Chapter Text
“I knew I would find you here,” Azumane sighed.
Sawamura hummed in acknowledgment, staring ahead at the clumped grass glowing under moonlight. He had a last sip of his beer and let the bottle fall to the side.
“Tough day, huh?” The taller sat next to him. “I can’t believe it’s been four years.”
“Yeah,” Sawamura felt the alcohol rise up to his throat and grimaced with nausea. “It doesn’t feel like it.”
They both paused and stared ahead at the dimly lit park. He would come every so often to the one midway between his house and school until it was demolished two years prior to make room for a preschool. Since then, Kiyoko’s park had become somewhat of a replacement, the closest he could get to their old hideout.
“We can talk about it, if you want.”
Sawamura took a deep breath and glanced quickly at his friend. Azumane looked older than he was, but his eyes never lost their warmth. “I don’t.”
“We’re all worried about you, Daichi,” he pointed at the empty beer bottles. “We can help.”
He shook his head with a light smile. It felt good to be cared for, even if he didn’t want it.
“I’ll be fine,” they were both silent for a few seconds. “It just gets a little worse this time of year.”
“It’s the worst day, for sure,” Azumane chuckled lightly.
Sawamura hummed, although he didn’t fully agree. He kept record of every single one of those days—when his best friend first told him of the illness, when he threw up and passed out at school, when he found out his time had been cut short for the first and second time, when he last saw the urn at Mrs. Sugawara’s room before ever settling foot in the house again, everything, everything was imprinted in his head like the nail on a coffin.
“Did you know Kiyoko found her necklace?” Azumane smiled.
“Oh,” Sawamura turned around slightly. “How did she do that?”
The other shrugged. “Luck, I guess? She comes here often too.”
Sawamura looked down at the little hills where they had dug a few years prior. He could picture the vice-captain down on his knees, face reddened by the cold and smiling wide up at them. He smiled back.
He turned to the other side, at an old tree that spread over their heads, and, under the evening light, it almost resembled the other tree, the one at the other park, their park, where one day, perhaps, there was a chance his best’s lips had brushed lightly against his in a gesture that was so intimate and otherworldly that he couldn’t help but wonder if it had happened at all. It was all he could think about when his lips first touched another girl’s at a party, if that feeling was reminiscent of anything from his past, or if that little secret he’d kept so dear to his heart was nothing but a twist of his imagination. It was a second that had sealed his fate, cast a curse on him, and there were no lips his could kiss without expecting the sight of amber irises and silver hair when he opened his eyes.
“I’m scared it will get easier with time,” Sawamura murmured, looking away from that tree. “I feel like I’m disrespecting him.”
“He would want you to move on, Daichi.” Azumane touched his arm. “You know he would.”
Sawamura resented the hypothetical in Azumane’s words. He wished the ‘would’ was never there, that they could somehow be so religious, so faithful, that he could believe for a fact that one day, seventy, eighty years ahead, he would close his eyes for a last time and open them to his best friend’s smile. He would apologize for ever remembering him as the frail, withering boy on a bed or as the piercing stare he’d shot him before saying ‘I hate you’, and not as the joyful and bright vice-captain he truly was. And the other would always forgive him. Deep in his heart, Sawamura knew the other must have forgiven him when pain and numbness crept on his chest inside that car.
Yet, his wishes died down like a puff of smoke, and maybe that was where their story had ended. And that made death all the more tragic, and life insufferably dull.
He wiped a tear and smiled at his friend.
“Can you help me get home?”