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“Be gentle with my heart, won’t you?”
Touya stares at his autumn lover, disappearing with the oncoming winter. His knight smiles brightly, blinking away his tears, reaching out to softly entangle their fingers together. His hands are warmer than Touya’s, as always, but they’re so cold now (too cold, too cold).
Touya doesn’t want to make them even colder, but he’s too selfish to let go.
The sun is melting into the horizon, staining the sky red and orange, and Akito looks so beautiful. The red dyes his face and his hair is golden in the shadows of the setting sun.
“Please, before you go, I want you to say it to me.”
These words clung to the tip of my tongue, refusing to leave, refusing to reveal my selfishness.
So simply I give your hand a soft squeeze (if only, if only - I want to do so much more, I want to drown in you, want to fall into your embrace and never resurface).
Then I notice. The moment your hand leaves mine, my hand feels warmer.
Oh, oh.
Please, no.
But his prayers mean nothing as Akito turns and mounts his horse, disappearing into the now-night sky.
He doesn’t look back, whilst Touya stares at his fading figure - his lifeline, his love, fading before his very eyes.
He has the wish to run after the other. He wants to throw everything away for Akito. Touya is so greedy, so selfish, so terrible, so horribly in love with someone.
And he never heard the words he so desperately wanted to hear all this time.
“I love you.”
These words never needed to be said. Touya knows that Akito loved him, and he most certainly knew he loved Akito.
Thus they were left unsaid, and it’s better that way.
It saves Touya from the heartbreak, the knowledge that everything could have been different. It would make his toss and turn at night and dream dreams that shouldn’t be dreamt in their foolishness.
But he’s a fool, so he’s been dreaming such dreams this whole time.
Stupid, so stupid. He’s just been dreaming dreams this whole time. Touya realizes this too late, and the moon is already rising in the inky sky.
It’s so full, but Touya feels like his heart has been ripped out of his chest - empty, so empty, and he reaches into this newfound hole where his heart once was as if expecting to feel something.
He held out his heart too far into Akito’s hands, and now he’s gone.
They were going to be together forever.
We were going to be together forever.
That’s what you promised me, so why?
Touya shouts into the night, but no sound escapes his lips. His voice has been ripped away along with his happiness, and they’re replaced by the welling of tears from deep within his chest.
They pour over, and the emptiness is replaced with a too-big lump in his throat and a heart that aches all over.
He hiccups and feels his tears flood down his face and feels his face heat up against the night, and he feels the feather-light touches of his lover.
They’re not there, of course.
Akito was all tough exteriors, and crass words, and cruel attitudes to others.
But really, beneath all that, he was vulnerable and kind and the most beautiful and perfect person Touya had ever met and would ever meet.
Touya remembers when he would cry. He would cry, and he would curl up into Akito’s chest like a ball, and the other boy would wipe his tears with his knuckles and tell him that he was wanted and loved (by Akito, he was loved by Akito, but he never said it).
He remembers the kisses against his hair (so delicate, so apprehensive) when Touya pretended to sleep, and then Akito would be gone, the memory of his warmth still lasting.
He’s not there, not anymore. There’s no one to hold him and tell him that everything was okay anymore.
The memory of his warmth has long since passed into the winter.
We were going to be together forever.
Touya wants to throw up. He wants to empty himself of all of these emotions, but they won’t leave.
He received too much and gave too much to Akito.
He loved too hard, but he loved too little - he was too brave, but he was not brave enough.
So instead, he drops his hands to his sides after wiping the last of his tears away.
“Akito,” Touya whispers, so softly, his voice cracking and trembling at the oncoming wind, so broken after his tears.
“Akito, Akito, Akito.”
It’s said like a mantra. It is, in a sense - it’s the memory that he was once loved and once loved.
A mantra to the one thing that was beautiful in his infinitely gray life.
“Akito.”
His name was the lasting warmth of autumn, and Touya’s is the unrelenting chill of winter.
Oh. He wishes he could’ve been summer, could’ve grabbed Akito’s hands and warmed them instead, could have brought him joy instead of the tears and the complaints.
He wished he could have been the sun, not the snow; wished he could be someone more brilliant and befitting.
“Akito.”
It’s the only sound in the empty area, with only the biting wind sweeping it away.
The words disappear as soon as they are spoken.
“I love you, I love you, I love you.”
“I love you. I love you! I love you! ”
He starts shouting, crying again, almost child-like. It’s the words he wished he could’ve heard, it’s the words he wished he’d been brave enough to say.
He just wanted to hear them from his love’s mouth, but it’s too late for that.
“...”
Touya is silent then, not trying at all to stop the tears falling down his cheeks. There’s nobody to see, after all. He can just cry and scream and dream underneath the winter night, with only the moon to listen.
“You left so that I’d be able to stay here.”
He did. Touya doesn’t know why he’s saying it. Akito’s not there. But the words are like a weight on his chest, and he needs to scream them out.
“You always told me to speak my heart out, didn’t you?
“Where I wanted to stay is wherever you are, Aki. You hold my heart in your hands.”
There’s silence once more.
“...please, give it back to me one day, won’t you?”
You promised we’d be together forever.