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Komaeda's bed is a mess of wires and electrode pads, old adhesive rolled into buds stuck to his leg hair. He has a tiny half-plastic/half-metal control panel with scratches on the front in his hand, a too-large teal battery that's long-since dead and a manual with torn paper edges by his hip. He can't feel his fingertips anymore from the amount of accidental electric shocks he's given himself, the unit's fresh pack of adhesives glinting back at him on the crumpled bedsheets. He can see himself in their reflection, running a hand through his hair, tongue between his lips. His nails are raw from biting at them, sensitive when he nudges the dials with them. His feet brush the linens, toes tangling in the wires. They feel like leads.
He's been at it what must have been an hour and a half, maybe two. Hinata had left to get electrolyte drink mix from the pharmacy and his favorite shampoo and conditioner at a quarter to noon. Komaeda smooths a thumb at the space between his eyebrows, migraine thumping at him, testing a pad. No current is running. The lights keep blinking, each side of the control panel shining at him in asynchronity. He sighs, flipping the manual back a page. Start over, he resigns, try again, I suppose.
The front door opens behind him, the crinkle of supermarket bags echoing over his shoulder. Hinata's gait stops in front of the door, the wood swinging behind him. Komaeda glances up from the wires in his lap to find him stock-still, staring at the metal briefcase and its contents with something unreadable on his face. “Komaeda,” his voice comes out remarkably even, Komaeda thinks, for the way his eyes burn through the wires tangled in his limbs. “What the Hell is that?”
Before he can explain the Gordion knot of medical-grade electrical wire in his lap, Hinata's dropping the bags by the bed. It seems he's abandoning them in favor of crossing his arms over his chest, staring. “Is that-” his voice tightens, “a heart monitor or- or something? Are you flaring again? Did you faint while I was gone?” Komaeda's busy fingers drop from the dials on the top of the control panel, glancing up. Hinata's face isn't unreadable anymore – its got its trademark furrowed eyebrows, frowning mouth, and eyes that look like a man scorned. On his Hinata-kun, that means, 'What part of you tried to kill you while I was gone?' Komaeda almost laughs. “I swear,” he huffs, bending down to squint at the manual on the bed. “If you've got chest pains, I am finding out how to dial 911 in this place…”
Komaeda laughs, weak against the shudder in his hands. The neuropathy is crawling up his arms from being bent over the infernal machine for so long, and the pain spike feeding his fatigue is an endless spiral that makes even the things he's done a thousand times hard to execute. He can't remember the order of the unit's directions, no matter how sure he is when he tries. He's starting to get a headache. “No, Hinata-kun, its not a monitor,” he waves his hand at him, but he can see Hinata eyeing him in his peripheral. Are you lying to me to avoid stroke protocol? He laughs again, a little less fatigued. “No, honest! No chest pain here,” Komaeda promises. Hinata seems to believe him, even if reluctantly.
“Then what is it?” he asks, staring at the battery on the mattress like it might be radioactive. Komaeda snorts. “Are you contacting the aliens?” Hinata pops the tab on a canned espresso, seeming to sit as far away from the machine on the bed as possible. Komaeda laughs at him again.
“No, Hinata-kun,” Komaeda assures, unplugging the wiring one at a time again, turning the dials back to off. They click closed, safety lock snapping. The lights turn off, and Komaeda rereads the manual again. Where did I go wrong with this thing… “Its a TENS unit,” he informs, uncapping a pen with his teeth. He's resigned to needing to take notes to figure out what steps he's doing backwards, reaching under his thigh for a highlighter. He uncaps it too. He glances up to see Hinata's mouth smeared with coffee and turned down in what must be utter confusion. He laughs hard enough he sends the cap flying into Hinata's chest, ricocheting back like a foam bullet. He blinks, glancing down at it as it falls on his lap, then looks back up at Komaeda, face blank.
“Its a huh?” he asks, wiping the espresso off his chin. His face is too cute – it reminds Komaeda of a puppy, staring at the Animal Planet TV channel when its left on while its parents are at work. He flips a page and underlines Step 4. Aha, his tongue pokes out as he reconnects his electrodes, Control pad settings first, then main wires, then pads… I had that backwards.
The things pain can cloud, he supposed. Even if he's done this a thousand times.
“It sends out electrical impulses to these adhesive pads here,” Komaeda holds one up by its wire, dial clicking. Clockwise, he reminds himself. “They're used to help with nausea, pain, all that- my anesthesiologist prescribed me one for when meds don't cut it. They don’t want to over-medicate, so anything that can…” he trails, adjusting a wire. He doesn't finish the thought, forehead creased as he stares down at the dials. “You have to follow everything perfectly or it won’t turn on. Safety locks. I’ve been trying-” He watches the lights turn from off to blinking to one being solid green, and his face lights up with it. “Got it! Yes!”
Hinata's fascination is written across his face. He hums as Komaeda celebrates his win, reaching for a pad on its plastic. It peels off with a small sound, fingers reaching for the edge to place it.
Komaeda jolts, gasping, dropping the adhesive onto the sheets. Hinata jolts with him, coffee can spilling down his face halfway through a sip. Komaeda scatters away from the wire by a few inches, his hand twitching. “Hah! Those things are strong!” he laughs to himself, hand tremoring. Hinata wipes at his mouth hastily before he grabs the wire up and sticks the pad back, chastising him under his breath. “Guess that's why it says to place them before you dial it up…”
“You should have listened,” Hinata hisses, then inspects his hand. Its still twitching from the rampant electricity. “Is that dangerous? Are you- are you okay?” Hinata looks between his fingers, eyes scanning. “It won't, like, burn you, right?”
“No,” Komaeda chuckles, but his hand is still jerking. He doesn't admit how cute it is that Hinata's fussing over his stupidity. He peers between his fingers almost cartoonishly. “It just startled me. My nerves, too, it seems.” His thumb twitches in Hinata's palm. “They're being dramatic! Ignore them.”
Hinata's face has that look on it that means he's decided something. Its not blank, but its unreadable- the kind of unreadable that's done on purpose, means he doesn't want Komaeda knowing what he's decided on. Komaeda would be upset seeing it if it didn't look so good on him. Eyebrows set, mouth thin, the hint of something bossy behind it. Ah, I could look at it that forever, Komaeda sets his head in his hand. It continues to twitch. “Well, you're clearly handicapped from handling this thing now, so…” Hinata reaches for the manual, squinting at it. He reads a few lines, eyebrows furrowing harder. “Uh,” his mouth opens a little, “I'm- it can't be that hard…” he murmurs, reaching to untangle the wires from Komaeda's limbs.
Komaeda's mouth suddenly feels dry. He'd reach for some of the wires to try to stop him if he could, but his dominant hand is still shaken and his other is buzzing with neuropathy. Hinata's already pouring over the manual, sipping his espresso while he reads the same two pages over and over again, glancing between the machine and the characters on the page, humming. His eyebrows are knotted up, but he's got that look that says, I've decided. Komaeda wants to go back in time and throttle himself. “What are you doing?” he croaks, throat drier than he expected. Hinata doesn't reply. “You- you don't need to babysit me, Hinata-kun,” he tries, reaching back for the control pad.
Hinata's stare is burning. “You have a track record for tragic accidents. Timeout from the electric shock machine.” He's firm when he says it, pulling the manual closer. Komaeda's words dry out in his throat.
“You do too much already,” Komaeda says it anyway, but he settles back on the bed, arms wrapped around his shins. He pulls his knees to his chest. “And its very complicated! I wouldn't want you to get a tension headache…” Komaeda would die if he saw Hinata popping Advil in the bathroom because his medical equipment gave him a migraine. “And- and I've- done it before…” Komaeda tries to argue, watching as Hinata's fingers fly across the sheet of plastic.
He goes between talking about how he's sucking up Hinata's soul in his peripheral and how Hinata is a walking Saint while he figures out his little puzzle. Hinata would normally scold him more for the language he's using on himself, and once or twice he tells him to cut it out, but he's much more involved with the controls in his lap. He sticks the electrodes to his own skin- best way to test if they're all working, he supposes- and Komaeda's voice climbs. “Hinata-kun, be- be careful!” Hinata doesn't look up from the manual. “I have a tolerance! My settings are- I wouldn't want them to hurt you!”
“Aren't you the one who brushed me off when I fussed over your hand?” he calls back. Komaeda stammers, then goes quiet. Then, just because he can, Hinata holds up the manual and taps a page. “And they can burn you, by the way. I'm reading all the warnings before you get your toy back.” Komaeda has the nerve to smile shyly back at him. Hinata rolls his eyes. It doesn't match the fond smile on his lips.
He dials the on/off dials up, going slow. So they also control strength, he reads, reading the numbers along the circumference of each dial. Neat. Neither pad seems to react, and the lights don't stabilize either. He frowns, staring at the blinking green. He reads the instructions over again. His thoughts become a background hum as the puzzle begins to break off into pieces. Pieces he can find a matching piece to, fit together until…
Place the electrodes on the plastic adhesion pad. Read instructions over. Identify the step you went wrong at, then read the rest and correct yourself…
Aha. He was supposed to connect the electrode wires together before he connected them to the control unit. He did the opposite. He scribbles a note in the margin to remind himself next time, boxy handwriting fitting between the lines. I tend to swap steps that look similar. Don't want to forget. He looks up, seeing Komaeda watching him. His rambles have ceased. He snorts. “What? Me treating your TENS manual as Cornell notes interesting?” Hinata waves it in the air. Komaeda glances at it.
Komaeda hesitates for a second. “You are very determined,” he finally says. “You're devoted to your charity work, Hinata-kun.” Hinata pauses over the controls, glancing up at Komaeda.
“Nothing about why I'm here is charity,” his voice is assured, but it croaks a little. He coughs into a hand. Komaeda laughs, holding his pillow tight to his chest. Hinata notices how his arm is too blue, the sweat at his temple and the blood dried on his lips evidence to his flare. Must’ve been biting his lip again. Hinata sighs, making sure the settings were adjusted to the same numbers and letters that were scrawled at the bottom of the page.
“Sure it is!” Komaeda's voice is too wheezy for Hinata's comfort. One of the lights holds bright green. Got it. He hurries to finish, hoping to cut Komaeda off with his heroics. “You even stay in bed with me. Why else would you be both my nurse and companion?” When Hinata glances up, Komaeda's got a manic haze to his eyes. He swallows.
Hinata doesn't know why he says it. His head is fuzzy after messing with the controls. “Nothing selfless or Holy about why I crawl in bed with you, Komaeda,” his voice is too even for the admission. He chokes right after saying it. “Uh- I- I fixed it for you,” he shoves the unit in Komaeda's very-pink face.
“Oh,” Komaeda breathes. “You're amazing.” Hinata's chest clenches.
“Well,” he says the word like its taking up too much space in his mouth. Its almost cumbersome. “Where, um, where do these things go?” He hears his voice get softer when he follows with, “What hurts?” Komaeda blinks up at him with a look so unguarded it makes Hinata feel raw by association.
Komaeda wordlessly runs a hand down his legs, nodding to them. Hinata glances up at his arm in reply. “That, uh, that arm,” he motions towards it, tilting his chin up. “It looks… Kinda blue. Isn't that, like, one of your signs?”
Komaeda's white eyelashes blink at him. His long legs brush together, blankets tossed aside. Hinata's eyes watch with embarrassing fervor as Komaeda stretches out, pressing a foot into his thigh. “Legs, please,” he whispers. “Those first.” He runs one foot over the other, tossing an arm over his head. Hinata is half certain he's doing it on purpose.
It would be worse if he wasn't. It would prove Hinata's admission right – nothing selfless about being in his bed, nothing selfless about his care. He places one pad at a time over Komaeda's legs, one on each shin, one on each thigh. Komaeda's breathing seems uneven.
Komaeda brushes his hands back with his boney ankles, and Hinata is thankful. Spares my morality. He glances up at him, handing him the control panel unit. “You wanna play footsie right now?” His voice shakes as he says it. Komaeda's chest heaves breaths that get heavier with each one, and for a tense moment Hinata thinks he's going to say yes. The tips of his toes dip into the back of his palm, and then they're gone.
Hinata swallows so deep he feels it in his chest. Komaeda holds eye contact longer than he can handle, glancing down at the adhesives. He doesn't know if he expected them to vibrate, make noise, or even shock, but they're… Surprisingly still. His eyebrows furrow. “Did I… Do it right?” he asks. Komaeda is adjusting the dials, running a hand up and down his left calf. Hinata hears the clicking of what he assumes is the safety locks disengaging, and it helps his self confidence- a little. “I mean, the lights were solid…” He reaches for the manual, eyes pouring over every step again.
Komaeda's soft hums fill the space between them. His hands shake a little as he drops the instructions. His eyes are closed, a small smile on his lips. An arm lays over his stomach, joints loose, neck relaxed against a pillow. Hinata smiles back, hand reaching to press his fingers into a pale, boney knee. Komaeda leans into it. He almost looks asleep. Hinata fixates on the peacefulness of Komaeda's pain relief so he doesn't obsess over the way his hand can't stop shaking until he touches him.
“Is that better?” Its barely above a whisper. Komaeda nods. The movement is so small its almost imperceptive. Hinata feels the magnets in his bones pull towards Komaeda's, brittle when he brushes an ankle with his other hand.
Hinata knows he's breaking when he leans in and presses a chaste kiss to his knee where his hand still rests, trembling in the aftershock. Komaeda's eyes fly open with a small yelp, and Hinata realizes what he's doing a second too late. Their eyes meet for a millisecond too long and Hinata stands abruptly, hand tangled in the wires.
His hand is last to leave Komaeda's skin. He hates doing it, even as he rushes to leave the tension between them and the bedsheets and the wires. Komaeda's eyes follow him, breathing uneven. Hinata's lips were the strongest spark of all, he thinks – no medical equipment could compare.
Hinata loses himself in routine while Komaeda loses himself in his; dials and pain relief and clicking of safety locks fall in line with tiny twitches, but Hinata finds his hands dipping into supermarket bags. He hums, dragging both over by the mini fridge in the corner of the room. His hip hits the desk below the window. He crouches, stacking water bottles, electrolyte drink mix, his favorite coffees. Komaeda's sweet tea slips behind it, sitting on the top row. He likes it to be a little frozen, Hinata remembers. He makes sure they're closest to the cooling unit in the back.
His hands move for him. Grab the glass. Listen to the ice machine groan, clink. Sip your coffee. Fill the cup with ice. Crack open a water bottle, stir… Komaeda's eyes watch him, kicking the fridge door closed behind him. He reaches for the laundry in the bathroom, machine blowing hot air on his face. He stacks it in the bottom of the closet, reaching for a bamboo linen hanging on the bottom rack.
Mundane. So mundane his heart doesn't skip beats anymore. So mundane he doesn't think about how Komaeda's detergent smells different than his own, or how the closet is arranged so differently than his – how he's organized his shirts opposite of his ever since he was in fifth grade, how his jackets are in drawers instead of hung. He kicks off his shoes, toeing the back. He reaches for the top button of his shirt, loosening the collar, pulling it over his head. His hand dips into the laundry basket, rifling through until touch alone tells him which shirt is his. Komaeda only wears cotton, he knows.
He pulls a new one on, running a hand through his hair. The coffee pot dings. He walks across the creaky floorboards, socks brushing the rug that's ruffled beneath the coffee table. He grabs a bendy straw from behind the kettle, ripping the wrapper with his teeth. He plunges it into the electrolyte water, ripping open a stevia packet. Komaeda likes salt, but he'll gag if these are too strong. He shakes a few extra ice cubes on top for good measure. Cold helps the nausea, and they'll dilute it when they melt.
He picks up the blanket when he passes by the couch, hanging limply off the back of it. Komaeda's mouth is dry watching him stir his drink for him, pinching his straw with a finger. He can't handle whatever feeling is catching in his throat imagining his chemotherapeutic bottle sitting on the countertop by Hinata's coffee (and how Hinata doesn't flinch anymore), so he focuses on crowding pillows underneath himself instead.
Hinata drapes the blankets at his feet. He closes his eyes as hard as he can to ignore the softness of it. One pillow goes under his neck, then under his knee. He makes a circle around himself too, cringing when he leans half his weight into them. His lower spine aches, and its sending those shooting pains through his whole body he hates so much.
He grabs a pillow from Hinata's side of the bed – oh God, he thinks, I shouldn't be allowed to say that – and bunches it up haphazardly. He lays on it. He cringes again. “Damn,” he huffs under his breath. “Gonna be difficult, huh?”
Hinata presses a knuckle to the AC power. It spurs to life, cold air hitting the hot coffee on his lips. He sets it to 62. He knows it by heart now. Komaeda struggles with his pillow harder, nails biting into the foam.
He knows by now lymphoma has a thing for specific numbers. Thank God I have the mind to memorize them all. He's distracted from the AC unit by hearing Komaeda swear under his breath, fighting with his pillow in his peripheral. He frowns.
The glass leaves a cold ring on the bedside table when he sets it down. He doesn't say anything at first, just… Watches. The bed is a mess of sheets and pillows, resembles a nest more than anything. His mouth opens to say something, and then he sees the pain on Komaeda's face. His eyelashes are sparkling.
