This was my first ever X fic...a oneshot about Subaru's life after Seishirou's death - enjoy!
Hollow Heart
Subaru felt nothing anymore.
As he pushed his hand through the chest of an innocent young girl, he only watched blankly as she screamed in agony, mismatched eyes uncaring. The feeling of her body falling limp around his hand only made him wonder briefly if he’d be able to kill more than one person at the same time this way, in order to save time whilst feeding the Tree.
But otherwise, he felt nothing.
Staring down at her corpse with an almost clinical detachment, Subaru’s expression never changed. He felt no remorse over her death…but he felt no joy in it either. Seishirou had once claimed that he felt nothing when he killed people, that they were just objects. But the former Sakurazukamori had taken pleasure in his killings, had enjoyed watching as the spark died in their eyes, leaving them empty shells.
To Subaru, these people might as well have been empty shells already.
When he shoved his hand through a shield of flesh and bone to pierce someone’s heart, Subaru never thought the act particularly enjoyable – he looked on it as something akin to a desk job, as if he were merely filling out innocuous forms and settling into a never changing routine. But his work was darker, and cost people their lives.
When the dust had first cleared from the two onmyoujis’ last meeting together, it had revealed a shell shocked Subaru bent over the still form of Seishirou, weeping at the death of the older man. The Seals had murmured comforting words to him, and pulled him to his feet, wrenching Seishirou’s body from his arms. Subaru had screamed, and fought like a wild thing in order to get back to his opposite half, clawing and biting in a way that he had never done before.
They hadn’t let him go, and had instead dragged him away from the scene of the confrontation, thinking for some reason that to stay on the bridge would break the last piece of Subaru’s sanity, crush him into something unrecognisable.
It had taken a powerful punch from Kamui before he had given up and allowed himself to be dragged away.
Afterwards, Subaru slowly became aware of a hole deep inside of him, a dark void that nothing any of his friends did could fill. And little by little, his tears stopped falling, and the nightmares that caused him to wake screaming in the middle of the night faded into nothingness, leaving him cold and empty.
His friends had whispered to themselves about Seishirou being the cause of his change, that he had cracked Subaru in one too many places and left him to an emotionless existence. Somehow the assumption hadn’t seemed right to Subaru.
It took him another week to figure it out.
He had been wandering in the grounds of the Imonoyama mansion at the time, gazing blankly at the strange and beautiful flowers that were grown there. His feet had taken him to a small rose bush, and he had remembered how much Hokuto had loved red roses, especially if they were from her brother on Valentine’s Day. He had paused, waiting for the familiar pang of grief he always felt at these moments.
He hadn’t felt anything. Confused, he had conjured up a picture of Seishirou lying in a bloodstained heap in his arms, expecting that the memory would cause him to feel the pain of loss again.
Instead, he had found himself gazing uncaringly at the man who had betrayed him, the cold form little more than a broken doll to his eyes. It was then he heard the soft whisper of a voice in the back of his mind, a hungry plea for blood.
And he had listened.
In the dead of the night, he had sneaked out of the mansion to the nearby park, waiting silently for someone to pass by on their way home or to a club. It hadn’t been long before a scantily dressed woman had joined him, winking and offering him a night of pleasure if he was willing to pay the right price.
Subaru had ignored her offer and simply plunged his hand through her chest, calmly tearing the barely covered flesh apart as he took her life instead. He had taken his gift to the Sakura Tree, and watched as it accepted his offering greedily, taking the woman to join with the hundreds resting under its roots.
The next day, Fuuma had broken into the mansion and practically killed Kamui yet again, all to give Subaru the last present he would ever receive from Seishirou.
A single golden eye.
Subaru didn’t even hesitate, and took the eye without question, casting the spell that would implant it in his own head and ignoring the horrified cries from the injured Seals lying all around him. Fuuma had smiled in satisfaction, and said something about how ‘it was fitting that one so pure should finally succumb to the void inside’, before leaving as if he’d never been there in the first place.
