Chapter Text
Yotasuke
Yotasuke found himself watching the two of them.
Watching the way Yatora’s mother sits motionless, back ramrod straight, barely sitting on the waiting room chair. The way she had perched like that for the past two hours ever since she had rushed in with her husband almost five hours ago.
They sit three seats down from Yotasuke. The rest had gone to the hospital cafeteria to get tea for Yatora’s parents a while ago. The cafeteria closed at 7:30pm, long before any of them had even imagined themselves here, and opened at 3am. Exactly. Yotasuke hadn’t mentioned the tea that still sat in the cardboard box.
(He didn’t admit this feeling to himself, but it just felt like it belonged to Yatora).
So, he sat there by himself.
The way her husband, Yatora’s father, had fallen asleep immediately, slumped in his chair, his wife’s large purse looped around his wrist.
Yotasuke had met Yatora’s mother at some point in the past (accompanied by his own mother), but he was still surprised at how many similarities there were between her and Yatora’s faces. He can see Yatora in the wavering set of her mouth, the furrow of her brows that made slight wrinkles appear on her forehead, in the sharp wideness of her eyes as she struggled not to cry in the same way Yatora always tried. In both of their long noses.
And so, staring at her nose for an absurd length of time, Yotasuke startles when he meets her steady gaze. Her mouth crumples in a half-hearted imitation of a smile before her lips tighten once more and she turns away, back to her wide-eyed stare.
Yotasuke turns his head away swiftly, gritting his teeth as his face burns from embarrassment and guilt.
It was like she could see right through him, through every inadequate layer, like she knew what Yotasuke had done (or rather, not done) and was judging him for it, blaming him.
Even he blamed himself a little.
She had swept into the hospital like a tsunami, skirts swishing about her legs, face flushed pink, car keys still jingling when she’d come to an abrupt stop at the receptionist desk. Yotasuke and Momo had been the only ones awake (Yakumo-san and Hacchan had been fighting sleep, but for those few seconds they had lost) and had exchanged looks of disbelief. The drive down to Hiroshima from Tokyo took over nine hours if you drove nonstop, four hours by bullet train, or one hour in the air.
A bullet train ride or a flight had to be booked weeks or at least, days in advance. And it was expensive.
Which left the only option that Yatora’s mother had driven well over the speed limit for four hours to arrive in Hiroshima. And it wasn’t hard to imagine when you looked closely at the strained lines of her face.
And Yotasuke marveled at that dangerous, single-minded dedication for someone else. Would his own parents, his own mother, go that far for him?
He didn’t think so; he looked nothing like her.
Yotasuke remembered how his mother had draped her body over him, hours after he’d pulled her down onto the floor. How she had assured Yotasuke of her love. But he wonders how much of it was real and how much of it was like an obligation, something she had to fulfill simply because it was her duty and not because she truly wanted to.
But it didn’t feel right faulting her, not really. It was like trying to find fault with a rose that had thorns, or with a bunny or a goat that chews on your clothes. It was her nature, and yet, was it wrong to wish for her to do something different? To be someone different?
しょうがない. Shouganai. He remembers when he’d first learned that word in his first year of primary school. No one in the class had understood, the teacher struggling to explain what it meant to a room of five and six year olds, when the meaning had hit Yotasuke squarely, out of nowhere, and he’d said out loud, without thinking, louder than he’d probably ever been and ever would be again: “So, this person doesn’t like me, and I just accept it and move on because there’s nothing I can do about it?”
And the frustrated teacher had brightened, with ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ coming from his classmates as they finally got it too because it was easier for a young kid to understand the terribleness of having no friends, like Yotasuke had known so well, and so it was easier to understand that when someone didn’t like them, it was out of their little hands and that that was fate.
And to accept fate because everything was fate.
But even as the teacher had cooed at him for his participation, his intelligence, in that moment Yotasuke hadn’t felt particularly intelligent. He’d felt dumber than he’d ever felt before, in his short life; he’d wished fervently, in those moments, that he could take it back because now he was acutely aware of the noose around his neck subjecting him to a lifetime of ‘it is what it is.’
He couldn’t imagine breathing again.
Yotasuke’s foot kicks out in a rotten mixture of rage and despair and a feeling that was ancient and he could not name, because this was nothing new and he’d always known it.
He glances once again in the direction of Yatora’s mother to find she no longer sits in her seat, but stands by a person who wears a white lab coat. Yotasuke watches the two converse for what seems like eternity, fingers continually digging into his crumpled box, almost puncturing the cardboard, before Yatora’s mother and the doctor both turn to look at him.
“Yotasuke-kun?”
He jumps up from his seat as Yatora’s mother says his name.
She looks at Yotasuke, eyes prickling with tears, but a determined stiffness to her body. “Call,” she pauses for a moment before each name, an urge to get it right, a feeling which Yotasuke recognizes, “Hachiro-san, Momoyo-san, and Yakumo-san. We can go see Yakkun now.”
Yotasuke jumps, fumbling with the box in his hands before pulling out his phone and scrolling through his contacts. He stops, cringing, before pocketing his phone. “Yaguchi-san, I’ll go and get them, but you can go ahead,” Yotasuke says, almost too quietly for her to hear.
She stretches out her arms towards Yotasuke and he stands there confused, wondering for a split second whether she’s trying to give him a hug.
“I can take the box,” Yatora’s mother offers, in way of explanation, realizing Yotasuke hasn’t understood her gesture.
Yotasuke hugs the box closer to his chest. “I’m fine,” he says, almost a bit too harshly, and before he can soften his words, she nods resolutely, turns, and walks back over to her husband, shaking him roughly.
The doctor stands to the side, waiting for Yatora’s parents.
Yotasuke is about to rush off to the elevators, when he realizes he has no idea where to meet her, where Yatora is. “Yaguchi-san, what floor and what room is Yatora in?”
“Floor 5. Floor 5, Room 5-9.” Both the doctor and Yaguchi-san answer in the same breath.
And as he runs off, only one thought is in his head, a thought his mother would call “unimportant,” “inappropriate.” And Yotasuke supposes she’s right, that it is another instance where his “bad habit” gets in the way, but it still doesn’t steer him from this thought:
How lucky it must be for you, for your mother to say your name without feeling like you have to carry the world on your back.
Yatora
A thin line of silence pierces through the static-y fog that is his mind.
Where before he had been trapped in that space between dreaming and living, or maybe, it was living and dying, he didn’t know, there was now a feeling of being awake, the newness of a brand new day. The newness of baptism in Piero’s The Baptism of Christ.
Almost like he is being reborn, and in fact, rather, it feels to him that he is being born for the very first time.
And there’s a moment where he believes it too. Where he can’t even remember his own name, or move his body, or even think his own true thoughts. The thoughts just run in an unorganized, laissez-faire, excited-like way across his mind. Baby bunnies out of the hutch for the first time.
And he’s at peace amongst his frolicking bunnies.
But one bunny-thought moves sluggishly, sluggishly enough that he unconsciously, unexpectedly latches onto it, the thought being caught in the viscous-flowing amber of his mind, and the bunnies poof from the green fields of his mind like they were no more than dust bunnies under his bed, and he’s left with a barren and empty land, and thinking for him seems to go out with a loud pang like a dying star, and the thought screeches out as if it were dying, and all he can hear bouncing around his head, multiplied and stretched and divided and compounded together, a mitosis voice like steel, “It’s not real, Yatora.”
He feels his body chill at the realization that that was his name, that this wasn’t real, that he had lost feeling with reality, lost contact with himself, but⸺and here’s the funny part⸺he didn’t care. And he knows he should care, but he was tired of the difficulty it took to know who he was again even if it only took thirty seconds of his existence to remember, to recall his life. To come back to a life full of chaos and no rest. It was like he was Lazarus, being risen from the dead, getting a second chance even though he’d already been sentenced to death. But he didn’t want that second chance. He felt undeserving and the life felt undesirable because it was hard, harder than anyone ever knew, to try to ground himself, to face his failures, his shortcomings, to once again promise to himself he wouldn’t let his mind set him out to drift only for it to happen again, time after time.
Yet, as if an intruder was pulling the strings, his mind struggled against his conviction, his flesh raced to win against his frantic chase for tranquility, and beeping and whispered sounds began to reach his ears, inhaled breaths began to fill his belly; truly he was a baby being born, but, really, what he really was, was his very own puppet master.
And so, when Yatora wakes up to the real-world, and looks through bleary eyes at a ceiling that was unnaturally white, whiter than his mother’s face cream, and catches in his peripherals, his unmovable limbs raised high on what looks to him like puppet strings, he feels he can’t be held responsible for the choked out shrieks that stumble out of his dry mouth, a ventriloquist dummy that has yet to be broken in. Or maybe it has been broken too much.
Because despite Yatora’s facade of apathy, it was just that, a facade, and he was terrified at being trapped in the confines of his mind where he was both the master and the slave.
Momo
Momo’s high-top sneakers squeak against the slick hospital floor as she races down the corridor ahead of Yotasuke and Yakumo and Hacchan, not paying attention to the whispered shouts of “Momo! Don’t run in the halls!”
