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“Kazuh—!”
So the sea. Love it or hate it, it’s always there, and when you spend so much of your time on its waves smooth sailing, it’s easy to forget that it’s still equivalently a blackhole. Even for how in-tune Kazuha is with nature, nature is still bigger than he is, and things slip through the cracks. He noticed a change in the wind, but didn’t realize the effect it’d have on the ocean until they were in the middle of the storm.
To be completely fair, he still largely underestimates it until it throws him and Beidou over the taffrail and sea fills his senses and lungs. It loads up his ears, burns his eyes and he treads water against the roaring waves. The sea is the color of the night sky, blues lost in saturating darkness while lightning spikes over their heads. He can still hear his crewmates shouting, but even that is scarce and drowned.
He finds Beidou in the water below him, unconscious, and he manages to fit himself underneath her with her arm hauled across his shoulders. She’s not moving, but her head is as above the water as he can get it. His legs are starting to burn. Water sprays into his face and he splutters, kicking harder. He tries to open his eyes, but his vision is too blurry to help him. The sea is too wide. The Alcor and his shouting crewmates are too far away. Beidou is a lot heavier unconscious and waterlogged. He tries to take in air and ends up with seawater instead.
He needs to get them out of the ocean. They need to survive.
For a while, it’s a blur. He treads, exhausted, keeping Beidou upright as best he can. She must have hit her head on the way down--or maybe the impact against the ocean was enough, he doesn’t know. But she’s unconscious for however long the blur lasts, and then well into his awareness when it finally seeps back in. The water is warm even below the dark sky, but an iciness has settled in his bones that he doesn’t know how to shake while still to his neck in ocean. He just kicks, drifts, hopes the storm doesn’t worsen and tries not to let them drown.
Then, somehow, an incalculable amount of time later, his feet find sand.
He tightens his grip on Beidou, hauling her beside him as he stumbles over wet sand onto the shore. It’s still pitch-black and stormy, so it can’t have been that long since they’d been thrown overboard unless he was more out of it than he realized and missed the sun rise and set, which he can’t find likely even as out of it as he was. His body aches and he’s exhausted, but they made it. Just a little bit longer.
He drags Beidou along with him, sopping clothes and gravity at his back. He only manages to get them beyond the tide before he collapses, softening Beidou’s descent as best he can and slamming onto the sand beside her. It hurts to breathe. It’s hard to breathe—he coughs against a rough inhale and up comes seawater, which is never a good thing. The sand is coarse, with a texture more akin to salt than the fine sands of Inazuma he knows. That’s a comfort; they hadn’t landed in Inazuma.
He gathers himself, swiping back his loose, sopping hair and crawls to Beidou’s side. It’s the middle of the night and raining hard, and it’s not easy to make out her condition, but she’s breathing steadily and he’s able to find the source of her unconsciousness—a cut on her temple, mottled bruising so dark he can see it even in the darkness. It’s nasty, but she seems otherwise unharmed. That’s good.
He catches his breath for another minute or two before getting his wobbling feet underneath him. There’s not a lot he can do, but maybe he can makeshift some kind of shelter. He needs to get her out of the elements.
It’s easier said than done. He does manage, of course, but the results of his labor are disheartening.
Between branches and habitation, he structures a crude tent in the foliage beneath towering trees and carves an expansive groove in the sand in an attempt to reach whatever dry ground could potentially be below. The sand is drier, and the overhead structure withstands the rain, so he hauls Beidou into it, gasping at the strain when it’s all said and done. It shouldn’t be tiring him out this much. His ribs hurt. Beidou is still unconscious, but at least this way she’s relatively dry and safe. He bandages her head with a strip from his tunic, securing it with a doubleknot. It doesn’t seem to be bleeding too much anymore, but he’ll need to keep an eye on it.
He doesn’t know whether or not he slept, but the black clouds turn gray as the sun comes up, and Kazuha ignores the pangs in his ribs as he checks on Beidou again, now in better light. The wound on her head has bruised badly, but her breathing is steady. He must have done an alright job keeping her head out of the water. He’d been worried.
