Work Text:
There is no other ending.
Tsukishima feels the barrel of the gun, still warm in his hands. Presses it to Koito's temple and watches the sinkhole form in his skull, the softness of his eyeball collapsing in on itself, dribbling black.
Koito, above him, warm and beautiful, bare elbows and flushed shoulders. The skin is soft where the knife sinks in, at the gap in his ribs, angled just so to pierce the heart. Blood threading down the length of the blade, the handle, caressing Tsukishima's wrist and forearm on its way to splatter sticky heat over his chest. His own heart is still where it lies, quiet.
Koito is on his knees, hands clasped behind his back, and Tsukishima's gaze stays fixed on the peeking edge of pale at his palm when the blade falls. He gurgles when the blade catches in the first notch of his spine. Tsukishima's bicep strains, aching for each messy downwards strike, the chunks of flesh it pries from that exposed slice of bone, the sudden droop of skin when the seal of his throat is punctured.
Hack, hack, hack. Koito had always made it look so easy; still, Tsukishima had not expected anything else.
This time, when Tsukishima wakes he can still feel the coarse knit of burlap rubbing against the brunt of his hands, can feel the absent heat of Koito’s mouth where he had turned to press a kiss against the back of his palm as the sack had gone over his head.
(This was new, startlingly new, so much so that Tsukishima had nearly paused for it. The phantom of gunpowder soot rests in the crevice of his love line all the same.)
Can still hear the echo of the gunshot, the tinny ring of it spearing his eardrums with the feedback screech. He is fine, and he knows he is fine, but he cannot quell the shake starting at the tendons of his wrist, the raking shivers at the base of his spine and the nausea spilling bitter air across the base of his tongue with each measured, low breath. His face screws and unscrews in turns, a sort of revulsion towards killing he’s surprised managed to survive his lifestyle, parasitic, squirreled somewhere in his marrow.
Koito shifts on the cot, yukata loose at the collar to bare the bandaging that crosses his chest. Tsukishima’s first impulse is to pull the fold of the fabric closed, to tidy it against his clavicle, but he hesitates, a stutter in the fluid motion of his wrist wrought by the lingering quiver from beneath his skin. He muffles his ragged breath with a quiet swallow, taking a deliberate, measured inhale through his nose.
(“Sir, these beds are not--”
Koito whines, long and low, scrabbling to fist in Tsukishima’s collar and yank him to the bed. Tsukishima grimaces, but there is fondness in his brow, letting himself be maneuvered until he falls alongside him. He finds it in himself to blame Koito’s eagerness for attention on the medley of painkillers he’s been administered to keep him down, his smile drowsy and his face lax.
With one foot braced on the hardwood so as to keep too much weight from the flimsy hospital bed frame, he complies and fits himself just barely beside Koito. The second lieutenant hums approval, throwing his arms over Tsukishima’s head to pull him closer still, until he’s nearly full alongside him, that one braced leg straining to keep contact as he’s tugged inward.
He releases him from his hold at this point, and Tsukishima steels himself to hold position until Koito manages to pass fully into sleep.)
Exhale.
“Tsukishima?” Softly, the latter syllable dragged through the subtle tide of sleep. Tsukishima’s hands still hesitate, hovering over the warm slice of bared skin, near brushing the thick cloth that runs oblique across his pectoral. He doesn’t speak, only swallows, but Koito turns to him, ducking to blink into his space. Koito’s searching his face, brows furrowed and lips softening in concern in the dark but Tsukishima cannot help himself from fixing his gaze on the way it makes his yukata fall open in full at one side, the topography of his ribs now subject to the moonlight’s brush.
He can imagine them splintered-severed-broken, seeping dark into the fabric, into the creases of his own minutely trembling palms. He swallows the thought on his next breath, feels it burst in his stomach, scattering leaden and sick at his navel. He blinks in the dark, about to lend his superior an affirmative when Koito’s own hands come up, clasping over Tsukishima’s.
