Chapter Text
Gakushuu is a bundle of nerves on the day of his school trip to their neighbouring town of Kyoto.
He feels a little silly for being so anxious, because Kyoto is at best three hours away by bullet train - two, if he bumps up the price a little bit on the tickets (apparently not even Kunugigaoka, for how endless their funds seemed, was going to fork out that amount of money times 40 students in 5 classes for an hour less of travel time.)
Ren gave him a packing list which Gakushuu followed to a tee, and Katsuya had successfully convinced them to not bring the weighted blanket.
“It’s an extra five kilograms,” she had said, “I’m not going to be lugging that around!”
“You’re not even the one carrying it,” Nanako had retorted, although it was not like they could control when and where they switched, and in such an unknown environment with potential triggers, it was a coin toss (a four sided coin?) as to whoever ended up fronting.
It could be Gakushuu all the way, or maybe it would be Yukio hiding behind Ren, or Nanako touching everything she shouldn’t be touching. Or maybe it would be Katsuya, who would have to silently suffer through lugging their bag around, which she vehemently protests against.
“It’s embarrassing,” Katsuya points out.
Yukio said, “it’s just a blanket.” (Yukio likes falling asleep with it as well.)
“It’s like an eight year old who needs a soft toy,” Katsuya insists. “It’s childish.”
Nanako says, “but Gakushuu is our baby.”
“There’s a difference between boyishly cute sometimes, and being a toddler.”
Gakushuu sighs. “Let’s not bring the blanket.”
Nanako kicks Katsuya under the table, and receives a glare in return.
“You’re going to have to sleep without it eventually,” Katsuya says. “Especially if you go on a longer and further trip. You might as well practice now.”
“I slept fine with it before I got it,” Gakushuu reasons.
“No, you didn’t,” Yukio reminds him softly. (He was there, for that most part.)
Katsuya frowns at the both of them, and pats Gakushuu’s hand. “The hotel will have very nice blankets.”
“If you run away and get lost,” his father says affectionately to him as he saw Gakushuu out the door, “I will hunt you down to all four corners of the earth, drag you back home, and zip-tie a house arrest ankle bracelet to you.”
Gakushuu sniffs. There are no corners of the earth. “The earth is round.”
“Get lost, brat.”
It’s the first time that Gakushuu’s leaving home for so long.
His classmates are largely unconcerned, themselves the children of busy millionaire parents who have been shuttled back and forth on business class flights ever since they were six. They chatter their way onto the shuttle train cabin as if this sort of travel is routine (it likely is). Gakushuu lets himself get swept by the momentum of the crowd and gets sufficiently distracted from his anxieties by his classmates bouncing him around like a party favor. ("Asano, can you help me lift my suitcase?" "Asano, do you know where the bathroom is?" "Asano, have you seen my phone?")
It’s a chatter of activity as people fight for the best seats. Gakushuu himself likes the window seat whenever they’re on a train, leaning away from his father (who would be clack-clack-clacking away at his work laptop).
Ren fishes him out of the wave of people, one hand around his wrist, and quickly shutters him to a booth near the back of the cabin.
The buzz and commotion from the earlier part of the day has died into a sleepy calm as they start moving - some of his classmates are asleep, snoring to the rumble of the train. They had an early start - it’s just eight in the morning. Everyone seems content entertaining themselves, either on their phones or broken off into groups of four with a card game between them.
Ren sits next to him, thumbing through his kindle.
Gakushuu snaps some very blurry pictures of trees as the train rumbles along.
The others aren’t awake, which gives Gakushuu a rare breath of silence. It’s weird, having people living in your head - he loves them, and he cannot imagine life without them now, but it’s still… strange.
Sometimes he thinks of them as permanent roommates in his head, sometimes he regards them as an extension of himself. He’s not exactly sure which version he prefers, and they’re both attached with their own sets of connotations… and he doesn’t know what the other alters consider themselves as, either.
