Work Text:
Regret makes a soldier and a coward, and Doppo Kunikida is neither of these things. The regret that clings to his skin is that of dirt and spit, blood under his nails and cigarette smoke on his lips — it is not the omen or manifesto of a coward, and it is not the philosophy of a soldier.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t fit in. Why Doppo seems to be the only one to understand that this world is not colored right, that things are not just, that he cannot reality to fit his own morality. Doppo is nineteen, headstrong, and aching for a fight he’ll never win.
It starts, like all things, with Doppo’s inability to keep his mouth shut.
It ends, rather uniquely, with blood pouring down his thigh and spilling out from his nose in some back alley in the wrong part of Yokohama, wondering just how much blood he can lose before the coherency of ideology is lost on him.
Doppo grits his teeth, and with shaky, desperate hands, reaches over to cover the wound in his thigh; cursing everything under the sun as the blood simply coats his hands, coordination lost against the lack of friction.
It’s red. It’s so red. His chin is soaked, the taste of blood is thick in the air and coating his tongue, and Doppo cannot focus on anything other than the need to be right right right right right as he tries to convince his body to hold on I can get up I can get help.
Doppo has no family in Yokohama. No one he can talk to, anyway. The nearest hospital is too far away. He’s got no phone and no change for a payphone.
There is no help coming for him, yet Doppo cannot find it in himself, even in his feverish and panicked state, to be sorry about the fight. He was right. There is no denying that.
“Just,” Doppo starts, before choking on a clot of blood and coughing harshly, barely able to get enough air in his lungs — not enough – “You and me, huh?”
The little cat doesn’t make a sound. It looks confused.
Doppo is simply shocked the kitten hasn’t run away. It’s a brave thing, ran under the dumpster as soon as those self-righteous fucks had taken a break from kicking it to beat the shit out of Doppo. Yet, as soon as they were gone, it had come out to check on him.
Shame it doesn’t have opposable thumbs or the ability to call for help.
In his delirium, Doppo almost reaches out to touch it with his bloody hands, taking pressure off his wound. Does pressure even matter? It’s cold. Who knew getting stabbed would feel cold?
“You better not die on me,” Doppo murmurs to the battered kitten. Realizing, bizarrely, that his lips are chapped; does it matter? The blood almost works as chapstick.
Before he has the chance to think the same about himself, Doppo’s consciousness — coherency — philosophy — desire to see the world alight — fades fades fades.
Doppo comes to, here and there. The city burns. He does not. He is cold.
Sluggishly. Slippery. It’s like there’s slime on his skin.
He swears to God something kicks him. It can’t be the kitten, can it? Little cats can’t kick well enough, can they?
“What happened to you?”
And they certainly can’t talk. Doppo can only groan, can only struggle to lift his hands and fail. Fail. He’s quite good at that, isn’t he?
(It doesn’t take one breakdown to make someone like this, so far away from home. He wants a smoke. He wants an exorcism. He wants something to go right.)
“You think we should leave ‘im here? He looks half-dead already.”
No, that’s definitely a person. Doppo can’t mumble anything to either affirm or deny care.
Another light kick to his side.
Doppo — I hate you, I hate the idea that you don’t need to help, I’m not dead, I’m not dead —
“Ugh, I don’t want to carry — bad —” The voice, another voice, fades in-and-out, light-and-dark. right-and-wrong, ideal-and-ideological.
It fades out.
Doppo is so, so tired. Exhaustion lies against every rib, every ache, every vein of his throat.
So very tired.
The world — won’t — move on without him!
“Hey!” Doppo shouts out, as hoarse and as loud as he can manage, scratching up the inside of his throat worse than barbed wire. “Don’t — don’t you leave me here!”
Maybe he catches their attention.
Maybe he doesn’t.
“Oh? It lives?”
Doppo, cursing the world and cursing the apathy of nature, fades out of life and consciousness before he knows if anything comes of it.
It’s freezing.
It’s the first and therefore most important thought on Doppo’s mind as soon as he’s capable of cognizant thought again. It’s freezing, there’s a draft traveling right over the soft, exposed part of his stomach and thigh, and the world is not meant for people like him.
Followed, immediately, by:
It shouldn’t be cold. I shouldn’t be alive. The world is not that kind.
