it's just us now - baradhiblue (2024)

Chapter 1: go on and hit me in the heart

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From too early an age, you've known there was no danger more pressing to your loving family's safety than the wickedness that lay inside you.

Jealousy, hatred, and obsession are the three pillars that uphold the tyrannical dictatorship of Daiji Igarashi's private thoughts, as much as your oppressed conscience fights to combat it. The goodness, the rigid righteousness is but your safekeeping technique: propaganda, smoke and mirrors, so the evil in you won't leak. No one else should have to deal with the beast that is you.

There is another you as well, who's been there so long you barely remember ever being a complete being, a you that discarded all the decency and shame inherent to the Daiji you and asked would it really be so bad if any of this were true? You named her (and it is a her, you can't escape from that) Kagerou, an ambiguous bit of wordplay that pleases her far too much for your comfort. Heat haze, mirage, ephemera, shadow… it all perfectly describes how much she destabilises you, how much you feel like you lose yourself the more of a foothold she has on you.

But she's still all you have. Your brother (sister, Kagerou insists, and you see it, but you're not willing to call the shots for Ikki) might love you, but he's far too overwhelming, simple-minded and selfishly selfless for you to feel comfortable taking your woes to him - he's the source of far too many of them (he'd let you do anything to him, Kagerou says, because you're helpless and he's beyond you, and you both know it). Your sister is younger, more naïve - none of you should contaminate her this way (you're jealous that she gets to be safe, that she gets to have that inner strength you lack, and you despise yourself for it). Your father is… your father. And your mother… it'd kill you to disappoint her, to reveal to her that one of her children is broken despite her best efforts. Though it's hard to face, you have enough clarity (hours upon hours spent reading, filling in the blanks about the depths of your sickness) to know Kagerou is just you. It's safe to confide in her, even if the call of the void thrummed through her every action (she wants to do it all, just to prove that your fear of your own monstrosity is worthless, just to feel something that is not guilt and horror for once in your life).

Sometimes, when something disconnects just right in your head, your body is no longer yours. You're perfectly aware - you know everything you're doing -, but you're not you, you're Kagerou, except you're not her and she's not you, it's just that unfortunately you share just one mind and one body and it's so much harder to tell where you end and she begins when you're not actively communicating, when the distinctive wrongness of her tone and emotions isn't there and you have to rely on the tingling, floaty feeling of the mundane actions she imitates. It's troubling. Especially so when she makes sure to rub it in just how much better she is at being you than you are.

And the worst is: nobody notices when she is you. You have no friends. You were once close with a girl who held your heart in her hands, but she is gone now (she discarded you in the first year of senior high when that inalienable fear bubbled within you too publicly for once, when someone got too close to something you didn't know was sore in you and the cracks in your psyche became so painful it made you violent, and you were deemed a broken toy, a fashion doll whose face and limbs melted into a grotesque mockery in a house fire), and every day you grow more strange in your loneliness. You want your brother who is your sister to comfort you, to hold you, to hurt you, to keep you safe from yourself and break every evil bone in your body, and the enormity of that desire disgusts you and just makes you want to never look into Ikki's face again. Kagerou has no such qualms; she gives Sakura almost everything you wish you had in an older sister — confidant, protector, safe harbour — but you stop her before she can complete it, taking over in dizzy spells right as a meaningful touch calls to the abyss that Kagerou has done nothing but gaze into. And yet… they all think this discontinuity is normal, it's just how you are, and they're not wrong because you have been torn like this for so long, but you wish there was any kind of recognition of your own self-identity in the eyes of others.

It changes when you win the kendo tournament in your last year (or rather she does, because it's always her when your body holds a sword, because close contact violence thrums under your skin and makes her shiver so pleasantly you want to throw up) and the fellow finalist you defeated goes Deadman and shoves your body against the wall in the locker room and you're so scared but Kagerou is still driving and she locks your teeth in a defiant grin and laughs like a villainess and the Phase II strangling you swears and calls you a real f*cking devil (and other more mundane pejoratives, but by God do you have the time to worry about him knowning Kagerou is a girl and being gross about it here?) and, suddenly, you catch yourself in the mirror and you're not even in your body anymore.

