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The world is spinning in on itself as Akechi shoves the door to his apartment open, locking it and collapsing against the wall. Sweat pools underneath his bangs, and he feels a dizziness akin to being spun in a centrifuge cloud his brain. Quickly forcing his uncomfortable dress shoes off and tossing his suitcase to some unknown pile of clothing, he all but sprints to the bathroom to lean over the toilet bowl.
Spit dribbles from his mouth as it opens and closes around nothing. The sickness in his stomach makes him want to kill himself, but he supposes the cruel irony is that it’s not enough for him to actually throw up. It’s abysmal—stuck in the stasis of the dark bathroom where he can do nothing but try to belch up his guts, to no avail.
His knees hurt from sitting on the tile; his head hurts from the nonstop pounding; his entire body is sweating profusely while also feeling as though it’s about to freeze to death. Finally, he gives up his attempts to throw up and sheds his dress shirt and tie before stumbling through the doorway to the bed and collapsing, curling up into a ball. The uncomfortable feeling of his sheets touching skin is reviling, but overpowered by the sheer fatigue dragging his soul down.
Akechi falls asleep to the sound of his own heavy breathing. The messy, quiet apartment might as well be housing a corpse instead of a human being.
When he comes to, his condition is no better than it was prior. It’s worse, actually. His throat is completely dry and it hurts to swallow, made no better by the coughing fit that wracks his entire body as he convulses. He’s so, so sweaty—as if he were stuck inside a bubble of boiling water.
With his eyes glazed over, he rummages around the bed to look for his phone. In theory, it should be easy to find the little square brick, but with his mind fogged up the process is so frustrating he wants to break all his bones in two and grind himself into sludge. Finally—finally, his fingertips brush against it beneath his pillow and he latches onto it to check the time.
The bright light of the screen in the completely dark room flashbangs him and he squints his eyes, barely able to stay focused enough to read the time. 3:15AM. The battery is somewhere around 17 percent. There's a large assortment of notifications that garner a few milliseconds of attention, but he can't be bothered to check on what any of them say.
He unlocks his phone with some amount of difficulty in typing the pin in, and opens up his messages before bursting into another coughing fit. He looks at the most recent contents and feels himself go numb with disbelief. Why he opened his messages in the first place is beyond him—who the fuck is he going to call? He chokes down a hoarse, aggrieved laugh that bubbles to the surface.
Nijima Sae - 12 hours ago. Seen. Masayoshi Shido - Call ended four days ago. The few other recents are various work contacts, reporters, and a random fan girl that found his personal phone number. He laughs harshly now. It’s a sharp, almost screaming sound that escapes him.
How funny. Hilarious, even. The thought occurs to him that he’s going to die here in this bed with his flesh rotted off his body before anyone ever finds him. He doesn’t even know the name of his next door neighbor.
He’s about to toss his phone across the room to resign himself to his fate before his eyes catch one name in his contacts that makes him stop. No, he can’t, he reflects in vain. But it easily roots itself in his mind with his mental defenses down.
Amamiya Ren - 7 days ago. Seen. The last time that they’d spoken was an ‘accidental’ encounter at the subway station a few days ago. Nothing more than a few words exchanged, a quip or two of amicable phrases traded before they had to part ways. He bites his lip before turning his phone off and placing it down to the side of his head.
As he shivers in place, his eyelids slip closed. Nausea haunts his vision. It’s almost as though he’s drowning in a world made of magma, or like his skin is covered in metal where it’s too hot on the outside from the beating sun but too cold on the inside as his heart freezes in place. He lies there, hacking and choking on nothing but the mucus produced by his own body. Revolting.
At least in the metaverse, the pain is external and can be brushed over by cursing until his voice is hoarse and wrapping his arms in tourniquets until the blood is stifled. At least he has someone to blame for it, something to take all his anger out on until the hunger in his bones is satiated.
But here, being nothing more but a shivering lump that could throw up at any moment, he has naught but his own weakness to blame. It’s pathetic. He tries swallowing down the sickening feeling rising upward, but it scratches his throat and burns as he coughs again. The pounding on his head never ceases.
He hasn’t been this sick since he was a child. His mother, taking what little time she had to stay home and nurse him back to health. Cheap, store bought soup reheated with the most minimal amount of chicken. A cool hand pressed to his forehead before she kissed him, willing the illness to pass through him peacefully.
Dimly, he’s aware that he should do something. Drink a glass of water, take acetaminophen, eat something for god’s sake. But everything in his body screams at him in any attempt to move. Besides, he can’t even cook when he’s not in a deathly ill state. There’s nothing in the fridge but energy drinks and a half eaten sandwich from the convenience store three days ago. He might as well just die at this point—it would leave very little impact on the world in the end.
It’s with that thought that he feels his control over consciousness slipping, gravity pulling him down to earth and into its heady, molten core where he’ll be melted down into little molecules of carbon, hatred, and spite.
A muffled voice punctures the haze as a sliver of morning light makes it past the closed blinds. Akechi mumbles curses that come out strangled due to the dryness in his throat that’s only worsened with time. His body feels like it's on fire, and at some point he kicked off his paltry excuse for a blanket onto the floor, exposing his bare skin.
The voice is crackling, static-like, and he has to strain to figure out what it’s saying or where it’s coming from. It sounds like it's some sort of deity that’s finally come to take him for all he’s worth, but he assumes it’s real just because life would never be so kind to him.
Finally, he comes to realize that it’s coming from the right side of his head and he looks over while he tries to understand past the gibberish-like fluff clouding his mind. “...kechi. You there? Are you alright?”
Akechi feels his blood run cold. The voice is very, very familiar. He swears, before he can remember himself, and almost swears again when he realizes.
His body is in no shape to move, much less his mind in any state to don the mask of a pleasant boy. But he tries anyway, swallowing down the bile rising to the top. “Ah, Amamiya-kun, I—” he’s interrupted by the immediate sound of his own body hacking, and he wants to tear out his vocal cords. “I’m doing fine. Please, excuse this incident. I did not intend to call you.”
“Are you sure? You don’t seem fine. Do you want me to…” Ren’s voice trails off in his mind but Akechi can assume what he’s saying anyway. It doesn’t matter regardless, when his response is going to be the same.
When there’s a gap in the noise, he deduces that it’s now his turn to talk. “No, no, that’s quite alright. I wouldn’t want to trouble you at all.”
A brief fuzziness comes back before it’s translated into real words. “—cut off, sorry. What was that? I’m going to leave the house in a bit…”
“I said that it’s fine, please. I really am—” he tries, but it’s not helping his case when he wheezes to make it through the words. “I don’t need anything.”
He’s met with silence. The awkwardness makes him stumble before he looks down at the screen and sees it’s gone completely black. He frantically presses every button to turn it back on before coming to the logical conclusion that the useless thing is completely dead. He wants to scream and rip off his head, but his body is once more reduced to a shivering mess as he hacks up nothing but more dry air.
The nausea returns, probably due to straining himself trying to respond, and he has no more will left to fight in him. His phone falls off the bed, forgotten, and he rolls over in defeat. He’s tired. So tired. The ceiling is far enough away that he thinks it must be in the stratosphere but at the same time he doesn’t feel grounded in the bed, more like he’s falling down infinitely and his stomach contents, or lack of, are rolling with inertia.
The brief flash of awareness he possessed escapes him and he’s thrust back into a fitful darkness, struggling in a state of neither rest nor wake.
When he wakes for what feels like the third or fourth time in a few hours, he’s startled by the light that floods his senses—it’s… almost angelic—rapturous even. Perhaps this is the time some creator above has finally decided to release him from suffering.
His eyes are crusted over and he cracks one lid the smallest bit open to see the silhouette of a person. The presence is warm, comforting, and soft. A cool hand presses to his forehead and he closes his eyes as he leans into it.
The familiarity of the gesture catches him off guard and he’s suddenly transported to a different place. A place where the bed is still twin sized but his body fits on it far more easily, his stained sheets are patterned with feathermen designs, and the lamp next to his bed seems to have all the light in the world to fend off the darkness in the middle of the night. Next to him, the figure moves closer, leaning over gently.
“...Mama?” he coughs weakly, straining to say anything at all. She says something to him in a concerned voice and he lets it support him like a floating raft in a very large, expansive sea. Her figure is hazy. She looks tall, but she’s always appeared tall in his mind: looking upward into her tired eyes asking to be picked up, being held in her arms as she rocked back and forth on the torn up couch.
