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It took several minutes for Rui to realize what was going on.
He had woken up at…maybe eleven in the morning, judging by the sunlight streaming in gently through the curtains. That was not surprising. No, that was commonplace, even relatively early by his standards! The most ordinary part of…whatever was going on right now.
He wasn’t an exceptionally late riser by most definitions, but he had always been the sort of person to stay up into the darkest hours of the night to finish up whatever he was working on, and pay off his sleep debt by sleeping in as long as his body needed the morning after. Yes, it was probably going to mess up his sleep schedule horribly, but he was more productive at night!
Anyway, he woke up alone most days. Being polyamorous, you would probably expect his chances of waking up next to one of his lovers to be triple that of someone with only one romantic partner. Unfortunately, all three of them tended to wake up at respectable, ordinary hours. Truly, he was heartbroken.
Or, more accurately, he usually was.
Because for some unexplainable reason, this morning, he woke up to all three of his partners curled up around him.
Emu lay on his stomach, her chest flush with his abdomen like a sort of weighted blanket. Deep pressure therapy wise, she wasn’t too bad, all things considered. Nene was next to him, lying on her side, head leaning against his shoulder, her breathing steady. Were they really still asleep? This late in the morning?
Tsukasa, meanwhile, was a whole other story. The blond was sprawled across the bed, an arm haphazardly thrown over Rui, his face buried in Rui’s chest in what was most likely a poor attempt to hide the excitement on his face. He was, after all, clearly not asleep, if the way he was practically vibrating with excitement said anything.
It wasn’t that Tsukasa was a bad actor. Far from it, in fact! Rui knows firsthand, better than perhaps anyone else, just exactly how committed to his craft the smaller man was. Tsukasa was incredibly talented, and put in the work a hundredfold. Ordinarily, if this was in a play, he would have managed a stone-cold poker face regardless of the scenario. He was, most likely, most definitely, just incredibly excited.
But for what?
Rui decided to “wake up” Tsukasa first.
He gently grabbed his partner’s shoulder, shaking him with just enough force to normally wake the blond man up.
“Tsukasa-kun? Good morning, I rarely see you up this late. Is something the matter?”
Said Tsukasa-kun immediately jumped up from his faux sleep so quickly it was comical. At the exact same time, both girls got up as well, and Rui found himself enveloped in a group hug.
Now he was really confused.
“...is something the problem?”
Tsukasa, Nene, and Emu all stared at him like he had three heads.
Now they were all confused.
Then, almost shyly, a descriptor Rui never thought he would use to describe the pink haired ball of energy he had the pleasure of seeing every day:
“...isn’t today Rui-kun’s birthday?”
Oh.
Well, that was embarrassing, wasn’t it?
Truthfully, birthdays had never really meant much to Rui.
What did birthdays mean to young children, anyway? Parties, hanging out with friends. At that age, Rui had neither friends nor parties, so there really wasn’t any purpose in getting excited for those things.
In fact, the thought of them actually made him feel more miserable, because that was just another experience he missed out on in his life. For that reason, he tried not to think about his own birthday too much. It was just another day to him.
Whenever he confessed that to a curious grown-up, they would always think of it as something cute. Proof he was “so much more mature” than everyone else.
(Proof he would never be like everyone else.)
In middle school, he didn’t exactly celebrate his birthday, either. It wasn’t a sad thing, not anymore. By that time, he had long accepted his fate of loneliness, of isolation. After some time, one realizes it is pointless to cry.
At that time, he was far too occupied with keeping himself alive to care about things like birthdays. Every single day was spent fighting against everyone that hated him, all those classmates, all those bullies, all those intrusive thoughts in his head that refused to shut up no matter what he did.
Who cared if he managed another year around the sun? That felt more like a personal failure rather than an achievement.
Back then, on his birthdays he barely talked to anyone. Not his classmates, not even the girl on the rooftop, the only person he offered more than a few perfunctory words to.
His parents could tell that his mental state was perpetually on the edge of teetering, ready to decline drastically from what it already was at any moment, and wouldn’t push when he didn’t say anything about wanting to celebrate his birthday “properly”, whatever “proper” may have been.
For those reasons, it was quite wise to assume that he never really cared much about his birthday. Not for the first sixteen years of his life, at least.
When he met Wonderlands x Showtime, he was a few months from his seventeenth birthday. By the time that passed, they had already grown close, and he got to experience his first proper birthday celebration.
He remembers crying that night.
Not the way he used to cry as a child, when he realized that he was never, that he could never, be normal. That no matter what he did, no matter how hard he worked, how desperately he screamed and cried and clawed with bloodied fingernails, he would never get to achieve that which everyone else had thanklessly, effortlessly attained without trying.
Not the way he used to cry when he was in middle school. Back when he passed his hopeless existence praying that every last forcefully-suppressed sob would be his last, hoping desperately that the agony of his every second would one day pass, lift, dissipate, through whatever method the universe decided to employ.
These tears felt different, somehow. Alone, in the dark of the Kamishiro family garage he managed to slowly claim as his room over the course of multiple years, his phone still lit up with pictures, videos, birthday wishes he hadn’t swiped away when they appeared as notifications from people he could consider acquaintances, maybe even friends, he felt like he truly mattered.
He supposed it didn’t really mean much to them. To his acquaintances (god, that word was beautiful. He had never imagined having people like that in his life before), it probably took less than ten seconds to type out a quick “Happy birthday, Kamishiro-san!”
And yet the realization that people cared about him enough to remember, the realization that he was capable of being treated in a way that was so ordinary, so normal...it felt so strange, so foreign. To a perpetually lonely child, normalcy is a better present than anything exceptional.
And his celebration with Wonderlands x Showtime…
These people spent almost their entire day with him. Truthfully, he would have been happy with anything, their mere presence was more than anything his younger self would have ever imagined himself deserving of.
They went to talk to him during lunch break, they met up with him after school and brought him for lunch, got him gifts and showered him in praise.
Really, what had he done to deserve all this?
You see, that’s the interesting thing about unloved children. When they grow up and are suddenly thrust into all the light they’ve been deprived of all their life, they start feeling guilt at leaving their darkness.
But he didn’t really feel much shame that day. Instead, he was just…happy. It was a foreign emotion to him, one he had never really felt before. He thought he felt it before, he felt an imitation, a shadow of it and thought it the real thing. But that day he was utterly blinded, dazzled by all the hope, all the radiance of the light that was soon to be commonplace in his life.
It has been a few years since then. He survived high school with his wonderful troupe by his side.
No, they weren’t just a troupe anymore.
It was right before his second last year of high school ended that Nene confessed. Rui accepted of course, why wouldn’t he? After all, he felt the same. Emu and Tsukasa shared the same sentiment, and they got together that very day.
Since then, they’ve faced many challenges. They’ve fought a few times, as is inevitable, and yet they always came out of these fights stronger.
And now they live together!
Really, sometimes Rui wonders if he had died in his first year of high school, and everything since then was just a very elaborate hallucination. Or was that a tad bit too dark?
He quietly laughed at his own joke, before suddenly realizing that he was currently still in bed with his partners and had been staring into space for the past five minutes.
“God, you’re still as much of a loser as always.”
Nene smacked his wrist lightly, rolling her eyes, although it was obvious that it was out of affection and not malice. Rui felt himself smile despite himself.
Somehow, for a moment, he felt entirely content, and almost divinely happy.