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As of lately, it’s come to his attention that Itaru’s kind of sick of his own company.
Most days, he finds himself waking up to a bed that feels far too big and cold for just him, duvet weaved between his legs because he still hasn’t managed to kick the habit of hogging it all to himself. But then again, why would he need to in the first place? (Who would he even share it with, anyway?)
He could feel himself slowly wasting away, day by day, his musty apartment steadily on its way to becoming the tomb that will eventually encase his lonesome bones. Sure, he had friends and family, but it’s not like there was really anyone that was an integral part of his life. Or at least, not anymore. If there ever was a time when he would fret over his cozy apartment being large enough for the two of them, that time has well and truly passed. He sometimes wonders if he’ll live and die in this pathetic, one bedroom apartment, all alone. The very thought of such absolutely and wholly frightens him. Itaru knows that if he doesn’t do, well, something, he’s certain that his miserable prophecy would someday be realised – which is precisely the reason for his uncharacteristic and spontaneous decision to go on a midnight supermarket run.
If anything, he needs the breath of fresh air. He’d been trapped in his own self-inflicted routine for so long – to the point where the days and weeks were beginning to melt together, forming some tiresome amalgamation of endless paperwork and boring event stories. As he continues to aimlessly explore the empty store, one feet in front of the other like some wandering spirit, he somehow finds himself in the frozen aisle. The shelves of pizzas are staring him right in the face and he feels the slightest tinge of a craving, but before he’s able to reach out and impulsively indulge, his extremely persuasive rational voice steps in, honed through gacha games and other terrible decisions Itaru almost made over the years. But can you even finish one, all by yourself?
He spends an embarrassingly long time deliberating over this, but while he’s still debating the pros and cons of having pizza for all three meals, his thoughts are interrupted with a small, child-like voice–
“Excuse me, mister, you’re blocking the way.”
Startled from the sudden voice (what kind of irresponsible parent was letting their kid go out at midnight?), Itaru immediately backs away from the fridge, only to have his back pressed against a warm, firm chest.
“Itaru?”
And just like every other spontaneous idea Itaru’s ever had, his innocent supermarket run turns around to bite him in the ass. (Of course.)
Usually, he’s fully prepared for this sort of thing – he’s had decades of experience in hiding behind a professional front, after all – but perhaps because he hasn’t heard this particular voice (the very same one he used to cherish for years) in a long, long time, he’s completely caught off guard. And like a newborn fawn, he stumbles.
“C-Chikage, wow, long time no see,” Itaru cheerfully (a little too cheerfully) says, spinning around to plaster his back against the cold fridge, as if doing that would somehow help get rid of the fire that’s rapidly spreading across his shoulder blades, the feeling of Chikage’s chest against him burning itself into his touch-starved skin. Cautiously avoiding eye contact, Itaru turns to look at the child that had spoken to him earlier, and he’s immediately compelled, by some twisted, awful feeling in the pit of his stomach, to ask.
“Is this your son?”
The question leaves his lips before he even processes it, before he even thinks about whether he even wants to hear the answer in the first place. He’s half-grateful that the boy has his fringe hanging over half of his face, because Itaru doesn’t think he’d ever recover if he looked at a child’s features and recognised Chikage in them.
“Who, Hisoka? No,” Chikage replies, unusually fast, almost as if he’d known where Itaru’s mind had leapt. “He’s a family friend’s son that I’m babysitting for a weekend. It was a last-minute thing… I didn’t have the stuff prepared to take care of him.”
“Okay,” Itaru dumbly says, entirely surprised because a) Chikage “privacy is important” Utsuki was willingly sharing personal information before even being asked, and b) Chikage felt the need to clarify to Itaru that he doesn’t have any children of his own. For some reason.
“Okay,” Chikage parrots, and Itaru’s honestly not sure if he wants to know what kind of expressions either of them are wearing on their faces. His back continues to burn.
“Okay. Can you move?” Hisoka snaps, reaching out to grab at the fridge door handle with his grubby little fingers. Itaru quickly gets out of the way, allowing the boy to pull out a tub of rocky road ice cream.
Chikage clicks his tongue, a nostalgic sound that Itaru hasn’t heard in forever, as he closes the fridge door behind the boy. “Hisoka, that was rude. What do you say when you want something?”
“Please,” Hisoka replies with a sulk, carefully placing the pint into their basket. Meeting Chikage again, after all this time (acting as a child’s guardian, even), strikes Itaru as unbelievably bizarre, like some kind of strange hallucination he wouldn’t – not even in a thousand years – see in his wildest dreams. He almost has to stop himself from reaching over to pinch his forearm.
“What… What happened to moving to Yekaterinburg?” Itaru finds himself asking, and he gathers up all the courage within him to take a quick look at Chikage. And oh, he looks.
Chikage’s grown out of the bowlcut that Itaru’s always associated him with, his long fringe parted in the center and tucked behind his ears. And frankly, if Itaru didn’t already know, he wouldn’t have guessed that the guy was thirty-four. He was still as handsome as ever, sharp features on sharp cheekbones on a sharp jawline. For some reason, looking at him makes Itaru feel like he’s going to cry.
“It’s… a long story. After this, would you like to, maybe, catch up? My place is about a stone’s throw away from here,” Chikage offers, ignoring the way Hisoka’s stubbornly tugging at his pants to get his attention.
Itaru thinks of his empty apartment gathering dust. And he nods.
---
“Sorry about the mess, I wasn’t expecting any guests,” Chikage says to Itaru as they enter his spacious apartment, the three of them shuffling out of their shoes. “Hisoka, remember to brush your teeth before you sleep.”
