(Rika/Satoko)
Read Night Before The Festival
Disclaimer: To be honest I’m not quite sure who owns the rights to all things Higurashi no naku koro ni, but it certainly isn’t me. There are spoilers in this little story in a roundabout way to two of the anime seasons, or at the least I mention one very important thing you shouldn’t know beforehand if you haven’t watched both seasons yet. The rest I’ve made up as I please.
Night Before The Festival
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Carola “Ryûchan” Eriksson
She sat in the window, limbs indulgently splayed despite the glass in one hand and the large saké bottle loosely clutched in the other. It was foolhardy perhaps, or maybe just overly defiant, to perch so in a spot where scheming, ill-intending eyes could easily find her… but Furude Rika no longer cared whether they did or not.
Tomorrow was the Watanagashi festival. Tomorrow the gates of her personal and unendingly cycling hell would open fully… and at some point thereafter, in some way and by some hand, perhaps even her own, Furude Rika would die.
She was long since resigned to this fact. It was inevitable. It was also not tonight.
The alcohol had become a tradition of sorts; a glass or two in the dark silence of this night that tethered on the very cusp of horror. She had once taken to alcohol in the hopes of dulling the inescapable and impending pain of her fate, but whatever benefits there were to be had, had been all too brief. Staying far too inebriated to care or worry had been its own blessing for a time, and like with all else she had given this an intensely dedicated try.
It had gone so far that the consequence became Satoko’s tears, as well as a quite emotionally straining ‘intervention’ by those precious, beloved, ignorant children. The latter she could have withstood for the sake of at least somewhat less clarity before her gruesome and gory fate, but not the former. No, never the former.
So now the glass that dangled carelessly from a small hand had never been more than half-full to begin with, and this particular vice was indulged in only when Rika’s fair-haired companion was sound asleep on her nearby futon. Ahh, if only Satoko could be spared, if Satoko, this one small suffering child in all of Hinamizawa, alone could be saved… Rika would have welcomed her death with joy and gratitude then.
But it was impossible, she knew that. Had this not been the case, Rika would have ended her own life long ago, and that would truly have been the end of it.
Instead, whether her death had come by her own hand or anyone else’s, once Rika’s life had ended the village of Hinamizawa and all connected to it was headed for such a horrifying and ghastly end that death, when it inevitably came for them all, would be a saviour. For Rika was not only the last, the only, remaining member of the powerful Furude clan, priestess and keeper of the shrine of their feared and worshipped demon-god… she was Oyashiro-sama’s chosen, the deity’s avatar in flesh.
‘The Queen Carrier’ the doctors and other outsiders called her, those men and women with minds of science that knew enough of the fate of the denizens of Hinamizawa to grasp her importance, as they created scientific answers to comfort them when those same minds balked in fear at the truth of the night. The name amused her somewhat, and she indulged their folly in return for their continuous efforts on her people’s behalf.
The truth of course was that Rika alone was the life, sanity and prosperity of the village of Hinamizawa and all those that were born there. Removing her would be Hinamizawa’s doom.
And so each time her life reached its blood-riddled end, the cycle began anew. Nothing short of Rika’s survival could ever break the unendingly repeating days of this curse, and yet everything and anything else could and did happen, only to end the same… with Rika’s murder.
How many hundreds of years had she lived now, endlessly repeating the same days of June? Rika lost count long ago, although her soul felt the weight of each and every one of those accumulated years. Although her body remained that of a small child her soul was already beyond old, already ancient and tempered by the passage of so much time.
As loved and respected as Rika was to the villagers for whom she in secret suffered so much, that love was laced with a touch of fear. Although she had learned how to keep a mask of childlike innocence in place there were times when her words, or just the look in her eyes, betrayed her true age. They called her wise beyond her years, yet to be the recipient of a glance from those ancient eyes without the mask of childishness was too unnerving, too frightening, for most.
Perhaps the veiled fear also stemmed from the whispers of those that could perceive a little more, sense a little more or for some other reason were able to catch a glimpse of something in Rika’s presence. Perhaps a shadow where none should have been, or a movement just at the edge of vision even though there was nothing there.
Perhaps they heard the sound, that sound of footsteps echoing just ever so slightly out of synch with Rika’s own.
Among those beloved children that considered Rika their friend there was one with a gift of this kind, one whose soul had been touched with darkness much earlier than this repeating hell and so had earned the attention of the hidden. If a future had existed, if they had not all been so doomed, Rika would have liked to take Ryuugyuu Rena into training at the shrine, to make her a miko of Oyashiro-sama.
But the future did not exist, and so even though Rena was serious in her devotion and had both heard and seen that presence that was invisible to all but Rika herself, there was no reason to mention anything to the girl. The occasional glimmer of understanding she saw sometimes when their eyes met was to be comfort enough, heavily laced with darkness though it was.
