Work Text:
On stage, Keito could almost see himself from the outside. The lights illuminating his features, the subtle changes in his expression, the firm and determined gaze of his eyes. Performing had always been sort of an out of body - experience for him. Not in a bad way, but in a way he could never quite explain like he wanted to. Eichi, for one, didn’t understand it at all.
He’d say, “You are you, Keito, there just is no way you can see yourself the way someone else sees you. That is limit of humanity.”
And the emperor would laugh, that small, cheerful chuckle Keito had once so adored but had lately come to despise. He had become Eichi’s trusted ally for the sake of the war, no, for the sake of bringing peace to Yumenosaki. But Keito wasn’t sure if the “peace” they were installing at the school was true after all, or just a charade maintained while sweeping everything unpleasant under the rug.
*
While Keito found that Eichi’s the statement was not false, he didn’t feel it quite correct either, something in it didn’t sit right with him. When he was on stage, he felt like he was watching a record of the performance, a video he had seen a dozen times over, where he knew every movement that would come to pass, no matter how slight it might be. But, it also felt like he was the machine playing the recording, that the recording was playing from somewhere deep within him, and he was just a medium channeling it. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t there for himself, but for the sake of someone else. All of it had been predetermined after all, the strings had been pulled and moves decided long before he set a foot on the stage.
In Yumenosaki Academy, there was only one person who could be called a true puppet master, but the student council might as well have been Eichi’s very own puppet show. A show where Keito was a helpless marionette slowly strangled by its own strings. It had taken him way too long to realize how tight the strings had wrapped around his neck, how limited his breathing had become, how limited everything about him had become. When his eyes had opened, he had hated himself for being so blind but recovered soon, thinking:
“I refuse to remain unseeing, for both the sake of myself and everyone around me.”
With his eyes wide open, he was able to see so many things he had barely even acknowledged before. There were so many people who looked up to him and cared for him, the him who had done so many awful things in the past, the him who was not perfect, the him who had merely just opened his eyes for the first time in a long, long time.
*
When the curtains were sliding away, revealing the three of them, standing on the stage bathing in the crimson light, Keito felt more alive than he ever had in that same situation. On this stage with these people who, together with him, formed what was most dear to him, he was alive in a sense that was almost foreign to him. It felt like a totally new, unfamiliar form on existing but even so, he felt more powerful than ever before. The power was his own to use, for himself and his unit, not for anyone else. And for the first time, he felt that he was seeing himself with his own eyes and not from someone else’s.
He might be a puppet, with Eichi pulling the strings, making him dance according to his whims, but even with a mere marionette for a leader, Akatsuki itself would not become a puppet. Never again would it dance the way the emperor wished it to. Akatsuki would rise from the ashes of the war, and bring about a new day, show hope in the form of daybreak.