Bamboo Grove [Atsushi x Reader] ✓

10. ɢᴏᴏᴅ-ʟᴜᴄᴋ ᴄʜᴀʀᴍ

Counting days was made possible through glasses of lukewarm water forcing medication into the stomach. It was just a matter of time until either the consumption of the small drug or death parole granted you eternal sleep.

Lenient treatment shown towards you by prison guards and higher-ups had undoubtedly been the doing of the government worker you'd met-someone whose name escaped your mind. You supposed it sought to relieve your anxieties, whatever those may have been, but it proved to have adverse effects instead. From the little interaction you could have during mealtimes with neighbouring inmates, you learnt that you had been exempt from an ordinary prison life; perhaps the guards felt sorry for you just like the orphanage director had felt... Did this mean you'd been abandoned again?

You're an orphan. You should not be afraid of being alone.

Recollections of the past flooded your mind, daunting every idle second into hours of insomnia. Empathy did not reside in the myriad of eyes that watched your every move, nor were you able to silence the complaints of children echoing within the walls, begging to enter the Bamboo Grove to play-to hunt. Their muddy feet moistened the concrete they walked over, the tatami mat, the walls closing in on you. They sat and watched, with scissors as small as their crimson fingers, blank stares in their smiles.

The face of the orphanage director had never seemed so clear behind their own shadows, grey eyes dully glaring. His lips moved, twisted, curled, but no words were heard; perhaps covering your ears while shielding your head closer to your knees had made you deaf to this.

As an orphan, you were always meant to die alone.

You sought to see nothing but darkness as you shut your eyes tightly, knees brought towards your chest to support the weight of your forehead as you covered your ears, trying to silence the laughter, the cries, the voices of the children. Aido Takeuchi sat amongst them, quiet, with his back pressed against the wall, neck severed through, bleeding. He was dead. He was dead but the children didn't care.

Your immaturity resulted in a child being killed, [Y/N].

No attempt at flooding the sink in your cell had washed away the blood from your hands, nor had it ever been enough to flood the cell in its entirety. Your flesh was still red as a guard pulled you back, another turned the tap off, and Takeuchi stood by the sink, paddled his hands in the draining bowl of water and washed the blood from his neck.

"It doesn't smell like tomato sauce," he echoed into the deafening silence, blistered hands melting at the touch of his own wound. "I'm bleeding, [Y/N]. I'm bleeding really badly."

Frankenstein's monster was a savage; through a lack of nurture and discipline, the most heinous crimes had been committed. Murder. You, Frankenstein's little monster, had been born with the ability to kill, not human, far from human. You were nothing but broken fragments of the deceased brought together, finding sullied singularity in watching those who brought you to life crumble, crumble and die, die and decompose in your memories.

The orphanage director had been morally forced to accept you despite your nature, trusting the words of a woman more than his gut. With precautions and instances of closure, he had issued orders to amend a uniform to fit your needs, to conceal what he considered to make you less human than other children your age: scars from the Bamboo Grove.

Although he ought to have informed you before your eviction from the orphanage, the director had never quite found the opportunity to tell you that your ability had been the reason why you'd been abandoned. He'd let years of solitude and artworks painted across your limbs and back pass by until you'd been given possession of a wrinkled letter which had predestined your stay in the orphanage. Mama's handwriting blotched the page, small, rushed, squeezed into a single sheet of paper.