For safety, spoilers up to chapter 422.

When We Are Good

His fingers fit nicely around her wrist and she wishes they didn't.

Too warm, too gentle. She hates that. (Bitter, vitriolic, all together now: hates!)

She hates it because it's him—his hands—he's got the sort of hands that run over you and take all your tricks before you realise he's seen them. Like he's exorcising you, pulling things out and sliding them between his teeth.

She doesn't have tricks, doesn't need any. That doesn't mean there's nothing he could take.

Or take over—

(over and over, spun round and round and round and it makes her dizzy like she's looking down from the height of his ego)

—it scares her.

She pretends it doesn't.

He pretends he doesn't know.

Hiyori can walk now.

Quick and light (right through the sky and don't get the sun in your eyes) and still all that lethal. She kicks Shinji in the face and looks into the split in his lip.

She's always liked red. Better than bored.

(She gets bored and he gets boring.)

Rinse and repeat.

Shut up, pay attention, if you make my name longer than three syllables I'll hit you three times harder.

Yer name's got seven syllables, Hi – yo – ri.

Wanna keep at least seven of your teeth?

He'd shut his mouth, except then he couldn't lick the blood off it.

Her scar still bothers her, sometimes. She tells him so and watches him flinch.

(Hiyori, Hiyori! Like he was dying. She remembers.)

He mutters, "Ain't there anythin' else to talk about," rolls every r like a rock up a hill.

She doesn't want to hurt him, not really. Not properly. As long as he feels something—

but she knows he does—

not much has changed, yet. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, lock the cat in the box and throw away the key. Layers in layers in layers: where are we now?

No one knows, of course.

If he does, he's not showing it.

He does know how to flick his words around like playing cards, sneak there and evade here. She's used to it: up at the end of the sentence, down for effect; he laughs like it's all his own great joke.

Most of the time, it probably is.

But his scars give him trouble too. She's seen him with his hand spread out across the side of his chest, like the long pale rift of a scar is hiding his heartbeat and he's trying to find it.

(Hiyori's got this nice little delusion that it's Not Her Fault.)

On the outside of his door, there's a nice smooth shiny bit where she's bang-bang-banged on it, disharmony in big staccato rhythm.

If he doesn't answer, he's asleep. (But then, not for long.)

Now, nothing. So she goes in.

He's doing jinzen, lying across his bed with his chest and shoulders and head hanging upside-down off the edge. Sakanade is lying unsheathed across his lap.

She wonders if he'd feel it if she winded him. Probably not.

Except—

then his reiatsu glides out around him, unwinding from Sakanade's like a rope as it frays.

"How's things, Hiyori?"

He doesn't move except for to sheath Sakanade. It sounds like a whisper.

She sits next to him. He's silent and still, glass in the shadows.

She punches the side of his leg and feels like she's hitting the bone.

"Sit up when you're talking to me, dumbass."

A pause. Breathe. "I might faint," he says, smoothly syncopated.

(Him of all people.) "Do it slowly then."

He does. Props his chin on his hand and gives her the look that means so, then, why're ya here? and ha, see this, I see right through you and into you and everything in between.

"Bored," she says.

"Ah."

They don't speak after that. Instead, they sit and look at the wall: it's like looking at a light and then closing your eyes. There are patterns, but none of them make sense.

(And she wishes he did.)

She leaves with no explanation, when the like-a-light starts to burn.

"Be good, Hiyori."

He unsheathes Sakanade, and the whisper's all she hears. This time she almost understands it.

(and we all fall down)

He is all skin and bones and subterfuge.

With her, he is honest. He is so without intent: he cannot stop himself. He would tell her anything she wanted to know, exactly measured, with the grace of scratched-out letters on a street sign.

(One point if you understand him, two for knowing what he'll say next, three for the right answer.)

Hiyori doesn't ask him much, because she's afraid of what he'll say.

Why do you tolerate me, why don't you stop me, why didn't you tell me I was—

She can hear him now: it swells inside her until it hurts and she can't get it out.

"Because I—"

She wouldn't be able to let him say it.

(Tap out, you're held down.)

Selfish, selfish: she would say it back (because it is true), but—where then? Like looking into a black hole before it swallows you—where to?

Still his bones are sharp.

Bite him, bruise him, make him bleed.

He catches her wrist, her elbow, her fingers. He barely moves. She looks upwards (meets his eyes) and goes for him—

(what's he doing)

and he twists his fingers into her hair and kisses her so hard he knocks her breath out.

(she thought she'd hate herself for it but)

She lets him. His hands span her face her neck her throat, up and over and around. He is sharp and she is small and they are entropic with the best of them: who cares where?

Your heart, or mine?

He reads her like sheet music. His fingers go sotto and sopra and up the accelerando, picking out time and key and exactly when and where.

Leggiero, half-step, crescendo up and up and up.

Later, she sees the bruises where his hips hit her legs. They're spreading and ferric and he is apologetic (she is insouciant). His lips when they touch her feel like ink.

Fiercely slow along the scar, the entire stretch of her skin. Tilts her head back—her arms snake around his neck and her hands hit his shoulder blades.

Metal grinds against her teeth.

Sometimes, she laughs so hard her ribs might break. At him, with him, for him—

and all that jazz (ha, ha): stupid Shinji with his rhythm and his rhyme.

He told her once that, sometimes, he wonders if she wakes up and actually decides how petulant she's going to be.

She tells him she could start.

"I'll take bets," said Lisa.

And he takes the time.