[ fic ] fallout (hibari/haru)
Title: Fallout.
Author/Artist: seireeii
Rating: T for Teen.
Warnings: None.
Prompt: VI - 44; Hibari/Haru - Bloodtears - I will cry when you can not.
Word count: 1,563.
Summary: It's in those moments when we're whole that we're truly broken.
fallout
when i can't stand on my own anymore.
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She isn’t breathing.
She hasn’t taken a breath since she opened her door to find the bloodied, muddied, and shadowed shape of the one person she least expected to see standing on her front porch. He is soaked in rainwater - tendrils of bloody water ran down the sides of his cheeks, threading through the onyx strands normally kept in orderly disarray. She can feel him shivering from where she stands in the center of her doorframe.
Haru has never seen him look so vulnerable, so defeated.
Cautiously, she takes a step forward, her brown eyes soft, “Hibari-san?”
At his silence, she takes another step toward him, and gently, slowly, touches the fractured skin of his cheek, checking to see if the blood on his face is from a wound on his face, or from the blood in his hair. Using the close proximity to look up at his eyes, she meets his dull, dead gaze, and widens her own at the subdued glaze coating his normally polished metallic blue irises.
“Hibari-san, what happened to you?” she asks gently, lowering her hand from the side of his face, and lightly places it on his shoulder. He flinches at the touch, and she jerks her hand away, startled. “I-I’m sorry, Hibari-san!”
He closes his eyes, and steps into her, his heartbeat pressing softly against hers, “…Haru.”
“Hi-Hibari-san?” She turns her head to her left shoulder as his chin drops to the slope of it. “Hibari-san!”
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She still isn’t breathing.
Even though she’s managed to half-carry, half-drag the injured and barely conscious skylark into her living room, she still hasn’t taken a single breath since she opened her door to find him on the porch.
His breathing is scarce against her wrist as she gently, but hurriedly washes his face. She can see his chest rising and falling, and draws comfort from that, but even as she washes and dresses his wounds, one by one, she knows there are thousands more she can’t see, that she can’t heal with her fingertips and comforting gaze. She begins to cry, her movements pausing against him, her free hand rising to her eyes to wipe away the tears.
She continues to treat his injuries, slowly and tenderly applying the ointments and Band-Aids to his cuts and scrapes, wrapping ointment and bandages around the deeper, larger ones, before wiping at her eyes once more. But the tears are seamless, and unbreakable, as they continue to flow, to fall to her knees and the side of his face as she hovers over him.
Deep inside, she knows.
She knows that he’s at his limits, that he’s pushed himself too hard, that even though he seems invincible, he’s still human underneath all of his indifference and resolution. She knows that at his core he’s truly a pure, selfless creature - never conceited, only ever dreaming to become strong for the sake of those he loves, a solitary knight. The tears fall harder, soaking the Band-Aids she placed on the side of his face.
With the only breath she’s taken since he appeared before her, she whispers, “Please, don’t die.”
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Deep in the darkness of her living room, Haru reaches for his hand, and weaves their fingers together.
She lies down beside him, presses her cheek to his shoulder as if by touching him, he’ll be able to draw strength from her delicate and fragile body. The tears wet his sleeve - her arms wrap around him tightly, her eyes wide shut and bleeding crystalline rainwater - as she draws solace from his shape, his rain-soaked scent, the subtle, but solid rise and fall of his breathing.
Holding him close, and burying her face into his damp, onyx hair, she matches her breathing with his, and remains by his side.
Offering everything that makes her whole to replace what was stolen from him.
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In the lull of the storm outside, he stirs, waking her from her light, light, light sleep. She lifts herself up to her knees, helps him sit up, and hovers beside him once more, asking questions and checking his dressed injuries over.
He watches her as she works, holding his silence, despite the quivering of her fingers against his skin. Something rises inside him, something he is still too weak and exhausted to fight against, and he lifts his eyes to hers, meeting her gaze hesitantly. She stops, and returns his gaze, looking him in the eyes as he looks into hers, watching the fire that smolders in the depths of her irises waver, and softly roll in harmony with her breaths.
He knows he frightened her.
He closes his eyes and turns away.
Tears fall to the back of his hand on the floor. “I hate it when you do that.”
He turns back to her, cracking open one eye in response.
“I wish… you’d rely on me more,” Haru whispers, her voice trembling. “With more than the fallout. Am I not strong enough to support you? Or protect you with everything I have? I care about you, Hibari-san. I really, really do. But that’s not enough is it? It’s not enough for me to put you back together praying to God that you’ll wake up when I do.”
Her tears fall harder.
“I was so afraid that I was going to lose you,” she chokes out, lifting her hand from his injured body. She wipes at her tears, inwardly scolding herself for letting them slip in front of him when she promised herself that she would be strong for him. “I was so, so, so afraid, that you wouldn’t come back this time.”
He sighs, and reaches his bandaged hand to the side of her face, leaning closer to her.
“Please, don’t ever do that again,” she manages, before his forehead is touching hers, their bangs melding together. One of her hands reaches for his face, but his free palm traps it by the wrist, his eyes pressed shut against hers.
“Haru,” he murmurs. His voice is a fierce, subdued whisper, bringing chills to her arms, and the back of her neck. “Thank you.”
She reaches for him, and his lips meet hers, and she pulls him as close to her as she possibly can. She isn’t breathing as he kisses her like she is the very air he breathes, like she’s the only thing in this world that he wants to protect. She doesn’t notice the fingertips brushing at the glistening corners of her eyes, the earnest whispers of his breaths against her face.
All she can feel, smell, and taste is his lips against hers.
His hand buries itself into the loose mass of chocolate brown hair at the back of her head, his other weaving together with one of her hands and pressing them both against her heart, holding them against the fluttering beats of her pulse. She knows he can hear it in the delicate silence between them, that he knows that she knows that this is the only moment he’ll show her vulnerability, that he’s reaching for her out of weakness.
That he kept himself together until he reached her.
Pulling her lips back from his, she wraps her arms around him and holds him, crying onto his shoulder and burying her face into his hair. She shakes, and she trembles, and she quivers, as she releases the feelings he poured into her, letting his pain meld with her pain, letting her weak and crumbling walls tumble down into the castle of his arms.
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And when she wakes up once more to the smell of freshly brewed tea and beaming sunlight, she finds him lingering on the porch steps, glancing back at her front door, and later at her, a tea cup in his hand, and grins.
She knows that she’s his home to come back to, when the walls of his office aren’t enough, when he needs warmth and solidarity. She knows that he knows it too, and crosses the front porch, takes his tea cup from his hand and presses her lips to his sweetly. His eyes widen in surprise - his azure-silver irises catch beneath the wind, his heart pounds underneath the lone palm holding it.
She reaches for the arm of the chair beside her right hip, and places his tea cup on it, before reaching her hands into his hair and kissing him wholeheartedly, his lips, though injured and still sleepy, tasting of green tea and mint. In her kiss, she tries to pour her feelings into him, whisper them to him in the way she runs her fingertips across the sides of his face, how she clutches him closer, and closer.
His eyes fall shut, and he kisses her back, drowning in her taste of strawberries and honey.
A few breathless moments later, she pulls back, her hands on his chest, her mouth dangerously close to his, and her eyes sparkling with the morning dew dappling the grass below the porch. She smiles her own beam of sunlight, and nods, “I’ll be here when you come back, Hibari-san.”
His irises open, and he nods in response.
“I’ll come back,” he replies, to which she smiles.
And she lets him go, knowing that when he needs her most, he’ll return to her.
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end.