Akechi has not felt this way in a very long time. In spite of the omnipresent need to guard himself, he relaxes, tenseness easing away.
“I’m—” another sputtering cough makes him brace his chest. “...fine. Don’t worry mama.” He’s not very convinced of the notion himself, but he has to be brave, because he can’t make her worry any more than she already is, so he’s really okay. It hurts to breathe, but it’s alright. He can do at least this much.
Faintly, he hears the tones of a human voice mumbling to his ears in response, but it doesn’t quite process. She slips away from the bedside with a few words and he finds his fingers grasping out to plead for her to not leave. Not yet. But it’s useless, she’s already disappeared and he chokes down a strangled cry. He doesn’t want to cry—he’s not a child anymore.
The pain runs down his aching body while his jaw tenses in place, until it’s relieved by the same warm presence back at his side. A soft blowing sound whistles into his ears, and as he tries to blink his eyes he feels a spoon bump against his mouth. It smells like heaven and more.
Still everpresent is the twisting of his stomach, but he opens up anyway for the small bit of liquid to run past his lips. A few droplets trickle down his chin. They’re quickly wiped away by the tender brush of a napkin. Another spoonful and he starts to cough again. The position is difficult to drink any of it when he’s laying down, so when the spoon comes back he tries to shake his head and sit up, but ends up collapsing backward.
His eyes, still bleary, begin to open up in the sunlight. The figure in front of him seems to morph right in front of his eyes, arm outstretched toward him with a bowl in the other hand. His mom doesn’t wear glasses. Nor was her hair that dark. Or short. And her shoulders were not that broad. He blinks blearily.
Ah.
The realization hits him, slowly.
His mind races to catch up with the revelation as his lips open around a gap of air.
“...Ren?” Akechi finally whispers, his voice coming out frail—almost childlike. The embarrassment only now begins to settle in, but it struggles to make space for itself among the intense pressure that’s been making his head feel like cotton.
“Ah, did you just realize it was me?” the juvenile boy chuckles through the mask covering his face. His eyes are squinted, and Akechi can’t place his finger on the emotion that grows with seeing his face right now, here, in such a vulnerable state. “Are you able to sit up? I don’t really want you to choke on the soup.”
He doesn’t have enough energy to formulate a real response, so he just repeats himself softly, “Ren.” There’s a pause before he clumsily remembers to ask, slowly, “why… are you here?”
The other boy’s eyes look away quickly. If Akechi were in his right mind, he may have even noticed his ears slightly coloring in embarrassment when a sigh escapes. “You didn’t sound too good over the phone. I was—I would have done it for any of my friends. Just so you know.”
The word ‘friend’ rolls into him at the speed of a freight train. He doesn’t have time to truly process it before he begins to try to rectify the situation, to retain some semblance of dignity. “Ah… really, I’m fine,” he lies. “You don’t have to be here.”
He’s returned with a dumbfounded expression. “Akechi, who the hell are you fooling?”
He strains himself to rise to the challenge, an argumentative snap rising up in his throat. He knows he’s wrong, but what good is there to admit his weakness? “Amamiya-kun, I don’t need—” he coughs again, undermining his point, “—you…to coddle me like, like some child.”
“Oh please. Spare me it for today. You called me at seven in the morning half-lucid and sounding like you just got hit by a truck. Your forehead’s so hot I thought I touched a stove, and you can barely get two words out without coughing." The frustration is evident in his voice, but it softens the slightest touch as he adds on, "Akechi, you're really sick."
Akechi’s mouth opens around a retort but nothing comes to mind at the moment, so he pouts a lip out petulantly and turns his head away. A hand brushes his shoulder and he feels the touch light up the skin around it despite his dulled senses. Distantly, it registers that he’s not wearing a shirt and is still in his dress pants and socks from the day prior, but that seems to pale in comparison to everything else.
Sweaty strands of hair cover his face as his eyes roll back over Ren. “You really are a troublesome adversary, Amamiya-kun,” he mutters to himself hoarsely.
“Ren.” Akechi’s brain struggles to catch up, dumbfounded as to why he’s repeating his own name like a Pokemon. A twinkle lights up in the other boy’s eyes. “You always call me by my given name, why the formalities now?”
