Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Wisping graffiti always decorates the corridors, but Suo finds that the bolder lines are bent in a way that carries the cacophony from upstairs further than usual today. Sound waves personified, they take the shape of curling rapids and curved horns, painted in thick drapes of dark against light. He eyes the spots where the spraycans lingered years ago, blotches dripping around bulging dragon eyes.

Another bang sounds from overhead. Suo walks, calm and steady, and does not have to guess what the source is.

Sakura’s swipes graze bare skin under a just-awakening sky, blurs of color against a backdrop of chainlink fencing and the biting chill of early morning. Suo stands just outside the door to the rooftop, watching patiently, as two pairs of feet skip and slide over concrete. He is continuously surprised Hiragi agrees to these early matches, although he has a suspicion there is some sort of blackmail involved.

Hiragi deflects, and Sakura ducks, spins his whole body weight to sweep his legs—his ankle is caught in an iron grip and promptly thrown into a group of plastic chairs with a grunt and a clatter. Suo is more worried about the chairs than his captain. If they keep breaking them, he’ll have to be called into a meeting with Umemiya about property damage again.

Sakura rolls with the momentum, soles skidding, and leaps back into the fray with hunger in his eyes. Suo glances to the pavilion to the left, all creaking wood and rustling leaves, and debates taking a seat. He eyes how close they’re getting to the tennis table and decides against it, in the event he has to pull it out of the way at record speed.

Footfalls tap behind him in a familiar rhythm, echoed against big empty walls beyond closed doors. Suo takes one generous step to the right when a tabletennis paddle is hurled in his direction, clanging against the door right where his head used to be. A muffled yelp sounds through the threshold.

Suo greets Nirei with an easy, pleasant smile and a good morning when he meekly opens the door, afraid of more beheading projectiles. He smiles back, chapped lips wobbly, and they both simply stand there and watch as Sakura barrels directly into Hiragi with a yell, backing it with a solid uppercut that aims to stagger. It doesn’t, but the only reason as to why is that it’s Hiragi.

The breeze picks at his tasseled earrings, and the ends of his hair tickle his cheekbones. The sounds of skin scraping skin, of knuckles cutting flesh meshes with the peaceful hum of leaves and wind, creating an odd, stilted sort of atmosphere. Suo chances removing his watchful eye from the spar and his attention strays to the quiet town beyond rooftop fencing.

“It’s only seven…” Nirei speaks up just over the leaves, and even if it’s a simple statement, it says a lot, and he agrees wholeheartedly. It is only seven, and here they are. “Did he at least eat breakfast beforehand?”

Suo moves his gaze to Nirei, who looks up from the phone in his hand to Sakura’s sweaty, panting form, and then to his co-vice. He’s biting his lip again, canines along old scabs. Suo has the urge to flick his chin to get him to stop.

He turns back to the fight, where Hiragi is growing increasingly annoyed and the Look in Sakura’s eyes is turning increasingly desperate. “He sure didn’t!” he answers with faux cheer, and doesn’t need to look at Nirei to know the face he’s making.

His words are tight with a bitter undertone, discolored an ugly pale green like the tomatoes growing in patches at the other end of the roof. He clasps his hands against the small of his back a little tighter to dig out the unease from its resting place.

Sakura stumbles, coughs bloodied saliva against the concrete, pants as it drips, and then sways to his feet with wild eyes on Hiragi. The King asks for a coffee break, a rare thing. Sakura barely gives him the time of day.

It is seven in the morning, Suo mentally reminds his beloved captain in the event that he suddenly gains telepathy. The time of day is seven in the morning.

Nirei writes something in his notebook, face grim. Suo dimly wonders what it is, and looks on.

+

“Why do we have’ta do this again?”

Gravel crunches under their soles in their unique little patterns Suo has come to memorize. Nirei’s is a quick tempo with his shorter legs, a little clumsy and dragged; Sakura’s is sure-footed and sturdy compared to it, but he drags his feet on purpose.

“Umemiya asked!” Nirei answers over his shoulder, ahead of them both. The box he’s carrying seems just a tad too heavy for him. Suo would offer to switch, but he’s pretty sure his own is even heavier.

Sakura, fingers hooked around the base of the box in his arms and repeatedly blowing his own hair out of his eyes, decides to taint the peaceful morning air with a scowl. Suo imagines it’s a little painful with his green-blotched eyebrow, busted open and healing as it is. “Can’t he do this shit himself…?”

“He mentioned being caught up with the orphanage kids this morning,” Nirei answers dutifully, turning around with a grind in the gravel to walk backwards, “Something about a doctor appointment for one of the younger ones.”

Suo’s gaze side-eyes Sakura with a glint. “Is lifting these too hard for you, Sakura?” he teases.

“Shut the hell up.”

Furin High looms with the darker clouds today, and the air smells like a storm. Suo relishes the coolness, thinks he feels the tiniest blotches of cold against his skin that spell the beginnings of a sprinkle. Despite the old throb it typically brings to his head, he chooses to enjoy the breeze before the heavy rain kicks in. Really the only thing he likes about colder weather is the wind.

“Umemiya said to leave em right inside the door to the roof,” Nirei says, still meandering backwards with his gaze seemingly mesmerized by the sway of Suo’s tassel earrings.

“Nirei, the pole,” Suo kindly reminds him.

“Hm?” comes, and then a ough as he turns around and effectively rams his knuckles directly into the metal of it with a throng. The noise Suo expects him to make is just barely tamped down to a meager mmph.

A good job is thrown to the wind by Sakura, ever-helpful. Suo smiles when he catches the twinkle of fondness there in gold.

They trudge along the edges of the road, on the concrete of the sidewalk, and then through the dirt of the main courtyard. They’re set in shadow, the walls of the school soaking in the dreary morning rays as much as they can before they’re blotted out by mist and clouds.

Nirei takes it slow up the school steps, soles clicking against cold tile. They follow close behind as he adjusts the hold he has on his cargo, barely getting one hand out grab the door.

He pulls. It stays shut with a clunk against the locking mechanisms. He tries again with a yank, and then says, “Oh. It’s locked.”

Sakura lets his shoulders drop and tips his head back. “Aw c’mon, he couldn’ta done that for us?”

Nirei turns, one hand still on the grip of the door as he gives a wobbly smile. “He probably just forgot… I’ve heard Umemiya can be kinda scatterbrained.”

“That’s one word for it,” Sakura grumbles in a tone that convinces neither of them.

Suo examines the school grounds behind them without much hope for finding an answer as Nirei considers their options. Who the hell locks a student-run delinquent school is thrown out by Sakura, and Suo distantly hears Nirei’s answer but isn’t particularly invested enough to register it.

He turns back around as Nirei barks a we’re not kicking it in! “We can just—we can leave them here? Maybe?” Nirei points up and almost drops his box. “The overhang will protect em from the rain.”

“I don’t halfass jobs I wholeass em!” Sakura barks. Suo is seconds away from making fun of him before he scoffs and trudges forward. “Just—ugh, hold this.”

He plops his own box into Nirei’s arms, who almost topples with a yelp. Sakura rummages through his pockets and Suo, curious, peers around Nirei’s box tower to see him reveal… two bobby pins.

Suo watches him bite the ends of them both, bend them down over his lip, and then crouch in front of one of the double doors. He blinks as he slots them both into the lock.

“What’s he doing? I can’t see!” Nirei tries to peek around his stack of boxes, bouncing a little on his feet, and then he slumps his shoulders and presses his forehead to the cardboard, “Please don’t tell me he’s getting a running start—”

“Shut up I need to hear it!” Sakura calls over his shoulder.

Around them, he hears the whisk of cool air bringing splatterings of droplets to the dirt. “He’s… picking the lock,” Suo answers a little numbly, the beginnings of a smile on his face on pure instinct to smother the surprise.

“What?!”

“Shut yer traps!”

They hear clicks over the sprinkle of the sky. Suo taps quietly along the tiles to look over Sakura’s shoulder, his hands shifting one pin around minutely while the other presses up against the inner side of the metal. 

From the sliver of his friend’s face he can see at this angle, he’s staring through the door in concentration, somewhere between the metal and the floor beyond it. He notes with private delight that his tongue is sticking out, bitten between his teeth.

More clicks, and he watches in fascination as Sakura seems to reel the pin out and start shallow again, migrating farther into the slot as he looks for something they’re not privy to. Suo can’t say he knows too much about locks—perhaps he should learn.

“We could get in trouble!” Nirei whisper-yells behind them, leaning around his stack of boxes with shaking arms and wide eyes.

“I don’t think this school enforces detention, Nirei,” Suo says fondly, and then leans over Sakura and hopes he doesn’t feel trapped by the presence, “Do you carry those pins around with you everywhere?”

“What did I fuckin’ say,” Sakura almost whispers, too distracted to inject any venom into it, “And yeah, you got a problem with it?” More clicks, another reel back in to repeat a process Suo isn’t versed in. He seems to be doing just fine even with the noise.

“Nope!” he smiles warmly, straightening out his posture so he’s not looming. Even with the few feet of distance between them, Sakura’s shoulders were stiffening. They’ll get there eventually.

Two more clicks in quick succession and a twisting of the other hand, and Sakura is pocketing the pins and standing up. Suo takes a stride or two back as his captain grabs the door handle and yanks it open, that ever-present dank smell bursting from the corridors.

“There,” Sakura unceremoniously grumbles, kicking the door open the rest of the way and turning to take his box from Nirei, who stares in awe, “Damn egghead makin’ us carry boxes all the way here an’ he doesn’t even bother to unlock the fuckin’ place…”

Sauntering through the threshold with his cargo, he looks over his shoulder as Nirei stares and Suo thinks, bruised eyebrow even darker in the dreary lighting. “Guys comin’?”

He blinks out of his trance with a smooth, easy smile. “Of course,” he concedes, following him through the threshold. Nirei trails behind, an odd look on his face.

Suo agrees with the silent sentiment, and spends the next two-minute trek up the school floors mulling over the implications.

Their walk past all the graffiti and the swirled colors is spent in a companionable silence, but one that’s tinted with just a whisper of that haunted feeling. Of that subtle, quiet worry that permeates a room whenever Sakura does something… distempering. It’s like smelling smoke without seeing a fire; like hearing only half of an SOS signal.

Suo keeps a mental laundry list of all the… things Sakura does that make him falter. He dismally adds this to the bottom.

The school feels a bit stagnant without all the students to fill the halls with noise and movement, and their footfalls up the stairs echo farther than he thinks they should. Even with all the kids bustling around from day-to-day, parts of the school are still pretty dusty and dank. The windows kindly show them all the particles loitering in the sunbeams.

They’re halfway up the stairwell when Nirei finally gathers the courage.

“Hey Sakura?” is echoed out against the walls and the backdrop of their footsteps.

Their captain hums boredly. Nirei takes a beat to reign in whatever anxieties he has. “Where did you learn to do that?”

Suo admires it, Nirei’s quest for knowledge, even if the journey is often stumbled and perhaps a bit nosy. What he admires more, however, is his bravery in the act—asking the questions the air has been prohibited from holding. It’s not stupidity; Suo will defend against that accusation valiantly.

It’s trust; trust that Sakura won’t take it as pestering, as pressure, but as simple curiosity or concern from a friend. Trust that Sakura won’t give an answer if he’s not ready to, won’t stretch himself thin for Nirei’s sake.

For a few beats they move up the stairs like the question had hit deaf ears, the shuffle of clothes and cardboard the only sounds other than the rain outside, still light, hitting the windows.

Sakura adjusts the box in his hands, and doesn’t look back at them when he says it. “Had to.”

It doesn’t exactly answer the question. In fact, it raises several more.

“H—” Nirei starts, and though he stands ahead of Suo in their little line, he doesn’t need to see his face to imagine the wobbly grimace, “‘Had to?’”

The rain patter outside gets louder as they near the roof. It’s a thunderless fall so far, but Suo feels something strangely similar rumbling in his chest already.

“Yeah,” Sakura says, and there is a warning in his tone. It’s not angry, and it’s not threatening; it’s a gentle, but firm hush, a finger to lips, a blindfold over big eyes. “Had to.”

Nirei gets the jist and clicks his mouth shut. The trust still hangs between them, mutual and comforting. Suo thinks about how fragile Sakura’s end of it feels, like he’s scared of holding on.

+

The tapping of Sakura’s foot against the floor tiles paints an antsy measurement of time. Suo places a hand over his knee in a silent plea to stop. It does nothing.

He can hear the vents in the floors somewhere behind him—Umemiya must have finally gotten the central air working again. It brings a nice shower of white noise to the otherwise boisterous classroom, laughter and chair shrieks berating the walls.

He thinks he smells Nirei’s cheap body spray from where he sits beside him, tapping away at his phone’s keyboard—soap suds and sharp citrus, the type of stuff found on Lawson shelves. Burning dust and hair tinges it, the vent’s dry heat mingling with the dank consistencies of the hallway air. 

Something similar radiates from their captain; a dry, circulating whirl of purpose—Suo imagines metal getting sandblasted, friction endlessly building.

“Give it a rest man,” Anzai laughs from off to the right, engrossed in a game with Takanashi that, as far as Suo knows, is being made up on the spot, “Your face won’t heal if you boil your damn blood away.”

Sakura angles a glare just past Suo’s shoulder that would kill if it weren’t for the fact that he seems to have a soft spot for the kid. His right eye sports some nasty swelling. There’s messy bandages along his cut-up chin, but in Suo’s opinion, the worse is the bruising along his ear, obtained from a blunt impact to concrete.

He says he hears out of it fine, and thankfully his balance seems intact—suggestions of doctor visits were shut down with venom on his breath.

“I’ve had way worse!” he growls, bruising molding to expressive, and probably painful, frustration, “You’ve seen me with worse.”

“That’s not the boast you think it is,” comes from Takanashi this time, and Sakura’s mercy unfortunately ends somewhere directly past Anzai.

Their captain barks out various obscenities they’ve all heard before, chairs getting kicked away and decks being shoved. Nirei pops out of his seat to tame him—Suo looks on with a bright smile etched to his face.

“To Hiragi’s credit, Sakura, maybe he didn’t want to spar because he also needs to heal up,” Kiryu shrugs against his deck, jacket pooling. He’s surrounded by loose-leaf paper and fiddling with the ends of what looks like an origami frog. “You beat each other black an’ blue like every fifteen hours.”

“Or,” Suo cheerfully adds, “He’s taken pity on you because you look like a fruit that took a tumble down a mountain.”

“I look like a what?!” Takanashi is promptly forgotten, and the heat death of the universe is now staring Suo through the skull. Warm!

Easy, Sakura, easy—! is a constant backdrop from Nirei. It’s not doing much, but Suo appreciates the earnest effort. “Why don’t you just relax for a while? I told you; sit down and enjoy the birdsong.”

Suo smiles, easy and loose and eye up in a crescent just the way Sakura hates, as he points at the treetops outside of the window. “Look; I think I see a brown-eared bulbul. And there’s a eurasian nuthatch over there,” he observes, “Oh, and a fluffy-backed tit-babbler! You don’t see those every day.”

Silence reigns over newly-stilled chaos. “... Is he makin’ shit up?”

Suo leans back to meet the eyes of Kurita, somewhere beyond Sakura’s baffled expression—of which he burns into his memory. “Only the last one!” he smiles with delight. Fluffy-backed tit-babblers don’t live in Japan.

Sakura stares, shoulders slumped and expression somewhere along the edge of the acceptance stage of grief. It flickers to bargaining. “Spar with me,” Sakura tries, “And I’ll… look at birds with you or whatever afterward.”

A valiant attempt, and also the sixth time he’s asked him this week alone. In his periphery, he sees Nirei make a tiny mark in his notebook, expression bleak.

Suo beams at him again. “Nice try!”

Depression makes its entrance, something like worth a shot being grumbled under his breath as Sakura slumps and turns to the rest of the class, looking a bit like a dejected puppy, though nobody dares say it. In a messy unison, they all shake their heads solemnly.

For a moment, it’s a sandblaster aimed at their chests, fixated on something unknown; obsessed with training, obsessed with studying adaptive fighting styles and quick reaction times, cursing himself to a level lower than dirt if he’s too slow even once.

It’s like he’s trying to be everybody every chance he gets—trying to fight like every good fighter he’s met, trying to lead like every good leader he’s ever been under.

His punches, from what Suo has heard, feel like Kaji’s now, too much focus on the wind-up to make up for his comparative lack of strength. His kicks are almost like Tomiyama’s; not quite lesser but telegraphed to the moon and back. His footwork is like Kiryu’s, fluid and cold, but easily tangled from lack of practice.

And none of it works together. The less it works, the more Sakura wants to perfect it, and the more he wants to perfect it, the less it works.

None of them get it. But Suo wants to.

All options exhausted, Sakura makes his way back to his seat. He collapses into the chair like his strings had been cut, and Suo watches him settle his chin on the desk, wince, then switch to his unbruised cheek.

He stares holes through the window, and there is an aura of unrest about him that makes anybody within a three foot radius start sweating. Suo pats his shoulder in a manner that may or may not be read as condescending.

He’s left alone in that coiled-up, pounce-ready state for approximately fifteen seconds, and then a paper frog is promptly flicked at his forehead.

He jumps, much to the amusement of Anzai, who wheezes, claps his knee, and lets his tight exhale dissolve into giggles. Suo feels himself beginning to grin as Sakura leans away from the attacker, staring it down in bafflement.

Kiryu’s laughter rings like windchimes—fitting. “Why don’t you make some paper frogs with me and maybe you’ll calm down,” he grins, with his hands, his voice, and his movements all lilted to a mesmerizing waltz.

He holds an origami fish in one hand, and presses down the back end of another frog with his other. It springs up when he lets his finger off, and Sakura jolts minutely in his seat again when it hops to his table, landing somewhere on his arm and tumbling off the desk.

“What the f—” he mumbles over Anzai’s second wheeze, and gently takes the frog from Nirei’s offered hand, who picks it up with sparkles in his eyes.

Studying it like it’s a contraption with wires and circuits, his gaze flicks up to Kiryu in a new light, as if he’s suddenly uncovered his true identity. “What the hell?” he exclaims succinctly.

All Kiryu does is tap his desk, where his touch jottles a few pieces of loose-leaf, and Suo knows exactly what he’s doing. Eyes meet around Kiryu and Sakura’s bubble, exchanging hopeful glances.

“I can show youuu,” he singsongs, rapping his fingers along the wood, “It’s just folding. Even you can handle folding, right?”

Something new lights up in Sakura’s gaze, something fiery. Hook, line, and sinker—the gazes around them turn relieved when Sakura scoots forward with a competitive bark about respect, and doing it with his eyes closed. He’s handed a piece of paper, and he takes it with vigor all the way down to his fingertips.

Suo doesn’t understand how he has so much energy, even after all the training these past few weeks. Though his stamina in combat is solid, he still never thought of Sakura as the hyperactive type. Watching him put one hundred ten percent of his attention into origami of all things is quite a sight, though. He was right—he truly doesn’t halfass anything.

Make sure the folds are tight comes from a Kiryu that is not teaching Sakura origami for the hell of it. Suo catches his gaze, shoots him a look that he imagines is a bit embarrassing on him, but gratitude is not to be ashamed of. Kiryu winks. One fourth of the class huddles around his desk, suddenly very interested in origami.

The next hour of their patrol break is spent giving Sakura an outlet. He is hilariously bad at folding paper.

+

His captain stares at the arcade machines with the same expression an overwhelmed cat would make and Suo does his very, very best not to laugh.

To his credit, it’s always quite loud in here. It’s a mosh pit of video game sound effects and chiptune music, only a few identifiable tunes poking out above the rest. Guitar riffs and synths from the more modern cabinets create a blanket for the older to build on; there’s the telltale beginning of Pac-Man coming from somewhere in the middle of the arcade, and sound effects from Asteroid weave in between.

Suo can’t see them from where he’s standing, but he hears a group of younger kids grappling with the messy controls of a racing title somewhere in the back. They’re trash-talking each other, and laughing wholeheartedly. He considers giving his coins to them, but Sakura is right here for the taking—he’s not going to pass up the opportunity to spoil the most starved kid alive.

“What’s the point of all this?” Sakura asks above all the music, glaring (pouting) at Suo and Nirei, who gaze at him expectantly. The blacklights clinging to the ceiling make the white side of his hair pop, and Suo can’t stop himself from staring at the one white cowlick floating in the dark.

He supposes it was unfair to simply expect him to walk up to one and start playing; Sakura is the type to follow breadcrumb trails when it comes to life’s more simple joys.

“What do you mean?” Nirei laughs, colorful shirt underneath his uniform burning in a bright neon pink, “To have fun!”

Sakura blinks, a half-scowl laid along his face like he’s unsure whether or not he should be mad about this. Somebody starts up a shooter somewhere behind Suo, roboticized gunfire beaming through speakers. His captain’s gaze flicks to it, studying the middling graphics of zombies attacking the screen.

“I think we should start with something classic,” Suo says, “The controls are often simpler anyway.”

“Oh, good idea,” Nirei replies, looking around. His embroidery of his uniform’s collar pops in the low light, yellow borders almost glowing. “I thought I saw Kiryu heading for the claw machines earlier.”

“Shall we?” Suo kindly looks to Sakura as Nirei meanders around corners to find the claws. Sakura, unsure, trails after him. The white bandage on his right cheek glows in a similar vein to his hair, making his face a bit like a checkerboard.

They walk through aisles of cabinets, and Suo lets his friends lead as he slows. He can’t help the joy that comes from watching Sakura experience new things; there’s a bittersweetness to it, a bit of a sour aftertaste, but it’s worth it for the moments of glee he spots in that guarded, bruised face.

His friend studies the glowing tiled patterns on the carpeted floor with a bit of wonder in his eyes, passes a kid that can’t be older than six who loses a mech-fighting game and throws out a nasty expletive. A girl around their age finishes off an impressively done song on Dance Dance Revolution.

Suo observes as Sakura eyes somebody playing Bubble Bobble, listening to the cheery music in a gentle pause of his steps. He slows in the middle of the aisle, and his eyes dart to the vacant cabinet on the other side, another Bubble Bobble in its preview sequence.

Suo smiles knowingly. “Nirei!” he calls ahead, peering over Sakura’s shoulder, “I think we have a winner.”

Both of his friends turn around, Nirei with bright eyes, and Sakura with an astonished scowl. “Huh?”

Suo pats the corner of the Bubble Bobble cabinet, simple circles glowing along its side. Nirei coos as he bounces up to it, exclaiming something about nostalgia and catchy music. Suo is rummaging in his coin purse when Sakura’s eyes flick to his hands and his next scowl is tainted with a blush.

“If I’m playing anything here, I’m paying for it,” he nips, stuffing a hand in one pocket and coming out with a few coins.

“So staunch and independent!” Suo grins to the clang of coins being slipped into the machine. He leans over the console with his hands behind his back, smile cheerful. “Can’t I spoil you just once?”

Sakura mumbles something like in your dreams under his breath, just loud enough to be heard over the arcade cacophony. The game starts, and Sakura skims over the characters on the screen and panics a little when he’s dropped into the corner of the first level with no guidance.

Suo is vaguely aware of Nirei pointing at the buttons, controls slipping from his lips as Sakura moves a little cartoon dinosaur around in amateur, unsure movements. He watches his character jump and shoot bubbles for a moment, jaunty chiptune worming their way into their heads, but then his gaze moves up to Sakura’s face and stays there.

The blacklights make his one golden eye glow. Suo wouldn’t exactly describe it as a rich shade—more like a sun-bleached, labyrinthian one. There’s deeper pinpricks within it, specks of sandstone and butterscotch ringing around the lighter tones.

It pops even more in the arcade, surrounded by grainy shadow. All of Sakura’s “imperfections” pop out here, under blacklight that draws out the neons and hides the subtleties. His split hair, the heterochromia, the bandage on his cheek, the butterfly one near his hairline that’s camouflaged with the rest of the white. His sharper-than-average canines poke out when Nirei directs him straight into an enemy on accident.

Many things cross his mind when he looks at Sakura, when he takes in that unique look, but none of them involve the words Sakura seems to associate himself with. It’s frustrating, how far away the world can feel sometimes—Suo thinks he has a grasp on its mechanisms, and then Sakura throws a wrench in all that; a good kid, detested.

He prides himself on understanding the world around him, on being able to predict it. Suo does not understand this, this hatred for somebody so all-encompassing. He doesn’t think he ever will.

But maybe that’s not what’s important. Because beyond the happy Bubble Bobble jingle, Suo thinks he sees a hint of excitement in that gold, a twitch of the corners of his mouth.

And then it’s ruined by the game over screen.

“Shit,” Sakura curses in a hushed spray, and Nirei lets out that marigold giggle.

“Sorry, sorry!” he laughs, hands on his knees, “I haven’t played in a long time!”

“I’ll say!” Sakura barks.

“I’ll make it up to you with the two-player thingy! I can play with you.” Hands dig for a wallet. “We’ll get right back to where we were in no time if there’s two of us shooting.”

Suo smiles. “While you two do that, I’ll be at the claw machine,” he calls over the noise, ignoring Nirei’s odd look, “Sakura, may I burrow some coins?”

“Huh? Yeah, I guess,” Sakura mumbles, mindlessly dropping a few coins into Suo’s waiting palm, and then he pauses, “Wait, didn’t you just —?”

“Thank you kindly!”

“Hey!”

Suo careens around two boys to avoid death, and then attempts to hunt down Kiryu.

He finds him in the exact place he expects him to be—eyeing a claw machine from all angles like the government is personally going to kill him if he doesn’t succeed in pulling his prize. Suo observes him for a while, simply standing there and watching the way he crouches down and bends around the machine to press himself against the glass, until he clears his throat.

If he seems surprised by his presence, he certainly doesn’t show it. “What’s the scheme today?” Kiryu asks without looking at him, reaching around the corner of the machine to tug the analog stick a hair to the left.

Suo watches the claw machine follow the movement, shaking on its flimsy metal tracks. “What ever do you mean? I don’t scheme.”

He hums knowingly. Suo finds himself fond of the way Kiryu seems to be able to sidle up to his personality. “Sure you don’t,” he says, adjusting the stick again just a tad before he clicks the button down.

It lowers, and they both watch through the glass as the metal claws close in around one of the bigger stuffed animals stocked under bright LEDs. Suo’s not exactly sure what it’s supposed to be— it looks too blobular to be anything in particular—but it’s pink, it’s got pastel blue stars on it, and it’s solidly in Kiryu’s tastes.

His friend’s eyes light up as the machine draws the claw back up, gripping its prize. It dangerously rocks the entire operation in its automated return trip to the hole in the corner, but it opens its maw and the prize is promptly dropped into the receptacle, accompanied by a joyous series of dings.

Kiryu bends down to retrieve the thing, and comes back up with that lazy smile, hugging the plushie to his chest. His hair, down today, stands out in a not-quite neon; the patterned shirt he wears under that drooped uniform glows in sharp little specks of green and pink.

“Need help?”

Suo gives him a guilt-trodden smile and shrugs. “I’m terrible at claw machines.”

Kiryu grins, walking past him to a second machine positioned just a few feet away. “I saw a cat in this one,” he nods to the pile of plushies behind the glass, and points.

Suo follows his gaze and peers around his shoulder. He’s met with black fabric and little beady eyes, complete with pink mitten markings along the paws. Its eyes are mismatched, its left pink, the right white—immediately, it’s quite the keeper.

At Suo’s pleased look, Kiryu taps the glass. “I’m gonna guess this would be Sakura’s first stuffed animal. It just has to be a cat.”

Suo quietly admires Kiryu’s observational skills. “How do you know this isn’t for me?” he prods, but holds out the coins nonetheless.

“You have that look in your eye,” Kiryu preens, wordlessly taking Suo’s offered (and stolen) coins and slotting them into the machine, “Plus, you don’t strike me as a stuffed animal or arcade kind of person. You’re more traditional.”

“And the… Sakura assumption?” Suo leans forward, amused.

“You’re obsessed with him,” Kiryu says simply, like it’s obvious. It lures out a strangely and genuinely shocked laughed from Suo.

“‘Obsessed’ with him, am I?” he chuckles as Kiryu moves around the machine, Suo taking up the mantle and moving the stick closer to the corner. “How so?”

“A bit to your left,” Kiryu calls, loud beeps and synths invading from the next aisle, “You’re really asking me that?”

Suo knocks the stick to the left a few degrees. “Why yes, I am.”

He waits for his next instructions, but they pause, and Suo moves his gaze away from the cat to see Kiryu staring at him through the glass.

“Oh,” his friend breathes, studying his face with big, round eyes, “Wow.”

Suo blinks. He’s careful to keep that ever-present smile up despite the pinprick of unease that pokes at him. “Cat got your tongue?” he tries lamely in place of a genuine what? What is it? What’s so fascinating?

Somebody down the aisle loses their game of Space Invaders. Kiryu smiles, an odd mesh of giddy and incredulous. “Nothing,” he says, a to the right interrupting it, “Sorry—maybe obsessed is too strong a word…”

Kiryu taps his chin, meandering around the machine while Suo adjusts the claw and eyes him, face forcibly neutral. “Enamored.”

“Enamored?” Suo doesn’t stop himself from gawking in time and Kiryu meets his shocked face with a mirroring of his own, smile upturned at the corner. He mouths oh my to himself, and Suo is on the verge of actually getting a little frustrated.

