Disclaimer: I do not own Yami no Matsuei
Side Note #1: Something that I haven't been able to get out of my head, and something to work on when I'm not busy with Southeast of Eden. Couples are in no particular order and are discussed as they come to me.
Side Note #2: "Elencho" is the Greek word for "control". I've concluded that "Elenchophilia" is basically one who desires control. If you can correct my medical terminology, please do.
Preface:
"Tired lovers, rest your heads
Here upon the pillows sweet
One for your brow, one for your feet,
And on this humble food be fed;
And then drink you of the holy wine."
So spoke the voice of the dead.
They dreamed of what was left unsaid;
They mourned the hollow loss of time;
And finally the two were wise,
And finally were lifted up,
And tasted joy, drank its cup
And drained the dregs of paradise.
- Unknown
Elenchophilia
Fukiya Yuma had a penchant for being in control. As a child she had her widowed father, too mournful for his wife and too devoted to his daughter to even think of remarrying, wrapped around her finger. She lived as the woman of the house. She ordered the living room, set up the bathroom just so, and what she cooked, her father ate, whether it was burned or not. He adored her, and she could coax him into doing anything she wanted.
School was much the same. Her teachers described her as "spoiled but not selfish" in her interactions with the other children. She expected the best of toys, pencils, seats, what have you, but more often than not she gave them to one of her friends while she took the second best of whatever it was. There was a certain incorrigible pushiness about her that defied argument.
Her love life was no different. Unafraid of repercussions, she pursued her natural inclination to keep female company throughout her teen years. Her adoring father was the only man in her life.
Torii Saya couldn't be called a girlfriend, as she wasn't. Her heart belonged to another. But she could be called a best friend. In fact, the "best" of what Yuma demanded and received form her peers was most often handed directly over to Saya. And she could be called easily controlled.
Yuma's rival in middle school once called her on it, saying she didn't have a best friend so much as a pet puppy. Yuma, of course, found this laughably absurd. It wasn't that Saya was brainless, it was just that she was so easy. Easy to understand. Easy to make smile, easy to make laugh, easy to convince that whatever scheme Yuma dreamed up was plausible and a good idea. Easy to make upset, and just as easy to cheer up. Saya was something Yuma understood.
So it came as quite a shock to Yuma when Saya disappeared one day. They were in the beginning of their first year of High School and Yuma had never known Saya to skip before. After returning home to grumble about it to her father, she stomped upstairs and dialed Saya's number.
"Hello?"
Yuma blinked at the somewhat desperate tone of Saya's voice. "Hey, it's me, Yuma."
"Yuma! Hey!"
"You sound affected, angel-wings. Why weren't you in school?"
"Oh, I didn't feel well."
"Why, what's wrong?"
"Shinichi dumped me."
"Good," Yuma said. "I never liked him. He was rude and uncivilized and he didn't even look good in a dress."
"I love him."
"No you don't, Saya. You're 15."
"Yes I do, Yuma. You're 15, too."
Yuma briefly wondered why that statement had any relevance. The crush on Saya she had nursed since Middle School had been kept a complete secret from the girl, Yuma had made sure of that. It was her personal policy never to encroach upon someone who was already spoken for, even if it was an impossibly effeminate man who was just begging to be dressed in drag, or an impossibly adorable best friend she had grown up with.
"Why'd he break up with you?" Yuma asked, quickly recovering.
"He said that I was…spending too much time with you."
"What, did he call you a dyke?" Yuma took Saya's silence for an affirmation. "Well, he was a stupid -sshole, anyway."
"Don't say that."
"Why shouldn't I? He called me a dyke, too."
"Yuma, please…"
"Ugh, Saya, you're too nice," Yuma teased with a roll of her eyes. She briefly considered telling Saya about her feelings for her, but decided that it was way too soon for the sensitive girl.
The next day Yuma called Saya again, asking her to come over.
"No, thanks."
That annoyed Yuma. Saya usually jumped at the offer to stay over like a dog jumped on a bone. After hanging up the phone, Yuma marched downstairs, tugged on her coat, and stormed off to Saya's house. Saya's parents, knowing her reputation, were reluctant to let Yuma stay in the house, so Yuma went directly to Saya's bedroom window and smacked her fist against it until Saya pulled open her blinds and then the actual window. Yuma blinked, taken aback at the red of Saya's cheek.
"What happened to your face?" she asked, pointing.
"I talked to him today."
"And he hit you?" Yuma asked, her own face red, but with angered blood. She had half a mind—scratch that, a full mind to go and flush his head down a toilet.
"Don't do anything, Yuma," Saya importuned.
"You are absolutely nuts, Saya! He hit you! You should strangle him!"
"You shouldn't get in trouble because of me."
Yuma tried in vain to convince Saya to consent to a revenge trip, eventually storming home. Well, she left on civil terms with Saya—she could never bring herself to get mad at the girl, no matter how wishy-washy she could be sometimes, but she did her fair share of foot-stomping on the way home.
"Yuma-chan," her father said when she relayed this to him. "There are just some things you can't control."
And he would look at her with those sad eyes and she wound falter under them, before ordering him to stop, the hospital wasn't necessary, and where was her medication?
And he gave it to her, saying she looked so much like her mother and how could the universe be so cruel as to try and take his little girl away the same way they took her mother?
