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The night wind comes in waves, tousling his hair, his oversized, borrowed clothes, guiding the leaves to sing as he sighs deeply, grass tickling on his face.
The night is cold, freeing, no walls to confine him or a roof to hide away the stars. The hand clutching around his own is warm, grounding, and the voice that accompanies it is quieter than what he's used to, but it's not any less familiar.
It's not an usual sight—Kyojuro talks, babbling on and on, talking with his mouth and the movement of his hands. Obanai listens, mismatched eyes towards the sky, sometimes glancing over to watch the bright expression in the boy's eyes, sometimes catching the glimpse of a missing tooth, face red and warm like the family name he bears.
How nice , Obanai thinks. How nice, to be born to such an honorable name.
He couldn't sleep. This, too, isn't unusual. The memories are still new, wounds still fresh, the smell of rotting food piled up in a cage still so vivid, and at worse nights he couldn't stop shaking around the four walls of the Rengoku Estate.
To his surprise, Kyojuro doesn't sleep as deeply as he thought he would. On one night the elder Rengoku had taken his hand, gentler than Obanai thought he would, guided him to the engawa and down the steps to the grass, to lie down and talk about nothing and everything, until sleep embraced them and they woke up with Senjuro's shadow cast over them by the sunrise.
It's become somewhat of a habit. This night is no different.
Kyojuro's finger pokes at his forehead, and Obanai blinks back to reality.
"That's your brooding face," Kyojuro says, tracing patterns on his face before Obanai shook his head in protest. "Are you okay? What are you thinking of?"
That's a loaded question , Obanai thinks, somewhat bitingly, but with Kyojuro that hostility only lasts a blink.
It's something neither of them ever asked the other, despite the comfort they take in each other's presence night and again. It was always quiet invitation, unspoken openness, wordless display of vulnerability, letting the moment of weakness wash away with the endless stream of irrelevant topics Kyojuro had in store, and the curious questions Obanai bounced in return.
Of course I'm not okay , Obanai wants to say. I know you're not, too.
Their wounds are an open secret to each other, Obanai and his old home, Kyojuro and the premature grief settling away at the pit of his stomach, like tending to flowers for his mother's funeral that is yet to come.
He's not okay, but—"I'm better, now that you're here," he says, squeezing Kyojuro's hand, so big around his. And I hope I could make it a bit easier for you, too , this one, he doesn't say.