“You’re making my day right now,” is all Kiryu says. Suo thinks about going home and practicing calligraphy to cope.

He opens his mouth, not really sure what he plans on saying, but Nirei’s presence seemingly materializes behind him down the aisle and Suo could not be happier about it.

Oh, he really is at the claw machines he hears him call. Nirei arrives at the scene, bless his heart, and instantly smooshes his face against LED-lit glass. “What’re we goin’ for?”

Sakura trails behind him, lagging a little as he takes in all the color and sound. Glowing gold rakes over all the stuffed animals, and then flickers up to Suo curiously.

“You’re just in time!” Suo smiles, easy and light, and then turns to Kiryu and privately gives him a look that he thinks teeters solidly between threatening and pleading, “Kiryu was just helping me.”

His friend plays with the edge of his dragged-down sleeves, wrapped around the plushie in his arms. He’s covering half of his grinning mouth with fabric while his studious gaze darts between Suo and Sakura. Nirei looks between them as well, eyes narrowing as he senses the tension. Sakura regards the group impatiently, clueless to the turmoil.

Kiryu grins, seemingly warring with himself, until he finally makes a hand gesture for Suo to adjust the claw again. Something tight uncoils in his middle as he obediently moves it just a hair forward.

“Oh, the cat?!” Nirei exclaims, smile brightening, and the tension seems to dissipate, “That one’s so cute!”

“Juuuuust a bit to the right,” Kiryu mumbles out, walking a slow lap around the machine, “Mh, back just a little.”

“This side’s a little off—pull it just a teensy bit backward,” comes from Nirei, brows furrowed as he crouches down and scrutinizes the claw’s trajectory.

Suo adjusts, trusting their judgement. Sakura stands at the other end of the machine, and Suo looks up at him through the glass to see him staring, bemused.

“You guys are more serious about this than cleaning the hallways at school,” he deadpans, hands in his pockets while he watches Kiryu continue his slow lap.

“Well duh!” Nirei exclaims, popping up from his crouch, “Sakura, you have to understand—these machines are really just made to rip you off. If you want a prize from these things, you have to give it your all. They’re intentionally unfair!”

Sakura makes a face. “Then why do you go here?” Left. He adjusts.

“Have you been having fun?” Suo asks him.

His shoulders hitch up, eyes darting when all attention flickers to him, and then he huffs and looks away to focus on the counter up front. The red dusting his face is just barely visible under the LEDs. “Y—Yeah, sure.”

Suo beams at him, something warm in his chest. “That’s why.”

The look on his captain’s face is one of simple, child-like surprise, and maybe a little enlightenment. Suo doesn’t get to enjoy it for very long, because a hand suddenly comes crashing down in the analog stick.

“Aaand send it!” Kiryu calls. His palm flattens the button, and the bulbs along the corners of the machine start blinking as they all watch the claw lower.

Breaths held, they watch as metal scoops around cotton, digs under soft limbs and around flimsy ear flaps. Its maw encompasses, waits an agonizing few seconds that he’s sure the programmers added just to introduce a little manufactured strife, and then it lifts.

Carrying the cat with it, it returns to the top of the machine, and then rattles its flimsy little track on its way to the other corner. Nirei makes a little victory sound, apprehensive but hopeful. He makes it again, louder, as the claw moves over the barrier of the hole and drops the precious cargo.

Cheers go around above the happy dings of the machine as Suo ducks down to retrieve his prize. The fur is soft, and there’s even fake little whiskers that glow under the blacklights. Nirei hovers around his shoulder to marvel at its little face. It is quite cute.

Sakura comes around the other side of the machine, joining them as Kiryu and Nirei exchange high-fives. Suo smiles, and then hands the cat out to his captain.

“You’ll have to think of a good name!”

Sakura stares, and Suo watches his face change as he registers it all a little late in his head. That neutral, content look slips away, and a confused curl of the lips replaces it. “Hah?”

Expecting this, Suo eases his smile from one of glee to something more calming, more encouraging. “It’s for you! Take good care of it—stuffed animals are meant to be loved.”

Gold and silver dart to the cat, then to Suo, and then back to the cat. “Wh—I can’t—I’m not—!” he stumbles, then throws a hand out to the machine, “You won it!”

“Yes, and I’d like you to have it,” Suo smiles patiently. Patience, and positive reinforcement. It really goes without saying that Kiryu was right in the fact that it needed to be a cat in particular.

“It was your mone—”

“Actually, it was your money,” Suo corrects, and he sees when it finally clicks. Sakura’s eyes narrow, and he thinks he hears Nirei snicker off to the side beneath all the cabinet cacophony. “I had nothing to do with this. Now you’re just going to adopt this poor kitten with your own hard-earned yen and leave it to starve out on the streets?”

He’s learnt that sometimes you need to bend a bit backwards to get Sakura to accept any sort of kindness. Things that are simple gestures to most are monumental to somebody like Sakura, to somebody as starved and as spat on as he is. Infinitesimal things take up the space of his whole universe.

It’s why Umemiya simply picks the guy up and forces him into a seat and a good meal when he wants to chat. It’s why he and Nirei have to barge into his apartment instead of ringing the doorbell and waiting like normal people. It’s why Sakura is dragged around town on their days off, included no matter what. It’s why their group chat has Sakura in it, even if he seldom replies.

We want you here. We like you here. We’ll spend the rest of eternity trying to get you to believe it.

Suo deems the effort worth it, wholeheartedly. It’s not due to some crush, like Kiryu seems to think—whether it’s true or not isn’t important, it isn’t the point. Sakura is a person. It’s about time somebody treated him like one.

Sakura’s gaze, cooling like molten lava against air, studies his face. It darts beyond his shoulder to regard Kiryu and Nirei with a similar expression, and Suo tries not to take offense to the apprehension there, the suspicion, the unease.

There’s a small war raging within those churning gears—Suo purposefully does not think about what kind of treatment had to occur for this to happen. For a kid to look at a stuffed animal like it’ll bite him—for a boy to look at his group of friends like they’re about to point and laugh.

Sakura’s gaze lowers to the cat, and finally seems to soak in its details. He raises a hand and slowly, hesitantly takes it from Suo’s, soft limbs hanging over his thumb. Their captain runs a finger over the glowing whiskers, takes the end of its cheap, cottonless tail and pets the pink fur there.

The noise of the arcade means nothing to Suo right now—the incessant jingles and repetitive voice lines from nearby fighter games take a backseat. It is simply Sakura in his view, the others’ presence hanging onto the edge, as he stares at the little cat’s mismatched eyes with an expression Suo admittedly has a hard time understanding.

According to Nirei and his trusty notebook, Sakura’s favorite color is pink. A deeper shade of it runs up his neck, dusts his cheeks, covers his ears as he holds the little cat in his hands, brings it to his chest, and studies the patterned arcade floor like he wishes it would swallow him whole.

“You’re—you’re one conniving little fucker, you know that?”

The thank you is written all over his face. Suo laughs wholeheartedly, chest singing.

OPERATION DRILL IT INTO SAKURA’S BIG HEAD
You, Anzai Masaki, Hiragi Toma, Kaji Ren, and 6 others…

UME [8:40PM]:
The roof was empty today! No sparring whatsoever!
Keep it up guys (o´∀`o)
Did Sakura have fun? Did he eat?

kiryu ‧  ˚   . ‧  ☆ [8:41PM]:
he’s a certified terrible gamer
he also stole my fries

Suo Hayato [8:45PM]:
I seem to recall you offering them!
And yes, I think he did have fun. :)

Nirei [8:58PM]:
I think he had a great time!
Umemiya, if you ever wanna bring him there yourself, he really likes Bubble Bobble!

UME [9:00PM]:
Oooh I wasn’t expecting that!
I thought he’d go for the violent fighters

Suo Hayato [9:01PM]:
He claims they’re “unrealistic.”

+

Café Pothos is empty save for one elderly man at the bar, Kotoha clanging dishes around in the back, and the obnoxious sound of Umemiya sipping sencha tea like he plans on drowning in it.

Hiragi holds the door open, and Suo and Nirei duck in with appreciative nods. The air in the café is always a nice mixture of sweet and savory, the menu and its top picks of the afternoon lounging around in the form of leftover flavors in the air. The gentle undertone of cleaning supplies and wet soil stays—Suo’s favorite details.

The door behind them shuts with a jingle of the bell and the chill from outside is snuffed by the warmth of the air vents. Kotoha calls from the back, a friendly be right there in her customer service voice. Umemiya is waving them down desperately like he’s in a crowd and not the only moving thing in the room.

“We see you, we see you,” Hiragi grumbles, ushering his kouhai between the tables. He nods respectfully to the older man at the bar who greets them, and then moves around the table to pull out the chair beside their leader. “We hear you too—didn’t anybody ever tell you to drink quietly?”

“Loud sips means you enjoy it!” Umemiya beams at him and leans forward to pat the table. “Settle in and order somethin’, it’s all on me!”

Nirei shimmies into the booth opposite of them, and Suo follows. Kotoha comes around a few moments later. She lightly smacks the back of Umemiya’s head with a potholder for drinking the tea fast enough to get indigestion, takes Nirei’s onigiri order while Umemiya pouts, and then he’s smacked again—on the forehead this time—for pouting.

“I’ll skip today,” Hiragi sighs, the familiar clutching of his stomach earning him a sympathetic smile from Suo.

“Hiragi,” Umemiya frowns, an encroaching warning in his voice.

“Umemiya.”

Suo greets Kotoha, smile amicable, while he politely ignores their divorced bickering that will surely go on for several minutes. “Genmaicha for me, please.”

“Eggy Sam?” Umemiya props his chin gingerly in his palm, meeting Kotoha with sparkly, eager eyes.

She drops her shoulders, and her knuckles graze the table where she rests the notepad she holds. “For the hundredth time, the egg sandwich is a breakfast item,” she huffs, “It’s two PM.”

“For me?” he smiles, fluttering his lashes at her like he thinks it’ll have an effect.

It doesn’t. She stares in a deadpan at him until he cracks and orders omurice.

“Suo’s on a diet—why can’t I be on one?” Hiragi says in an airy tone sometime after Kotoha excuses herself to the kitchen, “Anti-bullshit diet, starting now.”

Umemiya jabs a thumb at him, regarding Suo and Nirei with an aggrieved shake of his head. “He’s been so mean today.”

“I’ve been shockingly nice.”

“I think you need to start some meditation.”

“What I need is a fuckin’ vacation.”

“There they go again,” Nirei leans over to whisper near Suo’s shoulder, looking somewhere between uneasy and amused, “What do you think their record is?”

“Their longest bickering session?” Suo clarifies in a whisper back, eyeing the way Umemiya bites the edge of his mug while Hiragi complains like he’s working a nine-to-five with no paycheck. Really, he might as well be. “Fourty seven minutes.”

“Wow,” Nirei mumbles under his breath, jotting something down in his notebook underneath the table, “Specific.”

One of Umemiya’s hands suddenly comes down onto the wood, a small clatter following as he beams at his kouhai. Everybody mindfully ignores Nirei’s sharp twitch in his seat. “Speaking of vacation; Sakura has been promptly smuggled across country lines!”

“Huh?!” Nirei shouts.

Hiragi shakes his head, staring at a pamphlet propped up between the salt and pepper shakers in front of him like his life depends on it. “He means Tsubaki’s sneaking him out to go shopping. No patrolling for him today.”

“Oh, I bet he’s enjoying that,” Suo chuckles, “I’d pay to see him in stilettos.”

“You mean you’d pay to see him eat shit in stilettos,” Kotoha suddenly veers around the corner of the table, depositing Nirei’s onigiri in front of him with a grin, who is too preoccupied with horror to thank her properly.

Suo smiles in a similarly fond, wicked fashion as Kotoha refills Umemiya’s tea and bids them farewell. “Well, I thought it went without saying.”

Hiragi regards Suo thoughtfully. “Yeah I think I’d pay to see that too actually.”

“I’d pay to see you eat,” Umemiya lolls his head to tilt it toward Hiragi, teasing. He’s met with the second deadpan stare in the last ten minutes, but its effect is lessened by the way Hiragi has to cross his eyes a bit at the proximity. “In fact, I am.”

“We’re really doin’ this?”

Umemiya grins—it has this certain quality to it that Suo just knows means this will continue later—and then slaps the table again to reset the mood. “So!” He leans forward. “How’s he doin’?”

Suo carefully keeps the serenity on his face. Nirei, cheeks stuffed with rice and nori, furrows his brows and exchanges a nervous look with his co-vice.

Nirei swallows. “He’s…” Eyes dart from Suo, to Hiragi, and then Umemiya. “Good.”

Hiragi echoes the response in a suspicion hum, cheek leaned on a hand. Suo’s smile turns a little frayed. “Ambitious!”

It’s echoed again, a doubtful ambitious, huh, floating between them. Ambitious in the sense that he looks more and more tired every morning, yes. Ambitious in the way he tramples any other priorities to make room for more sparring sessions. Ambition is certainly one thing living in those eyes.

Suo thinks a better term for it is fretting, in both senses of the word and despite how soft the syllables sound.

Umemiya’s gaze turns from that soft, pale soap-sud to something closer to jagged shale. He can almost hear the water crashing against it, the seagulls shrieking. Suo would never admit it aloud, but Umemiya scares him.

“... Lacking… what would you say…” Suo thinks, tapping his knee under the table. There are a lot of things Sakura lacks; self-esteem, self-preservation, even self-respect in some regards—none of it is new information. It’s… troubling, but not new. “... Periphery.”

Brows furrow at this, and Hiragi speaks over a clang from the kitchen. “Periphery?”

“He’s got tunnel vision,” Suo clarifies, clasping his hands in his lap, “He doesn’t seem to even notice we’re worried. He’s… starting to not see us at all, I think.”

He doesn’t mean for it to sound so hopeless, and he certainly doesn’t mean it as a jab. Sakura isn’t looking away, not on purpose. He’s distracted. He’s preoccupied. He regards Suo like he’s a responsibility first, friend second.

It instills in him emotions he hasn’t discovered the names of yet.

“When will that kid get it through his thick skull…” Hiragi dips his head down, slides a hand over his face, “Maybe making him grade captain was a bad idea.”

That gets Nirei to lean forward, eyes big. Suo carefully tugs his plate away so his tie doesn’t land in his onigiri. “He’s doing a great job! He’s a really good captain!”

“That’s not what he’s saying, Nirei,” Umemiya chuckles good-naturedly, but regards his friend with careful eyes, “You think he’s cracking?”

“Some people just don’t do well under pressure,” he replies, “We put a lot of responsibility on him almost right away.”

“With all due respect,” Suo says, and then nods to Kotoha in a wordless thank-you when she appears with his tea, “I don’t think that’s entirely the cause.”

He lifts his mug delicately and takes a sip; the nutty notes always leave his chest warm. “The captain title has long-since been concrete! Removing it wouldn’t do a thing—it’s not the status that makes him want to protect so fiercely.”

“You all are in good hands with him leading,” Umemiya smiles, sure and sturdy, “I have no doubt of that—if anything, he’s a damn good captain because he recognizes how important the role is…”

A beat, and his smile recedes from his face. Umemiya’s eyes flick to his tea, and he holds the glass by the rim and swirls it around, watching the bubbles. “But he’s reckless when it comes to his own hide. And I don’t think that’s stupidity, or lack of composure under pressure.”

Suo eyes him. “It’s everything else he lacks,” he finishes.

A finger lifts from a glass rim to point at Suo. “Exactly. And what he pulled with Endo worries me.”

Quiet reigns over the table. Kotoha comes around to serve Umemiya his omurice, and to begrudgingly top up his tea. Nirei eats slower, appetite somehow visibly draining from him. Hiragi pops two pills into his mouth without much fanfare.

“Whatever happened to Sakura before this town—it deprived him of everything a kid needs to grow up,” Umemiya’s voice trickles out, soaks into the wood, “And when he came here, he finally got a good, long look at what he’s missed out on, and finally got to feel it for himself.

“You know how I say food tastes better when you’re with friends? Well… it also tastes better when you’re starving.” A spoon scrapes against his plate. “If you go a long time without food, and then finally get to eat again, it’s… salivating. That first bite? You barely know how to swallow it, it’s so good.”

Umemiya slices into his omurice, scoops it up, and takes a bite. Chews, gulps it down with a smile that isn’t quite happy. “He’s finally gotten a taste, and it’s delicious. Who on Earth would let a thing so yummy get taken away, after all that time without it?”

Hiragi watches Umemiya carefully. “Right, he wants to protect us. This is Bofurin we’re talking about here; I get it,” he says, low, slow, and quiet, “But this? This is different, Umemiya.”

“If you’re desperate enough, you’ll do anything,” he replies just as lowly, eyes kept to the lip of his plate, “I mean it. Anything. And offering himself up to Endo was an example of just how far he’s willing to go.”

Nirei’s food sits on his plate, growing cold. Suo watches him watch Hiragi slowly exhale through his nose, rub the bridge of it, and then:

“When he offers himself up like that, he’s no longer protecting his way of life. He’s protecting a version of this town that lives on without him,” Nirei says, surprisingly confident, and Suo finds himself smiling at that wobbly yet headstrong expression, “We need him to realize he’s in this community too.”

The beaming smile that’s thrown across the table is accompanied with a clap. “Well said, Nirei!” Umemiya grins as he wipes a grain from his lip, “I think Sakura’s the type to need reminders here and there, that people love him. We’re pros at that!”

“Consider it done,” Suo smiles, “Class 1-1 has lots of love to give.”

Umemiya finishes off his third cup of tea with a satisfied mtahh and leans forward, grin crooked. They all lean in with him, drinking in the sureness of his gaze.

“Show him we’re here. He’s come quite a long way from the skittish, flighty little cat he used to be!” he chuckles, bouncing his spoon in his hand, “He’s learned to trust a little. I’m confident that with some more gentle prodding, we can make it so that when he protects, he protects everything. Including himself.”

Something in Hiragi’s hardened expression softens, and he nods while studying the table’s wood grain. “I like to joke that he’s hard-headed, but I think when it comes to us, he’s a bit more giving. More open to things,” he murmurs, and then straightens to regard his kouhai with a grin that’s tired, but hopeful, “It’ll take a while. So, in the meantime—”

“We’ll protect him!” Nirei pops up from his seat, palms to the wood and silverware clattering as he shoots to tower over the table. His eyes are big, and there’s a great sense of pride and admiration in Suo’s middle when he hits his own chest with a fist. “You have our word!”

A blush joins his freckles when the old man at the bar looks behind him at the noise, but Umemiya smiles, big and wide. He suddenly hooks an arm around Hiragi, who almost falls out of his chair and has to snatch the edge of the table to keep his balance.

“Man, we’ve got some incredibly reliable first years this time around, huh?” he beams out in a bright chuckle, and Hiragi doesn’t even seem particularly bothered by the manhandling.

He simply looks to Suo, to Nirei, and then back to him, and behind the usual concrete wall is what looks like gratefulness. Interestingly, when Suo looks to Umemiya, beyond the trust there is a sort of hesitant relief in his eyes, teetering on the edge of worry.

He chalks that up to worry for Sakura, and ignores the fact that it seems very much directed at him.

+

The walls are a clinical white and the red exit signs make his eye burn. Suo scans the doors with fervor, his mind chanting a number in a fuzzy choir of flat notes. He’s aware the receptionist will probably call security when she realizes he’s not related in any sense of the word other than dear friend, so he keeps his feet quick, but pretends he belongs here.

The wood of the doors meld together in a blur that’s getting suspiciously green and red due to the fact that he hasn’t blinked in a while. His gaze catches 262 and he slows, studying every threshold along the corridor. His eye darts down to his phone screen in his hand, reading the text over and over.

267. He stops in front of the door, staring through the curtained window right at eye-level as he breathes carefully through his nose, and then he forces his palm to the doorknob.

The hinges slide back smoothly, and his eye instantly locks to Nirei’s, who looks at him from the hospital bed.

There is one lone fluorescent light on in the corner, and somehow the cool colors exacerbate the sterile smell of the place. The blinds are closed, leaving the corners of the room bathed in grey static. Shadows drag across Nirei’s face, subtle blues and greens bouncing off skin from the monitors around the bed frame.

His co-vice immediately smiles, tired and exasperated. He feels the ball of lead in his stomach get drowned in the acid. “Before you even ask, it’s super minor.”

“You got wacked in the head,” Kiryu, sitting at Nirei’s bedside opposite of the door, softly clunks the corner of his smartphone against his own temple. “I wasn’t gonna chance it.”

“You made everybody worry for nothing!” Nirei nearly whines, craning his head back and slumping his shoulders.

Suo studies his expression for any pain, lets his gaze settle on the butterfly bandage near his hairline that covers a short cut, and then traces the rest of him, scanning for red or white with an unmoving chest. Kiryu’s presence is a distant one at the moment, an afterthought, as he drinks in Nirei’s safe and alive one.

He’d been expecting worse. He’d been preparing for more blood, for more clenched teeth or glassy eyes that accompanies pain killers. He’d been expecting more bandages, a swollen face, a cracked voice, mumbling I’m fines that are so clearly misplaced. The message floating on his phone screen had made it sound like that.

Admittedly there is a part of him that’s angry at Kiryu for making it sound so vague, so hurried. It’s entirely overshadowed by the fact that, judging by his bloodied knuckles and wrinkled up clothing that Suo takes in at a glance, Kiryu is the reason Nirei isn’t worse off.

The back of Nirei’s skull rolls along the plastic headboard until it’s swiveled toward the door, and he’s looking down his cheeks to meet his gaze. Nirei stares for a moment, blinks, and then knits his brows, lifts his head. “Suo?” he calls, “You okay?”

It’s Suo’s cue to blink, lungs finally taking in air, and he wills his heart to calm. The adrenaline shooting through his veins is a familiar feeling, but the dread is harder to tamp down. His hand twitches at his side, eager to adjust his earrings in a nervous tic, but his phone is still in his tight hold, so he quickly pockets it.

Suo forces himself to stop iron-gripping the doorknob, and he lets it click closed behind him while he finds his way to Nirei’s bedside in the low light, easy smile replacing cold anger.

“That’s my line,” he replies, crinkles his eye, “Can’t believe you’re asking me that.”

“I’m alright, I promise,” Nirei smiles in an airy huff. His friend raises a hand to poke right at the edges of the cut on his forehead. “Just a bit of a headache. The doctors said I just need rest an’ I’m all good. Oh, wait—uh… they said no school tomorrow, I think? …Yeah.”

Suo glances to Kiryu with a subtle brow raised, but it seems it wasn’t subtle enough, as Nirei sits up with a pout. “I have a grade one concussion, not blindness.”

Kiryu quietly nods, chin on his palm, and Suo, satisfied, looks back to his co-vice. “Sorry, Nirei. What if your brain is all scrambled? Like eggs?”

Nirei goes a shade paler. “Like eggs?”

Suo can’t help but laugh. He hears the creaking of a chair and looks back at Kiryu to see him stood in a long stretch, arms spiked over his head. “I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Suo so I can order us food,” he lets out in a strain, sighs, and then gives them both a casual wave, “I’ll be back.”

Nirei says something Suo misses as he watches Kiryu meander to the door. He catches his gaze halfway there, and Suo shoots him a grateful look.

His friend smiles and matches it with a knowing glint, a face that says any time, and opens the door to let light and noise spill in. There’s nurses talking, throwing comments back and forth down the hall. It’s closed a second later, and the room is enveloped in silence again.

In the long beats of quiet that follow, Suo’s eye strays to the oximeter clipped around Nirei’s finger, trails up his wrist to take in every little superficial graze of freckled skin. Gaze climbing up, there’s a just-forming bruise blossoming along the meat of his shoulder, visible under the hem of a crooked hospital gown.

It’s shaped like a hand. That cold anger trickles and bubbles so deeply his joints throb.

His heart is pounding too fast. He’s used to the sound of blood roaring in his ears—he’s not used to it being so nauseating.

“M’ sorry I messed it up.”

Suo’s eye snaps to his face.

Keeping his gaze to his lap, Nirei fidgets with the hem of his blankets, folding them, unfolding them, rolling them up and smoothing them out. The way he shrugs his shoulders in to be smaller, the way there’s so much anger in his eyes that Suo knows isn’t directed at anybody but himself—it makes him start grinding his teeth together.

“I closed my eyes,” he almost whispers, like he’s afraid to admit it, “It all happens so fast—it’s impossible not to flinch when things are coming at you so—! I tried, I was just—”

“Nirei.”

He shuts his mouth, and he stills himself in the hospital bed, waiting for something; if Suo knows him well enough, it’s likely disappointment. So he slowly lowers himself to sit on the edge of the bed, watches Nirei tense up as the mattress dips.

In the quiet of the hospital room, each rustle is heard like a bomb. His earrings jingle as he settles. “Look at me.”

Nirei’s eyes scrape along the air, slow, to meet Suo’s. They widen a little as they take in the smile on his face.

“You think I’ve never flinched?”

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he’s thinking about it. The cold sting of steel on hot skin, the gouging of tissue and membrane, the way vitreous fluid had congealed and mixed with the blood running over his teeth. The taste of porky, raw flesh in addition to the copper in his mouth is the detail he wishes to forget most.

He never has to tell people it hurt—everybody knows eye injuries are some of the most painful.

He hadn’t simply stopped flinching after that. In fact, he’d done it more—with memories to fuel him, he’d been given a strong, irrefutable reason to be afraid of combat. It wasn’t just what-ifs anymore; every possible reality, every injury, felt real all at once.

He wishes he could give Nirei an easy way out here, or even an easy way in. A worry-free method, a full-proof guide. It’s not that simple. You really do just have to keep your eyes open, or else.

Nirei stares. The flick of his gaze to his eyepatch and back says everything and he looks embarrassed about it, so Suo grins and cuts him some slack.

“You’re going to flinch,” he instructs, and the way Nirei holds onto every word like it’s gospel makes him wonder if he looks like this to his Master. He hopes the room’s low light hides the blush he feels coming. “I taught you this first because I wanted to drill it into you how important it is to try not to.

“There’s ways to recover from it—things to fall back on. I’ll teach you all that soon,” Suo promises. Perhaps he should’ve taught them sooner; he just didn’t want Nirei to rely on the backup plans too much. But maybe he’s being unfair, not trusting his disciple to make the right call.

He’ll chastise himself for that later. “The temptation to freeze up in fights is deep-seated human nature. You’re not going to uproot it in a few months,” Suo smiles, amusement lightening his tone, “Don’t worry about all that. I’ll always be proud of any progress you make.”

Something in Nirei’s face softens, and what little fear he’d been holding onto vanishes and is promptly replaced with some mixture of confusion and guilt. “I didn’t really… improve.”

Suo holds his gaze. He makes a show of looking down at his bruised knuckles, limp in his lap, and then zipping his eye back up. Nirei follows; when his face lights up, Suo’s chest soars.

“Oh—! Yeah, I did punch a guy!” he smiles, absently running fingertips over joints, “It… didn’t really do much, but I did punch him! It distracted him enough for Kiryu to get the knockout!”

“See?” Suo beams, “You’re getting braver! And you’re a team player already; impressive!”

Nirei’s smile is wobbly, but his expression glows under the praise so much that it overshadows most of the uncertainty. It falls just a tad after a beat or two, and his gaze rests somewhere through Suo’s middle.

“... I’m falling behind,” he admits, and then tsks and rolls his eyes, “I mean—it’s not like I was ever close to begin with, but… now that everybody’s improving so fast… and everything with Sakura… I feel like I’m really far behind.”

Suo wonders if Nirei would be comforted or mortified by the admission that he feels similarly. The cycle of life is a fascinating one; there is always a bigger fish, and it’s easy to feel small when sized up against sharks and whales.

People spend their cycles growing indefinitely, always climbing toward the top, some senselessly, others with ambition. The choir chanting of the peak drowns out the enjoyable things that come with being the little guy.

Similarly to how he occasionally tries to wrap his head around the sheer size of black holes and celestial bodies, he finds it a bit incomprehensible to think of somebody that could genuinely defeat, say, Umemiya. But they’re out there. There is always a bigger fish.

Suo wants to tell him he empathizes. But with the way Nirei follows him, that might look like a black hole eclipsing another black hole—overwhelming, and therefore not wise to share.

“But I—I know it’ll just… take time for me to get there. I guess I’m just…” Nirei mumbles, “I don’t know… Frustrated? I jumped into that fight cuz I thought I was ready.”

Suo opens his mouth, but Nirei’s next words clamp it shut. “How do you do it?”

He stares while his friend gathers his thoughts, and that big, warm gaze settles against Suo’s carmine.

“How do you do everything so fearlessly? Are you even scared?”

He thinks about the little kid with freshly-removed stitches, hyperventilating on the floor of the dojo when strikes would near his blind side. Of course he’s scared—who wouldn’t be?

Normally, Suo would shrug a question like this off. He’d say something cryptic, he’d further the stupid ancient Chinese curse bit, but something about the way Nirei is looking at him right now halts whatever mindless redirection he was about to spew.

It halts everything in him, really, down to the beat of his heart, and his mind and body does a full reboot, starts from a slate that’s not quite blank, but rid of all the unimportant worries in his head. Right now, it is Nirei’s big, earnest eyes, asking a big, earnest question.

His Master has never admitted to being afraid. Suo remembers asking a very similar question in a very similar, awed cadence. He’d gotten a no. He’d gotten an I can’t be.

