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yandere-toons · 1 year

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DEATH AND DIGNITY

Yandere!Death the Kid – Platonic Scenario

WARNING: use of firearms, strong violence, toxic mindset.

WORD COUNT: 4.881

HOUR AFTER HOUR, from the time the sun climbed up the stars to the time it sank below the horizon, with every fanciful stroke of a tired pen, Kid poured onto paper the thoughts that would not leave him.

These thoughts gnawed at his mind like termites at rotten wood, consuming it bit by bit until what once was stable now teetered on the precipice of collapse. This flight of passion was a waking nightmare that haunted his every movement.

His right hand, which clutched the pen as though glued to it, exploded into a fit of shakes after forcing itself to remain stiff for a final sentence. The words that lay before him disgusted him more than the most fetid odour, and with an anguished cry, Kid tore the page free of the notebook.

“It's not good enough!” His yell was dripping with frustration, frustration with himself, the look of the letter and its intended recipient. The noise carried on the silent air of the mansion and shattered the peace of many a slumber.

It rounded corners and slipped underneath closed doors, ushering two pairs of haggard footsteps from a plush bed. Kid was deaf to this series of thumps, for what filled his ears was a combination of mumbles and rustles.

A few strips of paper had been severed from the rest and stuck to the spine while Kid pounded the majority into a ball and hurled it into the metal wastebasket beside the desk. As the wastebasket rattled, Kid slammed his elbows into the flat top of the desk, hunched over in his seat, and cradled his face in his palms.

“Kid?” Liz called, surprise and concern intertwined. “You okay?” She hesitated to ask, fearful of what had dragged such pain from him in the dead of night.

Bare feet brushed stone as Liz took another step towards him, and this one brought her to the foot of the desk. She looked down at the back of Kid's head and leaned forward to get a better view of him.

Kid did not meet her gaze. Perhaps, he had deemed himself unworthy of it, or perhaps, he had not the strength. “If I don't get it right, they'll think I'm garbage.” The misery in his voice told the story of someone who had given up on proving anyone wrong.

Liz saw how many pages were missing from the notebook and how packed the wastebasket was becoming, and she understood how steep the cliff was from which Kid dangled. “No, they won't. Just go with whatever you have left.”

On any of the nights that came before, he went to sleep at the same rigid bedtime. On this night, Liz observed, he quested for something that eluded him.

His eyes were glazed with manic confusion and open wide despite the dark circles surrounding them. His fingers danced across the desk as if it was hot to the touch, finding solace in digging each nail into the wooden surface.

Kid finally blinked after a full minute of staring at the next blank page in the notebook. In a shaky breath that teased the arrival of tears, he whispered, “I can't stop, Liz.”

It was not a declaration of determination or some great desire, but rather, it was a desperate recitation of the fact that he was, at that moment, as he had been at countless others, a slave to his obsessive thoughts.

They looped in his mind without end, threatening devastation if they were ignored and withholding his ability to relax until he wrote a particular string of words exactly as he had imagined them in his head.

Dozens of failed attempts sat in a stack inside the wastebasket.

Patty squatted in front of it with a curious laugh, collected a few balls of paper off the top, and began crafting an origami giraffe. She hummed a merry tune as she smoothed the trash and then folded it into a work of art, which earned a slight smile from her big sister.

Kid, however, was dead to everything but the blank page and the pen in his hand. He moved to quell the thoughts that suffocated him, and Liz grabbed his hand and guided it away from the page.

She frowned at the coldness of his skin and narrowed her eyes at his shallow breaths. “Have you had anything to eat today?”

He looked at her as though it was his first time hearing the word “eat” and was puzzled by its lack of apparent relevancy to his task. As the fact that a world existed outside of writing the letter washed over Kid in a slow wave, he turned his head back to the notebook and mumbled, “No. There was no time for that.”

Patty jumped up and spread herself across the desk, lying on her stomach and kicking the air. She stretched her arms towards Kid and shoved an origami giraffe in his face. “Give them this! Everybody loves giraffes!”

If she had taken a pack of crayons to it, one could have mistaken it for a real baby giraffe.

Kid eyed the origami giraffe and instinctively judged whether slicing it in half would produce equal pieces. A vertical slice would, he deduced, and he accepted it with both hands.

* * *

KID'S HOUSE WAS A CASTLE pulled from a gothic storybook, its walls adorned with tentacled skulls and red spikes, and its grass home to a garden of guillotines. Being in it was like stepping into a different universe, one where each room mirrored itself on opposite sides.

