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1. Bento
“Obikawa…Kiyoshi.” The faceless volunteer worker fumbles in the truck for his bento before resurfacing with a checklist apologetically, “It says someone already took it? Sorry man, you know how it is around here…you could always, uh…wait around for the extras,” he suggests, gesturing lamely towards another line.
Obikawa is not doing that. He knows what the queue for the leftovers is like. He doesn’t want to get another black eye. Wordlessly, he stalks back to perch on the mouldy plant boxes, wallowing in his hunger.
He closes his eyes and envisions himself becoming weightless. The portable hospital that arrived the other day told him he was underweight, among other health issues he’d rather not think about right now. He thinks about skipping the next meal because he simply doesn’t have enough energy to make the trek from his apartment to the food distribution truck.
He knows what his body looks like after a week of starvation. He remembers how the rumbling and the desperation of his stomach fell away after the first few days to a silvery, clean blankness that made him feel almost transcendent. His hands tremble as they run through his matted hair. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to be reduced to a corpse his neighbour finds rotting in his apartment, doesn’t want to be carried out with a cloth on his face for everyone who thought themselves better than him to gawk at.
This image of his decomposing body becomes too vivid. He has to open his eyes, just in time to see Tokinaga approaching him from behind the truck, recognisable by that huge rifle swaying on his back with every movement that keeps people reproachfully in line. Tokinaga bows his head politely, “Good evening, Obikawa-san.”
He wants to open his mouth to reply, perhaps to make himself appear so pitiful to Tokinaga he might give him the scraps of his own bento, but he hasn’t spoken in the past 2 days. His throat is so parched because the sinks on his floor of the apartment haven’t been working properly. His lips soundlessly part around a breathy exhale.
Tokinaga’s smile falters. He hands Obikawa a bottle of green tea. It’s chilled and sticks to Obikawa’s bare fingers in the frigid night air. He uncaps it and gulps it down frantically, trying to relish in the moisture despite the searing cold of the liquid doing nothing to relieve the soreness of his throat. It hurts like a bitch and settles mercilessly in the emptiness of his stomach, but it’s something, an unspeakable feeling bubbling through his veins to remind him that he is alive.
Obikawa clears his throat and blinks the tears from his eyes.
Tokinaga is already gone, and Obikawa’s heart begins to race as a feeling like loneliness throbs within his chest. Which is unusual — despite being completely solitary all his life, Obikawa has never felt like he was alone.
He grips the bottle and staggers to his feet, then spots Tokinaga jogging back towards him with a bento.
“Where are you going? Let’s share this before you head back,” Tokinaga offers him a pair of wooden chopsticks before setting the plastic carton on the thick concrete railing. He pushes himself up to sit next to where Obikawa had previously perched, gear and eyepatch jingling with every movement, reminding him of a cat’s bell collar.
Tokinaga pulls his mask down, unwrapping and splitting his own chopsticks neatly. He steals an expectant glance at Obikawa, who in turn stares at him blankly, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he waits for the nausea of standing up too fast to ease.
Tokinaga seems to sense his unease, scratching his cheek sheepishly in a manner so endearing to Obikawa that he finds the words leaving his mouth before he can process them. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Tokinaga’s face had already been ruddily flushed from the autumn night’s wind. It practically glows under the stark light of the lamppost as it goes even redder. “What- I don’t! What even makes you ask that?!”
Obikawa lets out a breath he does not know he has been holding, relief translated into the air, a puff of mist, dissipating eagerly into the darkness where the lamppost’s light cannot reach. He hops onto the platform next to Tokinaga, unwrapping his own chopsticks, tucking its paper wrapping into his pocket to disintegrate in the laundry. He pries the bento’s plastic lid open.
The bento is warm between his hands. His fingertips’ dull numbness begin to thaw, causing that heated sensation to intensify within them. Steam rushes out of the box, delightfully brushing against his face, and he feels his cheeks begin to warm slightly.
Tokinaga continues to give him a weird look, but begins to split the meat and vegetables between them evenly. He balances his share of rice on the lid as they pass the green tea and the bento between them. It’s a tricky, hand-shuffling balancing act, but they make do.
The night is still cold, and the food is barely enough for two adult men, but as Obikawa swings his legs out towards that darkness that cannot be caught by the light, heart beating in time with the man next to him, he thinks that he feels indescribably full.
2. Baba-san
The sun is halfway in the sky, perpendicular to the Earth in a way he cannot contort his torso comfortably to see. Orokapi decides to spend his day basking on top of one of his favourite buildings, wondering if he should try to seek Vollof out. Were they sequestered in the shade of their home again, designing new rooms? Perhaps they were with Alula. That thought sours quickly, Orokapi pushes it out of his mind.
There’s some commotion a few metres away from his tail, the vibration of several footsteps and the shifting of the earth around his domain. He cranes his head lazily to observe, curiosity piqued and boredom insatiable. He doesn’t plan on stopping any kind of natural activity. Contrary to Ahu’az’s volatile control over their own domain, Orokapi likes it when cats climb onto his scales or when insects make nests beneath the shade his massive body offers. There is only one species he cannot tolerate.
