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After every single neural incident he had come to witness over his career, Chikara had learned to dissociate himself from what he saw. He learned to put up cold, cold walls that after a while grew strong enough to protect him from even the most devastating scenes of men and women ripped from the drift and made to suffer the death that hurt while it killed.
And then Hajime happens. Chikara watches Tooru crash and burn and smolder, turn from human to a million pieces of hate and regret and bone-deep longing for release from the torment of having to live as a shadow -- empty, weightless, sheer remnants of the light that once was. He watches Oikawa Tooru fade into the gray, with nothing more than a faint echo of life left in the way his eyes looked at Chikara in disdain.
(”Stop trying to keep me alive, Ennoshita,” he tells Chikara once, twice, thrice, until one day he just stops and stares and asks with his whole body and soul for Chikara to just kill him already. “Please,” Tooru whispers, dead in every single way but for the heart that keeps beating in his chest, treacherous, unyielding, following Hajime’s orders to the very last second. “I can’t do this, Chikara, please.”
Chikara throws up that night, and doesn’t fall asleep even with the pills.)
After Tooru, Chikara had been so sure nothing else could get to him the same way.
He gets the call from Miyagi’s second base and hears as much as two full sentences before nausea hits him in the face and leaves him gasping for air. Chikara almost faints. Almost, but doesn’t, because fainting required the ability to let go. Chikara cannot let it go.
(After Tooru, Chikara had been so sure.)
He arrives to a sight that freezes the blood in his veins. He feels his skin turn to ice, feels his breath fail to leave his lungs, feels the carefully-built wall thundering in his chest as it falls to the image of his friend on the floor, more animal than person, more dead than the many corpses Chikara saw.
(After Tooru, Chikara thought he was sure enough.)
The days and nights with Koushi are the longest Chikara has ever known. Chikara would call them terrifying, except they’re not when compared to the hours he is left alone. Flashbacks of what he sees when he enters Koushi’s room flood him every time, tearing a new hole into his gut, bringing him tears, leaving him feeling useless. Koushi, on the floor of his hospital room, screaming and writhing, digging his nails into his arms and leaving foot-long gashes that bled into the carpet; Koushi, in bed, shackled to the railings, screaming and writhing, hazel eyes wide open in fear and mourning, pleading with the ghost of his other half, speaking to the memory that Chikara knows is a never-ending nightmare—
Koushi, on the floor again, wrists bloody from the handcuffs he forcibly removed, screaming into the night over and over again—
“Daichi! Daichi, take me with you! Take me with you! TAKE ME WITH YOU!”
Koushi, on the floor, days and days later, kneeling and holding the dog tag in both hands, praying, crying, begging Chikara to kill him, kill him now, kill him so he’s dead, he can’t do it, Chikara, I can’t do it, end it now, I don’t want to, I don’t need to live, Chikara, just let me go already, it wouldn’t stop, it doesn’t stop, please make it stop already—
(After Koushi, Chikara does not know anymore.)