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catsvrsdogscatswin · 1 year ago

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Higurashi Month 2024, Day 2: Knife

Higurashi Month prompts archive: AO3

If caves are deep enough, they stay the same temperature year-round.

Mion didn't remember what year of science class she'd heard that, but it was one of the things she clung to as she wrapped her arms around her folded legs and huddled into herself where she sat. Blazing summer or snow-thick winter, deep caves like this one held steady at around 10 C.

Dressed in only her long hair and her sheer nightgown, Mion badly needed that reassurance. She might feel like she was steadily getting colder, but she wasn't. It was just –psychosomatic. 10 Celsius was still cold, especially in thin cotton like this, and so she fell into the illusion that the cold was deepening when it was really just her enduring the chill for way too damn long.

Shion would-

She cut that thought off at the knees. She didn't know what her sister would do, now. She was… erratic. Unpredictable.

Mion closed her eyes and pressed her face against her knees, taking in several deep, shuddering breaths. Don't- don't think about that. Don't think about Batcha. Don't think about how her sister- don't.

Deep breaths. In, out.

She needed to use her training as the family heir, focus, and think. Strip the emotion from the situation and solve it –reactions could come later.

She was- she was locked up in the cells beneath the estate. Her clothes had been taken and switched out for a sheer nightdress –in another situation she'd snicker about victims in a cheesy horror flick don't think about it don't think about it– and she had no resources in her cell beyond pebbles and perhaps a handful of grit. Food and water were deposited just outside her cell periodically, and the privy hole in the back of the cell was too small to count for anything.

Stripping and changing her was a nice touch, Mion reflected gloomily. In the big city, of course, that was just another crime on a rap sheet, but out in the mountains, in the woods, in the wilderness… well. She wouldn't get far –even if she did manage to escape her cell– while barefoot and in a nightie.

Mion would be the first to admit that her family dealt in shady things, but she would also be the first to subsequently defend them from murder accusations. Her family weren't killers. Yakuza, yes. Willing to kill… yes, sometimes.

But they weren't murderers. Her father's organization –especially after becoming subordinate to Batcha– were focused on power and profit, not bodycounts. It wasn't wise to draw police attention, and cleaning up bodies was expensive. Relying on their fearsome reputation –and yes, willingness to get their hands dirty with torture when they did need to back up their threats– did most of the work.

But because the underworld was mainly ruled by force, and because the leader of the Sonozaki family needed to use craft and guile, Mion's extracurricular education had been somewhat unconventional –and so, by extent, had Shion's.

If you have prisoners, make them go barefoot. Take as many of their clothes as you can, so that exposure helps prevent escape. Do not let them acquire resources. Do not let them interact with any other prisoners.

Being on the flip side of those rules felt a lot less academic.

Mion took another deep, shuddering breath, pressing her face into her knees harder, until she could feel the bone squeezing against her eye sockets.

She had no resources. The cell door was locked, and her meal times were sparse and erratic. She was —trapped.

And she knew Shion. She knew her sister; knew her as easily as she did her right and left hands. Or… so she had thought.

Because training demanded that she try and understand the moods and motives of her captor, and Mion couldn't. Shion was… she'd been…

Insane felt like such a flimsy word to describe the complete upending of Mion's world. Shion wasn't like that, and Mion had thought she'd known her sister all the way down to her deepest heart. But, apparently, she hadn't; and the demons lurking down there were fearsome and cruel indeed.

Shion wasn't like this. Right? She wouldn't- she would never-

Mion didn't blame her sister for resenting Batcha. In her place, Mion would do the same. Maybe she already did, a little. But the jump from resentment to murder, even unintentional, was across such a large gap-

It felt like there was a piece missing, a trigger. There had to be. Right?

This kind of thing just didn't happen without triggers. There had to be a cause, an impetus. Shion couldn't be like this, hiding a side of herself so deep down that even Mion had never found it.

… right?

Deep in the cavern of cells, Mion shivered miserably.

AN: 10 Celsius is 50 Fahrenheit, for my fellow Americans. I also work night shift now, so for anyone who cares the chapters will be coming later in the mornings, since I get off my shift at midnight.

#Higurashi Month #Higurashi Month 2024 #Higurashi no Naku Koro ni #Higurashi When They Cry #When They Cry

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catsvrsdogscatswin · 1 year ago

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Higurashi Month 2024, Day 11: Empty

Higurashi Month prompts archive: AO3

The thing is, it was dumb luck.

It was just some damn dumb good luck.

