Work Text:
Toya wakes up.
Abruptly, suddenly, because he knows something is wrong. There’s something fuzzy stuck in his ears, clogging his throat. The sheets are too hot, soaking up the sunlight pouring from the window. Sweat matts the back of his neck and his eyes squint in the light.
Blindly, he reaches for his phone on his bedside. 11:38? Did his alarm not go off?
There’s a text from Akito, asking why he’s not at school, and another from a classmate sending him the homework for today. A reminder from his father to come home on time tonight.
Toya moves the sheets off his body, but something is wrong, again. He moves the sheets again, searching for the source of the itching, nagging feeling, when he realizes: he can’t hear anything.
Not the sheets rustling, not the birds that should be chirping, he strains, but can’t hear anything. As if from a far away body, Toya watches himself run to the bathroom, feet making no sound against the wood floor, watches himself shove the door open, leaning over the toilet, burning acid licking its way up his throat over and over again, until he’s lost track of the number of times he’s vomited.
Rising slowly, ears still stuffed with what feels like cotton, Toya wipes his mouth hastily and looks in the mirror. His eyes are swollen and red, and strands of hair are stuck to his forehead. Toya’s mouth tastes like sour fruit, and he anxiously digs out a bottle of mouthwash. Minty.
Toya should try and say something, maybe that will trigger something. He presses one overly warm hand to his chest and forces himself to say something.
Toya Aoyagi.
His name. His mouth traces the familiar syllables, his throat vibrates, his eyes watch his mouth open and close, but his ears remain empty. There’s nothing there, only the widening, yawning silence and his scrambled thoughts.
Again. Toya tries again, again. His hand comes up to his throat, and the image in the mirror is a crazed person, eyes blurry with sleep and panic at the same time. It looks like he’s choking himself, and a desperate laugh escapes his throat.
He can’t hear that either.
Toya sinks to his knees, his hands fly up to his hair, the bathroom tiles fade out of view as his vision fills with tears. Fear claws at his insides, leaving his thoughts in shreds of barely formed pictures. He can’t even begin to imagine how he’s going to go to school without the ability to hear, let alone continue the rest of his life like this.
Music comprises everything he does, it guides him and tells him where to go and what to do. Toya rushes back to the bedroom and grabs his phone, turning up the sound to the loudest, scrolling to the first song on his playlist and pressing play.
Disbelieving eyes watch as the timer ticks closer and closer to the end, the music that should have been filling the room replaced by black silence.
There’s nothing wrong with the phone, only something wrong with Toya.
Another all-encompassing bout of fear roots in his mind, and Toya can’t breathe, can’t breathe, his mind is repeating the same words over and over, Toya Aoyagi, Toya Aoyagi, please let me hear something, but nobody responds. He presses a hand to his face and feels the sticky tears, and his throat is rasping out something anguished, but Toya doesn’t even know what he’s saying, because he can’t hear.
Toya dissolves into rasping sobs that make no noise, he’s disappearing into the stretches of his mind again, but this time it’s even worse because nothing else is making any sense, any noise. He’s completely trapped in his own mind. This is probably his fault, he did something to make this happen, and he’s falling into a pit of spikes sharpened by his own mind.
The song playing on his phone ends, and a new one starts, another one he can’t hear. Toya raises his head to look at his phone, tears falling freely, when his phone lights up with a notification. There’s no tell-tale beep or buzz, and Toya knows he’s really done for.
The notification is a message from Akito, and Toya feels tears line his eyes again as he tries to figure out what he’s going to tell his partner. Gently, he picks up the phone from his nightstand and clicks on the notification, wiping the tears from his face with the back of his hand.
Are you sick? Do you need me to come over and take care of you? Sent at 11:57.
Toya laughs quietly, for what, he doesn’t know. There’s nothing remotely funny about him, sitting pathetic and helpless, unable to hear, staring at his phone, tears sticky on his face. Perhaps it’s the thought of Akito waiting for Toya.
I’m fine, no need to come over. I’m going to skip practice today, please don’t cancel on my account.
Sent at 11:58.
Read at 11:58.
As Akito types out a reply, Toya stands up off the bed and changes into day clothes. He’s already too late to school to make it up in any way. It’s best that he goes somewhere before his father comes home and finds out what Toya can’t cover up, that he’s lost his hearing.
