don't forget to save, don't look behind you

Mitsuru Kouzo based his initial impression of Yuu Sagara solely on the amount of screaming the guy did upon their awakening. This impression pretty much just consisted of endless repeats of the phrase shut the fuck up.

His second impression came shortly afterwards, when he intentionally startled Yuu in the kitchen. Yes, shut the fuck up was still at the forefront, but Mitsuru also recognized that Yuu was a possibly entertaining individual to harass. Not bully, because if there was anything Mitsuru absolutely was not, it was a bully. But the usual brand of harassment he dealt out to particularly irritating individuals to get a laugh out of their reactions would do.

The best way to put it is that Yuu was a normie and Mitsuru was the 4channer chanting “REEEEEE” at him for kicks.

He never really stopped thinking of Yuu as a normie, but the direr their situation got, the more Mitsuru saw him as someone who could be potentially useful. Mitsuru wanted to live. Yuu wanted to live. Moreover, Yuu seemed to get hung up on personal relationships — not that Mitsuru wanted to use the guise of friendship to manipulate him, because that would mess with his Untouchable Cred. But he could still use him, Mitsuru thought, and there could be something to be said for a tentative (and easily disposable) alliance.

He made his move after Najwa’s execution. You seem like the only other guy concerned there’s a fucking killer running around loose. C’mon, why’d I lie to you? There’s enough evidence I’m here for me killing you to be a shit idea. Let’s work something out.

… Not that there was much for them to work out except an agreement to share any information they had about their situation with each other, should they stumble across it.

And stumble they did. Sadly, as this all happened several months ago, the narrator has forgotten most of the specifics of what exactly went down. All that’s really important is it upped Yuu’s position in Mitsuru’s good graces without him actually giving a shit about the guy. He was a vessel for information. That was all he would ever need from him.

… Until [monobear voice] hello naughty children it’s mistrial time

Mitsuru didn’t expect the others to just leave him to bleed out, unless they were Malachi. He wasn’t wrong. Where he went wrong was when he didn’t expect anyone to actually tend to him in the aftermath, leaving him a prime target for murder. I’m going to die, he told himself over and over again, when he could finally think in coherent sentences. I’m going to die. He was a liability. Nobody was invested enough in his presence to keep him alive. That was his expectation.

Which Yuu wound up obliterating entirely.

His wounds were tended to. He was guarded. He was fed, and, yes, he was bathed. He was taken care of, kept alive, all thanks to the good graces of someone he barely even knew.

He hated it.

Why was Yuu even doing this? Mitsuru refused to believe that his intentions were selfless in the least. There had to be something the guy was getting out of redressing his bleeding stumps when he had never been discreet about how much he hated the sight of blood. A complex? A complex. Mitsuru would chalk it up to a complex, something deep and dark that he didn’t know about, because that was the only thing he could think of to explain why, because it sure as fuck wasn’t about him.

Worse yet — Yuu refused to give up on him.

Already going through a bit of an internal crisis thanks to Monobear destroying any kind of agency he had before, the second Yuu turned his back, Mitsuru proceeded to have the most reckless encounter imaginable. Which… you know. Yuu had questions.

Like hell Mitsuru was going to tell Yuu what happened and give up the little bit of control he had left over his life, because God knew Yuu wouldn’t be happy at fucking all. So he lied. But the truth came out.

When Yuu wheeled him back to the infirmary, he, as any reasonable individual would, wanted answers. And Mitsuru, as any unreasonable individual would, did not want to give them to him. What the hell did it matter to Yuu what happened to him? He was gonna die anyway. That was what he always told himself, that was what he knew now that the other big target was out of the way. Yuu wasn’t supposed to give a shit. Yuu wasn’t supposed to keep asking — and asking — and asking —

(Kentarou Fujita. Freshman year class representative. Took his job way too seriously, in Mitsuru’s opinion. Not a day went by without the guy leaving some sort of aggressive note telling him to follow dress code, or get his work done in class, or bring something to lunch other than an energy drink, for the love of everything beautiful in this world. Nobody tried that hard with Mitsuru, not even the teachers, not even his own family.)

(Of fucking course he’d fall for the guy.)

Mitsuru finally snapped at Yuu, and Yuu snapped right back, and they screamed over how you piece of shit, we’re never gonna get out of here — so what, you want me to just lie down and give up, because I’m not gonna rest until I do fucking something — FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU SAGARA —

(He knew what was happening to him, because Sagara, Fujita, they were all the fucking same with their persistence and —)

Then he fell out of his wheelchair, and Yuu was there to catch him, and that was when he realized two things.