He re-wraps her head with the same strip of tunic, but then his lungs hitch and he whips his head away, muffling coughs into the crook of his elbow. The effort hurts, like the coughs are made from dirt, and any attempt to breathe against them hurts nearly just as much. They’re wet, too. He swallows back the rancid taste at the back of his throat and breathes carefully through his nose. Thankfully, it doesn’t start another fit.
“God, what the hell…?”
Kazuha leaps toward Beidou’s side, clenching his teeth at the tear in his chest and pressing a hand on Beidou’s shoulder. “Don’t move,” he says. She blinks up at him, half-dazed, squinting against the bright overcast. “You probably have a concussion.”
“Ugh, I’m fine.” She bats his hand off with strength that surprises him. He doesn’t even have to help her sit up—though she does hiss and clutch her temple. “Okay—maybe a concussion. But, I—” She looks at him, then past him, then around them. “I think we have bigger fish to fry, where the hell are we?”
“I don’t know,” Kazuha admits. “An island.”
“Well, I knew that. Are you alright? Are you hurt?”
“No,” Kazuha says, ignoring his twisting ribs. “After we were thrown overboard during the storm, I… got us here. But I don’t remember how, it’s… it’s all a blur, really.”
“You dragged my unconscious ass through a storming ocean?”
“I dragged all of you through a storming ocean, Beidou.”
She snorts with an eyeroll. “Well. I’m impressed, kiddo. And I owe you one.”
“It’s the least I could do,” Kazuha says. Which is true—after she’s given him so much, and even if she hadn’t, how could he not do the bare minimum of keeping her alive? “But I still don’t know where we are.”
“Mm, right. I’ll take a look aro—” Beidou begins to haul herself up, but her eyes gloss over and Kazuha springs to his feet just in time to slow her fall. She’s still conscious, but there’s no strength in her legs and he sets her down carefully. “Okay.” Beidou holds her head with one hand, her other hand steadying herself on his shoulder. “Okay. Think you were right about the concussion.”
“I know,” Kazuha says. He bites his lip. “You should stay down, Beidou. I can manage on my own for a while.”
She sighs, but doesn’t fight him on it. “Shout if you need me.”
“I will.” Kazuha lowers her arm to her side and rises to a stand. “And to you as well.”
She nods shortly and Kazuha turns away, following the shoreline north and around the island’s circumference.
It isn’t a large island at all, which works against them being found. The habitation is native of Liyue, though—which means even if they haven’t reached Liyue, they’re closer to it than to Inazuma, and that at least bolsters their overall chances of survival. It surprises him to see such a storm in Liyue, but, he supposes their luck could just be that egregious. It wouldn’t surprise him at this point.
Fish, too. A lot of fish, near enough to the shore he could easily pick a few out of the sea with his sword. He doesn’t now, but that is good to know.
A hitch rattles his chest again and he coughs it out into his elbow. Still rough, still wet, still leaves him gasping for breath. His ribs ache, but as long as nothing’s broken—and he’d be able to tell if something was—then he’s fine. A cough is hardly trouble. It’ll clear up as soon as his throat has healed from the saltwater.
He finishes his walk around the shore and finds Beidou where he’d left her, only now she’s manifested her claymore and is sharpening it with a stone. She lifts her head as he approaches.
“Judging by the sand and what I see of the trees, I think we’re in Liyue,” Beidou says. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re right,” Kazuha agrees, taking a seat beside her under their makeshift shelter. “When the rain stops, we should start a fire. Someone’s bound to be close enough to see the smoke, even if just a cargo ship or fisherman. Speaking of, there are a lot of fish at the shoreline, and they’re surprisingly bold.”
“That’s good to hear,” Beidou says. She banishes her claymore and leans back on her hands with a heavy sigh. “This is gonna be fun… any idea on how much the storm’s got left in it?”
Kazuha pauses, watching the clouds, listening to the wind, catching raindrops with his gaze. “... Hard to say.”
