DELIRIA - YANDERE!CHUUYA NAKAHARA

Twenty five: Change.

It's about midnight when Chuuya knocks on your door.

The swelling on your cheek has only increased from the tooth implant, and so you clamp down on it with the ice pack. You stand up from your vanity desk and make your way to the door.

"Chuuya?" Your voice is muffled from the anaesthesia. You must look like a mess, with viscera and gore still in your hair like Medea, who slayed her children. "What're you doing so late?"

"I'm sorry for not visiting earlier," In his hands is an enormous bouquet of flowers: Champagne roses, white baby breath, Eucalyptus leaves, pink rose sprays, and more, tied together in a silk white ribbon. The tissue paper rustles as he hands it to your confused hands. "I was having my own issues."

"Come in," You open the door wider and set the flowers on the vanity desk, pulling out the chair and letting Chuuya sit on your bed. You admire the flowers, playing with the bulbous tips of baby breath's with a finger. "What were you having issues with?"

"I betrayed you," He says, hiding his glumness with a coolness that was blunt-edged. His mouth twists when you look at him with wide eyes, curious in their own right, but guarded with a look of traumatic possessiveness: Your past was protecting you from the future. "I couldn't save you in time. I could have spared you from getting all messed up. I could have gotten blood on my hands. But you had to take care of yourself again, when I should have been there."

You let out a self-deprecating laugh, deeply unkind to its core. Then you shrug. "I'm well used to this feeling—!"

"But I don't want you to feel this way," He slams a hand to his chest, gloved hands against his crossed bolo tie. "I want to take responsibility. I want to be part of your life. Be there for you when you're alone. Give some of your burden to me. Do you understand?"

"I don't," You say, truthfully. You reach past the flowers and shake a box of cigarettes, before popping one out and lighting it. Darkness and light drips from you like honey, and you tell your tales of abuse in exchange for comfort and solace-laced words. "I've been alone all my life. Home is precisely what my Father has taken from me. I am regarded with the same suspicion people reserve for foreigners here. I have been exiled to this rarefied class, one of those girls who outrun their trauma instead of succumbing to a life of prostitution to continue the cycle of hypersexuality and sexual trauma. Father has turned me into a foreigner, in my own country. I find more comfort in alien countries where I can escape my native tongue that has given me so much pain; I don't need to translate my alien argot into the language of the Rising Sun. I can escape its heaviness," You take a breather to suck in the cigarette, hollowing your cheeks out as painful as it is, before releasing a mouthful of smoke. It soaks into your pores, giving your face temporal shading that makes it seem as though Chuuya was talking to your child self rather than the adult self. "I'm sure you understand as well. You're Arahabaki. You're a vessel. Monster. I'm a monster. We're both in a class that's branded us as different."

"That's why I want to be with you," Chuuya argues. "I know what it's like—!"

"You don't," You shake your head, almost sadly, your hair falling and obscuring your eyes. "You really don't. I say we're both monsters, but we're on the same coin, never to meet the other side. I am malicious, evil, angry, filled with misery because I am shunned and hated by everyone in Japan. You're not. You haven't been abused. You don't know what it's like to be forced against all your struggles into something you can't recognise."

"I don't know anything beyond my memories of Arahabaki," Chuuya confesses. His voice is wavering, as though his confidence in his voice was waning. "It just happened one day, and then I gained consciousness."

You toss the cigarette box and lighter to him. He slides himself out a cigarette and curls his hand around the end to protect the ember, before leaning back on your bed. Smoke rises and ignites his face into varying shades of amber.