You're looking at your sweaty, rumpled, bruised self from outside, and you know she's looking back at you, licking her bloodied lips in stopped time.

“I guess the cat's out of the bag,” she says with a reddened smile.

“Kagerou…?”

“There's something so wrong with us, Daiji,” she continues, laughing breathlessly as if it's the most amusing thing in the world, “I don't think you're supposed to graduate from dissociative disorder to actually f*cking possessed all by yourself. We have a gift.”

But you've never even come into contact with one of those Vistamps and you were never raised religious enough to believe in kitsunetsuki or any supernatural explanation for demons, so how? Are the two of you just losing whatever's left of your sanity?

“Don't you want to find out? Make a contract with me. I'll get us out of this.”

The most horrifying thing is you don't know how else you're expected to not get killed or worse here.

“What do I even have to give you?”

“I'll take your bonds. Never love again. It's just me and you forever.”

It's already like that, you don't say, but you know she hears it anyway.

“Good doing business with you, lover.”

And time picks back up and you're in your body again, still controlled by Kagerou and she catches a glimpse of a training bokken that'd gotten loose in the struggle and quick as lightning takes hold of it and strikes the Deadman with strength and viciousness that can't possibly be yours.

It makes him release his hold, and you call on Kagerou to take the opening and flee, but your body is filled with angry, righteous fire and she bares her teeth and continues to strike again and again and again until the monster cowers back almost as if in fear of you, and that's how Fenix finds you when they finally manage to break the barricade, and then you are you again.

They commend you for your bravery and spirit, even as you're wrapped in a shock blanket trying to comprehend what the hell you just did. Your wounds don't even hurt, all you feel is a sickening mix of terror and fascination churning in your gut.

“There's always a place in Fenix for such strong and determined young men,” the squad leader with kind eyes tells you, and normally this attention would fluster you, but you just feel a devil girl's hand gripping your heart like a vise and you have to keep yourself from actually throwing up what little you had for lunch.

“I'll… consider it,” you tell him at least. Maybe it'd put the evil in you to good use, give you answers as to what is even wrong with you without broadcasting to your family you're a total lunatic.

Just you and me now, Daiji. It's just you and me.

Chapter 2: leave me hanging so they all can laugh at me

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You're still seventeen when you join Fenix, freshly graduated from high school with just as many disciplinary warnings as achievements. Your mother had cautioned you against it, appealing to your sensitive and sickly nature, but it just made you more determined - she doesn't know you have so much violence and anger in you, that it overpowers your physical and emotional frailty even when you're just yourself (but you're not anymore; the part of you that embraces madness bloomed into a monster much more literal than you'd ever imagine her to be).

You feel that the brass handling you is as fascinated by your inborn skill as they are uncomfortable with your uncanniness (you share these feelings; you're not sure who you are anymore), but it just means that you keep gathering accomplishments and rumours and eventually the head of the science and development division takes interest in you, and it's your turn to be fascinated and uncomfortable.

George Karizaki is strange, and you're not entirely sure they even see you as human, but they're so convinced they could use this bloom of demonic energy you just so naturally have to create something that'll elevate you into a true hero and change the face of this war that you're almost willing to forgive the touching, the imposing upon your boundaries for the sake of science.

“I could kill them if you want,” Kagerou whispers in your ear in the mirror, “I've been so hungry since you never feed us…”

The agonising empty feeling in your stomach in response to that feels too much more intense than the low-level hunger you're used to, it almost makes you double over in pain. But you shake your head, set your jaw even if your teeth wish they were sinking into something else.

“I need to know.” I need them to praise me. I need to do good for once in my life.

Her thrumming frustration and disgust melts back into you, there and not just like whenever you were in the back of your shared mind, and that's unusual these days.

