If all else fails, I still love you. | Renga

[16] To Offer Time

it has been brought to my attention that the "i wouldnt mind if you saw" thing made some of y'all think of seeing dicks,, i just meant them with towels on ,, this fic is rated E for Everyone

X days prior/Day 16

Reki popped up at the side of the bed and ripped the covers off of Langa's face. Langa groaned immediately and tried to bring the blankets back over himself, but Reki yanked them away again and said, "Good morning."

Langa squeezed his eyes shut, rolling over on his stomach and curling up in a ball to block out all the sunlight that was seeping through the windows. "Five more minutes, or maybe hours...just let me sleep a bit longer."

"Fine," he huffed, "but you need to be downstairs in time for breakfast, or I'm not giving you any."

"Mm, okay." He reluctantly stumbled out of the room, mumbling a few words about going to take a shower. As soon as he was gone, Reki dashed to his desk and found the paper.

The letter crinkled beneath his fingers, folding lines and lines upon itself. He glared down at it, wondering what purpose it even served.

Dear Langa,
We're both causing problems.

He hit his head on the desk and groaned at himself, thinking, Well no shit, Reki. Now what did that do? It didn't even get delivered.

He read the full letter, time and time again, which just reminded him of everything Langa had done—or maybe, what Yua had caused, or maybe, what he had let happen. Each time he read it, he found more flaws in his letter: rambles on insignificant moments, exaggerating his feelings, focusing on one particular emotion when there were way too many to count, and, most of all, not taking responsibility.

It burned in his heart, the guilt; that terrible feeling after blaming people who didn't deserve it. And when you realise they were blaming you too, it won't feel bad, because you knew you were on both sides of the story. You are the protagonist and the antagonist. It just depends on which story you read.

It didn't get delivered...and maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it was a good thing that he didn't have the chance or courage to hand it over. If he had, that'd probably just have made the situation worse. Even without reading it, Langa had already felt guilty enough; he'd shown that in the park, so he might've crumbled completely reading that letter.

It was all, "I felt", "I thought", "I wonder", "I wish". Which would have been good statements, truly. They were honest, brief, focusing on your feelings instead of blaming the one being talked to. They would've been good statements, but only if he hadn't also been guilty of things. So, in his head, it should have been things such as "I shouldn't have", "I regret", and "I will fix".

Even in the previous letters he'd tried to write—and Reki couldn't stress it enough, he'd scrapped many papers into his drawer, because they all started wrong—some parts of them were still true.

The drawer at the very bottom of his desk; it was pretty much a storage for spare ideas. Various sketches, school notes, drawings, recipes, things like that. And, among them, were the stacks upon stacks of folded, forgotten, and incomplete letters, all shoved in there.

He read the letter he was holding one last time before tossing it in there too, hoping it'd get lost with the others.

━━━━━━━━━━━━

In the kitchen, Koyomi was already trying to put orange juice in her cereal.

"Ew, what the fuck?" Reki snatched the juice bottle from her and stuffed it back in the fridge. "You're a disgrace."