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Hikaru knows there is something wrong with Yoshiki today. Well, something more than the current normal, anyways. He’s been weird since Hikaru told him they couldn’t have lunch together because he had something to handle. Hikaru hadn’t wanted to tell him what exactly that was, given Yoshiki’s history of jealousy. And yet based on his behavior ….
Hikaru sighs. “Did you follow me? At lunch today?” He tries not to sound accusatory. The last thing he needs is for Yoshiki to feel attacked lest he lose control of himself and his body.
They’re sitting in Hikaru’s room after school, both sitting on the floor with their backs resting against it. They have been doing their own things so far, Yoshiki reading a manga while Hikaru half heartedly played a game on his phone, now set aside and forgotten.
Yoshiki keeps his eyes on the manga spread across his lap he has been staring holes into while worrying at his bottom lip. His long fingers twitch, hesitating before turning the page Hikaru isn’t sure he actually read. “What makes you ask that?” he finally asks.
The white haired boy can’t help but snort. Yoshiki is probably at least slightly annoyed by that, given how irritable he currently is. “Well, I saw you, for one,” Hikaru starts easily, lazily. Even if he intends to attempt to reassert his boundaries and need for Yoshiki to listen when he tells him no, right now is clearly not the time to come in too domineering.
And truly, if he wasn’t trying so hard to get Yoshiki to respect more of his boundaries and wishes at the moment it would’ve actually been a little funny. Yoshiki clearly still forgets just how tall he is. Hikaru had seen him, trying so hard to make himself small. He hadn’t said anything at the time because the girl who had asked to speak with him couldn’t see Yoshiki, and Hikaru figured drawing attention to him would make her too uncomfortable.
He still feels bad that her confession was heard by someone she hadn’t meant to hear it. He also feels bad that she had an audience for her rejection, too. At least she’ll never know, and Hikaru is sure Yoshiki would never say anything to anyone else. He probably wouldn’t even had brought it up if Hikaru hadn’t.
Yoshiki’s cheeks flush at the admission, but he doesn’t say anything he defend himself yet. “So if you’re upset about the confession, don’t be. You heard me reject her. Nothing is going to change, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Hikaru figures it’s best to reassure the insecure boy first.
“You told her you weren’t in a place to date right now,” Yoshiki finally says. He still won’t meet Hikaru’s eyes, so maybe he has some shame about openly referencing a conversation he wasn’t supposed to hear. “If things were different right now, would you date her?” This time, Yoshiki does look at him.
His gaze is intense, Hikaru can see the red that shows through sometimes now. Sweat beads at Hikaru’s forehead as he wants to look away but refuses to. He feels like he’s walking on thin ice and takes a few moments longer than usual to choose his words. “I don’t think so. I don’t really know her, I’m not interested in dating someone I don’t know.” He hopes it’s enough to avoid upsetting Yoshiki. Luck is not on his side.
“So if you knew her and she asked you out, you’d say yes?” Yoshiki immediately follows up with.
Hikaru closes his eyes with a sigh. “I didn’t say that.” Why was he so caught up on this?
“You didn’t not say it, though,” Yoshiki replies, sounding both insistent and whiny all at once.
“Dude, I don’t want to fight with you. I told her no, there’s no reason to talk over hypotheticals.” Especially not if they made Yoshiki so glum. It is clear however that Yoshiki is not satisfied with that.
“I feel like I need to know,” he mumbles. “It makes me feel so sick when I think about it, can’t you just tell me for sure?” Hikaru wants to comment on the ridiculousness of asking him to give a solid answer on a hypothetical situation.
He focuses on a different aspect instead. “What do you mean it makes you sick? What part?” It’s hard, increasingly at times, to follow Yoshiki’s thought processes. “Wait, is it me dating?”
Yoshiki is too dependent on him in general. He hates to share Hikaru’s attention, it would make sense. Based on the flush of the dark haired boys face, he’s spot on.
Yoshiki nods eventually. “Yeah, it makes me feel so … gross. But if I don’t need to worry about it I don’t want to.”
The use of ‘gross’ makes Hikaru’s eyebrow raise slightly. Sick and gross? A little rude, Hikaru finds himself thinking. What’s so gross about someone wanting to date him? Maybe Yoshiki has decided romantic love is gross?
“Uh, gross? Sick?” Hikaru asks, waiting for Yoshiki to elaborate. He doesn’t comment on the last part of what he said.
Yoshiki looks frustrated as he tries to find his words. “Yeah, I don’t like the way I feel when I think about it. Yoshiki felt it too, I think. It’s weird. Sometimes the emotions feel doubled. It feels so, distressing, I guess.” The mention of Yoshiki throws Hikaru off.
