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Itia wakes up to something tickling her face. She opens her bleary eyes slowly. The sound of crickets chirping and leaves rustling in the wind reach her ears and chase the last remains of sleep away.
Now that she is fully awake, she realises that the thing that had tickled her face had been a dark strand of hair. Kannavi’s hair to be precise.
The man must have moved in his sleep and rolled onto her shoulder in the process. At least she can’t remember falling asleep like this. She tries to move her neck a bit, both to free herself a little and to get a better look at Kannavi, but it proves to be difficult with not only one, but two grown men resting their heads on her.
Orca’s silver head of hair lies on her other side, a little further down than Kannavi but still above her stomach. They had started to take better care of not putting too much extra weight on it, since Itia had expressed her discomfort regarding that. It’s already growing heavy enough as it is with her pregnancy progressing. Itia had started to notice some difficulty breathing when laying on her back recently, but right now her lungs don’t seem to mind too much.
Just when she thinks that she could fall back asleep like this, sandwiched between the two warm bodies of her closest companions, she feels Kannavi stir on her shoulder.
She turns her neck a bit to the left, and sure enough, Kannavi’s olive green eyes stare back at her tiredly.
“Oh, you’re awake.” He states while lifting his head a little from Itia’s shoulder so that he could look at her better.
Funny, considering he normally isn’t that good at remembering to hold eye-contact with the person he’s speaking to.
“I was just about to say the same thing to you,” she answers, her voice still rough from sleep.
Kannavi blinks at her, then lets his head fall back onto her chest, subconsciously burrowing his nose into the fabric of her shirt.
After months of living in close quarters together, it’s a habit of his that she had picked up on by now.
Itia can’t help but find it endearing.
“Did I wake you by moving?” He asks, his voice a bit muffled from the fabric. Itia can feel the vibration of him speaking trough it and against her skin. It tickles a bit.
“Hm?” She asks back. “What do you mean?”
“I woke up a while ago and slid a little further up your shoulder. Did that movement wake you?”
“Oh. No, your hair tickled my nose.”
Kannavi hums in acknowledgement. “Is Orca still asleep?”
Itia turns her head yet again to get a good look at the other man resting against her.
Orca’s silver hair is fanned out all over the mattress. She can even feel some of it tangled around her wrist.
His breathing seems to be even, and his muscles lax. Both signs that he is still fast asleep.
“Yes, I believe so, Kannavi.”
“Good.”
A short silence stretches between them, but it doesn’t take long for Kannavi to speak again.
“I like to watch him sleep. He looks so peaceful like this, don’t you think?”
Itia finds herself agreeing. While his bangs are covering half of it right now, she can see his wrinkle free face, and the way the fat on his cheeks —even if there is very little of it to begin with— mushes up where his face meets her chest.
He looks so young like this, Itia thinks. It is moments like these that she gets to see the closest thing to the soft hearted young boy that Orca had once been. Before Sarigari, that horrible monster of a man, had broken the last remaining parts of him that had stayed intact after growing up in the Empire.
Itia doesn’t like to hate people. She likes to pride herself with the fact that she doesn’t tend to feel hatred towards a lot of things, but she knows that she hates Sarigari.
Not only for what he had done to Orca, but also for taking away her home from her. For making her loose the town, which had probably seemed like an insignificant smidge on the map for Sarigari, but had been everything to her. Her whole world.
Her heart even aches for that poor woman that had been his wife.
Even if she never met Kalamári’s sister personally, she mourns that she had never gotten her freedom from that man.
Itia mourns that woman, because she knows that she probably had little to no choice but to accept Sarigari as her husband.
The curse of having been born as a woman in the Empire.
“He does.”
“Oh,” Kannavi says, like he just remembered something which he had neglected to tell Itia, “I’m sorry for waking you, by the way. I didn’t mean to.”
Itia smiles, even though she knows that Kannavi can’t see it like this.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve become a rather light sleeper.”
“…Oh, right.”
She feels the light sensation of fingertips on her belly, before Kannavi pulls back quickly.
“I’m glad that I don’t have to deal with stuff like that.”
Itia can’t help but let out an amused huff of air.
“Glad that you don’t have to deal with the quirks of female anatomy?” She asks playfully.
Itia can feel Kannavi nodding. “Hm, most of the time.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Care to elaborate?”
“You guys have better hair. It doesn’t commonly fall out that much with age.”
Of course, this is the reason. It’s Kannavi that she is talking with after all.
Itia starts to play with a strand of Kannavi’s hair, twirling it around her finger and inspecting the ends of the individual hairs.
“I think yours has gotten longer, and healthier.”
“You are correct, it has!” Kannavi says quite loudly. At least louder than one should talk if they don’t want to wake up a sleeping person.
Itia shushes Kannavi gently and she hears him gasp.
“Oh, right. Oops.”
Both of them fall silent for a few moments, listening to Orca’s quiet breathing and if there are any changes to the rhythm of it which would indicate him waking up, but Orca stays asleep.
The silence between Itia and Kannavi continues too. She can feel Kannavi’s hot breath on her collarbone, and how all of his muscles become more lax by the second.
Suddenly, Kannavi reaches out one of his hands to take Orca’s in a gentle grasp.
He laces their fingers together, which results in both of their hands ending up resting on Itia’s stomach.
The warmth of their interlocked hands seeps through Itia’s shirt and caresses the skin underneath. She sighs contently. It is a nice sensation.