As far as Gakushuu is concerned, they’re all equally important in keeping him - “Gakushuu” as a whole system, alive. Still, he knows very well that the other three still defer to him as the veto, which is quite honestly rather terrifying, because he feels like he knows nothing at all.
When Yukio is introspecting, he often wonders outloud a what-if they were normal. Nanako still calls him, occasionally, the “original”. Katsuya slips up, sometimes when she’s not quite paying attention to herself, and says “your body” instead of “ours”. It reminds Gakushuu that maybe none of them have quite fit the puzzle pieces correctly together yet.
Sometimes (when he’s very sure that none of them are awake to hear him,) he thinks of as… what it actually is.
Dissociative Identity Disorder. A mental illness . A diagnosis, a list of symptoms written and defined in a journal article. A set of delusions, a chemical imbalance, a series of unfortunate events… a sign that he’s not normal and he never will be.
And then he feels guilty afterwards for thinking like that.
He considers himself one of the lucky ones. Being able to share such a seamless and cordial relationship with his alters is more than most people would get. And they’re family now, who have stayed with Gakushuu through thick and thin. How could he ever give them up?
It’s not a very long train ride, and after that it’s a short walk to their hotel to check in. They’re groups in rooms of four, which means Gakushuu is lumped in together with Ren, Araki and Saito. They have an hour to relax before their class heads to an art museum, so Saito pulls out a deck of UNO cards.
Nanako switches in halfway through the UNO game.
Switching is like this: a brief out-of-body experience before you recalibrate and settle into yourself. It’s not something that can be controlled and it happens at the oddest of times, unless there’s a deliberate trigger (like getting shoved in a closet, punched in the face, or meeting Gakuhou) which may stress them out enough to induce one (it’s still not a guarantee). This is the kind of thing that no one is sure how it works or how to describe.
Nanako blinks, briefly disoriented, and then very quickly catalogues her situation. Ah, they’re playing UNO.
Another brief check tells her that none of them are awake, but she guesses it must have been either Gakushuu or Yukio before her, because Katsuya would have fought tooth and nail to not participate in a social bonding activity.
“Hey, Asano, your turn.” Araki prompts.
“Oh.” Nanako glances at the cards in her hand and the discard pile in the centre, brows furrowed. Next to her, Ren gives her a curious glance.
“Here,” she says, and drops a card.
“Hm,” Araki says, musing over his own deck.
Ren nudges her. “Hey.”
Nanako grins at him. “Hi.”
Beat one, beat two. Ren’s eyes light up with recognition. “Oh, N.”
Beat three. “Reverse,” Araki says.
“Oh, snap,” Nanako says. “Uh, um,” she throws down a card.
“Man,” Saito says, “UNO takes forever.”
Nanako asks, “how long have we been playing?”
“For like half an hour,” Saito answers. “Or similar. I don’t know.” He looks down at his watch. “Oh, 40 minutes.”
“...man.”
“Well, it’s almost time to meet the rest of the class,” Araki says. “Shall we continue this later?”
“Oh!” Nanako says. “We should combine two decks and get a larger group to play.”
“That’s insane,” Araki says.
“That’s a great idea,” Saito gives her a hi-five. “I know Mika brought a second deck and hers has a different design, so we can split them up later.”
“That’d be chaotic,” Ren says, giving Nanako a flat look.
Nanako winks at him.
Their first pit stop is an art museum, which their teacher describes as an eclectic and thought-provoking collection of pieces sure to inspire creativity, or something. Art is a minor elective in the Kunugigaoka curriculum, that she’s sure is added so that their website can proudly highlight the words “well-rounded” on their academic descriptions.
“An art museum? Man,” Nanako hides a yawn behind her hand. “I wish Yukio was awake. He’d get a kick out of this.” Places where you have to stand still, keep quiet and silently observe something static like museums, libraries and the Principal’s office generally don’t hold much interest for her.
“Oh,” Ren says, sounding far too dejected. “Isn’t he?”
