Haruki

"I don't write anything that people really relate to. So... I don't try."
Haruki is a Reaper from W12 of The Reaper's Game as part of the Kawasaki-Shibuya alliance. Before and after his week in Shibuya, he worked in Kawasaki. He is currently the Conductor there.
==Appearance==
Haruki has a rather tall and lean frame, standing at 5'9". He takes great pride in his appearance, and has many rituals to maintain it. His hair is bleached to a peachy blonde, from his natural dark brown hair. During Week 12, his hair was short and wavy with a long side fringe, kept back with many hairclips. Since then, he's grown his hair out and normally keeps it back in a ponytail, though the hairclips are still present. He wears circle lenses of various colours to hide his natural brown eyes, most notably wearing ice blue lenses. Otherwise, he wears a pair of wayfarer glasses. His eyebrows are well shaped and he normally wears the slightest application of eyeliner. As well, he has several piercings: Two on the right side of his lower lip, two lobe piercings on both ears, two helix piercings on his left and an industrial piercing on his right. He has other piercings that are hidden by his clothes and are generally a secret.
He enjoys wearing street dancer wear akin to hip hop dance videos, such as shirts with English text on it with hoodies or vests layered on top, harem pants or skinny jeans, and kicks. When he has to dress more formally as a Conductor, he wears jeans with v-neck shirts under a jacket. He often dresses femininely as well, letting his hair out, wearing heavier makeup, and form fitting clothes and skirts. Either way, he normally wears a number of rings and has a cord bracelet on his right wrist, and often has his nails painted.
==Personality==
Haruki comes off as a very charming young man, speaking with a lilt in his voice and adding little phrases ('yeah?', 'y'know?', 'huh?', 'right?' or the Japanese equivalent, 'desu ne?') at the ends of his sentences. He is very charismatic and knows what to say to make people feel good- or terrible. He does what he needs to do to get his way through life, and cares very little for consequences.
To be blunt, Haruki has many symptoms that align with Antisocial Personality Disorder, or Sociopathy. He feels nothing towards the vast majority of people, and has trouble expressing his own emotions. Anytime he feels conflicted with emotion, he pushes it away and ignores it. He enjoys manipulating people for his own entertainment or to get his way, and overall sees himself as above others. He has no trouble being cruel and doing morally questionable things- this is even when he was returned his entry fee, his humanity. At the same time, Haruki has a very deep self loathing for himself and the world. He ignores this by taking it out on others.
Deep down, though, he wants to be "normal" and to feel things the same way as others. His despair is never truly shown to others as to not appear as weak, though he's starting to realize that being vulnerable is the only way that he'll ever make any progress. And so, with the prompting of the few people he considers friends, he's slowly trying to inch out of his comfort zone.
==History==
===Pre-Game===
[cw: apathy induced depression / suicide]
Haruki grew up as an only child to two parents in the small municipality of Hakone, in the Kanagawa prefecture. His parents pressured him to do well in school to go into business school and inherit the family business, but this disinterested him. From a young age he became interested in music and so in elementary school and middle school, he joined the choir, learned how to play guitar and piano and began learning how to dance. His parents discouraged this greatly and pressured him to drop these hobbies, but gave in and allowed him to continue as long as his grades were good. A naturally intelligent boy, he succeeded and he entered high school as a talented young man that quickly grew popular.
But throughout this, he saw that he did not care about anyone; he never did, and never wanted to. He routinely felt like an empty husk except for his gratuitous self loathing, but music made him feel alive. In high school, when the courses were harder to keep up with but the opportunities to dance, sing, and play music grew, he began to extort his classmates using his charismatic front as a popular, charming man. Even when he got a better hold of school work and his hobbies, he found that using people was rather fun, especially when romantic feelings were in play. Several girls fell for him, and he enjoyed playing with their hearts and stepping on them, and appearing to be the faultless god that he felt he was.
After graduating high school, however, Haruki attended university and felt very apathetic about it. Without an easy outlet such as music, and without being able to find entertainment in playing with people's feelings, he was very bored and apathetic. As his first semester went on, he went to his classes less and less, having no motivation to get out of bed, and having no friends to drag him out of his dorm or check on him.
In the end, seeing that the adult life would just be even more boring than this, he decided to end it here before it could even get to that point.
===Week ??===
The Reaper's Game was exactly the type of excitement Haruki was looking for. Looking back with a better idea of how these games work, he supposes he was a soul grabbed from Hakone that wouldn't normally qualify for the game in the district closer to him, but due to his musical talent he had just enough Potential to play. He hadn't spent any part of his life trying to improve himself; the only thing he had tried to improve was to, in some fleeting moments, attempt to see people as people instead of objects to use and play with. Thus, his entry fee was his humanity, which didn't affect his performance much.
He won his game, and when presented with the offer to come back to life, he turned it down and offered to be a Reaper instead, liking the exhilaration fighting and killing things brought him. This was the sort of life he could do.
