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The office smells like antiseptic and smoke a scent so familiar now it clings to her skin more reliably than perfume ever could. The overhead light hums with quiet insistence washing everything in sterile blue-white. Her cigarette burns steadily between two fingers the ash long and unshaken.
Suguru sits on the metal tabl half undressed, his uniform jacket and shirt tossed aside in a heap soaked through with blood. His posture is too straight to be casual too tight to be relaxed. She knows better than to ask if he’s in pain—he is. They both are. It just wears different shapes on each of them.
The gash on his shoulder isn’t fatal, but it’s close enough to demand attention. A few centimeters deeper and she'd be calling in a different kind of cleanup crew.
“You’re lucky,” she murmurs, threading the needle. “Another inch and I’d be scheduling your autopsy.”
“Would’ve saved you some time though,” he replies lightly, mouth twitching in a not-quite smile.
She hums, dragging the needle through his skin with a practiced flick of her wrist. “I don’t like paperwork enough to make that trade.”
He doesn’t flinch but she catches the shift in his breathing when the thread tugs through flesh. She doesn’t comment on it. He’s always been good at masking discomfort, too good, actually. She’s never sure if that’s discipline or something more self-destructive. Maybe both.
Another stitch in and she says it without thinking:
“Hold still, pretty boy.”
The words fall somewhere between a murmur and a sigh, lazily carried on smoke.
Silence.
He blinks. Then turns his head toward her slowly, like he’s making sure he heard it right. “What?”
She doesn't look up. “I said hold still.”
“No,” he says, and there’s the faintest edge of a laugh in his voice. “The other part.”
She exhales smoke toward the ceiling, finally meeting his gaze with a bored kind of ease. “I called you pretty.”
A beat passes. Then another. She watches his expression shift, but not quite settle—like he’s caught trying to decide what to make of it.
He gestures toward the cigarette, raising a brow. “Are you even supposed to be smoking while you stitch someone up? Or is this your way of sterilizing the air?”
She smirks around the filter. “It’s calming. For me.”
“I feel safer already.”
He doesn’t say thank you but she can see the tension bleed out of his shoulders just a touch. It’s always like this with Suguru—quiet jabs passed back and forth, a shared language of not saying too much.
“You know,” he adds, watching her hands, “you could’ve just used RCT. Would’ve healed me instantly.”
“You bled on my floor,” she says flatly. “I think I’ve earned the right to stitch you up the old-fashioned way.”
He chuckles softly low and tired. “Sure. Just didn’t know bedside manner now included flirting.”
She doesn’t dignify that with a response.
The cigarette burns closer to the filter. She presses the next stitch in a little more gently than the last. His skin is warm beneath her gloves, even now, even with the blood mostly dried. There’s something strangely intimate about tending to wounds, especially like this—no drama, no screaming, no desperate energy.
She finishes the final stitch, cuts the thread cleanly, and leans back.
“You okay?” she asks, almost as an afterthought.
He doesn’t answer right away. Just flexes his fingers in his lap, eyes distant.
“Just tired,” he says eventually.
She doesn’t push. She’s tired too.
With the gloves peeled off and tossed away, she leans over to drop the cigarette into a ceramic dish and crushes it out. There’s another shirt folded in a cabinet nearby ne of Gojou’s, probably. She grabs it without thinking about asking and tosses it in his direction.
“Here. Cleaner than what you came in with.”
He pulls it over his head slowly, careful around the shoulder, and as the fabric falls into place, she watches the way his expression settles into relative calmness.
Then, because she’s not good at silence when it gets too soft:
“You know I meant it, right?”
He pauses, mid-adjustment.
“Meant what?”
She sits back on her stool, eyes on him. “That you’re pretty.”
His gaze lingers on her face like he’s searching for the joke, but finds nothing but the usual vague boredom. He opens his mouth like he might argue—then doesn’t.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” he says eventually, quieter this time.
She shrugs, lighting a new cigarette. “Why not?”
He doesn’t give her a real answer. Just looks at her with something raw flickering behind his eyes, something she doesn’t name and doesn’t touch.