Toya grabs his jacket and wallet as he leaves, shoving his phone in his pocket, not bothering to read what Akito sends next.
Okay, stay safe. Sent at 12:00.
The way over to the doctor’s office is so much different when Toya can’t hear. The streets are completely silent, even though Toya can see mouths moving and chattering away. The honking that usually fills the air is non-existent, and Toya almost finds himself on the edge of tears again. He likes the bustle of the city, enjoys the mindless noise, and now that it’s gone, his hands feel aimless, and his head is too full of thoughts to do this.
Toya goes on the subway for part of the ride, but almost forgets that the stops are called out by voice until the car jerks to a stop and people rush out of the door with no indication. His eyes lift to the digital sign over the sliding doors, where the stops scroll back and forth. For the rest of the ride, his eyes are trained on the sign until his stop arrives.
The doctor’s office is sterile white and nearly empty, Toya’s eyes telling him things his ears can’t. He’s already bumped into multiple people on the way over because he couldn’t hear their calls from behind him and didn’t move out of the way fast enough. Just thinking about how helpless he’s become has Toya feeling like he’s floundering, everything completely out of his control.
Toya watches as he reaches the front of the line, watches the secretary open their mouth and start talking, eyes kind. He waits until they’ve closed their mouth and then feels, rather than hears the words come out of his mouth.
I completely lost my hearing this morning, I can’t hear anything anymore.
His voice is so calm, revealing nothing about the terror that grasped at him this morning, and still holds him captive as he speaks.
The secretary looks at him with those stupid, stupid pity eyes that Toya’s seen before, and he’s thrust back into the memory of what if feels like to be helpless, to be pitied. They write something down on the paper and hold it up for him to see: Please take a seat, the doctor will be with you in a moment.
As Toya takes the slip of paper with his number on it and walks to the chairs, he catches the eyes of other people waiting in line or in the office, people who heard what he said, heard his words, and Toya’s struck with the sour bite of jealousy.
He’s barely aware of sitting down, his mind fixated on the idea that other people can hear his voice saying things and he can’t. The idea that people will look at him the way that secretary did, eyebrows furrowed into those pitying eyes and mouth pinched in mock sadness.
Toya remembers the way people looked when he told them he quit classical music, quit talking to his father, quit almost everything from his old life. It’s the same face, painted with pity, and he hates it to his very core. He hates being pitied, people pretending that he’s some sort of child to be coddled, someone who can’t take care of himself.
He leans back in the chair and closes his eyes, willing the tears in his eyes to fade away.
A tap on his shoulder.
The doctor holds up a sign that reads: I’m your doctor, please follow me.
Toya explains what happened, leaving out his bouts of panic and terror, his mouth moving around the words and throat vibrating but no sound coming out. The doctor communicates with written notes, asking questions, reaching instruments near his ears and poking things in his face. Toya pretends that he is far, far away, in a place where he woke up able to listen to music and hear the words he speaks.
The doctor tells him the hearing loss is inexplicable, with no apparent cause. Toya pretends that his body is not his, that he is just borrowing this broken body for a little bit and it will be over soon.
The doctor holds up a piece of paper: Your hearing loss is permanent.
Toya blinks. He laughs, not hearing himself. This can’t be true. There has to be a way to fix this, to restore his hearing. It’s the modern era, there is surely medical technology advanced enough to give him back his hearing. Look again, please. He feels himself ask the doctor. Toya pretends not to see the pitying look the doctor gives him, even though it makes his hands clench.
The doctor writes something on his piece of paper, obscuring Toya’s view of that pitying face. She turns the paper back around, and Toya reads the words on the paper: ‘I will try. We will contact you if we find anything that can help you.’
Toya nods blankly as he takes the pamphlets the doctor gives him, pamphlets titled How To Cope With Hearing Loss and Permanent Hearing Loss and Learning JSL: the basics and Being Deaf in Japan and he’s looking at the words and not really reading them, his mind is seeing these words and feeling the paper and oh. He’s far, far away again, watching himself walk out the door, watching as he walks down the street and into the arcade.
His ears are still completely empty, devoid of noise, and there’s a stretching space filled with black. The arcade is silent, at least for Toya, and the familiar chatter of children and buzzing of machines is gone. Another sound that he can no longer hear.
