#mercutio is such a bottom for being impaled | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sparklyjojos · 6 years ago

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[THE CHILDISH DARKNESS Recaps, Chapter 7]

[tw: gore, child abuse, bad things happen to a dog again]

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SEVEN

Saburou never had to use his imagination to describe what violence would look like in his books. Personal experience was enough. He’d been living with the storm of violence called Jirou under one roof for years.

Once when Saburou and Jirou were on their way home from school, they were attacked by a gang of three boys. Jirou barely broke a sweat severely beating them up. Naturally, as someone who enjoyed playing with his victims he wouldn’t just let the three go. Instead he brought a small dog with him, some kind of a small brown terrier wearing a collar, and had one of the hapless attackers do an unspeakable act to it. This event resulted in serious injury to both the boy and the dog. Jirou didn’t even glance at the terrified group as he picked up the wounded animal and took it to a vet clinic, even if he’d been the one at fault. In the end, the dog survived, and Jirou returned home laughing that he should have used a horse instead.

Saburou was confused by the shape of violence in his house. After beating Jirou, Maruo would often cry alone, and Jirou always had tears in his eyes when lashing back. No doubt Jirou loved and hated his father at the same time, the father who wasn’t able to outwardly show his love towards Jirou.

When Jirou was in middle school, he once beat up another student so badly that his furious father drove to the Natsukawa house. But before he could even enter the house, Jirou immediately pounced upon him and beat him savagely while straddling his chest, the same manner of violence that Maruo always used. This time, Jirou wasn’t laughing at all. He only snapped out of it and stopped the assault once the man’s son arrived and desperately threw himself between the two. Maybe only at this moment did crying Jirou remember that this was someone else’s father, and not his own. After that, Jirou got into less fights, claiming that they were a bother.

What is love? Why does it give birth to violence? Why does it sometimes make us hurt the ones we love? Maybe Maruo and Jirou wouldn’t stop their conflict until one or both were killed or until someone else died.

Then again, Saburou had a thought that if he were to die, he’d just get instantly forgotten. Poor Mercutio in the middle of a greater tragedy.

By the time March came around Yurio seemed happier, even if she still sometimes had a spell of apologizing to her dead boyfriend, or stood by Saburou’s bed in the middle of the night telling him to die. Maybe it’d be better if she left this cursed house. That being said, when Saburou contacted her parents, they said that they’d rather have her go to a good institution than have her stay at their house in that condition. Saburou didn’t want to hear about that possibility. He wouldn’t give up on Yurio. Atena and Shirou had already been taking good medical care of her, and besides, Yurio surely wouldn’t feel good in an institution full of strangers.

Or maybe he was mistaken and really just pulling Yurio into the vortex of his own emotions instead of doing what would be the best for her.

Yurio would cry and say “I love you, Saburou” while beating him so badly Shirou and Atena had to restrain her. But Saburou felt as if it was his duty to get beaten up by her. After all, he was the one who kept dragging her into his own emotional turmoils. The crime and the punishment. Every punch sparked a little joy inside him.

Maybe he really shouldn’t be comforting her after each time she lashed out. Maybe he shouldn’t say that since he loved her, it was alright.

One night, she broke his finger while laughing and crying uncontrollably, but Saburou refused Shirou’s proposition to go get some rest in a calmer place for a few days. This was a punishment he had to take.

One day, Shirou said that Saburou really should try to catch whoever had killed Yurio’s boyfriend Hashimoto. No doubt the girl had been hoping all this time that Saburou would be able to bring the killer to justice. She was still thinking about poor Hashimoto, whose body had been found tied to a ping pong table in the middle of a school courtyard, his legs, arms, and head cut off, a note about the “Death God Jawakutora” attached.

Saburou retorted that there wasn’t anything he could do, to which Shirou told him to try, goddamit!, and that people often repeated they couldn’t do something that they just didn’t want to try. During the argument Shirou punched him so hard that he lost consciousness.

When Saburou woke up, Yurio had been in the middle of carving bloody letters into his chest:

LOV

“It’s alright,” he told her when she tried to run away in tears. “It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.”

Was it really alright? He had to start moving. He’d have to catch Hashimoto’s murderer before Yurio tried to pull out his still beating heart.

Shirou had already gathered useful data for him and spread it on the kitchen table.

“Before I share my thoughts about the case, I’d like you to look at the evidence and tell me what you think of it. Someone who wrote a bunch of stupid mystery novels can’t be that bad at figuring things out. Do your best, Ehimegawa Juuzou.”

