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“Dad— Dad! Please!”
Josuke jolts awake with a cold chill, ice water flooding his veins as his body snaps him to consciousness via the sharp bite of panic. It’s a dizzying affair; he sits up too quickly and blood rushes to his head. He screws his eyes shut and breathes in until the lightness in his skull dissipates.
Blinking open one eye, Josuke squints in the silver glow. Okuyasu’s bedroom curtains are full of holes, and at Josuke’s angle, he’s getting a faceful of moonlight from a cloudless night. Compared to the darkness of the room, it’s nearly blinding. Josuke shades his eyes with a hand and looks around for the culprit of his wakefulness.
It doesn’t take long. Underneath him, the bed trembles violently, and the sheets are bunched up in a desperate pile by his side. Buried underneath is Okuyasu, shaking like a leaf. Josuke’s confusion is replaced by fear as he leans over his boyfriend, heart pounding in his chest.
Wrapped up tight in a makeshift cocoon, Okuyasu’s face is screwed into unconscious terror, sweat beading at his temples. He doesn’t speak again, but faint whimpers escape every time he exhales, and his grip on the comforter is so tight that the fabric has begun to rip. Josuke looks on, a dark, deep pit growing in his stomach, and he reaches out with Crazy Diamond to repair the damage.
We’d had such a good day, Josuke laments, wriggling closer and leaving his hands hovering helplessly over Okuyasu’s frame. He knows that’s not how it works, it’s never how it works, but seeing this now only feels more unfair when the day before had been so lovely. Josuke’s mom had let them have their first sleepover at Okuyasu’s since they started dating, and they’d made the most of it, ordering a pizza and hauling home so many snacks that they couldn’t possibly eat them all in one evening. He’d bought Okuyasu ice cream, and they’d gone all the way to the pier to watch the sunset together; even now, the memory is so vivid that Josuke swoons at how romantic it had all been. When they’d finally tumbled into bed they had both been smiling, and they’d kissed each other to sleep, mumbling into each other’s mouths until they couldn’t anymore.
Now, all of that seems like a distant, pleasant dream, with his boyfriend trapped in a dream of his own. Okuyasu winces again and thrashes in his self-made blanket prison, kicking someone away in his sleep. The harsh, ragged sound of his panicked breathing fills the quiet room.
Josuke begins to pull sheets away from his boyfriend, desperate to soothe him any way he can. Apparently he was too quick; Okuyasu whines high in his throat and squirms away at Josuke’s touch, nearly at the edge of the bed. Hesitant all over again, Josuke pulls back and crushes his feelings down, just for a little while. Just for long enough to do this right.
“Hey, Okuyasu,” he whispers, voice as gentle as he can make it. “Hey, it’s me. It’s Josuke. You’re safe, it’s okay...”
Okuyasu doesn’t wake up just yet, but when Josuke delicately places a hand on his side, he doesn’t pull away either. Slowly, he pets Okuyasu’s buried shape, murmuring any platitudes he can think of until finally his boyfriend uncurls from his fetal position and blinks open his heavy eyes.
“J’ske?” Okuyasu slurs, only half awake. He wiggles in place, reaching out to nothing, but Josuke catches his hand and brings it close. “‘s that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” Josuke replies, and lowers himself down to Okuyasu’s level, lying on his side so he can let him place a hand over his heart. “I’ve got you, okay?”
“M’ tired...”
“It’s real late. You can go back to sleep if you want to.”
“Yeah...” Okuyasu sighs deeply and lets his eyes flutter closed again. “Did I scare you?”
“A little.” Leaning down, Josuke brushes a kiss over Okuyasu’s knuckles. “It’s okay, though.”
“Sorry. It was just... you know...” Okuyasu’s voice begins to fade, tension vanishing from his face. By the time he mumbles the last word, Josuke has to hold his breath to hear it. “...dad.”
Josuke stares.
He doesn’t move. Not until Okuyasu’s eyes begin to twitch under his lids, and he pulls away in his sleep, shuffling away from Josuke’s arms to find a comfortable position. Even then, Josuke lies there, staring. Staring until his vision blurs and his body stings from holding himself perfectly still for so long.
Once the moonlight finally moves out of the room, Josuke sits up. He takes his time shuffling around Okuyasu’s body, unwilling to disturb his hard-earned rest, and slips out of bed on soft feet.
