sukunaes

The city outside was hushed, the kind of quiet that only came after midnight. Neon light bled faintly through the curtains, streaking the room in red and blue. You could hear the hum of the heater, the low rasp of Touya’s breathing beside you.

He wasn’t asleep yet- you could tell by the steady rhythm of his thumb tracing lazy circles against your arm. His skin was warm where it touched yours, always just a little hotter than normal, like he carried a piece of the fire still inside him.

“You still awake?” you murmured into the quiet.

He huffed a small laugh. “You’re talkin’, aren’t you?”

You smiled, eyes half-lidded. “Guess so.”

Touya lay stretched on his back, hair spilling across the pillow, one arm draped loosely around your shoulders. You were tucked against his side, your cheek pressed to the thin cotton of his shirt. His scent lingered faintly- smoke, soap, and the faint sweetness of the cheap coffee he always drank too late at night.

You tilted your head to look at him. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. The glow from the window traced the scars along his jaw, catching on the silver of his piercings. He looked softer like this, shadows blurring the sharp edges of him.

“What’re you thinking about?” you asked.

He shrugged. “Nothin’.”

“You’re lying.”

He smirked, just barely. “Maybe.”

You reached up, brushing your fingertips along the edge of his jaw. He didn’t flinch like he used to; he only turned his head slightly, catching your hand in his. The heat of his skin burned pleasantly against yours.

“Didn’t peg you for the clingy type,” he said after a beat, voice low.

“I’m not clingy.”

“Mm.” He tugged you closer, so your leg slid between his. “Could’ve fooled me.”

You rolled your eyes, but your smile gave you away. “You like it.”

He didn’t deny it. Instead, his hand moved to the small of your back, palm splayed wide, holding you there like he was anchoring you in place.

For a long while, neither of you said anything. The city hummed outside; the air between you stayed warm and still. Touya’s fingers traced slow lines up and down your spine, his breathing deepening as the silence stretched.

Eventually, the quiet became more than just comfortable, but something peaceful that neither of you bothered to break. You shifted a little, curling more fully into him, your fingers bunching in the hem of his shirt. Touya’s arm tightened around you automatically, as though his body knew exactly where to hold you even before he thought about it.

His warmth was steady, grounding. You could feel the faint pulse at his throat beneath your fingertips, the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest.

“You run cold,” he murmured suddenly.

You blinked up at him. “Huh?”

He looked down at you, his expression unreadable but his tone soft. “Your hands. Always cold. Should start wearin’ gloves or somethin’.”

You smiled. “Or I could just keep using you as a heater.”

That got a small laugh out of him, quiet and real. “Guess that’s one way to do it.”

You lifted your head slightly, brushing your nose against his jaw. “Thanks for keeping me warm, then.”

He hummed, eyes closing. “Anytime.”

The word carried more weight than it should have, and in turn you pressed a kiss to his collarbone, light as breath. “You’re getting soft, Todoroki.”

He snorted. “Don’t push your luck.”

But his voice was gentle. His hands were too. 

After a while, you felt his breathing slow, his hand at your back becoming still. You thought maybe he’d fallen asleep, until his voice came again- low, rough, barely above a whisper.

“Don’t know what you see in me.”

You opened your eyes. “What?”

He didn’t look at you. “You could’ve picked someone easier. Someone… normal.”

You propped yourself up on your elbow, studying his face. His expression was hard to read, the flickering light painting his features in soft gold and shadow.

“Maybe I didn’t want easy,” you said quietly. “Maybe I just wanted you.”

His eyes flicked to yours then, something unguarded flashing there before he looked away again. “…You’re too good for me.”

“Maybe. But you make me happy.”

That pulled a faint smile from him- small, crooked, disbelieving. He turned his head, meeting your gaze. “Yeah?”

You nodded. “Yeah.”

He exhaled slowly, the tension in his shoulders easing. Then, almost hesitantly, he reached up to cup your cheek. His hand was warm- always warm- and a little rough, his thumb brushing just under your eye.

“Guess I can live with that,” he murmured.

You leaned into his touch, smiling. “Good.”

He kissed you then, soft and unhurried. It wasn’t one of his fiery, desperate kisses- it was something quieter, steadier. When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours, the faintest smirk tugging at his mouth as he spoke“You’re dangerous, you know that?”

You laughed, curling your fingers in his shirt. “You’re one to talk.”

“Yeah, well…” His voice trailed off, his arm wrapping around you again. “Guess we’re a good match.” He muttered as you settled against him once more, the world outside fading away.

The hum of the city, the faint whistle of the wind through the window- everything blurred into the warmth of his body pressed against yours, the steady beat of his heart under your ear.

Sleep pulled you both under, and you thought to yourself for a moment more about how curious it was that two souls tangled together in the dark could somehow manage to feel like the safest place in the world.

Touya was released to you on the basis of you being his longest, and perhaps only, childhood friend; the only one willing to take him in after what he’d done. His family had not been authorized to bring him home due to a clinical concern of retraumatization; even without his father in the home, no one could be certain how that environment would affect him, and no one was willing to take a chance. It didn’t matter that you hadn’t seen him in years, or tthat you, along with everyone else, believed him to be dead—when the commission had called you, you’d agreed immediately.

You'd gone to see him before he’d woken up, nearly a year ago. Once again burned within an inch of his life following some nonsensical score he'd tried to but still hadn't settled. Standing there next to his mother, who—having not seen him since he was thirteen, before she’d been told he was killed during her own inpatient stay—clung to you in a way you’d never seen her do to anyone, trembling as you both stood on the other side of the glass and watched as the orderlies tended to his wounds and monitored his vitals from behind sterile dressings.

He would have never wanted either of you to see him that way, but nothing short of an obliteration of the building around you could have moved you from that spot, wholly unwilling to leave him again. You focused on his face, so changed and so hard yet you had a feeling that if he’d just open his eyes, you’d know it was him. You’d know, because you knew the second his face had flashed across your TV, days prior.

Like a mirror of your heart, you watched Rei raise a shaking hand to the glass. She sucked in a shuddering breath, exhaling a hollow and broken, “my son” as though he could hear it through the glass. To witness her grief brought its own wave of devastation and yet there was no one else to keep you both afloat so you let her cling to you as she silently cried for the little boy she’d left behind, believing he’d be safe—carrying the crippling weight of that guilt for all of these years.

* * * * * * * *

You’re unable to reconcile the eager, hopeful boy you knew with this man at your feet. White strands once red between your fingers—too long in some places, like he'd gone at it with shears in the dark. You absentmindedly make a mental note to ask Touya if you can fix it for him, when things get better and he can stand to tolerate a touch that isn’t violent.

