Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s a place for us. The dark grey sky swirls in his eyes when he shuts it close. There is somewhere beautiful for us. A place to call our own, Hiroto, a home for the two of us. Going home is hard. The sky dances to the softness of that voice, and then, the dark.

This time they said sorry. Bitten out like a piece stuck between teeth, Hiroto’s last day of the job consists of a refused free meal and a half-bitten apology. It’s been four days. It’s also raining. Which, considering the circumstances, might be even worse than not taking that meal. It’s easy to die starving. Starving in the cold is easier.

Two schoolgirls pass over, their keychains dangling above; figures with large doll eyes shake his vision. It reminds Hiroto of the overly loud announcements on glass buildings. It is strange to live where everywhere is someone else’s something and somewhere. Hiroto lives. He lives in somewhere as something. In is a strange way of putting it.

A single five-hundred yen lies in his palm. Hiroto makes a point by squeezing the object as hard as he can, the cold hard metal in his fist similar to the cold harsh rain, but there’s simply not enough in his stomach to move and walk to a convenience store and buy something as discreetly as possible without the cashier eyeing him like he just came out of the gutter. It’s more like a dark back alley. At least the gutter sounds warmer.

Maybe he can get a sandwich; a bento, even, a proper one, before he dies or something better comes along. Usually Hiroto would opt for bread, but his dignity begs for something better. Hiroto is going to die tonight. Or tomorrow. Today sounds okay. Nothing is going on but the rain and the smell of it make him hungry. Hunger runs and keeps running; meat, bones, the blood in the margins. He wants something, anything— and break it open with his teeth. Hiroto doesn’t want to die, of course, but he hasn’t wanted anything other than food for a long time. There’s a light in front of him, not the soft glimmer of stores, but harsh and cold and bright, and Hiroto can’t move.

A second before the coin rolls out of his hand unprompted and Hiroto dies, he couldn’t help but think, god, what a fucking waste.

Hiroto wakes up to an afterlife that has a ceiling, a bed, and a single nightstand with a lamp post so large that half its roof hangs over his head. The sheets smell nice, slightly damp from the rain because it smells like it too. Being dead gives clean clothes and the ability to sit up without the feeling of splitting your head open. Being dead is very nice. The room is very bright.

“Ah, hello! Woke up?”

God is a man with silver hoop earrings, Hiroto chews absently on this fact before he realizes that no scriptures in his mother’s old things told him what to say when god addresses you with a mug and a hello.

“I figured you’d want some water,” god says. “I made some curry, you can come out of the bed when you feel like it— uhm, my clothes suit you well!”

Hiroto makes a sound. God laughs.

“You look like you’re staring at a ghost! I’m a human. Hu-u-man. You see—” and settling down the mug on the nightstand, he pulls what Hiroto supposes is a funny face. “Perfectly human. Just like you, if you would please drink this very nice, very warm water, hmm?” Laughing when he peeks at Hiroto’s face, he adds, “Don’t worry, it isn’t drugged.”

Hiroto does what he says. The god-human smiles. Hiroto hopes there’s no poison in that thing; his stomach curls in that warmth.

“I’m Masaki, by the way,” the god-human-and-also-Masaki says. “Come eat when you’re ready, yeah?”

Hiroto didn’t say anything when she asked him, but she got the message. Looking back, he should have said something. Hiroto hardly looks back for the same reason why he doesn’t look forward; there is simply nothing to expect from the past, and the future Hiroto had wished for stays grounded in the past, the moment he refused her. If only god can save him, then she must be god.

God is dead. Hiroto has made peace with it but never mourned.

“Is it good?”

Hiroto is in a room. Hiroto is eating. He can’t tell which one is more surprising. This room is very warm; the food also. Good is the wrong way of describing the indecipherable. Hiroto half-waits the food to go stale and for the room to vanish. There is something about the food being warm that makes Hiroto want to pause, to stay still for a while and let the warmth sink through.

“I thought you got dizzy from all that rain,” Masaki says. “I mean, I do too. Rain sucks. I thought you fainted. You did, right?” Pausing, Masaki adds, “I have never fainted, though.”

