MONSTER || YANDERE!D.OSAMU

26. MOTHER DEAREST.

The phone in the Agency rings. You look up from your computer and meet eyes with Dazai, who merely smiles at you.

"That'd be your mother," He says as your hand hovers over the plastic telephone. Your breath hitches in your throat as you pick up, twirling the twisted cord between your fingers. You clear your throat and put on your best customer service voice.

"Hello, this is the Armed Detective Agency, how may I help you—!"

"(first name)."

Even the voice of your mother makes you stop in your tracks. You're turning back time and you're a child again, staring up at her fearfully as she coldly stares down at you, her night-like eyes glimmering in the dim air of the house. Father is not at home so it is just you and mother: siamese twins struggling to break away from each other. Being a daughter of your mother was a never-ending struggle; a perennial war that would have no end. It would take clowning for you to survive the battlefield of your house; for you to fill the empty void of a corpse your mother had given birth to.

And they say despair is the constant companion of the clown.

But that was a privilege that no one else experienced in this world: this clowning in front of a single audience that didn't care allowed you to make your outcast, your dispossession, something special. It allowed you to invent your own face. You made yourself. They say mothers and daughters exist as wretched mirrors; not you. You were separated, a walking bleeding one half of a siamese twin, crippled but alive.

"Mom," You say, just as crisp as her.

A moment of silence between mother and former-daughter.

She had disowned you; don't you remember?

"Let's get some tea together and talk," She finally says, her voice slow and drawn out, as if she was experimenting with reconciliation for the first time. Reconciliation that was new on her tongue, her crude tongue that left scars on milkflower petals.

You pause, not saying anything for a moment, before replying with a,

"Sure. When should we meet?"

"Right now," She says. "Let's meet at the Sandglass Yokohama cafe."

"Alright."

You hang up before she says anything else. You stare into space, your hand still gripping the phone handle, before Dazai grounds you down with his dulcet voice.

"What did she say?"

You turn to look at him. "She wants to meet for tea."

"You ought to get going, then. Don't want to make your mother wait."

"She's no longer legally considered my mom," You say, shrugging on a thin jacket over your shoulders. "She disowned me when I was arrested."

"A mother that doesn't stand for her own child. There must be a Greek word for that," Dazai muses. "Blood changes things, doesn't it?"

"Oh, very much so," You say, almost bitterly. "Especially if that blood isn't compatible with you at all."

—

You arrive at the cafe and sit on one of the outdoor tables, overhead a colourful parasol. You tap your fingers on the wooden table with a (favourite drink) already ordered, half-empty in front of you with its pink straw bobbing up and down the glass.

Your mother comes into the scene. She is wearing a white dress with a multi-coloured headband, on her ears diamond tear drops. She tucks in her skirt underneath her bottom as she takes a delicate seat in front of you.