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The first time Atsushi died, he was only five.
He doesn’t remember it, much how he doesn’t remember much of anything before the orphanage, but he remembers how it felt. The searing pain that burned into his abdomen, much worse than the pain that was already present on every other part of his body, and the white that faded into the corners of his vision, into the black of his already closed eyelids. He remembered when that white had completely consumed his vision for the first time, when the noise disappeared and the white became tangible like he was merely in a room. When he finally realized he could look down to see his body, laying on the floor of this white room, he had already drawn his attention to the white tiger sitting in the corner across from him.
He had scrambled back into the corner opposite of the tiger then, back pressed to the wall in fear, hands shaking where they gripped at the floor next to him. The tiger looked back, its white fur shining under the fluorescent lights on the ceiling of this room. It looked just as weary as he did, head lowering and back arching in defense as it too shifted its posture. They stared at each other like that for a long time, barely breathing in each other's direction. When he finally blinked, a quick blink only to relieve himself from the dryness his eyes had taken on, his eyes opened to a very different sight.
He remembers waking up, remembers the cold concrete and gravel of the alleyway pressing into his side, remembers the distinct smell of rot that followed him no matter where he moved. He remembers walking down those streets until he stood at the fence of a brick building, watching children play with a kickball. It starts to get a little foggier when the man approaches him and leads him inside, but maybe that's because he sleeps for almost two days as soon as he’s led to a bed.
-
The second time, he’s six, and he remembers it a lot more clearly.
He had been sleeping in the group room where he stayed in the orphanage every night for the last year. He was smaller than the other kids his age by a lot, his growth stunted by whatever had happened to him before he ended up here. The boys who slept next to him in the group room had found it funny to pick on him. He had gotten used to it by now, ducking and evading them whenever he could and not raising his hands when they did manage to catch him lest they start hitting harder in response.
He woke up in a frenzy, this time not from the nightmares he always forgot in a blur by the next day, but from the feeling of a pillow over his face and the sound of snickering. He thrashed and swung on instinct, trying desperately to get the pillow off, fighting to be able to breathe. He had felt his hands change, of course he had, because it was always a painful experience, but he hadn’t registered the feeling of his claws tearing through skin, or the blood that soaked into the fur at the base of them. The only thing he felt was the pillow finally pulling back from his face, and the body that hovered above him stumbled back and off the top of him.
He bolted the second he was free, feet swinging to hit the stone floors and immediately moving the second they got traction. He heard the feet pounding behind him as he ran, he heard the crunch when he jammed his toe into part of the floor and he heard his head slam into the ground when he fell.
He scrambled back to his knees as fast as he could, but clearly not fast enough as the boys caught up to him, grabbing him by the hair and yanking him back.
Maybe it's bad luck, maybe it's some twisted fate, maybe it's an act of God, but Atsushi sees the stairs he’s tripped next to and he feels his heart sink. The boy who has him by the hair grunts when he pulls him towards him, blood seeping from a wound on his stomach and filling Atsushi’s nose with a putrid metallic smell.
“You hit me!” The boy shrieks, clearly with no idea how Atsushi ‘hit’ him and left a gaping wound in his torso.
Atsushi would have scoffed if he could make his head stop spinning long enough to even see straight. As if the kid hadn’t tried to kill him only a couple seconds ago. The kid reels back his leg and swings it forward to kick Atsushi in the stomach. He feels bile rise in his throat, but he chokes it back when he feels himself fall backwards. The stairs are cold when he hits them, his shoulder cracking on the first one he lands on. It isn’t immediate, he has to hit almost five more stairs on the way down before he finally lands his head on one of the edges, cracking it open and immediately seeing black.
He doesn’t know how long it is before his vision once more fades to white, but he recognizes the familiar face of the tiger when it does. This time he’s positioned in the middle of the room, so backing himself into the wall takes much longer. The tiger seems much less apprehensive this time, she doesn't raise her hackles or push away from him as she had before. She just stares at him where he sits and stares back.
