Archive of Our Own

The throbbing in his knuckles was dull compared to the sharp, persistent sting of Toya’s words.

“Akito… let’s stop all this. I… I can’t keep going after this childish dream.”

They keep echoing inside his mind like an endless loop. The throbbing in his knuckles was dull compared to the sharp, persistent sting of Toya’s words.

They kept looping in his head like an endless, broken record, each repetition squeezing his chest a little tighter. It turned his stomach into a hard knot and made every breath feel thin and useless. Shoving his hands deep into his jacket pockets, Akito pulled his hood low over his eyes, glaring at the dark pavement as his eyes burned with a heat he refused to let spill over.

Why would he suddenly change his mind about surpassing Rad Weekend with me? Why the hell would he say those things to me if he knew exactly how to push my buttons?

Why, Toya?

His jaw clenched until his teeth ached.

I don’t understand you at all. Is your excuse of a father behind this, or is it something else? Dammit, Toya—why won't you tell me anything? You’re the one who told me to rely on you. You told me we were partners. So why the hell won't you do the same? Don't you trust me? Am I really not good enough for you?

The thoughts spiralled, each one uglier and colder than the last.

Toya doesn’t need him anymore… he really is useless, isn’t he?

Needing him when it was convenient but tossing him aside the second things got hard. Maybe that was why Toya suddenly-

But as soon as the thought formed, a sickening wave of guilt washed over it. Because that can’t be right.

Toya wasn’t that kind of person. He would never do something like this unless there is a reason, aka his dad.

Toya would never.

He would never…right?

-------------------

The sunlight radiating through the curtains didn't just annoy him—it burned. Two weeks of staying buried under his blankets had turned his dark room into a fortress, and he hated his mother for cracking it open. It felt like someone pulled the solid ground beneath his feet and turned his world upside down.

He squeezed his eyes shut as the floorboards creaked. He didn't have it in him to go back to school. The lack of Toya’s presence left him feeling numb, he hasn’t eaten in days, he hasn’t really done anything besides bed rotting. It was as if someone stripped his lifeline away from him.  He was also terrified of seeing Toya, no matter how much his heart yearns to see his partner. He was terrified of the bitter, cruel words still looping like a broken record in his head, refusing to leave the ginger in peace. It was almost unbearable-

A knock on his door interrupted his tray of thoughts, and his mother entered his sight. Akito immediately turned his back towards her and shut his eyes as tight as possible.

"I know you're awake, Akito..." His mother's voice was soft, but the underlying demand was clear. "I know the fight had a huge impact on you, and I totally understand that you needed a break, but it's been two weeks. I need you to pick up your classes again."

Akito buried his face in his pillow with a low groan. The day hadn't even started, and he already needed it to be over.

-----------------------

He probably looked worse than he thought, judging by the pairs of eyes tracking him down the hallway and the low whispers brushing past his ears. He couldn't care less, although they made him even more nervous than he already was, sensing how hard he was gripping the edge of his school uniform.

Just as he thought luck was on his side and people were keeping their distance, a familiar shock of black, starry hair cut through his peripheral vision.

Shiraishi An.

"You look like shit," she deadpanned, blocking his path.

Akito rolled his eyes, dragging a hand down his face. "I know. No need to remind me. Now leave me alone."

"Woah, chill. No need to get defensive—I was just worried," she said, her voice softening slightly before her arms crossed over her chest.

“I know, sorry, but I am fine”, he replied.

"Of course, you're 'fine' after leaving me all alone for two whole weeks without a single text. What even happened?"

"Got into a fight. Nothing serious," he mumbled, staring past her shoulder, praying she'd drop it. But this is An we are talking about.

An raised an eyebrow, her tone dripping with heavy sarcasm. "Right. It was sooo unimportant that you skipped two weeks of school. Do you think I'm stupid, Akito? At least think of a better excuse if you're going to try to fool me."

Akito let out a heavy sigh, the irritation flaring in his chest. God, he hated how persistent she was.

Before An could grill him any further, the morning bell chimed, sharp and echoing down the corridor.

"Saved by the bell," Akito muttered, side-stepping her without waiting for a reply.

"We're not done talking about this, Akito!" An called after him, but her voice faded as he pushed through the classroom door.

His stomach twisted into a tight, hard knot. He kept his head low, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. Just get to your seat, he told himself. If he’s staring, ignore him. If he’s angry, let him be angry. He was ready to take whatever icy look or bitter silence Toya was going to throw at him. He had spent two weeks rehearsing how he’d act tough, how he wouldn't back down.

He reached his row and finally looked up.

Toya’s desk was empty.

No neatly stacked notebooks. No blue bag hanging off the hook. Just a polished, wooden surface reflecting the morning sun.

Akito froze, his hand lingering on the back of his own chair. The noise of the classroom—the chatter, the scraping of chair legs, the rustle of papers—seemed to mute all at once.

He’s just late, Akito tried to rationalize, though his palms had gone cold. Toya is never late. But maybe... maybe he stayed home today because of me. Nah, that is not possible. Knowing his partner, He doesn’t like missing classes or staying at home.

"Alright, everyone, take your seats," the homeroom teacher announced, sliding open the front door with a stack of printouts.

Akito sank into his chair, his eyes glued to the empty desk beside him. The seat felt colder than the rest of the room. Every minute that passed without the door opening felt like a heavy weight pressing down on his chest.

He had prepared himself for a fight. He had prepared himself for Toya's cruel words to resume.

He hadn't prepared for the silence.

The teacher set the papers down with an unnaturally heavy thump. The usual morning chatter flickered out, but the air in the room felt off—stiff, thick, and wrong.

"Before we start homeroom," the teacher began, their voice flat, stripped of its usual morning rhythm. They didn't look at the class. They looked down at their ledger. "I have... an announcement to make regarding Aoyagi-kun."

Akito’s chest tightened so fast he couldn't inhale. His fingers dug into the edge of his wooden desk until his bruised knuckles turned white.

Don't say he transferred. Don't say he quit music. Don't say he moved away.

"I received a call from his family." The teacher finally raised their head; their expression filled with grief and grim. "Aoyagi Toya passed away two weeks ago."

The room didn't explode; it went dead, horribly silent.

A sharp, violent ringing filled Akito's ears, drowning out the sudden gasps around him, drowning out An’s sharp intake of breath a few rows over. The world tilted sideways.

Two weeks ago.

The math crashed into his brain like a physical blow. Two weeks ago, was the night two days of the fight. The night Akito struck him. The night he walked away, leaving Toya alone in the dark, bleeding cold weather and bloody cheeks.

While Akito had been lying in bed, wallowing in petty anger and self-pity, Toya was already gone.

"Shinonome-kun?"

Akito didn't realize he had stood up until his chair crashed backward onto the floor, the loud thack echoing off the walls. Faces turned to look at him, but they were blurry, featureless smudges.

"Shinonome, I know you were the closest to him, but please sit back down—"

He didn't hear the rest. Akito bolted out of the classroom, the heavy door slamming behind him as he ran into the empty hallway, desperate to escape a reality that had already caught up to him.

It sounded like a gunshot, echoing down the empty corridor before dying into a suffocating, ringing silence.

Akito took three blind steps forward before his body simply refused to cooperate. His legs felt hollow, like paper, completely disconnected from his brain. The air in the hallway turned to ice, thick and unbreathable. He reached up with a violently trembling hand, dragging at his collar, his fingers clawing at his neck as if his school uniform were a strangler’s knot tightening around his throat. He tore a button clean off, hearing it clatter uselessly against the floorboards, but it offered no relief.

Two weeks ago.

The teacher’s voice echoed in his head, dropping like an anvil onto his heart.

Two weeks ago. Two weeks ago.

Every repetition hit like a physical strike to his stomach. He didn't make it to the stairwell. His knees buckled out from under him, sending him crashing sideways against the cold, plaster wall. He slid down the surface, his nails scraping against the paint, until he crumpled onto the linoleum floor with his knees pulled tightly against his chest.

He tried to draw a breath, but his throat had closed to a pinprick. All that came out was a wet, strangled gasp—a desperate, pitiful sound that made his ribs ache. He hyperventilated in short, shallow bursts, his lungs burning as if filled with broken glass. Within seconds, a terrifying, prickling numbness washed over his skin. The blood drained from his face, and his hands and lips went completely static, tingling as if hundreds of needles were sinking into his nerves.

The hallway began to distort. The overhead fluorescent lights stretched into blinding, white smears, buzzing like angry hornets. The floor beneath him tilted violently, making him feel like he was sliding off the edge of a cliff into total darkness.

Desperate to ground himself, Akito wrapped his arms tightly around his legs and dug his fingernails straight into his own skin—hard enough to bruise, hard enough to tear through the fabric of his sweater. He wanted pain. He needed a single physical sensation that could pull him out of the void swallowing him whole.

Instead, the sharp sting of his own skin only dragged him backward in time—back to the heat of his bruised knuckles after the fight, back to the sound of Toya’s cold, sharp words, back to the precise second he turned his back and walked away.

I left him. I went home, shut my door, and went to bed for two weeks while he was already—

The thought snapped something vital in his chest.

He couldn't hold it in. He couldn't act tough, couldn't keep up the quiet anger, couldn't swallow the agony ripping through his lungs.