His chest seizes, throat tightening. But besides the thickness in his throat, he moves. He reaches for Komaeda first, hand between his shoulder blades. He startles before he relaxes, breathing out harshly. He glances up, wet eyelashes fluttering, and Hinata shushes without having to make a noise. Just looks. He takes the pillow in his hands, lays it across his knee, fluffing it back and forth before folding it in half. He lays it down on the mattress and eases Komaeda down. “There,” he says, and its so soft Komaeda finds himself wishing he'd have said nothing at all.
Hinata hovers. He hovers over him like a ghost over its tombstone, coffee breath hitting Komaeda's face. Komaeda's fingers itch to reach out and hold his face in his hands, taste the promises and espresso on his breath. He shudders at the thought, even though he promises himself he never would do it.
He knows he's a selfish creature. He knows he'll betray his own word, and he knows it will ruin the best thing that ever happened to him. He flinches, wet eyelashes burning his cheek when his eyes close. Something akin to panic starts to stab through his chest when Hinata can't be seen anymore – almost like he's not there at all, has already left, already decided Komaeda is too much and not enough and too fragile and never going to be normal or healthy and-
The bed dips near his feet, then beside him. Denim brushes his lower legs, skimming an electrode pad. His breath catches. Hinata's hand brushes his hip, then his collarbone, moving his hair aside. For a second, Komaeda thinks he's going to cry.
His eyes blink open. Hinata is still there and he never left, no matter how his body is failing him. His face is still just as soft as the night Komaeda told him he was this defective, still too kind, too selfless. Komaeda's hand reaches out and it stops mid-air, eyes glancing between hazel eyes and soft lips and the freckles on Hinata's cheeks. The AC air fills the space between them, windburning their cheeks.
Komaeda's chest aches. He's used to chest pains these days, but he knows these aren't the cardiac kind. His voice shakes when he says, “You- you know me too well, Hinata-kun.” Hinata doesn't flinch like he should. Its a death sentence, and Komaeda knows it. Maybe to them both, with how it'll kill him when Hinata comes to his senses and runs as far as he can.
But that's not what this feeling is about. Komaeda can't explain it, certainly doesn't understand it, but nothing bad has happened to Hinata yet. He wonders if he could be cursed opposite of him. He wets his lips, biting the inside of his cheek. It bleeds. I always did fancy the idea of soulmates. Hinata's face is braced for prophetic warnings about impending doom. “I don't know how I feel about being known,” he admits, instead of another useless tangent about luck and fatality and the psyche of the damned. Hinata's face softens. “But-” his breathing stops when Hinata's thumb brushes his cheek. His words die in his throat.
When did Hinata get so close? When did he start to smile like that? When did he start being in Komaeda's life at all, spend so much of his time in this little cottage? When did Komaeda finally- “... But I like it too much.” The admission feels like a blade and relief all at once. Hinata's lips twitch. It could be a smile, it could be a grimace – Komaeda doesn't know which he expects, can't tell which is on his face. “It makes me want to say things that could ruin this.” His hand reaches up to grip Hinata's wrist, shaky, reckless.
Hinata's breath comes out punctuated, harsh, coffee-hot. It catches. When he laughs, Komaeda feels it through all of him. “You couldn't scare me off if you were trying to give yourself an EKG in here.” The humor is brittle, his voice thin and his eyes too raw. Komaeda feels his face getting closer, Hinata's hand touching his collarbone, trailing down his chest. Its a border, and it keeps him from leaning close enough they do something they can't undo.
He's thankful.
Hinata's voice drops to that octave that tells Komaeda he's serious. He almost expects to be scolded for something; he wonders if he should be drinking his electrolytes instead of flirting inappropriately. He'd tear himself away and be a good patient if he had more shame. “I think I know what you want to say,” Hinata tells him, and Komaeda's heart jumps up his throat. He hears blood roar in his ears. “And…” Hinata swallows thickly, “I think I want to say it back.”
For a second, Komaeda wants to say, You must not know, then. He doesn't. Because he is selfish, and he wants to believe Hinata does.
Hinata's lips part, nearly panting into the chilled air between them. His jugular throbs with an anxious, thready pulse. Komaeda watches it, eyes trailing shaking olive skin. “But I don't know if…” he breathes. He doesn't finish the thought.
Komaeda imagines what it might be. He laughs, a broken sound. Hinata flinches. “Please don't think…” he tries to say, but he doesn't have any words left. Komaeda's eyes are cloudy. Hinata curses his lack of self confidence.
His hand shakes. He swallows his nerves. He raises a careful, trembling hand on Komaeda's wheezing chest. The laughter stops. Hinata's hand hangs in the space between them, too afraid to look him in the eye. He couldn't stand the idea of his paranoia making Komaeda think he was the reason he isn't saying it- much less his illness or his needs. Not your fault I can't figure out emotion fast enough for my heart to catch up, he swallows.
His hand drops to Komaeda's. He grips his wrist with a shaking hand, listening to his hitching breath. His finger shakes as he drags it limply over his palm. He presses the tip down, a shaky L being dragged over its surface.
Komaeda jumps to remove his electrodes, hands shaking. He's not laughing anymore. Hinata isn't sure how to read the expression on his face. “Y-You figured this out f-fast, Hinata-kun,” he says, voice shaken, too thick. “I was impressed. It took me much longer my first time.”
First time rings in Hinata's head no matter how hard he tries to get it out. He reaches behind Komaeda's back for his coffee, choking it down. He briefly considers trying to chug it all at once. “Well, um,” he croaks around the taste, “Maybe my Talent is Ultimate Caretaker,” he offers.
Komaeda's voice pitches into dangerous territory. “Then I'd really be selfish,” he says back. Another pad rips off his skin. Hinata watches.
“I'm pretty sure its only a you thing,” he placates, voice too soft. “I… Wouldn't put it past me for you to be my Ultimate, though.”
The sound of glue-sticky fabric ripping fills the air. Komaeda's facing him when it happens, but he looks back to the sound with a mixture of grief and something wrong on his face. His laugh is too sharp when it returns. Hinata's heart drops hearing it. “Oh, payback for-” he doesn’t finish, but Hinata thinks he has an idea. There’s a lump in his throat. “I’m such a klutz I’m destroying my medical equipment! Tragedy in action.” It sounds nothing like a joke.
When Komaeda’s hand starts to reach for his hair, Hinata grabs it. Its instinct now. He tangles their fingers from behind Komaeda’s hand. He thinks he hears him stop breathing when he does. “Hey,” he whispers, half into his hair. It smells like vanilla body wash. “Don’t stress. I’ll get you more from the pharmacy.” He remembers Tsumiki's face, crooked smile blinding him. Too trusting, face too pink. He flinches.
His arm has its own agenda. It wraps around Komaeda's waist, pulling him as close as he can get. The last pad unsticks, uneventful.
At one point, Komaeda may have shaken him off. He may have trembled, he may have asked if he had gone insane. Now he leans back, holds Hinata's arm to his ribs. His exhale is made of shattered breaths sharp enough to cut, hiding in Hinata's chest, falling back into the nest of pillows.
“Stay a while?” Komaeda asks. His voice shakes. Hinata isn't sure he's hearing him right at first. “I- I'm pathetic, I know, but- I'm exhausted, and I don't think I can fall asleep without you here anymore.” His swallow echoes on Hinata's chest. A glance down at his face tells Hinata he's bracing for rejection.
Hinata reaches down. Tuck a curl behind an ear. Rub a hand down a spine, pull his head towards your chest. Listen to the breathing while its here. Hinata closes his eyes, lips ghosting Komaeda's forehead. He stops himself before he purses his lips all the way, holding him as tight as his hollow bones will allow. “I'll never say no to you, Komaeda,” he whispers. Its a bigger admission than it sounds like.
He doesn't know if Komaeda realizes he's tracing little ‘L's' on his arm as he dozes, but he doesn't ask.
The inside of the pharmacy is sterile, white, fluorescent, cold. Its the lighting of a hospital far from home, Hinata's sneakers squeaking wrong on the freshly-waxed linoleum. His reflection gleams back on it when he looks down, hands shoved in his pockets. Walking into the pharmacy always feels equal parts like a death sentence and a God-given right these days.
He rolls his eyes. That was a Komaeda thought. Tsumiki is sat behind the pharmacist's counter, quiet hums filling the air. The chair she's sitting in looks startlingly like a classroom chair, arms rested on her thighs. The fan brushes her bangs, eyes dragging across her MonoPad screen, following mechanical sounds and blitzy jumping noises. Hinata's eyes narrow. Is she… Playing Mario's Mansion? He shakes his head. I know where she's been spending her weekends, damn. Nanami's influence never ends.
The door shuts behind him, stalling, weighted. When it does, Tsumiki falls out of her chair. The sound of her hitting the floor was so loud Hinata flinches. She yelps, a carton of medication discount cards falling with her. Hinata flinches with his whole body, air stagnant. “Hey, Mikan, you okay?” he calls. He shifts, trying to peer behind the counter. The once-over he gives her shows Tsumiki clumsily rubbing her scalp, but she's conscious. He shakes his head. She certainly isn't Komaeda. He jogs over to the counter. He'd be splintered into several pieces by now. “Hey, I'll help you,” he says. It tastes like deceit.
Tsumiki's feet skid on the floor the way a toddler's might on carpet. Its a wonder she's that clumsy, because they're Mary Janes on linoleum. They squeak loud, her limbs tangled, falling forward into the counter. “I-I'm such a k-kl-klutz!” she jabbers, peering over the counter to stare at the prescription coupons spilt on the floor. “Aweee,” she whines, slamming her head in her hand, “A-Aren't I-I supposed t-to h-help p-p-peo-people with th-those?”
Hinata's shoulder brushes her skirt apron, picking up some old refill buckets fallen beneath the counter. He glances up and sees Tsumiki standing on one leg, balancing on the tip of her shoe precariously. He swallows dryly watching her lean over the edge to investigate her mess. She's too innocent for me to be… He thinks it with all the guilt and none of the committance. His sigh ruffles her skirt.
He glances over a shoulder. The electrode sheets glance back, almost like they're proving his point. He glares. “Yeah, yeah,” he huffs under his breath. We get it, its like murdering a puppy. He stands and dusts off his jeans, then a breast pocket on his shirt. As if Tsumiki would allow dust in her pharmacy. He's almost bitter about it.
When he looks up, she's on two flat feet. That would be cause for celebration – nobody wants to see Tsumiki fall, especially before he's had coffee – but the look she's giving him makes him feel equal parts guilty and pissed off. She's looking at him like he has no business helping her off the waxed floor. His teeth worry his cheek, eye twitching. You've got no business being on it, he wants to scoff. “Wh-Why a-are you back, Hajime?” Tsumiki asks, head held down. Suddenly, she looks too much like the girl in the diner, blowing her nose into scratchy napkins and dropping sunscreen tubes all over her feet, parasocial betrayal heavy in her air.
Hinata doesn't know what to do at first. He takes a deep breath, forces a boyish smile. Tsumiki's cheeks don't warm up the way they usually do, her eyes barely catching on his lips. “Well, you're here, right?” he laughs, trying to force it to sound warm. Like wherever Tsumiki is, he wants to be. She looks down at the floor, a scratch of charcoal rubber from the bottom of her shoe sole, wringing her hands like there's something heavy in them she needs to wash herself clean of. She won't meet his eyes.
Hinata's heart beats wildly. Not because he feels like he's breaking something, even though he's guilty about it; and not because he's anxious, or at least not the way he should be. Komaeda's pain-dizzy face is on every reflection surface, from the plexiglass between the pharmacist consult counter and the open aisle to the shiny gleam of the refill buckets, and all Hinata can feel is something gummy slipping through his hands. It takes a second to realize its both panic and responsibility, saline and chemotherapy, pain tablets gone filmy when they're ran under water.
He takes a deep, shuddering breath. Tsumiki's eyes aren't watching. He's grateful, or she might notice his torment. The phantom reflections of Komaeda flip like a storybook; from pain to deflection, from deflection to flirtation. The shelves of medications turn into shelves of books, the pharmacy shuttering, floor tilting. Suddenly its the library and Komaeda is balancing over him again, staring up through his eyelashes, pretending the pain is normal...
Hinata freezes. Then he moves, almost without thinking. The counter edge is cold, his hand gripping it like a cliff ledge. Tsumiki's feet shuffle in his peripheral, eyes flickering up to his face. He smiles too wide and glances up at her, just like he would. He hopes Tsumiki is as weak as he is. Its going to be damn embarrassing if she's not, he scathes. On multiple levels. “You've been falling so much, Mikan,” he frowns. It takes effort that burns. “Have you been eating well?” Her startle is squeaky, hands fidgeting in front of her. Hinata hates the sign of success. His stomach drops. “Don't make me bust open a glucose monitor,” he chuckles too forcefully, smile too wide, words too warm. Tsumiki's face is so pink it matches her apron, hiding behind her hand.
“I- I've b-been e-eating,” Tsumiki argues, little hands shaking. Hinata watches her wide pupils run across the floor, twisting her hands in her skirt. The hem snags in her bitten nails. “Y-You sh-shouldn't waste m-medical eq-equipment on m-me! Th-Those a-are f-for people who– w-who n-need it.” He watches her scan the lines between the tiles beneath her feet, pushing her toe against them. Something in his stomach twists into a knot, looking over his shoulder so Tsumiki doesn't see his face drop if she happened to look away from her shoes. I know how you'd act if you caught me now. Its not as bleak as it should be.
Maybe his anger makes it easier. Maybe he just wants to get back to Komaeda faster. Maybe he's just a bad person when the hot sun is pushing at his weak spots, when the magnetism between him and a weak boy kept alive by electrode shocks pulls his moralism thin. He doesn't know which it is, hot breath fogging too close to Tsumiki's forehead. His stomach twists as her bangs part, chest screaming wrong, wrong, wrong. He considers knocking back an ondansetron tablet himself, the way his stomach his rolling. When his hand makes contact with her trembling shoulders, her strangled noise is too girlish to feel right. He swallows the bitter taste in his throat.
“I trust you,” he whispers, low and too raspy. Its not the way his voice sounds when his heart is skipping, or not for the right reasons, anyway. Not the way it sounds with Komaeda. Tsumiki's breath comes out short and rapid. “But l-lips taste sweeter with a little sugar, right? And- well, it would humor me,” his eyes flicker to the candy shelves across the room, almost too performative. His collarbones rattle with the weight crushing his shoulders. His smile flickers unevenly, stutter melting in his mouth. “Go grab something from the candy section, yeah?” His hand hovers like its going to touch her face, maybe graze her lips, but he can't make himself do it. Not when his shirt still smells like Komaeda's laundry detergent, not when…
Tsumiki scuttles off before he can wretch into a trashcan. He breathes out heavily, hand to his forehead. “Jesus,” he mutters, shaking his head. His whole body tremors. He slides behind the counter, fingernails scraping the enamel. He drops down, crouching in the shadow beneath it. “I'm picking up some cards that fell for you, Mikan!” he calls. Just in case she turns, he thinks, pocketing two sheets of electrodes from a shelf as he leans back on his heel, wonders where I went. Hinata shoves them into his jean pocket and stands. Tsumiki's shoes click on the floor, and then she's too close all at once.
Her smile is soft, girly, and too trusting. He shrinks into himself. Too content. In her hand is a pack of Skittles, rainbow and damning. The hand that touched her shakes and he shoves it in his pocket, just in case she noticed. She giggles as she shakes a few more out into her palm, fingers stained a kaleidoscope of colors. “D-Do y-you like Skittles, H-Hinata-kun?” Tsumiki asks sweetly. Hinata's blood runs cold.
Its wrong. Its wrong, its familiar, and the colors on her fingers are too bright. The inside of her lips are stained yellow, red and purple, the color of a bruise half-healed before it got slammed in again. Komaeda's nickname hangs in the air, too high, tenor shaken. He gulps, gripping the counter like it'll stabilize him. Tsumiki takes a step forward, eyes blinking slowly. It has no reason to feel as threatening as it does, because its completely innocent. He opens his mouth to say something, and its cut off clean.
His back pocket buzzes. The ringing fills the pharmacy cavern, low ceiling and shelving units ricocheting the sound back. Hinata fumbles with his MonoPad, screen lit up with ghost-white light. Komaeda N., I.D. #7777. Hinata's mouth is suddenly very, very dry. “I-Its him,” Tsumiki's voice sends a shiver up his spine. He turns, her eyes shadowed behind her bangs. “You n-need to t-take it. R-Right?”
Hinata watches the rainbow bleed out from her lips, tablet vibrating in his hand. The ring splits his head, ears roaring blood. “I- um, I'll- I'll be right back, Mikan,” he promises. His heart's not in it. Before he can take another look at her strange expression, he runs out the door, island heat mixing with too-cold sweat hitting the wind. He sucks in a breath through his teeth and presses the green button on the screen.
The wall behind the pharmacy is gritty, grey, covered in shadow. The wind is colder than he ever remembers wind being on the island, his chest stuttering, the sound of wretching following the rushing of water through the speaker. The toilet flushes, Komaeda's breathing heavy and uneven. He doesn't say anything at first.
Hinata's words are sharp and clipped. “Are you okay? Did you miss your meds?” He closes his eyes against the harsh sun. The smell of Komaeda's cologne and laundry detergent sits on the collar of his shirt, ruffling in the breeze. It sends a pang of something pathetic and raw through his stomach, achey and mushy.
