A/N: Warning again - there are more naughties in this chapter. But they are nice naughties. Proceed with caution. xx

xvii.

Tonight would be the last time. Throughout the day, Mirio had reminded himself of it with a firm though reluctant resolve. Even when he'd gone to the flower shop in a moment of dashing claustrophobia, he'd been overwhelmed by a sense of aimlessness when he'd arrived. The old lady, in her garden-bright kimonos and attentiveness, had noticed it – how Mirio only looked longingly at the flowers rather than plucking them up to buy as he'd become wont to do, sighing and hanging his head at their colourful bunches with a maudlin burden.

"Whatever is the matter, young man?"

"I have no one to buy flowers for today, Obasan."

"Oh dear. You do look to be in need of some brightening." And she'd handed Mirio a thin bouquet of pale chrysanthemum clippings. "Take these for yourself then, why don't you? And come back next week with that lovely smile of yours."

She'd tapped his cheek with that paper thin hand, and had sent Mirio on his way as though they were old friends.

Now, the chrysanthemums sat in a drinking glass on the windowsill, having faded from lavender to lilac to mauve in the room's spreading darkness. It was near-black outside, and still save for the flash of lights in windows. On and off again. On and off again. No black car had stopped in front of the house across and up the road, and Mirio – having sat unmovingly at the window for the last two hours – had seen no sign of Overhaul. What it meant, he didn't know and dreaded to think about.

Bubble Girl had arrived that morning. She and Nighteye were off in the back of the house, speaking in voices too low and fast for Mirio to make out – they'd promised to make themselves scarce but wouldn't leave; they would let Mirio and Eri be alone but wouldn't let them be alone. The reasons for it had nothing to do with Mirio and Eri themselves, of course, but still Mirio could not help the feeling of being a teenager again, chaperoned by Mom & Dad Incorporated when all he wanted was to have Eri completely and indisputably and uninhibitedly to himself. To hold her and kiss her and do things to her as though their lives depended on it. Because maybe their lives did depend on it. Who could say when things were so fucked up as they were?

There were takeaways in the kitchen which were probably cold and chewy by now. One more beer in the fridge which could not have seemed more unappetizing than it did then.

And from the window overlooking the garden, the specific street, the specific house, Mirio saw Eri. She appeared, not at the front gate but from around the back of the house in dashing, tight quietness – then she was through the street, a starry glow like an angel across the black tar – the she was up the stone pathway leading to the rental house's front door. Her steps were measured, cautious all the way; it seemed her and Mirio's newfound nearness in terms of address had thrown any sense of rebellious confidence she may have had before. Indeed, she looked over her shoulder constantly, back towards the house from which she'd come. Slow in parting. Slow in arriving.

When finally she rang the doorbell, Mirio cringed. The sound seemed so loud, as though it would wake the entire neighborhood. As though it would dredge up ghosts and send them rushing after Eri in a possessive, sleepless rage.

Things were eerily quiet in the rest of the house.

Eri was eerily quiet when Mirio opened the door.

He and she watched each other through a frightening unreality, Eri perhaps realising as Mirio knew that this was the last 'once more' they'd been granted. "Here–" he touched his hand to her shoulder, and stepped aside. "Come inside."

Hesitation. She looked back again to the house from which she'd come.

"We're still safe here, Eri."

But were they really?

They dashed on tip-toe up the stairs, Eri's hand holding darling and soft to Mirio's as he led her through foreign, undecorated corridors. If it weren't for the renewed threat hanging above their heads, Mirio could have laughed. He got the feeling Eri could have too. They could have laughed together because indeed, to sneak into one of the bedrooms – where the curtains were drawn and the double bed had been made with goose down duvets and throw pillows – felt innocent and hysterical. To close the door behind themselves was thrilling in some long-gone, teenaged way even if the air hung itself heavy with unspoken somethings.

