Work Text:
“Are you sure you want to—?”
“I can handle it, sensei,” Nobara says.
“Right, I know you can, just doesn’t mean that you should.”
She extends her hand, silently, bearing into him with her eyes until he relents and sighs, handing over the paper with the instructions.
“I know you’ve been taking care of cursed spirits in the countryside for a few years now,” Satoru says. “But you’ve already been here long enough to know—”
“City curses are worse,” says Nobara. “Yeah, yeah. These are just grade three, I’ll be fine.”
“Nobara.” He puts a hand on her shoulder to stop her, and his skin is unnaturally pale, just like his eyes are unnaturally blue when he peers at her from over his pitch-black glasses. “Have you ever done an exorcism on your own? Without your grandmother?”
“Yes,” Nobara lies. “It’s fine, sensei.”
And Satoru sighs yet again, a sound she's growing more and more used to hearing as the days pass.
Megumi makes it, too, whenever Nobara tries to talk to him about anything other than how miserable they are.
Too much. She's too much. Always has been.
Yet never for things that matter.
She folds the paper and tucks it under her arm, says goodbye, and goes to find someone who can drive her to where she’s supposed to go.
They’re not grade three curses, they’re way worse, and there’s a lot of them.
Nobara presses herself against a wall, her heart thumping hard enough to bruise her insides, her knuckles white where she grips her hammer.
She’s bleeding.
Jujutsu sorcerers usually see enough blood to last several lifetimes, and yet Nobara has rarely seen her own blood even if she’s been in fights before. She’s been hit hard enough to bruise, never hard enough to break like this.
Such a strange sight, such a heavy knowledge, the fact that she can die as easily as her blood spills down her face, the fact that her life is so meaningless and fleeting a simple step in the wrong place, one encounter at the wrong time, could snuff it out and no one would be none the wiser.
There would be nothing of her if she gets devoured by cursed spirits here, nothing but her blood on the tiles that someone would have to clean the next day.
Maybe they would search for her, but without a body and with so many residuals of grade two cursed spirits they would declare her dead immediately.
She’s just a student, after all, a first-year from the countryside, a small monetary compensation to send to her grandmother attached to a letter of condolences she would throw into the hearth along with the check.
Nobara wonders if Yuji had bled, too, when he died, or if he’d just been hit hard enough to bruise. Nobara doesn’t know the details, Megumi doesn’t talk about it.
She wonders if Megumi would cry for her, too.
Nobara makes it out of the abandoned building by herself, still bleeding, the taste of it accumulating on her tongue and sliding down her throat and she hopes her broken nose can heal cleanly, she doesn’t want a scar or a crooked bone.
What a joke.
“Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” Nobara answers Ijichi as she climbs into his car. She’s very much not fine. Her nose is broken and a claw bit into her arm deep enough she knows that is going to leave a scar.
She’s bleeding all over Ijichi’s backseat, all over the protective plastic that wraps around the interior of all the assistant manager’s cars.
How grim, she’d thought the first time she’d seen it.
How practical, she thinks now.
How many sorcerers have bled to death in this particular backseat? If she dies here, would Ijichi be the one to take the wrapping, bundle it, and throw it away? Or would he just wash it and reuse it? Is Nobara sitting on the graves of colleagues, friends?
When Ijichi circled back to pick up Yuji's dead body, had his blood stained this very plastic wrap where Nobara's now sitting? Where she’s now bleeding, too?
How many bodies has Ijichi carried out of this car?
Too many questions.
Her face hurts.
All she knows is that, if she’d died tonight, at least she would’ve made it to sixteen.
“Umh—”
Nobara breathes out, the air too warm through her nostrils, too thick with blood. It hurts. “What is it, Ijichi-san?”
“It seems that Shoko-san was involved in a traffic accident. She’s fine!” he adds abruptly. “But it will be a bit before she can make it here, it wasn’t good, apparently, the whole highway is blocked. Do you need—?”
“I’m fine,” Nobara says, climbing out of the car, clutching her injured arm and trying to ignore the way blood pools on the corners of her mouth before trailing down her jaw. “Thanks for the ride.”