The first time he blinks, once again, he wakes up. This time there is no alleyway, no putrid smell of mold, only the distinct sterile smell of a hospital room. He almost wishes for the gravel beneath his head when he feels a hand dig its nails into his wrist when he wakes up. He sees the face of the headmaster above him, glaring with disgust at the hospital parchment that surrounds his head.
“He’s awake.” The headmaster relays to someone in the corner of the room. Atsushi can’t see them, but he hears the outfit they’re wearing rustle as if they’re nodding in response. They leave the room, heels clacking on the way out. The headmaster let go of his arm, the marks he had left fading as soon as they had appeared.
“Get up.” He spits, venom lacing his words. Atsushi doesn’t. The headmaster stills.
Atsushi can sense the tension immediately, and despite his light headedness, he crinkles the hospital paper on the bed as he sits up. The headmaster doesn’t turn around, doesn’t try to look at him, and just starts walking.
Atsushi doesn’t have a choice other than to follow.
He ended up in the basement of the orphanage when they arrived back. The headmaster had thrown him down, staring directly at his forehead as he did so. He had been told to reflect, to think about what he’d done. For the next three days he had been left in the dark, without food or water, with no one but himself for company. On the third day, the headmaster brought him food and water in separate bowls, placing them in front of him. He hadn’t said anything, hadn’t looked him in the eyes, hadn’t told him how much longer he would be there. He simply turns on his heel and leaves.
-
Atsushi died four more times in that cellar, where he remained after he had attacked the one kid in the orphanage above him.
The first time is after he’s grown used to the headmaster’s routine. Once a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, he will come downstairs to remind Atsushi of the consequences of his actions. Atsushi still cries as the headmaster holds the nail over his foot, growing more and more irritated with him while he does.
“Use the hammer and drive the nail. It isn’t hard.” He presses the nail down farther into his foot, drawing the smallest amount of blood that trickles over the bruise from where Atsushi had struck and missed the nail the first time. “You’re being difficult.”
Atsushi just cries harder, the hammer rattling in his grasp until it is finally snatched away by the headmaster who sighs in exasperation. There's a flash of metal and Atsushi doesn't have time to respond before the nail tears through his foot, embedding into the cracks between cobblestone in the floor beneath it. A scream rips through him against his will, and he grasps at the wrist of the headmaster as he starts to pull away. He yanks his hand back in disgust at that, scowling at Atsushi’s hand, never his eyes, and buries his hand into the hair at the nape of Atsushi’s neck.
He buries Atsushi’s face into the bowl of water that rests on the ground, holding him there as the slight reach makes the nail dig into his foot even more. Atsushi, who was already crying, makes the mistake of gasping for air as his face is submerged. The intake of water that enters his lungs is suffocating and he sputters, inhaling more and more water as he tries to cough out what he’s already taken in. The whole time the headmaster’s hand never leaves the back of his neck, not when it starts going dark, not when he stops thrashing. Only when the bubbles begin to stop forming in the water does he finally let go, shoving Atsushi’s face out of the bowl.
“You cannot move until I come back.”
Of course I can’t, he thinks, between the nail in his foot and the black at the edges of his vision. He doesn’t dare speak it, though, he knows it is gracious enough that the headmaster trusts him enough to leave him here alone while he is traveling for the week.
He finds himself too weak to cough up the water as the headmaster walks away, his back to him while Atsushi’s eyes either close or his vision goes out. He can still hear the headmaster’s footsteps leaving the cellar this time when his vision changes from black to white.
The tiger stares at him once again, this time she steps forward as he backs away, keeping the same amount of distance between them the whole time. He tries to call out for her to go away, but water bubbles from his throat and falls from his mouth in waves, seemingly infinite as he cannot stop it long enough to take a breath. Tears well up in his eyes as he tries to wipe the water away faster than it can come out, and the tiger in front of him merely cocks her head to the side in interest.
He chokes on a sob, blinks, and wakes up. The headmaster comes back into the cell two days later to bring him more food and water.
