Work Text:
“You know, you’re allowed to look at me.”
Tao keeps her eyes on the shelf to her right.
To her left on the couch, there’s tugging on her arm as Dara pulls her prosthetic hand closer, slowly pulling off the black glove she always wore over it to toss it aside. Tao had done a mighty fine job of banging it up during yesterday’s mission, when a Maga got close enough to take a bite out of the wrist before she smashed their head against a wall. It was only after Alma noticed how bad her grip was this morning that he insisted they go back to the Saragi HQ to get someone to take a look, before the casing cracked any further from the deep teeth marks.
And after a quick checkup with Dara, Alma and Nei scurried out like little yappy chihuahuas to scavenge for snacks at the convenience store, leaving the two women alone together.
Little shits.
With a sigh, Dara runs her fingers over the prosthesis, tapping a few places here and there with her fingernails as she checks the damage. “Well, thankfully it’s reinforced metal — not too much structural damage visible from the surface. I’ll need to take a look inside though.”
Tao grunts.
”… and that means you’re gonna need to spend some time here while I fix it, or else it’ll get worse. That sound good? Or are you okay with one arm for a day?” Dara taps her on the bicep, but Tao still refuses to meet her eyes. After years of dealing with her, Dara probably isn’t surprised she’s acting like this.
“Fine.”
There’s a pause when Dara squints at one of the blunt tooth-gouges in the wrist area, and then she says, “Can you flex the fingers for me first? Let’s check how bad the reaction time is.”
It’s supposed to move like a normal hand — just a bit slower than her remaining one — but Tao never listens whenever Yoki or Dara try to explain the finer details. Tao turns her head just enough to look at Dara out of the corner of her eye. When Dara taps each extended finger, Tao responds by bending it slowly, carefully — but the response time is sluggish as each takes a full three seconds to bend, and then another three before it unbends. She scowls in concentration when the middle finger doesn’t react at all, staying straight despite her best effort.
”You look constipated.”
Tao glances at Dara in surprise. She only smiles back, gesturing for Tao to pull up her sleeve.
The prosthesis replaces everything from her left hand to mid-forearm, where it meets the socket that keeps it attached to the rest of her arm. Dara easily detaches it from the socket, gently placing it on the coffee table before knotting up Tao’s sleeve so it won’t hang uselessly.
The sudden weight loss on her left side always disconcerts Tao whenever she removes the hand, so she rarely does it herself — much to Dara and Yoki’s eternal frustration, forcing them to clean the rust and other buildup from daily use whenever she stops by. (Alma tried once and broke its pinky finger clean off, so they all agreed not to let him do it ever again.) Dara picks up the hand with a tsk as she glances back at Tao’s forearm, which she takes to mean You dumbass, clean your shit up.
Tao takes a long drag of her cigarette, watching Dara as she takes the hand to a portable workbench, placed perpendicular to Yoki’s desk. She begins to remove the flesh-colored metal plates around the wrist area with some type of elongated screwdriver, unscrewing and then prying them off before depositing them into a bin by her foot with loud clangs. Tao remembers it’s supposed to be heavily reinforced for fighting the Maga, something about it being double-layered, but she can’t recall what additions Yoki snuck in during the many times she’s visited. As long as it moves properly, she doesn’t particularly care for the specifics.
”No other injuries?” Dara asks as she pokes at some internal structure she’d just exposed. Maybe some wires, maybe some gears — Tao has no damned clue. “Alma looked fine when I examined him, but you — “
” — I’m fine — “
” — you never ask for help,” Dara finishes, as if Tao hadn’t interrupted at all. She squints at the prosthetic fingers, manually bending and then straightening the middle one to test it. It extends like normal, but as soon as she releases it the finger curls up again like a sad party horn. “I wish you would.”
”Don’t need it.” Tao leans forward to stub out her finished cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. “Thanks though.”
”You gonna fix this yourself next time?” Dara is rarely exasperated, maybe more patient than anyone in Saragi deserved, but Tao feels just a bit guilty now as she watches the mechanic puzzling over the damage. “I know it’s dangerous work, but you really should have come yesterday right after it happened. You could have damaged it more in the meantime — and you know you're always welcome here even if it’s two in the morning.”
Alma had said the same thing.
Tao suspects they planned all this behind her back – maybe not the “leave Dara and Tao alone” part, but the “force Tao to get help” one. His wording from this morning and Dara’s now were almost suspiciously identical. If she thinks hard enough, she remembers hearing the office phone being gently placed back in the receiver while she was still half-asleep this morning. She’d thought she was dreaming, so she rolled over and dozed off again until Alma barged in to ask for breakfast money. When she had trouble getting her jacket on over the prosthesis, he changed his mind immediately and almost dragged her out the door to go see Yoki and Dara instead.
