Emi Sekiyama [I5] Fight
Then, one of her on the sofa, lying back, leaning against Keisuke, who’s also in shot. She’s holding the camera far above their heads and they’re both making the peace sign into it, Emi’s lips pursed, Keisuke with a smirk of calculated cool.
The back reads, ‘me and Keisuke - we suck so bad we rock’.
Emi didn’t know what a panic attack felt like. After all, she had never had one. But maybe the icicles crushing her chest and throat, the desperate lack of breath and the one, overpowering desire to escape, escape now because she was in real, tangible danger came close to what one felt like.
- “Why?” Keisuke laughs incredulously at the TV screen, on which a struggle is taking place and the feminine screams are tinny and somehow unreal.
A glass screen and hundreds of miles separates them. They don’t care.
“I don’t get it.” Emi sprawls over Keisuke to grab another can of cola and rights herself again, eyes never leaving the screen. “Like, I didn’t get laid enough in real life so now I’m going to rape you, my pretty.” She chortles and gestures at the scene. “People are retarded.”
“I read somewhere…”
“You read?” Emi puts on an air of mock astonishment and Keisuke swats at her.
“Shut up, Fatty. Ow!” She had punched him on the arm. “Yeah, I read somewhere that like… one kid in every fifteen classes tries to rape somebody.”
“So that girl got really unlucky, huh.” They’re artfully blurring the actual action, but it’s easy enough to tell what’s going on and they’re just uncomfortable enough that they’re not watching it quite as avidly as usual. They’ve turned away for now.
“Yeah, I guess.” Keisuke glances apathetically at the screen. Emi’s gaze follows his, and then at the same time they reach for snacks before-
“Oh my God!” Emi drops a chocolate bar and gawks at the screen as Keisuke’s gaze follows hers - and they find themselves both staring at the victim, scrambling away from under the rapist who is now missing most of his throat in favour of a rather large knife and a lot of bright, almost cartoonish blood.
“Oh, man!” Keisuke’s laughing incredulously at the scene and Emi’s still gawking. A moment later, they’re both cracking up and high fiving each other, swigging their drinks and going back to the usual banter, bitching and egging on the contestant they would, were they legal, put real bets on.
They’re both good people. Watching The Programme every year doesn’t, in their heads and everyone else’s, change that in the slightest.
After all, if it’s right there for them to watch, why shouldn’t they watch it?
Weren’t those kids talking before he did that? Weren’t they having a conversation? Like they were now?
He probably wouldn’t.
But maybe he was that one in fifteen. Maybe he would. He was born to do that. He couldn’t help what he was born into in the same way that a foreigner or a gay couldn't help it, but they were all still as dangerous as each other.
They were all rotten.
And maybe two people her age would be sat on a sofa in one of their homes, high fiving each other at the best moment s and bitching about her agony like she’s not even real. Hot, dark humiliation flushed through her.
She was going to leave. If she could get away from him - maybe-
Emi stood up, shakily, feet struggling for purchase over the uneven ground and under her trembling legs.
“Emi? Where are you-“ Tatsutarou stood up as well and Emi turned, backing away from him.
“I’m leaving.” Her voice shook. “Don’t follow me.”
Two teenagers on their sofa, mockingly imitating her and shouting at the screen that yeah, that that’d work.
She backed away further, breath coming in short puffs, each ending in a wheeze. She would have to climb an embankment to get back onto the path. Could she climb fast enough?
“Wait, Emi - Emi, it’s dangerous, come on-”
She mutely shook her head - couldn’t trust words now - and moved backward in time with his moving forward; her legs wouldn’t do anything else, wouldn’t make their way to the embankment. She’d have to turn her back to him to do that.
He moved forward further, hands held out for her - empty, coaxingly, but her mind, her paranoid, fearful mind, they reached threateningly, about to grab, restrain, hurt. She stumbled, frozen in all she did but that slow backward shuffle, and then multiple things happened at once.
Her foot lost purchase on the stone right as the other lost ground completely - her body lurched downward and backward, arms flailing - she screamed, tried to do something, anything that would get her back on solid ground but she was keeling over backward and there was literally nothing to break her fall but what must be a sheer, solid cliff face-
Two teenagers laughing hysterically-
A wordless shout, and Tatsutarou lunging for her, hands grabbing her by the waist and arm and hauling her up, back, away from the edge, holding her firmly - but now Emi was in a sheer panic, kicking, screaming, Tatsutarou hissing something but she couldn’t hear it over the din, his hand moving to her mouth.
