Either one or two chapters left. Depends on how my thoughts organize.

Disclaimer: see part 1

Kaoru had never felt like she had thought this clearly in her life. The first few hours of trying to get Enishi situated were back breaking in the literal sense, but it all laid out before her as if someone had drawn her a map. First, dig a fire pit outside and get a pot of water boiling. Second, clean out a bedroom and make sure there was an approximation of a bed. Third, situate Enishi, bathe him (or at least clean off his back), and drink the rest of the purified water before boiling more water. Megumi's annoying boyfriend used to bug Kaoru all the time about the benefits of intermittent fasting, and she always told Sano to go to hell in the past because she liked food and saw no reason to starve herself. Now, as day two of no food was coming to a close, she felt almost spiritual about it. It might have been the key to her eerie calm about everything she had to accomplish.

Enishi, for his part, was in some sort of personal hellscape from the way he mumbled in his fever dreams. Someone named 'Neesan' played a large role in his mutterings and Kaoru wondered if she would get the nerve up to ask him right up until she remembered with a smack to her forehead that he was saying sister. A couple of semesters of Japanese in college should have rubbed off more considering how much her grandparents had wanted her to learn the language. Her grandmother had been adamant that being a Kamiya was something she needed to take pride in, but she felt so distant from her heritage to the point that when Misao was dragging her to cultural events she barely felt Japanese at all. Misao was fluent, and with her petite good looks she also fit all the clothes like they should be fit. Kaoru vaguely remembered visiting relatives in Tokyo one summer in high school and feeling both fat and distinctly out of place.

There had been mosquito netting in the second storage room, as well as a bunch of rotted bedding, so Kaoru used the clothes and a bunch of wide leaves as padding under Enishi. A rock and some rusty metal spikes she found in the storage shed allowed her to roughly hang the mosquito netting above them. It would have to do for the night, and as darkness closed around them Kaoru found herself drawing closer to Enishi. She wasn't afraid of the dark, not really, but as darkness fell the feeling of being alone pressed in and that was more than her soul could bear at the moment. As Enishi mumbled wordlessly to himself, Kaoru pretended like they were having a conversation until she fell asleep. It was, she would admit, a low point for her as well as him but at least he wouldn't remember it.

Kaoru talked about Aoshi mostly, because everyone else had wanted to hear her talk about it and she had blown them off. While Enishi was insensible he was a pretty fantastic listener, and it was way better to worry about her personal life than their basic survival.

"He told me I could keep the ring to sell. It wasn't inexpensive, either, he had done the traditional thing which I think he told me was two months of income? His income isn't insubstantial so, yeah. When he told me how much it was worth I was so excited and then immediately scared I would lose it somehow. Or break it, if that makes any sense. How do you break a diamond? I would look down at it, how all the diamonds set on the sides would sparkle and I should have known then and there that he didn't get me. I hated that ring. It was gaudy. But I told him I loved it." Enishi flopped awkwardly to the side and his arm smacked her in the stomach. With a cough and a low curse Kaoru gently set the offending limb to the side. "I told him it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given to me. I really wanted it to be, too."

Kaoru kissed his forehead again as it was the only way she could reliably tell his temperature when her own was fluctuating as night fell and the shivering set in. She might have been more resilient if she had fuel in her body, but she was burning fat reserves at this point and had the bad breath to prove it.

"You remind me of him, Aoshi. At least you did at first. You both have this way of freezing a girl with a look, and I don't think either of you smile without a good reason. But then you got angry and I realized you couldn't be anything like him because Aoshi didn't run hot when he was angry he just froze me out harder. I knew he was mad at me because he would get scary polite. Then he would stop using contractions…" She put on a fake male voice, knowing it was a pretty sorry impression. "I can not believe you would think of doing that. I have not experienced such embarrassment since you yelled across an entire banquet hall that you had reserved our seats. You lack decorum!"

Kaoru laughed at her own bad Aoshi voice.

"For the record, there were plenty of other people talking and I'm sure no one else noticed when I called his name. He just has really high standards for 'ladylike' behavior and I don't think I would ever have learned all the rules, or followed them even if I knew them. I think he had good intentions, but I wasn't the girl to tick off the box on his to do list that said 'wife'."

