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Daichi counts the days in red circles on his calendar.
They’re a reminder to himself, if nothing else, that time is passing, even though as far as Daichi can tell the sky outside the windows never changes and the hours swallow each other. That a world exists outside of this slate-grey, curling fog Daichi moves through, hands outstretched and searching. That somehow he’ll find his way out of this long dream and back to it.
In the top bunk, the sheets are turned down and tucked into the mattress, the pillows fluffed—everything just as Suga left it on the day of the sortie.
Things Daichi knows, after the battle—
As it stands, he got lucky. Suga’s friend Azumane and Head Physician Takeda speaking over his shoulder in low voices, soft and strained. Without the drivesuit to take the impact the fall would probably have crushed him.
Suga’s prognosis: Good. Not so good. Truthfully, it’s hard to say—his lungs have been cleared of water, his pulse and body temperature are low but climbing. The real cause for concern is that his consciousness seems to be wandering, trapped in the Drift after the sudden, traumatic severance of the neural bridge. When Suga’s condition stabilizes and his brain activity begins to resume, he’ll probably be able to breathe without a ventilator, but no further predictions can be made until consciousness returns.
That could be tomorrow. It could be weeks.
Daichi knows it’s not Suga there, in this bed. Suga isn’t in that broken body with its arms pierced through with needles, an oxygen mask strapped tight over the mouth to move the air in and out of the lungs. Suga is nowhere in the ICU; Daichi swallows hard and imagines he can taste his laughter echoing like bells through the Shatterdome, feel the shape of Suga’s smile press ghostly against his own lips.
He pictures the light that comes into every room he’s ever seen Suga enter, golden and alive and more beautiful than the dawn, and when he opens his eyes to the cold fluorescence of the white bulbs built into the ceiling of the medical bay it’s all he can do not to push his face against the bedsheets and scream Come back come back come back come back—
The night they move out of the trainees’ barracks and into their official Rangers’ quarters, Daichi finds Suga already sprawled in the top bunk. His head is cradled in the crook of one arm, and one leg dangles over the edge, swinging back and forth almost lazily.
“Hey,” he says. When he glances up he’s wearing such a silly expression Daichi has to look away. “Welcome to our crib.”
It sounds like coming home, and Daichi’s heart stutters. His hand comes up to rub at the back of his neck. “I see you’ve made yourself comfortable.”
“You bet.” Suga’s still grinning as he flips and stretches, eyes shut, his back arching catlike against the pillows. “You don’t mind being on the bottom, do you? We can switch if you want.”
That most definitely is the sound of Daichi’s bloodstream surging up into his head.
“Daichi?”
It should be common sense, but it’s a maddeningly slow three seconds before he realizes that Suga means the bottom bunk.
On the morning of the fourth day, Daichi pulls open the door, and Kenma startles up out of his chair like he’s been struck. He doesn’t relax when their eyes meet and the recognition registers. Instead, his face armors up, and he ducks his head down as he turns back toward the bed, hair sliding over his shoulders to shield it.
They stand there a minute, two minutes—two statues, frozen.
“I called it wrong.” Daichi can’t tell if the words are meant for him or for Suga. Maybe Kenma’s simply speaking them aloud for emphasis, to hear himself say them. “It’s all my fault.”
It’s not, Daichi wants to tell him. He knows it’s what he should say—they’re a team, after all—but his gaze strays over Kenma’s head to where Suga lies, so still and so pale, and the statement catches at the back of his throat.
Kenma doesn’t seem to be waiting for an answer. He stretches out his hand; his knuckles brush against the slope of Suga’s cheekbone, down his smile line, the touch slow and sad and too tender for this world.
“Come back soon,” he murmurs, so quiet it nearly disappears beneath the metallic blip of the heart monitor. “As soon as you can, okay?”
He’s gone before Daichi even realizes he’s left the room. There’s only the faintest stirring in the air as he passes, the door sliding shut soundlessly behind him.
