Work Text:
"Do you know about mayflies, Mr. Kisaragi?"
It isn't exactly the first question he expected to be greeted with directly after waking up. It's a little bit out of the blue, but after Shintaro spots a large, brightly coloured book held tightly in Konoha's hands advertising itself to be an informational book regarding "minibeasts", aimed at children aged five and above, he thinks he can follow this line of conversation.
A small squint at the book confirms his suspicions; he's pretty sure Konoha may have accidentally stolen the book from the hospital after he ended up there following their small adventure off of a cliff, but he isn't going to raise an issue about it. Shintaro sits up, running his fingers through hair that clumps together into spikes, leaving a shiny residue along the whorls of his fingertips. He wipes his hand on his duvet, shuddering at his filthy, disgusting self, but dredges up the facts from long-buried biology lessons, spent sweating into his tight shirt collar as the stifling heat works its way into every space in his lungs, forcing himself to stay awake, copy the diagrams on the blackboard. Copy, learn, vomit onto worksheet, repeat. Copy, learn, vomit onto worksheet, repeat. Best years of your life, kiddies.
He yawns, then opens his mouth:
"Mm, they live for years as children, then only live a few days as adults, something like that?" He leaves out the fact that their only purpose as adults is to have intercourse, pass on their genetic material, and die. Shintaro's face jerks and twitches, resembling something approaching a smile. What a nice adult life that sounds like. Short and sweet. His shoulders give a minor spasm of amusement, a sickening, rough snort scraping along the back of his throat, escaping through his nostrils.
Konoha nods very slowly in affirmation, poring over the pages laboriously, outstretched index finger tracing along the lines of text, fumbling over the more difficult characters as his lips move to sound them out inside his head. His normally expressionless features distort into the faintest of frowns, trying to reach deep down inside his memory banks, assist in recognising these confusing yet familiar shapes somehow.
Even though the nineteen-year old's body language appears to be more like that of a four-year old, Shintaro finds it somewhat endearing. He leans over the edge of his duvet nest and gives the boy's snow white hair an affectionate ruffle, swings his legs out of bed.
He isn't sure quite when they began sleeping in the same bed. He dimly remembers the first time Konoha knocked at the door at some godawful time in the morning - quite how he knew where Shintaro lived was anyone's guess - and spent the night, curled up in a makeshift nest of pillows on the floor by Shintaro's bed. The visits became more frequent, and then one day Shintaro just woke up to find himself being embraced by Konoha's long, slender, yet disarmingly strong, limbs.
His stomach always stirs a little uneasily at the feel of those limbs. Of Konoha's scent, too. It comforts him, but somehow the fact that he can't quite place where he knows it from ends up flooding every tiny pulsing, disgusting, inch of his body with hot, then cold guilt.
---
"You're still reading. Do you need help with some of the words?"
It's been five days since Shintaro saw Konoha first reading his guide to the more child-friendly insects on this bountiful earth.
Konoha looks up from the pages, fixes Shintaro with, not his usual deadpan gaze; something else. It's jarring. Shintaro feels like he's been looking into an abyss and only just realised that there's something in there. Something watching him back. Something that's dreadfully, dreadfully amused that Shintaro didn't notice it before.
As soon as Shintaro's noticed it, it has sunk back into the depths again. Konoha does his idiosyncratic head tilt, genuinely confused he's being offered help for such a simple task.
"...I can read all the words fine, Mr. Kisaragi. I'm just reading it again."
"Oh." Shintaro makes an effort to change his surprise into happiness, his mouth stretching awkwardly into an encouraging smile. It hurts his face. He still isn't used to the action. "G-Good job! Have you been studying, or something?"
Again, Konoha seems to be baffled by the question. He gives his head a small shake, and Shintaro can swear, hand on heart, other hand resting on the Bible while a man in a white collar and black tie interrogates him, he sees the soft red glow of Konoha's eyes shift. Red becomes a shining gold, cold black pupils narrowing to slits. And then it's just. Gone. Empty, pinky red laboratory rat eyes blinking at him once more.
Konoha stares down at the book, opened once again at the mayfly page. Have the hands gripping the book always been that skeletal? That harsh?
"I don't know. Suddenly everything just makes more sense."
---
A few days after that, Konoha's sleep patterns become more irregular.
It starts with Shintaro being awoken first, by Konoha having seemingly vivid dreams that affect him in the physical world. The boy's arms and legs flail wildly, the rest of his body juddering as his lungs give little wheezes, gasps, pants. Shintaro shakes Konoha awake, tries to relieve him from whatever terrors he can never remember upon waking. His eyes flash yellow in what little light there is, his face twitching into rabid expressions, baring his teeth in... is that fear?
After three days of more and more frequent interruptions, Shintaro realises that Konoha isn't afraid of whatever he's seeing anymore in his dream worlds. He's laughing.
---
Konoha's voice, tone, mannerisms, are now fluid and confident. He still reads aloud from his much-adored book of wildlife. Shintaro praises him every so often in a dull voice, thumping away at his keyboard while squinting at his latest composition, and making mental notes to get Konoha some more reading material. He turns down the volume as Ene tries to distract him again and again. Shintaro drags some open windows on top of her, and she just leaps to the front of the display, face an indignant pout, tiny virtual hands on tiny virtual hips.
"Mayflies live for several years as nymphs. They live in fresh water. When mayflies become adults, they live from a few minutes to a few days. Mayfly nymphs mostly eat algae. But some mayfly nymphs are predators. As adults, they have mouths, but do not use them. Their digestive system is full of air."
