Work Text:
Kurono’s never been one for fantasy. Where his classroom peers slumped over their desks and imagined all manners of other worlds, – self-indulgent romantic happy endings, the abrupt and permanent cancellation of school, hair that stayed clean for longer – he sat still and turned off his brain. It was never hard for him to do, just a simple switch clicked and he was only static. During his first months after Overhaul was taken in, Kurono would frequently frown and offer the advice of ‘just don’t think about it’ upon hearing of Overhaul’s obsessive thought spirals that sent him into rashes, and when the retort was always ‘I can’t,’ he simply accepted what he did not understand and stopped thinking about it.
Overhaul dwells in a vein off to the left, though really he was always the center, and Kurono always the split-off on his right. Overhaul doesn’t indulge in fantasizing about the impossible, and the things he desires which are possible are already being made reality under his hand. However, upon not understanding a different experience, he finds himself needing to understand, needing so intensely that he slips right back into those spirals. He doesn’t use words like ‘need’ anymore (did he ever?), but that doesn’t change how he studied Kurono’s predisposition to apathy so intensely.
But the things Overhaul doesn’t understand are categorized in a binary: ‘not yet understood’ and ‘not worth understanding,’ and if a topic doesn’t make it out of the first and into his neural almanac, it enters the second, and this is where that ability of Kurono’s to simply ‘stop thinking about it’ ended up. It seems, in present day, that the verdict is that Kurono has a weaker mind, and that is the reason why a nervous thought about not truly knowing one’s chance of inheriting blood diseases does not send him into some aberration of a panic attack. It’s this same apathy, though, that lets him brush off the idea of having a weaker mind.
The night air is warm and tainted with the promise of mosquitoes. Kurono shuts the balcony door behind him and it slides with a grainy whoosh-click. Beside him is Overhaul, who now steps back from the edge and slumps backwards into the painted metal frame of a chair. Kurono locks an ankle around the leg of the other and tugs it a distance away that he thinks Overhaul won’t bristle at before sitting. Overhaul has just finished another rant, an occurrence that’s only become more common in recent months, this time about the amount of men in the world who simply waste away instead of becoming anything. He’s bemoaning the amount of potential recruits he would be able to find if only they weren’t shut-ins. Only one man has been found who’s willing to serve under Overhaul. It was a lucky find, the man put-together in clothes but distraught in expression, collapsed at a rock bottom that had been a long time coming. Nemoto, a con artist who forced confessions.
Kurono tilts his head back. He hasn’t spoken many words to the other man yet, but Nemoto has become a catalyst. Can Confession make one admit things to himself?
He knows Overhaul’s a bad person, and he’s a bad person too. He never figured a boy like him, most at home in a black shroud, could become good, and he himself never had any apprehensions about that duality. It was somewhere in that realm of childish fantasy. But despite all the actions Overhaul had plans to enact (and the ones he had enacted already), Kurono felt he still understood the real idea of him, and the parts he didn’t understand – he could just choose not to think of them.
Nemoto already looked at home in the hideout, even without a mask, with his formal clothes and square jawline. The illusion was broken by the micro-tears in every piece of his outfit, the patches of dust, his frazzled hair, his face twisted in emotion he was clearly trying to suppress. Overhaul, across from him on the couch in his office (the couch he would have Kurono routinely sterilize once the man had gone), could read him. And just as simply, he changed the way Nemoto read him. He saw straight through Nemoto’s thin excuse for nihilism and into what he truly wanted, and he offered recognition in sub-dermal threads that had Nemoto leaning towards him over the coffee table by the end of the interview. Recognition flowed out of him so easily one could think he spoke to everyone in that tone, but Kurono had never been offered it because he’d been content without it. How did Overhaul know how to talk like that? The first time it happened, Kurono was a little surprised, and so he forgot to be nervous.
The plan was a reality, then. An ornate, full-face mask on Overhaul’s desk one morning, and then Kurono adopted his quirk as the face of his identity. He always knew it wasn’t going to work. But he didn’t mind going along anyway, after weighing the potential consequences and deciding he was fine with all of them. He stood guard in that office for seven more interviews, delivered masks to bedrooms the following mornings. He watched as Overhaul ever-so-slightly fine-tuned the way he spoke to each man, each speech pattern alien to the way he’d ever talked to Kurono. He told them each exactly what they wanted to hear, and it took Kurono until the fifth interview to wonder if that’s how Overhaul spoke to him too. Overhaul indulged Sakaki’s desire to ‘just have fun, man,’ an ideal Kurono knew he detested, and he feigned a sympathetic streak in the wake of Tabe’s recounting of harm at the hands of those who should have been trying to keep him from it.
The worst part was that he never addressed it when he was alone with Kurono – he simply agreed with Katsukame’s thought that animals should not be harmed when a man who could remember disposing of the corpses of mice for him was barely across the room. It wasn’t the lying Kurono took issue with. It was the idea that Kurono wasn’t his true confidant who was allowed to see the truth of his personality. It wasn’t the abject evil of Overhaul’s plans. It was that Kurono didn’t know if Hojo felt as qualified to speak on Overhaul’s behalf as he did.
Had it always been that way? Kurono figures there had to be some part of Overhaul’s childhood where he spoke objectively to everyone – they had disagreed in their youth, so surely there was a time before he learned to manipulate like this. But even then, why should Kurono be the special individual among the rest who’s allowed into the truth? That’s a fantasy, and it’s unlike him to turn his cheek to the reality.
He finds he can’t stop thinking about it.
A sense of finality hangs in the air in those last weeks. It’s the end, but Kurono doesn’t mind. Overhaul will make it out regardless of whatever happens, regardless of who Overhaul really is. Kurono ends up with that ornate mask, dirtied with time and battle, rolling across the jagged floor of a darkened room. He didn’t time the fight above him but he knows in his chest that it’s been too long. Stone is cracking and rumbling under Overhaul’s hands up there; the shouts of heroes drown each other out. He knows somewhere deep in him that the man getting his hands dirty up there is someone different than the boy Pops took in. So when Kurono draws his blade, barely positions it over the hero beneath him before swinging ruthlessly down, he doesn’t think of him. Not Overhaul, not Chisaki. He begs for the return of the truth.
“This is for Kai!”
Kurono’s pierced between the bones in his forearm in a wound that will follow him past prison. The knife falling to the ground can barely be heard over the static filling his head in pain and panic. His head pounds as he stares into the light and the figures that break it; his eyes shift slowly to the blade that impales him and denies him vindication.