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Tetta was not someone or something that was made to be cared about. Some people were made--formed by clay, blessed, and titled--for greatness, but Tetta was not one of those people. He was fragile skin spread thin over bones that were even thinner. He could never see correctly either, his eyes too weak to see even the largest of text.
Tetta was a child that was seen, not heard. He did not part his lips with the intent to speak until much too late in life, and he showed his interest in things by turning dumb eyes in a direction and hyperfixating until he understood. He did it with pencils and brushes until his middle school years, when he was too old and his parents too busy to pin artwork on the fridge. He picked up music, then, and allowed himself another language to learn and a talent to polish.
Tetta played piano until his hands cramped, or until his parents threatened to burn the thing. Despite picking up the habit in an attempt to draw the attention of anyone he could, his single-minded focus often pushed away the admiration of the two people he cared most deeply about. Their annoyance at the piano that sat proudly in the parlor was not something that he had foreseen. (Perhaps he should not have played it while they argued, but at the very least it drowned out the noise. Was that not something they ought to have thought about? Weren’t parents supposed to be conscious of those things? Didn’t they care?)
Maybe, when his parents decided to travel the world for a few years renewing their vows, Tetta should have realized that he was not made to be loved. He should have realized that he was a tool--a peirrot--to be used for others’ happiness. He was a talented son that brought home awards and good grades and did not cause trouble. He was a model student for the school, always with his nose in a book or his eyes on the board.
He was the perfect victim, the bullies just loved to beat tender ribs and rake nails across gentle skin. He had hair that was meant to be pulled, novels that were meant to be burned, and glasses that were meant to be broken. He was a tool--what other reason did he bring lunch to school, if not to feed the boys who pushed him into fountains and stole his shoes?
God forbid that Kisaki Tetta be a person, for the world would surely unravel around him.
And we don’t want that, now do we?
Tetta sat up so quickly that his glasses slid off the side of his head and clattered onto the hardwood. He was sitting at his desk, vision too blurry to read the clock, but clear enough to realize the general darkness he awoke to. With how hard his heart was beating against his lungs, Tetta couldn’t quite be sure if he’d woken anyone up.
The thought drew a single breath of laughter from his lips: there was no one home but him. That was how it had been, and that was how it would be.
Ghosts of hands ran down his sides, fingers hovering over the spots of flesh where he knew old wounds resided. It was telling, he thought, that he could not remember who had given him what. There were enough people that had hurt him--that had been there when he was hurt--that he couldn’t remember the culprit (was never meant to know).
When he brought a hand to his face, a real hand, not the ones that pulled at his hair, nor nicked at his clothing--a genuine thing that could hurt and create and do so much more (but only ever seemed to hurt people--himself included) it was shaking. He pressed the knuckles to his lips and breathed, trying to remind himself that he was alone.
Whether his isolation was a blessing or a curse, he would use it as whatever he could when the opportunity presented itself. Even if only hours before he was lamenting his loneliness--his inability to connect with people--he would thank his lucky stars now that he was alone. If he was alone then no one would betray him. If he was alone there were no threats--nothing that could hurt him more than he already knew he was.
Tetta’s hands were not made to punch, write, draw, play, or heal, but he forced them to do the work he desired. If he could not be a person--act like one, understand them--then he would become the greatest tool. He would hone himself into a weapon of solidarity and poise. He would be perfect. A marionette that danced when prodded, but always had control of its own strings. Freedom within a glass box. He would act the part.
He would not fail.
(He couldn’t.)
So he leaned down, hands groping in the darkness for frames that he knew the weight and size and smoothness of like it was second nature. He grabbed the glasses with a hiss of displeasure, feeling cold glass beneath his fingers. Clicking on his desk lamp, he pulled out his glasses kit from the drawer, and began meticulously removing the smudge. It wasn’t bad--an almost non-existent thing, from how lightly he’d pinched the lense--but it was the principle of it all. He would not be able to put them back on until the lenses were clean.
So he cleaned them.
