the nicotine between his lips
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Kaito is first introduced to drugs due to peer pressure.
He's merely twelve, with not much of an idea of what his father does with bags that drip of blood in the backseat, but the kid who asks for his zephr lighter ends up lighting a stick under his palm, and Kaito is reluctantly fascinated. Another kid seems to see this and whacks his arm to try it, and soon enough everyone in that little group of outcasts is urging him to try.
(He never really liked those guys. They were just the closest to being like him: alcoholic parents, dead parents, no parents, etc. His father with his bloody duffle bags just blended well in the background with them, like water soaking into fabric instead of the stark stain of blood.)
"Mom says it numbs you," one kid says (he forgot which one) and that statement within itself is probably the reason he ends up asking for one. Even at twelve, he's not up for feeling the things he feels, the reach for the cigarette being a mere mechanical movement. He coughs on his first try, but he gets the hang of it faster than any of the rest of the kids dare to admit.
The day he wants to kiss Kei for the first time is the day Kaito's eyes are a different kind of red than the blood-coloured eyes Kei uses to glare at him from a distance. No matter how fuzzy his senses become, the gaze of the raven haired boy is sharper than Kaito's pocket knife and inflicts twice as many cuts than he does carving smiley faces into tree bark.
Kei's voice is only abrupt in the sense that they haven't spoken for probably a year or so now. Other than that, he blends seamlessly into the rest of the collective voices of the playground, and Kaito wonders how long Kei's been there, leaning against the wall beside him. "Heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, stroke, death—"
"Kei." The brunette only sounds, if anything, bothered. He would probably be more so if the cigarette smoke wasn't making his bones dissolve delightedly into air, weightless under his skin.
"Your eyes are red."
"I know."
"You're killing yourself."
The statement doesn't hit as hard as he thought it would, and he pulls his legs into his chest to pick at the stitches of his jeans. "Maybe," he mumbles.
Kissing his teeth, Kei looks out at the rest of the kids running around on the pavement. "You should talk to someone."
"I'm talking to you," Kaito responds, stating the obvious like he always does.
"That's not good enough," he snaps, shifting his hands beneath his back, his perfect posture becoming undone for a moment. He looks flustered, Kaito thinks. "And besides, I'm really not trying to become that kind of doctor."
A tinge of envy twists at Kaito's insides because Kei already knows what he wants to be, what he's going to be. Like tarot cards, he knows what lies beneath them in visions of a developing future, laid out to him like a mere offer of success, and there's not much standing in his way.
(Well, unless Ritsu's instincts were as correct at Kei's trigonometry solutions; unless Kaito really is a burden to him. And seeing how his head feels like fuzzy television static, he's really not up to arguing otherwise.)
Golden eyes look up to the sky. "Maybe you shouldn't talk to me," Kaito ends up saying, his thoughts murky like swamp water and all he can make out are the dark thoughts. He then takes it upon himself to pull out his lighter from his pocket and watch the little flame dance, effectively ending their conversation. Kei doesn't leave, though, and Kaito silently spares the slightest of glances and watches him through his peripherals, waiting for him to leave and not talk to him for the next three years, maybe longer.
Then, Kaito abruptly meets his eyes, Kei having squatted down to his level and wrapped his hand around Kaito's, the light illuminating his eyes like bitter red coffee. His hand is cold, and Kaito kind of wanted to see if the flame would freeze, if Kei could make that possible.
"Put the lighter away," Kei commands rather frankly, and Kaito looks at him for a moment before obliging without question, lips pursing together awkwardly as his thumb clicks the knob so the flame vanishes. Kei lets go of his hand so Kaito could slip the lighter back into his pocket, and once it's there, Kei grabs his jacket sleeve and pulls him up and away from the wall, ignoring Kaito's clumsy stumbles.
The raven haired boy walks him into the building and they end up at the library, Kei dropping Kaito off at a desk before looking through the bookshelves. Kaito watches him. Kei tries his best not to make eye contact.
"Kei," the brunette says once Kei finds a book for each of them and starts reading without a word.
Kei flips the page. "This is a library," he answers lowly.
Kaito is silent for a moment, looking at the book he's got, looking at Kei, looking at how a little strand of dark hair is caught at the corner of his mouth. The boy really needed to cut his hair.
". . . What're you doing?"
"Apparently talking to you," he sighs exasperatedly, and turns to face the other. "Now shut up. No one talks in a library."
Confusion falls along his features. "I don't get what you're trying to—"
"Shut up."
Kaito breathes through his nose and sighs, looking to the side, then nods. Kei turns back to his book.
It's quiet. Kaito tries to read, but soon enough he's sleepy, his head against his arms, and his eyes go to that strand of black tracing along Kei's pale cheek to the corner of his lip.
He wants to kiss him. (And maybe it's just the smoke in his brain, but the urge is there. It's definitely there.) But he doesn't—the nicotine in his lungs scares him too much to even try. He doesn't want to poison Kei like that, like the venom of some toxic, self-destructive snake crawling up his esophagus and striking Kei with its needle-like fangs. He wants to kiss him, but he won't.
He does, however, brush that little black strand of hair from the corner of Kei's mouth and keeps his eyes open long enough to see Kei blush and look at him like he's a madman.
"You should get a haircut," Kaito mumbles.
(If he battles this smoking thing to a bloody pulp, then maybe he'll kiss him. Maybe. One day.)
Kaito falls asleep.
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idk how this went from an angst-y underage drug thing to a library aesthetic but it happened gn