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Sou pulled back the curtains covering the bedroom window to let light cut through the dreary darkness of the room.
“Good moooorning~! Rise and shine, Shin!” He called out in a sing-song. Sou practically bounced over to the bed where Shin lay peacefully and exactly in the same position Sou had left him in the night before. “It’s time to get up, you’re hungry, aren’t you?”
Not waiting for a response, he delicately peeled back the covers all the way down past Shin’s feet. This seemed to elicit a reaction from the other because when Sou looked back up to his face, Shin’s eyes were open. It was half of a win, unfortunately, since Shin was looking straight up at the ceiling and nothing else.
Sou knew that nothing could be especially interesting on the ceiling, so he didn’t bother to glance up. He kept a forced smile plastered on his face and held up his cheerful attitude.
“Did you sleep well last night? I know that I did,” Sou chuckled to himself. “Wanna guess what I dreamed about?”
The questions were met with a dull silence, but that was to be expected. Sou leaned over the bed so that Shin’s blank stare was now hazily fixated on him. “I dreamt about you aaaalll night long. In fact, I dream about you every night.”
If this was back before the death game, then Shin would have burst into a blushing mess by now and told Sou to stop saying things like that. The boy would have tried to hide his embarrassed expression, maybe even excuse himself to avoid the potential of being teased even more – always a high likelihood with someone like Sou Hiyori. However, this was after the death game’s conclusion and after the accident of Shin being voted to perish instead of his sister Kanna. The only response to Sou’s words these days was a stone-faced expression that rivaled even a statue’s poker face.
“Come on, not even a smile?” Sou prodded and poked at Shin’s face, grinning much too wide all the while. “You’re never dressed properly without one, as they say.”
His teases to lighten the mood seemed to fall on deaf ears, but that was fine. It was just any other day with Shin now.
After all, Shin was brain dead.
He puffed his lip out into a pout and flopped onto the stool by the bed. “Sheesh, tough crowd.”
Sou took a napkin and wiped the line of drool that had been steadily leaving the corner of Shin’s mouth. “I know you must be hungry, but we have to follow the schedule, you know?” He patted his medical bag and set it onto the nightstand by the bed.
To be more medically accurate, Shin was only in a persistent vegetative state, which allowed for more leg room in the realm of patient care. He could have become legally brain dead, though, if Sou had been any later in his timing of saving Shin’s life.
“All right, let’s get this show on the road!” Sou cheered rather gleefully, only for the space around them to become deathly silent once he finished speaking.
In a strict daily routine, Sou checked Shin’s vitals like his resting heart rate, his level of hydration, his breathing through the stethoscope and other bodily functions he needed to keep an eye on. Shin’s brain retained the basic information of which he needed to live, that being involuntary actions like keeping the organs functioning as they should. However, there was always a possibility that part of his brain would erode away as well, so Sou had to be prepared to catch anything that was off.
Sou rolled back his sleeves in preparation of following the procedure he’d been doing for two months now and began the necessary process of passive range-of-motion exercises for his bed-ridden patient. Sou took hold of each limb one by one and gently adjusted Shin’s joints to avoid them stiffening in place from a lack of movement. Taking a foot in hand, Sou carefully tested the many directions the foot could tilt and bend. He took hold of Shin’s limp hand and flexed each one of Shin’s fingers. To anyone on the outside, this kind of physical therapy would feel like an intimate pass time between two lovers.
They were far from being lovers, though. Neither was flustered by any area that Sou placed his hands on. He could slip his cold hand under Shin’s t-shirt and splay out his fingers over his soft belly, but the only reaction he’d get would be an instinctive flinch at the sudden temperature change. There were no shy glances, no tinted cheeks of embarrassment. It was strictly clinical, nothing more and nothing less.
But when the tedious procedure got to be boring, it was fun to pretend that something else was happening.
“You’re awfully calm for being felt up, you know,” Sou commented when his hands traveled to the undersides of Shin’s thighs and moved the appendages in a back and forth motion to keep the muscles from wasting away.
Sou changed places to exercise Shin’s arm muscles – or lack thereof – in a rhythmic motion. He further explained his thoughts by saying, “At least one person needs to be embarrassed by this sort of thing, so if it’s not you then it’s going to have to be me.”
