#and jump at the smallest reason to ostracize someone

[fivekrystalpetals]

oh, at the rate I am reading I think I might finish more than half of Pandora Hearts by today; the chapters are long but they feel so short. and a cliffhanger every second chapter I will die if I don't get answers; have this scene between Gil and Break (I will be lying if I said I didn't scream) because I am sure I can't keep up with the live posting anymore I will be overshooting too far ahead

[undyinglegends-blog]

Hi there so please allow me to scream about one Joshua Kiryu bc i've been sitting on this for ages now

I'd like to preface this by saying that Yoshiya "Joshua" Kiryu is not a monster. At least, he's trying not to be anymore.

Joshua knew a few things for certain in life: Firstly, he could see things other people couldn't. He was heavily ostracized by other kids for the things he could see--people with arrow-tipped, wiry wings, people who had died and were now running around Shibuya with timers on their hands, animals with glowing tattoos for legs, arms, tails, that would attack those dead people and cause them to disappear, strange red symbols that would float around, yellow symbols that would latch on to people and, a few times, himself. No one ever believed him, of course. "Stop lying," his parents would tell him. "Stop crying for attention." He eventually learned to just stop mentioning it. Later he learned to just stop telling people the truth at all, since they never believed him. People heard what they wanted to hear, and what they wanted to hear were things that benefitted them in some way. "Home life is fine," he'd say. "I'm fine," he'd say. "Everything's fine," he'd say. And people would believe him then, because that meant they didn't have anything weighing on their conscience.

Secondly, nothing he did was ever good enough for his parents. Top of his class, winning numerous awards in math and science at his school, and it was never enough because that was their expectation for him. Perfection was their standard. Sometimes Joshua would get a couple questions wrong on an exam, and his mother would look at him and tell him she was disappointed, that she expected better of him, that she didn't want a failure for a son, and Joshua would agree because what else could he do? They wouldn't love him if he wasn't perfect. So he tried to be perfect. He really did. But come his tenth birthday, when the world became nothing but him and a pair of silver headphones, he just... stopped caring.

Thirdly, the world was dull and gray to him. Unbeknownst to him, Joshua was suffering from depression. He found himself feeling unmotivated, unusually tired all the time, finding no joy in even the smallest of things that he had found to be hobbies of his. And the world around him felt just as gray and lifeless as he did. It took a lot of effort to just get out of bed in the morning as he grew older.

Then he met Hanekoma.

Hanekoma was and still is the only person that Joshua genuinely trusts, the one person who ever took him seriously and treated him as something of an equal, and most importantly, the one person who actually confirmed that all the things that he had seen for his entire life were real. Hanekoma told him about the Game, the Underground, the Reapers and Players. And Joshua listened to every word, feeling complete relief at the fact that he wasn't crazy.

But the more Hanekoma talked, the more Joshua realized that he didn't want to just learn about the Game; he wanted to be a part of it. There was nothing for him in the living world, he thought. Parents who barely knew he existed and fought all the time (Mother was stressed, Father drank because he was stressed, Mother got more stressed because of his drinking which made Father more stressd), peers who constantly mocked and ridiculed him, and a world that was moving so fast for a tired, goalless boy. In the Reapers' Game, though, there was a goal. Everyone could use pins, everyone was put on equal footing. And there was one goal: to win. There was something.

[SUICIDE TW]

He was afraid of doing it, initially. He didn't want it to hurt. But he knew he had to. He wanted to. He wanted to get out of this endless hell of his life and do something for once.

So on July 30th, 1995, Yoshiya Kiryu hanged himself in his room, and was later found by his mother the next morning. The funeral was minimal; very few attended.

[TW END]

He can still remember the look of hurt, of regret in Hanekoma's eyes when he saw that Joshua had entered the Game. But Joshua excelled in the Game, being able to use a wide variety of pins--not all of them, but certainly a large array of them. He and his partner made it to the end of the week, and while they both had scored enough points to return to life, only Joshua's partner did. Joshua wanted to become a Reaper. He even told him to keep his entry fee--his mark on the world, other people's memories of him, any information about him. He wouldn't need it in the Underground. The Reapers could not keep his entry fee in full, so only minimal information on Yoshiya Kiryu was released back into the living world.

