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“Hey, Reno… Reno? You up yet?”
Reno’s eyes blink open, slow and groggy to the morning light that bleeds into recovery ward.
He almost expected it to all have been a dream—that he and Iharu wouldn't have actually taken down the kaiiju, that he'd wake up in the ground instead of a hospital bed.
But here he is. His muscles ache and his leg has definitely been better days, but he did it. They did it.
“Renoooo–”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m up.” Reno groans, head tipping to the side to where Iharu’s voice keeps coming from. The smile that greets him warms him to his core. “You’re so loud. This is a hospital, you know.”
"Well fuck me for wanting to make sure you were still alive.”
“It’s just my leg,” Reno says.
“Right,” Iharu laughs, though his smile wavers as he turns back to the window. “Just your leg.”
Silence blankets the room and, after a moment, Reno sinks back into the pillows. “...Could’ve been worse, I guess,” he mumbles. “I was lucky to have someone like you around.”
“You mean that?” The way Iharu perks up in his bed is unmistakable.
“Well yeah, I mean... We did pretty good together, didn’t we? You were amazing out there. Better than me.”
“Hah!” Iharu makes a face before grabbing his pillow and chucking it in Reno’s direction. “Yeah right,” he says. “Better than me… There’s no way I could’ve taken down the honju alone. But you–”
“I couldn’t either,” Reno points out.
“Not yet,” Iharu says. “You will.”
Reno’s not sure he likes the sound of that. Not yet anyway. Not after yesterday. What if he loses a handle on things again, what if Iharu’s not around to save his ass the next time he fucks up.
“I’d feel better if you were there to take them down with me,” he says, and Iharu’s face floods with color. “...What? You don’t want to?”
“Fuck you, who said I didn’t!” Iharu barks back. “You saw what we did back there. We were frickin’ amazing. I could do that forever!”
“Yeah,” Reno breathes out, finally feeling more content than he has all week as Iharu huffs back at him. “Me too.”
With Iharu at his side, he could very well be invincible.