picfor1000 | Fic - Parceled Freedom (Psycho-Pass)

Title -- Parceled Freedom
Author--

cornerofmadness
Fandom -- Psycho-pass
Disclaimer -- Gen Urobuchi owns it, not I
Rating -- teen
Characters/Pairing -- Shuusei Kagari pov, Implied sexual shenanigans with Shion and Yayoi and Shion/Yayoi.
Timeline/Spoilers -- Soon after Akane arrives, no real spoilers unless you know absolutely nothing about Kagari and don’t know who Ginoza is related to.
Warning -- none
Summary -- He has never truly known freedom.
Author’s Note -- written for

picfor1000 for this prompt two crocheted snakes. It does speculate on Kagari’s childhood and what he gets up to within the confines of the enforcer complex. It’s mostly a Kagari introspective.
You cannot parcel out freedom in pieces because freedom is all or nothing. - Tertullian

XXX

That old familiar jealousy welled up when he saw her. Kagari savored its bitterness. On the surface Akane Tsunemori had nothing anyone would be jealous of. Compared to Yayoi or Karanomori, she was downright plain – even if he had called her a cutie - but she had something those women didn’t, the same something Kagari didn’t: freedom. He barely remembered freedom. When Kagari tried to picture his mother’s face, all he saw was a blank. He hated Akane for her liberty and wanted to carve it out of her.

Of course, that last instinct was why he was an Enforcer, a police dog on two feet. Something was wrong with him, a lesion in the hypothalamus the doctors at the isolation facility had said.

Kagari envied Akane’s freedom, her normal life. He wondered if she had happy childhood memories, if she thought about her parents and could call up something other than a mannequin’s blank face when she thought of them. Could be worse, he could be Ginoza and see his dad every day, knowing his psycho-pass had clouded to the point he’d been removed from society, chained up alongside Kagari.

He did have one childhood memory from before getting slammed into the isolation facility when he was five after failing the Ministry’s Medical Examination. He had two stuffed snakes his mom had made from a pair of his dad’s socks. They weren’t just any snakes. They were Yamata no Orochi and Tsuchinoko, serpents of legend. Kagari had loved these simple toys. He’d been so wild when the people from the facility came to take him away, they had finally agreed he could have the snakes with him.

The snakes were his one joy in that hell he grew up in. The whiteness haunted him, that soul sucking white, white rooms, white uniforms, unrelenting white. The soft music they piped in to calm the patients as they called them – inmates if you asked Kagari – worked its way into the brain like a parasitic worm. The staff had all been polite, but he could tell, even as a child, that he was younger than they were used to dealing with, that they pitied him. He started telling jokes to make them smile, to wipe that hideous pity out of their eyes.

Those silly snakes went everywhere in the compound with him. They slept in his bed. He even took them to class, such as it was in that place. More like an instrument of torture, a handful of psychotic children who were barely worth training since most of them had zero chance of rehabilitation and return to life. They had to try to prepare them was the party line. Taking his toys to class hadn’t lasted long. Hideki tried to steal them, and Kagari stabbed a stylus through the boy’s eye.

Kagari learned there was even further isolation in an isolation facility. The psychiatrist kept the snakes for a month while making Kagari watch vids of the police using the Dominators in lethal eliminator and destroy decomposer modes; until it backfired when he laughed at their pain. When he got the snakes back, they stayed in his bedroom. If proper policewoman Tsunemori came into his room now, she’d see the tatty snakes on a shelf, always with him, the vestiges of his short freedom.

Kagari couldn’t really figure out why he even kept the damn things. It wasn’t like he made many emotional attachments. The psychiatrists hadn’t liked to use terms like ‘sociopath.’ They were too out of date, too judgmental. It was easier to say his psycho-pass was cloudy, but the truth was, he was beyond cloudy. He had been dinged at fucking five years old. He was broken beyond repair. Did he really feel any connection to his parents through those snakes?

And why should he? They never once even tried to see him. Of course, it was entirely possible they couldn’t visit or send letters being an isolation facility, but it took years before he was old enough to understand that. By then he’d learned to hate the family who abandoned him. Yeah, Mom had cried when they took him, but Kagari figured when she had time to think about it, she’d be glad to have him out of her life before he did something embarrassing like killing an annoying neighborhood bully. Kagari could see that happening because he would likely have been bullied. He was so blasted short, and he liked video games; he’d have been a natural target. Maybe he wouldn’t have been a gamer in the outside world.

But in the facility his only friends were his game consoles. The workers there kept the inmates pretty rigidly separated, probably smart since Kagari didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of a dominator set to lethal. The doctors had determined no cuties for him. Kagari had other ideas.

Joining the police, even as their dog, sounded better than just lying around making a waste of his entire life. It offended Kagari’s pride that he’d never amount to anything thanks to how he’d been born. As much as he hated the whole Sibyl thing, working for it was better than nothing. He hadn’t counted on how much it would frustrate him, these hints of freedom he got whiff of on the job.

At least it had allowed him a bit of a life, an interesting one, and allowed him to deal with that forced celibacy issue. Thank you, Dr. Karanomori. Yayoi helped with those issues from time to time. Damn if both women weren’t even more aggressive than him. He wasn’t always sure he’d survive the encounter, even the ones where he was allowed to watch the two of them in bed, taking his own pleasure into his well-practiced hands. Kagari wondered what Tsunemori would think of all of that nonsense. Didn’t matter. All he could do was admire her from afar. If he tried to touch, he’d get zapped. One more freedom denied him.