Prompt: You think you can make something out of first meetings, Fukase, his red hair, his weird body horror aesthetic, and a city-like setting.
Pairing: Fukase/Kokone.
Requested by: UntitledReader.
She sits, and she waits.
The bench is cold beneath her. She adjusts her weight every so often to get comfortable, but it's no use. The wood digs into her thighs, her back, her neck. She coils her arms around herself, lips quivering at the gentle touch of autumn upon them. The sky is black, the stars are hidden by the smog of the brightly shining city just beyond her, and in the midst of it, she is alone.
She doesn't have to be. She could be at Galaco's party right now, dancing in a mass of moving bodies, sweating and drinking spiked punch and watching all of the girls around her collect numbers in swarms of permanent marker across their arms and chests.
Or she could be at home with her screaming parents, hiding in her room and wasting time blasting music through her headphones and clicking through blog after blog on Tumblr.
She could be straining her fingers trying to do something she knows she'll never be able to do, the strings of the guitar cutting into her skin, willing to go deeper, deeper until they've pierced her chest.
She could be at the mall buying clothes to help cheer her up, fixating on which pastel colors suit her the best until she realizes that it's all the same, they're the same colors they have always been.
But instead, for reasons she doesn't understand, Kokone is here, hugging herself under a street lamp by a sign that reads in big, bold letters Bus Stop, and she's shivering and it's starting to rain, and she's thinking, I should really be heading home, but she doesn't want to. She doesn't want to go home, she doesn't want to face her parents, doesn't want to face Galaco or her guitar or all of the clothes she wishes could make her feel like a meaningful human being.
She's here. She shouldn't be here, but she is, and she isn't going to turn around now. The neon lights of her home aren't strong enough to lure her back into them.
Feebly, her knees curl into her chest, and she clutches them, face buried in between. She doesn't want to have to see the city as she leaves it.
"Oh. Are you okay?"
Kokone jerks her head up so quickly it knocks her feet back onto the gravel beneath her.
The street lamp flickers.
"I'm-" She cuts herself off upon realizing the tear tracks streaming down her face. Pursing her lips, she brushes them away with the sleeves of her coat, mortified that her vulnerability could creep up on her so quickly. "I'm fine," she finishes weakly, her voice hoarse and choked.
But that's always the lie, isn't it? No one ever says, "I'm fine," and means it.
The silhouette standing in the darkness before her stays silent for a long while. In the darkness, she can't make out quite what they look like, but there's a noticeable amount of red in their eyes, and their hair is shaggy and unkempt, hanging in messy waves to their chin.
She swallows. This is a stranger. Her parents seldom warned her about them, but she knows better than to engage in conversation with them.
"Mind if I sit?" they ask. Her blood runs cold.
"Um." No, you can't, she wants to retort, but this is a bus stop after all, and she can't refuse letting them wait for their ride. "Yeah, okay. Go ahead."
They step forward, a shadow amongst even more shadows. The street lamp seems to brighten and brighten as they near her, and then she sees them, and if Kokone thought her blood ran cold before, then it's frozen now.
This them is not a them at all; it's a boy, shorter than herself, slumped, hunched and looking nearly as defeated as she feels.
But that's not the part that has her suffocating.
That is left completely to his face.
It's as if someone bashed his cheek in with a rock and then quickly decided that they could inflate what had been crushed again. The skin is dry and crooked and veiny and grey on the left side, creeping from the tip of his forehead all the way down to his jawline, disappearing into the collar of his baggy white jacket, where she is certain it continues. His eye is red, purely red, with no iris, no...anything, just a blank expanse of violent, bloody crimson. The corner of his lip is sewn shut in a tidy x, and the letter is mimicked in bright scarlet over his nose.
He says, "What? Scared?" and it's then that she realizes she has been staring at him with something far stronger than curiosity.
Her cheeks flush. "No, I-"
"No worries, kiddo," he interrupts, sitting beside her; close, too close, enough that their thighs are almost touching. But she has no desire to move away. "I don't expect anything different nowadays! It's gruesome, isn't it?" He cracks a delirious smile. The stitching at his mouth creases against the skin of his cheek.
"What do you want?" is all she can respond with, because she's so terrified but so intrigued by him.
He quirks a thin red brow, his eyes wide like he doesn't quite understand what she's saying. "Hm? Oh, I don't want anything, not really. I just thought it'd be nice to chat, y'know? Not very common to see a girl all by herself on a Saturday night."
She says nothing. She just looks at him, hands trembling in her lap. This feels like a trick, a trap. Like something horrible is bound to happen.
