Work Text:
Shoyo has been on the verge of crying for the last thirty minutes.
“You know, sweetheart, I’ve been getting really close to that guy from work.” Tadashi’s hand was mindlessly playing with Shoyo’s hair. They were cuddling on his ratty thrifted couch in his cozy Osaka apartment for their weekly Friday night movie date.
“Tsukishima?”
“Yea, that’s the one. We were talking earlier today during lunch about…” he hesitates. “About what if we tried out developing our relationship further? He and I.”
Shoyo scoffed, “Yea, right. You told him to buzz off and that you’re taken, though.” He smiled a little, amused by how ridiculous a request it would be.
Pfft. As if.
There’s a long moment of silence.
“You told him to buzz off and that you’re taken, right?” Shoyo repeated, sitting up from his place resting on Tadashi’s shoulder.
Tadashi stared at him like a deer in headlights. Shoyo felt like he was about to crash.
“Do not tell me to ‘calm down,’ Tadashi. Not again. I swear on my dead father’s ashes that the next time you do, I'm going to castrate you and spoon feed you your own testicles,” Shoyo threatens. He’s shoving empty cardboard takeout containers into the trash as he fumes about the hand he’s been dealt. His head hurts from holding back tears. His throat hurts from yelling.
“Babe, I just don’t understand what the problem here is.” Tadashi is far too calm and it’s only fueling the fire of Shoyo’s anger further.
“The problem is that you’ve been cheating on me for months! And right under my nose, too!” Shoyo whips his head around to where Tadashi was sitting at the table. He can feel tears pricking at the corners of his eyes and he furiously attempts to swipe them away. It is not the time to break. He’s still in complete disbelief about the whole situation. He thought he was being such a good boyfriend—letting Tadashi hang out with work friends on his own all the time without making too much of a fuss. But apparently he had terrible judgement and should not have trusted Tadashi with that amount of freedom.
Tadashi stares at him still. It looks like he has a few lightbulbs out behind his eyes. Maybe it’s this dimness that’s behind why he can’t seem to grasp why this whole situation is so upsetting.
“And then you propose this absolutely braindead idea that you want to take your relationship with this man further and you thought I’d give you the okay to do that? Are you mad?”
The look on Tadashi’s face tells Shoyo that that was in fact, exactly what he had expected him to do.
“I just wish you could’ve been more dignified about this.” He stands from the table and levels Shoyo with a blank look as though he can’t understand the hysterics. “It’s not like I’m asking you for an open relationship, just a blessing to explore what else is out there.” He rounds the kitchen counter and goes to rest his hand on his shoulder in a placating motion.
Shoyo is quick to swat the hand away.
“Dignified? You want me to be dignified? When I hear my boyfriend has been cheating on me?”
“Can you stop saying that? I wasn’t cheating–”
“Then what was it? Huh?” His voice breaks slightly, showing Tadashi the toll this argument is taking on him. “What were months of lunch dates and ‘Oh, I’m staying late working with Tsukishima’ or ‘Sorry, Tsukki ran into some problems, can we rain check our date’? What was all of that?” When he verbalizes it like that he feels almost idiotic for not realizing what was happening earlier. It was right in front of his eyes and he didn’t see it.
“He came onto me first! What was I supposed to do? What would you have done? If some hot guy sidled up to you every day at work? You can’t honestly tell me you wouldn’t–”
“I wouldn’t cheat,” Shoyo cuts him off. He can feel the dam cracking. “And I can’t believe you would do this now. Our flight to visit your family in Sendai for Christmas is in four days. I took three weeks off work for this! I cashed in all of my overtime credits!”
Tadashi proposed this trip three months ago. Shoyo thought this was going to be it. This was going to be when he finally proposed. After two and a half years of dating, they would finally put tying the knot into motion.
“Okay, yea, I guess after this I shouldn’t put you in a room with my family…or my high school friends.” He scratches behind his ear. He seems nervous about it, like this is something he’s just started realizing he should feel shame about. Like this would all come out and he’d be exposed for being a horrible person.
“Oh yea, now you decide to drop this on me. I already took off work and bought the plane tickets and planned all the gifts for your parents and grandparents! What am I supposed to do with all that now? Just toss it out with the trash?” He starts spiraling about all the money that he’s now wasted.
The dam finally breaks.
Tears start streaming down his face. He doesn’t even seem to notice, too focused on the tightness in his chest making it harder to breathe by the second. “You know what?” he holds his finger up in Tadashi’s face, silencing any response from him before he could even think about interrupting. “This isn’t worth it. Get out,” he grabs Tadashi by the shoulders and forcibly spins him toward the doorway. “If I never see or hear from you again it’ll be too soon.”
