It takes days for Spirit to come back up to consciousness, and Kami spends all of them worrying or uncomfortably dozing in a mostly comfortable armchair next to his bed in the infirmary. She knows it is ridiculous to feel guilty about leaving him, that she will sleep better in her own bed and that being at his side every moment of the day does him no real good, but she is willing to sacrifice hours of comfort for the payoff of being there when he wakes.

She gets a reward at last, although it is less dramatic than she imagined it would be. Spirit shifts on the cot, groans at the back of his throat, and then carefully eases his eyes open.

Kami had planned to give him a minute, to let him orient himself and adjust to his surroundings, but her worry and her relief seize hold of her body before she can stop them and she leans forward towards him like a flower towards the sun, reaching out to touch his shoulder to verify that he exists, coming in close to hear him so she can prove to herself that he is real and awake and okay.

Spirit jumps at her touch, pulling back before he sees it's her. Kami jerks her hand back, irrationally hurt by his reaction, but then Spirit's eyes focus on her face. His face relaxes into a smile, his body goes limp against the mattress again, and he drags a hand up to reach out for her again.

"Hi." His voice is hoarse but glorious. In the days of silence Kami has forgotten what he sounds like, and the timbre of sound is familiar and impossibly foreign simultaneously, like she's hearing him speak for the first time in her life. Emotion that she thought she had control of climbs her throat and locks down her voice but she smiles around it anyway, and that is enough for a moment.

When she manages to swallow back the threat of tears she has no words adequate for her relief, so she sticks with easy routine. "Hi."

Spirit's smile is still lingering at his mouth but there is something at the back of his eyes that Kami has never seen there before. "How long was I out?"

"A couple of days." Kami forces herself into calmness. All she wants to do is fling herself on top of the weapon and let herself dissolve into tears but that is not going to be helpful, and whether it's his eyes or his surroundings Spirit looks oddly fragile. She hates it. It makes him look breakable and mortal, and while these are both utterly true neither is a truth that Kami enjoys reflecting upon, especially isolated in the silence of her own head as she has been. So instead of pressing his limits she wills her smile to reach her eyes and rejoices that he is conscious and tries to fill the air between them with words.

"You were out cold when they brought you in. We've been mostly worried about your state when you came to, but you're off to a good start." She squints at him. "At least I think so. Either that or you're doing a really impressive job of faking." That wins a shaky laugh out of the weapon, as it was intended to, and Kami's smile becomes genuine in response.

"Seriously though." She trails her hand down his arm to wrap her fingers gently around his. "I'm glad you're awake. I've been really worried."

Spirit coughs and his face twists into unhappiness. "I'm so-"

"If you say you're sorry I will hit you," she cuts him off. "I don't care how worried I've been you are not about to apologize for being unconscious."

Spirit has stopped with the word half out of his mouth. He pauses for a long second and then ostentatiously closes his mouth. Kami feels a smile trying to creep back over her face in spite of her best efforts at mock severity.

"That's better."

Spirit's eyes on her face go out of focus, like he's looking at a point just past her head, and the curve of his lips collapses into a line of concern. Then he blinks and is looking at her again, and Kami is certain she knows what he is going to say before he says it, so she bites her lips shut to keep from cutting him off as she wants to.

"How's Stein?"

Kami knows that it is perfectly reasonable for Spirit to think of his meister - ex-meister, she corrects with a surge of inward satisfaction. They have been partners for years, and from what she can tell much of Spirit's energy has gone towards looking after the younger boy. It's natural and understandable and in fact rather endearing that the weapon's first proper concern should be for the other half of the fight, but the part of her that has spent days staring at Spirit's slow-healing bruises and recalling the expression on Stein's face just before Spirit was knocked backwards seethes at the caring implicit in the question. She has to look down in an attempt to hide her expression while she gets her face under control, and when she looks up the concern on Spirit's face almost takes her back down again.

"He'll be fine." She has no idea if this is true; there has been a buzz of concern in the academy for days, but she has been too focused on Spirit to listen to much of it, and the anger in her on Spirit's behalf justifies her answer before she has even fully committed to the words. "You don't need to worry about it."

Spirit blinks up at her and that shadow in his eyes is rising to the surface now, and then he says, "What happened?"

Kami stares at him and she has no idea what is in her eyes. She hopes it is less than what is in her head, because her mind is fast-fowarding through her memory and offering random snapshots: the awful expanse of sutured wounds across Spirit's body, the horrified expression on Stein's face as Spirit stormed up to him, the two of them close enough to kiss and the fury crackling between them, and worst of all the moment when she finally forced herself into Soul Perception a moment too late to do anything to prevent the impending explosion. She had a split-second of clarity looking at them, like she could see the whole path of the next several actions before they occurred. When she saw Spirit's golden wavelength expanding with self-righteous fury, she had been impressed for a moment before she realized that Stein's was dwarfing the weapon's, that the cold white glow was suffusing everything around her, and when she saw it harden into resolve, saw Stein shove hard against the weapon, she had started running but there had been no time to reach Spirit before the attack took him full in the chest. Kami has no idea what happened to Stein after that. She bolted to Spirit's fallen form, started breathing again when she saw that he was, and then realized that she was going to have to leave him in order to get help. By the time she had forced herself to go and returned with support, the meister was gone; there was just the devastation he had left to attest to his presence at all.

Kami doesn't look back up at Spirit for a long time, but her tears drip against their interlocked fingers and he doesn't ask again.