A/N: Because I like one-word titles nowadays. A short prompt.
Scissors
There are a few words that seem to swim through the fog of tears and cut their bleeding message into his mind one after the other. 'I'm sorry', 'Drunk', 'Wasn't thinking', something even as disgustingly fake as 'I love you'. He keeps scrolling through the texts, counting the missed calls and shaking quietly as he tries not to imagine it, not to let the betrayal take a solid, physical, real shape through the empty sentences that he can only half-register. Through the might of another powerful sob, he drops the phone on the table and gets up, grabbing a pair of scissors in his wake.
He has no clue where the aggression comes from or how exactly it strikes, wielding his limp body like a crazy puppet master who does not care if his dolls collapse midway through the show. Toushiro supposes there is a strange irony in how easy it is to succumb, even though he's always taken such great care in being restrained, composed, adequate. It's as easy as one, two, three. First go the post cards from Vienna – they met on the plane, Toushiro spilled his drink over Ichigo which seemed to amuse the latter beyond belief despite Toushiro's horrified rambling. Next go the amusement park tickets, the brochures from the theater, the scarf he got for Christmas, and eventually, the most precious of all – the photographs he's so meticulously collected over the last three years. Toushiro cuts and cuts and cuts, severing memory after memory while the cold metal in his hold diligently peels strips and flakes and squares of a splintered relationship, like it's always, always been nothing.
And maybe it has been.
When everything is but a pile of scrap around him, Toushiro stops and, gasping brokenly through the effort to keep himself from bursting into tears again, falls on the floor amidst the mess. That's when he sees the last of it – a little scar, running over the back of his hand and into his palm. It makes him ponder for a minute, how might he have missed that one, but although the knowledge that it'll hurt is red and clear at the back of his mind, he doesn't seem to find it in himself to hesitate. A few months ago, an accident on the ski resort and a very bad fall - that's what the scar might say to most. Toushiro got lucky, but his boyfriend insisted he got rushed to the hospital nonetheless.
The proposal had come somewhere among the white sheets and aprons, and threads, and painkillers, and stitches.
And tears.
Toushiro can feel them coming now, too, as he runs the blade of the scissors over the scar, cutting it open. It's not deep enough to harm him permanently, but there is a sickening pleasure – one he cannot explain – in destroying every single thing that once reminded him he was in love.
