Work Text:
Mitsuba Sousuke doesn’t know how to be alive.
After all, how could he? He isn’t even the real Mitsuba Sousuke. He’s a copy, an amalgamation of blood, sweat, and tears shaped by Tsukasa’s cruel hand. He’s a boy with no past, no present, and no future. The reflection he sees when he looks into the mirror isn’t his own, but a warped image of who he could have been, if things had been different. If Kou had been different. If Tsukasa had been different. If Sousuke had been different.
Mitsuba Sousuke has never been given the chance to live. He never even got the chance to try, the chance to prove he might be able to do it. Now, he fears, he never will. Ever since the severance, his body hasn’t been his anymore. Now that he thinks about it, did it ever really belong to him? Or was it simply a puppet of Tsukasa’s, blindly pulling itself forwards and dangling from red threads? He supposes none of it really matters. Whether or not it was Tsukasa’s or his, he could still tell himself to move his arm and his body would respond. Now, if he tells his arm to move, it’ll flop slightly before melting into sludge. He’s disintegrating before his very eyes. If he doesn’t eat, he’ll just get swept away with the tide, pulled into the next stage of death, the far shore.
Mitsuba Sousuke doesn’t want to go to the far shore. He wants to be human, to live and breathe and touch and feel and he wants people to see him, to speak to him, to be friends with him. He wants to laugh with somebody until his stomach hurts from the effort. He just wants to be alive, even if it’s just a pipe dream.
(After all, a supernatural like him could never be human.
A creature that has come to life on the far shore as a supernatural…
…cannot be allowed to live as a human on the near shore.
He was born monstrous, he’ll live monstrously, and when he dies, it’ll be monstrous.)
Mitsuba Sousuke will never achieve his dream. He knows this, so why bother trying? At this point, it’s doing him more harm than good. He forces the pieces of his battered, broken, villainous body back together with crude stitches and a deep, insatiable hunger. It seems like something pointless, and he’s not known for being particularly stubborn, so why does he continue trying? To him, at the very least, the answer is clear as day. He is desperate. He is so, so, so miserable and desperate to become a human that he’s willing to do anything to achieve it. He will become the monster Tsukasa wants him to be if it means he can one day live among the students of Kamome. He would swallow a thousand bleeding, beating hearts if it means he can one day stand on the other side of the mirror, no longer forced to look inwards. He would do anything.
…or so he thought.
Mitsuba Sousuke is not Minamoto Kou. He does not have the bold determination, boundless energy, and savior’s complex his best friend has, and that will be his final undoing. Mitsuba Sousuke wants nothing more than to be human, except maybe than to be dead. He just—he didn’t think eating would be this hard . He didn’t think he would have an ache, bone-deep and swelling, to consume flesh and maggots and hearts that pulse pitifully in his hands. But the hunger is all-destroying, and it’s only a matter of time before he can’t control himself anymore, and he eats something he’ll really regret. The school that lies on the other side of his boundary thrives with meat, with thick, juicy hearts he could squeeze. Blood he could drain, flesh he could rip apart, teeth sinking into breasts and feasting on the delicacies within. It would be so easy for him. Like taking candy from a baby.
But Mitsuba Sousuke doesn’t want to take candy from a baby. He doesn’t want to emerge from the mirrors and eat the very people he wants to become. He doesn’t want to eat the people he’s learned to care about, like Yashiro Nene, or Yokoo and Satou. He doesn’t want to eat Minamoto Kou most of all, even if he thinks Kou could probably fight him off.
Hm. Now, that isn’t such a bad idea, is it?
Mitsuba Sousuke is tired. He is tired of living as Tsukasa’s puppet, tired of watching life go on from behind mirror panes, tired of eating and tired of enjoying it and tired of picturing himself tearing the heads off of humans. He would just like to go to sleep, to fall upon a bed of cherry blossoms and tuck himself in, curling up to nap for eternity. His will is like a river, cascading and strong when his fervent desire to be human strikes, then docile and dormant the instant he has to do something about it. It would be much, much simpler if he could just pass on, let his body fail him and crawl his soul to the other side. He could be dead.
Mitsuba Sousuke would very much like to be dead.
An exorcist like Minamoto Teru could surely do it easily. Even Hanako would probably plunge a knife into his side if he asked politely enough. But an ending like that doesn’t please him. He would float the far shore, drifting aimlessly as an exorcised spirit, bodiless and directionless, but a sense of unhappiness would plague him like cockroaches, impossible to leave. His mind thinks back to a simpler time, a world he once commanded, the one place he could truly become a human.
(Soft blonde hair tickled his cheek, full of color and full of life.
Okay, then.
Want me to die?
Then I can be with you forever.
A single tear rolls down his cheek. It splashes onto a palm that isn’t his.)
There’s only one person who would be able to kill him. Only one person who Mitsuba Sousuke trusts enough to place a blade at his neck. He envisions himself on the business end of a trident, dented and slightly misshapen, but thrumming with raw energy and pure determination. Blue eyes glare into his own, and he’s never felt more seen. He pictures it an easy task, completed without much arguing or fanfare. He knows, as much as it hurts, that those dreams will be nothing like reality.
Minamoto Kou is the only person who ever truly knew him. Mitsuba Sousuke the human lived and died with only one friend, a boy with scrapes on his knees and an ugly traffic-light earring and words too bright to belong to this world. But Mitsuba Sousuke the supernatural will live and die with only one love, a boy with gangly limbs awkward from growth spurts and dead, dull eyes and words just dark enough to have seen pain. When Mitsuba Sousuke the human died, a part of Minamoto Kou died as well. But when Mitsuba Sousuke the supernatural was born, that part grew back—colder and uglier than ever before.
It’s that part, that diseased, rotting part, that will allow Kou to strike down his best friend. Sousuke is sure of it. And so, with the promise of death on his lips, he sets off for the city, one final destination in mind. He’ll make it entertaining. He’ll take Kou on a date first, he’ll laugh and smile and pretend that everything’s fine. After all, pretending is what he’s best at, isn’t it? It’s what he’s been doing his entire life.
Mitsuba Sousuke may not know how to be alive, but he’s a master at being dead.