Work Text:
they are the hunters, we are the foxes
i know places we won't be found and
they'll be chasing their tails trying to track us down
— taylor swift, i know places
.
“How do you never get exhausted?” Misora asks him once, sipping on a soda he’d bought her from the store. He’s still wearing his disguise, a cheap blond wig and huge glasses, and she smiles when he pulls the wig off in disgust.
“Exhausted of what?” Ryuga asks, slumping down in the chair next to her. Off in the corner, just in his line of sight, Sento is working on some new plan, a new schematic to give them an edge, whatever he can. Sawa is leaning over his shoulder and presumably trying to make sense of whatever he’s doing.
Misora shrugs and offers him the soda. “Of fighting. And running. And those stupid disguises. I’ve only done it once but I would be tired of it by now.”
Ryuga doesn’t feel tired. He looks at her and then out at Sento, tapping furiously away on his laptop, and then takes a sip of her soda. “Lot of adrenaline, I guess. There’s no time to stop running.”
Misora hums in response and leans back in her chair. Ryuga meets Sento’s eyes and thinks, If I stop running, I might die.
Or he might die.
.
The thing is, he’s been running for a long time, long before he ever met Sento Kiryuu. Running to save Kasumi, running away from a crime he didn’t commit, a murder he couldn’t solve, from the green gas and the men in the masks. Running from the law, running to the truth, to power, to justice.
When he met Sento, it’s like everything got kicked into overdrive. These days, he has so much adrenaline pumping in his veins, he thinks he might not ever slow down.
He asks Sento, “How long do you plan to do the Build thing?”
Sento stops and looks up from his work, blinking at him in what can only be described as incredulous astonishment. “Till it’s over.”
“Till what’s over?” Ryuga presses. “The mystery of the Pandora Box? Till we find out who you used to be? Till—”
“Till everyone is safe,” interrupts Sento, and his gaze clouds over like it always does whenever somebody questions his desire to save people. “Till we stop Faust and Night Rogue and everyone else involved with what happened to us, and to all the other Smash.”
There’s a pause as they look at each other, and Ryuga can feel the electricity sparking in the air around them—maybe it’s the power of their Drivers, maybe it’s the power in their blood, or maybe it’s just the way Sento is looking at him, but it makes him turn away.
He says, quietly, “You’re a good guy, Sento.”
Another pause, and then Sento says, not nearly as quietly, “So are you.”
Ryuga glances sideways at him. “I came here for me.”
“But you stayed for them,” says Sento, and he holds out a hand so Ryuga’s dragon flies down to rest in his palm. “That’s what matters.”
.
He thinks a lot about hiding. It wouldn’t be too hard. He’s been running over the vaguest outline of a plan since he escaped from Faust—get some money, catch a boat, find Kasumi and run away till they can’t catch him anymore.
Since Kasumi died, he’s rewritten the plan a few times, and always abandons it when he comes to the inevitable roadblock that would be leaving Sento, leaving Misora, leaving them all behind to fend for themselves. He’s not that kind of guy. And he’d rather clear his name than run like a coward.
Still, he brings it up to Sento once, casually. “If I hadn’t run into you when I escaped, I could be halfway into Hokuto by now.”
Sento snorts. “And what? You think you’d survive out there?”
“Hey,” Ryuga says, gathering himself up in offense. “I could survive anywhere.”
“Yeah,” drawls Sento. “Because you were doing such a good job of that before I found and rescued you.”
“You, rescued me?” Ryuga scoffs. “Without me, you would be dead at least five times by now.”
“That makes no sense, how could I die five times? Surely it would only be once.”
“You know what I mean!”
Sento rolls his eyes, but his voice is deceptively light when he asks, “You really think you could do it? Hide from everything you’re running from?”
Ryuga stares at him, at the line of his shoulders as he hunches over his work, at his dark hair falling into his eyes, at the scarf lying loosened around his neck, and says, “I’m not running from them anymore.”
“Why is that?” Sento asks, seemingly distracted by whatever flaw in his coding he’s just found on his laptop. But Ryuga can see the way his body shifts, his eyes darting over to him, waiting for an answer.
“Because of you,” says Ryuga simply. Sento’s fingers stop typing for a beat too long.
.
In the middle of a battle, all he can think is fight fight fight and the adrenaline spikes so high he can’t remember a time before he was fighting, before he was a rider, before he was at Sento’s side. A time when he was running away instead of running towards.
“You okay?” Sento asks him after a particularly nasty hit, and Ryuga struggles to his feet, blinking through his visor to see the familiar blue-and-red of Sento’s suit hovering over him.
