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solongsun For what felt like a long time, nothing happened. The corridors remained empty, and the only sounds came from outside. With a casualness that was almost convincing, Uruha set down his book and strolled over to the window, opening it wide and pressing his face hard against the bars to peer out.
'That's their car,' he said, though he didn't see to be speaking to anybody in particular.
He wrapped his hands tight around the bars and squeezed, and Ruki realised for the first time that each of his fingers was entirely covered in sticking plaster, a dull reddish colour against his pale skin.
He must have been biting his fingernails again.
It felt like taking off dark glasses: the way everything suddenly seemed clearer, sharper, bright enough to hurt his eyes. The plaster wrapped around Uruha's fingers was the colour of brick, contrasting lividly against the bone-whiteness of his skin; he was banging his left wrist absently against the sharp flare of his hipbone and an ugly bruise was starting to spread up the inside of his arm. His fancy watch glittered innocently in the overhead light.
Neatly dressed, perfectly coiffed as always, he looked a mess. He had huddled himself tight against the bars of the windows as if he expected time to reverse itself and Die to step out of his parents' car again; his fingers gripped tight as if he could have snatched the memory from Toshiya's mind and kept it for himself. A pulse was flickering visibly in his neck, and when Ruki came up closer behind him he could see in the window's reflection how savagely he was biting at his lower lip; how it bled; how he seemed unable to blink but instead was winking each eye shut separately in a precise, desperate sort of pattern.
After that, the whole room seemed to be more defined. He saw the edgy, jittery energy pent up in Toshiya's long limbs, draped artlessly in the sanatorium's shapeless clothing; he saw the muscle working in his jaw, the way he drummed his fingers and tapped his feet, the caged-animal look in his eyes. He saw the chess pieces scattered over the floor and heard in his mind again the crack of Shinya's own open hand against his face; saw the unfamiliar shape of his lips making spiteful sounds; saw him wandering behind Kyo like a ghost down the corridor. He looked down at his own body and touched his own hair gingerly with his hand, trying to remember the last time he'd showered: it had seemed like such a pointless task that he hadn't been able to make himself do it that morning. And the day before...he cringed, running his hand self-consciously through his hair, and pulled out the neck of his T-shirt to give himself a surreptitious sniff.
He could smell his own skin but, more prominently, the smell of disinfectant coming off the walls and floors.
He wondered how Die could possibly have stood it, the thought of coming back.
There was no noise – no signal was given – but at just a little after ten o'clock, a small flock of nurses appeared in the corridor, as if some god had taken the blinding white cleanliness of the hallway and fashioned it into people.
'That's their car,' Uruha repeated, dumbly, and because he could not chew on his nails he chewed on his knuckle instead. 'Of course, he'll have to sign the papers. Do the paperwork. It takes time.' His face was impassive but his eyes had a glittering, hectic look to them, and although he stood quite still in the doorway to the television room he gave off a crackling sort of energy that made Ruki feel edgy.
Toshiya, too, went and stood behind him – leaning against the wall, as if casually – and Ruki found himself joining them, sticking his hands a little shyly in his pockets and rounding his shoulders to make himself less obvious. From the their position they had a good view of the permanently locked door that led to the stairwell, and looking at it made Ruki's ears play tricks on him; made him feel like he could hear footsteps coming up the stairs. They couldn't have been real because they seemed to climb forever; they timed themselves confusingly with his scatty rabbit heartbeats and blurred into nonsense inside his head.
Normally the nurses would have been ushering them into bed by now but they, too, were waiting. The clock ticked.
When a key scraped in the lock, Uruha performed a kind of jump, and his jaw set itself.
'It won't be him,' he muttered very fast under his breath, 'He got it wrong. It won't be. They—'
The door swung wide open.
It was him, of course.
Ruki's first thought was that it felt like seeing a ghost: up until that moment, he realised with a pang, he had not truly been able to believe that Die was still alive.
He stood at the top of the stairwell with an embarrassed sort of grin on his face, and whilst he greeted the nurses who came to welcome him back with his usual friendliness, his lack of focus was almost comical: his gaze jumped searchingly over the tops of their heads, seeking out the faces of his friends where they stood as if paralysed in the doorway.
Ruki couldn't have moved if he had tried. Standing there, unthinkingly clutching at Toshiya's elbow for support, he felt as though there would never be enough time to look at him. Had Die always been so tall? His hair colour had faded almost to a strawberry blond, a good inch of black showing at the roots, and he held his shoulders awkwardly rounded: his jeans were tattered and ripped at the knee. His face was different, less drawn, the colours more vivid: the absence of dark shadows under his eyes made him look younger, and more hopeful.
Ruki wanted to stare and stare and make sure he had fully taken it in: the sight of Die standing in front of them all, on his own two legs, smiling like he used to. Alive, and whole.
Gradually the nurses drew back, cooing pleasantries like a little flock of white birds, and their view of him was unblocked at last. He hovered a little uncertainly, shrugged as if shy; he couldn't seem to stop smiling.