“Sweetheart, please–”
“Nope. Get. Out.” He says opening the door.
Tadashi doesn’t seem to see another way out aside from just following the lead. There’s that dimness, again.
Shoyo pushes the door closed with more force than is necessary. In the back of his mind he hopes it hits him.
Now that Tadashi’s gone the adrenaline starts to fade, leaving just this sudden emptiness. His head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. His skin feels like static. The tears start falling faster and his body starts shaking with sobs.
He ends up autopiloting back to his bed, curling under the blankets and silently hoping he’ll wake up in the morning and it would all just be a terrible dream.
He is not so lucky.
Shoyo spends the rest of the weekend curled up in his bed taking depression naps. He’s grateful for the time he called off work. Ripping his heart out straight from his chest would hurt less than this. He couldn’t imagine having to deal with this complete emptiness and having to deal with his work responsibilities. The only thing keeping the bed sores at bay is the need to empty his bladder and trips to raid his fridge like a feral raccoon.
He calls his sister first.
“Hello?”
“Natsu, you’ll never guess what happened,” he laughs a little ironically.
“Did that hag from work finally keel over? Ooh, no wait, did that Takeru kid finally quit? I know he’s been a real pain in the neck since the whole spreadsheet debacle resolved.”
Shoyo smiles wryly, even though Natsu can’t see it. “No,” he sighs. “I wish.”
“Okay, so then what could possibly have happened?”
“Umm…” Shoyo doesn’t know why he’s hesitating to share now. It’s not like he was the one who cheated. Tadashi’s actions shouldn’t reflect negatively on him.
Yet there’s a sinking feeling building in his chest that tells him that Tadashi cheated because you weren’t providing for him. The tears start streaming down his face again. Silently, this time, now far too exhausted to even cry with any amount of energy.
“Well…you see,” he starts, fingers gripping his phone tightly. He can hear how wet his voice sounds. He sniffles sharply, scrubbing under his nose to get rid of any drips. He licks his lips and gets a taste of the salty tears pooling in the corners. “It’s about Tadashi.”
“I knew it! I knew it! That good for nothing leech did something. Break up with him, he’s not worth it.”
Natsu says it with so much energy and passion it tells him she’s been holding onto this thought for far longer than she let on.
“Funny story, actually…” he starts.
He relays to her the whole sad story. Some of the details are fuzzy from being remembered through tears and brain static, but he thinks he paints a pretty good picture of his idiot ex-boyfriend.
“I’ll be honest, Sho, I always thought Tadashi was kind of a scumbag.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me until now? That would’ve been real helpful knowledge two years ago when I first introduced him to the family!”
“Well I didn’t want to intrude in case it was just little sister overprotective-ness. As much as I got bad vibes from him, you seemed happy, and that’s what mattered most to me.” She sounds a little guilty, like she wishes she had said something, that she had intruded.
Shoyo rolls his eyes. “Thanks, I guess. Better late than never.”
They talk more. Natsu carefully coaxes him back to sanity. Back to humanity, really. He hasn’t felt much like a real human person in the last few days. More like a wild beast of some sort, nesting before hibernation. But Natsu always has something going on that makes him laugh. She convinces him that he was too good for Tadashi, anyway.
“Yea, and anyone who would cheat on the Hinata Shoyo, my kickass big brother, wasn’t worth your time to begin with.”
That pretty effectively dries him up. He realizes his tears are wasted on wishing the traitor was still his. The concept of how much Tadashi sucked is really quite sobering. He mentally kicks himself for letting it go on so long.
In all honesty, he knew he didn’t really love Tadashi all that much anyway. Before the whole…situation, he considered Tadashi a consistent, reliable option. He was more scared of the unknown of being without Tadashi than of having to face the fact he was going to commit to someone he didn’t actually like all that much. But being forced into being alone made him sit and confront those feelings that have been simmering all this time.
When Natsu hangs up, Shoyo decides he needs to erase all traces of his sleazeball ex from his apartment. The sudden bout of clarity about who he’s really crying over, who he’s letting wreck his now three weeks of free time, kicks him into productivity to finally decontaminate his space.
He spends the next three hours picking through all the belongings in his apartment with a fine tooth comb. There was barely more than a trash bag’s worth of stuff in the end. Kind of pathetic for a two and half year long relationship that he had almost nothing to show for it.
