Chapter Text
Natsume is shuddering, probably only partly from the cold. He’s soaked through, hair plastered to his head, thin sweatshirt sodden and heavy and hanging off his body like the wings of a downed bat.
That’s one thing about this horrible night that Kaname has the power to fix. He starts to shrug off his own jacket. He’d had the umbrella when Natsume went running off, so he’s in much better shape than his friend.
“Natsume, here. You’ll catch cold.”
But Natsume doesn’t take it. He doesn’t even turn to look at him. He’s staring straight ahead, even though there’s nothing to look at except the otherwise empty train compartment. His crossed arms tighten, as if he’s hugging himself together. As if he’s putting up a wall.
“No thank you,” he says quietly.
Kaname blinks, stopping short. He’s still holding the jacket out. It just hovers there between them like some sort of sad offering.
Nyanko-sensei is watching them silently, eyes narrowed and very green. Unease twists Kaname’s stomach into knots.
The past two hours have been an exercise in what to do when absolutely every single thing goes all the way wrong, and anxiety has been on a slow simmer in the back of Kaname’s brain since the moment Natsume’s cousin sat down at the lunch table with a quiet sneer, but finally getting on the train home felt like a step in the right direction. It felt like they were heading out of a storm, metaphorically and literally.
But Natsume isn’t looking at him. His fingers are white-knuckled where they’re digging into his own wet sleeves.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he says, in that same quiet tone. “I don’t want your pity.”
It’s not a shout, but it feels like one. It lands like a blow. Kaname flinches from him, he can’t help it. He snatches the jacket back. Abruptly, he feels too big for his skin, clumsy and stupid and unsure of himself.
The other kids used to make him feel like this in those other places he lived. The friends he has now never have. He didn’t think they ever would. He doesn’t know what he’s done wrong.
Nyanko-sensei’s eyes narrow further, but it’s not Kaname that he’s glaring at.
“Don’t be obtuse, brat,” he says, as short and peremptory as Kitamoto’s mother can be when Kitamoto and his friends are getting too rowdy. “Your eyes are too good for you to act this blind.”
It’s Kaname’s turn to stare nowhere. Nowhere feels like the only place to look. In his periphery, he sees Natsume glance towards him, and in a complete turn of events, Kaname finds himself wishing that he wouldn’t.
He’s twisting his jacket between his hands. He doesn’t want to talk anymore. He wants to go home.
Then Natsume is sliding out of his seat, and he’s kneeling in front of Kaname’s, and his dark eyes are wide and bright and present. He looks like himself for the first time since his cousin started shouting from across the table, since he stood up with an abrupt rattle of dishware and bolted out into the rain.
“I’m sorry,” he says immediately. He sounds it, his voice stricken and plaintive. “I shouldn’t have said that to you. Not to you.”
Kaname manages to look up into Natsume’s face, but only for a second. His hands are a safer place for his eyes to settle.
“It’s not—pity,” he mutters. He wouldn’t be able to raise his voice now if his life depended on it. He feels like a ghost. “I’ve never felt—sorry for you.”
“I know.”
“I just didn’t want you to be cold.”
“Tanuma,” Natsume chokes out, “I know. I’m sorry. I know that.”
Nyanko-sensei hops up into the seat that Natsume vacated with a put-upon sigh. He settles into a comfortable loaf and presses into Kaname’s side, a warm, solid weight. His sturdy presence is bracing. The lurching, jittering thing in Kaname’s chest settles down into something it doesn’t hurt to breathe through, something that he can make sit still.
It isn’t about you, Kaname tells himself. He was taking it out on you because you were there. It’s about his cousin and whatever haunted them when they lived together and a million other things.
It still hurts, but it isn’t about him, so he can pack it away. He pets Nyanko-sensei, smiling a little when the lucky cat climbs into his lap, and finally musters the courage to look up at his friend properly.
Natsume is still trembling, still looks half-drowned, and he seems newly shaken now. He’s staring at Kaname as if Kaname might somehow disappear from the moving train if he so much as blinks. His hand is hovering between them, on the verge of reaching out.
Earlier, Kaname would have taken it. He wouldn’t have second-guessed it. But right now, he…isn’t sure. He doesn’t know if Natsume would want him to. He doesn’t want to get it wrong again.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re my best friend, Natsume. Of course it’s okay.”