He was completely at the mercy of those around him.

There was nothing he could do about it.

And Mitsuru Kouzo finally cried for the first time in five years.

(”No, no, it’s okay, just breathe —” “LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE —” “Breathe with me, breathe…”)

(One, two, three…)

The second time he snapped at Yuu wasn’t long afterwards. Yuu poked and prodded at him for more details — because he was concerned. Of fucking course he was. Mitsuru tried to play it off like it was nothing, but Yuu wasn’t buying it. And he continued not to buy it until finally Mitsuru gave up and gave a long and angry rant about what happened.

And then, out of all the bizarre things to come out of that, Yuu started hitting on him.

Mitsuru wasn’t oblivious. Mitsuru picked up on what was going on pretty quick. The problem was believing it, because — alright, how fucking incredible was it, this guy that he’d been grappling with Unwanted Feels for, suddenly showing interest in him — because why, exactly?

... Well. It was nothing serious.

(But Mitsuru got even more attached to the guy.)

From then on out, their dynamic was… interesting. They’d already bantered before, of course, but now there was something more casual about it. Domestic, even. Mitsuru’s tolerance for Yuu’s antics increased, as did Yuu’s for Mitsuru’s. It got easier and easier for Mitsuru to actually feel at ease with him.

But, like aversion conditioning electric shocks, his own internal hangups always stopped him from getting too comfortable with Yuu. He couldn’t bring himself to admit how important Yuu had become to him because — BZZT — haha, look at Kouzo, getting all sappy out of nowhere, guess he’s a weakling after all! He, who had convinced himself that he didn’t care what other people thought of him, actually cared far too much. He would be weak, he would be a target, he’d go right back to those days of his childhood where he wasn’t in control of what people thought of him, where what he was didn’t align with what they thought he was, where he would constantly try to shift their thinking but they would just torment him to no end —

And even worse, this was murder hell, Yuu could kill him any time of the day he pleased — but he wouldn’t. Mitsuru couldn’t see Yuu ever killing him. Which meant he trusted him.

(… God fucking dammit.)

So he burned, and he burned, and one day, Yuu said he loved him.

… What the fuck.

Mitsuru didn’t believe it. He couldn’t — he told Yuu as much, so help me God, if you’re shitting me, Sagara — but that just made Yuu upset, and then Mitsuru had to deal with that, and he realized, oh my god, he’s serious.

And he wanted an answer.

Mitsuru didn’t love anyone — anyone, not ever. His family was just there. Kentarou was just a crush. And Yuu was — somehow, Yuu had become more than that. Yuu had wormed his way into Mitsuru’s heart in a way that gave him physical pain to think about. It was fucking stupid, Mitsuru knew, because what the hell did he even know about Yuu, really, besides the fact that he was so infuriatingly persistent? Besides the fact that he was too emotional, too trusting, too weak —

(Because if he wasn’t the weak one, then that only left Mitsuru, didn’t it?)

He didn’t give him an answer. He started acting strangely. He may have been trying to show it. But it wasn’t clear to him. 

A few days later, Kiyoko sacrificed herself, and now?

Does Mitsuru love Yuu? He’ll never say he does. The idea that someone loves him is more than enough to short-circuit his entire way of seeing the world, where he had spent years building himself up to be this untouchable, unlovable figure. Tearing it down would mean… he couldn’t, he could never fucking do it. That’s where all his comfort comes from.

But, somehow, Yuu managed to hack at those walls enough for Mitsuru to at least dislodge a single brick. That was more than anyone — anyone, even his own goddamn family — was ever able to do. It’s enough for Mitsuru to envision a future coexisting with Yuu outside of the boat, snarky and squabbles and all, because at this point, there is no other set of hands in the world he could imagine willingly putting his life in.

Mitsuru had Malachi pegged as a wild card straight into their first interaction How could he not? The guy might as well have been walking around with a giant neon WARNING sign permanently attached to his head. He was too eccentric, too out there for there to be anything but sinister intentions lurking beneath.

But Mitsuru wasn’t repulsed, oh no. Mitsuru was intrigued. Because, you see, it was so fucking obvious that Malachi was putting up a front that Mitsuru made the subconscious connection between that and his own front of being The Most Despicable Human Being Alive. That was intriguing. What made him the way he was? What made him tick? And — most intriguing of all — what could make him break his facade?

(Because it had to be a facade. Mitsuru refused to accept it could be anything but a facade. Nobody acted like that without a good ass reason. Nobody.)