You can’t be sure if he’s aware of your touch now—it’s some kind of secret satiation for you to dote on him like this, as sick as it is. You don’t dare push it—the skin grafts have healed, but have left him too sensitive; or so you’ve deduced, by the way he pulls at his clothes like they’ve got hooks in him. You don’t know how to even begin to remedy that, but you’ll try to come up with something. For him, you would bend until you broke, though you don’t know why. It's an odd and deeply disturbing devotion to someone who’d tried to burn the whole world down.

You think you might be angry at him. You’ve felt a sort of nagging, low-simmering indignation since you got that call—a feeling that you’ve mostly kept point inward over the initial sense of betrayal at the fact that he’d been alive this whole time and left you alone. That he had come back after waking up, but not to you. That he’s been so close this whole time. You think you could understand, if you really stretched the limits of your perception of human behavior, but you feel it still—a piece of your own heart and a significant portion of your own childhood spent grieving that bled well into adulthood—time you will never get back. You try not to aim all of that venom at him, knowing he’s holding enough. But it doesn’t go away, and it makes you worry. Especially when you see the result of squashed down anger, pale and sputtering on the floor of your bathroom every night.

He hasn’t said much of anything since he’d been dropped off—rather unceremoniously, for him being a prolific villian—at your front door. The only time you ever really hear his voice is from behind a closed door, during his weekly (mandatory) check-ins with the psychologist he’d worked with during his hospitalization. Even then, he’s not particularly chatty—which strikes you as odd, considering the lifetime he'd spent needing to be heard—contributing only a muffled and clipped agreement to appease the doctor who clearly had too much on their plate to read into it any further.

But as you stand over him now, you wish they had.

Hunched over the toilet but quiet now, you’re confident enough that he’s over the worst of it, so you move away from him to reach under the sink to grab a washcloth. You run it under the water until it’s saturated—making sure the water is as neutral of a temperature as you can get it—and you wring it out, offering it to him and instantly regretting the way it will surely feel against his skin, but not knowing what else to do.

He takes it wordlessly, reaching up and behind to lay it across the back of his neck. He exhales slowly—a pained, rasping thing—and drops his head until it meets the seat of the toilet. Distantly, you think that it’s probably unsanitary, but you let him be, knowing he’s been in contact with worse. Knowing of all things, how little that matters right now.

“Hey,” you murmur, as softly as you can manage, “you need water?”

He doesn’t look at you but you see him nod his head minutely, so you find your way out to the kitchen to find a glass, careful not to slam any cupboards in the process—unsure whose nerves you attempt to be mindful of now, feeling your own fray at their seams.

You watch the water pool at the bottom of the cup and you think about being smaller, when you’d sneak Touya out after dark to play after training with his father. He’d be covered in bruises and burns and somehow still beaming at you, eager to show you what he’d learned. Even then you’d never let him—you couldn’t bear to see what it did to him when he tried. Instead, you’d lead him into the tall grass back near the woods that lined his home. You’d both flop on your backs, pointing out the stars you could see. He told you he’d become strong enough to bring them down for you, and despite the impossible, you believed him wholeheartedly.

You snap out of it when you feel water run over your fingers, muttering a curse and reaching to turn the tap off. You wipe your hands off on the fabric stretched over your thighs, and then swipe them over your cheeks—it’s not often you allow yourself to grieve the Touya that you remember—the one that has long since been burned to ash by his own need to be loved, to make his father proud—but when you do, it’s only because it comes without warning. Fleeting, but just as sudden and destructive as it was on the very first day.

You set the glass on the counter and rest both hands on the sink in front of you—taking a moment to hang your head and try to breathe. It hurts—forcing your lungs to inflate despite this weight that pins you to the floor—but it won’t do anyone any good if you’re both a mess, and you think that he needs you, even if he never says it. You wonder if there’s a part of you that needs him to, and what that says about you if it's true.

You make your way back to the bathroom, where you find him leaning up against the wall, slumped over himself. It’s hard for you to see him without all of his pride—stripped of the one thing that was going to make him the strongest hero. You could almost scoff at that, if the urge to dissolve into your grief wasn't stronger—you’d never wanted him to be a hero. You used to think that was selfish, that it was your own desire to keep him with you and safe, but now you can only feel a deeply rooted loathing for anyone who’d ever put the thought in his head.

You haven’t spoken to his father at all. His other family members call often—especially Natsuo, who calls every day. When he does, you hand the phone to Touya, who just holds it at a distance while his brother catches him up to speed on every single occurrence of the last 24 hours since he last called. It makes you smile—to know that the love Touya’s siblings have for him didn’t die with him, even if he thought otherwise. Even if he doesn’t know how to receive it now.

There is a part of you that feels relieved that his father hasn’t reached out. From what you understand, Enji is now working on some type of atonement for what he’s done—something that might pass for an attempt at redemption to others outside of this—but you’ve seen the damage he’s caused. How he could possibly atone for that, you don’t know.

You lean against the wall, sliding down until you’re sat next to him. You set the glass on the floor in front of him and he lets out a soft grunt—one you’ve come to decipher as some sort of expression of gratitude. He reaches for it and you tilt your head up to look at a spot on the ceiling, avoiding his eyes—trying to give him a little privacy, and trying not to acknowledge the vulnerability he’s shrouded in.

“I’m going to the grocery store tomorrow,” you whisper, still not looking at him, “we’re a little low on a few things, so if there’s anything you want, you can add it to the list.”

You say it with no expectation of a response, nor do you anticipate that he’ll actually do it. While it’s true, and you will, you’re mostly just trying to remind him that you’re there. You suppose that you might be trying to draw out the moment—to hold off the inevitable morning, when you wake up and he’s shut in his room again and you don’t see him until it’s 3am and he’s retching at your feet.

It’s quiet then, the silence prolonged and taking a human shape there in your bathroom, and you feel your eyes start to droop with the dissipation of adrenaline. You want to ask him if he needs help back to his room, but you know he’ll deny you. You know he’ll probably sleep here on the floor, against the cool tile that feels safer and more familiar that the room you’ve made up for him. You take in a deep, steadying breath, and you slowly make your way to your feet.

“You know where I am if you need me,” you tell him gently, and you want to tell him that you need him, too, but some things are too hard—even in the dark. “Good night, Touya.”

You turn and force your legs to move away from him—a wholly unnatural thing that you still have not gotten use to. You have it nearly closed behind you when, for the first time in a very long time, you hear a rasped “good night” from the other side of it.

You try not to react—lest you scare him with any sudden movements like a feral animal—but when your bedroom door shuts behind you and you collapse into your bed, the feeling has no where to go but out. You hope to god he can’t hear you, sniffling and whimpering like a child into your pillow, but there’s no stopping it now. Because despite believing you forgot—despite the years and the damage to his body, and all of the things he’s done to mask who he was before—his voice is still his as you remember it. Deeper, sure, and harsher, but you’d still know it anywhere.

It is a long while before you can pull it together—heaving in a shuddering breath and choking on the exhale you force out in a feeble attempt to settle yourself. You don’t know when you fall asleep, but when you do, you dream of being shoulder to shoulder with Touya between the tall reeds, following the point of his finger to the stars above you.

