He would have the scar for the rest of his life, the doctors said in even tones. There were options, of course, but they were costly even for a man with connections. And even so, even with the treatment, the injury would linger.
Tatsumi stared and stared and tried to make sense of what they were saying through one solid insulated wall of shock and another solid insulated wall of undiluted morphine. The bones that had cracked were knitting, the great calico splotches of bruising were fading, but his chest was still heavily bandaged. And there were other injuries, deeper ones, that wouldn't ever show up on any physical exam. If the tether between him and the medication were taken away, the pain would be far too much for any sole living being to bear.
Turned out it took a lot of drugs to keep a man his size under, despite his small stature.
The morphine made him feel like he was in an aquarium, staring out at the world from behind glass and feet of water. His body was heavy; he ached. Life passed by in flashes: Doctors, nurses, shitty television shows with shittier reception, even shittier food when his nutrition wasn't sent straight into his veins with a needle. Mein lurking in the periphery, tiny for her fourteen years, perpetually pale-faced. Connecting the fragments took hard thinking that he didn't want to do. He could have been there for years and only experienced it as a handful of hours.
"There's still the possibility of spinal damage, so we have to run a number of tests even once you've started to recover."
Even words like those didn't mean anything much. He was floating. He was weighted down impossibly.
…And through the morphine and the shock and the disconnected way he saw the world, he still realized. Even with a great chunk of his memory missing between that night and the hospital, he still acutely felt the absence. The empty space where Bulat and Schere should have been was impossible to overlook.
He would have the scar for the rest of his life, they said.
From occasional glances at calendars — the ones that remained in his memory — it took something like two months for them to actually let him the fuck out of the hospital. When he got back to the house (empty, too empty) he was still staggering. He threw out the condolence flowers and smashed the vase for good measure, ripped the card with the therapist's number into pieces, and fell hard onto the couch. Everything was spinning, his nerves unable to properly process reality through the heady cocktail of painkillers and rage and strangling disbelief. Cymbals were crashing somewhere. His ears felt like they must be bleeding.
He wanted to break everything the way the world had been broken, but he was too dizzy even to stand, his body reeling under the weight of the drugs. He felt like a marionette too weak to pull out its strings.
Faint, pattering socked footsteps rustled on the linoleum: Mein, probably with a dustpan, cleaning up the broken glass. Tatsumi closed his eyes and tried to blot the sound out with sleep.
The weeks after that were all warped around the edges, made dull by the drugs that continued to leave a nasty aftertaste at the back of his throat. The house stayed dark. He moved from the sofa to the bedroom and back, collapsed around corners or ranging restlessly; the television was never turned on, and when his hunger grew too great to be ignored, he threw an instant meal into the microwave and ate it. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do.
He wanted to break everything. He wanted to close his eyes and stop breathing.
Tatsumi didn't know how long had passed between his homecoming and the light streaming back into the house along with the sound of voices — he just knew the black wordless doldrums of the inside of his skull resolving into a disgruntled what the fuck, and put his pillow over his head where he was sprawled on the bedspread.
The light advanced further — and the bedroom door creaked open, bright yellow halogen-bulb beams assaulting the backs of his eyelids even through the pillowcase. Tatsumi swore into the mattress and didn't get up.
The sound of a sigh echoed in from the direction of the doorframe: Female, annoyingly familiar. Then, following it, a voice.
"Yeah, I figured as much."
"Fuck you," Tatsumi grumbled, and gave the intruder the finger, still not looking up.
There wasn't any reply — just the sound of footsteps, distant and then near, as the woman looked around the room. "That's pretty convenient, actually. Hey — I'm gonna put this dimmer switch on and close the door, so you can actually sit up without hurting your eyes and I'll be able to goddamn see."
And: A softer, closer light, followed by the click of the door closing completely, as promised. Tatsumi grimaced into the mattress: This was precisely why he hated this raging bitch.
"What the fuck are you even doing in my house, Esdese…?!" he asked even as he let the pillow slip away, as he pushed himself up on his elbows to glower.