The next two times blur into each other. He thinks the first of them involved a bat, or a pipe, or something of that nature that he had been hit with. He remembers that he had half transformed amidst the headmaster’s punishment, and he remembers it not going over well, past that it's all just the white room.
He had opened his eyes to the sight of the tiger standing above him. Shooting up so fast it made his head spin, he had scooted back as carefully as possible, not daring to blink lest she try to advance on him again. He got maybe a foot away from her when he realized she made no move to advance on him.
There wasn’t malice in her eyes, Atsushi would have recognized that well enough, but her whiskers quivered once or twice, as if she was acknowledging him. He stared at her for a minute, maybe two, long enough for his eyes to burn, and slowly, she blinked at him. Something in him swelled at the motion, sensing something he himself couldn’t understand. Not knowing what else to do, he blinked back.
When his eyes opened again, the cellar seemed much brighter than it usually had.
He knows the next time was his fault, at least on a more physical level than the others had been. He remembers bashing his head into the wall of the cell, he remembers trying to sleep and not being able to, he remembers hoping unconsciousness would work as a substitute. He remembers not minding if he didn’t wake up from it.
He had always healed too fast for it to be very easy to fall unconscious, so he assumes he overdid it by accident. The unconsciousness is welcome at first, and the fade to white seems more of an inconvenience as the light blinds him.
This time when he sees the tiger, she’s asleep. He stares at her without sitting up, still sprawled out on the ground of the white room. She’s close enough to touch, and with a hesitant hand he reaches out until his hand brushes through the fur on her back. Her head whips around, and he pulls his hand back with a start, but she doesn’t move any more than that, which is a great sense of comfort. When she doesn't seem to protest, he reaches his hand out again to brush against her fur.
The softness of her fur under his hand makes some of the tension leave his shoulders, and as he strokes his hand through it he begins to feel her shake under his hand.
Worried that he hurt her, he pulls his hand away, but she huffs air through her nose in annoyance and moves slightly closer to him, and he takes that as a sign to continue his motions. Soon a rumbling noise is added to the shaking, and she closes her eyes and once again rests her head on her front paws.
Atsushi turns his gaze back towards the ceiling of this room, hand still running through the fur of the tiger next to him. He feels his eyes start to droop more and more, restfulness washing over him more than it ever had in the dark cellar. He curls his body closer to the tiger, her fur sheltering him and keeping him more warm than he thinks he’s ever been in his life. When they close he stays asleep for at least another two hours, and when he’s greeted by the smell of the cellar he feels distinctly disappointed at the lack of warmth against his side.
-
The last of those four times is the most vivid of any of the times he’s ever died. He had been introduced to Shibusawa by the headmaster, who had explained that he was there to “rid Atsushi of his ailment”. For the first time, he had felt fear of losing the tiger within him. Maybe at one point she had been a curse, but since his last interaction with her he found himself dreading the feeling of missing her presence.
It had taken months of trial and error to even get Shibusawa an idea of how to get the tiger to make an appearance. He had noticed that it seemed most effective to put Atsushi in danger, and observed the partial transformation. He still wasn’t satisfied with that, wanting to see the whole tiger in all of her glory, and he came up with a plan and gathered resources to “perform an experiment”.
Atsushi had been led to a room with wires that all connected to a single chair in the middle of the floor. He’s escorted to the chair by the headmaster by a hand on his back, and no matter how much every bone in his body screams for him to run as far and fast as he can, he sits down on the uncomfortable surface.
It takes them fifteen minutes to hook him up to all of the wires that connect him to the chair, which gives him enough time to build more panic about what’s about to happen. By the time the headmaster leaves the room, leaving him and Shibusawa alone, Atsushi is practically vibrating in his seat.
“This is going to hurt a little.” He says, more a courtesy than a warning, because he’s sure Atsushi already knows. “Don’t try to suppress the tiger. Remember, we want her to come out so we can free you from her.”
