Chapter Text
[The tape clicks on.]
Sakasaki: So this is where Oukawa sends us.
Itsuki: Can we keep moving? I don’t want to spend too long here.
Sakasaki: Why, what’s wrong?
[Quietly, someone groans, interrupting them.]
Itsuki: That’s what’s wrong.
[Someone speaks, weak and hoarsely, but he is familiar. He speaks as though wracked with sobs, shaking and pained.]
?: Eh..? Come to watch me die?
Sakasaki: Excuse me?
?: Have you come to watch me die?
Itsuki: Hello again.
?: Hello, who are- oh, it’s you. I know you.
Itsuki: You came to speak with the Archives.
?: Did I? Did that happen… Yes, right, that guy, um, Mayo?
Sakasaki: Mayoi Ayase?
?: I remember him. Lovely.
[Static builds just slightly.]
Sakasaki: What’s your name?
?: Niki Shiina.
You’re like that- that guy who questioned me, aren’t you? You can do the same thing, can’t you?
Sakasaki: Sorry, what?
Shiina: You can do that questioning thing.
Sakasaki: I don’t know what you’re talking about, I-
Shiina: A Watcher. That’s what you are, a vulture, come to pick at me before I die. It won’t be a very good meal, you know.
Sakasaki: Watcher, that’s what Rei said too. Then, if I’m a Watcher, what are you?
Shiina: I’m doomed.
Itsuki: This is no use, let’s just go, that HiMERU creature can’t be far from here-
Shiina: HiMERU?
Sakasaki: You know of him?
Shiina: I know him.
Sakasaki: Tell me everything you know.
Shiina: Not just- not just yet. I’ll probably keel over before you even get one word out of me. Trade, you feed me, I feed you.
Sakasaki: Deal.
Itsuki: This isn’t wise, Natsume, you know, it’s not-
Sakasaki: What do you feed off?
Shiina: It’s very literal. Just people for me, I don’t get the luxury of statements or- or that sort of thing.
Sakasaki: Alright, here. Is that enough?
Shiina: For now.
[There is the sickening sound of wet meat being torn from bone, the sharp gasp of pain from Sakasaki, as the meat squelches, Shiina shudders and then, only Sakasaki is breathing heavily, the choked kind of breath taken when you have cried too much too much to let air pass through your throat.]
Itsuki: That’s surely not worth a statement.
Sakasaki: Would you question me if I said I think it is?
Shiina: It comes back, don’t worry.
[As he speaks, a strange noise like snapping bones and clicking joints is heard and Sakasaki’s breathing grows more erratic as it rises in a gruesome crescendo, the odd mix of wet and dusty, dry sounds like nails on a chalkboard, as the skin and muscle ripped away begins to grow back to cover the wound.]
Sakasaki: It’s- it’s back. How did you..?
Shiina: It’s how it works. This’ll keep me going, I think, just until I can get more. Go on. I’ll uphold my end.
Sakasaki: A statement?
Shiina: If you like.
Sakasaki: Statement of Niki Shiina, regarding his eating habits, statement taken direct from subject, 19th of February, 2023, by Natsume Sakasaki, head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Statement begins.
Shiina: When you ask most people - and I have asked most people - where their morals lie with cannibalism, they’ll often say the same thing. They think it’s entirely off-limits, up there with murder, unless it’s necessary. But where do you draw the line of ‘necessary’?
A lot of people reference that one story, I don’t know if it’s real, where there were a couple explorers who got trapped up a mountain. They were stuck and then they started eating each other, until they were saved. Everyone agrees they’ll never eat another human until they’re in mortal danger. But what if you’re always in mortal danger? What if there’s no real, actual consequences but your own conscience? What if it just hurts and then, it’s gone and both of you keep on going?
I can’t stop eating. It started when I was a child. I was a very, very small child. Light. The doctor told my mother to feed me more, but that it was nothing truly wrong, just that I was small. Nothing else. I was fed more and I stayed small. I got smaller, periodically, and I was eating constantly. More and more, until I was finally, and I think my mother was just tired of buying so much baby formula, ready to be weaned. I devoured everything and I never really got bigger. I was so hungry all the time. I didn’t stop crying, unless I was actually eating and at that point, to feed me so constantly was eating into my parent’s funds, their life, and I never stopped being hungry.
My dad was, aptly, a chef. Kind of a celebrity chef, not anymore, now he’s just a regular one, I think, I haven’t seen him in a while but… my dad was good with me. He kept feeding me. Once, when I was seven, he came home from work, smelling… off. I have a pretty good sense of smell, you know, but he was smelling like… metal. Like old cars. When I was seven, he came home and he brought home meat. It smelt like meat and it tasted like meat, but it satiated me in a way that I could never, ever describe. It was like being in a sinking boat and then, finally, finally, patching the crack in the hull, just for a moment, pitching out the rising water. I don’t want to think about where my father got the meat from. I know, deep down, but I don’t want to think about it, as much as I did eat it.
But my dad couldn’t be there forever. He left. I know why he left, no one could do what he did for that long and not leave, not flee, in the hopes the he wouldn’t be caught but he did leave. And he did leave me behind. I began to waste away. Normal food couldn’t stave off the rising tide of deep, ravenous hunger, couldn’t stop my stomach from growling like some terrible beast, didn’t stop me from seeing everyone who had the misfortune of passing my sight as cuts of meat. I had learnt, from my father, where the best meat comes from. I had learnt who the best meat comes from, I could smell it. I had not yet fallen to carrying it out yet, but I knew, and I knew the time was coming soon, when I would get too hungry not to do it.
