Chapter Text
Everything was too loud.
What was he supposed to do?
Hurried voices, anxious, fearful, horrified.
Shattering glass, crackling fire and crumbling concrete.
Cries of pain or distress, and the frantic stampede of people fleeing the horrific scene behind them.
Why? Why did things have to be like this?
Why was this world so cruel?
What right…. what right did they have to play god, to decide what we’re allowed to think about and say, and to smite whoever they please from the safety of their mighty throne.
What ri-
Yugo’s frustrated thoughts were abruptly cut short when he was tackled from the side and sent rolling down a sloped plaza, leading down to the bank of the local river. It’s water polluted beyond repair and muddied with floating trash and human waste.
The rough concrete and asphalt bruised and scraped him as he violently tumbled down the slope, and one particularly poorly angled tumble sent Yugo’s head straight for the curb.
The impact sent a blinding flash of pain through him, and rattled his brain enough to make the world feel foggy and distant.
He could still hear the crying, the screaming, the destruction. He wasn’t the only one in pain.
He couldn’t let this be the end of him….. he just couldn’t…….
Yugo trembled violently as he propped himself up on his elbows, then his palms. He could feel a wetness on the concrete under his palms, making it slippery and uncomfortable to get leverage. It didn’t register to him immediately that the liquid was running down his face, a large gash on his forehead where the corner of the curb had met his head.
How many times had he been through all this?
How many times had he watched helplessly as the people around him were slaughtered?
How many times has he barely escaped with his life after his home had been destroyed?
How many people had he lost? How many times now, how many would it take for it to be enough?!
It burned inside him, his usually serene and venerable disposition overwhelmed slowly and completely by an all encompassing feeling of frustration and hate.
His blood boiled, his desperation and will to live mixed with his fear, frustration and grief, creating a dangerous tempest of emotion.
He hated it, he hated it so much…..
He hated himself for not being stronger….
He hated the world for being so cruel…
He hated the government for being so arrogant and selfish….
….and most of all…..
……..above all else……….
……………he hated……………
…………………… fucking ………….
………………………… androids …………………….
Yugo managed to reach his feet, visibly and violently trembling in pain and exhaustion, but the teen could barely feel it.
He only saw red.
Just as he was able to wipe the blood and unshed tears away, the very moment he was able to see again.
The first thing he saw was one of them….
Mechanically, soullessly, and mercilessly, the menacingly swift and efficient being grabbed Yugo, grabbing him violently by the neck with its cold mechanical grasp and pinning him to the wall.
Even on top of its red and black apparel it was covered in the stickiness of congealed human blood. There were even splatters of it on it’s pale lifeless skin, the streaky bloody handprints on the thing’s face and neck were haunting reminders of the struggles of the already deceased, a temporary record of the desperation each and every one of them felt moments before leaving this world permanently.
Yugo felt bile rise in his throat at the mere thought of how many innocent lives this damn machine had taken just in the past few hours.
He then reflected that they’d probably all had the same thought as they sat in the same position he was in right now. Like a field mouse pinned under the talons of a falcon, helpless, horrified and powerless in its last few moments of life.
No……..
Wait a second……..please, I can’t die here………
The fury in his head morphed to horror and fear within seconds.
“No”. Yugo breathed, sniffing through a sob, “No, no, please NO NO…”. Yugo shakily raised his bloodied hands and tried to push the creature away from him.
It’s empty grey eyes stared at him without movement of reaction, not budging an inch. The vice grip of its hands squeezed, slowly and consistently becoming tighter, squeezing the life out of him.
It hurt his throat, it felt so fragile as it seemed to protest and creek under the pressure of its grip, as if the whole thing would cave, killing him instantly. Yugo couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think. He could feel the burn in his chest as his lungs kept straining to pull oxygen into his body and failing, he could feel the fuzziness of death start to crowd his vision. The deafening quiet and blackness that encroached his vision from all sides.
All the while the silver haired android gazed at him, soulless and empty of all thought outside of its assigned directive.
Yugo kept struggling, even after the sensation left his hands, long after his body should’ve succumbed to death, Yugo still kept clawing at the metallic fingers around his throat, digging hard enough into his own skin by accident to scratch and draw blood.
This is it isn’t it?
He was going to die here….
Yugo hated it, he hated it so much, there was nothing left in him to fight, no power, no energy, nothing.
He had nothing left.
They’d taken it all.
Yugo gasped violently as he sat bolt right up in bed in a cold sweat, his hands went straight for his neck. No hands, no cold metallic hands anywhere is sight.
He could breathe, or at least enough to not suffocate. Yugo felt his heart and lungs burn in exertion as he began to hyperventilate.
Shit, shit, SHIT.
Breathe, breathe, breathe dammit.
Yugo could see the familiar scene of his room around him, it was filled with comfort and happiness for him.
He knew he was fine, he knew he was safe, he knew he wasn’t going to die, he knew the people he cared about would be fine…….
He was safe, he wasn’t back there, he was never going to have to fight for his life like that again.
Yugo repeated these facts to himself over and over, and over again. He held himself and rocked back and forth doing his best to calm himself down and stay quiet.
It was late, he couldn’t afford to wake the others. They’d just call Ike-senpai again, in the state he was in now, often Ike was the only one who could calm him down.
The thing is, these flashbacks have been coming to him more and more often. They’d started a few weeks ago, and would happen once or twice a week.
