I

Things changed rapidly from there.
  Akiko had at first tried comforting Yuri, however, she found Yuri to be constantly locked in herself. The girl just seemed to shut off every time someone came to talk to her.
  “Yuri, the guy was a creep. If he did do himself in because of his obsession, how could you blame yourself?” Akiko had said, a reassuring hand on Yuri’s shoulder.
  But Yuri sat there, not responding. Akiko had almost called someone in, but always thought against it. As she would go for the phone, Yuri would cry out, or suddenly open her arms for attention. If anything, it felt like a game to Akiko, a child’s cry out for attention. Was she just the emotional puppet on the strings of a deranged child?
  In Yuri’s mind, she had finally, in a conflicting and paradoxical state.
  She was both now in total control, and totally out of control.
  She could not control herself. Did Akiko think she wanted to be locked in?
  But every time she opened her mouth, a scream would begin to rise in her throat. She repressed it, stunting and burying the reaction. Much like standing at the side of her mother’s corpse, she could not tell if Yukio had not been replaced by a dummy or a mannequin. He looked fake, like a prop from a horror film, the way he had been kneeling, accepting of his knife. It was not real, surely? She spent most of her days sat on the sofa, finding comfort in the colours that emanated from the digital display in the wall. They offered her a hypnotic escape, a kind meditation that kept her mind cleansed of the image of Yukio’s propped up mannequin. Sometimes she would turn it off, and try to be normal, but found the image slowly melting back into the forefront of her subconscious. She would clam up, her palms becoming sticky and her hair becoming wet with perspiration as she panted and began to hyperventilate.
  First, the shadow of a figure would form, in that position she found Yukio in. Then, the features would half fade in after, the vague tone of skin, the dark bowl of hair that made itself obviously different from the rest of the body. Then, not a lot else. She normally made her way back, with Akiko half carrying her over to the fire place, Yuri’s arms outstretched like a blind person trying to feel their way through the air. Then, she started to feel better.
  Knowing that she had control over Akiko, the one thing in her life offering stability and a sense of centre, gave her some hope for the future.
  It still did not stop the calls from coming through.
  She had three more calls.
  One had been almost the moment she had arrived from the suicide above. She answered it while Akiko vomited in the toilet. She was quiet.
  “Yes?”
  “You see what you do? You make people so unhappy.” The voice coldly pointed out.
  She did not bother trying to engage. She simply put the phone down when the line went dead. That was about the point when her mind went.
  No, surely not?
  She had not seen anything of Yukio since that night at the shop. Not even heard a peep from upstairs for a while since then either. She had detailed the odd knocks and thumps from above, not really sure what to make of it. Indeed, when she found out the mother had been murdered, it made the thing even more terrifying.
  Yukio had murdered his overweight and disabled mother. His motives were unclear. He had cut her throat, and on the wall written ‘Pig’ in large symbols. Then, he had bookmarked and watched many disturbing porno videos. They all had carried the same theme of an incestuous relationship between mother and son, normally ending up with the son overpowering the mother.
  Of course, this was just the rumour mill of the apartment. Yuri, however, did not rule it out. The boy was strange enough to murder his own mother, to sleep with her? Not out of the question.
  Still, what did it matter now? Yukio had finally caught Yuri’s attention, and he would never leave her now. This was part of Yuri’s feeling of powerlessness. Her lack of control. Yukio had won her over, in the most horrific and vile way possible. Instead of smashing down the door, traumatising her with a stalking and sexual harassment tirade or raping her, he had left a mental scar that would never go away in the ultimate self-sacrifice. She guessed he really did love his mother.
 
