a wisp of breath.

_____________________________________

Trigger warning: parental death, assassination, blood, death.

I.

You think you remember, but you don’t. 

Your life in Tokyo is a distant memory; it’s cloudy and vague, and yet you still tell your sister stories about your parents as if they’ve been written in your diary – they’re not lies, but not all of them are fully truthful, too. 

You know your mom was an artist – there’s a painting of you two saved, brought with you to New York – and you know your father could make the best monjayaki; you’ve stopped searching for the savour you last tasted more than twenty years ago. And that’s what you tell her about; you tell her about trips to the sea, late night tales, and breakfast in the sun. How you’d get scolded for not finishing homework in time, how you’ve been waiting for your mom to get back from the hospital and bring your little sister home. 

It’s all joyful, until it isn’t – this one night will haunt you until you hear the call of your grave. You don’t see it, but you hear it; and thus you stay in your room, holding Emiko, until help arrives. The days following it become a blur – you come back to yourself when your feet touch the American land. They told you it’d be safer if you lived there. 

II.

You’ll find out later that your father was a foster child of a Yakuza boss, who tried his best to distance himself from the clan and lead a normal life – of course, it could never happen. It was not for him to decide. It’s a miracle you two stayed alive, but you never think this way – there’s too much pain, too much guilt. 

You grow up with your sister and your relatives, your aunt and uncle who recently moved to the States themselves. For two people, who could never have their own children, it was both a diabolical blessing and a divine curse: it was always pleasant to hear children laugh in their cramped house, but counting every penny was never easy.

Life seemed good for you, though. Good enough, at least. You never understood why it suddenly got better too. One more thing you’ll find out later – the name of Hanging Man and one of its higher-ups, who stepped in to help.

III.

Some nights are worse than others, forcing you to wake up drenched in cold sweat – here he was, stuck in their apartment in Tokyo, alone with his sister, waiting for their parents to come, having a horrible internal feeling that something is wrong. Again and again. 

Maybe that’s why you’d savour any attention you’d get. 

Maybe that’s why you’d get to sit in a police car more than a few times as blood was spilling out of your nose. Hot-headed and reckless, you couldn’t even count how many times you've gotten into fights.

You weren’t stupid, though. Witty, sharp and always happy to finish your homework – you were kind of a mystery for everyone, including the best of your friends. But every move of yours is calculated. You know what you want, and for that you need both the brain and the fist – you’d never mention it, though. You’re aware your intention would seem immature at best, and deranged at worst. 

You try to join the clan as soon as you finish high school, but you’re left disappointed – they see you as a kid. And you are, you are just a kid – even if you’re not happy about it.

IV.

When she offers you to move together – start a new life – you’ve already graduated and started your new life in New York. Life of power, loyalty, and found family. You promise your sister you’ll visit, you’ll visit often, you just can’t leave. You can’t. 

You know it hurts her. It hurts you too – but you have plans, ideas, ambitions: either climb up the Hanging Man ladder, or work together with Akira and rule the city. 

Soon, you’ll have to choose. You don’t know it yet, but it’ll have severe consequences in the future.

You should’ve gone with Emiko.

V.

You’re destined to lose everyone in your life.

You meet her when you’re much younger – too young to understand the risks of your relationship. It just burns, it’s a fire that devours you both just like you devour each other. For the first time, you’re happy – you think you’re losing your mind when you start thinking about dropping your job for her. You could do something else, you could. It’s not too late. 

You don’t get a chance to make that step – you’re ambushed, and the blood that dries on your hands is the only reminder of her for the next eight years. 

You can’t remember the funeral – and once again, it’s a cloudy blur, one that will take a clearer shape only in nightmares. You'll look for her too, with a delusional hope that she is, in fact, alive – only to be left with no clues at all. 

VI.

_____________________________________

Trigger warning: child abandonment, assassination, quite detailed description of death, blood.

I.

The first memory you can recall is the experience of how the cold can lick your bones & gnaw at your skin. It’s how you gasp for air, only for it to freeze your lungs — you’re not older than a year, and the falling snow starts to become a little too heavy for you to lift your fingers. That’s when you close your eyes, exhausted and hopeless. 

It all comes back to you in your dreams from time to time. Sometimes, you’re unsure if it really happened, or if it’s always been just a nightmare to follow you everywhere you go. You must’ve been too little to be aware of this one fateful night in the street, but you’ve heard many stories & you do celebrate your birthday in January — that’s when they found you & brought you back to life after countless nights of fever and rivers of medicine; it surely was a battle. They said it was the first sign you’d be a fierce fighter too. 

After that, there's darkness.

II.

Nunavut is, in fact, quite different to the place you spent the first eleven years of your life — but you don't exactly remember it.. To you, it's all the same — you just know you don't mind the cold. You appreciate the food they give, you appreciate the smiles you receive.

