rot away
It's never enough.
He's not enough for Gokudera and Gokudera's not enough for him.
With Yamamoto, he feels almost complete—but not quite. There's always a small part of him that's empty, and like a black hole, it swallows up all the hope and the happiness that dances along his fingertips when it's almost in his grasp—but not quite.
Death, he knows, is inevitable. Most people would try to 'live life to the fullest' but then again, Gokudera's not most people. It's bullshit, he thinks, because he's going to die anyway. Does it matter if he dies earlier than he's supposed to? Does it matter if he dies without accomplishing anything? Does he matter?
It doesn't; he doesn't, he thinks, he knows, because he's going to die someday. Or maybe he's already dead inside. He's living and he's breathing and his heart thumps from somewhere between sixty to one hundred beats, but he's not really alive.
Being alive means you have emotions and you're doing things other than sitting in a fucking dump of an apartment for fifteen hours on end, blood-tattooed hands waiting to wrap themselves around another gun to shoot. Gokudera's long forgotten how to love so by theory, he's more dead than alive.
But Yamamoto makes him feel alive, or as alive as he can be, in any case. Yamamoto tells him, We're in love, and he tells everyone who asks him why someone like him would even want to be with someone like Gokudera, We're in love. It's what Gokudera lets Yamamoto tell himself in a pathetic attempt to convince himself that one day, it might come true.
Gokudera lets Yamamoto love him because it's already cruel enough that fate had decided for him to love Gokudera. And Yamamoto isn't someone that he loves, but craves. Gokudera's life had been full of what ifs and maybes, like maybe if he hadn't run away from his home, then maybe he wouldn't have been such a fuckup, or maybe he was destined to be a fuckup anyway. Or, what if he hadn't met Yamamoto? Then maybe he would've already disintegrated into stardust and returned to the sky where there's a whole lot of darkness and finally, he'd be the light. But Yamamoto isn't indecisive like him. He doesn't talk about the what ifs and he doesn't think about what could've been. He just does.
Gokudera knows that Yamamoto's loved him from when they first met. It was a growing attraction because that kind of love only happened in story books and their reality was nothing like a fairy tale.
Yamamoto used to look at him with longing rippling under his irises, along with something like pity, and god, that fucking pissed Gokudera off because he didn't need pity. He didn't need someone who was in love with him because he thought that he needed to be loved.
"You can love me," Gokudera hissed in his ear as they fought side by side against Varia. Rain and storm—one to calm the other, but instead, it had the opposite effect. Yamamoto was infuriating and everything he did just riled Gokudera up more. "But I'll never love you."
"If you say so," replied Yamamoto easily, grinning like it was a whole game to him and it probably was.
Yamamoto's always been like that. Treating everything like a game. Pretence and dreams are his shields; they're the things that protect his smile from the harsh cynicism of reality, but lately, they're crumbling down. The cracks in his façade come in the form of dark rings around his eyes and weary, sluggish movements. Yamamoto used to be—
—he didn't used to be like this.
He changed when his father died. Death did that to people. It changed them. But when it happened to Gokudera, he didn't change because he was already pretty much dead. He's the exception and he is for a lot of things, especially Yamamoto.
Yamamoto was sitting on the edge of his mattress, the bottom bunk because he didn't like the top. He was paranoid that he'd roll off, despite the barrier—which, to be fair, was rather flimsy-looking and probably didn't fulfil nine out of ten of the safety precautions. His head was buried in his hands and the hems of his sleeves were wet. He was crying, that was obvious enough, but he had told Tsuna and the girls that he wasn't going to cry and that he just needed some time alone for it to sink in.
Gokudera knew from experience that being alone was the worst when you had lost someone because it made that empty space just a little bit larger, so he pushed open the door and sat beside Yamamoto on the bed.