They sat down together on the edge of the bed. Mirio put his arm around Eri so that she could go nowhere but into his side; and though she leaned against him lightly she also twisted her head to look at him head-on, wide-eyed and flustered.

Only one of the bedside lamps was turned on. It dipped the room in a frail, mothy dimness, and cast dewy shadows about Eri's face. The material of her grey vest was thin, and low about her chest. She was wearing jeans – and god, Mirio was certain no woman had ever looked as lovely in jeans as she did. Loose hair. Feet thin and chiseled and cool white and bare, because the house hadn't come with slippers.

"It was weird coming here," Eri said coyly, and smiled a little. "This house. I never really noticed it very much before now." She pulled a silly face. "Although I have thought once or twice that it's kind of ugly. No offense."

Mirio laughed. "None taken. I'm just glad I didn't choose it."

"I like the big windows though."

"So do I."

"Kai's never allowed big windows in any of the places we've stayed."

She'd never brought him up in conversation before, and to hear his name mentioned so casually horrified Mirio. Not to say it made him angry. And somehow, there was nothing uncomfortable about it either. But the fact that Overhaul – 'Kai' – could have any part in something so domestic as the sort of windows Eri liked was hard to swallow. The brief mention of him was electrifying in all the wrong ways. What other sorts of things might Eri have been able to say?

In what other ways had Overhaul – 'Kai' – embedded himself in Eri's ways? Would she one day arbitrarily mention his favourite food? Would she point out at some point that he too had liked to leave his eyes over her legs when she wore jeans? Were there cozy, hidden parts of Eri's heart that Overhaul knew better than Mirio could ever hope to know?

He grinned against the notion, and touched a finger to the tip of Eri's chin. "I'll find you a house with windows taking up entire walls, if you'd like that."

She hummed hazily. "Maybe."

"One day."

She brought her face close to his, and spoke quietly. "Maybe one day."

"I'm going to take you away from all this. One day soon." Mirio moved to touch her berry-plump bottom lip. "But there's something I need to do first and… and… it would be better, safer for now, if…" To finish seemed the cruelest thing.

Eri watched him intently. With impossible tenderness, she kissed his finger.

"We shouldn't see each other like this anymore," Mirio said, persevering in his attempt at a smile even though he was doing a good job of breaking his own heart. Even if he knew it wasn't forever (not this time). He spread his fingers, his palm, across the plane of her cheek. "For a little while."

Somehow, there was none of the surprise he had expected from her. Eri screwed her mouth into a contemplative pout, and blinked against a subtle dread rearing itself in her eyes. Neither of them spoke for a while; they made no attempt to fight nor deny it. If anything, it was almost as though Eri had seen this coming. Lithely, she slinked out from Mirio's side and into his lap – her long, graceful thighs on either side of his, her hands weighing themselves like daisies on his shoulders.

Her voice was rippling. "What do you need to do?"

"To keep you safe."

"I've been safe for a long time already."

It was like she believed it.

"The rest of the world then." Lips coming close, Mirio spoke in a near-whisper, "You didn't tell me the truth when you said he left the bullets in Russia, right?" His hand found its way into her waist, beneath her shirt – a gradual dip, cool and fleshly. "And this–" his thumb grazed the raised, plastic texture of a scar. "He's still doing this to you. You wouldn't still be with him if he wasn't, right?"

"I don't know."

Like she believed it.

"Why not?"

"He's my husband."

"Husbands don't use their wives like he uses you."

"Sometimes they do."

"I would never."

"Because I can't give you anything," she said, and lifted her fingers to Mirio's temples. She stroked his skin, trailed her touch through his hair. "I've only ever taken things from you. Important things. And I can't give them back even though I want to."

Mirio pressed his hand to the dainty width of her back. Held her close. Close enough to feel her breaths wash against his face, to trace the shape of her jaw and cheeks with his lips. "You're enough for me," he said into her skin. "More than enough. Just you. I would give up everything a thousand times over for you to be with me." He held her closer. "Only me."

