| Ordinary Miracles [closed to Haruichi & Hoshi] |
[Sep. 22nd, 2008|01:33 am] |
It had been a long day. A day worth seeing the back of, in Haruichi's world-weary opinion, which was why he had been entertaining the fantasy of walking in the door and falling asleep as soon as he was out of his uniform since about two p.m. A mundane thing to wish for, but something told him he'd be just as well off wishing for some mythological phenomenon to present itself for his inspection (along with authenticating docuentation): neither was likely to happen, and he needed the sleep more.
Stepping slowly up the stairs, eyes half-closed and head aching quietly, Haruichi noticed the sun drowning in deep purple clouds through the dirty windows lining the stairwell of his apartment building. Night was coming, and Haruichi recalled then that his day had begun at one in the morning with a training accident which he'd only been able to save from becoming a traumatic amputation by a handful of seconds. The day, much like the dozen days before it, hadn't improved from there, and ten patients later all Haruichi wanted to do was go to sleep and forget he'd ever been a medic or an ANBU.
There was about as much chance of that as there was of being able to get to bed as soon as he was home, possibly even less. Still, step after step took him upwards until he was pressing his keys into the lock and crossing out of the world and into his home.
Haruichi's half-lidded eyes lifted, opening fully as he realized he hadn't heard Pika bark and that there was a good reason why. The golden dog was lying asleep in front of the living room window, fur bathed in sunset; and her mistress was doing something entirely peculiar. Hoshi was dancing.
And Haruichi was wondering if this was what stumbling across a unicorn was supposed to be like. One of the world's rare and inexplicable things, made all the more startling by the incongruity of it - a deaf girl, eyes closed, dancing to nothing anyone else could ever hear. He blinked, only once, then silently leaned his head and shoulder against their flimsy doorframe and watched her as the light coloured through the window. Letting his mind wander to her in curiosity, and feeling a strain in his chest at the joy she could find in something so simple - wondering at how somebody who'd lost more than him could be so much more joyous. The thin hem of her red gypsy skirt flared out like a flash of fire at her waist, her tangerine-tattooed wrists flipped through the air, and his eyes moved to the old bare burns lining her forearms.
Still and silent, Haruichi thought of the people who'd left Hoshi with those tattoos, and the others who'd left her with those burns. A family burned alive for being named Toshimora, except for Hoshi. Her sister had saved her, had thrown her bodily out the attic window right before their gas pipes blew. The poor girl had only been eight, about three years older than Hoshi at the time. And the last thing she'd done with her life was to trust the same world that had set her family on fire to save her baby sister.
Haruichi felt a twinned flinch of need and responsibility, just remembering the story - never mind the look on Hoshi's face when she'd told him. But in front of him, oblivious to anything but what she was feeling, Hoshi just danced light-footed on the bare floor with a smile brightening her lips. Looking as though she'd never suffered a moment in her life. Never been scared. Never been anything but loved.
You'd never know, unless you saw things the way he did - the way her eyelids didn't flutter, the half-formed words slipping into the air from her fingertips, the matching flick of her pulse in her throat as if it were her heartbeat setting her in motion - and when you saw those things all that was obvious was that she was still here and loving it. And that was what mattered.
He sighed fondly, hands shoved loose into his pockets and white eyes tracing every move she made in the dim gold air. It was going to be a long time, maybe never, until he understood how she could be so carefree and connected all at once. Right now, he just let her example lift his heart the way only she could and felt some of the ache of the day ease away. Until she opened her eyes and noticed him, at which point all he could do was causally lift an eyebrow and try to keep himself from smiling.
Hoshi blushed, then grinned and raced - bare toes barely hitting the floorboards - right into his exhausted arms. Haruichi almost laughed for how tight she hugged him, tugging her up off her feet and kicking the door shut behind him as he kissed her cheek. Strength coming from just being with her, thoughts anywhere but on the exhaustion in his heart or the stress of his day.
It felt so good to be home.
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Moonlight shivered through still, cold air in their bedroom hours later as Haruichi woke uneasily from a deep sleep. His eyes slipped open, instincts insistent against the desire to only shift blindly closer to his fiancee and go back to sleep. Haruichi blinked once against sleep's blur, then realized he was looking at the skirting board and blank wall. Hoshi's soft arms were wound around his chest and belly, fingers pressed gently against his heart and navel where she held him close. He concentrated, a moment's salient effort, and discerned the individual warmth and pattern of her smooth body pressed to his back. Everything was quiet, safe and theirs; and he realized with a small and startling smile that her warm little nose was pressed tenderly against the back of his neck. With that realization the feeling of uneasiness abated, drowsiness gently pulling at him again as he closed his eyes.
