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Ayato does not feel very much like a clan patriarch when he flops limply onto his futon.
Granted, he also did not feel very much like a clan patriarch when he drenched his blade in blood earlier, but facing down three people seeking to take advantage of the custody laws surrounding his and his sisters’ very precarious situation at least seemed in line with fulfilling his familial duties. The way he’s slumped onto his clean bedding without even having taken off his clothes, smeared with watered-down gore—that’s just pathetic.
His blade clatters to the side. He needs to clean it soon, before the blood damages the metalwork. Letting it drop like that is disrespectful as it is. He’s going to have to scrub the blood off the tatami before Thoma comes to wake him in the morning, too. And launder his clothes—but who is he kidding? He doesn’t know how to do that. Better to get rid of them entirely. Hide the evidence and stare down his housekeeper with enough placid derision that Thoma won’t question it twice, if he even attempts to do so a first time.
Their enemies are taken care of, at least. What he’s done tonight turned out to be surprisingly taxing work, for how simple the act turned out in the end. It has left him absolutely breathless.
He is really going to need to stop letting his training fall to the wayside of his newfound duties, Ayato thinks as he bends over his knees and braces his hands on his thighs. He can’t seem to catch his breath at all—
And now that he’s thought that, it won’t leave him. He tries to take a breath, but his lungs stutter, and then he’s gasping it all out in a panic—the next attempt doesn’t go much better, leaving him wheezing as he slowly curls forward and presses his face into a pillow.
Dying. He’s dying. One of the people he’d fought, they must have had a poison—he hadn’t been cut, but something aerosolized, perhaps. There’s a pressure in his chest, and he’s seen it happen before, a man clutching a fist over his breast and crying of a pain in his chest and shoulder, damage that destroys the heart until a person dies—
He can’t breathe.
His death would be a waste, at this stage. A fresh corpse for the carrion crows that have been circling the Kamisato Estate for the past months, except there are no crows left, so it will just be his own rotting meat sinking into the ground for the worms.
(Perhaps he deserves it, after tonight. He did it for Ayaka. She’s too young to understand, but he imagines that if he did, she would not forgive him. He likes to imagine that. It would mean that she was still untainted by the battlefield their life has become.)
The door to his chamber slides open. Perhaps there are carrion-eaters left still.
“Ah—my lord?”
Ayato freezes, as good as a flinch. His faltering breath stutters, and then ceases altogether.
“My lord!”
The chief retainer (read: the only retainer, at least while Ayato sorts through the loyalties of the remaining house staff) of the Kamisato Estate shuts the door behind him with shockingly considerate quiet and then scrambles to Ayato’s side, thumping into a half-crouch on one knee.
“My lord, what happened? Where are your wounds?”
Ayato tries to cough out a laugh, and produces something that, generously, could be called a wheeze. His hand shakes as he pushes himself to sit back on his heels, but calms after a moment.
“Worry about yourself,” he rasps. “Finding the master of your household like this, aren’t you concerned for what will happen to you?”
Thoma pauses in his fluttering. “... Should I be?”
“That depends, I suppose,” Ayato says with a calmness he doesn’t feel. “What are you going to do?”
With this information, he means, with the knowledge of blood on the floor and blood on Ayato’s blade and an incomparable access to Ayato’s daily itinerary that means Thoma knows exactly when and where Ayato has been on any given day down to the minute.
“I’m still trying to figure out where you’re hurt!” Thoma cries out.
The sound grates on Ayato’s ears, and the disingenuity even more so. Suddenly, he cannot do this. He has confronted three traitors tonight, and he cannot confront a fourth—not physically, with himself so drained and Thoma’s pyro vision a sparkling crimson at his waist, and not—not in his spirit. Thoma has not been in the household as long as some of the retainers that Ayato has dismissed in the past month, but he is the first servant that Ayato chose to employ, that Ayato vetted and considered and perhaps even—not befriended, but allowed a certain amount of trust to.
Thoma has been kept at arm’s length, of course. There is no sense in testing the strength of tenuous bonds such as loyalty against the power that information and money could grant someone in Thoma’s position, if he were to offer them to other interested parties. Ayato has not intended to allow Thoma this temptation in the first place.