Things Daichi sees, when they make it home—
Suga broken, laid out flat on the floor of the hangar. Suga’s arms and legs slack, blood across his forehead and caked dark down the side of his face.
Azumane on his knees, bent over Suga, big hands braced against his chest, throwing his weight into the downward push.
(It should be impossible for Daichi to see these things from where he sits, slumped on the floor of the wrecked Conn-Pod. It should be impossible to hear these things from so high up. Later the doctors will undoubtedly tell him he imagined it.)
Thirty chest compressions. Two rescue breaths. Thirty chest compressions while waiting for the rest of the medical team to arrive.
“No, no, please, Suga, no.” Two rescue breaths. Azumane’s face is wet. Thirty chest compressions. “Don’t do this, Suga, don’t do this, no, no, Suga, please.”
(Daichi’s a Ranger. A good Ranger never leaves his co-pilot—)
Bootfalls heavy above him and the world shakes, tilts off balance. Kuroo, dropping down the ladder and into what remains of the compartment. Kuroo’s arms locked around him, crushing Daichi to his chest. It feels like drowning. The bite of the armor against his cheek is red and cold.
“Don’t look.” Kuroo speaking, a thousand razor blades against his ear. “Fucking—Daichi, don’t look.”
(And already this is too far. Already Suga is so far away Daichi can barely feel him. They’re supposed to be one. They’re supposed to—)
When lead engineer Shimizu leads them into the hangar to meet Brave Aurora for the first time, there’s no need to ask which one she is. They know which one she is, the tall, sleek machine standing straight as a princess on the far side of the room, all looping silver decals and rich indigo blue. She’s slender for a fighting mech, and looks light on her feet—but what she lacks in the heavy armor and artillery department she more than makes up for with a cut response time and maneuverability that’s second to none, or so they’ve been told.
Their eyes fall on her and the connection is instantaneous, as synergetic as though it comes from within the Drift itself: That’s our girl. Daichi feels it in his bones, and there’s a corresponding shift in the way he breathes as he gazes up at her in wonder.
“Aurora.” Suga’s beaming, shading his eyes with one hand, nearly rising up on tiptoe to try and see all the way up the crown of her head. “That means ‘dawn,’ you know.”
Dawn. And something hot and sun-bright is coming up too in the hollow of Daichi’s chest, some feeling he can’t conceive a name for, even as it spreads though him all the way down to the tips of his fingers.
“I love her already,” he says.
Bokuto doesn’t talk to him as often as he talks to Kuroo or Akaashi or any of the other city boys, but on days that Daichi blips on his radar—
“Sorry about your girl, Sawamura.” For someone who tends to barrel through life with all the subtlety of a hurricane, Bokuto’s a surprisingly quiet walker. Daichi doesn’t even notice his approach until the catwalk beneath his feet sways with the added weight. “But you just leave her to Kiyoko-san and her boys and they’ll make her up good as new, you’ll see.”
On the ground below them the woman in question directs her phalanx of mechanics as decisively as a general sending troops into battle, clipboard in hand, glasses pushed up to balance on the crown of her head. Daichi wonders if looking at Aurora hurts for her as much as it does for him—the shining metal crumpled and lacerated all up her left side, the arm half-twisted where it joins the shoulder, the Conn-Pod torn in two. He looks and feels his chest constrict.
This is the seventh day now. Daichi wonders how many days away “good as new” is. He considers apologizing—Bokuto and Akaashi must be pulling double duty now that Aurora’s gone, her pilots suspended and only half-alive.
“I know,” is all he says, in the end. “I know they will.”
Bokuto’s mouth opens, then closes again, opens, closes. He looks like he wants to say something more. Instead he stops, worrying his lower lip between his teeth, scowling down at the docking bay as if to say he doesn’t believe in words.
“Sawamura!” His head comes up again with surprising force, and Daichi nearly takes a step back. “We’ll ride together one day! Let’s show those kaiju what for!”
Transmission from Mission Control to Scarlet Lancer, crackling to life over the comm: “Are you positive he’s still alive?”