By day, the Nijimura house is frightening, a home too big for the people living there and empty in too many corners to not have any ghosts. By night, it’s a maze of black corners and yawning ceilings. Dust gathers in thick clumps and sticks to diaphanous spiderwebs, forming yūrei in Josuke’s peripheral vision every time he moves his head. He traces the wall with one hand as he makes his way down the hallway from Okuyasu’s room, reaching the staircase and taking each step slowly to prevent the ancient wood from creaking.
He passes the kitchen in complete silence, ignoring the slumbering nest of Stray Cat on the counter, who peers at him through a curtain of thick leaves. Distant electric humming in the walls and a slice of unsettling blue light emanate from the living room. The TV must be on.
Josuke finally stops in the living room doorway, feet planted, looking in at the scene before him. His chest is tight, burning so fiercely it’s cold, frigid, slowing his heart to a menacing, thudding crawl.
Hunched up on the threadbare couch is a lump that was once a man. He looks up when Josuke’s shadow looms in the entryway, spittle trailing from his fleshy beak and slipping down his turgid flesh. There’s a question in his beady eyes, but Josuke doesn’t much care to read it.
Crazy Diamond’s arm glitters to life over Josuke’s own as he takes two wide strides and punches the wall next to Okuyasu’s father’s head. The man squeals, a high-pitched, piggish sound, and his gaze darts fearfully to the threatening glow of Josuke’s Stand just inches from his face. It’s a mistake— he crumbles the drywall in his enhanced grip as he leans in closer, lip twitching, near enough to smell the rotten-sweet of the man’s perpetually melting body.
“You piece of shit,” Josuke snarls, icy-hot all down the length of his spine. Okuyasu’s dad looks up at him, fear plastered on his loose features. It only intensifies when Josuke grabs him by the scraps of his shirt and pulls him upright, dangling the short sack of a man above the floor. They’re nearly nose-to-nose now, framed in the glow of the television. “Tell me why I shouldn’t crush you into paste, you disgusting motherfucker!”
Okuyasu’s father ineffectually squirms, trying to free himself from the Stand-strengthened hold, but all he can do is tremble as Josuke eyes him down. Breathing hard— when had he started to do that?— Josuke’s vision smears, eyes stinging, every inch of his skin tingling with fury of the kind he hasn’t felt in years. “You— how could you? How could you?”
The man squawks. It sounds like a dying bird. His hands come up, clawing desperately at Josuke’s wrists, and the cold slickness of his diseased skin makes Josuke’s panting stutter. Now his eyes are burning, hate and pity and nausea warring in his throat. He can’t decide what to feel. He can’t decide which one’s right to feel.
Slowly, he loosens his grip, and Okuyasu’s dad falls with a thump to the sofa.
“How could you do that to him?” Josuke breathes. “How— how could you ever—?”
Frozen in place, Okuyasu’s father looks at him with terror. It’s an expression he’s seen before, but never so close, never flattened and edged by TV light, smudged at the edges from the tears in Josuke’s eyes and the sound of his heart pounding in his skull. He crumples like a doll, legs splaying below him, Crazy Diamond fading to nothing.
“I love him. I love him and I know what you did to him.” Josuke’s voice is hollow to his own ears, wind through dead grass. “You don’t deserve him. He’s the best— the best person I know. The best thing in my life.”
He sniffles, hard, swiping away the tears streaking down his cheeks with his thumb. Above him, Okuyasu’s father looks on, confused and scared. Trapped in place like a child.
“And he still loves you. You don’t even understand, do you? After all this— he still loves you.” Josuke laughs, pained and phlegmy, mouth salty. “You won’t ever deserve it. And I don’t know if I can ever love him enough to be what he deserves either.”
No response. Josuke doesn’t expect one. He breathes in through his mouth, out through his nose. When he stands up, Okuyasu’s father flinches, shielding himself with his stumpy arms.
“Go to bed, Nijimura-san.” And Josuke leaves, across the too-empty house, past the sleeping kitchen and up the rickety stairs and down the hallway of ghosts.
He pushes open Okuyasu’s door as quietly as he can, but apparently he wasn’t quiet enough. Still cocooned within blankets, his boyfriend blinks myopically at him, gaze sleepy and dark in the gloom. “Josuke?”
“Hey,” he whispers back, and Okuyasu opens his arms. Josuke couldn’t go anywhere else if he tried. They wriggle back into bed together, legs tangling, and Josuke buries his face in the divot where Okuyasu’s neck meets his shoulder and tries to ignore the heat lingering in his eye sockets.
“Where’d you go?” Okuyasu mumbles into Josuke’s hair, and Josuke draws him closer, as close as he can manage.
“Bathroom.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Josuke croaks out as he breathes Okuyasu in. “I’m right where I wanna be.”