Tabula Rasa

A drabble that came to me earlier this week about a premise I'm not sure I've actually seen done yet in the LoveSick/Yandere Simulator fan fic writing community. You can consider its premise a slight AU given what we've seen thus far about the game's back story. Happy (early) Father's Day.

Mr. Aishi doesn't have an official name in canon yet, but I decided to go with Junichi as, based on an entry on Behind the Name, it's a combination of the characters for 'obey/submit,' 'pure,' and 'one.'

"…I tried, please believe me.
I'm doing the best that I can.
I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through,
I'm ashamed of the person I am."
- Joy Division, "Isolation" (1980)

The house feels surprisingly still for the middle of the day.

It's not a feeling that Junichi Aishi – no, he has to remind himself, when she isn't home he's Junichi Fukunaga once more – is used to. Every moment of every day and in every second of every minute in each hour, there is a pair of eyes on him. It's a kind of tension that would be hard to describe if he could ever find the courage within him to tell his story to someone, anyone, who might listen. He thinks it might be the same sort of pregnant pause that soldiers must feel when they know that an enemy awaits them on the battlefield but no shooting has begun yet. The only difference between those men and himself is that despite the horrific cost they will face there is always an end for them though whether in death's embrace or the shell-shocked aftermath of victory it doesn't matter. For Junichi there are only brief moments he can claim are truly his own and it's been that way ever since he moved in with her.

'Trapped,' he corrects himself bitterly. 'No need to let the Stockholm syndrome slip in that much.'

Today is one of those days. She had gone out to shop at the open air market in Buraza to fetch them pork cutlets for dinner tonight, among other things, about an hour ago now and he will have to work quickly if he's to succeed in his plan. He tries not to think of the empty smile that ghosted her face as she told him she'd be back as soon as she could, normally hollow eyes lighting up to give the impression of human affection, but unable to mimic it if one were paying enough attention. She's grown more trusting of him now since the birth of the monster. Perhaps she thinks that by having something that is theirs he won't dare try what he's been planning ever since they returned home from the hospital.

She needs to be wrong just once.

The monster's room isn't far away from theirs; it's right across the hall, in fact. His fingers steady themselves on the smooth surface of the sliding door as Junichi closes his eyes. What he is about to do is only right and if there was anyone to watch he's sure that no one would blame him. All he's been through at her tender mercies… it's not a fate he would wish on his worst enemy. She will cry, approximating real tears, but he knows that she'll never make the connection between the monster's slaying and his whereabouts today. Try as she might he'll find ways to prevent her from delivering any more hell spawn into the world. Perhaps Junichi will try to set up an appointment for a vasectomy in the future. He'll have to be careful of course. Baby fever is real, he knows, and sure to be at a pitch when it's compounded by grief.

He draws back the door and steps into the room. It's surprisingly pleasant, if he does say so himself. Junichi had even told her that it was his responsibility as the male half of an expecting couple to take the initiative to prepare it. She had deferred to him as usual as he'd picked out the wallpaper covered in swirling pastels, the milky white chairs and changing station, and even the handsome oak crib in the center whose polished handles gleamed just so when the sunlight streamed in. It was downright picturesque. If circumstances were different, Junichi might have even been proud of himself for setting it all up.

Junichi pushes himself forward. His window of opportunity gets smaller and smaller with each passing second he knows and he can't afford to back out now. Nor can he think much about the implications of his decision either as any self-reflection would surely stop him in his tracks. He has no illusions that what he is going to do is fundamentally wrong. The monster's nature hasn't surfaced yet but it will in time. The shell it bears is no excuse for all the misery it can unleash if he doesn't nip it in the bud now when he has the chance. Yet none of that reassurance seems to matter as he steps through the threshold and into its lair. His heart which had moments ago been as steady and calm as he could manage is doing overtime as he feels adrenaline begin to course through his veins.

Making his way to the would-be bed he sees it there lying in wait for him, totally unaware and prone. If he were to allow sentimentality to creep into this he might even go so far as to say that his intended victim is cute. Sitting there in a pink jinbei, the monster's chest slowly rises and falls, head resting gently against a sizable plush tanuki which his parents had dropped off the last time they'd visited during Golden Week. He tries not to pay attention to its rosy, chubby cheeks or a nose that reminds him oh so much of photos he'd seen of his grandmother. There can be no attachment between them; not now, not ever. But more than that Junichi tries to avoid its dark gray hair, thin as it is on its tiny head, and lips that even in sleep have formed a distinctive pout. If nothing else it steels his resolve to see this through to the end. Those things are hers, not his.

