EPISODE - 10 - The Smirk at the Door

[MA 18+ - Contains extreme graphic violence, suicide, death and gore, psychological truama, and disturbing imagery]

The days after the incident dissolved into a fog that felt more real than reality.

Mahitaro existed in a state that wasn't quite consciousness, wasn't quite dissociation—something in between, a liminal space where his eight-year-old body moved through routines while his thirty-seven-year-old mind retreated to somewhere deeper, somewhere the horror couldn't quite reach. His parents spoke in hushed tones. Neighbors whispered. The school sent counselors who asked questions in voices pitched for trauma, using words designed to make horror manageable.

But horror wasn't manageable. It simply was.

Yasuke was gone. Not dead—worse. Alive somewhere in the juvenile detention system, being processed by machinery designed to categorize and contain rather than understand. The house felt wrong without him. Empty spaces where a teenage presence should have existed. Silence where conversation should have filled rooms. Absence that somehow weighed more than presence ever had.

And through it all, Mahitaro waited. Because his adult consciousness knew—with certainty born from blocked memories beginning to crack—that this wasn't the end. The tragedy had more movements. The knife hadn't finished its work.

Three days after the incident, Gekidō appeared at their door.

The red-haired child stood on the threshold with an expression that seemed genuine in its concern. His parents had kept him away—"Let Mahitaro process," they'd said—but apparently time limits on grief had expired. Now here he was, holding a bag of what looked like homework, his face carrying the careful neutrality of someone approaching something broken.

Mahitaro's mother let him in. "Only for a little while," she said gently. "He's still... processing."

Processing. As if trauma were data to be sorted and filed away. As if witnessing your brother stab a teacher to death and then disappear into the legal system was something an eight-year-old could simply process.

Gekidō climbed the stairs to Mahitaro's room. His footsteps were soft, hesitant, the walk of someone approaching a minefield. He knocked—gentle, almost apologetic—and waited for permission that didn't come before opening the door anyway.

Mahitaro sat on his bed, staring at nothing. He'd been in this position for hours, maybe days. Time had become slippery, unmeasurable. His small body occupied space while his mind circled the same thoughts on an endless loop: I failed. I knew it was coming and I failed. I had a brother and now he's gone and it's my fault for not stopping it.

"Hey." Gekidō's voice was soft. He entered slowly, closed the door behind him with care, and stood just inside the room like he wasn't sure he belonged. "I brought your homework. Teachers said you could take your time but eventually you'll need to—" He stopped. Even through his performance, he seemed to recognize the absurdity. Homework. Like that mattered. Like anything mattered.

Mahitaro didn't respond. His eyes remained fixed on the wall, on patterns in the paint that resembled nothing but which his brain kept trying to interpret as meaningful shapes. Faces. Wounds. Abstract representations of suffering.

Gekidō crossed to the bed, sat carefully on the edge like the mattress might shatter under sudden weight. "Are you... okay? I know that's a stupid question but I don't—I don't know what else to say."

Tell me the truth, Mahitaro's mind supplied. Drop the act. Admit you orchestrated this. That you knew it would happen. That you sent me back here specifically to witness this, to suffer this, to—

But looking at Gekidō's face—at the genuine confusion and concern that seemed too perfect to be performance yet too perfect to be real—Mahitaro couldn't determine which reality was true. Had this always been planned? Or was he attributing malice to coincidence, seeing patterns in chaos because his fractured psyche needed the horror to have meaning?

"Mahitaro?" Gekidō's hand landed on his shoulder. Light. Warm. The touch of a friend offering comfort. Mahitaro flinched. The response was involuntary, body reacting to contact with someone who'd killed him in other timelines, who'd smiled while people died, who'd—

—or who hadn't. Who was just a person. Who's as confused by this as everyone else. The uncertainty was its own torture. "Sorry." Gekidō withdrew his hand immediately. "I didn't mean to—"

"It's fine," Mahitaro heard himself say. His voice came out flat, affectless, the emotional equivalent of static. "I'm just... tired."