Her blood is all over the plastic on his backseat.
Nobara doesn't stay to see what he does to it.
Despite Shoko not being there, Nobara goes to the infirmary anyway, because where else is she supposed to go?
She's going to stuff her nostrils with cotton and wrap some gauze around her arm, and she's going to lie down and close her eyes and hopefully have one dream where she doesn't see Yuji's headless body.
Again, she doesn't know the details of his death, but her mind likes to picture it in the most morbid ways possible.
When you see monsters, it’s not long until those monsters follow you even when you’re not looking at them directly.
When you fight monsters, it's not long until those monsters get inside your head, too.
She sits by Shoko’s desk and finds the gauze, trying to tilt her head back to keep her nose from running any more blood. She cleans it from her face and uses cotton balls to stop the flow, breathes through her mouth as she peels off her jacket and uses scissors to cut off her left sleeve, revealing the clean mark sharp claws had left on her skin, right beneath her shoulder.
Way too deep.
Way too much blood.
A little more, a little deeper, a little more to the side, and perhaps the curse would’ve clawed off something more important, something more vital.
How curious, if that'd been the case then Nobara would've bled to death simply because someone decided to crash into Shoko's car. Something completely out of her control, a whimsical twist of fate that could’ve ended with Nobara six feet under without anything she could’ve done about it.
How utterly fragile, her life, so ready to be taken away.
Shoko is stuck in an accident, Nobara dies.
Yuji is stuck with a special grade cursed spirit, he dies.
Maybe she should be more scared at the prospect, but death has brushed too close to her too many times in the past few days.
She's not scared. She's angry. Angry and not sure at what exactly.
So she grabs antiseptic, needle and thread, blinks tears out of her eyes that are not from pain, and gets to work, because when she’s angry and she doesn’t know at what the easiest thing to do has always, always been getting to work.
Monsters no one can see in a village where too many people talk. Work, become a sorcerer, and learn how to get rid of them.
Saori driven out of the village. Loneliness. Work, become a sorcerer, and go to Tokyo.
Yuji Itadori, dead. Work, you’re a sorcerer now, and suture your own damn wound.
So that’s what she does.
It’s not clean, and it’s painful, she’s never actually done this before but when has that stopped her? At one point in her life she had never taken hold of her hammer, had never driven a nail through a cursed spirit. At one point in her life she had never known Yuji Itadori, and then she did, and then he was gone.
“Fuck.” She doesn’t wince as she lets antiseptic soak through her open flesh, doesn’t wince as she presses it in with a bit of gauze and the burning aches all across her body. She doesn’t even wince as the needle gets stuck and she has to force it through her skin because her angle is all wrong and her hands are shaking and slipping on her own blood.
She winces because she can’t stop thinking about that idiot she’d only known for two weeks.
And how easily he’d just—
Died.
He’s dead.
He’s dead and Nobara is alive, yet it doesn’t feel real, not when a fucking car crash miles away could’ve been the reason she died, too.
The needle goes in, finally, finally, then goes in again and she pulls it through with one hand, too numb to feel the pain. Too numb to feel much of anything, really.
She breathes through her mouth because her nose is stuffed with bloodied cotton, and she sutures and it’s all wrong and crooked and it does burn, a little, just like the tears in her eyes that are not from pain, not really.
She’s only two stitches deep when she hears footsteps, and she turns her head expecting to see Shoko or even Satoru (where is he, anyways?) but the hand that slides open the infirmary door is slender and with thousands of little nicks and scrapes along the knuckles. Long fingers, bitten-down nails, hands that Nobara knows well.
Hands that had one too many times seized her by the wrist or the bicep right before the owner of said brutal, beautiful hands drove her to the ground in maneuvers so sharp and perfect they should be considered art pieces and not fighting techniques.
Maki-senpai.
Nobara nearly drops the forceps she’s using to hold the needle.
“The hell you doing?”
“The hell you doing?” Nobara counters.
“Finished a mission and came to wait for Shoko-san.” Maki lifts her left hand, giving Nobara a clear view of her pinky and ring finger—terribly swollen and crooked and purple. “Which is what you should’ve done, that looks awful.”