He can remember the day she was conceived as clearly as what he'd had for lunch the other day at the Saikou corporate headquarters. It had been a Saturday when he'd been awoken by a pair of needy hands and met with a ravenous gaze on opening his eyes. She did this at times, sometimes with his permission, and sometimes without. On her better days she would ask him what he wanted to do in their bedroom, even letting him decline her advances if she felt magnanimous enough on rare occasions and Junichi hates how good she feels to be inside of and how wonderful her tongue manages to be against his most sensitive areas. Other days there is no choice in the matter. She would pin him to the mattress and suddenly he would be a scared high school student tied to an ancient creaking chair in the basement (a place he can't go to now without breaking into a cold sweat), eyes shrunk to pinpricks and his breathing haggard as she straddled him, planting sloppy kisses all over him, over and over and over, "Tell me you love me, darling…", "I don't even know who you–"

The audible cracking of his knuckles brings him out of his stupor and Junichi releases a grip on the crib's railing he didn't even know he'd had.

He slowly reaches for one of the unused pillows by the creature's head, removing it with all the skill of an experienced Jenga player. Junichi barely trusts himself enough to breathe at this point for fear of waking his target. It's a quiet thing – on its best days he can even forget that it sits in this place at all until she asks him to check on it. Aside from the occasional murmur of discomfort to signal it needs a diaper change or to be fed Junichi might even go so far as to say it's a baby that most parents could only dream of having. All of the supposed long nights that plague young couples haven't hit him yet and he expects they never will. But he knows that it's all an act, a ruse meant to fool him and the world from its instinctual nature. He knows firsthand what it will be like when its kind grows up. He doesn't know how big her family is. Junichi doesn't even know if she has siblings, but it doesn't matter. Even if his act of rebellion will be known only to him and him alone, he at least fought against the fate he's long since acquiesced to with a whimper every night when she wraps her arms around his midsection like a vice as they fall asleep.

Junichi weighs the small object in his hands for a moment, feeling its cottony softness. He'll be as gentle as he can with it as he pushes it down onto its face; he knows it won't cry. 'Sudden infant death syndrome, I'm afraid,' says the imaginary doctor in his mind. 'We don't know the reasons for why they go. Sometimes… accidents like this just happen.' Oh, he'll weep alongside her then for appearances, but it'll all be a show. She brought it into this world. Junichi's practically doing the world a favor by ridding it of the vermin before him. But as he looks quickly away from the murder weapon and back to his target he realizes his mistake. He should've been quicker to do the deed.

Its eyes have begun to flutter and for a moment Junichi forgets his plan, wanting more than anything to slam the object in his hands into its face and push down as hard as he can. He's so close and there's no guarantee he'll get an opportunity like this for a long, long time and by that point an excuse might not be so easy. The opportunity literally lying in front of him is slipping out of his grasp. His hands hover in place over the monster's head as he lowers the offending object. 'Don't look,' he thinks as he tries to steady nerves which have begun to light themselves in panic over this latest setback. 'If you do that, you'll never be able to go through with it. You're no murderer. You're not her.'

This is it.

Do or die.

He can't feel guilty for destroying something whose only purpose is to perpetuate a cycle of abuse that is decades, if not centuries, old. What he's doing is only right. Karma be damned, if he has to return in penance as some lower lifeform, he will. What Junichi is about to do is nothing but a mercy to the unsuspecting men beyond this house's walls. The blood shared between them is as meaningless as the so-called marriage he's been forced into. Junichi is totally and utterly alone in this hell. If she will never let him go then this might very well be the last act of defiance he can muster and, by all the gods in heaven, he will have it.

If Junichi were a more observant man, however, he might have been able to avoid many things.

He might have avoided her or at least able to incriminate her with something if he'd paid more attention to the girls who had slowly left or disappeared from Akademi one by one after they seemed to show some interest in him. He might have avoided her wolf in sheep's clothing act about being too frightened to walk home with a murderer on the loose. Junichi might have avoided the chloroform rag that she'd brought along to use once they were navigating through one of Buraza's alleyways. If he'd pulled out a little sooner he might not even have to destroy his innocence like he is attempting to at this very moment.

But most importantly, Junichi might have avoided taking a minute too long to do the deed.

His breath hitches in his throat as he meets the gaze of a pair of slate gray eyes staring up at him from the crib solemnly. No. No. This can't be happening. It isn't fair. All this time, trying to steel his nerves just right to do what he's had to build himself up to for months ever since he found out she was pregnant… it's slipped away from him. The pillow falls from his hands and bounces onto the soft bedding of the crib with a quiet plop. He can't do this. Not now, not after making eye contact with it. A foolish part of Junichi doesn't want the last thing for it to see being a father who doesn't want it but instead whatever pleasant dreams are dancing through its head. It's why he hasn't downed an entire bottle's worth of sleeping pills yet himself.

There's nothing that fills him with warmth left in him.

