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"Kiss him for me," Mika whispers, lips brushing against Yuu's skin as he nuzzles against his neck.
"What?" Yuu asks, confused by the nature of the request.
"Kiss him for me," he repeats. Fingers curl against his shoulders, breath shaking for a moment, an instant. The only part of him that wavers, that reveals that this is far more complicated than a simple joke. So he shakes his head, lifting away and grinning at Yuu as if to say don't worry about it.
He draws his gaze away from Yuu, looking towards Yoichi, his target in question. Yoichi is wandering back and forth across the field, occasionally kneeling to examine some herb or another and picking the ones he wants. He's smiling absently, once looking over and waving at the pair, oblivious that they are discussing him.
"Why don't you?" Yuu finally asks.
Because I can't, he thinks. Nothing he can do will change this, of that he is certain. Yoichi tries, tries everything imaginable, but this particular burden is adamantine-- refuses to so much as bend to their efforts, so deeply tied to his being it is.
("Are you sure you want to keep going?" Yoichi murmurs, passing Mika yet another vial, some concoction that both pray will do something. Another vial that burns his throat and twists his stomach as his body violently rejects its contents.)
Because I can’t, he thinks again. He won’t say this. Not to him, not to Yuu, who is watching Mikaela with the same sort of passive smile that Yoichi has. Who finally seems to be content with everything he has, something Mika has struggled to protect for him despite finding little of this peace for himself.
So he won’t say it.
“It’s more fun to watch you,” he whispers. Yuu laughs, face lighting up as he reaches some sort of conclusion—that this was a joke, merely a set up meant to tease Yuu about Yoichi. And Mika smiles at him again as if to assure him that his conclusion is true (though he is not really certain what his conclusion is).
He moves away from Yuu, rolling his shoulders and shifting positions until he settles against the tree with his legs laying on Yuu’s. When Yuu seems to decide that he has stopped moving, he glances at him and raises a brow. “This,” he says, tapping Mika’s leg. “Isn’t helping.”
(Mika leans all of his weight against the wall, his legs so weak he fears he could fall at any moment. He’s shuddering, digging his fingers into the side of his chest until he bleeds.
“What other choice do I have?” He’d told him. Yoichi had said nothing, merely furrowed his brows and watched as Mika drank the vial. And now he stands beside him, holding him up and opening his mouth to speak before closing it again.
“You can live,” he whispers.)
Mika crosses his arms behind his head, rolling his eyes at Yuu before freeing him. He stretches out one leg and keeps the other closer to his chest, though not close enough to touch. “Go on, kiss him for me,” he orders, smiling once again.
Yuu laughs. “Fine, fine,” he grumbles, standing slowly. “If you insist.”
Mika taps Yuu’s leg with his foot. “As if you won’t take any excuse to go kiss him.”
Yuu shrugs and raises his hands. “I did stand, didn’t I?” Mika smiles again, turning his attention back to Yoichi. He’s squatting in a small patch of violets, quickly gathering a selection of the best. Yuu comes close to him, but he looks towards Mika instead and flashes a vicious grin.
“What…?” he wonders.
Yuu creeps up behind Yoichi, slowly reaches forward, then slams his hands on Yoichi’s shoulders.
Yoichi shrieks and flinches to Yuu’s touch; Yuu laughs so hard that he’s clutching his chest with his knees bent.
“Yuu, be nice!” Mika yells. “I said kiss not scare,” he mutters, rolling his eyes again.
Judging that Yuu has stopped laughing and is now awkwardly trying to calm Yoichi, Mika will wager that Yoichi was so scared he’s on the verge of tears (and his heartbeat seems to prove this).
Mika sighs, watching as Yuu whispers “I’m sorry” and “I thought it would be funny.”
(Yoichi had helped him back inside, forced him to lie down on the bed. All the while, Mika remained silent, refusing to say anything to him.
“You can live,” he’d said.
That’s not a choice.
He can’t live like this. He can’t live by hurting others. He can’t live when everyone else will die.)
Yoichi has calmed; Yuu holds both of his shoulders and smiles at him, not speaking. Finally, Yuu leans forward, holding the back of Yoichi’s head and kissing him. Yoichi leans into him, refusing to let Yuu go until he’s kissed him several times more. Mika frowns as he watches, lightly chewing on his nails. He has asked for this, yet watching them is merely a reminder of what could be, what he could have had, had he…
Mika shakes his head, holding his hand against his forehead.
