Chapter 4: Collision Course
The silence in Yuji’s apartment was a living thing. It pressed against Todo’s eardrums, louder than the muted images flashing on the television screen. There, Miki-chan was dancing in a pink frilly dress, smiling brightly under studio lights. Here, the real thing sat rigidly on the far end of the same sofa, wearing a faded black sweatshirt and staring at a crack in the plaster wall as if it held the secrets of the universe.
A week. Seven days of fractured sleep and jagged memories that felt both hyper-real and completely unreal. The taste of salt and lies. The rough give of tatami against his spine. The shuddering, angry silence afterwards.
Yuji, blessedly oblivious, beamed from the floor where he was rooting through a mini-fridge. “This is awesome! I’ve been trying to get you guys to hang out forever. Brotherly bonding! Megumi’s way less scowly when you get to know him, right, Todo?”
Megumi’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. He didn’t turn from the wall.
Todo grunted, a non-committal sound that hurt his own throat. He was trying to reconcile two images: the idol on screen, all calculated sweetness, and the person three feet away, who had cursed into his skin. The cognitive dissonance was a physical nausea. His eyes kept drifting from the glittering screen to the profile of Megumi’s face. The sharp line of his nose was the same. The sweep of his eyelashes was the same. It was all the same, and it was all a lie, and Todo had touched it.
“I got soda, and… oh, apple juice!” Yuji announced, triumphantly holding up a box. “Megumi, you like this stuff, right?”
“Sure.” Megumi’s voice was flat, his natural baritone a dissonant punch in the room after the higher pitch from the TV.
“Great! Be right back, forgot glasses.” Yuji hopped up and bustled into the kitchenette, whistling a tune that was, horrifyingly, the chorus of Miki-chan’s latest single.
The moment the kitchen door swung shut, the quality of the silence changed. It became charged, brittle. The cheerful whistle was a mockery.
Todo couldn’t stand it. The words climbed up his chest, hot and compulsive. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and spoke to the low coffee table littered with Yuji’s game controllers.
“I can’t stop thinking about it.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Megumi go perfectly still. Not a breath.
“The apartment,” Todo continued, the words spilling out in a low, rough stream. “The posters. The… the floor. I keep feeling the damn floor. I dream about the stars on your ceiling. They’re peeling.”
“Stop.” The word was a shard of ice.
But Todo was already turning towards him, driven by a week’s worth of fractured thoughts. “Was any of it real? The crying on stream? That time you said you felt connected to your fans? Was that just…”
“A script?” Megumi finally turned his head. His eyes were dark and hollow, the same emptiness Todo had seen just before the world ended. “Mostly. They give us bullet points. ‘Show vulnerability here. Express gratitude there.’ It’s customer service with a beat.” He looked back at the TV, where his other self was blowing a kiss to the camera. “You bought the product. Don’t complain about the packaging.”
The casual cruelty was back, but it was thinner now. Transparent. Todo could hear the exhaustion propping it up. He reacted without thinking, his hand shooting out and clamping around Megumi’s wrist where it rested on the couch cushion. The bone felt fragile under his grip.
Megumi flinched, a full-body jolt, but he didn’t pull away immediately. He looked down at Todo’s hand, then slowly up his arm to his face. His expression was unreadable.
“Why?” Todo whispered, his thumb pressing against the rapid pulse point. “Why let me? Why not just kick me out?”
For a long second, Megumi just looked at him. The bitterness in his eyes softened into something more complicated, more weary. A tiny, fractured smile touched his lips, gone in an instant. “You looked so destroyed,” he said, his voice barely audible over the silent, gyrating image on screen. “I thought… good. That’s punishment enough for both of us.”
The statement landed like a physical blow. It wasn’t affection. It wasn’t desire. It was mutual recognition of a nuclear-level mistake. A shared sentence.
Todo’s grip loosened. Before he could formulate any response—anger, hurt, understanding—the kitchen door banged open.
“Got the good glasses! The ones without the chips!” Yuji announced, carrying three mismatched mugs carefully.
Megumi pulled his wrist back as if burned, settling his hands in his lap. Todo straightened up, running a hand through his own hair, feeling his face was fever-hot.
Yuji stopped, his cheerful gaze darting between them. “Whoa. You guys okay? You’re both super red.” He grinned, a lightbulb going off over his head. “Did you finally have, like, a real conversation? Was it about workout routines? I knew you’d find common ground!”
“Something like that,” Megumi muttered, accepting the apple juice Yuji poured into a mug adorned with a cartoon cat.
“We talked,” Todo said, the word utterly inadequate. He took the soda Yuji offered, the can cold and slick in his palm.
“Awesome!” Yuji plopped down between them, his presence a warm, naive barrier. He gestured at the TV with his drink. “Oh, this is a good part! Look, she’s about to do that spin thing. Miki-chan’s the best, right?”
On screen, the idol spun, her skirt flaring. In the soft afternoon light of the apartment, the real person sipped apple juice, his throat working as he swallowed. Todo watched him. He watched the subtle tremor in his fingers. He watched the way he refused to look at the screen, his attention fixed instead on the sunlight cutting a bright rectangle across Yuji’s scuffed floor.
The secret sat between them on the sofa, a third, invisible presence. It buzzed in the air, charged and dangerous. It was in the memory of the tatami, and the salt, and the whispered confession that wasn’t love but need. Yuji chattered about an upcoming game release, blissfully bridging a gap that no longer existed in the way he thought.
Todo took a long drink. The soda was too sweet. He finally understood the punchline of the joke, and it wasn’t funny at all. The punishment wasn’t the revelation. The punishment was this: having to sit here, knowing everything, while the world carried on pretending. While his best friend smiled, and the image on screen smiled, and the boy he had fucked in a fit of ruinous passion sat beside him, hiding in plain sight.
He was still obsessed. The target had just shifted, imploded, and reformed into something infinitely more complicated. He didn’t know what it was. He only knew he couldn’t stop looking.