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Noiz used to think he liked pain, but now maybe he should reconsider. It used to be that he only felt dully, when at all. Pain was at best a blunt ache, a sort of pressure he decided to call sensation. Anything he felt might as well have been pleasure, just for the novelty of feeling. His world has changed, though, mainly for the better. He’s not sure if it’s totally for the better, because while he now knows what Aoba means when he complains about his hair catching in a comb, he also knows about the horrifying sensation of ice cream melting down from the cone. Sometimes he still confuses pain and pleasure, and Noiz starts to suspect he might have always been that way. Feeling is confusing, and he wants it to stop a lot of the time. How do people live with things touching them all the time? Why are itches a thing that happen? Why do they have to happen to him? Who decided that socks should have seams on the inside?
He has had his share of brushes with death. He has bled until the world blurred and he shook and his skin turned gray and he slept for days at a time. People have choked him so hard he could barely swallow for a week and shadows of hands stayed on him like a stain. He has been so ill he could hardly move, fever and foulness showing visions of hell. It doesn’t scare him.
Nothing compares to this. It is impossible for him to survive this. Nobody and nothing could endure this kind of agony. His whole body and brain are screaming, howling in a wordless, blank void of terror and pain.
He doesn’t even know what happened or how he got here. One minute he was turning around to pick up a mug of milky, sugary coffee from a low table, and the next he was collapsed on the floor, staring at the couch, dying. The pain is so sudden and intense he can’t even pinpoint where it starts. Maybe it’s coming from the lower half of his body, he doesn’t know. Identifying where sensations come from is difficult at the best of times, but in this kind of whiteout suffering he has no hope of finding out what hurts. Such a thing would require concentration and coherent thought, and Noiz will probably never be capable of those ever again. Aoba is going to come home and find his corpse here on the floor in the living room, clearly having died in awful and protracted fear and agony. Something warm and wet drips down his face. Is he bleeding? Oh god, he is bleeding from the face or something. Did someone shoot him in the head? He doesn’t remember a gunshot.
After an eternity of blinding, world-ending torment, a voice creeps into his consciousness. Someone rolls him onto his back and Aoba’s blurry and panicked face enters his field of vision.
“Noiz? Noiz, what’s wrong, what happened?” His voice is shaking, eyes wide and face pale.
Noiz can’t answer. His throat is burning, his whole body is trembling uncontrollably. How is he not dead yet? Will he have to endure this hell forever?
“Noiz, what the hell happened?! Why are you screaming like this?”
Something in his throat cracks and the screaming in his head stops. Was he screaming? Was that him? He’s still shaking, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts. The pain is subsiding a bit, and it’s definitely coming from the lower half of his body.
“Wh…” His voice is thin and threadbare. “What happened?”
“Oh thank god.” Aoba closes his eyes and runs a hand over his face. “I could ask you the same thing. I came home and you were curled up on the floor screaming and I couldn’t get you to talk. I thought you were dying.”
“I’m not?” Noiz is not convinced.
“I… I don’t think so,” Aoba says uncertainly. “Where does it hurt?”
“I don’t know.” Noiz decides not to think about how petulant he sounds. “Am I bleeding?”
“Not that I can see.”
“But…” Noiz raises his fingers to the wetness on his face. To his surprise, his fingers do not come away red.
“You’re crying,” Aoba says. “Maybe that’s what you felt.”
Noiz wipes his face on his sleeve in a dignified manner.
“Where does it hurt?” Aoba repeats.
It takes a few seconds of concerted effort to isolate the nexus of pain. “My foot?” He hazards a guess.
“Okay.” To Noiz’s great relief, Aoba does not touch him. “It looks okay… Wait, I guess your toe is a little red.”
Aoba just barely touches the toe in question, and Noiz screams. Agony bites through his whole body again, and he kicks out blindly. Luckily Aoba is fast enough to dodge, but just barely.