A sharp, violent scream tore out of his throat—a raw, ragged sound of pure, unadulterated agony that echoed off the hard lockers and shattered the dead quiet of the empty corridor. It didn't even sound like him; it sounded like a dying animal, stripped of all pride and defense. He didn't care if the entire school heard him, didn't care if teachers came running out of their classrooms, didn't care how pathetic he looked curled up against the cool wall.

He dug his fingers into his hair, pulling until his scalp burned, screaming until his lungs ran entirely out of air and his throat tasted like copper. Every breath he tried to pull back in was just another choked, jagged sob.

The pain wasn't just in his head—it was a physical, tearing sensation in his chest, as if his ribs were cracking under the weight of a truth he couldn't survive.

The sound was still ringing off the walls when the heavy classroom doors rattled open.

"Shinonome!"

Footsteps slammed against the linoleum—two, maybe three teachers, their urgent voices overlapping, sounding warped and distant through the deafening static in Akito’s ears.

"Get him up—carefully—"

Hands grabbed at him. Large, solid hands pinned his shoulders, trying to haul him up from the floor, but the sudden physical contact sent a spike of pure adrenaline through Akito's veins.

"Get off me!" he snarled, his voice breaking into a ragged scrape.

He thrashed violently against their grip. He fought like a trapped, wounded animal—shoving their chest, kicking his legs out, his knuckles catching one of the male teachers hard across the arm. He didn't care about getting suspended. He didn't care about respect, or rules, or the horrified faces peering out from the cracked open classroom doors.

"Shinonome-kun, stop, calm down! You’re hyperventilating—"

"I said get off me!"

With a desperate, blinding surge of strength, Akito twisted his torso, yanking his wrist free from a gripping hand. He slammed his shoulder into the vice-principal's chest, throwing the older man off balance just long enough to break the barrier.

He didn't look back. Leaving a trail of scuffed shoes and stunned shouts behind him, he sprinted down the hallway toward the emergency exit, tearing through the double doors and out into the biting morning air.

He broke into the courtyard, but the adrenaline that got him past the teachers crashed instantly.

His legs were shaking out of control, his knees wobbling like jelly, and every single step felt like something impossibly heavy he had to drag along with him. The asphalt beneath his shoes swayed. He stumbled, his shoe dragging against the curb, nearly throwing him face-first onto the pavement.

"Shinonome, wait!" a voice shouted from the doors behind him, but the sound was muffled, drowned out by the heavy, uneven thudding of his own heart.

He couldn't run properly. His body felt like lead, completely drained, yet a desperate, burning terror forced his heavy legs to keep moving. He gripped his own sweater with bruised fingers, hunching over as he dragged himself down the street—forcing his failing knees to carry him toward the Aoyagi house, no matter how much his body fought against him.

The moment his shoes hit the asphalt outside the school gates, the rest of the world dissolved into an unfocused, dizzying smear.

He couldn’t believe it. He had to see it for himself. No, Toya wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t just… die. He wouldn’t…would he?

The thought looped in his head like a poisonous whisper, driving him toward the brink of insanity. It’s a mistake. A fucked-up prank. The teacher got it wrong. Toya’s just sick. He’s sitting in his room right now, reading a book, waiting for me to show up and apologize.

He clung to those lies like a drowning man grasping at broken glass, even as they sliced him open from the inside out. Because the alternative—that Toya was truly gone, that his last memory of Akito was a cruel, bitter shouting match—was an impossible abyss. Akito’s mind violently rejected it. He couldn't accept that the most important person in his world had just had his life erased in a single, careless morning announcement.

That sudden, sickening collapse of his reality tore straight through his body. His nervous system severed its connection to his limbs; the sheer, crushing weight of emotional exhaustion settled deep into his marrow. Every single stride was a grueling battle. His knees trembled so violently that they buckled outward with every step, wobbling like jelly, while his feet felt like massive iron weights he had to physically drag through wet cement. The rubber toes of his school shoes scraped loudly against the rough concrete.

His balance was entirely shot. Twice, he stumbled hard to the side, his shoulder slamming into a brick wall, his palm scraping raw against the rough mortar just to keep his face from hitting the ground. He didn't even feel the sting of the blood.

He was completely absent from his own skin, drowning in his denial. The low hum of the city, the bright glare of the morning sun hitting the shop windows, the distant voices of pedestrians—none of it penetrated the deafening static roaring in his ears.

When he reached the major intersection, his hollow eyes saw right through the bright red pedestrian light. He didn't stop. He didn't even slow down. He just dragged his shaking, broken frame right off the curb and directly into active morning traffic.

A deafening, shrill car horn shattered the air, but Akito didn't so much as flinch.

Tires screeched violently against the asphalt—a high-pitched, burning sound accompanied by the acrid stench of scorched rubber that instantly filled the air. A heavy delivery truck swerved wildly, its massive steel bumper missing Akito’s hip by a fraction of an inch. The displaced gust of wind whipped his hair across his face and violently rattled his uniform jacket, nearly knocking him off his feet.

He barely registered that he had almost died. He didn't turn around. If he died right here, at least the noise in his head would stop. But he couldn't stop yet—not until he saw the truth with his own eyes.

"Hey! Are you out of your mind?! Watch where you're going, kid!" the truck driver bellowed, leaning halfway out his window, his voice thick with adrenaline and rage. Other drivers slammed on their horns, the sharp noise echoing off the surrounding high-rises.

Akito ignored it all. The screaming world around him was just background noise to the total ruin inside his head. He dragged his heavy legs up the incline of the sidewalk, his lungs burning with shallow, useless breaths, driven forward purely by the desperate, maniacal need to reach Toya's front door and prove everyone wrong.

When the iron gates of the Aoyagi estate finally came into view, Akito knew he looked horrifyingly out of place.

The estate stood as it always did—looming, pristine, and suffocatingly quiet. Its traditional dark wood, immaculate stone paths, and manicured courtyard projected a cold, untouchable elegance. And right in the middle of it was Akito: a ragged, bloodied wreck.

His hair was matted with sweat, his face pale as chalk, and his school sweater hung loosely off his trembling shoulders, stained with dirt from the brick walls he’d scraped against. A dark smudge of blood was drying on his right palm, torn open from his fall, but he didn't even notice it dripping onto the clean gravel beneath his shoes.

Every crunch of his scuffed soles against the neat, raked pebbles felt like a violation of the silence.

This was the place Toya had always tried to escape. The place that felt more like a mausoleum than a home. Standing before it now, Akito felt the raw edges of his sanity grinding down to nothing. There were no black banners, no crowds of mourners, no visible signs of tragedy. Just the same oppressive, suffocating stillness.

See? his mind whispered, grasping frantically at the quiet. It's fine. Nothing's wrong. He's just inside.

He stumbled up the stone steps, his heavy boots dragging behind him, and reached a trembling, blood-stained hand toward the wooden front door. He didn't knock like a polite visitor. He slammed his fist against the heavy wood, the desperate sound echoing through the courtyard like a plea.

"Toya!" his voice tore out of his throat, hoarse and cracking. "Toya, open up! Stop playing around!"

The heavy front door clicked open, but the person standing in the threshold wasn't Toya.

It was his mother. Her face was hollow, her eyes rimmed with red and cast in shadow, wearing the quiet, crushing weight of a parent who had already drowned in grief. She opened her mouth, her voice barely a breath. "Akito-kun...?"

He didn't let her finish. He didn't ask questions.

Akito shoved past her, his shoulder clipping the doorframe as he barged straight into the entry hall. The polished wood floors offered no traction for his trembling shoes, but he didn't care. He locked his sights on the staircase and bolted for it, desperate to outrun the reality trying to catch him.

"Akito-kun, wait—!" her soft, trembling voice called out behind him, but it was just wind in his ears.

He threw himself up the wooden stairs, but his exhausted legs betrayed him instantly. Halfway up, his knee buckled and his foot missed a riser. He crashed hard onto the steps, the edge of the wood digging viciously into his shins. He scrambled forward on his hands and knees, his bloodied palm smearing a dark, wet streak of crimson across the pristine steps, before forcing himself back up to his feet.

Two steps later, his balance gave out again. His hands clawed uselessly at the smooth banister, his fingers slipping, his chest heaving with shallow, ragged wheezes. He sounded like a dying animal, gasping for air that wouldn't come as he forced his jelly-like legs to take step after agonizing step.

He reached the top of the landing and lurched down the second-floor hallway, his vision tunnelling until all he could see was the dark grain of the door at the very end.

Toya's room.

Akito slammed his weight against the brass handle and threw the door open, bursting inside like a gale of wind—fully expecting to see Toya sitting at his desk, head turned, asking him what the hell he was doing.

Instead, the silence in the bedroom hit him like a concrete wall.

It was cold. Not just the chill of an unheated house, but a heavy, sterile vacuum that sucked the remaining breath straight out of his throat. There was no sound of turning pages, no quiet hum of classical music, no soft shifting of fabric. Just an impossible, echoing stillness.

Akito stood frozen in the doorway, his chest rising and falling in violent, shallow bursts. Blood from his scraped palm dripped off the tip of his middle finger, landing with a sickeningly quiet pt-pt onto the floorboards. He couldn't blink. His hollow eyes swept frantically across the space, refusing to accept what they were seeing.

