[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Thunderstorm

Genre: Comfort/Friendship
Length: 2642 words
B/D: I got this idea during a thunderstorm in real life, and I actually like how it came out. Cute Sora/Nath stuff, as usual.

She didn’t say she was coming, but there’s a cup of tea waiting for her on the table, to her mild surprise. Perhaps Hime is psychic, or perhaps it’s simply an article of faith; Nath doesn’t know the answer, but she’s glad to have it. The rain outside is falling in thick, heavy waves, crashing against the windows and battering against the roof; her clothes are sodden, and water is trickling from her hair down to her chin. But the curtain of thick, dark cloud hides more than a coating of rain, and water is not all that’s falling. Even now, jagged strikes of lightning are reaching down to touch the face of the land, to scorch and to singe, and they bring peals of rolling thunder for a companion. It’s as fair a storm as Nath has seen in a few years, and she’s pleased to be out of it.

“Sorry I didn’t answer the phone. I can work buttons, but it takes a little while,” she says, polite but toneless. Although she’s a firm believer in good manners, sometimes she can’t help but want to be more direct about things. If she was in her own home right now, she would have kicked off her soaked books and shook her head like a dog to get the water out of her hair. Alas, no such luck.

“Oh, my apologies. I just didn’t think! I’ll text or leave a voice message next time. Here, have a seat and I’ll get you a towel,” Hime says, but the pace of her voice is… off. She seems nervous, a little highly strung. Skittish, maybe.

“I’ll stand. If I sit down, the chair will get wet,” Nath says. She tries to soften her voice a little, slow her words. She’s always found that the best way to deal with nervous people is to calm down herself. “Do you mind if I use bits indoors?”

Hime is almost out of the room already, but she jumps to a dancer’s halt. No extra momentum, a perfect stop. “Oh! Oh, yes, Sora said something about that. By all means, go ahead! And don’t worry about the chairs. I’m sure they don’t mind.”

Nath sighs as her host departs. She had considered staying home when the phone rang, but Hime had never called her out of the blue. Nobody really calls her out of the blue. Nowadays, her phone is more of a clock. Not even a watch, since she can’t really handle it easily – although to be fair, it wasn’t as though she wears a lot of watches. So, on the basis of a hunch, she forged out into the wind and the rain. Sure enough, it feels like something is wrong. The only question is what.

She takes a delicate sip of her tea as she makes herself comfortable. It has to be delicate. Her tractor bits are useful but fine control is a chore, and she’s dumped enough hot beverages in her lap over the course of her life to know not to rush the balancing act. She tastes an undertone of sweet vanilla, no doubt one of Hime’s fabled kitchen experiments. Not a bad one, though. If nothing else it is warm and soothing, and chases off the shivers from the rain.

Her attention turns to the living room, which is… less chaotic than she remembers it. The furniture, usually more or less strewn about wherever it seemed to fit, has taken on a more orderly formation. It gives the room a different kind of personality, but it hardly seems like cause for panic. Not the reason Hime called her, then, but perhaps a clue? Maybe not. She has the odd sensation that there is something missing, subtracted from the scene. Of course, she rebukes herself, all baseless speculation does is pass the time until Hime comes back with the actual answer.

As it turns out, she doesn’t have long to wait. Her host arrives with a long bathtowel folded over her arms, black and white like a chequered flag. “Here, let’s get your hair dried at least. I expect you’ll need a hand?” she says with a wink.

Nath smiles. Hime is still the only one bold, or cheeky, enough to make that kind of joke with her. Although at first she found it quite disarming (so to speak), it’s one of the things she respects about the blonde girl. It puts her in mind of the first time they met, and had a strange discussion on the doorstep that neither one of them fully understood. As her mind follows the trail of the memory, she realises what seems off.

“It’s evening now. Is that other girl, Suguri, not awake?” she asks as Hime dries her hair. The blonde girl’s hands slow, and she senses that she’s hit the mark. It’s a long few seconds before the answer comes.

“...No. She’s away right now. Investigating some organisation she thinks is shady. I’m not worried, since it’s Suguri, but her being away is half of the problem.”

“And Sora?”

Hime exhales, long and low. “The other half.”

