Archive of Our Own ^beta

It took some time for Sho to figure out what the anomalies at the diner were so concerned about. Usually, not much seemed to stick with them. He'd taught them the same things multiple times without any really clear sign that they were taking any of it in, but they clearly needed, wanted, or expected something.

Finally, the diner owner went all the way out to the front, behind the counter, and gestured at the empty space. "Oh!" Sho said, "Ren! You were expecting Ren."

It gurgled in confirmation.

"Did you call him? He always seems kinda glued to his phone, so he should answer, if he just forgot."

The anomaly reached behind the counter and pulled out the receiver of a corded phone, offering it to him.

He sighed, "No, I can't do it. I don't know his number."

It waved the phone at him and he couldn't help feeling a little pity for the creature. It was in over its head, even if it seemed not to know it.

"I tell you what," he said, "I know which house he's in. I'll just go look for him, ok?"

The creature's gurgles sounded happier as it put the phone back on the hook and went back into the kitchen.

Sho rubbed the back of his neck. Right. Ok. This wasn't gonna be weird at all.

On his way to Jabberwock, he decided to pretend he'd forgotten the date of their next Folklore Studies test and . . . and something else to explain why he hadn't asked Leo. But fuck it, it was weird for Ren not to be at work. Checked out, grumpy, and rude, sure, hiding from customers, occasionally, but not missing.

He whistled as he stepped through the gate into Jabberwock, impressed by the size of it. If he and Bonnie had the run of this kind of acreage, he might not mind it so much when the Sasquatch rejected his R&R permits.

The giant mushroom looming out of the mist was the closest approximation he could see of a building, so he turned toward it, keeping his head on a swivel.

The door was answered by that annoying captain who'd rubbed him the wrong way last time they met, but technically, he was about to ask for a favor, so he faked a smile at the guy, pretending not to remember.

"Hey, sorry to bug you," he said, "I was looking for Ren, but he's not at the diner. Do you know where he is? I was just gonna ask him a couple of things about one of our classes, but I'd kinda like to find him, 'cause his boss seemed a little worried."

Haru looked suspicious, but when he whipped his phone out, and muttered, "Am I looking at the wrong tracker?" Sho realized several things at once. One, the suspicion wasn't about him, for once. Two, Ren's captain was tracking him, which even Mido, who seemed generally to want to know he and Leo were on campus and not out and about causing trouble, would have balked at. And three, if Ren had given both his boss and his apparently super nosy captain the slip, he probably didn't want to be found.

"Ah! No, the other tracker is still active. He's this way," the captain said, as if that weren't completely insane. Sho scrambled to follow him, hoping he could at least defuse the situation if he could come up with an excuse to drag Ren off to the library and away from whatever he'd been avoiding.

When they got to the top of the hill where the signal was coming from, they found Ren's jacket hanging from a tree branch, the tracker sticking visibly out of its pocket when they got close enough to spot it. Sho hid a smirk. Apparently, he hadn't given Ren enough credit.

The captain shrieked, apparently not thrilled, and all of a sudden, he was begging Sho for help finding his rookie, apparently either unaware or willing to ignore that Sho and Ren were technically in the same year.

Sho scratched the back of his neck, hesitant, and the captain slapped on a big, fake smile that made Sho feel squirmy and uncomfortable. "Hey sport," he said, trying to put an arm around Sho's shoulder.

Sport? Seriously? Sho evaded his grip and the captain hid it as a motion to rub the back of his neck, as if he hadn't been reaching for Sho at all.

"If you do me this little favor," the captain continued, "I can hand out flyers for the food truck to our park visitors. The truck is you, right? New business on campus is always worth noticing. Seems like you're doing well, but free advertising is-"

"Yeah, fine." Sho agreed, partially to shut the guy up. He wasn't convinced that the advertising was worth it, but if this guy was resorting to bribery to find Ren after exactly 0 minutes of actual searching, Sho certainly wasn't going to let him be the one to find Ren. The rest of it, he'd figure out later.

"Where does he usually go?" he asked.

The captain frowned. "He's usually trying to lock himself in his room with his phone."

That sounded about right, except for the 'trying' part, which Sho forced himself not to scowl at.

"Anywhere he definitely wouldn't go?" Sho asked.

"He's always trying to get out of checking the aquatic areas - I'd better go check them first! Good idea!"

The Captain was off at a truly remarkable pace, leaving Sho's head spinning a little.

Right. Fine. Cool. Rescue operation for a classmate he barely knew, who didn't like him, and who didn't want to be found. Definitely what he'd planned on for today. But that little part of him that the Jabberwock captain always rubbed wrong had its hackles up, so he checked around the base of the tree for footprints and then, not sure what else to do, climbed up into its branches to see if he could see anything from a higher vantage point.

He couldn't, really, but he could see where the trees thinned out and where they got denser, which was at least something.

Trying to imprint the aerial view on his mind, he climbed back down the tree and headed for the area where the trees got thicker and, presumably, easier to hide in.

There was something kind of nice about walking through the woods, if he ignored the fact that at least some of the animals he could hear moving around were definitely anomalous. If he was gonna have to come back for a real search, he should probably read through some of his relevant textbooks for a quick refresher of the more common creatures.

He walked long enough to realize that this whole thing was a fool's errand, and he was a fool for bothering. There was too much land to cover without any clues, and he didn't really want to find Ren anyway, especially not when he still figured Ren didn't want to be found.

Even so, the sunk cost fallacy was the sunk cost fallacy, and knowing it existed didn't make it pull on him any less. He could at least plan a different route out of the forest than he'd taken in, on the off chance of stumbling on something, and then he could loop back around to the house and check it, in principle, before he went back to the diner and said - something. Maybe just that Ren wasn't available.