Mion couldn't stop thinking about that as she clamped a hand over her mouth, trying to stop her breath from speeding up, trying not to vomit. She had just been –lucky.

If that word could even be ascribed to what was going on right now.

Batcha had known –or suspected, probably– in the way she always seemed to suspect most things, clever and canny as an ancient toothless fox. She'd taken in the weird fuzzy whine of the radio, the guns the men outside were holding, and her lips had thinned (even further) and she'd told Mion to slip away, quietly, secretly, remaining unseen, and go back home and retrieve a handbell from behind a certain hanging.

Her grandmother had given her a lot of orders, some more palatable than others, but at this one Mion could only stare. A gas eruption, and Batcha wanted her to go play fetch? Alone?

Batcha had snapped at her to be quick about it in her most ruthless tone, so imperiously that Mion was obeying before she could really think about what was happening, and she had slipped out the backdoor of the shrine meeting hall before she could even think about what was happening.

And then, well, training took over. Mion could say a lot of things about Batcha, but senile wasn't one of them, and the way she had phrased her orders implied that there was someone around who would wish Mion harm if they saw her escaping –and that there was something to escape.

She stepped purposefully out of the range of the lights, acting like she had ever reason and every authority to be where she was going, and then the second her eyes adjusted to the night, slipped into deep cover and began working her way through the forest as stealthily as a mountain native could.

In her slow, careful creeping through the bush, pausing to take in and identify every rustle of sound, there had been plenty of time to think, but Mion still hadn't been sure of what Batcha wanted. Grab an heirloom, sure, that sounded kinda-mostly reasonable, but to do it now? Like this? Mion was the sole heir to the family, and she was being sent out alone into a toxic gas eruption without even a cloth mask to her name.

It didn't make sense. But Mion had also been the heir long enough to know that when Batcha gave orders that didn't make sense, it was because she, Mion, didn't have the pieces to the whole picture yet.

So.

Go to the house, get the handbell, return. The sooner she accomplished that, the sooner she'd get answers –and better than that, the sooner she'd be in a locked room, safe from the gas.

It was about twenty minutes from the shrine to her house by bike, and it probably took Mion more than an hour to get there the way she did, sneaking slow and careful and never breaking cover. It was the snipers you didn't see that got you shot, and until she knew more about the situation, Mion was operating at maximum caution.

There were a select few gaps in the barbed-wire-topped chain link fence that circled the family property, and Mion wiggled her grubby way under the one closest to the back garden. Batcha was obviously either worried about the outsiders or worried about someone inside the family using this as an opportunity, and either way, it would pay not to go through the most public door.

Once inside, Mion followed Batcha's swiftly-reeled instructions perfectly, and received for her efforts a dinky little ancient handbell. Cool. The whole hidden mechanism thing was making her itch to know more –because those things were hell to construct and even more hell to construct in a building as old as their home estate– but there was also the whole small matter of the volcanic gas eruption and Mion shut off her curiosity for later.

She made a small detour up to her room, grabbing her schoolbag and dumping it out on her bed. Untying her white hoodie from around her waist, she wrapped the handbell in it and stuffed the resulting bundle in her bag for safe transport –and to muffle sound.

Slinging the satchel over her head, so that the body of the bag lay against her hip, Mion slipped back out of the estate.

The way back was quiet, though she stayed just as cautious and alert. It was a rookie mistake to relax once a mission's goal was accomplished; too often, people forgot you had to do it and get back alive for things to be truly successful. If anything, this was the time she should be most on-guard.

It paid off.

She'd gone into an army-crawl, satchel stuffed beneath her stomach and awkwardly dragging along, once she'd seen the distant lights of the shrine, approaching belly-down and far below the intended eye-range of most scouts. Every few squirmed feet, she'd stop and listen, and so she'd caught the tramp of approaching feet before they had heard her.

Mion had gone perfectly still, screened beneath several bushes and people's natural disinclination to spot anything that was below knee level, and listened.

Two feet. Matched regular steps, probably some kind of training. Quiet chatter-

They weren't wearing gas masks, she had realized as the words drifted over her ears.

There was a natural disaster going on and they weren't wearing regulation protective equipment, which turned the vague tickle of anticipatory confusion in her mind into a firework of alarmed suspicion that screamed down Mion's spine.

Something was going on. Something a lot bigger than she'd thought, and something Batcha had caught onto.

Okay. So –follow orders. Get bell, get back unseen. She couldn't afford to distract herself with speculations; she just needed to tab each bit of behavior for later analysis.

