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“Hey, Tatsuki. Wake up.”
Tatsuki grunted quietly and shuffled his body away from the sound source, covering his head with the blankets in the process. “Go back to sleep Daisuke, it’s late.”
“Come on, it’s important,” Daisuke replied, moving closer to Tatsuki. “Wake up.”
Tatsuki attempted to drown out the older man, but it was to no avail, as Daisuke kept pestering him. Eventually, he shifted back over to face Daisuke, rubbing his eyes scornfully. “I’m awake, what the hell do you want now?”
Daisuke smiled. “I wanted to tell you I love you.”
Tatsuki scoffed. “You’ve told me that every night for the last month, you think I don’t know that by now?”
“I don’t want you to ever forget that, okay? I love you,” he repeated, getting a wistful look in his eyes.
Tatsuki, in response, grunted and rolled back over. “I can’t move on when you keep visiting me like this, you know.”
“What, and you think I’ve moved on?” Daisuke retorted, rolling his eyes. “I didn’t ask to be like this, I didn’t ask to be…”
“Dead?” Tatsuki said quietly, not daring to roll back over and look at the older man. It had been a month since that fateful car crash, a month since Daisuke started visiting – no, haunting – him during the night. A month of nightly “I love you”s, a month of restlessness for Tatsuki. And yet, this was the first time that the word “dead”, the word that held so much weight and permanence, had come up in their nightly chats, if one would be inclined to call them that.
“Yeah,” Daisuke said after a lengthy pause. “That.”
“I don’t know why you’re still around,” Tatsuki sighed, sitting up to face Daisuke, whose eyes were misty. “We can’t do this.”
Daisuke’s mouth twitched, as if holding back the words he wanted to say. “I want us to,” he finally said, biting his lip. “Please.”
Tatsuki’s eyes watered. “We can’t even touch each other, Daisuke! You’re not real anymore. I keep hoping you’re real every night when you come back, I keep hoping that we can be together like we used to. But I saw your corpse, and I know it’s not real.” His eyes began to water as he put his head on his hands, holding back the tears and pain of the last month. “I don’t know what you need to move on, but if it’s me, please don’t let it be. I love you too much to let you do this.”
Tears fell for Daisuke, too, as he got as close as he could to Tatsuki. “I’m sorry I did this to you. I guess I was trying too hard to pretend I wasn’t…”
“Dead?”
“Dead. I should’ve left you alone to begin with, I’m so sorry,” he choked out between sobs.
Tatsuki reached out to his lover, before realizing he couldn’t wipe away the tears. He noticed the soft glow of the sun beyond the curtain behind Daisuke’s shadowless figure. “It’s almost morning.”
Daisuke sniffed, wiping away his tears. “I wish I could hold you.”
Tatsuki smiled the best he could. “I know you’ll be with me. I love you, Daisuke.”
“I love you.”
And as the sun rose, and as his lover left him for the last time, Tatsuki cried.