Notes

yuki had never asked for anything she had ever received in her life. she didn’t ask to be born on the same day as her older sister, she didn’t ask to have blue eyes (something no one in her family had ever had), and she never asked to be the special kid.
it’s not that she didn’t want it – she just didn’t care if she didn’t have it.
nevertheless, she was extremely spoiled as a child. if she wanted something, she got it. if she wanted to go somewhere, they’d go there. it was almost as if she had her parents wrapped around her finger; they would give anything to her at the drop of a hat.
but she wasn’t mean or selfish because of this – in fact, she was quite the opposite. she just took advantage of her parents’ behavior towards her.
her sister, however, was her best friend in her early years. ayumi, five years older than her, was practically a god to yuki. they’d romp outside and play games together, and sometimes ayumi would help yuki up onto the roof and they’d make-believe they were astronauts. anything ayumi did, she wanted to do too. she worshipped the ground they walked on, and she loved them as much as her little heart could handle.
and then she saw the advertisement on tv for mountain town, and immediately fell in love. it was an amusement park (primarily for children), and the bright colours and friendly looking mascots drew her in. for her fourth birthday, she begged her parents to let her and ayumi go there.
and, yuki always got what she wanted. they went there once, and she became addicted. she just had to have all the toys they sold, and she just had to go on all the rides she was tall enough for at least three times. she went again for her fifth birthday, and again for her sixth, and again for her seventh.
just like clockwork, they went for her eighth birthday. and for some strange reason, ayumi was nowhere to be found. they had gone missing, somehow, and although yuki didn’t quite understand, how they had completely vanished, she was still very upset.
once ayumi didn’t come back after a few weeks, everything started to change, bit by bit. she had never asked to be adored by her parents, but she had never wanted them to completely ignore her, either.
her mother and father started treating her as if she didn’t exist, forgetting to feed her and take her to school, and they didn’t get along with each other as much as they did. yuki knew they were sad ayumi wasn’t home yet, but she couldn’t understand why they started acting this way.
yuki then realized that she had to fend for herself from now on, if her parents wouldn’t do it. she walked herself to the bus stop and made herself messy little snacks, learned how to do small loads of laundry, and even did her homework all by herself. a year passed, and nothing changed.
until crybaby appeared in her bedroom window.
yuki wasn’t afraid; it looked like a friendly clown, and yuki always knew clowns weren’t supposed to be scary. everyone knew that. in a hushed voice, crybaby explained that she had to come back for her birthday this year; back to mountain town. when she asked why, it only said that it was a surprise. trusting the clown, she begged her parents over and over to go back for her birthday, and yuki always got what she wanted.
when they arrived, at the end of the day (just as crybaby had asked), she went to the back of the park and found crybaby waiting for her. it led her into the backstage, where it then told her to close her eyes and count to ten.
she never knew it was going to try to kill her. it was only a clown, after all.
it crept up behind her, but before it could do anything, a man by the name of richard belmonte rushed into the room and startled her, causing her to see crybaby behind her with a knife in hand. richard quickly ushered her out of the back, and told her to get his daughter and run. she had no clue what was going on (who was his daughter?), but yuki did as she was told and ran outside as fast as she could. a girl, about the same age as her, was waiting there, and yuki grabbed her hand and told her they needed to get help, because her dad was in big trouble. they quickly located an employee and led him to the back, where he refused to let them in. then, he took them to the security room and told them to stay put.
during the long hour or so they were in there, yuki learned that the girl’s name was margaret, and they quickly became close friends (despite not knowing each other for more than an hour. kids, am i right?). her favourite animal were bears, and she even had a teddy bear to prove it.
it was a very cute teddy bear. it also happened to move on its own.
margaret guessed that it was her father after a while, and it nodded. margaret started to cry, which yuki didn’t understand. why was he in her teddy bear?
it became very clear once he came out of the teddy bear as a ghost. it meant, simply, that he was dead.
richard explained that he had made a mistake and it had caused his death, and it might’ve caused yuki’s too if he hadn’t been there to save her. she asked him what he did, and he said that he had accidentally killed ayumi, and they killed him in return.
yuki was furious with him, because she knew for a fact that ayumi would never hurt anyone ever! and if they were a ghost, then why didn’t they just come back home? it didn’t make sense to her, and she wouldn’t listen to him. after a while, the employee came back with yuki’s mother, who promptly took her home.
yuki screamed and wailed, because she didn’t want to leave her new friend and dad all by themselves, but her mother, for once in her life, wouldn’t give yuki what she wanted.
yuki asked and asked and asked and was never given the chance to see margaret or her father again.
she wouldn’t see them for a long time.

