tallulahgs

There was supposed to be a chapter of the Malory Towers Battle Royale up, but due to a combination of my incompetence, my social life and my landlady's policy on the Internet, there isn't. However, next week I would definitely have had to post late, so this is in fact all JUST AS PLANNED. >_> Hopefully I'll get the latest chapter up tomorrow.

Anyway, DN fic.

[Title] Living
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 1293
[Characters/Pairings]Sachiko, Raito, brief mention of Sayu and Soichiro
[Warnings] AU; Raito's been denounced as Kira but not died. Parent-child angst. Written for/crossposted to

dn_contest, prompt "Sachiko".

The walls of the building always glow in the sunlight. As she approaches, the air seems to grow tireder, quieter, and the light on the ground is soft.

The men at the gates and at the doors know her now. She still has to show identification and she still isn't allowed to take her coat or her bag past the third set of doors, but they nod to her and wish her good afternoon. She wishes that they didn't. She wishes that she never saw the same person twice, so that no one can count how many times she's still coming to see him. Or that she were just one of many. Even that wouldn't be so bad. Mothers can find companionship in their children being in the same school or the same club or all attending the same specialist for severe post-traumatic stress disorder. She's prepared to believe the same would work even with this. But she's never seen anyone else visiting here.

(No one has done anything as awful as her son has.)

There are no windows, and the lights are always on. She wonders whether that bothers him. Do they let him go outside? It's all very clean - her shoes squeak a little on the pale blue floor, and the air always smells of polish and disenfectant - and very quiet and the men who guard him don't seem cruel, they are just impassive. But there are no windows.

- he is six years old and he's been sunburnt because he said he'd put the suncream on himself and then, when she trusted him and focused on getting Sayu, whining and wriggling, to submit to having the stuff rubbed onto her, he simply didn't do anything. And now he is lying on his front on his bed, whimpering as she smears aftersun lotion onto the reddened, deadened skin. He's complaining that he hates the sun, as if the incident wasn't his fault at all. She tells him that next time he'll remember -

It hurts. She keeps remembering and it always hurts and she knows that if she continues, finds more memories, she will break herself open and she will cry and cry and never stop. She has done that, once or twice, at night, alone, when Sayu is asleep and no one else can hear. She knows she wants to cry and cry and never stop in public, because she wants to force someone to make all this stop. She's ashamed of the want. She thought she was better than that.

He has more than one room. He has a bedroom, and he has this room, where they meet. She thinks it's where he eats, as well; often there is the faint scent of old meals. It occurs to her that he is never going to have a choice about what he eats again -

- Come on, Sayu, why don't you just try a little? On the side of your plate? Look, Raito's eating it -

No. After a while, she has to stop thinking about anything, stop her mind running around looking for new ways to get itself into trouble and just focus on things like breathing and walking and not bursting into tears.

He is sitting at the table already, waiting for her, and he looks up but his face doesn't change. She wants to believe it's his way of coping, she's almost sure it is his way of coping -

- thirteen years old, and starting middle school, and he's eating breakfast in a new uniform and his face is utterly blank but his hand trembles, just a bit, and he nearly spills juice down his shirt and then snaps at Sayu for making the table wobble -

- but she's terrified, the terror sinking its teeth into her and wrenching, that it isn't, it never was, that really he is a monster, a murderer, and he doesn't feel anything at all.

And she never knew.

But she isn't going to cry, because it irritates him.

Sometimes there is small talk. She makes it, and he nods, and sometimes replies, and sometimes seems to tune her out - he was never that blatantly rude before - and she thinks, she thinks that really, she was always part of the furniture in his eyes. Soichiro was his hero whom he was going to grow up to be like and Sayu was his annoying little sister whom he could sometimes amuse when he could be bothered but she herself was just his mother who fawned over his perfect grades and washed his clothes and cooked his meals and didn't even notice that he was murdering people, day in, day out, between homework and cram school and, and (she can't be angry, either, and she can't be sick, that is not appropriate behaviour, but it's so hard, so damn hard not to react to how he lied) and, and now they're stuck with each other.

(And it hurts that he can't even make the effort to be kind now; but then, if it was all a lie then why should he bother?)

She doesn't want to talk about Kira. She thinks she might have done, in the early days, which (in her memory) are nothing but sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking at all the wrong times, and crying. Too much crying over everything (she cried in the stationery store when she saw the back-to-school signs and the packs of felt-tip pens -

- she bought the children pens to keep them occupied on the long journey, and from the back she can hear them, Raito - ten years old now - is drawing Sayu pictures and telling her a story. It sounds like he and Sayu are cats leaving in a cave and fighting a war against the tigers who live on the other side of the river. The floor of the car is awash with crumpled-up pieces of paper and the lids of pens but it's all right; Soichiro - who always gets tense when driving long distances - is calm and his hands are relaxed on the wheel and the children haven't had an argument for at least an hour now -)

She thinks she might have talked about Kira while she was still in shock and couldn't hear the answers properly. She doesn't want to talk about Kira now, because she will hear the answers, and she thinks she knows that he won't be sorry.

(And not only for the killing, not only for the big things, but for the lying. For letting Soichiro kill himself over the Kira case and work for three days and three nights straight and snap at everyone because he's so tired and grow grey and ill and old; for just watching all that -)

She is always the one who gets up to leave because she can't bear to see him grow bored of her company.

(No. Perhaps she's scared about that, too; that if she provokes him into overt rudeness, he'll provoke her back, and then she might just - she might just -

- but perhaps it would be better if she stopped loving him, perhaps it would make all this easier -)

(Or, no. Perhaps it's not that. Perhaps if she provoked him into real feeling, she would see how he must be feeling right now, and how little she could really do to help him.)

And so she walks out, never looking back (he would seem folorn and somehow she doesn't want even that triumph) and goes back out into the soft, crying light to wait for the next time and for the way they'll both live their lies.