Work Text:
Yoshiki does not experience comfort of animal physicality divorced from his brain recalling its human narrative. There is no blissful ignorance. The moment he awakens, he knows exactly where he is and what he’s done.
He doesn’t even dare to breathe as he extracts himself carefully from the futon, sliding his clammy body away from Hikaru’s with surgical precision. Only when he’s satisfied that Hikaru is still sleeping peacefully does he slink toward the door, silent save for the whisper of fabric against the tatami floor as he retrieves his uniform.
He slides the screen door most of the way closed, leaving it a few centimeters away from the doorframe, and forces himself to keep his steps light instead of racing down the hall. Fleeing the scene. He can hold himself together the few extra seconds it will take him to reach the toilet at a quiet pace.
The act of moving at all only furthers his panic. With every step, he can feel all of the new ways in which his body aches.
Dressing is more complicated than anticipated with his fingers fumbling numbly over his belt and buttons. One of his socks is missing. His phone, still in the pocket of his trousers, is at 56%.
A wave of nausea passes over him and he knows it’s because of his nerves, but that doesn’t make it any less real. What he doesn’t know is whether or not it is real enough to make him sick. And being sick is loud.
So he slips like a shadow, like a stain, through the Indou house and places his borrowed pajamas on top of a laundry basket before tucking them into the side if the hamper instead. At the entryway, he cringes through the clammy feeling of his shoe against his one bare foot.
The early morning sunlight bends all of the shadows he’s used to seeing in the wrong direction. He left his bike closer to the road, so he forces himself to approach it at an inconspicuous pace.
The moment his front tire touches the road, Yoshiki alights and races to his house like his life depends on it.
His mom and Kaoru should both be asleep at this hour, and his father has already been at work for a while. Years of skulking around his own home have left him confident in his ability to make himself unnoticed enough to keep the worst of his ongoing crisis hidden.
Safely inside, he falls to his knees in the entryway and hyperventilates as he claws his shoes off. Then he stumbles to the bathroom with one arm across his middle as if he’s keeping his guts from spilling out of an open-wound until he can shut the door safely behind himself. He half-retches in front of the toilet several times before determining that he does not need to be sick after all.
If only he did. If only that would alleviate this panic.
He brushes his teeth, scouring the entirety of his mouth with the bristles so roughly that when he spits into the sink it comes out dark pink. It’s not like he could still taste—but he needs to hide it. He needs to clean himself off.
For the first time this morning, he leans in close and takes a good look at his face in the mirror. He has awful dark circles under his eyes and he could stand to comb his hair, but neither of those things are terribly unusual. With a sigh of relief, he stands upright, then watches the color drain from his own reflection as he catches sight of a mark on the side of his neck peeking out from beneath his collar.
It would be funny, the amount of trouble Yoshiki has to go through to get his shirt unbuttoned after having struggled so hard to button it up not that long ago, if it was happening to literally anyone else in the world. At least the only mark he’ll need to cover up is that one on his neck. Not that this one small mercy will make much of a difference at all when weighed against everything else that he has going against him.
He presses a bandage over his neck and mentally rehearses complaining about a mosquito bite.
A shower would feel nice, but it would be too loud. And he cannot stand the idea of being alone with his body right now. And… once he washes himself, every trace of last night that remains on his skin will be gone.
He’s messed up. Thinking like that, allowing the twisted parts of himself to dictate his actions even when he knows there will be consequences, that’s what got him into this mess. Knowing what’s wrong and doing it anyway and holding onto that—it’s irredeemable.
Where is the version of Yoshiki from last night—the one who thought to himself that the ensuing fallout would be worth it—now that it’s daylight?
The only thing that Yoshiki wants to do right now is crawl into his bed and pretend that he has not irreversibly ruined his life. But he doesn’t know if he can hide this one. He doesn’t know if his mother will see right through any of his attempts at normalcy.
And this will be the first place Hikaru comes to look for him once he wakes up.
So Yoshiki changes his clothes for the second time this morning without looking at his body. He grabs the bag with the remaining two slices of bread from the kitchen table and he goes right back out to his bike. He has to keep moving. He has to outrun the calamity kicking up inside himself until he has the space for it to come to a head.
At least so long as he’s on his bike no one will be able to look too closely at his face.
How the hell are there so few places to go that feel isolated enough out here in the sticks? If he could count on being able to hold himself together he could wander around Mion or even catch a train somewhere further out of town, but he doesn’t feel like risking the very real potential for a very public breakdown.