life changed abruptly after her parent’s learned of ayumi’s brutal death. yuki never knew the exact details, but she knew it was bad. her mother began to smoke incessantly day in and day out, and her father began to drink. the years went on, and yuki was forced to forget about margaret and her father, and even her sister. she now had her own problems to deal with; her mother had contracted lung cancer nearly a year later and her father was beginning to act aggressive towards yuki. in the two years that her mother continued to live, yuki’s days were spent going to school and visiting her mother in the hospital directly after. then, she’d go home and avoid her father, do whatever work was needed to be done, and then she’d sleep. it was the same thing every day for two years, up until her mother died very quietly in her sleep.
her mother’s death destroyed her father, who was a terrible alcoholic by this point. to take out his anger, he would berate and belittle yuki, even becoming physical at points. she was miserable throughout her teenage years, until she found who she thought to be the love of her life, cass.
he was everything that any girl would want in a person: sweet, caring, gentle, you name it. he was the person you’d want to bring home to your parents. for yuki, however, that was not much of an option.
whenever her father began to get too much for her to handle, she’d call cass and he’d pick her up shortly after, to take her someplace where she could relax. she had to admit, it was pretty nice to get away from everything for a while.
after six months of dating, cass offered her a joint as he drove her away from her house yet another time. without really thinking about the consequences, she took a drag off it. then another. then another. then another. then, she was high off her ass.
she didn’t really understand what was going on through the haze of smoke that was in her eyes, but all she knew was that she didn’t like what cass was trying to do to her. he was trying to grab her in places she did not want to be grabbed and he kept kissing her even though she didn’t want to be kissed. she told him repeatedly to get off, let her go for a second, and there was suddenly a searing pain in her arm.
there was blood everywhere, and her shoulder felt like it might come off any second. she didn’t understand what she had done, what did she do? and cass was screaming and calling someone on his phone, and her arm really hurt, and
she woke up in the hospital a few hours later, her head pounding and her shoulder feeling pretty shitty. cass was sitting across from her, with his head in his hands.
he had hurt her, and he kept saying he was sorry for it, that he’d never do it again. yuki was horrified. she never could have imagined that cass would ever want to hurt her, and just the fact that he did it because she wouldn’t hook up with him pissed her off. it also hurt her.
as soon as she got out of the hospital (which wasn’t very long; they stitched her arm up and made sure nothing got infected), she avoided cass everywhere as long as she could help it. she wouldn’t talk to him, answer his calls or texts, or even go home on the same bus as him.
she was only 15; what did she do to deserve this?
since she could no longer sleep as well as she used to, she usually stayed up doing schoolwork while her father was asleep. she had discovered cass trying to climb into her window twice already, and when she heard rustling outside of her open window, she assumed it was him again. she leaned out to tell him to screw off – and was met with the same face that tried to kill her when she was nine years old.
she was beyond shocked, and she stumbled back from the window as the robot (she remembered its name faintly, crybaby?) clambered in with its long, spindly legs.
it announced that its name (rather, he at this point) was babyface and he was here to make a deal with yuki. in exchange for her soul, the very essence of her being, he would bring back her sister and mother from the dead and return her life to normal.
it sounded like a sack of shit to yuki, but the more and more he tried to sway her, the more it worked.
after all, who wouldn’t want their mother after being stabbed in the shoulder? and they hadn’t seen their sister in over seven years – wouldn’t that be wonderful to see them again?
so yuki gave her soul up to babyface. and he left.
it was only a dream, she mused afterwards. he couldn’t have been real.
it scared her that her mind was turning to things that she wanted to forget, things she didn’t ever want to think about again. so she sought comfort from the only person she knew would give it to her.
cass willingly took her back with the promise he’d never hurt her again. she told him about her “dream” and how she was scared she was that she might be going crazy; he reassured her over and over again that she was just upset by what he had done. it calmed her, a little, to know that someone understood.
another two years went by, and yuki’s life was slowly getting better. her father was barely around anymore, so she couldn’t care less about him, and cass showed no signs of ever repeating the same behavior he did before.
it was okay, for a while.