He was high up in the tree, scanning the landscape, when a whole bunch of birds all took off at once from the same small area of the forest. Ok, then. Maybe not such a fool's errand, after all. He'd seen Bambi. A bunch of birds at once meant they were escaping from something, and if there was something, there were basically two options. One was that it was an anomalous creature they were afraid of, which he had a vague hope wouldn't be in one of the houses if it was unmanageably dangerous. The other was that it was a human, which could mean the weird kid with the man-faced dog but could also mean Ren.

He climbed down the tree, deciding to risk it, even if just to feel like he'd done something besides wandering around.

He found a track of churned-up dirt wider than a person, which he could guess meant it was an anomaly's trail and not Ren's, even without a lot of wilderness tracking expertise. Just as he was about to write it off and go back, he spotted an almost neon lime green in a pile of dirt, way brighter than a fallen leaf would be.

When he got closer and realized it was Ren's phone, his heart sank. All of a sudden, he realized there had been actual danger all along, and he'd been puttering around the forest without any sense of urgency.

Cursing under his breath, he pocketed the phone and started jogging along the track, keeping his eyes and ears peeled for whatever had made it, the incantation for his stigma on the tip of his tongue.

When he spotted blood, it took all of his willpower not to run faster, but whatever was happening, stumbling into it too fast to think would only make it worse.

Loud grunts and squeals ahead proved that whatever the animal was, it was still around, and equally loud shouts ordering it to leave proved that Ren was, too.

Sho hoped the shouting would be a distraction as he hurried toward all the noise.

Ren was up in a tree, holding tightly to his swim ring, which was wrapped around a branch, and his right leg was bloody under rips through the thigh of his pants.

At the base of the tree, a hulking armored creature with long claws was gouging the trunk, as if it thought it might knock it over. It looked a little like an oversized armadillo, but when it sensed Sho and turned, its mouth was much fangier. Great. Good. Perfect.

Sho settled into a defensive stance, ignoring about half of the things the Sasquatch had been drilling into him to keep focused on his feet. They'd been working on mobility lately, which all of a sudden did feel helpful, even if training was usually mostly frustration, so he'd have to grant Mido that much, anyway.

Instead of barreling at him like he expected, the creature plunged its head into the churned earth around it and started tunneling toward him under the ground.

"What the fuck!" Ren bleated, before getting ahold of himself and adding the marginally more helpful, "Get up off the ground! It senses vibrations!"

Sho grinned. Did it? That seemed like an easy way to make an opening. He held deathly still until it got close to him, then sprinted sideways as fast as he could, making a long leap onto a tree stump at the end. The creature popped out of the ground, teeth gnashing, at the spot he'd taken off from, and he blasted it with his stigma, sending it flying out of the ground and several feet back. While it was still disoriented, he raced forward, kicking it in its soft underbelly twice before it got control of itself and turned its teeth toward him again.

Before it could dig, he hit it with his stigma again, throwing it sideways to slam against a different tree trunk.

When it made a clear move to escape, he let it, hopping onto a fallen log where he hoped his vibrations wouldn't be so obvious.

"Why are you here?" Ren shouted, sounding more irate than grateful, which - yeah. Sure. It wasn't like he hadn't been taking that kind of crap from Leo for years, and at least Ren wasn't asking what had taken him so long when he'd gotten here mostly as fast as he could.

"Don't yell yet," Sho shouted back, sinking down into a crouch on his stump to keep a closer eye on the ground. "I wanna wait it out. Make sure it's gone. Unless you got an artery severed or something, it's better safe than sorry, yeah?"

Ren grumbled, but complied, which was - something, he supposed.

This kind of waiting, every nerve keyed up, always made time difficult to judge, and knowing Ren was bleeding made that worse. Sho was still a little nervous as he stepped down from his stump, but nothing seemed to happen, and when he looked up to Ren, his classmate was scowling.

Sho scowled back, and for a moment, they just stared at each other.

"How did you get here, B-Vagastrom?" Ren asked, "Why are you here?"

Sho raised an eyebrow. "Do you not know my name? We've been in class together all semester."

"Why would I need to know your name?" Ren answered, every bit as rude and prickly as he usually was at the diner. Not just a response to a boring job, then. "You're not in my house. Nobody is in my house, except for a pair of lunatics."

Alright. Time to defuse, unless he wanted to be standing at the bottom of this tree and shouting for the forseeable future, which he didn't. He reached into his pocket and pulled out Ren's phone. "Nah, I think you just spend too much time on this. You know, it's kinda shitty to hide it in your books during Dante's class. He's got that lower angle of vision," he said, gesturing with a hand.

"What the fuck!" Ren answered. "Why do you have that?"

Not so defused. Ok. Sho recalibrated his impression of exactly how surly Ren was. "Look, man, I'm sorry. I shouldn't joke. I'm not trying to fuck with you. I found it on the ground while I was following that thing's trail. I'm assuming you dropped it. You need help getting down, with that leg?"

Ren frowned, narrowing his eyes. "That depends. Why were you following it? Did you sic it on me?"

Sho blinked, raising an eyebrow. How would he have done that? Why would he have done that? He decided not to dignify the idea with a response. "The anomalies at the diner were worried," he said, "I said I'd come check on you. Kind of the only thing I could think of. They're doing their best, but they're not exactly -" when he couldn't figure out what he wanted to say, he just finished, "human."

Ren was staring again, and Sho struck a vaguely tough pose for him. "Anyway, I kicked that thing's ass. You're fine. So maybe come down here and call in sick so they stop wobbling around looking sad."

