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It had never been too much of a secret that something was wrong with Kaito, no matter how hard he tried to play off any possible ailments as being imagined by the person watching him coughing up blood. He was never one to get into too many specifics about what it was that was wrong with him, just brushing off the accusations and assuring whoever had seen his moment of weakness that he was honestly, truly fine and that everything would be okay. But his oddly specific denials of what was wrong could only last so long, and so when he and Maki had started dating after what had been months of mutual pining that the other was too oblivious to notice, he decided he’d let her and her alone in on his medical issues.
They weren’t much to speak of at that point, but he certainly did have a laundry list of formerly-diagnosed conditions that he’d “aged” out of, and that any future doctors would need to be made aware of. She didn’t bat an eyelash at the reveal, because she could see in clear letters that none of these were things he had anymore, his only recurring issue being a persistent chest infection that could rear its ugly head at any time, its one noticeable symptom being a bloodied cough. “See, I told you that you didn’t need to worry about me, that’s all perfectly normal,” he told her once she’d said she’d seen enough. “Now can we get on to happier things, like a movie or something?”
He was always ready to push past what was wrong with him to move to the next big thing that was right on the horizon, and it was a lifestyle that Maki wasn’t going to complain about. She’d spent so much of her youth being forced to let things linger in her mind and her heart that being around someone who didn’t seem to know how to do that felt like it was good for her, and she wasn’t going to knowingly hold him back from his jetting off into whatever came next. But even with his insistence that everything was fine, and what was wrong with him wasn’t much to take note of, she was still hesitant to go along with his every whim just in case something did happen. Their adventures on hikes (both being very active, with her having done a bit of criminal evading in the past and him striving to become aligned with some nation’s space program) had her always lagging behind him slightly, just in case something hit him and he was left choking on air; whenever they’d watch something or get roped into playing games she’d grow wary whenever he started yelling, in fear that the force would dislodge blood and he’d be spitting it on an unsuspecting audience.
Ultimately, her worries were best placed somewhere else, but she had no way of knowing that until it was too late to reclaim the lost years she’d spent worrying that she’d watch him die of his known problems. Their relationship flirted with the idea of getting more serious off and on, but neither of them knew how to approach the idea of being anything more than just a committed, dating couple that it never seemed to have the drive to go further. That didn’t stop them from moving in together, mostly to get Maki out of the grasp of the orphanage she’d spent her childhood in, but also to let Kaito finally break free from being underneath his grandparents’ feet all the time. They didn’t have much more than their few belongings, their romance, and a support system around them that consisted of their friends and his family, but within months of making the decision to find their own place, they were settled in and were sustaining themselves well enough.
Life was exciting and fun for someone who’d gone from a sheet-less cot in a cold room to sharing a bed with the man she loved, and yet Maki was still dragging her feet on finding too much enjoyment in her new life. She was still beyond worried that she’d lose Kaito to something that he was already aware of, and that fear wasn’t close to ruling her life, but it certainly did stop her from agreeing to do many things that he’d wanted to do. They could still go out and have fun, but she drew the line at anything risky, at anything that could trigger his condition (which she could only guess at, since she didn’t have all of the details). He knew why she would act like that, but his best assurances were not enough to get her to drop the glare and serious expression, her reminding him time and time again that she loved him, that she didn’t want to lose him, that she expected forever with him.
For a while, things seemed like they were going to turn out okay, as they fully settled into their lives together, but every day was not guaranteed. One morning, Maki woke up to Kaito’s side of their bed empty, his sheets thrown on top of her in what was clearly a hurry; before she could even call out his name to see where he was she heard him rustling around in the bathroom, coming out pale-faced and drenched in sweat but flashing her a grin when he saw she was awake. “Woke up panicking, nothing big,” he said to her, as he went back to his side of the bed, laying down with a visible tremble across his limbs. “I’ll sleep it off and it’ll be just fine, Maki Roll. Don’t you worry about me.”
“That’s exactly what someone says when they need to be worried about,” she grumbled, before noticing that he’d fallen right back asleep, not having even gotten himself back under his sheets. She sighed, tucking him in the best she could before snuggling up next to him, hoping that he wasn’t lying to her to make her feel better.
The next morning the scene was the same, except what woke Maki up was not the still silence of her boyfriend not sleeping next to her, but rather the unmistakable sounds of him coughing in the bathroom. Her eyes shot wide-open at the first hacking sound, and before he could even finish that single cough she was running towards the closed bathroom door at full speed, throwing it open to announce her presence. “Oh, hey there,” he greeted, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, it coming away completely clear. “Had somethin’ in my throat and needed to get it out, you know how it goes.”