Hisoka nods, yawning loudly, walking past them both into what presumably is the room he’s temporarily occupying. Itaru feels completely out of place amongst the modern furniture. He’s afraid he’d take one misstep and break something expensive, or worse, fall right into Chikage’s lap.
“I would offer you some soda, if it weren’t so late,” Chikage speaks, and hearing the way his oh-so-familiar, soothing voice reverberates around the room makes Itaru nervous. Actually, yeah, what the fuck is he doing in his ex-husband’s apartment? He should leave. This all feels like dangerous, forbidden territory and Itaru’s not sure if he likes the feeling of trespassing.
But just as he turns to leave, he feels a hesitant hand on his wrist, Chikage’s fingers just barely ghosting over his skin. God, does he crave intimacy, but he can’t ignore the pulsing, hurt voice that echoes throughout his head.
“What are you doing, Chikage?” his voice comes out hoarse and drenched with fatigue, but he doesn’t move away, and neither does he.
“I made a friend in Yekaterinburg. I think it was about four years after I left,” Chikage says, his voice low and soft, and Itaru doesn’t think he’s ever heard Chikage sound so… unsure of himself. “He was drunk – completely shitfaced hammered – and he was telling me about how his one regret in life was thinking that he knew the best course of action for his relationship.”
Itaru doesn’t have it in him to look at anywhere but the ground, the corners of his eyes beginning to flood with unshed tears.
“He loved his wife more than anything else in the world yet he left her, because he didn’t want to get her muddled up in his dirty work. He was so ashamed that he didn’t have the courage to talk to her about it, that he just… left because he thought he was protecting her from him. But really, all he was doing was protecting himself.”
“Please, stop talking,” Itaru whispers, shaking his head. With every word that leaves Chikage’s lips, the tiny bud of hope within Itaru’s chest grows bigger and bigger, but fuck, Itaru is terrified. His self-preservation instincts have kicked in, and there’s nothing that Chikage can say that would help him forget the Chikage-induced, bone-deep sadness that he’s come to see as his second skin. Both his head and vision begin to spin, and he finally decides to shake Chikage off of him, cradling his scalded arm close to his chest.
“You know what I’m getting at,” Chikage murmurs, his hands aching, yearning to touch but staying firmly by his sides. “Hearing him… made me realise that what I did was a mistake. I thought I was doing you a favour, but I can see that when I left you those divorce papers that morning, all I did was bring the both of us a world of troubles. I… I’m sorry, Itaru.”
Itaru sobs, curling into himself as his lithe frame begins to rattle with shivers. It’s as if the dam had been broken, years and years of loneliness and anger and misery crashing over him in suffocating, consecutive waves and he gasps haggardly, his lungs shrieking for breath.
“I’m sorry,” Chikage says, before reaching out to guide Itaru’s face into his shoulder, unable to maintain the torturous space between them any longer. “I moved back a while ago, but I didn’t have the guts to find you. Then I saw you today, in the supermarket, and I just felt like maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.”
“Yeah,” Itaru cries, “It’s trying to tell you that you’re a fucking idiot and an asshole and a piece of fucking shit and and and…” He incoherently babbles between hiccups, burying his cheek into the crevice of Chikage’s collarbone, and continues to curse Chikage to the high heavens, all while desperately clutching at the front of Chikage’s sweater. Chikage says nothing, simply soothing Itaru’s back with a trembling hand. He wonders if he’ll wake up the next day and like a frightened apparition, Itaru’ll disappear from his needy grasp, and it’ll be like he never was here. He holds Itaru a little closer, blinking away the tears that had begun to cloud his vision.
Feeling about a hundred tonnes lighter and a hundred times more exhausted, Itaru sags against Chikage’s chest, yet his grip on his sweater remains tight and unwavering. Sensing that Itaru’s finally calmed down, Chikage slowly pulls away, and says nothing about the patch of tears, snot and drool on his shoulder. He merely leads Itaru to his bedroom, and helps him shed his clothes, before tucking him into bed. Itaru genuinely cannot remember the last time someone’s treated him with such tenderness or care. If he hadn’t just leaked about half of his water supply onto Chikage’s sweater, he thinks he’d be crying right now.
“I’ve been so lonely for so goddamn long,” Chikage tiredly confesses, his voice barely audible. “I bought this apartment because I thought I could start all over, find a new home. But after a while, I realised that I didn’t want a home if I couldn’t have you in it. So I’ve just been alone.”
“You’re not alone anymore, Chikage, you don’t have to be lonely anymore.”
Itaru watches, with bleary eyes, as Chikage strokes his hair in that painfully familiar way that he always used to, his thumb lightly brushing the dip of Itaru’s temple. Everything around him – the sheets, the pillows, the quilt – smells of Chikage, and he whimpers, pulling the quilt around his chin to duck his nose into the soft fabric. If anything, he feels more comfortable here than in his own bed.
He almost drifts off, if not for his sudden awareness that Chikage had stood up, and was about to leave the room.
“I thought you just said that leaving me was a mistake,” Itaru shamelessly whines, squirming to show his displeasure like some spoilt brat throwing a tantrum for attention. He hears Chikage laugh, fondness slipping into his voice in a way that Itaru never realised how much he’d actually missed. In the darkness, Itaru sees Chikage strip down to his underwear, before lifting the other side of the quilt and slipping underneath it.
“If I wake up in the middle of the night because you’ve hogged the quilt all to yourself, I’m going to replace the sugar in your coffee with cayenne pepper,” Chikage threatens, only half-jokingly, and for the second time in his life, he takes another great leap of faith. Gingerly, he wraps an arm over Itaru’s shoulder, shepherding him into his chest. A smile begins to spread across Itaru’s face, and with his eyes still closed, he snakes his arm around Chikage’s warm waist.
And for the first time in a long time, he feels at home.