Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The blood is pungent and threatens to tear a loud, wet retch from him as he scrubs his hands raw and red. He runs the bar of soap under his fingernails, rubs it against his palms, as the diluted water swirls around the ceramic sink and down the drain, but he’s only barely managed a dent in the crust encasing his skin. The flakes scatter like snow into the water. Again, he retches, louder, and acid hastily climbs to the back of his throat to make a home there as the animalistic moan bounces off the white walls.

“Hey. Stop.” Pale fingers clasp around his hands, prying the soap away from them to rest aside. He forgets he’s not alone anymore, and something in that is as terrifying as it is soothing. “You’re just hurting yourself like this. Be more gentle.”

“I can’t get it off,” he chokes out in a reply. He’d been screaming for hours after it happened, and now even a mere hiccup stabs into his esophagus, his voice coming out in sharp soprano rasps. “I can’t get the blood off.”

The fingers dig into his hands more firmly. “Breathe.”

He does, but it isn’t enough.

“You did what you had to.”

He knows, but it isn’t enough.

His trembling, abused hand is lifted, and cold lips press against the knuckles, smearing blood across them. He fights back a shiver. He lies to himself and says it’s out of disgust.

“Just let me take care of the rest.”

He will, but it isn’t enough.

Chapter Text

PSALM 46:1

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”

"They'll laugh and they'll cherish what time they have left, because childhood is a ticking time bomb, growing up is simply coexisting with knowing it all ends one day, and adulthood is coping with the fact there couldn't have been enough preparation for it."

TRACKLIST

1. Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl, yeule

2. Summerland, half-alive

3. I Could Stare at You for Hours, The Happy Fits

4. Francis Forever, mitski

5. Back Around, half-alive

Chapter Text

They come overnight like a bad omen, silent and sudden. The house is empty one night, then by morning suddenly filled with a nuclear family of smiling faces, pristinely groomed black hair, and ironed collar shirts. Boxes are neatly stacked and piled on top of each other inside their trash can from where Haru had once detected from the living room window early this morning. The commotion of shrill voices and movers talking in deep tones had caused him to gravitate closer with curiosity. A sense of unease had washed over him like a tidal wave just as swiftly.

He can’t ruminate on his own thoughts any further before the handle of the brush swiftly slaps against his skull in an attempt to redirect his attention back to her as he reflexively cringes, catching the transition in the mirror perched on the vanity as his face morphs from pensive to pained. “Keep your neck still for crying out loud, Haru,” his mother scolds him in a hissed tone as though their neighbors could hear them through the walls. His scalp throbs as the bristles scratch incessantly over the spot where he’d been struck. “I think a new haircut is overdue. It’s getting too long and it just doesn’t look right on you at all. You’ll remind me to cut it after service.”

He’d nod if his hair weren’t being held in a tight vice and he’d been expressly given directions to not move his head, so instead he says, “Yes, mother.” His eyes drift back to the side again anyway, as though if he could sprout an extra pair as though he could see the house from behind the wal. Nobody had made attempts to rent out the decrepit, abandoned shack beside them for years, and he can’t even place if anyone before had ever lived in it to begin with. Some time ago, he’d overheard Mother chattering with a fellow churchgoer about it, drawing back on an aged wives’ tale that the house was cursed from some incident before either of them had even been born.

He would pass by it on his quiet walks to school, sometimes tilting his head up from where he’d been staring at the ground and peering in through the dark windows from where he stood in the grass. He would usually find himself too unnerved by the sight of nothing staring back at him to even approach it and would hastily shuffle away to get to school on time.

Whether he truly believed the rumor or not, he couldn’t accurately verify, and in this moment he doesn’t truly care about it. His stomach was only churning because the new neighbors included children. Two of whom appeared to be his age.

“Now, when we get there, please actually smile this time, will you?” His thoughts are swiftly back on his mother and he meets her eyes in the mirror as she smoothes over the top of his head with a flat palm. “Someone thought a pet died or something the last time they saw you,” she sighs in exasperation, the brush in her hand tugging near the nape of his neck. His body jolts in place from the sharp stroke before he can will the reaction away. She sighs again, louder. “Relax, won’t you? It doesn’t hurt that badly. Perhaps if you knew how to maintain your appearance, we wouldn’t constantly be in this situation.”

He knew, or perhaps he only thought he knew. He couldn’t keep up with fashion trends and he only knew how to brush his hair to appear tameable. Other kids seemed to follow them to the letter, styling their hair like soap opera characters and pop stars or wearing their uniform just slightly more trendier than most. When he dared an attempt to branch out, he found it made him look rather disheveled and uncoordinated.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, gaze drifting to his lap. He can’t get the situation out of his head, preparing what-ifs, anticipating the worst-case scenarios, because he couldn’t simply avoid their next-door neighbors. He runs over what he thinks should be said—the typical hi, I’m Haru, the It’s so nice to meet you. Where did you use to live? Oh, [insert place]? I’ve heard so much about it! He prepares for which areas they may have originated from, drawing back on vague minutiae about other places he’d idly collected over the years so that one day he may leave for someplace bigger and better. He’s so busy running over the material that he doesn’t hear anything Mother is saying to him until she withdraws the brush from his head. Her hands plant on his shoulders and spin him around to face her, away from the vanity to peer up at the spitting image of himself, a version of him that compromises with its own self. I’m you. Please be kind to me.