Your entire headspace has been a mess since Kagerou's apotheosis. The line between you two is no longer so blurry and uncertain, and your thoughts and feelings no longer have an open-door policy (on her end, at least; you have a feeling she can still peer into yours whenever she wishes). Kagerou isolates herself in her own corner and only comes to bother you at times like this, with a wave of such heavily imposed dissent it makes you physically sick.

With the way your contract poisons your ability to truly connect to others, her retreat makes you achingly lonely.

You return home on weekends to feel a bit less empty. Your brother spends what little free time he has those days peppily pampering you for getting a leg up in life and it's suffocating and a little too much (God, he's so sisterly, but you can't confront him on it because that's not how this works), but it's better than being alone. On weekdays, your superior, Hiromi (the same officer who saved you from yourself back then), gives you just about the same gentle attention, if more restrained and formal, and it's… fine. You're fond of him, but you feel he sees too much good in you and that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth every time he praises you and recommends you for awards and promotions - do you ever actually earn them or does Hiromi-san have too much of a soft spot for what he perceives as a cute, troubled child growing past his traumas? At least Kagerou's jealousy cooled, whatever threat she had perceived from him inexplicably discarded.

And Karizaki… Karizaki still treats you as if you're God's gift to them, however uneasy it makes you. The more you hang around them and their team the closer you get to understanding your condition, why you were able to evolve Kagerou, however incompletely, without the usual requirements. (You don't tell them about her, but you know Karizaki knows more than they're willing to share, always saying a boot boy like you can't possibly understand the science of it.) You begin to get a good idea about demons being parasitic organisms originated from the combination of human malicious energy and the Giff Stamp's viral load, stabilised by the animal DNA in Vistamps so they wouldn't fully graft onto a human and consume them like a bacteriophage. Karizaki's choice of you seems to rely on some sort of biomarker that allows for mutualistic existence, and that makes you wonder if you hadn't been infected by the virus when you were attacked by that Deadman. Kagerou urges you not to ask, making the hunger flare in your stomach as an implied threat, but you're so keen you got it that you tell Karizaki everything, just so that they can confirm you're not crazy.

“Fascinating,” they tell you, poking at your chest coyly, “Incorrect conclusion, but fascinating testimony and analysis regardless. You're quite the valuable boot boy, and so is your darling devil girlfriend.”

You want to insist she's not your girlfriend - she's just you, that'd be weird -, but Karizaki shushes you with a finger to your lips before you can protest.

“But you having a conscious colony already is great news. That means I get to tweak some aspects of devil control in the Driver specifically for you before full activation.” They grin wildly at you, and you feel you have reason to be afraid. “Are you ready for Phase 2, Igarashi?”

Kagerou's overwhelming sense of offense in your head tells you to tell them to piss off, but the idea of fully sublimating your own evil feels too tempting to deny, even if you feel so lost at being told you were wrong.

You take a second deal with the devil.

Chapter 3: hunger burns a bullet hole

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Your teeth feel so unimaginably uncomfortable. Everyone who you mention this to congratulates you on the wisdom teeth coming in, but you know you don't even have them in the first place, so the pressing growing ache is something else. The Fenix dentists can't find any damage to even begin a treatment plan, so you sink yourself in cold sweet treats to soothe the itching.

Your teeth burn the worst whenever you sober up from Karizaki's tests, a snapping instinct blooming from such an intense ache in your tense jaw. Sometimes you do bite them when you're out of it. You've woken up to blood in your mouth and Karizaki sporting covered injuries that don't look like they were made by human teeth, but you know it can't not have been you, or Kagerou-as-you.

“If the freak wants to keep their hands they better keep them to themself,” is what Kagerou tells you when you ask, and nothing more, though you can feel pangs of her anger and hurt escape the tight control she keeps on what you share. Karizaki tells you that they simply haven't found the right concoction to make the demoness pliable when invoked through the Revice Driver and that she's lashing out at the indignity of the thought, and you want to believe them - you need that Driver, you need to overpower Kagerou -, but your mouth hurts and tastes like blood all the time now and there's no amount of Dutch tart or frozen yogurt or novelty milkshakes that can make it stop.