The bed was made. The navy duvet was pulled completely taut, smooth and unruffled, without a single crease to suggest anyone had slept there recently. Toya’s desk was meticulously clear—his pens aligned in an acrylic holder, his notebooks closed, his desk lamp switched off. Everything sat in its exact, terrifying place, preserved like an exhibit in a museum.

No. No, no, no.

He took a shuddering step forward, his knee buckling before he caught himself on the edge of the doorframe. He staggered toward the desk, his raw palm leaving a faint streak of blood across the spotless white bookshelf as he dragged himself along. He needed a jacket thrown over a chair. He needed an open textbook. He needed anything—a mug left out, a stray bookmark, a drop of ink—some proof that Toya was real, that he had been here this morning, that he was coming back.

His shaking fingers brushed against the desktop. The wood was ice-cold. Dust hovered motionless in the pale sunlight streaming through the sheer curtains.

A sharp, violent wave of nausea surged up his throat. His vision blacked out at the edges as his legs finally gave out completely. He hit the floor hard, his knees cracking against the hardwood, sending a sharp jolt of pain up his spine. He didn't even feel it.

He slid down against the side of the desk, curling his arms tightly around his stomach to hold himself together. His forehead pressed against the cold wood where Toya used to rest his elbows while studying.

There were no tears yet—just a violent, uncontrollable shivering that started in his chest and wrecked its way down his spine. He then crawled like a injured dog towards Toya’s bed and reached up with his bloodied hand and blindly grabbed the edge of Toya's bedsheet, clutching the fabric so tightly his fingers cramped, burying his face directly into the mattress.

It didn't even smell like him. It just smelled like detergent and dust.

"Toya..." Akito gasped out, the word tearing out of his chest, small and broken, lost in the vast, empty room. "Please... answer me..."

He dug his fingernails into the tightly tucked sheets, ripping the corner loose, searching for a ghost in a room that had already forgotten the sound of his voice.

He buried his face into the cold mattress, but the smell of detergent and dust only proved the impossible.

Toya wasn't in the closet. He wasn't in the bathroom down the hall. He wasn't coming back.

The realization struck Akito like a physical blow to the lungs. The air instantly left his chest, and no matter how wide he gasped his mouth open, nothing came in. Panic roared back with double the ferocity, hot and suffocating. His heart hammered so violently against his ribs it felt like it was trying to shatter his sternum.

He hyperventilated in sharp, violent gasps, his entire body convulsing on the floor. His vision tunnelled into black spots, the edges of the room warping into dark smears as oxygen failed to reach his brain. He gripped his own head with both hands, pulling at his hair, a terrible, high-pitched whining sound escaping his closed throat. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't stop the room from spinning. He couldn't stop his mind from screaming he's gone, he's gone, he's gone.

He thrashed against the side of the bed, his knuckles slamming into the wood, desperately trying to beat the truth away. He screamed—a suffocating, choked sound that died before it could even leave his mouth—his ribs aching, his lungs burning like ash.

Then, right at the peak of the terror, when it felt like his chest would literally burst—

Click.

Something inside him snapped shut.

It was like a switch had been flipped. The screaming in his mind cut to dead air. The violent thrashing slowed, then stopped entirely. The agony didn't disappear; it simply froze over, turning into a vast, heavy, terrifying void. His rapid breathing slowed to a flat, mechanical rhythm.

Akito pushed himself up off the floor, his movements disjointed and stiff, like a puppet with cut strings. He stood up, but he felt entirely detached from his own skin. His bloodied palm hung uselessly at his side. He didn't feel the pain in his knees, didn't feel the sting of his torn skin, didn't feel anything at all. He was hollow. Dead inside.

He stared blankly into the corner of the room, his eyes dull and glassy.

And that was when a flicker of dark wood caught his eye.

Tucked deep into the shadow between the bedframe and the nightstand, hidden deliberately beneath the overhang of the mattress, sat the small wooden box.

Akito stopped. The numbness cracked just enough for a single, sharp jolt to run down his spine.

He knew that box.

He’d know it anywhere, in any light, in any lifetime.

It was a gift he’d given Toya for his fifteenth birthday. Akito had saved up his earnings from his part-time shifts at the cafe for weeks, hunting through flea markets and antique shops until he found something sturdy, quiet, and refined enough to actually belong in a room like this. He remembered the sheepish, awkward way he’d shoved the wrapped package across the diner booth, mumbling some stupid excuse about how Toya needed a place to keep his spare violin strings, so he’d stop losing them. (Toya never loses them, Akito knows that).

Toya hadn't used it for instrumental purpose, didn’t even suggest it.

Instead, he’d run his long fingers over the smooth mother-of-pearl inlay, looked at Akito with that subtle, rare warmth in his eyes, a small smile on his lips, and quietly promised, "I'll keep the things that matter most in here."

Now, seeing it tucked away in the shadows under the bed, preserved while everything else in Toya's life was being quietly erased, the weight of that promise smashed through Akito’s numbness.

His blood-stained thumb brushed over the dull brass latch. The varnish still carried a faint, lingering scent of cedar, aged paper, and the bitter coffee Toya always drank while studying or reading late into the night. It was the only warm, living thing left in this ice-cold mausoleum of a room.

With a sharp, shaking breath, Akito flicked the latch open and lifted the lid.

Inside lay a thick, orderly stack of envelopes. Each one bore Akito’s name written in Toya’s clean, precise handwriting—dated sequentially, completely unsealed, waiting for a reader who was two weeks too late.

His hands hovered over the open mahogany box, trembling so violently that the delicate mother-of-pearl inlay blurred into a hazy, shimmering streak before his eyes.

The sight of his own name—written dozens of times in Toya’s neat, unfaltering script—struck him like a physical blow to the sternum. It made the air in the sterile bedroom instantly thin out, suffocating and sharp. He couldn't read them. He couldn't. Looking at those clean, precise characters meant accepting that Toya had sat at this cold desk, holding a pen, pouring himself onto paper while Akito had been drowning in two weeks of bitter, stubborn silence. To unseal even one envelope was to shatter the final fragile barrier keeping him from the abyss.

Every survival instinct screamed at him to throw them away. He wanted to fling the heavy box across the room, to watch the mahogany smash against the pristine white bookshelves and scatter the paper like dead leaves. He wanted to rip them to shreds, to burn them, to erase every trace of the ink that proved he was two weeks too late. He wanted to destroy the evidence of his own failure before it destroyed him.

Instead, his hands moved with a desperate, frantic mind of their own.

Akito plunged his dirty fingers into the velvet-lined box, wrapping them tightly around the thick, heavy stack. He hauled the entire bundle out; his trembling grip crumpling the edges of the top envelopes and slammed them directly against his chest.

He dug his chin hard into his collarbone, wrapping both arms around the paper, gathering the letters to his sternum with a white-knuckled, punishing strength. He squeezed so hard his elbows locked and his shoulders seized, trying to force the ink straight through his clothes, through his skin, and directly into his hollow heart.

The sharp, rigid corners of the heavy cardstock dug mercilessly through his sweater, biting into his flesh and pressing hard against his fractured ribs. Every ragged breath forced his chest against the relentless edges, sending a searing, agonizing ache radiating through his torso. It brought him zero comfort. It brought no warmth, no voice, no relief—nothing but raw, unadulterated agony. It felt like holding a pile of burning coals directly against an open, bleeding wound.

A choked, strangled gasp tore from his throat—a sound so broken and hideous it barely sounded human. His vision flooded with hot, blinding tears that finally spilled over, trailing hot tracks through the dirt and dried blood on his cheeks.

His body gave out - again. Akito collapsed forward, his forehead cracking hard against the cold hardwood floor right beside the empty, open box.

He stayed there, curled tightly into a shivering ball in the pale morning light, his face buried against the drafty floorboards. He squeezed the letters against his chest until his fingers cramped into claw-like shapes, clutching Toya’s final, unspoken words like a lifeline, even as the sheer weight of them crushed the last remnants of his soul.

The unbearable terror of what those letters represented turned the already thin air in the room into poison.

Akito’s lungs seized. His heart didn't just beat—it thrashed against his sternum, a trapped animal trying to claw its way out. The realization that Toya had sat in that sterile silence, holding a pen with pale, steady fingers while quietly preparing to vanish, made Akito’s stomach turn over in a violent wave of nausea. The paper pressed against his ribs felt scalding hot, heavy, and sickeningly real. He couldn't stay in this space. If he stayed surrounded by the cold desk and the neatly made bed for another second, his brain was going to completely fracture.

Driven by a sudden, frantic surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline, Akito scrambled up off the floor.

His limbs moved in jerky, uncoordinated bursts. He didn't drop the letters back into the mahogany box. Instead, with trembling, awkward fingers, he shoved the crumpled stack and the box deep into the inner pocket of his uniform jacket. He yanked the zipper all the way up to his throat, burying paper and wood close to his skin—a desperate, instinctive attempt to hide the verdict from his own eyes while keeping it locked tightly to his chest.

He turned on his heel and bolted out of the bedroom, his heavy shoes striking the pristine hallway floorboards in a chaotic, desperate cadence.

Akito threw himself down the grand staircase, taking the steps two at a time. His heel clipped the edge of a step, sending him lurching sideways; he slammed his forearm hard against the wooden railing to catch himself, barely slowing down as the impact rattled up his shoulder. His breath came in ragged, wet wheezes, his sight narrowing to a pinhole of light at the bottom of the landing.

