Chapter Text
Why am I here?
That was always my favourite question to ask K when we were younger. She always cocked her head to the side, staring at me with her confused blue eyes as hair tumbled around her shoulders. As far as I can remember, I don't think she ever truly answered me. I suppose that's really the reason I'm writing this. My therapist told me that if I want to find the answer to my question, writing down the things that seem the most important to me could help me see it. And in my case, the most important things to me are my friends, especially K. It took me a while to agree to doing this, but here we are I suppose. All I want to know is if K ever answered my question somewhere along the way. My name is Mafuyu Asahina and I don't know why I'm here.
I guess if we're starting from the beginning, I should explain who K, my first real friend is. My whole life, I've always been surrounded by other people claiming to be my friends, my lovers, people who cared what happened to me, but deep down we all knew not a word of that was true. They weren't my friends. They were all like the radio for me. I'm always perfectly happy to put the radio on but even if I don't like or agree with whatever's playing I never, ever turn it off. I'd rather tune it out and sit staring into space than turn it off because when it's gone everything's too silent, far too silent. That is, everyone except K. One day, when I was eleven, my mother forced me to go to one of her work parties with her, despite my futile resistance. "Mafuyu! Gosh! You aren't a toddler any more! You should be able to socialise!" When we got there I was still nervously clutching at the sleeve of her red dress, but she brushed me off like some sort of bug and sashayed deep into the throbbing crowd of strangers. I frowned deeply; socialise? I didn't know any of these people! God, I could barely socialise with my own so-called-friends, how could I with these people! So I turned on my heel and headed straight for the door labelled flower garden. I remember those gardens so clearly, despite it being over five years ago. Pink and purple flowers bloomed delicately on large green bushes, beds flush with yellow and red stretched towards me as I carefully walked past them. But the thing that stood out most in that garden was the girl in the centre of it.
She had her back to me as she leaned over a fountain of rushing water and all I could do was stare, transfixed by her beauty. She had gorgeous blue waist-long hair that cascaded down her back like a rippling wave and was dressed in a black dress that fell just below her knees. The water from the fountain reflected onto her, casting her entire body in an ethereal blue glow like an angel's halo. I paused in my path, staring at her until she abruptly spun round so I could see her face. Milky pale skin contrasted with her bright blue eyes which were fixed on my own as I jumped back in surprise and shame at being seen. My mind raced as I wondered what she would do, maybe order me to go back inside or go inside herself? But no, she simply continued to stare deep into my eyes as she approached before tilting her head to the side as she stuck her hand out towards me. “Hi. My name’s K. What’s yours?”
I just stood there, slightly confused by this girl. People didn’t usually approach me. I was always the one coming to them. That’s why when I opened my mouth to speak the only thing that came out was, “..K? That can’t be your name.” I mentally cursed at myself the moment the words left my mouth, I didn’t want to be alone at this party, did I? But K just folded her arms defiantly and said with a sniff, “I don’t know who you are. You don’t need to know my name, do you?” It clearly wasn’t a question I was meant to answer and I just stood there, clutching nervously at the hem of my red dress, feeling the delicate stitches between my fingers. K sighed as if exasperated by me, stepping a fraction closer to me and staring at my eyes intently. I fidgeted a little more under her gaze, feeling like I was trying to avoid the sun. An impossible task. Then she opened her mouth again and said loudly, “Well? Do you have a name?” Slightly shocked at her raised voice, I began to speak, “O-oh..um..my name’s Maf-” Suddenly, K lunged forwards and pressed a cold finger to my lips, “Don’t tell me your real name! I didn’t tell you mine! So what should I call you?” I paused for a moment, consumed by thought. What did I want this girl to know me as? Something similar to my real name perhaps? Or just an initial, like her? But then I glanced up at K to see her tapping her foot impatiently and suddenly thought of a name. Yuki. When I was really little, my mother always used to call me that. It means snow, or happiness, and she used to sit me on her knee and tell me about the day I was born. It snowed that day, and it was the happiest day of her life. I always used to love that story and the nickname that came with it, it made me feel as if my mother was raising me into a beautiful light with her own two hands. By the time I met K, my mother hadn’t called me that for years.
“My name is Yuki.”