…Have people been… looking at you recently? More than usual? It might just be your imagination, but you feel exposed, open and raw, like when you were fifteen and friendless and your literature teacher drew you into his web and then the world became cold in a different way. Your fingers know the frostbite of judgment, of blame, but they also know the blazing heat of exploding gunpowder now - you hope you have more emotional resilience as a paramilitary special agent in development than you did as a child looking for gentleness in all the wrong places.

…Karizaki is almost the same age as your teacher was then. You're three years older in comparison, the age gap has shrunk from your entire life to just half of it.

(But you didn't wander into an unequal intimate relationship - This is work. It's just how having superiors works, isn't it? Sometimes they're handsy and overfamiliar and they drug you out of your wits to make superweapons and you wake up craving to rip their arm off its socket with a jerk of your head even though you have no memory of what happened and the half of you that does won't share. It's fine. It's normal. You signed away your will when you became a cog in the machine in exchange for a smidge of power and certainty. You're not in a position to be uncomfortable.)

When you come home on your holiday, you're so tired and worn down that you can't bother to push Ikki away. You'd have preferred giving your sticky affection to Sakura, but she's old enough now that she finds it embarrassing to have her older brothers be sappy and dramatic and emotional around her, always looking out for that invisible audience teenage girls must perform for (you know it all too well). It's a strange new paradigm, because while Ikki has always protected you from any dangers he made himself aware of (you never told him everything yourself, it made your stomach drop to show the true depth of your weakness), Sakura knows, you've always felt like you can be more open to her about what happens to you, if not about how overwhelmingly sad*stic and vengeful your first thoughts always are - you give her the end result: punishing yourself for being a bad victim -; now you only have Ikki to hold you, and you have to acclimate yourself to your teeth, wanting his flesh not quite as burning as how they want Karizaki's, but a deep seated ache that is maddening.

But maybe Ikki's airheaded good-natured ways are a gift that keeps on giving, for better or worse.

Sitting by the pond with ice cream, Ikki notices you keep pressing your popsicle to your aching jaw like an icepack and gets out of you that you've been having pain the military dentist hadn't found a cause for, so his brilliant idea is to ease your mouth open and take a look as if he's not just a washed out soccer player turned shop auntie apprentice. Such a motherly behaviour, but Ikki had always been a spitting image of the mother you shared, so of course it was.

“Huh,” he says, running his thumb over your teeth and wincing as a taste of iron blooms on your tongue, “These are a great deal sharper and longer than last I remember. My cute baby brother is getting fangy like a bat… It's almost like you're from one of those yuki-onna legends where they're bloodsuckers, but still all delicate and sensitive like fresh ice.”

You whine and pull away, wiping your mouth with a bashful look on your face. Unlike most people, Ikki doesn't compare you to a woman as a form of degradation or power play - it's appreciative, gentle, but still so embarrassing because you know you can't reciprocate however much it blares in your mind that Ikki is your sister: he’s beyond you; Ikki would let you do anything to him, but it'll always be tainted as a concession to your weakness, like an adult wolf allowing a pup to defeat it in play fighting. (You could just be sisters, Kagerou reminds you, an edge of annoyance, if only you'd stop playing chicken about it.)

Your teeth. Right. You forgot about your teeth.

Maybe you're really becoming a monster, bit by bit since you gave Kagerou your heart to save you from the Bat Deadman and ever the more since Karizaki's experiments. Monsters don't get to wonder about lives they aren't living.

“Nii-chan,” you begin, hiding your face into his shirt, “what if I really was some sort of… evil thing? Would you hate me?” A tide of emotion you didn't expect rose on your throat, turning your timbre watery. “Would you kill me?”

Ikki sighs, rubbing your back as he holds you close, “Daiji, you're family. Even if you turn into some sort of creature you're still my little brother. I could never kill you, and I'll always think you're cute and silly and my damsel in distress I gotta keep safe even if it's from the whole wide world and yourself too.”

