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The touch that wakes you is painfully tender.
You barely feel it, just a wisp of sensation slipping beneath your skin to rouse you. You sway between worlds, caught between sleep and reality, everything blurring into something unreal.
“It’s early, baby,” you slur, cracking open a bleary eye. The bedroom is smeared cobalt with the approaching dawn, a liminal kiss of blue. “Come back to bed.”
The low, rich hum you’re expecting never comes. There’s not the familiar weight of Kento’s hand sweeping up the curve of your hip, his wide palm cupping the plush of it.
“Ken?”
You start to blink away your drowsiness. The room is still bathed in deep blue, but it fades into something softer with each passing breath. You raise your head enough to peer across the empty sea of Kento’s side of the bed, and pause.
Kento’s sunglasses gleam on the nightstand. Your throat tightens, and something opens up inside you, an unending well that tastes like sorrow. He keeps no reminders in your bedroom. Here, there is no space for what waits for him beyond your doorstep. It is only the two of you, woven together into a tapestry of home.
“Oh,” you breathe, finally, terribly awake.
And the world falls out from under you all over again.
It’s Shoko who shows up on your doorstep, the bags under her eyes like bruises, deeper and larger than you’ve seen before. There’s a softness to her umber eyes that you haven’t seen in eons. She beckons you outside, and something in you goes cold.
She taps a cigarette out of an old, crumpled box. You take it when she offers it to you, and then she’s warm against your side as you sit on the worn steps leading to your genkan.
Her steady words ring their death knell and echo in your ears, imprint in your marrow. You’ll carry them with you forever, you know.
Shoko gives no condolences. The tip of her cigarette burns like a sunset as she presses it against yours. You suck in a breath until yours lights, and it feels like breathing her in, like sharing the howling thing in your hollow chest with her. Or perhaps she’s sharing the brambles pricking sharp in the gaps between her ribs with you.
The smoke rasps through your throat. You think of campfire soot and the embers of bonfires and the ashes that bones leave behind. You swallow down the cough. If you swallow down the deep, horrified wail too, no one but you needs to know.
“Itadori wanted to be the one who told you,” she says into the quiet.
You close your eyes for a breath.
“Kento would have hated that,” you say.
“He would have,” Shoko agrees, and the butt of her cigarette is stained with her lipstick, pale petal-pink.
You think of the young sakura in the corner of the backyard, how Kento had carried it home after you’d absently mentioned getting one. He’d helped you plant it that very weekend.
Somewhere, there’s a picture of the two of you under it, silken petals the color of a pearly dawn caught in Kento’s spun-gold hair like confetti, the delicacy of them only matched by the tender curve of your body curled around him. You wonder if you could bear to see it now.
Shoko exhales a stream of smoke. The two of you watch it dissipate into the chilly air, into the golden light of the mid-afternoon sun. “It’s not a child’s burden to carry a message like this,” she says, and it stings nettle-sharp, how you can hear Kento so perfectly in those words.
Quiet unfurls between the two of you.
“I’m glad it’s you, Shoko,” you say gently.
“I wasn’t going to let fucking Satoru tell you.”
“Kento asked you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” she says, glancing at you and grinding her cigarette out against your walkway. “A year or two ago. Hard to believe I’m the most reasonable option. Then again, you’ve met Satoru.”
The laugh creaks out of you, the groaning melody of a sinking ship, and Shoko stares out into the distance as it morphs, as it distorts into an age-old song. She plucks your cigarette from your shaking fingers and takes a deep drag. The tip burns bright, a searing shock of orange. She leans against you as you croon out your grief in wet, bone-scraping sobs.
How like Kento, you think that night, curled up on a futon in a cradle of too-cold blankets. You’d only lasted a minute in the vast, devouring emptiness of your shared bed.
How like Kento, you think again, fingers fisting tight in one of his shirts, to keep taking care of you even once he’s gone.
The pillowcase is warm and damp against your cheek. Whatever echo of the past woke you with that delicate touch is long gone. You ache for those blurry seconds before he slipped through your fingers once more.
You smooth your hand over Kento’s side of the bed, let your fingers trace across the cool, unused sheets. Beyond your reach, his nightstand is a tiny museum bathed in the quiet azure of the early morning, small pieces of him caught in the resin of time. His sunglasses glint starlight cold.
Pushing yourself up feels like swimming through honey, the air syrupy against your sleep-hot skin. It sticks to you, drags at you like a riptide. The bottle of sleeping pills is heavy in your hand. You shake out a single one, swallow it down with a mouthful of stale, room-temperature water.
The bed creaks beneath you as you curl up again. You close your eyes against the soft, enveloping blue of approaching dawn, sparing yourself from the way it paints melancholy across the walls of your bedroom.
Sleep creeps over you like oceantide, and you sink into the cradle of it with a quiet sigh.
When you wake, Kento will be yours again, if only for a few scant seconds.
It’s not enough, but it’s all you have.