Tell me you're not miserable

This is a different kind of feeling, so extremely different that you can’t seem to process it until the voices that flare up in punctuation to Howon’s statement, simmer back into silence. All attention points to one man directly in front of you with glasses pushed high atop his nose. He appears tired or aggravated or both and you respond to it with teeth clamped down, vice-like into the side of your cheek, not knowing what else to say even though you’ve wanted to speak up for months. You have imagined what this day would be like once your reserve broke, and how you would shred yourself of your hollow dignity if it meant you would get to work alongside your superior again, but now there’s silence instead of vehemence and this isn’t at all like what you imagined it to be. The man looks at you directly, thumbs pinched in a telltale fashion between his eyes. The sound of breath expelling from his chest is as threatening to you as raised kagune, a bloodied mouth, a promise of destruction. You wish you could step closer to Howon but you remain idle in your spot, awaiting words that may never come. “So be it.” You try to keep yourself from losing your balance this time, once surprise graces you in its laborious delay. Everything seems to come to a point and then a fragment of speech comes barreling through to shove you from it. Each exhale after that could contain the sky, in your chest would be the stars suspended. He’s next to you, warm and valiant and yours again. Talented and deserving of his honor, and yours again. Both investigator Lee Howon, Phobos the god of fear, and yours — just Hoya  — again. “You will not regret this decision,” you hardly manage to reply, jaw still slack with thawing shock. You take a step back, and then another, retreating with hesitance although you’re sure there is no conversation left to be had. You came in and roused a gentle fire before forces that who would no sooner chew you up and spit you back out into the streets a commoner, but instead they took time to listen to both of your harmonious pleas as pathetic and disjointed as they might have been. You decide you wouldn’t spend any more time wasting what little sympathy was granted to you. Answers have been given. You got what you wanted and it’s still a concept floating around without roots. You can say it to yourself over and over again but somehow, when you step back inside of the elevator and hold the door open with one hand, thick rings clicking into the metal, you still can feel the lurch of a smaller voice inside of you that wants to keep fighting for it. Perhaps this is a small repercussion from not following after him when he left. Perhaps this is the part of you that wanted to run through the crowd when he let go of your hand a year ago. You wanted him to tremble under the idea of losing you just like you feared losing him, and simply turning his back wasn’t enough of a goodbye. You wanted him to mourn you. You wanted to mourn him. Years standing side by side told you that it would never come. Like Howon, you proved to be a pillar in the face of overgrown sentiment. You could stand before death with hatred turning your blood into magma, could watch yourself drowning in the opened floodgate of your own emotions and there would be no tears shed. The sanctuary of your own mental stability could decay from the inside out but you would never let them see it touch your face.  He meets your eyes again, as earnest and purposeful as you’ve come to recognize from him. You see how tired he his underneath his unmoved expression and you wonder if he can tell how the past year have changed you too, taken a little bit of your normalcy away and replaced it with jaggedness. Agitation. You wonder if either of you will have the heart to say anything after the doors close, once again tied by a title as if the distance had never happened in the first place. You let him brush past you and situate himself, fingers uncurling from the door and promptly shoving into the pockets of your winter coat. On cue, the space once connecting you both to quite possibly one of the hardest tasks you have completed in your ongoing careers, dissipates into a steel wall that distorts a fuzzy reflection of your physiques, drenched in a jaundice light. Descent begins. You open your mouth to speak but can’t seem to find the right words.  

The ghoul looks up and they meet eyes for a second but it’s enough, always will be enough. There’s an afterthought somewhere between his quinque lashing forth, in the form of a body lolling back to the ground from where it was cradled in the arms of a predator. If Dongwoo had more of a heart, had not seen the same scene over and over again then he’s sure he would have stopped to check for a pulse instead of cornering the attacker. If he had more faith and maybe a little less hatred as though they’re exchangeable sentiments. If he hadn’t swallowed around the loathsome feeling of seeing familiar faces in the columns of the obituary page on their weekly newspaper maybe he would have thought twice before curling his quinque around the abdomen of the ghoul, serrated edges latching like fish-hooks into the epidermis and inevitably tearing, which ends things, but he doesn’t mourn the loss of a struggle. He’s too irritated. Too tired. The corners of his mouth hardly move when blood pools to meet the precipice of his shadow, intermingling in the scarce glow of a waning moon.  He retreats when all that’s left is a deflated figure collapsed into the browning stone of the building it once used for support, the seemingly toxic quiet  that follows, left uncontaminated until his own voice cuts through with a stark vehemence not unbeknownst to him, with a bite that makes nearly every utterance a heat seeking missile.  “Were you just going to stand around and enjoy the view while someone was literally being turned into a midnight snack or was there some semblance of higher intelligence in that small head of yours that justifies why I just had to do your job for you?”