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Momota doesn’t feel anything but exhaustion and annoyance when he notices Ouma of all people standing in his room, an unreadable expression plastered on his face. He’s more tired each time he comes back, and the coughs that erupt from his lungs like restless magma in a volcano grow worse, taking their tolls on his body.
The last person he wants to see is Ouma, the one who can see through each and every heroic word that he throws at him, hoping to throw him off of his scent of desperation, but he doesn’t receive the choice, because he knows Ouma won’t let go of little mistakes like Saihara would, returning back to the norm of their friendship because it’s the convenient thing to do for the both of them.
No, Ouma is nothing like Saihara; not even close, because Ouma won’t let him get away from the repercussions, even if they benefit him.
“Some friends you have,” drawls Ouma, eyes fixated on the blood that drips from Momota’s chin. “Still haven’t figured out that poor Momota-chan is ill. The dependency you share is tragic.”
Momota’s eyes flicker with fury, and if it wasn’t for his body beginning to burn itself out, he would’ve been able to give him a fiercer gaze, but he’s exhausted, too weak in the knees to force the muscles to contort.
“You’re—“ he sputters, splattering blood into the hand that clutches his mouth and digs into his cheekbones— “—you’re wrong.”
“Am I?” Ouma snorts. “We both know those motivational speeches of yours that seem to suffice for Saihara-chan and Harukawa-chan are coated with honey.” Interlocking his hands behind his back, he slowly approaches him before grinning right up at him, eyes boring straight into his.
“Tell me something, Momota-chan.” The hush of a whisper that escapes his lips as he leans up to his ear sends a chill down Momota’s spine. “How long do you plan on lying to yourself?”
And as much as he wants to blurt out that he’s wrong, that he isn’t lying and that he’ll somehow get better, his arms refuse to lift with the rest of his numb body, mind puzzled on whether it’s because of the pink splatter on the floor or the fact that he’s right.
-
Momota somehow isn’t surprised when he sees Ouma in his room again, hand tracing the edges of his bed and stopping when they reach a tiny patch of dried blood, eyes fixated on the pink color that pops out from the sheets, and instead of saying anything, Momota just flops on to the bed. His eyes blur in and focus on the ceiling, lungs struggling to circulate air through his blood, ugly blotches of fuzz appearing in his line of vision every few moments.
“To hell with whatever you’re trying to plan,” he grunts finally, breathing growing heavier and heavier the more he lays there. “I don’t.. want shit to do with it.”
Ouma’s smile doesn’t waver, and his eyes remain on the bulging pink in his hand, not even gazing up when Momota sputters hacks into his hand.
“Clocks are ticking with time that you clearly don’t have,” Ouma tells him, squeezing the edge of the sheet in his palm as the blood stained patch bulges out. “And time that Saihara-chan nor Harukawa-chan have, either.”
The way their names slip off his lips and hang above Momota’s head in the air as if to taunt him makes him grit his teeth.
“I’ll make time,” he tries to say, but the confidence he aimed for is far from its target, instead barely scraping the underbelly of exhaustion and desperation that hides beneath the cracking and crumbling mask he dawns.
“Oh, Momota-chan,” Ouma drags out innocently, as if talking to a child, but as Momota’s eyes shift to meet his, expecting some kind of emotion, they’re swirling with a thick vitality that trickles down his throat and pricks every bone and vessel in his body. “Don’t tell me you’re still trying to piece together that hero’s mask of yours when your lungs are cracking it for you.”
His words hit every nerve and more, and the words that Momota wants to fire back lodge themselves in his throat, thickening the air around him and causing the difficult task of breathing just to continue moving to become increasingly harder and harder. Vile, he thinks, swallowing hard against his urge to hack up blood. The fact that Ouma knows exactly what he’s thinking and what he feels is humiliating but strikes an unknown chord inside him, as if he knows the difficulty of masks more than anyone. And that would be true, because in the purple, endless swirling irises that are set on him, Momota sees something; something the unsettling churn in his stomach is telling him to confirm.
He thinks, no, he knows, that his will, no matter how strong, won’t be enough to protect the people he cares about, no matter how much he wants that to be the reality of his superhero, comic book-esque story. His journey is one of shame and jealousy, nothing like a hero’s of any sort, because he can’t be the heroes he reads in books and watches save the day in movies.
He’s human, and the fact that he and Ouma both know this truth is somehow relieving amongst the frustration that boils inside his bloodstream. He wants to think it boils for Ouma, for all of the evil things that he’s done, and yet, while that doesn’t feel right, he ignores it, because it has to be true.
-
Momota is curling away from Ouma when he enters the bathroom on the frigid tile, skin stained with pink blood, with his words still on his mind from then, in his room. Does he know what that feels like? he thinks, eyes fixated on the light’s reflection in his disgustingly vivid pink liquid.
“When you were in my room..” he trails off, head slowly turning to face him, anger fading away from his irises. “Did you understand what that was? My “hero’s mask”, you called it. Do you.. know what that’s like?”
Something flickers in Ouma’s eyes for just a moment as he sets down a medical kit by his own feet, and while his first reasoning for this flash of a change is the burning light above them, he knows that it’s something different. A shared pain of exhaustion and want to get all of it over with and finally lay your head to rest on the hydraulic press.
