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Tears weren’t a feeling that she knew.
She had been asked before. Are you crying? And she could answer yes or no with confidence. But the actual feeling of tears on a face, she didn’t have experience with. Maybe, if she were to ask, her head could describe them to her. Not that that was something she could do any time soon.
She did wonder, though. Were they warm or cold? Did they make your eyes sting? Shinra had told her once that they taste of salt, but even that wasn’t something she could understand.
And now, as she lay here, surrounded by the shadows that gave her comfort and interrupted by nothing but the moon through the window, Celty could say for sure that she was crying.
Her fingers gripped tightly to the blanket that had been draped over her. Her shoulders were quaking; up and down. What throat she had was burning, closing itself off. Even the billowing of her smoke was different, shooting up in quick bursts where it usually just licked upwards like a normal flame.
She was without a doubt crying. Though she wasn’t exactly sure why.
After a few moments she stood, stumbling toward the door as she found her balance. A single hand lingered on the frame as she slid the door open and stepped through it. In the next room stood Shizuo, vest and tie long since discarded as he gulped down what looked like… A bottle of milk?
Her knuckles rapped against the wall in greeting, the gesture about all she could do to get his attention. When she did he looked over his shoulder at her, setting the emptied bottle on the counter.
“Still awake Celty?” He asked, arms moving out in front of him to undo the buttons on his cuffs. “If the futon’s uncomfortable, you can sleep in my bed instead.”
Another poof of smoke billowed upward, a bit more suddenly than they had been prior. She made the motion to shake no, before realizing that unlike most of the time the two of them were together, she wasn’t wearing her helmet right now. She followed up with a quick, dismissive wave of her hand, before crossing her arms over her chest.
Shizuo didn’t know her as well as Shinra did. Shinra would already know she was crying, already have her pulled against him, already whispering to her about how tears didn’t suit her face.
Just the thought of those misguided comments made her even more upset.
“Bit of insomnia then? Usually the cure for that is warm milk or alcohol. I could always give you a good punch to the gut, that would put you to sleep.”
Her wracking shoulders paused long enough for a silent laugh, and pulling out her phone, her fingers danced across her keyboard to type a single word.
“Please.”
Shizuo’s expression changed as he squinted to read it, sliding his sunglasses off his face. He moved to take a seat on the couch, and, after folding a leg over the other, snapped his fingers with one pointedly aimed at the cushion next to him.
“You can’t order me around like a dog you know,” she wrote, keeping her body language expressly closed off to punctuate the sentiment. Though it wasn’t like she could be complaining. Shinra didn’t even give her the option of standing. He usually just pulled her next to him.
“Look, I’m not all that well versed in the emotional side of friendship. Unless you got someone that needs to be a bit more dead, I might as well be useless.”
Celty crossed her legs as she typed, feeling calmer already.
“That might be the first time I heard you call us friends.” She flashed the screen for a second before typing again. “I say it all the time. I like it.”
Shizuo remained uncharacteristically quiet for a long moment, eventually sighing a bit and resting his head back. “Calling each other friends counts as the emotional side of friendships, alright? But now that you’ve heard it I shouldn’t have to say it again.”
“I suppose so.”
Deep down, she wanted him to notice she wasn’t okay. She tried with her body language, after all, it supposedly makes up a high percentage of human communication, right? But she supposed without a face to give herself away, she might be too unreadable. At least for someone who hadn’t known her as long as Shinra had.
She only waited another moment before she bit the bullet, accepting her fate of having to just ask for help.
She typed slower than usual, feeling Shizuo’s eyes on her as she did. She didn’t want to show him this screen. She was prouder than this. But, what had to be done…
“What does crying feel like?”
There was no answer. After a moment Shizuo stood up, sliding his hands into his pockets and rounding back into the kitchen. Celty panicked, quickly typing up an apology. Had she said something wrong?
He came back with a glass of water, taking a seat and setting it between his knees, he then snatched up her hand, and, even though she momentarily panicked, she relaxed long enough to observe what he was doing. He carefully dipped his fingers into the water, letting it drop down on the back of her hand.
She felt it slide down toward her wrist. It sort of tickled in a way, leaving behind a trail of moisture that made her skin feel tighter as it dried.
For some reason, she could feel her entire body warm up. There was some sort of dull throb in her chest, but it passed when he let go of her hand.
“That, and I guess, your nose runs, and your voice gets hoarse. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve cried since I was in diapers, personally.”
Celty smiled up at him. He didn’t know, but she did. Moving her arms from her sides and into her lap, she began typing again, offering the phone up in her palm as opposed to the more aggressive shove with her fingertips she usually used.
“I do cry sometimes. But it’s nothing like that, obviously.”
“Yeah, you were crying just now, right?”
Turning toward him she expressed her surprise with another short message.
“Eh?”
“I may not be your roommate of twenty years, but I think I still know you pretty well. I would have said something, but I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.”
“I’d like it if you would,” she wrote. “I have trouble bringing it up myself.”
He nodded a bit in understanding. She watched as his fingers instinctually moved toward his lips again. Seems he kept forgetting he didn’t have a cigarette in his hand right now.
“Should I ask why?”
“Overwhelmed, I suppose. I already had a stressful job today, I didn’t need a disagreement with Shinra to make that worse.”
“That’s the problem with us humans,” Shizuo groaned, “we only care about ourselves.”
“That’s not true!” She answered, shoulders shooting up defensively. “He does care, we just…”
Her fingers froze mid-sentence, feeling Shizuo’s arm move around her shoulders and pull her under his own. “I don’t need to know. Don’t really want to know. All I care about is making you feel better.”
Celty let out a breath, her shoulders relaxing as she let herself lean into him. She tried to nonchalantly scoot her hips closer, shooting off another message.
“Thank you for letting me stay here.”
As she relaxed she took in her surroundings. Shizuo wasn’t exactly a neat guy. Just about everything was lying out except his clothing. (Probably due to the fact that the outfits purchased for him by his brother were too special to him to just throw on the floor.) The entire room smelled like the smoke from his cigarettes.
Best of all though was the warmth of his body surrounding her, warming her up, too. She was close enough to hear his heart beating. She imagined her own beating along with it.
She made one last futile attempt to message him as she drifted off to sleep, fingers fumbling and eventually collapsing across the keyboard of her phone.
“I lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv”