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They’d started as these sort of migraines, maybe seven or eight years ago. As was customary, Shinomori’s grasp on exact dates in the years after he left civilization was, according to him, close to precise, but never certain. The migraines were the mundane kind: there were no people to aggravate Danger Sense for miles, and Danger Sense was what made him sure of that.
Anything being wrong with Shinomori’s body, he had explained, was cause for serious concern to him, because he had a duty— carrying and training One For All, training it up as hard as he can. The emergence of the migraines wasn’t the kind of thing he just left sitting, he tried to figure it out. He hydrated more, he slept earlier, he ate different foods within his limited selections out here. He let himself rest more, until it became clear that, the instant he got back to work, nothing had been improved by all the rest before it. He took a full month’s walk further southwestward to give himself a change in weather, sunnier skies and clearer air. The migraines didn’t become any more or less frequent, but the change in them, the change in their quality , felt like it was exclusively downhill.
Then, and this was only about a handful of months before Banjo had come into his life, he’d had the first episode that looked like the sort of thing Banjo was almost used to seeing: a sudden, unheralded pain that brought Shinomori straight to his knees. He would beg off any attention until it was over, beg off being touched out of residual, instinctive fear that Banjo would try to take him to a hospital— he had tried to once, right at the beginning, and Shinomori had needed to argue hard to beg him off— and spend the entire period with both hands clamped firm around the front of his face, to the point that Banjo was always tempted to cross the touch boundary in spite of everything just out of fear of accidental self-injury.
Those would last something like twenty seconds to thirty minutes, and Shinomori would spend their entire duration on the ground, doubled forward, trying to be quiet. When they were over, he used to try to stand back up, even used to try to promise that in ten minutes they could return to whatever it was they had been doing before the flare interrupted them. Nowadays, he just quietly called Banjo over and asked for help to go sit, or sometimes lie down, somewhere more comfortable than collapsed in whatever spot he’d been standing on. The residual migraine, after this acute period was over, lasted less time than they used to, but they hadn’t become any more pleasant.
He’d had a couple seizures, now. The flares’ latest development was that: his body would pull and jerk.
“It’s always been…” Shinomori tried to explain once. Then he shook his head. “It feels the same. I understand that you’re seeing a different symptom, but my guess is… what it feels like is, that whatever is set upon tearing my body away from itself has just finally found the strength to try harder.”
He still slurred arguments when Banjo had to touch him, but Banjo did have to now. Shinomori had asked him to, too, when he was feeling healthier. I will argue with you, he said, and he apologized that it was going to be hard, but they agreed that Banjo should get him into recovery position and get something under his head to keep him from braining himself on anything. Banjo had done that on his own, the first time, but Shinomori made his seal of approval very clear shortly after it.
They were still not frequent. Banjo had known Shinomori for about one year and ten months, and in that time he’d witnessed about half a dozen flares overall. Two seizures total, about ten weeks apart. And whenever he was back in the city, there hadn’t been any seizures that Banjo hadn’t witnessed. That didn’t mean it didn’t sit on his brain, all the time.
Shinomori had made a hell of an about-face on heroes. He had been skeptical, at first, of the government extending its amnesty to Lariat. He never thought Banjo had been fighting a bad fight, but he didn’t trust any major power’s opinion of what the right fights were, and he didn’t trust that Banjo’s moral compass would be allowed to remain intact through it all. Now, he’d succeeded at talking himself into the idealistic picture of it, at some point between all of Banjo’s failed convincings.
He wouldn’t let Banjo stay around here for too long— wouldn’t let him linger over a day, though he was welcome to sleep here if he had to. Not only did Banjo have bills to pay— if it were just that, it would be much easier to say to hell with it. Long absences from the rest of Lariat’s life were suspicious, for one, and what’s more, there were an abundance of people out there in need of saving. Just like One For All was too much to risk even for the sake of Shinomori’s health, so too was Lariat’s heroing too much to risk.
