meikuree

link here: zenin mai/zenin maki, m-rated, 1.7k words, post-perfect preparation. warnings for sibling incest and referenced abuse.

the inspiration

long story short: a friend posted a hilarious bad sex meme for mai/maki which sparked the epiphany that of course these two would mention their mother during sex, and my brain took that in a far more melancholic and grief-laden direction. of course, a good part of that was just the inherent woe of setting anything in the jjk canon, but i connected the inane dots
it sounds unreal but i woke up at 1? 2? am one night, was just in the incredible throes of zenin sistercest angst, and then banged this out as if i'd been possessed in 1.5 hours. I JUST KNEW WHAT I WANTED TO WRITE, I was hellbent on bringing to life the shape of a single narrative. a lot of subsequent meta for this fic has been fleshed out by retrospectively tracing out why i took certain decisions i wasn't making fully consciously
what if mai had survived the massacre? what if she did but their mother died anyway and they had to reckon with the conflicting ambivalent aftermath of being liberated but also becoming orphans, part of it at mai/mai-compelling-maki/maki's own hands? juicy questions about complicity all come into play, which i can never resist
also these two are a walking bag of mother and family issues, you can't tell me they wouldn't have collided sexily over those like this

the pov, haunting motifs

the twins' mother is a peripheral character who doesn't get identified until the second chapter she appears, so structural is her peripheral presence that she gets treated as the character equivalent of draft doodles and marginalia. however since i'm minor character-brained and delusional this has only enhanced her magnetism and MILFette je ne sais quoi; she's really an interesting character by virtue of how much is unsaid about her, her absent presence, how much you can extrapolate from the SHEER CRUMBS we get of her, and how much she would've obviously and logically influenced the twins' upbringing and so had a hand to play in the preventable tragedy that befalls mai
given the ... ~nature of abuse themes in fiction and abuse narratives in general and the indirectly direct relationship between trauma and memory, their mother's wider marginality but emotional CENTRALITY, etc., this all manifested as a narrative that is also oblique, and about sisters whose perspectives of the grief/pain they went through are tragically partial even as it's central to the way their life has unfolded
more directly: this is about maki and her horror-ful archaeological excavation of what happened in the house + her allergy to soft emotions, and the incoherent task of attempting to pin a coherent narrative on abuse
the maki pov felt ‘right’ though I couldn’t put my finger on why at first; looking back it might be because the fic is dealing with the concept of hauntings on a few levels. there’s mai who was meant to be a ghost but is now alive here, and telling her side of the story that was omitted from canon — it’s like hearing a ghostly voice break through from the past I guess, and maki's pov also hammers in the partiality and i suppose out-of-reachness of a full understanding of what mai endured
from a convo with friends: "secondly, maki is also a ghost here, but in a different way — she’s still lost to the ways her upbringing in the zenin house impacted her and the fic is about mai talking through and trying to get through to her how it did so; thirdly, something unconscious I didn’t set out to include but ended up being present was how the aftermath — afterlives — of abuse basically scrambles your sense of self and the bedrock of how you view the world (hence the rubble and ruin in the last segment lol, yay for heavy handed symbolism) and very plainly, maki’s the one who killed their mother and just set off an irreversible trigger point so this seems more relevant to her"
this was also a nice piece to experiment with. I learned that when I write about depressing things I prefer to write it in an unflinching and very detached “here’s the reality of what happened” way and maki being a little less introspective than mai seemed more suited to that … while at the same time also still needing to work through things, and the fic was about working through the effects of abuse, so —> more sense. and this might be because I don’t like writing upsetting things in a sensationalised or emotional OMG YOU POOR POOR SOUL way — I prefer writing it from the pov of… someone very stilted or obviously off or who may even think it’s normal and hasn’t realised why it isn’t

more themes

in summary: this is about Bad Mothers and Bad Daughters who actually aren't bad on the level of their family but also can't help but think of themselves that way, lol
and also about standing witness, after the fact
i don't like ever boiling fic concepts down to being about a big generic box of Trauma because it feels too neat and i don't usually try to chisel only at One Single Point; that and there's often bleed over outside that box into other themes + bleed over into that box in stories that don't strive to be about trauma
but it's acceptable to say this concerns intergenerational trauma though i find that phrase personally twee
mai is more emotionally perspicacious and articulate than maki imo, and ironically thus also more realistic, as she had to live in a position where any abuse was unavoidable for a longer time
the freudian undertones and replacement mother-goldfish vibes here are also absolutely intentional lol

