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The plane is still grounded and there doesn’t seem to be any signs that’s going to change soon. Shuichi has figured out planes by now, and nothing in the behavior of the flight attendants who pass up and down the aisles indicate that they’ll be taking off again any time in the foreseeable future. Next to him, Kirigiri shifts in her seat and looks out the window for the third time since they landed somewhere in Libya. They couldn’t have taken off from Niamey more than half an hour ago, and they’re already stuck. Her frustration is subtle, but palpable.
Another announcement, the second since they landed in what was very much not their layover in Casablanca, is made in French, a language Shuichi can’t speak and can barely understand. That doesn’t stop him from using what he knows of English to try and put it together. Dû sounds like due, but all that tells him was that the reason for something followed that statement. Incliner comes not too long after that and sounds sort of like inclined so maybe they were obligated to do something here. An airport emergency, perhaps? The window is almost entirely blocked by Kirigiri’s head, so he can’t get a look out and tell. By the lack of panic of the plane, he assumes that’s not the case.
Kirigiri settles further into her seat, her stockinged knee rubbing against his. She’s frowning as if looking for something, but Shuchi doesn’t want to seem creepy and stare at the same spot as her when they’re not solving mysteries, so he adjusts his hat and stops looking. Most of the conversations around them are in languages that Shuichi can’t even name, so there are no comprehensible clues for him there. It’s been six months since his internship with the DSC started, but at times like this, Shuichi still feels so out of his league. He feels small, out of place, over-aware of the fact that he is a foreign teenager who would maybe be noticed by three people if he disappeared. One of those businessmen could fold him right up into their carry-ons and walk away and no one feel that there was anything different.
Around them, Shuichi notices at least four people take out their phones and check their weather apps. He remembers his uncle’s great advice about running into strangers: Once is a stranger, twice is a coincidence, three times is a tail. Maybe that applies to phone applications, too.
He fishes his phone out of his pocket, nearly elbowing Kirigiri in the ribs as he does so. She moves before his elbow can even land, almost like she saw it without looking, like she knew he was going to reach for his phone at that very second. Shuichi still can’t believe that he gets to work with her sometimes, someone so observant and clever, someone he admired like a movie star as he flipped through crime news stories all alone in that great expanse of emptiness in Tokyo, right where they’re heading back to once this grounded plane nonsense is dealt with. Or, well, they’re not heading right back there; DSC Headquarters is on the other side of the city from his parents’ apartment, but it’s still close enough. But the point is that he gets to be near her, and it sometimes doesn’t even feel real. Most of the time these days, it’s more real than he can deal with.
It takes a good while for his phone to load and connect to the wifi of the nearby airport, but as soon as it does, he sees a warning about an incoming sandstorm. Some part of Shuichi is excited: he’s never seen one before. The rest of him wants the flight to continue on so he can get back to headquarters and take a nap.
The app doesn’t tell him when the storm will hit their location, so he puts it down and fusses with a pamphlet about emergency protocols. “Is it close?” Shuichi asks, breaking the fragile silence between them.
Kirigiri turns towards him, one eyebrow raised. He still can’t figure out how she does that look, just raises one eyebrow and not both. He’s practiced it, but Shuichi has always come up short. “Is what close?”
“The sandstorm.” He says.
“It’s not visible yet, but if they’re not bothering to have us leave the plane, I’m sure it’ll arrive soon enough.” Kirigiri tells him. And then, a question. “How did you figure it out? I know you don’t speak French.”
In the first few days of working together, a comment that to the point would’ve made him want to cry, but Shuichi is adjusted to and enamoured with her bluntness now. “It wasn’t much. I just noticed that everyone opened their phones to the weather app after the announcement, so I opened mine, too.”
“Clever.” She adjusts the pillow behind her head, restless in the way exhausted people sometimes are. Neither one of them got much sleep on the last days of the investigation, but he’s fairly certain Kirigiri forwent sleep all together. She’s been good about hiding it though, trying to seem like she’s taking care of herself since Shuichi has gained the nerve to fuss at her about it. It’s something of an accomplishment.
“Thanks.” Shuichi smiles, unable to help himself. Comments from Kirigiri always made his heart soar, but he’s noticed the reason changing over time, changing in a way he’s not sure what to do with. It’s not like being noticed by an idol he has a crush anymore. It’s more personal than that, personal in a way that he knows and doesn’t want to. It’s unprofessional, it’s hopeless, it’s illogical, and it doesn’t go away. Love like this is a one way street with a cliff at the end, but Shuichi can’t stop going down it.
“Hm. No problem.” Kirigiri looks out the window again and Shuichi tries to improve his French by forcing himself to read the pamphlet and understand what’s happening in it. He kills some time like that and he almost misses when the world suddenly turns orange-tinted and the plane is surrounded by sand, but it grabs the edges of his attention and refuses to let go.