Masaki, which turns out to not be god nor exactly human, does the dishes. He talks a lot. He hums a little song when his back is turned to him, his head tuning to the rhythm of the melody. He sings well. Masaki looks happy in a way that troubles him. Hiroto has washed dishes for a month before they kicked him out, so he knows no one is ever this happy doing dishes. That’s the not-human part.

It’s not that all people Hiroto have met are miserable, but Masaki has been so relentless in his joy in the few hours Hiroto spent with him that Hiroto has the hypothesis where his entire life stock of miserable people has been to compensate for this meeting and this person, which doesn’t feel quite human in how he saved him, or why in the first place.

“You were a bit weak and you needed some food,” Masaki says, proving his point. “I didn’t exactly save you. If anything, you probably saved me.”

Hiroto pauses from staring at the grey-speckled walls and the large wooden clock. He briefly wondered if this man is drunk. “What?”

Masaki dries his hands on the soft-looking towel hanging on the oven handle. A shrug is directed towards it. “I need a little brother,” Masaki says. “You look younger than me.” Nodding to whatever reason Masaki is currently using to get to the weirdest conclusion Hiroto has ever been on the receiving end of, he says, “What’s your name?” And that, Hiroto assumes, is the not-god part.

Masaki lives in a five-piece apartment on the busiest street of the town. He has two bedrooms, one that Masaki has let him live in free of charge. He calls him Hiroto, adds an honorific when he is feeling playful (which is often), uses keigo with no polite intention behind it (which is always). He acts funnily. He acts like an older brother. One of these things irritates him, but he doesn’t know what.

He doesn’t know anything about Masaki other than his first name.

“O’nii-chan’s going for work—” and Masaki would leave with food on the table, still warm, and Hiroto with an apartment that belongs to someone else.

Masaki doesn’t ask him about his job, or the job that he doesn’t have but should at his age. He doesn’t ask about the hunger, the condition of his body—starved, dirty, complete with the abused hair. Masaki always leaves with food on the table. He leaves a second towel in the bathroom and a bottle of shampoo for delicate and damaged hair, whatever that means. Masaki doesn’t ask, Hiroto doesn’t say. He sleeps in a too soft bed in a too comfortable place. He doesn’t know why there is another bed made ready for him. Maybe he really is dead. Maybe Masaki died with him at the same time, and they ended up here, in this place, this apartment that is not really an apartment. Maybe this is the heaven she has raved about; where he hopes she is.

Hiroto squeezes out a drop of shampoo with his right hand. He stares at it with water falling over his hair, his eyes. The water is warm and his palm cold.

“Thanks for everything,” Hiroto says, and these words come out badly. He is not used to thanking people; no one has given him an occasion for it, Hiroto made sure of that. He twists his clothes with his fingers before he realizes they aren’t his. “I’ll go now.”

Today’s Masaki’s day-off, so he figures it is a good day for farewell. He does it in the morning because Masaki goes to bars at night. Hiroto-kun’s quite healthy now, and he has a nice face when he has some meat on his cheeks! You would be popular in— but Hiroto is not a fan of bars. He has tried to work there and had received napkins with numbers written on in smudged writing. He has slept with few and engaged with none. He got kicked out in a week for the same reason he got kicked out of every job.

Masaki is looking at him with a levelled eye, and, coming closer, moves a hand to his hair. Masaki doesn’t touch him often. He must know how it unsettles him. The touch; the kindness of it.

“It’s pretty now,” Masaki says. “Just a bit long. Do you want me to cut it? I’m good at it.”

“Masaki,” Hiroto says because it is the only thing he knows. It is also the only thing he knows about him. “I can’t stay here.”

Masaki hums. “What are you going to do after that? A job? If you can find one you won’t be on the streets, Hiroto.”

Shame crawls in his throat. It’s hard to breathe. “That’s. That’s none of your business.”

“It is, though. I’m your brother,” Masaki says. Flicking Hiroto’s hair, Masaki smiles. “How about you work with me? It’s high pay, and I’ve been needing a partner for a year now.”

“I don’t want your charity.”

