Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sei woke with a jolt to the hard, unforgiving darkness

and found immediately he was alone again, and cold, and lost in the black of a room he couldn’t see. His night vision had long ago crumbled away to blindness, probably a result of a somewhat botched experiment from his youth. His brain felt thick and muddled, and it was difficult to think, his thoughts weighed down as though entrenched in tar. Were there drugs in his system, or was this just a persistent, clinging sleepiness? He pulled the blankets around himself tight, thinking he must have been dreaming, dreaming a sweet and beautiful but fleeting dream about Aoba. Dreaming that he was anything but cold and alone and slowly being pulled into the comfortable liberation of death.

There came a flash of blinding brightness, and the sound of footsteps, and then something warm shuffled and nudged into Sei’s side. In surprise, Sei yelped and recoiled, and found himself backed against something solid. It was unusual for them to come for him in the middle of the night, but not unheard of, so perhaps this thudding of his heart, this bewildered panic, was a result of the convincing nature of the dream he’d had. He’d thought, if only for a subconscious minute, that he was safe and free. His body tensed with that knowledge and its accompanying ache.

“Hey,” murmured a soft voice, and Sei’s anxiety evaporated instantly. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”

The owner of the voice settled into the blankets beside him and gave a yawn as he threw a protective arm over him. “I just got up to go to the bathroom. Go back to sleep.”

It hadn’t been a dream.

He was safe here.

Beside Aoba.

“Are you okay?” Aoba asked, his words slurred with drowsiness. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m okay,” Sei said quickly, and tried to will his body to at least slow the trembling in his limbs. But now that he had recovered his memory of where he was, the fear, the terror that he could imagine himself back in such a place, a place where he was always waking up alone and cold, a place without Aoba, prickled at him painfully.

“Oh, no,” Aoba sighed softly, and wrapped his arms around Sei, pulling him in tight against his chest. He tilted his head forward and kissed the edges of Sei’s eyes, where tears had started to form. “Don’t cry. I’m here.”

Sei settled into Aoba’s body, and slowly the warmth returned to him, and slowly the quaking stopped. Aoba’s breath on his skin and his solid arms around him were the greatest bliss he’d ever known. Here he was, comfortable and happy, for the first time in his existence. He tucked his head into Aoba’s shoulder and smiled to himself, despite the tears that were still flowing, and shut his eyes, ready to return to sleep in Aoba’s caring arms. And then

Sei woke with a jolt to the hard, unforgiving darkness

and realized he would never be anything but alone and cold and lost.

Chapter Text

“Sei-san,” a voice was calling with the most melodious lilt, and its beauty shook Aoba from his slumber. He’d fallen into dreams again, dreams of a light rain falling and a soft, gentle kiss, dreams of warm doughnuts and friends bickering and a blue butterfly on a postcard. They weren’t real but Aoba clung to them with the little strength left to him in his mind. “Sei-san, have you come to visit Aoba-san?”

 “Yes, I’d love to see my brother.” The response made Aoba quake. Somewhere in depths of his lost mind he was aware of the meaning, he recognized the words. He had a brother. It had been a surprise to him, the first time he’d woken surrounded by scientists in white coats and Toue had pushed them aside to show him the weak, pale body spread out on an operating table across the room. Just like him. Broken eyes full of tears, staring at him with the hopelessness of a long-held dream shattered. It was still a surprise to him. It always made him quake.

Footsteps approached. They removed the blindfold from Aoba’s eyes, and he blinked against the white sterile light as his vision adjusted. At first Clear had wanted to take away his eyes completely, but Sei had reasoned with him. I can’t use scrap on him if he can’t see, Sei had said, running his fingers like pale spiders up Clear’s chest and pausing to rest them in the center. Take away his legs first. Please? So the compromise was that Aoba must wear a blindfold unless permitted otherwise, like when he had watched through his tears as the oscillating saw in Clear’s hand sliced through his thigh, while Sei observed from the bedside, giggling softly. Or rather, he would have watched, if by the time the blade reached his bone he hadn’t already passed out from the pain and the dense stench of blood and antiseptic and the splattering of red across the metal table.

Once his pupils had shrunk to a useful size, their faces appeared before him. It was them, of course. His caretakers, his lovers, his owners. His light and his feeling and his sound. The only things that existed in his life, the only physical objects in existence, the only people in the world. They were both smiling. Sei weakly, in that exhausted way that he had, but Clear was grinning like he was gazing at a room full of his own personal hoarded treasure. 

He ran his gloved hands up Aoba’s chest. They didn’t feel like anything alive. He was a complex computer touching him, not cold or hot but room-temperature, inorganic and mineral.

“I want to see the inside,” Clear breathed to Sei. “Don’t you? All the muscles and bones and nerves and organs. I want to see all of Aoba-san.”