From that moment on, me and K were virtually inseparable, we never left each other’s side until we had to, we met up every other day and we would call for hours upon hours, often invoking my mother’s wrath over her insistence I study. I loved K like a sister, she was the other half of me that I’d never known existed. Except for one thing. K never told me her name and I never told her mine. I loved K too much to risk asking her name and it was pretty clear she was never telling me it unprompted. And our friendship remained like this for well over four years until I was fifteen, in the best four years of my life. That was until my mother decided she’d had enough, and once my mother had had enough of K, so had I. I suddenly found myself drowning in orders to study, possible career options, new friends that could ‘introduce me’ to the world of business. My mother was slowly cutting K out of my life, but I couldn’t do a thing to stop it. She never noticed my yawns as she forced me to work deep into the inky dark night, or the way my breaths began to become shorter and more panicky whenever I met someone new. And slowly, bit by bit, I began to get used to it. I stopped crying over my piles of work each night and running away from my mother’s footsteps echoing through the hall, but I also seemed to stop feeling all other emotions. The fear and anger and sadness I used to be so used to didn’t feel as heart-stoppingly awful as before, but somehow my oh-so-dearly-yearned-for meetings with K began to feel boring. Nothing she said felt funny, and I couldn’t find the will inside me to do so much as smile. I suppose that’s how it ended.
I remember that day so clearly, the day that K decided I was too far gone to waste her time on any more. She was telling me some story about a boy, and as far as I can remember, it wasn’t that interesting so I was staring down blankly at my phone. I had her voice tuned out, barely aware of my surroundings until I began to hear K filtering through. “...ki! Yuki! Are you even listening to me at all?” she shouted at me, folding her arms across her chest with indignation beginning to slip through her mask. I looked up from my phone mutely, tilting my head as if trying to show I was without having to actually speak. Clearly K wasn’t convinced, frowning down at me intently, a sliver of hurt showing in her eyes as she spoke again, “Exactly. I can tell that not one word I said made it into your brain just now.” I didn’t move, slightly confused at her reaction. Why did she seem so upset? It was just a story after all. “And it’s not just now! I swear you never listen to a word I say these days! What happened to you, Yuki..” she asked, pearly tears beginning to form in the corners of her eyes and smudging her shadowy makeup across her face. I felt my face begin to snarl up defensively and I forced myself to speak, my voice rough and low as I spoke, “I’m just tired. Nothing’s happened to me, I’m just not fully awake.” K frowned down at me, blue eyes brimming with accusation as she spat back at me, bitterness hidden in her words, “And let me guess, you weren’t awake the other day either? And you haven’t been awake for the last few months?” She sneered at me, leaning forwards in animated anger, an anger I could barely understand anymore, “Or maybe, you just don’t care anymore? Maybe you don’t think I’m interesting enough anymore? Perhaps you have other friends who are more like you: boring and plain.”
K paused, her chest heaving as she glared pointedly at me, her gaze boring into my eyes like she wanted to drill a hole into my face. At her words, I froze, my heart almost felt like it had skipped a beat at the amount of venom in her words. Surely I misheard; K would never say something like that to me. I stared at her with wide dark eyes, waiting for her to apologise or backtrack like she usually did in an argument. But this time, I was wrong. Noticing my silence, K jumped to her feet, jabbing her finger in my eyes like a knife as she began to shout, pent up rage I didn’t even know she had towards me spilling from her lips, “See? You don’t even care enough about our friendship to try to deny it! All you do these days is work and work and work but it doesn’t even matter! Am I not more important than your stupid manipulative mother?” K began to stumble backwards, heading towards the door of my room and I suddenly found the energy inside to throw my phone down and leap in her direction to tightly grip her wrist. She gasped, blue eyes still streaming with tears as she desperately tried to shake me off, “Stop! Yuki! Let me go!” she cried, her anger dissipating in a moment. Unfortunately, that was the same moment mine chose to make its appearance.
I stared at K as she tried to pry my tight fingers off of her arm, blue hair floating around her shoulders. She was the same exact girl that I’d met all those years ago. From her eyes, to her hair, to her words, to her. . .name. I still didn’t know this girl’s name. She said I didn’t appreciate our friendship? K was the one who always insisted on not knowing each other’s names! I wasn’t the problem in our relationship! It was K, it was always K. And as that same girl looked into my eyes, I saw how hers widened in slight fear at the icily cold look on my face. “I’m the one who doesn’t care, am I?” I said softly, my whitening fingers squeezing her wrist even tighter, to the point where I could see her blood failing to circulate into her fingers. “At least I’m not so much of a coward that I can’t even tell my best friend my name.” K opened her mouth and closed it again in shock, looking like a terrified blue goldfish as she did so before recollecting her senses. She drew herself up to her full height, which was still noticeably shorter than me and began to shout again, “What’s that supposed to mean? It’s not like I know your real name either, Yuki! If it bothered you that much then maybe you should’ve opened your mouth for once and actually told me! Oh, but no. That would involve having to actually feel things! And we all know you can’t do that anymore, you monster!”