“What the fuck, Noiz?” Aoba demands, arms shielding his face.
“It hurts!”
“So you tried to kick me in the face? Okay, whatever.” Aoba folds his arms over his chest, clearly hesitant to go near Noiz’s foot again.
They wait for a while for Noiz to be able to look at his foot without cringing. “So what exactly happened?”
“I don’t know. I turned around to get my coffee and then everything hurt and I was lying on the floor.”
Aoba squints at him and Noiz can see him fitting the puzzle pieces together. “Are you saying,” Aoba says slowly, “that you thought you were dying because you stubbed your toe?”
“I guess so.” Noiz has never had a very solid idea of what stubbing a toe means. He’s encountered it in writing and occasionally when people around him complain about it, but if it’s happened to him, he’s never known it. “It hurt a lot, okay? It’s never happened before.”
“You were curled up in the fetal position screaming and crying,” Aoba says, staring at him, “because you stubbed your toe.”
“Are you sure it’s not broken?” Breaking bones is supposed to hurt a lot. Maybe his toe is broken. Maybe Aoba shouldn’t be coming dangerously close to smirking at him and making fun of him.
“Try moving it.”
Is Aoba trying to kill him? Like hell he’ll move his toe ever again in his life. He would like to forget that his toes exist. “No.”
“Do it or I’ll do it for you.”
If looks could kill, Noiz would be planning his boyfriend’s funeral. As it is Aoba remains alive and apparently serious about seeing if his toe is broken. He carefully curls his toes, trying not to give away how much it still hurts. All his toes dutifully curl in. Not broken, then.
“I think you’re going to be okay.”
“No thanks to you.”
“I did all I could, and you tried to kick me in the head. Anyway, you can’t do anything about a stubbed toe other than swear a lot.”
“How often does it happen?” Noiz does not sound like an anxious child at all. He is a grown adult, living by himself with his boyfriend. So what if he was recently convinced that he was dying at the hands of a coffee table? Everyone makes mistakes.
Aoba’s grin is pure, unfiltered evil. “Oh, I don’t know. Every couple weeks, maybe?”
Noiz decides to invest in a pair of heavy boots, and maybe take them off on his deathbed.
--
No matter how many baths he takes in the hospital, he never feels quite clean. The hospital room is stuffy and small and he is cramped and bored. Aoba’s visits help relieve the boredom, but he can only stay for so long, and sometimes it’s overwhelming how much there is to feel even just holding his hand. Sometimes he wakes up drenched in sweat, sheets sticking to his skin, and he thinks he must be dying or drowning or some other horrible thing. His healing wounds itch, and when it gets so bad he can’t stand it he tells Aoba to hold his hands still. Itching is an invention of the devil, he is certain of it. He can’t even believe that /not clean/ could be a sensation.
When he is finally allowed out of the hospital he goes home, strips off the clothes Aoba brought him, and turns the shower on the way he always does. He’s briefly distracted by the cold tile of the bathroom floor against his bare feet, how some parts of his feet touch the floor and others don’t. Then he steps under the water and the world explodes.
“FUCK!”
Fuck fuck fuck FUCK. The water is—hot? If he hadn’t used his own shower before, he’d swear broken glass was pouring out of the showerhead. He’s not good with temperature; he knows some temperatures are nice and others aren’t, some hurt and others hurt in different ways and some don’t really feel like anything at all. This temperature hurts, it hurts like hell, and he huddles away from it in the corner. The spray still wicks against his legs, tiny droplets of pain leaving a flush over his skin. He’s too astonished to even make a sound, and he’s thankful for that, because his neighbors don’t need to hear horrible screaming after however long of dead silence.
At long last he musters enough courage, or at least bravado, to drag himself upright and wrench the shower off. He collapses back against the wall, shaking and panting. Showering is much more dangerous than he ever thought. He goes to bed without bathing.