Nobara frowns, turns away from Maki and her broken fingers and returns to her own suffering. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s terrible.”
Before she knows it Maki is leaning over her, softly tapping on Nobara’s wrist to get her to stop and Nobara surprises herself by actually doing so. She still doesn’t know what it is about Maki that just gets her to—do things.
Not only she got Nobara to train for the stupid Goodwill Event, she also gets Nobara to do absolutely everything she wants during said training. Work on your stance, work on your speed, work on your reflexes, work on how you take a fall.
And Nobara does everything and more, bruising herself with grass fields and with the blunt end of Maki’s practice staff, and at first she’d told herself it's because it makes sense. Maki is trying to teach her, after all, and she clearly knows her way around a fight way more than Nobara, but then she’d realized—
That doing everything Maki says is simply easier. Easier than having to think for herself, because she would start spiraling, wondering if anything she did would ever be right, would ever be enough.
So Maki wants her to stop suturing her own wound, and Nobara stops.
“This could’ve waited, it’s not something that would’ve killed you,” Maki says. “You’re more likely to give yourself an infection with that horrible needlework. Did you even clean it?”
“I did,” Nobara says, a little defensive. “And I’m fine, I just wanted to get this over with.”
“Don’t move.”
“Maki-san—”
“I said don’t move.”
And with that she’s gone, but only momentarily. When she comes back she’s holding an ice pack and she presses it to Nobara’s tender nose, and she’s very careful when she does it, clearly not wanting to push too hard.
“Hold this. And get that cotton out.”
Maki speaks in commands just like she does when they’re training, and just like then Nobara does exactly as she’s told, telling herself is for her own good.
Hold the ice pack to your broken nose so the pain subsides, try to land a hit on Maki so you can become strong enough you will never have to watch a friend die again.
The cold is nice, relieving. Nobara should’ve thought about it herself.
“Now wait another second.”
Nobara does.
This time Maki comes back while drying her hands on a towel and she sits on a stool just like Nobara’s, telling her to spin so they can face each other, and once she does Maki puts on a pair of clean gloves and leans in and—
“What are you doing?” Nobara asks.
“Helping. Move back and let me take a closer look at this.”
“Your fingers are broken.”
“Just two of them,” Maki says in a tone that suggests she’s gotten by with having more broken at the same time. “And even then I bet my stitches will be way better than yours.”
“It’s a really horrible angle.”
“It’s not about the angle.” It’s obvious right away, just from how Maki holds the forceps, that she’s done this before. Maybe to the other senpai. Maybe to herself, too, and that’s why she’s taking pity on Nobara when Nobara has never known her to show pity about anything or anyone before, not when she grounds Nobara to the dirt nor when she’d inadvertently said those words about Yuji’s death when they met. “You’ve never done this before, right?”
“What, stitches?” Nobara asks. “It’s not exactly something a lot of people do.”
“Sorcerers do,” says Maki.
Nobara is quiet.
“Shoko-san will teach you if you ask her,” Maki continues, thoroughly focused on what she’s doing. She always has that intense focus about her, as if the entire world disappears and there’s nothing left but the task at hand.
Nobara feels like a task, a simple problem for Maki to solve and then forget, and maybe that’s what she is.
It’s surprisingly nice to know that, at least for a few minutes, there is someone wholly focused on her and nothing else. It’s nice to know that, at least for a few minutes, Maki’s entire world disappears and there’s only Nobara left.
A twisted prospect, perhaps, but Nobara likes it all the same.
“Is this your first time getting sent on a mission by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
Maki doesn’t ask how it was, since the answer it’s obvious, she loops the thread on the needle once again and when she passes it through Nobara’s skin her touch is so steady she barely feels it. “Good job.”
“Good job?” Nobara scoffs, winces when the gesture makes her nose throb, presses the ice pack a bit more firmly. “I almost fucking die.”
“Wanna tell me about it?”
“I—”
Now this is odd.
Maki’s never asked her anything remotely similar before, they’ve never really spoken outside of Maki instructing her how to stand during a fight.
