章節 4: EPISODE - 4 - The Weight of Words
[MA 15+ - Contains themes of grief, psychological trauma, and emotional distress, and suicide]
The bile came first, as it always did.
Mahitaro's consciousness returned to the familiar sensation—the acidic burn in his throat, the wet stench of stomach contents on tatami, the cool press of woven straw against his cheek. His body knew this routine by heart now: the convulsive awakening, the brief disorientation, then the crushing weight of remembering.
But this time, he didn't move. Didn't try to rise. Didn't even open his eyes fully.
He simply lay there, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell, listening to the morning sounds filtering through his window. A crow cawed somewhere distant. A delivery truck rumbled past. Someone's television murmured the morning news through thin walls.
The world insisting on its continuation while his mind replayed death on an endless loop. Eruto's smile.
That was what remained clearest—not the arterial spray, not the desperate weight of his dying body, but that final expression. That impossible, heartbreaking smile that said it's okay when nothing would ever be okay again.
You don't have to carry everything alone.
The words echoed through Mahitaro's skull with the persistence of wine, a high-pitched whine that never quite faded. They weren't comforting. Damning, a reminder of promises he couldn't keep and help he couldn't accept.
Why did you smile? Mahitaro thought, his mental voice raw with anguish. Why did you have to look at me like that, like I was worth saving, when you were the one bleeding out?
His hands moved without conscious direction, palms pressing against his face, nails finding the soft skin of his cheeks. The pressure increased, fingertips digging in, leaving crescents that would bruise. He wanted to dig deeper, to peel away the face Eruto had smiled at, to excavate the skull beneath and silence the thoughts that wouldn't stop screaming.
The physical pain was nothing. A distant sensation, easily dismissed. The pain inside—that was what threatened to split him apart from within.
Minutes passed. Maybe hours. The quality of light through the window shifted, suggesting time's passage, but Mahitaro remained frozen in his puddle of bile and despair, a body waiting for its mind to decide whether to animate it.
Eventually, survival instinct won. His body moved—mechanical, joyless—pulling itself upright. The room tilted, then steadied. His stomach churned but produced nothing. He was empty in every sense that mattered.
Two days into the loop—or was it the same loop, recycled? Time had become slippery, non-linear—Mahitaro stood in his room as evening painted the walls in shades of dying light.
The day had passed in fragments he couldn't quite piece together. School, probably. Classes he'd attended without absorbing a single word. Eruto's presence beside him, alive and whole and unaware, each smile and laugh a fresh blade between Mahitaro's ribs.
Now, alone in his room, something inside him cracked.
"Why did you smile?!" The words tore from his throat, unexpected even to himself, raw and ragged. His fists slammed down on his desk with enough force to rattle everything on its surface. "Why didn't you stay scared, stay angry—why did you have to look at me like I mattered when you were DYING?!"
Books toppled, papers scattered, pencils rolled off the edge to clatter against the floor. Mahitaro's heart heaved, each breath feeling like it was being dragged through broken glass. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the room's chill. His hands shook—from rage or grief or the toxic mixture of both, he couldn't tell.
The desk groaned under his grip. His knuckles had gone white, bloodless, the bones visible beneath translucent skin. He wanted to flip it, to smash it into kindling, to destroy something tangible because he couldn't touch the things actually destroying him.
His arm drew back, muscles tensing for the blow that would shatter wood and probably his hand—
"Mahitaro?"
The voice stopped him mid-motion, freezing his body like someone had poured ice water through his veins.
His mother's voice. Soft. Hesitant. Wrong.
Wrong because it shouldn't sound like that. Wrong because in every previous loop, his mother's voice had been hardened by alcohol and disappointment, sharp with contempt, empty of anything resembling care.
But this voice held worry. Genuine, unmistakable worry.
The door slid open slowly, the sound of wood on wood seeming impossibly loud in the sudden silence. Mahitaro didn't turn, couldn't turn, his body locked in place as if movement might shatter whatever strange moment this was.
His mother stood in the doorway—he could feel her presence even without looking, the particular quality of attention only a parent could project. When she spoke again, her voice was even softer, as if addressing something wounded and liable to bolt.
"I heard you shouting. From downstairs." A pause, heavy with unspoken things. "I know... I know things have been hard. Since your grandparents passed. Since everything changed."