“Of course,” he mutters, but he accepts Sento’s hand anyway. His colors are bright, terribly bright against the afternoon sun, and as the Smash nears them, Ryuga takes a moment to think about a time when he’d thought he’d never see anything but the color green again.
But the gas is long gone. After they defeat the Smash, Sento transforms back into a plainclothes physician and claps Ryuga on the shoulder. His scarf today is blue and red, stark against the beige of his coat.
“Come on, Sawa said she had a lead for us,” he says, jerking his head in the direction they should be going.
“Wait,” says Ryuga, breathing still uneven. Sento stops and looks at him, head cocked curiously, and Ryuga forgets what he wanted to say. “Just… needed to catch my breath.”
Sento’s lips quirk up in his half-smirk half-smile. “Don’t get too caught up in the fight, Banjou. We have a lot to do today.”
“Oh, sorry, we can’t all be genius physicians,” Ryuga mocks, shoving his shoulder into Sento’s, who rocks sideways but continues grinning at him. He falls into step besides Sento and it feels a little like contentment.
.
Sometimes, when it’s a late night and he can’t sleep, he’ll get up to grab a bottle of water and watch Sento drifting between wakefulness and sleep at his work station, eyes drooping and breathing steadying for just a moment before he jolts himself awake to work some more. He’s always working, studying, planning, ready for the next fight, for the next time he has to be a hero.
Ryuga doesn’t know how he does it. Once, just once, he watches Sento fall asleep and, miraculously, stay asleep for more than a few minutes. About twenty minutes in, he jumps awake with cold sweat running down his face.
“What’s the matter?” Ryuga hops to his feet from the chair he’d claimed, almost ready to go back to sleep himself before Sento had woken up. “Is it a Smash? Or—”
Sento stares at him, wild-eyed. “No—no, it was just—forget it.”
Ryuga doesn’t look away, staring as Sento blinks rapidly and then looks away from him. He wipes the sweat off his cheeks with one hand and turns his head back to focus in on his computer, although his eyes squint at the screen as if he can’t really see what he’s written.
“You had a nightmare?” Ryuga ventures, because it’s the only explanation.
Sento glances briefly at him, then away again. “Don’t worry about it.”
Ryuga presses anyway. “What was it about?”
“I said, don’t worry about—” Sento looks up again and Ryuga doesn’t know when he’d started walking closer but they’re face to face now. Sento’s breath goes down in a swallow. “It was you,” he says, in a voice much smaller than he’s ever used before.
“Me?” Ryuga repeats blankly. He's seen Sento scared before, but this is a strange and desperate sort of fear flickering across his face. His bangs fall loose and in disarray over his forehead, getting in his eyes as he presses buttons on his keyboard without any care for what he's typing.
"It's nothing," says Sento hoarsely.
"Was I dead?" Ryuga asks, and feels something shift in the air again, a fragile rush around him.
"No." Sento stops typing so furiously and looks up at him, his eyes wider than Ryuga's ever seen them. His eyelashes flutter dark against his skin. "You... you'd left."
His heart stops beating for a moment. "I what?"
Sento's lips finally, mercifully, quirk in a half-smile and he says, "You really are stupid, Banjou."
Ryuga reaches over and shoves him. "Shut up. What do you mean I'd left? I wouldn't do that."
"I know you wouldn't." Sento blinks at his hand where it lingers on his shoulder, and Ryuga quickly removes it. "That's why they call it a nightmare."
.
He tries not to think about it for a while, and lasts two whole days and two whole nights before the two of them are sitting over a sleeping Misora, keeping watch on their hideaway and waiting for Sawa to return, and he turns to Sento.
"I wouldn't leave." Ryuga surprises even himself with the adamance in his tone. "I wouldn't leave you guys."
Sento doesn't look at him, staring down at Misora as she tosses in her sleep. "I know that."
"Hey." Ryuga reaches over without thinking about it, his hand finding and settling on Sento's knee. "I'm in this with you. No matter what."
When Sento's eyes meet his, there's something dark and haunted inside. "Isn't it kind of... awful? To ask you to fight by my side when... when I might be the reason you're fighting in the first place?"
Ryuga stares at him, startled. He doesn't move his hand. Sento's leg shifts beneath his touch. "What, because you're Katsuragi Takumi?"
Sento says nothing, just stares down at his hands, at Ryuga's hand on his leg, at his foot lightly tapping in a nervous rhythm on the concrete floor.