“Don’t mistake cunning for understanding,” seethes Ouma, resting his palm against the wall, expression unwavering. “I’m not oh-so-heroic Momota-chan who wants so badly to be the guy who helps everyone out without a scratch that he ends up sabotaging himself and all that admire him, acting as if he’s all high and mighty when he doesn’t believe a single word that he spouts from that stupid mouth of his.”
Momota pauses and recoils from his words, swallowing the pain and digging his nails into his palm. He wonders if he’s avoiding answering it directly, instead throwing him off by jabbing where it normally hurts him the most, and imagining the unexplored territory of the emotions and thoughts Momota has never thought about belonging to Ouma is spinning wheels of regret in his chest.
“Maybe not the same as me, but,” he protests, attempting to sit up and ignoring the pain that shoots through his body and strains his voice, “you know what it means to hold a mask close to your face, don’t you?”
“Know what it means?” Ouma repeats, and he laughs a cold, hardened laugh. “I’m not desperate to use these lies for everyone’s benefit like you, Momota-chan. Even if we were cut from the same cloth, you and I have vastly different roles to play in this, so let’s keep you in the spotlight as the hero in this story. It’s the one I like best.”
“You—“ he tries, trying to deflect the truth of it as he averts his gaze, but Ouma stops him.
“Are you still trying to paint me as the villain, or have you finally begun to realize I haven’t done anything to cause the tiny cracks and severs in that little mask of yours?”
Momota’s lip quivers, and he wants to say that he’s wrong, that he’s the reason his blood boils furiously, but when he replays the humiliating memories in his head, Ouma didn’t do a single thing to provoke him to freak out during Gokuhara’s trial. It was his own vile, his own jealousy and fear that the people that clung to him for guidance wouldn’t need him anymore that drove his decisions. Saihara wouldn’t need him anymore and would finally leave him in the short time that they knew each other, and envy gurgled in his throat, leaving a gag worthy aftertaste on his taste buds.
Ouma had never been the villain in the hero’s story that Momota wanted to have; not even for a second. The wolf devouring the sheep in the pasture lay dormant in himself, for he was the sheep and the wolf in one lonely vessel.
He is his own demise, swirling inwards with each dying breath he takes and each fuzzy patch that slips into his vision every now and then.
When he finally meets his eyes again, he doesn’t know the look he’s giving him until Ouma drawls, “Don’t give me those pitiful eyes now, Momota-chan. After all, I am the villain,” and somehow, Momota can taste the ting of sadness that comes with saying these things, slipping down his throat and remaining in the back of his mind.
“How do you live like this?” he chokes out, throat dry and itchy as he heaves himself to his feet and coughs into his elbow.
“I don’t have to for much longer,” Ouma replies, facing him with a smile that seems triumphant on the surface but is something new beneath it when Momota focuses enough, “now that we’re in this plan together.”
-
Thinking about the things that he doesn’t know about Ouma and all the things that make him want to delay the lowering of the press makes him hesitate after helping Ouma under the small space and on to his jacket.
“What are you waiting for?” Ouma’s strained voice echoes throughout the hangar, a pained smile on his face. “It’s getting harder to move, so.. hurry up.”
Momota’s heart almost shatters at his words, desperately swallowing saliva down the desert that is his esophagus to get himself to say something instead of watch the life gradually fade away from Ouma’s purple irises.
“I keep thinking,” he says finally, “about how we treated you.. how I treated you. And I don’t know what you’ve been thinking or feeling, but there’s some kind of twist in my stomach that tells me you aren’t what I kept telling myself you were.”
Momota averts his gaze. “I thought I knew what you are, Ouma,” he tells him, eyes growing glassy, “but the truth is, I don’t, and I’m sorry I ever thought I did. And maybe, somehow, I keep thinking we could have been something nicer if we weren’t stuck in this god awful place.”
Ouma lets out an exhausted laugh, eyes slowly shifting to meet Momota’s. “Perhaps,” he mumbles, falling quiet when he notices his eyes that are pricking with tears. “Don’t tell me you’re going to cry over me now, Momota-chan,” he whispers, a gentle scoff escaping his lips that are curled into a melancholy smile as his tired eyes gaze at Momota’s mauve stained glass irises.
Momota hates how hopeless and fucked this plan is, how he can see the sadness in his eyes when they meet and bore into each other, sharing an inexplicable pain that threads them together and connects their hands together. Ouma’s hand is cold, devoid of warmth, and he feels like screaming out, letting the riled magma in his lungs burst and erupt. He barely feels human, and the more their eyes remain locked, the harder Momota wants to grit his teeth and embrace him to find the humanity he can’t see in his eyes.
The swirling oceans of violet that crashed against summer beaches in his eyes are now laying under a thin layer of winter ice, devoid of the fire Momota once saw in them and grew to wish to see behind the occasional flickers of stilled waters bathing under the sun. The lips once curled into a smile of devious intent now hold a faint smile colored with exhaustion and pain, tinted with a melancholic pale, and the fingers always pressed to those lips are almost as white as his bedsheets, stripped of their color and tipped with a frigid blue.
Momota’s fingers roam his arm, hoping to find some kind of warmth to surprise the nerves in his body, and when he doesn’t, his forehead sinks to press against the surface of the cold machine, knowing that this will be the last burst of human touch and warmth Ouma will ever feel and that he’s lucky it’s not his.