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“I always kinda thought you swung that way.”
Panic. Tendrils of it was wrapping around his lungs, squeezing, squeezing. His head was being dunked under water, and he was floating in it. Distantly he heard their words, their hatred.
His tongue was heavy in his mouth, slow and unyielding. Forcefully he managed to spit out poison. “You think I’m some kind of homo? As if. That’s disgusting.”
Tasuku stumbled after them, trying, trying, to hear them, to deny their claims.
He couldn’t really breath.
Onomichi was a hilly town, with steep roads and dangerously tall drops wherever you went. He’d never seen the appeal of it until now.
Now, when his lungs were still struggling for breaths and his heart was trying to escape him. Now, with trembling fingers clinging to the banister. Now, when his mind was clinging to any last reason why this was still worth it.
He was just so tired . Of this panic, of this helplesness. Of the disgust, of the constant dread of someone finding out.
Now, they knew.
There was no use left to this, right?
And yet, even the thought of it, of-
The panic wasn’t letting up, him staring down at the bushes far below not helping. He’d thought it would stop! At this rate he wasn’t sure what would do it first — the trembling making him fall over the banister, or his lungs unable to even pull in a single breath . Surely this shouldn’t happen not. Not anymore. Not now. Now that it was finally going to end.
It would be better this way. He was tired of so many things, like this it could end. And yet he was scared. The thought of dying scared him.
Something flashed in the instant, and when he looked over he saw a woman sitting in the windows of one of the houses that overlooked the hills. Suddenly she jumped out, for a moment stopping time, and then just as suddenly she was gone.
His heart was beating it’s way up into his throat. Thump thump thump. His vision was swimming and he swallowed around the queasiness. Had he really seen that? Had it not just been an illusion?
“I thought you might die. But I guess not, hmm?” Her voice was low, steady. Calm and collected. Completely unlikely how he’d been earlier. It made his stomach clenched with a feeling he couldn’t place.
“Should I have died?!” He was desperately seeking something, a validation that he’d done the right thing. Or maybe that he’d done the wrong thing by not actually dying.
And yet… Thinking of that brought back the earlier panic, leaving his breath stolen once again. When they got to the top he was heaving, desperate for a breath of air. There were drops of sweat cooling on his face and neck.
He did want to die, didn’t he?
“Some of the people who come by are gay.”
When she jumped off and floated away, he wasn’t sure that it hadn’t all been a very elaborate hallucination. He clutched the ice cream stick she’d thrown to him, clinging to the reminder that it was. Grounding him that it had actually happened.
He survived — somehow, despite the outburst — the panic in school the next day, and came back to the drop-in center. Maybe he could survive if he did it one day at a time.