Nanako sticks her tongue out at him. “You don’t have to look so disappointed.”
“I’m not!” Ren defends, face reddening. “I like spending time with all of you.”
“Uh huh,” Nanako says, rolling her eyes.
It’s adorable, honestly, the weird push-pull thing that Yukio and Ren have going on. It’s surprising to remember that Ren, Yukio and Gakushuu have known each other for pretty much the same length of time, since they were in first grade of elementary school. Nanako herself missed just a little over a year, and Katsuya came in almost one year later… although the timeline isn’t too specific on those, because it’s less of a switch turning on and more of the slow haunting realization that something’s been misplaced in their heads.
Ah, she’s usually not this introspective. But she’s usually not in an art museum, and she’s usually not alone in her head.
Gakushuu’s the one who fronts, after all - he’s the dominant personality. They’ve tried taking a stopwatch to it once, when Katsuya wanted to “optimize” their strategies, and record keeping was… well, it wasn’t the best, and any measurements were jumbled up with errors of up to several hours, but when you’re four people in a trench coat juggling one single stopwatch…
She concluded that Gakushuu was awake most of the time, and it can be generally assumed that if he wasn’t in front, he would be in the backseat, something like background music in the back of your head. So this lapse of empty air was a little odd.
Katsuya was second in running for most seconds spent conscious, particularly when they were at school, and she meticulously catalogued every interaction they had with their friends (and enemies) for her scheming purposes.
Nanako herself and Yukio drifted in and out with no set parameters, although Yukio tended to be more active at home and Nanako was so in school. Katsuya had theorized it was because of their general temperaments, which made sense, but not that Nanako knew much about what things made sense.
...man. This is what too much quiet does to a person. Now she’s thinking thoughts .
Ren, on the other hand, is oddly captivated by a painting and he’s snapping a picture of the... caption? Is that what they called those little plaques at the bottom of each painting? Blurb? No, that was for books.
Yukio would be having way more fun than her in this place, on a cute little art museum trip-date with Ren.
Hah! She and Katsuya have a betting pool going on. Katsuya thinks Ren will have to make the first move and ask Yukio out, but Nanako knows that Ren will be too nervous to navigate the whole whatever-this-situation-is of trying to date one alter in a system of four, and it’s Yukio who will have to take the initiative.
Was there some unwritten social rule about dating your brother’s best friends? Or dating your best friend’s brother? What if two of those parties were in the same body?
That was too much math for Nanako to handle. Algebra. Yukio is better at algebra than she is.
Damn it. Paintings have got Nanako thinking about math. She was never coming to an art museum ever again.
“Hey, N- Asano, look at this.”
Ren calls her over to a lumpy pot behind a glass display case.
“That’s ugly,” Nanako says.
Ren laughs. “It has character, that’s for sure. It reminds me of-”
“-that flowerpot that G- we had to make in art class in fourth grade?”
“Yes, that’s the one!” Ren snaps his fingers. Nanako squints at the pot.
Gakuhou had it on the desk of his home office. You could fill perhaps an inch of water before it spilled out of the absurdly low spout, but it couldn’t hold a plant because of angles or physics or something like that. Gakushuu had given it to Gakuhou after their class that day, Gakuhou had said, “that’s hideous” which made Gakushuu burst into tears, and the pot would hold down Gakuhou’s paperwork ever since.
Nanako takes a picture of it. “I’m going to tell Gakushuu that his work is museum worthy.”
Ren says, affectionately, “Gakushuu can’t do art for shit .”
(The stickman that Gakushuu has drawn of Yukio for Ren is still wedged in Ren’s school folder.)
The only two of them who Nanako would consider have any sort of artistic talent are Yukio, who likes to sketch, and Katsuya, who can play the violin. Nanako is… well if they had to split them up by a stereotype in one of those personality-type quizzes, Nanako supposes she would be considered the sporty one, although Gakushuu himself quite likes to run around.