He forgets, sometimes, that Yoshiki has access to those thoughts and feelings. Yoshiki felt sick, distressed when he thought about Hikaru dating?
“I think that’s jealousy,” Hikaru supplies. It’s a guess, one that leaves him more confused than before. Yoshiki could’ve dated if he wanted to. He was too insecure about his moles to notice how girls had looked at him. “I don’t know why Yoshiki would’ve felt that way, I mean I guess I do. He never did see that girls thought he was so cute and mysterious or whatever.”
Yoshiki looks unimpressed, brows pinched together. “It’s not like that. It’s not about that.” Yoshiki looks like he’s thinking, connecting dots. How he can look so annoyed with Hikaru for not knowing when he just figured it out himself is a mystery. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Hikaru scoffs. “I think I know Yoshiki well enough to parse through why he’d feel that way.” He hopes it doesn’t show that he’s second guessing himself, feeling unsure.
Yoshiki shakes his head. “You don’t get it,” he whimpers as he presses the palms of his hands against his eyes.
“What makes you so sure?” Hikaru asks, a tinge of annoyance in his words now. He’s the human being here, not Yoshiki.
Yoshiki shoots him a look filled with so much bitterness it borders on resentment. Yoshiki had never looked at him like that before and it knocks the air out of his lungs to see such a look on that face, directed at him. “He knew it so I know it. And he’s so sure it used to keep him up at night.”
Unable to help himself, Hikaru takes a step back at the intensity of the look and of the words. “You gotta help me understand what you’re talking about here, man. I don't really understand how things got so intense.” He says, noticing the way Yoshiki’s red eyes fill with tears again at his words.
The dark haired boy doesn’t bother to wipe the tears from his face now. “I have all these feelings all the time and they’re so strong. I don’t know what ones are mine and what ones are Yoshiki’s most of the time,” Yoshiki starts, voice wet. Hikaru is just grateful it’s still tears and not something else spilling out of his eyes, splitting his skin…
“But when it comes to you,” he continues while refusing to meet Hikaru’s eyes. “I trust his thoughts, his feelings. With all the time I have spent with you and all the memories I have gone through, I don’t think you’ll get it.”
It hurts, knowing that there is anything Yoshiki ever felt like he couldn’t tell Hikaru about. And it hurts more, makes him angry, that some thing, some monster, knows something about Yoshiki that he doesn’t. As if this thing could understand Yoshiki better than Hikaru could. As if it has the right to know something so personal that Yoshiki didn’t even want to confide it in to Hikaru, his near life-long companion?
It’s not fair. None of this is fair. And maybe that makes him childish, but isn’t he still young enough to be? Doesn’t he deserve to be a little childish here?
Tears spring to his eyes now, too. “That’s not fair, that you get to use his thoughts, his feelings, against me.” Hikaru can’t argue against something he’s not a party to. “He never…. He never shared some of that with me, I guess more than I thought.”
What all did Yoshiki keep from him? Keep to himself? Hikaru’s vision blurs as more tears fall, his thoughts continuing to race. Why didn’t Yoshiki think Hikaru could take it? That he wouldn’t get it? Why didn’t he give him the chance to prove him wrong?
Hikaru is pulled from his thoughts and back to the present at the feeling of soft fingers under his eyes, wiping his tears away. Yoshiki looks even more distraught than before.
“I’m not trying to use it against you, I promise I’m not. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Yoshiki rambles, his own cheeks still wet with tears as well. “I’m lashing out at you for something I started. I’m sorry. It’s just so much. I can’t handle it.”
Hikaru reaches a hand up to cup Yoshiki’s cheek, thumb wiping at his tears in turn. He didn’t get to prove himself to Yoshiki, but he can prove himself now. “I can. I can handle it,” he promises. And whatever it is, he will. Because this weighed on his Yoshiki, too. He will prove he could’ve done it for him, if given the chance.
“I just don’t know how he did it, how he kept it all inside,” Yoshiki admits, learning forward to rest his forehead against Hikaru’s shoulder. Under normal circumstances, Hikaru would tease him about the uncomfortable position, about how the lanky boy was much too tall to be hunching like that. But for now, Hikaru wouldn’t say anything.
Instead, Hikaru brings his hand back up, this time to the back of Yoshiki’s neck. He slips his fingers into silky black hair as the other continues. “He… he loved you so much.” Hikaru’s fingers freeze for a millisecond and his heart drops before he resumes once again. Yoshiki loved him.
Of course he loved him. Hikaru loved him too. They knew each other since they were little boys. But Yoshiki loved him.
