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To say it’s been a long night would be an understatement.
It’s almost one in the morning when the five of them collectively trudge into the lounge. There are the usual routines, all performed in a spell of grudging silence, mediated by a few sighs and groans here-and-there as velcro-strap gloves fall off and boots are zipped down.
Usually, there’d be some after-battle chatter. Some commentary about how things had gone and what they could’ve done better, or more comfortable, light-hearted banter if it’d been an easier expedition. Even on nights where their operations didn’t go to plan, it was rarely so dead quiet.
Tonight was by all accounts a success, and yet it’s completely silent.
It’s an uncomfortable kind of silence, brittle and uneasy, but Yukari isn’t in much of a mood to change that. Just like everyone else, she sticks to her routine. Sets her gear into its case, grabs a glass of water from the kitchen, then slips up the stairs with only a driveby wave to the boys on the second floor in place of her usual Goodnight .
Once upstairs, she starts getting ready for bed. Washes her face, brushes her teeth, dresses down into her pyjamas; the works. It’s there in the third-floor bathroom that she assesses the damages, rubs off any of the visible scuff and dirt, and rinses out her cuts.
Really, it’s not much. Comparatively, her wounds are minimal. A hatched scrape here, a purpling bruise there. The others had it worse. She’s not in as bad a shape as Yuki, whose exhaustion was apparent in the several times he dozed off standing on the walk home, or Sanada with his hanging shoulders and limp arms, or Junpei with all his mumbled melodramatic griping.
And she’s not in as bad a shape as Kirijo-senpai, either.
It’s hard, in a lot of ways, to feel any sort of sympathy for Kirijo. Or guilt, or even just concern. It’s like a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite slot into place no matter which way she turns it. There was always some small part of her that just rejected the idea—that wanted to believe that whatever dejection or discomfort Kirijo felt was somehow, in some way, justified.
The problem is that part of her was small, and didn’t have much control over her brain as a whole. Instead it warred with her more human, empathetic half that told Yukari that being rich and pretty—that being a Kirijo —doesn’t make her immune to pain.
Nor necessarily deserving of it. As much as she might want to believe.
And thus Yukari finds herself in her room, brushing her hair in incessant cycles as she agonizes over a traitorous feeling of concern. It’s like an annoying itch she can’t scratch away; a stubborn little bug, restlessly chittering and flying against her like a mesh screen it didn’t understand was non-permeable, causing an annoying little tap each time.
It’s just that—Kirijo-senpai had it rough tonight. Having Penthesilea occupied by recon meant she was even less prepared than Yukari had been when they were ambushed in the lobby, leaving her to bear the brunt of the attack.
Yukari tries to stamp out her worries. Kirijo walked the whole way back without any audible sign of pain. Nor were there any visible signs: she wasn’t limping, meaning she probably didn’t break anything when she’d been thrown across the lobby by that huge king Shadow, and any blood that seeped through her shirt hadn’t bloomed far past the source.
But she had been holding a hand over her arm. And slouching more than the prim and proper way she usually carried herself. And she’d flinched when Sanada helped her to her feet, before recoiling away when he offered his arm.
Eventually, the back-and-forth with herself has Yukari throwing down her hairbrush and standing up. Her fit dies out in the few steps it takes to stomp to Kirijo’s room, where she knocks twice to no answer.
There’s no muffled shower sound, though, and the lights are on beneath the door, so Yukari knocks a third time. Again to no answer.
“Kirijo-senpai?” she asks the wood.
“Takeba?” is the startled response from behind it. Then, with more of that characteristic, practiced evenness, “Do you need something?”
“Um, no…” Yukari kneads her hands together, clearing her throat. “Not really. Can I come in?”
It’s quiet for a moment. She’s not sure if Mitsuru just didn’t hear her or if she’s just stalling for an excuse. The door is unlocked, though, so Yukari slowly turns the knob in her palm, then peaks her head through the crack.
She finds Kirijo there, seated with her knees folded over the couch and in a black undershirt, her usual bell-sleeve blouse folded on the coffee table in front of her. Yukari’s suspicions quickly prove warranted by the assemblage of cuts and scrapes and other red pocks dotting down her arm.
Seeing Yukari there, though, causes her to drop the roll of bandages she’d been holding in her surprise, sending it sprawling across the floor.
“Oh, um. Sorry,” Yukari mumbles instinctively, rubbing at the back of her neck. “I… just wanted to check in.”
Mitsuru’s upper half drops, her arm fishing to retrieve the awry spool. Once she finally gets hold of it, she slots it back into the box in front her—her first-aid kit, Yukari presumes—and smooths down her skirt.
“Right, well, I—” She reorients herself so that her seated position now faces Yukari. “I’m doing quite alright, Takeba. You don’t visit my room often. Is something the matter?”
Yukari swallows. It’s not like she’s done this before, and probably won’t again if she can help it, but she disregards that question in favour of more pressing matters. “Are you sure about that alright thing? That’s… a lot of cuts.”