“It’s not! I assure you! You have a nice build, just need a little exercise and training and it will be okay—yeah?”

Yeah, no. “I am,” and Hiroto stops, somehow can’t bring himself to finish. Hiroto’s heart throbs at the offer, harsh, clear; an irregular beat. He finishes, “I am not what you want, Masaki.”

Masaki looks almost sad, the kind of face someone makes when clouds start to gather over a clear blue sky. Masaki is a lot of almost-look and almost-have.

“Hmm, that’s true.” Masaki laughs instead, reaching over to ruffle Hiroto’s hair. “Your hair, that’s for sure. So let me cut this bad boy down, hmm?”

Masaki touches his face. He cuts his hair after that. I’ll be gentle, Masaki says, when his hand runs down his chin, then again when he massages his scalp. Hiroto reluctantly admits that Masaki has done a nice cut, though his only frame of reference is the watermelon cut his mother gave him when he was nine. Momentarily forgetting about the unspoken contract of privacy, Hiroto asks him where he got the skills.

Masaki laughs. It doesn’t sound like one. “What, Hiroto wants to know more about me? Heh, o’nii-chan is so happy—"

He is about to take the question back when Masaki continued, “I cut my own hair. We didn’t grow up very rich, you see. I had to figure a way to keep my hair nice for the girls in my class! I didn’t trust the cheap stylists, it was a disaster last time I went to one, jeez, and it was a decade ago!”

”It’s different cutting for someone else.” 

“Eh— what, did Hiroto-kun took up the job before?” 

“I did,” he says, “for three days.”

Masaki is trimming the hairs over his forehead. Hiroto sees Masaki’s large eyes upward, his nose on the level of Hiroto’s view, the lips if he looks down, and the slight dimple marks even when his mouth doesn’t move. Small black hairs fall down the bathroom tiles unnoticed. “It is different, I agree. I was cutting Aniki’s hair ever since I was fifteen! Then he had to get annoying and insisted on growing his hair without my assistance— isn’t that cruel? It was long enough for a small ponytail! A man with a beard and all! Can you imagine?”

Hiroto can’t. He can’t imagine anyone looking like Masaki with anything resembling a bread, but that’s not what made him pause.

“You have a brother,” Hiroto says.

Masaki blows softly over his forehead, grabbing a brush to clear the clinging hair. “I did. I had one. Well, two, now. Counting you, Hiroto.”

“I’m not your brother, Masaki.”

“Hmm,” Masaki says, coming to cup his face with his hands. In the mirror, Hiroto sees the back of Masaki’s head, light brown, and the beginning of the sliver hoop hiding between the threads. Masaki looks like a hairstylist. The sort of people that get heads subtly turned and discussed behind his back. Hiroto has seen it happen, he might have even seen Masaki in the past passing by if he lived near enough that street and that alley.

Something is definitely irritating him. He doesn’t know what. “You know nothing about me.”

“Uh-uh, that’s not true,” Masaki says inconsequently, and shying himself away from the mirror, Hiroto sees Masaki’s smile over by the glass mirror, one hand on the hair, another on his shoulder. “I know that you look very sexy in a good haircut. That’s one thing that I’m sure no one else knows, Hiroto-kun.”

Now let’s trim your beard, okay? Actually, hmm—let’s cut that down too, yes?

It’s not so different from anger, that’s what he thought.

“There you go,” Masaki says, but he has a hand behind his back; Hiroto’s arm. “Now, try and hit back.”

Hiroto clenches his teeth as he pulls. The hand doesn’t budge. “I can’t,” he spits out. “I told you I am not what you’re looking for, Masaki.”

Go slower is the usual criticism, the other is that you need to want to hit me, Hiroto-kun, you can’t swing a punch at something else other than me, you understand?

What do you do anyway?

I will explain when you’re ready to work. Now hit, Hiroto.

