One more chapter planned after this. Been one RL thing after another, sapping all my energy. Trying to bounce back.
Disclaimer: see part 1
Days melted into one another and Kaoru started to realize how easy it was to ignore the passage of time when preoccupied with the basic tasks of survival without modern conveniences. The time it took to harvest and prep food was prodigious, not to mention she had started to worry about possibly needing to cultivate the taro rather than merely consume it. That damp field was the best place and she could maybe use the shovel base that she found in the shed to start to turn the soil and plant starters. It wasn't something she relished doing, so at this point Kaoru was merely contemplating it.
While not fully out of the woods with his fever, Enishi had insisted on absconding with the mosquito netting one day and going fishing. Kaoru's increasingly alarmed arguments about how it was a terrible idea weren't about to dissuade him. He came back with some moderately sized fish that turned out to be more bones than meat, but Kaoru was grateful for the variety in their diet even as she was irritated all that night under the wet netting that had refused to fully dry before the sun set. He was also too sick to get up the entire rest of the following day.
She only said I told you so once.
Twice tops.
The single bar of soap became the focus of Kaoru's anxiety because it's all she had to clean just about anything with. As if to compensate, she never used it on herself. She had taken to using one of the old shirts as a washcloth and tried to wash off her body with warm purified water before sundown. After what she was pretty sure was about a week she took time to wash her hair with warm water and did the best she could to untangle and retie it up. Other than her hair never really feeling clean, she didn't feel like she was particularly dirty even if the clothes she wore never felt exactly clean either.
Enishi was dragging in more fuel for the firepit to Kaoru when she felt compelled to ask him, suddenly distraught, "What if I get a cavity?" He gave her the usual impassive stare, but he hadn't just dumped the branches and walked away so he was clearly in a mood to entertain her worries. "I mean, there's no dentist and people can die from their teeth rotting…"
Today Enishi was wearing his own leather shoes, the silk pants, and his suit vest and he should have looked ridiculous, but Kaoru was slowly coming to the realization that he was not only objectively handsome but also subjectively handsome to her in particular. It made looking at him more difficult. She tried to dismiss it, assuming it was the fact that he was literally the only other person on this island. But if he had bought her a drink in a bar she was increasingly certain she would have accepted it. Not that that was something Enishi did, she was pretty sure. If he went to bars it was because he had business to accomplish there.
"Are you prone to cavities?"
"Well, not exactly, but it's more the greater principle."
Enishi began to move away from her as soon as she said 'not exactly' and called over his shoulder instead, "Cook faster, it looks like it's going to rain and we still haven't successfully lit a fire in the stove."
Kaoru wanted to get semantic, pointing out that they had successfully lit a fire but they had been unsuccessful in making sure the smoke stack was redirecting the smoke outdoors instead of indoors. They had smelled of wood smoke that whole day and it had made Kaoru hungry for BBQ, but on the bright side they had not burned down the house.
Wiping sweat from her brow, tired of the oppressive humidity and heat, Kaoru thought that a little rain might be nice.
When there was nothing to do but sit across from one another in the couple of rooms that didn't leak and swell in the torrential downpour and driving winds, Kaoru wondered why she had ever thought rain would be anything other than a huge inconvenience.
"How are you not cold?" Kaoru directed the question, again, to Enishi's prone form next to her. He had lain on his side and closed his eyes as soon as it became apparent that there was going to be no more useful tasks to accomplish in the wake of the weather. It was as dark as dusk and only mid-afternoon.
As his response has been silence the first time she shouldn't have been surprised that it was silence again.
"Is there anything at all I could possibly offer you that would entice you into having a normal conversation with me? Like a regular person?" Kaoru pulled on yet another shirt, as if the layers would finally make her feel warm, or comforted. A drop of water hit her hand, and she hoped that was condensation and not a leak above.
Enishi cracked an eye open at her, she noticed, and she would have sworn she saw it roll before he closed it again and then sat up and regarded her with his usual regal casualness. "What do 'regular' people talk about?"
Flustered because she hadn't actually expected him to take her up on it, Kaoru tried not to sound too eager. "Friends and family? Hobbies? Stuff they watch on TV? I mean, I have a hard time imagining you watching tv, but maybe you like all sorts of shows…"
"I don't watch TV." Enishi deadpanned, pinning Kaoru down like a bug with his unblinking stare. "But I'm aware of it. People respond better to you when they think you share their interests. I read reviews and summaries sometimes."
