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Atsushi doesn’t open up to a lot of people.
He knows, from the bottom of his heart, that feeling like he does is pathetic, and willingly telling people how he has been beaten and ridiculed his entire life is unnecessary.
No one wants to hear it. It’s not like Atsushi wanted to tell it, either. It’s one of those taboo topics adults talk about in a low, quiet voice, so no one else hears what they’re saying, or to which parents cover their children’s ears whenever brought up in their proximity. It’s private. Impure.
The orphanage is a dirty topic. It reminds him of a man he still loves, a man with brown eyes and calloused fingers that sung him lullabies as he branded a number into his side with burning hot pokers, that ran his fingers through his hair as he picked out bits of molten metal out of his skin, that gave him advice as he drove nails into his feet or kicked him in the ribs or watched him curl up behind bars and whine and starve. It reminded him of gaggles of children with scissors in their hands, children that talked hushed whispers of points and blame, that opened their eyes wide and innocent and pointed at him whenever something happened, be it his fault or not.
Atsushi… doesn’t know how to feel about it.
He read, with his newly-acquired phone and internet, about trauma and mental illnesses and cures because he knows something is off about him, he just doesn’t know what to name it. And websites upon websites worded it gently, like he was a frightened animal, and told him that everything was so, so wrong with him, but it was okay. Because he needed time. Time, patience, help.
Time he doesn’t have, patience that wears thin, help he can’t receive if he doesn’t tell someone.
And he doesn’t tell anyone for the most part but, sometimes, when everything is overwhelming, he forgets that his family bears burdens of their own. He forgets, and he speaks without thinking.
The train station wobbles in his vision. Atsushi is still on his hands and knees, looking upward to a God more forgiving, a deity that could hold him, listen to him, answer his prayers. There is none. When he looks up, all he sees are brown eyes. They look familiar. And when a hand strikes him, it feels familiar too. Beneath the sting and pain blossoming from his skin, he can feel the gentle caress of the callouses on the fingers and palm.
“Pity yourself, and life becomes an endless nightmare,” he is told, and the voice morphs into that of a man whose face he forgot.
Atsushi did not feel anything, then. His fingertips buzzed nervously and his throat dried and swelled and his eyes felt like they were bleeding. But in his chest, in his ribcage, between his lungs, there was nothing. He did not feel, when everything went back to normal.
And now, when he feels pathetic, miserable, sad, he thinks of the two brown-eyed, calloused-handed men in his life that linger in his dreams, that whisper to him of worth. When they morph into one another, Atsushi does not wake up miserable, he wakes up with shame pushing down on his shoulders and guilt in his stomach and self-hatred in his palms.
The funny part is– he cannot hate one and love the other. Not when he dreams of his mentor encased in the divine glow of stained glass murals and sees his father mingling around his new family, laughing and joking without a care in the world. Not when the callouses on their hands feel the same, be it patting his head or ripping his hair out.
So Atsushi floats in limbo, in a void of indecisiveness, wraps ignorance around him like a blanket and does not think about the lightness of his head or churning of his gut whenever he thinks about everything.
The blanket suffocates him.
It’s a blissful feeling.