“I- I took Kytril,” Komaeda's voice is too wet, “It… Its not working.” His voice cracks down the middle, and Hinata's heart feels like it does the same. He closes his eyes against the shade, nails digging into the grain of the pharmacy wall. “I… I forgot how heavy chemotherapy is,” Komaeda laughs, so empty and so young. Hinata's arms shake.
“Okay, I'm- I'm coming, alright?” his words rush out like blood from a wound. “Just, let me- I'll-” Hinata pats his back pocket for the adhesive sheets, just in case they decided to dematerialize when he wasn't looking. Komaeda wretches again, choking this time. Hinata's throat seizes, and it gushes before he can apply pressure. “Oh, God, baby-” he covers his mouth a second too late, trembling. He flinches. Alright, time to high-tail it, he goes to turn towards the street.
“W-Wait,” Komaeda's voice croaks, then stalls. Hinata holds his breath. Then he does something that Hinata honestly never thought he'd do, and he tastes blood in his throat. “Can you- if- if you're still, um, by the pharmacy…” When he tells him he is, Komaeda takes in a deep, shuddering breath. “I- I'm out of- Emend. Y'know, the, the medication that comes in that little booklet? Its…” he pauses, and Hinata can hear the flinch in his voice when he says, “They gave me it for chemo rebound nausea at the oncology office. I… I think I'm-” he gags again, and this time it doesn't stop. Hinata closes his eyes again and imagines running his hands through his hair, wiping his mouth with a damp cloth. His legs itch to run as fast as they'll go, leaning hard against the cement wall.
“You think this is- is from the withdrawal?” His jaw tenses despite himself. If Monokuma would've given you your fucking meds, he barely swallows it. “From- from not having them?” he can't help the anger leaking into his voice. Komaeda goes quiet. Its all the confirmation he needs. “Alright. Yeah, I- I know the ones. Give me a few minutes, Komaeda. Hang in there.” Komaeda's breathing is too heavy for his comfort. Hinata's voice quiets when he praises, “Thank you for telling me. For- for asking me.”
Komaeda stutters on the line a bit, and then there's the sound of running water. The sink echoes on its porcelain on the other end, Hinata wishing more than anything he could be there to wipe his face with all the gentleness he deserves. His gut twists again, gnarling, toothy. Romance has hands, good God. The humor doesn't sober him. “I- I shouldn't have.” Its a classic Komaeda line, but it lacks all the bite it normally does. Whether that's from the water gargling in his mouth or something warmer, Hinata doesn't know. “Thank you, Hinata-kun.”
Hinata doesn't want to hang up. He never understood those corny teen romcom scenes where a girl is laid out on polka-dot printed sheets, fingers tangled in a rotary phone wire, singing, ’No, you hang up!’, but he shamefully thinks he's starting to. He'd argue it with Komaeda if he had less pride, and more truthfully, if Komaeda were less sick. He starts for the glass door, jeans catching wind, nearly tripping on the gravel as he fumbles with the bar on it. “I gotta go,” he almost cringes at how regretful it sounds. “I l-” He stops dead in his tracks. Something sounds like it cracks on the other end of the line, or drops on the tile, and then its dead quiet.
Komaeda stays on the line a good thirty seconds more, breathing heavily into the speaker. Hinata hangs up, and then he's inside pharmacy air, cold AC, and the smell of antiseptic far from hospital home. Tsumiki’s sitting at the counter, Skittles scattered across the off-white tabletop, her fingers bleeding watercolor dye. Hinata breathes in sugar-thick air, Tsumiki's eyelashes fluttering, eyes staring so blankly he's sure she's looking straight through the pharmacist's counter.
His stomach curls with unease when he sees her. The ringing of the pharmacy door doesn't alert her, her breath coming out short and hard. It ruffles her choppy bangs, her dilated eyes so dazed she looks drugged. “Hey, uh, M-Mikan,” he calls, voice shaking around her name. She looks up like it sent a live current across her skin. “Did you hit your head or something?” he tries to laugh and it just gets stuck. He swallows it and tries again. The chuckle sounds as weak as his legs feel.
“O-Oh, H-Hajime!” she squeals, jumping up out of her chair. It clatters to the floor, her tripping legs a blur in his vision. She comes crashing into him, wrapping her arms around him tight enough to hurt. Goddamn, he thinks, chest wheezing, you're stronger than you look. Her breathing on his collarbone feels too cold for somebody living. His arms are frozen at his sides, hanging awkwardly in the air. “I- I w-wa-was afraid I sc-scared y-you a-away!” her voice pitches, Hinata flinching against the noise. You're going to break a window, woman.
He's tense a second longer, and then she drops her arms, stepping away from him. She stutters an apology. Her cheeks are pink, but she doesn't seem as self-assured as before he left. Hinata can't manage to get himself to say anything sugary to her after that phone call with Komaeda, the L word still stuck in his mouth. “I-I…” Tsumiki trails in the silence, picking at her nails. “I d-don't re-remember what I s-said.” Her hands twist in the long, uneven ends of her hair, the white lights catching the orchid reflection in it. What usually looks just black in the security of the hotel turns sickly purple, bruised and wrong. Hinata looks down at his shoes.
“Don't worry about it,” he bristles, rubbing the back of his neck. “I just, um… Are you okay?” The look in her eyes is almost as unsettling as the tone she had when he bolted out the door. Hinata can't help but notice how she keeps looking back and forth, wall to wall, even once over her shoulder, almost like she thinks she's being watched. His heart pounds. Did she notice something was missing? He scrambles for a heroic scaffold, words scraping his throat. Just in case. “Did… You see somebody while I was…?” He doesn't finish.
His arm brushes his chest when he crosses it over his ribs, the fire left from where Tsumiki touched him burning. Its not a passionate fire, not the kind that causes a flush, causes the vivid dreams he can't stop having, stuck in bed between cooling blankets and the same face that plagues them. It was the kind of fire that comes from brushing your hand against the splintered wood on a bridge railing, the burn that follows when a fabric scrapes wrong, when you can't stop digging a nail under the raw edge of another when you bite one too short. Its that kind. The ugly kind, he thinks with not enough guilt, eyes passing over Tsumiki's small, girlish face. The kind that touches nerves I didn't want touched. He wants to get Komaeda's meds and get back to the quiet, air-conditioned cottage he's stuck in. Alone. His jaw tightens.
Tsumiki's words are sharp enough to sting, mostly because they're so innocent. Her voice hits like sobriety does, hangover and all, and Hinata's head roars with it. She sounds so small… “I- I r-remember y-you ha-had to t-t-take a call,” she fusses with the hem of her bandages, eye contact jittery. “A-And t-then I th-thought–” She suddenly won't meet his eyes at all. Hinata's stomach rumbles with unease.
“You thought…?” he trails. Tsumiki is quiet. He clenches a fist at his side and dives for it. “Come on,” he hushes, “You can trust me.” His crooked smile wobbles, but he thinks she's too deep in to notice. That stings more than it would've if she had.
“I- I thought of t-three t-two di-digit numbers,” Tsumiki leans on the counter, pressing her foot down into the tile. Her patent leather shoes crease down the toe line. “A-And th-then–” she takes a breath so sharp it looks like it hurts. For a second – just one – Hinata's ears ring loud, like a prophet hearing a warning. He clears his throat and its gone. “I s-s-smelt…” She stops.
When she says it, she rushes it out so fast she doesn't even stutter. “F-Fruity sakura perfume.” Her shoulders are slumped like the admission dragged her down, pulled her into a riptide. Hinata watches her face, her eyes fluttering. He wonders if he should be busting open a benzodiazepine bottle for her with the look on her face.
The humor is raw, but he feels his face pale. “What were the numbers?” he asks despite himself. Something in his core flashes red, a fire alarm pulled into strobe lights. He shoves it down and his hands come back bloody.
He's blinking away something dizzy in his head when she says it. “33-24-13.” The numbers swirl his vision for a second and he braces a hand on the counter. Tsumiki says it again, quieter, almost to herself. Hinata reaches under the plexiglass divider by the pharmacist consult banner and pops a few Skittles in his mouth.
“Hey, um, Mikan,” he says, swallowing them thickly. She looks up, eyes too unguarded. Hinata squares his shoulders. “I'm a little dizzy myself. It was pretty hot outside. You mind running across the street to the market for an iced tea?” He pretends the shade wasn't as cold as it was. Tsumiki nods, too willing. Hinata feels a dull pang of guilt and chases it with a few more Skittles. “Thanks,” he says, then winks over his shoulder. For good measure. Tsumiki trips on her way out the door, and Hinata is alone in the pharmacy.
Behind the counter, he sits in front of the chemotherapy aisle. Rows of bottles with giant caution labels and a yellow sign flash in front of him, detailing the protocol for disposal. His eyes pass over the word incinerator and biotoxic, his heart skipping. He curses under his breath. “Not what I'm here for,” he reminds himself, eyes closed. “Relief, not…” he swallows, reaching for the shelf in front of him. He steps a shoe up on the bottom ledge and pulls himself up, grabbing three aprepitant booklets. He jumps down, shoes thudding on the linoleum.
He opens it. He's not sure why. Maybe it was to make sure it wasn’t tampered with, maybe its just because its odd to find a medication inside a cardboard plate. Whatever the case, the inside makes his mouth run dry. The characters blur as his hands shake, reading a doubled, Last day of your chemotherapy:: __/__/__, a nausea score listed below. The little frowny faces colored different shades of grey aren't as emotive as the picture they conjure, but they do the job of stinging his eyes; Komaeda, shivering, knees bruising on the bathroom floor, dry-heaving into a toilet bowl, head lolling on the porcelain. Hinata rips out the blister foils with shaking hands, shoving them in his back pocket.
The incinerator roars to life with a shudder, frozen from disuse. The cardboard clinks against the bottom, the smell of ash barely contained. The timer goes down slowly, too slowly, Hinata's eyes stubbornly fixed over his shoulder. The front door remains unapproached, the incinerator and his body mostly hidden behind the stocking wall and the shelf he looted from. The mechanical whirring stops, his fingers prying open the viewing window. Everything inside is ash, the clittering of it emptying down the garbage shoot comfortingly final.
When he stands, he's facing the red narcotics safe. Its not used anymore, but above it sits the bulk bottles of opioids. Komaeda doesn't need a fill, but his eyes wander them anyway. Never know when I'll be alone in here again, he sighs. His fingers wrap around a bottle of hydromorphone, peering inside. “Probably not strong enough,” he murmurs to himself. “God, that's just sad.” He'd only admit that alone in a pharmacy with chemotherapy aids in his back pocket, but hey, its true.
When he puts it back, his finger drags against a vial. Its shoved far against the back wall, almost like its hidden. Hidden among the hidden, Hinata realizes, so its gotta be pretty strong. He picks it up in his palm and squints at the label. Fentanyl, intramuscular/intravenous, 50mcg, 2.5ml…
Hinata stops for a second, fingers stalling. Then he grabs the insert out of the box behind it, the words Fentanyl citrate burning backwards into his front pocket. Definitely stronger than Norco. The vial slides in next to it and he snatches some syringes, pocketing them on the inner pocket of his shirt. Just in case. When he unhooks the chainlink that separates the pharmacy counter from the open aisles, he sees Tsumiki outside, waving to Owari and Nidai fading into the sun on the long charcoal street ahead. He elbows the door open and breathes, “Mikan, there you are.”
She turns, eyes wide and cheeks pink. He barely controls his expression. She seems to have recovered, he thinks sourly. Oh, joy. “Thanks for the tea,” he takes the glass bottle from her, warm fingers pressing into the condensation. He pops the lid and takes a swig. Tsumiki giggles, and Hinata caps the tea faster than he opened it. “I gotta head on back. Won't need any rescuing, right, princess?” The charm is paranoid, almost anxious. For all its worth, its tighter than it should've been, but Tsumiki doesn't seem to notice. She giggles again, nodding her purple hair around. Hinata gives her one last smile before he starts on the trek back to the bridge, fingers itching for his MonoPad. I gotta check in…
Tsumiki stops at the pharmacy door. She turns over her shoulder, cheeks warm, heart full. I should let Hajime know that he calmed me- Her hand shakes as she touches her forehead, headache sharp and sudden. Whatever flutter she had in her chest squeezes when she sees him slowing down on the street, face buried in his MonoPad, typing away on it. Texting. His face is distorted by heatwave on the air, but she can see his smile, wider and warmer than any she saw that afternoon. Something in her head fogs, her jaw tightening.
The smell of the diner is all around her, all stale grease and cold ice cream, milkshakes thawing in thick glasses. The afternoon she intended on spending swimming and sharing fries with her friends got cut short, the image of Komaeda's arms wrapped around Hinata's shoulders burnt into her mind. He had smiled so joyfully, his laughter so genuine. What's worse, Hinata looked happier. Tsumiki watches him nearly stumble getting his footing on the bridge, distracted by whoever's on his tablet screen. Who is he paying attention to? she sours to herself, even if she knows. Her hand tenses so hard on the door the bell inside rings on repeat. Why isn't it me?
The wind picks up. A little dust from the dirt road blows in her eyes and she blinks, covering her face with a hand. When she wipes the dust from her eyelashes, the fog is gone and so is Hinata, his silhouette fading over the bridge arch. She casts a shaky, anxious glance in the pharmacy, rushing inside. She knows how important it is to keep an eye on the medications, after all.
There's blood all over the floor. The air is thick with the smell of iron and dented metal, bat lacquer broken like a promise. His heart is in no better condition, the breathing in the room heavy, metal and tears and the smell of polaroid ink distorting into one big puddle beneath their feet. When he catches the look of the murderer in the growing red reflection on the bathhouse tile, he thinks she looks like she did when they were children, her hair bound by braids that aren't there, platinum silver instead of rusty red. The only sound she makes is punchy panting, her hand not shaking, the expanse of pale skin through her black swimsuit dripping in crimson.
His stomach is twisting, and for a second he thinks he might be sick. There's nowhere to tell where ginger hair ends and the clotting blood begins, smearing the luxury tile wall in vibrant maraschino. The broken camera lay at the side of a torn plaid skirt, inky fingerprints and weather-worn scratches catching his eye like a shard of glass. He starts to heave, and for the life he was raised in he knows its not the gore that's doing it. His fist bangs against the glass table beside him and for a second, he swears he hears it crack.
“My job is done,” has her voice ever sounded so resigned? So cold? Her eyes are the color of the blood beneath their feet, of the hair on Koizumi's head parted with a gash, of the gnarling in his gut that feels like finality. The pictures in Koizumi's laxing fist stain red, the image of his sister going with the rusting ink. “Forgive the mess, young master.” A pale, bloodied hand wipes her silvered bangs from her forehead, and if he knew knew better, he'd think its tears on her eyelashes.
Koizumi's lifeless eyes stare at the images at her side. The body announcement plays, and with a start it dawns on her that she is considered a person too, and they both have discovered the body. The rule is two, she remembers, sliding her sword out of its carrier. Her eyes close, a single drop of blood running down her nose. Even I don't agree I count.
Kuzuryuu's voice is no short of shattered. “Peko,” it shakes, “What have you done?”
She doesn't say anything. She crouches in the bloody mess, toes curling into the clots beneath her. She fishes out a picture where ink runs with memory, the blood mixing until black-blue iodine and rust red become something stormy. Natsumi's face blurs in it, shaded by her bangs, too far from unconscious to be asleep. Her jaw tightens.
“My duty,” she says. Kuzuryuu's sobs fill the room, but she isn't owed the right to cry so openly. Hers are silent instead as she flushes the pictures down the toilet, vending machine water bottles in hand. They mix with Koizumi's blood as they splash on the toilet rim, and then her raw heels hit the stone outside, and the window shutters behind her.
The room is so quiet, so dark. The bathroom door is closed, the light beneath is spilling over the floor, prayer-soft. Hinata nearly trips over his feet trying to get over the doorway, then over the rug. His knee slams into the couch and he grumbles. “Fuck, shit,” he swears, hand shaking when he swipes it over his forehead. “Alright, okay. Okay.” The nausea capsules burn into his pocket, his hand sliding into it behind him. To remind himself they're there, to remind himself he's here to help. His breathing slows down, the air conditioner hum reaching his ears. The roaring blood in his head calms down, his steps hitting the floor calmer.
The fan isn't the only sound in the room, though. He was only a few feet from the bathroom when he hears it – over his shoulder, this mechanical sound giving way to the darkness. Almost methodical, almost timed. At first he hears the sound of something beeping, wondering if its an alarm. For a second, he tenses, wondering if its a medical device Komaeda conveniently decided to not tell him about before he heard it. But then the sound layered as he turned around, the bed a heap of blankets fluffed so high the white comforter looks like snow. A hum-hum-hummm sound, almost liquidous, thick, pausing between each rotation. When Hinata gets close enough to see Komaeda's hair sticking out of the blankets, the sound of far-away footsteps joins the symphony. His eyebrows furrow, reaching into his back pocket for his nausea tablet.
When he gets close enough to see him fully, his heart seizes. Komaeda's laying next to a shirt of his, one of the several off-white button-downs he wears on a regular. This one has an old coffee stain on the collar, still fresh with the smell of being worn, cologne still on the inside. When his hand reaches for Komaeda, he leans over him enough to smell Komaeda's too, a damp spray on the lining of his breast pocket. Hinata's heart flutters up his throat. He mixed them.
A pale, anemic-looking hand is fisted in the buttons, but Komaeda's face is also leaning on the speakers turning out these strange, mechanical noises. The volume is up, and as Hinata watches Komaeda nose the collar of his shirt, there's some sort of hissing air sound over the speaker too. God, he’s cute, Hinata thinks, and it doesn't go unnoticed that that's what he thinks first. He guesses Komaeda was honest about not being able to sleep well without him. Something gets tight in him at that. Must’ve been exhausted. The footsteps come back through the speaker, his eyes fixed on the logo on the back of his student handbook. What the Hell is he listening to?
Komaeda breathes out harsh and the smell of bitterness on his breath reminds Hinata of the pills in his hand. He sighs, face souring. Damn cancer, he shakes his head. And here I was going to try sneaking some more pictures. Not like he had a photo album of Komaeda asleep or anything. “Hey, Komaeda,” he starts, as gentle as he can. His hand clasps the shell of Komaeda's shoulder. He shakes it, just barely. Komaeda shoots up, a gasp strangled in his throat.
Hinata jumps back, thigh scraping the bed. Komaeda's got a hand to his chest, his breathing shallow and uneven. Hinata doesn't think he's ever seen his eyes so wide and wild. “Hey, hey,” he hushes, hand shaking in the space between them. “Its me. Just me.” Komaeda's own name had seemed to terrify him. He brushes his bangs from his forehead, sweat gathering there, adrenaline making his stare jittery. He looks like I was gonna… Hinata can't finish the thought. He swallows thickly. “I- I brought your meds,” his hand shakes as he holds out the foil. Komaeda's hesitant eyes land on it. For a second, Hinata somehow worries he got the wrong ones.
Komaeda doesn't take them. Hinata's other hand shakes with a water-dotted, half-drunk water bottle. Komaeda's lip shakes when he says, just above a whisper, “I thought you were- a…” Hinata's chest tightens. He knows what he meant to say.
He drops the meds in Komaeda's lap, holding the water bottle between his hands, dropped between his knees. The MonoPad is in his hold, laying haphazardly across the blankets covering Komaeda's thighs. The bed suddenly feels like it can't hold his weight when Hinata presses into it. “A murderer?” Its not harsh. Its guilty. You're so weak, his teeth grind. Not- not weak. Fragile. Every time he's left Komaeda alone in the past week flash behind his eyes, every chance somebody had to walk through the unlocked door, every way he always fails to try to protect himself…
Once, Hinata thought Komaeda was just crazy, borderline suicidal. Thought he wanted an easy escape, a coward's way out of their situation, maybe even to scare everybody hard enough a true murderer wouldn't ever approach him. Might've thought he was damn smart for it, even. Nobody will take someone up on an offer to plan their own murder, he'd scoffed. Now he thinks it was helplessness, the idea that no matter if he locked every door, prayed to every God, read every Bible in existence, took up every experimental drug or trial, somehow, some way, he was sure, beyond any doubt that he'd collapse one day and the wrong person would find him. That it was the idea of the body that already betrayed him, the one he already mourned every day was going to be his own murderer in the worst way possible, lead the worst person to him when he was his weakest.
Hinata doesn't realize his eyes are stinging until Komaeda is staring at him. He blinks them back and looks away. His voice is soft and low when he speaks, but so, so genuine. “No.” Komaeda's hands fidget in his lap, as messy as the wires were that morning, tangled in his limbs like Frankenstein's lightning. “A nurse.” Hinata blinks at him. Komaeda stares back. Its quiet for a second, then he breathes out heavy. His hands toy with his MonoPad. “I thought you were a nurse.”
Komaeda opens the foil with deft fingers. The capsule lands in his shaky palm and Hinata hands him the water bottle with a tremoring arm. The air is so alive he half expects Komaeda to spark when he grabs it. He doesn't, but he tosses the pill back and takes it like a shot of whiskey, and that's almost worse. Hinata doesn't know what to say. There's the beeping again, the MonoPad speaker blaring it too loud for the tenseness between them. Komaeda watches him stare at it. He doesn't rush to turn it off, but he fumbles with it a little, staring at the screen. It illuminates his face a pale, unearthly blue, and something flashes in his eyes. He looks up at Hinata and he doesn't think Komaeda has ever looked younger.
It turns off. Komaeda's forehead drops into his hand, his sigh seeming a thousand years old. Hinata itches to reach out and touch him, but he seems to be flinching if the AC even hums too loud, so he decides to wait. His fingers scratch at each other in his lap instead. “You don't have to tell me,” he reassures. Komaeda's eyes are tired when they look up, something about them glassy. Its not illness glassy, though. Komaeda sniffles, and Hinata watches the AC blow a bunched-up tissue around the far edge of the bed. He suddenly feels like a very, very bad- whatever he is.
He's been crying. Komaeda looks up with eyes so green, edges so red they look like emeralds in comparison. Hinata's hands can't scratch into his own fingers deep enough, so he reaches out for him, tangling in the sheets above his lap. They both pretend the noise in his throat is him clearing the snot, but its not.
“I want to,” Komaeda says, and its nasally. He coughs a little. Hinata's eyes couldn't ever look away from his face, but Komaeda stares at the mess in the bed. His limbs are knotted around the cooling blankets, snotty tissues everywhere, sweat stains on the covers. He feels disgusting. Hinata looks at him like he's the prettiest thing in the world. “I- I trust you with this. I want you to…” To know that? To see that? To see this? A thousand selfish sentiments and all Hinata will bare.
The air gets tense. Quiet. A minute passes, the analog clock over the lounge boring into him. Komaeda's breath becomes thinner and thinner until he just turns on the tablet again, pressing Play. The sounds are familiar, too familiar. He flinches against them, looking up at Hinata with his watery eyes. He tries to blink the sting back and they just fill up more. A calloused thumb wipes his cheek and he decides he deserves every punishment this world has to offer. “Close your eyes,” he whispers, voice miraculously steady. Hinata's eyelashes flutter closed.
He sees it when Hinata recognizes the sounds. His face falls, eyes shooting open. “Oh, God,” he says, hand over his mouth. It shakes at the edges, Komaeda's head down. Hinata thinks he might look guilty, but that's not quite right. “Is that-” he pauses, almost disbelieving. “People… Make that sort of thing?” His voice sounds a little far away. Komaeda doesn't nod. He just hands him his MonoPad instead.
Hinata reads it twice. Something in his chest sinks. Its not disgust, not fear, not this is so disturbing. Concern. He runs a finger over the screen like he could feel the texture of the words.
Hospital Ambience: IV Pump, Heart Monitor, Nurse Checks. His throat is thick, his heart is pounding, and his mouth is is so dry. The tablet dips when Komaeda takes it from him, their fingers brushing. He stares through the bed like its not there.
Komaeda fumbles with the off switch. The silence is louder when the heart monitor beeping leaves. “You think I'm crazy.” It sounds convinced. There's no question in it, no opportunity to comfort. Hinata knows Komaeda said it like that on purpose. Whether he knows it or not.
But Hinata does what Hinata has learned to do, or maybe always has. He carves a place for that comfort, for understanding, right in the middle of all that certainty. Komaeda isn't looking at him, so he makes him, words hard enough to bruise. Just a little, not too much. Komaeda looks at him like the ache was a relief all its own when it lands. “I think you're hurt,” Hinata says, almost forceful. Komaeda's not breathing. “And I think you needed me here and I- I wasn't…” That part was harder to be forceful about, he finds. The swallow aches, Komaeda laughing hollow, low. I know that sound, Hinata looks up. Komaeda looks like he's grieving something he never learned he lost.
When he says it, something in Komaeda seems to shatter. Not a lot, not a clean break – not the ones that heal easily, not the ones that don't leave chronic pain. The ones that fracture slowly, hairline, creeping, the ones that leave memory, leave a sting. “I wasn't here, in bed with you,” Komaeda brushes his collarbone with a hand, and Hinata knows exactly where the fracture sits.
Something settles in him. In his stomach, in his heart, across his forehead. A shard of light, a spill of water, an echo of- of something. He thinks he shattered with Komaeda, but its not the kind of ache that you want relief of. Its the kind of ache you think brings honesty, the kind of ache you think of when you can't sleep, the kind that bruises in a way you press into beneath the desk in class. I'm not a nurse. Its not as dramatic as it feels. No nurse crawls in bed with his patient. Hinata's hand writhes in the sheets, finding his, and they tangle together while Komaeda's breath turns heavy, then turns wet, then turns into crying.
I'm not a nurse. Hinata should have known that by now. His fingers curl into Komaeda's, pressing into his palm. Komaeda's voice breaks, pitches high. His hand scrabbles at his shirt like it hurts to breathe and Hinata whispers something he doesn't catch under his breath. I'm a caretaker. I learned how to give care because somebody I love is sick, but I'm not a nurse.
Love. Love. Yes, love. He doesn't take it back this time. He doesn't say it either, but he doesn't hide it from himself. He pulls Komaeda to his chest instead, sniffling, whimpering. His hand rubs across his back, catching on a shoulder blade. Love.
Komaeda's voice is quiet when he says, “You were doing me a favor.” It cracks around favor, shakes across doing. “You- you have to leave sometimes.” His voice gets even quieter when he says, “You have a life.”
A pause. It slashes across Hinata. “Even if I don't.”
The rush of limbs is fast, sudden, clumsy. Real, horrifyingly real. Komaeda chokes when he squeezes, but Hinata hardly notices. “Maybe this is my life.” Its a confession, he thinks. It has to be. He doesn't know how else to say it. “Maybe you…” He can't manage anything else.
Komaeda's question comes out soft for something so broken. “Am I crazy?” The days where Hinata would've said yes without a second thought seem so distant. “I- I hate the hospital. I'm terrified of it. I…” Komaeda's lip wobbles. It takes all of Hinata's discipline to keep himself from leaning in, swallowing the words, shushing him with everything caught in his chest instead of fighting the clumsiness of teenage romance tooth and nail.
But he doesn't. He brushes Komaeda's hair like he wanted to at the pharmacy, breathes in the bitterness still on his breath. “Its the one place you didn't have to worry about you falling apart. You had machines and doctors and nurses for that.” Komaeda's eyes are on his lips, then his eyes. They're hesitant, like he's touching some part of Hinata that he can't scrub his handprint off of by being here. Hinata likes that. He cups his cheek, getting so close the shards of silver in Komaeda's hazy green eyes are splintering in his hand. “You are not crazy.” It has force. Force and something else. “You are sick,” and quieter, “You have always been sick.”
Hinata's guilt mixes with the warmth in his chest, confusing and drunk. The words pour out, so honest they seem to bleed light. “You needed to feel like somebody was watching you do you didn't have to watch yourself. You- you needed to sleep, and I wasn't here, so- so this…” Komaeda's hand jerks the MonoPad in their laps. A tear streaks on it, his wheeze following.
Hinata lifts Komaeda's chin. His eyes shine. “Call me when you're tired.” Its soft and its demanding all at once, and Komaeda is so in love. “I'll run if I have to. Don't care if I get heat stroke.” The murmuring is so low it reverberates through Komaeda's chest, and for a moment he panics. Hinata's hazel eyes shine. Komaeda's crying breaks into a hesitant laugh.
“Okay,” he says. He shouldn't and he does anyway. Selfish, utterly selfish, and completely in love. “Okay.”
Hinata's hand reaches behind him. The sheets tangle in his fingers, and then something else does. Buttons scratch his bitten nails, Komaeda's shoulders shaking when the brushed cotton covers his sweat-sheened skin. His hand claws at the shirt like it might disappear, a shield against the world.
Hinata thinks he's imagining it when Komaeda starts to lean in. He does, and he leans in anyway. His hand is on his thigh beneath the sheets, their faces as close as they were in the diner, as they were in the hotel restaurant the night Komaeda told him he was sick, as they were every night Hinata wanted to wake him up with a kiss instead of pain and nausea, instead of a morning announcement they shouldn't have. His breath brushes Komaeda's eyelashes and they flutter. “Komaeda, I…” He thinks he's actually going to say it.
Ding, ding, ding.
“Hello everybody!” the voice squeals over the monitor. “A body has been discovered!”
Owari throws the soda cap back against the beach house door, metal scraping glass. It screeches, a scratch catching the light from the afternoon sun. Chandler Beach rolls out in ivory glistens, the waves tossing and turning. Its the kind of place she'd dreamed of visiting as a kid, looked at on postcards at the corner store. The kind of place she'd never thought she'd get to see. Now I just wanna go home, she hums around the Coke bottle, glass hitting her teeth. Oh, well. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Oh, right. Except the bodies. At least the food's good, she tosses back a jalapeño popper.
“Hey, coach,” she calls to Nidai, who turns on his heel. He grunts at her, staring down the collar of his jacket. “Those two here yet?” He shakes his head. Owari groans, head hitting the mosaic wall. “Dammit! They better stop messin’ around and get here!” The bark echoes through the whole beach house and out the door. If the breeze was lighter, it might've ruined the footprints on the sand. She takes another swig from her cola. Hajime would kill me for messing up evidence… she ruminates. Then again, he's not here.
Nanami looks at her from across the room. She glances down at her watch, pixels ticking. Her pout is too genuine for the topic at hand. For a second, they all almost worry they're getting too used to the hostage situation they're in. “Tsumiki said she saw Hajime earlier today,” she wipes at her eye. “But he seemed to be off in a big rush. Something about Komaeda. She seemed really jumbled.” Mioda stares right at Nanami, but she conveniently looks down at the crime scene. If Owari knew any better, she'd think she was deflecting.
She throws the lid again. The rough edges scrape the glass door, screeching loud. The mess of scratches on the door look like scars, or maybe battle wounds. Owari frowns. “They better get here, or I'm gonna have words when they do,” she crosses her arms over her chest, slumping. “Whatever they're gettin’ up to isn't as important as this!”
Nidai laughs, boisterous and loud. “Maybe they're taking a jog out on the island!” he hums, large back eclipsing the chair he sits in. Its almost humorous, if it weren't for the body and bloodstains on the floor across from them. “Cardio calls at all hours of the day.” Owari rolls her eyes.
“Komaeda doesn't run, Nekomaru,” Kuzuryuu snorts. “That freak doesn't have an athletic bone in his body.” Owari looks at him, but something about the way he's leaning on the wall is wrong. His eyes are far away, and he's looking too intently at Koizumi's body. He sees this stuff all the time, she's puzzled, taking a bite of her burger. Why's he looking at her like that?
“If they're doing cardio, it ain't running,” Owari mutters around her burger. She wipes at her mouth, crumbs falling in her skirt. Souda startles next to her like the words tazed him, hand stalling when he reaches for one of her fries. She looks up at him with honest eyes, shrugging. “What? You know its true.” She washes it down with more Coke, setting the empty bottle down.
Nidai's looking at her with that look that tells her he's on a mission, and she should've known, because you mention someone doing cardio wrong and he spins out like a dreidel. “Do I have to teach them proper form, Akane?!” he bellows, and its so loud Souda jumps back into the glass doors. Kuzuryuu flinches, grimacing. “You should know better than to let people run with bad posture! The injur-” Nidai's passion gets cut off by Souda's mortified mumbling, Owari's cheeks stuffed full with cheesey fries.
“Oh, God, please don't,” Souda whines, covering his face with his beanie. “I can't handle you getting involved, man. I can't even handle- any of that. Oh, I can't handle any of this!” Apparently Owari spilled the beans, because Souda's sliding down the beachhouse wall, face covered and whimpering. “Mahiru's dead, Hinata isn't here to figure out who did it, because he's- doing Komaeda! What is going on?!” he wails, and then goes dead quiet.
Well, Owari thinks, that's one way to put it. Souda grabs a fistful of her fries and stuffs them in his face, whimpering noisily into them. Kuzuryuu's got his nose pinched tight, and Sonia is looking at the label on a Japanese lychee soda with too much intensity to be natural, face hidden in the doorway to the storage closet. Nanami is reading the Monokuma File, but her eyes have that knowing glint that always made Owari's hair stand on end.
“Uh,” Nidai says, glancing around the room. Somewhere in the fuss, Pekoyama had left. He looks down at Owari, who shrugs her shoulders. “That… Kind of cardio has a few acceptable forms, I guess,” he mutters, scratching at his cheek with a nail. Souda whimpers further, hands pressed together like he's praying for relief, and Nidai's face looks flushed enough he just grumbles an excuse to leave. Owari watches his broad shoulders disappear down the sand, shouting after him to grab her a milkshake at the diner. He nods over his back, disappearing down the track.
“How can you eat at a time like this?!” Souda's teary eyes hide behind his shadow, leftover grease on his lips. Owari raises her eyebrow and doesn't say anything. Seems kinda… Excitable, she tells herself, turning away from him. Kuzuryuu's muttering to himself in the corner, no doubt curses. “Oh God, we're gonna die…” Souda worries under his breath, “And all because Hinata's gay. Too gay to come investigate the damn murder! Oh, Hell's bells.”
“You could try investigating the murder, y'know,” Kuzuryuu sighs, glaring from across the room. He's got a Mountain Dew in his hand, but its barely touched. When Souda looks back at him, he looks down at the floor. “Okay, yeah, point taken.” It seems to be mutual agreement Souda's too flighty to solve a murder. “You could go, like, find them?” Kuzuryuu offers instead, thumbing the edge of his soda rim.