The longest conversation they had was after meeting Maki’s sister, when Maki had explained why she’d chosen to become a sorcerer, and Nobara had realized how difficult being a sorcerer must be for her.
Then she foolishly admitted she respected her. Which is true, of course it’s true, who wouldn't respect someone as reliable and put-together as Maki? But she knows she came off as incredibly childish.
So—no. They don’t really talk. They don’t do this.
Nobara wonders how exactly the girl that'd knocked her to the ground so many times is now gently stitching her wound and asking her questions about her stupid mission. How exactly she'd gotten there.
“There were more curses than expected,” Nobara says, her voice a bit unsteady, she hopes Maki thinks it’s just because she’s in pain. “The assignment said they were grade three but they weren’t and I got surrounded.”
“You made it out though.”
“Barely,” she scoffs. “I got hurt.”
Maki shrugs, and somehow the movement doesn’t interrupt the steady rhythm of her hands. “So did I.”
“Yeah, well, you weren’t two seconds away from bleeding out on Ijichi’s backseat.”
“This is nowhere near as bad.”
“But—it could’ve been.”
Maki looks up at her, something strange glinting in her eyes. There is tape on the left hinge of her glass frame, wrapping thickly over and over, a bit of blood smeared there. Fresh blood, leaving the smallest of prints against Maki’s temple, brushed away by her bangs.
Nobara stares at the spot for far too long, knowing that Maki is staring at her too.
“My first mission by myself,” Maki says, then looks back down at the needle. “My spear broke. You realize what that means, right, for someone like me?”
Nobara nods, though Maki isn’t looking at her. She likes the way Maki says “someone like me,” like she is different but isn’t ashamed of being so. She says it like a challenge, like a battle scar.
“Couldn’t exorcise the cursed spirit without it,” Maki continues. “The thing tried to swallow it, but the spearhead got lodged on its teeth so I had to reach for it. I used one hand to hold its jaws open and the other hand to grab the spearhead. I thought it was going to chew both of my arms off.”
“Maki-san, is that supposed to make me feel better? Because you clearly won, and that’s a badass story, all I got from my first solo mission was a broken nose.”
“Sure, I won,” Maki says. “It didn’t bite my arms off, but the teeth were poisonous. I nearly collapsed after I got the spearhead and killed it. Then I almost bled out in Ijichi’s backseat. My point is, it could’ve been worse, it could’ve been way worse, and that’s an awful feeling, isn’t it? To know that just one slight misstep—”
“Could be the end?” Nobara sighs. “Yeah, it’s awful. How do you deal with it?”
“I’ll tell you when I find out.” Maki cuts the thread, ties a neat knot on it, puts down her scissors, reaches for bandages. “I don’t have advice, I’m not very good at that, I just want you to see that that nagging, awful feeling in your gut is something we all deal with. Maybe that doesn’t help, but it’s the truth.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t help at all, Maki-san.”
Maki shakes her head, the corners of her mouth tugging upwards. “At least show a bit of appreciation that I’m trying, dammit. You think stitching you up is fun? Especially when you’re so gloomy you basically have a rain cloud over your shoulder?”
She has a whole storm over her shoulder, complete with thunder and lightning and winds strong enough to sweep a house from its roots. Nobara sighs, moves the ice pack a little, closes her eyes at how good it feels, at how numb her arm is after Maki sprays something on it.
“It’s this about Itadori?”
Nobara drops the ice pack, it slips through her fingers like water, like that name had been a searing brand against her skin and this is just her reaction to getting burned.
Maki catches the ice pack before it can hit the ground. “Guess it is.”
“It’s not,” Nobara says. “I mean, it is. He was an idiot, but he was kind and hardworking and he did his best but he still died so— what if, one day, I do my best too and it doesn’t fucking matter? He said—he said to live a long life, those were his last words, but I don’t think I know how to do that. I don’t think sorcerers live long lives at all.”
Maki is silent for a bit, pressing the ice against Nobara’s tender face until Nobara sighs and holds it there herself, her fingers brushing against Maki’s glove momentarily. The contact sends a jolt through her, and she has no idea why, Maki’s been touching her for a while now, red blood spotting her surgical gloves.
