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Osamu had learned to manage pretty well by the middle of Rank Wars season. He had long since figured out how to work around the new pains, the way that he couldn't bend his torso all the way around or carry anything heavier than his phone with his arm. He had long worked out the parts of HQ where he could stop and sit down without anyone seeing how weak he had become, how easy it was for him to get tired out. He had all but forgotten what it was like to be functional after a workout or to climb steps without every movement of his thigh sending tight fingers of swollen-feeling strain creeping up and down the leg. What were harder to cope with were the mental idiosyncracies that had developed along with the physical things.
It was harder to think of himself as a person, now. Half the time it was like he was something else: some half-formed thing of other people’s ideas imitating the person they wanted him to be. It felt like growing up. It had been a good thing that he got hurt, in the end; people were finally, finally praising him for something. They had praised him because he had finally done it, gone with the flow, followed instructions closely enough to gain social approval.
It was, also, deeply annoying to him that all of this wasn’t born of a mistake. He hadn’t even done anything wrong getting himself impaled. Reiji had even told him as much: “Protect Amatori, with your life if necessary.”
Osamu had followed Reiji’s instructions almost to the letter. He remembered it every few nights, waking up with a jolt when he felt the spikes slide through his flesh again, feeling them peel through his heart and lungs, remembering what it had been to lie there in a pool of his own blood. He would wake up, suddenly, with his heart hammering, too terrified to move or go back to sleep.
Osamu's dreams had always been pliers and barbed wire and rainy mornings on which he woke up abandoned. Those had been fine. He never woke up screaming, even now. It was all just background noise, a reminder of so many lost things, of the childish concept that perhaps he had been loved. Osamu's dreams had turned to black spears sliding through his stomach and waking up in hospitals and the slow realization that he would have been lauded if he had died on the cold concrete outside HQ. and that was every night, all the time, and slowly it was becoming normal for him. He wasn’t sure that that was better or worse.
It didn’t matter. It had never mattered. He would get over it a few hours later, or sooner out of necessity if it was close enough to a school day for his alarm to go off. Or if someone knocked; the terror of disappointing his friends by being so affected by something like this was stronger than what was keeping him pinned down. He couldn’t wake up in the light, so he bought blackout curtains and woke up at five in the morning.
It wasn’t enough for him to be alright at all, but it was enough to get through life on. It was even easier, now that he knew what to do. Now that people had that shred of respect for him, paid for in blood, he could breathe easier. That was worth it, worth sleep and nightmares and the scent of fresh blood.
It was enough to get by.
Rank wars themselves were a whole different beast.
The thrill of combat, the feeling of chopping off the limbs of your enemies: Osamu wasn’t sure how much he was supposed to enjoy it. It felt strange but good to fight, though he was guilty that he enjoyed it at all. It felt for once that something was right, and it scared him that perhaps he had become a person more suited to live and die by the sword than anything else. But increasingly, rank battles were the only thing in his life that felt at all important, even if he knew that was a completely insane thing to think.
His well-worn worries all slid away at least a little bit in the heat of battle, as though perhaps his problem was simply that his brain went too fast. As if it was an organ meant to overclock itself in a fight rather than sit around doing nothing.
And yet! Sometimes things could still get to him.
For example, Ouji's Scorpion piercing his throat, mimicking the inexplorable sliding of a spike through his spine. The world trembled around him, and Osamu felt the phantom pain of the stab wound, half expecting to wake up in a hospital bed again, only to land on the Bailout mat, actively stopping himself from searching his throat for stitches, surprising himself when he moved his arms without the resistance of an intravenous morphine drip. He put his weight on his bad arm for a second, relishing the small grounding sting of pain when he pushed down.
This was fine, wasn’t it? This was normal. It didn’t need to matter to him, because everything he lost here would be worth it. He didn’t even have it that bad; Kuga, for instance, had lost limbs. Osamu wasn’t that badly off, with just aches and pains and a perverse sense of longing for what he would find on the other side of the gate.
God, it couldn’t be like this for his whole life. Kuga was like he was for a reason, after all. Whatever was on the other side of the gate, it would require more of him than this.
He found the prospect tantalizing. A fast death could not be worse than this.