Work Text:
Noriaki couldn’t read the writing on the blackboard.
He glanced down amidst the quiet shuffling of notebooks being rifled through and the scratch of No. 2 pencils on paper. His own handwriting greeted him, scrawled notes on the specifications of the literary analysis due at the end of the week that his teacher was currently explaining. Five pages with a focus on symbolism and—
He narrowed his eyes. The writing became muddled halfway through, a mess of jagged strokes and meaningless characters that almost made up a language that was just adjacent to Japanese.
“I looked at your proposals over the weekend, and many of you have a strong understanding of the narrative as a work of fiction,” his teacher said. “However, that won’t be enough for this paper. I want you to go deeper than a summary of what the author has already shown us."
He looked back up at the blackboard. He saw nothing but a haze of smattered white, as if a child had been let loose with a piece of chalk to draw whatever they pleased.
“Stating the symbols themselves will only get you half-credit at best. If you want full marks, I want to see what those symbols mean and why they are used at all. You’ll have the rest of class today to get started.”
The teacher’s voice grew fainter, as if she were speaking from the other end of a tunnel. All Noriaki could hear was the reverb of her words, a barely intelligible echo. Her instructions became an ambient hum, like the electronic warble of the fluorescent lights above his desk.
He tilted his head. It didn’t clear the fog.
The world and his body had become two different channels being played on the same television, neither quite aligned with the other. It was a strange sensation, similar to when he had been intertwined with a hospital bed through IV lines and painkillers strong enough to leave him pinned to the thin mattress under the weight of his own exhaustion.
A caving pressure against his stomach made him frown, striking through the haze that had rolled in around him. On a whim, Noriaki glanced down to see if he had been leaning against the edge of his desk.
He hadn’t been. He was still sitting straight in his chair, hands placed neatly on top of the desk and his feet flat on the floor as his intestines spilled out onto the tops of his shoes.
Blood smeared across the clean white tile and pooled around the still twitching bits of flesh and muscle, wet flaps of skin clinging to the circumference and hanging loosely to the exposed gaps of his stomach they were meant to hide. When he inhaled, he could see the way his organs pulsed, living meat exposed to the naked eye.
Noriaki raised his hand and waited patiently for the teacher to look over at him. He thought she might have called his name.
“May I go to the bathroom?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Be quick. Lunch is in twenty minutes.”
He pushed himself out of his chair, taking care not to step on the tangled knot of flesh by his feet. Once he stood upright, the acrid scent of decay nearly made him reel back when it was finally freed from the wound in his stomach. His classmates kept their eyes down on their papers, a polite ignorance that allowed for Noriaki to keep his pride as he bowed his head and made his way out of the room.
The only person who openly stared at him was Jotaro, who watched him with a strange look on his face as Noriaki pressed a hand to his stomach to stop his organs from unspooling any further as he slipped outside.
His intestines trailed behind him as he walked, smearing through dust and rubber eraser shavings as they dragged along the floor. The hallways were empty, resonating with the sound of hushed note-taking and long-winded lectures that trickled out from the classrooms that lined the building. The sun filtered through the windows in a blinding haze that somehow made it feel two-dimensional when the air-conditioning negated any heat it could have provided.
A quiet, but undeniably wet splat against the floor broke through the hush. Noriaki kept walking, leaving behind the chunk of skin that had sloughed off the back of his hand and landed somewhere by his heel.
Noriaki closed the door to the men’s bathroom behind him. The stalls were empty, leaving a sterile silence as he lumbered up to the mirror and let the hand on his stomach drop.
The rip in his school uniform was large enough to make the rest of the fabric a set of tattered remains that clung to his shoulders and wrists, framing the hole in his stomach with olive green. The once pink organs had become an inflamed red, oozing blackened blood and clear pus that left the stench of infection in the air. Already, the skin on his hands was starting to detach from his body, revealing hints of bone nestled within divots of rotted muscle.
His hair had already thinned, the line of his cheeks too gaunt against his cloudy eyes. A stitch of skin hung from his right jaw, tapping against his ear when he leaned in closer. He carefully reached up and peeled it off.
And peeled. And peeled.
