edited: ✓ | 1/20/2024
trigger warnings: implied abuse
—
Your head feels like a parking lot located at the very centre of the Earth: filled with smoke and rumbling and chattering and tires squeaking against the asphalt, crowded with vehicles that each carried a thought, all escaping you, leaving you isolated with the stereotype of danger and horror. You fall into this abysmal void that's darker than your shadows, understanding that it's within your eyes, the shadows, and they haunt your heart, taunting it to follow them into the dark. And follow they do, resulting in your head repressing everything that has once happened to you.
You feel so alienated and drunk—but in reality, Atsushi sees you as the bible verses sprayed on public bathroom walls; he sees you as misleading signs in a dead city where there is no one to see, he sees you as copies of holy paintings on car tunnel walls, but he knows you are the isolated parking lot of a convenience store in which drug dealers snuck around in the dark. And when he stares at you, he sinks. He doesn't know why. His image of you is so thin and two-dimensional. He can almost see the palpable past just by staring at you; and like corpses floating to the surface of the water, he sees bruises and beatings and burns and blood that you never deserved as a child bloat to the surface of your skin.
In other words, he thinks you are just something strange and almost mystical thing that people just couldn't place a finger on. The reason edged just outside their consciousness, but never crossed their mind on why. You were always calm, even under pressure, and quiet. But whenever confrontation highlighted your face, thoughts of SUICIDE! DRUGS! ALCOHOL! crept and swallowed you whole.
But Atsushi understands.
He knows what it was like to fear confrontation, knowing that he was never meant to last living on this Earth—why do you think he flung himself into every life-threatening situation within the Armed Detective Agency? It was to prove that he was, in fact, good enough to live, and that the life he lived was the correct one, because all his life he was told he wasn't good enough.
He embraces you. He presses his hand against yours and places his lips on your forehead, shyly, peppering them against your cold cheek that ripples under him when you smile distantly at him.
The concept of home, and consequently, hell, was projected onto you, and he is to wonder why he was drowning when dancing with the devil at the bottom of your ocean. Home is where the heart is, he recalls someone saying, only to realise that both your heartbeat and his were out of sync.
"Are you even listening to me?" You inquire. Atsushi shakes his head and climbs out of his thoughts.
"I'm sorry. I got distracted," He says. You hum, before running your tongue over your front teeth. "Do you mind repeating what you just said?"
"I said, don't you think it's inherently scary, the birth of Jesus? Simply by giving her son life she has already killed him, doomed him to the cross."
That makes him think for a second. "I don't think she knew she was giving birth to a corpse."
"I don't either." You look at him and there are clouds of stardust in his eyes, twinkling gently as he kindly, and lovingly, smiles at you. Spectrums of gold and violet gleam at you softly.
You and Atsushi remain silent as you sit together, hands laced and intertwined together. Evening begins to overtake the skies and the birds are dotting the cloudy skies, their silhouettes traversing over your heads like black confetti. Atsushi looks up and thinks that the beauty of the skies has already been sucked in by your soul, because despite all the repression and helplessness in your heart, you were so beautiful, so gorgeous despite everything you have gone through.
They do say repression comes with trauma, and vice-versa. Freudian in style, as Western psychologists might say, he thinks; trauma and repression define each other: trauma is that which is so unbearable that it has to be repressed; repression the consequence of something too traumatic to be borne.
"Sorry for tuning out on you," Atsushi apologises once again. You shake your head.
"It's alright. I like you enough that it's okay."
"I love you," Atsushi says, turning his body to look at you fully. His eyes are filled with constellations of the worried and his lips curve into a sad smile. He knows it will take a while for you to confess that you love him, because your definition of love has been distorted, warped and fucked up, wrung of all affections and where the empty space was was filled with abuse. And besides, you said 'like' with a sharp edge to it, like a sharp razor—thin and unsympathetic. He is always getting cut by it. It lurked in your eyes, something that wisps at his fingertips like droplets of water. It is wild and untamed and the stillness of your presence rivals against the intensity of your eyes.
"I think I am full of shit, Atsushi," You begin, ignoring his confession of love. "I was raised by hypocrites and everything I have gone through makes me unsavable. How could you love someone like me?"
"Easily," He argues, fiercely. "It's instinctive. I can't stop it. It's not reasoned."
"I think I was brought up just to hurt myself," You say, continuously ignoring him. "I won't be happy. And I know I won't be, because I don't deserve it. I can try and fill up that empty space with little distractions, with art, money, alcohol, drugs—but it never lasts. It isn't meant to. I'm not meant to last. Why can't I last? I'm...Everything about me is so temporary."
Atsushi sits in silence, staring at your side profile as you spoke.
"I'm still alive, knowing there were once days when I didn't want to be because of everything that happened and knowing there might once be days where I don't want to be. I can't live as I once did, telling people that I was doing fine and desperately wanting them to wade through me and see that I was in pain," You say, turning to him and fixing your gaze on him. "It's okay, Atsushi. You don't have to say anything."
"I love you," Is all he can say, before he organises his thoughts. "I would walk on water for you."
"Very Jesus-of-Nazareth of you to say so," You say. Your hand on his tightens, and he accepts the corset of your fingers welcomingly. But your face as the look of an angry animal—some sort of shadow that reminded him of veterans returning from war. "But I guess that's how love works. You simply accept that you've been empty all along before someone comes in and defines that for you."
He quirks a brow. "What do you mean?"
You smile, before leaning your head against his shoulder. The weight of your head on his shoulder makes him melt, and he shyly leans in closer to your warmth, where he shakingly brings an arm around your shoulders. His eyes shine like pearls in soft happiness when you sigh, relaxing into his arms.
"How do you measure nothing, Atsushi? You measure it by the world around it. The opposite of a wound. Didn't the world come pouring through when you were abandoned by the orphanage? I've been defined by my past. So have you. And then it took both of us to realise that we're beyond that. I've left home."
"I've never had a home to begin with," He says, gently. "Neither have you."
"That's true," You admit. "But knowing you love me, why does that matter now? After all, love makes everyone no one who they were before."
"I'm scared I'm not good enough for you," Atsushi admits. "There are more capable men for you. Why me? Why have you chosen me to love?"
Your eyes adjust in the dark, and so does your heart. It flickers, like a camera lens, before focusing on the moon to reflect back in your corneas, shiny silver light shimmering on the surface of your eyelids. You know what it is like, to become a dead thing on display; you have been so for nearly all your childhood life, being a dead thing that was animated by blood pounding beats to the fragile body. To feed yourself on the spectacle of slaughter.
"Because you're so authentically you," You say, smiling before closing your eyes, revelling in his warmth. It radiates off him in waves and you let yourself be pulled down into its depths. "You who have realised memory is punishment, realising that it lacks any shade of time, realising that it denies the "pastness" of things and prolongs its presence. How can I not love you, when you've made me leave home?"
"Home?"
You lick your lips.
"I've left what I used to be and reincarnated as something good so people can finally believe in me."