"Yeah." Gekidō nodded, accepting the lie because what else could he do? "That makes sense. This whole thing is..." He trailed off, clearly lacking vocabulary adequate for the horror they'd witnessed.

Silence settled between them. Not comfortable—silence after trauma was never comfortable—but not hostile either. Just empty space where words should exist but didn't.

Then Gekidō spoke again, his voice quieter: "I keep seeing it. The blood. The way he just... fell. I close my eyes and it's all I can see." Good, part of Mahitaro thought with vicious satisfaction. You should see it. Should carry it. Should suffer like—

But Gekidō's expression held genuine trauma. His hands trembled slightly, his eyes shadowed with the kind of haunted look that came from witnessing something the mind couldn't integrate. Either he was the best actor in human history, or he was actually just a human processing his first encounter with death.

Which is he? How do I know? How can I ever know?

"Me too," Mahitaro said finally. Because regardless of Gekidō's true nature, that much was honest. The blood. The falling. The wet sounds of dying. All of it lived behind his eyes now, permanent installation in the gallery of horrors his memory had become overall.

They sat in silence for a while longer. Eventually Gekidō stood, placed the homework bag on Mahitaro's desk, and moved toward the door. He paused at the threshold, hand on the doorknob, and without turning around said: "Your brother's not a monster, you know. Whatever happens next, whatever they say about him—he's not a monster. He just... broke. We all break sometimes."

The words hung in the air after Gekidō left, resonating with frequencies Mahitaro couldn't quite parse. Comfort? Absolution? Or something else—knowledge delivered in the guise of platitude, truth hidden in the obvious?

We all break sometimes. Yeah. Mahitaro knew about breaking. The breaking came three days later.

Mahitaro woke to voices—low, tense, filtering through the walls from the living room. Adult conversation pitched to avoid waking children but loud enough that the emotional content carried even when specific words didn't. His mother's voice. His father's deeper tones. And a third voice—official, bureaucratic, delivering information with the practiced neutrality of someone whose job required frequent delivery of bad news.

He crept from his bed, small feet silent on wooden floors, and positioned himself at the top of the stairs where he could hear without being seen. "—tried everything they could, but the damage was too extensive—"

"What are you saying?" His mother's voice, sharp with rising panic. "What damage? You said he was in custody, you said he was safe—"

"He was. Is. But Mrs. Yasachiru, your son was found in his cell this morning. He'd used his bedsheet to—" The official paused, clearly searching for gentle phrasing. "He attempted to take his own life. The hanging was interrupted, but he'd been without oxygen for several minutes before guards arrived. The brain damage is... significant."

The sound that came from his mother wasn't quite a scream. More like the noise a wounded animal makes—primal, involuntary, the audio expression of something fundamental tearing inside her.

Mahitaro's small hands gripped the railing. His knuckles went white. His vision tunneled. Yasuke. Hanging. Brain damage.

The words assembled in his consciousness but refused to form coherent meaning. His mind rejected them, tried to reclassify them as misheard, misunderstood, anything except what they clearly were entirely as thought.

"Where is he?" His father's voice, strained almost beyond recognition. "We need to see him. We need—"

"He's at the hospital. But Mr. Yasachiru, you need to understand—he's not responsive. The damage to his frontal lobe, the oxygen deprivation—even if he survives, he won't be the person you remember. He may never regain consciousness. And if he does, he'll require constant care for the rest of his—"

His mother's sobs cut off the rest. Deep, wrenching sounds that seemed to come from somewhere below her lungs, from some darkness in her heart where grief lived. His father's voice joined—not crying, but something worse. The hollow tone of someone whose understanding of reality had just been forcibly mostly rewritten.

Mahitaro stood frozen at the top of the stairs. His eight-year-old brain tried to process information designed to shatter his mind in confusion. Yasuke tried to kill himself. Is brain-dead or close to it. Will never wake up or will wake up as something else, someone else, a body without the person who used to inhabit it.

His legs gave out. He sat down hard on the top step, the impact jarring his spine but barely registering against the numbness spreading through him like frost as he somehow processed everything.

