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He’s supposed to be dead. He’s pretty sure that’s what he’d been thinking when he’d poured as much of the drain cleaner as he could manage down his throat. Not totally sure though. He’s not totally sure of anything, anymore. Other than that he’s supposed to be dead. That’s a nice solid little holdover from when anything made sense.
He was supposed to have died at the climax of a masterful production. He was supposed to have died as a punchline, as the last piece of this complicated joke he’d been telling his entire life.
Or else he was supposed to die when Kaneki had killed him, punchline be damned. Never woken up at all. Or after that, the first time he’d been able to get his body to move, and he’d ripped and torn at his flesh and insides until he’d passed out only to come back again, to wake up again, to try again.
Or any of the number of times after that, whenever he could move and think clearly enough, drugs or chemicals or starvation or thirst or stabbing himself through with these stolen kagune only to wake up again. And again. And again.
He’d tried, once, to drown himself, not in the bath, but out at sea - endured the agony of getting all the way out from the fourth ward to the beach, spend hours tying weights to his limbs in a haze and dragging himself out into the water, only to wake up back on the shore, too spent and exhausted to move the several meters to the water and stick his head under again.
An old fisherman found him, wrapped him in a blanket and dragged him back to his old-beat up truck. That man should be dead, too, really. For being that kind. That dumb. But whatever he’d done to stop himself from drowning must not have left him very hungry, and if his body wasn’t going to move on its own he’d still been far too tired to make it, even for the joke.
The old man lent him a phone, and really, he should have just called the CCG, or whatever they were calling themselves now, right then and there. But he called Nico instead, and passed out again before he got a chance to see what that stupid old fisherman’s face must have looked like when Nico and Uta drove up, covered in makeup and tattoos.
It might’ve worked, even after all that, if Nico hadn’t insisted on chopping off the fingers and toes that had gone blue and then black. An infection, eating him up from parts of him that were already dead. But even such poetry hadn’t won his fellow clowns over. (They’d grown back, of course. Of course.) It was just a better joke for him to stay alive, apparently, though he can’t say he agrees.
It must be getting rather boring by now. Uta must be tired of watching the same scene when he comes down here to his basement to find a body collapsed and convulsing on the floor, covered in blood and puke and whatever he’d grabbed that time around. It can’t still be entertaining. He certainly finds it played out.
He fades in and out, in and out. Of consciousness, of his body. Sometimes he remembers with perfect clarity what he’s just done, sometimes he has no idea. He never knows why, not really. Even later, when he’s mostly settled back into half awareness and half presence, (always just a stitched together mess of halves,) he doesn’t know why. Had he really thought, this time, it would work? Had he wanted it to?
Even with his healing, with the carefully measured boost of RC supplement, his throat is usually too raw to really talk, but this, too, is part of the routine. Even if it was all healed perfectly, there’d be nothing new to say. Uta brings him water - cold, lukewarm, or hot - he always asks in the exact same tone, and usually only gets a shrug. He’ll wait by the bed to see if it stays down, and if not, he’ll deal with what comes next. Sometimes, completely in silence, other times talking calmly about whatever, what he needs from the art store, which stores are opening, where Nico is headed for the next vacation - from what, neither of them can say.
And eventually, it’ll go back to baseline, lying there watching old tv shows, or playing gacha games. Empty conversations that dance around anything with any weight.
And then he’ll do it again, find the bottle of paint thinner left out, maybe. Or one day he’ll notice he’s gathered a little pile of sedatives to try all at once. Or if Uta’s being careful, even to the point of keeping his RC levels suppressed enough, he’ll just rip himself apart with his own teeth.
And then, as he’s swinging in and out of consciousness, after, he’ll wonder all over again why he’d done it. What he really wanted. He’s supposed to be dead. He’s supposed to be, but he’s not. And that’s all he knows.
Uta comes down the stairs, his face blank as always. He’d asked, in a different life, what had come first, that blank mask, or the physical one he’d made to cover it, and Uta had looked back at him, the smallest crease at the corner of his eyes, that might just have been a trick of the light, and said “Really? I think I’m quite expressive.”
“Water?”