The next call came not long after Akiko had begun to feel uncomfortable.
  Akiko, now a full time carer to Yuri, to the point where she was feeding Yuri soup like a child, had grown weary. She not only had begun to stop going to work, was now spending less and less time outside. Like Yuri, she had become and prisoner of the apartment, all be it not so willing. She had begun to feel trapped, but nervous of leaving the house. Yukio had left a scar on her too, but in a way of pitying. She started to think about Yuri, if the girl had just gone with Yukio, would this had happened. In some ways, she almost never had wanted to meet Yuri again. Since their meeting, she felt different, off, not herself. Suddenly, the past year and bit felt like a sinister trap. Was Yuri holding her there as a prisoner? And if not, why had she not left of her own accord sooner? Yuri would make a whimpering like a lost puppy, or not move for too long, and Akiko would suddenly feel a responsibility for the girl. When she had been grieving for Akira, Yuri had held her close, like a mother to a child. Now the mother was ill, she felt selfishly like running away, only thinking of herself. No. She had too much to return to Yuri. Still, she felt uneasy the crazier and crazier Yuri got.
  Yuri had started to babble into her phone every now and then, seemingly having phone conversations with no one. Then, sometimes the phone would actually ring. Akiko wondered who was on the other end, but the way Yuri spoke to them, it sounded as if she was being scolded.
  Yuri had received the second call when Akiko was preparing a ramen lunch for them. Akiko had been increasingly more and more suspicious, and it was making Yuri jumpy at the time. The way that Akiko would look at Yuri, no longer with pity but with a tinge of doubt. No, fear. That worried Yuri. Yuri would sometimes find herself mimicking phone calls, answering to no-one, preparing a speech for the next real call. But when the time came around, she never did say anything.
  “Hello.” She said, a deflated sound of defeat in her voice.
  “Yuri, you’re beginning to lose control. You need heed Yukio’s passion.”
  She did not question it.
  For some time she pondered what the voice had meant by ‘Yukio’s passion.’ Had the creep been telling his friends that they were an item? Had he been weaving this lie that he had a girlfriend living in the apartment? The filthy mother fucker covering up his incest?
  No.
  It felt like a threat. A premonition.
  Still, how could the advice giver take advice from someone else? That was not her role. She ignored the next lot of calls from the stranger, opting to stare vacantly into the coloured display.

This was when Akiko snapped.
  After another back and forth between the two girls, Yuri whimpering and pouting like a child as Akiko tried to leave, Akiko suddenly slammed her fist down on the counter.
  “No! You’re a grown woman! You can look after yourself! I’m tired of looking after you. I need my money! I need work! I need to leave this damned place!”
  Yuri fell to the floor.
  “Why!” She wailed, “We only need each other! Remember who owns this place?”
  “Yeah, you! I don’t have to stay here. You paid for it!”
  “You’d leave me here after everything that has happened? Everything we’ve been through together? Was I not teaching you how to be strong?” Yuri pleaded, suddenly finding her voice.
  “You’re not teaching me anything! Only how to be a needy and miserable shut in! It’s not my fault your life is so fucked up!”
  Yuri sat bolt upright at this, her eyes swimming with tears.
  “I’m not messed up! I’ve helped people! I’ve helped you and you’re just going to spit in my face!”
  “I want a better life. I want to go out and meet people! I might as well be caring for a senile old hag right now with all the freedoms I have! I’m glad you made your way, but you’re just toxic!” Akiko spat the words out, months of frustration bubbling in her.
  Yuri crawled up the chair and knelt on it, gripping the top of the back cushion.
  “You don’t appreciate me! You’re my servant, damn it! I helped you find yourself in emotional turmoil. You didn’t have to suffer like I have. I’m your safety! I’m your guardian! I’m the only thing you need!”
  Akiko looked upon the screeching girl on the chair.
  Yuri’s hair was straggled, her skin pale like bright moonlight. Her face looked both round, but all its features were haggard by her yo-yoing weight. The nails on her hands looked nearly translucent in the pale light of day. Her cloths hung off her, too baggy to be filled by her frame. The girl had transformed into a Rake, able to morph into a bouncy, springy, needy child, full of youth and energy, then, into a cold and heartless monster, ready to let someone die to meet her ends. And now, we had the snivelling farmer, pleading with her livestock to go to slaughter. But, the livestock refused to budge.
  In a way, Akiko was sad as she left the apartment for the last time. It had been a place of stability, a place of comfort. But, it had also ended up her prison. And, now she realised a she packed her bag and violently strode out, that Yuri had been the guard. The girl had been beyond messed up. Akiko could not point it out, whether it was alcoholic father, her mother dying, or that woman she had met at the B&B. They had discussed the elderly woman at length, but never the woman herself, more how her defined tragedy had made her who she was. Her personality was agony. Akiko hated the idea that that was what Yuri had become. She thought back to that sweet and plump girl that had first convinced her to kiss Akira back when they were children. It had worked, and they had been happy. But now, that advice giver, that little child was a mask amongst the collection, only there when she needed to change forms to fit the situation to her needs. Akiko walked out the gates with a sad pride. She had arranged to stay with her boss and his live-in boyfriend for a while and earn some cash to make up for the time lost. Then, she would leave Tokyo, maybe to some foreign country, away from Japan at least. Maybe she would try Europe. Maybe America or Canada would be better suited to for her needs. All she needed to do was put herself and a few thousand miles between herself and Yuri. She would visit her parents on the weekend, let them know she was leaving. Maybe they would cover some of the costs. She just knew not to look back.