“Well, no.” Kuroo, bland and drawling, but in spite of the words Daichi knows he’s wound tight, muscles tensed, ready to spring. “But with all due respect, Marshal, I’ve got Sawamura about ready to take a tumble into the Pacific, so are you going to let us fish for Sugawara, or do you want two drowned pilots?”
“Heaven above, Kuroo.” The alarms are singing behind Nekomata, mechanical chorus of voices trying to articulate that there are other kinds of danger. “If you meet any more trouble out there, after that tangle with Bakunawa—”
“I’ll take responsibility.” A low smooth exhalation as Kuroo breathes out into the comm. “We’re not going back without him.”
Everything he says is so clear-cut. So sure. There’s no confusion. It’s only belatedly that Daichi realizes Kenma hasn’t said a word.
“I’ve got a read on Sugawara, Scarlet.” First Officer Ukai, now, curt and clipped. “Debris surfacing at nine o’ clock. We’re sending the birds to you.”
“Roger that.” Scarlet bending at the waist like a dancer, one massive hand reaching down, probing in the water. Kuroo, muttering under his breath, “C’mon, Suga. C’mon, sweet thing. Let’s go home.”
“What’re you up to?”
“Just working on a couple of letters.” Suga doesn’t turn around, but there’s a warmth in his voice. The old t-shirt he’s wearing has ridden up high enough to show the slight arch of his waist going down into his shorts; Daichi twitches at the fabric with one hand as he crosses the room to lean against the bedpost, almost protective. “Have to catch the mail truck first thing tomorrow morning.”
Suga’s always writing home, Daichi’s noticed. He probably sends out and receives more letters than anyone else on the base. “You got a lot of girls waiting for you over there?”
“Oh, tons.” Suga rolls onto his side. He cocks his head, mouth stretched in the widest imaginable ear-to-ear grin, and the yellow light of their room skims over his collarbones. “There’s my mom, and my big sister, and my little sister—hey! Daichi! Hey!”
Daichi swipes the pillow out from under Suga’s head and presses it against his face, pushing him gently down against the mattress. He hopes that in a minute they’ll both be laughing too hard to pay much attention to the flush that’s blooming like a signal fire now across his cheeks.
On the twelfth day, Kuroo enters their room without knocking, and drops a paper bag of steamed meat buns in Daichi’s lap.
“It took a lot of sweet-talking to get you those,” he says, without preamble. “So eat up.”
Kuroo’s mouth is curved sideward in that signature knife-edge smirk, but his face is so worn the expression looks almost ghastly—the skin sallow, the eyes blank and sunken in. Daichi doesn’t want to know what Kuroo sees when he looks down at him and clicks his tongue, the sound a whipcrack in the empty room.
(Daichi realizes he hasn’t seen Kenma since their encounter in the hospital ward. He hasn’t bothered to find out who they’ve been running drills with, either, now that Aurora’s out of commission—though he knows he should.)
“Eat,” Kuroo insists. “Do it for him.”
And because he isn’t going to take no for an answer, he stands there, watching as Daichi reaches into the bag and fishes out the first bun, biting into it gingerly as though it might burn him. Kuroo’s gaze is sharp and appraising, almost critical. He doesn’t leave until the bag is empty.
Daichi knows when Suga hits the water.
He is untouched, but suddenly he feels his entire body awash with a cold liquid terror, and his eyes and mouth sting with salt and he cannot breathe—
And Suga is plunging down, down into the depths where nothing can follow him, while above the surface in the land of the living Bakunawa writhes and twists in the coils of the whip. Somehow the rage is enough to move him—he shouldn’t even be able to think, but bright red spots bloom at the edges of his vision and Daichi moves, every muscle screeching with the effort to reel the whip backward and slam Brave Aurora’s knee into the join between the armor plates, bending back Bakunawa’s spine.
Under the sound of splintering bone and the keening wail of the kaiju, the comm crackles as Scarlet Lancer comes awake again:
“Get clear, Aurora. We’ve got you.”