There was the softness of her mouth along his forehead. "Maybe one day."

His hand grasped her nape, white hair concealing the touch like a veil. "One day soon."

Her lips found his.

They didn't kiss gently, but rather with an imploring impatience: a cursive slur of mouths, of hands gone dumb with fervor.

Mirio clasped her against him like she was a figment, a specter simply waiting to slip away, and she fed herself into him anxiously and quietly, fingertips here then there, in his neck and on his chest and beneath his shirt. It was familiar, wholly without the self-consciousness of kisses gone by; it was risky and new, their tongues meeting in a wet, hesitant mingling. Full of a preemptive loss and a disorder of possible love. Where before Mirio's heart had been still, now it blazed to life like a wasp trapped under glass. Eri's face was hot, and smooth, and frozen in an expression of bright, clear feeling – it felt like a cheat for Mirio to open his eyes to glance it, but still he did, and felt himself spill out of body helplessly.

He rolled his head away to settle into her neck, kissing along the tendons and behind her ear, body screamingly alert to the invisible valleys Eri's fingers traced along his ribcage. She clutched the material of his shirt and pulled it up over his head. He took hers off too, withdrawing for only a moment to consider – to drink in – the rises and falls of her stomach, the skin ragged with thick scars and milky pale beneath; her breasts, small and beckoning in a flimsy bra; the ivory ridges of her collarbones and shoulders.

Like cupping wine glasses, Mirio melded his palms around Eri's chest. Kneading. Squeezing gently as he brought his mouth back to hers flagrantly, where she sighed into his tongue.

"Is this okay?"

Eri nodded, eyes dazedly shut, and continued to kiss him.

"And this?" He undid her bra, and slipped its straps from her shoulders.

She shook it off completely, dropping it at Mirio's feet. Her nipples were flushed rose, bright against her skin's whiteness – Mirio took them between his fingertips, thumbing roughly, and was charmed by the blossomy spread of Eri's blush from her cheeks down into her neck as she nodded once again. A quietly rasped yes. Another as Mirio wrapped his lips around one nipple to kiss, to suck, leaving dews of his mouth around the sensitive, red flesh and relishing the way his name trembled out from Eri's lungs.

Curiously, she touched at his nipples too, circling them with a testing lightness and ghosting her touch across his chest in restless, eager patterns.

Mirio circled his arms around her waist and twisted their bodies around to the bed. The white covers sighed beneath their weight, and moulded themselves around the taut, bowed shape of Eri's frame like an embracing cloud. She undid her jeans; she lifted her hips lazily to tug them off, revealing those legs lithe as tulip stems and the narrowness of her hips. And so many scars. So, so many scars, it would take a week for Mirio to kiss them all. To graze and love them all like they were precious.

He laid himself on top of her, kissing her mouth again (not knowing where to start on the rest of her body) and pressuring his groin – growing ever heavier – against her own. The material of her underwear was a frail barrier. Her hands found their way up and down the length of his back, her body going stiff and breathless beneath him as he continued to work himself against her.

"You're so beautiful."

"Can you take your pants off too?"

He did. He retreated momentarily, and rushed to unbuckle his belt, to drop and kick away his trousers to some unknown coordinate – his cock swelling, and begging, and only growing more desperate as he delighted in the image of Eri waiting on the bed. Nothing but underwear between the both of them. It had been minutes. It felt like an eternity, and the sweetest eternity known to any man on earth. Chest rising and falling with slow, steady breaths, Eri sat up and stared. Stared with a strange expression as Mirio came close once again, her face level with his stomach, her gaze travelling downwards as her hand lifted to his hardness.

Her lips glistened wetly.

The look in her eyes was glassy as she flattened her palm over Mirio's erection, and he moaned so ardently it seemed to make her shiver. She rubbed, the pressure unbearable in its gentleness; she watched the motion of it with a charmed fascination, as though her hand wasn't hers at all. All the while, looking down at her with a pained, delicious anticipation, Mirio combed his fingers through her hair. Waiting. Somehow helpless and able to do little more than groan her name like this in itself was ecstasy.