Esdese was leaning against the wall with her hands in her pockets, thumbs up over her hip bones, long blueish silver hair down past her knees and beat-up jeans and thin zippered hoodie and infuriatingly compassionate pale blue eyes — bold as fucking brass, with that air-headed attitude like there was nowhere better for her to be than standing here. It was giving Tatsumi a fucking migraine just looking at her, and he itched to just pick up something heavy and throw it, to punch the wall or the slut's stupid fucking pretty face and show her that she was not motherfucking welcome here, god damn it.
"You probably haven't been keeping track," she said reasonably, "…but the default term for a Medical Leave about up by now, and you either need a doctor's papers or my okay to stay here longer and keep your job."
"Fuck you, get out."
"Cute," Esdese replied flatly. She pushed off the wall and moved closer, her eyes narrowing in scrutiny. "Look, I don't expect you to be back at work. Not yet. That would be too cruel. All the same, I do expect you to take care of your damn self, which you don't seem to be doing in the least."
Tatsumi responded to this not with words, but with a pair of upraised middle fingers. For some reason, this made Esdese smile wryly.
"At least you've still got enough spunk left to be an insufferable prick. C'mon, go dunk your head in the sink — and shave off that five o'clock shadow while you're at it, you look like you've got a fungus growing on your chin."
"Says the bitch whose only place she needs to shave are her bloody pubes." Tatsumi was glad he hadn't put his fingers down.
"Tch. I'd be more than happy to prove you wrong right now, but in your delicate condition seeing what kind of heat I'm packing might give you a case of the vapors." Esdese was smirking. "Come on, dumbass, get up."
"I'll do it if you go the fuck away," Tatsumi drawled.
"I will, but I'll be coming back soon."
"And why the fuck is that? Your little inspection's over, isn't it?"
Esdese just looked at him blankly, like Tatsumi had overlooked something obvious — but then, things Esdese called obvious tended to follow leaps of logic and private trains of thought that were hard for others to follow, and the younger man himself had positively zero fucking idea what legitimate common sense actually was. "Because," she said patiently, "Mein and I are going shopping, after which we're coming back and I will be cooking you two dinner. She told me you've been living off Wild Hunt's frozen food, and what kind of boss would I be if I let you poison yourself with preservatives?"
"Mein needs to learn when to shut her fucking face," Tatsumi grumbled. At last he let his hands drop, and his head as well, propping his cheek on the pillow.
"She's scared for you; scared of losing you," Esdese murmured. "She's a sensitive kid and you two have been through something really traumatic. Don't be too hard on her."
He wouldn't even deign to reply to that one. Esdese was right, and Tatsumi knew that well enough.
"Don't be too hard on yourself either." And then Esdese's smooth hand was on his head, really lightly, ruffling his hair briefly in a gesture so fucking paternal Tatsumi could've died laughing. "And seriously, clean yourself the fuck up before you come downstairs. You look like a goddamn zombie."
And Esdese turned on her heel and left, just like that, closing the door behind her again.
Tatsumi growled into the pillow and closed his eyes. His motherfucking lady boss. Pushy bitch thought it was her god-given right to fuss over everybody in the world just because she'd won a fucking fist fight with the last guy.
The worst part, by far, was that even now Tatsumi couldn't make up his mind whether it was annoying as fuck, kind of sweet, or a combination of both.
It was the smell that woke him — tomatoes and beef and spices and potatoes, and Tatsumi's stomach snarled at him to get up. Groggy, he shoved himself upright, yanked his pants to the right place on his hips, and opened the door to glare into the hallway.
The light was on downstairs, and he could hear voices — Esdese's and Mein's. There was clatter, there was stirring. The kitchen was in use, the noises proclaimed. Even as his stomach writhed and clawed at him with need, his head and his chest felt impossibly heavy.
So he stumped his way back into the bedroom, swerving over to the left in order to get into the bathroom and splash some water on his face. Tatsumi could at least admit that he needed to eat and that it was better for that stupid fuckass to do the cooking than for him to flounder around on his own.
