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“Here,” says the girl, “looks like you need it.”
Kouyou stares at the offered pack of cigarettes. They’re cheap. Crinkled and worn at the corners. Her first instinct is to smile and gently refuse, spin a quick conversation to make the girl laugh once and then get the fuck away from her so that she can be alone.
Her second is to scoff, wrinkle her nose, turn away. Say she doesn’t smoke, say it’s a disgusting habit, say the cigarettes in her hand are cheap.
She does neither.
She reaches out and takes one.
The girl’s fingers are firm and pale next to hers. They look like Mori’s hands - the hands of a surgeon.
“Thank you,” says Kouyou, reflexively, even though she doesn’t really want to be polite right now. The girl flicks on a store-bought plastic lighter, shiny, sickening green, and lights the tip of the cigarette, and Kouyou brings her lips to it with a practiced ease, breathing in the nicotine and feeling her lungs burn.
It’s good. It’s a good feeling. She likes smoking, which is something she doesn’t admit to herself but is true.
The girl at her side doesn’t look at her. She’s shorter than Kouyou, in plain attire and pants reaching down to the ankles. Her hair is cut jagged, the edges at varying heights which frame sallow cheeks and sharp features, tied behind her with a type of carelessness which indicates purpose more than it does appearance. She wonders if the symbol stretched across the faded t-shirt matters to her, or if she just found it, somewhere - her father’s closet, a thrift shop. Something like that.
There’s a glass bottle at her feet, to the side of brown boots which look new. She drops her lighter into her jacket pocket and picks it up, swallowing whatever is in it in a long gulp. Her throat bobs, and Kouyou traces the curves of her jaw in the shadows of the gas station awning, the dip of thin cheeks, the bruises beneath her eyes.
She looks so obviously awful that Kouyou wants to shake her. Wants to ask her how she can bring herself to be seen by another this way, how she can bare her soft misery out for the world to see. Isn’t she afraid of a knife sliding through it?
But Kouyou is not here to talk, and neither is the girl. Kouyou smokes. The girl drinks. She turns, and something glints in streetlight buzzing-yellow. A hairpin, Kouyou notices, pulling the front of her hair away from her face and to the side. It’s pretty. Gold, butterfly shaped. It seems out of place, with the rest of her, when she fits so well into the fading evening light, but she doesn’t comment.
“It was from a friend,” says the girl, and Kouyou startles, blinking, and kicks herself for the lack of awareness. The girl hasn’t moved, though; she’s just turned to face her, an eyebrow raised. Like this, she looks- familiar. All pursed lips and hard eyes.
“I didn’t-”
“You were staring at it. The hairpin. Don’t be so obvious next time.”
The words make something itch along Kouyou’s arms and shoulders, along where her clothes touch her skin. She swallows it down, and breathes in more smoke.
The girl is back to not looking at her when she exhales, and Kouyou tilts her head, letting a strand of red hair fall across her face. She wouldn’t ordinarily tolerate that type of messiness, but right now-
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” says Kouyou, keeping her voice sweet. It’s hard, when the smoke is so bitter. “Especially considering that you’ve been so-”
“Mhm,” says the girl, blowing out smoke into the night. Her eyes are unfocused, somewhere else, and Kouyou might as well not have said anything at all.
There’s something hot at her cheeks, at her fingertips, at her waist, where a knife is tucked, cool against her skin. She ignores it. She makes herself ignore it. She breathes in and watches as the girl holds a cigarette between her fingers with a practiced motion. They’re dipping, a bit, at times, like she’s used to holding something heavier.
They wait in silence. The girl doesn’t seem bothered. Her body is the type of relaxed that reminds Kouyou of the snake which lives in the Boss’s office, hidden behind a tank, blinking at everyone who passes through with beady black eyes and venom ready at his fangs. The Boss had picked it up by the head, once, and sunk its teeth into the wrist of someone who had displeased him, and turned to Kouyou as the man had wreathed on the floor, a smile on his face.
Mori had been there, as well. His eyes as he had looked at that man had been flinty, not joyful and not horrified. He had reminded her more of the snake in that room than the other man, and had administered the antidote without flinching.
She admires him, sometimes. For being able to turn things on and off like that.
She wonders who exactly it is that she’s sharing cigarettes with.
“If you’re looking for flowers, there’s a store over that way,” says the girl, idly. It takes Kouyou a second to realize the shape of the statement in the air, weaving between fog and stone.
“I’m not- why would I be looking for flowers?”
The girl waves the hand holding the cigarette in the air. Smoke trails after her and dissipates. “This place is only really near a graveyard.”
“You make a lot of assumptions,” says Kouyou. Her ears ring, and the necklace around her throat suddenly feels hot and tight and strangling. She makes herself breathe in smoke and hold, burn, eyes water, and only then does she breathe out, just to prove to herself that she still can.
The girl shrugs. “Am I wrong?”
Kouyou really does not like this girl.