I had a brother for one week. Got to know him for seven days. And now he's gone. Not dead but worse—trapped in a body that's become a prison, a flesh cage housing nothing but strange functions.

The grief that hit was different from what he'd felt after the incident. That had been shock, trauma, the immediate aftermath of witnessing violence. This was something deeper—the slow-dawning understanding that loss was permanent, that there would be no recovery, no return to normal, no future where Yasuke existed as anything except a cautionary tale about the fragility of human minds under pressure.

He wanted to cry. Wanted to scream. Wanted to do something, anything, that might release the pressure building in his heart. But his body had gone numb, his face stained with his dry tears, his voice stolen by shock too profound for expression.

Instead, he sat. And breathed. And listened to his parents fall apart in the room below.

Eventually, they left—rushing to the hospital to see what remained of their eldest son, leaving Mahitaro alone in a house that felt like a funeral. The front door closed with finality that resonated through empty rooms. The car started. Drove away. And silence settled like dust over everything

Mahitaro descended the stairs slowly. His small feet found each step with mechanical precision, his hands trailing along the railing his brother had touched countless times. The living room still smelled like his mother's perfume, his father's coffee. Evidence of life continuing despite catastrophe.

He stood in the middle of the empty house and felt his mind begin to fragment.

This is the part I couldn't remember. This is what my psyche blocked out. Not just watching Yasuke kill the teacher, but this—the aftermath. The slow realization that I lost him twice. Once to violence, once to despair. That he existed and then stopped existing, all in the span of days.

His small body swayed. The room tilted. Colors bled into each other like wet paint. And then—a sound. Soft. From behind him. Mahitaro turned.

Gekidō stood in the doorway. Not the child version Mahitaro had grown accustomed to. The teenager. The one from the future, from the loops, from the library where this had all started. Red hair catching light that seemed wrong for the time of day. Expression caught somewhere between concern and something else—something sharper, more calculated.

And on his face—a smirk. Small. Knowing. The same expression Mahitaro had learned to associate with suffering.

"You," Mahitaro whispered. His child voice couldn't carry the weight of accusation he wanted to layer into the word, but he tried anyway. "You're him."

The smirk widened slightly. Gekidō—the real Gekidō, the future one, the architect—tilted his head. "Yes."

The admission hit like physical impact. Mahitaro staggered back, his small body suddenly inadequate for the rage trying to express itself through his child bodys fists.

"You knew," he choked out. "You knew this would happen. Sent me back here to witness it. To suffer through losing a brother I'd forgotten existed. You—you—"

"I did," Gekidō confirmed. His voice held none of the childish tones Mahitaro had heard for the past week. This was the voice from the loops—older, harder, carrying weight of someone who'd died too many times to bother with gentleness. "I sent you back. Made you watch. Made you feel it. Because you needed to understand."

"Understand what?!" The question came out as a shriek, his vocals breaking beyond there limit. "That you're a monster? That you enjoy torture? That—"

"That you're the one who can reject fate," Gekidō interrupted, his expression shifting into something more serious. "That's what this is all about, Mahitaro. Not cruelty for its own sake. Purpose. You were always meant to be the one who changes everything—who breaks the cycle I couldn't break. That's why I chose you."

He stepped closer, and despite Mahitaro's desire to retreat, his small body remained frozen.

"If you're seeing this—me, standing here, speaking to you like this—it means everything worked. You have the power now. Blooded-Loop. The ability I gave you before I died in that timeline you changed to despair in as planned. That's right. The power that's been making you suffer, making you loop, making you experience my torment layered onto your own. Used to be my own. But I already planned for you to know that in time. Your reward after finding your resolve. If you do that is, my dear Mahitaro."

Mahitaro's breath caught. "What?"

"The suffering you've felt isn't just yours," Gekidō explained, his voice carrying a strange mixture of regret and satisfaction. "Every loop you've lived, every death you've endured—you've been experiencing fragments of my pain. My memories. My accumulated trauma from thousands of loops I lived before passing the curse to you. It's how the power works—transfers not just ability but suffering, forging new resolve from inherited despair."

