Work Text:
The only sound that fills the apartment is the rhythmic crunching of vegetables under a knife. Aki is in the middle of thinking that it’s getting a little late when, as if right on cue, a loud bang down the hallway causes him to jump nearly out of his skin, violently ripping him from the peaceful serenity of the evening.
Aki dramatically slaps a hand over his chest. After taking a deep breath to compose himself and calm his racing heart, he thinks that the front door had slammed open so hard the door knob would have most certainly left a dent in the wall… if there wasn’t already one there from previous repeated assault.
He peers around the corner to see a figure slumped over, leaning up against the door frame. He can see only a silhouette at first, the evening sky brighter outside than the dimly lit, narrow corridor of his apartment, though he doesn’t need to see a face to know who had disrupted his peace. Aki knows it’s you from your signature dramatic (i.e., obnoxious) entrance.
“[Y/N],” he calls down the hallway when you don’t move. There’s a flash of panic as he thinks of the worst that could have happened, though he’s also wondering in exasperation what could possibly have you acting so weird this time — because really, it could be anything. His voice stirs you and you stumble in through the door, leaning against a wall now. He can hear a low humming sound that he thinks is you mumbling. He strains his ears but can’t make out what you’re saying. “Huh?”
“I said give me a second!” you exclaim, much louder than what was necessary when a normal inside voice probably would have sufficed. Your words give way to a deep groan, and you press the side of your head into the wall as if you’re trying to ease the pain of a headache.
Aki sets the knife down with a sigh, thinking dinner can wait and he hasn’t put anything on the stove yet anyway, before approaching you, only to stop dead in his tracks a few paces away. He can finally see more clearly the blood that soaks the collar of your disheveled dress shirt, stray splotches staining here and there, and what looks to be the remnants of a steady stream of blood down your neck from your face, already drying against your skin.
At last, a sense of alarm washes over him, his own blood in his veins running cold and his heart stopping for a split-second like he’d been jump-scared when he sees the unmistakable vibrant pink and red hue of exposed flesh. A twinge of guilt pricks the back of his mind at the fact that he had considered you might have simply been out drinking after work and had returned home obnoxiously shit-faced, even though it was not out of the question. Really, a wound should have been his first guess, being an all too common occurrence in this line of work and in this household. He thinks he’s less surprised by the fact that you’re wounded, and more surprised by the fact that it was on your face, which has remained relatively and remarkably unscathed compared to the rest of your body in all other past instances of getting injured up to this point. He had not been expecting to see two large claw marks raked down nearly the whole length of the left side, but he supposes it was bound to happen sooner or later and you were probably long overdue.
“What the fuck happened this time?” The way Aki expresses his concern is perhaps a bit out of the ordinary, but he's rushing over to your side the instant he overcomes his initial shock.
“I got scratched on the eye by the Gonorrhea Devil. What does it look like?” you respond in a gravelly voice while Aki peels you off of the wall. He ignores the bit about the Gonorrhea Devil, barely even registers it — you’re always saying some shit like this and he’s long since given up trying to figure out if you were lying to mess with him or if you were telling the truth.
Instead, Aki is more concerned and bewildered by what he thinks is the understatement of the century. “Scratched?”
You only grunt in response like you’ve suddenly lost the energy to speak, but you apparently have enough of it left to bat him away (albeit rather feebly) when Aki tries to wrap an arm around you to offer some support. He simply goes to hold you again, unbothered by your behavior that he’s grown used to at this point. You don’t fight back a second time, giving in a little too easily as if you’re weak and lightheaded from blood loss. Aki leads you further into the apartment, kicking the front door closed behind him with his foot. He brings you to the bathroom, turning on the light so that he can inspect your face in better lighting.
Aki takes a hold of your chin, angling your head up and side to side, to examine the gashes that run down the left side of your face, both of which sliced through your eyebrow but had miraculously spared your eye. The outside of the wounds are pink with mild inflammation, and where the skin had ripped away is rough and uneven, making the fact that you had received them from a crazed, rampaging devil all too obvious.
Wounds like this one isn’t anything Aki hasn’t seen before, especially when it comes to you, but he still worries just as much every single time you come home with a new one. He thinks of the nasty, nasty scars they will leave on your face if they aren’t stitched up, and even if they are stitched up, though he knows you won’t be bothered by the way they will permanently alter your appearance.
Aki supposes that this isn’t the absolute worst thing that could have happened, the worst of which he’d rather not think about. This, to him, comes pretty close to it, though, considering the circumstances, and he pushes the thought away that tells him the worst thing that could have happened almost did just happen, and would have happened if you didn’t have insane luck on your side. Aki is surprised he hasn’t had a heart attack yet at this point, thinking he’s long overdue for one, but really, you’re alive, and that’s all he could ever ask for at this point.
