Chapter Text
Suo had to hand it to him, Sakura had held out far longer than he’d expected, considering his living conditions.
As winter blanketed Makochi in a mantle of soft, deep snow, abruptly putting an end to pretty much any gang activity, Furin students had started getting sick, generously sharing their cold, flue or bronchitis, viruses mixing and resulting into some truly spectacular illnesses.
Class 1-1 hadn’t been spared, and most of them had taken a few days off at one point to stay warm at home, but Sakura had stubbornly resisted – up until Nirei came down with a particularly vicious cold, and obviously infected the class captain before he realized he’d better stay home.
Suo, showing his usual perceptiveness when it came to Sakura, had noticed his friend was being slightly off during their patrol.
This, and the fact that Suo remembered perfectly well what Sakura’s flat looked like – the picture of the small, barren living room had flashed in front of his eyes quite a few times in the past months – explained what he was doing in front of Sakura’s door, shopping bag in hand, raising his one eye to the heavens in a rare show of exasperation as he saw Sakura still hadn’t fixed the lock.
At least that meant he could get in, even though Sakura hadn’t answered his knock.
Suo’s breath caught as he came in – he had expected it to be cold, but not that cold. The little flat was dark and freezing, to the point Suo almost expected his breath to fog the air as he breathed out.
“Sakura-kun?” He called out softly, toeing out of his shoes and walking towards the flat’s main room.
No answer came from what Suo could now see was a large Sakura-shaped lump on the futon, perfectly hidden under the covers.
The sight tugged at his heartstrings, but he knew Sakura wouldn’t react well to anything he’d understand as pity – even though that wasn’t even close to what Suo was feeling.
Forcing his usual light tone, Suo approached the futon as he continued addressing his friend.
“Come on, Sakura-kun, is that any way to greet your guest? I come bearing gifts, too. Pretty much everyone plied me with food or medicine once they heard I was coming to visit you.”
Thus saying, he knelt by Sakura’s side, setting down the bag he held, which, true to his words, was overflowing with gifts for Makochi’s latest and beloved child. Worried when the sound of his voice didn’t cause any kind of reaction, he gently tugged at the covers, trying to catch a glimpse of his friend.
Sakura’s signature black-and-white hair showed first, causing another spike of worry in Suo when he saw it was damp with sweat, plastered to Sakura’s forehead.
But it was when the cover was finally tugged back enough for him to see his friend’s face that Suo knew something was truly wrong.
Sakura’s striking eyes weren’t closed in sleep, as he had half-expected; instead, they were staring right at him – or rather right through him, since it was obvious Sakura didn’t truly see him. Those eyes were made hazy with fever, the pupils so large both eyes almost seemed to be the same color.
Now truly worried, Suo kept on tugging at the covers, intent on assessing his friend’s condition.
This finally provoked a reaction, but not one Suo would ever have wanted.
His friend and class captain – someone whose strength he had admired from day one, whose fiery personality kept Suo (and the rest of class 1-1) firmly in his orbit – let out a terrified whimper, trying vainly to tug the covers back up with shaking hands.
“P-Please don’t.”
The whispered plea achieved what the flat’s low temperatures hadn’t, freezing Suo to his core.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again. Please let me keep the blanket, I swear I won’t make any more noise, please, I’m sorry-”
Feeling physically ill, Suo immediately let go, but Sakura made no move to hide himself again, keeping unnaturally still instead, his breath coming out in panicked little wheezes. His clouded eyes had partially focused – on Suo’s hands rather than his face, he realized, feeling another knife stab at his heart.
For once, class 1-1’s unflappable vice-captain felt completely, utterly out of his depth – just in time for what he considered the most important task of his short life this far. Fix this!
“Sakura-” he tried calling out softly, hoping to get his friend a bit closer to the present moment, but stopping abruptly before even getting the honorific out as his friend flinched.
Sakura had never seemed to particularly appreciate his last name. It was something Suo had idly noticed and noted, but it hadn’t particularly surprised him. He had chalked it up to his friend being embarrassed by having such a cute name, and hadn’t bothered to dig deeper. An unforgivable mistake.
“Haruka-kun?” Suo breathed out, his voice as soft as he could make it, hoping, praying-
It wasn’t anything obvious, but it seemed to him that he had a little more of his friend’s attention. At the very least, he hadn’t flinched again, which at this point was essential to Suo’s continued sanity.
“Haruka-kun, I’m sorry I scared you. I know it’s cold, and I don’t want to steal your blanket. I just need to check how high your fever is, alright? It could be dangerous.”
Suo kept speaking in the same soft tone, shifting closer to the top of the futon.
He raised his hand ever-so-slowly towards his friend’s forehead but, as he had feared, the motion immediately made him the focus of Haruka’s terrified gaze as his friend once again let one of those awful whines escape.
And, ah, there was the fury he had been expecting, rising from his lower abdomen, making his lungs hurt, closing his throat. Not now!
Later, he told himself. Later, he would indulge. He would let the anger fill him up, blank his mind as he laid waste to something preferably highly breakable, in a quite uncharacteristic show of temper. He would revel in imagining his hands around the throats of those who had mistreated his captain.
But right now, in this small and bare room, the only breakable thing was Haruka. And since Suo would rather dig out his remaining eye out than hurt his friend more than he had already been hurt, he called up every single trick he knew to maintain his usual serene mood.
It was the hardest it had ever been, to make it on the other side of this emotional storm with a normal breath pattern and a small smile on his lips – but he made it. Anything else would have been unimaginable.
Haruka hadn’t moved, even as he stared at his raised hand, and so – because Suo had to reach him at one point, and because he had no better idea – he finished his movement, covering his friend’s burning brow with his hand.