He doesn’t respond. What a bad actor. All actors are good for is reading the lines on the script when they’re prompted. It’s not even a line, just a shrug, or a nod would do. What a nice playwright, giving him options. Too bad they’ve cast a dud. A corpse. A dead man. Only — only he’s not, is he. Of course.
“Souta-kun?” He’s missed his cue.
Someone yell cut, someone start the scene from the top again. Uta (No Face) descends the stairs — and action—
He blinks, a pathetic clapperboard replacement, but its all he can manage. The scene doesn’t reset. Not on cue. It will though, only a matter of time. You’d think the production would run out of budget by now. Oh, but that’s right, he’d managed to siphon his cast-mates off enough to keep their jokes going for a long time. It was supposed to be a parting gift. Or a consolation prize, given how things turned out.
So, really, it's his fault. How fitting.
Uta returns with a cup of water. He doesn’t remember him leaving. Only he does, because it's happened so many times already, each one interchangeable with the last. He reaches out and takes it.
Oh, no wait. He doesn’t. That’s just a memory too.
For a hazy, fleeting second, he wonders if none of this is happening at all, if it's all just memories. Or his imagination. An afterlife? Is this hell? Wouldn’t that be nice.
The moment passes. It will come back again, probably, like everything else about this scene, his own tiny eternal recurrence. It was a nice delusion while it lasted.
Uta puts the cup down by the side of the bed, instead. A slight little ad-lib.
“Uta —“ the actor speaks, off-script, to his own surprise. What comedy of errors did they start, with that little change.
Uta doesn’t seem to notice the deviation. “Hm?”
“I—“
And then you say — and then I say ——— and then —
“— can’t do this anymore.”
He’s on the edge of his seat, really, watching this from the outside. He has no idea what happens next, suddenly. How very interesting.
Uta sits down, next to the other actor, on an old hospital bed the props department must’ve found somewhere. The silence works, dramatically, but it’s the sort of long silence where you can hear every sniffle and cough from the audience, breaking the emersion just when you need it most. Only there’s none of that, because there isn’t an audience here at all.
Clowns without an audience? What a travesty.
“I can’t keep doing this.”
Oh, is he still talking? He supposes he’s still talking, then, as much along for the ride as anyone else. Hey, he wants to ask himself, is this what you really think? Or are these just more lines you’re saying? Do you know? Because I certainly don’t. Bad comedians deserve to be heckled. Hey, hey, hey, answer me.
His body curls in on itself, shrinking back to the corner of the bed, seemingly trying to take up as little space as possible. As if there’s some magic set of dimensions that if he can just shrink beyond, he’ll pop out of existence completely. As if it were that simple.
“Doing what?” Uta says, finally, though he must already know the answer.
He doesn’t reply. Play’s over then. There are no more automatic confessions, no more lines his voice wants to read without permission, just the ever so slight burn of his clenched muscles to greet him as he floats back into his own frame. A pity, he’d rather stay a ghost.
Uta’s still just sitting there, expressionless, waiting.
But it's too much work to explain that he has no idea what those words meant, himself. That he’s only guessing, and that Uta might have a better guess than he does.
So he replies with the only certainty he has. “I’m not supposed to still be here.”
He can’t tell if that’s the answer Uta is expecting. He can’t tell a damn thing from Uta’s face, and it’d be infuriating if such an emotion wasn’t far beyond him at this point. He pulls his knees in another centimeter tighter. It hurts to do. He rests his head against them, as if he could slot his eye sockets neatly over his knee caps. Pushes until little flicks of light dance in the dark behind his eyelids from the pressure.
“No one is, not really,” Uta says.
He knows that. He does. There is no grand plan, no real ‘supposed to’, no cosmic law he’s breaking by surviving, because nothing means anything at all. But that’s exactly why, exactly because nothing meant a damn thing, that he’d written his script. Something with a plot and arcs and themes, with a careful conflict and a thrilling climax and rewarding payoff.
Of course the world doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. If it had, he’d never have been born in the first place. The world just is. Even Kaneki Ken figured that one out, that’s how painfully obvious it is.
But in his script, he’s supposed to be dead.