Sei appeared thoughtful, but after a moment he shook his head. “I don’t want to kill him, though. I love him. We love him.”

Clear turned towards Sei, regarded him carefully and brought a hand up to brush along his cheek. Sei shivered under his fingers, but stared up towards the machine with huge dark eyes, eyes that could have been the shadow of Clear’s bright ones. “I’m not human, Sei-san. I want to see what makes a human a human. I want to see Aoba-san’s heart.”

Sei’s eyes slid sideways towards Aoba, and Aoba’s entire body gave a violent jolt when their gazes met. Nii-san…my big brother. Anything Sei wanted of Aoba, Aoba would give it to him. Sei could have anything: his legs, his arms, his sight or his voice. Clear, too. It was Aoba’s fault that both of them were like this. Aoba owed them everything his owned. If that was his body, then that was fine. He belonged to them, he…he loved them.

“Look at mine, instead,” said Sei.

“Hmm?” Clear asked, quirking his head, lips parted, brushing silken strands of Sei’s hair back behind his ear.

“I’m human too,” Sei replied. “I have a heart. Look at mine instead of Aoba’s.”

If Clear’s bemused expression was anything to judge by, this statement seemed to have little cause or reason. “Why?”

“If you look at Aoba’s heart, and his muscles and his nerves and his organs, he’ll die,” Sei replied. “I want you to look at mine. Please.”

Clear took a moment before a gentle smile spread over his features, and almost instinctively, Sei smiled back. They were a pair of angels, pale-skinned and glowing and beautiful, their intentions benevolent and pure and childlike. It seemed in that moment that they came to an agreement: Sei would open his body for Clear, Clear would spare Aoba his heart.

Aoba would have begun to cry, but he couldn’t remember how.

It happened so quickly after that, it seemed. They all relocated to the operating room, Aoba carried in Clear’s steady arms, Sei pausing to press warm kisses to his unresponsive face. They prepared themselves, and Aoba was abandoned in a seat against the wall with a full and unobstructed view of the proceedings while they sanitized and organized.

Even if he had had the energy to move or to speak or to feel, Aoba wouldn’t have known what to do as Sei stripped his clothes off and laid himself out on the operating table. Something inside of him was thrumming in the terrible, unpleasant way he’d gotten used to, his whole body trembling with it. The same trembling that he saw echoed in Sei’s bare ghostly figure across the room, but it slowed as Clear ran elegant fingers over his limbs and his flesh.

Clear leaned down and kissed Sei, full on the lips, long and deep, before straightening himself and pulling his tray of tools towards himself. He chose a scalpel that gleamed colder than ice.

Aoba felt the most basic, most instinctual urge to close his eyes as Clear poised the knife over Sei’s chest, but his flickering strength didn’t lend him enough willpower to do so. Not even as Clear smiled to himself and let out a pleased sigh and asked, “Are you ready, Sei-san?”

Sei smiled in response with stark white lips. “Yes. Please go ahead.”

The brightness in Clear’s eyes was inhuman at best as he brought the blade down towards Sei and slipped it into his skin. Sei barely flinched as he was sliced into, his eyes locked on Clear, and then slowly, in jerks, dragged his gaze towards Aoba. Blood welled up as Clear swept the blade down, long and deep.

“You’re used to this, aren’t you?” Clear asked, watching the viscous liquid bubble to the surface. “Sei-san.”

“Yes,” Sei replied, voice high and strained and breaking.

Clear wiped the blood from his scalpel, set it aside, and fingered at the opening curiously, and Sei’s tormented gasp caught in his throat. Used to it, maybe, but the pain was unadulterated and the pressure of Clear’s fingers digging past his skin, coming into contact against raw, wet, living bone, must have been agonizing. More so as Clear pulled back with dripping, red-tipped fingers, and reached for a bone cutter.

“This is here to protect your heart,” Clear hummed, seemingly to himself, as he began to work at the sternum, ignoring small, hoarse, gasping whimpers that rose from Sei’s throat. “You don’t need it anymore.”

The whimpers grew into harsh, wracking sobs, enough so that Clear had to remove his hands and his tool and pause in his work. Blood flooded across Sei’s chest, leaking up and out onto his skin, dripping down all over his body. Clear merely stared at it, watched as it flowed dark and warm, and then leaned down to lap at it. Showing no reaction to its taste, he straightened up again and pushed a hand flat against Sei’s abdomen.

“Please stay still,” he requested, voice low. “It’ll only hurt more if you keep moving, Sei-san.”