Her voice came chime-like and faraway. "Can I–?"

"God, yes… please do, Eri," Mirio stuttered, even having no idea what Eri was going to ask. "Please."

Fingers in the elastic of his underwear, she pulled the material away so that it fell at his feet. So that his cock was bared fully to her. And with a characteristic softness which had never been so awful (glorious and darling, but agonizing against the hopeless hurry which homed itself all through Mirio's body), she enclosed her fingers around his length and moved them along in awkward, uncertain shuffles. Tentative. Light enough to not feel like much. And very obviously, very innocently inexperienced – this in particular made Mirio dizzy with mind-numbing relief. To think that she didn't touch Overhaul like this. At least… not enough to know how to do it properly.

He held his hand over hers. "Like this." And then he let his head fall back on his shoulders at the feel of Eri's palm shifting more smoothly along his erection. Her fingers thin and delicate, and clumsy if Mirio ventured to loosen his grip. Her wrist twisting weakly after a few quickening strokes. And fuck, did she look gorgeous doing it: long-limbed and lily white, biting her lip in an expectant concentration or flicking at her mouth's corners with the tip of her tongue, an endearing flash of pink on pink.

Mirio moaned again, and guided her to go faster.

Faster, until there was too much breath caught up in his chest. Faster still, until his hips began to rock for more.

Eri looked up at him, dreamy through heavy lids. "Does – does it feel okay?"

"You're doing it so well, Eri," Mirio gasped.

She cracked a tight smile, and slowed after a little while more of delicate, eager caresses. She stopped. Let go. And still smiling, she pressed her cheek to Mirio's stomach, slung her arms around him in a gangly, skin-filled hug. "Your heart is beating fast," she said. "It's nice."

"Your face is nice."

"Thank you. I made it myself."

"Well would you look at this." Mirio leaned her back onto the bed, grinning down at her dewy expression. "She's cute and she's funny." He lay down alongside her so that his stomach was curved against her side, his legs twisting up with her own. He kissed her forehead, traced his hand down the length of her naked torso while his body throbbed for more. For more of her.

Eri, Eri, oh god, Eri.

He curved his touch once more over the mounds of her breasts, considering again the tautness of her nipples and their clear shade of pink, and then dipped his hand into the cavern of flesh beneath her ribcage. Over her stomach where the skin was soft and finely stretched over slight, unexpected muscle. In between the valley of her hipbones. Stopping, hidden by the white cotton of Eri's panties, where his fingers found the spot between her legs wet and welcomingly warm. He circled his fingers slowly at first, relishing the nuances across Eri's features as they tightened and blushed. He circled quicker, the muted sound of her keening driving itself through him.

At some point, she looked away, and brought the back of her hand to her mouth to muffle her moans. Fingers now dipping slowly inside of her, Mirio moved himself to be back on top; and with his free hand, he made her look at him. He took her hand away from her mouth and instead held it to his, where he kissed her knuckles. Sucked two of her fingers, finding their weight against his tongue exhilarating. And indeed, finding the way she gasped at the motion of it the most brilliant sort of agony he'd ever known.

His fingers came out of her wet.

She lifted her hips and curled her legs obligingly for Mirio to slip off her underwear, and she watched through a sort of daze – her cheeks blotchy like waterlilies, lips parted in an enamoured and panting line – as he repositioned his hips along hers, as he took himself in hand and... paused.

"Before I do this," he murmured, and began to pull away reluctantly, "I'm going to find us a condom. I think I had one or two in my suitcase."

Eri reached her fingers quickly, fervently, into Mirio's hair. "No. I want you like this."

"But Eri–"

"I can't have kids."

