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“Get in the fucking Exisal, Momota.”
“I’m going!”
Geez. You help a guy set up one fake murder and suddenly he thinks he’s your boss. That’s what Kaito gets for agreeing to this crazy fucking plan.
At the foot of the Exisal, the machine looks more imposing than ever. It reminds him of a butterfly, the brightly colored outside a cautionary tale, a death by poison waiting for those who dare ignore the warning signs. An apt metaphor, if a bit too on the nose.
Kaito puts the thought out of his mind. Butterflies make him think of Gonta, and that’s not something he wants to do when he’s about to be locked in an enclosed space with Ouma for God knows how long. He’ll end up strangling him before the others have a chance to discover their fake crime scene, and then everything will have been for nothing. He refuses to disrespect Gonta’s memory by failing now.
Ouma clings to the rungs of the Exisal’s ladder, leaning against it on unsteady legs. He’s upright by willpower alone, the same stubbornness that led to locking themselves in the hangar and using up the last of Iruma’s inventions to facilitate their scheme. Kaito kind of wants to make him sit down. Only because he and Maki both are fucked if Ouma kicks the bucket for real, of course. Nowhere in his mass of conflicting feelings for Ouma is there room for sympathy. Not this late in the game.
That's what he tells himself, at least.
“How long until Iruma’s bomb runs out?”
Freely bleeding onto the hangar floor was, admittedly, beneficial to their plan. Ouma only had so much of Angie's donated blood stored up—he couldn't take too much, or he'd risk tipping someone off to their staged murder—and adding their own blood to the mix left the rest of it to go on the bed of the press. They couldn't afford to stop and clean themselves up, anyways. Any number of hiccups could arise and eat up valuable time.
Kaito gets that they’re on a time limit, but he’s also eager to patch himself up now that all that’s left for them to do is get in the Exisal and wait.
Ouma reads Kaito’s intentions in his expression. “Not enough,” he says, grimacing. His voice lacks the urgency he spoke with earlier, when he explained his plan and the two of them scrambled to execute it, a hint of fatigue showing through his collected exterior. They must have more time than Ouma’s implying, but how much? “Also, I don’t think there’s a first aid kit in here.”
Unsurprising, if he thinks about it. Monokuma’s all about gruesome deaths.
“Wait, you had enough foresight to take antidotes from Shuichi’s lab, but not a first aid kit?”
The glare Kaito receives is tempered by the sweat rolling down Ouma’s face. He grumbles under his breath, something about not thinking straight since Gonta’s—since Gonta. “So I overlooked a couple little details. We’ll be fine.”
There are a number of protests Kaito could voice, here. They could bleed to death if they don't give themselves any medical attention. Having them uncovered is uncomfortable and, honestly, unsanitary and isn't at all how he'd imagined swapping body fluids with—someone. With someone, one day long off into the future, no one in particular that occupied his fantasies. Obviously.
He also refuses to play around with the possibility of infection, time crunch be damned. They have to live through the night for this shot in the dark to have a chance at making its mark. He glances around the hangar for something that could help. It’s too much to ask for there to actually be medical supplies, but there has to be something he can turn into makeshift bandages.
He turns to ask Ouma if he squirreled away any blankets when he holed himself up in here, pausing when he finds the other sitting on the ground, pocket tool in hand, one leg suddenly bare up to the knee. The blade is folded out, cutting the severed leg of his pants in a neat spiral. “You weren't going to let it go, right?” Ouma raises one tired brow at Kaito's confusion. “It’s not ideal material, but if it’ll get you into the Exisal faster, fine.”
“Uh,” Kaito says, fingering the sleeves of his button up guiltily. Ouma’s already down a shirt, but he slides the knife around the circumference of his other thigh with ease, turning his white pants into cutoff shorts without so much as nicking his skin. He kicks off his shoe, strips the fabric from his leg, and starts shredding it.
“Hurry up.” Ouma gestures to the remains of his other pantleg with his elbow. “You can take care of that on your own, right?”
“Yeah.”
Kaito takes the fabric and winds it around his left arm. There’s just enough for him to cover the wound properly and tie off the bandage. He tightens one of Ouma's weird leg belts around it for good measure. When he finishes, Ouma’s just starting to wrap his own arm with the rest of the cloth. He probably chose not to try wrapping his back because the bandage would be too short, but the idea of leaving it uncovered makes Kaito’s stomach squirm. Ouma’s pocket tool lays discarded on the floor.
He shrugs out of his overshirt. Ouma startles when he scoops up the knife, losing his hold on the bandage. The cloth starts to unravel and he curses, grabbing for it. The wound on Kaito’s arm throbs in sympathy as Ouma winces and pulls the fabric tight against his pale, bloody skin.
“Decided to go back on your word and kill me after all?”
“Of course not,” Kaito scoffs. He cuts into the bottom of his shirt, drawing the knife almost all the way across it. The zigzag pattern he creates isn’t as neat as Ouma’s spiral, but he ends up with a continuous strip of cloth long enough to suit his purposes. Ouma draws the other belt taught with his teeth, a practiced motion Kaito has to make himself look away from. He waits for Ouma to finish up, then holds up his hands. “Alright, arms up.”
