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He could feel her gloved fingers move about inside him, the tips hooked just so, appraising the jagged rims on either side of the gash in his stomach, pressing down gently to feel out for any ruptures in the thin membrane that walled his abdominal cavity.
He sucked in a breath, sharp, and kept his eyes firm on the ceiling. Her scent had mingled with his own and grown heavy in the pregnant summer heat, wisteria and disinfectant and something distinctly her permeating his sweat and the gore of his wound.
I shouldn’t be feeling like this, he thought, miserable. It shouldn't be making me so fucking happy that she’s got her hands on me, in me, when it’s like this, when it’s only ever like this.
But it did. It did, and were he to look at her now, he did not trust himself to behave like anything more than an animal.
“You’re lucky,” Kanae said, finally, mercifully, and from her tone alone he could tell her lips were pursed together tight, could picture the grim slant of her mouth. “The cut is ugly, but it’s clean. He cut through what little fat you have and through the muscle, but he didn’t nick anything underneath.”
Sanemi grunted, noncommittal. The fight had been like that, too: the ugly kind of clean. Lower Moon One was a dumb bastard, granted, but he wasn’t exactly a paragon of fine judgment, either. He’d gotten sloppy, forgotten himself in the quick of his anger. Made a rookie mistake. A moment late to duck, and the sonovabitch would have bisected him. A moment late to duck, and now she’d be standing at the table bent over his halves, hands knotted, knuckles white.
He closed his eyes.
Whatever, he told himself, uneasy. I won’t make that mistake again. She won’t have to—
To what? a coiled part of him said back. Weep? Scream? Mourn? It flexed in him, hard, the taut body of that serpent named Doubt. Bury you? She would, sure, but don’t presume it’d mean shit.
Fuck you, he told it, pointedly. Even if it wouldn’t mean shit to her, it’d mean something to me.
Why?
‘Cause, he said, and forcibly shut himself up, replaying the fight in his head.
In the end he’d lopped the bastard’s head off without even using his Breath. That was good enough, right? It was make-up enough.
Right?
Kanae hummed. He drifted off to the sound of it, to the feel of her hands working the wound, mending him like old cloth.
§
Even at night the July sun blistered.
He rose from the sickbed with a disoriented grunt, thumbing absently at the upper edge of his bandages, feeling around with the flat of his hand for the little bumps where the stitching knotted. She had done them in a neat, close crowd; As if I’d give a fuck about scarring ugly, he thought, and scoffed without any real malice. Weird woman.
He threw the covers aside and padded from the room, aimless. Sweat stuck his hair to his nape in clumps, stuck his skin together where parts of him touched. He could feel his own tongue, swollen and heavy and too huge for his mouth, cutting itself on the jag of his teeth. He felt like death.
I probably smell like it, too.
The humidity was not helping the weight of the heat. They needed rain, badly—but the monsoon tarried, making the season unbearable.
Sanemi thought of drying fields, of famine. He thought of fevers breaking out, thriving in the long reign of the sun. Then he thought of the storm coming, breaking at last, and breaking fierce: thought of too much water drowning the houses and what was left of the crops, leaving the earth turned and smooth as it drained, too clammy to make proper graves of.
He shuddered.
“Shinazugawa?”
“Kochō,” he acknowledged, and realized he’d wandered far out of the care ward and into the mansion’s inner courtyard. Wide lilac eyes held him, unreadable, and he curled his toes in the grass. He always felt so artless around her without a sword in his hand, without a means to make the argument that they belonged in the same scene.
“Too hot to sleep, isn’t it?” she said, affably, and he gave an absent nod. It was strange to see her like that, out of her uniform and in bedclothes, her hair without its clips, pinned away and up. It was…intimate.
Fuck. Fuck!
He lowered his gaze.
“Come here,” she said, willfully or blissfully ignorant of his thoughts, and patted the place next to her on the bare wood. “Have some barley tea.”
He thought about declining. About turning around and saying, Thanks, but I’d better try to sleep while it’s at least a little cool out. Or, Thanks, but I wanna walk, wanna try to get some breeze, a bit of moving air. It’s so fucking stuffy, even outside.
But then he was looking at her again, at the way the collar of her yukata sat at her nape, loose and pooling and yet still so infuriatingly proper, large morning glories blooming on the pale fabric at the sleeves. He was looking at her eyes, and no, no, lilac wasn’t quite the right colour, was it?
Wisteria. They’re wisteria.
Witch eyes. Slayer’s eyes.
Kanae’s eyes.
He sat down on the porch with a grunt, mindful of his wound, and hooked a dirty foot under the opposite knee, letting his right leg hang. He drank the cup she’d poured for him in silence, trying hard not to think of how good it felt to be alone with her, even if it was only ever like this, even if every moment he had had to be thieved.
“Kumquat?” she offered after a time, and he eyed the bowl with suspicion. Where the fuck did you get these so out of season? He had a feeling that it probably involved Gyōmei, which meant that he had a feeling he really didn’t want to know. She was close with the would-be monk—a touch too close for his heart’s comfort. “I promise they’re sweet,” she added, eyes laughing, and when he opened his mouth to retort she popped one on his tongue.
They were sweet.
He still sputtered. “Don’t feed me strange shit, oi!”
“It’s just fruit, Shinazugawa.”
“It’s ripe kumquat in fuckin’ July,” he seethed, chewing too hard. “It’s strange shit.” Then, after a moment: “And stop calling me that.”
“What, your name?” She sounded bemused.
He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t.
He toyed with his hands, brushing lint off his knees that wasn’t there. “My name’s Sanemi.”
“And mine is Kanae, but I don’t think you’ve ever called me that.”
“That’s only ’cause—” he shut his mouth before he could make an even bigger fool of himself. Ran a hand through his hair, agitated.
She held another kumquat out to him. “You can, you know.”
“Can what,” he said, wary eyes on her fingers, on the fruit held between them, bright like a miniature sun. No wonder the heat’s fuckin’ inescapable, he thought, distracted. Here she is, with a plate of these fuckers. That’s like inviting drought.
Okay, so not distracted. Delirious.
A distant part of him wondered what kind of sedatives she’d had him under.
Kanae struggled not to laugh at the way he glared. “Call me Kanae,” she clarified, and his head snapped up to look at her face. Her expression softened. “If you want to, of course. Sanemi.”
He didn’t reply.
Instead he took the kumquat from her with his teeth, liking the way that made her redden, liking the way the flush spread down her neck when his lips brushed her fingers.
It’s the heat, Doubt said, ceaselessly coiling and uncoiling its long body.
Didn’t I tell you to shut the fuck up?
Doubt scoffed. You really think a woman like her could want an animal like you? You really think she could love it?
He looked at the curve of her smile, at the way her eyelids fell, half-mooned and content. Looked at her eyelashes, long and black and spidered, at the dense shadows they cast on her cheeks.
He swallowed slowly. Yeah. ‘Cause I’m her animal.
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fin.