* * * * * * * *

There is a warmth against your cheek when you stir, spreading across the skin of your forehead as you stretch and squirm—fighting the pull of just a few more moments of sleep. Blinking slowly, you study the beam of light peaking through the sheer curtains—the way the little refraction cuts through the otherwise dark of your room.

For a moment, in the light, you forget.

But when you roll to your side—away from it, looking to the door—reality returns with such thundering force that it leaves you breathless.

Despite the weight of it all, you push up off your bed to sit, head hung a little as you wait for the vertigo to subside—this endless oscillating between stages of sorrow. The house is quiet, but you hadn't expected anything else. Your eyes burn a little, and you wait for the tears to come. When they don’t, you resign yourself to the day.

You stand and move to the door, opening it quietly and wondering distantly when you started moving around like an intruder in your own home. There’s a vexation that comes with the thought—it curls in your stomach, slithering around the other feelings you’ve been holding there, and you shove it down, down, down, because you don’t want to be angry at him. Because he’s been through enough.

You don’t listen to the voice that tells you: so have you.

When you walk down the hall, the bathroom door is open, and Touya’s bedroom door is not. He must have gotten up before you, if he slept at all. You don’t imagine you’ll see him today—at least not during the day. You fight the urge to hover outside his door, ear crammed to the wood to try to hear him breathing.

You make it to the kitchen, flicking the switch on your old coffee maker and reaching your arms above your head, stretching a little. It does well to put you back in your body—your spine extends and pops and you remember that you are still a human being. 

You realize that you’d forgotten that, since Touya had come back—that, despite the seemingly fatal injury caused by his absence, your heart kept beating and the world continued to turn. That alone was an abominable hurdle for a while—how dare anyone else move forward, when he could not? But despite yourself, you did just that. You graduated, went to college, graduated again, got a job. You made other friends, but none ever made it as close to you as he had.

Every single thing you did felt insignificant despite your best attempts at a normal life. That in itself was something to grieve—you found no sense of accomplishment in the things you’d done and the loneliness, despite being surrounded by other people, was debilitating. You had found it hard to connect, and sustaining friendships had been difficult because he was always the comparison in the forefront of your mind. Reduced to a shell of a memorial for someone else. Every day, he haunted you. He would never know that you never even asked him to stop.

The coffee maker beeps and you are back again, sighing as you reach for a mug. You pour, breathing the smell in deeply and allowing it to bring you some tiny iota of comfort. You didn’t much care for the taste, if you were honest, but it was warm and it felt like something of a ritual—a small, rare indulgence you allowed yourself—so you drink it.

You move through the house on autopilot after that—dressing quickly, brushing your teeth, splashing water on your face in a half-attempt at washing it. Grabbing the grocery list—no new additions—off the fridge, you are halfway to the front door when you hear movement down the hall. You pause, listening as the floor creaks under Touya’s weight, and then it stops.

All at once, you are overcome by the need you feel—the longing that tells you to open that door and hold him to you. To breathe him in and feel the flutter of his heart beat from behind his ribs and know for sure that he is alive and there with you, because you’re still not convinced he's not just a new and creative apparition that your mind has concocted to torture you. The feeling fades as quickly as it came, and it leaves you panting, sagging against the wall as you try to come back to yourself. You wonder if it will always be like this—grieving for him with his ghost in the next room.

You manage to pull yourself together enough to reach a shaky hand toward the door. The cold winter air hits you, and it jars you enough that it’s all you can do to just stand there on the stoop, gulping down the chill into your lungs, trying hard to regulate the emotions that move through you like so many battering rams. You let them wreak their havoc and then move on through you, summoning whatever bravery you can to make it to your car and put the keys in the ignition. You feel a tug behind you as you walk further from the house, from Touya—the same one that you felt when you were thirteen and walking away from the scattering of the little ash that was left of him. The same one you felt as you all but carried his mother back to the car from the hospital after seeing him again. The thread that ties you to him. You wonder how long it can stretch before it starts to fray—or if it already has.

Your phone rings as you pull into the grocery store parking lot. You feel a tinge of regret as you answer it.

“Hi, Natsuo.”

“Hey!” he says into the phone, and the kindness that radiates from his voice warms you a bit, makes you smile.

“Sorry,” you tell him, opening the car door and climbing out, back into the cold, “I just got to the store. We needed food—Touya’s still at home.”

“Ah, that’s okay. I can try again later. It’s not like he’s going anywhere.”

You huff out a tiny laugh at his bad joke, and it makes you feel a little lighter. You find that the ache of putting one foot in front of the other is lessened, however minutely.

“Listen,” he starts, sounding a bit cautious, “I was actually hoping to talk to you. I wanted to see how you were doing—I know this probably isn’t easy for you.”

And you hate the way you want to hang up the phone immediately, because now your eyes are burning as you walk into the store and this is definitely not the place to let out whatever has been lurking just beneath the surface of your control, but it’s Natsuo and he’s so good and he cares for you like he always has, so you try to hold on to yourself. When Touya was gone he looked after you, adopting you as some sort of pseudo-sibling. You think he may have needed it as much as you did.

“I’m…managing,” you say, hesitation thinly veiled—too tired to tell him anything but the truth and still wanting to be delicate. “I just—I feel like I’m going to wake up and he’ll be gone. And it scares me a little that sometimes I wish that were true.”

You think that maybe you shouldn’t have said that last part, not to Natsuo—but the knowing sigh from the other end of the phone tells you that it’s alright.

“Has he said anything yet?”

“No, not really. I think I might've heard a word or two last night, but I was so tired that I’m not convinced I didn’t make it up.” A lie. But better than he said good night to me and I completely lost my shit. You still had some semblance of pride.

“Hey, that’s progress!” he says, but his tone doesn’t quite deliver the excitement you think he wanted to. You realize that he might feel as worn down as you do.

“Do you think it’ll get better?” you ask quietly, not certain you want to know the answer.

There’s a pause, long enough that you start to think the call may have been disconnected, and then he says, “Don’t give up on him, okay? I think…I think he’s trying.”

* * * * * * * *

You make it back to your house and you haul the groceries up to the front door, the conversation with Natsuo at the forefront of your mind despite your best attempts to will it away. You know intimately how hard it’s been for him to be away from Touya—to know that he is alive and so close and still not be able to see him. The commission has not yet given you the greenlight to have his family over to visit, even without Enji. You understand, and you think it would probably be too much for Touya anyway; to see all of them and know that the only thing that has changed—really, fundamentally changed, into something so mangled and nearly unrecognizable—is him. You wish you could show him that it wasn’t true, but it’s hard, and the guilt you feel reinforces that. Either way you spin it, life went on. You all kept living, even if what you'd really accomplished was some bastardized version of mere survival.