Every red-carpeted staircase footed the traffic of dozens of guests, and all the linen-draped tables threw their candlelit shadows upon the stone floor. The floor had been scrubbed and buffed until no scratch was in sight, as you noticed your reflection on the monochromatic rock.

Peering through one of the arched windows of the aptly named Gallows Mansion yielded the moon-tipped glint of a cast-iron fence, its spear-like bars pointing at the purple sky and spreading from a locked gate.

The music of the student body enjoying a break rang loud over the jazzy piano emitting from a gramophone. Its needle traced the grooves in an old disc, tucked into the corner of the walls bordering the right side of the central staircase.

Doing so much as lifting a piece of food from the lines of prearranged plates seemed a disservice, as if you were sullying a priceless creation meant to be looked at, not touched. The air smelt of salads, turkey legs and mashed potatoes with peas, leaving a zesty bunch of crumbs on everyone's tongue but your own.

Kid bopped himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand: “Idiot!” He hissed the word through clenched teeth and pushed his eyes to the floor, his breathing rattled and his once-steady hands curling into fists.

“Of course, they don't like it!” The bite of self-disgust in his voice was potent, but when Kid snuck a glance your way to catch you scanning the other partygoers with boredom, his heart punched his ribcage. “They're not having a good time,” he muttered, “I need to fix this.”

After patting imaginary dust from the clothes he had ironed twice before the party started, Kid took a deep breath through his nose and straightened his posture to the point of stiffness. A stony composure washed over his face and unwound the wrinkles clinging to it.

Kid departed from his group of friends, who were humouring the blue-haired Black☆Star as he stood atop a table and dramatised the events of his latest victory, and only one of them noticed.

The squeak of dress shoes pivoting on the stone floor alerted you to the sight of Kid sliding into the space beside you. He had aligned himself with you, facing the same direction as you and standing at the same distance from the nearest table as you were.

He wore black suspenders over a dark tie and a cedar brown dress shirt, like a classy gent out for a stroll, giving him a muted appearance that would have been easy to overlook in the crowd if not for his half-striped hair.

“I couldn't help but notice that the catering is not to your liking.” Kid recited the line that he had been refining in his head and repeating under his breath on the way over. “Rest assured, the menu will have greatly improved by the next party.”

As he turned to you, his arms came round from behind his back. “In the meantime, please accept this as a token of my apology.”

Kid presented an origami giraffe with the spirit of a chef peeling off the lid of a silver platter. He had closed his eyes, but when his anxieties about somehow grabbing the wrong item sprouted, he reopened them to study the gift in his hands.

“Patty wanted me to give it to you.” He stumbled on the name, as if he had intended to say a different one, but faltered just as the sound came out.

You tucked the giraffe underneath your arm, nodded at him, and offered a smile that Kid had yet to see you bear for any other person. “Tell her it's the finest gift I've ever received.”

Something bloomed on your face, an untroubled excitement that quieted the worries swirling round his mind about whether the dimensions of the paper giraffe were still symmetrical. “I heard about your last assignment!”

It was at that moment that Kid lost himself, his mask of calm slipping to betray unabashed interest. The hunt for maleficent souls had not occurred to him once that night. These villains were as much fair game as a wild hog, yet here he was, fretting about matters that he now wondered if his father would deem trivial.

Your eyes flitted to your pocket, which your free hand dipped inside with a purpose. “It sounds like dangerous work, so I made you this.”

A ringlike shadow flew over Kid, and then a necklace found its place on him. It was symmetrical, just as he would like it to be. It was also homemade, a truth that dawned on him like the first ray of sunshine after a storm.

“It's a good luck charm!” was how you described it, but he was too far gone into a spiral of hopeful theories to register this.

Kid cradled the necklace in the palm of his hand, and he saw the effort you had poured into making it. In that instant, it was a promise, a wish fulfilled, a dream realised.

When he gazed at you again, time had frozen for him. The surrounding chatter about upcoming exams and who had collected how many souls from voices of varying pitches and tones shifted to a similar, insignificant buzz, as did everything else but the rapid beats of his pulse.

His arms began to outstretch towards your face with the awe of someone daring to reach out to something godly. Kid took the sides of your head in his hands, applying a firm yet careful pressure that suggested both the need to admire and the fear of causing ruin.

In a half-breathless whisper, he said, “Of all the souls I've seen, yours possesses symmetry unparalleled.”

It was the type of compliment one might expect to hear while dancing under glittering chandeliers on the marble floor of a ballroom, intimate yet formal. From the mouth of a god who personally folded the tips of every roll of toilet paper in his mansion into triangles and abandoned missions to centre the painting in his living room, it was the type of compliment that had you walking with your head held high.

A wine glass full of apple cider hit the floor and shattered against the stone.