His expression softened slightly, something almost approaching genuine emotion crossing his features. "I knew it would hurt you. Knew it would break you. But I also knew—or at least gambled—that you'd be strong enough to rise from those ashes. To find resolve I never could. To reject the fate that consumed me."

"You're insane," Mahitaro whispered.

"Maybe." Gekidō's smile held no humor. "But I was right, wasn't I? You're still standing. Still fighting. Still trying to save Yasuke even though you just learned he exists. That's the kind of strength I needed. That's why you're special from me entirely."

He moved closer still, until he was kneeling at Mahitaro's eye level. "This conversation—me being here, speaking to you now—it's all pre-planned. Predicted through loops. I'm not really here, Mahitaro. This is a message. Echoes sent through time using the last fragments of power I had before giving it all to you. My teenage self—the cruel one you've encountered—he's operating on memories I gave him. A personality I crafted specifically to torment you into strength. But he's gone by now. Since your seeing this message and all. Which also shows you did manage to show a flicker of resolve. Also as I had mostly planned."

Mahitaro's mind reeled, trying to process layers of manipulation that went deeper than he'd imagined.

"The red circle on your calendar," Gekidō continued. "You thought it was always there, but it wasn't. The loop ability evolved it—created it as a marker, a challenge, a way to focus your attention where it needed to be. Everything has been designed to forge you into someone capable of what I couldn't achieve."

"Why me?" Mahitaro's voice broke. "Why make me suffer like this?"

"Because you're my dear friend," Gekidō said simply. "The last person I cared about before loops destroyed my capacity to care. I gambled everything on you because I believed—still believe—that you have what I lost. The ability to hold onto humanity while wielding inhuman power. The strength to reject fate instead of surrendering to it."

His hand reached out, hovering near Mahitaro's shoulder but not quite touching. "Your parents will forget you suffered this and forgot everything to. They'll suppress your memory of Yasuke ever existing in the household after he dies from the lack of oxygen, of me, of all of this—not from malice, but from a twisted attempt at kindness. They'll think they're protecting you by helping you forget. It's selfish. Cruel in its own way. But also... human. That's what trauma does to people, Mahitaro. It makes them into worse versions of themselves while they're trying to survive. So which means your next step is your first redo in this timeline of are childhood. Just a hint, cause if I tell you the whole thing you're supposed to do. You'll probably lose that resolve from my own stupid planning, because only your own matters in these horrible times."

Something dark crossed his expression. "I hate them for it, honestly. Your future parents. The alcoholic mother, the distant father. They had a chance to help you, to support you through this, and they chose their own comfort instead. They're idiots. Cowards. But..." He paused, seeming to wrestle with the admission. "...they at least tried to spare you one pain. That counts for something, even if it doomed you to different suffering."

Mahitaro's tears finally came—hot and sudden, spilling over without permission. "I don't understand. I don't understand any of this."

"You will," Gekidō promised. His hand finally landed on Mahitaro's shoulder—warm, solid, real despite being impossible. "When you save him. When you break the cycle. When you reject fate completely. Then you'll understand why every moment of suffering was necessary. Why I had to be the villain. Why you had to endure this."

He stood, looking down at Mahitaro with an expression that mixed pride and sorrow. "I'm using the last dregs of loop power I have left—the final reserves of energy fading from when I once wielded what you now carry—to send this message through time itself. To predict this moment. To speak these words across the years so they'd reach you exactly when you need them. This conversation, these warnings—they're costing me everything I have left just to make them real."

"Don't go," Mahitaro whispered, hating himself for the plea but unable to stop it. "Don't leave me alone with this."

"I already left years ago," Gekidō said gently. "This is just an echo. A message in a bottle, cast through time to reach you at exactly this moment. The real me—the one who loved you like a brother, who played with you as children, who watched you grow—he's been gone longer than you remember. What remains is just... purpose. The ghost of someone who cared enough to damn you to save you."