You can't remember how you ended up here, but you never question it. You never question why they speak your language either; you don't wonder why others don't, and why you're forced to learn another one. It feels natural. It has to be, right? It's probably the school they (who even are they? who were you talking to? you knew someone else?) were telling you about.

You're content.

III.

“You’re not good enough,” they said, and you felt a tear roll down your cheek. Just like everyone else, you go through the training – no questions asked. That's why you're here. And you’d never even dare to ask – you like it. It keeps you occupied, it makes you feel valuable – even in setbacks, you’d be happy to spend hours at the training ground, going through one task over & over again. But these words felt, indeed, like a failure: not as good as everyone else, you might as well go back to the streets you came here from. 

You soon learn they’re not thinking about letting you go; they see something completely different in you: you’re calculated. Methodical. Meticulous. And while combat fighting might not be the perfect path to choose, there’s another place for you – clinical precision and a detached emotional distance. The greatest weapons you can wield. 

IV.

One more memory to keep you at night and confuse you in your drowsy state: your first kill. It was the first and, simultaneously, the last one to leave some spots of blood on the wooden floor. It wasn’t as clean as you wanted it to be, and you were scolding yourself in your mind and as you watched life leave their eyes.

You leave little room for error: even after they take their last breath, you still take a moment to check their pulse, assess the severity of their injury; you check the clock and make sure when’s the right time to leave – you’ve already planned this, and it means you must close the door behind you in twenty seconds. And you do, as well as lose the jacket of the hotel concierge.

No one ever thinks to suspect you, to think of you as a murderer — you’re a reputable surgeon, why would they think that? All of you, who work at this hospital — you’re all a bit strange, especially surgeons. Your talent and smile disguises everything.

V.

The other side of you requires meticulous planning as well — it’s as if you purposefully chose the life of never ending checklists & preparations. After your first surgery, you stare at your hands, painted in red – you feel your colleagues touching your shoulders, congratulating you, but you’re focused on the blood, slowly dripping between your fingers. 

One of them – takes lives, another – brings them back to Earth. Every day, they both go through the same routine with some exceptions, because you always wanted to save people. Are these, who die because of your touch, considered human if they’re the destroyers of peace? It’s a thought you bring with you to bed, and, every night, it sleeps on the pillow next to you. 

_____________________________________

Headcanons:

Left in the streets of Copenhagen in the middle of winter, he was found by a couple of passers-by. For the first eleven years of his life, he lived in an orphanage, until he was noticed and taken by the Red Eye. He would always consider them his parental figures and he'd never remember his time in the orphanage ever again.

He decided he’d become a doctor when he was fourteen, and would spend hours studying after he was done with training. Since his overseer noticed his talents and interests, his studious nature was being encouraged and, in a way, became a part of his training. 

Yes, he’s not as good at weaponry and combat as others in the Red Eye, but he’s still highly trained, skilled, & deadly – especially compared to an average person. However, when it comes to his assassination techniques, it requires meticulous planning & surveillance. He uses his medical knowledge to get his targets killed in a way it’d seem to be a natural death — a heart attack or a stroke. Never leaves blood behind him. If needed, he can use his other skills too, but he never had to.  Not yet, at least. 

Has his own code of ethics and tries to target individuals whom he believes deserve punishment for their own crimes & actions. A bit of moral ambiguity, of course. Especially knowing it’s not always ‘the bad guys’ the Red Eye is going against. Call it brainwashing, if you will.

A survivor since childhood, to this day he’s still all about survival. Yet he's recently started to grapple with the ethical implications of his actions, especially when there’s someone he’s already saved that has to be his next target.

Approaches his work with a sense of professionalism – both in the hospital as well as when it comes to the Red Eye matters. 

Sleeps way too little :’) Catch him roaming the streets of New York at night. 

Wanted connections:

His overseer. Up until now, Ren was a model Red Eye member. Obedient to a t. However, something's happening (is his chip broken?) - he's began raising questions. Well, he's not raising them out loud, not yet, but he might look different, and his overseer is probably not happy about it.

Someone who’s coming after him. Many reasons for it, one of them being that perhaps Ren assassinated a member of their gang. I’d love this to be an antagonistic dynamic. 

Colleagues at the hospital. Obviously, they don't know about his involvement with the Red Eye – but does he seem odd to them because of his reluctance to speak about his childhood & youth? Is his mysterious and secretive nature quite weird to them? Possibly. Or maybe they’re fascinated? Maybe they don’t care? Lots of possibilities, I think! 

Other Red Eye. Are they close? Are they rivals? Do they annoy each other? Did they grow up together? Once again, lots of ideas! 

_____________________________________

Trigger warning: abuse, eating disorder mention, blood, parental death, murder, cancer. 

