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Gunfire rings in the air, a rapid, crackling staccato that sets the time and tempo of a new dance. Chisato’s eyes move to take in the room, muzzle flashes starbursts of fiery orange that dot her vision like stars in the sky. Her brain is totally organic, unlike her heart, but she swears she hears it whir and whine as the world seems to slow down just a smidge, just enough to parse out trajectories and figure out what the best movement to make is. A subtle shift of her head, her arms pulling in just a couple inches closer to her torso as she raises her own gun in return, a breath that leaves her mouth in time with the crack of bullets against the wall behind her and the wet crunch of Chisato’s own ammunition against her assailants’ chests and arms.
Sound, piercing and almost unbearably loud. Chisato is reminded of pitch-black corridors and the sound of soft-footed steps and whispered words in her ears, of Majima’s scream as she shoots a round in the air next to his face. Chisato is reminded of three shots against the flimsy metal of the window covers and a ball of wavy black hair and angry amethyst eyes as they flit from behind a pillar, gun held firmly in front of Takina as she takes aim and shoots for the gaps in their assailants’ vests, streams of red trailing behind choked gasps of pain.
Partners. A well-oiled machine that works its way through the worn and ripped wallpaper of the abandoned hospital, through hallways loaded with armed men and cracked windows and crumbling walls buckling under their own weight on shaky foundations. They have no clue how the building has lasted this long, but it’s clear it won’t be much longer until it all comes crashing down, and they want to be done and out of there before it does.
The two of them burst through the door of an old lab, Chisato diving in first with a turn of her shoulders and a tilt of her head as bullets mark the wall behind her. Takina trails in her shadow, already aiming and firing down the sights of her gun once, twice, a third time, a man down for every bullet.
The room is filled with equipment, gleaming and squeaky-clean in stark contrast to the dilapidated walls. Chisato gets no time to admire the shine of polished beakers and test tubes filled with ominous-looking liquids before she and Takina split, twin streaks of red and blue that rush at shocked men as they load whatever they can find into black canvas bags.
It’s a messy affair.
The dust from Chisato’s bullets fills the air with a crimson haze, and though Takina doesn’t aim for vitals anymore her bullets are still very real as they ping against the walls of the lab, gleaming red with blood from an arm or a leg. The floor turns slippery, and Chisato is thankful that Takina is so anal about efficiency that she found that tip about putting Band-Aids on the soles of your shoes so you’re less likely to slip.
Chisato runs at a man, weaving her head to the side as he fires a shot at her that goes wide, pressing the spiked mouth of her gun against his chest and squeezing the trigger once, twice. The man goes limp, and Chisato drags one of his arms across her neck, keeping him on her back as a shield as she turns to shoot at another of the thieves—God, how many are there? What’s so important about this place? Takina probably told Chisato about it on the train, but she had been a little too distracted. Something about how the purple of her eyes had glowed in the early morning sun. Something about how good she looked with a pair of red-rimmed reading glasses perched on her nose.
Chisato finds herself distracted now, too. Something about the way she sees a needle, hastily plucked from a nearby table, sink into the skin of Takina’s arm. Something about the pained wince in Takina’s face as she digs it out, the tip still trailing liquid in an arc through the air as she whips around, donkey kicking the man in a very, very unfortunate place before raising her gun and firing a bullet into the man that Chisato had been about to shoot just half a second ago.
“I’m fine!” Takina hisses, and Chisato shivers at the sight of the needle on the floor as she drops the man on her back—now suspiciously covered in a few extra bullet wounds from where she suspects his comrade-in-arms had been... not very careful about his aim—and shoots at the final remaining mercenary, the bullets landing square and true with a crunch and a groan.
“Are you sure?” Chisato asks, brow furrowing at the way Takina is rubbing at her arm. A splotch of red seems to grow in the fabric of her uniform, but Takina waves away her concern.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she says, feet carrying her out of the room in a brisk walk. Chisato follows, an empty magazine popping out of her gun as she reaches into her bag for another one, fumbling at the leather clasps and straps. “At worst it’s probably a mild anesthesia and I have another ten minutes before I pass out.”
“That sounds considerably worse than you’re making it out to be,” Chisato mutters, still digging around her bag for a magazine. Takina turns, eyeing her curiously for a moment before reaching into her own bag with a sigh. Chisato’s eyebrows find her hairline as she finds a clip of red-tipped bullets being handed to her. “Oh, thank you!”
“Anytime,” Takina murmurs, glancing at the walls around them with a nervous energy coursing through her. Her eyes seem to glow, nearly electric under the sickly white of the flickering LEDs overhead. “We really have to get out of here though. We have the research notes, and the bags with anything the mercenaries stole can be recovered from the rubble, but it would be very, very bad if we’re still here when—”
A rumble. The ground beneath Chisato shakes, pebbles clattering across the floor and old doors shaking in their loose hinges as the sound of something that Chisato thinks is suspiciously close to a bomb of some kind fades into the growing white noise of a building literally collapsing around them.