And, where am I?
The pain comes after. The pain comes as soon as Doppo opens his eyes, shooting straight up, tensing his thighs in the anticipation of movement and finding this sharp spark that runs up his spine, down to his knee.
(The pain comes after every ideology, he’s finding, and the ache in the back of his throat is still there.)
Doppo finds no harsh white cot, no infirmary, no bustling hospital staff. It’s dim, it’s mildly humid, and the windows are from floor-to-ceiling, giving such a stunning view of downtown Yokohama that Doppo would have his breath taken if it wasn’t because of his thigh already.
There are stitches in his thigh, he realizes.
They’re remarkably well done. Even, neat. The area looks less irritated, but there is still dried blood caking everything around the area other than the wound itself. It isn’t bandaged up. There is still blood flaking against the curve of his lips and Doppo’s glasses are screwed up and uneven on his face — did they get damaged in the fight?
One day, he’ll learn to fight better than someone at a scrapyard, but he can only give what he knows.
He wonders if the kitten is okay.
He wonders if he’s still going to die, or if this is the afterlife that everyone has been too scared to confront.
Doppo sits against the kitchen counter — which he can recognize as a counter, now, almost bumping his head into a cabinet close to him — and waits. Processes. Wonders if this is what the rest of his life is going to look like, wondering where he’s going to go, wondering what’s going to happen to some delinquent kid-who-isn’t-a-kid who doesn’t know how to accept the obvious.
Never once does it cross his mind to wonder how or why he got here. Maybe it was his fever-adled brain that had processed what had happened, but deemed it safe, but it startles Doppo enough to cause him to bang his head into the cabinet behind him when footsteps sound and someone comes into view.
It’s —
It’s no nurse. It’s a boy, who looks around Doppo’s same age, with this darker auburn hair that’s stunning as it catches the light, and these bright, knowing brown eyes, and —
It isn’t the injury that takes Doppo’s breath away, but that’s what he’s going to attribute it to.
“Oh, you’re awake,” he says, and he looks remarkably calm about the whole ordeal.
Doppo is not stupid. He knows that this isn’t safe, that he’s in the apartment of a stranger, injured, and probably unable to run away if he tries. Given the gorgeous view of downtown Yokohama, he’s in a high rise.
There is only one company that owns all five of the high-rises in the city, one of which is residential. Mori Corporations.
Doppo is in the apartment of a mafia grunt with a meticulously-stitched stab wound, that isn’t bandaged.
At least the guy is holding a roll of gauze, but Doppo wrinkles his nose at the clear bottle — is that a vodka bottle? — in the guy’s hand.
“You are not pouring that on me,” Doppo says immediately, as strong as he can get his voice. He is no coward.
(That is, in fact, the sum total of all his problems: Doppo doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up, how to make himself smaller. Doppo knows what he wants and how to get it — that doesn’t lend itself well to moving himself out of the way of others.)
“Hah?” the guy says, holding the bottle up like he’d forgotten he was holding it. The countertop is cold against Doppo’s back. The guy is wearing nice clothes — namebrand, maybe? “Do you want to get sepsis and die?”
“Use an actual disinfectant,” Doppo scoffs, with too much audacity for someone that maybe-is-maybe-isn’t kidnapped. “Vodka or tequila is a terrible Hollywood thing. Don’t even think about it.”
The boy rolls his eyes, overdramatic. “It isn’t vodka. You couldn’t pay me to drink this shit. Or straight vodka, for that matter.”
“Then why is it in a liquor bottle?”
“It looks nice,” the boy defends, jutting his chin out defiantly. Like he’s used to arguing. It suits a mafioso, Doppo supposes — but he isn’t native to Yokohama, he doesn’t know the ins-and-outs of the city like the back of his hand yet. “It’s just hydrogen peroxide. I disinfected it when I was stitching it, but I figured you’d want it disinfected before it got bandaged, too.”
Doppo grunts.
The boy takes it as an affirmative, ambling over with practiced, easy movements, and holding Doppo’s thigh down tightly before he pours the hydrogen peroxide over it.
It fizzles.
Doppo goes to jerk back.
His thigh doesn’t move whatsoever, like it’s being pressed down by more-than-human force, but maybe he’s in shock. This certainly isn’t the afterlife. It certainly isn’t whatever Hell he’d deserve.
