Thanks, as always, to Ellen Brand, Waywren Truesong, Joisbishmyoga, Cherry, and Cloudy for beta work and cheer-reading.
Recovery (is not a straight line) (Part 2)
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
~East Coker, V.26-28. T.S. Eliot.
"—how could you!?"
"—should have kept the mask myself regardless of skill—"
"—won't ever trust you again—"
"—never should have let you take up his mantle at your age—"
"—should turn you into Dad right now—"
"—ought to have arrested you and damn the consequences—"
"—Dad will take care of it, it's all you deserve—"
Handcuffs biting into skin, no keyhole, no escape.
Pain ripping through his shoulder, down the ribs, a stab through the heart and screaming through his skull—
"—you failed me, son."
Kaito thrashed under the blankets as he hit consciousness, needing to get out, get away; pain meant pursuer, meant pursuit and he couldn't be caught—not by Snake's bullets, not by Aoko's hate or Saguru's justice or Dad's disappointment—
As he shoved upright, trying to swallow the rising pressure in his lungs and behind his eyes, his hand gripped bare skin instead of mattress. A startled, virulent curse cut through the censure ringing in his ears and he froze, sucking in a breath that came back out as a sob while the limb vanished with a slew of quieter profanity and clattering noises.
He swallowed again, desperately fighting the tsunami of emotion that was compounding with the old injuries flaring remembered pain across his skin.
Everything was too much.
With the first sob having already broken free, he couldn't hold back the flood, and covering his face with his hands achieved nothing but a futile muffling against quickly-dampened palms. His eyes stung and his chest ached and Aoko had said—had said—
(She hadn't, but the memory of her scorn had felt so real, the strongest thread weaving in and out of the full litany of everyone Kaito had, or could have, disappointed. Could still disappoint, all the explanations in the world didn't guarantee Aoko wouldn't throw him out in justified betrayal…)
The rasp of his broken breathing echoed too loudly in his ears. A voice spoke, distorted into meaningless but enough warning that Kaito didn't flinch at the arm wrapping tightly around his shoulders, or resist being pulled against solid warmth. Saguru kept talking, the words too much effort to parse but the tone low and calm, everything it hadn't been in the dream.
Like Kaito wasn't a failure.
Useless.
Ignorable.
Kaito let himself huddle against Saguru's side and surrendered to the inevitability of crying himself empty.
When he was finally hollowed out like a paper mâché magician, the room had started to change texture with the first hint of dawn. Saguru had fallen silent somewhere in the interim, but he hadn't moved away, either. Kaito heaved a sigh and scrubbed at his face with a pajama sleeve, because he'd failed to foresee a midnight breakdown in tears and all his handkerchiefs were in his daytime clothes.
Clearly an oversight. He'd fix that later.
For now, still shaky from the unexpected catharsis, he dropped his head back against Saguru's shoulder. It was a good shoulder. Sturdy and uncomplaining even when Kaito probably deserved it.
So. Facts. Facts were better than feelings; there'd been a surfeit of feelings this morning already.
Saguru wasn't going to slap handcuffs on Kaito no matter what worst-case scenarios his pessimistic doombrain projected into his dreams, and Mom and Jii still trusted him to be Kid. To survive and find Dad's killers and not fail Kid's purpose or legacy. Aoko was the wild card, and thinking too hard about her possible rejections summoned a surge of emotion Kaito had no wherewithal to dwell on.
He refocused on Saguru, instead. The icy tendrils of panic had subsided and Kaito could think again, meaning he could remember that Saguru'd woken up swearing, which was a bad start to anyone's morning. "Y'okay?"
"Shouldn't I be asking you that?"
"I asked first."
"Fine," Saguru conceded in the tone that meant Kaito didn't have to look to know he was rolling his eyes. "It was a terrible wake-up method, but I could manage after you let go and I had my glasses again, at which point you were a welcome distraction."
Kaito huffed softly at the irony of fixing the problem he created in the first place. He did that a lot. "Still. Sorry for waking you, especially like that."
