Work Text:
The first thing Leo notices when he wakes up is that he isn’t in bed. The second thing is that his whole body aches — presumably from sleeping against the bedroom wall — and the third is that there’s paper everywhere. Still half-asleep, he reaches for the nearest sheet, but stops when opening his hand brings a stinging pain and a trickle of something warm on his skin. There’s a metallic taste in his mouth when he swallows, the action making him aware of his dry throat. Has he drunk anything recently?
“Sena,” Leo mumbles, the name scratching against his throat as he forces himself to speak, “Rittsu, what happened?”
It’s barely worth asking, since neither of his lovers are around to respond — Izumi’s away for two nights doing a modelling job in a different city, and Ritsu’s on his flight home after staying with his brother for a few days — but he finds the words crawling out anyway. His eyes ache, and he reaches up to rub at them weakly, noticing the dampness on his cheeks. When he pulls his hands away, they’re wet and warm and there’s a vague throbbing pain in them, and—
Blood. Too much blood. Blood on his hands arms face clothes everywhere.
—he feels like he might throw up.
(Something tells him that there’s nothing in his stomach to throw up anyway.)
Curling tightly around his own body, Leo blinks back the stinging behind his eyes and draws in a choked breath, then another and another until he’s gasping on stale air and trying hard not to cry. Distantly, he’s aware of his own hands covering his ears like he’s been told to do when it feels too loud, but he knows everything’s coming from the inside and there’s no easy way to get it to just be quiet.
“...more professional, Kuma-kun, you can’t just—”
“Oh, come on, Secchan, you’re...”
Muffling a sob into his knees, Leo presses his hands harder against his ears and tries his best to ignore those voices.
Those voices...?
Wait.
“Leo-kun, we’re home,” one of the voices calls. Sena, comes the hazy, barely coherent thought as he wipes at his tears with the heels of his hands.
“Hope you didn’t miss us too much,” the other voice — Rittsu — adds playfully, and the ache in Leo’s throat seems to increase tenfold.
I did, I do, please come back.
He can feel something warm and wet on his cheeks, and he isn’t sure if it’s tears or blood. Maybe it’s both.
(He can picture himself with bloody tears rolling down his cheeks, the same as the blood from all the old wounds on his body opened by some divine force. Maybe there’s a song there, one dark yet beautiful, quiet yet commanding.)
(His mind stays painfully, scarily blank.)
“Tsukipi,” comes Ritsu’s voice, closer this time, but it sounds distant, like it’s coming from underwater. “Hey— fuck, Secchan, can you get the first aid?”
There’s a light touch to his wrist and he feels himself jerk backwards, but the wall behind him stops him from moving any further back. A broken sob forces its way through his aching throat, hot tears trailing down his cheeks. He hates this.
“Tsukipi— Leo, do you recognise me?” Ritsu’s voice is gentle, piercing through the dark fog seeming to fill Leo’s mind. “It’s Ritsu,” he continues, “your Rittsu, yeah?”
Leo manages a nod, letting his head fall back against the wall with a weak sigh. “Rittsu.”
“I’m here,” comes the reply, warm and comforting and everything Ritsu is, “and so is Secchan.”
“Sena,” Leo whispers, searching the room for the model and finding him standing behind Ritsu, focusing on one of the papers on the floor rather than Leo and the mess that he is.
(He isn’t as bad as he was in their second year, he knows, but he also knows Izumi’s probably seeing him as he was then, locked in his room with nothing but shredded up pieces of the illusion of hope he had once believed in.)
Izumi kneels beside Ritsu and wordlessly reaches for the sleeve of Leo’s hoodie, rolling it up to his elbow. The composer winces at the angry red marks on his wrists, the result of blunt nails raking against skin, some — and it’s painfully obvious which — drawn over with pen, a grotesque mixture of black ink and red blood. The other arm is the same, he realises numbly.
“‘m sorry, Sena,” Leo breathes, slumping forward into the model’s chest. There’s a soft sigh that he recognises as Ritsu, and a light kiss to his forehead from Izumi.
Something cool nudges Leo’s arm, and he turns to see Ritsu holding a glass of water. “Drink,” he instructs, holding the glass to the composer’s lips so he doesn’t need to hold it with his mangled, bloody hands. The water feels amazing on his dry throat, and he drinks the whole glass quickly.
“We need to get your arms cleaned up,” Izumi points out. “Can you walk?”
Leo gives a tiny nod in response, pushing himself off the ground. He feels sort of dizzy and nauseous, his vision swimming all of a sudden, and then he’s on the floor gagging over a rubbish bin Ritsu’s got under him. There’s a hand on his back — he’s not sure whose — and another brushing loose strands of hair away from his face, and he thinks he might pass out and when he wakes up this’ll all have been a dream.
