Chapter Text
“Are you breaking up with me?” Shuichi asks, voice trembling. “For real?”
Yes. He is. And everyone wants to know why. Why—the question Eiri hates the most.
And why? (Ha.) Because he never knows how to answer.
“You tell me,” he says, scowling at his therapist as he fingers the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. “That’s what I pay you for, isn’t it?”
“You’re sabotaging yourself,” she says, meeting his stare, without even a glance at her notepad. “You’re convinced that you don’t deserve to be happy, so once things started going well and you started to feel content, you ended it.”
Eiri’s scowl deepens and the fingers in his pocket still. “…You didn’t even have to think about that, did you?”
“No, not really.”
It makes sense, he supposes. Things were starting to go well. He was starting to feel content. He can remember one day in particular that felt like it belonged to someone normal, someone who wasn’t so screwed up; he woke up beside Shuichi, made breakfast, took Riku to school, worked, picked Riku up from school, made dinner, and fell asleep beside Shuichi. He remembers feeling so…peaceful. So comfortable. So satisfied.
The breakup came four days later. And he felt blissfully screwed up once again.
“But you’re unhappy, aren’t you?”
Eiri exhales a stream of smoke and wonders briefly if Riku’s teacher has started encouraging him to form full sentences and questions; he’ll have to do something about that later. “Yes,” he says. “Isn’t it great?”
Riku frowns and looks confused. “But—”
“Quiet.”
“…But—”
“Nnh. Hush. It’s done,” Eiri snaps. “Go do your homework.”
Riku obeys and Eiri tries to write. They have a silent, uneventful dinner. No one laughs or talks with their mouth full. No one tries to tell a joke but forgets the punch line. No one finds a really bad movie on TV for them to watch. No one insists on playing a silly game like Twister. No one sings.
Around midnight, Riku crawls into the writer’s bed and even in the darkness of the room, Eiri can feel the boy’s look of “What do you have to say for yourself?”
Eiri sighs, weary and regretful, and admits, “I made a mistake.”
“How are you going to fix it?” Yuji Nakano has a bad habit of acting like they’re good friends, just because Eiri sometimes acknowledges his presence. He doesn’t appear to understand that when they run into each other in public, it’s purely happenstance. This particular afternoon, he seems to think they planned to meet at the convenience store when, really, Eiri’s just out of beer. “I mean, you can’t just ask him back this time.”
Eiri arches a questioning eyebrow.
“You told him it was really over, right?”
Right.
“Then that’s what he’s thinking. And apart from being sad, he’s probably pissed as hell. So if you just ask him come back, without offering anything else, there’s a good chance he’ll reject you.”
Oh. …Really?
“Yeah. And, I mean, I haven’t heard anything, but who’s to say he isn’t already thinking of moving on? Or has, even?”
That’s unlikely, Eiri thinks.
Hopes.
…Shit.
“You’ve got to do something really serious. Really romantic. Y’know?”
So be it.
“What’s the occasion, sir?”
Eiri glances down at the little boy standing beside him. Riku nods, approving, encouraging. He grits his teeth and looks back at the jewelry store clerk.
“…An engagement,” he says.
He’s wasted two weeks trying to decide if this was the right thing to do. It seems reasonable. A proposal is serious. A proposal is romantic. There’s no way in hell Shuichi will turn down a proposal. And if he goes ahead and marries the boy, he’ll be less inclined to repeat his mistake, he thinks.
Hopes.
“Yuki?”
“Hey,” Eiri says, trying to keep his voice steady, though the hand holding the phone to his ear is shaking like mad. His brow furrows at the noises he hears in the background; it sounds like the singer is in the middle of a huge crowd that’s all speaking…Spanish? “Where are you?”
“Um, Spain.” Well, that explains the Spanish. “I’m on tour.”
That’s right. He forgot. It’s on his calendar, but he never looks at that thing. “When are you getting back?”
“A—month, maybe, I don’t know. Yuki, why are you calling me?”
Why. He shuts his eyes for a moment and then opens them, looking down at the little black box sitting on his desk.
“Yuki?”
“Will you marry me?”
“W...what?!”
He forces himself to not hang up, to not tell the boy to just forget about it. He forces himself to look at that little black box, to tell himself that he does deserve to be happy and this is going to make him happy. “Will you marry me, Shuichi?” He repeats, adding his name, which he thinks makes it sound better.
Shuichi stammers something nonsensical and incoherent while the people around him chatter rapidly in Spanish and Eiri holds his breath.
And then the line goes dead.
…Shit.