A few days later, the feeling of filth is unbearable. His hair is flat and greasy, his skin is oily, dirt is crusted under his nails. It’s either shower or shave his fucking hair off, and he knows for a fact he looks terrible with his hair any shorter. He stands outside the shower this time, carefully turning the shower on and tentatively holding his hand under the water. It’s hot, and he jerks his hand out with a sharp hiss. Okay, so it needs more cold water. He twists the knob, and the temperature doesn’t change at all. Growling in frustration, he shoves the knob again. Icy cold water streams over his arm and once again, he finds himself shouting obscenities at his shower in every language he knows. Good thing his neighbors probably thought he was crazy to begin with.
He would like to have a word with whoever decided that shower controls should be so fucking sensitive. All he has to do is brush the damn thing and it goes from ice water to what he is pretty sure is the devil’s used bathwater. Baths are easier to figure out, and he doesn’t have to deal with the insistent pounding of water against his hypersensitive skin. Baths are safe and warm and bubbles are also soft, except when the soap gets in his eyes and he nearly claws them out, convinced that he’s going blind and will have to bid a fond farewell to seeing anything ever again. Maybe he should invest in a pair of swimming goggles just to be safe.
Life with touch is dangerous. How do normal people manage? How are they not constantly curled up away from everything? The bath is the place that he feels the least; the water is all the same temperature and texture and it’s the same all over his body. His nails don’t catch on anything, nothing unexpected touches him. He can just be, he can just rest. Then he falls asleep in the bath for the first time and wakes up sputtering and gasping, in the same blind terror as his nightmares. He stops spending so much time in the bath.
Eventually he establishes a working relationship with the shower. They’re not good friends, and he’ll probably never be able to completely trust it, but it gets the job done and he can’t fall asleep in it and almost drown. The metal of his piercings holds heat longer than flesh does, it turns out, and they stay pleasantly if unsettlingly warm after a long shower.
Falling asleep after a shower is nice, though. He used to hate the waste of time that was showering, but now he can feel himself relax under the heat, can feel the soap strip away grime and smells and bad memories. Maybe it’s not so bad like this.
Then the hot water cuts off. Showers are bullshit.
--
Noiz is not a particularly light sleeper, but not being able to feel when people in his bed leave did wonders for his ability to sleep through late-night bathroom trips. Now he falls asleep plastered to Aoba most of the time. Noiz can’t stand being cold, and Aoba is warm and happy to cuddle even if he sometimes complains that Noiz is going to crush him someday. Let him complain. He’s never been bothered enough to actually make Noiz move.
At first he woke up every time Aoba so much as rolled over, not used to the blankets shifting with another person’s movement. It doesn’t help that Aoba snores, which he vehemently denies every time Noiz brings it up. It’s not so bad, just enough that Noiz can tease him about it. Slowly but surely, Noiz learns how to share a bed, even if he insists on sleeping basically in the middle, or mainly on Aoba’s side.
He half wakes out of a baffling but not unpleasant Technicolor dream when Aoba rolls out of bed and stumbles down the hall. Noiz wanders in and out of sleep for god knows how long, returning to his dream for several hours before he hears Aoba return and fumble with the blankets. It’s too much effort to help him, and Aoba always apologizes too much for waking him, even when Noiz just wants to go back to sleep.
Aoba drapes his arm over Noiz as if the other boy is just an exceptionally bony teddy bear, and within seconds his breathing evens out and his body relaxes. Noiz is finally starting to get back to his dream again when something goes horribly wrong. Something deathly cold and clammy must have crawled into the bed when Aoba got up, and now it’s touching his leg. He startles wide awake with a hoarse yelp, tearing the blankets off and shaking Aoba.
“Wh-wha’? What’s wrong?”
“There’s something in the bed!” Noiz feels around frantically, finding nothing but wrinkles and a surprising number of crumbs. Where do bed crumbs even come from? He suspects he does not actually want to know.