Sou’s fingers slid down the length of his forearm, passing over the scar of a bullet hole, and stopped at his wrist to check his pulse. “It’s possible you want me to be embarrassed,” he guessed with an unimpressed sigh. “I’ll admit that it’s a fair revenge, for all the times I’ve teased you and whatnot. I’ll let it slide, just this once.”
The immersion was broken when Sou encountered a change in Shin’s pulse upon pressing his fingers down onto it. It was faster than it normally was, and it certainly wasn’t because of their little doctor roleplay. His leg began to bounce on the ball of his foot when he pulled out the machine to measure Shin’s blood pressure. When the numbers came back to him, Sou held the machine a little tighter than necessary.
“Ah… seems like you got the ol’ case of hypotension! Nothing I can’t fix, though. Don’t you worry,” he reassured Shin, who didn’t seem the least bit concerned, with a couple of pats to the head.
Sou finished up the check up and rolled over a wheelchair that was made comfy to sit on with fluffy blankets. “Thanks for always being such a patient, well…patient!” he giggled at his own joke. “Let’s go get a bite to eat now, you’ve earned it.”
It wasn’t too often that Sou miscalculated something or couldn’t predict the outcome of events. This time he had screwed up.
Sou slammed his fist on the keyboard of the information systems room, too riled up to care about the pieces flying everywhere and startling a Shin AI into logging off immediately. Those could always be fixed or replaced, but the scene he was witnessing on the large screens in front of him were going to be irreversible if he didn’t act fast enough.
He tore his eyes away from the display to launch himself out of his chair which couldn’t even spin a full revolution before he exited the room. His dress shoes clattered down the hallway in frantic echoes, bringing him closer and closer to the elevator. Every stride, every step he took was eating up precious time that Sou just didn’t have.
After all, Shin was bleeding out.
Right. Now.
Right this second, Shin had bullet holes strewn all over his body.
Right as Sou was desperately pressing the down button on the elevator, Shin was getting colder and colder.
Sou could almost feel him fading away through some sort of cosmic sixth sense that could never be proven by science even in a revolutionary organization like Asu-naro.
When the doors finally opened, he dove into the elevator and had to wait an agonizingly long amount of time for it to descend. He muttered a slew of curses under his breath as the elevator was taking its sweet time to signal Floor 3. For all this death game was worth, they idiotically hadn’t invested in stairs. If Shin died on him because of something as trivial as a lack of stairs, then there would be hell to pay, that was for sure.
The ding of the elevator reaching Floor 3 was music to his ears. Fortunately, the elevator had given him enough time to catch his breath for the next sprint. When the doors opened just large enough for him to fit through, Sou squeezed through and bolted in the first direction he saw. Sou didn’t exactly know where Shin may have run off to, but he had a talent of being able to guess these things.
He rounded a corner too quickly and he slipped on something that made him lose his footing. Sou plummeted to the ground of the Ruined Corridor with a thud. His fists tightened with frustration and throbbed dully from a couple scrapes in the fall. He was about to start mentally complaining about how Asu-naro also forgot to invest in a janitorial staff when he finally noticed what had made the floor so slippery.
Blood… Shin’s blood, to be exact.
Sou jumped back onto his feet and followed the long trail of bright red blood. It led him to a door opening shrouded in darkness except for a faint source of light coming from within.
Sou didn’t hesitate to dart inside and made no pause at the sight of Shin’s limp body draped over a keyboard. Under normal circumstances, maybe he would have cracked a joke over Shin not leaving the computer until the very end, like a true shut-in tech nerd. But now wasn’t the time.
He pressed the tips of his fingers against Shin’s neck, surprised to still feel the trace of a heartbeat with his blood painting the floor red and all. Sou paid no more of his attention to observation and hoisted the incredibly light-weighted boy onto his back. He held Shin up with one arm while his other typed onto the keyboard to open a secret passage way to an emergency health room, one that was stored on each floor just in case something was to go wrong. However, it was proving to be difficult to unlock as his fingers kept sliding onto the wrong keys due to Shin having bled all over it. Sou would make sure to give him a talking to later about keeping the work area clean.
Finally, the password was accepted and a door off to the side opened up for him. He readjusted Shin who’d been slipping out of his grip, and then hurried into the operation room. He set Shin down none too gently onto the bed in his haste of racing against the natural course of death and rushed to grab too many things to count: an IV bag, transfusion blood, all the works.
In hindsight, going to Safalin’s clinic would have saved him so much lost time, but interfering with the death of a participant was strictly off limits. No one was supposed to know about this.