It stings, momentarily — it fades out as the bubbles stop fizzing up, reacting chemically to the blood.
The boy is methodical and precise, even in the act of pouring hydrogen peroxide all over his own counter. He’s deathly silent while he does so, bent over to inspect the stitches, and Doppo is struck by how short he is, dim overhead lighting reflecting off auburn hair in striking shades.
“Who are you, anyway?” Doppo finds himself asking, having to clear his throat. He doesn’t flinch again. There’s no need to — he is not a coward, pain can’t stop him from doing what he wants.
The boy hums. “The guy who saved your ass, if that counts. You? How’d you get yourself stabbed?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Doppo retorts, employing the same method of avoidance as the boy in front of him as he stands up, to his full (unimpressive) height.
The boy blinks.
Doppo blinks back at him.
“Chuuya,” the boy says slowly, eventually. Like he isn’t used to his same treatment back at him. “The name is Chuuya.”
Doppo relaxes, just slightly. A mafia murderer wouldn’t have a name like Chuuya, right? “Doppo,” he says, then more hesitantly. “And I got on these kids about — they were messing with this cat, and —”
The boy — Chuuya — raises a brow, and Doppo is struck, suddenly, fervently, with how close Chuuya is standing, pressed between Doppo’s spread thighs to disinfect it. It doesn’t change that he’s in Doppo’s personal space, or that Doppo is on Chuuya’s counter. The stench of blood and chemicals can’t dispel that.
“Cat, huh? You some sort of hero type?” Chuuya asks easily enough, and maybe he realizes how close he is to Doppo’s personal space, too, because he takes a step back unprompted. It allows Doppo’s breathing to return to normal. Maybe he’s going into shock.
“No,” Doppo says automatically, honestly. The hero type would be able to accomplish what they wish; Doppo’s some washed-out high school graduate, toying with the idea of school and morality and pulling at strings they aren’t there.
(There’s got to be something to give this life meaning, right?)
“The cat didn’t do anything, though,” Doppo continues eventually, when Chuuya simply keeps observing him with keen, knowing eyes. They’re bright. Full of life, full of mystery; it reminds Doppo of a life on the brink of living.
He wonders if Chuuya sees the same.
“Didn’t feel right to leave it alone,” he says, again to fill the silence.
Before Doppo can come up, once again, with something to say, Chuuya cracks a smile. It’s crooked and lifts one corner of his mouth further than the other, pushing at freckled skin, and the full weight of its heat hits Doppo like a freight train.”So you are the hero type, then. How sweet of you.”
“It isn’t a —”
Before Doppo has the chance to refute or mull that over yet again, there’s a flash of movement behind Chuuya — his need for a fight activating immediately — but Doppo barely has the time to process that it was the swish of a fluffy tail before he’s laughing.
Laughing, doubled-over, choked-out breaths in-between heaving gulps of air, leaning over with one hand pressed against his uninjured leg to keep him balanced. “You — call me a hero type but you hauled my unconscious ass back here with a cat?”
If Doppo didn’t know any better, and he doesn’t, he’d say that Chuuya flushes, the tips of his ears tinging pink as he looks away quickly.
“Cat was light,” Chuuya defends quickly. “It wouldn’t help or hurt to bring it with me!”
“How did you even manage to carry all that?”
There’s that keen look in Chuuya’s eyes again. For a Port Mafia boy, Chuuya doesn’t seem larger than life like everything else about the mafia.
(Maybe that’s Doppo’s first mistake — not realizing that the Port Mafia, like every other business, is an organization. It can’t be all arson and murder all the time, can it? There has to be bureaucracy to the theatrics.)
“I have my ways,” is all Chuuya says. If he’s going for dark and mysterious, he fails.
“Hey —” Doppo starts, the thought popping into his head unprompted, sitting back up and leaning against the cupboard, uncomfortable as it is.
As he begins, Chuuya seems to remember that Doppo’s injury still needs bandaged, leaning over to unwrap the roll of gauze just enough to get a good starting point. Doppo, in turn, attempts to lift his thigh enough for Chuuya to get under it, but winces and aborts the motion halfway through, shocks of pain pulsing through his hip and down to his knee.
