Work Text:
For all that his family loved detailing what a disappointment he was, Tooru was actually quite adept at accomplishing the impossible.
After all, defying expectations by failing so spectacularly was still, technically, defying expectations. On his most embittered days, he considered that a win.
A win he clung to quite desperately when the weight of the impossible felt just a bit too heavy to bear. As it turned out, denying one’s inherent magical aptitude—the primordial bit of his soul that often wanted most wretchedly to commune with the stars—could really grate on the nerves! It was almost as difficult as tuning out the constant arcane whispers of the celestial bodies themselves, as severing the connection that wanted to catch so badly inside him like a hook lodged somewhere deep behind his sternum.
He learned from a young age that there was a profound difference between a family business and an ancestral one. To eschew one was to estrange his blood; to eschew the other was to leave the smooth chiffon-like fabric of the universe with a gnarled thread ripped free and disrupted from the careful loom of destiny. (One always seemed to feed into the other, where his family and their work was concerned—his mother never really had the time for anything less than the finest silks.)
Luckily for Tooru, his shoulders proved just broad and strong enough to carry both of those crushing consequences almost every day of his life. Luckily for him, he had aptitude and study skills enough in school that he could charm his walls and curtains against the tender susurrations that Oikawas were born to hear most clearly from the night sky. Luckily for him, he was rather good at closing doors and keeping them shut so tightly so as to not hurt himself, because fingers smashed in doorjambs always seemed more painful when they were self-inflicted.
Unluckily for Tooru, someone moved into the apartment next door to his with an innocuous cluelessness for magic and all its traditions that was matched only by his penchant for never locking up.
“You didn’t bring a key?” Tooru managed between labored breaths he was attempting to control. Fat lot of good running every day seemed to do him if he wasn’t equipped to handle the three flights of stairs in his apartment without getting winded.
“Why would I?” Koushi asked, the round slope of his forehead marred by a quizzical twist between his ashen eyebrows. “We were literally just downstairs at the dumpster.”
“For half an hour,” Tooru huffed back, his voice rising a bit indignantly. “This is New York—do you know how much stuff robbers can probably make off with that fast if they don’t have to force a door?”
The other rolled his eyes, punctuating the expression with a cock of his hip that—of course—nudged the front door to the apartment open from where it had been propped open by the deadbolt. “So we’d call it unconsensual spring cleaning,” he said in a flippant tone Tooru could immediately clock as sarcasm after two years of knowing him.
The dry wit nearly wrenched a laugh out of him before he swallowed it back down and covered it with a scoff. He had a point to make, dammit! “You’re unbelievable.”
Tooru edged past him in the doorway, hip-checking Koushi into the frame to cross the threshold into the apartment and relishing a little in the quiet ‘oof’ he heard behind him as the smaller man connected with the wall. But his righteousness was horrifically short-lived, ending abruptly on a sour note when his toe caught against a stack of paperbacks edged too far into the sliver of clear footpath. It sent the tower all over the floor and his body almost careening face-first to the faux wood. “Son of a bitch!”
His irritation only mounted when the gleeful cackle and chirp of “Serves you right,” set fire to his cheeks and the tips of his ears in a way that had nothing to do with embarrassment at his near-spill; and everything to do with the fact that the smallest slips of Koushi’s joy (even at his own expense) had the nasty tendency to send his heartbeat stuttering out of rhythm, and had done so since perhaps the first day he’d heard such an incredible sound.
— ☽ ☼ ☾ —
Despite the fact that March was only beginning and the vernal equinox was still a week away, Koushi had convinced Tooru to embark on some “spring cleaning.” He’d done it in his usual Koushi way: simply appealing to Tooru with a disarming smile at a moment when Tooru was least prepared for it, and plans were set with barely any effort on his part. They decided to set aside two back-to-back weekends for the undertaking, and made plans to purge all the clutter from their respective apartments one at a time. However, since they’d begun on the first Friday afternoon after half-days at work, Tooru pointed out every handful of hours in the depths of Koushi’s apartment that perhaps when it came to a sentimental hoarder like him, they’d need two weekends alone to sift through the cluttered, supposedly-organized chaos of his place.
