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Shion can probably draw a line between the stages of his life many, many times — before he saved a boy and after, before a boy saved him and after, before he destroyed No. 6 and after — and he still doesn’t know which of these would be correct. Any? All? Would it be correct to draw one when Nezumi left? Before that? Would it be now, when Hamlet’s familiar weight, a weight he hasn't felt in a long time, and its squeaks make him startle as he feels it climb up his shirt?
The message it relays is short, simple: open the door.
Shion does. The damp night air breezing past the coarse wood and hitting him does nothing to alleviate the sight that greets him — a sight that stings almost as badly as having that parasitic wasp inside, because he knows it’s him, and he knows that it’s him. Unexpected, familiar. A face Shion has wanted to wipe from memory as much as he's wanted to keep it on the forefront of his mind, the details in it: the distance between eyebrows, the edge of his jaw, the slope of his nose. Turning them around until they're mixed together.
It goes a bit like this: he blinks — Nezumi is here. He blinks — Nezumi is here. He slams the door. He blinks. He opens it again.
Nezumi is here.
It is in between one blink and the next that he says, “You insecure asshole.”
Nezumi looks surprised — for all of a second — before he smiles, features relaxing in that confident way he has, the way which Shion never gained. “See? I had told you you weren’t weak, but you really gained a spine in my absence.”
Brick-walled resentment has always been as disheartening as it is foolish, but Shion cannot help the lump that forms in his throat. “How dare you,” he whispers. I missed you, he wants to say.
Nezumi wobbles. “You won’t invite me in?”
“I share a room with Inukashi,” Shion says, avoiding the question entirely. Like that means anything.
He wants to avert his eyes; he can't. The worst part in all of this is, Nezumi hasn’t changed at all. His hair might be a little longer, but his eyes, cheekbones, posture… Shion bites his tongue to realign himself. The familiarity hurts. The pain wakes him up, a bit.
Nezumi looks expectant.
Shion deflates. “Come on in.”
It is only when Shion’s eyes move down that he notices the growing red patch.
“What have you been doing?” he asks later, once he has Nezumi actually sitting down and he doesn’t feel like all the air — and instead maybe just three-quarters of it — has left his lungs.
Nezumi resiliently avoids his gaze. “I’ve probably been less busy than you.”
“You’ve been busy enough to get shot in the thigh,” Shion points out, disbelieving.
“It only grazed me, and it missed any important arteries.”
Shion yanks down Nezumi’s trousers. Not all that carefully; the fabric that was stuck due to the blood releases skin painfully, if Nezumi’s breath turning rapid and shallow is any indication, if the tremor that reverberates is. Shion's hands are shaking as he undoes the bandage, lifting it off by only just, barely peeking at what's underneath. Nezumi barely reacts to his care. Shion is left wondering how he didn't get an infection.
A wound a quarter-inch in diameter and three inches long, deep and jagged. There's enough blood for the back of his tongue to almost taste the copper and the blue of the veins contrast stark against it.
“Just do what you can,” Nezumi says. As always, his tone composes several shapes: all flat, none encouraging.
Thing is, the anger and frustration builds up. The absence, the loss, the emptiness — is Shion supposed to ignore it? His fingers twitch. It probably takes longer than it should to make any movement or speak, chest tight, hot. The blood continues oozing. “I'm not a medic,” he snaps.
“Then do what you can,” Nezumi repeats.
Shion doesn’t, not really. He uses a small rag and some water, rubbing the wound and around it gently, wrapping a new set of bandages, perhaps tighter than he should.
For a moment he wants to imagine, to try and understand how the events transpired, what Nezumi has been up to. Maybe he’ll learn. He laughs inwardly — that assumes Nezumi wants to say something, which Nezumi almost never does. But he wants to ask: how have they come to this and formed this big a distance between them — how has Nezumi accomplished it, to stay away for so long. Did he not feel as Shion felt? Does he not still? We might not be your people, Shion thinks, but this is your home. He focuses on trying to clean the wound: the dirt and the dried blood, the way his hands go sweaty and slick with it. He presses down. Hopes for the blood to clot. Nezumi hisses at that — oh, an admission of humanity.
He desperately wants to talk to Nezumi. He cannot find the words. The pit of his stomach clenches and it feels as if something is lodged in his throat.
Nezumi waits patiently, says nothing, until Shion is done.
“I'm sorry,” he says finally, when he doesn’t know what else to say. For the careless way he handled the injury. For his first words when he saw Nezumi. For trusting Nezumi to come back, after all this time. Nezumi just nods, tight-lipped.
Shion doesn’t know how long they sit there like that, just the two of them in the dark.
He sighs. "You can stay here for tonight. In the morning I'm throwing you out."
“Don’t make offers you won’t follow through on.”
Shion chances a glance at Nezumi's face. He is, predictably, smirking.
“It’s a threat, not an offer.”
“Sounded like an offer to me!” Nezumi’s laugh is half-cut, like he wants to express it but it doesn’t want to come out — or it doesn’t remember how to. The expression doesn't stick. “I saw a lot as I was coming here. The rebuilding has been going well.”
Shion’s lips quiver. This guileless snob, offering his opinion. Like he seeks his approval.
Nezumi softens. “You’ve been doing well. Being a paradigm suits you.”
It does? Shion feels himself flush, bewilderedly pleased and not wanting to be.
Nezumi reaches out then, gentle fingers touching his arm, moving like his body has just been released from the penitentiary. “You’re a good person, Shion. You always have been.”
Shion looks down at his hand and then back up at Nezumi. His throat is tight. “Let me sew you up.”
