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"Hey, beansprout," Maki says, and her teeth flash in time with her glasses, and it is so painfully familiar that for a brief second, Yuta loses the rush in his veins, the pounding compulsion in his feet to launch him to her side--why, after all, if she is right here, has been right here all along, if nothing has changed? The second passes, and his blood roars tenfold, breathless with joy when he launches himself into her; she doesn’t budge, just like always. He feels intensely self-conscious after--just like always, too, but this time, her hand doesn’t come to his jaw to tilt his eyes to meet hers.
He stills, swallowing hard, suddenly hyper aware of the dim lights of the infirmary, the sterile walls and the slinking unease of Rika, “Sorry, you’re still recovering, aren’t you, Maki-san?” She shifts back, resting the brunts of her palms on the hospital bed, and Yuta shuffles away. Her hair is cut short in the back, but her bangs have remained in part, falling dark over her face rather than swept neatly along her crown, and when she tilts her chin their tips brush her nose. He wants to reach forward and clear them from her face; He does not know why he stops himself.
“Recovering,” she repeats, mouthing the word once more before it manages to leave her mouth bereft, lips still parted. Yuta’s eye twitches in a strange sympathy, the thud of her wordless echo burrowing beneath his lungs.
“Yes,” he says, and he takes her hands in his own, and despite everything, for all his consolation, he is the one who trembles, and she fits her thumbs over his knuckles, stilling him fractionally. "You're getting better, aren't you, Maki-san?" He says, and he hopes she cannot see the way his lips tremble around his smile, the way his lashes flutter helplessly. He takes their joined hands against his lowered head, drags them against his cheek. The engagement band he'd exchanged with Rika is cold against his skin, and he watches the blood travel through the burns on Maki's wrists, gamboge and plasma-sticky, bordered by splotchy, pink bubbles rising grotesquely from her skin.
Her head falls away to the side--this is different than shame, different than being ignored, as if his care had passed some subconscious judgment and was promptly discarded upon appraisal. "Gojou's been sealed." She says, instead. He stiffens, pressing her fingers against the discolored shallow of his under eye.
"Yes," he mutters, "I've heard, but, I… I can't imagine that guy getting hurt too badly, in all honesty."
She laughs, dry and bitter, and her hands jerk away. His eyes instantly wet, but when he flicks his gaze up, she looks as if she's been wounded worse than he, laughter simmering into sickly choking, gasping for air, as if her skin is still frying, her lungs filling with her own transmuted flesh. Her jaw tips back, the trembling column of her throat bared.
"Maki-san," he tries, “I missed you.” and when she looks at him through those overlong bangs with those dull-dark eyes and violent wounds, each scar speckled with clusters of heat blisters, some oozing plasma across her temples, he feels like she is begging. Her lips raise into a lopsided smile that looks far too close to a grimace. She wears it like pride, but she radiates a lurid desperation.
Selfishly, he wants to save her from whatever this is--no, he wants to wait for her atop the pit, his arm dangling low, an arm the Maki of another time would've clasped, but knows this one cannot. Still, he'll lay pressed to the lip of the crater, if only so she can find a final foothold in the gouging of his eye, if only so there is a warm body for her to collapse into when her engine heart and mechanical body whirrs to a stop. It's no sacrifice at all, for him.
"I missed you too, beansprout," she manages, spoken with a warped dullness, like the recording of an echo amplified to the volume of a first utterance. Despite having spoken it already, she tests the shape of this word, too, feeling the way it stretches her lips, and then purses them, the drag of the motion on her healing scars.
She hops onto the cot and falls sidelong--something in it strangely graceless, but perfectly ergonomic, a different beauty he cannot help but admire, however strange and terrifying it may be--and rolls so that she can face him, one arm curled beside her and the other arcing above, beckoning his company, he obliges, crawling to lay in the space she leaves. Her curled arm reaches up around him, and he cannot keep himself, then, from crying. Her arms are warm and broad and unwavering, and yet they are not touching, they cannot be touching with how her head against the pillow is so nonchalant, her hair splayed about her like the radial stain of a seeping gunshot wound. He must be utterly alone--more importantly than that, she must be, too.
“I miss you,” he murmurs again, leaking tears, gasping against her breast. He roots desperately for the words, he does not want to hurt her, does not want to reject her, but does not want to pretend away this disquiet that burbles with her blisters, festering beneath her skin and leaking noxious pus into her brain.
“I…” she speaks so slowly, so dully, and Yuta tries his best to not sniffle, to listen closely, “don’t… know what I was supposed to do.” Her voice thins at the end, wrung of pain. Yuta’s entire face tenses in sympathy, his cheeks flattening and eyes squeezing, dripping tears. What can he do? What can he say?
“I--I’m sorry, I don’t,” Yuta breathes, so coarse in his throat it feels as if the words physically drag, his chest erratically rising and falling with a pained lilt, “I don’t know either.”
“It’s fine.” She says, and Yuta nudges his temple against her throat, his hair falling over her skin, and she says nothing as she envisions the sticky disengagement of the fine strands from the healing skin, how they will clot in place, as if her very blood is clutching him even when she cannot bring herself to fall against him.
“I’ll help,” he whispers, wrapping his arms gingerly about her so that they embrace each other, uncurling from between them to gird her back and straighten her spine, not with an expectation of strength, but an offer of support, “with whatever it is, now. If Gojou needs to be--or you need, or--”
She shushes him, a wince in her throat with the way he barrels through his words, breathless and teary and clutching at her with a desperation she’s sure he’s dampening. The sick, bitter thing planted inside of her ever since she learned she was a failure --not as a value statement, she is too proud to scorn it, but just as an is , beat into her bones so that every success is a despite, despite, despite --rails at its enclosure, incandescent with want to feel the cursed energy that thrums beneath his skin, that would trail up along the path of her touch like iron filings to a magnet, and she blinks her way through it, this unkind appetite one of the only colorful things in her mind since she had woken with skin of leather.
“Thanks,” she mutters, as opposed to a snide as if, and the crown of his head makes her cheek itch terribly when she buries her face in his hair, breathing deep, picking apart the scent of him; what is foreign, what is familiar.
She loves this tender animal, and his useless tears, and his demeanor with her, how utterly unpitying it is, how horrifyingly devoted, but there is little space for warmth in her, as she is, after breathing her own boiled blood. It is a draining frustration that makes her realize how shitty of a tether she is, and what she will become, what he cannot stop and what she does not want to. It is terribly, terribly tiring.
She falls asleep there, listening to him sob. Feeling her body fall, the tension of her muscle unknitting, Yuta trembles in his whimpers, breathing against her, holding her and lying still.