Chuuya

I woke up somewhere over Germany. (I figured that out later — only a couple of hours left in the flight.) Honestly, I was even kind of glad I’d spent most of the trip unconscious. Flights from Asia to Europe are absolute crap — ten hours twisted up like a goddamn pretzel in a tiny-ass seat.

The first thing I realized was that I was on a plane. And let me tell you, that’s one hell of a way to wake up — your guts all weightless, like they don’t belong to you anymore. I felt like absolute shit, too. Mouth tasted like a goddamn litter box — same as always after a night of drinking too much. But the turbulence had nothing to do with a hangover.

Without moving or opening my eyes, I started taking stock of my surroundings.

When I try to explain how I sense the world with For the Tainted Sorrow, I usually tell people to imagine something like a photo negative — say, a pitch-black room with bright silhouettes of objects and people. That’s a super simplified version, though. It’s not about color; it’s about mass, volume. But whatever — most people find it easier to picture it that way.

I figured out that I was sitting close to the wall — probably a window, unless this was some kind of cultist prisoner transport plane with solid walls. But no, seemed like a regular Boeing 707 or whatever, with three-seat rows on either side of the cabin.

On my left and right, two people sat close — lightweight, slender figures. Definitely two of the chicks who jumped me. Keeping guard.

There was a faint electric hum in the air. Yeah, no doubt — if I so much as twitched the wrong way, I’d get zapped by that thing again.

A row behind me, sprawled out in the window seat like he fucking owned the place, was a very familiar seventy-kilo asshole. He’d shoved his stupid, ridiculously long legs into the mesh pocket meant for trash in the seat ahead. I tamped down the urge to turn, open my eyes, and glare straight into that bastard’s smug face.

Next to Dazai sat another girl, same weight and build as my guards — had to be their third sister. Looked like she was dozing. No surprise there. The barrier they were keeping up around me probably sucked the life out of them. And with a long-ass flight like this, they had to take turns resting.

Dazai was murmuring to one of the girls — not the one next to him, the sleeping one, but the one sitting ahead of him, to my right, by the window.

“...Our parents always knew,” she was saying. “Or at least, they figured it out when our mother got pregnant with Anne, and it was clear there’d be three of us. Because our great-great-grandmothers, the witches — they were triplets, too.”

“The ones who were executed?” Dazai asked. Hell if I knew what they were on about. “You never said what exactly they were tried for.”

“Truth be told, I don’t know,” the girl admitted. “It was so long ago. But when you have power like that, you can’t escape the temptation to use it for evil. Believe me, they were true monsters. When people finally discovered their magic and came to execute them, those witches slaughtered half the village before they could be stopped! And even killing them wasn’t easy.

“The first one — they tried hanging her, but the noose didn’t snap her neck. Then they tried drowning her, but she wouldn’t sink — like the devil himself was holding her afloat, even when they used hooks to force her under. In the end, they had to burn her.”

“That’s horrific,” Dazai murmured, though he didn’t say exactly which part he found horrific.

I was still too fucking out of it to process all this properly. Just woke up, after an emotional breakdown, head still a mess, and now they were dumping all this horror-story shit on me first thing? Jesus Christ, and people complain about morning news bulletins. I’d take a scandal about some politician pocketing cash over this medieval torture nonsense. Better with a cup of coffee. Also, I was starving. And I really needed to take a piss.

“The other two were burned at the stake right away,” the girl went on. “They reduced their bodies to nothing but ashes and bones, but even then, their hearts wouldn’t burn — black, hardened things, like chunks of stone. Cursed, monstrous creatures...”

“There’s nothing supernatural about that,” Dazai cut in, ever the fucking know-it-all. “The heart is the densest muscle in the human body. Burning it completely is actually quite difficult. Still, I don’t quite understand how your parents were so sure those witches were connected to you.”

“Well, before they died, they swore revenge on the village. They said they’d return. Be reborn. And we look just like them.”

“Well, certain phenotypes do run in families, as does the likelihood of having children of a particular sex...”

“Oh, come on. Three girls — just like before!”

“But if your mother had had another child, there would have been four of you,” Dazai pointed out, not backing down. Come on, say something about logical fallacies, like you love to do. “Or maybe five, or more.”

