WARNING: DEPICTIONS OF BLOOD
So I was writing my other story "Furihata Kouki's a Yaoi Manga Artist" when my computer crashed and about 3 days of hard work disappeared ;-; Sad and angry and excited for the New Years, I began to write this while my mother watched the New Year's celebration, blah blah blah and decided to fine tune it a bit today.
I kind of wrote half-asleep, so please cut me some slack and don't expect beautiful, organized, and well-developed plots okay? ^^; Thank you for reading my humble Fanfiction and have a happy new Year!
Hello. My name is Akashi Seijuurou. You need not tell me yours, for I, quite frankly, couldn't care less about the answer. You are solely here to act as my confidant, a leather-bound diary that just so happens to breathe and have a human form.
I suppose I ought to begin with an explanation regarding my presence inside this oddly lavish place for a prison cell-
I gouged out Kagami Taiga's ugly burgundy eyeballs. With a pair of scissors, manufactured in the year 1957 by a small factory in London, to be precise. The factory's owner, Lily Harris, unfortunately passed away after her fiance raped her, beat her, and lacerated her lungs with a butcher knife.
I wonder, though, if "rape" was too distasteful of a word here: she must have, somehow, taken pleasure in his actions, for why would she marry someone whose behavior she couldn't tolerate? She surely knew about his tendencies.
Insane people are not only insane at the moment of their crimes, after all- they have been this way since they were born.
Ah, but do forgive me. I was a tad carried away.
Removing a person's eyeballs with a pair of scissors, despite what many think, is actually a fairly difficult task. You can easily puncture it, but to completely remove the optical device you would need to do away with the person's eyelids as well, and that was a rather tiring task given that Kagami Taiga was a very disobedient man. And even after successfully snipping his eyelids off I still cannot take his eyes out in one piece-there were still too many optic nerves connected to the optical device, and I had to twirl my blade around the edges of the sockets to sever them-but in this process the metal, unfortunately, made contact with the eyeballs. Eventually, I gave up and just cut the eyeballs into several pieces and let them fall out on their own, slippery with blood and vitreous humour.
Oh, I see that you are a little bit uncomfortable at the mention of blood. Well, I'll take it that you have never seen blood run down a person's skin, then. It's so beautiful: the liquid moves so elegantly along the surface of a vesicle that used to hold it, and its bright red colour just sends divine waves of exhilaration through your entire body-it's mesmerizing. I had been utterly mesmerized by it, so I made a few more incisions upon his face: I made multiple fissures in the left ear as well as in the right, but neither seemed to produce the desired effect so I completely removed them instead. I couldn't poke through his cheeks, so I had to cut through them.
And by this time I had finally had enough of Kagami Taiga's howling so I cut out his tongue as well.
Much nicer. As I had previously thought and anticipated, he was remarkably more attractive without those ugly eyes and his tongue. I cannot even begin to fathom how Tetsuya found him even remotely endearing with them.
Of course he had been confined since the very beginning, but I had never immobilized anyone through disconnecting their tendons and lacerating their leg muscles before and I had long yearned for the opportunity to do so, you see. People talk so often about it, about how horrific and how cruel but also how effective it is, that I just want to perpetrate this torture on another person once.
Anyway, one would expect a man like him to have rather thin skin, but his skin was actually rather thick and difficult to cut through. Nevertheless, I succeeded in cutting through the rubbery material. I would then have cut open his body to study his organs, but I had looked at enough lungs, livers, kidneys, and whatever internal organ you can think of to last a lifetime during my teenage years, so I refrained.
To finish him off, I wrapped my hands around Kagami Taiga's neck and just squeezed, though that was an embarrassingly difficult task to accomplish due to my unfortunately small hands.
Why did he have to die, you ask? Because why not? I had derived all pleasure possible from him-what would keeping him alive do besides annoy me?
After Kagami Taiga breathed his last breath, I waited patiently for law enforcement to arrive, which they didn't until 54 minutes later. I'm disappointed-I thought Tetsuya would definitely notice earlier-but anyway, a tanned policeman pounced on me the second he saw me and ordered me to drop my weapon even though I had dropped them long before they arrived.
