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Riku once joked, “If I told you to die, would you?” It was a throwaway line, tossed in the middle of some stupid argument about laundry and forgotten dinner plans. But Yushi didn’t laugh. He just looked at him, silently, the way someone looks at the sky before they kneel to pray.
“If you asked me to,” he said, voice quiet, "I'd thank you for letting it be you"
Eight years. Eight years of growing up together and growing into each other. If you asked Yushi where he ended and Riku began, he couldn’t tell you—he’d say there’s no point searching for a line that doesn’t exist. Every breath he’s taken for the past eight years has had Riku’s name in its lungs.
Their love was never clean. They fought. God, they fought hard—slammed doors, walked away, said things that scraped their throats raw. But the thing about them? They always came back. Not out of habit. Not out of fear. Out of starvation. Being apart felt like walking around with no ribs to hold their hearts in place.
When Yushi loves, it’s not gentle. It’s absolute. Riku is his gravity, his altar, his god and his grave. If Riku told him to bleed, he’d ask where. If he told him to stop breathing, he’d kiss him first and thank him for the honor. And if he ever had to die, he’d want Riku to be the last thing his eyes held and the first thing his ghost looked for.
But it’s not one-sided. Riku tries to act like he’s the stable one, the reasonable one, but he’s just as wrecked. Every time they fight, he spends the night telling himself to stay strong, to let Yushi come to him first—but by morning, he’s the one trembling at the doorframe, whispering, "Are we okay?"
Yushi always smiles at that. Always opens his arms. "We're always okay,” he says, even when they’re both still bleeding in places they can’t name.
They’ve learned to destroy and rebuild in the same breath. After every fight, they love each other better—not cleaner, but deeper. Like scar tissue that makes the skin thicker, harder to tear.
Yushi sleeps with his face turned toward Riku’s heartbeat. Riku wakes up with his fingers locked in Yushi’s shirt. They cannot function without the other nearby. Even silence feels wrong if it’s not shared.
The world calls it codependency, obsession, something unhealthy. Let them. Yushi doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. His life is a wire stretched between Riku’s heart and his own, and if that wire snaps, he already knows he’ll fall willingly.
And Riku? Riku knows if he ever lost Yushi, he wouldn’t survive it. Not in the dramatic sense. Not suicide. Just—emptying out. He’d keep walking, keep working, keep existing, but something vital would rot inside him until he was just a body wearing clothes Yushi once touched.
They don’t say forever. Forever is a word. What they have is breath. Spine. Pulse.
And every beat says the same thing
If you fall, I die with you. If you break, I bleed too. If you ask for my life, take it — I am already yours.
Eight years, and it still hurts how much they love. Not the kind of hurt that needs fixing. The kind that reminds them they’re alive only because the other one is.
Yushi once said, “If you ever kill me, do it gently.” Riku answered, “If I ever kill you, it’ll be be because I died first.”
And they both meant it.