How do you become God? 

For your mother, it was control. Showered with attention, you were unsure if your mother loved or envied you — every kiss on a cheek she gave you, it reeked of hatred, as if you were here to deprive her of her youth, to feed on it and steal it; and yet every time your nose bled or your forehead burned with fire, you’d feel such tenderness you never experienced before. Soon, you learn the name of every physician in the local hospital, and you spend more time there than in your warm bedroom; you’re constantly surrounded by white walls instead, gripping your mother’s hand. 

Your mother, too, knew every doctor — and she was beaming every time you’d spend days or weeks in a sterile ward, her words full of saccharine promises and warm refuge. You wouldn’t eat what wasn’t allowed, and you’d gladly juggle between dozens of orange-coloured plastic bottles. You’re a master at accommodating it. And every night you pray it’d never end.

How do you lose faith? 

For you, it’s the loss of your father. You’re naïve enough to forget that everything ends, and you unknowingly utter your last prayer on the eve of your father’s passing. Cancer. You weren’t aware – none of you. While you were drinking countless pills and pretending to eat, he’d devour steaks and conceal his pain with bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon. Which, by the way, seemed disgusting to you; at least until the moment you found out he was counting his days. Celebrating them. 

It left a mark on you, of course it did; but it also bruised the relationship between you and your mother. She sees you slipping away, and you, with sharp scissors in your hands, try to cut off this invisible threat she’s been weaving for years now. 

You leave immediately after the funeral. She tries to call you, and sheds many tears, but you’re already in New York — with little to no money in your pockets, you find a place you share with six other people. That’s the first time you hear the name of Damon Stone. For the first time in your life, you feel what others would call inspiration. You hope to meet him at least once in your lifetime. 

How do you repent for your sins? 

For you, it’s how you crawl on your knees. You’re not begging. You’re trying to survive in these cold, unwelcoming streets: born with a silver spoon in your mouth and used to the caring touch of your parents, you’re not accustomed to fighting for yourself. But you learn quickly, and the newly established circle of acquaintances are eager to help you. 

You crawl, because you know that in a few years you won’t be able to notice the scars on your delicate skin anymore — because you have a goal with the name of Stoneage Industries. They could help you — and you could help others. You know it. But you also know your path must start with education, that’s why you save every penny, and use every admirer for your own financial gain — you’re not interested in their vows anyway.

So how do you become God? For you, it’s intelligence, power & the thrill of it all. The first time you feel the strength at your fingertips is when you pull the trigger of your gun, and you feel warm, sticky, metallic smell on your skin. You don't care, it's just a job — but the adrenaline (and the money) makes you come back for more.

Either way, it’s a long and steady climb until you reach the seat you’re in, and it’s not without losses and proverbial, and literal, blood of the others.

You’re content, and even happier whenever you see another replicant leave the premises of Stoneage — what a miracle it is, to see them laugh and cry, to feel their skin and be unable to tell if they came from the womb or the lab. 

What a beautiful sight — the creation of life don't forget you create it because of the loss of the others 

_____________________________________

Headcanons:

She was born in Bangalore, India, but her parents moved to the US when she was six years old. 

As you can probably guess, Riya definitely has a bit of a god complex.

God complex was what pushed her to earn money by working for the Old Mafia House, too. She didn't notice when and how she stopped being an associate and became their hitman. She's not very loyal, to be fair. But she'll do what she's asked to do.

Her mother had Munchausen by proxy, consequently Riya seemed rather sickly as a child and suffered from numerous eating disorders. Still hates eating in front of others, even though she did get better when she moved away from her mother. 

Absolutely fascinated and infatuated with the concept of replicants and replicants themselves. For her, it’s an absolutely scientific miracle and she sees nothing wrong with creating someone who’s ‘more human than humans’.

Working on her PhD at the moment. 

Wanted connections:

Someone who helped her to join the Stoneage. She might’ve been a top student and had money saved from her work with Old Mafia Houe, but it wasn’t exactly easy to get a job there — someone would’ve helped her. Was it a romantic partner, or just a very good friend? Perhaps she ditched them afterwards and they despise her now? Or perhaps they are using & manipulating her now? Would love it to be a complex dynamic and I see many ways this could develop and go. 

A replicant who hates her. Perhaps she wronged them, perhaps it’s just a mere fact she was a part of them becoming a replicant. 

Friends, she met when she first got to New York. It would’ve been the six people she lived with when she came to the city — it could’ve been only a month they shared their apartment for, yet they’re still in touch as they went through so much together. 

Colleagues. She’s a perfectionist, so it’s not easy to work with her. 

People from the Old Mafia House. Maybe they're not exactly trusting her and feel that she may not be the most loyal. Maybe they're pushing her to get more involved in their business.