Chapter Text
PrologueThe Tea
Nine minutes into being married, Mirio Togata was having the best morning of his life, and he had a great many mornings to measure it against.
The shrine smelled of cedar and cold stone and the green sharpness of the sakaki branch, and the small assembly they had allowed to come was doing the thing people did at weddings, talking too brightly in a space that asked them to be quiet. He loved them for it. He loved nearly everyone, as a settled policy, but this morning he had it badly.
Her mother was crying in the satisfied way of a woman who had predicted this exact morning for a decade. Her father had given up on his collar. Toward the back, a lean scarred man in a plain dark suit leaned on the wall with his hands in his pockets, and everyone was pretending not to notice that the President of the Hero Public Safety Commission had cleared his morning for a ceremony this small. Mirio had noticed. He had decided, today of all days, to be happy about every one of them.
She was beside him in the kimono he had picked.
He had picked it on purpose, the high collar and the line of it, because he had wanted, just once, to choose how she stood inside a day, and because it kept her from fully turning her head, which she had clocked instantly and intended, he could tell, to make him pay for at length. She had picked his in return. Deep slate, cut at the shoulder so he looked, for one morning, like a man who could hold still, which he could not, and which she knew better than anyone, and had dressed him as anyway, like a wish she was making out loud in cloth.
He held the lacquer cup he was supposed to hold and watched her drink her tea and was, by the standard of a man who was easily and often happy, completely undone by the size of it.
This was the moment the side of the shrine came in.
It came in without warning, a concussion of timber and paper and white morning light, and then a shape in the new hole where the wall had been, big and wrong, shouting a name he placed off a bounty sheet a half-second later. Plaster rolled across the tatami. Her mother made a small sound.
Mirio was already gone.
He went first. He always went first; it was the oldest reflex he owned, older than the name the magazines used, older than the number. He dropped through the floor and kept his clothes, which a younger version of him would have left in a pile on the tatami, and which stayed on now because a tailor and a great deal of his own hair and an argument she had flatly won had made it so. He came up on the far side of the intruder, solid, between the thing and the room, where he lived.
He was not alone out there. He never was. Behind him a length of gray cloth was lifting off the shoulders of the man who had taught him. On the other side, taller and broader than the boy from the dirt a lifetime ago but wearing the exact same face, Tamaki came in with both hands going dark at the wrist, audibly informing the universe that he had known, he had said, he had said today of all days.
It was, even Mirio had to admit, a great deal more hero than the situation strictly called for.
He ended it. It did not take long, and it was not interesting, and the only part of it he would have wanted anyone to watch was the part he could not, because it was behind him.
"That was really uncalled for," he told the unconscious problem at his feet, and meant it. His morning had been perfect. He had checked. Mirio looked down with the wounded dignity of a host whose dinner party had been spoiled and waited for an apology that was not coming, because the problem was unconscious, which he felt was no excuse.
The whole of it had taken perhaps twelve seconds.
Into the ringing quiet, a voice found the words first, high and delighted and appalled and unmistakably Nejire.
"Marishi. You didn't even move."
Mirio turned around, dusting plaster off his sleeves, to look at his wife, and there it was, the thing he had known without checking, the thing he had built his whole reflex around the certainty of.
She had not moved.
She was exactly where he had left her, the lacquer cup in both hands, plaster dust in her hair, having watched a stranger come through the side of her own wedding and decided to let him handle it, because he was there. The most guarded person he had ever met had sat through a wall coming in and not so much as set down her cup, because she had run the only math that mattered and come out certain.
He had saved a frankly unreasonable number of people. And the one who undid him, standing in the dust of his own wedding in his good kimono, was the one who had simply assumed he would and not bothered to look up.
He crossed back to her through the plaster, all the height the years had handed him. Standing over her in the wreck of the wall, he knew how it read to the room. The big one come back to the small one to check she was unhurt. It was, like most things about them, the reverse of what it looked like. He was the most solid man in any room he walked into, and he was solid because a guarded girl had decided, at twelve, that he was worth standing next to, and had then simply never moved.
Every head not checking on a relative had turned to her. She lowered the cup. She looked, without hurry, at the three of them standing where the problem had been, not one of whom had glanced back to see if she was all right, because not one of them had needed to. Then she looked at him, and Mirio held still, actually held still, for once, the way she had cut the cloth to pretend he could, and waited, because he already knew the answer and wanted to hear her say it more than he had wanted most things.
"Why would I move," she told him. "Mirio's right there."
She lifted the cup again. The tea, against all reason, was still the right temperature.
"And I'm not ruining this kimono. He picked it."