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This isn't how it was supposed to end.
Acrid smoke fills Sakura's lungs as he drags himself across the courtyard, red trailing behind him, above him, around him. The arbour on the roof is burning. He needs to get up there. He needs to help. He needs to protect them.
"I'm counting on you," Tsubakino had said, and now he's lying on the ground bloodied and motionless, piled up in a wretched heap with Suzuri and Nakamura and Mizuki and Momose and Hiiragi and Tomiyama and Togame and Kurita and Kakiuchi and Takanashi and Anzai and Kaji and Tsugeura and Kiryuu and Sugishita and Sakura is crushing them beneath his weight, dragging them down down down down
A hand grabs him by the ankle and coils around his leg.
"Now, where do you think you're going, Sakura?"
He tries to kick it away, tries to get back on his feet, but there are more of them, limbs slithering around his body, trapping him, pulling him back towards the ground and then under it, into a bottomless ocean that's freezing cold even though the world is on fire.
He tries to scream but no sound emerges.
"This is your fault," a voice whispers by his ear, and he shudders.
"...kun..."
"This is your fault," a voice whispers, and he's on the roof, helpless to do anything but stand there as Umemiya is crushed beneath Takiishi's heel and the sky burns. Unable to save Suou as he meets the same fate, lying in a pool of his own blood and still smiling despite it all, choking his way through an apology and Sakura is drowning in ice water.
"...Haruka-kun..."
"This is your fault," a voice whispers, hands on his body, restraining him, and he's never felt more violated than when Takiishi turns his wrath on Nirei and Sakura can only watch, is forced to watch, sick to his stomach. Never felt more hopeless than when he lifts Nirei by the throat, choking him, and only once his body goes limp holds him out over the open sky and
"Haruka-kun!"
He lashes out and breaks the surface in a single movement, punching up right into Suou's jaw where he's hovering by Sakura's shoulder. He grunts lightly.
Sakura's gaze darts around the darkened room, breath erratic and heartbeat pounding in his own ears—and he realises he's back in their apartment.
"...Hayato," he croaks.
"You've still got quite the mean left hook," Suou mutters, rubbing his jaw, and Sakura feels a wave of guilt and shame overtake him.
"I'm s—"
"Hush. None of that." He moves his free hand to Sakura's cheek instead, cradling his face in the meat of his palm. "Was it that nightmare again?" Sakura nods, and Suou leans down to press their foreheads together, eye glinting in the low light. "It's okay. We're still here. We're not going anywhere." Sakura sighs against him, savouring the warmth of skin contact as tension gradually melts from his limbs.
After a moment, he turns his head away from Suou's touch, looking for further reassurance, and is met with the sight of Nirei still fast asleep at his other side, cheek squashed cutely against his pillow as he slowly breathes in and out.
It hadn't been like this, originally.
At first, they'd just bought an apartment together because it was convenient; or so Sakura had believed at the time. The truth was that both Nirei and Suou had loathed the thought of leaving him alone after they graduated from Fuurin, so had proposed the idea of the three of them sharing an apartment in order to save on rent. So they went hunting, and eventually found somewhere that suited their needs: not spacious, but comfortable.
Early on they'd each kept to their own room, but slowly found themselves spending more and more time together in Suou's, which was the largest. Sakura was frequently plagued with nightmares—nightmares which, as the other two would eventually find out, often involved them coming to harm—and so he would frantically knock on their doors in the middle of the night, checking to make sure his horrible dreams hadn't become an even more horrible reality. On those nights, they'd end up all crammed into Suou's bed, sleeping surprisingly comfortably in a tangle of limbs despite the tight quarters (and despite the aches and pains they'd inevitably be left with the following morning).
Eventually, after they'd committed to buying a larger bed to share between them, Nirei's room became a spare bedroom, and Sakura's room (the smallest, which he had insisted on taking when they got the place) became a home office.
Out of all of them, Nirei is the one who kept the most of his boyish charm as they grew together over the years, and it shows best when he's relaxed like this, all the taut and anxious lines of his face smoothed out. Like this, he looks just like the teenager who had taken Sakura's hand and dragged him into his new life kicking and screaming that fateful spring. With his left hand uncurled, as gentle as it was briefly violent, Sakura sweeps blond bangs from closed eyes.
