Tokyo Babylon Fan Fiction / X/1999 Fan Fiction ❯ A Perfect Circle ❯ Creating a Sociopath ( Chapter 18 )

XVIII. Creating a Sociopath

Obligatory Author’s Warning: This chapter is contains content that is disturbing. Violent. Sick. Wrong. I do not say that lightly. I disturbed myself looking back on this chapter to edit it. If you do not want to read about what would be done to turn a near-toddler into a sadistic sociopath for the rest of his life, I suggest skipping the section marked ‘1973’ until you see the section marked ‘1999’. I felt it was a necessary tangent, but a tangent nonetheless, so it can be skipped without losing track of the main plot.

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The Sakurazukamori Clan had originally been assembled centuries ago from a motley selection of Japan’s social outcasts, those who would nowadays be called ‘psychopaths’ or ‘sociopaths’, or, more recently, sufferers of the euphemistically entitled ‘antisocial personality disorder’. Males and the much rarer females who fit extreme molds – charismatic cult leaders with zero regard for their underlings’ welfare, megalomaniacs and pathological liars, serial killers and rapists – were collected under covert mandates by the Shogunate and bred for their desired traits, producing a line of offspring that was noticeably ‘off’, but not as purely composed of calm sociopaths as the Shogunate’s leaders desired.

Scant few of the children were pure, biological sociopaths from birth—humans void of remorse or emotion—and those few who actually were displayed a discouraging lack of patience, control, and temperance. Most of these pure sociopaths were violent, aggressive, and plain angry, all traits undesirable in elite assassins. Intelligent though many of these pure sociopaths were, they were unruly and unwilling to cooperate with the Shogunate’s programs. They were more than willing to study onmyoujitsu, as it served a purpose and relived their constant, emotionless boredom, but upon completing their training, they all split and became a threat to the Shogunate that had first trained them.

Those children who were not pure sociopaths soon proved to be more useful. Through years of trial and error and primitive psychological studies, the Shogunate discerned that those children who were either only slightly ‘off’ or normal from birth and who were psychologically ‘programmed’ from infancy served as far better assassins. It took decades to devise a program that produced a calm, balanced sociopath from near-scratch, and many raving mad adolescents were shot and buried in mass graves in the process. Perhaps through a complex web of inbreeding from the original trial generation, or perhaps through incredible psychological and emotional strength, one girl was produced who survived the training program intact, save for her utter dearth of remorse or emotion after its completion. Her multiple repressed neurosises were negligible in the face of the closest success the Shogunate had achieved in the decades after the program was started.

This girl, the first to be given the surname “Sakurazuka” for this particular instance, was introduced to the guardian sakura tree, and she became the first Sakurazukamori. In the generations that followed it became more apparent that the environmental sociopaths, though just as remorseless those purely biological, were just as likely to turn against their creators, and were perhaps deadlier in their retained scraps of humanity. It also became apparent that their loyalties lied far more intimately in a bond with the guardian tree than they did with the government’s interests. The Sakurazukamori line had taken a life of its own separate from its intended purpose, that ‘life’ being directly opposed to that of the parallel Sumeragi clan, which was also originally formed for to benefit the Shogunate, but had taken its own path. In the following generations, the two clans moved further from their roots and developed more intimate, idiosyncratic customs, and their new, secret lives and motives were obscured from the Japanese government. The government attempted to infiltrate the two clans, only to the loss of many of their best spies, and thereafter left the clans to their own devices so long as they mustered when needed, no questions asked of their methods so long as they got the job done without making too much of a mess.

By November 22, 1967, when the thirteenth Sakurazukamori was born, the Sakurazukamori training program had degenerated to the control of a handful of capable ‘programmers’ on the payroll of a maverick, occult-related branch of the Japanese government. They were brutal, brilliant psychiatrists specializing in torture and relying upon terror, drugs, and electroshock to create sociopaths for the Clan line. In short, they were people who could easily be mistaken to have taken a great deal more inspiration from George Orwell’s 1984 than they cared to admit.

The botched lobotomy attempts of the early twentieth century had been abandoned after producing several ‘vegetables’, though the trainers had more recently dabbled in electroshock to the frontal lobe after psychiatric reports were published proclaiming that biological psychopathic tendencies originated in faulty connections in that portion of the brain. The only Sakurazukamori to receive that treatment in addition to her normal ‘treatment’ regimen, Sakurazuka Setsuka, survived miraculously uninhibited, though otherwise unaffected as a result of electroshock alone. When the treatment was tried with higher voltage on Setsuka’s twin sister, Maaya, she turned into a dribbling mess to be euthanized by Setsuka herself, who by that point performed the task with only the complaint that the blood stained her white dress. After these failures, it was decided that the thirteenth child would be programmed using older, tried-and-true methods.

What was once an incestuous family had in the past century become promiscuous, and an increasing number of Sakurazuka were turning out to be homosexual. Vestiges of the original ‘sociopath generation’ had been severely diluted from the Sakurazuka bloodline over the decades, and, as a result, though they were almost indistinguishable from pure sociopaths even to themselves, the Sakurazukamori displayed disturbing faults despite their programming. The faults were minute and often oppressed to the point that they went unrealized for years but were so regular that, through some odd twist of mercy, the Tree had declared that a Sakurazukamori’s ultimate reward would be death at the hands of the one he or she loved, and that person would, in turn, become the new Sakurazukamori, fulfilling an additional immortal element in honor of his or her predecessor.

While performing a routine organization of unsolved case files in the early 1990’s, a detective’s intern noticed that somebody had taped a quote cut from a book to the cover of the case file regarding the disappearance of the final two Sakurazukamori ‘trainers’ in 1976:

“Nothing happened to me… I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism… nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me… can you stand to say I’m evil? Am I evil?”

The intern recognized the quote as being a one of Dr. Lecter’s from Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, but, beyond that and its obvious implications, nobody knew why exactly somebody had chosen that particular quote for the “Sakura-Assassins” case file. Masumoto Kenji, one of the ‘trainers’ who went missing, was known to be a sociopath himself with a special taste for non-sexual child torture, so some investigators assumed it was a reference to him. One of the interns with a penchant for conspiracy theories assumed somebody was referring to the mysterious “Sakura-Assassin” him-or-herself, a question addressing the most basic concern plaguing those who monitored the Sakurazuka line: is the sociopath truly brought out of the child, or is the job becoming less and less complete as discipline flags and the bloodline thins?

