A Farewell to All Futures

A New Fate

Warning: implied mental/emotional abuse, implied transphobia/homophobia, implied domestic abuse, gender/body dysphoria

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While the students who were awake talked through the class group chat, Yuri laid awake in bed, staring up at the ceiling. He was unable to sleep with thoughts racing through his mind. His handbook kept buzzing with notifications, but it sat on the bedside table untouched, its messages left unread.

Yuri recalled what had happened in the last few hours. Setsuka - a person he trusted wholeheartedly solely because of her gender - had spiked the food Mikado had made - which was the only food he would take from a male because of the quality, and he was told that Setsuka helped too - for the class dinner for Syobai's birthday. He normally wouldn't go to any party hosted for a male or with males, but there were lots of women there, so he decided to go along with what the others had planned.

After everyone had succumbed to the drug's effects, himself being the first to feel the symptoms due to his big appetite, they left with their partners or their friends to help each other through the effects. But who came to him? Syobai. Who...didn't hurt him like he thought he would. He didn't make Yuri stay or do anything that made him uncomfortable. And once the drug's effects eventually wore off, Syobai just...let him go. No conditions or anything.

From all the time he spent around men or just heard about them, he knew that men were disgusting, violent, barbaric creatures that preyed upon the weak and wouldn't take 'no' for an answer, no matter what anybody said. They would just take advantage of weaker people and just take what they want without giving anything back to the women, not giving them what they wanted. But as Yuri had seen for the months he had stayed at Hope's Peak Academy, there were three contradictions that he had seen so far.

The men in his class simply...didn't do anything to the women around them to hurt them in any way. As Kokoro had said, they were too focused on what they personally wanted, and they seemed to have better morals than the men he had heard about. When they were under the effects of the aphrodisiac, they didn't mindlessly go after the women to fulfill their needs. Instead, everybody talked rationally on how to handle the problem before agreeing with their partners to go to their dorm and handle things there.

Another things that he noticed was that even if the women weren't given anything, they bore no grudge. They still talked to, remained friends with, and even hung out with the men. They didn't get angry if nothing was given to them or if a person was entirely useless to them. To someone like Yuri, who had slowly learned that he was nothing if he couldn't be of use to anyone anymore, this was an appalling discovery. 

And lastly, if men were so cruel and barbaric and digesting, then...what was he really? He always saw himself as a man who broke the mold and dedicated himself to women alone, but was that really true? Whenever he tried to get closer to his reasons for existing, they always seemed weirded out by him and made uncomfortable. 

During his own birthday party, when he was lifeguarding for the others, they were still seemed apprehensive to trust him, and during Kokoro's birthday party when he was slightly tipsy, he tried to flirt with and get closer to Setsuka and Hibiki, when they weren't dating at the time, they drunkenly went up a tree to avoid him.

With the women not fully happy with him, could he really call himself a being made solely for women? He tried to offer anything to them, but they wouldn't take it. Was he just not good enough, was he just as beastly as the ones he hated, or...was it really something else?

The last time he had to question his own beliefs, Emma had asked him what gender he considered himself to be. He didn't want to talk about it at the time under the excuse that it was too late at night to think about it, but it seemed that the question was unavoidable now. Was he actually...a girl?