Dear Koutarou

Preamble

'You don't give up.'

Akaashi threw his legs off the bed. If he was eight, he would have found the nerve to dangle them, letting the overhanging sheets to brush against the back of his foot and caress his tendons with each alternating motion. Yes, it was that same oversized bed when he first found himself in that room, let alone, that hospital.

But Akaashi was 24, and his height was an inch or two away from matching the bed's length.

At some point of his life, he had grown exasperated with this ambience. His eyes would travel over the walls that were so white they appeared dingy and filled his stomach with dread. Although the flimsy curtains they would put up were replaced every week, Akaashi couldn't help but think, as the wind picked them up and hoisted them into the air with the hems dancing in incoherent waves, that these sheets of thin fabric were reminders of how weak he and every other patient was.

That he and everyone else in the rooms identical to his were hanging on the edges of dear life, tortured over and over and over by the breeze, their diagnosis: sometimes weak, sometimes raging, but nonetheless the sequences of future events were always, always, a varying surprise.

One they all hated.

It always had something to do with pain.

Akaashi threw the window a scowl before turning towards the door.

'You just don't. I know what you can do!'

The ground beneath his feet was cold, sending tingles up his spine, leaving the hairs on his nape to stand on end. He eyed his toes for a second more than a moment, curling them and loosening in no particular rhythm. He just felt like moving.

Running even.

Only then did the image of the day prior replay in his mind: his back, disappearing in the crowd of semi-busy workmen coming to and fro. Akaashi woke up that morning forgetting what color his shirt was before he meandered through the station. That single memory made him want to stand, run, and wish for one step closer, or a second longer with him. Maybe then he could be able to hold on to the tail-end of his clothes, maybe then in his curled hand would be a fistful of his shirt... maybe then he would freeze in place and look back.

Akaashi would have been able to study his eyes, wallow in his soft gaze a moment more as he would tell him he didn't want him to disappear, that walking out of that very train meant walking out of his life. Akaashi would have been able to look at him properly, and maybe, just maybe, he would see through his gold irises and recognize a loneliness that might have been suffocating him from the inside, a loneliness that pricked at the back of his head, or a loneliness that ate away slowly, painfully, at the pit of his stomach.

Alas, Akaashi was never granted that extra step.

Now he was holed up in a room alone, pondering if he was ever going to see him again. He regretted falling silent as he walked away, he regretted playing statue as he exited the train.

He drew a shaky breath, then winced. The air he was breathing was poison, polluted with mourning wails and gasped sobs that meandered through the corridors. He hated this environment.

When everything around them was perfectly capable to shining rivalrous to the sun, the wretched feeling of death lingered in the air. If anything, Akaashi would have preferred things repainted gray.

The color would have at least empathized what they felt. Those who cried on the other side of the door, those who wrapped arms around each other, those sobbing into their palms robbed of all hope and will to continue a life in the absence of a lover.