Work Text:
The palm of Komaeda’s hand is dark grey from the moist soil, working at it with the small shovel to loosen it before sprinkling the seeds in. The seed packets are a light red, the front stamped with the Future Foundation logo and a brief description of its contents in small capital letters underneath. He turns it over in his hand before crumpling it up and shoving it into his pocket.
Every month, the ship comes into the port, filled with crates of essentials: food, soap, clothes befitting the season. Everyone’s needs are accounted for, making sure there are separate crates for the ones with health concerns or dietary exceptions. The Future Foundation must be thriving back in Towa City, because the crates have began to fill up with more than just the basic amenities. This month, the group received a box filled entirely with gardening supplies, which no one seemed to particularly want. After being left in the warehouse for over two weeks, Komaeda took it upon himself to lug the crate home (which was quite the feat for someone of his respective strength) Hinata’s cottage.
“Don’t count on those sprouting any time soon.” Hinata’s voice brought him back to the present. He knelt down next to Komaeda in front of the garden bed, handing him a glass of iced lemonade. “I doubt any of those seeds will even fertilize.”
Komaeda brings the glass to his lips and takes a sip. On a hot spring day, which feels more like summer on the tropical island, a cold drink is the perfect amount of refreshing. Hinata furrows his brows at the pair of gardening gloves on the ground, and outright grimaces when he sees the dirt on Komaeda’s human hand.
“Why won’t you wear the gloves?” He asks, the slight annoyance in his voice evident. “There’s so much dirt under your fingernails, they’re practically black.”
“I don’t like the way they feel,” Komaeda says. “It’s suffocating.”
Hinata sighs in defeat. He’s aware this is an unwinnable argument. Komaeda continues to work at his small garden, tapping the soil with the back of the shovel to cover the seeds. He lets the water from the can pour onto the dirt, turning it from moist to outright wet. Hinata watches carefully as the color shifts from a light grey to a dark, rich brown.
“You should come in.” Hinata tells him, staring into his eyes underneath the brim of his sun hat. Sonia had recommended that he wear it to prevent heatstroke. “It’s going to rain.”
Hinata props himself back up into a standing position and looks down at Komaeda, offering his hand. This has become a common gesture between them; a silent moment of solidarity between the two. Komaeda, as always, wordlessly accepts it, and with Hinata’s help, he’s standing adjacent to him over the garden bed.
Komaeda takes a minute to reorient himself— often times, when he stands up too quickly, his vision gets spotty and there’s a faint ringing in the back of his ears. Hinata’s grown accustomed to it by now, waiting for Komaeda to give him a signal that he’s successfully readjusted himself.
The indubitable fact of the matter is that there is no indication of rain in the air or the sky. Everything Komaeda knows about the world is telling him that today will be a perfectly sunny day, and that Hinata is wrong. But Hinata, for everything that he is, is undoubtably correct. Or rather, Kamukura Izuru is correct, and Hinata is delivering the message.
Komaeda follows behind Hinata, their grasp breaking apart with neither of them willing to commit to the act of holding hands. Because, yes, they sleep together, both literally and figuratively, and yes, they live in the same house and share a bathroom and a kitchen and all of their clothes, but there is something about hand-holding that screams intimacy that neither of them are ready for.
Komaeda knows there is no romantic tension between them. At one point, there might have been. There was, at least for him. But given Hinata’s tendency to remind him that their relationship is purely circumstantial, he’s decided not to fan that flame. Once, Hinata had said that they were only together because there was not one person in the world besides one another who could understand each other the way he and Komaeda do.
Hinata leads him away from the flower beds, located at the front of the hotel, to their shared cottage. There is absolutely no real reason for the two of them to share a cottage, especially considering how many of their former classmates had chosen to move off the island into Towa City.
Once, in a letter from Koizumi, she had inquired as to how they could possibly remain in such a miserable place. “How unfathomable,” She had written. “That you could be content with spending the rest of your lives in a place that has caused you so much suffering.” Hinata replied that there was no place in the world that he would be more content with spending the rest of his life.
The cottages are so eerily similar to the ones in the Neo-World Program that at first, Komaeda had refused to sleep in them. He wasn’t the only one with that idea either, because for the first week, most of the remnants had set up makeshift bedrooms in the lobby of the hotel. He eventually moved back to the cottage, partly because he was experiencing severe back pain from laying on the carpeted floor.
