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Story: [Survivors of War]
Summary: He finds her when she's dying.
Crossover: (Harry Potter) / (Sekirei)
Genre: Spiritual, Drama? Romance?
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Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
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"Are you alright?"
Karasuba blinked at the sound of a voice.
Shifting slightly to get a better view of the speaker, she couldn't quite contain a wince.
Musubi-chan really had grown strong.
The sky was gray, overcast with heavy rain clouds, all just waiting for some kind of signal before they tried to wash away everything underneath them. The speaker was a man with black hair, and with a battered pair of glasses hiding some unusually green eyes.
He didn't seem overly concerned about what she assumed must be quiet a gruesome sight. After all, she was pretty sure that she'd had her arm ripped off at some point during the fight. And she was probably bleeding out. Not to mention whatever scratches and bruises she must've accumulated for her entire body to have moved so far beyond pain that she'd retreated into something more akin to numbness.
She was going to die here. Underneath a rainy sky, her wounds too grievous to survive.
It was a fitting end. If perhaps not quite as-... well, she'd been hoping her death would be quick and violent, really. Not this slow and agonizing thing. But she'd gotten her fight in the end, and even if it could've ended more pleasantly, she was more than content with it.
Breathing out a shaky breath past her broken ribs, Karasuba turned her eyes back towards the sky.
The man would go away soon enough, either to call an ambulance that would never make it there on time, or because he didn't want to end up implemented by others in whatever violence that had happened to her. But she wanted to see the moment when the rain started to fall.
There was a weird sound of rustling fabric across grass, and when she glanced back at the man, he was sitting next to her, leaning back on his hands and staring up at the sky along with her.
"It's a beautiful day." The man commented with a kind of absent tranquility.
Karasuba wondered since when overcast rainy skies were classified as 'beautiful', but didn't respond. She was dying, and she doubted she'd be able to form words even if she tried. No, better to simply remain content where she was.
Then again, perhaps the man was a bit wrong in the head, because she was fairly sure she was bleeding all over the ground surrounding her, and generally people didn't enjoy sitting down in pools of blood.
"So, why do you want to die so badly?" He asked, still staring up into the sky.
Karasuba wondered if this was somehow normal to him. If he regularly walked around greeting people who were bleeding out on the ground, talking about the weather and whatnot.
Did it really matter though? She was going to die, regardless of her desires. And this was as good a way to die as any. Certainly better than to die old and decrepit in a bed surrounded by loved ones, or whatever it was that people were into these days.
She wanted to die in battle, die when she would always be remembered for what she'd done, die as a story told to scare little children into obedience, die like she had lived. Violence for violence, blood for blood.
The man made a thoughtful sound. "You notice things when you're about to die." He stared up at the sky, a wry, tired smile on his face. "It really is a beautiful day."
Karasuba wondered if perhaps he was going to be dying soon as well, if perhaps that was why he was so careless about approaching her dying form.
But yes, it was a beautiful day. In its own way.
The rain clouds churned overhead, twisting slowly, almost powerfully despite their almost ethereal quality. The threat of rain lingering in the air like a whispered promise. And finally there was the warm breeze that glanced across her all-too-cold skin.
Blood-loss could probably make a person freeze to death, even if they somehow managed to survive without their blood. All that warm liquid, spilling out and never returning.
Yes, it was a beautiful day.
The man made a thoughtful noise, gaze briefly flickering to her before returning towards the sky. "Are you scared?"
Karasuba felt her face twist into a scowl, despite the pain of making any expression at all.
She had decided that she was going to die like this, and she was going to die like this. What could there possibly be to be afraid of?
"Of dying? Of going away to somewhere else?" The man sounded gentle, heavy with sympathy, and older than he looked by far.
And she was.
She was scared. She'd always been Number 04, Karasuba, the Black Sekirei. And now she wouldn't be. And if she wasn't that, then what would she be? Would she become part of the grass stretching out around her? What could that possibly mean for her?
What did 'dying' really mean?
"Today is a beautiful day." The man commented. "Tomorrow will be just as beautiful, in its own way." He turned towards her, gaze so sharp and warm and unstoppably impossible to ignore. "Do you want to see it?"
Yes.