It was already rare to find a surface in his space that wasn’t otherwise occupied with a stack of unread books or an errant trailing plant stem, though they did seem to be making slow progress through the more random odds and ends pulled from cabinets, corners, and an incriminatingly-high amount of junk-drawers littered throughout his house and furniture. (“You can’t have multiple junk drawers, Kou, that defeats the purpose of having one at all.” “Maybe I just have too much stuff that doesn’t fit into good categories.” “That just means you need better categories, not more drawers!”)
One by one, hour by hour, these random crammed pockets—by hour three on Saturday Tooru had officially coined the catch-all term crap cloisters that sent Koushi into peals of reluctant laughter so great he couldn’t muster the energy to be offended—were cleared out, and the crap sorted out of each little space found its way into a box by the front door which would eventually shuttle it all to the dumpster behind the apartment complex. Old binders of papers from college that had somehow survived Koushi’s post-graduating move from his small town into the city; soap and shampoo bottles languishing under the bathroom sink with an inch of product left inside because for some reason Koushi couldn’t bear the thought of actually finishing something before moving on to new replacements; saplings that languished almost bitterly now that they had been left out of Tadashi’s sight; all of these things and more met their discarded end by way of Koushi’s hazel scrutiny and Tooru’s needling of “When and where are you gonna use this again?”
Tooru actually managed to clear some of the books of the floor with a novel idea—to transfigure some of the stronger hardcovers themselves into shelves for their siblings languishing in post-purchased purgatory. Koushi had put up quite the fight about it, his eyebrows pinched and brown eyes alight in the orange rays of the five o’clock Saturday sun.
“What if I want to read them?” he challenged, hands crossed over his chest and the distracting bow of his lips pressed into a tight line.
Tooru had two years to build an immunity to this sort of look, turned on him so many times in bars and at his shop and across restaurant tables when Koushi seemed to just want to be contrary for contrary’s sake. Two years to build an immunity, to launch a counter-move because he was born under similar stubborn stars a month behind the other, but there was still a wretched part of himself that wanted to shake apart so completely under the willful strength of his conviction. Koushi had said once that he wouldn’t let the stars stop him, a moment crystallized in his head for as long as he would probably care to remember, so what effective defense could Tooru possibly mount against someone determined to defy something greater than all of them on earth?
Koushi was probably a million times better at it than him, anyways.
Tooru opened the book he held in his hands, a thick compendium of magical animals found in the Carpathians and their surrounding regions, and slipped the receipt out from the front cover. “You bought this from Tetsurou’s book shop,” he said as read the receipt in a flat, unimpressed tone, “on February 14th of last year.”
He remembered it, actually, because he’d been there. Koushi was wearing a similar expression to the one he had now, all hard-eyed determination framed by cozy stacks of books on either side of his shorter slender frame. They hadn’t gone out for Valentine’s Day, it was simply Valentine’s Day and they’d gone out, of course—Tooru to pick up a couple of potion books he’d ordered through Tetsurou’s shop and Koushi to tag along because his evening had been free. At some point, they’d gotten into it about whether the vampire population in Transylvania was still as strong as it had been throughout history, and Koushi had insisted that it’d declined on account of modern accords to retain most of the surrounding mountains as sanctuary for the endangered dragon populations.
As Tetsurou was silently ringing Tooru up for his order with a privately-amused smirk, Koushi cut away to ask him if he had any texts to actually prove his point. The bookseller had slunk away with a feline grace to his stride and an uncanny awareness for practically everything in his shop stock, and returned a few minutes later with the tome now seated in Tooru’s spring-warm fingers. Koushi had paid for it and Tooru’s ingredient references before the other managed a word in edgewise about the magical land treaties enacted in the late nineteenth century to help ancestral lords retain their mountain estates.