He’s spiraling out inside of his own head, but there’s no one he can talk to about this. There isn’t even anyone he could talk to around this. He doesn’t go to any of their friends with his problems, and even if he tried they would wonder why he was talking to them and not Hikaru.
Kurebayashi is the last person he could ever go to. She can already tell when Yoshiki and Hikaru have mixed—she’d take one look at him and see his soul all emulsified and she’d know everything without him even saying a word.
For a desperate moment, he wonders if Yuusuke is still working at the market. But he hasn’t spoken to him in years—hasn’t even made eye contact in longer. Even if they’re complete strangers outside of having exchanged pleasantries, he’s the most likely person to have any words of wisdom for Yoshiki… but he can’t risk the fallout of being seen speaking with him.
And isn’t that just a real shitty thing for Yoshiki to be thinking. Selfish. Coward. Asshole. Twelve hours ago everything that he is was still hypothetical.
Their old hideout would almost be private enough, but he can’t stand the thought of facing the unmarked memorial he’d made for Hikaru. Here’s some bread. Sorry about desecrating your body.
He pedals hard toward the mountain until his lungs are burning and then he keeps going, forcing himself through the pain.
Just inside the woods at the base of the mountain, he finally permits himself to collapse. His bike is a few meters off the path. No one should come looking for him here.
He lays directly in the dirt and leaves, heaving ragged lungfuls of air and sprawling his heavy limbs out like a starfish. At least it’s cooler in the woods, now that his clothes are plastered to his skin with sweat from exertion and the already-oppressive heat of the summer sun.
Eventually he gathers enough energy to pull his phone from his pocket to check the time. His battery’s at 51%. There’s a LINE message from Hikaru.
Yoshiki reflexively opens the message before he even has time to register how much the alert terrifies him. It’s just a sticker, though. A Labor Cat, its head turned to the side and a paw shielding its eyes from the sun, WHERE? floating in text above its head. He sent it 17 minutes ago.
Reception isn’t good out here, but he’s not deep enough in the woods to have no connection. He lets his phone slip through his weak fingers and fall to the ground as he throws his arm over his eyes.
He has several hours in which to get his shit together before he needs to go home and have dinner with his family and wake up for school tomorrow and interact with Hikaru like everything is normal. Like he hasn’t fundamentally changed and dragged Hikaru right down with him.
But Even Yoshiki gets sick of the relentless narrative of his own mind. Self-flagellation loses its sting without moments of reprieve. So he sits up and pulls out one of the slices of bread and nibbles at it without an appetite while playing through mindless mobile games. He wastes an hour and another 22% of his battery before another LINE message interrupts his mindless tapping.
A different Labor Cat sticker, this one facing forward with its head tilted to the side as it asks ARE YOU OKAY?
He turns off his alerts.
Yoshiki pulls his knees close to his chest and leans his head against them, curling in around himself and testing how much psychic damage he endures if he allows himself to think about it.
He feels disgusting. Why had he willingly put himself into a situation that would leave him feeling like he ought to be pulling off his skin before anyone else can see it? Was this the sort of thing he was into? Feeling defiled?
No, he thinks in response, rejecting the idea vehemently. That’s not how I felt at all. I felt cherished.
His throat tightens up quickly and his eyes sting. Somehow it feels like that makes him even more fucked up, the idea that being treated lovingly was enough to bring him to tears.
All of his carefully constructed barriers, all of the times he had reminded himself how important it was to just keep his head down and endure a few more years living here, all of the times he had berated himself for even daring to imagine anything too vividly because it wasn’t safe to hope for anything so long as he was here—he’d just tossed it all aside.
What was the point of depriving himself for so long, stuffing what he felt down so deep it hurt, if he was just going to be weak and give in the moment Hikaru gave him the slightest bit of encouragement?
He sniffed loudly, shutting his eyes tight.
In spite of the upset churning of his stomach and the terrified rabbiting of his heart, there is still a part of Yoshiki that is glowing warm like an ember. It’s fragile now, much dimmer than it was last night, but in spite of the ways in which he feels he has irrevocably broken some permeable boundary, he wants to protect that warmth he feels as something sacred.
Just let me have this, he had thought to himself last night like a prayer. He knew himself well enough to know that there would be some consequences to work through, but he had somehow decided that this was a fair price.
And Hikaru had embraced all of those parts of Yoshiki that he’d tried in turns to smother and ignore like it was effortless. Like it never occurred to him, beyond the fleeting memories that shape the framework of his borrowed life, that there was anything to worry about at all.