"It wasn't your fault. My pillow is conspiring with restless dreaming to steal my glasses, and you needed company."
"But if one of us is sleeping badly, neither of us is sleeping. Maybe I should ask Riku about sleeping on the couch instead."
"That would require his parents wondering why the bed isn't sufficient when it's big enough for two—and being separated by half the house after the next inevitable nightmare, rather than at hand. I don't believe either prospect is appealing, do you?"
Just thinking about it made Kaito shiver involuntarily. "...No."
"It might be easier in shifts, with extra catch up in the afternoon… I'm sleeping better in the afternoons, I've noticed."
Kaito hadn't noticed a particular difference for himself, but trading off had the bonus that they could wake each other out of any new nightmares before they got bad. "Let's try it. None of this is sustainable, though, and you need something that you can sleep in comfortably, from a long-term perspective. You can't guarantee you'll sleep in a room by yourself for the foreseeable future, you travel."
The flight from Tokyo to London was too long to imagine staying awake every single time, and that was only the most egregious example. The sunglasses had been an effective substitute for mental shielding on short notice, but of course it wouldn't be enough for everything. Saguru had addressed his daytime failsade concerns well enough already, but for nighttime…
Kaito sat up to get a better look at Saguru's head, glad for a new project to keep his brain busy with. Saguru released him without comment, and waited with an expectant eyebrow raised at Kaito's obvious scrutiny.
"Hmm. What do you think, cloth headband or an eyemask? I can do either, with flexible enough bronze chain…"
Now that he wasn't holding Kaito up, Saguru leaned back against the headboard with a thoughtful expression. "A headband might be useful for certain types of exercise, but an eyemask would be more sensible from a sleep perspective."
"I can make an eyemask by tonight with the right supplies. Shouldn't be hard." He'd patched plenty of rips in his favorite clothes from inadvisable parkour stunts before he'd started mending bullet-holes out of Kid's dress shirts. If he could get the materials here, he'd make a sleek-looking sweatband as a bonus, otherwise he'd do it when they were back home. Saguru would get a closet full of bronze accessories if he needed them, if Kaito had anything to say about it.
"Thank you," Saguru murmured, the edge of the exhaustion he must be feeling now bleeding into his tone.
Kaito gave Saguru a considering look; sunrise was highlighting just how bad the dark circles under the blond's eyes were, and Kaito couldn't be much better. "For now, do you want to try a sleep shift, or borrow the last of my concealer?"
Saguru's expression pinched unhappily, but didn't even have to think before he replied: "I want more time before I let my subconscious have a go at the degree of unadulterated panic you were projecting. Concealer."
Kaito hid his wince just fine, thank you. "Concealer it is."
They avoided any deserved concerns about their lack of sleep, despite being awake before the rest of the house, and Kaito cheerfully abandoned all writing work for the day to source his supplies. The general store proprietor let him barter some errand work for everything but the bronze, and a few other odd jobs was enough to get a perfect length of chain from the Moogles.
Having a clan of small white molebat creatures be the best jewelers in town was a little disconcerting, even though they were already creating his retirement-worthy masterpiece, but Kaito was long past pointing fingers at Weird. And he seemed to have earned a sliver of respect from them for the degree of exactitude he'd put into his parameter sketches for the replacement Hope, because there was definitely a discount compared to the first visit.
By the time the chain was successfully anchored along the padded material, and the loop tucked inside a second tube of elastic to protect against pulling hair without sacrificing the stretch, Kaito's emergency sewing kit was almost out of thread. Still, he'd finished before the others had gotten home and had even caught a brief nap somewhere in the middle. He left the completed project on Saguru's pillow and made a half-hearted attempt to organize more of his conflicting memories, before opting to stay distracted with more books until he'd managed at least another six hours of sleep.
In my defense, I haven't had time for fiction in ages and seeing villains get karmic comeuppance is a net psychological positive.