His form began to waver, edges blurring like static. "Never give up, Mahitaro. You have what it takes. I've seen enough futures to know—if anyone can reject fate, it's you. That's not hope. It's mathematics. Pattern recognition. Cold calculation based on thousands of failed attempts."

The smirk returned, softer now—almost genuine. "You were always special," he said. "My greatest friend. My last hope. Prove me wrong." His voice lowered. "And also when you realize the truth about those fake memories—of the redo timelines I gave you in this loop—don't let it break your resolve."

"And I'm only telling you this myself because you may realize that they were never real in the first place, and only designed to help you. And well the fake part, well that part was only you relooping. The family stuff was the real part of the memories. Just wanted to let you know. Anyways I hope I didn't shock you, goodbye old friend."

And then he was gone. Not fading dramatically, but simply absent—as if he'd never been there at all. Leaving Mahitaro alone in an empty house, small body shaking with sobs, mind fracturing under the weight of revelations that rewrote everything he thought he understood.

The knife was easy to find. His father kept tools in the garage, sharp things for cutting and carving and purposes that never included what Mahitaro intended. But intention didn't matter. Function did.

He brought the blade to his room. Sat on his bed. Stared at it—metal catching light, edge honed sharp enough to part flesh with minimal resistance.

Gekidō said I'm special. Said I can reject fate. But what if he's wrong? What if I'm just another variable in his calculations, another tool to be used and discarded?

His small hand wrapped around the handle. The grip felt awkward in child fingers, but he managed. The blade pressed against his wrist—not cutting, not yet, just pressure. Testing. Feeling the edge against skin that had never known this particular violation.

But something was different now. His hand felt stronger—the enhanced abilities Gekidō mentioned, already integrating into his system somehow, it seems the loops had made him gain his own abilities entirely, and Gekido either knew, or actually knew, or not at all. He could feel it, subtle but undeniable. Power that didn't belong in an eight-year-old body.

Gifts from a ghost. Tools for rejecting fate. Or just more manipulation, more ways to extend suffering.

The blade pressed harder. Blood welled—more than a scratch, deliberate incision that parted skin and revealed flesh underneath. Pain bloomed, sharp and clean, cutting through emotional numbness with physical clarity.

I could do it. End this. Stop the loops. Stop the suffering. Just one deep cut, let arterial spray paint the walls like the teacher's blood painted the hallway, and—

But Gekidō's words echoed: You're special. You can reject fate. Never give up.

The knife trembled. Not from fear—from rage. From stubborn refusal to give Gekidō satisfaction of being right or wrong. From spite pure and simple.

Fine. I'll play your game. I'll try to save Yasuke. I'll reject your fate. But not because you want me to. Because I refuse to let you win. Refuse to let suffering be the final word.

He lowered the knife. Set it aside. Bandaged his wrist with hands that were steadier than they should be, enhanced coordination making the task.

And whispered into the empty room: "I'll save him. I'll break your cycle. And when I do—when I prove you right or wrong—you won't be there to see it. That's my revenge. You gambled everything on me, and you'll never know if you won."

The promise hung in the air, bitter but genuine.

Outside, the sun set on a day that had rewritten Mahitaro's understanding of suffering. Inside, he sat in growing darkness, grieving for a brother who existed in a hospital bed somewhere, brain too damaged to contain personhood, sustained by machines while everything that made him Yasuke had already fled.

But underneath the grief, underneath the rage, underneath the horror—something new had taken root. Not hope. Hope was too fragile, too easily crushed.

Purpose. Bloomed from spite. Forged from inherited suffering. Tempered by revelations that made cruelty seem almost comprehensible.

He would save Yasuke. Not because Gekidō wanted him to. Not because fate demanded it. But because the alternative—letting suffering be meaningless, letting Gekidō's calculations be proven correct without resistance—was unbearable.

The loops weren't finished. The tragedy had more movements to play. But for the first time, Mahitaro felt like an active participant rather than passive victim. And that would have to be enough.

TO BE CONTINUED...