Chapter Text
Kazue has discharged her sunglasses and she’s smoking near the door when they come back. Ash is ready to wage war, but Eiji places a palm on his forearm as they walk, gate squeaking in their trail.
“You really can’t say anything,” he says, and swallows like he’s expecting a slap or something. “You never gave a damn, I learned from you.”
She shakes her head, and that lifted hand goes to rest on his cheek; Eiji’s eyes are still puffy, red splotches where he rubbed at his tears.
“I think it’s a good skill to have,” she says. “Subtlety doesn’t run in the family.” She sounds proud; Eiji’s shoulders fall at his sides.
“Aren’t you mad?”
“It could have been done with a bit less of a flare, but—you said what you had to say. I convinced everybody that you were ‘understandably upset’ and said things you didn’t mean.”
“I meant all of it,” Eiji retorts.
Kazue nods like that’s just a given, and, really: Ash gets why they don’t get along, Eiji and her; they’re just so similar in that way of being unapologetically themselves, and maybe Kazue knows, because there’s something mischievous in her eyes.
“Don’t worry, I think you made it on your uncle’s black list. He really doesn’t like public displays of… Well, anything.” She shrugs. “He’s like that. And, despite his flaws, he tried to help.”
“You never accepted his money,” Eiji insists, following the line of smoke from her mouth as Kazue exhales.
“I did, for the surgery. I wasn’t going to put your father’s life on the line just because of pride.” She side-eyes Ash: he knows he’s listening to something he shouldn’t, but she’s using plain, easy-to-get Japanese instead of Izumo-ben, as if she didn’t mind. “But I do have my pride. If I can’t at the very least provide for you and your sister then what kind of mother am I? That’s what I thought. But then I was always working, and you had to provide for yourself anyway, and in a flash you were an adult and I hadn’t been there and I don’t understand anything about you anymore.”
Eiji gapes and maybe that redness on his neck is actually embarrassment; Ash takes one step back, to give them some semblance of privacy, but Kazue huffs, waves at him to come closer.
“Your friend—Ash-san, not all Japanese people are like this. This family is messy, mainly because of me.”
“I don’t know. Ei-chan can be as scary as a gangster when he wants to,” Ash says, hands inside his pockets, and if Eiji gapes at him, Kazue stifles a laugh around her cigarette.
“Get inside from the side door,” she says, pointing at it. “The other guests are gone. I’m going to bring my brother to the airport. I think Fuyu-san and Masaru-san are packing already.”
Eiji pushes the front door open.
“I’ll take Uncle to the airport. It’s not like he can fight without an opponent, I’ll be fine,” he adds, and maybe it’s supposed to be some kind of idiom, only it applies literally when Eiji comes in and acts like nothing at all happened. Daichi tries to speak, and Eiji tells him, voice composed and smile in place, that they should really go fetch his luggage or he’ll risk being late for his flight.
And off they go, Emi’s bewildered eyes following from the window.
“This family is a flaming hot dumpster fire,” she says, in English.
Ash ruffles her hair.
“I’ve seen worse. Do you need help putting the fusumas back in place?”
She does; Ash rebuilds the guest room, but Kazue doesn’t ask him to carry his futon back there.
When he’s done, Grandma brings him tea and Ash is still sitting there awkwardly in front of Emi’s laptop when Eiji comes back to find them both engrossed in a discussion about the shortcomings of reality TV while an episode of Terrace House streams in the background.
Ash knows he turned with his ears perked like a surprised housecat; Eiji steals a rice cracker and smiles.
“We agreed to disagree,” he says, and sits down too, close enough to plop his head on Ash’s shoulder as if it belonged there. Emi doesn’t turn, but there’s a bit of a too smug smile on her face, so maybe Ash will just combust on the spot or something equally dramatic. So much for dying in the snow like a dumb leopard and any other stupid metaphors.
The next to go are Fuyuko and Masaru, bags in hands and on shoulders.
“She’s very upset that we didn’t make it in time to say goodbye, you know?” Masaru says, voice low and eyes soft to his wife. Fuyuko is thanking Grandma way more kindly than she did Kazue. “She feels very guilty. It was difficult for her too.”