Aoba stares, eyes unfocused, and gropes for the blankets. Noiz swats his hand away and continues hunting for whatever was so fucking cold and on his leg.
“What? Did you have a nightmare?”
“Something cold touched my leg! I can’t find it now.”
“I can’t understand you.”
“I said,” Noiz repeats, louder than is perhaps strictly necessary, “there is something cold in the bed and it touched my leg.”
“I think you’re speaking German.”
God damn his half asleep brain. It’s not his fault he reacts in his first language in times of distress. He takes a deep breath and tries to organize his thoughts. “Something cold touched my leg. I think it must have gotten into the bed when you got up.”
“Nothing got into the bed. Go back to sleep, you had a bad dream,” Aoba yawns.
“No! I… What if it’s dangerous?” His hand brushes something cold and he jerks it away with a yelp. “What the hell?”
“God, Noiz, calm down.” Aoba rubs at his eyes. “That’s just my foot.”
“Your… what?” Maybe he’s not totally awake after all.
“My foot.” Aoba presents the offending appendage. “See?”
“So you… you touched me with your foot?” Why? For the love of god, why?
“I guess so.” Aoba lies down and pulls the blankets back up. “I was cold, okay?”
“You put your foot on me because you were cold.” He just wants to get all the facts right. Something doesn’t make sense here. Nothing attached to a living human being could ever be that cold. Aoba is messing with him. This is an elaborate prank, it has to be.
“Yeah.” Aoba has the blankets pulled up almost to his eyes.
“Why?” Noiz demands.
“You’re warm.”
The thought gives him pause. He knows that he can feel external cold or heat, and that other people are warm, but never got around to realizing that he could be warm to other people. “You are the worst person ever.”
Even from under a pile of blankets, Aoba’s tone is scathing. “Yeah, because it would be awful if someone latched onto you for heat at night all the time. I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
“I can’t believe your feet got that cold. What is wrong with you.” He’s not pouting, because pouting is for children and he is not a child. How could Aoba not be aware of the horrifying shock that cold feet present?
“Go to sleep, Noiz.”
The other side of the bed is not nearly as warm, and he wakes up wrapped around Aoba the next morning. He resolves to make Aoba wear socks to bed from now on.
--
Noiz is familiar with pranks. He considers himself an accomplished prankster, if he’s going to be quite honest. Nobody knows what it’s like to get a laugh at someone else’s expense better than he does. And okay, sometimes his pranks are not as harmless as they could be. Some people just need to grow a sense of humor.
But when Aoba comes home with a sturdy cardboard box and a barely-contained grin, Noiz knows what he’s up against. Aoba is a seasoned hell-raiser, which is one of the things Noiz likes best about him; he needs someone who can keep up without descending into pointless one-upmanship. The box is unmarked, doesn’t seem that heavy, but Aoba’s being very certain to keep it level as if the contents shouldn’t be shifted too much. Noiz thinks he can hear something moving inside it.
“What’s in there?”
“A surprise. No! You can’t just take it!” Aoba shoves Noiz back with a foot; Noiz scoots back, he can’t judge how hard people are going to push him and how much it might feel so he tends to err on the side of caution lately.
He sniffs. “Is it food?”
“No. You’re not eating takeout anymore, you’re learning to cook like a person now, remember? I’m not gonna be an enabler.”
Actually Noiz is a passable cook these days, although cooking is still a minefield of horrible textures and temperatures. What the hell is the difference between soup fresh out of the pot and soup that’s been sitting for five minutes? A world of pain, apparently. Some days Noiz wants to give up and live on cold sandwiches for the rest of his life. Also, cooking knives are sharp, and he’s sliced himself more than he’d like to freely admit. After getting lemon juice in a cut, he’s sworn off all citrus for the rest of his life. If he dies of scurvy, then that’s the price he pays and he’s willing and ready to accept it.
“Electronics or something? Are you gonna take it apart? Can I hack it?”