Not to mention — he scowled at his reflection in the mirror, at his hair sticking up every which way and the great dark circles beneath his eyes — the obnoxious woman was right. He needed to shave. Esdese's description of the situation as five o'clock shadow had been unnecessarily generous; Tatsumi's stubble was almost to the point where it could be called bristles.
It looked like shit, and Tatsumi had always snorted at those who grew themselves depression beards — so as a man who refused to hold himself to separate standards from others, he got out Incursio and a can of shaving cream and got to work.
By the time he was done, his face stinging a little from the bite of the chemicals and the buzz of Incursio (the electric razor), the entire house smelled like freshly cooked meal and hunger was a pissed-off animal hooking its claws into the walls of his stomach.
"Well, you at least look a little less like you just crawled out of your own grave," Esdese pronounced immediately upon Tatsumi's arrival at the base of the stairs, right at the junction of living room and dinette. "Get your butt in your chair, I'm just about done."
Tatsumi offered up his two favorite fingers in passing, then plunked himself down at the table with a sigh. Mein had already set it. She'd changed the placemats to the plaid set: the one Lubbock had bought when Mein had been so entranced over how cute she thought it was, and that made his throat contract in an awful choking kind of way.
The sound of impact against plastic made him turn. Esdese was steadily dumping boxes of frozen food into the garbage can.
"…What the fuck are you doing to our food supply, you motherfucking asshole…!" he snarled. Esdese just looked at him and held up one of the remaining boxes, pointing to the nutrition facts printed on the side.
"Have you ever taken a look at these and seen how many chemicals get pumped into this crap to keep it from going bad? It's a Wild Hunt product, so I wouldn't expect you to understand." Esdese's voice was stern and parental and just a little bit whiny, like she was the teacher's pet lecturing a classmate on a painfully stupid mistake. She wrinkled her nose and tapped the fine print. "As long as I'm in this house you and Mein are going to eat real goddamned food that isn't going to give you cancer."
"It's FDA-fucking-approved, or they couldn't fucking sell it," was the first argument that came to his lips. Esdese made a noise of distaste and tossed the box into the garbage with the rest. "And fuck you, stop throwing out the goddamn tortilla tilapia at least, those are actually decent!"
"The FDA can go fellate its own shriveled gonads," Esdese proclaimed dismissively. "And fuck you, you obviously have no idea what decent even means if you can call any kind of frozen food that. Tomorrow I'm making you real tortilla tilapia for dinner, and I'm going to teach Mein how to make it before I go so that you'll never have to subsist on this dog shit again."
"My girlfriend does not need any cooking lessons from you, I can do well enough for the both of us!"
Esdese snorted and turned back to the stove, dusting off her hands. There was a tall pot on the burners, and she took off its lid in order to stick a ladle in and stir it as great clouds of steam emerged and drifted up to the ceiling. "Tatsumi, you couldn't cook your way out of a paper bag if your life depended on it."
"Fuck you, yes I can."
"You can't."
"I will bet you fucking money that I can."
"Fine, you're on. If you manage to produce even one competent meal before I leave, I'll give you a raise. You don't owe me anything if you lose — anything material, anyway. You'll just have surrendered your competence as a man for all of time, or until you manage to prove otherwise."
The nerve of this bitch just didn't end. Tatsumi stared with something like wonder as Esdese lifted up the ladle casually, and sipped from it.
"Well, this is about ready, so let's eat."
It was like trying to stop up a breaking dam with his bare hands, but Tatsumi still fought to hold his tongue when Esdese deposited a pair of bowls on the table — one for Mein and one for him. Dinner was apparently very thick stew. Tatsumi could see thick chunks of beef, potato, green bean, and tomato drifting through the murky broth.
It actually did look appetizing, but Tatsumi wasn't willing to damage his pride enough to start eating right away, so he watched as Esdese filled her own bowl and brought it to the table, then sat down.
"You can get your own refills if you want them, and I'm hoping that you do want them, because this stuff is never as good once it's been in the refrigerator for more than a couple of hours — the broth will get sludgy… at least that was what Bors said."