As one Kuroo and Kenma hurtle forward, plasma cannons locked on to the belly, homing in on the vulnerable flesh beneath. Daichi releases the whip, throws all his strength into pitching Brave Aurora sideward out of the line of fire as the volley comes—two, three, four shots blowing the serpentine body apart. He is untouched, but still he cannot breathe, every nerve in his body alight and burning.
“You’re so focused when you’re out there,” Suga tells him as the techs strip them down in the Drivesuit Room after their first solo kill. His eyes are soft, wistful. Daichi doesn’t think he’s ever seen those eyes on a soldier before, and he’s pretty sure he never will again.
“You mean we are,” Daichi points out, cocking an eyebrow at Suga’s back. “You’re in my head when we’re out there, after all.”
“Maybe, but you make the calls. And while Kenma might have a supercomputer in that little head of his, no one’s quicker on the uptake than you.”
At this Daichi ducks his head down, fiddling with the join on a gauntlet, and doesn’t answer.
“You could even be Marshal one day.”
“I don’t think Old Man Nekomata will croak until the war is over.” Daichi chuckles, forces down the feathery sensation curling suddenly in the pit of his stomach. “Besides, I couldn’t.”
“You could, too,” Suga insists. “You can do anything.”
By the fifteenth day Daichi’s certain he can find everything he needs in this life projected on the monitors next to Suga’s bed. Suga’s vital signs, the doctors tell him, are growing stronger by the day. He’s fighting, they tell him. He could wake up any day now.
Of course he’s fighting, Daichi thinks. When the doctors leave he closes his eyes and reaches for Suga, pressing his lips to the back of one slim hand. He’s the best man I know.
There isn’t time to say anything when the kaiju twists around to face them just as the whip hits home and coils, no time even to shout for assistance as the horn saws like a knife through the Conn-Pod and Brave Aurora pitches dangerously to one side, nearly going down on one knee in the surf.
Then the left half comes free, scattering in the air in a shower of wire and glass and twisted metal.
Daichi can see the sky through the hole that’s been carved out next to him, can see the waves frothing all around them and the red and yellow stars by the shore that mark the Shatterdome. He thinks it could be a trick of the light, the gleaming silver of Suga’s drivesuit in the debris, flung wide by the impact, hurtling down, and this can’t be, it can’t be real, Suga loves the sea, Suga’s at home on the water, Suga—
Suga’s already barefoot and stripped to the waist by the time Daichi finds him, backstroking in the shallows near the shore. When Daichi calls to him he goes under, surfacing again a moment later with his back to the sun, and the rays turns the wet wisps of his hair a pale gold.
“The water’s nice,” he calls. The morning is pale blue and clear, and the breezes lift his words and carry them gently to where Daichi stands, digging the toes of his boots into the sand. “Want to take a dip?”
He sounds so at home, and the water certainly looks nice from here, smooth and turquoise-blue, shimmering all the way to the horizon. It doesn’t look like the same ocean the kaiju rise from, the same water that Daichi’s seen black and angry and roiling during lightning storms. He almost can’t reconcile it. He doesn’t know how it’s even possible—but then again everything Suga touches seems to come away with a brightness about it.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll watch from here. You know, from good old terra firma.” He kicks at the sand at his feet for emphasis, and Suga shakes his head, mock-incredulous, laughing. “Don’t go out too far.”
“I’m from a port town, Daichi. I’ve been swimming since before I could walk.”
“Well, even still.”
Azumane comes in on his own, once in a while, though it’s not clear to Daichi which of them he’s checking on when he does. He’s shy and self-effacing and weirdly soft-hearted for such a big man, but Daichi finds he likes the sight of him more than any of the other white-coated automatons that haunt the medical bay.
“You can keep talking to him,” he tells Daichi. It’s the twentieth day now, and his eyes are on the screen, marking the slow upward spike of the lines that map out Suga’s heartbeat. “It seems to help.”