It wasn’t that he was saving Shin because of something as fickle as friendship. That was only a role out of many he had to play for the consent forms to be signed and the glory of the death game to take place under Asu-naro’s thumb. Sou was doing every possible tactic to save Shin because he wasn’t supposed to die like this. He had sworn the moment he laid eyes on him in that lackluster, dusty highschool classroom that he’d be the cause of the life draining from his wide, bright eyes that seemed to take up the whole world in a child-like wonder.
It was supposed to be Sou that was the cause of Shin’s heart beginning to flatline. It was supposed to be him that crushed Shin’s chances of being victorious in this death game. It was an inevitable truth that he’d always believed in, so why?
Sou bitterly repeated the question over and over in his head while darting across the room to a drawer he proceeded to violently wrench open. In the compartment was his very last option, one that would most certainly not fix things up good as new. It wouldn’t lead to a happily ever after, but he was out of time, out of patience and out of luck. He held up the needle of pure adrenaline and turned to look at Shin – a currently dead Shin.
“I’m not letting it end like this,” Sou decided, expression grave.
Sou dipped a spoon into a warm bowl of soup and held it up to Shin’s lips. “Say ahh~,” he instructed in a playful manner.
The spoon prodded at the boy’s lips which instinctively opened to welcome the food into his mouth.
While Shin had quite enjoyed miso soup in the past, that was now the only thing that was more or less safe to consume normally. The other nutrients that Shin needed were sent through a tube that went into his stomach later in the evening, so that his body could rest while digesting the food. It hadn’t always been that way. Sou had a scare a couple of weeks into this new arrangement with Shin choking on a piece of chicken lodged in his throat due to the food being poorly chewed. Sou was trained in the heimlich maneuver, but he didn’t want to make it a daily habit of saving Shin from something like that. And so, the tube feeding became Shin’s primary source of nutrients.
With that being said, spoon feeding was more for Sou’s own enjoyment than anything else.
After Shin’s throat moved to indicate he swallowed down the food, Sou asked, “Do you want some more?” He paused and then took Shin’s silence as consent. “Okaaay, here we go…”
He repeated the same motion and watched as Shin’s brain worked to ingest something purely through involuntary actions. It was fascinating in a way, to see the brain adapt under such dire conditions. Sou could’ve been impressed by Shin’s fighting spirit to stay alive. Even back then, Shin had managed to surpass his expectations. He hadn’t predicted that Shin would take on a new name and persona to survive. There was a sense of pride in watching someone he’d known for years awaken to a deeper potential of himself. He had grown.
On the third spoonful, Shin seemed to have a harder time swallowing and some of the broth escaped his lips to drip down his chin. Sou used his spoon to collect the liquid and ease it back into Shin’s mouth when he seemed to be able to swallow again. Just like this, Shin appeared to be nothing more than a child.
However, Sou was never the nurturing type. A darker feeling swirled around inside of him. It was deep and sinister with nothing short of malicious intent. With any indication of the will to survive in someone as hopelessly far gone as Shin, it unearthed a part of Sou that he kept relatively locked tight. With each gulp of soup, Shin was telling Sou that he wanted to live, in his own way. It was like he was begging for Sou to give into his most prominent thoughts. Sou felt somewhat similar to a man being seduced, but his desires weren’t sexual ones.
His fingers twitched around the spoon–restless to complete a much more craved task–as it filled up once more with broth. Each time there was a tiny spark of light in Shin, a hint of desire to keep experiencing the world that he could no longer consciously interact with, that made Sou want to kill him on the spot.
“Just a couple more spoonfuls, Shin. You can handle that, can’t you?” He grinned with far too much teeth, wondering if the words were meant more for himself than Shin.
Sou’s once gentle behavior became more forceful when he jammed the utensil into Shin’s mouth, making the boy cough in response. That choking noise wasn’t enough though, it wasn’t enough of the struggle he so desperately needed to see.
His hands itched to wrap around Shin’s twig of a neck and squeeze down with every bit of strength he had – not that he even needed to. It wasn’t like Sou hadn’t tried to before. It seemed to happen at the end of every spoon feeding session these days.
Many times, Sou would get overcome with an insatiable bloodlust to explosively overturn Shin’s wheelchair and watch him limply collide into the ground. Shin wouldn’t move, simply lay sprawled out like a ragdoll. Sou would get on top of him and prepare to finally put an end to it, but he’d always pause when met with the same apathetic stare.