She was dying, and she wanted to die like this, had always wanted to die like this. But she wanted to see it, wanted to see tomorrow, wanted to see if it would rain for days and days in the endless flood that the rain clouds now seemed to promise.
She wanted to live.
A small, understanding smile. "Don't worry, I'll wake you up in the morning."
The last thing Karasuba saw before her eyes slipped shut, was the man pulling out a stick from his sleeve, and a warm light washing over her, making the pain that had stretched itself into her very bones suddenly disperse.
XXX
When she opened her eyes again, it was to the view of a ceiling.
She was in a bed, her body wasn't hurting, and there was a smell of something cooking.
Karasuba blinked.
This was death? How strange. She'd been expecting something... different. She wasn't quite sure what she'd been expecting, but the normalcy of this had definitely not been it.
Sitting up, she looked around the room. Wooden walls with a kind of general homeyness to it, even if it seemed too sparse to actually be lived in. Possibly a guest room to a traditional Japanese home, and most definitely not a clinic of any kind.
So she was dead. And her afterlife consisted of... this.
Was this some kind of dig at her for dismissing this type of ordinary life out of hand? A punishment of sorts for all the horrible things that she'd done over the years? Forcing her to experience something that she'd never wanted, until her mind broke and she begged and begged for forgiveness?
Karasuba made a thoughtful face, and then decided that she could admit to liking whoever was in charge of this, if that had been their goal. The amount of sadism necessary to even begin thinking of this must've required a certain panache for torture that was only rarely seen in civilized society.
It was never any fun to deal with amateurs. She always ended up feeling bad for their absolute uselessness to the point where she'd actually end up killing them quickly just to hurriedly make sure that they never tried to do anything that painfully pathetic ever again.
Some of the things they had tried on her over the years still made her wince, even now. It had just been so-... so hopelessly retarded.
Pushing the thoughts from her mind, Karasuba climbed to her feet, absently noting that her torn and bloody clothes had been placed on a nearby chair. They seemed to have been cleaned and repaired though. Which was weird, because she was fairly sure they'd been far beyond either of those things.
More interesting was the way both of her arms shifted easily as if one of them hadn't at all been torn off by the enraged Sekirei. Though, considering how she was dead, perhaps arriving in the afterlife meant that one arrived whole if perhaps still with all of the scars. Karasuba frowned at some of the lines crisscrossing her skin, she had no idea how that would work, or why.
Still, she turned her attention back to her surroundings, and blinked. Even her sword was there, leaning against the wall. Whole. Not shattered, not bent, not even scratched from where it'd lodged itself in Musubi-chan's arm that one time.
Curious, she went over to pick it up, and found that it at the very least still felt like her sword, even if it couldn't possibly be it. Or well, she was dead, and the sword could probably classify as 'dead' too with how broken it'd been by the end of it, so maybe they'd ended up in this place together.
Being dead was weird.
Glancing back at her clothes, Karasuba shrugged. She should probably put those on, unless she wanted this 'ordinary life'-hell to devolve into one of those disgusting love-comedies. After all, the smell of food indicated someone else doing the cooking, and she'd caught enough revolting glimpses of that setting to know that adding nudity to the mix would just make it even worse.
XXX
The man from before was there.
"Ah, you're awake." He threw a smile her way. "Sorry. I might've let you sleep in for a bit."
Karasuba stared at him, not quite sure if she was supposed to respond to that somehow.
He was wearing an apron, and looked awfully domestic for someone who'd been so completely at peace with striking up a conversation with someone bleeding to death. It reminded her a bit of Miya. A monster hiding amongst humans, trying to pretend at being 'normal'. Though she supposed that the man wasn't so much a 'monster' as he was simply 'strange'.
Also, she was a bit unsure about realizing that the man must've died too. Or perhaps he'd never been alive in the first place? Perhaps he was simply related to the 'process of dying' somehow, like a grim reaper or something, come to fetch her soul to the afterlife.
It made sense, even if it still didn't explain the oddly domestic scene that he was currently playing out.
He met her eyes, still looking old and sad and tired and kind and understanding, and it was more than a little disturbing. He couldn't be more than just barely past his teens, and yet he acted as if he was older and wiser than she was.
