nealuchi | first divided

Title: first divided
Fandom: Bungou to Alchemist
Character(s): Atsushi
Pairing(s): None
Genre: Character Study
Word Count: 522
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Neither of the Atsushis are the original.
Notes:

In the outer Atsushi’s memories of life, there’s only one of him.

He doesn’t feel that presence in the back of his mind recalling Micronesia. Even if there was no need for the inner wild-eyed, sword-wielding Atsushi in the life of a simple textbook editor, his absence is glaring when the outer Atsushi is so used to him.

There’s no slotting the inner Atsushi into their role, the withdrawn Atsushi who rarely ever spoke about his writing even to his family. Even without having met the inner Atsushi directly, the outer Atsushi knows his behavior isn’t a one to one.

But then, the outer Atsushi remembers his bitter complaints that Palau did not need revised textbooks, for all that would do would be to educate the native people on how bad their living situation truly was, and the harsh words feel foreign on his tongue.

Is the Nakajima Atsushi that lived and died an ordinary human a third Atsushi? Or are they both pieces of the original, split by some accident of alchemy and fate?

Rather than clear up the mysteries of their being, Atsushi finds that the truth grows ever more obscured.

The inner Atsushi wouldn’t mind being the fake one.

The outer Atsushi worries his days away over which of them is real, what ‘real’ even means. The inner Atsushi, less given to such cares, would freely take the mantle of ‘fake’ if it cured the outer Atsushi of these concerns.

But he remembers their life as well as his other half does, and agrees: neither of them are the same as the original. The outer Atsushi is closer, but not a perfect match.

Why split them apart? It could have been an accident. It could have been something like the children’s literature authors - their works for children made them children in the mind’s eye, and his writing of a poet who could neither be fully a tiger or fully a man led him to become the same.

Or - Atsushi does not know the original as well as he knows his other half, but he tries to imagine a sword in his hand and sees the holder wracked with guilt. His literature is worth fighting for, and that Atsushi would fight because he could do nothing else, but inflicting pain on even potentially living beings fills him with regret.

This Atsushi exists to spare his other half from pain in every way. In that sense, he’s been filling his role since the moment one of them became two.

Their writing is their writing, belonging no more to one than the other.

The outer Atsushi seems more obviously the type to seclude himself and write page after page, but the inner Atsushi possesses the same attachment to their words. Give them a pencil and paper and both will write the same stories.

They were born of the same book and the same memories of a long-dead author. The inner Atsushi does not fight only for the enjoyment of destroying Taints, nor does his presence dictate whether they fight for their literature.

Light and dark are still made from the same material.