"That's pretty cold. TV can be enjoyable, you know. Don't you want to enjoy things, too?"
Enishi looked at her like she was stupid. "I enjoy things."
"That," Kaoru said wish great amusement lacing her voice, "Remains to be seen. I mean, you're like this indestructible survival robot. Not that I'm not grateful for that!" She saw how his formerly indulgent expression was souring. Apparently even Enishi didn't like being called a robot, no matter how true it felt in a lot of ways.
"Some people need to be better in control of themselves when circumstances demand it." His criticism was clear.
Kaoru knew she had asked for this conversation but she was still annoyed at the direction it was taking. "Yeah, well some people need to get the pole out of their butt as well as their back!"
Enishi did the thing Kaoru had started to notice he would do when he felt defensive, and laid back down with his back to her instead of his front. Most of the time he always had a watchful eye on her, tracking her even when she was a mere blob past the edges of his vision. When they argued, which happened about once a day in some minor capacity, Kaoru felt that attention shift to anywhere but her and while it shouldn't have been an effective way to punish her she felt it keenly. They had to make this relationship work while they were stuck here, but at the same time Enishi expected Kaoru to be the one to compromise when they didn't agree. Typically she would wait it out and they wouldn't speak of it again, but this wasn't the same as who should have checked the smoke stack in the kitchen, or why fishing with their bedding was a bad practice. Kaoru had made it a little more personal.
"I don't think you're a robot, for what it's worth," Kaoru said to Enishi's still injured back. "But even you have to admit you're a pretty severe person, even here and now. I mean, you practically know my whole life story and I know almost nothing about you."
The silence felt less pointed, but Kaoru was pretty sure she should give up and settle down to sleep or something when against all expectation Enishi spoke up.
"Telling you about my life would be a non-negligible risk for you. I'm a technical consultant for more than strictly legitimate businesses. My associates are…" He hesitated.
"Not nice people, I guess."
Should could feel his smirk even if she couldn't see it. "To put it mildly."
"Well, you must solve some interesting problems for people sometimes, right?"
"Arranging an endless supply of burner phones isn't genius level work."
Kaoru gave a sharp laugh. "I'll eat this shirt if that's the only thing you do, because there's no way you would have stayed in that kind of work if that were true. And I'll tell you what, I also don't think you're in it for the money."
Enishi carefully resettled so that he was facing her, those light eyes of his about the only thing she felt like she could see clearly in the dark of the room. "What if I said I was in it for the money?"
"Then I'd call you a liar." Kaoru said, laughter in her voice as she poked him in the leg with her toe. It was about as close as she'd ever gotten to touching him casually, purposefully. Usually, any time they came into contact it was over passing food or tools to one another and followed immediately as often as not by a reflexive apology from Kaoru.
"Here—now—would be the only place I could let you." Enishi said it with a smile on his face, casually laid out, but she had no doubt of the truth in his words. He was the kind of man who wasn't about to allow himself to be challenged, and in a dark world fear and respect were equally useful. Maybe he really was protecting her by telling her nothing, but she wasn't the kind of person who believed people were meant to float on alone. Maybe he was so good at being a survivalist because that's all he ever did.
A dreary thought for a dreary day.
"Real friends can tell you like it is. I can't tell you have many times Misao has yelled at me when I felt fat, or Megumi laughed at me when I was having a bridezilla moment, and even Sano has had his moments of clarity when I start lecturing him about how to live his life when I don't even have mine in order. You need at least one person in your life that's allowed to call you on your bullshit."
Enishi was still biased towards amused, and for that Kaoru was grateful. Sometimes he simply tuned her out, like a radio frequency that had filled with static. "That's you, is it, Kaoru Kamiya?"
"Well, do you see anyone else here?" Kaoru gestured and then immediately wrapped her arms around her middle again as cold air swept over her. The broken window was impossible to board up entirely and the draft was terrible, particularly when the winds were high like today.
Warmth surrounded Kaoru when Enishi wrapped his arms around her from behind, and she allowed herself to lean into him. He could still have a low grade fever, and she should worry about that, but more importantly he was like a furnace compared to her and her shivers subsided immediately.
"If you cultivated more muscle you'd be less cold."
Kaoru wondered if he could sense her displeasure psychically. She concentrated on her gratefulness for his body heat instead. If her heart gave some rogue thumps from the reality of his proximity, well, there were things she could hold tight to inside her own soul and that fact would have to be one of them.