It would've probably just been annoying, but she was dead, and being dead was somewhat new for her, so perhaps she ought to refer to the man's apparent expertise in figuring out whatever the hell was going on at the moment.
"I'm dead?" She started, asking the question that would hopefully cause him to simply explain the details of it all and be done with it.
The man blinked stupidly at her for a long moment. Then he snorted a laugh, short and helplessly amused. "Not at all." He reassured her, smiling warmly. "Though it took a bit of work."
Karasuba frowned. He wasn't lying. He honestly believed that he'd somehow managed to patch her body back together into working condition. "That's impossible. My spine was crushed."
The man turned back to the stove, making a noise of agreement. "Yes, and it was very finicky making sure all of that stuff ended up where it should be."
Karasuba continued to stare at him. "That's impossible." She said again.
The man nodded absently in agreement. "Absolutely." He twisted his wrist and a stick appeared in his hand. "But I can cheat a bit." He threw a smile over his shoulder, allowed the stick to disappear back to wherever he'd pulled it from, and then returned all of his attention to cooking breakfast.
Karasuba continued to stare. "A stick?" She finally asked after a long moment.
"A wand." The man corrected her, smiling with a certain degree of smug cheerfulness. "A very, very good wand."
Karasuba made a face. "Magic doesn't exist."
The man nodded as if that didn't at all contradict his claim of her having survived her injuries without even the slightest of lingering aches. "Of course it doesn't."
Karasuba waited, expecting some kind of further explanation of why he would so readily agree to that, without even once hinting towards how he was currently losing the argument.
It took until the man placed a plate filled with what looked an awful lot like a classic English breakfast in front of her, for Karasuba to realize that he honestly wasn't going to elaborate.
"If not magic, how did you do it?" She glared at him, daring him to try and dodge out of answering her.
The man tilted his head, and then with a single tap of his wand, turned his coffee cup into a songbird. "Magic doesn't exist." He nodded to himself. "Magic definitely doesn't exist." He turned the songbird into a teacup. "And even if it did, there'd definitely not be any laws forcing me into telling you that." He turned the teacup back into his coffee cup. "Because magic isn't real."
Karasuba stared.
After a long moment, during which the man turned his attention back to his coffee, Karasuba opened her mouth again.
"That's new." She said, still feeling a bit dazed about the possible implications of that.
"It was to me too, once." There was a nostalgically bittersweet glimpse in his eye. "You get used to it after a while."
XXX
"Why are you here?" Karasuba finally asked, curious despite herself.
The man made a thoughtful noise. "I've heard teenage rebellion is good for you." He frowned. "Though I might not be one of those anymore. Huh." He sipped at his third cup of coffee. "Maybe I'm just having a mid-life crisis then?"
Considering that he barely looked past twenty, Karasuba wasn't entirely sure if anyone really ought to be calling it a 'mid-life' crisis. Unless the man expected to die before he turned forty.
"That doesn't actually answer anything." Karasuba pointed out.
The man turned his sharp green eyes towards her, but hummed absently. "I could've reached too high, done too much. And I was the only one who didn't trust myself not to try."
Karasuba wondered – not for the first time, and probably not for the last – if the man chose to speak about everything in cryptic statements and unspoken riddles, or if it was simply some kind of ridiculous habit of his.
"Why here?" She tried again.
"Forbidden zone." He shrugged. "Japan has been abandoned for decades."
Karasuba blinked at him, feeling a little bit stunned, because with over a hundred-million inhabitants, Japan sure as hell didn't seem abandoned.
"Not sure on the details." He said. "Something to do with an island appearing in the sea, maybe? Or was it just something about an island? Or was that unrelated?" He shook his head. "Big evacuation, lots of displaced folk, big mess. All I really know is that it's almost impossible to get into the country from our side of things, and doubly so to get back out. That was all that really mattered, in the end."
Decades ago, an island, and people with strange abilities packing their bags and leaving without ever looking back. That sounded an awful lot like it might have something to do with Minaka and his precious Sekirei Plan.
Too bad that the man honestly didn't seem to know anything more than that about it. She was feeling a bit curious now.
XXX
Four days later, Karasuba realized that during all of that time, she hadn't actually bothered with thinking about much of anything at all, really.