“If we’re still here when that happens,” Takina hisses through gritted teeth, immediately dashing in what Chisato thinks is a random direction but assumes is their evacuation route, dragging Chisato into movement, a white-knuckled grip around her wrist. “Run!”
“Aww, you do care!” Chisato croons as she pumps her legs under her until she is running right beside Takina. She shakes her wrist from Takina’s grip and moves her hand to fill it instead. Their palms are dusty and clammy, but Chisato just thinks it’s warm and... nice. Really nice. She should do this more often.
“I saved you from one collapsing building,” Takina snarks back, sliding down a flight of stairs as a chunk of ceiling crashes down somewhere in the hallway they’d just been. “I would be very upset if another one killed you.”
Chisato jumps down the stairs three at a time, quickly shooting down another hallway and hearing the splat of her bullet on a body as a mercenary that she can only assume they had missed on their original warpath crumples to the ground. “Does it really count as a collapsing building if it was only the glass observatory?”
“It does, because it makes you feel worse about it.”
The two of them vault over a piece of collapsed ceiling that, if the hole through the floor above them is any indication, actually came from the uppermost floor instead of their current one. A part of Chisato is still stuck in the lab, still stuck in the moment where the needle had sunk into Takina’s skin. The left shoulder, too.
(Chisato remembers the feel of a rough cord of scar tissue stretching from the front to the back of Takina’s shoulder. Chisato remembers apologizing. Chisato remembers Takina telling her that it’s okay. That she would do it all over again if she had to.
Chisato remembers how much that scared her.)
The exit to the hospital is barely ten feet away. The glass door, after Takina had shot through it to get them in, is barely more than loose shards of glass and a thin sheet of dust covering the floor, glinting under the sun.
The world slows.
Chisato sees the way cracks worm their way across the walls of the hallway, a sound like a clap of thunder accompanying it. Chisato sees a portion of the wall next to her collapse. Chisato knows, immediately, that she is not fast enough to step out of the way.
Takina does, too.
Chisato feels the breath get knocked from her lungs and her feet give out from under her as a weight crashes into her, knocking her onto the ground. She half-expects to feel that vaguely familiar feel of glass piercing her skin, but she opens her eyes to find herself swaddled in Takina’s arms, her partner’s back having braved the brunt of the damage as they slide to a stop right outside the now-collapsed entrance to the hospital.
Chisato quickly lifts herself up into a sitting position, straddling Takina. “I told you,” Takina says through labored breaths, glaring at Chisato with adrenaline-fueled fervor that sets something shooting down her spine that she hopes isn’t an errant shard of broken glass. “That I would be very upset if another collapsing building killed you. And I meant it.”
“Uh,” Chisato flounders, because she really had never expected karma to work so quickly. “Um. Sorry. And thank you.”
Takina pulls herself up, wrapping her arms loosely around Chisato’s waist and pressing her forehead against the flat of her chest. Heat tingles against the now-old scar of her latest heart surgery. Takina takes a deep, shuddering breath. The set of her shoulders loosens into something vaguely relaxed—not completely so, because Takina is rarely anything more than a loud sound from pouncing on the nearest perceived threat, but more languid than usual.
“Anytime,” Takina murmurs, patting Chisato’s hips in what both of them choose to interpret as The End of The Moment, whatever it is and whatever it might have become. Chisato stands up, offering her hand to Takina as she does. Their palms are rough and dusty with leftover building as Takina lifts herself up, stumbling for a half-second before she manages to right herself.
Chisato looks Takina up and down, wincing as she finds tiny holes where she knows glass is probably hiding littered across the deep blue of the uniform, then pausing as she lands on a particularly nasty gash right on Takina’s leg.
"You're bleeding!" Chisato squawks through the muted sounds of concrete on concrete, rubble littering the ground and dust filling the air as another section of the hospital collapses behind them.
Takina looks down. Blood oozes from the gash on her leg, angry and red. Chisato starts fussing like the mother hen she is, hands a blur as she reaches in her bag for a roll of gauze and a pair of tweezers.
"...I didn't even feel it." Takina says, realization dawning across her voice.
"This is NOT the time for false bravado—”
“Chisato,” Takina whispers, burning and urgent in a way that makes Chisato pause. Sweat shines across the top of Takina’s lip as shaky breaths dig their way out from her lungs. “Chisato, I can’t feel the cut.”
Chisato finds herself well and truly sick of hospitals, at this point.
