Title: Thin
Fandom: Original fiction.
Characters: Meki/Yuku
Theme: #16 - Honesty
Rating: PG
Summary: You'll have me back, but it's gonna take a week. --Stars, 'Take Me to the Riot'
Disclaimer: Meki and Yuku are mine. It is advised they remain mine, because they're really just two sick bastards I can't imagine anyone else wanting.
So. He was in the middle of a controversy, or the rebirth thereof, and the editor he swore he hated was pregnant, and he'd maybe just shattered something in his relationship. Figures. His ridiculous not-family finally gets their heads screwed halfway back on, and then Lavender Suruji steps in (is dragged in, but Yuku had to protect him, he had to).
Him, and a couple of stupid countries who seem to enjoy wasting their time on a literary battle.
Three days after the shatter, he mentally declared it a crisis and went to do what was just normal in such crises-ask Meki for his opinion. He knew that this was not the best idea in the world, but dammit, he was fresh out of sane resources, between an eleven-year-old, an alcoholic, a pregnant woman, and a man who had been wearing black lipstick for nine years.
He found Meki lying on the floor next to the kotatsu they'd already shoved everything else aside to make room for. He was writing with low-grade annoyance at the paper or maybe at everything else, so Yuku stretched out beside him and waited for him to pause and rest his writing hand before he took it. Meki didn't look at him, focusing his vision closely on the words, but his arm tensed.
"What am I doing here, exactly?"
Meki flipped a page in his notebook. "I assumed you were trying to kill me."
"Objectively, Meki."
Meki rolled his eyes. "Objectively? Well, objectively, someone might say you're just plain being stupid, though for what reason I don't know yet. A paranoid person might say you're doing this deliberately as payback for all the heroin or something. Objectively, I would say you are out of your fucking mind for thinking you could shelter Lavender easily, and twice as insane for thinking you could pull off the possible attempt at destroying me. You've already literally killed me once, I mean, come on, you could at least not do it figuratively later."
"I didn't think I could pull it off," was all Yuku could tell him, weakly. "There was nothing to pull off."
"Even if there was, you failed. That must hurt." Meki's voice was as black and barely-composed as the hair flipping incessantly into his face. He was speaking in sarcasm and cruelty, biting out coldness in the hopes of it hitting Yuku, but beneath it was the slightly mad urge to scream.
"Then what am I going to do?" Yuku asked. Yeah. Bad idea.
He needed to sleep more.
Meki's eyes actually widened. He closed his notebook and sat up to stare at Yuku for a moment or two in a combination of disbelief and irritation so heavy Yuku thought he might strangle him.
"Honestly?" Meki began. Then he stopped, like he had to think about it. "Honestly," he repeated, "the fact that you don't know-three hundred years and you don't know-is your answer."
"Meki-"
"You should be worrying more about what that means," Meki said, as calmly as possible, "than what you intend to do about this." He stood up, letting his voice slip back into annoyance. "Now, I have to work, because if I don't, Raizu will do the physical damage you've neglected, and then I will have nothing and my hands might be too paralyzed to finish this chapter later."
Meki disappeared too quickly for Yuku to say anything, leaving him to cringe and think that today was really not his day for words.
The worst part, Yuku had to think, was that Meki was telling the truth.