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Kyo needs to stop going grocery shopping, apparently. But Tohru really wanted to try making taro steamed buns. Kyo thinks that sounds horrible, but Tohru really wanted to try it, and Master’s other disciples have already started calling Tohru the house and Kyo the fire so it’s not like he can salvage his reputation by not going. Who the fuck needs a reputation anyway? He can kick their asses six ways to Sunday, that’s the only reputation they should care about. That, and knowing if they upset Tohru he will kick their asses six ways to Sunday. Anyway, Kyo went to the grocery store, six train stops away because the dojo is even more isolated than Shigure’s place. He shouldn’t have gone, really.
Because he gets back and the dojo is on fire.
There’s the momentary awe of it, because even as he walks up the steps he can see everyone’s heads safely on the stone walkway out front, not in any danger at all, so he can just kinda think shit. Because it’s not every day you get to see a big fire like that up close. And then, of course, the next thought is oh shit, because that’s his house and it’s on fire and it’s not like he or Tohru had much to grab, but that’s still their house on fire. He’s suddenly seized by an intense wave of panic to make sure Tohru was able to grab her mom’s picture. She’d be distraught without it, and fire takes no prisoners. He adjusts his grip on the plastic bags of groceries and starts searching the crowd for her. He’d just find Master, who’s tall enough to be spotted over a crowd, and ask him where Tohru is, but Master’s off at a conference this week, getting the dojo some fancy new accreditation. So he swims through the ranks of disciples. But Tohru isn’t with them.
He asks an older kid, maybe his name was Saitama? “Hey, Saitama, where’s Tohru?”
“Oh, Kyo-senpai, you’re back!” the kid says, all reassuring smiles, “Don’t worry, everyone’s already out and the fire truck is on the way. That old mountain pass is giving them trouble, I think.” And then, horrifyingly, he looks around Kyo, eyebrows scrunching, “Wasn’t Tohru with you?”
Kyo doesn’t even bother responding. He just drops the groceries and sprints inside. The fire’s toward the back of the house—the kitchen, maybe?—so the smoke isn’t too bad in the front. He screams for her. She’s not in the entryway, or either of the little sitting rooms that come off the main hallway, or the front bathroom, and she’s not answering. He checks the east wing, farther from the flames where the practice mats are, and of course she’s not there, but he’s got to check, right? Because even as airheaded as she is there’s no way she went closer to the fire. Unless—
Unless she was trying to put it out. Kyo’s stomach clenches. He runs toward the kitchen, tripping twice when the wooden floors, warped by heat, give out under his shoes and send his leg plummeting down before he can wrench it out and keep going.
Inside the kitchen, flames have consumed the north and west walls, and the room is searingly hot, and there’s smoke coloring the whole room in thick, wooly black. He can’t even see the damn countertops, much less Tohru. He hears the noisy blare of the firetruck siren slowly approaching. He’s still screaming for Tohru—who gives a fuck if he ruins his lungs, he’ll live as a mute for the rest of his life as long as he gets to live it with her—and coughing around mouthfuls of smoke. The back door is framed with stone, so even though the wall around it is burning and the door has fallen out, the doorway is intact, throwing what light it can into the room, but it’s not enough. Kyo can’t see, and he can’t breathe, and it’s so fucking hot, and his legs are shaking the way they did when they found Tohru at the bottom of that cliff. He crumbles the same way too. Just collapses on his knees.
There’s less smoke down here. In his panic, his need to find her faster, he had forgotten you’re supposed to stay low in a fire. He blinks the smoke out of his eyes. Who cares if it looks like he’s been crying. And then he sees her. Sunk low, curled up in a ball, and absolutely still. But that’s Tohru. Kyo tries to call out to her but his voice catches and dies on the ash in his trachea. He crawls to her, shakes her shoulders, and it’s only when he stops shaking her that he remembers to check that she’s breathing. She is, and Kyo would sob with relief if he had the time. Her throat has gotta hurt from breathing all that smoke. He’s gotta get her out. It’s just ten steps to the back door, and now that he knows she’s alive, he feels strength return to his legs. He picks her up, and he can tell she’s conscious because she tries to fight him—kicks at his arms and slaps his chest—that’s fine. Kyo bets she can’t even see who he is through the smoke.