When Banjo showed up this time, it was to exactly the kind of thing he’d been trying not to think too hard about every single waking hour of every single day of work (or chores, or unbearable idleness, though he kept that last category shaved down real small) for the past fifteen weeks; since the first seizure. Shinomori was on the ground— scarily near the water of a slow-moving stream that he liked to place fishing traps in, he laid about two meters away from the stream, and Banjo thought about a world in which it had hit him a few seconds earlier or a few seconds later—and he was on his back, arms sprawled out, still for several seconds at a time between a sharp, abrupt full-body twitching.
Some people go to a place of altered responsiveness for seizures. Seizures start in the brain, so of course, connecting one’s brain with the world in ways one’s used to can sometimes be the first thing to go, or at least to get muddled. There are some seizures that are just that. Absence seizures, they’re called: a person suddenly loses awareness and responsiveness, but they’re otherwise just sitting in a chair. Still epilepsy.
Shinomori didn’t for his—some people didn’t—at least not worse than he had with the worst of his flares before. He’ll brain fog the hell out, and sometimes the pain meant he was just gone, but he could react to things Banjo was doing, and speak or try to speak, and rarely seemed confused so much as upset and panicked.
Though his mouth had gone dry, Banjo was about to call out to him. It had to be better to announce himself than to just be some sudden movement, some footsteps Shinomori didn’t have the focus about him to recognize right then.
Shinomori got his half a word out before Banjo had even finished seeing him, though. Maybe aware enough to be a step ahead of him, maybe just making a leap of trust that the sudden movement in his periphery would be what he’d hope it would be. “Ba—”
“I’m here. I’m here.” He ran the rest of the way, kneeled down and sat on his heels about a foot back. He put himself right between Shinomori and the water, even though the distance was far enough that he was almost certain nothing bad could happen with it right now.
“Gonna move you now.” Shinomori didn’t argue, didn’t do much more than one meek moan in response, more than in protest, to being guided and shifted onto his side, and it scared the hell out of him. Banjo stuck a hand under the left side of his head and left it there, between him and the ground, careful to hold all his fingers flat and play pillow rather than ever hold or grab.
Shinomori laid on his left side, jerking irregularly, and Banjo sat with him, one hand under his head, the other hovering. Both of the other times this had happened, Shinomori’s body would try every so often to roll him back onto his back, and so Banjo would catch him and wait for a safe moment to guide him back. Today he was much more still, most of the time, but when he did move it was violent. Banjo had grown up by the ocean, and watching this was like watching a slow-moving, heavy wave build and finally pound against the rocks.
After a period of this, Shinomori cried out in a short, low way that got choked in the middle of his throat.
It wasn’t a one-time thing; he couldn’t stop them once he’d started. It built, in volume, and in tenseness somewhere inside him, and then his head snapped forward with a violent jerk. And it started over, and built, and built, again, and this time the snap of the muscles down the side of his neck sent his head hard down into Banjo’s palm. And again, the movement seemed like some kind of reset. Like an almost-venting of the pressure.
His voice was allowed to quiet down for only a moment, and to gasp down a few breaths, before the whole terrifying, mounting cycle started over again and would not let him alone. Banjo could just sit there and watch, and hold his hand still and document it in his brain in case it was knowledge they could use somehow later, before the same ugly thing began to build again, like a slowing, burning elastic stretch and the whip crack that followed, to the same breaking point.
His head didn’t jerk as far downward as it had the last time. It broke his cheekbone.
The force of it, somehow. There weren’t even many strong muscles up there. Banjo didn’t understand it. The muscles in the neck, maybe, if they were able to pull hard enough to— it broke his cheekbone. Not by impact, Banjo would swear ; he still had his hand beneath Shinomori’s head and the muddy bank below them was even softer.
It took Banjo a moment to realize that it had ended with that.
Shinomori stayed rigid for about ten seconds longer, but then slowly, his muscles unwound, and the world came back into focus as his body started to slacken. A bead of blood dripped into Banjo’s palm. More of it smeared across it, at once, when Shinomori’s head eased downward into his hand and then went limp.
“I’m here,” Banjo’s mouth was saying again, and Shinomori sobbed once in short, immediate response to it.
Shinomori quieted himself after that. He didn’t quiet himself all the way— the way things were, there was simply little embarrassment left between them; circumstances had forced Shinomori’s hand on that. But he quieted himself to gasped, slowing breaths, and to a low hum of acknowledgment when he was finally ready to start moving.