Shintaro is pretty much sick of this book after two solid weeks of Konoha refusing to shut up about it, but it seems to be helping him recover whatever person he used to be, so Shintaro keeps his lips firmly buttoned and bravely soldiers on through the endless facts about ladybirds, aphids, moths, butterflies, dragonflies, and so on.
And of course those goddamn mayflies. They seem to be Konoha's favourites, to which Shintaro thinks, big deal. They're flies, which means they're going to end up on the business end of a rolled-up newspaper before their insignificantly short lifespans can come to their natural end.
---
"Isn't it funny, Mr. Kisaragi?"
Shintaro isn't sure when Konoha quite mastered such subtleties in his speaking voice, but he's somehow managed to fit innocence and mockery in the same sentence. Shintaro spins around in his chair to give Konoha an enquiring look, only to stop dead in his tracks.
Konoha, smile almost cutting his face in two, bright yellow snake eyes slicing through the musty air of the room and fixing Shintaro's own, dull brown ones' gaze, throws the book onto the floor and gets to his feet.
His body language is utterly transformed from that overgrown four-year old's stance barely a fortnight ago. His entire demeanour oozes complete mastery over every single cell of his body. Hair now jet black, previously white shirt transformed into the same colour. The darkness is almost gathering around him. Like he's attracting it with his very essence. He's punched a hole in the universe, and light is rolling into the yawning chasm, unable to break free.
He takes a few steps towards Shintaro's chair, where the boy sits transfixed. The steps are slow. Confident. Rehearsed, almost, despite how impossible that is-
Flicking his head, tilting it to the left in such a... in such a Konoha way, Shintaro hears the bones in the boy's neck crackle and crunch. This can't be Konoha. It can't be, can't, it can't, it-
'Konoha' leans over the chair, opens his mouth, and in a drawling hiss, speaks:
"Spending such a fucking huge fraction of their lives as immature little babies. Then when the fun part of their lives rolls around, they have minutes to make the most of it. You have to see the humour in that, right?" The rictus smile widens impossibly. Dazzling sunburst eyes spark with amusement.
His hand whips out and seizes Shintaro by the hair, wrenching him out of the chair. The superhuman strength of the android is the only thing keeping Shintaro upright as weak, trembling unemployed knees collapse under him. The speakers on the computer are aching to vibrate now as Ene pounds on her side of the monitor, mouth opening and shutting as she screams at the top of virtual lungs, inhaling air made of pixels and expelling almost silent sound made of longitudinal waves that can't transmit hard enough.
'Konoha' sighs, almost wistfully, as he exclaims with almost unbearable smugness: - it would be kind of irritating if Shintaro wasn't on the verge of emptying his bladder from terror -
"Of course, I'm the only one who can even appreciate the humour in this situation. Such is my burden. Well. I'm sure I could spend next time setting it up more beautifully. Perhaps we could make a play of it! The Mekaku City Grand Guignol! Ah. I'm already so eager to start again, and I haven't even had all my fun in this world yet!"
Before Shintaro can even begin to work on deciphering the mess of words dripping with dramatic irony that he was just subjected to, he's aware of a bright flash of metal hurtling towards his head at untraceable speed, and a searing heat biting into his neck, emptying his lungs and filling them all at once with something that isn't air, more like- red. It's just- it's just red it's- everywhere it's just wet and red and hot and red and red and-
The hold on his hair disappears and Shintaro pitches forward onto the carpet, driving whatever foreign object that was just forced into his throat even further in, tearing through soft flesh, ripping vocal cords, arteries, veins to shreds. Bearing the foul-smelling mess he'd watched dissected in secondary school to the open air, boiling hot high pressure redness, vividly bright red and oxygenated like no grazed knee, no attention-seeking shallow slashes on his inner elbows, splashes onto the carpet, pooling around. He'd scream, cry, howl from pain if it weren't so so difficult to even draw the air to do so. The breathless, helpless panic sets every nerve on fire, the need to let everything building up in his stomach without any possibility of freedom sending Shintaro into momentary insanity, desperately trying to relieve it through internally deafening screams, ricocheting sub-vocally, makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopjustmakeitstopkillmenowkillmenownownownownownownownowNOWNOWNOWNOWPLEASEPLEASEPLEASESTOP-
As though compensating for Shintaro's inability to make a sound besides soft, wet gurgling, 'Konoha' has turned up the volume on the speakers, allowing Ene's hysterical build-up to be released. Shintaro's ears are invaded by a high-pitched wailing that is sounding more and more distorted, metallic, glitchy, by the second.
A deafening smash reverberates through the room, and Ene's cries for help are silenced. Silent tears spill out of Shintaro's eyes, track down his cheeks, soak into carpet, mingle with his (filthy) bright blood. 'Konoha' sits down very calmly next to him, crosses his legs and rests his chin in his hands.
"There, there, Shin~"
What in God's name what was that what did he just call him was that-
Almost lifeless eyes widen, the realisation thudding into him too late, chest swelling to bursting point with searing emotions, sub-vocal screaming interrupted by a single, unuttered word:
Haruka.
The monster that used to be his friend - he's being stupid again, it was more than friendship, they both knew it, not that either of them said (maybe it was Shintaro's disgusting, depraved, desperate, imagination, after all) - continues, almost lazily:
"Don't be so sad! We'll have lots of fun together next time. And the next time. And the time after that, and..."
The sound of his speech fades into the distance, becoming an ambient buzz. Shintaro's empty, unseeing eyes are fixed on the book from the hospital, double page spread still telling the non-present readers all about the wonders of the creatures that only live a few minutes as adults, then die.
---