i am seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it.

[protential]

I'm fine, Touya. [He said he was fine, didn't he? This has got to be the fifth or sixth time he's said it. Maybe the seventh. Every time he says so, the look on Touya's face seems to get more severe, all pinched and screwed up, like he he just swallowed a lemon or something. Hikaru leans against the wall with one hand, clutching his stomach with the other, and he tells himself he's fine because there's no way he isn't. I'm fine, I'm... It hurts, though. It's fine. It does hurt a lot. That crazy fucking bastard--he'd laugh about it, about the absurd awfulness of it, except it hurts a lot to breathe in, you know.

Watanabe-sensei was in a downright foul mood all morning, growling and snapping at everybody, but Hikaru never expected him to flip out like that. The exhibition hall is still a loud but dull roar of people trying to figure out what's going on, who's gotten hurt, and everything else. Watanabe grabbed a knife out of nowhere and just went to town on a bunch of random bystanders. The initial panic made it hard to react in any real way, but Hikaru knew exactly what to do soon as that knife-wielding maniac turned his attention to Touya.

Not that he should have cared as much as he did to do what he's done. Ah, god damn it. Pale in the face, feeling a little dizzy (or more than a little), Hikaru decides maybe he should be sitting down right now.] Seriously, I'm just... I'll be fine, so don't fre... freak out, or anything... [And trying to protest makes Touya all the more concerned and annoying for it. Hikaru slowly sits down with a groan, then takes his hand away from his stomach, and he isn't surprised to see blood smeared across it. Obviously, he got stabbed while defending Touya with his whole body. That's obvious. He felt the blade sink right into him, which hurt like a son of a bitch. Then somebody else tackled Watanabe out of the way, and the knife clattered to the floor, and there's a lot more blood than he was expecting. He just bought this fancy dress shirt like a week ago. Fuck.

All of the sudden, Touya is pressing his own hands to the wound. Maybe he's trying to staunch the blood before help arrives, but that's kind of unsanitary, you know. Hikaru wants to tell him that, but it's getting hard to center his thoughts on any one thing. It's getting hard to focus his eyes on Touya's face. He doesn't regret getting in between Touya and that loony fucker, but he would've preferred an aftermath that's less of a hassle than this. Anyway, he doesn’t really care about Touya beyond their next official match, and Touya can't sit down at the goban with a deep abdominal wound, right, so it's like...

It had to be this way, he thinks. It's always had to be this way. If Touya is in trouble, and Hikaru is in a position to do something about it, then that's what he's going to do. Though it began as a duty, a way to serve his nation faithfully, it goes way above and beyond that nowadays. He can't regret something as important as Touya's life.]

You're going to have to wash your hands, [he murmurs, his eyes all glassy and glazed, yet strangely dark at the same time.] You're getting your hands dirty, you stupid...

Comments

[ashlar]

[It's hard to say how Shindou's blood has ended up on Akira's forehead. Just enough of it is there to mat down a patch of Akira's bangs. He knows it's that because he pressed his wrist to his forehead, panicked and panting, and it came away looking like lipstick on a napkin. It frightens him. He's never been so scared of his own hair--not when Shindou saw the whirlwind of it in the morning, not in the dream of a callused hand brushing it away from the nape of his neck...

To be honest, he wants to vomit. He can feel his fear treating his lungs like bobbing corks; he can feel his throat giving away. Shindou's blood is desperately hot, and whether he means to or not, his body is writhing, combative toward death. Akira can feel Shindou moving beneath his hands, and it's horrific. Like a worm on a hook, he thinks faintly. Shindou's blood is rising through the spaces between Akira's fingers.] I--I'll-- [He'll wash his hands. Akira wonders why that matters. He wonders why Shindou thinks it matters. He wonders why Shindou doesn't know it doesn't--it never did--not like it was supposed to. Not like it might have to a more diligent man.

Whatever that means. Akira is diligent about keeping as much of Shindou's blood inside him as he can manage. He's heard something since childhood from all the men around his father--always about blessings. About how his hands are blessed, by god. And what's the worth of a blessing, when Akira's hands are slipping against each other, too clumsy to keep Shindou together? If god was going to bless him, then why aren't his hands blessing Shindou in turn? What's the point? Maybe, once, he looked at the sky and the smoke and he wondered that, too.] Stupid--you stupid--Shindou. [Akira gasps. Shindou is a few shades more deathly pale than Akira is, but just a few. Between the blood and the sweat, and the terrified thickness of his own saliva, it makes sense for tears to start leaving his eyelashes, too.] You told me you were fine--how many times did you say that? But you're-- [Not going to die. Of course not. Of course Shindou won't die. That wouldn't happen. It won't happen that way, definitely not. --Akira can tell, after a point, that Shindou can't hear him talking anymore.

