⸺  Biography

[CONTENT WARNING FOR SUICIDE]Born Sutō Atsushi (須藤 敦) in Nishinari-ku, Osaka some time in the early to mid 1980s, A was his family’s firstborn son. His siblings, a set of twins, were born one year later. His memories of his birth family are fuzzy at best. He remembers that his mother and father drank a lot and that he cared a lot for his baby brothers. Atsushi was dumped at an orphanage at age three or four. It didn’t surprise him. He’d come to understand from the time he was barely able to talk that the love of his parents was transactional. He was another mouth to feed that offered nothing in return.At age five, the orphanage he lived in was visited by an Englishman named Quillish Wammy, who donated a hefty sum to help renovate and expand the facilities. Maybe it was when he noticed the child reading books beyond the level most ordinary adults reached, or perhaps when he saw him reassembling the broken model skeleton in the classroom from memory, but Atsushi was relocated to Winchester and spent the rest of his formative years at Wammy’s House. That mind of his that never seemed to shut up or rest had finally earned him something for once.His intelligence grew by leaps and bounds over the next year- the young boy devoured a good chunk of the library in his free time, especially fixated on topics like combustion engines and human anatomy. Atsushi was relatively well liked by the other children despite his odd fixations given his tendency to treat the younger ones the way he’d treated his younger brothers— warmly.Close to his seventh birthday Beyond Birthday arrived at the orphanage. The two met while Atsushi was sprawled across the common room floor, staring at a cadaver’s open chest on the glossy page of a textbook. Bizarre and unnerving to most, yes, but somehow their first encounter didn’t end in the tears or fighting that most of Beyond’s interactions with others tended to instigate. Atsushi, a bit anxious and strange by nature, never found Beyond particularly frightening because of his own macabre leanings. The two of them were fast friends and the others often said they were basically joined at the hip. Wherever Beyond was getting into trouble, loyal Atsushi was never far behind, smoothing things over as he went.L used to live among them— a strange and lofty figure who Atsushi admired. And then he became the L, practically a superhero in the eyes of the children at the House. He came from nothing just like the rest of them, after all. They all wanted to be like him.When Atsushi and Beyond were selected as the first candidates to succeed L, they figuratively lost their names and became Alternate and Backup. A and B. The two worked hard, and even as more potential successors were chosen they were consistently at the top of the rankings. Sure, A had a tendency to overwork himself, but for the first time in his life he was worth something to the adults around him. A bit of stress was easily justified in the mind of a child who saw affection and praise from the people meant to care for him as transactional.New arrivals at the orphanage were still celebrated back then. Matt, Mello, and Near showed up and made waves, and A happily listened to their questions and stories as their little minds blossomed. The competitiveness of the candidates then hadn’t become a thing of venom yet, and seemed driven by genuine excitement.That changed. Rivalries began to be encouraged by the staff. A certainly wasn’t alone in being compared to the others constantly, but he definitely got the brunt of it.You can’t succeed L if you keep this pace You need to work harder to reach his level. You need to start pulling your weight.As A entered the his teens, the pressure on him had only multiplied as those same young children were being considered for the line of succession. A worked harder in hopes of dispelling the doubts that the staff had in him. He became more and more withdrawn the harder he studied— even B rarely saw him, and when he did, he looked different. Weary. His thoughts always seemed to be racing in those days days- heartbeat going a mile a minute, the path of his mind was hurried and hard to follow when he spoke.Perhaps it was that mind that never stopped thinking that broke him in the end.After making a particularly simple error on an exam, an instructor berated him with unexpected sharpness.Don’t you realize how many people would die if you made stupid mistakes like this as the next L?Well, he certainly never stopped realizing it.He worked harder than ever, but his grades took a nosedive. He was constantly exhausted, mind plagued by what-if scenarios when he couldn’t flawlessly clear the stumbling blocks set up in front of him.How many people would die if he failed at L’s job? It would certainly kill him if he did, at the least. And then what? Would this burden be passed to B? To the others? To the youngest of them? Would they lose their lives to it one after another as well? The spiraling thoughts ate him alive. It was impossible to do much more than lay in bed and rot while his mind ran him headfirst into darker and darker alleyways.The last time A would see B was at breakfast. A looked at him with warm eyes and that lopsided grin like he used to wear daily as they spoke that morning. It was foggy as anything outside, snow was falling. He doesn’t remember what they talked about now. Was it happy? He thinks it was. He remembers that B laughed.He doesn’t remember a lot of the day after that.He remembers the chapel at the edge of the grounds, looking up at the sky, seeing B’s face looking down at him. He’s pretty sure B was a hallucination. His ears were ringing, and he couldn't make sense of a single word that mouth was trying to form.After that was… nothing.He should not have survived it.
The other successors were told he didn’t.
He was unceremoniously erased from life at Wammy's House like he'd never existed, mentioned only in hushed conversations away from the eyes of the staff.A woke up from a months long coma completely disoriented. Broken bones, a fracture of the skull at the parieto-occipital region. More bruise than unmarred flesh.That period of healing is full of holes in his memory, but he remembers a letter full of legal jargon in Roger’s handwriting expressly forbidding him from returning to the orphanage. He’d become dangerous to the other children, apparently, but his medical bills were covered. How kind.A left the hospital once he could manage to walk unaided again and never looked back- no, he was far too angry to even risk getting the police called if he went to get his things. So he survived how he could while legally dead with no ID— however he could manage.It wasn’t always illegal. At first it was doing physical labor or errands for the elderly for a little cash. But eventually he fell for the wrong sob story, picked up the wrong job, and ended up as an errand boy for an organized crime ring. While he's managed to separate himself from it to a degree now, he's still involved with dubious people. The garage he operates out of as an unlicensed mechanic is more or less a chop-shop. There's still blood on his hands he'll never be able to wash away.A struggles with the consequences of his attempt to end his own suffering daily. While his congenital inability to feel pain has spared him from a lifetime of severe migraines, his vision has never been the same. A traumatic brain injury at the parieto-occipital region has left him with lasting vision issues that sometimes leave him seeing double or unable to focus.

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