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Every time he transforms, it’s like a throwback to 5 years ago. Sensory-wise, mainly; it’s the dull pain and the feeling as if the air was about to be punched out of his lungs. But nothing happens. Taiga knows he’s actually fine because new generation drivers are faultless and deadly effective. He leaves the explanation to whatever psychosomatic entanglements might be at play. And these are far out of his field.
Being knocked out of transformation is distracting enough to not care about it at the moment. Cloud of pixels obscures his vision when he hits the ground. In the split second, he shields his head crossing arms over it. The armor dissipated the moment Bugster landed its hit, so he is thrown against the concrete unprotected, barely making out a roll that would absorb most of the impact. Still, in his clumsy attempt, his forearm takes the most of it and as he turns over, splayed on his back, he feels a sharp pain. Taiga curses under his breath.
Brave is still fighting, a little more chaotically than before, but at least it seems like he managed to land a solid hit while Bugster was busy throwing Taiga around. It is just a matter of a finisher that arrives soon after. Hiiro lands a hit: it’s a flash, blade drawing an elegant arch in the air, another swirl of pixels, and it’s all over.
He doesn’t even grace the remnants of the dissipating Bugster with a single glance and furiously treads towards Taiga, who winces even before the surgeon gets to start his litany.
“Do you need to have your ears or eyes checked? Maybe your memory? That was not the plan.” Hiiro spits out, still out of breath, droplets of sweat disappearing into his collar. “You were supposed to support me from a distance.” He points to the spot Taiga was, well, supposed to stay in. Next words don’t get to fall out of his mouth because he notices the blood leaking through Taiga’s torn sleeve and immediately crouches next to him. Taiga lets him roll up his sleeve and bites his tongue as Hiiro does so. He immediately gets out a bandage roll from the pocket of his coat - prepared as always - and dresses the wound, putting the necessary pressure to stop the bleeding. As soon as he is done, Taiga holds up his arm before he is told to.
“It is a battlefield, Hiiro. You need to change strategy as you go. You were in his range. If it hadn’t been for me it would be you lying there. Probably.” Taiga’s almost nonchalant about it and perhaps that’s what sets Hiiro off because his inspection of other possible wounds that fall would leave on Taiga’s body come to a drastic halt.
“And that is supposed to make it okay?!” His voice is almost hysteric. Taiga huffs. He has a nasty habit of rolling eyes at the hand that helps him.
“Come on. Realistically, I had it worse.” It’s true. Hiiro knows it’s true. Yet he is acting all livid about it and Taiga has none of it.
“If being reckless is something you want to brag about then you should-”
“Retire?” Taiga cuts him off before he gets to finish. “I’m not a fucking egg, Hiiro,” buzzing in his head, makes him hear his voice as if he was in other room. Or if there was a solid layer of old TV static put on it. It makes it easy to raise the voice. “As a matter of fact, maybe it’s you who should retire if you can’t stand me getting scratched.”
Hiiro’s lips form a thin line.
“Stop fucking acting like you’ve never thrown yourself in front of danger,” his words land one by one. “Damn mister knight in the shining armor.”
There are no more words from Hiiro as his eyes darken. He gets Taiga’s unharmed arm across his shoulder and helps him struggle to his feet. Whatever it is, it feels like a sudden drop in temperature.
Walking back to the hospital, despite being mercifully short, is somewhat a cooldown. The adrenaline rush from the fight basically petered out and while the wound already stopped bleeding, it reminds Taiga of its presence with jabs of pain.
To be fair, he feels almost ready to say sorry but Hiiro shut himself off good and proper so trying to talk to him would be as productive as attempting to strike up a conversation with a statue. Hiiro practically hauls him to the CR, striding with the energy of someone who didn’t just come out of an exhausting fight. Kiriya is inside, sitting among tons of files and turns towards them when the door opens.
“Yo. Sorry for the mess, doctor Kagami, I,” He stops when he actually takes a good look at the state of them. Taiga gets begrudgingly directed to the chair across Kiriya and Hiiro rushes to the cabinet.
“Nice ouchie you got there.” Kiriya continues unbothered by the arctic atmosphere dragged in by them to the CR, moving in closer to inspect the arm.
“Particularly nasty case of an encounter with the pavement.”
