Difference between revisions of "Rui Onishi/History"

And this new world opened to her like a wound.

It was the jaundiced sky she noticed first, stretching across the horizon in that too-tight, waxy way skin stretches on the face of a corpse. That yellowy sky framed a gutted landscape of what, long ago, might have been a lush, rolling valley, touching fingertips with the treeline of a proud forest. But the valley was now dust, the soil as bleached as bone, and those tall trees tangled their sharp, skeletal branches until the dead forest coiled like barbed wire.

A taint had crept into this sick world like gangrene, and now it was eating its body from the inside out.

She stood in the shadow of a great castle, also resigned to rot under the heavy, murky skies. Its towering parapets were crumbling and dilapidated, brick and mortar powdering into the air, and bramble netted shut its grand, rusted gates.

Even its fierce moat had nearly dried up, the churning water reduced to a thick, muddy stream.

A line was cast into it.

That's when Rui realized she wasn't alone. Next to her, an old man sat on the riverbank, his twisted back hunched forward. He was fishing. His aged, wrinkled hands, coloured the same as those diseased skies, held the other end of the line.

"I am thou," he began simply, tiredly, his papery voice as weathered and dry as the earth under her feet. "Thou art I. I am the Fisher King."

She couldn't see his face. Even then, she wasn't sure he was even a king. He looked so old and so frail. His hair grew grey and haggard. But there, on his sunken brow, was the glimpse of a crown, the studded gems missing, the gold dulled with generations of corrosion.

He pulled unremarkably on his fishing line. "I am to suffer the pains of my oath. I have chosen them, I shall endure them, but I shall never die of them. That is my curse."

He turned to look at her, and Rui stared into the face of the Fisher King. His eyes were cloudy like a corpse's. His peeling, scabbing skin was growing over the crown slumped on his brow, fusing it to his twisted face. He smiled regally at her, and Rui could see the Fisher King's hollowed teeth through the rotted holes in his cheeks.

Something compelled her to glance down, and she saw the Fisher King was seated in a dark, wet, crimson pool. It was blood. He was soaked in it, and it was pouring thickly and greasily from his body, trailing a highway down the riverbank. And that's when she realized the murky water in the moat wasn't water at all. It was blood. He was fishing in his own blood pouring from an eternal wound--

"And now it is yours."

The air felt cold on her neck. Something wet dribbled on her feet. Rui raised both hands to clasp down on her throat, which was opened now, split in two from where she'd cut it open, her arterial blood hot and sticky between her fingers. She tried to scream--

And there was only silence.

This world ended when she opened her eyes. There were no more jaundiced skies.

Just the bleary white ceiling tiles of her hospital room.

2009

There were two white-walled rooms, separated by a pane of glass: a typical visitation room in the Osaka Detention Centre. They were small and cramped, and the room where Rui stood wasn't even wide enough that she could spread her arms. But that was as much as she, or anyone, could expect when wanting to speak to someone on death row.

The cellar stinks of ammonia and old paint kept reminding Rui of her rage, the anger that seethed up every vein of her body like an infection. It was all she could do to stay still, to look composed, and to not tear this place down with her bare hands until it crumbled at her feet.

Pulled from her dark thoughts, Rui tensed, posture stiffening, as through the glass she could see the door open to the second room.

The ushering guard had his head bowed in an unusual display of respect; his eyes turned politely away, his lips curved into a strange, warm smile as he allowed Shinichi Onishi to enter.

Her father, though now dressed in prison whites and rattling chains, suffering a life of solitary confinement under the order of execution, looked no different from any one of Rui's memories. He still cut a striking figure. He was placid and untouchable, his youthful face untroubled, and his yellow eyes were hooded with gentle patience. He waited as the guard removed his binds and politely locked him into his own room.

When Shinichi met her eyes, and smiled in a kind, silent hello, it was all Rui could stand to shatter the glass dividing them and run to his side. She fought the tears prickling her eyes. It'd been so long, and seeing him here, now, reminded her acutely how badly she missed him. It was sobering how her lifetime of being in his confidence had now been severed to a single, half-hour visit once a month.

After a moment, he motioned her to pick up the telephone on the wall of her room. Rui obediently did as told, hugging the receiver close to her ear.

"Rui," his voice seeped smoothly over the line, in time to the silent movement of his lips on the other side of the glass. "My little girl. Have you missed me?"

It took all her strength not to let her knees buckle. Rui put on her strongest face and nodded her silent yes.

His smile widened as his eyes watched her. "I don't think you could ever disappoint me. My perfect daughter who has always done as she's told, and who looks so troubled. How lonely you must feel to be all by yourself now."

