Chapter Text
Every breath Langa sucks in comes in short staccatos, like a cat scampering across a piano and leaving an awful, fumbling tune in its wake. He’s had this feeling before, enough to understand how rattling this phobia has become for him, and every time it comes around he feels like a child again. Between wandering outside, tip-toeing around a bush, and trying to scoop up the neighborhood’s stray cat, Langa’s first experience with blood had come flowing from a nasty slice down his lip. The cat wasn’t friendly, and when little Langa frantically looked down to his empty hands, steadily growing wetter with every thick drop hitting his skin, he’d shrieked so loud that a cluster of birds shoved themselves to the treetops and away from such a horrendous noise.
He’s seventeen with a needle-thin scar now, and if one looked close enough, the small hatches from each stitch across can be visible too.
Reki calls him dramatic when those spurts of panic come out after getting scrapes from the asphalt, but he patches him up every time, without fail, and by the end of it Langa’s eyes have settled away from his mildly disturbing wound and rather onto the person tending to it.
“You’ll get used to it,” Reki’s told him before, and he’s started to think he actually was until… until—
“Hey— Hey hey, Langa— Langa,” Reki says urgently, and quite literally has to straddle Langa on the ground to stall his painful squirming and take hold of the offending hand pooling up the same thick wetness Langa dreads with his whole heart.
Every beat from his pulse sends a shocking burn to the surface of his palm, he wonders if there’s debris stuck there, if Reki is only going to these lengths because it really is as bad as it looks. Dark, dark enough to wince at even though it matches plenty other shades of the only black he’s ever seen. It’s the pain that makes it scary, he hates to see the dull and pale grey of his skin and imagine —more like know— there’s something grave oozing underneath.
“Rek—“ Langa winces. His hand is quivering and he doesn’t know whether to risk a glance and try settling his worries or if this time, it’s better left unknown.
“Look at me,” Reki says, somehow answering Langa’s need for a decision. His friend grips his wrist at the edge of his vision and leans closer, the other hand brushing back strands of thin wispy hair that the night breeze has blown into a frazzled mess.
“Just look at me, Langa.” Reki says again, but Langa is staring at the speckled black sky and tries not to think about black blood.
Something gets through though.
“Sing the alphabet for me.”
That’s stupid, he can’t sing. But his lips are moving anyway and each time his hand stings he chokes out a letter and his toes curl. Reki’s hand is sliding up his wrist, gradually, and after one last brush along Langa’s cheekbone, he uses the other to tug off his headband, that whole flurry of hair going somewhat limp and framing a focused face.
“K— L— M—“ he struggles, but he’s still just as panicked as before, and although Reki holds every ounce of trust he has, there’s nothing that can’t keep him from looking just once because his hand is hovering right there and Reki’s headband hasn’t reached it quite yet and it’s building it’s getting worse it’s definitely getting worse—
“O— P— Q—“
He looks.
“AGH!”
“Langa!” Reki startles with the headband tight in his clutch. “What did I say?! Just—“
Langa feels like a startled wolf now— or cat, the one he encountered that slashed at him in a moment's notice all those years ago. His wild stare flickering around his surroundings and tuning into micro sights that send a thrill through his body. Things feel foreign all at once when he makes the connection, a blink-and-you-miss-it experience where when he once saw dull shadow, it’s replaced with— with something else. The street signs, the graffiti, sleeves of his friend’s shirt and… and…
It feels like jamais vu, where his gaze jumps from his hand, sporting a nasty gash that glints under a streetlamp, to his friend, wide eyed and frantic with those tufts curtained along his forehead.
They're the same shade, the same… color. Two opposite sides of a single spectrum, where one of the worst sights somehow coincides with the most comforting to him.
“R…” he feels his mind blanking out, vision going blurry from another wave of shock.
The color of blood, and Reki’s hair, and countless other things he has yet to discover—
is red.