“Cool.” She sighs, heavier. “That’s great. Well—”
“We’ll be alright,” Kazuha says.
Beidou huffs. “That was my line.”
“I know.”
She ruffles his hair and he half-laughs, but it irritates his chest again and he turns quickly, pressing coughs into his sleeve.
“Kid?”
He waves his opposite hand at her, twisting further away. The coughing should stop any second now—the first fits weren’t long—but instead of stopping, they seem to dig deeper, squeezing under his chest cavity and nestling further and further down. Kazuha coughs and coughs until he’s dizzy and the world spins and he can’t catch a breath.
“Okay, easy—” Beidou grips him by the shoulders. “Easy, easy, Kazuha.”
Eventually it’s over and Kazuha gasps, nearly throwing himself into a fourth fit with it. Blessedly, that doesn’t happen. His vision is spotty and the world is still spinning. He tries to shrug Beidou’s hands off, but it doesn’t work.
“Fine, fine,” Kazuha pants, “I’m fine, d-don’t—” He swallows the threatening itch in his throat. “Don’t worry.”
“Kazuha. Kazuha, you sound horrible,” Beidou says, clearly worried. “That cough is—it sounds like you have water in your lungs.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Kazuha says.
She presses her lips thin and levels him with a narrowed look, one that there’s little arguing against. “Kazuha.”
“I’ll be fine. Once the storm lets up, we’ll get a smoke beacon going. Or perhaps the crew will find us first—you know how they are. Odd-defying and tenacious. I’m sure they’re looking for us now, and Huixing is good with storms. They will find us.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Beidou says. “But I wanna know if you develop any more concerning symptoms. I don’t like how that cough sounds.”
He doesn’t like how it sounds, either. Or feels. He nods. “I will keep you posted.”
It keeps raining through the afternoon, evening and well into the night. Kazuha can only think how lucky they are to have landed near Liyue and not Mondstadt; given their clothes are still considerably wet, and the state of the weather, he isn’t sure they’d be able to manage in a colder climate. As it is, he and Beidou sleep side by side for body heat’s sake, and it’s still raining when he opens his eyes the next morning. And his lungs have started to hurt regardless of whether or not he’s coughing.
Once Beidou’s up, they go fishing.
“How’s your head, Beidou?”
“Better after sleeping,” Beidou says, slinging her claymore over her shoulder and swinging her hair out of her face. “You don’t have to worry about me, kid.”
“I think I’m within my right to worry,” Kazuha says. He manages to skewer a fish on his sword, finally, knee-deep in the ocean. They’re feistier than he expected. “You were unconscious. And you do have a concussion.”
“Eh!” Beidou, the water reaching her mid-shin, slams her claymore down into the sand beneath the tide and nabs a stunned fish straight out of the water with her bare hand. “I’m fine. More importantly, how are you feeling?”
“I am also fine,” Kazuha says. He feels kind of bad for the fish. “Thank you for asking.”
She gives him something of a look again, less stern than the one from yesterday but still with an air of questioning. He wasn’t lying—he is fine, and it’s only marginally harder to breathe today than yesterday.
“Alright, well.” Beidou trudges out of the water, gesturing for him to follow with a jerk of her head. “Come on. I think a beacon’s still out of the question with this rain, but we should be able to get a fire going under the shelter long enough to roast these suckers.”
He does feel very bad for the fish, but it is what it is. He follows Beidou up the shore toward their camp.
He breathes, normally, but it upsets something in his chest and he turns to bury coughs into his arm. The fit is deeper than the fits before it—chestier. He can feel each cough in his ribs and it pounds like a tortured heartbeat.
“Kazuha?”
He tries waving her off again, but the dizziness gets to him first. His knees slam into the sand and he coughs, hard, and coughs, and keeps coughing, and—every heaving inhale folds into another fit, and another fit, and—
He hears Beidou’s claymore hit the ground. “Kazuha!”
Ah, she sounds worried. He wants to wave her off again, but.
