Work Text:
She sat on the edge of the desk and let him work.
The building had come down in about four seconds. Less, maybe. There’d been one accursed in the doorway and no way past it, and Okarun had said this way and pointed at the stairwell, and she’d gone, because he was usually right about these things. Then the floor above had made a sound she’d never heard anything make before—a long grinding groan, like something enormous changing its mind—and the whole east side of the building had folded in on itself in a roar of brick and dust. They’d got out. The accursed hadn’t. She’d been picking mortar out of her hair ever since.
Nothing had come for the noise. They’d waited the better part of an hour to be sure, crouched in the treeline with her bat across her knees and the dust still settling behind them, and nothing had come. Just birds, eventually. That was the part that mattered.
The room they’d found was cold in the way only empty buildings got, the kind of cold that came up out of the floor and settled in for the evening. It got at every part of her the air could reach. Her arms, the back of her neck, the whole exposed line of her front where her shirt should have been. She’d given up on it about ten minutes in. It wasn’t worth the argument, and the shirt was ruined anyway, stiff with dust and torn straight through where the glass had gone in.
The scrape ran from just below her collarbone, down across her ribs, and finished somewhere above her hip. Not deep. Long, though, and filthy, and it had been full of grit when he’d started.
He’d already got most of it out. Tweezers first, working from the top down, one hand braced flat against her shoulder to keep her steady while the other picked. He hadn’t said much. He never did when he was concentrating, tongue caught between his teeth, glasses sliding until he pushed them up with the back of his wrist and left a smear of dust across the lens.
“This’ll sting a bit,” he murmured, tipping the bottle against a fresh pad of gauze.
It did.
She hissed through her teeth and he paused, the way he always paused, waiting on her without looking up.
“Just get on with it,” she muttered. The sooner it was over the better.
He went.
The antiseptic burned cold and sharp all the way down. She tipped her head back and found a water stain on the ceiling to stare at instead. Brown at the edges, darker in the middle. Kind of looked like Hokkaido, if you squinted. Or a dog.
His hands were warm. That was the thing. Everything else in that room had gone through her like she wasn’t there, but wherever he touched her, the cold couldn’t get in. His fingers were careful and unhurried, steadying the skin above each pass so the gauze wouldn’t drag, working along the length of the scrape in small sections. Somewhere along the way she stopped keeping track of the sting and started keeping track of his hands instead.
Somewhere around her ribs he started humming.
Barely anything. Three or four notes, dropped and picked up again, so quiet she doubted he knew he was doing it. She’d heard it before—over the stove, over his notebook, once at four in the morning on a station platform when he thought she was asleep.
She never mentioned it. He’d stop.
The gauze came next, laid on in overlapping strips, then the roll of bandage wound round her ribs. He worked it slowly, passing it from one hand to the other around her back, and she lifted her arm out of the way where it was needed without either of them saying anything about it. He tucked the end under and pressed it flat with two fingers.
“Too tight?”
She rolled her shoulders. “Nah.”
He smiled a bit at that, shoving his glasses back up with the back of his wrist and adding a second smear to the lens. “Try turning it.”
She turned, one way then the other, and the bandage held without pulling. She said so. He hummed again, that same three-note nothing, and sat back on his heels to look at what he’d done.
“Looks good,” he mumbled, mostly to himself. Then he glanced back up at her, over the top of the frames. “Try not to move it too much though, ’kay?”
Then he was up and moving, gathering the wrappers, capping the bottle, packing everything back into the kit in the order it had come out.
The cold got at her again immediately.
She reached for her sports bra where she’d left it folded on the desk. Getting into it was worse than she’d expected. The band dragged over the bandaging and lit the whole scrape up in a bright stinging line, and lifting her arm to get the strap over her shoulder pulled at something under her ribs that made her stop halfway and breathe for a second.
She got it on. She kept her face where it was.
The tank top after that was easier, though not by much. She tugged it down over the bandaging, smoothed it flat, and rolled the shoulder once to test it.
It didn’t want to go all the way up.
