Work Text:
"It's my body and then yours, lieutenant." Tsukishima breathes, the prickle of truth dragging up the ragged column of his throat.
"Oh, don't say something so horrible, Tsukishima," Tsurumi says, but he hasn't stopped smiling with the very corners of his lips, his eyes death-dark and his posture perfectly strung. Good, good. Even now, Tsurumi won't yield. Tsukishima is grateful for this ambient temperature distance, the way it suspends space and time about them. Tsukishima's eyes dampen, and blood passes through his draping fingers, collecting in the gaps between each digit and dripping, accumulating faster than the tension can hold it.
Tsurumi's head is set straight, but his eyes give a frenzied twitch, watching the dark fall from Tsukishima's limp arm only to get whipped away by the wind as the train barrels ever onward. Flickering to his own palm, trailing blood through the passing air, thick and full enough to create a splattery streak on the sky. Again, between; Where there is blood, where there is none. Tsukishima is appalled at the sudden guilt that assails him, comes over him like tide before withdrawing, leaving him soaked, wide-eyed, lucid.
Tsurumi pays it no mind, taking a single, decisive step inward. It echoes across the metal drum of the carriage, moving through Tsukishima like ripples on water.
There's a clatter beneath them, the wretched gasp of something dying--no, something surviving, something crawling its way from its own carcass, shrieking at the inundation in its own blood. "Tsukishima!"
Something plugs briefly in Tsukishima's throat, a hiccup of air so dense it feels like heaving a piece of cork from his lungs. It stops the title on his tongue, and for that he's hideously grateful, particularly when Tsurumi's gaze flickers to his bereft face.
"Tsukishima! Where are you!" Koito yells, and it's foreign and rough and darkening in his throat, seemingly suddenly having become a man. Tsurumi's smile curls tighter, prongs drawing inward. Tsukishima feels terribly sick for understanding the humor. “ Tsukishima! ”
"First Lieutenant Tsurumi! Are you out here? Do you hear me!?” Air begins to seep in through his hysteria, making him squeaky and pitchy and desperate as the squealing of a handbrake, his bravado easily drained, ”Please, leave Tsukishima! We've disposed of Ushiyama Tatsuma and Hijikata Toshizou. We’ve done enough! Leave him to me!" Tsukishima can see his hands scrambling at the back railing of the car, following the streaks of blood Tsukishima’s body had left against the wooden deck, up the side of the metal scaffold. A tremble works through his biceps as he attempts to drag himself to standing, as if this meager dignity will call the lieutenant to him, will bring Tsukishima back to him.
Tsukishima’s eyes skip dutifully away--without his lieutenant’s grace, nor his efficiency, but close enough, even as the spongy tissue of his grey matter swells to meet the cage of his brain, the build of pressure begging release through the hiss of air through his clammy tear ducts.
"Oh, god, please," Koito gasps, but his lungs are strong and full and wonderfully young, and so he speaks with perfect clarity, accustomed to this hissing shriek that casts his pleading with a sheen of petulance at odds with the content of his speech, “please, if you can hear me, please don't go, please, you'll die if you go."
“ Tsukishima! " The second lieutenant bleeds from the gash in his face, wrenched open, pleading with the sky and hailing the ground, demanding their answer. His breath goes thick, staggered by the webbing of mucus building in his throat, a spume of snot building at his upper lip. He blinks, catching the seep of tears in his lashes, and they flush down the man’s wound in his face, diluting the flood until the border between skin and flesh is exposed; the warmth of his skin, the tender, pink lining of his cheek.
Tsukishima has never been prayed to, at least not to his face. He thinks of Igogusa by the shore, her letters and their devotion so deep and quick-moving they can only be called faith, and this, too, drenches him like tide. His entire hand darkens with blood. Red-palmed, damp-eyed, he faces his lieutenant.
“Do as you please with the remaining division members, Koito. I’m finishing this.” Tsurumi barks, and his smile softens into fondness, the kind held for particularly competent enemies or especially novel, well-liked toys. Koito lets out a sudden wail, the noise reminiscent of the sudden force of a puncture.
First Lieutenant Tsurumi, please listen to me-- Tsukishima! Do you hear me?! Tsukishima, you can’t die for this! You’ve done enough!
"If you keep going," Lieutenant Tsurumi says, and Tsukishima stiffens with dread, that he will be loosed, his strings cut and his body crumpling inward on itself, plastered to the roof of the traincar by wind and rain and time, blood oxidizing to adhesive rust, even as it moves forward and forward and forward--
Please! You’ve done enough!
( Koito hears him fall against the roof, the thud of lost will, every nerve frenzied with disorganization, having lost all centrality, and he calls for him--it’s you! I need you!--calls his name again and again until some sort of bearing comes to him, brings him to the edge that he had so faithfully ascended, now dragging himself on his belly.
“Tsukishima, oh, Tsukishima, come here,” he says, snotty and young and loopy on blood-loss and endings.
Tsukishima’s head throbs, a heavy, particulate-laden churn of impulse knocking against his skull, “Koito, sir.”
“Come here, I need you, please.” His tongue is dumb in his mouth, unmetered for his pain, unfettered by his terrifying gratitude. Tsukishima has no answer to this--has nothing left to give him, everything in him drained and painful and blasted open. What good is this twitching viscera, this mottled canvas of outturned flesh? There is no line for him, between skin and flesh, every cubic inch of him vulgar and stained sanguine.
Tsukishima drops his limp arm, letting it hang from the lip of the roof, a strain that makes the nerve sing all the way to the base of his skull. Koito gasps, delight and relief, grabbing for his dead arm and clasping it between both hands. Tsukishima can’t feel a thing, but he imagines he’s colored Koito’s hands ruddy. )
"If you keep going, that arm may never be useful to you again."
A warbling little smile comes to Tsukishima's lips, blood tracking down his face and smearing his trembling jaw, just a touch of the mania that so readily seizes his lieutenant. The pounding behind his temple accelerates with his heart rate. "What use is there for it beyond right now, sir?"
Tsurumi bares his teeth for him in approval,
good man
, and Tsukishima feels the train pass beneath him as he steps against its momentum. His dead arm swings in time, and his shoulder feels like hellfire.