It reminded Sou of a dead fish with their unmoving hollowness. They weren’t the same eyes that he’d seen so long ago, reminiscent of a baby squirrel that was trembling with anxiousness. The case with Shin, though, was that nervousness turned into an unrivaled determination when confronted with a challenge. Sou saw it all the time in an unmatched fascination when watching the live feed of the death game’s progress.
But those lively teal eyes were long gone now, replaced with a husk of what they once were. Upon seeing them, the overwhelming urge to snuff out the last remaining spark of Shin’s life force faded almost instantly.
With one final jam of a spoon into a hacking Shin, Sou could let go of the breath he didn’t even realize he was holding in. “There we go, all done! What should we do now?” Sou wondered aloud with a forced cheeriness, more to fill the room’s empty silence than anything else.
It was a valid question, though.
What now?
Sou set the spoon down on the table and rested his chin on the heel of his palm. He let out an overly exasperated sigh. He was growing tired of this mundane routine: tucking Shin in at night like a doting mother, rolling his wheelchair through the park on an especially sunny day, and engaging in long one-sided conversations about anything that came to Sou’s mind.
The thought of abandoning the present form of Shin had already crossed his mind several times in their time together. He considered putting all of his efforts into creating the perfect replica of the Shin that he’d grown attached to in the death game, a doll that Sou could be entertained by in whatever manner he wished. The problem was a lack of equipment. He no longer had the money or materials to create something as complex as that, and so… he settled.
Settling was boring. He hated boring things, but Sou stuck around anyway. The reason eluded him, but he was working on the answer. All in due time, he continued to remind himself.
It wasn’t unusual for him to become bored with something. His spontaneous, out-right strange nature was in attempts to constantly keep himself entertained. When he found himself plagued by normalcy, Sou noticed that he tended to make self-destructive decisions or make deals that wouldn’t benefit him in the long run in a desperate attempt to escape a dull lifestyle. Asu-naro had been one of those times, he acknowledged with the indifference of someone recalling the dump they’d taken earlier that morning.
It was all in the past now, anyway.
Maybe.
The death game had run its course, which would leave the organization satisified enough to not look too thoroughly into his whereabouts. Sou had faked his death during the “banquet” – not a name he’d come up with himself as it was not to his taste whatsoever – and given an Oscar winning performance of losing to a high school girl. Even so, acting could only get him so far as Asu-naro wasn’t the type of organization to tolerate loose ends. If they were to convince themselves that he was still alive and in hiding, then they would find him. If he was needed by them for any reason, then they would find him. It was possibly only a matter of time before this little domestic charade of his with Shin came to an end.
“We should probably get you some more water in your system with the low blood pressure and all,” Sou explained to what felt like a brick wall. “Can’t leave you high and dry, now can we?”
But he could.
Sou didn’t have to take care of him, fuss over him and spoon feed him like this. He didn’t need to linger at Shin’s bedside in the dark of night long after the boy had gone to sleep. It wasn’t necessary to watch over him for hours, just to make sure he was still breathing, until he couldn’t stay awake anymore. No one was forcing Sou to lay next to Shin as he slept, but he did it anyway.
Before Sou left to gather the hydration equipment, he glanced down at the delicate hands settled amongst the blankets in Shin’s lap. Without much thought put into it, Sou reached out and held each end of Shin’s fingertips as he bent them to encourage flexibility. He’d already done it that morning, but what was the harm of doing it now?
They felt small in his grasp. If Sou truly wanted to, he could snap them like carrots and see if that could get an intriguing reaction out of Shin. But instead, he held Shin’s hand tenderly in his own, as if he hadn’t only moments before pondered the idea of strangling Shin so forcefully that his neck broke in half.
The warmth felt nice and simple, something that Sou could maybe even relax into. And with the cozy atmosphere of sitting at the kitchen table after having a nice breakfast, it was sounding more and more tempting.
He let himself ease into the sensation and loosened up the muscles in his shoulders he hadn’t even noticed tension in. He realized in that peaceful pocket of time that too often his brain was always thinking about something or the other, and that his head would eventually become over-heated and fry his circuits like a computer.
Shin’s fingers jerked awkwardly to enclose over Sou’s, causing him to gasp and nearly jolt to his feet from surprise. “Ahaha… wow, you startled me,” he laughed through the uncomfortable feeling of being caught off guard.
