[He moves on all fours until he gets to the couch, pressing his face into the arm of it for a long while until he realizes Akira didn't follow him, and his words sink in. He's starting curry roux. He's giving him space. He's--]
[--infuriating.]
[He drags the pillow he had that morning off the couch and burrows into it for the second time that day, not entirely sorting through the last ten minutes of his life because he can't, thank you, but taking in several deep lungfuls of air and holding them to calm his racing heartbeat. After about five minutes, he presses his face fully into the pillow as deep as it will let him press, and yells for a solid fifteen seconds.]
[And then he gets up, puts the pillow back on the couch, and acts like nothing ever happened. Because of course he does.]
[He watches Akira in the kitchen warily, and then wanders toward his bedroom, only to stop at the mouth of the hallway and stand there a while. It blurs, for a moment, between what he's lived in for two years and Maruki's falsified version of it that included his mother, just to his emotion-addled mind. He closes his eyes and pivots again, moving into the kitchen just long enough to claim the small sunflower decoration he'd set on top of the fridge that morning. It gets moved, this time, to the small table at the end of the hallway.]
[It's going to hurt when he doesn't remember it's there and it reminds him of his mother, but it's going to hurt no matter where he puts it. At least this way, it's a small indication of where her room had been. The apartment he lived in with her as a child had been laid out similarly.]
no subject
[--infuriating.]
[He drags the pillow he had that morning off the couch and burrows into it for the second time that day, not entirely sorting through the last ten minutes of his life because he can't, thank you, but taking in several deep lungfuls of air and holding them to calm his racing heartbeat. After about five minutes, he presses his face fully into the pillow as deep as it will let him press, and yells for a solid fifteen seconds.]
[And then he gets up, puts the pillow back on the couch, and acts like nothing ever happened. Because of course he does.]
[He watches Akira in the kitchen warily, and then wanders toward his bedroom, only to stop at the mouth of the hallway and stand there a while. It blurs, for a moment, between what he's lived in for two years and Maruki's falsified version of it that included his mother, just to his emotion-addled mind. He closes his eyes and pivots again, moving into the kitchen just long enough to claim the small sunflower decoration he'd set on top of the fridge that morning. It gets moved, this time, to the small table at the end of the hallway.]
[It's going to hurt when he doesn't remember it's there and it reminds him of his mother, but it's going to hurt no matter where he puts it. At least this way, it's a small indication of where her room had been. The apartment he lived in with her as a child had been laid out similarly.]