deercountry | wolves in the middle of town

Paul makes the journey home from the dojo in a haze of grey, tracing his steps by memory alone through the streets.

At some point, his numb, bare fingers fumble a message into his Omni, reaching out to the people who need to know. When he pushes the door open on the new apartment he shares with Kaworu to find it empty, his fear flutters so high in his throat that he can't make the sound he wants to make. He barely stops to pull off his boots and shuck his jacket before he walks mechanically into the bathroom and lowers himself into the enormous tub that had been one of the things that convinced him this was the place for them.

With his clothes still on, the cuffs of his sleeves singed, Paul turns the coldwater tap to full blast and sinks back into the rising water to stare at the ceiling.

(In the kitchen window, a poppy droops in the golden light of autumn, the edges of its petals blackening.)

Edited 2022-10-14 03:54 (UTC)

Dragging himself up the stairs feels like an impossible task but he manages it. He manages it despite his body feeling so empty that might as well be weightless, unable to even raise his own foot to the next stair he's so lacking in substance.

On the landing, Kaworu sees Paul's coat and shoes and hears the water running. He needs to be with someone. He needs someone to bring him back, redraw all his lines, make him find his own form again so it can hold his heart that's in danger of being pulled into nothingness.

He slips his own shoes off like shedding skin and pads over to the bathroom. It's one of his favorite rooms. It gets warm with the water, and Paul and Izuku's voices echo around the room like a chorus. Paul puts bubbles on his head and hums softly. It's a nice place.

Without stopping, as though it's one continuous motion, he climbs into the tub across from Paul and curls up, burying his face in his arms. The water isn't warm. It's cold. Cold is numb. He doesn't mind.

Paul watches Kaworu come to join him with bright blue eyes, shining like lapis lazuli, his mute tracing of Kaworu's journey to the tub full of wild, broken longing. Green eyed, he'd warn Kaworu about the chill of these waters, but like this, after everything that's happened - all he wants is for him to be close.

But he doesn't slide across to fold Kaworu up in his arms. Not yet. He's sure he has the fire back on its leash, he's sure of it - but still, he hesitates. He slips his hands down his shins, into the water itself, and he waits to see if the water will be troubled by them.

"Kaworu," he says, worry tender in his tone, "We'll get her to come home. I promise. It's going to be all right. You won't keep feeling like this. I won't let that happen."

Kaworu makes note of the distance and it wounds him. He wraps his arms around himself, like trying to stem the bleeding. Instead, he nods miserably at Paul and makes no effort to close the distance either, despite his desire to be wrapped in long, thin arms with impossible firmness.

"Your eyes... What happened?" He shivers, with cold, but with something else too. Anxiety? Or perhaps a strange prescience of his own to know something has gone wrong.

That shiver puts a sliver of ice through Paul's heart, and that must be what will pin the fire down, bind it back to his will. He slides down the tub until their folded knees are nearly touching, reaching past Kaworu to turn on a stream of hot water.

"When I saw Gideon," he says, numbly, looking past Kaworu at his bare hand on metal, "We argued. I was angry."

He hasn't let himself be angry like that since the beach. The cold, black, dead-star rage, vast and devouring.

The water is warm. It soothes his shivering into the smallest of trembles. Yet, even as his body warms, the primal urge to shake still lingers in the depths of his being. At the mention of Paul's anger, the urge grows. He doesn't like when Paul is angry. He doesn't like the blue-eyed boy that he wishes felt more strange than familiar. Like he could pretend it was someone else.

"So did I."

It shouldn't feel like he has Kaworu cornered. He's hemmed him in with an extended arm many times before, Kaworu's teasing, delighted face turned up at him; he's had the favour returned more often, Kaworu's impetuous demanding nature insisting on the seriousness of Paul's capturing.

But this is different. Paul turns off the water and draws his hand back to his knee, looking at the crumpled angel's misery.

"I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry for you too. You're not bonded but she's your sister too."

