Chapter Text
Sakura beats his ass.
Of course he does. Suo doesn’t even know why he thought it would go any other way.
Sakura beats his ass, and then Suo’s brother’s ass, and then drags them both far enough away for Umemiya to take his place and pummel his master into the ground. There’s no charisma to it. None of the fun and flare of the school president’s usual brawls. This is bareknuckle dirty, unceremonious in every aspect except for the one where Umemiya takes his master by the hair and forces him to a kneel, in front of him and Hao both. Beneath Umemiya’s grip, the man seems… practically frail.
Goliath himself brought down by a child who still needs Hiragi’s reminder not to yell in study hall.
“You are both, all, relieved of your duties. Your training, your diet, your– everything,” His Master gasps as they stare. His forehead is pushed impossibly deeper into the hardwood floor, as Umemiya forces his bow. His knuckles are pulled white as they strain against his Master’s neck. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you–! I– I–”
Beside him, Hao makes a tiny noise under his breath, this quiet ‘what’ that nearly bowls Suo over in hysterics.
Exactly, he thinks, as his trembling fingers reach along the wall for something, anything to grab for a tether. Now you get it.
Furin is just like that. For months, he lived as happy as he’s ever been, bickering with Sakura, encouraging Nirei, planting himself back to back with the rest of their classmates: Kiryu and Tsugera and Anzai and Sugishta, their friendship of all things buoying him along. It’s dizzying how easy it is for them to bend the world to their will, to take previously conceived notions and shatter them to pieces at your feet. He had left when he had because he realized he was in too deep, that the reconnaissance he was meant to gather would be for nothing if he could never free himself of them.
And look where that landed him, scrabbling for a handhold and flinching when the only thing he finds is Sakura’s waiting palm, open and steady. He hovers above it, unable to take his eyes off his master, and desperately unwilling to truly face Sakura’s ire.
Not now, not when the world itself feels tilted on its axis. When for the first time in months he can breathe, and it still somehow feels like his chest is caving in.
Still, the pull is undeniable, and Suo is so, so weak to these people. He drops his hand in moments, slow, steady, controlled, until the moment Sakura’s impatience gets the better of him and he surges up to meet him.
Their fingers slot in the most aggressive way possible. It’s so very Sakura, it forces his gaze away from his master since the start of his and Umemiya’s fight.
He looks the same as he did all those months ago: forming bruises line his cheeks, a scrape across his chin, and a new crease in between his brows as he darts his gaze between meeting Suo’s eyes and their joined hands.
“Did I hurt you,” he asks, low over the sounds of Hao starting to panic beside them. His grip starts to loosen.
Suo stares for just a second before the hysteria gets the better of him.
He giggles. Honest to god giggles, rusty as it is, aching as it does, he shoves his free hand over his mouth, as if that will stop the torrent of laughter pouring out of him. He squeezes tighter on Sakura’s hand and ignores the stares of the rest of the room.
“Sakura-kun,” he drolls, and the tone still comes as naturally as it did all those months ago. “You just punched me.”
He pauses for dramatic effect.
“A lot.”
“You deserved it!” Sakura snaps back, blush already staining his cheeks. “You were being stupid.”
“I was being stupid,” Suo concedes, only slightly dry because he was truly stupid to think that he could get away from them. “What’s different now?”
“You don’t deserve it now,” Sakura huffs. He glares down at his Mas– his former Master, who Umemiya still has pinned to the floor. “Not in front of him.”
The look he returns to Suo is as determined as he’s ever seen it, and there’s something in those depths that strikes deeper than any physical hit.
“If you reach out to us, we’ll help. I won’t– I won’t let anyone hurt you for that. Not now, not ever again.”
A lump lodges itself in Suo’s throat. He swallows it down to plaster on a smile that stretches his bleeding lip.
“Believe it or not, Sakura-kun, I am a decent liar who certainly didn’t make it easy on any of you. You couldn’t have known. I wouldn’t let you.”
“Obviously,” Sakura says, with a roll of his eyes. “But we know now.”
The smile drops off Suo’s face. He feels bereft without it, adrift until Sakura brings him back with a squeeze of his hand. The grip is hurting him now, too tight by far, and yet, Suo wouldn’t dream of letting go. Not now. Maybe not ever.
“Okay,” he says, a little soft, a lot dazed, feeling like the world is somehow both settling and shifting beneath his feet. He ignores the way his brother is staring at him, and instead chooses to focus on Umemiya, who is watching them with this odd mixture of pride and pain on his face.
“I– its done?” He asks, feeling childish and for once not regretting it. “I’m out?”
“You’re out,” Umemiya confirms, silencing his former Master with a tight grip. “You never have to see this place ever again, if you don’t want to.”
Umemiya watches him for a second before he adds:
“There’s no obligation here, Suo-kun. We did this to help you, but your resignation still stands, if you want it to. We’re not going to force you back to Furin.”
Sakura makes a noise that’s instantly snuffed by the sharp look Umemiya sends him. Suo feels something in his blood dim. After what he did, even if Sakura accepts him back, it would be in poor taste for the head of Furin to allow a deserter back in their school. It’d be easy for nearby gangs to see this as an opening, a weakness for them to exploit.
He should leave for their sake, stay gone now that they know he’s no longer working with his Mast–
“That being said,” Umemiya continues with a smile. “I think your class would miss you if you left. There’s always a space for you, if you want it.”
Suo blinks up at him. There’s nothing deceitful in Umemiya’s face. There never is; the man’s about as much an open book as he can be, but there’s something in that openness that’s refreshing. After months and months of lies, he can turn to this and know he’s being truthful.
He can know he’s allowed to go home.
“I want it,” he says, desperate. “Please, I–”
He whips back around to Sakura.
“Take me back?”
It comes out pleading, the whine of a kicked dog, not Sakura’s vice. Not the person meant to have his back, but his captain has never been one for status. Least of all, when he’s flushed from cheek to chin.
“Don’t– don’t look at me like that. It’s not like we filled it or anythin’. If Umemiya says it’s fine then it’s fine. You don’t–”
The hand in Suo’s twitches.
“You don’t have to cry, okay?”
Cry?
Suo swipes his free hand over his cheek. A tear slides across his palm to drip down onto the hardwood. He watches its path with a creeping sort of detachment.
“Of course not,” he hears himself say. “The dragon in my eye must be–”
“Suo,” Sakura intones, low and deep and chiding. He sounds upset, looks even more so, when Suo finally swings his gaze to his, but there’s something beyond the stern pinch of his brows. Something aching and devastated and familiar in the set of his jaw, Sakura’s features with Nirei’s signature tilt. His co-vice’s unerring compassion reimagined in their captain’s calico features.
The last time Suo saw that expression was when he was– when Nirei had–. The lump in his throat is heavy as he forcibly swallows it down. His vision blurs.
“I— I mean—“ Suo stutters, trying and failing to get his emotions back under control. There’s nothing more to say, nothing more he can possibly mean, because Suo doesn’t even really know what he could mean.
His life until now has been a series of fickle phrases, of lies and half-truths stacked so high no man could scale it, and yet, here his classmates are, dismantling his every carefully concocted lie just so they too can stand in the mess of it. Just so Suo can lie again, just as he so recently promised Sakura he would never do.
He chokes on his own self-reproach.
Stupid, he thinks. Stupid, and yet Sakura doesn’t let go of his hand, and Umemiya doesn’t pull himself up from his position at their front, and Hao, for all their petty squabbles, stays still and silent beside them.
“That’s enough,” Sakura says beside him, tugging Suo slightly closer. Suo, exhausted and hurting in places even Sakura wouldn’t know about, tips into his side without fuss. He feels himself go distant again, his emotions fizzling just out of reach. “Suo said he wants to come back, so we’re done here. We’re going back to our class.”
He glares at Umemiya, chin raised, as if he’s challenging something. Suo doesn’t know what, but the trace of amusement in Umemiya’s eyes proves it’s nothing their leader hasn’t already expected.
“We’ll see you in a little!” Umemiya says cheerily. For the open smile on his face, his hands remain stone-cold and steady on the back of his former Master’s neck. “I’ll dispose of this trash and meet you out front!”
Suo doesn’t know what disposing of trash means in this circumstance, whether its police or some other underground punishment he hadn’t known bofurin to participate in. Maybe that’s why he saw Endo, of all people, fighting out there in the square. He doesn’t know, and he’s learning, he doesn’t care. He’s too exhausted, he’s too spent, all of this is too much, and Sakura, for all he’s put him through, is too easy a place to land.
“C’mon Suo,” Sakura says, and for all Suo doesn’t deserve this easy forgiveness laid out before him, he’s too weak to refute it. He lets Sakura haul him up, lets him keep their hands clasped between them despite the fact that Suo should be able to hold himself up just fine. There’s that childish feeling again, that wave of neediness that he’s never been able to shake.
But, he’s learning, maybe he doesn’t have to.
Sakura and Umemiya certainly didn’t seem put off by his clinging, and Hao? He spares a glance for his older brother and finds him looking just as lost as Suo himself feels. There’s an emptiness there that Suo is intimately familiar with, a sort of raw, open wound that bleeds when pressed, the kind that is good in the long run and agonizing in the short– like a surgeon carved you open and took out all the rot, and now all you're left with is that pink, painful new skin.
Suo forces his blurry gaze to trace the matching scar on Hao’s cheek with his remaining eye. He thinks of that fresh pain and compares it to the sun-bright fire of Sakura’s hand in his.
“Suo?” Sakura asks.
He’s stopped apparently, barely a foot away from where they were sitting, so of course Sakura would question it, but he doesn’t argue, just watches with a narrowed gaze as Suo turns to keep his brother in his line of sight.
“I hope you find your place, Hao,” he says, soft in all the ways their Master explicitly forbade. That sort of affection was reserved for their younger brothers, the wide eyed recruits Master would bring in, still clinging to his honeyed words. He and Hao were meant to be opposed, always kept at each other’s throats, but even injured animals know when they come across their kin.
They’re the same. Even if they’ll never get along. Even if they’ve only ever hurt each other. Suo still wants the best for him, and he can’t imagine anything better than Furin, than real friends.
Hao turns his blank stare to him, lingering on the tight handhold Suo refuses to release. Four years of fighting has given them ample time to learn each other’s mannerisms, and he sees the exact moment Hao accepts that this is it, that it’s over.
“I hope you’re happy in yours, little brother.”
He turns to meet Sakura’s glare.
“You’ll take care of him?” He asks.
Sakura scoffs. His fingers tug on Suo’s until he’s pressed back against the other boy’s side.
“We’ll do better than you did,” Sakura says, determination stamped into the set of his jaw. “Let’s go, Suo.”
Suo takes one last look at Hao, doing his best to imprint the memory in his mind’s eye. He likely won’t get another one.
Hao had long since been the better of the two at making himself invisible, at letting Suo take the hits, when there was any chance he could evade. By morning, he’ll be gone, and Suo knows better than to follow. Not that he wants to. Enemies they are not, but he doubts he and Hao will ever count as friends. Not in the way his class does.
Certainly not in the way Sakura and Nirei do.
He drops his gaze back down to their swinging hands, and dutifully follows his captain out of the building.