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“What the fuck happened to you?”
While not the softest of greetings, Rohan thought that the question was more than warranted. For once, Josuke looked any other teenager. Maybe a well-dressed teenager, with his t-shirt tucked into his designer belt and barely a scratch on his polished loafers, but a teenager nonetheless. Without that tacky modified school uniform, he could have blended in perfectly with a crowd his age.
Unfortunately, that didn’t change the fact that they were both standing in the middle of an empty convenience store at one in the morning with blood smeared across the entire lower half of Josuke's face.
Josuke’s expression shuttered from open surprise to something a little more guarded. He looked back down at the modest rows of discount bandages in front of him, pointedly turning his shoulders away from Rohan.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “It’s fine.”
Blood slowly started to trickle down his jaw, staining whatever patches of skin hadn’t already been crusted over in flaky crimson.
Rohan could have left. Would have been well within his rights to do so, even. But he found himself letting out a long sigh instead.
“Your nose is bleeding.”
“Huh?” Josuke blinked, rubbing at his face and then grimacing at the streaks of red that marred his palm afterwards. He pinched his nose shut with a long groan. “Ah, shit.”
“Stay here,” Rohan said. He shoved his way past Josuke, ignoring his half-muffled protests to march right up to the coffee machine by the counter. Without hesitation, he snatched up a fistful of scratchy paper napkins and then made his way straight back to hold them out to Josuke.
Josuke didn’t move to take them.
“Well?” Rohan shook the napkins. “I mean, if you want to bleed all over the store, then go right ahead. Don’t let me stop you.”
Josuke still didn’t move. He stared at Rohan’s outstretched hand with some strange emotion between suspicion and confusion. Pinpricks of blood dripped down his chin to dot the hem of his shirt.
Rohan sighed. “Josuke, I’m not wiping your face for you.”
Josuke snatched the napkins out of Rohan’s hand in a flash, bundling them up against his nose in a crumpled mess as he scowled.
“Didn’t ask you to,” Josuke said. “But thanks. I got it.”
Rohan eyed the steadily growing splotch of dark red that seeped through the thin napkins. “Right.”
“Look, I got it,” Josuke repeated. He snatched a tube of antiseptic and a pack of tissues from the rack and turned to make his way to the cashier. “Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.”
Rohan rolled his eyes. Even from here, he could see Josuke clearly fumbling to set his meager haul onto the counter and find his wallet under the stare of the unimpressed worker behind the counter.
Really, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do.
He looped around the back of the store, grabbed two cans of the cold mediocre coffee he came for in the first place, and circled back to push them in front of Josuke’s purchases.
“Add these. We won’t need a bag.”
Rohan ignored Josuke’s sputtering and handed over a few bills to cover the cost, the cashier barely batting an eye at the transaction before she forked over his change and his receipt.
“Have a good day.”
Rohan nodded along absently, scooping up his coffee and making his way towards the door. He didn’t have to turn around to hear Josuke swearing and stumbling after him, the automatic doors opening for them both with a tinny jingle. The sweltering heat of the mid-summer night made the collar of his shirt damp with sweat the second he left the air-conditioned store behind. The parking lot in front of them was empty, only the buzzing of a yellowed vending machine and the hum of a flickering streetlight a few feet away acting as their ambient background.
“Here,” Rohan said, holding out one of the drinks. “Use it for the swelling.”
“What?” Josuke replied. His eyes flickered down from the aforementioned coffee back to Rohan’s face in disbelief.
Rohan held out the coffee with a pointed stare. “Look, if you don’t take this, I’m going to drink them both.”
Yet again, Josuke was quick to snatch his offering out of his hands.
“Fine,” he muttered. “You didn’t have to pay for my stuff though.”
“Do you really think I was going to wait in line behind you when we’re the only two people in there?” Rohan shot back. “Believe or not, but I have enough money to afford some dollar-store bandages.”
“Fuck off,” Josuke said. There wasn’t as much heat to it this time around though. Maybe it had something to do with his current struggle to pop open the aluminum tab with his bruised knuckles. Eventually, he managed to force it open, gulping down a hearty amount before he pressed the can to the inflamed skin around his cheek.
Rohan decided to follow suit, taking a more reasonable first sip of his own drink. “So are you going to explain what happened or are you just going to take my coffee and brood?”
Josuke took another swig of said coffee, grimacing when that small motion tugged against the muddled bruise on his cheek.
“Think it might be a little above you,” he replied. “Unless you’re in the mood to hear about some dumb shit.”
Rohan snorted. “What, did you get stranded at a party or something?”
Josuke kept his eyes fixed on the cracked concrete.
“Wait, did you actually?” Rohan asked.
“I didn’t get stranded,” Josuke shot back. He swirled the can in his hand with his lips pursed tight. “I just—look, I’m not kidding when I say it’s dumb.”
“You know, you’re doing a lot of talking for someone who’s not explaining anything.”
Josuke glared at him. For as bristly as he was, it was the closest thing to a normal reaction that Rohan had gotten out of him the entire night.
“It’s a long story.”
“Do you have anywhere better to be?” Rohan retorted.
Josuke gave him a look that said that unfortunately, he didn’t. Which was as expected.
“This guy in my class invited me to a party some of his friends were throwing,” Josuke finally said, looking like he was pulling his own teeth out all the while. “I’ve been invited to a couple, but I never bothered to go. Wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t have anything else going on though, so I figured I’d just go for the hell of it.”
Josuke glanced over at him with a pained imitation of a smile. “I was right. It really wasn’t my thing.”
“Hm,” Rohan said. “I figured you’d be more of a people person.”
“That’s the thing,” Josuke replied. “I am. I like going out. I like doing stuff with Okuyasu and Koichi and all that. But something about that party just got to me.”
