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Tsukasa read the same line over again for what felt like the hundredth time.
He always emphasized good posture on himself, but currently he was slouched over his desk, his hand supporting his head to keep it from knocking down against the wood. Exhaustion weighed him down, but he refused to admit it and give up reading. This wasn’t the sort of thing you slept off to feel refreshed in the morning.
He let out an annoyed sigh and blinked his eyes a few times, trying to get the words in his book to look like anything but random squiggles on a page.
The book’s content was right up his alley — a scientist’s latest research into the anatomy of the kaiju and an argument against the current classification system, finding it too limiting for such an ever-changing species. He tried discussing scholarly kaiju topics before with the other pilots, assuming that they’d have intellectual curiosity in the monsters they were fighting, but no one else had the mind to engage in it.
The other Jaeger pilots were more interested in talking about the latest kaiju they fought and how they had bested them in a fight. Tsukasa was self-aware enough to know of his own bragging tendencies — when you were one of the top piloting duos, you were allowed to bring it up as needed — but he did at least also have a brain he liked to use to think about things.
Well, no one else bothered with kaiju research except his co-pilot, but Tsukasa was under the impression he was only being indulged in those discussions so they would remain on good terms.
He forced his attention back to the page. His thoughts had drifted again, and there was just no focus to be found. The longer he stared at the words, the less he understood them.
Another sigh left his lips, and he tugged at his hair to try to relieve some of the incessant throbbing of his head. He could read better if it didn’t feel like his skull was cracking open.
“Y’know, if it was me hunched over my desk sighing every minute, you’d have forced me into bed by now.”
Tsukasa closed his eyes, not bothering to bite his tongue on a refute since it felt like a dead weight in his mouth anyways. This was quickly becoming one of his worst overloads yet. He wasn’t sure whether he’d end up losing all his strength and keel over at his desk or puke all over the floor with how astoundingly terrible he felt.
Of course, Hinata was the type of person who saw purposeful silence as a thing to fill with words.
“I’m gonna spare you the ‘I told you so’ speech for now, alright?” Hinata continued, and Tsukasa heard shuffling that took him a moment to process as Hinata getting off his bed on the other side of the room. “But, c’mon, you should just get to bed now, Tsukasa-kun. You need to sleep, and even if you can’t fall asleep then you need to close your eyes. The best thing to do is to just treat it like a normal migraine.”
“I won’t fall asleep. That’s why I’m reading,” Tsukasa muttered, forcing his eyes back open. This time for sure he’ll make it through reading this sentence. And if he’s feeling ambitious, maybe the one after that too.
“Tsukasa-kun.” Hinata’s voice was right behind him.
Tsukasa ignored it.
“Last chance or I’m picking you up and carrying you.”
Tsukasa grimaced, his head throbbing with the sudden tension pulled on his face, but he managed to speak through it. “Don’t, Hinata-kun. I’ll seriously puke this time.”
He must have sounded as awful as he felt, because instead of pushing it like he usually did, Hinata let out a soft hum then spoke in a quieter tone.
“Okay, we’ll stay here until you’re ready to move.”
They were developing a sort of routine around Tsukasa’s overloads, growing from the series of one-offs it had been in the past. He wasn’t a touchy person, not like Hinata was, so while he expected it, the sudden fingers combing through his hair was still jarring. Alien. Unknown.
But Tsukasa’s eyes slipped close before he realized it, his brain deciding whatever processing power spent on vision wasn’t as important as focusing on this.
Hinata worked in stages. First was the combing, his fingers untangling any knots with delicate care until all of Tsukasa’s hair could be run through without hitting a single snag. Brushing through the knots never hurt, and even if it was soothing in its own way, it wasn’t where Hinata managed to work the pain out of him.
By all accounts, the only recovery for an overload was to give the brain time to sort itself out, and if you were able to fall asleep through the pain then you were lucky. Doctors had tried knocking pilots out before, but they quickly realized that under any sort of medical sedation, the overload took longer to recover from. Some pilots opted to go that route, but Tsukasa resolved to deal with it. Going under sedation seemed like a terrible idea with their on-call profession.
Of course, having the pilots’ brains slowly bleed to death was an equally unfavorable outcome.
The doctors had noted that Tsukasa suffered less mental strain than average compared to other pilots, both in severity and abundance, but it only made his stomach sink thinking about how it could be worse than this. He was lucky he had the choice to forgo sedation and push through on his own.
When Hinata took a moment to smooth down Tsukasa’s hair, he knew with that last step that everything had been untangled. Tsukasa’s head hurt too much to put enough thought or power into looking forward to something, but he leaned against Hinata’s hands, like he needed to prove he wanted him to keep going.
“Still feeling nauseous?” Hinata asked softly. “If you think you can manage it, then it would be a good idea to get you laying down since you do tend to doze off at this part.”
“Don’t treat me like a child,” Tsukasa mumbled, but slowly, so slowly, stood up on his own. The room spun — he couldn’t be sure if that thing on his desk was even a book anymore — but he only had double vision instead of triple, so he accepted that as assurance he could indeed walk five steps without losing his stomach or collapsing against Hinata.
Hinata held his arm as he guided Tsukasa to his bed, staying right by his side as they moved at a snail’s pace. When they got to the bed, Tsukasa took a deep breath as he willed his legs to move and climb into it, but they felt muddied and stuck to the floor. Like not only his mind was melting, but his body was turning into mush too.
In the next moment, he was laying down. He blinked a few times, before his eyes could focus on Hinata standing beside him, tucking him under the blankets.
“I said don’t treat me like—”
“I’m treating you like my partner, Tsukasa-kun,” Hinata said, his lips curving into a small smile. “Close your eyes, I’m going to go turn off the light.”
