#to not remotely fawn over her and always look like she was merely tolerating being at them?

[paradife-loft]

Coronabeth "please please please pleeeeeaaaase collar me 🥺" Tridentarius

[yourdearhart]

The Price Tag | Author’s notes

Seven million yen.

Seven million yen.

               For seven million yen, Louis’ father had bought him from a Black Market livestock pen. He kept turning the figure over in his mind, looking at it from every angle his mind could devise. That was what his life was worth, what he was worth: seven million yen. Three years ago, his father had bought him for seven million yen, and taken him home to his new life. His only life—what he had before could not be counted: miserable and wretched, with its sole purpose being his inevitable death. This purchase price, he had gathered, was unique to him—it was not something he had in common with other children, outside the ones he had lived with. It was unusual.

               He began to ask the nanny about the price of things. How much had his father paid for that car? What were the silverware worth? What had she given the cashier for the new clothes she’d bought for him? He could speak well enough to get these questions across now, although his speech was still slow and stilted, and he had to think a great deal about what he wanted to say before he marshaled the words in order to get them out properly. Sometimes, it was too exhausting to do it properly, and with Mara he would slip into something more casual and far less grammatically correct, but she had become talented at deciphering his meaning even then.

               As they sat on the couch, watching TV—which had taken no time at all to become Louis’ favorite pastime (though, to the perpetual chagrin of Mara, he eschewed cartoons, in whose childish, low-stakes foibles he could find no entertainment, and continually sought out things well above his age range)—he asked her what his father had paid for it.

               “I don’t know,” she replied with a small shrug. “This was here when I got here.”

               “Yuta? Marion?”

               “I don’t know if they know. Probably not,” she said. “Do you want me to look it up for you? Do you want me to find out the price?” Louis had been an odd fawn from the beginning, but if this harmless game of checking on the price of things was his latest quirk, she saw no harm in entertaining it. He nodded eagerly at the offer, and she took out her phone to take a look at similar TVs of the same brand. Louis’ attention abandoned the TV to watch Mara until she came up with an estimate. “It looks like—” Assuming Oguma-sama had picked the TV no more than a few years before Louis’ arrival, “—it was about eight million yen.”

               Louis stared, then looked back at the TV. Eight million yen. The thing with which he spent so much time amusing himself; the thing which was his window into so much of the rest of the world; the thing which pleased him most in the house had cost his father more than he had. In a most curious sense, it was betrayal that stabbed through his chest, as if the TV itself had done him a wrong.

               His hand curled up around the remote until the grooves of the battery cover dug into his fingers, and then he rose and hurled it at the wall with as much force as his skinny arm could muster. It burst apart, batteries flying out. He had meant to throw it at the TV, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to damage something so important to him, and he felt sure his father would not buy him another if he broke it. Perhaps if he broke something worth more than he was, Mara and his father would take him back to the livestock pen (this was not a genuine fear anymore, but he supposed the possibility always existed).

               “Louis!” It was something of a marvel to him that he could still shock Mara in this way, although it was only brief now. Right away she was on her feet, striding over to shut the TV off manually. “What has gotten into you now?” she asked. “You don’t get to break things like that; you have to use your words.”

               On his feet, Louis quivered, his breathing coming too quickly for such a tiny exertion. How could he explain to her, about the price? His father had sworn him to secrecy about the circumstances of his entry into the house, and even if he hadn’t, Louis simply did not have the words to spell it out. What words he did have were not only inadequate, they fled from his mind in the throes of his emotion and the harder he chased them the faster they ran, until he was left with nothing but the stunted, stupid grunting he had used to speak with the other livestock children.

               His hands curled into tight fists and his teeth ground together as he frantically reached after his hours and hours and hours of speech therapy, trying to put together something to explain himself.

               “Louis,” Mara said, gentling her tone. “Come on. Tell me what’s wrong; use your words.”

               Mara, who tolerated his fits of temper and explosions of frustration that, to anyone else, were mere temper tantrums. Mara, who had told him time and time again that she was not his mother, and yet seemed to fill all the appropriate roles. Mara, who believed that he could use his words, and maybe someday would realize all she had was a dumb fawn more useless even than other children.

               Louis’ eyes and throat burned, but he refused to cry. The keepers at the pen had no tolerance for it, and his father was not much impressed either. To cry over something so silly…no, he wouldn’t do that.

               “I…” What did it matter, about the seven million yen anyway? His father had rescued him; was that not all that was important? Because of Oguma, Louis was going to live. Because of Oguma, he could speak at all. His father had given him a voice—it wasn’t his fault Louis failed to use it. His father, who had bought him to raise as his own son, who had plans for him, who believed he was worth seven million yen. And here he was breaking things like a fitful child and acting an idiot about it. “I can’t!” he burst out at last, trembling like a branch in a storm. He lifted his glassy eyes to Mara’s, his jaw working as he tried to come up with something more, tried to use his words, and came up dry. “I can’t!”

               Louis lowered his head, waiting for the scolding, or the simple, quiet sigh of disappointment. It had been some time since Louis’ last fit over his inability to express himself, but it felt like they always wound up back there in the end. Sometimes, it was as if Oguma had just come too late, and Louis could not be salvaged. But it wasn’t fair! He worked so hard! He did everything his tutor asked of him, and more! And yet he still could not communicate as well even as children years younger than himself. Sometimes, he was relieved his father kept him schooled at home, so he did not have to open his mouth around other children, and let them know what an ignorant fool he sounded like (and he knew they thought that; he wasn’t a moron, and he knew when the children at the park or the playground or the pool were laughing at him).

               Instead of scolding, or sighing, Mara came and knelt in front of the shaking fawn, and pulled him into a hug.

               “It’s okay, Louis,” she said. “It’s okay.” With a soft whimper, Louis buried his face in Mara’s shoulder. “Take a deep breath, alright? Take your time.” Take a breath was one of Mara’s frequent pieces of advice, and one of the earliest he had come to understand, so it was almost by reflex he took a deep, shuddering breath at her direction, and felt his body start to relax again. She patted his back and sat back on her heels. “But you can’t break things when you’re upset, Louis. You know that. We’ve talked about that. No breaking things. That’s not okay.”

               Louis shuffled his feet and stared at the floor. Be good, he thought. I can be good, for Mara. Never again would he be good for his jailers, just to stay out of trouble, but for Mara and his father, he would be good to earn their praise, to please them.

               “I’m sorry,” he said.

               “I know. I forgive you. Next time, if you can’t use your words, what will you do?”

               “Take a breath.”

               “Good. You will have to tell your father about this, you know.”

Louis cringed. His father had saved his life, and Louis repaid it by smashing things in a fit. Perhaps his father wished he’d bought #5 instead.

“It will be alright. Your father will forgive you too. But you do have to tell him.” Louis sighed quietly through his nose, and nodded. “Do you want to draw something?” Louis’ eyes flicked up to Mara’s without lifting his head, and he gave another quick nod. “Okay. Go clean that up, and I’ll get the crayons.” She gestured to the remnants of the remote as she got to her feet.

               Later, when he told his father it was broken because he had stepped on it by mistake, Mara did not correct him.