Maybe he called her.
And maybe that’s why all those shitheads — Yoki, Alma, Nei, that weird veiled nurse — had disappeared so conveniently. Not like it was hard for anyone to notice how Tao could never look Dara in the eye, or to figure out the reason why. She’s not really the expressive type, but whenever she isn’t her normal straightforward self it always sticks out like a sore thumb.
And many of those times just so conveniently occur whenever she’s at Saragi HQ.
Fucking hell.
Tao scowls to herself, reaching for another cigarette in her right pocket. She mentally curses when she doesn’t find one — the Maga from yesterday crushed the pack when they fell out of her pocket during their mad dash to bite her head off. Nothing had been salvageable, and she found there were only four cigarettes left in her desk when they got home last night. She smoked two last night in quick succession before bed and then the other two today, one on the way here and the one she lit while waiting for Alma’s checkup to end. She wonders if she can try to smoke the stub she just put out, but that would make her look even more pathetic than usual.
She glances around the room for a distraction, at all the shelves behind Yoki’s desk and the assortment of drawers and boxes around the rest of the room. She could probably try to read something. Yoki’s desk is littered with paperwork and engineering textbooks, but she could never hope to understand anything in those and she didn’t care to read about Saragi’s budget —
“ — and as usual, you’re avoiding me.” Dara’s voice is teasing as she steps away from the bench to dig through a large cardboard box in front of the desk. “Man, what did I ever do to you?”
Tao feels heat rising in her cheeks when she spares Dara a glance now. This time the mechanic is watching her, a small smirk on her face as she pulls out some metal parts. “Nothin’. Kinda weird to stare at someone while they work, though.”
Dara heaves a dramatic sigh and waves a metal sheet at Tao, similar to the plates she’d just pulled off the prosthetic hand. “I guess. But hey, don’t I work fast? I even had everything in this box ready for you.”
”… you had that prepped already?” Alma, I swear if you called her this morning —
”You’ve been here for repairs four times in as many months. Of course we did.”
Now Tao feels really guilty as Dara makes her way back over to the workbench, where the prosthetic hand, some fingers half-flexed and others fully extended, lay like a surgery patient in rigor mortis. Absently, she picks at the knot in her left sleeve with her remaining hand, trying not to think too hard about how much she wants to scratch at the socket.
”… sorry.”
Dara looks up from her work and raises an eyebrow. “It’s fine. I like seeing you.”
Tao freezes.
”… but I don’t like that it’s usually for repairs. Or drawing Alma’s blood. Or giving us a bill for damages.”
Tao exhales through her teeth, desperately praying for a lit cigarette to drop out of the sky and into her hand right now. “Yeah?”
”Yeah. You could just visit for fun sometimes. You play mahjong? We do it every Friday night.”
”No.”
”Isn’t your office inside an old mahjong parlor?”
”It was abandoned for years before I rented it. Doesn’t mean I know shit about the game.”
Dara sighs again as she begins fiddling with more mysterious internal structures inside the hand with some tools she pulls from a drawer. The fingers suddenly convulse all at once, which seems to please her. “We’ve known each other for years, and I still don’t know what your hobbies are. What do you do outside of work?”
Tao can’t think of anything right now, as she watches Dara work out of the corner of her eye. “Eat. Sleep.”
“No TV? Alma says you guys watch stuff together all the time.”
”… not really.” She only watches when she can’t be bothered to leave the room after Alma turns on his nightly shows, and even then she hardly pays attention anyway. The closest thing to a hobby she has is probably reading the newspaper, but you could only read so many of those in a day.
“Pity.” Dara puts down her tools to stretch, wincing when her back cracks loudly. “You want some coffee? I bought a few cans yesterday.”
”Sure. Any cigs?”
”If you come over more often, I’ll get some.” Free cigarettes could lure Tao here more often, but she doesn’t know if she can handle that commitment. Dara pushes herself away from the workbench to wander over to the mini-fridge behind Tao’s couch. “I know you like black coffee, but I also have some latte and matcha ones if you want.”
”Black is fine. The kids will want those other ones, anyway.”
She hears the fridge open and shut behind her, and then the characteristic crack of cans being opened —
— and then she nearly jumps three feet in the air when she feels the freezing-cold press of something to her cheek.
When she turns to glare at Dara, the mechanic only smiles down at her like some beatific saint. She’d pulled the can away before Tao could knock it out of her hand in surprise, a much faster reaction time than Tao expected from her.