Why didn't I try to escape, you ask? Well, why would I? I had never been convicted for a crime before, and had nothing to lose from the novel experience. No extreme physical harm can come to me-my status as the previous head to the Akashi protected me from the worst, didn't it? I'm going to be kept inside a comfortable room, not unlike this one right here, for the rest of my life, and I'm not going to be deprived of any comfort I had outside of this prison.
I had expected brutal beasts of men to clamor about with each other and challenge my authority, but I'm sitting here and talking to you for "therapy" instead. I suppose I am disappointed, but I am not one to complain.
Say, have you ever strangled anyone for the sake of personal enjoyment? The feeling of another being's complete submission to you; their body, bodings, and breath completely controlled by you; their entire world within your literal grasp; you being the absolute and supreme in their existence-that power is quite addictive, more so than any drug. It sends electricity through your arteries and veins as your beating heart pumps it throughout your body, and the more you squeeze, the more it builds up in your blood and becomes more and more and more and-
Apparently it's quite pleasurable on the receiving end as well, but I've never been on the receiving end, I'm afraid.
I'm used to having power and not giving it, you see? I adore being in control and using everything around me, including my money, my workers, my father, and my friends-that's what they think, anyway-to maintain it. For me, only power is absolute, and everything else, including what they call morals, emotions, and attachments, are arbitrary.
I won't call them useless, but they are strange, capricious, and disposable to me.
Other people don't seem to share my sentiments, though; they scream "manipulative" in my ears as if it's a bad thing to be. It's utterly ridiculous, isn't it, that one second they praise a person for having leadership and vision and the next they criticize him for it? I don't harm anyone, usually-I actually prefer to keep myself in the good graces of everyone around me.
You ask me if I understand the concept of "love"? Well, I'm afraid that I am not awfully familiar with it. I've seen depictions of it in movies and books, and even have a couple of acquaintances that claim to feel this whenever they see each other, but personally I have never comprehended how two people could become so overwhelmingly emotional when they come under its spell. I can tell you that I'm rather good at seducing and pleasing my sexual appetite, but I conjecture that is not what you call love, is it?
Love, based on what I've heard from my friends, involves two people exposing, molding, and entrusting their souls to each other-they are supposed to find everything about the other endearing. You see, I cannot do that with another person. Whenever I tried to share my "soul" with someone and told them about my innermost thoughts and how much I wanted to slice my neighbor's throat open, they would scream at me and run.
I am not stupid. I know that I am not normal. Of course I try to hide this in order to survive, but I suppose I simply thought that if this emotion all those people claimed to feel for me, this love, is as powerful as the books, movies, and words of my friends say, they would somehow understand that this is who I am, that I am different.
None of them did, though-Well, there was one notable exception. His name was Furihata Kouki.
I met Kouki at my "friend", Kuroko Tetsuya's birthday party about a year ago. My first impression of him was weak, plain, pathetic, utterly uninteresting to me. Tetsuya, however, seemed to be awfully fond of him and insisted on introducing him to me. Out of social courtesy, I greeted Kouki and exchanged a few polite words with him.
I might have seduced him a little bit along the way as well-it never hurts to have control over someone, regardless of who that someone is- and, not surprisingly, by the end of the party Kouki was utterly enamored with me. I am extremely handsome, after all, and I can charm anyone if I put effort into it.
He was meant to be nothing more than another conquest. To my surprise, however, I found myself enjoying his presence after a few meetings.
You see, Kouki is the type of person that grows more beautiful with each look. At our first meeting, I thought he was plain.
At our second meeting, I thought he had a couple of interesting features.
At our third meeting, I thought he wasn't bad-looking.
At our fourth meeting, I thought he was cute.
At our fifth meeting, I thought he was gorgeous.
At our sixth meeting, I decided that I wanted him, and I promptly told him so. But I didn't love him, per se: I was expecting us to go out for a couple weeks before Kouki, like everybody else, turns away the second I talk to him about the real me.
It was after a lovely dinner consisting of Tofu soup and some rice that I told Kouki about this me. It was strange, though-I had an odd feeling in my stomach even though I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Or so I thought.
I was surprised when Kouki didn't say anything, didn't get up and run, and just sat there and smiled. Trembling, shaking like a leaf, but not leaving, he encouraged me to speak more. He was shrinking in fear as I described how lungs looked without its body and how I wanted to crack open every one of Kuroko Tetsuya's nails and watch him bleed to death, but he never looked away and he never tried to leave, just kept on a smile as he listened.
That didn't happen a lot. I suppose I was then charmed-Kouki accepted me, the true me. I didn't need to pretend, I didn't need to manipulate him into anything I wanted-he was already at my feet without any of it. He seemed to understand that I am not inferior, that I am just this way.
Soon we moved in together. During this period, Kouki was very intimate and made several rather grand declarations of love that would seem hyperbolic and insincere if it came from anyone else. But with Kouki, it's a different matter: He was simple, sometimes to the point of obliviousness, and painstakingly easy to read. He was someone that's utterly incapable of lying, something that I can do without any compunction for my goals.
Kouki said that he will love me forever. I didn't believe him, and had stared at him in incredulity when he made that statement, but he only replied with a reiteration of his previous statement. When I scoffed, he looked at me with a feeble smile, and told me that he would love me even if I murdered his entire family.
He would be upset and confused and angry, he said, but his would not stop loving me.
His expression when he said those words is forever engraved it my mind: a combination of fear and determination and something I couldn't quite place my finger on. I can't comprehend this "love" he spoke of, but I reckoned that it had to be a pretty powerful emotion.
So our life continued on. Kouki was still getting his Psychology/Neuroscience pHD, so he would come home and do the housework everyday while I provided for all of our financial needs. Why did I do that, you ask? I, quite interestingly, didn't know either-I suppose that I simply found him a rare and precious thing, and that I could not let him go.
Everyday, he would greet me when I came home, and then just listen quietly as I told him about how I planned to get rid of my father, occasionally interjecting with a short sentence or two but mostly just listened. We never fought, and everything was peaceful. For me at least.
Our first fight took place when we were on vacation to Disneyland. I found the concept childish and degrading, but Kouki expressed his uttermost desire to go and I did not wish to make him upset, so we drove there in my car. It was on our way back that we got into an argument regarding-something stupid that I can't even remember now-and Kouki, for the first time in our relationship, became angry at me.
He screamed at me-why do I still remember his words so clearly after so many years-"Why?"
"Why what?" I had replied.
"Why do you do this and say these things and...what is wrong with you?!" He was still screaming.
Something broke inside of me when he said that. It's strange and unpleasant; I guess I was hurt by his words. How ironic, I thought, that I would get hurt by somebody's words when I did the same to many people without any compunction everyday.
"Nothing, Kouki." I had said-by this time something was burning and threatening to burst out and I feel my self-control slipping-and I continued: "You're the one that's in the wrong here."
"I'm the one wrong?! So you think that it's normal to talk about how much you wanted to kill your father everyday and ruin a little girl's childhood just because 'You felt like it'?!" Kouki said, still screaming.
I thought he understood that there was nothing wrong with me; that this was just the way I am; that even though I'm not 'normal' I still cared for him.
Turns out he's just like the others who have left me.
Suddenly, I found his screeching and yapping very annoying and I just couldn't stand it so I stopped in the middle of the highway. "Get out of my car." I said to him.
His eyes-chocolate-widened as he exasperated about how we were in the middle of a highway. I didn't care, and I repeated my sentence: "Get out of my car."
He began to cry, and, oddly calm yet angry at the same time, I reached over to open the door for him. Kouki stared at me, and began to mumble a few incoherent sentences, but got out of the car in the end and just stared at me without closing the door.
Oh, by the way, it was winter. As Kouki stood there in the cold snow, tears rolling down his eyes, I felt something strange. I didn't immediately drive away-for some reason I couldn't. I don't know what I felt as I looked at his broken frame and shivering figure-It could be pity, guilt, surprise, anger, et cetera-but I knew that it was something unpleasant and that I didn't like the sight of Kouki in tears.
I hesitated before putting my hands on the steering wheel. Seeing my hesitation, Kouki sobbed softly, barely audible against the traffic: "I love you, Sei."
I froze.
He continued: "I love you."
When he saw that I didn't reply, he started chanting in the snow like a mantra: "I love you, Sei. I love you. Don't leave me. I love you."
I love you. I love you. I love you. He said. I love you.
