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The playground always sulks in its solitude at this inhumane hour, but the dim night that shrouds the swingset is something of a boon to nerves when its holes have mended. Too much civilization crowds the sky tonight, too much to let anything filter through-- much less star or moonray. Tenko kicks his legs back and forth but doesn't make to sway. His sneakers harmonize quiet shk-shks with the crickets as he dredges up and scatters the woodchips below. Despite his seclusion, it isn't a forlorn sound. There's a waxing melody on the breeze and it smells sweet of carcinogens too familiar not to ease the bar. He perks up at languid footsteps drawing closer whose staccato betrays their drive, and his fingers tighten around the suspended chains at his sides, just barely.
Sure enough, a flash of missing moonlight cuts through the shadows as Touya's head shocks stark white from the streetlight when he rounds the corner. Tenko bites the inside of his lip to keep from calling out some lame greeting and raises a hand in a feeble wave. Touya spots him immediately, and it is obvious from how his face splits into something vibrant enough to make Tenko forget the suffocating clouds above them. He waves back and slinks across the pavement to join him at the swings.
It must be the hundred and first time they've scurried from their homes to find midnight-dyed company in each other this way, yet Tenko still has to will his cheeks not to flush and his limbs to stiffen when confronted with Touya's unfettered smile. He probably wouldn't notice either way because he's already a ball of nerves by default. Tenko's always anxious about something or other. That's kind of a lie, though, he ponders, a thought down an absentminded track as he peers at Touya, who flounces gracelessly into the seat beside him. I'm not anxious right now. Just jumpy. He's late.
Just shy goes unmentioned, which, all things considered, is probably a positive, on cardiol terms. Touya turns to him with eyes too relieved to be solely happy and too purple to be solely tired and asks, "Did ya wait long?"
Tenko shakes his head, mirroring the other's mirth with a puddled relief of his own. "No." He lies. Touya quirks an eyebrow at him like he knows, because he probably does-- Tenko's insides may as well be hidden behind a single sliding door when it comes to him-- but when he remains steadfast Touya sighs. "Sorry anyway." A sickly raspberry puffs out from his chapped mouth. "Got caught up with some stuff. Y'know how it goes." He yawns with all that dramatics of a Shakespeare lead and lets the silence spread lazy and summer-soft between them.
It's not just the words that give Tenko pause (but to be fair, when don't they? When can Tenko keep any of Touya's pain from burrowing into him deep enough it becomes his own?-- when would he try at all?), but rather what bellows below them, the ruptured hums and whistles weeping pus and serum from behind the boiler room door-- but even so, that implication can barely be considered such between them. It's that hearth heat catalyst that has Tenko's words dying in his throat as he once more begins to peel back the shivering orange walls that have only thickened in absence. Tearing them down again with somber hands forever twitching for certain new callouses.
He reaches out to touch, tentative and hesitant before Touya nods minutely, and traces the curve of his jaw with a warmth only rivaled by dead blizzards-- all-encompassing and blanketing; near chokingly tight in its embrace. Every last mark, every last lesion that has made a new home in his skin, Tenko carves it bone deep into the pads of his fingers and his amorphous blob called memory. Touya doesn't speak either, because-- in some twisted way, some coal black manner, he wants this too; some record to be left behind, if only in Tenko. It will never escape his mouth nor the underside of his actions, but the wholehearted ease with which Tenko soaks up his very existence could be reason in and of itself to surrender himself to its origin. It could be. But if he did he might die and it'd really suck if he left him alone without so much as a good night. So he shuts his eyes and sits still and obedient while he leaves his flesh at the mercy of eight tender and skittering spiderlegs.
The plump and pink blisters that bubble down the side of his jaw and end at his soft chin, still round even at seventeen; the dried blood curled old and exhausted in a crescent that encircles his temple; the scabby cut in his lower lip still raw with fresh clot; the first degree, rage-red outline of a hand large enough to span his cheek and flay its intent to any wandering gaze, it's-- it’s too much. There’s just too much. Tenko lets their feverish temperature seep into his own because while there's no room for rejection in his touch, it's just--
When I was younger I thought there was something wrong with me. Pinky conscious as is second nature, Tenko brings his hands to hold Touya's face within them. As if his palms could ever hope to heal instead of hurt. When Hana would scrape her knee and cry, I'd cry too, and when I would scrape mine I’d cry, but not when anyone else did. I love my mom, but I didn't cry for her. His eyes flutter open at the lack of movement and Tenko knows his own must be red, not just roadkill but the splatter on impact too. It's Touya, so it's fine. The first day they met he held Tenko's wrists firm through a panic attack like a foul-mouthed security blanket. What did you do to me?
