a/n: Alternate theory for Akashi's dual-personality. Canon divergence, spoilers if you don't read the manga, etcetera, etcetera. Enjoy!
Theomania
n. - a madness in which one believes they are god
The Incident occurred when he was four years old.
The boy's red hair was neatly trimmed and his red eyes were focused. His father had trained him in etiquette and manners for as long as he could remember. He remembered to bow to elders, remembered to put his things away when he was finished with them, and remembered to do his preparatory lessons early on the day. Creamy fingers remained polished by his attendants, and the boy was one of the quietest children any of the estate's employees had ever seen.
They were absolutely charmed by him. He flashed gap-toothed, hesitant smiles at them and looked to his father for permission before pedaling over to the immaculately dressed men and women. He was encouraged to remember that they had things to do in this household, just like him, and the boy took his father's words to heart. Seijuuro nodded in understanding, determined not to disturb them while he read his books or fiddled with the pieces on a shogi board in the main hall's living room.
It was routine for the child to rise at seven by his own alarm. Dutifully, Seijuuro's scarlet eyes flew open at the chime, and he threw his legs over the side of the bed. A steward awaited him in front of his bedroom door, the sinewy man unfolding his sleeping robes once they both arrived at his delegated bathroom. He told the boy in his polite tones that the bath had been prepared moments ago, and to let him know if he needed anything else.
Seijuuro declined with a small smile, assuring the manservant that he would be fine on his own.
The man bowed deeply, as was appropriate of his rank. His bow was so low that his face was hidden, and thus the child suspected nothing. He had worked here for years, his terrible secret carefully smothered long before he had been employed, and had only bubbled to the surface as he watched the young master of the household.
He determined that he would wait no longer. If he hesitated for too long, he would miss the golden opportunity, and the fiery-eyed boy would be past his prime. He would be too old, too tall, too intelligent, and too guarded. Right now, the boy trusted him. He was small, his cheeks gleamed a precious crimson as he exited the bathroom and toweled himself off, and the man knew his life would be over, but the blood pumping hot between his ears depleted his hesitation.
"Come this way, young master," the man mused, keeping his voice carefully level. He had to act believable. Seijuuro had to believe in the routine they'd shared for years, now.
His small arm extended, tiny fingers curling around the man's large, ill-intentioned hands. Red eyes crinkled and the gap-toothed mouth turned up happily enough as the man lead him back to his bedroom. Children trusted too much, really.
When he entered the room, he slid the door shut and waited. Patience. He'd been patient for so long. What was the use of rushing now?
"I'll help you with your clothing, young master," the hired hand recited the words he said every day, keeping his hands behind his back while the child ran to his expansive closet. When Seijuuro leapt over to him, towel hanging loosely around his unbearably thin waist, the man smiled, hoping that he seemed kind. He pulled out western clothes – a white button down shirt, overalls, and corduroy shorts. The man retrieved a set of freshly pressed underwear and motioned for the heir of the Akashi household to come closer.
Once the boy was close enough, he muffled his screams with his hand at first, and then stuffed the underwear in the boy's mouth. His hands roamed the boy's body, feeling the lull and dip of his hips in absolute bliss. He swallowed his fear and panted, thoughts racing. He could hear the boy screaming, could feel his arms fighting against his hold, and he smiled. Seijuuro was warm in his arms, soft and pliant under his thumbs, and he could feel saliva welling up in his mouth.
It was wrong. Seijuuro's muffled bellows hollowed into choked sobs behind the cloth. The man narrowly dodged a bony ankle aimed at his crotch with excellent observation, continuing his heady exploration of the unwilling child. He was perfect—so pure; so innocent; so beautiful. He reveled in the glory of the small body as it very slowly stilled, frightened crimson eyes growing dim as they filled with tears.
The man tasted him, humming in pleasure. He tasted clean, having just emerged from the bath. For several minutes, he was left to his devices, but an unprecedented circumstance suddenly ruined his moment. A maid from the neighboring corridor had gotten concerned when the young master had not been heard from after the bath had been drained, and she burst into the room, her chest heaving. She yelled for someone to help, bravely pulling the man off of the boy and screaming. She was elbowed as Seijuuro spat out the offending cloth, wiped his tears, and joined her in yelling for help. The remaining staff came in, finding the two adults locked in a power struggle, and Seijuuro's father fell into a shocking rage.
The man accepted his fate rather easily, momentarily guilt-ridden by his actions and perverse desires. His eyes fell as the police came to take him away minutes later.
Akashi the elder ran to his son and clutched him close to his chest, letting the boy cry for as long as he wished. For days after the Incident, Seijuuro had been a vacant shell of the child he had been before. His father cleared his staff of men entirely (save the bodyguards and drivers), ordered background checks on the women, and assigned no less than two people at any given time attending his son to make sure they were always kept on task and they kept their hands to themselves.