Mion would have nodded to herself, but she couldn't afford to move right now. Instead she'd held rabbit-still as the men slowly drew even, then passed her hiding place. Carefully moving in the slightest of increments when they had gone down the trail, she had tilted her head to peer through her hair and seen that both of them carried guns. Big ones.

Mion couldn't really tell specifics from behind and in the dark, but she didn't need to. They looked like part of the Heckler & Kock MP5SD series, and submachine gun was bad news to her right now no matter what model it might be. That wasn't the sort of thing you used to suppress looting. It was more the style of gun for black ops.

She had continued inching forward once they were gone, though not without some hesitation. Had Batcha wanted her to come back, possibly into the jaws of danger, or had Batcha trusted her to take the handbell and know to get to safety?

Mion was trained well, but she was still only within a month of being fifteen.

This was a higher and thinner tightrope than what she was used to.

On the basis of it being better to know what was going on, though, she'd kept scooting through the underbrush, figuring she may as well scout the situation before she left, now that she'd gotten this far.

Since she was an approaching the backdoor at an angle, Mion could see the open space in front of the meeting hall before she got to the back, and she froze –this time out of shock– as she saw the bodies out front.

Obviously they were bodies. Men and women on the ground, sprawled in graceless heaps, and there was blood, gleaming dark in the moonlight, and bullet holes and more of those men standing around them with guns on their backs and bodybags and-

Mion had stuffed a dirty, resin-covered hand in her mouth and gnawed the back of her knuckles rather than screaming.

Okay.

So.

The gas eruption thing was probably bogus.

Were these rivals of her family? If so, they were fucking nuts, assassinating multiple innocent bystanders in Hinamizawa, as well as all the heads of the Three Families-

…oh.

Batcha probably picked up on what was wrong a lot faster than she had.

Mion had released her fist and breathed deeply. Right, so her whole family and most of the upper village hierarchy were probably dead. Right now, she needed to get away and call the police. She'd be willing to grab even Oishi right now; he might be a bastard who called her family murderers, but he was a tough old bastard who hated injustice more than anything. Any port in a storm.

She'd wiggled backward, starting to slink with excruciating care back through the forest to the ravine that ran through the river path, trying to think of where to go because if the diddled radios and the sheer preparation meant anything, the phone lines had probably been cut-

"Who's there?"

Mion had frozen again at the voice, mentally swearing at how her panic might have nixed her caution, and held utterly still. In the ensuing silence, she'd heard a gun's safety catch go click, and immediately closed her eyes and flung herself to one side.

Gunfire sizzled and roared through the bush she'd been screened by, and relying on that brief second of blindness and disorientation from the muzzle flash, Mion was on her feet and-

Two of them: the enemy was patrolling in pairs. Definitely a professional operation.

She'd let training take over and tackled the nearest, grabbing his wrist and using her knowledge of the family martial art to twist his body into a hold between herself and his partner, so she wouldn't get shot. That had bought her a half-second, and she'd used it to snap his wrist, smash her foot into his instep, and jam her elbow into his throat.

His scream of agony died unborn, twisted into a raspy gurgle, and she'd used the momentum to keep them turning as she heard the crackle of underbrush –very professional, the other man was circling her already to get a clear shot– and hurled him away from her.

He crashed into the other man, very nearly taking them both off their feet, and Mion had snapped her stolen gun up on reflex, stock braced against her shoulder, as the other man tried to take aim-

Luck. It was just some damn freaky good luck that she'd managed to hit both of them at once, and then bolt into the undergrowth before the chattering radio or the distant shouts could catch up with her.

Mion dry-heaved at the thought, but she kept her hand clamped over her mouth, and she tried to keep her cool.

She was sheltering at the bottom of the river gulch now, trying to think. She had her school satchel, the handbell, and a stolen Heckler & Kock MP5SD3 –she'd been right about the model series– with about two-thirds of its box magazine full. She also had her model airsoft gun, which wouldn't do anything but look real and hit people with lead pellets, so it had limited usefulness.

She was probably being tailed, but these people clearly didn't know the mountains as well as she did –although they did know them much better than any outsiders, and that was a thought to later unpack– and she could probably afford a moment to just breathe and… swallow her nausea.

Mion had never knowingly or willingly participated in a death before, much less killed someone herself. She knew it was an open possibility for years, due to her position and all, but knowing and doing, as it turned out, were vastly different beasts.

Two of them.

She shuddered, and then squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, lowering her hand. Two people were probably dead, but a lot more than them were dead, and she needed to keep moving if she wanted to make something of that.