“She died a few months after Anne was born. Overdosed on pills,” the girl said darkly.

That didn’t actually disprove anything Dazai had said, but I guess he was trying to be polite, because he just said, very gently:

“Oh.”

“She hated me,” said the girl sitting to my left — the one who hadn’t spoken yet. “When Charlotte was born, no one thought anything of it — just another daughter. When Emily came a year later, our mother started to suspect something was wrong. But when she got pregnant a third time, she knew. She knew history was repeating itself. That she and our father, our whole family, our neighbors — they were all doomed. That everyone was in for the same thing that happened in the last century: a curse, a slaughter, burnt bodies...

“She tried to get rid of me. It didn’t work. I survived, but I was born weak.”

Oh? Anne’s weaker than the other two? Noted. Not that it necessarily applied to her power, but still — good to keep in mind. First, though, I needed to figure out how the hell to tell these sisters apart. They looked practically identical, with the same bland, blank expressions, the same near-matching outfits. Not that I’d gotten a good enough look at them yet.

“After I was born, she tried to kill all three of us again,” Anne continued. “Our father stopped her. Back then, he didn’t believe in the curse — thought it was just an old wives’ tale. Called her insane. When she tried again behind his back, he had her committed.

“She... she didn’t just overdose. She did it in the asylum. Because of us. Do you understand what I’m saying? We drove our mother insane. We killed her. Charlotte and Emily were just babies, I wasn’t even a year old yet, and the curse had already begun its work...”

I had no idea what the hell Dazai was supposed to take from this, but all I got was that these girls had a seriously fucked-up mother who reaped exactly what she sowed.

For once, I actually wanted Dazai to do his whole superior, logical thing — point out how dumb this all sounded. To drop one of his smug little insights like he was so damn good at — because what I’d just heard was absolute bullshit.

But he kept quiet for some reason, and it was pissing me off.

"Our father," the eldest, Charlotte, said, "was a good man. Or at least, he thought he was. He believed that his daughters’ well-being mattered more than some old family curse. He took care of us. When the time came to send us to school, it became clear that wouldn’t work: in small villages, everyone knows everything — about the curse, about our mother’s illness and death — and the other children wouldn’t leave me alone. They said horrible things, they hit me… So our father tried to teach us himself. The older we got, the less we left the house because… well, our abilities began to manifest. Mine, at first. I saw some kids yanking Anne’s hair, and—"

"They weren’t just pulling it," Anne said quietly. "They called me a witch and set my hair on fire."

"Yes. I was terrified, and… that cursed power burst out of me. Two boys ended up in the hospital, their bodies covered in electrical burns. Before that, we thought our lives were difficult, but after that, it became hell. Even going to the store for food felt like stepping into enemy territory. And then we found out Emily and Anne had the ability too — Wuthering Heights…"

"And even then, our father didn’t abandon us. Not that he had anywhere to go — he was already an outcast in the village, and we were too poor to leave. He had to take the dirtiest jobs just to keep us fed…"

"The villagers hated him more and more, and one day, some drunken bastards… they…"

"They killed him. Beat him to death in a fight. And then they came for us. They couldn’t do anything to us, of course, but we knew we had to run."

"Back then, the laws around abilities were even murkier than they are now. We didn’t know where to seek protection."

"We jumped onto a passing freight train, ended up in Manchester, and lived on the streets for a while. We didn’t use our powers. We begged, we stole… One of the Lord’s commandments says theft is a sin, but using abilities is an even greater sin…"

"I see… And then Joanne found you?" Dazai asked.

"We found her, actually, when we read in a newspaper about a church and a woman with a gift like hers. There are many ordinary brothers and sisters in the church, but even among those with abilities, most have to wait months just to speak with her — or even see her. But she noticed us immediately…"

Well, no shit, I thought. Anyone would notice that kind of power just lying around unclaimed.

"…And she promised she would rid us of our abilities, but only after we helped her rid the world of certain wicked people. We've been working for her ever since."

"That is unspeakably tragic," Dazai said. "If you three fine young ladies were one person, I would most certainly have chosen this poor maiden as my partner in a double suicide."

Jesus, what a thick-skinned bastard — these girls just told a story so grim it would shut up even the most hardened criminals, and this asshole was still cracking jokes.