That's the last warning he gets before his veins are filled with fire. Every part of his body jolts uncontrollably, this time not from fear but instead from the electricity that courses through his body from the multiple electrodes placed all over him. He screams, he knows he does because he feels the tearing start to form in his throat, but nothing processes past the buzzing in his ears. The electricity stops before he can pass out, and he can’t find the heart to be thankful for it.
“Very good. But again now, try pulling against your restraints more. They’re very sharp, surely the drawing of blood will entice it.”
They repeat the process so many times that Atsushi stops trying to keep count. At one point, when Atsushi is only just barely conscious enough to see through blurry vision, he watches the headmaster enter the room. Him and Shibusawa talk to each other, just barely loud enough for Atushi to make out parts of it.
“-turn it up?” He catches the words from Shibuzawa’s sentence and his breath rattles even more, arms shaking both from the leftovers of the electrocution and the fear of it continuing.
He blinks and the headmaster is gone, leaving just Shibusawa staring wickedly at Atsushi while he turns the knobs on the device he’s been using to activate the machine Atsushi is attached to. He smiles at him and Atsushi knows that this will be the end of their experiment, even if he’s not sure how yet. He hears the click of the button and the electricity courses through him once again, rattling his jaw and speeding up his heart. At some point, Atsushi stops feeling afraid.
The pain that flows through him doesn’t stop, but it lessens enough for him to almost enjoy when the black flows into his sight. He’s still jerking in his restraints, he can just barely feel it, but not being able to see somehow makes it much more bearable to endure the electricity. It takes a minute, but the pain eventually fades all together with his vision.
It's more the memory of the pain than the feeling of actual pain itself that makes him jolt up in fear and grab at his arms when he wakes up in the white room again. He’s surprised when he’s not met with the resistance of restraints, so he overestimates and nearly smacks himself in the jaw. His posture immediately stiffens up when he feels breath on the back of his neck, and he nearly trips over himself trying to get away.
For the second time in this white room, seeing the tiger puts him at ease rather than terrifies him. Her whiskers graze his face as she follows him when he backs away. He stops trying to run at this realization, breathing out in relief.
He hears the voice of Shibusawa and his breath hitches once again, body wracked with fear. The tiger growls at this, curling her body around him as if in protection. The sound of Shibusawa’s voice becomes more clear, words starting to form as the tiger looks around as if for a source of the sound. Atsushi doesn’t dare blink, lest he wake up and be brought back to the real world.
“Here, kitty kitty kitty…” Shibusawa calls, voice ringing through the empty room. The tiger growls once again, her hackles raising and her teeth bared. He calls out again, and the tiger nudges her face against Atsushi’s cheek. They make eye contact, and Atsushi knows what she wants. He’s reluctant, because he knows what it will result in, but he nods, runs his fingers through her fur, and slowly (ever so slowly), he blinks.
This time he wakes up in a pool of blood. Not his own, not this time, but the blood presumably of Shibusawa, who lays headless on the ground in front of him. He wishes he felt nauseous, he wishes he felt regret. The only feeling that courses through him now is the most intense relief he’s ever felt in his life. The headmaster opens the door to the room they’re in, and the look of disappointment he gives him is nearly overshadowed by the fact that this is the first time he’s looked Atsushi in the eyes in years.
-
He sees the face of the orphanage nurse descend the stairs with a bowl of food and water once again, as she has every two days for the last twelve years. Something is different this time, she meets his eyes as no one has done for as long as he can remember. She speaks to him, and its music to his ears to hear a voice other than the headmaster’s.
“Do you know what day it is?”
He shakes his head, he doesn't dare to speak lest she stop and leave. She sets the bowls down at his feet.
“Tomorrow is your birthday.” She glances at him as he looks up at her in confusion. She glances back at the entrance of the cellar like she’s concerned someone will come down at any moment and catch her speaking to him. She sighs and looks back at him in defeat. “I hope you fare better than most.”
She leaves and he looks down at the food in front of him. Instead of the scraps of whatever the children above him had had for food that day, there is a full plate of meatloaf and potatoes.
