Chapter Text
“Yamaguchi, your fanfiction obsession is getting out of hand. Hitoka told me yesterday that you forgot to have your lunch and dinner because you were too busy reading a soulmate fanfic.” Kiyoko gently scolds the freckled face boy for his mindlessness.
“You don't understand Kiyoko san. When reading a book, you have to learn everything about a character. Right?” Yamaguchi questions with bright starry eyes.
“How they look, how they talk, what they like but in fanfics you already know the characters very well. You don't need to know about them. You already do and you can read different stories of the same people in so many different scenarios,” He stops to take a deep breath.
“I think Soulmates too are kind of similar if such things really exist. Your heart already knows them even if your brain has forgotten. They are your soulmate, you and them are born from the same star dust! How cool is that! Both of you must have lived so many lives together and you will too in this one.” Yamaguchi keeps on explaining, his hands flying in different directions in animated motions.
“It's okay if they're taking their time to find you. The universe is vast! But so is your love for each other! You'll find them surely and you'll feel the happiness you feel when you find a fanfic you were looking for a long time, the one whose name you had forgotten, the one you forgot to bookmark or maybe the one deleted by the author but someone like Yachi san was kind enough to send you the downloaded copy. You'll feel complete.” Yamaguchi ended his rant leaving his roommate, correction, newly “Ex”-roommate’s girlfriend visually perplexed.
Yamaguchi Tadashi leads a simple life. He lives in his shared apartment complex with his roommate Yachi. He goes to college for an Arts and Literature degree. He reads fanfics most of the time obviously. He paints or make fanarts or study whenever he’s not reading fanfics. Yachi and her girlfriend Kiyoko has unofficially adopted Yamaguchi due to his self-destructing habits.
Yamaguchi loves fanfics. Soulmate AUs to be precise. And him not being a very social butterfly leaves him a lot of room and time to build his own universe in his head.
Yamaguchi isn’t much of a ranter. He generally is a kind of person who keeps his thought to himself. He is quite nervous now that all of Yachi’s belongings are packed in different boxes but he also feels happy for her; proud even. In a way they are quite the same, introverted, easily nervous. But then Yachi had met Kiyoko and her life wasn't quite the same anymore. Kiyoko brought the best out of Yachi, she always helps her with her social anxiety and phobia of people. When Yachi told her roommate of four years that she would be moving out and started living with her girlfriend Kiyoko, Yamaguchi was beyond pleased. He also felt a pang of jealousy and sadness for himself but he didn't let it show.
Like right now.
He's bullshiting his way through his fanfiction theories to the couple while a part of him is dying inside.
Yachi is still there but he already misses her.
It feels like middle school all over again where just when he had made some new friends they had left him.
But he's an adult now and he knows that Yachi will still be there for him.
Maybe Kiyoko have sensed the dark cloud looming over Yamaguchi's heart despite his rather cheerful behaviour. Maybe that's why she proposes that they should go to the Firework Matsuri that was happening a few blocks down the road as a farewell party for Yachi. Yamaguchi agrees.
Yachi on the other hand asks Yamaguchi if he wants some new roommate and after lots of thinking when Yamaguchi says yes, Yachi pulls out a few advertisements’ poster from her backpack that she designed herself and gives them to her best friend to put around campus.
The dark clouds hovering around the green haired boy's heart starts clearing away a little bit.
-
Yachi and Kiyoko have a lot to unpack but that doesn't stop them to spend a few extra minutes with Yamaguchi. Given the fact that the boy suffers from loneliness.
They are at the Matsuri (festival) where Yachi is insisting on buying everything she sees as compensation of her moving out.
Yamaguchi isn't letting her.
Soon enough they find themselves outside the tent of a Psychic.
Kiyoko isn't really interested in going inside but the puppy eyes, both Yachi and Yamaguchi gives her is irresistible.
Once inside, they are pleasantly surprised. Previously they thought that the interior would be mysterious, with a dangerous vibe, maybe a few skulls would be laying around, maybe a talking raven would greet them with head-puzzling riddles, a very old lady with several symbolic tattoos would determine their destiny. But nothing.
The inside was rather pastel themed and rather with cute aesthetic as Yachi claimed.
Instead of an old wrinkled woman, a girl probably in her twenties welcomes them rather cheerfully.
Yachis excitement is out of the roof with the overall atmosphere. She wants to do a tarot card reading to know what the future has in hold for her and her Shimizu senpai.
The psychic girl lays out several shiny stones and tarot cards with nice bright colours to choose from.
