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“You still think I’m a time leaper?”
The words were on the tip of his tongue, sweet and messy and full of glee, but something was wrong. He knew he was speaking, that was for certain, because there was that grainy sort of croak in his throat that signified speech, and Hanagaki was there because his hair shone like a beacon, sucking up every ray of light from the streetlamps. He was greedy that way—malcontented to get be, no, Hanagaki had to have more—he just needed to have it all.
So what did that leave Tetta, who wanted only two things? Where did he belong?
All he wanted was to feel that wonderful sensation of greatness—not of being better than everyone, because that was vanity and it always left an incurable ache in his guts—but of being more. The Greatness was something hard to define, but it was something that existed inside of all things that ought to be wanted.
Success was something that held Greatness, but it could so easily be soiled by poor competition or simplicity.
Happiness had Greatness, but it was something that was fleeting and relative. It was harder to be happy when you were less than. (Less than what? Tetta never knew exactly, but it filled his lungs with water and sapped the energy from his bones when he wasn’t doing something. It was exhausting—so fucking exhausting.)
Greatness and catharsis were not the same thing, but he could never achieve greatness if there weren’t stakes. If there was nothing on the line—if there was no risk—what point was there in winning? What deficit did he overcome? How hard could he truly have worked?
So Greatness, which was relief and pleasure and power and a thousand other things that poets and philosophers waxed for centuries over, was something that Tetta was obsessed with; though, hooked was a better word. Once he’d tasted but a drop, his entire life seemed to break apart at the seams, and it had left him trying to sew it back together. Bleeding fingers, shaking hands, and eyes that couldn’t focus on anything up close, Tetta stayed awake for hours every night trying to thread the needle.
And he’d been so close this time.
He’d felt the sunlight on his skin and for only a moment he was at peace. The never ending antsiness that bordered on mania melted away, and for one, shining moment, Tetta had simply just breathed. There was nothing clouding his mind or weighing him down.
(He was starting to think that maybe Greatness was just freedom by a different name.)
Tetta had been so close this time but…
But.
But what?
He couldn’t really remember. Hanma had picked him up on his bike and they’d taken off. Draken and Hanagaki had tailed them, even after their bikes were abandoned. He and Hanagaki had grappled and he’d slipped away. And then it was just himself and Hanagaki, and he was about to say something that Hanagaki was not going to like, and then
Oh.
He wasn’t talking, he was screaming.
He’d opened his mouth to speak, but he’d seen headlights in the distortion of his glasses and his body moved before he fully processed what was happening. He’d taken a single, solid step forward and was on his way to doing a second when the truck had slammed into him.
Luckily he couldn’t seem to remember the moment of impact, because as it was right now, he was on the ground. He was howling but it was silent, the only thing his brain was able to process being the ringing in his ears. Tetta’s eyes were open, he was sure of it, but there was nothing that he could definitively see. The world was a mosaic of muddy starbursts that looked like when he’d press his fingers over his eyelids. Every few seconds he’d see stark white, snow lined streets, but they’d get swallowed up by the darkness just as fast. He could have sworn he’d seen a crown of golden thorns before him, but he couldn’t really tell.
Tetta knew that this wasn’t good. He couldn’t feel the pain yet—which was undoubtedly good for now—but this, getting mowed down, was bad. He couldn’t come up with something to salvage this, his brain—which was probably dripping out of his ears or already painting the sidewalk, let’s be honest—couldn’t weave together some tapestry that ended with him walking away the victor.
He doubted he’d be walking anywhere.
An experimental attempt at movement came up blank. Tetta tried to move his leg, not anything crazy, just enough to make sure he was on his side lest he choke to death, but nothing happened. He felt the muscles tense, but nothing moved—he felt nothing. It was just numb.
Something hot dripped from his eyes down his cheeks, and something wicked whispered that it was blood. (Which wasn’t wicked, it was true. Maybe the unrelenting stream of blood weeping from his head was why he couldn’t see. Maybe that’s why he was sobbing?)
Breathing was a monumental task, but he could keep at it. It rattled his body every time he breathed in, but he was still breathing so he savored it. He stopped shrieking when he tasted iron on his tongue—whether it came from his lungs or it dripped into his mouth, your guess was as good as his. As the screaming in his ears died down the world started coming in clearer.
There was someone on the phone, his voice high with anxiety and the speaker loud. There was an ambulance on its way, but Tetta couldn’t hear the siren, so the brunt of medical attention was still focused on the main ground of the Tenjiku conflict. If the EMTs picked him up in time, he just might be able to slip under the radar and not get caught. It would be nearly impossible, but if Hanma was as dedicated as he’d always been, they could make it work. Hope filled his heart for the first time that evening.
But then something warm touched his face, and for whatever reason he was currently partmentalizing—fear, anguish, blinding pain—Tetta heaved with a sob. (It wasn’t just one though, the gentle touch had sent him spiraling, and before he knew it he was inconsolable.) With every breath, he slowly came to realize that there was in fact something dripping from his mouth, but at this point he didn’t want to know.