Enishi shivered and called for his sister again. Kaoru scooted closer, hoping her proximity would comfort him even if she couldn't do much about the fever other than wipe a wet shirt over his forehead now and then. She had already cleaned the wound as well as she could and changed the dressing on it by boiling his shirt in a pot of water and then rewrapping it around his chest and back. Clad in nothing but the shirt bandage, some expensive looking black boxer briefs she wasn't about to remove, and the silk pants that had been in the chest and which she had struggled to get him into, Kaoru felt like he wouldn't feel too exposed when he joined the conscious world again. Laundry was one thing on her to do list for tomorrow along with food, though food was bolded, capitalized, and italicized in her mind.

"Maybe I was willing to overlook it all because I was tired of being lonely. I wanted a family again." Kaoru paused and Enishi cried out, his voice hoarse from the constant babble. "You seem pretty lonely, too. Deep down. But I also don't think you're the kind of guy who would propose to a girl because you thought that's what people did."

It occurred to Kaoru that he was a computer programmer who knew how to treat knife wounds and who knew what opium smelled like. Clearly there was more to him than business meetings and coding. Hopefully he would pull himself out of this fever and she'd get to learn more about who Enishi Yukishiro really was. She had to be hopeful because the alternative was too bleak given the circumstances.

As she curled up next to him, too tired to pretend anything, his arms encircled her instinctively and his babbling ceased. Enishi shivered, still miserable and unconscious, but Kaoru knew she was doing him good by not keeping her distance. Touch was important for healing. Or so she told herself.

Stiff, cold, and moist in that way she hated because it reminded her of every camping trip Misao had ever talked her into going on in their college years, Kaoru woke to find Enishi about the same as she had fallen asleep to but luckily no worse. His breathing was labored, and she ladled some purified water into his mouth until she got too hasty and he instinctively choked. It wouldn't do to drown him, and she was too tired to do this job properly. Time to get her butt out of 'bed' and get foraging.

Just to be safe she grabbed the metal piece, even if she was unlikely to have the gumption to use it on anything living. Then again, survival instincts ran strong in her as she was starting to realize now that Enishi was out of commission.

"I'll be back soon to check on you, if you can hear me in there," She cringed. That sounded stupid. Oh well, he wasn't giving her an eye roll or a wry comment so she was probably in the clear.

She had rinsed her underwear yesterday, scrubbing them with a funny smelling bar of soap she had found in storage and even if it had no lather it did seem to clean those ridiculous garments. In the storage room she had made a neat pile of the clothes she and Enishi had arrived in and thought about doing laundry first only because she had some idea how to go about doing it. Ultimately, she gathered her wits and set out down the trail that led from the house instead.

The morning was full of strange birdsong and the rustling of bushes and Kaoru found herself jumping at every noise. The fourth time a whistling bird caused her to swing the metal piece around she told herself, out loud, to stop being such a damn coward. Enishi was counting on her, she had to remember that. What she couldn't do for herself she could do for someone else and she squared her shoulders in the ill fitting shirt she had already stress sweat through the armpits and marched herself down the twisting trail.

There was nothing by the water except a rotted pier. Not even a scuppered boat she could dream of salvaging. Kaoru took the time to make another SOS out of branches since there was a good space for it on the beach, and that killed an hour or two of the morning. She was dreading needing to go off trail and think up a marking system so she wouldn't get lost, a la Hansel and Gretel but with 100% less bread, when as she walked down the beach she noticed a weirdly cleared out spot. It extended inland a bit and there was no way she could get lost in an open field so she explored.

At the end of the clearing, to her shock, were two airplanes. They were different colors and she could make out a faded star on the body of one and a still red circle on the body of the other. She didn't want to get any closer than she was, despite knowing that these planes had been here easily as long as the house had been abandoned given the way vegetation was trying to reclaim them. Too afraid that there were creepy skeletons in the cockpits, Kaoru started to back away with wide eyes and tripped, falling on her butt in the damp soil.

Groaning at herself for generating more laundry, she finally focused in on one of the plants in the field and blinked hard in recognition. She had been thinking of her obaachan this morning and it was as if the spirit of her grandmother had led her to salvation: taro. A whole field of taro. She would know these plants anywhere, even years after she had been forced to weed her grandmother's garden.

Using the metal piece creatively, Kaoru loosened the damp soil around a few plants that looked likely and pulled up breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She wasn't a huge fan of the leaves, but they would be edible too and hunger was excellent seasoning. Even though digging up the plants was tedious, dirty work, Kaoru was so excited by the prospect of food that she had gotten second and third winds. There was a whole field of them, too! Taro had never been her favorite, but it would forever after have a special place in her heart.

