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It’s a joke, is what Narumi tells himself during the JAKDF’s annual paperwork update.
A joke, his brain insists as he stares at the Emergency Contact section he’s had to fill out every year since he enlisted.
The very first year, he tried to leave it blank. Tried telling the harried looking secretary who chased him down with stern orders to fill out his paperwork, completely, and return it by the end of the day that it was fine. There was a part of him that wanted to tell them that there was no one to put down in that section and, surely, there were others in the same position?
What he did instead was put down Hasegawa and not tell anyone, because if anything happened to him that needed an emergency contact called, he was going to make sure it ended in death.
The fifth year that he had updated his JAKDF paperwork, he decided to switch things up. Not because he thought Hasegawa was a terrible emergency contact—he had never actually given a reason for anyone to contact Hasegawa in an emergency situation—but because he, in all of his wisdom, had come up with a vastly better plan.
Earlier that year, the Third Division had shown up the First Division in every possible way when it came to aptitude tests: long range shooting, short range shooting, the blade. Between their Captain and Vice Captain, Narumi was starting to feel a little bit like he was being left behind. Like he wasn’t enough.
Like everything he had done up to that point hadn’t been enough.
And he wasn’t going to tell anyone that, even on threat of death, so.
He puts down Vice Captain Hoshina Soushirou as his emergency contact in year five in his JAKDF tenure as a joke because Hoshina might be good at many things, but there’s no way he’s going to be a good emergency contact.
Narumi’s going to make sure of it.
And make sure of it he does: he doesn’t get so much as a papercut for two years (mostly because he refuses to do his own paperwork).
Of course, he should have known it was never going to last. The universe would have shown him too much of a kindness if it had; he would have been a favored son, and he knows he’s never been that.
He wakes up after one particularly nasty exploration of a honju’s guts with the bright lights of the infirmary glowing above him, cast on his arm and a crick in his neck. He rolls his head over in an effort to stretch the pain out, only to wish he’d never woken up in the first place.
There, in a little blue plastic chair, sits one Hoshina Soushirou, not a single hair of his bowl cut out of place, jacket zipped all the way up to his sharp chin.
“What are you doing here?” Narumi demands immediately, voice soft and slurry from the pain medication.
“You put me down as your Emergency Contact,” Hoshina says, waving the clipboard in his hand around. Narumi squints at it, eyes watering, but can’t make out anything the paper on the board says so gives up in a matter of three seconds.
“No I didn’t,” he says, petulant.
“I asked to see the paperwork because I didn’t believe it myself. You most certainly did.”
Wiggling down into the hospital bed in an effort to disappear, because he knows exactly what he did and when he did it and why, Narumi pouts. Tries to cross his arms over his chest only to remember that one of them is in a cast and it hurts to move it.
The silence that settles over the two of them, punctuated by sounds from the hospital staff passing by his room out in the hall, the subtle murmur of them passing by, the tap tap tap of their shoes.
“You didn’t have to come,” Narumi finally bites out, tongue heavy in his mouth from whatever they gave him to stave off the pain.
“Oh, no,” Hoshina tells him, tapping the clipboard on the side of the bed, edge of his mouth twisting up. “I wanted to see what kind of trouble the Captain of the First Division had gotten himself into that counted as an emergency.” He takes the clipboard away, settles it into his lap. “That, and they won’t discharge you unless you’re under adult supervision.”
“I’ll call Hasegawa. You can leave.”
Hoshina hums, tapping his chin with a finger. “And yet, he’s not your contact in case of an emergency. They wouldn’t even let him in when I got here.”
Narumi wants to build a time machine. He wants to go back and fix his paperwork from two years ago, even one year ago, and then he wants to go back and prevent Hoshina from ever being born.
“I can take care of myself,” he insists, trying to casually look around for the clothes he came in wearing. Anything to get out of this stupid hospital gown and out of here.
“They’re not going to discharge you unless it’s into my care,” Hoshina says, rephrasing what he said earlier as if Narumi hadn’t understood him. “Since I’m, you know, your emergency contact.”
There’s a question there that Hoshina isn’t asking outright. The why did you do this to me unspoken.
Narumi doesn’t answer it, since it wasn’t asked.
It takes four hours to discharge him properly, twilight having come down on Ariake Maritime Base as he was in the hospital. Four hours to get discharged for some cracked ribs and a broken arm and an emergency contact who doesn’t quite hover, but doesn’t quite leave him alone; an emergency contact who is more curious than concerned.
They don’t speak as they exit the double doors of the ED, a paper bag full of pain meds in Narumi’s good hand, hospital issued sweats and an I HEART TOKYO t-shirt encasing his chest. They had found it necessary to cut his suit off, apparently.
On the corner just outside the hospital, Narumi stops under the streetlight and looks at Hoshina, who’s hair shines with the light, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. “You can go home, now,” he tells him, trying to be direct, to be brusque, to be commanding, but all he sounds is tired. “We’re out of the hospital.”
Hoshina tilts his head to the side, ever so slightly. “And abandon my duty as your emergency contact? I could never.”
Narumi rounds on him, nearly dropping his paper bag. “It was a joke, okay? I didn’t think I was ever going to need one, so I put you down.”
Hoshina’s eyes widen slightly, but he doesn't move from his spot on the sidewalk, even as Narumi had crept closer in his intensity. In the end, he surprises Narumi: he doesn’t ask, ‘you’re that sure of yourself?’; doesn’t ask, ‘you didn’t have anyone else?’.
Instead, he asks, “How was it supposed to be a joke if I wasn’t supposed to find out about it?”
Narumi gapes at him like a fish, synapses in his brain firing away as he tries to come up with an acceptable answer.
“Pretty bad joke if you ask me,” Hoshina says when he doesn’t come up with anything after fifteen entire seconds, reaching out and taking the paper bag that’s dangling from Narumi’s limp hand. “Come on. Let’s get you back to where you belong and I’ll hand you off to Hasegawa.”
It takes a moment for Narumi’s brain to start working again.
By the time Hoshina leaves him in Hasegawa’s care, tucked into his bed with the cap to the pain medication unscrewed so he doesn't have to fight with it later, a cup of water with a straw in it left on his night stand for later, Narumi’s pretty sure he’s got a bigger problem to deal with:
Hoshina Souhirou is a much, much better emergency contact than Narumi thought he could be.
And he wants it to happen again.