And as casual as you please, she started eating. Tatsumi shook his head and glared at his own bowl.
Once he heard Mein's spoon start moving, though, he knew that he couldn't delay the inevitable for any longer. Rolling his eyes, he started eating.
…And fuck her — even to Tatsumi's uncultured and uncaring tongue, the stew was on an entirely different level from anything he'd ever prepared out of a can; it was even better than Saya's cooking. This was closer to what he'd come to expect out of restaurants that served separate courses of appetizers and desserts and charged upwards of $20 a person for each meal. He should've known that Esdese wouldn't be so arrogant without being able to back it up — that was the annoying thing about this woman: that every time she came off as a smug douchebag she whipped out raw skill to give herself competence.
If there was one thing that had to be said about his unbearable bitch of a boss, it was that Esdese is the right person to stand at the summit of any meritocracy.
…Though Tatsumi would still rather die than admit that anywhere other than the nice, private interior of his own skull.
"This is very good," Mein remarked, out of the blue. Tatsumi looked up at his lover through his hair — there was a real smile on her face, even though it was small and shaky. This was probably the first time she'd actually smiled in months. He didn't want to be the one to make her stop, and so he swallowed the complaints and just kept eating.
"I'm glad you like it. If you want to learn a little about making soup and stew from scratch, I'm happy to teach you anytime." When Tatsumi risked another glance up, Esdese was smiling back at her with a pleased expression. "What about you, Tatsumi? At least you don't hate it, do you?"
"Fuck your cunt with broken glass and die. If I hated it I wouldn't be eating it, dammit," was what he said aloud. His face felt hot, which only served to piss him off more. "…It's okay."
And Esdese laughed. "That's high praise, coming from you. Glad you find things to your liking."
Mein was still sitting right there. Times like this, the high road was the only road, but it still didn't feel any less grating.
Esdese didn't simply cook like a housewife — she also washed all the dishes herself like a housewife.
"Are you a businesswoman or are you a mail-order housewife?" Tatsumi jeered. "Give me a fucking break."
"Only when you stop being such a goddamn stereotype," Esdese replied. Her voice was airy, even, and carried no perceptible malice. "If somebody doesn't do it, your sink is going to be filled with rotting shit in no time, and trust me when I tell you that that's about as fun to clean or work around as it is sanitary. Mein's probably sick of cleaning up after you by now, and since you don't seem to feel like cleaning things up yourself, I'm graciously giving her a reprieve."
"Fuck off."
It was late by the time Esdese finished, almost eleven — but then dinner had started at around nine anyway. Mein had disappeared for a time, and they heard the shower running counterpoint to the faucet in the sink. The noise had vanished then too, and given the reading on the oven clock she'd probably gone to bed by now. Even though Mein was most alert in the evening, she still went to bed before midnight every day so that she could be awake in time for school.
"Well, your mission's accomplished, anyway, so you can invite yourself back the fuck out." Tatsumi sprawled back on the couch and glared at the opposite end of the room.
"Nope." The sound of the faucet flipping off punctuated Esdese's declaration. "Did you manage to miss it when I said I was going to be cooking for you tomorrow, birdbrain? I'm off work; Ran and Wave have things under control, and I'll be taking care of you until I know that you and Mein will be all right on your own."
"Don't you have your own damn household to play matron at? Fuck off already."
There was the sound of a groan, and then footsteps. Tatsumi stared warily from the corner of his eye; Esdese had her hands in her pockets and was walking towards the division between kitchen and living room in an easy stride; like she fucking owned the place. "I do, but Kurome is sixteen, and that's more than old enough to handle household chores for a while. Leone's also supposed to come around and check up on her with Akame every few days, and there are more than enough shenanigans going on at that coffee shop to keep her perpetually in my debt as far as favors go, so I have no reason to believe she won't. On top of which, there's this amazing, futuristic device called the Smartphone that lets us contact each other via text or voice from any damn where."
"You are not staying overnight." Try as he might, Tatsumi couldn't keep the horror from leaking into his voice. He hadn't actually realized — must've been trying to block it out subconsciously — but now that it was smacking him in the face, Esdese's intentions had been pretty clear from the start.
"I am indeed staying overnight, because you are my employee — ergo, I own your ass; ergo, your well-being is my personal responsibility. You need somebody to look after you for a little while, Tatsumi. And I'm sure Mein's been doing just fine with that, but she probably needs time to grieve too. Hell, she needs time to be a normal middle school kid, and she can't do that when she has to be the adult in the household."
"I don't need you to babysit my ass, you goddamn fuckhead, get out!" He wasn't fully sure when he launched himself off the sofa to stand square in the center of the room — just that he was on his feet with his weight distributed just perfectly to fly in any direction, his veins full of adrenaline and his head full of rage.
Esdese stood there across from him. One of the strings of her hoodie had gotten tugged askew and was stuck on her shoulder, underneath the edge of the hood itself. Her hands were still in her pockets, with just her thumbs visible — they were balanced over the bones of her hips again. Her eyebrows were drawn down, but other than that she was expressionless.
Her well-developed breasts rose and fell once, exaggeratedly, and then she spoke. "Stop bluffing just to protect your own damn pride. You're pissing me off."
It was like flipping a switch. Tatsumi had stepped forward, his fist had flown out, almost before he knew what was actually happening. And just like that, Esdese sank down fluidly and grabbed Tatsumi's wrist as the punch sailed over her head. She stood back up in the next moment, and Tatsumi was still bristling as Esdese loosened her death grip on the wrist and shifted her hand down so that her palm and fingers were cupped soft but firm over the knuckles of Tatsumi's clenched fist.
"You are not okay and nobody with any goddamn common sense would expect you to be okay," Esdese said in an even and relentless tone, and her pale-blue eyes caught the dim lighting so that Tatsumi could have sworn they glowed like a cat's. "And it does not make you weak to admit that you need someone else's help, it makes you a fucking adult."
"Fuck you," and it was a good thing that that was an all-purpose phrase because over and over again it was all that Tatsumi could articulate. He grabbed the front of that stupid hoodie in his left hand and tightened his grip; there wasn't room to wrench Esdese forward any further than this. "You don't get to give me that bullshit about how oh you know how I feel until you've been in my head, and you aren't me, so you can get the fuck off your motherfucking high horse any day now, you raging sl—"
"I know," Esdese went on from six inches away, and her eyes were intense and pitiless and her gaze was boring straight through Tatsumi in a way that was hot and almost unbearable—"you don't have to believe me, but I do know—"
And her right hand came up, open and easy, and Esdese's fingertips skimmed over the freshly shaved line of Tatsumi's jawbone.
Tatsumi dragged her the last six inches inward.
Apparently his brain had disengaged, because all that mattered was that Esdese's hands were on his body, not quite rough but decidedly not gentle either. They kept getting teeth mixed up in their kisses — never really biting down, but grazing the rough edge of enamel over lips and tongue like a reminder. Esdese was breathing deeply against him, eyes half-closed, and Tatsumi grabbed onto her hips to better feel the shift of her body. The blades of Esdese's pelvis fitted against his palms perfectly, sharp and sculpted.
They strained together like it was some kind of contest. Esdese kept making a low noise that was too deep to really be called a whimper, and when their bodies brushed up hard against each other she pulled back to breathe oh god against Tatsumi's shoulder. Tatsumi tried to yank Esdese's hips up against his again — he wanted contact, he wanted the urgent burn of lust to resolve itself into actual pleasure — then Tatsumi pushed her forward at the same time, and sent the both of them slamming hard against the couch, Esdese back-first.
Even with all the breath blown straight out of her, Esdese bared her teeth and laughed. This was fine. This was perfect. The bottled-up emotions of the past months and all tonight's anger had resolved themselves into reckless, restless aggression. Tatsumi welcomed the outlet, the chance after so long to vent all the tangled-up violence inside him. Tatsumi's body weighed heavy on top of her, pressed against her from the diaphragm down, hips planted perfectly and immovably between Esdese's legs. Both of them were shaking — from anticipation, from impatience. Esdese reached up, framed Tatsumi's face in both her hands, and knotted her fingers into Tatsumi's brown hair to drag him down into a kiss.
