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“Yuuto!”
Screaming, crying, the sound of a thousand anguished wails for justice, for mercy, for all the things the gods should give them but do not. If it were as simple as a prayer, as simple as belief in a higher existence, as simple as salvation—well, he would have already gotten it. The heavens would have parted and justice would be imparted on these invaders.
He has learned that Justice doesn’t exist.
“Yuuto!” another frantic cry and then a hand on his wrist, fingers on his veins and sudden force on his feet—pulling, pulling—”Yuuto! Run!”—and he follows.
(Behind him, the heavy clank of metal, the steel dogs of war firing canons from their backs and acid from their breath. A battalion of men in helmets and uniforms, glowing red duel disks like swords—monsters that are real.
He doesn’t need his gazer to see them. He lost his on the way.)
“Yuuto,” Kurosaki Shun is breathing, trying to breath, trying to lead through this smoke and debris. Somewhere along the way he’d tied a bandana around his mouth and somewhere along the way Yuuto did the same. “Bomb shelter—somewhere near the Tower—not open to public—”
“Where’s Ruri?”
Kurosaki Shun stops. There flashes sorrow in his eyes, replaced quickly by anger, by vengeance, by regret, by a million other things that Kurosaki Shun shouldn’t be. Understanding, smiles—they were what once adorned his face like fine jewelry, draped over his eyes in a beautiful gossamer veil, and Shun would part them when they were alone and his eyes were like honey gold.
Yuuto sees nothing of which used to be, not even broken jewelry or ripped veils, nothing to suggest that Kurosaki Shun had it all ripped away from him. No, Kurosaki Shun ripped it all off himself. His vengeance is his own.
(His eyes are burning like fire from the sun and it is the sort that blinds rather than nourishes, destroys than creates.)
“Taken,” the grip on his wrist tightens. “Taken by Academia.”
And there are no more words between them, except the sentences Shun’s fingers trace onto his veins, the paragraphs his grip creates, the novels Shun writes with every heavy step away from their home, their attackers, their haven. Yuuto understands even if he doesn’t.
Ruri is gone.
It doesn’t happen like it does in the movies, the books, the TV shows that Ruri liked to pull them into watching on Friday nights when Yuuto slept over and they’d watch the stars afterwards. It doesn’t happen like a flash, either, or suddenly after Yuuto wakes up one day and decides that everything would be easier if he forgot.
The most painful thing about it is that Yuuto fights the war in his mind, tries day after day to adjust to life on constant adrenaline, living on rations and with the smell of rotting flesh, the nonstop cries of pain he has to try to sleep through in the middle of the night. Sometimes the shelter shakes with the next bomb, a piece of rubble would fall, and they’d all remember how easy it would be to level the entire structure with a well-placed explosion.
It brings bile to his throat so much that Yuuto refuses to eat anything other than bread and water, unable to stomach both food and their situation.
Shun tries—he tries so hard to keep Yuuto together. Arms around his shoulders and heat shared from their bodies and Yuuto tries, too, if not for him then for Shun, who needs Yuuto when Ruri is gone. Shun, his best friend. His anchor.
The only one who plasters all his cracks closed and stays there for as long as he needs for them to dry.
(Shun, who doesn’t speak in his sleep but instead tightens his arms around Yuuto’s body, because sleeping separate would just hasten the cracks on both of their psyches, and Yuuto returns that embrace the best he can when he’s kept awake at night—when they’re both awake but refuse to say a word to each other, because their bodies (quick breaths, pounding hearts) will do it for them.)
And Yuuto endures, hanging on by a spider’s thread, climbing and climbing with his own two hands until he can finally try to at least sleep during the night, finally close his eyes and block out the muffled sobs from the other occupants, bury his face in Shun’s chest and feel safe there.
“And Ruri?”
Hands on his back that push him closer and Shun’s face buried in his hair. “We’ll get her back.”
Ruri will return.
Blood, blood—wounds that won’t close—gashes that won’t stop bleeding—”Shun! Shun! Breathe, please, breathe!”—prayers to gods he doesn’t believe in anymore—the empty silence of the battlefield around them—
Yuuto’s voice is hoarse.
“Please, please,” he curls his fingers around the gash and applies pressure, wills it to stop bleeding with wishes alone but it won’t. “Shun, please, please—please—”
So many pleas that he doesn’t know the meaning of the word anymore besides it being his salvation. Yuuto tries his best, tear stains down his cheeks—he can’t lose his best friend, he can’t lose his only anchor—but it is too much, too much.
Too much?
Yes, too much. It’s too much.
Then make it simpler.
(Shun tries—he tries so hard to keep Yuuto together.)
“I think we need some fresh air,” Yuuto says, a closed book on his lap. “We can’t stay indoors all day. It’s bad for your health.”
“Is it?” Shun tries to smile, tries to slip into the persona of the Kurosaki Shun he was before, but it feels as though he’s a stranger, now. This is not him. “A lot of things are still in… construction outside.”
“What’s some debris to the sun?” Yuuto stands up and puts his book down. I Am a Cat, the title says. Shun remembers it as one of their reading assignments a year ago. “Shun.”
“Sure,” he takes Yuuto’s hand and leads them both out of the hatch of their makeshift shelter, having abandoned their first one long ago, when the looks got too much.
(When Yuuto would walk around with the most serene expression on his face but the blankest eyes, hollow laughter and empty smiles. How was class today, he’d ask when Shun came back covered in dust and cuts and bleeding wounds and Shun would try to smile and say It went okay.
He tried—he tried so hard to keep Yuuto together, and now he is nothing more than a shell of what he once was, having forced those rose-tinted lenses through his eyes until his brain also saw through them—permanently.)
Heartland is nothing but rubble and debris, clouds of smoke in the air and embers burning in corners—fires started elsewhere. Yuuto, however, takes a deep breath and exhales smoothly, as if this were one of their normal escapades from school, eyes softening at the surroundings around them like it is the park it once was.
“It’s nice to get out for a while,” Yuuto says, moving forward with Shun’s hand still in his. “Even if everything is still in construction.”
“Yes, construction,” Shun says but his voice feels hollow. He only moves along to where Yuuto takes him, stops when he does. Construction is the only way Yuuto will take it.
War is not a word he understands—war is a word he refuses to understand.
Yuuto is a glass statue that has already shattered, but Shun tries—he tries to paste it all back together even if the cracks show on the surface. Even if a thousand marks leave obvious trails on Yuuto’s psyche, and the whole world can see how he’s failed, Shun wraps Yuuto in layers and layers of plaster, glue, and tape.
Yuuto stands even through his faulty construction, and that’s enough for Shun. That’s enough for him to see his best friend broken but still alive, still moving, still breathing and here with him unlike Ruri and Academia and his parents.
(“Would you like to join the Resistance?” they’d asked but Shun just tightened his grip on Yuuto’s hand, Yuuto’s eyes looking at him questioningly—”An after-school club?”—and shook his head.
“Of course not, Yuuto,” he’d say later when they were back in their bunker. “I’m part of the going home club, remember?”)
“How’s Ruri?” Yuuto asks everyday and Shun puts on that fake smile again (him, him, but not all at once).
“She’s doing well. She can’t write much because of how strict it is there.”
Ruri is at boarding school.
(And Sakaki Yuuya, when he sees him—”Where are we going, Shun?” and “On a vacation, Yuuto,”—with his smiles and his entertainment and broken like Yuuto but still with a will to stand on his own feet rather than with glue and plaster.
Sakaki Yuuya is everything Yuuto could have been.)