Author: Shigi
Illustrations: Shigi
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Trigger Warning: This story includes detailed written imagery of severe anxiety, depression, suicide, abuse, manipulation, coercion, trauma and sexual assault. Please proceed with...
The nurse who came in later on woke Nagisa up and advised him to go home. "I'll be taking care of Kirishima-kun for the night. Go home and come back tomorrow afternoon,"She whispered. Nagisa and Yuto were enveloped in a blanket but Yuto had fallen asleep in his arms. Nagisa sluggishly wiped his eyes and peered at the clock.
4:00 AM. He looked down at his lap to see a sleeping small 19 year old and huffed but his lips curved into a small smile. The nurse shook her head but she smiled too. "I wouldn't have called you to leave sir, but that would be against policy,". Nagisa laid Yuto down in bed properly and tucked him in before he pecked his forehead. "I'll come back to get you, Yuto-kun,".
He picked up his bag, his damp jacket, and Yuto's backpack. He slipped on his glasses and glanced at Yuto once more, who was peacefully asleep. The nurse ushered him out and the door shut behind her. When Nagisa arrived home, he couldn't sleep a wink so he attempted to make a coffee for himself but he didn't even know how to do that properly. He had added too much water and was disgusted with his diluted concoction. After being babied by Yuto for so long, he had forgotten how to do even the most basic of things for himself.
A pale yellow notebook stuck out of Yuto's bag and caught his eye. He pulled it out, intrigued. He knew that Yuto took fantastic notes for his classes, he'd seen him complete them at home, with the extra material pasted neatly to the pages and the key points were highlighted.
But Nagisa pulled out the wrong book. Yuto's lecture book was a light blue. The unsuspecting one that was chosen was the book he used to vent his emotions. On the last page, Yuto had marked out was a suicide letter.
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There was only one letter and it was addressed to the man he had been living with. The bottom half of the page was tear-stained and his handwriting had been smudged, which means Yuto must have been blubbering away while he wrote it. Hot tears welled up in his eyes while he read the letter. The man didn't try to hold back his tears and continued flipping through the front pages of the book.
It contained Yuto's vents from when he was a senior in school. It talked about how he was abused at his family home, the gruesome and cruel torture he had to put up with. How he was sick of it. How he was lucky to be liberated from the vindictive women in his family for a few years. How euphoric he felt whenever he the dull kitchen knife at home sliced through the skin on the back of his thighs, cutting himself as if he were a limp piece of paper being sheared to shreds by a pair of scissors at his own will.
The pages also talked about how grateful he was to actually live with Nagisa, even though he came with a lot of emotional baggage. How he hoped he would be declared dead before he could even step foot into his family home again.
Nagisa shut the book and finished his coffee, feeling heartbroken. He'd been through this much? How did he not know this? No, how did Yuto manage to hide all this from him? So all the short responses, the rude demeanour, hating physical contact; they were all his defence mechanism. It was a way to keep this dark and morbid secret all to himself. All of this overflowing pain to himself.