Yuri vomited.
Not in the toilet, but at the door as she heard the footsteps of Akiko drifting away down the stairs. Each step gave her an overwhelming sense of being spun around violently, too fast for her mind to catch up. She leant against the door and simply vomited up bile. Heaving and sobbing, she knelt down, her body almost in the same pose as Yukio’s death statue. She however was very much alive. In some ways, she wished she was dead.
  A greyness fell over her for several days, and her energy zapped away from her every second she was awake. She grew even more and more emaciated, either eating too much in a sitting that she simply vomited the last thing she ate back up again, or not touching food for a few days. She drank a lot, a couple glasses of water every hour in a robotic fashion. Something in her body was still willing her to live. Curse it. She just wanted to die. Still the thought of murdering herself like Yukio did.
  Was this the end goal, to end up like Yukio? Or, was she meant to go to Aokigahara and hang herself in the woods like her sterling example of a father did?
  Men. All the men cracking under the pressures of life. Doing themselves in.
  Could they not handle it?
  Yuri had prided herself on being a survivor of her circumstances, or taking a risk in going to Hokkaido and managing to strike up lucky. All the men she had encountered in her life seemed to be weak. Snivelling in a way. They took to the rope to hang rather than to walk across.
  But now, Yuri was feeling like they must have felt. Lost, lonely, crushed. Afraid. God, was Yukio afraid? As he plunged his knife into his stomach like some bygone era Samurai. Or, was her father afraid as he plunged into the deep and dark woods, rabidly searching for the tallest tree he could find to escape life from?
  Agony.
  That was all she felt in her body, both physically from her poor lifestyle, and in her emotions, in the very chemical make-up of her body. Everything just hurt.
  Had she really been medicating herself? Or simply pacifying her eventual breakdown? Had her emotional experiments turned against her? 
  She had no answers. Only questions. And no control.
  For several days, as she wandered around the apartment in a daze, she half expected a gloating call from her stalker, but nothing of the sort came about.
  Soon, she began to realign herself.
  Feeling an odd sense of attachment to herself again, she decided to become Auntie Suzi again.
  She remembered never feeling bad as Auntie Suzi.
  Whenever she felt bad, she was Yuri Kikuchi.
  She had to be Auntie Suzi.
  In a frantic flurry, she plugged back in her computer and loaded it up. The machine buzzed into life, a sense of fatigue as it woke up for the first time in months. Yuri however, felt exhilarated. As the computer booted to life, she felt life returning to her. But, while the computer struggled, she simply absorbed the second hand energy. She even drummed her hands on the desk. She felt nearly exhilarated to the point of doing an on the spot jog. She felt like her old self again.
  That old self being Auntie Suzi.
  She beat her fists on the desks, rocking forwards and backwards to the beat.
  “Come on! Come on! Come on!”
  A slither of spittle dribbled out her mouth as the computer desktop loaded, and the web page she began to load up loaded into life.     

Next Chapter: Part 5 - Wilt: II