That is the actual, real Die, Ruki's brain chanted at him stupidly, standing about a metre away. His hair looks thicker than it did before, and the cords in his neck don't stand out so sharply, and one of his shoelaces is starting to fray and come undone.
'What happened to you?' he said at last, aware that nobody else was speaking, and Die's grin turned a little rueful and wavered around the edges.
'Well.' He laughed a little awkwardly. 'My heart gave up.' He gave a sheepish sort of shrug, running a hand through his hair in a gesture of discomfort that felt familiar. He cleared his throat and looked up at the three of them, his mouth still smiling but his eyes not entirely happy. 'I thought I was going to die,' he added, his voice casual but for a tiny hitch in his breathing; they all pretended not to catch it.
Uruha made a soft sort of noise, but when Ruki glanced at him he gave no sign of noticing he had done anything unusual. He flexed his bandaged fingers as if he wanted to reach out and grasp something.
'Uru?' Die asked gently, and Uruha performed a sort of strange flinch.
'You almost missed me,' he said miserably. 'I'm getting out soon. In a week. No more than a week. My dad said. So you nearly—'
The rest of his words were lost in Die's shoulder as he lurched unsteadily forward and almost fell into him, his fingers grasping clumsy handfuls of Die's T-shirt as tight as they could; his knuckles were white, his head bowed, jaw clenched. He drew in an uneven gasp of breath, like a sob, and Ruki watched as Die lowered his cheek against the top of Uruha's head; as he put his skinny arms around him and clutched him close.
'I wouldn't have missed you,' he mumbled. 'I would have got here.'
Stupidly, Ruki's eyes felt like they were stinging; he had to look away, busy himself with lighting a cigarette. It wasn't just seeing Die that was affecting him, he realised, but something about the way Uruha was holding himself: the way his usually poker-straight spine had sagged forward; the way his proud head had bowed itself into Die's chest; the way his twitchy, restless hands had found a place to still themselves in the folds of Die's clothing.
He didn't look back until he felt he'd got himself under control. He found Die holding onto his friend fiercely, and he realised that despite the way the muscles were standing up like ropes in Die's arms, they didn't look quite as prominent as they once had. The line of them was less noticeable; didn't seem to jump off the bone the way it once had, and his hands looked less oversized in comparison to them.
He became aware of Die's eyes on him and started a little guiltily. Smiling, the redhead held out an arm.
'Come here, you idiot,' he said, his voice cheerful even though his eyes looked wet, and shyly Ruki joined them; placed a hand on Die's back to feel the bones of his ribs and spine, prominent as ever but the skin around them warmer; let his body rest against Die's side to hear the beat of his heart, strong and steady and still, still, still going, after everything.
He imagined himself and Uruha as Die must be seeing them; imagined how much the two of them might resemble the sad, limp, damaged people they must have been when Die first met them: he thought he understood, then, why Die's arms closed around the two of them so urgently, and why he squeezed them both so tightly. He closed his eyes his eyes and all but butted his head into his friend's body, leaning against him just for the thrill of confirming that Die was now strong enough to take his weight, and it was so good to be touched – to be handled with care. The sudden rush of love he felt was almost giddying: he clung on tight.
It must have been a long time before slowly, the three of them peeled away from each other. Ruki stepped back but Uruha seemed reluctant to go very far; he started to tear at the plasters on his fingers with his teeth and he kept finding little reasons to touch his friend, smoothing down Die's hair or a wrinkle in his T-shirt. His eyes were pink and he kept sniffing; he had left a smeary damp spot in Die's clothing, a Rorschach of his own face. A little uncomfortably, Toshiya unfurled his long body from where he had been lounging against the wall and watching them all, and held his hand out.
'Hi.'
'Hi.'
He and Die looked at each other and shook hands nervously, and then Die's face lapsed back into its trademark grin.
'We didn't really get a chance to...it's Hara, right?'
'Toshiya. And you're Die.' He smiled, an easy smile that was not so dissimilar to Die's own, and wrapped his arms around himself protectively, 'That was some party trick you pulled. You do that for all the new people?'
'Only on very special occasions,' Die assured him, and Toshiya gave a huffing little half-laugh.
'Everybody around here missed you like crazy, you know.'
Maybe it was the emotions running high, but his choice of words seemed to strike them all as funny; Die gave an ungainly snort and Ruki felt his lips twitching, and Toshiya laughed aloud into the odd, not entirely uncomfortable silence between all of them. Only Uruha's dark eyes still looked worried, flicking anxiously between Die and the door, and Ruki couldn't figure out why until Die quickly glanced around to look behind him, apparently searching for somebody else.
His stomach dropped.
'I should – is Aoi in our room?' Die asked eagerly, and he turned from the doorway too quickly to see all of their expressions slip. Toshiya shot Ruki a wary glance, but in return all Ruki could think to do was bite his lip; they trailed after Die, unable or maybe unwilling to match his quick, enthusiastic footsteps, and Ruki closed his eyes as Die grabbed at the door handle to his dorm expectantly.
It swung wide onto a view of two empty beds and from the back, Ruki watched Die's shoulders sink. He hesitated where he stood, his angular figure seeming everywhere at once, and then turned to them with an uncertain look on his face.