The victims, all found naked and with a note saying ‘Death God Jawakutora’, all in Nishi Akatsuki or nearby towns:

-- Hashimoto Takashi – as mentioned, his body had arms, legs and head cut off. Marks of strong impact on the body. Cause of death: decapitation. The body parts were wet with tap water. Lack of blood suggested Hashimoto had been murdered in a place different than the schoolyard where he was found.

-- Ogata Shuuichi (43) who had been impaled from mouth to bottom with a wooden pole, which was then stood vertically by an elementary school near the victim’s house in Imadate. The body showed marks as if it had been tied with rope several times around the chest. Cause of death: impalement. Like with Hashimoto, the murder must have been commited in another place.

-- Amaya Yoshiaki (31) and Ogaya Masayuki (32) who were killed by hitting a concrete parking lot in Takefu many times in a row, each time landing face down. It was estimated that each time they had fallen from 10 m, probably from the window on the fourth floor of the elementary school the parking lot belonged to. The victims’ arms and legs bore rope marks.

-- Sakamoto Rio (27) -- found with most his bones broken, the resulting internal trauma being the cause of death. Once again found in Takefu by an elementary school (but a different one than the two victims above). Near the body stood two poles usually used to support the bar in high jump.

-- Nanbu Takahiro (18) – found next to a middle school in Imadate, impaled with a pole from bottom to top. His arms had been cut off, and investigation concluded that his severed head had been violently pushed onto the end of the pole several times. The cause of death was blood loss.

Saburou noticed that all the bodies were found near a school. The note “Death God Jawakutora” could come from its follower, maybe someone calling themselves Jawakutora, but it could also be a proclamation: “death TO God Jawakutora”. Saburou proposed that if Jirou really was connected to Jawakutora, then the murders could be his doing (Shirou was for now staying silent with his own judgment).

Next, Saburou wondered if there was mitate involved. Every murder scene could symbolize a different historical execution method. He couldn’t find any execution methods that would resemble exactly what happened to Hashimoto, however. The boy’s torso had been cut into several pieces like a squid tentacle cut into rings.

Thinking about Hashimoto, Saburou figured out the source of the water. The victim’s body had been frozen so that the body slices wouldn’t spill out their contents. The murderer must have wanted to keep those slices in shape for whatever reason.

Another confounding thing was the first impalement. The pole had been driven through the body in the other direction than in historical executions, with the sharp end stuck into the ground. And what about the unexplained rope marks? Saburou thought that maybe the rope was used on many victims to hide its significance in a single crime scene (“hide a tree in a forest”), but quickly dismissed it as a stupid concept from ridiculous mystery novels.

Next, the two victims who had been thrown out a window. Why do it more than once? Why have the victim always hit the ground face-down and never with their back or side? Maybe the murderer wanted to make sure the two would die, but then why not throw them from somewhere higher like the school’s easily accessible roof?

Then there was Sakamoto, also considered to have hit the ground many times in quick succession, but from relatively smaller height, almost as if somebody performed a wrestling move on him over and over again until all his bones were broken.

As for Nanbu, why would the murderer repeatedly push the head onto the pole?

Saburou didn’t get it at all, so he raised his head to ask Shirou, but Shirou had already fallen asleep on the couch.

“The hell, figure something out first before you wake me up!” he complained after being shaken awake.

“Why should I be the only one here who’s actually trying to think?!”

“Because Yurio wants you to think. Today at the therapy she said stuff like ‘Saburou isn’t serious about doing a single thing!’, ‘He won’t even face me properly!’. If a 13-year-old girl’s roasting you like this, then it’s over, bro! Wake me up when you find something, OK?”

Saburou tried, but couldn’t think of anything more. He went to the kitchen and sunk into the darkness of the storage again, thinking, thinking, thinking. Just like he had closed himself off in the darkness of the warehouse after Runbaba’s death.

Tired of thinking, Saburou fell asleep and had a dream.

Saburou and his three brothers were still children, playing outside the Nishi Akatsuki elementary school. Yurio showed up, somehow older than them, and proposed that they play jump rope. When they said they didn’t have any rope, she pulled out a knife and asked the kids to hold Saburou down. Saburou felt uneasy, but his brothers were all laughing cheerfully, so he smiled too. Yurio sliced his abdomen open and pulled out his instestines, and his brothers used them as their jump rope. It didn’t really hurt, although Saburou was a little concerned how they’d put everything back later. But his brothers and Yurio were all laughing, so he laughed too.