Her fellow interns blew her off as nuts, and the quote and its case file were shoved back in the file cabinet behind more pressing cases.

The case file in question referenced a disappearance from a hospital ward that had been the subject of international conspiracy and speculation for several years. The patient—a nine-year-old boy who had remained in a coma for almost a month as a result of overdosing on illegal memory-altering drugs—his mother, and two visiting men of no blood or marital relation disappeared without a trace, leaving only splattered blood and the scent of sakura in the hospital room. The popular story went like this: a nurse down the hall heard yelling and gunshots, but by the time she reached the room, the two visiting men, the patient, and his mother were gone, and the floor and walls were spattered with blood in arcs reminiscent in formation of somebody leaving a high-powered water hose spewing and jumping on the floor. During the police department’s questioning, the bewildered nurse claimed through shivers and sips of strong sedative tea that, beyond smelling of blood, the room smelled like Ueno Park in spring.

The international tabloids got their hands on the crime scene photographs and ran a story highlighting the fact that even though the Japanese police knew the names of the inpatient and his mother, and knew that both had been diagnosed with clinical psychosis, their suspect list featured only the names of the nurses on duty during the time of the murder. The tabloids dug up age-old conspiracy theories of a government cover-up of an ancient clan of elite assassins, and, for a few years, the urban legend of the “Sakura-Assassins” resurged. Every person who had disappeared without a trace in Japan for the past four-hundred years was assumed to be prey of the mysterious Assassins, and multiple television specials and small-time publications traced the victims’ pasts for reasons the Japanese government would conveniently want them to disappear. Specialists in sociopath psychology and Eastern occultism claimed the existence of obscure sects dedicated to the feeding of vampire sakura trees, and claimed the existence of medical experiments records of Orwellian torture programs to create ‘the perfect sociopath’ out of toddlers. Everything seemed to fit perfectly, and, when placed in a historical context with a smattering of facts that just happened to be obscure but correct, it was assumed that all the facts presented had to be true as a part of the package.

The information presented in this way was, in fact, riddled with inaccuracies and sheer fantasy. The Japanese government had planted faulty, spectacular information to feed the conspiracy mill and misdirect those vestiges of truth that had been uncovered by the civilian population during the generations the Sakurazukamori line had been in place. The Sakura-Assassins craze died down as the media directed the world’s attention to other matters, and the Japanese government considered itself in the clear for the time being. There would always be inquisitive prodders who would get a little too close to the truth, but so long as the general public was kept in the dark, they would consider their job well done.

Several years after Sakurazuka Seishirou assumed control of the Clan at the age of fifteen in 1982, any questions regarding the solidity of his psychotic state were allayed, and nobody in the government ever again bothered to question whether the boy was a pure sociopath. Originally, government monitors thought he was too calm and balanced given his horrific background at the hands of the ‘trainers’. He was a productive and functional enough member of society to graduate from an elite high school with honors and enter an undergraduate program for veterinary medicine at Tokyo University. However, through scraps of evidence gathered through a joint probe of the Sumeragi and Sakurazukamori lines in 1992, it became evident that the sociopath-programming performed on the most recent Sakurazuka was, to the fullest extent of the government’s knowledge, the most complete job ever recorded in the Clan logs. There would be no botches with him as there had been with his mother. He was the perfect Sakurazukamori. He would have been much more useful if he gave any damn whatsoever about the government’s task list for him.

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1973

“How was school today, Seishirou-kun?”

“Good.”

“Did you mind your teacher?”

“Yes.”

Kenji, one of the men in black suits, pressed a sticky, circular patch centered around a metal node against five-year-old Seishirou’s temple. Seishirou twitched and tried to worm away, fighting the impulse to bolt from the brutal man and hide in a corner, screwing his eyes shut and making himself as small as possible. Terror aside, he didn’t like the cold dot in the patch, and the sticky pads sometimes gave him a static shock that made his flyaway hairs drift for a while. Kenji jumped away and cuffed Seishirou’s ear just as Seishirou tried to kick him in the shin, clutching Kari to his chest protectively.

“Mind your temper, Seishirou-kun,” said the older man in a black suit, seated cross-legged across the opposite shrine wall. “You do not show anger. Do you want us to tell your mother you’ve been a bad boy today?”

Seishirou buried his chin in Kari’s head, glowering over Kari’s velvet snout.

–Pulling Seishirou up by his arm, shaking, throwing him to the cold floor—the floor, smash, nose shatters, blood in his mouth, crying—“You do not cry; you get even”—he jumped at Kenji’s leg; the man fended him off, bent his arm backwards; it snapped, the bone popped out of its socket—grinding the shattered bone together, open, marrowed edges grinding like sandpaper, splintering pain—crying—Kari, Kari, we have to be strong, we have to kill the man who hurt us, we weren’t fast enough—shaking Seishirou by his broken arm, stabbing pain, vomiting in pain, begging, stop, stop—“You never beg; you are proud”—no, no, please stop, please stop—“Clean it up”—thrown into the vomit, cheek-first, disgusted, bleeding into the mess, it’s disgusting, it’s hot—please, please, it hurts, it stinks, I want Mommy, I want Kari—“Clean it up. Use your clothes. You’re weak. You’re weak.”—I want Mommy. Mommy, Mommy, don’t be disappointed. Kari and I aren’t crying. We’ll kill the man who hurt us, Mommy—

“No,” said Seishirou. His right shoulder was wracked by the screws as he hugged Kari tighter, pushing against the inside of the bored holes in the shattered bone. He bit back a pain-induced rush of bile. His right arm was in a sling, and his shoulder and upper arm were fanned by an array of long screws supported by metal slats that reminded him of the Erector sets at school, the base wrapped with white gauze edging brown around the punctures with old blood and old puss. If he turned his head to the left too far, the edge of one of the support slats touched his nose and jarred the inside of the sore bone.

Don’t cry. We’ll make Mommy proud. We don’t cry. We’re special.

