Anime: Blood+
Spoilers: Not particularly. My summary has more of them than the actual fic does. It takes place in episode 16...kinda.
Summary: Let's all pretend that stupid Kai didn't complain about the seating arrangements... Saya has trouble sleeping on the way to Russia.
Haji looked away from the passing scenery outside his window to cast a glance at the woman sleeping across the car from him.
At least, she was trying to sleep. He could tell that she had had just woken herself up again, tossing and turning on the narrow sleeping bench. At least she hadn't actually rolled off onto the floor this time.
He waited patiently. "Haji?" The whisper was soft, its speaker seemingly afraid of breaking the rhythm of the silence pressing in around them. "Are you awake?"
She didn't need to ask, they both knew that. But he replied anyway, with a simple nod. He knew she was watching.
She turned on her side to face him, half-covering her face with her blanket. "I can't sleep on this bench. And everything seems so loud... I can't imagine that I've ever been on a train like this before.
"Ah! Not that I was trying to get you to tell me or anything! I was just saying..." Saya looked down at the floor. The relative silence of the cabin started to become oppressive, even to him.
"Do you want me to play something for you?" he asked softly, beginning to reach for his cello case.
"Mm?" Saya looked up, surprised at his offer. "You'd better not. It would probably wake up the others," she said with a soft sigh.
Haji straightened in his seat again, and resumed alternately watching Saya and staring out the window.
After a few minutes had passed, Saya sat up in her seat. Wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, she leaned her head against the wall and joined Haji in watching the scenery as it rushed by.
He didn't notice when it was, precisely, that she shifted her focus from studying the passing snow to studying him. When he returned her gaze calmly, she didn't look away as he thought she might.
"Haji?" She paused for a moment. "Can I sit with you?"
He raised an eyebrow slightly in surprise.
Saya shifted her gaze out the window once more. "All I can see here is where we're going. I—I want to see where we're coming from."
Haji wordlessly shifted his cello case from its place on top of the seat to the floor near the door.
Nervously, Saya moved across the compartment to sit rather stiffly next to him. When he glanced at her again, she was looking anywhere but outside. And anywhere but at him.
The minutes ticked by, Haji once again dividing his attention between Saya and the window. She inched closer to him so she could see outside, and relaxed, absorbing herself in the hypnotizing vision of the passing snow and trees and the occasional house or farm.
She didn't notice Haji begin to watch her more than the passing sights. By then, the quiet beauty of their journey had begun to sink into her mind, and she slowly and unconsciously allowed herself to drift off to sleep.
As she slumped forward in the seat, Haji gently pulled the blanket more securely around her shoulders. He hesitated for several long moments, but the swaying and jolting of the train eventually decided him, and he pulled Saya to the side, letting her come to rest with her head on his leg.
For perhaps more than an hour, Haji did nothing more than gaze at the sleeping woman. Several emotions seemed almost to cross his face, but in the end, only expressed themselves in his eyes. Eventually, he turned back toward the window, allowing the hypnotic passage of scenery to lull him into something almost resembling sleep.
It was completely unconscious when the fingers of his good hand came to rest on Saya's head, and started weaving themselves gently through her short hair.
Morning came, and he knew when the others in their party started to stir and move around in their cabins nearby. They were awake earlier than they had been when they had traveled by ship. Apparently train travel didn't agree with them any better than it had with Saya.
Once again, he observed the sleeping woman, and was surprised at how his hand had worked itself onto her head, but he made no effort to move, not wanting to disturb her sleep.
Over an hour later, he heard shouting from David's cabin, and then loud footsteps storming down the short hallway to their own small room. Predictably, the door slid open with a bang, and Kai burst into the room.
Had anyone been paying attention, they would have been startled to see Haji's lips twitch into something resembling a ghost of a smile as Kai's shins slammed into the cello case blocking the doorway and the boy fell headfirst into their room with a yell.
But Kai was busy picking himself up off the floor, muttering dire threats against the survival of both Haji and his cello case. Saya had been awakened by Kai's entrance and was blinking sleepily, running a hand over her face and rubbing her eyes to help her figure out what had woken her up. When she saw Kai on the floor, she giggled.
And then she ran her hand through her hair and went extremely still. As her hand met his, Haji closed his eyes briefly and reprimanded himself for such a breach of etiquette, then slowly disentangled his fingers and removed his hand from her head entirely.
He went back to impassively staring out the window, but he knew that Saya was sitting up slowly in the seat and studying him, completely blocking out the rantings of her brother as background noise.
She was just opening her mouth to speak to him, just reaching out her hand slightly toward him, when Kai finished manhandling the cello case onto the empty seat. Saya was distracted by the sudden crashing, and looked up. Kai scowled at Haji, and Haji was sure that once Kai worked past the pain in his foot to realize where Saya had been sleeping, he would get an earful from the boy.
But at the moment, Kai was content to grab Saya by the wrist and help her up, then tug her out of the car toward breakfast. Saya paused slightly on her way out the door and stared at Haji for another moment before she allowed herself to be persuaded into the dining car.
Haji closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and released it. Then he stood up and walked out of the car to join the others, stopping briefly to check on the condition of his cello case.
A/N: Arg. This had a...slightly different tone in my mind when I was writing it. So, if anyone who might actually read this sees Haji and Saya doing anything besides sleeping, you write about it...let me know...please? They just didn't want to behave that way here. -.-,
I might have overdrawn Kai a little bit, and I think that the prose seems a bit awkward at times, but that's generally intention, and meant to reflect the overall mood. The POV's a bit funny too, but relatively easy to work with...and these are things that probably wouldn't bother anyone but an English major, lol.