Chapter Text
“You hafta promise not to freak out about this,” Hikaru says all in a rush, eyes darting towards Yoshiki as they pause outside his bedroom door. His voice is hushed despite the fact they’re the only ones in the house. “You can’t tell nobody, neither.”
He’s got the same shifty expression and barely contained energy as when he was eleven, and had managed to smuggle three baby raccoons into his bedroom and hide them for four whole days before his mama found out and made him put them back outside on threat of a whoopin’ that would make his head spin. Somehow, both of them had ended up in trouble for that whole mess, and that’s really not an experience Yoshiki wants to relive.
He levels Hikaru with an unimpressed look, not really in the mood for games, but Hikaru doesn’t budge. Yoshiki, predictably, gives first. Maybe one day he’ll learn how to stand up to his best friend, but today’s not gonna be that day. He hasn’t been able to deny him a single thing since he got out of the hospital, and Hikaru’s definitely noticed and takes advantage of that fact.
“Fine, alright. No freakin’ out, and my lips are sealed tight,” he says, hands raised in surrender.
Hikaru’s nearly vibrating out of his skin with jittery anticipation, but he pauses to examine Yoshiki’s face for a long moment, like he’s trying to read more than just his mood or the truthfulness of his words. He’s breathing a little harder than usual, each warm exhale tickling Yoshiki’s jaw. Seconds tick by, and Yoshiki feels his cheeks start to warm beneath the intensity of the gaze, the weight of his attention, but it’s there and gone again before he can get too flustered. It’s probably weird of him to feel a little disappointed by the loss.
“Okay,” Hikaru says at last, and takes a deep, deliberate breath, like he’s bracing himself for something. “Don’t scream like a little girl, okay?”
“I wouldn’t scream like a—wait, why would I scream?”
He doesn’t get an answer before the door is thrown open to reveal…nothing. He steps slowly into the room, peering around like he’s waiting for something to jump out and bite him, but there’s nothing there. No sign of fur or scales or feathers. The same four walls and familiar posters and dusty window all greet him, just like always. The golden afternoon sunlight makes the shadows deep and long, and the dust motes glitter as they dance through the air. The room looks totally normal, if maybe a bit messier than usual since his plethora of half-finished projects and mostly-forgotten hobbies have made a reappearance since the last time Yoshiki was here.
“What kinda joke are you tryin’ to pull here?” he asks, squinting down at a lone knitting needle laying abandoned in the middle of the floor, yarn trailing across the room and disappearing into the depths of his closet, like he’d dug it out only to toss it over his shoulder when it turned out not to be what he wanted. The words end up coming out more befuddled than annoyed, which is probably good enough to get the point across. He is feeling awful confused at the moment.
“Yoshiki!” Hikaru croons all of a sudden, excitement overflowing and bubbling through his voice like a swollen creek. It sounds like he hasn’t seen him in years or something, and the only warning Yoshiki gets before he’s practically tackled into a hug is a weird, unsettling prickle on the back of his neck. The enthusiasm with which Hikaru latches onto him is as suspicious as it is baffling, considering they haven’t parted ways pretty much since they met up to head to school together that morning.
He’s not really sure what to do with the sudden armful of best friend he’s got, and feels his cheeks go red again as Hikaru presses closer than he usually would, practically hanging his whole weight off Yoshiki’s neck and leaving them chest-to-chest. Hikaru isn’t pulling away, though, so it’s with hesitant hands and a pounding heart that Yoshiki indulges his own desires just enough to wrap his arms around Hikaru’s waist in turn. He’s warm, and soft, and Yoshiki knows he’s a terrible person for even noticing that fact, but that doesn’t stop his skin from tingling where Hikaru wriggles against him.
The muffled sound of birdsong and rushing wind outside seems to resonate with the sudden rush of blood pounding in his head. It reverberates around his skull, almost loud enough to drown out the little warning bells that are ringing in the back of his mind. Eyes slipping shut, Yoshiki allows himself to drop his head just enough to feel the brush of course hair across his lips. He can smell Hikaru’s familiar shampoo as he nuzzles into his neck, and something earthy and metalic beneath it, but there’s a weird lack of the sour smell Yoshiki’s always associated with his best friend and humid spring days. His brow creases, unseen beneath the fall of his dark hair, and his eyes snap open.
Something’s up, but he’s not sure why he suddenly feels like he should turn and make a run for it. This is just Hikaru being clingy, after all; it’s sudden, sure, but he’s done weirder things before. That’s what he keeps telling himself as he swallows down the taste of iron in his mouth and clears his throat, trying to speak around the tightness there.
