Work Text:
Bang!
There’s a gun in the house, Gakushuu knows.
He knows where it is. He’s seen it: a just barely-there flash of grey metal, tucked in the corner of one of the cabinets in his father’s study. He’s seen it from the corner of his eye, when his father hadn’t quite managed to shut the drawer fast enough.
Then when his father did so a bit too quickly, Gakushuu could hear the faint scrape of metal against wood as the drawer’s contents jostled, in the thick silence of the dark, dark room.
A handgun, if Gakushuu had to guess. The drawer wouldn’t be big enough for anything else. It seemed like the sole occupant of that drawer, with how bare it had looked. Sitting naked behind a single door and a single lock, (not even in a case!), almost like an invitation.
He wonders if it’s loaded.
Father’s not good at keeping secrets.
He would have been, maybe when Gakushuu was younger, back when he still wanted to believe every single lie that dripped off the man’s tongue. His father could have told him anything in the world, and Gakushuu would have believed him.
He had, for many long years.
Even the best person in the world couldn’t keep up a front forever. That is Father’s biggest mistake. He has a mask for every waking instance, even in his own house. Even the best liars are still human - humans slip up. Gakuhou was bound to trip over his own cracks at some point.
(Especially, when he doesn’t have a place to take his masks off. You switch from one to another, then another, then another. If you don’t switch them fast enough, someone might see your face. Maybe you might see your own face. Maybe you should, see your own face. Before you forget it.)
Father’s not good at hiding the gun.
Father’s tried to hide other things. He’s tried to hide many many things from Gakushuu. Except he forgets that this is Gakushuu’s house, too.
Maybe when Gakushuu was younger, he would never have dared to stick his little fingers into dark holes or dig around the places that Father said he wasn’t allowed to be in.
There’s a false sense of security that a house affords a person. After all, you’re expected to be most vulnerable, where your house is. Father lives in this house, and he’s not good at keeping secrets in it. He’s comfortable, and he’s human, and he’s still living in the world where when Gakushuu was younger , and he forgets that this is Gakushuu’s house, too.
Gakushuu takes a lockpick to it one afternoon. There are three things in the drawer. A photograph, a letter, and a handgun.
You couldn’t get a gun in Japan.
That’s the most interesting discovery to Gakushuu. He already knew about the photograph and the letter.
It’s odd, sometimes, when you’re wading ankle-deep through western media, and the people from the West talk about getting a gun like it’s an ordinary chore. Rice, milk, eggs, pistol - into the shopping cart, out of the store. You couldn’t get a gun in Japan.
It lies innocuously on the open wood of the unlocked drawer. Not even a case! Any other person could walk in here, break the locks, and arrest Father for a felony.
(Of course, no other person could walk in here. They would have to get through the front door.)
Father has a gun in the house. How did he get it? Gakushuu almost considers asking him - what a puzzle!
He’s only seen one other person with a gun. (Secondhand, he’s heard there are about twenty seven more.) (“They’ve been modified to all hell. They’re useless for anything other than BB pellets. That’s probably the reason they let us keep this as a souvenir.”)
He holds the gun, and points it at the floor. Feels up the handle. Opens the gate, half-cocks the pistol. Rotates the cylinder chamber until it aligns with the loading gate, depresses the unloading rod.
A cartridge pops out.
Gakushuu’s breath catches. The gun was loaded. How exciting.
He sets the cartridge very softly on the floor, between his legs. Slowly rotates the cylinder again… ah, another one. Two. Three. Four. Five.
It’s fully loaded. How exciting .
A giggle erupts from him, before he can stop it.
Father’s not good at keeping secrets.
Every day,
Gakushuu plays Russian Roulette.
See, life doesn’t play out like a consistent, unskippable track. The beats are shuffled. Some of the days are good days, and some of the days are bad days.
That is the problem, because when Gakushuu wakes up, he never knows if it’s going to be a good day, or a bad day.
It’s like pointing a gun to your head. Would you prefer it if half the rounds are empty? Because that meant there was always a chance you could live. Or you could live your life as the seconds tick by, like you’re suspended forever in the loop of those few seconds of not knowing.
Sometimes Gakushuu wishes he had the security of certainties.
He doesn’t remember elementary school enough for him to say if he misses it. The walks home were always the worst, because he never knew what sort of mood Father would be in. Would it be a good day, or a bad day? He couldn’t be late, but he always tried his best to be, and the fifteen minutes it took for him to walk home were always the worst fifteen minutes of the day.