"Man, now you're the one being stupid," Ryuga says, shaking Sento's knee lightly. "You're the guy who saved my life. I don't care who you used to be. And I'm not gonna run from the truth."
Sento runs his teeth over his bottom lip, and Ryuga finds himself tracking the gesture without meaning to. Even in the darkness, he can see the flash of white, the pink of his lips, the way Sento's breath runs down his throat and catches slightly in the hollow of it.
"They're gonna come after us," Sento says.
"And we'll fight them," Ryuga returns easily. "Are you done moping?"
Sento snorts. "Guess so. Should we wake her up?"
"Nah, let her sleep. She needs it." Ryuga glances back down at Misora, who thankfully is still asleep so she can't make fun of him for being sappy, and then adds, "Was that the only reason you were so scared, the other night? Because you'd dreamt I ran away?"
Sento glances at him sharply. "I just... didn't want to do this without you."
"This?" he echoes.
Sento's hand curls over his, squeezing. Ryuga feels his insides squeeze in the same way.
"Everything," says Sento, his gaze sliding away. "Just... everything."
.
Their hideaway gets ambushed on a Thursday evening, and Sawa and Misora get away safely before they have to retreat from the fighting. Ryuga barely manages to toss one of the Faust soldiers off of him before Sento grabs him by the arm and slams his sword to the ground, covering them in a haze of protective smoke so they can get away.
Maybe it's the fact that his breathing is already ragged in his chest or the fact that the setting sun across the harbor has him seeing pinks and golds everywhere he looks, but Ryuga can't stop thinking of how he doesn't want to stop running as long as Sento's there, how his feet automatically turn to follow him around every corner and down every back road, how when they finally stop to catch their breaths, he can't stop looking at the way Sento's chest rises and falls, the armor falling away into his everyday clothes and his eyes bright when he looks at Ryuga.
"You okay?" Sento asks as they lean against a wall, surrounded by nothing but the abandoned building and the trees sprawling out to their left.
"Never better," says Ryuga with a grin, bracing his hands on his knees and looking up at Sento. "Let me get my hands on Night Rogue again, we'll see who runs next time."
Sento returns the grin, as light and easy as if they hadn't just been in a battle for their lives. "Next time," he promises. "I'll let you at him."
"You better," Ryuga says, and then, maybe because of the light or his breath or the pressurization of the wind around them, but he draws himself up and surges forward before he can talk himself out of doing this.
Sento fumbles the kiss a little, caught off guard and his hands jumping with no set destination, but Ryuga's lips meet his and the battle seems so faraway it's like it melted out of his mind. His hand comes up, hesitantly cupping Sento's face and his skin is unfairly soft beneath his fingers. Sento pulls away just a little to stare at him, wondering and breathless, and then his mouth is back and warm and insistent against Ryuga's until he's wondering why he didn't do this so much sooner.
"What was that for?" Sento asks after a moment, the words seeming a little lost on his tongue as he stares at Ryuga.
"You didn't like it?" Ryuga asks, half-teasing and half-worried.
Sento rolls his eyes. "Don't be stupid, of course I liked it."
Ryuga feels like his face might split from his smile. "I just figured... I didn't wanna do this without you."
"This?" Sento repeats, and his hand is warm on Ryuga's, thumb stroking over his wrist, holding him so still and close that he feels as though all of him is at peace for this one moment.
"This," Ryuga agrees and leans in to kiss him again.
Sento smiles this time, his teeth pressing gently against Ryuga's lips just for a second before he's kissing him back, slow and steady, with a scientist's appreciation for dissecting new things and new experiences. Ryuga doesn't care much for that, but the rush of warmth from his head to his toes that Sento's kiss brings him is heady enough that he can forgive him being calculating just this once.
"You kiss exactly how I thought you would," Sento muses, the words a quiet hum over Ryuga's lips. "Really warm."
“How long have you been thinking about it?” Ryuga demands.
Sento grins. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
There’s a rustle in one of the trees that stops whatever smart remark Ryuga had half-formed to say, and they both glance at it then back at each other in mild alarm.
“Maybe we should get back to someplace safe and find the girls,” Ryuga suggests, dropping his hand from Sento’s face reluctantly.
“Right.” Sento pulls away but keeps a hold of his other hand, fingers intertwining with his. “Come on, I think I know a place.”
He tugs Ryuga’s hand and turns around the corner, footsteps speeding up as they begin running, away from the monsters and the battles and the sinking golden sun for one night. Ryuga runs and thinks of sweeter things than fighting, and when they finally stop, he finds that he isn’t tired at all.