Made New
| Synopsis: Your husband, Kento Nanami, comes back home after Shibuya. Only he isn't quite the same.
Pairing: Kento Nanami x Reader
Content Warnings: Body horror, Creature! Nanami Kento
Story:
Grief, you think, can make you do strange things.
When your brother died, you remember going around all throughout the house, opening all the doors in all the rooms, convinced that if you find the right one, you would find him there.
Lying on his bed, perhaps. Sprawled on the couch like a cat catching a sunbeam. In the garden on his hands and knees, dirt under his fingernails as he carefully repot another plant, a new member in his already vast collection.
You had even checked the cabinets and the drawers in one last, desperate bid, to find your brother still alive. Perhaps shrunken to the size of a mouse, to be kept in the cup of your palms, in the stitched pocket of a well-loved shirt, where you could keep him safe, always.
Grief does not, however, make you hallucinate.
You open the tap.
Water, clear and cold, gushes out onto the glass.
Fills it.
Spills out.
You don’t move. You barely even feel the wetness on your hand.
“Honey?” Your husband’s voice fills your ears. “The glass is filled.”
You look down, surprised.
Oh.
Then you drop it, and it shatters. When you laugh, it sounds like there is broken glass in your throat. You are surprised you do not bleed.
“Sorry,” you said. “I’ll get another one.”
Kento does not answer.
You don’t even bother cleaning up the mess in the sink, instead filling another glass and bringing it straight to your husband.
He is, after all, thirsty.
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
His fingers leave a red smear on yours when he reaches for it.
(Grief does not cause you to hallucinate. It does not leave physical marks.)
The blood on your fingers is a physical mark.
You close your eyes.
Grief does not have a scent.
(Or perhaps it does: you remember how after your brother’s death, you could no longer stand the scent of roses. They had been given by the dozen during his wake.)
But you do know this: grief does not smell like blood and burning hair.
Something in your chest unclenches. Your heart perhaps, finally being able to beat again. Your lungs, finally being given permission to breathe, after having been robbed of it for so long.
Your husband is alive.
He’s returned.
You would thank every God that ever existed except–
(Dear God, why did he have to return like this?)
Your husband, Kento Nanami, has come back a horror.
You open your eyes to find your husband choking, he vomits up blood and ash, a smear of black tar on your pristine kitchen table. Acid rises in the back of your throat. It smells terrible.
But your body remembers him, even when your mind struggles to call him familiar, and you are at his side before you even have time to think about it. The process is so familiar it is almost mundane: one hand reaching up to rub circles on his back, the other reaching up to brush back his sweat-slicked hair.
Except your hand meets empty air. Your fingers scrape against the smooth, bloodied flesh of his scalp, where all the hair had been burned off.
You flinch.
He notices.
“I’m sorry, my love,” he says quietly. “It must be hard to see me like this.”
Your breath catches in your throat, your heart clenches in your chest. You feel as if you are watching the news of Shibuya station all over again. The realization that Kento, your Kento had rushed into that madness.
That burning, sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach at the idea that maybe, just maybe, your husband will not be able to come back home after this one.
But he is here, he is alive, and you are ungrateful.
Grief wells in you like tears. It is a rock in your throat preventing you from speaking.
“I’m sorry,” you gasp. “I’m sorry. I’m so so so sorry.”
His hand–the one where the flesh hasn’t been burned off, to lay bare the muscle and bone, the one that is still whole–reaches up to squeeze yours.
“There is nothing to apologize for,” Kento says softly. “It’s a shock. I understand.”
He had come back from Shibuya two days ago, a shambling mess of blood and muscle and bitter ruin. The left half of his body had been burned beyond recognition, an empty hole in his skull where his eye should be.
(He had told you later that it had popped like an overripe fruit in the heat, then boiled and burst into flames).
It is an injury no human could have–should have–survived.
And yet, he is here, he is here. In your pristine kitchen, trying and failing to drink even a glass of water.
You should have been grateful.
But all you can focus on is the streak of vomit on the kitchen table, ash and tar, as if his blood had boiled from the inside.
“I’ll get you another one,” you say softly.
“I don’t think it’s necessary, my love.”
His voice is heavy with resignation, and something in you aches. You had never heard your husband sound so defeated. Tenderness wells in you like tears, and before you can stop yourself, you bend down and kiss his unburned cheek, leaning your weight against him, so sure in the knowledge that Kento Nanami will always, always hold you up.
(And he does. For whatever else the fire consumed, it has not taken this, his firm, dependable presence against you. No matter what,your husband will always, always hold you up. The solid bedrock that you had chosen to build your life around.)
“I’ll get you another one,” you repeat.