This same principle was why he’d fallen asleep at his desk: he couldn’t go to sleep until his homework was done. Two equations stared at him from the page--one mostly worked through, yet the answer conspicuously blank.
You lied, a voice whispered. You broke your promise.
He did in a way, though he despised the voice that said it. He promised himself that he would do everything that he set out to do. Though it wasn’t climbing the ranks of delinquent organizations, his schoolwork was just as important. A ghastly hand pinched at the junction of his neck and shoulder. Tetta shivered.
He had failed, but he would make up for it. He would right his wrong, then do what was necessary to make sure it never happened again.
Tetta put on the suitably clean glasses.
4:15am.
He put away the cleaning kit and finished the first of the last problems.
4:22am.
He started the last one. A fist dug into his diaphragm so suddenly his lungs spasmed. Tetta finished the math problem without so much as a wheeze.
4:36am.
He removed his socks first, followed by his shirt, then his pants. He left his glasses on the bedside table. He brushed his teeth.
4:40am.
Tetta crawled into bed and closed his eyes.
(He is overtaken by calloused hands, steel toed feet, and teeth, and nails, and bitter, vile words, and, and, and--)
Tetta’s alarm was wailing, and there were tears in his eyes. He woke up to an empty home, and an even emptier heart.
(6:30am)
He did not know what to make of the man, Hanma Shuji, that he recruited. Of course, he’d done enough homework to understand the gist of what Hanma wanted, but he did not yet know what to expect. This shortsightedness was exemplified by the fact that he was currently in Tetta’s living room, oo ing and ahh ing at the decor and the tv. Sprawled out across the couch--arms and legs too long for his own good--Hanma seemed at home wherever he lay. Tetta was envious, but it was all the more reason to have Hanma on his side: the elder made up for Tetta’s weaknesses. (He knew that he was riddled with them.)
Tetta was forced to do his homework--not at his desk, like he had been accustomed to doing, but--at the living room table. He had read everything he needed for literature, and he had already finished his math. Just a lab report to pour over, and he will have completed everything he promised he would do.
“How do you do that?”
Hanma’s voice is gentler than it usually is, but is not devoid of the sly smile the man truly loves to wear. The sun had set long ago, veiling the man in a blanket of shadow.
Tetta finished writing the sentence he was on before he met Hanma’s patient gaze.
“Be more specific,” he demanded.
Hanma just lifted a finger--lazily pointing towards where Tetta had taken up the opposite side of the table. “How do you manage to just sit there and work for hours and hours?”
Tetta rolled his eyes, used to this line of questioning. “Dedication,” he said simply. “It’s not even work if you make yourself do it.”
“Don’t you get bored?”
“You get used to it.”
When Tetta went back to his work, Hanma stretched loudly--and frankly, obscenely--before pulling himself into a standing position. There was a low-level mischievous grin on his lips as he walked to the front door. He paused for a moment, as if he were going to say something, but he hissed a private laugh before leaving without even a goodbye.
Tetta may have gotten himself in over his head with this one, considering Hanma had broken in to supposedly hang out with him, but there was a feeling he couldn’t ignore. Like a string of his was being pulled. (He wasn’t opposed to it. It seemed like an inclination more fun— if that was the word—than most others.)
And so after the first few weeks of Hanma having to break and enter in order to spend quality time with his new obsession, Tetta started leaving the front door unlocked. Hanma did not voice his approval, but his grin was wider and his eyes knowing--so Tetta figured he appreciated the gesture. If Hanma started bidding him farewell, he had no reason to believe that it was spurred by Tetta’s subtle acceptance of the man’s presence.
If the first time he entertained his guest in the wee hours of the morning, the elder was piss drunk and nonsensical, it seemed like just another normal occurrence. It made Tetta want to cuff himself upside the head, because why did he not assume something like this would happen? Hanma had already pilfered a few sips here and there from his parent’s liquor cabinet, so it wasn’t like drinking was outside the amorphous sphere of Hanma. Tetta was just too shortsighted, too blind to see that far into their continued future.