Fine. Nobody had asked it to.
She tried it again anyway, because that was worth knowing. Slower this time, lifting instead of rolling, seeing how far the arm would get before it gave out.
It stopped her early. Something caught under the bandage and pulled tight across her ribs, and the noise she made was small, but it wasn’t nothing.
Behind her, the packing sounds stopped.
Then a breath out through the nose. Long. Very deliberate.
Oh, here we go.
“I literally just told you not to move that so much.”
“It’s fiiiine.” She rolled the shoulder again, slow and easy, like she’d meant to do it all along.
“The barely suppressed grimace says otherwise.” He didn’t look up. Just kept winding the leftover gauze back onto its spool, thumb pinning the loose end flat, working the roll tighter than it needed to be.
Ah. So he could tell, huh.
There had, in fact, been a bit of a twinge with the motion, a sharp pull beneath the bandaging at her side that vanished almost as quickly as it came. Everything ached in that dull, distant way that came after, when the running was done and the adrenaline had drained off and left everything she’d done to herself to surface, one piece at a time. Her hair was still full of plaster grit. The room smelled of antiseptic and old damp, and the cold had crept back into her the moment he’d stopped working, settling into her shoulders where his hands had been. She hadn’t noticed how warm they were until they were gone.
She couldn’t let him know that, though. He’d know he was right.
“This isn’t a grimace!” She folded her arms with as much dignity as the bandaging allowed, turning her chin pointedly away from him. Something pulled unpleasantly at that, but she kept her expression fixed. “It’s a hard-boiled scowl! Ken Takakura would be proud.”
“Yes, you’re really evoking the great Ken Takakura right now.” He finally glanced up, gauze roll balanced in his palm, one eyebrow doing most of the work. “Now give it a rest. You’ll strain yourself.”
She huffed, but let her arms fall again. Her shoulder was getting a little stiff anyway.
The faint twitch at the corner of his mouth told her he’d noticed.
Smug little bastard.
“It shouldn’t have hurt that much from just raising it, though…” He was already frowning at nothing, gauze abandoned on his knee, that particular crease appearing between his brows. “You must have pulled something… let me get you some ibuprofen. How long ago did we eat? Maybe you should have something first, to be safe.”
His attention dropped to the bag at his feet before he’d even finished the sentence. He crouched over it and started sorting, moving aside the packets of gauze and the bottle of antiseptic with the same care he gave everything in there, glasses slipping slowly down his nose while he searched.
She watched him dig. She’d seen him do this a hundred times now, the running checklist he never said out loud, the way one problem always unspooled into three more before he’d let himself sit still. It was easier to watch than it used to be.
His hoodie was still lying beside the first-aid kit where he’d thrown it earlier, leaving him in nothing but the plain T-shirt underneath. She wasn’t used to seeing his arms so bare. There were scratches running along one forearm she hadn’t paid much attention to before, thin and scabbed over, and a bruise starting to darken around his elbow. Goosebumps stood out along his skin in the cold, and he hadn’t said a word about it, because of course he hadn’t.
When he leaned farther over the bag, his collar shifted away from the back of his neck.
Angry pink showed beneath it.
A long graze started below his hairline and disappeared down under the fabric, raw and scraped and stripped of its top layer, the kind of thing that would have had him fussing for ten solid minutes if it had been on her. He’d spent the last half hour crouched in front of her with his sleeves shoved up, working antiseptic into every scratch she had while she complained about the sting, and he hadn’t mentioned it once. He’d have felt it. He must have. It had been there the whole time.
Her eyes narrowed.
She still hadn’t gotten to him yet.
A moment later he straightened with a cereal bar in one hand and a little foil packet of pills in the other, holding both out to her like a waiter presenting the bill.
“Okarun…” She took the bar at least, holding up her free hand to ward off the pills. “I’m fine.”
The wrapper crackled between her fingers. Maple. Her favourite of the ones they had left.
Her thumb paused against the edge of it.