Kid recoiled as if he had been slugged in the gut, a twitch invading his eye while his face warped into a look of pure horror. The shattering of the glass was a high-pitched explosion that clawed his brain, which overflowed with images of the apple cider tainting his spotless floor.

When Kid thrust his head towards the source of the disaster, his gaze met that of Liz, who was standing in front of a nearby table with Patty.

He stormed to her table and arched his back, careful not to step in the orangish puddle of drink and broken glass. “Liz! How could you? Do you have any idea how long it takes to make this floor sparkle?” The words gushed out of his mouth like a waterfall, not stopping to breathe or allow for another's response.

As his agitated rant about needing to scrub the room again rolled over her ears, Liz raised her arm and rubbed the back of her head with a forced chuckle. “Whoops! Guess I'm a little clumsy tonight.”

Patty skipped after her big sister, only to pause and set her mouth agape when she took a peek at you. “Huh?” She tilted her head and leaned towards you with her hands sticking outwards.

“Hey!” shouted Patty, drawing the short word into a lengthy stretch of surprise that pulled joy at her lips. “You're who Kid's always talking about!”

Kid caught his breath mid-sentence, and he veered towards her as panic etched itself across his face. “Patty!” His sheepish outcry reverberated through the atrium and gathered the attention of various partygoers, who disregarded their previous conversations and proceeded to rubberneck.

She turned to him and cocked her head with an innocent hum. “What is it, Kid?”

He dashed behind her and began pushing her back to the table where Black☆Star was devouring his third dish. Patty did not resist, merely staring over her shoulder at him.

As soon as you were out of his sight, the repetitive thoughts returned to swarm his mind like flies flocking to the smell of carrion.

* * *

FROM THE MOMENT that it was flung over his head to the moment that he walked the streets of Death City on this overcast twilight, Kid had not removed the necklace for any reason for even a second.

He kept it near his heart, circling his spearpoint collar and framing his skull brooch of pure metal as if his heart would cease to beat without it.

Liz had glimpsed him cleaning it and polishing it when he thought he was alone, and on three separate occasions, she had questioned him about his preoccupation. “I don't know what you're talking about,” Kid always replied, eyes half-closed with disinterest and tone one of steely resolve. “I'm simply caring for a friend's gift.”

He was chasing a fantasy, and it seemed that everyone except him knew that. Every few minutes, he reached for the necklace and touched it, holding it for a bit to confirm that it had not disappeared since the last time he checked.

Shimmers of a napping sun poked through the cloud bank and dappled the cobblestone road ahead. The rhythm of his footsteps, a deliberate pattern of Kid counting the number of brown and grey stones, was broken by a scream.

It was the scream of glass as it shattered into a downpour of shards jumping on the street, and it dotted the cobblestones where Kid would have rested his feet if not for the hulking man blocking his path.

His mask was akin to the head of a devil, with bicorn ears and a drill-like nose. It glared down at Kid from under the rows and rows of fluorescent lights spewing out of adjacent buildings.

He had donned the red spandex and yellow cape of a superhero from the comic books of yore, but the sack he lugged over his shoulder was brimming with gold bars.

The surprise that had opened Kid's eyes and mouth wide died away with a surge of opportunistic confidence. “You evaded me once, Lupin. I can assure you it will not happen again.” He extended one arm to Patty and the other to Liz, prompting them to exchange brief nods.

The sisters vanished into beams of pinkish-white light, and there in his hands materialised a pair of silver Beretta M9s. Kid held them upside down and crossed his outstretched arms into an X-shape, with his pinkies hooked on the triggers.

“You think I'll just stand here and take it?” was all Lupin bothered to say before his free hand scooped a wooden handle out of his boot.

No sooner than Kid saw the glint of a dagger did he yank the pistols towards his face and form a protective barrier of steel and tailored sleeves.

The blade was so swift and the cut so clean that he was scarcely aware of where it had struck. His ignorance persevered until the glimmer of something caught his eye as it was split in twain and ripped from its home about his neck, and the answer drove a graver pain into him than the sharpest spear.

The necklace, a sliver of yourself that you had so graciously bestowed on Kid, lay battered at his feet.

The shock lasted only for as long as it took him to stumble backwards and regain his footing. He had enjoyed the gift so much that it became indestructible in his mind, and to see it reduced to what a passer-by would call garbage was the most dastardly of transgressions.

It was then that the pang of sorrow, which paralysed him like a snake's venom, bled into a frenzy that shook his heart and twisted his innards into knots. A lonely kind of fear crept up his spine, the kind that saw isolation in crowds and focused on every detail of imperfection.

