There are a number of things that trigger a switch between me and Genocider Shou.
If I faint, Shou will wake up.
If Shou goes to sleep, I will wake up.
A sneeze or a taser can be used to swap between the two of us.
All of those things I've told Byakuya before; one of them he even invented.
But there's one more way.
One thing I don't think about, one thing I don't let myself think about. Because it shouldn't be possible. It shouldn't be possible. And I really, really wish it wasn't. Even thinking back on it makes me feel cold; makes goosebumps litter my skin.
That's how it happened the first time, actually.
It may have even been her birth. Her first appearance, not fully developed, not yet a human and more like a creature, a rampant, twisted, needy thing. A monster. Hot and pulsing like a wound gushing blood.
My mother's told me so often that I was not strong enough. They hated my weak heart, my weak emotions, my weak body. My weak kidneys.
I was ten years old when they began "strength training" to make me grow into a stronger preteen than I was a child. Strength training often involved me not waking up in the same place I fell asleep-somewhere dark and cold with rope burning my skin with every movement.
Sometimes I'd be tied to a chair in the basement; sometime's I'd be hogtied in the closet. Sometimes they were "kind" enough to leave me with some dull light; other times it was complete darkness. Sometimes I would finally struggle out of the bind only to find the door locked.
At ten, they told me they were being kind to me, because they weren't even using strong or complicated knots yet. I screamed and screamed until my lungs felt raw, until it hurt to swallow. "This is to help you", they'd say. "This will make you stronger."
The agreement was that I wasn't allowed to eat or drink until I successfully exited the room they'd locked me into. There was no mercy. They never once helped me out after I screamed enough. Eventually, eventually, I would get myself out. I had to get crafty, sometimes. I had to use other tools to my disposable; once, a coat hanger angled strategically with the light switch. I grew used to the feeling of rope burns on my wrists and my ankles.
The first time, it took me about forty-eight hours. It was indeed a rather simple knot that time; they had me in the basement, with the light on, in a chair. My wrists were tied around the back of the chair, my ankles tied separately to the legs of it. They would never bless me with such an easy challenge again, one that today I'd be able to escape in mere hours or minutes-but it took me two days then nonetheless.
For the first day I just screamed and cried until sleep came. I believed they'd come for me. When I woke the next morning, hungry and swell-throated, I started trying to get out. I had to work myself into a standing position so I could lift my arms up over the head of the chair, crashing both it and me into the floor at the process. Trying desperately to ignore the pain and the wetness where my chin collided with the concrete, I twisted my legs and flipped myself over so I could pick at the knots with my fingers until they blistered.
The process took me hours, but eventually, eventually, I was free. When I slowly walked heavy-footed up the basement stairs and creaked the door open, my moms were so happy. They cheered and congratulated me. They hugged me, kissed me, and promised me my favourite dinner as celebration. I was happy for a while to have made them proud, but when I cried at the restaurant, and would not stop crying, they stopped smiling at me again.
I didn't think it could get any worse than being hogtied in the closet. At that point I'd been subjected to strength training many times. I'd learned knots, I'd learned rope, I'd learned hunger. I realize now that it was during these times that Genocider Shou's skills were honed. Agility and cognitive thinking, resourcefulness and a very careful hand - I gained those skills then and so did she; those were the same talents she used at her disposal in a homicide.
The hangers had been my saving grace in the closet. I had gotten frustrated for one of the first times; not upset or sad but something gruffer than I usually experienced. I'd taken to throwing my body against the walls and the door as well as I could with my limited range of motion. I was screaming loudly for them to let me out, that this was too hard, that I was strong enough already. After I slammed my body into the wall with as much force as I could, a few hangers from the top of the closet fell and hit me.
Three and a half days later, I was free.
I stopped crying for them. My ribs were bruised and I was hungry, so hungry. The only light at the end of the tunnel was the dinner they'd take me for afterwards. Food began to mean so much more. Food began to mean safety, warmth, strength.
Over all this time, Genocider Shou was forming. I hadn't noticed her there, I hadn't felt her presence budding and developing. But it created her. It slowly created her until finally I-no, they-unleashed her.
I was back in the basement; almost twelve. Hanging. Hanging.