“There’s no need for you to be in pain if it can be avoided…” He was still crouched over the bag, gaze dropping back into it as though the answer might be somewhere under the bandages. “Especially when it was my bad judgement that—”
He was still stuck on that?
They’d made it out. The dust had settled, nothing had come for the noise, and they were sitting here in one piece with nothing that had got its teeth into either of them. Whatever aches they’d picked up along the way would be gone in a week and forgotten in two. She’d have made the same call in his shoes and probably a worse one, and if he wanted to spend the whole evening turning it over she’d just have to find something else for him to do.
That was good enough for her.
“Yeah?” She let the grin spread slow, tipping her head at him. “So you’ll let me have a look at your back now, then.”
“Eh?” His head snapped up, hands frozen in the bag. “It’s just a scrape! There’s no point.”
Ha.
Hypocrite.
His glasses were still sitting low from all that rummaging, close enough that she barely had to lean forward. She shoved the cereal bar into her back pocket—she wasn’t putting a maple one down, not for anything—and reached out.
In one neat motion, she plucked them straight off his nose.
The indignant squawk he let out only made it better.
She was already backing away, hunching over her prize as she pushed the glasses onto her own face.
The world arrived filthy. Two fat thumbprints of dust sat square in the middle of both lenses, right where he’d been shoving them up his nose all evening, and she was still working out how anybody lived like that when the floor went strange beneath her.
She blinked hard. The wall ahead blurred at the edges, distance pulling oddly in and out until her eyes started to ache from trying to make sense of it. The whole room tilted and swam when she turned her head, the floor seeming to rise up to meet her, and she had to plant her feet to stop herself swaying.
Gods. How did he see anything?
She tipped her chin down and looked over the top of the frames instead.
Okarun was squinting at her, eyes narrowed and naked without the frames, aiming a glare at her that was landing perfectly well.
She pushed the glasses back up her nose.
“There’s no need for you to be in pain if it can be avoided.” She dropped her voice, straightened her spine, and adjusted the frames with careful fingers, holding the pose like it was a stage direction.
His face went red almost immediately.
She laughed as he lunged for her, darting sideways just before his hand closed around her wrist. The lenses threw off her sense of distance enough that she nearly clipped the wall instead, catching herself with one palm.
A sharp pull ran through her side.
She ignored it.
“I-I don’t sound like that!” He pushed himself back up, one hand braced on the floor, eyes narrowed somewhere in her general direction. “And I need those to see!”
“You’re right, of course!” She backed off another step, hands spread wide, her voice climbing into a singsong. “You sound far more pretentious.”
His mouth dropped open.
That one got him.
He came after her again, slower now, squinting to keep her in focus. Brows pulled down, the full scowl aimed right at her.
It might have been intimidating, if he hadn’t looked so much like a man trying to read the small print.
She kept retreating, laughing as she went, one hand holding the glasses in place while the other reached behind her to feel for the wall.
Rough plaster slid beneath her fingertips.
Then nothing.
She kept going, edging around him until she realised she’d almost made a full circle of the room.
Her palm came down on something soft.
Fabric bunched beneath her fingers.
She glanced back over the tops of his glasses.
His hoodie.
She’d made it right around the room.
She had it off the floor before she’d finished thinking about it. Getting into it was a mistake and she knew that halfway through, the stretch dragging hot and bright across her ribs, her bad arm refusing the sleeve until she forced it through. Worth it. It settled around her like it had never been anyone else’s—closer at the sides than it used to sit, because she was the one who’d taken those seams in.
It smelled of metal and wood and him.
“Oi!” He was moving before she’d got the second arm in. “That’s mine!”
“ACKshually—” she got the hood up one-handed, backing off toward the middle of the room “—I think you’ll find it’s my hoodie.”
His mouth opened. Shut. She watched him work through the fact that she was, technically, right, and then discard it entirely.
She flapped an empty sleeve at him and dropped her voice into the register.
“I’m Okarun!” She squared her shoulders and hunched them at the same time, which took some doing. “I’m gonna blame myself for a building falling on us!”