“Uh, yeah? What’re you….” The words get lost somewhere behind his teeth as he looks past the head of fluffy white hair nearly obscuring his vision and finds…another Hikaru. Watching them from the doorway to the room.
He feels his mouth drop open. The Hikaru in the doorway has a strange look on his face as he watches them, but when he notices Yoshiki staring, it quickly twists into a grin. There’s something smugly amused in the way he tilts his head, almost like he’s saying, told ya so.
“What—“ Yoshiki croaks, and tries to disentangle himself from the body in his arms, jerking like he’s been burned by every point of contact. His head is spinning as he wriggles a sweaty hand into the nonexistent space between their chests, and pushes the person hugging him away.
The face that pouts up at him is…definitely Hikaru. He’s got the exact same features, down to the cowlick and crooked tooth, the freckle on the bow of his upper lip and the little scar above his eyebrow. He’s looking up at Yoshiki from the right height, and his build is the same, insofar as Yoshiki can tell. There’s something off about the eyes, though, that he can’t quite put a finger on. The shape’s right, and the color, and even the little gleam that tells Yoshiki that there’s about to be mischief, but there’s something….
Then, the lower lip pushes out further, and those unnervingly familiar-but-not eyes go all shiny and liquid, and then his face starts to melt oh what the HELL—
Yoshiki, to his credit, does not scream.
He instead makes a choked off little moan in the back of his throat, and takes a few stumbling steps backwards until his knees hit the side of the bed and he winds up falling back onto it. The old frame groans warningly beneath the sudden onslaught, and he really hopes it won’t collapse beneath his weight, both because that would be embarrassing, and because his head is spinning too much to catch himself at the moment. When he closes his eyes, the oil-slick colors of that dripping mass are burned into the backs of his eyelids, oozing and dizzying and making his head hurt. He’s pretty sure there were colors he’s never even heard of writhing and pulsing within the depths of that void.
“What the hell,” he whispers, raising shaking hands to press tight against the sockets of his eyes, trying to replace the warped image of Hikaru’s face with starbursts of pressure instead. It doesn’t help.
“It’s weird, right?” Hikaru says, and the bed bounces a bit as he throws himself onto it. Yoshiki, still on his back, groans at the wave of vertigo that overtakes him.
“Dude, how’d you do that?”
“Do what?” Hikaru’s voice replies, a little choked like he’s fighting back laughter, but it comes from further away. He can still feel the warm press of Hikaru’s leg against his own, close enough to hear his soft breathing. He groans again, not liking where this seems to be going.
“What is going on?”
“Magic, I think,” the Hikaru sitting on the bed with him says, and he feels him shift. Yoshiki can picture how he’s sitting now, tucked up against the wall with one leg splayed out to the side, the other pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around it and chin resting atop his knee. Somehow, the mental image is enough to chase the last of the lingering dizziness away.
Yoshiki cracks his eyes open, gaze sliding almost instinctively towards Hikaru. It’s soothing, somehow, to see him sitting exactly how Yoshiki knew he would be, staring down at him with the hint of a sheepish smile playing at the corners of his lips.
“You good?” he asks, and behind that smile his eyes are full of quiet concern and wholly his own. The real one, then. Slowly, Yoshiki nods.
“Is your twin over there gonna behave?” he mumbles back, voice low even though the room is too small for his words to go unheard. He hears a snort from across the room, like laughter quickly choked off, and resists the urge to lift his head and glare; he really doesn’t want to risk seeing that weird thing dripping down his face again.
Hikaru’s grin gets a little wider, any hint of seriousness draining away as mischief lights up his eyes. Yoshiki glares at the safer, closer target, for all the good it does; Hikaru’s been immune to his pissy looks for years now.
“You get used to him,” Hikaru says simply, giving a half-shrug. “But I’m sure he’ll play nice if you say pretty please!”
Yoshiki wishes he could shoot lasers out of his eyes or something. Maybe Hikaru would take him and his glares more seriously, then.
“You wanna explain?” he drones, and tries very hard not to react as he feels the bed bounce again as the second Hikaru flops down on his other side, legs crossed and knee pressing into his hip. Hikaru’s face is staring at him from both sides now, and this bed is definitely way too small for three people.
The room feels warmer all of a sudden.
Are his cheeks getting red? God, he hopes neither of them notice, but judging from the amused slant of the second Hikaru’s smile, they probably do. He quickly tears his eyes away from that crooked mouth and focuses instead on the water stain on the ceiling above him.
For a moment, the silence hangs between them, a presence with teeth and weight. The real Hikaru stares down at him, expression schooled in the way it always is when he’s thinking real carefully about what he wants to say. It’s not an expression Yoshiki sees on him often, and that fact just makes his face feel a little warmer. The clone shifts closer, a hand braced solid and warm on Yoshiki’s thigh as he adjusts himself, and his stomach flip-flops again. Then, Hikaru opens his mouth.