Discomfort shifted to something else, a bubbling excitement that made it hard to keep still.
The movement hadn’t been made with thought or intention, Sou knew that after a quick glance at Shin’s blank expression. He had heard of cases that involved a baby-like reflex to grab an object put into a patient’s hand, but he’d never seen it in person. It was so much more intriguing to experience first hand, especially because it was Shin.
Sou gripped the fabric of his shirt and attempted to catch his breath. His heart thrashed around in his chest with too many emotions to process. Sou understood that this didn’t mean Shin was conscious or on a road to recovery, but this was the most exhilarating thing to happen in a long while.
Absently, Sou wondered what other fun experiences they could have with Shin’s unintentional responses.
The second feeling he couldn’t quite figure out filled him with a certain unease that he couldn’t pinpoint. It made the palms of his hands clammy while his mouth became unbearably dry. He’d been startled and fascinated in the beginning, but it was possible his heart continued to thump around erratically for a different reason now.
It wasn’t like they had never held hands like this before. Sou touched Shin all the time now that the boy couldn’t take care of himself, and even before the death game Sou had managed to sneak in some physical contact to see how Shin would respond. It was for data purposes in regards to creating the Shin AI and nothing more, he had reasoned at the time. But for some reason, he was giggling like a schoolgirl at the smallest hint of reciprocation. He shouldn’t be this excited.
Sou stared at their hands clasped together and then to Shin who was propped up in an awkward posture in the wheelchair. He took note of little details like the small moles on Shin’s pale cheek or the way his chapped lips were always slightly parted due to the relaxed muscles in his jaw. It was something that he saw everyday, but it felt unique in this moment. In such a moment as this, it gave the impression that Shin had something to say, sentences and feelings on his tongue that he wanted to express but couldn’t come out.
He found himself to uncharacteristically join in on the silence, instead of rattling on in a sea of conversational nonsense. It wasn’t intentional, though. It was like a cat had caught Sou’s tongue. Being unable to speak his mind had never a problem before now. Saying whatever ghoulish or blunt thing that came to his brain was deeply ingrained into his personality, but not in this moment. Not when the golden light of the morning sun caught Shin’s eyes in a way that made them sparkle again like he wasn’t a dead man walking. Not when the birds sang to each other outside and those brilliant eyes followed the twittering sounds to the window. Shin reacted to it like it wasn’t something meaningless that occurred on the daily, but like it was something new.
Sou was speechless, seemingly at the mercy of someone who couldn’t even blow his own nose.
When they made eye contact, however, Sou stiffened in place akin to a cheetah on the savannah in the middle of stalking a wary gazelle. He wasn’t sure if he was simply seeing what he wanted to see, but there was something behind Shin’s eyes that wasn’t there before. In all the time taking care of him, the expression of a corpse never left Shin, which was one of the reasons Sou had kept him alive for this long. But now, something else was there and it tempted Sou more than any drug.
Like this, Shin was more beautiful than anyone he’d ever seen.
When Sou finally found the ability to speak again, there was only thing he could possibly say. His voice dropped lowly when he voiced his most genuine thoughts, “I could kill you right now.”
He had never explicitly told Shin what he wanted to do to him, which was a thrill all on its own, but he figured there had never been a need to. Sou was positive that murderous intent always lingered in his eyes when they fell upon Shin, growing more vigorous and indulgent when his mind went through all the possible ways that he could make the process of ending his life as long and painful as possible. He knew that Shin could feel his intensity, with how he always used to tremble under his gaze, and wondered at the time when Shin would be able to figure it out. But in the end, Shin had been too dense to guess the intention.
Too dense to run away from Sou when he had the chance.
“Well then, I suppose the cat is out of the bag now,” he said casually, as if the revealed secret wasn’t incriminating enough to get him thrown in jail – not that he’d ever let that happen, of course.
Sou continued, “You know that I could do it so easily, right? You can’t even speak, let alone move.”
He leaned in close enough to see the tiny hairs on Shin’s face. “You wouldn’t be able to stop me. Even back then when you could still use your legs, you wouldn’t have been able to escape me. You could have tried to run from me with everything you had, and I’d catch you every time,” Sou spoke with a fixed, sinister smile.
There was no change in Shin’s face to reveal an understanding of what Sou was saying to him. He didn’t imagine it, though, when he felt the squeeze on his hand get tighter.