Silence followed from her end of the line, though both father and daughter both expected as much. Rui could not speak to confirm or deny. But Shinichi could read the answer well enough on his daughter's gentle, stoic face.

"Let me fix that, Rui. You can never let me down, so I know I can ask you to do this."

Stepping forward, his face softened with fatherly pride as he outstretched one hand to affectionately glide the tips of his fingers down the barrier of glass. Staring into his child's face, his yellow eyes never blinked once.

"There is someone you must protect."

1990

When she was old enough to wonder, Rui asked one evening, "Father, do I have a mother?"

Shinichi Onishi had been absorbed in a book. The title of the book itself escapes Rui's early memories. But, for anyone else to ask him a question, her father would not have twitched an eye from the print. He would have answered, in that calm, metallic voice of his, without a single glance.

But his daughter had asked the question, so he closed his book and looked down inquisitively at her. Soon enough, that kind smile of his, the one he would only give to her, rose to his lips. "This is a conversation I hoped to save for when you were much older," he began, rather frankly, but with a strange wistful quality giving his voice a rare richness. "She is far away, Rui. She left us both shortly after you were born. She did not want to stay."

This gave Rui pause for a moment, her large eyes staring guilelessly forward, her face transparently digesting this information and trying to make sense of it for the very first time. New synapses were forming.

Most children would then want to ask, 'Why?' or 'Where?' or 'How long?'

Rui just said, matter-of-fact, "Then I will stay until you ask me to leave."

Surprise flickered across Shinichi's face, and it only caused his bemused smile to grow. He settled one hand over the top of his daughter's head. "What a good girl you are. I will allow it."

2005

So anxious was Mr. Akako Takemoto, one of the most respected senior members of the Yamaken-gumi yakuza gang, that he did not accept Shinichi's customary offer of tea. Takemoto was revered most for his flawless sense of public decorum, so for a man like him to deny tea was something strange and unprecedented.

Even worse was for a man like him to pause, and in a violent display of rage, knock the many delicate, antique pieces of the chadogu straight to the floor in a rain of broken glass.

Shinichi Onishi did not rise from behind his desk. Like Mr. Takemoto's reputation for decorum, Shinichi held his own reputation for placidity. He did not react outwardly to most things... least of all this. He only turned his hooded eyes in a silent command for the young woman at his side -- his daughter -- to close the office door.

Rui, same as always, did as she was told.

Door closed, it was only four of them inside the darkened office. Takemoto, a young kyodai who served directly under him (and was now looking a little pale in the face at his superior's display), the blandly-faced Shinichi Onishi, and his ever present daughter, Rui.

"This is unacceptable, Shinichi," Takemoto barked, all use of honorifics and formality forgotten. His face was purpling with rage, veins surging from his temples, sweat beading across his forehead. "The favourite nephew of the so-honbucho is barely alive. And now your kohai admits to the mistake. They confused him with another man. He was tortured for days. Now they suspect brain damage. He cannot even speak!

"And now there will be retribution! Any man involved will be killed. I too will be killed! I was the one who pioneered the allegiance between the Yamaken-gumi and the Yamaguchi-gumi! I will be held accountable for this!"

Shinichi Onishi considered all of this in that measured patience of his. His hands folded together. "I shall deliver all of my subordinates responsible for the torture. They will all present their hands for your discrimination. You may take what you feel is appropriate --"

Takemoto interrupted with a breathless roar, his voice seized with outrage, "A few dirty fingertips will not correct this!"

2009

Years ago when she was just a child, Rui's father had chided her never to purse her lips. It was a sign of insecurity and weakness, and nervous habits were beneath her.

Absently recalling that advice, she adjusted the lapels of her suit for the sixteenth time in the past hour. Briskly, mechanically, she checked her hair, gliding one palm down its sleek, inky length, feeling reassured to feel nothing out of place.

It was of the gravest importance that she had to make a perfect first impression, especially to a man as important as Daisuke Itami. Her father deemed him as precious. Someone whose life must be safeguarded at all costs. Someone whose work may very well change the world. And now she was to become part of it. His work was about to become her work. His life was about to become her life.

Her existence was about to begin on the doorstep to Omoikane Investigations.

Again, she checked her appearance, afraid of the possibility that it would not meet the high standards of someone like Daisuke Itami. Her suit was unruffled and every pleat was pressed into a dignified line. Her shoes were polished to mirrors. Her appearance was fit to represent her blood, her family name and, most important of all, her father.

She took a moment to prepare herself.

Inhaling quickly and holding her breath, she reached out to knock twice on the door.

A minute passed.