"And what about your story, Wilde-san?" Dazai went on. "Of course, if you'd rather not share, I won’t press."

An unfamiliar voice replied:

"No, I don’t mind. My fate is not nearly as tragic as the Brontë sisters’. Fortunately, I was not born in some remote village but in London, into a family of… let’s say, considerable means."

The voice belonged to a chubby guy, probably pushing ninety kilos, sitting behind us in the same row as Dazai and the third sister. Right, Kouyou had mentioned there was some guy along with the three girls.

"In a very wealthy family," Charlotte corrected gently, without envy or reproach. "The Wilde household welcomed the finest members of society — musicians, artists, writers, theater people…"

"That’s true," Wilde admitted. "But my childhood was not a happy one. For as long as I can remember, I have always seen through people. Everyone pretended to like me — friends, teachers, guests in our house… but none of them were sincere. They all wanted something from me — or rather, from my parents. Later, I learned how to make people genuinely like me — it’s easy when you can see right through them — but their affection no longer brought me any joy. Everything comes easily to me: I have plenty of friends, I got into Cambridge last year, I have a bright future ahead of me. But nothing excites me anymore when I can see the strings pulling at people. It all feels dull and meaningless."

I immediately realized this guy was just a spoiled, self-absorbed prick.

"That sounds familiar," Dazai mused. "So, if I understand correctly, you, Wilde-san, only wish to rid yourself of your ability, while you, ladies, would prefer to erase your entire past — or at least most of it?"

"Exactly. Joanne has the power to do that."

Yeah, I’d seen what she could do with my own eyes. What a goddamn show.

"And you’re not bothered by the idea that you’d be given, in a way, someone else’s identity and memories?"

"People get rid of scars from wounds... And our abilities are scars," Charlotte said.

"…Just like our memories," Anne finished.

"My life and personality suit me just fine; I simply want to be free of my ability so I can stop seeing people as puppets," Wilde said in that lazy, arrogant tone that was really starting to piss me off. I couldn’t take it anymore — I finally opened my eyes, turned to the guy, and said:

"Dude, you’re just fuckin’ full of it. I can actually hear you pulling problems straight outta your ass."

The girls on either side of me, who had probably assumed I was unconscious or asleep, flinched and focused on their barrier. I could even hear it crackling stronger.

"Relax, I’m not going anywhere," I snapped. "If I mess with gravity right now, the plane carrying three hundred people either crashes or blows up mid-air. What do I look like, a psycho?"

"Is your Mister Nakahara always this crude?" Wilde asked Dazai distastefully.

"My Mister Nakahara…" Dazai repeated, as if tasting the words, then looked at me with a heavy gaze. The right side of his face was already a juicy shade of purple, his lip split  — and I won’t lie, seeing that was deeply satisfying. "Yes, he always is," he said.

"You got any food left from the in-flight meal? And can I take a piss and brush my teeth?" I asked.

"There’s no food left," Dazai sighed.

"We’ll be landing in…"

"…an hour," Charlotte and Anne said coldly, in eerie unison.

The hell were they still trying to scare me with their creepy-twin act for? I’d already heard them speak like normal humans, each on her own.

"Well, it’s gonna be a real shitty hour for you sitting next to my wet pants," I informed them cheerfully.

The girls grimaced but shifted in their seats and got up.

"What, we all going to the bathroom together, like in primary school?" I asked, not moving. Moving was hard, considering the greenish shimmer of the barrier still surrounding me.

"Yes," they said in chorus. My humor was clearly lost on them.

"We'll expand the barrier just enough for you to walk," Anne added magnanimously.

"Mister Ikita," Charlotte said softly, "would you mind helping us again? We need your illusion to avoid attracting attention."

And that’s when I thought: what the fuck? I’d already gotten used to Dazai being “Mr. Ikita,” but what illusion? What the hell was she talking about?

“I’d be happy to help!” Dazai chirped cheerfully, climbing into the aisle after me. He waved his hands around a little and, as if by accident, brushed against both girls — hardly avoidable, given how damn cramped airplane aisles are — then solemnly declared:

“Abracadabra!”

The electric barrier around me vanished. Well, of course, it did.

I had to fight the urge to drop my jaw like a dumbass kid.