The first time Touga vanished, Saionji came home one evening and the apartment was empty. He checked every room, twice, as if Touga were merely a book or a set of keys that could be mislaid. Then he told himself that Touga had probably just been restless, had probably gone out to feed his desires for extravagance and attention.
In the morning, he was sure that Touga must have shared some girl's bed for the night, a girl chosen for nothing so much as her capacity to worship someone who was essentially a stranger. When he left, Saionji made sure that there was food in the fridge and a note on the counter, not allowing the slightest hint of the disapproval he felt to sneak into the gesture. There would be no point in starting a fight.
When he came back in the afternoon, Saionji yelled at the cat when it stood by the entryway, watching him unblinkingly, because it never greeted him at the door. It was always too busy following Touga around. The cat ran away and hid under the coffee table.
Yelling at the cat wasn't fair, and he knew it wasn't fair, and he regretted having done it. The cat was just a cat, it didn't have the power to make someone stay or leave, even if Saionji wanted it to have that power, or used it to that end. He spent two hours on his hands and knees, trying to apologize to the cat.
The cat stared back at him with wide, green-gold eyes, blinking slowly. He had no idea what it was thinking. If it had been Touga, he would have been pleased that Saionji would be desperate enough to beg forgiveness after having been baited into losing control. Because no one was ever angry with Touga unless he wanted them to be.
Saionji gave up on the cat before he had the chance to go back to blaming it for things it couldn't have done.
The next day, Saionji didn't make it to class.
Was this what Touga had meant by "no promises": that one day, without warning, he would be gone?
But in a certain sense, he wasn't really gone. The apartment was littered with signs of his presence; still-rumpled sheets, clothes, a whole shelf of jars and bottles in the bathroom, dirty cups, the cat with its demands for attention. Saionji found them one by one, and the way he regarded them, automatically, made him aware, in stages, that he was still living his life around the assumption of another person, one who was now absent from the space that created.
He didn't know which was worse: having no idea where Touga was or having a very strong suspicion that he knew exactly where Touga was. He changed his mind about it at least twice a day. Was there any place more dangerous, more toxic, more damaging than the sunny courtyards and arcaded hallways of Ohtori Academy? Was there anything more willfully self-destructive than going back?
The days passed, and Saionji once more acclimated himself to living alone. He no longer announced his departure in the morning or arrival in the evening, as the cat seemed indifferent to such things, and there was no one else to hear. He no longer moved about the space as if making room for someone else. He fell once more into myriad little habits that he had formed in the time before Touga had arrived.
The apartment returned to the state of neat orderliness that isolation afforded him. The bed was made, the dishes washed. Touga's belongings were contained and set aside, with no one to use them and leave them lying about. Only the cat remained.
And then, Saionji opened the door one evening and the cat didn't greet him.
Touga was back. He was slouched in the chair, turned away from the door, staring at the wall. The cat sat five feet away, ears pricked, tail curled around its feet. It looked from Touga to Saionji and back again, every part of its body aside from its head and the tip of its tail held perfectly still.
Saionji wanted to rush forward, wanted to take Touga by the shoulders and dig his nails in out of relief and fear and desperation. He wanted to make Touga tell him where he'd been and promise that he would never, never disappear again.
"I'm home," Saionji said hesitantly. He got no response.
It wasn't pride than held him back, but resignation. He could have done all that, but it wouldn't gain anything. He could have made Touga speak, but he couldn't put an end to the silence that had settled over him. He could have told Touga how worried he had been, but he couldn't make him believe that it mattered. And he could probably have extracted a promise from Touga, but that was guaranteed to end badly.
The swell of gratitude that Saionji had felt upon Touga's return ebbed away, leaving nothing in its wake but a sense of helplessness.