Chapter Text
“I love you.”
The words taste salty whispered against damp skin, moonshine and streetlights in lazy paintstrips across the expanse of it.
Hinami brushes her lips to his chest, lightly as a breeze. “I love you,” she says again, catching the moment by the tail-end, before it could slip by completely. “I love you. I really, really love you, Ayato-kun.”
His silence is expected. It is the first thing she learned about the boy next to her, among the other pennies and trinkets she’s collected over nearly three years. Ayato-kun is guarded, wary – he protects his secrets tighter than he protects the Tree’s. There isn’t a chink in his armor for a girl with two kagunes and too many broken bonds to slip through.
(And even if there is, Hinami isn’t certain if she could take advantage of it.)
So she contents herself with honesty and heavy-handed audacity. It’s what Ayato-kun prefers, anyway – subtlety isn’t something he can bat away with a well-placed remark about her gentleness and her weakness and her rinkaku that isn’t supposed to be kept away from enemies, midget, you’re supposed to fucking drive the pointy end into them!
He despises her, or some part of her that resembles all that have burdened him in his 18 years. His father (failing to protect their so-called family), his sister (fraternizing with the enemy), Oniichan (uselessly spouting out stupid words when they could do so, so much more) – he’s sneeringly compared her to them almost from the moment Eto-san had foisted her care onto him.
She wears those parts of her prouder than she wears her kakugan. She suspects that makes him despise her even more.
But she loves him.
Ayato-kun, her teacher who has told her countless times to leave the Tree if she wasn’t going to use her kagune to fight. Her partner who has threatened more than once to leave her for the Doves if she doesn’t get up by herself. Her lover who does not love her, only the way she mouths a silent scream when he curls his fingers in just so.
He is her gaoler, her caretaker, her guarantor, her rock. She figures it must be Stockholm Syndrome (because who is she but another weapon for the Tree), but it doesn’t matter anymore when her daily life for the past few years has been so intricately woven around his.
(Not around the Tree. And almost not around finding Oniichan either. It’s the one thing she might almost truly hate about him.)
Angry, cold, defiantbrashviolentlostlostlostlost boy that he is – she loves him.
And she wants, at her core, only to be honest. Consequences be damned.
She releases a breath she’s forgotten she’s been holding in, and presses one last kiss on Ayato-kun’s collarbone, light and shadow from passing cars dancing on its ridges in a smooth ripple. “Good night,” she whispers, before she (lets him dismiss her words first) rolls to face away.
A soft pressure on the back of her head stills her movement. She can feel his warmth through her hair, soft breaths sifting through her scalp like a mother’s fingers. She fumbles momentarily with the lump in her throat, relearning how to swallow.
“Hinami…”
Her name comes soft and stilted, the effort to keep it from his lips crumbling down like a cliff to a tsunami, piece by heavy piece. And when he wraps a shaking arm around her waist, her breath shudders because she can hear his vessels thrumming a war song and she can smell his hesitation drowning in saltwater that batters his armor to smithereens until there’s only him and her and her name murmured on the curve of her nape-
-and when it’s sunshine that comes through the window slats, the flood recedes and she’s left awash with the cooled surface of the dip of the mattress next to her, and the sinking feeling that everything is as it has always been.
She rubs her eyes, stretches her limbs, and sighs herself into the day. A warm coffee scent permeates through the slightly open bedroom door, wafting from the little machine in the kitchen corner, and her discarded clothes from the previous night have been moved from the floor to the clothes hamper. As she pads barefoot across the tiny apartment, she notes there is freshly wrapped meat in the fridge and a hastily scribbled note on its door, telling her of his whereabouts for the day in no more than three coded lines.
…As it has always been, Hinami realizes, heat blooming where her diaphragm should be, so strongly that tears drip down her cheeks before she notices.
She runs her fingers across bruised, quivering lips, suddenly hearing the years-long honesty that the noise of daily survival had dampened, blasting music through her furiously pounding ears.