Eiji doesn’t say anything, but he nods; Emi looking at them both with tense eyes, until Masaru sighs. “You should come to visit sometimes,” he says, tentative but louder. “We’d love to have you. And maybe your friend would like to visit Osaka, Ei-chan?”
It’s like he too thinks that Ash is supposed to be attached to Eiji long-term. Or maybe he’s just being nice.
“Love and cough can’t be hidden,” Grandma says, as fast as the sound from the car engine rumbles in the yard.
As if on cue, Emi coughs very loudly, choking on her spit, and Ash decides that he won’t ask, not even when Eiji hums, unaffected. He grabs Ash’s wrist and calls for Emi to stop being silly and go finish watching Terrace House .
*
Eiji volunteers to go back to Higurashi-san, one of the friendliest neighbors, to return the foldable tables they borrowed for the wake. Ash can smell a plot from three miles away, especially when Eiji specifies that Emi doesn’t need to come.
They huff down the street, wood cutting in their palms, and then Higurashi-san insists they should stay and have tea with her, which take them another half hour of pleasantries. Ash’s Japanese gets complimented mostly out of Higurashi-san’s kind-heartedness because Ash’s mind is running in circles as he tries to find out why Eiji could possibly want to spend time alone with him out of the house.
“Eiji,” he says, when finally—finally—Higurashi-san has closed the door, leaving them alone in the still sunlit street, ocean cutting between the roofs in wide blue squares.
“What is it?” Eiji asks back, shoulders tensing—Ash did this to him, Ash made him into something wary, something scared.
“You tell me? You wanted to be alone, you—”
“Oh, Ash, sorry, it’s nothing bad!” Eiji looks mortified, so now Ash can feel guilty too, about being such a drama queen. “I just wanted to talk with you without Emi listening in, really… Her English is too good.”
“It sure is,” Ash answers, on autopilot, and still can’t move a single leg, because Eiji looks uncomfortable and Ash doesn’t know why and if he doesn’t know why he can’t protect him. “I need to ask you something, but it’s selfish,” Eiji says.
“You can ask whatever you want,” Ash tells him, and he means it, and he knows Eiji knows he means it.
“I need to stay here for a bit longer. I’d really like to go back home, but I can’t leave Emi right now. She seems all cheery in the morning, but you saw her: she goes full-blown panic at night and I know she wouldn’t ask for our mother’s help, so—Ouch, what was that for?”
Ash pinches him on the arm once again, and he knows his eyes are blazing, just like he knows that Eiji isn’t scared of them.
“How is that selfish? You’re literally going to do something you don’t want to just for your sister’s sake.”
Instead of winning the argument—apparently, that was what Ash thought he was doing: winning the argument—Eiji sighs.
“Yes, but I’m asking you to stay with me!”
Ash plays it cool, hands stuck in his pockets and shoulders clenched. Does Eiji understands—does he really think he needs him? Or maybe it’s the other way around: maybe Eiji thinks that Ash can’t stay alone and that’s true, in a way; Ash could survive alone, it’s the one thing he’s truly good at, but living is another matter entirely, something that doesn’t happen when Eiji isn’t there.
“Sure. You don’t have to ask,” he says, coward that he is.
“Of course I have to. People should always ask if you’re okay with something,” Eiji says, and, dear God, Ash is never as human as he is when Eiji is there to melt his insides with one off-handed comment; with unsolicited kindness that just comes naturally to him.
“Okay, but you don’t have to, really. Of course I’ll stay with you if that’s what you want.”
Eiji nods, but he looks once again this close to crying; it seems like he’s able only when he’s out of the house.
“I know it can be heavy with my mother, even with the relatives gone.”
Ash nods and keeps on walking, and his brain keeps on buzzing.
“You know—about your mother.”
Eiji tilts his head, suspended with surprise.
“She really—she reminds me of you a lot?”
Eiji swallows and Ash is pretty sure he’s finally pushed a button he shouldn’t have; stuck his nose, his whole fucking dumb head, somewhere he shouldn’t have. Until Eiji hums.
“I guess we can be pretty similar. We’re both cowards,” he says and Ash pinches him again. “You should really stop that!”
