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Choices are compound and meaningful and serious.
He is twelve, banished by his own fucking family because he wasn't worthy of being a son or a brother. He gets caught up in stealing. He's shit scared, obviously, beacuse crime is just a meaning to survive and he fell into the wrong crowd.
The consequences are pretty shitty. It's not just petty crime he's landed himself in, but a criminal heist with a gang that is far too known to the government. He's only fucking twelve years old, but he's looking at for years in a juvenile detention and then getting transferred to an adult centre for another four.
That's eight years at minimum. He'll be twenty by then.
Or, he could kill himself.
A man in his fourties that smells too much like liquor and faintly like blood clasps a hand on his shoulder and offers him the first genuine smile he might have ever experienced from anybody apart from his own brother.
"Want a job?" he asks, and confused and scared and horrified, the twelve-year-old boy agrees.
Work or prison? It kind of seems like a no-brainer.
He's thirteen when the treatments start. He made a choice—certainly serious. Genetic modification was in the contract he signed a few months prior, but he was twelve and directionless and petrified, and thought that working for the government might be better than jail.
(Maybe, just maybe, it would make his brother and parents proud.)
"Oh," the doctor says to him, military-grade, stern, and entirely unbothered. "Your form said that you were male."
"I'm a boy," he replies, dry and tired and pissed the fuck off. Physical strength alterations should have nothing to do with his goddamn sex, right? He squints, ready to yip out a sassier response when the doctor puts the forms down and gives him a genuine look.
"When you're a smidge older, we'll look into helping you there," he continues, "but for now, let's focus on the surgeries recquired for your admission into the Hunting Dogs."
He's torn between which is worse following—the monthly visits, or the recovery period. It takes him two fucking months to adapt to his altered body, but it takes him 24 hours at a time to recover from the monthly treatments.
(And somewhere, deep down, he wonders whether this is actually worth it.)
He's fourteen when he first goes into battlefield. He wonders if his brother would be proud of him, because he can smash bricks like they're chalk and stop vehicles with his torso.
(He still wonders if his parents would be, too, and then he wishes they were six fucking feet under.
Not very apt, he thinks, for an alleged warrior of justice.)
A new dog enters the pack, cold-hearted and heightened in his senses. Tecchou-san doesn't get along with him, but he seems to have a soft spot for the fourteen-year-old boy, often giving him shallow praise and defending him when he makes mistakes.
Once a week, he goes to their shared dorm for dinner. Tecchou-san has strange tastes in food, but Jouno-san makes a mean chankonabe.
He's fifteen when he discovers he has an ability. He didn't think he had one—he thought it was something only people as special as his brother, or Tecchou-san, or Jouno-san, got to have. It's the same skill as his brother's, though, because he's never free from the overbearing comparisions to a perfect military shoulder that decided to make himself a chandilier in the basement of his dormitories.
The captain is overjoyed, though something in the slap on the back he gives makes the boy think that maybe he already knew this was going to happen.
Kids like him don't get opportunities like this without some kind of gain, right?
He's sixteen when the anticipated day comes. On top of his Hunting Dogs surgeries (that he just found out he would die without...), he's been receiving hormone therapy.
It helps, but it's nowhere near enough. The person who he is on the outside will never be who he is inside. Who he is, inside, will never be enough.
The doctors offer to help him out with the remainder of his transition, as promised two years ago, and he accepts.
Tecchou-san and Jouno-san bring him flowers to his bedside table. The captain extends a congratulations—although it's tense and odd and definitely unexpected—which he finds himself smiling about when he's alone at night.
It's like a disfunctional family, but one he belongs in. Two brothers, and a weird, drunk uncle.
He's seventeen when the final hound is added to the family. She's an infant, then she's an adult, then she's the same age as he was when he first entered. He finds himself tending to her anyway, unsure of her age, because he knows what it's like to make a choice when you're young and scared and you don't actually have any choices.
She's not scared, though. She's not like him at all. In fact, she normally yanks on his two cheeks and calls him a crybaby for his own fears.
He's eighteen when the captain pulls him to one side, offering him a special mission. It's another choice that isn't really a choice at all—one that he could refuse but he dreads to find out what would happen if he shouldn't.
"I'd like you to infiltrate an organisation, now that you're an adult," the captain says, all smiles and belly laughs. "They're the underground rats of Yokohama. Quite apt, considering how I found you, son. I expect you to get recruited and work alongside them, then report your findings back to me once a month."
"Me?" the boy questions, dread creeping up in his throat. "Of course, I'm happy to help wherever, but—"
"Who else?" the captain response, placing a gentle hand on the boy's shoulder. But he's not a boy, not anymore. He's a man; Michizou Tachihara, Hunting Dog. "I'll email you over the intel. Recruitment should be easy, as they're currently recovering from a pretty severe executive loss from the department you'll be placed in. They need all the help they can get, with who they're angling to take over."
He's nineteen when he finds out what the phrase two sides of the same coin really means. Infiltrating the fucking prestigous Port Mafia, he fits into the role pretty well. Criminality aside, it's not that bad. It's all an act, of course, but he gains another big brother, another big sister, a grandpa, and... well, his partner is odd. But he has one of those too.
Two sides of the same coin, him and Gin. It's bizarre, because the two of them are so fucking different, but he anticipates the chase—their blade to his neck, his gun to their stomach. He anticipates the silence, cold daggers shooting from their eyes as Hirotsu-san tries to separate them and control them.
Gin has never spoken a word to them. He doesn't know shit about them—not even their fucking age, or gender—but he always finds himself anticipating. Wanting. Like it was something he was always missing.
He's twenty when he tries to kill himself. It should be the first time he's tried such a thing (it isn't), but the blade comes pretty easily to him—ready to stap him right in the chest because he categorically refuses to be a puppet anymore. He uncovers it all, with the help of a weretiger: the betrayal from his captain, the agency being innocent, the fact he wants to be a stupid, shitty mafioso.
He isn't as fast as the captain. He never thought he would be.
He loved being a Hunting Dog, too. He loved having Tecchou-san and Jouno-san as his peculiar older brothers. He loved swinging Teruko-san over his shoulders and letting her be a fucking child, even just for five minutes. He even loved the captain—the man he thought as trying to save him from his own demise.
But he loves the Port Mafia too. He loves Hirotsu-san, his grumpy grandpa who chain-smokes and ruffles his hair when no one is looking. He loves Higuchi-san, even though she's skittish and weird and obsessed with Akutagawa-san and ever once tried to fit in. He loves Akutagawa-san, too, who reluctantly lets him call him his big brother by scoffing out small breaths instead of stabbing him with Rashomon.
He loves Gin.
He loves Gin.
None of that matters though, because Michizou Tachihara has never been a person with his own feelings or thoughts—just a weapon, and a puppet on a string that follows orders.