Work Text:
Killing Tadano had been a matter of convenience.
Initially Eito had not paid them any mind at all in-between all the other riffraff, dare he say they blended into the background so much that they were not a person. Their steps may as well have been made of air and they snuck up on him twice but he gave them grace instead of ending them there and then. It was flimsy, only to avoid any suspicions from too many deaths in too-quick a succession, but it ran out just as quickly. They signed their death warrant the second they left the cowards club and joined in on the fighting.
Being quiet was one thing, but having the power of invisibility was another. If Eito could not keep an eye on them then Tadano needed to be left out of the equation entirely. All it took was cornering them in the library at night, a place their paths had intersected too many times for Eito’s liking, and they were gone. Their blood bolstered him. He burned up their body in the undying flames as easily as anything.
They disappeared and it was awful and everybody panicked but nobody really mourned. Nobody really knew them. It was easy.
Eito dreamt the night after he did it.
It was startling because he does not dream. When he does, they’re horrific nightmares, but even those were rare in the grand scheme of things. It was odd, though— he immediately knew this dream was not a nightmare.
He was sitting on a park bench, in the city square. He had been there maybe one or two times total in his life. It was an overwhelming place on its own, and its only purpose was to be absolutely chock-full of humans all the time, too many people and too overwhelming for him to do more than a few things there. And yet he was sat on a bench right in the middle of it, facing the road.
He ended up not paying it much mind. He was sitting next to someone, after all.
They were thin and tall, but not as tall as he was. Their hair was fluffy and purple and the bangs got in their face and obscured their eyes a good deal but they did not make a move to brush them away. Their expression didn’t hold much of anything. They wore turtleneck under a regular t-shirt that looked more elegant than it should have, being paired with a long skirt, and their hands looked delicate and cared for. They smelled neutral, like scented laundry detergent that had already faded with some days’ time. They wore earrings that framed their face nicely. Their skin was unblemished. Their spine was straight. Many words to say they looked more like Eito than like a bloated corpse. Many words to say they looked beautiful to him.
He had never dreamed of a face like his own before. He had dreamed of his own face, and of the faces of others— rotting, putrid, disgusting things they were— but never of another person, separate from himself, who was clean. To say they took his breath away would never have been able to convey the depth of the wonder felt.
“Hello.” He tried to greet them, but the second they turned that empty expression onto him they stood up, and walked away.
It was among the most blatant rejections he had ever received in his life, and yet he followed after them. It was a dream, after all, and he had no idea if he would ever see them again.
They walked somewhat together. The distance between them never shrunk, but it never got any wider. Eito expected them to try and get into the narrower streets and wind through them to shake him off, but they never did. They kept to the main road, to the thin crowd of other faceless, unrendered, unpleasant people that populated the rest of the dream. He called out to them periodically, raising his voice only slightly and hoping distantly that he did not sound too desperate.
Hello, wait up, who are you? Unanswered, all of them.
They walked off the sidewalk and onto the road when it ended. Eito followed them. They walked until the road became a highway, and he still followed them. The pace stayed the same— it felt like a chase, despite the fact it never became anything faster than a leisurely walk. It went on for what felt like forever. They walked until they were on top of an overpass and the sky and concrete were about all they could see anymore. It was a vague time of day that his eyes could see but he could not identify. He didn’t think about it further.
Eito was just about beginning to feel the exertion of it all when they stopped right on the shoulder, right on the highest point. The cars there all froze in time and served as little spectators that he did not much care for but couldn’t do anything about.
“Why won’t you say anything?” Eito managed to ask. Kind of a nonsense question, given everything. Probably would have made more sense to ask about the hike they had taken him on, but he didn’t. His breath was more labored than he would have liked it to be even if his body didn’t feel quite the same strain.
They finally turned around to look at him properly when he asked that. “You know, Aotsuki-san, I’m the sort of person who is perfectly fine for small talk.”
That took him aback. “Small talk?”
They nodded. “Of course. If you ask me about the weather or about how shitty traffic has gotten, I’m a completely fine partner. Entirely normal. There’s a rhythm in those sorts of things that I like to think I’m very familiar with, and that I’ll never lose an ear for. If that is what you wanted me for, then of course I would indulge in it. But that’s not what you want. You want to talk. ”
“I was under the impression it was perfectly normal to want to speak to the people you meet.” He huffed out a small bit of incredulous laughter. Whatever they were speaking about, he could only half keep up.