He feels her presence at his side, her hands on his shoulders, and he’s grateful because dark spots dance in and out through his vision, and it’s hard to catch a breath between the coughing. He coughs so hard he gags, and— he doesn’t throw up, but he coughs up something onto the sand. Salty. Mucus. Another bad sign.
But it eases the fit and he sinks back onto his calves, gasping for breath. Beidou keeps him steady and he’s grateful.
“Kid.”
“I know,” he croaks, distressingly out of breath and dizzy. Logically he knows which way is up and which way is down, but wouldn’t know whether he was falling forward or backwards if he tipped. “It… probably sounds worse than, than it is.”
“Kazuha.”
He finds her face. Her eyes are clouded in pent-up frustration, her expression stern but overwhelmingly worried. He’s still catching his breath, but only realizes now how long it’s taking him to recover, and how little he has.
“... Or,” he rasps, “or I should— probably take this seriously.”
“Yeah,” Beidou says. “Come on, let’s head back to the shelter and try to get some food in you.”
He nods.
Beidou pushes him to let her take the watch that following night, and at first he only accepts without objection or negotiation because he knows how worried she is and hopes seeing him rest will abate some of that for her. Then, after he’s had the chance to lie down, he realizes how tired he is and how awfully the pounding in his head has become, and then he’s just relieved he hadn’t fought her on it or compromised with taking half the shift, because all he wanted to do then was sleep and hopefully wake up feeling better. The coughs are there still, and just as deep, but he hasn’t had another fit since that morning. Sleep comes surprisingly easy.
He’s deep into it when Beidou shakes him awake.
“Kazuha? Kazuha, wake up.” Her hand presses into his forehead, blissfully cool. “Kazuha. Damn it, Kazuha, I need you to wake up, come on.” She shakes him, and his awareness fittles back slowly like sand trickling through an hourglass. He feels uncomfortably sticky, the headache spreading across his skull and down into the base of his neck, graduating from a throbbing pain to a pounding burn. It’s too warm, but also not warm enough. He’s shivering, and when he takes a breath through his mouth his chest rattles, and lurches, and—
Coughing.
Again.
Wet coughs, coughs with intention, coughs that lodge gunk in the back of his throat. Beidou hauls him upright and his head spins, nausea roiling, breath stuck, but he can’t push her off. The coughs are productive, and he leans over the sand and coughs up more of whatever’s trapped in his chest, but it doesn’t bring the relief he’d been expecting. He’s still out of breath and he still feels choked.
“Okay.” Beidou massages his shoulders a moment longer before pressing him to lie down again. Even the sand under him is uncomfortably warm, and he curls his knees up into his chest and breathes shakily. It’s warm, but he can’t stop shaking. “Okay, kid. How’re you holding up? Talk to me.”
He feels her hand run circles against his back. He doesn’t know what it’s helping, but the knots in his chest loosen a little. He doesn’t even have a mind to tell her not to worry anymore. Clearly that ship has sailed.
“Not—” Kazuha stops to try and clear his throat, because he sounds wrecked, but it doesn’t do anything. He huffs. “Not well.”
“You have a fever.”
Yeah, he sort of figured. The confirmation isn’t reassuring. “Mmnn.”
She combs his hair out of his face. He didn’t realize how much of it had been clinging to him until the night air breezes over his sweaty skin. He’ll thank her when he doesn’t sound like he’s been gargling coral. “The rain is starting to clear up. Hang in there.”
“I will,” he wheezes.
She strokes his hair until he falls asleep.
Beidou is moving him. Her grip is solid, her gait sure, but his vision is hazy and he’s seeing two of her. The rain has stopped. There’s a light, too—a warm light, firelight. It accentuates the shadows on her face. The shadows around them. He trembles, and she gives him a squeeze.
“You’re alright, kid,” she murmurs, kneeling and settling him down gently. “You’re alright, it’s alright.”
