Chapter 89: Between Safety Protocols and Stars
The Heart at night felt like a cathedral after the choir went home - lights down two notches, fans whispering, the smell of warm metal and old coffee hanging around because nobody had the heart to tell it to leave.
Saffi shuffled out of the prototype bay like a ghost who had remembered she was mortal. Her slate was hugged to her ribs, hair wild from the headset, cheeks pink from concentration more than heat. She paused at the threshold the way she always did, glance ping-ponging between the sign that read SAFETY AT POWER DOWN and Raizen, still bent over the work table.
"I logged everything" she said, voice soft and frayed at the edges. "Torque map, line creep, the - um - the oscillation thing."
"Resonance" Raizen murmured without looking up. He had a driver between two fingers and a spool canted open like a mouth on the table. "It’s still too heavy and not powerful enough."
"That’s... two complaints" Saffi offered, trying for a joke and landing somewhere honest. "We can fix heavy. Power - we’ll... we’ll make it listen."
He made a noncommittal sound that meant he had believed her the second she walked in here months ago and tried very hard not to show it.
"I need to learn more. Way more. And I don’t have much time..."
Saffi took half a step like she might stay, then all the way back like she might fall. "Go to sleep soon" she lied at him with sincere eyes. She took another three steps, pivoted, scurried back for the charger she’d forgotten, bumped her hip on the table, said "sorry" to the table, and finally disappeared, leaving a little wake of fluster behind her.
Silence returned, different and not really.
Raizen thumbed a knob, listening to the tiny ratchet complain. The prototype was hung in parts that pretended to be neat. The thing already looked fast sitting still. But it did not (yet) look light.
"Too much mass on the back" he muttered. "Slip’s alright, but the column’s mushy. If the anchor sets, I’ll feel it late. Can’t risk it."
He leaned in. In the glass, the lab’s quiet LEDs painted pale bars across his cheekbones. He smelled oil and resin and the faint lemon of wipes from a bin someone had remembered to close for once. He balanced the spool between thumb and forefinger and turned; the line whispered across his skin. The feedback was there, alive in his hands. It just wasn’t loud enough to save anyone yet.
Something soft and warm touched the middle of his back.
He flinched.
It was a small, instinctive flinch, all muscle and a life of edges. His knee bumped the stool - the stool slid - his hip kissed the bench’s lip - the bench responded by betraying him with perfect physics - he sat down, lost balance - tipped sideways into the prototype with all the grace of a cat realizing a second too late that the counter was narrower than it looked. All in this order.
Nothing broke. Hopefully.
Something clicked.
"Sorry!" Hikari blurted, already bent over him, hair escaping a quick tie, helmet dangling from two fingers like she’d simply carried it everywhere tonight and forgot to put it down. "I - I thought - are you okay?"
Another click, to his left this time. The kind of click mechanics make when they decide to follow orders.
He knew the sound before his head finished turning.
The left anchor pod’s safety LED flickered from white to amber. The little muzzle – not much, really, a tidy hex where the line would launch - had rotated to find the largest reflective surface it could see. In a bad joke about luck and geometry, that surface happened to be Hikari’s eye.
The pod chirped. The motor twitched alive. A knot of line thought it was a bullet.
Raizen moved without asking his brain for permission.
His left hand found Hikari’s cheek and turned her face away, clean and firm, like aligning a compass. His right hand came up on instinct to catch - too slow. The line snapped past, kissing the back of his hand hard enough to cut. The hook shot by her temple with a cruel whisper and buried itself in the far wall whose foam systems forgot that they existed. The auto-brake grabbed - the line sang - the room decided it would keep them both.
They froze in the little aftershock that comes when a disaster shrinks itself down to an anecdote.
Hikari’s eyes were huge. Her breath fogged the space between them once, quick and quiet. "Are you alr-?"
"Fine" he said, which was true in the large way and a lie in the small one. He let go of her face only when he saw focus return to her pupils and color to her mouth. "You?"
"You - your hand -"
He followed her gaze. The back of his hand wore a clean red line, shallow but bright, already beading. It hurt in the specific way thin cuts do: precise and annoyed at existing. He flexed his fingers. They answered.
"Ah, it’s Nothing." He tried to put the apology in his voice without putting the fear. "I left it primed. That’s on me."
She shook her head, quick. "That’s on me. I shouldn’t have - I touched - I spooked -"
"No" he said, softer now. "You could breathe and I’d find a way to make that my fault. And calm down."
They both found they were still half tangled. She stepped back, cheeks blooming heat not quite entirely from the scare. Something skittered across the floor. Hikari crouched and picked up the small black pouch that had skated out of the shadow of his jacket when he fell.
She turned it over in her palm like it might object to being handled by anyone but the person who carried it. "What’s this?"
He stared at it for exactly one heartbeat longer than he meant to, then exhaled like he’d decided to stop hiding from himself. "It’s... It’s for you. Didn’t really know how and when to give it to you..."
Her eyebrows jumped like birds. "For... me?"
"Before we left for Ukai" he said, slower than the words wanted, "at the Glowline. You stopped at a window. For a long time. And I’m - stupid about time - but not blind."
He nodded at her hand.