'Where's...' he grinned a little painfully, his voice unconvincingly light-hearted, 'Where's Aoi?'
It was impossible to watch the way that the smile he was trying for kept slipping into doubt; Ruki looked quickly down at his feet. His heartbeat seemed to be reverberating dully in his ears, like he was underwater; above it he could just about hear the way Die's voice got tighter as he asked a second time: 'Where is he?'
'He...he sort of got into trouble,' Ruki mumbled.
He risked a glance at Die's face and found the confusion still there.
'Trouble? So – so he's in the isolation room?' he asked hesitantly.
'He's – not exactly – he's—'
'He's upstairs,' Toshiya interjected apologetically, cutting through Ruki's nervous babbling, and Die took a small step backwards.
'Upstairs? But what did he do? Why? What's going on?'
'Die—'
'I mean – it's got to be a mistake; he doesn't belong up there. They know he doesn't belong up there, they—'
'Die,' Ruki tried desperately, but the look on his friend's face shut him up.
'I don't understand,' Die said quietly, 'He's supposed to be here. He has to be here. I sent him letters.'
His face was urgently wide-eyed, and Ruki understood suddenly that it had gone two ways, Die's being sent away – that they had missed him and worried about him, hoped and wished and prayed that he might still be living; but that the whole time he had been missing them, too. He had been praying for them to keep themselves together in the same way that they had been praying for him to keep himself alive, and though Die had held up his end of the bargain, they had let theirs fall.
The feeling was very similar to guilt. Uruha touched the door of Die and Aoi's dorm with one hand and bit at the knuckles of the other.
'Aoi was bad,' he whispered, his words clear even with his teeth nipping and tearing at his own skin.
'Uru?'
'He was...he was rude. To my dad. He said bad things; wrong things. He...he deserves it.'
It was strange, how much it reminded Ruki of standing with Uruha by that same door a few days ago; the way Uruha had looked then, claiming he didn't miss his friends; the desperation with which he had eyed the door. It must have been that – the undone look on his normally composed face – that made Die bite back whatever he had been about to say; that made his expression soften a little.
'Uru, he doesn't deserve it,' Die said gently, and Uruha glanced up at him with wet eyes, a tear already trailing down one pale cheek.
'No,' he whispered. 'No, he doesn't.'
Toshiya started to nibble on his thumbnail.
'Did they...did they put him upstairs just for that?' Die asked.
'Dad,' Uruha breathed, his eyes fixed on Aoi's bed, 'Dad put him there. He made them. He wants to give him shocks so he'll forget.' He shook his head; frowned. 'But Aoi won't forget.'
The four of them stood there quietly for a short while, staring at each other soberly. Toshiya bit his nails, and Die took a long, slow, deep breath that he exhaled almost soundlessly. He seemed to be struggling; inside his eyes there was a terrible conflict going on, and he looked around at each of the three men before him in turn, searching to see if any of them had the answers.
'I worked really hard,' he said finally, his voice quieter than normal, 'To get better. I did everything they wanted; I ate what they told me to, and I lay still when they told me to, and I didn't throw up, and I...my parents didn't want me to come back here, but I – he didn't answer my letters.' He ran his hand through his hair agitatedly, 'He just...he has to be here. I have to see him.'
'They have to let him come down soon,' Ruki said meekly, 'All his things are still down here, and they can't keep him up there forever—'
'No.' Die inhaled shakily, 'No, that's not good enough.'
'But...' Ruki trailed off, and Die shook his head.
'I've waited,' he said simply, 'I've waited weeks. I'm not waiting any more.'
Almost reflexively he glanced back at the two empty beds behind him; the sight of them seemed to give him courage. His mouth set itself grimly.
'I'm seeing him,' he said, his voice low but firm, determined in a way Ruki had never heard it before, 'I'm getting up there. Tonight.' He paused. 'You don't have to come with me. I don't know how I'm going to do it, and there's almost no chance we won't get caught, and I – I honestly don't know how much trouble there'll be if any of us are caught. Lots, I guess. But—'
'I'm coming,' Uruha said quietly.
'Me too,' Ruki added.
'I will,' Toshiya said nervously, and ducked his head. 'You know, if you'll have me.'
The four of them looked around at each other a little uneasily, and Die gave a small nod. He glanced back at Aoi's bed again; Ruki saw his throat go up and down as he swallowed heavily.
'Then I'll knock for you,' he said plainly, 'Tonight.'
Ruki watched as Die's hard gaze found Uruha's; it softened there, and he smiled.
It felt eerily as though the four of them were about to march into battle, but Uruha smiled back: and that, Ruki thought as the nurses started flocking around and clucking disapprovingly and ushering them into bed – that smile was where the truth sunk in, that Die was really and truly back. And not just that, he reasoned as he allowed himself to be shooed off into his dorm, but that there was fight left in them, no matter how fearful and forced and desperate it felt: that they could be defeated, they could be torn apart, but they could still struggle.
And that making the choice to push back felt in itself like an act of power.
That was what made all the difference.