It’s one thing waking up in one, dead to the world as she drowns in anesthesia and a dull, throbbing pain that lights a straight path down her chest. It’s another to infiltrate one for a mission, the building nothing more than a skeleton, the decrepit and rotting remains of what might have once been a beacon of sterile white.
It is another, and decidedly the worst of the three, to be in the waiting room while she waits for Takina’s results.
Something electric courses through Chisato as she stretches her sore muscles against the cold, unforgiving plastic of the waiting room chairs. There is a ravenous craving for motion, for action, stirring in her stomach, in her lungs and her bones and the tips of her fingers.
“Was it this bad when you guys were waiting for me?” Chisato mutters, voice a hair’s breadth from a whine as she turns to look at Mizuki, calm and collected as always as she thumbs through the third magazine in as many hours plucked from a nearby pile.
“Worse,” she says, and her voice is cold, flat, and entirely and unapologetically accusatory. Chisato feels herself wilt under the glint of an eye peeking over much-too-dark-for-wearing-inside sunglasses and a raised eyebrow. “In case you forgot, we were very much unsure whether we would be getting word of a successful surgery or your untimely death.”
Chisato throws her head back and groans, kicking her legs against the scratchy fabric of the waiting room carpet. It is tacky, ugly, multicolored lines stretching in unending arcs and spots of bright fuchsia and neon green that feel like they’d be more at home at an observatory or an arcade. A gaggle of screeching children race across a nearby hallway, as if to prove her point.
“It’s quite fun to see you squirm, if I’m being honest,” Mizuki continues, eyes roving over a brightly-colored advert for an upcoming swimsuit line. Sky blue blurbs and sunny yellow price tags line the edges of the page. “Takina was just... sad to watch.”
Chisato’s legs stop, landing against the floor with a heavy thump. She sees how Mizuki flips to another page from the corner of her eye, nonplussed.
The topic of... everything, really, that had happened while she was out cold for her surgery and then during her disappearance has been... sore, to say the least. The kind of thing Chisato doesn’t really ask about and Takina doesn’t really talk about, and everyone tries to pretend to forget about.
“Poor girl almost looked deader than you did,” Mizuki whispers, her voice carrying an edge of something soft that Chisato hasn’t heard from her in a long time. Not since she was younger and new at LycoReco, and Mizuki had felt like she needed to play the role of older sister in ways other than the incessant squabbling and unending banter. “Three layers of gauze, enough burn cream for the smell to leak through, and more painkillers than I am almost certain she was actually allowed to have going through her system.”
Mizuki closes the magazine in her hands with a soft flap of paper against paper, eyes finally meeting Chisato’s. The eye contact is stifling. Burning, almost. Even the sharp gaze of the model on the cover of the magazine seems to join Mizuki in its judgement.
“‘Not until we know,’” Mizuki whispers. Chisato can almost hear it, the soft timbre of Takina’s voice, slurred by the painkillers and burning, smoldering with a depth of emotion that Chisato can only really begin to see the edges of. “‘I can’t go to sleep until we know.’”
That same group of screeching children scurries along the hallway right in front of the waiting area, breaking the tension somewhat. Chisato feels herself letting go of a breath she doesn’t remember holding. Mizuki looks away, eyes trained on the hallway where Takina’s doctor will eventually walk down to give them the news of her diagnosis.
“It was worse,” Mizuki says again, nails scratching against the flimsy paper of the magazine on her lap as she replaces it with another from the pile. “Because you don’t have to wonder if you were too slow to save her.”
Chisato opens her mouth to say that technically, that had almost happened. Technically, not being able to dodge out of the way of that collapsing wall by herself could have killed Takina, too. But she also knows how to pick her battles, and this isn’t one she’ll win. She knows she wants to pick a fight on a technicality because she is stressed and hurting and just... she just really wants to know if Takina will be okay.
“I’m sorry,” Chisato grumbles, puffing her cheeks out and tracing the multicolored lines of the carpet for the nth time. Shame burns in the pit of her stomach and high on her cheeks.
Mizuki eyes her from the side of those same sharp sunglasses. Her gaze lingers for a moment, heavy with something like pity. “Come here,” Mizuki sighs, lifting an arm up, and Chisato almost jumps as she is pulled into an awkward hug. Mizuki’s nails drag across the skin of Chisato’s arm in a soothing circle. Mizuki’s heartbeat sounds against her ear, steady and strong.
“We love you, you know?” Mizuki whispers. The lilt of her voice, the way she drags the question out—it sounds like she thinks Chisato doesn’t actually know. Like she’s trying to push the reassurances into her hands no matter how unwanted Chisato might think them. “It’s why we worry. It’s why we get angry.”
