Memoir.
When he wakes up, the first thing he sees is white.
He feels warm; someone is holding his hand, spreading the heat through his fingertips, up his arm and through the rest of his body. It’s nice, he thinks, feels as though his fingers are shaped to fit in the grooves of the hand in his. It moves then, a light twitch against him, brushing lightly against his knuckles, and then he sees a face swim into his vision.
He observes the high cheek bones, the shadows beneath the eyes, soft lips pursed, disbelieving. It’s a pretty face, he concludes. He hopes that the hand he’s holding belongs to that same face.
“Hikaru,” it says, mouth forming the words in a way he likens to a rose. He likes roses. They’re pretty and soft, very much like the face that is staring back at him, eyes blinking. “Hikaru,” it says again, voice filling with something all sorts of warm and excited and happy, and it’s then that he registers that the face belongs to a boy, who keeps calling his name.
That’s right. His name is Hikaru. Hikaru means light, which is a bit like how he feels now, floating and drifting and out of place.
“Hikaru,” the boy says, his eyes starting to glitter a little. Hikaru recognizes it as tears. The boy is going to cry. He frowns at this, because he doesn’t think someone so pretty should cry, much less over him. It’s ridiculous, he thinks, so he raises his hand and rubs a little at the boy’s eyelids, doesn’t know if he’s done the right thing when the boy gasps and makes a soft noise at the back of his throat.
“Don’t cry,” he tells him, as sternly as he can with his voice hoarse and throat all scratchy. “Gives you headaches.”
There is a pause, and then the boy smiles, spreading across the soft rosebud lips and leaking into his eyes which crinkle and almost disappear. “I missed you,” he says, as he leans forward to hug him. “I missed you so much.”
It’s warm and he smells like soap and skin, Hikaru likes having the boy’s arms around him and he feels happy, thinks that if it feels this good to be missed he wants to be missed every day. He breathes in deeply, takes in that nice, familiar smell until the boy pulls away, eyes still moist even though Hikaru told him not to cry.
“I’ll get the nurse,” he says, reaching for a remote control on the side table, excited and tingly and Hikaru feels it radiating off him. “The doctor will give you a check-up and make sure you’re all systems ready and then you can come back, thank god you can finally come back -”
Hikaru beams, glad that someone was fussing over him so much. “Thanks for your help,” he says, and likes the way the boy smiles back at him in that eyes-disappearing sort of way. “Can you tell me what your name is?”
He can’t understand what he did wrong, but in that split second it took for him to ask the question the boy’s smile fades, and it goes back to what it was like the first time Hikaru saw him, when he’d just woken up and his eyes were filled with disbelief.
“Hikaru?” he says in return, phrased almost like a question.
“That’s my name,” Hikaru corrects, giving him what he hoped was a friendly smile. He didn’t like this so much, the way the boy looked so sad suddenly, the glow gone from his cheeks and his soft lips no longer upturned in that happy curve. “What’s yours?”
The boy doesn’t say anything for a while, just looks at him in that new, different, sad way of his, as if he was searching for something in Hikaru, looking for something that he didn’t have. “Hikaru,” he says again, quietly, so tenderly Hikaru feels his heart ache a little.
“Cool,” he replies, grinning as cheerfully as he can. “So we share the same name, huh!”
The boy’s look of utter devastation scares him.