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It’s hot. The sticky weeks of late-June when summer is trying to assert itself aggressively through the rain. In the window, the salvaged air conditioning unit clacks and clangs as it sputters along, never letting up on the reminder that its only here second hand, after some human or another had deemed it too broken to bother with. And maybe that was true, and they’d be better off kicking it out of the window frame and just using a fan - cheap enough and far easier to manage. Uta was thinking of wiring in a full ceiling fan, complete with lights, anyway, but electrician’s work was always hit or miss on the DIY.
“Turn that thing off, please.” Itori mumbles, slurred from the bottles of wine they’d split (not evenly). “It’s giving me a headache.”
“Without it, the heat will make it worse,” Uta says, wondering if he shouldn’t have taken more of the drink for himself, for his sake, or for hers, he isn’t sure. Probably both.
She groans into the pillow and reaches up sloppily to hit at his arm, insistent. Her skin is slick with sweat, even with the damn thing on. Despite the fact that his must be too, the sensation feels cold, sending goosebumps over the ink lines of tattoos.
“You’re closer to the window,” he says, just to be contrary, which is a habit he ought to have broken years ago, but probably never will. They’re adults now, it says so on the fake IDs Itori had made for them both, resting in the wallets on his nightstand. He’s pretty sure Itori’s age is a lie on hers, but it hardly matters. Everything else on them is, too.
Itori lifts her head up just enough to glare at him. On her ID, she’s smiling, but it doesn’t reach her eyes, not really. I don’t think anyone but you would notice that, she’d said. It is a good picture, practiced and deliberately so.
On his, well, they aren’t his eyes at all. Might as well have listed his birthday as today, right at the cusp of summer, rather than be the one truth on the card. The start of December seems forever away, now.
He watches a bead of sweat fall down the nape of her neck. He can feel the damp edges of the loose tank top he’s wearing as he shifts, debating reaching over her to the unit. It makes the entire endeavor feel unnecessarily complicated. Like more than he can muster up the energy for.
“It’s the humidity, really,” he says, instead.
“I don’t care what it is.”
He’s read about it, as much as he could understand anyway. Evaporative cooling, and all. The transfer of heat energy and phase changes. When it’s like this, muggy and hazy between rain storms, the sweat isn’t doing them any good. A misapplied evolutionary response. Maladaptive biology. Something like that.
He gets up off the bed, hyperaware of the fabric of his clothing and the feel of his own skin. The newest additions he’d made to the design around his bicep are less than a week old, but it doesn’t feel any different from the rest of it. Guess that would be adaptive biology. Not that the article had mentioned anything of the sort. Of their sort.
He doesn’t go over to the window. Instead, he slips out the door of the bedroom and into the hall. His bare feet - it’s much too hot for socks - stick to the reclaimed vinyl flooring with each step towards the kitchen.
There’s plenty of food, for him, for her if she wants it, and for anyone else that comes by, but the heat effects even his appetite, and the wine is doing more than enough to quell it for now. He fills two glasses with as many ice cubes as he can manage from the little bin on the side of the freezer. It’s tempting to leave the door open, the cold condensation billowing out of it like clouds into the muggy air. Uta lets himself, just for a little, breathing the mist in deep and resting his head against the cool metal of the unit.
He remembers dragging it up here, how it’d barely fit the narrow stairs and how back then he had still been able to feel the fight from the day before in his shoulder as he supported half its weight. Not that the others hadn’t offered. It had been a good find. Much better than the air conditioner he can still hear clanking a room away. Really, he can still hear dozens, maybe even a hundred or more if he strains his ears across the ward. It’s nothing compared to what Itori can do. Which really must not be helping her head.
He closes the freezer and takes the tall jar of the leftover coffee from this morning out and pours however much will fit in around the ice cubes into one of the glasses. It’s not particularly good coffee, all the more so now, having sat hours cooled in the refrigerator, but it’ll have to do. He fills the other glass up with water. He can’t take credit for the plumbing work, though he did find this particular sink. Like the electrical, he could try it himself, and had, but it was better to call in a favor. Maybe he should do the same for the fan. Or a better air conditioner.
Itori is exactly how he left her, a few more drops of sweat between her shoulder blades, AC unit still clanging on and on next to her. He puts the cups down next to the bed. Even if she wanted to shut it out, she’s not drunk enough not to be tracking his every movement.
Still, when he places one of the ice cubes down right between her shoulder blades she jumps, and he has to move fast to catch it before it falls into the folds of the sheets and starts a puddle forming on his mattress. He’s ended up right over her, holding himself up by his arm. She squints up at him. Scowls.
He pops the ice cube into his mouth. A drop of cold water drips out from between his lips and right onto her forehead. He finds himself smiling at that, which just makes more water dribble out onto her cheeks. She pushes at his chest, misses the low cut tank top entirely and presses right against his skin. He yields easily, rolling back to a sitting position, still nearly straddling her legs.
“Now you’re closer to the window.” Itori says, wiping the drops and sweat off her face with the back of her hand.
“Oh,” Uta says, popping the mostly melted ice cube out of his mouth to speak. He looks over to the air conditioner less than a meter from his head. “Guess I am.”
She pulls her knees up, just barely sliding them past his legs. “Turn it off.”
“It’ll get even hotter,” he says, but does as she asks.
The thing gives off a baleful mechanical groan and a long frustrated hiss, as if the only thing more burdensome for it than being forced to continue to work was being told to stop.
