Teruteru Reader Inserts

I'll Be Here in the Meantime

[hhnnnnNNNNGGG LETS HAVE SOME ANGST

also for the record im making up Teru's siblings n shit i dont remember the canon LMAO i just know he has a lot right???

nd title is lyrics from Dismantling Summer- The Wonder Years i just listened to all the Wonder Years on my phone to write this LMAO]

The ambulance drove off quickly, sirens blaring terribly and lights blinking harshly against the summer sky. It was one if the brightest, sweetest days of June, and your neighbor was being rushed to the hospital after collapsing in her upstairs bathroom. Her son was left on the front porch with you.

Ms. Hanamura had been getting worse since she had moved herself and all her children to the house next to yours in May of last year. Each month brought a new element of her sickness; coughing up blood in November, fevers all December, dizzy spells in January. It all culminated behind closed doors as you and her third youngest son, Teruteru, had grown closer and closer.

The only ones home that morning were Teruteru and his two older sisters, the other kids being at summer camp. Ms. Hanamura collapsed at about 11:43, and the ambulance arrived at 11:47. Teruteru's two older siblings went with her, but Teruteru chose to stay behind. His tears had already dried from his cheeks and the big yellow t-shirt he wore on days off from the restaurant. His face was expressionless: his eyes were gazing emptily, completely hollow like a jack-o-lantern. As he watched the ambulance drive off with his mother, you walked up the stairs of his front porch.

"Teru?" You stood next to him, hands folded nervously in front of you. Normally, he went with his mother in the ambulance. If that didn't happen, he'd be here on the porch, sobbing and babbling in his thick country accent about how afraid he was for her, how he cursed God and everything else that she wasn't getting better.

But now, he was silent. You had learned how to deal with babbling and sobbing and fear, but you didn't know how to deal with silence.

"Teru," you tried again, touching his shoulder. He turned his head towards you, but didn't look up to meet your gaze. "Teru? Would you like to go inside?"

You saw his lips twitch and his eyes flicker, but he only nodded silently. There was an awful, sick feeling in your stomach as you took his hand and led him back into his house and up the stairs.

You reached his room and sat him down on the bed. You held both his hands and gazed into his face. Still, his eyes did not meet yours. He was staring slightly to the left of you, blank-faced toward the wall. You were half-worried that he might explode at any moment. You were scared you would do something wrong and he would just crumble.

You reached up with one hand and cupped his cheek. His face softened only the slightest bit, but he kept his eyes away from your face. You ran your fingers through his messy hair, taking note of how he hadn't done up his pompadour yet. He looked as if he had just woken up and thrown something on (he slept nearly in the nude during the summer, as you quickly learned through your tight and sometimes uncomfortably open friendship) and hadn't even had time to shower. An idea came to mind- something you wouldn't even consider under other circumstances. But remembering his love for bubble baths and relaxing in warm water brought such a thing to mind, and without a second thought, you leaned closer to his face.

"You wanna go take a bath?"

Finally, he looked at you, eyebrows raising ever so slightly as if disbelieving that you were actually offering something like this. Your gaze and proximity remained, and he closed his eyes and nodded.

"Stay here." You got up and walked to the bathroom down the hall. It was a larger bathroom than you had expected for the smallness of the house, and was kept in fantastic condition by Teruteru and his siblings. You knew for a fact that his mother had collapsed in her private bathroom and not this one, so the trauma of being in that place could be avoided. Your main focus was to make Teruteru comfortable and secure- and for the love of god, to break his silence, not for your sake, but for his own.