He wasn’t prepared to deal with Hanma like this. (And it was his own fault, truly. He had bitten off more than he could chew, and now he needed to deal with it.)
“You,” Hanma said shortly. “You are thinking. Thinking your big thoughts. What is it?”
“What am I thinking about?” Tetta clarified, barely following the other’s speech.
Curled up on the couch, dirty shoes wrapped in the blanket Tetta had stripped from his bed the moment Hanma had stumbled in, covered in snowflakes and clearly in his night clothes, Hanma hummed in assent.
“I’m thinking about you,” Tetta responded. “I didn’t do enough research for you.”
The wide-eyed look that seemed so strange on Hanma’s face quickly melted into something of his usual smirk. It was missing some of its usual heat though—it almost felt rueful in the lamplight.
“You always—no, I can… I can go,” the elder said, though it came out more like a question.
“Why would you do that? I haven’t actually kicked you out before, and hell would freeze over the day you leave of your own volition. So what are you really asking?”
“You didn’t do your ree search,” Hanma tutted.
Tetta was a half second away from an aneurysm.
“I know, and that’s on me.”
The words were like oil on his tongue, but if he was to be a machine—a cog in something that needed other parts, Hanma, to work—he would swallow it down. He’d speak and he would mean it, as much as an automaton could.
And it seemed like it was worth it, because Hanma was looking at him with that strange stare again. It was confusion, surprise, intrigue, a million things all at once. Tetta prided himself on his understanding of other people, and while Hanma was an unusual subject to begin with, this gaze was unreadable. It didn’t fit.
“What?”
It was almost too quiet to hear, but the heat had shut off a few minutes ago, and they were wading through silence silky and soft. (Hanma was never quiet, but apparently booze did wonders. Drink was supposed to reveal different parts of someone, not change them entirely, like the facsimile of Hanma before him.)
Tetta’s response is simple. “I don’t understand your question. Make more sense.”
Hanma blinks once, chin bobbing towards his chest for a fraction of a second, before he opens his eyes again.
“ ‘f there was anyone who could make… could do with me, to get it. It’d be you. But it’s too much—Y’know?—all the time, for everyone! I don’ know what’ta do about it.”
Tetta could only wonder how much Hanma had had to drink to reach this state of incoherence.
“I don’t understand,” Tetta said for the seventeenth time that evening—that he’d counted. “But you can understand me, so listen. I’ve seen how you act, I should have expected this, I should expect everything. I didn’t, and so that’s my screw-up.”
This time, Hanma blinked twice, before leaning off the couch so suddenly Tetta thought he was falling. Instead, Hnama leaned over the coffee table that separated them, and scrutinized the younger’s face.
“You don’t want me to-to stop being—to change?” He sounded incredulous, and Tetta was almost offended.
“No. Of course not. I came to you for a reason . I took the risk on all of you because I thought it was worth it. If you changed for some unknowable reason—now that would be bad. That would be your bad.”
Face pinched in concentration, Hanma seemed to taste every word before he said it, as if it would help him make sense.
“Why do you change and not me?”
It was Tetta’s time to scrutinize the other, and it was high time for him to change the subject.
“A reason far too complex for you on a normal day, and especially not now that you’re drunk.”
He got to his feet in a manner he hoped didn’t seem evasive, and began making his way to the stairs. Hanma groaned the whole way, complaining about being left on his lonesome, and how he’d choke to death on his own vomit if left unattended.
“You’d better hope you died,” Tetta hissed. “If you hurl on my couch I just might kill you myself. And take your shoes off. Goodnight.”
When his bedroom door was shut behind him, and Hanma’s chorus of half-sung goodnights died down, Tetta wondered when he started wishing Hanma a goodnight in the first place.
And as he laid in bed that evening, he wondered when he’d started to care about shit like that.
A poison. That’s what you are.
Tetta couldn’t tell if he was reminding himself of who he truly was, or if he was warning himself about Hanma, but it stuck with him nonetheless.
(He didn’t want to find out.)