The warmth becomes tangible—there is a fire, a bonfire, all smoke and heat. It’s as comforting as it is overwhelming. Beidou sits at his side, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and pulling him close, and he digs his forehead into her leg and breathes, breathes, breathes. He’s too hot, but the fire is nice. The fire also means a smoke signal, which hopefully means they’ll be found soon.
He opens his mouth to ask her something, but what comes out instead is another coughing fit. She braces him through it, rubbing his back. It isn’t as long, but it hurts, and he gasps for breath when it’s over and tries not to think too hard about just how tight his chest is.
“Beidou,” he pants, trying to blink his vision clear enough to read her face. He can’t make everything out, but he can tell how worried she is and how hard she’s trying to hide it.
“It’s alright,” she says. “It won’t be long now. Hang in there.”
He wants to try and reassure her not to worry, but the only thing he can do is nod and close his eyes. When sleep comes for him, it isn’t gentle.
He wakes up to the sensation of being carried a second time, but not by Beidou. He knows her grip; this hold is too wide and too unpracticed to be hers. He kicks out, but is held down, the gait beneath him growing swifter.
“S’ alright, bud, s’ alright. Your head’s kinda cooked, isn’t it? It’s alright, but you’re safe.”
Oh, maybe he does know who’s carrying him after all. “Juza…?” His voice is wrecked, weak, and it isn’t until he’s hit with the urge to cough that he realizes how badly his chest aches, or the way his head pounds, or—gods, he’s been sick before, why is it so hard to breathe? “Juza…”
“The one and only!”
It’s so dark. The world is stifling, thunder banging around in his head like pots and pans, the ache poisonous in the marrow of his bones. He didn’t think it possible to be able to hurt so deeply. He tries to cough, but that only seems to further drench his lungs instead of clearing them up. And then it’s even harder to breathe.
But if Juza’s here then that means they’re found. It means they’re safe—him and Beidou both. The flare worked. Everything is going to be okay.
“—Liyue, you know that pharmacist? We’re just gonna do some course-correcti—”
Everything is going to be okay.
“Kazuha? Kazuha, can you hear me?”
Everything is going to be okay.
“Holy shi— Beidou!”
He doesn’t remember anything else. Even as Juza sprints below him and his awareness slips away, he can’t help but feel it’s probably for the best.
Kazuha wakes up with such crisp awareness he’s nearly sick with it, but he sucks in too deep a breath and folds into himself hacking. His chest hurts, but he can feel the gunk trapped within it loosen, which— is good, but the coughing becomes wet and the ache sharpens to a needlepoint and he clutches at his chest and squeezes his eyes shut.
Hands pull him up by the shoulders and support him over a wooden bucket he doesn’t recognize. A hand he does recognize slaps him on the back. “Cough it up, kid,” Drake encourages, his opposite hand gathering Kazuha’s hair behind his head. “Don’t stifle it.”
Kazuha doesn’t think he’d be able to if he tried, but as it is he’s too tired to try. It’s relieving to be able to cough productively—as gross as it is. The coughing is doing something now instead of just… bringing panic in the midst of being unable to breathe.
He hacks into the bucket until the coughing settles into a wheeze, and he takes a deep breath. His lungs rattle, but not as severely. Drake rubs his back.
“Good, good.” The bucket is set aside, a blanket pulled around Kazuha’s shoulders. Between that and the stature Drake cuts, he feels abruptly dwarfed. “You’re doing great, kid. Breathe.”
“Drake,” Kazuha rasps. His voice isn’t as poor as he was expecting. “I… where…?”
“Well, take a look around.”
When he finally recovers his breath, Kazuha lifts his head. He sees Drake, first—him and his relieved smile—and then a row of made, empty, snow-colored beds that mirror the one he and Drake are stationed at, tray tables and shelves housing books and tinctures and succulents all over. Windows gaze out at the golden mountains of Liyue and immediately he knows where they are.
“You speedran pneumonia,” Drake tells him, his hand still a steadying weight at Kazuha’s shoulder blades. “Congrats. Baizhu was actually impressed.”
