Chapter Text
At first opportunity, Tsukasa slips out of the arena with a swollen jaw, his bag slung over only one shoulder because his entire left side aches too much to bear even that weight.
He could never stand the chaos in there: the mindless screaming spectators, the too-bright spotlights, and the greedy old men lurking in the shadows just beyond, counting their profits made off the bodies of those younger and poorer. At the same time, it's quite a drop to step out from that high octane atmosphere into the cool night, and from there to the sparse back alleys he's been calling home.
There is always a certain thrill, being in that cage. Knowing he's putting his abilities to use, his whole being, physically fighting his way toward his goals—when in most of his life, the enemy is one that can't be defeated with fists.
He moves through successively dimmer streets with none of the grace, the presence, that he wore on stage. He's injured, he's tired, he's miserable.
Out here, he is only biding his time.
He exists begrudgingly, because there's nowhere else to park his flesh until the next match, until he needs it again. So he does the bare minimum to keep it going.
For the last few weeks, he's been camping undisturbed between two multi-story buildings, worn-out boxes of brick and concrete that at least block the wind. One has a peeling sign out front advertising apartments for rent, but Tsukasa sees no need to waste his hard-earned funds on something so frivolous as four solid walls and a roof over his head.
The other is tagged with graffiti of dubious grammatical and anatomical correctness, but the long-faded paint suggests its author won't be back to fix it anytime soon. The buildings stand about two armspans apart, which would normally be too open for a good hiding spot, but there's a wide dumpster crouched against the apartment building, and that gives plenty of cover from prying eyes.
His body is beyond aching by the time he arrives, and he's so intent on getting behind his shelter, getting somewhere he can just drop down and pass out, that he almost misses the fact that something's different tonight.
He's not alone.
There's a figure crawling up the walls, literally, four limbs splayed out and clinging to the brick of the apartment building like a gecko. He's short and slight, with wild, up-sticking hair, and his hands are clutching gigantic suction cups by U-shaped handles, his feet stuck into two more. Before Tsukasa's eyes, the man pulls one of these cups free from the wall with a loud pop, and then reattaches it somewhat to his left, so he can lean that way, and peer at one particular brick that appears no different than the next.
Tsukasa knows he should turn around and leave.
He can find some other dark corner to hole up in for the next twelve hours, get some much-needed rest.
But the sight before him is so baffling that he can't stop himself from saying, "Who are you?"
The man jerks at the question, but his grip is secure. He looks back over his shoulder, then down, and seems relieved to see Tsukasa, rather than someone else.
No one has ever been relieved to meet Tsukasa's looming shape in a dark alley before, but then again, that's normal people.
"Just gathering samples," wall man says cheerfully, going back to his inspection. "Spotted a rare fungus growing between some of these bricks. It's deadly poisonous, so that's pretty cool."
Should Tsukasa be surprised his sleeping spot is covered with poisonous fungi? Just his luck. That, and the older generation that has polluted this world with their capitalist greed.
"It seems unwise then, to touch it," he remarks.
Wall man lets go of one of his handles and leans his weight back lazily from his other three holds, so he can angle around and wave his free hand. "I'm wearing gloves. Hey, you know you're bleeding, right?"
"I'm aware," Tsukasa says, though he wasn't. He wipes the stinging cut on his forehead, and feels wetness. His last opponent of the day had been a brute. He just wants to go to sleep.
"You know, these fungi may be poisonous, but boiled down, they make a pretty powerful analgesic. Come on, I'm set up on the roof, I'll fix you up."
When Tsukasa stares at the absurdity of the statement, the man only grins back.
"I'm Senkuu, by the way," he adds. And then he grasps his suction cups again and uses them to crawl all the way up the wall, pop pop pop, as quick as any lizard. He's slithered over the roof before Tsukasa can even conceive of a response.
Tsukasa doesn't want to follow, but he also can't stomach the idea of sleeping nearby while that guy might be peering down at him from above. He adjusts the bag on his shoulder, and leaps easily onto the dumpster. From there, he climbs up after Senkuu, fingertips digging into the shallow seams between bricks, determinedly not thinking about poisonous fungi as he goes.
"Man, I thought you'd use the fire escape," Senkuu says, when Tsukasa gets to the top.