Souda's reaction was instantaneous, so loud Owari almost jumps. Almost. “Wh- dude!” Souda squeals, flipping towards Kuzuryuu. Kuzuryuu doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with his proposal. “I am not going near- anywhere private with- no!” Owari would laugh at him if she wasn't in agreement. From what little she's seen, she's sure it would be an eyeful – and earful. She shudders. Souda points a finger at Kuzuryuu, fluorescent pink eyes wide. “You do it, macho man!”
Its Kuzuryuu's turn to look scandalized. He drops his Mountain Dew from his mouth, eyes wide as saucers. “Me?” he asks, mouth a wide O. “Oh, no no no.” He waves a hand. “The people at the top of the ranks don't do the errand running. No. And besides-” Kuzuryuu seems to fight down a shudder, “I've seen enough in my life. That would be my breaking point, I think.”
Souda's face is grief-stricken. “So you agree its emotionally scarring?!” he accuses, arms flailing. Kuzuryuu goes quiet, then nods slowly. Souda's breathing is bordering on rapid. “We both saw that in the library, man! I deserve Witness Protection too!” Kuzuryuu seems to think this over. His passive face appears to be an agreement.
The two slowly turn their heads. Nanami looks up from her MonoPad, backing out of the file lazily. “I promise I wasn't sleeping,” she murmurs, rubbing her eye again. “What's going on?”
They both say her name at once. Kuzuryuu goes, ‘A favor, Nanami-’ and Souda goes, ‘Oh, please, Chiaki-’, which would've been funny, Owari thinks, if Nanami's face didn't widen a little. She puts a hand out, shushing them.
“Oh, hey, Hajime, Komaeda,” she says, and Owari's snicker is drowned out by the paling of her classmates’ faces. “We've been waiting for you.”
Komaeda smiles thinly, stepping over the doorway with his hands in his hoodie pockets. Hinata's eyes are guarded. “We've been here quite a while,” he says, subtly. Yes, subtly. “I believe these two were too engaged in a… Heated discussion to notice, though.” Souda's hair is so bright against his face he looks like he's a traffic cone. Kuzuryuu shoves his face in his drink and chugs it swallow after swallow. “So,” Komaeda says, too brightly. “Murder details?”
"Koizumi Mahiru,” Hinata says, voice remarkably steady. Owari always found it creepy how he reacted so viscerally to the bodies but could recite the case details like they were pages in a book. “Fatal injury is blunt force trauma to the head. File said it was instantaneous, although there seems to be a blood trail. I'm guessing she was-”
“Dragged?” Komaeda hums, chin in hand. He's crouched beside Hinata, their shoulders so close they're brushing. Voices echo down the beachhouse trail, Pekoyama flanked by Tsumiki, Tanaka, and Saionji. Owari doesn't have to look at their faces to know what they look like. “Hm, yes. I concur. Likely with that bat…”
Hinata snorts, standing up. He doesn't bother to greet the people filing in. Komaeda leans against the wall, peering over Koizumi. Even Owari's stomach turns when he parts her hair, looking at the gash on her head with an intensity she'd expect of a coroner. “Concur? Really, Komaeda?” Hinata opens his MonoPad, only glancing at the widening group once. His stare is noncommittal, almost empty. “You sound like Sherlock Holmes. Its freaky.” For the bluntness of the words, he leans against the wall beside him, hip nearly grazing Komaeda's. It almost seems like he has to be as close as possible, even as Komaeda's fingers brush with blood.
Komaeda wipes his hands on his jeans. Hinata watches, but doesn't seem at all affected. Even Kuzuryuu grimaces, a boy who likely grew up with the phrase ‘blood on your hands’ since he was a toddler. “Yes, dear Watson,” Komaeda's eyes twinkle. He glances around, and only then does he seem to notice the crowd. “Oh, hello, everybody,” he waves, his fingers still stained. “Forgive us for being late. We were held up.”
Nobody says anything. Mioda looks off to the sand and whistles. Owari grabs the fry bucket from Nidai and shovels some. Tanaka mutters to Sonia, whose face is bright pink. Kuzuryuu won't look at anyone in the eye. Hinata clears his throat.
“So,” Hinata begins, and it sounds a little dry. Seeing Komaeda for the first time in days, the crowd can fully appreciate his appearance. The few glances of him Souda and Kuzuryuu have gotten weren't very telling – the library didn't show his face, and the diner was from several feet away and in afternoon glare. Now that they see him, he looks like a wreck. Kuzuryuu hates the word he thinks of is debauched. Kuzuryuu's lip curls. “Anything we should know about the crime scene?” Everyone is quiet.
The daylight is much more accusatory to him. Komaeda's undereye circles are leagues worse than Hinata's, his hair unbrushed and unwashed. His lips look torn to shreds, bitten in ways they can't be from the inside, and the hem of his shirt tells Kuzuryuu he put it on inside out, the hook-and-eye dye pattern backwards. Souda seems to realize it at the same time, grimacing. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispers, “How much of a rush were you in, man?”
Kuzuryuu doesn't want to think of it. He mimes a zip it, glaring at Souda over his flat lips. “We don't wanna know, Kaz,” he mutters. “We don't know how the killer got out,” Kuzuryuu says, louder. Hinata nods, looking back and forth across the room. “We don't know if they hid in the storage or left some other way, but it didn't seem like they coulda been the one who left those footprints,” he nods at the ones in the sand. He doesn't really see them when he looks at them.
“Alright,” Hinata hums to himself, tension dissolving. Tsumiki scuttles out the door, seemingly in a rush. When Hinata looks around, he's surprised to see Saionji isn't there. He frowns. I'd expect her to have been more upset. “Well, we should take a look. Storage closet, Komaeda?” he calls, but Komaeda doesn't seem to be listening. He turns, looking at his far-away expression. “Uh, Komaeda?” Nothing. “Holmes.” Komaeda's head snaps up and Hinata can't help but chuckle, bleeding through his exasperated sigh. Komaeda smiles sheepishly.
“Sorry,” he says, taking the extra effort to walk a half-step closer. Suddenly they're close enough their shoulders are brushing. Hinata hardly notices, leaning in. “Maybe we should try the bathroom first. I want to wash the blood off my hands.” Hinata goes to say there's no running water inside. Remember?, he's going to remind, when we thought you were going to be sick in there? He stops, Komaeda's knowing eyes shining in the light. Oh. Hinata glances at the bathroom door, the Out Of Service sign bloodred. Alright.
“Sure,” Hinata says, maybe too loudly. Everybody stares. “Let's clean that up.” Komaeda walks in breezily, the door shuttering closed behind them. When it does, Hinata hears the scraping of something metal behind him. He flips around to see Komaeda kicking the trashcan in front of the door, grabbing towels from the hanger to weigh it down. Hinata clicks his tongue. “Alright, what are we doing in here?” he looks around. The light is dimmer than he expected and the switch doesn't work. “Any reason the door has to be kept closed?”
Komaeda slides the door to the shower open, stepping inside. He tries the handle, but no water comes out of the pipes. “As promised,” he says to himself, glancing up to Hinata. He smiles wryly. “Maybe I just wanted to stoke the fire,” Komaeda proposes, locking his hands behind his back. Hinata watches his boots make contact beneath the shower ledge, echoing on the tile. Hinata raises a brow and Komaeda's flushed face turns away. “Or maybe I know someone out there is the murderer,” he says, quieter. Its almost a whisper between them, Komaeda's grey eyes blinking up slowly through his eyelashes. “And I don't want one of them coming in here, or worse, listening through the door, so…”
“So you made it look like we were doing something weird in here,” Hinata finishes, fighting back a smile. Komaeda smiles at him, glancing at him from the corner of his eye, then staring up at the barred window. His breath comes out in a hushed laugh. “You really are something, Komaeda.” That feeling in his stomach gets warm, sticky. He wonders, for a second, what the others think of them. Well, I heard some, he sighs to himself, following Komaeda's eyes. That's a damn tall window. “You think they got out there?”
“Anything is possible, dear Watson,” Komaeda taps his chin. His eyes twinkle in the light, mischievous and prophetic. Then there's a hand on Hinata's shoulder, and Komaeda is whispering in his ear. “Haul me up on your shoulders so I can see if it opens?” he hushes. Hinata looks at him with eyes wild as an animal. Are you crazy?! If I topple, you'll- He can't finish the thought. Another broken skull on the beachhouse floor would suck on its own, but Komaeda? I'd never recover.
Komaeda's voice is soft. Its grounding, and its right on his face. Hinata gulps. “I trust you, Hinata-kun,” he whispers. “And,” his finger trails the edge of Hinata's jaw, “We're the only two we're sure didn't kill her. We can't trust anybody else.” His big grey eyes blink at him, eyelashes fluttering. I can't believe you're flirting with me over a murder case, Hinata thinks, hauling Komaeda's thin thighs over his shoulders. He's light enough his balance doesn't waiver too much, but he steadies himself on the wall anyway. Komaeda reaches up with his long, spindly arms, thighs tightening.
Hinata swallows. I overlooked a key piece of this arrangement, he thinks, hands digging into Komaeda's hipbones. Komaeda laughs airily. “I have to thank Koizumi!” he trills into the air, hand bracing against the window. “She's being such a lovely wingwoman. Will you pick up a ouija board after the trial from the supermarket for me, Hinata-kun?”
His face is burning and he can't see with his head leaning on the wall for stability, so he just grinds his jaw. From Komaeda's laugh, he could feel it. “Quit it,” Hinata bites, patting his thigh like it'll do something. Komaeda's high-pitched laugh tells him it just amused him. Or worse. “Does the window open or not?”
“Indeed!” Komaeda leans back, bracing his hands on Hinata's head. His fingers thread in his hair. Hinata would be lying if he said he didn't have to swallow a very odd noise. “But it takes both of us to get up here, so somebody would need either an accomplice to get up here, or a ladder of some kind…” Hinata doesn't know if its Komaeda's nails scraping his scalp or the fact he's got a very breakable boy on his shoulders, but he can't figure out how to get him safely on the ground.
“Could- could those footprints have been from an accomplice?” Hinata's voice sounds a little rummy. Komaeda looks down at him from above. He can feel the smugness on his face. Hinata manages to glare up at him. “Oh, damn you, you planned this!” He snakes a hand around Komaeda's leg to smack his own forehead. “You little- how am I going to get you down?” Hinata groans. Komaeda hums too happily.
“Maybe we have to stay like this forever,” he says, almost dreamily. It briefly dawns on Hinata Komaeda is his most touchy around dead bodies and murder trials. How fitting, he thinks wryly. That's what I get for falling in love with a demented Sherlock Holmes. “Or maybe-”
Hinata crouches slowly, guiding himself down by his hand on the wall, leaning his head to it. Komaeda squeaks, holding on tighter, thighs tightening. Hinata bites back something about ‘this is your fault’, before eventually settling one knee on the ground. He breathes out, hand digging into Komaeda's hip. “Do not fall,” Hinata orders, voice tight. “I will kill you if you die.”
The crash is loud, but its not bloody. Komaeda lands on top of him, Hinata closer to the ground from being beneath him. His back lands right on top of the metal trashcan, Komaeda's limbs falling haphazardly around him. He falls a few steps back at first, holding onto Komaeda as hard as he can before they fall. The towels cushion his back a little, but Komaeda slams him right into the door. “Ow,” he mumbles, rubbing his head. Komaeda lays in his lap, sprawled across it sideways. The trashcan is rolled in front of them on its side, far, far away from its original barricade in front of the door.
The steps ascending towards them come on fast. Understandable, he supposes, because of the sound. Tanaka opens the door, eyes wide, Sonia and Tsumiki over his shoulder. Komaeda looks up from his lap, perched like a bird of prey. “... Hello there,” he says, blinking slowly, “Forgive the noise. We got a little carried away.”
Hinata runs a hand down his face. Tanaka's face turns pink. Sonia excuses herself, Tsumiki turning away from the door. “We're fine, everybody,” he says, Komaeda clinging to the wall, stumbling to his feet. “Just… Crashed a little.”
“You gave us all quite a fright,” Pekoyama approaches, sword casting a shadow over him on the floor. Hinata blinks, the shape strange on his face. It almost looks like steps on a staircase, the edge of the handle glinting in the afternoon sun. His frown deepens. Steps on a… “The noise was incredible out here.” She helps him to his feet.
Everything comes into focus. The vending machine, half-empty from when he got Komaeda his sport's drink. The footprints outside, half disappeared from the sand ruffled by wind. The trashcan by the vendor, filled with water bottles as Komaeda approaches to put a MonoCoin in the slot, towel in hand. Their eyes meet over the keypad, his smile sharp as a blade.
“Thank you, Pekoyama,” Hinata turns to her, hand still in his. He shakes it once. It feels final. “That was a great help.”
He walks off to help Komaeda with the vending machine, Kuzuryuu's eyes burning into his back the whole way.
The elevator shutters, going up, up, up. The inside of the volcano has cracks in the rock through the grates, Komaeda's eyes digging into it. They blur, tripling over, the shaking velvet floor wracking his bones. They ache, and the Percocet pills in his back pocket probably would've alerted somebody if the metal cage they were in wasn't making so much damn noise. He promises to put some cotton balls in his prescription bottle next time, hand curling around the elevator bar. He swallows the ache in his clavicle, presses his fingers to the lymph nodes swollen at the nape of his neck. When he closes his eyes, stars dance.
Murders. He never thought he'd be investigating them, at least not this young. Once, he thought about being a forensic anthropologist or a private criminal investigator. A coroner, even. Blame X-Files and Bones for that one, he thinks weakly, but even the voice in his head shakes.
Hinata is there. Oh, Hinata. Warm, sun-tanned hands wrap around his wrist, breath fanning his ear. “Are you okay, Komaeda?” Its a soft question. No accusation in it, even though Hinata is used to crisis now. Komaeda doesn't nod, but he doesn't shake his head either. He feels like his pelvis might break leaning his hips back on the elevator railing, every part of him hurting.
“I think that investigation took more out of me than I expected.” It comes out more evenly than it should for how bad he hurts. His spine feels like its been broken, his nodes aching. Everywhere in his body his blood churns feels contaminated, radioactive. He breathes out hard. “I- let's just get this over with,” he swallows, swaying on his legs when he tries to take a step.
His Hinata-kun is there to steady him, just like he always his now. He's lucky for that. “We'll make it as fast as we can,” he promises, the crowd rushing for the open door. Whispers surround them, the students glancing between each other. “You can rest after this, okay?” His hand rubs down Komaeda's side, nails scratching the windbreaker fabric. The hiss is comforting, soft, reliable.
Komaeda takes a step that burns the soles of his feet. He clenches his jaw. “Okay,” he says, so quiet. “Okay.”
Monokuma takes the stand. They swear their oaths. A few of their friends say prayers, their hands shaking in front of them. Komaeda takes his podium next to Hinata. For a second he misses his early adolescent wheelchair, the clover painted on the back, the 55 stitched into its seat. He breathes out and the air bites back.
Its all around him. The pain, the nausea, the ache. Not in the sense of the pain he'd get from the infections he'd let fester, or the sepsis attacks he's suffered when the immune rescues didn't work the way they should. Not the way the needles drilled into him when the lumbar puncture was done, and not the way his chest felt when he had his arrhythmias when he was fifteen. Its not a complex regional flare, not hot or sparking on his skin; and its not the cut of a scalpel in surgery, not the dig of a needle into bone when the local anesthetic wasn't enough for the stem cell biopsies and the flashbacks made him much too quiet.
No. No, this was deeper. Quieter. Predator-quiet, slower. The kind of predator that comes on silently, the kind that snaps its jaws when your back is turned. His blood is pooling in his legs, his hands mottling on the podium. The ache is in his ribs, across his chest, in the nodes below his shoulder blades. They spread across his hips and between his bones, his breath steaming between his lips. His neck swells with the waxy lymphs that wane, and all at once he closes his stinging eyes, missing so, so badly when the oncologist told him that, ’I'm not too concerned if they wax and wane, Komaeda. We should test your ANA antibodies first, run your spinal fluid for Lyme again…’ The hope from that, when he thought they were wrong – it spits up in his mouth, infantile and bitter, and all at once he thinks the floor is going to open up and swallow him whole...
Hinata's voice is clear, sharp, and conclusive. It clears the air enough he can breathe again, so startling it grounds him. He looks up, seeing his eyes glow in the dim of the trial room. The moon is rising over the gape in the top of the volcano, moonlight catching in his hair. Komaeda's heart pounds against the ache in his ribs and it feels like cold water. “I don't think we need to worry about who had access to washing the blood off,” Hinata's voice is hard. “There were water bottles in the trash can by the vending machine in the beach house. Komaeda and I saw them during the investigation.” Komaeda wonders if his face looks pale. Hinata's eyes look at him and something flickers. “The killer had to use those to wash off. The beach house doesn't have running water.”
Monokuma's laugh is childish and cold. “Of course I turned the water off! You think I want teenagers doing unwholesome things in a shared shower?” he giggles behind a paw. “The killer had to wash off some other way, I will confirm! Yes, indeed!”