He was just in the wrong place at the right time. Rinne. He was homeless at the time, I never asked and he extended me the same grace, and I was… I think it was in the way a cat will take itself away when it knows it’s dying. I was looking for somewhere to die. An alley, like this one, someone desperate, like this one. He was sleeping. I knew it was wrong but I was too hungry to care, I wanted to live too much to care. I had rolled up his sleeve and- bit down. I don’t know when my teeth had gotten so sharp. I ate from him. I still had a sense of restraint, at this point of starvation, not yet to the point of fully devouring him but I picked his right forearm fully clean, to white bone.
He never woke up, not through the entire time. Only after, when I was sobbing, finally full, finally afloat, did Rinne wake up, to a small boy, younger than him, me, surely covered in blood, his blood, and he must’ve been in pain, but he- he looked down, at his arm and I looked too. It was so strange, I could barely describe it or think or move, but his- the tendons and ligaments and meat of his arms reached out to one another, like slick, wet tendrils of flesh, reaching out and taking their hands, covering the bone once more like a trellis, overgrown, only the sound of it, that terrible sound, cracking and popping and all the while, sliding, smooth and thick with blood, until all that was left was a neat, raw and pink patch of scar, new and fresh. It never went away. I took Rinne into my apartment and he’s fed me. He’s fed me well. He’s more scar than untouched skin, after these long years. He swears he doesn’t mind. I almost believe him.
I think he stays with me sort of transactionally. Like this, see, I feed him, he feeds me. I have a good job, I make good money, I keep the apartment and I make him food. I still enjoy cooking, even now, even if the smell of the meat turns my stomach a little, and he enjoys eating it, so who am I to deny him? He says he’s fine with it. He says he doesn’t mind it, when I eat. He likes to watch, sometimes. Doesn’t even cry anymore. Sometimes, I worry that I’ve taken a bite out of a part of Rinne, instead of just his flesh. I hope it was nothing important.
I’ve taken a bite out of everything I see. I can’t help it. I have to. I can’t help it. I have to live. I have to. I- I’ve been faced, every single day of my life, since I was born, to make the choice, my life or someone else’s? And every single time, I choose myself. I choose me, I choose to live, it doesn’t help that they heal, that they are fixed, that there’s really nothing that happened, because there’s still that scar. It still hurts, they still cry out in such sickening pain that I wish I had chosen death, but I can never. I can never. I will always choose myself and it sickens me.
I met HiMERU through Kohaku and I met Kohaku out of chance. He was tracking some- oh, some guy who used to frequent the cafe, on HiMERU’s behalf, Kazehaya? Something like that. He ran into me, smelt what I- what I am and let me take from him, same place as you, and he lead me to HiMERU. That’s it. He just thought I might be usefu or that HiMERU could benefit me, but I don’t know why. I’ve never eated from HiMERU. I’m not sure he is edible, even for someone like me. The first time I met him, I just… froze. He was so deeply wrong, when I saw him and I didn’t even know why. His face was like melted plastic, moulded into what was almost a person, but was just so very wrong. He’s terrible to look at and I can never quite keep eye-contact, until I looked away, until I had to turn. He would taste bad. I keep thinking if I did bite down, instead of me, taking something from him, he would take something from me. I don’t know why I’m so sure. I just- I feel like it. And I don’t want to become like HiMERU, much more than I don’t want to die.
I- I don’t know what I’m becoming. If I’m becoming anything at all or if I always was this. Kohaku says I’m like him. I was a person once and something, one of the fears he talks about, took me over to feed off of me. But I think, deep down, I’m closer to HiMERU. I’ve always been this. I’ve always been insatiable. I’ve always been a monster. I just- I can’t die. You understand, right? I can’t die. Not like this. And I’m still not sure if that thing that marked me or made me or that I am some extension of is using me to farm the fear of the people I’m eating or if it’s my own fear of what I’m becoming - what I maybe already am - that is so delicious to it.
[He sobs, suddenly, cracking through the silence, and Sakasaki quickly speaks.]
Sakasaki: Statement ends.
Itsuki: What?
Sakasaki: Something’s here.
Itsuki: Excuse me?
Sakasaki: It’s looking at me- at us.
[Something laughs, soft and low and scratchy.]
?: As expected. Such keen eyes, Archivist.
Well, come on. Looks like the heavens are about ready to open.
Sakasaki: Your name.
?: Demanding. Rinne Amagi. Just here to escort you.
Sakasaki: Do we need an escort?
Amagi: Trust me, in here? Your eyes won’t get you far.
Sakasaki: Shu?
Itsuki: Hm? I met your younger brother once.
Amagi: That’s right. Sent him mostly to look after our Niki.
Itsuki: Yes. He seems to be telling the truth.
Sakasaki: Okay, good. I’ll go then.
Amagi: C’mon. You too, Niki, get up-
[Shiina groans and is hefted to his feet.]
Sakasaki: Where is it?
Amagi: Just behind here, I just need to-
[Static builds and there’s a quiet sound, like an old, out-of-tune fiddle, just slightly off.]
Amagi: Watchers first?
[The tape shuts off as the door slams behind the two of them.]