“You’re not—what I meant is, she takes a lot on herself, and she tries to keep it together and even when she takes arguable decisions, she owns them and tries to do her best.”
Eiji huffs, scornful.
“Cheating isn’t an ‘arguable decision’, she was married to him.”
“And he was dying, and they both knew it.” Ash tries to arrange the words in a way that makes sense instead of being offensive. He isn’t sure he knows how. “I—Sometimes one has to do things that other people find reprehensible because it’s the only way for them to survive. I don’t think she wanted to hurt anybody, and sure as hell she didn’t want to hurt you.”
He watches Eiji weigh his words, peel them as if they were a big onion.
“She had to take on two jobs to keep us all afloat, she never wanted me to help,” he starts, quietly. Even the sun coming down sounds louder. “She said that I was still a kid, I should have focused on studying and vaulting—I’m still a kid, in many ways. I still have all these people that try to protect me.”
“It’s the Eiji protection squad. Don’t look at me like that, Bones named it.”
Eiji blinks and then snorts when Ash rolls his eyes.
“I know, they’re dorks, but… Eiji, people want to protect you because they love you, not because you’re weak.”
Eiji shakes his head, an incredulous hum on his lips.
“I don’t think I’ll stop being mad at her anytime soon, but I get what you’re saying.” He sighs. “And at least she didn’t catch a flight to the US and disappeared for two years to get involved in a worldwide conspiracy?”
“I’m pretty sure the conspiracy wasn’t what you had in mind when you took that flight.”
“Well, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, right?” The tone is playful; he’s smiling open and wide now. “I was really lucky.”
The sun is burning hot on Ash’s nose.
“There’s just one problem,” he says then, to save himself a bit of embarrassment, and Eiji’s chin perks up. “I gotta buy some underwear because I forgot mine at home and I can’t deal with having that freaking ugly bird on my ass-cheek, it’s creepy as fuck, I feel violated.”
As usual, Eiji can fly high enough to clip him on the ear and he isn’t afraid to use this power.
*
The plan was to be useful: helping Emi out with math homework, Kazue with the groceries, distract Eiji and provide space if he needed to grieve in privacy. And It would have worked just fine if Ash wasn’t such a wreck. But his body has decided that Izumo is too quiet to sleep at night, so now Ash’s hit with waves of daily drowsiness that Eiji endorses by lowering his voice and asking Emi to be quieter.
Ibe calls during one of Ash’s comatose naps, and Eiji moves to step out of the room before Ash can will his own hand to grab at Eiji's ankle and stop him.
“I’m ‘wake,” he tries. He wins himself a scratch on the head, the part that isn’t still dunked into the pillow.
“A job?” he asks, when Eiji’s done with the Japanese. Ash needs a shower, and to get his act together, but it’s impossible to move with Eiji sitting there carding fingers through his messy bedhead. He yawns instead, and he feels like he could sleep another couple of months.
Eiji yawns too, sympathetic.
“They asked Ibe-san to cover the shoot for this article about Ginza, but he can’t so he recommended me—it’s a good job, the magazine is quite notorious locally.”
“When?” Ash asks, frowning at Eiji’s serene face and dry eyes. If he cried again in the last week, Ash didn’t see, but grief is a shaky landscape, and you never know when you’re going to slip and fall in a crack.
“I’d have to meet with this Shimada person before we can finalize anything. I think we should go back before Thursday—”
“Eiji.”
“—So that I can meet him before the end of the week. And, yes, I don’t want you to cancel another appointment,” he adds, because they’re well accustomed to each other’s bullshit at this point. Ash opens his mouth, sitting on the futon, but Eiji disarms him with one smile. He’s basically the safety lock on Ash’s gun, really. “You already won the ‘only once a week argument’, Ash.”
“Twice a week is for people who should be fucking admitted in a psychiatric hospital, I’m—”
“The most incredible, strongest person I know. And you’re going to see your therapist on Thursday.”
“Can we agree to disagree?” he tries, but Eiji’s is already smiling in victory.
“I only do that with obtuse people, you’re too good for that. Now try to get up, I’ll make you breakfast. Or dinner, I guess,” he adds, one eyebrow tilted at the clock.