So you can’t kiss them without hurting them.
That’s alright, isn’t it?
There are worse things in thisworld.
He grits his teeth and lets out a sigh.
Of course it’s not that simple.
How much do they take for granted, he wonders. Have they ever thought about how they are able to relax in the sun, when he finds himself uncomfortable with only the light coming through the trees? Do they realize how delicate they are to him? Have they ever thought that they are lucky to be able to be with someone without the constant knowledge of all the things they could do to them?
Mika squeezes his eyes shut. They have no reason to worry about such things.
When he opens his eyes again, Yuu and Yoichi have begun to talk again; Mika takes a deep breath as he begins to calm down now that they’re no longer kissing. You shouldn’t have asked him to do that, he thinks. But then, what else is he supposed to do, if he cannot kiss him himself?
(“Mika, look at me,” Yoichi whispers. Mika shakes his head weakly, trying to draw the quilt over his face. “Mika,” he says, half a whisper and half a whine. “We should stop.”
Mika finally looks at him, his expression a twisted combination of pain, urgency, and need. “We can’t,” he huffs.
“You can’t keep doing this to yourself. I can’t keep letting you do this to yourself.”
Mika grabs Yoichi’s hand suddenly, shaking his head again. “We just have to find it—when we find it, we won’t have to do this anymore. I… I’ll be human and this will finally be over,” he whispers.)
Yuu is speaking in a hushed tone, clearly meant to evade Mika’s hearing. He vaguely wonders if he should go along with it—cover his ears, do something to intentionally ignore what they’re saying. Before he reaches a decision, it’s too late. “Mika asked me to,” Yuu murmurs.
“Huh?” Yoichi says.
“Mika asked me to—he said ‘kiss him for me.’”
“…he did?” Yoichi looks over towards him, and Mika smiles and waves as if he can’t hear a thing.
“Do you know what that’s about?” Yuu asks.
Mika curses under his breath. So he had thought it was strange. He should have known (I shouldn’t have asked him!), should have realized that Yuu would consider it an odd request. He’s kicking himself for it—he was so stupid to think that such a request would be ignored, even if he made efforts to mask why he had made it in the first place.
(“Mika, there’s no cure,” Yoichi says. “You know there isn’t.”
“That’s not true,” he whispers.
Yoichi reaches forward to run his fingers through his hair; Mika pushes his hand away. “We’ve tried everything. You know we have. I can’t find anything new and everything that we have done hasn’t so much as given us a clue.” He speaks cautiously, watching Mika carefully—like this is something he must say but is afraid of what will happen when he says it.
Yoichi’s face and heartbeat tell him it’s the truth. Mika pulls the blanket over his head again, covering his ears and avoiding Yoichi’s gaze. “It’s not true…”
“There’s nothing,” he whispers. “You’re killing yourself trying to find something that doesn’t exist.”
“There has to be one,” he murmurs. “There has to be…” There has to be.)
Yoichi shakes his head at Yuu—no, he doesn’t know why Mika asked this of him. Yet the spike in his heartbeat says he’s lying.
(When they had first started their search, Mika had made a demand: don’t tell Yuu. Perhaps he was asking too much of him—Help me, find a cure, but don’t tell him, keep it a secret, please! he’d begged. I need this… he’d whispered.)
Yoichi lies for him, even now, even with Yuu standing before him asking for a truth that is only barely related to what they have been doing without his knowledge. “Are you sure he wasn’t just teasing you…? He seems to do that a lot,” Yoichi murmurs. Mika sees his discomfort—shorter breaths, heart racing, avoiding looking in Mika’s direction as if seeing him will give away his lie. Yet Yoichi hides his lie very well, and Mika wonders if he’d always been able to hide the truth or if he’d been forced to learn since meeting him.
(Another secret he’s begged him to keep: Please don’t tell Yuu that I’m not human. Yoichi had discovered it long before Mika said anything to Yuu. Yet he promised him, and he kept it—he did not breathe a word of it to Yuu, even when Mika’s life nearly depended on it. He’s far too kind, Mika has decided.)
