date posted: 2024-01-05
summary: Fight fire with fire.
word count: 1,361 words
content warnings: vomiting, self-hatred, mental breakdown/mental health issues
notes: warning for semi-graphic descriptions of violence and gore and shit but it's not that bad. still, tread carefully, and be even more careful with the strong self hatred here. also, warning for vomiting (not graphic).
"Okumura-kun," he hears, and almost wants to snarl at the sound on instinct. Snarl, instinct. The man behind him would be proud at those thoughts, the words alone.
Yukio doesn't bother to turn his head; he keeps his arms leaned on the toilet seat, the edge of the bowl searing lines into his skin, too uncomfortably warm from how long he's been there. His eyepatch is abandoned on the floor; after several heaves into the toilet, he ripped it off and threw it to the floor, not bothering to see if it’d been stained. He doesn’t know how long it’s been rotting there.
Time slips past him too easily now; it'd be more frightening if he didn't become so numb to it already.
"What do you want now?" Yukio bites out. His voice rasps as he speaks, hoarse and heavy like a smoker's voice after years of several packs a day. It's pathetic.
He knows Toudou is smirking without having to see it. It's almost like his natural state, Yukio thinks. Belittling and all-knowing, wise in all the worst ways, knowing all the horrible, bloodied and jagged edges of a person and how to scrape up against them with a stone to shape them into the desired result.
Even now, at another new low, his throat raw from bile and his head still dizzy from hitting the toilet seat from his abrupt collapse on the floor, desperate and heady, his nose and lip crusted in blood from the impact, probably all gnarled and bruised now – he still feels that rebellion in him, stupidly youthful and naive, as he so badly wants to throw back all of Toudou's own failures in his face, do something to get back at him.
All the youth he never afforded himself in his earlier teenage years, wasted as an exorcist living a double life, the line like a tightrope, twisting and stretching in the wind as he balanced with all the imitated agility of a nonchalant cat on a ledge – in these moments, at his lowest, with someone like Toudou behind him, all scathing and cutting like the smallest lacerations from a jagged wire, he's reminded of his strength, most of all.
He feels it, then, the prick in just one eye, the laughter echoing in his head like an axe to a tree, or a hammer to the skull, banging and banging and reverberating until it shatters. Pathetic, he hears, over and over, cackled and manic.
"Damn you," he mutters bitterly, "damn you all!" he almost roars, rising from his pitiful position on the floor and curling his hand into a fist, gripping as hard as he can muster in the air, then slamming the floor uselessly. His vision blurs and erupts into blue at the outburst. It's expected, timely.
Nothing about Yukio isn't predictable anymore.
It's useless, he knows. Satan will keep laughing at him from his head; Toudou will keep watching him, taunting him, as he pukes up his dinner from the unmanageable nausea that tormented him, curdling in his stomach and up to his chest, threatening to burst as if his heart was a swollen battery, dead and gone but holding so much power it has nothing left but to explode. The kind of nausea only cured one way, finding himself crouched on the floor in front of a toilet bowl. It's pathetic, alright – he'll give Satan that one.
Toudou laughs from behind him, light at first, crescendoing and bursting into a cackle. He'd agree with Satan if he could hear him – hell, he probably already did agree, already knew, could tell from the blue erupting from Yukio's eye, could read it immediately for what it was.
A strange sense of calm overcomes him, as rage slowly stirs and boils in his stomach, his guts, all of him. Part of him wants to lay back on the cool, unwavering toilet bowl, to give in.
The other part of him wants to rip someone's guts out, Toudou's, anyone's, to rip and tear through flesh and organs, to take a match to the gore and watch it light up in flames that'll never turn blue. Something, anything satisfactory in this life.
He gives in, lets the calm completely overtake him, and lays on the floor slowly, his head slightly hitting the partition to the shower, his feet at Toudou's as the man watches the scene unfold before him. He briefly wonders what Toudou must think of him now, after Kyoto, all the fascination he held for Yukio, all tipping over into this silly, overwrought display.
Another part of him, all gnarled and contorted, wonders if Toudou still holds that same fascination for him, after all this time. He doesn't shiver at the thought, and that unsettles him more than knowing that Toudou has been here for this long, just watching him.
He lets the cold of the floor seep into his bones, inhales and exhales as quietly as he can manage, his chest shaking with the breath, and wonders if this is how one feels in that final in-between stage, between life and death, before rigor mortis has taken hold, after the loss of brain function, as the body works through the stages of death. Yukio knows how silly the thought is, that after the brain dies, the soul should go with it, if a soul even exists. In times like these, he's more inclined to think pessimistically.
But, ridiculously, he circles back. He wonders if this is how Shiro felt in his final moments: this strange stillness, the iciness in his chest and how stiff his body feels, but still twitching from the cold. Rigor mortis, he thinks again.
He wonders what Satan will think, when he ends up in the same position as Shiro, choking on blood that isn't his own, bleeding from all over a face that isn't his own, moles marred by smeared, polluted blood, glasses cracked and crooked, hair matted by the blood leaking from all over the body that isn't his own. In their final moments, he wonders how the both of them will feel, if it'll be that uncontrollable, contaminated rage, or that eerie, sedate listlessness.
Yukio shifts into a sitting position, leaning against the tile partioning off the shower from the rest of the bathroom, translucent and frosted.
"I said," he begins, his voice still rough, "what do you want?"
He finally meets Toudou's gaze, his own expression hopefully the mix of steeled and focused that he wants it to be. Toudou looks mildly amused, only the slightest bit bewildered; a crack.
The man leans forward briefly, his arms crossed as he leans against the door frame. He shrugs.
"I wanted to see how you were doing, tonight, after you left the cafeteria so suddenly, Okumura-kun,"
Don't call me that, he wants to say, but he bites his tongue.
Instead, he calls it for what it is: "Bullshit," he says, as calmly as he can manage, slowly enunciated and half-whispered.
"Ah, you said it, not me," Toudou says, shrugging again, closing his eyes briefly. A smirk splits his face, nasty and wretched. Yukio wants to choke it out of him until those orange feathers and ears of his turn blue from lack of oxygen, or perhaps corrupted by Yukio himself, by Satan himself, either or both of them. It matters, he knows, but in a different way now.
Toudou uncrosses his arms and pushes off the door frame. "It's been fun watching you, Okumura-kun, but I have serious things to attend to," he says, so sure of himself. "I'll see you in the morning, hopefully cleaned up." He gives him a once over before turning and leaving, keeping the bathroom door cracked open.
Yukio doesn't notice the sound of the door to the room clicking behind Toudou. He unconsciously curls his fist into the tightest grip he can manage, but when he realizes it, he relaxes it, and leans his head back against the shower partition, staring at the tiled ceiling.
Fight fire with fire, he thinks, no matter how much he hates that fire. In the Illuminati, it's all he has on his side now.