Lovebirds
by Raichutec
Shunsui recalled the first time he ever saw Jyuushiro start coughing. It had been during a particularly grueling semester at the academy. Everyone was stressed by the sheer load of classes with difficult exams coming up. Jyuushiro being the stalwart student that he was had pulled an all nighter trying to prepare himself. Shunsui never understood why his friend pushed himself so hard. He always made good grades and all the teachers loved him. Things came to him so easily, why all the fuss?
He knocked on Jyuushiro's door to rouse him and the face that greeted him seemed so haggard he wondered if he'd woken the wrong student. "Saaa, Jyuushiro-kun, is that really you?"
He didn't even let his friend reply, sweeping into the room with his hands on Jyuushiro's shoulders, directing him right to his bunk. "You didn't sleep last night, I can tell these things. Your exam isn't until this afternoon. We'll nap till then."
"No," Jyuushiro tried to protest, though Shunsui was making it very difficult to resist, "I haven't even finished up with chapter ele--" He paused in mid-sentence, a hand darting over his mouth abruptly. And then he bent over, coughing so violently the force if it made Shunsui's lungs hurt out of sympathy.
Since then, he'd come to accept it as part of who Jyuushiro was. He'd fuss, and then he'd start coughing. People who had never seen it before, or simply weren't accustomed to it, always fretted over him in the most embarassing ways. But Shunsui knew what to do, setting Jyuushiro into the nearest bed, even if it was his own. Warm blankets and tea and a call to the 4th Division when the cough refused to abate.
"I've been dying for centuries," Jyuushiro would sometimes joke, dark humor always hit him when he felt miserable.
"Saaa, don't be silly, you," Shunsui always replied, "You can't die and leave me all by myself. Don't you know what happens to a lovebird when his mate passes away?"
He knew the inevitability of it all the same. And in the cage of his room, he kept a quiet vigil over a sickly Jyuushiro and tried to resist the urge to touch his face for fear of waking him. To memorize the contours of his cheek, his jaw, his forehead with meandering, curious fingers.
Eventually his resolve always fizzled out, but Jyuushiro never woke, either.