Tiger Stripes
➵ A brief character study related to Atsushi's healing abilities.
➵ Some headcanons about his appearance are mentioned
➵ No dialogue aside from a quote from the Dead Apple manga
➵ Read this on Ao3
For all intents and purposes, Atsushi should have no marks on his skin. He should be smooth, silk moth white. Most people don't know that his regenerative powers aren't impeccable.
Montgomery knows. She's seen the marks on his torso: Dry, jagged, dark skin that sometimes burns the same as when the wound was fresh right before he wakes up, despite being fully healed. Maybe it's a way in which that entity that he's teethered to tries to convince him of his strength. After all, he has survived worse, he will always push through the next thing.
He doesn't like looking at it. In showing it to Lucy he might as well have opened up his chest cavity: Here is where I'm weakest. It's not in my everflowing tears or in my screams of pain or in my seemingly inmortal hope. It's at the very core of my body, where I couldn't heal properly, will never heal properly. It's in the mark of the violence that refuses to leave my life, no matter how quickly I flee from it. It's in the guilt I carry for my very existence, and the mark left by the person who helped me do my penance.
He's sure she must have scars too, but he's never seen. Sometimes he ponders on it while she scrambles about the café, still trying to imitate the way the manager serves the clients. Sometimes she startles when someone raises their arm too quickly, and it's subtle enough no one bats an eye, but Atsushi knows. He knows, and he understands. He understands the tension on her shoulders, the tapping of her fingers on the table to take herself out of her thoughts, the wary gaze she greets every new face with, that careful line between suspecting the worst and silently begging for connection. He understands, so he doesn't bring it up.
He's got more marks in other places. His shoulder blades are striped down to his back where his gaze cannot reach without a mirror. He's got marks like Orion's belt where his hip bones used to protrude when they let him go too much time without eating a proper meal. His feet and ankles are bound by shackles, patterns the fur of the tiger traces perfectly whenever he lets his claws out.
Atsushi wonders if the rest of the tiger's stripes are also scars he would have gotten, had he been a normal human. He supposes the tiger should be almost black, then, so the idea is silly, but it's less jarring than wondering if the next time he gets injured all trace of the damage will disappear or if he'll get distorted in strange ways.
After his first encounter with Akutagawa, he got a new mark right where his leg grew back. The skin is raised, a little lower where rashoumon's fangs dipped in, a little higher where the extremity was ripped and dragged along instead of cut. The marks are white, surrounded by brown that turns angry red when he takes a hot bath. The weeks following the fight, he would fall asleep running his fingertips over the keloid, coiled up on himself and waking up briefly every time he mistakenly thought his limb had been detached again, dozing off when his shudders made the rough skin itch.
None of the other times he lost a leg left a scar. None of the other times he got hurt by rashoumon left a scar. Not even Akutagawa's bite when he was a vampire left a scar. Some evenings, he limps a little on the right side, when he's too exhausted to be present, too distraught to bring a smile to the surface. If anyone in the dorms has seen it, no one has pointed it out. The conversation would be a strange one to have; who feels the absence of a leg that is still very much attached to their body?
He was both fascinated and terrified by the discovery that his body can regenerate. Yosano was mostly smug about it. He half-expected her to be disappointed she doesn't have to treat him. He wonders how much getting healed by her hurts, if it feels different from getting healed by the tiger.
His healing abilities are the only proof that convinces him that he was "gifted", not condemned from birth. It's the one thing he's come to expect, instead of thinking he has to earn it. The tiger is simultaneously cruel and merciful. The tiger keeps him alive, has kept him alive at any cost, under every circumstance a person could and shouldn't go through. He lives racing against the tiger, he lives under the tiger's care.
Atsushi thanks the tiger whenever he sighs with relief because he doesn't easily feel his bones under his skin, but finds strong muscle and soft fat between them instead; he curses the tiger whenever he lies on the floor, surrounded by rubble and the memories that plague his brain like pus in a wound; he prays to the tiger whenever he can feel his soul outrunning his body, prays for clarity before he prays for life, because he's never sure if he truly deserves to stay.
Atsushi wonders if he could forgive himself each warm cup of tea he drinks if the tiger wasn't within him, if his life would be worth the same if he didn't have his ability, the ability to fight like a wild beast and survive like a cockroach, the ability to protect and to heal. He wonders how his coworkers would look at him if they realized that, sometimes, he doesn't heal quite right, that his body is a little more fragile than he lets on.
"You killed me that time, with those claws."
"Of course I did! Because I wanted to live! No matter what, I raise the tiger's claws to live!"
This is came out from somewhere in my brain in the middle of the journey that is falling asleep when you have chronic insomnia and it took me having a weird dream about Ranpo and all of the next day to finish writing it so I hope someone likes this and it isn't too much of a stretch.
I love thinking about a characters' life in the quiet moments, their relationship to their bodies and how that affects them. I truly don't think Atsu would be half the hero he is if he was protective of his body (or his life, for that matter, as Montgomery so often points out). I might try writing something similar for the rest of my favorites, if the muses wish to help me with it.
Thank you for reading!