Despite his stubbornness, Tsukasa’s heavy lids closed, unable to fight against keeping them open. He heard the flip switch from across the room, and the room grew dim. It was never pitch black, being a military facility they always had to have a safety light on. Usually the glow of that wasn’t perceivable with your eyes closed, but the hypersensitivity of his headache made that little light a nuisance.
Or rather, the absence of Hinata was already diminishing what little help he had already done, but Tsukasa didn’t want to think his pain tolerance was that bad.
What felt like a mix between a few seconds, a minute, or maybe a couple of hours in Tsukasa’s addled brain passed before Hinata got into bed next to him. He moved carefully next to Tsukasa as he shifted into a comfortable position, pulling the blanket up over himself too.
Tsukasa was beyond the point of protesting at sharing the bed, and not from his exhausted state. He refused to think about if his growing need to have Hinata next to him was because he didn’t want to be alone, or if he needed Hinata specifically. And he wouldn’t dare bring it up either, never sure of Hinata’s honest intentions behind anything, even if just the other day he had quipped they might as well shove their beds together for more room.
It was quiet before, but a true silence fell between them as Hinata’s hands combed through his hair again, running through his bangs and pushing them up from his forehead. Tsukasa was convinced that Hinata must have studied how to do this. No one could so perfectly know the right pressure to use to relieve tension, and the ideal pace for each run through of his hand.
And he knew the right moment to move away from his bangs, letting them remain back and keeping his forehead exposed to the cool air. Hinata massaged his scalp, his fingers somehow just knowing exactly where to go to relieve the most tension.
Tsukasa’s head was too muddled to do more than remember to breathe. Where he had felt like his brain had liquified, Hinata was able to sculpt it back up into a working thing again. Other pilots were sedated and given days to recover from overloads, but Tsukasa would likely wake up with nothing more than a dull ache.
He had thought about it over and over, what special power Hinata must have, and before he could stop it the question slid from his lips.
“How do you…?”
“Hm?” Hinata hummed, his voice right next to Tsukasa, so close together he could almost feel the accompanying vibrations as he spoke. “Oh, you mean how do I get you all fixed up? That’s a question I’m surprised you haven’t asked sooner, but you must have really been trying to think about it. So, you really wanna know?”
Tsukasa gave a small nod, barely a shift of his head.
“Well, alright then. Truth be told, I don’t actually know.” Hinata laughed softly. “I’m not magic or anything, and I don’t secretly study acupuncture on the weekends. I just… started doing it, y’know? I have some theories. It’s probably just oxytocin or something, but it makes you think if the doctors aren’t smart enough to try to shove a cat on everyone’s laps after they get out of the Jaegers.”
“Except you,” Tsukasa grumbled.
“That’s not being fair, I get a headache sometimes . Maybe it’s because I understand my limits, huh? Or maybe all my lack of overloading just means in like a year or something my head will explode. It’ll be a whole thing. Everyone will be shocked, then assume it’s a prank, then after a few minutes they’ll panic that I hadn’t barged in yet with confetti. You’ll even cry. At the initial boom and the realization.”
Tsukasa was jealous of Hinata’s presumably stronger mental capability while piloting — the other man never so much as got a cold, let alone suffered the side effects of Jaeger piloting.
But the potential for long-term effects hadn’t crossed his mind.
His weakened state left him a looping image of one day waking up a month from now and speaking to Hinata, only for him to suddenly collapse. For his central nervous system to have short circuited permanently, for blood to seep from his orifices, for him to never move again. For him to be gone, gone, gone, gone—
In the next moment, Hinata’s fingers dug gently into where his jaw connected, right by the ear.
“No need to frown, okay?” His voice dropped quieter, yet felt closer than it had been.
Tsukasa’s fingers twitched with the need to reach out, but ultimately too exhausted to move. It didn’t stop the nausea from starting to swirl again, an anxiety growing in his stomach with the need to get out. “Hinata. Please.”
“I’m fine, I promise, Tsukasa. Perfectly healthy, don’t worry about it. Hold on.” Hinata’s hands left his face, moving to do something Tsukasa couldn’t see and he fought to keep his breath steady. A moment later, one hand returned to the top of his head, already running through his hair again and smoothing down his worries. “I grabbed your book when I went to turn off the light, so I’ll read it to you. Let’s start at the beginning of this chapter, I’m sure you don’t remember any of what you read anyways.”
Tsukasa didn’t care what Hinata decided to do, so long as he stayed there. He wasn’t given the choice to respond further though, as Hinata began reading once he flipped to the beginning of the chapter Tsukasa bookmarked earlier.
“Okay, let’s see… ‘On the topic of kaiju radiation and how it relates to the current classification scale.
“‘It is established in texts previous to this one the adaptability and exceedingly impressive intelligence demonstrated by kaiju of higher Serizawa classifications’— I’m just gonna skip reading over those silly numbers attached to the end of this. You don’t need to worry about footnotes right now. ‘However, this chapter aims to use a case study of Gnat-bug to prove the significance of radiation at time of breach.’”
Hinata continued reading, the words flowing from him with more grace that Tsukasa expected considering the subject matter. He still slogged through retaining any of the information, the content of what was being read, but he kept careful track of Hinata’s voice.
Its lilts and pauses. The gradual tone change from precise diction to Hinata’s typical way of speaking, warm and vibrantly expressive. He kept his voice quiet while he mindlessly combed through Tsukasa’s hair, and he spoke like he was reciting a fairytale. Like kaiju weren’t real, and that scientific words spilling from his lips weren’t out of place for a child’s story, but simply things of magic.
Tsukasa’s body grew heavier — different from the exhaustion from earlier. No longer running on fumes, but allowing himself to ease away from consciousness. Comfortable, warm, and lulled to sleep with his last thoughts circling around Hinata.