Rui was still holding that breath. She knocked again -- twice of course.

More time passed.

Rui checked her watch. She was absolutely sure the building would be open. She had triple-checked her research into the company. Doggedly, she reached out a third time to knock--

--just as the door opened, leaving her fist outstretched in thin air.

In the place of the door stood a lanky young man, everything that the mysterious and dangerous Daisuke Itami shouldn't look like, shouldn't be, and was. He was wearing a three-piece suit. His hair was purple. And he was loudly eating a package of strawberry pocky as she stared at him, one piece sticking out of his mouth and bobbing up and down with every chew. He regarded her back, appearing to be waiting for her to say something.

Rui's eyes transparently reflected her own confusion. This is Daisuke Itami? This is the man worthy of her father's attention?

Remembering her plans, Rui straightened her back, put on her most stoic face, and, without any warning, thrust a tiny PDA toward him, screen-first, to read. The text was already there, pre-typed in preparation several hours ago.

[I am Onishi Rui. On the behest of my father, I offer my services entirely to you. I possess a considerable amount of skills.]

Still eating loudly, he squinted to read the phone, nodding to consider it all. Rui watched him, inwardly surprised at the lack of commitment on the man's face. She'd expected some confusion, or at the very least, a desire for explanation. She had that pre-typed as well.

Instead, Daisuke spoke up, mid-chew, "Hmmmm. You happen to have a sandwich-making skill?"

Rui's mouth moved a little of its own, though no sound came out. There's not many people in the world who can render a mute woman speechless.

"You didn't get the hint? Let me try again!" Daisuke conspiratorially leaned in. "Psst! I want you to make me a sandwich." He explained helpfully.

Rui pursed her lips.

1997

It had always been her choice.

And this had been a particularly easy one to make.

Rui had just turned ten years old when her father asked one day, "Rui, do you love me?"

"Yes, father," she replied softly, obediently, and meaning every word.

"Would you do anything for me?"

"Yes," she repeated without hesitation.

"There is something I must ask of you," he revealed, staring straight forward as he walked along, leading her by the hand. "Should you accept it, it will be a heavy burden for you to bear. For that reason, I will not force my request upon you. You must choose for yourself."

Rui did not answer, though she was listening. Her eyes watched the way her father's hand held hers, and how similar their fingers looked next to each other.

"My life, my research, and all of my secrets... I need someone to protect it. Rui, I ask for you to become my guardian. Can you do this for me?"

Rui's eyes closed against her own contemplation, her head lowered as though already forced to bear the weight of those words. She was old enough to know that, as of that moment, everything had changed. Her father just asked her not to be his daughter, and that he did not want one. He wanted something else.

She felt a dulled, distant pang ache inside her chest, the same sensation she always felt when she knew he was silently assessing her. Despite that, Rui knew it was still her choice. She could have refused her father here, and remained as only his daughter forever. But she couldn't deny him. What if he stopped loving her?

She had nothing else. No one else. She couldn't let him down.

"I will, father," was all Rui said, her hand loosening inside of his.

Shinichi wasted no time to drop to one knee, and with all the affection in the world, draw the tiny body of his daughter into his arms. One of his hands stroked her black hair... which was still trying to grow back to its original length since that day when half of it had been cut off.

"Thank you, Rui," he replied dotingly, as his eyes stared into the space past her shoulder. "I know that you will always meet my expectations."

2008

She read that they lead him away in chains.

Rui was too late too see it for herself, when the police came to arrest Shinichi Onichi for the crimes of conspiracy to commit murder and treason against the nation of Japan. All the papers reported on it the next day: prominent surgeon with yakuza ties charged with treason. Respected medical professional alleged to be responsible for dozens of missing persons.

Her father's printed mug shot stared back at her with his same unmoved patience.

It did not take her long to learn it was a traitor among his own employ to turn him in... a plant from the Yamaguchi-gumi, themselves. He had become too dangerous for them. When they finally learned of his private army, they panicked. At that point, they found it too difficult to attempt murdering Shinichi Onishi -- too much collateral damage -- so a deal was struck with the police to arrest him.

His men, mostly immigrants lacking Japanese citizenship, were forcibly scattered under the capture of their leader. Some disappeared for good. Others re-emerged as corpses.

Rui, the police found, was particularly difficult to interrogate. It is hard to force brief, impassioned confessions from someone who cannot speak.

The trial was long and confusing, as one would expect for a man who surrounded himself with rumours and half-truths. During the proceedings, they called him many things. A disgraced surgeon. A yakuza senior. An accused serial murderer. A shadow mastermind behind the sarin gas attacks of a decade ago. A charismatic cult leader. They even said his private army had been offered promises as strange and ridiculous as immortality.

