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When he was born, his first thought was that the temperature of the room was a few degrees too chilly. He'd been wrenched from soupy warm nothingness into sudden reality, and reality was a few ticks off from the ideal. It was mildly grating; he wouldn't have made such a mistake.
The second was that the self-congratulatory claps he was surrounded by were like the annoying buzzing of insects, bloodsucking mosquitoes. Their excited hum was a distraction, enough so that he found himself quickly growing annoyed.
The third thought had flowed naturally from the second—the scientists around him were much too close, and that warranted correction. When one had stretched out a hand to help him out of his womb, he'd caught their wrist and stared in warning.
They'd all taken a step back, as predicted. As a result of their obedience, he'd released the scientist's arm and risen on his own out of his little pod. Quickly, he surveyed his surroundings, ignoring the people for the time being, as they were annoying and little more than nuisances. He was every manner of fighter and strategist; frankly, they did not concern him.
"Kamukura Izuru," said one of the scientists, and he responded with a glance because something he deemed to be innate programming told him that it was his name. "The Ultimate Hope." More claps, small enough to be polite, but still vibrating with excitement, achievement.
Ultimate Hope. It was what he was programmed to believe he was.
Unfortunately, it seemed these people had little idea what hope even was. So while the words, and the idea of 'Ultimate Hope' were present in his mind, they didn't compel him to do all that much of anything. So, of his own volition, he chose to wait, and watch these people.
——
Eventually, he ended up shunted off to a side room. It seemed to be temporary, until several days passed and Izuru had the distinct certainty that they did not quite know what to do with him now. They'd made their experiment, but now they knew not what to do with him. They gave him tests, all of which he performed to the highest degree without the barest hint of strain. At first they gave him books when they realized he needed stimulation, until the speed with which he finished them seemed to annoy them to the point they didn't want to bother to keep up.
His room was usually dark, and there was no entertainment to be found. His mind busied itself with analyzing his surroundings until it couldn't anymore, and then it turned toward itself, pulling loose threads within his brain and analyzing them until he was left with twisted strings.
He left the room when he felt like it, but honestly it didn't interest him all that much. He tolerated tests, he tolerated empty thoughts, and he tolerated annoying interactions, simply because anything he encountered was predictable. Leaving wasn't much of an appeal, simply because the world itself was boring.
Until Enoshima Junko.
——
Death surrounded him, to a certain extent. Izuru was, in some senses, a grim reaper, omnipresent, witness to a multitude of atrocities committed both within his presence and without.
People died—insignificant ends to insignificant lives. It did not evoke any emotion in him other than his long-reigning apathy. He watched people choke on their own blood, bash in their formers friends' skulls, arm themselves with any manner of weaponry and point them towards each other. None of it shocked him, and none of it affected him. Every time, he emerged bloodless and untouched, as if he hadn't even been there in the first place. The most reaction that could perhaps be pulled from him was a distant sense of pity from the senseless waste of life. He would not lie and say that they would have contributed much to the world—statistically, they likely wouldn't have done much of anything. And yet, something in him felt something like pity for these lives, snuffed out so prematurely. Even though they would not have done anything meaningful, they would have no chance to even try.
So death was an old friend to Izuru. It settled over him quickly, and he allowed it to swirl around him. He was immune to the crippling human emotions that were associated with the act.
...Until the day the body he was standing over was that of a girl with hair the color of (swirling latte) and eyes of rose. She stared up at him a with gentle gaze, warm and loving despite the cold pallor of her skin. She was swimming in a puddle of her own blood. It leaked slowly from a multitude of wounds.
She extended a hand weakly, even managing to muster a genuine smile. "H-Hinata...kun..."
"I am not him," Izuru answered simply, though in truth this girl, Nanami Chiaki, unnerved him greatly. They had met before, and when she had met his eyes he'd felt the same feeling he was experiencing now. When she smiled at him in that way, the absolute picture of kindness and goodness, he felt something strange, an uncomfortable piercing sensation not unlike being prodded with a syringe.
"...No..." she said weakly, still smiling with a gentle confidence. It was as if she was explaining something to someone very young, which Izuru clearly wasn't. "I'm sure you still are."
Izuru did not agree. It was fact: Hinata Hajime had been eliminated in order to birth Kamukura Izuru. His own life was built upon sacrifice. Nanami was simply deluding herself if she continued to claim Hinata existed within him, but saying so seemed excessively cruel; even the thought of uttering the words to her made that anomalous piercing sensation increase, so he stayed silent. He let her speak about video games, about times enjoyed with someone who no longer existed. He let her cling to her hope, let her attempt to drag herself toward him even despite her increasing paleness and weakening breaths. He let her continue to utter words of purity and positivity, even as her strength started to slip away from her.