Chisato takes a deep breath in. The smell of coconut shampoo drowns her senses of the too-crisp smell of antiseptic.
“Thank you,” Chisato answers, and hopes everything she hides in the words is enough. She wonders if she’ll spend the rest of her life trying to make it enough.
Honestly? That doesn’t sound too bad. She has a lot more life to live now, after all.
The second to last thing Chisato expected to see strutting down the hospital hallway was an Alan Child. The last thing she expected was for the Alan Child to start talking to her and Mizuki, introducing herself as Takina’s caretaker during her stay at the hospital.
The woman looks right at home in her light blue scrubs and fresh-pressed pearly white lab coat, the burnished bronze of an Alan pendant hanging off her neck and bouncing against the dip of her collarbone with every step they take towards Takina’s room. Her eyes shine from behind a pair of simple, thick-rimmed glasses as she rapid-fires an explanation at Chisato and Mizuki.
“It was supposed to basically be a new form of anesthesia, you see? Congenital insensitivity to pain is usually incredibly dangerous because it manifests in children too young to know how to take care of themselves, so they bite through their lips or their fingers, or crash into walls too fast, or don’t understand why falling head-first onto the ground is a bad thing after the first time it happens—they don’t have a negative pain response to associate to those things, so they just keep doing them until they eventually... well, die. But if CIPA—or at least, something similar to it—could be artificially induced in an adult patient who already has a baseline level of innate care for their body, it could be used as an alternative to the highly addictive painkillers we usually give our patients.”
Mizuki nods. Chisato nods. They share a look that communicates loud and clear just how little they really understand and commiserate over that for the half-second between breaths as the doctor continues her tirade.
“Your friend is pretty much in perfect condition, save the superficial injuries on her leg and back from the glass, but she got injected with a... trial version, of sorts, of that CIPA-esque anesthesia that I’d developed. If I had to guess, that’s uh... probably why you were actually called to stop that heist. I’d left old research notes somewhere and it looks like they had someone smart enough to figure out how to recreate it, which considering that it could potentially be injected into a mercenary to turn them into a killing machine that won’t stop shooting until it literally can’t anymore... well, the dangers kind of explain themselves, don’t they?”
“Yep,” Chisato responds, popping the ‘p’ with a purse of her lips.
“Now, obviously this is only temporary. I can’t very well fully simulate a congenital, chronic disease. Moral implications notwithstanding, it would be pretty much impossible to replicate the full effects of CIPA through induced methods, let alone something as simple as an injection, so rest assured that your friend will only be like this for... I want to say maybe three weeks?”
“Sorry, three what?” Mizuki says incredulously, parroting Chisato’s thoughts aloud. “Three weeks from just a single injection of... that?”
The doctor nods, sticking a blunt nail between her teeth. The poor edges of it are already chewed through. “Yes, unfortunately. Your friend was injected with way over the theoretical recommended dosage for the solution, and while it shouldn’t have any other adverse side effects on her health, the duration of the effect is unfortunately much longer than originally intended for an actual patient.”
The three of them stop in front of a closed door. The nameplate by it reads “Inoue” in flowy cursive handwriting. Chisato’s brows furrow as she mulls through the deluge of information she has been handed, picking out the important bits and trying to arrange them into something simple and easy to understand.
“So basically,” Chisato starts with an air of finality that she hopes will cut through the impassioned ramblings of the doctor-slash-definitely-mad-scientist that has led them here. “Takina will be quite literally unable to feel or register pain. For the next three weeks.”
The doctor seems to shrink in on herself a little. Even Mizuki takes half a step away from Chisato. She doesn’t know what her face looks like right now, but if it’s anything close to how she feels thinking about her life for the next three weeks, it’s probably somewhere in the general vicinity of absolutely terrifying.
“Um. Yeah, that about sums it up.” The doctor squeaks.
Chisato sighs, opening the door to the patient room. The metal of the door handle is cold against her hand, and she wills it to cool down the feverish anxiety curling in her gut as the room comes into view.
Takina is asleep on the bed, hair smooth brushstrokes of inky black against the white of the sheets. A soft wind blows through the half-opened window in the back of the room, ruffling her bangs and the loose edges of the bandages that peek from under the covers, one set wrapped around her torso, another around her leg.
It’s such a wild departure from her usual, entirely-too-serious self. Takina looks almost at peace with the world, instead of constantly at war with it.
“The girl with a mile-long self-sacrificial streak is unable to feel pain for the next three weeks,” Chisato whispers, muted and absolutely horrified. Something cold and heavy settles at the bottom of Chisato’s gut.
“...Yep,” Mizuki responds from beside her, popping the ‘p’.
Chisato hates hospitals. And she is very, very afraid that she will find herself back in one much too soon.