Kairi noticed which book series he'd been reading when they returned this time around, and was delighted. After the final study session for the week had met the adults' satisfaction, the rest of the afternoon and evening passed discussing with Sora and Kairi what Kaito thought about what he'd already read, and hearing bits and pieces of what else he hadn't yet by this prolific author. Riku contributed occasionally but he and Saguru had their own quieter conversation going—Kaito overheard the words 'muscle damage' early on and deliberately tuned them out to avoid eavesdropping further.
Saguru spent several stretches of time without his glasses on, and looked as tired as Kaito felt by the time the night wound down. That much visible exhaustion meant he was probably a hairsbreadth from falling asleep standing up, so Kaito offered to take the first shift awake. It was telling that Saguru didn't even make an obligation protest before swapping his glasses for the new eyemask and crawling under the covers with, "The fit is perfect, thank you."
At least I can do something right.
Kaito left his bedside lamp on its dimmest setting, since Saguru didn't seem to care, and finished his current book, then traded it for the top of the stack Kairi and Sora had pulled from Riku's shelves earlier. Somewhere into the second book of the new stack—they were short books and Kaito had won multiple class bets over his reading speeds and retention—Saguru shifted uneasily, curling in on himself. Kaito dropped a hand on his shoulder and was relieved to see the tension relax as Saguru stirred from REM without waking fully, unpleasant dream interrupted.
Half an hour later, Kaito was yawning and idly wondering if Shadows were liminal enough that in a world full of them—like here, not back home—and with enough control, Kaito could partially shift forms like the current heroine. Night vision binoculars were good, night vision would be awesome...
A muffled phone alarm sounded from under Saguru's pillow. The blond lifted his head and switched it off in one smooth movement before the rising volume could disturb anyone else in the house, then shoved the mask up and squinted groggily against the dim light. "I slept?"
Kaito huffed in amusement. "Yep. Nipped at least one nightmare in the bud, so I guess it's working, but did you not think I'd wake you up?"
"I set it before we'd decided shifts," Saguru countered, "and when I'm sufficiently tired I can lose track of time." He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, smothering a yawn. "Besides, would you have?"
"Eventually. Probably when I finished this book, but since you're up now, I'll crash." Kaito marked his page and set it aside, then grabbed the first of the series and dropped it in Saguru's lap. "In case you get bored."
"Thank you. …Sleep well."
Kaito didn't say aloud that it was hard to sleep any worse, at this point, and closed his eyes instead.
He dreamed about flying over forests on his own wings until a dark wave swallowed up the sun, but before monsters or worse appeared the dream broke into pieces. The comfort of quiet nothingness stayed until he woke well after sunrise.
The mattress shifted, snapping his brain from foggy consideration of trying to go back to sleep into full alertness. Saguru was still sitting with a pillow against the headboard and the eyemask perched amusingly on his hair. Or, well, leaning over Kaito to set a book down on the book pile, since that shift was what caught his attention.
"How late did you let me sleep?" Kaito sat up when Saguru made room for him and stretched, eyeing the window curtains—behind them, the sun intensity was bright enough to be around midmorning.
"We've both been sleeping poorly enough that I didn't wish to wake you unnecessarily. Particularly as the brain can't recognize how sleep deprived you are when you're sleep deprived, I thought it better to let you recover while you could."
"...Fine, but tonight we switch because you're just as bad."
Saguru smiled in dry amusement. "If you insist."
Kaito stretched again, falling back against the pillow afterward because it was comfier. He must have ended up with his back almost against Saguru's legs in his sleep, no wonder he felt the mattress move. "How'd we do? It doesn't look like I got far enough into a nightmare for Kurou's memories to have affected how I wake up again."
"For which we can both be grateful. It's difficult to tell because you sleep quietly regardless, but there were points where you went unnaturally still. A nudge seemed to ease your posture to one less tense. I hoped it was sufficient, rather than needing to wake you up entirely..." Saguru trailed off with a questioning expression.
"Seems to have worked, yeah." At least something finally had. "Another night with this much decent sleep and I should manage Axel without a concern of straining too hard. ...I think."