Josuke let out a long sigh, his shoulders hunching inward as he fiddled with the empty can in his hands.
“I dunno,” Josuke muttered. “The guy who invited me kept trying to introduce me to everyone too. Followed me around the whole night saying I should go say hi, or go get a drink, or start dancing. I know he didn’t mean anything by it. He was just trying to be friendly or whatever. But it just really got to me.”
He fell quiet after that. When the silence stretched on for one second, then two, Rohan gestured for him to keep going with an idle hand.
“So I swung at him.”
Rohan balked.
“What?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Josuke snapped. “That’s what I’m saying. I dunno. It was loud, and everyone was talking and laughing and having a good time, and I wasn’t and I didn’t know why everyone else was and it fucking pissed me off!”
That seemed to be the loose screw that unleashed the torrent of words that fell out Josuke’s mouth, leaving Rohan stunned speechless.
“Yeah, it was dumb. He had his friends there with him and they fucking kicked my ass, and they were right to, but I was mad and I don’t know why I was mad. I feel bad about it, but at the same time, I really, really don’t, and that makes me feel even worse.”
A frustrated grunt escaped him as he tossed his empty can into the overflowing bin hard enough to make it bounce off the rim and clatter onto the uneven pavement.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Fuck, I really don’t.”
Rohan took a sip of his own coffee, the metallic bitterness making him grimace.
“You’re right,” he finally said. “That is pretty dumb.”
Josuke twisted his face up, the bruising along his upper lip making him look exceptionally pathetic, but Rohan didn’t let him get a word in just yet.
“Dumb,” he continued. “But not devastating.”
Josuke opened his mouth, paused, and closed it again. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked testily.
“It means that I really doubt that getting your ass handed to you by some hormonal teenagers is the thing that’s going to break you.”
At that, Josuke went quiet. He shoved his hands in his pockets and pursed his lips together with that same strange look on his face.
“I wish it was.”
Rohan blinked. “Seriously?”
“No, I mean, like, I wish it really was a big deal.” Josuke narrowed his eyes and tilted his head, like that could somehow shake the right words out of his skull. “Like getting into a fight at a party was the biggest problem I had. But it’s not. And I really don’t think it’s ever gonna be.”
Idly, Josuke started to scuff his shoes against the pavement. “I think that’s what got to me. Normal stuff like that is never gonna matter to me anymore, and nobody is really gonna get why. You know. After everything else.”
Rohan did know.
“Things are going to happen to you that won’t ever happen to anyone else. Throwing a tantrum about it isn’t going to change that.”
“A tantrum?” Josuke repeated incredulously. “Are you seriously—”
“Why do you think I’m out here with you?”
Rohan tossed his empty can into the trash. Unlike Josuke’s, it slid neatly into the bin without bouncing off against the plastic rim.
“I hate quiet houses. I still can’t stand being home alone once it gets dark.” He thought of unlocked windows, of empty hallways that never quite stayed empty when he turned his back on them. Anyone could go unnoticed as long as they were silent. A house only had so many doors you could escape from.
“I only explain that so many times before it just becomes another story,” he continued. “People like Kira are people you can only live through once. If you go around seething because nobody else will ever understand that, you’re only shooting yourself in the foot. You won’t get to have a normal life like you’re looking for, and you won’t make one happen by forcing yourself into it. It’ll be easier if you just accept that sooner rather than later.”
It was blunt, but Rohan didn’t think there would be any good in nursing the kind of wound that Josuke was holding onto.
“That’s not fair,” Josuke gritted out, digging his nails into the meat of his palm.
“Of course it’s not,” Rohan replied. “But what can you do about it? What’s done is done.”
Rohan couldn’t put his finger on it until that moment, but as he watched Josuke clench his jaw with something heavy hidden behind his eyes, he finally managed to figure out what about Josuke made him feel so uncanny. For all his posturing, Josuke had never really been more than a brat who talked first and swung last. Even when Rohan pushed, back when there was no ambiguous common goal they begrudgingly shared, there was always a certain threshold he had to cross before Josuke would be willing to fight back.
But now, Josuke didn’t look like he’d sit there and wait for that first swing. That kind of patience had long since been burned out of him.
Rohan was looking at someone who couldn’t risk handing out the benefit of the doubt so freely anymore.
“You don’t get to go back to being whoever it was you were before all of this happened. None of us do.”
Josuke’s mouth opened, but he paused before he said anything. Almost visibly, the livewire energy that sparked through him like a raw nerve fizzled out into something much quieter.
“That’s not fair,” he mumbled.
“No,” Rohan agreed. “It’s not.”
A heavy silence as thick as the heat around them sweltered under the glow of the streetlight. The weight of Josuke’s thoughts threatened to bear down on Rohan too, and right now, he didn’t think he had the strength to hold that for him.
“If you want more coffee, buy it yourself,” he said, stepping down from the curb to make his way through the empty parking lot. “I’m heading back.”
“Wait.”
Rohan stopped and glanced over his shoulder. Josuke had taken half a step after him, worrying at his bleeding lip. He paused, screwing his face up with deliberation, before he finished whatever it was that he wanted to say.
“You should get a dog.”
Rohan blinked. That was the last thing he expected to hear.
It was clear his confusion was evident given the way Josuke hurried to explain himself too.
“I mean, it’ll probably be high maintenance and kinda expensive and whatever, but, you know,” he said. “Can’t get too quiet if you have a pet, yeah?”
It was a jumbled and vaguely incoherent semblance of a justification, but somewhere between the lines, Rohan thought he caught a glimpse of the tentative care that he had first seen in Josuke so long ago.
He pursed his lips together, not quite a smile, but something that could have been one. “I’ll think about it.”