He smiles and his face is a bitter ruin, you can see muscles working on the left side of his face–
(For all the skin had been burned away in the fire.)
He turns his head so he can kiss your wrist. Lingers there. where your pulse beats rapidly underneath the paper-thin skin.
(Five years of marriage and he still makes you feel like this: like your blood is a fizzing thing, the frothing foam of a cold soda on a hot day, water beading on frosted glass. It is a wonder you do not float away.)
(Your husband is thirsty.)
“I can’t drink it,” he says softly.
(He has come back a horror.)
“Kento…” On your lips, his name is both plea and prayer.
It has been two days since he had come back from Shibuya. Two days since he had been able to eat or drink anything.
You wonder if it’s because his esophagus had been burned in the flames. And you wonder if he will ever be able to taste anything again.
And, inexplicably, you think back to your wedding day, and how he had kissed you so tenderly that your makeup did not even smear on his lips.
(And how, later that night, he had told you that you were the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.)
(Delicious, delicious, delicious.)
“You have to eat something,” you murmur softly.
He closes his eyes.
(Eye. The other one had been burned in the fire. Burned and popped like overripe fruit.)
When he opens them again, he refuses to speak. Instead, he stares at the fading kiss mark on your neck, just above your pulse point.
(Had it really been three days since the two of you laughed about it over breakfast?)
Despite his silence, there remains a single immutable fact: your husband is starving.
His single remaining eye is haunted as he looks at you choke down your food–for he insists that you shouldn’t neglect your health when taking care of him. You saw the way his throat move, the Adam’s apple bobbing as if swallowing an invisible meal.
(Your husband is starving.)
You had tried, heaven knows you tried. First with all of his favorite meals: bread from his favorite bakery, so soft and freshly-baked that the scent rises through the packaging, then prepackaged meals from the convenience store, then soup, so thinned that it held only the ghost of flavor.
And now, finally, in one last desperate bid, a glass of water.
And even that, his body rejects.
(Your husband is starving.)
“Kento, you have to take something,” you insist.
“I know.”
“It’s been two days.”
“I know.”
“Isn’t there anything you want? Anything at all?” you ask desperately. “Please, baby, whatever it is, I’ll go get it.”
He closes his eyes.
(Eye.)
(You can hear the lie before he says it: it grates at him, so sharp that you are surprised that it does not make his throat bleed.)
“No,” he breathes.
(On his lips, the word is both like plea and prayer.)
There is something he wants, but he refuses to say it. Your heart squeezes
The word grates at him, a lie so sharp you’re surprised that it does not make his throat bleed.
“No.”
“Please,” you whisper. “Please.”
(You are losing him.)
(Your husband has come back to Shibuya. And yet he will die in your house, in your arms, because he is starving.)
When he opens his eye again, he stares at you but does not speak.
Kento stares at the fading kiss mark on your neck, where just three days ago, he had pressed his lips against your skin and promised to come back safe.
He does not speak–
(And yet somehow you know. One cannot love him the way you have and not learn how to read his silences. You know him better than you know yourself.)
Somehow, you know.
He is not staring at the mark on your neck.
Instead, he is staring at what is underneath it: the wild, restless beat of blood underneath your skin. He is staring at your pulse.
You are sure of this knowledge, just as sure as you are in the fact that your husband is starving and that he will die–
(in your home, in your arms)
–if he does not have something to eat or to drink.
And that, no matter how much he needs it, he will not ask for this.
(And you are sure, too, that if it had been you who was starving, he will give it to you without hesitation. He will bleed out every last drop.)
You stand.
The motion startles him.
“My love–” Kento says, but you shake your head.
Walk to the sink, where shards of the broken glass still lay. You can hear the scrape of his chair against the floor as he stands.
“That’s dangerous, let me do it–”
But you barely hear him, there is a ringing in your ears that muffles his voice. It is as if the entire world is underwater. The glass is so sharp that it doesn’t even hurt as it splits your skin, clean through the meat of your palm.
(He had told you that you were the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.)
The blood that runs down your wrists is so hot that you are surprised it does not set you alight. When you turn back to Kento, he is frozen in place, his single remaining eye is focused on you. The red stream running from the split in your palm.
You wonder if it had been the same color of your lipstick the way you were red
(He had been so gentle when he had kissed you that it did not even smear.)
You lift your palm.
“Please,” you said softly. “For me.”
His hand is trembling when he reaches for you–
(How strange, you think, feeling strangely detached. You had never seen your husband tremble before.)
And Kento Nanami lifts your palm to his hand–
And he drinks.
Your husband has come back a horror. And yet, as he drinks, you can see the burned flesh knitting itself, new skin growing over muscle. Your husband, come back from the dead to return to you.
Finally made new.