how she found herself backed in the corner of his room late one night, she didn’t know. she was scared, shaking - begging him to stop.
but he wouldn’t. and he didn’t.
the next morning, she was still in his arms. she quietly took her belongings, and ran home.
she called the school, told them she was sick with the flu, and didn’t go back for a week and a half. she couldn’t stand to even think about him; she wasn’t about to go back to school and look at him.
her anxieties and worries about him got so bad that she stopped going to public school altogether, and she finished her senior year of highschool at home. she had small concerns about her father maybe wondering why she was cooped up in the house all day – but he honestly didn’t. every other night he went out to go get drunk, and he didn’t come back until the late afternoons. he mostly kept to himself during these few hours, and if he saw yuki, he might throw an insult at her, or push her around a little. he didn’t seem to care about her all that much, and as long as he wasn’t hurting her anymore, she was fine by that.
as she spent the next 4 months in solitude, her father was going away for longer and longer, sometimes disappearing for weeks on end. a few days after she turned 18, he had been gone for two months, and she knew he wasn’t coming back.
there was no way after all of this that she’d be able to go to college (even if her grades were good); she was too mentally destroyed by everything that had happened in the recent years. she decided she’d settle down in a small apartment with a crappy job as a bouncer, and try to work her way up from there.
but there was no stopping her bad luck.
yuki was unpacking into her new apartment late at night when she heard his voice again. not cass’s, not her father’s – but babyface. babyface. standing in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, with an all-knowing smirk on his face. “i know something you don’t know,” he taunted her, tilting his head ever so slightly. she was frozen in place, thinking that maybe she had finally lost her mind. “i know something… that’ll probably blow your little mortal mind into itty-bitty pieces,” he continued.
“what?” she replied, almost tentatively.
“you can’t die.”
“i can’t- what?”
“die, yuki. you can’t die.”
“you’re kidding me.”
“oh, no. i don’t kid around, yuki. here – let me show you.”
a gun materialized in his hands, almost if by magic. she watched in a sort of daze as he slowly raised it up to her head, and blew her brains out.
yuki didn’t remember much of being dead; it was almost like waking up after sleeping for a while, and you just can’t remember your dream. the first thing she saw was babyface standing over her with a confused expression on his comical face. once she showed signs of consciousness, he grinned wide (although it didn’t seem like a very nice grin). “oh, goodie. you’re still alive.”
laying in a pool of her own blood, yuki was forced to listen to babyface’s speech about how she had committed an “unspeakable act of evil” and she needed to be “punished” for it. whatever she did wasn’t ever explained to her, but it didn’t really matter to her at this point because she had just died. she had just died. died. as in dead. deceased.
babyface was right; it really did blow her little mortal mind into itty-bitty pieces. no matter how many times she worked it over in her head, tried to wrap her mind around it – it just didn’t work. logic could not explain the phenomenon that was happening.
and it went on for five years.
whenever he felt it was necessary, he’d beat her up or even torture her with any weapon he could think of. she didn’t really understand how he did it, but he did. and whenever he felt she deserved it, he’d kill her. she’d come back to life a few hours later, and the cycle would start all over again.
five years, yuki had to always listen for signs of when he might be near. for five years, she had to fear walking around corners and into rooms with no escape. for five years, babyface completely destroyed her.
because of his sick nature, babyface thought it would be fun for yuki to work at the place she despised the most: mountain town. at first, she refused, but with the threat he wouldn’t let her die until she had become a pile of flesh and bones, she (unwillingly) took a security guard position for the amusement park.
she never ever would’ve imagined she’d find her best friend after fifteen years.
instructed by an employee at the front, yuki headed to the back room where she only had to wait a few minutes before someone tapped against the door frame. "um. hey." her gaze snapped towards the woman standing in the middle of it. "you're the, uh... new guy, right?" the woman asked.
"yup. that's me." she snapped her phone closed (she had been previously looking at listings for an apartment), and stood up from the chair she was sitting in. "ah, okay! that's good, at least i have the right person." the girl, dressed in the company outfit, - mountain town, that is - held out her hand for yuki to shake. "my name is margaret. i'll be showing you the ropes around here. it's nothing too hard to handle, though, so no worries."
the name clicked somewhere in the back of yuki's head as she took the outstretched hand in her own. she couldn't exactly place where yet, but she brushed it off. she couldn't have known this girl; she had never seen her before in her life.
"i'm yuki." she noticed margaret was wearing a school bag of some sorts, and she squinted at it. barely, just barely, she could see the ears of a stuffed animal poking out. from the looks of it, it was a bear. weird. again, it clicked in her head somewhere, but she pushed it away. it was coincidence. it had to be coincidence.
"really? i knew someone with that name once, a long time ago." margaret studied her, tilting her head as her hand returned to its side. "anyways, i was supposed to give you this, i almost forgot about it. silly me!" she reached into the bag to pull something out, but it was forgotten in lieu of the stuffed bear falling out. "oh, shoot! i'm sorry," she said quickly, sounding as if she were apologizing to the bear rather than yuki.
it clicked.
