Twenty Two: Escape.

                                    

                                          
You take that into contemplation: Could you be more than Scalpel? 
The next few days pass by like a blur. You sleep, wake up, eat, disassociate, and sleep again. You're often found, as the guards put it, in a trance-like state, as if you were living through something else, somewhere else. You eat alone in a secluded table at the very corner of the dining hall, mindlessly playing with the mushy food with your spoon, blind and deaf to those who attempted to strike up a conversation with you; they were often met with a blind-eyed stare, as if someone else other than you were staring at them, at a different angle, at a different place. 
You could be more than Scalpel. 
It was just a matter of committing to it.
But were you willing to be someone else? You had tried; it had ended in failure, with Chuuya putting an end to your placid and peaceful life. His obsession overflowed and shattered the glass it was being held in; explosive just like him, and sent ripples and shards of glass everywhere. Left a mess. 
Left you as a mess.
You could still feel Hikari's ghost haunt you.
You could hear another breakdown coming. 
You close your eyes and cross your legs on your bed. Your hands are shaking on your lap. Your breath comes out in irregularities, your heart thumping in your throat. Your heart drops like a stone in your stomach, and you curl into a ball in your cell bed. 
You could be other than Scalpel. 
Something worse.
Something that they wanted you to be. That way, you could be free of your own struggle. Maybe that was why Chuuya had ruined your life before; he had found you struggling in the raging river of your life, and had broken your legs so that you wouldn't struggle anymore, just like how a wolf mother kills one of her mortally injured pups—a hard sense of compassion and love and necessity of allowing death to come to the dying. 
Yes, you would become worse. You would burn the bridges of your past, and flourish out of the ashes and become something nightmarish. Something beyond Mori's imagination.  That way, he could no longer control you as his creation, and relinquish all power he had over you.
The truth was, the guilt you felt for the victims was not because you had killed them, but more so because you enjoyed the killing. The Scalpel was called that for a reason; why else would a scalpel be sharp if it were not meant to cut flesh? Mori had simply sown the seeds, and watched it grow; the cultivation of a long chain of events leading to this had been your doing. Your design.
Hikari Hashimoto has become your design. Your becoming. The hallucinations that had haunted you had stemmed from guilt of enjoying blowing her brains out, because it meant you had been fighting against yourself. A war of annihilation within yourself that you had won. 
You had discovered that after a long day of contemplation, staring at the cool grey walls, and cackling to yourself hysterically at the thought of returning to a normal life. Dazai had done it, but it came with his ridiculous clownery; a clownery that he could not ever put down as a second mask. The mask became him, and he has become the mask. Another paradox. You laugh. You laugh and laugh and cry. A laugh woven with insanity. A laughter knitted with despair, only procured from those at the bottom level of hell, frozen in unthawable ice.  
There was no way that you could be like him. A suicide would mean Mori would have won; would have meant a different ending to Frankenstein, where the creator was victorious over his wretched creation. No, you could not have that; you would rather kill him yourself than have that sort of revelation of your sad life.