--Kenji was the brutal man, the enforcer, the one who always knocked Seishirou back into line if he showed emotion. Seishirou was allowed dissent and snark, and he was allowed to strike back, but if one flicker of emotion showed—any anger, or sadness, or pain, or fear—he was locked in The Room with Kenji. Kenji had whips. Kenji twisted his arms and legs. Kenji threatened him with whips with metal bits in the thong that he said would stick in Seishirou’s skin and muscle and rip out every time he was lashed, and Seishirou didn’t want that, did he? So, Seishirou had to be good, and strong, and patient, and silent—

“Seishirou-kun, look over here now.”

Seishirou grudgingly faced the older man in the black suit across the shrine entryway. Kenji was whispering to the other man, handing him the control panel. Seishirou glared; he and Kari knew what that panel was for, and the men didn’t need to whisper about it as though he did not. He was a smart boy. Smart and strong.

--The hospital was scary, but Seishirou wasn’t allowed to cry, because no matter where the nurses took him, no matter which back rooms, no matter which operating rooms he was wheeled to, delirious with pain, feverish, and terrified, the brutal man was always there, watching. If Seishirou cried, it would be worse next time, and Seishirou knew from experience that no matter how bad he thought it was, the body was capable of feeling worse pain, more terror—the nurses said, ‘You can tell us the truth. What happened to you? Were you beaten?’ But Seishirou couldn’t say. The Man would find him. The Man would beat him with the whip with metal bits and tear his skin off—

“Seishirou-kun,” said the older man, “how have you been doing in school lately?”

Seishirou shrugged and rotated his toe on its axis behind the opposite ankle.

“Have you started any fights?”

Shrug. Glancing around the room uneasily, spine crawling, wanting to crouch low and slink away, looking for an escape, watching Kenji so he could stare straight ahead as soon as he looked at him—

“I got your report card the other day, and we’re very proud of you, Seishirou. You got high marks.”

Seishirou hugged Kari and fought to keep his expression savory. The man nodded.

“We’re going to tell your mother you’ve been a very good boy, Seishirou. She’ll be proud of you. She’s raised a good, strong boy.”

Seishirou stared.

“Have you been making any friends at school, Seishirou-kun? Yamada-sensei says that you haven’t made a single friend but Kari.”

“…Kari and I don’t need friends. We are alone.”

“Do you fight alone, Seishirou?”

“A Sakurazukamori always fights alone.” The words sounded dead to him, as often as he had heard them and been made to recite them, but they had worked their way into the very grooves of his mind and bone. He was alone. He was special. He did not feel.

“Are you sad to be alone, Seishirou-kun?”

“No. I do not feel sadness.”

“Do you really not feel sadness, or do you say that because you do not want to be beaten?”

Seishirou bit his lip. “I do not feel sadness. I do not fear being beaten.”

“It’s okay not to like physical pain, Seishirou-kun. It is okay to fear physical pain. That is just how our bodies are set up. But you must not show it. You must not show a soul.”

Seishirou bit his lip and shrugged.

“You do not feel emotions, Seishirou-kun.”

Seishirou shook his head frantically.

“You act too wild and emotional, Seishirou-kun. You must learn calm and temperance. You must learn to be tranquil and patient. We will work on that.”

Seishirou glanced at the door. He did not like the sound of that. ‘Working on something’ usually meant he ended up in The Room for doing something wrong when he had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. If he answered what he knew they wanted to hear, they said he was just saying it, and beat him anyway until he did not even remember what they wanted him to say in the first place. But, when he answered the next time, dead, sore, and spirit-broken, they were satisfied for some reason. It was usually what he had said the first time, and Seishirou did not see the difference beyond half-believing what he had said this time around.

“Do you miss your mother, Seishirou-kun?”

Seishirou eyed Kenji, who was taking a glass cup off of one of the shrine’s carved wood tables and setting it in the center of the tatami floor.

“No. I would step on her corpse and move on if she begged me to…” He wrinkled his nose, trying to find the childish words to describe what he was feeling. “…not kill her.”

“Do you see this glass, Seishirou-kun?”

“Yes.”

“Break it.”

Seishirou approached the upside-down glass carefully, still clutching Kari tightly to his chest, and stomped on it. He howled; his socked foot crashed through the cup’s basin and stomped on shards. He jumped away from the glass, hopping for a moment and screaming in pain and shock, staring in horror at the bloody, mangled mess his socked foot had become, before falling onto his side and burying his face into Kari’s flank, screaming. He was too terrified to look back at his own foot.

“You brought this upon yourself, Seishirou-kun,” said the older man. The two men had watched impassively; Kenji stepped forward and hauled Seishirou up by the scruff of his school uniform shirt. “You did not think before you acted. This pain is your fault. Should Kenji rub your nose in your mess so you see what the price is for being a fool?”

Seishirou’s spine shot with fear. He knew that meant the brutal man would shove him face-first into the jagged, bloody glass left on the tatami mat.

I cannot beg. I must be calm. I do not cry. I am special.

“…no.” The older man nodded in approval. Seishirou’s throat hurt from forcing himself to hold back his cries of pain and terror. It had been a few months since he had last wet or soiled himself in terror, but he had long since learned to control that—it was humiliating, and the punishment was equally so. Kenji never let him forget what a disgusting, cowardly little waif he was for that behavior. “I’ll be good. I’ll think before I act.”

“Good boy. Kenji, set Seishirou down so we can continue without hurting his foot. I think we will require antibiotics and a few stitches this time. And no anesthetic; Seishirou needs to learn mistakes do not cost lightly.”

Seishirou’s breath caught as the brutal man stretched his legs out in front of him and set him down on the floor. He knew what that odd word meant. It meant he got a shot, but after that stitches did not hurt. He knew that if he didn’t have it, he didn’t get a shot, but the stitches hurt and he had to bite on Kari’s ear so he didn’t scream. If he was caught biting when the brutal man’s back wasn’t turned, he got cuffed, and the nurse pulled just a little too hard on the thread.

--“You’re well past the age of crying. You are no infant. You are entering kindergarten. Everybody cries but you, because you do not feel. You are special.”—

--I am special. I do not feel. I am different.—

“Seishirou-kun, if that glass was your mother, would you feel any different than you felt just now stepping on it?”

Seishirou thought for a moment, wondering which answer would save him an afternoon in hell. He had picked up that they usually responded best to honesty, even if it wasn’t the answer they wanted. “…if my mother hurt my foot like that, I’d be angry.”

