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No one tells you the easiest way to cope is to not cope at all.
Author's Notes
this is a little character study of yugamu covering my favorite headcanon for him i've conceived of, which is that he has a dissociative disorder. i may be insane for it but that's okay. i also wanted to get back in the swing of writing fics
On his first job, Yugamu panics.
Little feet tread silently as he follows his target. His breath is quick, shallow, too loud. He's sure they can hear his heart pounding. Scared isn't the right word, but maybe anxious is. He doesn't want to do this. He doesn't want to do this. What choice does he have, though?
He strikes. He pounces, knife driving deep into their neck, and the moment it connects he detaches. It's like a snap away from himself, but not quite on the outside looking in. The target is just a body. Just a job. He doesn't need to worry.
A sigh of relief escapes him. It's done.
From then on, every victim is a body. It's easy to disconnect. It's just work. He doesn't enjoy it any more, but he doesn't fret about it either. There's no love, and as he gets older that gets more and more disappointing.
Their head is bashed in. They're shot from afar. Poison is slipped into their wine. And he feels nothing.
Then comes the girl in the hospital.
Getting in isn't too difficult. She's heavily guarded, but he's dealt with situations like that before. He's done and seen it all. He slips into her room and she greets him with a smile.
"Thank you," she says. He doesn't know how to respond, so before he kills her, he sits beside her bed and listens.
"It hurts." Her voice is soft, strained. "My parents have been doing anything to keep me alive, but…" Her smile looks pained, perhaps bitter, and Yugamu understands. The struggle to live because everyone else wants you to, but you hurt and you're tired.
Her death is swift and painless.
Is his body his own? He's not sure at this point. So much of it has been changed, swapped out for something stronger. It's not something he tries to think about often; how can anyone cope with being an experiment? It's easy.
In a way, he doesn't. He puts it away for later, and later never comes.
Eyes drift over his nails - more like claws, at this point. His index finger pricks his thumb and he doesn't feel it. A bead of blood surfaces. It's strange knowing he's the outlier, even among his family. He wants to feel something besides the burden of his career.
Easier said than done, he supposes. All his classmates are beautiful; he'd love to kill any one of them, watch the light leave their eyes, but none of them feel the same. He's an outlier among them, too, striding too silently down the halls as they make way for him. He's grotesque to them, and to them grotesque is something undesirable. He doesn't have much time to be disappointed about it; he's busy killing and being molded into a better killer. Besides, there's a bit of a thrill in it, isn't there?
No one understands. He can't decide if it bothers him or not.
Yugamu's not thinking about it as he stalks his latest hit. All he cares about is the body in front of him, blissfully unaware. In the back of his mind, he wonders if he'll be unaware before he dies, or if he'll get to enjoy it.
That's when another shadow catches his eye.
She's not too far from him, her eyes clearly on the same goal. There's a glint of metal in her hands. His foot lands on a fallen leaf, the crunch of it loud enough to alert her but quiet enough that their target won't notice. She meets his gaze.
This is it, he thinks. They both know the unspoken rule: they have to fight to the death. He's confident he could take her on if he wanted, but he doesn't think he does. There's no hiding the detachment in his gaze, his eye fixed on her and something far away at the same time.
She approaches him and drops her knife. The circles under her eyes say it all. His own eye widens slightly.
"I don't really want to fight over this," she says. "Do your worst."
He vowed to kill her one day. It's the one murder he wants to commit. His mind feels clear, truly clear when he thinks about it. It's the first time in years he's felt like this.
Then comes the war.
When he powers his hemoanima for the first time, he kills the invaders with ease. Killing was his whole life before. Is it easier when they don't look human? He's not sure. It's all the same loveless act.
Waking up in an unfamiliar school surrounded by unfamiliar faces, he feels strangely calm. Maybe it's relief that he's no longer under his family's thumb. Maybe he doesn't really feel anything at all. His easy smile betrays none of it, almost too cheerful when he introduces himself as an assassin.
Most of them have their doubts at first. He himself didn't envision more killing when he got away, and his attachment to the TRC itself is tenuous at best. Not that he wants everyone to die, but maybe that his desire to save them doesn't outweigh his desire to get away from it all. Nozomi and Moko easily tip the scales, though; he can't help but be pulled in by their passion and charm. It helps that no one recoils from him here.
Besides, he has a target to kill. He has to get back.