Touya juts out his lower lip in a pout and fixes his eyes to the space two inches left of Tenko's head. "Quit staring." He mutters. His cheeks grow humid beneath Tenko's hands and it's enough to wrestle the saltwater that was or wasn't ready back into the ocean. What haven’t you?
"I hate him." Tenko says, tongue sticky and frustratingly anemic. "I wish he'd die. I wish I could kill him. I'd kill him, really, I would." His hands drop and he clutches at the chains again just to have something to choke. "I really would." He mumbles at the ground. His head dips forward in shame, and paradoxically enough, Touya has to remind himself not to lean over and hug him.
Touya sighs loudly, intonation more suited to an owner admonishing their sheepish dog than the conversation at hand. "You always do this." Kicking at the woodchips, he adds, "Thinkin’ you gotta fix everything. I'm the one who's gonna kill him, dumbass." He nudges Tenko's foot with his own to get him to look up, and he does, and again Touya is forced to exercise impressive amounts of bodily restraint upon the sight of his stormy emotions souped amongst mildly frenzied panic all spilt haphazard over his features. Manhandling his impulses into line again, he grins easy and lightly devious in the way only delinquent teenage boys are capable of. "If you wanna help, then you can snag me some bandages from the konbini." Tenko's pupils glitter barrel-chrome and Touya doesn't miss it. Giddiness and those poorly-contained hormones well up quick as springwater, or at least, the former does, because again-- Touya is a teenage boy. "Or I can do that and you can pick the snacks. No surume though."
He jerks his chin towards the street he came from before and Tenko both swallows his own unseemly appetite and lets his expression go just a little rotten to match before nodding. Touya flashes him teeth before snatching up his hand without a second thought, only avoiding certain crumble from Tenko's instinct to yelp and tuck his pinky in just before he twines their fingers and yanks him to his feet. "You're going to kill yourself at some point if you're not careful!" He shrieks as Touya drags him along, soon breaking into a manic run and leaving Tenko stumbling over his feet to keep up before he finds his balance again. "If I'm gonna die, then you do it!" Touya cackles, twinkling flute notes gliding loopy along the breeze. This hour must be lucky, inhumane as it is, or at least it must be in Tenko's opinion-- to be allowed such rare mouthfuls of that genuine sort of joy, it must be lucky. "Only if you kill me first!" He calls back. Touya just grasps his hand tighter in his own and drowns out the cricketsong with his own breathless chords.
Even with nothing chasing them, even with no rhyme or reason, they run with reckless abandon, and Touya looks terribly happy. He looks so happy when he pounces on a cluster of trash cans and lights them to high heaven; happier still when Tenko liberates the engulfed garbage from their rusty prisons and sends it spilling all over the scorched pavement. "I love when you do that." He sighs, and it sounds more like the confession they’ve been dancing around for months than that threshold itself. It sinks into both their ears cotton-comfortable and he tells Tenko, "Do it more often, okay?"
Tenko thinks of the gloves he'd left behind in his bedside table, those that stow away six clammy fingers to keep the world safe from him and his ripped and stinging cuticles. Those gloves that have all but become an extension of his own self. He thinks of the ghastly figure that sneers at him from the other side of the mirror, the pale and nail-scarred boy with hemophilic eyes curtained by a head of messy black hair. He thinks of turning five years old and the mountains of dust he'd cried over when he did. Of those still accumulating on his bedroom floor despite his greatest efforts. He thinks of Mon-chan and the ephemeral pile his small and loving body had become.
"Okay." He murmurs. The dingy streetlight above them illuminates Touya's head like a half-price halo. The faint red that still persists within shines so dark it could be soot-- a yin and yang to keep just one thing, just one sliver of this world in equilibrium. A checkered flag waving proud above its impending end. Tenko watches the scattered flames spatter blue spit across Touya's wide mouth and doesn't bother waiting for the stopwatch to click. "Yeah, okay."