It will be fine, Toya tells himself. The doctor is looking for ways to fix him at this moment, and soon, she’ll find something, some way to fix him, fix his hearing. There will be a way, Toya tells himself insistently. He’s not hopeless, no matter how much he’s heard those words told to him, heard them so often that he almost believed it himself.
Toya slips a coin into a claw machine and presses his hand to the joystick, thinking about that endless pit of thoughts that he had been slipping into, until Akito found him. Akito, who pulled him out and picked up all his broken pieces and helped Toya put himself back together into some semblance of a person. Akito, who breathed the ecstasy of life into Toya’s empty shell.
Akito, who was standing in front of Toya now, a half-smile on his face. Toya felt himself smile involuntarily, the first smile he had given himself today. Of course it would be Akito.
Except, Akito’s mouth opens and moves and Toya can’t catch up, can’t hear Akito’s voice. He lowers his eyes to Akito’s mouth, trying to derive the meaning of his words, Toya’s helpless. His eyes go back up and Akito is staring at him, and if Toya looks hard enough, he can find a faint pink on Akito’s face, even under the neon arcade lights.
Toya should say something. He opens his mouth, unsure. How will he manage to tell Akito, his partner for so many years?
He feels his throat make the words, I’m fine, don’t worry about me. I wasn’t feeling well, but I’m doing better now.
Akito doesn’t look like he believes Toya, but he’ll have to take it. Toya gives an apologetic smile, wishing that he could give Akito something more than whatever scraps of himself he has left right now. A hand pats his shoulder awkwardly and leaves Toya in front of the crane machine, the claw still waiting for Toya to make his first move.
When Toya returns to his house, still in a shroud of suffocating silence, the house is empty. It’s 14:26 when he looks at his phone, so his father isn’t back, probably. Toya has difficulty noticing when, because of the vastness of the house. It’s too cold, empty, so he sometimes doesn’t even notice.
He remembers being locked in the house for hours on end until he practiced his piano and violin, callouses rubbing against the ivory keys and metal strings until the skin on his fingers grew rough and grey. Toya remembers looking out the window at a group of boys playing outside in the street, laughing, kicking around a soccer ball, acting like children. The pain that seized him in those moments was nearly unimaginable, the urge to cry, kick, scream out for help. He wanted to go outside and play with those boys, but had been trapped in that painfully clean room with the black piano and brown wood of his violin, black and brown to the brightness that shined in from the window.
Toya sighs and goes to his room. It’s no good dwelling on the past. That’s what he tells himself over and over, repeats it to himself until the memory of the words is tattooed onto his tongue and his mind. He tells it to himself in the mirror, desperately begging for those words to be true for him.
It’s no good dwelling on the past. It’s no good dwelling on the past. It’s no good dwelling on the past.
When will he finally listen to himself?
Somehow, somehow, Toya manages to disassociate from his father’s wrath when he finds out that Toya skipped school. It’s made better by the fact that Toya can’t hear his father’s harsh voice, and perhaps the lack of hearing has deadened his other senses, because Toya barely feels the slap on his face when it comes.
He doesn’t even feel himself walking away in disgrace, barely registers the turn of the doorknob under his hand, watches himself uninterestedly in the mirror as he wets a towel and presses it to his cheek, repeating a process he’s repeated a hundred times before.
Toya tries to remember to be angry and confused and hurt as he changes into his pajamas, tries to will himself to remember the pain he felt when his father hit him for the first time, tries to remember the pain he felt that morning when he woke up without one of the most fundamental parts of his entire identity, but all he feels inside is the dull buzz of indifference.
Sometimes, he thinks as he brushes his teeth, the pain and hate was the only thing keeping him going back then. He survived on that burning that came from somewhere deep in his mind, let it keep him alive, stringing him along day-by-day.
It hurts to remember just how much it hurt back then, the pain of being forced to do something that he hated. Toya thinks of it again, again, over and over and over again, pressing on the memory like a bruise, trying to bring back the same sort of feeling again because he knows that if he can feel the same sort of pain again, he can get over this somehow, but he’s left with the dwindling high and the dark room and his thoughts spinning wildly out of his control.