Ren's frown intensified, and he suddenly got harder to hear, his voice dropping from a shout so that Sho had to strain to hear. "I think I'm gonna need help down."

Sho nodded. "Alright. We've got options. You could try lowering yourself down on the rope attached to that thing, if you've got that kind of arm strength, and I can help you land. I can climb up and carry you down, which is honestly probably the most practical, or one of us can call your captain or vice-captain to come get you down."

Ren visibly shuddered. "Do not call that clown."

Sho snorted. "Fair. I'm not gonna lie, I realized it was a mistake the second I asked him about you, so if you want help evading him for a bit, it is kinda my fault he's looking for you."

Ren swore, but then sighed. "No, that one's actually not on you. He'd be doing that anyway. Asshole."

"Yeah, I saw that thing with the jacket. Nice move. Wonder if you could get some kinda thing to make the jacket wave next time. Taunt him a little."

Ren looked surprised. "What?"

"The tracker," Sho said.

"No, I know that! You went with him to track me?"

Sho sighed. "Yeah, man, I felt bad. I was gonna tell him 'oh, whoops, we have to go to the library for our project, he can't possibly help you out with -' You know, whatever. I worked out you were giving everybody the slip on purpose a little later than maybe I should have."

Ren bit his lip. "Why are you helping me?"

Sho shrugged. "Why not? Do I need a reason?"

He barely caught what Ren muttered to himself ("fuckin' extroverts") before Ren shouted down, "Please come get me. I twisted my ankle before it got me with its claws, and I don't really want to land on it by accident."

Sho nodded, looking for a good way up, and Ren added, "But if you drop me on purpose, I'll sic my Vice-Clown on you. I'm starting to think he can control the weather."

Sho gritted his teeth and tried not to take it as an insult. It was one, as far as he was concerned, but he was starting to get the distinct sense that Ren was paranoid about everyone and everything, and maybe that he had some reasons to be.

"Got it," he snapped, "Keep your pants on. I'm trying to figure out what to go for." He leapt upward, catching a large branch and swinging himself up onto it with a little extra flourish. Ren's eyes widened very slightly, and Sho felt a little better. Nice to get a little acknowledgment, even if it hadn't been on purpose. "This one," he announced, grinning with satisfaction. "Hold on, I'm gonna try to climb around so that when I get to you, you can grab onto my back and I'll have my arms free to get down. I figure based on your grip on that thing, your arms are fine."

"Yeah," Ren answered. And then, looking away in vague embarrassment, "Thanks."

Sho moved slowly and carefully, because if he fell and broke something, they'd both end up dependent on Ren's clown, and he definitely did not want that.

He handed Ren his phone back, first, in the hope that it would somehow placate the guy, or at least soften his spikes. Then he found the best spot he could and squatted awkwardly on a branch, wrapping his arms around the trunk to stabilize himself. "I should be good," he said, "But if you can be careful with the one good leg, do. You're gonna have to mostly hang on to me yourself so I can get us down without twisting my ankle."

"Yeah," Ren answered, his voice strained.

It had been a while since he'd carried someone piggyback, and it was extra weird not to be helping Ren stabilize himself. Ren grunted softly in pain as he jarred his leg, but managed to grab on strongly around Sho's neck, strangling him a little since he wasn't reaching back to hook his arm under Ren's thigh and Ren couldn't, or maybe hadn't, grabbed on with his legs.

Sho thought about reaching back, but he needed both hands, so instead, he said, "I'm so sorry to ask this, man, but can you wrap your legs around my stomach? I really don't wanna fall or drop you, and I promise I'll be quick so we can get that bandaged."

Ren grunted in his ear, but then he did it, adjusting his grip around Sho's neck as soon as he could.

"Tell me you're good and I'll go," Sho said.

"I'm good," Ren answered so fast that Sho almost doubted his word, but he didn't really want to risk all the other things that could go wrong if he tried to stay up here longer, so he started climbing down, figuring at least that if Ren's grip slipped, it would be his own fault.

When he made it to the ground, he set Ren down carefully and finally got a good look at Ren's right thigh, which had been scratched deeply enough that the blood had run all the way down to the tops of his shoes. He winced.

"Shit, dude, it didn't look that bad from the ground. Fuck. Sorry I made you, uh-"

Ren was blushing and wouldn't meet his eyes. "You didn't have a choice. Still better than falling. I hope."

Sho sighed. "Ok, we are definitely not getting back to campus without bandaging that first. Hold on."

He slipped his jacket off and stripped out of his button-down shirt, figuring his middle layer was probably the cleanest. It was a little cool in the shade wearing just his t-shirt, but he could see that Ren was shaking a little bit, from any number of things, if he were going to guess, so he draped his jacket over Ren's shoulders and buttoned the top button to keep it closed before he started tearing his own shirt into strips, using his pocket knife to help keep them even.

Ren's brows contracted. "Don't - uh - I mean. You didn't ask for mine?"

Sho grinned at him, hoping it would be reassuring and not yet another inexplicable trigger, and answered, "Nah. Unless you're always in an undershirt, which sure, maybe you are, mine's a middle layer, so I figured it would be cleaner. Less sweat than the bottom, less dirt than the top."

"Oh," Ren said, his shoulders easing a little bit. "That - actually makes sense."

Sho winked. "I try."

He knew immediately that it had been a miss-step, but he seemed to be wearing Ren down a little bit, because he blushed and looked away instead of saying anything nasty, this time.

Once his shirt had been reduced to a set of strips, Sho frowned. "You uh - you don't happen to have a secret backpack somewhere with water in it? It would be better if I could clean these out first, but I wasn't exactly expecting to be -" he gestured at the forest around them.

