(no subject)
Did he used to smile? Yuki distinctly remembers smiling at some point in time.
It's not to be melodramatic over the matter in the slightest. He had never been one for melodrama, even before... well. Everything. Overexaggerating one's emotions was childish, and epicene. Men were not supposed to reveal their emotions publicly. Large displays of weakness as such were for kids. Yuki was eight, and yet he knew this, and applied this. He was young still, but matured beyond other individuals his age. He admired it. He hated it. But that was that and such was there.
He just misses it, is all. Smiling. Showing emotion beyond the faintest of expression, sole giveaway of his feelings shown in a simple quirk of his lips. He watches out the window, other children laugh and play hopscotch. The sun shines, the grass grows, and that curious way their mouths broaden and show off teeth seems almost foreign. It's strange, to have forgotten how to smile, and sometimes he touches his fingers to his lips, experimentally tugs and pushes until he thinks he has replicated something similar. He does not let Akito see.
Akito.
Curious thing, the gods, and Yuki doesn't dare to look him in the eyes unless he's told so, perhaps out of fear of just what he is going to find there. He bows his head and nods his way through life, reserved and polite and always in attempts to keep Akito at a calm. There was nothing quite like when Akito expressed his own emotions. Strange how someone so quiet and succinct could experience such highs and lows. Zero to a hundred within a minute. Yuki had seen it all. He wondered, was all. What drove Akito. What was the reason for everything.
"You are lucky to have me, Yuki," he whispers with a smile, and Yuki peers at Akito as he sits, looking every bit the king, even whilst sitting simply on the floor. Akito is crosslegged, and Akito has a cigarette perched delicately between two fingers. Yuki stares at shins and silky blue fabric of a kimono, and waits. He is on his knees, he is silent until spoken to, and he waits. Akito tips his head to the side, as a tendril of ash wafts up through carefully positioned lips. "Without me, what would you have done? I pity what would have happened."
It is not hate that drives him. Yuki decided this long ago. Hate would have been too simple an explanation.
To hate was to dislike intensely or passionately, and Yuki had taken great care to research the word, when drawing this theory to a close. It was to feel extreme aversion for, or extreme hostility toward. To detest. Akito did anything but detest him. One who detested did not show such care. They would not hold someone close at all times, avoid letting one out into the public eye where falsehoods and lies could have been weaved into tiny, impressionable ears. Akito protected him, didn't he? Someone who hated him wouldn't protect him.
"I am bored with this cigarette," Akito adds, simply, and Yuki knows what he means by now, cringes a little and grabs for the hem of his own kimono. "I am bored with you, Yuki, and I am quite sorry for that." Akito leans over and crushes the cigarette into the skin of Yuki's thigh, tiny singe scars dotting all up and down. "Thank you."
He cares, he does not care. Perhaps he cares too much.
Yuki doesn't scream, doesn't do more than gasp and snag his nails into silk fabric, takes Akito's cigarette once it is extinguished and tips it into a nearby trash. He doesn't need to do so. They are wealthy, and they could have cleaning. He does it because he too cares. And when Akito is happy, Yuki is happy. He knows this, because Akito knows this, and even informed him of this, oh so very kindly.
It is their special place, something about this room that keeps Akito quite calm, and Yuki likes it. He likes when Akito is not angry, not because of what he does to Yuki, unspeakable horrors from which everyone turns their heads, that everyone pretends don't occur. But it is because when Akito is unhappy, everyone is unhappy, not just Yuki as well. And Yuki did not like to keep everyone unhappy.
If his mother didn't think too much of it, after all, maybe it wasn't as bad as he initially thought. Perhaps he was just being ungrateful.
Akito crawls closer, and cups Yuki's chin, smiles a smile and studies him with sharp eyes. "You love me, Yuki, yes?" He kisses the corner of his mouth, nothing too intruding. "Nobody else will. You are lucky to have my love in return. Who else would have you?" He slips behind Yuki, arms ghosting around. Hands tiptoe underneath his kimono, and Yuki tries not to shudder when delicate fingers infringe onto his privacy. Kisses, tiny kisses, scattered up his throat, his collar bone, his jaw. Yuki says not a word, his only giveaway is tiny hands clinging to the fabric, scrunching up silk and revealing bruises and scars up his legs.
Giveaways, every which way. Yuki doesn't allow too many. Not in front of family, because they would prefer not to see. They have their own issues. Not in front of friends, because he doesn't have many. Scaring them away would mean he would have to restart all the careful work he had invested in other people. Politeness came easy for him. Kindness did not. Besides, Akito did not allow for many friends, or much family. Not while he needed Yuki. Not while they had their special place, black panes and hardwood floors.
Akito tilts his head against Yuki's, lips ghosting treacherous lies against his ear. "Nobody will love you like I do, Yuki. Nobody will ever love a silly rat."
Yuki's eyes shut tight, as his nails garrote silk, press into his skin and it's apparent where some of the tiny, crescent moon shapes across his legs came from. Because he may try to fight all he wants, but it's pointless. The fighting, that is. He knows it's true. And fighting the truth was a fool's errand.
Perhaps that was it then. It wasn't hate. It was love.
Silly kind of thing, love was. Yuki didn't understand the craving.
After love this strong, love this grotesque and intruding... He could do without.