Yachi chooses a deck and a stone, making the grin on the girl's lips wider.
After nearly half an hour of picking different kind of oracle cards, Yachi is more than satisfied with her reading as their future ahead is bright.
Now it's Yamaguchi's turn and when the girl asks what he wants to know without even thinking his mouth goes, "my soulmate."
Yamaguchi takes his sweet time deciding on a deck of cards and stones, the deck being a colour of black with shiny golden lining and ethereal celestial bodies. The stone he decided to pick are moon rocks, which he feels extremely drawn to.
After deciding his pick, when he looks at the psychic face, he finds her face extremely serious and the atmosphere of the room suddenly feels strange, its so heavy that even Kiyoko and Yachi can feel it.
Whatever comes out of the girl’s mouth for the next hour or so, no one in the room was expecting to hear.
…
He feels like a weirdo for believing all these bullshit things. So what if a lady with fancy looking cards told him that his guardian angel is his soulmate who loved him deeply in the past life? That they loved him so much, they decided to not to be born in this celestial plane with him and protect him from above? Bullshit. Biggest load of bullshit he has heard in a while. But then again one of the “Who is your guardian angel” quiz also said the exact same thing word by word. It’s not like he was hearing what she was saying for the first time. He doesn't know. He doesn't understand. He's living in the 21st century for god's sake. People are making new scientific discoveries every day. But here he is even after knowing all of these facts and admitting that both the psychic lady and the uquiz quiz are big scam, he cannot help but cry. His heart aches and yearns and bleeds for this stupid guardian angel who's causing him so much pain.
Before he even knew what love is he looked for someone. Always. Everywhere he went, every step he took, every word he spoke, his eyes looked for someone. Longed for someone. That's when he befriended the moon. He could look at the moon for hours. Ever since he was a child, he loved the moon. The full, the half and the crescent. And on new moons he found this huge crater in his heart.
So, on a dire situation like this he looks at the crescent moon from his balcony. With Yachi san gone from the apartment there's this eerie silent stretching all over. A silent so serene that he could hear his tears falling on the ground.
He weeps to the moon.
Yamaguchi was always alone. He preferred being alone but today he felt extra lonely. The moon was almost gone. The remnants of its light being overpowered by the darkness all around. Like Yamaguchi's happiness. Feels like the moon is also mourning for him, feeling his pain. He thinks to himself that the moon must be missing the sun. How silly? There are so many stars all around? Why miss the sun? He feels unexplainable jealousy for the sun. But what Yamaguchi forgot was that the sun is also a star and the brightest and closer to the moon. It's weird how these abstract thoughts cloud Yamaguchi's head.
What's the point of living when he barely feels alive? Why does people make living like it's such a big deal? He's having these intrusive thoughts for a while now but tonight for the first time he lets himself think. He already found out that his soulmate was on another plane. Maybe they didn't trust him enough or have enough faith in him.
“Did you not love me enough to be with me in this life?” He wants to scream to the sky. To the barely visible illumination of the moon.
It may seem childish or foolish to others to see a 20 years old boy throwing a tantrum or contemplating the meaning of life over a hypothetical thing like this but for Yamaguchi it's everything. He's the boy who everyone left behind, he was the boy with abandonment issues, he's the boy who wasn't good enough.
But there's this one he is best at. Saying goodbye. All his life people have left him but he didn't have a hard time letting them go. He often finds Yachi texting her friends from school or friends from her old neighborhood, friends she left behind when coming to Tokyo. He wonders how it feels to have a friend who grew up with you.
So, when it comes to saying goodbye to the world, he's more than happy to be able to do it. There's nothing tying him down. No one holding him back. He has no friends, no family to lose him.
He feels restless. He doesn't want to stay here on this apartment. Or in this earth for that matter. He cannot see a future.
When Tadashi thought about today's possibilities, he didn't think it'd be like this. The thought of killing himself never came to his mind. But now that he is letting his mind explore that option, it doesn't sound too bad.
He's not being selfish. It's not like someone is going to break down like he is breaking down right now when he is gone.
“Is death the portal that'll take me to those adventures I want to go to?” He says out loud to the empty skies. He looks up with glazed eyes to look at the moon only to see it gone, hidden beneath dark black clouds.
No, he cannot do this today. He cannot leave this Earth without looking at the full moon one last time. It's the only thing he ever truly loved in this lifetime.
“27 more days and then I'll be free.” He promises the moon.
The moon though, has other plans for him.