And yet, as with many things as of late, it has happened regardless of Ayato’s wishes—and he cannot deal with it right now.
“Leave,” he gasps into his palm, squeezing his eyes shut. For the last few moments that he has it, he will wring out whatever obedience and obeisance Thoma offers. “I can’t do this right now, Thoma, get out.”
A hand alights on his arm, so warm it very nearly burns—the effect of hot blood in a pyro user’s body. A shame that all Ayato has in his veins is apathy and ice. Prior to this moment, Ayato hadn’t realized the sheer extent of the cold that is prickling through his veins.
His gaze drags over to Thoma’s, and he watches Thoma’s throat bob as he swallows.
“Begging your pardon, my lord,” Thoma whispers, “but I can’t leave you like this.”
“I am hardly stopping you,” Ayato says, his voice practically a hiss.
Thoma’s fingers twitch against Ayato’s arm, and he pitches out of his frantic crouch to settle more firmly on his knees beside Ayato.
“Begging your pardon,” Thoma repeats, voice steadier this time, “my lord… but if you were the arbiter of my moral choices, then I’m afraid you’d have perished a few weeks ago already, probably from malnutrition.”
Then he tugs on Ayato’s bloodied sleeve, aiming to—well, remove the cloth, presumably, except Ayato doesn’t understand why. He flinches away, staring at Thoma, and realizes he’s—
Scared.
Ayato laughs into his palms, pressing his frigid fingers into his own eyes. The chill doesn’t help the burning tightness, but at least he doesn’t have to look at Thoma like this.
Archons. Thoma. The man hasn’t disobeyed Ayato a day in his life, and now he chooses to grow a spine? Then again, it’s been a long time since his obedience came with any sort of overt metaphorical genuflection. Perhaps he’s been biding his time, waiting for an opportunity—
A warm touch tugs Ayato’s wrist away from his face, and a soft, wet cloth wraps around his fingers.
Ayato stares at Thoma from between his fingers.
Thoma himself is looking down, a small furrow of concentration between his brows as he rubs, gentle but thorough, at the sticky blood caked into the creases of Ayato’s joints. It comes away a brighter red than it dried, diluted by the water—there’s a bowl of it, steaming and warm, that Thoma must have grabbed from across the room and heated with his vision. Has Ayato been so wrapped up in himself that he didn’t even notice Thoma stand up? Archons, he should be dead right now. Would be, if it was anyone else in the room with him.
Thoma finishes cleaning Ayato’s sword hand, running a fluffy white cloth over it to get rid of the last of the dampness. Ayato’s fingers curl in, involuntarily defensive, and Thoma lets his own get snagged between them.
“My lord,” Thoma says, peering up at Ayato’s eyes. Ayato isn’t sure what he looks like right now: wide-eyed, surely. Probably shell-shocked. It’s funny that he could keep such a straight face when killing three people, and the smallest bit of kindness after the fact is what cracks him open. It’s hilarious. “Are you bleeding from anywhere?”
A loaded question. He is not bleeding, but to reveal this fact is to acknowledge that none of the blood present is his own, that he fought and killed tonight.
Ayato shakes his head. Thoma’s responding smile is slow and steady, and his fingers squeeze Ayato’s.
“That’s good, my lord,” Thoma says. “I’m glad to hear it. I… heard you coming in at this late hour, earlier, so I drew you a bath. That’s why I came in, to ask if you wanted to take it. I’m the only one who can get it hot so quick at this hour. Shall we go get you cleaned up?”
“Why?” Ayato asks.
“I think you would be more comfortable in clean clothes, my lord,” Thoma says quietly. “That’s all.”
Ayato’s hand twitches violently, almost spasming around Thoma’s—he lets go, drawing it back to his chest, but not pressing it close enough to dirty it with blood once more. It’s the only part of him that feels human right now, he thinks.
He doesn’t say anything, but neither does he resist when Thoma draws him to his feet and leads him to the bathing chamber.