”Don’t spill it,” Dara chides her when Tao, embarrassed, snatches it out of her hand. Immediately her fingers begin to numb like she’s holding an ice cube. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
”’course I am,” Tao grumbles, taking a sip from the can. It’s so cold her teeth hurt, like the fridge was a direct portal to a glacier core. Even though it’s the brand she always buys for herself, she can barely taste anything but cold now.
“You’re kinda red.” She’s definitely teasing her now.
Tao shuts her eyes and inhales deeply through her nose. When she opens them again, she avoids directly looking at Dara. “You surprised me, that’s all.”
”Hm.” Dara slides onto the armrest next to her as she sips on her own drink: a violently-pink can of strawberry soda, probably something so sugary that it would make Tao’s teeth shrivel. “Don’t see that every day.”
Dara is so close to her now, perched on the armrest like a waiting vulture, that Tao’s arm brushes against her thigh. Tao’s face is almost eye-level with her chest, the mechanic jumpsuit unbuttoned to expose her black sports bra and all the pale skin down to her pierced bellybutton — probably not safe or practical for the kind of work she does, but nobody is going to lecture her about it when she has a drill in her hand.
Tao stares straight ahead at the armchair across the table, stiff as a board.
“Anyway,” Dara is saying nonchalantly, as she pries the tab off her own can to toss in the nearby trash can, “we’re having a hotpot night on Saturday if you guys want to come. Yoki’s treat, but I’m sure Alma will make him regret that. It’ll be just us four.”
”I’ll think about it,” Tao mumbles. They didn’t have any jobs scheduled for that day, and Alma would never let her hear the end of it if she rejected free food on his behalf. “Never know when a job will come up.”
Dara nods, knowing not to push her luck, but then she throws all that sage understanding out the window to stick her soda in front of Tao’s face. Tao is never sure what to make of Yoki and Dara’s need to be affectionate with everyone — and she certainly is having a great time trying to unravel Dara’s friendliness with her now, since she doesn't know what she’s done to deserve it after years of being standoffish with the other woman. “Wanna try? It’s a new flavor.”
Tao squints at the cartoon logo, wondering what exactly was new about strawberry in particular to warrant the large bubbly “BRAND NEW LIMITED FLAVOR” label slapped across the can — something seasonal, or maybe advertising some prefecture’s specialty produce? But she doesn’t wonder for long, because she finds herself inclining her head to let Dara bring the can to her lips.
She was right: it’s so sweet it feels like her tongue is coated in sugar, but the carbonation is gentle enough that she doesn’t immediately spit it out. Dara retracts it with a smile to take another sip herself.
”It’s fine,” Tao says, licking her teeth. She should really go to the dentist. “Not my thing though.”
”Well, your taste buds probably don’t work very well — all that smoking and everything.” Dara waves dismissively. “Alma tells me all about the weird food combos you guys try.”
”You two sure talk a lot, huh?” Maybe too much.
”What else is there to do when he’s getting blood drawn? Speaking of which….” Dara frowns for a moment, taking another swig of her soda. “He’s due for another round next week, or earlier if you can hack it. You’re almost out of bullets after yesterday, right?”
How she always knew when her bullet supply was low, Tao would never be able to guess. “… yeah. Why not do it today?”
”I didn’t feel like spoiling his mood — and Yoki isn’t finished with your new batch anyway, so we won’t know how much we need.”
Tao glances at the clock. Almost half an hour has passed since Nei and Alma left, and now she’s wondering if they’re stalling on purpose.
As if she’s read her mind, Dara clears her throat and gestures to the workbench. “It’ll be another half hour before I finish with your hand. Damage isn’t that bad, nothing complicated — but you’ll have to be better about the regular maintenance.”
”Sure.”
“That means cleaning it on the regular and drying it when wet. No submerging.” Dara gently tugs on Tao’s ear, which makes her hiss even though it doesn’t hurt at all. “We can’t keep doing it for you, and we sure as hell can’t let Alma do it again.”
Tao sniffs indignantly, raising the coffee to her mouth for another too-cold sip. Her fingers are about to fall off from frostbite, but she refuses to let go of the only thing keeping her mind from doom-spiraling right now, between her maddening semi-conscious desire to flex her left hand even though it was gone and being too close to Dara. “Yeah, I know. Thanks. As usual.”
”You’re welcome. As usual.” Dara slides off the couch, but she leaves her half-finished soda on the coffee table when she walks back to her bench.
They sit in relative silence for a while as Dara works.