He can’t decide if his Master saying yes would’ve comforted him, or embedded that hopelessness deeper. On one hand, the person you look up to having the same emotions as you can be grounding; it can make everything seem so much less towering. On the other; having the person protecting you, guiding you, admit that they’re the blind leading the blind—it’s scary, being so directionless.

But Suo is smart enough to know, now, that his Master is human, and is therefore scared. His Master is, sometimes, a bit of a liar. Suo is very much a liar as well, and he wonders if he gets it from him.

But Nirei is smart too. And he doesn’t deserve a liar for a Master.

“Yes.” He doesn’t look at his disciple when he says it, and he mentally apologizes for that. Maybe one day he’ll look somebody in the eye for once. “I am scared.”

He’s so momentarily stunned he even says it that he spends a beat or two simply studying the feeling it leaves in his mouth. The aftertaste it makes; something like cigarette smoke and the odd minty chemicals of fluoride foam.

He struggles to find something to say, some way to soften the blow. But when he finally looks at Nirei again, that expression is back to sparkling.

“Really?! You seem so calm all the time…” he comments, leaning forward to rest elbows on knees, chin on palms. There’s something subtle in his eyes, something laid underneath in a steady foundation, and it takes a moment for Suo to realize it is thankfulness. Respect. “How do you—”

A loud noise from the corner of the room. Suo whips around as he sees light spill in from the door, catches sight of it slam against the stopper near the bottom of the wall. It shakes on its hinges, and they both stare at the silhouette in the doorway like deer in headlights.

A disheveled Sakura looms in the threshold, breathing heavily, as he gapes wide-eyed at them. His favorite mountain jacket hangs off of one shoulder, and he’s still wearing sweatpants and sporting that wavy bedhead. The busted lip from yesterday is still healing.

His gaze beams just past Suo and takes in Nirei’s state, attention darting between the bandage and the oximeter, the scrapes along his skin, and Suo sitting with him.

He watches Sakura’s mismatched eyes soften at the sight of Nirei blinking, startled. It’s interesting, and perhaps a bit humbling, to see what must be a perfect mirror of what he had looked like coming in, all the way down to the world-settling relief laving his eyes and sagging his shoulders. A distant anger is there too. Suo hopes he wasn’t as open-booked about it.

“Who was it.” It’s glared and pierced, and it’d probably be seethed through clenched teeth if Sakura hadn’t already seen that his friend is at least alive.

Nirei straightens with a nervous smile, hands placating. “Kiryu already took care of them—I’m fine!”

Sakura moves. The door closes behind him in a rough clunk, casting the place in shadow again, and he storms across the hospital room to stop next to the monitors, looming over Nirei’s little form. He shrinks a bit underneath it.

“You’re in the goddamn hospital, you think that’s fine?!” he growls, throwing a hand out to the monitors above the bedframe, “This is where people go to die!”

Nirei’s funny little incredulous look is something Suo burns into his head. “I’m not dying! They’re discharging me in like an hour!”

Sakura’s wrinkled up face whips around to Suo, who leans away to avoid his morning breath which, judging by his overall state of being, he can safely assume he did not have time to brush out. Distantly, he’s aware of Nirei letting his hands thump into his lap in a defeated slouch.

“He’s alright. Grade one concussion,” he relays calmly, “He has to rest, and no school tomorrow.”

Sakura reads him, then darts his eyes to Nirei and reads something there too. Without looking away, like Nirei’s some sort of specimen to study and decide the fate of, Sakura leans toward Suo and says, quieter, with a hint of bloodlust in the syllables, “We’re sure Kiryu took care of em?”

Nirei cranes his neck back yet again, shoulders hanging. “Sakuraaaaa it’s not that big of a deal!”

A finger comes out to jut at his face, and Sakura’s next words, while snarled and textured like gravel, hold with the syllables a sort of desperate care, horrendously frazzled. “I don’t care if it’s not a big deal to you, it’s a big deal to me!”

That silences Nirei, who’s mouth shuts with an almost comical clink of his teeth. Sakura’s face, even seen in the low light, is left to paint itself in shades redder and redder with every beat of silence. He shoves his attention away to study the wall, fingers carding through black and white.

“I thought— ghh, Kiryu made it sound like you were on death’s door! I thought the sheet would be over your head for sure!” he scrubs at his scalp, gesturing wildly with his phone white-knuckled in his other hand.

For a moment, Suo genuinely thinks that he can hear some very raw fear weaved between the words, and then he’s whipping around to Suo again and he’s too busy leaning away to dwell on it. “Where is that fucker?!”

“Bathroom. Don’t kill him, I need him alive for research,” he requests. Nirei let out an undignified squawk.

“When he comes back in here I’m gonna fillet his ass,” he dutifully announces, shoving his phone in a pocket and looking around for a chair.

Suo nods to one in the corner while Nirei pales. “Like a fish?!”

“Like a fish!”

Sakura grabs one, swivels it around on one leg, and plops unceremoniously into the plastic so he’s facing its back, huffing. He cards his fingers through his hair again, glaring at the bedframe, and as soon as some of the heat dissipates from his eyes, he scrapes it up to meet Nirei’s.

In the quiet of the hospital room, they can practically hear their captain’s gears churning, his teeth clenching. His legs part around the backrest and one of his knees hop up and down in a storm of nervous energy, ball of his foot bouncing and rocking along the tiles. His sneakers aren’t even tied.

He looks like he wants to ask. Suo smiles knowingly. “Is Sakura wondering if Nirei is really okay?”

“Up your urethra, Suo.”

It gets a bark of laughter out of him. “Wow! Such a big word, where’d you learn it?”

“From your mom.”

That gets an even harsher laugh, and he leans forward to grin. “And that?”

Sakura looks away, face red. “... Takanashi.”

Nirei’s giggles flutter between them, and Suo looks over to see him lying back against the pillows behind him, fingers rubbing eyes as he grins. “Stop makin’ me laugh, it hurts,” his chortles while his shoulders shake.

Sakura straightens in his chair, subtle hint of an embarrassed grin slipping from his face fast. “Shit—sorry—”

“It’s fine, you’re fine, really,” Nirei struggles through one more silent bout of laughter, hand-waving, “S’ a dull ache.”

Suo leans to the side and picks at the blankets around them, gently tugging and tucking. “Maybe you should get some rest,” he suggests, spotting the sudden bout of glassy exhaustion in his friend’s eyes, “I’ll stay with you.”

Nirei smiles, a little lazy and crooked, and hums out a fond mother hen that Suo is about ninety percent sure was not meant to be said aloud. “You don’t have to,” he insists, although it’s done quietly and reluctantly enough to cement his decision to stay even further, “My parents are prolly on their way.”

Suo worries the blankets a little more, “Well—” adjusts the wire strung from his oximeter, “—if you’ll have me—” and gives the warmest smile he knows, “—I’d very much like to stay.”

He can see Sakura blushing in his periphery and he’s very lucky Suo is too busy making Nirei feel comfortable to make fun of him for it. His co-vice smiles, a thank you in his gaze as he settles deeper into pillows, and then his tired attention swivels to their captain.

“‘M sorry for scaring you, Sakura,” he mumbles, and with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, “Next night out is on me! To make up for it. I’ll be right as rain by then.”

Sakura blinks at him, and then huffs and looks down at the wires snaking around the monitor setup. “I wasn’t scared! And who the hell pays for dinner for gettin’ knocked out? I’m payin’!”

They can’t help but smile at the obstinacy.

Suo pokes fun and watches with glee as Sakura is forced to reign in his rage for the sake of Nirei’s comfort. Their friend drifts in and out after a while, watching them bicker with a loose smile and lidded eyes before he’s eventually dozing off and drooling along the pillow.

In the silence they carefully build to keep him there, he watches Sakura delve into a quiet loathing session. It’s much the same look that he had when first seeing what Tomiyama was capable of—delayed horror, fear of what could have been. Something a bit deeper than simple frustration, a bit more primal.

This look has a lot of guilt stacked atop it. For every bounce of his leg there’s likely a thought swirling around his cranium, colliding with everything else in an ugly, watercolored bruise. He’ll be agonizing over this for days, Suo knows.

He thinks of KEEL, of their captain practically begging them to blame him for the shitshow it was, wanting the scoldings to hit him already so he can slink off and lick his wounds instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Suo imagines he’s already playing that role in his head; the reprimander, the recipient, the victim and villain—it’s all the same to him.

He knows it won’t help. But he says it anyway. “Sakura.”

Eyes dart up to him, silver and gold catching the glow of the monitors. “It’s nobody’s fault but the guy who punched him,” Suo reminds him quietly, eye locked onto his friend like a vice, “And he’s somewhere in a ditch right now, hopefully drowning in rainwater.”

Sakura holds his gaze, long and studying and burning with something ashamed that he gulps down. He doesn’t give a reply—doesn’t even nod. He just glares a hole through Nirei’s chest, rising and falling with steady, even breaths.

It feels like the words fall on deaf ears.

Sakura leaves the same time Nirei’s parents arrive, something deeply contrite etched into his face. Suo watches him go, dimly wondering if he’ll break a new training record tonight.

+

Ori has become less of a cage and more of a sandbox. Despite this, it is still loud as all hell in here.

The dull roar of teenage boys never quite ceases, even in the lull of combat. The floors are dusty and the main lobby smells of wet spray paint and deli meat from the coolers by the entrance. Sunlight hugs the graffitied walls, makes the brighter splotches and swipes of color pop against drab drywall and soundproof mats.

Suo sidesteps a stumbling Inugami, who whips around to beam sharp teeth at him and then dives back into his one-on-one with a second-year he’s not familiar with. He weaves between spars and gracefully ducks under the occasional overshot swing, hand-waving apologies.

He sees Nirei flagging him down from the front of the lobby, holding a can of soda. The sky goes unburdened by clouds today, and it’d almost feel like spring if not for the chill nipping at him through the open entrance.

Whatever glass is left within the frames of the windows is dirty, smudged, and scratched. Most of them don’t house glass at all. He wonders how horrible it would be to walk in here barefoot, even if he can’t see any large shards along the tiles.

Nirei beams at him and it’s as bright as the parking lot beyond them, glowing under direct exposure.

“Shishitoren’s improved a lot since last time!” he exclaims, seated on a table covered in cardboard and ghosts of designs etched into its metal. He raises a finger off his soda can, twisting to point around gutted window frames. “I can tell our guys are having a rough time already.”

Suo follows his gesture, watching Kiryu’s ever-steady presence on the field waver for a moment as he stumbles on an uppercut. His gaze flicks to the others around the parking lot, to Anzai punishing a greedy double swing, to Kakiuchi ducking under a punch but getting kneed right in the sternum for the effort.

“Are you going back out there?” Nirei asks at the end of a long sip and swallow.

Suo’s eye goes to the healing cut along his co-vice’s hairline, and then quickly retreats back to where it should be. “I’ll take a break and stay with you a while,” he smiles, settling to hover near the entrance and watch the sparring from the shade of the overhang.

In the corner of his vision, he knows Nirei is regarding him with a long stare, tilting his can in little circles. He stays quiet and opts to sip loudly instead of grace him with conversation; perhaps his method of protesting this. Suo does not particularly care.

He spots Sakura’s hair somewhere in the middle of the chaos, Togame barreling into him in a blur. Their captain’s lower back skids along the pavement when he falls—that’ll leave a nasty roadburn—but he quickly recovers with a slam of his opponent’s wrist to the asphalt, twisting to take advantage.

Hands grab, but Sakura swings around in movements almost too quick for even Suo to follow, and Togame’s left to the road. A geta is kicked off directly at their captain’s jaw, hard. That pisses him off, and he goes for the kill. A second geta is thrust directly at his nose, even harder.

Nirei flinches and squeaks the table next to him, nails to teeth. Suo waits patiently. Sakura stumbles, hisses, as wood clatters to gravel and his soles scuff against dirt. He spits blood onto the rocks, cursing, and then he’s whirling back at Togame before he can recover, ducking for his blind spots.

Both of them are grinning with bloodied teeth.

“He can take a beating,” Nirei comments uneasily, shaking his head, “I could never… how do you just get up after a hit that could have easily broken a bone?”

Suo smiles. “You think about how horrible it would be if you lost,” he replies matter-of-factly, “It’s a great motivator.”

Nirei gawks at him with big eyes. “Right…”

Suo’s attention trails for a bit, scanning the crowd of Shishitoren and Bofurin alike, in and out of the Ori building. Gatherings like this, spaced between a month or two, are what keep spirits and skills high. Thanks to Sakura, they’ve learned how important allyship can be; it’s only right that they don’t let that war-saving lesson go to waste.

Umemiya and Tomiyama are going at it somewhere down the hall behind him, and he turns around to see the whirlwind that is Shishitoren’s leader curving a killing blow an inch away from the other’s skull. Umemiya falls back, contorts on the way down, swivels down to kick at dodging legs.

The ends of their leader’s uniform billow like flags, and his smile is wide.

“Oh—Kanuma’s back with the ice,” Nirei announces, and Suo turns to him sliding off the table, crushed soda can in hand, “I’m gonna go help em’. We’re sparring later, yeah?”

Suo hesitates for a second too long, and Nirei’s face falls, frustration nipping at the frown there. “Suo…”

He hurries to correct it. “Of course! The doctors said you’re good to go, after all.”

He’s being studied. Nirei’s waves furl around each other in the slight breeze and he pays attention to that rather than his hard stare. “And you’re not gonna make it super easy on me, right?”

“I wouldn’t baby you, Nirei,” Suo replies, and hopes the glare of the parking lot hides the tautness in his smile, “We’ll continue training like before.”

A few long seconds of agony, and then Nirei sees something in his face that seems to satisfy him. He nods once, and then patters off to a clearer section of the parking lot to meet Kanuma at the entrance.

A slow, meandering laugh catches his attention, and he’s suddenly taking in Togame’s slouching, stumbling form, trudging his way to the coolers by Suo’s feet. There’s blood smeared around one cheekbone, skin busted open in a burst of red, and the right side of his face is scraped to hell and back, some parts of it shiny and raw with roadburn.

He carries his geta with a finger looped around the straps. The teeth are splattered with Sakura’s blood.

“Your captain is somethin’ else,” Togame chuckles, hand thumping against the threshold, “Mind if I sit?”

“Not at all,” Suo smiles, stepping aside to let his bigger stature through, “He’s certainly a go-getter.”

“I’ll say,” is his reply as he crouches down, slow as all his other movements, though a wince accompanies the crack that pops from a knee. The lid of the cooler is lifted, and the sound of slushed ice clanging against tin echoes around the walls of it. “Drink?”

“... Sure,” Suo accepts. He picks a basic soda, unfamiliar with the brand. Togame straightens with one hand to his lower back, wincing, with a ramune bottle in his other.

Oh, hey, Sakura’s free, he hears from a very excited Tomiyama, who zooms out of a corridor and straight past them with a speed only reserved for somebody running from a wild animal. Suo’s hair follows the woosh of the air he leaves behind. He blinks as Togame grins.

“Don’t sneak up on him, Choji,” he calls after him, sliding onto the table where Nirei sat a moment prior, “He doesn’t like that!”

They watch as Sakura, already in a verbal spat with Nirei and Enomoto, leans against nearby brick as he catches his breath. Judging by Nirei’s worried brows and fretful gestures, it can be assumed that they’re trying to get Sakura to at least clean up before another spar. The middle of his face is solidly splattered in red, as is the hem of his shirt.

He watches him twist away to spit more blood onto the rocks, and then twist back with a growled I’m fine on his lips. Suo is suddenly very, very tired.

In comes Choji, hopping around their captain like a particularly antsy frog. The cadence of his voice, loud and kiddish, can be heard even across the parking lot. The word fight comes out, and something in Sakura’s eyes lights up like a firework.

Suo counts the seconds before Sakura’s pushing off the brick wall and raising his fists. It takes one and a half. Neither party seems too concerned about the blood still coming from his nose. Okay.

“What a trooper,” Togame comments, and Suo cannot help the bitterness that rises in his gut at that. He’s less of a trooper and more a bestial belligerent.

To drown it, Suo wordlessly pops open his can. It hisses out in protest and when he takes a sip he has to keep his face clear of surprise at the stinging carbonation. It’s been quite a while since he’s had a soda. He’d forgotten it bubbles along your taste buds.

He feels a gaze on him. It’s not Togame—he’s watching Tomiyama forget he can fight with fists—and it’s not Umemiya, who’s been released from said leader’s hold to laugh with Hiragi and Tsubaki somewhere in the back of the lobby.

Suo looks over his shoulder. It’s Nirei, standing by another cooler on the other side of the lot. He’s darting his eyes between Sakura’s bloodied face getting kicked to the pavement and his co-vice. Suo follows his gaze neutrally, takes in the sharp grin molded around bared canines, the manic eyes begging for a challenge despite the bags underneath them.

“Is everything okay with him?”

His attention juts back around to Togame. He opened his bottle at some point, and Suo watches bubbles warp around the marble inside as it’s tipped back.

Togame’s eyes, holding the general demeanor of spring, cools to something windy. Something a bit sharper; the first bite of autumn. “He seems kinda… tight.”

Suo has been observing the way Sakura’s developing style mirrors others for a while now, but up close and personal to Tomiyama’s signature movements, it’s a dingy replica next to the real, genuine article. The colors are wrong, the shapes are off—the strokes are all made in the wrong directions.

It’s a replica of an impressionist painting articulated like photorealism. It’s copying the source and leaving behind the what for, the why. It’s drawing lines and it’s playing a chord without ever asking how it connects to the rest, what it’s supposed to say. It’s empty—not for a lack of effort, or even a lack of soul. It just lacks Sakura.

Togame is entirely correct, if understating it a little. Sakura isn’t nearly versed enough in this new attempt at grace to be going up against Tomiyama of all people, and his transitions are painfully stiff and clunky. He’s gained a limp sometime in between Shishitoren’s second-in-command leaving and their leader stepping up to the plate. From where Suo stands, he can see blood on Sakura’s sneakers.

“Who, Sakura?” Suo plays dumb, tilting the can to his mouth, “He’s been—”

“Scared?”

Suo pauses. There’s carbonation bubbling at his lip, but he’s too busy taking in Togame’s knowing gaze to stop the dumb look on his face.

“Eh, I can see it in his eyes,” he says, takes a swig of his ramune, “I think everybody can, if they look for it.

“The way he punches now, too… ‘s different. Way different from before.” The bottle is tilted around by the bottom of its neck, marble clinking. Eyes stare a hole through the back of Sakura’s head, currently tamped down to the pavement as he gasps in the air forced out of him from a kick he had no chance of avoiding.

“Back when we met, fighting on stage, his fists had purpose, sure, but… compared to now?” A low whistle sounds, and Togame takes another sweet sip. To Suo, it sounds a bit like the toll of a bell. “That kid has drive.”

Suo watches it like his eye is getting scraped by that knife again—coarse and looming, like something terrible is about to happen any second. He has yet to see Sakura fully lose a fight; he’s struggled during some, sure, but in all the months Suo has known him, he has yet to slump to the ground and not be able to get back up.

Right now he presses his forehead to the pavement, a stream of slow, saliva-ruby running from his mouth to the road. He breathes like he’s drowning, sweats in the cold like the sun is mere miles from here. One of his shoulders tremble on the way to his feet, red sticking one lid closed as he glares and seethes and bares that determination of his.

“Everybody’s feelin’ it—the effects of the war. Some more than others though, I see,” Togame comments, and Suo has this odd urge to defend his captain, like he’s saying something wrong. He opens his mouth to retort, but he can’t latch onto anything disputable.

“Musta put things into perspective for him,” is said in a gentler way, like he can sense Suo’s displeasure. Or maybe it’s simple empathy. “Musta made him realize some things he hadn’t figured out just yet.”

Strangely, the edges of the parking lot and the uneasy stares thrown toward Tomiyama’s sparring partner are what Suo decides to focus on. Sakura is thrown in a dull, distant static, made the periphery even if it’s the center of his vision.

He hears mutters, questions, clear as crystal while the impact of flesh, grunts, and the scuffs of shoes might as well be in a different dimension. Should we… intervene? Some of them have stopped sparring, if only to avoid Tomiyama’s recklessly wide trajectories. Woah, he’s bleeding a lot—

Something in Suo’s mind will not let him see that. Something is blocking it off. He tries to listen, tries to dig through the voices— Nirei, begging Enomoto to do something— but all he can hear is Sakura’s faraway pants, the wheezes at the end of his breath, the rasp and gurgle of viscous phlegm in his throat.

Suo should be doing something. Why isn’t he doing anything?

The sound of a body hitting asphalt, the choked gasp and coarse roll of it turning over gravel, the wretching of a windpipe that’s catching blood and nothing else.

“Don’t underestimate Choji,” Togame says then, with the hint of a smile as he eyes Suo’s tight look, and he stares wide-eyed at what he can only interpret as a threat in the moment.

Tomiyama laughs between the neurons in his head, bubbly and excited and scraping against the fear already there. Suo whips around, wills the static away—

Tomiyama’s giggling, good-natured, and a little apologetic. “Sorry, man! That last kick was a little hard,” he breathes out through bloodied teeth, and Suo is surprised to see him quite battered. He’s stepping across gravel toward Sakura, who’s heaving wet breaths against the ground, and Suo jerks forward, heart in his throat.

“You’re a solid fighter! And durable as hell!” he exclaims, punching the air in a wide arc that has his whole body spinning to follow it, “Your stamina’s crazy!”

A hand comes down, offered to his captain, who’s pained eyes scroll up and widen at the sight. “That was fun! Wanna get some grub with me?” he motions to the coolers, “I’ll give you my pickles!”

Suo holds his breath. Sakura stares, a restless array of emotions flitting through his gaze—under the vast undertone of frustration, he thinks he sees a brief moment of ire before it’s taken over by that reflexive distrust.

Sakura, noticeably not taking his hand, slowly brings a leg underneath him, toe of his shoe drawing a line in the gravel. His shoulders shake again as he arches to sit up, but there’s a hiss in the sharp intake that interrupts it and he’s unnervingly still for a beat or two.

Head down, a hand raises, very slowly, to meet Tomiyama’s. Bloody fingers slide over a bloody palm, and Tomiyama beams at the acceptance, bright and earnest. He pulls him up without much thought and it’s a harsh yank, so Sakura is torn from the ground in a jerk that has him barking out a pained yelp.

Suo feels the adrenaline slowly ebbing, and he lets out that breath he’d been holding in a long, shuddering exhale. OW—easy, bastard, you kicked me a million times is yelled across the parking lot, which also seems to collectively sigh.

“Told you not to underestimate him,” Togame grins behind him when some of the activity returns. Suo regards him with a look that borders on spooked, but he reigns it into a more neutral confusion just in time. “He’s different these days. He knows the meaning of limits now.”

His eye trails after his captain, who limps along behind Tomiyama leading him to the bathrooms. The kid doesn’t offer to help him—honestly, that may be his smartest decision yet.

Something heavy clogs his throat, and he tilts his can back again to drown it with soda. It feels different, and he startles when he realizes he’s crushed it a little in his grasp. He doesn’t remember doing that, doesn’t even remember hearing the sound.

If Togame notices this, he doesn’t comment. Suo is left to stew in his embarrassment in peace, accompanied by the occasional deep sound of bubbles stretching around a ramune marble.

The general cacophony that comes with sparring comes back to his ears full force as his heart settles, and he wonders if that’s a record—the longest he’s gone without seeing that paralyzing static. Without having his will pulled out from under him during a time when he needs will more than ever.

He chastises himself, glaring a numb hole through the top of his soda can. One of his hands raise to adjust an earring and he holds his can by the top with the other, tracing the rim. The smell of the dojo is creeping into his head; he tastes a hint of that fluoride foam again, that porky flavor, and suddenly he feels a little ill.

Togame is staring. Suo wonders if he’s going pale.

He blurts out the first thing that comes to mind, because he can see a question building in the other’s and he doesn’t want to be the one answering to people right now. “What do you do when Tomiyama won’t listen to you?”

Well. At least the ghostly sheen across his skin is probably red now.

Togame blinks, and then laughs, slow and meandering like everything else he does. “You don’t have t’ tiptoe around askin’ for advice, Eyepatch,” he chortles, a pleased hum wrapped in the syllables.

He leans back to down the last of his ramune. It clinks to the metal table where he sets it in the corner, condensation dripping in a ring around the base. “Well…” He scratches the stubble on his chin as he tilts it up, studying the stains soaked into the drop ceiling tiles above them. “That’s a tough one.”

A few beats pass, and Suo focuses on calming his nausea while he thinks. Maybe drinking soda was a bad idea. “Somethin’ tells me this is all pretty new to him,” Togame reflects, eyes flicking down to Suo for confirmation, “Am I right?”

“Perceptive,” Suo replies, looking around for a trash can and finding one just a few feet behind him to toss his can into, “He’s from out of town.”

“Ah, a newbie,” Togame smiles, light, and then he grins more when he thinks about it, “Things are adding up.”

He lolls his head around to crack his neck in a wince. “I think… it’s not that he isn’t lookin’ where he’s going. It’s that he isn’t looking at what he’s running over.”

“I can see it in the way he moves. He looks at nothing but his opponent.” Suo thinks about a boy in a yellow jacket, following empty logic and tired of an empty chest. “He hears nothing outside his and his target’s breaths.” Climbing for the top, hands bloodied, only to find the top is far more empty than the bottom ever was. “Everything but his goal falls off the radar.”

Togame straightens, hands on his knees, as he regards him with something not quite cold, but sincere in a way that raises his hackles. “That’s dangerous, I’m sure you know. Accidental friendly fire is a real possibility with that.”

The wind in his eyes darkens; it’s not stormy, nor is it hail, but perhaps the sheen of the sun hitting puddled grass—a bright, lively fern, reflecting. Suo has a feeling he is no longer talking about fights.

The metal table creaks as he leans forward again, and Suo cannot help but join him, drinking in every syllable. “Sakura is a kind kid, looks out for his friends as much as he claims he doesn’t.” He grabs the ramune bottle off the metal, marble clinking, and points the end of it at Suo.

“Make him realize he’s not just hurting himself. Then, maybe he’ll listen.”

Chapter Text

The wind is loud with the way it cuts at him, and his earrings jingle each time his feet pound against asphalt. Distracted apologies leave his lips as he weaves between startled townsfolk, golden tassels rearing in his periphery. The windchimes are loud today—they sound more turbulent than blissful.

Suo swivels around a cart left halfway off the sidewalk. He keeps his eye locked overhead, breaths coming steady, on the two figures darting along the rooftops. In a faraway thought, he wishes he had a wider lens to work with—he keeps having to look back at the street to avoid obstacles, what with his lack of peripherals on his right.

One is gaining purchase on the chase, hands out to grab at clothing but missing by just a few inches. They both clamber over the tops of attic fans and careen around turbine vents, shoes pounding across metal. They spring over the lips on the edge of buildings, arching over alleyways with twenty foot drops like it’s nothing.

Suo is falling behind. He’s fast, but not Sakura fast.

“Nirei!” he calls across the street. In between the slideshow of buildings he passes, every few seconds he sees Nirei running in parallel on the street across, keeping up well. Big eyes dart to him. “They’ll go left—take 42!”

Nirei’s head whips around, and then he’s nervously nodding and cutting it down the next left turn. Sakura’s keeping to the right edge of the rooftops, trying to corral their thief to the north end of town. It’s smart—that leads to the river, and the buildings, and therefore rooftops, trail off by the time the bridges start narrowing the playing field. Sakura’s trying to run their assailant out of options.

Suo dives into an alleyway, shooting past dumpsters and letting the ever-present Makochi tune of windchimes fade from his ears. The stark contrast in light has his eye struggling to adjust to the shadows cast, and there’s noise around important, sharper bits he should be focusing on. 

He lifts himself over boxes, listens to the creak of wooden crates that protest against his weight. A cat resting atop an air conditioner spooks and darts to a higher vantage point. It smells like damp, rotting meat back here, and he mourns the clean fabric of his shoes while splashing through dirty rainwater.

Vaulting over a decrepit fence, he beelines out of the alleyway, eye scanning the rooftops in a blind sweep, white sky assaulting his retina. He spots Sakura still hot on the thief’s trail, reliable as ever. Miraculously, they haven’t dropped their stolen merchandise—most people would simply deem their prize not worth getting caught.

The bridges are in sight, just around the corner of an apartment complex. Suo races down the sidewalk in a fast patter, soles pounding against concrete. The dampness of the middle morning makes the air bite a bit colder—he can’t decide if it’s easier to breathe in or not.

He looks back up at the rooftops, finally parallel to the chase. The thief’s hoodie drags behind him in the wind as they scurry over vents and electrical boxes, shoe laces loose, flying, and somehow not tripping them. The sun is blotted out by their figures in harsh glares, moving and flickering with their strides.

Sakura is inches away from grabbing at them. He’s gaining as their thief starts to lose steam, starts to realize they’re running out of places to go. Suo’s focus narrows in, heart pounding, as he gets so close, and then—

Sakura stumbles.

He scrambles to right himself as soon as it happens, listing to the side and popping right back up, but Suo can see even from here that something is wrong. He can hear the heavy breathing even from the ground, can see how lazy his steps are getting, how exhausted his posture is now.