-
Even though he’s kicked out, it feels like he’s being released from a prison sentence. He has almost nothing for possessions, he has no home, no job, no money, no idea where he is, but he’s overjoyed to see something other than cellar bars and cobblestone floors.
The sun hits his face as he’s shoved out the orphanage’s front doors and he’s instantly blinded, but when the fresh air enters his lungs he finds he doesn't mind at all.
It takes hours of walking for it to sink in that he really has nowhere to go and no one to help him. He pauses on a bridge to watch the water that rushes below it, and he’s reminded of the first time he had seen the tiger since being locked in the cellar of the orphanage. He shudders at the thought of it, even though the water here is much more beautiful and clear than the dingy bowl of water he had been forced into all those years ago.
Maybe it would be more efficient for him to become a thief.
He genuinely considers that for a while. He needs money and he doesn’t imagine getting a job is really in the cards for him, even though he’s not quite sure what the process entails yet. He looks around the bridge for people going past, anyone who looks like they may have money he could feasibly get his hands on. He sees someone fly by him on a vehicle with two wheels, blowing his hair back as they pass. His eyes widened in surprise.
“Okay… maybe not him.”
The next people he sees are a group of men in padded suits and helmets, all carrying weapons and running uniformly in line with each other. His frown deepens, he won’t be able to rob them, either. His heart sinks at the thought that there's a possibility he isn’t competent enough to rob anyone in this city. He glances down at the water in defeat once again, only to see the feet of someone floating downstream. His heart sinks, and his feet move on his own before he even recognizes he’s moving.
You can’t swim- he tries to remind himself, you can’t swim this is so stupid-
He’s in the water before he can stop himself. He tries to wade over to the man but the ground drops off and he’s plunged into the water. His arms flail in a desperate attempt to keep his head above water and also continue his fight over to the man. He sees the man look at him, and immediately process what's happening.
As if it's nothing, the man flips himself and swims towards Atsushi. The feeling of an arm around his waist is the last thing he feels before everything fades to black in a motion he’s incredibly familiar with.
His heart jumps when it fades to white once again, and immediately he searches for the visage of the tiger around him. She meets his gaze and pads towards him like a house cat recognizing its owner has made their way home.
He reaches a hand to her face and she butts her head into his palm, where he immediately scratches the fur of her cheeks with a grin. He doesn’t try to speak, in case water starts pouring out like it had the last time. She presses her forehead to his and his chest feels warm, his hands surrounded by the soft fur of her cheeks.
He realizes too late that he’s closed his eyes with his head against hers, and he feels a wave of bittersweetness wash over him just as his eyes shoot open and he rolls to his side to cough the water onto the ground, or, he’s on a bed? So he coughs water onto a linoleum floor beside the bed, enough to form a decently sized puddle. He feels hospital paper under him and he’s hit with recognition.
He sits up too quickly and coughs again, and when his eyes come back into focus he’s met with the sight of a woman in a office uniform with dark purple hair and a butterfly clip staring blankly at him, seemingly frozen in place where she had been going to throw away a pair of blue hospital gloves in the bin across the room from him. They spend almost a full minute staring at each other like that, until she simply straightens herself up again and clears her throat.
“One moment.” She steps outside and he hears something that sounds like her yelling “Dazai” into the room outside of the one he’s currently in. She reemerges into the room and approaches him cautiously. “Can you remember your name?” Of course he can, but his voice is still raspy so he has to clear it a few times before he can speak.
“Um.. It's Atsushi… ma’am.” He tacks the “ma’am” on at the end hesitantly, and watches as she very visibly represses a laugh. She walks up to him carefully, making sure he can see her hands, which he greatly appreciates.
“Well, Atsushi, can I take your vitals?” He’s not quite sure what that means.
“Sure.”
Shortly thereafter, he sees the drowning man, who is no longer drowning, open the door to the room. He looks at Atsushi in something akin to wonder, and cocks his head to the side- sort of like the tiger, Atsushi thinks- with a lopsided grin on his face. He peeks his head out the door again and shouts to someone else.
“Kunikida! He’s alive!”
