Thread by @meekswrites

#sakuatsu
Assassin AU
TW: blood, injuries, guns, violence

___

Miya goes MIA on a Tuesday.

He simply drops off the face of the fucking earth, and Kiyoomi knows because his sources across land and sea are flipping their shit and celebrating in equal measure. +

https://twitter.com/kuroosbangx/status/1421876958237974529

Kiyoomi himself has gone underground. He has shed his skin—every identity, every disguise, every accent he’s ever created: gone. He wears no fake contact lenses, has dyed his hair back to black, and he no longer wears makeup to change the contours of his face and hide his moles.+

He is, at the end of all this, once again, just himself: Sakusa Kiyoomi, a former gun for hire of the highest caliber, sipping tea and watching the rain fall outside his penthouse floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass windows. +

And then one of those windows, despite the inordinate amount of money he paid to have them custom-made, shatters to his left. There are three rapid shots and then a crash before a figure tumbles in, rolling to a stop on the concrete floors among glass and rainwater. +

Kiyoomi’s gun is one bullet short—merely a gamble and a memento at this point. Because he has allowed himself to stop expecting anyone to be a threat to him ever again.

Still, he has five bullets left, and he aims, and he braces himself, ready for the kickback of a kill shot. +

Of course, that’s when the intruder lifts his face, and beneath a sweep of box-blonde hair wet with rain and worse, Kiyoomi recognizes the bright glimmer of honey-brown eyes in a flash of lightning and averts his shot at the last second. +

If he’d been any less of a professional, he’d have a dead body in his living room right then and there.

Instead, the bullet ricochets. Miya flinches. Kiyoomi stares.

He’s at a complete loss for words. Because he’s now two bullets short, and, still, his target is alive. +

In true fashion, Miya opens his goddamn mouth to spew utter garbage at the worst possible moment. “What’s good, Omi-kun? I gotta say—ya really gotta work on yer aim.”

He doesn’t get up, and Kiyoomi sees that the puddle beneath him is too dark to be purely rainwater. +

“What the hell are you doing here?” Kiyoomi says.

Miya grins. “Thought I’d see how retirement was treatin’ ya.”

“I won’t miss a third time,” Kiyoomi warns, his finger still hot on the trigger.

He’s honest, always, and Miya knows it. +

His recognition of the truth staring him down, the tunnel of a warmed-up gun dark like a locked eye, shows in how his smile fades.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Miya says finally. His voice is quiet when he adds, “Sorry.” +

Kiyoomi stares him down for another beat, and then he withdraws his trigger finger and flips on the safety. “You could have taken the front door,” he says. He takes a sip of his tea. It’s growing cold.

Relief lines Atsumu’s shoulders as he flips into his back. +

His right hand lands lightly onto his side, where blood spreads like netting across the soaked material of his dress shirt. “Ya woulda shot me on sight.”

“That’s true,” Kiyoomi says.

Miya smiles, but it’s muted. +

Kiyoomi watches his eyes slip closed, notes the difficulty with which Miya swallows.

“Ya gonna let me bleed out here and follow through on yer last job?”

Kiyoomi’s fingers itch for his trigger, and he halts on his backward step toward the washroom where his stocked kit lives. +

Triage measures race through his mind, yet he hesitates. It would be easy to let Miya die—for real this time—and have his own debts and lies die with him. Closure.

But he watches the pool of blood spread across his floor and instinctively takes that step back, then another. +

“Omi?” Kiyoomi hears the reedy sound of Miya’s voice follow after him as he retreats. It’s tinged with a hint of desperation, the sound of it foreign, horrible. “Kiyoomi?”

It makes Kiyoomi’s gut clench as he ignores it and quickly rounds the corner of the hallway. +

When Kiyoomi gets back, Miya has pulled himself three feet toward the entryway, as if to escape, and making a mess of the rug there. He clicks his tongue in annoyance.

Miya struggles to lift his head and peers up at him through hazy eyes that widen when they land on the kit. +

“You were always a surprising level of work, Atsumu,” Kiyoomi says. He pinches his lips together at the slip, hoping Miya is too out of it now to notice, but he sees a quirk of a smile at the corner of Atsumu’s mouth before he thunks his head back down on the rug. +

“Gotta keep ya on yer toes,” Miya replies easily, though he’s breathless, and his teeth become dirty with blood when he coughs. “Or you’ll just get lazy with the rest of the useless scrubs ya work with.”

“For once, stop talking,” Kiyoomi says sharply. +

“For once, stop talking,” Kiyoomi says sharply. But his fingers are gentle even as they firmly roll Atsumu over. “I didn’t spare your life—/twice/—just to have you die in my living room.”

He’s surprised by a sudden touch. +

Atsumu’s fingers are cold and shaking where they press lightly at Kiyoomi’s jaw.

Kiyoomi doesn’t stop where he’s cutting Atsumu’s shirt open to assess the wound, doesn’t falter in starting to wipe it off and disinfect it, +

doesn’t stop trying to save the man he’d been sworn to kill to earn his own freedom.

He feels his own fingers begin to tremble. He fumbles with the roll of gauze.

“Hey,” Atsumu says, voice barely a whisper.

Kiyoomi swallows. It’s bad. It’s really bad. +

But he’s the one who started this. He’s the one who averted his shot—/twice/ now—the one who opened the door to what this may become, and he’s going to follow through with it.

Still, he says, “Stop,” his own voice choked and quiet.

“Let me just look at ya,” Atsumu says. +

Kiyoomi stills his hands, looks down into honey-brown eyes with his own no longer hidden in return, no longer disguised, no longer protected by layers of duty and debt. “What are you staring at,” he says. He swipes a sleeve across his face. +

He’s going to have to get his windows fixed to stop the rain from getting in.

Atsumu’s fingers trail from Kiyoomi’s jaw to the crest of his cheek to the two moles on his forehead. “You,” Atsumu says. And he smiles. +

Kiyoomi gazes back at that smile and listens to the rain fall outside and feels warmth spread through him even though he’s begun to shiver from the cold.

He takes a moment to watch Atsumu’s eyes slip shut, his face go lax. +

Kiyoomi is honest, always, and he said he wasn’t going to let this man die in his living room.

So he rolls his sleeves up and gets to work.

///

Whew! This was not the thread I thought it would be. Will I never be able to write ACTION? Lolol I’ll keep trying. 💛

Also, I always feel a gut punch about tears and rain. You know that Blade Runner monologue with "like tears in the rain"? And the FMA "it's a terrible day for rain" scene? OOOF. lol