Archive of Our Own

Rin stood in the doorway of his bedroom and stared at the empty space where the hospital bed had been. The rental company had collected it yesterday, efficiently disassembling the metal frame and rolling the mattress out like it was any piece of furniture. As if it hadn't been the site of the last three months of Yoichi's life.

He walked to the window. Opened it. Closed it. The air outside tasted like exhaust and rain, normal and alive.

"I want to die at home," Yoichi had said, eight months ago, when the diagnosis was still fresh and Rin was still capable of arguing. "In our bed. With you."

"You don't know what you're asking," Rin had said, voice cracking. They'd been sitting on the couch, the one with the broken spring that Yoichi always claimed didn't bother him. "I can't watch you die, Yoi. I can't do that."

Yoichi had reached over, taken Rin's hand, turned it palm-up like he was reading something there. "Yes, you can," he'd said. "You're the only one who can. Remember when I got that stomach flu in Osaka? You sat in the bathroom with me for twelve hours. You read me that terrible novel aloud because I was too weak to hold the book."

"That's different."

"How?"

"Because you got better."

Yoichi had laughed, dry and knowing. "Well. I'll get better at dying, then. And you'll get better at helping."

The hospice nurse had said the end would be peaceful. She'd used that word exactly, as though there was anything tranquil about watching the person you loved forget how to swallow food.

Rin sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress was bare now, striped with imprints from the rental sheets. He pressed his hand into the depression where Yoichi's hips had rested.

Three weeks before the end, when Yoichi could still speak in full sentences, he'd woken up at 2 AM and grabbed Rin's wrist with surprising strength.

"Remember the night we met?" he'd whispered.

"You know I do."

"You were wearing that blue shirt. The one with the coffee stain on the collar."

"I was mortified. I kept trying to hide it with my scarf."

"You kept failing. The scarf kept slipping. I thought, 'This idiot is going to strangle himself before he gets my number.'" Yoichi's eyes had been bright with fever or memory or both. "You were the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. Still are."

"Stop it."

"Can't. Dying man's prerogative." He'd coughed, a wet sound that made Rin's chest seize. "Hey. When you meet someone new. Don't tell them about the coffee stain. Keep some mystery."

"Shut up," Rin had said, but he'd been smiling, crying, holding Yoichi's hand until the morphine pulled him back under. "I'm not meeting anyone new. You're stuck with me."

They'd had six months from diagnosis to death. Pancreatic cancer, aggressive, already stage four when the pain became too much to ignore. Yoichi had refused the hospital from the start. So Rin had quit his job. He'd learned to clean a feeding tube, to administer liquid morphine with a syringe, to turn a body that weighed less than a child to prevent bedsores.

He'd learned the particular silence of 3 AM, sitting in the armchair by the window, watching Yoichi's chest rise and fall.

The last had come on a Tuesday. Rin had been making tea in the kitchen, listening to the kettle whistle, when he realized the whistle was the only sound. He'd walked back in with two cups. Habit. Stupid habit. Found Yoichi's eyes open, fixed on the ceiling, seeing something else.

Rin lay back now on the bare mattress, staring at the ceiling fan. They'd talked about replacing it for years. The motor hummed too loud. 

"One of these days," Yoichi had said last spring, standing on the bed to dust the blades while Rin held the ladder and pretended not to panic. "I'm going to fall off this thing and break my neck, and then you'll wish you'd bought the new one."

"Get down. You're not Spiderman."

"I'm Spiderman's tired boyfriend. Different thing entirely."

"Isagi Yoichi. Get down."

"Make me."

Rin had reached up, grabbed Yoichi's ankles, pulled. Yoichi had collapsed onto the mattress, shrieking with laughter, and they'd spent the afternoon not buying a ceiling fan, not doing anything productive at all.

Later.

He rolled onto his side, pressing his face into the pillow. It still smelled faintly of Yoichi's shampoo. Coconut. Cheap. The same brand he'd used since university.

"You're a creature of habit," Rin had told him once, watching him squeeze the last drops from a bottle.

"And you're not? You've eaten the same lunch every day since 2015."

"I have not."

"Egg salad on wheat. Carrot sticks. That terrible green juice."

"I like routine."

"You like control."

"I like knowing what to expect."

Yoichi had capped the bottle, set it on the shower shelf with precision. "Well," he'd said. "Expect me to keep using this shampoo until I'm ninety. You'll be sick of the smell."

In the closet, Yoichi's clothes hung in their usual order. Rin had opened it this morning and been physically struck by the sight of it. Sleeves arranged by color, the red hoodie Yoichi lived in during winter, the dress shirt he'd worn to their anniversary dinner last year. Rin had taken it out, held it to his face, and screamed into the fabric until his throat bled. Then he'd hung it back up, careful with the collar, and closed the door.