He keeps his distance, but unsure if it's for Paul's sake or his own. Usually, he's keen to get in close, to pretend they're eliminating all the barriers between their souls. But now something has been broken in both of them and they don't fit together quite right. Nor does it dawn on him that sorry on someone else's behalf is something he could not have understood almost a year ago.

Paul almost smiles at that, even now. The tension of it unrealized plays around his mouth, brings a different fractured light to his eyes. He's not alone. Kaworu is here, feeling it with him, and it's terrible - but they're not alone, either of them.

"That's why we'll get her back," he says, mustering up reassurance through the haze of this awful day, "She's ours. She knows that."

Whatever she says, whatever she tells herself. She knows that.

"And you're mine." He comes a fraction closer, their toes almost touching. "So I'll take care of you."

"We will."

Because the opposite is not an option. He will not accept it.

Kaworu's lips quirk and he taps at the base of Paul's foot, just before his toes, with the tips of his own. Paul's feet are much bigger than his. He knows this because Paul is fond of occasionally pointing out his tiny feet.

"And I take care of you. I'm your guardian angel. Not the other way around."

That ekes a shallow, puffing laugh from Paul, dry as ash.

"You're right. How could I forget."

His eyes are blue, but not glowing, no reflected light bouncing off the water between them. His voice is his own, unified and whole. He exists in a single moment, and no others, and these are all things that he takes as signs of safety. His heart barely flutters when he slides his hand from his knee and reaches for Kaworu's left arm, where Gideon's handprint still lies, proof of their connection holding yet.

"I love you," he says, and taps out three beats on the hidden handprint.

Nothing happens on the first or the second. It is the third that flares blue as death and twice as hungry, heat licking Kaworu's vulnerable skin like it means to work down to his bones.

Paul recoils so hard and fast that he cracks the tile behind him with his skull, opening a gash he will not feel bleeding for some time as he stares in luminous horror at what he's done, pulled as far away from the angel as he can be within the confines of the tub.

Edited 2022-10-16 23:18 (UTC)

At first, he doesn't scream. The shock is worst that pain. In a mirror of Paul, he recoils too, slamming his spine against the tap behind him. It's that impact of that object against his skin that finally makes him cry out in pain.

Then it fades, the bruising that the tap inflicted on his skin starts to recede, like ink splatters being magically removed from a white page. Kaworu opens his mouth to tell Paul he's okay and then all that can come out of his mouth is a scream of pain.

Is this what it's like to be human? To have to endure this pain for minutes, hours, days, months before it heals? What a miserable existence and now he's part of it. He chokes on it as he reaches over to feel the charred and peeling skin on his shoulder.

Kaworu has teased and scolded Paul in turns nearly as long as they've known each other about Paul's protectiveness over an angel who cannot ever be hurt deeply or long. It's foolish of Paul to prefer to risk his own fragile human self, foolish of him to handle Kaworu with the delicacy of a seashell in his palm, but as Kaworu has also pointed out, Paul is a fool.

Love makes him gentle like nothing else does. He cannot help himself.

"Kaworu," he says, hollowly, "No, no -"

Paul heaves himself out of the tub, almost slipping in his unbalanced haste, and he backs toward the door with his hands in fists clutched to his chest as his eyes stay fixed to the wound that does not close itself over, the hideous corruption of the immaculate form, and he makes a torn, soft noise in the back of his throat.

"Paul..." Kaworu tries to call him back but the sounds come out in a guttural cry as he moves his arm to reach out to a boy he loves. The boy who is always so gentle with him, who picks him up and carries him like he's a delicate glass object meant to be fawned over.

He sits there, in tepid water, shaking and clutching a wound he doesn't know how to heal and staring at a boy he doesn't know how to comfort.

"What...?"

"Sophia," Paul says, wild-eyed and bleeding light, "Get Izuku."

The ink black mouse bursts from over his heart in a gush of smoke, wreathed in the same flickering, unreal glow that radiates from her Sleeper. She hangs suspended in the air, curled up on herself, and the alarm shivers across the unseen web of Omen communication to Midoriya's woollen, obstinate companion.