Taking off her shirt, walking around in nothing on top but a bra and suspenders, Kaoru bundled up her treasures and started back for the house. There might have been shame involved some other day, worries of sunburns at the very least, but nothing was more important than protecting these ugly roots until she could get back to the house and peel them.

Kaoru was on a roll. Not only had she prepared and eaten several taro roots (which she had eaten too quickly and immediately almost thrown up), but she had found honeysuckle! Another dredged up memory from her grandmother's garden, she vaguely remembered her grandmother forcing her to rub it on a burn one day. At the time Kaoru had been confused why the old lady had done it, but even if it was superstition it couldn't hurt. Who knows, maybe it would do Enishi some good. So there she was, watching the laundry dry on the deck railings and crushing honeysuckle to make a paste to smear on Enishi's back. If nothing else it would make him smell amazing, and given he had been sick and sweating all day, he needed a little help in the scent department.

The taro she had prepared and mashed for him sat in ceramic bowl next to the other ceramic bowl of purified water, and Kaoru made sure it was far away from where he could knock either over and proceeded to change his bandage. As before, she didn't think he was getting worse but neither was he improving, and Kaoru wondered how much fight he really had in him. Probably a lot of he could save her life while speared from behind. If anyone could pull out of this, he could, she was sure.

The honeysuckle paste was merely her way of trying to tip the scales in his favor. If they ever got rescued she would also go visit her grandmother's grave and thank her profusely for those summers as a child she was forced to weed and fertilize and harvest what had felt like her entire vacation. Had Kaoru known that a scant decade later she would be alone in the world but for Misao and the Makimachi branch of the family, she would have appreciated them more.

Light faded on them both in the room, Enishi silently breathing and Kaoru watching him breathe. It was worlds better than the tortured ravings of the night before, but Kaoru was unsure if his silence was because he was getting better or worse. She fell asleep jittery, pressed next to him as if she could use him as a blanket.

She got her answer when, in the middle of the night, she was pinned on her stomach with her arm wrenched behind her back.

"What the hell!" Kaoru yelled into the pile of shirts and leaves, slightly muffled, kicking her legs as if that would shift the weight on her back. "It's me, it's Kaoru!"

Her arm was wrenched harder for all of a second, then she felt the weight drop off her. In the dead of night, the darkness felt thick. Kaoru wasn't sure where Enishi was and while she had been seeking the comfort of his warmth before, that little interlude was a reminder that he was no teddy bear.

"How long has it been?"

Kaoru wanted to let him stew, but relented faster than she meant to because she was so happy he wasn't dead or insensible. "About a day and a half."

"Why am I sticky?"

"Ah, oh, that would be the honeysuckle I rubbed on your back. It's supposed to help infection?" Kaoru felt around for the food bowl, and found it without too much trouble. Luckily it had escaped their wrestling match. "I have food…"

Kaoru felt around for where Enishi was, and her hand came into contact with what she suspected was a rock hard thigh because she felt silk. Running her hand up to the edge of his pants, her fingers were brushing abs that still felt too hot to be normal body temperature when a hand clasped her wrist. He divested Kaoru of the bowl and she pulled her hand back quickly.

"What is this… stuff?"

"Taro. Boiled and mashed." There was no response in the darkness so Kaoru tried again. "See taro is a root, kind of like a potato only—"

Quickly, Enishi interrupted. "I know what taro is."

"The easiest way is to eat it with your fingers. I have some water too, when you're done." Kaoru, unable to resist bragging a little bit about how productive her day had been, added, "Not only did I cook but I did laundry yesterday, too, I'll have you know."

There was an amused snort, so Enishi had definitely heard her.

"How is it?"

The sound of ceramic being placed on floorboards let Kaoru know he was probably done with the small bowl of taro mash. "It tastes like soap."

"You aren't going to like breakfast then. Better learn to love it." She folded her arms in front of her, only to feel a masculine hand run itself from her calf up to her thigh. A shiver ran the length of her body but not a single cell protested his overly familiar touch.

"You said there was water." Enishi said, breaking Kaoru's fixation, and she took his hand in her own and guided him to the other ceramic bowl. Her heart was pounding in her ears.

Unable to leave well enough alone, she cleared her throat and bit out in a tone that only quivered at the start, "Does that taste like soap, too?"

Another snort from her companion was eaten by the darkness.