And then one of her own hands reached out, grabbed, wrenched hard at something unexpectedly cold, solid. She decided later on, trying to parse the events, that she might have been aiming for his shoulder.
The first beep sounded over the top of her screams, and cut them off with authority - the echo of both rung momentarily around them, thrown back by the cliffs, and then all fell still.
The second - Tatsutarou’s eyes were wide and tear filled; Emi had stilled. She noticed a scratch on his face.
Before the third, Emi was already pushing desperately away, but Tatsutarou had frozen in what was maybe utter disbelief. She couldn’t make him move, let go.
They’d both watched. They both knew.
But the third never came. In its place was the bang. It was louder than the TV had painted it to be. Less tinny. Infinitely more real.
And then the pain hit with such impact that she thought absurdly for one second that it was her own collar which had detonated. But her pain wasn’t her throat.
It was her face.
She thrashed her head to one side with a shriek, lifted her hands and flattened them over the blazing heat that seemed to be both burning and freezing her cheek in equal measures. Her legs gave from under her and she fell to her knees with a thud that jolted her entire body, hands still planted over the wound which now throbbed like her very heart had jumped to it. And it was there she sat, wailing and shaking her head, clutching her face and shaking.
Long after her throat was raw and her screams had fizzled out just like the heat, sound still found its way up and out of her throat in a constant, agonised trickle. She couldn’t see; she didn’t dare open her eyes.
When she breathed, she smelled metal and burned meat.
She sat there for what could have been an age, on her knees, hunched so her nose was buried into her skirt, absorbed in her own pain. She sobbed, but the tears streaming down her face seared at that one cheek and made her whimper with it. She soon stopped crying.
There was a moment, presently, when the pain had gone from unbearable to only nearly unbearable, where panic flooded her and forced her eyes open. Where was-
It looked like a hole in the ground, but when she saw that the hole was glistening in the moonlight, she realised with a thud to her gut that it was liquid, dark and viscous, shining on the rocks.
In its centre was Tatsutarou Iwamoto, half on his back, half on his side, knees buckled and sprawled. He gaped at the clouds above, staring up at them like they might soon move and show him the stars.
"Tatsu.... Tatsutarou?" she croaked and, when the reply was silence, she crawled closer, pain to her knees ignored. She stopped at the edge of the shining dark, then reared back upright to her knees as his hand moved.
She watched it.
Was it scrabbling for purchase on the rock? Its movement shifted the liquid it lay in so that it rippled, the light dancing across its surface. It seemed to clutch weakly, lose its grip, and then it merely began to twitch. It didn't even pretend anymore.
His face was frozen in terror - eyes staring blankly, one of them splattered in blood he wouldn’t blink away. His chin was burnt, blackened and charred - and his throat and entire neck were no more, a black, wet mass, still oozing liquid. Was that the dull glistening of bone she could see through the dark?
The stench was overwhelming.
Emi barely twisted to the side in time before she was retching bile onto the rocks, mixing with the tears dripping from her face, pain, grief and nausea making her weep and scream with it. She rose to her feet barely a moment later, stomach still heaving, entire body trembling violently. Swayed. Liquid dripped from her front.
Stumbling, Emi made her way back into the alcove as though sleepwalking, fell again to her knees and started to blindly grab. Tatsutarou’s food and water and plastic bag were unceremoniously thrown in with her own things. She worked on autopilot. She copied those she’d seen before her. Her hands were burnt, too, palms stinging sharply with every object she touched.
There was a dead young boy behind her.
There was a dead rapist behind her.
She couldn’t convince herself of that now that her panic was extinguished.
All she knew now was that it didn't matter what he was.
All he was now was dead, and she did it.
It was an accident. But she did it.
She hefted her bags, threw them over her shoulder, catching them as they nearly slipped back off. She was shaking almost too much to be able to move straight.
As she slowly climbed the embankment, Tatsutarou seemed to be watching her go.
((Last bit of spam, I promise! *flails*
OKAY SO. Tatsutarou is dead, Emi has his weapon - Emi is wounded with burns to her face and hands.))