Akechi flushes, unable to control the gross display of his emotions in his weakened state. “I was just…My apologies. It always seemed natural.” He pushes his elbows back into the pillow in an attempt to lean forward to sit up, but struggle would be a generous descriptor for the motion. More apt would be a stumbling baby deer that can’t support its own weight and just keeps crumbling to the ground.
When he’s about to grit his teeth and summon all his strength to do something as simple as sit up, he feels Ren’s arm come up behind his back to support him. The touch lights his skin on fire, in a different way than the fever, and he hopes his messy hair is enough to cover up his expression. He doesn’t swat the hands away, which he asserts to himself that it’s not because he enjoys them there, on the small of his back, but because he doesn’t have enough energy to do so in the first place.
“I didn’t say anything against it, did I?” Ren’s eyes crinkle up at the edges and Akechi can picture the natural smirk of his playing across his face.
“I suppose not,” he huffs, taking a shaky breath.
Ren moves a pillow over and places it behind Akechi, so he can lie back on it. The gesture is so particular, so caring, that it ends up pushing him into the realm of jealousy at the thought of him doing it for anyone else. He's definitely not in his right mind right now. Has Ren done this before?
Instead of contemplating that, Akechi watches Ren’s hands reach over to grab the bowl of soup, and when he pulls his mask down it's the first time Akechi's fully seen his face since he gained consciousness. Those long lashes are criminal in the way they illuminate his eyes, and he sucks in a shivering breath at the way the other boy takes such care to blow the steam off the top before offering it up to Akechi.
Spoonfeeding him. He doesn't know if there is any act more humiliatingly intimate than this, but as of now he doesn't care to unpack it. The taste of the soup is stifled by his plugged nose, but he can tell that it's of good quality. Reminiscent, but not the same as a convenience store version from his childhood.
It continues like that for quite a while, spoonful after spoonful until the bowl is almost drained. They don't talk much aside from when Akechi gets into a coughing fit where Ren repeatedly asks if he's okay, which is only met with a flimsy assurance that yes, he's completely fine.
Ren looks like he wants to disagree on principle, but refrains from doing so after seeing the expression on Akechi’s face which tells him it’s more so to convince himself than it is anyone else. The pity makes Akechi want to throw up all the soup he just ate, but he’s really not in a position to argue right now.
When he gets up to go to Akechi’s sorry excuse for a kitchen—the burner is one of the only spotless areas of the house because of the fact that he rarely, if ever, cooks anything aside from instant ramen—Akechi feels his body falter and fall back down against his pillow. As if Ren’s presence was the only thing holding him up.
In his mind, his weakened state makes him want to tear something apart with his bare hands, but his body clearly disagrees with that idea, because at the moment he feels like he’s being actively encased in lava and sweating to all hell for it. He can’t even summon enough strength in his arms to sweep his sweaty bangs from his eyes, and he finds himself sinking back to the mushy goo.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ren coming back holding another full bowl of soup. The image becomes hazy as they slip closed again and his breathing becomes labored. He hears a mumbling noise that seems to align with the timbre of Ren’s voice, and it’s almost comforting as he falls back into a delirious sleep.
When he wakes again, he’s seized by a series of fitful, shattering coughs—so seismic that his empty stomach feels like it’s about to come back up to him. He heaves for a few moments before he drags his body from the bed and falls to the ground, clawing to get to the bathroom a few meters away. Something falls in the kitchen, and the rapid pitter-patter draws closer until Akechi is almost hunched over the toilet.
With his hands gripping the sides of the bowl, he feels an acidic liquid crawling up his esophagus and he heaves, over and over again. Returning to the same position he was last night, he prays that this time he won’t be stuck in the hellish stasis chamber of needing to throw up—but can’t—once more.
As hurls up his stomach contents, or lack thereof, out, on the back of his neck he feels a hand brush through strands of hair and gently pull it back. It makes him feel like a drunk college girl throwing up in the club, but it’s a relief nonetheless; he doesn’t know if he has the energy to get up and wash barf out of his already beyond messed-up hair.
After what feels like an eternity of cycling between feeling the disgusting sludge drain from his mouth, sitting back, seizing up again and restarting, he finally relaxes into the chest behind him, feeling utterly defeated.