When Aki releases you, you start to sway slightly, which doesn’t go unnoticed by him. He holds you steady, scared that you might pass out and crack your head on the bathtub, while he reaches over to start the bath.
“I got it,” you say.
“You sure?” Aki lets go of you as a test. Wordlessly, you begin to shrug your uniform off, tugging at your already loose tie to undo it completely, and unbuttoning your bloodied dress shirt. “Okay,” he says when he thinks you’re not going to collapse.
When Aki walks away, he hears your grunting and groaning echoing from the bathroom as you peel the rest of your clothes off of your sore body and get into the bathtub. He returns with a clean, wet hand towel, and his eyes sweep over your bruised and battered body before he kneels down beside the bathtub. He gingerly takes you by the chin, but when he goes to clean the area around the wound, you rip your face away from his grasp. He thinks you’re just trying to be difficult on purpose.
“I’m fine,” you insist as you swing at him, pushing his arm away with the back of your hand. You lean away from him again when he reaches for you, and on his third try, he grabs you by the mandible with a firm grip, squishing your cheeks together.
“It’s going to get infected, dumbass.” A moment of silence passes when he starts to clean your skin, before he speaks again. “Why do you have to be so difficult?”
You ignore his question, but at least you’ve left him to work on cleaning your wounds. Aki leans in very, very close to you as if his eyes are going bad, and his light breathing feathers over your damp face in an oddly comforting way, the cool air soothing your hot, inflamed skin around the burning, ripped flesh. At times, you can’t seem to help yourself, and your gaze flickers over to look at his face, contorted with focus and worry. Aki is trying to clean your wounds as gently as he possibly can, though he occasionally applies a bit of pressure to scrub the dried blood off of your skin as well as any dirt and grime. Your constant hissing, grimacing, and pained moaning distracts him.
An exasperated sigh escapes his lips. “Honestly, [Y/N].”
“What, you’re angry with me?” There’s a challenging edge to your voice as if you hadn't just been gazing affectionately at him, and Aki sighs again at this. He’s just amazed by the fact that no injury will stop you from being incendiary and argumentative just for the hell of it.
“No. I mean, why didn’t you get any sort of first-aid? Like, at the very least.”
“I just wanted to go home, man.”
“It probably wouldn’t have taken that long.” You don’t say anything, and at this point in time Aki is still oblivious to your reasons that you refuse to disclose like it’s forbidden knowledge or something. He wonders if you just want him to do it, and although it doesn’t seem completely out of the question, he just never seems to know with you. Again, it could be anything — you could have a completely legitimate reason, as would be the case if your reason truly was the fact that you would rather have Aki do it, but you could just as likely be doing it simply because you want to be difficult and you think it’s funny to see him get so stressed out. Knowing that pondering your reasons and even questioning you will get him absolutely nowhere, he changes the subject. “How long ago did it happen?”
There’s a pause, like you’re trying to recall. “I don’t know, like an hour, or… maybe two hours ago. I don’t know.” You shrug in a nonchalant manner and Aki feels his blood pressure spike again.
“Oh my god,” he mutters, wondering what the hell you had been doing all this time. Now that he thinks about it, it’s entirely possible that you had walked your ass home instead of at the very least getting a ride from a coworker. It’s almost like you’d rather risk bleeding out or getting a serious infection than ask for help.
Once Aki has finished cleaning and washing your wounds out with running water, he decides to clean the rest of your face for you. You grunt with each scrub, scrunching up your face, like you're annoyed and about to swing at him but you don’t openly defy him for once.
He leans away when he’s done, letting his gaze wander over your face and running a thumb over your unscathed cheek, before sighing and getting up with some effort and a grunt. You huff in amusement, and he guesses that you’re probably calling him an old man in your mind, even though you’re just about the same age as he is.
“Don’t fall asleep in the bathtub. When you’re done, I’ll stitch you up,” he says. You don’t respond, instead staring at the water, and he wonders if you’re looking at your own reflection undulating on the surface — he knows you’re not the type to fuss over that kind of stuff, but if there ever comes a time when you start to loathe what you see in the mirror, he’ll be there and ready to remind you that there’s nothing about you to hate. Though, he’s not sure that day will ever come, and his face flushes with embarrassment for even letting such a corny and cliché scenario play in his head.