Ash sighs and tries to unfurl his limbs into something more solid than jelly while Eiji steps out of the room, lighter now that he’s back in his element: the role of Ash’s caretaker, getting him out of bed, getting food inside him.
Ash swallows the acrid taste of the meals he skipped and tries his best to roll the futon in an acceptable cylinder, to take up the less physical space he can since he’s already spilled all over the rest.
Down in the kitchen, Eiji hands him a bowl of rice with one of those encouraging smiles and asks him if he’d like some salad too.
So this is it? Eiji’s father dies, Ash can’t keep it together for more than two consecutive minutes and now they aren’t even back in Yokohama but already back in their old dynamic?
“No, thanks, I’m fine,” he says. It’s a well-practiced script. Ash just has to make it work until it becomes true.
*
“Take care of Emi-chan, alright?” It’s more of a threat than a polite request; Kazue doesn’t falter under her son’s scrutiny.
“I’m an adult! An adult!” Emi says, and makes an old couple turn around in the middle of the station.
Kazue sighs; Ash can smell menthol on her, even if at this point her smoking habit isn’t a secret anymore.
“Take care. Call when you arrive.” She releases Eiji from her hug and then hesitates before petting Ash awkwardly on the elbow. He knows he must look stunned because she blushes and then pushes a plastic bag in his hand. The bright pink lid of a plastic container peeks through the handles. “It’s onigiri, with crab. You can have it for dinner. Please remind my son to call more often.”
When did it happen that Ash became the responsible friend? Is this a parallel universe? But Kazue is looking straight at him, and Ash feels compelled to nod.
Then Emi bolts to hug him, stick-arms circling his midsection, and Ash doesn’t even find in himself to flinch.
“Come back soon, okay?”
“Or maybe you can come when school finish, stay for a bit.” Eiji pats her on the head and turns to Ash like he needs his approval to have his sister over.
“Sure, she can sleep in the kitchen.”
“Mean!”
They both wave their hands as the night bus takes off. The seats are too small for Ash’s legs, but it’s way cheaper than the train, and if you’re lucky enough you can just sleep off the trip. If you’re lucky and your phone doesn’t ring, that is.
“Who is it?” Ash asks, groggy, but Eiji puts the phone back inside his pocket, silenced.
“Don’t worry, they’ll call again if they need me.”
Ash hums, and tries to close his eyes anyway—they’ve chosen the seats in the back so that Ash can have a complete view of the other passengers; still, he doesn’t like that the door is so far away. He looks at the old couple that is chatting three seats on the right and the kid with the big headphones; the woman who’s typing on her laptop at the speed of light. He bolts awake at every stop, and catalogs who gets in and who gets out.
“Is this seat taken?”
Eiji shakes his head and helps the lady to push the diaper bag on the rack. The child is so small Ash could probably hold them in one hand. They must weigh less than a gun.
“What’s his name?” Eiji asks, lips curled upward. The baby drools happily on their bib.
“Hiroshi. A bit old-fashioned, I know,” the mother says, taking their stricken expression for some kind of criticism.
“I think it’s beautiful,” Eiji tells her, with such adamant confidence that the mother smiles too, perplexed.
Ash doesn’t believe that there’s any particular order to the universe, but if there’s a single person who’s always defied everything he believed to be true, that’s Eiji; it’s just fair that the universe’s rules bend for him at least a little bit, and it’s a bit of a miracle that Hiroshi doesn’t cry not even once all the way to Yokohama.
*
It doesn’t feel like being back home. Everything is where it’s supposed to be, Ash’s bed and Ash’s spot on the couch and Ash’s Pac-man mug and Ash’s toothbrush that he forgot there. But things never managed to make a home for him: he’s had expensive things, and the cheapest, most tattered ones, and they held no difference; he’s lived inside mansions and squatted in dirty, molding holes. Things, places: they’re useful or they’re not, and that’s all there is to it.
Eiji picks the last of his clothes to put back inside the drawer because he’s a neat freak who needs to unpack as fast as he’s put foot inside the house. His back pops when he stands up.
He smiles, then, tired and small, but here it is: that’s home. That smile is home to Ash.
“I want to take a run,” Eiji says, and he’s already bending to the side in a stretch. “Join me?”