Suo hesitates just as Sakura does, eye boring a hole through his head as his captain rushes to gain the ground he’d lost in the slip-up. They near a particularly big gap between buildings, an alley sinking a hole in their path. The thief leaps over the edge and lands, keeping momentum. Sakura bounds up to the lip and leaps off after them, but the takeoff is wobbly and it feels brittle.

His jump is too short.

Suo shouts out as Sakura plummets, smacks his nose against the brick of the other building’s wall. His hands miss the lip, but before he can do anything to recover, his body collides with an air conditioner perched in a window and the corner catches his ribs hard. The plastic of it cracks on impact, shards of it flying out to tumble across the alleyway.

Sakura’s body bricks, disappears beyond a rotting wooden fence. The sound of the impact is loud—Suo’s worried shout is louder.

He forgets the thief and simply prays Nirei either handles it fantastically or loses them altogether, and darts back to the fence. He doesn’t want to kick wood splinters over Sakura, so he opts to climb it inside of bust it in. It’s damp, so it’s hard to get a hold of—Suo grapples for advantage on the mortared brick instead.

The fact that he can hear coughing is a good sign in the sense that Sakura is alive— a fall from that kind of height could have easily killed, especially with such a rough way down and such an awkward bend of Sakura’s neck, crashing against the wall like that. He hopes the air conditioner did more to break his fall than his ribs; it sounded heavy, the impact.

Suo manages to peak over the picket fence, and sees the colors of Sakura’s hair in the shadows. His form stirs, rough coughs and desperate gasps being choked against black shapes and dirty, wet concrete. The sounds echo against the brick loudly, and Suo hurries to scramble over rotting wood.

His feet hit the pavement, and he darts straight to Sakura’s side, who landed halfway into a pile of soaked cardboard. Suo drops to his knees next to him, a worried mumble leaving his lips as he takes in his form.

Sakura coughs out a stream of blood that oozes and drips to the board below them in a wet splatter, lifting his head to bare his teeth. “What are y’ doing!? Go—go aft—” his breath hitches, and a hand shifts and presses against his middle. The next breath he lets out is slow and labored, carefully controlled through starved lungs that fight against it.

“Forget the thief, Sakura, I’m more worried about you,” Suo says, hands hovering in an unsure stilt, “Is anything broken?”

“‘M fine.” His voice is oddly nasally.

“Sakura.”

“J’st gimme a min’te.”

“Sakura.”

“Yeah, somethin’s broken, idiot!” Sakura gripes, and then his face twitches when the yell makes his middle tense, “Fuck.”

Suo scans his form. His one hand puts pressure against his shirt, fisting the fabric tightly to the skin. Suo has never liked the fact that Sakura’s ribs are visible in the indents when they’re shown bare, and he especially doesn’t like how he can see that even through the tight wrinkles and folds of his shirt, but he forces his gaze to flick elsewhere.

Sakura’s holding himself up on one elbow, head down and against the other hand that cups his nose. Suo winces when he realizes the bridge of it looks off—he winces further when Sakura turns his head and it’s entirely crooked. The skin there is already a deep red, scraped raw from the direct impact on brick, and it’s laden with splatters of blood that likely cover the worst of it.

His friend moves to get up. Suo leans forward, keeping his gaze on him steady. “Let me help you,” he blurts, and the way it echoes around the alleyway in a second request is a bit painful, “Please.”

Silver and gold take him in, soak in the earnest, worry-hardened gaze of his vice captain. There’s something like humiliation shadowing every other thing Suo looks for in Sakura’s. He can’t find the trust. If it’s in there, it’s trying to survive the second-nature instincts to peel away from everything.

Blood drips to cardboard. The hand pressed to his side carefully unfurls from the mass of shirt folds. Suo brings his own out, and palm meets palm in a soft clap that echoes louder in his own head than it does the alleyway.

In the struggle to stand, Sakura almost slips on the wet cardboard once and has to be saved by Suo’s careful balance, but otherwise, it’s a slow and smooth journey. He keeps a hand on Sakura’s arm just in case as he lingers upright for a moment, still catching those last breaths.

He stumbles forward to the light at the end of the alley and Suo guides him along until he stops at the mouth of it, stiffly turning to spit blood into the cracks in the pavement. He lists to the side and bumps his shoulder against the brick, leaning on the wall as he closes his eyes and tilts his head back to drink in the cold air.

Suo waits patiently. The sound of windchimes fades back into his awareness; that ever-there backdrop of heartbeats. The turbulence in their undertone isn’t there anymore. It’s back to a breathing, lulling, mingling tune—that silky Makochi texture.

“All tha’ effort an’ we didn’ even get em’,” Sakura gripes through short little huffs, nasally, “What a bunch o’ fuckin’ bull.”

“I’m sure Mrs. Yachi will understand,” Suo replies kindly.

Sakura is quiet. He drags his eyes open to stare at the top of the building he leapt from, something like ire bubbling in those metals.

“Sorry. I…” he starts, fumbles to find the words. A hand comes up to rub at the back of his neck, but something about the glaze in his eyes tells him it’s not out of trepidation. “I don’t know what—I just… Sorry I fucked it up.”

Suo watches him closely. “There’s no need to apologize, Sakura,” he says, almost as an afterthought. Sakura loves blaming himself for things—Suo’s grown accustomed to veering him from that path. What he’s more focused on is searching him for other injuries.

He’d stumbled. People stumble, mistakes are made, but Sakura isn’t the type. Sakura is graceful as much as he is loud, and even if he does fumble the bag, his recoveries are fast and efficient. That’s one of the greatest advantages he has in fights, after all; the ability to turn the tables within seconds.

Suo trails his eye down, looking for any odd angles, any rumples in his uniform, any darker stains in dark fabric. He pauses at the way his hands shake against his sides. When he keeps going, he rests his gaze on his friend’s shoes, suspicious.

“Oi. Quit oglin’ me,” Sakura grumbles, looking down his cheeks at him, “You’re freakin’ me o—”

“Are you injured?”

Sakura blinks at the sudden question, and then his eyes go lidded and he stares at Suo like he is a true, bonafide idiot. The sunlight above catches the reflections in the fresh blood lacquering his face. “‘M gonna pretend you didn’t just ask that.”

Suo fights the urge to roll his eyes. “Is your foot injured, Sakura?” he asked lowly.

His face resets, and then washes to confusion. “My foot? No,” Sakura answers, and interestingly Suo doesn’t feel a lie in it. Hm. “All that’s fine, quit mother hennin’.”

Suo thinks, keeps his gaze on him. He must do it for quite a while, because Sakura looks away and gets this red, uncomfortable look on his face. It conveniently hides the pallor of his skin—he doesn’t know how he didn’t notice it before.

“Give me your hand,” Suo instructs, lifting his own.

Sakura regards him oddly, but must be out of steam (which is worrying in and of itself), because he obediently lifts a hand to plop it in his palm. Suo adjusts, can feel his hand shake against him even now. He pointedly looks up at Sakura. He’s looking back, vaguely betrayed.

“Gimme a break, I fell off a building.” There’s an odd whistle to his words, a strident rumbling from crooked and cracked sinuses.

He tears his arm away, pushes off against the wall, and Suo sees the exact moment the light leaves his eyes. A glassiness shifts in to replace the lively sheen, and Sakura pitches forward on a stumble.

Suo darts to catch him, a worried Sakura leaving his mouth in a bark that he’d be embarrassed about any other moment. Sakura’s feet try to right themselves, and a hand comes to press against his back for stability. Suo keeps his shoulders balanced, peering around him to get a look at his face.

It’s gone a shade paler, and he’s blinking hard, trying to focus on the transition of the alley’s pavement to the sidewalk’s concrete. One of Sakura’s hands fumbles for something to hold onto, anything, and Suo’s comes to meet it. It’s gripped tight.

“Did you hit your head?” Suo asks seriously.

“No,” Sakura breaths out, the glassiness in his gaze receding like a slow tide.

“Sakura.”

“No,” he hisses, “I promise, I didn’t.”

Suo gives into the nerves and worries his lip. He studies his friend’s face, darting his attention to and fro while Sakura slowly, steadily straightens, like he knows he’s testing his luck. His hand is still clenched around Suo’s. It’s worrying how grounding it is to the both of them.

Something alights in his mind. “When was the last time you ate?”

Sakura regards him oddly, and then his gaze wanders a bit as he thinks. His grip around his palm loosens. It’s a simple question. A simple question that takes him far too long to think of an answer for.

“Uhm,” he hums intelligently, gazing through the lines painted on the road that basks out in the sunlight. There’s a beat where he sees he’s connecting dots, and then he’s wincing. “... Shit.”

His dear friend slides his gaze to clunk against Suo’s own. It feels rattling and hollow, like plastic. “Yes, Sakura?” he deadpans in a low warning.

“I think it was…” Sakura winces, and it’s for reasons beyond his various broken bones, “Tuesday night.”

Suo pauses. His breathing turns mindful, aware of the seconds spent inhaling, the time spent letting it out. “Sakura,” he calmly lets out, “It’s Thursday.”

Sakura wisely keeps his mouth shut, but he’s pointing a sort of decayed, withering look his way. No wonder Sakura had stumbled, had seemed lethargic, and he’d already looked tapped out before the normal him would even begin to feel it. No wonder he looks pale, no wonder he’s trembling.

His body is running on nothing.

It’s odd, the sudden clap of emotion that rolls through him. It’s a lot of different flavors, a lot of seemingly simultaneous dichotomies flickering along his gut like lightning, but this feeling is familiar. The walls of his skull, of his lungs, have tasted this all before, in many little bite-sized amounts.

It laves over him every time that half-SOS chimes; every time he smells smoke, but fails to find a fire. Every little thing that Sakura does, especially to himself, is met with an appropriate reaction from Suo. Worry is most of it. Grief is a close second. Suo does not have a name for the runner-up.

One word does not encompass this particular version of it, mixed in with everything else as it is. It’s wrath, but it’s not the cold, remorseless fervor that Suo enters when his life is tampered with. It’s not the ice, and it’s not the mechanical motions of his joints, working through muscle memory alone.

It can’t be, for that type of wrath is usually reserved for the people and the things that haunt the good parts of life.

It’s wrath, but the seething through his teeth is done in desperate little whispers. It’s wrath, but the temperature is set to that perfect in-between; stinging your skin, yet never burning. It’s wrath in it’s spelling, but never in the syllables, never in the delivery of it. It’s wrath, but it hurts to call it that.

Wrath is reserved for protecting the good things. It is now directed at one of the good things themselves. And Suo doesn’t know how to handle that.

Oscillating at a dangerous pace between that gentle, fretful hovering and that frigid, violin-grinded hatred for things that hurt people he likes, Suo opens his mouth to speak.

“Guys! There you are!”

Suo is very glad he doesn’t speak.

Nirei materializes into view, jogging down the road from the direction of the bridges and offering them a guilty smile. “I’m really sorry—I completely lost em’... Hooo my God, that was a workout.”

He doubles over as soon as he reaches them, hands on his knees as he struggles to catch his breath. “I didn’t—” A breathless gulp. “—see Sakura—” A pause. “—chasing them anymore. And there was—” A shake of the head. “— no way I’d be able to—”

Nirei straightens, and promptly flails to point at Sakura’s face, stumbling back with a noise bordering on a screech bursting from him. “Sakura! Your nose!”

Their captain regards him with a deadpan look, posture odd and stilted from the likely-broken ribs. His voice comes out in a pinched creak. “Yeah. I can feel it.”

“What happened?! Are you okay?!” he worries, hands hovering around the edge of Sakura’s bubble as he furrows his brows. He starts inspecting every angle of him, a bright care and fear in his eyes that makes the brown there feel hardened, even if he is panicking.

Suo lets the war in his chest die off as Nirei’s fussing licks and washes at it like a tide. His co-vice’s presence is always like a tap on the shoulder, an invitation to breathe. A reminder that the room will stop being stifling once you open the window.

“When did this—I didn’t see, I wasn’t—!”

“Don’t worry, Nirei,” Suo puts on his golden smile, hand leaving Sakura’s to fold behind his back, “Sakura just fell off the roof and hasn’t eaten since Tuesday!”

If it weren’t for the… circumstances, Suo would find the way Nirei’s eyes seem to bulge out of his skull hilarious. Right now, it simply seems appropriate.

“WHAT?!”

Chaos erupts. Nirei’s voice bursts in quick, scattered little syllables and half-thoughts, high-pitched and loud enough to almost hurt. A few heads farther down the street turn at the noise. One or two of them catch Sakura’s bloodied face and hesitate in concern.

Their beloved captain whips his head around to glare daggers at him, and even though he tries to snarl, it obviously sends sharp pains up his face, because it looks oddly stiff. “Why would you say that?!”

Suo brings a hand to his chest, mock offended. “You think I’d lie to him instead?”

“Oh my God—we have to get you to a hospital! And—and food— why haven’t you eaten?!” Nirei has his hands buried in his hair, fisted around his curls. Suo hopes he doesn’t pull. “The gluttonous Sakura, not eating?!”

Suo pointedly turns his head, regarding Sakura expectantly. “Yes, why haven’t you eaten?”

Their captain sputters, cheeks red for reasons other than his scraped up snout. “First of all— no hospital! You couldn’t drag me to a goddamn hospital!” he pokes a finger into Nirei’s chest, “Second of all… I—!”

Sakura throws his hands up. “I didn’t—! I didn’t have time, okay?! I forgot! I was busy, so sue me!” he shouts, voice a little raspy, “Pothos was closed last night, and I was too tired to be cookin’ shit, so I just went to bed! And—this morning was rushed and I didn’t get a chance to eat!”

‘Rushed’ as in ‘in a hurry to squeeze in some training hours.’ ‘Busy’ as in ‘working himself to death.’ “And yesterday’s breakfast?” Suo asks calmly.

Sakura runs a hand down one side of his face, dragging his eye bags down with it. They’re getting puffier every day, it feels. “I don’t remember,” he growls out and finishes it in a harsh, guttural huff. That’s new. Sakura is not a whiner—a fed Sakura, that is. “I was prolly busy then too.”

Nirei and Suo exchange a look. “You need food. We’re gonna get food, right now,” Nirei decides very wisely, and then winces as he takes in Sakura’s… unsightly appearance, “You need a doctor first, though. The nearest hospital…”

“Hey, I said I don’t need a hospital!”

They promptly ignore him. “I believe it’s somewhere off 282,” Suo supplies. That’s a bit far, he thinks as he rocks his weight on the balls of his feet. “There’s an emergency clinic on the south edge of town.”

Sakura yells something else at them. Neither of them pay attention, and the snap of Nirei’s fingers drown out the end of his huffed barks. “Oh, that’s perfect! That’s the one Umemiya takes the orphanage kids to, right?”

“I believe so,” Suo smiles, “They’re very understanding about anxiety when it comes to doctors.”

“Oh, that’s good! Hear that, Sakura? It’ll be fine—they’re really nice and—”

Nirei’s smile bricks, and Suo whips to follow his gaze.

Both of Sakura’s hands are over his crooked nose, fingers placed along red, raw, swelling skin. He stares through the pavement like he’s mentally preparing for something and he’s got this look in eyes; that determined, petty sneer, fiery and unyielding.

Both of their hearts seem to launch to their throats as they bark at him to stop, but Sakura moves before either of them can do anything.

They hear a sickening crack, and his breathing promptly turns to loud, wobbly, uneven inhales, restrained at the back of his throat.

Nirei twists away to gag. Well, Suo thinks, that’s one way to solve it.

+

A week later, Sakura joins them for a (mandated by Umemiya) lunch break at Pothos. The bridge of his nose is dyed a sickly yellow-green, bordered by remnants of a deep purple watercoloring his eye bags.

His expressions have become a bit listless, but he eats well. When he slumps against one arm and dozes in and out for half of the break, neither Suo nor Nirei have the heart to wake him.

+

Crickets make some of Suo’s favorite sounds.

The window is open. It shouldn’t be, Suo knows better than that, but the dojo is oddly stifling tonight and at some point he’d slid it open and relished enough in the cool air to keep it that way. If the heating bill is high, his Master likely won’t complain regardless.

He’s hot, and the rustle of leaves just outside—plus one or two distant windchimes—makes him expect the call of crickets. It’s silly to; they’re not around in the colder months. For some reason, Suo finds the lack of chirping in the air a little disquieting tonight.

He keeps glancing at his phone. Uncharacteristic of him, perhaps; even more uncharacteristic is the way he bites down on a teacake while hovering over the pixels. He almost never eats while on his phone—it’s unsanitary, and he’s a little more mindful of germs than most.

The dojo is quiet save for the breeze outside, the jingle of that windchime, and the steady hum of circuitry in the walls. Suo stands aimlessly in front of the fridge, chewing and staring and weaving his fingers between the tassels of one earring.

The tea kettle whispers, balanced on the lower right corner grate of the stove—Suo’s always-spot. The quiet breath of the fire underneath it measures Suo’s own, steady and slow, meticulously so. He makes sure of it.

None of the pixels have changed from where his phone lies on the kitchen island. The backlight of it dims again, and Suo busies himself with finishing off the teacake while he taps at the screen to light it up.

The fridge cuts on, a remedying hum for him to focus on instead of the silence. His ears tune into the rhythmic undulating of its compressor, regular enough for it to be mostly predictable, but varied enough for it to hold his attention.

His earlobe feels a bit sore from the constant tugging. He switches to playing with the other one, and in a faraway memory Suo can feel his Master tapping at his knuckles to get him to stop.

Now that it’s empty of a teacake, Suo busies his free hand with idle scrolling, dragging down to flit back through messages from hours ago. He reads them for the fourth time, none of them particularly insightful, but then he scrolls to the bottom again and he regards Umemiya’s bigger speech bubble with a close cousin of bitter obedience.

OPERATION KEEP SAKURA ALIVE
You, Anzai Masaki, Hiragi Toma, Kaji Ren, and 6 others…

UME [10:04PM]:
I know you guys are worried
But you know how Sakura’s been lately
Maybe he needed some alone time!
Everybody needs that
I’ll keep looking. You guys hit the hay
If I see him, you’ll all be the first to know
。.:☆*:･'(*⌒―⌒*)))

He scrolls back up to one of Nirei’s messages. Went to his place, it had said, he wasn’t there. He left his phone on the futon.

Suo opens the fridge, bends down, and digs through one of the crisper drawers. He rises back up with a bag of grapes, and pops one in his mouth.

He’s not stress eating. It explodes between his molars. He does not stress eat, he thinks, as he picks more grapes off the vine in the bag.

The tea kettle’s whispers rise higher until they’re chirps and then they’re screams. Suo pops another in his mouth as he pads to the stove to flick it off. The fire recedes to nothing and the screaming lowers back down, windchime replacing it.

A shping sounds from his phone speakers. Suo whips around immediately to hover over the screen, and if anybody else were here he’d be embarrassed.

It’s not in the group chat. There’s a red 1 laid over the back button. He taps it, and stares at his contact list, at Nirei’s name hugging the header, lettering bold.

Nirei [10:43PM]:
Park

Suo shoves the grapes back in the fridge, makes his way to the genkan to slip his shoes on, and is out the door in under a minute.

Suo Hayato [10:43PM]:
I’ll be there in 5.

He doesn’t think to put a jacket on, so the cold night air sinks through his changshan and into his skin quickly. It’s biting enough nowadays that the heat from his lips pours out in little clouds, swirled away by his cheeks as he hurries down the steps of the dojo two at a time.

The park is fifteen minutes away on foot. He’ll just have to run really fast.

The streetlamps blur by in dopplered buzz of electricity. Nirei has grown quite rebellious, Suo thinks with a half-grin between strides. Going directly against Umemiya’s orders to stand down and let him handle the search; he would say it’s unprecedented, but when it comes to his friends, Nirei is a bit of a streak of fire.

He thinks the boy is, maybe, nearing his limit, and this might be the last straw. Suo has seen it; that steady, encroaching upset in all of his actions.

The obsessive picking at his lips, and then picking at the scabs that form from it the day after. Pulling at the hair along his eyebrows, his lashes. The little rituals he does, the touching of his own shoulders after messing with his hair, the flattening and aligning of his pants seams when he sits, the repetitive rewriting of words until they’re just how he wants them.

They’re all typical of him, but the frequency has changed. He presses his pencil so hard into the paper when tallying up Sakura’s things now that he often snaps the graphite.

Suo skirts around a familiar utility pole and sees the entrance of the park a little ways down the block. He huffs against the cold and his nose stings when it bites. He doesn’t know what to expect when he gets there—the concision of the text spells trouble, suggests that he didn’t have time to write anything else.

He rounds the gate and hears harsh syllables. They’re familiar, and he runs along the stone walkways in a beeline toward them. Cutting through a few of the windy trails, his soles rap against cold, hard dirt, then concrete, then hop over black, plastic borders and onto mulch.

The bathrooms are ahead, placed neatly by the swing sets and the strung-together climbing dome illuminated with streetlamps. Oddly, when Suo slows, breathing clouds out into the air in huffs, he realizes the voices are echoed and confined by the mouth of the men’s bathroom.

The loud whir of the hand dryer is covering most of it, and Suo is about to move forward, steeling himself, but then the drone of it cuts off and the cadence of arguing makes itself known. Suo is close enough to pick out only two voices.

Unease flutters in his gut—Nirei’s higher notes, stressed and pleading, and Sakura’s frustrated, lower jabs. It doesn’t sound quite as fond and easy as the bickering he’s familiar with. The Ts are harsher, the Ss sharper, even if all Suo can pick out is tinny, muffled syllables.

They suddenly get louder, and then Sakura’s figure is trudging out of the bathroom, Nirei yipping at his heels.

“—on’t mind it—”

“You shouldn’t have to!” Nirei bites while adjusting his scarf, and oh, Suo is admittedly a little startled to see the frustrated reddening of his face, “Nobody’s asking you to do this!”

“Well I want to, what’s the problem with that?” Sakura bites over his shoulder, golden eye and bandage over a busted cheekbone catching the light of the streetlamps. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his mountain jacket, breath billowing—at least he’s bundled up a little. “Why’re you so obsessed with what I’m doin’, huh?”

“Why are you so obsessed with training?!” Nirei follows him and they both step off concrete and onto mulch. “You need a break—”

“I don’t need a damn break!”

“I can tell this is wearing on you—”

“Get off my ass, Nirei!”

“Apparently I haven’t been on your ass enough!”

“What is with you?” Sakura snaps, turning around and grinding his shoes into the mulch. “Why are you suddenly so—?!”

The turnaround makes him look up to see Suo standing a yard or two away. He pauses, registers his presence, but he seems too preoccupied with Nirei to properly think about it, and promptly levels the boy with a look Suo can’t see from here. “You’ve been weird lately.”

It kind of burns in an odd, cold sting. It leaves the air a bit sour, bitter in its curdling, and Suo watches as Nirei soaks in the flavor. His jaw slides to the side, he bites his tongue, and it’s been a while since he’s seen Nirei with so much genuine ire in his eyes.

“I’ve been acting weird?” he says in a manner like he’s ice about to crack, like he’s gas in a tank that can’t keep the pressure contained. He gestures to himself with both hands, sharp movements, and the scarf around his neck dangles with the motions. “Me? I’m the one acting weird?!”

Suo takes a tentative step forward, silent and slow along the mulch. Sakura has this odd, troubled look on his face, teetering between offended and something a little more tender.

Nirei steps forward. For a kid who normally doesn’t have much of a presence, the single action makes Sakura match it and take a step back. “So I’m the one training for so many hours that my legs shake by the end of it?”

“It’s me who’s assigning himself way too many extra patrols? I’m holding Hiragi hostage in spars until I can’t breathe anymore?” Nirei gripes, gesturing wildly, “So I’m skipping meals? I look like I’m running on three hours of sleep? I’m the one who’s working himself to death for God-knows-what?!”

Sakura bares his teeth, clenches the inside fabric of his jacket pockets. “You’re blowin’ it way outta proporti—”

“I wish I was!” Nirei interrupts in a shout, nose and ears and cheeks red from both the biting air and the burning ire, “Do you realize how much I wish I was having one of my normal freakouts?! For a while, I thought maybe I was!

“I thought maybe I was just looking too far into it, jumping to conclusions. I thought you were just… going through a rough patch, and you’d bounce back. But at this rate, I don’t think you will!”

Nirei fiddles with his scarf, tugging it down, because he looks overheated even in the cold and he’s glowing with something that tastes so similar to his outburst back during the Noroshi war that Suo starts to feel sick.

“You keep making it worse— you keep starving yourself of more and more things! You barely hang out with us anymore, you turn down all our invites we give you because we know you need a break, and then you go and train until you’re coughing up blood!”

His voice cracks at the end, and there is something so deeply sad seething through his teeth that it permeates the whole park, starts rusting the metal bars around them. Nirei’s face is wrinkled up in that familiar, frustrated bite of his lips, that baring of his canines that are salty from tears, and he’s clenching his fists at his sides because if he weren’t, Suo’s sure they’d be grabbing at the hem of Sakura’s shirt.

Just as Suo’s gaze swivels to Sakura, Nirei speaks. And Suo knows something is about to burst.

“I just—I don’t understand—please let me understand! We can help!” Nirei croaks, chin wet and eyes pleading, “Why are you so hellbent on this?! You can’t keep this up, Sakura—sooner or later you’re going to—!”

“I finally have people I like!” There it is. It’s loud and it’s echoed, rung against all the metal and all the railings, and Sakura meets Nirei’s watery, wavering look with something that reminds Suo of crumbling brick.

“I finally have friends, and a livable house, and people I can trust!” he yells, guttural, visceral, and buoyed with so much fear that it almost physical hurts Suo’s chest, “If I can’t protect the one good thing I’ve ever been given, then I don’t deserve to have it!”

The air rings afterward, like the sting of silence that comes after a long-ringing fire alarm quiets. Grainy shadows along the swing sets seem to groan in tandem with the chains, with the subtle choir of existence and the wind. Sakura’s shoes shift in the mulch, a gentle grating against something impossibly louder in the air.

Suo is typically quiet by choice. It is rare that he is truly silent about a matter—he’s just as opinionated as everybody else, but he handpicks his words and actions carefully. He is succinct and efficient with his mouth, his movements, and his motives.

But it is also rare that he’s fully unable to speak. Words leave his mouth easily, it’s just a matter of picking the right ones. He has no trouble making his opinion known. So when everything halts in his head after Sakura’s hoarse shout—when every streamlined thought abruptly pauses and scrapes against one another like tectonic plates, all he can really think is ah.

“After hearing what you guys said, I feel a lot lighter.” He looks lighter. So why do his words feel so heavy? 

“But… but still… can I ask you guys to give me one more chance? Just one’s enough.”

Ah.

Normally, in situations like this, it’s Suo that has the last say. In lesser arguments, in calmer moments where the stakes don’t feel so relevant to the very foundation they walk on, it’s Suo who settles it. Sakura complains, Nirei begs in panicked breaths, Suo persuades with gentle logic.

Suo is not the one to speak. Nirei is, and the syllables are shrouded in more anger than either of them are prepared for.

“Why… are you so—” It’s grinded out like a blade to a wheel, grains chipping away the unimportant and leaving only sharp edges. “—so ruthless to yourself?!”

Tight fists at his sides, hair over his eyes, and shoulders up to his ears, Nirei cracks at the seams while trying to sew up Sakura’s and all they can do is watch. Something like confusion warps their captain’s expression, panic tinting it, and he opens his mouth but Nirei beats him to it.

He brings a fist to his own chest, hits his sternum twice, and looks Sakura in the eyes with his own wide, tearful ones.

“I can’t protect the people I love. At least… not fully.” There’s a wilt there in his tone and his posture, but it picks back up with a new fervor. “Not yet. Do you think I don’t deserve to have you all, then?!”

Sakura widens his gaze. “That’s not—No, I—!”

“Then what’s different?!” Nirei yells, and it echoes across the playground and hollers against metal bars with a desperation neither of them have heard since Endo.

He gestures wildly around him, to him, to Suo, to Sakura, to Makochi. “What’s the difference, between what I deserve and what you deserve?! We’re all human, we’re all kids! So tell me what the difference is!”

He huffs against the cold air, breaths clouding in front of a wet, red face, and Suo cannot help but be reminded of a Nirei getting on his hands and knees in front of their bloodied captain, telling him how important he is.

Suo wants to step forward, to mediate and to comfort, but at the same time he feels this needs to happen. Whether Nirei needs to say it, or Sakura needs to hear it— something has to give, something has to change. If he stops this, he stops the pressure.

But something else keeps him from moving. It’s the way Sakura has his head down, the way his hair covers his eyes, the way he stands in the mulch with fists clenched, remarkably silent when the old him—the one they’re sorely missing—would have taken this to a screaming match.

And then that aura hits him.

That fire he feels around Umemiya—it’s here, housed in Sakura’s chest, flames licking healing ribs. Resolve chanting, perseverance singing, intransigence beating like a drum. It is a heavy thing—the weight of the world and then some—and it crackles like Kaji’s, thunderous, stentorian. It crawls like Endo’s, overshadowing all else.

It is barreling, and it is not stopping for anybody; even the people he’s doing it for.

“If you’re not gonna help me train,” Sakura says, ruthlessly, chillingly numb in his delivery, “then go home, Nirei.”

Quietly, in the cricketless silence, Nirei’s breath hitches. Suo sees Sakura falter, sees his throat bob with a thick swallow, but he stands his ground, unmoving.

