you seem desperate for ryozen’s attention instead of finding meaning for yourself
(Call out my character in-character meme)
Sasori did not hear the words in Gai's loud and usually upbeat tone. It was a low tone that found its way into familiar places just beneath his skin--- So desperate for my attention. You reek of it, even Gai can smell it on you. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you enjoyed debasing yourself for my entertainment.
"You don't know shit about me," Sasori snarled, sinking further into the seat. And yet it felt like his back was pressed against a concrete wall.
It wasn't like he wanted this. It wasn't like this life was his first choice.
He had just wanted to be a kid, for fuck's sake. Sasori just wanted his parents to come home. He wanted to have remembered the last thing they said, or when he last saw them before he was hastily dressed up and shoved into a car to an airport to a plane that would take him to a country he didn't even know existed.
He would have liked to find meaning in art-- fill the hole their absence left with something beautiful. And yet each time was like tearing the wound anew, salting it like a forsaken field. It wasn't there in Medicine either--- where patients became mere things you'd poke needles in, press incessantly like a bruised fruit until they'd cough up the diagnosis and you can move on to the next case. Cogs in a wheel that bulldozed over everyone's humanity.
How many evenings did Sasori want to claw his eyes out because he had it so good--- so why didn't it feel like it?! Why was something so remotely in the past still creeping under his skin?
At least now, if he filled himself with the rot of it... it made sense. Shit begets shit, and he's feeling shitty because he's doing shitty things. He was a shitty person. He deserved all the shitty things tossed his way. He deserved nothing but the blissful numbness in his chest that Ryōzen's company brought. And if he indulges in the occasional pleasurable experience--- he can sit with the sinking feeling of disgust in his chest.
What else was there to have? What else could life offer him?
"But congratulations if you've found your own fucking meaning--- if you've found meaning in your dad's death or your friend's... whatever the fuck THAT was. Good for you." There it was again, the pit in his stomach, the tightness in his chest. Like clockwork, or a drug's familiar prodrome, he feels it boil ugly within him.
He did not expect feeling something rise in his eyes. "It's not as if I haven't fucking tried."