The boy's father assured him that he thought no less of his son after this. The man that had touched him inappropriately was the disgrace. He was human trash. He assured Seijuuro that the boy was better than them. If he wanted to be phenomenal, he would never turn out to be a boy like that – he would lead by example.
After that exchange, Seijuuro seemed to finally brighten up, if only by a margin. It took months for the boy to truly recover, assisted by his father's stern and proud words, and the help of a psychiatrist. She said that many children in situations like his developed various problems and complexes to cope with horrific Incidents like that, and her job was to make sure that he knew there were trustworthy adults in the world, and he certainly didn't have to endure his pain alone.
Seijuuro simply nodded, regaining his confidence one day at a time.
/
By the time he finished elementary school, he hadn't done something ridiculous like forget the Incident, but he had assuredly found something that helped him move past it.
Some time after his fifth birthday and before his eleventh summer, only one thing his father had said remained in his mind. Successful people are the victors. You want to be successful? You want to be better than that man, Seijuuro? Then you must hone your mind, and you must win.
Success became something that he sought to take his mind off of that humiliating moment. He studied for his tests until he had memorized all of the material. He participated in various sports until he found one that he wanted to devote his time to. He planned his moves on the shogi board against his father so excellently that his parent eventually had to concede defeat to the boy's abilities.
His mother, quiet and lovely woman that she was, encouraged him to continue with both the intellectual pursuit and the physically strenuous one in middle school, mostly because her son had seemed much more driven and engaging after he'd gotten involved in his elementary school's shogi club and the basketball team. The youngest member of the Akashi household nodded his gratitude, and strode towards his room, preparing to study for the upcoming exams, sure that he would be able to get into his desired institution.
Teiko, renowned for its' prevalence in the sport of basketball (still far inferior in popularity to baseball or soccer) and its' academics, enticed the boy. He smiled, eagerly excited about the new heights he would reach there.
Some silly notion like making friends with the unworthy people with whom he surrounded himself never crossed his mind.
/
Excellence. Success. Victory. Teiko's motto resounded well with the adolescent's mentality.
Unlike the students in his early childhood, his classmates were finally starting to get serious about sports, and he took pride in being a part of such a well-oiled machine as Teiko's basketball team. Once he made his talents known and recognized, Akashi started to plan. He looked at the regulars, at his fellow freshmen, and he saw everything come together in bits and pieces. He found boys that were driven, much like he himself was, and he started to put the puzzle together.
With Captain Nijimura's help and the Coach's consent, the young heir molded the first string into something phenomenal. For the first time, Akashi found himself nearly pleased by his fellow classmates. He smiled with them, almost enjoying his time together, but never forgetting what he was there to do. When he played shogi matches against Midorima, it was a reaffirmation of his tactics. After he pointed Aomine in the right direction, he folded his arms across his chest and smirked. Once he encountered Murasakibara and figured out how best to socialize with him, he congratulated himself. Those three were necessary for the new style he had in mind for this team.
The strange outlier was Kuroko Tetsuya, whom he went out of his way to patiently teach and encourage. Out of all of the members of his new team, he was decidedly the strangest. The other small youth was full of gratitude for the redhead for giving him a chance, and Akashi, possibly for the first time in his life, found someone normal interesting. Kuroko certainly had a gift – if he hadn't had one, the boy with crimson hair might have been warier of him – but off the courts, he really was nothing special.
For whatever reason, Akashi helped him study when they weren't doing basketball drills together. He blatantly refused to mingle with the group just to hang out with the idiots, but he truly respected Kuroko without any rhyme or reason. Perhaps it was because he was polite, and he had a sense of decency and respect, unlike the others of his new clique. Just when he was on the verge of questioning his own motivations, the second spring of his middle school years arrived, and he became too busy with games and new recruits to worry about that.
Once Kise joined, Haizaki was terminated, and Akashi was exceptionally pleased by the course of events. He was offered captaincy, and he accepted with proper courtesy. At this strange juncture in his life, he was determined to have everyone at the highest level of excellence, as befit him, even if they vomited, cried, and bled. His obsession became so prominent that he was momentarily blinded. Blinded by his emotionality, strangely enough.
When everyone started awakening their true talent, thinking that they were beyond him, thinking that they didn't need him any more, that was when something within the boy cracked, and he grew exceptionally frigid. The prominent part of his brain, usually so polished and thorough, got disturbed by another voice. It was much quieter at first, but it slowly and surely rose to surface. He had wanted companions to challenge him, hence the reason he'd worked them so tremendously. They'd become machines for victory, just like he'd wanted. So when he felt them slipping out of his grasp, however momentarily, he felt lost, much like he had been when he was a child, disgraced and humiliated by a man ten times his age.