Toya puts in his earbuds and lies down, unable to find the will to do anything else. He doesn’t even know himself why he finds the playlist Akito made for him, presses play, presses shuffle. Doesn’t know why he falls asleep to empty nothingness playing in his ears, nothing in his mind, nothing in his heart.
Unfortunately, Toya wakes up again the next morning. And the next. And the one after that.
Somehow, he manages to find a way to go to school, avoids raising his hand to answer questions, and talks even less than he has before. He learns to watch the sign above the subway exit, learns to watch other people’s mouths, learns to read their gestures and movements. He learns the familiar shapes that words make, learns what want to go to Weekend Garage and partner look like coming from Akito’s mouth, and the entire time, he waits for word from the doctor that she’s found something, anything, that can save him.
Most importantly, Toya avoids going to practice with Vivid BAD Squad, no matter how much Akito texts him about it, no matter how much An gives him weird looks out of the corner of her eye. He’s tried singing in the mirror, and it’s a thousand times worse than speaking. He can’t find the right ways to control his voice, can’t, can’t can’t can’t can’t. Thinking about it, trying again, makes the bile rise in his throat all over again until he’s a vomiting mess on the toilet, lacking even the smallest amount of control over himself. When he looks in the mirror, all he sees is a pathetic mess unworthy of trying again.
Toya is rescued from the endless cycle of hating himself when the doctor texts him, asking him to come into the office. When he walks over, he feels the smallest flicker of hope, the hope that soon, he’ll be able to hear all these people chattering around him, will be able to hear the subway call out the stops, will be able to hear the secretary as they talk to people in line.
The doctor pinches out the flame of hope with cruel, cold fingers as she holds up a sign that reads: It’s permanent. There’s nothing I can do.
Toya feels his chest constrict with the familiar feeling, the one that he’s struggled to keep away for so long, and all he can think is not here, please, not now. But then again, he’s the one that doesn’t have control over something as small as his body, and he can’t stop himself as the tears brim at his eyes.
The doctor looks at him with another pitying look, beginning to pull out more of those stupid pamphlets and it’s too much for Toya to handle right now. His clothes are rubbing his skin wrong, the lights are too white and harsh and the smell of antiseptic is too strong, and all his senses are going crazy except the one he needs the most.
Toya stands up and he’s pulling his arms out of the doctor’s grasp, pushing his way out of the door, running down the street, and he doesn’t care who’s staring at the boy running down the street gasping for air, sun glinting off the streaks of tears on his face, because he’s searching for the one he needs the most right now.
Akito, Akito, where would Akito be right now?
Toya pulls out his phone and presses play on “Ready Steady”, feeling the inexplicable magic take him into his SEKAI. Instantly, he’s surrounded by the smell of fresh coffee and pastries, the graffiti on the wall is familiar as ever, but the one most important thing in his life is missing.
The music is gone, and that’s when Toya really knows this is final, forever. MEIKO rushes out to greet him, kind face morphing to one of concern when she sees what is probably the most pathetic expression on his face right now.
MEIKO gently guides him into the café, where he collapses weakly in a chair, barely able to support himself. Toya was here to look for Akito, but he’s so selfish, so selfish, because he’s crying again, unable to control his tears as they pour down his face, sobs crawling their way out of his throat and into the air.
Toya can barely gather control of himself to gasp out a broken explanation of what happened, one he knows MEIKO probably can’t understand, because his words have been smashed into pieces by his mind. He sees the questioning look on her face, and knows that she didn’t hear what he said. He repeats it, again, but she still doesn’t hear him, because it’s all his fault, he can’t master control over his voice enough to tell her.
MEIKO asks again, Toya can see the shape of the word what forming on her lips, and he’s so frustrated at himself, so angry (but he’s feeling it again) that the words I lost my hearing spill out of his mouth, insistent and rough. MEIKO face is one of sadness but then she looks up and her face transforms into one of shock. Toya follows her gaze and he lands on Akito, standing at the entrance to the café, his face flashing between anger and confusion and hurt and anger and hurt and confusion.
Akito’s mouth opens, and Toya knows that Akito’s saying something filled with hurt and anger, but he can’t hear any of it, doesn’t understand what he’s saying. His eyes brim with unshed tears again, again, like the helpless idiot he is.