Ren blushed. "No. I was honestly just looking for a little quiet, and I got out too far and I just-"

He trailed off, and Sho recognized his chance to save the conversation. "Yeah, fair. I thought Mido was bad, but your captain is nuts."

Ren's eyes suddenly looked desperately into his own. "Right? He keeps trackers on me! Literal trackers! If I don't answer when he knocks, he picks the lock on my bedroom door or climbs in through my window!"

Sho felt something well up inside him with the anger, an impulse to protect Ren in spite of everything else the guy had said to him. Frankly, it would probably be stupid to try to help him and it was definitely none of his business.

Even so, he found himself saying, "Yeah, fuck that. We've gotta get you to either Mortkranken or the hospital first, but if you need help finding a place to hide -" Then what?

He stopped himself, picking up the first of his makeshift bandages and changing the subject. "But that is still bleeding pretty bad, so - awkward question. Do you want me to wrap that up over your pants and just try to make it tight and move fast when we get going, or do you wanna take your pants off so I can bandage it right?"

Ren's whole face turned a dark red almost instantly, and Sho braced himself for some kind of accusation, but instead, Ren said, "I'm gonna have to, aren't I? Because if I don't, I'll walk worse, and then you'll have to carry me, and no offense, but that hurt like hell."

Sho looked away, figuring that anywhere else to look would be better than directly at Ren, just now. "And your ankle?"

"Fuuck. It hurts less, so I forgot. Are - how bad am I gonna owe you if you have to carry me out of here?"

And there it was. Sho kept his temper, because it wasn't like he hadn't figured out what was up. "Unless I find out later that you did it on purpose, you're fine," he said, sounding a little snippier than he meant to. "It's a fuckin' accident, dude, what do you want?"

Ren clenched his jaw, but didn't snap back, suddenly sounding tired instead. "Right now, I want you to carry me to the doctor or whatever, so - sorry to be a pain in the ass, I guess."

Sho nodded. "Got it. Unfortunately, sounds like we've gotta get these bandages as secure as possible, so one more choice, do you wanna take your pants off, or do you want me to try to cut or tear off that other leg above the scratches? Because I just thought of that, and it might work."

Ren sighed. "Ok, yeah. It's worth trying. I'll uh - I'll hold the cloth? Or something? These are ruined anyway."

It felt weird not to talk as he got through the process of cutting through Ren's pants and wrapping up his injuries, using the pant leg and some sticks to approximate a splint for his sprained ankle. He felt weird, but he had also worked out that Ren could go off over basically anything, and while that might be fun to poke at later, it wasn't right now.

When he was done, he realized that Ren was gripping his jacket tightly around his shoulders and that, blush long gone, he was looking a little pale.

"Shit," Sho said, reaching forward to grab Ren's chin with one hand and check his pulse with the other, his fingers pressed to Ren's carotid as he looked straight into his eyes, trying to judge how with it he was. "You're losing too much blood. Are you dizzy? Lightheaded? Pulse is maybe a little fast, but I don't have a watch."

"I have a watch," Ren said, "But uh - yeah, a little. I, um -"

"Got it," Sho said, cutting him off and squatting down, his back toward Ren. "Ok, grab on, we're going now."

Ren complied without complaint, which also seemed like a medium-to-bad sign.

Once Ren was secure, he took off, moving as fast as he felt like he safely could, keeping his ears tuned to Ren's breathing. As he pushed open Jabberwock's weird gate and stepped out into the main campus, he clocked that the breaths in his ear were starting to come a little faster and shorter.

Mortkranken was a little bit closer than the hospital, but the hospital had a clearly labeled emergency room and he didn't think he could afford the time it would take to find the right person to help at Mortkranken. He turned toward the hospital, telling Ren to hold on and keep breathing.

At the hospital, Professor Nicholas turned up almost immediately when he found out one of the patients was a ghoul and whisked Ren away to have his wounds cleaned and stitched up, and for a moment, Sho just stood there, at loose ends. There was kind of nothing left to do, but something just felt wrong about leaving. Telling Ren's boss what happened wasn't that useful, at this point, telling the Jabberwock captain was out of the question, and going back to his truck felt silly, somehow.

Instead, he wandered casually over to the check-in desk at the ER, turning his most charming grin on the nurse sitting there and asking politely where the best place would be to wait for Ren. He could always change his mind later, and for now, he might as well bookmark some new recipes on his phone for a while.

Finally, Ren came back out into the lobby in Sho's jacket, a little bloody from his first piggyback down the tree, and a pair of loaner sweatpants with Darkwick General's emblem on the thigh. He didn't even scan the seats, like he didn't expect anyone to be waiting, and when Sho called his name, he jumped.

Staring, Ren opened and closed his mouth twice, before squawking, "Vagastrom?"

Sho laughed. "Oh shit. I told you off, and then I didn't actually tell you my name, huh? It's Sho."

Ren's eyes darted around the room and for a second, he looked like a trapped animal. "R-right." He spluttered. "Got it. Sho."

Sho sighed, trying not to take the vague fear on Ren's face personally. He's literally being stalked, he reminded himself. He gets a pass for like 20 seconds when he's surprised.

He smiled, trying not to overdo it and make Ren more suspicious. "We don't have to hang out here," he said, gesturing toward the exit. "Assuming they said you could leave, of course. I was just kinda worried. Wanted to make sure I got you here fast enough, you know. You were basically panting in my ear by the end, so it seemed a little - major."

Ren blushed, the color spreading from his cheekbones all the way across to the tops of his ears and Sho forced back an instinctive smirk. Then Ren started walking and Sho fell in beside him, trying to seem casual.

