Rearranging Fate | Tokyo Revengers x OC

133 • Elizabetha Bloodbath #4

"What...what did you just say?"

He must've misheard. That was the only explanation available. Because there was just no way Shinichiro was a time leaper. There was just no way that Shinichiro and Sanzu went to such great lengths just to save him. There was no way that everything that had happened so far and would happen in the future was because someone had rewritten the whole clockwork for him. Because if that was the case, then it made the current situation sound more and more like bullshit.

Because if that was the case, then everything was his fault.

"Why her?" He was the one who died. He was the one who the clock turned back for. He was the one who made the time leaper and the trigger move. He was the reason why the current clockwork was as it was. Him, not Reina. It was all him. "Why? Why Reichin? If it's me, then why is she the one who...why is she...?"

"Why is it different?" Izana asked, tilting his head to the side with his arms crossed, looking so fucking relaxed that Mikey wanted to claw his stupid face out of sheer frustration and spite. "You were fine with Reina taking all your burdens so far, so why is it different now? Or are you just realizing that you are the center of her pain?"

"I never asked her to take it!"

"It doesn't make a difference," replied the elder brother. "Just so you know, the clock may not move for her, but she was, in more ways than one, tied to four time leapers."

Ryou who used her for his own gains, that homeless man who took the power from under her nose, Shinichiro who got that power because she didn't kill Ryou, and Takemichi who now has here as his trigger. Whether she wanted to or not and whether it was deliberate or not, both her life and fate had been tied with many stray cogwheels.

"Doesn't that mean..." Mikey swallowed the lump in his throat, his hands beginning to claw his scalp. "I...Takemitchy, Reichin, and Shinichiro...none of them would've suffered if...if I had just died."

It was all his fault.

"I wonder about that." Izana shrugged. "Shinichiro went as far as to turn back time for you. If you had died again, maybe he would've done something worse." Maybe he would've become something worse than Reina, killing as many people as he could if there was even a hundredth of a one percent chance he could bring Mikey back to life. "Who knows?"

Mikey wasn't entirely at fault, not when his only sin was being so loved that Shinichiro went as far as going back in time for him. Izana knew he couldn't blame Mikey or Shinichiro, not when he knew damn well he would do the same and even more for Reina. For his sister, nothing was too much. For his sister, he would do anything. Whether it be committing murder, getting shot, following her through a bloodstained path of misery, and even leaping through time. He would do them all for Reina.

But unlike Mikey, Reina was alive to stop him.

That was why Izana could only watch and do whatever he could to help her as she continued to drown in whatever darkness she had been cursed with. That was why Izana cursed the world and the people who had changed the clockwork into what it currently was. That was why Izana wanted nothing more than to break every single bone in Mikey's body and tear apart every single one of his muscles if it would forcibly and permanently stop him.

Mikey felt like screaming and crying and punching something at the same time. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fucking fair. If he was the one who defied fate by living, then why must others die for him? If that was the case, then he would rather be the one who died.

"Reichin already paid the price for her life. Hers and her siblings." The people she had killed, from Victoire Marseille to Hiroshi Ryou to everybody else, were the lives taken to balance the scale. Reina had paid for all the anomaly existences she had created upon Ryou's leap through time. She didn't need to be doing the same because of Shinichiro and Takemichi. She didn't need to take his spot. She didn't need to be doing any of this. "Why does she need to pay for mine too!?"