MEIKO’s stepping in front of Akito, waving a hand, Toya can guess what she’s saying. Let’s think this through, and take a deep breath. She looks back at Toya, deep In thought, and then pulls out a pad of paper meant for taking orders, and a stubby pencil. She hands it to Akito, who looks at it, and then back at Toya.
You seriously can’t hear me when I talk? Akito writes, flipping the pad to show Toya. He shakes his head. Akito opens his mouth, says something, says it again, and Toya’s shaking his head again. No, he says. There’s nothing there.
Akito’s staring at him in what Toya believes to be shock, shoulders tense with disbelief. He’s not writing anything, so MEIKO takes the pad and writes: Have you gone to the doctor?
Toya nods, answers the rest of her motherly questions, and then watches as her gaze goes between Akito, who’s still slack-jawed, and Toya, who feels so much calmer on the outside than how he truly feels on the inside.
Her mouth moves, forming words Toya can no longer hear. He had almost forgotten about it for a little bit, pretended it didn’t exist, but now the reality is coming back for another round. Forever. He’s stuck like this forever, and he can’t do anything about it. He’s helpless, out of control, out of options.
Akito picks up the pad, eyes downcast, head turned downwards, so Toya can’t read his face. For so long, Toya’s mostly been able to read Akito’s facial expressions, which often revealed things his voice didn’t, but it strikes him now that he will have to read Akito’s facial expression for the rest of his life. Considering that Akito even decides to continue to stay by Toya’s side.
How will you sing?
Akito’s face is a broken mirror of hurt and confusion, split into shards, and Toya hates himself so deeply for making Akito feel this way. His gaze lifts again, and Toya anchors himself on the sight of Akito before he lets himself slip into that pit of dark thoughts again.
I don’t know. Toya says. These words, at least, are becoming familiar enough to say without the accompanying hearing.
You can still speak. Can you sing? Akito scribbles hastily. He looks unsure of himself, a look Toya isn’t used to seeing on his face.
Toya reads the request over and over again. How he wishes he could tell Akito that he would wish for nothing more in this world than to be able to sing again, but every time he tries, something presses hard at his throat, stopping the music from flowing out. It’s as if something is preventing him from reaching for everything he was so close to.
Toya shakes his head, once, twice. He tells himself to watch carefully as Akito’s face shatters into a thousand more mirrored shards, tells himself that this is his punishment for being so careless with himself, he has to watch as every stark hurt splinters across Akito’s face and know, understand that he was the one who did this to Akito.
I need to think about this, Akito writes after a little bit. He gets up, puts down the pencil with unusually measured carefulness, and leaves, just like Toya knew he would in the end. Toya’s left stranded, left without his music, without his partner, everything he loves and wants scooped out of him until he’s the hollow shell he was when he first met Akito.
Toya leaves the SEKAI before MEIKO comes back, he ends up spat back onto the street, and he’s wandering aimlessly around on the streets. He thinks back to what it was like before he met Akito. Toya had been so tired of hating and hurting in the seemingly endless cycle that it had taken every last bit of energy from him, and he had been on the verge of doing what he thought was necessary to end the cycle. He remembers that day, wandering around on the streets just like this, promising to himself that he would do it when he went back to his house, he would really do it this time.
There had been nothing left for him in life. Not any music that his father forced on him, nobody to talk to, nothing to throw himself into, only the sharp hatred and pain, and after that faded, nothingness.
And now his music is gone again, his friends have disappeared from his sides, and Toya’s all alone, again.
Subconsciously, Toya’s fingers are pinching the inside of his elbow, hard enough that the skin is raised and red. The pain comes to him after he lets go, and Toya breathes in hard. Maybe that’s what he needed, the pain, to make him feel like there was something worth living and fighting for again.
The idea hovers in Toya’s mind for a breathtaking second. He has to.
Toya stands over the sink, a drugstore pocketknife, the handle a lurid yellow, blade extended, metal cold against his pale skin. It’ll just be a little bit, until he remembers the control he had over himself. His teeth bite hard into his lip as the blade draws pretty little ribbons of red against his skin, the blood beading up and spilling down the sides of his arm to stain the sides of the sink scarlet.