Shinichi Onishi did not speak once during his trial. Not even when he was found guilty of his crimes. Not even when he was sentenced to be executed by the state.

Rui spent the day of her father's sentencing trying to scream with a voice that would not work.

1995

Shinichi Onishi was the very definition of professionalism and austerity.

While not a particularly cold or unpleasant man -- on the contrary, he was known rather well for a kind disposition -- he was reserved and serious. He smiled only out of warmth, and never from a particular sense of humour.

So Rui was especially surprised when one evening he asked, "Rui, would you like to play a game?"

Her father was not known for playing games. It would actually be the only time he would say such a strange thing. Confused as she was, the young child felt a thrill at this unexpected surprise, especially coming from a beloved parent who had never asked to join her games. It must have meant that he decided to love her just a little bit more that day. How could she ever say anything but, "Yes, please, father. What is this game called?"

Shinichi rewarded her curiousity with a fond pat of his hand on Rui's head. "It's called the Persona Game."

2005

"If you expect the Yamaken-gumi to remain affiliated with the Yamaguchi-gumi, you will sacrifice more than a few fingers of unimportant men! Don't you understand the gravity of this?! What am I talking about broken alliances... there will be an open declaration of war!" Takemoto snapped, though the rage poisoning his voice did not reflect in his eyes. There was only fear there. He was afraid. His hands, usually held so elegantly, every gesture steeped with precision, were trembling.

He was truly afraid for his life.

"Everything will be changed. Everything. There will be no forgiveness if the so-honbucho is insulted," he rambled endlessly, pacing the floor of Shinichi's office while desperately wringing his hands.

Shinichi Onishi only watched him with his customary silence, looking more akin to be studying the man than truly listening to any of his cries. Takemoto didn't seem to notice. He was too far lost in his own hysteria.

He lifted one hand to brush the beads of sweat away from his eyes, and his own gesture stopped him in his tracks, arriving to a whip-crack pause as his beady eyes homed immediately on the elder Onishi. Takemoto frowned to himself, and then, without warning, motioned his young kyodai close.

The Yamaken-gumi enforcer, despite all his tattoos and angry piercings, looked close to shitting himself as he obediently inched closer to Shinichi's desk. It was telltale on his face that he'd heard one too many street rumours. However, he found the nerve to step close, bow deeply, and leave a cloth-wrapped bundle on the polished mahogany.

In one glance, Rui's downcast eyes recognized the shape of an aikuchi and scabbard.

Shinichi, unlike his daughter, did not glance once at the strange bundle. His attention was wholly focused on Akako Takemoto, watching the man's face and every play of emotion with a decidedly unusual intensity. His yellow eyes were dull and matte, unreflecting. "My patience cannot last forever, Takemoto-san. Please explain what you mean by this."

Takemoto was the total antithesis of Shinichi's calm disregard, but his blood refused him to look away from the man's eyes. He took in a deep breath, and spoke suddenly, his voice as cutting as what was concealed under the cloth, "The reason for my visit is to request your blood, Shinichi. It is the only way this can be forgiven."

Surely, any sensible man would be outraged at this point. Shinichi Onishi just appeared to look all the more amused, like Takemoto had just inadvertently revealed the punch line to his own private joke. Though he did not smile, amusement was coiling in the corners of his youthful features. Finally, as though to reward Mr. Takemoto's directness, he finally glanced down at the offering laid on his desk. He considered it transparently for a beat.

Takemoto's jaw steeled visibly when Shinichi reached one hand for the cloth-wrapped bundle--

--only to be stopped. A quicker hand flew in to steal it away before he could even touch it. It was Rui, accepting the weight of the aikuchi in both hands as her stoic eyes looked away. She did not speak a word. She did not need to. The look of acceptance gentling her face spoke volumes.

Inside a split-second, that still, stoic figure that stood aside her father's desk had swiftly crossed the room. She drew to a crisp stop, and her long fingers took one corner of the bundled cloth. In a single motion, and at Mr. Akako Takemoto's feet, the cloth was opened to spread neatly across the floor, Rui dropping soundly to her knees, her back bowing forward.

Now uncovered, the aikuchi's polished scabbard shone in her hands.

She did not lift her head to meet Takemoto's surprised, perplexed stare. Rui only spoke to him, softly, politely, "I am my father's blood. Please accept it. I hope it will suffice."

She pulled the blade free of the scabbard. And in one reflexive, automatic movement, like a smile, or a sigh, Rui cut her own throat.

