HOLD ON
TILL MAY - 西村力
You’re just wasted and thinking ‘bout the past again. Darling you’ll be okay.
In which: you’re growing up in a rough neighborhood beside the train tracks, you meet Riki on a fire escape, and from then on, he becomes the one constant in your life. You grow up together, sharing secrets, quiet moments, and promises while you hide the things happening at home. As everything gets harder, you cling to one promise: when you turn eighteen, you’ll leave together. But sometimes, wanting a future isn’t always enough to make it there.
Genre - Angst, childhood friends to lovers, hurt/comfort, slow burn, dark romance, established relationship.
Pairing - 西村力 x fem!reader
WC: estimated to be around 20-25k+
⚠️ PLEASE TAKE TIME TO READ THE WARNINGS!! This fic is really heavy on the heart and has multiple very serious and dark themes!! ⚠️
Warnings!! - Domestic abuse, child abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, neglect, alcoholism, trauma, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, suicide attempt, major character death, grief, hospital scenes, panic, crying, violence, kissing, making out, romantic intimacy, underage characters
Authors Note: Hey all! It’s Aiko here, I’m finally releasing my first fic here after being on enhablr for almost 3 years now . This fic is going to be 20k+ maybe even more cause im still adding stuff to my later chapters, so I apologise to readers who don’t like longer fics :(. HONESTLY, I never intended for this to be this long but i realised there was js so much i cld do with a storyline and locked in 😼😼. This is all HEAVILY based on Hold on till may by PTV and i really suggest everyone reading to listen to the song while reading (there’s a few little lyrics references in here). ANYWAYZ! This is just the epilogue and I will be uploading the first chapter tomorrow as I figured it would be better to see how it’s received piece by piece so if there are any complaints im able to tweak it before releasing more :) (Also cause my fuckass laptop is broken and tumblr mobile is genuinely the most painful thing on earth and won’t let me upload it all at once). I hold this fic and this song really close to my heart, there’s some truth from myself and my life in this story and i hope all the readers going forward will be able to enjoy it as much as i do. THANK YOU FOR READING THIS MESSAGE!!
Taglist is open!!
ENGLISH IS NOT MY FIRST LANGUAGE!!
NOW PLAYING: …Hold On Till May - By PIERCE THE VEIL
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EPILOGUE - THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEPT
The city had never been kind to children. It was not the sort of place people moved to because they dreamed of raising a family. It was simply where people ended up when rent was cheap enough to afford and leaving was not an option. The apartment buildings stood shoulder to shoulder along narrow streets, their concrete walls stained by years of rain, smoke, and neglect. Dark streaks ran down from every windowsill like old tears that had never been wiped away. The concrete itself had taken on a permanent grey-brown hue, the colour of things left outside too long. In places the surface had cracked and flaked, revealing the cheaper aggregate underneath, rough and pitted where the weather had chewed at it for decades. Rust gathered in the corners of every window frame, flaking away in reddish dust that settled on the sills and on the hands of anyone who leaned out too long. The frames themselves were thin metal, painted once long ago in a colour no one remembered, now blistered and peeling so that the bare metal showed through in scabs. Pipes groaned behind thin walls whenever someone turned on a tap, a low, complaining sound that travelled through the building like a shared complaint. The plumbing was old and temperamental; sometimes the water came out brown for the first few seconds, sometimes it arrived with a violent cough of air that made the pipes shudder. Old air-conditioning units dripped steadily onto the pavement below, leaving dark circles that never fully dried. The units themselves sat crooked in their window slots, their outer casings dented and faded, the fins clogged with years of dust and pigeon droppings. In the quieter hours you could hear them straining, a wet mechanical wheeze that rose and fell with the heat.
