☆♫ // vi i still despise you and erika for this ask // actual meme
even after months, the smell of blood and acrid gunpowder never leaves neku’s senses.
in a world where snow or dreams overpower all, neku might have been able to ignore it. but now, in the odd silence generated between white tile and wood, there is no avoiding the hollow drums of trepidation that ring in his ears. the faint blur of metal passing over metal is all too vivid in neku’s head, even when the day of reckoning was more than half a year ago.
betrayal leaves a wound that’s too deep for band-aids and too fresh for scarring. who better to know that than the boy pushed away once and shot twice by the same person in less than twenty-two days?
something about it still cuts and bleeds him too dry for tears. everything about it is too easy to remember—there are the last shards of his memory gluing themselves back after they died in the kiln, the cold laugh against his fervid heartbeat. neku still knows most of the things he said in the room of reckoning: each fluctuation, each pause, every gesture or slight movement of his hands, his chest, the lift and fall of his head over and over and over until it all ended.
i thought i finally found a friend i could relate to.
for a while, neku wonders how he came to that conclusion, his fingers rubbing circles over his temples and not cold, hard steel. ‘wishful thinking’ might’ve been what rhyme or shiki would call it—what they’ve probably said once or twice, though the time that neku’s been alive has been nothing but a blur—but there’s a part of him that says it wasn’t wishful as much as it was true. he had spent one week in the equivalent of hell with him, fighting side-by-side for survival (since ‘a second chance at life’ obviously didn’t fit them both,) talking, squabbling to each other and with anyone else who stumbled upon them.
in the end, sure, that didn’t amount to much: it could’ve easily been a farce, with every word precise, meticulous, enough to tip him off without completely breaking. but neku can’t help but shake off that it did amount to something, more so than shrewd lies and scalding, superficial words passed back and forth. it’s not as if he’ll ever really know, not when that is, essentially, the nature of joshua kiryu himself.
all neku can really do is trust him. it’s a hard thing to do, after betrayal again and again and again, but part of him still does, even if it hurts to try.