The pain bites at the back of Toya’s throat, telling him to stop, stop, stop, but he can’t, he has to do this. And maybe it’s satisfying, seeing that he has the smallest amount of control over himself, he can do this to himself.
Toya stops himself at three cuts, dripping blood that doesn’t look real to him. Reverentially, Toya touches the droplets of red, watching it well up on his finger into rubies that drip down to mix pink with the water.
He wipes the neat lines with a towel, watching with a perverse satisfaction as the white towel turns red. Toya’s filled with a hate that tugs at his stomach, telling him that he can’t control this because he needs to feel the pain so badly, but another voice in his mind tells him that he’s proving to himself that he can control this.
Toya has control over himself, he tells himself over and over again. I am in control of myself. His mouth forms the words, but his ears don’t pick up on it, and it’s a stab in the gut to remember that he can’t control what he hears and doesn’t hear. He bangs his forehead against the hard marble counter, laughing to himself. It’s the same desperate laughter he’s laughed before, but he can’t hear it, can’t control it.
Oh, and then his control is slipping out of him in waves and gasps and puffs of breath, and the pocketknife comes back up to his arm again, out of his control, slashing red lines across his arm, filling his vision, all he can feel is how waves of pain consume his mind and he’s helpless, floundering, pathetic.
Toya drags the blade across his skin one more time, leaving his arm a tangled mess of red. He looks up, into the mirror, and there’s one thing he’s certain of. The person in the mirror isn’t him. The person in the mirror shares the mole under his eyes, the split blue-navy hair, but something’s wrong with that person’s eyes. They’re wild and frenzied, and Toya hates how lost the person in the mirror looks.
He’s finally admitting it to himself. He’s hopelessly, helplessly, lost, drowning in the ocean with no one around for miles. It’s too quiet in his mind and he stupidly tried to fill it with something else to make up for the loss of music: first the hope that things would be fixed, then, the falsehood that things could carry on, and then the pretense that everything was fine, then the urge to feel pain again, but even that didn’t work, because in the end, he’s left by himself, a pool of blood in the sink and a pocketknife held too tight in his hand, a pocketknife instead of the microphone that should be there.
Toya tosses the pocketknife to the side, burying his head in his hands and letting out a breathless sob. But that’s it, that’s all he has left to feel, as if every other emotion has been drained from him. He doesn’t even have the energy to cry anymore or to scream or kick or fight back.
Toya lies down on the bathroom tile, hard under his hands, and closes his eyes. His sleep is drained of dreams, but he slumbers on.
Toya can’t bring himself to go to school, to face Akito and An, who surely knows about what happened already. And if An knows, then Kohane knows, and he can’t face what will surely be pitying looks plastered on all their faces. He wishes that it could be different, but he’s had too much experience that proves otherwise.
Instead, he wanders around the streets, getting new plushes from the arcade and giving them away to small children, never saying anything, just holding it out. He goes to the library and skims the words, not registering them. He’s listless, and every time he returns to his house he adds another cut to his growing collection. The first few have the thin web of scar tissue growing over them, but when Toya sees it, he reaches for them, on autopilot.
Cutting open the old scars hurts more, but that’s what Toya wants, he wants the pain, the biting, hurting, real feeling to it. When his father slaps him for not attending school again, Toya bites his tongue and tells himself that he deserves all of this pain.
Still, every night, he falls asleep with his earbuds in, listening to music that he can no longer hear. The playlist goes through hundreds of songs each night, but the notification center remains empty as ever. Toya knows that he shouldn’t even hope for a text from An or Kohane, least of all Akito, but he can’t stop himself from fantasizing about it, just another way that he’s completely out of control.
Except one day, he does get a text from Akito, just one, asking to meet up. Toya tells himself to say no, but his fingers type out yes, and he’s gone. He’s out the door, running his fingers through his hair in the smallest attempt to clean himself up.
Akito’s waiting in Weekend Garage, staring out the window, his entire being bathed in sunlight. He has a pad of paper, pencil, and a cup of coffee in front of him, waiting. Toya stops in the doorway, but his heart is already racing forward to meet Akito, thundering out of his chest, and oh, this feels even better than those bloody nights bent over the sink. He can’t allow himself this, but he walks forward anyway.