“You remember that night on the mountain, right?”
That drains any weird feelings right away, flushing Yoshiki’s body with ice. Of course he remembers the mountain; how could he ever possibly forget the night he almost lost Hikaru?
He still has nightmares about it any time it rains (and most other nights, too). When he dreams, he can still feel the freezing cold and the mud-slick leaves and the uneven terrain of the mountain path beneath his feet. If he allows his mind to wander, it always comes back to that inky darkness—night pressing in on all sides, heavy and inescapable without even the moon to light their path.
The forest had felt hungry, and as their bobbing flashlights illuminated the gnarled trunks and winter-bare branches, Yoshiki had expected to see something monstrous with every step. He was cold and miserable and wishing he’d been able to talk Hikaru into staying over to watch movies, instead of insisting that he’d go with him to run whatever weird errand he had claimed he just had to do that exact night.
Then, he’d heard Hikaru giggle. He turned his head to see him grinning, felt the jab of an elbow in his side as Hikaru gestured with the beam of his flashlight. That enthusiasm ignited the spark of excitement within Yoshiki’s own chest, a bubbling warmth that made the miserable, creepy trek through the mountains feel more like an adventure than a horror movie. For someone who couldn’t stand scary things, Hikaru seemed wholly unbothered by the situation.
“Hey, Yoshiki. Look! Sexy tree!”
“You’re so stupid—“
He hadn’t been able to finish, because Hikaru turned towards him, smiling in that way he had that seemed to warm Yoshiki’s bones even when he felt frozen stiff, and then he was just…gone. Not even a scream. Just the ugly scar of a sneaker sliding through the frosted over debris and slick mud, and the sudden stomach-dropping realization of just how close their path had lead them to a ledge.
“Hikaru?” Yoshiki whispered, and for a second, it was like the whole world had stopped. No animals cried from the forest surrounding him. The wind held its breath, every tree still and waiting. Not even the rain dared to fall. Yoshiki was entirely alone. Just him, and a best friend who was both alive and dead only until he dared to peek over the edge and find out the truth.
Then, the reality of the situation washed over him. His heart dropped to his stomach, which twisted and fell to his feet. His insides were all scrambled up and his brain was filling with the white noise of panic.
“Hikaru! Hikaru, can you hear me?!”
He scrambled to the edge, careful as he could be with his hands shaking and adrenaline coursing through his blood. The flashlight beam darted wildly over the ravine below, searching for the flash of a brightly colored jacket, of pale hair, a glimpse of a sheepish grin or angrily furrowed brow, praying for anything but blood, please be okay, please please please please please—
The beam caught a splattering of red, painfully vivid against muddied hair, and Yoshiki’s heart stuttered in his chest. It was like his own body was telling him—if his heart stops beating, yours will, too.
It took too long to get to him. Yoshiki had scrambled down the incline with a careful desperation, searching for a path that wouldn’t end in him lying bloodied right beside Hikaru, unable to help. All the while, he kept screaming: for Hikaru, for help, for a miracle, and knowing with every unanswered plea that it was useless.
When he finally reached the bottom, rain blurring his vision and terror making the world around him waver around the edges, Yoshiki almost didn’t notice the thing hanging in the air above Hikaru. It only caught his eye when his flashlight jerked away from the sight of red blood on a pale face, and it swallowed the flashlight beam, illuminating it from the inside-out. The thing rippled and undulated, like silt and blood caught in a stream’s gentle current. It made his heart stutter, but he refused to falter, rushing into the mass of void-and-light to reach Hikaru. It parted around him like a swarm of gnats in summer, then coalesced once more.
As Yoshiki knelt beside his best friend, it settled over the both of them like a shroud, weightless but present all the same. He shuddered, and it had nothing to do with the cold.
The blood was thick and warm and not stopping. It coated Hikaru’s face, dripping into his eye, staining the pale strands of his hair. When Yoshiki reached out trembling, mud stained hands to lift the sodden fringe from Hikaru’s forehead, he had to close his eyes at the horrific sight of broken skin and crushed bone and the darkness beyond that, pumping out red red red.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he croaked, eyes still closed, breaths trembling in his throat and catching in his lungs. The smell of mud and dead leaves and blood were all mixed up, filling his nose, making him nauseous and faint. He didn’t know what to do.
“Y’sh…ki….”