In all the animes that Yukio watches, Nanako could fit them into their little boxes. The main character, the helplessly charming and empathetic love interest. Slightly aloof, quiet and contemplative. The wide-eyed cheery one who never seems to be able to sit still. The bad boy (girl?) who acts like they’re too cool for anything and is a secret softie inside.
Like they had their own little niches! It was funny to think about at first, and then it was odd, and then it made Nanako wonder about who each of them were and why they were here.
“Come on,” Ren says, “I saw another exhibition I want to see.”
Two gallery sections later, they run into Yuna and Yuu, the former of whom is excited to recreate the statue poses with Nanako, and proceed to run around the museum together. Ren and Yuu, both armed with their camera phones, share a long-suffering look.
“I really want this little bowl.”
“Then get it,” Ren says.
Nanako frowns. “Katsuya is going to be mad at me for wasting money.”
“Come on,” Ren rolls his eyes. “It’s a bowl.” He leans over her shoulder and catches a glimpse at the price tag. “Hm, yeah, okay, I see what she means.”
“Thanks.”
“Museum gift shops are so overpriced,” Ren grumbles.
“It’s such a pretty bowl, though,” Nanako sighs. “I could put cereal in here. Or soup.”
Ren picks up a keychain and squints at it in the light. “How does that work, anyways? Your finances?”
“What do you mean?”
“How do you guys split your allowance?”
“I don’t know,” Nanako shrugs. “It’s all our money, we just share it.”
“What, you guys don’t have a budget for who gets to spend how much?”
“...Not really, I guess.” Nanako turns the bowl in her hands. “I mean, we all share everything we buy.”
“Doesn’t it get tiring? Being in each others’ spaces all the time?”
“W- well, no, of course we share everything, I- wh- what is that supposed to mean?”
“Sorry,” Ren says quickly. “I didn’t mean anything bad by it.”
Nanako tries not to glare at him. “Then what did you mean?”
“Well, you know,” he shrugs weakly. “Don’t you guys get privacy from each other?”
“...I mean, we can’t actually read each other’s minds. Our thoughts are still our own.” Nanako says.
“Yeah, I know, I just…” Ren shrugs again. “Sometimes I picture the four of you as different people living in the same one bedroom. Seems it might get a little exhausting, even if you’re used to it.”
Nanako… thinks. Was it exhausting like that? She didn’t know. It wasn’t quite the same concept as four people in one bedroom, because they weren’t always all there at the same time… and for as long as she’s been around, that’s just how it has been for her. If they each at their own space… well, if she had her own room, she’d probably get lonely. She won’t even know what to put it in.
...She’d probably put this bowl.
“I hate you,” she says to Ren, with feeling. “Go have this stupid talk with one of the others when they’re awake. Stop making me think.”
Ren laughs after her. “Come on, ‘Ko. Help me pick a keychain.”
Katsuya wakes up in the middle of a busy street.
And then almost immediately gets bowled over by someone crashing into her from behind.
“Hey! Watch it!”
“S-sorry, Asano!” The terrified student - oh, one of her classmates, Tenshi. He’s no one of too big of an importance that Katsuya is immediately put on high alert for crossing path with, and - oh. He’s run off.
“He-ey.” Oh, it’s Ren.
He swings an arm around her. “You scared him, ‘Ya.” Ren steers her away from the class to join the back of the queue instead. In front of her, Tenshi creeps further away, still looking startled.
“Whatever.” Gakushuu will eventually switch, take over, smile at Tenshi, and win his heart back. It’s no spilled water to cry over.
Ren huffs. “Our next agenda is walking back to the hotel. We’re having dinner.”
“Hm.” There’s a shopping bag in her hand. “What is this?”
Ren says, “ah.”
Katsuya rifles through it, pulls out its one lone item, and sighs. “God dammit, Nanako.” Only she would buy such an odd, lumpy, cutesy-looking useless bowl.
“Got it right in one,” Ren says.
“Of course I did.”
“She’s going to want to keep it on the desk,” Katsuya sighs. “We don’t have space on the desk.”