Akito’s face is cautious, unsure when he sees Toya, but he smiles anyway. He picks up the paper and pencil and writes: Are you okay? and Toya lies yes.
Their “conversation” stretches onwards through the day. Toya notices An and Kohane watching from a distance, concern painting their faces, but none of that cloying pity that Toya hates. How could he be so stupid to think that An and Kohane and Akito would be the same as others? Even from the beginning, they had been different.
Akito smiles softly across the table at Toya, and he thinks to himself, maybe things will be just a little bit okay, even if he can’t hear the bustle of the café, even if he won’t be able to hear An and Kohane’s sweet voices, or Akito’s rasp anymore, he’ll figure it out somehow.
Akito grabs his arm as they get up to leave, and Toya raises his arm for the check. His sleeve falls down, and Akito’s mouth falls open. His hand reaches out to grab Toya’s arm, the one that’s in the arm, and his hand is running over Toya’s arm.
It’s Toya’s collection of scars, ripped open over and over again, on display for everyone to see.
Toya wrenches his arm back and pulls the sleeve back down, avoiding Akito’s eyes. He can see Akito’s mouth moving, probably shaping swear words, and his face looks so frustrated now at the lack of hearing between them. Toya wants to cry again, but his eyes are startingly dry as he looks at Akito.
I’m going to take you to a doctor.
This time, Toya doesn’t argue.
Toya gets better about the blood, about his thoughts, about the need for control over himself. Akito helps, An and Kohane help. They bring him to the doctor, remind him to take the medication prescribed, throw away his pocketknife, help him learn JSL, fingers twisting and turning in the air.
He very decidedly does not try to sing again, at least not for a little bit. His voice falls into disrepair from lack of use, but Toya learns how to replay songs in his mind. There are some favorites, that he knows from beginning to end, and can imagine himself singing along, someone at his side.
Learning how to take the small victories is hard, at first. The need for control over his own body sometimes overwhelms him, and his hands find their way to the kitchen knife and the knife finds its way to his arm and it starts again, but Akito and An and Kohane are there, and it’s better now.
The hardest part, Toya thinks, is being cut out of Vivid BAD Squad. If he can’t sing anymore, he can no longer contribute. Their eyes are soaked in sorrow, and Toya’s heart throbs as the last strings of the thing he treasured most in the world are cut from him. He knows it’s for the best, if they still want to surpass RAD WEEKEND, but it’s hard to remember to stop including himself in the group whenever he thinks about them all together. He loses access to the SEKAI, his phone deleting the song. That final shred of his past life disappears, and Toya has to tell himself that it will be okay, because it’s the right thing to do.
They spend time together, Toya leaning on Akito’s shoulder, practicing JSL together. Toya learns, and over time, the pain deadens, but he learns to live with it. There are people, of course, like his father, who dismissed his hearing as inconsequential, or stupid, or any number of wrong things, and it takes a long time of Akito and Tsukasa encouraging Toya to stand up against it until he finally can.
An, Kohane, and Akito continue singing together, and eventually Toya can bear the hurt and the ache of what he could be doing, could have done, long enough to watch them sing. He can’t hear their voices, but he can feel the pulse hidden somewhere within him, feeling the same vibrating energy that they do.
And one day, he listens to them practice in Weekend Garage, and he no longer feels the ache of not being onstage with them. Toya runs a hand over his raised scars, and realizes that it’s been a year since he last hurt himself on purpose. He’s learning to fix himself up, and after the song is over Akito tells him through sign language, what Toya will repeat to himself in front of the mirror later. You are worth trying again for. And again, and again, and again. There is always a chance to try again.
Many years later, Toya watches from backstage as Kohane, An, and Akito finish the last song of their set, lights shining down on their breathless faces, wide smiles as they finally, finally surpass RAD WEEKEND. The crowds cheering feels wild and frenzied, and Toya misses being able to hear so badly in this moment, wants so badly to be up there with his former teammates, that his eyes brim with tears for the first time in years.
As the cleanup begins, Toya leaves the microphone connected to the cord and picks it up, standing onstage and pretending he’s facing a crowd of fans, just like Akito had always dreamed. Akito’s dream had finally come true, and maybe it was Toya’s turn.
There is always a chance to try again.
Toya clears his throat, opens his mouth, and tries again.