He wasn't like Tsuna. He wasn't compassionate and his words were too awkward to come out the way he wanted them too. He was too used to them being jagged and hard, to hurt, not to soothe, so he bit his bottom lip to keep them inside and he didn't touch Yamamoto either. Didn't wrap his arm around his shoulder or pat his back or wipe his tears because he just didn't do things like that.
But being there for Yamamoto was enough.
Yamamoto turned towards him, tear-tracks stained on his cheeks with the pink flush that came with crying, and his eyes were red too. He didn't say anything, but placed his hand on the back of Gokudera's neck instead and Gokudera had watched enough teenage rom-coms to know what was going to happen next.
He'd kissed Yamamoto purely because Yamamoto had needed him and it was nice to be needed for once. Maybe, at that moment, he was no different from Yamamoto who was in love with him because he thought Gokudera needed to be loved, but it was better being anyone other than himself.
His words at the fight, Gokudera belated realises as a passing though, swallowing a mouthful of beer, were a lie because he ended up with Yamamoto anyway.
"We're out of milk," he says to Yamamoto, voice raspy from years of smoking painting his lungs black and stripping his throat raw.
He says it quietly, under the volume of the television playing some shitty old cartoon that Yamamoto likes to watch every Wednesday and that Gokudera doesn't care much for. But Yamamoto hears him anyway and quirks one eyebrow up in confusion. The arm snaked around Gokudera's waist tenses and his fingers presses into Gokudera's side the pale skin, leaving bruises that will purple hours later. It's a silent way of asking what's wrong because something's wrong. Gokudera never cares about anything because he's far past the point of being able to care.
"You drink your coffee black; why'd you want milk?" asks Yamamoto, with careful precision that comes with years of knowing Gokudera and knowing what not to say.
"It's not for me." Gokudera picks at the label, starting to curl and peel at the corner, damp from the condensation. "It's for Uri."
"Right," Yamamoto says, like he wants to believe Gokudera, but you really can't get everything you want. If that was true, then Gokudera wouldn't be sitting on this fucking shabby couch with a fucking shitty television and a shitty signal and an equally shitty life. For both of them. "I'll buy some tomorrow."
"Sorry, you've probably got other plans," says Gokudera and at least that part's true. He's sorry for a lot of things, like ruining his own life and Yamamoto's life and fucking everyone's life. And it's true that he's the storm because all he can do is destroy and yell and scream and kill and he's sorry.
Yamamoto doesn't answer and they wallow in the silence for a moment too long, thick with tension, before Yamamoto says, "It's okay because I love you."
Gokudera grunts a reply; whether it's an I love you back or shut up, even he doesn't know. It's so predictable, what Yamamoto tells him, that it's become routine and Yamamoto probably doesn't realise he's saying it anymore.
The laugh that Yamamoto gives in return isn't routine though. It startles Gokudera, who almost spills his beer onto his lap but holds it steady before it can.
"I don't get you, Gokudera," he starts, the amusement laced in his words and it's almost sickening because this is anything but funny. "One second you actually act like you might—you could love me back, and the next, you want to fucking rip my heart out."
The amusement is gone by the end of his sentence.
"You're complicated, Gokudera. I don't understand you and I'm sick of not understanding you," he says and in all honesty, it's not unexpected.
The rain and storm together?
It was never going to work out.
And Yamamoto gets up from the sofa, doesn't even look back behind him, and does something Gokudera's been dreading since day one.
He leaves, and the only thing Gokudera can do is take another swig from his beer and watch him go.
Twenty cigarettes a day becomes forty and forty becomes sixty in the span of seventy two hours.
Gokudera forgets to eat properly, to move properly, and to think properly.
I'm not dying, he tells himself, I'm already dead.
He's just waiting for the moment that Yamamoto comes back crawling through the door to drag Gokudera from under the surface and save him from drowning like before.
It all feels terribly déjà vu.
The empty space feels emptier inside him; he's living and he's breathing and his heart thumps from somewhere between sixty to one hundred beats, but he's not really alive.