He needs to get a touch-up soon. His roots are showing.
It had taken time for him to learn how to hold another person. It was a long and arduous process, but Nirei and Suou had both taught him patiently, alongside all their other friends. Shown him how to love and be loved in turn.
Gently turning Nirei's head so as not to wake him, he puts a hand either side of his face, brushing careful thumbs beneath twitching eyelids. He's dreaming, Sakura thinks.
He presses a kiss to Nirei's forehead—Akihiko, he mouths against the skin there—and feels warmth settle heavy like a blanket over his ribcage, once more putting out the anxious fire reignited in his heart. He's okay. They're okay.
It'll be okay.
Suou slips an arm around his waist, pulling himself flush against the length and breadth of Sakura's back. It's minute, but he can evidently still feel it when Sakura tenses, nausea twisting in his gut, a tiny insistence that he doesn't deserve this.
That voice got smaller with time, but it never really went away. He was told by people much smarter than him that it probably never would, but it'd at least get easier to manage. On good days he can even forget it's there.
"Is this okay?" Suou asks, voice little more than a caress of breath against his ear so much unlike the writhing, grating thing from his nightmares.
It had taken time for both of them to get past Suou's walls, too, though that was less of a breaking down and more of a slow, systematic dismantling: Nirei finding the cracks in his façade and Sakura helping pry them open, gradually revealing the truth of the man hidden beneath layers upon layers of deception and deflection. It still feels like they're learning new things about him every day. But that's fine. They have time to spare.
Sakura grumbles something that sounds vaguely like "of course it's okay," slowly but surely relaxing into the touch. He hooks his chin over the crown of Nirei's head, pulling him closer, and feels him unconsciously nuzzle into the crook of his neck in response.
He feels so warm.
This is where I belong, Sakura thinks, and right now it's more of a reminder to ground himself than something he truly believes. Suou noses at the nape of his neck and it tickles.
"I can hear you thinking."
"Then quit listenin' and go back to sleep."
"And leave you all alone with your thoughts?" Suou pokes a finger into his side and he barely suppresses a squeak. "I'd hardly say they're good company at this hour."
"Shut up," he hisses. "You're gonna wake him up."
Nirei groans, a sound which extends into a grumble.
"Too late," he complains into Sakura's collarbone, muffled by the fabric of his t-shirt.
"Aw, Hikkun, did we disturb you? I'm sorry," Suou says, not sounding sorry at all.
"No you're not," Nirei says, wriggling out of Sakura's hold to look him in the eye. "Nightmares again?" He hums by way of a response. "Then we'll stay awake with you. Right, Hayato-san?" Sakura feels rather than sees Suou's nod.
"Don't you have work tomorrow?" he asks, not wanting to be any more of a burden to them than he has to be (not wanting to drag them down down down—
"This is more important," Nirei insists, staring him down with a single-minded determination that leaves no room to argue. "We love you, you know?" They've told him as such maybe hundreds of times now, but he still feels his face heat with embarrassment.
"I know," he says, followed by a half-mumbled "you too."
Nirei's face brightens and, a little drowsily, Sakura thinks it's too early for the sun to be rising.
"Is there anything we can do to help?" he asks, taking Sakura's left hand between his own and rubbing a calloused thumb across the back in a soothing gesture. "Anything at all."
"Just… talk, I guess."
"What about?"
"Anything."
"Why don't you tell us a story?" Suou suggests.
"You know more of them than I do," Nirei objects.
"But you tell them better."
Sighing, Nirei relents, and begins his tale.
The story itself doesn't matter; Sakura is hooked on the sound of Nirei's voice instead, listening intently to the way it lilts and wavers, the occasional call and response with Suou, a quiet laugh, a soft hum. It lulls him, and the last conscious thought he has before a dreamless sleep claims him is:
I'm so lucky to be here.
And for now, until the light of dawn chases away any remaining shadows of doubt,
It's enough.