In summer the heat settled between the buildings and seemed to have nowhere else to go, turning the apartments into ovens by the middle of the afternoon. The air itself felt thick, heavy with the smell of hot asphalt, cooking oil from the street-level shops, and the faint metallic tang that always hung near the tracks. Sunlight bounced from one concrete face to another until the light itself seemed exhausted. Laundry hung from lines strung between windows dried stiff and hot to the touch within an hour. Children learned early to press their palms against the cooler insides of walls or to sit in the thin strips of shade that formed only in the late afternoon when the sun finally slid behind the higher rooftops. In winter the cold slipped through every crack around the windows and made the floors freezing beneath bare feet. The wind found every gap in the frames, every unsealed joint, and moved through the rooms like a quiet animal. Condensation formed on the glass and froze in delicate patterns overnight. People slept in layers of clothing that never quite lost the smell of the previous day’s cooking. The radiators, when they worked at all, clanked and hissed without ever producing real warmth, and the thin mattresses on the floors did little to stop the chill from rising up through the boards.
Behind the buildings, almost hidden between two rows of apartments, ran the train tracks. They were close enough that the sound of passing trains travelled through everything; walls, floors, furniture, even the thin mattresses people slept on. The tracks themselves were a double set of rails set into a shallow concrete trough, the ballast between them black with years of oil and brake dust. Weeds pushed up stubbornly in the gaps, tough and grey-green, surviving on whatever moisture the night left behind. During the day people barely noticed the trains. Children shouted over them. Cars drove over the crossings with a brief, indifferent rattle of wheels on metal. Shopkeepers continued their conversations while the rails began to hum, that low electric warning that something heavy was coming. The hum started as a faint vibration in the soles of the feet and grew until it filled the chest. Then the train arrived in a rush of air and noise, the cars flashing past in a blur of colour and graffiti, the wheels striking the joints in the rails with a rhythmic clang that seemed to shake the very foundations of the buildings. At night, though, it was impossible to ignore. The low rumble would begin somewhere in the distance, slowly growing until the windows trembled and the walls seemed to vibrate in time with the wheels. Sometimes the horn was so loud that it made sleeping children wake up crying, their small bodies startled into the dark, hearts hammering while the train continued its indifferent passage. The sound of the horn carried differently at night; it seemed to bounce between the buildings and arrive from several directions at once, so that for a moment it was impossible to tell which way the train was coming from.
You eventually learned the sounds. You knew the difference between a freight train and a passenger train by the weight of the vibration and the length of the silence that followed. Freight trains were longer, heavier, their cars clanking and sighing as if reluctant to leave. They moved with a kind of weary patience, the couplings stretching and contracting with a metallic groan. Passenger trains were quicker, sharper, their passage over almost before the windows had finished rattling. You knew which ones passed quickly and which ones seemed to drag on forever. You knew that if you were sitting on the fire escape when one came through, the metal beneath your shoes would vibrate until your legs felt numb, a deep trembling that travelled up through the bones. You knew that if you stood on the rooftop, you could sometimes see the lights moving between the buildings like distant, restless stars; brief, bright, and gone before you could decide what they meant. The rooftops themselves were a landscape of tar paper, gravel, and the occasional abandoned chair or broken television set. From up there the city looked almost orderly, the streets reduced to thin lines, the people to moving dots. But the trains remained the same: long, loud, and impossible to ignore.
The neighbourhood was rough, but children still found ways to make it theirs. The alleyways became racetracks, marked by chalk lines that washed away in the next rain, the surface uneven with cracks and patches of older asphalt that had been poured and forgotten. Broken pieces of wood became swords, their splintered edges soft enough after enough battles, the grain worn smooth by small hands. Empty bottles became targets, lined up along the base of a wall until someone knocked them down with a well-aimed stone; the glass shattered with a bright, satisfying sound that always drew a warning shout from a nearby window. Rooftops became places to hide, or to sit with your knees pulled up while the city breathed below you, the wind stronger up there, carrying the smell of distant factories and the occasional drift of cigarette smoke from a lower balcony. The rusted fire escapes became ladders to worlds that existed above everyone else’s heads. The metal was pitted and flaking, the steps worn thin in the centres where countless feet had climbed. Some of the bolts were loose; some of the landings sagged slightly under weight. Nobody had planned for children to play there. Nobody had made them safe. Nobody had asked whether they should. Children simply climbed anyway, because the alternative was staying on the ground where the adults lived, and the ground had never felt like it belonged to them. On the ground there were rules and voices and the constant possibility of being told to go inside. Up high there was only the wind and the view and the knowledge that for a little while no one could reach you.
