Disclaimer: I do not own Gravitation. Maki Murakami does.

Prompt: It eats at Shuichi, that Yuki won't share a bed with him anymore. It eats at Yuki, too.

Rating: M for mentions of rape, dark thoughts, language, and sexual suggestions.

Sickness

His body shook with shudders he refused to acknowledge.

The bed was cold, despite the recent addition of a thick black comforter to the normally sparse sheet set. The room was dark, even though the blinds had been open enough to allow beams of moonlight to provide some sense of lighting. The atmosphere was dense and suffocating, pulsating around him like taunting laughs that took the sweetest victory in the whimpers that begged to escape his mouth. He simply clenched his jaw, closed his eyes, and refused to let them. Or tried.

Yuki wasn't there, and it made Shuichi shiver more.

It had been gradual, he knew – the distancing of his lover – but it seemed so rapid. He could still remember the warmth of the other man, soundly at his side. The gentle traces of fingertips along his side and spine, a promise of more … strenuous activity. More often than not, he woke to find his arm reached across the blonde's side of the bed, or with the other's pillow pulled up against his chest.

'It's only been two weeks,' his mind chanted.

Two weeks, but he could still see Tachi's face every time he closed his eyes. He remembered the threats and whispers as though they had just been whispered in his ear, still felt the calloused hands roughly violating his body. More nightmares than he could care to recount, and that was the problem. Yuki had already started being careful around him, a little more distant, a little more cold. He shared the bed with a hesitation that Shuichi couldn't miss, held a slight timidity in his touches. But the final straw had been when the singer had shot up in bed, screaming Tachi's name and sobbing hysterically. Yuki had stared at him, golden eyes wide and glaring with an expression he had never seen before, before yanking the sheets away and racing from the room.

He hadn't come back, and that had been a week ago.

'It's me.' Shuichi reminded himself, stomach clenching. 'He can't stand me now, now that I've been ruined. He can smell it, too. Taste it. Them.'

The claim that had never quite warn off. The tainted oil that was permanently bathed onto his skin. The fact that the men followed him everywhere, clung to him, when Yuki tried to touch him. He was destroyed, no longer a desire, so deeply taken. There was nothing beautiful about him anymore, nothing anyone could yearn for without a wrinkle of disgust at the tarnish. He was not worthy of even the lowliest of attention, and certainly not of Yuki Eiri.

'But I need him.'

Slowly, carefully, as he had so many nights before, the pink-haired teen disentangled himself from the sheets, pausing only long enough to pull the black comforter around his shaking frame before moving forward. A cloak of darkness floating across moonlight; he paid no mind to the cold floor on his bare feet. Violet eyes hollow and elsewhere as they stared ahead at the door of the bedroom; he knees shook viciously in warning of collapse, and he let them, barely catching the doorframe to keep from knocking his head.

The tears of his nights were already falling as he clung to it.

'I'm so sorry, Yuki,' he mourned, scrunching his eyes closed again as his head rested against the wall. 'I know I ask too much of you, to keep me here, to watch me. I know it's selfish of me to stay, and hurt you like this. I…I know I have this sickness, Yuki. I know I can't be with you now, now that I'm like this. I know I should leave, before I give it to you, too.

'But I can't…I've tried. I promise I have. But I can't leave you, Yuki. I … I need you. I need to be with you so bad it makes my head hurt just to think about it. Please, I need you to … please, Yuki …'

"Please, Yuki," he whispered against the wall, just as he had the night before, and the one before that. "Don't leave me here. I need you. Please, Yuki." His shoulders shook as he slumped into the protective crinkles of the comforter.

"Help me."

-______________-

His hands shook so viciously that he had to put the mug down before it dropped and shattered.

His mug half-full of days-old coffee; it was tasteless to his numb tongue. Everything was tasteless. The coffee, the air, life. He barely acknowledged any of it, in the darkness he had surrounded himself in. The darkness he deserved to be in – surrounded by oblivion for the sins he had committed. His penance. It was cold, hauntingly so, and it felt like he was suffocating for the mere fact that he was still living, when justice demanded his death.

Everything had been shattered back into the places he always knew they would be, and it made Eiri's hands shake more.

He couldn't stand it. The recurring past, the guilt, the taunts the Devil threw in his face every time he dared to slip into bed beside the rose-haired teen he had taken into his home. The small hopes he had held of happiness at Shuichi's appearance had been destroyed with one vicious sweep – one violent act. He had tried to fight it, tried to prove that he was worthy of comforting the broken innocence, to prove that he could make things right. He was wrong.

'Two weeks,' he hissed silently, bitterly. 'Two fucking weeks.'

Two weeks since he had thrown Shuichi Shindou from his house, two weeks since Hiro Nakano had told him of the attack. Two weeks, but he could still imagine his young lover bound and begging under street lamps as he fell to his fate. The stabs of pain in his gut whenever the singer would moan and whimper in his sleep had grown increasingly difficult to ignore. He had tried to be careful with him, kept cool and distanced himself, attempting to give him room to heal. But then he had been woken in the middle of the night, to Shuichi's horrified screams of "Tachi!" and "Stop, please!", and inhuman, aggressive sobs that were still fresh enough in his memory to tear at his heart. He couldn't handle it. He could do it.

A week ago, he had run from the broken teenager, and had not gone back.

God, but it wasn't Shuichi that had driven him away. Never in a million years would Eiri ever blame the other male for what had happened.

'It's me.' He didn't need to tell himself that. 'All I ever do is hurt him. I keep those memories around him every time I touch him. I remind him of what they did to him, of the pain and betrayal he felt. I keep his nightmares alive.'

He yearned to hold the lithe body against his. To kiss every remaining bruise, every healing scrape. To suck atop every crude claim until his own had overtaken it. To cover Shuichi's tender body with his own, to taste the sweetness of strawberries that still clung to his skin. To beg the singer stay, to forgive him. To let him stay. But Eiri could not fool himself into believing he deserved to touch the soft skin again, to kiss the lips that had whispered his lies back to him. He wasn't worthy of him.

'But I …'

Mechanically, his knees uncurled to push him from the chair of his study, away from his closed laptop and solace of the dark. He cringed with each heavy step across the floor, desperately forcing his eyes anywhere but at the doorway he walked through. He was trembling by the time he stopped in front of the door that had been his destination for the past few nights, and without a word he allowed himself a moment of weakness to fall. Sliding down the wall, cradled against the panel of the entryway that blocked the innocence his heart soul craved for.

"Please, Yuki."The same words from last night; he bit his tongue to keep from answering, eyes burning as blood trickled into his mouth. "Don't leave me here. I need you. Please, Yuki."

'Don't ask me, please!' The writer's mind raged as his body curled into itself. His chest seared with a familiar pain as his arms wrapped around his knees.

"Help me."

Eiri ignored the tears that slipped by, dropping his head into his folded arms his body jerked with torment.

'God. Shuichi!

I can't.'

Last short one for a while. Got to start back on my "what-if" submissions. ^^;

Let me know what you're thinking, please!!!! The reviews from the last submission really … really made my week, guys. Thank you all so much! :)