"i knew... a girl named margaret too," yuki interjected. margaret's head snapped up as she carefully placed the bear back in her bag. "you did?"
"yeah. i did. i met her here, when i was... nine. and her dad... was stuck in a bear like that one," she finished, pointing at the animal. she could've sounded crazy. she could've sounded like an absolute lunatic. why would margaret still be here, of all places? it was just coincidence. there was no way this was the same girl. now she probably thought yuki was crazy, and-
"oh my god. no way," the other female responded. "yuki?"
"margaret?" she replied, hesitantly.
the two women were overjoyed to be reunited with each other, feeling as if they had been connected all of these years. margaret announced that she had been building a robot for her father since his death, and coincidentally, it was finished that day. if yuki hadn’t been in shock before, she definitely was now. they both rushed off to where margaret had been keeping the robot, and richard came to life once more.
yuki knew babyface hated richard, for one reason or another, but when he got a body for himself, he went absolutely berserk. he killed yuki in the park right then (luckily nobody but margaret and richard were around to see it) and she was informed later that babyface had tried to fight richard, then he shouted a bunch of things about being “selfish and a terrible person”, before disappearing altogether.
when yuki woke up, she had to hurriedly explain about her “immortality” and the exchange she had made with babyface, for the two were both very bewildered as to why she was still alive. margaret was absolutely furious, being the overprotective friend that she was, but richard did not understand. he told yuki that he had never acted that way when he was still in the back of the park – and he didn’t go by babyface, his name was crybaby.
the name rung a bell, but yuki dismissed it. it had been many years since the incident, and he was bound to have changed.
richard was not so sure.
the next few months were probably the happiest of her life; she now had other people she could go to, instead of staying cooped up inside the house all the time. if she wasn’t dead, or at work, she was most likely at margaret (and now richard’s) house.
she didn’t notice at first, but ever so slowly, she began to grow on richard. she didn’t know exactly why she liked him so much but he had a very likable personality (and it didn’t hurt that his body wasn’t hard on the eyes). yuki couldn’t help but be attracted to him, and eventually, after weeks of psyching herself up, she told him how she felt. she was completely prepared for some disgusted reaction, a “you’re too young for me” (because she was, he was almost twenty years older than her), but that was not what she received.
she instead, was told that he felt the same way.
yuki was very, very happy, for once in her life. richard suddenly became the ray of sunshine she needed in her dark world, and everything was okay. it was okay. she was loved by someone, and she had a friend. she wasn’t alone. she was okay again.
except for the fact that babyface did not approve of this. he got even angrier than he had before, killing yuki for the littlest of reasons (not like he did on a daily basis), sometimes leaving her on the edge of death for hours upon hours, and she slowly forgot about her ray of sunshine. nothing, absolutely nothing, could change the fact that babyface was still there, plaguing her life.
he became even angrier when yuki let richard move into her house, taking every chance that he could to belittle richard’s relationship with her, to insult him, and most of all – annoy him.
he also seemed to think it was particularly funny when he killed yuki right in front of richard. and slowly, very slowly, richard came to the conclusion that there was only one person who could be inside of babyface; ayumi.
but when he told her, she refused to believe him. she would not believe that ayumi was doing these terrible things, because her sister would never hurt her. they loved her; why would they want to hurt her?
a year after yuki had found richard and margaret again, ayumi revealed themselves to be the one controlling babyface.
they told her how much they hated her, how much they loathed her, and what richard had did to cause this to happen. how he refused to tell anyone they were dead when crybaby accidentally killed them. how he ignored them when they needed his help the most.
how it didn’t make any sense that richard saved her, and wouldn’t do a single thing for her.
they gave her soul back, told her to go to hell, and disappeared forever.

yuki was shocked that after all these years, it really had been ayumi this entire time. she shut herself away in her room, angry at richard for the things he had did. although it was in the past and she couldn’t change what had happened, she could still be angry.
she stayed in there for five days, lying in bed, before hunger eventually forced her to get up.
hunger.
it was something yuki hadn’t felt in five years. and she was suddenly feeling it again.
it was all real.
and she cried.

a few months later, in canon-present, yuki is struggling to lead her life normally, after everything that’s happened.
but she had richard and margaret, and that’s all she needs.
yuki only hopes that someday, she’ll be able to see ayumi again. despite everything, she still didn’t believe that was her sister.
yuki would find them.
someday.