A voice, barely even a sigh. The bare branches above them trembled in the wind, raining droplets down upon them. The water settled like tears upon Hikaru’s impossibly pale cheeks. The strange mist swirled around them, a pocket of bloodspray left suspended in the air. Hikaru’s eyes, dazed and only half open, stared unseeingly into its depths. His lips trembled as he tried to speak, and Yoshiki held his hand, hushing him gently, begging him to save his strength.
Hikaru stared up at him, then through him. A strange expression twisted up the side of his face that wasn’t covered in blood, like that eye alone was staring up at a sky full of stars and not Yoshiki’s tear streaked face. The other one stayed right where it was, blood filling the sclera and every capillary burst, unseeing and dull as Yoshiki tried his best to wipe the blood away from it.
The mist slipped tendrils between those bloodied lips, wove itself through Hikaru’s dirtied hair. It prodded at the wound in his head, not truly touching it, just…there. Yoshiki could taste it on his own tongue, meat and metal and mud fizzing like pop rocks at the back of his throat and making him want to gag. He felt it tickling against his skin, trying to seep inside the both of them. When he tried to touch back, to bat it away or grab hold of it, his fingers found nothing at all. Hikaru’s mouth kept moving all the while, and it was impossible to tell whether the red on his teeth was from the mist or his own blood.
“You’re not dying, so shut up,” Yoshiki snarled, refusing to acknowledge the breathless whispers that dripped last words, nearly inaudible past chapped lips and punctured lungs. The mist swirled and pulsed, morphing into something viscous and clinging. It fizzled against Yoshiki’s skin as he spat out his words, tingling like electricity against wind-chapped skin. It seemed to linger over the bitten-bloody skin of his lips, sending shivers down his spine. “You’re going to live. You’ll be fine, I promise.”
And somehow, impossibly, he was. Even though Yoshiki’s clumsy first aid attempts did nothing to help, and the way he carried his broken body back to town should have caused irreparable damage, Hikaru lived. His hospital stay wasn’t even that long, and he went home with casts on his leg and arm, and bandages wrapped around his head, and no sign of the internal trauma or brain damage that Yoshiki had overheard the adults whispering about with the kind of somber tone that said they all thought he’d be better off dead.
The doctors called it a miracle. Their friends at school teased him about being a freak of nature, ruffling his hair with careful touches and undisguised wonder in their eyes. His mama thanked Yoshiki for bringing him home and scolded Hikaru for his carelessness, then held them both tight while she cried; big, heaving, messy sobs that had Hikaru clutching her back with just as much desperate relief and love as she held him with. Yoshiki stayed stiff and awkward the whole while, not sure how to respond to such a display of emotion, but his chest had ached with the sheer amount of joy that rushed in to fill the hollow space that Hikaru had almost carved out of him.
Someone jostles him, snapping his attention back to the present. Hikaru—the real one—is watching him with a concerned look. Yoshiki clears his throat, turning away from the too-knowing gaze, only to find himself staring into the same face on his other side. His nose scrunches with displeasure at the realization that escaping Hikaru’s scrutiny has just become a lot harder.
“Yeah,” he answers at last, forcing his response out around a tongue that feels too thick and heavy inside his mouth. He keeps his gaze level with the second Hikaru’s mouth, thinking about the dizzying shapes that had dripped down his face and the feeling of dizzying cold tingling against his lips that night on the mountain. He has the creeping feeling he knows where this is going, but he still makes himself ask, “What about it?”
“I followed y’all home,” the double says, teeth flashing with a familiar impish grin.
“Hm.” Yoshiki’s brow furrows, a frown tugging at his lips as he gets confirmation that he hadn’t just been imagining the connection, or hallucinating the thing on the mountain.
“You’re handling this better than I did,” Hikaru tells him with a frown. The second one laughs brightly, nose scrunching, cheeks flushing, eyes squinted. It’s adorable and completely indistinguishable from how the real Hikaru laughs, and that thought has dread oozing its way down his spine.
“Yeah, at least Yoshiki didn’t faint!” the double manages between laughs. Hikaru scrubs a hand through his hair, the slightest hint of pink stealing over his cheeks even as he waves the comment off like it’s nothing.
“What can I say? It was super freaky to see my own face up and walkin’ around without me!”
“You fainted?” Yoshiki asks, just for something somewhat normal to hold on to.
“Yeah!” the mimic interjects, still snickering. “For a whole hour!”
“Hey, you would too, if you looked out the window one day to see some naked dude out there looking just like you!”
“Naked?”
“Well, duh. Where was I supposed to get clothes from?”
“What is happening?” Yoshiki whispers, covering his face again. There’s a perfectly synced, sympathetic pat on both of his shoulders. He wishes he had enough flexibility to kick both of them at once.