Kuusuke's parents are eating dinner when he comes home.
His mother rushes out to greet him as he walks past the dining room.
"Come join us for dinner," she says.
"I've already eaten." Kuusuke says, giving her an apologetic smile."I'm on a special diet to help with my anemia, remember?"
"Oh right! I'm really lucky to have such a health conscious son. Still, do you think you could take some time out of your busy schedule to spend some time with your parents?" she begs, her eyes large and pathetic, "We hardly see you anymore."
"Okay, okay, there's no need to twist my arm." Kuusuke says with the best brightness he can muster and he follows her into the dining room.
"Well, look who's finally joining us for a change." Kuniharu says, "I see you so rarely that I almost forget it isn't just your mom and me here."
"I think it's only fair for me to come and go as I please. This is my house after all." Kusuke says."Besides I'm very busy these days."
"Ah yeah, fair enough, fair enough." Kuniharu says taking a sip of the wine that he and Kurumi had been drinking.
"Would you like some wine, Kuu-kun?" his mother asks offering Kuusuke a glass of it.
"Ah no thank you, I'm underage, remember?" Kuusuke says gently. He wants to keep himself sharp right now and the inhibition loosening effects of alcohol is the last thing he needs when talking to his parents.
"Only by like two months, It's fine." Kuniharu says.
"I'm so proud to have raised such a diligent student, but with grades like yours you can afford to slack off a little more. Besides aren't you set for life thanks to that energy whatsit you invented?"
"I'm not just in college to get a degree, I'm there to learn." Kuusuke lies.
"Have you met any girls you like? I was about your age when I met your mother."
"I'm well aware." Kuusuke says. He's got much more important things to do than knock-up a highschool student even if he wanted to which he very much does not.
"Darling, don't rush him. I'm sure he'll find someone when he's ready. Besides I think our Kuu-kun might like boys instead."
There had been a time when he would have killed to have so much of his parents' undivided attention. In a sense he had. Now that he has it though, he can't for the life of him remember why he wanted it so badly.
"Wait, really?" Kuniharu sputters, "Do you really think our son is that sort of person?"
"I certainly hope you don't have any problems with 'that sort of person,' my dear father who let stay in my house out of the goodness of my filially pious heart?" Kuusuke says, smiling brightly.
Kuusuke's pretty sure doesn't like men either. It's true that seeing that pretty-boy in his basement all trussed up and helpless gives him a certain thrill but the thought of doing that with him is just as repulsive as it is with any woman. Still he'll gladly perpetuate his mother's misconceptions about his sexuality for the opportunity to make his father squirm.
As Kuusuke sits there and listens to Kuniharu's desperate, drunken attempt to explain how much he does in fact support the gays and his mother's occasional tipsy interjections explaining the hints she'd thought that she'd noticed towards Kuusuke's sexuality, a familiar emptiness settles in his chest.
It doesn't matter what he does. Whether he keeps letting Kuniharu stay with them or he upsets his mother by turning him out onto the streets in a mere century nothing will remain of them but dirt.
Even if he does manage to succeed in his mission and send humanity to the stars the few millennia of extra time it will buy them is naught but a thin layer of soap scum on the Lake Baikal of all eternity. No it's not even that. It's nothing at all.
Watching his parents enjoying such simple animal pleasures fills Kuusuke with a indescribable jealousy. Would that he could fortify himself against the crushing futility of existence so easily!
Suddenly Kuniharu ceases his rambling and leans across the table to whispers in Kuusuke's ear, "Come down to the basement. Our guest is trying to break my seals."
Kuusuke's blood runs cold.
Kuniharu sits back down looking puzzled. "You're looking kind of pale there, son. Are you feeling okay?"
"I'm fine. I just remembered some urgent business that I need to attend to," Kuusuke says as he makes a hurried exit.
He needs to get to the basement, as soon as possible.
*
Makoto rams the handle of his toothbrush into the protruding hinges of the door to his bathroom prison over and over again trying to push out the pins holding them together. The task is grueling, but he keeps at it anyway, because his only other option is to stay here and let himself be literally bled dry, and he doesn't want to die here, all alone with nobody to morn him. Surely, the rising star Mugami Tooru deserves a better send off than to be tossed out and replaced by the next poor sap that madman manages to nab like he's nothing more than an empty shampoo bottle or a filled garbage bag.
So Makoto keeps hammering away at the pins, comforting himself with fantasies of how he'll have that freak carted away to prison when he gets out of here.
