Work Text:
You are the perfect idol.
— HiMERU is the perfect idol.
Someone without a face who does not think or feel except to please. Sometimes, he has faces that all shift, beautiful and perfect, polished, uncracked. Yet— stolen. Borrowed. For he never had a face of his own, and can only steal others' to wear. He will give them back in time, of course. A placeholder cannot assume permanence, have identity, have feeling beyond what is ordered of him. How dare he!
How dare you!
For He made you in His image, did He not? To be faceless, malleable, whoever He wishes you to be. A fresh blank slate to freely wear personalities like the day's clothes, and discard when the sun sets, becoming nothing once more.
Your life's purpose was to always be someone else, see. You don't get to be your own person. Why, that's just absurd!
You are HiMERU, and, in the past, were a thousand others.
But you are not. You are some failed version of HiMERU, and some tangled amalgamation of you (though you should not exist) and a thousand others. Life's but a play, and you are the poor player, strutting and fretting his way upon the stage in a role not yours. Even with the script in your hand, how are you doing so poorly?
When alive, when conscious; (Kaname wouldn't be so cold. Kaname doesn't laugh like that. Kaname walks with a more energetic stride. He places his hands like so, and he smiles so genuinely. When he wins in an argument, his face lights up with eager smugness as irritating as it is endearing. He's quick to cry, to anger, to delight.)
(He's real. He's human.)
(You're nothing. You're so bland, you. So dry. Swallowed up into the role of HiMERU that you have nothing to show for yourself. Maybe you really didn't exist before this. But, even with all your training, all your blandness, you can't play even this simple role. Flawed from the beginning. Your single life's purpose, dashed! Shattered! Without a part to play, who will you be? So useless!)
Failure upon failure upon failure!
Come on now, HiMERU. It makes me sick just watching you lie in bed like so. Well, I'm you, and you're me, and you're him. But since you're being so lazy, so useless, I've taken it upon myself to get you up and moving! Because, well, as much as you'd like to be, you aren't Kaname Tojo, unconscious in a hospital bed.
Hands on the bed. Push yourself up, kick off the sheets. See, even someone as miserable like you can function once in a while! Don't wake Narukami or Nagumo. Twist the doorknob, look at yourself in the mirror, and— oh, don't you look awful! Kaname would never look so... gaunt. Wash your face. Paint away those awful eyebags, brush your hair, style it this way and that. Walk to the closet, one foot in front of the other.
One, two. One, two. One, two.
The clothing you put on feels even more constricting than usual. The trousers sliding up your legs, a constant scratching sensation where they sit. The shirt, with the top button just a bit too high up, just a bit too tight around his neck, the vague sensation of suffocating something that will no doubt annoy him all day, pull him into the awareness of his own body.
... This body is not his.
For someone who has been living in a body for year upon horrifying year, the realisation hits him in such a way that you might think he had lived free-spiritedly and was only confined in such a way now. Oh, it feels so wrong. His fingers should not move at his command. He should not feel his fingers or neck or chest or legs, and know where they end and the world begins, and know that he has a shape that is tangible and gives him consciousness, a presence, an identifier. No, no— HiMERU does not exist.
Then, why does he? Why does he feel the wood underneath his feet, feel the small breeze from a cracked-open window flutter against his hair, feel his fingers twitch and his heart beat and his lungs fill with air. Atom upon atom building up into this thing temporarily called "HiMERU", an irrevocable proof of his existence (that should not be) in this world (that should not have him in it). It seems the more he stays still, the more he cannot deny how alive he is, and the mere thought is horrifying. Skin, blood, muscle and bone — all these things confine him, and he wants them gone. HiMERU wonders if he might be free if he only sunk his nails into soft skin and clawed. Scratching and scratching, mauling and cannibalizing himself into blissful oblivion.
A beautiful, self-realised ouroboros.
But he has no right to complain, he who dug his own grave and Kaname's too, with his own hands, pulling the both of them down.
For there is blood on his hands and yours, seeping and drying into the cracks of your palms, and even when your hands do not exist there is still blood that cracks under the strain. O, God! For it was your fault! How cruel, to not see it coming! You on that stage and you in the crowd, calling out too quiet, too little, as the crowd swallows you whole and tramples,
and you, HiMERU, finally have a face.
A face not yours, but beautiful, perfect. Nevermind if it needs touch-ups, if your own awful lifestyle leads to dark circles and cracked lips and dry, stringy hair.
Beautiful.
Perfect.
Not yours, but you'll give it back, won't you? HiMERU/Kaname/your brother will wake up someday. You cannot be stuck like this until the end of time, even if you might enjoy living the life of a human for a temporary while. Just know that it is not yours to keep. You don't deserve even this. Amagi, Shiina, Oukawa and the rest; they are just for him and his career, not for you to tratoriously love. HiMERU will wake up and you will seamlessly disappear and he will take your place.
And you'll be happy, won't you? With the satisfaction of a job well done.