The men chuckled. Seishirou watched them and shifted, trying to get his mind off the pain in his foot and fight off tears. They were casually glancing at the sticky pad control box every now and then. “…I mean, I think… I’d be angry at myself for making a foolish mistake.”

“Your mother, or a glass cup: what is the difference, Seishirou?”

Seishirou thought. “My mother is a person. My mother is my mother.”

“Do you love one over the other?”

“I do not love.” The answer was automatic, bone-engraved.

“Are they equally easy to break, Seishirou?”

“My mother wouldn’t cut up my foot.”

“Does one mean more to you?”

“No.” Seishirou frowned. His mother was his mother; of course she meant more to him, but… “…why are you putting a rock out there?”

“Look.” The brutal man kicked the rock across the room at the older man’s nod. “If you could stand, you’d kick this. You do understand that we are only making you sit because we want you to be able to walk, not because we do not want you to feel the pain of your foolishness, don’t you, Seishirou-kun?”

“Yes.”

“Would kicking a rock across the road feel any different to you than breaking your mother’s arm like Kenji did yours, Seishirou-kun? What if you saw your mother suffering in screws and a sling like you are right now, cut up all over and sore?”

Seishirou hugged Kari. “Kari and I would not feel a thing. Humans are like rocks to us. We kick them, and we wouldn’t feel it.”

“Kari is very special to you, isn’t she? She goes with you everywhere, doesn’t she?”

Seishirou remained silent, shocked. He knew he was nailed, but he was having difficulty grasping why. The older man leaned forward kindly. “Is Kari more special to you than that rock, Seishirou-kun? What about that glass?”

Seishirou clutched Kari to his chest fearfully. “…you can’t take Kari,” he said stubbornly. “You can’t take Kari! Kari’s strong; Kari doesn’t feel! Kari won’t hurt nothing! Kari’s different!”

The brutal man whacked Seishirou in the nose, flat on his back. Seishirou sat bolt upright, alternately grasping his nose and reaching out, bellowing, as Kari was slipped from his loose grasp. He overbalanced and caught himself on his bloodied hands.

“NO! GIVE HER BACK! GIVE HER BACK!” He was bawling. “KARI! KARI!”

“No, no, Seishirou-kun,” said the older man. He waved to the brutal man that he should not whack Seishirou for such a disgusting display of emotion. The brutal man turned and faced Seishirou half-amusedly, cradling Kari back-up in his forearm and stroking her head as though she were a real pig. “Kari is an object, a plush pig. And even if she were real, nothing is more precious to you than anything else. Kari is like that glass cup to you. Kari is like that pebble to you. Do you understand, Seishirou-kun? No different.”

“No!” Seishirou reached out and flopped forward onto his legs, reaching out to the brutal man, who was sliding the rice-paper door open and walking into the back room. “Kari’s not weak; don’t hurt Kari! We promise we don’t feel! We’ll be good! We won’t cry no more over nothing! We don’t love Mommy!”

“You talk too much, Seishirou-kun. You explain too much of yourself. Silence befits you best. You do not care if anybody understands you.”

“—KARI! KARI!—”

“—You do not care about Kari any more than that glass cup. There is nothing in this world precious to you. Nothing. Kari is an object, trash to be thrown away.”

Seishirou sniffled and wibbled, trying to gain control of his crying. The older man stared at him.

“There is nothing in this world, not one thing, not one special thing, not one acceptation, that is special to you, Seishirou-kun. There never has been. There never will be. Nothing but your pride is sacred to you, Seishirou-kun. Do you see what a fool you’ve been?” Seishirou was shaking with something that was second cousin to fear and hopelessness, but far more vague and dead. “You’ve been a very, very stupid boy, Seishirou-kun. Do you see how stupid you’ve been? You don’t care for Kari. You’ve been very stupid. If you broke Kari, it would be just like breaking that glass cup. That is what you feel about Kari.”

--No. No. You’re wrong. That isn’t what I feel about Kari. Kari’s different. Kari’s not Mommy or a cup or a rock or anybody at school or Yamada-sensei. Kari’s Kari.—

--“You’re a foolish boy, Seishirou.”—

--Please. Please, no. No. NO.—

--“You don’t feel for Kari. You feel for nothing. There are no acceptations. There are no acceptations in this world. You will never feel for anything. Everything is like that rock. Everything is like that glass. No different.”—

--PLEASE STOP. PLEASE STOP. IT HURTS SO BAD. MAKE IT STOP. PLEASE!—

--“You’re feeling all this pain because of Kari. Do you hate Kari?”—

--The weak die. The strong survive. Kari, I’m not going to die.—

--sobbing, begging, sobbing—the ripping, the ripping of the flesh of his back and the knitted muscle beneath, the wretched pain, the screws in his shoulder knocked about and loose, bleeding, vomiting—

--“…I hate Kari.”—

--“Wrong. You do not hate. Love and hate are the same. You attract to nothing. You do not hate. Kari is just an object. Do you hate the glass cup?”—

--“I hate the glass cup.”—

--“Wrong. Your own stupidity makes you hurt. The glass cup is Kari is a rock is your mother. They are one and the same to you. A corpse. Trash.”—

--“I hate myself.”—

--The lashing wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop—the shrine nurse screamed “Stop it; he’ll die of infection, the boy will bleed to death, he’ll die!”, but it didn’t stop—“You do not hate yourself. You do not love yourself. You are indifferent to yourself. You are nothing to yourself. You do not hate yourself. You do not love yourself. You do not hate. You do not love.”—

--“I do not hate.”—

-- bone jarring from inside—

--“I do not love.”—

--leaning against a wall, gasping, sobbing wretchedly, begging God to make the pain stop—Mommy, Mommy, make the pain stop—

--“Come, it’s time to break another object. And then we will dress your wounds. We don’t want you to get infected. Your shoulder may have to be re-set. I told Kenji not to jar that. It can’t heal crookedly.”—

Seishirou stood in the shrine-room, shirtless and barefoot with his chest wrapped in bandages and his arm still in a sling, though his foot had long since healed. He had recently been fitted with glasses for his early onset of farsightedness, and the glasses were far too big for his face. Though the screws had been removed from his shoulder the other day and he carried himself coolly and upright, he was still a sorry sight. He stared levelly at the older man, waiting for him to speak.