You think you could understand why he’d want to reduce the world to ash, knowing that.

You set the bags on the counter, grabbing one and moving to the fridge to unload it, and you think of Touya, like you have done every waking moment since you found out he was still alive. Part of you is so angry at that, as you seem to be at everything now, because the life you are suffering through and the thoughts you think are not yours. You wonder if they ever were, really—was there ever a single moment of separation from him? Even in his absence, you never could tell where he stopped and you began.

You all but jump out of your skin when you hear movement behind you. You whip your head around, a surprised shriek gathering preemptively in the back of your throat, and find Touya—glass from last night in hand, visibly startled by your reaction. Setting it down in the sink, his movements are cautious, and you have to fight to regulate your breathing. You stand there, eyes wide and clutching a bag of spinach to your chest, frozen in place as he faces you.

His eyes meet yours and he doesn’t look away for the first time in the weeks he’s been here, and suddenly you are thirteen and he’s the king of a castle made of sticks. He’s telling you that he’ll protect you—his counsel, his confidant, his right hand—from anything, and all you can think is you liar, you liar, you liar. 

It takes every ounce of control you have to not audibly crack under his stare, but then he opens his mouth and rasps a soft thanks, and you think he’s probably thanking you for the water from last night or maybe for the groceries but then it doesn’t matter at all because suddenly your vision blurs and you’re crying and there is nothing to be done to stop it.

It’s too much—the blue of his eyes that hasn’t changed and the way you are so angry at him you think the feeling alone might burn you alive from the inside and the way he is standing in front of you like a deer in headlights, an arm half-extended to you because he has no idea what’s happening or how to help. And you want to laugh, because you don’t either.

But right now you can’t do anything but cry, head hung and arms around yourself, fridge door still open and grocery bag hanging by your side. Suddenly you’re afraid that if you let go—if this whiteknuckled grip you have on yourself fails—you may very well fall apart.

You cry until you feel like there’s nothing left in you, and when you wipe your eyes you find that he’s still standing there. And then you’re wishing that you were still sad because now you’re just angry, and maybe a little embarrassed at your outburst, and there’s nothing to stop you from scrunching up your face and spitting out a venom-filled where were you? at him.

And you can’t really blame him when, after a pause, he turns on his heel and retreats to his room.

* * * * * * * *

You find yourself once again suffocating in the silence of your house through the evening. You drag yourself to bed early—not bothering to clean yourself or change—and faceplant into the covers. It’s not necessarily your intention to fall asleep, only to not have to face what's happening outside the door; you don’t even realize you have until a sharp yelp has you shooting upright from your bed, blinking blearily and trying to sink your fingers deep enough into your consciousness to drag it up to a functioning level.

You sit there for a moment, barely breathing as you strain to hear through the wall. And then you hear it again— that tiny, pained gasp, and you are out of your bed and moving before you can even consider if your mind is playing tricks on you. You do the only thing you can think of and hurry to the kitchen to fill up the glass Touya had returned earlier. Water in hand, you walk back down the hallway—slowly, like you’re approaching a feral cat with a forearm hovering in front of your face to block any fearful swats—and stop outside of his door.

“Touya?” you call, knocking on the door softly with a knuckle, “I have some water for you.”

There’s no movement behind the door—you expected as much, so you let out a slow breath and take a seat, back leaning up against the door. Part of you wonders if this is okay—if you should just leave it outside of the door for him to pick up after you’ve gone back to bed—but the other part is so tired of this. Tired of tiptoeing around him, tired of pretending that god forsaken elephant in the room crushing both of you isn’t there. You think you might owe him an apology for earlier, too. Maybe.

You realize you’d fallen asleep when the sudden absence of the door at your back has you startling. You look up from your spot on the floor, and he’s there in the doorway—blue eyes wide and staring at you like he doesn’t know what to make of this—of you.

“Sorry,” you say quietly, despite the bitterness you feel, “I just wanted to give y—hey, are you bleeding?”

His eyes move to where yours are now locked on the hand of his that grips the door, and he sucks in a breath when he sees what you are seeing.

A fresh wound over the back of his hand—a tear of the skin over the exact spot his staples used to be, the blood now dripping onto your floor.

Neither of you move. The silence is deafening.

You are the first to shatter it: “Can I clean that for you?”

His head is down, but you can see him eye you from under his white bangs, carefully mulling it over. It is a painfully long moment before he offers you a slight nod. You pull yourself to your feet and turn, walking toward the bathroom and hoping he chooses to follow.

You throw open the cabinet under the sink to locate your first aid kit. Luckily, Touya’s care team had sent some supplies with him to care for his skin, but you’re not sure if there’s anything that can be helpful if he needs a new graft—or if that's even a possibility. The specifics of his treatment are lost on you, and you feel a fresh round of frustration at that—because why the fuck would no one bother to tell you anything about how to help him?

You hear him enter the bathroom behind you, and something akin to relief washes over you. You hand the glass of water you’re still holding to him, and he takes it from you silently, cradled in his uninjured palm. You gather up the supplies you think will be the most helpful; you turn to face him and you’re immediately a little woozy, because he is still bleeding—more than what you’d consider a reasonable amount. It doesn’t seem to bother him, though, and he just stands there, eyeing you. Cautious, like an animal cornered.

“You—hm. Can you sit on the toilet so I can look at it?”

He moves silently after a moment, sitting before you. It is another before he lifts his hand up to you, so slowly, his whole body tense.

“Is it okay to touch you?”

He offers something clipped—more of a grunt than anything but you interpret it as affrimative; you slowly wrap your fingers around his wrist, turning it to examine the gash.

After cleaning a bit of the blood away, you realize it’s not as bad as you’d thought. But it does need rinsed out and patched up.

“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” you tell him quietly, unwrapping the sterile wipes from their packages, “but if you think there’s a problem with the grafts, we should call the doctor.”

He’s silent and you continue working, unfolding the towelette and wiping it over the wound, murmuring a small apology for the sting. You’re not sure if he feels nothing or everything—uncertain of how the nerves in his body react to stimuli anymore—but if he’s in pain, he’s not showing it.

“It’s—not that,” he mutters, and you have to physically restrain yourself from tensing the hand that’s still holding onto him. To hear him speak is still so foreign and so painful that you almost have to block it out to focus on the task at hand. He hesitates, and out of the corner of your eye you see him open his mouth and shut it again, like the words are there but unwilling to come out.

“Okay,” you feign nonchalance, pulling a piece of gauze from its wrappings and applying it to the clean wound. You pull another few to add to it, and he finds his voice again. You hope you’re not shaking.

“Happens when I—” he tries, and it's so quiet you almost don’t hear him; he’s turning his head away from you, like he needs to look at anything else to get it out, “—the dreams.”

You don’t look at him, but the need to is enormous. You unwrap the roll of bandages, considering your next words carefully.

“Did you do this to yourself?”