Sei did his best to obey, his body shaking with his efforts to remain motionless, and before long the noise of the bone cutter eating through him sounded out again, and Clear was pulling pieces of solid white from his body. He placed it aside like it was nothing more than a leaf fallen between the pages of a book he was examining and returned to his incision, pulling the skin apart with his one hand as he adjusted the light above, smearing bloody fingerprints on it. He leaned in and peered down inside.

“Oh,” he breathed. “It’s beautiful, Sei-san.”

Sei was not in a position to reply, his eyelids fluttering, his lips pallid and parted with the battle for his shallow breaths. Aoba would have at least had the capacity to briefly wonder if he was dead if not for that. Somehow, a further despair prickled at him, and he moaned low in his throat.

This seemed to remind Clear that he was there, because he suddenly turned towards him. His face, so pale and cold, was speckled with blood, and the contrast was so sharp it was dizzying.

“Do you want to see too, Aoba-san?”

Aoba didn’t want to see. Aoba even knew he didn’t want to see. Aoba could almost tell him that, could almost form the words in his brain, almost motivate his tongue into creating them. But it was too late. Clear was already reaching into Sei, past his broken flesh and sharp bone, wet gurgles and snaps and squelches, and then….

“Look, Aoba-san,” Clear whispered, turning around towards Aoba again, crimson rivulets pouring down his arm. A human muscle gripped between his fingers. Still convulsing with the effort to cling to its life. Still beating. “It’s a human heart.”

Chapter Text

Sei couldn’t help himself.

He knew it was silly. Illogical. His own thoughts sounded absurd as he thought them. He knew so from the beginning. That didn’t stop him from doing it, though. Not here in the dead of night when it seemed like it was the only thing that would keep him together, keep him from his terrorizing nightmares. Sei’s hair now fell down long past his collarbones in the front, straight and black and silky and strong. He’d been taking such good care of it, going as far as asking Aoba’s friend Koujaku for the best way to maintain it. It felt nice against his own fingers, and he knew that Aoba liked it, liked burying his nose it in and running his hands through it and tugging on it gently in bed. And that was good, that was lovely, but it wasn’t enough. Something about his hair was all wrong.

It was dark in Aoba’s bedroom, the only light the moonlight through the veranda window, and Sei slipped soundlessly towards the bed. His brother’s face appeared sharp, half illuminated, half in shadow, and although his mouth was hanging open wide in a quiet snore, Sei thought he’d never seen anything more beautiful. Aoba, his beloved little brother Aoba, who had finally come for him and saved him from his pain after the eternity they’d spent apart. They had been connected, once. They had been two parts of a single whole, and Sei had spent his whole life thinking that’s how things should have been, always. They had been born that way, and it was only natural. That was a time when he had been at peace, and he wanted to return to it. To a life where he was like that. Always with Aoba. Always connected to him. Always a part of him.

Sei settled onto the mattress beside Aoba and leaned down towards his face. He would have to be gentle, careful, but he knew how. After all, Aoba had the same kind of feeling in his hair that Sei had in his own, and he knew from so many years of forced haircuts and brushing what hurt and what felt good. It was a thing that they shared together, something that only they could understand, and maybe they could know it again, know each other’s pain and what it was like to exist in the state they were born in. To return to a time when everything was how it should be. When they remained undeniably together.

He started with a clump of Aoba’s hair that laid splayed out on his pillow, and then took a few strands of his own, and tenderly, slowly, entwined them. It wasn’t so much a braid as a knot, and his own nerves alerted him to their discomfort as he pinched the ends of his hair, but Aoba merely breathed deep and stayed oblivious to Sei’s movements. He continued in this fashion, leaning awkwardly down towards his brother, resting on his side and his elbow, using his hands to gather Aoba’s longer hair and join it together with his own, creating snarls and tangles at their junction.

It wasn’t until he was halfway done, just about out of hair within reachable distance, that he realized that making the knots was becoming more difficult. He paused to look at his hands in the passing moonlight, and noticed, to his surprise, that they were shaking.

His hair hurt. But that wasn’t it.

He stared at the hairs joining them together, the places where the blue met black in a messy, intricate series of tangles. Something about it was jarring. There was nothing smooth, there was nothing clean and orderly. When they had been connected so long ago, it had been a single, uninterrupted stream of hair that had flowed between them. It had breached the space in between peacefully, it had effortlessly lived there. It hadn’t been marred by unsightly kinks or untidy knots. Everything had been perfect. It had been natural. It had been right.

This wasn’t right.

Tears rushed to fill Sei’s eyes, and, quietly, his chest jolted with a sob, and then another. He had Aoba now, he knew he did, but he hadn’t truly been returned to him. He could never be a part of him as he once was. They couldn’t coexist in the way that they were meant to. The moment their hair had been severed, so had their connection. They could never return.