A group of humans huddle around his abdomen. No greater than 10 people, they hold strange tools he cannot recognise with clunky suits which look miserable to be wearing in such swelter. Before he can react, a strange sensation travels up his spine and his entire lower portion goes numb. This is why he cannot stand them; their actions are always annoyingly motivated by the destruction of their kind.
They have made their move, their intentions clear. Orokapi will do the same. It is not hatred he feels for them.
He raises himself, blood cooling the higher in altitude he goes. He lets them run, but if any of them return he will not be as merciful. It is not cruelty that he enacts upon them.
The humans scramble away, but there’s one person lagging behind the rest as they flee. The person slows and bends down to cradle something within his arms. It's one of the cats that linger around this building he's particularly fond of. Does he think he is rescuing it?
Orokapi doesn't think twice. He bites down on easy prey. The body goes limp almost instantly. The cat scampers away. He doesn’t bother to inject his venom, it tastes like nothing and he barely feels it going down his throat.
The heat in the air begins to relent. The group fades into a smudge on the horizon. Orokapi thinks he should pay Vollof a visit.
–
…They did everything they could. It’s not their fault. Tragedies like these are bound to happen in our line of work, but it’s a pity we had to lose a bright mind so soon. Humanity is one step closer to defeating IPOs because of his noble sacrifice.
The young man in Baba-san’s old office? Just let him be. I think he’s been working under Baba-san ever since he came here. Poor boy…let him grieve. It’s fine, we’ll come back to clear it out in a week, it’s no rush.
3. Super peach shortcake
“Hey, Tokinaga?” He earns himself a non-committal ‘hmm’, as Tokinaga chooses to prioritise balancing approximately 30 candles on a dubiously flammable peach shortcake.
(Unfortunately, after Tokinaga texted Obikawa to ask how many candles he wanted on his cake, the only response he was given was “123456789”.)
It’s actually kind of disrespectful, and maybe fifty percent blasphemous to ignore a God’s direct inquiry, Obikawa thinks. He feels like he should attempt breathing fire into Tokinaga’s face or banish him away for his insolence, except watching Tokinaga make increasingly constipated expressions as he struggles to keep the candles from sliding off the cake is infinitely funnier, so he keeps his mouth shut in favour of licking the excess frosting from the cake and watching new wrinkles form on Tokinaga’s face by the minute.
Oblivious to Obikawa’s entertainment, Tokinaga unbends himself in an extremely middle-aged manner. “Okay. Now we sing the birthday song, and you make a wish before blowing the candles out.”
He scratches his head. “Huh, why do we need all that? Can't we just eat it now?”
Tokinaga looks at him with a pained expression.
“...Just blow out the candles. I've already lit them.”
Next, Tokinaga tells him to put his hands together to make the birthday wish, and to “hurry before the candles fall off oh my god the cake is going to burn”, which, in his defence, contributed a lot to Obikawa’s poor decision making. Thus, under stressful conditions, Obikawa’s 3000th(?) birthday wish is for world peace because he saw that in a TV show once, which he now realises is kind of antithetical to his own character and goals. Huh.
Tokinaga slaps his shoulder to be quicker as more wax collects at the candle bases. Panicked, he blows the candles with such gusto bestowed upon him by the birthday gods, unsure if it is his spittle or breath that actually extinguishes them. It's a fantastic process, and Obikawa wonders why humans don't just do this for every cake they eat.
Tokinaga claps half-heartedly, and to his credit only grimaces a bit at the visible saliva droplets coating about half the cake’s surface area. He hands Obikawa a bizarrely shaped tool.
The plastic appendage is weirdly blunt and ridiculously unwieldy. It has holes in the centre and Tokinaga is looking at him expectantly, so he kind of just pushes it onto the cake until the frosting bulges out of its holes. Judging by Tokinaga's blank, checked-out expression, he's not doing it right.
Handing it back to Tokinaga impatiently, Obikawa feels a bit stupid and chastised by his stare. He just wanted to eat some cake, dammit.
Tokinaga flips the tool perpendicular to the cake, and begins to divide it into slices. Obikawa nods sagely, because that was the second method he would've tried after denting the frosting, peering obediently over Tokinaga’s shoulder as he makes him do the work again.
“Why do humans celebrate birthdays, anyways? Ah, I don't want that slice. Give me a bigger one, with two peaches!” Tokinaga gives him a withering look and begrudgingly takes the inferior cake slice for himself.
“Um, I don't know? To celebrate the fact you were born, I guess,” He then seems to register Obikawa’s words, pausing to point the plastic knife accusingly at Obikawa, “If you don’t even know what a birthday is meant for, then why are we celebrating yours in the first place?”
“I don't know! I wanted to eat cake! You told me you eat cake on birthdays!”
Tokinaga’s face scrunches up in an endearingly ugly manner, and Obikawa thinks that this inexplicable urge to pinch his cheeks is what owners must feel when their cat looks particularly gormless.