“Happy seventh birthday, Seishirou-kun. Did you get a cupcake at school today?”

“Yes. It was delicious.”

“You like sweets, don’t you?”

“I love sweets.”

“That’s excellent. I think Kenji got you a cake you’ll love, then. It’s deathly sweet, like pure marzipan. You’ll tell Kenji thank you, won’t you?”

“I will.”

The rice-paper door behind the man slid open, and Kenji walked into the room with Kari cradled in his forearm. Seishirou looked Kenji over carefully.

“I don’t see a cake.”

The older man laughed. “Patience, Seishirou-kun. Look, it’s your old friend, Kari. How do you feel about that?”

Seishirou shrugged. Kenji set Kari in the center of the room and pushed the sticky-circle onto Seishirou’s temple again. Seishirou stood quietly until Kenji finished and stood beside the older man again.

“Now, destroy Kari, Seishirou-kun.”

Seishirou hesitated. The older man was glancing from the control box to Seishirou, and Kenji was crossing his arms and staring Seishirou down.

“What’s the matter, Seishirou-kun?”

-- “The glass cup is Kari is a rock is your mother.”--

“…I have one hand. Kari is hard to rip.”

Kenji handed Seishirou a knife. Seishirou stared at the weapon, tested its blade lightly, winced when it sliced the pad of his forefinger, hesitated, and nodded coolly. He walked to Kari and toed her onto her side, stiff, stubby legs sticking out at right angles to her pale pink belly, and knelt, pinning her cylindrical chest with his knee and starting to slice her limb at the base, pinning her left forearm with his injured hand.

Kari started screaming.

Saw, saw, saw. Pink fabric separating at the seams, pink threads snapping under the blade. Kari was screaming, her stitched, motionless mouth smiling under her snout.

“Seishirou, it hurts! Please, make it stop! Please!”

Saw, saw, saw. Screaming. The pig was still, motionless on her back, smiling gently at the ceiling with her left foreleg hanging by threads, cotton spilling up from the wound. Saw, saw, saw. Agonizing, long seconds passed. Another leg, then another. The screaming grew louder. Harsh panting. Unholy, tortured screaming. Begging.

“SEISHIROU, AREN’T I YOUR FRIEND? DEAR GOD—STOP—screaming—screaming—PLEASE! AS YOUR ONE AND ONLY FRIEND, I BEG OF YOU, SHOW THIS LITTLE BIT OF MERCY—”

Saw, saw, saw. The cotton guts spilled out, puffing up out of Kari’s chest like clouds. Seishirou stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth; his arm was getting tired, his glasses kept slipping down his nose, and Kari had no neck, so sawing her head off would mean sawing the width of her body. He gritted his teeth and rested his arm for a moment, looking Kari over as she screamed, stock still on her back, smiling, smiling.

“PLEASE!” Her static-shot voice cracked. “SEISHIROU, JUST LET ME DIE, IF YOU EVER FELT ONE SCRAP OF LOVE FOR ME.”

“Why?” He shook out his wrist and pushed his glasses up his nose, glancing over his handiwork on Kari. “My arm is tired. I am resting.”

Kari screamed and screamed as Seishirou rested, and then he got back to work. Saw, saw, saw. Kari kept screaming and begging, always smiling, motionless and stiff, swaying back and forth on her narrow back with Seishirou’s sawing motions. A few clumsy centimeters into Kari’s neck, a black, grilled device tumbled out of the cotton edge-first onto the ground and fell on its back. From that moment, her screams were even louder and clearer. Seishirou regarded the black box with the same awareness as a child who has pulled the voicebox out of a talking toy—that is where the voice comes from, and it is mechanical, running on batteries, but it is still the toy’s voice.

Seishirou jammed the knife into the center of the black box, smashing plastic and wire, and Kari’s voice died immediately. The room was silent.

Saw, saw, saw.

Seishirou hit the center of her throat, and, all of a sudden, he stopped. He stood and shook his hand out.

“That was hard. My hand is sore.”

“Good boy, Seishirou-kun,” said the older man. “You did very well.” Kenji stooped down to sweep up Kari’s remnants. “You have had a long day. You must be hungry. I am sure Nakata has a good, hot supper ready for you in the kitchen.”

Seishirou did not watch Kenji leave the room with Kari’s body and guts in a dustpan. “I am hungry.”

“Good. You’re going to start shooting up like a weed soon, so you need to eat well. In a few years it will be time to start you on additional growth supplements. You’ll be very tall and strong.”

Seishirou turned the large words over in his mind for a moment. “Does that mean I can still eat sweets?”

“If you exercise regularly and eat well, I promise you a good desert at least once a day. If you keep up this good work, I’ll make sure they’re extra good.” The older man bowed slightly and smiled. “I’m proud of you, Seishirou-kun. You have a long way to go, but you grow stronger and more like your true self every day.”

Seishirou smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

Days passed, and then weeks. The men sent for obscure mage-healers to make Seishirou’s wretchedly scarred skin whole and smooth again. Seishirou went to school and made good marks, keeping to himself during recess, playing with children and talking jovially but never fully getting to know them, always drifting. He never showed a particular penchant for any one group of kids. Whereas most kids with glasses as overtly dorky as Seishirou’s would be teased within an inch of their lives, the teachers noticed that students tended to give Seishirou a wide berth after having teased him only a few times, electing instead to whisper about him behind his back. Sometimes he played a little too roughly, and apologized most charmingly when he had to explain himself to the teacher, but something about his apologies were far too smooth and sincere for a seven-year-old. Something in his eyes was dead behind the smile, flickering like a rare flash of light across water, but noticeable. All the teachers thought they were the only ones to notice it, hallucinating, or perhaps crazy, but the kids were sensible enough to trust what they saw.