Outside the doors, Sho tugged Ren gently off to the side by the lapel, and Ren instinctively threw his hands up in front of himself, like he was about to ward off a blow.

"Relax," Sho said, "I just figured even with the quick healing and all, your leg's still probably not 100%. We gotta figure out where we're going before we end up wandering around, especially now that it's dark out. Or do you need to sit? You seemed uncomfortable in the lobby, so-"

Ren was looking at him like he'd grown another head, a puzzled wrinkle making his face look a little petulant, which - yeah, maybe he just was that too.

Sho waved a hand in front of Ren's face. "You in there? If they have you hopped up on pain meds or something, I can just find us somewhere to sit for a while. Your captain's probably still looking for you at your house, so it should be safe most places out here, we'll just eventually need a plan."

Ren opened and closed his mouth, then spat out, "You keep saying 'we.' What do you want from me?"

Sho raised an eyebrow. "This shit again? Look man, I already said. You clearly got a raw deal with your captain, and it's partially my fault that he's all riled up now. I don't have to have a reason."

Ren seemed to have regained some of his prickliness with his strength. "Bullshit. Everybody has a reason."

"So, what?" Sho asked, "You don't like my reasons, or you think I'm lying? Because if it's the first one that's fine. But if it's the second one, you can fuck right off."

Ren's forehead actually lost some of the tension he was carrying, which was not exactly the response Sho usually expected from cussing somebody out.

"I don't like any reason that's just like 'Oh, do it 'cause it's the right thing, do it for your friends, do it for the animals, do it 'cause it's fair.' It's all bullshit, and if you actually believe it, you're just deluding yourself."

"And what," Sho said, "I'm supposed to say it's 'cause I want my jacket back and you owe me for my shirt? Not sure where that gets us."

Ren blushed harder again, starting to shrug out of the sleeves of Sho's jacket. "Shit, I-"

Sho grabbed him by the shoulders, stopping him, and then then tugged the jacket farther closed. "Stop. Fuck. I didn't mean that, asshole. It was a joke. Kinda"

Ren's breathing got a little faster, like he was afraid, and Sho let go of him, taking a deep breath and running a hand through his hair as he took a half-step backward, . "Ok. Alright. Let's - hit pause for a sec."

Ren scowled at that and the only thing that kept Sho from giving up right then and there was a righteous little ember burning in the middle of his chest. "Tell me one thing," he said, his eyes locking onto Ren's, "And then I'll either bully you into letting me help you, since that's apparently what it's gonna take, or I'll take my jacket back and get out of your hair. Do you think everybody's a heartless bastard, or just me?"

Ren was scrawny and moved around the world like he'd never gotten in a fight in his life, or at least never won one, but he squared his shoulders, refusing to cower, and answered. "I don't like strangers. And it turns out you can see somebody every fuckin' day for years and they're still a stranger. So no, Burnout, I don't think anything different about you. You're not special just 'cause people fall all over you when you smile at them."

"Ok, iPad Kid," Sho shot back, his face sliding into a sideways grin even as he threw out the insult. "So where are we going? I'm pretty sure the food at the diner would actively harm your recovery, but that clown will find you if you go home. Do you wanna figure it out here, or do you wanna go sit down somewhere?"

Ren opened his mouth like he was about to make a fight of it, but then the wind went out of his sails and he sighed instead. "Something's fuckin' wrong with you. But I do wanna sit down. The ankle's better and the thigh's not bleeding, but I can definitely feel that the muscles haven't finished healing."

Sho sighed too, calming himself down. "The library and the cafeteria are both pretty close, but if you don't want something that public, I know where a couple of benches are that would be a little more out of the way."

Ren groaned, looking up at the sky. "Fuck, I'm so over people today." He looked back down at Sho and added, "No offense, or whatever. Am I an asshole if I steal your jacket and then ask to sit outside?"

Sho smirked sarcastically. "Well, you might be an asshole either way, but nah, it's fine. It's not that cold, and you got blood all over my jacket before we got you bandaged up, so I'm not in that big a hurry to get it back."

Ren looked down, studying the side of the jacket. "Fuck. I did, didn't I? Sorry."

Sho waved it off. "Yeah, staunch the blood with your brain next time, would ya?"

Ren actually laughed at that, a surprised little bark that made Sho feel prouder of himself than he probably should have.

When they sat down on a bench a little off the beaten path, Ren immediately pulled his phone out, slouching against the back.

"Checking on your clown?" Sho asked.

"Raids. Almost late," Ren said.

Since Ren always seemed to be gaming on his phone, Sho went ahead and added 2 and 2 to get 4, but he still didn't know if Ren was talking about something that would take two minutes or two hours, so he scooted a little closer and peered over his shoulder.

Ren flinched, hard, then leveled a glare at him.

Sho raised an eyebrow. "What, I can't be curious?"

Ren's narrowed eyes as he turned back to his phone suggested 'no,' but he didn't technically say it.

Sho snorted. "Relax. I was just trying to figure out what we're talking about here. But if you're just, like, picking characters, that's fine. If you're gonna be doing the actual fighting, I might go get some coffee or something."

Ren's eyes softened a little. "Yeah, no, I'll just be a sec. It's a guild thing, so it just kinda combines everything and spits out a winner. Numbers game, just with advantages and disadvantages factored in. I'm setting units, but it's not - yeah, there, done."

He looked up, slipping his phone into his pocket, and Sho sat back away from him a little, camouflaging it with a casual stretch. "Cool. So, hiding places on campus. You have any already, or just uh - how'd the clown put it 'trying to lock yourself into your room.' Rat bastard."