“That still doesn’t sound like me!”
He came at her low. She went left round the desk and the whole thing turned into a circuit—him cutting one way, her going the other, the first-aid kit skidding off across the floor when one of them caught it with a heel. The room wasn’t big enough for either of them to commit to anything. Every time he squinted her back into focus she’d already moved.
“And I think you’ll find,” he snapped, drawing himself up straight, “that actually I’m Ken Takakura!”
“Don’t call yourself that, you bastard!”
She was laughing too hard to hold the voice steady now. Her ribs had started filing objections somewhere around the second lap. She ignored every one of them.
“I’m OKARUN!” She hopped backwards over the fallen kit, both arms up. “Did you know the sun is actually an alien? It’s true!”
Her hand found the weight in the pocket.
Oh, that was good.
She had the roll out one-handed, the other still clamped over the glasses, and gave it a flick. The cloth unfurled and hung open down the length of her arm, every pick in its loop catching what light there was.
“I’m Okarun, and I look like a cute little nerd,” she said, swinging it in a slow arc, “but ackshually I’m a master criminal—”
“YOU PUT THOSE DOWN—” he had both hands up now, palms out, advancing on her at the careful pace of a man approaching something he’s afraid of startling “—OR SO HELP ME.”
She laughed so hard something under the bandage lodged a formal complaint about it, and rolled the cloth back up before it could swing again. Loop by loop, the way he did it. Tucked the tie down flat. Slid it back into the pocket and pressed a hand over the outside to be sure.
Then she looked up, grinning, and found him still standing there with his hand out. He hadn’t moved. He was watching the pocket.
“MY NAME,” he said, and drew a breath that took a moment, “IS KEN TAKAKURA.”
It came out of him at a volume she hadn’t known he had in there.
Her feet stopped. That wasn’t a decision—the name did that to her, always had, some traitorous part of her snapping to attention at the sound of it no matter whose mouth it came out of.
And he knew. That was the worst part. He’d used it on her like a weapon and he was already moving.
“AND THAT’S A LIE!” He was coming, fast, one hand out. “BUT THERE ARE SOME THEORIES THAT THE MOON COULD BE AN ANCIENT SPACESHIP!”
Of course. Of course that was the part he had to correct.
She still hadn’t moved. She could feel herself not moving, could feel the exact shape of the thing holding her there and could not for the life of her put it down, and he was four steps away and closing and grinning about it.
Cheating. Absolute cheating.
“Stop saying that name!”
She got half a step before his fist closed around the hem.
The desk was at her back. He’d walked her into it and she hadn’t noticed him doing it, too busy being pleased with herself, and now there was nowhere to go and nothing left to go there with. Her chest hurt. The lenses had turned the room into something that swam every time she moved her head, and her skull had started to ache in a low insistent way that suggested she’d been wearing them far too long.
But she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this much fun.
“Then give me back—” he hauled upward, and she got both hands into the fabric and hauled back “—my glasses and hoodie!”
“Whoa there!” She dug her heels in, wheezing. “Take me out for dinner first before stripping me—”
It was a good play. She’d watched him go scarlet over less than that, over nothing at all, and scarlet took him ten solid seconds to come back from. Ten seconds she badly needed for remembering how breathing worked.
He didn’t go scarlet.
He went still, and he looked at her—properly, right at her, close enough now that he didn’t need the glasses for it, that squint still fixed in place and doing something to his face she hadn’t seen on it before—
and said, completely flat:
“What did you think that maple bar was?”
There were no ten seconds.
There was nothing at all, just a sound coming out of her that had stopped being laughter somewhere along the way, folding her over the edge of the desk while he wrestled the hoodie up over her head with both hands and plucked the glasses off her face on the way past.
“Ha!”
Winded. Barely audible. He got it out anyway.
When she came upright he had the glasses back on and was shoving his arms into the sleeves, dragging the hood round the back of his neck and yanking the whole thing down into place like a man securing a perimeter. Hair standing up in six directions. T-shirt rucked at the collar underneath. Chest going like he’d run somewhere.