Seishirou-kun was always kind and helpful, but something was wrong with him. When students would pass a dead bird on the playground, most of the boys would poke at it, fascinated, save for those sensitive souls who stayed on the other side of the playground so nobody would tease them for being upset, and most of the girls would cry or act disgusted save for those few tomboys who threw their bravado out with the boys. Seishirou regarded it with all the neutral detachment of an adult, looking it over with that hidden, dead flicker, before moving on. He handled the dead birds with more calm than the teachers, who winced in distaste when shooing the students away so the body could be cleared away. Seishirou once carried a mauled pigeon to the fence with his bare hands, scooping up the guts that spilled over the bird’s chest as he carried it, and only winced and jumped back when his first throw was too short and the carcass splattered into the dust in front of him, dashing spats of blood and clear fluid across his glasses. He disliked being sticky with dust and politely asked if he could be excused to wash up, but, beyond that, seemed only vaguely annoyed with his lack of throwing aptitude.

The school counselor had long since given up on him by this point, so when he was sent in yet again with a report entitled “throwing dead birds”, he was asked to sit quietly with a Tinker Toys set while the school contacted his mother. He ended up switching schools with explicit orders to keep a low profile, lest she run out of elementary schools that would be willing to take him.

It was about this time They started giving him pills with his dinner, which did not bother Seishirou since the only sharply raised his appetite and made him feel invigorated. They were “vitamins” and “supplements”, he was told, fore-cursers to the growth hormones that were being cooked up for him to take when he got of age. Then there were the white pills, which made Seishirou start to forget things. It started small; he would forget where he had placed things, or which song he had just heard in the car, or which pages he had to read in his primer for homework. Then the pills changed shape, from small and egg-like to larger, beige, and octagonal, and he started to forget what day it was. He would get up, ready for school, only to be reminded that it was Sunday. He would wake up, and four days had passed without his knowledge. Then, the pills changed again, and it was weeks—

Seishirou’s stomach and throat were sore when he woke up in a hospital bed, a tube fed down his esophagus into his stomach. He was surrounded by equipment reading his heart rate and breathing, beeping off-white boxes connected to patches on his arms and chest. A nurse was frantically reading all of the machines attached to him, weaving through crossings of off-white wires and plastic tubes to reach panels. He gasped around the feeding tube, sputtering. He had had feverish dreams of being rolled around the hospital, vomiting, hearing words like “overdose”, “blood poisoning”, and “neurological damage”, and after that, absolutely nothing. His brain felt as though it had been pounded and re-arranged from the inside by a jackhammer, the pathways and the delicate webs of neurons sizzling and vivid behind a dull sheen.

There were two men in black suits standing by the bed, somehow familiar—Kenji and the older man, that’s right, them—and his mother, Sakurazuka Setsuka. Kenji had a huge, white cake balanced in his hands, surmounted by candles too blurred by Seishirou’s fuzzy vision to count.

“Happy ninth birthday, Seishirou-kun,” said the older man.

Seishirou regarded the cake coolly, sitting up straighter and coughing. “…what happened to me?” He gagged; it hurt to talk. His voice was raspy and ruined, barely audible. The nurse helped him sit up and whispered that he needed to hold still while she removed his feeding tube. The process was highly unpleasant, akin to pulling a clumsy plastic snake out of his throat, and his throat was left horribly raw when she was done, but the resulting freedom was well worth the ordeal. She left when she was done, ruffling his hair and promising to return soon with Dr. Akimoto to check on him.

Seishirou looked at his mother quizzically.

“You’ve been in the hospital for a month, dear,” said Setsuka. She knelt by the bed and took Seishirou’s hand. “How are you feeling? Do you remember what happened?”

“…overdose?” he whispered. The word floated in his wrecked mind, trying to find a connection in the loose sea of neurons.

Setsuka glared sharply at the older man and Kenji, the latter of whom shrugged, the older of whom stared at Setsuka impassively.

“He has no idea what happened, trust me. He must have heard that word floating around this room. I told the damn nurses to keep their mouths shut.”

“Is it really my birthday?”

“No, we missed it by a few days,” said Setsuka. “As soon as we got the news that you were waking up, we got this cake out of the fridge and jetted down here to celebrate. I’m sorry if it’s a bit cold and stiff, but it had to keep.” She stroked Seishirou’s hand. “Honey? It’s time to say good-bye to Kenji and Tanaka. They say that you’re ready to study onmyoujitsu full time with me. Isn’t that grand? We’ll be like two peas in a pod from now on.”

Seishirou looked at Kenji and Tanaka over Setsuka’s head, coolly, staring them down. He knew them and knew their faces, drawing upon former cold, intellectual knowledge, but his knowledge about what exactly they had to do with him was purely intuitive. They had taught him and made him strong. They had made him realize that he is special.

He wanted to hate them, but he did not. They were merely there.

“Are you hungry?” said Setsuka. Kenji set the cake down on Seishirou’s lap and pulled Seishirou’s glasses out of his front pocket, pushing them over Seishirou’s eyes. “The nurse said you could eat a bit if you like.”

Seishirou could count the nine candles now: thin, dripping, and spiraled white-and-blue, like a barber’s pole. The light wavered across his glasses. There was a smiling pink pig painted on the white cake’s face with icing, and the delicate words “Happy Birthday Seishirou!” had been scrawled beneath the pig in careful, red Kanji.

Setsuka took the cake from Seishirou’s hands and set it on the bedside table as he sat up and coughed, taking deep drinks of water. Kenji and Tanaka were talking amongst themselves as Setsuka leaned over and whispered into Seishirou’s ear, smiling. She took the cake off the table and carefully placed it in the cellophane-faced cardboard box that had been set on the foot of the bed, saying that it would be a terrible waste not to keep it.

Seishirou smiled.

-------------------

The cake was deathly sweet, like pure marzipan.

--------------------

1999

Seishirou sighed and sat back on his heels, pulling a cigarette out of its box with his teeth and searching his pants pocket for his lighter with a deceptively steady hand. He was kneeling at the base of an intricate, meter-diameter pentagram he had drawn on his kitchen floor with black chalk, surmounted at each star-point by a dead candle. Though it was dusk, every light in the apartment was off, and the blackout curtains were drawn. When Seishirou flicked his lighter, the kitchen floor flared into momentary, guttering light; once it died, the embers of his cigarette were the brightest thing in the apartment, illuminating ghostly, blue smoke and thin ash.

