heroes and thieves
chapter fourteen - home
two months later
Things aren't perfect. Nor will they ever be.
Ayumu's health is better, and his ongoing physical therapy is going well. However, a post-release evaluation suggests he will perhaps need additional surgeries as he ages, and his left leg remains weak and at times unreliable. His physical therapist advises that he walk with a cane the majority of a time. He, of course, ignores this advice.
Hiyono's position as a transcriptionist for the police department earns barely enough to cover the rent, groceries, and bills. After three weeks, Ayumu insists on finding a job. He is about to accept a position as a short-order cook when Kiyotaka intervenes, offering him the opportunity to work as a crime scene evidence collection specialist - provided, of course, he pursues his degree in criminal law in the evenings. He accepts with much grumbling and complaining about being tired of school, despite not being enrolled for well over two years.
Initial concerns regarding how Ayumu will pay for said degree are silenced when Eyes Rutherford visits Hiyono on a Sunday morning, fresh off a plane from Brazil, and hands her a check for a very large amount. She declines twice out of courtesy before accepting, and deposits the money in Ayumu's bank account before he has time to object.
When Ayumu turns twenty in December, he has the flu, refuses his birthday cake, and also refuses any other company aside from Hiyono. She thinks he's being grumpy until he sits her down at the bench in front of his electric piano and plays a sonata he composed for her, something slow and beautiful and sounding like rain in the summertime.
Things aren't perfect. They live in a small apartment, struggling to make ends meet, preparing to balance their jobs and a degree on top of that, still finding themselves - their true selves, the ones they'd never really exposed to each other during their time together in Tsukiomi, the selves they'd never really known. But they're together, and that's what counts.
"Hey."
"Yes, Narumi-san?"
It's probably almost two in the morning, but there won't be anywhere for them to go tomorrow, anyway. Snow is falling hard in Tokyo; the trains are stopped and the sidewalks in front of their apartment building are glistening white. If Hiyono listens, she can hear the wind whistling outside, blowing drifts across the roads and into the dim streetlights. They are wrapped up in a blanket and the sheets of his bed, one of his arms around her shoulders and her hands absently messing up his constantly disheveled hair. "Do you like it here?" he asks.
"Here?" she asks, blinking, squinting at him; the candle lit on his nightstand is about to burn out. "Do you want to move?"
"I don't mean here. I mean… With me."
"Oh, well, in that case, Narumi-san should have just said - "
He cuts her off, sighing. "That isn't what I want to ask."
"... oh."
"You moved around often when you were young," he says, and it isn't a question because he knows by now, because she's told him all the raw details of all the foster families that rejected her for hacking and cracking and using a computer in dangerous ways. "Did you ever really feel at home, with any of them?"
"No," she answers, right away, shaking her head against his shoulder. "Never."
"I never felt at home, either."
"Ever?" she asks. "Even with your parents? Or Madoka-oneesan?"
"Before now, I've always been an intruder. An unwanted extra." It doesn't pain him to say this, she notices, and she takes some comfort in that; she knows all the details of his past, too, some of which Kiyotaka had never told her; she feels very strongly that his childhood was harder than hers, by far. "You're the first person not to simply take pity on me. For the first few weeks, I even thought I was here because you did feel sorry for me, but then…"
"It's more than that, Narumi-san."
"I know." He pauses; the wind whistles loud outside. "What I did mean to ask was if you felt at home. Not here, but with me. Because of me."
Hiyono purses her lips. It's not perfect, with him. And it never will be. He's grumpy and smarter than her and never quite says what he's thinking, but he's given everything to her, showed her the raw parts of his soul, the parts of him that feared his death (and still do) and the parts of him that were vulnerable enough to love her even when he knew it was a trap. And she's given it all back to him.
Even when they struggle, even when they bicker and she nags and he gets irritated and walks out of the room to be alone and play his piano, there's still the way he smiles when she eats his cooking, the way he kisses her unexpectedly, the way he tells her he loves her when she's the most undeserving, the way he glances at her while they're doing something as mundane as watching television and smiles, and how wonderful it is to see him smile -
- and that's home. That's what it means, to her. But how can she put that into words?
"Of course," she says, drawing in a breath. Her voice is softer than she wants it to be. "But - Narumi-san, I - "
"Hiyono."
She closes her mouth. And she notices that for the first time in a very long time, Ayumu isn't looking at her when he's speaking.
"Do you want to get married?"
Oh.
She thinks to herself that it's just like him to propose like this - at two in the morning, while they're half-asleep in bed, talking about things that have nothing to do with marriage, in the middle of a sentence. The only other time she would have expected it would have been while she was doing laundry - or perhaps while he was cooking - as casually as he would ask anything else, really, like "have you seen my cane?" or "when is my next therapy appointment?"
But she really couldn't expect Ayumu to kneel down and pull out a box and deliver a speech, nor would she want that, because after all the dramatics and well-laid plans and speeches they've already experienced -
She realizes she's lying in silence and leaving him hanging. She looks up at him, studying his face in the mostly-dark room, and thinks to herself that the first time they saw each other - the first time she saw his profile like this - she was eighteen and he was sixteen and they were in high school and she'd never once guessed that this would happen.
She's happy that it is happening.
"Ayumu," she says, quietly.
He turns his head and looks at her now, his brown eyes wide. "What?"
She smiles. And she doesn't really have to say anything else. At least she thinks she doesn't. Because she'd told him, just a few weeks before, that she would only stop calling him "Narumi-san" if they got married.
His bedroom is quiet for a moment, but then he laughs, shaking his head, and leans down to kiss her.
It's good, she thinks, to finally be home.
the end
author's note: Thanks for everyone who followed this fic! Since this fits into my post-Spiral headcanon, if you'd like to learn what happens to Ayumu and Hiyono after the conclusion of heroes and thieves, you can read my fic "endroll" (spoilers: BABIES!), which I am hoping to resume again soon. I may also write a few one-shots that take place between the two, but I am still tossing those ideas around. Long live Spiral!