Recalling the Incident brought forth anger he didn't know he'd had trapped within him.
Akashi coolly reasserted his dominance after his impromptu match with Murasakibara, terrifying his teammates into obedience. His eye flashed gold, his mannerisms changed as a whole.
He'd grown casual with them. He'd grown complacent. He'd gotten too used to thinking about the team, too close to these people, too close to becoming friends.
When Aomine drifted apart, he allowed it, so long as Daiki continued to meet his point quota in matches. Once Murasakibara began listening to the redhead unconditionally, Midorima and Kise straightened their backs and nodded in earnest.
His mismatched eyes flicked to the side and his lips uncontrollably twitched. He caught sight of Kuroko, who looked so broken and lost that he felt vaguely reminiscent again. But now he had no time to worry about others.
Victory was the only thing on his mind.
/
When Kuroko announced his intention to leave the team, the louder part of Akashi's mind whispered good riddance. The softer, more rational part of his mind was mildly disappointed.
The redhead dismissed him after announcing his intentions for the other five regulars upon middle school graduation.
Kuroko seemed to look through the other boy before he disappeared. Akashi predicted the shadow's ambitions months before they crossed paths again and snorted. Tetsuya had always been so foolishly sentimental, and it would be his job as rightful leader to show the blue-haired teenager how naïve his thinking was.
/
Akashi wasn't afraid of Tetsuya's perseverance, but he did admire how strong his determination to pull the miracles out of their bad habits of thinking that they could play alone was. The redhead had always respected this particular method of the shadow player's. After all, one required pawns to take the head of the King. Kuroko was doing his best to show them that working together made him stronger than all of them, and thus far, he had succeeded, with minor ups and downs.
That was hardly debatable. Akashi was the one who had shown him that such a place could exist for the boy with low stamina, low presence, and big dreams. The redhead was the world's strongest advocate for team play, except he didn't believe in people working together so much as he did people doing what he wanted, nowadays.
Still, something stirred in him when he watched Kuroko play in the Winter Cup. Akashi's lips turned up against his will, enticed by the very thought that Tetsuya believed himself a match for him. If he were to hazard an extremely accurate guess, his ex-teammate probably thought that if he were to defeat Teiko's most notorious captain, said captain would break free of his current mentality and realize that people were intended to work together, and he would return to being the pleasant Akashi that had spent countless hours teaching the quiet and small basketball player how best to utilize his gifts among the bright stars he played with.
Akashi scoffed, humored by the very idea. Nothing about him had changed, save for his violent streak. Success—no, victory—was still everything.
He felt a headache just thinking about it. How worthless.
When the shot clock buzzed, he stood up, paying no attention to the other Rakuzan regulars as he swept out of the stadium.
/
Tetsuya's loss should have been reassuring. It should have felt good when the redhead smirked and reminded the blue-haired teenager how ineffective resistance against him was.
Instead, it felt a bit like trying to fight a rising tide, and a little like he'd had an out of body experience.
"I don't know you at all," his old teammate had murmured for the second time. "I won't lose next time. I'll win with my friends…I'll show you what teamwork looks like."
Akashi's teammates, celebratory but also shell-shocked at how frigid the redhead had become near the end of the match, stared at the two of them with bated breath. The Seirin regulars, bone-weary and bitter, were also worriedly glancing at the small basketball players, ready to jump in and separate them by force, if need be.
"You're too hung up on such a trivial thing, Tetsuya." Akashi turned around, refusing to meet his steel blue eyes. "I am absolute, and that is all you need to remember."
By chance, he peered over his shoulder again, and felt Kuroko's gaze burn through him all over again. He shoved his foolish, unwarranted sentimentality to the back of his mind.
/
It takes two years. The redhead has a breakdown that nobody but Tetsuya expects. His other ex-teammates thought maybe something would change if Akashi lost…but he'd always been proud. They never could have envisioned him crying in front of others. They never imagined that his old self would awaken in the middle of a match in a last ditch effort to destroy Tetsuya and his stupid pretty words (friendship, effort, teamwork).
Tetsuya pads over to him, on the verge of passing out, surrounded by his loving teammates. He smiles gently at his old captain, who's in the middle of an identity crisis. He pardons Akashi's resistance, remaining on the floor beside him, sweaty and crying just the same.
"Welcome back," Tetsuya whispers, and the redhead's head spins. Why are you talking to me—I lost—I'll die.
It's Rakuzan's first loss in years, and it's all his fault. His team picks him up, restrains the redhead to keep him from lashing out and stabbing out his own eyes. They try to quiet him in the locker room while he sobs and screams, memories of the Incident – his first and only loss of dignity, of respect, of power – remove him from his consciousness.