At first Yugo hadn’t minded the comfort at all, in fact it’d helped so much, he loved his senpai and even though it was clear to Yugo he didn’t remember him. It didn’t matter, he was still Ike-senpai. Kind, soft-spoken, patient, and magically capable of knowing what he was upset about before he’d even been able to completely explain it, or process it himself.
Somehow, Ike always knew what to say to him, how to coax him back to this world and out of his own mind.
He was so, so, so, incredibly grateful….
If it had stopped there, maybe it’d have been fine.
It hadn’t stopped, it’d gotten worse. First, it was every other day, his gen mates had tried so hard to comfort him themselves, to get him to even just breathe….
He loved and appreciated all of them, he really truly did, they were his family, after all.
Even Fulgur, as shockingly and jarringly similar he was to the androids who’d tormented him endlessly, and were the source of his fear and trauma.
Yugo wasn’t stupid, nor was he blind.
Of course he’d been incredibly weary and terrified of him at first, but as Yugo saw him interacting with the others he quickly realized he was different. The emotions he had on the subject were confounding and complicated, and he hadn’t had the time to work through it all on his own yet.
However, he knew one thing in his heart. Fu-Chan wasn’t a danger to anyone. He was too warm, too cheerful, too welcoming and thoughtful. Perhaps a bit sarcastic with a morbid sense of humor, but Yugo had spent too much time watching the way he cared for all of them in the most gentle and subtle ways possible. Never prying too deeply, he was simply there for them, and more than willing to talk through your problems with you, but also willing to simply provide a distraction or emotional support for as long as needed.
Everything about Fulgur’s personally was so different, so lifelike and warm and tangible. Yugo could never mistake him for an android, if he never looked at him that was.
It was a poor solution, yes, but it worked. By playing it up as getting shy or embarrassed to make eye contact; Yugo kept his eyes to the ground when Fulgur was around. On stream was even easier because all he could hear was his voice. Yugo had managed just fine, and while he had many questions about his appearance, he was able to set it aside.
Fulgur Ovid, FuuFuu-Chan, his kyoudai….
That’s who that voice belonged to.
However, that didn’t mean that in a state of panic and disorientation that Yugo would be able to remember or register that fact. He loved all of them but he couldn’t kick Fulgur alone out, tell him he was making his attacks worse and longer by being in the room. It’d break his kyoudai’s heart, and Yugo knew that.
However, he couldn’t keep relying on Ike either.
Before too long, Yugo began to feel guilty, for keeping Ike up through all hours of the night every other night, if not every night.
It just wasn’t sustainable for him, outside of even just Ike’s streams and collabs, and scheduling and planning many of the members of NijiEN relied on Ike to mix cover instrumentals for them. Ike was always working, so taking away any of the time he slept had taken a toll on him quickly. It didn’t take much for Yugo to notice.
If Yugo was going to be up all night because of vivid flashbacks, there was no need to drag another person down with him. No need for them both to be exhausted beyond belief.
……back and forth……….
……….back and forth……….
….in and out………..
…….in and out……………
It was so quiet and peaceful here, there’s no danger here, you know that, you know that, you know that.
Breathe, just breathe.
Yugo couldn’t stop the tears from flowing freely down his cheeks. It was so devastatingly frustrating, for once in his life he was safe, comfortable, and loved by so many. It hurt so much that he couldn’t talk to them, explain it to them, ask for help or a hug.
Now that he knew the pleasure and relief that comes with having a real family, it was heartbreaking to keep them at arms reach about this, to have to do it alone….
After, Ike-senpai had disappeared from their world this was exactly what his life had been like. Nights upon nights of insomnia, loneliness and helplessness.
He knew what having family there felt like now, and Yugo wasn’t sure he had the mental strength to hold himself together like this for much longer.
It’d been over a month of nights with no more than an hour of sleep at a time, a month of emotionally draining and stressful dreams. A month of constant grief, for the people he lost, for the innocents that died, and for his own ruined adolescent years.
It happened in less than a second.
Yugo felt a cool and eerily familiar hand on his shoulder and stopped moving stopped breathing, the Yugo Asuma of today left the building entirely. This was the Yugo Asuma that was vengeful, rage-filled, grieving and scared for his life.
Yugo snapped around with a gasp and looked at the person. It was Fulgur, but that wasn’t what Yugo saw. Despite the deeply concerned and sad look in his eyes and the crisp and pristine pajamas he wore, all Yugo saw was a soldier coming to kill him. Someone who wanted to take his life, and wouldn’t stop until he was dead and buried.
They met eyes for no more than a split second before Yugo lunged at Fulgur, hands going straight for his neck. Fulgur gasped in shock and tried to say something but Yugo was already squeezing his throat with all his strength. The only sound Fulgur managed to force out was a gasped pained yelp. His eyes were wider than Yugo ever would see them, and Fulgur was more shocked and afraid at the moment than he ever would be for the rest of his life.
This moment, and that face would haunt Yugo Asuma for the rest of his life.
Yugo saw it but was too far into the flashback to register or process why the android wasn’t fighting back against him, why it was just letting him strangle it.
The scariest part of it all, was the adrenaline and glee Yugo felt at pinning him down; at hurting him, he took sick sick satisfaction in the pain on its face, after seeing ten times worse on the faces of hundreds of innocent people, and the numerous times he’d only barely escaped with his own life.
They’d pay
He’d make them pay
He’d make their fucking coward of a ruler pay.
He’d make hurt them the way he hurt.
It was only what they deserved.