Tsurezure Monochrome - Fujifabric
Tsuritama Op Full
Yuki watches fragmented shapes dance across his ceiling—the light bouncing against each corner of his bedroom as his brows knit together and he tries to figure out why he’s still awake at such an odd hour in the night.
He imagines the faces of thousands of people watching him through the shadows—tremors vibrating through his bones as the darkness moves around him and suddenly, he feels as though he’s the unassuming protagonist in a horror film.
He goes with that for awhile—embarrassed to admit that with the faces he’s most likely making, he’s probably the scariest things in all of Enoshima, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling fear.
And neither stop him from falling back into a light slumber.
He nods awake in what feels like moments later—gasping in tired surprise as three knocks ring clearly through the silence. He’s cocooned inside of his blankets, tripping over his feet as he stumbles to the door, and there’s that moment of heart-throbbing terror for a moment longer as he reaches for the doorknob.
Of course it’s Haru, and he’s crying about monsters in his closet and long fingers scraping against his windows, and Yuki would roll his eyes if he didn’t hate the sight of the other boy upset—
and somehow, Haru ends up nestled against him beneath the blankets, and Yuki finds himself telling Haru of the shapes against his ceiling, and the air inside of the room, and how it feels to drown while standing on dry land.
Haru doesn’t understand, and that’s no secret, but he’s interested and he’s honest, and his wide, violet eyes glow translucently through the darkness as he asks Yuki to explain it to him.
“I can’t,” Yuki breathes, the alien’s nose mere centimeters away, “It’s just like drowning. It’s like scratching through the water and trying to find something to hold on to, but finding nothing—like reaching for someone’s hand and realizing that no one’s there, like trying to breathe and discovering that your lungs are filled with sand.”
And Haru laughs, reaching forward and lacing Yuki’s fingers in his.
“Yuki won’t be able to reach for nothing anymore,” he giggles, brows drawing together as a serene smile spreads across his lips like sunlight in the thick blanket of darkness, “Because whenever he feels like he’s drowning, he’ll always find my hand.”
Maybe Yuki feels like he could cry then—maybe that airlessness feels so far away and intangible that he wonders if maybe he’s been living a dream all these years, and has finally woken up.
Maybe he falls asleep holding Haru’s hand.
Maybe he awakens and doesn’t let go.
Natsuki looks at pictures that he’s pulled from the large, manilla envelope in his mail bin.
Sakura has cut her hair. Not a lot, not enough that anyone who saw her every day would notice, but he catches the way that the ends of it wisp against the edges of her shoulders and not the small of her back, and he wishes that he could brush it like he used to. He wishes he could be there to get her ready for school.
There’s a baby in the picture—a new addition to his family that he’s never held or spoken to—or even met in person, and she fills the space that he left behind without even trying.
His father has been so good at filling in the empty spaces left in his life. Natsuki hopes more than anything that he won’t be forgotten.
Because he’s twenty now, and he’s chasing his dreams, but some nights he wakes instead to chase the tendrils of nightmares, to grasp at the edges of poignant imaginings in a cold sweat and the remnants of tears.
He thinks of the mother that never saw him grow up—the way she used to push her bangs from face and laugh as though there was no such thing as sickness or dying young, and he wonders how many years will pass before he’s nothing more than a dusty photograph in the corner of the kitchen, and a memory that’s graying at the edges.
Or a name that his younger sister only hears in briefs stories over the holidays.
And that’s scary. That’s terrifying.
Natsuki wonders if there could ever be anything worse.
He watches his family grow through photographs. We hears his sisters laughing and singing only over the phone once a week.
He’s happy, he supposes, doing what he loves in a rich and interesting far-away land, but maybe family is more important.
Maybe.
Anonymous: /looks at picture you posted with the questions/ Kyaaa~!! So adorable~[Fgfvfhgjf thank you ;w; what a nice message to get right before i leave on my trip fgfbgjf]
[because of work and stress and everything else, but the prompts are saved in my drafts, and i’ll get to them as soon as i get back! see you guys in three days!]