“I thought as much,” Nath murmurs. “You think I can help?”

“Mm. It’s just that…” Hime begins, and thinks carefully about what she’ll say. “Both of those girls are… quiet, you could say. With Suguri, it isn’t a problem, because she’s usually straightforward about things. But with Sora… I suppose I just feel like Sora has gone through things, and is going through things, that I can’t quite understand, so it’s harder for me to get close.”

She’s careful to keep her tone neutral. “You mean the war.”

“Yes.”

“Where is she now?”

“Huddled up in the bedroom… ah, wait!”

Nath has already gotten to her feet, wet hair be damned. She straightens her back and pushes back her shoulders, a deliberate gesture to hide the irritation building in the pit of her stomach. Ten thousand years, she thinks. Ten thousand years, and the war is still following her. The war, the war, the war. It is an old wound to her now, and it has no right to reach into her life after so long.

“Nath, be careful, will you?” Hime asks, quiet and serious. “I feel like she might lash out… Did I ever tell you how we met? Suguri and I were passing by when she first awoke, and the first thing she did was fight us. It was like she’d gone berserk. It was fine that time… but without Suguri here, I don’t know if I could contain her if she becomes becomes aggressive again. The town is so close...”

When Nath speaks, it is in the businesslike tone of somebody who accounts for all eventualities, and knows when to value clarity over kindness. “I understand. I fought her during the war. Lost pretty badly. But unless she has her rifle in her back pocket, it shouldn’t be a problem. I’m bigger, heavier, and built tougher, so I should win in close quarters. For now, I’d like to assume it won’t come to that. I’m going to go up, so in the meantime, I’d like you to make enough tea for the three of us.”

Hime smiles, and breathes what might be a pre-emptive sigh of relief. “Thank you, Nath. I knew that calling you was the right decision. It’s frustrating since I can’t do anything to help by myself, but I’m sure you can manage.”

Nath finds a lot to think about as she climbs the stairs. The most important thing is to plan her approach. She takes care to tread loudly, walk with a steady pace. Not sudden, not quiet. Predictable. Surprising Sora is the thing she most wants to avoid, because it’ll be the easiest way to find herself in a fight that she’s not quite as confident of winning as she led Hime to believe. The rain is still battering against the roof, and a heavy roll of thunder calls as she approaches the door of the master bedroom, left just ajar. There’s an urge to peek, but it’s not the right call.

“Sora,” she calls, and her voice is clear and calm. “It’s Nath. I’m about to come in.”

There’s no reply. She waits for a good five seconds, then nudges the door open with her shoulder and appraises the bedroom with a sweeping glances. It’s a bedroom too big for one person, more orderly than the rest of the house, conservatively decorated. A standing closet with a selection of dresses, a floor length mirror, and a set of dressing tables seem to be the newest additions. Everything else is almost antique, including the bed, which is wide with an oddly ornate carved footboard, and a wall of pillows (with a few missing) forming a dividing line down the middle.

Balled up in one corner is Sora, her knees pressed to her chest, her knuckles white and the tendons of her hands arched up as she clutches the fabric of her shirt. Her eyes are hard and glinting in the near-gloom, and her face seems pale and somehow more angular. If she had been rocking back and forth, Nath would perhaps have been a little relieved, but she is perfectly and utterly still. The very picture of a cornered animal.

“I’m going to sit down.”

It isn’t a request. It is a simple statement of fact. She reprises her steady, predictable stride and charts her way to the side of the bed opposite to Sora’s. The mattress groans and creaks under her weight, but holds.

“You okay? You didn’t reply when I called to you.”

A moment of tense silence. “I… I thought I imagined it.”

Her voice is rasping, a croak. A dry throat. Definitely fear, Nath thinks, although it’s obvious. Fear is a dangerous thing. The more afraid you become, the more afraid everybody else becomes. The more afraid everybody else is, the more justified your own fear, and the larger it grows. It was probably a good thing Hime didn’t come up, Nath decides. She seemed nervous, and that might have been the spark to start the fire.