Kirijo blinks, then not-so-subtly turns her sword arm away from Yukari’s line of sight. It’s conspicuous to the point of nearly forcing a barked laugh out of her, but that is stopped by the sudden lump in her throat.
“Yes, I’m sure. It’s nothing to lose sleep over,” Kirijo says calmly, before a swift pivot back to, “Did you have something you needed to discuss with me?”
And Yukari just looks at her for a moment, deciding on her next approach. She didn’t prepare past this point, what with the all coming-here-in-a-fit-of-frustration thing, but it seems—objectively speaking—kind of hard to manage cleaning and wrapping wounds one-handed. Especially when you’re using your non-dominant hand, which she knows Mitsuru’s left is.
“Well, not really.” Yukari opens the door wider. It takes her a moment to think on it, how to even put it into words, but eventually the simple, blunt facts come out instead of any roundabout way of phrasing it.
“Those cuts look pretty bad, Kirijo-senpai. And if you’re gonna do it like that, it’s going to take you forever.”
Mitsuru’s face shifts. Her jaw sets uncomfortably, lips closing into her mouth before sliding loose again. Pink dusts her cheeks as her eyes dart down to her box of supplies. “Oh, no. I’m quite used to doing this sort of thing on myself. I assure you there’s no trouble.”
“Kirijo-senpai, do you mind?” Yukari starts, hands on her hips. She really tries not to sound impatient, but it’s already one in the morning. “You’re gonna be up for another hour at this rate. Just let me do it.”
Kirijo stares at her for a beat. Eventually, though, rationality seems to win out, as she scoots closer towards one arm of the couch to make room for her.
Yukari has never been in her room, but she’s not going to make a fuss of it. It’s about what she expected, anyway; all the milk and honey you’d expect from the heiress to one of Japan’s wealthiest families, elaborate furnishings made of polished wood and surfaced with thick brocade fabrics. She plunks down beside Kirijo and takes quick inventory of the first-aid kit between them.
“Arm out,” she instructs, though her voice lacks the bite from when she’d been standing at the door. Still, Kirijo obliges her wordlessly.
It’s much worse than what she made it out to be. Besides the darkened scuff marks—Yukari imagines those came from the fall—there’s a number of scrapes speckling the skin. Some deep enough to call cuts, with noticeable indents into the flesh. Others deep enough to call a gash.
Looking at it, she distantly wonders how many scars Kirijo has. Nips and scratches are bound to heal over easily, but she’s been dealing with Shadows for far longer than Yukari has. If it’s just been her and Sanada for however long, then there must’ve been times where she wasn’t lucky enough to have someone nearby. Times where she got hurt. Just like tonight.
And she seems pretty… used to this. Uncomfortably used to this, actually.
Yukari feels herself frowning. Kirijo isn’t looking at her, like a patient who’s too nervous getting their blood drawn that they can’t bear to watch while it happens, so the expression goes unnoticed. “Did your shirt get blood on it?” she asks, just to make conversation.
“Ah, yes,” Kirijo answers stiffly. “It was torn, though, so I’ll have it sent off for mending. I have plenty like it.”
“I see,” Yukari mumbles. Must be nice, is what she doesn’t say, because she has more bedside manner than that. “Do you always do this on your own?”
“Most times, yes. Unless it’s particularly bad, in which case I’ll ask Akihiko to assist me.”
The answer comes clinically. Yukari fights the urge to push on it, to ask for examples where it was particularly bad if the sight she’s looking at now doesn’t qualify as such. That’s a fight she loses. “Why didn’t you ask him tonight, then?”
Kirijo’s head tilts over to her, like the answer was self-evident. “It’s something I can manage on my own. I wouldn’t want to impose.”
“He’s your friend.”
“I’m aware of that,” she says simply. “But I prefer not to burden others with matters I can handle myself.”
Yukari feels her frown deepen. She lets it go, though, in favour of returning to the task she actually came here to do.
“Yukari,” Kirijo starts again suddenly, while Yukari’s dabbing ointment on one of the deeper cuts. Her head turns up only to find that Kirijo still isn’t looking at her. Rather, her gaze is fixed straight, with the hand of her free arm curling into a fist, then unfurling again against her thigh.
“I wanted to apologize for… putting you in that situation. The possibility of an ambush hadn’t at all occurred to me.”
“I don’t know why it would have.” Yukari responds, clipped and contemptuously. “Not like you can predict the future. And we’ve never dealt with anything like that before.”
“Well, I have seen Shadows in the lobby before. That was… a long time ago, but I should have never operated under the assumption that we would be safe simply because we were on the ground.”
Her words peter off into a mumble. Her apologeticness needles at Yukari. It’s just— infuriating to hear. It’s nonsensical. It wasn’t Kirijo’s doing, and wasn’t something she could have reasonably predicted.
“I don’t think you have any right to apologize about it,” Yukari tells her, matter-of-fact. There’s a sucked-in hiss from Kirijo as she swabs alcohol over one of the gashes where there’d been noticeable debris. “Actually, I just don’t want you to. Apologize for what was in your control, not stuff that you couldn’t have helped.”