But once Yotasuke had run into the cafeteria saying they could see Yatora now, Momo hadn’t wasted any time. Bolting up from her slouched position, she dashes past the elevators, instead taking the stairs up, two, three at a time.
When she reaches the third landing, the realization that she doesn’t know where Yatora is makes her skid to a stop, the sudden change in speed making her almost fall down the stairs, pulling at her pigtails in frustration.
“Fifth floor,” Momo hears a ragged voice say behind her, and when she looks back, she’s equally surprised and impressed to see Yotasuke’s kept pace with her. He’s leaning over, hands on his knees—actually box on his knees, hands around box—sweaty hair covering his tomato face as he inhales and exhales sharply. Pseudo Sumo Pose!
A pleased grin takes form on her face.
Yelling out “Yotasuke-kun!” she wraps her hand around his arm despite his resistance, dragging him up behind her, the pair bursting through the metal door once they hit the top of the fifth floor landing. “Okay, so which room?” she questions, head tilting past Yotasuke to look left and right, down each end of the hallway.
Her eyes, once she’s finished her scan, snap back to Yotasuke, one of her pigtails whipping him in the face. “Sorry!” He doesn’t even move to Momo’s non-relief, looking like he’s about to pass out. He puts a hand up in a wait gesture as he catches his breath, head cast down.
“Are you okay?” Momo asks, not able to keep anxious anticipation out of her voice.
Yotasuke simply nods, standing up straight. He side-eyes Momo. “How are you not exhausted right now?”
“Sumo.”
At the single word answer, Yotasuke waits for more of an explanation, but there is no more, and his nose scrunches in obvious annoyance.
“Right…” He pulls his arm out of her grasp.
“So, where is he? I don’t wanna have to check every room!” Momo declares, even though it looks like she’s about to do just that.
“It’s Room 9, but-”
Momo doesn’t bother to listen to the rest, and before she knows it, she’s standing in front of Yatora’s room.
Her hand reaches out to slide open the door with its little window (and if she were taller, she’d peek through), but the…the feeling doesn’t feel right, but she pushes it down anyway because she just wants to see Yatora, and she opens the door and all she can do is stop, standing frozen in the doorway.
“…Yatora…?”
At the sound of Momo’s voice, Yatora’s mother, who sits crouched by the bed on the far side of the room, stiffens for a second before going back to brushing Yatora’s hair, not acknowledging her. Momo can’t see anyone else in the room besides the two, and honestly, she can barely see Yatora, only the end-lump where his legs are covered with a blanket, raised high in slings, and she can’t explain it but she doesn’t wanna go in. There’s a chilly feeling in the room that instead of filling Momo with fresh air makes her lungs contract with the effort to get anything else, anything at all, into them.
“Eugh~” she exclaims, backing up quickly, almost tripping. Yotasuke stumbles similarly beside her, before a pair of hands steady her, and she looks back and up to see Hacchan and Yakumo, both of their faces flashing rapidly from expression to expression: from stricken to horror to despair before settling upon their own signature unreadable expressions.
Hacchan moves Yotasuke and Momo aside to step into the room. “Excuse me, Yatora-kun Okaasan.” He bows once before taking another step.
The words fall comfortably out of Hacchan’s mouth like he says it all the time, and Momo guesses he does, but to her the words sound foreign and clunky and she’d rather call Yatora’s mother just Okaasan or just Yaguchi-san.
Momo watches Hacchan to see if he’ll bow again. After all, Hacchan is the most respectful person she knows, and even if Yatora isn’t awake right now, Hacchan, without fail, will bow to him too. And he does, but to Momo’s surprise, he bows to the right.
“Yatora-kun Otosan.”
At the mention of a third person, Momo leans forward on her tip-toes into the room, glimpsing a pair of shoes (and missing Hacchan’s third bow which was indeed aimed at Yatora).
Just as she leans forward even more to get a better look, a sound like something caught in a tunnel rings out once, before growing higher and higher in intensity and frequency and she falls over her feet because she has to get out of there.
Shooting back out of the room, past a stony-faced Yakumo who in contrast rushes forward, Momo clenches her teeth, grinding them against one another as though she were preparing to wrestle. Except even she doesn’t feel strong enough for what is in that room.
And even through her panicked craze where she can’t focus on anything long enough for it to register in her brain, Momo knows who the sound belongs to, knows that she should be there, right beside Yatora, but she can’t, because no matter how much she refuses to acknowledge it, this night feels like that night, his sound was like her sound, except on that night the her hadn’t been the person in the bed screaming for their life, rather it had been Momo screaming for Machiko’s life.
Machiko had never screamed back for herself.