The spell that had just extinguished had been simple enough to render. As often as he performed this spell, he was sure he could draw the pentagram and its corresponding border-sigils in his sleep by now. Tonight, its predictions had been especially clear. This was no divining spell in the purest sense of the word; the Sakurazukamori’s various powers did not include future-sight. It was a simulation akin to a mathematical program, something that measured the probable paths and reactions energies would undergo if left unchecked as they currently were. Seishirou knew it was futile to place complete trust in the simulation, as human emotions were unpredictable, but it was a good place to start brainstorming. He rubbed his temple. Attractions were not the only energy measured; this was also a measure of balance, and Seishirou was already drafting a complicated mental flow-chart of causes and effects. He frowned.

I can’t let this go unchecked anymore. Things are going to go out of control. God damn it. I’m sick of playing this game. I’m getting worn out. I’m going to make a careless mistake. This is going to be a pain in the ass to balance out. Too far in one direction, and the balance tips back over the lip of destiny, I’m back at square one, and the war commences. Not far enough in that direction, restraints remained in place as they are, and I lose everything.

I’ve got to buy more time.

Seishirou took a deep suck of his cigarette and slowly exhaled, calming his nerves. I’ve got to keep this balance in place longer. This is precarious as it is, defying fate. It’s going to tip sooner or later, sooner if I don’t do something. And if that happens, I don’t know if I’ll be able to halt things again. Once was enough. Fate’s momentum is being dammed, and when it tips, it’ll be all that much stronger…

God, this is a mess.

Fine, fine. It’ll even out. Even like a balance—no! No, no balance. Have to stay on the edge. Can’t balance out. Can’t tip. Have to balance. Can’t tip, can’t balance.

You remember how to be utterly irresistible, don’t you?

No balance; balance on the edge. Keep nudging, don’t fall off the edge. Don’t fall off the edge. It’ll all be lost.

--------------

“Just close your eyes and relax—as much as you can in that water, anyway. This will be over soon. You doing all right?”

“Um… super. Why are we doing this?” I really hope nothing is poking out. Thank god for shrinkage…

“Good.”

“We’re doing this because of ‘good’?”

“I promise I will explain everything when we’re done.”

“Um, okay. Why not now?”

Subaru sighed. “My answer hasn’t changed. You’ll take too active a part in the spell if you know what I’m looking for. It would be like… like a placebo, or your guard would be up and you’d tip us off. You just need to lie there and relax. I promise this won’t hurt you.”

Subaru was checking the candles around the perimeter of the circular, Japanese tub in which Fuuma was lying of two inches of ice water, eyes screwed shut and clenching his arms against the cold, not daring to curl up lest the thin, white towel draped across his waist fall off. Every inch of his bare skin was goose-bumped. Fuuma sneezed; surely, if he had to strip down like this, the spell would be important enough for Subaru to have to wear his ceremonial robes, but Subaru was in his street clothes. Fuuma knew his logic was unsound, but since he was cross, it made sense. Subaru had originally wanted him stark naked, but had finally allowed Fuuma a purified washcloth, sure that its presence would not cloud the spell too much. Fuuma did not see why wearing swim trunks or boxers would ruin the spell, but Subaru had insisted. The cloth was near-transparent and clinging like hell, but it was still better than nothing. He kept telling himself that.

You did agree to this, Fuuma reminded himself. He shuddered as a chill raked up his body. Earlier, upon Subaru’s vague request to strip down and get in the ice water, Fuuma had demanded an explanation before he would cooperate, but Subaru had insisted that it was imperative that Fuuma go into this with a clear, unprejudiced mind, and he promised that he would explain what he was doing after the spell’s completion. Fuuma’s curiosity, along with his biting guilt and corresponding eagerness to please Subaru—even if it meant humoring some odd onmyou urge—finally urged him into the tub, along with Subaru’s insistence that Fuuma’s life somehow depended on the spell’s results.

All right, come on. This is Subaru. He doesn’t do stuff like this without a good reason. What’s the worst thing that could happen, anyway? –no, don’t even think about that. Too late. Er…

“All right,” said Subaru. Fuuma snapped his eyes open and stared warily, still half-thinking of the worst things that could happen. His teeth were starting to chatter. “We’re ready.”

“S-s-Subaru-s-san, what the hell are we doing?”

Subaru walked to the door and switched the lights off. The room became pitch-dark save for the guttering candlelight and silent except for the thin water sloshing around Fuuma’s ears. Subaru walked back to the edge of the tub in the wavering light and stared down at Fuuma, shadows flickering across his face.

“All right. This is a somewhat evasive spell, Fuuma-san, but I promise that I will be as gentle as possible. I don’t think you’ll notice anything, but if you do, please don’t panic. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“…okay.”

“You’ve received martial arts training. I know you can do this. Make your presence as low-key as possible. If we’re traced, we’ll get deflected, and we’ll never get a clear shot again. It’s bad enough that I’m the one doing this; it’s like flashing a strobe light over our heads. We need all the help we can get. All right?”

Fuuma stared back at Subaru and furrowed his eyebrows. There it was again: pieces of a puzzle he should know and of which he knew the shape, but knew without details or a face. The viscous shadows slipped from his mind’s grasp. He took a slow breath.

“This has to do with Sakurazuka Seishirou, doesn’t it?”

Subaru seemed unaffected for a moment, meditating with the candles up-lighting his face in the dark, but then stared at Fuuma and narrowed his eyes suspiciously, regarding Fuuma with a look that bordered on nasty, or as close to nasty as Subaru had ever gotten with him. Fuuma blinked. That’s a yes.

“…how much do you remember about him?” asked Subaru.

Fuuma stared back, willing Subaru to believe what he was about to say. “…only a name. He’s connected to you somehow. You lost the same eye he did because you wanted to; that’s all I remember. Well, I know his title is ‘doctor’. Of what, I don’t know. I just remember that was his title. I’m assuming medical or something.”

“Veterinary.” Subaru looked Fuuma over slowly, rakishly. “…nothing else?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

Subaru stared for a long time before lifting his right hand with the index and middle fingers upraised and overlapped, not taking his eyes from Fuuma’s.

“…all right, then. We’re starting. Close your eyes and make yourself undetectable.”

Fuuma sighed and closed his eyes, lowering his presence to the root of his chest and regulating his breathing to a calm, shallow pace as Subaru started to chant. His body warmed enough for him to unclench his arms and relax, concentrating on the dull sounds of his breathing and his heartbeat, pushing Subaru’s low mantra to the back of his mind. Perhaps he was delusional, but he thought he had always been especially good at escaping detection like this, even if somebody was actively looking for him. He already had a knack for Being in Plain Sight and still not being noticed, even when he was not concentrating on going undetected.