“You know,” Ren says, “me and Nanako were having a similar conversation about that.”
“About what?”
“Space.” Ren says. Pauses. “About each of you having your own spaces, that is.”
“Elaborate.”
“She knew you’d be mad for her buying the bowl,” Ren starts. “I asked if you guys had separate budgets, and she said no. And she said that you all shared everything. Which made sense, I’m not saying it doesn’t, but it got me wondering, isn’t that a little claustrophobic for you all?”
“No,” Katsuya says, almost immediately. “It just is.”
But Ren doesn’t say anything more - just smiles at her briefly, and then goes back to strolling silently, all while Katsuya’s own mind starts and works.
She wonders what Nanako’s input to the conversation would have been - no doubt something far too altruistic than it needed to be, like how they were family and they were so intertwined together she couldn’t imagine it any other way. That’s the sort of sentiment she’d always expressed, smiling at Katsuya like she’s forgotten there was a time that Katsuya could have killed them.
And that time, was a time where Katsuya wouldn’t have hesitated to say she would have rather been alone.
Especially in the beginning - when she was just understanding her bearings in the world, and Gakushuu kept trying to invade her space and her life. All he did was mess up the persona she was carefully trying to construct in front of Gakuhou. It would have been perfect if he wasn’t there, was what she thought at the time.
She, Yukio and Nanako were “born” already sharing their consciousness in a space, and neither of them were ever fully their own person in the physical neurotypical sense. It is true that Katsuya couldn’t conceive of an existence other than this, and in the coming years she’s (begrudgingly) started to think of them as her family.
Did she want to be alone, now? Perhaps she still privately entertains the thought sometimes - what if they were four separate people? Siblings, perhaps, or classmates. Their dynamic would be wildly different, their interactions even more so. She would likely have been one of those people who bullied Gakushuu into running away. Or maybe he would have won her over again, with his earnestness, and she would have had no choice but to adopt him.
She keeps these flighty imaginations to herself. They’re not practical to have, nor grounded in any true purpose, so there’s no use dwelling on any of them. What matters is the here and now - and the here and now is the fact that they’re all alters in the same system.
Being together is simply a fact of life that cannot be altered, so why be bothered about things like space?
“We can’t get claustrophobic. We share a metaphysical space. It can be literally anything we want it to be.”
Ren blinks at her. “What is it?”
“What is, what ?”
“You know. What you said. The space.”
Katsuya looks at him longsufferingly. “I don’t mean a literal space, idiot. We just share the same headspace.”
“So when you guys talk,” Ren says. “What do you… see? Or hear? You all have different appearances, right, so how does that work? Like, a couple of voices just floating in a dark void, or…”
Katsuya huffs. “The experience is just like if you were thinking to yourself, but you hear the other alter’s voice. If you’re referring to the physical manifestations of ourselves, then it’s just like if you were dreaming, or thinking of a scene with characters.”
“Oh!” Ren says. “So do you guys like, hang out? Where?”
“Something like that,” Katsuya says. “We are in our bedroom.”
“Where else?”
“That’s it.”
“...You have a mindscape with endless opportunities and all you guys do is stay in the bedroom?”
“Not just the bedroom,” Katsuya rolls her eyes. “We go to the kitchen sometimes.”
“Right,” Ren says. “Let me rephrase. You have a mindscape with endless opportunities and all you guys do is stay in the house?”
“There is no need for a physical setting,” Katsuya sighs. “We could very well be voices in a dark void if so desired. The setting just happens to be our bedroom because we are comfortable with it.”
“Ah,” Ren says, scrunching up his face. “That’s cool, I guess.”
They’re silent as they cross the street, their reflections flitting about in the storefronts. Katsuya carefully re-wraps the bowl back in it’s cover.
