Work Text:
Your name is not Chikage Utsuki.
Your name isn't April, either. Sometimes it's Cabbage Man, or Unromantic Senpai, or Ape (???), or Shitty Elite Glasses, or Chikachon. You need no name, because you're the scariest thing around these parts, the thing that goes bump in the night. Sounds like a stupid cliche, but you know it's true. Not to stroke your own ego, right. Scary for what, your ability to file your own taxes, senpai? Itaru would joke here. Sakuya would laugh, Hisoka would roll his eyes, Izumi would just raise an eyebrow. And you would say nothing, because speaking up means lying, and to them, you don't want to lie.
Destroying Mankai was a personal errand. Like buying rare spices on a "business trip", or eating gingerbread with August and him. Twenty four minus one Director equals zero. Organization business you feel nothing about, only a vague sense of irony at the best of times — to be surrounded by some of the kindest, most patient people you've ever met, and to still deal in spycraft and assassination behind their backs, like you never learned your lesson. Maybe you even get off on some of it — no, that's a lie. It's just what you do. What you know.
Sometimes, you think about having to do it all over again — because the Organization said so, because there's a hostile element within the company, because December got his ass ratted on again and now you're left with no choice — or worse, just. Leaving. Disappearing without a trace. On the worst nights, you think, without me, they'd be so much happier, and on the best nights you know that you're right.
It makes you want to retch and retch and retch.
ELEVEN THINGS "CHIKAGE UTSUKI" SEES WHEN HE REMEMBERS THE KIDNAPPING OF IZUMI TACHIBANA, WHICH HE CAUSED, PERPETRATED, AND RECEIVED NO PUNISHMENT FOR:
1. one yen coin flipping through the air
2. curry plates in a restaurant too brightly lit
3. spices spreading on the tongue, hot, then cold, cold, cold
4. taxi ride, heavy head on cold shoulder
5. endless nights with a script on loop
6. a milky face backlit by the moon— oh, you really came?
7. yelling
8. a small bottle breaking, the smell of nothing
9. not catching the coin
10. the correct cop-out answer, pink hands grabbing empty ones
11. waking up at home
(Oh, that's right. Home.)