Chapter Text
The first thing he felt upon waking was a dull bodily pain. It was the kind of pain that lingered after the anesthetics had worn off, a vague memory left in the nerves reminding his mind of the trauma his body experienced during surgery.
But it felt different. His body felt different. He’d had surgeries before – torn ligaments from a soccer game, an inflamed appendix – neither of which elicited this strange incongruity he now felt in each joint, at every juncture of skin, between each muscle and its corresponding bone. He tried to think of reasons behind these sensations and realized his thoughts were jumbled and that for the moment, he had been consigned not to do or to think, but to feel.
The overwhelmingly prevailing feeling was that this body was foreign, like an ill fit. His eyeballs creaked as he lifted his lids, rolling uncomfortably in sockets they were clearly not designed for. With each minuscule muscle contraction he attempted in an effort to sit up, he discovered similar, intense aches, aggregating and springing up through his nerves until it felt as if entire sections of his torso were begging to be torn away from the puzzle slots they had been forced into. Amidst the mess of agony signals in his brain, the first coherent thought emerged.
This body is not mine.
The second one was, but why wouldn’t it be? Am I dead?
“You’re awake,” he heard a voice say.
He could only assume that the voice belonged to his attending doctor, presumably the one who saved his life. He tried to muster an expression of gratitude, but his mandibles shifted awkwardly.
“Don’t speak. You should get some rest, Kirito-kun.”
He nodded, feeling the pangs in his neck vertebrae. Shifting back down into his cot, his eyes passed inadvertently over his right hand.
Almost immediately, he recognized it.
The memory flooded him, as grotesquely vivid as a dump of acid. Shimizu Maki had held his hand tight in both of hers, seconds before the plane ruptured at its seams upon impact and tore her limbs from her body. It was the last thing he remembered before he blacked out, and there was no mistaking the contour of that hand, the slightly shorter ring finger, the paleness of the skin…
It took his ears a few seconds to register his own scream.
He was not sure who his tear ducts used to belong to, and he doubted Masuzaki remembered either. He figured they might have been Maki’s, or perhaps Riku’s or Kyohei’s. All he knew was that whoever did own them probably did not use them very often, because the first time he cried, it felt as though his tears were irrigating freshly dug canals on their way out through the corners of his eyes. It felt oddly pleasurable, and almost excessively so. It dawned on him, the irony of enjoying an act rooted in unimaginable grief.
Even after Masuzaki’s lengthy explanation, Kamui still did not understand why the transplant researchers could not have run their experiment on someone else, using body parts of nameless corpses that man did not know or cherish. Even after accepting the doctor’s justification that the surgery would contribute to life-saving science, he failed to see why it was at all necessary to stitch together the brain matter of his classmates and implant into him memories of their last moments.
He stopped sleeping at night, preferring to close his eyes during the day, when street noises would drown out their dying words and the daylight would suppress the images of their mutilated bodies.
He cried often.
For the first seven years, he was immobile. Masuzaki’s sponsoring company, the Tougane Foundation, supplied Kamui with not only a residence, but also a helper drone that took care of him and equipped him with locomotive ability. Unsurprisingly, he could not return to school, but he was quickly put on a homeschool regimen led by a team of education drones also provided by the foundation. A bright and inquisitive boy fascinated by the world of knowledge his cybernetic professors bestowed upon him, Kamui never complained about this setup and was thankful that the Tougane Foundation was willing to do so much. He was a bit perplexed as to why his parents were not allowed to visit, but since he was never very close to them, the issue simply dropped from his mind after a while.
Kamui’s favorite subjects were computer science and holo-design. At first, when he read about and began to idolize a wheelchair-bound early-21st-century cosmologist named Stephen Hawking, he had wanted to pursue physics in Hawking’s honor. However, he eventually concluded that physics was too theoretical and abstract for his practical, hands-on taste. Kamui craved concrete pursuits he could sink his teeth into, and programming was a passion well-befitting of him. As he explored the many applications of computer science, holographic art drew him in: there was something about manifesting beautiful colors and images using bite-sized pieces of text, like he was a painter with a keyboard, that he found poetic – and Kamui wasn’t a particularly poetic young man. Being of the visual sort, he continued to prefer manga to books as he did in his early childhood, much to the dismay of his literature professor. Kamui would try to convince Fukuda-sensei every other week that the hundred-year old “Monster” was educational for its historical value, but would get shot down.
It turned out, too, that both programming and holo-design worked with his daily schedule: staying up long nights to code wasn’t a problem for him.
For those first seven years, keeping his Psycho-Pass clear was probably his biggest challenge. Periodically, a traumatic memory or a bout of existential hopelessness would visit him, and the change in hue would be picked up by his helper drone’s daily health-monitoring cymatic scan. When this happened, he would be administered medication, which was adequate but never completely effective, leaving him with minute deteriorations that were individually negligible but became significant as they piled up over time. While it was a constant source of stress to see a rise in hue (which was clearly not a beneficial cycle), Kamui thought the idea of the Psycho-Pass was poetic in itself, and frequently wondered about the basis of its programming. He thought it was beautiful that it represented sound minds with light, pastel colors and distressed minds with darker, glaring ones, and it gave him a sort of sick satisfaction seeing his own color grow more intense and vivid over the course of several months.
The very last time his Psycho-Pass was scanned, he was yellow-green, a vibrant, shocking color he was satisfied with. He would go on to use this as his default color, the color he assumed he never changed from, but the truth was that there came a day when he stopped knowing at all.