Work Text:
A branch rustles, a bird fluttering from its perch. A dull throbbing pulsates from Akamatsu’s headphones, sound pushing to further lull the air into a thickly spread hum.
Shirogane fiddles with the strap of her camera, shifting the tightly laced nylon so that it further abrades against the bare skin of her neck. Her fingers slip across the nail bitten rubber grip curving at the underbelly of the camera, tracing their way up to the lens cap. Her nails tap into the hardened plastic, barely resisting the urge to pluck the cap off.
Akamatsu tilts her head up towards the mid-morning sky, her hair fanning out in slight disarray with the oddly angled positioning of her headphones. Had Akamatsu’s features slackened just a fraction more; had her leg uncoiled from its tensed state barely brushing against her own, or her lips faltered from their taut line, or the frantic beat resounding from her headphones died down, perhaps it would’ve been simple to approach the matter at hand. Perhaps it would’ve been simple to patch together a redemption arc worthy of a second rate character such as herself without the nagging sense that she was intruding on something she clearly shouldn’t.
The rambling of Akamatsu’s music deafens suddenly, yet she shows no signs of stirring herself to interact with the person who’d been sharing her space for the last half hour. Shirogane can’t help but wonder if she reached out to prod at the cheek mere millimeters away from her own, if the tip of her finger would pass through air.
Features caught in the soft glow of sunlight, Akamatsu resembles a half-dilapidated sunflower - stem bent, face almost straining against its nature to bathe in searingly bright light. Shirogane shakes her head at the irony, because at some point Akamatsu Kaede’s face had radiated light rather than sought to jerk away from it.
“Not that you’re unwelcome but, why are you here, Shirogane-san? If you’re here to give me some unnecessary apology for a death I signed up for I’d prefer that you didn’t.” There’s something bitter laced in Akamatsu’s voice, something that shouldn’t really affect her, yet it still sends the slightest shiver skirting up her spine.
Akamatsu’s voice is cold - that’s it. Her tone whispers with breaths of unmelting frost in comparison to the strong cords of encouragement the character Shirogane had helped create once sang.
“No… that wasn’t my intent,” Shirogane drops her gaze to her lap, fingers absentmindedly lacing through one another. “I-I wanted to keep you company. You seemed rather lonely…”
Akamatsu gives a exasperated huff. “That was what I was hoping for, yeah. It feels weird, y’know, for my ears to be so attuned to sound - every little creak; every thundering step - it’s all there, constantly. It’s as if the world’s screaming, and I can finally hear it.” Akamatsu slips her headphones onto her neck. “At least out here the only thing screaming is my thoughts.”
It’s too much. Too many words and far too much sentiment laid bare in front of a complete stranger like her, Shirogane thinks. It’s out of character, for the both of them. She can’t quite find the courage to scrape up the last of the disdain festering somewhere in the recesses of her mind to care.
“May I?” Shirogane asks, the hooked print of her thumb already popping off her camera’s lens cap.
“Hm,” Akamatsu hums, tilting her head to look at Shirogane through a half-lidded gaze. “Oh, right. Sure.”
She angles the lens at a reasonably slight tilt in hopes of catching some of the bright rays of sunlight pooling at Akamatsu’s shoulders and lighting her hair a molten gold on film. “Smile.”
Akamatsu does just that. Shirogane can’t help but wonder if she’d been used to peeling on smiles even before the game. The shutter clicks. Shirogane sends Akamatsu a wilting smile of her own.
The developed photo would fetch a steep price, if she chose to sell it, that is. Somehow, she knows she won’t. Yes, Akamatsu almost appears as a near exact replica of her fictional character in the morning’s radiating cheer at first sight, but there’s something too intimate about what she’s certain the photo would come out as. Her throat gurgles with an unheaved sigh. When had she become one to care for intimacy beyond that projected onto a glazed screen?
She brushes off the thought, reassuring herself that this very moment was a thing of fiction itself, even if she chooses not to share it. Then, appropriately steady fingers slip the dented cap onto the outer rim of the antique lens.
Photography is something of an unforeseen hobby she’d picked up after being plucked from the synthetic, wired womb she’d sprawled in, fading into her beloved world weaved from lies. She’s unable to grasp at the reigns of her current world, unable to manipulate a screen that had eventually spun out of her precise control all the same. But film, she can wrangle into submission. Film she can manipulate, control. Through the lens of a camera far older than she, she can print out her world as she wishes. An unseen script can’t be ripped apart in the comforting promise of still snapshots.
Yet, here, with her leg pressing ever so lightly into Akamatsu’s, the promise of absolute control doesn’t feel quite as weighted, quite as promising at all. She’s a doll Shirogane herself had crafted, yet Akamatsu’s thigh still radiates warmth from where it barely touches against Shirogane’s own. Everything she knows of her is fiction, a thing spun from her own dedication and giddily conceived plot, but the flesh sculpted into fair, prettily sloped features is real. Painfully so.
Shirogane reaches, hand vibrating with a tremor unnatural to an experienced seamstress, lightly plucking at Akamatsu’s own. Her hand is still, tensed in surprise. Her hand is warm. Her hand is tangible. Real.
Akamatsu glances at her, eyes searching for something Shirogane herself isn’t fully aware of having possessed, a longing for intimacy Akamatsu had given the smallest of promises of. She doesn’t pull away. Shirogane almost, perhaps some fictional kindness had remained after all, or perhaps Akamatsu hopes subconsciously for an illusive tangibility as much as she.
“You’re real,” Shirogane breathes, whispers.
Akamatsu’s face hardens. Pretty plaster features having slowly eased, hardening. “Of all the people to feed me that lie, I hadn’t expected for you to be one of them.”
Shirogane grips her hand harder. She doesn’t pull away. One of them will eventually, though. Return to the ward. Go through another equally synthesised day filtered by doctors who tried a little too hard to care too much for people they really didn’t care for at all. (Well, perhaps they cared for the faces shared with characters from a pixelated world, Shirogane supposes. But in the end it doesn’t really matter.)
Eventually, they’d pull apart. But until then, she’s content to clasp at Akamatsu’s hand, at warmth, at reality. And if Akamatsu indulges her a little more, gives Shirogane’s own fingers the slightest of squeezes, she’s more than content with that too.