Work Text:
orthoepy
ôrˈTHōəpē/ the correct or accepted pronunciation of words.
Before the castle, back when their nails were crusted perpetually in drying blood, when they rarely saw the hours of a day after a sunrise, when there were more slayers and even more demons, Shinazugawa Sanemi and Tomioka Giyuu had circled each other like wolves. The dance they engaged in was rarely about competition and even less about rivalry. On the surface, it was about curiosity. If one managed to dig deeper, to get under the skin of each individual, it was more about survival than anything else.
Trust was not a word that Sanemi's tongue understood the shape of. Loyalty, respect, honor--each a word whose meaning his tongue had learned over the years, that his teeth and lips knew the shape of. Vowels and consents his throat understood. But trust? Trust was far-flung, a word in a different language entirely for which there was no translation.
Or it had been, until the castle. Until the castle, when everything changed between one breath and the next. The understanding of the word trust, an understanding Sanemi had never had and had never hoped to achieve, never wanted to achieve, had solidified itself in the base of his throat and in the marrow of his bones.
Between one breath and the next in that horrifying castle, Tomioka Giyuu had gone from someone he circled with wariness, with a need to know if the next moment would be the moment that Tomioka Giyuu would put a knife in his back, to someone he circled because he needed the Water Hashira in order to live.
But in the aftermath, it seemed that he still needed the Water Hashira in order to live, especially with his newfound understanding of trust. And it's certainly not what he thought his life would be like whenever he entertained the idea of putting his blade away for good.
"Ow," he yelps, flexing his hand out of instinct in an attempt to pull away from the pain.
Giyuu, sitting on the floor across from him, their knees touching, barely flicks a glance in his direction as he says with absolutely no sincerity, "Sorry."
Sanemi scrunches up his face for a moment before huffing and readjusting his grip on the haori he has held before him, the fabric bunched and clumsy in both hands as he attempts to hold the hole in the fabric taut so that Giyuu may work.
Finger still stinging from where he was poked with the sewing needle, he watches as Giyuu wiggles the sharp end of the steel through the fabric, as-close-to-like colored thread chasing behind it, tip of his tongue sticking out between his lips. There are already several stitches in the fabric of the haori, each of them a different size, some of them missing the hole they're attempting to patch entirely. He wonders how many more stitches it will take to mend the wound in the fabric, how much longer they will have to sit on the engawa of their home, dappled sunlight on their skin, knees pressed up against each other with their breath mingling between them before it may be fixed.
If it even can be fixed, that is. It's a large hole, put there by an errant nail that had been sticking out of a doorway in town, Sanemi just unlucky enough to discover it.
"You know," he starts with a wince, rather than shouting when the pinprick of the needle pierces his skin again, "this isn't urgent. We can just wait until we go to see Nezuko again and she can mend it."
The needle jabs him again, and this time Sanemi knows that Giyuu did it on purpose.
"I thought we said we were going to try and be more independent and rely on Nezuko less, now that she's married?"
Sanemi frowns. "I mean, yes, but--" Without breaking his grip on the fabric, he shakes his hands in Giyuu's direction as though to say look at what we've had to resort to. Ten fingers between the two of them, and it's taking all three of their hands to mend one hole. How much independence can there really be for them, when it takes both of them to do something that normally just requires one person with nimble fingers?
Giyuu's tongue slips back into his mouth as he finally looks properly at Sanemi, face flat but a glimmer of humor in his ocean eyes. "We're learning to be independently codependent. Now be quiet and hold still."
"So you can stab me again?" Sanemi adjusts his grip on the fabric, fingers cramping from holding it in the same way for so long, pain beginning to shoot up his forearms. The haori is wrinkled from where he's been holding it, marred fabric flowing out of either hand. Some of the fabric beneath the stitches Giyuu has so painstakingly laid into the hole puckers slightly, Giyuu's handywork mismatched but still performing their intended duty.
Sanemi cannot say the same for them. Theirs is a bond built on matching scars and shared horror, continued out of necessity. They quickly found that living and functioning in a world that was not meant for them (breathing, disabled, idle handed) could not be done alone, but it could be done together. Doing it together was easier, the trust between them sturdier than the stitching Giyuu was attempting.
Shaking his head lightly, Giyuu goes back to the work shared between their hands. He manages one clumsy stitch, then two; a third one, once he's managed to untangle the thread that trails the needle.
On the fourth, the needle goes into the meat of Sanemi's palm. He exhales harshly and, knowing that all of the times he's yelped and yelled throughout this ordeal have fallen on deaf ears, drops the fabric into their laps, bringing his palm to his chest to cradle it with what remains of his other hand. The needle and thread follow with him, the torture device coming out of Giyuu's grip with little resistance.
After a moment, he pulls his hand away from his chest, grits his teeth. Pulls the needle out. Blood wells up in the pinprick immediately, the red of it swelling over and running through the lifeline of his palm. He curls his hand into a fist at the sight, pulling it back to his chest. Enough of his blood has been spilled throughout his life; he doesn’t want to see anymore.
Giyuu's fingers are light on his wrist moment's later, gentle as he pulls Sanemi's injured hand back into his orbit.
Sanemi's eyes follow his hand, frozen under Giyuu's tender grasp. He watches, quiet, as Giyuu carefully pulls what remains of Sanemi's fingers back so that he can see the damage he's wrought. There is blood still welling from the wound, the area around it red and angry, blood smeared and ground deep into the lines of his palm.
The apology does not come in the form of words, but rather in the revenant press of Giyuu's lips to the wound.
This, Sanemi has come to understand, is what trust is. To be hurt and still be able to forgive. It might also be love, though he has shoved the memory of how to form the word so far down into himself that it may never resurface.
He think he may catch a glimpse of how it's formed in moments like this.