Chapter Text
There are three ways people usually look at Tohma Ishibashi.
Some people see him as a pretty boy. That usually lasts until they meet him.
Some people look right through him. That usually lasts until they try him.
Some people treat him as a threat. If he has to choose, that’s his favourite. At least it tends to tell him something important and correct about them.
His first few weeks at Darkwick are full of all three. But it’s fair, because he’s watching everyone else right back.
Most particularly, he’s watching Jin Kamurai.
Jin is awfully easy to watch. In fact, Jin demands to be watched - those movie-star looks and that rock-solid self-assurance are a lethal combination all on their own, never mind literally everything else about him. He owns Darkwick, from the moment he steps off the Galaxy Express.
Of course, of course, Jin pulls the biggest, fanciest sword out of the artifact warehouse, and immediately dices a target dummy with an ease and skill that telegraphs that this is insultingly easy. Jin couldn’t possibly get stuck with something embarrassing, or something low-class, or even something he doesn’t quite know how to use. It had to be a sword, a beautiful weapon, a king’s weapon, and the way Jin’s forearms flex as he swings it tells Tohma that Jin never doubted it was waiting for him.
It also tells Tohma that he had better get to work.
In his bones, he knows, like divine prophecy: he needs Jin to want him. That’s what he’s here for. If Jin can just see how helpful and useful and resourceful Tohma can be, everything becomes possible.
He’s not stupid. A Kamurai isn’t going to fall in love and ride off into the sunset with someone like Tohma. He’ll need to marry; there’ll need to be some nice girl with a bloodline and a family name. But Tohma doesn’t need Jin to fall in love.
(And if Tohma has, well… that ought to be perfectly understandable, and also entirely and solely his business.)
A king, even the smartest, strongest king, needs an advisor. A vizier. A hand, a proxy, a shadow. A lieutenant and a hunting dog.
Tohma watches Jin, and waits for his opportunity.
While he waits, Tohma has a lot to do. The halberd that picked him is imposing, versatile, and pleasingly deadly, and has a certain medieval elegance to it. It marks him as a warrior.
He’s not entirely sure he is, yet. He’d done his research, and he’d expected to have to be able to fight when he came to Darkwick, so he’d prepared as well as he could; he’s quick, and stronger than he looks, but a polearm is heavy and the balance isn’t where his body expects it to be. Still, every time he picks it up, it feels like being greeted by an old friend. It’s not fighting him. He just has to get to know it. He can do this. He knows he can.
He starts running every morning, while the air is still cool, the halberd over his shoulder or passed from hand to hand until its weight feels like part of him. A session of weightlifting after class, which at least gives him something in common with Mido, the other Vagastrom ghoul. And before bed, every night, an hour or two in the training facility, however long it takes until he’s worn himself completely out. Nobody else wants to train that late, so he gets it all to himself.
Except the problem with a good idea is sometimes someone else has had it too.
He walks in and in the far corner, going through kata after kata at breakneck speed, is Jin Kamurai.
For a moment, Tohma pauses to watch. It’s too impressive a display not to. Jin moves like he was born with a sword in his hand. Maybe he was. It wouldn’t actually surprise Tohma.
But he’s being rude, and that won’t do. Reflexively, he bows, even though Jin isn’t paying him the slightest bit of attention. He might not have even noticed Tohma’s there.
That’s fine. Jin doesn’t have to. Jin and his perfect arms, bared by hastily rolled sleeves, can just keep doing kendo. He’s busy. Tohma has work to do, and he will do it perfectly whether or not anyone is looking. If anyone were to look, surely they would have to be impressed too. But that’s not the point. It isn’t.
In the opposite corner, he shrugs off his jacket, rolls up his own sleeves, and sets to. Slowly at first, and then faster, as the flow begins to feel natural. Step, step, lunge - strike, step, parry, hook, disarm, jab. Enemy down. Step, step, lunge - strike, step, parry, hook, disarm, jab. Enemy down. Soon all he can hear is his own heart, his own breathing, the bone-conducted sound of his feet hitting the ground, perfectly in rhythm. He’s got four of the target dummies closing in on him and he’s a blur of flawless violence -
- and then his elbow is wrenched back, his feet are swept out from under him, and he hits the ground flat on his back hard enough to knock the breath out of him, with a heavy weight landing square on his belly and the whisper-sharp edge of Jin’s sword at his throat.
“Kamurai-san!” he gasps, fighting air back into his spasming ribcage. Jin is sitting on his fucking chest. Jin is sitting on his fucking chest -
Jin is staring down at him with obvious disdain. That hurts worse than the fall.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Tohma manages, with a quarter of a voice. “I didn’t-”
“No. You didn’t.” Jin’s face is hard. “I thought you were smart.”
Something in Tohma hits flashover. He bares his teeth in a furious snarl, and takes what breath he can -
“Shut up,” Jin says sharply. “You walked in here and you put your back to a threat. Stupid. Do you expect the world to give you a fucking formal invitation before it jumps you?” His tone goes sing-song, mocking. “Please, Ishibashi-san, may I?”
Tohma swallows. The edge of the blade bites his skin.
This is transcendently unfair.
But Jin… is right.
Jin raises an eyebrow at Tohma’s lack of retort, like that’s what I thought.
He settles his weight backwards onto Tohma’s hips, and Tohma - is only gasping because Jin’s two hundred pounds of muscle is off his diaphragm and he can finally breathe, that’s all, that noise he made was not a whine. It has nothing to do with Jin Kamurai’s ass, balancing all that weight on his pelvis. Nothing.
Jin’s eyes bore into him.
“I’m only going to say this once,” he says. “I know you want what I can give you. Everyone fucking does.”
Tohma breathes through his nose. It keeps his mouth shut, but it’s still a critical error. He can smell Jin’s expensive cologne, and the edge of warm clean sweat under it.
“I don’t need incompetence. And I don’t fuck with bootlickers.”
Jin shifts, and it presses his ass back into Tohma’s hips, and Tohma has to bite back an actual whimper. He only gets most of it.
There’s a flicker of that Kamurai smirk.
Goddamn him. Goddamn Jin fucking Kamurai and his perfect arms and his perfect ass and that diamond-point smile.
Tohma’s utterly fucked. He’s helpless, he’s pinned, he’s exhausted, everything hurts - his pride most of all.
He’s at least half-hard.
And Jin knows.
Jin knows everything.
“Do better,” Jin says, and rolls up to his feet like nothing happened.
He walks away without another word, sword easy at his side and his jacket slung over his shoulder like a cape.
Tohma hasn’t cried in years. No matter how hot his eyes feel, he won’t now.
He grits his teeth and forces himself up to hands and knees, feeling every rib scream at him, then onto unsteady legs that don’t want to hold him but fucking will. He will get up, and he won’t fall.
Dizzy but determined, he picks up the halberd, and his jacket - and then it dawns on him, and he has to lean on the halberd for a second while it sinks in.
The words ringing in his ears, in Jin’s deep voice, the voice he’s dreamed of hearing directed at him for so long. The words he knows he’ll carry like a tattoo on his soul until they put him in the ground. He knows what they mean.
It’s not a closed door. It’s a roadmap.
It’s a lesson Jin didn’t have to bother to teach him, and didn’t have to decide he deserved enough to benefit from it. But he did.
It’s the closest thing Jin Kamurai will ever give him to encouragement. And that means Jin thinks there’s something in Tohma worth encouraging.
That he’s worth it.
His bruises ache, and the fire in him roars. Somewhere along the way his gritted teeth have become a grin.
“Do better,” he whispers.
All right. He fucking will.