Karen had stumbled over to him, a deep gash in her cheek spilling blood down her pale neck. And yet, she had only been concerned about Subaru, wanting to know if he was alright. Subaru had turned to face her, and watched calmly as she fell back in shock, caught by the gaze of his mismatched eyes.
Before anyone could say anything, he had left the building, regardless of the destruction left behind him. He had returned later with blood on his coat and a package tucked underneath his left arm. When asked by the confused Seals where the blood had come from, Subaru had lied and said that he had witnessed an old woman being knocked down by a careless driver, and had stayed with her until the ambulance came. They had commented on his kind heart and continued restoring their home and bandaging their wounds.
Subaru had felt no guilt at the lie.
He had simply retreated to his room and unfastened the package he had bought whilst out, revealing a black trench coat practically identical to the one Seishirou had always worn. It hadn’t been intended as a way to copy the former Sakurazukamori – it was simply that his new coat would show up less in the dark than his old white one.
When he had finally gone downstairs to help the Seals with their work, Sorata had paled, and gurgled something about looking just like Seishirou. Subaru had raised an elegant eyebrow at the comment before brushing past him, ignoring the shared looks that he knew were going on behind his back.
That night, they had followed him. Subaru had been too focused on his task, and hadn’t noticed his pursuers. The first thing he knew of them was Yuzuriha’s shocked gasp as he calmly pushed his hand through the chest of a young boy barely older than Kamui.
He had turned to face his former allies then, the cherry blossoms falling around his black clad form, and they had known. They had finally realised what he had become. Arashi had stepped forward, demanding why he had become all that he once hated, angrily reminding him that as the Sakurazukamori he would be unable to be a Seal anymore. He had shrugged then, cold voice cutting through the air as he told her that he couldn’t form a kekkai now anyway – he had no one that he wanted to protect.
Then before anyone could react, he had released his shikigami, and escaped in the confusion. They hadn’t seen him since.
Everyone had always thought that it was Seishirou that changed Subaru into the emotionless shell he had become. But what none of them realised was that Subaru had been destined to become the Sakurazukamori before he even met Seishirou, and that he had carried a void of nothingness where his heart should have been since birth.
Hokuto had once told him that she’d wanted him to realise that he had a soul too, to show his emotions. But Subaru had never had a soul, or emotions. Just a dark hole in his chest.
It had taken him years, but Subaru finally understood that Hokuto had unknowingly been right when she’d said that he had a bad habit of making other people’s emotions his own. But what she hadn’t understood was that it was because he had none himself. He was nothing more than a mirror, absorbing the happiness and innocence of his sister when he was young, forming the person he was as a child.
When Seishirou ended their bet and tried to kill him, the pain he felt at the betrayal was not his own even then – it was the well hidden regret that Seishirou was feeling at his actions. Even when he retreated inside of himself, Subaru was only mirroring the hurt felt by Hokuto at the Sakurazukamori’s betrayal.
And when Hokuto died, Subaru only felt the hatred and grief that his grandmother felt at the passing of her eldest grandchild.
Throughout his life, Subaru had been nothing more than a blank slate, absorbing the emotions of others to fill his hollow heart and carry on living. No one, not even himself, had realised the truth.
But the Tree had always known. It had sensed that he was destined to become a Sakurazukamori, and that he carried the void inside himself. And it had known that it would only take the tiniest thing to trigger off the chain of events that would cement him in his future role.
So it had called Subaru to itself on that fateful day when Seishirou had been delivering his latest kill, and allowed destiny to run its course. And Subaru had been trapped by the cherry blossoms, stolen away like his grandmother predicted seven years too late.
Subaru had walked the path Fate had laid out for him, pulled into a confrontation with Seishirou, the hold his grandmother’s emotions had in his heart rapidly fading in her absence to be replaced with the calmness and hidden longing of Seishirou. And he had killed Seishirou and fulfilled his destiny.
Now he had no one he cared enough about to take on their emotions. Hokuto had died long ago. Seishirou had been killed by his own hand. And his grandmother was far away in Kyoto, too distant to even be considered a relative anymore.