Chisato wakes to the feel of scratchy hospital sheets against her cheek and an embarrassingly dry mouth. She hastily wipes a trail of drool from the corner of her lips, groaning as her back makes her aware of just how uncomfortable sleeping hunched over a bedside really is. She rolls her neck back and forth, a crick sounding from her stiff joints that echoes much too loudly in the quiet of the hospital room.
The light of early morning shines through a floor-to-ceiling window, shades of pink and faded orange and hazy gray filling the sky, a gentle golden glow breaking against the glass and suffusing through the room. Chisato almost feels herself preen under the warmth, pulling a blanket she doesn’t remember putting over her shoulders tighter around herself.
“God, it’s cold.” Chisato murmurs, rubbing the sleep from her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“I could give you another one of my blankets, if you want?”
Chisato stops. Her hand drops from where it had been rubbing at her eyes as her brain finally processes the sound of fabric sliding against fabric that wasn’t just Chisato shifting on the sheets, the sound of soft breaths that wasn’t just the gentle whisper of the air conditioner, and the glowing purple of Takina’s eyes that wasn’t just another gleaming corner of the sunrise sky, staring at her with something unbearably fond.
Oh.
“Oh!” Chisato says aloud, exhaustion slipping off her bones to make way for the somehow-heavier load of relief that flows through her. “Takina, you’re awake!”
“Well, I don’t really think my injuries were severe enough to warrant me not waking up any time soon, right?” Takina says, quirking her head to the side in confusion, and Chisato shouldn’t really find it that cute, but the image of a midnight black cat with piercing amethyst eyes nearly melts her where she stands. Sits. She digresses.
“Not the point!” Chisato whisper-yells, willing worry and a sliver of anger to show in her voice. “I was still worried about your other injuries! They pulled 27 shards of glass from your back, Takina!”
“...I didn’t—”
“Feel them, yes, I know,” Chisato sighs, running a hand down her face as she slumps in her seat. “The doctor told me about your... situation, for the next few weeks.”
“...Did they let you know when I’d be out?” Takina asks, and Chisato wants to strangle her, to tie her down to the bed for the next three weeks so she can’t throw herself under more collapsing ceilings for Chisato’s sake.
“...A week at most,” Chisato says, and she really hopes her voice shows just how deeply upset she is at that fact.
Takina hums, having the decency to at least look... nonplussed about the information, instead of outright appreciative of it like she probably would be under normal circumstances.
Silence hangs over them for a bit. The two of them find themselves in that liminal space that the world makes of itself when everyone is still waking up and everything is just empty enough to make you feel like maybe you’re alone in it. The sound of buses and cars is far away, the muted thumps of steps across the upper floors of the hospital a quiet beat that Chisato can almost pretend is the nonexistent beat of her own heart in her ears.
Chisato’s hand slides across the smooth silk of the hospital bed sheets until it finds Takina’s. She threads their fingers together slowly, tentatively. She drags a thumb across the bony knuckle of Takina’s thumb, the pads of her fingers catching on baby-pink skin of faded scars. The sound of rubble on rubble and the feel of dust and smoke scratching against the back of her throat.
“Thank you.” Chisato whispers, even as she hates the words and what they mean.
She wishes she didn’t have to keep thanking Takina for saving her life at the cost of her own.
“Better me than you,” Takina says, and Chisato doesn’t know if she can bring herself to believe it.
Takina, always the overachiever, is out of the hospital in only 4 days.
Chisato fights, nearly to actual blows, to keep Takina away from missions for the last two weeks of her... recovery period. She complains to Fuki even though she knows it won’t really do anything, then complains to Mika and Mizuki even though she knows that won’t do anything either, and then finally claws her way up to complaining to Kusunoki, who could actually do something about it, but she is shut down with a cruelty and efficiency hitherto unknown to Chisato.
“Be glad I’m not sending her on more missions,”Kusunoki says, and the steel in her eyes makes Chisato’s hackles raise. Her lip curls in a snarl that she hopes looks as threatening as it feels. “A Lycoris with talent that borders on 1st-class suddenly unable to feel pain but still functioning as a member of a strike force? It’s tempting."
Chisato’s eyes narrow. “DA has always operated on the darker edges of gray morality, but I think something about scarily efficient suicide bomber high schoolers should be enough to tip whatever moral boat floats around in your head."
Kusunoki doesn’t answer. Chisato doesn’t take it well.
Security ended up having drag Chisato out of the office, and she only let herself get dragged out because she’d managed to hammer out a compromise that hopefully wouldn’t get Takina killed during the next two weeks.
Didn’t stop it from being absolutely nerve-wrecking, though.
Takina has always been efficient, has always been good at what she does, but has also had enough awareness to not get herself hurt doing it, for the most part—a restriction that, as Chisato has been finding out, seems to have been borne mostly from necessity.