“Every encounter with pavement would be nasty if you hit it after being thrown full force,” Hiiro barks back, coming to the table with the tray. Instruments clatter when it's put down. “Get these papers out, if you will. The way he is, you’ll get to take a look at him soon enough, coroner.”
Kiriya seems half amused and half serious but salutes and collects his work, and Taiga catches the kind of looks he gives them - ones that seem nonchalant but are in fact painstakingly assessing. With all files tucked under his arm, he exchanges a glance with Taiga that is probably supposed to be knowing, but he’s uncertain what Kiriya knows and what they are exactly communicating on.
“I’ll leave you to it, then. Play nice.” And he’s gone. As much as it would make everything awkward, Taiga almost wishes he wasn’t. By his side, Hiiro silently unwraps the bandage and assesses the wound after it’s uncovered.
“What do you think about this?” Hiiro’s voice is nothing out of the ordinary, or at least attempts to be indifferent but fails, just barely. It shakes on the edges when he gets tiny gravel out of the wound. Taiga hisses but the kind of look Hiiro sends him, shuts him up so he draws his lips into a thin line.
“Fucking gnarly.”
“Right. Fucking gnarly.” Hiiro repeats almost absentmindedly because his focus is somewhere else. Taiga just looks up for a second in disbelief because he never heard his swearing like this. Not like he wasn’t capable of landing effective invectives because he definitely was, but that was something new. Taiga feels kind of anxious at the prospects.
Meanwhile, Hiiro is busying himself with patching up work, with all necessary tools lined up on the table. He is obviously swift with it, as he washes the blood from the skin thoroughly. The laceration is not that deep but it looks ugly and is jagged and, well, needs a couple of stitches. And apparently, Taiga’s saying that he had worse, doesn’t make it more okay. Or at all okay. Which is a concept that is novel and almost crazy, and he needs at least another few months to mull over it. Nico would tell him that he is stupid or something and she would be probably right.
The silence at CR is almost overbearing, falling like a heavy curtain over them both. It’s just the buzz of electricity and while Taiga is more than used to deafening silence at his own place, this once, he wishes for a radio. Sharp artificial lamp is also too much, darting straight into his head. He lowers his head and focuses on his shoes and tiles, and the other arm, leaning against the thigh. The vision is not exactly blurred, but the world seems a bit unreal and distant, still behind a screen of static. The smell of antiseptic is familiar, at least. Smell of Hiiro too, and Taiga realizes with a sudden tightening in his chest how grounding it has gotten.
“Are you ok?” Hiiro must have noticed the hitched breath, but he doesn’t look up from his forceps and the needle. Taiga answers with a short, nervous chuckle.
“Your bedside manners are impeccable.” Hiiro offers a millisecond long glare as an answer.
Final suture is put in place, pulled through and tied. Having finished, Hiiro leans back in a chair, looking at his job and then at Taiga, letting out a slow breath that is, just like his voice, composed but shuddering at the peripheries. Taiga purses his lips in a tight line that goes askew, involuntarily.
Hiiro walks away to clean and put away the instruments. Taiga’s gaze follows him for a while until he lets his back press against the chair and bends his head slightly backwards.
“Can you dim the lights?” He hears a click and the oppressive brightness diminishes. It’s almost pleasant. He mutters a thank you.
If anything, it’s probably just fatigue that makes him feel like he’s suspended in something and floating without direction. Tightness in his heart doesn’t really help and his breaths come out irregular, waxing and waning. Stitches slightly pull at his skin with an itchy sensation that’s both barely there and overwhelming.
Suddenly Hiiro is by his side and places fingers on Taiga’s face, propping it to take a better look as if he was raising it out of water. He cradles his face with gentleness that is less professional and more cordial, one that Hiiro usually reserves for different contexts and situations and Taiga’s breath gets stuck in his throat for a moment.
“What’s that for?”
Hiiro frowns and huffs a warm breath. From this up close, he sees strands of Hiiro’s hair that fell out of order and stuck to his forehead, and a small cut on his lip. Taiga doesn’t recall the moment during the fight when he might’ve gotten it. But then Hiiro moves his hand to Taiga’s hair and brushes it from his forehead. Next second, a hesitant kiss lands there and Taiga feels like he hits the ground. It’s as earth-shaking as it is stabilizing and as it gets firmer, Taiga feels the worry and the care seeping from it.