It seemed, sitting at the very bottom of a stack beside his desk now, the only time it had been opened was across the table of the bakery they’d stopped into four blocks down after they’d left Tetsurou’s for Koushi to prove his point. Now, one year later, Tooru felt he had found a much better use for it on his terms.
“It doesn’t even look like it’s been touched since then,” he added, slipping the receipt back into the fold of the cover. “And it’s not like I can’t change it back.”
Koushi eyed him for another long moment, then finally released the tension from his shoulders. “Okay,” he relented, his eyes still glinting with a mild edge of challenge, for stubborn challenge’s sake. “But you’d better make a list of what’s actually going into these shelves. And if I need one of them, you’re coming over to help me get it again.”
As if he could refuse Koushi anything, Tooru thought quietly behind a grin and a simpering “Of course, Your Highness,” before they sorted through the piles until they had amassed a collection of books sturdy enough to make good use of.
— ☽ ☼ ☾ —
Once the majority of Koushi’s books had been cleared and stacked onto the new shelves in his small living room and tinier bedroom, there wasn’t much else to sift through besides the kitchen, which they decided to save for Sunday. When the sun sank below the horizon on Saturday night, later by minutes each day closer to the end of March, Koushi invited him to stay for dinner and a movie as a break from their hard work. But somehow Tooru found enough willpower in himself to decide on going back next door to work on the handful of orders he still needed to fill come his shop’s reopening on Monday. He managed a tight smile and a surprisingly-even farewell to Koushi even as shadows began to grow over the city and inside himself.
With the full moon and Venus hanging heavy with expectation in the deepening sky, he didn’t feel quite up to stepping out and making the trip to the larger workroom at the back of his shop, even if it would have made his work quicker and easier. Even tucked into the quieted safety of his charmed apartment, he could still feel the glaring weight of the sky, like sandpaper hovering over parts of himself scoured raw and never quite healing.
The stars always spoke louder, grew more powerful the nearer they drew to solstices and equinoxes.
Instead, he set up his Instant Pot in his bathtub (having put away his home cauldron set and not feeling up to rooting around his enchanted storage spaces to find it), closed the door of his tiny ensuite, and turned the volume up on the music playing from his phone to cover the sibilant whispers of celestial he could sense trying for the latches on his windows and doors. Despite the steam rolling off the potions in waves, frizzing the sweeping chestnut fringe across his forehead and curling the ends of his hair around his ears, it was easy to lose himself in the timetables and careful monotony of attentive brewing.
Having concrete evidence of change and something tangible and deliberate to do with his hands—watching a color shift before his own eyes, stripping herb stems and grinding dragon scales—was one of the most reassuring things to him, the balmy salve that worked best on the broken seams that still bled after he tore himself from apparent destiny. Having a say in an outcome, even if its cosmic diameter was the size of a pressure cooker, gave him more bone-deep joy and autonomy than he’d received from the stars in a long time. He knew that potion-making was something he could love the moment he’d brewed a successful healing potion by himself and felt the same surge of wonder as when he was six; when his mother and sister had set the armillary spinning in the family observatory and he began to hear the murmuring of the stars unrolled to him like the long-form scroll of a never-ending song.
That had been one of his happiest memories, before he grew up to realize that the siren call of the sky was less about appreciating its beauty and more about willfully drowning.
And so now here he held himself, adrift among a threatening sea in a rowboat shaped like a bathtub that he fought to paddle and keep steady all on his own.
But, he thought with a maudlin little smile as he spelled the cooker lid transparent to check on the potion’s color—sparkling swirls the rich shade of toasted hazelnuts tinted by a waning winter sunset—he wasn’t completely helpless, nor was he completely alone. He’d built tethers over the years that could safely, strongly bring him to shore.
That, Tooru supposed as he propped his chin on arms pillowed atop the edge of the bathtub, was enough for now. He could brave murky insistent seas that didn’t think he was good enough, could resist the deep-seated temptations to give himself over to them, so long as he had a connection to ground that felt more solid to him than the nebulous murmurs of stars.