Mahitaro's jaw clenched. His grandparents. Right. In this timeline, before the incident, before the framing, they'd still been alive. Their deaths had been the beginning of his family's slow collapse into dysfunction, though that collapse seemed minor compared to what was coming.
"But you can't keep doing this to yourself," his mother continued, and now there was a tremor in her voice that made Mahitaro's throat constrict. "It's been getting worse. I can see it. The way you barely eat, barely sleep. The way you look at nothing for hours. I..."
She stepped into the room, and Mahitaro could hear the uncertainty in her movements, the careful placement of feet as if navigating a minefield.
"You're my son. And I can always tell when you're hurting. Parents know these things." A soft, sad laugh. "Even when we're not good at saying so."
You wouldn't understand, Mahitaro thought, the words bitter in his mind. How could you possibly understand watching your best friend die in your arms, feeling his blood soak into your clothes, seeing that smile that broke something fundamental in your soul? How could you understand dying over and over, waking up to bile and blood and the certainty that it's going to happen again?
But what came out was quieter, flatter. "You wouldn't understand."
"Maybe I wouldn't." She was closer now, close enough that he could smell her shampoo—something floral, ordinary, achingly normal. "But I don't need to understand everything to know you're suffering. And I don't... I don't want to lose you too."
The words hit him like a physical blow. Something in his mind cracked, a fault line spreading through the numbness he'd built up like armor.
She doesn't know, he realized. She doesn't know she's already lost me. Multiple times. In multiple ways. That the son she thinks she's talking to is already a ghost wearing familiar skin.
His fists, still clenched against the desk, began to shake. Not with rage this time but with something more dangerous—the kind of emotion he'd been keeping locked away because acknowledging it meant acknowledging he was still human enough to feel.
"I don't..." His voice came out hoarse, damaged. "I don't know how much longer I can keep going."
The admission hung in the air between them, heavy with implications he wasn't sure she could fully grasp. But the silence that followed wasn't empty. It was full of something he'd forgotten existed—presence. Someone actually being there, actually listening, actually trying despite the inadequacy of words.
He felt her hand on his arm—tentative, warm, real. The touch anchored him to the moment in a way nothing had since the loops began.
"Then don't do it alone." Her voice broke slightly on the last word. "Please. Whatever you're carrying, you don't have to carry it by yourself."
You don't have to carry everything alone.
Eruto's words. His mother's words. The same sentiment echoing across the gulf between life and death, between timelines and resets, insisting on something Mahitaro had stopped believing was possible.
Connection. Support. The radical notion that suffering could be shared instead of endured in isolation.
Something inside him shattered.
Not the loud, violent breaking of glass, but the quiet collapse of a dam that had been holding back too much for too long. The tears came suddenly, unexpectedly, hot tracks down his face that he couldn't stop even if he'd wanted to.
His knees gave out. The floor rose to meet him, hard tatami against bone, and he crumpled into a shape that resembled prayer or defeat or both. The sobs tore from somewhere deep in his heart, raw and ugly and animal, the kind of crying that hurt physically, that felt like it might turn him inside out.
His mother knelt beside him. Her arms wrapped around his shaking shoulders, pulling him close in a hug he couldn't remember experiencing in years. She didn't ask questions, didn't demand explanations. She just held him while he broke apart, her own tears falling silently into his hair.
"I'm here," she whispered, over and over. "I'm here, I'm here, I'm here."
And for this one moment, in this one iteration of an infinite nightmare, Mahitaro let himself believe it might matter.
Morning came differently this time.
Mahitaro woke not to bile and blood but to sunlight—still painful, still unwelcome, but somehow less aggressive. His eyes were swollen nearly shut from crying, his head throbbed with dehydration, and his body felt like it had been wrung out and left to dry. But underneath all that was something he'd almost forgotten existed.
Not hope. That was too strong a word, too presumptuous. More like... the absence of absolute certainty that death was the only answer. A hairline crack in the sealed door of despair.
He dressed slowly, his movements still heavy but no longer completely mechanical. The uniform felt less like a costume for a play he'd memorized too well and more like just clothes—uncomfortable, slightly restrictive, but tolerable.
