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Hizashi blinked slowly, letting his vision readjust after hours of looking at the world from behind yellow shades. He hadn't taken them off in front of anyone in what had probably been months. He didn't quite know why, but doing so felt... odd.
The face that stared back at him from the mirror looked strange in a way he couldn't name. The eyes looked at once both too deep and too shallow, like there was some kind of brick wall built up behind them despite the exhaustion that seemed to drip and curve around the concentric circles in the irises. The skin underneath his eyes lacked warmth, despite being light enough to pass due to the concealer he'd applied that morning. There was no smile on the face.
Hizashi tilted his chin, gaze tracing across the jawbone. It wasn't a bad jaw, he reasoned, just... sharper than he'd expected. He'd say gaunt, if he wanted to be rude. The features on the face, while technically his, weren't familiar to him; he could identify himself in photos, but he couldn't picture his face. Sometimes, this seemed like a good thing; others, it was not.
Hizashi did not recognise the face, but he couldn't recognise the other face, either. The one with the yellow shades on. Looking at it made something inside him hold its breath, fluttering tightly but frantically, like a heartbeat but wrong. Scared, he thought. The face with the yellow shades was a threat.
It was, Hizashi had decided, necessary. There was a hole, in the world, and Hizashi was the only one who seemed stubborn enough to cover it.
Hizashi's gaze lingered on the face's cheekbones, the face's glazed eyes rolling to follow suit. He raised a hand to trace his skin, a detached sort of discomfort registering just outside of conscious thought as his fingertips brushed against his own face. It felt too still, like a marionette, or a statue. He tried to smile, injecting life into his cheeks, but the face in the mirror's lips twisted in a melted-plastic movement and its eyes remained disturbingly dull. Hizashi dropped both his hand and the smile like he'd been burned.
He screwed his eyes shut, trying to erase the smile from his mind at the same time that he tried to recall what features had twisted to form it.
Succeeding at neither task, he stepped away from the mirror, pressing a hand to his forehead. He sighed. He didn't know where he was going with this. The face had just caught his eye, and he hadn't been able to look away. He supposed it was a combination of caution and morbid curiosity.
Curiosity, cats. Hizashi was not a cat; Shouta didn't pay attention nearly enough for him to be one.
Hizashi turned and walked away from the mirror without a backwards glance. He didn't care about the reflection, anyway.
The yellow shades were left folded on the counter, waiting to be worn.