Chapter Text
B gets a fever seemingly overnight. It comes and goes in waves. He splits his time between hissing venom at Kirishima and wriggling out of his cocoon of blankets because he’s too hot, or shivering, glassy-eyed and curled beneath layers of flannel and down.
“Are you sure I can’t take you to a hospital?” Kirishima asks again, gnawing his lip as he stares down at the thermometer. A hand shoots out of the pile of blankets he’s been speaking to, fingers wrapping like iron bands around his wrist.
B is glaring at him. His eyes are bright and his teeth are bared and he shakes his head hard. Kirishima knows that can’t feel good with the fever he’s got. He remembers the way B looked when he mentioned a hospital before. How he’d attacked him on the boat. How scared he was.
“Okay.” Kirishima sighs. “No hospital.”
The hand releases him and slithers back into the blanket pile. Kirishima is certain there will be bruises circling his wrist in a few minutes.
He spends the day making B sip down passable amounts of tea and soup. The fisherman in him can’t shake the guilt about not going out to sea but he reasons that the catch has been bad for weeksmonths…years now. He’s probably saving money on the fuel he’d use up to make it out there. Besides that, he wants to stay here. B doesn’t seem accustomed to someone taking care of him. He blinks when Kirishima first approaches him, surprised and uncertain when he offers him soup. It’s from a can, but years of living in proximity to Denki have made Kirishima very savvy in what Denki likes to refer to as “food hacks”.
“It’s egg.” Kirishima says as B sniffs at the bowl, peering into the amber broth as if it’s the first time he’s seen soup before. “The white and yellow fluffy stuff is egg in there, and there’s peas and some diced up onion and a little bit of powdered garlic.” He rattles off, ticking each ingredient away on a different finger. “My friend showed me how to do it. It makes soup taste like, a thousand times better.”
B silently mouths the word soup, then he looks up at Kirishima.
“Yeup,” Kirishima agrees brightly. “Soup.”
B glares down at the bowl, pensive. His fingers twist around the spoon. After a moment, he scoops a spoonful and holds it out for Kirishima to eat. It’s kind of scary how smoothly he moves. It’s such a mundane little motion but B is so precise about it, he doesn’t even spill a drop. Kirishima obliges him by opening his mouth and taking a sip. It’s good soup after all, better than it would have been if he hadn’t bothered with all the extra ingredients. It’s warm and rich and the flavor of garlic lingers in his mouth long after he’s swallowed. It’d be better with the fresh stuff but it’s been a long time since Kirishima’s been able to justify buying fresh stuff just for the flavor in a long time.
“S’good.” He says, motioning for B to eat.
B stares at him for a long time. Then he looks back down at the soup. He finishes the bowl before he burrows back inside the blankets. He sleeps like the dead for the rest of the night and doesn’t stir until the early morning when Kirishima makes to leave for the boat.
Kirishima winces when he rustles awake. He’d been trying hard to be sneaky but it’s difficult. He’s clumsy by nature and used to living alone and it feels like every floorboard in the house is somehow looser and creakier than it should be.
“You can go back to sleep,” He tells the red set of eyes watching him from the couch. It’s all he can see this early, with the blankets wrapped around B and the sun still far below the horizon. “I’m just going out to fish, I’ll be back later. Promise.”
B sits up at that. His eyes dart from Kirishima to the door, then to the window. Outside, the world is dark and grey and there's no way to tell where the flat marshland stops and the ocean begins. The blanket slips down and Kirishima sees B's face in the wane morning light. His mouth is pressed into a tight line and his eyes are bright. This will be the first time he’s been alone since Kirishima plucked him up from the water two days ago.
Kirishima grabs a set of keys off the hook beside the door. He drops both on the coffee table beside B. “That one is for the house, back and front door,” he says, pointing. “That one is for the truck, not much gas but it’ll get you into town if you take the only road out of here. And that’s for the boat house. There’s only a dingy with some paddles but…it’s there.”
B blinks down at the keys, looking somehow lost. Kirishima finds that he kind of likes making him look that way, like he’s been shown something for the first time.
“There,” He says after a moment, smiling. “Feel better now?”
Wherever B is from, apparently they know how to flip the bird. Kirishima laughs. He straightens and circles around to the kitchen to grab his pad and pen, dropping them on the coffee table too.
"You're stupid," B scrawls out. Kirishima snickers. It's hard to feel insulted when B is mussed with sleep and dressed in his pajamas from middle school.
"Yeah, probably. I think I can trust you but if I come back and you've stolen my truck...I guess I'll know I can't. Good luck though, it's about the only thing around worth stealing and it's not even worth much." Not to mention that anyone in town he could try to sell it to would recognize that it's Kirishima's.
He bends to take hold of B's blanket and pulls it back up over his shoulders. “Get some sleep, I’ll be back later.”
It’s another day of empty nets, but Kirishima’s feeling optimistic enough to throw out the last of his lobster traps. It’s probably much too early in the season to catch anything of worth but, well, Kirishima’s caught stranger things hasn’t he?
His truck is still parked beside the shanty when he gets back. When he opens the door he’s met with the scent of salt and garlic. B is there, standing over the stove. There’s two empty soup cans on the counter beside him.