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“Look,” A puff of smoke slithers into the air around him as he opens his mouth, surrounding him in a suffocating embrace. He closes his eyes and breathes in the white poison he exhaled, relishes the dirtiness of it all.
He says it to try and reason, says it in search of some little give, some little hope and some little proof that he isn’t all the dirt and poison and disgusting fraud they said he is. He said he is. He thinks he is.
He searches, across the folds of his mind, and finds nothing.
“But there’s nothing to look at.” He says again after another inhale, to no one in particular, in some form of conceding.
It’s dark out. The alleyway is void of any street lights, except for the soft and somber infrared sensors he can barely make out in those security cameras people think will keep the criminals at bay. Some of them even fakes, not wired up to anything at all, running on a single double A battery inside.
They don’t work, he knows, if his time on the field has taught him anything.
They don’t work, he knows, because look at him standing here, in front of their buildings. A criminal.
How is he supposed to face Hinako now?
The cigarette extinguishes, and he’s thankful for the warmness it induces in him. He doesn’t know if it is actually the cigarettes themselves, but that doesn’t really matter now.
It never really mattered. If only he could hammer that thought into his head, have those words wrap around his neck and choke out his voice when those other words, the meaningless ones, the ones that didn't matter, tumbled out of his mouth.
Try as he might, he cannot disregard the entire mishap as impulse. That would be doing a disservice to the years of dark and disgusting and downright antisocial fantasies he’d had of them together. Years of dreaming of this day, dreaming of the way they describe confessions in the romance novels he was never supposed to read but did once in a moment of rebellion in his childhood, the way it's supposed to make you lighter.
He thinks the way his soul feels like lead is only further proof of the utter wrongness in him.
He remembers when he first asked Hinako out, a bouquet in hand right outside their workplace, on a Friday, their coworkers swooning by the door, the sun on the very edge of the horizon, painting the whole city in a warm shade of orange. He remembers distinctly the way he felt after she tentatively accepted both the bouquet and his proposition. He remembers the emptiness.
The lies. The hollow guilt of apathy and the way it slowly enveloped him into a never ending performance.
He remembers consoling himself of his oddity by supposing that this was not real, that this was a performance, and thus, he should not have expected to feel the warmth and lightness and all the happiness the honest lovers in those novels did.
He did not deserve such nice things for his lies.
He cannot blame it all on lies anymore.
It takes some time for him to return, to go home to his wife, to the careful narrative he spent years orchestrating only to destroy in a moment's weakness. Well, several years of weaknesses.
Weak. Wasn't that what his father said about him?
It takes some time, but ultimately, he’s standing by the apartment door he spent the last decade returning to, playing house with a woman he appreciates truly with the whole of his body, except for where it matters.
He stands in that corridor for several minutes, and turns away, and takes the elevator back down again.
The despair gnaws at him. The way his lips formed those words. The shape of it, the vowels, the enunciation, everything replays in his head in an endless loop.
“That’s disgusting”
And it is so, isn’t it? It is very much so. A criminal. A mistake. A fraud. A liar.
It is so. That’s what he’s thought, what he’s always thought.
He wonders what Hinako will think, if he tells her. He won’t tell her. She doesn’t need to know. There is no use pouring gasoline on a bushfire, he thinks. He tries to take those words and string them around his throat, tries to wrap them around it so tightly that his voice becomes voiceless and his id can no longer act so irrationally, so driven by desire.
He wants to know. He wants so desperately to know. He wants, in some twisted fashion, to see the look of horror and disappointment and fury on her face, on her precious face, and he wants the proof again that he’s truly, truly…
Those lips and the way they wrap around the air, the way they form the words echoes in his mind still.
Disgusting.
There’s also a part of him delusional enough still to hope for comfort.
He won’t tell her. He won’t indulge the twisted monster inside him more. He will not tell her. He cannot tell her.
He breathes in the fresh air around him. It is still cold at night, even in July.
The fresh air feels like barbed wire in his lungs, clear enough to cut through the haze with which he hid behind.
He chuckles a little, because who is he kidding?
He walks back into his building like a criminal on death row, a new sense of determination and certainty filling him. He marches up the corridor to the elevator with the same dread as one marches up to the gallows. The only difference now is this is entirely self imposed.
She doesn’t have to know, rationally he can understand this, sees this fact clearly. It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter. The same words that should be choking his voice out of his lungs are the same that reaches deep into his throat, into his heart and soul and fishes out the things that should not matter anymore.
She shouldn’t have to know.
The key is in the lock and he twists the handle and pushes the trapdoor beneath him open with a lever.
“Kazui! You’re back!” Hinako rushes towards the door in her pyjamas, a soft anger mixed with relief and affectionate annoyance. “I told you to stop drinking so much. It’s nearly twelve!” She nags as she ushers him into the stage he’d been living in for a decade and more.
“Hinako,” his voice is distant even to himself. The rope around his throat tightens.
“Yes?” she answers as she props him down the sofa, about to pour him a glass of water.
“I need to tell you something.”
He wonders later, why if it was him hung on the gallows, that she was the one who died?