As I said, I'm not stupid. I know that I am different. I didn't choose to be this way, I didn't choose to be this messed up person- but, nevertheless, I am a horrible human being, I am an ugly person who is, essentially, no different from those locked up inside prison cells. I am insane and had always been insane, just like Lily Harris's fiance was.
I am disgusting, I know that much-when all those other people left me, I wasn't angry. After all, they had been raised to utterly despise people like me. I never blamed them. I knew that I am unworthy of this wonderful emotion called love and that we would never be compatible anyway. I had expected to grow old alone without anyone by my side-not that I minded before Kouki came along.
Kouki was different. He was taught to hate people like me, just like everybody else. I'm sure he was what they would call a kind person; he always thought of other people, even when they didn't think of him. He put other people above himself. He had a strong sense of right and wrong, and I'm sure that I would be characterized as wrong in his mind; but this man, this very kind man, stayed by my side and listened to me talk about my disgusting thoughts. He allowed me to be my horrible self.
It couldn't have been easy for him. He was just like everyone else, but he dared to stay by my side and be there for me even though I was incomplete, horrible, disgusting, wrong.
He dared to come to me even after knowing who I am, I said, he loved me even though I am as different from him as can be.
I appreciated that.
It was that moment that Furihata Kouki became important to me. By the time I came back to myself, snowflakes were gathering on Kouki's red hat and his tears were freezing on his reddened face. "You're not going to leave me here alone, are you?" Kouki quietly asked, trying to muffle a sob.
I answered: "Of course not, get in."
On our way back, Kouki talked about his past. His parents and friends had abandoned him after he informed them of his sexual orientation. (Before he met me, he had to spend his holidays alone, Kouki said.) His first boyfriend only used him for sex, but he was afraid to leave because he was plain and nobody else would take a second look at him. "Thank you so much for being by my side, Sei." He said.
I couldn't say anything-what was I supposed to say? That I was actually no better than his previous partner? That I didn't and couldn't love him?
I think, though, what I felt for Kouki was as close as I'm going to come to love. He was the first person that I saw as something more than a chess piece and would do things for that normally displeased me. For example, I actually went to Tetsuya's house and socialized without any expectations; I took a three-week vacation from my job when he told me that he felt lonely and abandoned; I maintained a conversation with one of his high school friends, Kagami Taiga, for ten minutes even though I hated everything about him the second we met, simply because he was important to my Kouki.
I liked making my Kouki happy, you see. Yes. My Kouki. He was devoted to me and made exceptions for me the way I made exceptions for him. He loved me and me alone, and I will do anything to keep it that way.
I made a promise to Kouki that if anyone dared to hurt him I will gouge out their eyes, slice their tendons, and give them the most painful death possible. Kouki had laughed at those words, and said that would not be necessary. He believed that evil people did not exist, only people whose minds, circumstances, and upbringings were a little different from his. If anyone harmed him, he said, there would usually be a good reason behind it, and while he would hate the person for hurting him, that person didn't deserve death just because his mind was a bit wacko.
Yes. Kouki was lovely, but he had his faults. This excessive kindness towards others was one of them, and his inability to stand up for himself was another. He would sometimes forget to clean up the Kitchen after dinner, and he is horrifically stubborn about his awful choice of clothing.
I hated him for those faults, and would have strangled him already if I didn't hate seeing him unhappy for some odd reason.
See, I didn't love him the way a normal person would have. When a normal person loves another normal person, they dismiss the other's weaknesses or somehow turn them into positives; I hated Kouki's weaknesses and never saw them as anything other than weaknesses, but they somehow made Furihata Kouki who he is.
It would be nice if he changed them, but if he didn't I suppose I could live with it.
Say, did you know that Kagami Taiga was a fireman? It would certainly explain his sinewy legs and strong arms, wouldn't it?
The day before New Year's Kouki had went out with Tetsuya to pick out gifts for everybody. He always wanted to buy gifts for everyone, even though he didn't need to spend his time and energy picking out a gift for anyone aside from me. As I said, his excessive kindness towards others was his greatest weakness, but I had to let him go because he seemed so chipper about meeting up with his friend.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have; I should have just locked him up in my apartment and kept him there.
Kouki told me that he would be home before I got back from work, but when I opened the door to our apartment, I found no one. I called Tetsuya, but he didn't answer my call.
I was driving to the shopping mall when I heard about the fire.