I stared at K in disbelief, her harsh words playing in repeat on my brain like a glitching audio file. K herself stumbled backwards, fingers flying towards her mouth as she covered it in horror at what she’d just said, dark eyelashes fluttering against her pale skin. I swayed slightly on the spot, a lock of purple hair falling over my eyes. Monster. Monster. You monster! Quickly, I turned away from K covering my eyes with my shaking fingers to hide the tear that slipped down my face as that single word rang through my head. A monster. I wasn’t a monster! Surely I wasn’t a monster. . .right? “I-I’m sorry, Yuki. . . I didn’t r-really mean tha-” I cut off K’s trembling quiet voice with my own sharp one, that seemed more alive with emotion than it had for months. “Shut up. Get out of my house, right now,” I turned towards K suddenly, moving my hands from my face to show her my red eyes glowering with malice. “And just so you know, this monster’s name is Mafuyu Asahina. Not that you would ever care.” K stared at me in horror, before spinning on her heel and sprinting down the corridor towards my door, loud ugly sobs racking through the quiet house. The door shut with a heavy slam. That was the last time I saw K for two years.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it, the next two years were living hell. I almost never left my house, my world seeming to shrink until it was only my four walls, which were plain and free of decoration, which was my mother’s choice. Growing girls should focus on their studies, distractions will only get it the way. Or so she said. The piles of textbooks on my desk grew higher and higher, their pages yellowing after all the times I thumbed through them every single day. I remained surrounded by my close ‘friends’ and I always got the highest grades in class through ‘pure talent’. Or so everyone else said. In reality it felt almost as if I was living through some sort of twisted nightmare, with no support whatsoever unless it was in the form of my mother standing over me late into the night with blue eyes flashing as she went through my work. Oh Mafuyu, you’ll never become a doctor with notes like these. Mafuyu, why haven’t you solved the equations I gave you last night? Mafuyu, these solutions aren’t right, try them again please. Mafuyu, Mafuyu, Mafuyu. In any other world, I might have screamed at her in anger and despair. Maybe I don’t want to be a doctor! But I just felt numb to it, far too used to the thought that I was working myself half to death than any young girl should be.
But soon after my seventeenth birthday, I began to overhear whispers between my parents, notice their stolen looks whenever I mentioned school. One darkened night, while my mother was out at a party I snuck into her work study, searching desperately for whatever she was hiding. Because she was hiding something, that much I was sure of. I spent hours rifling through her cupboards, checking each and every individual file until I was convinced she would return home soon and catch me in the act. But eventually, once it was well past midnight and my eyes were droopy and hazy with tiredness, I found what I was looking for. Hidden underneath a stack of thick books was an unlabelled file which I quickly opened, only to find a large red notice. House Sold. I gaped in confusion, not even disappointed or upset. This house barely had any meaning to me, all it felt like was a prison, four walls and a roof that caged me like some sort of pathetic puppet. But, was my mother really willing to sell it? Without even telling me? I began to close the file and was just about to replace it under the pile of books when I paused. If we were moving houses, did that mean I would have to go to a new school? Icy cold fear ran down my spine like the finger of a corpse at that sudden thought. If I went to a new school…I would need to make new friends. Even if I barely liked my friends, at least they made me feel in some way normal while I was at school. Without them, I’d truly be all alone.
The next night, I fought with my mother for the first time in three years. Fear and desperation was clear on my face as I shouted, “I can’t change schools! I just can’t!” My mother glared at me with a heated gaze, her eyes dark with fury and her dark dress swirling around her ankles while she stalked towards me. “Mafuyu Asahina. When did you go into my study? You know that you aren’t allowed in there.” Her cold voice sent a shudder through my entire body and I quickly shied away from her like a shadow hiding from the sun. I stumbled over my words in my effort to backtrack and barely avoided tripping into the wall, “I-I-I didn’t! I swear!” My mind raced for an explanation while my mother continued to glare at me unbelievingly, “I heard you and dad talking about it the other day!” She stared at me with dull blue eyes that felt almost like they were cutting into my soul before turning on her heel sharply, barely sparing me a glance as she sashayed out the room. “We leave in two weeks.”