1996

Rui was nine years old, and attended one of the most prestigious private schools in all of Sumaru. All of the sons and daughters of the local Yamaguchi-gumi administration attended this school.

During lesson breaks, the Yamaguchi-gumi children preferred to keep to each other, their families close enough that they have grown up as constant playmates. The girls especially kept bonds that hold like meathooks. All except for Rui Onishi, though not for a lack of trying. She lingered around, a permanent wallflower at the perimeters of their games, trying to stir up enough courage to enter their circle. She wanted to terribly. She had daydreams of being able to play carelessly along beside them.

She was just not sure how. What came so easily to them wasn't the same for her. She didn't have their normal smiles. She had never laughed the way they do. She wanted to search her heart to find the feelings that they must have felt, but she wasn't sure how. So Rui thought the only way was to watch them, studying what they do, until she could learn to be the same.

The other girls barely tolerated her, not really knowing how to take Rui's stoic face, quiet manner, and that surgical way she liked to study their every movement.

It felt like she was trying to dissect them.

One day, she looked up, and they're all staring down at her, a wall of Yamaguchi-yumi princesses sharing the same staring eyes and pointed smile.

The boldest of them stepped up and dropped to an inquisitive crouch in front of the seated Rui, the girl's black eyes standing coldly apart from the gracious smile on her face. She inquired, bluntly, with no preamble, "You want to be our friend, don't you?"

Conditioned by her father's similarly direct manner, Rui replied quietly, automatically, "Yes."

"But nobody likes you. You're weird. You scare everyone."

That brisk statement confirmed every one of Rui's fears. Though it could not show on her face, she felt her heart sink. She didn't know what to say, so she said nothing at all.

Rui's young interrogator stared for a moment more into her face, her searching eyes not met. It seemed to appease her; her smile widened. "But there is a way, you know, to show us that you're normal. You have to let me do something and not tell on me. If you want to be our friend, you have to promise that. Do you promise?"

Her hooded eyes still averted, staring blandly away at nothing, Rui said again, "Yes."

That's when the girl reached out to her. It is the first time anyone her age had tried, or even wanted, to touch her. Rui dare not move a muscle, so sure that if she moved even just a bit, she'll reveal herself, reveal that she had no capacity to be normal, and then she'd scare her off.

Slowly, and very carefully, the Yamaguchi-gumi daughter took one of Rui's long, dark braids in her fingers, touching the girl's hair with exquisite gentleness, and Rui wondered if this is what friendship was. Did this mean she had a friend now?

Then, next to her ear, she heard the unmistakeable cutting sound of closing blades. And Rui's averted eyes watched as her long braid fell into her lap.

The girl drew back sharply, quickly, a small pair of school scissors held in her other hand. She looked fiercely, almost eagerly down at Rui, her face split with a vicious grin. Her expression dripped with hungry expectation, just hoping for a reaction, any kind of reaction--

Nothing at all. Eyes widening, the girl laughed in surprise and disbelief.

"You're not even crying," she declared down on Rui, who still hadn't moved, hadn't spoken. "Don't you even care?"

The girl ambled back to her feet, already lost into her own malicious giggles; she marvelled at the sight of Rui, the weird girl who didn't seem to mind that half her hair was in her lap. "You're not normal at all, Onishi Rui! You're so scary!"

The row of girls, some laughing behind their hands, broke into a quick retreat, afraid of being caught by one of their teachers. Their shrieks and giggles grew distant. And left in their wake, Rui still sat, watching her long hair slowly unravel out of its severed braid.

She had learned something very important.

She was different. And no one could ever love her.

2002

Sigmund Freud once spoke of a particular psychological phenomenon he called transference. The human mind compensates for dysfunction, and any one repressed emotion will find itself emerging, somewhat strangely, in other situations.

Rui was fifteen years old. While girls her age navigated their first pre-paid credit cards and kissed their first boyfriends, she was resetting her own fingers and popping her left shoulder back into its socket. She had worked with every formidable weapon forged for a human hand, learned every physical vulnerability inherent of the human anatomy, thusly experienced every sort of bruise and laceration that is possible on the human body, and could even write her own annotated thesis on the psychological ramifications of seventeen hours of a forced march while nursing an open wound.

Her father actually asked her to write a paper on something along those lines.

Rui handled it all with her patient indifference. She sat quietly, unassumingly, through every one of her lessons, be it in the presence of her father's trusted men who oversaw her own endurance training and combat hardiness, or alone in the presence of her father, teaching her the human body over the yawning thoracic cavity of his medical cadavers.

None of this inspired the least bit of anxiety on Rui's face, her expressed bleached of any sort of discomfort.