Tatsumi made some kind of faint noise, and Esdese only had time to notice that there was something off about his eyes before a sharp blow to her chest knocked all the breath out of her. The next instant, Tatsumi had torn himself free and fled the room.
"…What the fuck?" she said to herself under her breath, and frowned as she heard the faint sound of retching. Esdese pulled herself to her feet gingerly, rubbing her sternum with the heel of her hand, and stared hard into the kitchen. Tatsumi was bent shaking over the sink.
And it was odd, it was fucking odd, but she couldn't move. Her head was an entirely different kind of disconnected from the rest of her, so that even if she'd wanted to cross the line that divided the living room and kitchen to try to figure out what was happening, her legs just wouldn't obey.
After a pause that was entirely too long, Tatsumi rose back up. He wiped his face with his wrist, stood for a while with his shoulders hunched and his face down-turned, and then ran the faucet. The smell of bile lingered. Even from half a room away, Esdese could tell that Tatsumi was tense and jittering. His chest was rising and falling very sharply, like he was hyperventilating.
Esdese stepped onto the linoleum, wary for reasons she didn't understand all too well. Tatsumi didn't startle again, but he still didn't move away from the sink or even look up. Esdese stepped forward again, still tense, pausing after each pace; there wasn't any reaction until all that separated them was the kitchen counter. That was when Tatsumi smiled bitterly and straightened up, not turning to face her at all. There were shiny tear tracks on his face and his eyes were red-rimmed, but at least he wasn't actively crying.
"What the fuck was that?" Tatsumi managed at last. Even to Esdese's ears, his voice sounded more worried than he wanted it to.
"…Are you okay?" Esdese clenched her fists as she said it; her body wanted to resist her giving out those words, but it somehow seemed important to say them.
"Nope, apparently not. Fuck me. I'll clean the sink out properly later, I don't think I'm really up to that right now." he turned, finally, to face Esdese. Tatsumi's smile was lopsided, and his hands were still jittering a little, almost like he had some kind of palsy.
The staggering, loose way Tatsumi moved reminded Esdese dimly of Syura, toward the end of their final confrontation back in highschool when his stuffing had been knocked out of him. Tatsumi limped to one side, gravitated towards things he could lean on; he looked diminished, somehow.
"Okay. I can take care of the sink my own damn self, you know; I'm not helpless enough to not know how to disinfect shit."
For some reason, this made Esdese laugh again.
"Really, just give me ten or fifteen minutes to breathe and I'll do it. "
"I doubt you could clean your way out of a paper bag."
"Fuck you, yes I can."
"Don't believe you."
"Yes I can, you colossal ass."
"Fine. If you can clean and disinfect the sink to my specifications, oh high-and-mighty boy toy, then you're off the hook about my goddamn cooking bet."
"Ah." There was something a little less pained to Tatsumi's expression when he smiled this time. Tatsumi still couldn't decide if it was irritating as fuck all or actually kind of a relief. "Yeah, okay, I can work with that."
He pushed himself upright, took a few dragging steps forward, and then unconsciously plunked his forehead onto Esdese's cleavage before she had any idea what was actually happening.
Esdese didn't say anything. She just stood there, brought her hands up to lay them flat against Tatsumi's back as he leaned as a warm and heavy weight.
Tatsumi stood awkwardly still for quite a while, but even then Esdese didn't straighten up. If not for the fact that his eyes were still half open and his breathing uneven, Esdese would have thought that he'd gone to sleep right there.
In very cautious movements, she lifted one arm and got it around Tatsumi's shoulders awkwardly, resting his palm directly on the point where her shoulder blade started to raise up. Even though this put Tatsumi's damp face away from Esdese's cleavage (much to her dismay), no protest came from either side.
It occurred to Esdese that she had something breakable in her hands right now.
It occurred to Esdese that not for anything in the world would she break it.