As if noticing her skepticism, he barks out a laugh, rolling his eye and flinging his arms over the back of the bench, legs crossed. "No need to be this horrified, geez," he snickers, cocking his head at her. He doesn't bother hiding the once-over he provides, which is fair. Kokone didn't try to her hide her ogling, either. "The name's Fukase," he continues after a moment, the humor fleeing his features. "There. That clear things up?"
"Um." Kokone glances around, expecting someone to come up behind her and scream, You've been pranked! so she doesn't feel so timid. But nothing comes, and she lets her shoulders relax and says, "Kokone. I'm Kokone."
"Really? I was expecting something less...fluffy. Something more mysterious." Fukase shrugs, his eyes glinting in the blinding street light just before the bulb falters, goes black, and screams back to life a second later, overwhelming and all-consuming.
Kokone tucks a loose strand of brown hair behind her ear. It tumbles out and tickles her chin in eager disobedience. "Where are you from?" she asks, averting her gaze to her shoes so she doesn't to have look at the mangled remains that were once his face.
"Here," Fukase responds. Either he doesn't notice her ignorance to his face, or he just doesn't care. "I've lived here my entire life."
"Me too," Kokone whispers. Which is all the more reason to leave it behind.
"Really now? Where are you going that could top the city, huh?" Fukase laughs. She can feel him adjust his position beside her.
"Anywhere," Kokone says before she can think of what's coming from her lips. Her cheeks heat, but she presses on. "Anywhere is better than here."
Fukase starts, his eyebrows lifting in one effortless motion. "You don't know where you're going?"
"The destination doesn't matter," Kokone whispers under her breath, "it's the-"
"Journey that matters, right, right, all that bull," Fukase snorts, waving a hand dismissively. He slowly changes the direction of his hand to the small bag resting at Kokone's feet. "That doesn't seem like enough to have a journey with."
She musters a shrug.
He sighs, leaning back against the bench with a sense of irritation about him. "I'm trying to be helpful. It'd be nice if ya worked with me here."
"Helpful?" Kokone echoes. She spares him a brief glance that he greets her with full-blown eye contact. She sucks in a deep breath and goes back to scanning the ground. "I don't know how this is supposed to be helpful."
"Oh? I'll cut right to the chase, then." Fukase clears his throat, rolls his shoulders back, and says, "We're not so different, you and me."
"We're...not?"
He scoffs, but the amusement has returned. He no longer seems as if he's waiting for some kind of a reaction out of her. "You're not the only kid in the world that wants to run away," Fukase says, and his gaze is so bright that Kokone can't help meeting it.
"Huh?" she blurts stupidly.
"Three years ago," Fukase begins, and now it's his turn to pull away, to look at the ground and twiddle his thumbs idly, "my mom left, and my dad hit me, and so I ran away. Funny thing is, I ran to this bus stop, this one exactly, thinking that no one would find me if I took a route so obscene."
"Did it work?" Kokone asks.
Fukase glares at her, a scowl twisting his face. "Of course not." He dips a finger down, back bent over his legs, so that he can write something into the dirt. Or maybe he's just doodling. Kokone can't tell from here.
"I was about two stops in when my dad caught up to me and dragged me back home. I told him I hated him. And then-" Fukase's nose points toward the city, his finger lifting from the dirt to trace the grey on his body "-he did this to me. He annihilated my body without remorse." He pauses for a moment, then adds, softly, "They're burns."
"He...burnt you?"
"I'm not gonna bother going into detail," Fukase mumbles, "but he walked out after that, and I was taken to the hospital to get treated, then thrown into a home, and I haven't seen him since."
Kokone gapes. She finds her hand on his shoulder, and he doesn't so much as flinch at the touch. "I'm-"
He lifts a hand to silence her. "I don't need you to pity me," he says roughly. When the malice has settled, he faces her, dropping his fingers onto her hand. It seems so natural. It's like they've done this before.
But she can tell- they're both thriving off the comfort of somebody else.
"No one would adopt me," Fukase continues, "because I was considered ugly. Deformed. People would rather go for the cute little kids, the toddlers, not some pre-teen that looked like he'd climbed out of the pits of Hell. So you know what I did? I left, and I fended for myself, and now I'm here, I'm like this, without a home or a family, and it's all because I did what you're about to do."
He draws himself away from her, and Kokone reciprocates the action, hands to herself, clutching at her chest for oxygen.
"Do you love your parents? In spite of everything, in spite of what they might say or do, do you genuinely love them?"
Kokone thinks back to all of the times she's witnessed her mother scream at her father, witnessed them in each other's faces, shrieking and hitting. She thinks of them sleeping in separate beds. Her father crying when her mother kicked him out that first time, how he crawled back and her mother accepted him with soft apologies and a warm embrace.
She thinks back to all of the times they have never involved her, never tried to hurt or blame her, how they've come into her room one at a time to stroke her hair and tell her they love her.
