Chapter Text
He misses himself, the way he used to be. He was strong once, he thinks, not shapeless, dissolving, like his body is a memory that’s fading away. And still he stays in bed and eats junk food that will only make his skin worse and Satoru cradles him like he’s something precious. “Baby,” Satoru murmurs, pressing soft kisses to his neck, and he hates it, needs it so badly and hates it.
He doesn’t want to be a baby. He wants to be a person again.
—
The medication makes his hands shake, so Satoru brushes his hair, sectioning it into neat braids down his back.
“I’m not going out like this,” he mumbles, and then he feels a little sick—who is he kidding? He’s not going out at all.
“I have to maintain you in the matter to which you are accustomed,” Satoru says, like he’s quoting something out of an old movie, and nuzzles the soft place under Suguru’s ear.
“You’re always smelling me,” he says, loved, embarrassed. “What’s your deal?”
“You’re my deal,” Satoru says. “Pass me the hair tie.”
Suguru slides it off his wrist and feels like he’s losing something.
“You can’t keep doing this forever,” he says. “My hair will fall out.”
But they both know that’s not what this or forever mean.
—
Sometimes he just stands in front of the mirror and touches the glass. The slump of his belly, his heavy arms, the softness under his chin. His dull moon-face flushed and burning. He’s so embarrassed by himself, humiliated. A thousand curses writhe inside him when he thinks about it, bile rising in his throat.
When he sees himself like that he wants to stop taking the pills. He’d rather hear voices than take the pills. He wants to live in his own body again.
Satoru never says anything when he finds Suguru like that, just slides his arms across his stomach and kisses his ear, head tucked in the crook of his shoulder.
Satoru’s eyes are like mirrors too, the clean blue of them, but Suguru has never been able to see what he sees.
“I miss,” Suguru tries, “I miss…”
But the sentence never finishes, the sounds won’t come out, and he doesn’t know how to explain the things he’s hungry for. His hunger makes him ashamed.
—
“I love everything about you, I think,” Satoru says. They’re laying in bed and Satoru is kissing his hands, finger by finger, then planting kisses on the flat of his palms. He nestles his face there, in the palm of Suguru’s hands, like Suguru is the one holding him up instead of the other way around.
Someday Satoru is going to leave him, his crazy boyfriend. The bloated boy who weeps in bed, who vomits up curses, who can’t recognize his own face in the mirror. Who can’t seem to do anything anymore. One day he’ll recognize that Suguru is only the dead weight holding him down and stop treating him, tenderly, like his anchor.
“I love Suguru-chan’s voice,” he’s saying, nuzzling Suguru’s hands. “I love his eyes, his smile…” He grins, giddy, ambushing Suguru with kisses all along the crease of his neck. “I love his pretty face, his thoughts… I love it when you share your thoughts with me, Suguru-chan.”
He chokes then, although he tries not to. If Satoru knew half the things he thinks about, Satoru couldn’t stand to look at him. If Satoru could read his mind he would close the book and burn it, for good measure. And he’s not an idiot; he knows what Satoru is asking for, knows he’s trying to coax Suguru into saying something real. But some books should remain shut, some poison unspilled.
“Hey,” Satoru murmurs, kissing his hair. “Shhh. Don’t cry, sweetheart.”
To his horror, Suguru finds that he is. The medication always seems to make him weepy, except when it makes him numb.
“I think terrible things all the time,” he whispers. “They’d ruin you. They’ve already ruined me.”
Satoru makes a soft sound of protest, kissing his forehead.
“You’re not ruined,” he says. “And you can’t ruin me. Talk to me, baby.”
“I’m not a baby.”
“You’re not,” Satoru agrees. “You’re my baby. Totally different.” He rubs slow circles into Suguru’s back, patterns he can’t trace. He doesn’t know why the world always makes sense to Satoru. He doesn’t know why he can’t find the patterns there.
Shapeless, all of it. The world. Suguru.
—
The voices weren’t telling him to hurt Satoru, but he wasn’t blind, even then, crazed with pain; he knew that was what it would amount to. Even when they asked him to hurt himself they were asking him to hurt Satoru.
He tried cleansing them from his skin, washing himself raw. He stopped eating, spent sleepless nights on his knees vomiting, just trying to starve them out. He thought he could do that, starve his thoughts until they were pale and thin and then—and then what? Hazy; he can’t reconstruct his logic. But he didn’t want to eat and he didn’t want to hurt Satoru and he wanted all of it to stop, the violent tableaux playing out in his head and the violence in the real world, where the people he loved kept getting brutalized.
It wasn’t really so different, human terror and ugliness giving birth to curses and Suguru’s own terror and ugliness wrecking destruction in his head every time he closed his eyes. Blooming, blooming, like smoke in the dark.
—
He can barely remember Satoru visiting him in the hospital. He was so drugged up then, skinny-sick, and the world was like a fog he had to physically cut through just to see. But Satoru’s eyes were gleaming, bright as street lamps, two stars he watched drift closer and closer until their skin met. He had a hazy sense, even then, that he was Satoru’s shelter, that Suguru could protect him. He remembered wanting to tuck Satoru under his arm with a kind of gentleness this world was beating out of him.
But he doesn’t remember what he did, just the sheen of Satoru’s eyes and his presence, soft, obliging. He could be patient when he wanted to be; that was the thing no one really understood about Satoru. He was still being patient now, months into Suguru’s destruction.
“Please don’t leave,” he whispers, when he thinks Satoru is asleep. His eyes are closed, his breathing steady, and Suguru is holding him close, snowy head pressed against his heart. “I know I make it impossible for you. But don’t leave me.”
They’d fallen asleep playing video games again, the controller clutched loosely in Satoru’s hands, and Suguru’s fingers over his, just wanting to be close. He isn’t interested in playing anymore, isn’t interested in anything really, but he’s content when he watches Satoru play, something in him willing to settle for the reminder that someone he loves can still be happy here, like a promissory note: If you stay, you might be happy again. If you stay, you’ll see him happy again.
It’s easier to have these conversations when Satoru isn’t looking at him, blue eyes tucked away. He doesn’t really want Satoru to see him like this, to know him this much. Suguru wants to protect him. And still the impulse—furtive, selfish—to show Satoru everything. He wants someone to see him and love him anyway.
“I know I fucked it all up,” Suguru croaks. “We were supposed to be the strongest together, and now we’re just… together.” He pauses, throat aching. “And I know it’s bad, but you’re so good, and I just… hope you can stay.”
He rubs his cheek on the top of Satoru’s head, trying not to wake him but unable not to touch him. He’s so warm, more alive than Suguru can be, and he smells sweet like milk, like something simple. Suguru wants some things to be simple.
“You’re always smelling me,” Satoru slurs, teasing and half-awake. He’s shoved his eye mask up his face, the seam of one blue eye shining. Shoko had given it to him one year for his birthday. For his beauty rest, she said, and he’d grinned, pleased, like a cat.
And Suguru doesn’t know how to explain it. That he’s close and breathing because he needs to be, that it isn’t until he’s here, taking in heady lungfuls of Satoru, that he remembers he’s supposed to breathe at all. That if he wasn’t drowning in Satoru he would be drowning in his own head, a thimble of water where he’d choke to death. He could manage it. It wouldn’t be hard.
He cradles Satoru against his chest, holding him near, nearer. Nearest of all.
“Go back to sleep,” he says, and covers Satoru’s eyes again.