Writing an ability rulebook from scratch is hard when you have to empirically confirm if your theories are true or not!
"Small mercies. While Sora-san invited us to come visit again later to handle Axel-san, I would prefer to avoid returning home with such significant loose ends left behind."
"Likewise," Kaito agreed, and decided that was enough talking about nightmares and emotions for a while. "Want to track down some food and compare notes about which books you read last night?"
The dull roar of Saguru's stomach answered for him.
Saguru's decision to let Kaito sleep himself out meant they missed breakfast, but Riku's mother was understanding of their excuses for sleeping in and they cobbled together a decent meal with her permission to use the kitchen.
The best part of it being the last day of finals meant there was no studying obligation for the trio after. They had agreed the night before about going to the other island again, so Kaito postponed his visit to the moogles until they were going to the docks together.
Saguru also seemed inclined to stick closer to home base, working with his staff near the house rather than trekking to the beach proper, and then joining Kaito on the porch again with the other books from the series they'd shared last night. Delineating more memories in the journal had interruptions to discuss the plot twists as Saguru predicted them aloud—with good accuracy, complex whodunit stories these were not—and analyzing the problems of fictional characters was a welcome distraction from their own.
Soon enough Riku returned from school, understandably triumphant and relieved over the start of the summer break, and Sora and Kairi rejoined them shortly, free of their uniforms and in equally high spirits. They walked to the docks with Sora running circles around the rest of them until Kairi convinced him to save his strength for sparring on the island itself, "Or I'll be sure to beat you!"
Sora's countering boast and their mutual comparison of past spars carried the group the rest of the way to the docks, and then the pair ganged up in a professional level of no-nonsense insistence that put Saguru and Kaito in Sora's boat and Riku in Kairi's, with no acknowledgment of protests or offers of rowing assistance. The only concession they made was that this time around the trip wasn't a race.
Once there, the afternoon passed quickly with celebratory snacks, Kairi and Sora sparring to a draw, and Kaito showing off how to dodge against Sora and Kairi both at once while Saguru and Riku heckled from the sidelines. Kaito ran out of stamina before the keyblade wielders, because they clearly ran on enthusiasm rather than human energy. He dropped to the sand when one of Sora's swipes with the wooden practice sword caught the edge of his foot, rather than risk a follow-up hit and the inevitable bruises.
"I concede! You two are a menace."
The victory celebration dance would have wounded his pride, if he still had any pride. (He wasn't going to let Sora's puppy-like disposition make him forget Sora had single-handedly defeated a Nobody that could mess with either time or perception or both to a degree even Kaito hadn't been able to follow, let alone counter—the kid's natural talent was off the charts.)
Rather than complain, Kaito dragged himself over to snag a cushion and flop in the shade next to Saguru, soaking up the warmth of the wooden platform without the burn of direct sunlight. "Your turn to entertain the masses."
"I don't believe a count of two satisfies that definition."
Kaito closed his eyes and curled around the pillow theatrically. "Can't hear you—already asleep."
"I'll be sure to inform you of your new ability to sleep-talk when you wake."
Kaito snickered into the pillow as Sora and Kairi cajoled Saguru into taking Kaito's place, and dropped into a doze, hoping to be too tired to dream.
The surrounding activity prevented him from slipping into a proper REM cycle—one moment he would have sworn he was awake, listening to the spar, and the next he actually was conscious, blinking at the realization that the cheerful trash talk had been nonsense generated by his brain. The island was noisier than before, but not the distinctive clunk of wood on wood; new voices Kaito didn't recognize mixed with those of Riku, Sora, and Kairi from the direction of the docks, teenage excitement audible even though it was too far away to make out the words.
He debated joining the group for introductions, or at least finding where Saguru had wandered off to since he didn't hear any British accents in the chatter, when Saguru appeared at the top of the ladder to the platform. The visible frustration in his expression smoothed away when he saw Kaito looking back at him, but he couldn't quite force the tension out of his shoulders as he sat down in the corner between the wooden slats and the guard rail—as close to the edge of the island as was physically possible without falling into the surf.