Ren walks beside her but looks straight ahead, expression pensive. He’s a lot like Yukio and Nanako, who spends their time with Katsuya trying very hard to forget that she was once the reason Gakushuu almost wanted to die, like they wanted to forgive and forget. It’s a lot harder to forget, when Gakushuu still wakes up with nightmares trembling with the memory of it, tossing away his blanket like it was suffocating him.
Out of the four of them she believes that only Gakushuu has sincerely and wholeheartedly forgiven her, and has every day since tried to remind her that she was never the one at fault.
Katsuya doesn’t like thinking things are her fault. She blames the Principal for every last bit of it, for being the reason that she - or any of them, really - ever existed. Gakushuu for some unfathomable reason still loves his father, and always talks fondly of the memory of the feelings of Gakuhou when they were younger, which is just stupid , in her opinion, because Gakushuu can’t remember jack about anything from before he was six.
She doesn’t know if it’s some sort of trauma-related amnesia or just the fact that Gakushuu was too young and hardly anyone remembered the day-by-day from when they were toddlers. Likely the latter, since if Gakuhou was supposed to be the epitome of good parenting then, there wouldn’t be trauma to block out from that early in Gakushuu’s childhood.
It’s a tricky thing, guilt and blame - because Katsuya doesn’t really think she feels guilt. Not in the moral sense that most people seem to describe, at least. She understands enough that she knows Yukio and Nanako and Ren blamed her for… all that . There’s an emotional undercurrent of distress they’ve attached to her name that she knows is hard to get rid off, and Gakushuu - who is the only one willing to ever speak about his experiences back then - tells her that her presences were ever more overwhelming and terrifying than when Yukio’s or Nanako’s ever had been.
Regret and disappointment are emotions she experiences often, when a plan doesn’t work out right or when a miscalculation in her strategies causes a lapse in her plans. Hurting Gakushuu and the others was a large regret because it caused so many setbacks in their functioning, it made Gakushuu become even more of an outcast which put them back by so much when trying to develop a social network, and…
And, well… because they were family! And you didn’t hurt family, because they were hers!
She would stop at nothing to be the best. Get to the top of the social hierarchy, where everyone answered to her, but… but of course those three idiots had to be there, too! They were just hers now!
(“Yukio was definitely scary,” Gakushuu had said. “Because I never knew what was going on back then. I thought there was another person in my house.” He paused. “I mean, you were just an all round… enigma.”
“What was I like?” Katsuya asked him.
“Well,” Gakushuu said. “Honestly? I think the hardest part was separating you, me and Dad.”
“What?” Katsuya had laughed, because that sounded a little too absurd.
“I can’t speak for Yukio or Nanako,” he shrugged. “I think they were hit harder than me, because they weren’t awake during Dad’s ‘lessons’, but I always was. I mean, I was still terrified of you, but all the times they heard you? I was hearing Dad, and myself in my own voice because - we didn’t understand any of this DID stuff yet, so you guys were all, me. I always heard Dad’s voice and my own voice calling me useless and stupid and crazy.”
Katsuya said, “I’m sorry.”
Gakushuu smiled at her. “Yeah. That’s it.”
“What?”
“I never really heard Katsuya until you said something that neither Dad nor I would ever say to myself.”
“...What did I say?”
“That you didn’t want me to die.”
Katsuya’s eyes widened. “...Gakushuu…”
“I… I’m fine.” He says, And then he lunges at her and buries his head in her shoulder. “I don’t think I’d ever have made it without you.”
“Even after all I did to you?”
“Without you, I think I would have hated myself and Dad even more than I could have handled.”
“And you still don’t hate Gakuhou?”
“...Sometimes I do,” Gakushuu admits, burrowing deeper into her arms. “It’s hard to. I… I love him. I don’t know how to explain it, but I do. And I know he still loves me.”
“It doesn’t matter-”
Gakushuu sobbed, “it matters to me.”
“I know,” Katsuya sighed. “I know.”)
That’s okay, because her role in the quartet was to be the cold-hearted bitch. And she can cold-heartedly bitch-hate Gakuhou enough for all four of them.