Subaru’s chanting charged with restrained tension, as though he was retaining an unruly force, and the water around Fuuma surged with equivalent energy. The backs of Fuuma’s hands seared, and he choked on a scream of shock as Subaru’s voice caught for a split second, no more noticeable than the flicker of a wingtip in a fan. The same wind buffeting the water lashed out, and Fuuma sensed the candle flames flutter flat and extinguish in the darkness. Subaru held his chant constant and rhythmic, rising and swelling with the tides of the spell so slightly that it seemed a constant rock in a rush of water.

Subaru raised his voice for the last few syllables of his chant, and, when he yelled his last word, the room’s energy caught before dissipating and the wind died, no essence of the spell left save for the ice water sloshing against the sides of the tub. Fuuma took a deep, shuddering breath as the water calmed around him, trying to soothe the nerves along his spine, and noticed how tightly he had been gripping his forearms. His heart echoed dully with his ears half-submerged. Okay. Calm down. Breathe. It’s over.

“You can open your eyes now,” Subaru said after a moment. Fuuma did and felt the backs of his hands in the pitch-darkness, relieved that the skin felt whole and unmarred. Subaru walked to the door and switched the lights on, momentarily blinding Fuuma.

“…well?” said Fuuma, staring at his hands as his eyes refocused. They looked fine. He saw Subaru walk back to the edge of the tub out of the corners of his eyes and looked up, cradling his right hand in his left. As usual, Subaru was difficult to read, but to the extent of Fuuma’s guessing ability seemed an odd mixture of comforted, confused, and torn.

“Here.” Subaru pulled a huge, fluffy towel off of the wall-rack and handed it to Fuuma before facing the wall with his hands in his pockets and shoulders slumped. “Get dried off. You must be freezing.”

Fuuma snatched the towel and dried himself off before wrapping the towel around his waist and stepping out of the tub to sit on its edge, still glancing at the backs of his hands every few seconds and feeling the ghosts of the searing twinge. Subaru turned around at Fuuma’s prompting and stood with his hands behind his back, shoulders straight, staring off at the far wall. Fuuma wrung out the washcloth and arched his eyebrows.

“Now are you going to tell me what you found out?”

“…you are marked as I thought you are.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Subaru sighed, absentmindedly reaching for his pocket before looking at Fuuma and replacing his hands behind his back. Fuuma set the wrung washcloth on the edge of the tub. “…it’s a long story, not something you really need to worry about. You’ve got a dance to get ready for. I can tell you later.”

“That’s a very weak cop-out, Subaru-san.”

Subaru gave Fuuma a vaguely annoyed look before sighing and staring off again. “In short, you have been marked by a very dangerous, deceptive man, a longtime enemy of mine. He’s… a case I have been following for a long time, and for some reason, he’s still got you tagged as his prey.”

“Still? What is that supposed to mean?”

Subaru shrugged and made a non-committal noise. Fuuma stared at him, waiting for an answer.

“This man is Sakurazuka Seishirou?” It can’t be Seishirou-san. Seishirou-san’s the most harmless guy I ever met in my life.

“You are correct.”

“Why?”

Fuuma cursed himself, glad Subaru was not watching him gape like an idiot. Calm down. You don’t know him, remember?

Subaru stared off, thinking. He sighed. “Because he’s the Sakurazukamori.”

“The what?”

“The assassin of the sakura burial mound. His proper title is Sakurazukamori, the lone hunter. He’s an assassin raised to take out enemies of the Japanese government, but he like all of the past ones has gone renegade. Their loyalties are to their Tree and to themselves alone; the government hardly uses them anymore. They learned their lesson. He’s… evil in every sense of the word. He’s deceptive, heartless, dangerous, treacherous. He’s the worst kind of traitor there is. He… betrays love, betrays intimacy without a thought. He’s sick. He’s got a lot of stuff really messed up in his head. That’s who the Sakurazukamori is.”

Fuuma fought to keep his expression neutral. You can’t mean Seishirou-san. That can’t be right. Something… there has to be another explanation; that can’t be right…

“Really?” Fuuma’s tongue felt heavy and dead. “Um, really?”

“Really.”

“That’s… wow. Really. This guy’s stalking me? Really?”

Subaru gave Fuuma a wan look. “…really.”

“Why?”

Subaru stared off silently for a while, then finally shrugged and reached for his pocket again. “I don’t know. You had better get ready for the dance.” He turned on his heel and walked out of the bathroom, pulling a cigarette out of his Mild Seven box with his teeth. Fuuma followed him and grabbed his shoulder.

“Subaru-san, come on!”

Subaru violently shrugged Fuuma’s hand off and froze for a moment, glaring over his shoulder and emanating dull rage and hatred, before checking himself and relaxing. The fabric of Subaru’s white jacket was damp where Fuuma’s hand had been, rumpled and dark enough to make Fuuma think he had grabbed Subaru a little too hard. Fuuma’s tongue felt tied and heavy, and the flow of what he was about to ask died under Subaru’s dull, simmering stare.

For a split second, Fuuma could have sworn that Sumeragi Subaru snarled at him.

Subaru-san, what the hell is wrong with you?

The tension spread like a soap bubble and, finally, popped. Subaru closed his eyes and turned his back on Fuuma, resigned and slouched as usual, and clicked his lighter under his cigarette, shielding the flame with his other hand. He sighed and exhaled smoke, replacing his lighter in his pocket. He was quiet for a long time. Fuuma’s nerves were still sizzling under vague, underlying tension.

“Subaru-san, uh…” Fuuma cursed his tongue, trying to work it around something, anything, any sort of apology, but for what, he was not quite sure. Subaru sighed walked down the hall. The tension dissolved, leaving Fuuma with the realization that he was standing in the cool hallway with naught but a towel wrapped around his waist. The sudden absence of unresolved tension felt like an anticlimactic void.

Subaru stopped for a moment at the top of the stairwell. “…I’m late for a job,” he said quietly, almost shamefully, then started walking down. “I’ll talk to you and Kamui after the dance.”