For a moment, he stared. "Yes, I know you can't. Which is why I need to get a–"

"No. I mean I can't have kids ever." She touched at a spot between her hipbones without seeming to fully realise she was doing it. "I… can't…"

"Oh." It dawned on him. "Oh god, Eri. I'm so sorry."

She draped her arms around his shoulders once again, and smiled beckoningly through a bemused fugue. "Please don't stop, Mirio. I want you to do this."

"Are you sure?"

She pulled him in, and kissed him. Long. Soft. Murmuring into his mouth, "I want you so much."

The quivering truth of her voice made Mirio weak, his chest on fire, his cock hard and tight and gasping for her. Uncertainly at first, eying the place on her stomach where her hand had been and wondering over the thin, horizontal scar he spotted, he took himself in his hand once again and pumped a few times more. Then, somehow feeling himself balanced at the very edge of a cliff face, he sunk himself into her and forgot – at least for the moment, in a bright flare of sensation and feeling – about everything. Aware only of her and the striking tightness of her walls around him as he fed himself deeper, deeper, tighter – this, though Mirio dared not think too deeply about it, was another small victory. How knotted she was with him inside of her.

How she went so stiff and so quiet with each movement he made. So frozenly stiff and so anxiously quiet, Mirio was almost sure she'd passed out. And how at last she gasped, how she squeezed herself closer to him with her fingertips clawing at his back, her own spine arching, when finally he began to thrust into her. She said, moaned, cried his name. He said, moaned, cried hers too as he plunged himself ever further. Steeping himself in her depths. Drowning himself in the sounds and touches, the way in which Eri trembled against and for him.

Everything about it was brilliant, though in the grand scheme of things it was quiet and simple.

Everything about it was worth everything Mirio had ever lost.

And when his spine set itself alight with shuddering, delicious tremors – when he came inside of her – Mirio collapsed with his face alongside hers, sweat carving streams into his temples. His heart bounded in his ears. The room was silent apart from the spent, excited echoes of their breathing. Mirio, weak and yet somehow vividly awake, held his hand against Eri's cheek. "I love you."

She said it back. Nothing had ever sounded so true before.

For a long time afterwards, longer than was probably safe, they lay there naked and wet with sweat and cum, holding each other. Stroking each other's skin in indiscernible spirals, kissing and smiling like teenagers who'd just gotten away with deflowering each other while Mom & Dad Incorporated were in the very next room. Giggles floated and were forgotten in the bedroom's hazy glow. Eri looked inexpressibly young, innocent and beguiling as her face burned the colour of an angel.

In the room's more shadowed corners, there loomed in wait the knowledge that this would be the last opportunity they'd have to be in each other's arms. Just for a little while. But still a while too long. For now though, they chose to ignore it. To bask instead in each other's touches and kisses, the newfound vulnerability which should have seemed stranger than it did.

"Would you have wanted kids?" Mirio asked at some forgotten point, Eri tracing circles on his chest.

She replied almost immediately, "Not with Kai."

"And if it hadn't been with him?"

"I've always tried not to think about it." She stopped tracing, and nuzzled her head against him. "But sometimes, when I see pregnant women and women with children in TV shows or on the street, I get a little sad because I think that maybe I'd like to have my own. Or at least… I'd like to be able to. If things were different. I would let them go to ballet classes and eat sweets. Not all the time, but often-ish."

Mirio smiled dumbly. "I'd let my kids eat sweets whenever they wanted."

"Their teeth would rot."

"I'd take them to the dentist."

"What if they don't like the dentist?"

"We'd have to be firm with them."

"But then we could reward them with more sweets afterwards."

Mirio chuckled. "I was thinking something more along the lines of how we could take them to watch a movie, or go ice-skating, or something."

"I've never been ice-skating." She twisted her head against his chest to grin at him, exactly like the hypothetical child of the hypothetical future Mirio was imagining. "You could take me one day too."

"You know," he kissed her forehead, "I was thinking exactly the same thing."

A/N: Aww.