Joshua immediately became a Harrier Reaper, and was very efficient in his job of erasing Players. But upon learning about the position of Composer, the most powerful being in Shibuya, he set his sights on that. For once in his existence, he had drive, motivation, a reason to do something, and it was wonderful. The world, for once, had color to it as he fought and got stronger. This was where his quietness grew into confidence, and confidence grew into arrogance. A couple slips let him find that people’s reactions to him flirting with them--especially cute boys--was not only hilarious, but kept people from getting close to him. Why bother? No matter how lonely you are, your life made it pretty obvious that friends weren’t for you.

Eventually, he took on and defeated the previous Composer. His ethereal form reflected the age of his soul--how long he had existed, how old he would have been had he lived--and suddenly, he could hear everything in Shibuya. Everyone’s thoughts and emotions were readily available to him, all at once without filter. And it stayed like this for around 10 years (if we assume twewy takes place in 2007). Joshua could hear and see everything in the city--every horrible crime, every fight, every meeting between friends, every death. He had to pay special attention to the deaths, of course, to see if they were strong enough to be Players. He was bombarded with information, especially with the rise of popular culture and the city’s fixation of the consumption of goods.

This overexposure to people and consumerism, as well as his own cynical viewpoint warping his perspective, caused Joshua to gradually grow to loathe the city. And the city grew duller and more vapid in response to Joshua’s will. He is the city; the city is him. They affect one another. The omniscience cause him to become horribly numb and disenfranchised, not blinking at death or murder or suicide any longer because he had seen it so many times.

[SUICIDE TW]

Finally, it came to a tipping point, where Joshua was going to destroy Shibuya--and himself along with it. And he thought he was finally going to get his wish for death, to stop his miserable existence. Kitaniji was actively trying to stop him; any of the Reapers who wanted his job could just try to kill him; and even Hanekoma, the one person he genuinely trusted, thought it best to help Minamimoto become Composer and destroy Joshua in order to protect Shibuya. And once more, Joshua Kiryu felt completely and utterly alone. Not even the person he trusted more than anything thought he was worth saving. Every path lead to Joshua’s death in some manner.

[TW END]

So he was willing to put everyone’s lives on the line. He felt nothing as he killed an innocent teenager and made him fight for him, put him through hell just so he could prove that the city was stale and stagnant, just as he had always thought.

The time Joshua spent with Neku began to plant the seeds of doubt in his mind. Neku was no longer fighting for himself, he was fighting for another person, one he had just met and yet already cared about. Multiple times throughout the week, Neku had helped other people, in some cases without a bit of hesitation, because it was the right thing to do. He saw Shibuya’s people grow and change, both in good ways and bad--including his own proxy. It didn’t make sense to him. This want to help and protect people... the fact that someone once as cynical as him could gain that was baffling.

Even as baffling was Joshua faking his sacrifice. Well, not entirely faking. Neku would have most certainly been destroyed by the level i flare, and had Joshua been a tenth of a second later, he could have been seriously injured himself. He didn’t get out of that unscathed, either--the attack had grazed him as he jumped to a parallel world, and it had hurt a lot more than he thought it would. Any later, and he could have easily been in far worse shape. That week in that alternate timeline let him think, and he did everything he could to justify to himself that all of this was wrong, that the moment Neku was presented with a strenuous situation he would revert back to his old ways, and Joshua’s plans to erase Shibuya could go on as planned.

But then Neku didn’t pull the trigger. He had every reason to, but he didn’t. Joshua had won their Game, and he could do as he desired with the city. But he couldn’t destroy it. Not after going through that week with Neku, after watching him fight Kitaniji in order to rescue everyone--Joshua included--from the Conductor, after being unable to shoot Joshua. He didn’t know what was going through Neku’s head or why he didn’t shoot--but some small, deeply-hidden part of him thought that maybe, maybe it was because Neku thought Joshua was worth saving.

“I can’t forgive you. But I trust you.”

He still doesn’t understand how that was possible.

The following week left Joshua to reflect, to fight with Hanekoma over what he had done to protect Shibuya, and to finally realize the disgusting, emotionless monster he had become. Even just a bit of the weight of what he had done slammed into him full-force, and he slunk into momentary despair over what thing he had turned into. Since then he has been guilt-ridden and remorseful, but is unsure of how to even begin to approach the subject. Only recently has he left himself start to acknowledge his emotions, because the guilt and horror at what he had done was just too strong to push aside.