–
“Hey, Tokinaga,” Obikawa says through a mouthful of peach cream. Tokinaga humours him with another distracted hum, polite enough not to speak while eating. He's still pushing that peach slice around the plate, which Obikawa will offer to take once he finishes his own comically large portion.
“I don’t remember the day I was born. And I'm probably older than the candles you put on the cake. Does that mean I can’t have a birthday?”
“It should be okay. It's more about the thought behind the celebration, anyways,” Tokinaga has unfortunately eaten the peach slice.
“So, if I thought about eating this cake but actually threw it into the rubbish, would the thought still count?”
Tokinaga pauses chewing to give him a slightly horrified expression, “Um, how did you even come to that conclusion? Can you please just eat the cake normally?”
Obikawa, for once, falls into a contemplative silence. No matter how hard he tries to think about the exact instance of time where he had achieved awareness, the way his muscles first constricted, the way oxygen had first entered his cells, the first time instinct had instructed his soul, ‘consume, you must survive’, he comes up empty.
It figures, since he’s been alive for so long, but being so unsure of his own conception makes a queasy sense of unease bloom unpleasantly at the base of his gut. Was it alright to celebrate an existence such as his?
Tokinaga sets his plate down and shuffles to retrieve a plain, cardboard box from beneath the coffee table. “If I had known this wasn’t really your birthday…I wouldn’t have spent so much money on this, argh,” despite his irritation, he sets it gingerly next to Obikawa and fidgets nervously, anticipating his response. “Whatever. Happy birthday.”
Oh, that’s right. Tokinaga is here, isn’t he? For he has brought things that the organism within him could never fathom, and had no eyes to see (it only had a mouth to consume, for it had to survive). Things like melted frosting and surprise presents and the smile that stretches so uncontrollably across his face. That could be enough for Obikawa.
4. Beer and pizza
There’s a heavy pounding on his door. Obikawa looks up from his mobile game, the scent of Tokinaga registering, a pinprick of awareness in his mind across the gaps in the door frame.
Ever since he’d eaten one Obikawa Kiyoshi and has become him, he’s found himself to be irrationally paranoid of sleep; which is barely the worst flaw for his vessel to have, considering he barely needs to rest, but annoying to adapt to given his affinity for napping. On the bright slide, it makes 3 AM visits like these more than welcome, to have something to fill the neverending void of boredom besides the ridiculous amounts of mobile game ads being seared permanently onto his cornea.
He pads to the door and swings it open wide. A strong gust of freezing wind instantly makes his skin prickle with goosebumps.
Tokinaga’s eye patch is freshly red and askew, brown flecks of blood crusting the visible skin around his socket. His hands are wrapped around himself, shivering uncontrollably from what is probably a mix of fear and the cold, the sleeves of his sweatshirt rolled up despite it. Shallow horizontal scratches line both his arms, sluggishly bleeding.
He looks almost like a ghost, illuminated only by the glow of corridor lights and the lowering moon, teeth audibly chattering and making no attempt to look him in the eye, staring intently at the hallway of Obikawa’s apartment instead. Obikawa props his foot against his other leg and leans against the door frame, assessing the state of his friend.
“You look like shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna order some pizza?”
“...Yeah.”
Obikawa spends way too much money on the midnight priority delivery fee and two regular pizzas, but what the heck. It’s warm on the heated floor of his apartment and they’re raiding his own fridge, chugging beers, talking about everything unimportant and unrelated to the blood Obikawa rinses as gently as he can from Tokinaga’s wrists.
If money could bind them forever within this moment, he’d gladly throw his life savings (currently zero) to those poor graveyard shift workers.
The pizza arrives and the driver is already speeding out of the car park when they open the door. Tokinaga is calm enough now that he lets Obikawa lay him on the couch, untie his eyepatch, lucid enough to bite his lip in pain as Obikawa rips the cotton off the clotted wound. Obikawa tries to clean it with baby wipes and as much delicacy as he can muster, unused to this sort of intimacy, but desperate to try.
The mottled, ugly flesh is strangely precious in his hands. He cannot bear to see it bleed because of him. Slowly, quietly, uncharacteristically, he soothes the only ache in Tokinaga he knows he can fix, and quietly hopes that he could be able to fix the ones he cannot reach, some day.
When Tokinaga slumps onto his lap, sluggish and exhausted — but clean and calm, pride bubbles in his chest for a job well done. Tokinaga groggily reaches for the end of his braid and fiddles with the unbraided tuft, blinking his eyes as if fighting the urge to fall asleep.
It’s never happened like this before; Obikawa giving, Tokinaga receiving, but the gentleness he coaxes from his hands to handle Tokinaga with as much care as Obikawa Kiyoshi and Orokapi can handle settles so perfectly within the walls of his apartment. It satiates the beating within his chest he was never aware of, breaks the world down into just the important parts: The beer cans, the pizza boxes, and Tokinaga before him, drunk and giggling and perfect.
+1. Why didn’t you eat him?
“Then, I’ll just eat you.”
He doesn’t mean it. He can’t apologise, either. Does Tokinaga hate him now?