“Sorry, senpai,” Nobara says after a bit of silence. “I shouldn’t have rambled like that.”
“I get it,” Maki says. She doesn’t say anything else on the matter, maybe because she doesn’t know what to say, maybe because there isn’t anything to say. Nobara doesn’t even know what she wants to hear.
Somehow, though—she knows Maki does get it. Knows Maki, too, has bled and seen loss and has brushed death as closely as Nobara. She’d also confronted their own fragility, the heavy knowledge that heralds how fleeting their lives are.
Nobara wonders if she thinks about it as much as she does, if she also recounts her own steps, and the steps of others, and if her mind also wanders in all the catastrophic directions of could have beens and what ifs.
Maki doesn’t look like the type, but then again, Nobara never thought she would be the type to think so much about death.
“Why did you become a sorcerer, Nobara?”
“I wanted to come to Tokyo,” she says easily. She’s not embarrassed, and judging by the way Maki tilts her head, Nobara suspects she gets that too.
“And now that you’re here, do you think it was worth it? It’s always going to be like this, you know, it’s always going to be dangerous, we’re always going to be one misstep away from the end, and it is likely we won’t live long lives but—is it still worth it?”
Nobara thinks of the endless countryside and the summer heat, the stares, the rice fields, the whispers, the monsters nobody else could see, the loneliness—
She’d been so lonely.
“Yeah,” she says, and she doesn’t hesitate this time either.
“Good,” Maki says. “Don’t try to make your life even shorter by giving yourself awful stitches again, though.”
This makes Nobara laugh, and it’s a bitter thing. “It’s my birthday, you know?”
And Maki looks up from tying her bandage, her eyes—not wide, she doesn’t look shocked. Nobara has learned that Maki rarely reacts openly with her face other than to show anger or annoyance, or something equally negative. So, no, she doesn’t look shocked, or surprised, but she does look at Nobara a little differently.
“Is it?”
“Yeah,” Nobara says. “Sweet sixteen.”
“You didn’t tell anyone.”
Not a question.
“I didn’t see the point,” says Nobara. “Who cares about a birthday? Itadori didn’t even get a funeral.”
“Right.” A pause. Leave it to Maki to not make this kind of situation completely awkward, Nobara doesn’t even know how she manages. “So why tell me now?”
I’m lonely.
She doesn’t say that, though it would be the truth. She's not that pathetic.
“Don’t know,” Nobara admits. “Wanted at least someone to know, I guess. Sorry it had to be you, senpai, you’re just the only person available.”
And that’s a lie. Nobara wouldn’t tell anyone else, for a reason she can’t quite explain.
“Right,” Maki repeats, and somehow it still doesn’t feel awkward. “No one here knows my birthday, either, if that makes you feel better.”
Nobara’s mouth crooks into a smile. “It doesn’t.”
And Maki flicks her in the forehead. “Consider giving you proper medical care and saving you from an infection my birthday present.”
“Best present I’ve ever gotten.”
Maki takes off her gloves, stained with Nobara’s blood, and dumps them in the closest bin. Her fingers still look terrible, so Nobara hands over her ice pack and when Maki waves her off she grabs her wrist and presses it against her knuckles anyways.
Even as she does so, Maki is still trying to catch a glimpse of her nose, and she uses her good hand to grab a hold of Nobara’s jaw and tilt her head to the side.
Her fingers burn, but it’s a pleasant burn that Nobara doesn’t completely understand, all she knows is that she wishes Maki would hold onto her like this for longer, perhaps forever.
Maki’s soft. Despite it all, despite Nobara seeing her lift five times her weight and run as fast as a bullet for miles and miles, despite Nobara seeing her fend off both Panda and Megumi at the same time with nothing but her trusty staff, she’s still soft.
The way she touches Nobara is soft, even the way she looks at her is soft, at least right now it is.
It’s the first time she is soft with her at all.
“You’re a bit of a hypocrite, senpai,” Nobara says, her voice suddenly hoarse.
“Huh?”
