Out on the Verge of the Rest of Our Lives, Part Two

The cold hits her exposed shoulders first. Hakaze exhales, slow, grounding herself in the bite of the air and the solid presence of Ren behind her. She’s acutely aware of how close he is: of how easily she herself could step back and run into his unnecessarily solid chest, or lean the other way entirely. How she absolutely has no intention of doing that.

Before she can linger too long on the thought, Ren is setting their drinks on the railing.

As she watches, Ren kneels. His hands are light on her ankle. “Does it hurt?”

The look on his face is soft and concerned. It should not make Hakaze’s mouth go so dry.

“It’s fine,” she says. Then, stupidly, “Your hand feels nice.”

Ren flushes. The look of concern is briefly chased by something dark and hot, lush as he seems to orient himself to how close they are, how the hem of her dress flutters next to his hand.

Still, he’s persistent. “You should get it looked at.”

Hakaze feels crazy. She feels the stirrings of something wake up when she watches his upturned face.

Fuck it.

She raises a single eyebrow. “You’re looking at it now.”

Ren’s uncertainty melts into heavy, singular focus as he takes her ankle with a surer grip, turning it this way and that, as her dress flutters against his face. When Hakaze begins to slips her shoes off, his eyes dart up to hers. “Hakaze,” he hisses. “We still have to go back. Let me fix it and we can go.”

Hakaze eyes his bright eyes and blushing cheeks, and grins, too far gone on the giddy rush of Ren’s attention to even feel the dull throb of pain in her ankle. “It’s just shoes, you pervert.”

“Hakaze,” Ren says again. When she keeps pulling them off he unhooks his tie pin and does something complicated with his fingers, so that the strap of the shoe is more or less in place. “Here—let me—”

Hakaze goes still when Ren tips her foot in his hands, examining it with an earnest, almost painful focus. There’s nothing tentative in his touch, and he's steady, intense, unguarded. The longer she watches him, the more it feels like he’s forgotten how to hold himself back, like whatever restraint he carries has quietly failed, leaving her caught in the full, unnerving weight of his attention.

Ren, unselfconscious, tips Hakaze’s ankle around, trying to get a good angle. “The light in here’s bad,” he mutters. “Can’t see if anything really wrong with it.”

Hakaze feels lightheaded, something heady and thick spiking her blood. Without a word, she nudges a chair back with her heel and sits, letting her knees fall open.

Ren freezes. His pupils blow till there’s the thinnest ring of brown around the black.

“What are you doing, Hakaze,” he says, soft and shaking. He sways forward like there’s a chain connecting them, like he can barely stand straight. He’s blushing so violently he looks almost ill.

Hakaze finds that her throat’s too dry and her brain’s full of sparks and static to speak. She pulls Ren close and Ren obeys the tug with a quiet, helpless sound, his slender legs slotting neatly into the space between Hakaze’s.

For one disorienting second, she thinks about asking him for that confession. It hangs sweet and hopeful in the air between them, waiting for her to reach out and take.

Instead, she inhales.

“Ren,” she says, and realizes that her hands want, desperately, to touch his face. She knots them in his jacket instead.

His lips part. He looks wrecked.

Her fingers tighten in his jacket. “I’m going to tell you something real. You have to listen.”

His eyes, his hair, his face: they’re all familiar when he says, “Anything. I’ll do anything you ask.”

Fuck. She doesn't think she'll survive this.

“You are fucking infuriating,” she tells him, pulling his hair a little in frustration. He goes perfectly still. “You make me crazy, do you know that? I don't do this because I know how I am. I go all in on people, I get too attached. And if you use that against me, I’ll kill you.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” he murmurs, his voice is low and rough, his eyes stuck on hers. She tightens her grip on his hair and he closes his eyes, briefly, with a quick, sharp little inhale.

“It’ll end badly. We're going to drive each other crazy.”

“That’s okay,” he says. He really has no business looking this certain. “We’ll figure it out and start over.”

Start over. He really is crazy. 

But being stuck in time has also done crazy things to her brain. She thinks of the shadow Kirishima had cast over her all these years: but he was just a man, wasn't he? Just a guy. And the veiled figures of Astreon that she mistrusted had coalesced into the shapes of people she trusts: Mamoru, Fukunaga. Fuma. 

She had been wrong about herself, too, in so many counts, about what she was, what she stood for. And for the time being, maybe it mattered less if she believed if she was difficult to love or not. Maybe that was something that she shouldn't listen to just herself about.

She looks down on him, bossy and imperious. “Well? What do you say, Prince? Do you want to go out with me?”

Ren lifts his hand, stopping just short of her waist. The look in his eye is almost reverent, which should be all kinds of illegal.

“All in,” he says, voice tipping up in a question.

Hakaze nods, grim and certain. “All in.”

“Good,” is all he says, before he kisses her.