— ☽ ☼ ☾ —
As the following week wore on, the sky grew louder in Tooru’s ears and closer against his neck. It wrapped itself around his thoughts like a thick fog and made him feel like he was living once-removed from himself. Every interaction he had felt pressed through a sieve and every sight viewed through a pane of frosted glass. No amount of cleaning the glasses perched on his nose or focus tinctures downed between customers and brewing seemed to ease how withdrawn he felt. He never remembered denial feeling this thick before, and thought a bit wryly to himself that something really devastating must be on the horizon of this equinox for him to feel this worn-down.
Even the presence of his friends threatened to grate on him, those that kept him tethered to the ground and out of the winding dark of his head. He broke standing lunch breaks with Hajime at his campus’s library and spelled his shop signed to Closed and Away so that people like Tetsurou or Koushi wouldn’t invite themselves in.
Koushi, being his next-door neighbor, was another story entirely.
He’d grown so used to seeing the other, to existing in their side-by-side orbits, that his absence felt positively vacuous. But there was something about the week that left him feeling too wrung-out to even try fixing the hollowness in his chest that widened without the other. It was easier to let the solitude happen to him, to let long-festering wounds out to breathe and hurt after being covered for so long instead of pretending he was fine for the sake of face. A part of his mind above the water registered this was a bit selfish, to dodge texts and sidestep attempts to hang out, but the larger part of himself wrapped in thick fog cared much less. He’d even felt too stuck to strengthen the spells on his apartment that warded off the growing power of the sky, and as he laid listlessly on his couch in the late Friday sunset, the stars and planets spoke to him at a near-conversational volume that vibrated deep in his empty chest.
The reverberations inside himself, under his skin, calling for him in arcane tones he knew, but didn’t quite know how, called to him from the battered driftwood of his couch. Let them in, his mother’s voice crooned from deep below the sea surface, and on the tail of that call came a warm distant memory of his first spread of a star chart atop an ancient Oikawa tapestry.
Let us in, whispered the dying rays of light striping red-orange-lilac across his floor from the window.
“Let me in,” a voice called from the other side of his front door. “Tooru, open up.”
Tooru jolted and sat up like a string—a tether—pulled taut from his chest, and the world fell back into place around him. Fluorescent light from the hallway sliced through the sunset painted on his floor, and he looked up a bit blearily to make out Koushi standing in his open front doorway.
“Hey,” Koushi said, voice gentle, eyes blazing, jaw set, hands slack. The broken-up pieces of him flashed the image of an angry dog choked back by its lead at the last second through Tooru’s muzzy head.
“Hey,” Tooru managed in a croak back to him. Selfish, a part of him hissed, louder now than the other thoughts that felt like they were calling from across the room, pushed out the window. Selfish, selfish. You’ve avoided him all week. He felt cowed by the thought, and the need to suddenly apologize and explain flushed through him with shameful heat. “I—”
A moment of silence settled between them, long and filled as the space from Tooru’s couch to the door where Koushi was still standing. The other looked at him, eyes snuffed of their indignation and replaced with a gentleness that scrubbed Tooru raw instead.
“It’s fine,” Koushi supplied in his most patient voice, the kind he suspected he used on the most agitated animals that came to his clinic. “I know you were probably busy with work.”
“Yeah,” was all he could answer, or else he’d risk falling apart under the out he was given. “I’m sorry.”
Koushi offered him a small smile as he crossed the threshold and flicked on the light by the door. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I haven’t really been grocery shopping this week,” he said as he pulled himself up to stand. It was a conscious choice to force himself into his old rhythm, but it was the only option he really had right now to ignore the glare on the other side of the living room window. “So we can order out if you want dinner.”
The other’s smile broadened into a grin as he made himself at home, leaning against the kitchen counter and ignoring the pile of dishes in the sink Tooru was suddenly embarrassed of. “Think you’re getting out of it that easily, do you?”
A momentary panic flashed through Tooru as he struggled to catch the meaning of Koushi’s words. “Get out of what?”