“If you hadn’t ended up like this, maybe I would have cut those legs off to keep you right where I want you. But where’s the fun in that, I wonder? It’s so much more enticing to see you squirm over and over again, scrambling towards a freedom in sight, only to plummet right back into my grasp. Because, at the end of the day, that’s where you belong, Shin.”
Sou’s breathing quickened with anticipation, frustration and a little bit of desperation, no doubt showing a completely unacceptable expression at the time of his words. The words weren’t socially acceptable, either. But then again, when had he ever cared about any of that?
“That’s what I want, but no matter what I do, you don’t give it to me!” Sou banged his fist down on the dining table. The impact was hard enough to make the soup bowl rattle, as if it was sentient enough to tremble at the possibility of Sou taking his anger out on it. The bowl felt more alive than Shin, furthering his irritation.
“You just…just sit there! That’s all you ever do. Can’t you tell that I’m sick and tired of it?” he fumed. Sou clenched Shin’s hand tight enough to really hurt, but there was only a faint flinch to the action. It infuriated him. “It’s so boring, Shin! Boring, boring, boring!”
In his anger, suddenly the skin on skin contact repulsed him to a nauseating degree. Sou knocked his chair over when he stood up and attempted to rip his hand out of Shin’s grip, but the fingers holding onto his hand didn’t budge. It resulted in Shin’s whole body being jerked forward. Shin fell face first into the table. But even when it must have been painful, he didn’t let Sou go.
“Let go!” Sou snapped, trying to pry the fingers off one by one.
Shin held on tight like his life depended on it.
In a desperate battle for control, Sou’s features darkened and he squinted his eyes into a glare. “You think you’ve won? You think that just because you’re not dead yet that you’ve won? I can toss you out if I want to, I can keep you if I want to. Don’t think for a second that you’ve beaten me!”
He was practically screaming at someone that couldn’t even lift his head off of the table, and he probably should have felt embarrassed. But Sou had been hanging on by a thread for quite some time now, and something in him had snapped apart.
“Don’t screw with me!” Sou yelled down at Shin, hands still firmly interlocked. “You’re nothing, you’ll always be nothing.”
By the time Sou had gotten out all he wanted to say, his shoulders heaved with each shaking breath. He could feel the uncomfortable sensation of sweat accumulating on his forehead. His eyes were sharp and narrowed on Shin’s head that had eventually rolled to the side, squishing his cheek to the wood, in Sou’s maddened struggling.
A small voice in his head was telling Sou that he had made an error in his last sentence. Someone who he claimed to be meaningless had managed to agitate him in ways he hadn’t been in a very long time. He wasn’t an idiot. He could understand that much, at least.
“You…” He paused to gather his thoughts. “You were supposed to be nothing.”
Unsurprisingly, the ramblings of a mad man had no responsive audience.
Having not been granted a two-way conversation, Sou had a chance to self reflect. He had let himself get far too impassioned in the heat of the moment. It dawned on him how truly worked up he’d gotten, noticing a permanent mark of his fist in the table. Having a mechanical arm had its disadvantages when it came to furniture, unfortunately. Sou felt sweat trickle down the back of his neck and down his shirt. This wouldn’t do, he really needed to get a hold of himself.
Shin’s hold on him loosened, letting Sou’s hand fall back to his side. It allowed him space to calm himself, only taking a couple of moments of recuperation before he felt relatively good as new.
Sou gently supported Shin’s head with one hand and tilted him back into a proper sitting position with the other. “Ahaha, that must have been so scary! Nevermind all that, Shin. I was supposed to be getting your hydration equipment, wasn’t I?” His tone had returned back to normal, as normal as an obnoxious glee could be, and there was little evidence left in Sou’s appearance to indicate that he’d gone off the deep end only moments before.
He turned on his heel and exited the room to make preparations.
When had Shin started mattering to him in a way that was more than a scientist and his test subject?
Sou dug through his memories while sitting on the stool beside Shin’s bed and absently played with strands of his teal hair. It was late in the night now, but he couldn’t sleep with everything that was on his mind.
Had it all began on those sleepless nights without Shin when he’d been killed by Alice? Was it even further back when they spent everyday together in Shin’s highschool days? Or perhaps, it could have been during the death game when Sou neglected his paperwork to obsessively watch the livefeed of Shin wearing his scarf, clinging to his scarf.