For once, Suo is not entirely sure what to say, how to fix things. The hurt look on Nirei’s face knocks the breath right out of his lungs.

A leather shoe shifts in the mulch. His scarf soaks in the tears that drip from his chin, and there is a bitterness that flushes through his eyes so quick Suo almost misses it. Nirei is chewing on his tongue between his molars, glaring through the ground between them with a lost, hopeless anger, and then he’s nodding.

He nods to himself, to them, to the silent park that doesn’t help him, and he looks like he wants to spit on it. Such an expression on such a normally kind face looks so uncanny and wrong, Suo feels his gut writhe.

He expects a fine to be thrown out, some last ditch retort to worm its way into their heads so they can agonize over it later, but nothing comes. The sour acceptance on his face rings clear, the anger and the remorse and the worry all culminating into one horrid little wobbly grimace, wet with fear.

Nirei throws Suo an apologetic look, turns around, and says nothing as he leaves. His footsteps pad across the mulch, tap onto concrete, trudge through grass. His figure leaves the lightpath of the streetlamps, and it soon becomes a moving line disappearing around trees.

Suo almost goes after him, because admittedly, he’s a little pissed himself—for many, many piling reasons, but Sakura speaking like that to Nirei is the cherry on top. But something roots him, and won’t let go.

It takes a long while for Sakura to lift his head. When he does, he looks up at Suo, almost tentatively, through his fringe.

The gold glints, scared. I shouldn’t have said that, it screams, and all the anger Suo feels rushes out with the next cloud of breath in the air.

The swing set’s chains creak in the breeze, and a streetlight flickers somewhere in the corner of their bubble. Suo regards Sakura carefully, sees the way his breaths are measured, methodically counted. He takes in the clench of his teeth, the reddening of his nose and ears. The puffy eye bags, the beginning of a gaze that’s bloodshot from lack of sleep.

Suo finally steps forward, a slow meander. He pointedly takes his phone out, clicks the screen on and lets the light of it grab Sakura’s attention. He checks the time on the lock screen.

“It’s almost curfew,” Suo announces into the dark matter-of-factly, careful to keep his voice steady. The light from his phone illuminates Sakura’s figure in a cold blue. His captain looks up at him numbly, and his eyes are watering. A pang shoots through Suo’s chest. “Three ‘til.”

He half expects Sakura to scoff, to say so what, to use it as a show of defiance, but he simply stands there, looking a bit lost. He doesn’t move, doesn’t reply; whatever energy he had before has been flushed out of his system, and he looks a bit like a walking corpse, only distantly catching Suo’s words.

His phone screen dims, shuts off, and Suo slips it back into his pocket. “My place is closer than yours.”

It takes a moment, but Sakura’s eyes soften. He blinks, looks around, wipes at his eyes as he sniffles, and then he’s staring down at the mulch and nodding.

Suo gently grabs his wrist, and leads him out of the park. Sakura follows, unnervingly quiet.

+

Water trickles through the pipes in the walls, quiet and muffled and flattened into a one-note hum. Suo rummages through the closet down the hall, wishing for the crickets.

A glow shines along the borders of the bathroom door, light crawling across hardwood until it stops short at the lip of a misaligned board. His fingers graze fabric, and he rises on his toes to pull it out, one hand pushing back the boxes on top that want to follow.

Futon mattress and blankets bundled in his arms, he slides the closet door closed with his foot and peers around his cargo, padding down the hall to his bedroom.

In the middle of pasteled and cute decor, back when they’d first visited the Kiryu residence, Sakura had been a fidgeting mess.

Glancing around at everything like he was afraid to look at one spot for too long, shuffling like he thought he was somehow standing in the wrong place; his face had been dusted pink and he’d been oddly quiet, responses coming out in quick, rushed mumbles, as distracted as he looked.

Against the street smarts, the resourcefulness, the confidence, and that refractory demeanor, there is always this scared stray just under Sakura’s skin. There is fear in everything he does; every cautious, eerily quiet step, every microexpression painting his face, every meager attempt to shove people away.

Suo had opened the front door to the dojo with the understanding that Sakura is very scared right now.

He thought he’d stand and shuffle around the genkan for a while, directionless and antsy, and he wouldn’t demand anything because he’d be hyperaware of his own presence in a place not molded to fit him. He’d take in every inch of the space and catalog what he thinks he doesn’t deserve, the host’ kindness included. Suo was sure he’d avoid eye contact all evening. 

But within the first few moments of guiding him through the entryway and apologizing for the chill in the air as he shut the open window, he realized that he’d been a little off.

He’s less of an antsy, nervous flight risk and more of a weathered, drooping, exhausted shell. And it’s a little worrying, honestly.

Suo’s not sure he’s ever seen Sakura this tired, this scooped and hollowed. He stares through the tatami like he barely even registers it, slumped in the threshold on locked knees that he’s sure are overworked and sore. His shoes are still on, but he makes no move to take them off and enter the main room.

Suo, halfway across the width of it and looking back, simply stands there for a bit, taking him in. Sakura doesn’t even seem to notice.

Water hitting porcelain echoes out of the bathroom, steam rolling from the gaps between its bifold door. Suo’s socked feet press against the two boards that always creak; he measures the tempo like he always does, and finds he’s walking faster than usual.

His bedroom door is nudged open with a shoulder, and he lets the bundled up spare futon unspool to the floor next to his own, blanket still dangling from his hold. A soft thump accompanies it as he crouches to straighten it out, to smooth the wrinkles. It smells a bit like dust as he fluffs out and straightens the blankets. Considering the fact that Sakura’s entire apartment smells like mold, he’s sure he won’t mind.

He has a feeling he’s started to drop the whole ‘self-care’ thing. His hair is never as neat as it used to be, and nowadays it’s left to do whatever it wants, which is usually the bedhead he wakes up with, wavy and scrunched. The bandage slapped over his cheekbone blares against the overhead lights, white taped over dark, sickly blue-green.

One of his jacket’s sleeves are rolled up—he must have missed that in the low light outside—and there’s little bandaids and bruises littered all over the skin. He’d hoped Sakura would start gaining weight, but it looks as though he’s losing it. The lines under his eyes are getting deeper, puffier. The light is steadily leaving those pupils.

Some of that lightning arrives in his chest again, distorted and wrong. He tamps it down, and tells himself if Nirei can’t solve it with that fury, neither can he.

He’s idly picking lint off the fabric when his pocket buzzes. He blindly slips his phone from it and clicks it on. The notifications on the lockscreen unfold as he taps them, and he sees the ghost of his own message— I have Sakura. He’s okay.— above new replies.

Umemiya thanks him, somehow managing to slump in relief over text using kaomoji. Kaji asks to be invited over for the express purpose of kicking Sakura’s ass. Hiragi sounds tired. Kotoha asks to join in.

Nirei’s profile picture slides into the read indicator under his message. He doesn’t reply.

“Are you…” Sakura starts, hoarse voice only traveling halfway across the room, but Suo has good hearing. It’s graveled and numb, and reminds him of when they’d visited him while he was sick; breathed out in a low whisper, like it’s all he could manage. “Are you sure that… your, uhm… Master, or whatever, s’ okay with this?”

Suo looks over from where he sifts through his closet, sees his friend lingering in the threshold of the bedroom. He doesn’t come in. By the hesitant, guilty look in his eyes, he probably thinks he’s not allowed. “My Master is out of town for the week,” he replies kindly, “but trust me, he’d be just fine with it.”

Suo rises to his feet. The water is no longer running through the walls, though he’s not sure when that changed. His feet carry him to his desk, where he uses its mirror to pick more lint off the silk shirt he’d changed into, and then reaches for an earring.

It jingles quietly, and Suo stares at his reflection, at the way the ends of his hair come to brush against his cheekbone as he tilts his head. His fingers stop really trying to unloop the silver there and instead simply run over it as he takes in the lines under his eyes.

They’re not nearly as prominent as Sakura’s, but they’re beginning to flaunt themselves around his face. Little indents where the skin grows darker, puffy up top. His hair is a bit frazzled—it’s not much, but it’s enough to have embarrassment bloom in his chest as he runs his other hand through it.

His distracted fingers finally unloop the earring, and he delicately hangs it with the others, hooked along the rows of a holder. The other hand goes to undo the second.

Movement in his periphery catches his eye. He hears that windchime, muffled but still singing gently, as he looks through the mirror at Sakura loitering in the doorway.

Fabric slips into Sakura’s hands, who’s fumbling with the pile like he just noticed Suo right in front of him. “Those should fit you,” Suo says, patting the top while his friend adjusts, “The pants might be a bit long. Sorry—I don’t own any shorts.”

Sakura blinks down at the pile like he’s not quite sure which angle to even start studying it from, and then that gaze is turned on Suo, who stands before him in the threshold.

It’s that look again; that deep-seated skepticism, that inelegant stammer and stumble and trip on textures he’s never felt before. That calculating whir of the gears, examining something from every side for the why and never once considering it could be that people simply care.

Not that Suo blames him—Sakura’s thin, sinewy universe has started eating itself to survive. In that stage of starvation, everything just feels like an enemy.

Silk instead of an old, grass-stained jacket. Wet, clean hair instead of sweaty, unkempt strands. The bandage that had been on his cheek had been peeled off, revealing a healing cut among the watercolors. 

He looks a bit more present, and he takes in Suo’s room with a new curiosity—tentative, but there. His clothes are bundled in his arms as he surveys the decor in a loose, tired fashion. Water drips from the ends of his hair and falls to the towel around his shoulders. Suo can’t look away from the two cowlicks at the front, already trying to rear up stubbornly despite the weight.

It’s not much, but it’s something—he looks a little less hollowed out here, and Suo will take anything at this point.

“You can set your clothes anywhere, don’t worry about it,” Suo says, looking at him through the reflection. Sakura looks away from the shelves along the halls to blink at the mirror.

When he doesn’t move, Suo unclasps his other earrings and blindly hooks it with its twin, turning around. “You can come in, you kn—”

“Why aren’t you mad?”

It’s not as hoarse as before, and there’s some energy behind it—most of that energy is funneled into the bite it has. It’s not malicious, Suo can tell that much. It’s not about him at all.

It hadn’t been about Nirei either.

Interestingly, Sakura’s pinched look doesn’t reach Suo’s eye. It stops just below that, noncommittally meandering around his collarbone. He sees him look for the tassels that aren’t there; he tends to stare at them when he can’t find the will to meet his gaze.

Suo decides perhaps it’s a good thing they’re not in. He needs to start seeing them all.

“Why…” Sakura starts, and then clicks his teeth shut as his eyes rest on the extra futon laid across the floor. He looks down at the bundle of clothes in his arms, at the borrowed sleepwear on his shoulders, and seems to shrink.

The question in his eyes, after spending many months with Sakura and learning his language, is clear.

Why are you giving me things I don’t deserve?

Logically, realistically, and emotionally, Suo has plenty of answers—and objections—to that question. A laundry list of them, overlapping with other lists in his head on what he respects and loves and hates about Sakura Haruka. But to say any of them to a boy who has such an unwavering belief that he is unlovable, untrustable, and unwantable, is to simply not say anything at all.

Sakura will not hear that. He cherry-picks like his life depends on it, and Suo is almost certain that at one point, it truly did. He’s sure this is Sakura’s way of anticipating the crumbling of his world, of sleeping with one eye open to watch for knives against his back. Dodging bullets only to run headfirst for the barrel.

This is his survival strategy—never believing anything good that comes out of people’s mouths. Never letting himself have good things that last. Never allowing himself to get comfortable—the rug burn will hurt worse when it’s pulled out from under you.

How does one convince such an abused, cold, frightened animal that the blanket it’s being given is not to suffocate it?

Sakura does not cross the threshold—treats his entryway like it’s something he has to earn. Somewhere outside, they hear the rare rumble of a car engine passing by. The windchime plays its muffled tune, barely scraping the edge of their bubble.

“You’re already angry enough at yourself for the both of us,” Suo settles for. It is a fraction of what he wants to say—grossly understated, and flung between his neurons like a sentence in Google Translate, “I’m very angry. But my anger isn’t at you.”

And when Sakura’s eyes flick up to finally meet his own, there is innocent confusion there. For some reason, it makes Suo’s chest broil hotter.

There is a concern sitting on the edge of Sakura’s lips; Suo can practically hear its syllables. He almost opens his mouth and voices it, gets the start of a word out, but it dies in his throat and they’re left with an awkward croak that fizzles into the air.

It lives in his eyes, though, and Sakura has always been a very open book. It’s a unique kind of lost, like he doesn’t know the next step when scoldings aren’t on the docket. It’s a part of his routine—of course he expects it.

But Suo is not going to drop that other shoe. Never in a million years would anybody in Furin finish what Sakura’s so-called “family” started.

He doesn’t know how to stop Sakura from anticipating swings and yells—he just hopes he’ll one day be comfortable enough to let go of that worry. So he turns around, crouches down to plug in his phone, and speaks lightly.

“Do you want the lights on or off? I can sleep in either.”

Sakura takes the bait, and Suo smiles as he hides his face with the excuse of watching the charging animation play over his lockscreen. “I ain’t afraid of the fuckin’ dark!”

“No shame in nyctophobia,” he grins, looking up at Sakura from where he kneels by his futon, and then he reaches over to pat his friend’s wordlessly.

Sakura hesitates, and then after a long beat he finally allows himself through the threshold. Adjusting his hold on his clothes, he shuts the door behind him with a soft click. He hesitates some more with his fingers over the light switch before Suo’s nodding and he’s flicking them off.

His eye adjusts to the sudden darkness slowly, and he feels along the hem of his covers to slide his feet underneath. There’s rustling beside him where Sakura drops his clothes somewhere and shuffles into his own futon, adjusting the blankets.

There’s a few long beats of fabric moving around, silk against cotton, and then Sakura speaks up in the quiet. “S’is shit made from fuckin’ angels or somethin’?”

A laugh bursts from Suo, chuckled into the dark. In his grainy periphery, he sees Sakura’s moonlit silhouette twitch at the noise. “It’s silk. Nice against the skin.”

Sakura shuffles in the dark some more with a baffled, pleased sort of hum. Suo adjusts too, his eyepatch’s strap digging into the back of his head where he presses it against his pillow.

There’s a stretch where it’s quiet enough to hear the scrape of branches against the side of the dojo. The windchime is there to ground them, to ring against troubled and tired minds, to lull. Suo stares at the ceiling, blinking slowly. His phone vibrates against the floor.

He rolls to the side, drinking in that moonlight that trickles through the window. It catches the edges of Sakura’s form, curves along his shoulder. His wet hair, now all tousled and spiked around this way and that from a rough scrub of the towel, catches it in bright white lines, cowlicks everywhere.

Sakura’s hair is wavy when wet. His pillow has been shoved in front of him so that he hugs it, and he’s using his own arm to cushion his neck instead. Suo smiles, momentarily forgetting that Sakura is facing him and drinking him in too. He supposes a pillow would be uncomfortable after years of not using one.

He wonders if this is Sakura’s first sleepover. The thought makes something in his middle sink, but not necessarily in mourning for all the missed memories. He can make new ones here; it’s just a shame that this is all Suo could do for his first one. It’s not exactly a party.

“You can take that off, ya’know.”

Suo blinks, and his eye strays from the wild white strands sticking up in the moonbeams to lock onto his friend’s face. He hums in a question.

“The eyepatch,” Sakura elaborates. Oh. “You don’t normally sleep with it on, do ya? Seems uncomfy.”

Some sort of strange heat crawls along his sternum. He smiles through it. “I do take it off to sleep. I just didn’t want the ancient Chinese curse to spread to you is all.”

“Oh fuck off,” Sakura grumbles half-heartedly into the stillness and Suo chortles in a hum.

A beat passes. Something soft crosses Sakura’s face, squished against his arm. “But really. I don’t give a shit about scars. Or… missin’ eyes. Do what you want.”

Suo blinks, and drinks that in. He’s suddenly reminded of bright sun on his face and sand against his feet. The chemical smell of sunscreen and the salty taste on the air. The cry of seagulls mixing with the laughter of children and teens.

Sakura’s skin had been littered with little pockmarks. Most of them were small, and thin, but there were others—stretched across a shoulder blade, poked along his spine, cut straight down his stomach—that were deeper, longer, older. The biggest Suo could find was one right under his ribs, short, deep, discolored, and shiny against the sand.

Nobody had commented, and everyone had had a good time. But Suo’s sure that it stuck in many of their minds—particularly, the circular burn marks along the back of his shoulders and upper arms. Where a t-shirt is usually just long enough to cover them, they were displayed against the sun there, loud against all the others despite their size.

They looked like cigarette burns. As if he’d been used like an ashtray.

Something pops in his chest, tight and warm and raging, but as he stares at Sakura’s open, sleepy eyes, it simmers to something manageable. He moves his face in accordance with a smile.

He moves a hand with it, and brings it up to loop a finger around the leather strap. There’s an urgent pressure deep in his stomach— stop, stop, what are you doing?— but he swallows it down and lets the eyepatch leave his face.

He searches, hard, for anything that resembles disgust in Sakura’s eyes when he sees it. Suo is glad for the low light—he hopes it hides the worse of it, hopes it flattens out the graphic parts into one messy, wrinkled pink thing to squint at. He can’t really say why, but he never felt right about a prosthetic, so he never got one.

He almost wishes he had, now. It’d certainly be less off-putting than what’s usually in the mirror.

But there is no disgust in Sakura’s gaze. There isn’t even a whole lot of surprise—a quick, minute widening of the eyes, but it’s held there softly, soaking it in with a distinct lack of pity. For once, it doesn’t feel as though somebody is scraping against his soul when they look at it.

His gaze is steady, and he’s simply taking it in like he takes in everything else. It’s not ogling, it’s not gaping. It’s a gentle question he’s asking, with plenty of space to flee if he’d like. Suo doesn’t feel like he needs to roll over, to look away, and he doesn’t particularly want Sakura to either. He’s content like this.

There is something there, though, in place of the usual horror. His reaction is velour, light and grazed, but there’s something stinging underneath it, and it takes Suo a moment to realize that it is anger.

It is remarkably similar to that vengeful ire currently sitting in his own chest. Suo’s body, taut and braced for something, settles deeper into the futon, and he lets out a breath against his pillow.

Sakura doesn’t ask. Suo dearly, greatly appreciates it.

He wakes to heavy breathing that is not his own.

It takes a moment for the cotton to leave his mouth, for the sound to scrub his mind of it. Suo breathes in, sleep-adled system making sense of a half-dream that falls through his fingers. The first thing he’s aware of is that windchime, calling in a silver hush.

The next thing he’s aware of is a scared hitch of breath behind him, and the rustling of fabric.

Suo shoots halfway upright and darts an eye over his shoulder. It’s still the dead of night, the world black outside, and the moonlight has moved to the wall, white softly bouncing off the paint. It presses a glow on everything else, dim but there, and a few feet from him Sakura lies crooked in his futon, twisted in the blankets.

He’s got his neck craned over his shoulder as cushioning, and his arm hangs over his head, hand twitching. The borrowed pillow is contorted and molded to his side tightly, trapped under his weight. His other hand paws at his own collarbone; the skin there is slick with sweat.

Brows twitching, his breath comes out fast in little huffs, almost whimpered on the exhales.

Suo moves, keeps his eye on him as he blindly removes himself from his own covers. “Sakura?” he whispers, hesitation teeming. No reply comes but a hitched breath and a head twitch.

He slowly closes the distance between their futons in a quiet crawl, stopping at the very edge of Sakura’s mattress. Hands hover while Sakura’s brows furrow, while his teeth clench and grind and fingers paw at his throat more incessantly. His breathing turns trembled when he moves his face further into the skin of his arm.

It all picks up in speed, and Sakura’s shaky little huffs trail into terrified half-croaks. The muscles in his face twitch into something hunted. Suo’s chest catches fire and he places a hand on Sakura’s shoulder.

“Sakur—”

Hands snag his wrist and shoulder immediately.

It’s a blur of movement, a burst of noise that bounces off the walls. Suo is upright one second and pinned to the hardwood the next, wide eye staring up at the ceiling the moonbeams race across.

There’s a hand right against the dip in his throat, and the other is pulled back in a fist that aims for his nose. His eye darts from its bruised knuckles, to bared teeth, to the wild eyes of his captain, silver and gold burning with something unseeing, something animalistic.

Alarms blaring against his cranium, he grapples around the wrist pinning him and croaks out a, “Sakura!” that’s embarrassingly frightened in the moment, but he’s more worried about getting out from under fists that regularly punch people into concussions.

Wolfish eyes stare back at his wide one, chest heaving and light slipping along skin. Sakura blinks, teeth clenching together so hard Suo hears the grinding, and then the awareness cuts into his fight-or-flight.

Recognition replaces it, and Sakura flinches away like he’d been burned.

The hand over his throat leaves as quickly as it had pinned him, and he scrambles up as Sakura scurries away. His shoulder blades hit the side of his desk harshly, and it rocks from the force, his earring holder tipping and crashing to the wood in a burst of plastic and metallic pangs. Sakura’s head snaps to the noise.

Suo watches as the mirror attached to it wobbles, his reflection warping and blurring. He sees himself hold his hands out steady, pretending they aren’t shaking from the sudden adrenaline spike.

“Fuck—” Sakura gulps before Suo can get anything out, and it’s so devastated it chokes whatever he was going to say out of his mind, “I’m— Fuck, I’m sor—”

“Don’t,” Suo blurts. His voice wavers, but he’s sure of the syllables. “It’s okay—”

“No! It’s not—” Sakura snarls out, and then flinches at his own voice, “—stop saying it’s okay—I almost—!”

“But you didn’t,” Suo finishes, easy and smooth against his captain’s jagged edges, “I shouldn’t have touched you, I know how you—how you react to that. I’m sorry.”

Sakura gulps in air and gives him this odd, desperate look. It’s almost a plea, it’s almost a beg, but Suo’s not sure what he’s asking for. One hand, pressed against the side of his desk, leaves the wood to rub at his throat, right where he’d been pawing at it in his sleep.

His gaze absently trails down Suo until it rests somewhere through the floor, faraway as he catches his breath. A beat or two of settling his lungs, and then he’s struggling to his feet on shaky legs, palms atop the desk’s wood.

“I need—” Sakura licks dry lips in a thick swallow, “—air. Just. Gimme a min’te.”

Suo hesitates, but steps aside. Sakura stumbles forward, eyes a flavor of numb he’s not a fan of while he gestures behind him. “I’ll—I’ll clean that up, ‘m sorry, just—I need a minute. ‘M sorry.”

He wants to tell him how little he truly cares about the earring holder, but Sakura is already opening his bedroom door and dragging himself through the threshold. His heavy footfalls echo down the hall, get softer as they go. The walls creak in half-hearted protest as he hears the front door open and then shut with a click.

Suo is left in the middle of his bedroom, world silent except for the blood in his ears.

It is a long few beats before he moves. He spends them letting his lungs simply take in air, letting the adrenaline ebb from his veins, letting his equilibrium settle with the world’s tilt. His feet carry him to the door, where he flicks on the light. It blinds him for a moment, he blinks against the ache it brings to his head, and then he’s standing in front of the desk.

He picks up the holder, most of the earrings still clasped in, but some are simple hooks and were jostled off their rack. Suo crouches down, peering around the desk to nab any that clinked to the floor. He catches a few that gleam under the ceiling light, spots three or four hiding in the shadow of the desk.

Gathering the few pairs scattered across the desk’s top, he starts hooking them on. He’s extra careful with the antique ones—thankfully, only one was knocked loose, and it clinked across the table for barely a moment before its tassels killed the momentum.

He polishes them with his shirt, and hooks it there next to its sibling. When he looks down to make sure none went unaccounted for, he spots his eyepatch on the floor next to his pillow.

Suo looks up at himself in the mirror, meets the mottled pink lump in his socket. Stray strands of his hair sway against the rest, sticking out in places, but for some reason he doesn’t find himself caring this time.

He straightens out his twisted shirt, fixes its collar out of habit. Under the light, he squints, internal clock buzzing at such bright colors during such a late hour. The air feels dry and his eye stings. It flicks to the open door of his bedroom.

He’s stepping out into the hall then, dearly hoping Sakura didn’t simply leave.

His feet pad down the hall in slow little footfalls; he keeps them meandering to give Sakura an extra few precious seconds, if he’s even still there to begin with. Suo likes to think he’d be there; likes to take his captain for his word, when he means it.

When he wanders into the main room, the numbers glowing on the microwave read 2:14; Suo rubs at his eye, exhaustion dusting the edges of his mind. He steps down into the genkan and reaches for the door.

It’s only when he twists the knob that he realizes he didn’t put his eyepatch back on. The thought almost stops him entirely, but then he’s peeking through the crack and seeing black and white hair, and it drains from his mind without protest.

He stayed, sitting on the top step in front of the welcome mat, small and folded into himself, but there. His hair is wild, sticking up and swirled this way and that from sleep, and still damp in places.

Suo feels a smile on his lips, and widens the gap in the door. Sakura flinches at the creak of its hinges, bows his head down in a sort of guilty gesture, and he finds himself stepping out onto the mat before he can really even think about it.

The cold air hits him in a sharp wave on the way out. His breath billows as he turns to shut the door with a gentle click, eyeing Sakura as he does. There’s a beat where he waits, socked feet cold against wood, and then he moves when his friend makes no complaints about the company.

His feet carry him the stride or two it takes to reach the top step, and he slowly lowers himself to the lip. Suo flattens his feet against the grain of the step below him, sits down beside his captain with a few inches between them. Suo doesn’t look at him, doesn’t want to pressure him with the weight of a gaze—he looks out over the road instead, counts the streetlamps through tree branches.

His peripherals have Sakura’s head down, pillowed in his arms, his arms on his knees. He’s looking away from him, shoulders taut, locked in that stage where he’s simply waiting for everything to start crumbling again. This Sakura is a trapped one, and that is upsetting, but Suo cannot help but note that the choice to run was there, and he did not take it.

That gives him real hope.

Suo smiles as he slots his cold hands between his knees, studies the folds of his own sleepwear to keep the pressure of answering off. “I take it this is routine?”

Sakura stiffens further, minutely. A hand moves to scratch the side of his face. “... So what if it is?” he says lowly, syllables billowed to the night air.

Suo watches the breeze grab at the ends of branches. The sensation of wind against his right socket is a foreign one; it’s been a very long time since he’s felt that. “No judgement here,” he assures, “I just… had a feeling.”

His gaze trails up, slowly, into the black of the sky. It’s a shame light pollution blankets most stars, but the sight above them is pretty even now, and they’re lucky to be in a more secluded town where the very air doesn’t seem to glow.

Suo’s attention wanders between constellations in the sky, making new ones with the string of his gaze. No crickets fill their silence; it’s instead a gentle wash of wind against grass, against foliage around fences.

Sakura breaks it, still looking away. “They’re not usually so… loud.”

Suo chances a look at him. Sakura doesn’t tense under the weight of it. “Loud?”

He thinks for a moment, moving his head to stare down the length of steps in front of them. “... Not really in a noise way. But in… like, a pressure way?” he trails, confusion painting his features, and then he shakes his head, “I don’t know.”

Arms unclasp around his knees so his face can be scrubbed by his palms, fingers in his scalp. His voice comes out muffled, pooling around his hands. “I just wish that bastard would get outta my head.”

Unease settles into Suo’s gut, and his mind lights up with a few names and faces. “May I ask who?”

A beat passes. For a moment, he thinks Sakura isn’t going to grace him with an answer, but then it’s mumbled out in a tone that’s barely there and low, like a kid admitting to a misdeed. “Endo.”

Suo tilts his head up in a slow intake of the idea, details rerouting. Ah.

Occasionally, Suo has a nightmare about him. It’s less about Endo and more about what he could have taken. It’s less about the guy’s presence—tasting like pen ink, feeling like charcoal—and more about the lack of another, much more wanted one, more about the feeling of it slipping through his and Bofurin’s fingers.

Suo had told Nirei to trust their captain. In his dreams, he never says that. He thinks about that a lot.

“He let go.”

Suo flits his gaze to him, leaning forward. “Pardon?”

“Endo let go,” Sakura grits louder, “Of… of me, of the win. He—He let go.”

Suo furrows his brows. “In the dream?” he asks.

“No,” Sakura hisses out, shoulders taut, “In the—He let go, Suo.” He doesn’t know what that means. The unease in his middle starts climbing up the walls of his stomach with each repeat of it, but he keeps quiet.

“I didn’t win that fight because I was stronger, I won that fight because he—because he ffffucking—!” Sakura clenches out through bared teeth, fingers catching the hair along his scalp in fists. His eyes, for a moment, are faraway, but then they flit back to the wood he stares down at and tsks, “I didn’t win.”

Suo opens his mouth. Sakura opens his first, heated. “Sure, he gave up and he lost, but really, in the grand of scheme of things, I didn’t do shit!” he bites in a snap, edges of his voice curled up like his lips, “If he hadn’t…”

Suo watches that silver gaze latch onto something in his mind, hook onto a what if and use it like a life raft. It’s scared, like it’s brushing up against something terrible so closely he can smell it. “If he hadn’t let go—”

“Sakura.”

Something in Suo’s tone must ring an alarm bell or two, because Sakura’s gaze flicks to him fast, tired and frazzled and blinking from his little raft of agonizations.