And a grin on him so pleased with itself she wanted to throw something at his stupid face.
She couldn’t. She was holding the desk. It was the only thing keeping her upright.
Gods.
Laughing hurt—
It took a while to come down. The laughing went out of her in stages, in stupid little aftershocks that set themselves off again every time she caught sight of his hair, until eventually there was nothing left in the room but her breathing and the dust turning slowly over in the light.
Her chest sorted itself out soon enough.
The stitch in her side did not. It had dug in somewhere under the bandage and settled there, a hot wire drawn tight through her ribs, and the scratch went taut along with it. Every wince pulled the whole length of the thing. Every pull made her wince.
She’d built herself a system.
“It hurts.”
“Should’ve taken the ibuprofen when I offered, then.” He crossed to the window and crouched to retrieve the first-aid kit from where it had ended up under it, not looking at her once on the way. “Instead of gallivanting around the room.”
He wasn’t showing her anything like the requisite amount of sympathy, she felt.
“It hurts, Okarun.”
“I heard you.” He turned the kit right way up, thumbed the catch, and started sorting it back into order. “I’ve still got them, you know. The good stuff, the fast-acting ones.” A wrapper went into the pile. Then another. He let her get most of the way to hopeful. “And you can have them…”
He paused. Looked up, right into her eyes, that smarmy grin back on his face.
“After you eat.”
She dug the bar out of her back pocket and held it up between two fingers. The wrapper had gone soft with the warmth of her, split along one seam, and folded clean in half somewhere around the second lap. She turned it over. Something inside shifted with a dry rustle and settled lower. Whatever shape it had started the evening as, it had given that up a while ago.
“Look!” She tipped her face up at him and blinked hard, twice. There were still tears sitting in the corners of her eyes from before, and she had absolutely no intention of explaining where they’d come from. “Look at me. I’m cwying.”
“You’re laughing.” He didn’t even glance up from the kit.
“I’m cwying, Okarun.”
“EAT.”
“What a gentleman.” She tore the wrapper open along the split, taking her time about it. “Gets a girl’s top off, still holds out for dinner.”
He shoved the whole thing into her mouth before she could finish enjoying herself.
“Eat.”
She ate. It was crumbs and it was maple and it was goddamn delicious.
“And,” he added, straightening up with the foil packet held between two fingers, well out of reach, watching her intently, “I did say not to move it too much.”
“You have said that,” she agreed around a mouthful.
“I did say it.” He turned the packet over. Tapped it once against his palm.
“You’re gonna keep saying it.”
“I might.” He crouched, put the pills into her palm and folded her fingers shut over them, entirely too pleased with the whole evening. Then he reached behind him for the water and pressed that into her other hand as well. “Here.”
She got them down with a mouthful and handed the bottle back without looking, already writing the next twenty minutes off. They’d work. He’d said they were the fast ones and she’d never once had to check whether he was right about that sort of thing, which was a luxury she’d stopped noticing she had.
She wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist. Pointed at him.
“Hoodie. Off.”
The change came over him in stages. She watched the grin go, watched him remember, watched the whole triumphant set of his shoulders come down about two inches as he worked out that the thing he’d just won was the thing he had to hand over.
“Fine.” He dragged it off over his head, slowly, with as much dignity as anyone can manage while turning themselves inside out. His hair came out worse than it went in. “Don’t nick it again.”
She immediately nicked it again.
“Ayase-san—” Both arms went up and stayed there, spread wide, appealing to a room that contained nobody else.
“Keeping it warm.” She pulled it on over her head with the arm that would still cooperate. “It’s freezing in here. You’ll thank me.”
He sighed. Long, aggrieved, entirely undercut by whatever his face was doing underneath it, which she wasn’t sure she could call anything but fond.
Then he pulled his shirt off, sat down on the floor with his back to her, and that was that.