It takes Thoma a half-minute of swirling his hand through the water, sleeve pulled up and on his knees beside the tub, for steam to start rising from the water. It must have been half-warmed already, and Ayato spends the time picking at the ties of his robes with numb fingers. He’s very cold—his hands shake, and his fingers are clumsy.
He’s not usually the sort of young master who can’t manage his clothes without the help of a house servant. Nonetheless, Thoma does not wait for him to say anything before stepping up to Ayato and unwinding the requisite knots himself.
The room is slowly growing warmer, but when Ayato lets his clothes slide to the floor—ungrateful, probably, given Thoma is the one who will have to pick them up to launder, if they’re even salvageable—he shivers harder. With his clothes off, there is not nearly as much blood on him as initially appeared—there wasn’t enough to soak through his layers, so it is only his hands and face that are stained.
He feels as though he’s been coated in filth from head to toe.
When Thoma finishes gathering the bloody, dirty clothes and turns to look at Ayato, something stiff in his expression…
Ayato feels his mouth twitch, and he very pointedly does not hunch his shoulders. Growing up as he did, he’s long past the self-consciousness of nakedness in front of a servant. The pinprick-splatter of arterial spray across his cheek, however…
He climbs into the tub and dunks his head under the water.
When he comes up, Thoma’s face has relaxed. He hefts the folded pile of clothes in his arms. “I’ll let you bathe in peace, my lord. I’ll just go take care of these and then come back to help you finish up, alright?”
“Take care of them?” Ayato finds himself asking, tone cold and yet on the inside mostly just surprised when his tongue actually obeys his desire for it to move. “You fancy yourself terribly proficient at handling bloodstains, then, even at your age?”
Thoma smiles politely. “I’m hardly a year younger than you, my lord.”
Ayato goes still in the water, the gelid fingers of anxiety trickling down his spine despite the steam. “My age,” he says quietly, staring down at the place where faint ribbons of dried blood are starting to flake off his unclean hand. “That’s hardly ever been relevant, has it?”
Thoma shuffles quietly for a moment, and takes a short breath. It escapes him shakily, a sure sign that Ayato is not the only one scarcely keeping it together. The knowledge somehow doesn’t feel like as much of a victory as it should.
“Anyway, um!” Thoma says, and they both jump at the awkward loudness of his tone. “I wash clothes for the whole household, y’know? That includes a lot of women! It’s just part of the deal, sometimes. I’m really used to it, I know a lot of tricks for getting blood out of clothes. Though, um, ladies usually know not to get it on anything white…”
The last part comes out in a mumble as Thoma stumbles out of the door, fumbling it closed behind him with a last call over his shoulder. “I’ll be back soon, my lord!”
Ayato does not know how long he truly takes to return—only that, by the time he does, the water has gone cold, Ayato’s hair has started to dry, and Ayato has not quite yet figured out the mechanics of how to force his body to move again.
“Oh,” Thoma ends up saying, biting his lip as he stands over the tub with an armful of clean sleeping clothes and—Archons, he’s holding Ayato’s vision. Ayato hadn’t even noticed. Ayato stares up at him dully, letting his head tip to the side. “Ah… sorry for leaving you without help for so long, my lord. Please pardon me as I warm the water back up…”
That, somehow, more than anything, finally cracks the realization open in Ayato’s chest. Thoma is—he’s simply—
Ayato trusts him. Ayato trusts him, and Thoma does not deserve the consequences of that.
“You should leave while you can,” Ayato mumbles, resting his chin onto the edge of the tub. Thoma’s hand dips into the water, swirling it gently as he works the energy of pyro into it. Ayato only realizes that he’s been shivering again when the heat coaxes his muscles into stopping. “Tonight was just the beginning. Everything is only going to get worse. I can give you as much money as you want if you don’t sell out…”
He trails off, throat too thick to push the rest of his words past.
“But then who would keep your bath warm?” Thoma asks.
It’s a cheeky question. Ayato drags his face even lower, hiding his expression behind his knees as he grits his teeth and lets his face be washed clean by salt and heat.
When Thoma wrings a clean rag out into the water of the bath, the touch of cloth to Ayato’s back is warm.