Mitarai's Story: Haven
Characters: Mitarai, Kuwabara (Sensui, Doctor, Itsuki)
Pairings: None
Continuity: English Anime
Summary: Mitarai was forever an outcast, shunned and mocked mercilessly at school, unseen at home. It finally gets to be too much for him, and his life is forever changed—and then changed again. Warning: Attempted suicide.
Author's note: I sincerely hope I've gotten the relevant details right…it's been a while since I've seen the relevant episodes, and I'm not in a position to rewatch them at the moment.
"Freak."
Mitarai's face jerked to the side as if he'd been physically hit.
Then he cringed, realizing that he shouldn't have shown weakness. The more they knew what hurt him, the more they would do it.
Why had they chosen him? Mitarai had no idea. Who could fathom the choices of middle school bullies? He was quiet, true, and shy, but he was hardly the only shy loner at the school. Why had they chosen him to heap their torments on?
But they had.
They mocked him mercilessly, every day seeming to come up with fresh torments for him.
His home life wasn't much better. At least there he was just ignored, but the constant fighting meant it wasn't much of a sanctuary.
He had always spent as much time as he could in the school library, savoring the quiet, but lately it had been crowded, and it had been harder and harder to finding a nook to curl up in.
Then the bullies found him.
Once they had discovered his one safe place, he lost it.
He tried to find a new one, but they took to following him after school, making it impossible for him to scout out a new sanctuary.
He wondered if none of them had anything better to do with their time, but apparently making his life miserable was their favorite pastime.
With them following him and mocking him, the only choice he had was to go straight back to his house.
Not home.
He had no home.
The library had been the closest thing he had, and now that that was denied him, he found himself adrift.
It went on for weeks. He could handle it at the level it was before, but this…
Something had to give.
So when he heard himself called a freak one more time, something snapped.
He found himself feeling suddenly detached, almost as if he were watching a movie of his own life.
A movie he didn't care about at all.
A movie he didn't want playing any more.
He was walking, almost drifting, in that strange sense of detachment.
It was raining, he noted without much care.
He walked into his house.
Went into the kitchen.
Picked up a knife.
And walked back into the rain.
Thunder cracked and rolled around him, threatening to break that precious sense of detachment that kept him from feeling any pain.
That must not happen.
He sat down on the side of the deserted street, not caring where he was anymore.
He lifted the knife and cut deeply into his forearm.
It hurt, but the sense of detachment grew, which was good.
He cut again, watching disinterestedly as his blood mixed with the rain and coursed down his arm into the gutter below.
Just like his life, he thought absently.
He switched hands, and was about to start on the other arm when a strange feeling stopped him.
It was a feeling that cut through his detachment, but this…this was a feeling he was utterly unused to.
It was a feeling of power.
It exploded out from him, seeming to turn everything within a ten-yard radius into a sort of negative space where every color was replaced by its opposite.
Then the strange colors were gone, but the feeling remained.
Here, in this space…he was in control.
He stood, feeling a little wobbly from blood loss, trying to figure out what had happened, curiosity temporarily overcoming despair.
He saw his blood, sluicing away from him, mixing with the water at his feet…
Water that was strangely bubbly.
He leaned toward it, wanting to see more…
The water leapt up and enveloped him.
He was in a strange space.
He seemed to be floating, drifting in what had to be water…but it couldn't be, because he wasn't drowning.
He floated there for what seemed like a very long time, but might also have been only an instant.
Then a door opened up out of nowhere.
Two men stood there, the one stepping back to make way for the other.
The second one, a tall man with black, slicked-back hair, smiled at him and held out his hand.
Not quite knowing why, Mitarai reached out his uninjured hand and took it.
The man had spoken gently to him, told him things that made sense of the world.
He said that the world was a wicked place, that people were an unending evil that must be destroyed at all costs.
The man said his name was Sensui, and had called over one of his associates—he just called him "doctor"—to fix Mitarai's arm before he passed out from blood loss. As the doctor worked on him, Mr. Sensui told Mitarai more about the terrible evils of humanity, and offered him a chance to help stop it all.
Mitarai hesitated.
Was it really as bad as all that, for everyone?
Yes, said the man. If he didn't believe him, he could show him.
With some reluctance, Mitarai agreed.
The tape had been horrible.
How had he ever doubted humanity's evil? It was so obvious. There was nothing good, nothing redeemable about the human race.
They all needed to die.
And he could help.
Sensui's smile wasn't so gentle when no one else was looking.
The boy had asked if that was the whole tape, and he had said yes.
In truth, the boy had only seen ten minutes of it.
Mitarai's life now had purpose.
He would do whatever Mr. Sensui required, and if he died in the process, it was just one more human parasite being cleansed from the earth.
So when Sensui sent him to capture the orange-haired boy, he had been more than ready.
Or so he thought.
He had captured the boy and his friends inside one of his water-creatures .
He was holding them there, making them suffer, as he had suffered.
He didn't expect to lose.
Orange-hair had let loose with something new, something he shouldn't have had, and Mitarai found himself lying defeated on the sidewalk.
He was as powerless as he had ever been.
He's going to kill me, he thought.
And he found that the thought terrified him.
Why?
He wanted everyone dead, including himself.
He'd tried to take his own life less than a week ago.
But that had been him finally taking charge of something.
This?
This was helplessness at its most profound.
"You deserve to die!"
He could taste the anger in that voice.
He cringed and screwed his eyes shut, trying to prepare for the blow that would end his life.
Instead, he felt a hand wrap around his.
"But…I can't."
Shock at the utter incongruity made his eyes fly open of their own accord.
What?
What?
How could…what?
Orange-hair…Kuwabara…picked him up and bodily dragged him away. He stopped only to pick up his unconscious friends, dragging all four of them all the way back to his apartment.
The fact that this stranger—this enemy— was taking him into his own home shocked Mitarai to the core.
Why?
Wasn't he human?
Weren't all humans evil?
So why was he doing this for him? Mitarai had just tried to kill him.
Unbidden, tears sprang to Mitarai's eyes.
When Kuwabara dragged him, panting, through the doorway, he nearly lost it.
Because somehow, in that instant, this tiny apartment—this place he'd never even seen before—had become more of a home than he'd ever had in his life.
After all those terrible years adrift, he had finally been offered a haven.