Ah, so he was right. But. “Pneumonia…?” Kazuha coughs twice, but harshly, into his fist. His mouth is too salty. He wants water. “I didn’t think it’d… progressed that much.”
“Yeah, we were all surprised when he gave us the diagnosis. Your fever’s still pretty toasty, but Baizhu said you should be fine now that his assistant’s looked at you. He’s gonna give us some medicine to help you cough.”
“I’ve been coughing just fine so far.”
Drake scowls good-naturedly and tousles his messy hair. “You know what I mean, come on. You’ve gotta get the rest of that shit out of your lungs, we don’t play around with pneumonia. The trip here was rough, I’ll tell you. Do you remember any of it?”
Kazuha blinks. “... No.” Not even a blur.
“Yeah, so.” Drake sits back, and Kazuha grips the hem of the blanket to pull it tighter around him, a dull chill spreading over his shoulders. “We think you were unconscious for most of it—”
“You think?”
“Either that or you just weren’t getting enough air to be coherent,” Drake says. “By the time we found you and Beidou, your lips were already turning blue. Scared Juza half to death.”
“I do remember that…” Kazuha coughs into his fist again. “Where’s Beidou now? Is she alright?”
“Ah, yeah.” Drake rubs the back of his neck. “So, she’s fine, physically. Got a hell of a concussion, but Qiqi’s good at her job and Baizhu isn’t worried. Just be prepared for her to do whatever the verbal equivalent of hurling a person overboard at mach speed is.”
“Is she angry with me?”
Drake opens his mouth, but the door slams the wall on the other side of the room. Kazuha meets Beidou’s eyes, he meets hers, and with or without Drake’s help he has his answer.
“And there she blows,” Drake says. He pats Kazuha’s head soberly on the way to his feet. “Listen well.”
He moves past Beidou into the hall, closing the door behind him so that they’re alone. Overall, she looks perfectly fine. There’s a strip of gauze taped over her temple, but you’d never guess that was from a concussion. She’s fine. Fine and clearly upset.
Now Kazuha stifles the urge to cough, because that’d be too much. Beidou inhales deeply through her nose.
“Kazuha.”
“Captain.”
She lurches forward, seizing him by the shoulders and blazing into his eyes with her own.
“Why didn’t you tell me how sick you were getting?” she demands, with the same voice he’s heard her use to bark at the waves and commandeer her ship through barreling storms. She shakes him, and her grip trembles. “Why didn’t you tell me, why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I, I didn’t realize,” Kazuha says. “I didn’t realize how—”
“Kazuha.” Her grip is painful and his head swims, but her face isn’t angry. She looks distressingly close to tears, in a way wholly unfamiliar and frightening. “Kazuha, this is bigger than that, you can’t just not reali— how did you not realize you couldn’t breathe? Baizhu said you had to have—why couldn’t you just tell me something was wrong? You know there was more wrong than what you told me, Kazuha, you knew something was wrong.”
“Beidou, I—please. Please.” He could never be afraid of her, but the fever Drake mentioned is beginning to make itself known again, and the years in her eyes are startling and he wants to make it stop. “I never meant to hurt you,” he tells her. “I promise. Please.”
She inhales shakily again, but sits beside him, sliding her grip from his shoulders to his forearms. “Was it—… Kid, I know you don’t trust easy. I don’t expect that to change, but I hoped that—at least for a situation like this you would—”
“No, Beidou, this isn’t a matter of trust. I trust you more than I’ve ever trusted most of the people in my life.”
Beidou chokes out a laugh. It’s a noise that trembles all over and hurts his heart. “I don’t get it. Then why wouldn’t you say anything?”
“I…” Kazuha swallows down the saltiness in the back of his throat as an excuse to buy time to find words. “This is going to sound callus, but, I… I genuinely did not think anything of it. I knew it was hard to breathe, that it hurt to breathe, that my symptoms were worstening but I didn’t… I didn’t even dismiss it, I knew full well what was going on, I just… I don’t know how else to say it other than I really didn’t think anything of it.”