With a sudden ferocious pang of loneliness, Sei tried to leap up from the bed, but only ended up wrenching his own hair and Aoba’s with it, drawing a yelp from Aoba and a shuddering cry from his own chest. And then Aoba was up and staring at him, eyes wide, face as far away as their tied hair would let him go.

“Sei, what’s—ow!”

In the darkness his eyes followed his hair to its end, where the jumbled row of knots hung between himself and his brother.

Sei didn’t really know what embarrassment was, but supposed if he had to guess, this was probably it. And that, layered on top of the devastating realization that he was still—still—so alone in the world, that he and Aoba were separated forever, made his sobs rise up again, this time loud and demanding, and his lungs ached with the strain of them and his shoulder crumpled inward and his face scrunched up in his pain.

“Hey, Sei—oh no, wait, shhh….”

And suddenly there was warmth all around him, and a solidity he could rest against, and he was enveloped in Aoba’s arms. Pressed against his chest, he cried pathetically into his shoulder and felt himself shaking against the confines of his hands rubbing soothing circles on his back. The emptiness inside of him felt like it was threatening to eat him alive, but Aoba was anchoring him now, firmly in there in the bedroom, and although that hardly fixed things it somehow made everything better, made it more tolerable. Sei latched onto the way his voice sounded as he murmured soothingly into his ear, shushing him softly and telling him that he was going to be fine.

Finally, as Sei’s trembling began to slow to intermittent shivers, Aoba spoke.

“What’s this about, Sei?”

It took Sei a long, empty moment before he could gather his thoughts and feelings into words, and he leaned in and wrapped his arms around Aoba to pull him even tighter.

“Aoba,” he said, voice hoarse and strained, “I wanted to be connected again, I wanted us to be together again, but we can’t—we can’t—….”

Aoba began to rub at Sei’s back again in long, contemplative motions, quieting him. “But we are together.”

“Not how we used to be,” Sei mewled helplessly, shifting closer and closer, digging into Aoba’s warmth.

With his face pressed up into the crook of Aoba’s neck, Sei couldn’t figure out why Aoba was shaking too until he heard an amused sigh escape from him. Was he laughing? But Aoba then took Sei’s face between his hands, and wiping his tears away with his thumbs, brought Sei’s gaze up to his eyes. They were a mere few centimeters away, and even in the darkness, through his tear-drenched eyelashes, Sei could see the gentleness in Aoba’s face, the warm glow of his understanding.

“You mean our hair, right?” he asked. “I don’t really think you can connect us again that way.”

Sei sniffled. “I know.”

“But…,” Aoba trailed off, glancing away for a moment. “That doesn’t mean we can’t connect in other ways. We’re finally together, aren’t we? You’re here with me now, Sei. Nothing can pull us apart ever again.” He took a deep breath. “And now we can do things that we couldn’t even do when our hair was connected. We can connect in better ways. I can hold you like this. And….” Letting his eyelids flutter shut, Aoba drew closer and pressed a shy-quick kiss to his lips, before pulling away slowly with darkened cheeks. “I can do that too. And….”

He trailed off, this time not meeting Sei’s gaze at all, and lowered his hands from Sei’s cheek to his shoulders.

“And?” Sei asked breathlessly.

“And….” Aoba paused. “Now we can connect by…by doing things like…making love….”

Although his voice grew quiet at the end, Sei caught every word and felt a grin spread across his tear-stained face. Connected or not, his little brother was unbearably cute.

“Anyway,” Aoba said quickly. “We’re together now. We don’t need our hair to be connected for that to be true.” He laughed. “Just think of how annoying that would be, too. I’d always have to be there while you went to the bathroom.”

Sei laughed with him, and though he thought that wouldn’t be so bad, he understood Aoba’s point.

“Now we’ve made the decision to be together,” Aoba went on. “Ourselves, on our own. Nothing is forcing us, and isn’t that even better?”

Yes. Sei didn’t voice it aloud because he was too busy feeling comforted by the way that Aoba looked at him, but he felt the statement living inside of him.

Aoba separated from him a bit and tugged his fingers lightly through their hair, gasping in sudden pain when they snagged in the knots holding them together.

“Hey,” he said, grimacing. “Maybe we should use some conditioner or something to get this out. Want to go shower?”

Sei giggled, almost elated with the pain of Aoba’s fingers pulling against his hair, and hugged Aoba tight again. “While we’re there, can we be connected like you were talking about before?”

In his arms, he could almost feel Aoba’s body heat rise as he blushed, but his grip tightened in return. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Let’s do it.” He went to stand, and sharply inhaled again as his hair was yanked back. “Let’s take care of this first, though.”

Sei smiled, rising to stand with him and grabbing onto his hand. Maybe they could never return to how it once was, but now as long as Sei could hold his hand like this, that would be enough.