Tonaegiri Week 2025 - Day 2:
Trial/Trash Chute/Forgiveness
Despite Kyoko knocking on the door, telling him he'd been showering for longer than usual, Makoto could have sworn he still smelled the trash room from Hope's Peak on his skin.
It had been months since they'd arrived among the Future Foundation, but occasionally rogue scents from the killing school life visited him. Sometimes it was fairly innocuous ones, like the sauna. Sometimes...worse ones.
They didn't always accompany consistent peaks and valleys in his mood, but the trash smell specifically tended to crop up in moments when he needed to be alone.
Which, in turn, led to long showers, like this one.
"Sorry!" he called out, flinching at the way his own voice echoed against the tiles. "I'm almost done."
He dried off and emerged in his pajamas.
Kyoko was flipping through the notes he'd taken at their last meeting with leadership, which made him smile, despite himself; he'd gotten so used to her looking at his notes after the fact, he'd taken to writing things like 'Hi, Kyoko' on them, in the margins. "Interesting," she murmured under her breath.
"Don't apologize again," she said. "No one is angry."
"Byakuya is embarrassed, because you were right."
Makoto sighed. While, in casual conversation, Kyoko seemed equally likely to favor either one of them, he felt like she tended to take his side in serious arguments– and he was pretty sure Byakuya felt that way, too. It wasn't that he doubted she meant what she said, but he worried she might be too generous with him sometimes. After all, in this case, he was the one who had raised his voice.
He hadn't meant to. He tried not to. But sometimes it just...felt like he was in a class trial again.
He still believed in what they'd been initially arguing about, but honestly, as soon as he'd raised his voice, his appetite for the argument had kind of vanished, and now he just felt nauseated by guilt.
Byakuya was probably going to sleep in his own room tonight, and Makoto's heart was still beating too fast.
"If he is angry," Kyoko continued, "that's okay, too. It's not an unsafe thing to feel."
"I know, I'm just...I shouldn't have yelled."
"I think you upset yourself more than you upset him. You don't like how arguing makes you feel, so you interpret it as some serious transgression. It's not. He's fine."
"If he were fine, he'd be here, showing off how fine he is."
Kyoko sighed, putting down his notes. "You wish he were here. So do I. But you're drawing a line between that feeling and the agitation you feel from the argument and interpreting it as a sense of fault."
He gave her an imploring look.
"Sorry," she shrugged– unapologetically, despite her words. "I'm not always the most comforting."
"It's not that. It's just...You don't always have to defend me."
"Do you genuinely think your words were harmful?"
"Then what's bothering you?"
The question gave him an immediate sense of clarity and direction. "I'm gonna go see how he's doing."
"If you want. But I'm telling you, he's just pouting." There was a trace of fond confidence, as she said that last part. A familiarity.
"I'll be back in a minute." Makoto made for the door, but he had barely stepped out into the hallway before he was bumping into Byakuya, approaching the door from the opposite direction.
Byakuya's face immediately reddened; no doubt he'd intended to either make his own powerful entrance or slip into the room without comment, not bumble into Makoto while in the act of returning.
Unlike when last they'd seen each other, now Byakuya was dressed for bed, too, and holding his big thermos– the one he only used when he didn't mind sharing his drink, though he never admitted it was for sharing.
"Oh!" Makoto exclaimed reflexively. "You're back."
Byakuya seemed to be trying to will his blush down. "If you were planning on getting tea, I already have some."
Whoa. He was admitting that the thermos was for sharing?
"What kind?" Kyoko called from inside the room.
"Don't 'hm'. You like oolong."
"Are you going to let me in?" Byakuya added, in Makoto's direction. He was avoiding his eyes, and the persisting pinkness in his cheeks made it seem like maybe the question wasn't just a snarky way of asking Makoto to move.
"Yeah, of course," Makoto said quickly, and as Byakuya's eyes met his, a feeling of reassurance seemed to pass between them both. "I'm glad you're back. I thought you might be sleeping in your room tonight."
"Oh please. You think I wasted my time pressuring them into getting a box spring for this bed only to not use it?" He smirked proudly, entering the room and setting his thermos in its usual spot on the bedside table.
(It was promptly taken up by Kyoko, who took a deep sip and then put it back.)
"I don't know how much time you wasted," Makoto teased, feeling the tension thaw. "Wasn't it just one email?"
"I think what you meant to say was 'Thank you for the box spring.'"
He laughed and was about to climb into bed when Byakuya stopped him and sniffed his hair. "They can smell your shampoo on the moon. How much did you use?"
"He was showering for two hours," Kyoko ratted him out.
"And hour and forty-eight minutes."
"I smelled garbage," he admitted.
There was a look of comprehension on Byakuya's face. "Do you smell it now?" he asked.
"Good. Because your hair will fall out if you wash it again, and I don't know if the Ultimate Hope's brand can survive that." He patted Makoto's cheek with a tenderness that nicely contrasted his teasing.
"As long as I lose the top one," Makoto joked back.
"That's the only one that will stay," Kyoko said.
Byakuya exhaled a laugh, and while Makoto's heart was still beating a bit too fast, it was easier to ignore, now. He took the thermos when Kyoko handed it to him and sipped it just enough to let the warmth that was already in him, seeing that Byakuya and Kyoko were both here and hadn't vanished, unfurl to his skin.
The others must have sensed that he was still shaky, though, because the nightly struggle to get Kyoko to go to bed at a decent time met less resistance tonight, and when they all turned in, Byakuya casually gathered Makoto's head to his chest, so he could hear his heartbeat.
Byakuya took off his glasses, and Kyoko turned off the lights.
"I'm sorry I shouted," Makoto murmured into the dark.
"You already said that," Byakuya answered. The hand that was cradling Makoto's head had a steady grip on his hair.
"I know. And it's not that I'm sorry because I think you can't handle it. I just...When I feel like I'm back in...it...I don't want to make you feel like that, too. I shouldn't be dragging you guys back to that place every time I feel like I'm there."
Kyoko's arm came to rest on his back, and she leaned against it. "We don't get to leave it behind any more than you do. You aren't dragging us anywhere; it's here with us all the time. Honestly, I find it more tolerable when we act on it and don't ignore it."
"I prefer to ignore it," Byakuya said. "But that's a conversation for the morning, or ideally never. Get to sleep, before the detective changes her mind and turns on that infernal desk lamp."
"Glass houses, Mr. Five More Pages."
Byakuya hummed contentedly.
Makoto felt like the matter of his temper had more or less found a comfortable resolution, for now– or at least, there was no need to bring it up again –which left him with the realization that they did still need to talk about what they'd been arguing about in the first place, and he did still feel just as strongly that Byakuya was wrong about it. He sighed and decided to follow Byakuya's lead and outsource that worry to the morning.
For now, he raised his head to kiss the underside of Byakuya's jaw and settled back into place, letting the comparative steadiness of Byakuya's pulse guide him into a state befitting sleep.
baratheonpilled
janainaart
jacobvanloon
gummygunk
snowghoul
germansingergirl
kaledo-art
