(( So, I don't know, this happened... random Kotetsu x Tomoe angst. I do that every once in a while. Guess I still have something of a T&B muse after all. ))
Silence made Kotetsu nervous.
He'd never really thought about it all that much: most of his life was spent around the noisy, the boisterous, the downright ridiculous. Even the first time he'd thought he'd noticed the correlation, there were very good reasons to think it wasn't so. (The secreted glance she sent him as he fumbled for the ring, the butterflies in his stomach for days before and afterward.) When those reasons vanished (and with them his source of energy for the noisy, the boisterous, and the downright ridiculous), he buried himself in people until the people dwindled to few enough that he could remember the expressions on their faces when they left him each night, long before sleep could take him. Then he buried himself in his work - ran himself ragged enough to crash into his bed, or couch, or the bench in the workout room - until forced into vacation by erstwhile coworkers and a sympathetic boss.
No, it wasn't until a month, on the day, after Tomoe was gone, and some weeks since Kaede was whisked to her grandmother's house, that he'd finally walked into his home and registered silence. He'd spent most of the morning idling about the kitchen, rubbing at a stiff neck and grumbling under his breath - catching himself talking more than once to people that weren't there and shrugging it off and out of mind in favor of digging out some manner of food from the haphazard assortment of takeout left in his fridge. Then came an attempt to watch the television, but it was early in the day, with only soaps and worn out news repeated from the morning. There was only so much of that he could take before it was clicked off again and the silence enveloped him so completely that he began to count the ticking of his watch.
There was no shuffling about of people, heard even when they tried to be quiet. No giggles and shushes and tugs on his clothes. No exasperated sighs when he didn't understand something that had been explained multiple times and no teasing pats, pokes, and pinches to drag him out of a stupor or cheer him up. No life. His own memories of such things seemed to fade the longer he spent in the silence, without care for all the pictures and the too-brief home movies he attempted to remind himself with.
It was some days later, when the silence had driven him stir crazy and he'd tripped over two piles of clothes on his way to the kitchen, that he left. He went for a jog down the main city streets, drinking in the background noise; the shouts and rumbles and curses and growls of the city and the life still somehow churning within it. It wasn't the same, of course - nothing would be - but it was something and he dove into it with careless abandon. So long as he could work. So long as he could keep that memory clear in his head; to prove to himself that the silence was wrong - that it was insubstantial and not as all encompassing as it felt alone in his flat… then maybe he could stand to wake up the next day and wade through it again and again and make good on one promise, at least.
He was good for one, after all, wasn't he?
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