At least, not until the day one lesson had ended, and she spent the afternoon assisting one of her father's favourite soldiers in his sushi shop. His name was Aleksandr, and he was a hulking, grizzled old Russian who talked wistfully, nostalgically of the Cold War years, and had decided to defect and move to Japan after he saw his first photograph of a geisha, or "that woman who would change his life." He was still looking for her.

Despite his four or five solid decades spent killing people bloodily, he held a soft spot for little Rui, and sometimes he even felt proud of her like he would his own daughter. That day, he was adamant on giving her a deserved meal after all of her work.

As he prepped his kitchen, Rui had been distracted, staring into an aquarium tank full of wriggling eel, watching their slimy bodies twine past each other as they swam in a snakey mess. All except for one of them. It was focusing its big black, unblinking eye straight at her, staring at her in fishy silence. Something about that caught her complete attention, and she wandered closer and planted both hands flat against the aquarium glass. Rui and eel watched each other in total awe.

Until Aleksandr's big, meaty hand dove into the tank, snatched that very eel out of the water, slammed it down on his chopping block, and drove a knife through its head.

Rui just stared in disbelief.

The Russian was whistling some old Cossack song as he split the struggling eel's belly in two. He laughed to himself, spraying ashes off his cigarette, as he tossed the hacked viscera over his shoulder. Her eyes wide, her limbs locked up like rigor mortis, and with sweat pearling down her temples, the Onishi girl flinched as eel innards hit the trash bucket with a juicy thump.

As he began singing, Aleksandr didn't even notice Rui fainting dead to the floor.

2005

White ceiling tiles were the first thing Rui could see. After a few blinks of her sticky, filmy eyes, their bleary mess took shape and form. She inhaled, and immediately smelled the sharp odours of plastic and antiseptic coming off the tubing run into her nose.

She was in the hospital.

Rui closed her eyes weakly, her mind somewhere lost in that limbo between medically-induced sleep and an achy awakening. Her entire throat felt like it was on fire, like it had been gored.

That's when she remembered. Her decision. The blade sinking into her trachea. The dream. Her throat, split in two, pooling blood around her feet. And the voice in her head, the one that spoke so clearly:

'That is my curse.'

'And now it is yours.'

She swore she could still hear the voice talking...

Rui inhaled sharply, the memory sobering her out of her cocktail of sedatives. Her eyes opened again, forcing themselves to focus, trying to find the owner of the voice she swore she could hear. For the first time, she could feel the thick bandages binding her throat, restricting her head from being able to turn. Instead she strained her eyes to follow the source of the voice.

It belonged to a young physician speaking quickly yet very politely, no doubt a personal employ of the Yamaguchi-yumi. Standing at the foot of her bed, he was speaking to her father, who was also there in her hospital room.

Rui's tired eyes creased with relief.

Father was there...

The physician was telling him, "--will never speak again. Other than the blood she's lost, the inferior laryngeal nerve has been severed, and there will be permanent injury. However, I feel confident enough to suggest invasive surgery in order to correct this. Of course, I expect a respected professional like Onishi-sama to be aware of this. While I cannot ensure it will be completely successful, there is the chance she--"

No.

They can't do that.

She won't allow it.

Her injury was Father's now. It cannot be returned. It was her gift to him. It was her offering for his protection.

She tried to speak up to voice her dismay, only to find her voice gone, and with only a sharp, acute pain left in its place. Of course it would be gone.

It hurt to breathe. But Rui still found the strength through the agony, and the focus through the dizziness, to reach one trembling, fumbling hand up and clap it fiercely down against the bedrail. Her long fingers curled around the icy metal.

The sound was loud enough to draw four eyes onto her, one surprised pair belonging to the physician and the second pair the same, bland, yellowy stare of her father's.

Her father considered her quietly, and appeared to understand the silent desperation in his daughter's face. His eyes softened.

"If you would excuse us both," he said to the physician, courteous, but at the same time, dismissive. "This can be discussed at another time."

The physician did not even attempt to argue with him, despite the finalizing tone to Mr. Onishi's voice. He had learned never to question his employers. He bowed and took his departure.

The door closed quietly behind them, and Shinichi's hand lowered to carefully brush a tress of hair from his daughter's face. "I will oblige you if that is your will, Rui," he told her affectionately. "Just when I think you cannot possibly please me any more, you surprise me again. I don't know how I managed to be blessed with such an obedient daughter."

The tense breath sighed itself out of Rui. It felt like daggers to breathe, but her father was there, and the pain was nothing.