Ren looked sideways at him for a moment, hesitating. "I hate him," he finally said, "But usually people just see the smiley, peppy, bullshit attitude and think, like-"

Sho scoffed. "Nah, man, that dude's fake as hell. Reminds me of - some of my family."

"Fun," Ren answered, sarcastically.

"Yeah, right? Anyway, your guy isn't even that good at hiding it. Those trackers are some real controlling bullshit, and come on. 'Trying'? Your door should have a lock, that's just-"

Ren rolled his eyes. "It does. He picks it. I could get it re-keyed to be sure he couldn't get a key and he'd still be in in about 30 seconds."

Sho whistled.

Ren tipped his head back over the top of the bench, staring up at the sky. "I thought I was fucked when I became a ghoul. And then I came here."

Sho knew he shouldn't just watch Ren sitting there, but he couldn't seem not to. He didn't think Ren fit in at Jabberwock, based on literally everything he'd said tonight, but it was hard to imagine him fitting anywhere. He was prickly enough for Vagastrom, but he'd get his ass beat, probably, ghoul strength or not. He wasn't soft and old-fashioned like Subaru, he was a different kind of asshole than those rich shits at Frostheim, he wasn't freak enough to join the freaks in the woods-

"At least you didn't end up stuck with the lawyer kid?" he suggested.

Ren groaned. "Don't remind me. That guy talks like he swallowed a dictionary, but then he tries to actually think and there's nothing up there. I'm not even sure he knows it's sarcasm when I call him Detective."

Sho snorted. "So look, unless you have a better option, we could try to fuckin', I dunno, barricade your door? Or I can try to sneak you into Vagastrom. Or I guess we could sneak you into one of the cars outside, but you're trying to heal, not get tetanus. If it's far enough in the back outside that people wouldn't see, even the Cap doesn't think it's worth trying to fix, and he's always clanking around under something. When he's not beating my ass."

Ren raised an eyebrow.

"Not literally," he clarified, "It's 'training,' but it's a pain in the ass. Sparring with that guy is like - I dunno. Wrestling a grizzly or something, but the grizzly doesn't want to hurt you, it just wants you to learn, which is like, ten times more embarrassing when you end up on your ass again."

"Your captain makes you wrestle? Sounds kinda-"

"It's MMA. Kinda. A lotta the guys in the house aren't that focused, so it mostly ended up being MMA adjacent and running by the Cap's rules. We have this big cage for cage matches, and I made the mistake of taking down all the normies, so-"

So that sounded nuts, but he was saying it to a guy who lived in a nature reserve in a fake mushroom house, so at some point, he had to accept that everything about this school was a little nuts.

"So yeah, we spar," he trailed off. "Leo doesn't though, so it's not like - I mean, you're not gonna get thrown to the wolves if you show up at the garage with somebody who's supposed to be there. And not to brag, but I am kind of second dog. Leo's Vice-Captain, but I'm the top of the leaderboard for people who've actually had a real fight this year. Sasquatch is too scared he'll hurt somebody."

"'Sasquatch' is the Captain?" Ren asked, "The grizzly that wants you to learn?"

Sho snorted. "Hey man, don't make fun of my metaphors. People are scared of Mido - that's the Captain - but he's honestly just kind of a well-meaning himbo. I mean, truly, sometimes both a dumbass and a pain in the ass, but at least he's not pretending to be anything he's not. And if he is, he's playing worse than what you get, and that's - at least you don't get blindsided."

Ren sighed. "Yeah, fair. So what happens if I do go back with you? I'm not exactly psyched to deal with a million people, but I'm not psyched to see Haru tonight, either. He's just gonna tell me this is why I needed a tracker to begin with, not that he'd have known I was stuck somewhere until-"

All of a sudden, he stopped, his eyes widening, and Sho wasn't sure why. Wrinkling his forehead, he waited Ren out.

Ren shuddered, like somebody had walked over his grave, and whispered, "Shit. Do you think I would have died?"

Sho thought back to the creature, the tree, the wounds. Maybe not. Maybe not, because surely, if he'd stayed up there long enough, he'd have tried to staunch his own bleeding. But maybe, because maybe he'd just have ended up passing out and falling, or getting eaten when he realized he couldn't wait and tried to leave.

"Shit." Ren said again. And then, quieter, "Fuck."

Ren was shaking as it all sunk in, hard full-body tremors that shook the bench, and Sho reached out to grab his shoulder. "Hey, man, it's ok. You're alive."

"Oh shit. Oh shit. I was too distracted to notice, but I-"

"Yeah," Sho agreed, "That's the kind of thing that only sinks in later, huh? And then it's a fuckin' nightmare all over again."

Ren held his hand up in front of his face, watching it shake in the moonlight.

Cool. Good. Right. As far as Sho could tell, there were two major ways you might react to almost dying, and one was wild elation, and the other was abject terror, and neither one was great for making decisions, so now that Ren was trying his best to shake into a million pieces next to him, he was just going to have to make an executive decision.

"Ok," he said, getting to his feet and offering Ren a hand. "Get up. You're coming home with me, because if you're gonna have a panic attack or something, I don't want you by yourself. And I know you'd have other people in the house, but - just come with me. Come on."

Ren stood up and his legs looked wobbly, reminding Sho, for the second time in one day, of freakin' Bambi, of all things, and all of a sudden, he just needed - something. He needed not to be stuck in the middle of whatever was going on. He needed to be settled, to have something finished, whatever that meant.

"Ok," he said again, "So good job starting with 'get up,' but you just got that ankle fixed, so what if I carry you?"