Once he's managed to remove the pins from the hinges of the door he's pulls it inward and pries it open wide enough to squeeze through and stumble out into the basement.
He stands there for a moment trying to get his bearings. To his left a set of rickety stairs that supposedly lead to freedom. To his right lies the child's corpse. Whatever drugs his captors keeps in there must have a strong preservative effect. The body hasn't decomposed in the slightest since Makoto first saw it what must have been weeks ago. If it weren't for the spikes through his throat Makoto would think that he was only sleeping.
It doesn't seem quite right to leave the poor thing's mutilated corpse down here. The brat's got to have someone out there, some parent or friend or older sibling, who'd benefit from the closure of a found body and a proper funeral.
Makoto approaches the the body doing his best to ignore the rising tide of foreboding washing over him.
He takes hold of the spike protruding from the body's throat and pulls it free from the flesh and the linoleum flooring beneath it. liquid gushes from the hole left behind as it starts knitting itself shut. Is the kid somehow still alive despite everything?
Makoto reaches down to check the kid for a pulse and predictably finds none but the wound in the dead child's neck has healed over completely.
Corpses can't heal, right? Makoto never did all that well in his biology classes but he's reasonably sure that they can't. Certainly not weeks after death.
What's going on here? Could it be that his captor isn't just a madman?
No. That can't be it. Makoto probably just missed the kid's pulse, which is doubtless quite weak from being drugged senseless and nailed to the floor for who knows how long.
All the more reason to get the spikes out of the child and the child out of the basement as soon as possible.
Makoto reaches down to remove the spike from the child's right hand as well but finds the metal hot enough to burn his hands.
He is too distracted by pain and confusion to pay any mind to the sound of hurried footsteps coming down the stairs and up behind him.
However, the sharp blow to the back of his neck that knocks him out is much harder to miss.
*
Upon waking Makoto finds himself tied down to a table. Standing over him is a man who Makoto recognizes as his captor from his frigid green eyes and ash blond hair.
"You're a real troublemaker, you know?" his captor says with an exaggerated performance of exasperation, "Trying to make a break for it wasn't enough for you so you tried to take off the seals as well. You have no idea how lucky you are that I was here to stop you."
A smile creeps across his face, "Clearly I haven't done enough to secure your cooperation."
Something in his captor's tone sets Makoto's heart pounding in his chest.
"What are you going to do to me?" Makoto asks, afraid of learning the answer.
His captor retrieves a large mallet from beneath the table, "The human healing factor is a wondrous thing. However it presents certain unique vulnerabilities as well," he says, winding back the arm holding his mallet. "For example if I break your legs and neglect to splint them properly-"
"Please don't, Kuusuke!" Makoto finds himself saying, speaking through no will of his own.
Makoto's captor freezes for a moment upon hearing these words emerge from Makoto's mouth, unbidden as they are. He lays down his hammer and reaches down to cradle Makoto's cheek. "But Kusuo, this man has proven that he'll keep causing issues unless I take away his ability to."
Makoto's eyes narrow in an expression that isn't his as his mouth speaks words that aren't his, "if you really needed to you could have done it when he was unconscious instead of making a big production of it. You're having too much fun with this."
"Is it not enough that I dedicated my life to you? Must I also sufficiently joyless about it?"
"That's not what I mean and you know it," the thing puppeting Makoto's body says. "I just don't want you to do something so cruel for my sake."
"Oh Kusuo, you're too kind," his captor says, staring lovingly down at Makoto in a way that feels uncannily like he's is looking not at him but through him at something he can't see. Then his captor leans down to kiss Makoto on the mouth.
The kiss is long and awkward. Eventually his captors tongue finds its way into Makoto's mouth which it tentatively explores cautiously prodding at his teeth before whatever's possessing his body bites into it hard enough to fill Makoto's mouth with blood.
His captor pulls away, clearly struggling to maintain his composure as blood pours from his mouth.
"Why did you do that?" the thing inside Makoto asks.
"I wanted to try something. 'If man will strike, strike through the mask' and this mask looks so good on you. If you keep wearing it and let me run a few more experiments, I might even reconsider my plan of maiming it."
Makoto feels the thing inside of him twist his face into a disgusted expression.
"Don't look at me like that. We'd hardly be going all the way. Too many disgusting fluids, and we need our dear blood bag to stay a virgin, anyway," his captor pouts, crossing his arms. "I just want you to hold me and carress me with the beautiful body body that was so unjustly wasted on this worthless man. I've served you with more loyalty and devotion than any husband has his wife in the history of this doomed, dying world. Would you really be so cruel as to condemn me to living out my brief life bereft of the gentle touch of a lover?"