He groaned and held his head in his hands.
Sou had gone into the deal with Asu-naro not expecting or wanting any sort of attachments to those he interacted with. It was easier that way, more malleable that way. Sou wanted to have his fun and satisfy his own morbid curiosities before moving onto the next big thing, but now a single person was standing in his way of doing just that.
Normally, Sou would have flattened them without a thought and kept his pace. He couldn’t with Shin because there was nothing he could do, which brought out a bitterness in him. Killing the boy as he was now would bring him no satisfaction, but Sou felt more attached as the days stretched on.
When he’d told Shin about wanting to be the one to end his life, amongst other threats, he meant it wholeheartedly. That was something unchanging and hell would freeze over if it did. However, it was like his ability to act on his commitments had been stolen right out from under his nose. All those instances he had backed out of finishing the job, they had been on the excuse of it not being the right time. He had continued on with their routine, telling himself that there was something missing – that he couldn’t kill Shin just yet.
But that morning, the missing piece to Sou’s eccentric puzzle had finally clicked into place when there was something noticeable in Shin’s gaze – something new and different. That had been the right time to kill him, but he hesitated. He hated hesitating in doing anything that mattered. Uncertainty indicated weakness, and that indicated a lack of control.
And Sou had to always be in control.
It didn’t feel that way earlier, though. He felt completely out of control. Instead of choking Shin to death like he so desperately wanted, so desperately needed, Sou rambled out threats to establish groundless superiority and shouted at the poor boy. He knew that he was so much better than that. He was Sou Hiyori, the charismatic and friendly guy in the suit that cracked jokes at others’ expense. He wasn’t someone that lost it on a person that had been minutes away from complete brain death because it made absolutely no sense to do so. There was no rationality to it. And yet, his chest stung more and more every day when Shin wouldn’t talk back to him. There was a loneliness to it that was far outweighing the boredom he’d been annoyed by in the beginning.
Sou lifted his head and saw a strip of moonlight laying over the top of Shin’s sleeping face. It was the only thing that was illuminated in the pitch black bedroom, so he focused on it.
He shifted from the stool onto the bed to get a closer look, disregarding any social courtesy of not watching someone while they are resting. Sou lifted a hand and brushed the edges of his knuckle down the curve of Shin’s cheek.
“When you sleep so peacefully like this, a part of me thinks that you’ll wake up the next morning and greet me like you used to,” Sou whispered. “Maybe we could play games together again. I’d even let you win for once, Shin. Would you like that?”
He gazed intently at Shin’s face, taking every part of it that he could see in the little amount of light he had. There was no question that his soft features were appealing. Shin was nice to look at and even prettier when he smiled. Sou felt his cheeks warm when he thought about that precious smile being caused by him, directed at him and no one else.
Unfortunately, Shin didn’t smile anymore. Sou still had all the pictures he had taken without Shin’s permission, but they always paled in comparison to the real deal. He wished more than anything to see the soft upturn of Shin’s lips again.
It was undeniable now that there was an attraction.
“Ah… when you sleep like this you remind me of fairytales,” Sou scooted closer and pressed a thumb gently on Shin’s bottom lip. “I grew up as a kid being told that knights in shining armor would come riding in to save the day, kiss the girl and live happily ever after. In Sleeping Beauty, the princess was awoken by a true love’s kiss.”
He leaned down to hover above Shin’s mouth. “What do you think?” Sou breathed a whisper, careful to not disturb him too much. “Wanna… try it out?”
Sou placed a light kiss on Shin’s lips. The sensation was nothing like the exploding intensity that the movies would have someone believe. It didn’t make his heart race or spark an uncontrollable desire of pinning Shin down on the bed. Instead, the kiss was chaste and fleeting, just another casual, familiar touch out of many that they had shared. It lasted for only a couple of seconds at most.
Another difference between real life and the movies was that Shin didn’t wake up just because Sou really wanted him to.
“This really is just too cruel,” he complained to no one in particular, smiling twice as wide to make up for his disappointment. “But alas… our story was never meant to be a happy one. You see, I’m no knight and you’re certainly not a princess. We’re just two people… people without any particular plot line to drive us.”
“And most of all, I could never give you a true love’s kiss,” Sou leaned his forehead against Shin’s and sighed.
“It’s really… too bad.”
Sou got up from the bed and closed the curtains, snuffing out the sliver of moonlight and plummeting them both into complete darkness.