“That is not what it sounded like in here and you know it.” Maki’s voice was steady, even if her heart was racing with every word she spoke. “If something’s going on you need to tell me and you need to tell me right now, Kaito.”
“Nothing’s going on!” Raising both hands defensively, Kaito could see Maki coming closer to him, her trademark glare prominent in her eyes, but he didn’t know what else he could do except deny her accusations. “Let’s just…go back to bed, whatever was in my throat’s gone now so I’m good to sleep if you are.”
She pursed her lips together in thought before rolling her eyes and wrapping her arms around him in a hug, which he reciprocated once he was certain she wasn’t about to try strangling him. “You know that I don’t want to lose you,” she reminded him for the millionth time, a phrase she said more often than nearly anything else in his presence. “I want you to think about that next time something like this happens.”
“Trust me, I never stop thinkin’ about that,” he said, sounding serious for a rare moment, before pushing out a laugh that sounded genuine enough. “I’m the luckiest guy alive thanks to you, Maki Roll, and I could never forget that. Now back to bed, yeah?”
Tilting her head back, to the point that her long ponytails were brushing their ankles from how low they were allowed to hang, Maki’s expression had softened completely and she was staring up into Kaito’s face with wonder and love in her eyes. She didn’t want to force their embrace to end, but he seemed insistent on getting them back into their bed—and when he simply lifted her up to carry her back, she got her wish and he got his.
All day, as they went about their normal lives, she managed to push any and all fears about what was happening to Kaito from her mind, made easier by the fact that he elected to use that day to run errands that she didn’t have to accompany him on. That let her spend time alone, sort through all of her thoughts, and convince herself that he was right and that nothing was going on that she needed to worry about.
That was a decision that would have been better left unmade, she decided the next morning when she woke up to him glassy-eyed in the bed next to her, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth and collecting on his goatee, on his chest, and on the blankets still covering him. Dazed at first, looking at him with her barely-awake mind, Maki initially reached out to touch his shoulder, but her fear that she’d lost the one person who mattered to her overtook her senses before she could lay a finger on him. The force she used to shake him awake was far too strong, but she couldn’t control herself at that point, with her screaming and crying and pleading with higher powers that he was still alive.
“Wh-what’s going on?” he asked her, snapping out of whatever trance he’d been in, followed immediately by him smacking his lips together, the metallic taste of his own blood causing him to scrunch his entire face up. Maki was attempting to blubber out some sort of explanation but she couldn’t, her whole range of emotions having been exhausted in such a short amount of time, and he wasn’t sure how to respond to what was going on.
At that point there really was no more denying that something was wrong with him yet again, a fact he’d known for days and had been trying to hide from the love of his life as to not make her worry more about him than she already did. A minor cough and chills were no big deal, though, but once his illness got to the bloody stage like it had there was a need for medical intervention, and even though neither of them wanted to see it happen, it was the only way to handle the situation.
[]
For reasons that she only vaguely understood, Maki wasn’t allowed to be present at any of Kaito’s meetings with the doctors in charge of his medical treatment. It was something to do with her threatening aura, and her immediate reaction to start demanding answers whenever something was said, but she usually didn’t question it because normally him going to the doctor was a simple thing. In this case, though, she wished for nothing more than to be able to be at his side as he was examined and diagnosed with whatever had caused his condition to spiral downward so fast, and yet she was only allowed to go as far as the door in the waiting room, kissing him goodbye over and over when his name was called. “I promise I’m fine, I’ll kick this thing’s ass, whatever it is!” he told her, followed by another kiss from her that had her jumping from her tiptoes to reach his lips.
As she left the office she could taste his blood in her mouth, and the fact that it was there because of her love for him, and not because she’d been careless in killing someone, was bizarre to consider. She shouldn’t have been tasting his blood, not even a little, because that meant that something was wrong with Kaito, and if something was wrong with him that meant that she could lose him, and she couldn’t bare to think about that actually happening to her at that point. They had spent so many good days and nights together, time that she never could have expected to have anything pleasant happen to her, that having the opportunity for more such things getting stripped away from her felt akin to being thrown back in the orphanage, being forced to do their dirty work for the rest of her days.
Maki was just breaking through the surface of all of the negative thoughts and emotions this was throwing her through when her phone rang in her little purse, and she was so anxious to hear about her dear Kaito that she answered it without checking to see who was calling. “Uh, are you still coming to lunch today?” she heard Shuichi’s voice ask her, timid as always, and it took several moments for her to realize that it was a Thursday afternoon, the day that she always went out to lunch with him and Himiko (and occasionally others if they dropped in, but never anything less than those two). “We’re at the usual table, whenever you stop by, but you’re usually the first one here and—”
“I’ll get there when I get there,” she snapped, rudely cutting him off and immediately hanging up afterward. Did she actually want to go to the lunch? Not in the slightest. But she knew if she told Kaito that she was considering skipping out of the routine meal he’d point out that she was only punishing herself by doing that and that she should be nicer. So, despite not wanting to do it, she dragged herself up out of the funk that morning’s discovery had put her in and took herself to the restaurant that she ate at every week at that very time, seeing the two people she expected sitting in their normal spots watching the door in anticipation for her showing up.