Mion paused only a moment to kneel down at the riverbank and splash water over her face, before moving on.

If she wanted to be able to call for help, she'd have to go back to the village. Not because she believed the landline was up –it almost certainly wasn't– but because she needed a pair of wheels, fast. The searcher's dragnet would spread wider by the moment, and since they couldn't have teleported into the village, she'd need a vehicle to outpace it.

Submachine gun on one hip and satchel on the other, Mion worked her way through the rocky hillsides and steep forest around the village, aiming for Rena's house. Rika-chan was –even if she hadn't been found like that, she probably would've been in the group at the shrine, and Keiichi…

Mion swallowed thickly.

Before he… before Irie was gone, he'd said that it had just been stress and fever brought on by worrying over Satoko and her damn uncle, but Keiichi hadn't been acting right since the festival. Still, he was in the clinic now, so he should be fine for the foreseeable future. Even yakuza didn't shoot up medical facilities; word got around, and sooner or later nobody would be there to treat your injuries.

So, Rena's house it was.

Mion opted for speed rather than secrecy as she made her way over the incredibly rough terrain of the mountains around Hinamizawa, but she started doing more to hide her trail when she started circling back around to where Rena's house was. She didn't want to lead the bastards straight to it, after all.

As she got closer to the village, though, Mion paused.

Something was… off.

Slinging the gun around to the small of her back, she quickly and quietly swarmed up the nearest tree, wedging herself in close to the trunk as she peered through the leaves towards the not-so-distant buildings.

The lights. Nobody's lights were on.

A prickle began at the back of her neck. Something was really wrong.

She couldn't see more without a pair of binoculars at this distance, though, and Mion worried her lip for a moment, considering. Moving in closer didn't seem like a good idea, especially considering how it'd turned out last time, but she couldn't afford to circle the area forever. Sooner or later, the assassins would come across her trail and track her down. She was outnumbered several dozen to one, and anyone who got the jump on Batcha wasn't going to consider Mion much of an obstacle.

Hmm.

There were the escape tunnels, a secret known only to the inner circles of her family. She could go down and grab Rena, because she couldn't leave her friends in this weirdness alone, and the two of them could book it out of the mountains and into Okinomiya. She had relatives there, she could make that work. Yeah. Find out what the fuck was going on, then mount a counterattack.

She slid down out of the tree and kept moving.

~*~

Rena's house was locked, but Mion fished through the pile of "treasures" in the backyard and found a bit of broken wire basket she could use for a lock pick. She ended up having to shoulder-check the door in anyway, but at least she'd been mostly neat about things.

The house was quiet. She wasn't even sure if the power was on.

"Rena?" Mion called softly, moving along the hallway by memory with one hand trailing against the wall. She kept the machine gun tucked in the crook of her other arm, ready but following trigger discipline. "Hey, you here?"

Her eyes had long since adjusted to the dark, and when she slid the door to Rena's bedroom aside, Mion could easily tell that it was empty. Rena's blanket was tossed aside, and her futon was a little rumpled, but otherwise her room seemed normal; no sign of a struggle, and Rena would have struggled if she'd been taken unwillingly.

Mion stared at the futon for a few seconds, her mind feeling as blank as the empty space. The hell was she supposed to do now? What was going on?

Not really willing to believe she'd find anything but knowing she still had to check, Mion shook her head and moved off down the hall, calling "Mr. Ryugu? It's Sonozaki."

No response, and when she checked his bedroom and his office, there was nobody there. She stood there for a few minutes in front of his desk, her brow furrowed in thought.

Silently, Mion crept back to the kitchen, and when she opened the fridge door, she nodded glumly to herself. There was no gust of cold air or flicker of light inside; the power had been cut.

Pulling out a water bottle, Mion unscrewed the top and drank, her eyes still eerily blank. When she'd refreshed the thirst born out of crawling through the mountain forests for over three hours, she screwed the top back on and stuffed it in her satchel.

Methodically, Mion took out the bento Rena had packed for tomorrow's lunch and wedged it into her bag alongside the bundled hoodie and water bottle. She then went to the drawers and fished through them until she found the first-aid kit, and pulled that out, too. Lastly, she went to the hall closet and raided a high-power flashlight; one of the heavy D-cell ones with a baton-like grip.

Food, clean drink, first-aid, light source, weapon(s). Still moving on autopilot, Mion nodded vaguely to herself and slipped out of the house.

She looked around cautiously when she hit the street, but everything was still quiet. Moving across the yard, she went to the neighbor's front door and bent to jimmy it open with her wire tool. Her progress through this house was a lot swifter; not calling for anyone, but simply walking through all the rooms checking for clues.

