DELIRIA - YANDERE!CHUUYA NAKAHARA

Twenty six: Fire.

"Chuuya," You say, his name rolling off your tongue like a round piece of candy: Sweet, indulgent, but bad for you. But an occasional candy never hurt anyone. "You also have a meeting with Boss?"

"No, I was looking for you," He says. He checks his gleaming watch, the gold burning under the light.

"What for?" You walk away from Boss's office, with Chuuya right by your heels.

"I was wondering if we could go back to your hut," He says.

"Again, What for?"

"To burn it," He says. You halt, mid-way through a step, polished shoe hanging in the air.

"What? Why?" You turn your head towards him, the reminders of where you had once hid turning your eyes into a dark velvet; desolate stillness in (eye colour) hues. Old scars re-emerges from your heart and project them onto Chuuya's delicate but firm face, his expression never changing despite the flickering lights above.

"If we burn it, we can move on from it," He says. "They say that when you're missing a tooth, the tongue always goes to the source of pain. The (last name) house has been demolished. All that remains is the hut."

"You think that'll help me?" You can't help but sneer. You can't help it; it's a compulsive trait of yours to be contemptuous towards people who try to help you because you've been disappointed by help for so many years. "Think that'll reverse everything done to me?"

"Not reverse," He says, his voice still and calm despite your rising hackles. "But go forward. Burn it and you won't have anything to look back to."

You pause. Burning the hut? You haven't ever considered it. You considered it an artefact, a piece of bone that only archaeologists could discover under the layers and layers of dirt, because it was a physical part of your past that had assuaged the pain. To let it exist would mean you were deliberately drawing out the past, like a musical note blown for too long. To destroy it would mean that there was nothing to look back on. The thought makes you dizzy, and the ground below you feels unstable, shifting, undulating. The hut was a master at speaking silently to you—all your past you've cried in that hut, its interior smeared and hanging with your tears, like ornamental pearls. The hut was dirty laundry. A skeleton in your closet that was much alive, rotting and stinking in your breast, blackening the flesh until it would start to show up on your skin like a permanent bruise.

You feel for your car keys.

"Be ready in five." You say. Chuuya lets out a short laugh: triumphant.

—

You lug the gasoline jug into the trunk of your car. It sloshes against the plastic sides as you slam the trunk shut.

You climb into your car and switch it on, with Chuuya in the passenger seat. You roll down the window and let the wind waft in, the salty tinge of the Port rolling in like laughing tides, its colour stretching wide and far like a blue desert. Seafoam fizzles, spitting against the rocks, before receding back into the oscillating surface; always the edge of the ocean remains elusive.

"You wanna go to a bar after this?" Chuuya prompts, which entices a shrug from you.

"Sure," You say, focusing your gaze on the road. As usual, your driving is haphazardous as if you were suicidal; jerking right and left too late, speeding up, cutting through, weaving in the traffic—you were a madman behind the wheel. You slice through an orange light just as it's about to turn red, not caring for your safety as you were jerked backwards from the sudden speed. The sun dips under the horizon and the crescent shape of the moon emerges from the clouds, curved in gaping, dolorous craving, bowed around emptiness, a curve emphasised, suspended over the world, pale as bone, in full magnificence.