During Noelle’s trial, Mitsuru got his answer.

… Kind of.

”I wanted to see the looks on your faces when you got it wrong?” Fucking really? What a cop out. Mitsuru was disappointed. But he also wasn’t, because it was some insight. If nothing else, he’d learned that Malachi wanted them all to think that he was someone to be despised.

(Kinda like another guy we know, eh?)

And then Mitsuru went and got gud. Which was. Well. Malachi had already established himself as even more of a shitlord than before, what with the whole taking Hiyuu hostage situation, but Mitsuru wasn’t too much worried about that. He was worried more about the fact that he was about to fucking die. But he still found time to get in some jabs at Malachi, because like hell was he going to die while letting Malachi think he was scared of dying. Priorities, man.

It wasn’t until after the whole SlimeQuest2k15 deal and Mitsuru had a couple of days to recover that things really got interesting, though. By that point, Mitsuru knew that Malachi had been the one to find him, and not only that, but he… had actually been helpful? The fuck? That was odd. Generally Malachi had just been obstructing everyone’s forward motion. That just made him even more infuriatingly difficult to read.

So when Malachi all but jumped him in the infirmary after the motive announcement, Mitsuru seized the opportunity to try and get some insight.

… After he seized the scalpel he had under his pillow and stabbed him.

(He had to defend himself somehow, didn’t he?)

What exactly happened during that interaction, one might ask? The answer, in short:

four (4) murder attempts,

one (1) sasunaru incident,

two (2) leg wounds reopened,

three (3) sets of bandages undone,

infinite (∞) amounts of sass, and

something he didn’t expect.

Mitsuru was dead set on figuring out how Malachi worked — because, deep down, the guy reminded him so much of himself that it drove him up the fucking wall. Mitsuru needed to break Malachi, because he needed to prove that he himself was stronger, that there was nothing, nothing that could get the better of him, not anymore. Because if he could get Malachi to break while keeping himself intact, then he could validate his own entire modus operandi. That was also why he insisted on calling him Natadama — it made him more human. He needed to prove that Malachi wasn’t some monster, that he was just a guy, so he could prove that he himself was the exact opposite.

(He never really got the irony of that.)

They kept going back and forth between violent and... actually having some sort of understanding. Not that Mitsuru was actually interested in the guy, but... Not to act like a Homestuck, but it truly was a kisemesitude. Malachi didn’t pity him the way everyone else on the boat did. Malachi was a wild card through and through, and that was exactly what made him so reliable. Mitsuru trusted Malachi, in some weird way, to keep clashing with him, to keep laughing in his face, even while he was (half-assedly) trying to to kill him, to keep being Malachi.

And then, he died.

Mitsuru didn’t want to believe it at first. He didn’t, really, until Monobear told him that Malachi’s corpse wasn’t smiling. And it was hard to take, because Mitsuru had started to think of Malachi as a constant — an annoying ass constant, sure, but not someone who was actually going to get killed.

(Because if Malachi could be killed, what did that say about what was in store for him?)

It was a sobering trial, for sure.

Fast forward to the second mastermind vote, where Malachi was under fire. Sure, the evidence suggested that it was Malachi, and Mitsuru sure as hell wasn’t going to trust his gut feeling over the evidence. But in his gut, part of him was sure all along that Malachi wasn’t their guy. He’d have been disappointed if he was. That would have been too predictable, and Malachi was anything but predictable.

Didn’t mean he had to be happy about getting it wrong, but at least he wasn’t disappointed.

Mitsuru hates him. Oh, yes, he hates him. But it’s an active hatred, not something born of apathy. That was why he refused to laugh at Malachi’s death — hatred isn’t the opposite of love. Apathy is. He tried to act like it didn’t matter to him at all, because if he showed he cared in his own twisted way, if he laughed, then he knew that Malachi would have been laughing right back at him from the afterlife.

Mitsuru Kouzo’s story begins long before the actual Mitsuru Kouzo. It doesn’t even really begin with the Kouzos as a familial unit.

Anzu Kobashigawa and Akio Kouzo were the definition of cliche high school sweethearts. It was every AU shipper’s dream come true. Their friends always joked that they made their vows in their graduation clothes. All in good fun, they laughed. It was clear the two were hopelessly in love.

Sadly, for them, love couldn’t conquer all.

Depending on your point of view, there are actually four Kouzo children. You’ll never see the oldest in photographs. Jin Kouzo was pronounced dead on what was supposed to be his birthday. The young couple was devastated. Of course they were devastated. But it didn’t end there.