The fire escapes were especially tempting on days when the heat made the streets unbearable. The higher landings caught whatever breeze managed to find its way between the buildings. From three storeys up you could look down into the alley and see the patterns of the stains on the pavement, the way the light moved across the walls as the afternoon progressed. You could watch the trains approach from farther away, catching the first glint of the locomotive before the sound reached the lower floors. The metal of the fire escape held the day’s heat long after the sun had moved on, so that even in the late afternoon the railings were warm under the hands. Sometimes the whole structure seemed to breathe with the passing of a train, expanding and contracting in tiny, invisible movements.
You were one of them. You were six years old when you first climbed too high. The decision had not felt like a decision at the time. It had begun as a game of following the older children who treated the fire escapes like ordinary stairs, then as a quiet determination to see what the tracks looked like from above, then as a stubborn refusal to turn back once the ground had started to look smaller. You did not know that the city would become the backdrop to almost every important memory of your childhood. You did not know that the boy who reached for your hand that afternoon would eventually become the person you measured every good and bad day against. You did not know about love yet. You did not know about dependence or grief or promises that could survive years. You only knew that you were a little girl who wanted to see a train from above, and that you had somehow managed to get yourself stuck on a rusted fire escape three storeys up, one small sneaker wedged between the metal grate and the brick wall, your fingers white around the railing, the ground suddenly very far away.
The metal was warm from the afternoon sun and rough under your palms. The grate of the landing pressed a grid pattern into the soles of your shoes. Below you, the alley looked narrower than it had from the ground. A plastic bag drifted past on a weak breeze, turning slowly as it fell. Somewhere a radio played a song you didn’t know, the bass thumping faintly through an open window, the melody distorted by distance and the intervening walls. You could hear your own breathing, too loud in your ears, and the soft scrape of your sneaker as you tried, carefully, to free it. The brick wall was close enough that you could see the individual pits and stains in its surface, the places where old posters had been torn away leaving scraps of paper that had weathered into grey. You tried to pull your foot free and felt the sneaker twist tighter. For a moment the whole fire escape seemed to lean with you, and the drop yawned open in your stomach. The height, which had felt exciting only minutes before, now felt like a mistake that could not be undone. Your fingers ached from gripping the railing. The sun was still high enough to make you squint when you looked toward the tracks. In the distance the rails began their familiar low hum, the first sign that another train was coming.
Somewhere else in the city, another six-year-old boy was having an ordinary afternoon. He had been sent out with a coin for ice from the corner shop and had taken the long way back, the way that cut behind the buildings and ran parallel to the tracks. The shop itself was a narrow space with a sticky floor and a cooler that rattled constantly; the ice came in rough blocks wrapped in newspaper that left ink on the hands. He didn’t know he was about to meet you. He didn’t know that your name would eventually become one of the most important sounds in his life. He didn’t know that years later he would remember the exact feeling of your small hand in his, the way your fingers were cold even in the heat, the way they tightened when the next train began to approach. He walked with the unhurried pace of a child who had nowhere particular to be and no adult watching the clock. The alley he followed was familiar: the same stains on the pavement, the same discarded bottles, the same patches of weeds pushing up through the cracks. He had climbed these fire escapes before, though never as high as the one where you now stood. He knew the particular creak of certain steps, the places where the metal felt less secure underfoot. The afternoon light slanted between the buildings in long, dusty beams. Somewhere a dog barked once and then fell silent. The rails hummed again, a little louder now.
Neither of you knew anything about what was coming. That was probably the kindest part.
A/N: Im so scared guyz i hope you liked it so far D:
