Oota had never known exactly when she began to enjoy other people's pain. Or rather, she was not sure it was truly enjoyment, and not simply the most honest way to exist in the world she had been given.
In Oota's house, children learned to be silent earlier than they learned to speak. Their father called his "lessons of perception" a scientific search for boundaries. Their mother took notes. Kaede endured it first. Oota watched. At seven years old, she saw a red-hot spoon touch her brother's skin. She did not scream. She did not run away. She simply stood there and noted: how his breathing changed, how his eyes became glassy, how in that moment a person stopped pretending.
She asked herself then: did she feel sorry for him? There was no answer. There was only a strange, cold curiosity and a faint, almost imperceptible warmth in her chest.
Later, her father asked what she thought.
"Pain strips away lies," the girl replied.
Father smiled. It seemed he approved. Or perhaps he simply recorded new material for his experiments.
Over time, she began to understand that she herself only stopped lying when she inflicted pain or observed it. Everything else, social rituals, smiles, "I understand you" seemed like cheap theatrical props.
At thirteen, she held a bird in her palms. Its small warm body beat desperately. Its beak tore at the skin on her fingers. Oota slowly closed her hand. Not out of anger. Not out of revenge. She simply wanted to see where the struggle ended and… what began? Resignation? Horror? Or simply the biological end? When the bird went still, the girl sat for a long time with it in her hands. She felt no guilt. But there was no pure joy either. There was only a quiet, almost sacred feeling that she had touched something real.
And the real, as she already suspected by then, was almost always cruel.
With Kaede, everything was more complicated.
She tied him up not because she hated him. And not because she loved him, at least not in the sense in which normal people use that word. She wanted to see him without filters. Without the protective armor of the older brother that he had grown over the years of their father's "lessons." The blade slid across his skin, leaving thin red lines. She whispered:
"Do you hate me right now?"
Sometimes he answered "yes." Sometimes "no." Sometimes he simply remained silent and looked at her in a way that made her own breath catch. In those moments, she did not know which of them was more trapped.
Was it revenge for him always being first? Compensation for her own helplessness? Or was it truly a search for ultimate closeness, the kind that neither sex, nor tenderness, nor words could provide? Oota herself could not answer definitively. And it was this impossibility of an answer that attracted her most of all.
She did not consider herself a sadist in the classical sense. Sadism implied pleasure in another's suffering as an end in itself. With her, everything was more tangled. She derived pleasure not from the pain itself, but from that instant when everything fell away. When a person became naked, not in body, but in essence. In that moment she felt almost tenderness. And at the same time, contempt. And pity. And arousal. All at once.
Sometimes at night she thought: what if all of this was simply a beautiful lie she told herself to feel better? What if she was simply repeating what had been done to them? What if her entire "philosophy" was merely an elaborate way not to feel like a victim?
But then she remembered Kaede's eyes in the moment when he broke and at the same time reached out to her. She remembered how she herself had trembled, holding the dying bird in her hands. And she understood: even if it was a lie, it worked. Even if it was an illness, it made her more alive than most people around her, who spent their entire lives hiding behind what was comfortable.
Pain was the only language that did not lie.
But who said that truth had to be kind?
And who said that the one who dragged this truth out into the open was not herself its victim?
Oota did not know.
And the older she became, the less this unknowing frightened her.
She simply continued to weave her web.
Not because she was sure she was right.
But because it was the only way to feel reality at all in a world where everything else seemed fake.