He doesn’t know what he means by he let go, but he doesn’t think that matters. Those are the details—the things Sakura has decided to spend all his energy on, rather than the bigger picture looming overhead. He sees the serifs in the fonts but doesn’t read the words; counts the trees, and ignores the forest.

Sakura is the type to dwell on the past, but he’s also the type to look toward the future. That combination is what drives him to never repeat history. He learns from his mistakes, and does his absolute best to never repeat them. It’s commendable. It’s admirable. Suo respects Sakura deeply for it.

But it’s also a very slippery slope. And he thinks Sakura Haruka is a bit of a tortured, fraying, slipping boy.

“No matter how you cut it, this is all my fault!” It’s yelled against the dam’s concrete, bounced off the pavement. “That’s what you’re all thinking, right?! That this is all my fault! Just admit it!”

The look Sakura is giving him makes him want to crawl in a hole. He’s sure the feeling is mutual.

“I’m weak… and a poor excuse of a man. But still… that’s who I am. So… just like last time, I’m sure—I’m sure I’m gonna… cause more trouble for you guys. So…”

Suo clenches his teeth.

“I’m sorry.”

The worst part is that Suo cannot find it in himself to blame Sakura for dwelling on it all, even if he is destroying himself with the what ifs and the I’m nots, with the lessons and stakes from the past haunting his future.

He’s not sure he wouldn’t fall like this too, in his position, with his experiences. He’s not sure he wouldn’t settle his shoes right into the grooves Sakura left behind in the dirt, tracing his every action, his every thought. Every motive, every worry.

Comforting Sakura Haruka makes Suo feel like a hypocrite.

“Do you really think anybody would have blamed you, if he hadn’t let go?” Suo asks, eye gouging into silver. Sakura stares back with a complicated gaze, and try as he might, he cannot name the emotion that resides there. “Nobody would—”

“It doesn’t matter if anybody woulda blamed me! That’s the—that’s the problem!” Sakura snaps, hands leaving hair to gesture through the billowed white in his face. “That’s what bothers me; it’s the fact that nobody here would blame me!”

Frustration and cold nips at his face as he snarls. “You guys are—are too nice, you’re too good! And if I had lost, I would’ve failed all those too-good people.”

Suo watches him slump forward, watches the look on his face drain of that ire, and whatever it is that’s left is desaturated, borderless. He presses his elbows to his knees again, pillows his head in his arms. “It’s easier when people are horrible. I know how to handle that,” he croaks into his sleeve, “I don’t know how to handle this.”

The breeze is the only thing in their ears besides the hum of existence blanketing it. The cold seeps right through his sleepwear, but he doesn’t find himself being all that aware of it. Suo’s breaths coil around his own neck.

Among everything else Suo has stowed away in his memory, among everything Nirei has written down in that notebook, there is one trait of Sakura’s that sticks out above them all. Suo was first impressed with him because he had the skills to back his big mouth. After that, he’d realized that was simply a bonus; there was something else that truly hooked him in, that truly held his attention and respect.

Sakura is nothing if not earnest.

It’s in every one of his actions. For a boy with such a one-tracked ambition, he is surprisingly open-minded. And for a boy who’s so scared of benignity, he wades its water all the time. He tries new things with new people, he admits and apologizes when he’s wrong, he holds curiosity for his classmates, he frets and panics when somebody is upset.

It’s the thing Suo likes about Sakura the most: that he didn’t give up on people. Even now.

“You’d like to learn, though,” Suo finds himself saying. Sakura turns his head, flicks his eyes up to him, and they are big and wide and simple in their answer. “Wouldn’t you?”

A beat, and then Sakura nods, subtle. Suo watches his cowlicks bounce in the cold. “Well then…” he smiles, “The first step to dealing with too-good people is to accept their kindnesses, even if you’re convinced you don’t deserve it.”

Sakura soaks it in, scrunching his brows. He follows his movements as Suo shuffles and stretches to a stand, bones and wooden stairs creaking.

He brushes off his pants and then looks to his friend, hand outstretched with a warm smile crescenting his eye. “The second step is to get a good night’s sleep!”

His breath clouds his view for a moment, white against grain. He expects hesitation, but to his delight, Sakura almost instantly puts a hand in his. Suo is so surprised by the immediate trust that he doesn’t pull him up right away.

When the white in front of his face clears, Sakura is regarding him with a deadpan look, almost pouting. 

“That’s not the second step,” he grumbles. Suo gives an almost giddy smile in return.

+

Sakura nods off in class the next day, baggy eyes dark while he slouches over his desk. Suo keeps watch, pinning a look to anybody who dares try to prank him, even if he’s normally the enabler.

Interestingly, Nirei quietly assigns himself guard duty as well, a conflicted sort of look on his face. Even when their conversations are stilted and off, Nirei doesn’t stray from their captain, doesn’t avoid him.

Suo smiles, following behind them in the hall and yawning all the while.

+

“No luck?” Togame sidles up beside him with a cold ramune bottle in hand, blood smeared across the corner of his mouth.

They watch as Sakura takes a hard kick from Tomiyama, just to grab and twist at his ankle and wrap a leg down on his knee. Tomiyama simply bucks back and contorts to swing himself between Sakura’s legs, latching onto his back like a koala.

Sakura takes two hard punches to the head. Suo fights the grimace growing on his face, tracing the rim of his soda can with a finger. “He’s… getting there.”

Shishitoren’s second-in-command chuckles into the neck of his ramune. “He’s stubborn is what I’m hearing.”

Suo drags an eye to the fight and sees that wild glint in his captain’s pupils. He tips back the soda can and downs the rest of it, voice bleak. “Cheers to that.”

+

They’re in the middle of helping a store owner rearrange some shelving when they get the call.

His feet shift against tiled flooring and his knuckles catch the lip of a counter. Suo’s fingers adjust around cardboard as Nirei fixes his grip on the other side. Voices bounce over the shelving units surrounding them, layered atop the ever-present hum of the corner store’s refrigerated section.

Nirei peeks around his shoulders, careful not to step on any merchandise. The faraway, boisterous laughter of the store owner can be heard from the entrance, Hiragi’s lower chortles weaving below. Kaji stands slumped against the counter, boredly clicking at the computer there in an attempt to fix some nebulous issue with its settings.

A harsh ringtone seethes against the labyrinth of metal shelving. Hiragi’s still laughing with the owner with a box in his hand, and he sets it down in front of Kaji as he pats his pockets for his phone.

Suo nods to his right, and Nirei follows his gaze and attempts to straggle himself over boxes in his path to veer around shelving. The conversation toward the front fades in companionable snickering.

Interestingly, Suo spots a third year zip down the street outside. It gives him pause, and Nirei stumbles at the sudden break in momentum.

“... What?” is uttered across the store, the amusement in Hiragi’s tone shedding its skin, “Hold on, slow down—”

Nirei stops too. Another third year runs by outside, a second year right on their tail. “Mrs. Takanashi please—just breathe, alright? Where is it? I need—”

Big eyes travel back to Suo. He’s vaguely aware of Kaji catching the look on Hiragi’s face from around the monitor, and he slips his headphones off, twisting the lollipop in his mouth.

“Okay—we’ll be right—yes, Mrs. Takanashi, we’ll be right there. Stay indoors.”

Hiragi shoots Kaji a dangerous look, and he’s already moving. He revolves it around to Suo and Nirei, the latter of whom drops his end of the box on his foot at the sudden eye contact.

“Big crowd on the east side—they’ve got weapons,” Hiragi’s voice rings out lowly, “One of ours is surrounded; he’s a first year.”

Suo drops his end of the box and is following Kaji out the front door in an instant. Nirei jumps in line right behind him.

The cold air is roaring, and Hiragi’s footsteps drum behind him in an odd syncopation with his heartbeat. Another student rips around the corner and dashes down the street, phone to their ear. He hears Nirei bark out a question to Hiragi, something like who is it. The shouts of another kid down the block rub over the answer.

Kaji takes a left, a right, and Suo follows, eye taped to his shoulder blades. His earrings jingle as Hiragi’s phone rings again, echoed against the tarmac. A close cousin of dread crawls along his sternum; Suo tries not to think about why, tries not to dwell on the weapons, the feeling in his gut.

They take another left. Kaji stops so suddenly, Suo almost runs into him. He skids to a halt, peers around his shoulder, and—

The dread rises to his throat.

Their numbers hover around KEEL’s, but none of them are still standing. The ones that are conscious look like they’re hanging on by a thread, limbs splayed and eyes glassy. Blood stains the tarmac in shiny blotches and splatters; the sun catches on knives and metal bats that litter the pavement, glinting. Suo spots red along the edge of a blade, and it bleeds into the rest of his vision.

Sakura looms in the center, lungs heaving, winter sun glaring. And that aura of his crackles.

It sounds like a war drum, weighty and thick and vibrating in his chest as well as everyone else’s. Undertoning it is a trembled whine, like the shaky lines made by a seismometer; tectonic and oceanic in scale. It’s fractal in its texture and it just keeps going, keeps unfurling layer after layer, skinning itself in its haste to be bigger.

Suo cannot see his expression from here—his back is turned—but the right side of his face is dripped in carmine. And then the world shifts as Sakura sways.

He hears shouts—from their senpai, from Nirei, from the townfolk leaning out their windows in horror—and he thinks one of them might be his own. Another third year, coming from the opposite end of the street, is there before anyone else. Sakura pitches to the side and they catch him just in time.

Everybody’s beelining for him instantly.

Hiragi zips past him as Sakura presses a hand to the third year’s shoulder, heaving out I’m fines that drip from his mouth like the blood does, splatting to the road. Suo has to step over bodies to get to him, and he’s batted the unfamiliar third year away by the time Hiragi makes it to his side.

“Woah, woah—easy, kid!” Hiragi hushes when one of Sakura’s knees shake under his weight, grabbing him by the shoulders. The captain’s hands, fingers and palms bruised and bloody, are instantly trying to shove him away.

Sakura’s breathing so hard that the crackling in his throat ends in wheezes; he’s doubled over, weight on knees that lock to keep him upright. Suo can’t see his face through his bangs, but he can clearly see where a metal bat had connected with the back of his head—smeared red paints the white there and drips down his neck, trickling over shoulders.

The bloodied edge of a blade won’t leave Suo’s mind. He’s huffing out into the cold air, scanning him up and down for gashes, for slices, for stab wounds. He’s bent over—he can’t see anything; all it is is the white air that unfurls from Sakura’s hard breaths.

“Sakura! Are you okay—is anything broken?!” Nirei worms his way through the small crowd, eyes big and horrified. He hovers around the edge of the droning thickness in the air; it takes Suo’s heart and relocates it in his throat, so he’s sure Nirei is probably losing his mind.

Above them, townsfolk shout out concerned questions. Some of them dart from their windows with the aim to meet them at ground level, to help.

Sakura only replies with a weak shake of his head, swayed and exhausted and still lowered to stare at the pavement. It seems to teeter his equilibrium because he leans too far to the right and Hiragi has to catch him, lean up against him to keep him from bricking to the asphalt.

“Why didn’t you call for backup?!” he frets, a hand on a shoulder, and then he whips up to glare at Suo and Nirei when Sakura doesn’t respond immediately, “Why didn’t he call for backup?!”

Breathing hard, Sakura tries to straighten. He paws at open air and Suo quickly takes his hand, gives him an achor to grab. Distantly, he thinks it’s very odd behavior for him and he wonders if he has a concussion or if it’s the exhaustion nipping at him.

There’s a gash pressed into the arm Suo holds, bitten through his uniform’s sleeve and dug into the skin there. He can’t tell how bad it is, but the tear in the fabric is long and it’s wet where he holds it, soaked through in a mahogany that highlights the creases of his own palm. Suo smells copper in the air and his mouth is suddenly very dry.

“‘M fine,” he croaks out between inhales and gulps, “I d’dn’t wanna… they—they had weapons, I didn’t—”

“You didn’t what?” is growled lowly just outside their bubble.

 Their attentions flicker to Kaji, who stands a few feet away and crunches his teeth down on the rest of his lollipop. The music from his headphones, curled around his neck, is tinny and small against the open air. Third- and second-years lingering along the fringes of the group start stepping back warily. 

Sakura turns, finally lifts his head in the motion. A slice lies across his right cheekbone, horizontal and an angry red. The rest of his face below is curtained in blood.

It is very close to his eye. Suo feels himself stop breathing.

Sakura swallows in air greedily, and narrows his gaze. “What was I s’pposed t’ do, hah? Call everybody here so they could get stabbed?”

“Maybe,” Kaji twists the lollipop stick in his mouth, “Maybe, if you were smart, you’d realize we’re more capable than that.”

Hiragi shifts beside Sakura. “Kaji—”

“Yeah, maybe next time I’ll swallow my goddamn common sense and call all my friends to a bloodbath,” Sakura snarls. Suo holds his arm in a tight grip that he’s sure hurts, but the adrenaline is clearly still there and his captain simply tugs harder. “Sorry for not wanting you to die.”

“You’re being stupid,” Kaji replies simply.

It’s the simple things that piss Sakura off the most.

“I don’t get it—what’d I do wrong, exactly?” Sakura snaps, raspy voice rising with the white that curls around his face against the cold, “There was a gang destroyin’ th’ street; Furin takes those out. I’m in Furin.”

“Alone?”

“What?”

“You’re in Furin alone?” Kaji’s eyes catch this cold glacial sheen to them. Nirei inches behind Suo. He lifts a hand to remove the naked lollipop stick from his mouth. The melody of his music is just barely heard over the clatter of nearby front doors opening, of people murmuring their is he okays and does he need helps.  

“No, wha—”

“Then why are you acting like it?” Kaji deadpans in a growl.

Suo doesn’t see Sakura’s expression. He sees Hiragi’s though; he sees the unease. Normally, unease from Hiragi is not much of an alarm bell, even if he is a King. There’s something in this look, though, something like dread coiling around the worry, and Suo feels something similar lodge in his own throat. “Kaji, sto—”

“Don’t you think,” Sakura interrupts, jaw slid to the side and patience in his voice inflating the anger about to burst. It’s cheery in a faux tone, and it sounds incredibly foreign on Sakura’s tongue. “it’s good to try to protect your own?”

“Only when you let others do the same.”

“I don’t fuckin’ need protecting!” Sakura snaps. It feels like eight steps backwards.

“Bullshit!” Kaji clap back with thunder. Somehow, even though Suo doesn’t know him that well, the steps backwards here feel like a thousand.

Hiragi steps between them, and his voice is lowered in a warning. “Put the headphones back on, Ka—”

He goes unheard. Kaji simply steps around him and Sakura careens to join, ripping his arm from Suo’s. “I can handle it myself!” he snarls.

“You call this handling it?”

That thrumming is back, felt more than heard, deep in their chests. Somehow, it feels like two titans sizing each other up, silhouettes over trees and blending into the skyline. Circling around one another with their ideals and teeth bared, they’re poising to lunge.

Logically, Suo knows not much will happen in the grand scheme of things if they fight. They’re teenagers, they’re boys; it’s what they tend to do.

“I took em’ out, didn’t I?!”

“That’s not the most important thing here and you know it!”

But lightning cracks back against the hide of Sakura’s drums, circuitry glowing, and it sure feels like the Earth’s crust is about to crack.

Guys, Nirei is begging in a plea, barely a ripple in the waves, please stop—this isn’t helping anybo—!

Hey! Hiragi’s shout sinks into the quicksand. Both of you, st—

“I’d rather it be me than them!”

“And how do you think they feel about that?!”

Kaji Ren, stop it right no—!

“As long as they’re alive that doesn’t fucking matter!”

Hands grab at the front of Sakura’s shirt. Before anybody can do anything, Kaji’s barreling into him with a yell and they’re both stumbling fast.

“No matter how many green tea labels—” Sakura’s slammed against a brick wall. “—you put on that goddamn bottle—” Arms rip him away from it, shake him around, slam him back to the mortar. “—it’s still coffee!”

Sakura’s eyes widen, bloodied hands grappling around Kaji’s to loosen the grip, but he’s yelling in his face before he can catch his breath, teeth bared and spit flying. “Make up your mind! You think you’re the whole school or somethin’?!”

An image of teeth sinking through flesh flashes in his mind. The grain and the static of Kaji’s unfurling middle loom, spread across the street like it’s a tidal wave. Sakura grimaces at the force of it all, the pressure against his sternum. He starts to say something, starts to choke out a question, but Kaji’s manhandling him by the shirt hem again, jostling him against the brick.

“One minute you think everything on Bofurin has landed on you like you’re the only one here, and the next you think you’re too pathetic to be worthy of it!” Kaji spits, silhouette snapping at the seams. “Make up your mind! Pick a problem!”

He barely gets that last word out before Nirei is suddenly between them.

Suo is a bit ashamed of it, but it’s only when he sees him seemingly materialize there that he realizes he’d left his side to begin with. The boy slots himself in front of Sakura, one hand on Kaji’s wrists and the other thrown over his captain like a shield.

Everything pauses. Nirei doesn’t say a word, but the look on his face is everything. His eyes are wide, everything about him shaky like he’s an atom against a qausar, but he stands his ground, loyally puts himself between a respected second-year leader and his inexperienced, floundering first-year captain.

It’s staunch, and he plants his feet firmly. There’s fear there in the stance, almost crippling, but there’s so much resolve to accompany it that it doesn’t even really matter.

Kaji breathes heavily, and then his lit eyes lock onto Nirei and something snaps. Slowly, agonizingly so, he unfurls his fists from Sakura’s shirt. And then when he steps back, he does so in a stumble, and Hiragi is there to press a hand between his shoulder blades.

“He made me angry,” Kaji shudders out to Hiragi with his lips curled, burning eyes still pinned to Sakura straightening against the wall.

“I know, I know,” Hiragi replies in a hush. Suo is probably the only one that hears it. “He’s already injured, just give it a rest.”

The street is agonizingly still. Kaji tsks and it’s like a loud clap in a quiet library. He steps forward, and Nirei tenses up, preparing for a hit, but Kaji simply bends down to pick up the lollipop stick he’d dropped to the tarmac amidst the yelling.

He stands up and pins a look to Sakura, who’s watching him carefully and throwing awed glances at Nirei. There’s a moment where the second-year looks like he wants to say something, standing eerily still as he studies Sakura’s bloodied and bruised face with an intensity rivaling hurricanes.

But he tears his gaze away and pins his eyes down the street, sliding his headphones back over his ears. The tinny music disappears and Hiragi lets him go easily, gives it a few seconds before he lets a pent up sigh leave his chest.

The King looks to Sakura, and Sakura himself jolts at the eye contact. The street stays quiet. Suo half expects him to start scolding. But when he steps forward, the frustration there is softened by the worry in his gaze.

He offers a hand, and Nirei blinks and steps aside. “Let’s get you patched up.”

His captain stares, takes in the scarred palm in front of him. Breaths are baited; the way Sakura’s been lately, it’s a coin toss on whether he’ll accept help or not. In the beginning he would’ve looked at an offering like this as though he were a wounded animal, eyeing the hand like it held a knife. Now, Suo likes to think he’d take it.

Well—he should say before this all started. Because right now, in this moment, Sakura doesn’t quite regard it with distrust. He trusts Hiragi. He’s just too stubborn for his own good.

“I’m fine,” Sakura replies, oddly quiet and subdued. He looks distracted, and he pushes himself off the wall and shoulders past the hand. “I’ll do it myself.”

Breaths release, disappointed. Something dark takes over Hiragi’s face.

“Sakura,” he says. It is a commanding bark, one of those tones that tend to glue Suo’s soles to the ground. Sakura stops too. Hiragi’s own thrum sounds, reverberates in their chests; wood splintering, gravel loosening. The smell of gasoline. “I said, let’s get you—”

“I’m going home, and I’m doing it myself.” It’s measured carefully in tone and volume. Sakura looks over his shoulder, and remarkably, the wounded titan silences the older, wiser one. Pupil a pinprick in gold, there is no room for an argument, even if it’s the King making it. “Hold me down, if you wanna patch me up so fuckin’ badly.”

Suo barely has room to breathe between the pressures in the air. It’s dirty, because Sakura knows they’d never. It’s dirty because it’s asking them to be horrible in order to be nice, and Sakura has been around long enough now to know that’s not in the cards.

It’s a war call. One that Sakura knows he’ll win.

He walks away. Nobody goes after him.

Chapter Text

The breeze prods at his hair, shifts the few leaves left on the ivy that twists around metal railing. He presses a knuckle to the doorbell. It clicks uselessly, and he knew it would; it’s more habit than anything else.

There is blood on the doorknob. Suo’s mouth tastes like pork.

The complex groans when the air twists, and the FOR SALE sign swings in a loose, creaking dangle. The air is cold and he wishes he’d brought a scarf today, or maybe an extra layer. His eye throbs in that thick, slow lave, the wind gouging.

His pocket vibrates with a text, probably from Nirei, but he ignores it in favor of pressing his own bloodied palm to the brass and twisting. He doesn’t bother knocking—just peers into his friend’s apartment.

“Sakura?” he calls, less because he thinks he’ll get an answer and more to simply announce his presence. It’s dark as always, with the small window by the door painting a pitiful little square of light onto the hardwood. Suo watches dust drift along the sunrays for a moment, listening for movement.

He takes in the line of light that beams across the wall, slatted like the bifold door of Sakura’s bathroom. The water is running through the walls, a trickling, muffled hum. There’s dots on the floor, subtle and dark, but Suo follows them with his gaze and sees the red tint, sees the stumbled path they make. He steps through the threshold and clicks the door shut behind him.

Being here, in this apartment, is a little bittersweet.

It’s all shiny and new and thoughtful additions on top of an old, dilapidated foundation. It’s kiddie curtains in front of dirty, smudged glass, it’s modern furniture set up against creaking, pockmarked walls. It’s appliances bought for somebody who had to be taught how to use them. It’s food stocked in a refrigerator the occupant did not purchase.

The paint job is chipping. The faucet drips. The balcony door isn’t sealed correctly and it lets in a draft that raises the heating bill. But there are people who come here every week and make it lively, make it loved. They leave pieces of themselves behind on tables, in goodbye half-hugs, in the warm things they say with reckless abandon.

The bedroom door is slid open. From where Suo stands in the middle of the kitchen, he can see the cat he’d given Sakura at the arcade lying halfway off the edge of the futon.

It makes him think of the first time he’d visited, carrying a bag of medicine and get-well-soon notes and listening to Nirei fret. No sixteen year old should be living in an apartment complex for singles. Nor should a fifteen year old, nor any child younger. But from the language Sakura had used, from the matter-of-fact tone of his tired and raspy voice, this is what normalcy looks like to him.

Suo wonders how long he’s been alone like this. Whatever the answer is, it’s too long.

He thinks about it a lot; more than he probably should. Those flinches, that guarded center, the stiffening and shutting down of his system when interacting with adults. That expression—pure, unadulterated disbelief—when they’d visited him months ago; those wide eyes, like he could never fathom something so simple, so obvious to other people and their lifestyles, but so, so alien to Sakura’s.

Suo uses it all as a reminder, a goalpost; make Sakura so used to kindness that an act of it will never put that look of disbelief on his face again.

“What the hell are you doin’ here.”

It’s less of a question and more of a posturing threat. Sakura’s voice grates in a thin echo through the bathroom door, still closed. Suo can see the shadows of his feet shuffling under it. He raises a hand to open it, but pauses.

“Are you decent?” he asks instead of answering his question. Sakura makes a confused noise through the bifold.

“Am I decent…? At what?”

Suo closes his eye, smile fond. “Are you clothed, Sakura?”

“Wha—yes I’m clothed—”

The door is promptly slid open and Sakura jolts at the movement. Suo’s eye adjusts to the sudden beam of the fluorescents overheard.

The first thing he notices is that his uniform has been shed, thrown into the tub where one sleeve lies over the lip to trickle blood to the tiled flooring. The second thing is that there are injuries his jacket had been hiding—a tear in the side of his white shirt is bordered in red, and he’s sure there are others nobody had been privy to. The third; copper and sterile chemicals have replaced the smell of mold.

The fourth; Sakura has his arm hovering under the running faucet, and the cut there is bigger than he thought.

“I asked you a question,” Sakura clenches out, leaned over the sink with one knee balanced on the edge on the bathtub. He glares at Suo through the mirror, hung on the wall by Kiryu. A medkit sits next to him on the lip of the tub, with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol perched precariously along the edge.

“And what do you think the answer is?” comes Suo’s blithe response, leaning up on the balls of his feet and keeping his arms to the small of his back.

Red drips from his chin, plinks to the lip of the sink and runs down the outer side of its bowl. It joins another line of garnet. Suo can see where Sakura has wiped at the flow of it, where it’s been smeared across his cheek only to get it all over the inner part of his bare wrist.

Face injuries bleed a lot. It could just be the bright fluorescents, but he’s looking a little pale while he leans against the porcelain. Suo tries not to feel alarmed at how much red he can see in this white (yellowed) dingy bathroom. There are a lot of veins in the face; they bleed a lot.

It’s so close to his eye.

“Get out, Suo,” Sakura warns, but his gaze avoids him. It focuses on the hand clamped around the arm that bleeds sluggishly in the sink, water turning discolored as it swirls in a spiral.

“Aw, you’re just gonna kick me out righ—”

“I don’t want your help,” Sakura snarls, and Suo is careful not to show it, but he’s admittedly a little surprised at how vicious it is.

He can see the regret linger in his gaze immediately after it seethes from his teeth, though. He can see how tense his muscles are, how high-strung he must feel. Suo does not cross the threshold, because Sakura keeps his eyes on it through the reflection of the mirror like if anything crosses it, he’ll lunge.

He can feel it in the air, Sakura’s nervous energy bounding along the walls. Caged, and about to combust. That wounded titan has lumbered through the trees, slunk back to its home to lick its wounds, and now there’s a little insect that won’t leave it be, won’t stop nipping at it. Suo doesn’t blame it for being annoyed, for finding itself at the end of its rope.

If it were anybody else, he would leave. When scared animals bare their teeth, it’s best to back away. But backing away has gotten neither of them anywhere for the past several months.

Suo can deal with a few bite barks. He’s had worse.

“Yes you do.”

The air undulates, and Sakura’s pent up expression twitches in the mirror.

“You want help. You just don’t want to be in a position where you have to ask for it, because you don’t know how.”

It’s so quiet that Suo picks up the sound of faraway laughter from the street even over the running water. “Luckily for you, Sakura, I’m the one offering. All you have to do is answer! And you want it, so why not give me a yes?”

As badly as he wants to, Suo does not lean forward, and he keeps a tight hold on the urge to enter the room. It’s the invisible line that he refuses to overstep, because it’s built from trust and fear, and those are two very delicate things.

Sakura fears him—or perhaps the idea of a friend—for many reasons that Suo is not privy to, but he also trusts him, and Sakura Haruka’s trust feels like a pearl in his hands. Suo is not very old and not very wise, but he knows precious things when he sees them, and he has been taught to care for the rare and the precious.

The quiet plinks of red dripping onto white is like a clock, ticking and ticking. He watches as Sakura meets his gaze through the mirror, like it’s somehow easier with a layer between them. He studies him, searching for something in his eyes, in the planes of his face, and Suo wonders what it is.

What does somebody like Sakura consider an enemy? Is it wider than most people’s definitions? Does he know what a friend looks like? Has he had that luxury, to be able to tell them apart?

Slowly, at first, Sakura seems to lose steam. His resolve wobbles, swaying and teetering like it’s been built hastily out of necessity, brick on brick with no mortar in between. His shoulders lower until they’re slack, and while he keeps the pressure against his arm steady, the rest of him loses whatever fight it had and slumps against the sink, everything finally giving out.

Sakura’s voice cracks as he bows his head against the porcelain, weak and defeated, but to Suo, this is a grand victory. “F’ne.”

Like exposing his neck to sharp teeth, trusting there won’t be puncturing of anything vital. It’s nervous and it’s tentative, but the faith is there.

Suo was taught to care for the rare and the precious. He steps over the threshold, and the air unties itself.

Sakura tenses when touched in general—even kind interactions are met with suspicion and suspense. Like magnet-on-magnet, same polarity, he shies away from other fields, from warmth and solace. When he makes it to the sink, Suo wraps fingers around his wrist, a loose grip that he’s careful not to close, and Sakura twitches under him like he wants to pull away.

He bends down, picks up the well-loved, half-full first aid kit to place it on the tank of the toilet for easy reach. Their polarities conflict. Sakura’s resolve to be alone and Suo’s determination to be company grind together, dig into each other in soft warps of their fields.

It’s been like this since day one, Suo thinks, as he thumbs the edge of the gash in his captain’s arm, measuring the depth. Suo has pulled, Furin has pulled, and Sakura has pulled back, but with each little tug, he’s migrated closer to the warmth of human bodies.

Suo looks forward to the moment where Sakura stops fighting warmth altogether.

There isn’t much to pour into the mold silence leaves. They’re left with the trickle of water and their own breaths to fill the space, with the occasional plink of blood to white. Both of their phones vibrate at once. Neither of them move to check them.

“Have you cleaned it yet?” he asks, his own hair obstructing his view of his friend’s face as he leans down to inspect all the red. The hum of the Earth and the echo of his voice against the walls makes it sound bigger, louder, even as he tries to keep his voice soft.

The gash isn’t deep enough to need stitches—even if it was, Suo is inclined to believe Sakura would rather fight a wild cougar than go to the hospital—but it is quite long, running from his elbow and twisting around his arm until it’s only an inch or two away from his wrist.