When Tooru drew near enough, Koushi elbowed him pointedly in the ribs. “Cleaning,” he laughed. “It’s your turn this weekend, remember?”
Right. He’d sort of forgotten about that. They really had managed to clean out and piece Koushi’s apartment back together over the course of one weekend, and of course left Tooru’s for the next. Which admittedly, looked a bit messier in the wake of this week’s exhausted negligence, and he was suddenly taking it all in with a fresher mind and wave of slight embarrassment. He hadn’t kept up nearly as well with his chores as usual, and compared to Koushi’s newly-freed space, he had to admit there was a little decluttering to be done.
But another part of him was loathe to really start any sort of project with the way his head still felt suffused with cotton and his limbs strangely leaden.
“Honestly, you kind of look like crap,” Koushi said with a gentler nudge to his side. When Tooru found the strength to meet his eyes again instead of staring fixedly at the countertop, there was a gentle perception and concern in them that made him feel turned inside out again. Almost like he knew about the thunderstorm in his head, the way it cloaked everything in choking mist and made him doubt everything beyond measure. “Why don’t you take a shower and I’ll start going through stuff in here? We can do it like my place, laying things out bit by bit and deciding whether to keep or toss.”
Tooru nodded, because when could he ever refuse Koushi looking at him so kindly, offering himself so easily to help.
And that was how his bathroom became a sanctuary for the second time in a week, and another one of the countless times Koushi pulled him back to safe ground.
— ☽ ☼ ☾ —
Even though it had been such a simple suggestion, Tooru was surprised at how much a simple shower seemed to do for him. The fog in his head seemed to fizzle away with the steam dissipating into the bathroom fan overhead, and the hot water that sluiced through his hair and over his shoulders eased some of the recent tension that had grown roots beneath his skin. He felt more invigorated, more ready to close off the parts of him that wanted to throw open the windows and bathe in moonlight instead; and his breath came easier now that the vacuous emptiness under his ribs slowly refilled with life.
He skirted on the edge of a different temptation now, and felt his foot dangling lightly over the edge of something larger than even that.
The temptation to indulge in the fact that Koushi was in his apartment, on the other side of a few thin walls. The dangerous belief that the rings of their orbits crossed in the smaller distance and that meant something, a something he couldn’t describe beyond the fact that it was more than the something they already had, and that he wanted it more than anything else.
The omniscient stars had hinted at that great large something more than once in the past week. It was what made them so dangerous, it was what made Oikawas slaves to their messages and whims for as long as their lineage cared to remember. That the stars knew everything about everyone because they lived under their wide, watching sky; that as much as humans gazed at the stars, the stars gazed back, and spoke to those they deemed most worthy to hear the messages.
For generations, his family touted their legacy of worthiness like an honor. Tooru wondered if he was the only one who saw it more as a curse—to act only as a messenger for something that thought it understood you only by watching, never by living alongside you. To have no choice in the course of your life because something else thinks it knows better.
But Tooru nearly forgot that this past week. Because the stars weren’t whispering about him, the way they so often did when he tuned them out, they were talking about Koushi. The way his name sounded in their otherworldly tongues felt wrong to the parts of himself that knew Koushi, but right to the parts that felt the sky. He could know what the other was thinking, what he was feeling—if he wanted to, if he let them in. He could have the answer to the aching question that laid restless at the bottom of a chasm between them that he was always afraid to cross.
He could know without Koushi ever letting him in, they reassured him, and that had been both the urge and the fear that kept him lingering at the edge of the pit.
Oikawas thought they knew everything about everyone, simply because the stars told them. Tooru knew that was all bullshit. There was infinitely more to learn about a person based on what they told him themselves—it was why he’d never felt that comfortable performing cold readings on strangers. He didn’t like the hollowness that accompanied filling in his gaps with cold cosmic omniscience.
Besides, what kind of person would he be, thinking he knew everything about everyone, when he could hardly stand the fact that everyone thought they knew everything about him?
