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After the elation of living was subdued by the monotony of day to day life, everything crashed.
The buzz from their connection had faded, and finally he could see clearly. Junpei was used and then seemingly discarded. The woman who had been a part of him had vanished without even a thank you.
He had seen so many bodies... too many bodies. In this timeline, there was minimal death, but the deaths that had occurred were all too cruel. The mangled corpse of the ninth man was a fine indicator of this. There were easier ways to kill, if killing could even be justified. Bombs and trickery were certainly not a pleasant way to die.
Junpei knew of pleasant ways to die. He had experienced this in other timelines. Like a knife slipping into your soft skin while you drowned and slowly fizzled out. He did not get the grace of fizzling out like everyone else, though. Even after he had died and died and died he was still living, and if it wasn't for her...
If it wasn't for Kanny, he wouldn't have given a shit.
Being stabbed in the back by Hongou wasn't horrible. Hongou may have been manipulative, but Junpei certainly did not love Ace. Junpei didn't even entirely blame him, considering most of the murders were thanks to Akane's manipulations. When Ace stabbed him in the back, it was a gift. A sweet release from a fruitless timeline.
Being stabbed in the back by Akane was hell. She didn't need a knife. All she needed was to search him, know him, become him, and then leave without a trace like all of the haunting deaths from previous timelines.
He hated that he loved her. Were his feelings even real, or had she created them with her morphogenetic astral projection bullshit? Was anything real?
Junpei wasn't the type to expect a reward for saving someone. He considered himself to be a pretty decent guy, heroic even. He had saved so many lives on that ship. It seemed the only life he couldn't save was his own. Was this the true meaning of heroism? Because if so, he wanted none of it.
He was through playing the action hero. He would find Akane Kurashiki, no matter the cost. If she didn't care about bloodshed, why should he? After all, Junpei and Akane had been one and the same at one point. When he found her, she would have nowhere to run. She would have to confront his feelings. She would have to become a part of him once more. Junpei was a fucking disaster without her. He craved to be whole, in any way he could get that.
Marriage. He had to find her, marry her. Become her.
She had stabbed him in the back and he didn't even care. Junpei would have been honored to even be Akane’s dog. Anything to fill his gaping hole.
Alcohol brought back the buzz temporarily, and the neighborhood whores got to know Junpei rather fast. Sometimes, in his drunken stupor, he would even find himself with a man. It numbed the pain, if nothing else. Intimacy was the closest he ever got to becoming a part of someone else. Stable relationships were out of the question, though. The fact that he couldn’t help but moan Kanny’s name in the heat of the moment was indicator enough. Those who attempted to seriously pursue him were pushed away with a scowl.
Occasionally, he would keep tabs on his teammates from the game. He couldn’t abandon them even if he tried. But in the end, they were nothing to him.
She was his mission, she was his puzzle. He had to seek a way out of this hell.
The knife she left in his back acted as a tourniquet. He daren’t rip it out. Instead, he would wait for her soft touch, her big brown eyes, and girlish charm to remove it safely, or push it further in.