“He loved you so much, it felt like it was overflowing, cause there was no where to put it. You couldn’t know, he couldn’t show it. He felt so much shame.” The words are tumbling out of Yoshiki now like a river, seemingly unable to stop. “It felt like such a heavy burden. Not that it was you, just the feelings themself.“
A burden, Hikaru thinks. How much it must have hurt to feel so much that it turned into a burden. Yoshiki basically speaks his mind for him, “No wonder he was so sad all the time, so exhausted. I don’t know what to do with all of these feelings.”
Yoshiki had become more reserved in the months before his death. Hikaru had noticed, of course. He noticed everything about Yoshiki. At least, he thought he had. But he had never been able to figure out exactly what was getting to his friend. He had tried to drop hints nearly constantly that Yoshiki could tell him anything.
Of course Yoshiki hadn’t felt like he could tell Hikaru this. Hikaru understands this. He is well aware of the thoughts and attitudes of the majority of their community, and how Yoshiki himself knew the belief to be stupid. But he also knows how aware Yoshiki was at all times of how his family is already viewed and why the thought of adding to that would be unbearable.
Hikaru wonders for a moment, feeling selfish for thinking of himself in this situation, if Yoshiki never told him not because he was worried about his feelings not being reciprocated, but because Hikaru wouldn’t want to be friends with him anymore? He’s hit with a feeling of despair at the realization that he will never get to convince Yoshiki that there was nothing he could’ve done to make him not want to be his friend anymore.
Hikaru has to gather himself before he can respond. “I wish that he had trusted me enough to tell me. To let me try and convince him he had nothing to be ashamed of. That neither him nor his feelings were a burden. Or to at least let me carry some of its weight with him.”
To be honest, he had never really considered the idea of a romantic relationship between them. But, in the spirit of still being honest, if Yoshiki had confessed … Hikaru can’t say he would’ve turned him down immediately. Hikaru had never considered a guy in that way before at all. Yoshiki was different, though. If he knew it was an option ….
Hikaru’s dad told him to marry the girl most important to him, but he always thought of Yoshiki in those moments. He never allowed himself to think about how even as a teenager and having heard the spiel a million times, Hikaru couldn’t ever imagine anyone ever being more important to him than Yoshiki.
Yoshiki is silent for longer than normal in a conversation but manages to find his words eventually. “He did trust you, Hikaru,” he tells him first, with deep sincerity, likely after realizing how hurt Hikaru felt about Yoshiki not trusting him in any capacity. “But he knew you didn’t like boys and having to reject him would make your friendship awkward for at least awhile.”
Hikaru agrees that it would have been a little awkward between them if he had to reject him. “I’ve never given much thought to my sexuality before, to be honest,” Hikaru admits. “But I wish Yoshiki had given me the chance to think about it.”
Yoshiki’s head snaps up off Hikaru’s shoulder in an instant at his words. “What do you mean? You like girls,” he says, sounding the most confused Hikaru has heard yet. Despite the confused tone and expression, it’s clear Yoshiki believes what he’s said wholeheartedly.
“Yeah,” Hikaru shrugs. “But that’s just how it is.” He regrets the words as soon as they leave his mouth, watching Yoshiki’s eyebrows shoot up, gearing up an ‘I told you so, I knew you wouldn't get it’. Hikaru doesn’t allow him the chance. “That’s not what i meant, I mean I have never really had a reason to think about if I like boys, too. But if it was Yoshiki that made me have to think about it, well….”
Yeah, Hikaru thinks. If Yoshiki had asked him if he likes boys, he would’ve had the realization that not just boys, but Yoshiki.
A wave of devastation washes over Hikaru as he has the realization now. As he’s forced to think about what he never could bring himself to before. Yoshiki drowned in shame and anxiety and silence unnecessarily. Hikaru could have, and gladly would have, carried that shame and anxiety - maybe even alleviate some of it eventually.
He will never get the chance. Hikaru will never get to tell Yoshiki he loved - loves him, that every time he thinks of the person most important to him he has always pictured him and it’ll never be anyone else. It’s a grief he wasn’t expecting or prepared for. Before he can stop it, a sob wracks his body.
“Oh,” Yoshiki says quietly. He seems to understand what Hikaru’s sudden sobs mean now and reaches out to pull him into his arms. Hikaru goes willingly. He clings to Yoshiki with a grip that leaves his knuckles white. Yoshiki holds him just as tight, tucked to his chest.
“I’m sorry,” Yoshiki whispers into his hair repeatedly. Hikaru knows it’s not his fault. Tries not to feel resentment that he’s not his Yoshiki. “I’m so fucking sorry, Hikaru.”
‘Yeah,’ Hikaru thinks, burrowing closer. ‘Me too.’