In his script, this scene isn’t supposed to happen. In his script, so many scenes weren’t supposed to happen. He can hear it, the city grinding on above him, the machinery of the CCG, whatever new logo they’d slapped on it, whatever new blood they were using to paint its walls, still churning and churning. And below him, too, he can smell it. The rot that’s buried under there no one bothered to uncover and burn. It’s too much, too much to swallow down any more. It makes him sick. He pushes against his own eyes harder, tugs at his hair, bites at his lip, as if it will make the nausea stop. But it doesn’t. Nothing does. Nothing ever does.
The bile burns on its way out and all he can think is that it's not fair, it's not fair that anything gets to leave this disgusting body of his when he always has to come back to it.
He doesn’t remember what he’s swallowed this time, or if that’s even what he did. It all tastes like filth anyway. Anything that was inside him would. Anything from this world would even if he hadn’t been the one to swallow it. He doesn’t understand how humans or ghouls eat anything at all. This entire world is shit.
He’s shaking. There are a hundred and one ways to play it off, he’d rehearsed and practiced them all, and then forced himself not to need them. To just make it stop. But none of that works now, and all his scripts are too caked with dirt and blood and sick to read from and somewhere between life and death and life again he’s forgotten the cues.
Uta pulls the blanket from the foot of the bed and manages to wrap it around his shoulders without any contact at all between the two of them. He’s grateful for the little courtesy. Touching one body right now is already too much.
The space that should be silence is filled by the sound of fabric shifting, of shaky breaths, of the ringing and pounding in his ears. He doesn’t understand how Uta manages it, to be completely still, completely quiet, for so long. Even when he moves, shifts back on the mattress until he’s sitting cross legged, it's almost noiseless. Maybe everything else is just too loud.
Even when he finally does speak, it's hushed. “I’m not going to tell you it gets better—”
Or maybe it’s just distant, like he’s speaking from somewhere far, far away.
“— but it gets a little easier.”
He wants to ask what, and how, and why Uta is saying this now, or at all, but it all gets jumbled up in his throat and all he manages is some indistinct muttered question.
Uta looks up at the ceiling, rather than at him. There’s another pause, another stillness. Uta’s ever impenetrable stillness. It’s completely foreign to him. It gets under his skin. Gets stuck in the rot and decay just below the surface of his body and doesn’t let go until Uta speaks again.
“Every day, you wake up and have to come up with some reason to stick around until the next one.”
There’s an expression there, on Uta’s face, after all, but its still impossible to read. He tries to imagine what could possibly be written in parenthetical or stage directions to prompt such a thing and comes up completely blank. It’s all just nonsense to him, theatre of the absurd, disjointed words and stage directions that reject any sense of logic.
And that should be frightening, this not knowing. He’s never been able to afford not knowing, just as he’d never been able to afford stillness, or the gentleness in Uta’s voice as he continues.
“It’s just that you’ve always had an answer, before now.”
Before now. Before he’d botched his own closing number. Before he’d missed his bow, skipped the credits, even bungled the metaphor. Ruined everything, everything, but somehow not enough. Not the way he was meant to.
Before it all went off-script.
So that’s it. He’d just been thinking about it backward.
It isn’t about figuring out why he’d done whatever it is he’d done this time, or any time. This, this cycle of fruitless self destruction isn’t actually new at all. That’s not what changed.
He found a gun in the evidence locker and held it to his head, pulled the trigger once, twice, again and again until the barrel was empty and he had a terrible headache, and then wiped the blood off and through each bullet in the trash, and gone to whatever meeting he was supposed to go to. Just for the joke of it.
He stood by the edge of the railing in cochlea, waiting for Kijima to finish up, listening to the screaming and squelching, and thinking, absently, about how easy it would be to just tip over backward and fall all the way down. How his head would crack against the ground, how his blood would mix with the rest of the gore and grime down there and he wouldn’t have to deal with listening to these torture sessions anymore.
He took his little toy Tsunagi out, alone in his room, and touched the tip of it to his own stomach until it just broke the skin, thought about how funny it would be to end such a dishonorable life in such a classic honorable way.
There’d just always been a reason to stop himself, before. The show must go on, after all.
But now the show’s over.
Uta hands him the glass of water, the one he didn’t take before. It's warm. Uta had chosen hot water this time, then. He swishes it around in his mouth. It won’t erase the taste of it, but it makes it just a little more tolerable.