like you;
“It could’ve been any of us…!”
Slowly, aching to run, run, run, I went back to Y-333, and sank on my haunches. The meat still hung from her teeth. I shifted her over. Fur stuck out horribly from a puffed face, twisted with agony. I looked, screamed no, I just, I only, but it was her face. I skittered to Y-558 and H-754, buried my nose in the stink and tore pieces of them away, tears flying out like blood.
No metal. No monster sat in their brains. Just the most kindly, foolish, trusting, selfless animals in the world–my friends.
Murderers. Me.)
"If you'd said all that years after the fact, you'd be an ordinary girl, and a little happier. But things are going to get better than the last few months. There will be changes–though you’ve enough of them on your plate these days.”
“What? I’ve murdered my friends–and I should be worried about starting college?”
“It does seem a little funny. Most girls would be seeing a chance to make friends. With you, it’s more of a choice.”
“I have no choices.”
“You’re alive because of a choice.”
“Somebody else’s.”
“End round one. By the way, are you writing anything at present? A diary, even something entirely imaginary?”
“The last time I imagined something, people died.”
“You saw something concrete, and terrible. Imagination, ah, it’s like a spell, which can curse, or remove a curse. That’s C.S. Lewis.” The translator stumbled over that, but was rewarded by Yuko’s faint look of interest. “Just imagine like Isaiah. Swords into Ploughshares.”
Which was quite fitting, and suited Yuko entirely.
“Some bastard–” She knew more Chinese swearwords than Yuko knew Japanese “–stole my meds. Bit crazy not to angry, right? And they think I, I shit, Hari-Kiri, ‘cos I say I, I think of cutting; Big Brother eat heart. No reason, I Hari-Kiri. I think of….” She gasped put one finger up, and gestured quickly around the tiny dining room, “This. More shut up, I…” She made the appropriate action. Yuko took another spoonful of cornflakes, because she had nothing to say.
Her parents visited daily, having nothing else to do, but learn a new language, find work, and find a country. They always brought posters, of London landmarks, bible verses and bored looking cats. The blood slid down her walls from behind them, but Yuko put every one of them up.
Most of the other patients were quiet, unremarkable types. An awkward boy in aerobics sometimes had Takiguchi’s face, but she knew it wasn’t real–no flashbacks, just nightmares moving out of sleep.
It was worst when she saw Utsumi in the sad smile of a nurse, bleeding onto the carpet like the risen Jesus–her demons poured terror into her mind. And she remembered, the kindness of the dead to a mad, stumbling girl. They’d wrapped her in blankets, hugged warmth into her without getting cut; and smiled–drawn the fear out. Memories before the Lighthouse were colorless, hazy, and the most painful of all.
Her Daddy said her friends were in heaven. To her eternal shame, Yuko no longer trusted what her parents said. Whatever she knew about friends, and murder; they didn’t.
Yuko was quiet, obedient, and resisted every urge to talk to her victims–she wanted to be with her parents, soon, for as long as she could be. If only it was safe for them. When a young orderly pushed her into an empty bedroom, and whispered a suggestion, Yuko froze through. Her next movement was an hour later, when half the staff had answered the orderly’s cries for help. In their next session, the doctor's first real question was what had happened. Yuko gazed at him like a cornered rabbit, and calmly lied.
Crying ‘evil’ was no longer a thing she could be allowed.