They’re very close to each other, their knees bumping on their stools, Maki’s hand on her face and Nobara’s hands cupping one of hers, still pressing the ice pack on her broken fingers. Close enough Nobara can see very well the tape on Maki’s glasses, close enough she can see the way color swirls so vividly in her eyes. They’re beautiful, she notices for the first time, like melted gold, like autumn leaves.
“I heard what you said when we met—after Panda-senpai said you should be kinder to us.”
“Being soft on them isn’t gonna help them.”
“I meant it,” Maki says.
“No, you didn’t,” Nobara says, for some reason smiling. “I mean, gee, look at you now.”
“I just told you we’re gonna live very short lives,” Maki argues. “That’s the opposite of going soft on someone.”
“Well, it’s what I needed to hear.” Nobara looks down at Maki’s hand again, suddenly self-conscious about maintaining so much eye contact. They’re nice hands, she can’t help but notice, elegant even though they’re scarred. “So, thank you.”
Maki’s hand slides along Nobara’s face, it stops feeling like a simple way to look at her wound and begins feeling more like comfort. When Nobara looks at her again, she finds Maki smiling. “If that’s what you needed to hear, then I’m a little worried about you.”
Nobara smiles, too. “You know, you’re a very difficult person sometimes, senpai, most people would just say 'you're welcome.'”
“I just gave you four stitches with two broken fingers,” Maki says. “I’m allowed to be difficult.”
“I stand corrected. You’re always a very difficult person.”
“So are you.”
“I’m not.”
“I walked in here while you were basically mutilating yourself,” Maki says. “And you still didn’t want to let me help.”
“Well, this stuff is kinda embarrassing,” Nobara admits.
Maki laughs, leans back, still lets Nobara press the coldness against her fingers but doesn’t hold Nobara’s face anymore. It’s a shame. “What’s embarrassing are your poor first-aid skills.”
Nobara rolls her eyes. “Give it a rest already, not all of us are perfect at everything.”
“You think I’m perfect?”
Yes, Nobara wants to say. So perfect it’s borderline annoying. So perfect it gets on her nerves. So perfect it makes her want to know more, know everything.
No one can be perfect, this is logically true, and yet there is Maki who is so full of contradictions. Who’s loud when they’re training and yet now sits in front of Nobara with an almost shy tilt to her voice. Maki who’d acted as if nothing could touch her, yet whose eyes had trembled, only slightly, upon seeing her younger sister just a few days ago.
So bizarre. So—perfect.
Nobara still respects her.
Doesn’t mean she’s not going to tease back.
“Nah, I saw the stitches you gave me, they were slightly off anyways.”
Maki scoffs. “Oh, yeah? Because you were doing so much better?”
“At least I have never done them before, what’s your excuse?”
“You wouldn’t stop talking,” Maki says. “It was distracting.”
To which Nobara simply grins. “So I’m distracting?”
Maki’s mouth opens, closes, she hesitates only one second when she says, “In a way that's annoying enough to make my hand falter, yes.”
Bingo.
“Well if I can make your hand falter then I deserve some praise, surely.”
“Surely,” Maki says. “Too bad you're never going to find anyone that believes you.”
“You’re funnier than I thought, senpai.”
“Yeah? Did you think I was a cold-blooded bitch?”
“Honestly? Yeah, kinda. You probably thought the same of me.”
Maki smiles again. “Just a little.”
“And now?”
“Now I just think you’re a brat,” she says. “But at least you’re cute.”
This time it's Nobara who opens her mouth, closes it, hesitates—unlike Maki, though, she doesn’t have any sort of comeback. “Oi, what the hell?”
“What?” Maki chuckles.
“You think I’m cute?”
“I said it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but—”
The door to the infirmary slides open, Nobara too focused on her conversation and on Maki’s ridiculously arrogant smirk to have heard the click click click of Shoko’s heels against the tiles.
Shoko looks a bit out of breath, her hair slightly messy and the bags under her eyes more prominent than ever. She doesn’t smell like alcohol, which is a miracle, and at least brings Nobara some comfort because she can discard Shoko's habits being the cause of her accident.