She watches as a frown imprints itself on Kirijo’s profile. It’s a thoughtful frown—her eyes are cast down to her own hands, and her bottom lip is worried up between her teeth like a pout.
“But I could have done more. The fact Shadows are attuned to the phases of the moon is something I should have realized much earlier. That much is obvious now.”
And really, it makes Yukari kind of want to scream. There’s this hot frisson that just seizes her up, an impulse to just start flinging theoreticals at Kirijo. Questions like what, exactly, she would’ve done differently, how she would have solved the logistical problem of them needing a navigator on the ground, how she would work around the fact that having a single additional escort with said-navigator was about all they could’ve managed without endangering the three in the tower. And how—even if Junpei was there in the lobby we with them, or Sanada, or Yuki—would that have changed the fact that they’d been ambushed? They needed people in Tartarus searching for Yamagishi. Frankly, the fact that there’d been two people down there was already a deviation from protocol.
(And if it’d just been Kirijo down there, who knows what would have happened. It’s not like she can heal herself.)
“It’s easy to see things as obvious in hindsight,” Yukari grits out instead of any of that, her tone painfully tight. “But really, even if you knew there’d be one of those big ones tonight, it wouldn’t have changed much. Think about it realistically.”
It takes a lot of patience. An exhausting amount, actually, and she’s already tired. If Yukari is honest, Kirijo gets under her skin in a way few things manage to do, and she does it all without the brashness of Junpei or persistent lameness of the Chairman.
“I… apologize for the trouble, then.”
“Don’t,” Yukari snipes. “It’s fine. I get it, you know. You think you should apologize, because you think you’re holding us all at gunpoint to be here. Well, you’re not. Everyone joined on their own free will. Quit holding yourself to some insane standard.”
It flings out of her mouth without her getting much of a say in the matter. That bothers Yukari too, that she hadn’t even been thinking about it. It’s an automatic response, the kind of constructive honesty she’d give to a friend in a slump. It’s something she didn’t necessarily mean, either, but—as she’s forced to grapple with its utterance after the fact—finds regrettably apt. That is what Kirijo’s doing, isn’t it? Just shoving everyone else’s issues onto herself and infuriating Yukari in the process.
“You don’t have to— do everything, ” she adds, exasperated. “Micromanaging everyone like this as if it’s your job. People can handle themselves—well, maybe not Junpei. But I can handle myself.”
Kirijo looks at her with this long, askew look. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise, Takeba.”
“I know,” Yukari replies in a mutter as she ties the knot to the bandage snug around Mitsuru’s bicep. She does know, is the thing. She knows it’s none of Mitsuru’s intention and somehow that just bothers her more . With that wrap finished, she continues, “The point is that I don’t need you taking responsibility for decisions I made.”
“It is my responsibility,” Kirijo retorts, but quietly this time. Her back is stiff and her eyes remain averted. “You may not like it, but I at least bear partial responsible for all injuries that occur during our operations.”
She just doesn’t quit. But Yukari is much too tired and annoyed to stamp out the embers of Kirijo’s stubbornness, so she just clicks her teeth instead. Turns her arm and mutters, “You’re impossible, sometimes.”
Though Yukari would like to pin it on her words, it’s the action that must hurt. Kirijo winces then exhales a shuddering sigh. When Yukari looks up, she finds a pained expression on her face, its typical smoothness exchanged for something unnaturally tight. When she notices Yukari’s eyes on her, she ducks her head, suddenly looking more like a scolded child than an obstinate, untouchable heiress.
And Yukari doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like the expression, and she doesn’t like how it makes her feel—all itchy and irritated. She takes a long, steadying breath, then fixes Kirijo with a pointed look.
“Look,” she starts, as she flattens a plain adhesive bandage over the last remaining section of split skin. “Beating yourself up over what you are or are not responsible for isn’t going to change anything. We didn’t know, now we know. That’s all there is to it.”
She falls back, running a hand through her hair as she snaps the box full of plasters closed and sighs. “And geez, the mission was a success, you know. What’s the point in getting worked up like this?”
Kirijo pauses at that. After a long, contemplative beat, she concedes that with a bow of her head. “I… suppose you’re right.” Then, as though reading from a manual, she straightens her posture and reminds herself that, “We should count ourselves fortunate, and strive to do better next time.”
Finally, Yukari thinks. And with all of her injuries taken care of, Yukari latches shut the first-aide kit and stands. “Exactly right. And the first step of doing better is getting a good night’s rest, I’d say.”
And if she sounds impatient, she’d argue it’s at least a little warranted. She hates being up so late.
“I can agree with that,” Kirijo hums, at last with something close to her usual polite smile. “Thank you for your assistance, Takeba. I apologize for keeping you up so—”
“Ub-bup-bup. Nope. None of that.” Yukari spins on her heel to say, pointing an accusatory finger at Kirijo from across the threshold. “Instead, Kirijo-senpai, how about just a goodnight?”
Kirijo blinks away her wide eyes and nods slowly. “Of…Of course. Goodnight then, Takeba.”
“Goodnight, Kirijo-senpai.”