Yuu seems to finally accept this answer as truth—Mika merely meant to tease him, and he’d overreacted by thinking it might be more. Yuu sighs and rubs his temple for a moment. “I guess it was… If he says something like that to you, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Don’t worry about it, Yuu,” he murmurs, furrowing his brows in concern as he smiles at him. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”
Yuu sighs again, lowering his head. “You’re right, you’re right… It probably wasn’t anything.”
(“We can keep trying,” Yoichi finally tells him. Mika can hear the pain in his voice, see his conflicting ideals drawn in his skin. Too kind, he thinks. Yoichi is going against his very nature to help him (or perhaps it is his nature, to help others even if he doesn’t agree with it, because he loves them too much), ignoring all of his instincts that surely tell him this will be the death of Mika. Ignoring how it kills him to see Mika in this much pain if it means helping him—something he has tried to keep hidden, for Mika’s sake, but Yoichi is far too easy to read.
And now it is Mika asking, “Are you sure?”
“If it means this much to you,” he responds. His voice shakes.)
Mika breathes out in relief as the subject is finally dropped. Yuu offers to help Yoichi gather the plants, so Mika forces himself to relax again as he watches the two.
It only takes them a few more minutes, as Yuu starts to complain that he’s hungry.
“But I don’t have them all yet,” Yoichi whines.
“What do you mean you don’t have them all? You can barely get them in the bag!” Yuu says.
Yoichi frowns, leaning over and taking a handful of blue flowers. He grumbles something that even Mika can’t hear, and judging Yuu’s expression Mika guesses he agreed to have lunch. Then he stands. “Wait here,” he says. He walks over to Mika, smiling widely and running his thumb across the flower stems. “We’re going home.” Mika nods, stretching his arms before sitting up.
Before he can stand, Yoichi has crosses the distance between them and taken his shoulders. And then he leans forward, kissing Mika’s forehead.
“Kiss me yourself,” he murmurs.
Before he can react, Yoichi shoves the flowers into his hands, smiles again, and stands with his hands clasped behind his back. “What are you going to cook for us?”
“I’m cooking?!” Mika asks loudly, scrambling to his feet. He knows Yoichi is changing the subject—for once, he’s grateful for it, glad that he won’t have to stumble through a reason for making that request.
“Well at least you can be trusted not to burn the house down!” Yuu yells back (Mika hadn’t realized he’d spoken loud enough for him to hear).
Yoichi runs back to Yuu, Mika following easily. “Why don’t you two ever do it, I can’t even eat it,” he whines.
“You’re the best at it,” Yoichi says.
“Then ask Shiho, he taught me!” he says.
“But then they’d all come and it wouldn’t be just us,” Yuu mutters.
Mika rolls his eyes, pulling his hood over his head. “’Fine, fine, if you insist,’” he says, quoting the other.
“Hey!” Yuu lightly flicks him and pouts at him.
Yoichi seems confused, and Mika merely shrugs. “You’re not supposed to make the chef upset, you know,” he says.
Yuu groans, and they walk the rest of the way home like this—teasing each other and trying to get them to laugh. Mika was grateful for the distraction.
(Mika cannot stand to see Yoichi so conflicted, not over him.
You’ve burdened them both, now.
Yoichi continues tending to him, refusing to let him move until he’s decided for himself that Mika is feeling well enough. When he does, he only helps him sit up. “How are you feeling?” he murmurs.
Mika huffs a laugh, clutching his chest again as the pain sears through him. “Fine,” he hisses through grit teeth. Yoichi notes how he holds his chest and leans forward to put his hand over Mika’s; Mika watches Yoichi carefully, red eyes peering into his.
Yoichi is barely inches away from him, concern seeping into his features again.
I’m sorry. He can’t bring himself to say it.
“Are you alright?” Yoichi asks.
“I’m fine,” he promises. “I…” I’m sorry for making you do this. He still cannot say those words.
If he cannot say it, he will show him.
He reaches for Yoichi, holding his ears and rubbing them between his fingers. Says nothing and hates himself for it. So they sit in silence, Mika eventually leaning his forehead against Yoichi’s.
He wants to apologize, do something that proves to Yoichi that he regrets involving him in this at all. But everything he thinks of poses risks to Yoichi—too dangerous, you can’t hurt him more than you have. But he wants to. He wants to kiss him.
He doesn’t think he can.)