Fandom: Eyeshield 21
Title: The Fast and The Furious
Author: hana-akira AKA rurichi
Character: Kobayakawa Sena
Genre: Drama, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: 18+
Warning: OOC
Prompt: Inspired by Ch. 178 when Sena has his wonderful furious expression and Ep. 114 when Agon slightly notices Sena's fury.
Summary: In a world where Sena never met Mamori or Riku when he was younger, he gives into his fury and thus becomes a different person. Dangerous!Sena.

A/N: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak had a heavy hand in my writing of this fic. If you've read the book, you'd notice that some sentences are carbon copies or very similar: this is done INTENTIONALLY. I am not claiming credit; I am not plagiarizing. I DON'T GET ANYTHING OUT OF THIS BESIDES YOUR TIME.

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Chapter 1: Pandora's Box

Featuring:

Children who really should have known better — a pacifist trapped in a corner — and the inevitable outcome of what happens when you push someone too far and too hard

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A SMALL FACT CONCERNING KOBAYAKAWA SENA:

He didn't deserve the way he was being treated. Then again, by society's moral standards, nobody else deserved to be treated that way either.

"Hurry up, slowpoke Sena. You're so slow."

"Why don't you carry our stuff, huh? Maybe you'll be useful for once."

"C'mon already; it can't be that hard to clean a classroom, can it?"

Ever since Kobayakawa Sena was in pre-K, he had always been bullied by his male classmates. Bullied into carrying their backpacks, into getting their lunch, into cleaning up after them. It had become so much of a common sight that both his female classmates and his teachers turned a blind eye to what was happening to him. Sena was a small slip of boy; his petite stature and Asian face obvious proof of his pure Japanese genes and blood, and it wasn't through any fault of his own that he was a prime target for bullies. He was just so tiny and he was just there.

The fact that no one helped him could have been attributed to the bystander effect, the social psychological phenomenon where individuals don't offer any means of help in an emergency situation to the victim when other people are present, but no one liked to think that they were so inhuman that they wouldn't help another in need. People simply wrote it off that they simply 'didn't know' Sena was being bullied and left it at that. So when he was being more tormented than usual by his 'classmates', naturally, no one came to save him.

"Hahahaha! Sena likes it rough! Sena likes it rough!" A boy Sena's age said gleefully as he pushed Sena around as though he was an old rag doll, a toy that was meant to be bent and twisted and broken.

He couldn't distinguish the faces of his bullies at all, despite the fact that he knew all of them for at least two years now. To him, they were all just a blob; shapes and visages all mixed together, each expression the same as the last. There was no difference from one bully to the next. It was a sad, but true fact that when Sena even saw or even heard a bully, they were regarded all in the same way: as the enemy.

(One monster was silently released from Pandora's box so swiftly that not even the wind had noticed—a monster so calculating, so cunning, that it schemed its way back to the box so that it could pick at the lock and let the other monsters out.)

"Of course he does," another boy snorted sarcastically, a malevolent grin spreading over his lips after a particular hard shove; the same sort a child would have after holding a magnifying glass over ants on a hot summer day or successfully getting away with tricking their parents into getting the newest model of a Honda dirt bike.

It should be noted that Sena was a pacifist at heart—a peace lover if you would, and a general overall non-violent person due to the fact he disliked violence and feared the feeling of pain. At six, he was the most passive-aggressive of his age group and he simply accepted that what happened to him was normal: something that wasn't unusual in society nor was it uncommon. He didn't know that the things he was subjected to—physical suffering, humiliation, shame, drudgery—were all things that weren't tolerated and that no one could get away with it scot-free in the world today.

He did, however, know that there were limits to a person's endurance, to a human's tolerance for pain. A boundary, that no matter how tempting, should never be breached.

(There was only so much you could pour into a cup before it overflowed, only so many times you could drop a cellphone on the floor before it didn't work and couldn't serve its purpose anymore. A beast is unleashed from its cage, a tentative step, breaking into a run only after knowing for sure that its freedom has come.)

"It must be fun playing in the mud, right? Does the earth taste good, Kobayakawa?" Another male voice mocks him as his face is shoved into the dirt, taunting him as they leisurely take their time flipping through a sports magazine.

Enough was enough. Even the weak got tired of the same old routine. In the end, someone had to break. No one ever said it wouldn't have been Sena, though.

(The way Sena breaks is the same way the rest of the suicidal and the homicidal people do—hanging themselves, overdose on drugs, killing everyone else with guns, falling purposely from a building. Except Sena doesn't just break. He gets payback. And that, in the end, is what makes all the difference.)

An ugly and furious look came over Sena's face, his eyes taking on an even darker shade of brown than dried blood.

(Pandora's box is opened and hope is trapped inside.)

"Do you think that if you cry out for help, someone will come to your rescue?" The last boy said maliciously, a derisive smile on his face as he towered over Sena's prone and trodden form. The other three were next to the boy, all spectators at an execution.

(A fallen angel falls from heaven: unforgiving, vengeful, and both God and human is a curse on its lips. The words triggered resentment and it led to hate.)

It was oppression. It was slavery. And it was hatred that had been bottled up to the point until it would finally burst. A cold fury unlike any other surrounded Sena, deafening in its silence and violence it promised as something snapped inside him—something like glass shattering or when fine china is thrown against the wall. His fear left him and he was overwhelmed with anger.

What happened next was natural, and frankly, something a long time in coming.

They were punched and kicked and destroyed by a boy who was utterly consumed by rage. His knuckles and nails were so frighteningly strong despite their minuteness. His voice, too, was able to hurt them. It was retribution at its finest, not that Sena could recognize it because he thought it was just animalistic instinct: something fast and furious like the automatic response of fight and flight.

(This is what happens when a pacifist is forced to defend himself and no one comes to save him. No knight-in-shining-armor, no mentor-in-the-form-of-a-wizard, no old-lady-with-an-apple-in-her-hand. No one.)

Somewhere underneath all the bruised bodies, Sena could see his broken heart in pieces, each piece shining with some sort of inner light and beating beneath all that flesh and blood. He stood above the whirlpool of beaten faces on the ground, taking only a cursory glance of his handiwork, and announced:

"I'm sick of it."

(Dark mahogany hair in the sun, a shadow over the boy's face, and a strange flicker of ferociousness in the eyes: as the faces looked at the boy standing above them calmly, they could only understand one thing.)

I'm so sick of you.

"I'm tired of this."

(They were the ones who had made this being before them.)

I'm tired of your ugliness.

Sena did not kill them. But he came close.

(Six is an unlucky number after all since it was the Devil's number and so Sena is six-years-old when he gives into his everlasting fury and all-consuming hate. Not that anyone knew. But soon the world will know. The world will know the name of Kobayakawa Sena.)

Blood drips down from Sena's nails, blood splattered all over the earth not unlike the mud stains on his clothes, and he says nothing at all as he stares blankly to everything before him.

("What have I done?" Pandora says in shock, terror written all over her face after she realized that the box she had opened that was given as a gift was actually a curse in and of itself.

'What have we done?' Little boys think dumbly, numb with the knowledge that they were the ones responsible for making an ordinary boy turn into an extraordinary creature.

Whathaveyoudonewhathaveyoudonewhathaveyoudone—)

"I did this," Sena says wonderingly, as though he's found one of the Seven Wonders of the World or the meaning of life itself, looking bewilderedly at his hands and feet, the tools and instruments which had wrought destruction and defeat.

(The deed sinks, sinks, sinks, into the mud, into his head and bones, and hell hath no fury like a victim scorned, like a child abused. Fast and furious, furious and fast, and dirty as you can.)

Sena smiles and all is right with the world.