Chapter Text
he thinks there may be snow drifting down outside. it might explain why the house is so cold, freezing cold, cold as a tomb. time is nothingness.
he’d had a dream once—a nightmare really, sick. tripping out of the shower, wet and undone and clumsy. figures obstructed in the steam outside coming to help him. a blue haired boy’s warm fingers feeling up his burning pulse, his neck. he’d never paid attention to it and it was too illogical to be real—why would that brat be anywhere near them, let alone touch him there.
chills run through him.
something presses up against the outside of him. chihiro pulls it out of him, piece by piece by blood-drenched piece.
he hadn’t realised. his life fell in on itself and maybe he had realised at some point, then it had faded away like mist. he thinks all the games and matches has shaken it loose, everything had ramped up as the winter cup increased the pace, as rakuzan was steadily threatened by the rainbow coloured freaks. the monster curdling in his stomach, seeping out onto the floor.
puking his guts up, the roiling of his stomach a weak imitation of the Now that stretches out in front of him. in patches of grass when he found himself on late night-early morning walks, stumbling to the closest bathroom after a certain smell hit him.
but he’d never understood. Not exactly. Or maybe he forgot.
over his floor this time in the morning, when he couldn’t understand what the burning feeling in his throat was he’d crouched in the chill, cold lighting, understanding slowly crawling into his brain.
his fingers aren’t working properly. They’re cold, so so cold. everywhere hot his fingers touch inside while he scissors himself opens turns cold too. blood slides out between the digits and with them memberous fluids he doesn’t wanna think about.
fuck, chihiro doesn’t even fucking know which one knocked him up. if it’d come with mibuchi’s evident beauty, with kotaro’s temperamentalness, nebuya’s hunger. it doesn’t matter, he concludes—it’s red drenching the floors now, trailing down his thighs. red, red, red. he’s pulling the shards of their victory out of his insides, almost on his knees on the bathroom floor. shards of bone and gristle, lumps of blood. red and black. or did you want this too, young master, do you want to take the rest of me? he thinks about pulling chunks out, throwing them into his face—take it and fuck off, for akashi to stitch together an heir or a mascot or to discard as he saw fit.
he stabs too hard. aways aching. he needs hot water, they’d put him in hot water afterwards to get the pain out, but he can’t crawl to the tub here, his entire body’s locked up.
he hadn’t even realised fully what was happening when what felt like a knife of pain jabbed through his stomach. he’d crawled then, practically on his hands and knees for the bathroom. his bedsheets are been drenched. he doesn’t know how long it’s been, that he’s stayed on this floor sweating and shivering at the same time. filthy and stupid.
his stomach keeps on convulsing. he sees his intestines like they show on colourful diagrams bunched up, being squeezed like a wet rag as he shudders through the pain. it opens him up—he’s dripping—so that’s something as he prepares himself before grabbing onto the something nearest his fingers. it drags against his insides, every bundle of nerves in there like a hot brand. the stretch is unbearable. black spots swim around him.
another gush empties itself to pool and stick against his flesh as he pulls it out. mangled and deformed, too gory to be called a baby, really. or at least the little leg of one.
vomiting in the basin after a particular match, he can’t remember which one or if it even happened at all, wasn’t another strange dream he’d conjured after escaping into his manga for too long. he’d been on his knees then too, the harsh bite against his skin as he retched, shakily. as if it was about to crawl out of him then and there, many eyed and glittering. some bespecled frog-looking boy in a blur of orange pausing in the hallway where he’d been unable to close the door in time. seeing a curled up smear of blue and white in his periphery, a bewildered
“kurok..?”
there are whimpery noises echoing in the blinding white of the bathroom. silly, stupid, almost animalistic. hands are curled around his throat, and he is strangling, he is dying.
“no. who are you?”
he lets it go with the rest of it on the floor. almost black-blooded. who is anyone, really. his entire body is heaving as those wretched noises fill the air, on and on and on. from a million miles away, he feels hands cup his flat stomach, flesh ending abruptly with chilly tape.
orange was shutoku. yes. akashi had threatened to rip his own eyes out, and chihiro’s tearing them out of himself, they burst like jelly and slide down between his wet hand.
he’s inhaling blood. it slides off and out of him like rivulets. his face was burning. molten lava trickling down his cheeks.
he’s wind and air. empty space. a myriad of hands weave through his hair, gripping. there’s a thuddering noise too and when chihiro looks he sees his hands are shaking so badly against the tiles it was as if they had a life of their own.
he wishes this was a better story. He wishes he could be something braver, more clever, but he is who he is (whatever he is) and akashi won’t have this. won’t have his transcendental child, he can’t take anything else from him, not when chihiro’s carved it out and killed it himself.