=== Week ?? - Week 12 ===
Seeing as he never really had much empathy or feelings or emotions in the first place, Haruki fit in very well with the rest of the Kawasaki Reapers. He was praised for his erasure rates and his emotional stability; many Reapers only had one or the other. Since he was dead, he took the opportunity to express himself the way he's always wanted to; he bleached his hair, started wearing circle lenses, painted his nails, got piercings, and finally felt something that could be described as happiness. His Reaper powers turned out to be sound related; something he found very suitable. As with when he was alive, he was rather popular with the Reapers and had all sorts of short lived relationships with them.
After a few years of being a Reaper, a certain Player caught his eye in a game. This was Jean, a foreigner who he thought was very attractive. He taunted him and his partner, and followed them around during his game and made their lives hell. After the Player lost his game and ended up a Reaper, he was assigned to help show the new Reaper the ropes. Disgusted by the Player's naivety and amused at his lack of self control, he decided to toy with this one and lead Jean towards repressing his emotions completely and just letting go.
Haruki ended up creating a monster, and this mess was something he was finding very appealing for himself, too. He manipulated Jean into a relationship with him, loving the idea of how he felt nothing for others but would love him. This plan quickly went downhill, as several months into his relationship, he found that he started to have strange, soft feelings towards him. Unable to express it properly, he pushed them away and continued on with the toxic and murderous relationship. Later on when Jean began to have second thoughts, Jean broke up with him and Haruki was unexpectedly devastated. He had no idea if he was angry that Jean broke up with him or angry that Jean was becoming soft again. Jean transferred out of Kawasaki shortly after, leaving Haruki spiteful and alone.
A few months later, the opportunity came up to act as an ambassador for the Kawasaki-Shibuya Alliance. Haruki took it immediately and transferred to Shibuya for the week, hoping to see Jean and to drag him back to Kawasaki.
=== Week 12 ===
Shortly after Haruki managed to find Jean, he was rejected horribly by him. Haruki was taken aback; Jean really had changed after going to Shibuya. Disgusted by the way he changed, he held onto his belief that Jean can go back to "normal" and hounded after him for nearly the entire week, to little success.
He focused on the game and brought a bit of a Kawasaki taste to Shibuya. He helped support several erasures since he was somehow an Officer and could not erase them himself. During many of these fights, he taunted the Players and gleefully watched them fall into despair shortly before their deaths.
However, two people were strangely persistent with him in a way he couldn't describe. Kashi, a Player, kept insisting about having a friendship together, and Takumi, a Reaper, persistently tried to get to know him. The genuine kindness from both of them, even after they both saw how horrible of a person he was, made him highly uncomfortable. To prove that he wasn't going to be soft like Jean went, he tried to erase several Players; but was convinced not to and he was defeated. Later on, he tried to erase Kashi. But in the middle of strangling her, he slumped and let her go. He loathed that he became like this, but something inside him wanted to reach out towards the hands that reached for him.
After the game ended, Haruki was extremely conflicted. He exchanged phone numbers with Kashi and Takumi, saying he'll make an effort to stay in touch, and went back to Kawasaki.
=== Post-Week 12 - Week 14 ===
After he arrived back in Kawasaki, he proposed certain things for the Alliance. With the Kawasaki Composer Ascending, the Conductor Aizawa moved to the Composer seat, leaving the Conductor seat open. Because of his efforts, Haruki was promoted to the position.
For a good portion of a year, Haruki worked diligently to help the district. The empty, numb feeling mixed with sparks of emotion inside felt too complicated to approach, so he ignored it altogether. Cruel things no longer brought him excitement like before. He was quite the de-saturated version of himself from before.
As per the alliance with Shibuya, he identified a Reaper that probably wouldn't cut it for Kawasaki but could benefit from Shibuya- Shiori. He brought Shiori over personally to Shibuya, half interested in how Jean was doing as he heard that Jean was a Conductor now too. During the reunion, he found himself spouting hurtful words of hatred towards his former boyfriend, absolutely disgusted at how soft Jean had gotten to be. He spent the next few months being relatively antagonistic towards Jean, pushing his buttons just to watch him get enraged.
=== Post-Week 14 ===
Haruki continued to do his job, eventually forgetting about Jean since he was too boring now. However, one day on his way to pick up a new mic stand from AMX in Shibuya, he ran into a Reaper, Cheer, who seemed to detest him quite a bit. Irritated at the fact that he was being followed by someone when he was not trying to cause any trouble, he sarcastically tried to navigate his way around the Reaper. Cheer dropped a hint implying that Jean was incapacitated in some way, which piqued Haruki's interest.
Later on, he met with Kashi to catch up. Through vaguely phrased words due to their being incognito in the RG, he believed that Kashi said that Jean was dead- and began to panic. He was reassured that Jean was alive, and felt relieved- and immediately felt rather perturbed by his reaction, realizing in horror that he was still in love with Jean. Trying to cope with his feelings, he requested Shiori to allow him to visit him. He begrudgingly arranged for him to come over, and while he was there he ended up revealing more about his emotional state (or lack thereof) than he would to anyone, with Shiori bonding over these struggles. Though Haruki tried to push Shiori away after that moment of vulnerability, he later took Shiori's offer of friendship.