Kaito was still muzzy from sleep, but it was impossible to ignore body language like that. Rather than ask a stupid question like 'Are you okay', he settled for: "What happened?"
Saguru was silent for several long moments, breathing meditatively. "Several friends had the same thought about visiting the island. They are all… enthusiastic. And emotive."
Siphoning his curiosity and concern into his mental sea, since that seemed to have worked out the last time, Kaito eyed Saguru's bare head. "Guessing you didn't want an interrogation about your glasses and everything else, like the last time?" Koizumi didn't have her diving helmet handy, after all.
"No. I was managing with the three, but doubling it—" Frustration flashed across his face again, before he slumped further into his chosen corner. "I excused myself to check on you. Even when you're awake, you're… quieter. And there's only one of you."
And you aren't shutting down the conversation; time to get some better answers on if you're dealing okay after all, because the initial survey says No.
Still, there was something to be said about sidling up to the real questions. "Proximity does make a difference, then?"
"Yes, more similar to sound than sight. My… edge of awareness, I suppose, is also broader here than the places more like home, which I suspect is similar to how you've mentioned it's easier to travel from worlds that are less like ours."
"Makes sense. More Shadows, more reach. Do you know how far your range typically is?"
Saguru steepled his fingers in his lap. "Enough to make crowds… difficult. A medium-size room or so as default, which appears to vary based on multiple factors, including how tired I am and how intense the external sources are."
Kaito exhaled slowly. Tokyo was not a good city for needing a lot of personal space. "Does being tired make it better or worse?"
"Smaller radius, stronger feeling. And while I've gone from tolerating two people for an hour to tolerating several teenagers for twice that, it's still exhausting and I hate how unexpected inputs easily create an overload I might have to physically escape, or depend on external aids to manage." He dragged his hand over his face, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to ward off a headache. "I hoped to be better than this before we were home."
Kaito finally sat up, dropping his chin in one hand against the support of the cushion so he could scrutinize Saguru more closely. "Did something change since you were working with Solomon-san? Besides both of us sleeping like crap. I wasn't around when you were working with Koizumi, but I thought building your input tolerance was a step beyond having shields when you needed them. The way you describe it now, it's like without the glasses you don't have shields at all, but at Jii-chan's you were… you said you were doing okay."
He drowned the reflexive guilt in the ocean calm, Saguru didn't need to feel that right now and it was getting easier with practice, though he wasn't fast enough to stop Saguru from twitching briefly before the detective's self-control took over.
"No, at Jii-san's I said I have practice with coping mechanisms and I wasn't going to perseverate on how I used to be. I spent as much of these travels compartmentalizing to function as you did. You take too much responsibility on yourself that isn't yours—while I appreciate your efforts to minimize your projecting it back at me—but you're in a better place than a week ago and I'm too bloody tired to deflect."
You say, as you completely fail to answer the first question.
Kaito thought back on their first day at the game shop, and almost wished he hadn't. "Hakuba. You were playing a strategy game with Solomon-san and didn't even twitch when there were five of us and all you had were gloves." They'd all been calm, cheerful, and not crowding him, but the point still stood.
Before answering, Saguru retrieved his sunglasses, which boded terribly for how he thought Kaito was going to react. "It wasn't worth mentioning, when we were so focused on dealing with each crisis of the alternate universes—I thought it might even be related to not being in our proper reality, at first."
"What wasn't worth mentioning?" Kaito demanded.
Saguru looked out over the ocean rather than meet Kaito's gaze. "I can't block things out like I could originally, working with Solomon-san. The way I perceive the input changed too, ever since—" he broke off with a rippling shudder, which he only did if he was thinking about—
"When the Heartless swarmed so badly that you fell," Kaito finished for him, with dawning horror. "They got past the bronze and… what, ATE your shields out of your psyche before I dropped us in the swimming pool?"