Standing at the base of the stairs was Toya’s mother.

She hadn't moved from the foyer. Her knuckles were pressed white against the fabric of her skirt, her shoulders drawn tight. As Akito came crashing down the steps like a hunted creature, her pale face softened into a deeply pained, sorrowful expression. Her eyes—so hauntingly similar to Toya's—brimmed with a dark, heavy concern, taking in Akito's wild, sweat-drenched hair, his torn uniform, and the dark blood smearing his open palm. She took a hesitant step forward, her hand reaching out toward him, her lips trembling as she tried to form his name.

Akito saw none of it.

His eyes were completely glassed over, staring straight through her as if she were made of air. The soft stretch of her arm, the quiet tragedy in her expression, the trembling breath she drew—it all dissolved into the roaring static deafening his ears.

He didn't flinch, didn't slow, didn't even acknowledge the space she occupied. He threw his entire body weight into the heavy wooden front door, the latch giving way with a loud, violent crack, and plunged headfirst back out into the sharp, blinding glare of the morning light.

The world outside the Aoyagi estate didn't look like a city anymore; it looked like a flickering, low-resolution broadcast.

Akito walked, but he couldn't feel his feet hitting the pavement. The impact of his boots against the concrete was entirely silent to his ears, replaced by a low, hollow ringing—like the sound of air rushing through a vacuum. Cars sped past on the street beside him, but their engines were muffled, pushed behind an invisible wall of thick glass. Sunlight glinted off store windows, striking his eyes, but his pupils didn't adjust. Everything felt glaringly flat, sharp, and drained of colour.

He looked down at his right hand. The scraped palm was caked in dark, dried blood, dirt ground deep into the torn skin. He knew, intellectually, that it should burn. He knew he had slammed his knee into the wooden stairs. But there was zero pain. His hand felt like a plastic prop attached to someone else’s wrist. He flexed his fingers, watching them curl in slow motion, fascinated and repulsed by the complete delay between his brain's command and his body's movement.

I am walking home, he thought. The sentence felt foreign. It wasn't his voice in his head; it was a cold narrator reading a script from a mile away.

He didn't remember crossing the main intersection. He didn't remember turning onto his street. Time slipped through his mind like sand—one second, he was past the train tracks, and the next, his hand was hovering over his own front door handle. A fifteen-minute walk had evaporated into a single, terrifying blink.

He reached blindly for the door handle, but before his numb fingers could touch the metal, the front door swung open from the inside.

It was Ena. She had a sketchbook tucked under one arm and her jacket half-on, clearly on her way out, but the moment her eyes landed on him, she stopped dead.

The air in the entryway instantly curdled. Ena took in the whole sickening sight of him in a fraction of a second—his torn, soil-stained uniform, the dark blood caked across his palm, the raw, purple scrapes on his shins, and the glazed, dead-eyed stare that looked right through her skull. The annoyance on her face melted into sheer, unadulterated shock, rapidly replaced by a wave of sharp, choking terror.

"Akito...?"

Her voice pierced right through his mental static—raw, high, and trembling. She dropped her sketchbook onto the floorboards with a loud thwack and took a rapid step forward. "What happened to you?! Why are you—are you bleeding?! Where have you been?!"

She reached out, her hands frantic as her cool fingers clamped onto his upper arms. She tried to pull him into the hallway, tried to shake him, tried desperately to anchor him. The sudden heat of her panic, the overwhelming, suffocating reality of her care—it hit his fragile defense system like a sledgehammer.

Reality snapped back with a violent, sickening jolt.

The frozen shock cracked wide open, exposing the bleeding nerve endings underneath. Seeing his sister's face twisted in horror forced the suffocating truth back into his chest: Toya is dead, Toya is dead, and you ruined everything. Now he won’t ever come back again. But right behind the grief came a wave of pure, toxic self-loathing. He was filth. He was covered in dirt, blood, and failure, and she was looking at him like he was dying. He couldn't bear her touching him. He didn't deserve her warmth, and he couldn't survive watching her heart break for him, too.

Akito flinched violently away from her touch, wrenching his shoulders back with such force his heel caught the doorframe.

"Don't—!" he choked out. The word tore out of his throat, raspy, ruined, and wet.

"Akito, stop it! Look at me!" Ena's voice cracked, desperate and terrified, her hands reaching into the air between them again. "You're shaking! What is wrong with you?!"

"Don't touch me!" he forced out, his voice rising into a cracked, ragged shout that made his own lungs scream. He couldn't look at her face. He couldn't bear the soft, devastated light in her eyes. "Just... don't look at me!"

"Akito, please—"

"I'm fine!" He took a jagged, uncoordinated step backward, his hands trembling so violently he had to ball them into fists, digging his short nails directly into his raw, torn palm to force the pain to keep him standing. He forced his eyes down to her scuffed socks, refusing to make contact. "I'm fine."

"You are not fine! You're bleeding, you look like you're going to—"

"I'm sorry," he rasped, the words small, ruined, and tasting like copper in his mouth. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

Before she could grab him again or see the tear tracks cutting through the grime on his face, Akito turned his back on her. He dragged his heavy, broken body up the stairs, taking them one excruciating step at a time, leaving Ena standing frozen at the bottom, her hand still hovering in the air, terrified and entirely helpless.

He shoved his bedroom door open, collapsed inside, and slammed it shut, twisting the lock with shaking fingers until it clicked.

The room was pitch black, the blinds drawn tight. He slid down the back of the door, his knees pulling up to his chest as he buried his face in his arms. But there was no relief here.

Inside his uniform jacket, polished wood and heavy, sharp rectangle of letters pressed mercilessly against his ribs. Every shallow breath he took forced his own bruised chest against Toya’s handwriting, reminding him with every single heartbeat that he had retreated into a room Toya would never walk into again, carrying words he was too much of a coward to read.

He sat beside his bed, his back stiff, staring at a small knot in the wood grain of his floorboards.

Deep down, beneath the ice, an enormous, crushing wave of agony was waiting to obliterate him. He could feel it thrashing against the floorboards of his consciousness—the boiling guilt, the image of Toya's mother, the terrifying reality of the box. It was a monster clawing at the door, screaming at him that Toya was dead, Toya was dead, Toya was dead.

Every time that monster hit the door, Akito's chest should have heaved. He should have screamed. He should have torn his room apart.

Instead, his brain threw up a lead shield.

The hot, surging agony was instantly converted into a freezing, paralysing static. His vision tunnelled, the edges of his sight blurring into soft grey shadow. His heartbeat unnaturally slow, a heavy, hollow thud against his ribs that felt faint, as if it were beating inside another room entirely.

His hand moved like a claw, creeping upward to touch his chest. Beneath the stiff fabric of his jacket, the sharp, hard rectangle of letters pressed into his skin.

Read them, the quiet voice whispered from beneath the ice. You ruined everything. Read what he left you.

Akito stared at his own hand resting over his heart. He tried to force his fingers to grasp the zipper. He tried to command his body to pull the letters out. But the connection was severed. His hand remained motionless. He couldn't feel the fabric of his jacket. He couldn't feel his own breathing. He was entirely trapped inside a frozen, airtight room within his own mind, forced to watch himself sit motionless in the dark, clutching a dead boy's words with a body he no longer owned.

The silence on the other side of the heavy wooden door was absolute.

Akito sat still and listened, his ears straining through the deafening roar of his own pulse, listening for the sound of footfalls on the stairs, the turning of a knob, or a sharp, insistent knock.

None came.

Ena was letting him be. She had respected his boundary—she had heard the sheer, broken desperation in his voice and stayed put at the bottom of the steps. The realisation hit him with a fresh, sickening twist of guilt. She was terrified, left alone in the hallway with the sight of his blood and his ruined face, yet she was holding back out of sheer care for him. He was punishing the only person left who was trying to keep him anchored.

Akito rested his head back against the dark sheets covering his mattress, his throat so tight it felt swallowed by glass.

It took him a long time—minutes stretching into an agonising, endless smear of time—before his body found the strength to move. He raised his right arm, his blood-stained palm scraping uselessly against his stomach until his stiff, awkward fingers finally found the metallic tab of his jacket zipper.

His hand trembled so violently the metal rattled against his teeth.

Click. Zip.

Slowly, inch by excruciating inch, he pulled the zipper down. The sound of the teeth separating cut through the dark room like a blade tearing through wet fabric. Akito reached deep into the inner pocket, his numb fingers hooking around the thick, heavy pile, and hauled out the letters Toya had left behind.

He laid the four envelopes across his lap.

The pale, heavy cardstock caught the sliver of weak light leaking through his closed blinds. Written across the front of each one, in Toya’s clean, precise, undeniable handwriting, was his name.

Akito.

He couldn't open them. He simply sat there, staring blankly down at the four rectangles of paper, locked in a brutal, suffocating war within himself.

His heart was screaming at him to rip the paper open, to gorge himself on Toya's voice, to grab onto any remnant of the boy who had vanished from the world. It was a desperate, primal hunger—to hear Toya speak to him one last time, to know what he was thinking in those quiet, final days.