Ren looked pale, and he was still shaking, but whatever answer he meant to give didn't come out, because he took a step toward the path and all of a sudden, he was retching, throwing up nothing, which was a whole different kind of concerning, and then coughing, as he tried to get control of the retching, and all of it so hard his eyes teared up, a glimmer in the moonlight.

Sho reached over and rubbed his back, telling him to breathe.

Ren swore and apologized and swore more.

Sho sighed and pulled Ren down into the grass, sitting next to him. "Here. Catch your breath without having to try to stay up."

"Fuck."

"Yup," Sho agreed, "Hell of a day, huh?"

Ren kept trying to throw up nothing, occasionally bringing up bile, and his eyes filled with tears enough to drip down his face.

Sho reached into an inside pocket of his jacket, while Ren was busy sniffling and choking and not quite ever technically crying, and pulled out a stack of spare napkins he kept mostly to wrap up little bits of food to treat Bonnie with between meals.

"Here," he said, handing Ren one, "Blow your nose, and then take deep breaths. Count to ten, or whatever. All that shit. You're gonna be ok."

Ren blew his nose and then threw up more bile and, when Sho wordlessly handed him another napkin, wiped his mouth.

Finally, he got himself contained, the initial shock wearing off.

"Ok," Sho said, "We're gonna go, and then if you need to fall apart again, you can do that at the garage. Or, you know, upstairs at the garage. My room, but don't make it weird."

He turned around, gesturing toward his back. "Hop on. Piggyback again. Gotta baby that leg a little. If anybody asks, it was doctor's orders."

Ren didn't move. "You saved my life."

Sho groaned. "Yeah, maybe. But I already said don't make it weird. This place is weird enough already."

Ren's arms wrapped around his neck and Sho could tell he was still shaky, could feel the quivering in Ren's body as he reached back to hook his arms around Ren's thighs and stabilize him. Then he stood up and set off for home, taking a slightly winding route that would be less likely to take him past any of Leo's usual haunts and let him slip into one of the less-used entrances to the building.

Up in his room, he put Ren down, then showed him the small private bathroom he had by virtue of this technically being the designated room for the Vice-Captain, a hair smaller than Leo's room, designated for the Captain, and considerably nicer than Mido's room, which was technically an old storeroom that he'd repurposed for some godforsaken reason Sho hadn't made it his business to guess.

"So you'll be good for a while," he said. "I'll have to leave and go get food, but you can chill as long as you need."

His legs still wobbly (or maybe wobbly again), Ren collapsed onto Sho's bed, curling in on himself.

Sho nodded. "Yeah, seems about right."

Ren covered his face with both hands, and Sho wasn't sure if he was embarrassed or overwhelmed or a little bit of both, or just still shell-shocked.

He knelt down next to his bed, getting closer to eye level with Ren. "Hey," he said, "If I go cook us something, are you gonna be cool? I'm not gonna come back and find you convulsing on the floor?"

Ren shook his head.

"No, you won't convulse, or no, I shouldn't leave?" Sho asked

"I'm ok," Ren said, his voice muffled through his hands.

"Got it," Sho said, standing up. Then, just in case, he grabbed a piece of paper off his desk and scrawled his wickchat ID on it. "This is me if you need something. When you're not curled up on top of your phone. Not a joke, just an observation."

Deciding what food to cook was often harder than doing the actual cooking, but he had several useful constraints - easy to digest, comforting, fast to make - that cut down his choices, and luckily, Leo didn't seem to be looking for him and he could get in and out fast.

When he returned with leftover soup from yesterday's food truck menu and fresh rolled omelets, Ren was sitting up, tucked back against his headboard, focused on his phone and looking much calmer. His eyes widened as he took in the full tray Sho was carrying.

Sho didn't quite manage to fight back a grin. "Don't overreact. It's just leftovers and some eggs."

"Shut up," Ren said, his scowl nowhere in sight, which Sho was pretty sure counted as a smile. "You're a shit liar."

"You don't know that."

"You're being one right now. You literally-" he cut himself off. "Whatever. Sure. You're not hot shit and you don't expect anyone to think you are."

Sho huffed a laugh. "Just eat. You need your strength, and you have to be hungry, after all that. You can decide if I'm hot shit after you have some food in you."

Ren looked down at his knees, tucking his arms around his middle as Sho put the tray down next to Ren, then grabbed one of the bowls of soup for himself and plopped down in his desk chair.

"It smells really good," Ren grumbled.

"So eat," Sho said, gesturing at the tray.

Ren picked up one of the omelets, tucked into a bento box so that they could be stacked on the tray. "It's not poison, right?"

Sho knew his instant flash of rage had shown on his face because Ren held up a hand, panicky, and half-shouted, "No offense, no offense! At Jabberwock, sometimes things are poison."

"What do you mean sometimes things are poison?" he asked, his voice still sounding offended, even as he managed to swerve away from actual fighting words.

"Towa throws wolfsbane at me sometimes. Which is wild, because Haru says it's poisonous to touch and gets all mad about it, but Towa always seems fine. But I'm not convinced he's all human. I mean, he's not, he's a ghoul, but you know what I mean."

Sho had no answer to that. "Eat your eggs," he said, "Or your soup. Doesn't matter. Eat. You almost died. And I'm not fucking poisoning you."

Ren was clearly looking for a comeback, but then he actually took a bite and looked surprised and then pleased, which some days was all Sho really wanted from the world. He smirked into his own soup, and this time, when Ren told him it was good, sounding a little ashamed of himself, he accepted the compliment.

Eventually, Ren went back to his phone, creepy music coming from it while he ate his soup.