“Do you think he can hear us?” Daichi asks.
Azumane seems to know he’s not being asked for an executive opinion, and thus answers in his capacity as longtime friend. “He’s always been such a good listener, you know.”
Daichi’s throat closes, because that’s true—he has, he always has.
They don’t realize it right away, but the sound—shrill cacophony of screeching and ripping flesh and claws scraping against metal—is the beast tearing off its own tail. Bakunawa arches its back, twists its body around and the tail comes away in Scarlet Lancer’s grip with a sick crunch and a thick spurt of kaiju blue, jarring her left arm. Kenma cries out in pain and they can hear his voice shot through with panic over the comm, and Scarlet Lancer stalls, the Drift shaken.
“Kenma! Shit, stay with me, Kenma!” Kuroo’s voice swells, cracks. “Aurora, cover!”
Suga’s skin is pale, his hair matted with sweat across his forehead. He wets his lips the smallest bit with his tongue, breathes out, and then he’s smiling again.
“A dance, right?” he says, light and easy, loud enough for the words to skid across the comm to Scarlet Lancer’s Conn-Pod, and all the way home to Mission Control. They’re for Daichi, but they’re for Kenma, too, and Kuroo, and everyone besides. “Come on. I’m with you.”
Brave Aurora’s arm comes up, whip flexed in her hand, and she lets fly.
Things Daichi already knows how to say—
“I’m putting my, uh. My head in your hands.”
A bond of trust between co-pilots is necessary for the Neural Handshake to succeed. His gaze falls across the Conn-Pod to where Suga’s hooked in beside him, and his heart quickens with something more than just battle-hunger.
“How does that line go?” Suga’s voice echoes strangely from inside his helmet, but there’s no mistaking that smile. Daichi thinks sometimes that he’d know it even from deep beneath the sea. “Oh yeah. You jump, I jump, right?”
You jump, I jump.
I’d do anything for you, he wants to say. But that sounds dopey and stupid and like it’d uncover too much of his heart, so instead he says, “Right,” and hopes it means the same thing.
He wonders if he’s being selfish, what with the war on and so much that still needs doing—exercise regimens to be returned to, cadet screenings, test runs on the simulator, anything he could help with barring actually getting back into Brave Aurora with someone else next to him. In spite of all that he might still be contributing to the war effort, however broken he might be, he’s here, haunting Suga’s bedside uselessly from the barest hours of the morning until long into the night.
But for now the truth is that everything begins and ends here, in this tiny, white capsule of a room in Intensive Care. Everything begins and ends with his hands cupped around Suga’s face, their foreheads pressed together as if it’s the proximity that keeps them breathing.
The truth is that, for better or for worse, whether they deserve each other or not, Suga is the one he’s meant to die with. And maybe they’ll die side by side one day before the end of the war, but not today. Today, they’re alive together. That’s enough for now, even if they’re grasping, clinging for dear life to the threads that pull them toward this world.
A good Ranger never leaves his co-pilot. Daichi’s head knows this. His heart knows it, as he thinks back to the twenty-three circles on his calendar and tells himself, One more day. One more day I get to keep him.
You need to wake up, he thinks, and even if they’re not hooked into the hardware there’s a stirring at the fringes of his mind that reminds him of the Drift. He’s reaching for Suga in the colorless not-light of their two minds, casting his net outward and waiting. I can’t do this without you.
Scarlet Lancer takes the lead when they’re finally out on the water, but they aren’t searching long—Bakunawa surges up out of the waves to meet them, looking for all the world like it’s about to swallow the moon. It collides with Scarlet’s chest, claws scraping, her huge hands coming up to dig clawed fingers into its sides. They grapple there, and it appears for a moment like it’s going to manage to pitch her backward under the water until Brave Aurora flanks her, the long chain whip in her hand hooking around a foreleg and wrenching. The kaiju falls back and ducks back under the water with a cry, twisting its tail toward Aurora’s legs. She sidesteps, nearly dancing, and Kuroo lets out an appreciative whistle.