It’s difficult to hit with anger. It’s difficult to hit without it. Anger doesn’t have a concrete form; it doesn’t bear a name. Never has Hiroto been angry at someone, but rather he is the anger; he remains angry. The street oozes a swift noise of cars and people; it’s loud, it’s annoying along with the movements of his thoughts battling to single out in the forever buzzing streets. Younger, Hiroto has lived off puckering anger off his chest, peeling off the rot and let it fester in the open air. Light shakes under his eyes, and rain starts to fill his vision. The ground beneath him moves, shakes, and Hiroto breathes to the rhythm of his wound, opening and closing in that sizzling sound.

Look at me, Hiroto.

Masaki dawns in the fallen light. There will be a place for us. Younger, Hiroto’s mother made a promise. A breath, two, and twisting his arm from Masaki’s grip, Hiroto aims straight at his face.

It’s different from anger. The place he had ripped off years ago relents hollowly, echoes in Masaki’s laughter, saying, “You’re getting better at it, Hiroto! Now—hit again.”

Sweat clings to Masaki’s T-shirt. He is wearing that shirt; it’s his in a way that everything Masaki has given him is his. Vision blurs as he tries to hit again towards Masaki’s equally wavering gaze. Into it, he almost wants to hit right through him. Will it prove Masaki’s existence? Will it prove his? Why did he save him— and inevitably, the question wakes up another—why would he? Masaki wants a brother, he had a brother, and now he picks up people in the streets for a replacement. Vision blurs again, this time to the left, up, and the sky, blurring at the edge of blue and grey, starts to flash before his eyes.

Masaki is bright. Masaki, shrouded by light, has his head up to the sky. Shh, shh, and rain dawns on them at the same time as the light.   

They got to Masaki’s apartment drenched. Masaki is laughing.

“I have never really liked the rain,” Masaki says, and couldn’t finish.

“Shut up!”

“Sorry. Sorry, I will stop.” Masaki covers his hand over his mouth. It doesn’t work.

“I said shut up!”

“Sorry.” But Masaki can barely get that word out without another of his laugh, “Hiroto—”

“It’s not that bad!”

“Yes,” Masaki says with what he probably thinks is a serious face, right after another that annoying, high-pitched laugh. That bastard. “Yes, sorry, Hiroto-kun did a little fall—”

“I didn’t fall—”

“Instead of aiming for me—”

“I was aiming for you—”

“He just fell a little on the ground—”

“What does ‘a little’ even mean—”

“—face first!”

“Shut up!”

Hiroto sniffs and looks away. His nose hurts.

Hiroto finds out about Masaki’s last name during his first day of work. It isn’t hard to miss.

“Amamiya, found yourself a new partner? It’s about time, it’s been a year you worked alone.”

And the other man, smaller and thinner with glasses props up behind the first, starts, “Amamiya-san, here’s the reward…”

Only then Masaki would pay any kind of attention to them. Masaki. Amamiya Masaki. Hiroto shakes out the sweat licking down his ears and tries not to wince at the bruise blooming down his elbow. Tipping his head cheekily, the men utter a goodbye to Masaki’s retreating back. The larger man moves his eyes to him, huffing.

“I didn’t think he would take on a new one to the business. I bet you gotta change the brand name too, huh? What are you, his friend? His secret little brother? Takeru’s? You look more like him than that guy does. I always had my doubt if they were actually related.”

“I’m not his friend,” Hiroto says, and that is all he could say. Masaki was looking back, his hair shaking in the dim-lighted warehouse. When Hiroto walks towards him, a gust of wind hits his face.

“You are famous,” Hiroto says when they reach the exit, looking at Masaki’s hand, a stack of money towards him. “This is a lot.”

“Hm, that’s half of your share. Hiroto-kun did very well tonight, especially for your first time! What do you want to eat tonight? There’s still some stew left from yesterday—”

“Masaki.”

Masaki stops in his track. The orange lamplight dots his face when he looks back, cutting strips off the edges of his face. The crease of his skin eats that bout of light, shadowing the smile. Masaki asks him what’s wrong. Hiroto says, I can’t figure out if you’re wrong or I am. I am really becoming your brother.

Masaki laughs, pleased. “Really? You really think so?”

“People are starting to think so.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know you, Masaki. I can’t be your brother if I don’t know you.”

“Bullshit. I don’t know you and you’re my brother to me,” Hitting the heel of his shoe against the concrete, Masaki says, “There are things we don’t tell to our family, and sometimes that might as well be everything.”