Not a word had been spoken, just the horrendous sound of Akechi's puking to fill the silence, but somehow he’s grateful for it. If he was subject to some sort of horrific fawning, treating him like a child, or—god forbid—if he saw something as atrocious as pity in Ren’s eyes now…
It’s when he looks upward in the haze, he sees the expression is only inquisitive, somewhat concerned, head tilted to the side like a curious cat. Somewhere a hand creeps up by his mouth with a tissue to wipe away the remaining dribble. He shoves it away, and grabs a tissue himself because he refuses to be treated as incapable, and the hand slinks away.
Once he realizes himself and his position, the body behind him holding him up, he attempts to sit up before coughing weakly. He fails.
“Here, let me—”
“Amamiya, I do not need your assistance.”
A beat. Akechi thinks he finally got him off his back, removed leach at his side, when he feels a shaking rumble behind him. Perhaps he’s crying, that would be disappointing. A fluttering sound reaches his ears when he realizes, belated, that the fucker is laughing. Giggling even.
“Alright. Are you sure about that?”
He restrains himself—it’s not that he can barely move—from strangling the boy, lest he forget everything he’s worked toward up until this point. This is only a minor setback.
“Yes.” Akechi grits his teeth. Out of pure spite, he wills himself to sit up, some traitorous part of his mind missing the warm presence at his back, and feels the world spin on itself. He’s not so weak as to keel over and accept death so easily, so up he goes despite his body’s protests. Some part of him feels defiantly triumphant as he stares down his rival.
The only thing he gets in return is a gleaming smile. They come to eye level as Ren also stands up from the bathroom floor.
When Akechi stumbles out of the bathroom and collapses on the bed, his abdomen muscles scream at him as they contract. Heaving, and still burning with fever, he looks up at the figure standing above him sheepishly holding up a shirt and sweatpants.
“I, uh, found them. Just thought you might want to change out of those. Or, change into these.”
Akechi looks down at his bare chest and remaining dress pants and flushes, not entirely from the fever wracking his body. “Ah.” He snatches the clothes from the outstretched hand and shoves the shirt on quickly. It’s not as though it’s nothing that Ren hasn’t seen before, given their previous bathhouse excursion, but the change in context makes his raw edges feel especially exposed.
He begins to strip off his uncomfortable dress pants, when he catches Ren turning around quickly. He doesn’t know why, because it really doesn’t matter all that much, aside from if he’s trying to spare himself the issue of looking at Akechi’s revolting, sickly body. That he could understand.
As he slips into the sweatpants, he faintly registers that he doesn’t own any clothes that look like this. He can’t really be bothered to discern why Ren is giving new clothes as he chugs from the glass of water by his bedside.
“Thanks,” he coughs up, and passes out once more.
For the nth time he’s woken up in a haze, he doesn’t know how long it’s been. Some amount of light still leaks through the curtains, but by now it’s clearly evening. He takes note of the fact that his forehead isn’t burning, and he realizes it's due to the cool towel staving off the fever. As he opens and closes his mouth dryly, he reaches for the water on the bedside table, almost spilling it in the process.
Looking up to scan his surroundings, he sees that there’s a body draped across the cheap armchair in the corner of the room.
Ren is sleeping.
Akechi involuntarily coughs, which spurs the other’s eyelashes to flutter open drowsily, eyes immediately flitting over to him. He's not wearing his glasses right now, and without the softening touch they add, it makes him look sharper. More defined. A threat to Akechi’s already weakened psyche.
“Sorry, I dozed off,” Ren laughs to himself sleepily, “do you want more soup?”
Akechi nods in response, not trusting his voice to come out anything other than a croak. At that, the other glides to the kitchen to prepare another bowl before returning to his bedside, like a nursemaid attending to a patient. Akechi studies the thoughtful expression on his face and swallows.
Ren blows softly on the spoon. He looks up at him with a horrifically soft expression as he murmurs, “I think your fever might break in another day or two—”
“Why are you still here, Ren?” Akechi cuts him off harshly. He could have waited for Ren to finish speaking, but there’s no point.
He can’t take it anymore. Can’t stand the ease at which he wants to allow Ren to keep up this asinine charade. The tone is intentionally cold, almost accusatory. The way Ren’s body goes the tiniest bit rigid and his jaw clenches does not go unnoticed. It doesn’t matter anymore, because Akechi can’t stand the idea of being pitied any longer. Perhaps it’s not pity, but some clever plan to one up him by taking control of him in his most vulnerable state. He would prefer that one, actually.
