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“Fuck!”
The curse is punctuated with the clang of metal on metal. Ichika reels from the impact, her sword arm tingling, still jarred from the blow she had to block. She’s stumbled a step backwards, and she quickly plants her feet again, taking up a solid stance as she looks up and—
She barely gets her sword up in time to stop the spear again. This time, her whole body trembles with the effort. Gasping for air, she takes another step back, thrown off balance. The spear swings again, then again, and Ichika barely blocks each strike as she's slowly forced backwards.
She never has time to regain her footing. One misstep, and she falls back, her sword slipping from her grasp as she lands on her tailbone, hard.
“Ow,” she says, looking up at the shadow that steps up to loom over her.
Saki only levels her spear at Ichika, the metal point nudging at the underside of her chin. Her gaze is flat and emotionless when Ichika meets it, the two of them staring at each other as they catch their breath.
Finally, Saki drops the spear. When she looks back up, she's smiling, exhilarated.
“Finally!” she crows. She offers Ichika a hand, smiling wider when she takes it. It takes Ichika a moment to get a grasp; her hand is still numb from gripping her sword. “That was the last one, so it's the only one that counts!”
“That's not how it works,” Ichika huffs, once Saki's pulled her to her feet. “You can't just ignore four to one in my favour.”
“Yes I can. I just did, actually.”
Ichika just sighs, dusting herself off. Blades of grass and specks of dirt that were churned up during their spar go flying, and once she deems her clothes clean enough, she bends down to scoop up her sword. When she goes to straighten up, Saki is already there, a waterskin in her outstretched hand, her spear in her other.
“Thanks,” Ichika says, accepting the water and downing half of it in one go. The water settles in her stomach and seems to weigh her entire body down. By the time she lowers the waterskin, her sword is heavy in her hand, dangling loosely by her side, and she's slouching. Groaning, she tips her head back and lets her shoulders relax.
A stray gust of wind picks up, ruffling her hair, which tickles the back of her neck. It's a good day to spar outdoors; the sky is a clear blue, but a thick layer of clouds shields them from direct sunlight. After several days of training in bright, sunny days, she's glad for the reprieve.
“Good thing it's cloudy today,” she says. “It's been too hot this week.”
Saki doesn't reply, which is strange. Ichika has long grown accustomed to Saki's voice in her ear, wanted or unwanted. Maybe she's just tired from the sparring.
“Icchan.”
As if summoned by Ichika's thoughts, Saki speaks. Ichika twists, noticing the sudden edge in Saki’s voice. “Hm?”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Huh?” Ichika blinks, looking down at her body, but the wound quickly makes itself obvious.
It’s a slash across her left forearm, likely done with the tip of Saki's spear, beading with droplets of blood as evidence of her carelessness. As Ichika inspects it, adrenaline fades and the pain sets in, as if the wound only started to exist when she noticed it, leaving her with a bleeding wound and stinging arm. She frowns.
“At least it's not deep. I'll have to…” She trails off when she looks up and meets Saki’s eyes. Right. “Oh. Do you want to…?”
“Can I?” Saki asks, but she’s already reaching for Ichika, her fingers wrapping around the wounded arm. Her voice has dropped further, into something deep and hungry. Ichika shivers but lets Saki take her arm.
“Yeah,” she says. “Just remember, no—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Saki's lips quirk to the side. “Should we sit down?”
Most days, after they spar, they sit on the ground together to catch their breath and pass water between them until it runs out. But it's not with a sense of relief and shared exhaustion that they sit down, today. Instead, Ichika settles onto the grass uneasily, a mix of anticipation and the same morbid curiosity she always feels in her chest.
Cross-legged on the grass, Saki wastes no time. “Okay?” she asks, and Ichika's head has barely dipped in a nod before she's raising Ichika's arm to her mouth.
“Okay,” Ichika says hoarsely, belatedly.
She lets her arm go limp, allowing Saki to do whatever she wants with it. She averts her eyes, if only to give Saki some privacy as she does… whatever this is.
It’s not anything that she nor Saki can explain. It only exists in these moments, where neither of them speak and Ichika avoids looking at it.
The first time it happened, Saki gave Ichika a nosebleed in the middle of practice— an accident, Ichika failing to block a strike. While Ichika tipped her head forward, wincing, Saki swiped her finger through the blood, ignoring Ichika's confused protest. Then, slowly, as if in a trance, Saki put her fingers to her mouth and…
And then. The unspoken agreement is: whenever Ichika bleeds, Saki notices. She'll ask, or Ichika will offer, but either way it ends with Saki bent over the source of the bleeding, her breath misting against Ichika's skin.
The touch of Saki's fingers is warm. The blood that trickles from her wounds is warm. Sometimes, it's hard to tell the difference.
“Icchan,” Saki says, after a long moment. Ichika starts, thinking for a moment that she's done, but Saki hasn't moved at all.
“Huh?” is all Ichika can muster. Her heart is pounding, her muscles tensed. It's like sparring, only more vulnerable; here, she doesn't have the chance to evade or block. It's just her and Saki, her arm in Saki’s grasp, bleeding into her hands.
Saki’s eyes dart from Ichika’s face to the wound, both equally raw and open. “Can I cut you again?”
She doesn’t flinch. As if she’d just asked Ichika to pass her the waterskin. On the other hand, Ichika reels. “What? What do you…”
“Sorry,” Saki says, and she drops her gaze. “It’s not… this is barely anything.”
Although she's avoiding eye contact, Ichika knows what Saki's trying to hide— the eagerness, the one that Ichika dutifully tries to ignore.
Obviously, she knows that Saki wants this. But the knowledge doesn't prepare her for the gleam in Saki’s eyes, the part of her lips and the way her tongue wets her lips. The hunger, at the core of it all. Saki wants this, for whatever reason.
And Saki is her best friend, her childhood friend who trained with her to be a knight. She's never been scared of her.
“Okay,” Ichika says. Saki perks up, and Ichika sucks in a breath and stumbles over her words. “I, um… I mean, just don’t… I still need to train, and I need my arm for that, so…”
“I’ll help patch you up,” Saki says, and then she snickers and rolls her eyes. “Do you really think I would just let you keep bleeding like that? You wound me, Icchan.”
“I mean— of course not,” Ichika protests. Her head spins, from the whiplash of Saki with blood reflected in her irises to normal, smiley Saki, teasing Ichika and reading insults into her words. She's never been so involved before.
“Right,” Saki says. “So hold still.”
From her waist, she produces a dagger. Ichika tenses. She knows that Saki carries a short blade with her, for use in close combat situations, and she’s seen her wield it dozens of times. Never like this, though; suddenly, the dagger is an instrument of offence, not a defensive last resort. Ichika hears her heart in her ears, her combat-honed instincts finally reacting to the armed person next to her, but she doesn’t pull away.
With her dagger in hand, Saki grips Ichika’s wrist with the other. Hold still, Saki said, and Ichika marvels at how steady her arm is, with their combined efforts, as the metal meets her skin.
She looks on with a sort of weird detachment as Saki glides the dagger down her arm, her flesh parting around the edge of it, leaving behind a dark red line. It really is so easy to hurt someone, she thinks, and then she wonders how exactly they’d agreed on sparring with metal weapons instead of wooden ones. The memory seems far away, though, as her arm splits and bleeds and gleams.
It doesn’t even hurt much. She barely felt the pain of the initial cut, made during the heat of combat. And as Saki continues to lengthen it, digging deeper than her spear did, Ichika just feels the way it pulls at her flesh and the coolness of the metal on her skin.
Then Saki lifts Ichika’s wrist, tilting her arm into a vertical position, and suddenly all the pain sets in at once.
It’s a burning sensation, one that tingles down her entire arm and follows the path of the blood. Seeping from the cut, tracing down her arm and to her elbow, where it gathers into dark scarlet droplets and drips, and drips, and drips—
Directly into Saki’s mouth, positioned just below Ichika’s elbow. Ichika stares in fascination, transfixed.
She always looks away when Saki does— this. But she was watching the dagger, so she was watching the blood and so now she’s watching it flow down her arm, a trail of crimson snaking across her skin. She’s watching the way it pools on Saki’s tongue. The way it drips onto her lips when she closes her mouth and swallows, her throat bobbing, her eyes fluttering shut as she…
As Saki drinks her blood, Ichika finally admits to herself. Before, when Saki would lick at the skin around her wounds, it always felt like a passive act. Scavenging, even, taking what was already there. But now, her arm stinging from a cut that Saki made deliberately to draw blood from her, positioned just so for the blood to drip from her elbow into Saki’s mouth, it’s real.
Saki drew her blood, and now she's drinking it.
Ichika doesn't want to stop her.
A wet sensation, movement. Ichika feels her breath stutter. Saki has her mouth on her arm now, small licks to catch the still-flowing blood, following the trail of red up. Her breath comes fast and heavy, cooling the wet skin her tongue leaves behind. With every few strokes of her tongue, her nose nudges against Ichika's arm.
They've stumbled into familiar territory. But Ichika's looking at her for the first time, and she never would have imagined Saki like this: her eyes half-lidded, lapping at Ichika's blood like the only thing that matters in the world is getting more of it.
Can Saki sense her heartbeat, as close as she is to Ichika's wrist, to the opening where proof of her racing heart spills out? It's always felt as if Saki had one finger on her pulse, a direct line to Ichika's heart. To have her drink straight from it feels like the most natural continuation.
Sharp, searing pain pulls Ichika back into reality. She jerks, ripping away from Saki's clawed grip. The movement tugs at her wound, and she hisses through her teeth, cradling her arm to her chest.
“What was that? Did you—” She cuts herself off, scared.
Saki blinks slowly, a dazed look in her eyes. Her throat bobs as she swallows the remnants of blood on her tongue.
“Sorry,” she says. “Sorry. I was… I wasn't looking and licked the… sorry. Are you okay?”
Ichika just stares. Is that a glow fading from Saki’s eyes? Or is it the thrill of having more blood than usual, an actual stream of it, instead of traces lapped up from her skin?
Her arm is still stinging— Saki's tongue, irritating the wound, rubbing against it. It's the first and only rule she ever asked Saki to follow, the first and only time they talked about it explicitly: don't lick the wound. But in the face of Saki's request, and the dagger with Ichika's blood on it, it doesn't seem to matter much anymore.
“Yeah,” Ichika says. “It just… hurt.”
“I’m sorry, Icchan,” Saki whispers. “I… I didn't do it on purpose. It's just…”
There's blood in her mouth; Ichika sees it when she speaks. It's stuck between her teeth, lines of red against white. When the silence stretches on, Saki wipes her lips with the back of her hand, smearing blood across her face, the crimson glowing like Ichika would swear her eyes were. My blood, she thinks dizzily. Mine.
Suddenly, she's raising her arm again. The bleeding has slowed somewhat, but blood still trickles out, tracing the same path down her arm.
“Here,” she says. “It's okay.”
Saki hesitates, her fingers circling Ichika’s wrist, her eyes on the blood. The stream is halfway to Ichika's elbow. “I'll bandage it for you,” she promises.
“I know,” Ichika says, and Saki leans close again.