Tooru breathed the last remnants of thick steam into his lungs, held it for a long moment, and exhaled a little more blackened stardust from his mind. He felt better, he really did. There was color in his cheeks again, life in his eyes, and he felt a little less washed-out like cold moonlight. He toweled his hair dry, unsure whether to style it as usual because the only one who’d see him was Koushi, but eventually decided against it and let it hang loose and soft around his face. He pulled on a clean t-shirt and joggers and made his way out of the bathroom. The air-conditioned chill of his bedroom was refreshingly bracing, and he felt like he was seeing the world with a bit more clarity than before.
And that clarity was more than enough to register Koushi in the center of the living room, flanked by a trunk he’d all but forgotten about with its top thrown wide. Tooru’s eyes stayed glued to it, because the dim thought flickered in his mind that if he could approximate its dimensions by eye, maybe the width would match the size of the hole that had suddenly been punched through the very center of himself.
He hadn’t touched that trunk in years.
He kept it shut tight and out of the way because of self-inflicted finger-smashings and toe-jammings. Because of snagged threads and bleeding edges. Because it was a knee-high lacquered tomb filled to the brim with ghosts like moonbeams and starlight, casualties from a life he’d ended with his own hands, and because murderers never really had any reason to dwell at the graves of their victims, did they?
It was the vernal equinox, the first day of a warm spring, and Tooru felt so very, very cold.
Koushi turned around from where he was arranging velvets and wools and chiffons over the back of the couch, eyes bright and a heartbreaking smile on his face. It was too sweet and awed for someone running his hands so carefully over phantoms.
“Tooru,” he breathed, with nothing short of reverence. “Are these yours?”
He prayed the low living room lamplight was enough to mask the wince that might have flashed across his face.
“Yes,” he said, too quietly and with an edge to his voice that sounded hunted. He had nowhere to look, really, between the night sky coming through the window behind and the ghosts on the couch in front.
“They’re beautiful,” Koushi said in the same sort of soft voice, his own gaze falling back to the sets of traditional tailored robes and cloaks his mother insisted he wore for more formal witching occasions, once upon a time when he was teenaged and brilliant, her pride and joy that clung to every word she said. There were jewel-toned silks embroidered richly with gold and silver, luxurious wools with precise tailored cuts and drapes he remembered feeling invincible in. He felt frozen as Koushi’s hands trailed over them all, his eyes wide as if keeping them open would ensure he could really take it all in. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”
“Yes,” Tooru repeated, not really sure what else he could say. So many things and nothing at all were raging around inside his head, thoughts churning so chaotically he was afraid it’d be painful if he opened his mouth to let any of them wrench free.
Curiously, the next time Koushi turned his head enough for Tooru to see the side of his face, there was a flush in his cheeks, blooming so high to the skin up under his beauty mark. “Do you wear these?” he asked, and Tooru wondered if his own pulse was thudding a little harder, because Koushi sounded almost shy with the question.
“I used to,” he supplied, deciding that was probably safe enough to answer. “When I was younger. Shorter. I’m, uh, not sure if they still fit.”
“Right,” Koushi laughed, a whisper-soft thing that stirred the air still closed around Tooru like a mausoleum. He didn’t know when they’d gotten so close, a hand’s-length between them as he stood beside him, but his laugh was as close to a stirring breeze as he’d get while trapped in his own head, and he tried to follow it to a way out. It coalesced into thread, wrapped around his wrist, and tugged. Pulled harder when Koushi added, “Of course you were one of the lucky ones to have another growth spurt after high school.”
Tooru felt the pull of a half-smile on his face. Winding tighter out of the graveyard, pulling him back to solid unturned earth, to open fields with no stone in sight.
The shyness returned to Koushi’s face, Tooru could see it now with the way he dipped his head and ran a hand over a robe that sat more separate from the others. He’d nearly forgotten that one, which was somehow understandable and unfathomable all at once.
It was the last one he’d ever worn before shutting it all away.