The man was good company for that kind of thing.
Staring quietly out over the sea, drinking far more coffee than was probably even remotely healthy for a human's biology, moving with steady steps, and with the weight of someone who'd seen far too much clinging to his tired shoulders.
It was strange. He reminded her more of an aging grandfather who'd mourned the deaths of his family and yet somehow continued to cling to life, than the barely-twenty-something that he probably was.
An old soul in a young body. Except, his face was too thin from lack of food to look youthful, and the dark bruises under his eyes certainly didn't make it any easier to see his age reflected as accurately as it ought to have been.
An old soul in a young body that had been through too much to avoid scarring.
Still, there was a certain tranquility in the empty house with its sliding paper doors. In the man's meticulously prepared meals, in his willingness to smile despite the fragile pieces of something broken that she could sometimes glimpse behind his tired eyes.
Four days, until she considered asking him for his name. Until she considered introducing herself.
A hermit, that's what he'd willingly become in his attempts to flee from something that would've turned him into someone he didn't want to be. An exile, hiding from people who would've hoisted him up and lauded his every gesture.
She could understand the desire to avoid such people, could accept the desire to not want to even bother with crushing such pathetic bugs underneath her heel. But that wasn't it. He had disappeared, fled, because he didn't think he could ever bring himself to crush them. Not until they'd already corrupted him, tainted him until he'd become something else. Something that he'd been fighting against for far too long to ever consider surrendering to.
She wasn't quite sure if she could understand that degree of squeamishness from a person, but when she told him that to his face, he'd simply laughed. A weak chuckle, startled and amused, and almost gravelly from lack of use.
It had been a nice sound.
XXX
'Harry' he'd told her when she'd asked. Nothing more, nothing less. A short and unassuming name that was the only real thing that he had left from his parents, but never the entire name that those other people had breathed in awe.
'Karasuba' she had given him in return, not quite willing to admit to a serial number that had always chafed, or a title that had never been one she'd claimed for herself.
He'd nodded, and sipped at his tenth cup of coffee.
And so the fifth day since the day she should've died, passed them by as well.
Without much notice, without much care.
Karasuba wondered if the sound of seagulls, shrieking endlessly at each other as they sailed along the winds of the sea, should really sound so peaceful to her ears.
XXX
The seventh day, she picked up her sword again, and decided to go for a walk.
Harry raised an eyebrow at it, but didn't much seem to care, too deep into his fourth cup of coffee to pay much attention to the world at large.
So she made sure that the fifth coffee cup was out of his reach.
Bloodshot eyes, dark bruises underneath his eyes still attesting to the nightmares that never let him sleep, and an addiction to coffee to rival the worst of the insomniacs she'd ever met. Perhaps a proper walk would let him exhaust himself enough that he could have a full night's sleep for once.
Her act of merciful kindness went fairly unappreciated however, as they began a walk that they in hindsight should've needed to make days ago simply to keep their groceries stocked.
It took some time to get used to magic. Or perhaps the worry should be that she hadn't even noticed that she'd already grown used to it? To the silence of a house without electronics, a house without a phone, or light-bulbs, or even a fridge? And that despite this lack somehow managed to have all of the regular comforts of modern life?
It was strange.
But the breeze from the sea was cool, and the sun underneath the blue sky was warm, and even Harry's grumpiest glare at having his coffee held hostage soon faded away into a fond smile.
It really was a beautiful day.
XXX
Karasuba had never really shopped for groceries before, had never much shopped for anything at all actually. Her needs had been provided for by MBI, and there was no need to lower herself to doing something so pointless.
It was a new experience. And Harry's indulgent amusement grated more than a bit, because even if she didn't know what they were supposed to be doing or how, she could easily pick this up without him grinning silently whenever she stumbled her way through.
Though, she was glad that she'd convinced him to follow. He might not need to shop for groceries like regular people thanks to some kind of magical thing, but he actually seemed to know how to do it for some bizarre reason.
So they shopped, and he caught when she stumbled trying to make sense of it all, even if she really could do without being such an obvious source of amusement for the man.
And if he leaned on her a bit, tiring too quickly from the walk for it to be healthy, she was simply satisfied that her attempt to exhaust him into sleep was going fine.
