Work Text:
Mikoto has been vaguely aware for a long time that something is wrong with him.
The timeloss in high school and then college made that abundantly clear to him, though he’d always determinedly told himself that it was because he was easily susceptible to stress.
When he’d go to the doctor he’d mention the fatigue and call himself scatter-brained; I have a poor memory, he’d told Moriyama-sensei, the same doctor he’s been seeing since he was a newborn. He never mentioned the timeloss.
What was the harm? He never woke up hurt. His work would finish itself, his apartment would be clean, his fridge full of groceries he couldn’t remember buying. Clearly nothing bad was happening during those gaps in his day that he could never quite recall; surely it wasn’t worth risking the potential of being institutionalized over.
Mikoto still remembers a classmate he’d had in high school. A quiet, plain faced boy. Esashiki Akifumi. He was quiet because he had a stammer to his voice that others liked to laugh at him for; once, he and Mikoto were grouped together for an assignment. He can’t even remember what their science teacher had asked them to do. He just remembers the way he’d coaxed a laugh out of that boy who rarely spoke, rarely smiled and never laughed.
Mikoto had thought him to be anything but plain in that moment.
Three weeks later, Esashiki’s desk was cleared out at school. None of the teachers would say what happened, none of his classmates cared, and Mikoto didn’t know where he lived. It wasn’t until college when he met Esashiki’s cousin and she told him, shame-faced and quiet, that he’d been forcefully hospitalized. She didn’t know why.
Some mental disorder, she’d said, tone pitying. What mental disorder, Mikoto had wanted to ask. The stammer? The melancholy from being bullied? Esashiki was in a hospital for two years. He immediately left the prefecture to stay with some distant relative working farmland in Hokkaido. His cousin had muttered about weirdos banding together.
If Esashiki was institutionalized for two years, what would they do to Mikoto?
It probably wouldn’t be much different from what’s happening to him now. At least his cell is more like a bedroom; at least he can leave its narrow walls and isn’t force-fed addictive medications on unhealthily high dosages to keep him lethargic and compliant. He’d looked up those psychiatric care centers after talking to Esashiki’s cousin; everything he read filled him with unease.
But maybe…if he really did kill someone…that would have been better.
No. Rather, wouldn’t it have been better if he wasn’t like this at all? Pacing the narrow space of his cell, Mikoto wants to say that’s the case, but he doesn’t know why he is the way he is. And if his guess is correct, the Mikoto who Shidou had talked to the other day has been taking care of him for a long time. It’s probably him who does so much of Mikoto’s work when he’s overwhelmed, cooks for him when he can’t bring himself to, cleans when he’s busy wallowing in self-pity, shops when he forgets…
But what, Mikoto thinks, nearly knocking his hip into the dresser as he sharply turns, about the other one? Why does Mikoto have something, someone, like that as part of him? Someone so angry. So volatile. So…
He stops. His nails dig into his scalp. He hadn’t even noticed he’d started tugging at his hair.
He’d thought about it when talking to Kazui, hadn’t he? That these symptoms are usually for people who needed to be protected; a self-defense mechanism that can only develop in childhood.
“Nothing happened to me,” he says to himself, his quiet voice sounding too loud in the silence of his cell. Nothing happened to him. Right? His mother would never hurt him. His aunt is the only relative he was close with until his grandparents forgave his mom for…for what, again? The divorce?
Why did his parents get divorced?
He wasn’t that young. Six years old. Surely he remembers why. Why doesn’t anybody talk about his father, anyway?
Mikoto remembers that his mother had been pregnant when she filed for divorce. He knows it was her but he doesn’t know how he knows. He remembers going with her to the hospital for a check up—for her, for his unborn sister, but for some reason…one of the doctors had sat with him, hadn’t they?
It had been an older woman. She gave him a coloring book and asked questions about his father while he filled the empty outlines of butterflies and cats with color. He couldn’t answer her properly. She talked to his mother about him forgetting something too, didn’t she?
Fuzzily, he recalls his aunt picking him and his mother up and how he’d dozed in the backseat with the coloring book still in his lap. He thinks his mother and aunt had talked about him.
Maybe it’s for the best he doesn’t remember, his aunt had said. Yes. It was about him. I mean, can you imagine living with that sort of memory as a child?
His mother had hushed her. They asked what he wanted for dinner. He’d asked for tonkatsu.
What did he forget?
He tries to think about it. For the first time he can recall, he truly tries to dig into that gap in his childhood—
DON’T LOOK.
It’s not a voice; it’s more of a feeling but it hits Mikoto with such visceral strength that he stumbles into the edge of his bed and catches himself on his mattress, breathless with the impact of emotion.
“What,” he says aloud, then tries to think, what?
He’s tried to do this a few times since he’d been declared unforgivable. Of course, nothing is that easy; no voice calls back to him. Maybe it doesn’t work like that.
The feeling remains, though. That plea for him not to look. What happened to him?
With dread that sinks into his nauseous gut, Mikoto can guess. With or without the memory of it, there’s…only so many things that could have happened.
So he doesn’t guess. He doesn’t think about it.
Mikoto stares up at the ceiling of his cell and thinks about nothing at all.