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.
"(First name) (Last name)," A guard opens your door, a look of uncertainty on her face, "You have been found exonerated of your crime."
You blink at that, "What?"
"You're found innocent," She hands you a plastic bag, "A gentleman dropped off some civilian clothes for you. Get ready to leave in ten."
You watch her lock your cell again, this time with the package in your hands. It crinkles and ripples in your hand, and when you open it, you find the same pair of clothes that you had worn the day you had been let off from your job as a librarian.
Cunning bastard. Replaying the past.
You shrug off the prison jumpsuit and into your civilian clothes, the fabric feeling like a carapace as you slide in. It feels foreign. You feel alone in your own clothes, as if they weren't your own, but someone else's donation. You shuffle uncomfortably in them on your bed.
"Ready?" The guard asks. You crack the kinks out from your neck, looking at her with a dead look.
"Not really."
You find yourself being escorted back to Port Mafia headquarters in a black car waiting outside the prison complex, being driven by men in suits and sunglasses: Henchmen. They're quiet in your presence as if afraid of triggering anything. Their apprehension makes you feel small. The only noises are the screeching noises of their walkie talkies and the humming of the car as it turns right, left, right, left.
"Give me that," You say to one of them. He points to his chest, "No, the walkie talkie."
He hands it to you without a single word. You wait for it to buzz, and when it does, the voice of Chuuya enters your ears.
"Did you get—"
"I'm out, Chuuya," You say into the mic, "And there's a reckoning coming."
You smash the walkie talkie in your hand, breaking it into splinters and bits of stray machinery. A strength reminiscent of your past self. You watch it drop onto the ground with a clunk, sneering when the buzzing remnants of Chuuya's voice attempts to come through. A core of revenge begins to grow in your chest, like the verses of a poem coming to life, the ink flowing thickly like blood rather than blood—after all, you have had a taste of both. You feel the air tense up even more; it was almost palpable, like cotton candy being squeezed tightly into a fist, hanging in the air.
"Gentlemen," You announce, "My name is (first name) (last name)."
You expertly yank a gun out of one of their holster's and shoot them in the heads.
XX
Chuuya's standing by the Mori Corporation's entrance, his arms crossed and feet impatiently tapping against the floor. The sun is setting, spilling Midas' touch gold rays against the floor, a vibration in the air that Chuuya recognizes as tension.
His shoulders are tense. What did you mean by reckoning?
Car tires screeching. You open the door for him from the inside, and a corpse comes tumbling out, limbs numbly hitting against the bloody interior of the car as it crumples onto the ground. You're in the driver's seat, looking at him with a calm, almost serene look.
"What the fuck?" Is the first thing that falls out of Chuuya's mouth, "What the fuck did you do?"
"Get in, Chuuya," You say, turning your gaze to the front. He kicks at a corpse before climbing into the car, "We're going my way."
"What is your way, exactly?" He asks. You smile, and when he lays his eyes on you, it is almost as if you were asleep: in the moment the untainted child spirit, the pure innocence. In sleep one is once again brought back to a state of sweetness; in sleep, one is remade, one is resembled from the inside out, fresh and new as innocents. There was an unspeakable untouchable aspect to you almost, as if you had found peace within yourself; a touching, but unsettling peace. You don't answer his question but violently steer to the right, sending him smashing against the window, "Hey!"
"I'm going my way," You say, not taking your eyes off the road. The stench of blood is heavy in the air, "You're following."
"What the hell?"
"We're going to fight to the death," You say. His face drops into that of shock, before strange curiosity.
"What? Why?"
You pull up to a large, empty space, sparsely littered with street decorations and park. The car comes to a lurching stop. You stare at the front, before turning to him with a smile, "You got a cigarette on you?"
"Yeah," He unsurely hands you one, watches you light with his lighter. The car window is rolled down to let out the smoke.
"I've been thinking, that's all," You say, blowing smoke out the corner of your mouth, "That maybe I've been chasing after the wrong sort of path. The wrong sort of life."
"You mean, as your job as a librarian," Chuuya states. He gestures to your clothing.
"Exactly," You say. Your voice is strangely full, undulating with something, as though filled to the brim, "It was the wrong life I chose to live. It would be the same as trying to force a square into a circle hole."
"So what's your plan? Why fight?" He breaks into a smirk, "I'm beginning to like these turn of events."
"Fighting you is a bet I've made with myself," You say. You flick the ashes with your hand expertly, "I cannot be Scalpel again. But I can be something worse. By fighting you, I can get over that obstacle."
"You'll lose," He says, already triumphant, "You can't defeat me."
"Oh, I know," You say, tossing your cigarette with a flicked finger, "That's why I'm doing all this. If I lose, it just shows I can't be Scalpel again. If I win...well, that just means something else, doesn't it?"
He clutches his hat and smirks, eyeing your gaze with an equally bloodthirsty gaze, "So a fight to the death, eh?"
"Until one of us falls." You repeat.
"I wouldn't want princess to die," Chuuya says, his voice taunting and filled with victory. You smile, peacefully at that, eyes closed and all.
"I wouldn't want to die either. I've changed my mind. I've had a vision. A dream. To die is to let Mori win. I can't have that."