The black velvet glimmered like oil slick as it sat delicately draped over the couch cushions, with tiny rows of opalescent buttons lining the center front from neck to hip and along the fitted cuffs. The fabric itself was breathtaking enough, but what was even more impossibly mesmerizing was the hand-laid beadwork. Thousands of silver and white stones and beads, patterned in an exquisite map of the night sky all over the garment. Tooru knew it was mostly accurate too, because his mother once boasted that they’d handed over the star-chart of his birth night to the tailor at his fitting.
“Turn it over,” Tooru found himself saying around the breath still held tight in his lungs. Koushi did, and let out his own air like it had been stolen from him. Tooru couldn’t really blame him, because after years shuttered away, it floored him too.
Across the crisp tailored shoulders, the beadwork gathered more tightly and rained down the back of the silhouette like falling stars. The bottom hem was decorated with the phases of the moon that flashed in different pastel colors as the stones shifted in the light. Tooru remembered the way the colors reflected against polished parquet floors when he danced, a light source all his own even under chandeliers the size of boats at a distant relative’s party.
Koushi looked speechless.
Tooru finally let out the breath latched tight in his lungs, and with it, “You should try it on.”
The robe slipped a bit from Koushi’s grip before his fingers remembered to work again. “What?” his voice quivered. “Me?” he asked with a shaky, disbelieving sort of laugh. “I can’t. There’s, like, rules to this sort of thing, isn’t there? Some kind of… magical signature, ownership, or… or, something. Right?”
He’d turned to look at Tooru fully, his eyes drifting from him to the robe still sparkling in the lamplight, taking it in and reflecting it out like its own light source. His face was more open than he’d ever seen it—so earnest and raw, curious and wanting, but achingly cautious.
Tooru’s heart was breaking.
But so was everything else.
In that moment, he realized that Koushi didn’t know.
He didn’t know that Draco was missing the beads that made up Eltanin towards the left side of the robe’s waist, lost when he’d ripped the entire thing off his shoulders in the heat of a vicious argument with his sister five years ago. He didn’t know that Ursa Major was crooked over the back on account of the crease the robe undoubtedly had for being carelessly shut away for so long. He didn’t know he kept this trunk around because as much as he distanced himself from all of this, he would never be able to be rid of it completely, because it was a part of who he was whether he liked it or not. He never would have pulled it out from the corner of the living room if he had known, which made it worse and better all at once.
To Tooru, this was the most shining example of his failure, of everything he never wanted to be. To Koushi, it was the most incredible thing he had seen in his life, and—with a start that made his hands shake at his sides, Tooru realized Koushi was looking up at him like that, too.
There was no doubt in his eyes, no derision. No admonishment on his tongue for failing a legacy or snide judgment from a stranger. Tooru had never told him the full story of his past, completely certain he wouldn’t be able to bear disappointment if it came from him. So he kept it locked up tight, and felt immeasurably grateful when he never pressed it, even when they’d skirted close to it on occasion.
Koushi didn’t know about the war he waged with himself and the sky; and now didn’t know how important he was in all of it changing. Didn’t know the fact that he had just shattered Tooru’s magical world so completely with his ordinariness. He’d pulled the wind from the thunderstorm in his head without even trying, yanked power from the buffeting waves by not knowing, and by extension, not caring.
Tooru, with some of the most powerful magic in the world at his fingertips and a core most at peace among the stars, killed so much of himself and shoved it in a trunk to fester as ghosts. Koushi, with no magic at all to speak of and feet firmly planted to solid ground, killed those ghosts without batting a starlight eyelash, and now held the inert skeletons from Tooru’s closet between his hands like a trophy.
It was a trophy he wholeheartedly deserved.
Tooru cleared his throat, thick with feeling, and offered him a smile he felt through the deepest, deadened parts of him that he thought he might just be able to mend.
“Put it on.”
Koushi’s eyes lit up like the first rays of sun breaking storm clouds, and Tooru pulled himself to solid ground in the slowly-calming sea.
It was the vernal equinox, the first day of a warm spring, and Tooru felt so very, very new.