She was asking him what to do. Telling him he was hurt, even. His brain was barely receiving the message that he was not as badly injured as he thought he would be over the sound of his limbs aching and calling for help. So, he knelt there for a moment, head hung and breathing shallow. He was silent, like he usually was, but still.
Good hand raised to identify the cabinet that stood behind Kurasame’s desk and off to the side of the far wall, atop the stage area. His brain was only working so fast at that moment, struggling with such basic tasks in the aftershock of the adrenaline leaving his body, but he could at least tell her to get the potions for him. That would help. If he could restore what he’d lost, he would be just fine, and better yet, with the storage of aquamarine bottles they had on stock… he could heal both of them. “In there. Grab the red ones first. You might as well drink one yourself.”
They’re ginseng flavored. He left that to himself, though. It seemed like such a childish comment, to care about the flavor of something that would, inevitably, save their skins. As he sat there, however, as he had eventually brought his knee down and had come to rest upon his heels, he could only wonder why she had stayed. She had the ability to come and go between worlds at will, and he knew that if she truly wished to, she could have created a portal on her own, dragged them both through. For some reason, the blonde who was so insistent on helping him at the moment had decided to leave them be within this world. He recalled a lot of things from that time, the drowsiness he had always accounted to just how much had happened that day, but…
Why was it suddenly not an option?
With a sudden burst of effort, he made himself stand and after recovering his balance, dusted his pants off out of habit. A few steps took him to his desk, to where he reached into the drawer and pulled a particular book from its depths. It took a bit of dusting it off, but he smiled at his own fortune. His God’s Rulebook hadn’t been taken from the room.
Call it a good luck charm, he figured. He wasn’t even religious, much less to a god. He spoke more often to Etro than he ever would Bhunivelze, anyway. Something about a motherly touch, he guessed, but the fact remained: he cared very little for the afterlife or where his body would end up. Death, God’s hands, so on and so forth had never applied to him anyway. Yet, the book interested him. A set of guidelines that identified an honest way to live? More importantly, a list that he had broken more of the rules in than followed? He just had to wonder what heretic had decided to take the voice of a deity into their own hands, and for some strange reason, it always felt as if that book’s presence made things go a lot better than planned.
As such, he tended to leave it in his desk and hope it would help him from falling asleep in class. Whether it really was lucky or not didn’t matter. It was all mental anyway, right? Still, with a sigh, he slid the thick book into his satchel and returned to where he had been sitting before. The blond stood now, however, as he no longer wished to grovel at the floor for the answers he would only with his own two hands, on his own two feet, and with his own voice. “What are you hiding from me?”
Watching the girl fumble and stumble whilst she carried the bottles in her hands, he had decided that now, rather than later, would be a better time to come clean about things. Later they would be in too much of a hurry, for her to leave and for him to aid the survivors, for any real discussion to be held. Now, however, they were alone in a room and tending to each other. If she was hiding something from him, which she was and while he had no proof, knew by human nature that such was true, he’d rather know it now.
Secrets had a messy habit of getting in the way.
Listening to his directions she hobbled over to the cabinet, trying her best to walk more normally than she was. Shoving the pain out of her mind was not particularly working in her favor but she was determined to make it work until the injury could be overcome, and she opened the cabinet with little trouble, though she did have to give it a rather hard tug. Eyeing all of the bottles and things on the shelves she reached out and picked up several of the red ones, trying to place them all carefully in the crook of her elbow to make for an easier journey back to her friend. Really she had no idea what she was picking up but she would have to trust him on this and she turned back, shifting a little bit as she stood stationary.
Truth be told she was not particularly clumsy nor was she graceful, but she was generally steady on her feet and able to keep her head in place so she walked carefully back to Ace, noting that he appeared to be looking at something—a book, from what she could see, though that wasn’t surprising to her in the end. Eyes staring rather intently at the bottles in her arms she lifted it once more when she heard him speak and it took her several moments to actually process the words that he was uttering.
If hard pressed she would admit that she always knew that it would come down to this, because Ace was rather perceptive and there were some things about herself that she could not hide. Being a Nobody wasn’t necessarily something to hide anyways, because she was not particularly ashamed by the fact that she was—to feel shame over something unchangeable was ridiculous. But rather she simply never told anyone because no one ever bothered to ask. After all, for all intents and purposes, she appeared and sounded and acted human, no different from anyone else. It would take, in the end, someone who she was willing to be around often to ask most likely.
So she had been expecting this.
Yet still she said,
”I’m not—“
Before cutting herself off and taking a deep breath, closing the distance between herself and his desk and setting down the bottles as carefully as possible with a soft clatter. Faintly it occurred to her that she had not closed the cabinet door, but that was hardly important at that point in time, and instead she simply picked up a bottle and pulled the stopper off of it, presenting it to Ace with an imploring gaze that simply told him to take it, because she was not ready to speak yet. Thoughts were cluttered in her mind and it would take her a little bit of time to actually short them out in order to form a coherent sentence, to give a plausible explanation for everything that she had, in essence, been hiding from him.
So she made him take the bottle and she took her own and tipped her head back and drank it because she knew, logically, it was a potion that would help in the healing process. And unlike how she imagined they would be, it actually tasted rather good—not a taste that she could place in one way or another, but it wasn’t an unpleasant thing that settled on her tongue and it slipped down her throat easily. Almost immediately she felt the effects of it and she leaned her hip against his desk and sat the almost empty bottle back down, finding that it was becoming easier to breathe deeply.
Smoothing down the fabric of her skirt—stained red with blood, she noted, which wasn’t surprising in the least—she stared down at the desk before opening her mouth. ”I wasn’t—“ and then she closed it again because there wasn’t supposed to be excuses spilling out of her mouth and Naminé would not accept that from herself, because excuses meant that she had done something essentially wrong which she had not felt she had done. So she backtracked and gathered her thoughts once more, and decided that she would begin this explanation in the simplest way that she knew. After all, she had always been blunt and straightforward about the truth.
”I’m a Nobody.”
( There was emphasis on Nobody, trying to make it clear that it was capitalized. )
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