After months of slowly opening up, coming to Shibuya more often, he began to become a slight bit more comfortable acting "friendly" around others. He met Chris, who he didn't mind, and several others, none of which he particularly cared for. But he found himself actually looking forward to seeing Shiori the most. He began actually making an effort in maintaining a friendship with Shiori, and let him further into his shell than ever before.
For Christmas, he gave Shiori a flash drive with all of the music he's composed so far, while Shiori gave him a set of bars for his industrial piercing. During a session of pseudo-therapy, Kashi helped Haruki understand emotions better by transmitting different emotions to him. He remembered vaguely feeling all of them, but when Kashi transmitted "romantic love", he was left more confused about feelings than before.
=== Week 15 ===
Haruki spent the week feeling the slightest bit of anxiety over Shiori's first week in Shibuya, and didn't know why that was the case.
=== Post-Week 15 ===
Shortly after the week, during another session of pseudo-therapy, Kashi found the reason why he was so disconnected from his emotions. With his request, she cut into the layers separating him from feeling things to help him learn how to feel emotions at last.
About a week after was his birthday, and 7 year anniversary of his death. He generally felt empty on this day, but this year he felt especially bored, and... sad. For maybe the first time, he felt some sort of regret for being so eager to leave the RG since he came full circle back to the same listless boredom in the end.
Sensing this negative energy coming from Haruki, Kashi surprised him and spent the day with him, offering chocolates and a new accessory for his microphone.
==Relationships==
=== Jean ===
Haruki's ex-boyfriend. He fluctuates between hating him and loving him, and wishes Jean would go back to being "normal" aka a heartless killer. He hates how Jean has become so caring and called him out for trying to be a hero. Despite this, he has recently realized that he is still in love with Jean and would be devastated if he died, and doesn't know how to deal with these feelings.
=== Nagito ===
Nagito was as close to a Reaper partner that Haruki had after Jean. They teamed up on Players together all the time, and went to Shibuya together during Week 12. In the end, Nagito stayed in Shibuya and Haruki left to Kawasaki and the two only contact each other occasionally.
=== Kashi ===
A Player in the week he worked in Shibuya, and now is the closest thing he's had to a best friend. She's been crucial support for him in his journey to feel more human, and he appreciates to some degree the amount of effort Kashi is willing to put into him. Not only has she acted as a sort of therapist / psychiatrist, but she also used her Angel powers to tweak his static to allow him to feel more. He enjoys spending time with her, and feels the strangest feeling of warmth and also... gratitude? when he's with her.
=== Takumi ===
A Reaper from the week he worked in Shibuya. He finds them interesting, and is not sure how he feels about them. They try their best to get Haruki to open up, but this unfortunately causes Haruki to throw his guards up with twice the power. Despite this, Haruki tries to make a vague form of an attempt to stay in touch.
=== Chris ===
He met Chris when he was exploring Shibuya one night. He thinks he's rather funny, and seems to enjoy his company. They see eye to eye on a lot of things, and Chris' reassurance that not everyone hates him, and his willingness to look past his actions were both surprising and appreciated.
=== Shiori ===
Originally a Reaper of his own district, he initially transferred Shiori over to Shibuya moreso to get on Jean's nerves, but after seeing how much better Shiori had been doing in the kinder district, he found himself more invested with him. Since the two of them related in not having a "normal" emotional capacity, he had been comfortable opening up with him, finding a real friendship. In fact, he was doing things he never does for people for him. 
Unfortunately, this fell short as he became vaguely aware of Shiori's feelings towards him, and came to realize his own complicated feelings. Scared of getting any more invested, he stopped contacting him. 
=== Cheer ===
He doesn't understand this guy. 
==Trivia==
*He has a total of 18 piercings, but only wears 15.
*He composes music, and provides the instrumental and the vocals by himself. He publishes some of his music online, under the handle "Yoshinda", where he has a relatively large following. However, a good portion of his music is just made for him, and are songs trying to describe his feelings, or what he believes feelings are like.
*Despite being fully comfortable presenting femme, Haruki is still 100% cisgender; he just doesn't believe that fashion is gendered at all. 
*When he was in university, he was in the Humanities Department studying Psychology.
*His noise form is a werewolf named Lupus Cambiare. He is extremely tall and can emit sounds that could shatter eardrums.
*His Reaper power is sound, and he has found a way to use this cruelly; "stealing" someone's voice or removing any sound that comes from someone's vocal chords.
*His wings vaguely have the shape of music notes- since becoming Conductor this became less obvious.
*He enjoys sleeping.
*He also really likes vanilla lattes.
==Gallery==
harukinoise.png|Lupus Cambiare (by nessa)
haruki.png|Haruki's appearance in W12.
temp_haruki_ref.png|Haruki's full body reference in W12.
harukis a cute lady.png|Haruki's femme presentation, post W14.
haruuuu.png|Haruki with his hair down, not necessarily masc or femme. Art by Nessa.
Category:Reapers
Category:Officer Reaper
Category:Week 12