The other children, so strong and beautiful and precious to her, she had sometimes lent thought to what their futures could have been. They were not entirely aware of it, but they had all been born to be the leaders of this village, to be her servants, her brave and trusted knights. Although she was ill equipped to show it, trapped in a small child’s body as she were, Rika loved them all with something akin to a mother’s heart on the days she still had strength. They were all of them irreplaceable, but there was one far more precious than any other.
Her Satoko. Her adorable little housewife.
Rika would call the other girl her better half if she did not know as no-one else could what it truly meant to be a joint existence, to be merged soul deep with another… creature.
Satoko never sensed the third presence in their small but happy home, Rika made sure of that. It was as always the two of them against the world, the two orphaned children that managed to live quite successfully by themselves, no adults involved, in their little house on the hill of Oyashiro-sama’s shrine. The blessed child and the cursed.
Age had tempered Rika’s frustrated urge to scream at her villagers when they ignored her Satoko, but the anger at their ignorance remained. To think that Satoko was cursed, when in fact the girl was loved by Oyashiro-sama simply because Rika loved her… no, if anyone should be feared it was Rika herself. Her people remained blissfully unaware of the devastation Rika could bring upon them, and of the danger of hardening her heart against them.
Even in the darkest hours, when the hopelessness was too much for her, Rika still loved Satoko with all her child’s heart. Sometimes it seemed like it was all that kept her going, kept her trying to break the wheel of their dark fate.
As a young girl Furude Rika had fallen in love with her best friend and eventual house-mate, and under untold hundreds of repeating years that love had remained. It had grown in strength and desperation until it was the sun, the one light to brighten Rika’s ever darkening existence, the love for this sweet dandelion child.
Although it was usually frustrating to have a child’s body when the spirit itself was old, this was one aspect that made Rika grateful for that particular consequence of her strange circumstances. As she was a child in body there could not ever be any adult urges for her, no carnal impulses to taint the love she held for the other girl. As much as she needed Satoko, it was a chaste need, and the priestess of Oyashiro-sama remained ironically, technically untouched and unkissed.
There were times when in despair and sadness Rika sought the warmth of her Satoko and she slept sharing the girl’s futon, clinging to her hand. Only once had Rika given in to a need to be closer still, and the memories of those days, as precious as they were, were their own form of punishment.
In one of the many cycling days Rika, hurting and too upset to be as careful as she should, had reached out and found that although shocked, there were warm arms open and welcoming her. Simply holding Satoko’s hand had not been enough that night, instead Rika had embraced the girl desperately, tucking their tiny, bony bodies in tight. Satoko had blushed furiously but hugged her back equally, small hands petting Rika’s hair and rubbing her back until they fell asleep this way.
Rika had then found that her falling in love had not been a one-sided thing, although the passing years made their feelings vastly different in strength and measure. It almost drove her to tears still, merely remembering, her sweet little Satoko and her adorable puppy love.
The days following Rika’s neediness Satoko had acted very different from normal, and their friends noticed. The otherwise so energetic girl was markedly calmer, spending considerable time simply staring at Rika while blushing, something which made their older friends smirk and grin in devious delight. The older children had always claimed that Satoko was Rika’s little wife, but undoubtedly none of them had expected it to be anything but an inside joke.
Rika herself was embarrassed to find herself blushing slightly when Satoko clung to her hand in class while they were being alternately smirked at or cooed at by their friends. Even the otherwise so clueless yet kind teacher noticed, and, after a moment of startled surprise, cooed at them as well. Such sweet puppy love.
The one brief kiss that Satoko planted on her cheek before running out of the room when school was over had made Rika blush so furiously that the older children had been far too stunned to even tease her about it. It was her most cherished memory, although it always came with sadness knowing that Satoko did not share it, that for Satoko that moment had never happened.
Still, Rika was grateful for that small blessing despite the sadness attached to it. She would not have wanted Satoko to have to remember what had followed that particular event. It had been an end so horrifying and brutal, and because of her Satoko had been at the centre of that nightmare. That time Satoko’s death had been so slow and so agonizing… because of her.
She could never let that happen again.
So Rika held Satoko’s hand on rare occasion at night, but mostly she just watched the girl sleep, never revealing to anyone much less Satoko herself how deeply she truly cared for her. The end still came, every time, and it was painful and horrible and sometimes Satoko was singled out for more pain than any other, and even though she could never quite figure out why it was always, always Rika’s fault.
But at least Satoko was not tortured more as a means to hurt Rika. Never that, never again.
And so Rika sat in her window, glass in hand and eyes sweeping over the slumbering form on the floor not far from her. Draining the final dregs from the glass she turned away from her vigilance against the hostile night, absently tucking the evidence of her vice away to be dealt with in the morning, and continued to ignore the voice that kept speaking to her, kept calling for her attention.
Lying down on the futon on her side so that she could continue to look at Satoko’s face in the dark, Rika decided that she might as well get a few hours of sleep. Tomorrow was Watanagashi after all, and it would be an eventful day for her. A very busy day.
Oh yes. It would be a big day.
And Furude Rika would keep her eyes open until the end.