Usually, Ash would decline. He doesn’t dislike running per se, but doing things without a fixed purpose isn’t in his style. He moves around because he has things to do, something to accomplish—running for the sake of running isn’t freeing, it’s perplexing, and tiring, and he’s going to do it anyway because his purpose is keeping Eiji company now.
“Shouldn’t you go to sleep instead?” he tries, one tilted brow at the sun that’s still way too low on the rooftops. Eiji’s hair is a ruffled mess from dozing off on Ash’s shoulder for eight hours on a bumpy night bus, and his eyelids are trying to fall down, but there’s a spark of stubbornness in them. Nothing Ash can hope to simmer down.
“That’s my line,” Eiji rebuts, and he’s already changing inside jogs, bent down to put on his colorful ankle brace. “You’re the one who didn’t sleep a bit. Maybe the train would have been better?”
“It’s the same. I don’t sleep in places where I can’t get out,” Ash’s tongue says, on autopilot. It’s tiring—all these rules that his body made up to keep him alive are going to fucking kill him one of these days.
Of course, Eiji nods like it makes perfect sense instead of being a mental illness’ symptom—like he understands, and Ash knows he does. As much as someone who didn’t live the way he lived for ten years, Eiji understands.
Ash doesn’t know how he does it; how he can be so strong, run on a sore ankle, and still look ready to take flight at every step while Ash is stuck on the ground trying to be efficient like an old, boring vacuum cleaner.
Rinko Park is bustling at this hour, sun not yet high, runners and dogs carrying around sleepy owners and a street sweeper rustling around with a broom that sends puffs of glinting dust in the air. The morning is crisp, sun-beams stretching in every direction.
“Let’s go get Starbucks after?” Eiji decides, in a whim, when Ash reaches him after a too narrow curve. He tilts an eyebrow but doesn’t comment; he’s learned from experience that whenever Eiji comes back from some especially Japanese experience, being a job interview or a festival, he always returns with the need to search for international flavors, something you could get in any airport whatever the continent. And Ash really needs a sugary coffee-flavored monstrosity to fuel his carcass of a body.
Eiji starts to slow down when they reach the sidewalk, breath heavy, forehead sweaty, and smile big.
“You sure don’t like running,” he says, to Ash’s face—he doesn’t know what kind of face is making, because he never really knows, with Eiji; he doesn’t have to guard it, with Eiji.
“Did you call your mother?” he says instead because, if he lets Eiji always win, he’ll risk getting soft for real. Worse than he already is.
His cup reads Jo-shu, and it’s the closest any barista has ever gotten to his name back in the US too, when Shorter and he would throw Bart Simpson’s level jokes instead of their actual names.
They snatch a table on the far end of the room, near the emergency exit, and Ash tries to not feel too guilty about it.
“I sent a message to Emi-chan when we arrived—okay, okay, I’ll call her! Don’t make you stupid boss-glance, you know it doesn’t work on me!”
But Ash smirks behind the rim of the cup while Eiji is already fishing for his phone—it rings before he can unlock the screen, and Eiji frowns instantly.
“What is it?” Ash asks, back straightening on cue, hand ready to draw the gun he doesn’t have.
“It’s just Mizu-san. Again.” Eiji sighs, sheepish. “I have to answer at some point, it’s just…”
“Do it,” Ash says, fast. “You can answer now, I don’t mind. Sorry, I’ve been glued to your butt for days. I can give you privacy,” he adds, and scouts for another table. He could just go out of the shop entirely, he could—
“It’s not a matter of privacy—it’s just that I have to tell her something she won’t like, so I’ve been trying to put it off.”
Ash frowns. The phone is still lighting up, silenced.
“What do you have to tell her.”
“You know what I have to tell her, Ash,” Eiji says, face serious, tense pinches at the corners of his eyes.
Ash shakes his head and the cup in his hand creaks.
“No, I don’t fucking know. Eiji, for fuck’s sake.” He doesn’t even know why he’s so angry all of the sudden, but it burns up through his throat. “I won’t let you turn her down just because—”
Eiji waits, eyes wide, and the whole universe is definitely spinning too fast around them. Ash swallows.