XXX
For the first time in eight days, Karasuba woke up without the smell of breakfast being made.
And despite the satisfaction of a job well done, there was a ping of worry, and the slightest feeling of disappointment to not find him already in the kitchen.
But even if she'd never really tried cooking on her own, it couldn't be that hard. And she already knew where everything was, so it shouldn't be an issue.
She determinedly held onto that belief until he stumbled drunkenly into the kitchen in a sleepy panic, only to pause with a weird expression on his face before suddenly starting to laugh.
And if she was perhaps oddly pleased to see it, even as she tried to empty her lungs of black smoke, then that was a secret she'd take with her to her grave.
Instead, she simply glared. Both at him, but also at the frustratingly obnoxious cooking-implements that wouldn't do what she told them to.
XXX
The eight day was spent in the kitchen, either cleaning up her messes, or with Harry carefully explaining the various intricacies of actually making food.
It was frustrating, and annoying, and needlessly complicated, and ridiculous, and a pointlessly useless thing to know, and Karasuba wondered why she wouldn't have changed it for the world.
Or rather, she might've wondered that, but she was concentrating on trying to learn, and the feel of his warm hands guiding her own was distracting enough as it was.
So, the eight day they spent in the kitchen, and Harry taught her to cook.
And if perhaps he didn't teach her nearly enough for her to do it on her own, at least he'd be there to continue the lessons any time she might decide to ask.
By the time the sun set over the horizon, Karasuba had mostly learned to ignore the way Harry's amused huffs of laughter tingled down her spine whenever he stood close enough. Even if her center of balance always seemed to shift into his weight whenever she didn't remember to avoid doing it.
It was a good day.
XXX
On the ninth day, she was sitting on the porch, staring out at the sea again when they received visitors for the first time.
Harry was on his sixth cup of coffee when Miya's rather distinct profile appeared along the road.
Karasuba considered fetching her sword, but then decided not to.
She wasn't going to fight the Number 01 in the courtyard. That'd just end up with half the house completely decimated, and she got the distinct impression that Harry wouldn't be above forcing her into manual labor in revenge for the inconvenience of having to rebuild it all from scratch.
So she remained where she was, and wondered absently if the big fluffy clouds in the sky would be turning to rain later in the day, or if they'd be drifting away in the wind before they got cold enough to let the rain fall.
XXX
"You're alive." A statement, tinged with a mixture of disappointment and disgust. A bit like Karasuba would imagine someone speaking to an unusually persistent cockroach.
Karasuba wondered briefly if she ought to try to pretend to be the 'bigger man', but then dismissed the thought. She was who she was, and she'd never been the kind of person who wouldn't gleefully fight back at first sign of opposition.
"Do you kiss your husband with that mouth?" She asked her instead.
Miya's knuckles turned white, the sheath on her sword creaking slightly under the weight of her restrained anger. "That is none of your concern." She said through gritted teeth.
Karasuba briefly considered mentioning how she'd have to dig up said husband before she'd be able to kiss much of anything, but then decided that there was a limit to fighting back. Especially when she wasn't sure if she could say it with a straight face.
Instead, she simply shrugged and leaned back against the house wall from her comfortable position on the porch.
Miya glared at her for a bit longer, but finally managed to continue doing whatever it was that she'd come there to do.
"How are you alive?"
Karasuba raised an eyebrow, not entirely sure why that was of any importance whatsoever. "Magic." She finally deadpanned, waving her hand all 'mysterious like'.
Miya twitched, her earlier barely restrained hatred slipping further towards annoyance. "Magic isn't real."
Harry grinned at them over his newly emptied coffee cup. "That's definitely correct, madam." He then climbed to his feet, clearly intent on getting started on his seventh coffee cup of the day.
Karasuba wondered if it was possible to overdose on coffee, and if she ought to be worried, but then discarded it. He hadn't managed to kill himself yet, and from what he'd explained previously, his entire biology was slightly different from that of normal humans, so there was probably not even any point in looking it up in the first place.
Miya startled a bit, apparently having been too focused on Karasuba to really have noticed Harry's presence, but she seemed perfectly willing to glare at him as well. Probably because of how rather obviously amused he was by their conversation.