But his mind was paralysed by absolute terror. To read those letters was to accept that they were real. It meant acknowledging that Toya had sat at his cold desk knowing his time was running out, choosing to write words down because he would never get to say them out loud. If he unsealed the first envelope, the fragile shield of denial he was desperately clinging to would shatter forever, exposing him to a truth that would completely destroy whatever was left of his soul.

Akito remained frozen in the shadow of his bedroom, his breath hitching in ragged, silent gasps, his shaking hands hovering uselessly above the four envelopes as the war inside him raged on.

With a sharp, shuddering exhale, the terror gave way to a hollow, devastating defeat. He couldn't run anymore. He owed Toya this much, even if the truth incinerated him where he sat.

Akito’s trembling fingers reached down and touched the cold edge of the first envelope—the oldest one, its postmark dated just days before everything fell apart.

His bloodied thumb hooked beneath the paper flap. The sound of the seal tearing open was tiny, but to Akito, it sounded like a bone snapping in the dead quiet of his room. The crisp paper resisted for a fraction of a second before giving way, exposing the single sheet of heavy linen paper folded neatly inside.

He pulled the letter out.

As he unfolded it, the paper released a faint, haunting trace of cedar wood and coffee and fresh cookies—the smell of Toya’s bedroom, of quiet study sessions, of late-night walking back home after rehearsals. Akito’s chest caved in, a silent, agonised gasp escaping his lips as the scent hit him like a physical physical blow.

He forced his eyes down to the dark blue ink resting on the pale page. Toya’s handwriting was unmistakable—refined, deliberate, each stroke executed with quiet grace.

The letter began simply:

Akito,

I write to you because I am not good at expressing my feelings, not that you would find these letters anyways. First of all, I need you to understand I did not mean what I said, about surpassing RAD WEEKEND being a childish dream. I find it great that you have a goal in life, unlike me. Which is the first reason for why I left you. I do not possess that resolve that is settled deep in your heart. So, I am automatically not worthy of standing next to you, as your singing partner…

The pale blue ink on the linen page began to blur, distorted by the pool of hot, heavy tears rising in Akito’s eyes.

Every single sentence hit him like a gunshot to the chest, snapping bones and tearing open raw wounds he hadn't known were there. He couldn't stop reading. His eyes raced across Toya's neat, deliberate handwriting, taking in every word of the heartbreaking confession.

I did not mean what I said, about surpassing RAD WEEKEND being a childish dream.

A sharp, ragged gasp choked in Akito’s throat. All those weeks of bitter, festering resentment—the poisonous anger that had burned through his chest every time he thought back to their last fight—crumbled into dust. Toya hadn't looked down on him. Toya had never thought his dream was childish.

I am automatically not worthy of standing next to you, as your singing partner.

"No..." Akito whispered into the dark room, his voice a ruined, agonising scrape. He shook his head violently, a hot tear spilling over his lash line and splashing directly onto the margin of the page. "No, you idiot... that's not... you were the only one..."

As his eyes dragged across the second paragraph, the agony inside him turned into pure, suffocating torture. Toya’s words weren't distant or cold; they were filled with a profound, terrifying awe.

You, who hung the stars in the dark night sky... you, who gave me a purpose...

Akito’s free hand flew to his mouth, trying desperately to smother the hideous, broken sob tearing out of his chest. It felt like Toya was standing right in front of him, speaking with that quiet, gentle sincerity—yet the boy who wrote these words was gone, buried beneath six feet of earth. Toya had looked at him and seen light, warmth, and salvation, while Akito had been blind to the painful insecurity eating his partner alive from the inside out.

I feared of you leaving me on your own choice because you saw how many flaws I had. So, I left you first.

The sheer tragedy of it crushed the breath straight out of Akito's lungs. Toya had run away not out of coldness, but out of absolute fear. He had shattered their bond to protect himself from a rejection Akito never would have given him.

Please keep in mind that me leaving you has nothing to do with you, so don’t blame yourself, Akito.

"How can I not?!" Akito sobbed aloud, his forehead dropping until it hit his knees, his hands crushing the edges of the letter. "How the hell am I supposed to not blame myself?!"

Toya had begged him not to carry the guilt, but the words did the exact opposite. They proved that if Akito had just noticed, if he had just chased after him, if he had just grabbed Toya by the shoulders and screamed at him how much he meant to him—Toya might still be here.

Akito clutched the single sheet of paper against his face, breathing in the fading scent of cedar and cookies and bitter coffee, drowning in the unbearable truth that Toya had loved him enough to write a galaxy into existence for him, and Akito had let him drown in the dark alone.

A primal, desperate urge drove Akito’s bleeding fingers as he tore through the second envelope. The paper ripped violently down the centre, the sound jagged and loud in the suffocating quiet of the dark room.

He unfolded the sheet with hands so unsteady he nearly dropped it onto the floorboards. The scent of cedar and black coffee rushed out again, carrying with it the sickening, coppery undertone of dried blood—Toya’s blood.

His eyes devoured the handwriting, tracking the deliberate ink lines across the page as the words began to hit him with the force of physical blows.

Now, the picture of us together under that huge willow tree is smeared with blood. My blood. Because I scraped my skin and decided I want to keep hurting myself with the photograph.

A strangled cry ripped straight from Akito’s throat. A horrific image flared behind his eyelids—Toya sitting alone in the cold silence of his room again, pressing sharp edges into his own skin, bleeding onto a memory of a day Akito had held so close to his heart.

He remembered that picnic. He remembered burning the edges of those cookies three times before getting them right, remembered his heart hammering against his ribs as he sang that stupid, clumsy song he’d written in the middle of the night, terrified Toya would hate it. He remembered the faint pink heat on his own cheeks, and how Toya had wrapped his long arms around him, smelling like fresh rain and winter snow and coffee.

I remember how I felt safe, warm, comfortable – loved, though I suppressed the last feeling as fast as possible...

"You were loved, you idiot," Akito choked out, his voice cracking into a ragged, wet whisper. He slammed his fist down onto his own thigh, the physical pain grounding him just enough to keep from blacking out. "I loved you! It wasn't a lie—it was never a lie!"

Toya had kept the headphones. Toya had kept the grumpy orange plush cat from the arcade booth. Toya had treasured every single second of the warmth Akito had tried to give him, yet the poison in Toya’s mind had twisted all of it into proof of his own unworthiness.

I deserve to suffer; I was born to suffer... I ran away from you; I ran away from myself. Because I am a coward.

"No, no, no—" Akito shook his head violently, tears streaming down his grimy cheeks in thick, hot tracks, dripping onto his pants. "Stop saying that... Toya, stop it..."

The repetition at the end of the letter carved straight into Akito’s chest, shredding whatever was left of his composure.

I am a scaredy cat, yet you chose me.

I am a coward, yet you chose me.

I am a mess, yet you chose me.

Why did you pick me?

The question hung in the dark room like an accusation, screaming from the page.

"Because it was you!" Akito screamed into the empty space, his voice breaking into a hideous, broken cry that he buried instantly into the sleeve of his uniform jacket. "Because nobody else mattered! Because you were everything, Toya! I didn't want anyone else—I wanted you!"

He collapsed forward until his forehead slammed hard against the hardwood floor. He crushed the second letter against his chest right beside the first, clutching both pages so hard the paper creaked under his grip. He curled over them in the dark, sobbing so hard his entire body convulsed, drowned in the realisation that the boy who thought he was a worthless burden was the only person who had ever made Akito feel alive.

The ache in his throat turned into a dry, hollow burn as he stayed pinned to the cold floor, his entire body shuddering from the violence of his tears. Every ragged breath felt like breathing in crushed glass, but the physical pain couldn't touch the sheer, suffocating hell inside his head.

He lifted his head just an inch, his eyes raw, swollen, and bloodshot, fixed on the handwriting that was slowly destroying him.

Toya had bled onto their memories. While Akito had spent two weeks brooding in bitter silence, nursing a crushed dream he had shared with his partner and waiting for a text that would never come, Toya had been sitting in the dark of the Aoyagi estate, cutting his own skin open with a photograph of the best day of their lives.

Why did you pick me?

The question tore through Akito’s brain over and over, a relentless, torturous loop. He hadn't just failed to save Toya—he had let Toya die believing he was an unwanted burden. He had let Toya walk away thinking that Akito’s affection was a lie, a temporary fling, a mistake waiting to be corrected.

"I picked you because I saw your potential," Akito rasped, his voice tearing on the words, barely more than a wet, desperate wheeze against the floorboards. "I picked you because you were the only one who made any of it make sense...I picked you because you were worth it… I picked you because… you looked like my everything…"

He squeezed his eyes shut, but it offered no escape. All he could see was Toya’s face—not the serene, stoic partner he knew on stage, but a boy trapped in a nightmare, sitting alone at a cold desk, systematically writing out his own eulogy. Toya had loved him with a quiet, terrifying depth, yet he had hated himself so much that he believed leaving was an act of mercy.

The weight of it pressed down on Akito’s chest until he couldn't expand his lungs. He was suffocating under the brutal irony of it all: the very warmth he had tried to give Toya had only made Toya feel more unworthy, more broken, more desperate to escape.