To pass the time, Tao idly flips through an old travel magazine that Dara snatches off Yoki’s desk for her, fantasizing about various ways to obtain a cigarette without leaving the comfort of the couch. She wonders briefly if Alma is trying to buy some for her now, but she isn’t sure he knows her supply is low because she didn’t have the energy to complain about it this morning.
She takes a sip of her coffee twice, the temperature finally something manageable for her mouth after ten minutes of sitting out. The magazine is boring schlock: this edition’s theme is all about Tokyo and its many wonderful attractions/tourist traps, half conspiracy theories about local folklore (some of which may be true, if they were Maga-related) and half poorly-edited reviews about the best local restaurants (most of which were actually chains). Most of them have probably closed down in the five years since publication. She isn’t sure who in Saragi would be interested in any of this junk, unless Tatsuomi brought it over on his way to extort Yoki for overpriced intel.
Without looking up from the magazine balanced on her thigh, she reaches for her drink on the table and brings it to her mouth.
It is not her coffee – it’s just a shot of pure sugar.
The strawberry soda is still horrific, but more manageable now that half the carbonation is gone. It’s almost like cold juice this way, something a child (and their dentist) would love on a hot summer day. She puts it back quickly before Dara can look up again, returning to the magazine.
Dara’s estimate is correct: it takes her almost half an hour to finish up the repairs, but Alma and Nei still aren’t back from their convenience store trip. (The kids would be fine if they run into trouble, Tao thinks. Nei has a brain on her sometimes.) She’s finished the magazine twice in that interval, and by the time she hears Dara getting up from the workbench, she’s halfway through her third reading.
When she looks up, Dara is walking over to Tao with the prosthesis cradled between both of her own hands.
“Ready?” Dara nods at Tao’s left sleeve. The knot there had been slowly undoing itself over the half-hour since they’d first taken her hand off, loose enough now that she could gently poke it and it would unravel completely. “I’ll roll that up for you.”
”I got it.” Tao tosses the magazine over her shoulder, which Dara frowns at, to slip her entire arm out of the jacket. She pointedly keeps her eyes on the table when Dara slides onto the couch beside her, still cradling Tao’s prosthesis.
It’s quick work for Dara to redo everything, triple-checking the internal locking system in the socket to ensure it doesn’t fall off suddenly. Tao always found it frustrating to do herself — not because it was particularly complicated the way Yoki set it up, but because she didn’t like being reminded of how she lost it.
When she finishes, she taps Tao on the bicep and says, “Flex for me.”
The fingers work almost immediately when Dara taps each one for her to bend. She opens and shuts the hand, rotates the wrist, makes a little O-shape with her thumb and other fingers — all the tests Dara and Yoki usually make her do to test the prosthesis after they finish repairing it. The reaction time, still just a bit sluggish compared to her right arm, seems normal again.
Dara hums, satisfied as she gives the socket another once-over. “Good. Does it feel okay? Not too loose? Tight?”
“Nah.” The weight and motion of the hand feel satisfying – almost natural – like her old hand is still there. Yoki mentioned that they had to precisely calculate her arms’ weight to ensure the prosthetic hand weighed nearly the same as the other side, so that it wouldn’t throw off her balance when she moved. She rotates her hand to look at the new outer casing Dara has installed. There’s no sign of the teeth marks anymore, but if there’s still any internal damage she would never see it.
“Does it look good?”
Tao finally looks at her. Dara’s sitting back now, hugging her knees to her chest as she waits for Tao to respond.
“… yeah.” She flexes the hand again, squinting at the back to check for any other damage. Not even a scratch anywhere, like Dara buffed it all out while Tao was dying of boredom on the couch. “Good work. Thorough.”
“You’ll have to compliment me better than that.”
Tao raises an eyebrow. “You’ve been hanging out with Nei too much.”
Dara just laughs. “She’s a good kid. And you know, she visits more than you two — “
”You sound like a neglected grandma.” Nei has probably done twice as many jobs as Tao and Alma since joining Saragi, but considering how often she harangues Yoki for work it isn’t surprising at all. They couldn’t sustain themselves solely off Saragi jobs, anyway. “Didn’t you guys complain she never stops working? You shouldn’t encourage that, she’s only a kid.”
Dara has to think for a moment as she rotates to sit on the couch normally. “Yeah, we do. Sometimes I think you guys take it a bit too easy in comparison, though.”
They’re sitting close together again, the silky fabric of Dara’s jacket brushing against the skin of Tao’s arm. Dara leans her head back, raising the aviator goggles on her forehead to rub her eye more comfortably. Tao thinks she looks tired.