“It is.” They nodded. “Incredibly normal. Everyone speaks to someone, at some point. But you want to talk . You want conversation. You want complicated things like explanations and reassurance and connection, and I am not you, Aotsuki-san. I’m not the sort of person who likes to be threatened with something like conversation. It is something I am completely incapable of. Do you understand? Absolutely and completely incapable. That’s the way it is. Besides, it’s not like I have anything to say to a man like you.”
“A man like me…” The words were bitter as they left him, but really they held no trace of a bite to them. This dream person didn’t mean it as a slight at all, and it was transparent just from their tone of voice. What they said was not conversation, merely small-talk, just as promised. Something told Eito he should be angry regardless but the feeling never manifested— the sort of oddness that came with dreams, he had to suppose. He still asked the question that had been burning at the back of his throat, however.
“Do I know you?”
“You can’t dream of a face you haven’t seen,” they confirmed.
Eito shook his head. “I can promise you I’ve never seen a face like yours in my life.”
They sighed. “Just like you’ve never ‘seen’ any face other than your own, right? But you did see my face. It’s not my fault you can’t tell.”
“I suppose at this rate it would be too much to ask for your name as well,” he said.
“Of course it would. That would just be conversation again. You’re very persistent, you know?” they said.
Eito’s brows furrowed, almost indignantly. “You can’t blame me.”
“I can blame you for quite a few things, Aotsuki-san. My name is really of no concern to you,” they replied.
Again the accusation was entirely impersonal. In a sense that was unsettling, too. They were beautiful, and their voice was as pristine as their face, yet it held nothing as well. Maybe it was a little resigned, one crack in it he had managed to pry open, but the bridge between the depth of their feelings and Eito’s understanding of them was a monster too long to even humor crossing. In practice, the person in front of him was truly hollow. Only good for the most superficial of communication, just as they had presented themself.
Goodness, though, it was beyond him to care. He had apparently seen this person before, and they did not make him sick or nauseous, nor did they make his hatred spike into an ugly shape he could barely conceal. He had followed them all the way up the overpass at a time that was not noon or afternoon or morning or nighttime and when they looked like they had something much, much better to do. It would feel like a sin to take anything more than the inch he had been given, even in a dream.
He leaned against the railing. Breathed out as though it would take with it every bit of exhaustion and heaviness that had taken refuge in him. “Let’s… Let’s talk about the weather, then. Small talk.”
“Alright. Let’s keep it small, then.” Words said with a slight reminder in them— the knowledge that his desperation would not get him anything even an inch deeper.
They leaned against that same railing, and only made a halfhearted attempt to really look at him. Both talked about just the bare surface of just about everything. Conversations Eito would usually cut off at three sentences extended themselves into hours. It was startlingly easy to speak a lot and say very little, the words tumbling out only a few at a time, before cascading into a mess of nothing. Even with his lack of practice in the area, it came to him with ease, as though it was an old friend. It was such a nonsense performance, but he kept doing it. They kept going along with it.
His empty words pooled at his ankles first and steadily made it up until they hugged his thighs, his stomach, his ribcage— the breathlessness began very slight and yet it became a crushing thing before long. His conversation partner, the mysterious someone he had apparently seen before, looked no more bothered than how they had started. It occurred to him then that only being good for small talk really was a formidable skill, and that he was going up against a consummate professional. He would have admired it more, if not for the circumstances.
They made it up until those words reached Eito’s neck. He felt just about everything meaningful he had ever stored inside himself get pushed out, leaking out of him through his ears and eyes and becoming unsightly as it was crushed out of him in service of keeping the flow of words going. His vision blurred with the pressure of it all but he did not stop talking, did not want to fall behind the person he had begged to speak to. He spoke and spoke and spoke and things got dark and—
He woke up.
The ceiling of his room faded into view, slowly but surely. A very different scenery than what he’d just experienced. Go figure. Even when he saw pleasant things in his dreams, they ended up nightmares at the end of the day. The overflow still sat on his chest and sunk him into his mattress. As some of it fell away it whispered to him, told him that he would dream again tonight, and that he would meet that someone again.
He would simply have to worry about that later. Get better at small talk, maybe.