She lets the sound of rain fill the air between them. There no need to speak just yet. She’s not in a hurry, and the longer she stays as she is, the more time Sora will have to get comfortable with her being there. The blonde girl still hasn’t moved. She seems so different from the girl Nath has become used to – the quiet girl who always seemed to be doing something with her hands, who reached out to her with such easy affection. She’d gotten more hugs from Sora in the brief time since they met again than she’d had for years. But now the girl kept her hands to herself.

“Let me tell you a story,” Nath began, when she felt the weight of the silence beginning to be a burden rather than a help. “It was a couple years after they patched me up. The world was still a chaotic place, back then. People were rebuilding, reconnecting. Getting back to life after devoting themselves to death. But there are always some folks who take advantage of times like that.”

Sora says nothing, but her interest is piqued. She doesn’t turn her head, but she still looks at Nath from the corner of her eye, watching her face, her mouth.

“Well, I ran into one of the unscrupulous types. He had a gun, one of those old-time, pre-war things. Kinetic, six round clip, single fire, snub nose, badly made. He wanted me to give him my money and get on the ground, and, well, I didn’t feel like it. Why would I? With a weapon like that, he could have emptied it against my forehead and been lucky to leave a bruise. But he decided to escalate things and show off that he was serious, so he fired a shot into the air.”

“...What happened?”

Nath pauses, arranges her words in her mind. “I’m not a hundred percent sure. Everything after that is just a big, blank space. Lost time. I know that they nearly had to put the guy back together with a needle and thread, and I just kept shouting when they were trying to calm me down. The last thing I really remember is the sound of the gun, and the smell of gunpowder. It… took me back to places that I really didn’t want to go again, and I just lost it. Went on autopilot.”

Sora says nothing, but lowers her head to meet her knees. The patter of raindrops on the roof fills the empty space. Nath takes a moment to collect herself again. The story was a little more taxing on her than she thought.

“So, that’s my story,” she says, doggedly. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, why don’t you tell me how you feel about the thunder?”

Sora turns her head sharply, eyes wide, and she knows she’s hit her mark. The girl inhales shakily. “It’s… it sounds too much like the artillery. Against a black sky… It reminds me of the first time I ever went out to fight. I can’t get it out of my head. I… hate this.”

“It gets better in time. Having friends who understand helps. If you can get some earmuffs, that’s good too. Otherwise, you had the right idea – find somewhere dark, be still for a while,” Nath says. “And don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re not at fault for feeling this way.”

A second ticks by. Two. Slowly, slowly, Sora rebuilds her composure. When she looks at Nath again, her eyes are no longer wild and hard, but the soft, calm eyes that she’s come to know. “Thank you, Nath.”

Nath smiles, somewhere in the gloom, and leans over the wall of pillows to nudge her shoulder against Sora’s. “I’d give you a hug, but… well, obvious problem. I was a soldier, but I can’t really say I was in the ‘army’.”

“Are you crying?” Sora asks. The question is so sudden that it takes her aback, and the confusion shows in her expression. “There’s water on your face.”

“It’s rain. I came over in a hurry when Hime called me. She was very worried about you,” Nath says. “I told her to make us some tea, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“Nnn. Maybe in a little while. Can… Can I call you if it happens again?”

“If you call me, I’ll come. Pinky promise,” Nath says, and chuckles at her own joke. Sora looks at her, her head tilted in thought.

“You don’t have a pinky finger, but you have a pinky toe. Take off your boots.”

“…Are you kidding?” she asks, flatly.

“No. You owe me a pinky promise. If you won’t take your boots off, I’ll take them off for you,” Sora replies, her eyes glinting.

“You’ll have to wrestle them off me,” Nath says, before realising she should really have held her tongue. In a blink of an eye and a whirl of blonde hair, Sora has her in the beginnings of a fearsome headlock. Luckily, she has a simple response: she stands up, lifting the weigh easily. Suddenly the situation is no longer Nath in a headlock, but Nath with Sora draped over her shoulders like a coat.

“You seem to have livened up. I am going to get some tea, and maybe use your shower because my clothes are drenched. We can talk about pinky promises after that. If you’re coming with me, hold tight.”

“Auuu. Stingy,” Sora murmurs, but keeps her grip. Slowly, with gentle, steady footsteps, Nath carries her friend from the darkened room and down the stairs, where a warm smile is waiting for them.