Saburou woke up and returned to the living room. Shirou didn’t appreciate being stirred awake once again, but Saburou was really at the end of his rope with the case. He related what little he had figured out.

“I think we should forget about the execution methods idea,” Shirou said. “Let’s try to look at it from a different point of view… hm?” Suddenly he brightened up. “I know! I know what the murderer did! Ha ha ha!” But he refused to tell Saburou anything before leaving. “I’ll swing by the crime scenes to make sure!”

“Wait, Shirou! Just give me a hint!”

“It’s a child! Children play! And children’s games are sometimes cruel!”

A few hours later Shirou stil hadn’t come back home and didn’t answer the phone, so Saburou decided to check the crime scenes and find him, taking Yurio along as it was better than leaving her all alone in the house. The two headed to the Nishi Akatsuki middle school. Saburou had Yurio wait outside and entered the staff room. Despite the late hour, three teachers were still there. They instantly recognized their former student Saburou – then again, it’s not like there was a single person in Nishi Akatsuki that didn’t know what the Natsukawas looked like, especially after the Nozaki case. According to the teachers, Shirou had shown up some time ago claiming to be looking for footprints.

When Saburou left the staff room, Yurio had disappeared. He quickly spotted her alone in the schoolyard, shaking all over. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to take her to where her boyfriend had been killed. But as Saburou came closer, he realized it wasn’t Yurio.

The ghostly pale girl was standing there.

Saburou closed his eyes in fear.

“You’ll protect me, right, Saburou?”

He opened his eyes. Yurio was standing in front of him, crying, and he had a sudden feeling that she’s going to hurt him. He took a step back. She took a step forward.

“Saburou. Saburou. Saburou.”

Her face morphed into the ghostly pale girl, her eyes completely black.

“Don’t run away. Protect me.”

He tripped and fell together with her, closing his eyes on instinct. When he opened them again, it was Yurio looking down at him, crying in despair.

This time he found himself only able to embrace her after a long moment.

“I’m sorry, Saburou, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being such a child.”

A child. Didn’t Shirou say…

Saburou realized just what Shirou meant. ‘Children’s games are sometimes cruel’. The murders didn’t symbolize execution methods, but different games. Now that he thought about it, didn’t he have a dream about a bloody edition of jump rope? It’s like his mind actually had figured the truth out and attempted to tell him! Just like his body in the dream, the victims’ bodies all served as toys for the murderer:

-- Hashimoto – daruma-otoshi, a game in which a daruma doll is placed on top of several round pieces of wood, and the player hits the pieces out with a hammer trying to get the doll to the ground without it falling off. That’s why the murderer had to freeze the body and make sure the round pieces wouldn’t fall apart. The limbs were cut off so they didn’t get in the way, and the severed head played the role of the daruma.

-- the reverse-impaled man – a spinning top. This explained why the sharp end of the pole had to face the ground. The victim was additionally tied to the pole with rope to keep balance while spinning.

-- the couple in the parking lot – menko, in which one player throws a card on the ground, and the other tries to throw his own card in such a way that it overturned the first one. The victims’ arms and legs were bound with rope so that they could be thrown flat on the ground like cards.

-- Sakamoto – served as a pachinko ball. He was sent flying multiple times like from a slingshot using a rubber tape stretched on the two poles. Repeatedly hitting the ground and other objects broke most his bones.

-- Nanbu – kendama, a variant of the cup-and-ball game in which the player tries to catch a ball onto a spike or into cups… or in this case, tries to catch a head onto the sharp end of the pole or the wounds where arms had once been.

There was no doubt that the murderer had used the victims as toys. But what child could play with toys that giant?

Shirou still didn’t answer his phone, and quick calls to all the other schools proved that he hadn’t showed up at any of them lately. Atena and Shirou’s various friends didn’t know where he had gone either. No way Shirou was just laying low trying to catch the murderer, he was the type of guy to go around loud and flashy at all times. Had he been the one to be caught instead this time? He’d said he would examine the crime scenes once more…

Saburou remembered a line from The Silence of the Lambs.

Clarice, does this random scattering of sites seem overdone to you? Doesn’t it seem desperately random? Random past all possible convenience? Does it suggest to you the elaborations of a bad liar?

Was it the case here too? Could this revelation lead Saburou to find the murderer’s hiding place?

What is the first and principal thing he does, Hannibal Lecter also said, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. (…) How do we begin to covet, Clarice? (…) We begin by coveting what we see every day.

