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They're alone in his room and for now, that is all that matters.
He breathes out.
"I know who you are, Ouma-kun."
There's no need to waste any more time. He's already made sure to have a table between them in case of an emergency.
(He really isn't sure of what to think anymore.)
And yet, of course, Ouma's face does something terrible and, again, before he can blink, everything slips away through his fingers.
Gone are the sparkling eyes and teasing smile and gone is his familiar playful posture. Shuichi wants to think a glitch in the universe has just happened, right in front of his eyes, because this Ouma does not (should not ever) exist.
The person in front of him may wear the skin of his deceitful companion but the dull and utterly lifeless eyes do not belong to him. Neither does the deathly bored look or the carelessly drooped shoulders.
"Well then, Saihara-kun, did you enjoy the show?"
Ouma huffs out a bitter laugh before Shuichi can answer or even fathom the thorns slowly but surely surrounding and squeezing and cutting into his own heart.
"That was foolish of me to ask, no? Of course you did."
He scoffs and rests his arms on the table, gaze vengeful. Shuichi barely supresses a flinch.
"How utterly boring of you."
He needs to think think think but the words echo in his mind until he's sure he will never dare dream of anything else again.
Boring. Saihara Shuichi was boring. As if he could read his mind, Ouma adds on.
"Predictable too. Really, I should've made you more inhuman than you already are."
Made.
Shuichi thinks he might throw up.
"What the hell do you mean made?"
Ouma purses his lips and he looks so disappointed, bordering onto cold hard anger.
"It means exactly what you think it means, my dear detective."
He can feel the ground shaking under his feet. Or is it him that's trembling like a leaf?
When he fails to talk, Ouma sighs. He speaks again, in that grating, corpse-like voice.
"Everybody you've known here, everybody you've ever believed in or lied for or whatever else, has auditioned for this very game."
He pinches the bridge of his nose.
"I was, I suppose, graciously given the role of the mastermind. I'd hoped something unpredictable might happen with the killings but of course everything everyone has done so far was all according to the fucking plan."
Shuichi grips the edges of the table.
"And what about Akamatsu-san?"
Ouma tilts his head. A treacherous voice within him whispers that, under any other circumstance, he might have considered it cute and he has, in fact. He has thought Ouma was cute before, fleetingly and shamefully, though with how close the boy resembles a rotting shell with those bleak bleak eyes, it's nothing short of fucking terrifying.
"What about her? She was made to murder, Saihara-kun. If you still cannot see this, I truly pity the work I bothered putting into you."
And with that, Shuichi feels himself shatter; his legs finally giving out, leaving him collapsed on his knees and hands automatically going to grab his hair (an old habit, really). He thinks he hears Ouma sigh again.
Then there's footsteps and an impossibly bony finger tilts his chin up.
Ouma. Of course.
Ouma with those mesmerizing, beautiful purple gaze, eyes full of child-like death and grief and everything else he is so, so scared of.
"I won't kill you. Though you already know that, don't you?"
He laughs, loudly and soulless and without any humor.
"It would be so boring for you to die at my hands, obviously!"
And Shuichi hates him and pities him and worst of all loves him, of course he does, cherishes him even at his worst, he cares about him despite how much of a puppet Ouma resembles and oh, oh god, does that set his heart aflame.
Something taps at his cheek and he realizes he's crying, tears dripping down like crimson from his veins after a really bad day, days he's been having almost nonstop lately.
He realizes it's Ouma's hand that touches his cheek and he wants to melt into it and slap it away and set it on fire and he does not know which part is worse.
Then, to his surprise, Ouma flinches and hastily retracts his hand, as if the simple touch of a human being could scorch his flesh.
"You disgust me," he says but his voice is shaking and falling apart at the seams and Shuichi should feel a vengeful happiness that Ouma, after all, suffers too but all he feels is soul-crushing sadness and a burning desire to help him, in any way, though he does not know how.
This boy with empty starfire eyes and cracked lips and a morgue-like voice and in an instant, he knows this is the boy he will love forever.
And then, then Ouma stands up and looks at him with an undecipherable look in his roadkill eyes and then he's gone and Shuichi does not want to know if he'll ever come back.
He dares to hope he will be enough.