“Tsukipi, breathe,” Ritsu reminds him once he’s done, and he buries himself in Izumi’s chest again, reaching out to take Ritsu’s hand. He does, careful not to touch the wounds there, only holding his fingers and rubbing firm but comforting circles using his thumb on the back of the composer’s hand.
“Sorry,” Leo gasps again, “I’m so sorry.” His throat burns, and he tries to swallow back the remaining taste of vomit still lingering in his mouth. He’s vaguely aware that he’s crying again, and his tears are all over Izumi’s shirt. He’ll probably be scolded for it later.
(He won’t be. He can tell, by the way the model cards gentle fingers through his unbrushed hair, the way he whispers words of comfort and pure love even as Leo shakes and cries in his arms.)
Izumi whispers something to Ritsu, and then he can’t feel the hand on his anymore and there are footsteps — walking away? — and he can’t breathe, hands stinging as he clutches the back of Izumi’s shirt.
“Leo-kun,” Izumi says firmly, “Leo, he’s coming back, trust me.”
Leo nods quickly, but he’s still shaking and everything hurts.
“I promise he is.” The model guides Leo’s ear against his chest, still stroking his hair. “Try to breathe with me, okay?”
The composer nods again, loosening his grip on Izumi’s shirt as he tries hard to breathe in time with the steady heartbeat against his ear. This sort of kindness from Izumi is foreign — he can count on one hand the number of times the model has been this gentle with him — but nice nevertheless. It’s not as if he usually doesn’t care, Leo knows, it’s more a kind of fear that he’ll fall back into the ways of their second year. Leo’s scared of that too.
“It’s okay now,” Izumi whispers, and it’s only for the pin-drop silence that Leo is able to hear, “I’m sorry we left you alone.”
Don’t be sorry, Leo wants to say, it’s not your fault I ended up like this. The words stay on the tip of his tongue, though, a pleasant sleepiness washing over him as Izumi continues brushing through his hair.
“I’m back,” Ritsu says with a yawn, placing a bowl of water and a washcloth on the floor beside them. “Secchan, you’re better at this than I am, get him to come here.”
Leo can’t see Izumi’s face, but he’s surely rolling his eyes when he speaks. “It’s always complaining with you, isn’t it, Kuma-kun,” he groans, but still pries Leo off him and into Ritsu’s arms instead.
Unsurprisingly, Ritsu is even more comfortable than Izumi — probably due to being a more commonly used pillow — and Leo yawns as the younger strokes his hair rhythmically. “C’mon, don’t fall asleep on us,” Ritsu jokes, which is more than a little hypocritical. “We need to get you cleaned up.”
Leo winces as the cloth touches his skin, but Izumi holds his arm firmly in place. The process isn’t too uncommon, he realises with a stab of guilt, but usually not this bad. Izumi works quickly, and before he knows it, his left hand and arm are bandaged up and the model is reaching for his right.
“I’m sorry,” Leo mumbles again, because surely he needs to apologise for putting his lovers through this. “I shouldn’t have let it get this bad.”
(He can’t control how bad it gets; times like these, it’s like he isn’t in control of himself. They both know that too, but it doesn’t give him an excuse for making them worry.)
“I’ll accept your apology if you can give me one reason why this is your fault,” Izumi sighs, grabbing the bandages again and starting to wrap up Leo’s other arm. Ritsu hums in agreement, pressing his lips to Leo’s forehead as the composer nuzzles into his chest. “Soooo annoying.”
Leo finds himself laughing a little as Izumi finishes up with the bandages, and suddenly everything feels a lot more familiar; a little less painful.
Ritsu lifts Leo up and carries him over to their bed, tugging the blankets over them both. “I don’t care what Secchan wants, we’re going to sleep now.” Leo hums, letting his eyes fall closed as Ritsu wraps his arms around the composer’s waist.
“You need to start thinking about things other than sleeping,” Izumi retorts, but he’s climbing into bed too, hugging Leo from the other side. “Only because of Leo-kun,” he adds with a yawn, and Ritsu laughs, the sound soft and warm.
“You should laugh more often, Rittsu,” Leo mumbles sleepily, opening his eyes just a crack to see a pretty blush spread across Ritsu’s cheeks.
There’s a light flick to his shoulder from Izumi, along with a muffled “shut up and let me sleep.”
“Okay, okay, as Sena commands,” Leo jokes, which only gets him another flick (and another laugh from Ritsu) but then everything is quiet, save for Izumi and Ritsu’s soft breaths and the slow, lovely melody playing in his head.
(Maybe he can write it down tomorrow, and they can all clean up the mess he left, but for now, they’ll sleep, and when they wake up maybe everything will be a little bit better.)