"Stay there," he tells Kaworu, desperately, as steam rolls off him in clouds, "Izuku-kun is coming - he'll take care of you, he'll -"

Panic swallows anything else he can think of to say, chokes him on his own tongue and the bitter taste of char. He cannot leave; he cannot stay; he cannot avert his gaze.

A loud THOOM cracks over the city like a thunderclap, but there is no storm, save for the lightning-clad visitor who lands (without causing damage) in front of their place and lets himself in with a key quick as any resident.

"What kind of burn is it??" he calls ahead as his sneakers pound across the floor and into the bathroom. What kind of burn can overcome Kaworu's regeneration? Midoriya made it across the city instantly, not to be hindered by anything as trivial as a sound barrier. He didn't have time to ask Sophia anything other than where and what the emergency was.

He falls to his knees next to the tub. Skin blistered and opened in layers like a red flower--He already knows it's bad enough to need a trip to the Lumenarium.

"The water's not cold enough--It'll be okay Kaworu-kun, I know what to do. Don't touch it, don't get it wet. The water's just to cool it down."

His voice fades to a wave of the softest gentleness. Before turning the tap, before doing anything, he must calm Kaworu down. He takes Kaworu's free hand. With his other, he strokes his hair, careful not to do anything more to jostle him.

Kaworu, for his part, is no longer crying out and has seemed to have gone into some sort of minor shock with both his body and his mind used to this kind of sustained pain. He makes soft whimpers, like a wounded kitten, and says nothing more.

When Izuku comes over to him, at first he jerks away, afraid that Izuku will poke or prod his wound. However, the simple movement causes him pain anyway and he chokes on a noise. He lets Izuku take his hand and stroke his hair and stares, wide eyes red like the fire that burned him, at Paul.

Wondering why he hurt him. And desperate for his comfort.

The arrival of Midoriya should take the bite out of Paul's fear, but when he recoils out of the hero's path it's clear that it does no such thing. All it does is exchange one immediate fear for a complex of others, all of them reflected in Kaworu's wounded, bewildered eyes.

"I'm sorry," he chokes out, "I am so sorry, Kaworu, I didn't mean to hurt you - I don't know what's happening, I don't - " and the next noise he makes is pained with more than guilt as his closed fists flash bright, a burst like two glass bulbs shattering. He realizes, with a tilted, nauseous lurch, that the room is still getting hotter.

"I have to go." He looks between Kaworu and Midoriya, stricken with a flat-out terror neither of them will have seen since the day of the storm, the nearly paralytic horror of loss unfolding before him out of his control. "I didn't mean for this to happen. This isn't supposed to be happening."

He's already backing to the door, his steps measured and extraordinarily careful, his Omen still floating like a ball of candlelight before him.

Midoriya's head whirls around. "No, you can't leave, you have to tell me what caused this! I thought--you used it just fine before--Isn't it fire? Like Todoroki-kun's Quirk? Why isn't Kaworu-kun healing?"

He turns on the cold tap with a careful enough stream that won't splash on the burn. He scoots the short distance across to the sink cabinet and retrieves the first aid kit while mentally counting symptoms.

There's an irritated huff beyond the door--Midoriya's ram Omen unable to assist due to their size except for some glowering at Paul.

"Take this for the pain first, Kaworu-kun," he says lowly.

He opens one of the little packets and presses an ordinary aspirin and water from the tap cupped in his hand to his lips, his touch feather-light but insistent on accomplishing his task. His voice is all over the place, and his eyes are wide in a taut face, but his hands are steady. He had hoped never to be reminded what burned flesh smells like.

"I have to cover it before I take you to the Lumenarium. They'll do a better job of dressing it. I'll just wash my hands first. It'll be okay..."

Kaworu's eyes look at him, wide, pained, and pleading. He's already been a victim of Paul's carelessness. He doesn't want to be a victim of his abandonment either. He doesn't want to be alone. Loneliness burns even more painful than flames.

