disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: to Emily, because she loves them best and tbh there is just not even close to enough Mako/Neph in this world
notes: I'm so sorry this took so long? I was blocked forever, bc I couldn't figure out why Mako was so sad BUT THEN EMILY SAID SOME THINGS AND I REALIZED WHY I WAS BLOCKED
notes2: tbh no one knows Kino Makoto the way Emily knows Kino Makoto so ye
title: breathing electricity
summary: She was the most ruthless kindness. — Makoto/Nephrite.
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Lita was smoking, again.
It was her worst habit—Rei's worst habit, then Mina's, then her own—and the dirty filter hung between her fingers, glowing cranberry over the balcony, was a spark of light in the night. She didn't even like it, much. Smoking, that is. It was dry and hacking and awful, addictive along the lining of her teeth.
But it was something to do, and the nights Lita didn't sleep were very, very long.
"All alone?"
"Hey, Nate," Lita sighed out smoke.
"I think your doorman hates me," he said conversationally. "Actually, I know he does. He gave me the stink-eye on my way in."
"I'm pretty sure Mina pays him to do that," Lita said. "She pays him for Darien for sure, at least. Your glares are probably just a freebie he throws in for the hell of it. He has an attitude."
"Doormen shouldn't get to have an attitude."
"Hey," Lita said sharply, sitting up and shooting him a narrow-eyed look. "He's a person, too, with opinions and—and a family. He definitely gets to have an attitude. Don't go all New York rich boy on me, Nate, you know I can't stand it."
"I kid, I kid," he said, hands coming up in surrender.
"Zeke's rubbing off on you," she said, and flicked the stub of her cigarette away. It sailed through the darkness, flared so bright, and then went out as it hit the gutters below.
"God, I really hope not," Nate said, face pale. "Zeke and rubbing are two things I never wanted to think of at the same time."
"Oh, gross. Did you have to go there?"
"You went there first!"
She leaned against him, bumping easily shoulder-to-shoulder, and then, rather suddenly, wrinkled up her nose. "Gross, you smell like old sweat."
"Yeah, well, you smell like smoke," he said, but he buried his face in her hair regardless. She didn't tell him to get off, or to go away, or anything else that she normally would have done. Nate was large and gentle, an academic that Lita knew only because they were both frighteningly good at running from things: the world, their friends, each other. She knew him because Amy knew him, because she'd stumbled over him in Central Park's Strawberry Fields one day when no one else was around.
"It was such a long day," she murmured, as she slumped and curved her body into his. "Remind me to never let Serena and Darien get a divorce. I don't think I'll survive another wedding."
"That bad?" he asked, slipped an arm around her shoulders and drew her closer.
"Worse," she said wearily. "Rei's being a nightmare about it."
"Aww, c'mere, Leets. S'not so bad."
"You don't even know, Nate," she shook her head. "It's like—it's like—god, I don't even know. It's like she's determined to ruin the whole, and I don't know why."
She trailed off, her words swallowed up by the gathering darkness. And then:
"No," she started again, "no, that's a lie. I do know why. I just don't like it."
"Why?" Nate asked, very softly.
"Because she loves Serena," Lita said, smiling quietly. "More than anything, she loves Serena."
"What."
"I mean, we all do, you know?" Lita continued, casually oblivious. "We all—Serena's, she's just—she's special. Really special, and really easy to love. And we do, we all do. Not loving Serena would be the same as being dead, I guess. But Rei—"
"Rei is different?"
"Rei is different."
"Jacob loves her."
"So does Serena," Lita shrugged one shoulder. "Just not as much as she loves, y'know, Darien. Or maybe—different kinds of love? Something, I don't know."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," Lita sighed. "I just—I know Rei wants Serena to be happy. I do, too. But not—not like this. Not here. It's not right. Serena's not, I don't know, she's not—"
"You sound sad," Nate said, very quietly. She shifted a little, the crackle of her bones a song he still couldn't quite put the notes to. He watched her watch the world, but that was their relationship in a nutshell, he reflected. She was beautiful and she didn't know it, all long legs and fawn-skin and laughing emerald eyes. Laughing, at least, when she wasn't like this.
But like this she didn't really belong to anyone, not even herself.
"Sad isn't the right word," Lita murmured at last, gaze trained on the horizon, on the sea of glittering lights that unfurled before them. "I'm not sad about it. Melancholy, maybe?"
"That's a big word," he grinned out of the corner of his mouth. "Have you been talking to Amy?"
"Shut up, Nate, Amy's great and you know it," she shoved at his shoulder, a hint of a smile curving at her lips.
"Whoa, look, there you are! I was starting to wonder where you'd gone," he laughed, but quietly, and slipped an arm around her shoulders. When she turned her face into the crook of his neck, hiccupping hot wet tears into his shirt, he didn't draw away.
Nate let her shake herself to pieces, and when she spoke, her voice was a tremble.
"It's just—oh god, oh god, Nate, I'm so dumb, it's just that—"
"Hey, no, you're not dumb, Leets, stop that—"
"I am, though, because—because—now, now Darien's going to be the one taking care of her at three in morning when she's had a nightmare, and it won't be me, and I'm going to lose her, and she's my family, they all are, oh my god, what am I going to do?"
The words burst out of her, a torrent of emotion that she'd kept back for days, weeks, months since Serena had met Darien and her world had spiralled into incomprehensible chaos. Shoulders shaking, Lita reached up to cover her face with her hands.
