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Getting used to Kai again isn’t easy.
Not naturally handsy, like Nakano seems to be, but he has a tendency to touch, anyway. Purposeful, and not for the sake of touch – reaching out a hand to help someone up, or insisting they hold onto him tightly on his bike. It’s almost as though the skinship is secondary, at best, his intent for contact sought for the sake of the conscious and the physical a necessary by-product.
It makes Kei feel strange.
(Guilty, maybe, is the word, though he has no reason to feel so.)
He remembers, sometimes, hands at his throat, fingers curling in on what little breath there is left, nails digging into bruised and bandaged flesh. He remembers still hands at his shoulders, his hips, his legs, holding him against cold metal as serrated edges bury themselves into the soft of his skin and dig up wells of crimson. He remembers icy wakes dripped in sweat, roused from the numbness of oblivion at hands on his body and the tightening of his restraints.
Tenderness, gentleness – even those eventually prove the precursor to pain and suffering. The touch of a human never spelled out anything good.
Kei’s chest aches, nonetheless, when he flinches away from Kai’s touch.
“Kei?”
His hand hangs in the air, unretracted, eyes bright and wide. He’s hurt, maybe – confused. Kei has never been able to tell the nuances apart, and it leaves him grasping desperately at straws.
‘Sorry,’ he thinks to say, though what for, he knows not. Sorry that even he, who laid down his life for his, was just another human to his flesh, recoiling at his touch. Sorry, that he’d left him behind, yet even now with the distance closed, they were farther than ever, paths approaching like asymptotes.
Was it enough? Had he suffered enough to repay his loyalty? Even now, Kai looks at him, molten eyes steady and sure, expression twisted in confusion but trusting that Kei has his reasons. It makes Kei’s stomach twist, wish that he was back on that table if only to avoid his gaze, as ridiculous as the notion was.
“Can I… is this alright?” Kai says, instead of asking ‘why’, hand hovering over Kei’s shoulder.
Even now, he lays down all he has for him, sacrificing the freedom given to him if only it would help Kei. When Kei finally drags his eyes up to Kai’s, apprehensive and unsure, Kai’s are more determined than he remembers, framed by exhaustion and a sudden agedness.
‘No,’ Kei thinks, even as he nods, wordlessly.
What he can give will never be enough.
So he lets Kai’s hand rest on his shoulder, palm like knives into his bones, searing into his flesh. It is, after all, all that he can give.