The room murmurs. It seems alive with the sound, whispers turning into shadows as the moon hangs overhead. Komaeda's eyes droop, exhaustion hauling at his bones. I want to curl up against this podium and go to sleep, he wishes, and really, who would stop him? What would the consequence be? His insides ache for the smell of Hinata's cologne in his bed. When his eyes open again, all eyes are on Pekoyama. His stomach twists.
He doubts anybody would believe him, but this is his least favorite part. He glances to her steel glare, staring, silent. He can't find the words to convict her.
His tired eyes fall to the floor, sight too heavy to hold in them. They drag, worn and exhausted. His eyes land on shined shoes, polish still gleaming. Up they trail on the pinstripes of his trousers, across his breasted suit. Kuzuryuu's hands are tight on his podium.
Its barely audible. Soft exhale, his jaw clenching. Komaeda watches his eyes flash gold, the lion in the chase. The predator.
His voice is sharp when it slices the room. “Yeah?” it goads. “You want to talk about messing around in the beach house, Hajime?” Komaeda stumbles on his feet. Hinata looks across the room with a flinch that ricochets in Komaeda's bones. The room tilts, whispers turning into gasps, murmurs going louder. Komaeda hears them ring in his ear, the questions incessant; all of them hurt to listen to.
Hinata expected this. From the second he and Komaeda figured out the end of that damned Twilight Syndrome arcade game, he expected it. But Komaeda flinches like it hurts, his head downcast, and something rears in him. Souda's voice is wild, giggly, paranoid, and way too annoying. “H-Hey man, come on,” he looks at Kuzuryuu, “Just- let's hear h-him out,” he pleads, stuttering. Kuzuryuu doesn't look at him. Souda wipes sweat from his brow, flicking it over the edge of the podium and off his fingers.
“Fuyuhiko… Is this about what we saw in the beach house?” Sonia says it lowly, eyes downcast to the trial floor. Komaeda's skin prickles, hair standing on end. Against the nerve pain beneath the surface of it, it feels entirely too raw, but that's not the part of him he feels is on display.
Hinata's face is blank. His eyes are heavy, his shoulders sagged. Its the posture of a man guilty, a sentence rolling out of the jury's mouths. The judge's mallet comes down hard and Komaeda can see it plain across his face, can tell by the look in his eye its a sentence worse than death. His hand tightens on the podium, suddenly unable to look Hinata in the eye when he turns his head towards him.
The room is quiet. All eyes are on Sonia at first, and then Hinata. He feels them, anxious and juvenile, the kind of stare teenagers uses when they've heard something by their locker in the hallway they don't believe and can't get out of their heads anyway no matter how hard they try. His flesh feels peeled back, bones covered by the expanse of sinew rubbed raw by aquatic salt outside the doomsday courtroom they sit in. If he were to close his eyes, the salty air is close enough he could listen to the distant waves and pretend he's on the beach, not here in the trial room waiting to send another child to death.
Hinata does not close his eyes, because that's not what he's here to do. He is not relaxing on the beach. He's being stared at by all his classmates, friends and leaders alike, skinned alive. Their prying eyes have access to the muscle that is littered with the nerves Komaeda's electrodes had shocked, the bed full of wires seeming so far away. When the eyes fall off of him, he knows they fall to him.
His glare is deadly. Kuzuryuu doesn't back down, and that's when Hinata knows it. Its clear as day, the fear wild behind his angry eyes. He's got something to lose. Something personal, something precious. Hinata exhales hard and opens his mouth to accuse him, but Kuzuryuu's harsh voice cuts him off. “You noticed the bottles, right?” Hinata doesn't have to nod, but he does. For formality's sake, he tells himself, even if its really just to try to get everyone looking at him instead of Komaeda. “So what else was in that trashcan?”
Nothing changes, but the room turns cold. Hinata's blood circulates mechanically, and then it stops. He suddenly doesn't know what to say. Kuzuryuu's venomous stare turns towards Komaeda, who flinches when it does. “You,” he hisses, “What did you see?”
Hinata wants to call out, tell Komaeda not to say anything. Tell him this is a desperate attempt to stall what's inevitable, a play at fate. But Komaeda knows that, and Hinata knows him well enough to be able to tell when he looks at him, and he also knows him well enough to know why he won't stop Kuzuryuu's desperation. His hesitant grey eyes glance up to his accuser, lips parted. Everybody can tell his breath is baited, and Komaeda can tell everybody in the room is thinking something else.
’Is he the killer? They showed up late.’ ‘Did they wash the blood off at their cottages?’ ‘Could they be the mysterious accomplices? They've gotten remarkably close.’ Once again, Komaeda is the witch at the top of the hill, arms bound to the stake, kindling lit beneath his feet. His chest is suddenly so tight he can hardly breathe, pain forgotten in the light of vivid publicity. He breathes out slowly.
And Hinata is the one held by the clergy beneath the fire, because he always is, isn't he? He's always sympathizing with the wrong person. He's always solving things, fixing them- he's the type to bash against the pastor's wrists, beg to have them put out the flame, say, ’He's innocent, he's innocent! He's just-’ What would he say, Komaeda wonders? Sick? Lucky? Unwell? All things the village used to prosecute then, all things many died for.
It looks like nothing has changed, and it looks like Hinata will ruin himself anyway. Komaeda looks down at the ground with all the guilt of a witch and none of the craft. His voice is barely audible. “A sport's drink.”
In the middle of the erupting quiet, the gasps around the room were cut off with Hinata's shout. Its the same exclamation he uses when he shoots down a killer's defense, his emotion too wild in his throat. He jerks against the podium like he wants to run at Kuzuryuu, shoulders trembling. Komaeda's surprised to find he looks angry. “Anyone could've bought that!” His yell is so loud it shakes the people around him, a few jumping behind their stands. “It doesn't mean we were-”
He realizes his mistake a second too late. Hinata doesn't seem angry about it though, Komaeda finds. That confuses him. He was so angry when Kuzuryuu outed them, why isn't he embarrassed now? His shoulders just sag in, breathing out heavily. He pinches his forehead, elbow on the stand. Everybody watches.
Nobody has to ask. Nobody has to ask, ‘Wait, huh?’ or, ‘He was accusing Komaeda, what does that have do with you?’ They are all quiet, and Komaeda thinks that might be worse. Hinata lays against the podium with a spine too slack, eyes closed tight like he wants to be anywhere else.
It's guilt. They have gone through enough to know what guilt looks like, and they know they are seeing it. Komaeda's gut twists, face pinching. The mutters fill the room, and he hears a thousand words at once.
One stands out, Tanaka speaking to Sonia between her and Saionji. “Is this the carnal desire you told me they were leeching, Princess?” Saionji's nasally sniffs stop to tell him to be quiet and Komaeda flinches from it, hiding his face.
A metallic glint catches his eye. He shuts them further. Hinata is braver and doesn't look away, but Hinata doesn't consider it bravery. The cottage key catches the dim, depressing lighting of the courtroom, reflecting like hot sun on a blade. “This was in your freak's hoodie in the beach house when me and three other witnesses got there,” Kuzuryuu doesn't yell, but his voice booms, “So how the Hell do you know the water bottles were the killer's?” Hinata's mouth is dry for a second. He swallows to wet it, but Kuzuryuu is faster. “You two were there, weren't you?” It cracks. “Weren't you?!” Komaeda's head snaps up, shaking all over. He looks away, and that's all the witnesses need.
Sonia glances away, scandalized. Owari goes, “Oh, its for real,” whistling under her breath. Saionji grimaces, turning away, wiping her snotty nose. Tanaka mumbles something about ‘Lupercalian rituals’, head hidden in his tall collar. Nidai is remarkably silent.
Komaeda has never felt more exposed. When he looks to Hinata's face, expecting to see that closure- that fatalistic, inevitable closure he's been waiting on for so long- there's only determination.
Hinata tries to be clinical about it. Not personal, not convictional. Not act superior or like he's condemning her when he does it, not when Kuzuryuu looks at him like that. If the Hinata who didn't know what it was like to fear the inevitable taking somebody he loved looked like, he might not have been so kind – but its the same look he wears in the mirror every morning now, or the door to the pharmacy, or the water crossing the bridge to the islands to fetch the electrolyte flavors Komaeda likes. He knows it, and so he is clinical, because that's the only way to be that isn't biased. “Only the killer had blood to wash off,” he says, as evenly as he can.
It still hurts seeing Kuzuryuu's face. Hinata has to look away for a second, watching it break in half like that. If he had watched a while longer, he'd have seen the danger follow, but he didn't.
Kuzuryuu's voice doesn't perform passivity now. Its sharp, its loud, and its terrified. “If you're going down, I'm taking you with her!” His face is red, hot with anger and wounded by something deeper. He realizes what he said and doesn't stop, breathing heavy. The room reacts before he can speak – Mioda covers her mouth, studded bracelet scraping; Sonia turns towards the floor and whispers a forgiveness in Russian; Owari mutters a messy ‘Damn, man…’ and refuses to meet his eyes. Kuzuryuu doesn't seem to hear them.
When he goes to say something, the sound that cuts him off is soft. Soft and final, like the satin that lines a casket, the flowers that only bloom in cemeteries. Pekoyama's face is quiet, her arms not crossed as they usually are. They fuss in front of her before they drop, resigned. “Fuyuhiko,” she says, and for how gentle it is, he reacts to it like it was a demand behind a gun. “Enough.”
Komaeda watches Kuzuryuu's heart break in real time. For a second, he thinks he can't do it. Then Hinata looks at him with that determination, that undeniable spark, and his chest is heavy. If you don't convict the killer, everybody else dies. He closes his eyes, breathing shallow.
His hand tightens. The podium shakes a bit, his pain searing. I need this over, the desperate, adrenaline-laced part of him begs. I can't take standing anymore. His mouth opens without him asking. “Peko didn't go for a swim.” He can't watch Kuzuryuu's face, so he watches Hinata's. “She did it.”
The last thing anybody hears before the execution door opens is a metal-and-wood key hitting the courtroom floor. It echoes like a gunshot, fatal and metallic, a lightning strike slicing something in half.
Kuzuryuu calls out for her and his steps fall in line, and then he disappears behind the execution door.
Komaeda is never normal, but this was a little excessive.
Maybe Hinata's being overly pragmatic (he often is after these cursed Nancy Drew LARPs), but Komaeda walked back from that trial like he had a stick up his ass, he keeps cracking bad jokes, he almost fainted in his arms when he tried to get up from the couch after he finished his miso soup, and he sat in front of the TV and watched a rerun of a Brazilian soap opera about a Saint and a runaway rich-girl prostitute in 1940s communist South America. He was so absorbed Hinata called out and asked Komaeda if he spoke Spanish, and Hinata's sure his face was completely mystified and worthy of some proper asthmatic laughter, per Komaeda agenda.
Komaeda does not laugh. He watches the soap opera intensely as the woman whips her corset off on top of a hill at sunset, hair tossed to the wild wind. The Saint watches, horny and terrified. Yeah, mood, man. “No, Hinata-kun, I do not,” he says to the subtitle-less screen, sipping his water enigmatically. “Do you?” Hinata's eye twitches. I know you're not watching the bare tits on screen, he doesn't say. He thinks it really hard, though.
The air is tense for another fifteen Brazilian music-filled minutes before Hinata sighs. “Okay, what's wrong?” His hands are on his hips and he's sure he's the image of an angry housewife asking the dog why he's tracked mud all over the freshly-waxed floors, pie in the oven and husband off at war. Komaeda looks up with wide eyes, lips pursed around his straw, and yeah, okay, he's the dog. Hinata rolls his eyes. “You think I didn't notice you walk back to the cottages like you had something where the sun don't shine?”
Hinata's fried, and he can tell he's fried, because he noticed Komaeda's hiding something before he could catch the same thing he's going to hide behind. Komaeda's lips play at a grin and he stumbles. “Oh, no no no,” Hinata waves his hands, “That was a call out, not a- do not try to make a sex joke right now, Komaeda!” He wags his finger, and, like any guilty dog would, Komaeda gets sheepish. He dumps his leftover soup in the garbage disposal and leaves his bowl on the borrowed restaurant tray, refusing to look Hinata in the eyes. Hinata groans, following him like a Saint with a death wish. “Fess up, c'mon.”
When Komaeda turns, his eyes are bloodshot. He hasn't been crying, but they look exhausted. Up close and in the lighting of the cottages, Hinata can see what the trial room lighting stole and what the twilight wasn't cruel enough to expose. The veins beneath Komaeda's eyes are vericose and pulsing, skin so pale it looks like he could run his fingers along them and find them raised. His lips are drier than they should be, than he thinks they ever have been. Horrifying, Hinata thinks, because he's downed five ice waters since they got back, his fingers blue up to the palm from holding the cups. His hands always do that when its cold out and Hinata always panics, even if he says its normal.
Normal for you, Hinata stresses. Every time Komaeda looks at him like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Not normal for anybody else. And not normal for those who love you, even if he doesn't say that part.
Hinata sighs and Komaeda knows by the sound of it he's done for. He looks down to the cottage floor, suddenly unable to meet Hinata in the eye. “I- I'm in pain,” he says, so quietly. “That- that trial was harder than I expected. I… I guess I stood too long.” Its fragile, its pathetic, and its entirely too honest. Hinata's hands are reaching for him before Komaeda can see him doing it.
Hinata's eyes trail the expanse of cold, blue-purple skin on Komaeda's arms. His jacket is slung across the back of the couch, his hair still damp from a post-trial bath – which should've been his first clue something was extra wrong, because Komaeda told him his Hellfire-hot baths usually stop that weird color pattern on his skin. ‘Burn my nerves off for a good half hour,’ he'd told Hinata the first time he'd asked, walking out of his cottage bathroom looking entirely too red. ‘It helps the pain.’ His skin didn't rest a more neutral color now though, the cold throbbing pulsing through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. Hinata's palms ache when he makes the contact, callouses too warm against it. He mutters a curse under his breath. “Komaeda…” he hushes.
Komaeda jumps, but only a little. The pain, Hinata assumes. His back is a little slouched and a little crooked, which is a remarkable combination to make. Hinata flashes back to the way Komaeda walked back from the courtroom, legs swaying, curled in on himself and scuttling along the rickety wood of the drawbridge. Hinata suddenly feels very guilty for making light of it the way he did. It must hurt like Hell for walking in those damn shoes over those old bridges, his hands press into the muscle of Komaeda's shoulder. He watches a pale, speckly hand shoot out to the microwave desk, holding it. The sound Komaeda makes should not be making his face so red.
Hinata's hands go down. They stop at his lower back, hovering. The way Komaeda bends against the natural curve of his spine looks… Wrong. Almost looks- broken, Hinata eyes it. If it weren't impossible to walk with a broken back, he'd be asking Komaeda if he's been hiding one since the fall. “You hurt yourself in the investigation.” Its a whisper, not an accusation. Komaeda flinches anyway.
Its nothing compared to the flinch he makes when Hinata's hand brushes the cotton near his lower back, though. He jumps, knee bashing into the microwave cart. “No! No,” he yelps, grappling the edge of the wood with both hands. He pants out once, the noise sharp in the stunned silence. He turns, his eyes guilty when he sees Hinata's hands flat in the air. A surrender. “Just- um, my shoulders are fine, ha!” he chuckles, scratching his cheek with a bitten nail. Hinata doesn't miss how there's dried blood at the edge of it. He's been biting them to the quick. “Less work for you, and…”
Komaeda sees it. A flicker in Hinata's eye, a hesitance. A worry he's done something, stepped on something too fragile. Or maybe that someone else has. Komaeda shuts his eyes against it, heart still pounding. When it finally slows down it sinks, and he's not sure exactly where it stops when it hits the bottom. After what was said in the trial… He swallows. No. No, I can't let him think he's done anything less than everything. Komaeda breathes out slowly, and then he says it.
Hinata watches him. He fusses all over, an anxious habit he never had before they learned each other like this. Before Hinata learned him, learned these fragilities, vulnerabilities, aches. Komaeda crosses his left foot over the other, pressing his toes into his other ones like a toddler does when they have mud on their feet, hands wrung at his hip. He won't look Hinata in the eye, but his face is the one he wears when he's his most honest. Something lifts off Hinata's chest.
It doesn’t last, though. “When I was younger, I had to get a procedure.” Hinata immediately knows something is off by Komaeda's tone. Its heavy, its guarded, and it looks like it takes force to unguard it. It looks manual, like unlocking a door from the inside. “I- I had had… I had had Lyme disease as a child. Not- not many people know that about me,” Komaeda looks off to the side, holding onto himself like he's on display. Hinata closes his mouth and decides he'll keep his chastising for another time. “My family and I went vacationing a lot when I was younger, so- um, th- that's how I got it. Yeah.”
Komaeda takes a deep breath. When he does, his whole body tremors. Hinata realizes his eyes are shining. Oh God, his heart sinks, whatever this is is a big deal. “So- so when I was about thirteen and I- I randomly looked like I had a stroke–” Hinata tries to contain whatever look is on his face. Judging by Komaeda's reaction, he doesn't succeed. “I- I didn't! It just- it was a paralysis type that… Looked like it.” Komaeda glances away when Hinata drops his hand from his mouth, he tries to speak again. Its weak, tired, and he thinks it sounds like its about to break. “So, they had to, hah- um-” Komaeda's wet eyes blink a few times, and Hinata takes a step forward.
