Chapter 10
Most of the nausea had subsided by now. But a little of it still remained. It sloshed around when he walked, deep in the pit of his stomach, spiking up his torso and up the back of his throat whenever he thought about why it was he felt that way. Hiro wondered if that was just going to be a permanent fixture of his self now. Much like his abuse had left him feeling like he didn’t have any control over his puppet-strung body, he wondered if it was just another unpleasant feeling he was going to carry around with him for the rest of his life. Chaining him, burdening him.
He didn’t look at the numerous messages waiting for him in the chatbox. He saw that Takahiro had changed his status back to available now, but that was all Hiro dared to glimpse before he turned off his computer. He couldn’t face that kid right now. He didn’t want to spend any more of his afternoon sobbing and retching over a sink than he already had.
He went to lie down. Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. What even was he supposed to do in this kind of situation? He had no clue. He hadn’t watched any films about it, he hadn’t read those sorts of books. He didn’t know what one did exactly, upon coming to the realisation that they might’ve in their troubled past done something… What had been the word Takahiro had used?
It sent cold shivers all throughout his body. He crawled under the covers, still fully clothed, and leaned his head into the pillow, but he couldn’t relax. He couldn’t get comfortable. He was still achingly tense; he was still stiff as a board. His body felt like a piece of lead piping.
He had to think. He had to remember, before Takahiro did. What had happened that night?He laid in bed for hours with his eyes screwed shut as he forced himself to go over every painful detail of his life at that time. He tried to remember the fights, the deceit, the lies, the two-facedness, the isolation, the depression, the anxiety, the fear, the tears – just all of it. It was so important that he remembered.
It wasn’t like unlocking an old, forgotten door and having a ton of junk fall out on top of him, as he’d once likened delving into the depths of his memories to. No, it was like… jumping into a misty body of water, not at all knowing just how deep it went. The deeper he sunk, the darker it became, the slower he got. The more the memories built up, the more the pressure crushed him, and each memory took him further and further away from the possibility of ever coming back up for air again.
Drowning, that’s what it was. He was drowning. That’s what it felt like.
Things were awful back then, nine years ago. That wasn’t too hard to remember. Every day was a brighter, warmer hell. Each day he woke up at a different hour. At some point he’d stopped taking care of himself. He was staying in a room he could no longer afford, surrounded by food wrappers, dirty clothes, and broken computer parts. On his bedside table was his phone, filled with so many missed calls that it had made him want to sink into the earth like the corpse he was. Everything had been falling apart, and especially him.
There was a party. It had been the first and last flat party he’d ever been to. It was crowded, noisy, and that strong alcoholic stench just permeated the house and everything in it. He’d been drinking. He’d been drinking a lot more than he should’ve been.
And there was a girl. Amanda…
He gasped into his pillow, squeezed his eyes shut. No, he couldn’t think about it. He couldn’t think about her. He skipped over the scene in his mind – he didn’t want to watch it happen in such crisp, graphic detail. He didn’t want to feel it and get despairingly lost in it. Distancing himself from that particular memory was the only way he could get past it, to where he needed his mind to be.
He was upset. Understandably. He’d just been raped, his favourite flatmate had smiled like the sex was supposed to cheer him up, and he’d just been hung up on by a rape support helpline. He’d gone to Tadashi’s place, hoping that Takahiro was still there…
He whimpered. He remembered standing over Takahiro in the dark as he slept in Hiro’s old bed. He remembered grabbing him, holding a hand over his mouth as he begged the young boy not to say a word. He remembered he started to cry, and he lay down beside Takahiro, and put an arm over him, and…
His eyes flew open, distraught. Nothing. There was nothing else. He had no further memories of that night. He thought he’d just passed out, from exhaustion, from betrayal, from being stuck at breaking point for so long, running on empty – but he didn’t know. He hadn’t known at the time, and he didn’t fucking know now.
Maybe it was good news. Maybe it meant that nothing had happened. Maybe Hiro had just crushed the boy by accident as he passed out on top of him. That was completely plausible. That was within the bounds of his acceptable reality; he could handle that.
But the truth was that he just didn’t know. He couldn’t say for sure. And, for as long as Hiro was left without an answer, he felt like… he could never really be happy with the person that he was.
He wondered if maybe it was a psychology thing. Maybe he just couldn’t remember because he didn’t want to remember. Maybe his mind was protecting him.
Because he didn’t want to be a bad person.
Because he didn’t want to be someone else’s Aunt Cass.
-------
When he next spoke to Takahiro through the chatbox, the following morning, he was unyieldingly strained. He was scared. No, he was terrified. He was deathly afraid. He had laid awake all night, just stuck in a state of perpetual stress, and the only difference between him now and seven hours ago was that he wasn’t lying down anymore. He was sitting at his desk, soothing words with no heart behind them right at his fingertips, as Takahiro admitted to worrying last night when Hiro hadn’t come back.
Hiro didn’t laugh as Takahiro joked that he was so old that he didn’t know what ‘brb’ meant. Hiro typed ‘lol’ but he didn’t laugh. How could he? He was waiting for it all to click; he was dreading the second Takahiro would say the words that Hiro feared most in the entire world right now.
Wait… I remember now. That’s right – YOU touched me, didn’t you? That sobbing, suffocating beast from my dreams was YOU. You hurt me like she had hurt you.