“Why didn’t you bring me to a hospital?” Doppo asks. It isn’t anger, nor is it fear in his voice; maybe it should be. This is a mafia boy.
Then again, Chuuya has been nothing other than kind so far, and perhaps Doppo expects too much of people (and is constantly let down; given the reason he was stabbed and all). Chuuya has been kind, giving up his time and his kitchen counter, and there aren’t many mafiosos, Doppo thinks, that stop to rescue a kitten as well.
Chuuya hums, his focus entirely on Doppo’s injury.
With a touch, this soft, gentle touch of Chuuya’s calloused palms — physics stops obeying the known laws of the world.
As in, Doppo begins to float.
He doesn’t feel weightless, not necessarily, but like the rest of the world is not following suit; it isn’t far, but he’s lighter, like the gravity of the world has ceased to see him as an integral part of it.
There’s a red hue about him, and through the red haze, the rapid thump.thump.thump. of Doppo’s heartbeat, Chuuya looks entirely unfazed by the entire thing.
In fact, Chuuya looks so calm about it that, through his bewilderment, Doppo never even thinks to contemplate that Chuuya isn’t the cause of this.
Chuuya calmly, methodically, begins to wrap the gauze around the wound, aggravating the stitches as little as possible. Practiced, fluid movements.
Doppo focuses on that, because otherwise he is going to focus on the cold, this — this lack of heat emanating from his thigh. Like the cold touch of the knife never left, metal meeting flesh in a collision course, Doppo’s body none the wiser about what to do after.
It takes Chuuya barely a minute to wrap the wound, and as soon as the gauze is secured, the red hue around Doppo disappears. He comes, softly, to rest on the counter again, and if he was in any better mind than his own, maybe he’d freak out about it.
Instead, Doppo blurts, “that’s a neat trick.”
And that’s the right thing to say, because Chuuya bursts out in laughter, not unlike Doppo earlier.
He notices that Chuuya never answered the question earlier. Why didn’t you bring me to the hospital?
Does it even occur to a mafia boy, to go to a hospital? Is it an option for him? The stitches are on par, Doppo knows, of ones he’d get in a professional establishment; the biggest difference seemingly being the environment and the sterility of it.
He should be more concerned about this. Really, Doppo should.
Still, he has this childish idea that there is still some good in the world, and that Chuuya is not going to hurt him, that he doesn’t want something from Doppo.
This time.
Owing the mafia a favor is never something one wants on their repertoire, but Doppo — finds that he doesn’t care. Maybe that says something about him being screwed-up in the head.
“Trick, huh?” Chuuya says, once his laughter has subsided to his shoulders shaking rather than the full-body laugh from a minute ago. “It’s not a trick. It’s an ability.”
“You are not some two-bit superhero,” Doppo says immediately.
Looks Chuuya up-and-down again.
“Or a two-bit supervillain,” Doppo amends.
“Having a superpower,” Chuuya starts, though makes a face at the word superpower, “doesn’t automatically make you a hero or a villain. I mean, how many comics have you read? They’re so unrealistic!”
“I’m some guy off the side of the road that got into some trouble because I’ve got a heart bigger than my sense, picked up by a charming and cute, though mysterious, guy wrapped up in criminal affairs that I certainly shouldn’t know about, who carefully bandages my wounds instead of taking me to a hospital proper,” Doppo delivers flatly.
Chuuya stares.
Doppo stares back.
They’re doing this again, huh?
This time, the staring is broken by Doppo’s own actions, waving it away. “Fine, fine, no trashy book plot for you.”
His question still remains unanswered.
Chuuya looks around, like there is someone in the shadows of this lonely little apartment — maybe there is,Doppo hasn’t the slightest clue where that cat went. He hopes it’s doing okay. Doppo would check, but he’d get too attached.
Eventually, when Chuuya has clearly decided that no one human beyond them is around, he leans forward. This wicked look in his eye, it looks second-nature. And it fades into something softer, something somber. Something befitting a fallen king lost to ruin than some teenage boy picking up a stabbed Doppo Kunikida, delinquent all-for-nothing, off the side of the road.
“I don’t know,” Chuuya says, dark and low and solemn.
It takes Doppo a moment — a moment in which all he can think of is the tone of Chuuya’s voice, sins confessed to the trust of shared air — to realize Chuuya is answering his question.