Inside the cottage, Hinata closes the opened windows and lowers the shutters. The bed is unmade, the duvet crumpled up into the corner of the mattress and the faint outlines of two heads pressed into the pillows. There was no official decision for Komaeda to move into his cottage— it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision on Komaeda’s part. One night, when the nightmares got too bad, he had come to Hinata’s door in the cold, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boxers. In a wordless interaction, he had climbed into bed with Hinata and rested his head on his chest. It was intended to be a one-time thing.
Komaeda heads to the bathroom, pushing the glass doors to the side and not bothering to close them behind him. He turns on the sink, hot water rushing out of the faucet onto his dirt-stained hands. The scalding heat makes him bite his lip, drawing a small amount of blood. Hinata had called his preference to shower and clean himself with burning hot water a ‘masochistic tendency’. Komaeda expressed his discomfort with the comment, causing Hinata to briskly apologize and not mention it again. He scrubs his hands harder upon recalling the memory.
“You okay in there?” Hinata’s voice calls out from the bedroom, and Komaeda looks down to see that he’s left the hot water running over his hands, noting the first impressions of scalds on the back of his human one. It’s not unusual for him to do this, though it’s usually not accidental. When he would have a nightmare, Komaeda would stand under the hot shower head until his skin turned red and raw and he couldn’t think about anything besides the pain. He thought back to the ‘masochistic tendencies’ comment before shutting the faucet off and drying his hands gently on the towels, making careful work of it as to not irritate the tender, pink skin. Komaeda stares down at his hands: the knuckle bruises, skin ripped off near his cuticles, nails bitten down below his fingertips. It’s worse than unsightly.
Hinata calls his name again, and this time Komaeda turns around. He’s seated on the bed, back pressed against the headboard and hands in his lap. He hadn’t noticed it over the sound of the faucet running, but the sound of rain hitting the roof had begun to echo throughout the house. Komaeda shoves his hands into his pockets and makes his way to the bed, taking a seat in the corner.
They sit in silence, wordlessly taking in the presence of one another. The intermittent patter of raindrops hitting the cottage roof echoes between the two of them. It’s been a year since he woke up, and every day he wonders if it would have been better to stay dead. There’s a lingering waft of discomfort between him and Hinata, one that floats above all the survivors, but thickest over the two of them. Komaeda owes him about a thousand apologies, if not more.
The silence envelops them like a weighted blanket.
***
When the rain lets up about an hour later, Hinata cracks open the windows and lets the room air out. The island is unique in the way that it’s somehow never humid after it rains, despite it having every reason to be. There’s a lot about their life that doesn’t make logical sense, though, so Komaeda doesn’t concern himself with it too much.
Hinata is by the door, his sneakers already on and white linen shirt buttoned. His hand is on the doorknob when he turns around to look at Komaeda.
“You coming?” He asks. Komaeda gets the feeling that Hinata doesn’t particularly care if he is.
“Yes.” Komaeda replies, slipping on his sandals and shrugging his jacket over his shoulders. He follows Hinata out the front door and past the gates, past the supermarket and the farm. He thinks about grabbing Hinata’s hand once or twice.
They stop in front of the beach. Hinata steps onto the sand, staring off into the coastline. Komaeda remains one step behind him, as he always does. It’s windiest by the water, where there are no buildings to obstruct the salty air. The breeze blows over Komaeda’s face, his hair obstructing his vision. He remembers when they first met on this beach. One of their many ‘first meetings’, when their faces were young and eyes light from any burdens. Hinata had smiled at him in the carefree way he does, back when he didn’t know Komaeda was someone to fear.
Komaeda steps towards him, so that they’re almost standing on the same plane. The breeze sweeps their faces lightly. A wave crashes onto the shore and dissipates, dispersing just inches away from their feet. A seagull lands in front of them, hopping across the wet sand and digging through the grains with its thin beak.
“It isn’t scared of us,” Komaeda observes. “Look how close it’s getting.”
“It doesn’t know there’s anything to be afraid of.” Hinata replies absentmindedly, still staring off into the distance. “Why would there be?”
Komaeda knows it’s a rhetorical question, aimed at no one. Still, he wishes he had an answer.
***
Every morning he wakes up next to Hinata, he feels his sense of self deteriorate a little. It’s the notion, possibly, that his attachment to the man next to him is not being bound by any past experiences, but rather that Komaeda has formed a genuine bond to Hinata Hajime himself. It is in the moments when Izuru Kamukura does not even cross his mind when he is the most conflicted.
Komaeda savors the minutes where Hinata is still sleeping, his chest falling and rising with each sleeping breath he takes. Komaeda always keeps a comfortable distance from him, far enough away that he won’t disturb Hinata’s rest but close enough to count the faded freckles across the bridge of his nose. He’s never felt about anyone the way he feels about Hinata in these moments. When he wasn’t looking, this yearning for domesticity must have nestled itself into the cavity of his chest and refused to leave since. And it’s everything Komaeda isn’t— it’s warm and settled and comfortable. Komeda hates it, and he never wants it to leave.
Somewhere along the way, he started to memorize everything Hinata had ever told him. It was as if Hinata was a part of him, a constant reminder of his weakness. He knows how Hinata takes his coffee in the morning, his favorite month of the year and his shoe size. He knows that Hinata has a nail biting problem and a certain sensitivity to being criticized. He knows that Hinata is a lot less put together than he seems from an outsider’s point of view. He knows all the things that make Hinata tick, all the people he’s been and the ones he’ll never get to be.
Hinata knows too much about him, too. He knows about Komaeda’s fear of staying in one place for too long, his aversion to commitment. Hinata knows why he never lets himself get too close to anyone, why he’s so reckless without fear for his own safety. He wants to run away from the responsibility like he’s used to, to never see Hinata again and never let himself be as vulnerable as he is now. Hinata has more power over him than he thought was possible for anyone to. Hinata could break him in one sentence without blinking.
Komaeda needs to leave. He needs to leave before things get so bad that he and Hinata are indistinguishable from one another, before the lines blur and he can’t tell where Hinata ends and he begins.
But when Hinata’s eyelashes flutter open, his pupils adjusting to the light, the first thing he does is look to Komaeda and say his name under his breath. And Komaeda can breathe again.
***
By the end of April, the turnips and radishes in Komaeda’s garden have sprouted. Tsumiki stands by his side, taking the roots from his hands and placing them in the woven basket with her thin, gentle hands.
“I can’t believe they sprouted.” Tsumiki says.
“Chalk it up to my luck, I suppose.” Komaeda laughs. “I can always count on my talent to create a miracle.”
“I wouldn’t dismiss your own efforts that quickly. I see you out here every day, tending to them.” She says. She speaks with a little more confidence and a little less of a stutter ever since they woke up.
Komaeda looks up at her, tilting his head. He smiles, shaking his head.
“Who ever thought you’d become the voice of reason between the two of us, Tsumiki?”
She smiles too, the corners of her eyes creasing. This time, Tsumiki gets to her knees and joins him, placing the basket between them. He turns towards her, taking in the sight of her dark hair falling over her shoulders, no longer tangled and choppy. Her skin has regained a healthy color, her cheeks pink from the sun. He runs his own hand through his hair, noting the way the pinkish tint that used to fade out at the tips has begun to spread from his roots to the rest of his hair.
He turns back to the garden, resuming his task of tugging the small red and white bulbs from the soil.
***
When the Future Foundation ship pulls into the port with their monthly necessities in May, Komaeda is first to take a crate of gardening supplies back to he and Hinata’s shared cottage.
“Can you believe my luck?” Komaeda asks Hinata, delighted as he opens the top of the box. “Look at all these seeds! Sunflowers, dandelions… they’re going to be so beautful when they bloom.”
“Not your luck,” Hinata says, looking up from his laptop. “I told Naegi how much gardening has helped you lately, and he promised he’d send more supplies.”
“Why?” Komaeda asks, genuine concern on his face.
“I don’t know.” Hinata says. “I guess… I guess I like seeing you happy.”
“Oh,” Komaeda says under his breath, and he feels it envelop him, that domestic warmth nestled deep in his rib cage. Hinata likes seeing him happy. He likes seeing Hinata happy. The line between Hinata and him has completely blurred, and yet there’s no fear attached.
“Okay.”