"The morning air slips through the crack in the window with an almost undue softness, spreading through the room like something that shouldn’t be allowed to enter unnoticed, touching Geto Suguru’s skin in a slow, insinuating way, finding spaces where the body is still vulnerable to waking. It isn’t just cold; it’s a sensation that settles in, that makes itself at home beneath the skin with enough familiarity to be unsettling, as if it’s not the first time it has taken this path. The shiver climbs up his arms, reaches his shoulders, and settles in his chest, where there is already a tightness that predates any thought, something that didn’t begin in that instant but seems to have crossed the night alongside him, silent, persistent.
His eyes open without hurry, but there is no rest in the way he wakes. The ceiling is there, white, unmoving, exactly as it should be, and yet there is a faint impression of distance, as if the space had been subtly stretched while he slept. He watches it for a few seconds, long enough to realize he’s watching too much, that he’s trying to confirm something that shouldn’t need confirmation, and that realization alone already carries a discomfort that’s difficult to justify.
Breathing becomes the first anchor point, or at least it should be. The air enters cold through his nostrils, travels down his throat with a clarity that draws too much attention, and expands in his lungs with a weight that doesn’t match the lightness it should have. He tries to ignore it, tries to let his body return to its automatic rhythm, but he can’t avoid the excessive focus on each stage of the process, as if he were tracking a mechanism he doesn’t fully trust. His chest expands, holds the air for a moment that stretches beyond what’s natural, and then releases it slowly, but there’s a minimal delay between impulse and execution, a small mismatch that repeats in the next breath and the one after, creating an uncomfortable sense that something inside him responds late, like an internal echo that never existed before.
The silence in the room isn’t empty. He realizes that without knowing exactly how. There is a density to it, a quality that suggests attention, as if the space were returning every small sound in a different way, not as an echo, but as presence. The slight shift of the sheets, the contact of skin against fabric, the almost imperceptible sound of breathing — everything seems recorded in excess, as if more than one point of perception were involved in that process.
He sits up in bed carefully, not out of physical necessity, but from an exaggerated awareness of his own body, as if every movement needed to be monitored, validated. His feet touch the cold floor, and this time the cold is simpler, more logical, almost comforting in its predictability. The floor is cold because the morning is cold, and that still makes sense, still fits into something that can be explained without effort.
The thought appears with a strange neutrality, as if it were just a retrieved piece of data, without immediate emotional weight. Twenty-two years. The information exists, but it doesn’t connect to anything larger, doesn’t bring expectation, doesn’t bring celebration, it just occupies space for a moment before starting to dissolve. Even so, another measure of time slips in alongside it, overlapping, impossible to completely ignore. One year. One year since..."
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
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