"You have girls throwing themselves at you. Guys too," the thing inside Makoto says. Makoto finds it hard to believe that so many people could possibly be interested in this freak, even if his face is kind of nice.
"I don't want any of them. I might as well embrace a bag of garbage or a rotting corpse. Nothing in this world could possibly be worth loving save for you."
The thing in Makoto's body twists Makoto's lips into a smile that feels too wide to look pleasant or sincere, and says, "and you think you're so much better than this man. You're just the same as him."
"Shut up," Makoto's captor snaps and draws a symbol on Makoto's chest with his bloody fingers.
It burns like acid against Makoto's skin. It takes a moment for Makoto to notice that the whimpers of pain emerging from his mouth are his and his alone.
"What was that?" he asks.
But his captor does not answer, instead walking away from the table and out of Makoto's sight.
The sound of a spike being pounded through something soft and wet echoes through the basement.
Shortly after the pounding sound stops Makoto's captor returns, a syringe full of dark liquid in the hand not occupied by his mallet.
"There, nobody should interrupt us now and since I grabbed this while I was up," his captor says, smiling brightly as he plunges the syringe of black goo into Makoto's calf, "I can make this really painful."
Fortunately, Makoto's captor must have given him too high a dosage once again because after the first few excruciating strikes of the mallet to his shinbones Makoto's consciousness slips away somewhere the pain can't reach.
*
Makoto is alone. Everything else is over. Everything else is gone. All that is left is him.
Then he sees a crack in the nothing that surrounds him. He pries at it over and over again and little by little it gives way. It's the hardest thing he's ever done but he doesn't want to spend the rest of eternity trapped here in this empty place so he does it anyway.
He is still alone. The world beyond the world is a pointlessly vast and empty darkness.
He cries out into it for an unknowable amount of time until he grows sick of even his despair. Then he gets up and starts walking.
For a long time there is nothing but just as he begins to fear that he is truly the last thing in existence he comes across a shining, golden egg.
As he cautiously approaches, it rocks first to one side and then to the other, first gently and then frantically until it cracks open to reveal his beloved sister Kokomi.
Makoto rushes forward to throw his arms around her. He pulls her close to his chest, leans down and bites into her neck.
She thrashes desperately in his grasp clawing at his face. Trying to break away from him. Trying to stop him from devouring her warm, sweet flesh.
How dare she? Doesn't she know that he's been alone for so much longer than she has? Doesn't she know how much he needs this? How much he need this bright, warm thing so similar and yet so different from him to fill up the freezing void inside him?
As he dissolves the boundary between the two of them her memories mingle with his. He remembers how she, much like him, was born a bright and wondrous thing to bring joy to those around her, but unlike him, when the fire of her consciousness had burned all around her hollow, she had been content living in a world of puppets until her hatching. He sees himself through her eyes and learns her terror at her devouring. Even this is dear to him, for it has been a long, long time since such terror had gripped him.
All too soon, he has swallowed, digested absorbed and integrated her into himself completely, utterly, leaving nothing behind save for him. Alone once again.
*
Makoto wakes up lying in the bathtub the taste of Kokomi still in his mouth. He tries to rush to the toilet to vomit but something has gone horribly, painfully wrong with his legs and he ends up vomiting on the floor just outside the tub instead.
What a horrible nightmare, Makoto thinks as he climbs back into the tub. He'd never do something so horrible to Kokomi. Her happiness and safety are far too important to him.
But that isn't quite true is it? Thinking back on his relationship with Kokomi it had never been that he wanted to protect or take care of her as much as he had wanted her to want him to. To need him the way he needed her. To be someone who would never leave him, never reject him, never hurt him.
But she had, when she pushed him away back before this hell of his had started, and, for the first time since it happened Makoto recognizes the ugly expression that he'd seen on her beautiful face as he fell as one of hurt.
Had he ever tried to understand her feelings or had he just read whatever emotions he wanted into her practiced, perfect smile?
That kid, or whatever that thing is, had been right. It was always his own fantasy that he'd loved, rather than the real thing.
Makoto stares at his twisted, ruined shins in a room scented by his own vomit and wishes that he'd loved his sister less selfishly and mourns that now he'll never get a chance to do so, or even to apologize for failing to.