Among the things is: an old mug that he debated smashing on sight, but ultimately decided not to in favor of not spending 30 minutes carefully cleaning ceramic shards out of the cracks and crevices of his flooring, a half dozen old mismatched socks that he has no idea how they got separated from their other halves; assorted ratty clothing that Tadashi would wear to bed when he stayed over; and a handful of photos that he had had printed and displayed around his apartment. He stares at the pile of holiday cards sitting on his dresser meant for Tadashi and his family, trying to decide what to do with them, also.
He texts Tobio—a friend from college that moved out of the city and now has a farm property about 10 miles outside city limits—to ask how long it would take to clear space for a bonfire. He gets a short text back telling him he could have a nice fire up by tonight, but asking what the occasion was. His phone is buzzing in his hands as soon as he finishes reading the text.
“What’s the bonfire for?” he asks off rip.
Shoyo goes through the unfortunate series of events for the second time today, much less tearful this time, thank God.
Shoyo can’t see Tobio on the other end of the line, but he can sense him nodding as he strings him along on this adventure. He offers to make an event of it, to invite friends and buy fixings for s’mores. Shoyo laughs at the idea, imagining a whole devil’s sacrament surrounding a bonfire of Tadashi’s belongings up in flames. He declines the offer for the gathering, but still asks for a bonfire to be built.
Putting all of Tadashi’s things into his car was easy enough, shoving the trash bag into his passenger seat. The cards meant for Tadashi’s family are shoved into the side of the bag, too. He’ll decide what exactly to do with them when the time comes.
He drives the arduous journey out of the city on a Sunday night to Tobio’s place. The drive affords him an opportunity to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of the holiday season. He could fly home and visit family for the first time since he introduced them to Tadashi; for the first time in years. He’d get to see Natsu and Mama in person again and catch up. Mama would be overjoyed at the prospect of new family pictures. And he could use the money from refunding the tickets he bought for him and Tadashi to buy himself a nice, cushy round trip home instead.
Shoyo’s planning for the holidays is interrupted by a stray cat in Tobio’s long driveway. He swerves over the gravel edges to avoid the creature, not knowing if his fragile mental health could handle a dead cat, too. Oh, thank God, he thinks as he sees the critter scamper off into the tree line.
Pulling up the rest of Tobio’s driveway was simple enough. He hauls his sack of miscellaneous junk over his shoulder as he carries it up the front porch steps like Santa Claus’ crappier cousin and rings the doorbell. Tobio opens the door in full winter weather attire—thick padded coat, well-worn beanie that Shoyo just knows he got as a freebie at a business conference, heavy jeans with wet hems from walking through the snow—no gloves, though. He sees the red and chapped skin of his hands as he rubs them together for warmth, blowing warm air into the hollow between them.
“Follow me,” he says, tipping his head to signal him to come in.
Shoyo follows the instruction and trails Tobio through his home and out the back door to the rest of his property. He sees the roaring bonfire that Tobio built, just for him. He lowers the trash bag of Tadashi’s things off his shoulder and admires the blaze for a moment.
“Fire’s ready for some sacrifices,” Tobio jokes.
Shoyo laughs dryly, looking down at the bag in his hand. “Do you think I should just give it back to him? I know I have stuff I want back, maybe I could send a friend to do a trade off.”
Tobio’s face screws up as he thinks. He gestures his hands like scales as he mentally weighs the pros and cons of both options. His crystal blue eyes scrunching up as though he came up with a particularly heinous con.
“I think the decision of whether or not to burn his belongings, that’s ultimately up to you. I do think it will allow you a clean break from him,” he says. He snaps a small stick in two and tosses both halves into the bonfire as if to solidify his point. “But, I think if you have any intention of getting things back from him, it would be a lot easier if you have some of his stuff to bargain.
He hums in agreement. How much are those old sweatshirts really worth to him…
Shoyo watches as cotton clothing burns in the fire. Flames lick at the threadbare t-shirts and sweat stained socks lying across the logs. He hears high pitched pinging sounds as the smashed pottery sings under the heat. The holiday cards for Tadashi’s family have been emptied of cash and gift cards and are slowly wilting under the dancing red light of the inferno. Across the way, he sees Tobio, his clear blue gaze reflecting the flames of the fire as he watches on. In his hands is the last photograph yet to be tossed into the pit. There’s a long moment of quiet only the crackling of the wood and the occasional sharp sounding whistle.
“To the man who will forever live on in infamy,” he toasts finally before crumpling up the photograph and tossing it in the fire with all the rest of his things. The photo curls in on itself as the edges catch. The smiling faces in the center of the image start to fade away as the darkness creeps over them.
Tobio walks over and wraps his arm around his shoulder, momentarily breaking Shoyo out of the hypnotic trance of watching the wreckage. He can’t help but think as he stands in front of the fire pit that this the warmest he’s probably going to feel for a long time.