Chapter 5
Advice
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Yes, yes, I know. This part is especially soppy and cliche. -.- Sorry. Just go with it. I promise it gets better.
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Touya was starting to be really afraid. The last time he had been this worried, Yuki had been on the brink of disappearing. But at least then he'd had some idea of how to help, how to fix the problem. But now... Now he felt afraid and helpless at the same time, and this was not a combination he was used to feeling. It didn't sit well with him.
Yuki barely left his room anymore. When he ate, he ate barely as much as Sakura, which for Yukito was next to nothing. He rarely spoke to anyone, and his eyes always seemed to be focused on the ground. Touya had tried to talk to him more than once, but it was difficult. It was more than just his silence; it felt as though it was actually hurting him to talk to anyone. And Touya couldn't bear to cause him any more pain than he was already in.
It got to the point where he was so desperate, he turned to his father for advice.
"I don't know what to do," he said quietly to his father, seated across from him at the dining room table. "He's getting worse, not better. I don't know how to help him. He's... he's in so much pain, and I don't know how to help him."
Fujitaka sighed. "It's a difficult situation. But of all the people he needs right now, you are probably the most important."
"How do you figure?" Touya said with a touch of bitterness. "I'm the one who reminds him of sex, right? And that's where his pain came from."
"Well..." Fujitaka paused, and Touya felt him considering his phrasing before he spoke. He listened carefully. Though he didn't often seek it out, his father's advice was almost always worth taking.
"Yukito's body was violated, Touya. It's not so much that sex reminds him of pain, although that too. Even though we don't really think about it, our bodies are something sacred to us. They are one of the few things that are completely ours through and through, with no one else to control any part of it unless we want them to. Yuki no longer feels like his body is sacred. Someone else took that control away from him. To him now, it's like a foreign object, something that has been profaned. It's no longer his. He doesn't really have much of anything that's only his right now, especially if you consider that even his mind is shared with Yue."
"So what does that mean?"
Fujitaka shrugged. "Make him feel like himself again. Give him back his body."
"How am I supposed to do that?" Touya muttered.
Again his father shrugged. "You're his lover. You figure it out."
Touya blushed in spite of himself. Even though he knew that his father knew that Touya and Yuki had sex, it still felt really awkward for him to say it out loud. To cover his embarrassment, he asked, "How do you know so much about this?"
Fujitaka smiled. "I was a psych major in college before I went into archaeology. Didn't I ever mention that?"
"No..." Touya had begun to mull over what his father said, and was lost in thought. There had to be a way to convince Yuki that his body was his own again. He couldn't make the physical scars go away, but he was determined to heal the emotional ones. Yukito would get better. He had to. He just had to, because Touya knew he couldn't survive without him. And that was that.
"Thanks Dad," he said. "You've given me a lot to think about."
"You're welcome," said Fujitaka. "Do your best with Yukito. We all miss his smiling face around here. He's a good boy."
Touya stood up and smiled at his father. Not every Dad would be so supportive of his son's boyfriend. But somehow it had never been an issue. He didn't really appreciate that often enough, he realized suddenly. With everything that had happened, now as well as before, his relationship with his father had never been a problem.
'Thank God for small miracles,' Touya thought. 'I have enough other things to deal with.'
"Touya." Touya paused in the doorway as his dad called out him.
"Yeah?"
Fujitaka hesitated a moment, then said, "Listen, you have to understand that he's not going to be the same. Even if he gets better, he's never going to be exactly like he was. Something like this changes people. You have to expect that."
Touya felt a chill run up his spine. He imagined Yuki with that despairing, dead look behind his eyes forever. But then he shook his head to banish that image. He couldn't think like that. It wouldn't help anything.
"I understand," he told his father. He went up to his room to think.
Fujitaka smiled softly after his son. All of them could feel how much pain Yuki had been in since he got back, although maybe some of them more than others. Ever since the incident, Fujitaka had known that Touya would come to him for advice, and so he had tried his best to think of a good way to explain it to him. Now, having done his poor best, all he could do was sit back and wait.
He glanced over at the picture of Nadeshiko that Sakura wished good morning every day at breakfast. In the picture, she was always smiling. Sometimes, Fujitaka thought, pain made life unbearable. You couldn't go on. But sometimes it made you realize that there were things in your life, good things, that you didn't appreciate enough. Sometimes the pain in life made the pleasures that much stronger. And sometimes, it was possible to heal.
'Once again,' he thought to himself, 'life continues.'
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