Her stormy grey eyes scan over him from head to toe, the corner of her lip slowly quirking into a half-scowl. She delivers her verdict then with a decided swiftness. “It’ll do,” she says firmly, though no less with a sighing disappointment barely detected in her tone as she sets the brush aside. He lets his head lower again. “But you desperately need a haircut.”

It's here that he finds it safest. The gentle smell of dust. The soft murmurs and quiet, calm atmosphere. The piano playing throughout the service and displaying a tender reverence that made even him relax. To show her godly devotion, even Mother is absent of words. Her hands are carefully folded and her back is straightened. When the gentle yellow light hits her heart-shaped face, he almost could let himself get carried away with this image of her. If this one would go home with him instead . . . He perishes the thought inside of his head.

He isn’t looking at her, however. Their new neighbors are here as well, stiffly wedged in a mahogany settle only two rows down across from them between two other families. From the angle from which Haru and his mother are seated, he can only really see the identical tetrad of black-haired heads. Between the two parents are their two children of similar height. Nothing gives away their personality beyond hushed whispering occurring between the kids, only to earn a sharp, scolding whisper as the mother turns her head slightly, revealing a dull pair of red eyes framed by long eyelashes and a small button nose. The child to her immediate left turns their rosy face slightly, smiling sheepishly with similar features. Thereafter, not a peep leaves the two kids and all four turn to face the service again.

Haru swallows, watching their dynamic quietly unfold. Most people are desperate to get out of this sleepy town, not actively attempting to infiltrate it, especially as the main complaint has and always will be the sheer lack of nothing here. His school was only a block away, and most shops were further out and structured for practicality rather than entertainment. He spent a considerable amount of time inside of his backyard, idly kicking at pebbles as cicadas chirped loudly overhead, or inside of the only bookstore they had to make up the rest of the story of his favorite manga with at least four of the issues never in stock. He couldn’t recall the last eventful thing to happen here.

Still, there’s church at the end of every week, and while that normally had been a comfort, right now the lecture being delivered only filters through one ear and straight out the other with absolutely nothing committed to his memory. His curiosity can’t help it—he’d rather know who these kids were so he could plan ahead of it, especially considering them being his neighbor and any avoidance on his part is completely impossible with his social mother. The best-case scenario is they ignore him outright. The worst case scenario . . .

He snaps his head back to face the front before he’s caught in the act of not paying attention. He likes their pastor, a young-ish man with square frames and a frequent habit of talking animatedly with his hands. He drops anime and Star Wars references for the sake of appealing to the kids, though he may be the only one who actually appreciates them. He would stay up watching the films with his dad, eagerly shoving the DVD collection box into larger hands. The discs would be scratched and erode over time, but he only thought that if he took better care of them, hoping that if he just did everything right, they would last forever. Time is cruel. He didn’t need to be too.

Once they disperse, Mother is the first out of her seat with a type of vigor he could always stand to admire more, her long floral skirt flowing as she walks away. He takes the respite to be able to breathe. Most days, he really only gets increments of time by himself—she gets awfully lonely. He’d told himself not to complain. It would be worse if he had nothing.

He approaches the refreshments table in slow strides, hoping to soothe his dry throat. His fingers wrap carefully around the ladle resting to the side of a large bowl of red fruit punch. He tilts a helping into a small cup and sips gingerly on it. He never really knows where she goes when the service ends, just that every so often he’ll hear her shrill laugh from across the room. He’s just about to set the ladle back down when his elbow hits the person beside him, and he jolts, glancing up. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says hastily. It takes only a split second to discover he’s talking to the girl he’d briefly seen before.

“Oh, that’s my fault,” she says casually. Her choppy black bangs frame her gentle face, and she’s missing at least one front tooth, causing a slight lisp he can just barely catch.

He takes one look into her aureate eyes and it’s all over from there. Pretty. He hastily smothers the thought before it can catch fire. “It’s n-no trouble,” he stammers, his face suddenly warm.

The girl curiously tilts her head at the refreshment table, eyes scanning over the array of baked breads and small snacks as she rocks herself on her tiptoes. “Is it good?”

“Huh?” he says dumbly, glancing at her only brief enough before he had to immediately lower his gaze again back to the table as he recognizes what she’s specifically imploring. “Oh—um, the drinks are good.”

She reaches over for a cup to pour some of her own to verify his opinion herself. Rapidly, his prepared conversations from earlier tangle with each other into unyielding knots and he finds it impossible to form them into a sentence.

“You seem nervous,” she observes with a small, amused giggle after taking a slow sip from her drink. “I don’t bite, you know.”

