He jumps the turnstiles at 3AM, no one around to call him out but the rats on the tracks and the snoring drunk passed out on the floor next to an overflowing trashcan. Lights from the incoming train slide across the tiled walls and the screeching on the rails is as familiar as his own prosaic voice. He watches the rats scurry away, and he breathes in the recycled air, sways just a bit. His fists clench and unclench.
The train rushes into the station with a wail of metal against metal and a gust that threatens to whip his head back. Only one of the double doors slides open, and he accidentally rams his shoulder against the other one as he steps into the empty car. The door closes behind him with a dull rattle, and he leans back against it. He breathes out, closes his eyes.
Tonight is another late night morphing into early morning, and he knows he looks like a catastrophe. Dark circles under his eyes, unshaven face, blood on his front. Not his blood, at least, but still. Conspicuous. Alarming. He slumps down in the seat closest to the door, forgets there's blood on his knuckles as he runs his hands through his hair. He's tired, hasn't slept in what feels like, what must be forever. His skull feels like it's stuffed full of the cotton gauze he uses to wrap sliced-open wounds.
Screech and dull rattle; the car remains empty at the next station and the train moves on, jostling him with an ease that is proof of insignificance.
And damn, he's hungry. A familiar hollow inside him, he feels it acutely, and he remembers a line of sharpie-marker-graffiti he'd once seen on a subway map, a neat scrawl across the cartography of Brooklyn that read, boldly: Let me tell you about longing.
Let me presume that I—
The train reenters a tunnel, and the glass of the window darkens, reflecting his haggard image back at him. Blood on his face too, but not that much. He wipes his face against his shoulder, his sleeves already splattered with something unsettlingly organic. He picks at them blearily, gives up and wipes his hand on his jeans. Forget it. Keep going, it is already tomorrow and Krieg will be waiting.
But he is hungry. He is hungry, he is hungry. His entire being pines for something, like it always does after a job, there is something he needs, wants so badly, a haunting addiction, and he rakes his fingernails across his thighs in frustration.
Could he maybe—no, he couldn't. Hopeless, don't even think about it. His stomach growls, and he growls back, eyes squeezed shut as he is cornered by a terrible, creeping desperation that makes him want to claw at his chest. What the fuck, what the fuck, god. What can he do. It didn't use to be like this. He used to be fine, content even. He rocks with the movements of the train, breaths coming short, shorter.
Needs to sleep, needs to eat, needs more than that, needs, needs, needs.
Needs to forget, but no. No, he refuses, even if it means this. What can you tell me about longing.
At the next stop, someone gets on, footsteps registering vaguely in his consciousness. He doesn't look up, pulls his hood over his head and focuses instead on the hammering in his ribcage, the lightheadedness, the inexplicable, frantic want.
Focus, focus.
It comes to him again, like it always does in these hours, this name he rarely ever dares to utter, this name that makes up half of a bloodshot memory, and when he does dare, in those instances of absolute stillness, it is with a slow almost-reverence. Careful, make sure no one is listening. The first sibilant syllable ending with a slight tap of tongue against teeth, the second a drawing back of the lips in a tight, ironic smile—
His mouth moves silently. Goes like this: San-ji. San-ji. San-ji.
Cigarettes smoldering in the ashtray in his apartment, unsmoked, burning down to the filter like incense sticks. Eyes shut in the haze, in this way that is almost like drowning, smoke in his lungs instead of water. It's almost a ritual, on nights like these, ungodly hours of violent work and persistent insomnia. Blood on his clothes, and smoke, and smoke. Calming. This is a summoning, an evocation. Focus. This is all there is left. Focus. San—
"Hey asshole. You really look like shit."
He's still on the train; he looks up, eyelids heavy.
And, "Sanji," he says.
He's aware that this is impossible, supposed to be impossible. This city is a sprawling heartache of misguided romanticism, failed machinations of fate against a cold backdrop of glass and steel and asphalt concrete, and he's just a thug on a train with blood and probably bits of someone's brain splattered on his shirt. Who's he kidding? Definitely not himself. Nothing works this way, for anyone, and especially not for people like him—he is not a romantic. He is not stupid.
The windows darken again.
But look—look, Sanji is still there, San-ji who is saying, "it's been a while," and there is Sanji, who is sitting across from him, legs crossed in the same way they were when he sat atop that table at the Baratie and had said so calmly, I'll kill you too.
There. There.
Sanji's face is next to his reflection in the window glass, and it creates the illusion that they are sitting side by side, but that's a lie. Their shoulders have never touched like that. He blinks slowly, and Sanji is looking at him, and he finally lets out an exhalation of disbelief.
"Long while," he agrees, weakly, belatedly. Long, long while since that first and only day they'd met, and they had all limped on since then, except there is an overflowing ashtray in his apartment and he is still lighting cigarette after cigarette late at night.
"Krieg?"
"Yeah."
Now comes the downward turn of Sanji's mouth that he remembers so vividly, has so effectively branded on his memory and conscience. Vicious corners of a scowl. He evokes this along with Sanji's name before he ever evokes Sanji's smile—no, he cannot even remember Sanji's smile, if Sanji ever did smile at him.
"Dumbass," Sanji sighs, no real sting in his voice. "You're better than that."
Oh no, he wants to laugh. He isn't better than that, he isn't better than anything, but thank you, for you to say it, that means something, you've always been so kind. And there are things he wants to say, white-hot words bubbling in the acid of his stomach, visceral sentences nesting in the dip of his tongue. He wants to tell Sanji everything, how hungry he is, for food and for more than that, how he's always hungry since meeting Sanji, how there is a craving in his very bones, an obsession he does not understand, but it is there right now: low, low burn.
Sanji, I am being destroyed. I am burning. Sanji, I—
Instead, he asks, "you have a cigarette?"
Sanji gives him a look, but takes a pack from his breast pocket and taps one out against his palm, extends his arm.
He leans forward to take it, their arms a bridge for but a second before they pull back. He rolls the stick between his fingers, stares at his shoes and Sanji's shoes on the grimy floor of the train, the space between them suddenly traversable in a way he never believed, if he just stretches out a leg. "Do you know," he says, in a burst of desperate audacity over the screech of tracks, "I'm always craving one of these, after a job. Just the smell of it. I don't even smoke."
Sanji has put a cigarette between his lips, and he is looking at him again, expression carefully blank.
Do you know, he wants to say, how much, how bad. Can you understand. The smoke, your ghost.
No. No.
Two more stops before Sanji speaks again, and this time, his voice is different. "Hey, you know what's good for getting bloodstains out?"
He glances up from their shoes, the space he cannot bring himself to cross. "What?"
"Lemon juice." This time, Sanji's mouth is turned up in a smile, something he never thought he'd see again, not even in his fever-bright-dreams, but there it is.
He grins then, can't help it, and this feels strangely familiar. "Going to be squeezing a fuckton of lemons then."
Sanji laughs, which is entirely new to him, and he is still trying to catalog it when Sanji unfolds himself, crosses the aisle in a single stride, takes his hand and presses the pack of cigarettes into his palm. "Yours," says Sanji, whose hands are pale with long fingers that wrap easily around his wrist; Sanji does not mind the blood.
He swallows hard, stares hard. "Thanks," he croaks.
The train is already slowing down for Sanji's stop.
Don't ask where he is going, he tells himself, crushing the pack in his hand. No. Home, he can't help but answer his own murdered question, home and bed and sheets that smell like smoke and let me tell you, Sanji, let me tell you about—
"Take care, Gin."
"See you around, Sanji."
He pockets the cigarettes. Dull rattle of the door.
Yes, let him tell you about longing.