Akito’s bloodied palm scraped against the dark floorboards as he pulled his knees up tighter to his chest, shrinking into himself as if he could disappear into the dark. He clutched the two read letters to his heart, the paper crinkling under his punishing grip, while the remaining unread envelope lay beside him on the cold wood—a row of waiting blades, each one promising to slice away whatever tiny piece of him remained.

The agony tore him apart from the inside, but beneath the grief, a dark, poisonously complex conflict began to take root in his chest.

He was drowning in love for the boy who had left these words behind, yet a white-hot, suffocating rage flared up through the numbness. How could Toya write all of this—how could he describe the warmth, the safety, the stars Akito had supposedly hung in his sky—and still choose to leave him alone in the dark? It felt like a profound betrayal wrapped in a love letter. Toya had put him on a pedestal, turned him into a saviour, and then abandoned him on the altar of his own insecurities without ever giving Akito a chance to fight for him.

"You coward," Akito choked out, the word tasting like venom and iron on his tongue. His fingers dug so hard into the floorboards his nails nearly split. "You selfish, arrogant bastard..."

He hated Toya for giving up. He hated him for deciding, all on his own, what Akito deserved. He hated him for making the choice to die and leaving Akito to carry the wreckage of two lives on his shoulders.

And then, almost instantly, the rage collapsed under the crushing weight of pure, toxic guilt.

The anger made him feel sick to his stomach. How dare I be mad at him? Akito thought; his chest heaving as a fresh wave of self-loathing washed over him. Toya had been bleeding out internally, trapped in a silence so loud it had eventually killed him, and Akito had been too avoidant, too blind, too caught up in his own stupid pride to hear him screaming for help. Toya had called himself a mess, a rebound, a burden—and Akito’s failure to reassure him had basically confirmed every single one of those terrifying thoughts.

He loved Toya so fiercely it made his ribs ache. He hated Toya for dying. He hated himself for letting it happen.

Trapped in the middle of that horrifying triangle of grief, rage, and guilt, Akito pressed his face into his bruised knees and wept, completely torn to shreds by a war he had already lost.

The storm of tears eventually subsided, leaving behind a cold, hollow emptiness that felt even worse than the crying.

Every breath he drew rattled in his chest, sharp and painful, but the quiet in the room was louder than his own ragged breathing. Beneath his crossed arms, his eyes drifted down. The final envelope was still resting against the dark floorboards, untouched, its sharp paper corners gleaming in the dim shadow.

He stared at it with a terrifying blend of dread and desperate, starving longing.

Akito was terrified of what was left. The first two letters had already peeled his skin raw, exposing every failure, every silent misunderstanding, every drop of blood Toya had shed alone in the dark. He knew that opening this last one would mean reaching the end of Toya’s voice forever. Once these pages were unfolded, there would be no more words. No more quiet confessions. Nothing left to read, and nothing left to hope for.

Yet, he couldn't leave it sealed. To turn away from it now felt like another act of cowardice—another moment of abandoning Toya when he was begging to be heard.

With a slow, agonizing effort, Akito lifted his bruised face from his knees. His trembling, blood-stained fingers reached down, brushing against the cold cardstock. His thumb hooked under the back flap, his body instinctively flinching away from the inevitable blow, before he finally tore the seal open.

His hands were shaking so violently he could barely align his fingers with the edge of the final envelope. The paper was cold, yet it burned his bloodied palm like hot iron.

He didn't want to open it. Every instinct begged him to stop, to shove the unopened letter back into his jacket, to preserve some tiny, untouched corner of reality where Toya hadn't said his final goodbye. But the fear was a hollow thing compared to the brutal debt he owed.

The paper ripped in a single, jagged cry.

He pulled out the final sheet and unfolded it. The scent of cedarwood and bitter coffee and Toya rolled over him one last time, sharp and overwhelming, like a physical hand pressing down on his chest. His blurred vision struggled to focus on the lines of neat, deliberate ink.

This is probably the last letter I will write to you.

A dry, choked sound tore from Akito’s throat. His lungs seized, refusing to take in air as his eyes raced desperately across the page, consuming every word, every thank you, every agonizing confession of love and devotion Toya had bled onto the paper.

Thank you for basically everything... You taught me that the air outside of my room wasn't meant to hurt me, to choke me... You gave me a sense of belonging; you gave me a home I could find peace in.

"You were my home, too," Akito sobbed into the dark, his voice breaking into a hideous, shattered ruin. Tears rained down his face once again, dripping off his jaw and soaking into the collar of his uniform. "You idiot... you were the home..."

Toya had viewed himself as a ghost, a broken shell dragging Akito down, while Akito had seen him as the only person who made the world make sense. Every line was a monument to Toya’s quiet, devastating love—a love so vast, so terrifyingly deep, that Toya had buried it under his own ribs, terrified that expressing it would crush Akito under its weight.

To realize that Toya had spent years feeling oppressed under his father's pressuring expectations, only to find brief, agonizing solace in Akito's presence—and to know that Akito had ultimately failed to keep him afloat—was a horror that peeled away the skin from Akito's very conscience. Toya didn't think he deserved to take up space in the world, yet he had built a sacred sanctuary out of Akito's fleeting smiles and offhand comments. Akito had unknowingly held the power to keep Toya alive just by existing, yet he had let go of the reins the second things got quiet and difficult.

And then came the lines that destroyed what was left of his soul.

I love you, Akito.

I love you in a way that terrified me... You were the only reason my heart kept beating in a body I had already given up on.

Akito let out a sound that didn't belong to a human being—a high, strangled, horrific cry of pure, unadulterated misery. He doubled over, slamming his forehead against his knees as the words burned into his eyes.

The realization hit him like a sharp blade carving through his flesh: Toya had been dying of starvation in plain sight. Every quiet glance, every subtle lingering touch, every time Toya had stepped back to let Akito shine—it wasn't indifference. It was a boy hopelessly, desperately in love, choking on his own devotion because he believed his affection was a curse that would poison Akito's pure, bright future. Toya had loved him enough to die in silence so Akito wouldn't be tethered to a corpse.

Toya had survived solely because of him, held on for dear life just to stand beside him under the blinding stage lights, and Akito had let him slide back into the dark over a fight, a misunderstanding. He let himself get worked up over the insult, he tossed him away because he thought his dream and goal were more important than his partner. In the end, he hadn't just lost a partner; he had lost a friend, he had abandoned the only person who had ever truly, fully surrendered their entire soul to him.

Please keep singing. Promise me you won't let the silence I leave behind swallow your voice.

"How?!" Akito screamed into his own knees, his chest heaving in violent, ragged spasms. His hands squeezed the edges of the page, paper crinkling under his frantic grip. "How am I supposed to sing without you?! How am I supposed to breathe?!"

The request was a cruel, stifling torture. Toya was asking him to burn brightly, to conquer the stages they were supposed to share, to carry his memory into the light. But Toya was the music. Toya was the rhythm beneath his feet, the harmony that made Akito’s wild, rough voice sound like something worth listening to. Asking Akito to sing now was like asking a man to breathe after ripping out his lungs.

There was no light left. Toya had taken every last spark with him, leaving Akito trapped in the airless silence of a dark room, clutching three ruined sheets of paper, completely pulverized by a love that had come far too late to save the boy who wrote it—and far too late to save the boy left behind.

The quietness that followed the last word of the final letter was not merely an absence of sound; it was an absolute, empty vacuum.

Akito remained pinned to the cold floorboards, clutching the three ruined pristine sheets of paper against his bruised chest like a man trying to stop a fatal haemorrhage with paper towels. The frantic, ugly sobbing that had torn his lungs apart finally burned itself out, leaving behind a scorched, barren wasteland in his mind. The physical pain in his throat, his knees, and his raw, scraped palm receded into a dull background noise, completely eclipsed by the hollow void filling his skull.

He didn't move. He couldn't. His body was entirely paralyzed by the sheer weight of what he had just consumed.

The light filtering through the closed blinds grew steadily dimmer as twilight bled into night, casting long, bruised shadows across his bedroom floor. In the dark, Akito sat trapped in the desolating quiet, staring blankly at the wall across from him. His brain began to rewind, mercilessly dragging him backward through the past year, turning his own memory bank into an interrogation room.

Why didn't I see it?

The question wasn't a thought; it was a blade, plunging into his throat over and over again.

He saw Toya’s face—not the stoic, distant boy the rest of the world saw, but the Toya who had stood beside him on street corners, shivering in the winter air, holding two cans of cheap warm coffee. Akito forced himself to re-examine every single moment they had shared, stripping away the comfort of his own arrogance to look at the terrifying truth beneath.

He remembered the times Toya had hesitated before speaking, his fingers twitching at his sides, his shoulders tense and high. Akito had assumed it was just Toya’s quiet nature, his classical upbringing, his difficulty expressing himself. He had never considered that Toya was literally choking on his own words, terrified that speaking his mind would drive Akito away.

He remembered the way Toya would stare at his own hands after a difficult rehearsal—staring at them with a quiet, hollow disgust that Akito had brushed off as simple perfectionism. He wasn't trying to fix his technique, Akito realized, a fresh wave of nausea rolling through his stomach. He was looking at himself like he was poison. And I just told him to keep going. I just told him we needed to be better.