“Take your time,” he says it slowly. Komaeda nods, wetting his lips. He makes a motion for the glass of water on the desk and Hinata grabs it for him before he can ask, pressing it into his hand. “I'm not going anywhere.”
Komaeda drinks, his lips left a vibrant red from the cold. His breath shudders out like he froze his lungs with it. Hinata wonders, even if only momentarily, if the cold hurts like cold or like a blade for him. Something in his chest is tight. “The- the doctor had to test spinal fluid for infection like meningitis, intracranial pressure, a CFS leak, or residual Lyme,” Komaeda's voice levels out to that tone where Hinata thinks he sounds almost like a nurse, clinical-calm and too detached to be about himself. His mouth is dry and open, but Komaeda isn't looking at him. “They… They used hollow needles to drill into it. I was awake.” Another sip of cold water. His lips look bruised. “I only had local anesthetic to help me cope since anything else could've killed somebody with any number of those conditions, and I hardly respond to it. Unlucky, right?” He doesn't laugh, but he smiles. It doesn't reach his eyes. “You can imagine how that went!”
When Komaeda does laugh, its hollow, delayed, and feels like when a child tries to laugh too loud because the adults in the room are laughing too. Because there's too much booze at Christmas dinner, and because they're muttering amongst each other too lowly, and they feel like there's something going on that's higher then them. Abandoned, cold, the exact kind of thing children ache to join. But Komaeda is not a child, even if he was one then, laid out on a cot soaked with too many bodily fluids and twitching in pain – and suddenly Hinata sees it in his eyes, the thirteen-year-old boy with IV bruises and teary eyes, and he remembers his parents were dead already and the hospital room was empty. He suddenly has to swallow a very big lump in his throat. “That's-” he's holding Komaeda's hands shaking from the inside out. He presses his thumbs into the backs of them, hopes it helps. Komaeda breathes out and his wrists stop seizing. “That's legal?” Hinata's voice is dry.
Komaeda's eyes are twinkling, but they look so, so far away. Far away enough they look empty, like he's not in the cottage at all. Hinata pulls one hand away and starts to raise it. Go slow, he reminds himself, he might jump. “Well, its not a routine procedure, Hinata-kun,” he wheezes, a laugh crunched behind it. “Unlucky, truly! I could've died.” He says it too easily. Something in Hinata pinches and doesn't let go. “I got off easy, though. My spinal cord has some nerve damage, but-”
“Is that why-” Hinata's horror hits Komaeda before he hears it in his own voice. He covers his mouth, the sound spilling out from between his fingers. Komaeda's face pales as he watches Hinata's wide, hazel eyes jump around on his face, shutting so tight they almost tear over. Is it that bad? he wonders, unable to look away. His eyes ache for the floor, but he can't stop staring. I didn't think… “Is that why you turn all purple and red and- is that why you hurt so bad, Komaeda?” Hinata's hand goes under his bangs, pressing on his forehead. His eyes blink rapidly. “I mean, besides the-” his mouth closes and opens once, and then he's quiet.
Hinata's too kind to say it, but Komaeda isn't. “The cancer?” he says it like he might ask Hinata for an extra creamer over breakfast. Sometimes Hinata-kun is plain about it, Komaeda has noticed, but not when I'm like this. Not now. Komaeda laughs anyway, because he can't stop himself. “A lot of the attacks are that. It spread to my whole body, being my spine and all.” Hinata's eyes are too kind all of the sudden and Komaeda's gut twists into a knot. Oh no. No, no. He did it again. He's going to want to stay, he feels himself sink. He's going to want to stay because I'm sick, and I'm going to let him because I'm selfish, and then-
The ‘and then-’ never comes. Not now, anyway. Maybe one day, but not now. Instead Hinata reaches over, his fingers hot and rough, callouses softer than they have any right to feel- wraps them around his wrist, sags into him, wraps an arm around his shoulder. They breathe at the same time, exhaling into each other like the proximity is all they needed. Like that could revive their classmates, heal nerve endings, fix everything.
They know it can't, but maybe it wasn't supposed to. Maybe I just needed him to breathe with me. Maybe Komaeda doesn't need an omnipotent, perfect person who's going to miraculously save them all. Maybe he just needs someone who's going to survive with him and be there for him when he has to flinch against the smell of alcohol, count down for the needle.
“When we're out of here, you need to open a medical malpractice case.” Hinata clears his throat, trying to hide the tears in it. Komaeda notices, as he often does. Surprisingly, he doesn't hate himself as much as usual. “We can go down to the courthouse and-” Komaeda jerks in his hold, choking, whatever he was going to say stuck in his throat. Hinata jumps back, face flushed. He mutters something Komaeda doesn't hear.
“Court-” he coughs, Hinata's face hidden. He's staring at the bed, taking a few steps towards it. Komaeda takes some deep swallows of his water, almost choking on an icecube. Courthouse. Courthouse, God. “Very… Distinct choice of words, Hinata-kun,” he rasps, “Next time, just advise I get a lawyer?”
Hinata doesn't answer him, though. Komaeda turns around to see him standing near the bed canopy, untied at the masts, flowing down enough its over Hinata's shoulders. He seems to be looking rather intensely at the bed, or at least downward. Komaeda frowns. “Hinata-kun?” he calls. “Are you-”
“Yes, yes, courthouses,” he says again. Komaeda's cheeks flame. Now he's messing with me. “Shirt off, get on the bed. Face down, preferably.” Komaeda sprays water a foot in front of him, shooting up his nose and dribbling down his shirt. The glass falls to the ground, rolling on the hardwood, hand stagnant in the air. He just stares, Hinata turning, arm still shadowed by the bed curtain. Komaeda looks down at his shirt, drenched in cold water. He shivers.
Hinata hums. “Well,” he clicks his tongue. “You're gonna have to take it off one way or another now.” Komaeda has no idea what conversation he's having. He looks down, shirt soaked in a ventricular loop, stuck to his ribs and so white its see-through. He conned me into a wet t-shirt competition, Komaeda runs a hand down his face. It comes back wet. This isn't actually happening, is it?
He opens one eye. Hinata's smiling, waving something in the air. Komaeda frowns, his other eye stuttering open. Its the controls to his TENS unit, plastic electrode pad stucked into his elbow, cover off. Komaeda blinks. “Hinata-kun,” his voice dips, “You use your powers for evil, you know that?” he sighs, crossing his arms over his wet chest. He shivers. “I'm freezing cold! That makes it worse, you know.” Hinata looks sheepish, but far from guilty.
“You can lay on me after, okay? And- look,” he glowers, glancing away as Komaeda fumbles with the hem of his shirt. “If you get close enough, you can see how red my face still is.” Komaeda walks forward, hesitating only once. He's going to have to touch my back, he realizes. He swallows, blood rushing in his head. I don't know if I can…
When Hinata gets closer, the curtain that was hiding the unit is over his head, then Komaeda's. They stand under it, moonlight piercing the window. Its forgiving in the way the island sun never could be, and yet Komaeda's night sweats persist. They're quieter on prednisone, but it'll take a while to get them down to a level he finds manageable again. He reaches a hand to Hinata's waist, the denim of his jeans a scrape across his palm. The curtain tangles with it and for a second it looks like a veil, covering both of them, sticking to Komaeda's wet ribs when it brushes his side and leaving the feeling of something bridal. His cheeks are suddenly very, very red.
He lowers himself down to the sheets, face pressed into the flat of the covers. The AC groans in the background, ever-present during the dead of night, cooling the sweat on his back. He shivers, the presence in his room overwhelming – he couldn't pretend, even for a second, like he's alone; he couldn't close his eyes and pretend he's half-asleep, rolled over on his stomach, startled awake by the glisten on his skin. The flush is running down his chest and he can't stop it.
Hinata's knees are dipping on the bed, but they don't come any closer. Komaeda thinks he's going to hyperventilate, either from panic or homosexuality. His arms crook above his head, hair spilled out around him, mattress darkness beneath him. He doesn't think he could look at Hinata if he tried. I'd die, he's sure. Irrefutably. The pressure on the mattress doesn't come any closer and he thinks he might anyway.
“Hinata-kun,” Komaeda turns his head to call out, ask him if he's okay, maybe disgusted. Its a miracle his voice doesn't shake. He flutters his eyes, his cottage suddenly in the dark. His heart sinks when he realizes Hinata turned the lights off. “Oh,” he says, “You turned the lights off.”
“Uh, yeah,” Hinata says, and then there's shuffling in the sheets. Komaeda's heart lurches and there is no way he's going to survive this. My heart murmur is going to give out, his breath shivers. “Sensory deprivation, PTSD and all. Is- is that okay?”
Leave it to Hinata-kun to have necessary reasons to giving Komaeda a sexuality-induced heart attack. Medical ones, no less. And psychiatric! What an amazing man. Komaeda shakes his head in the sheets, laughing. “Oh, its wonderful, Hinata-kun!” It comes out silvery in the dark. “Its-” Komaeda's voice chokes out when Hinata's hand trails his back. He suddenly can't finish his sentence.
Hinata leans over him and Komaeda feels a hand press a half-foot above his head. He holds his breath, the torso looming behind him so warm it radiates. Hinata's hand softly cups his jaw, gently leaning his head back. He swallows his voice, but not before he makes a very strange keening noise. He isn't shameful enough to look guilty. Hinata clears his throat. “Um, here. A pillow.” Komaeda blinks down and lays his head on a cottony, fresh-fluffed pillow, nuzzling it despite himself. He chuckles.
“I shouldn't be enjoying this luxury,” he murmurs back. The pillow swallows it. Hinata snorts in the dark behind him, leaning up off his hand. Komaeda misses the warmth behind him already. “You make me a hedonist, Hinata-kun.”
Payback's a bitch and Komaeda likes it that way. Hinata sputters, coughing. If he'd been drinking water, it'd been perfect. “Sh-Shut- just-” he pauses, breathing in deep. Komaeda feels the way he shifts on his knees behind his hips and he'd be lying if he didn't say he enjoyed it. That is not the same sensation as cuddling, he swallows, fiddling with a loose string on the pillowcase. “Okay,” Hinata breathes, “I'm going to place them along your spine. That's safe for your- whatever the Hell, right?”
Komaeda nods. Hinata reaches into the sheets and under the mass of pillows above Komaeda's head, leaning over him again. He stops there, breathing into his hair, over his neck, cooling the sweat on his skin. Komaeda shivers. Its so stark in the dark of the cottage he breaks the rule he made himself and glances back behind him, catching Hinata's hazel glare in the dim. They're intense, they're glowing, and they're so, so close to him, a hand smoothing up his sides, knees pressing into his bare waist. Everything goes tunnel-vision all at once.
“Thank you for trusting me, Komaeda,” Hinata whispers. Komaeda pretends not to keen again, like this is normal. Hinata pretends it is normal, fishing the wires out from beneath the pillow. His eyebrows furrow for a second, stalling. His hand doesn't move from Komaeda's side. “Hold on-”
And then the door opens wide.
Saionji kicks him out of her cottage, hand full of Gummy Sharks. “Yeah, yeah,” she huffs, “Look, big bro, I appreciate you being all comfy being a pathetic little sap and all,” he's pretty sure her snicker is performative. The words echo in the air. Big bro. His heart aches. “But its late as Hell and you're in my room, and I don't want anybody getting ideas, soooo-” she braces her sleep slipper on the back of his calf, pressing down. He feels like a damn arcade motorcycle, head reeling from a night of too many apologies and not enough propofol. “Kick it! Bye!”
The door slams shut behind him, her nameplate jingling on the door. It scrapes, his temple throbbing with it. He palms over his good eye, muttering under his breath. “Damn garden gnome,” he ushers to himself. “She coulda been nicer about it, jeez…” The night air bites at his skin, crawling under his suit. He glances both ways down the dock, frowning.
Only two people left, Hinata and Komaeda. Opposite ways, same apology. His frown turns into a grimace, throwing his head back to the sky. “Oh, dammit!” he growls. “Where's a quarter when you need one?” Its an expression and he knows it, even if only because there's only one choice of who he'll see first and because Komaeda's luck would tip in his favor first anyway. Kuzuryuu stalks down the dock.
The air is raw, his heart rawer. He woke up after running into that execution and telling Pekoyama everything he should've before they even accepted those stupid invitations to Hope's Peak, made that arrangement they'd ‘pretend they never knew each other’. The Academy was meant to be a chance for them to just be classmates – equals, friends, peers, not an orphan his parents adopted to groom into the perfect weapon before she knew her own name, a chance for their two children to have the most self-effacing bodyguard the world have ever known.
Before he knows it, tears are falling on the dock. One is a little bloody and one is normal, stinging the left side of his face stronger than he'd expected it to. Kuzuryuu palms his eye patch, the numbness in his retina more disturbing than pain would've been. The numbing shots haven't worn off yet. He frowns, wiping his other eye. Now's not the time to be a little bitch. You have two more apologies to make, Fuyuhiko.
These two are arguably the most important ones of all, if he's honest with himself. Sure, he was willing to try to trade everybody else's lives for Pekoyama's, but isn't that what Yakuzas do? Anybody's lives for the family's. Anybody's, no matter the numbers. Especially for the women, his jaw tightens. But scapegoating on somebody's business? That's chickenshit. He kicks a rogue seashell down the dock, his gut sinking in the water with it.
He tells himself his guilt is why his stomach feels like that. That he's not thinking about what the Hell Hinata and Komaeda might be doing behind that cottage door, why they ran off so fast after the trial. Why they looked as guilty as they did, why Hinata slumped over like that when Kuzuryuu went after him so pathetically. Komaeda was fuckin’ limping, his mind helpfully supplies. And Hinata ran after him like a puppy. His eye twitches. A lovesick, horny puppy, dammit.
Guilt. Guilt is honorable. Guilt is easy to face. Guilt makes sense in a situation like this, stuck on an island where people are murdering each other. Guilt he can handle. Guilt is better than- oh, his fucking door is locked, dammit. Kuzuryuu clenches his jaw, keeping himself from kicking the door. “Hinata,” he yells, pretending the lights aren't on. “Hey, dude, its me! Can you- I gotta talk to you.”
He waits. He waits a long while, and Kuzuryuu has a patience problem, or so he's told. When his legs get tired from pacing, he walks down the dock to Komaeda's cabin. Even cult leaders deserve apologies, he sighs, staring down at the weathered dock. Even bipolar, beady-eyed cult leaders. At least now Kuzuryuu had an excuse to avoid eye contact. He fumbles with the eye patch, thumbing it.
It smells like her perfume. Something in him feels bruised, hand fiddling with the charm at his belt loop. Pekoyama's necklace, a simple silver locket. It feels like it burns his hand. He takes a deep breath, hand outstretched to knock. He can't find the words to call Komaeda's name. He shuts his eyes instead. God, I was a dick. He opens his mouth, but pauses. Komaeda's voice rings in his head, the first trial technicolor and perfect focus.
‘If anyone wants to kill me,’ he'd said, so chipper. Kuzuryuu grimaces at the memory. ‘Just come find me! I'll leave my cottage open. We can even conspiracize together!’ “Oh, fuck it,” Kuzuryuu mumbles, opening the door. Can't think of how to knock on Komaeda Nagito's door, dammit. His foot's already in when he looks up. “Ay Komaeda, I came here to, uh, apologi-”
Everything screeches to a halt. The room tilts, his vision thuddering. Hinata's head snaps up first, hand stretched out over Komaeda's pale, sweat-glistening body. Komaeda's head snaps up second, but its arguably more violent- he flinches, shudders, tries to pull at the covers like they could cover the situation somehow. At fucking all. Kuzuryuu’s hand goes lax, Pekoyama's charm falling on the floor with a metallic clink. His eye twitches, frozen on the ruined mattress in front of him – a rump of pillows at the head, blankets tossed in the corner, the sheet not tucked at the end. There's what looks like a white button-up at the end of the bed beside Komaeda's discarded t-shirt, a big lounge pillow beneath his head. They don't say anything, don't look at each other – just stay there staring at their intruder with wide, guilty eyes.
Intruder. Intruder, oh, shit. Kuzuryuu scrambled to shut the door closed, tripping over the steps down the cottage door. He runs off Komaeda's doorstep, fussing with his suit as he goes, eyes cast down. He watches the waves beneath the dock crash with obsessive-compulsive precision. “Nope,” he mutters to himself, “Not dealing with this shit today. No. Not- no. They can fuck all they want in- nope.” He walks faster, hoping to outrun anything he might hear if he hangs out too close. Learned my lesson at the library, he shivers. “This is what I get for trying to be a good person…”
Inside, the two watch the doorway. It slammed shut behind Kuzuryuu, so hard it would've been startling if it had been from anybody else. They watch it a few minutes more, almost as if they expect him to materialize in the room again. Neither are sure what he'd say, but they keep watching anyway, eyes frozen on the doorway.
And then suddenly Hinata leans both hands on his back and Komaeda crumbles into the mattress and they both break out into a wild, unrestrained laughter, clinging onto each other. Komaeda lays face first, hands fisted in the pillow, wheezing into it when his laughter peaks. Hinata doubles over behind him, hand reaching beneath the discarded bedding for the wires left tangled. He peels each sticker with shaking hands, pressing them into Komaeda's skin as his body shakes. He shivers from the cold adhesive and it only seems to make him laugh more, Hinata smoothing the edges out as Komaeda rolls over onto his hip.
