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Stupid, fucking Reserve Course students.
Despite knowing he can’t do anything to quell his nerves, Matsuda’s hands keep fidgeting with the spare scalpel he keeps in his hair. It was an intimidation tactic that turned into a crutch; like everything else in his damn life.
For some stupid, shitty reason he can’t get numbers out of his head. He wonders briefly if this is how she thinks.
Six. Six Reserve Course kids with starry eyes and big smiles signed their lives away in front of him. It was like watching a cow trot to the slaughter house—disgusting, vile, and sickening. Matsuda had read in a textbook about food production that animals are led into a cage with a bolt gun pressed between their eyes. The idea is that the prey animals don’t even feel anything as the metal shoots through their skulls and into their brains. After that he stopped reading textbooks.
Matsuda was no better than an executioner. He had done that six times. Not all at his hand, no, but ascribed to his name regardless.
And now it was seven.
He couldn’t even warn them.
He couldn’t warn Hinata .
Stupid fucking idiotic Hinata with a million conditions and errors in his biological makeup. Stupid Hinata who was determined despite all the shit he pulled to make him run as far from the Hope Cultivation Project as possible.
(spilling hot coffee on his lap, shoving him out of doors, tossing all manner of material at him, throwing his little offerings into the trash, only for Hinata to trot back like a sheep begging for its throat to be slit, and he wants to scream, to say why those that fail the Hope Cultivation Project disapp—)
Matsuda finds that everything that finds its way beneath his fingertips crumbles. Crumbles like sand, to molecules, to atoms, to flickers of axioms and synapses that flit away from his fingers. It feels a lifetime ago when he wanted to be a doctor to help, to heal.
(the hippocratic oath can kiss his ass. words are meaningless)
So here he stands, in the halls of the Reserve Course, beneath everything. Despite everything. Because he is the same as every fool who signed a contract with the academy: they are owned, stamped, marked, and used.
Hope’s Peak wouldn’t dignify Hinata’s death by taking his mind in the expensive biology lab.
It is not because he cares.
The cruel irony is that Matsuda Yasuke is many things, but not a brain surgeon. He is a neurologist. Those two are as different as night and day—because he understands the inner workings of the mind does not mean he should be granted apotheosis of it.
And yet. And fucking yet.
And yet his hands are the steadiest of Hope’s Peak's entire medical staff from years of breaking them over and over again in fits of self punishment and Enoshima’s ascribed method of growing stronger. He can hit a pinprick with a dart from twenty feet away.
So they make him cut open their fucking heads.
The first Reserve Course didn’t even make it to recovery.
(the first one, who was she? he never makes an effort to learn what he cannot use, what can hurt him, more shit to keep him up at night)
Matsuda hates blood. He hates cleaning it up off of floors and walls even more.
(he is a perfectionist, better than any of the surgeons they cart in. his perfectionism chokes him, vined roses wrapping around his neck in a noose)
It makes sense why they wouldn’t consult him on the transorbital (less invasive, requiring no cutting of the skull; that will be saved for later) lobotomies. He had rushed down when he heard the screaming; he spent a lot of time in the Reserve hallways now. Watching.
For what, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps he didn’t want to know.
Hinata’s screams haunt him.
He’s too much of a coward to rush in and help.
That’s his cruel secret.
(emotions are a weakness. it is a phrase that has slipped past his lips a thousand times under callous circumstances, with no consideration for the irony. he has vivid dreams of carving his own heart out of his chest, the human delusion with unrelated organs’ effects on the psyche —)
Love. The only four letter word he would never dare utter, of all the profanities and sacrileges he mocked. Love is stupid; a mere elicitation of the brain. Emotions are a fool's folly.
Matsuda loves.
The biggest fool of them all.
And so he ponders which is worse: unfeeling apathy or passionate ignorance.
Empty neuroscience comforts him.
He waits outside in recovery.
When the doctors disperse, he slips into the room. Hinata has two bandages over the corners of his eyes. He appears to be asleep, and unfortunately Matsuda knows too much to be fooled by appearances.
He only learns later that the tip of the leucotome (the icepick they stabbed into his amygdalae; emotional significance, fear) broke off inside Hinata’s brain.
He silently tells Freeman-Watts to go fuck themselves.
He does not hold Hinata’s hand.
He does not speak to him.
And he does not apologize.
Matsuda Yasuke does not make promises lightly.
“Listen up you disgusting brain-dead fool. Can you hear me? Good. You’re going to survive this. You’re going to outlive all of these assholes and get fucking revenge.”
He does not kiss Hinata’s forehead.
Matsuda is heartless and faceless. He is a nobody that even nobodies will forget.
And he does not mourn Hinata.
The project is named Kamukura Izuru fifteen hours later when he awakens.