the price
Later they stopped staring, and Kai felt a little less like a burning candle, and Tyson was watching TV with Max and Hilary and Daichi and Kenny, and he felt safe enough, inexplicably safe enough in retrospect, to say idly at Rei's shoulders wrapping the cake in tinfoil, "I could break your face."
He paused along with Rei. Studying the shoulders, imagining the calloused fingers in their inactivity, expecting the worst in that Rei would understand what he meant. Because, after all, it was usually safer when they didn't understand. Much. It put them off balance and it was so much easier to hurt them, and when he was hurting them they weren't hurting him, but unfortunately Rei nodded, because he understood, and that hurt Kai.
"You know? I could do a lot of things to you for making me feel this way."
Rei knew. He put the cake, splattered liberally with melted and solidified candle wax, in the fridge and turned. And he understood how Kai didn't specifically mean HIM so much as all of them, so much as the entire world, and he understood why Kai couldn't look at him. After all, they both knew it was undeserved.