He sighs at that, like you’re the biggest idiot in the world for asking. Like it inconveniences him to have to hear such a question. You want to kick yourself, and after a lengthy pause, you wish you hadn’t asked at all.

“Not…on purpose. In my sleep.”

You have no idea what to say to that, and you have the feeling that if you say anything at all you might start crying again and you know that would startle him, so you grit your teeth and nod—almost mechanically—as you wrap the bandage around his hand with as much care as you can muster, but your movements are robotic; drawing your fingers back too quickly like he burned you, only trying not to linger but communicating a worse version of it. The regret is a tangible thing.

“Should be okay now,” you say, and it’s almost a plea. Too thick with emotion that refuses to leave you be.

“Thanks.”

It’s so much softer than you think he should ever be, especially now. It’s alien—wrong, you think, the bitterness a sentient thing inside you—and you don’t respond because there’s another part of you that is so, so devastated that until now he’s had no one to tend to his wounds like this. Like he deserves—gently and with humanity, even if that alone was no small task for you, for a much different reason. You wonder if he’ll ever tell you about the dreams—if he will ever trust you enough to share a secret with you again. You think of the staples that once held him together and you taste bile.

“Are you—” he starts, and then stalls, and you watch as his hands clench and then unclench in his lap, the fresh bandage straining around his knuckles. You watch the movement and wait for him to continue.

“Are you angry?”

Your eyes snap up to meet his, already searching for you. You see him tense like he's braced for impact, but he doesn’t look away, and neither do you. You decide that it’s not fair to either of you to lie, so you tell him the truth.

“Yes,” you whisper, and his face doesn’t change. He doesn’t say anything to that, and you think that maybe it’s for the best, because right now would be just about the worst time for him to suddenly want to unpack your anger. You are bone tired, teetering on some edge that is far too unstable, and you just want to retreat back into your bed and nurse this wound privately. So you stand, murmur a quiet good night to him, and you do just that.

You’re not sure how long it is before you’ve wrung yourself out, and eventually you give up on any hope of sleep, pulling yourself up off the mattress with the intent of making sure Touya made it back to his room.

When you walk into the hall, you nearly trip over it—the glass of water from earlier, full again—a white flag at your door, waiting for you.

* * * * * * * *

A slight and silent shift occurs after you patch Touya up in your bathroom, but you can only detect it in you. You can’t be sure if it’s a general improvement or a sign that you’ve reached the end of your rope.

You no longer feel as much like you’re a stranger in your own home—and that’s good, you think, except there’s still something there. You grow bolder, more open in your hostility—Touya does not. The rage vignettes the edges of everything until the power that lives in Touya pales in comparison. A smoldering thing, just waiting for the right kindling. Capable of incinerating your little apartment down to its foundation.

It’s there when you watch him sneak into the kitchen from your spot on the couch. He doesn’t need to do that, but you haven’t told him otherwise. You wonder if a part of you gleans satisfaction from his discomfort—that he feels like he’s the one walking on eggshells now. You should feel guilty about that, because he’s likely felt like that this whole time and in theory, you want him to be comfortable. But the thing that lurks on your periphery feels justified in watching him cower. Like you’re owed that for what he’s put you through. 

And more guilt follows, then, because it feels profoundly wrong to feel victimized by someone who experienced the hell that he did. To name what exactly it is that he’s put you through brings such a nauseating wave of shame over you, because it's a tiny flea in comparison to what was done to him; you feel like a fool to compare losing a friend to his father burning him within an inch of his life and abandoning him over and over again. You don’t want to believe that he would hurt you intentionally. And maybe, if there was another way, he would’ve come back. He would’ve at least found a way to let you know that he was alive. He was your friend.

And yet, he did not. 

So despite the altruistic part of yourself, watching him slink past you makes you want to lunge at him. Makes you want to let out whatever ugly thing is slinking around in your gut and tell it to do what it pleases with him. To make him hurt, like you do.

Rationally, you know you’re ignoring what’s really hurting you—and that it is hurt, underneath all of the rage. You’re not sure when your philosophy toward accountability became something adjacent to an eye for an eye, but you suppose that’s what happens when you’re left to rot in your anger—necrotic and poisoning you from the inside. No where for it to go but out. 

It’s not fair. You land here every time—you know how childish you’d sound if you said it out loud, but the repetition of the phrase is as incessant as your anger. You’d spent the majority of your life grieving over the loss of him, just to have him creep around you now like he hasn’t haunted you the whole time. He’s here and he’s still gone. You are always in purgatory. 

There’d been no follow up with you, either, which you found telling. He has his weekly check-ins, or he did, but not once has anyone from the commission checked in with you. Not once has anyone called and asked, how are you settling in with your dead, not dead, mass murderer, childhood friend? Are you getting along?

And that’s the thing—you are, on the surface. He still rarely says anything, but he cleans up after himself and if you weren’t so painfully aware of his presence all of the time, you think maybe you’d forget he was there at all.

It just makes you wish he’d say something. Anything to acknowledge what’s happening between you, or maybe just within you—something to let you know that he understands what he’s done. That you are not the only one walking around half out of your mind. Up until he left he’d been the biggest loudmouth you’d ever met, and the thought that he has nothing to say to you now just makes you so, so sick. 

It dawns on you that he may not know the extent of the hurt you carry around. He’d asked if you were angry, and it had caught you so off guard that you are only beginning to turn it over in your mind, weeks later. You’d have been indignant, if you hadn’t been so exhausted that night—because of course you are angry. There is nothing else for you to be.

You sink down further into the cushions of the couch and pull your little throw blanket up over your chin. It’s getting colder out, and the heat hasn't yet kicked on. You make a mental note to text your landlord. You consider if you should have informed him that you’ve been housing a serial killer in your apartment. You watch out the window, eyes following the descent of the sun as it tips over the horizon. There’s a commotion; the birds in the tree out front take flight all at once, and your heart aches with the envy you feel. You wonder if they know how lucky they are, to not be tethered to anything that keeps them here. 

For the second time in the last few hours, you hear a door down the hallway swing open. Slowly, like the person opening it is an intruder and not the man you’d been cohabitating with for months. Right now, they are seemingly one in the same. 

“Touya.”

He freezes like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. He looks at you, and despite yourself you feel a little pity for him. You sigh, letting out a slow breath and hoping it takes the edge out of your tone. When you open your mouth, you know it doesn't.

“You don’t have to sneak around here, you know. You’re allowed to be out here when I am.”

He looks like a cornered animal, and the snarling, bitter part of you keeps him pinned there, delighting in the way that you can see he wants to hide.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, head down. 

Sorry.

He’s…sorry?

Ah, you think. There it is.

“What for.” It’s not a question. When it comes out of your mouth, it is a challenge. It is a warning. It is a poison tipped arrow, pointed straight at him. 

