I find it hilarious that Just Some Guy Takumi Sumino has several romantic interests and the one he has the most normal and functional relationship with is the assassin who thinks torture and murder is hot and that it’s the assassin who is fixing him.
Rating: General Audiences
Category: M/M
Fandom: Kamen Ride Faiz
Language: English
Ships: Inui Takumi/Kiba Yuuji
Characters: Kiba Yuuji, Inui Takumi
Tags: Fix-It Fic, Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix
Words: 575
No additional warnings.
Written in 2018 to cope. published on AO3 in 2021
Summary:
Kiba wakes up in a hospital bed.
[Spoilers for the very last arc of Faiz.]
Kiba opens his eyes to find himself in a hospital bed, Inui clasping his hand, warm tears dripping onto his fingers. He's never seen Inui cry before, at least not like this. And for whom? The man who had betrayed him.
Inui always had more faith in Kiba than the man himself did, or anyone else, really. But he never really realized this, not until now.
Raising his other hand to gently cup Inui's face, wiping tears away with his thumb, he tries thinking back on what just happened.
"Kiba?"
He must have passed out. His abdomen is throbbing, his legs feel numb, like they're not even there. Inui must have hit him there, Kiba realizes.
It was a small price to pay in exchange for getting to live. He'd manage even without functioning legs.
"Kiba!"
Inui must be consumed by guilt. Kiba wants to lessen this, somehow. He feels that he deserves way worse than this for what he had done. He wants to reject Inui, push him away, because he doesn't deserve him. Not his guilt and not his-
"Kiba! Just... Say something already!"
Kiba snaps back into the present.
"Inui..." His voice sounds awfully hoarse.
"Kiba..." Inui tries to wipe his tears with his sleeve but it doesn't work as well as he anticipated and he gets more snot on it than tears. "Oh fuck..."
Kiba smiles. For a bit he feels like nothing even happened. Like they are back at the batting cages, just talking and enjoying the other's company.
Back then, Inui Takumi had a calming effect on Kiba. With him he felt understood better than by anyone else.
But Inui clung to an idea of Kiba when the man himself had already changed.
Kiba knows now that he'd been wrong, at least partially. It's no easy choice - humans or orphnoch? But to fight for the humans, who had betrayed their trust times and times again... Kiba was starting to understand what Murakami had been saying all this time. Maybe the humans were eternally meant to be his enemy.
Yet Inui chose them.
Inui chose them over him.
Kiba didn't really know why he'd even cared so much. It seemed to be much less about gaining a strong ally and far more about... Having Inui by his side.
He looks over to Inui, who is now frantically wiping his snot-covered sleeve with a tissue.
"Inui..." Kiba says and Inui stops the snot wiping and looks at him, with that soft expression of his, and it feels a bit strange. Kiba is now too awake to ignore the stinging in his chest, or his throbbing headache. "...What happened?"
Absent-mindedly crumpling the tissue in his hand, Inui takes a moment to think.
He looks down then, his expression visibly darkening.
"...Your legs..."
"Inui..." He takes the other man's hand, the empty one, in his, and squeezes it firmly. "It's okay. It's not your fault... You made the right choice"
Inui's eyes glaze over again.
"It could be way worse. I could be dead right now!" Kiba says in a joking manner.
The other man doesn't laugh. He hums briefly, as if to signal that he has thought the same thing. But it seems to do little to console him.
Kiba absentmindedly massages the back of Inui's hand with his thumb. "I feel no regret... Or malice towards you." It's true. "And I don't want you to feel guilty like this."
Or anything.