“You're assuming monster me would have the same discernment. That it wouldn't want to hurt you and everyone.” And it frustrates you. Once again that assumption that you're made of porcelain - not even of glass; glass is still deadly when broken, porcelain just crumbles to dust.

Ikki eases your cold wet face from its hiding place with a gentle ruffle to your hair.

“You can hurt me if you need to. I wouldn't mind.”

Anything. Kagerou really was right.

You keep a wary gaze fixed on him, monitoring his response, and sink your mysteriously sharpened teeth into the pulse of his wrist as if it was the pulp of an apple. It tastes so rich and intoxicating it overpowers concern and propriety for a second and you lap the blood up as if it were pudding off a peeled lid, but your distraction can only go so far - Ikki is good at hiding pain, but he's not unfeeling.

You pull away in a daze, a mess of blood still sticking to the lower part of your face and dripping to your neck. “I'm sorry, I don't know why I did that.” You plead anxiously to your brother, moving to attempt to stop the bleeding with the wet towel you had around your shoulders. “I've just been… so out of it lately.”

Chapter 4: slowly taking me apart

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“I'm really scared, Dr. Karizaki.” You reiterate, a growl slipping into your voice that isn't quite yours as you attempt to hold the line that your mutation and its accompanying hunger are significant trouble. “My brother had to get minor surgery to put his tendons back together after I tore them out. If I did that lucid, who knows what I could do next time you put me under.”

“Is that a threat, Igarashi?” They grin and flick your forehead teasingly. “I know how to counter a vampire doll. You should worry more about what fate would befall a Lucy Westenra-type character like you when your Dracula is your own demon. She'll eat you from the inside out, Bride of Dracula.”

Something unpleasant rises in your throat at Karizaki's comparison. It doesn't sound so bad, yet it terrifies you. Something in you does long to be eaten and taken by something all-loving leagues beyond your comprehension - that's why you have more than a passing interest in the passion of esotericism regardless of your nihilistic lack of belief; you long deeply for a love you know for a fact will never be answered -, but you cannot give in or surrender as long as you live, for the love that'd eat you does not exist but your real human responsibilities and reputation do. Even if Kagerou purports to be that all-consuming love, your conscience will not allow you to abandon human decency by repaying the imperfect love of your family with lacerating teeth.

“I won't let her. I can't let her.”

“You're really supremely cute,” they pat your cheeks and angle you to look at their display shelf, “That is the guiding struggle of a good Kamen Rider. I can make this inhumanity something that can protect people. So let me mess with you a little more.”

“I want to know what's happening to me,” you insist, “I know you know more than you tell me.”

The smile you see isn't any less devilish than Kagerou's.

“Careful what you wish for.”

They still keep their secrets, promising that there's intentionality to how they want to present the information to you, so you wait until your next scheduled experiment, staving off the anxiety that stokes the fire of your craving the best you can.

It hurts. You feel lightheaded and dizzy as if you really had pushed yourself beyond the tight rein of control to the chokehold of punishment with starvation (you haven't been able to stick to even that bit of ritual self-management; the chocolate wrappers in your waste bin keep accumulating in an attempt to feed your body enough endorphins that it'll stop behaving badly).

‘Endorphins’? Kagerou laughs in your head and your body is enraptured by aberrant sensation you can't place. It's charming you're trying to feed me pleasure, but sweets are a bit passè.

“Shut up.” You whisper, resting your forehead on the wall beside the elevator doors while you try to get your senses in order, vision still a blur of phosphenes when someone places their hand on the clammy nape of your neck and calls for you.

“-Daiji? All good in there?”

Ah, Akemi-san. Your only advocate here. As the medical expert of the science team, she checks on you as much as she can - her concern as to whether the rather excessive substance use in the experiment regimen could be compared to MKULTRA and have similar effects on your identity and cognition have been taken to the ethics board multiple times, but Karizaki continues to receive the go-ahead.

