TWs for this chapter: D34th, Injury, Renji watching from beyond the grave idk man Renji's POV ----------------- They found my body days later. Or, rather, what was left of it. By the time they found me, there wasn’t much to identify. The fire had done its work well. The flames had torn through everything, leaving behind only a fragile, unrecognizable reminder of who I once was. I had been charred beyond recognition, with nothing left of the person I used to be. A body so distorted that the very idea of who I once was was lost in the devastation. I had been burned, and it had left no room for dignity. No room for the things I had once cared about. No one really wanted to find me. There was no funeral. No ceremony to mark the end of a life. There was no one there to mourn me except Kiyoshi and Katya. Katya—she wept. I imagine her tears were endless. The sound of her sobbing was the last thing I could almost hear before everything faded. The love in her eyes, the warmth I had once held close, now just another memory of something I’d ruined. Her pain was like a blade to my chest, a reminder that I had let her down. Let down everyone who had ever cared about me. I had promised her a future, but there was nothing left now. Just ashes and the hollow ache of someone I loved being left to pick up the pieces. Kiyoshi didn’t cry. Not at first. He never did. But I knew him too well. I saw it in his eyes when he found out. I saw it in the way his fists trembled with anger, the way he hit a wall so hard that he fractured his hand. The sound of the bone breaking echoed louder in my mind than any scream I could’ve let out. Kiyoshi was the kind of guy who always acted like everything was fine. The kind of guy who kept everything inside until it hurt him. And that’s exactly what happened. The wall didn’t break first. He did. And when I saw his knuckles split open, I knew it was my fault. It was just the two of them who felt my loss—the people I had let get close, the ones I had promised to keep safe. They were the only ones left to mourn a life that had meant so little to anyone else. My parents, the people who had pushed me to be perfect, to never show weakness, never make a mistake—my father, who had spent my entire life chipping away at me until there was nothing but a hollow shell, and my mother, who had silently accepted his cruelty—didn’t say a word. Not a single word. They didn’t even bother to bury me, not the way they might have done for a real son. The silence was deafening. I could almost hear their indifference, hear them justify it to themselves—he wasn’t good enough. He didn’t live up to the image we built for him. He didn’t meet the expectations. And now, he was gone. It was almost as if they were relieved. And maybe that was the final joke. The harshest one. Because in the end, the son they had spent their entire lives trying to mold into perfection, the son they had punished for every flaw, every mistake, every shred of humanity he showed—was gone. A disappointment in their eyes. And that was all I was, in the end: a disappointment. But here’s the thing—I was finally free. For the first time, I wasn’t shackled to their expectations. For the first time, I didn’t have to wear the mask anymore. I didn’t have to smile and lie about everything being fine. I didn’t have to pretend to be the perfect son, the perfect student, the perfect everything. I could just be. I could just be nothing. And in that nothingness, I found a kind of peace.