The first thing she should have done was apologize for her brashness on the phone, but Shuichi looked like he was concerned with bigger things than her being a bit rude. “You look like you’ve been crying,” he pointed out, causing Maki to bring a hand to her face to feel her eyes, noticing how underneath them felt slightly swollen, due to how many tears she’d cried while she’d been alone. “Do you want to talk about it? We’re here for you.”
“No, it’s nothing important.” The best course of action was to not bring it up, lest she make herself get emotional again, and Maki knew that the moment she brought up Kaito being sick that Shuichi would start jumping to worrisome conclusions as well. She pulled out her normal chair and sat down in it, feeling the weight of everything pushing down on her shoulders as she got comfortable, and before she realized it she was face-first into her arms on the table, heaving a heavy sigh but doing no more.
“I think I have some magic I can use to get this out of her,” Himiko said, sounding bored and distant from the situation at hand, but that was just how she always was. “It may backfire, though, so maybe I shouldn’t try it. I don’t want to turn either of you into frogs.”
“The thought’s appreciated, Himiko, but if Maki doesn’t want to talk then we’re not going to force her to. She wouldn’t force either of us to say a word if we were feeling down.” That was something that Shuichi was incredibly aware of, given that he’d stumbled into the weekly lunches in the throes of depression many times and hadn’t once been forced to explain what was wrong, until he was ready to do so. He usually refused, and came back the following week like nothing had been upsetting him in the first place, but that was his way of handling things and no one was going to make him change it.
For Maki, though, her way of handling was self-destructive, complete with yelling and violence until she could curl up in Kaito’s arms and have him heal whatever bothered her. It worked every time, but it wasn’t going to be available her on this one, and after steeling herself for what she knew was coming she sat up, brushed her bangs out of her eyes, and looked at the two who were watching her. “I just got done with being at the doctor, because some idiot we know decided he’d prefer being dead than alive and didn’t do anything about it until today.”
That was all she said, and all she was going to say on the matter, and neither of the others quite knew how to react to it. Shuichi was trying to come up with something to tell her, but every time he’d so much as part his lips to get a word out he’d shake his head slightly and rethink his approach, while Himiko sat with her finger pressed against her chin, also thinking about what there was that could be said but not coming to any solid conclusions. It was unusual for them to all be quiet for so long, but no one had the right words to address what had been brought up and no one was going to force a conversation to fill the quiet void.
Their lunch together became three individual lunches all sitting at the same table, or rather two lunches and Maki refusing to order anything because she felt that if she tried to eat, she wouldn’t get anywhere. Her whole body ached just to think about her Kaito, how he was somewhere alone and suffering without her, how she’d promised him forever and had let herself get stopped at the door. If that had been their last parting, she’d done nothing but let him down in his final days, and how was she supposed to live with herself knowing that? “Hey, what’s up with her?” she could have sworn she heard Kaito’s voice ask (although it did sound rather distorted), and she closed her eyes to try and hold back the tears the sound called to her eyes. “Seriously, what did you do to her, why’s she lookin’ so sad?”
No, that wasn’t her imagining him asking about her, that really was Kaito asking those questions, and Maki’s eyes shot open at about the same time that he placed his arms on her head, looking at the other two and their solemn expressions, waiting for an answer. “I don’t think you thought things through very well, that’s what’s up with her,” Shuichi answered, his face softening so it didn’t look quite so grim. “You’re going to have to repay her big for what you’ve put her through today.”
“Aw man, she told you guys all about it, huh?” Chuckling to himself, Kaito lifted his arms at about the same time that Maki had tilted her head back to look up to see if it really was him—and because she’d already convinced herself that he was dying, seeing him looking perfectly lively was enough to get her to give in to her tears. The sight of her crying made him freeze, bending down to get more on her level, assuring her that everything was okay. “I didn’t want ya to freak out too much about things, but you went ahead and freaked out anyway, didn’t you?”
“You were bleeding and looked half alive, of course I freaked out!” she blubbered, before getting out of her chair, draping herself over for a second before remembering that they were in public and they had two friends there as their audience. Quickly containing herself, she backed away from him, crossed her arms over her chest, and gave a slightly-wavering hmph as he stood back up to full height. “So what was that this morning, if you’re not dead right now? Just spontaneous bleeding?”