Then again, that was elementary school. The memory of what that must have felt like, quickly dissolved in the coming years when he entered middle school. Now those fifteen minutes started the very moment he woke up, and proceeded to follow him as he followed Father to the exact same place.
The letter is old, the photograph is older. The ink has faded along the well-worn folds. The edges of the photograph are smudged. There are dabs of splotched ink on the letter, smearing some of the words together.
Ah, the letter. Gakushuu enjoys reading it. There’s no mention of him anywhere - why would there be? He is unimportant to this narrative.
It’s a piece of history, for the both of them. If it were up to Gakushuu, he’d put them up in good sturdy frames, and hang them. On the wall, by the trophy case. So he can walk past his awards and read the letter over and over again, without having to worry that they’ll crumble to dust in his fingers every time he turns them around.
He’s already made good, clean scans of both the letter and the photograph. Every day he thinks of reprinting it on sturdy paper and tacking it to his room wall. He doesn’t, though, because he’s better at keeping secrets than Father is.
Ren tells him he has the unfortunate tendency to overthink. Gakushuu doesn’t consider it overthinking. He has contingencies for the way everything could go, steps that he doesn’t write down because he already knows them by heart.
What if he wants to run away? He can take the ledge by the window, and be over the gate before Father makes it out the front door. He has a stack of cash, and his passport. A lot of people overthink what to bring. Gakushuu is not an overthinker - he will not be caught in his own clothes with his own things because no doubt Father already knows to look for them. He doesn’t think he would have much in the way of sentimentality to bring - after all, if he’s running, if he’s actually running, that means he’s crossed the impassable border of deciding to leave every single little bit of his old life behind. He wouldn’t even need to bring his phone.
What if Father dies? An accident, perhaps? At this age, he’s still a minor, unfortunately. He doesn’t know the specifics of Father’s will for him, but he’s the only heir. It doesn’t matter to him either ways - if Father decided to be philanthropic for once in his death, Gakushuu won’t dispute it. He has his own savings, and he has no intention of keeping the same lavish lifestyle. The only thing that would matter is where his guardianship would go until he’s a legal adult. He has no relatives, he may have to ask Ren. God forbid he is sent to an orphanage - see plan Run.
What if it wasn’t an accident?
Gakushuu thinks about it, a lot. The great possibility of losing. The fantasy that he’ll win. There is no conceivable chance that he’d beat Father in a fight, unless he’s asleep in the middle of the night and Gakushuu has a gun.
Ah, a gun.
There are bad days, and then there are good days. There are days where he thinks of the gun in the locked cabinet in Father’s study, and there are days where he thinks he loves Father so much that his heart can’t contain it all, and he’ll lose his words trying to say it.
When he thinks of running away, he always thinks of Father finding him. Finding him, and saying, “come back, I love you.” It sounds different, every single time in his head. Most of the times it sounds like himself.
Come back to me, I love you. There’s so much of it, Gakushuu can’t articulate the way it spills out of him. He wants to be hopeless. Everyone talks about cutting contact; Gakushuu doesn’t want to cut contact. He doesn’t want to burn that bridge. He wants them to work, so so badly.
He thinks of red-stained sheets, and the recoil of a gun at three in the morning. (Plan: not an accident.) Then he feels so so guilty, and so so bad. He is just as terrible of a person, thinking of killing someone he loves so so much.
It always comes to him at the worst moments, in brief flashes - when they walk past each other in the halls at school, or when they’re at the dinner table, or when he hears soft footsteps pass his room door. When the look Father sends him is a little bit too harsh, or when Father’s tone stings a little bit too much, or when the carpet scuffs just a little, and Gakushuu thinks, I want to kill him.
Gakushuu rewrote the letter once. He rewrote it in his own handwriting, on his own piece of paper, with his own pen, in his own room. He just wanted to see how it would feel like.
It’s not always the gun. Before the gun, it was the big meat-cutting kitchen knife, the one that Father keeps sharp for the good beef.
When he thinks about it the odds are always worse, because he always has to get close to use it, and Father is a light sleeper.
When he wants to give himself a treat he thinks of being super extra lucky that night and making it all the way across the room without waking him up, and then he has to think about where he would have to hit. He only had one shot, to make it count. A cut on the face would hurt a lot but it wouldn’t kill someone, the bones there were too thick. The neck, then - a very quick plunge through a soft throat. The knife would probably get caught at the spine, but it was probably fine, by then. Or maybe a thick slice diagonally down the thigh? The death would not be immediate, but there were very important arteries in there, and it would immobilize him. Enough time for Gakushuu to run with Father’s phone, and no way for him to call for help.
