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Maki is hard and impenetrable where Shuichi is soft and bruise-able, and Himiko is barely solid at all. She’s not what they need, or not enough, or too much, and she doesn’t know how to be anything else. She doesn’t know if she can be anything else.
She wishes Kaito had left her instructions on how to be a good person, instead of just a jacket. Later, when she’s alone in the dark pressing her face to the material, taking shuddering, wet, uneven breaths, she takes it back, and for the first time in as long as she can remember, says a prayer. She’s rotten, has been for longer than not, and she would bleed and scream to keep whatever of him she has left. Her hands shake with how hard she’s gripping the fabric.
Himiko is wrapped in blankets in front of the TV, staring unseeingly. She makes a soft noise of protest when Maki reaches for the remote, and drinks the water Shuichi places next to her, and turns her face when the single beam of sun making its way through the closed blinds finds her eyes. These are the only reasons Maki knows she’s still alive.
She’s so, so small. Himiko sometimes seems larger than life, taking up five times the space that her diminutive stature and general energy output require. Eccentricity and steadfast belief - passion, even, in her own strange way - exude from her. Her personality used to exhaust Maki, frustrate and annoy her. Now, with Himiko curled in on herself, dead-eyed, she would give anything to be pestered about RPGs and fantasy sub-genres and the history of escapology. She would give anything to watch Himiko put on a show while they sat on the living room floor, all in their pyjamas, and not let them leave until she’d managed to coax a smile.
She would give anything for her to stop looking every bit as fragile as she is, so that Maki could come near her without fear of breaking her.
She was not made for anything but destruction. She has killed men ten times the strength and size and will to live. She wants to brush her hair.
Himiko has been wrapped in that same blanket for days now. Her hair still isn’t very long, but it must be uncomfortable.
Maki digs through their bomb-site of a bathroom until she finds a comb. Carefully, tentatively, she perches on the edge of the couch, and puts her hand on Himiko’s shoulder. She looks at her briefly and turns back to the TV. So Maki shifts positions, and, starting from the ends, begins to detangle the mats.
Shuichi is sitting on the floor of the hallway, back to the wall, hunched over, head between his knees. Clinically, much too detached for a girl whose best friend is having a body shaking, sobbing panic attack, she notes that he is severely hyperventilating, and at risk of passing out.
She tries to feel bad for not having the emotional response she thinks she should, but can’t quite manage it. She’s felt out of her body for days now, disconnected like an old phone, a distant and indistinct ringing in her ears, consciousness hanging loosely. It’s like watching herself as a character in a TV show. (No, the irony is not lost on her.)
She was doing something. Right. Get the job done. Get the job done.
Slowly, she walks over to Shuichi, and slides down the wall opposite him. He doesn’t acknowledge her, save for flinching violently when she hits the ground.
“Shuichi,” she says, quietly. No response.
“Shuichi,” she says, louder, and he makes a noise like a wounded animal. He lifts his head, eyes squeezed shut so tight his whole face is scrunched up, and bangs his head against the wall, once, twice, hard enough that on the second time, it shakes. Quickly, she reaches out and grabs his hand, yanking it towards her, and he immediately freezes, his frantic breaths the only sound and movement between them. She mutters an apology, not really meaning it. She got him to stop.
Holding his wrist, she turns his hand over so that it’s palm-up, and stares at it intently, studying it.
Shuichi’s hands are smooth and unblemished, save for a couple of paper cuts from all the reading he does in lieu of sleeping. Long, bony fingers with soft pads. She knows he looks at them and sees blood that isn’t there. He told her.
Maki’s hands are calloused and rough. She’s always kept them that way, for practicality, even in the weeks or months where jobs were mostly just watching and waiting. Now, she refuses to lose that, and works out every morning, practices with her knives on the regular. If the single good thing she can do with her life is protect the only two people left alive that she loves, then that will be enough.
It can never hope to make a dent in her monumental deficit, and she has completely selfish motivations, and the threats they face are no longer really physical or even external, and it has to be enough, because she doesn’t have any other option. She has nothing else to offer. It will be enough.
Maki looks at her hands, and she doesn’t imagine blood, she just remembers it. It’s not figurative, it’s hot and sticky and comes off in annoying flakes. She doesn’t bring it up.
Shuichi’s hand is warm and sweaty, and still held in hers. He’s slowed down a bit, but his other hand is still clenched, white knuckled. She takes a finger and runs it lightly over his palm in a spiral pattern, a trick she learned to ground herself in the field. A lapse in focus loses carefully calculated and limited opportunities. A lapse in focus might be deadly.
Sitting on the hardwood floor, they’re about as safe as they can be, and Shuichi is not dead as he shakily gets to his feet. She takes his offered hand, even though she doesn’t need it, and dusts herself off. He doesn’t meet her eyes, and he probably won’t for the rest of the day, but he does place a hand on her shoulder and guide her towards the kitchen. She just barely registers the click of the kettle.
Giving her a small smile, Himiko pours the water into a mug with her favourite teabag, and pushes it towards her.
Maki has no idea how she became something of a rock, but she’ll try her damndest not to crumble. And hopefully, be stuck back together when she does. It’s the most optimistic thing she’s thought since they escaped. She clings to it like it’s going to save her, and earnestly tries to believe that it will.