You shake your head no. She pulls lightly on your arm, probably so you can tell her what ails you better, but without the support of the wall your body is too limp to stand by itself and you collapse over her shoulder, briefly thankful your ever-mockable delicate and light constitution means you don't topple her.

“...’m sorry.” You mumble, trying to pick yourself up with every bit of balance you can manage, but she wraps an arm around your waist and keeps you close.

“Even like this, you're still apologising for existing. Gotta live a little, baby bat!” Her hand rubs your lower back gently over your uniform, and it reminds you vaguely of how Chika-sensei used to touch you, but there isn't the choking oppressiveness of living on someone's good will. Akemi-san is damn near as powerless as you in the situation you're in, and that serves for some cold comfort. “Can you make it to your roost, or do I need to take you in for rehab?”

“Don't know. Really hungry.”

You can't see the face she makes, but you know she widens her eyes by the way her face muscles move against yours. Does she have access to Karizaki's testing data? Does she know what's happening to you? Does it scare her too?

Her loose hold morphs into a proper hug, making you whine at the unfamiliar touch, but you don't feel like your threat-to-ability analysis is enough to warrant trying to escape.

“I'll solve that for you. Let me take you home.”

And she does. Akemi-san leads you to her quarters right beside the medical facilities and lets you rest on her bed while she looks for something to feed you.

There's something about this experience that sends a flush to your face and a tingle to your extremities. An older woman has taken you back to her room and trusts you in there, expecting nothing of you other than for your illness to pass. It's probably not good that what comes to mind is not your mother but Ikki, and that you resent him for his choking clinginess, for an excessive love for you that you don't know how to react to. (You almost wish he'd just touch you already. Do you have to do it? Throw it in his face that you know the bond between you is abnormal and that the lack of concrete proof makes you sick because now that you have been taken advantage of more solidly you’re so much more aware of what’s wrong but yet still you struggle to accuse Ikki of hurting you when he hasn't ever crossed physical boundaries?) Overwhelming anger and fear strikes you all at once. Where did these thoughts come from? You know they’re your thoughts. Have you always felt like this?

Akemi-san finds you lying in a puddle of your tears and the swirl of feathers from her pillow, torn apart by your teeth. Softly, gently, she takes your shivering form in her arms and rubs your back again, a slow circular motion that lulls your panic back underground and leaves just the horror, the terrible realisation that maybe you'd hurt Ikki not out of improper desire but as a culmination of years and years of accumulated prey animal rage from being improperly desired. You can't stop crying. You're sure you look and sound pathetic, but Akemi-san doesn't judge you.

Once your sobs quieten, more from exhaustion than anything, you notice how close you are to her bare neck and shoulder. You're still hungry and your teeth still tingle, but you're so scared of hurting someone who cares for you in such a respectful manner…

“It's alright, Daiji. Just bite.”

You dry swallow at the reassuring permission.

With a sharp inhale, you bite down.

You take the reins of the body and mind you share the instant the taste of blood sends a little death of cathartic pleasure through Daiji's overstimulated mind and you quickly change the locks. You put this entire night on lockdown, accessible only to you, until further notice. You always have to do this, keep the deepest rage and despair Daiji feels at the reality of her life contained in you, because the public Daiji cannot operate if she remembers or feels tied to everything she ever thought, felt or experienced. If the consequences of an episode are large enough, you allow bits and pieces to return, bit by bit so as not to overwhelm.

It really sucks, having to live like this.

You lick and nibble and suck on the pretty doctor's neck until there's just enough of her saviour blood in your stomach that you feel satisfied. It's interesting, you find, how much more sinner's blood and flesh you need to stop hungering despite the fact that your teeth crave so badly to rend them apart. It's almost as if you're built for inflicting punishment, and that's a very appealing idea. You're the demon that punishes those who lust after Daiji, who hurt her to please themselves. Even if you have to hurt her yourself, it's for her own good.

“Let's not mention this again, Mikoshiba.” You tell her straightforwardly as you pull away, and you can tell from her expression that she knows you're not Daiji. “Let's not do it again either. Leave us to starve. It's better that way.”