He tries his name again, and Tsukishima makes to answer, but it feels too warm, where the rough of his skin meets Koito’s uncalloused palms. Like he’s buffing them, scuffing every point where Koito reaches for him, brushing thumbs over his knuckles before dragging them to his mouth, pressing his lips gentle to the knob of each joint as he mutters consolation--not a kiss, it cannot be a kiss, just a test of the skin where Koito is most sensitive to the contact.
He should pull away. He cannot allow Koito to do this to himself. In an act of insidious selfishness, too, he knows he cannot do this to Koito; worse, even more insidious, he already has, and he does not know how to stop.
He flinches--a brief screw of the face, a jolt of those captured hands, nothing more--and Koito’s eyebrows knit tighter as his eyes go childishly wide, the line of his jaw pulling his face into a pout, near-pleading. Despite the childishness, it is a display without petulance, any naivete drawn from the well of something warm and honey-sweet and distant from either of their lonely islands, the taste of it on Tsukishima’s palate making him swallow hard. Making him tremble with want for violence, a curtailed inevitability.
Near panting, he turns, able to use the press of the pillow to reset the alignment of his jaw. Koito watches his mouth in the dark, listens to the wet cluck of tongue and cheek as he realigns. Blinking, he presses his gently pursed mouth once again to his knuckles, a soft smack as he withdraws. One hand anchored securely around his wrist and the other reaching for Tsukishima’s crown. He presses the back of his palm to Tsukishima’s temple, and while his touch on his hands had been searing, his skin is now cool to his own.
“Are you ill? Should I call for Ienaga?” It nearly jolts him, the mundane absurdity of it, to call the cannibal doctor into the sickbay in which Tsukishima has no right to be, to fuss over him and berate his poor skin and tired pallor for the sake on account of his poor, tired dreams. Funny, too, the thought of the exhaustion of the imagination; Tsukishima is not inventive enough to occupy the endless drudgery of night, but he supposes the field experience has replaced any need for originality.
“No, sir. I’m fine.” Koito lapses into a weighted silence, slows his breath until it matches the tempo of Tsukishima’s. Tsukishima cannot tell where the impulse comes from, the younger so readily, so intuitively falling into line with him. The back of his palm passes back, brushing his scalp and skirting the upper edge of his ear, a strange sort of affection, Koito thinking little of the unconventional treatment. Once more, he brings his wrist to Tsukishima’s temple, glides it back against the skin and the side of his head.
Tsukishima closes his eyes, lets it happen. That weighted silence has now found purchase in his own throat, pulsing with an absent heat, “You should rest, Lieutenant Koito.”
Seemingly understanding, Koito doesn’t make to stop him, something of the nighttime ambiance usurping his fatal optimisms. He releases Tsukishima’s knuckles and withdraws from his face--not without passing that hand over his own temple in a quiet display of longing that smarts in the gaps of Tsukishima’s ribs. It is an act of mourning, to listen for the sound of rustling cloth as they untangle from each other, knee-to-knee and hip-to-hip, for the sound of Koito’s sigh as he turns onto the flat of his back to reclaim the transient space and watch him pull away.
“Tsukishima,” he says, blinking into the ceiling beams, leaving his lips slightly parted as he hesitates on his next clause, “Were you going to… fix my collar?” Even dimly, there is an open anguish in some of the creasing of his features, the small furrow at the corner of his eye and the edge of his slackened lips.
Tsukishima flattens his mouth, unsure of what to make of it. He raises his hands--
(The soft curve of his skin, glowing in the night, the white of the bandage and the dark stain that rests in its middle. The dip of his clavicle and the jut of his Adam’s apple, all presented in innocuous tableau. Koito’s own utterance pleading his touch.)
--and drops them to his sides once again, regimentally stiff. They burn.
“Goodnight, Koito.” He swallows the silence.
“Goodnight, Tsukishima.” Once again, the letters trail as his name drags on Koito’s tongue, as if reluctant to leave the haven of his mouth, reluctant to part. As Tsukishima exits, he glances back, the loosened collar of Koito’s yukata gaping in the dark, Koito slumping as he sinks into its maw.
With a trepid breath, he leaves the door slightly ajar.