The memory of their terrible final confrontation flared back into his mind, burning hot and ugly. Akito hadn't started that day with anger. When Toya had suddenly claimed that surpassing RAD WEEKEND was nothing more than a childish dream, Akito’s first instinct hadn't been rage—it had been overwhelming, panicked concern. He had stepped closer, scanning Toya's hollow eyes, desperately asking if he was okay, if something was wrong at home, why he was saying such insane things.

But Toya had known exactly how to dismantle him. Toya knew every single one of Akito’s triggers, knew precisely which buttons to press to force a wall up between them. He had deliberately provoked Akito, weaponizing his coldness until Akito's terror curdled into blind, wounded fury. The argument had escalated, spiralling completely out of control until Akito's fist had connected with Toya’s face—a sickening, heavy strike that sent Toya stumbling back, the split skin on his cheek matching the shattered quiet of the alleyway.

Akito had walked away after that, panting, blinded by hurt, believing Toya had discarded him.

He engineered it, Akito realized, the revelation twisting like a knife in his gut. Toya had calculated his own execution. He had deliberately driven a wedge between them because he believed Akito was better off without him, forcing Akito to hit him just to guarantee Akito wouldn't chase after him. Toya had sacrificed their bond—and his own skin—to make sure Akito walked away clean.

And Akito had fallen right into the trap. He had let his pride take over, nursing his bruised ego for two weeks, waiting in bitter silence for an apology that was never coming.

While Akito had stayed in bed all day nurse-feeding his anger at Toya and at himself because of how guilty he felt, Toya had been sitting alone in the Aoyagi estate, holding a sharp blade against a photograph of their picnic, bleeding onto a memory because he believed he was a burden that needed to be erased.

You're a monster, Akito thought, his fingernails digging so deep into the flesh of his left wrist that he felt the skin break beneath the pressure. You called yourself his partner, but you let him manipulate you into abandoning him when he was screaming for help.

He wasn't just a bad friend; he was a catastrophe. Akito had entered Toya’s life, shown him a glimpse of warmth, given him a taste of freedom, and then allowed Toya to push him away the second things got terrifying. He had let Toya go to his grave believing that his life was a temporary rebound, a mistake, a burden that Akito was waiting to be rid of.

The weight of his own ignorance was a physical sickness. It coiled around his spine and squeezed, pressing his ribs into his lungs until every shallow breath felt like inhaling liquid lead. He was trapped in a room of his own making, surrounded by the remnants of a boy he had promised to stand beside, drowning in the devastating realization that the silence he had allowed Toya to build had been the final push into the dark.

The pre-dawn light didn't bring warmth; it bled into the room as a dull, bruised slate-grey, casting long, stark shadows across the floorboards where Akito sat.

The suffocating guilt bled seamlessly into an even darker, more terrifying realization—a quiet, insidious horror that settled deep into the marrow of his bones.

As the hours crept toward morning and the silence in the house grew absolute, the core of Toya’s letters began to echo in the hollow expanse of Akito's chest. I love you, Akito. The four words hovered in the dark like a ghost, raw and bleeding, stripped of all the hesitation, the cold distance, and the paralyzing fear Toya had carried in life.

It completely unravelled him.

An agonizing, poisonously complex conflict flared beneath Akito’s ribs, a white-hot friction between devastating grief and a terrifying, poisonous sense of unworthiness. Toya had loved him. Not merely as a temporary singing partner, not as a passing acquaintance or a convenient refuge, but with a profound, horrifying depth that had served as his only lifeline in a world that was actively choking him to death. Toya had looked at Akito—with all his rough edges, his fiery temper, his quiet desperation to prove himself—and had seen a sanctuary, a saviour.

And yet, the sheer unworthiness Akito felt was a sickening, impenetrable wall.

How can I dare to hold those words? Akito thought, his jaw clenching so hard his teeth groaning against one another, his temples throbbing with a dull, rhythmic pain. How can I stand here and consume his love when I didn't earn a single drop of it? How can I say them back now, when he will be six feet under the cold dirt and can’t hear a single word, I’m saying? It’s too late. It’s a fucking insult.

A cruel, relentless voice inside his head screamed that confessing now was nothing more than self-serving cowardice—a pathetic, disgusting attempt to clear his own filthy conscience after letting Toya drown. He felt filthy, undeserving, like a murderer trying to claim the devotion of his victim. He had let Toya walk into the absolute dark believing his feelings were a dangerous secret, a burden that would crush Akito if it ever saw the light of day. He had let Toya die believing he was an unwanted rebound, a temporary placeholder until someone better came along.

How could he dare to claim Toya's heart now?

And yet, as he clutched those three crinkled, tear-stained pages to his chest, his knuckles white and trembling, Akito realized something even more agonizing.

To deny Toya’s love out of his own self-loathing was just another way of rejecting him.

Toya had poured out the absolute last pieces of his soul on these pages. He had sat in the cold, oppressive silence of his family home, bleeding onto paper, risking every shred of dignity he had left to leave Akito with the unvarnished truth. Toya had borne his heart completely, without defence, without hope of rescue, simply so Akito would know he was loved. To hide behind guilt, to refuse to accept those feelings because Akito felt too dirty to touch them, was to spit on the immense, agonizing courage it had taken Toya to write them down in the first place.

Toya deserved the truth. He deserved to have his love met, matched, and returned—even if the confession was uttered to a cold, empty room. Even if it arrived long after the pulse in Toya's wrist had stopped beating forever.

Slowly, Akito lifted the worn, folded pages. His hands shook so violently the paper rattled in the dark, but he brought them to his face, pressing the ink-stained linen directly against his trembling lips. He inhaled deeply, catching the faintest, dying ghost of cedarwood and cookies and coffee, buried beneath the metallic tang of dried blood and his own spilled tears.

His eyes squeezed shut, a fresh, heavy tear cutting a hot track through the dried grime on his cheek.

"I felt the same way," Akito whispered into the empty room.

His voice was a ruined, barely audible rascal—a sound carved straight out of absolute grief and shattered pride. He tilted his head back, resting his skull against the heavy wood of his bedroom door, sending his desperate plea up into the quiet dark.

"I loved you, too, you absolute idiot," he choked out, the words tearing his throat like crushed glass. "It was always you. From the moment you sang with me, from the moment you looked at me like I actually mattered—it was never anyone else. It was only ever you."

He swallowed hard, his throat burning, forcing the confession out against the silence, hoping against hope that somehow, somewhere past dusk, the boy who had hung the stars in his sky was listening to him.

"I loved you, Toya. I'm sorry... God, I'm so fucking sorry..."

The confession didn't fix the broken pieces of his soul. It didn't wash away the suffocating guilt, nor did it undo the tragedy rotting in his chest. But as he sat there in the pale light of morning, holding Toya's final words against his heart, the violent, chaotic storm inside him began to settle into a cold, heavy calm.

The frantic breakdown slowly ebbed, replaced by an enduring, terrifying resolve. The light outside his window shifted from dark blue to a pale, ghostly grey. It took hours for his body to obey him again, his breathing stabilizing into shallow, hollow rasps.

When he finally moved, his mind was no longer spinning in circles. The paralyzing terror had burned away, leaving behind a clear, singular path.

Ignoring the dead weight in his knees and the severe, icy numbness in his legs, Akito pushed himself off the hardwood floor. His body protested violently; his knees nearly gave way beneath him, and he had to catch himself against the wall, his bruised palm scraping against the wallpaper. He stood there for a long moment, swaying, staring at the empty room, before forcing his stiff limbs to move.

He dragged his feet across the dark room, every step heavy and deliberate, until he reached his wooden desk.

He pulled back the chair—the legs scraping softly, mournfully against the floorboards—and sat down. The wood was cold through his clothes. With stiff, awkward fingers that refused to stay still, he reached into his top drawer and pulled out a fresh, unlined sheet of white paper and a simple black ballpoint pen.

He clicked the pen. The small sound echoed like a gunshot in the quiet room.

He laid the paper flat, smooth beneath his trembling hand, resting the fine metal tip against the stark white page. Staring into the fading night, Akito closed his eyes for one last breath, opened them, and began to write back to the boy who had left him behind.

---------------------------------

The heavy clatter of damp dirt hitting the wooden casket had long since faded into a distant, hollow echo. One by one, the black umbrellas had dispersed, the sombre crowd melting back into the grey fog of the cemetery until the solemn, meaningless murmur of condolences died away entirely.

Akito had stood through the entire service like a statue carved of jagged stone, his eyes bloodshot and hollow, refusing to look anyone in the face or acknowledge the pitiful, suffocating glances thrown his way. He hadn't spoken to Ena, hadn't looked at Tsukasa or the others, and hadn't moved an inch as the rain slicked his hair down over his forehead. He had outlasted them all—Toya’s cold, distant family who barely knew the boy they were putting in the ground, their mutual friends who wept without understanding the full horror of the dark, and the quiet mourners who would move on by next week.

Now, he was completely alone in the biting afternoon dampness, standing before the raw, dark mound of turned earth that covered the only person who had ever truly known him, seen him, and loved him without reservation.

The bitter autumn wind rustled the high, barren trees overhead, carrying a sharp, freezing chill that cut through his suit jacket. Akito didn't flinch. The physical cold was a faint; pathetic thing compared to the absolute winter frozen inside his chest.

Carefully, Akito sank down onto his knees in the slick grass, completely unbothered by the dark, wet soil soaking through his black trousers and staining the fabric. His limbs moved with the heavy, mechanical stiffness of a broken machine.

