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It comes, as do all things from Shion, with absolutely no prior warning.
“Nezumi, I’m in love with you.”
Nezumi eyes halt on the page. He stares at the word error for a long time, then looks up to meet Shion’s earnest gaze over his paperback. He debates feigning deafness and starting the paragraph over, but the boy doesn’t look like he’ll just let this one go. He folds the corner of the page, closes the book and asks, “What?”
“I said I’m in love with you. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’m positive.”
A colossal pressure flexes in Nezumi’s breast. He takes a breath. “I see.” Shion’s gaze is expectant, brimming with neutral curiosity, and Nezumi feels like a specimen in a petri dish. He shifts in his seat, feeling the pressure in his chest wind tighter as sweat starts to bead on his brow. His heart gallops arhythmically. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he tells him finally, throat dry. He’s beginning to feel a little sick.
Shion raises an eyebrow. “I think you do. I obviously want you to tell me you love me too, and that you want us to be together.”
You stupid bastard. “I’m not. I don’t.”
No disappointment registers on Shion’s face. He was expecting this. “Okay.” He makes to get up.
“Shion.” Nezumi’s voice is hard, hoarse. Shion pauses. “This is no place for love.”
“I thought you’d say that,” Shions says, because naturally the little genius did.
Nezumi’s straining heart swells to choke him. He barely gets the words out. “It makes you weak.”
Shion smiles a little smile that cuts through Nezumi like a knife. “I know. You need to be strong. It’s alright.” He stands, and Nezumi’s gaze follows him upwards like a madman in prayer. “I’m going to take a shower.” He picks up his towel and leaves their room. Nezumi is left with a hurricane inside him.
Over the next few days, Shion acts...normally. He wishes Nezumi a good morning with a bright smile, is pleased when he salts the soup correctly, refuses to complain about his aching shoulders after washing the dogs and is generally insufferable to be around. Indeed, the only abnormality in daily life after Shion’s confession (statement?) is that Nezumi feels like he’s been blown wide open.
Love is for the weak, he tells himself. But Shion isn’t weak. He’s ostensibly stronger than Nezumi, who is cowering and avoiding the other boy as far as he can. Shion picks up on this, because of course he does, and gives Nezumi as much space as is possible in their cramped living space. He’s at Inukashi’s hotel more days than not, and when he’s in their room he sits unobtrusively in a corner to read.
Over the next few days, Shion remains normal while Nezumi feels himself going crazy.
“Stop it,” he mutters to Cravat, who’s been staring at him in mousy concern since it happened. “Spare your worry for him; he’s the one who should be nursing a broken heart.”
And that really gets to the crux of the matter, because Shion doesn’t appear to be broken-hearted in the least. Instead, it’s Nezumi who feels like he’s rending in two when he sees him, who’s upset and angry that Shion has done this to him because love is for the weak.
Nezumi wonders some nights, with Shion’s back rising and falling against his own, if he might ever come to hate him. He doesn’t pray, hasn’t since he was a very young child. He thinks in the darkness that if he ever were to, it would be for that.
On the fifth day, he breaks.
“What are you doing?”
Shion looks up from his book. “It’s Romeo and Juliet .”
Nezumi breathes, in and out. “I meant, what are you doing?”
Shion puts the book down. “I don’t follow.”
“Five days ago, you…” Nezumi’s voice, which has carried him through harrowing performances and out of death’s gaping maw, gives out on him. He restarts. “You said you loved me.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“So, what are you doing?” Shion’s face remains blank as an endpaper. “You can’t just blurt something like that out like it’s the day’s news and go on about life!” Shion frowns, opens his mouth to say something, but Nezumi ploughs on. “You can’t just act as though you haven’t ruined... broken everything! You can’t just be normal!”
And now, finally, the hurt starts to register. “Broken?”
“Yes, Shion,” Nezumi hisses, “broken. Everything was fine. This,” he gestures between them, “was working. And now it’s broken.”
Shion’s face is crumpling in on itself and Nezumi desperately needs him to look ugly. “But...things have been normal.” His voice is thick.
“Normal? They’re never going to be normal again. What happens now, huh? If we become enemies? It’s like I’ve said all along.”
“I could never hate you,” Shion says, just like before, “and I couldn’t never kill you.”
“My point exactly,” Nezumi spits. “But you need to—”
“I could never have killed you or hated you or even not cared about you,” Shion cries, “at any point since we met four years ago.” Tears are streaming freely down his cheeks. “If that means I’ve loved you all those four years and if that makes me weak, then fine. You can kill me. You can win.”
There’s no trace of humour in his voice, no hint of a smile on his face, but Nezumi has to believe he’s joking. “How am I supposed to kill you?” Shion glowers at him even as sobs wrack his body, and Nezumi feels panic well inside him at the realisation that he’s nearing the brink of tears, too. “How am I supposed to look at your face and not see you here, right now, or over there, saying you love me?” His voice is steadily rising, higher and more raw than anything he’s let out for years. “How am I supposed to ever go back to normal? Fuck, Shion, you can’t just throw words around!”
“I never threw anything around,” Shion forces out through gritted teeth. “I meant it.”
Nezumi’s breathing is laboured. His chest hurts. “How can you have meant it? How could you feel something like that and just forget?”
“You think I forgot?” Shion is standing now, looming over him, and Nezumi doesn’t know if he’s ever seen him this angry. “You think I don’t feel like I’m cracking every time I see you, feel the slap in the face with every reminder you don’t feel the same way? You think I’m that stupid, huh?” The words slap him in the face; an accusation. “You think I can just throw something into the wind and laugh when it blows back in my face? I’m doing it for you , Nezumi!” Slap. “So that you don’t have to feel uncomfortable! I cry in the shower so you don’t have to see it,” slap, “sit for hours with the dogs so you don’t have to know I’m barely holding it together! And now you’re furious at me because you think I forgot?!” His fists ball and Nezumi thinks for a moment that he might actually strike him, but then he deflates. A laugh bubbles to his lips, bitter. “How can you be so selfish as to demand I demonstrably care when you made so perfectly clear that you don’t? How can you make it my fault that you don’t want to kill me?”
“I want to kill you,” Nezumi says, voice ragged and cheeks stinging. “I can’t.”
Shion’s gaze on him is heavy. Red eyes, red irises. He breathes, in and out. “Alright.”
He leaves.
Nezumi catches him just outside the entrance. “Shion!”
Shion stops, but doesn’t turn around. “Nezumi, please just leave me alone. I’m tired.”
Nezumi is tired, too, tired to the bone. He aches. “I don’t want to love you,” he whispers, and the words cut his lips as they’re carried past them on his breath. He’s flayed raw; powerless and vulnerable.
Shion pulls in a shaking breath. “I know you don’t.”
“Shion...I’m scared.”
He turns around. His eyes are still watery, his face streaked with tears, and Nezumi, stripped and broken and besotted, realises that love is not for the weak. Love is for the brave.
He can be brave.