They stay like this for a while and Hiiro breaks away finally, to bury Taiga’s head in his shoulder. Taiga feels the warm embrace closing in around him.
“Seriously, what?” He reaches up to put his hand on Hiiro’s arm and tugs at the shirt.
It takes a moment until he feels how Hiiro slightly shakes with suppressed sobs. Taiga freezes; a pang of guilt sinks like chill into his bones.
His hand tries to grip Hiiro’s shoulder in a way that seems reassuring. A response to Hiiro’s fear that’s probably insufficient, but Taiga doesn’t know what else he can do because whatever his words are, they’re drowned out in the uneasy feeling in his head that quickly claims other parts of his body. Whatever he feels, it always consumes Taiga entirely, either spurring him into action or paralyzing, gluing him to the spot. He feels rendered useless, unmoving and he hates that feeling. It’s unnervingly similar to hopelessness which makes him nauseous with its familiarity.
He gets that it’s the kind of situation when a couple of minuscule things tumble down and end up in an avalanche. It’s not about the failed plan, not about the arm and the stitches (laid neatly and to be taken out soon). Zoomed out, in macro scale, it’s about everything in between, it’s about where they started and where they are now: a room infused with an antiseptic smell that whisks him away to a past that is unwelcome and still lingers in the crevices of his memory.
“It’s not that I’m mad at you,” he hears words mumbled near his ear and a warm patch of breath on his neck. Hiiro sounds like he weighs each of them and mouths them carefully to not spill the tears. “I’m worried because you’re getting hurt and then you say it’s nothing. It gets me back to-” He chokes up. Another sob shakes them both.
Taiga gets it. Because they come from the same place of grief and regret, and misascribed guilt.
“Listen, a situation like this probably will happen again. Can’t promise you it won’t.” Taiga finally mutters. There is not much comfort that he can offer.
Hiiro drops down to his seat, elbows propped up at his thigh and head in his hands.
“I was overreacting,” he says after letting out a deep exhale, setting his voice straight. “I know you’re capable and you can take risks if you find them necessary.”
“Still, you give me too much credit.” Taiga chuckles briefly, “Sometimes, I’m just being stupid. Rushing into stuff. I was there before I knew it. I guess I just didn’t want to see you hurt.” He extends his hand to Hiiro’s shoulder. The other man drags his hands off his head and laces them together, still looking down on the floor. Hiiro seems small and despondent which is not a sight Taiga likes seeing but he cherishes the kind of trust he is given.
The atmosphere is a little more relaxed, warmth seeping into white walls covered in comfortable semidarkness. It was CR after all, littered with everyone’s personal stuff and probably the most familiar place in the hospital, despite being the workplace (in which Hiiro has been relentlessly and mercilessly enforcing no display of affection rule but as much as Taiga loves to pick on his petty shortcomings, he doesn’t feel like pointing it out now).
“It’s the same for me. It’s just, when I saw you hitting the ground and lying there, my mind just went back to…” Hiiro goes quiet, but he doesn’t have to finish. Taiga’s heart hurts a bit. “It’s a very vivid image.”
Taiga moves in closer, legs of the chair scratching against the floor. He tries to suppress the shaking of his arm when pulls Hiiro in, smashing their cheeks together. Hiiro huffs in surprise but embraces him and settles his hands on the small of Taiga’s back.
“Come on, I’m here, despite everything. For better or for worse.” Taiga says straight into Hiiro’s ear, who flinches and makes a noise of a startled cat in protest. Taiga responds by locking him into a tighter hug, one that’s perhaps stronger than necessary. Yet, Hiiro puts his head on his shoulder and Taiga only hopes that some of his tension evaporates. He brings his stitched hand carefully to Hiiro’s hair. It sifts through his fingers. Hiiro nuzzles in closer. Taiga lets himself breathe in deeply. There is careful and anxious adoration welling up in him, as he was holding something fragile but Hiiro is firm against all expectations, steadying Taiga even if he lets himself be soft and vulnerable.
“Put your imagination to better use.” Taiga mumbles into Hiiro’s collar and is rewarded with half-groan and half-laugh and something that sounds suspiciously close to you’re stupid.
It’s a dulcet moment that lingers and stretches out, enclosed within their arms and as far as Taiga is concerned, he could be called an idiot even a million times for it.
“Let’s go home.”