More than anything Tetta simply wanted to get up and run, he didn’t want to be lying face down on the concrete, he wanted to feel his toes. He would take anything at this point—even the pain. God, he would have given anything to feel the roadrash he probably had. (He sobbed louder.)
He was too far gone—breathing too hard, thinking too hard, shaking, too much, too fast, too far—to be able to recognize the sound of the ambulance siren as it got louder. He simply assumed he was screaming again, this time just a high, keening whine. Tetta’s eyes squeezed shut—or at least he thought they were—to fight against the vertigo that gripped him as he died. (Because he was dying. This had to be what it felt like, it couldn’t be anything else. He’d sob and laugh if he wasn’t already doing both.)
He rested within his pool of agony, malcontent to do so but unable to do anything else. This was his penance—his punishment—for daring to dream that he could ever achieve anything in a life that had Hanagaki in it. Tetta was just a stepping stone—a useless being. If he would forever be sidelined, unable to find peace, what was the point? He’d been thoroughly beaten. Time had come together to create a kinged pawn to trample over him.
Tetta was tired of being a doormat.
Tetta was tired.
He let the darkness swim around him, just like the veritable symphony of noise that surrounded him. Instead of trying to cloy atop their waves, he simply let himself go. Floating had never been so easy. It did not feel like Greatness, nor was it freeing, but it was nothing, and that was all he could deal with at the moment. (Maybe this was peace?)
He drifted for infinities wrapped in seconds through microcosmos of void.
It wasn’t so bad.
He could, perhaps, get used to it, given enough time.
He was starting to think that he wouldn’t mind staying here, wherever that was.
But Tetta could never win because just as he was settling into his grave, a pair of hands wrapped around his cheeks, and suddenly there was light. It was warm, and scratchy, and full of color. As if someone had lifted the veil from atop his eyes, the world came to in startlingly clear resolution. Black, yellow, red, gold, brown: the face before him was contorted and speaking, but it had all the right colors in all the right places and that spelled calmness. Security.
The calloused fingers wiped at his face, cleaning it of whatever had been smeared across. They were gentle, despite being tools of violence.
“Tetta?” a voice raised above the din. “Can you hear me?”
Tetta didn’t really register what was happening, except for the fact that he was being pulled upwards slightly, and was consequently pillowed by warmth. Unsupported, Tetta felt his head loll to the side, his colorful world disappearing, his eyes found the (his) blood pooling on the concrete. A few more drops joined the mix, his lips parted to let the liquid flow. (It may have allowed him to breathe easier, but it made his heart rate pick up.)
He must have reacted, because he was held differently now, and the color was swimming over top of him again. They looked worried. “Tetta, you’ve gotta say something.”
As much as he would have loved to oblige, the boy wasn’t exactly sure that he remembered how to form the syllables, or exactly what order they were supposed to go in. It also sounded like it cost a lot of energy that he didn’t have. He just blinked at the other.
They swore, and grabbed one of his hands—which he realized because he could see it being pressed into the other’s cheek. He couldn’t feel it. Not really.
“I can’t,” he rasped, the air getting caught in his throat. “Can’t feel.”
The kaleidoscope flowned, but nodded. It pressed a prismatic beam to his hand, the featherlight touch of lips creating a pull from somewhere that definitely wasn’t his hand.
The sun told him that it would be okay, and he believed him. Even though his hair was down and he looked worse for wear, he knew that there was a jacket wrapped around him that wasn’t his, and so he thought that maybe—just maybe—letting the sun keep him warm would be alright.
He hummed in contentment.
Shuji was having a mental breakdown, finally, after sixteen years. Because when he’d heard Kisaki scream something within him snapped. Draken didn’t even try to stop him from sniffing out the other boy. He couldn’t hide the curiosity and thinly veiled horror in his expression, though Shuji wondered if he had any right to speak: his face had to have been wide open.
Concernconcernconcern fear.
He didn’t know how to feel anything else. Unsteady feet brought him closer and closer to the sound that ignited every terror response within him. Shuji had never shied away from violence—after all, he’d helped kill a girl that morning!—but he had never heard Kisaki make that noise before. He’d never heard anyone make that noise before.
The moment he came upon the scene, there was nothing anyone could have done to stop him. Hanagaki was crouched over him, grabbing his shoulder when another god rending scream left Kisaki’s mouth. Shuji moved without thought, grabbing the kid by the back of his uniform and veritably throwing him in the opposite direction.
Kisaki looked dead. Were it not for the way his sightless eyes stared forward as he seized, Shuji would’ve thought him long gone. The right side of his face wasn’t eviscerated, but it was pretty close: the skin had peeled back because of the force in which he’d been hit, and there were clumps of his hair missing. Blood soaked through every inch of his skin except for where his tears were cleaning lines down his cheeks.
And that said nothing for the rest of him, which wasn’t in much better shape. His left leg was twisted like a bread tie, the bones and joints pointed in a half dozen directions. It was shattered.