Kannavi sniffs. Itia dismisses it the first time, but after the second and even third time she asks: “Kannavi? Is something bothering you?”
It’s then that she realises, that Kannavi might be kept up by something. Some bothersome thought or memory of the past which keeps him from falling into the warm embrace of sleep. Or maybe the embrace of sleep itself hadn’t been that warm after all and filled with those very things he doesn’t want to think about instead.
It isn’t typical for him to awaken throughout the night. Kannavi tends to be the last of them to wake up. In the past that has resulted in either Itia or Orca attempting to untangle themselves from Kannavi’s limbs in the morning.
What it also means is that this type of midnight talk doesn’t really happen between herself and Kannavi.
He shouldn’t be awake. Not without a reason at least.
Naturally, Itia grows a little concerned.
She hears Kannavi sigh before he answers. However, it’s not the sad or defeated kind of sigh which Itia had expected to leave Kannavi’s mouth.
“I’m just so happy that all of us can be together like this.” Kannavi answers. That really hadn’t been what Itia had expected to come out of Kannavi’s mouth, but at this point she really should have learned her lesson of never expecting anything specific when it comes to Kannavi.
“When Orca disappeared after Gerakí, I was so very scared that I would never be able to see him again,” he continues. “But you already know that. You were there.”
Itia does know. After regaining his emotions even further and spending more and more time on the Mud Whale it also became more and more obvious to probably everyone how much Kannavi was suffering under Orca’s loss.
Which means that Itia, who had been living in the same building with him, had noticed most of all.
Itia had been scared too during those months. For both the very same, but also very different reasons that Kannavi had been. Her thoughts had circled around Orca a lot. A man, who, despite his many faults and wrong doings, she had started to feel compassion towards. A man, who she had already been married to at that point. A man, who she had started to care for.
By starting to care about Orca, she automatically had started to care about Kannavi too. During the months of their shared feelings regarding Orca, and the growing support of one another, Kannavi had become much more than just Orca’s peculiar medic and her husbands best friend to, but her own very dear friend instead.
Itia smoothes down Kannavi’s hair in a comforting manner as she waits for him to stop speaking.
“That was the second time he just disappeared on me like that, and it was the second time I realised how scared I am of possibly having to do without him.”
“He’s here right now, Kannavi,” Itia soothes her friend gently, “and he’s not leaving,” she says to Kannavi just as much as she does to herself.
Kannavi just nods and buries himself further into the fabric of Itia’s shirt.
“Yes…but, Itia?” Kannavi asks. Itia can tell by the faintness of his voice that he must be growing rather tired.
“Yes, Kannavi?”
“You’re here too.” Kannavi states simply.
By the way Kannavi had breathed in Itia assumes that he still wants to go on with his sentence, but might be struggling to find the right words. That’s alright, Itia is a patient woman. She can wait.
Itia tucks a longer strand of Kannavi’s hair behind his ear, her fingers brush against the shell of it and she finds his skin to be cold there.
“You’re here too,” he repeats. “And I couldn’t do it without you either. I would be sacred.” He finally looks up at her, and Itia can see his eyes shine with moisture. “I need you both.”
Her throat feels thick and her eyes sting. She is sure that they must be shining just like Kannavi’s now.
His silhouette blurs a little at the edges from these unshed tears.
These words had touched her heart. Of course the three of them know that they care for each other deeply. One doesn’t go through hell and back together and come out without some sort of lasting bond. However, Itia hadn’t expected this kind of development to happen between the three of them initially.
When Orca had first asked to marry her, she had said yes because, logically, that had been the best option for her at the time. It wasn’t every day an imperial officer asked for the hand of a simple girl like her. She had hoped for security with this match, for someone she could follow and live in an agreement with, that would have been nice enough to her. That was before she realised Orca really wasn’t like any other Commander of the Empire, and that all of these things that she had hoped for weren’t things that Orca could offer her.
At least not in the traditional sense. She, of course, had grown to love the man anyways.
When she had first spoken to Kannavi, she hadn’t expected to even become friends with him. If she had tried to fill the traditional role of a wife, like the Empire defined it, their relationship would have remained strictly professional with no room for friendly affections in the future. That simply wasn’t how things had worked in the Empire.
However, both Orca and Kannavi, and as a result also herself, didn’t really fit into this idea that they would have had to represent in theory anyways, and knowing the both of them, they had never planned to in the first place.
Itia hadn’t expected to love the two men this way, but despite everything, she does now.
After her home town had been burned down and wiped ou she hadn’t expected to ever feel this kind of love again. She hadn’t expected to feel anything ever again, but now she does, and, in all honesty, she could’t be any happier.
Sometimes it really is the most unexpected people that end up giving you a home and become your family.
Itia exhales. A few tears escape from her eyes at the same time.
“Oh, Kannavi.” She pulls him closer. At least as close as she can with only one of her hands free —her other arm trapped under Orca’s weight— and Kannavi being significantly taller than her. So it’s really more Itia caressing his head with her left arm. It doesn’t matter, the gesture does what it was supposed to do.
“Kannavi,” she looks over to Orca briefly. He is still fast asleep, despite their talking and the movements. She can’t address him directly, so a look would have to suffice. “I care for both of you, a lot.” Itia sniffs,”I love you both.”
Kannavi looks at her with something in his eyes that she can’t quite place, but it’s evident that it’s nothing negative, despite the increase of moisture in his eyes.
“Me too,” he eventually answers. “I love you too.”