He’s lucky it isn’t deeper; it goes right over vital arteries.

“I was about to,” Sakura grumbles, the before you rudely interrupted going unspoken, and it leaves Suo with the urge to smile.

“Good. Now I can do it for you,” he gently nips back, twisting the faucet and watching the last of the water trickle along his arm in pink lines. Sakura doesn’t react beyond a fidgety shuffle of his feet.

The pipework in the walls going silent makes the hum in his ears even louder as Suo picks up the bottle of alcohol from the tub’s edge. It’s almost gone. He doubts he needs to warn somebody like Sakura of how painful this will be, but he wonders if he should count down or something first.

“If you start countin’ down like I’m five I’ll punch you,” Sakura warns darkly, and it forces a smile on Suo’s lips he doesn’t mean to put there.

“Noted,” he grins, still wonders if Sakura would think a ready? would count as “babying,” and then answers that with a solid yes. He simply gives him a flick of his eyes, a quick acknowledgement, and then he tips the bottle over his arm.

With how big the wound is, even if it’s not deep, Suo expects pained noises, and a lot of them. Maybe even a strained yelp, a seethe through his teeth, a white-knuckling of the porcelain beneath him, something.

But as he watches, unbreathing, Sakura’s expression only twitches, his leg bounces a little to release the energy, and he dips his head down to clench his teeth. And that’s it. The only fanfare is a wince, a shift, and a tautness of his jaw he lets go of a few seconds later. A quick hitch of his composure, and then it’s over.

Suo stares, something ugly soaking into his soul like ink on paper, slowly dawning, slowly saturating his view on things. The bottle in his hands feels like a brick. Memories connect in Suo’s mind, morphing into a half-formed spiderweb of Sakura’s ins and outs, strung together with throw-away lines and vaguely odd reactions.

He smells petrichor, suddenly, and thinks back to wet cardboard and a thief they never caught. He thinks about Sakura falling off a goddamn building and getting right back up—thinks about that air conditioning unit connecting with ribs, the blood splatter along the brick wall they’d left to the rain to wash away.

Suo doesn’t know why it didn’t dawn on him that that wasn’t normal. Maybe it was the adrenaline from the chase, maybe he was just too swamped with relief that Sakura was moving and alert at all after a fall like that—whatever the case, it just hadn’t—

He’d reset his nose himself. He’d done it with little preparation, even less forethought, and even less reaction to the pain. His breathing had gone funny, he’d had to stand there for a moment and stare hard at the concrete through the worst of it, but he’d simply risen to his feet afterward, the bridge of his nose straight, and said something spiteful about not needing a hospital, thank you very much.

The half-empty medkit carries a heavier presence in the room all of a sudden.

A beat or two passes as Suo has to swallow the thickness in his throat, and then he’s setting the bottle down and peeling gauze from the medkit.

“Sorry,” Suo apologizes, and then he quickly tacks something—anything—on so that it doesn’t sound as broad and as deep as he means it, “I should’ve given you something to bite down on.”

In his limited periphery, he catches Sakura giving him an odd look, but more red trickles along his arm and Suo is more concerned about blood loss than anything else at this point. He presses the gauze to the wound, hears no hiss from Sakura at the pain pressure is supposed to bring. 

He swallows that thickness again, and he’s carefully unspooling the roll of bandages when Sakura speaks up, voice a little thin.

“M’ surprised Nirei isn’t here.”

Suo isn’t offended. Nirei is often loud-spoken about caring for their captain, and will stop at nothing to do what he thinks is best for him. Suo is… quieter, in that regard. Not lesser, just softer. A whisper of comfort, he tries to be, where Nirei likes to beam and buzz in your mind.

“Nirei is off doing damage control,” Suo answers the unspoken croak of a question, lifting Sakura’s arm up an inch or so to pull the bandage underneath, “We figured I’d be the best bet for convincing you to let somebody patch you up. He knows more about Hiragi and Kaji and how they work than I do.”

Suo catches a grimace at the edge of his vision, and he flicks his attention over to see Sakura bowing his head down until his forehead is flush with the sink’s lip. “Great… now my vice captains are cleanin’ up my messes.”

Suo would like to say nonsense, would like to flick him on the forehead and be done with it, but after weeks and weeks of this ritual, of Sakura killing himself and then dragging his own corpse through another day to do it again, Suo’s not sure he has it in him. Cyclical things tend to drain, and draining things tend to be cyclical.

Sakura’s first mistake was believing himself unloveable, unwantable, and unworthy of protection. His second mistake was thinking the folks of Makochi inherently deserve saving more than him. His third mistake; considering self-sacrifice to get there. His fourth?

Doing it slowly, in front of hundreds of worried, worried eyes.

Suo would likely follow Sakura anywhere. There is a sturdy trust in him that Suo holds, an unshakable awe and respect, and that tethers him to wherever Sakura would like to go.

But he’s been sinking lately. It’s hard to admit that he’s dragging Suo down with him, but he is. It’s not blame. Suo’s not blaming anybody here. But it’s happening. Every foot Sakura drops, Suo goes down six inches, and he’s simultaneously getting further and further away from him, and getting uncomfortably close to how he must feel.

“He doesn’t seem to even notice we’re worried.”

“Make him realize he’s not just hurting himself. Then, maybe he’ll listen.”

The problem is that he’s pretty sure Sakura already knows.

“I shouldn’a said that back there.”

Suo flicks his eye up. Despite the way he’s pressing his palm against the wound, gauze soaking in the blood in between, Sakura doesn’t seem to feel it, instead opting to stare at the border of the mirror with brows furrowed. Suo latches onto a strand of white, painted maroon, that sticks to his forehead and congeals with the blood.

“Which part? You’re gonna need to narrow it down,” Suo snides, and smiles when one of Sakura’s feet dart out to lightly kick him in the ankle.

“Fuck off,” he grumbles, and shifts so his chin is propped up on his other dirtied palm. His gaze focuses to stare at the gold in his iris’s reflection. Something deeply unsatisfied flits across his face. “I was just… It wasn’t a big deal. And they were makin’ it a big deal. And then I just kept runnin’ my mouth.”

Suo runs another slow ring of bandages along skin, and lets his captain’s gears churn.

“There were—it was too much. Too many faces, lookin’ at me. I didn’t—I didn’t mean t’...”

He trails off, and Suo sneaks a glance at him to see his knuckles digging into his lips, glaring at the wall beneath the mirror like he couldn’t bare to look at himself any longer. Some tension leaves Suo’s shoulders; not quite in relief, but in exasperation.

“I’m sure Hiragi knows as much,” he calms, finally slipping the last of the bandage roll around Sakura’s arm. He thumbs the edge so the grooves of the fabric fall into each other, sticking to itself. “He understands you hot-headed types.”

Sakura glowers at him. “You’re startin’ to piss me off,” he mumbles with no heat, eyes following Suo’s hands idly with an odd look on his face, “I wasn’t… I wasn’t talkin’ about them.”

Suo looks up, blinking. The texture of the bandage along his fingertips stays, and even if the contact isn’t at all necessary, Sakura isn’t pulling away. He’s worrying his lip instead, glaring at the floor tiles somewhere behind his vice captain.

Sakura opens his mouth, closes it, flounders a bit. He can see his mind flailing for syllables that won’t brush past whatever barrier it is that keeps that honesty in. “I meant the… the thing I said, about… about you guys.”

His voice shakes at the end. He looks almost as devastated as he did when he walked into the classroom after recovering from that fever, apologizing for being human, tilting his head down and bracing for it all to fall.

It takes Suo a moment to even catch onto what he’s talking about.

“And how do you think they feel about that?!”

“As long as they’re alive that doesn’t fucking matter!”

“It matters,” Sakura grits, white-knuckling the edge of the sink bowl, keeping his gaze on the imperfections of the wall’s tilework, “I shouldn’ta said that. It—It matters.”

Admittedly, he’s only just now catching up to that line, just now soaking it in. He’d been so focused on calming Makochi residents, on dealing with any stragglers, on hurrying to Sakura’s place before he patched himself up—or worse, collapsed. He hadn’t really given it much thought.

And it’s probably mostly because he knows Sakura didn’t mean it. He already knows. As soon as it came out of his mouth, Suo had flagged it as a blatant lie, a bluff. He hadn’t let it fester, hadn’t given it the time of day. That was not an opinion his Sakura held; it was an opinion this new, desparate version of him cooked up, and this version of him is not what he really is.

He’s not even just biting off more than he can chew anymore. He’s scraping other people’s food onto his plate, making it all his burden, and eating until he chokes.

“I didn’t mean it,” Sakura croaks, and oh, it sounds so terrified, so agonizingly young. His face twitches like it’s about to twist up, he holds his mouth in a tight, thin line even as it wobbles on the edges. He keeps his breaths measured because if he doesn’t, Suo thinks they would get erratic quite fast.

Sakura reacts to this more than the physical wounds. And that is one of the many reasons Suo forgives him.

“I know you didn’t mean it,” he eases, and Sakura looks at him so fast he’s surprised his neck doesn’t hurt from it, “It’s okay, Sakura. I know you’re kinder than that.”

Big eyes stare, and—there it is again, that expression. The one he held in the dark, slumped against his wall, sweaty and weak and feverish. That shock, those unfathoming gears, like he’s trying to make sense of a fourth dimension.

It makes something in his stomach writhe. Suo continues to rummage through the medkit, letting it soak into Sakura’s mind as he takes in the air about him.

He goes into a sort of a stupor, a baffled little what? on his face that Suo finds simultaneously endearing and depressing. That pent up look deflates into a passive stare, vaguely confused in its undertone, and the rest of his body sinks with it into this odd, docile version of him.

He’s a little surprised, given their proximity. Most of the tension in his frame has dispersed, and while some of it is still there, he no longer watches Suo with distrustful eyes like he thinks he’ll lunge. It buoys the drops of hope in his gut to the surface.

He decides to chance it, and takes a wipe to a cut further up his arm. The bathroom is quiet as he works, as Sakura lacks that previous prey mentality, and as no flinch or glare comes. He stands and he stews in his thoughts, letting a friend clean his physical wounds while he licks his mental ones.

Little fireworks go off in Suo’s head. He honestly didn’t think he’d get this far.

“... You don’t haveta clean all of em’, yaknow,” Sakura finds his voice again, cheeks and ears red, as he studies the knob of the cupboard behind his friend to avoid his gaze.

Suo tilts his head to remove his shadow from shallow bits of red scraped into flesh. “I know,” he says simply, “But I’d like to, if that’s alright with you.”

Suo’s focused on the task, but he can feel Sakura’s mismatched eyes grazing his face, soaking in the calm expression, the gentle movements. They’re closer now that Suo has moved up his arm to take care of scrapes there; he doesn’t recall a time Sakura has ever let him trace the outer edges of his personal bubble like this. Neither of them are very touchy individuals, and Suo has secretly let Nirei do the heavy lifting when it came to getting Sakura used to touch.

A month ago, he doesn’t think he would’ve allowed this proximity, this level of intimacy, even if it’s just cleaning cuts in a sterile, too-bright bathroom. For Sakura, this must be big.

He wonders if their little sleepover had anything to do with it.

“I believe healing should never be a lonely process,” he echoes, borrowing the cadence and the feel of his Master’s words, even if they might sound different coming out of his mouth, “Healing alone isn’t quite healing, I feel.”

He thumbs the backing of a band-aid, peels off the paper strips, and lays it along a cut. Sakura is looking at him oddly, that moody pout jutting his bottom lip out.

“You’re makin’ a big deal out of it too.”

It makes Suo smile, but a bitterness twists it into something sad that he masks much too late, so he lets it sit there and sour the room, because frankly, he feels Sakura needs to see it.

His next move, he does slowly. The wipe in his hands rises in front of Sakura’s face, and when he follows it and doesn’t lean back, Suo takes it to the cut under his eye, still bleeding sluggishly.

Sakura tenses under it, but he doesn’t lean away. He’s staring. Suo focuses on driving the excess blood from the wound, measuring its length, seeing just how close that knife had gotten to slitting an eye. That anger bubbles again, but he keeps his touch light and gentle. Keeps the nausea down with a thick swallow.

His captain barely responds to the sharp stinging he must feel in the sensitive skin of his face; Suo thinks he’s probably too focused on the fact that a hand is touching his cheek and it’s not closed into a fist.

“I’m not. Really, Sakura,” he says quietly, the edges of his voice wilting, “I don’t care if it’s not a big deal to you. It’s a big deal to me.”

He leans away to search for a bandage. The lights overhead make a subtle buzz that can barely be heard over their breaths. The lid of the medkit clunks against porcelain when Suo drags it closer.

When he turns back with a bandage in hand, Sakura is looking at him like he’s seeing something new. And Suo feels hope.

+

Fist fights can change very quickly. The pacing of them is almost never smooth; there’s always hiccups on its tones, there’s always hills and valleys of movement, of action. Always breaths to take, always a single hit that can stop the music flat. The tempo never stays still for long; if it does, then it’s quite a boring fist fight.

The music of a fight, felt in the chest, is never a full song. It never concludes on a final, intentional chord. The stopping point is always abrupt. That ever-ramping progression of speed, of intensity, and then the sudden drop-off to nothing leaves his bones vibrating, as if they’d like to keep singing.

Suo has long-since acclimated to the unpredictability, however paradoxical that may be. He knows any fight could end at any time, and as a consequence, he is used to the whirl of air moving, and then the abrupt stagnation of it. The transition is ingrained in him. He knows that song and dance.

He thinks maybe it’s the echo of it, then, that dislodges that typical calm in his center. Maybe it’s because the thud of that shoulder hitting hardwood is so rough, so loud, that Suo’s feet freeze to the gymnasium floor.

One moment, he’s gently correcting Nirei’s wobbly posture, laughter somewhere off to his right, and the next, his tassels are jingling in the silence while he halts, watching Sakura stumble from a hit, slam into the hardwood, and go eerily still.

He’s carefully trained himself over the years to never freeze. You can fight, and you can run, but you can never freeze. And he thinks maybe it’s because it is Sakura that his whole mind starts buzzing in that frequency that hurts his heart; it stops everything in him, sensible thoughts included.

The gymnasium, once a cacophony of footwork, sole squeaks, and chatter falls to a pale silence, nobody breathing its air. It leaves room for the thunder outside to roll over the ceiling, for the rain to patter against the windows. All eyes rake through black and white as they wait, one second, two seconds, three, four.

People are already rushing forward then, because four seconds alone is far too long, much less the seven that Suo watches him lie there, limbs dead.

Anzai is the first to reach him, only a few feet away in another spar with Takanashi. Hiragi—Sakura’s sparring partner—is the second, shouting to not crowd him. Distantly, Suo is aware of Nirei passing him, fretting and darting between people in his haste to get to their friend.

Suo’s fingerpads feel numb. Shoe squeaks and worried barks sound over the roar in his ears—it all rushes faster when he spots, through a gap in the small crowd, Sakura’s bloodied face.

Give him space! Everybody back off! is what Suo hears just under the beat of his own heart. Is he okay? is uttered and echoed. He’s waking up! comes from another, Kiryu, he thinks. It kickstarts his instincts, and he’s finally stepping forward and rushing into the crowd, ashamed of the delay.

Suo manages to squeeze to the front just in time to see Sakura coming to. Hiragi and Anzai hold him up, shoulders resting against laps and arms as the gymnasium floor creaks under them. There’s a water bottle already being passed around the class to the center, carried with the fretful murmurs. It lands in Nirei’s sweaty hands, who grips it with loud crinkles.

Suo crouches down next to his captain as Sakura’s lids open, close, and open again. Blood trickles from his nose, is smeared over a watercolor painting of past spars and previous street scuffles—it’s all ugly reds and greens and yellows on top of flushed cheeks and pale skin everywhere else.

The cut under his eye is still healing. The quick and shallow beats of his breaths change when a comforting layer of awareness flashes in his gaze.

The rain outside barely sounds above the chatter of the crowd, above all the worried questions. Sakura is sweating bullets, and Suo knows it can’t all be from exertion. Anzai angles his face toward Suo, eyes big and worried, as he mouths he’s really warm.

Sakura lifts his head, rapid blinks adjusting to the silhouettes of them all. Light beams through the windows in quick blares that he winces at. Suo watches the gears start to churn at a sluggish pace again, back in motion but chugging along at a pitiful rate. There’s something agonizing about the few seconds it takes for him to fully register the scene, all the people around him, the arms holding him up—it takes far longer than it should for him to jerk away from the holds, breaths fast and huffed.

“Sakura, take it ea—” Hiragi starts, but Sakura’s already trying to scramble to his feet. Nirei openly frets, shakes his head no and practically pleads with him to sit back down, and the scattered fretting of the class around them rises to a dull roar of noise. Sakura either ignores it or doesn’t hear it at all.

The class’s composure teeters with Sakura’s when his face goes three shades paler and his knees buckle. Suo is the one to grab him this time, gently by the arm and then around the shoulder. As he’s steadying him and watching his friend try to right his footing, try to blink the glassiness away from his gaze, he quietly notes that wow, Anzai wasn’t exaggerating—he feels like a furnace.

“Sakura, let’s take a break for a moment,” Suo smiles amicably. Somehow, his voice remains steady as ever, even if his chest feels a little like it’s crumbling. “Then we can go b—”

“M’ f’ne,” Sakura breathes out—it’s predictable, and yet it always manages to hit them all in the same tender spot every time. The instant aid of another party, and then the I’m fines and the it’s whatevers in the face of his own ailments—it hurts. “Let’s go, m’ f’ne.”

Hiragi is still busy trying to shoo some of the classmates away from Sakura’s bubble. Kiryu crosses his arms and pins Sakura with an unimpressed look. “You look like death.”

“Who fuck’n’ cares?” Sakura bites through his teeth, a drop of sweat-mixed blood plinking to the floor from his chin, and it hurts. Lightning illuminates a sickly face, blood reflecting it all boldly, and it hurts. He pushes against Suo, who pushes back with a firm grip, and it hurts. “M’ n’t takin’ a break unt’l I fuckin’ win one!”

“You won,” Hiragi says then, and his voice is steady and concrete, but Suo cannot ignore the desperation in his face, “You won that one, Sakura. You can rest now.”

“Don’t fuckin’ pull th’t shit w’ me!” Sakura growls, rips his arm from Suo’s grasp, and though he sways for a moment and everybody holds their breath for the topple, he keeps upright and glares. “St’p goin’ easy on me! You were goin’ easy th’t whole time! I know you can fight better than that!”

“I was goin’ easy cuz you looked like a strong breeze could blow you over! You need—”

Sakura scoffs at him, bares his bloodied teeth. “I’ll fight somebody else, then, who’s not afraid to throw a couple punches!” he shouts, voice hoarse, and then scans the crowd.

Everything hushes, and nobody offers themselves, gazes darting away to avoid Sakura’s glassy but sharp stare. Pattering rain fills the space of the murmurs. There’s a look on his face, first confusion, and then concern, and then what seems too close to betrayal for his liking flits across it all and Suo steps in because it hurts and he can’t take it any longer.

But Anzai speaks first.

“We’re boycotting you!” Anzai bravely declares, puffing out his chest and pointing directly at Sakura’s bloodied face, “Until we see you finally sit down and get some rest, none of us are sparring with you!”

They watch as their captain’s face contorts to bafflement, and then quickly recedes back to rage. Hiragi crosses his arms and speaks before Sakura can start yelling.

“I agree. Sakura, this has gone too far.”

Sakura audibly sputters, and Hiragi regards him with, truly, one of the most genuinely worried gazes Suo has seen from him. “I’m sorry, I really didn’t wanna have to do this, but for your own good, I’m gonna need you to sit the next couple of patrols out. Rest. You need it.”

Sakura throws his hands out. “What?! You can’t do that—!”

“I wish I didn’t have to! But look at you, Sakura,” Hiragi growls, enunciates it carefully, and Sakura miraculously follows his command and looks down at himself, at his wobbly frame, at his pale, clammy skin. “Listen to yourself.”

Suo knows he means his ridiculous pleas to keep an unproductive spar going, to keep everything moving despite his engine being aflame, but Sakura’s very breaths spell it out just as well, if not better. They’re trembling and rattled around congestion in his chest, short and fast and labored and wrong. Wind scraped against a cliff face, is how it’s sucked in and forced out, with a little wheeze at the end that shouldn’t be there, that’s never there normally.

They watch Sakura’s gaze lower to the floor as he catches those ragged inhales, as he swallows down whatever blood-saliva that’s coalesced in his mouth. Suo’s gaze drops to his friend’s hands that fidget with the seams of his pockets, that ball into fists and relax again, not knowing where to put the energy.

It’s been months since Suo has seen his knuckles bare, without some sort of bandage or bruise tainting them. They’re bruised now, a splotchy mess of black-green-purple-blue that contrasts sharply against the ghost white.

For a long moment, Sakura is unnervingly silent while he stares at the floor and breathes between cracks of quiet thunder. And for a long moment, Suo feels some close cousin of giddiness at the prospect of Sakura finally, finally giving in.

“I don’t even get why you’re training so hard, man,” Anzai says into the silence, and instantly, Suo knows that it was the wrong call to make.

Nirei meets his gaze, and judging by the lack of reactions from the others, none of them are privy to the way Sakura’s shoulders tense, just a little bit. It’s imperceptible if you’re not looking for it, if you don’t know to look in the first place.

“Yeah. You easily beat most of the students in Furin,” somebody else says; Suo doesn’t even bother identifying them because with the tiny sliver of his face that Suo can see from this angle, he spots frustration, and that is not good.

Hiragi nods, brows furrowed. “You give me a lot of trouble in mere spars—you’re no pushover. Hell, you defeated Shishitoren’s second-in-co—”

“No I didn’t.”

It’s spat with a quiet venom that has Nirei tensing up beside him, and Suo knows it’s over.

A beat of tense confusion resides in the air, then it’s cut down by Sakura’s next seethed words, aimed at the floor. “I didn’t defeat Togame. He gave up.”

Hiragi slumps his shoulders. “Sak—”

“And Endo?” Sakura lifts his head, and pierces Hiragi with a hellfire stare. “I didn’t defeat him either.”

He thrusts an arm out in a sharp gesture, eyes wild. “He gave up, too! He let go!” he growls, and then fists a hand into the fabric of his own shirt, “Don’t you get it?! I haven’t done shit!”

The stricken looks on all their faces aren’t helping Sakura calm down. And it hurts. “Both of my strongest opponents threw in the fuckin’ towel halfway through the fight! I haven’t defeated anybody!” he seethes through blood-tinted teeth, chest crackling, “I got lucky.”

It’s funny, in a twisted, distorted sort of way. He recalls Sakura occasionally tossing out crumbs to the pack, little granular tidbits that suggest so much about his past with so few syllables. One of them frequents his mouth, and it’s usually said in a sarcastic, casual bitterness that tastes like raw sourdough.

“Yeah, historically, I’m not the luckiest guy on Earth. Trust me.”

“That whole fight… I was trying to think like Umemiya.” His hands fall to his sides. Sakura lowers his head, stares at the peeling tape on the gymnasium floor instead of faces he can’t bare to meet, and even that hurts. “I was trying to convince myself that I wouldn’t lose simply because I couldn’t. But Umemiya says shit like that because he has the strength to back it up.”

His voice shakes, like he’s afraid to say it out loud. Something in Suo shakes with it. “I don’t.”

“That whole fight… all I could think about was everything I was about to lose, and everybody I was about to fail.” It hurts.

A dreadfully taut beat of silence, two, three. And then Sakura raises his head just enough to peer at them through his hair. “You all elected a grade captain because he got lucky, not because he won.”

Thunder reigns, and Sakura turns, moves through the crowd that’s too paralyzed to grab at him. He’s slow and unsteady on his feet, but he makes it to the gymnasium entrance, throws words over his shoulder in a hoarse call—something about Shishitoren letting him spar —and roughly throws open the doors.

And oh, how it hurts.

The rain is louder than the blood in his ears. He counts this as a blessing, and keeps running.

The gymnasium doors hang open, students rushing in and out. The hardwood of the threshold is getting wet from the rain. Nobody pays it any mind.

Cacophonous and doubled in volume from the water pelting the courtyard, all Suo hears is thunder and shouts. He sees Hiragi rushing for the school entrance, tailed by a few others. Half the class loiters along the fringes of the door, uncertain.

“He shouldn’t be out there—he was really sick!” Anzai, above the uproar, from where he stands directly under the threshold. His frantic gestures fling rainwater. “The rain’s gonna make it way worse—”

“There’s no way he’s gonna even make it to Ori—” Kurita. He’s throwing his jacket on and shoving his feet in his shoes, aiming to follow Hiragi to the rooftop, “He’s gonna collapse on the way there!”

Lightning cracks above them, guttural and shaking. Most of the commotion carries itself outside, scurrying to the main building. The gymnasium turns quiet, all for the few stragglers who whisper, and Nirei, who’s pacing and scrubbing at his own scalp as he mumbles to himself.

“I would say ‘what’s he thinking,’ but,” says Kiryu, low as he stares through the gymnasium glass at the first-years hurrying through the courtyard. “He’s not thinking anymore. Not through that fever.”

He doesn’t take the fastest route; he takes the one he knows Sakura prefers—it’s longer, and windier, and it cuts through the town at odd angles, but it passes all his favorite spots. Café Pothos, Cactus, the diner he goes to with Kiryu sometimes, and, delightfully, a few lesser-known alleyways home to stray cats. His captain likes to claim it covers more ground on patrols. Everybody knows better.

He’s already soaked at this point. The leather of his eyepatch suctions to his skin uncomfortably and his breaths come out in bumpy huffs, wet shoes struggling for purchase on slick tarmac. His eye throbs against the cold air.

“Suo?”

He blinks. There’s a hand on him—it’s Nirei. He’s looking at him, eyes big; one of Suo’s hands is playing with the tassels of an earring, tugging and pulling and twisting, but Nirei’s fingers slot along his palm, gently peel it all away. Kiryu is gone. They’re still in the gymnasium; he must’ve left.

The look in his eyes is heavy, and buzzing with a nervous energy, with an amount of questions and concerns Suo could never hope to answer in a lifetime. They are all simple on the surface. One of them seems to be are you okay?

Suo’s not sure why he’s asking that. The other innumerables are something along the lines of what the hell do we do?

“Nirei,” he answers, or calls, or both, “I’m gonna go talk to Sakura. The others are getting Umemiya.”

His hand moves to wrap around Nirei’s wrist, squeezes once. The air in the gymnasium is cold and wet. “Catch up with him, and bring a medkit.”

Nirei blinks, takes it in, and then notches his head to the side in a wary recoil, connecting dots. Suo moves his face to smile, makes sure to show the correct number of teeth.

He hopes his co-vice doesn’t notice the thick swallow. “Do you trust me?”

The nod is instant. “With my life.”

Distantly, he feels something in his core soften at that. The smile on his face turns an ounce more real—he fears the immediate comparison makes it all the more easy to differentiate. “Then trust me with this.”

Suo passes only a handful of residents, everybody else inside until the storm finishes rolling over. People look up from their hooded raincoats and stare as he runs by, bending around corners as his muscles supply him with the memory on when to turn. His mind is too focused on other things. He’s thankful he’s walked this way with his team so many times.

There’s a steady pooling sensation in his gut, heavy and feeling like dry ice against the walls of his stomach. It churns up, coats his throat in the stuff, zings the sides of his lungs in a hot-cold beam of adrenaline.

Suo doesn’t want to do this.

“Show him we’re here,” Umemiya had said, flanked by experiences Suo is not versed in, “He’s learned to trust a little.”

Suo doesn’t even know if he can do this.

“I’m confident that with some more gentle prodding, we can make it so that when he protects, he protects everything. Including himself.”

He does not enjoy Umemiya’s company. He’s kind, and he’s compassionate, and Suo respects him just as much as anybody else in this town, but for every one meaningful sentence that leaves his mouth, another two hundred nothings succeed it. He’s loud, he’s boisterous; the type Suo doesn’t like to spend his time near. He’s beaming fluorescents when you’re already being blinded by everything else.

But that’s the thing; for every two hundred nothings, there is one gem hidden in all his nonsense. Suo had genuinely thought that gentleness was the answer; Umemiya had spouted as such, and there had been something about it that made him believe this was the one rare, valuable lesson; he’ll spend the next week pouring out empty lines.

“I think Sakura’s the type to need reminders here and there, that people love him.”

But he’s tried that. And it isn’t working.

Even against all the progress, all the wary glares turning to simple acceptance, all the flinches switching to leans, all the disbelief morphing to a slow but tentative embrace, there is still this achingly deep issue that Sakura doesn’t seem to think is an issue to begin with.

Sakura once told him he wanted to become the top because he at least wanted to find some worth in himself. It seems he has continued that long, long trend of painstakingly cataloging every point of worth in his world, and ignoring himself in the process.

He hears a train. He needs to do this.

Suo’s soles splash in the trickle of water running across the asphalt. When he rounds the corner, the rain pulls sideways, and he squints his eye against the rush of it, wind grabbing at wet hair.

Sakura’s figure is ahead, a small blotch of Furin fabric. The Shishitoren emblem and its tunneled maw encircles him, frames him in an arc. He trudges down the middle of the asphalt, slow feet scraping across old, cracked tarmac. Suo slows, breathing hard against the cold that wraps him.