“That’s, um, that’s not…” He trails off, clutching the cup in his hands. That’s not really why I’m so nervous, he’d meant to inform her, but that would leave a chance to be pressured into revealing the real reason, and he couldn’t follow through with that.

“My name’s Aoi. I think we’re your neighbors, right? I saw you with your mom earlier. She reminds me of this one singer that’s really popular in Tokyo, actually. That’s where my family and I come from. You guys just walked here, right?”

His shoulders lower as he finally glances at her properly. He’s only a couple of inches taller than her, but her confident posture seems to put her a foot over him with ease. “R-Right, we, um… We do walk.” He reflexively cringes at the sound of his own voice made impossibly small, barely above a coherent mumble. Other people don’t struggle with talking, so why is he the exception? “O-Oh, um, my name’s Haru,” he says as an afterthought.

“You can relax,” she teases, poking his arm with one pointed finger. “Hey, wanna meet my brother? He’s actually my older brother but only by a few minutes, but I’m a lot more mature than him.”

He could never discern whether boys or girls were the easiest to deal with. “Um, sure?” he says, his voice a sharp octave as he phrases it as a question inadvertently. She talks a mile a minute and he finds himself struggling to keep up. He’d never really met such a chatterbox nor could he sympathize with having so much to say and actually having the luxury to say it.

“Perfect! Come on.” Her small fingers wind taut around his wrist to tug him away from the table.

He finds his mother in that moment when his head turns, talking eagerly with the rest of Aoi’s family beside the pews. He chews on the corner of his bottom lip as he doesn’t mistake the sight of her pointedly giving the father more attention. Aoi seems to take up more after him, while the supposed brother takes up more after the mother. “His name’s Shion. He likes drawing,” she informs him. “You’ll probably be a lot less nervous around him, so that way we can actually talk normally.”

“Normally?” he parrots dumbly, but Aoi only waves her free hand wildly from side to side to catch the attention of her brother.

“Shion! Come see!” she insists, the loudness in her voice causing a few eyes to snap toward the both of them with very little warmth regarding her outburst in a sacred space. Haru winces as though he’d been the one shouting, the heat rolling down his neck as his gaze hastily finds the floor and makes a home there.

“Sheesh, d’you have to be so loud?” her brother complains once he approaches them. “Now Mom’s gonna be really mad when we get home.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says dismissively, and Haru glances up in horror. The sheer audacity has him quickly scanning around for both of their parents in desperate hope they hadn’t heard it. “Anyway, I found our neighbor! Haru, this is Shion.”

Haru reluctantly glances at Shion, hoping to gather his nerves enough for a proper introduction. But just like with Aoi, the words clog messily in his throat at the sight of him—poised, relaxed, hair neatly combed, larger-than-life scarlet eyes. If Haru knew better, he would believe Aoi and Shion to be television stars rather than normal kids his age. Even their humble, identical outfits reserved for church service doesn’t deter their natural charisma.

Shion tilts his head at the staring and Haru hastily brings himself back to reality. He decides to go first in introducing himself. “Um, hi! I guess my sister’s been pestering you an awful lot, huh?”

Ha. Hardly. It’s not every day that he gets to have a normal conversation without it ending in spite and quiet, where he has to stew in his inability to maintain a conversation, in his failure to say anything right. Even when he practices and practices andpracticesandpracticesandpracticesan, he never has the words in sequential order and especially can never say them right. They stumble eagerly over each other like tots trying to be first in line, and by the time the heat rushes to the back of his neck and to his cheeks he’s already forgotten what he’s said and has half-convinced himself it wasn’t anything noteworthy to begin with.

“No, not really,” he admits. Though Aoi is far more chattery than he’d anticipated, it’s also welcome. It stipulates that he won’t need to say a lot, that nobody will expect that of him. In a strange twist it only encourages him to try. If it doesn’t last, well, it never did to begin with. “Um, she was just telling me about Tokyo.”

“We didn’t live that far inside the city,” Shion says a bit sheepishly, punctuated with a small laugh. “So it’s not like it was anything very special.”

“It had to be more special than here.” These two will very quickly come to understand how little there is here, but right now they seem so warmly enthusiastic that Haru keeps his own observations locked tight behind his teeth. “Um, why did you move here anyways?”

“Our dad’s got a new job here!” Aoi explains brightly, a hand still clasped around his wrist. “It’s s’posed to be a really, really cool one.”

“Oh . . . and, is it tough being in a new place?” he asks.

Shion tilts his head slightly. It’s like he knows something no one else does. “Only a little,” he says slowly, like he’s considering the words.

“But since we’re neighbors, you’ll be able to help us get used to here, right, Haru?” The way her name sounds flowing out of her mouth comes so naturally as though the three of them have known each other their whole lives.

“I can try,” he says, nearly lightheaded with the idea.

“Perfect! Starting now, we’re friends,” Aoi declares. He knows this won’t last, but he lets himself get carried away with the idea anyway.

Perhaps this time things could be different.