Yana's Story: Unique
Characters: Yana, Kido, Kaito
Pairings: None
Continuity: English Anime (with discontinuity declared on the narrator's statement that the Mushiyori psychics never used their powers again)
Summary: Yana is the laid-back, easygoing sort, but has also always had a desperate desire to be unique. But when he gains his psychic power, he faces a strange contradiction: his territory, the very thing that sets him apart…is the power of Copy.
Author's note: I honestly can't remember if Yana and Kido are supposed to go to the same school…eheh.
Another request, also from Stardust Imaginings, who is a great fan of the Mushiyori Psychics. If you want to see a true prequel story for them, check out her story Strange New Powers. :)
Mitsunari Yanagisawa was born into a loud family.
Between his two lively sisters and his loudmouth brother, he could hardly ever get a word in edgewise.
His siblings came by their loudness honestly—their parents were also embarrassingly enthusiastic about pretty much everything.
All in all, it was a very cheerful household.
Yana, though, must have gotten a set of recessive quietness genes. He was about as laid-back a fellow as you could hope to meet, and though he appreciated the cheerfulness of his family, his quiet, casual nature meant that he had a hard time getting noticed.
He was stuck in a strange space where he desperately wanted to be noticed (as himself, not as the middle child of that crazy Yanagisawa family), but his laid-back personality meant that he didn't particularly want to do anything that would get him noticed.
So when he got to middle school, he decided that if people didn't listen to him, perhaps they would look at him.
He dyed his hair bright blue-purple and styled it so that it stood up straight in the air like a broom, and then cultivated a reputation as "that laid-back guy with the crazy hair".
That worked well enough for him, and he made some good friends, especially Asato Kido and Yu Kaito, whom he remained friends with all through middle school and into high school, even after Kaito went on the more prestigious Meiou High.
Still, even with his friends and his reputation, Yana harbored a secret desire to be something more, something unique.
He got his wish, but it seemed that fate had a sense of humor.
Those were some strange times.
It began innocently enough: he just felt a little under the weather, just enough to give him an excuse to stay home from school. It was a little worse the next day, a fairly miserable sort of coughing and sneezing that was almost enough to disguise the intense feeling of weirdness that was slowly taking over his entire body.
The symptoms abated the next day, but the strange feeling remained.
He went back to school the next day, weirdness or no, but he quickly decided that that might have been a mistake.
The crowd pushed and shoved around him, and, as it did, it seemed to pulse with a strange…light? Sound? He couldn't even tell.
During lunch, someone brushed past him, muttering an apology, and Yana had the strangest sense of—
But before he could figure out what it was, it was gone.
He looked down at the hand his classmate had brushed, not sure what he expected to see.
But there was nothing. It was the same hand he'd always had.
The weird feeling had subsided a little after the incident at lunch, but by the time the last bell rang, it was all he could think about.
The strange pulsing feeling was all around him, everywhere, and wouldn't give him a moment's peace. He made his way through the crowd, carefully avoiding any accidental skin contact, desperate to get out of the school and away from the throng of students.
He finally made his way out into a less crowded street, and then cut through an alley to get as far away from people as he could.
It helped a little, but he still felt awful.
He stopped to lean against the wall, trying to pull himself together.
"Are you ok?"
Yana started, but then realized it was only Kido, who had apparently followed him.
"Yeah, m'ok," he mumbled.
"You don't look it. Are you sure you were well enough to come back to school?"
"Are you?" asked Yana.
Kido had come down with the same bug he had, so it might have been a fair question…except for the fact that it was Yana who was the one having trouble staying on his feet.
"You seriously don't look good," said Kido, concern growing in his face. "Do you think you can make it home ok?"
Yana straightened up and stepped away from the wall, intent on proving that he was fine, perfectly good, never better.
And promptly headed for the ground.
With a shout, Kido jumped forward to catch his friend—and as he did so, their hands touched.
An unearthly feeling washed over the both of them, and Yana felt the same strange sensation as before, which he now recognized as…well, otherness.
There was something other than himself, and there was himself, and then his self took in that otherness and made it his own.
When Yana opened his eyes, he found Kido already staring back at him, a look of utter shock in his eyes.
"What. The. Hell."
Yana scrambled up, looking down at his hands as he did so.
His hands?
No.
These were someone else's hands.