“I—” he’s still not looking at you, and you know at once that you will not be able to stop whatever is about to come out of you, “—thought I should stay out of the way.”

You take in the sentiment and let it roll around in your head for a moment. You pull every word from the stem, turning it over, breaking it down into pieces. Trying to understand. 

All you can gather is that he’s wrong. Fundamentally and devastatingly wrong. And if you were a better person right now, you’d console him. But the animal crawling its way out of your throat is faster and far more cunning than your own integrity.

You scoff—part of you is shattering, splintering faster than you could hope to put it back together, and you don't try to. His eyes snap to you, and you know he’s trying to read what you’re feeling from your face. Enough of that, you think.

No more. 

“Stay out of the way?” you repeat, moving to stand up from the couch. You take a step toward him—he doesn’t move. There’s so much distance between you, and none at all. You feel like if you reached out to touch him, he too would shatter. It’s effort to keep your hands clenched at your sides. You understand intimately and at once why he took such a liking to violence. 

You know you’re being cruel right now, but you let it out anyway. “There hasn’t been a second of my life that you’ve been anywhere but in the way.”

He looks at you, and you see the confusion all over his face. It does nothing but spur you on. Something inside you tells you to make it hurt. 

“Every single day since you left, I have been right here. I couldn’t do anything, Touya. I have been on that hill, waiting for you. Trying to talk to you, pleading to whoever was listening to bring you back. So you can imagine how it feels to know now that you were never up there to begin with.”

You don’t recognize the sound of your own voice. You hear it from outside yourself, and around you the scenery changes. You are back in those woods again, far smaller, still just as angry. Just as afraid.

“You were here the whole time,” you whisper, eyes boring into his. You feel them sting but you do not waver—you do not look away.

“This whole time,” you’re louder now, fueled by everything you had pushed down—for him or for you, you couldn’t know—“all of the years I spent trying to come to terms with you being gone—you were right here. Alive and breathing. Someone else entirely. Doing whatever the fuck you were doing.”

By now, he’s removed all traces of emotion from his face. His jaw sets and you are overwhelmed by the sudden urge to sock him in it. This is the Touya you hate—the one that reverts back to indifference. The one you haven't seen in so long and the one you'd know anywhere. The one that looks at you like you’re a piece of asphalt kicked up under his shoe. You feel your stomach turn. 

“I know what he did to you, Touya. I know it was awful and that he left you there to die and I have spent every second since hating him enough for the next three lifetimes,” you feel the tears slip down your cheeks, and you make no move to wipe them. You want him to see. 

“But you left me,” you croak, lacking all of the heat you had a second ago, knowing you’ve arrived at the root of it after all, “I needed you and you left. And you took all of those people with you. It wasn’t him that did that, Touya.”

A pin drop would be far too loud with the silence between you right now. You look at him for a moment more, and he is somewhere else—eyes looking past you, body tense and ready to flee. You take a deep breath in, and let it out. 

“I understand it all,” you tell him quietly, “but I’m still stuck there.”

You convince your feet to move after a moment more and brush past him, legs feeling like lead all the way down the hall. You close your bedroom door softly behind you, and sag against it. A small chuckle escapes you before you can stop it. The back of your head meets the wood—it occurs to you for the first time that the man you just berated has killed an unimaginable number of people. You wonder when exactly you lost the plot so badly that that stopped being any bit of a concern for you.

* * * * * * * *

You don’t see him at all for the rest of the week. It’s not shocking—you expected as much.

But you weren't expecting to find him sitting on the front step as you return from your grocery trip.

You approach him slowly, as if he’s a great big predator that can only sense movement and you are the prey trying to outsmart him. He eyes you, but says nothing. You make it to the stoop in front of him before you decide to attempt to speak to him. 

“Hi.”

A pause. You watch him suppress the urge to bolt. And then, “hi.”

“Are you alright?”

He grunts, and looks away. You take it as a yes, because you’re not aware of an alternative. You switch your groceries to the other arm.

“What are you doing out here?” you ask softly, trying to tread lightly. “It’s cold.”

He studies you for another moment. You’re not quite sure what he’s thinking. You wonder if he’s finally decided to take you out for what you said to him the other day. 

“You need help?”

You balk. “I—uh. Huh?”

He nods toward the bags in your arms.

“Oh,” you blink, a little stunned. You can feel your brain searching for an explanation that Touya is clearly not going to provide. “Uh, yeah. Sure. You can take these.”

Without another word, he takes the bags from you and disappears back inside the house. You’re stuck on the stoop, reeling. Wondering if the world has started to turn in reverse.

* * * * * * * *

You eat dinner alone, as you’ve grown accustomed to, and you plop down on the couch to assume your nightly routine of pretending to watch the TV and listening for Touya’s movements in the next room. Your nerves are buzzing from your interaction with him earlier—you bring your wine glass to your lips and suck down more than you should. Despite all the effort you’ve put into deciphering the meaning of it, you come up empty. 

So absorbed you are in the apparent puzzle he’s created that you don’t notice him come out of his room until he’s blocking your view of the TV with his body. You jump, spilling your wine and hissing out a curse. You look up at him, heart rate elevated and more than a little confused. Your eyes meet the blue of his and you don’t know what to say.

“Hi,” he mutters, kicking his foot at a spot in the carpet. He’s never looked more like he did when he was thirteen than he does in this moment. 

“Hi,” it comes out as a whisper, because it’s all that you can manage.

“What’re you watching?”

You think maybe he’s already killed you. Has to have, because there is no way this interaction would happen in the reality you were living in before. Your mouth opens, and then shuts. Opens again. “Ah, uh—nothing really? Just flipping through.”

His gaze moves to the empty spot next to you. Yours follows, and you look between it and him a few times, trying to catch up. 

“Do you—” you pause, wanting to proceed cautiously. You fight the nervous laughter that bubbles in your throat, deeply uncomfortable in what would otherwise be a very human exchange. “Would you like to join me?”

There's a horribly tense moment of deliberation from him, and then he decides to do just that. He settles down on the couch awkwardly, like he’s never done a thing like it before, and you watch as he adjusts. He’s so tense and it starts to feel stupidly comical; a squeak of a laugh slips out of you before you can stop it. He shoots a glare at you, and it makes you laugh harder—the whole thing is ridiculous, and you laugh with your head thrown back until you feel something dislodge itself from your insides. His face softens, however minutely, and you swear you see a tiny, tiny hint of a grin at the corner of his mouth. 

“Oh god,” you choke out, trying to beat down another round of giggles. You wipe a tear from your eye and let out a sigh, allowing the smile to stay on your face. You feel something shift, if only by a centimeter, between you. 

You pay attention to what’s on the TV in front of you for the first time in months.

* * * * * * * *

Touya starts to get it.

He has no idea what it is—only that he feels different, and he thinks that’s a good thing, maybe. He assumes it is, because there’s been considerably more enthusiastic head nods from his therapist through his screen each week.

