Work Text:
The shattered glass on the asphalt glimmers in rotating red and blue, colours changing faster as the sirens get louder and louder. Not like the shards in his hands. Those stay the same, glinting white where they aren't drawing blood from his burned and puckered skin.
“Dad?” He calls out, his hands beginning to shake. So small, those hands, wounds fresh and weeping – not the pink and angry old scars he traces on the bad nights. To remember, to try to forget.
The lens widens, and Jyuto looks down through the thick black smoke and the fumes, through the flashes of blue and red and bile rising in his throat until he can see the child with shaking hands. Heat swells from every direction, so hot it feels as if the air is being sucked from his lungs with each breath.
“Mom?”
The child peers through the smoke, knowing what he's looking for but not what he'll find. The world is spinning too fast around him, faster the harder it is to breathe. Behind the child sounds a strangled gurgling more animal than human. It's easier to imagine, to pretend it was a monster crouching in the wreckage than face the possibilities.
The truth.
Don't look! Jyuto tries to yell, but he's trapped on the outside of a fishbowl, words garbled and meaningless. His firsts, red-gloved, beat against the glass. Don't turn around! Don't look don't look don't look-
Darkness, like a thick black barrier pulled over him. He'd call it a mercy, if he believed the concept existed. There's a knowledge that prevents that, knowing the darkness is for eyes but not the child's. Never the child's.
“Jyuto,” A voice floats by, a rumble in the deep. Dark chocolate and lavender tea. He chases it, like a drowning man reaching for the surface. “Jyuto, wake up.”
Piercing the surface, he does. Jyuto's eyes flutter open.
In the lamplight, the form hovering over him casts an impressive shadow. Despite the size of the man looming over him – almost twice as broad as Jyuto – where Jyuto's heartbeat once would have hammered, it slows down instead. A gentle frown can be made out on Riou's face, blurred as it is.
“Are you alright?” Riou murmurs, and pulls back to a more respectable distance, now lying on his side closer to the edge of the bed.
It's instant, the way Jyuto misses the sense of that tremendous strength above him, restrained but ready to act if needed. But simply being in Riou's atmosphere is a comfort. One he knows better than to take for granted.
Jyuto nods, though the little flashes of red and foreboding remain. Fading the more the world around him comes into proverbial focus in every way it can without his glasses. Which lay beyond Riou and the edge of the bed where the warm light of the lamp mixes with the green of the alarm clock.
There is a tickle of breath against his neck and the slow rise and fall of a bare chest sweat-stuck to the skin of his back. Legs, lithe yet hard are tangled in his own. Best and worst of all, Samatoki's arm is wrapped around Jyuto's waist with more determination than someone deep asleep should be capable of possessing.
Fast and firm, an anchoring weight. It's not enough to stop the sense of dread that has settled in the pit of his stomach, but it's nice. It counts.
“I'm quite alright,” Jyuto finally manages to respond. He yawns and brings a naked hand to cover his mouth, the start of his sentence muffled against it. “It was simply a bad dream. What's the time?”
“Oh-four-hundred,” Riou responds without looking at the clock. A reflex, robotic and ever-reliable.
It's unfair, the way Jyuto’s heart seizes still at the deepening of Riou's frown. The soldier shuffles closer, one of his large hands bridging the distance between them to brush some hair from Jyuto's forehead. His knuckles brush against Jyuto's cheek on the way back, so tender it's unbearable. How does he say so much without uttering a word?
To bridge the offending inches of black silk-cotton sheets between the two of them becomes an immediate goal, inciting wriggles and the usual vain and ill fated attempts to escape the iron grip of the mobster behind him, holding on tighter with the smallest grunt.
Jyuto huffs and shakes his head, wishing he had his glasses on to fully behold the sweetness of Riou's fond smile in the lamplight.
“The sleep salve I brought from the base seems to be missing-in-action, but I could make you some chamomile tea,” Riou offers. Every word drips with the earnestness of a man who says exactly what he means in his own peculiar way. Acknowledgement, consideration without judgement Jyuto's history of notdoing that. Not being able to give voice to his thoughts, needs, desires.
It's not so bad once you get used to it, Jyuto can't help but to think, the mortification and horror of being known like this.
“I mean it, I'm fine. You woke me up before the worst of it,” Jyuto admits, almost self depreciating in tone. The indomitable commissioner so often defeated by a dream, one night terror or another.
Samatoki's breath still tickles the back of his stiff, sore neck as Jyuto stretches it from side to side. Joints crackle, rickety. He wonders if the soreness is from sliding into the void between pillows again and in turn if Riou had lifted his head back onto their shared pillow at some point.
“The real tragedy is that I can't quite reach you from here,” Jyuto sighs, the hand not trapped by Samatoki's coming to rest limp on the sheets between them, palm facing the ceiling.
In the low light it seems less of an indignity to aim a pout at the vague features of Riou's face. The reward of that rich, rumbling chuckle would be enough, is enough.
But Jyuto always gets more than he knows he deserves and Riou's calloused palm slides over Jyuto's own - soft yet scarred.
“Better?” Riou asks, giving Jyuto's hand in his the smallest squeeze.
“A little, I suppose,” Jyuto closes his eyes and hopes the low light hides his smile. “It will suffice.”
The fog is still there behind his eyes, ready to pull him back under, even as Riou hums in contentment.
In the orderless court of his mind there are words, but there are always words, usually too many thoughts to count and always ideologies at war. All too often they're replays of his missteps and tragedies, and he's forced to remind himself any step is a step forward towards his goal. The past brings self-flagellation, the future brings fear and anxieties far beyond his control.
The present, this present moment, touched by Riou's kindness and Samatoki's grounding touch even as he's dragged back under...
It brings a clarity he can't be sure he'll ever have upon waking.
“Riou,” he calls out, quiet and unsure.
How many nights had he woken shaking and crying, calling out the names of those who can no longer answer? Sirens and gunshots playing in his head on repeat, the screeching of tires and crunching of metal – he used to sit up with a cup of herbal tea he'd make himself, trying to shake the memories until the cup in his hands was stone cold and his morning alarms rang to 'wake him up'. Occasionally he'd pace instead of sit, or switch the tea for coffee but routine was routine.
More than a decade of this nightmare protocol, beginning curled up alone in his bed and ending in a sleepless daze.
“Mm?” Riou's calloused thumb strokes the back of his hand, back and forth. In this moment, Jyuto Iruma understands love.
Thank you, he wants to say, thank you for being here. But his mouth won't make the right shapes. It's too pointed, too poignant, hurts too much to admit.
He settles on a soft, “Goodnight.”
Even knowing that by the time he wakes Riou will be making the trek back through the dreaded wilderness to base camp, Riou's gentle hum is better than a lullaby.
The yakuza-flavoured sack of flesh attached to his back presses his lips into Jyuto's shoulder. Another matter entirely.
“Shaddup bunny cop,” Samatoki slurs, snuggling in even closer. “Nightmare's gone. Mm, 's sleep time.”
This one, Jyuto thinks with a surge of annoyance – affection, whatever you want to call it – won't be up till midday. And he's right, about the end of the nightmare and all of it's pernicious lingering echoes, about it being well and truly time for sleep.
Samatoki is right about something for once in his short and bright life, and he won't remember it come morning.
There's a smug smile on his face as he slips into sleep, regardless of the drool puddle forming on his shoulder and the sound of morning traffic beginning to flow.
It seems there are small pleasures in the mortifying ordeal of knowing and being known. It isn't all horror. Not so bad, indeed.