With trembling, bruised fingers, he reached beside him and picked up a delicate, vibrant bouquet of bright blue forget-me-nots. Their vivid, electric colour struck a violent contrast against the bleak, decaying grey backdrop of the graveyard. He laid the stems gently atop the soft, disturbed earth—a quiet, unwavering promise of true love, endless remembrance, and absolute, stubborn loyalty. Even in death, even with an endless expanse of silence stretching out between them for the rest of his natural life, Akito was not leaving his side. He would come back here tomorrow. He would come back the day after that, through the rain, the snow, and the blinding summer heat. He would come back for as long as he had air in his lungs and blood moving through his veins.

Beside the bright blue blossoms, Akito placed the thick, sealed white envelope containing the letter he had spent hours bleeding onto paper in the suffocating pre-dawn darkness of his bedroom. The paper rested against the cold soil, carrying the final, unfiltered truth of everything Akito had locked away inside himself until it was far too late.

He flattened his palm directly against the wet earth, the damp soil caking under his fingernails as he pressed down with a desperate, crushing weight. He let his fingers dig lightly into the dirt, clutching at the ground as if he could somehow reach through six feet of dark soil to take hold of Toya’s cold hand one last time—to pull him out, to drag him back into the light, to force warmth back into a body he had let slip away.

A single, searing tear spilled over Akito’s eyelashes, cutting a clean line through the rain slicking his pale cheek, dripping silently off his jaw to disappear into the fresh dirt below.

Slowly, heavily, Akito pushed himself back up to his feet, his knees aching and stiff from the cold ground. He stood over the grave, his silhouette sharp, dark, and uncompromising against the vast, overcast sky, his eyes fixed on the bright blue blossoms clinging to the earth.

"I will never forget you," Akito whispered into the empty air, his raspy, ruined voice breaking softly against the cold wind, carrying a lifetime of unspoken devotion into the quiet cemetery.

He turned his back on the world and finally walked away, leaving his heart buried beneath the quiet earth.

---------------------------------

Dear Toya,

I hate you for this.

I hate you with every single drop of blood left in my body. I hate you for writing those letters, for folding up all of those terrifying, beautiful, grotesque thoughts, sealing them in paper, and leaving me here in the dark to carry the monstrous, suffocating weight of them all by myself. I hate you for sitting in that quiet, oppressive house, bleeding onto a photograph of a day that meant the absolute world to me, and thinking—even for a single, stupid second—that I would ever, ever be better off in a world where you didn't draw breath.

You called yourself a coward. You called yourself a failure, a ghost, a rebound, a burden that I was forced to haul up a steep mountain against my own will. You asked me why I picked you out of everyone else in this city. You idiot. You absolute, arrogant, blind, stubborn idiot.

I didn't pick you out of pity. I didn't pick you because I was lonely, or because I needed a quiet shadow to trail behind me while I chased my own selfish pride. I picked you because the second I heard you sing on that street corner; the rest of this godforsaken world went dead silent. I picked you because you were the only person alive who looked at my rough, angry, vicious edges and didn't try to smooth them over or break them off to fit inside a box. You stood beside me on the asphalt and you let me be human. You gave me a home, Toya. You were the only reason any of this music ever mattered in the first place.

And you walked away believing I was too good for you?

You calculated your own execution, didn't you? You sat there in the dark and mapped out every single trigger I had. You knew exactly which words to throw in my face, exactly how to insult everything we had bled to build together, because you knew it would set me off. You pushed me until I lost control. You let my fist shatter your cheek in that alleyway, not because you were angry, but because you wanted to guarantee I would turn around and walk away without chasing after you. You engineered a violent break, so I’d be too angry to look closer at the scars on your wrists. You used my own temper as a weapon to make sure I’d leave you alone in the dark to die.

How could you be so fucking cruel to both of us? Did you really think my stupid pride was worth more than your life? Did you really think I’d give a single damn about a bruised ego if I had known you were drowning right in front of me?

And the worst part of it all—the thing that is going to rot inside my chest like open fire until the day my own heart stops—is that your twisted, tragic plan worked completely.

I fell for it. I walked away. I pouted, I stomped around the city streets, I nursed my stupid little grudge for two full weeks, waiting for you to come crawling back and apologize to me. I thought I was the one who had been wronged. I sat in my room, feeding my pride, while you were sitting alone in the stifling silence of your father's house, holding a blade against your skin, pulling yourself apart piece by piece because you were convinced your very existence was a curse on my life.

I am a monster, Toya. I am an absolute, irredeemable, pathetic failure of a partner.

I called myself your partner. I boasted to anyone who would listen about how well I knew you, how I was the only one who could read your silence, how we were going to conquer RAD WEEKEND together and tear down the sky. And I was completely, utterly blind. I walked beside you every single day. I saw you flinch when the world got too loud. I saw you staring at your own hands after long rehearsals with that hollow, terrifying disgust in your eyes, and what did I do? I just told you to hit the notes harder. I told you we needed to be better, faster, stronger. I thought you were just tired. I thought you were just being a perfectionist. I never once stopped to grab you by the shoulders and ask if the air inside your own head was choking you to death.

You were bleeding out in plain sight, screaming for help without making a sound, and I just kept walking toward a bright stage, assuming you’d always be two paces behind me. I dropped the leash the second things got uncomfortable, and I let you wander off into the dark all by yourself.

I don't deserve to hold your memory. I don't deserve to breathe the morning air you left behind. You built a sacred sanctuary out of my offhand smiles, and I built a grave out of my own fucking ignorance.

And then I got to the end of your third letter.

I love you, Akito.

Reading those four words almost killed me right there on the floorboards. It tore through my ribs like a rusty blade, pulling everything inside me inside out. I felt physically sick to my stomach. My first instinct was to burn the paper, to bury my face in my knees and scream until my throat gave out, because I felt too dirty, too guilty, too utterly pathetic to ever lay claim to those words. You wrote a love letter to a boy who let you down. You confessed your entire soul to someone who failed you in every single way a human being can fail the person they care about most.

I felt like an absolute thief even reading it. I told myself I had no right to hold that confession, that answering it now was just a selfish, cowardly way to clear my own filthy conscience after the damage was already done and your body was cold.

But I realized something while I was sitting here in the dark, clutching your handwriting against my chest until the paper crinkled. Denying your love because I feel guilty is just another way of rejecting you. It’s just another way of abandoning you when you were brave enough to lay your heart completely bare. You bled onto this paper, Toya. You risked every last shred of your dignity to leave me with the absolute, unvarnished truth of who you were. To hide behind my own self-loathing now would be spitting on the immense, agonizing courage it took for you to write those words down before you left.

So, hear me, Toya. If you’re anywhere out there past dusk—if some quiet piece of your ghost is lingering in the corners of this room—you listen to me right now.

I loved you, too.

I loved you long before I had the sense or the maturity to realize what it was. I loved you long before I had the courage to name it, let alone say it out loud to your face. I loved you on that freezing street corner when we drank cheap warm coffee until our hands stopped shaking. I loved you under those blinding stage lights when our voices clicked together and made the whole floor rattle beneath our boots. I loved you on that stupid picnic when you smiled—that real, rare, soft smile that you only ever gave to me when no one else was looking. And I love you right now, sitting at this desk, drowning in a room that never erased your presence, whether you were physically there or not, holding three ruined pieces of paper.

It was always you. It was never going to be anyone else. You were never a rebound. You were never a placeholder. You were the rhythm, you were the harmony, you were the entire damn song.

You asked me to keep singing. You begged me not to let the silence you leave behind swallow my voice whole. You asked me to burn so brightly that the whole universe has no choice but to notice me, so that a piece of you can survive in the music I leave behind.

You selfish, beautiful bastard. You’re asking me to drag a corpse up a mountain.

How am I supposed to sing without you? How am I supposed to step onto a stage, look to my left, see an empty space where you used to stand, and open my mouth without choking on my own blood? You were the music, Toya. My voice is just rough, angry, worthless noise without you there to balance it out. Asking me to keep singing without you is like tearing out my lungs and asking me to keep breathing.

But I’m going to do it.

I’ll do it because you begged me to. I’ll do it because it’s the only punishment I have left, and it’s the only way I can keep your name alive in a world that was too cold to save you.

I am going to take every single ounce of this suffocating agony, every drop of blood you spilled in the dark, every tear I’ve cried onto these wooden boards, and I am going to turn it into a violent, unquenchable fire. I am going to drag us both onto every single stage in this city, whether the world likes it or not. I will sing until my vocal cords tear open, until my chest caves in, until every single person in the crowd knows exactly who Toya Aoyagi was and what he gave to me. Every note I hit, every stage I burn down, every quiet space between songs—it’s all going to belong to you.

You wanted to leave quietly. You wanted to fade into a shadow and let me move on clean. Well, you failed, Toya. I’m never letting you go. I’m going to carry your ghost on my back for the rest of my life, and you’re going to have to listen to me sing whether you want to or not.

I’m coming back to your grave tomorrow. And the day after that. And every single week until my own legs give out and they dig a hole right next to yours. You don't get to escape me. Even in death, even under six feet of dark soil, I am standing right beside you.

I love you. I’m sorry. I promise.

Wait for me.

Yours forever,

Akito