"Of course I do," Kokone says. They raised her, they loved her, even if they didn't love each other.
"And what about your friends, huh? What are they worth to you?"
"Everything," Kokone whispers, because they do. Galaco, with all of her giggling and smiling and party throwing and glittering eyes. Anon, with her intellectual advice and her ability to clamber out of every situation. Yuuma, with his reassuring pats on the back and dumb, hilarious ideas. She thinks of them, of whether or not they'd miss her, if she'd miss them. The answer is so obvious, so why does she keep pretending it's not even there?
Fukase is grinning now, his gloved fist tapping apprehensively against his thigh. "What's something you're good at? What can you do with your life?"
"I-" What can she do? Play the guitar and fail at it? Forever? There has to be something else. She...She can dance, and she's pretty damn good at math; doesn't that count for something? "I can...I can do whatever I want," Kokone murmurs, chewing down on her knuckles because it feels amazing to admit that. "I can do whatever I want."
"You have so much love in your life, so much potential. Do you really want to run away from that, Kokone? Do you want to spend every moment regretting that you stepped on this bus? Do you want to end up like this, like me, disgusting and morbid and a freak?"
"You're not a freak," Kokone says weakly.
"I'm not? Well, you'd be the first to think otherwise," Fukase replies, blunt and stoic, his eyes boring into hers. "Don't do it," he says. "You'll just get caught and things will be even worse than they were before."
You don't know that. She would have said that to anyone else, but the thing about Fukase is he does know. Somehow, she found a person that does.
The sound of wheels screeching over gravel and pavement rings in Kokone's ears. She holds her breath, whipping her head in the direction that the bus is coming from, barrelling toward them at a speed that is too slow, that is taking too long.
It pulls to a halt in front of her. The doors open.
She needs to make a decision. She needs to make one now.
Fukase stares at her, and the vibe just reeks of, Well?
She is paralyzed. She can't move. Her legs won't walk her up the steps onto the bus. She twitches, aching desperately to leave, but she just can't, she's grounded. This is where the road ends. This is as far as she can go. She's going to rip up the one-way plane ticket she bought. She's not going to hitch this ride to the airport, because didn't she know that's where she was going to go all along?
The doors shut, and that's it. That's the sound of her fate being sealed. The vehicle rumbles away, and Kokone watches it go, her heart throbbing in her throat.
Fukase's palm touches her knuckles.
Kokone stumbles into reality once more and looks at him.
He grins. She can feel herself working up a delicate smile that can just hardly break the surface of her features. But it's there, somewhere. It's real.
"Feel better?" Fukase asks.
Kokone nods. "So much better," she breathes.
He rises to his feet, dusts his bulky jacket off, and says, "Then my work here is done." He turns around on his heel, giving a little wave over his shoulder, and it hits Kokone hard that he walked into her life just to disappear again, as quick as the wind, like a ghost that had never been there at all.
But he understands her. He knows that she's aching inside, and through all of his scars, Kokone gets that, she gets that he's aching inside, too.
"Wait!" she blurts, lunging out of the bench to grapple for his sleeve. She heaves a heavy breath when he peers over his shoulder to look at her. "You...You didn't let me say thank you."
"You just did," Fukase says. He starts to move off again, but Kokone yelps and tugs at his jacket for a second time. She doesn't want him to leave. She doesn't know why, but she really, really doesn't want him to leave.
"Stop, stop," she says urgently, and he sighs, relenting...smiling. It's a crooked smile, not very pleasant, maybe a grimace if nothing else, but it's there. She can see it. "Wait."
He gyrates on his heel, looking up at her, arms crossed solid and steady across his chest. "I'm waiting-"
"Let's go out for, um. A snack. Or something."
Fukase's expression shudders with something like baffled bewilderment. "What? Like...Like right now?"
"Yeah. Yeah, right now." Kokone swallows. "To celebrate."
He doesn't seem to catch her drift. It's like he wants a reason.
"You just saved me. I feel like I owe you."
"You really don't think I'm freak," Fukase mutters, a thumb brushing down the dilapidated side of his weathered face. Kokone watches, tempted to imitate the action. Instead, she clenches her hands at her sides, straightens her posture, and nods.
"If you're a freak, then I'm a freak," she says.
Fukase flashes her in an inhuman grin, all teeth and barely any lips. His hair flops into his face, and he swipes it out with a quick flick of his wrist. Then, he extends the same hand to her, gracious and maybe a little awkward. "Shall we?" he asks.
And Kokone doesn't hesitate to take his hand, thinking, This guy, the moment she feels the explosive contact resonate within her.
She smiles, leaves her mistakes behind her, and says, "We shall."
This was really fun to write tbh. I hope it fit your standards and what you were looking for, Noe! ;;
Next up: Mayu/Haku.