Out of nowhere, he has a vivid flashback to his grandmother helping him get dressed as a child and promptly regrets everything he's ever done in his life, ever. He thought he was too tired to blush, but apparently not. Ouma looks almost amused, his left hand dropping down from its place on his right bicep to hang limply at his side.
“As much as I'd love for Momota-chan to tenderly bandage my wounds, we really don’t have time for this.” Ouma mercifully lets the opportunity to poke fun at Kaito pass. Unlike the last time, his seriousness is genuine. They must be cutting it close now.
“Tch. Fine." He lowers the bandage, offers Ouma his pocket tool back, and sighs. Ouma’s eyebrows lift slightly, like he’s surprised Kaito isn’t arguing. He pulls himself to his feet, using the Exisal to anchor his weight. His cold fingers brush against Kaito’s when he takes the tool, trailing across Kaito’s palm with a featherlight touch.
He could take that hand, hold it in his own until Ouma’s fingers stop making him shiver. The urge is almost as strong as his desire to hold him down until his back is treated to Kaito’s satisfaction. Both those things will have to wait just a little longer, but if Ouma thinks he’s given up on making him take care of himself properly, he’s got another thing coming.
Kaito has to help Ouma climb the ladder—“You made us wait too long,” he says, pointing down at his visibly trembling legs—so that he doesn’t fall. He keeps as little distance between them as possible, reaching his arms around Ouma’s middle to grab the bars on either side of his body, caging him in so that if he slips, Kaito has a chance of actually catching him before he hits the ground. He feels pretty weak himself, coughing freely and grimacing at the spray of blood that speckles Ouma’s back with gory freckles, but Ouma already knows that.
Ouma jokes that Kaito should be extra careful because another blow to the head so soon might leave him out of commission entirely, a concept he finds more terrifying than he thought he would. This is Ouma’s plan; Kaito knows the gist of it, but there’s so much left for Ouma to fill him in on. Kaito doesn’t know if he could pull it off by himself. He hates being alone, and even if it’s Ouma filling the space next to him, anything is better than facing the terrifying ordeal ahead of him on his own.
Ouma is so much more than Kaito ever thought he was. He can’t wrap his head around it all. Before Gonta and Iruma died, he’d played with the idea of one day understanding the Ultimate Supreme Leader. Ever since they first woke up in the academy, every time Kaito thought he reached the bottom of the well, something else would prove that there was more depth than he expected. He finally reached bedrock, he thought, when the fourth trial came to pass, but the ground opened up beneath him once more and swept him away with the rest of the rubble.
Their positions make climbing the ladder awkward, a sort of undulating, spidery crawl taking them slowly towards the hatch. A slightly embarrassing amount of time later, Kaito drops into the seat of the Exisal, breathing heavily and swallowing back the blood pooling in his mouth.
It’s not until he’s adjusting himself in the cramped interior of the machine that he realizes just how small the space is. He knew that the Exisals were built to be piloted by the Monokubs and that the cockpit would reflect that, but the reality of the situation only begins processing when Ouma’s legs dangle in front of his face as the other boy tries to find a way to descend that doesn’t involve driving his feet into any of Kaito’s extremities.
Without thinking, he offers his hands up to Ouma, ready to help him lower himself gently into the Exisal. Once his brain catches up, he’s certain that the other will reject him, if not laugh in his face. But Ouma doesn’t jump down on his own. He studies Kaito’s face for the slightest of moments before taking his hands, threading their fingers together so he can properly distribute his weight.
Even in his current state, Kaito finds the strength to brace Ouma and support his decent. His arms ache with the movement, the wound on his arm throbbing unhappily. Ouma squeezes his hands on the way down, their clammy palms pressed together, the pressure lighting up his nerves. It’s pleasant despite the pain.
There’s a moment, as Ouma comes down, where Kaito acknowledges, privately, that he’s about to have a lapful of the most disagreeable boy on the planet and he has no idea how he’s going to get through the next few hours. He doesn’t let go right away, nor does Ouma. Neither of them bring up the fact that it’s wholly unnecessary for Ouma’s thighs to rest on either side of his own or for their chests to be pressed quite this close together. Kaito pretends it’s for the benefit of Ouma’s back, and he assumes Ouma does the same, because even after he disentangles their hands, he sits and looks up into Kaito’s face. Into his eyes.
He has to wonder what he sees there. Kaito doesn’t know how he feels about any of this, but Ouma’s proven himself to be more than capable of discerning Kaito’s best-kept secrets. Ouma can read him better than anyone else and it’s infuriating that Ouma understands him better than Kaito can understand himself. There’s an imbalance to their relationship, because while Kaito knows that he’s the only one that’s bothered to consider Ouma’s actions without being completely waylaid by the dense front he puts up, he’s also certain that he’s only now beginning to peel back those layers.