The slice had been at an angle, dooming one piece to be longer than the other. That cretin, Kid thought, had not the decency to damage it symmetrically. By robbing the necklace of its symmetry, he spat on your hard work and perverted his connection to you.

Thuds of boots on stone approached him in a flurry, and Kid spun his head towards the noise to see Lupin rearing his dagger in preparation for another swing. Kid drew his twin pistols before Lupin could do him any more harm and, at point-blank range, planted two shots in his chest.

“You wretched pig!” Kid bellowed vitriol with the ferocity of a vindictive god, and during that momentary surrender to his darker impulses, that was what he had become.

He pulled the triggers again and again as quickly as they reset. The flashes of light were brilliant and tinged with pink, an oblique hail of his very soul.

To Lupin, who it blew to the ground, and the dagger knocked free of his grasp, it was inescapable like the claws of fate reaching down to take a swipe at him.

The barrage of shots had mangled the body beyond recognition, yet Kid fired at it still. He unloaded his virtually infinite magazine until the bones turned to powder and the cobblestone was chock-full of holes.

His hold on the pistols' grips was ironclad enough to crush a windpipe, a fact that unnerved Liz into shouting through the din, “Kid! You can stop now!”

The shadow of Kid stretched far as he loomed over the dead Lupin. His teeth, clenched until aching, glistened with spit while sweat traced the sides of his head. The incessant twitch in the corners of his lips complemented the wrathful look in his eye, the look of vengeance outpouring.

When the flood of bangs ended, the air, so thick with tension, begged for an encore. Kid swung his arms downward in a manner both snappy and rigid. Trails of smoke wafted from the barrels of the pistols, hissing and crackling.

The chipper, excitable voice of Patty rang out in the coming silence. “Woah! He's got spooky eyes!” Like a child to whom death was a game, she laughed.

As Kid turned back to the necklace and softened his scowl, the rage that had consumed him faded into hollow depths. In its place, a sense of shame swept over him like wind over dunes.

Kid dropped his weapons at once and fell to his knees. The sound of the pistols clattering to either side of his feet, as well as the immediate protests from Liz, went unheard.

For a while, all he could do was stare at the ruined necklace as if at the burial of a dear friend. Terror squeezed his stomach and seized all warmth from him, the anguish about what you might think of his failure to protect your gift, about a mistake that you may believe was intentional or evocative of his shortcomings.

When Kid retrieved the necklace, it was a heap of pieces that would never be whole again. His lips began to quiver, and he became misty-eyed.

He kept pushing the broken ends together, whimpering like a kicked dog when nothing stopped him from pulling them apart as effortlessly as he breathed.

Tears dripped from his eyes and plopped on the skin of his hands in streaks that rolled down the base of his thumbs. Some dangled there on the edges of his fingers, while others plummeted to the cobblestone and stained it with dark spots.

A shudder had begun to invade his body as if a cold wind was blowing through the room that only touched him. His hands closed around the remains of the necklace until his fists could be no tighter, and then Kid slumped in defeat.

“They entrusted me with this.” His voice rose from a desolate whisper to a high-pitched lament that threatened to crack under the tears straining his throat. “And I failed them.”

Even with the towering shape of the DWMA on the horizon, you had never seemed farther away from him than you did now.

Liz looked on, arms akimbo and eyes crinkled in suspense, and debated whether to console him or chastise him.

Patty raised one finger to her chin and observed his woe with a wide-eyed, curious gaze. She had parted her lips slightly, and a howl of laughter was bubbling on them.

“I don't deserve to live anymore,” cried Kid. He pressed his fists against his temples as if his brain was throbbing and wept into the dimly lit expanse of the deserted street.

Liz sighed through her nose and turned to Patty, who bent forward from cackling and slapping her knee. “Come on, Patty.”

The instant she said this, the two sisters knelt at Kid's side. Patty slammed her palm into his back time after time as if she were performing some crude version of the Heimlich maneuver on him. “You gave them a giraffe, so there's no way they can hate you now!”

Liz set her wary eye upon the scattered remains of Lupin, upon that display of a life ended in seconds with barely any trail to prove that it had existed. “Kid, we should tell your dad.”

His head snapped up, and the outflow of tears paused. “Yes,” he mumbled, “yes, you're right.” Kid stuffed each piece of the necklace into his pocket and then rushed away from the skeleton, lifting both hands to his collar and straightening it.

He banished all distress from his countenance and shut his eyes. When they opened, the back of his hands lay sideways against his lapels. He twisted his wrists and curled his fingers before extending his arms frontwards, tucking his middle and ring fingers into his palms while splaying his thumbs, index fingers and pinkies.