Saguru had said multiple sources amplified the input. If the handful of Heartless in the Darkness corridor had combined with Riku's panic to break the original suppression enough for his ability to resurface, then the exponentially-growing mob of Heartless must have been...
No wonder you're having nightmares about what they feel like—it's a wonder you ever dream of ANYTHING ELSE.
"That's my working hypothesis." Saguru folded his arms across his chest in what was trying to not be a defensive posture and failing miserably. "There were so few instances where we weren't at risk of encountering unexpected unpleasantness, I didn't test beyond a few brief confirmations. When I started working with Koizumi-san, she made her own assumptions about the quality of Solomon-san's efforts, but it wasn't worth correcting her without risking the secret of other worlds."
"So you just… restarted from scratch," Kaito said numbly, as multiple recent conversations where Saguru had conveniently failed to correct his assumptions took on new meaning. "Again. From a bigger disadvantage than the first time around."
"I was hoping to see it change again, with her help," Saguru admitted, exhaustion leaking into his tone.
"But it didn't."
He shook his head. "I can tolerate a slowly improving degree of input, or drown out a somewhat greater degree by focusing on the memory of music or chess games or similar, but the sunglasses are less a redundancy and more a primary filter."
And that explains why you jumped so fast on getting another set of glasses here...
Kaito forced himself to refocus. "So if you're processing the input differently now, what does that mean? Emotions feel stronger than they used to be? Or, no—when you said my being calm was like standing in ocean surf, was that literal?" He paused. "Metaphorical. Whatever. You actually feel like you're in the water, rather than feel my… calmness."
"Essentially, yes."
"How does that even work?"
Saguru tipped his head back to stare at the sky through the foliage shading the platform, arms still folded like a self-hug. "If you damage a sensory system without knocking it offline entirely, it can lose the ability to accurately parse input. Heat or cold or pressure to damaged skin feeling like pain, for example. I imagine my brain is attempting to adapt, and sense-imagery is what I have left to work with."
"Hell."
"There's a chance it will recover, of course… it's been less than a month since both 'injuries', if you care to call it that." The bland resignation spoke volumes about how little Saguru trusted his luck.
"But you're flying blind, and neither Solomon-san or Koizumi are likely to have any answers because no one we know is going to be familiar with Heartless and psychic abilities both. And anyone who is familiar with what a Heartless can do to psychic abilities isn't someone we'd actually want to trust." That was probably a short list of sentient Heartless like Xehanort. No.
"I agree, unfortunately, which was why I didn't see a reason to postpone our departure from Kudou-san's. I'll muddle along like I've been for the past weeks… Things have been manageable, but even pleasant emotions get tiresome in comparison to silence."
"I can imagine, if it's like a synesthesia overlayer of reality all the time," Kaito conceded with a grimace. He eyed Saguru's posture and offered, "I'll help you experiment, if you want. You already agreed to do the writing down for me to make my classroom shenanigans science; least I can do is the same for you."
Kaito grinned winsomely, and was rewarded with Saguru finally meeting his eyes with a slight smile. "I suppose I did, and fair is fair. Something to fill the time between catching up on homework and planning your next heist."
"Exactly."
"Speaking of that, have you already started planning your inevitable visit to the Smithsonian, or are you waiting until we return home first?"
Grateful to drop the topic for a while, Kaito got as far as "I'm waiting," in case the museum pulled something else with the setting or display, when Riku appeared at the top of the platform's ladder.
"Everything okay up here? The others didn't notice but you took off pretty fast… I can have us all play ball on the other side of the island for a while, if you need more time."
When Saguru hesitated, clearly wavering between politeness and exhaustion for his response, Kaito stood and tossed his cushion at the blond, who caught it automatically. "I'm tagging in, you take an actual break—the last ten minutes didn't count."
"If I must," Saguru allowed with a grateful smile. "Have fun. "
Kaito grinned back. "It's me. If I cannot find it, I will create it."
"I expect nothing less."