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She can't sleep again.
Touka lies on her cot and stares at the ceiling and thinks about nothing in particular, which is its own kind of exhausting. Somewhere in the ward someone is breathing with the heaviness of real sleep. She envies them.
She hears him before she sees him. The curtain shifts. He looks tired too, tired and more awake than he would like to be. Clearly she wasn't the only one suffering from insomnia. "You too?" she asks.
"Yeah, me too."
Ken sits on the edge of her cot and it dips under his weight. He's carrying something and in the low light it takes her a moment to realize that it’s small stack of paper squares. He sets them on his knee. For a moment they just exist in the quiet together, his arm close to hers, not touching, and she's aware of the not-touching the way you're aware of a sound that's just stopped.
"Can I show you something?" he asks almost timidly.
He starts with a crane. She watches his hands move and thinks, vaguely, that she has seen children do this. Human children on trains, small fingers, small hands working at paper with the ease of something taught early, passed down, practiced until it lived in their movements. She'd watched them the way she watched a lot of ordinary things—from a distance, with a hunger she never examined too closely, because examining it wouldn't lead anywhere useful or happy.
"Here," Ken holds a square out to her. Touka takes it. She tries her best to mirror what his hands just did. Her fold goes crooked almost immediately. His hand comes over hers. He doesn't take the paper away. Just guides, his fingers settling over her knuckles, warm and unhurried, and she feels the small redirect of pressure as he adjusts the angle. She refolds it and the edge meets cleanly.
"There." He doesn't move his hand right away.
They go slowly. His voice stays low and she finds herself focusing on it more than the instructions, the particular tone of it in the silence, the way it gets slightly softer when he's being careful with her. Every few folds his fingers find hers again.
Her first crane comes out lopsided. She holds it up, eyes unimpressed. "It's terrible," she complains.
"It's your first try."
"I guess. Were you good at it the first time you tried?"
He considers this, and she watches him decide not to lie. "Uh...yes, I was. Sorry." She huffs a small laugh, short and amused at his perpetual desire to apologize for stupid things. He seems happy though, as if pleased to be the cause of her amusement no matter the reason.
Their smiles don't fade and neither of them avert their gaze for a moment that goes on just long enough to simmer.
Breaking the spell, Touka looks away. "It's silly, but Ayato wanted to learn things like this," she admits softly. "After our parents—I mean... he was little enough that he still wanted ordinary things. Knowing how to play card games, to learn how to whistle. How to make stupid paper cranes." She examines the ugly excuse for a crane. "But I didn't know how to do any of those things. I kept thinking I'd learn one day so I could teach him. Of course I never did."
She tells him this plainly. It's been true long enough to have lost most of its edge. Most of it.
Touka mind wanders to small Ayato, needy and wanting things he was never going to get to have. How she'd tried to give him all she could, and how that hadn't been quite enough.
She hadn't known how to make paper cranes.
Just like she hadn't known how to whistle or play any card games. She had been a child too. Just a child trying to hold two lives together with her bruised hands and there had been no one to sit with her and say Here, like this. Let me show you, Touka-chan.
Ken doesn't say anything. He just sits with her, and she feels the line of his arm against hers and realizes the not-touching resolved into touching long ago.
She doesn't move away. She finds herself rarely ever wanting to move away from him.
He holds out another square of paper. His response, Well learn it now, goes unspoken. She takes it, and their fingers catch in the exchange, longer than necessary.
By the third crane she has the basic shape. By the fifth the wings sit mostly even. She stops and lines them up between them on the cot, five in a small imperfect row.
It's silly to her that for whatever reason they bring her joy. They're just pieces of paper.
Touka reaches for a particular paper crane. The bad first one, the one that looks like what it is—a first, a beginning, an evidence of not-knowing. She holds it out to Ken, feeling like it belongs to him for a reason she cannot articulate.
He takes it without question. His eyes drop to it and he turns it over slowly like he's reading something written on it that she can't see or understand. Then he looks back at her, and his expression is so... open. So unguarded and soft.
She's seen him afraid, she's seen him brutal, and she's seen him lost within himself, but this is... different.
A feeling in her chest blooms. She can't explain what, and she can't explain why.
Touka has kissed him more times than she can count. She knows the shape of his hands now, the feel of his body against hers, and the sound he makes when he's about to come undone. She has longed for him and worried for him and been so angry at him she could barely speak.
She thought, after all this time, she understood what this was—what she felt—that she'd cataloged it and named it properly and contained it after all this time.
She understands now in this moment that she had no idea.
This isn't infatuation or desperation. It isn't need. It isn't even just want.
It is something she doesn't have a word for. It's something that has been growing in her for years in the dark as if it doesn't need light. It's soft and enormous and has been patient and waiting, and it has chosen right now, over paper cranes, to make itself fully known.
Actually she does have a word for it.
"I love you." She hears it leave her mouth like she's hearing someone else say it, and her first instinct is to pull it back and to make it smaller. She decides not to because it's true and no amount of backpedaling would change that. It has been true for a long time, probably. There's no use being afraid of it now.
Ken's eyes go bright and seem to become wet almost immediately. At some point she had stopped finding his emotionality aggravating and began finding it comforting. His smile is wobbly and he doesn't bother trying to compose himself before he speaks with no hesitation, "I love you too," The words sound like they've been waiting right there, just inside his mouth all this time.
She feels the truth of what they've said still sitting in the air, full of promise. She feels overwhelmed in the best way.
Looking back down at the cranes to obscure her flushed cheeks, Touka clears her throat. "Good. Well, show me how to make the next one. I think I can still get better at it."
She glances up briefly to see he's still smiling. It's still beautiful, still bright.
With confident movements, Ken picks up a square of paper and his hands find hers.