Trace Me Onto You <> komahina

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On lonely nights, he dreams of Nagito.

He dreams of salty ocean air and warm sun on his skin, a manic laugh, and green eyes that gazed upon him so tenderly, once, it made his chest ache. Palm trees danced in the wind, casting long shadows over two bodies nestled in the sand, staring up at fluffy, white clouds when there was nothing else to do and no one else around.

Within the first days of knowing Nagito, he had found him charming, a sort of mysterious allure about him that drew Hajime in like a fly to the spider's beautifully woven web.

Even after he'd seen all the cracks in the guy's psyche, even after his behavior toward Hajime went from adoring to hostile at the notion that he may not be as great, as mighty, as his peers. Even after he began sneering and spitting venom at the very thought of his first friend in Hell, he couldn't help drifting back to his side, remaining in his orbit as it ripped an irreparable tear in the fabric of Hajime's mentality.

He was born useless, turned into a vessel for greatness, and even then it was not him that was the great one, but some sick alter ego forcibly implanted in his brain. Nagito, in the end, did not think he was great, but he said that hope lived inside of him, radiant and beautiful, and that he loved it. That meant, to some pitiful extent, that he had loved Hajime, too; that he had been capable of loving him.

In truth, that was all Hajime needed from him. Through all the hurt — the accusations and the mocking; the tormented echoes of screeching laughter that bounced off the walls of his skull when things felt too big and loud — Nagito had loved him. Obsessively and maniacally, but so pure and sweet, and oh how Hajime loved him back.

Hajime loved him looming above like an anvil ready to drop, he loved him tied down and defenseless, he loved him sick and sweaty and mean, he loved him butting in where he needn't be, he loved him watching the waves crash as the sun glittered off the water to reflect in his olive irises, he loved him bound and bloody; loved him cold; loved him dead.

When he looks back at those days, fuzzy in his memory as they are, he remembers how many chances Nagito gave him that he didn't take. An outstretched hand, a cryptic message, the seat by his side ever empty, and yet, blinded by words Nagito hadn't even truly meant, he ignored the opportunity for something fleeting, but that felt utterly right in every sense of the word.

He ignored Nagito's love and his own, and he had doomed even the notion of us; an ache that he lives with every day, an ache that he knows will never fade.

An ache so debilitating some days, that as the medication drags him down into proper REM sleep that, these days, he cannot have even by sheer unmedicated exhaustion, he prays he could stay wrapped up in slender arms and press his face into white hair for the remainder of forever, that he would never wake from this dream that he had hoped would be his future.

The Trials were not real, but Nagito's sickness was. He died in the hospital not ten minutes from where Hajime lived a month after their release.

He had gone to see him once, near the end. His face was sunken and dark from his lack of energy to eat anything substantial, even the liquid nutrition they fed him via peg tube wasn't enough to replenish the pink Hajime remembered constantly painting the apples of his cheeks. His long, slender fingers, practically begging to be poised over piano keys, were all bones where Hajime held them gently in his own, afraid the appendages would shatter like glass were he too rough.

His skin was gray and damp with sweat, even though Hajime knew he was cold. He'd told him, at some point or other, about how he'd always had poor circulation, that he was always cold, to some degree. Before he left, dejected, with words he still could not find the courage to say bruising the tip of his tongue, he requested the nurses cover him with another blanket for his comfort.