“Now what do I have here?” Shoko asks, despite the tiredness in her face her eyes are hungry and quick as they roam over the scene. The bloody needle and thread, the even bloodier cotton Nobara had used for her nose, and the way they’re sitting face-to-face, a clean bandage on Nobara’s arm, her nose and Maki’s fingers still terribly broken.
“Finally,” Maki says. “Took your sweet time, Shoko-san. Nobara here almost gives herself sepsis.”
“Hey! I did disinfect everything!”
Maki waits for her.
Nobara is so startled to see her out of the infirmary that she physically jolts.
“Surprised?”
“Yeah,” Nobara says. “I thought you’d gone to sleep or something.”
Maki ignores this in favor of coming closer to take a better look at Nobara’s nose. “Feel better?”
Which is a stupid question, in Nobara’s opinion, because Shoko had settled the bone perfectly and without much fuss, it’d taken her only a few seconds just as it’d taken her a few seconds to fix Maki’s fingers, the damage reversed so easily it’d make Nobara feel almost bad.
It’s comforting to know that Shoko will be there to give them a second chance should they need it, but it’s also strange to think that pain can so easily be erased. It almost makes it meaningless.
But even if now Maki is asking stupid questions, it occurs to Nobara that maybe, just maybe, Maki is only trying to find a way to keep talking to her.
The thought it’s even stupider, there is no way, yet Nobara embraces this because it makes her feel warm, even if it’s not true.
“Yeah,” she says. “Much better. She left the stitches, though, says she’s too tired to fix them now and she’ll do it tomorrow since there’s no risk.”
Maki nods, eyes flickering towards the bandage around Nobara’s arm. The same bandage she’d put there.
“She said you did a good job,” Nobara teases.
“Of course I did.”
Nobara doesn’t mind keeping the stitches for one night, wouldn’t mind keeping them for as long as they take to heal. They may be crooked at the base and perfectly straight at the top, but they’re a reminder of what Maki had said, how that heavy dread in Nobara’s gut is something she feels as well.
How she isn't crazy for feeling like this, how she isn't the only one who may not live a long life, how she's not the only one that suffers, that grieves.
Maki hadn't said it in that many words, but it's how her presence makes Nobara feel now.
The stitches are a reminder of that, a reminder of Maki, too. Nobara likes it, realizes that liking it makes her a little deranged because it’s a damn sutured wound and nothing more, nothing but an ache.
But today is the first time, since coming to Tokyo, that she hadn’t felt so alone.
“Say,” Maki starts, “how tired are you?”
She’s fucking exhausted. It’s late enough the moon is out, silvery gleam on the paths of an otherwise empty school, and though her nose is healed it still throbs faintly with the ghost of hurting. Her arm is surprisingly normal.
All she wants to do is crawl into bed and ignore her alarm the next morning, ignore Satoru pestering her for a debrief, ignore Megumi trying to teach her how to write a proper report, ignore that she still needs to do training for that stupid Goodwill Event.
“Why?” she asks instead, because she knows a double-sided question when she hears one.
“I have pizza leftovers,” Maki says. “Not really fancy, but it’s too late to order anything. I thought we could eat together and watch a movie.”
God, her voice is so smooth, so steady, she doesn’t really ask, doesn’t really offer either, she says everything with a casual cadence, just thinking out loud, maybe, nothing to freak out about.
Nobara still freaks out, just a little. She knows what this means.
Or, at least, she hopes she knows.
“Sounds wonderful.”
“Great,” Maki says. “Follow me, then.”
Nobara clings to Maki’s arm, and she does so casually as well, catches the split second in which Maki freaks out a little, too, how her eyes snap to her then straight ahead again, as if nervous to be caught looking in the first place.
“Who knew you were so sweet, senpai.”
“I’m not sweet.”
“Mmm, I beg to differ.”
Maki sighs, perhaps realizing that she’s too far into this whole thing to ever be able to salvage her reputation. “Just—happy birthday, Nobara.”
Nobara smiles, leans more into her, forgets a little what it’s like to be so lonely you start to wonder what someone is going to do with the blood you leave on plastic covers, forgets what it’s like to be so lonely you don’t tell anyone it’s your birthday because you think there’s no point to anyone knowing.
“Thanks, Maki-san.”