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The hallways in the hospital were a cruel labyrinth. At the best of times, the full-grown monsters called “adults” would swarm them and give him a place to hide, sneaking behind a tall pair of legs or crouching behind a parked gurney. He would still be lost, sure, but the chaos would ensure that anyone else without a hardwired lay of the land would be just as lost as him amidst the rumbling crowd and plain white-and-teal corridors, each distinguished from each other only by the different labels on the doors. Getting turned around was almost a guarantee in a roiling sea of putrid bodies. On good nights, Eito could use that to his advantage.
This was not a good night.
The hallways were stark, blindingly lit, echoing long and sustainable down corner after corner of empty tile. Nowhere to hide. No cover to blow. No chance of escape. The raucous pounding of shoes thudding heavy, fast, running after him grew louder with every new block his tiny legs would carry him, loud, loud, loud. Louder still were the voices, like gunfire and scratched blackboards, the voices of those monsters named Mom and Dad. Soon, they would catch up to him. They shrieked that they weren’t angry, just worried, just so concerned for their little boy, but he knew what their concern felt like—smothering gristle bruising his tender sides and yanking him off the ground and dragging him to some new chamber where he could rot in the cold, never certain when the next assault on his senses would come for him. They only ever dealt in lies.
He just had to keep running. His lungs burned with every inhale, never enough air to draw in before he was heaving it out again. As if the halls weren’t doing a bang up job of making him lightheaded and dizzy on their own. More than once, he tripped and fell and his knees slid painfully down the slippy, grabby floor, and they grew purpler each time, and he just had to ignore it and keep running and crying and running and crying and running running running running--
Suddenly, he was curled up on his side in the dark. He gasped for air, sat up straight, shot his eyes back and forth across the room. The hospital was gone. The monsters weren’t on his trail anymore. The ground beneath him was soft, and not the ground at all--it was a bed, and he wasn’t its only occupant. A familiar monster blinked open its striking blue eyes from its position at his side, arms draped around his hips.
Right. He wasn’t in the hospital. He was at the Last Defense Academy. He was in Takumi’s room, in Takumi’s bed. There was nothing for him to be afraid of…
…so why was he still trembling?
“Aotsuki,” came Takumi’s sleepy, scraggly voice from under the blankets. “S’too early… What are you getting up for..?”
Eito sighed, leaning back against the wall and taking a deep breath (at first through his nose, which he regretted, and then through his mouth). Every time he blinked, that disorienting haze of white greeted him. Every little noise outside was the sound of his parents’ footsteps chasing after him.
(Maybe he should breathe through his nose, after all. Takumi’s scent, as foul as it was, was impossible for his frantic senses to misidentify.)
Takumi wriggled out from under the blankets, propping himself up on a sinewy elbow so he could get a better look at him. He withdrew the arm once flopped gracelessly over his lap and settled his hand on his shin, instead: a less intimate place to be touched. Eito appreciated the gesture, even if Takumi was repulsive either way.
“Aotsuki..?”
He’d forgotten that Takumi had even asked him a question. He must have been more out of it than he thought. Takumi was probably expecting a response from him. Eito shook his head as if it would rid himself of the monsters crawling out of his hindbrain. It didn’t work, but he spoke anyway. He was usually pretty good at that.
“I’m not getting up,” he rasped. His throat felt dry--had he been hyperventilating in his sleep? “I’m just…”
Finally, Takumi’s shambling form emerged from the nest of blankets and rose to Eito’s height, or as close as he could get to it. He sat up, Eito reminded himself. He just sat up normally. The warped hand on his shin came up to rest on his arm, as gently as one would touch a butterfly’s wing. The feeling twisted in Eito’s gut. He still couldn’t quite tell the difference between compassion and pity.
“Another nightmare?” Takumi asked. Eito nodded stiffly in response. Takumi sat up a little straighter. “What about?”
Eito shot an incredulous glare at the wretched beast attached to his hip. What was he so interested for, anyway? Every time Eito woke gasping or screaming in the night, it was the same routine. Takumi would lift his groggy little head, take a moment to gather his bearings, then ask him what he was dreaming about. As if it mattered. As if it changed anything.
If it doesn’t matter either way, Takumi had said to him the first time they argued this point, then you might as well tell me.
At the very least, sharing the details was a shorter and less frustrating conversation than having the same dead-end argument for a fifth time. It wasn’t like there was anything he stood to gain from talking about it. It was just easier to let Takumi get his way. That was all there was to it. Eito shifted his weight forward, averting his gaze to his lap.
“I was in the hospital again,” he said. His voice came out smaller than he intended it to. Bogged down as he was by the imagined memories still flashing behind his eyes, his body didn’t quite feel like the right size yet. He wished it wasn’t such a familiar feeling. “I think I was a kid. Everything seemed so… big.”
Takumi’s eyes bugged all the way out of their sockets. Eito did his best not to wince in response.
“The hospital? Like, Kamukura General Hospital?” Takumi seemed more alert now, all of the drowsiness sucked out of his voice. “Do you think it might have been a memory?”
Eito shook his head. “No,” he said, “not Kamukura General Hospital. I think those kinds of dreams are exclusive to Shouma-kun.”
“Oh,” Takumi said lamely, settling back into his spot on the bed. Eito rolled his eyes.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he groused. “I’ll try to have a more relevant nightmare next time.”