The first time the plane flew overhead, Kaoru was struck by the noise. In a lot of ways she had become in tune with the lack of human generated noises on the island, and so when the plane buzzed the open area where Kaoru was boiling water for her sponge bath, she covered her ears with her hands. Suddenly, realizing how silly she was being, she jetted up and waved frantically as she saw it start to circle back around with tears pricking her eyes.
Enishi broke into the clearing moments before the second pass, and was by her side in an instant, pulling her towards the trail to the sea by a hand. It was a sea plane, it seemed, and by the time they made it to the water it was bobbing on the ocean, propeller slowly idling. People in bright clothes were waving at them and shouting.
Kaoru was fully crying, but she wasn't ashamed. They were tears of relief and they were tears of joy, but in some ways they were also tears of pure terror. While they were saved (rescue at last!) the only way Kaoru was getting off of this island was on a plane. Unbidden, visions of oxygen masks dropping and retirees screaming and praying in different languages filled her mind and transposed over the emergency workers making their way over through the surf.
"Kaoru," At once Kaoru noticed Enishi was shaking her by the shoulders while she gasped for air. He was saying her name over and over, stern in that way she knew meant he was worried.
Looking over at the smiling rescue workers, who were reaching out to her while speaking in gentle tones in a language she didn't know, she recoiled. "I can't fly again, I can't…" It was a mantra spilling out of her lips, as she searched Enishi's face for answers.
As a rescue worker in tan, wearing a baseball cap with some sort of official logo and a bright orange vest tried to place a hand on Kaoru's shoulder, she felt Enishi pivot them neatly out of the way then flinch as if he hadn't meant to do that. He relaxed his hold on her and addressed the recuse workers in English, then Japanese, then Chinese. When they responded positively to the last one, he appeared to hold a brief conversation. Questions and answers flowered around Kaoru in tonalities she had never studied. Meanwhile, she had her eyes fatalistically locked on the plane as if she could hypnotize herself with the lazy movement of the propeller.
"They want to examine us, can you stand on your own?" Enishi had stopped touching her to talk to the rescue workers, and she had sunk down to the sand.
"Of course I can stand," Kaoru said testily, but her eyes never left the plane, even as it felt like her heart couldn't leave the events surrounding the crash. She did not even move to stand, despite her brave words.
A worker knelt down to meet her at eye level and spoke softly in what she suspected was Chinese, but Kaoru shook her head. She didn't understand. When they took some medical tools out of a bag, Kaoru looked over at Enishi nervously, but he was impassively watching another man take his blood pressure with a portable cuff and a stethoscope. Kaoru looked back over at the man who was smiling indulgently at her as if she were a frightened child, and she straightened her spine and forced herself to sit more normally. She wasn't going to fall apart, not now, when they had come so far.
She had no clue what the emergency worker was saying, but they kept up a steady stream of conversation in that language she didn't speak. Probably, they had a great bedside manner, if only she knew. Maybe they were talking about their family, or how their pet dog had chewed through the screen door again and gotten out, or perhaps how lucky she was to have been found when surely the search for survivors was minutes from being abandoned. Kaoru, unable to match the gentle mood, kept seeking out Enishi with not so subtle glances in his direction. He seemed fully focused on whatever the other emergency worker was telling him, however.
Finally, whatever diagnostics that were required were over, and Enishi walked over at last. His renewed proximity brought down her anxiety by volumes, but the plane lingered at the edge of her vision and loomed large in her mind. She stood up to meet him, dusting the white sand from her hands for what she hoped would be the last time.
"I spoke to them, and they do have a sedative they can give you, if you're willing to take it."
Kaoru looked over to the men who were smiling at her like she was about to come unglued in front of them, and perhaps she was as she now made a concerted effort to not look at the plane. "I don't have much choice, do I?"
"There are always choices." Enishi said cryptically.
Kaoru looked over at the friendly rescue workers, then back at Enishi. "Promise me something. Promise me you'll make sure nothing happens to me while I'm out. You've watched my back this far. See it through to the end." She needed reassurance that she wasn't drugging herself merely to seal her own doom. It was an irrational fear, Kaoru knew, but she needed to feel at least a sliver of safety. It was weird to think this man, who was both stranger and close companion, would be the person on whom she hung her hope. But then, here they were.
Looking her up and down, almost judging her resolve, Enishi nodded shortly. "I will."