FINGERS CROSSED, yuzuha usagi

CHAPTER TEN

Wasn't missing too draining, too hard to let a heart crave so badly it ached? Wasn't letting go a kind of murder? Wasn't life so short to such urgency of loving? Perhaps yes wasn't an answer, and no never meant the same, and maybe was not that close to a what if or a pair of hands that hid the warmth of a breathy laugh and the lines of years of them. Perhaps the meaning was just as devastating as the connotations, like love was too.

For Yasuko it had been that what made it all worse. Love. It had been following her, pleading to be welcomed in her arms, yet she never dared to reject it, so it clinged to her, as if some day her eyes would look back at it, with a childishly hello lingering on the corner of her lips the same way it did on Ikehara's the moment he guided her around what was left of a building's second floor, where everything reduced to the sound of their steps and the green eating the insides of desks, the backs of chairs and the windows' broken frames.

There were only two games left and still, Yasuko's eyes seemed to be permanently glued on him.

"Is the back of my head good?" Ikehara asked, glancing at her over the shoulder at the same time she turned hers to the side, finding a speck of sun on the ground.

"Pretty average." She shrugged.

"Spit it out already." Ikehara leaned against a rusty desk, placing the rifle he'd been carrying next to him on top of an useless keyboard.

He asked and she did. Immediately. Maybe too fast to ignore how much she cared, how troublesome it was to answer, how feral it was to feel it. Yasuko had never known a closeness like that, one she feared and desired and hoped it stayed with her one minute longer than the the one that had passed by. If someone had told her Ikehara had cursed her to be drawn to him, she might had believed it. The only proof she would've needed were his eyes, looking back at her as he had done the night she prepared an extra cup of tea and walked outside his room although hers was on the other side of The Beach, or the night before he left, when he knocked on her door and didn't speak a word even as he let her hands rest on his back, waiting for her fingers to move first. A caress he didn't want to see, because if his eyes had watched her hesitation, he would've tried to apologize for ever thinking of saying goodbye, and it would've been too late. It always would've been too late, even at that time.

"Do you think you'll ever forget me?" Could love be forgotten too?, she exhaled.

"No," Ikehara lowered his voice, as if he was afraid of hearing himself, "I wouldn't dare."

"Do you think we can still be friends when this is over?" For once, she stepped forward, not caring if he noticed her fists clenching, her eyelids barely blinking at his shoulders tensioning and his breathing fastening.

Nothing was spoken, yet it didn't matter. She knew the answer just watching him shift under her gaze.

Perhaps teeth and claws and blood was all they were made of. Perhaps soft whispers and fading into each other's arms and letting their eyes do the talking was the other side of it.

A gunshot travelled down the street, and like a sixth sense, it felt as if the pause menu they had been hanging on reloaded their respawn point in a blink.

Ikehara grabbed her arm tightly the moment they heard it, moving her out of the windows' way. Engulfed by nature, he pulled branches and snatched leaves off their vision to get a better view of what was going on outside their building.

"What the fuck?" Ikehara grabbed her rifle and pointed it at the center of attention of the city. Three figures she swore she would recognize even if she lost her sight were facing each other.

"Please tell me that's not who I think it is." Yasuko peaked at the trio over his shoulder, but Ikehara's awful management of firearms almost knocked her out as he gave up, handing it to her with a grumpy pout.