Shinomori’s seizures really didn’t work like seizures were supposed to. Banjo didn’t have specialized training on it, but the symptoms in the brain struck them as a little bit wrong. But it still made them both feel better for Banjo to roll through a little protocol anyway. Gave them a sense of direction, maybe, and a sense of direction was a thing both of them tended to emphatically need. Checked in on whether anything had gotten any worse. “What year is it?”
Shinomori answered.
“What’s my name?”
He daren’t ask Shinomori’s name when he was like this, compromised. Banjo hadn’t gotten anything more than the mononym yet, didn’t even know if it was family name or given, and this wasn’t how he intended to find out.
“Banjo Daigoro,” answered Shinomori unsteadily, “Lariat.” He’d answered the same way since the first time Banjo had needed to do this.
“You got it.” Banjo looked over their situation. “Listen, I don’t wanna ask you to stand.”
“Thank you,” Shinomori half-enunciated in response. Simply, and very tiredly, but with conviction, an ounce of purpose behind it. His voice was less quiet than it could’ve been. Banjo got the feeling he was doing that for him—there wasn’t much else Shinomori could do. It worked, anyway, it was reassuring against the rest of the whole worrying picture.
They got inside faster than they normally do. There wasn’t any sitting him halfway up and waiting, and then easing to stand while Shinomori got his feet under himself. Banjo just scooted around to the other side of him, so that the bloodied side of Shinomori’s face wouldn’t be the part forced to sit against his chest, and got his arms under his back and knees and hauled him up off the ground in a princess carry.
He got Shinomori indoors and settled atop his blanket rather than under it, because he didn’t want to track dampness under the covers, and Shinomori would want to be the one to deal with getting out of his muddied clothes once he was able to. Helped him settle down to sitting, once they’d confirmed he felt alright to sit, just because it would make everything else they had to do next easier. It was a warm day, and that meant he had been making do without a shirt, so Banjo could at least root around for a towel to dry and gingerly brush off the top half of him.
Shinomori took it all the way someone does when they have to take it. His right eye closed, and his left only mostly closed, hovering and twitching out of not wanting to actually make contact with that lower lid.
They had to clean that, next. It didn’t take much discussion—Banjo’s best try at discussion, and he was trying to be sensitive about it, was cut off with a hand on his shoulder. Shinomori nodded with his head hanging low, hair in his face. Banjo used the small basin Shinomori kept in one corner and a plastic bottle of water he’d brought with him, because it was a little more sterile than the water Shinomori had boiled and put away in the two metal bottles he kept here.
The bruising was worse than the skin tear itself, which is what you can expect with a break anywhere on the face. It was his cheekbone, after all; less than a break would still have left him with a black eye. There were four disconnected, thin little breaks in the skin, all along the same path like a dotted line. That was concerning to him—it was like the bone had probably gotten yanked with the force of that final convulsion and had torn the skin when it had moved, and Banjo didn’t know how to set a bone like that. Shinomori’s left eye couldn’t stop blinking, though it still refused to blink all the way.
It was as Banjo was washing his face that Shinomori brought a hand up, still silent through it all—he had made a few muffled gulps or heavy breaths in pain through the process of getting it cleaned, but nothing else. He hovered his fingers for a long time over the site of the break before brushing over it to actually feel the damage. Banjo stopped moving and let him. And he did watch, even though it felt like he shouldn’t be watching, because it seemed unsafe not to.
Shinomori’s probing brought Banjo’s attention to something he hadn’t noticed— there was another small break above his eye. His skin hadn’t broken there, and the bruising got caught up with the rest of the extended black eye he was forming. But there was a fracture up there in the brow bone, too, right across from the other break.
Shinomori brought his hand back down then and gestured for Banjo to finish, a loose waving of one hand and a nod. They’d been just about there anyway, but he did one last rinse over everything, since Shinomori had touched the open broken skin. Then he dressed it.
“I’ve got Advil,” Banjo said, once Shinomori was lying down, still atop the top blanket.