They were smaller than his large ones, and a little darker, and the calluses were in the wrong places.
He looked up again at his shocked friend, and then turned slowly toward a nearby window.
His reflection hit him like a gunshot.
Messy blond hair, serious jaw, piercing eyes—the face that was looking back at him was Asato Kido's.
Yana threw himself away from the window.
Still not entirely steady, he lost his footing.
This time, Kido wasn't fast enough to catch him.
Yana's eyes blinked open, and he stared unseeingly at the sky for a few moments before remembering what had happened.
He jerked upward, and looked down at his hands again—but they were his, not Kido's.
"What happened?" he wondered out loud.
"You hit your head. I think it knocked you out for a few seconds there."
He looked over to see his friend sitting cross-legged next to him.
Yana rubbed his head. "Geez…. What did I hit?"
Kido pointed. "That."
Yana looked at it. "Man, who puts an iron pipe sticking out into an alley?" He pulled himself into a more comfortable position, and then asked a more pertinent question. "But…what happened before that?"
"You expect me to know?"
Yana was quiet. "Well, I know what I think happened, but, you know, I did just knock myself out on an inconvenient pipe. So I was kinda hoping you could give me your version."
Kido shook his head, but answered.
"You fell over, and when I caught you, you…you turned into…me."
"Oh man, I was hoping I was hallucinating…" groaned Yana, pulling himself back against the wall.
For a moment, neither one of them could think of anything to say.
Finally, Kido spoke.
"How…did you do that?"
Yana put a hand to his forehead.
"I don't even know, man. I just…had this really weird feeling, you know? It started while I was sick, but then today, it was like…" he trailed off, waving his hand around to indicate what it was like.
Kido stared at him.
"You say…it started while you were sick?"
"Yeah."
Kido looked down at his hands, flexing them half unconsciously.
"Wait…" said Yana. "You…don't…also have some crazy-weird feeling, do you?"
Silently, Kido nodded.
"Oh man…do you think you're going to start turning into people too, do you?"
"No way of knowing."
They looked at each other.
"Well, if you do, be sure to tell me quick. It'd be nice to know I'm not alone in this."
That was true enough.
Something strange was happening to him, and that was a frightening thing.
Still…
Something had happened to him that, as far as he knew, had never happened to anyone else.
No one.
Ever.
He found himself wanting to try to do it again, to see if he could do it at will.
If he could…he would have an ability that was completely, utterly unique.
His, and his alone.
But if his best friend was going to get the same thing…
He tried to quiet the little monster of jealousy that was squirming somewhere in his stomach.
In the end, that wasn't even what he should have worried about.
Over the next few days, first Kido discovered his power, and then they both found out that Kaito had also come down with whatever superpower-inducing bug they had had.
It gave them each a different ability, which Yana thought was awesome—he got to share the amazing experience of these new abilities with his two best friends, but he still got to have something that no one else had.
It hadn't hit him yet exactly what that was.
The three of them had gotten together to see what they could do.
Kaito allowed Yana to try his ability on him, so, for the first time, Yana deliberately extended his power.
It was every bit as strange as the first time, but this time he was ready for it.
He felt that strange sense of self-that-wasn't flow outward, and then back in, and then he was Kaito.
He didn't just look like him.
He was him.
Though he was still wearing his own clothes, everything else about him—stance, expression, diction, mannerisms—was Kaito.
And he knew things.
Things he shouldn't have known.
"I got a 93 on my latest exam. It's the lowest I've gotten in either high school or middle school, and I blame the fact that I was sick for not letting me beat Minamino this time."
Both Kido and the real Kaito stared at him.
"How did you know that?"asked Kaito.
"What do you mean? Of course I know. I…I…"
Kaito blinked, and then clutched his head.
No! Not Kaito! Yana!
With an effort, he forced himself to be himself again.
Kaito's form and memories slipped away from him, leaving only the knowledge of the one memory he'd deliberately accessed. Everything else was gone…he could remember having had it, but there was nothing there.
Copy.
That was when he realized the irony of what he had gained.
His personal, unique ability was the power to become someone else.
He had been a little disappointed at first, feeling gypped, but then he realized how selfish he was being, and his natural mellow sense of humor quickly came to his rescue.
Yana grinned wryly.
Well played, Universe. Well played.