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He couldn’t handle the dark, which was kind of extremely annoying, but at least he knew the reason for that one. It wasn’t like the missing eye, or the scars along his body, or the fact that he’d been trapped in the dark in the rubble in the first place. He knew why he couldn’t handle the dark, could point himself to the small eternity that comprised his first memories and then deal from there. It was an answer, and just about the only one he had for a whole host of questions, starting at the roadmap of past injury on his body and careening past why did nobody come to get me out of the destroyed underground whatever-the-hell-this-is and ending in the age-old who am I.
He did not like the who-am-I, not least because whoever he was, his body felt wrong. His frame was too stocky, his hair was too dark. His face didn’t feel wrong, but that wasn’t much of a relief: something had melted some sort of silicone mask onto it, destroying most of his features, and the fact that he didn’t care about that beyond the massive amounts of pain he was in could not have been a good thing. At least he still had his empty eye socket—and wasn’t that just insane, that he was fond of the hole in his face. The people at the hospital had been perplexed by this—not least because the socket was reinforced with an incredibly strange prosthetic holder—and he couldn’t really blame them. Most nameless burn patients were unconscious, not amnesiac; most nameless burn patients were identified by friends or family long before they were discharged, but he didn’t get either. They asked him for a name, several times; he did not have one to give, and did not want a new one. He wanted someone to show up and tell him who he was, that they had been looking for him, that they cared he was gone, but that never happened, and so finally he chose a placeholder name, telling himself that it was just until he was found, just until he learned who he really was. Saito, he told them, you can call me Saito, because it was funny, even though he didn’t know why.
Nobody cared that it was a joke, though. He was the only one laughing; the nurses and doctor were just glad that he was one less problem to deal with. There had been an explosion; it had paralyzed the daughter of a business mogul and orphaned and half-blinded the daughter of a high-ranking police officer; both of those girls were in the same hospital, only a few floors away, far more injured and a far higher priority than he was. The paralyzed girl had woken up after her surgery and was on the road to recovery; the police officer’s daughter was still unconscious, and he had overheard the nurses whispering about her in the halls: poor girl, so young, lost another parent, what will happen to her now, who will break the news…
If he wasn’t here, the hospital would have more resources to look after the orphaned girl. Otherwise it might be— sorry your dad’s dead, we would help you out but there’s some burnt asshole downstairs who thinks finding out who he is is more important than your care, even though he doesn’t matter at all and you, Mizuki Date, matter so much, so goddamn much, more than anything else in the world, even.
Mizuki Date—was that her name? It must be; it felt right, felt a hell of a lot more right than anything else. It felt even more right than him going by ‘Saito’ felt like a hell of a good joke, which put it about on par with the rightness of his missing eye, which was kind of crazy. He must have overheard her name from the nurses and just forgot that too. It made sense. His brain was kind of swiss cheese at the moment, so he signed himself out under the name Saito Yagyu and left before anyone realized the name was fake.
Next step was to find somewhere to go. He was an injured nobody with no name and no face and an alias that was more a joke than anything else; if it was funny for a reason, and for a reason that other people knew, maybe someone who gave a shit would be able to use it to find him, but the odds of that were a hell of a lot lower than the odds of him getting rescued from that rubble, and he hadn’t been rescued. He’d had to claw his way out himself. So fuck him, basically. At least he was going by a funny name.
Train stations were well-lit at all hours of the day and night, which was good, and there was nobody stopping him from just hanging out there, which was better. He had absolutely no money on him, which kind of limited his options, and if he had a job he couldn’t remember it, so he couldn’t really take a train anywhere, but at least here in the station he didn’t have to worry about the dark, and remembering how it felt to wake trapped under the rubble, reeling from some unknown betrayal. The darkness had been as oppressive as the heat, and as lonely; he had woken memoryless with his throat already raw from screaming and with no voice to speak of, with a burning pain in his face eradicating all thought. He had clawed at the stone and dust and blood around him. He had not gotten out for hours.
He spent the night in the train station reading destination brochures and thinking about the sort of people who went to those places; in the morning, he tucked a brochure for the Atami hot springs into a pocket of the pants he’d been given at the hospital and started off in the direction he thought they were in, heading anchorless into some kind of new life—a short one, probably, culminating in a mundane death that nobody would mourn, but at least one that would include some beautiful sights, if the brochure was accurate in literally any way at all, and if it included those, this life would be worth it—right?