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The liquid burned as it slid down Akito’s throat for the first time.
Damn.
He sat with the sensation for a moment.
Yeah. That was deserving of a ‘damn’.
Not the kind that Akito had been hoping for, though. In all honesty, he’d kinda wished for it to be more of a ‘damn, this shit sucks’.
Instead, it was a ‘damn, I could go for some more of this’.
He wasn’t– He wasn’t supposed to enjoy this. He wasn’t even old enough to drink, for fuck's sake. Though, he supposed he’d already gone through with the action. Nothing he could really do to take it back now. The impulsivity was already behind him.
Maybe he was just hoping that the actual taste of the substance would be enough to deter him. He couldn’t deter himself, so he was putting his last bit of faith in that to stop him.
But, as many people in his life were so painfully aware, Shinonome Akito was not deterred by many things.
The burn–he’d always heard about that damn burn–was nice.
Akito felt like he was burning on the inside already. Maybe it was some sort of twisted catharsis to enjoy the once metaphorical burn reflected as a physical sensation now. Maybe it made the burn feel more real to him. He didn’t know. Akito didn’t know anything, except for that he wanted to burn.
He lifted the cup to his lips again, taking another sip of the– actually, he didn’t even know what kind of alcohol it was. His parents never drank much, so he hadn’t had a lot of exposure to it in his life. He was luc- Was that too far, too soon? Whatever. He was lucky that he’d found this bottle tucked away in the corner of the cabinet at all.
An would probably know what it was, given that Weekend Garage used to be a bar. Not that he’d ever tell her shit about this.
He felt a spark of guilt, for just a moment, as An crossed his mind. If she knew about this, she’d never stop giving him a piece of her mind about it. She’d seen enough of the drunkards causing a ruckus at Weekend Garage and stumbling through Vivid Street during the late hours of the night. Still, unlike their partners, Akito had been running around on Vivid Street since he was a child, too. Unlike An, those memories didn’t mean much to him when the desire to drink was this strong.
He just needed to stop thinking. He knew–they all knew–that he was prone to overthinking like this. Even so, he didn’t like to talk about it. He would rather lay in his bed, sometimes for hours on end, as his mind tormented him with a spiral that he was constantly running away from during daily life. He preferred to fill every second of his day with noise and light and color and movement and something to do.
It wasn’t like he didn’t enjoy all of these activities and all of this stimulation, because he did! But, he knew that he wouldn’t be nearly as insistent on it if not for the taunting thoughts looming at the corners of his mind. They would relentlessly take every quiet moment as a chance to drag him down with them as he endlessly analyzed every mistake in every single facet of his life, every single day like a neverending vicious cycle.
And now the sky was dark, and the city lights had dimmed. After the action that he forcibly filled his day with, there was nothing Akito could really do about the natural silence of nighttime. The only noise during these hours was Ena’s voice muffled through the wall. He would never tell her this, but sometimes it was his saving grace; most nights she didn’t speak all that much, like today. But when she got riled up and the sound was more constant, it helped to lessen the overbearing weight of these thoughts just a little.
He wondered if she’d be disappointed in him if she knew what he was doing right now. Actually, no. He mostly wondered if she’d done it too. She’d always had it much worse than Akito did. She deserved to do this, to deal with the pain like this, a lot more than he did.
Doesn’t matter now. Maybe they could have some sibling bonding another day. Today, he just wanted to drink until he was numb. Akito wanted to drink until the swirling thoughts constantly lurking beneath the surface were nothing but a melted puddle in his mind. Until they were as much of a liquid as the alcohol he drank to make them disappear, until they were washed away and no longer a threat and he was finally, finally , left with a chilling emptiness in his brain. Until he could stop thinking .