“Because of me. I won’t let you turn her down because of me—come on, tell me it’s not ‘like that’, now! Tell me that, if I didn’t exist, if I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t have already been on dates with her, to take photos of the billowed-ducks and pretty skies or whatever the fuck photography students like to shoot at!” His head is burning, and his hands are a bunch of blurred sticks taped to the plastic cup. Does he want to? For Eiji to tell him that it’s true—and it is. It must be, because if it’s not, then Ash has fucked up: he’s somehow managed to fuck up even Eiji fucking Okumura, who’s the best, most perfect human being—
“Maybe,” Eiji says, and fiddles with his straw, eyebrows knitted in the middle. “Or maybe not. I really think I prefer men, Ash.”
Huh. The table and the chair and the whole shop brakes so fast that Ash’s brain ends up splattered on the inside of his skull. Thanks to eight million Gods, he’s always been fast at recalibrating.
“Well, then you should be with a man!” he blurts, cup squashed in his hand.
Eiji blinks slowly and looks at him with such intensity that Ash suspects he’s actually witnessing the gathering of shouting beasts that are ravaging inside Ash’s skull, picking his brain apart.
“Ash… What do you think you are?”
A flaming dumpster fire. A bio-hazard. A war crime disguised as a human. A broken public toilet soiled with mold and shit and obscene graffiti.
“I’m not—” Jesus. This shouldn’t be discussed in public. This shouldn’t be discussed at all. “I’m not worth it. No, Eiji, listen.” He pushes the cup out of his reach; some coffee is drooling from the side because, despite years and years of training that were supposed to make an obedient monkey out of him, he’s still a fang-mouthed savage. “This isn’t some trauma-shit that I’m going to magically solve through the power of worksheets. This is a fact.” It is: he knows it is and he knows he has to word it out for Eiji or he’s never going to understand; he’s too good to imagine, to accept, that the way Ash is now, with the startling and the nightmares and the spurts of anorexia, with the dissociation and the panic, the utter disgust for the very skin he inhabits, is as good as he’ll ever be. As close to sanity as he’ll ever be. “I’m not worth throwing your life away. You don’t exist—” For his salvation, Blanca said. Blanca likes to use big words, but Ash’s trying to stop acting like a romanticized tragic protag; he’s been the protagonist of his life and it sucked: he wants to be a side character in Eiji’s story, he wants to be the supportive friend, the sidekick, the wingman. “You don’t exist to take care of me. I can’t let you.”
The crowd—the line at the counter, the typing on laptops, the faint J-pop song in the background all disappear as Eiji looks at him like Ash is talking Finnish; gibberish, something not only incomprehensible to him but that Ash hasn’t understood either, delirious sentences delivered by a mad man.
“What are you talking about, Ash?” There’s a faint smile on Eiji’s lips like he thinks Ash is somewhat joking. “It’s mutual. It’s always been mutual, I rely on you all the time.”
“Of course you did, but I’m not talking about gunfights. You don’t need that kind of protection here and that’s the only thing I’m good for, let’s be real. I’m just saying that you need someone—someone who can support you, someone you can confide in... Eiji?” Did he break him? He’s just—he isn’t moving anymore; Ash turns to be sure that Yut-Lung hasn’t appeared from the emergency exit wearing traditional Kazakh clothing.
Eiji blinks again, twice.
“What do you think happened in the last two weeks, Ash?”
Ash is confused until he recognizes that boiling, scorching itch inside his throat as absolute horror.
“I—your father died. Sorry, I didn’t mean to make everything about me again.”
“No, Ash—” Eiji breathes in through the nose and then exhales. “I’m the one who should apologize, I know you have trouble with this kind of stuff.”
“Funerals?” Ash is confused and he doesn’t like it. His eyes dart once again to the emergency exit and he hates himself because this is Eiji—this conversation is the worst conversation ever, but it’s still with Eiji and so it’s fine. He’s fine and he’s finer when Eiji lifts one hand, careful, and places it on top of Ash’s fist on the table.
“No,” he says, voice quiet, English always accented and perfectly clear, like every time he has to say something troubling but true. Something he thinks it’s true. “I meant recognizing when you’re being incredibly helpful and neglecting your own needs for somebody else’s.”