She’d expected the scrape to be worse than it was. It ran from just under his hairline down between his shoulder blades, raw and pink and shallow—nastier looking than it was serious, the kind of thing that would be gone in a few days. Nothing in it, either. He’d have got the worst of it out himself, probably, blind, over his own shoulder, which was such a stupid thing to do that she decided not to bring it up.
She got a hand on his shoulder and turned him round before she touched any of it.
They’d done a pass in the treeline, the quick version, both of them still dust-blind and shaking too hard to trust it. This was the real one. Shoulders, ribs, the length of both arms, the back of his neck, the soft place under his jaw where you could miss something if you were rushing. She turned his wrists over and looked at his hands. She said arms up and he put his arms up.
Nothing. Scrapes and bruises and old scars she already knew the shape of. Nothing that broke wrong, nothing ringed, nothing with that shape to it.
She let herself breathe out. Better safe. It was always better safe, and she always felt stupid afterwards for how much lighter it made her.
She tapped his shoulder and he turned back round without being asked.
Then she got to work.
His shoulders had changed. She noticed it properly for the first time, kneeling there with the gauze in her hand—the width of them, the way the muscle sat along his arms now. Nothing like the boy her hoodies used to hang off like sails. Everything they’d done had gone into him somewhere. All that walking, all that carrying, all that hauling her upright when she couldn’t manage it herself.
He’d got strong when she wasn’t watching.
He flinched at the antiseptic and she told him to shut up, and he did.
Somewhere around the middle of it, she started humming. The same tune he had.
He didn’t say anything about that, either.
She worked her way down, one section at a time the way he did. Somewhere past his shoulder blades his breathing changed—slower, deeper, going out of step with her hands. His head dipped. Came back up. He mumbled something that might have been a word.
She didn’t hurry. It seemed a shame to.
By the time she was smoothing the last of the tape down he’d gone heavy under her palms, chin on his chest, shoulders dropped so far they’d stopped being his. He was still upright, technically. That was about all that could be said for him.
Then he wasn’t. He went sideways slowly, like a felled thing, and she caught his shoulder and stopped him at about thirty degrees. He made a small wounded noise at her and didn’t open his eyes.
“Time for bed,” she said.
“Mm.”
He didn’t move. She hadn’t really expected him to. She pulled the hoodie off, dropped it over his head from behind, and steered his arms into the sleeves one at a time while he did approximately none of the work involved.
“Up.”
He got up. She wasn’t sure he ever properly woke to do it.
They laid out where they always did, back to back, close enough that she could feel him breathing through both their layers. The cold was still coming up out of the floor, but it didn’t get anywhere near her.
“Hey.” She shifted her shoulder around until the floor stopped digging into it. “D’you think camp’ll still be like this?”
“Mm?” It came through her back more than her ears, a low buzz between her shoulder blades. “Like what?”
“This. Being idiots.” She flapped a hand at the room in general, at the kit still lying open where she’d left it, at all of it. “Y’know.”
He thought about it. He always thought about it, which was the whole reason she asked him things.
“I’m sure there is,” he said eventually, and she could hear the shape of it going soft round the edges, most of him already gone. “People will be people. And they need enrichment, or they go mad. Any social species does. You can’t just stack them somewhere safe and expect that to be enough.”
“Enrichment.”
“It’s the correct term.” Said with enormous dignity, from a boy who was about four seconds from unconsciousness.
“There it is.” She was grinning at the wall. “There’s the pretension.”
He didn’t rise to it. His breathing had already started going long and even, and it made the whole floor feel less like a floor.
“Goodnight, Ayase-san.”
“Night, Okarun.”
She stayed awake a while after that.
The tablets had got at the worst of it, the way he’d said they would. Her side had stopped arguing. The cold was still down there in the boards, working away at the room, getting nowhere.
The tune was still going round somewhere at the back of her head. His tune, the three-note nothing he did over the stove and over his notebook and hadn’t once admitted to. She’d picked it up off him at some point without either of them noticing, and now it was hers as well, and she hadn’t the faintest idea what it was called.
She’d ask him. Sometime.
Probably not, actually. He’d only stop.