Hashimoto had been killed first. A student of this school. Probably murdered somewhere in the school grounds. What person had had the ability to see him every day? The killer had to be someone living in Nishi Akatsuki, and since Shirou hadn’t gone to any other crime scene, it’s likely he and the murderer ran into each other somewhere near the school. Could a student be killing people?

Saburou along with Yurio returned to the staff room and asked for a list of all the people that had been at the school that day. Saburou’s former physics teacher Kamimura Tetsurou, who had only just entered the staff room too, quickly wrote down all the names for him, claiming he remembered them perfectly.

The list consisted of 38 people. None of them was Shirou’s. Maybe the old teacher just forgot about him, but how on earth do you miss someone so obnoxious?

“I think I’ll head to your house next, professor,” Saburou said.

Kamimura moved like lightning, but Saburou was faster. He wrenched the knife out of the teacher’s hand. Yurio picked the knife up from where it fell and before anyone realized what was happening stabbed it into Kamimura’s neck.

“I’m sorry, Saburou,” Yurio cried as they were escaping in his car, “I’m sorry, I thought he hurt you so I stabbed him, I thought you were hurt…”

Saburou was silent as he pulled up by Kamimura’s house. Never in his life would he think that it’d come to this. That he would kill his own teacher.

That he would kill?

Yes. Even if Yurio was the one holding the knife, things she did were things he did too. Her actions were his actions.

Shirou. Where’s Shirou? Was he still alive or already turned into some grotesque toy? To think Shirou could possibly be dead, this cursed and smart and obnoxious and always blunt and wonderful little brother of his, to think Shirou could never again criticize his books or tell him to go fucking die…

No. He couldn’t lose Shirou. He didn’t want to be left alone in the darkness.

He bolted out of the car. Shirou’s Bentz had still been parked by Kamimura’s house. The house itself was dark and quiet. Saburou entered it yelling Shirou’s name again and again.

“Dad?” came a quiet voice in response, in childish tone but an adult pitch.

Someone was in the storage under the kitchen floor. Who was that? Would Saburou open the trapdoor only to find himself there, curled in the darkness?

“Dad, let me out!”

Saburou opened the trapdoor and saw a long empty room with a ladder leading further underground.

“Dad!”

The voice came closer, but there had to be yet another wall between them, so Saburou felt safe going down the ladder. A sound of something hitting against something else echoed.

“Dad, let me out already!”

Saburou started climbing down another ladder.

“Dad, let’s go and play already!”

This room was empty too, but in the light of a few lamps Saburou could see another trapdoor surrounded by a puddle of fresh blood. If it belonged to Shirou, then Saburou was more than ready to enact a terrifying revenge upon whoever hid there further down. He opened the last trapdoor.

From the darkness climbed out a monster. A giant naked man – four meters tall and even more in width -- with his head big and round, skin as white as a snowman’s, and fingers as thick as Saburou’s wrists. The monstrous man was dragging Shirou’s bloody limp body behind him.

Saburou’s world turned on its head.

He moved back to the house, found an axe in the garage and wielding it returned underground. Shirou was now lying discarded and completely still on the floor.

“What are we going to play today, dad?” The giant was smiling.

“Let’s see -- a game of murder out of love!”

A moment of wild flailing with an axe later the giant became little more than a bloody pool, but before Saburou could completely pulverize the body, he heard a noise and turned around to find Shirou had regained consciousness. Axe forgotten, Saburou pulled his brother up all the way to the kitchen. His warm, living brother.

Shirou said later that the child from under the floor had grown so big because he had been raised in an ozone-rich atmosphere, much like vegetables that grow better in that condition. [Whatever you say, Maijo.] Kamimura must have experimented on the child for whatever reason.

When Saburou had used the axe, his chest was bursting with a feeling of love. For whom? Shirou, Yurio, someone else? He only realized this later, but with every swing of the axe he had been chanting ‘It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright”. Who was he saying that to? Maybe to himself. To remember he was still alright.

Maybe that love he had felt was directed at that giant kid. Maybe, in a way, Saburou saved him by taking his life.

Wasn’t death the best option for someone who only hurt people, and didn’t really know anything, and spent his days alone in the darkness underground?

“I love you, Yurio,” he said. “I’ll protect you. Please finish writing what you started.”

Yurio hesitated, but after his reassurance took the knife and carved the rest of the phrase into his chest:

LOVE ME TENDER

[>>>NEXT>>>]

#sparkly reads tcd #maijo and jdc stuff

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