on the title and epigraph

it's intentional that i chose an epigraph that ends with, "Do you know where the bad dreams come from?" because the ~problem of abuse (which, reducing it to a 'problem' does a disservice to all its shadowy contours) is often the void of it not being recognised or articulated as such; abuse is the formal box for a very difficult (experientially) phenomenon. that and maki is repressed about how her upbringing has impacted her
you think it's a haunting; in spinozan fashion though, the supernatural "divine" phenomenon has really been wrought by human hands
another on the nose comment i made about this fic to friends: "your mind keeps the score and like a ghost or a haunting the after effects of abuse will just break through to the fore whether you like it or not; you have no say in the eruption and disruption"

favourite bits

Back in the house, they knew their mother by a series of titles and referents. Servants referred to her in awed but cautious tones; men who disdained women moderated themselves around her, mindful of her husband. The Clan Head’s brother’s wife. As if perception rubbed itself off on you like the lustre of an old coin, patina staining your fingers, passed down with chainlinks from your betters; as if she could only ever be glimpsed through the pale screen of distance. Her name itself was less often uttered, though Mai and Maki could glean it well enough from the family scrolls and inscriptions hung in the foyer hall. Their avoidance of her name now seems like repetition, a ghostly sleight of hand: leftover compulsions, the past gnawing itself into the present with groping tendrils and bad curse-breath.

an attempt to compare heritage/inheritance to bondage and claustrophobia and entrapment
this is also a bad flickering lampshade for the fact that gege never gives the mother a name
i'm always surprised by readers' fave bits compared to my fave bits, and i have to say that i was surprised by what people noted, but this fic is also a path breaker in that i genuinely did like some of my flourishes, so there was little divergence there
that said, readers' frequently cited fave bit, which i thought was too on-the-nose at first lmao:

Mai glances back from the window, wind ruffling through her jade-black hair. “Because, Maki,” she says, “she could’ve loved us all along. She just chose not to do it."

specific sections

“What do you dream about?” Maki asks, the fourth time.

An open question; honest in its childlike curiosity. Mai shudders with a gasp. Maki has stilled her fingers inside her, but Mai’s body remains at a fever pitch. Mai’s heartbeat is loud, its steady, wet rhythmic thump reverberating across the room. Her senses have been heightened since the massacre, in a pale reflection of their cousin Toji’s.

“I think about her—bringing us to a festival,” Mai exhales, “walking with us. Trying out different clothes. Smiling in the golden sunset. Reading a story to us. Playing games together. Making bento boxes for us with those stupid panda squares. Letting us rest when we’re sick, so we don’t have to worry about work or—“

this is mai wishing for an idealised version of her mother, as a friend put it. intended this as a reversal of the usual "tell me your sexy, sexy sexual fantasies" scene with mai starting from very childlike and innocent wants, then progressively listing off all the things her mum didn't do and then it devolving into very basic needs all kids should be entitled to but which mama zenin failed to meet, w a trace of mai-typical ambiguous inappropriate psychosexual tendencies

on mama zenin crying on mai's shoulder: it seemed like a good way to hint at emotional incest, and in my head mai feels conflicted because on one hand a) it's a form of closeness 2) it's actually a warning sign and a maladaptive coping mechanism when a parent keeps unloading intimate emotional issues on their (young) kids

Their parents’ shoes are too big to fill. She is just one person. She wishes she could burn, once again, like in Shibuya. She wants to set herself aflame. She wants—

since this is a sibling incest ship, there was a great opportunity to spin a unique strand of parental guilt and interpersonal alienation out of this. although mai is the one who can best understand what maki endured, maki also feels distanced from her because of the guilt over killing their parents
and maki also feels like she has to take on the responsibility for fulfilling all the idealised-mother-wishes mai just listed off because she sees herself as a protector..... in my h/cs at least. and yet she just severed all chances Mai has of ever experiencing her actual mother’s love, w the massacre

She was rarely kind to Mai. She was even worse to Maki. Maki had thought it her crime at first as a child, something she did, though she could never find the cause. Instead, the fault must have lay with some obscure, permanent blemish within her being; lodged at birth into the creases of her soul. Then she grew up.

an attempt to seed hints about a) mama zenin hating the twins just for being girls ('permanent blemish'), b) that maki easily discarded their mother's criticism, in line with her (seeming) self-possession and confidence in the anime and manga

lastly

this is a fic i'm still pretty fond of, and perhaps one of my favourites, even if it's objectively rough in places (the abrupt transitions, lack of explaining anything)
personally, an "image" i keep returning to that encapsulates this piece's mood is -- that feeling of returning to a place, as an adult, and piecing together what happened with someone who also knew what it was like intimately, and speaking The Thing aloud for the first time, articulating it to each other with adult eyes, the uncanniness of retrospecting something you still feel the tremors of. and this is slightly personal, but when i was young i once grasped and read a letter addressed to me from someone who had gone through [event] with me; our subjectivities were on different ground, but i still felt grateful for her perspective. a little of that experience went into this