“Sneezed so hard I bit open my tongue, left me dazed just long enough for you to wake up and see the damage before I even knew what was goin’ on.” He raised an arm to scratch at the back of his head, while Maki still stared at him, unamused at how overdramatic she’d let herself get at the mere sight of him, multiple times in one day. “Sorry about that, by the way. I should’ve probably tried to clean myself up or feel that my tongue wasn’t quite right.” If his story was true, it definitely explained why he sounded as if he was speaking with a slight lisp, and as Maki found herself watching his lips she could occasionally find his tongue peeking out, swollen on one side. “But hey, we’re all good now, so I’mma let you get back to your lunch while I…take care of something else.”
It must have been obvious that Maki was going to argue against that decision, because Shuichi jumped in and meekly said, “That sounds like a plan, Kaito. We’ll keep her here with us until you’re done with whatever you’re doing.”
“Don’t I get a say in this?”
“I think it may be better if you just go along with it,” Shuichi continued, knocking his hand against the table to draw her attention towards where she needed to sit. “I don’t know what Kaito’s got planned right now, but I’m willing to guess it’s an apology for what happened.”
Nodding furiously, Kaito added, “Y-yeah, it’s an apology for makin’ you think I was dying just because there was a little blood! We’ve gotta work on jumping to that conclusion every time I get even a little cough, but there’s time for that later! Now I…I’m gonna get outta here for a bit, you three enjoy!”
He left before Maki could fully register what he’d even said, let alone ask him for some of the physical affection she craved. Finding that she’d been defeated in that regard, she took her seat once more and looked at her friends with much more upbeat eyes than she’d had before, actual light shining in their red depths. “I guess there’s no choice but to listen to him,” she remarked, before sighing. “Even though I wish he wasn’t so boneheaded about things. What’s so important that he takes care of it on his own?”
“We’ll just have to see,” Himiko answered, while Shuichi shrugged. “I could do a tracking spell on him to find out, but that’s a lot of work.”
“I can be patient about this.” All at once the roller coaster of emotions she’d just been on hit her and Maki let out a single loud laugh, before throwing her head back, dissolving into giggles that had her kicking her legs as they dangled on the chair, her audience exchanging surprised looks at how she was behaving. When she sat upright, there were tears rolling down her cheeks, as she struggled to collect herself once again. “I can’t believe him, though, making me think he was dying like that! He really had me going, and I fell for it, and I…”
“And you what?” Shuichi asked, trying to draw out whatever she wanted to say, even though his attention was on something behind her. When she merely laughed again and let the crying continue, he grimaced, glancing towards Himiko for a split second before he hurriedly got up from his chair to approach their emotional friend. “Come on, Maki, this isn’t like you to be like this. What’s going on?”
“Here I was, convinced that the only man I could ever love was about to die on me, only for him to have not been dying at all!” Maki grabbed at the sides of her face, her hands moving back until she was gripping the base of her long ponytails. “Can you believe that, Shuichi? Would you, in all of your detective wisdom, been able to figure that out?”
While he thought about how to answer that, she ceased laughing, even though there were still fresh tears coming from the corners of her eyes. “If it makes you feel any better, yes, I would have been able to figure it out, but…for a different reason.,” he replied, placing his hands gently on her arms, which she bucked off. “Calm down, if you stay this worked up you’re going to only make yourself more upset.”
“Upset? I’m not upset! I’m…well, whatever I am, it’s not upset!” She looked him dead in the face, noticing that he wasn’t looking at her anymore, but before she could call out his lack of attention his eyes snapped to hers and he shushed her, catching her by surprise. “How dare you shush me,” she started, before being hushed a second time. “Shuichi Saihara, do you want to die?”
“No, but I also don’t think you want to ruin Kaito’s plan.”
It was by far the strangest response Shuichi could have had, and it took Maki completely out of her emotion-filled moment; she was promptly thrust right back into it when she heard what was unmistakably a cough come from Kaito, and Shuichi motioned for her to stand to go meet him, wherever he was. Their paths ended up crossing in the middle of the little restaurant, empty except for them, and it was right as Maki considered laying into him in another bout of her emotional insanity, he leaned into her and pressed his lips against hers. She was overcome with the feelings of romance, of physical affection, in that moment and she went along willingly with his advances, not noticing a thing around her until he pulled his lips back and looked down.
The gasp that she gave when she saw the ring was genuine, as was the reaction to smack his arm repeatedly, displeased with the heartache he’d put her through to get her to this point, but they both knew what her answer was going to be. It never had been a secret how much she was in love with him, just like it hadn’t been a secret that something was wrong with him, but in this instance, he’d been able to use what was wrong to make something right.