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It wasn’t that he wanted to: he needed to. Abandoning Kai was perfectly intentional, and Kei was not afraid nor remorseful to admit as such.
Kei thought that leaving Kai behind was like sending him away, kind of, even though abandonment was what it was and there was no way around it. That was fine. Kei didn’t need justifications--only what was and what was not. In-betweens were not allowed, since that was where things like normal people emotions and unreasonable what-ifs and wishes and ill-wants tended to dwell. They were always there, lingering the way spores are invisible to the eyes but irritate all the same.
(“Cards are more useful when you don't give them away,” Kei said when Tosaki brought up, in place of exchanging hellos, Kaito’s holdup in juvenile prison.
Tosaki didn’t roll his eyes at the comment, but he sipped luxuriously at his coffee.
“Hm. You don’t need him anymore now that you are taking things seriously. So I decided to wash him out,” was all that Tosaki gave.)
Kei didn’t think about needing him anymore. He didn’t. And, he couldn’t; Satou took priority nowadays. Kaito was not required in his daily existence, for his survival, not with his and Nakano's fucked up deal with Tosaki and his mostly illegal team. Distantly, Kei remembered his little sister, hissing adjectives at him. Even before he died, crushed under rubber tires, people called him cold. Weird and insincere and off in the head was what he was, they said. It didn’t offend him or affect him; nothing totally did.
(“You’re human, Kei.” Kai said, and held his hand out like it cost him nothing.)
It hadn't gotten him much, either; just a quarter of his life in a detention center for aiding and abetting an known ajin. After Tosaki left, Kei allowed himself relief at the knowledge that Kai was somewhere far away where he could not call for him.
There were two instances in his life where Kei grasped the hugeness of the difference between need and want.
1. At age nine, Kei spoke of wanting to practice medicine for the first time and his mother told him to cease contact with the boy known as Kaito. The boy, after all, was the son of a convict, directly related and by pure association made him a bad aftertaste, pretty much criminally. Nagai Kei wanted to become a doctor, so he needed to cut deadweights and kids of previously incarcerated criminals from his life. His mother had broken this down for him for reasons Kei understood and appreciated and eventually he set out to abide by them, spelling the end of amicability between him and his younger sibling. Kei also understood that he wanted a few things, like the unfortunate demi-human he was from birth: to be a doctor, and to be friends with the boy known as Kaito. He could not have both. And when he did choose, he did not choose Kaito. He chose his little sister.
2. Kei looked at Kai’s form, passed out over the stale floorboards in that old cabin, and decided to leave him behind. Some inane, inert part of him wanted to stay. That forever part of Nagai Kei who would simply choose the boy known as Kaito, no questions asked, no grief given. That frozen, foolish and plain part of him his mother would harangue him for and give him the same look she leveled at his father's tombstone. So again Kei chose, and this time Kei chose himself. Kei did not question himself when he wrote that note, as he heaved himself onto their stolen motorcycle and willed himself away. He did not wonder how human he was.
(Nagai Kei was not human, technically; the media spat at the very possibility of it, and he had died on a lab table in a soundproof room enough times to confirm that immortality was not a gift from any reasonable god. He killed himself and was killed more times than he can count. The boy did not miss his life before death.
Nagai Kei was not human, but Kai was a contradiction, and contradiction caused the human condition.)
Kei didn’t need Kaito, but Kei wanted him.
It was not a pleasant idea, but it was a theory with increasingly unshakeable merit.
So he theorized, and he dreamed, too. In that dream*, Satou massacred everyone but him, and then Kai was on the phone, then on the building right below his.
“Let’s go all the way to Kyushu this time,” Kai yelled into the call, voice impossibly unbroken by howling wind.
On the rooftop, Kei looked at the sky, the deep blue skies that inspired no relief. Why wasn’t he more surprised? “Th--thanks,” he said. He was smiling, sweat peeling off his face, the world narrowed down to two. Kei was going to jump. He ran towards the ledge, ready to plummet. Somehow, he believed Kai would catch him. It was a certainty that was not certain at all, and it was here that Kei realized Kai was impossible and Satou could not have defeated them this easily.
"This is a dream," Kei said, and Kai smiled a smile that was for real, quiet and stoic, and then he died.
Later, Kei wondered if Kaito somehow embodied the notion called hope, that sinister concept Westerners called all-powerful and redemptive and a balm. Kai had been the one and only person to help him without malice or disgust or any expectation for reciprocation. He was simply there when Kei called.
Kei didn't need to beg, didn't even have to ask.
(Kei figured this was probably what was detrimental about them. They were not really friends. Some ruthless commitment, some uneven mesh of give and take. Of relentless idiocy. Maybe to earn and enjoy such devotion you had to be a moron.)
Maybe Kei was irreversibly affected by this, impressed and repelled all at once. The impression of a savior, maybe, but that was unattainable for human and demi-human alike, and Kei left that image and imposition in the harried crevices of the bible.
What was less improbable, and perhaps slightly more believable, was the idea of a friend, a friend who took on such a strangely senseless shape it jarred him, concerned him.
Kai was very, very loyal. So much so it made Kei wonder if there was a core of serious anger in him, if his rage went somewhere deep to be stripped and exposed to air the way rust builds itself out of water-soaked metals.
He wondered because Nagai Kei has never once chosen Kaito, but Kai has always chosen him. He couldn't figure it out. Couldn't puzzle the trend out of its extreme absurdity.
(“You deserve more than this,” Kei told the one-way plexiglass. Kai stared flatly back at him through the glass.
“You deserve it,” Kai said, something wide and careless in his eyes, knowing and yet uncaring.)
Maybe he did hate himself, at some early point in his demi-human career. He was terrified, newborn and vulnerable. He wasn’t a soldier, then; not even a player in the game, just a high schooler who didn’t know what the hell was happening to him, or did, and to live in that knowledge like a quarantined rat made him want to end people.
Nagai Kei was scared, that was all. He called Kai for that reason. Maybe that was the most predictable part about him. The only thing he shared with other people, that which made him recognizable. Maybe that was what drove Kai to him that night, calmed him, soothed and sobered him, even through the haze of ten years of neglect and ambivalence and sneering behind backs.
The most human part to him, maybe--and the most strange part to Kai's face, when Kei raised that shitty pocketknife to one of those thick and important arteries they've only just started learning in biology class.
(“Why did you do that,” Kei asked, when Kai interrupted one of the class bullies and got beaten for it. That was the second time this week. From a very young age, Kei watched it all happen--as Kai moved forward with his sophisticated, deliberate form of self-destruction--so to some degree he felt an inkling of responsibility.
Kai looked at him, face flat and unworried. He was punched once, blood blackened around his nostrils. “There’s no why,” he said, strange and patient in the specific way he was, and Kei understood with sudden clarity why the other boys would keep going after him. “I could’ve stopped it. That’s it.”)
Everyone was dead except for him, Nakano, Tosaki, and Shimomura. So, the dream wasn’t entirely wrong. Satou massacred. The discrepancies: Kei was shot in the head by a hand pistol and thrown off the roof by the impact. He didn't jump. Kai was not there to catch him.
Either way, they lost and Kei called his mother to say bye but also to hear her voice. How human was it, to run? He imagined death in the water. Maybe this time he could invent the river.
The four of them eventually returned to Iruma City.
“You’re human, Kei.” Kai said, from somewhere far away. (In his dreams, the ones where they still scoured for rare beetles together and climbed great tall trees only to tumble off them, Kei believed him.)