“But that’s—” Beidou stops to think, but shakes her head again. “That’s not like you, Kazuha. Ever since I’ve met you, you’ve always been in-tune with yourself and your limits. And you push it—hell, we all push it—but it’s not like you to keep something like this to yourself. You’re more rational than that.”
“I… I know.”
“Then what changed?”
“I…” Kazuha thinks, and it’s hard, because he doesn’t understand it anymore than she does. He collects what little he can, the memories he knows and can recount cobbled with the spacey ones, the blurred uncertainties. He is more rational than that, he knows he is, but ever since he and Beidou hit the ocean during the storm, he—
… Oh.
“You were hurt,” Kazuha realizes quietly. “That’s what changed.”
He looks up at her just in time to watch her entire demeanor crumble. The steadiness, the confidence, the secondary anger—even the usual self-assurity she carries in her shoulders. All of it snaps in half in a series of half-seconds, and Kazuha’s throat closes up.
“Beid—”
She lets go of his arms, sinking back, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Gods.”
“Bei—”
“Gods, shit.”
“B—”
“I’m fine,” Beidou lies, squeezing her eyes shut, her face half-hidden by her hand. She’s wrapped her other arm around her chest, tight. “I’m… fine. Gods. Shit, Kazuha. Shit.”
He reaches out in a sort of half-attempt, but she doesn’t notice, and he can’t bring himself to follow through with it. What would he even do? He hadn’t even thought about why he hadn’t behaved rationally on the beach, why he hadn’t kept tabs on himself like he always does, like he told her he would. Now she’s blaming herself, and he knows it isn’t necessarily his fault, but. He doesn’t want her to do that for his sake.
He also knows she needs time to process, the same way he does. Telling her that now probably wouldn’t get them anywhere. It’s a conversation they’ll have to have when she’s given herself the chance to take a step back.
But he still wants to do… something. Maybe not words, but he has to do something.
He scoots forward, shortening the distance she put between them. He does another half-reaching out, but it doesn’t land quite right and he withdraws again. He’s never been good at instigating affectionate touches—Tomo has always yanked him into it and Beidou and her crew have been largely the same so far—but.
He carefully tugs her hand down from her face.
“Kazuha,” annoyed, trying to hide, an attempt to push away his hand, “I’m not—”
He hugs her. She stiffens, muscles welding into her bones.
“Kazuha…?”
He doesn’t say anything.
All at once and without warning, she wraps him up in what is easily one of the fiercest embraces she’s given him, both of her arms firmly trapped around his shoulders, his head buried in her collar. He feels her shuddering inhale, the way she ducks her head into his hair. She clutches him, wholly and all encompassing, and he clutches her back.
“Kid,” Beidou croaks, her voice thick and wet but sure, “kid, I don’t know what I would do if—... shit.”
“I know.” His chest aches with the swell of his heart, the burn threatening the corners of his eyes even when he’s squeezed them shut as tight as they’ll go. “I don’t know what I would do, either. For you.”
“You gotta talk to me when shit’s going on,” Beidou says, cupping the back of his head and drawing him in closer. “I don’t care how sick or injured I am, you’ve gotta talk to me if something’s going on with you. It matters. Gods, does it matter. Kazuha.”
“B-Beidou,” he stammers, but the words fail and he opts to hug her closer instead, and she reciprocates again. They stay that way for a long time.
A coughing fit has to interrupt, of course. He gags over the bucket some more and tells her the truth when it’s over and he’s heaving for air and she asks if he’s okay. The answer is no, naturally—but he is better than before and that that isn’t nothing. She calls the second half of that a non-answer, which is fair enough, and helps support his quaking hands while he sips through a cup of warm honey-lemon water. Then he relaxes into her side as she leans against the headboard. Usually she’d talk and he’d listen, or vice versa; but this time it’s enough just to sit with her quietly and know they’re both alive.
He lets his mind ebb into a safe, comfortable blur, drifting to the sound of her breathing and the feeling of her arm wrapped around his shoulders, and then he falls asleep.