“Huh. Didn’t have you two figured for kinky types.”
“What happened to ‘any good as a snake wrangler?’” Suga snipes back, and his voice is pitched low to mimic Kuroo’s languid drawl. Daichi almost laughs, but the head is rearing up again, and he punches out, swinging for an eye. “We need you back on the offensive, Scarlet.”
“Got you.” Moonlight on Scarlet Lancer’s claws, blood-red and glistening. “But what a beauty, this Aurora girl. I guess we’re the big ugly sister, huh, Kenma?”
“Please stop talking,” Kenma says quietly. They can nearly hear his eyes rolling all the way to the back of his head. “I’m picking up on a bare fleshy spot near the tail, Kuro. Try to get a grip on it while Aurora goes for the throat.”
“Roger. You copy that, little sister?”
“We’ll follow your lead,” Daichi says. “Age before beauty, after all.”
When he was younger Daichi ate up all the science fiction he could get his hands on, devouring stories about spaceflight and distant star systems and seemingly impossible futures. So he knows a thing or two about orbits, and that’s what it feels like each time he steps into the Drift. The pull of the void, the negotiation nearly a dance—we spin around each other, I break from you, you pull me back, we hold each other steady for the freefall.
It shouldn’t be real. It should be unlawful for it to be this easy, but when he and Suga slip sideways into each other’s heads it’s no less than a key finally sliding into its lock, the bright door to all their tomorrows swinging open in front of them.
When Daichi looks at him he doesn’t think about dying. He doesn’t think when will it all end, or what if one day the monsters win. All he knows is this: on the last day of the war, when the sun’s coming down, he and Suga will run down to the beach by the base. They’ll swim and swim and swim for the sinking light until their arms and legs give out, and the surf will turn them on their backs and float them to shore. And this day will be the day things go back to being safe and certain, and the next day, and the next day.
Most days Daichi feels broken and Suga saves him every time—from ferocity, from hate, from the fear that one day his veins will harden completely into machine. Suga’s never acknowledged this truth and yet he must know, this concern of hearts, this small, human, precious thing.
That Suga is the cornerstone of all his dreams must mean he’s—important, right? But that’s not it. That’s not big enough. Daichi can’t get his tongue around it. He doesn’t know how to say it.
The big thing, at the end:
Takeda tells Daichi that it won’t be over if—when, he silently amends—Suga wakes up. He could emerge from coma state with all manner of impairments—confusion, amnesia, limited physical mobility, a loss of sight or speech.
“Whatever it is,” Daichi says, “I’ll be with him.”
Takeda rakes a hand through his bird's nest of hair. His shoulders slump under his lab coat, bearing down under an immense, invisible weight. “I hope you know, Sawamura, he may not recover his preinjury level of functioning. Such complete recoveries are rare, even when the prognosis is good. He’d need weeks of rehabilitative physical and psychological therapy. Months, maybe.”
“Even still,” Daichi says again, eyes never leaving Suga’s face, “I’ll be with him.”
The first step to winning a battle is being able to name your enemy. Like this:
“All right, folks, we’re looking at a Category Four, codename Bakunawa.” Ukai. An image shimmers to life on the monitors in front of them in time to his words—horned head, four spindly legs sprouting from a long snakelike body, wicked spikes studded all along the spine. “Sighted at 0200 hours. Heavily armored all along the dorsal side, but there are likely a couple of spots under the belly where the scales taper off that you’ll want to aim for. It looks aggressive and speedy in the water, though, so watch out.”
Nekomata cuts in, “Aurora, you’ll wing for Scarlet, as usual. Work to immobilize so she can get a clean shot for the killing blow. You should be able to match it for speed.”
“Received and will comply,” Daichi says. “We’ll make a dance of it.”
A shrill, thin sound over the comm—Kuroo drawing in a whistling breath. “You any good as a snake wrangler, Aurora?”
