Continued from here.
Her muted sense, the one without words, brought back pictures sharp as photographs of scenes that she’d forgotten about. Sitting side by side on the roof with her feet dangling over the ledge as Chishiya’s shoulder kept her steady. Unable to quell her restlessness and find tranquility while waiting in his room until he returned from a game. Arms winding themselves around his shoulders, pulling him away from whatever he was working on or reading to recapture his attention. Each time had a color, a smell.
As Kuina turns to face him, his heart rate picks up but his gaze stays on her, unwavering. It's difficult to look away from Kuina once she's looking straight at someone, capturing all their attention with a single glance. It's even harder when he's been so long without being able to look at her properly instead of stolen glances or stares across the room with Arisu and Usagi present. He can't feel the awkward tension there'd been between them when they slept at the hospital, crowding themselves into a single bed as if they were looking for a reason to still be next to each other. He can't feel the mixture of emotions there'd been at the Beach, entangling hesitance with want. He watches as her eyes travel from his own, down to his lips, to a point in his neck, and he can only watch in silence as she takes him in so deliberately slowly, swept up in the nostalgic emotion behind them.
The whirlwind had finally stopped.
“I wish we’d had this instead of the Beach.”
Chishiya hums, considering this. "We might be different people by now, if we had," he says, lowering his tone to match hers. He can't quite match the softness in which she speaks, but his voice has a certain roughness to it, an unpolished quality far from elaborate words and carefully constructed sentences. It's the other side of the coin, letting his guard down in a different way.
“Or I would’ve found you here."
"Unlikely," he mutters, thinking of the map he'd given Usagi earlier, with so many scribbles and pointless notes that in the end, it had been hard to make out the indications beneath it. It had transformed from a tool to something that brought him comfort, as if he still had her beside him. "It was difficult enough to attempt to piece which games you'd done after the blimps went down. You couldn't have possibly guessed where I'd be beforehand."
"It wouldn’t have been so bad.”
To that, there was little he could say. "No," he agreed. "It wouldn't have." They'd have faced other problems, and perhaps they'd have met different people, but he was certain the end result would be the same. Would always be the same. With them together.
"Kuina," he starts, because he has to tell her, rip the bandaid off now that they're alone. "We should talk." About the Beach, about their time before they'd found the dealer's den, about every single thing they'd been through ever since they'd separated, but above all, there was one thing she ought to know.
"Kuzuryuu is dead," he says. He's not sure if there was a softer way of telling her, but he doesn't know how else to do so. Kuzuryuu is dead and there's no use adorning it. Kuina had been somewhat close to him during the Beach, though the extent of their relationship had been largely unknown to him, mostly because he preferred it that way. But there was no denying they'd had a bond, however fleeting, and she deserved to know. "He was the King of Diamonds."
"I'm sorry."
@kuinaoflight
Kuina.
Her runaway thoughts are halted the second their eyes lock, almost losing herself in the waves of nostalgia that flowed from the sound of Chishiya's voice alone. She'd let herself revel in how peaceful she'd felt with him again, momentarily not sensing any of the thickened tension that permeated between their methodically shared space. But the call to attention is said in the shape of her name, coaxing her away from getting too off track.
Followed by three words one loathes to hear:
We should talk.
“Kuina,” he calls, before he can figure out what to say to her, trying to snap her out of whatever thoughts she’d locked herself inside of. “Kuina,” he tries again, to no avail.
After the Ten of Hearts, when Mira appeared on the screen at the dealers’ den, he’d begun to suspect Kuzuryuu had also been hiding something. During the game, he’d been unable to find either of them, and knowing the reason Mira had for being absent and how close her and Kuzuryuu had been, Chishiya had assumed that in one of the face cards was where Kuzuryuu could be found. He hadn’t expected himself to be the one to do so, and he certainly hadn’t expected the outcome of the game.
If this had come as a surprise to Kuina, it wasn’t because she’d been unable to think of it, rather, she probably wouldn’t have wanted to do so, following a similar pattern than she had with Chishiya. Unless she was given a reason to, she would always offer the benefit of the doubt and never presume anything immoral, something that had failed her both with Kuzuryuu, and himself.
Tears start streaming down her face and his first impulse is to check behind him on the nightstand for any tissues he might have, which is a rather pointless action because he knows there’s none. The irrational side of him wants to call her name again, as if that is enough to take away whichever feelings are spilling out, but it’s even a more irrational side of him which resolutely closes the distance between them (because Kuina’s crying, and if she’s crying there’s no time for doubts or uncertainty) and places one of his hands on top of hers, the action not as soft as it was careful. Brushing her knuckles and the back of her hand with his thumb as he moves towards her.
“Kuzuryuu was a lawyer,” he starts. His voice has dropped to barely above a whisper, but they’re closer now, she can hear him perfectly and if she can’t, she’s near enough to practically feel the words on his lips. “Who believed in equality and using the law in order to aid those who needed it.”
“Somewhere along the line, he became… disillusioned. With the unfairness of the justice system and how it favours some more than others.” He hadn’t told him, but it hadn’t been necessary. In professions where you worked for the public, you quickly learned the public was divided into ‘priorities’, and ‘not enough money.’ Medicine had been like that and at the time, he hadn’t cared enough to even warrant saying he ‘got used to it’. There hadn’t been any ‘gotten used to’, a period of adaptation where he had to come to terms with the reality of how the healthcare system worked, instead he’d simply accepted it as the reality of his job, just as he’d accepted the shitty coffee machine in the floor he worked in and the bad music taste most of the surgeons had. It’s there. It’s slightly unpleasant but it’s there.
“I’m not going to go over much detail on the game.” Frankly, because time spent going over maths and probability would be time badly spent. “The game started with five players, and after a few rounds, we were the only two remaining.”
“I was out of my depth,” he admits. “I was one round, which translates to a few minutes, away from losing. He could’ve won, if not on that round, probably the next. But then…” He pulls his hand away from her, laying it down on the space between them.
“I told him deliberately that I was making a choice which would make it impossible for me to win, unless he reacted with a specific move of his own. I did this knowing that if he chose to disregard this and end the game, he’d be forced to go against his ideals by acknowledging his life had more value than mine.”
“He could’ve killed me right there, but he chose to prolong the game until we were tied for the last point.”
It’s not easy to put in words what happened next. The weight of the decision on Kuzuryuu’s shoulders, symbolised by the scales hanging right on top of him. His fingers intertwined in front of his face, blocking everything from view except for his eyes, dark with the turmoil brewing behind them.
And Chishiya, calmly showing the keyboard with the number 100 on it.
“The game, as I said before, could only have one winner, and it was me because he sacrificed himself in order to finally be able to live his life according to his ideals.”
He’d thrown his head back and welcomed the acid pouring down on him like a Christian welcomed holy water, with eyes closed and the most serene expression Chishiya had ever seen in him. Relief, release, purpose and peace at last. And all the while Chishiya was watching this man endure such an excruciatingly painful death, all he could think of was how he wished he was in his place, feeling the same exact things he was. Purpose and peace at last.
“I felt jealous one could die in such a way. Him, Arisu…” You, he wanted to add, but even now, even while they were both lying in bed together and his hand had dried her tears, he could not bring himself to say it. “They made me want to turn my life around. I suppose they’re the reason why I’m here.”