Shinomori’s response was a hum, and loosely reaching out his hand in lieu of a verbal response. He was very still. His one uncovered eye watched the ceiling— flicking about, the way his eyes always do, they hadn’t been willing to sit still in the entire time Banjo had known him and they were probably never going to. It had to hurt, though. Every way the visible eye moved, the covered one was mirroring, which had to hurt against the broken skin. And it seemed like it probably did; he was glancing about less than his usual, keeping his eyes still for what seemed like as long as he could convince himself to.
He didn’t often accept pain medication. Banjo made the process as quick as he could. He’d caught on by now that they weren’t talking as they sat him up, and helped Shinomori hold a water bottle, and laid him back down.
“I need to be alone for a minute.”
A few minutes had passed since Shinomori had swallowed the pills and laid back down. Banjo had settled across the shelter to give him space, as much space as a person could give in a dug-down earthen home not much more than a couple meters wide, and he’d pulled out a book and everything. A good cheap detective novel could get him every time, and it turned out it was nice to have one on hand to be polite sometimes, which was the only reason the book had made it all the way out here with him so many times by now.
He’d been a little unsure whether leaving space was the right decision, at the time. So now, he was sure it was, but.
“Please, Banjo.”
“I… I get it, I’m just not feeling good about it.”
Shinomori struggled with that for a moment. Technically, he was powerless in this scenario, and Banjo knew how much worse that must make it. Those cards were all in Banjo’s hands. If he decided to stay, then he decided to stay; only one of them could leave the room right now.
“I’ll shout if I need you,” he offered. A thing he almost definitely would have done already, but presented with a little strain in his voice that hoped it might be taken as an offer, at least as a good argument. “My voice is fine,” he said, and he put more strength behind his words as if to prove he could do it.
It was ... it was an okay argument.
What was a better argument was the amount of just slightly desperate Shinomori sounded to convince him. He didn’t have many cards to play, and it was palpable in the air that he was fishing around for what few of them he could make into an offer.
“...Alright,” Banjo breathed, staring good and hard down at his own hands. He laid the book neatly atop the backpack Shinomori kept in the corner of the room and pushed himself up to stand. “I’m gonna be just outside, I’m within earshot.”
“Within shouting distance.”
“......That’s—”
“Banjo,” said Shinomori. “Please.”
He spoke it to the ceiling. Shinomori’s one uncovered eye stayed on aimed that way, his head pointed straight above himself, and the look in his eye held a flatness. Not tension, the lack of it. An uncharacteristic lack.
“...Guess I’ll take a walk,” he murmured, “guess I’m taking a walk.”
Banjo took a walk.
It was laid along a very tight circuit around the neat three by three meter dugout that made Shinomori’s home. When he got antsy to drift inward, he got by with not entertaining the impulse more than once or twice. He didn’t know if he got within an audible footstep distance for Shinomori to know he was doing it. That wasn’t the only reason he tried, really tried, not to do it too often. He gave Blackwhip the task of latching onto whatever landmark it was he was walking toward next, and pull him in a straight line to keep him from walking inward.
He walked too fast for a leisurely, excuse-making walk. In about twenty minutes, Banjo got a taste of what it might be like to walk through these woods for months with nothing in mind but moving in a straight line— with a thousand things in mind, and trying to ignore them all for the sake of moving in a straight line. A circle, in Banjo’s case. A circle that wasn’t taking him anywhere.
He was within shouting distance.
“You can come back,” Shinomori called.
So he did.
“Come here, please.”
Looked like he still wasn’t feeling well enough to get up. He had rearranged himself a little though, fluffed bedding up behind him so that he could recline without being completely on his back. It probably meant less pressure on his head; Banjo probably could’ve thought of that. Wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t mentioned it.
Banjo came over by his side. The futon was one of the newer things in the home—Shinomori was picky and reticent to accept gifts at all, but he had let Banjo purchase a new futon, if it was a cheap one, considering he’d thrown his old one out something like two years prior once it started severely molding.
It wasn’t elevated off the ground by more than a couple layers of combined broad leaves and scrap cardboard to keep it clean. So as he had before, when they were cleaning off Shinomori’s face and bandaging the wound, Banjo sat seiza beside it.
Shinomori rolled his arm over, the one nearer to where Banjo sat. Down by his side, moving it so that his palm rotated up. Banjo set his hand in it.