The flames crackle, engulfing more of that north wall, and with a deafening crack the stone frame of the back door collapses, heat finally melting the grout out of place. Fuck. Shit, shit, shit.
Front door it is. Kyo backtracks, dodging sparks and pieces of the ceiling that are starting to come down. There’s less smoke in the hallway, and he can see Tohru’s face, tear-streaked and dirty. Guilt pools like bile on Kyo’s tongue, and he gags on it. Maybe that’s the smoke again.
Wait. Fuck. Her mom’s picture.
Kyo doesn’t have time to weigh pros and cons because the ceiling of the kitchen collapses behind him, and he can hear firefighters asking the disciples out front where to hook up their hoses. He hefts Tohru higher in his arms and runs to their room in the west wing. He grabs her mom’s picture off the bookshelf, and that stupid little book Tohru bought for him when they were second-years, and he runs to the door at the end of the west wing and throws it open and sets Tohru in the grass at the edge of the treeline, twenty meters from the house.
It takes several moments of coughing to choke out, “Tohru—Tohru. Come on, are you in there or what!?”
Tohru makes a visible effort to open her eyes, and she has to rub them to get the sticky, ashy gunk out of her eyelashes. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out, and her whole expression alights with panic and she swings herself upright and coughs like she wants to turn her lungs inside out. Anything angry Kyo had left in him disintegrates, and he finds himself with one hand holding her hair out of her face and another rubbing small circles around her vertebrae as she coughs and hacks and eventually spits up something dark and grainy. “It’s okay,” he keeps telling her, “You’re alright. We’re okay.”
She keeps coughing out that liquidy ash until eventually it’s just bile and tears coming out, and then Kyo pulls her into him, cradles her there, lets her cry. That was all probably way scarier for her than it was for him anyway. He can feel her heartbeat against his chest like this, pounding like crazy, still terrified. He holds her tighter. “You’re alright, Tohru, look,” and he reaches around to grab the picture and show her, “We even got your mom’s picture.” His throat hurts, and he coughs and spits out the ash to the side. He finally realizes his left leg and arm hurt like crazy. “What were you even doing in there?” he asks, kinda joking because she’s still crying and her heart is still pounding, “taking a nap?” She just sobs harder, so Kyo strokes her hair and says he’s sorry.
And then he realizes there’s blood on his hand. He’s been getting it in Tohru’s hair, even though it’s clearly not from her head. Where is it from? He pulls back from Tohru and scans her for injuries and doesn’t find anything other than little red spots where sparks landed on her and a scrape on her calf. But there’s certainly a lot of blood. In handprint shapes. Oh fuck, he’s bleeding, isn’t he? Well, he can deal with that later. But now he knows why Tohru is so distraught. “I’m fine, Tohru. Don’t worry about me. Doesn’t even hurt.”
She keeps opening her mouth to say something, he can feel her jaw working where her face is pressed into his shoulder, but she can’t get any sound out.
At the frantic direction of the incredibly distressed disciples, an EMT makes his way over to Kyo and Tohru. “Sir,” he says, very calm and very professional, as if speaking to someone in great distress, “we need to get you to a hospital.”
“Alright,” Kyo says, “but she’s coming too. She breathed in too much smoke.”
The EMT sighs in relief, maybe he expected Kyo to fight him on it, and agrees. “My name is Okumura. I can carry her,” he says, “if she can’t walk.” He waves another EMT over, a beefier guy. “This is Ibe, he’s gonna carry you.”
“Me?” Kyo asks. His tongue is starting to feel like sandpaper. His leg itches. “I can walk fine,” he insists.
The EMTs exchange a glance. Ibe says, “You can try, but I wouldn’t want to make that leg any worse.”
