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Sakusa should’ve done better. Done more. He knows, he knows as something terrifying takes a bite out of his lean flesh, his tender, beating (and very much alive) heart. He think he feels blood oozing out in small pools in their wake in his body, feeling smaller, colder than ever.
He heard from a friend of a friend that you’d been diagnosed with some terminal illness, something along the lines of a few months, no cure, non-transmittable. Yet he’d never visit, because of the ‘trepidation’, the ‘dread’, because it’d agitated him. Frankly, it was just him and his small mind, perpetual really. He never reached out; not a single click on the small, bright screen on his phone and not even on restless nights of contemplation on whether or not he brings meaning to anything as he drowsed himself in alcohol.
He’d always think about your hugs, those gentle embraces, always lasting longer and feeling tighter than he’d like. His mind stretches back to your school days, a smile always stretched from one end of your face to another, and you were always dressed in lovely clothes on dates as you’d struggle to make some conversation with him. He loved your voice; he thought it sounded serene and sweet like having ice cream on a chilly day. He loved your soft lips against his, and he even wondered if he’d ever get the chance to feel them against his jaw, his neck.
But oh, how cruel time was. How cruel he, Sakusa Kiyoomi was.
He remembers everything falling out of place, that everything being the small bouquet of flowers and that place being his clenched hands as he asks the nurse to repeat her words amidst the empty silence of the hospital lobby.
“[NAME]’s heart stopped beating last night. She passed away,” the nurse offered a curt bow, her eyes dark and her hands clamped tight. She’d licked her lips once, he’d blinked twice, and the clock had chimed thrice.
One,
two,
three,
then he’d left the counter without a single word. Your death fucked him over six ways from Sunday, and he couldn’t do a single thing about it. So he's on the precipice of life or death, he doesn't quite know, and his cold heart (it’s really just the shell of it, you’d already taken the real thing) is left in solitude as his bitter guilt begins anew.