Jou had thought he had run out of things to lose.
His confidence went first, fraying away years ago until he didn't recognize the face in the mirror as his own. It took his sense of self with it, tore at the very foundations of his self-determined role as savior to leave him a shell, hollow and brittle and thinner with every passing day. From there it was a quick slide - his friends one day, his sobriety the next, until showing up in response to J.J.'s summons counted as a victory, or would have if he remembered the meaning of the word. Even the distance in Sugane's eyes hardly touched him - without any person underneath his exterior Jou was sure there was nothing left to hurt, no recollection of pride to tell him how to be ashamed.
It does hurt, when his NOTE tears free of the back of his suit. It comes with a horrible wet noise, like it's his spine instead of his soul, lances his body into agony he didn't think he was still capable of feeling. His scream knocks his voice hoarse, tears raw and bloody in his chest, and when he falls back to the ground it feels inevitable, it feels like the last time.
He thinks he blacks out, maybe, for a moment; it's hard to tell, in the haze of red-washed pain, a fire of agony bursting out to fill the shape of what was once himself with a burn, if nothing more substantial than that. But even that fades, his fire failing as certain as everything else, and when he blinks he sees Sugane.
He thinks it's a nightmare at first, and that's telling, or would be if he had the time to think it through. The denial is a self-defense mechanism, the last desperate attempt of a shattered soul to mend the fracture that will destroy him past repair. But it's no nightmare, just the inevitable harsh lines of reality, and when it happens Jou doesn't even see the motion of the whip-quick tail snapping through too-delicate skin. What he does see, instead, is the rush of blood, heart-scarlet and cripplingly abundant, spilling over the reflexive shudder in Sugane's throat and staining the stripes of his overlarge skirt crimson instead of white. There's a symbol there, if Jou could reach for it, but all he is reaching for is a scream, and even that fails to form in his pain-raw throat. All he can do is stare, wide-eyed and impotent down even to the use of his voice, as the creature lets Sugane drop boneless to the ground in a spill of color that tears out Jou's hope as efficiently as the alien ripped free his NOTE.
It's only then, with his tears and his scream and his breath all still and silent, that Jou can feel the last unrecognized light in his life flicker out.