I awoke not in my bed but instead suspended in air, in complete and total darkness. My wrists were tied to some kind of thick rod; I couldn't see it. The rest of me hang limply, my entire body swinging and hitting against the cold concrete wall when I tried to move.
Like a crucifixion, my feet more than 12 inches above the ground, my head light, my hands and upper arms so drained of blood I could barely feel them, could barely will them to move. Maybe, if I did have feeling in my arms, it would've been an easier trap to get out of. But I couldn't. I couldn't. I was reduced to something that seemed primal at that point, after a year of this hell: screaming for help. I couldn't feel my arms, I told them that. But as always, all I got in return was silence.
I tried with all my might to get myself free. With my feet back against the wall, I could almost get some traction. I could almost crawl myself up the wall, but my arms would get twisted and God, oh my God did that hurt. I couldn't see anything. When I kicked my legs below me, even staring straight at where I knew they must be, I couldn't see even the slightest indication of movement. Because of that, I couldn't see my hands completely white from the ropes cutting circulation, but I certainly felt it.
How long had I been hanging here? I could keep trying to shimmy myself up the wall, but again and again my arms got in the way. I was still moping; still crying until the basement door creaked open. Not Mom. Not either of them. My dad! My savior, my knight in shining armor, he would help me!
I screamed bloody murder for him to let me down, but he didn't listen. "Touko, your mothers and I are leaving for the weekend," he said. "We'll be back in two days. If you get down before then, there's dinner in the fridge, okay?"
When the door to the basement shut again, the feeling in my chest was no longer sadness. It was anger. It was rage. The scream that left me felt more like a rawr, like the roar of something nonhuman and deranged. I began throwing my body against the wall again, my flesh slapping and bruising against the surface, my shoulder blades bloodying. I screamed, and that's when I felt her.
I felt her, within me, inside me, a ghost, a phantom. A gushing wound, hot and red, unforgiving and angry, and she screamed with me in a voice not my own. She was out and so was I-so was I. My body began to move without me telling it to, it began thrashing around by her accord and not mine. In fact, I wasn't doing anything.
I was no longer producing the scream that echoed the walls, or making the movements I could feel in my waist and my legs. It was her, it was Shou, an unbridled, ferral thing.
She screamed of hate and gore and bloodlust, she spit and flung her limbs until she was swinging. I was quiet and I watched, bewildered. I knew that if I wanted to, if I willed the leg to move right now, it would, but I didn't contribute. I let her go. Instead of trying to shimmy up the wall with her feet, she was pushing off of it until she was swinging back and forth from her wrists, pushing off the wall again every time she met it.
I wondered, is this some kind of rage-induced auto-pilot? But even then I knew that couldn't be it; this was something else. This was someone else.
"I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU," she screamed, speaking to my parents that were not upstairs anymore. "I'M GOING TO FUCKING CRUCIFY YOUR ASSES, EVERY ONE OF YOU, EVERY ONE OF YOU!"
She swung until she could flip over, like a child on a swingset trying to swing over the bar. When she eventually succeeded, she was able to position herself on the bar, which I could now feel was more like a plastic tube. The weight of our body on top of it was enough to make it crack beneath enough pressure and weight. Through a series of unbelievably painful movements, she broke the bar, and we tumbled with it to a devastating position on the floor.
It sounds simple and characiaturish in words, as if she had super strength and made this feat in mere minutes-really it was hours and hours of trying, both to position herself on the bar and then to break it. On the ground, my body mangled, in unbearable pain, I began to cry again. I wasn't angry anymore. I was sad and cold and hungry and in pain.
With that distinction, she disappeared. Her spirit, or essence, or whatever it was, pattered away again, and it was just me, broken on the floor. I felt like I could still hear the voice that wasn't mine bouncing vaguely off the walls and floor.
Eventually, after a long rest, I went upstairs, cut my wrists free from the segment of tube with a knife held between my teeth, and ate dinner.
Pure, unbridled rage will bring Shou forward. The kind of anger that consumes every piece of your soul; it will merge us, make us one, both awake and alive. Both conscious, both there.
It shouldn't be possible.
I wish that it weren't.
What I will never tell Byakuya is that I was conscious for one of the murders.