"What am I gonna do, Nate?" she asked, muffled. "What do I do?"
Ah, there it was. He pulled her a little bit closer, so that she curbed into the cradle of his chest. Her hands dropped.
"They're not going to leave you, Lita," he said, gently. "They love you."
She choked out a laugh, a jagged intake of breath. "God, you don't—you don't even know, do you? Serena's our—she's our center. We all revolve her, whether we want to or not. Without her, we'll—we'll—"
She stopped, to breathe hard through her nose, before she went on again.
"Without her, we won't be the same. Amy'll bury herself in work, and Rei—Rei will withdraw, and then only there'll only be Mina and me. We'll fall apart without her, Nate, you don't understand. We're a family, but without Serena…"
"Without Serena, you aren't?" he guessed.
"No," Lita shook her head violently, auburn curls caught between her lips. "No, we still are, but we're all lonely people. Rich lonely people, who don't know how to be alone. They say money can't buy happiness."
"I don't think that's right," he said, pulling her hair away from her face.
She was a shadowed thing in the night, the spray of freckles that he knew danced across her nose obscured by darkness and she rubbed her hands across her face. Her shoulders flopped up and down in the most downtrodden shrug he'd ever seen.
Everything tasted bitter and ashy, and she resolved not to smoke anymore.
"They're the only family I have, Nate," she said, at long last. "The girls—they are my family. After the crash, they stuck around when no one else did. I have things, yeah, I have lots of things. But things don't—"
"Things aren't a family," Nate supplied, and Lita nodded miserably into his shoulder.
"They're all I've got."
"You've got me," Nate said.
"You don't count, idiot," Lita said soft. "You're important, but you're not family."
"I could be."
"Nate? Right now is not the time to be shitting on me, I had a hard day and it's only going to get harder," Lita sai, drawing her shoulders up to her ears and curling into herself, until she was a tiny ball of sharp elbows and sharp knees and sharp, shining tear tracks down her cheeks.
"I'm serious. Let's run away together."
"Mina would kill me," Lita said, flatly, rubbing away the last of the tear-tracks. "And Rei, too. And Amy would do that pissy-faced thing she does when she's disappointed, and Serena would cry. Have you ever made Serena cry? It's like making a kitten cry, it's pretty much illegal."
He actually giggled, at that.
Lita had to try very hard not to giggle, herself.
It was a failing venture, and soon they were laughing outright, Lita having lost any sense of control after the emotions of the day and Nate unable to help himself because he was an idiot whether he wanted to acknowledge it or not. They laughed until the sound of it bounced down to the ground off the buildings, and until it had built into something so large that there was nothing for it but to let it have its way.
Lita laughed until the muscles in her stomach hurt, and then she laughed some more.
"Feel better?" Nate asked, when they'd quieted. The echoes of their laughter lingered, still.
"No," she smiled, "but thanks for trying."
"I'm hurt, Leets, really hurt," he said. "Don't you love me anymore?"
"Oh, shush, you big baby, like you weren't trying to get that reaction out of me all night," Lita rolled her eyes.
His grin was a wide white flash in the dark. "Always gotta make you smile."
"You're gonna have to try a lot harder pretty soon, sorry, Nate."
That made him stop, for a while.
They stood together in silence, Lita tapping out a discordant tuneless rhythm on the balcony railing, the metal ping-ping-pinging beneath her nails. It was a nervous thing, and she'd have kept doing it the rest of the night if he hadn't spoken.
"I was serious, before."
"Hm?" she looked up at him.
"About running away. I meant that, Lita, you have to know I did."
"I know you did," she said. She cracked a little smile, the kind that people only wear when their whole world is about to fall apart. "But we can't."
"Why not?"
"You know why, Nate."
"Why not?"
And she didn't say Serena's getting married and she didn't say they need me and she didn't say I need them, although all of these things were true. She didn't say that now wasn't the right time; she didn't say that if there ever was going to be a right time, they'd be lucky.
She didn't say that lonely people don't know how to love unless they're taught, and she never had been.
She didn't say anything, in fact.
Instead, she reached up to curl her palms around his face. She looked up at him, he with his straight nose and his dark curls and his heartbreak eyes, and she stood up on her toes to kiss him.
Lita kissed the life out of him. She kissed him like fallen rose petals, like vanilla cigar smoke hazing out the window in Rei's apartment, like a brewing storm. She kissed him like goodbye and hello and six bottles of brandy down the drain. She kissed him like icing and the wind through leaves and like breathing electricity deep in his lungs.
She kissed him like she was about to go to war.
"I love you," he said, glaze-eyed when she pulled away.
"I know," she said, and she was smiling, deep smudges beneath her eyes soft peeping violets under the meadow-green of her eyes. "It's the same for me."
She was the most ruthless kindness.
Nate touched her face, fingers pressing into the high curve of her cheekbone, and that was how they stood, close but never quite close enough. They stayed like that for a long time, hand in hand as the first creeping light of dawn began to stretch across the skyline.
Lita pulled away to look out at her city.
"After the wedding," she said.
"What?"
"After the wedding, we'll go somewhere. We'll—"
"Run away?"
"Yeah," she said. "We'll run away."
Nate brushed Lita's curls away from her face, and the motion was as practised and habitual as anything in the entire world. The breeze took them, then, and carried away their worries like lullabies.
Above them was the night sky, fading red.
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fin.