”What’s that supposed to mean?”
Dara smiles at the ceiling. “Visit more.”
”So you guys can throw more work at us? Thought you just liked having us around.” Tao clicks her tongue, reaching for her coffee again. “How many debts are we working off now, between Hourai and Saragi?”
Dara laughs, counting out the most recent incidents on her fingers: “All those cemetery gravestones. Those walls in the alley from two weeks ago. Some car damage. Do you know how expensive city-owned trash cans are?”
Tao imagines she’d be in crippling debt for life if Yoki actually made them shoulder the cost for everything they broke on the job — not to mention Alma’s ever-increasing tab with Hourai Restaurant, since he drives it up every week before he can clear it all with his hours helping out in the restaurant and the profit splits from his jobs with Tao. “I get it. Sorry.”
”Hand me my soda and I’ll forgive you a little bit. Can’t speak for Yoki though.” Yoki would probably forgive someone even if they stabbed him on purpose, so Tao isn’t too fussed about it.
Tao hands her the soda as she sits up properly to take it. She immediately frowns though, shaking the can a little to hear the liquid slosh. Tao takes a prim sip of her own coffee, now lukewarm enough that she can actually taste the bitterness.
“Did you drink some of this?” Dara turns to her, holding the soda out to Tao again. “I’m not mad — “
Tao raises an eyebrow, leaning away from the can shoved in her face. “I think you’re a little mad.”
”It’s almost gone. Give me some of your coffee, I’m thirsty.”
Tao doesn’t remember drinking that much of it or how much there was before Dara went back to work, but she also can’t defend herself when Dara gently pries the coffee out of her hand and shoves the soda into its place. Without any pause, the mechanic chugs half of it.
”… too late for me to ask for a matcha coffee?” Tao places the soda back on the table. “I’ll take Al’s share, he won’t mind.”
”Don’t be greedy.” Dara hands the coffee back to her, wiping her mouth with her jacket sleeve. There’s still enough left for Tao to take one last drink, but she just holds it instead.
“Should I pay you back for the drinks then?” Tao nods at the fridge behind them. “Just for what I had, obviously. If you bought half the store I can’t afford that.”
“No, it’s my treat. Regretfully.” Dara pats her on the arm. “Between you and Alma, you guys could clear out a market.”
“Pain in the ass for my wallet, the kid’s still growing.”
“Then he’ll get worse. Great.” Dara stretches her arms over her head, her spine audibly cracking again. “Good luck on the impending bankruptcy.”
Tao huffs with laughter and finishes off the coffee. She crushes the can in her fist and nearly tosses it to the floor when Dara raises her eyebrows, so she meekly places it on the table instead. “I’ll need a place to crash in that case. Is your couch open?”
”For you two, always.” Dara shifts suddenly, frowning, before reaching underneath herself to pull Tao’s black glove out from under her ass. She immediately reaches over to take Tao’s left hand in hers. “Ah, shit. Forgot to put this on for you.”
”… I can do it myself.” But Tao lets her do it anyway, extending her hand to make it easier for Dara to pull it on. The glove is a nice black leather, flexible enough to accommodate the prosthesis’ range of motion and protect it from most surface scratches or minor water damage. Like most gloves it only goes up to her wrist, where her jacket sleeve (less consistently) protects the rest of it. She remembers trading for the gloves a long time ago, when Yoki first presented her with the hand after she joined Saragi — she’d helped some old man, a leather worker, figure out who had kidnapped his daughter. He had no money but a lot of skill, so he paid her with a pair of left-hand gloves after she rescued the girl from some local gang.
The glove slides on easily, perfectly molded to the prosthesis after years of use. She flexes the fingers to make sure everything is on straight, noting how well the material stretches without straining. Dara watches, still holding Tao’s hand between both of her own.
They both look up at the same time, so close now that Tao can feel Dara’s breath on her face.
And then she freezes when Dara smiles coyly and presses the back of Tao’s hand to her chest.
“Do you like having me help you, Tao?”
She doesn’t know what to say.
She doesn’t know if she should be cursing the kids and Yoki for leaving them alone or if she should be thanking them, but she doesn’t back up the way she imagined she would in a scenario like this.
Dara weaves their fingers together and leans in closer — so close that their noses brush now.
Tao’s heart feels like it’s about to explode. Her mouth is dry. She can hear her heartbeat in her ears. She wants to look away from her but she’s too close to avoid this time.
But Tao still doesn’t pull away. Instead she finds that she’s leaning in too, lured in like a moth to a flame.
When they kiss she tastes black coffee.