A beat passes, and Sakura must sense a gaze on his back, because he twists around and meets his eye over his shoulder. His friend pauses—he’s too far away to gauge his expression, but even in the dreary weather, that gold of his pops.

Sakura turns and keeps walking. Suo hurries to follow him.

“Sakura—”

“Go back, Suo.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to decline,” he calls over the rain, faster pace catching him up so that he’s trailing at his shoulder.

“What will it take to get you off my ass?” Sakura growls, glare fixed to the tunnel ahead. Suo smiles emptily.

“You know exactly what I’m looking for,” he replies. Keep the tone light. Keep it steady, keep it normal. “Don’t make me spell it out for you; you’re smarter than that.”

“Why are you guys so stubborn?”

That’s very funny. He says as much.

“What’s fuckin’ funny?”

He ignores the question. “How do you expect to spar with Shishitoren when you’re like this?” he asks, tilting his head and letting rainwater trickle over his face, drip from the strands that dangle.

Sakura’s tired glare swivels to him, almost unseeing. “I’m fine.”

That’s also very funny. Suo keeps this one to himself—the mechanical tone rips something out of him, but it’s done in a slow tear. He’s focusing on calming his middle instead of replying with anything snarky.

“You know you’re not.”

“Can’t hear me over the rain or somethin’?” he bares his teeth, eye dead set down the middle of that tunnel, “I said I’m fuckin’ fine!”

“You can’t beat Tomiyama on a good day,” he replies, wonders if it’ll strike a chord. Something minor changes in his captain’s glare. Good; keep chipping. “What makes you think you’ll beat him with a fever?”

“I’ve been through worse.” His breathing is already ragged, even from just the walk across town. “It’ll go away.”

“Nobody’s asking you to do this,” Suo gripes, picking up speed so he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with Sakura. A close cousin of desperation is starting to form around his middle. “Nobody wants this.”

Sakura doesn’t reply. That desperation clutches his lungs so hard he’s seeing stars. “Sakura.”

Not a word. Keep your head on. Keep chipping. “There’s nothing to gain fr—”

“JUST—” Sakura whips around, a hand splayed out between them to shut him up. He grinds his teeth together, tongue slotting between molars as he closes his eyes to calm whatever emotion had reared its head.

He opens them again, and it is an entirely new expression that Suo has never seen on him. 

This is the first good look at him he’s gotten since following him. He looks quite miserable soaked in the rain. His hair is plastered to his skin and maybe the weather is exacerbating it, but he’s as white as a sheet. The bags under near-bloodshot eyes are puffier than ever. Suo can see it in his gaze—he’s so tired.

They’re wide, his eyes, and there’s something taut in them; he swears he hears the stretched creaking of a tightrope somewhere in the back of his mind and he wonders where it comes from.  

It’s almost… begging. Sakura is begging. “Let me do this.”

The rain rushes at them sideways. It’s coming down so heavily that it’s started a steady rush of water down the road, building its own current. Suo’s shoes stand in the middle of it, rainwater building against them only to run around the soles or trickle over the arches. The fabric of them is soaked.

Sakura is not a beggar, and yet he turns to what may very well be his best friend, and he begs, thinking that he might understand. Somehow, thinking that his best friend would let it all slide if fed a please. Somehow, thinking that Suo is kind.

What an idiot, to think that Suo Hayato is kind to things that hurt his circle.

“Let you do what, exactly?” he demands lowly, voice skimming just over the surface of that mercury in his stomach, “Let you protect us? Or let you protect your pride?”

He trails around Sakura in a slow half-circle until he’s right in front of him, rain to his back. His tassels graze the slope of his jaw in the wind, hair brushing against cheekbones, and whatever tightly-wound warmth that his eye has held during the last few months fizzles and cools to something jagged.

Sakura stares, something like alarm ringing beneath the film of fever. He thinks he sees some semblance of genuine anger, some distant remnant of it, recalled slowly in the froth of his mind. Good. Get him angry. Get him hungry.

He stands his ground. Sakura’s fists clench at his sides, jaw tight, and his eyes flick over Suo’s shoulder, to the tunnel. He steps forward, makes it one stride before Suo’s hand shoots out to press against his shoulder, shirt soaked and cold under his palm. Even through that, Suo feels the heat radiating from him.

His captain stops, and gold spears him through wet, dangling hair. War drums break the horizon line of his mind. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t let himself. Suo is much more scared of what Sakura will do to himself than of what Sakura will do to him.

He meets his piercing gaze. It’s sharp—even through the haze of fever it’s stabbing and critical of him, edges glowing with a light that feels like polished stainless steel against skin, cold and yet sweltering in proximity. Suo’s own glare, canyoned and the texture of sandpaper, stabs back as if saying answer the question.

Lightning traces Sakura’s wilted figure. His gaze scrapes from Suo’s to the Shishitoren emblem painted over the tunnel.

“... Let me…” Sakura croaks, shoulder pressing against his hand, “past.”

And there it is. His chest is rumbling, and he’s staring through the eyes of that titan now. It’s rising like a mountain, disturbed by the flies and now caught in that thick time-jelly that comes with brain fog, with scorching inner temperatures. Ire runs laps around a golden iris, its path ghosting behind it.

The Earth seems to shake under its lumbering limbs. Suo’s heart shakes with it, and he keeps his breaths steady, his gaze even moreso. He takes in the pale skin, the inflammation under his eyes, the glassy, faraway texture licking at his friend’s mind. Suo swallows. He has to do this.

Being gentle didn’t work.

“Make him realize he’s not just hurting himself.” He hadn’t liked that advice. He was raised to be gentle, he was raised to not crowd. His Master told him everybody deserves a little bit of grace, a little bit of leeway to stumble and trip.

Being gentle isn’t going to work.

“It’s easier when people are horrible.” Suo thinks of his own explanation to Nirei, thinks of staring at his own reflection in the boy’s screen as he’d said a smartphone is only useful to you if you know how to use one. “I know how to handle that.”

Sakura doesn’t know gentle. He needs to do this.

“Why go all the way to Ori,” Suo challenges over the torrent of water and wind and everything whipping around in his mind, “when I’m right here?”

And just as he thought, Sakura’s eyes snap into focus, dart past the surface layers of his gaze like a harpoon. He regards him with wide eyes, shock lining those pupils; he’s searching for the punchline, for the purpose. There’s a gross sense of satisfaction roiling in his gut when he correctly guesses all of that will peel away within seconds into a simple, hungry desire to fight.

Nirei has the tally written somewhere of how many times Sakura has asked Suo to spar within the last few months. It was somewhere in the eighties last Suo asked, and that had been weeks ago.

It’s a gag among the classroom, an inside joke about the dramatic final showdown of Suo Hayato the Immovable Object versus Sakura Haruka the Unstoppable Force. The gag, over time, has evolved from the showdown being the fight, to the showdown convincing Suo to fight in the first place. It’s for laughs, for innocent chuckles. Suo likes to play along—it gets Sakura riled up easily.

So Suo lifts one foot, slides it back along the asphalt in a quiet scrape against rippled water, and settles into that familiar stance that comes easily. Carefully cradling his center of gravity, balancing it at his core, he regards Sakura with a cold invite to step up to make the first move, and he mentally prepares himself to kick somebody who’s already down all in the name of picking them up again.

And, as he’d guessed, Sakura’s one-track mind doesn’t dwell too much on the change of heart. Something in his eyes goes wild, salivating at the chance to fight the one kid who hasn’t sparred with him even once, and his pale face breaks out into a grin, crooked and sharp.

He laughs, almost manic in its enthusiasm. After months and months of his friend asking for a conversation, Suo breaks the ice.

Sakura responds with whispers of a frightened animal too scared to stop, and he lunges.

The footwork against the water is immediately fast and pelted, and Suo is momentarily surprised at just how fast Sakura is able to get, even when sick—it’s different when you’re the target, it’s a different feeling, it’s a different timeline altogether. His fists are there before your mind even catches up to the fact that he’s moving.

A swing, a duck, a sidestep, a redirect. Suo’s shoes splash on the tarmac in little twists and whirls; his movements have always been confined, tight, succinct, whereas Sakura’s style relies more on wide angles, yet quick adjustments. Suo relies on his opponent stumbling; Sakura is an expert at recovering.

He drops under the swing of a leg, bends back when a second sole cuts through rainwater. A punch is dragged forward by careful hands around a wrist and he has to dodge the oncoming kickback Sakura tries for in the anticipation of it. A foot comes for him; he limbos down and sees clouds.

Another swing that grazes his head. It leaves the air behind stirred and colder than the rain. His eyepatch sticks to his scarred lid uncomfortably and his hair tangles around the strap, but knuckles are darting to his jaw and he’s too busy jerking back to dwell on it.

They settle into that familiar rhythmic upset, paradoxical like all fights are. The song of it is made of instruments trying overpower one another, trying to overtake their beats. Pure sound pushing and pulling, settling their rough grooves on a track that’s not specially made for either; it’s whoever can carve the fastest.

It’s whoever can force their opponent to their rhythm, whoever can get a foothold in the door first.

His mind enters that almost blissful, quaint emptiness, with a low, mantle-deep thrum juxtaposing it. It sings through his bones, feels like feathers grazing them and the Earth’s weight pulling at their thickest parts all at once. It sounds like a rainstick; feels like wind.

Suo’s body settles into that acute awareness, and the corners of everything turn crisp.

He can hear Sakura’s breaths over the gurgle of thunder, fast and ragged. His captain is currently overtaking him, but that’s to be expected—Suo is on the defensive and plans to keep it that way. Keep Sakura coming, keep him chasing. Wear him down, make him lunge and follow those breadcrumbs, melt the rest of that candle he’s been burning. 

He doesn’t plan on hitting him. He refuses to; this isn’t a fight he’s going to win. It’s just a fight Sakura is going to lose if Suo does it right.

A titan versus an insect, biting and buzzing around ripped ears. Suo should be scared—he is, but reasons other than his own safety.

His shoes aren’t made for this kind of weather. Sakura forces him to back away, to splash along dirty runoff and lose his footing on the slippery tarmac. His captain is recovering from a swing when Suo struggles for balance, so it’s a lucky break, but he doesn’t like how that bodes for the outcome of this.

Blurs of movement, arms swinging out and spraying rainwater in speckled arcs. Sakura is gifted at quick, spur-of-the-moment attacks, but Suo’s watched him fight long enough to have learnt his patterns. He telegraphs them just clearly enough, and the wind-up time is just long enough for him to react.

He’s getting desperate. Suo hasn’t even tried to attack, and it shows on Sakura’s face, in his whole demeanor, just how much it’s pissing him off. He thinks he’s being toyed with, and that works to Suo’s advantage because an emotional Sakura is a stumbling one, but it still hurts to watch.

His punches are getting wider, more forceful, the wind-up times are longer. He gasps against the wet air and shakes the hair out of his wild eyes, some sort of stop fucking toying with me burning in that silver-gold.

Interestingly, for each hit that doesn’t land, the fear on his captain’s face grows.

It hurts, but Suo does not feel guilt for it. This is his last resort—he’s tried everything else.

Suo takes in the ragged breaths, the slouched, shaky posture, the puffy eyes, the clammy skin, and that rainstick drone in his mind gets louder, envelopes everything a little bit more. His resolve aligns with the grooves of it, with the beats of Sakura’s lurching, hitching tempo.

All he hears from him is the rattling of weak lungs. All he sees is the struggle to even keep baring his teeth. It hurts. It hurts to listen to, it hurts to watch, and it hurts to let it continue. Suo is used to pain. Suo is not used to this kind of pain—this unique writhing in his core, this tautness at the base of his throat. He feels it in his teeth, the warble of Sakura’s whole being.

Just a little longer. It may be a titan versus a fly, but it’s a beast so battered and bruised and drained from everything else that it will collapse, it will splay its hide to the buzzards, serve its blood to the mosquitos.

He feels rumbling. Suo does not have to do anything to take it down. It’s doing everything for him. Just a little longer.

Sakura throws out a kick, more forceful than all the other ones combined, really, and Suo takes a chance. He flicks his wrist, presses the meat of his hand against the calf of his friend’s leg, turns, twists, flips. He has to arc his back in a limbo, has to bend his legs at odd and tight angles for it to work, but he redirects that force with a mere inch to spare.

A hand presses against wet asphalt when Suo expects a falter and a collapse. Sakura contorts midair, carries the momentum into a new arc instead of crashing to the wet road in a daze like most do, and Suo sees the new line of motion just a millisecond too late.

Sakura swings with feverish desperation, a whirlwind of kinetic energy behind it that’s been building up for several seconds now, and it actually connects.

The pain is a noisy burst of static and a deep pressure in his skull, all along his jawbone and temple, and Suo’s suddenly staring at concrete and iron. The bones along his arm throng in a deep, aching scream, and he doesn’t know why. His single eye waters from the impact, from the stinging that reverberates up his sinuses.

For a moment he thinks it’s suddenly raining even harder, because there’s a steady stream of wet pouring from his nose, but then he realizes it’s blood spilling over the doubled railroad. He blinks harshly. The railroad?

They were right. Even when sick and weak, even when he’s wobbly on his feet and his body is teetering on dysfunctional, Sakura’s hits have purpose.

His ears are ringing. He hears his own breaths huff against wet metal over the rain, and he white-knuckles the tracks, mind stalling and slipping. His world spins on a carousel. The static of that rainstick is gone, replaced with a throbbing pulse of half-thoughts and—

He hears a train.

His throat makes room for his heart, and when he looks up all he sees are lights. The ringing in his ears receeds behind the deafening horn, louder than anything he’s prepared for and rumbling his chest with the sheer volume, with heavy wheels against steel. The angled bars of the cowcatcher seer his mind beyond the lights.

Somewhere to his left, Sakura screams. Suo makes a mistake, and closes his eye.

Hands shove him, and the whip of airflow from the train’s front thunders past as Suo hits concrete. Everything in him reels, his mind seizes, and he whips around so fast he’s dizzy from it.

He screams his name, he thinks. He’s not sure. All he knows is that he’s staring at the windows of the train cars blurring by in a desynced chorus of thunder, the ghosts of headlights bruising his vision.

Suo scrambles to stand and he curses himself at the lack of grace as he slips in his hurry, splashing back to the wet tarmac. He’s breathing heavily, his huffs overshadowed by the racket of the train, the shudder of its spinning parts. Something drips—blood, it’s blood—sluggishly from his chin, lapping over his teeth.

His legs are shaking when he stands and he’s not used to that. Ice locks his lungs and his heart is in a free fall to his feet, but all he can do is stare through speeding metal, wait for it to pass. His skull throbs, his chest hurts, his eye lances the damaged nerves around it—all for different reasons.

It’s unbearable, the wait. Some sort of otherworldly noise invades his head, some senseless choir of textures and sounds that don’t make sense, that he’s never felt in real life much less conquered in his mind. The mantle of the Earth is about to erupt, the sky is about to fall, the—

The caboose of the train speeds past in a whirl of air, and Sakura lies on the other side of the tracks, coughing into water.

Something zings through him, some sheet of shuddering, intoxicating relief allaying everything in his mind, and he nearly lets out a laugh against the rain, jaw shaking. He gulps, a second wave of it licking at his silhouette, and this time the chuckle he lets out is silent, but his shoulders shake, the tail of it turning hysterical and heavy.

Sakura slowly lifts his head, and Suo cannot help but feel something in his gut writhe at the sight—at all the blue and green and yellow, at the rainwater dripping from plastered hair to meld with a sheen of sweat, at the big, glassy, fearful eyes.

The racket of the train fades down the tracks between them, and Sakura’s chest rattles even over the downpour—he hears the fluid in his lungs, listens to the wet crackle in his throat. He pushes against the asphalt and his arms shake. He stands on a wobbling knee that gives out immediately, and he splashes back to the water, heaving.

He tries again, fails again. Suo watches him attempt a third, Sakura’s teeth gritted, but his very arms shake against the effort of holding himself up and it’s all he can really do. He coughs, wheezes through the patter of rain, one shoulder collapsing to the road.

Suo stands, water mixing with the blood on his face and limbs cold while the cloth of his uniform gets soaked. Several long beats pass before he moves—the noise is his head is still ebbing, so his legs don’t quite work correctly at first, but he manages to step over the railroad tracks and stop before his captain.

And when Sakura looks up, his feverish gaze climbs over Suo the way Suo’s own mind climbs over Sakura, a sort of desperate grapple, a tight hold after almost being yanked away. It’s fearful. It’s beyond relieved. It’s guilty. He doesn’t say a word, and Suo knows exactly what he means.

He looms over frantic, uneven breaths spilling past clenched teeth. The thunder aids, rumbling in time with their heartbeats and giving Suo’s presence another inch or so of grandeur, of unwillful dominance. Sakura’s veiny hands tremble to keep his chest off the wet asphalt—the water squelches under his sweaty palms as he shifts.

Suo regards him with a close cousin of grief.

“You fight like you’re more scared of your allies than your enemies,” he says into the cold, forces it past all the frigid mind muck, “You’re hurting them more than your enemies too.”

The face Sakura makes has Suo swallowing down the guilt that bubbles up in his chest. It’s all wide eyes and scared pupils. Confusion, and then disbelief, and then a horridly fresh and ugly look passes by it all, coats it in a thick layer. It’s something like remorse, but the mere word isn’t near enough. It’s more than that—it’s deeper. Viscous, thick and sticky. Warm in a humid, sickly sense, and rotting like a carcass.

And then Sakura’s gaze focuses again, and it lands on the blood running down Suo’s face. His shaky eyes trace its path, how it trickles from his nose, over his lips, and down his neck to paint the collar of his shirt red. They stare, and then they dart to Suo’s bare hands, flicker between the clean, bloodless knuckles, stray to the tracks beyond them that curve into the rain mist.

Suo forces himself to hold his gaze steady, even if Sakura’s stricken expression is maybe the last thing he’s ever wanted to see.

His dear friend bows his head, then, lets his chest crackle out a cough against the wet concrete. His breaths are shaky and uneven and wheezed along the ends, and when he presses his forehead to the flooded asphalt, a fuck is strained through gritted teeth.

It’s barely heard over the rain, and yet it feels as loud as a siren to him. The pained lilt to it, in more ways than one, makes it feel like he screamed it. Maybe it’s his imagination, but Suo could swear his ears start ringing from the volume.

Sakura breathes and the world fizzes, rain flooding between all the swirling half-thoughts; Suo watches his friend’s arms shake with the effort of holding himself up, takes in the ever-scarred knuckles and wet bandaids. His hands are ghost white against the dark water that runs over them, against all the cold realizations.

In the back of his mind, in the very recesses, there is an equally cold anger at whoever made Sakura so convinced of his worthlessness. Suo gives it a moment to fester, if only to grant him another minute or so of strength. The further he digs into the sources of Sakura’s mind, the longer the tunnels get. It has to end somewhere, for both of their sakes.

Suo crouches down, balances on the balls of his feet. Sakura coughs again and then lifts his head, slow and tired and drooped by the rain and the exhaustion, and his glassy eyes lock onto his outstretched hand.

“Step number three of dealing with too-good people: never think for a second that they’re about to give up on you.”

Suo smiles at him, wet and bloody. And something gives. The fight, or whatever drops of it were left, leaves in a silent collapse of his innards, and Sakura releases a trembled breath, lets his head hang again. He raises a hand, almost drops to the asphalt from the shifting of his own weight, and too-warm skin meets Suo’s palm.

The bubbling of his chest quiets to a low simmer, and Suo exhales in silent, dizzying relief.

He stands, and gently pulls Sakura up with him. It’s a slow rise of weak limbs, and there’s a wince on Sakura’s face he’s not quite present enough to mask. When he grazes the top, a light fades from his eyes and his legs buckle—Suo is there to catch him, to sling Sakura’s arm over a shoulder and huff little words through the rainfall.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you—” he breathes, and even if the circumstances aren’t great, Suo finds that it’s nice to say this and have Sakura finally give into it.

Sakura is heavy against him, a good portion of his weight pressed to his shoulder while he tries to come back online. They adjust their footing until his friend had his soles on asphalt, and then they’re moving down the street back the way they came in a slow shuffle. Suo watches his captain’s shoes trip over wet concrete, careful to keep the rhythm of their footfalls steady.

Lightning blinks in the distance over the geometric horizon of the town, thunder accompanying their slow strides. They’re steering away from the railroad just as another train comes through, loud ka-thunks vibrating his teeth while it passes. It’s going to take a while to get back to Furin—or even Sakura’s house—at this pace, but he has time.

When he peers at his friend, there’s pain in his eyes; going faster seems to make him stumble and wince, and Suo’s not a fan of bringing him any more pain than necessary. He just hopes the fever will stay down until they get somewhere to treat it.

“‘M s’rry.”

Suo barely hears it over the rumbling of thunder and train engine, croaked in a voice that sounds much too small for the Sakura he’s used to. He glances down at him, at the pale face obstructed by wet and unkempt hair.

“... For which part?” he asks a little ruefully, reminded of dingy bathrooms and the smell of isopropyl alcohol. Sakura stumbles and Suo readjusts to keep both their footing.

A beat or two of distant lightning. “All o’ it I guess,” he slurs, mixes his vowels together in one ashamed mess, “Couldn’t… st’p. W’s h’rd t’ stop.”

Sakura’s head lolls. Suo’s not sure how much longer he’ll be able to walk.

“I know,” Suo breathes, gentle and giving in his tone. Distantly, he wonders how many people have even spoken to Sakura gently before Makochi. “I know it seems unfathomable to you, right now as you are, but it hurts us more than you think it does when you treat yourself like this.

“It felt a bit like we were slowly losing you.” It still feels like it, as Suo keeps having to carry more and more weight while his friend’s body decays. He thinks he hears another, smaller ‘m s’rry, and tries to calm the hurt in his chest. “You can make it up to us by getting better, and learning to lean. How’s that sound?”

Sakura’s breaths crackle against the rain, and lets his head loll to Suo’s shoulder. “... ‘kay…” he wheezes.

They inch along the street in the cold, watching the rain slant from side to side as the wind changes its mind. Suo’s nose is beginning to feel numb, and Sakura’s coughs teeter between weak and worrying. The arm slung around him acts as a radiator against the chill in the air—Suo can’t say the heat is a good thing.

He looks up and finds a smile grazing his face with the view of two figures hurrying down the road toward them—the telltale silhouette of Umemiya, and the smaller figure of Nirei trailing along beside him. The fog besetting the town does nothing to dampen his spirits; there’s a relief in his middle that is palpable.

The class had likely rushed to Umemiya because they’ve noticed, over time, that Sakura is a favorite of his. He’s not sure what’s different, but there’s a strong, strong mutual respect there that he and many others can taste from a mile away, a mutual understanding that’s been built from conversations nobody else has been a part of.

He’s glad Umemiya didn’t have to step in—some small, selfish part of him was hoping he’d be enough.

They’re just in time, as the signs are starting to show themselves—Sakura’s body has reached its limits. His knees threaten to buckle again, trembling violently, and almost all of his weight has been surrendered to Suo, who keeps him afloat the best he can.

His friend coughs against his shoulder, wheezes trailing it all, and he doesn’t stop coughing for several beats that are far too long to remain upright. The tail-end of the fit has Sakura swaying nauseously, little groans Suo doesn’t think he makes on purpose croaking from overworked lungs.

His body gives out. Suo stumbles with the extra weight, his friend’s name leaving his mouth in a worried bark, and then the two silhouettes enter his peripherals and Umemiya’s diving in to catch them before they’re down.

“Woah, woah, we gotcha—!” he hurries, ducking under Sakura’s dangled arm and hooking it around his shoulders. He’s smiling, but Suo can tell it’s tight. “There we go—holy—you’re like a space heater!”

Sakura barely reacts to the newcomers—either he doesn’t notice them, or is too tired to care. Nirei, however, runs up to fret with hovering hands.

“Sakura—oh my God, you’re so much worse than I thought you’d—” his eyes dart to Suo, and he stops, “Suo?!”

He blinks as they walk, and then the dull throb of his nose and the taste of copper in his mouth reminds him of what Nirei’s gawking at. “Ah,” Suo says intelligently. He smiles, hoping his teeth isn’t covered in blood; that wouldn’t be very comforting. “It’s just a scratch, Nirei. Don’t worry about it.”

His big eyes dart between their wheezing captain and his co-vice, gears churning. The medkit he’s carrying at his side dangles in his tightening grip. There’s a moment of hesitance where he traces the outer edge of their circle, unsure how to help, and then Umemiya comes to the rescue again.

“Nirei—run ahead to Pothos and tell Kotoha we’re coming,” he asks, adjusting his grip on Sakura while he’s wheezing a weak cough to cold air, “Get some ice ready.”

Nirei nods his head hard, and he’s turning to dart down the street in a heartbeat. The rain still pours heavy, and Suo is starting to shiver against the cold. It’s nothing against Sakura, who’s teeth have started chattering.

His co-vice is a little dot down the street by the time Umemiya speaks. “I take it you two had a nice talk?”

Suo lifts his gaze from the asphalt to look at him. Umemiya keeps his eyes forward, and that sturdy, subtle smile is there, unrelenting and sure. The rain ruins his hair a bit, and chunks of it loosen from the way it’s styled back to fall over his face.

Suo smiles, turning his eye to the road. “Yep. An eventful chat.” He supposes almost getting killed by a train would count as eventful.

“Good,” Umemiya grins, and then shrugs his shoulder to nudge Sakura’s slumped form between them, “Hear that, Sakura? You’re in good hands!”

His captain crackles out a half-present groan, and something in Umemiya’s face twinges. He watches Sakura with a gaze Suo can’t read, but it’s something impossibly warm, impossibly loving. It’s from somewhere deep, somewhere genuine and sincere and careful and pained.

The gaze is turned to Suo, and he’s a bit shocked when those emotions do not leave when he takes him in. “Thank you,” Umemiya says to him, “He’s got a damn good family surrounding him.”

Suo blinks. Normally, he takes the thank yous from residents with grace, all the gifts with a humble tint to his words. Somehow, such an earnest one from Umemiya locks his jaw shut.

Sakura rasps out quick breaths between them. The lights from the café ahead glow against the rain, smear down in its warbled reflections until it reaches their shoes. Nirei hurries out the front door, waving them down like there’s a chance they’ll miss it.

Suo smiles. “Anything for Sakura.”

+

Suo wakes to froth in his bones, and cotton in his head.

It’s a steady thing, the way the world laps at him. First, it’s the light filtered and spread through old curtains, yellowed from the fabric and dispersed to bounce along walls. Sudding at the edges of his consciousness, it’s what pulls him up the most, and he opens an eye to see the blurred wrinkles and folds of a comforter.

The pillow under him moves as he does, stirring as he draws in a breath that smells faintly of eggs. That’s the second thing that prods him awake, the smell of breakfast; the third is the trickle and hum of running water in the walls, and the rustling of somebody in the kitchen.

Just over the blueish glow the morning sun gives the comforters, he sees familiar bedhead, black and white swirled and waved. Suo shifts, lifts his head to peer over the blankets.

Sakura sleeps dead to the world, sun on his face. He’s twisted in the blankets, head cushioned by an actual pillow for once, courtesy of Nirei. A wet rag, neatly folded, lies across his forehead, damp bangs brushed back by its edge. Another lies over his neck, crooked and layered over his collarbone.

He can see the way the sun bounces around and glistens against sweat-slick skin. His chest is still crackling with each breath, a bit shallow and always wheezed after a coughing fit. He’s still pale, but he looks marginally better than he did last night.

When he raises a hand to rub at his eye, he belatedly becomes aware he’s still wearing his eyepatch. He’s sure there’s red little imprints of the strap across his forehead, and he smiles groggily against the image, a little embarrassed, but nothing Nirei would tease him for. The movement strikes a twinge of pain across his nose; he hopes it’s not bruised too badly.

His fingers scratch at his neck and catch tassels. Ah, right. He’d left his earrings in too. Unfortunate, he thinks, as he paws for them and blindly discovers some knots.

He yawns, quiet as his eyes water, and then he swivels his head on his pillow and reaches an arm over the distance between his and Sakura’s snugly fit futons. The back of his hand presses against his friend’s cheek, sweaty and hot. It moves to the rag along his forehead; cold, freshly rewet.

Suo hums, pleased and groggy. Sakura stays unmoving, solidly out since being laid in that booth at Café Pothos, head in Nirei’s lap. Suo would be more surprised if he were awake; after so long of overworking himself, his body must be desperate for some real rest.

He swivels his head back to stare at the ceiling, gaze tracing the wooden planks while he blindly paws for his phone. He finds it just above his head, resting on the tatami. Suo lifts it directly above his face, almost drops it onto his bruised nose, and checks the time.

His mind feels a bit desperate for rest, too.

It feels a little undeserved, but Suo has no real reason to deny himself. Nothing urgent is calling. Nirei is here, in the kitchen cooking breakfast, making sure Sakura’s temperature doesn’t spike. Umemiya is on stand-by, ready to step in if they need it. Hiragi gave them all as much time off as they need to take care of things.

His eye droops, distantly aware his breathing is turning slow while he rests his phone in the blankets, grip around it loose. Perhaps he could sleep in a little longer. Sakura is somewhere warm and safe, finally resting, finally giving himself some grace, putting some faith in his friends.

It’s only seven in the morning; Suo can follow suit, be a good role model. The others will pick up where he left off.