Shinomori closed his fingers, and closed his eyes, and pulled Banjo’s hand up onto his chest.
“Can you stay the night today?”
Banjo’s lungs emptied themselves without his doing, with overwhelming relief. It was overwhelming a couple different ways, too. It was overwhelming to be relieved about doing the bare minimum, about a situation where he cannot do anything. “I was gonna fight you for it. I can stay.”
“Thank you.” He held Banjo’s hand to his chest, still one hand cradled in both of his, and he stared at the ceiling for a long time, picking at and moving around his fingers as if there was still something he was trying to say. It took him minutes. “Take One For All.”
A resolve hardened itself in Banjo’s chest more quickly than he could’ve come up with consciously. Yeah. Okay. “Yeah. Okay. How do I take it?”
“You don’t. I do, it has to be given.”
“Okay. What do you do..?”
“What do we do,” Shinomori settled on—like it was a matter of semantics that he had decided on just now, but it sounded more than a little important to him. “It’s very simple. A DNA transfer.” Shinomori stopped, and then laughed, very, very quietly so as to not disturb his face. “I ate a strand of my predecessor’s hair,” he explained, knowingly awkward, “and that worked well enough.” Banjo laughed. Shinomori laughed back, under his breath to keep from disturbing his face, and both of their hands fiddled around until their hold wound up just a little tighter. “He and his predecessor completed the transfer with a kiss.”
“A kiss, huh.”
“The predecessor and successor pair before him, too. There’s a—” A little breath stuck in his throat, and again, he sort of laughed at it, “—storied tradition of kisses, with One For All.”
It wasn’t really a suggestion yet. It wanted to be one, though. Banjo sat himself down on the edge of the blanket instead of sitting on his heels, in a way where his hip just tapped against the side of Shinomori’s hip. Works for me.
Nothing moved very quickly after that. Nothing was necessarily going to, it didn’t feel like a barreling train, or a thing with a real solid destination. Just a series of things they both picked their way through deciding to do, and see what happened next. Banjo brushed his thumb real quick over the inner curve of Shinomori’s fingers, and Shinomori’s hand tightened, so quickly, and he shifted their hands around to hold Banjo’s in one while his other reached up to frame his jaw.
“Yeah?” breathed Shinomori, just that, trying hard for the right thing to say and a little bit odd on his voice. Banjo kissed him, and he kissed Banjo, and Shinomori seemed to hold on for as long as he could but came away for air in seconds, and with a stutter in his breath. When Banjo decided to see about coming in for a second kiss, he accepted it, turned his head in toward Banjo and allowed it to settle him. This one was just as short. It ended softer. Both of them could breathe.
They did, breathe. There’s that chamber that can happen in the air between two people when they share breath. Neither of them wanted to leave it.
“......Alright. I have it?”
“No— no,” Shinomori answered. He shook his head, and better opened his mostly-lidded right eye to look up at Banjo, meeting his eye before flicking away. “You don’t. I’m not quite ready. I’m sorry.”
“Ah,” said Banjo, and he tried to not get misconstrued as disappointed. “Alright.”
He wasn’t disappointed about One For All. He wasn’t. It was Shinomori’s. He was also not, in particular, disappointed about being kissed.
Shinomori also seemed to care about not getting misconstrued as misconstruing him. He had a habit of being able to hold his expression very still. He looked the way a lot of people look, even though Banjo himself never had: a curated resting background-character face, keeping their heads down.
(After years of living out here almost completely unwitnessed, you would think that kinda skill would start to atrophy. But, as much constant energy as Banjo would’ve thought it would demand of anyone, it must be the kind of thing that sticks once a person has done it enough. And it must be that Banjo, on the other hand, had just never started trying.)
Things were all very still though, for a beat, all sides trying very hard not to send signals. And it was nice, but it was also the kind of thing Banjo could never do for too long.
He tapped on the side of Shinomori’s uninjured cheek.
“I’m not ready one minute later,” Shinomori clarified. It was mostly a joke, but very much said just in case.
“I know. I didn’t figure.”
“Just being sure.”
Shinomori found a hold on Banjo’s shoulder, and—watching his face—pulled himself up into him.