“I found my lost child,” she said, a small quiet familiar voice reaching through the maelstrom of Accelerator’s blackened heart and the black, black wings sprouting from his back and his own scream wailing into the sky.
Aya’s heart was hurting in ways she didn’t know how to deal with. You’re not good enough, her mind whispered to her. No one wants you.
She’d never been left before.
It took a while for her to pick herself up, quiet the tears she’d been holding inside herself unshed, and go out to where her dad was working on some computer project.
Aya curled up next to him quietly.
She felt more than saw his surprise. After a moment, he tucked one arm around her shoulders, kissed the top of her head, and kept working.
She stayed there—feeling loved.
It’s not Wolf’s job to comfort her team. It’s her job to take care of them and protect them, which means making sure they continue to do the things they do, no matter how terrible.
But when Ice Queen sits down quiet and somber against the wall of the training area, Wolf goes and sits beside her. Sometimes they say nothing, and she ends up feeling frustrated at her inability to break that emotional wall.
Sometimes, Ice Queen tilts her head and stares with coldly glittering eyes. “Three hundred eighteen.”
Unverified kills. Counting coup.
Wolf counters, “Five hundred ten saved.”
Kukuri woke in Kuroh’s arms, groggy and lightheaded and wondering what had happened to her, if everyone else was okay. Except she couldn’t remember and for a moment, she tried to panic. Had she hit her head, gotten amnesia, but there was Kuroh’s warm smile as he reassured her, “Just rest.”
She listened to the warmth of his voice, the sound of his heartbeat as he carried her away. She looked back, something in her heart disquieted enough to realize something was still wrong.
But Kuroh would make it better, she thought. She would believe the sound of his voice.
Dazai was already lying on the futon by the time Chuuya got in. He was too stiff, his lanky form stretched out with his back to the door, face to the wall, almost radiating with tension.
Chuuya sighed. “Did you even get patched up?”
Dazai didn’t answer.
It had been a hard enough fight and Dazai had never been good at self-care.
Chuuya hung up his jacket and his hat and changed into one of Dazai’s overlong shirts. He glanced over Dazai’s body for any major injuries. Finding none, he curled his body around his partner’s until finally Dazai relaxed.
This is what keeps you alive. You breathe in the stale, bloodstained air—the smell of iron and sweat—and you press down with even pressure on her wound as you listen to her shallow breaths. You can already see the fever in her glazed eyes and flushed face. It doesn’t matter if you can’t actually smell the infection yet.
Some things they don’t talk about.
They talk about battle plans and mission parameters. They talk about each other’s bad taste in clothes and vehicles and extracurricular activities, like trying to get oneself killed. They talk about video games and bets and how the other ought to get themselves killed.
They don’t talk about moments like this, washing each other’s wounds, unwrapping and rewrapping bandages because they don’t trust anyone else to do it, lying down on the same bed until morning because they’re partners. It’s as good an excuse as any.
Chuuya never asks why Dazai holds so tight.
Chuuya woke up in his own apartment, blinking eyes open to familiar aching pain of aftermath. There were other familiar things: annoying singing in an all too familiar voice, the sound of shoes on his floor.
“No shoes,” he said before he stopped to think. “Shitty Mackerel,” he added, teeth gritting around the words. He peeled himself out of the covers to sit up gingerly.
“Chuuya! You’re awake,” Dazai singsonged, coming in close.
For a moment, a breath, they were teenagers again, before Chuuya remembered this was all wrong and he had no partner. “Dazai.” He didn’t kick him out.
Mikoto had never had alignment testing. It was usually obvious from appearances whether someone needed comfort when hurt or needed to give it when someone else was.
But his family hadn’t cared and neither had he, and somewhere along the way he realized he didn’t feel either.
But he let them comfort him, Tatara and Izumo, when they noticed him brooding, let Tatara try and amazingly succeed at drawing him out of his worst aftermaths. And he let them draw comfort, Anna sitting next to him, claiming his attention with a small hand.
He didn’t feel broken for the lack.
Yata was floored when he realized Saruhiko had never been fussed over, and despite his glassy-eyed illness, managed to convey so much confusion that Yata was taking care of him, it made something in Yata’s chest hurt.
Yata knew he was hardwired to take care of people, but this was Saruhiko. It wasn’t just that need to comfort that had him pasting on his cheeriest expression and trying to show a comforted what it felt like to finally get what he needed.
It took a while, but finally Saruhiko relaxed. He gave the tiniest smile, and Yata’s finally felt real.
Chuuya always assumed the reason Dazai was an attention whore was because Dazai was one of those people who needed to be fussed over whenever he was hurt.
Which made it annoying when Dazai insisted on treating Chuuya like he needed to be fussed over and comforted in the aftermath of Corruption.
“Go away.”
“What if you died in here?”
He didn’t need Dazai bringing him food, checking his bandages, not when Chuuya itched to do the same for the guy with nothing worse than a broken leg. He hated Dazai, so he resisted.
Dazai petted Chuuya’s hair.
Chuuya groaned.
“Why are you helping me?”
It took several breaths, rough and panting. The hand on Dazai’s shoulder was limper than it should have been. Chuuya was physically strong, for all he was tiny compared to Dazai. Dazai didn’t care about being touched and didn’t shove his partner off, but he suspected if he did, Chuuya would actually collapse back onto the bed Dazai held him at the edge of.
Corruption wasn’t actually new. It felt new. It was only the second time they’d deployed it in the field, but even so, it was the entire reason they were partnered together in the first place.
There was no love lost between them.
Saruhiko had almost completely forgotten what it felt like to be taken care of, so it came as a bit of surprise, both unfamiliar and familiar at once, the way Misaki hung around on his return from the hospital.
“How many stitches?” Misaki asked as he frowned at Saruhiko’s limp.
How many stab wounds was more like it, Saruhiko thought with a scowl. And how many pints of blood did he have to get, how many hours passed out unconscious, how many days stuck in the hospital, surprised at how many people came to visit and how long they stayed. Misaki stayed the longest, stubbornly sleeping on the ugly couch in the corner of the room until they’d released Saruhiko to finish recovering at home.