Haruka seemed to hold his breath, even as the contact made him tremble hard enough that Suo felt it through his hand – but when Suo kept the gentlest of pressures and refrained from any other movement, he let a shaky sigh escape and even seemed to press up the slightest bit in Suo’s hand, seeking more contact.
Once more feeling like a vice was slowly tightening around his heart, Suo hesitantly moved his hand up, carefully carding his fingers through the damp black-and-white strands of hair.
Haruka gave another shuddering sigh as his eyes fluttered shut.
Touch-starved. It was such an evocative term. Suo had noticed it early, had filed it away in the quickly growing list of items he had noted (hoarded) about his class captain. It wasn’t a secret; his classmates probably didn't know what to name it, but he had seen and appreciated their combined efforts to make their friend and class captain more used to casual touch. They all knew how Haruka reacted to the simplest marks of affection, from words of thanks to a friendly punch on the arm; all knew not to go too far, to use Haruka’s signature blush as a marker of whether they could push a bit more or had to retreat.
Touch-starved. Suo had noticed it early, and he’d thought he understood what it entailed.
Right now, staring at his friend’s expression, he knew that previous understanding for what it was: a sham. It felt like his friend had been stumbling around in the desert and had finally found an oasis as he drank from Suo’s gentle touch. His eyebrows were the slightest bit furrowed, a sure way to know Haruka was concentrating – he was trying as hard as he could to take it all in, to understand, to record it.
Truthfully, Suo wasn’t so big on casual touch either. Certainly not to Haruka’s extent, and there were exceptions, but he still spent a lot of his time with his hands behind his back, keeping a careful distance from others.
And yet right now he knew that were it possible, he would have carved out a room for Haruka in his ribcage, held him close to his heart.
As it was, Suo contented himself with keeping up his left hand’s soothing strokes in his friend’s hair, his other hand catching at the bag’s handle in order to drag it closer. He was sure he had seen an infrared thermometer somewhere…Yes, there it was.
Thankfully, it had been an extra from someone’s home, not a new one he would have had to use both hands to open, so he one-handedly toggled the right settings and raised it to Haruka’s forehead.
Unsurprisingly, the screen lit up red, but Suo still let a small sigh of relief escape as the thermometer read 39,1°C; too high, to be sure, but not actively dangerous. He could just imagine how traumatic trying to get his friend in a cold bath to lower his temperature would have been, considering his reaction to a tug on his blankets.
He knew that he still had to get some fluids into his friend; but as Haruka’s breaths grew more regular still, the last lines creasing his forehead smoothing out, he let himself have those few moments of peace.
The night was both miserable and not.
Haruka’s fever stayed high until way into the night, finally breaking and allowing his friend to get some real rest around 4 AM.
Suo himself didn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time, waking up in a start each time he started drifting off, part of him convinced his friend’s condition would worsen as soon as he had his eyes closed.
Getting Haruka to drink anything was, as he’d expected, a heart-wrenching frustrating experience, his friend tensing up until it felt like his neck would shatter as Suo tried to raise his head up enough to keep him from choking. (The very worst part was that Haruka gave no sign of a fight, either resigned to getting hurt or knowing resisting would just make things worse – but Suo couldn’t dwell on this, or the rage would be back, and it still wasn’t the right time.)
And yet, there was something in finally being allowed to take care of his prickly friend that felt…right.
He resorted to stroking the black and white strands of hair again several times during the night, and it felt like each time Haruka’s tension at the touch dropped faster.
After a while he gave himself permission to deviate from his usual path, his fingers lightly tracing along his friend’s soft cheeks, proud nose and still too warm brow, Haruka seeming to sink in a slightly calmer sleep at the touch.
Later still, what was probably a particularly bad dream had Haruka’s hands forming into impossibly tight fists, tendons visible on his neck as he clenched his teeth; Suo reflexively seized one of the fists with both his hands, massaging it lightly in the hopes of bringing peace to his friend. He barely had the time to berate himself for his thoughtless action before the hand held in his seemed to melt, so completely it relaxed. (And if Suo ended up holding his friend’s hand for quite some time after this, learning the feel of strong fingers interlaced with his, well, no one needed to know).
So all things considered, Suo could probably forgive himself for giving into sleep even as the grey morning light timidly reached the small room…
But probably not for wanting to keep this night close to his heart – or for the part of him wishing that something of what they had shared could anchor itself in Haruka once he came back to himself.
Haruka woke slowly, his body fighting him every step of the way. His eyelids too heavy to lift, his throat parched, he felt like he had been in a hell of a brawl, but looking back, he couldn’t remember being in a fight – in fact, patrols had been remarkably calm (boring) lately with the arrival of winter.
This thought brought back other memories – winter, the snow, the cold, the flue burning through class 1-1 – and right, now he remembered. He had started feeling sick while on patrol, but had refused to say anything, although Suo clearly had been onto him, the observant asshole. He had come home, opted for extra sleep rather than food, crawled under the covers…and had obviously spent a bad night fighting against the illness, although it at least felt like the worst was behind him.
It still felt like there was something important he’d forgotten about, but he resigned himself to letting it come back on its own and focused on trying to disentangle himself from his covers, eyes still stubbornly shut, letting out an embarrassing whine as the movement called on tired muscles…
…only to freeze as a hand landed in his hair, clumsily stroking the strands in a way that felt inexplicably familiar.
His eyes popped open, tiredness forgotten, to the sight of one of his vice-captains lying on the floor next to him, face resting on his left arm and eyepatch slightly askew, apparently trying to comfort Haruka in his sleep.
Inevitably, irrepressibly, red flooded Haruka’s cheeks in a blush that put all his previous blushes to shame.
What the hell?!