School unfolded with its usual routines, but Mahitaro found himself seeing them differently. The whispers that normally felt like knives now seemed like just noise—unpleasant but dismissible. The stares that usually pinned him like a specimen on display became just eyes looking, nothing more or less.
Eruto appeared beside him between classes, alive and concerned, asking questions Mahitaro still couldn't fully answer. But instead of the crushing guilt that usually accompanied his friend's presence, Mahitaro felt something more complex—grief yes, but also a strange gratitude for these stolen moments before the inevitable.
If Eruto told me I didn't have to carry this alone, Mahitaro thought as they walked to their next class, then maybe there's something I'm supposed to do with that. Some way to use it instead of just letting it destroy me.
The murderer. The pattern. The loop itself.
These were the real enemies, not his own existence. If he was going to be trapped in this cycle, forced to witness death repeatedly, then maybe—just maybe—there was a way to fight back that didn't involve surrendering completely.
It was a dangerous thought. Every time he'd tried to change things before, fate had simply adjusted, finding new victims, new ways to frame him. But he'd been operating from despair then, from the certainty that nothing mattered.
What if he tried operating from something else?
By the second day after his breakdown, Mahitaro found himself in the school library during lunch period.
The library was a quiet space, underutilized by students more interested in gossip and socializing than studying. Rows of books stretched into comfortable dimness, dust motes dancing in columns of light from high windows. It smelled of old paper and wood polish and the particular stillness that accumulates in spaces dedicated to preserved knowledge.
Mahitaro moved to the newspaper archive section, where bound volumes of local papers stretched back decades. His hands trembled slightly as he pulled down volume after volume, spreading them across a study table.
He wasn't sure what he was looking for, exactly. Patterns, maybe. Evidence of previous loops, if such things left traces. Unsolved murders with similarities to his situation. Anything that might give him leverage, understanding, some small measure of control.
The papers crinkled under his fingers as he flipped through them—yellowed newsprint documenting the mundane tragedies of ordinary life. Car accidents. House fires. Missing people. And occasionally, murders. Unexplained deaths where the accused seemed circumstantially guilty but maintained their innocence.
His pen scratched across his notebook as he took notes, documenting dates, names, locations. A web of connections that might be meaningful or might be paranoid pattern-seeking by a mind desperate for patterns in chaos.
Hours passed. His eyes burned from reading in dim light. His hand cramped from writing. But he didn't stop, couldn't stop, because this was the first proactive thing he'd done since the loops began. Every word read, every note taken, felt like a tiny act of defiance against the fate that had been crushing him.
You don't have to carry everything alone, Eruto had said.
But right now, alone in the library with only ghosts and records for company, Mahitaro would carry this. Would try, at least, to understand the nightmare he was trapped in. Would look for cracks in the pattern, weaknesses in the loop, anything that might give him leverage.
Not for hope. Hope was still too dangerous, too likely to be crushed.
But for spite, maybe. For the stubborn refusal to simply accept horror as inevitable.
That was enough. For now.
Evening came with its familiar dread—the orange light that painted everything in shades of ending, the lengthening shadows, the countdown to violence.
Mahitaro walked home alone, his bag heavy with borrowed library books, his mind full of fragments of information that hadn't yet cohered into understanding. Each step felt heavier than the last as he approached the timeline's predicted climax.
But this time, something was different. Not in the external world—the sun still set, shadows still lengthened, the overpass still loomed in the distance. The difference was internal, subtle but significant.
I'm still afraid, Mahitaro acknowledged as he walked. Still expecting the worst. Still carrying the weight of every death I've witnessed. But I'm also still moving forward.
That night, lying in bed and staring at his ceiling's familiar cracks, Mahitaro whispered into the darkness: "Eruto... Mother... I'll try. Just one more time. I'll try."
The words hurt to say—they always did, promises made to people who wouldn't remember them. But underneath the hurt was something else, something fragile and dangerous.
Not hope. Not yet.
But the shadow of it. The possibility that maybe, somehow, there was a way through this that didn't end in rope and bile and endless resurrection.
When sleep finally came, it wasn't peaceful. Dreams still brought blood and smiles and the accusatory eyes of the dead. But it was bearable. For now, bearable was enough.
TO BE CONTINUED...
每周推薦票狀態
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榜單 
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