Probably. Sometimes he imagines Father waking up just as the knife grazes skin, and shooting his hand up to grab Gakushuu. In some scenarios he thinks it’s an intruder, and in some he expects Gakushuu to be the one to have come. In some scenarios Father breaks Gakushuu’s hand, in some he slams him to the floor, and in others he goes for the knife, and then Gakushuu’s the one bleeding out.
Gakushuu always concludes his thought experiments the same way. Unfeasible .
Gakushuu rarely thinks about killing himself. It’s a win, in his book - see? He’s not suicidal. He’s fine.
Plan Suicide was an option that included the aforementioned decision to uproot everything he has ever known. (See plan Run.) If he wanted to kill himself, he could go for any of his other contingencies, which would provide an equivalent solution. Running and suicide had equivalent consequences if he succeeded - he would leave his entire life behind him. Killing Father would… well, a success would mean immediate implementation of plan Run, and a failure would also mean an immediate implementation of plan Run. Subsequent failures of plan Run would mean the immediate implementation of plan Suicide, which would bring him back to the drawing board and also would be unideal, because Gakushuu doesn’t carry out plans if he knew he would fail.
So there. Suicide isn’t in the cards for him, because if he was going to go all in, he would just go all in.
This is what he always concludes, in the middle of the day.
At night, he doesn’t sleep, and the feeling in his chest aches so bad until he feels his head swim and his eyes tear up. He is a terrible, terrible person for even being able to think about any of these.
On good days Gakushuu thinks about a future where they’re both alive, and then it is a tossup as to where the rest of his thoughts take him.
Some days he thinks about cutting contact, and he doesn’t know how to think about it. He loves Father too much to think about never seeing him again. He thinks about how Father would feel - Father loves him too, obviously. He would be so so hurt, just like how Gakushuu would be so so heartbroken. People say cutting strings is supposed to make your life better, but Gakushuu can’t imagine how it would be any better, to have to do something like this.
Some days he thinks about reconciling with Father. They’d be better, together. Gakushuu will wake up to always all good days, and breakfast will be a “good morning”, and the gun in the house will not be loaded. The letter and the picture will be in the frame by the trophy case-
Some days Gakushuu thinks about the past.
Some days Gakushuu thinks about a future where he’s alive. He’ll wake up to all good days, and there will be three seats at the table. Maybe Mom will still be here - there would be the four of them at breakfast. There won’t be a gun, and there won’t be a letter, and there won’t be a picture.
This thought comes, few and far in between. It comes often. It turns good days into bad days and bad days into worse days. Gakushuu tries to think about loving all of them, but he doesn’t remember Mom at all. He thinks he loved her, but he doesn’t remember what that feels like, and it makes him feel terrible, because what kind of person doesn’t remember their own Mother? So he only tries to think of the three of them.
He always thinks of Father loving him back as much as Gakushuu loves him. They’ll be able to do all the things Gakushuu wished they could do, like say “good morning”, and talk at breakfast, and wake up wanting to go downstairs without wanting to turn around and go back to sleep until tomorrow.
He hates thinking about this because it will never happen.
(He thinks he loved Ikeda. He doesn’t remember. He still does, he thinks, because whenever he reads the letter and sees the photograph, his chest hurts in the exact same way it always does when he thinks about Father.
Gakushuu wonders what Ikeda’s contingencies were. Did he try to run away before that? Did he try to kill someone? He must have failed, then. Gakushuu feels sorry for him.)
Gakushuu wonders if he should put the gun back together. He has to, because he is supposed to be good at keeping secrets. If he leaves it apart, or unloads it, Father will find out.
But then he keeps thinking of the loaded gun in the house.
Gakushuu wonders if he’s lying to himself. He thinks of his contingencies.
Can he actually kill Father? He doesn’t know. He loves Father so much, he can’t imagine ever-...
Except he does. He always imagines it, doesn’t it? What kind of terrible person is he? How can he think about such terrible things? Ren is his best friend, but he never wants anything bad to happen to Ren. He never feels that overwhelming feeling swelling in his chest in the same way. Does that mean he doesn't love Ren enough? Gakushuu doesn't think he wants to, then, if it's going to make him want to hurt.
Is that what love is? Not knowing if your love will kill someone.
That must mean Father does love him.
Why does he have a gun in the house?