And Yuma told him to stop worrying; a little pneumonia was nothing to fret over. She wouldn't leave him like Mother left. She knew it. She promised it.
A few days later Saya's mother called. Knowing that the Torii family was wary of her "gayness" as Saya's little brother had termed it, Yuma had an awful feeling in her stomach. Saya was well-beloved of her family, and they would call her closest friend if something serious had happened.
"She's not eating," Saya's mother told her, and those 3 words kept ricocheting across Yuma's mind as she again ventured to the Torii household. This time, Saya met her on the porch.
"I'm just not hungry," Saya said, smiling weakly at Yuma.
"Did you talk to Shinichi again?" Yuma demanded.
"Yes."
"And let me guess, he said you were a disgusting lesbian again?"
"That's not the reason he broke up with me."
"Then what is?"
"Because I'm sad and tired all the time."
Yuma scowled, and then smiled. "Of course, and he notices that you're only happy when I'm around. No wonder he thinks you're mine."
Saya smiled weakly.
"We're going to send her to a doctor," Saya's mother informed Yuma when she called Saya back into the house. "It's not right for her to be like this."
Yuma went home and took her medication.
So Saya disappeared for a few days, and Yuma waited and worried and coughed for a few days. Her worry was getting to her. She felt feverish. Her head hurt. Her neck hurt. Sunlight bothered her. Where was her medication?
Saya's family called the Fukiya household again. "They diagnosed her with depression," was her mother's tearful message. "Saya said she's been feeling sad for a long time. They said that breaking up with Shinichi only agitated it. They're leaving her at the hospital for observation. And she still won't eat."
Yuma promised to visit the afflicted girl right away. But when the phone was nestled safely back in its cradle her throat closed up. To cough was painful and she crumpled, emptying her stomach on the tiles of the floor, waiting and hacking for what seemed like hours for her father to come into the room and then rush her to the hospital.
"Fukiya-san, the antibiotics assigned to her haven't been powerful enough. She's developed Streptococcus pneumoniae."
"You can just up the antibiotics, can't you?" Yuma demanded from the bed, not content with being talked about.
"There's more to it, Yuma-san," her doctor said, addressing her. "Because of that, your body has been overdeveloping cytokines into a cytokine storm."
"What does that entail?" Yuma's father asked.
"It means that she's developed sepsis. It means that her heart, liver, and kidney are now at risk, as well."
"Oh, no…"
"Fukiya-san, she's also developed meningitis due to the Streptococcus. We can prescribe the proper antibiotics and chemotherapy, and she needs to stay in the ICU. Fukiya-san…she's dying."
Yuma hated every moment in the hospital. Not just the chemotherapy, not just when her IV bag was refilled, not just when she forced down pills with increasing difficulty. When her father came in and looked at her with haunted eyes, and when he prayed for the spirit of her mother to be her guide in death. When she thought about Saya, under treatment in some other part of the hospital, losing weight and interest in life.
It tore at her that she couldn't get up and go to Saya and force food down her throat. She began penning a letter to Saya, telling her to start eating and come visit her and please get well. Saya would get it before Yuma died.
"It's such a shame," a nurse said, outside Yuma's open door. "That poor Torii girl."
"It's always sad when the young ones give up. She was just starting to make a recovery."
"What halted the progress?"
"Apparently she heard the doctors discussing a friend of hers who's here. Down with streptococcus and meningitis."
"That's lethal!"
"If her friend was going to die, she didn't want to stay alive."
"You can't buy loyalty like that."
Yuma looked at the piece of paper she had just scratched the last four words of her letter on.
PS I love you.
After that Yuma's condition grew worse.
"Now, don't cry, Daddy," Yuma said one night two weeks after news of Saya's death. "I'm going to be all right."
"My little girl…my baby girl…"
"You are going to find another wife and have dozens of little girls," Yuma said. "I absolutely forbid you to do otherwise."
Yuma drew a ragged breath and her father burst into tears.
"Stop it. Stop crying, Daddy!"
Her IV was taken down and her father sobbed brokenly.
Yuma liked Meifu. It was pretty and pink, two of her favorite non-sentient things. The weather was nice and so were the people, especially Tsuzuki. When she had first arrived he had offered to show her around and get her acquainted with the afterworld.
She confided in Tsuzuki that she wasn't used to being the one led around, and she did not like it. She had died from something out of her control and that bothered her.
"A controlled death isn't any more pleasant," Tsuzuki had informed her. Yuma noticed that he was sad when he told her this and she immediately produced enough change to let him go buy a muffin. His face lit up at the thought of food and Yuma was reminded of Saya, so easy to make happy before her depression and the breakup with Shinichi.
"Tsuzuki, do you know of anyone in Meifu named Torii Saya?"
And then Yuma was in Hokkaido, outside a small cottage, and knocking on the door with a confident smile on her face. Saya opened the door slowly.
"Yuma?"
"That's me."
"I knew you were in love with me," Saya told her once, some weeks after Yuma had been assigned to be her partner.
This shocked Yuma. "But...I made sure you never knew!"
"You can't control my intuition, darling."
"Why did you never say anything?"
"I didn't want you to be sadded with a girlfriend suffering from depression. Not when you were ill."
"You knew I was sick?"
"Like I said, you can't control my intuition, Yuma."
"And...and you loved me, too?"
"Yes, I did."
Yuma leaned over and kissed Saya. And Yuma saw with satisfaction that she could still make Saya smile.