“Why did you give this cigarette to me?”
The girl ignores her. It sends a sharp spike of irritation through Kouyou’s chest. She clicks her tongue, tries again, brittle and barbed,
“You don’t know me.”
“I told you,” says the girl, after a few seconds, “You looked like you needed it.”
Her lips tick up. They’re thin, cheap pink lipstick lazily smeared atop. Kouyou wants to roll her eyes about it. The lack of technique, the lack of care. The lack of caution.
“And I’m a doctor, so trust me, I know what cure you need.”
A doctor. Kouyou isn’t sure whether to believe her or not. What is it with the doctors she meets being so uncomfortably young?
“What, did you get your degree in the middle of a forest?” slips out, twisted up in skepticism and sarcasm. She doesn’t bother to blame herself. This girl cannot be older than her, and she’s certain even Mori waited five or so years after this to don his white coat. Unless she doesn’t have a degree, and she means she’s one of these illegal, underground doctors who learn from each other and give varying levels of care that she no longer trusts after seeing Mori’s list of awful ones.
“Close,” the girl shrugs, “the middle of a war.”
Kouyou pauses. War had devastated everyone. Some people had sold their daughters to pay off debts, and some had lost them in the gamble. Some people had established systems along broken-down lines of what used to be a functioning society and figured it out. She wonders which of the doctors who refuse to work with the Port Mafia had taught this girl, that she’s so confident calling herself one.
“Ah.”
“You sound like you think you know what happened,” says the girl, voice drawling and casual. She takes out a cigarette and her lighter, holds the lit cigarette to her lips with the same hand that has the glass bottle pressed between two of her back fingers. She breathes in, breathes out grey smoke, and takes another drink. Her exhaustion looks more willing to cut, as fog drifts from their feet to their knees and the world turns just a bit duller.
“Don’t I?” asks Kouyou, and now she’s- curious is not the right word, not for the type of fierce need that echoes through her chest. It’s not a good or a bad need, but one born of a lifetime of being thrown from one thing to another without any weapons but the demon at her beck and call and the information in her ears.
She should know why this girl calls herself a doctor, because there’s an explanation. She should know instinct rarely equates to action, and her anxiety doesn’t mean she will not be able to deal with this girl if she winds up being a threat. She doesn’t know this girl, or know of this girl, and that should mean, right now, that she’s not someone to worry about.
But.
“Do tell,” says the girl, sounding amused. A car rumbles to life from somewhere around the building, tires rolling over stone and gravel. Kouyou finishes her cigarette and fishes out an old handkerchief from her pocket to drop the smoking butt inside. It’s grey, burning ash turning droll against the off-white. At her side, the girl laughs.
“So fancy , my, my, just drop it on the floor like the rest of us common folk.”
“Is it fancy to have manners?” asks Kouyou, tilting her head just so.
It is, is the thing. Faking small things like this, habits and subtle mannerisms, are what make it so easy to fake a noble upbringing. The upper crust are so shallow, that only a few small actions and tidbits of knowledge can get you into their circles, passing by the same way fish pass through streams.
Kouyou likes it. Those assumptions. She likes the implications of a false noble birth and what it could mean. She likes how it separates her from the young girl running around in the dirt without a care in the world, or the girl who sat at her father’s bedside, or the woman who never bothered to see him as he was dying.
“I don’t know, you didn’t have any medical care wherever you lived so some underground doctor or traveller taught you enough that you’ve decided the title fits?”
It’s carefully broad. People like to talk, when you give them somewhere to start.
The girl hums, and her smile does not change. Bemused. Aggravating.
“Close, actually.”
She flicks open the pack of cigarettes with her finger and slides another one out. She offers it to Kouyou, held at the edges of her fingertips like drops of water about to fall. Kouyou stares down at it, at the thin white wrapping and the orange end. She stares at the girl’s hands, plain nails cut down to the quick, stares up steady, unshaking wrists and wound forearms.
Her skin is-
Flawless. Completely flawless. Unscarred along her arms and her face and the exposed parts of her collarbone and neck in a way which feels almost unnatural. Unsettling. Perhaps Kouyou is simply used to people who live violent lives.
“Just close?” Kouyou asks, and lets the irritation up her throat and soak into her tongue. The girl just tilts her head, smiling a little, in a way Kouyou is coming to realize is somewhere on the line between fake and real that she despises.
The best lies always have some truth in them. That doesn’t mean that Kouyou has to like it when she’s the victim.
“Just close,” the girl echoes. “You’re missing a few details.”
Kouyou doesn’t click her tongue, or anything so obvious. She thinks the girl knows anyway, from the way she finally turns to face Kouyou, fully, turning her shoulder to lean against the rough brick of the gas station wall.
Her eyes are shaded. Something familiar in them. Something which Kouyou doesn’t like, the same way that she doesn’t like kintsugi pottery, which has once-broken edges emphasized instead of smoothed over.
The girl says, “Why don’t you save me the bullshit and tell me what you really want to ask?”
Kouyou does not like this girl.
“Why did you give me that cigarette?”
“I told you,” says the girl, “I’m a doctor.”
“Occupation, not motivation,” says Kouyou, still not taking the offered second. Mentally, she adds, and what sort of doctor encourages their patients to smoke? even though she knows the answer to that, and the answer is many. The less than legal ones, at any rate. Mori just chides lightly at the habit, though he never partakes himself. Probably because the lifestyles of those in the Port Mafia are likely to kill them long before any cigarettes get the chance.
She’s wondered before if it reminded him of something, or someone, and settled on ‘probably’, to be used at a later date. She’s still waiting for it - for that day.
The girl scoffs. She flicks a strand of dark hair over her shoulder, and the gold of her hairpin shifts, just slightly. “Anyone ever tell you not to look a gift horse in the mouth? A thank you would be nice.”
“How giving of you,” Kouyou mocks, unable and unwilling to mask it. The girl’s expression is unchanging, in the shadows of the gas station and the low, dead evening. She looks almost like a ghost, for all of a second, before she blinks back into reality with a slow, creeping smile.
“How giving of me,” the girl repeats, expression on her lips growing in size and in teeth, seeming to delight in the way it narrows Kouyou’s eyes to slits. “Maybe I was just bored. Why does it matter so much to you?”
No one does things without reason, Kouyou thinks, eyes flicking back to the girl’s hand. The second offered cigarette. It hangs there between them like a rope swinging in the wind, cut away from the tension and left behind just a few minutes behind the rest of the world.
“Why are you here, then,” Kouyou asks her instead of answering. The girl's eyes flick over her once, clear in a way which raises her hackles and the hair along her arms. They’re the same color as Mori’s.
“I was running away,” shrugs the girl, leaning back again. Her shoulder blades touch the red brick, her hair splayed out across it behind her head like a halo. Her eyes stick to Kouyou. “But then I decided the only reasons I had were stupid ones, so I’m going back.”
For a second, Kouyou’s almost thrown - she hadn’t expected such an… honest response. Only a second, but it’s enough that the girl sighs and raises an eyebrow.
“At least pack a bag, you know.”
There’s a knife tucked into the inside of her kimono sleeve. Kouyou imagines flicking it into her fingers, the touch of cool, familiar metal against her palm, and slicing it through this girl’s throat.
“I’m not running away,” she manages, her voice steady and cool in a way that she doesn’t feel. “I’m not a fool.”
“A fool?” the girl hums. “Is that what you’d call it?”
Someone who doesn’t know how to accept their place in the world, thinks Kouyou, someone who is stupid enough to dream of a better life instead of surviving the one they have. Yes.
“What would you call it?”
The girl shrugs. She finally pulls the cigarette away, puts it to her own lips and lights it. She breathes in and breathes out; the smoke is white and acrid. It burns Kouyou’s eyes.
“Depends on where you’re running from,” she offers, after a minute. A smile creeps its way onto her face again, wide and too sharp. “There are some things you just can’t run away from, though I wouldn’t call someone who tries a fool for it.”
The smile is disquieting; it feels like a theatre mask, something painted in too-bright colors and too-harsh, lined features. Kouyou swallows, looks away; out into the foggy evening to the painted blend of grey and sunset-purple in the sky above. The clouds drift by, slow and exhausted, dripping into one another like dew off a leaf in a forest.
“Then what would you call them?”
“Desperate.”
The girl pushes herself off the wall and drops her cigarettes and lighter into her jacket pocket. She tips her head back and lets her cigarette hang in one hand, holds the glass bottle to her lips with the other. Kouyou watches as she swallows once, twice, three times, before she finishes with a soft gasp that should be satisfaction but is just a few feet too far away, and looks down again.
“You could stand some lessons in etiquette,” snaps Kouyou, to push out the spiking, raw feeling crawling up her throat and through her chest. She hates that word so, so much. Desperate . That’s a word for young girls with skinned knees who can look their fathers in the eye and fools who follow love thinking it will get them anywhere but hell.
The girl’s smile is back on her face. It’s less wide, no less unnerving. It’s not a happy one.
“Go fuck yourself,” she says, lightly. Her footsteps are lost in the sounds of cars on the road and footsteps somewhere behind them as she walks over to a black trash can, metal gleaming in the damp air, and tosses her bottle inside. The clang of glass feels too loud.
Kouyou watches as the girl walks away from the gas station. Away from the shadows beneath the awning, from the rough, old red brick and the chipped sidewalk. She walks into thick fog, which swirls up from around her knees to her ribs. More of the strands of her hair have come loose from when she was leaning against the wall, magenta eyes flickering between Kouyou and something in the distance that she hadn’t been interested in sharing.
As she disappears into the evening, Kouyou hopes she never meets this girl again.
She doesn’t smoke.