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“You’ll die some day, you know! Just die some day!” The ghoul’s final words ring in the air, cold and vicious, and desperately, hopelessly afraid.
At fifteen years old, Arima Kishou welcomes the sentiment.
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“You are a tool,” Kaiko tells him. “You live and breathe for the sake of V.” The underground halls that house V’s secret meetings are always cold. Arima has already gotten used to the chill, but nevertheless feels a near-imperceptible shiver when he’s forced to meet Kaiko’s empty, depthless eyes.
“If you are told to kill, you will kill. If you are told to die, you will die. You will obey whatever order V gives you. Do you understand?”
Arima understands. Arima always does what he’s told. He doesn’t know any other way to live.
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“Sometimes I almost think you’re not human.”
Fura is always bluntly honest when he speaks to Arima, something that Arima never fails to appreciate about the other boy. Arima enjoys spending time with Fura. He relishes the other boy’s passion, the way he dedicates all his enthusiasm toward everything he does. Fura’s emotions - his fear, his anger, his sadness, his joy - are always so freely given. When Arima is with Fura, sometimes he thinks he can almost understand what it feels like to be a regular teenage boy.
Arima wonders what it must have been like to have grown up caring and being cared for by others, taught to love and to touch others with gentle hands instead of how to kill with swift, ruthless efficiency.
Is that what it means to be human?
Arima can’t help but envy Fura for that, at times.
When Fura asks Arima if he could join the CCG, for a moment, Arima regrets.
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Arima asks, once, about the idea of family.
“Family is a human concept. You are not human.”
Despite his age, Tsuneyoshi never loses that sharp, steely quality to his gaze, the kind that can turn a lesser person to stone the moment they dare trespass into his line of sight. At the moment, though, those eyes are focused on Arima - with a hint of emotion that almost feels soft, something like pity.
It makes Arima feel disgusting.
“Don’t trifle yourself with such silly human matters, Kishou. You don’t need to think about such things.”
Arima has always known he was Tsuneyoshi’s favorite.
In another life, Arima might have called him “father.”
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“Do as you’re told.”
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A half-ghoul cries alone in his prison cell, begging for death.
Months later, a young man reads a poem from a book. He smiles when he looks at Arima.
His life does not belong to him. He is a captive; a tool. There is a path laid out before him that he doesn’t know of yet; it continues where Arima’s is meant to end.
There are moments when Arima hesitates. When he meets the young man’s eyes, he remembers: this fleeting warmth is stolen.
When he eventually asks for his freedom or his death, Arima will not let him go. It’s selfish, Arima knows.
(Let me have something of my own, just this once.)
When you name something, it becomes yours.
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A family is…
Someone who loves you.
Someone to love.
Someone who belongs to you.
Someone you belong to.
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At the end, there are many things he leaves behind. Mistakes he can’t fix. A legacy of cruelty and death. He’s glad, he thinks, to be rid of these.
This is freedom.
It feels so cold.
The half-ghoul he killed, the young man he raised, is crying as he cradles Arima.
He leaves behind this too.
(My rose, my only rose. The one I tamed, unique in all the world.)
“Haise…”