“Research on the heredity of depression within families shows that some individuals are more likely to develop the illness than others. If you have a parent or sibling that has had major depression, you may be 1.5 to 3 times more likely to develop the condition than those who do not have a close relative with the condition.”

Nurture watered nature’s seed: Anzu’s mother and great-grandfather had both struggled with the disease. For some, medication is an option; for Anzu’s mother, it had completely the opposite effect, and Anzu refused to risk it in herself. She would just... live as best as she could. Maybe talk to a therapist. She could get by.

(See, she told herself that, but how could she get by when she couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning?)

If only you could pay your bills with love. Fortunately, Akio was dedicated to making ends meet, and took up a variety of odd jobs besides his day job teaching. Unfortunately, this left Anzu at home alone much of the time, which wasn’t helpful for her condition in the least. That is, until Keiichi was born.

And then, two years later, Mitsuru. (The one we all know and love.)

And then, two years after that, Mika.

As the oldest, Keiichi felt a certain degree of responsibility towards his siblings. And so, in lieu of their workaholic father, he stepped up as a sort of “father” figure. Big shoes for a five-year-old to fill. While it did make for some cute scenes in the playground — “It’s okay, Mitsuwu, I have the band-aids!” — it was a metric fuckton of mental stress for a young child to take on. In short: Keiichi Kouzo grew up long before he should have for the sake of the family.

Certainly a responsible young man, taking after his father like that. As for Mitsuru? He was much quieter, much more subdued, much more... sensitive, strange as it is that such a word could have ever applied to him. He read. He drew. All of these he did in his room, the world outside being scary as it was. But he admired his brother, and looked after his sister, when he needed to. It was an odd life, but not a bad one.

Then, as it usually goes in these kinds of stories, school started up and everything went to shit.

It wasn’t a friendly school to begin with, and Mitsuru stuck out just enough to earn the dubious title of Most Bulliable Kid In The Class. They called him names. They pushed him around. Mitsuru was terrified. He was just a simple farmer boy trying to get through life quietly, but these kids...

Clearly the solution was to isolate himself even more.

(That wasn’t the solution at all, but that was what he did.)

Keiichi was aware of the bullying. There was no way he couldn’t be. But although he’d grown up before he should have, he still had only two years of experience on his brother. And the stress of dealing with his emotionally distant mother, and his physically distant father, and his increasingly difficult to deal with sister (because how was he supposed to take care of a little girl —)

All his life, Keiichi had seen his mother as a lost cause. Someone he’d tried so hard to help, but just couldn’t do anything for, even though he had no idea the depth of what plagued her. So he eventually learned to just... not touch her.

The day Keiichi noticed the parallels between their mother and Mitsuru was the day that Mitsuru became another lost cause.

(He’d focus on helping Mika. Mika wasn’t a lost cause, he could still do something to save Mika —)

(And Mika was so young, but she knew that something was terribly wrong, and she was frustrated, so the only thing to do was to take it out on her older brother, because he was the only one who would actually respond.)

And so the years passed, and so Mitsuru's relationship with his brother deteriorated, and so he became all but a stranger in his own home.

And the other kids wouldn’t leave him the fuck alone.

He was eleven. It was a particularly bad day. He’d skipped the day before, which he knew would make it worse, because then they’d call him a coward, and that was exactly what they did, and that was —

Well, the straw that broke the poor boy’s back, to be precise.

He ran home early in tears that day and all but had a nervous breakdown in the quiet of his room, quiet because he knew that nobody would be able to help, and... quiet because, suddenly, he had a thought. What if what they said about him was... was all true? What if he was a freak? What if he was gross? What if, what if, what if, he mused...

If he was all those things... if he embraced them, if he was proud of them...

Would he have any reason to be upset?

... Could he... could he win?

And in that moment, he resolved to do just that. He would become the most detestable person imaginable. He would stop taking care of his hygiene, even going so far as to put petroleum jelly in his hair to emphasize its greasiness. So what if they laughed at him? He’d laugh right back. He’d be rude, nasty, downright revolting, and then they’d know to never mess with him. How could they degrade him when he was already degrading himself?

... It worked, kind of. A horrible way to make friends, but a great way to drive people away. He had built up a terrifying reputation of sorts, and he’d be damned if he let that one get taken away from him. He had to have control of something in his life. So fuck his classmates. Fuck Keiichi. Fuck them all, because in the end, the only one who helped him was him.

(And, y’know, might be worth mentioning... another great way to terrify people is through horror games.)