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Tetsurou has, over the course of their relationship, considered this scenario every now and then. In weak moments, after a fight, or when he was just feeling plain insecure. But nothing, not all the imagination in the world, could prepare him for the way it really feels. It's like he's submerged in ice water, his limbs heavy and his heart aching with the strain of every beat, his fingertips numb from the cold. Muffled and far away, yet just outside the window, he can hear the crickets chirp on a hot summer evening that is more freezing than any winter night.
He sits on the kitchen chair, motionless, like he could stop time by simply staying as still as possible. His tears fall anyway, a stinging reminder that there's nothing he can do to prevent the inevitable, not even holding his breath until he faints.
The old, scratched up table is blurry in front of his eyes. A shiver runs down his spine and he suppresses a sob only by pressing a hand against his mouth. It's shaky, provides no comfort and no refuge. He wants to crawl under the kotatsu and curl up into a ball, close his eyes and ignore the world.
But he can't, because it's not his kotatsu, it's Kenma's. Just like the pan he always uses to make tamagoyaki in the morning or the ugly cat throw pillow Fukunaga got them for their wedding. All of these things will stay here, motionless, in Kenma's house that isn't Tetsurou's anymore.
He grabs one of Kenma's tissues to blow his nose and considers leaving a couple of yen on the kitchen table to pay him back. Kenma wouldn't appreciate the joke.
As if on call, he appears in the doorway. Tetsurou averts his eyes.
"I got your stuff," Kenma says, and turns to leave without another word. Tetsurou gets up and follows him to the living room, dragging his feet without meaning to.
There's an open suitcase on the floor, containing everything he forgot when he was last here to gather up his things. Countless little memorabilia of their relationship, then their marriage, collected over the course of eleven years. Kenma has purged the house of all their memories, and he's handing them off to Tetsurou to deal with. It makes bitterness churn in his stomach, black with pent up anger, but he's too tired of fighting.
"Check if anything's missing," Kenma says, shuffling under the kotatsu like Tetsurou has seen him do a thousand times before. He used to find it endearing. Now he wants to pull Kenma back out by his collar and shake him, tell him to stop acting, but he knows he won't. Kenma is miles away already, hidden behind the facade he has carefully constructed for dealing with any of their issues.
Maybe it's Tetsurou's fault for never being able to crack that facade, no matter how hard he tried. He thinks it's Kenma's fault for putting it up in the first place.
Instead, he glances at the suitcase. It stings in his eyes like looking directly at the sun, so he only gives it a vague once-over. A couple of ties he had forgotten on the bottom of their shared closet. A photo of Kenma and him at their first business event together, drunk on the feeling of being able to do anything, of reaching unbelievable heights hand in hand.
"Seems like you got everything," he says, because if he keeps looking he's just going to cry again.
He closes the suitcase and picks it up, ignoring the clatter of small items falling into disarray. Kenma didn't take any care with throwing them inside in the first place. He almost hopes something breaks.
Kenma stays sitting there, and Tetsurou doesn't bother talking, because they've already said goodbye countless times. He walks to the door by himself.
"Wait," Kenma's voice cuts through the messy clouds on his mind, right as he's putting on his shoes. A spark of hope, stupid yet impossible to smother, shoots through his chest like lightning.
"Forgot something," Kenma says, and pushes the ugly cat pillow into Tetsurou's hands.
Two cartoonish kittens with entwined tails. Their heads are too big and their whiskers are bent out of shape. He remembers looking at it for the first time, how he’d laughed and told Fukunaga they’d rather burn it than display it around the house.
“You can keep that,” he says, choked up.
“It doesn’t match the decor anymore,” Kenma says.