They don't allow him to ride in the back of the ambulance. He isn't family.

His mother made him change out of the suit he was wearing. Probably for the best. She made him shower, too, and he snapped at her for it and it took him far too long to be ashamed of himself for that. But she was patient. He needed to wash his hair, and his face, and...

There's blood dried deep into the grooves between his cuticles and fingernails. Not on every finger, but on plenty of them. Akira picks at it while he waits in what they call the waiting room. No better place for that, he supposes. When he got out of the shower, he put on a pair of thin cotton pajama pants, a t-shirt spotted with old paint, and one of his cardigans, unbuttoned. He didn't care about any of it when he left his house, and he doesn't care about it now. He couldn't say how long he's been sitting here through this underwhelming vigil. He examines what he has of Shindou's blood. He's thinking about what to say when they can see each other next. His last words to Shindou were almost this: You really don't get it, do you? What was he saying that about? Nothing vivid enough to matter. They might have discussing a game. Or maybe Akira was referring to his own admiration of Shindou Hikaru, and the heartthrob of it. Whatever the case, it came out of his mouth like a wire pulled tight, and he pressed his thumb hard against his temple while he said it. The headache... The air in that venue had felt so thick, and it gave Akira the most awful headache...

Shindou isn't awake when Akira is finally allowed to go into his room. So Akira waits on the floor beside his bed. Akira is a heap of opposing clothes, and his head is a heap on the bed, and his hair is like a fountain, pouring over his face, hiding him. He therefore looks like he could be asleep, but he isn't. One of his hands is atop the bed, too, and the pad of his finger rubs slowly over the edge of this thumbnail, again and again, where Shindou's blood still lingers.]

[protential]

[Hikaru is in surgery for a while, for more than a few hours, and of course he doesn't remember any of it. He doesn't remember much of anything after passing out, other than the righteousness of knowing he did the right thing when the right thing was demanded of him. For his efforts, he's rewarded with a wound to the right lateral part of his stomach, and the surgeons tell his parents that the knife came this close to slicing through one of his kidneys, too. But the surgery to deal with it went relatively well, no real complications, and his mom probably cried and his dad probably stayed silent while listening to the prognosis. He does remember waking up a little when they were still at his bedside; swaddled in morphine, he could only nod when his mom said the doctors would take good care of him. Then they left his room, and they left for the day. That was just the way it had to be. Neither Hikaru nor his parents want anything more to do with hospitals and healthcare.

So Hikaru falls back asleep for some amount of time, against his will, a passenger in his own body, until the smell of incense wakes him up again. It's so strong--and not actually there, because what sort of hospital would allow incense on the premises? He opens his eyes, blearily looking up at the ceiling, and he recognizes that ceiling from all the visits he's made here in the past. The nurses undoubtedly still know him by name, even. It wasn't that long ago that Sai checked in one last time for a moonshot of a surgery to address his breathing dysfunction. Hikaru slept on the floor that night, on a thin, uncomfortable futon, terrified his brother would stop breathing at any given moment... But now he's the one in the hospital bed, rigged up to bulky machines, stuck through with stupid needles and tubes--he doesn't feel grieved or confused, just irritated. He feels like shit, too. The painkillers aren't all they're cracked up to be.

It takes him a minute more to turn his head, in testing the give of his own muscles, and that's when he spots the other hand on his bed. He spots Touya's dark hair after that and he doesn't need to ask to know that it's really Touya sitting here with him, holding a quiet vigil of his own. It triggers the most intense sensation of déjà vu in Hikaru, intense enough to make him feel faint, to make his eyes water (that incense is ridiculous), but he closes his eyes and weathers the worst of it. He forces himself to breathe in and back out. He forces himself to speak up as soon as he can, his throat scratchy and pained.]

What...

[What the hell are you doing here? is what he wants to ask. But it's pretty futile to ask something like when he already knows why Touya is here. He makes a smaller sound, closer to a whimper, maybe a fragment of a choked sob, before a new infusion of morphine smooths him back out. It's fine. It's all right. He did what he had to do, what anyone with any sense would do in that same situation. He doesn't have to be scared of whatever it was that made him want to die for Touya's sake. The smell of incense is finally fading away, at least...]