Empty.

She checked four other houses on both sides of the street before returning to the Ryugu household, pausing in the shadow of Rena's trashbins and thinking hard. No Rena, no Mr. Ryugu, just blank walls and Rena's treasures. Their car was still in the driveway, and if they'd run from something, it'd be by car, right? If not… if every house in the village was as empty as this street…

Something was up. Something, potentially, even bigger than an assassination strike on the Sonozaki family.

Following her memory of the village emergency procedures, everyone would have gathered at a number of key points for ease of protection and evacuation. The closest one to Rena's house was the branch school.

Don't fix what's not broken, as the saying went, and if the alleged gas eruption had done such a good job of clumping the village leaders up to be killed –there'd been only a few bodies, but there was no way in hell Batcha and the others wouldn't be kicking up a storm after hearing a damn firing squad out front, and the interior of the meeting hall had been silent– then telling the rest of the village to evacuate in the same manner would be an excellent way of…

…of what, exactly? Getting them out of the way? Or…

Mion tried not to think about it.

She had supplies; she needed to find her friends, what… what few of them that remained. She didn't want to think about Rika and Keiichi right now.

Mion nodded to herself and set out for the school, circling back into the welcome shelter of the trees on the way. It'd been hours since she stumbled at a blind run away from those two dead men, but she hadn't seen anybody since. That was nothing but good as far as pursuit was concerned, but she wasn't seeing a single one of her two thousand fellow villagers, and that gave Mion the heebie-jeebies.

Something was majorly up.

The village was dead silent as she circled around it, but about midway through her journey to the school, she began hearing a lot of truck engines moving about in the distance. Huh. Someone leaving, or coming in? Or both? An exchange of the guard…?

The trucks were parked in front of the school when she came to it, sidling her way through the trees, but they looked government-standard. Mion knew a thing or two about that, thanks to her days in the riots.

They looked military-standard, and a strange, nebulous worry began to cuddle in her gut. What was going on?

She slunk carefully around the periphery, staying out of the range of the lamps and headlights, trying to get close enough to listen in on what was happening. These men seemed a lot less subdued than the ones up by the shrine, and they wore a different uniform. These men also wore gas masks, although that wasn't enough to make her trust them. The men who had gathered her family and the others wore the masks too, at least at first.

Glancing up at the sky, Mion estimated that it was close to around two or three in the morning. Safely crouched some five hundred yards out, it was still too dark for her to see what was going on in the schoolyard; the glare of the headlights were dazzling.

Mion was again faced with a difficult decision. Her friends were, presumably, in there somewhere, but she also had a clear shot to the Sonozaki estate; focus was clearly around the various evacuation buildings, and the thought she was trying very hard not to think was that if her building had been subjected to a complete massacre, then-

No. Don't think about it.

The point was, there was a good chance that rescue wasn't viable. For various reasons. So which risk should she take –getting herself caught on a fool's errand, or heartlessly abandoning her friends to some unknown doom?

If Mion had been making the decision for herself, she wouldn't have hesitated a second; fool's errand all the damn way. She hadn't gone through all this just to leave her friends behind at the finish line.

But the thing was, she was no longer entirely certain she was going through this just for herself. Strictly spinning this out as a thought exercise, it was, hypothetically –just to follow the patterns– possible to assume that since her family and the other village leaders had been neatly decoyed and killed by this whole gas eruption story, the rest of the village had been likewise tricked.

Logically speaking, since the people around the shrine meeting hall had been well-equipped and professionally trained, there was probably some kind of larger group responsible. If the pattern of lure villagers to evac spot with bogus story and kill them there held true, then Mion might be the only survivor in Hinamizawa. Which meant –again, just spinning out theories here, this kind of extermination program didn't just happen in modern Japan– that she had a duty, responsibility, and obligation to survive and spread the news.

So.

Mion was kinda split, here.

She thought, chewing on her lip, for a good five minutes, before her resolve finally strengthened. She could try to sneak in closer and get some real information for her relatives in Okinomiya to chew on, some valuable stuff that was more coherent than everyone died and there were probably (maybe?) soldiers around, and then book it out of here for the tunnel path. If that brought her close enough to scout out what had happened to her friends, well, that was just happy coincidence.

Mion shook herself into a more focused attitude, and then set out.

#Higurashi Month #Higurashi Month 2024 #Higurashi no Naku Koro ni #Higurashi When They Cry #When They Cry

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