“Takina,” Chisato hisses through gritted teeth, blood pumping through her fingers as she presses a towel against the hole in Takina's side. “I did not have a half-hour-long screaming match with Kusunoki about keeping you safe while you can’t feel pain just for you to run in the path of the first bullet you see.”
She’s almost sad the gunman who shot Takina is already passed out on the ground where Chisato had shot him three times, two to the chest and one in the leg. Anger courses through her like a tempest and she doesn’t know where to direct it now that her only readily available, ontologically evil target is already out of the question.
“It wasn’t the first bullet I saw,” Takina responds, and Chisato finds herself at the crossroads of thinking Takina is an insufferable smartass and leaving her alone to treat a wound she can’t even feel or kissing her so she’ll shut up and let Chisato treat it until Mizuki arrives. She pushes the latter thought away like it has burned her, something to ignore later. “It was just the first one you didn’t see.”
Chisato’s mouth snaps shut with a clack of her teeth.
Takina is right. Always, always that one singular weakness. Her eyes give her an advantage over anyone she can see, but that doesn’t really help if they’re out of her line of sight.
What better way to stop a bullet than with a stupid, meddlesome partner who feels both no pain and entirely too much... something, when it comes to Chisato?
A shadow flits over Takina’s eyes. She looks... unsure of herself, almost. “I’m... sorry?” she says, her voice lifting in something close to a question at the end. “I just... I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
The way Takina says the words tears through the metal plating and copper wires of Chisato’s heart. The anger bleeds from her stomach, cooling into muted acceptance and lined with an anxiety that leaves Chisato feeling hopped up and antsy. Her fingers flinch against the smooth skin of Takina’s stomach, a trickle of blood sliding over her ring finger.
“...I don’t like it when you get hurt either,” Chisato murmurs, fingers digging into the blood-soaked towel like it has personally harmed her. Takina stares, impassive and not entirely emotionless but still unnerving in the way the pain doesn’t show in her eyes. One of Takina’s hands comes to rest atop Chisato’s, a thumb smearing the trail of blood on Chisato’s fingers across the back of her hand as it brushes across the rough skin.
“Better me than you,” Takina says, and Chisato hates it. She hates how Takina says it.
Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
They end up going to the hospital again. Chisato hates being right.
The last week of Takina’s recovery agrees with Chisato much, much more than the first two, probably because Takina has to get used to moving without ripping the stitches on her wound, leaving her incapable of taking on missions without tracking blood everywhere from the hole in her side.
Chisato insists that Takina stay with her at her safehouse so she can be properly looked after while she’s on the mend, and after several suspicious looks, three different reassurances that yes, despite how much she hates it, Chisato would let her take on missions again as soon as she's able to, and a spirited-but-much-less-rigged-than-last-time session of rock-paper-scissors to decide on chores for the week, Takina finally acquiesces.
The air of the apartment fills with the smells of spices, the sound of water bubbling in a pot, and the rhythmic thump of a knife falling against a cutting board. Takina’s eyes glow with a familiar determination as she dices the green onion, hands nearly a blur as she cuts, cuts, cuts, then slides them into the pot of bubbling water and other assorted ingredients that Chisato would be lying if she said she remembered.
“Are you sure you don’t need me to handle the cutting?” Chisato calls from where she sits at the dining table, cheek resting atop her hand as she looks into the kitchen at Takina working her magic. Her hair is tied up in a ponytail that leaves the skin of her nape exposed, and Chisato's eyes rove the pale expanse distractedly, her fingers drumming against the wooden dining room table. She wonders what it would feel like to press a kiss there. She wonders if Takina would even react.
Takina hums, the sound a gentle rumble that floats over the divide between kitchen and dining room along with the steam wafting from the pot. “It’s fine, don’t worry,” she says, tongue peeking from between the pink of her lips. “It’s much safer for me to do this right now, since I’m not in much real danger if I mess up.”
“You realize it’d be pretty bad if blood got in our food because you didn’t notice a cut, right?” Chisato says, a writhing, poison-soaked lump settling in the pit of her stomach. Her words feel flimsy as she knows them to be, and Takina brushes them aside with a wave of the knife. The glint of it under the kitchen lights is unnerving.
“Better me than you,” she says, and something about the words makes Chisato go still, her mind blank with a million different emotions that all vie for attention in a flash of color that all cancels out into a white that washes across her vision and a ringing in her ears.
Chisato comes to her senses when she feels a wave of steam hit her face like a wall. She blinks. Pools of deep purple blink back. Chisato looks down, seeing how she has clamped a hand over Takina’s wrist.