Why didn’t you bring me to the hospital? It’d have been far easier to bring him there than take care of him here.
“I don’t know,” Chuuya reiterates, shrugging. It’s closer to a roll of his shoulders, and Doppo is struck by how clearly uncomfortable he is. Why, he wonders. He’s only answering a question. Is it too direct? “I’ve no fucking clue why I even bothered stopping at all. I have no clue who you are. Still don’t know if I care. You were —”
This time, Chuuya is failed by his own words and his own words alone.
Doppo stays silent. Has the irrational urge to reach forward and grab his hand, maybe give him some comfort. That wouldn’t do anything, and Doppo doesn’t know what he’d accomplish anyway — they barely know each other. Chuuya’s right. I have no clue who you are.
“So, yeah,” Chuuya sputters lamely. The frustration shows plainly, plastered against a furrowed brow and tense shoulders. “I don’t know why you’re here. You were so — so insistent, I guess. It… was a far cry from what I’m used to. And now you’re here.”
“And now I’m here,” Doppo repeats, slowly, getting a taste for the words in his mouth.
Somehow, it doesn’t feel right. It feels like something is off-balance, like he shouldn’t be sitting in this apartment building with some mafia boy because he happened to get himself stabbed at the right time. Something that Doppo doesn’t have any control over, and in an act that he’s been practicing, he leaves well enough alone.
After that, whatever words Chuuya has dies on his tongue, and he begins to clean up the mess created by the medical supplies. Hydrogen peroxide, another container of gauze, the sewing kit and lighter, all put away into wherever their respective places are in Chuuya’s kitchen.
Doppo sits on the counter all the while, observing Chuuya’s movements.
They aren’t languid and methodical, the acts of someone comfortable in their own home. They aren’t tense because Doppo’s presence demands diligence.
Honestly, Doppo has no clue. He’s known the guy for half an hour now, at best; it’s not like he has Chuuya’s life story.
A thought strikes him. Important enough to break their silence.
“Chuuya?” Doppo starts, relishing the way Chuuya’s name sounds rolling off his tongue, eyeing another flick of a fluffy tail diving under furniture in the decorated living room. “The cat. Have you taken it to the vet?”
“Do you think I’ve had the time to take the stray cat to the vet while you were bleeding out? Why, no, I haven’t had the chance.”
“I got stabbed,” Doppo reiterates, “because there were some idiots kicking it.”
The realization hits Chuuya like a bomb hitting its target. The moment it clicks is on full display for Doppo’s amusement, and it’s quite cute.
“Do you still want to go to the hospital?” Chuuya asks abruptly, in the midst of stopping his task — putting a pan away — to track down the disappearance act of a cat. He’s frazzled, easily distractible, and easily the nicest mafioso that Doppo has ever met.
“Hm?” Doppo says, waving it off as soon as the notion strikes him. “I never wanted to go to the hospital in the first place. Just thought it was odd you didn’t take me there. Are you going to bring me along to the vet?”
“Who says I’m going to the vet?”
Chuuya dives to the floor in an ill-fated attempt to capture the cat. The creature skitters away, all the way into the hallway, before Chuuya can even think about grasping it.
For a guy with a superpower, it sure isn’t helpful for catching a cat.
Doppo waits out that answer.
Chuuya huffs, standing up and dusting off his shirt despite the lack of dirt on it. “Will you b fine to walk it?”
“If it’s for the thing I got stabbed for, yes.”
Thus, begins the adventures of: capturing the cat, subduing the cat, transporting the cat, transporting Doppo, surviving Chuuya’s driving, surviving the walk to the veterinarian’s office lobby, and realizing, at no point in this time, that Doppo and Chuuya fell together like friends who have always known each other.
Maybe it’s something naturally to Chuuya, but it isn’t to Doppo. The surreality of his situation is not lost on him; nor is it too difficult to ignore, arguing with Chuuya on the way to the vet what a proper cat diet is supposed to look like.
(The receptionist kindly informs them that they are, in fact, both wrong.)
To the start of new adventures, Doppo thinks, eyes crinkling with a smile as Chuuya bitches in the waiting room about something in the tabloids, and to falling in with the wrong crowd.