The bathroom still had Yoichi's toothbrush in the cup. Rin hadn't touched it. He brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink now, spitting into the dishwater.

They'd been together eight years. They'd fought about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper. They'd built IKEA furniture and sworn at each other in Swedish. They'd fallen asleep on the couch during movies, woken up with cricks in their necks, stumbled to bed holding hands.

"You're doing the screws wrong," Yoichi had said, holding the incomprehensible manual at arm's length.

"I'm doing them exactly like the picture."

"The picture is a lie. The picture is propaganda."

"Give me that."

"Your hands are shaking. You're angry at the dresser."

"I'm angry at you."

"No, you're angry at the concept of flat-pack furniture, and you're taking it out on me, and I won't stand for it."

They'd assembled the dresser wrong three times before getting it right, and Yoichi had made them both tea afterward, triumphant, as if they'd conquered something meaningful.

There had been nothing cinematic about their love. It had been a Tuesday kind of love, a grocery-store-loyalty-card love, a leaving-the-cap-off-the-toothpaste love.

"Did you use my toothpaste?" Yoichi had asked, standing in the bathroom doorway in his underwear.

"It's our toothpaste. We share."

"I can tell you used it. The cap is on wrong. You always put it on wrong."

"Who cares? It still works."

"I care. I care deeply about this, Rin. This is a fundamental incompatibility."

"Should we break up?"

"Obviously. Over toothpaste. Very civilized."

And now it was a love that didn't know how to end.

Rin got up. Went to the kitchen. Opened the refrigerator and stared at the contents. Leftover takeout from well-meaning friends, a half-empty bottle of ginger ale Yoichi had sipped at when he could still keep things down, a jar of pickles Rin hated but Yoichi had loved.

"How do you eat these?" Rin had asked, watching Yoichi fish one out with a fork.

"With joy. With purpose."

"They smell like feet."

"Your face smells like feet."

"That's not a rebuttal."

Yoichi had eaten the pickle in two bites, grinning with his mouth full. "Everything you hate is something I love. That's how this works. That's the deal."

"I don't remember signing that contract."

"It's in the fine print. Section seven, paragraph three. 'Rin must tolerate pickles and Yoichi must tolerate Rin's terrible taste in music.'"

"My taste in music is impeccable."

"You played the same album for three months straight in 2019. I still have nightmares about it."

"You liked that album."

"I liked you. There's a difference."

Rin closed the refrigerator door. Leaned his forehead against the cool metal.

They'd had plans. Stupid, mundane plans. A trip to the coast next summer. Replacing the couch. Maybe a dog, eventually, when their building allowed pets.

"Something medium-sized," Yoichi had said, scrolling through adoption sites on his phone. "Not too small. Not one of those dogs that looks like a rat."

"You'd love a small dog. You'd dress it in sweaters."

"I would not."

"You bought a raincoat for the neighbor's cat."

"That was different. Mr. Whiskers has arthritis."

"We're not getting a dog named Mr. Whiskers."

"We're not getting a dog at all if you keep vetoing my names."

Plans that assumed time was an infinite resource, that death was something that happened to other people's boyfriends in other people's stories.

Rin slid down to the floor, back against the refrigerator, knees drawn up. He sat there until the light outside changed, until the apartment grew dark around him. He didn't turn on the lights. Yoichi had always been the one to do that, complaining about the electricity bill, flipping switches with the efficiency of someone who'd grown up with parents who nagged.

"You're wasting money," Yoichi would say, moving through the apartment like a general securing a perimeter. "Lights on in empty rooms. Heat up too high. We're going to end up on the street, eating rats."

"We live on the fourth floor. There are no rats."

"Yet. But keep leaving the lights on and see what happens."

The silence was the worst part. Not the absence of Yoichi's voice, though that was bad enough, but the absence of his presence. The way a room used to shift when he entered it, the way Rin could sense him in the apartment even when they were in different rooms. That energy was gone. The air was just air now. The walls were just walls.

Rin crawled to the bedroom. Pulled the pillow to his chest. He didn't cry. He'd cried so much in the last week that his body seemed to have forgotten how, leaving him with a dry, aching pressure behind his eyes that felt permanent.

He reached for his phone, dead in his pocket. Charged it. Opened Yoichi's contact, photo from two years ago, at a friend's barbecue, Yoichi laughing with sauce on his chin, and typed:

I bought the wrong milk again. The one with the red cap. You know I always get confused.

He hit send. Watched the message fail. Yoichi's phone was in the drawer where Rin had put it, along with his wallet and keys. Dead battery. Silent.

Rin stared at the screen until his eyes blurred.

"I don't know how to do this," he said to the empty room. "You were supposed to teach me."

The refrigerator hummed. The ceiling fan clicked. The city moved outside, indifferent, continuing.

Rin lay on his back on the floor, phone pressed to his chest, and waited for the morning he didn't want to see.