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The day started as usual as he walked into the shared room of theirs, his grandma already enjoying tea while his sister chatted animatedly about whatever—ugh—boyfriend she had this time, only pausing to make sure materials for class were properly in her bag. He thought, not for the first time, how lucky she was for being able to be so utterly vocal about it.
That knife-like feeling twisted in his gut.
It was another morning.
-
The more he lost himself in his head, the most distant he felt. Acting out his daydreams without noticing was only a part of it; it didn’t stop his classes from slipping by as if mere grains in an hourglass, barely noticing that the bell had rung until the shuffling and slight bumping of desks roused him. He looked to the side at His desk.
Somehow, it felt even more distant than usual. He was absent by now. It was just slightly lopsided to the right. The cubby within was neat.
He could feel the wood beneath his fingers, and it made him sick.
He stood up slowly, almost dizzy. The sky was already just barely tinted with a sickliness that told him it was time to go, and as he surveyed the emptying classroom, all he could think in the slow buzzing that filled his mind was how far everything seemed.
And he was already gone, without saying a word.
Words. That was something else he felt was missing, the chattering of classmates blurring in his ears. He breathed, slowly, ran his fingers over the darkened metal of the desk’s legs, and left.
-
Kazuki seemed happy. Even Tooi seemed to be struggling to keep a straight face, a smile faintly curling on his lips.
It felt complicated.
As Kazuki turned to him, eyes brighter than they’d looked in a long time, and said something that ended in a question, he looked like he was trying to share something, in the way you try to share a message by throwing it, crumpled, across the room, and it lands at the teacher’s foot and it’s read in front of the class, and somehow the meaning is lost across the way, ruined by a near-inevitable childish scrawl and a mindset of mockery.
So Enta smiled as if it was glued to his face, staring within Kazuki’s eyes as, for a moment, they turned to face him entirely. They glimmered in the evening light, and he felt his mouth dry.
He isn’t sure when it stopped, how long he was staring, transfixed, before he realized that it had been closer to an afterimage for some time, then, if the two, already on the staircase, could speak to that reality. A call for his name, and his fixed, natural smile called a reply.
It was only Tooi who stayed for a moment there, eyeing him in a way that made him feel smaller, transparent, maybe a bit pitied, until Kazuki grabbed his arm, tearing his gaze away from Enta, and he was brought to stumble up the next few steps.
The familiar nausea bit through his intestines in a way that shook his hands and breath and caused a heat to rise in his throat that he wasn’t sure was rage or sadness or anything he could name. All he could sense was how acute everything was, how loud his heartbeat suddenly felt and how it curled within his chest as if trying to escape, how the seagull cries felt much too loud in that instance.
And somehow, he felt simultaneously more alive and dead than he had in what was probably a few days. Maybe weeks. It had grown far more muddled in recent times.
So he followed.
-
As he watched them again, later, merely smiling and responding to nods, he wondered if this was what a “third wheel” felt like, from one of those stupid books his sister was too loud about at breakfast, from a passing comment online, from...
The thoughts died somewhere as he was faced again, voicing an affirmation, before the moment ended.
He, though, was always watching, with that one blue eye that he let show.
Speaking as animatedly as he allowed himself to, but always watching Enta with some inscrutable expression that made his innards curl themselves into a shriveled mess.
Some part of him wanted to shout, Because of you, Kazuki will barely look at me anymore unless it’s something about you.
If you’d go away already... maybe he would realize that I’ve been here all along.
Another part of him felt sick for suggesting it, if only for that sparkle that he’d missed so desperately.
But mostly, all he could sense was the strangeness of his body and the blurred world from behind his eyes as he floated, unsure, among the gazes that swept the surface, flew past him, without really seeing him.
As he brought a water bottle to his lips, his throat remained just as dry among the coming night.