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Kawase had never liked animals— especially not dogs. Feral ones the least.
For starters they shed everywhere, coating whatever they touched in a layer of grime and fur. They were disgusting creatures who drooled and left trails of dirt behind them and did whatever they damn pleased. They barked too loud, they jumped on people, they were driven by an intrinsic need to survive and nothing more. Feral dogs were stupid. If you offered them food or tried to pet them they would snarl and bear their teeth at you. Some of them would bite you, and whatever disease they carried would infect the hand that had committed the crime of trying to help.
Kawase hated feral dogs the most because they were too much like him.
He had long been in the practice of biting the hand that fed him. Sometimes it was literal rather than metaphorical. He could vividly remember what the faces of the servants of Ikeda manor looked like despite it being years since he'd last seen them. He remembered their looks of pity and odd resignation, how they would look at him as though they knew everything that was rotting inside him and what new blights were yet in store. He couldn't remember their names. He remembered the anger of being looked at like he was something to be pitied so very potently.
Kawase experienced phantom sensations. He'd be sitting at his desk poring over notes and would feel the spindly caress of fingers up his spine. The creep of the contact up his back brought with it bile, and with bile came a new sort of revulsion. As he emptied the contents of his stomach it always felt as though he were expelling a bit of his pride; it was the only thing he had, the very fiber in which he was created, and it was unraveling before his eyes. The hands were a reminder. They never went away.
A reminder of what? Many things, probably. A reminder of lurid eyes set in the face of a man meant to be a philanthropic saint. A reminder of the calloused hands of a father that felt the need to remind him of his incompetence. The worst was when it was a reminder of the hands of a child with messy hair and a stupid grating laugh that was most assuredly fake.
Tamamori was painful. Perhaps more so than anything else.
Kawase hated being thought of as a fragile object. He had never known the feel of a gentle hand or light caress, only tightened fists and frantic shoves. Everything seemed to move too fast and yet somehow so agonizingly slow; he was always being left behind, forced to remain in the hell of his own past. How dearly he wished to forget the trembling eyes of a little boy staring at him through the crack of a door as Kawase dug his nails into his father's skin. How badly he desired to erase from his memory the fact that Tamamori, the most precious person in the world to him, had watched him almost die. It was water under the bridge now, rectified by the corpse of his father- but it was a haunting thing to remember.
Such hypocrisy, considering the blood on his own hands.
His entire life was a never-ending cycle of hypocrisy. He cared so little for his own well being but would kill to preserve that of others. He worked so diligently to turn himself into a frigid shell of a person, one that wouldn't hesitate to eviscerate anyone who got too familiar. The distance between himself was a chasm that expanded and deepened until it was impossible to be anything but cruel, so much so that his reputation preceded him as someone to be dreaded. Even so, he worked in a field designed to help people, one that required only the gentlest of hands and most compassionate of temperaments. He felt like his life was comparable to one of Tamamori's outrageous stories; he was full of holes and contradictions and held together by only the faintest strings of logic. Yet somehow he was functional, waking up every day in a manor that served as a living temple of his failures, and he kept going.
He failed in all aspects of his life. It was part of his foundation. Failure was Ikeda Eiichi, son of none.
Feral dogs were much like him. There was a memory of him somewhere encapsulated in the bones of a dog, one that had been thrown down into a well years ago. Before he had been taught the necessities of cruelty, before he had learned the reality of this world, he had loved to care. The dog was always happy to see him. It would run to him and lick his face, whine for his attention, and curl into his side. He loved the feel of the dog's warmth. It would seep into his palms when he pet the poor creature, and it was a reminder that this was a living creature who expected nothing from him. The stench of alcohol was never present on its breath. There was never vitriol spat at him. It was just a small thing, helpless and pitiful, that loved him and needed him.
That dog was dead now. It didn't have the luxury of dignity and a proper burial. Its bones were lying in the bottom of a well, sun bleached and brittle. Dead, a corpse that would never emit warmth again.
Sometimes Kawase wondered if he would ever experience anything like that again. How confusingly— infuriatingly— healing touch could be. It was a double edged sword, one that felt like it was forged to mock him. All his life hands had only been raised against him, but somehow a part of him remembered what it was like to touch and feel. It was almost a sign that he was not the only living creature. There were other beings out there, things that didn't live to maim and destroy, and they were tangible, corporeal. They were things that he could never touch. He could only jerk away, an instinct as natural to him as breathing; trust was for other people, ones who weren't as horrible as him. And yet every time he sat in a booth in Kanda Cafe, staring into the face of a ghost of his past and gritting his teeth over the tilt of those fake glasses, the urge came back.
He had tried to kill Tamamori. He had almost done it, too. Tamamori was his polar opposite, a narrative foil in the purest sense. He was trusting to the point of his own detriment, almost laughably so. That night on the bridge would never be erased from his mind. How easy it would've been to push him then. How effortless it was to imagine Tamamori's corpse, bloated and rigid in the throes of death as it washed ashore, just as his father's had been. But Kawase had never experienced anything quite like the thrill and naive comfort that came with being an accomplice, being so irrevocably intertwined with a person.
He had fallen in love.
It was the first and last time.
Love was a very foreign concept to him. He understood it on an academic, detached level, but it was exactly that— detached. He had never known the "unconditional" love of a parent. He had never experienced the love of an admirer. The kids he had grown up with never loved him. How could they? They knew so startlingly little about him. He supposed that was a selfish line of thinking. None of them were without sin and burden. He could remember the cold eyes of Hanazawa, the way the warmth of his smile never seemed to completely reach his eyes. He remembered the frightening ardor with which Minakami would read, always thoroughly consumed by something. He remembered Tamamori and his hallucinations, how sometimes he would become near inconsolable over things only he could see. Perhaps they had always been destined for each other. Oddball freaks with something to hide, self-absorbed to the point of isolation.
Despite all that, he could remember his days with them in perfect clarity. He remembered days spent playing detective over petty crimes in the village. He remembered sitting by the riverbank and watching the gorgeous bruised colors of the sunset. He carried with him all these useless memories that served no purpose but to bereave him. A shrine of things he could never get back.
They had all moved on, gotten older. Kawase's bruises had faded. Minakami had gone through dozens of journals. Tamamori had more stories under his belt. Hanazawa had left them all behind.
Time stands still for no one.
Kawase wondered if he would ever be more than just a feral dog- a creature that yearned for connection and doted dutifully after the person it loved, never letting anyone close. The thought resurfaced every time he watched Tamamori and Minakami walk together under the same umbrella. It recurred every time he woke up to an empty house. With every drag of a cigarette, with every manuscript he destroyed, and with every terrible, selfish emotion that kindled deep inside him.
He wondered.