Work Text:
After Suzume’s door has been closed, Souta allows himself a moment to sit down.
He lowers himself onto a pile of stone that probably used to be a wall, and he closes his eyes, and he tries to wrap his head around the fact that he’s alive. Alive, and himself, despite everything. There is a heartbeat thrumming underneath his skin. There is air in his lungs. There is a breeze on his skin that he can feel. He is made of flesh again, and not of orange-painted wood. It’s a lot to process.
And, underneath that bone-deep relief, he’s tired. He may not have been able to feel tiredness when he was a chair – wood, after all, doesn’t have a nervous system – but he can certainly feel it now. As it turns out, being an inanimate object and then being a Keystone really saps away your energy. Not to mention the fact that he’s just defeated the Worm.
All of that has left him feeling pretty wiped out. So he’s grateful for the opportunity to catch his breath.
He listens, sitting there quietly, as Suzume’s aunt fires some questions at her niece – “Where did you go? Who is that boy? You look like you’ve been crying, are you all right?” – and Suzume tries to explain the situation as well as she can. Souta doesn’t try to stop her; as much as the Closers’ world is supposed to be kept secret, answering some questions here is probably inevitable. Suzume’s aunt saw the door in action, after all. She deserves some answers.
Although, Souta reflects, it’s probably for the best if they don’t tell her that they only very narrowly kept Tokyo from getting destroyed. It seems that the poor woman has had enough stress lately.
In the middle of Suzume’s explanation, her phone rings loudly – which makes Souta’s heart briefly freeze in his chest, but the noise isn’t an earthquake warning like he’d expected. It’s just Serizawa, who is calling to check in on them. When Suzume tells him that they’re all safe and that Souta is back, Serizawa’s reaction is so loud that Souta can hear it crackling through the speaker of Suzume’s phone. Souta smiles to himself at that. It’s nice to know that despite everything, Serizawa is still the same.
From what he can hear from Suzume’s end of the phone call, Souta pieces together that Serizawa is the one who drove Suzume and her aunt here from Tokyo, and that he apparently crashed his car somewhere along the way and is now trying to fix his car (Souta hears Suzume ask him “Huh? With duct tape?”, so that’s a reassuring thought).
Serizawa also has a lot of questions, and Suzume starts to answer them. It’s the same answers that she gave her aunt earlier, so Souta decides to zone out a bit again and focus his energy on catching his breath instead. The cut on his arm stings, and his side feels vaguely sore; it seems that his body is in the same condition it was before he was turned into a chair. The condition it was in when he’d just been cut open and thrown against the ground. No matter how terrifying and difficult it was to be a chair, it was pretty convenient to have a body that couldn’t feel exhaustion or pain.
As Suzume continues her phone call with Serizawa, Suzume’s aunt stands to the side, giving Souta a critical look. She keeps her distance, though Souta can feel her eyes burning holes in him. From what Souta has gathered, Suzume’s aunt is a fairly strict woman – especially when it comes to any boys that her niece may or may not be hanging out with. He can imagine that that counts especially if the boy in question accompanied Suzume on a journey across the country, for reasons that are unknown to her. She seems to be saving her questions for later, though, and he appreciates that.
She may not know about the Ever-After and the Worm and the fact that the world was very recently very close to ending, nor does she know about the fact that Souta was very much not human for the past few days – but she does know that her niece just pulled him from a space behind a door that shouldn’t reasonably exist. She may not know what that means, but she’s empathetic enough to give him a moment to catch his breath.
Souta is distracted from his musings when Suzume hangs up the phone and turns towards him and her aunt again. “Serizawa is almost done fixing the car,” Suzume says, putting her phone into the pocket of her skirt. “He asked if we could start walking towards him already. He can’t get into the ruins with the car, but he’ll pick us up at the nearest road.”
Souta nods. “Sounds like a plan.” He braces a hand on the stone that he’s sitting on, intending to push himself upright.
What happens next is strange:
Souta gets up and automatically leans all of his weight forward.
It takes a second before he realizes that he’s toppling over, and he would’ve landed flat on his face if Suzume hadn’t noticed and grabbed his lower arm. He stumbles, trying to find his footing, and he ends up awkwardly standing with his feet far apart like a newborn fawn.
“What the Hell?” he mumbles, and he looks down at his legs – and it is then that he realizes that he was expecting to see three legs.
But there’s… not. Of course there’s not. Humans only have two legs. Not three. Three-legged chairs have three legs, but humans have two.
He thinks that, just briefly, he forgot about that.
Suzume is still holding his lower arm. Her hands are warm, and Souta spends a moment marveling at that before shifting his attention to the worried expression on her face. “Souta?” she asks him, her eyebrows pinched together in the middle. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah,” he replies quickly, because he doesn’t like that worried look on her face. She’s been wearing that worried look far more often than what’s probably healthy. “Yeah, just-- Yeah, I’m okay.” He exhales an exasperated laugh. “Just getting used to dividing my weight over two legs instead of three.”
Suzume’s expression clears with understanding, while her aunt only looks more confused. Souta might’ve laughed at that if he weren’t having so much trouble staying upright.
Suzume’s aunt looks him over; she’s been doing a lot of that in the past ten minutes, but her gaze is different, now. More worried, less cold. “Are you sure you don’t need to sit down for a moment?” she asks him.
Souta considers the question, but decides against it. He just needs a bit more practice. It didn’t take him very long to get used to the chair’s three legs – and he’s been walking on two legs his whole life. He just needs to keep going, to remind himself of how balance works.
“I’ll be all right,” he says, and with that, he takes a careful step forward. He’s still wobbly, and he leans on Suzume quite a bit more than he’d like to admit, but at least he stays upright.
Suzume smiles at him, and they make it a few more careful steps before Souta decides to stop leaning on Suzume. Which instantly turns out to be a mistake – without her to guide him, he immediately leans backwards too far, then forwards too far, and he ends up falling over, one knee hitting the grass. He lets out a disgruntled huff. How embarrassing.
“Oh-- Souta!” Suzume calls out to him, and then she’s kneeling beside him. A hand that does not belong to her rests on his shoulder, and Souta glances up to see Suzume’s aunt standing over him.
“I’m okay,” he assures them, “really. I just got too confident.”
He braces a hand on his knee, pushing himself upright again – and as he does so, Suzume ducks underneath his arm, pulling it over her shoulders to support him. She looks up at him, grinning. “Does this help?”
“You don’t have to,” he replies, and it comes out a little desperate, because he’s already caused so much trouble for her and he really doesn’t want to add to that list any more. “You’ve already done so much for me.”
Suzume shrugs, her expression warm. “I’ve carried you all the way from Kyushu to here, right? I can carry you a little further.”
And carrying him further is exactly what she does. She’s too small to carry his entire weight – she may have carried him all the way from Kyushu, but he only weighed barely three kilograms back then – but her support helps a lot anyway.
By the time they make it outside the ruins, Souta is walking a bit more steadily already. Serizawa is waiting for them there in the car; he greets them by honking the claxon five times and then frantically putting on some song about friends reuniting, which he blasts from the car’s speakers. There is true relief in the loud gestures, and there is true relief in the grin that Souta gives in return.
The group piles into the car, and Souta notices that he’s already feeling less strange than before. More grounded. More like himself.
It’ll probably be a while before he fully gets used to being human again, but there is a heartbeat underneath his skin and air in his lungs and warmth in his chest, and that’s probably a good place to start.