A drop of blood plunks onto the wooden cutting board from the tip of Takina’s finger, a deep scarlet that shines ruby-red under the bright lights.
“Chisato?” Takina calls, and Chisato realizes it’s probably not the first time she’s said it in the past ten seconds. Amethyst eyes search her face for something, awash with confusion. “Chisato, are you okay?”
Chisato swallows, her mouth feeling bone-dry and her tongue heavy as a lump of lead. “When is it enough?” Chisato asks, her voice barely more than a whisper. “If I’m not even allowed to get a cut on my finger without you taking it in my place, where do we draw the line?”
Takina’s lips purse together as she sucks in a breath, eyes flicking to look somewhere just above Chisato’s ear. She does not answer. Chisato does not take it well.
“Takina,” Chisato murmurs with an urgency that she hadn’t even realized she harbored. Her voice borders on hysteria as she digs the words from the copper-lined corners of her steel-plated heart. “I love you.”
Chisato sees the way Takina’s breath hitches in her throat. Her grip on Takina’s wrist tightens. “I love you, but where does it end, Takina?” Chisato whispers again, the heat from the pot boiling over next to them heating her skin to a pink flush. A bead of sweat drips down the side of her cheek. “Is there any point where you decide it’s not worth throwing yourself between me and danger? Is there any price you’re not willing to pay?”
Takina’s eyes fill with something shadowy—clear-cut amethyst shine replaced with the darkened and hazy purple of a pastel sunrise. The knife clatters against the countertop as Takina drops it, lifting her hands to cup Chisato’s cheeks.
Her mouth opens, words perched on the tip of her tongue. Chisato fears them with every fiber of her being.
And then, Takina flinches.
There is a pause. The bubble of the pot coming to a boil. The smell of spices. A smear of blood from the cut on Takina’s finger as it drags across Chisato’s cheek, and a matching stain of ruby red that spreads across the pure white of Takina’s apron, spreading from the bullet wound outwards.
“...That hurt,” Takina whispers, realization sparking in her eyes.
Chisato doesn’t think the world could be any crueler.
Takina’s room is already prepared for her by the time they arrive back at the hospital. Chisato almost laughs, almost cries, and is wholly, totally unsurprised.
The white walls of the waiting room mock Chisato, but she is much too tired to care much for it.
The weight of the day and all its consequences rests on her shoulders like a physical thing, a pressure that seems to clamp down on her ribs until it takes a conscious effort just to breathe, in through nose and out through the mouth. Mizuki flips another page on her magazine, but without the shield of heavily tinted sunglasses it’s much easier to see how her eyes glaze over the words on the page. A corner of her lip looks bitten raw from where she has chewed it out of nerves and worry and who knows what else.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
Takina’s injection had worn off.
It shouldn’t really come as a surprise, considering that they were already two and a half weeks into a speculative three-week prognosis, but the fact of it still blindsides Chisato. Really, since it means she has to actually be careful with her bullet wound and not take on missions, Chisato should be downright thankful for the slightly-early end of a painless Takina, but it is a hollow comfort at best.
“Mizuki?” Chisato whispers against the quiet of the empty waiting room. She vaguely registers the sound of the magazine in Mizuki’s hands snapping shut before she continues. “She’d die for me, wouldn’t she?”
The air in the waiting room seems to still. Chisato’s words hang overhead like a guillotine, like too-bright fluorescent hospital lights and ceiling tiles that seem to fall apart at the edges. Chisato’s lungs seize with a sudden, paralyzing anxiety.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Chisato is sure that if she had a heart, the sound of it pumping in her ears would be deafening right about now. The eerie silence of the hospital distracts her from the loud reality knocking on the walls of her life, raven-haired and amethyst-eyed and practically suicidal with love.
“Oh, Chisato,” Mizuki whispers, wet and just barely holding back that same torrent of emotion that Chisato thinks is ripping its way through her, too.
It’s painful, realizing what it means to be loved by Takina. Chisato hates it. Chisato loves it. Chisato doesn’t know how to deal with it. Mizuki wraps an arm around her shoulders as tears fall from her eyes, and Chisato feels a wetness carving a path down her cheeks to match. She doesn’t sob, she doesn’t scream; Chisato just curls up against Mizuki and lets the tears fall.
“Was it this bad, when she realized it too?” Chisato asks, because she’s lied to herself long enough to grow sick of that, too. She’s so tired of furtive glances and linked pinkies under the café tables and pretending to wipe food off Takina’s cheeks whenever she wants an excuse to drag her thumb across the corner of her lips. She knows what love looks like. She sees it in the mirror every morning and she sees it in the pastel purple of Takina’s eyes, half-lidded and heavy with adoration whenever she thinks Chisato isn’t looking.