It’s new. The therapist, anyway—the Hero Commission sanctioned psychologist check-ins (a generous title, considering the lack of any real clinical treatment) had quickly fizzled out and then stopped all together, and it was at the tail end of another one sided phone conversation with Natsuo that he’d heard of a shrink with a reputation for treating those who’d been harmed by heroes.

“She has a surprisingly booked schedule,” Natsuo had said, half in jest and not without a tangible weight. If nothing else, Touya was curious—and bored. With nothing better to do, he decided to try a session. Before he knew it, he’d sat through the better part of four. It's not the worst thing in the world—he'd already been through that.

He doesn’t talk much—mostly because he’d talked a whole lot on a national scale and really, what else could he possibly have to say—but lately, he’s found himself full of questions he doesn’t know how to ask. It’s hard—he doesn’t feel particularly brave these days, and to get his mouth to shift into the shapes of the words is enough of a challenge. But he tries—he figures that has to count for something. Something about therapy makes it acceptable to congratulate himself for the smallest of victories.

He wants to understand your anger. There’s a weight to it—one that smacks into him solidly every time he’s on the other end of it. He’s not unfamiliar with it—he’s been pissing people off for years now. But yours is different. Yours is heavy—you hate him and you still run your fingers through his hair when he hides his tears in the toilet bowl and heaves out everything he’s buried deep inside himself at two in the morning. It’s not so easy to wrap his head around that part.

“Your friend.”

It comes through the speaker as a statement and not a question, and he scowls. Is that what you are to him? He’d been so sure that he’d never had a friend. But that can’t be right, can it? When everyone had moved on and away from him, but you had not—was that your friendship? The word tastes bitter and unsatisfactory on his tongue, but he doesn’t have a better one. He nods.

“Is that so surprising, Touya?”

He says nothing, only glaring into the camera. She sighs, wholly unimpressed.

“Think about it. You’ve mourned someone and then they show up out of nowhere, and they’re not that person you’ve been keeping in your heart all of this time. It’s like—a second death.” She says, tapping a finger to her chin as if to summon the words. “Another cycle of grief on top of the first. That’s a lot to feel, no?”

And he…knows that. You’d made it pretty clear, of course, but he feels it, now—like a rash. Your grief sits on his skin and festers in a way that his did not. His burned hot and fast and left him empty, and he woke up without a thought of what the consequences of that fire would be. Yours hit him like a brick wall the second he stepped foot through your door. That brick wall only gave way to cement—unending, uncomfortable. Keeping him stuck in his room—keeping him away from you.

It feels wrong to interfere with it—like for all he took away from you, this is the least he could give you. He can handle the anger, of course—he can sit in your white-knuckled fury and let it close in on him. That’s fine.

The crying is another thing entirely.

It’s not as if Touya is a stranger to tears, either—he saw his fair share of them wet the faces of those he cut down. Just like the anger, it never particularly bothered him. Not like yours do.

And maybe it’s because he doesn’t see them. The only indication that there are tears comes when he lays completely still at night, and he can just barely hear your sniffles through the wall. Something about it feels bad—unfair, maybe, the way you wait until you think he’s sleeping to let out what you’ve been holding on to. He almost wants to laugh at you—because what is the point of sparing his feelings now? He’s already put you through this much. He would deserve to have all of the aftermath be aimed right at him.

But to lie to himself is evidently not off limits, because it does affect him. Every once in a while he’ll hear a whimper through the dry wall that twists his gut into a tight knot. He thinks of the promise he made you, all of those years ago. He tries not to, but your crying fishes it back to the surface—his stupid, idiot promises to protect you no matter what. Only to become the knife that keeps your hands pinned to the table. He doesn’t know how to protect you from himself. He finds himself still taking from you.

He finds it odd to spend an hour every week learning about the mechanics of human connection. Finds it unsettling, actually, talking about something so insignificant as feelings and realizing that where you are concerned, there is nothing insignificant about it.

“Alright,” he mutters, coming back to himself. “M’hanging up.”

His therapist only laughs. “We made it 20 minutes this time!”

* * * * * * * *

He decides to try eating dinner with you. You’ve been dropping little half-invitations for the last few weeks, and he’s been readily avoiding them. To sit across from you at your table feels too much like confrontation—the cowardice he’s become accustomed to shuts it down before he’s even had time to really consider it. Another odd thing he'd not known himself capable of—this thing his therapist found no shortage of glee in identifying as anxiety.

But tonight you’re eating on the couch in front of the TV, and that feels better. In the dark and with a distraction, he doesn’t have to fully face you. He can think of you, loudly, and you’ll be none the wiser.

He sneaks glances at you from the other side of the couch and finds himself struck—not for the first time—at how for all of the ways you are different now, you are still the same as you were when he was a child. He knows it’s nothing to do with how you look and everything to do with the way that you are—an anchor that both terrifies and comforts him. He woke up in that hospital bed and knew you were there on the other side of the glass before he opened his eyes. He'd know you anywhere—the only part of his heart to keep beating despite his best attempts at digging the whole thing out of himself.

Is that what friendship is?

He shakes himself out of his head when he feels you squirming next to him. From the corner of his eye he watches you fight with the blanket you’ve swaddled yourself in, finding himself somewhere between amused and endeared. It’s an unfamiliar feeling and yet, it feels like he’s felt it toward you all his life. He gives you another second to sort it out yourself before he feels bad. He forgets where he is, he forgets himself—he doesn’t think at all when he wraps his fingers around your foot to free it from the fabric tangling it.

Both of you freeze. For an aching moment, neither one of you breathes. And then you wrench your leg away from him like he’s burned you.

“Sorry,” you mumble, already standing, already shaking. “Sorry, I just—”

But you’re already halfway down the hall—voice tapered off in an explanation he doesn’t need to hear you finish because he already knows. Your door shuts quietly behind you, but creates such a divide between you that you may as well have broken it off its hinges. He doesn’t have to be still to hear what’s happening on the other side of it—he feels it bodily.

He can’t listen to you cry again. His body makes the decision before his mind does, and when it finally catches up he’s standing in the middle of your room.

You’ve gone completely silent—he’s not even sure you’re breathing. Rigid and curled into yourself, you refuse to meet his eyes. Something about it is hard to stomach. It makes his chest ache and before he can stop himself, he’s reaching for the covers and sliding into the bed next to you, wholly ignoring the way the fabric feels like sandpaper against his skin. He closes his eyes and his body forms to yours on a memory he doesn’t have but feels he must. You make a wounded sound like he’s just punched you.

“Touya,” it’s barely a whisper and wholly a warning. There’s so much pain in your voice it makes him nauseous. He ignores it, snaking his arm around your waist to pull you to him. You regress to a simpler phase and a baser instinct and you fight him, shoving at him, breathing hard, “Touya—”

“Just let it out,” he murmurs, pressing his forehead between your shoulder blades, holding on to you like his life depends on it. It hurts, and he will not ever let go. “Please. Let it go.”