She didn’t pull the drawstring with a greedy snap. She eased it. The small stars fell into her palm, almost golden bright even in the tired lab light: twin earrings, exact to the ones she’d been halfway in love with through glass, a dozen Chapters ago in a city that always pretended it was never dark.
Her face did a thing he would be ridiculous to try to describe. Surprise first, then a softness that made the room stand straighter, then the sort of delight small enough to keep so it never spilled.
"You remembered." It wasn’t an accusation. It was... More like a discovery.
"I tried not to." His mouth tilted. "Failed miserably."
She turned one between thumb and forefinger - the star winked. "Can I -?"
"They’re yours" he said, and then, because he knew the face she was about to make, "And no, this is not a bribe to put you on my side in the eternal war between safety protocols and getting things done at two in the morning."
Her laugh arrived, quieter than usual. She hooked one earring through the small hole in her left ear, then the right, movements precise like a ritual she’d invented now. She looked up at him not to ask for approval - Hikari was not a person who asked for that - but to share the moment like a piece of bread.
She had never worn earrings before. Mina wore her tiny silver dots - barely there, yet always catching a wink of light like they had secrets. Alteea flaunted hers, long arcs that swung like punctuation to her every word. Even Saffi, shy as she was, kept a single stud glinting in her left ear, a softness she never spoke about. Hikari had always told herself she didn’t need that. Too much dressing, too much softness for someone who lived in movement and steel.
But tonight, with Raizen watching her, she didn’t hesitate. She pressed the point through, breath sharp at the sting, then did the other without flinching - decisive, like driving a blade into straw.
Raizen blinked. A thin drop of red had trailed from where she’d pierced herself. He flinched, halfway rising, already scanning the mess of the lab for a cloth, a rag, anything. "What!? Wait - you’re actually bleeding!"
"It’s fine," she said, steady.\
"It’s not fine" he countered, rifling through a drawer with one hand while the other tried to keep the prototype from tipping. He pulled out something that might once have been a clean strip of gauze, then frowned at it like it had betrayed him by existing.
Hikari only laughed again, this time soft enough to sting. "You’re worried about a scratch? Raizen, I’ve had sparring sessions that left worse."
"Yeah, but..." His jaw set, fingers flexing uselessly around the scrap of gauze. "...it’s different."
"Thank you" she interrupted him. The words weren’t big. They didn’t need to be. "Now. Your hand."
She was already pivoting toward the wall cabinet where a dozen identical med kits lived. He reached and pushed her wrist her wrist away, a touch with a word inside it.
"I’ve got it" he said.
She turned back, puzzlement creasing her brow. "Why wouldn’t you let me -?"
He let the answer out because holding it in would make it worse. "I can’t depend on others. If I start, I miss something. If I miss something, someone else pays. I can’t -" He shrugged one shoulder, the old knot of hunger and duty and fear in his voice almost polite. "- I can’t do that."
The crease in her brow changed shape. She stepped closer until the lights painted both of them in the same bar of white. Her palm rose and landed against his cheek, light, steady, thumb near the hinge of his jaw. Her hand was warm, the way you remember fires being if you grew up in cold places.
"That’s not how it works" she said, quiet enough to make the fans lean in. "You don’t stop depending. You choose who to depend on. And then you look at them until they remember how to be strong."
He didn’t close his eyes. He stood perfectly still and let the words learn how to sit in the places that had been refusing chairs for a decade. Then he pulled the kit anyway, because habit isn’t a villain - it’s a survivor. He wrapped the cut with the neat efficiency of a boy who had learned early where the bandages lived. She watched, not impatient, not wounded, just taking inventory of a person who would always try to pick up the heavy end first.
When he finished, he blew out breath and rolled his right wrist. The cut pulled and filed itself under "alive." He set the kit aside, then reached back into the mess and began reassembling the prototype with that odd, gentle reverence he reserved for machines and swords and nightmares he’d turned into plans.
Hikari tilted her head at the prototype. "This... thing. I don’t understand it."
"Good" he said, a little grin audible now. "Then it’s working."
She smacked his shoulder, very lightly. "Explain a very small amount. The size of a grain of rice."
He pinched the drum’s flange between thumb and forefinger again and let the line run, then brake. "Most grapples are just pullers. You shoot a line. It sticks. It drags you like a sack. This is..." He searched for a word that wouldn’t give the blueprints away to the air. "- more like a fishing rod. You cast, not just shoot. You feel the set through the line. You don’t yank, you lean. You reel with resistance that tells your body what your eyes can’t see. And you never fight it straight on. You angle. It lets you move like... A hundred times faster, in every direction, and you don’t swing like a normal grappling hook. It’s a new concept. It also allows you to cast and pull way faster. Or at least it should... But this drum isn’t – Sorry, I’m just way too excited..."
She blinked. "Fishing rod?"
"My father took me out on the ledge sometimes" he said, and the edge in his voice softened beyond his control. "Before... it doesn’t matter. This feels like that. The drum needs to talk. Not scream. Talk. And settle dirty deals with everyone."
She nodded like she had filed a secret under her tongue. She ran a finger along the edge of her earrings, as if she was afraid to break them. She let out a small, unwanted smile.
Then, the door hissed.