He sat. His arm ached with fatigue, violently shaking back and forth, preceding the sharp sounds of impact.
In retrieving his die for another toss, Otogi felt a chip marring the once-smooth surface. It joined so many others that had been born from his fury. His fist clenched tightly, painfully, around the imperfect twin cubes. They dug sharply into his calloused flesh. He was damaging them, he knew, but it was the only way.
He could bare to sit motionless for only a few moments. The dingy motel room seemed to darken around him, made wholly of flickering fluorescent light and the drone of sound that came with it. Finally, he drew his arm back and released, letting out a nearly inhuman cry as the die crashed onto a steel desk drawer, fracturing for a final time into multiple jagged shards.
It was the age old problem Otogi never thought he would have to face. Something that plagued men he had always considered weaker than him.
I'm very glad to have you as my friend, Otogi.
A simple sentence in a sea of many that resonated, hurtfully, in his mind. She had said those words with the kind of oblivious sincerity only she could maintain, while her hands remained clasped in those of Hiroto Honda.
They were engaged, she had revealed, and had been for a while. Otogi hadn't known. He hadn't wanted to. It was something he didn't think was possible - not at so young an age, not when he had spoken to her just a few nights before. He had told her of how he had changed over the years, a heartfelt admission of all that she'd meant to him.
While they had spoken, Honda had taken a protectively stoic stance. They had fallen out of touch not long after everyone else had grown apart. Shizuka became their only reason to maintain brief contact, barely civil. The playfulness of their youth had left and now all that remained was reproach and hatred.
As Otogi sat, finally managing stillness, the light flickered a last few times before giving out. The darkness contemplated.
Quietly perched on opposite ends of an auburn chesterfield were a pair of crossed lovers. In the pristine living room, their animosity was evident.
Shizuka had averted her eyes, a kind of guilt swimming in her sigh. "I just think," she spoke softly, "that we should have told him sooner."
Through the open window, the evening sky was starless, lanced only by the dull hum of silence.
"You're too nice," Honda finally responded, agitating his hair with one hand. "He's been trying so hard to steal you away."
"Steal me?" Shizuka said accusingly, her voice having cracked, rising in volume. "I've barely seen him, and you're worried, what, I'll just run away?"
"It isn't like you were ignoring him," he snapped, "and for two years, not exactly a long time."
Exasperation painted her words. "It is a long time. Long enough for me to love you, long enough for me to miss, and move on. I'm young," she said, her voice again barely above a whisper. "The years matter."
"And back then, you were even younger," he continued. "He shouldn't have been seducing you like that." Honda shifted his weight, sending aged groans through the delicate furniture.
She turned to face him. "It was the same with you, then."
"But here we are."
"Here we are."
Often, Honda felt his self worth tumbling into a steep decline. He had never been the most stable of individuals. Assertive and strong, certainly, but underneath existed such a destructive force, he was powerless to hold it down.
Again and again he would become convinced that Shizuka was only settling for him, because Otogi had been absent for too long. It had pained her for months when he'd left. A rift formed between them that mended itself only, he feared, because of her loneliness. He didn't know what they'd had, years ago. Without the power to ask, lest he overreact, Honda's assumptions could only concoct the worst.
It had been hell to watch them talk again, face to face. Shizuka was an open book, and Otogi's attempts to hide his own emotions had grown soft, it seemed, while he had been gone. So their perceived exchanges were translucent, and Honda's silence was due in part to his racing mind, piecing together their looks and ticks into an imaginable story.
It was at least fulfilling to witness his brokenness when Shizuka revealed their engagement. Translucent gave way to transparent, while opaque stood Honda, firmly convicted, smug and asserted.
He had triumphed in their adolescent conflict, on par with that of Yugi Moto and Seto Kaiba, but in a rivalry about the heart, as opposed to the cards.
But in speaking to Shizuka and amidst the aftermath, he began to feel cheated as before, only now it further fastened in his conscience. The greater the tragedy, the harder she would fall, and there was no thing more tragic than the dejected mess of a love undone.
Otogi would not speak to her again, and he would not stand to see her face again. There would linger behind it the presence of loss, the shroud of penance.
Countless things spoken, innumerable more understood silently. A private poetry for their younger years.
Yes, this he had lost, and how gracelessly he now descended. They had had an everything.
And yet, he was void.