He doesn’t know what to expect, but he prepares himself for a disappointing response. Refusing to back down, he stares at Ren as he searches for traces of an answer.
A pause. Then Ren grins.
“Ouch, that’s icy.” He levels an amused stare at Akechi. “And here I thought that we were getting closer.”
Akechi narrows his eyes, but his heart begins to beat faster. “You refuse to answer my question.”
Ren huffs a wry laugh. “Thought you wouldn’t notice.” He lifts the spoon up Akechi’s mouth as he says it, the motion now familiar. Another hand comes around to support the small of his back as he sits up to sip from the spoon. Repeat, over and over again. The worst part of it all is Akechi lets him, now seemingly compliant to being treated like a patient after just a day of training.
He raises a hand to stop another spoonful from reaching his mouth. “Ren,” the name makes the other’s head perk up, “I appreciate all that you’ve done for me, truly, but have no desire to force you to stay as my nurse.” The words taste sour on his tongue, but they’re polite. A sufficient performance.
“And if I want to?”
Akechi pauses, as that wasn’t really a possibility in consideration. He coughs weakly before plainly reasserting, “You should go home.”
“So mean. Kicking me out like this is cruel, you know?” Ren begins to pout, and if the whole affair wasn’t so aggravating, Akechi might let the thought slip that the expression is almost cute. Which is terrible. He crushes it like an eggshell in his mind. The bowl is almost empty by now.
“I will not break in lieu of your tending, I assure you.”
Ren seems to consider that statement carefully, looking Akechi up and down. If Akechi was any more delusional, he might feel his skin burn with the alternate implications of such a sweeping gaze. “Fine, fine, if you insist that I go.” Ren finally concedes, not without an overdramatic sigh. He takes the bowl to the sink to wash like it’s his house that he’s in—when did he get so comfortable?—and then returns to the chair he was sleeping on to collect his things. Akechi’s eyes trail after him the whole way.
It’s there he notices how clean the apartment is. The clothes that used to be strewn across the floor have been folded and put away, the instant ramen cups onto the counter tossed, and the dishes washed. Ren finishes grabbing his things and turns back to look at Akechi. He stands relaxed, hands in pockets, like this is exactly where he belongs.
Akechi gets out of bed, refusing to stumble now, and walks over to where Ren is to lock the door when he’s gone.
“I’ll be back,” Ren smiles. It makes Akechi want to strangle him with how sincere it sounds.
“Goodbye, Ren.”
One last look is shared between them before Ren's departure, and then Akechi closes the door behind him, locking it. In the new silence of the apartment, he reflects to himself that he’s sure he locked his apartment door when he got home. And on that note, how did Ren find his address in the first place? Questions that he will ask later, but for now he’s used up the last of his fleeting strength in this brief pocket of lucidity, so he collapses back onto the bed with seizing coughs.
The room feels large now with the warm presence that previously filled the space gone. It’s quiet, clean—but empty. He falls asleep to the harsh sound of his own wheezing, briefly coughing in random intervals.
True to his word, Ren comes the next day. And again. Always with some kind of food, going from basic soups to more solid meals and flavors. He brings over medications and painkillers because Akechi ran out a long time ago, and the crushing feeling of being taken of comes for his throat. It snakes around and strangles him silently, until he gives in as to avoid the pain of resisting.
Slowly but surely, Akechi’s physical condition improves and there’s this pervasive, intangible sickness that begins to cloud his mind, that wants him to stay sick because he doesn’t want this to end just yet. He wants to crush those thoughts in their wake but they grow with each passing day.
Constantly, he’s reminded how he hasn’t been taken care of like this since before his mother died, and even then it was in fleeting moments. This level of tenderness almost feels unprecedented in scale, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. But, like the selfish, ensurient man he is, he accepts it anyway.
Akechi rises from bed a week later from when the sickness first hit him. It’s almost entirely dissipated by now, but some ache and weakness remains in his joints. He coughs up phlegm into a tissue and gulps down a glass of water before making his way to the bathroom. When he sees the outline of his body in the mirror, the feeling of disgust overwhelms him, clattering through his frame.