Orbs of violet light expanded at his fingertips and enveloped his hands in a sizzling, sparking glow that shot forth onto the cobblestone. It exploded in a ball of purple fire like a comet's tail and, with searing heat whipping the hem of Kid's uniform, branded the face of Death into the ground.

The brilliance of the flames shone across every speck of wall and window in the street. Disembodied souls of the dead emerged from Kid as strips of darkness silhouetted against this light, their ghostly shapes bobbing and pulling away from him with expressions of permanent terror.

The trio of holes that acted as Death's eyes and nose touched the reddish sky in blazing cylinders of light, and an angular figure cloaked in black appeared in the upward wind that followed.

Death, God to many and Dad to few, looked back at Kid through the same white mask that had rendered him unreadable in the days of early childhood. Even with eyes that judged the souls of all living beings, Kid could only guess his father's emotions until he talked.

“Hiya, Kiddo! Learn anything new?” He spoke with the goofy voice and exaggerated mannerisms of a cartoon character from the black-and-white era of television.

As he maintained heavy eye contact with his father, Kid resembled a statue carved out of stone so that it may never shed a tear. He stood erect, his dry tone betraying a hint of disdain. “You can scratch one name off your list.”

From her spot just beyond a car's length behind him, Liz stood beside her sister and squinted at Kid. Patty was still finding amusement in how funny Lupin's skull looked with no jaw bone and only half a cranium, while Liz struggled to parse the venom that laced Kid's words.

Death leaned towards Kid to the point where his mask was all that was visible, turning his head so that one eyehole was nearer to Kid than the other. “Oh? And which one would that be?”

Kid was conscious of his red-rimmed eyes, but he forced his lips into a straight line and smothered the urge to contort his face and resume crying. Instead, a hateful coldness flowed into his pronunciation of the name that he spat from his tongue as if it were a piece of rotten food. “Lupin.”

“Ah, can't say I'm sad to see him go!” chuckled Death, shrugging and retreating to his former position. “He must've gotten lazy after last time!” He bounced as he said this and stuck out his arms with palms upturned.

On his hands were oversize gloves, the bulky and puffy variety that devoted sports fans jiggled in support of their favourite teams. No part of Death's natural form was exposed, all of it concealed under cloth and mask.

Kid allowed his eyes to narrow and his brows to furrow. He delayed blinking, fearing that the movement would encourage another tear to fall. “Yes, I'd rather not be reminded of my past failures.”

Death settled down enough to take a closer look at his son and indulged in what he considered to be harmless curiosity, but his next question struck Kid like a lightning bolt. “Say, Kiddo. Where's that necklace you've been wearing?”

* * *

LONG AFTER THE CORRIDORS of the DWMA had darkened with nightfall, life stayed under the flickers of sconces to prepare the school for tomorrow.

The door to the infirmary creaked open, and a stream of moonlight gloated over the pair of black shoes that trudged across the tile floor.

It startled you from where you had been changing the sheets on a bloodstained bed. “Kid? What are you still doing here?”

Kid emptied his pocketful of broken pieces onto the end of the bed. He turned his gaze sideways and clenched his jaw, refusing to look you in the eye. “A Grim Reaper worth respecting wouldn't make such a grievous error.”

You nearly failed to recognise what the pieces once were, but when the realisation loosened your grip on the sheets until they clumped near the pillow, you slunk towards him.

Kid collapsed into a sitting position, with his knees folded on opposite sides of him and his toes pointing at the walls. “You have every right to wish ill on me.”

He bowed his head so that his hair obscured his eyes, which had lost much of their natural glow in favour of a tearful sheen. He condensed the emotion that had been running rampant in his voice moments earlier into a whisper. “But my life would be worthless if you cut me from yours.”

You crouched to his eye level and brought your hands onto his shoulders with a tentative slowness. “We're friends, aren't we?” Hesitation littered the “aren't we” part of the statement as if you were deep in foreign territory and searching for validation. “One broken necklace won't change that.”

The crescent moon jiggled with a resonant laugh, and as Kid sat there wondering what sort of angel you must have been to forgive him, his shoulders rose with a newfound lightness.

You almost took your hands back when he gripped one in each of his own, holding them up at equal heights like a knight pledging himself to his new liege. “I will never let you down again.” His stare became unwavering on the word “never” as though it were the most certain thing in the universe.

Kid sprung from the ground at such an impressive speed that he dragged you with him and went airborne for a split second. His next footstep was brisk, no more than a lurch, and brought him far closer to you than was necessary to make his words heard.

“This I swear on my life.”

Do anything you want with my work, but never make me boring!

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