Chapter Text
The first time he saw Sakura fight, Suo stopped smiling.
It was not a conscious decision. The polite, pleasant curve of his lips simply evaporated, bleached away by the sheer, concussive force of it. They were on the wrong side of town, outnumbered three to one, and Suo had already calculated how many vertebrae he’d need to misalign to make this a tidy and forgettable incident.
Then Sakura moved.
He did not step so much as detonate. A crack of white and black hair and a ragged, torn thing ripped from the bottom of his lungs. The first thug’s fist came in wide and stupid. Sakura didn't block it. He met it. His own forehead smashed against the incoming knuckles like wet stone cracking against bone. The thug screamed, his hand breaking against Sakura’s unyielding skull.
Suo’s eye widened. The single, visible amber iris dilated. He had seen a thousand forms, a thousand styles — the liquid grace of Jikoku-ryu, the crushing power of street brawlers, the needle-precision of assassins. This was none of those things.
This was a rockslide.
Sakura pivoted, and the movement was all wrong. It was too open, too exposed. A textbook mistake. A second attacker lunged for the gap in his guard, a straight punch aimed for the solar plexus. And Sakura took it. The air left his lungs in a sharp huff, but his feet didn't budge. They were bolted to the asphalt by some primal, furious gravity. Instead of crumpling, he used the momentum of the hit to torque his body, his own fist already in flight. Like a gunshot it went through with the man’s ribs and Suo felt the crack through the soles of his shoes, a seismic tremor in the concrete.
It was ugly. It was brutal.
It was the most beautiful thing Suo had ever witnessed.
Suo knew he was a man of veils. He existed in the space between words, deflecting and reflecting to keep himself clean. He smiled and let the world’s anger slide off him like rain on oiled silk. He found safety in the intangible, in being unseen and unknown.
But Sakura—
Sakura was naked.
He stood there, blood already trickling from his split brow into the corner of his heterochromatic eye, painting the white of it pink. And he was grinning, a raw, feral baring of teeth. It was the grin of a cornered animal that had just remembered it had claws.
The third guy tried to run. Sakura didn't chase him. He hurled himself forward. His body was a projectile, a piece of storm-wrecked debris given intent. He caught the man by the collar and simply… pulled. He pulled the man off his feet and into the orbit of his rising knee. The impact folded the thug around the limb like wet cardboard.
When the three men were a groaning pile of bruised meat and snapped bones on the ground, the silence that followed was deafening. Sakura stood in the centre of it, chest heaving, shoulders bunched up so high they nearly touched his ears. He was trembling from the sheer effort of containing the maelstrom inside him now that the fighting was done. He wiped his nose with the back of a shredded sleeve, smearing red across his cheek.
Suo forgot to breathe.
He realised he was standing perfectly still, his hands having fallen from their customary loose clasp behind his back. They hung at his sides, useless. For the first time in years, Suo Hayato felt bare. And it was in front of this, this absolute, unyielding, honest violence. There was no deception in Sakura’s fists. No strategy. It was just the truth of his body, the weight of his will, slammed into the world without apology.
"You okay, Suo?"
The voice was hoarse, scraped raw. Sakura was looking at him, brows furrowed in that perpetual scowl.
Suo opened his mouth. The usual silky reply — Perfectly fine, Sakura-kun. That was quite the display. — died on his tongue. It felt like a lie. Like ash in his teeth that a single cough would send blowing away. Instead, he just nodded, a short, stiff jerk of his chin.
Sakura grunted, looking away immediately, the tips of his ears turning the colour of his namesake flowers. He shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched deeper into his jacket, muttering something about "annoying punks."
And that was when Suo felt it.
In his stomach, of all places. Something shifted that hollowed him out. A splintering of the pristine, lacquered surface he presented to the world. He wanted to touch the dent in the wall where Sakura’s fist had landed. To press his thumb into the bruise blooming on Sakura’s cheekbone to see if it was warm. To be close enough to hear the ragged, wet sound of Sakura’s breathing.
He wanted to understand how something so dysfunctionally defensive could made him feel so defended.
Days later, they were sparring.
It was a formality, really, a way to burn off energy. Suo moved like water, slipping past Sakura’s wild swings, tapping his temple, his floating ribs, the back of his knee. I could end this. I could break you here, here, and here. He smiled, that gentle, infuriating smile.
"Too slow, Sakura-kun."
Sakura’s eyes flashed, his scowl deepening. And then he stopped trying to hit Suo.
He just walked forward.
Suo’s smile flickered. He tried a feint. Sakura didn't react. He tried a low kick to the shin. Sakura took it with a grunt, his forward momentum unbroken. He was a stone wall advancing, impervious to the raining of assaults. Suo’s hands, so fast, so precise, touched Sakura’s chest, his shoulder, his face. Nothing. The man just kept coming, his eyes locked on Suo’s, burning a hole through the veil.
Suddenly, Suo’s back hit the chain link fence.
He was cornered and trapped — by someone who had not used a single feint, or made a single sidestep. Sakura’s fist drew back, knuckles raw and swollen. It was a promise of what was coming, so clear it could have been verbal. The whole world could see it. Suo could see a dozen ways to slip it, to turn it back on him.
He didn't move.
He watched the fist come. Watched the shift of muscle under the torn compression shirt. Watched the way Sakura’s mouth tightened with the intense, focused pressure of a star collapsing in on itself.
The fist stopped, a hair’s breadth from Suo’s nose. The wind of it ruffled his dark hair.
Suo could smell the copper of old scabs and the faint, clean scent of cheap soap. Sakura was panting, his whole body a taut wire of restrained violence.
"Why,” Sakura demanded, voice cracking. "Why didn't you dodge?"
Suo looked at the fist. Then he looked past it, past the torn knuckles and the scarred forearms, into that mismatched gaze. The confusion there was so blatant.
Suo’s hand, the one that could shatter a wrist in a blink, came up. It was slow and hesitant. His fingers, cool and dry, brushed against the hot, swollen skin of Sakura’s knuckles.
Sakura flinched and his fist recoiled, cradled against his own chest.
"The hell are you doing?" he snapped, his face turning a violent shade of scarlet.
Suo looked at his own hand. It was trembling. Just a tremor, but a tremor nonetheless. He had been in knife fights and stared down guns without a flutter. But the heat of this boy's broken skin had entered his bloodstream like a drug.
He curled his fingers into his palm, as if to trap the warmth there.
"Nothing," Suo said. And for once, the smile that returned to his face was far from certain.
"You just move me. That's all."