Since the end of TWEWY, Joshua has been trying. He’s been trying to become better. He is slowly beginning to try to understand people, to understand that people’s lives--even his own, to an extent--have value, to try and be just a bit more selfless, to try and care. It’s certainly difficult, uncomfortable, and extremely foreign to him, but he’s trying. (I tend to play him like his KH3D incarnation, hence this is how the original game leads to this--) He doesn’t want to continue to be the monster he had been.

Becoming a Reaper was like he got tinted glasses. Eventually, the luster faded, and the world was gray once more. Because of Neku and crew, Joshua Kiryu finally feels like he can see color in the world that he couldn’t before.

[justasimplewriter1]

When I First Saw Him- TLC Shipweek: Satellite

TLC Shipweek day 2: Satellite. This also goes towards my prompt #2: First Meeting. Cress sees Thorne for the first time, and begins to obsess over him.

I freeze the picture. This past week Sibil assigned me to looking at the convicts on Earth. She said it was to get to know the planet better, but I knew it was so Queen Levana could choose people to help her take over the large blue planet. Sibil would never tell me what was going on, but I was smart, I could figure it out. 

On this particular day, I was looking at the smallest offenders, the thieves and rowdy people. I was quickly scanning their profiles, taking the ones that Queen Levana would want, when I came across him. Carswell Thorne. He was wanted in the American Republic on many accounts of thievery. 

I could not believe my eyes. He was perfect. He had shaggy blonde hair, bright green eyes, and he was six foot two, perfect for my five foot frame. In the mug shot they had of him, he was wearing a cocky grin that did not reach his eyes. 

His report said he had stolen from an old lady, but from what I could read, it seemed like he was really helping her. He was not really all that bad. Farther back in his file showed him stealing a port screen from a little girl when he was nine, I was sure he did it because he had a crush on her. 

Everything had a reason. He was helping someone across the street, and people thought he was mugging her. Another time, he saw one monkey hitting another, and he felt as though he had to help it, he was only twelve. Every instance I could see his ulterior motive.  I realized that he was actually a good Samaritan, but Eartheners could not see it. 

I bet he would not care that I was a shell. He probably would not even know what that meant. I spent all day dreaming about how, when I got out of this satellite, we would meet somewhere on Earth, and he would fall in love with me immediately when he realized how alike we were. How we were both ostracized by our people, and completely misunderstood. We would marry and have two kids named Star and Carswell Junior, and we would live happily ever after. 

When night rolled around, I tucked myself into my bed, wrapping my hair around my bed posts, and body, before falling asleep, hoping I would dream of Carswell. 

I did. I woke up to the sound of a banging. I leapt up from the bed before getting caught up in all of my hair. It took me five minutes to unravel myself, but when I entered the monitor room, it was not Sibil who stood there, it was Carswell Thorne. 

His arms were crossed over his large chest, and his eyes were bright with mischief, the way I had imagined they would be all day, every day. I twirled a piece of hair around my finger, or I tried to, as it was too long to make it look like the other girls made it look. He did not care. His grin turned soft, and he reached out to grasp my arm and pull me closer. “I have been looking for you Cress.”

“Really?” I squeaked, but snuggled into his arms.

He chuckled, “oh yeah. I have been dreaming about you for years, and I have been getting in trouble, hoping you would notice me here, in this exact room.”

I giggled, “well it worked. I found you early this morning.”

He nodded, “I know. I could feel it.”

I sighed and leaned more into him. “I also felt the overwhelming urge to kiss you Cress.” I nodded, and leaned into him. He tilted my head up by the chin, and leaned down, and we were kissing. 

It was my first kiss, and it was perfect. He swept me up into his arms, and his tongue invaded my mouth, the way I had read about, and I was breathless and at his mercy. He had just begun to take me to my bed, when I heard a real banging.

I jolted up gasping. I looked around, and saw I was alone, but there was a noise coming from the monitor room. I could not believe it. Was he actually here? I jumped out of bed, unraveled myself, and ran into the other room. “Thorne?” I called out, but instead of my savior waiting in the room, it was Sibil staring at me, confused.