“Kuro.” A long-suffering sigh. That’s Kenma, for sure, Daichi figures, and trades a knowing look with Suga across the Conn-Pod. “When we get out there, we’ll draw the assault so you can get the jump on it. Let’s go with that until I have a clearer idea of how it moves. Is that okay?”
“We trust you, golden boy,” Suga tells him, fond, and the silence on the other end of the transmission probably means Kenma’s blushed and dropped his eyes back to the diagnostic screens, pretending to be preoccupied with drawing up a strategy.
The morning breaks grey and rainy, and the only other person waiting for the bus to the Tokyo Shatterdome is a pale boy in a black windbreaker. He’s got earphones on, and he’s smiling down at the wet ground as he taps his feet to the beat of some song Daichi can’t hear, but he turns his head the moment he notices the presence next to him on the bench.
“Hi,” he says, popping out one earbud with a grin that looks to Daichi—just a bit, the tiniest bit—like the only glimpse of the sun he’s likely to get on this incredibly overcast day. “You headed for the base too?”
“Uh, yeah,” Daichi answers. He offers a hand to shake, blinks in surprise when he finds the returning grip surprisingly firm, the spindly fingers curled around his own cool and strong. “Sawamura Daichi, from Sendai. Ranger-in-training.”
“Sugawara Koushi from Tottori, also a Ranger-in-training. You can call me Suga, though; everybody does.”
Daichi doesn’t anticipate the punch that lands squarely in the center of his chest following this introduction, knocking out whatever wind Suga’s smile didn’t already catch, and it’s all Daichi can do not to double over, hands clutching at the spot where his heart should be.
Suga probably hears his breath catch. Another grin, another flash of honest-to-god brilliant sunlight. ”Guess we country boys should probably look out for each other, huh?”
On the morning of the thirtieth day, what passes for an ending—
Daichi steps out of their room and Kenma crashes into him like a runaway train, throwing him back against the door. He can see Kenma’s eyes wide and wet through his hair, his mouth moving soundlessly, and there’s an ache that blooms in Daichi’s ribs because he knows, he knows what this is about, he might have felt it in his dreams—
And Kenma’s righting himself and pulling at his arm—Kenma who goes out of his way not to touch anyone skin to skin but Kuroo, and that only because they’ve been friends since they were babies, Kenma who for the past month hasn’t been able to look at Daichi and not recoil—and they’re taking off at a run down the hall to the medical bay. Daichi’s sure he’s never seen Kenma run before, has only ever watched him shuffle through life in a half-daze, and suddenly now all he can do is suck in his breath and throw his feet harder against the ground to keep up.
Azumane’s standing by the bed when they reach Suga’s room, and Takeda’s checking the wiring on the heart monitor, but Daichi forgets everything when he sees Suga’s eyelids blink open and close again. The stitch in his side seems inconsequential now, and the sorry literally-just-rolled-out-of-bed state of his hair doesn’t even register, though he sees his reflection in the window clear as day.
He’s watching Suga draw in a breath, deep and strong, all the way down to the pit of his chest. Suga’s lashes flutter and Daichi nearly bursts into tears right then and there because he’d been so afraid he’d never see those eyes again, that he’d lost them to the cold inky blackness in the deep—but Suga’s skin is warm, flushed under his shaking hands.
He can feel his breath rattling in his chest with every inhale and he’s in too deep, too deep, he knows that now—but he has to say something important, something that has only tangentially to do with how well they Drift together, but I love you I love you I love you sticks in the back of his throat, and all that comes out instead is a strangled, broken sound.
Suga’s eyes open, and Daichi’s scared they’re going to snap shut again, but they stay open, struggling to focus. His lips move—his voice hasn’t come back yet, but Daichi’s memorized the shape of Suga’s mouth around every word they know, both smiling and not.
“You jump, I jump, remember?” he whispers, and he knows this is real, not a dream, not a hiccup in the Drift. He knows, because nothing is more real than Suga’s breath ghosting against his face, golden. Golden and alive and more beautiful than the dawn. “You jump, I jump.”