-
Atsushi’s been with the ADA for almost a year when he dies for the eighth time. He’s been assigned to another job with Akutagawa, and the two of them are butting heads as they always do for the entirety of it.
It's a simple in and out job, something the two of them should have no issue handling themselves, which means that obviously when things go south there isn’t backup on standby for them like there usually would be.Why would they need it, when they were only supposed to be searching through boxes in a warehouse for a few crates of illegal weapons. They enter the warehouse confidently together, looking at the rows of boxes that line it. Atsushi groans when he sees them, glancing over to Akutagawa who looks just as unenthused to have been tasked with looking through all these boxes until they find the object of their search.
“You take the left, I’ll take the right.” Atsushi offers, trying to figure out how long it will take them to get this done and get back to their organizations. Akutagawa glares at him.
“There's more boxes on the left, Jinko.”
“Yeah, but the boxes on the right are bigger!” He points out, gesturing wildly at them where they're stacked along the wall. “I’m not fighting with you about this, lets just-”
Before he can finish getting the words out, he hears the firing of a gun, and bolts to the edge of the room just in time. He finally takes the time to examine their surroundings and smells the scent of another person coming from the rafters of the warehouse above them. He quickly yells at Akutagawa to move and points out their attacker where they stand above them. Akutagwa immediately summons Rashomon, using it to shield most of himself from the range of their attacker. Atsushi lowers himself behind a crate, and peaks over the corner of it to get a better look at who is attacking them. He can’t see their face very well, but he can see that their gun is no longer aimed at either of them, and instead aimed at a wire toward the center of the floor. In the air Atsushi smells the putrid stench of gunpowder, not just from the gunshot, but from behind one of the crates that the wire is leading to.
He puts the pieces together fast enough to react. He bolts towards the line of fire as his hand transforms into a tiger’s paw, using it to block the line of fire towards the wire. He flinches as the bullet embeds itself into his paw, drawing blood. Akutagawa takes the moment that their attacker is stunned by having missed their mark to lunge forward in front of Atsushi and lash up towards the rafters with Rashomon. His defense he had arranged with Rahomon had to come down for him to attack, leaving their attacker just enough time to angle the gun down at him and open fire.
In a split second decision, Atsushi leaps forward and shoves Akutagawa to the floor unceremoniously. He doesn’t even get to hear the curses that he's sure Akutagwa is throwing his way before he feels the bullet embed itself into his forehead.
He wasn’t aware death could be that fast. Every time Atsushi has died, it's been a nondescript amount of black before it finally places him in that white room. This time, he’s with Akutagawa and then he’s face to face with the tiger.
There’s something different about it this time, an air of finality filling the room he’s in. Atsushi hadn’t died since Fukuzawa had used his ability on him. It made it much easier for Atsushi to control his ability, to monitor when and how he transformed, to keep his ability in check and under wraps. There had been a long period of time where Atsushi had been scared that this had chained down the tiger, that it had set him free only to lock her away, a fate he wouldn’t wish on anybody.
It brings him comfort to see her now, still as unchained as ever, staring at him when he appears. He can feel it, as clear as though the tiger herself had said it out loud. He knows this will be the last time he gets to come back from this.
With tears in his eyes, he meets the tiger’s strong gaze, and he knows they feel the same. His hand reaches out and falls above the tiger’s nose, and she closes her eyes as he scratches there. Atsushi smiles at her, not daring to blink quite yet. He can remember every time he’s seen her here, even if he can’t remember what led up to it. He remembers being terrified, he remembers scrambling to get away, he remembers the first time she ever let him pet her; but most of all, Atsushi remembers dreading waking up more than anything else.
He rests his head against hers, and this time he keeps his gaze locked on hers for as long as he can. She huffs a puff of air, and he laughs.
“I know.”
He lets his eyes close while his forehead rests on hers, and he hears her chest start to rumble again. He knows it’s purring now, because that’s what Dazai’s cat does.
“Thank you.”
Atsushi can’t help but hope that he doesn’t see her again for a while.