Touya...

[ashlar]

[Akira himself is wondering whether he might be asleep. He's probably at least halfway into a dream. It's the only thing that makes sense--the blurring of consciousness and an exhausted imagination. Akira knows where he is: a cold hospital room, his head resting upon starched sheets. He knows that the sounds around him are Shindou sounds, all monitoring his vitals, making sure he's still alive. He knows that his knees are sore from keeping him staunch on the hard linoleum floor. But at the same time, there has to be a dreaminess here, because it smells like a temple and it feels like reverence. Like duty. He has the sense that he's skipping something, as if he should be--what? Ringing bells? Sweeping clean important places? If there's incense, an altar must be nearby. And maybe it's dusty, but Akira can't leave where he is right now.

He must be halfway dreaming.

The first hint of Shindou's voice has Akira's head jerking upright. Akira gives half a gasp when he rises, and he's ruffled all over. His hair is springy in places, like stress has given it new shapes, and he has some strands stuck to his cheek, to his lip. His eyes are wide and sparkling like troubled pewter. There's an exhilarated flush to him, but his complexion in general is poor, with discoloration beneath the eyes. The awe in him, though, is more immediately notable than any of that. His amazement outweighs even the strangeness of Touya Akira appearing so disheveled.

That awe gives way to tension pretty quickly. Akira shuts his mouth, then shuts his further, pursing his lips tight. He rises from where he's been kneeling for hours--the length of time makes itself known in how his legs tremble when he stands. But he's backing away to sit in the nearby chair. He doesn't arrange himself gracefully. His wrists rest atop each knee, and his hands come together between them, all his fingertips tented and pressed together hard. That might be an angry tremor to his hands. And it's too serious to be embarrassment, or a teenage outburst of some sort. He's...]

They said you can have ice, [he says, too suddenly. It sounds like the strike of steel over flint: a fire starter.] Chipped ice. If you're thirsty.

[They've told him other things, too, if only because he's been a terror to them.]

[protential]

[Morphine really is just a modern miracle. Hikaru feels like he's floating, or maybe he's sinking, or maybe it's both of those things at the same time. There's no need to bite down on a sturdy stick, or a leather strap, in order to weather the worst of the pain. He doesn't have to claw at the blankets in desperation and hope that his wounds won't fester with dangerous fluids. Lying here comfortably is so miraculous that it doesn't feel real, like it's something someone made up to fool him, to make him feel like he's dreaming, except for the way Touya is looking at him. Touya is looking at him like he never expected Hikaru to look back at him for any reason. It's the sort of look that causes Hikaru's throat to tighten up, and it's already dry, yeah, like he's tried to swallow a handful of spices. (Crushed cinnamon is supposed to be good for purifying the soul.) Touya is looking at him and that's all the proof he needs to know that he's still alive. He wasn't planning to die back there, but he wouldn't have been surprised if he did. Not that you can be surprised when you're dead. But, you know.]

Touya...

[This morning, he saw Touya in a sleepy, pretty mussed and messy state, but how Touya looks right now is different from that. Touya looks like he could vomit up his most recent meal, or tear out his hair, or tear out and then eat his hair, or something equally violent. Hikaru wonders if Touya's been eating enough, because he's heard about how Touya refuses to eat lunch during his games, and that's a stupid as hell thing to do. It seems so stupid to go without eating--to fast, that's the word for it--for any amount of time whatsoever. Touya Akira's the real moron here, for not eating his lunch, for not running when Hikaru told him to run, but he's still in one piece and that's the only thing that matters. The one and only thing.]

Hey, Touya...

[Hikaru sounds inescapably tired, like he could fall back asleep at any moment. He looks like it, too, with how he's struggling to keep his eyes open more than a sliver. Some of his fingers are trying to curl inward, to anchor him to wakefulness, but it's weirdly hard to move any part of himself. He's struggling to do more than breathe and lick his dry lips a little in between breaths. At the same time, Touya sounds like he's getting ready to burn down a forest. That's familiar, and it's also kind of scary, because Hikaru is too weak to defend himself against any of it. Touya's voice has a high chance of scalding him, when really all he wants is that cup of chipped ice and another soft blanket. Unsurprisingly, Touya's bedside manner could seriously use some work.]

How long've you been here for? I don't... what time is it, even...

[He tries once more to lift up his head, in search of a clock, but that only makes him wince and sigh audibly.]