And peeled until it unzipped along his mouth, down past his bottom lip, leaving each of his teeth on his right side exposed before it finally fell loose.
The door creaked open.
“Noriaki?”
Noriaki caught Jotaro’s gaze through the mirror, watching as he made his way over to his side with a concerned frown.
“Are you alright?” Jotaro asked. “I can get the wheelchair from the nurse if you need it.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.” Noriaki’s eyes traveled down to Jotaro’s shoes, where he was crossing the bloody line Noriaki had left behind on his way to the bathroom. “Careful. You’ll ruin your shoes.”
Jotaro frowned. “With what?”
Noriaki looked down at the loop of his intestines, the severed puncture that tore his kidney and his stomach.
“Noriaki? What’s going on?”
He scratched idly at the edge of the torn skin along his cheek, just a little above the newly exposed flesh of his jaw. He could already feel it starting to loosen the harder he dug his nails in.
Before he could try to peel that off too though, a broad hand wrapped around his own, pulling his arm away from his face.
“Be careful,” Jotaro said. “You’ll make yourself bleed if you do that.”
“It’s alright,” Noriaki replied. Blood loss wouldn’t change anything now.
He supposed he didn’t have much to complain about if he was already dead.
Jotaro’s frown deepened, turning to glance over his shoulder before he faced Noriaki again. “What are you looking at?”
“Hm?” Noriaki blinked. “You.”
“No you’re not.” One of Jotaro’s hands patted lightly at his cheek, the rough pads of his fingers squishing against wet tendons and putrefying skin. “Can you look at me?”
Noriaki twisted his face up. Now that it had come to his attention, he realized that his gaze kept slipping away from Jotaro’s face, drifting somewhere to the wall behind him. Trying to focus on him was like forcing two opposing magnets together, a straining disconnect that wrenched the two apart.
It took longer than he would have liked, but when he caught Jotaro’s eyes, Noriaki found that he couldn’t quite make out his face anymore. It was too blurry, too vague for him to make out any more than the outline of his jaw and the errant curls of his hair that escaped his hat. Too uncanny.
He didn’t like looking at that.
“Okay.” Jotaro’s hand fell down to gently grasp Noriaki’s own, coating his palm with slick pus as he pulled him away from the mirror and towards the door. “Come on. We’re going to the nurse.”
Noriaki thought he might have frowned. “Are you hurt?”
Jotaro didn’t say anything for a long moment. He stood there, silent, then quietly squeezed Noriaki’s hand.
“I’m okay.”
“Oh. That’s good.” Noriaki’s cheek itched, but the impulse that ran down from his brain to his hand that would get him to scratch it fizzled out midway, leaving him in an absence of motion. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Jotaro said. “I’m sure.”
“Did you still want to go then?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“To get you checked out.”
Noriaki looked down at the festering remains of his own body, the concave hole that would never quite heal.
“I don’t think that would do much now.”
Jotaro tightened his grip on Noriaki’s hand.
“Please.”
There was something quietly urgent about the way he spoke that Noriaki hadn’t heard before. Concerned.
Noriaki felt his head drift up and down in a crude mimicry of a nod.
“Okay. If you want to.”
His own voice sounded vacant, something that wasn’t quite his own. Distantly, he wondered if he should have been disgusted by what he had become, by the rotting flesh of his body and the silence of his ruptured heart.
He wondered if Jotaro should have been disgusted by him too.
But Jotaro still held his decaying hand. Blood smeared across his skin, his fingers intertwining with the rotting skeleton of Noriaki's own and holding on tight to the strips of flesh and skin that still managed to cling to the cracked shards of bone.
“Thank you,” Jotaro murmured.
Noriaki didn’t understand it. He didn’t know how Jotaro could stand to touch him at all.
Jotaro’s grip never faltered though, and as selfish as it was, Noriaki thought that maybe he didn’t have to understand it to indulge in it. When Jotaro pushed the door to the bathroom open, tugging Noriaki along with him, Noriaki didn't fight him. He only realized then just how warm Jotaro's hand was.
Perhaps he already died before. Perhaps he would die again. But for now, Noriaki wouldn’t mind seeing what it was like to live.