Kirigiri leans back and takes notice of something on the ceiling, and so Shuichi can get a good look at it. It’s a solid, impenetrable wall of sand, more sand than he could ever imagine existing. It moves fast enough that his eye can’t train on one particle of it, not even for a second. It just flies by, ceaseless and stupendous and making him feel miniscule in a different and much more enjoyable way than before. It’s giant in a way he can comprehend. It’s giant in a way he can love, and so he does.
Suddenly, Kirigiri sits back up and undoes her seatbelt. “Switch with me.” She says. It’s an order he doesn’t question because Shuichi knows what he wants the reason behind it to be and knows that’s probably not what it is.
They switch quickly and re-settle themselves even faster. Closer to the window, Shuichi can see more of the storm, and it gives him an excuse to not have to look at anything in particular for too long. Still, he notices Kirigiri in his periphery, and she seems like she’s preparing to say something.
“I got caught in a sandstorm once.” Kirigiri tells him. “Yui-oneesama and I were in Nevada and I convinced her to ignore the alerts because I thought I had a good lead. It turned out to be nothing.”
Shuichi turns towards her quickly, almost as if she was in immediate danger. It’s stupid. No amount of fast turning can save past Kirigiri from damaged lungs. He’s stupid. “Isn’t it dangerous to be out in these sort of things?”
“Of course it is. But we lived, and you’re still getting the best view. Some things aren’t made to be witnessed from the outside.”
He nods and looks at Kirigiri’s shoulder, losing the nerve to look her in the face. He always loses the nerve to look at her properly when she says something so suddenly clever, and Shuichi wishes that he wouldn’t. Maybe if he looked her in the eye in that moment, he could get to know her better. He’s already gotten to know more than he could have ever dreamed, gotten to know pieces of the person behind the man, the myth, and legend, but he wants to know more than he does right now. He wants her all the way through. He wants to hear about her and Samidare and Nevada and how it came to be that they ended up calling each other sisters, he wants to know why she wears boots so often and how she manages to buy a ribbon everywhere they go and what she does with all of them, he wants to know more and more and actually do something with all of his knowing, but as it is, he can’t, and so he looks at her shoulder instead of her face and hates himself so violently that he wishes he had the courage to pitch himself out the window and straight into the sandstorm.
“Sometimes I wonder where you come up with those things, Kirigiri-senapi.” Shuichi admits, voice not breaking so much as already broken because for all of his cowardice, he can’t let this conversation die. He knows why he wants to keep it alive and that should be enough to convince him to kill it, but it isn’t. It just isn’t.
“I wonder that, too.” She rests her cheek on the pillow behind her and it smushes her face, making her look more pouty than posh, more petulant than professional. Shuichi is one year, one month, and one day older than her, but he finds himself forgetting that until he gets a rare look like this. It’s almost like being given a gift. “Did you know that you’re the only intern that calls me Kirigiri-senpai?”
“Really?”
“Really. Garcia, the Marques twins, and Wright don’t speak Japanese, and the rest are older than me. Apparently calling me senpai while I’m younger than them offends their masculine sensibilities.” Kirigiri rolls her eyes, and Shuichi can’t help but snort at that fact.
“Wow. They’re so stupid sometimes.” He says. “I just...I don’t get why it would bother them so much. I mean, you’re ahead of us. You’re up there because you’ve earned it. They should be able to recognize that.”
The orange of the world outside makes Kirigiri’s face look more red than he remembered and there’s a lock of hair in her face that he’s tempted to reach out and move, but he doesn’t. Shiuchi doesn’t usually do casual touches with friends, and so it would inevitably come off as what it is—utterly and hopelessly romantic.
There’s no way someone as sharp as Kirigiri didn’t know about the crush he had on her before he even saw her face, and surely she’s noticed how it’s turned into something deeper, more tender, something that makes his chest ache when she closes her eyes. Now he can look at them, can see her eyelashes and how they curl and the smattering of eyeliner on her lids. It’s clumsily-applied, smudged at the edges, the application of a fifteen-year-old who hasn’t had time to learn. Shuichi daydreams about teaching her someday while she speaks. “They’ll learn respect someday. Watch for it. It’ll be quite the amusing lesson to witness.”
“I will, Kirigiri-senpai.” He promises, because he has no doubt that it will be.
“You can call me Kirigiri-san.” She tells him. “You’re almost done with the internship, so you’ll be calling me that soon enough. But only you. Not the rest of them. Only you.”
She must be delirious. That’s the only explanation. She must be so tired that she’s delirious. “I...Okay.” Shuichi stutters out, glad that her eyes are closed so that he can’t see how much he’s blushing.
“Okay, Kirigiri-san.” She corrects, and Shuichi wonders if the sandstorm has lifted them into some alternate dimension where good things happen to him and Kirigiri sasses him with her eyes closed in half-sleep.
“Kirigiri-san.” Shiuchi echoes, and something like a smile crosses her face before she cuddles into the pillow and seems to truly fall asleep, and Shuichi feels so close to her in those few seconds, but then the storm passes and the plane starts and he is farther away than ever.