Reo is startled, to say the least. Even Eikichi is at a loss. They've never seen their captain quite so neurotic, and they're not sure whether or not to call an ambulance before Seirin's Kuroko Tetsuya pleas with their coach to be allowed acceptance. Since Akashi's suddenly started screaming for them not to touch him, and not to dial 110, they figure that it's fine. He comes in and tentatively reaches for Akashi's hand.
"Akashi-kun." Tetsuya is perfectly calm and steady, waiting for Akashi to lift his mismatched eyes and truly look at him. The redhead's mouth closes in a scowl, and he rubs his tears gruesomely on the back of his left arm. He snorts back his snot. Tetsuya, graceful and patient, simply smiles.
"What," He breathes lowly, infuriated with himself.
"It was a good match." There had been one point of difference. Akashi had felt a fire in his blood he had only just touched in middle school. "You know, I've always wanted to thank you."
Akashi laughs bitterly. "What a terrible method of going about it."
Kuroko keeps his gaze level once the redhead looks up. "I had to make sure I really thanked you."
"My other personality is still me," the young heir hisses. "Obviously."
"But you repressed something important," Kuroko replies in his quiet manner. "Now you've got it back. I don't know what happened to you in the past…but this obsession with victory is unhealthy."
His hands clench. "I have to be…" Better than that human trash. Better than humans. Victorious. "Perfect."
The other teen slaps him in the face. Akashi blinks, taken aback. "You're only human." Kuroko reminds him. "There's nothing wrong with improving yourself…but no man is an island."
Tears prick at the redhead's eyes again as he scoffs. "I feel like you've been saving that one up for a long time."
Kuroko smiles. "Only for a few years."
/
After that match, he starts to see the world differently. His teammates genuinely worry for his mental health. They hover around him, trying to make sure everything's alright. He tries to change his playing tactics, but not overtly – they're still working together, but he has to realize that deeming people worthless and useless is no help to team morale at all.
Victory is still everything…but he thinks maybe he can accept his own shortcomings, too. Every time he gets a chance, he calls Tetsuya. Maybe it's to recall his victories since his most recent loss, maybe it's because something in his gut is yelling him to figure out what the hell's the matter with the smaller teenager. Maybe he's starting to wonder exactly what makes Tetsuya, who should be at the bottom of life's metaphorical totem pole, so confident.
He'll get to the bottom of that issue later.
/
His father had been less disappointed about the news of his son's loss, and moreso pleased that his son was becoming less frigid. Of course he'd wanted his son to win, but that was because the man thought winning made the adolescent happy. He hadn't realized it was simply a coping mechanism. Once Akashi the younger recalled the full story of his and Tetsuya's history, his father seemed bemused.
"You know, Seijuuro," his father remarks in his brisk way, "if you want to pay that boy back, you have to see him as an equal – no, more than that, because you respect him already. It's all well and good if you make friends, but right now, he's your rival, first and foremost."
Seijuuro contemplates his words before sending a message on his phone, making plans for the weekend.
/
They sit together at a family restaurant, ordering in polite tones and observing each other casually.
Without warning, Akashi begins to speak. He tells Kuroko of the time he was molested as a child (the Incident), and his words shock the smaller teenager so badly that he almost spills his drink. He goes into full detail, saying that his psychiatrist had warned him about developing some form of schizophrenia, and his own surprise at the discovery that he really had created a second persona, after all. He notes that he's beyond that now – he's started to accept both versions of himself, and stops leaning on his dormant personality (the one that had created his still-golden eye in middle school) as a crutch. Kuroko remains silent throughout the tale, nodding when the redhead paused to show that he's paying rapt attention.
Once he's finished, Akashi folds his hands together. "That's all I wanted to say." He commands focus like a regal, as always, but his expression is much softer than it had been at the beginning of high school.
"Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me that." Kuroko dips his head in gratitude. "I'm impressed that you could be so kind and patient to others after all of that."
"I am an opportunist." Akashi replies flippantly. Kuroko smiles. "I simply did what I had to do to make my life ideal."
"Wanting to see your friends improve is admirable," the smaller basketball player responded.
"I don't have friends, as a rule." The redhead states flatly.
Blue eyes stare at heterochromatic irises as he chuckles lowly. "Not even me?"
Akashi sizes him up and refuses to avert his eyes. "I suppose you are something close to an exception."
Kuroko stands and his lips curl upwards. "I'll see you at the spring tournament, Akashi-kun."
"I won't lose this time." Akashi declares.
A bell on the door of the shop tells the redhead that the blue-haired shadow player is gone.
/
When Seirin loses in a close match that spring, Akashi shakes hands with Kuroko, murmuring good game with a genuine smile and earnest eyes.
Kuroko, disappointed and yet satisfied, smiles back. Thank you.
Akashi decides, right then and there, that playing basketball for fun and victory isn't such a terrible, plebian idea after all.