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“War is over, if you want it!” sang, or shouted, John Lennon, from the speakers inside the old teal Chevrolet that Byakuya Togami sat in. War was over, but left its mark. In the streets, in shops and the schools, hope was living again. But, people talked in a certain way now. With sickly amounts of optimism, as not to rattle the grave of Junko Enoshima open with even speaking despair. Togami thought it irritating, the way she was still feared. The song repeated, and he let it continue. He admired the Beatles.
The car was barely running, and struggled against the rough snow road. Byakuya wouldn’t say it out loud, he never did, but he felt the history inside of it should be kept alive. It was owned by his uncle on his mother’s side. He felt annoyingly sentimental lately. He chalked this up to his classmates, who were very heavy on the subject of optimism and hope. They partially led him on this road in the first place. Future Foundation had a meeting in Paris, and Byakuya had a day off, where he said he had business to take care of. Really, he just wanted to head down south to visit his family.
After a three hour drive, Byakuya finally reached his childhood home, an old small house with a field behind it. He hadn’t been back here in years. His eyes scanned the building, which was covered with layers of snow, from inches on the porch rocking chair to the covered roof. It looked abandoned, the decrepit way it sat there, clearly untouched. The rotting wood and weak structure didn’t help. He knew it wouldn’t fall though, it was exactly like that when he was a child. It brought him comfort, which he couldn’t describe easily anymore.
Before entering, he looked onto the large field they owned in the back. Typically, it would be full of treated grape vines, across all the acres. Byakuya walked up to one of the plants, and inspected the curls along the vines, dusted with frost. The plants hadn’t been touched in years, and even under the snow, they were overgrown and weedy. ‘How sad’ , he thought. He turned back and stomped onto the porch, inspecting everything further. He kicked off some of the snow that was sitting along the porch, an physical effort he almost felt ashamed of. Byakuya warily opened the door, which creaked loudly with age.
Byakuya came here with many types of denial. He told himself that this house did not mean anything, and he told himself of the reality of her death. But, he didn’t see his mother sitting on the old loveseat, and he wasn’t expecting the grief that would cause him. Instead of her smiling face, there was her old dried blood on the floor, and he felt a burning sensation in his head. After ten years, a man can make many delusions to soothe himself. Separating his mother from her death. He knew she was dead, but his heart truly thought he was wrong, that his family and his childhood were still alive here. He came back to see her, and now stood here with only the worst of it. He was here with the memory of his dead mother on the floor, and him being taken away. Byakuya ran up the stairs, and in a split second saw his face in an old silver mirror on the wall, in which he saw a childlike face full of fear. ‘Weak, foolish, idiotic-’ and other words of disdain rolled through his head, as he headed into his old bedroom.
‘This is just terrible.’ he thought, as he closed his bedroom door. He stood still for a moment, leaning against the door, breathing heavily. ‘This isn’t me, speaking so frankly like this’, he whispered to himself. His discomfort was suffocating him. He walked over to his bedroom mirror on his old dusty vanity, and he looked into it once again. He found his face neutral with his usual stoicism, which calmed him down. He looked down onto the top of the vanity, which held a framed photo. ‘I remember this, mother thought it would be interesting if we took a photo with an old camera. I hated it actually, sitting still for so long, and she had to hold me so I wouldn’t move. How stupid I was.’ he thought as he looked at it, and gripped it tighter than he realized. His mother sat there, in an old black dress, with her long, curly blonde hair. Byakuya sat in a novelty sailor outfit, with a tired, boyish face, sitting on her knees. They both had flat expressions, but in his mothers eyes he saw love. Her mouth curled with a smile, akin to the subtelty of the Mona Lisa. ‘I suppose she always had that expression though’ he thought, and he was right. His mother had these large, blue eyes that many people commented on. She always seemed to look at everything and everyone with a certain form of helplessness and love. Byakuya could recall that pure expression in every memory he had of her, even as she bled out and looked at him, and her light faded. She was still beautiful then.
