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Shu has very thin wrists, is Luca’s first thought.
(It should not be this surprising. Even in the before– before food became a rationed resource worth killing for– Shu had been slim. Slender fingers, slender limbs, slender torso. Luca’s old overcoat used to swallow the sorcerer, dwarfing him instead of enhancing his presence. Before things had gotten this bad, Luca used to love dropping that giant piece of clothing on his then acquaintance. It’d been a rare moment of respite from the ever mounting confusion and strife that came with his responsibilities.
((because even back then, the virus was already taking hold like a particularly insidious weed but paced among the thousand other small oddities and anomalies, no one had noticed.
not until noticing was the death sentence instead of the close call anyway))
The coat is gone now, burnt into ash and dust like so many other things in his life, but Shu is still here. His frame is too thin, his cheeks are too hollow and his purple eyes are as feverishly bright as his purple flames. But he is here and Luca is long past the point of being picky about his blessings.)
“Luca?” The calm tone startles him out of his thoughts and he looks up to see Shu staring at him curiously, “Is something wrong?”
He shakes his head and resumes walking, pulling his companion along. Shu accepts his silence willingly enough and continues to follow without question. Shikigami flickers around him, circling and wary as Luca thumbs the warmed metal of his own means of defense, the need to stay alert ever present and humming. It is relatively safe here, where their group has chosen to stop for the time being– the infection has not quite taken root in the pockets of wilderness– but Luca can still hear screams and moans mixing into an acrid smell of burning flesh-rubber-gasoline as half rotting hands reach out out out–
“Luca?”
He knows it is concern that threads through Shu’s voice but like so many other things that have twisted over the years, he can only feel irritation in response. It has him turning with poison burning the back of his tongue and cruelty curling around his loosening fingers. Before either can make their bitter entrance however, he feels the thin thin wrist in his grasp twist into an answering pressure around his own.
Luca looks up into quiet steel and burning wisteria. He feels his jaw jump and the blond turns away, letting go. It is Shu who holds on for the rest of the walk in silence.
.
.
.
Shu has very thin wrists, Luca thinks.
For what he knows Shu’s hands are capable of, the sorcerer’s wrists feel almost like an intended deception. They are not delicate, per say, and far from fragile, but a more fitting adjective does not surface. If there were a comparison Luca thinks it would be picking up a feather only to realise it was made of finely spun lead.
“Luca,” said man glances up through his lashes to see the faint uptick of Shu’s mouth, “that tickles. I need to finish the bandages. Stop.”
Luca feels his own lips quirk, a mischievous streak he thought had died years ago bubbling weakly in his stomach. Shu watches him with a fondly wary expression as Luca picks up the supplies from next to him. There are more scars added onto the pale skin of Shu’s forearms now. His healing capacity exceeds those of normal humans, but poor nutrition and poorer rest had taken its toll. Luca can feel the uneven texture as he finishes off the wrapping and wonders idly how many more will criss cross before–
He picks up Shu’s other arm. Shu blinks at him curiously but stays still. The blond uses that to his advantage.
(Bone white moon. Silver-white water. A scintillating city.
Shu is painted black and white and grey, having foregone his usual halo of violet for much needed stealth. He is less flesh and more shade and Luca stares at the half play of a silken blur tapering down to a sharply cut waist. There is a very old story from a time long ago when Luca could still see gold instead of black and grey about a fox with painted eyes and a snake with gilded skin. It spills like strips of crimson ink around Shu’s eyes and Luca does not remember seeing color since–
Cool fingers lay over his forehead.
((hush))
A raid gone wrong and a separation. Caught out in a bad storm before finally making it back to base. He had lain in bed with a fever for almost a week straight afterwards.)
It has been a long time since he last used his hands to do anything other than hurt, but what Luca has planned is hardly difficult. He runs his thumb along the ridge of Shu’s inner wrist before flipping his companion’s hand over. Even after so many years, the sorcerer’s veins are clearly visible under pale skin, blue-green and leading up up up to the crook of an uncovered elbow. It is an easy thing to track the pathways with his fingers, spider webbing teal and purple red in fragile threads. Shu’s fingers twitch and Luca’s grip tightens, unwilling to let the other pull away. He runs his thumb into the hollow of his companion’s elbow before feeling the muscles under his fingers tense.
A hand catches his own, and the blond raises his eyes to meet soft violet draped over lilac smoke. Luca turns away as Shu huffs in amusement, slim fingers tracing the inked edges of an old tattoo.
.
.
.
Shu has very thin wrists and Luca should have wrapped them up with cuffs or his belt or barbed wire, tight enough that they chafe red or bled or turned purple blue because he cannot. Shu cannot. Luca refuses. No more. He has lost so much– they have all lost so much– but Shu has been by his side since the very beginning. Since Vox and Finana and Fulgur and Yugo and–
–he cannot go. He cannot be gone. Not when Luca is held together by anger and desperation, stitched together precariously by the last vestiges of golden spring and first sunrise. Shu is the seamstress that Luca returns to when his insides are spilling out in black tendril and grey smoke, spools of thread spun gold and amethyst when there is nothing (nothing nothing). If Shu goes, then what of Luca?
(If the eye goes, what of the storm?)
He can still feel the fine bones wrapped up in his hands. He can still feel how they slipped out of his hands.
He should have shot the person Shu walked to the door then left behind in the spaceship.
He should have followed. Or held tighter. Or incapacitated Shu. Or–
(Shu would have gone anyway because Luca has never been able to protect anything he’s actually wanted to keep.
If Shu were here, he’d rebuke Luca. Maybe even his carefully controlled flames would flare for good measure because taking on all the guilt removes any of Shu’s own agency, but Shu is not here and Luca has never been good at not spiraling and–)
Shu’s eyes blink at him from the dark recesses of his mind and it feels like a dam breaking. Luca has been refusing to revisit the last few hours after they broke the stratosphere. Someone, likely Mysta, had led him to this room and he’s been left alone since in white static and monotonous humming. But now, Shu blinks at him in burning lithium with flickering twilight and Luca cannot turn away, not when the sight is seared into the back of his retinas.
(The sorcerer is silhouetted against a bloody sun, bleeding crimson orange onto both the earth and the sky.
“I know you’ll come back.”)
“Shu,” Luca whispers, as his hands close around the air, tightening to the point of pain, “Shu.”
There is no answering grip.