"And who are you?" A demand more than a question, and Karasuba felt herself bristle for some reason.
Harry met her glare with a placid stare, and then he... 'shifted'. His back straightened, his eyes turned into hardened glass, and his wand-arm fell into a perfectly casual position that would allow for his wand to slip out from his sleeve in an instant.
One moment, he'd been Harry, the man who drank two dozen cups of coffee every day, who couldn't sleep properly, who smiled and laughed, and whose warm hands guided her own around the intricacies of the kitchen. The next, he was the man who could've had it all, who could've taken and taken until he'd become an unstoppable monster, because none would've dared to contradict him until it was already too late.
The difference was jarring, and he met Miya's commandeering presence as a king would greet a general.
"I'm Harry Potter." He told her simply, green eyes so impossibly sharp. "Now, what exactly is your purpose here, madam?"
Karasuba was staring, a little bit shocked at the unknown man who'd been her Harry just moments ago. Miya was staring too, but there was a confused wariness in that expression, as if she wasn't entirely sure why her instincts were screaming 'danger' in regards to an ordinary human who wasn't even armed.
"Her injuries were lethal, yet there was no body." Miya finally said. "Then there were rumors about someone fitting her description wandering around a nearby town."
"Investigating the source of the rumors." The man who probably wasn't quite 'Harry' nodded with absent acceptance. "And now? What will you do now, madam?"
Miya rather obviously floundered for words, in all likelihood because she hadn't been expecting to find Karasuba alive at all, and hadn't really entertained what she might do should that particular scenario come true.
As the awkward silence stretched between them, Karasuba decided that she was cruel enough to enjoy how it made Miya fidget.
XXX
Miya left almost as quickly as she'd appeared, unsettled and uncertain, and Karasuba allowed herself to relax into absent amusement in regards to the meeting.
The only reason Miya could've known about her being alive would've been for her to have been informed of it. And the only one who'd do that would've been Matsu. And, since Musubi had not been the one to come charging in to see her, the brain-type Sekirei had probably kept her survival a secret from anyone but Miya.
Karasuba wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but was guessing that it would mean a 'wait and see' approach to her continued presence. An approach that would mean that Karasuba would need to make the first move in their confrontation.
Except... there wasn't really any need for her to do that.
She'd lost. Completely and utterly, she'd been defeated.
'Love' had saved the day, and Musubi had walked away victorious from her battered and lethally wounded body. So there wasn't really any need to go looking for a rematch.
Karasuba hadn't changed, she was just as strong as she'd been when she'd fought Musubi, she was just as weak as she'd been when she'd fought Musubi. Nothing had changed, so there wasn't any point in starting a fight with the one who had defeated her.
She'd lost, and that was that.
She couldn't really say she was happy about it, but facts didn't exist to appease her. They were just facts.
Maybe some day, if she ever figured out a way to get even stronger than she already was, perhaps she'd search her out and they'd fight again. But she wouldn't even know where to begin looking for a 'way to get stronger', so there wasn't really any point in bothering about it.
Harry sipped at his eighth cup of coffee, the seagulls continued to screech their way across the sky, and Karasuba watched the clouds.
She was pretty sure it was going to rain.
XXX
The tenth day they ended up competing over skipping stones.
Both of them cheated. Harry more outrageously than her, but then his throws could never gather as much physical force as hers.
Still, making the skipping stones float in water, or directing their skips with his wand, was definitely blatantly cheating. No matter what he had to say about it.
Karasuba still managed to claim a win though, after her not-at-all-against-the-rules distraction during one of Harry's more spectacular attempts to outdo her.
XXX
On the eleventh day, they went shopping for groceries again.
This time, Karasuba at least knew what to expect, even if she couldn't fulfill their goals with the same casual manner that Harry could. He still got a few chuckles from her reactions to the people around them though.
Karasuba felt like the world was a very bizarre place, because apparently old ladies mobbing each other over a brief cut in prices was considered perfectly normal, but staring at those same old ladies in incredulous disbelief was somehow considered strange.
And even if it was a good excuse for her lapse in apparent 'normalcy', she really wished that Harry would stop chuckling explain to anyone who asked that her upbringing had been 'sheltered'.
