Work Text:
Your call has been forwarded to voicemail.
The person you are trying to reach is not available.
At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up.
Voicemail
0171 58XXXXXX 04:48
05:11
At first, it’s quiet.
Isagi already knows who it is, but doesn’t know what it is that keeps him frozen in place, waiting for any decipherable, human sound to filter through the speaker. He tells himself if he abandons his phone on the pointy corner of his coffee table—with its lower edge protruding, dangerously so, threatening to tip over and hit the carpet with a muted thump—the words will come faster, while he’s as far away from it as possible.
In silence, he stands a couple inches from the armrest of the sofa where he could lean a hip against, perhaps a merciful close to a merry night—the first of the New Year. Weakened by the alcohol and loud music, after long hours of indulgence to the pulse of the crowd with the intensity of someone who needed to cut loose, his body protests with the tell-tale signs of soreness across every overworked joint. Add a mildly upset stomach.
It’s quiet. The apartment breathes in the same calm tone. Isagi’s heart clenches in agitation, the volume of its thumps gradually climbing in his ears, enough that it pierces from one strained, buzzing eardrum to the other.
Then, there’s the rustle of clothes, the audio scraping no differently than static. Accompanied by a wet sniffle, and ragged breathing undeniably heavy with the weight of grief.
“I don’t… I don’t know what I’ve made myself drink tonight. Or how—how much. Fuck…”
Kaiser’s voice cracks toward the end. Miserably. Words bent around the dizzy ripples of inebriation and an overly dry mouth, ethanol settling firmly on top of the wide surfaces of pristine, white teeth.
“I wanted to call, to—to talk to you for a moment. Wish you Happy New Year’s. And I didn’t even… I didn’t even—didn’t have your shitty number—goddamn it… goddamn it…”
Sorrow pours now, in choked down noises akin to sobbing. Something like successive sobs, but not quite.
Broken crying, restrained crying, deep from the core of his existence. Shattering the moment it comes into contact with the vulnerability of flesh and those scraped vocal cords that cradle shards of a ruined voice.
“I was looking for—I just. I just needed it, I don’t know, I felt like I should have it. And I didn’t, I fucking didn’t have it. And I didn’t even ask you for it the last—”
A shaky, steadying breath cuts in, followed by a thick swallow. Two trembling lips curling inward in agony to muffle the surge of a whimper, before it manages to creep in and show weakness. Conceal the evidence. Like instinct.
“I didn’t even. Didn’t even ask for it last time I saw you. Didn’t ask the past five years. I never thought that day would be the last time that I’d—I’d see you. Standing before me. Real, and facing me—I never thought, I…”
Tears shake free from the confines of puffy eyelids, the ducts that have been throwing them up in abundance; marking the start of an inconsolable overflow without an end.
Salt diluted in water, withering feelings watered down to heartache. Heartache tempered with alcohol.
“Had to… I ended up calling all seven people I have listed in my contacts begging for it. Can’t even remember what I was fucking saying. If I sounded dumb, shitty, and pathetic—which I’m—I’m sure I did.”
The pause sinks into the layers of reality as devastation. A deceitful calm before the storm of his undoing on his end of the line, where his pulse is beginning to spike, drawing attention to the panic-induced shudders of an imminent breakdown.
Cruel in all of its brilliance. The fall of the young emperor to knees that are, regrettably, not suitable to endure any more losses; defeat in the frequency of a dying star—that which Isagi has never heard before.
“But I remember the shaking. I was—My fingers were shaking trying to press ‘call’. Praying to some god you’d pick up—or at least—fuck—that it’d go to voicemail—that… That you’d—that you would… would… god damn it all…”
He’s brought his hand to his mouth, stifling deep gasps echoing through the digital channel of the speaker in Isagi’s phone as the manifestations of his anguish.
His shameful words; arranged through effort to produce the phrase of a mangled confession, glistening with the glory of childlike tears. Those tears of fragility that had Kaiser thinking Isagi must be delighted to hear, see, feel drop as he was recording his message.
“Even in this state, I can’t wish you the best. I don’t know what the best would be for you, Yoichi. But I’m—I am… I am shitty, and selfish, and limited even in the restriction I’ve… I’ve inflicted upon us. And, in my regret—”
Tears glide smooth down the punishing, steep slope of admission, they fall, and fall; rainfall turning into weightless snowflakes, the remainders of Kaiser’s fractured self scattered along lonely peaks awaiting their glacial damnation.
“…And I’m selfish—so, in my—my regret, I realized you’d be the best for me.”
Isagi lurches toward his phone with a nasty growl, veins nearly bursting apart at the command of the wrath in his boiling blood. He grabs it, fingers matching the stiffness of his set jaw, but he’s a second too late, and when Kaiser’s quivers continue resounding between foreign words, he is overcome with the urge to hurl it to the wall.
“I wish you’d stayed—”
Isagi was not the one who chose to leave, not the one who honored the distance like it was a vow on an imperial scroll—so he screams that to the digital signals of Kaiser vibrating in his phone, thumb hovering above the red button that can bring this act of mockery, draped in crystals of crocodile tears, to a close.
“—I wish you’d—you’d stayed where I could still see you, Yoichi.”
The sentence wraps up with the rawest, ugliest sob, drenched in something shockingly human as it claws out of his ever-bruised throat.
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry. I fucked up. I’ll miss you forever. Happy New Year.”
[beep-beep]