Aki bends down to pick up your dirty work clothes scattered all over the ground, taking them into the other room to clean. His gaze falls on the deep color of the blood soaked into the white cloth, already drying and turning a brownish red hue, and he thinks of all the times he’s tried to convince you to find some other job. Your argument was always the same, that it was pretty hypocritical of him to tell you that while he’s making no move to do the same.
Quite frankly, Aki can’t help but worry for you, and what he thinks is high blood pressure is most definitely at least partially due to your reckless behavior during work. He thinks that patrolling with you has its ups and downs, in that he gets to spend time with you and keep a close eye on you, but he has to experience first hand the way you recklessly throw yourself into a fight with a devil right before his very eyes. He can only prevent you from taking so much damage and you suffer even more injuries when you and Aki are not on patrol together, often coming home to him with giant bruises and lacerations that he has to fix up. A fleeting thought wonders how you’re still alive though he immediately pushes it down. He’s not sure how much he believes in jinxes, but just in case…
Aki shakes his head free of this concept and goes to work washing the blood out of your dress shirt before throwing it in the washing machine with the rest of the laundry. He cleans his hands before rummaging through the apartment, wondering where he’d last put it before he finds the suture kit resting casually next to the television, an item that has become a staple in his and your household and made its way onto the shopping list next to the toiletries, groceries, and other essential items.
He hears sloshing from the bathroom followed by the steady and constant gurgling of draining water, and then shuffling as you dry yourself and search for clothes to put on. When you finally emerge and make your way to sit in the living room, Aki stops and stares at you garbed in his clothes, and although not a rare sight, he still appreciates (i.e., absolutely loves and adores) seeing it. A faint rosy blush dusts Aki’s face when he thinks just how endearing you are wearing his clothes, despite the jarring gashes down your face, which look a lot better now that it's clean and you’re all washed up. He shakes himself from his thoughts, approaching you and holding out to you a glass of water and some painkillers. You grunt, pushing his hands away but he just holds it out to you again.
“Come on,” he urges. You eye it for a split-second like you’re suspicious that he’s done something with them before you take his offerings, throwing the pills into your mouth and draining the whole glass of water in a matter of seconds. Aki sits on his knees beside you.
“How many will I need this time?” you croak.
Aki stares at your wounds for a bit, mentally spacing out the stitches, before he simply says “A lot.”
He pats his lap, and you accept his invitation, letting your head fall onto his thighs ungracefully and making him groan in mild pain. Aki places his hands on either side of your head and adjusts it on his lap before he goes to work threading the needle. You blindly feel around on the table for your phone and start casually tapping away on it like you’re not about to have your face sewn back together by a man with questionable medical skills and a grand total of zero qualifications. He doesn’t have to tell you to take a deep breath when he does the first suture, and as he progresses down the length of the first gash, you occasionally flinch and hiss but remain relatively still.
Your eyes are, for the most part, trained on a video playing on your phone, blinking away any pain-induced tears. At some point you seem to give in to your urges, looking past your phone screen and at Aki while he’s concentrating. He catches in the periphery of his focus your attention shifting from your stupid video to him. Aki’s heart leaps in his chest, and he allows himself a glance at you, making eye contact for a split-second before returning his gaze back to your gashes, miraculously never breaking stride in his stitching. You wordlessly go back to watching your video as if nothing had happened.
When Aki is done, he uses a cool, damp washcloth to gently dab at the irritated skin around the freshly stitched flesh. Then, he rests his hands on either side of your face, running his thumb over your right cheek which catches your attention just as intended. You swing your phone away from your line of sight to meet his eyes, and the same, familiar feeling he always gets when he catches your gaze makes his heart flutter, before he leans down to press his lips to yours in a brief kiss. When he breaks away and straightens himself out again, Aki slides his hands under your shoulder blades and pushes you into an upright sitting position though he can feel you intentionally going limp against his hands just to be difficult.
“Come on,” he grunts, but a chuckle escapes him as he shoves you all the way upright. “I’m gonna finish making dinner.”
“‘Kay,” you reply, setting your phone down on the table and placing a hand on his shoulder, using him to hoist yourself up onto your feet. You disappear into another room while Aki returns to the kitchen, and when you come back to sit in the living room again you have your laptop and headphones with you to entertain yourself in the meantime.
While he cooks, Aki feels himself yielding to the thoughts that stubbornly cling to his mind, his mental state weakened by distraction and the stress of, well, dealing with you. Aki knows he can’t really do anything about your recklessness. No amount of begging and arguing has ever worked in the past and he doesn’t think it will ever work. He’s convinced the only thing that will stop you is death itself, as much as he hates to think it.
