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“ Tsukishima! Are you alive?”
Tsukishima feels hands on the filmy tubing of his intestine, the sensation distant for lack of nerves and impossibly cool for an organ constantly ensconced in heat, but it does not bother him until he can feel a sterile piece of cloth polishing the rim of it, picking away gravel and dust that had tracked up along the sticky flesh as he’d been rushed to the field hospital.
He retches instantly, the shredded muscle of his core drawing in in reflex in a way that makes him acutely aware of the rent skin at his navel, the immense pain of the shell’s mere blast having enough force to punch the flesh so far inward it had split, his intestine oozing forth; The pain of its warm, thready bleed, ruptured arteries with no destination spilling fresh, hot over his hips, seeping from the diagonal cross of the wound. The reflexive motion, that tightening of the core, pulls at his estranged innards, making them shift painfully in the medic’s hands as they attempt to squeeze back through the suction the movement creates.
His vision blackens, prickling with white like someone has jammed crude fingers through the pinprick holes of each star, ripping the fabric of the cosmos, ripping Tsukishima apart from the navel. He blinks rapidly, fingers scrabbling at the sterile sheet beneath him, each desperate pant smearing the wet of his blood against his stomach. He feels a hand on his upper arm, and he sees someone’s mouth above him, teeth glistening with saliva and brow dotted with sparse hairs. Tsukishima passes out.
The doctors mutter their thanks, getting to work.
His fingers quiver as he dresses, and he finds himself inordinately frustrated for it; Tsukishima is a soldier, pain is his very craft, so easily and brutally inflicted on others and so to tremble beneath its ambivalent heel is a disservice. He attempts to smooth it away, and he buttons his uniform pants with the coal of anger going dark in his throat. There is a small, withering part of him that rejoices in his irritation, his ability to feel at all, the deep, drained apathy as subject to Tsurumi’s machinations wrapping viciously about its weakly kicking heels.
In starvation of this sensibility, he presses the belt buckle up against his navel, right where the bandaging ends, vision dimming at the sudden awareness of the position of his organs, his ability to manipulate them with such a gentle push, the dirty white sparks of pain that make his elbows involuntarily jerk. Feel, if you so want to. This is what it is to feel.
An orderly ducks into the room, flapping the curtain gently in warning. "Second Lieutenant Tsurumi's requested your presence."
That sensibility, back again and licking fire through the porous sponge of his lungs, fracturing his breath into frantic heat, "He's out of surgery?"
The orderly nods, his smile compressing one cheek back against his teeth in a subtle tell of awkwardness that Tsukishima is too disoriented to interpret. Tsukishima, ever diligent, thanks him, waves his dismissal. The orderly hovers outside the tent for a few moments, exhaling deep, exhaustive breaths, as if to rid himself of any lingering traces of the tent, the man with the dark eyes and the haunted face, and the incongruous, unnatural spark his message had summoned in him.
Tsukishima folds the sparse overcoat, crossing the cloth slowly, deliberately, right over left in affirmation of his breath. Still, he finds himself unable to generate an answer to the seemingly eternal query--Tsukishima, are you alive?--any different from the one blasted from his innards: I'm not sure.
Tsurumi tells him what it is that he is to hear, and it is no more complicated than that, his coat full and regal on his shoulders despite the compact fold of his injured form on the futon. He holds Tsukishima in his tent; smoothing the path of crown-to-ear-to-shoulder with the cool of his thin palms, petting along the cording of Tsukishima’s throat; he has no option but to give in. His eyes are dark beneath the bandaging, his cheeks sunken, and his skin ashy against the tone of the cotton, but Tsukishima knows to duck his head so that his lieutenant can smile. His life is his.
In the night, his bandages yellow and wilt, plasma and interstitial fluid seeping through the black knit of his sutures. He’s treated again in the morning, and as he sits on the cot the doctor gives him a low-lidded stare. It makes him feel like a hobbled dog, and he wants to bare his fangs, raise his hackles.
Instead, dutifully, he lets the doctor's slim hands test the bandaging, the pair of shears digging gently along his hip and tracing up to his rib in a singular, sweeping motion that parts the tight winding. It unfurls ever so slightly, but he feels the sticky center of the wound more acutely with the gentle tug.
"Clench your teeth," the doctor mutters, the pity in his eyes sourly blasé, and Tsukishima hisses as he pulls back the cloth, his skin elastic before it peels away with a tacky, vulgar sound. The skin is dark with the suggestion of blood where it's pinched together rather haphazardly. Where the skin is unbruised for his harsh landing against the cold-hardened ground, his stomach is pinkened for the increased blood flow the tight bandaging had compelled.
He feels like it could tear apart any moment, and looking at the blast wound makes it ache intensely, vivid enough that he cannot tell which spiking impulses are the dragging phantoms of memory and which are the bloody pulses of pained, healing flesh. When he looks up, Tsurumi is standing behind the doctor, lips pursed in an innocuous whistle as he looks at the fresh sutures. His gaze lingers on the aubergine marks that follow Tsukishima's side, a massive splotch following up from just below his ribs to the mid-point of his thigh. Through his uniform pants, there is no way for Tsurumi to know the point at which it ends, but his eyes linger there all the same, his appraisal tracing only the exact span of the bruise, drifting along the washed out grey-green-yellow edges with a fond smile at his mouth. The IV bag that trails him jangles in strange reminder.
Tsukishima feels grotesquely charmed, finding the brazenness of it endearingly eccentric, even when the doctor's finger twitches in discomfort at the scrutiny. He is hasty in replacing the bandages, ignoring Tsurumi's laughter when Tsukishima duly raises his arms high overhead to ease his work.
"Need your bandages be replaced too, sir?" They are speckled in red, but each point of color is washed out, diffused as if having been soaked in some transparent liquid, and the cloth plasters to his skin thoroughly enough that Tsukishima can see a vague outline of the missing fragment of skull. It does not disturb him.
"Would you like to watch?" Tsurumi smiles. The doctor busies himself with washing his hands, perhaps a degree more thoroughly than their situation can afford. Tsukishima, for all his lack of disgust, instead feels a horrible pang of pity resounding against his ribs with a hearty tap. Not for Tsurumi; for himself. Unexpectedly, he cannot stand the sight of his failure, his failure bleeding and throbbing in reds and pinks and yellows at the thin slice of skin that's bordered by fat.
He does not know how to say no, however.
"I must be able to concentrate, second lieutenant." The doctor blinks, eyes still low-lidded when he glances to Tsukishima, who cannot help but flush--in gratefulness, in shame, in shame for his gratefulness.
"Ah, haha! Can't have you scrambling my brains any further, I suppose!" Tsurumi laughs, flapping a jovial hand in Tsukishima's direction. He takes the dismissal with a polite nod.
Yet, ever diligent, for all his resistance to the strange pity, Tsukishima is sure to thank the doctor.