He looked up into the mirror, and he saw grief in his own face. He saw how much he looked like her, but his eyes were full of something different. He had her blonde hair and her blue eyes, but warped with the stern features of his father. His own face was like a poison. Byakuya felt such shame, and he stumbled onto his child-sized bed. He slowly crumbled into a ball, and for the first time in years, he wept. ‘I could have saved her, I could have ruined my father, I could have saved everyone’ raced through his head. He gripped his skull with his fear, and felt he could pull his hair out. The war was over, and he had a goal to rebuild the Togami name and corporation, but now, all he could think about was decimating every part of it. ‘I wish Junko left him for me, to let me choke him, flog him, and make him suffer and bleed, and then make myself suffer as well.’ he thought. He grit his teeth and let himself into his rage. Suicide was never an option he even thought of, naturally, it was for the weak. But he didn’t feel like a strong willed Togami anymore. He was not filled with the ruthlessness and urge to conquer, but with grief and regret. Once again, he was the 8 year boy who saw his mother killed. Byakuya started to unfurl his body, and stretched out his limbs. His tears stopped burning, and his expression was blank as he stared at the ceiling. It looked the same as it always did. ‘I wonder if he was taken from his childhood and life as I was, I never could ask.’ He thought of his father. The only thing he knew about Kijo Togami was that he could hurt people.
Over the years, many people had thought Byakuya was conditioned by his father to be the way he was. He supposed that was true in one way, but mostly, Byakuya had to pretend to stop caring. He felt trapped, not ignorant. He never felt as if he admired his father. Every time his father would beat him, he would feel rage and pain. He knew they pitied him, in the way they looked at him. He remembered a time, in the library, he was in a brief conversation to Naegi about himself, even the smallest bit of knowledge of his past. He looked at Makoto's face, and his expression of pity made him sick. He got up, left the library, and didn’t answer as Makoto called out after him. They saw him as a case to help, someone who couldn’t realize just how poisoned they were. But he always knew he was a hostage, he wasn’t a fool.
Byakuya looked at the white crumbling ceiling, and felt as if everything he forced away from himself rushed back into his soul. ‘In this house, I feel the sins of myself. The killing game, my business, my past, I am evil, aren't I? But maybe I can end it. Maybe with all my futures and places where I stand as evil, with every thing, every terrible turn of phrase and action I take trailing behind me on a chain, I can walk into that field, and the chain can break.’ he thought, reciting his own ideas poetically, as if he was writing a letter to himself. With his red, puffy tear stained face, he slowly sat up. ‘Should I surrender to evil? To this world that offers me so much, so much that I can never deserve? These people I hurt? Can I fake a redemption I can never achieve?’ he thought. He saw the cross beside the window, which hung over his bed. He recalled his mother making him pray, and how they would go to church and bless their meals. Byakuya wondered if his honesty was coming from God, or from some divine intervention. He looked outside the window again. There was no snow, but the clouds parted onto the snow which let the white sky be pierced by the bright sun, almost clouded over by the atmosphere.
The back door slammed open, and Byakuya burst through. He ran into the field, laughing and stumbling. His tall, lanky body made him look like a madman, or at least he hoped. He trudged through the grapevine field as far as he could muster. His thin, white shirt billowed through the winds of winter, and his blonde, unruly hair blew into the wind. His stumbling feet tripped over each other and he fell onto the top of the snow, and did not sink into it. He felt cold down to his bones, but his smile extended the length of his face. He rolled onto his back, and folded his shaking, pale hands over his chests, feeling it rise and fall with his breathing. Byakuya decided he would wait here. He wondered about so much he had hidden for ten years, his family, his mother, and about the village. He had a cousin, Brigette, he used to play with her often on this field. Would she come find him here? He used to know everyone in the village, he had friends, would they come? His grandmother, who berated everyone on being traditional and her old ways, would she come? ‘They are probably dead’, he thought. The grief he felt brought him ecstacy. Would one of his friends find him? He didn’t tell them where he was going today, but he didn’t think about that. For once in his life, his name didn’t decide his fate, and what he would do. He wasn’t the heir to the Togami family, but the second member of the family down this dirt road who met a tragic end at this house. Byakuya decided he could live with that.