Night 55: M61-70 Hallway
The food was disgusting, but he had to eat. While Grell was hardly a gourmet by any stretch of the imagination, he knew good food from poor and this? Was atrocious. He'd only managed to choke it down because without food he'd have no energy and there was no way he'd allow his energy to run out. He still ached from his fight the previous night,
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The routes from cellblock to cellblock had had around three weeks to ingrain themselves into her internal map, and with no trouble along the way to deter her, Tsubaki had little difficulty finding her way to Kurogane’s room. She had to wonder if he’d found a metal box like she had with his things inside, if the whole prisoner population had in a gesture that said ’I understand perfectly well what goes on after hours.’ An admittance that stripped away the veneer of the peaceful hospital Landel had set in place during the day.
Maybe the facades were drawing to a close. Maybe the nights were going to change, and not in a good way. A lot of maybes and no real answers ( ... )
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It was Kurogane’s tall form framed in the door, but what she noticed almost at once was the state of dress he was in. She was practically eye level with his bare chest, making it easier to see the two-tone skin he had in some areas. Oh, it looked like she’d interrupted him while changing…
While he looked down, she looked up. At least he didn’t seem more worse for wear than yesterday. “Sorry for the disturbance… I wasn’t able to contact you today, so I thought I’d see if you were still in,” she said in her soft voice. She would’ve done the same with Fai, too, if she could be in two places at once. What were the chances that Fai was still in?
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"Did you come here first?" he asked suddenly with a quick look to the hallway behind her. Fai clearly was not with her, but if she'd been to his room already to check, that was a good enough sign that neither one of them would be seeing the magician that night.
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In response to being shown his back, Tsubaki lowered her head and said nothing. She wasn’t exactly unprepared for his answer: she was the one holding back, as she had done so often before. A quality that had caused more than one conflict.
It wasn’t that she valued Kurogane less than connections to her family--she did want to know if the place’s effects were causing him and Fai pain. It was more worrying not knowing what was happening to others than knowing what was happening to herself. But how was it not selfish to want to know about him and her brother both? There wasn’t a clear division of interest, and in some ways that was worse than only caring about one or the other. In that sense, Kurogane’s point was deserved. If on the one hand she couldn’t express her true feelings beyond a shadow of a doubt, and on the other she couldn’t express her true feelings at all, then it was difficult to see why she should speak up in the first place ( ... )
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"That's better," he sighed and had a seat on his bed, pointing her to the other, "I'll tell you what I saw, but I can't say that'll explain anything. I still don't get it myself."
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Though his gesture for her to take the other bed was a sign that he was open to having a conversation, she didn’t want her question to interfere with the rest of the night. She’d be especially guilty if spending precious time talking about last night meant either of them were less prepared for whatever could happen this time. She wished she could have found him earlier.
She sat, but almost immediately had to reflect on what he was saying. “Saw?” she echoed. Kurogane had been seeing something? He’d said he hadn’t been hurt, so she’d already known it hadn’t been some kind of assault, but…
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The fact that he still didn't understand it made explaining it for the curious girl even worse. He didn't like when he couldn't explain something for himself let alone trying to explain the same for others. Unless he was discussing with someone else who the same thing had happened to. By her presence there, and the fact that she hadn't gone down at their touching, he was pretty sure that she hadn't faced anything like he had.
"Don't know where it was, but there was a guy there. With a sword. He looked a lot like you," he explained, deciding it might just be better to say what he knew he'd seen. As for the emotions... those were how he'd known they were related, but he didn't want to even attempt to explain that far. He still couldn't understand that much.
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A man. A man with a sword who looked like… her?
She felt her heart thud in her chest as the pieces started to come together just out of her reach. Kurogane, becoming affected by something she had at first attributed to some kind of outside attack. When had it happened? Right as he’d touched her. And then there was the one thing that hadn’t fit no matter how many times she went over events in her mind--his sudden question. No, no, also an observation at the same time. You have a brother.The more she heard, the more she kept thinking back to that night in the upstairs hall when she’d seen a flash of Masamune’s last moments, though how those two moments could be connected eluded her. The possible answers for what Kurogane was talking about were almost too big to grasp. Had they…? But how had she not felt anything ( ... )
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