#elusionyou

The words are quiet, barely a breath amidst gasps for air and life. Those gray green eyes are pleading, dazed, uncertain, and in a place that is clearly not here, not here.

“Komeada...”Komaeda had nightmares. After the game - or maybe, with such a frantic look in his eyes, it wasn’t just to do with the game.

“Shh.”Hinata kissed his forehead, kissed his cheekbone, that pale skin that’s too pale for someone healthy and bright and full of life. Komaeda still whimpered, flailed just slightly.

“Hinata-kun...”

“I’m here, Komaeda.”

This is, by this point, a routine. A weekly ritual. Sometimes the dreams of despair are every week. Every two weeks. But they always come for one of them, the two still clinging to each other amidst the ashes after the burning, blazing fire of despair. Clinging as if they’re all the have in the world.

Because some days, it feels that way.

“I love you, Hinata-kun...” Komaeda breathed, and Hinata stilled.

He doesn’t know if he means something like that. How can he mean something like that? Komaeda says all sorts of things when he’s desperate. When he’s vulnerable. Hinata feels guilty to take it seriously, to take that flourishing acceptance and love and adoration that he doesn’t deserve -

Not from Komaeda.

“Hinata-kun, please, please...”

He swallowed, seeing tears bead up in those lake eyes, making them look like faltering rain clouds in spring.

You’re so beautiful when you’re vulnerable, Komaeda.

“...Yeah.” He said softly, kissing Komaeda’s brow, feeling the skin shiver underneath with a sick sense of satisfaction. It is sick, isn’t it? He shares a bed with Komaeda, and sometimes affection, just because - 

It’s too much.

They’re the ones that understand the most, the helplessness, the ache, the feeling that something is wrong even when everyone else wants to ignore it.

For that, how can we not stick together desperately?

“I love you, Komaeda.” Hinata said with bated breath, kissing the inside of the other’s wrist.

It’s wrong to lie. But the other is lying too, isn’t he?

Komaeda, even after all this, I still don’t understand you.

Again, Komaeda’s skin shivered under his lips, and again he felt a depraved sense of accomplishment and victory.

I’m so sick.

He cradled him close, against his chest. He knew Komaeda won’t mention it in the morning. It’ll be forgotten, like morning frost or evening dust. Part of him mourned that. But if the times he woke up, shrieking from nightmares of needles and helplessness and scalpels - 

Well, he takes comfort in that Komaeda will just forget that.

He sighed as the fragile boy in his arms fell back into uneasy sleep in his embrace, and brushed back that frail, winter frosted hair.

You’re so beautiful, he couldn’t help but think, Komaeda Nagito.

He kissed the other’s forehead despite him not needing the comfort one more time, before burying his face between the other’s shoulder blades.

Okay! Here we go! Last one! Whoop whoop!

“I really need you.”

“…Hinata-kun…”

He hadn’t been moving much for a while now. 12 minutes, 48 seconds, 22 milliseconds, 37 microseconds to be precise. He’s still hunched over, fingers rubbing at his temples, mind rushing at approximately 7.8 kilometers per second. There are 155245 things to be aware of in this cabin alone.

The patterns in Nagito’s breathing, the flickering of Nagito’s gaze, the individual strands of his hair from the ones messily brushed away from his eyes to those tucked behind his ear. The number of dust specs in the air, the amount of light filtering through the blinds, the amount of UV rays, the folds and wrinkles in their clothes, their sheets, their bodies… Nagito’s breathing raises exactly .848 decibels, and then, Nagito speaks with the words he’s long since predicted.

“Do you need anything? Hinata-kun?”

Hinata’s breath hitches, and even though he predicted it, he latched onto the name. Hinata-kun. The breathiness, the lull, the motions of Nagito’s lips, tongue, throat that gave that name sound from the delicate plucks of his vocal chords.

“More medicine…a shoulder rub…maybe some water… Hinata-kun?”

Nagito’s delicate fingertips tentatively press against his shoulder. The grays, greens, and hues in-between shift and shimmer from reflected moonlight within his irises. With every imperfection, every pore he is now intimately aware of, Nagito’s face really should have been hideous.

“Hinata-kun, are you listen…”

His fingers lock around Nagito’s wrist. Already he knows off the top of his head Nagito’s blood rate, blood cell count, and iron deficiency. He pulls Nagito in his lap, and knows very well everything Nagito has done, everything Nagito has eaten, and every place Nagito has been within the last 27 hours.

“…Hinata-kun…?” Nagito sighed. Exasperation, anxiety, and worry swirl around in just that exhale among a litany of various other emotions. Just a little embarrassment. Just a little. “I asked you a question.”

“I really need you,” he said, urging, squeezing, breathing in more of everything that was Komaeda Nagito and everything that touched Komaeda Nagito from the dust under his fingertips and caught to his hair to the remnants of sweat stuck to his skin and clothes. “Stay here. Let me…hyper-fixate on you until my brain settles down.”

“…that’s creepy…”

There’s a little bit more embarrassment, now.

“It grounds me, Nagito,” Hinata said and then he began to nibble at Nagito’s neck, making him shiver. Pores, skin cells, thrumming heat and blood underneath. Nagito has what can only be identified as Nagito’s taste. Nagito’s scent. Nagito, Nagito, Nagito. “Just for a little while… Just a little…”

I want to drown myself in you.

Ah, huh… Okay. Let’s try this.

Reincarnation AU

“These are very impressive sketches, Komaeda-kun.”

“…Thanks…”

Nagito squirmed a little as Gekkogahara continued to flip through, humming softly as she did. Even at the sketches that detailed himself brutalized, the ones depicting ruined classrooms and bloodied corpses… Her expression didn’t change even a little.

“They…” Nagito swallowed. “They’ve been getting worse. And I don’t…understand. I don’t understand. They feel so real, sensei.”

“Do you feel as though you are dissociating, Komaeda-kun?” she asked patiently, lingering for a moment on a page depicting a grinning, malicious girl with wild ponytails. Given the jaggedness of the lines, the smudging, the scribbling, it was almost as if Nagito had attacked the paper while drawing it.

Nagito shrugged helplessly.

“Sometimes… I forget where I am… Sometimes…”

“Your parents are very worried,” she said. “You scream at night. Is that true?”

Nagito shivered and nodded helplessly.

“Sensei, I… Um…” He shuddered again when she reached that page. He watched fearfully as she stilled, as she blinked a few times. For once, Gekkogahara looked taken aback.

Nagito swallowed.

“…I-I see her, too… Your um…daughter…”

“So you do,” Gekkogahara said softly and airily. “Interesting. Well, I have her picture on my desk. It is not uncommon to dream up faces you have seen before.”

Nagito hung his head.

“…But I’ve never met her before,” he mumbled. “Yet she shows up sometimes, and in my dreams, I feel like I know her well. It’s…creepy.”

Gekkogahara-sensei’s daughter is a really unpleasant little girl but… Compared to her…

“It’s curious, to be sure, but…” She shuts his sketchbook. “I do not think you are a twisted person, Komaeda-kun. I certainly do not consider you dangerous, even to yourself. But I can see why your parents were so worried.”

He didn’t feel much reassured, but he did nod along.

“Komaeda-kun… There is…an unproven theory… That of previous lives and existences. Perhaps even different universes. Maybe this is one of those unexplained phenomena?” she suggested.

Nagito perked up.

“That said,” Gekkogahara went on firmly. “Were that to be true, that is not the life you lead now. You need to remain grounded in this reality, all the same.”

Nagito blinked and then he nodded blankly.