“Fine,” she says. “I won’t say it again.”
A beat.
“But I’ll still think it.”
That does something. His mouth twitches again—halfway to a smile, and this time it almost reaches his eyes.
“Thanks,” he says, barely above a whisper.
She exhales smoke toward the ceiling, eyes following the curl of it as it disappears.
“Anytime, pretty boy.”
He knocks once before letting himself in.
It’s 3:07 a.m., and she’s still at her desk, staring at a half-written report like it personally offended her. The overhead light is off, replaced by the softer, warmer hue of a lamp shoved into the corner. The shadows move slower in this light, less cruel. Still honest.
She doesn’t look up when the door opens.
Getou slips inside like he belongs there, like this is routine—and it is. His uniform is rumpled, collar askew, and the bruises stand out dark and blooming along his jaw, his temple. There’s dried blood crusted into his knuckles.
“You look like shit,” she says, tone flat, almost fond.
“Good to see you too,” he mutters, voice scratchy from disuse and exhaustion.
She jerks her chin toward the mini-fridge in the corner. “Ice packs. Top shelf.”
He goes without protest, digging one out and pressing it to his ribs with a quiet wince. His other hand finds another for his jaw. She watches the way his fingers tremble, just a little.
He doesn’t sit in the chair. He sinks. Like every bone in his body is trying to remember how to stop holding tension.
She doesn’t ask what happened.
He doesn’t offer explanation anyway.
The silence stretches between them—not awkward, not cold. Just familiar.
Her cigarette rests in the tray, barely smouldering. She doesn’t pick it back up. Instead, she gets up, crosses the room, and tosses a blanket over his shoulders without ceremony.
He flinches, but only slightly. Then sighs like it knocked something loose in him.
“Thanks,” he says, eventually.
She sits back down, pulls the report toward her again, and scribbles something she won’t be able to read tomorrow in the margin.
“Try not to bleed on the couch,” she murmurs. “It’s the good one.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
And then he closes his eyes.
They sit in Shoko’s lab like they’ve done a hundred times before—no lights except the soft green glow of some monitor she’s never bothered to turn off. The air smells like antiseptic and metal, the way it always does after too much violence.
Two canned coffees sit between them on the table, untouched but cracked open. One is already lukewarm. The other is going that way fast.
Geto has his arms folded on the tabletop, his head resting on them. Not asleep, but not fully present either. Somewhere in between. That place your brain goes when your body’s still buzzing from adrenaline and your heart hasn’t decided whether it’s safe to stop racing.
She nudges his head with the back end of her pen.
He grunts, barely moving.
“Table’s not a pillow,” she mutters.
“Don’t care,” he mumbles into his sleeve. “It’s cold. Feels nice.”
She nudges him again, a little firmer. Still gentle.
He sighs and lifts his head a few inches, just enough to sit up. Slouches instead, fingers curling around the coffee can like he might drink it this time. He doesn’t.
Silence settles again. The kind of silence they’re good at. The kind that doesn’t ask for conversation or comfort—just presence.
She takes a sip of her own coffee. It’s bitter and stale. She doesn’t mind.
Eventually, Getou says, “I hate how quiet it is after.”
She doesn’t answer. Just nods, barely perceptible. She knows what he means. The way the world feels too still after a fight. Like it’s holding its breath, waiting for the next blow.
He rubs at his face, slow and tired.
“Thanks for this,” he says, not really looking at her.
She doesn’t say you’re welcome. Just slides the untouched coffee a little closer to his hand.
He takes it this time.
And for a while, the only sound is the soft hiss of the AC and the dull click of her pen against the desk.
Shoko flicks her lighter on thumb moving in a practiced rhythm. The cigarette she lights is already bent at the filter—forgotten in a pocket too long—but she smokes it anyway like she’s punishing it for existing. The morgue is dim, cold, and buzzing faintly under a fluorescent light that needs replacing. She hasn’t bothered.
Suguru’s perched on the edge of the autopsy table again, shirtless, with dried blood cracked along his ribs. His posture is relaxed, but she knows better. He only ever sits like that when he’s hurting more than he wants to admit.