By the time I arrived at the scene, the flames had mostly been quelled, black smoke engulfing the building in its place. I looked around me, and there stood Kagami Taiga with a battered Tetsuya in his arms. I inquired about Kouki, only to receive nothing more than silence from the two. I repeated my question again, and once again received nothing more than silence and an apologetic glance from Kagami Taiga. Kouki had died, I deduced that much at the moment.
What did I feel, you ask? I must say that I don't remember feeling very sad in particular. I felt angry that something was taken away from me without my permission; I felt shocked by the unexpected departure of someone so important to me; I felt empty, like I had just lost something; but I wasn't sad.
What even is sadness, anyway?
I later learned, over a dinner with the lovebirds at a fancy restaurant, that Kagami Taiga could have saved Kouki's life but was more concerned about getting his newfound boyfriend, Tetsuya, out of danger first instead.
"By the time I carried Kuroko out, the building had already collapsed and the giant concrete beams fell and..." Kagami Taiga sobbed as he buried his face in his hands, "I'm so sorry, Akashi. I'm so sorry."
Tetsuya wiped his boyfriend's tears with a tissue and added: "Furihata-kun always cared for others' comfort above his own, Akashi-kun. He would be happy that we are alive and well and talking to you like this."
Now, if this was some tragic, cliched romance story, I would say that Kouki died with a serene smile on his face, happy in his final moments for the comfort of his friends. I would have moved on, albeit a little sadly, to another person while I watched over Kagami Taiga and Tetsuya like they were my family.
Unfortunately this isn't. When they finally got Kouki's body out of the building, I saw a clear expression of pain on his face-or what remained of it, anyway. His nose had been smashed broken and a steel beam went straight through his forehead, leaving behind a gaping hole. His lips were smashed into disconnected pieces of meat, and most of the skin that covered his cheeks were bruised and stained an ugly burgundy.
The only intact part of Kouki's face were his large chocolate eyes that once looked at me with such adoration, fear, love, annoyance-emotion-and now enlarged in an expression of dread and utter, utter pain.
Kagami Taiga had hurt Kouki and took him away from me. Sure, he said, many times, that he was sorry, that he regrets everything so much, that he hates himself for letting go of a life, of someone so dear to him. Unfortunately for him, I don't understand apologies. I don't understand what he meant by "sorry" and "hate myself" or any of those apologies he spouted. I only know that Kouki was scared, that he didn't want to die in Tetsuya's place, that he wanted to be here with me.
Do I hate Kagami Taiga? Say, are you aware that you ask an awful lot of questions for a confidant? I thought I was supposed to be the one talking here, or would you prefer to talk instead?
Please, with all due respect, shut the hell up, thank you.
The next day, I intended to wander about the city a little bit to take my mind off of Kouki. My life should have returned to normal after he left, but I realized, after I looked through the 8th clothing store without much interest, that Kouki had become normal. I never loved him, I never felt for him that burning, scorching passion he claimed to feel for me, I never felt that he was irreplaceable to me, but I suppose that I came pretty close.
As the concept of his departure from me finally settled in my mind, my mind began to feel numb as something else bubbled in my mind. I tried to hold it in, but with every step I take it becomes more and more impossible. My ears were ringing. They rung and rung and rung and just won't stop. I felt in control, as I always did, but there was something else that threatened to consume me.
This hysteria came to a sudden halt when I saw Tetsuya and Kagami Taiga in a high-class restaurant, seemingly enjoying each other's company over a glass of red wine.
The something in me snapped.
Kouki was dead, and, despite what many people think, dead people don't have eyes. So why should I bother with making Tetsuya and Kagami Taiga comfortable if it won't make Kouki happy? Kouki's not here to be pleased or displeased anymore. I won't see those chocolate eyes soften in pride for me anymore; I won't feel his soft brown hair against my jaw anymore; I won't be able to wipe away his tears anymore because he's dead.
And I decided, right then, that regardless of what Kouki would say about it, I will keep my promise to him.
Seijuurou here isn't really meant to have a specific mental illness; he's really supposed to be just kind of insane and creepy, ya know? I don't know if I successfully conveyed the character ;-; I LOVE dark stories, but I can't seem to be able to write one of my own.
Thank you for reading my humble fanfiction and have a happy new year!