Aki manages to break free of this notion (though he knows it’ll be back before long) and prepares a bowl for you. When he steps out of the kitchen, he sees you wildly playing air guitar to some solo he can just barely hear through your headphones, thrashing your head and body around where you’re sitting and only pausing to swat violently at what appears to be the empty air at first, but he figures was probably a fruit fly. Anyone would have thought that you hadn’t just been attacked in the face by a devil, that you didn’t just get your face sewn back together like a ripped doll by some guy, and that you’re in perfectly good health. He’s completely bewildered and he seems to always forget what follows, how you just act this way every single time like you’ve completely forgotten your wounds — which you probably have, knowing you.
He wonders if you’ll be okay after all, if you’ll always be okay no matter what happens to you, but quite frankly he’s scared to let himself get comfortable with this idea. He fears the day that your luck runs out.
But Aki tries to force himself to believe all that matters is that you’re okay right now. You seem to be more than okay, really. Sometimes, he feels a bit silly when he’s losing sleep over shit like this while you don’t seem to have a care in the world.
He inches closer to you, setting the bowl down beside your laptop while he eyes you the whole time. You briefly glance up, doing a double take when you realize he’s staring at you as if you’re a specimen, some experiment gone wrong. You rip your headphones off of your head.
“What?” you snap. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Aki is silent for a moment longer, the two of you staring each other down, before he shakes his head with a deep sigh. “There’s something wrong with you.”
You click your tongue with displeasure before you replace the headphones back on your ears and scarf your dinner down. You’re already halfway through by the time Aki joins you at the table with his own serving, and the two of you eat in silence, the only noise being the muffled sound of your music leaking through your headphones. While you’re fixated on your computer screen, Aki glances over at the stitches in your face to scrutinize his work and he thinks he’s getting a lot better at it, which would be funny to think about if it didn’t mean you were constantly almost dying to then have to be his practice dummy.
A few hours later, you and Aki settle down to sleep for the night. Just as Aki is falling asleep, he feels a prick against his shoulder which jolts him awake. He blinks the bleariness from his eyes and looks to see that you’re pressing your face against him, which wouldn’t normally be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that you’re laying on your stitches and putting pressure on your wounds. That’s certainly a cause for concern all on its own, but on top of that, your stitches are poking Aki and making him extremely uncomfortable and itchy.
Aki presses a palm to the side of your forehead, careful not to disturb your stitches even more, and attempts to push your face away so that you’re laying on your right side, only for you to roll back into place. He tries a few more times but your head keeps falling back, almost like you’re awake and doing this on purpose just to annoy the living shit out of him.
He takes you by the shoulder, shaking you and calling your name. You breathe in sharply, telling him that he has successfully stirred you from your deep slumber.
“Wha—? Huh?” you mumble, swiftly propping yourself up on your elbow and looking around in the dim light in your half-conscious state.
“Stop sleeping on your left side,” Aki tells you. “Your stitches are going to get messed up.”
You grunt in response, shifting around and flopping into your pillow face down.
“[Y/N].” Aki shakes you awake again. You rip your face off of the pillow.
“What?” you snap, still half-asleep.
“I said lay on your right side.”
You groan as if he’d just given you a grueling task, but you comply. You bounce around until you’re laying on your right shoulder, your back turned to him, and you’re straight back to being sound asleep in less than a minute.
Aki shakes his head with a sigh, before he scoots up and leans the side of his face against your shoulder blade, slipping his hand under your shirt and resting it against your warm skin. He listens to your faintly beating heart and your steady, shallow breathing. When Aki’s mind threatens him with thoughts of what it would be like to never hear these ambient noises again, he screws his eyes shut and attempts to fall asleep. But he fails, resigning himself to these thoughts. He’s sure that the silence would be deafening, and he’d lay awake all night, alone in this space that would feel a thousand times bigger without you. He really, really hates to think about how this was a genuine possibility. He’d never know what to do with himself if one day your luck truly does run out and death finally catches up to you after years of you miraculously evading it the way you do, almost like you're taunting it.
Aki thinks that he’s just lucky he gets to hold you every night, to see you wearing his clothes, to cook for you, to hear you say some stupid shit that he pretends annoys him but still makes him laugh. Yeah, even if the shit you say can be dumb as hell and just plain incomprehensible at times (most times), he thinks— he knows he’d miss arguing over the most trivial shit with you so much that he’d probably die of heartbreak. Well, he supposes he’s just being dramatic now. He blames it on exhaustion, and thinks he should probably get some sleep.
Aki scoots closer, as close as he can, and his grip around you tightens like he’s scared that if he lets go of you, you’re going to disappear right then and there.
What am I going to do with you? was Aki’s last thought before he finally succumbs to his exhaustion.