The money weights in the pocket— his pocket, Masaki’s pocket, Masaki’s clothes. “Everything,” Hiroto says. “There’s just one thing, really.”

Hiroto breathes in a laugh. “You know why I ended up where you found me? Why couldn’t I find a job and last for more than a week?” Hiroto pictures Masaki smiling. Hiroto can’t stop but return the smile to that image in his head. “They find out eventually. All the time.”

It’s not hard to find out. It has been reported. One of the headlines at the time reads, Single Mother Killed by Her Teenage Son. Hiroto remembers it because that was the one an affronted mother threw into his face when he came out of the trial. Shame on you, my child, shame on you, she cried out, as though shame is the worst emotion that can come out of death. Hiroto spent more time in guilt than mourning.

“My name was redacted due to minor protection, but there are pictures of me on the internet. Name attached in some. They find out. They are afraid I will kill them next.”

Masaki makes a thoughtful ah— sound. “You served time?”

“They didn’t have enough evidence to convict me. It helped that I was a minor.”

“I see. It must have been hard. Hiroto-kun is very hardworking. Too bad people weren’t willing to hire you.”

And somehow that isn’t enough. Something in Hiroto itches painfully. It’s annoying. “I didn’t kill her,” he says, and surprised himself in saying it. He has never defended himself; there has never been the need to prove himself to anyone. “Mom was in debt. She couldn’t repay.”

“I see.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Hiroto.”

Hiroto grasps the front of his own shirt. Masaki’s shirt. It doesn’t matter. He’s trying to pull the fabric, to ease the stretch. Blood rushes to his ears and he pulls and pulls. “Why do you believe me?”

There’s a laugh. A kind one. “I would believe my little brother, and I guess I want him to be less, hmm, alone? There’s nothing as lonely as not being believed, I think.”

“She wanted to remarry,” Hiroto says. “She wanted to form a new family. I wasn’t enough. She wanted something else. I thought I was enough.”

I understand that, Masaki says, and even then Hiroto’s heart couldn’t stop racing because Masaki is taking his hands in his. Masaki’s head is near their intertwined hands, the soft hairs brushing on his burning skin.

“I might as well have killed her because I refused. I didn’t kill her,” and with something stuck inside him, he guts out, “Masaki, Masaki, Masaki—"

His throat hurts. It annoys him. It annoys him so he opens his mouth. His clothes aren’t his. His room isn’t his. Masaki is his—

“Aniki,” he says, whispers, lets the word skip, fumble over. “Aniki.”

He wasn’t sad enough when she died. He wasn’t happy enough when she lived. Hiroto can’t be a killer and an ungrateful son without being also bad at being them. In many ways, it would have been better if Hiroto actually is what that newspaper said.

Masaki is sleeping when Hiroto sits next to his bed. Masaki’s bed. Possession with Masaki is tricky. Hiroto has touched everything he owns— his bike, his bed, his clothes— even Hiroto can belong to him if Masaki wants to. But Masaki sleeps with his mouth slightly open and his eyes closed and doesn’t notice Hiroto walking in and sitting on his bed, watching.

It’s not that Hiroto doesn’t have his room to sleep in. It’s not that he wants to sleep neither. It is simply that at night, Masaki sleeps with narrow streaks of tears, making a transparent gleam from eyes to cheek. One time Masaki woke up blinking up to him and Hiroto asked him what he dreamt.

“Home, I guess,” Masaki says, rubbing his eyes and yawning a little.

“The past?”

“Of sorts. It’s not the past I miss though.”

“Going home is hard,” Hiroto says. “Is that why you cry when you do?”

Masaki moves and lifts his blanket. An empty space. “It’s not hard when you are two.”

There will be a place for us. Somewhere beautiful. She promised, Hiroto thinks when he settles into that space, empty, then full, his head touching Masaki’s pillow, his breath soft against all this silence. Hiroto doesn’t mourn.

“The two of us,” Hiroto says with his eyes closed, feeling a hand running over them, but Hiroto isn’t crying.

And then, and then, the dark.