Kyo feels his expression furrow. His head tilts down to look at his legs. One of them is puddled in blood and caked with dirt. Oh. That would explain it then. When had that happened? “I didn’t do this,” he says a little dumbly. He’s not some fucking idiot. He would have known if he cut his leg open! Right? I mean, apparently not, but he should’ve felt something.
Kyo lets Ibe guide one of his arm’s around his shoulders so he can take the brunt of his weight. He stops them for a second to grab Tohru’s mom’s picture and that stupid little book. As he passes them, the disciples’ faces are a mural of terror and grief—except Saitama, who had the bright idea to call Master and is speaking solemnly into a cell phone. Firefighters are spraying huge shoots of water onto the roof of what was the kitchen. There’s just one ambulance, so Kyo lays down on the gurney and Tohru sits on the bench on the side. They’re both given oxygen masks and little monitors that clip to their fingers, and Okumura asks Tohru about her injuries, simple yes or no questions that she can answer without speaking, while Ibe cuts the bottom of Kyo’s pant leg off and starts cleaning the dirt off of the wound.
The moment an alcohol swab brushes the first dirt particles away from his leg, Kyo has to bite down on a scream. He is suddenly, vibrantly aware of just how much everything hurts. His head throbs, his throat singes, his chest feels like the gaping pits of hell itself. His left arm and leg are white-hot with pain, and every embedded bit of dirt is a knife-strike. Tohru glances away from Okumura’s patient questions, sees his face, grips his hand in hers. It hurts, but it’s nice. It’s comfort. It’s strength—Tohru’s own, personal brand of strength that shows up in funny ways like trying to put out a house fire even when it’s snared half the kitchen already. Kyo squeezes back, even though that makes him want to throw up his insides just to feel something other than the howling ache of whatever the fuck is wrong with that hand.
“I’m fine,” he tells her, trying to ungrit his teeth, “focus on Okumura over there—he’s asking you about dizziness.” Okumura gives Kyo a quiet little smile of appreciation. Tohru gives Kyo one of her Looks, the one where Kyo knows she doesn’t believe a word of it and is postponing her coddling to a more appropriate moment, and turns back to Okumura, but her hand stays twined with Kyo’s. He’s stupidly grateful for it.
Ibe doesn’t mention any of that. Just says, “It’s not deep, you just nicked a major vein.” Blessedly, he doesn’t ask what happened, so Kyo doesn’t have to admit he has no fucking clue. “Oxygen feeling okay?” Kyo nods, but Ibe wasn’t really looking for an answer. “You’re lungs should stop hurting so much in a few minutes here. We won’t get to the hospital for another fifteen minutes or so, but once we’re there the doctors will x-ray you. Should be fine. Your girl might need something to help her clear her lungs out though.” He looks at Kyo, gives a weird little half-smile, repeats, “Should be fine.” He fills up a funny-looking syringe. “Just getting you an IV line—precaution, and makes the morphine kick in faster.” Kyo feels the cold tip of a needle in the crook of his elbow and doesn’t mind too much if it promises to make all the other hurts go away.
Time gets funny after that. He feels the vertigo of being in the back of a large moving vehicle mostly. He hears the dulled edge of chatter from Okumura and Ibe. Feels the warm squeeze of Tohru’s fingers around his. At some point that dull chatter gets sharper and the vertigo gets more rattles and less sway and the lights get brighter, and that’s the hospital, he supposes. Which is fine. Until Tohru’s hand lets go of his and he sits straight up and tries to walk back to her. He stumbles, and she catches him, because of course she didn’t go far. She still doesn’t say anything—can’t, Kyo supposes—but god, what he wouldn’t give to hear her voice. Just one little, Kyo, we shouldn’t make trouble for the nurses! and he’d be set. Cognitively he knows they shouldn’t make trouble for the nurses, and he knows that’s what Tohru’s got to be trying to convey with her little pat-pats on his shoulders, but time is so gravity-stricken right now and his body is so rubbery and foreign and he feels this childish need to make sure Tohru’s still gonna be there when he’s back to himself.
He hears an unfamiliar voice say, “He’s never had morphine, has he?” and he feels Tohru’s head shake in a ‘no’ and her chest stutter with the same staccato notes it makes when she laughs. Still no noise, no tinkling confetti in a metal tube. He would recreate the sound for her, the beautiful noise of her laugh, so that she could hear it from another tongue and love it as much as Kyo loves it.
Tohru walks him slowly back to where he’s supposed to be, but he can’t tell where that is. Someone asks Tohru if her current dose of morphine is treating her okay, and she must nod yes because they don’t do anything to up the dose. She helps Kyo organize his limbs on the hospital cot and then she gives him her sternest, softest look, and she steps back and sits gingerly in a plastic chair hands unfolded and spine boneless. Which, in Tohru body language is code for essentially collapsing and Kyo sits back up and says, “She’s lying—it hurts really bad! Hey, nurse! Nurse! Come back, she’s lying!”
A man in scrubs strides in. “Sir, please stop yelling. You’re disturbing the other patients,” he says, stern and frustrated and pinched tight at the eyes.
Kyo lowers his voice. “But she’s hurting,” he says again. “Look at her arms.” The nurse does, and sees nothing except Tohru’s placid, fake smile. Kyo can tell. That’s her don’t worry about me, I’m fine even if I’m actually so upset I could cry smile. The nurse sees none of this, of course. Kyo decides he hates this nurse. He will kick this nurse’s ass when he can find the strength to get out of bed.
The nurse turns back to Kyo, mouth already open to say something, but something in Kyo’s expression makes him think twice, shut his mouth, sigh, and say, “Alright. Give me a second,” and walk out of the little curtained area where Tohru and Kyo are. When he comes back, he’s pulling one of the curtains aside to reveal another bed and saying, “Miss, if you would?” and Tohru tries to make that placating, frantic wave of her hands to say she doesn’t need a bed.
“Tohru, they’re nurses,” Kyo says, “it’s their job to make sure you’re not hurting. Let them do their job.” It’s a long sentence, and he almost bites his tongue saying it. Almost. He’s fine. It works anyway. She clambers into the bed and the nurses give her a little shot and Tohru sighs almost instantly. Kyo can finally relax too, and time goes fuzzy and impressionistic again. He’s wheeled around some places. They tell him his leg might be itchy for a while, and not to pull at the stitches (Kyo does not remember getting stitches). He asks about Tohru a few times. Maybe more than a few. The nurses have these sappy looks on their faces every time he asks. They keep giving him different answers. “Waiting for the radiologist” or “Getting her chest x-rayed” or “Resting in the inpatient wing.” Tohru must be busy. Kyo understands. These damn nurses are wheeling him all over the place.
The next time he feels truly lucid, there’s the dual-beeping of two heart monitors, almost in sync. One for him and one for Tohru, in the bed next to him. Master is there, flipping through a book of poetry. Kyo remembers that book. He got it for Master for Father’s Day, like, ten years ago or something. The pages are all dog-eared now, and the cover has been bent back so many times it’s starting to detach at the edges.
“Good morning, Kyo,” Master says, even as ever, when he notices Kyo’s eyes on him. “How are you feeling?”
Kyo tries his tongue. It’s dead weight against his teeth and he has to unglue it from the roof of his mouth to get it to do anything. He tries to blink to clear the groggy feeling from his cheekbones, but it doesn’t do much. “Tired,” he answers, and Master smiles.
He says, “You scared the disciples. They thought you died when the kitchen collapsed.”
“Course I didn’t die,” Kyo snips. “If I died, how would I get her out?” Tohru is still sleeping, heart monitor slow and steady. It doesn’t entirely get rid of Kyo’s impulse to put his ear against her sternum to hear the beat for himself. The picture of Tohru’s mom and Kyo’s stupid little book are both on the bedside table between their beds, along with a vase of flowers with a card signed from Akito.
“Everyone else has already come to visit,” Master says, noticing Kyo’s lingering gaze. “They’re downstairs in the cafeteria. Banished by a Nurse Yashiro for being too noisy. Akito isn’t sure you won’t assault them if they get too close, so they had Kureno drop those off.”
Kyo nods. Akito wasn’t far off with that one. Kyo would not assault them, but that’s because it would upset Tohru, not because Kyo wouldn’t like to. Tohru may have forgiven everything, but Kyo remembers her shaking and cold, with nailmarks clawed into her cheek. He remembers her leg bent the wrong way at the bottom of a cliff. He remembers a promise of a lifetime in a cage for being born wrong. He doesn’t forgive so easy. Tohru, though—Tohru goes out for coffee with Akito sometimes.
“How’s she doing?” Kyo asks. He never visited her in the hospital after she fell—because he’s a fucking coward—but the scene feels too close to home anyway.
“She’s fine,” Master says, closing the book and setting it in his lap. “She apparently coughed most everything out of her lungs before she even got in the ambulance. The worst she has is some irritation in her trachea and a few first-degree burns on her arms.” Master’s expression flattens, upset. “You on the other hand, got yourself twelve new stitches in your leg—not to be walked on for a week—as well as six in your arm and two in your hand. You have a second-degree burn on the back of your neck too.”
“Oh,” Kyo says, swallowing. It makes him nervous, the weight of the love Master has for him. He’s had this luxury for years, but it always feels like a fresh bruise. “I didn’t know.”
Master smiles. “That’s what Nurse Yashiro said. She said you tried to get up and walk out to find Tohru anytime they stopped wheeling your gurney for a second—they ended up giving you Fentanyl to get you to stay down long enough for them to get the stitches in.”
Kyo doesn’t know what to say to that, and is saved from having to say anything at all when the room to the door slides open to reveal Momiji and Kisa’s faces stacked on top of each other, and once they see Kyo awake they both throw the door open and then the can of worms is truly open and the whole fucking zodiac, minus Akito and Kureno, plus Hanajima and Uotani, clambers into the room and starts asking how Kyo’s doing, is his leg okay, does he want some snacks, water, anything.
“Shaddup! Tohru’s still sleeping!” It doesn’t occur to Kyo until after he’s shouted that his voice was very much louder than everyone else’s.
Kagura pokes at Tohru’s cheek until Rin snatches her hand away, and Tohru doesn’t stir. “The doctor said she’s fine,” Hiro says, voice accusatory, “was he lying?”
Hatori is already flipping through the charts posted at the end of their beds. “No,” he confirms. “She’s smaller than Kyo though, so it would take longer for the drugs to work their way out of her system.”
“Plus, she has poor circulation,” Ayame sighs, “The poor thing.”
“How’s our favorite cat doing?” Shigure asks, putting all eyes back on Kyo. “How did you manage to cut your leg like that?” Everyone looks earnest, like they expect an answer. Kyo doesn’t have one. He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t fucking remember, okay!?
“Who cares how he hurt it,” Yuki—of all people, the fucking rat—says, “What I want to know is why Tohru was inside a burning building.”
Momiji nods, “Ja. From what Kazuma says that Saitama says, everyone else had already evacuated.” Kyo doesn’t know that either. Fuck. It’s not like he could’ve asked her, her throat is shredded.
Kisa gives him an out and says, “It’s just a good thing everyone’s okay, I think.”
“She’s awake,” Hatsuharu says, and the whole room turns.
“Remember she can’t speak yet,” Hanajima manages to say before everyone crowds Tohru and lavishes her with the love Kyo assumes is her birthright on this planet. Uotani and Hanajima each squeeze either side of Tohru in a hug while Kisa and Ayame and Momiji lay across her lap like they melted there and Kagura and Shigure and Ritsu all screech about how worried they were and Yuki tells her he’s already helping Kazuma with the preparations for the renovations for the dojo and Hatsuharu pats the top of her head and Rin and Hatori and Hiro all pretend they don’t care that much—and the worst part? Kyo knows, deep in his bones just like he knows Master is his dad, that they mean all this love for him too, the only difference is how they show it.
Master, seeing how Kyo is staring and smiling all stupid, says, “You two really are like a house on fire.”