He collapses to his knees, his hands sliding down the bars of its cage. Junichi wants so many things in this moment. He wants to scream, cry, run away and never look back from this place (as pointless as he knows that endeavor to be), to be the man in the photographs that litter his prison whose smile is genuine and not part of a carefully constructed mask, perhaps even more so than hers is, and to feel some sort of remorse for having contemplated for so long taking a child's life. Instead Junichi feels the same deadened feeling he has felt ever since he came to live here sink in once more.

Seconds turn into what Junichi is sure are minutes as he sits there, kneeling before his former target, shaking the bars of the crib as if he were the infant instead. It was foolish to think that he could ever hope to take control of his situation. She was right: there was nothing left for him outside and certainly no reason to do anything other than follow her whims. All he had to do was give up, to stop hoping that there would be a light at the end of the tunnel, and he would be free at last. Junichi had heard her casually mention before in passing that her father had been a man whose mind had never recovered whatever trauma it'd suffered when her mother had broken him. He is both empathetic and envious at the same time towards a complete stranger.

Lost in his own despair, Junichi almost doesn't notice the touch suddenly present against his left hand until he stops shuddering. But when at last he feels he's cried as many tears as he's able he finally turns towards the source of the sensation that has been resting against him. He's tried to psyche himself up today for a litany of fake emotions: shock, grief, even anger, but surprise is not one of them and more so when that the feeling is genuine. In the time he has taken to wallow in his own self-pity his target has taken upon itself the duty of moving one of its small hands out to him, tiny fingers splayed against him as if it can somehow bless him and free him of his would-be sin, its expression unwavering in how calm it is.

It takes all of Junichi's willpower to meet its – her – eyes and he finds that as soon as he does he wants to look away in shame. She had done nothing to him; none of this had been her fault. In a war against someone who seemed remorseless to the depths in which she'd sink to keep her happiness, he'd sunk down too. Bile begins to rise in the back of Junichi's throat as he tries desperately to mentally bargain with his daughter for forgiveness.

Daughter.

It's the first time he's ever ascribed that term to her. Oh, the hospital had told him that's what she was, her mother told him that with a gleeful expression every single morning, but it was something he'd avoided altogether. It had been a foul word, a curse that was so awful he felt it shouldn't pass from his lips. But now it seemed appropriate to him. In her own way, she was just as much a victim of circumstance as Junichi was.

Picking himself up Junichi stares down at her. Features that had once seemed so alien, cruel that he could barely stomach them, no longer inspire that same sense of revulsion that they once had. Hesitating a moment, he reaches his arms down to pick up the girl, resting her head against the crook of his arm as he'd seen his aunt and uncle do countless times to his cousins when he was younger, her small body tucked close to his chest as he practically collapses onto the wicker chair next to her bed.

'Do all things begin in innocence?'

It's a question that floats to the surface of his mind without much prompting. It's hard to imagine at one point that she could be anything but the monster he knows her to be. But there must have been a time when even she was in his daughter's place, defenseless and vulnerable, a tabula rasa waiting to be etched onto by the world's sculptors. His thoughts travel briefly to her father, a living corpse of a man who saw, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt the world but at the same time couldn't. Junichi didn't blame him for retreating into himself. In its own way such a thing must have been like achieving nirvana. Yet had he fought as much as her mother…

It was a dangerous line of thinking, Junichi knew. "Coulda, shoulda, woulda" was the eternal refrain of mankind. He was operating on a theory, perhaps even less than that, and it was something that he had no proof of. Perhaps this whole line of thinking was a sham and nature dictated everything. For her part, his daughter offers no support and no criticism to his reasoning. In the entire time since her departure from her little world, she has been totally silent, as per usual. Absently tugging on the neck of his white polo with his free hand, a nervous habit, a new plan begins to form, a desire for revenge borne out of anger at his failure and to atone for what he's tried to do.

"Your…" he has to steady himself to even the utter word, "…mommy isn't the only one here for you. I am too."

Tears begin to well in the corner of his eyes and he has to fight the urge to give the little girl an impromptu bath.

"I know I haven't… haven't been the best daddy, but I can change."

An understatement. She'll never know just how lucky she was in avoiding what she did. Nor will she ever. It's a secret he intends to take with him to his grave.

"I don't know if you can, but I'll try to help you change too. We can be good together."

Images of his little girl over the years flash before him. Her first day of school, a broken arm from climbing a tree, sitting with other children at lunch, and, though he has to fight his way past his own desire to break into a panic, sitting across from someone and admiring them from afar. If she can't understand what it means to be kind, then he will teach her, help her, so that she understands that she doesn't have to be a monster.

"I…"

It's not a burden he's asked for but one he will undertake for everyone's sake. Leaning forward, Junichi places his lips as gently as he can to her forehead in a kiss.

"I love you, Ayano."

She will be her father's daughter.

He'll make sure of it.