| [Mar. 28th, 2015|03:15 am] |
And woke with a gasp.
The room was dark, the air still. He lay motionless, with his stomach still twisted with phantom pain, and his heartbeat shuddering in his chest and throbbing in his healing leg.
Aoba’s ceiling. Aoba’s bed. And next to him, the warm, steady presence of Asuma.
No, not steady. Tense. Asuma’s back was to him, steel-taut. His breathing was quiet but ragged, punctuated by soft, stifled sniffling.
Genma turned towards his friend. “Asuma?”
Asuma went silent and still, frozen like he’d been caught at something.
“You okay?”
There was a heavy exhale, another held breath, and a slow inhale. “Yeah,” Asuma said, rough-voiced and strained. “You?”
It would be easy to lie. Say yes. Accept Asuma’s lie. Safer, when they didn’t know each other’s edges anymore, didn’t know how to fit together, where to be careful, or how to help each other stay strong.
So it was almost a surprise to himself when Genma heard his own voice rasp, “I’m not.” He turned onto his side, dragging his unwilling leg over, and reached for Asuma’s broad shoulders.
Asuma rolled onto his back and dragged his hands over his face, sniffling again and catching his breath, before he turned the rest of the way over to face Genma. A sliver of light from the street lamps outside came through the slatted blinds, picking out dull sparks in Asuma’s eyes, and a faint sheen of damp on his cheek. He didn’t speak.
Genma reached one hand carefully up to brush the moisture away.
“Bad dreams,” he said. He took a breath to steady himself and tried to figure out what to say. How to unlock whatever it was that stood like a vault door between them. In the end, he just curled his fingers into Asuma’s hair, substituting touch for words that wouldn’t come.
Asuma blinked once, then several times, and swallowed. His head nodded a tiny bit under Genma’s hand. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Me, too.”
That impulse to grab and hold and never let go came again, and this time Genma gave in, rolling closer and raising the arm between them until Asuma acquiesced, too, and settled with his head on Genma’s shoulder, his hand splayed over Genma’s solar plexus, rising and falling with each of Genma’s breaths.
At least this felt right.
“Want to tell me about it?” Genma asked. “Or should I go first?”
He should have been expecting Asuma’s reply of, “You first.”
“I don’t know how to start,” Genma said finally, when silence had stretched out too long. “I… There was a funeral but I didn’t know who’d died. I think it was my team, everyone there seemed to think I should know. But there were five portraits, not four. I’d heard my captain call the mission abort, and then an explosion. And there was a little kid, covered in blood—my blood, I think.” He rubbed a hand over the scar on his abdomen from their mission to Isegawa, barely a month old. The dream was evaporating as he tried to chase the details. And he was acutely aware he was lying next to a man who had just lost his entire team. Genma’s nightmare was Asuma’s reality. “I… Sorry.”
The silence stretched out again, a crushing, accusatory silence. Genma ground his teeth together, silently castigating himself.
Asuma took a soft breath, then said in a near whisper, “Shitty dream. Like being a ghost that didn't know they were dead.”
“Yeah,” Genma said. “I guess… Yeah. Maybe that was it.” Outside a gust of wind tossed the maple tree outside Aoba’s window, sending a dappled flurry of shadows scurrying across the ceiling. A mirror to his unsettled mind. He’d lost count of the concerns he’d been shoving into dark corners, but not a single one of them was content to wait until morning now.
Asuma lifted his head slightly, scruffy beard rasping against Genma’s bare chest. It was as close to an invitation as Genma was likely to get. |
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