Lightning Serenade

Chapter 9: Fields VII

Denki was mortified.

After taking his morning pills (sans the antipsychotic. The doctor was true to his word), he had joined his friends in the group room. They already had their muffins but were waiting for him. He groaned but obeyed when the technician called him over to check and document his vital signs, wanting to check on Hitoshi and eat his muffin, but he figured that it was better to get it out of the way now rather than being pulled away from his friends after he sat down.

When he finally made it over to his friends, Neito held out two muffins.

"Blueberry or chocolate chip?" he asked.

Neither wanted to choose which one, both insisting the other one choose as Hitoshi rolled his eyes but smiled as he ate his own banana nut muffin.

"Why don't you split both so that you don't have to decide?" Hitoshi joked with a snort.

To his dismay, the blonds decided to do exactly that. Denki had taken an experimental bite out of both muffins to see how they flavored together before promptly telling Neito to learn from his mistake and only eat one at a time.

Their laughing and good attitudes abruptly came to a halt because of Denki. He always screwed everything up, didn't he?

He had just asked Hitoshi if he fell back asleep okay after having a nightmare last night.

Denki though it would be bad enough to come up with that seemingly out of nowhere; Hitoshi would laugh at him and ask him what the heck he was talking about. Instead, Hitoshi went pale before a blush rapidly creeped up his cheeks.

Hitoshi quickly turned to Neito, "you told him?!"

"What? No!" Neito promised.

"Then how would he know?" Hitoshi demanded, more hurt than angry.

Hitoshi didn't want to seem like his world revolved around his soulmate when he was trying to make a lasting friend out of Denki. He didn't want Denki to think that he couldn't last a night away from his soulmate, separated by only a wall. Hitoshi might have ended up telling Denki anyway, but he felt like that was his decision to make and felt a little betrayed that the choice was taken from him.

Denki knew he had to fix this. The last thing he wanted was a stupid, impulsive comment from a stupid, impulsive boy to come between literal soulmates.

"Sorry! Sorry!" he started, hands up in a surrender, making the two look over at him. "It must have been a dream or something."

"Or something?" Hitoshi fished, sulking.

"I hear voices," Denki admitted, looking down at the ground. He hoped he didn't scare his new friends off. "They're weird. They'll match what people are saying in real life and echo it in my head at the same time. I guess they aren't above singing songs to me when I wake up in the middle of the night, especially songs that had been mentioned earlier that day."

Hitoshi and Neito shared a glance.

"I swear Neito didn't tell me anything," Denki doubled down. "One of my voices was singing your alert song to me last night, or maybe it was just stuck in my head. I don't know why I thought—" Denki cut himself off, feeling super stupid and small.

He didn't know why his brain would make the connection that Hitoshi must have had a nightmare just because he had a song stuck in his head. He wasn't Hitoshi's soulmate, so there was no connection there, so why had he gone and said something stupid like that? It would have been better if Hitoshi didn't have any nightmares because then he would be laughed at, maybe mocked, but he wouldn't have gotten between two new soulmates if that had been the case. That was the first time his stupidity caused a rift between the two soulmates who were already struggling to connect, and he would feel just as bad and stupid every time, vowing to never do it again, until of course the next instance occurred.