Sutures are hard, making your hands not tremble even more so. Shion takes a deep breath and steadies his hand, the task of threading the needle harder than it has ever felt. Nezumi grits his teeth as a particularly fast stitch pulls at his skin. Another hard task: not feeling bad about this. Shion has, objectively, changed a lot since first exiting No. 6, at times altering himself on his own and at times unwillingly, forced by the circumstances, but ever since Nezumi said he has wanted Shion to stay the same, well—
He has tried to keep himself as-is. A lot. He just now wishes he didn’t. Just so he could establish some kind of primaeval craft of emotion — the kind that surges up, the kind that can actually express anger properly, in shouts, in screams, in dropping Nezumi on his ass out the door and into the night, the kind that instead doesn't feel abandoned. He presses his shaking fingers against the wound. The needle gets almost-dropped three or four times. Shion is unable to stop swaying, focus is near-impossible to muster. Somehow, the final product is a neat row of stitches across the ridged flesh.
He finally speaks: “Nezumi.”
“Hm?”
“Where have you been?”
“Here and there.”
He sighs. “A real answer. Please.”
Nezumi echoes that sigh, more as a mockery of it than because he feels like he has to. In response, Shion heaves him up.
Kind of.
He tries, but that is a whole other person and heavy, and Nezumi isn’t expecting it so his entire body weight rests on Shion, so Shion almost drops him and Nezumi almost slips and his elbow bangs on the table with enough velocity and force that it’s certain to bruise, before Nezumi can right himself on his one good leg again.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like? Carrying you to the bed.”
“What? No, I— I should go.” He pauses to shift his eyes, but doesn’t try to take his weight off Shion. “I’m going to go,” he says more firmly.
Shion huffs. “Not on that leg, you’re not.”
That walking on it would be torture is, well, a probability that reaches one-hundred percent. Shion shoves him forward, and Nezumi endures the necessary humiliation of it until he’s horizontal on the bed.
“You left. And you were going to leave again,” Shion accuses.
“I had to.”
“You kissed me then you left.” He doesn’t say: how do you think that made me feel? They hadn’t talked about their feelings, neither the hidden ones nor the ones so close to the surface someone on top of that mountain of corpses they climbed to get inside No. 6 could easily see. This could be an opportunity, perhaps. No— Shion will force it to be one. The move from acquaintance to friend to whatever it never has had the chance to be has been painful — and he refuses to accept this continuing.
Nezumi glues his eyes to the window instead of facing him, gripping his own jacket like a lifeline, looking conflicted. “Am I still the only person you’ve killed for?”
“What?” Shion’s eyes shutter twice. The blackness behind his eyelids inures him to its side. He doggedly does not think of that night, the things he had to do. The things he didn’t have to, and still did. “Of course.”
“Then I should’ve stayed gone.”
Shion wants to roll his eyes, and the bed proves its brilliance by trapping Nezumi in its comfort and unaware and the springs in the mattress squeak a little, Shion climbing behind him.
Nezumi stiffens. “You're sleeping here, too?”
“Where else would I sleep?” Shion asks, feigning being perplexed.
"I told Inukashi I'm back."
Shion waits for the elaboration. When it doesn't come, he gets comfortable, facing the small hairs at the base of Nezumi's neck that aren't long enough yet to not escape the hair tie.
Nezumi's shoulders remain straight and unmoving, so Shion instead chooses to focus on the slim pulse and how it's picking up, jumping out on the side of Nezumi's neck. “You have a nice neck,” he says. He didn't mean to speak it.
He doesn’t know how to broach the actual conversation topic.
Trussed up head to toe as he is, Nezumi turns around on the bed, nearly elbowing him on the nose twice in the process. His laugh turns into a hiss when he puts his weight on the injured leg. Shion chooses to focus on his face instead, not wanting to be confronted with evidence of Nezumi's living away and Nezumi's choices and Nezumi's consequences.
Maybe he expects to see judgement on that face; Nezumi is just mirthful. "How charming. Do you say that to all the boys?" He leans closer. "Is that how Safu fell for you?"
“No, just you,” Shion answers, honestly.
If one is to judge by Nezumi’s expression, these would be the worst words ever spoken.
“Why do I have to suffer your sense of humour?”
“I’m not being funny. I missed all the rats. And that includes you,” he says, aiming for joking and landing on earnest. There’s no verbal evidence Nezumi feels the same way. “Will you stay after this?”
Like he always does when uncomfortable, Nezumi chooses to laugh. He tries to make it sound sinister and incredulous, Shion knows. He tries to make it hurtful.
Shion waits.
“Yes,” Nezumi chokes out finally. “I’ll try. There might not be more forest people but I’ve found other believers in Elurias, I want to bring them here—”
Shion kisses him. Was that so hard?
The answer is yes.
It’s messy, a little bit. Not like Shion has much experience to boast about when it comes to this. But it should be enough to feel the rough cotton of the sheets against his cheek where he’s lying and against his hand where he’s gripping and the gentle lips that graze his own, that follow his gasp.
He pushes backwards. “Stay.” This time it’s an honest plea.
“I wasn’t lying earlier, Shion.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
Nezumi looks at his eyes, his hands, takes in the rest of the room, minimalist though it is. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll do better than try. You’ll have me helping around here for three months before I go searching again.”
“But you’ll go, again?”
“I have to.”
He does. Can Shion work with this? It’s not even really a question – can the moon rise each night? By virtue of his character Nezumi will continue travelling and searching, and by virtue of his character Shion will continue improving what’s here, to recreate the fickle luck of the previously well-off for everyone.
“You’ll come back?”
“Won’t you be bored of me by then?” Nezumi jokes. Shion is not in the mood for jokes. “Yes.”
A rat hidden in some corner chirps. He’ll take that as proof, then.