“I didn’t agree to play twenty questions,” Aoba says. “And it’s not a machine, and you can’t hack it or take it apart.” He looks faintly horrified at the idea of dismantling whatever’s in the box.
“If you can’t eat it or hack it, what’s the point?” In the past Noiz has been accused of being excessively utilitarian, which he thinks is uncharitable. Sometimes you have to be a little cutthroat to get what you want when you run away from your fantastically rich family to the other side of the world. He’s just being practical.
“Sometimes things can be nice for the sake of being nice.”
“Okay, if it’s nice why can’t I see what it is?”
“God, you’re impatient. Surprises are fun. You’re like a really tall toddler, you know that?”
As a fully mature adult, Noiz is quite within his rights to pretend he’s forgotten Japanese for the rest of the day. Maybe if he ignores Aoba for long enough, he’ll leave the box alone and Noiz can get a look at the inside.
No dice. Aoba takes the box with him while he plays a video game, and throws things at Noiz whenever he sidles over to the box. Noiz retreats to the furthest corner of the room, where he does not sulk, and devotes himself to a mess of code.
And he’s up to his pierced eyebrows in the code a few hours later, when he’s rudely interrupted by Aoba dropping something in his lap.
“Hey, fuck off I’m w—”
The thing moves. It’s a yellow ball of fluff, some kind of pompom? It’s sort of warm, and it’s definitely moving. Noiz is very out of his depth. It has... a head? A couple bits sticking off the head? It noses at his knee. He doesn’t dare touch it. What if he breaks it? Pressure is hard now that he feels things, he drops and crushes things by accident several times a week, and he doesn’t want to hurt something that seems alive.
“I figured you might like them? You like rabbits, right?” Aoba says anxiously, after a few moments of silent stillness from Noiz. “You’re not actually allergic or something?”
“It’s… a rabbit?” he says stupidly, staring at it. Aoba puts another one next to it, this one slightly larger.
“Yeah, it’s a baby. You’re home alone so much of the time, I thought you might like pets to keep you company. You can touch them, you know.”
“I’ve never seen a real one up close,” Noiz confesses. The rabbits are nosing around his lap, probably in search of food. “What if I hurt them? They’re so little,” he frets.
“They’re pretty tough,” Aoba says. “They can bite like bastards, even this small.”
This is not great encouragement to hold them, the idea that these tiny squishy-looking things might secretly have sharp pieces. Still, he screws up his courage and touches one with a fingertip. At first he thinks he must not be judging the distance correctly; he doesn’t feel anything?
He pokes his finger forward, until he encounters a resistant, solid center, presumably the main body of the rabbit. It starts to feel warm, but the sensation of the fur is nearly nonexistent and totally bizarre. It’s… soft? Is this what soft is? It hardly feels like anything. But somehow it’s still nice. Carefully, he moves his finger back and forth across the rabbit’s tiny back.
“They’re soft,” he says, mostly to himself, storing the sensation away for future reference. He still has trouble getting words for textures right, sometimes accidentally using sound-words for them.
“Yeah, they’re like the softest things ever,” Aoba agrees, picking one up and cradling it against his chest. “I got two so they could be friends and keep each other company, and also because I figured you wouldn’t share if I only got one.”
“You got that right,” Noiz says, still staring at the rabbit in his lap. He holds a hand out flat in front of it, and it crawls onto his hand, nestling in his palm.
“So touching isn’t totally bad?”
Noiz suspects that Aoba sometimes feels guilty for dumping a whole new sensory aspect into his brain with no real warning when Noiz reacts negatively to some new feeling. It’s a definite learning curve, and when he’s frustrated Noiz does sort of wish he could go back to his muffled blanket of tactile isolation. But then something nice happens, like a warm cup of tea or a bubble bath or a popsicle on a hot day, or, apparently, baby bunnies.
“Nah,” he says, shuffling back to lean against Aoba’s side. “It’s all right.”