Sho got up to grab his bento box off the tray, which was still next to Ren, and moved the tray to the nightstand, climbing up next to Ren and looking over his shoulder. "Whatcha watchin'?"

"Horror movie," Ren answered, keeping his focus on the screen and giving Sho an opening to study his face, trying to guess how much he'd actually recovered from the shock and how much he was just burying himself in other things to avoid thinking about it.

"I've been really into B movies lately," Ren said, "But this one's newer - last year, but it was on the festival circuit, so it was harder to get to - and it's supposed to be actually scary." Then he added, "You can watch if you want, but it's kind of a small screen," looking away from his phone as he did and blushing as he realized Sho was staring at him.

Sho looked away, rubbing the back of his neck, and pretended it hadn't happened, in spite of the fact that Ren's eyes were now boring into him like he wanted to drill a hole straight through Sho's skull.

"I don't really do horror," he explained, a little embarrassed. "Always makes me sleep like shit. Our first case started with a deepfake of a ghost, and honestly I think the video fucked up my sleep more than the actual thing. Or at least more than the second time we saw it, 'cause then I knew it was gone."

Ren narrowed his eyes. "I dunno. Deepfakes are harder to make than people think. I mean, they're easier than people think who don't know they exist, but once people actually talk about them they're harder. There are plenty of tells if you know what kind of things to look for."

Sho laughed. "Damn, alright. I'll come ask you next time, then. Leo saw like 5 things wrong with it, he just didn't tell the rest of us until after the case was practically over. Dick."

Ren furrowed his brow. "Are you guys not friends? I thought you were friends."

Sho sighed, leaning his head back. "No, we are. Have been since middle school. He's just still a dick. It's fine."

Ren was still looking at him instead of the movie, which felt like a victory, and he wasn't sure if that meant Ren was pathetic or he was.

"I don't know how you have the patience for all those people," Ren said. "And the energy. I don't really get how extroverts - exist. So, sorry if I kinda mess up."

Sho wrestled with himself for a moment, then said what he wanted to anyway, "I mean, it helps if you don't think of everybody as a stranger."

Ren turned back to his phone, but it was clear at a glance that he was thinking, not actually looking at the screen. "Not an option," he said after a moment. "People lie too much. They pretend to be what they're not."

"And you don't?" he asked.

"I do. I pretend I have the energy to argue with people, and then I feel like shit if somebody buys it."

Sho let a tiny smile slip past his control. "I dunno, you held your own pretty well outside the hospital. You almost got me to leave you alone. So maybe you do tell the truth. Coulda told me you thought I was the only asshole in the world and I might've stormed off."

"Fuuck," Ren groaned. "And then what, started puking on the grass outside our fuckin' mushroom house for one of the lunatics to find? No thank you."

"Technically, you were dry heaving," Sho observed.

Ren leveled a glare that both of them knew he didn't really mean, and Sho laughed.

"Anyway, you got anything else to watch? I wouldn't mind, I just - you know."

Ren's eyes suddenly sparkled as he forced down a smile that was almost getting away from him. "This is gonna sound like an insult," he said, clearly trying to hold back his glee, "But it's only, like, 5% actually an insult."

Sho raised an eyebrow.

"We had this anomalous creature for a while that was pretty smart, and it liked watching kids videos with these little drawings over old folk songs. So it fucked my algorithm all up, and now I have a bunch of horror movies and a bunch of those. So we could watch bedtime stories, just... not any of the ocean ones. I am done with the Dragon Palace."

"Ok, asshole," Sho said, letting all of his quickly-developing fondness for his weird classmate creep into his voice and soften the insult, "I'm not a baby, I just get a little scared by things made to scare people."

Ren laughed. "I said! 5% insult. 5. And they're annoyingly good for falling asleep, actually. I still sleep like shit most of the time, even when the clown's not climbing in my window at the crack of dawn, but it's kinda soothing."

"Yeah, sure," Sho said, gesturing toward the phone. "Which one's your favorite of those? I like going down a weird rabbit hole sometimes."

"It's the longest one," Ren said, "So as long as that's ok. It actually gets into some of the details in the fight scenes, so it's a little extra exciting, but it's also long, so I have a better chance of falling asleep before I finish. Not now, obviously. But when I'm trying."

"Yeah," Sho agreed, scooting over until their shoulders were touching as they both leaned against the headboard. "Go for it."

About halfway through the story, the phone fell from Ren's grip when he fell asleep, slumping sideways and resting his head on Sho's shoulder.

For a minute, Sho thought about waking him up. Then he thought about trying to get up and turn the light out without waking him up. Then he gave up on both and closed his eyes, tipping his head back against the headboard and trying to finish the story with his imagination for the pictures, which worked just fine until he, too, slipped into sleep.

At around 2 am, Sho woke up to find himself tangled up with Ren, the lights still on and both of them still in their clothes. For another minute, he thought about what to do, but when he got up, Ren slept like a rock, completely dead to the world in spite of everything he'd said about sleeping like shit.

Sho changed out of his jeans and into a pair of sweats, leaving his t-shirt on, then turned out the lights and climbed back onto the bed, on top of the covers where he'd been before, but not quite touching Ren.

At four in the morning, he woke up with Ren cuddled up and using him as a pillow, an arm thrown over his stomach as he drooled on his chest. I still sleep like shit, huh? Lying little bastard. Pleased with himself, Sho whispered, as quietly as he could so that he wouldn't actually wake him, "I dare you to call me a stranger in the morning. Your move, asshole."

He didn't mean the 'asshole' part, really, and he resisted an impulse to wrap an arm around Ren to keep him in place. He closed his eyes and matched his breathing to the rise and fall of Ren's breath on top of him, and he fell right back to sleep.