“No, no, it’s not like that!” Takumi quickly got himself back into position to fuss over him. It was annoying, but not intolerable. “I’m not disappointed or anything. I just, uh… felt kind of stupid for assuming.”
“For what it’s worth, Takumi-kun, you would be stupid regardless.”
Takumi smacked him on the arm with a huff, which made Eito feel better than anything he had said so far. Getting under Takumi’s skin was one of life’s simple pleasures. He could always count on it when all else failed.
“Whatever…” Takumi said. “So it was the hospital you grew up in, then?”
He really couldn’t leave well enough alone, could he? Talking about it will make you feel better, Takumi had said to him, the first time he woke up at his side in a cold sweat. What would he know? Eito had been dealing with nightmares by himself for his entire life. Maybe he’d had the instinct to babble on about it after the fact when he was a child, but he’d long since grown out of it. It wasn’t like he had anyone to indulge him in something so useless, anyway. Takumi, the childish menace that he was, just couldn’t see that Eito wasn’t stuck at that juvenile stage of comfort-seeking like he was. It was obnoxious.
…and yet, Eito found himself nodding and drawing his knees up to his chest. Only because it was easier to play along, of course.
“One of them, anyway,” Eito said, resting his chin atop his knee. “Or some amalgamation of all of them. Now that I’m awake, the details are fuzzy.”
Takumi rested his big, stupid head on Eito’s shoulder without asking first, but there was something paradoxically soothing about the feeling of writhing tapeworms through the thin, sweaty fabric of his shirt. It stood in direct contrast to the sterile prison of the hospital with all its cold, hard edges and suffocating right angles. The swirling disgust in his gut reminded him that this was real.
“What was happening?” Takumi asked. Troublesome little worm, always sticking his nose in places it didn’t belong. Eito leaned his head against Takumi’s.
“I was running from my parents.” He could still hear the echoes of their wretched voices reverberating between the narrow walls of the corridor. “I never saw them, but I could hear them. They were always just one step behind me, just one turn of the corner away.”
Takumi furrowed his brow, clearly trying to fit some puzzle pieces together in his empty mind.
“You were running from them… because they look like monsters to you, right?”
Eito narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t expecting Takumi to understand. He’d lived a charmed life back in the Tokyo Residential Complex, with a normal home and a family that cared about him. It was only natural that he would hear the word “parents” and instinctively associate it with safety. It made sense that he would leap to the shallowest conclusion to explain why Eito would feel otherwise. None of it came as a surprise at all.
Still, it stung a little.
“I was running from them because I didn’t know what they would do to me.” A strange sort of pain bloomed in his chest, like saying it out loud for the first time made it more real. This is why I don’t dwell on it, he thought. What good would talking about it do? It wouldn’t retroactively change the way his parents saw him as a burden to be disposed of. It wouldn’t turn back time and allow him to scoop the terrified little boy he had been into his arms and tell him that they were all wrong. It wouldn’t fix anything. It wouldn’t make the nightmares go away.
“Aotsuki…” came Takumi’s repulsive voice, gentler than usual. “Hey, don’t cry…”
What? Eito touched his fingers to his cheek. They came away wet. When had that happened? He sniffled and scrubbed at his face with his sleeve, taking a quiet breath to collect himself. Takumi, as worthless as he was at damn near everything, certainly had a talent for making him lose his composure. It was one of the many things that made him so dangerous.
(And yet, Eito always felt himself drawn in by him, further and further each day. He wasn’t going to dwell on that, either.)
Eito was about to open his mouth to retort, something like, “if you don’t want me to cry, then why are you pushing me to talk about something so painful,” but Takumi cut him off before he could start.
“They can’t treat you like that anymore.” He sounded so resolute that it almost didn’t sound stupid. Obviously, they couldn’t treat him any way anymore. They were--
“Even if they were still around,” Takumi said. Eito’s heart froze in place. Sometimes, it felt like Takumi had the ability to read minds. Maybe it came with being a time traveler. “I wouldn’t let them leave you all alone like that.”
“Really, now?” Eito asked dubiously, clenching his jaw. “How would you stop them, exactly? If they threw me away like I was trash and left me to rot in some new hospital, how do you propose you would make that better?”
“I’m good at finding people,” Takumi said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. “I’d find you, and then you wouldn’t be alone anymore.”
Such a profoundly stupid answer, lofty and immature and useless… but Eito could feel the rabbitlike heartbeat of that child racing down the halls of his nightmare, and he could feel the way Takumi’s words settled it. It felt like Takumi was talking to a deeper part of him that hadn’t yet lost hope in impossible promises. Eito unfurled from his huddled stance and leaned more solidly against the hideous ogre at his side.
“You’re just as much of a hopeless idiot as I thought,” Eito said, but Takumi was well accustomed by now to hearing past his words. Content with his efforts, he curled up at his side, burrowing into the blankets once more as his characteristic drowsiness reclaimed him. He was smiling. Eito was smiling, too, though he would never admit it.
“You’re welcome, Aotsuki.”
Eito lay down beside him and closed his eyes. The hospital wasn’t creeping there behind his eyelids, waiting for him. His parents’ voices were drowned out by Takumi’s quiet breathing. Whether he liked it or not, he was safe, now.
“Goodnight, Takumi-kun.”
“Night, Aotsuki,” Takumi mumbled. “Sweet dreams.”
Somehow, Eito knew that they would be.