He feels you freeze—and then the breath leaves you so violently it startles him. He’s almost relieved when he hears the accompanying cry.

He keeps himself held tightly to the curve of your spine in some strange hope that he might absorb your grief into himself. If he could just carry this, it’d be better. For you, anyway—he’s certain that what you’ve been carrying around would be enough to put him down, but he’d drop at your feet if it meant you could be free of what he’s done to you. The most altruistic he's ever felt in his life and with no sense of pride about it.

His arm tightens around you when he feels you start to fight his grip again. “The hell are you doing—”

“Please,” it's only half audible through a tight throat—and it renders him silent. “I just need to see you.”

He can do nothing but let go—let you twist around, and he immediately wishes he’d have fought you on it, because to see your face right now is too much.

Even in the dark your eyes find his and for the first time he can easily name the feeling that permeates into his bones. A wretchedness so familiar and tender like a wound, it’s only a second before he’s pulling you closer for his sake—anything to not have to see the injury he's caused. He’d burn the whole world down again to not have to see what he’s done to you—more cowardly than he's ever known himself to be.

It's odd, knowing that it’s not necessarily guilt he feels—instead it is a mountain of what can only be his grief, looming and jagged with no perceivable path up it. He looks at you and you reflect back at him a version of yourselves he’d left behind. He takes in your gap toothed smiles and grubby fingers interlocked with his and he tastes iron.

“I was afraid you were really gone.” Your chest shudders harshly against his own. It’s awful—the whole thing. He’s certain he’s never felt like this—at least not in this lifetime.

“Yeah,” he can’t get his voice above a whisper. “Me too.”

It’s painful—the child in him that he believed to be destroyed. Looking him in the face now, you stand next to him, but a step behind. That hurts more than anything—the outstretched hand he never reached for. How different things would have been if he’d have just turned around. He understands now—he’d left you both back there.

He holds you to his chest and feels, for the first time since back then, when something is knocked loose within him. He’s not afraid that he’ll bleed all over your bed, because he knows he already is. Something about the certainty of the way you are here, and he is right here next to you, shakes him fundamentally. There are no tears left in him to shed, so instead he tries to steady shuddering gasps tucked into the crook of your neck.

And then it’s his turn to be held, and that’s painful too, because his skin is still so sensitive and his heart is breaking and god does he wish he would’ve turned around.

He opens his mouth to say something and can only let loose a tiny, aching sound into the silence, and you understand. But that’s not enough—he needs to try. He needs you to know—to hear him and see that he tried.

“I wanted to find you.”

It shatters the quiet that’s been settled around the two of you. He wonders if it’s a cruel thing to say. He doesn’t know how to gauge your silence. He settles on filling it.

“Didn’t know how,” he whispers to the ceiling, “Was too late—I was too late—“

“Touya.” You stop his spiral and you sound exhausted. You lay shoulder to shoulder now as you did once before, in some other life so far away from this one, and when your fingertips drag up his palm and weave between his own, it feels like you’ve touched down to bone marrow.

“It’s not too late,” you tell him, turning your head to look him in the eye, “it’s not.”

He has no reason to believe you and yet, he thinks he could. If there is a version of himself that could could trust, still living somewhere inside him.

but now you’re standing near dottore’s worktable, hands moving as you talk, voice warm with momentum.

“and people always think astronomy is just… looking up,” you’re saying. “but it’s not. it’s patterns. predictability layered over chaos. the sky is basically a massive archive if you know how to read it.”

dottore makes a quiet sound of acknowledgement without looking up from his notes.

you take that as permission.

“so i started keeping track of the constellations properly, not just the obvious ones, but the smaller groupings most people ignore. did you know some of them only appear for a handful of nights each year? you miss them if you’re not paying attention.”

you stop to think, then add, “actually, that’s probably my favourite part. the idea that something can exist so consistently and still be so easy to overlook.”

dottore’s pen slows.

“…fascinating,” he says.

you smile, encouraged, and continue.

“i borrowed a star chart from the akademiya archives, not even a new one, one of the old handwritten ones, and it’s wrong in places. or at least outdated. some positions don’t line up anymore. i’ve been correcting it myself every night.”

you gesture as if mapping the sky in front of you. “it’s kind of satisfying. like arguing with someone who’s been dead for centuries and winning.”

this time, dottore looks up.

his gaze settles on you fully now, as if you’ve just transitioned from background noise to a primary subject of interest.

“i didn’t expect you to enjoy something so… meticulous,” he says.

“oh, i didn’t either,” you admit lightly. “it started as curiosity and then suddenly i was calculating star movement by hand. for fun.”

“for fun,” he repeats, faint amusement colouring his voice.

“yes! and i know it sounds boring, but it’s not. there’s something comforting about it. no matter what’s happening down here, the stars just… keep going. and they’re pretty,”

you realise you’ve sat down on the edge of his desk at some point. your legs swing slightly as you talk.

dottore does not comment on this.

instead, he sets his pen aside.

“explain the corrections you mentioned,” he says. “what discrepancies did you find?”

your eyes light up.

“okay, so-”

you launch into it. properly this time. you talk about seasonal drift, about how certain constellations appear earlier now than they did in older records. about how some scholars insist the heavens are immutable, while the evidence very clearly says otherwise.

you talk about freezing nights spent outside with ink-stained fingers. about the quiet satisfaction of getting the math right. about how the sky feels less distant once you understand it.

minutes pass. then more.

eventually, you trail off, breathless, realising how long you’ve been talking.

“…sorry,” you say, rubbing the back of your neck. “i didn’t mean to ramble.”

dottore studies you for a long moment.

“no,” he says at last. “do not apologise.”

you blink.

“you speak with precision,” he continues. “and with genuine curiosity. that combination is… rare.”

your ears warm. “you don’t think it’s a waste of time?”

“a waste?” he scoffs softly. “you are independently verifying centuries-old astronomical data for personal satisfaction. that is hardly trivial.”

he reaches out, adjusting your sleeve where it’s slipping down your arm, an absentminded, familiar gesture.

“you see structures others accept without question,” he adds. “and then you test them.”

you smile despite yourself. “you make it sound important.”

“it is important,” he says calmly. “anything that engages your mind this thoroughly warrants attention.”

you laugh quietly. “you’re very supportive of my sudden star obsession.”

“i am observant,” he replies. then, after a pause, “and i find your enthusiasm… agreeable.”

you lean back on your hands, content. “i could show you the chart sometime. the one i’ve been fixing.”

“i would like that,” he says without hesitation.

the sincerity in his voice catches you off guard.

you glance at him, smiling. “really?”

“really.”

you hum, pleased. “careful. if you encourage me, i’ll talk about this for hours.”

dottore allows himself a small, knowing smile.

“then i suggest,” he says, “that you continue.”