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One day you fall for this boy.
You don’t know when you fell, like a proverbial boulder thrown down an endless abyss, and you think there probably wasn’t a specific day it all started. Perhaps you were born in free-fall, helpless against gravity. Maybe it’s fate, ineffable and inescapable. It was always meant to be like this: One day, you looked up and saw another little boy, and you realized that the world was never securely beneath your feet. There is nothing there to catch you.
There is no specific day you can point to on a calendar and say, “This was the day I fell, head first, in love with Kaneki Ken. I’ve yet to hit the bottom.”
You have known Kaneki Ken for ten years, but you think you’ve loved him for a lifetime, before time, beginning, and end held any meaning.
And he touches you with his fingers.
He has wonderful fingers –long and tapered, strong, made to create beauty. You think he could have been a pianist if he wanted to; he plays your pulse as expertly as ivory keys and you are his piano. His.
You yield to the whisper of them on you, shiver when they are not, desperate for their return.
And he burns holes in your skin with his mouth.
He is molten fire, the fusion of hydrogen in the sun’s core, and you are kindling under his kiss, his tongue. You burn, and there is nothing but ash to show you once existed. But it is proof that once, he had poured his love, his everything, into you.
The dark, secret bruises he leaves on your skin fade with time, but he has marked you far deeper than that, has seared traces of himself into bone and marrow. He is in you, blood and bone.
And it hurts when you look at him.
The arch of his brow, the slope of his nose, the curve of his lips –you have memorized it all, everything Kaneki Ken. You have catalogued every smile, every tear, every breath, and you have come to realize that the one thing you have never seen is his back.
All you ever see now is his back, the passing smile that is no longer for you.
And it hurts when you don’t.
But he is in you, in blood, bone, and marrow, and there is no part of you that is not his, there is nothing to cut out, nothing to amputate. The entirety of you is an untreated burn, festering, burnt charcoal and dead flesh.
And it feels like someone’s cut you open with a jagged piece of glass.
There is no day you fell in love with Kaneki Ken, and, as your heart pumps your blood, him, you know there will be no end.
When you die and the last of your soul dissipates into the emptiness of space, they will open you up and learn that he is written into your DNA, that Nagachika Hideyoshi loved Kaneki Ken the way moths love flame.
Painfully, desperately, inevitably, irrevocably.