He let his thumb trace the arch of her cheekbone before drawing his hand away. "Sleep now. I'll ask the doctor back to assess your condition."

Shinichi Onishi turned from his daughter's bedside, only to be stopped by her tug of her hand on his sleeve. Her fingers had caught themselves in his suit jacket, pinching the heavy material and beckoning him back. He turned his eyes down on her.

It was the first time Rui would ever reach out to him. She never asked her father for anything, physical contact included. She never invited herself to take anything from him, even the comfort of touch.

And now, she did not do that out of selfish desire. There was nothing on her face that seemed to yearn for him to stay or ask him to comfort her pains. Instead, there was only that same, desperate look, trying to convey what her voice could not. Rui couldn't speak to tell him this, but she had to let him know.

Her fingers tightened. And her dried, cracked lips slowly mouthed a single, ratifying sentence:

I did it.

There was an instant of silence, and then a slow, indulgent smile destroyed the blandness of his face. He turned his arm until he captured her reaching fingers in his, clasping his mute daughter's hand gently between both of his own. He handled her as though she were the most precious thing in the world. His world. "That is very good, Rui. Very good. You have earned your place in my confidence. I am so proud of you.

"Now I know I can ask more of you. Now I know that you'll never fail me."

PRESENT

Death row prisoners spend their time waiting. They are not informed of their execution until an hour before the proceedings. Until then, they wait, faced with unique reality that is the limbo between life and death. They are too weighted by the inevitability of death that they cannot live, and yet they are still forced to wait to die, possibly even years.

Their limbo is a private one, restricted to a solitary cell that cuts them from all human contact.

This is how Shinichi Onichi exists, this day spent no different from the last, as he sits in his room, hands folded in his lap. Today, like all days, he spends in silent contemplation, his bland stare focused on one cement wall as he thinks.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of an all-consuming hatred of the world must be in want for a means to destroy it.

Shinichi Onishi is not an angry man, but he hates the world for all that it is: worthless. He has no place in it. No one has any place in it. The world is a terrible place that all could easily see, that all have easily experienced at one time in their miserable lives, and yet no person seems to possess the will to stop it.

He first became aware of his hatred years ago in medical school. The hatred only worsened when he worked as a surgeon, one of Japan's most prominent medical authorities. So many people would come to him with their pains and their cries, and he only found them at their most tolerable when they were opened up, silent and offering him their beating, pulsing parts. Soon enough, surgery would turn into dissection. And then dissection into experimentation. In the end, that's what they all were. Raw material.

He hates all kinds of human beings. The gentle and the malicious, the powerful and the powerless... all are equal to him, all equally worthless.

And he is just as worthless as they are. He is no judge of humanity. He hates himself just as much.

His ultimate realization of such helped him discover his Persona.

Yet that simple realization was not enough. He had to concede that a powerless man could not accomplish what he planned for the world. He had power to attain. Power comes in many forms. Money. Control. Fear. Knowledge is the most terrible power of all to wield, and he has so much more to learn.

He is an intellectual. A scientist. He is an eternal student of the world, bowed to its lessons. He hates the world, and everything it has to teach him, but he does not let that fact taint how precious knowledge can be. He is decreed to observe and test this world until he has understood all of it. Once that is accomplished, then he can find the means to destroy it. There will be nothing left for him than to make every useless living being feel the way he has, and suffer out the pains of his hatred. All they'll have left to feel is his despair.

And when he has finalized his knowledge, he will impart every single one of his lessons and show all human beings their true natures.

Since the discovery of his own Persona, much of his research has been focused upon them. Why have so few people been able to understand them, much less attain them? It countered his theory on human beings. There were all the same. Any differences among human beings were superficial at best, and their true natures were static, immutable and born wrong.

It wasn't long until he found the New World Order. It helped that he already held a position of power. It was so simple for him to ascend to the upper echelons of the yakuza. It also helped that he was willing to do anything for this secret organization in exchange for his research. He was one of their many generous benefactors of raw materials toward their cause: human beings who would be tested upon to find their own Personae. Few succeeded. Most failed.

And that margin of error was enough to claim his interest. Human beings were all the same. They all had equal capacity to realize their own worthlessness. But he was sure that he could perfect the inherent science to these experiments.

Knowledge is a tedious thing. Humanity has refined knowledge to the practice of science, embodying it under specific laws that answer only to a single authority: observation.

He is a researcher. He directs experiments of all types in his quest for knowledge, carefully manipulating variables and observing the effects. Sometimes he amuses himself with his research, and expresses his own thesis before even considering the experiment's results. He has learned so much by now that he is barely ever surprised by the outcome.

