Knowing

Falling in love was painful, Gunji was beginning to realize.

He’d spent much of his life fooling himself into thinking his insignificant crushes and bouts of affection for others was love. Convinced himself by the time he was an adult that he knew what it meant. Strange to realize that he wasn’t aware of what love actually meant until he was twenty-five.

Twenty-five when he met a man who he thought shone like the sun and made him infatuated with every inch of him. And then, in an instant, Haurchefant was cruelly taken away.

Twenty-seven when he met a man who reminded him of Spring and brought joy to a heart he’d assumed was permanently shattered. It was messy and full of mistakes and it didn’t go as well as the first time. Somehow, he managed to hold on to this love, but now he was desperately afraid of losing it.

Gunji had never seen this man before this year, his thirtiest; soon twisted and forcibly bastardized into his thirty-first.

And upon first meeting everything about this man should have infuriated Gunji, brought out the deepest depths of his wrath and fury.

Yet never before had he experienced what it was like to lay your eyes on someone for the first time, and feel your heart breaking.

It was… strange. He didn’t realize it happening at first; didn’t recognize the painful squeeze in his chest, threatening to burst the fragile heart that would never fully heal from the first.

At the same time, it didn’t feel like it was the first time he’d felt this, somehow.

Every feeling he got when he looked at Emet Selch felt… familiar.

Impossibly so.

And yet he was familiar. 

Stronger than any sense of deja vu, Gunji felt it.

He knew him.

On every shard, in every life, in every way, he knew him.

In every cloying, clawing ache that buried itself deep within his chest, in his being, in his soul, he knew him.

With every half cocked smile and sarcastic quip, with every word, enunciation, lie, he knew him.

And it was breaking him and his heart apart trying to figure out how.