“There, happy?” He slides the last bit of ice back between his lips.
“Nope. Miserable.” That’s his privilege, he knows, hearing her that honest. The makeup around her eyes is smeared by the sweat, some of it probably smudged onto his pillow case, and he can see uneven patches of red around her hairline. Not that he’d ever dare mention it, to her or anyone else. She’s pretty, though, like this. He rolls back over to the other side of the bed, and reaches for the cup full of coffee. He offers it over, and Itori takes it wordlessly. She presses the condensation covered edge of the glass against her forehead and lets out a long, wavering sigh.
He could just watch her like this, taking breaths in and out of the muggy air. And she’d let him. A snarky comment here or there, maybe, but even that is part of the routine. Though, thinking of it that way makes it just a little bit unpleasant. Things are stagnant enough in this stifling humid heat already. He fishes another ice cube out of the glass of water and slips it between his lips, just for the contrast. Cold on hot, movement on stillness, black lines of ink against his skin, the lace of her bra against hers.
“I’ll go get some fans,” he says - noise against the closest thing to silence they’ll get here, in the heart of the city, their ears both more than capable of reaching out for at least a kilometer.
The other room on this floor has become a sort of storage room now that he’s migrated most of his mask making stuff downstairs, into the old ward office proper. He put so much time and effort into this building that he supposes everyone decided to just let him keep it, and find another place for their meetings. Or maybe they didn’t think he was serious, about stepping down. Someone told him that again, just the other week, asked when he was planning on taking the reins of the place back. It was, they’d said, still his for the taking. Not because they’d needed anything, though he would have been perfectly willing to help, but just because the way of the world was to follow the strong, and he was still the strongest one around.
He’s thinking about opening up a shop, instead. He’s not situated for much foot traffic, intentionally buried in back alleys as the building is, but that probably won’t be much of an issue, given the clientele. Itori is ahead of him on this, too, and she didn’t even have a building to start with. She’s a marvel, really, going near completely above board with her paperwork, paying rent for the cramped little retail space and doing all the permitting.
There, she’d said, pouring him a glass from a bottle of blood wine at the still unfinished bar, the first legally sold glass of blood wine in Tokyo. He’d even paid for it, just to make it official.
The standing fan is easy enough to find, poking its circular head out from behind an easel and an old arm chair, but it takes him a while to remember where he’d last seen the box fan. Turns out there were three of them in here, all lying on their sides, stacked on top of each other. He’ll have to put the word out, in case anyone needs one. It’s awfully hot, after all.
Not that the fans do much, in this humidity. The air conditioner still blocking the window doesn’t help, but the fan mode isn’t much quieter on the old thing, so he does his best to place the ones he’s dragged out of the store room around it. The whir they make is steady, at least.
For a while, then, they’re both still, half reclining on the bed as the fan oscillates back and forth, back and forth. He’s let his hair get rather long, and the air tosses it to and fro across his shoulder.
“I think I’m going to shave my head,” Uta says, on a whim.
Itori raises an eyebrow at him.
He combs his fingers across the sides of his scalp. “Maybe I’ll leave a mohawk in the middle.”
She scrunches up her nose at that.
“I’m pretty sure I have an electric razor in the back room, help me find it.” He wasn’t seriously considering it, until now, but he sort of wants to see how she’ll react. Besides, he has a reputation as someone who far too easily follows his whims, and he’d hate to disappoint.
“Absolutely not. I refuse to be your accomplice in this.” She tips the mostly empty glass of coffee back, for emphasis, the ice cubes clinking pointedly against the side of it.
“Persons harboring or otherwise preventing the arrest of a ghoul will be severely punished,” he recites back, “No getting out of this one. Help me shave my head.”
“I’d rather face the doves. Do it yourself if you’re so determined.” She fishes one of the ice cubes out of her drink and studies it between two manicured fingers before dropping it back in the glass and handing it over to him. “And get me a refill.”
“As you wish.”
When he comes back in with her fresh glass of coffee, about a third of his head is shaved on one side. The air blowing out from the fans feels strange against it. Kind of nice.
She takes the cup and looks him over. “You didn’t finish.”
He turns his head side to side in front of the fan, feeling the contrasting sensations along the line of hair he’s parted over. “I think I’m going to leave it like this,” he decides, as much on a whim as before.
She grabs at his tank top and pulls him onto the bed. It’s not forceful, by any means, but assertive none the less. He obliges this, too. Her nails are sharp against his chin as she lifts his jaw and tilts it back and forth. Her eyes are appraising, the same way they look over bits of pilfered jewelry offered to her as payment.
She runs her hand along the shave section, and back into the mess of hair behind it. He lets himself be guided by her, moves whichever way she turns him. He leans into it when she runs her hand down his neck and out under the thin strap of the tank top he’s wearing. It slides off easily.
She runs a finger down and then up, in a lazy circle around the muscles of his chest, and then back up his neck to rest on the shaved section by his ear. She flicks at the piercings there, as if to say she’s done with the assessment.
“Well?”
She leans back against the pillow and takes a long sip of coffee. “It works.” She says, decisively. “Somehow.”
“That’s all I needed to hear.”
He flops the wrong way across the mattress, laying his head in her lap and his bare torso across the top of the sheets. He’s catching the very edge of the box fan’s breeze against his side. It makes the sweat slick skin there rise, just slightly, into goosebumps.