Komaeda might've gone to say something when the laughter allowed him to, but the dials were turned up with sudden, unexpected care. His cackling dies into hums, pain simmering into a sensation that feels deeper than relief. Hinata quiets down, rolling him onto his back, feet hitting the floor. He wipes the tears from his eyes as he crouches at the fridge, smiling into the LED glow. As Komaeda watches him set up a tiny ashtray dish of his morning medications by the bedside, a sparkling water bedside it, he thinks relief has become the feeling of being known, Hinata chuckling as he sits at the foot of the bed, still staring at the door.
Kuzuryuu finds Pekoyama's locket sitting on his usual restaurant table in the morning. Its polished, smells like mint, and has a new chain through the loop. He pockets it and takes it as he's forgiven, sitting down with Souda.
He refuses to talk about what he saw. Souda's boots are scraping the wooden floor, his zipper flying up and down his jumpsuit in the same way that made him crackle like a roaring fire what feels like eons ago, but his mouth is crinkled quiet now. If Souda notices the difference he only says so with his eyes, glancing between his greasy hands and his too-bright clothes, the motor oil muddying the restaurant floorboards, the heavy cloying grief blanketing would-be Class 77 as they all turn their eyes to him.
Kuzuryuu doesn't have it in him, but he does it anyway. Blinks one sleep-crusted eye open, rubbing at the one he doesn't have anymore like habit gone sour in a glass. “Oi,” he grumbles, a few of his classmates turning away. Only the genuine ones bother to keep staring. He thinks that means something. “I only have one eye left for you to keep starin’ at. Gonna at least try to be polite?” Tsumiki scuttles off an apology, Saionji sniffling under her breath. Kuzuryuu tries not to crack a smile. “Nah, its fine,” he sighs. “Just don't stare. Feels weird when I can't see from all angles.”
Its a lousy excuse and they all know it, but Owari nods and slams some of her breakfast platter on his table and Sonia offers him some chamomile tea, Souda bites his lip hard enough they don't talk about what he said, and Saionji slides him a pack of her Swedish Fish, so hey. That was the point of showing up, right? For all of us, he sighed. The solemn booth Pekoyama had been sitting alone gawks over his shoulder. His jaw tightens. All but one.
A broad-shouldered boy wearing the same white dress shirt he always does comes stalking up the staircase, hair rumpled and jeans looking nearly inside out. Kuzuryuu's chest seizes so violently he feels like he could choke on his tea. He waits a second, just in case. His eye twitches.
All but two. Hinata slouches into the corner booth on the far end of the restaurant looking like he chose to wear the laundry machine on backwards, running a hand through his uneven hair. He watches as Mioda whistles too noisily up at the yellow wallpaper ahead of her, trying much too hard to look like she's focused on the lemon açai by the hot water dispensers. Souda's shoulder tenses by Kuzuryuu, zipper stalling.
His body goes stiff all over. God, I'm officially a witness, Kuzuryuu groans into his hand. If Souda being quiet puts me on edge, I've crossed a line. Why couldn't he have lost both his eyes in that Godforsaken execution? He watches the ceiling fan groan with the effort of fighting off Mioda's squabbling with Tsumiki in the corner, who seem to be talking animatedly enough its tormenting the restaurant machinery. Kuzuryuu looks back to find Hinata falling asleep at the table, head falling forward into his hand, breathing way too deeply and eyes cast too far down to notice the espresso machine is open.
Kuzuryuu's jaw spasms with effort to not call him out on his nightly rendezvous. Instead he sighs, tosses a single Swedish Fish at Hinata's tanned arm. He jolts awake, eyeing the gore-red candy in his lap. He blinks, glancing up at the bustling room. Everybody had begun their morning activities now, and two parts of Kuzuryuu were thankful – the part that didn't want to be the sob story, and the part that didn't want to think about what he saw. He thumbs Pekoyama's pendant and can't ignore either, rolling his eyes.
He jerks his head towards the tea station when Hinata looks towards him. For both their sakes, he pretends not to notice the flush on Hinata's face when he half-falls into the table, scraping his knee with a low, ‘ow, fuck’. Kuzuryuu runs a hand down his face. “Oh, God,” he mutters. “How late were you up?”
Souda's head snaps up. Kuzuryuu doesn't have it in him to ignore it. He just groans again. “Not talkin’ about it, Kaz,” he hides his face in his teacup. “Not today.” He sends a final ‘thank you' to Pekoyama for the way Souda shuts his mouth, scratching at his patchy sideburns. Kuzuryuu snorts. “You gotta touch up your dye job, man,” he jabs, because that's easier than losing your first love and seeing your friends fuck in Hawaiian Islands Hunger Games. “I can see your black stubble coming in.”
Souda was going to bite back. And for once, Kuzuryuu was going to be grateful. They were going to fall into a bicker about his friend's punk hair dye upkeep and he'd help him ask Mioda to touch it up, because Souda added the fluorescence and Kuzuryuu added the social to their relationship – he'd ignore Hinata's absence at lunch and there wouldn't be any more murders, he'd go home when his parents sent the bodyguards off the coastline, he'd find out his sister was at home waiting for him and Pekoyama's death was some fucked up twist of fate. That that screwed up arcade game was like everything else on these islands- desperate, fake, violent, and they'd find out who was behind it, his friends and his family, and they'd avenge her. He'd cry, his sister would cry, and the classmates he had left would return to school and enjoy the semester like they should.
That didn't happen. Because Hinata didn't get coffee at the espresso machine. He got hot water and a ginger tea bag, the exact kind he packs in his back pocket and Kuzuryuu never sees him drink. Kuzuryuu's eyebrows furrow. Hinata pauses at the vending machine, crouching down low. His sleepy eyes blink at the plexiglass, pressing two buttons. He flinches when a can rolls down the display, shoulder jerking against the machine. Kuzuryuu's eyes focus back on the table.
“Um, man,” Souda whispers, and Kuzuryuu doesn't glare like he normally does. He starts to, and then he just groans. Souda goes quiet, but even teenage tragedy can only keep Souda Kazuichi quiet for so damn long. “You… What happened when you apologized to Hinata?” Kuzuryuu can't look Souda in the eyes when he answers him.
“Nothin’,” Kuzuryuu fusses with a honey packet. The clink of Pekoyama's locket is wild and silver. “He didn't answer.”
Souda's quiet a second longer. “Wh-What about–” Kuzuryuu knows its coming. Doesn't make it any easier. “K-Komaeda?”
Kuzuryuu snaps his head towards Souda, their knees hitting each other's under the table. Souda yelps, Kuzuryuu's grimace reflecting off his polished, sharpened teeth. A single drizzle of sandwich dressing goes down the front of his jumpsuit, tomato slices running down a pant leg. He gulps. “A-Are we in d-danger, man?” Souda's face is as pale as a sheet. Kuzuryuu pinches his nose, nail catching in his eyepatch string.
“You're not,” Kuzuryuu breathes in. Souda's eyes are everywhere. “Yet.” Souda whimpers at the threat. Kuzuryuu rolls his eyes, just because it makes this feel like any other day. “But I probably am,” he admits into his hand. He glances back to find Hinata dipping a tea bag into a steaming cup of water, hand methodical. He looks like he's on repeat, like the movement itself is a compulsion. A little tea splashes on the bag of caramel toffies beside him and he doesn't flinch, steam rising from the cup. Why am I talking about this? Kuzuryuu's jaw screeches tight. What-
The staircase creaks with a footstep. Kuzuryuu can't help but look – half a voyeur and half hoping its a girl with silver hair and red eyes coming up the stairs, alive as she was yesterday morning, pretending they didn't know each other like they did. When Komaeda comes up the stairs wearing jeans that he's never seen him wear- are they new from the supermarket?- a plain white shirt with a coffee stain- and black combat boots instead of his weird zippery ones, Kuzuryuu doesn't know which is worse. All eyes turn to Komaeda, then to himself, and then to Hinata.
“Oh, sweet baby Jesus,” Souda whispers. He swallows. “Uh, hey, Komaeda,” he calls out. His voice is awkward and he's scratching his neck. Kuzuryuu tries to tug at the wrist of his jumpsuit, but Souda already had stood up. Oh, you fucking idiot, Kuzuryuu steals half Souda's sandwich to hide in. Alright, your funeral. “You're late! Um, maybe come- come have some-”
Komaeda isn't listening. He's staring at Hinata, who looks up with all the warmth their tiny island paradise has to offer; his wrist stops dipping the tea bag, his eyes brighten. He's sitting in the dimmest corner of the restaurant, nestled into the most private booth he could find- but suddenly it never looked brighter, tea bag forgotten in the hot water as he makes a move to stand.
Komaeda's staring at him too. His eyes are wide, too grey, and the circles beneath them are so deep he looks like he has a foot in the grave. For a second his lips part like he's breathing in too deeply when Hinata tries to walk towards him and the whole room holds its breath, but then he stumbles. He seems much too aware of everybody's eyes on him at once, hastily excusing himself into the kitchen. Souda sits back down slowly, Hinata watching Komaeda's green jacket whisper around the corner with what could only be described as sleep-deprived neuroticism. “Or, uh,” Souda lays the forgotten tomato slice on the table, “Or- not.”
Kuzuryuu sips his tea. The Swedish Fish aren't bad, he decides. Mioda's yelling something too close to the ear on his blind side and he flinches, stuffing another one after the last. It seems to help dull the new-sharp sense as she trills off to Tsumiki, voice too bright for 10am on a grieving Friday morning. “Come on, Mikan-chan! Ibuki will go with you, I promise,” she holds Tsumiki's shaking hands in hers. The nurse wails to herself, head flying back and forth. Mioda jumps up and down, the floor beneath Kuzuryuu's table shaking. He holds it down with an elbow, grimacing.
“Ay,” he starts to say, glancing up at the pair. The reprimand was on the tip of his tongue, hand barely catching his tea. “Is there a reason to be jumpin’ like that? I-” Kuzuryuu pauses. All defense of his morning breakfast and his teacup go out the window when he sees how Tsumiki's looking at Hinata, the reflection in her glassy eyes. He watches it for a second longer, just to make sure he's sure of what he's looking at.
He sets his jaw. Leans back in the booth, cup in hand. Takes the pineapple salad in his other, lays it in his app. “Fine,” he grumbles, “Make a fuss.” He knows that look. He wore it every day since he and Pekoyama were kids, and he thinks he'll always wear a bit of it now that she's gone. He shoves some cherry tomatoes behind his teeth so it doesn't burn as bad. Souda watches with a look that says he knows he's not getting an explanation.
When Tsumiki comes up on Hinata's table, a few people are watching. Saionji stares too loudly, even if she's quiet aside from her sniffles. Sonia watches too, a quiet fascination behind her eyes. Nanami doesn't look up from her Gameboy all the way, but she glances, shoulder leaning towards Tsumiki's squeaky voice. Owari glances over her taco salad, washing it down with an orange soda. “H-Hajime, co-could y-y-you hh-help me with in-inventory a-again today?” she rocks on her little heels. Mioda stays over her shoulder, silent except for the loudness of her movements, fists pumping through the air. “I- I th-think I-I'm c-cal-calculating s-s-stock wrong…” Hinata's eyes shift up to her face, “And I- I- I love sp-spending t-time w-with y-y-you!” Tsumiki's little fists shake with the confession, her cheeks bright pink.
Kuzuryuu watches Hinata's face go through the stages; idle listening, then something of calculation, and then close in on something quiet. Nothing about it seemed disingenuous, but nothing about it seemed warm, either. Something strange settles in the pit of his stomach as Hinata leans into his hand, elbow braced on the table, smiling up at Tsumiki. “You know I always love helping you with inventory, Mikan,” he says it too easily, Kuzuryuu thinks. When he's genuinely flustered, he gets frustrated, Kuzuryuu remembers, if the trial was anything to go off of. Hinata leans back in the booth, carefree. Something in Kuzuryuu's chest twists up tight as he watches it. “Just wait up for me, okay?” Tsumiki explodes into a burst of girlish giggles, Mioda whispering to her as they wander back to their table.
Souda's leg is jittering again. Kuzuryuu slams his fist into it under the table and he wheezes. “Quit it,” he barks. “You're gonna turn yourself into a sub sandwich again, dimwit.” Souda rubs at his kneecap, glaring through the slits in his pink contacts. Kuzuryuu glares back, eyes trailing the dressing marks down his tracksuit. “Seriously, man,” Kuzuryuu sighs, “Sonia's never gonna give you a chance if you smell like balsamic-”
The room quiets down. Not in the dramatic sense; its not suddenly as silent as a tomb, everybody staring all at once. But the energy shifts when the kitchen door opens and closes, and when Komaeda turns with a coffee in his hands instead of a tea Kuzuryuu thinks his friends that have less deductive talents had to have noticed something was off too, even if they aren't hardwired to notice it as fast as some of the others. Komaeda's sleepy eyes blink rapidly, the sunlight glaring against his temple. The veins below the pale skin glow, and then he slides next to Hinata in the booth.
They don't talk. Everybody watches them not talk. Everybody watches how they don't meet each other's eyes, don't lean into each other, and don't give each other enough space either. He's pretty sure Mioda was trying to see if their knees were touching from under the table. Kuzuryuu hides behind a glare of sunlight, refusing to look. It feels like nobody breathes for a second while they wait to see what happens next.
Komaeda slides Hinata his coffee. Hinata slides Komaeda his tea. They pop their sticks out of the plastic lids, sipping silently. Neither blink, neither nod, neither compliment ’you got this just right’. They drink, they drink in silence.
Tsumiki walks off, face buried in fresh strawberry fresca salad. A little pink cream gets on her nose. She wipes it with her thumb, waving to Hinata. Kuzuryuu sees a flicker of self-doubt in her face, and he's pretty sure she's covering it up with some kind of flirtation- desperate flirtation. Hinata smiles at her over his coffee and nods. Kuzuryuu can't tell if it makes Tsumiki feel like she's won or not, but she giggles to herself and leaves the restaurant, voyeurism raw in her wake.
Komaeda watches her go. His shoulders are stiff, his glare following. He doesn't look back to Hinata despite the fact the tension is obvious in his face. He doesn't accuse, Kuzuryuu notices. His breathing is too shallow, his torso too tense, but he doesn't accuse. Not like he has to, Kuzuryuu thinks, eyes on Hinata's table.
Souda mutters something to himself. Kuzuryuu tunes into just the end of it. “... That trial cause trouble in paradise, man?” he laughs, too awkward. Kuzuryuu rolls his eyes.
“Nah,” he grabs up their plates. Souda watches. His eyes are guarded. Kuzuryuu snorts at him, shoulders shaking. “Relax.” Souda doesn't. “Hinata doesn't eat caramel.” Kuzuryuu's back is turned, but Souda's sputtering is loud enough he's sure his surprise is evident on his face.
The whole room watches as Hinata's exhaustion melts. Hot, late-morning sun and no sleep makes a trial a sedative all its own. That's the excuse Hinata would use, anyway, Kuzuryuu looks away. Komaeda watches Tsumiki descend the stairs with a tight jaw, hand crinkling on his tea cup. Hinata watches him watch, pretending like he can't see it. His eyes blink slowly like its just tiredness – like its not something hotter, warmer, more magnetic.
Hinata's shoulder brushes his. Their thighs brush denim under the table. Komaeda goes stock-still and then his cheeks go bright pink, glancing at Hinata from the corner of his vision as much as he can without moving. Hinata smiles when he makes what might've been a squeak, and then his face is blank again. The room is silent now, and so are they.
Hinata stands first. Komaeda sits there staring at the table, their empty cups left with handprints still on them. He starts to walk to the staircase, and for a second the whole room thinks Komaeda is going to let him leave without following- thinks Hinata is going to leave without him, leave him at the empty table with empty cups, breakfast untouched.
Hinata grabs the bag of caramel toffies. Halfway across the room, he stops. His face is unreadable, the same expression he wears in trials when he's waiting for the killer to decide how they intend to defend themselves. Its the same one he wears knowing that the defense will have their fatal flaw in it, hidden somewhere in their desperation. He glances over his shoulder, mouth set thin, looking at Komaeda like he's waiting for him to confess to a crime he already knows he committed.
Komaeda stands. He takes both empty cups and hurls them into the trashcan seven feet away, the dry sound of them scraping the metal and plastic almost chalky to the ears. When they leave they leave together, so close behind each other their hips knock on the staircase, and if Kuzuryuu bothered to squint through the new depth perception of having one eye, he might've sworn Hinata had a hand in one of Komaeda's jean pockets.
Souda breathes out. His hand is on his temple, palm flat, sweaty and delirious. He looks like he has heat stroke. Kuzuryuu is going to start using the room service call button instead of coming to this damn restaurant if this keeps up. “Fuyuhiko?” Souda calls out, voice wobbly. “I got a question.”
Kuzuryuu tosses back the last of his chamomile like its brandy. He wipes his mouth. “Komaeda bottoms,” he shudders, the dim twilight of Komaeda's cottage tattooed on the inside of his good eyelid.
Souda's voice weakens. “Good talk!” he thumbs up, and then they both lay flat on the restaurant booth beside each other.