He watched as her hand collapsed into the blood where had been reaching for him, pin loosened from where it had been grasped in gentle fingers.
That painful feeling did not leave him. In fact, he felt a bit like he was being crushed. He mentally checked himself and found no injuries. Everything physically was normal, and yet his breathing was unsteady and his heartbeat irregular. When he registered the new feeling of liquid sliding down his cheeks, for a long moment he did not know what to make of it. The source of his physical abnormalities, or was it instead another effect?
How very strange.
Izuru blinked, raised a hand and dried the tears with unnatural grace. That spiky feeling within him was not gone, and the all-encompassing crushing feeling had not abated. These baffling feelings, they were unpleasant, but they would surely end.
With a now placid expression, he leaned down, plucking up the pin.
The blood sullied his fingers.
——
Izuru thought that Enoshima Junko was terribly boring. When she'd first approached him, he'd gone along with her not because of she herself, but because of the world she spoke of. That world seemed intriguing, and so he'd decided to support her.
As time went on, she'd started to interest him less and less. She hadn't been very particularly interesting to start, but she had held a certain level of his intrigue, which was more than any others could say. Once he'd started to better know her, however, he'd realized that she was terribly boring. Predictable. She'd joyously toted him around, enjoyed roping him into her game of despair, pretended to understand him. "Hey, senpai, isn't this so much more interesting than that boring world?" she'd remarked cheerfully, as if she and him were at all the same, as if she and him were in similar positions. She'd always referred to him with deference, but from her, it was always a mockery, spoken with too much familiarity and steeped in her brand of slyness.
Along with his first realization had come another: the fact was, he didn't like Enoshima all that much. Hatred of her was too much work, and she wasn't worth such effort—to him, nothing was—but to say he held neutrality towards her would be a lie. No, he disliked her. She was obsessed with despair, which she claimed was the epitome of interesting. And yet, her own actions were predictable. They were more erratic, but after even just a bit of time with her he'd begun to predict her with enough accuracy that she'd ceased to interest him anymore.
But again, it was her world that had pulled him in. So even though she tended to annoy him (at least as much as Izuru could be annoyed) and he looked down on her, he was at least invested enough in the result to plant himself on her side, if only to view the results as they unfolded.
But standing there now, the results themselves weren't very interesting. He watched humanity tear itself apart, watched the rioting and the violence, and didn't feel much of anything. He watched despair unfold as Enoshima unveiled her killing game to the world, as she attempted to snub out those last dregs of hope, and he closed his eyes even as wars raged on in the streets beneath him.
No, he decided. Enoshima Junko did not interest him one bit.
——
When they came to claim her body once footage of her execution had gone live, Izuru didn't do a thing. He stood in the corner, watching over her broken and bloodied corpse, saying nothing as they came and tore her apart, some with reverence and others with vicious fervor. He watched as she was deconstructed before his very eyes, her limbs torn asunder, her eyes pulled from sockets, her innards flayed open. He thought about that USB in his pocket—his very own piece of her—where it clattered against an enamel hairpin.
She'd thought that this killing game was the height of excitement and the peak of despair. She'd planned it out meticulously, chattering about it to her sister for weeks on end as she ironed out every detail. Izuru had listened silently from the shadows, his usual hiding place. When she'd asked him for his thoughts on it, he'd said he didn't care, as long as he had an uninterrupted view. She'd laughed. "The whole world will have a view!" she'd exclaimed, full of grandeur. "Upupu! I can't wait to see them all fall into glorious despair!"
It had been both satisfying and fascinating to watch her downfall.
When all was said and done, the killing school life had been interesting to Izuru, but not because of the despair. No, what had started to interest him so much more was that undying hope. Watching someone like Naegi Makoto—or Nanami Chiaki—as they went through countless traumas and events that by all means should have left them in despair was so much more intriguing to him. It made him feel curiosity for the first time in a very long time. Everything said that they should have been crushed under the weight of despair, and yet they hadn't lost their hope. Instead, they'd rallied themselves and others, even as they'd endured agony and loss. What drove them? Why did they refuse to lose hope?
He did not predict it, and so it excited him. Thinking about the fact that he didn't understand it made his mind buzz pleasantly, a maddening sort of anticipation of the unknown. On its own, despair was boring. But something like hope, and how it fought and interacted with despair...
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the USB. Enoshima Junko had laid the foundation. She'd created the framework of a killing game, one that was a perfect environment for hope and despair to clash. However, her plan placed her in a management role, far removed from the actual game. She was the overseer, there to enjoy the show and keep everyone in line.
But...wasn't participating in it so much more unpredictable?
——
When he laid down in that womb to die, Hajime Hinata was reborn.
And thus the game began.