Shuji was knelt before him, head bowed as if in prayer, as he surveyed the damage. If he wanted to, he could’ve taken a pair of chopsticks and started picking out the fragments of bone from his mangled thigh in a fucked up reversal of his funeral rites. The thought almost made him laugh, because he could hear Kisaki’s drawl in his head. “Disgusting.”
Yeah, he was. And that was why they got along so well.
So when Shuji realized that kisaki had gone limp, a feeling that he would later be told was terror, possessed him to slap his hands on the other boy’s cheeks. Though the blonde was silent, Shuji was not. He screamed as if his life depended on it, because in a way it did. They would never again dance hand in hand atop a stage so beautiful in a theater of their own creation. Kisaki had breathed new life in Shuji, and here he was with it cooling on the street. If he could have, he would’ve picked up the blood and put it back in: tenderly pour each and every drop back where it belonged, because Kisaki was not made like him. He needed to be held carefully, positioned like a doll. The strings attached to him were spider’s silk—so thin that even the slightest of shifts would tear them; it was what made him uncontrollable.
People didn’t understand Tetta the way he did—didn’t understand that Kisaki wasn’t full of himself, as the world would have had one believe, he was instead hollow. He was made up of pieces of scrap fabric, a brutalized quilt that held a spectrum of colors so wide Shuji couldn’t help but stare.
Vile as he was, Shuji couldn’t help but admire Tetta’s beauty.
Even when he was waxen like a corpse, sharp eyes dripping with agony, and body broken beyond repair, Tetta was Beauty in its final form. The essence of Beauty wrapped the boy like a second skin so tight not even knives, trucks, or wounds could break it. There was nothing about him that was repulsive—Shuji could have looked for hours. (Had looked for hours one night, where Tetta had passed out on his living room couch.)
Broken as he may have been, Shuji would have given anything to overwrite his glorious death. The blonde would have given up his rib—handed over a seed of his own life, nurtured it—in the hope that it would allow Tetta to continue to live beautifully. Shuji would have torn himself apart, given himself away, fully and wholly, to exist somewhere in the heart of the man that had stolen his. If he were only able to live as a fragment within Tetta, he would have found himself blessed: that was how important the boy was to him.
So when his eyes cracked open, Shuji couldn’t stop the tears from cascading down his face. He called to the boy like a siren, hoping to bewitch his soul back into its shell. For the first time since laying his eyes upon the boy, it seemed as if Tetta saw him.
(Looking into the abyss allowed the abyss to look back, but when two abysses looked at one another, who granted the first look?)
“Tetta,” Shuji choked. “There you are.”
The boy blinked slowly, no indication that he’d even heard. His eyes were focused solely on Shuji’s face, and that was plenty good for him. His face was marred by so much shit the older boy could hardly see through, so he began to wipe away at the viscera and blood that caked his skin—careful of the still open wounds and chips of glass embedded in his flesh.
And Tetta smiled.
Shuji thought his heart stopped beating.
If he could’ve cut a single moment from the weaving that was time, he would’ve saved that smile. Pressed it, varnished it, preserved it to keep in his pocket forever. He would’ve wanted to run his fingers along its tattered edges, to be able to at any time pull it out. But life was cruel, and so blood bubbled out of his nose as his head tilted upwards, his breathing growing erratic. Already elbow deep in viscera, Shuji wrapped his arms around the boy and allowed him to expel the blood that was filling his throat. (It was a good thing, too, because the second his head tilted down, a sustained stream of blood poured out of his nose and mouth and created a new puddle on the concrete. When Shuji sat him up against himself—the older boy’s chest pressed against Tetta’s back—the boy’s head lolled onto his shoulder, dazed smile still in place. He looked too still.)
“Tetta,” he whispered the name like a hymn, “You’ve got to say something.”
The grin receded slightly, yet the boy merely stared, apathetic to Shuji’s state of disarray and failure. Shuji wept, his breath clogging his senses and drowning out the pulse that beat against his skull. Copying the half-dozen romance films he’d ever seen, Shuji pressed Tetta’s hand to his lips, trying to imbue it with the strength he wished he could share. They rocked slowly as the ambulances started to turn down the street. Tetta soon became awash with red and blue lights, his voice so thin it was almost swallowed.
Can’t…feel.
It wasn’t the worst thing he could have said, but it sure as shit wasn’t reassuring.
The EMTs tried to pry him away from Shuji, but he didn’t want to let go of the boy. He couldn’t get hurt when Shuji was at his side—what he’d agreed, promised, swore to do. He couldn’t leave Tetta on his own again; even if it was a more muted tone than anything else he’d ever done.
When they finally managed to extricate the duo and strap Tetta to a gurney, Shuji held onto the boy’s hand, not daring to drop the unmarred flesh. It took four first responders to pry their hands apart in order to load the boy, but Shuji swore he felt the boy squeeze him before they parted.
The world may have been a colorless cesspool of boredom and apathy, but Kisaki Tetta, no matter what he did, always seemed to leave Shuji shaking with awe. Maybe Shuji really did give a part of himself to the nerd, because now that he was gone, there was a distinct emptiness within him.
Maybe there were worse things in life than boredom.