Suddenly, he’s nine years old with bony ribs poking out through his skin and bruises littering his body, a disgusting matted cluster on top of his head. Skin that looks gray and deathly, because no one has bothered to glance in his direction other than when they have to assure he’s still alive at the very least.
In a moment, his arm lunges for the hairbrush on the counter and winds up furiously, the insurmountable urge to smash the mirror to pieces overcoming him. Just as he’s about to release it against the glass, his hands loosen from the handle and it clatters to the floor. His body shakes. He heaves a strangled breath as he collapses against the sink edge, fingers gripping it like his life depends on it, like it’s the only thing keeping him together—it may as well be.
He’s not sick anymore. Ren made sure of that with his incessant tending, with his homecooked soups, and undeniable warmth. So why—why does he still feel like he’s dying? Like he’s choking on the spittle dribbling from his mouth. Like his heart is going to drop straight from his chest onto the ground in a rotting mass. He feels it, beating loudly as shaky breaths stutter out.
He squeezes his eyes shut and counts to three.
The world pauses for just a moment as he calmly gets up from the ground and looks into the mirror. A wave of cognitive dissonance washes over him as his mind oscillates from acknowledging what stares back at him is him, and insisting that it’s some other kind of monster, a foreign body. Perhaps, those are one in the same.
Akechi brushes his teeth, straightens his hair out, and gets dressed for the day. After putting on enough makeup to build a city upon, he tries out the polite smile of the detective prince, slipping into it like a second skin. Seeing what reflects back at him makes him want to barf.
It never fit him quite right, though the masses have always been too stupid to recognize a phony when one is standing right in front of them—it's the same principle Shido came to power by. Everyone has always been exceptionally easy to fool, except for a boy he met briefly at a TV station. Ren Amamiya.
Akechi hates Ren Amamiya.
Hates his moronic saviour complex, hates his idiotic–frankly naive—sense of justice, hates his stupid, pretty face—
He cuts off the thought there. Thinking about that boy will do nothing good for him now, especially when he’s so close. After two years of everything he’s worked up towards, he can’t afford to be distracted by something so trivial, not when it’s all on the line. Hands will begin to grow, to crawl around his neck if he’s not careful to stay five steps ahead, and right now he’s only three.
No matter how much he tries to push that imbecile from his thoughts, his mind refuses to oblige him. It races to torture him with visions, fantasies, every sort of debauchery possible to conjure. If he shuts his eyes, they appear behind him, emerging from the darkness like saints of the day, and if he opens them, they appear in the mirror’s reflection. There is no winning here.
Some softer, traitorous part of himself yearns for that vulnerability, yearns to bare his naked heart and soul out in the open for the only person that has ever seemed to come close to understanding him. At some point it shifted from the simple exhilaration, a curiosity, to a familiarity, a comfort in their constantly evolving rivalry.
Somewhere he knows that the phone call he made out to Ren was not entirely a mistake, as much as he wants to deny it. As he fiddles with his tie in the mirror and fixes his hair again—not one strand out of place—the thought is doused entirely when his phone rings.
Akechi lurches over to ensure it doesn’t go past the first ring; he's all too familiar with what happens when the man on the other side of the line is left waiting for just a second too long. The call clicks on. He listens vaguely, robotically offering sycophantic responses. His hands are shaking as he grips the sink counter but his voice is steady.
A new target assignment—he only just finished the last one before falling ill, but it seems as though there’s not a moment of rest for those with dirty hands and dead consciousnesses.
Someday, he thinks to himself, this will all be worth something when his goals are fulfilled. There is no room for softness and domesticity in Goro Akechi’s life. That is not the hand that he has been dealt, regardless of how badly he craves it. Someday he’ll win this game and he will come out on top as the victor, the way he deserves. And then it will all be over.
The call clicks off. His hand falls to his side, holding the phone while his head drops down. The call history taunts him. Five calls to or from Ren this past week, yet right at the top most recent remains Masayoshi Shido. It feels like a sentence of damnation.
The phone screen goes dark and he puts it in his pocket. Taking one last moment to adjust his hair in the mirror and straighten out any wrinkles, he smiles again, this time putting everything in him into making sure it looks perfect—that it’s dulcet, pleasant. He grabs his briefcase and slides on his dress shoes and opens the door. The sickness has passed.
There’s no excuse for faltering now.