This makes his favourite experiment -- the one that would surprise him the most, the one that would surpass all his initial estimates -- all the more precious.

Little Rui... she is not precious to him in the way a father would liken his daughter to diamonds. Her data is precious, one of the few private amusements left in his life.

But she is a guinea pig. A lab animal. He could care for her no more than a microbiologist for his multiplying virii on a petri dish. Other than providing the basic sustenance to allow her to survive, his relationship to her is nothing.

It had been that way from the start, when he first held her infant body in his hands and was able to look into the sleeping face of his only child. He could only think of how pure she appeared, the ultimate tabula rasa, an incomplete human being that could produce any sort of data he wished.

As he studied her newborn delicacy, the first thought to strike him was the question of human endurance. It was an important concept, and a particular study he had yet to breach. To what lengths could a human endure? How long until the body wears out? How long until the mind falters? How long until the soul is evacuated?

Oh, the worthless world must have looked on him and watched him smile down on his newborn daughter, thinking him so full of love and affection. He meant that smile, but there was no love.

It was his will from the start not to teach her about his hatred. She would never learn about it unless she would, by rare permutation, be able to discover it on her own. He would give her the same worthless world as everyone else, operating under the pretense of family bonds. One variable would be his role as her father, a kind one, though with some unique differences. The human spirit perseveres the greatest under the burdening weight of lofty expectations...

He would be the father, but she would not be raised as a daughter. That is not a role fit to test the hardiness of the human spirit. Instead, he could raise her as a warrior. A guardian.

But there is a delicate balance to the human condition. He wanted to raise a human being, not an automaton. It would be incredibly easy to erase her of any sense of humanity and build her as an unfeeling machine, a mindless tool constructed for a single purpose. But there would be no spirit. To test human endurance and keep the evidence valid, there would have to be an element of choice.

She would have to choose everything on her own, even her own rewards. He would not provide her with neither reward nor punishment, and allow her to internalize it for herself.

But, in the end, he had underestimated the lab rat. Abandon it in a maze with only one correct path out, and it will ultimately find its way. Reward the rat, and it will remember that path, and run it so quickly, so precisely, that you will liken its escape to an art. Reward it again and again, and the rat will dedicate its life to escaping.

But this rat saw the reward, ignored it, and retreated back into the maze. The rat has been rewarding itself ever since.

He had never been so surprised. He had never been so pleased. His own daughter... forsaking years of evidence, disproving his own theories, and all in order to give him inconceivable data. She has to be his greatest experiment, a human being that has given up her own happiness to remain in his service. His loyal guardian.

His protector that managed to attain her own Persona through the power of her denial and self-estrangement. Her acceptance of her own unhappiness was her Renaissance. He was so proud of that. Just when he was resigned to sign her up for the experiment, she manages to succeed on her own...

And now the worthless world has her, a being so perfect in her tragedy. Will its human beings question their own happiness when forced to look at her face? Will they, too, come to realize their own miserable lives? Would they be able to smile again knowing a creature as pathetic as her exists in their reality?

Rui, his little lab rat. If he were only to ask her, would she remain in her maze forever?

He will observe the answer to that question soon enough.

In the privacy of his prison cell, Shinichi Onishi breaks into a slow, unwinding smile.

He doesn't intend to remain forever in his.

2005

The aikuchi fell from her fingers. Still bowed in reverence, Rui craned her head to make sure the unfolded cloth caught the blood from her butchered throat. It did.

Rui made no move to stop the bleeding, to hold her laceration together. It wasn't for her to determine how much blood the Yamaken-gumi required. It was her father's decision. She would wait until he told her it was enough. She would just have to be patient...

Only four seconds passed before the world began to spin. Mr. Akako Takemoto was speaking, but she couldn't make out his rushed, wild words. Nor could she hear her father's bored, measured response. All she could hear was the pulse of her own blood in her ears. Rui blinked her eyes once, slowly, heavily, and raised her eyes from her spreading blood. She saw the sunlight beaming in through the window, the dust motes wafting through the streams of light, and the unreadable look in her father's yellow eyes. He was watching her, not saying anything. It wasn't enough blood? Did he need just a little more? Surely he would say something soon. He loved her. She wouldn't die. He would tell her...

Shinichi's face was marble. His mouth was unmoving. His eyes watched as she bled. Rui didn't think he ever looked at her before in such a way. Father's kind eyes looked so cold, and the colour in them was shifting, mutating, and she wasn't sure into what. The world tilted dangerously, and she sunk to one elbow, trying to keep his eyes. She held on to them for as long as she could.

Then she blinked again, and then all Rui saw were those endless yellow skies.