Ash doesn’t say anything, but he might as well have had some kind of glaring sign stuck on top of his head to signal that he is out of his depth.
“You organized our trip to Izumo, made my suitcase and forget yours, you got sucked into my family’s emotional disasters, got mistreated by half my relatives—you had to wear a fucking suit and I know how much you hate wearing a fucking suit.”
“That’s—it’s just clothes.”
Eiji nods, complacent.
“Sure. It’s just clothes and it’s just flowers—and they’re all horrible triggers that make you sick, but you still braved through all of it just to stay with me and you’ve been great with Emi and I don’t know what you said to my mother but now she likes you, probably because it’s impossible not to like someone who’s as blatantly selfless as you are.”
There’s cotton stuffed inside Ash’s brain. Sometimes—sometimes, living with Eiji in Japan, inside a tiny apartment where their beds are pressed together and they have a small couch and no kitchen table—sometimes he thinks he must have been drugged out of his mind in that darn mental health facility and the true Ash is actually a lobotomized vegetable whose brain is being poked and prodded inside a fishbowl.
“I’m a mess,” he says, tongue parched, and Eiji nods again; the grip of his hand strengthens.
“Sure thing, and so am I.”
Ash’s eyes are prickling and he doesn’t know why. His fist tightens under Eiji’s grip.
“I’m just so scared you’re going to resent me one day. Because I stole so much from you.”
“You didn’t steal anything—you give me so much. I couldn’t have done any of this without you, Ash. Snapping at the speech? I would have snapped the first second I put feet in Izumo—no,” he says, and he lets out a strangled laugh. “I would never put a foot in Izumo because I would have freaked out and messed up the trains! I—this doesn’t make any sense,” he says, and sighs hard, and looks at him straight in the eyes. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you, you have to trust me on this, okay? You save me just as much as you say I’m saving you, every day. And I want it to be like this forever—and, we don’t know how long that is, alright?” he adds, lips quivering. “What if I die tomorrow or—”
Ash snorts.
“Over my fucking dead body.”
Eiji’s lips settle into something that isn’t quite a smile; it’s solemn, it feels like embers at the bottom of Ash’s stomach, and it warms him up. He tilts his head, to search Ash’s eyes behind the hair he needs to cut.
“But it could happen. And I wouldn’t trade a day with you for a very long life with Mizu-san, which I’m sure is a wonderful person. Or anybody else, really. Any other wonderful person wouldn’t be my person. That’s you, Ash, you’re my person,” he adds, silly moron that he is, and Ash isn’t going to drink his stupid coffee. He won’t ever need any other nourishment but Eiji’s hand on his.
“How can you be sure.”
“I just am. You are enough for me, exactly as you are right now. You have to trust me on this.”
Trust is the most difficult thing that exists in this wretched pathetic excuse of a planet, in the tangled, sharp mess that Ash’s life is. Eiji knows it and he’s asking it because it’s important, and Ash can never deny Eiji anything.
His shoulders fall and he knows, deep down, that he does trust him. He isn’t sure he isn’t sucking Eiji away from a better life, but he’s at least sure that Eiji doesn’t think he’s doing it. That Eiji loves him—that he could never doubt.
“I don’t wanna go to therapy today,” he says to their hands, still linked. “I’m failing at it.”
“You can’t fail at therapy, Ash. It’s literally impossible.”
It’s Ash’s turn to smirk.
“Not the first time I do things that are supposed to be impossible, you know?”
Eiji doesn’t throw his coffee at him; he squeezes his hand harder as if they weren’t in a public place; as if no other person held any relevance to him but Ash’s dumb ass.
“You can’t fail at living, Ash—as long as you’re alive, know that you aren’t failing me,” he says. “I don’t need anything more from you. Stay alive, okay?” he says, and maybe he’s going to cry. Ash made him cry again. “Forever isn’t worth much, after all. I won’t ask you forever, I’d never ask you to outlive me, but as long as you can, please—”
As long as he can—Ash wants it. As long as the universe lets him, he wants all of Eiji, not just a part, not when Eiji is willing to give himself wholly with so much courage that, as much of a coward as he is, Ash could never even start to comprehend.
“Okay. As long as I can.”
It isn’t any less, and it sounds like a promise Ash could keep.