She probably would've argued about it – because she'd grown up in war, not in the peacefully idyllic place that 'sheltered' usually referred to – if not for the knowledge that Harry was probably as used to the battlefield as herself, and that he was commenting on another kind of 'sheltered' no matter how it was actually interpreted by their surroundings.
After all, he was never the type of person to turn his back to a window, no matter how safe he presumed himself to be.
XXX
On the thirteenth day, they had another visitor.
A young man with red hair and a bittersweet expression on his face.
"Don't worry, I won't tell." The man waved off Harry's discomfort at his presence. "I don't agree, and 'Mione is bloody upset about it, but I won't tell."
Harry stared at him for a long moment, before his face broke into an oddly fragile smile. "How did you find me, Ron?"
Ron sat down on the edge of the porch. "I asked myself 'where is the most bloody stupid place to go to hide?' and here I am." He grinned, easy and free. As if talking let him slip into happier memories.
Harry snorted a laugh, very carefully avoiding spilling his fourth cup of coffee. "And how did you get in?"
"Same way I'll be getting back out." Ron waved a plane-ticket in the air. "Had to take a detour through Spain and a few other places, but there shouldn't be any problems."
Harry sipped at his coffee. "So... why?"
Ron's face turned somber. "Because you are our best friend, Harry. I can't let you just disappear off the face of the Earth without at least trying to make sure you're alright."
Harry made a thoughtful sound. "And? Am I 'alright'?" And there was an edge there, a hidden displeasure at not being trusted to take care of himself.
For the first time since his very careful appraisal of her in those first moments, Ron turned to face Karasuba. "Is he? 'Cause he always just says he's 'fine' when I ask."
Karasuba watched how Harry's face twisted in annoyance at again being considered so incapable of taking care of himself, and she shrugged. "I wouldn't know. I've never bothered to ask."
Ron's eyes narrowed at her, even as Harry's eyebrows moved towards his hairline.
"He's alive, and he's not dying any faster than I am." She continued, meeting the redhead's suspicious eyes with her own. She smiled, cruel and twisted and gleefully murderous. "That means he's better off than most people I've spent time with."
XXX
"I think he thought we were a couple." Harry mused as he watched Ron retreating along the path to the house.
Karasuba made an absentminded noise of agreement, having picked up on the insinuations as well.
Harry sipped at his sixth cup of coffee. "Do your species even have couples?"
Karasuba blinked. "Yeah. Sekirei have an Ashikabi they choose, who wings them." Her thoughts turned to Musubi-chan and that boy she'd attached herself to. "And they love each other lots. Or something."
Harry tilted his head, seemingly curious. "Not you?"
Karasuba leaned back on her hands as she stared out over the sea. "I have an Ashikabi. But the only one who ever cared about that guy was Benitsubasa."
"No 'happy ever after'?" Harry guessed, turning back to his coffee.
"I winged myself on him because I wanted to fight Musubi-chan at the end of it all." She explained.
Harry chuckled. "So, something like an arranged marriage? All practicality."
"Something like that." Karasuba agreed. "And you?"
Harry made a thoughtful sound. "Might've been, if I'd managed to trust myself. Children and white-picket-fence and all that." He made a gesture to his coffee and the dark bruises under his eyes. "But there's no use crying over spilled milk."
Karasuba tilted her head until she could look at him properly. "If you snap, I'll squish you like a bug."
Harry stared at her for a long moment, before letting a smile stretch across his face, honest and hopelessly fond. "I guess I'll have to be careful then."
Karasuba hummed in agreement, turning back to watch the sea and the white puffy clouds overhead. Harry sat down next to her on the porch, and sipped at his sixth cup of coffee.
And so the thirteenth day passed.
XXX
A/n: I seriously considered trying to turn the ending into blatant romance, but then I said 'fuck it' because whatever this is, it kind of really suited these two better.
This came about because a certain someone *glares at reviewer* gave me a setting that was just too fucking perfect not to use. And no, this isn't really part of the "Ashikabi Series" as I see it. It just belongs to the same fandoms. (Hence why I could get away with giving this fic a title without 'Ashikabi' in it. Hurray for the exploitation of loopholes!)