Damn, he’s fully crying now. Ugly weeping in the woods with snot running down his face and everything. There’s a lot of things to cry about, now that he’s started. Mourning Hikaru, always. Mourning the life he could have had if he hadn’t been born in a village like this. Hell, he’s even mourning the morning he should have had, waking up slow and tentative together.
Only then does it hit him that Hikaru woke up to find Yoshiki missing and unresponsive. He swears and rakes his fingers rough back through his hair. This guilt, this specific guilt, is rational and deserved. Even if Hikaru doesn’t have human sensibilities, he still gets lonely and doesn’t like being ignored. And even if that wasn’t the case, it wouldn’t make it right to have turned tail and ran.
He scrubs his face on the front of his shirt and pulls his phone out again. There are a few more messages from Hikaru—actual messages, not just stickers—but he sends off a response letting Hikaru know that he’s in the woods—off the road that goes past the Ito’s farm—before going back and reading through them. He’d swung by Yoshiki’s house. He didn’t know if he had messed something up.
Yoshiki stares at his phone for several minutes waiting for a response. He feels tired now, from the way his eyes are a little swollen and from pedaling too fast for too long and from waking up too early. He ought to at least see what Hikaru has to say before he dozes off, so he compromises by resting his eyes while sitting up.
Instead of the feeling his phone buzz, he hears someone calling his name in the distance. He’s surprised, but not startled, to realize that Hikaru is already so nearby.
“Over here,” he shouts back, pushing himself to his feet and walking back to the road so that he can wave Hikaru down once he’s in view.
It hurts a little, the way Hikaru looks nervous when they meet. He plays it off well, observing, “Yer back is covered in leaves!”
He shrugs it off awkwardly and offers Hikaru the uneaten slice of bread from his bag, settling back down on the ground.
“Did I do somethin’ wrong?” Hikaru asks. He sounds almost frightened, like he’s expecting to be scolded.
“No,” Yoshiki says, trying his best to sound confident in his answer. “I just had some stuff to think about.”
“Yer lyin’,” Hikaru says, but it sounds more sad than accusatory. “I can tell yer upset. Just tell me so I know what I did.”
Yoshiki sighs heavily. “I’m really not.”
He flexes his hand around nothing to work up the courage before reaching tentatively over and setting it gently—so he could shrug it off without even really trying—atop Hikaru’s shoulder. Then, when he is not shrugged off or shoved away or otherwise rebuffed, he holds one shaking breath and leans forward until his forehead bumps gently against Hikaru’s.
Between this proximity and the length of his hair, there’s no way Hikaru can see his eyes like this. It’s the coward’s way out, sure, but it’s one of the least cowardly things he’s done so far today.
“You didn’t do anythin’ wrong,” Yoshiki says. “Promise. I shouldn’t’ve left but I got… worried. And not ‘cause of you. You don’t need to understand. It’s… it’s better if you don’t understand.”
“But I don’t wanna mess up again,” Hikaru says, plaintively.
If he can’t do it for himself, Yoshiki knows he’s got to at least get his shit together for Hikaru’s sake. If he keeps beating himself up over things like this and punishing himself, Hikaru’s going to internalize it and start fretting over it too.
And it’s selfish, but he needs Hikaru to be unburdened by this part of society. He needs Hikaru to maintain the parts of himself that aren’t governed by human morality. He can’t live with himself if what Hikaru takes away from last night is the concept of shame.
“Yer good,” Yoshiki starts. Damn… his voice is unexpectedly tight again. That’s the problem with crying, it’s too easy to start up again afterward. “Yer good for me. I’m okay. I liked it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah… Just gotta maybe wait a while before I do that again. So I don’t… do this.”
The hug that Hikaru pulls him into is reassuring, ultimately, even if it does start him up weeping again first. Hikaru talks at him about unrelated things like how that kids book he picked up turned out. He tells him about how he feels a little strange being in the woods here, but that it’s not close enough to the mountain to be a big change. And he tells him about how his momma’s out for the day so they can go take a nap back home if Yoshiki doesn’t want to keep layin’ in the dirt.
“I promise, just nappin’,” Hikaru reassures him with all the sincerity of a blood oath, eager to keep that promise. And the thought of getting to have another chance at waking up beside Hikaru today feels a lot like redemption.
So when they ride out of the woods together, plummeting back into the summer, Yoshiki thinks that maybe all anyone will be able to see when they look at him is relief.