You’re as bad as she is.
You’re worse than her because you already knew how much it hurts.
But you just didn’t care.
You just wanted to make yourself feel a little bit better, and you didn’t care.
Hiro sharply slapped himself out of it. He couldn’t keep doing this. He wasn’t going to last much longer if these recurring thoughts kept assailing him, beating him down, blaming him… He didn’t know whether or not he’d done it, yet his mind had so effortlessly compiled all of the reasons for why he might’ve done it. What kind of a sick brain even did that.
It was all that he could do. To keep himself sane. He wouldn’t talk about the past, for fear of jogging Takahiro’s memory, or even his own, but he just let Takahiro talk at him for a long while. He let him talk about anything and everything that he wanted to. He didn’t stop him, he didn’t tune him out. And after a few hours it became clear to Hiro that he could start to relax a little because Takahiro’s memory seemed to be suffering from the same unknowable murkiness as his own memory. Besides, Takahiro hadn’t given any horrifyingly explicit details yet. Nothing characteristic of a textbook abuse case.
He had added one horrifying little detail to the night in question though. Something that had made everything less dreamlike and more harrowingly real.
TAKA: The smell…
TAKA: There was a really bad smell. Like dad’s scotch. Only sweeter, I guess. I don’t really know.
TAKA: Just… alcohol, you know?
TAKA: Did Cass used to drink a lot?
A part of Hiro just wanted to come out and end this and say it. I’m so sorry, Taka-kun. I had never meant to hurt you. You were such a good kid. I know I could say it a million times and it’ll never be enough, but I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… But he refrained. A part of him was holding his twitching fingers back. Saying sorry was essentially an admittance of guilt. That he was at fault. That he was accountable for something.
Eventually it got dark outside. The painful pangs of hunger got harder and harder to ignore. Takahiro wished him a goodnight and signed off, and Hiro continued to sit there for a while, wondering how he was ever going to sleep again.
He wanted to sleep and never wake up.
-------
Over the next few days, Hiro had been convinced that his life was coming away at the seams once again. Like it always seemed to do. His shit just didn’t want to stay together.
He couldn’t come to terms with it. That was, the possibility that something could’ve happened between him and Takahiro, years and years ago. That night, when the accumulation of weeks of unmoving, unending hell had just peaked… It was impossible. He couldn’t keep comfortably living the life that he did now whilst possessing the knowledge that the possibility existed, that something could’ve happened. For fuck’s sake – he was supposed to be helping kids like him, like Takahiro, but he couldn’t even look at his inbox anymore. Those emails, they just… killed him inside. All of those boys who looked to him for clarification, for guidance, for support, for help…
It was just too much. He couldn’t delete them, so he could only ignore them for now. Until he could work something out. Until he could work out what to do. Until he could handle the situation better than he was currently handling it.
He was losing weight again. He couldn’t eat; his stomach reeled whenever he thought about it, and yet he couldn’t seem to distract himself from it for long enough, no matter what he did. Work couldn’t distract him, his addictive game couldn’t distract him, bot fighting in his lab’s basement couldn’t distract him, and going to Lucy’s dive bar to get absolutely smashed couldn’t distract him – at least not for very long, and he always felt even more abhorrent afterwards. Even his own boyfriend couldn’t distract him.
It had quickly become a problem. Even as Morgan kissed him or touched him or fucked him, his mind just couldn’t stop for twenty or so minutes and lose itself to the sensations, no matter how good they were. He went from a moaning, gyrating mess to completely stock-still in a matter of seconds. He didn’t want to picture that boy’s face – whether it was fat-cheeked and grinning, or lean and imperturbable – when he was doing anything like that. It wasn’t at all like the feeling of being robbed of his control, or used; it was just a different nauseating unpleasantness altogether that Hiro couldn’t bear to go through again.
He couldn’t think of anything else to do. The second time it happened, he told Morgan that they were through. An undeniably huge part of their sustained relationship had been that Hiro could feel comfortable having sex with him, and if he couldn’t do that without thinking about Takahiro, then he didn’t want to do it anymore. It wasn’t fair, and it especially wasn’t fair to Morgan.
Hiro was regretful. Really, he was. But he must not have seemed very regretful. From the way Morgan had slammed the door on his way out.
At least he was still answering his phone. For now anyway. He still picked up the inevitable call from his brother. Tadashi had sounded so wary at first – sort of aloof, like he was waiting for Hiro’s usual loud and feverish tirade. But… it never came. They talked as they normally did, and after about five minutes of ordinary conversation, Tadashi reacted positively, his mood picking up drastically. He slipped in a line about being happy that his brother made the right choice, and Hiro pretended not to hear it.
They talked for another twenty minutes before they ran out of things to say, and Tadashi told Hiro in his most tender, proud voice that he loved him.
“Love you too, bro,” Hiro murmured. He ended the call, bringing his fists up to his face, and he did his best not to start crying again.
He tried not to think about it. He tried not to think about how he’d never hear those words from his brother again, if he only he knew what had happened. Goddammit – what had maybe happened.
He couldn’t think of anyone who’d be more betrayed than his own brother. Especially when Tadashi had asked him and had taken a chance and finally believed him, when Hiro had promised that nothing had happened.
Amazing, he thought wryly, running a hand over his eyes. I still have tears left.