Haruichi sighed silently, pure contentment, and lifted his arm under the covers just enough to let his fingers slip around hers where she rested her palm against his belly.
His fingers closed around deliquescing flesh. Small bones and sinews shifted listless in his grip.
White eyes shot open, pupilless focus blurred in horrified confusion. Haruichi's chin jerked down, blanket pulled back, sight focussed frantically on his hand and her hand and and--
Unbridled horror shot straight through him.
Hoshi's blood was all over his hands. His stomach. Her ringed wrist was purpling, rotting, skin stripping away in millimetres and he rolled out the bed - her other dead hand falling onto the plain cotton sheet with a squelch of clicking bone and sloughing skin. Haruichi gasped in fright, reached out for her, pulled the blankets back from where he'd just felt her with him and slammed his mind over and over against a wall of panic in an effort to find thought and reason and how to fix this because he was supposed to fix it and please gods, he could fix th--
--the way her sleeping face was eaten, rotting, honey-tinted skin turned to fetid slush and suddenly the smell hit him and he couldn't wake her up and the skin was split to the right of her eye and he could see the muscle and bone. But he could fix it, he'd seen it before, he'd seen it before, why wouldn't she wake up? He had to take her to hospital just like--
"Not her, not her, not her," he was whispering. Not after everything she'd made it through. He'd just seen her dance. She was alive, please!
To the right of her eye, he'd seen it before.
"Not her, not her, not Hoshiko, please, she's not like us."
To the right of her eye, just like Inuzuka Tsume.
It would get to him later. It always did.
Haruichi screamed and woke up. Slammed his forehead straight into the floorboards as he started off the edge of the futon. One elbow shrieked pain as he cracked his ulnar nerve in a three-inch fall. A knee hit the skirting board. His bare hip hit the floor with a muted crunch. Panic had him by the throat and he scrambled up to his knees - half-tangled in blankets only to find Hoshi sitting up nursing a spot on her thigh and looking at him with orange eyes wide in concern. Paws on the futon beside her, Pika was growling in a low, defensive rumble and watching them both.
Breaths staggered in and out of his lungs as he stared at her. Whole, healthy, beautiful, real, safe. She took her hand off her leg as she shifted over and reached out a hand, touched his shoulder. Warm. He thought her hand was shaking until he realized it was him.
They just looked at each other in the monochrome light, the only colour swimming in her eyes. Hoshi's face held nothing but concern and confusion as she watched Haruichi try to fight away the fright in his own. Haruichi could only keep looking at her eyes, her cheeks, her lips, her nose, her skin and replace all that he'd just dreamed with what he knew was real.
She was real like this. The other thing wasn't real. Not for her. Not her. Not so long as he looked after her, like he'd somehow been trusted to do by Fate and her sister and her.
He suddenly reached for her, clambering awkwardly back into the bed and winding his arms tight around her. She held him in return just as tightly, warm fingers on his cold, sweat-slicked back and her forehead pressed to his collarbone. They clutched each other in the darkness, each feeling incredibly small and vulnerable, not a word said or a sound made.
It was only a dream. Only a bad dream. Subconscious overspill and pressure from overworking and old fears he'd forgotten to assuage. It hadn't been real, and it never would be.
Haruichi told himself that over and over, all the while deliberately ignoring that even though the dream wasn't real what it had done to him was. He'd hoped to let it go, just for a night, and not be an ANBU with blood all over his hands - and this was what happened. Maybe it served him right.
Eventually Pika licked his sore elbow and whined sadly, so Haruichi pried a hand away from Hoshi to pet the dog in return. Hoshi pulled away just enough to look up at his face, brush some of his dark hair back from his brow, and give him one of her brave little smiles to get him back on track. In an amazing display of normality his cheeks coloured in embarassment in return, but finding his feet wouldn't be so easy after that. It would take all night, in small and uneasy steps neither of them was used to braving. Because later, guilt would stab easily at Haruichi through his prised open guards when he realized he'd kicked Hoshi in the leg while they slept. Later still, Hoshi would resist the urge to smudge away the tears that panic had placed in the shadows under Haruichi's eyes, because she knew his pride could only take so much. Eventually, Haruichi would realize he couldn't work the next day and feel nothing but relief as he planned to spend every second of it at home with Hoshi.
His work meant the world to him. The ANBU he looked after meant more than his life was worth. But Hoshi was his reminder that he was human, and was both more and less than his job demanded he be. She was the part of him untouched by the regular recurring horrors of his work, and he needed that so much more than he'd imagined a man could. Because everything he'd just dreamed was real for those he tended to, and worse would be coming... so he had to have something to keep him strong. Like Hoshi's dancing, her smile and all her other ordinary miracles.
It was something he finally accepted in that moment as he first watched her smile for him and bring him home.
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