He takes the aspirin with little complaint but shakes his head, trembling, at the mention of leaving. He doesn't want to go to the Lumenarium. He doesn't like the white walls and the antiseptic smells. It's like being back in the labs. He'll wake up alone after some disaster with no company except an unfamiliar ceiling.

Paul can imagine too clearly this room full of smoke, the red, dull glow of a fire running through the walls and bowing the ceiling, and it's as if imagining it sends it running down his own marrow in merciless, starving runnels. The smell of Kaworu's burn is inescapable, not-quite-human flesh scorched coating the back of Paul's throat as he breathes shallow and shaking, skin paled like he too somehow trembles at the edge of shock.

"Crown of ash," he rasps, smoke there and not there between his teeth, "The unmaker. Indivisible divided, the sunder-star tower-"

When he bites his tongue he does it so savagely that the white that flashes across his eyes does so only inside of them, the blinding flare of pain matched to the hard click of his molars slotting into place. He shoves the heels of his hands against his eyes like brands, and they burn as fiercely. Terror holds him in its palm. The world spins on a strange and hostile axis, and it spins him with it, out and out and out unending.

He thinks, absurdly, of a paper dragonfly, hung at the end of a string.

"I must not fear," he whispers, with swollen, wounded tongue, "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."

The glaring luminosity of his hands flickers. He thinks of them on the wheel of a ship that shakes itself to pieces around him, straining against itself in every part. He is the ship. He is the hands upon it. He is the storm that seeks to break it.

"I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path." He breathes deep of iron and salt, the vapour of his arteries, and he floats on the great calamity of his selfdom as a leaf in the wind. "Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

"I don't know what's happening to me. What went wrong," Paul says, with his hands still over his face, words slurred but his own, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth unnoticed and unimportant. "I don't know why he's not healing. You have to take him somewhere they will. Please. I can't hold it like this forever."

Edited 2022-10-25 01:05 (UTC)

The litany is meant to be something to calm the speaker, but Midoriya has only ever heard it in the context of crisis. A moment of weakness steals over him, and his next steps scatter like birds.

Every sense, including the common one, says Paul needs to leave, but Midoriya doesn't want to let him out of his sight. He sees Paul's slim silhouette running wreathed in blue flame and collapsing dead in the street as delicately as a falling leaf. He sees a sudden blue conflagration engulfing half the block leaving nothing of Bakugou and Dabi's bodies worthy of salvage. He was not there for what happened or what might happen. Aizawa taught his students to think of the worst-case scenario. Midoriya comes to a terrified halt in the middle of doing so instead of charging forward with solutions and contingencies like he usually does.

He only moves on instinct and need, cradling Kaworu's head and resting his cheek against it as much to comfort himself as he. His face mirrors Kaworu's stricken look at Paul. He descends into a quick patter of murmuring.

"You can't leave us, you have to stay, you're bleeding, Kaworu-kun is scared--" I'm scared-- "please--"

He stops suddenly. Midoriya's Omen has appeared behind Paul in the doorway. Without hesitation, they give Paul's back a glancing headbutt designed to jostle him but not push him further into the room. It's a brusque sort of call to attention. Midoriya blinks. He remembers what he's doing. He remembers who he is, where he came from, and who he wants to be. It's the sort of shining, crystalized thought that calmed Blackwhip's first uncontrollable and destructive awakening.

"I don't know if it's like Todoroki-kun's Quirk, but you can't overheat, and you can't trap yourself inside. You need to get somewhere outside with cold water." The sound of the bath tap returns to wash away the buzzing in his ears. "I need to stay with Kaworu-kun." Because he doesn't like hospitals goes unsaid. That is a later bridge to cross. "But you need to keep talking to us with Sophia-san. Who will help you if it gets worse and you're unable to tell anyone? I won't let you be alone."

wolves in the middle of town | october catch-all

i'm a house on fire and everyone is leaving | kaworu nagisa

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cw: burns

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cw: burn description

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cw: self-injury, tongue trauma

cw: description of burning to death