What he sees makes him feel something, the emotions hot and fragile in his chest alongside the pain in his lungs. The two mix together until he can’t distinguish one from the other, until every breath he draws reminds him that Ouma has left him irrevocably changed. If he never saw Ouma again after today, Kaito would spend the rest of his life ruminating, seeking closure that he’s not guaranteed to get even if he sees Ouma every day until he dies. Not that that day is shaping up to be too far off.
He’s not sure he likes what’s under Ouma’s mask, or the tension strung out between them that jumps like a rubber band and stretched almost to the breaking point until Kaito managed to convince Ouma to stop pulling. He hates the thoughts that well up in him when they make eye contact, conflicting demands to kiss and punch screaming at him from opposite sides of his brain. Kaito can’t forgive him, but he can work with him, and he can weather the storm caught up in his chest until the longing suffocates him.
Nudging Ouma's arms as far away from his sides as they can get in the cramped interior of the Exisal, Kaito bandages Ouma’s back with a tenderness he can’t disguise, a softness that conveys his regret, and a firmness that denotes his experience. He can feel Ouma's eyes on him while he works, passing the fabric back and forth around his torso, Kaito's arms wrapped around him in a facsimile of a hug.
“If Momota-chan wanted to cuddle with me, he didn't have to go this far,” Ouma says. There's no smile on his face, nor the intentional emptiness that reveals so little yet so much. If he had to describe it, he'd go with earnest, if exhausted, which is extremely weird to think considering just who he thinking it about. Then again, the guy's already in his lap. They're about to face off against a robotic bear, their five fellow kidnapees, and whatever sick fucks are watching them, all while pretending one of them killed the other but not letting on who did what. There's pretty much no way that any of this can get weirder.
Then it does.
“Not that I mind.” Ouma rests his hands on Kaito's shoulders, raising his elbows to keep his arms out of the way. His voice is oddly fond. “I should have expected a softie like Momota-chan to pull a trick like this. Well, I've always wanted you to hold me in your big, strong arms. Guess I can check that one off the bucket list, huh?”
“Stop fucking with me,” Kaito chokes out when he finds his words again. There isn't enough room in this Exisal for them to let their emotions spill out in the open. There isn't enough room in the entire damn hangar for Kaito's love and hate and hurt.
Saying nothing, Ouma gives a quiet hum. Kaito runs out of bandage and wishes he'd cut more of his shirt off, or maybe taken the sleeves. Without enough space to maneuver, there's nothing more he can do about it, so he settles for awkwardly draping his buttonup across Ouma's shoulders and pulling it closed over his chest, hiding away all the damage of the past six hours.
“I can dress myself, you know.”
Let me do something for you, he silently begs. He can't articulate why he wants to, why nothing that's happened up to now has been enough to turn him away, why he wishes they were anywhere but here, doing anything but this, so that Kaito could hold him close without smelling blood. Hatred wells up in Kaito at the sight of him, only to be overridden by something unknowable. It urges him to destroy Ouma before the world can do it first, before it can do it crueler. It tells him to never give a touch that isn't soft, comforting, the kind that lingers out of love.
Neither of those are fitting for them, but they battle each other in Kaito's chest and by the end, there will be little left. All of it will be centered on Ouma.
“You're being awfully quiet, Momota-chan. You know, I'm surprised! I thought you'd take the opportunity to interrogate me while I can't get away.” For emphasis, he squeezes Kaito's shoulders. He’s an insignificant weight on Kaito’s lap. He’s held dogs that weighed more than Ouma.
The warmth, though. That one’s new. The gummy heat that sticks their skin together where they touch, the humidity that gathers in the air when Ouma reaches up to close the hatch—it fills him with love. It makes him sick with it.
He's still holding his shirt closed over Ouma's chest. He is tired, and he is worn. Tomorrow might be the last day he ever sees. He needs the two of them to matter, even if neither of them make it out, even if Maki's poison does its job despite the antidote, even if he coughs himself into his grave. As long as the others live, he'll be satisfied with the life he's led.
He still wishes it could have been a little softer. Is it wrong of him, to want to pretend that the little time they have left could mean the same things to Ouma as it does to him? If it is, he doesn't care. This world has taken so much from them, shamelessly, rapturously, and if the last act of defiance Kaito manages is gentling his hand towards this monster of a martyr, so be it.
Ignoring the small, surprised noise that rises from Ouma's throat, Kaito puts his arms around him again.
“Let's just. Sit. Can we do that?” Kaito exhales shakily. He wants too much. To rest his head on Ouma's shoulder, to confront the paranoia and misery that's grown in the both of them, to hold his hand and never let go. He's willing to accept whatever Ouma has to give him, though. It's not like that pit of emotion could work itself out even if it were given a decade to do so.
“Sure, Momota-chan.” The words are soft on Ouma's lips. Kaito can feel Ouma's breath on his face. Cold hands drift from his shoulders to cup his jaw, just for a moment. The shiver it invokes isn’t lost on either of them. “We'll conserve our energy for when the show really starts.”
Ouma's head on his shoulder is the worst consolation prize in the world, but Kaito knows this might be as good as it gets. He's not used to settling, but the impossible might be too far out of reach this time.
They sit, and he wants, and they wait.