i love you, you know that?
//. @goroni // clockers // majima-kun
Majima’s heartbeat is the only thing keeping him grounded, in addition to the gentle rumble of his voice and the sliding stroke of his fingertips along his skin. He hadn’t quite noticed how brightly the red of his tattoos seemed to glow and it’s almost surreal how he runs his own hand along the inked skin, feeling how the texture doesn’t shift when he drifts away from the painted imagery to naked flesh. His kisses up to Majima’s collarbone are aimless and absent, for he’s in another world. A world where the very sound of the silent air seemed to warp in his ears and he can only see the dead staring right back at him from the abyss of Kamurocho. Were it not for Majima’s arms clasping him in a warm embrace, he feared he would float away in this place where logic and natural law didn’t seem to apply.
He couldn’t remember if he told Majima the truth of what happened in Osaka. Legal repercussions hadn’t followed him back, that he was aware, but it was less the fear of being caught for what he’d done that made him seem there and yet not. Since waking up in his bath tub with the water tinted pink with the remnants of his blood he had been living as if in a dream. A nightmare. Kamurocho was no longer a steel jungle. It was organic, a living thing, where the streets seemed to expand and contract beneath his feet as if breathing. The heartbeat in his ears sounds monstrous and pounding, droning on like a migraine and he wishes to hide. It’s all too much sometimes. But in the silence, he hears breathing--his own, but he doesn’t recognize it. He sees himself in the mirror, but he’s pale. Sickly. Dead. With dark around his eyes, blood black on his chin and a ghastly puncture in his throat.
Reijiro returns to reality with a shiver, just in time for Majima’s voice to soothe and greet him back to the present. Majima’s tenderness is all he could ever want. But he can’t bring himself to focus wholly upon it. He helps himself to a kiss, letting himself remember where he is in that brief moment of warmth and enjoying the taste of Majima’s breath like a dark smoky roast. There’s a desire to roll onto his back and pull Majima over him for more. But he fights it. He can’t fully commit. His head feels far too foggy, far too gone with the guilt and madness that has him fully ensnared. He sits up a little bit, and he matches Majima’s eye level, and there’s a noticeable tiredness in his eyes, but it’s different from what one might expect after a full week of tireless work in the Trauma Center. Sunken, restless, unable to find peace in either the waking or the dreaming worlds.
❝ I love you too. More than anything, ❞ he says, voice barely above a whisper. He doesn’t want to spoil this affection between them. How he longs for it during the days where he’s alone and barely awake while Majima is out doing whatever a Patriarch does. He misses those days, honestly. Where he was well enough to pretend to have a conversation with his absent beloved, get into one-sided arguments where it’s only his voice ringing out throughout the house while he mindlessly cleans up the place. He pulls his legs to his chest, the warm expression gradually fading. He’s here in the present. And if he hadn’t told Majima before--he honestly can’t remember the past few weeks, all of it running together in an incohesive blur--he’s about to now.
❝ I... I killed someone, ❞ the cold returns to him again. Filling his veins like saline. He feels dead despite the rapid beating of his heart in his chest, ❝ ...When I was in... Sotenbori. ❞
