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“I’m supposed to hate him.” Teru’s voice is quieter than she’s accustomed to hearing it. She glances over at him, but he remains in his place flopped back on her bed, staring at the ceiling fan as it goes around.
The words are vague, unexpected. She knows exactly who he’s talking about.
“Why?” She asks, because that is one thing she cannot understand.
Teru sighs. His voice is weighed down with responsibility as it so often is.
“He made a deal with the clock-keepers. He’s a half-supernatural, and it was a voluntary thing. I’m supposed to be able to hate him, to keep him under control and ensure that he causes no harm. I’m not supposed to trust him, not supposed to—“ Teru cuts himself off.
Aoi suddenly finds herself enraptured by the repetitive motions of the ceiling fan rather than the splayed, distressed form of her friend.
“That’s bullshit.” She says, and her voice does not shake. She didn’t mean to speak, didn’t feel the words on the tip of the tongue, but she does not take them back.
Teru turns to look at her, finally drawing his eyes from the ceiling fan. “What do you—“
She turns to him as well, meets his eyes and speaks with an intensity she does not usually allow herself. “They’ve already taken your life from you, they shouldn’t be able to take your love from you too.”
She watches as Teru’s eyes blow wide, watches as her words are processed. Watches as he wrestles with them, some deep part of him fighting to dismiss them as nothing. Watches as he dismisses them out of necessity.
He turns from her. “My falling in love was against the rules to begin with. There’s a reason they’re in place.” I am not permitted to be human , he doesn’t say, but she hears it clear as day.
Aoi has never been one for anger, but now she cannot prevent it from welling up within herself. She hates what has been done to Teru, hates those who did it with the same intensity that they have made Teru hate himself.
“That’s not something you get to choose .” She hisses, sitting up abruptly.
“Yes, well.” Teru says, not even flinching from where he lies. He sighs, the sound of it so deeply filled with weariness that Aoi feels it ache through her bones in response. It is a weariness that no person deserves, but that Teru deserves the least of all. “It’s not as if that matters.”
“That’s bullshit!” she exclaims, because it’s true.
He sighs, again, like she’s a particularly foolish child. “It doesn’t matter, because even though it wasn’t a choice, I still—I failed, to fulfill my duties.”
I failed , he says, as if that means anything . As if it can even be counted as a failure when it was something he should never have been measured on in the first place.
“I have… indulged in it far too much, and this failure is the price for it.”
“I am literally actually going to strangle you.” Aoi’s relatively certain that it’s the first time she’s threatened someone with violence, and maybe she’s spending too much time around Nene, but she feels no less vindicated for it.
Another sigh, long-suffering and no less weary, “Aoi.” He met her eyes at last, gaze soft and sad, “There is nothing that can be done.”
Aoi deflates, knows the conversation is over. She doesn’t dismiss it, though, carefully shelves it away with her other reasons to kill Teru’s father should she ever meet him and allows the conversation to slip away with ease.
She will find a way to do something about this, eventually, but for now she lets Teru have his peace. He needs it, even more than she does. (He shouldn’t have to.)