Work Text:
- how I wonder where you are?
Yashiro is soft.
Hanako doesn’t mean that in a way the kid would exorcise him for.
He means it in the most literal way possible. Everything about Yashiro is soft.
From her cheeks he cups in his hands that bring to mind her White Inferno, to the strands of her hair, that he can’t help but run his hands through, soft as silk, and as insubstantial as sea foam.
From her dew-moistened eyes that can get him to do anything- her tears the only price for any wish- to the breaths she puffs out when she’s sleeping, the only evidence she still is, because of how still she sleeps, he has to cradle her close to hear that proof of life, and every sound to him is so, so, precious-
From her voice, as she calls him, and like a magic trick, he’ll appear from nowhere and anywhere –
‘Hanako-kun.’
Sometimes (ok more like all of the time), he has this irrational urge to lay his head on her lap and cuddle her daikon legs (so maybe not everything about Yashiro is soft, her head is definitely hard), to rub his cheeks against hers like a spoiled cat demanding –pay attention to me, pay attention to me-but the urge isn’t unbearable yet. So he just satisfies it by clinging to her, enveloping her wholly in his arms, sometimes gently (when she’s awake), and sometimes harshly (when he’s desperate).
He has to hold himself back sometimes to avoid crushing her with his embrace. It’s not that she’s fragile, but she just seems so light when he carries her in his arms, as if most of her soul has already left her body (and he can’t have that, can’t, and maybe it really is absurd of him to think that the tighter he holds on, the longer he can keep her-)
So. Maybe it’s not as innocent as he first meant.
But maybe it’s also not as irrational.
Fifty plus years without any touch (which is still infinitely better than before when there was touch, but touch that was intentional, and touch that hurt) so sue him for latching on to the first warmth that found him. He didn’t think he was missing it or craving it. But just because Amane decided he didn’t need the moon, doesn’t mean he still didn’t long for it.
And now that he has it, he can’t let go of it. Because Yashiro touches him so, so gently. As if he’s the fragile one, not her. And for some embarrassing reason that she’ll never, ever know, it makes him want to cry whenever she does.
After years of sharp corners and edges and nothing, he just wants to sink into safetywarmthcomfort-
Everything about Yashiro is soft, soft, soft.
From her smile that makes him feel like he’s watching a meteor shower, to her lips on his cheek that make him feel bursting like a supernova.
From her very nature to her heart – which can forgive a murderer and call him a friend.
And he can’t have that
He can’t have her forgive him. Her softness might be the death of her. He might be the death of her.
So he goes. Or tries to.
It was only supposed to be one wish, a boon he’d grant her so that she could have a happy life, short-lived though it may be.
But one touch led to another, and he’s formed a bad habit he can’t break. Amane has only ever craved the moon and the stars (everything in the universe), and this feels something like it. But more than touching her, it’s being touched by her that he finds he can no longer live without (oh, the irony).
He has to leave her for her own good, he tries to convince himself. But where he holds on to her softly, she clutches at him, grounds him, binds him with even more force than the gravity he is no longer subjected to. Sometime he thinks the scale superfluous, when her voice (everything about her) works just as well.
‘Hanako-kun!’
He can no more leave her than the moon can stop revolving around the earth. He’s stuck in her orbit now.
She’s too strong to abandon him and he’s too weak to let her, so where does that leave them?