She walks over without saying much, bottle of saline in one hand, a gauze pad in the other. The heels of her boots echo once, sharply, before she stops in front of him.
“You gonna let me heal this one or let it rot for dramatic effect?” she asks, crouching to inspect the wound.
“I thought you liked your patients quiet and half-dead.”
“I like them still.” She presses the gauze against his side, deliberately rough. His breath catches sharp through his teeth.
“Always such gentle hands, Shoko.”
“You want gentle, go see someone who doesn’t know what you look like on the inside.”
He laughs, dry. She can feel the warmth of it even without looking up. There’s a slight tremble under his skin, whether from blood loss or exhaustion, she can’t tell.
“I missed this,” he says.
She doesn’t answer right away, just dabs at the wound again, cleaning off the worst of it.
“The bleeding?” she mutters.
“The company.”
She freezes for half a second, eyes flicking up to meet his. No bite behind the words. No sarcasm either. Just that slow, dangerous honesty he’s been carrying more and more lately, like it’s getting heavier and he doesn’t want to hold it alone anymore.
She tapes the gauze down with two strips of surgical tape, quick and precise.
“Don’t get sentimental,” she says.
“Too late.”
Her hands move without thinking. Needle. Thread. Suture. She’s stitched him up enough times to do it in her sleep. Has, probably.
“How long are you staying this time?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His gaze drifts across the room—toward the cabinets, the stainless-steel counters, the tray of rusting surgical scissors she keeps meaning to toss.
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me.”
Her voice is quiet, even. No tension. But it lands.
He exhales slowly. “A week. Maybe two.”
“That’s generous.”
“I’m feeling generous.”
She starts stitching. The needle bites into his skin, and he doesn’t move a muscle. Their bodies have stopped reacting to pain the way they used to. Or maybe they've just redefined what counts.
“You’re lucky it didn’t go deeper,” she says, knotting the first thread.
“You say that every time.”
“And you keep giving me chances to say it again.”
“Maybe I just like hearing your voice.”
She pauses just a second too long before making the next stitch, then ties off the final loop and steps back. The skin around the wound is inflamed, angry, but now it looks cleaner.
“You ever think about quitting?” he asks.
She peels her gloves off and tosses them in the bin. Walks over to the sink, rinses the faintest trace of blood off her fingers even though she was wearing gloves the whole time.
“No.”
“Liar.”
“I’d get bored.”
“I think you’d survive.”
She turns off the tap and dries her hands on a towel. Her reflection in the chrome faucet looks tired.
“I’d survive,” she echoes. “But it wouldn’t be living.”
When she turns back around, he’s still watching her. That same unreadable look he wears when he’s weighing a decision too large for the room it fits in.
She walks over and wipes a smear of blood from his jaw with her thumb. The skin there is warm, flushed from pain or proximity—she doesn’t know.
“You look worse than usual,” she says.
“You always say that.”
“And I’m always right.”
He catches her wrist before she can pull her hand away. There’s no pressure in it just the quiet reminder that he’s still here.
“You still think I’m pretty, though,” he says.
Her mouth twitches like she’s suppressing a laugh, or a sigh.
“Only when you’re bleeding.”
“Lucky me.”
She lets him hold her wrist for another breath. Then pulls away and walks to the cabinet. Lights another cigarette before she even opens the drawer.
“Shirt’s in there. Clean. Probably Gojou’s.”
He slides off the table, careful around his ribs. Doesn’t make a sound when his feet hit the floor, but she notices the way his fingers flex at his side, like he’s testing the stitchwork.
He pulls the shirt out of the drawer but doesn’t put it on right away. Just holds it in one hand, staring absently at the blood drying in the creases of his elbow.
“You still keeping the flask in the second drawer?”
“No,” she says, without turning. “Moved it to the fridge. Cold whiskey stings less.”
His grin cuts through the quiet.
“You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,” he says.
She exhales toward the ceiling, watches the smoke drift.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
But she doesn’t say he’s not wrong. And he doesn’t say goodbye.