(Chisato knows she’s not exactly easy to love either. The thin rope of scar tissue down her chest throbs in time with the invisible beat of blood pumping against the faded skin on her shoulder where Majima's bullet had pierced through.)
Mizuki thinks of Takina, angry and hurt in more ways than one. Mizuki thinks of the sobs that had wracked her suddenly-too-small frame when they told her Chisato had gone missing. Mizuki thinks of sharp eyes glowing under the dark of a cloudy autumn afternoon as they stare at the closed door of Café LycoReco, waiting in vain for a red-clad sun with ruby eyes. Mizuki thinks of a girl forced to grieve for a life she had saved.
“Worse,” Mizuki forces past the lump in her throat.
Chisato huddles closer and laughs, a mirthless thing that peters into flat nothing.
“Yeah,” she says. “Thought so.”
Takina wakes up to the uncomfortable feeling of a stray beam of light hitting her eyes through the hospital window. A groan slips from her mouth as she squeezes her eyes shut against the onslaught of an early morning sun, and wakefulness brings with it its myriad sensations—the feel of her scratchy bedsheets, the dull, throbbing pain of the hole in her side, what she suspects to be exactly 27 spots of tender skin along her back, and the warm weight of Chisato’s hand on her own.
“Good morning,” Takina hears from her bedside, and a shiver runs down her spine at the sound of Chisato’s voice, scratchy and hoarse from sleep. Takina pretends not to see the red that rims Chisato’s eyes and chooses instead to focus on lifting her lips into a smile, gentle as the sway of the branches of the cherry tree looming in the hospital courtyard.
“Good morning,” Takina responds, and it’s downright embarrassing how her voice drips with awe and yearning and love. God, how she loves. The hole in her side throbs. “Sorry. Did I wake you up?”
Chisato rubs the heel of her hand against her eyes, some vague noise of affirmation slipping from her lips as she stretches in what Takina knows to be an incredibly uncomfortable chair. “Yeah, but it’s fine. I wanted to talk to you, anyways.”
Well. That’s... a little ominous. Takina’s heart stutters in her chest, but Chisato seems to pick up on her nervousness, giving her hand another squeeze before slowly lacing their fingers together. Chisato’s thumb trails a circle on the back of Takina’s hand, soothing, repetitive. One of her fingers rests against Takina’s wrist, where her pulse beats a frenzied rhythm in double time.
The two of them stay like that for a little while, lost in the hazy feeling of sunrise and laced fingers and eyes heavy with secrets neither of them seem keen on hiding anymore. Chisato’s eyes practically burn against the off-white walls and shiny linoleum floors.
“I love you, too,” Takina whispers, freeing her hand from Chisato’s grasp to place it against her cheek. She brushes a thumb across Chisato’s lips, a little dry from the AC. Her hand travels a path from Chisato’s cheek to her temple, fingers slipping into messy blonde strands and combing them straight once more as Chisato leans into the touch. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to say it the other day.”
Takina’s hand trails back down to the jut of Chisato’s chin, tilting it upwards just a little, just enough that when Chisato straightens up in her seat, just enough that when Takina dips her head forward as far as she can without disturbing her wound, their lips come together in a kiss that tastes of vending machine cookies and canned coffee, that smells of antiseptic and old bedsheets, that looks like burning sunrise and pastel skies.
Takina and Chisato’s first kiss is far from glamorous. It hides in the shadow of anxiety and soaks in the apprehension that lines their bones—but it is theirs, and it is real, and they’re both here to have it. There’s not much more they can ask for.
“Please,” Chisato whispers against Takina’s lips, a wingbeat prayer that breathes over her mouth and across her face like crimson. “Please be... a little more mindful. Of how much you mean to everyone. To me.”
The irony laughs, full-bellied and cruel, in Takina’s face. She rests her forehead against Chisato’s, sliding the pads of her fingers wherever she can find skin. Chisato’s neck flexes as she swallows, Chisato’s cheek burns as her fingers trail a path across it, Chisato’s lips tremble as she passes over them once more, first with her thumb and then again with a kiss.
“I’m sorry.” Takina whispers—because even though she can’t make promises, even though she loves and fears too deeply to guarantee that she will never take another bullet or climb another tower to catch Chisato should she fall, she knows exactly what is going through her head right now.
She knows the words she herself had wanted to hear the most, once upon a time.
Chisato smiles, a silent acknowledgement of the words, of the truth and the intent behind them. They strike a compromise in their eyes and seal the contract with a kiss. It’s almost cliché, it’s almost a fairy tale. Takina’s heart sings as the sun peeks over the horizon, the orange-gold light of it washing over her like her own second lease on life.
Takina revels in being alive to enjoy the love she would die for.
For now? That’s more than enough.