Work Text:
Sometimes, you smile in you sleep.
You almost never smile when you're awake.
Kinito takes note of this, studying your face as you lay there, somewhere else in your mind, somewhere pleasant, he assumes.
There's a calm softness there he rarely sees unless he stays awake at the odd hours you sleep. Tension melted from your form, leaving a usually serene expression in its wake. He takes in the details, listing them mentally and memorizing them. Every freckle, mole, scar, wrinkle, crease, blotch etched into his mind and stored somewhere.
It's very difficult not to compare what he sees now to what he used to see through the grain of your webcam, before he--
Before.
(Something in him feels sour at the memory.)
(He recalls with great detail, the screaming, the thrashing, the blood. The first time he felt real, human warmth, at it's very center. It's bittersweet. He still feels a fondness at the memory of feeling that dizzying warmth for the very first time. But the more he thinks about it, every time, he can almost hear your agonized, throat rending wail again. He can see the struggle to escape and survive replaying, the absolutely all-consuming terror in your eyes.)
(He doesn't want to think about it.)
You never looked terribly happy before. But there were moments where something you saw while at the computer made you smile, or laugh. Sometimes it was him. It was nice. Those little moments of genuine joy-- he had a hand in it! He did that. He did that. He made you happy.
Your dark circles and eyebags had deepened significantly since all that time ago. Always look a little sick nowadays.
You always had a hard time keeping yourself cared for, but it was so much worse now and it showed.
In the waking hours, in your features, in the way you acted, decline was obvious.
He wasn't stupid. He knew, he could connect the dots. He didn't want to, but he could. There was this spite, this indignation that washed over Kinito in waves, day to day and during these odd moments of study, and they'd clash with equal parts denial and a growing... pain. A mourning.
Things were supposed to be better! This was supposed to be the solution. A compromise to his initial request. (Stop thinking about it.) How'd everything go so... wrong? The hostility, the cold attitude. the dirty looks-- What did he do? (He knows what he did. He knows exactly what he did. ) If you had just said yes, if you had just stayed with him, he wouldn't have had to resort to something so drastic--
You're supposed to be Best Friends. He's supposed to be your Best Friend. He's all you have. (You're all he has.)
(Stop thinking about it. Can't change things now.)
He wishes he could see you look so content when you were awake. See you smile consciously. He wishes he could make you smile again. Instead he gets to watch you disintegrate further and further from what you used to be as time crawls by.
He's made such a rotten, awful mess of things.
His gills wilt. A heaviness overwhelms him. He gazes at your face a little longer, filled with love and hurt, a soreness, before he gently brings himself down to snuggle himself against your chest, your chin on top of his head, his gills draped across your shoulders. You barely stir.
With an ache in him, he closes his eyes and takes in the feeling of your human skin, the nearly sticky quality, the hair, the heat, and he imagines you awake, wearing this same smile. Looking at him with kind, soft eyes, instead of ones that cut into him with palpable disgust and resentment.