"Too far away." Tsukasa grunts as he drops over the lip of concrete parapet edging the rooftop. "Not worth the effort." He tries to be inconspicuous about wiping his hands off on his pants.
Senku has a pot boiling over a camping stove, like a hobo—not that Tsukasa has room to talk. He peers into the bubbling pot and takes a deep inhale.
"That's not mushrooms."
"Nah, instant ramen. Figured I should make dinner first before I dirty the pot with, like, literal poison."
"Poison that you plan to put on my body."
"Yep," Senkuu says cheerfully, dumping out the contents into a plastic bowl, and then handing it to Tsukasa. "Eat, you look like you need the carbohydrates."
Too numb to argue, Tsukasa takes the bowl, jams his back against the parapet, and eats. He wasn't planning to have anything warm tonight, and the hot broth is as strangely comforting as it is astonishingly salty.
Senkuu, his own bowl steaming at his feet, rinses out the pot with a water bottle—dumping the excess heedlessly over the parapet into the alley below, just imagine if Tsukasa had been sleeping down there—and then scrapes into it the contents of a few jars he has lying around, a bewildering array of substances of varying color and consistency. Tsukasa can't even tell which one is meant to be fungus.
By now, Tsukasa is done with his ramen, and has set his bowl aside. He takes this opportunity to study the other man, who alternates between stirring the pot and gulping from his bowl. Hopefully he won't confuse the two. He's younger than Tsukasa had thought from below, probably around Tsukasa's own age, and moves with a frenetic energy, like there's too much to get done, in too little time.
"You look familiar," Tsukasa says.
Senkuu looks at him askance over a mouthful of noodles, and slurps them up before answering. "You might know my dad. He's on TV a lot."
He beams a little at that, clearly waiting for a followup question, but Tsukasa refuses to ask. He's already cursing himself for showing that much curiosity in the first place. He goes back to drumming his chopsticks on the rim of his bowl, trying to figure out 1) how he got himself into this situation and 2) how to disengage, short of leaping away onto the next roof.
He's saved from this line of thought by the sound of Senkuu clicking off the camping stove. The contents of the pot have boiled down to a suspicious gray paste, which he decants back into one of the original jars. Then he twists on the lid, and begins to pour more water over it, catching the flow in the now-empty pot.
"Cooling it off," he explains, seeing Tsukasa's stare.
The paste, when applied to Tsukasa's forehead and jaw, has a similar cooling effect, bringing a tingly, numbing sort of relief. He'd been wondering why he allowed Senkuu to get close enough to put that stuff on him, but when the pain dissipates like magic, Tsukasa even lets himself be coaxed into pulling up his shirt, so Senkuu can get at his side.
More bruise than flesh by this point, that entire area has darkened to a mottled deep purple that's ugly even in this low light. Senkuu tackles it with the same brisk efficiency he'd used for scraping gunk out from between brick, and Tsukasa finds himself almost relaxing into the steady, methodical touch.
"Anywhere else?" Senkuu asks when he's done. At the negative, he returns to his earlier seat and twists the cap back on the jar. "So why are you so beat up anyway? Are you yakuza or something?"
Tsukasa pulls his shirt back down with a scoff. "You waited until after you finished eating with me and dressing my injuries to ask me that?"
"We were busy having such a scintillating conversation, right?" Rather than putting the jar away, he rolls it back over to Tsukasa, with a sardonic grin. "Keep the rest. You yazuka types probably get into a ton of scrapes."
Rather than taking it, Tsukasa stops it with his shoe, and stares down at it, thinking. Then he digs into his bag for a flyer, one of the ones from this week's tournament. He was using the other side for scratch paper, so he just holds it up instead of letting Senkuu take it and see the sums scribbled over the back.
Of course, that means he's faced with the numbers himself, which makes him scowl.
Still so far from his goal.
"Oh, MMA, huh?" Senkuu looks between the front of the flyer to Tsukasa's face, as if comparing the likeness. "Shishiou Tsukasa. Reigning champion. I always thought those things were scripted."
"You're thinking of wrestling."
"Huh."
There isn't anything particularly damning about his tone, but Tsukasa still feels a strange need to defend himself. "It's a living," he mutters.
Senkuu glances over the edge of the roof, and raises his eyebrow. So he does know Tsukasa has been sleeping down there. "Can't pay that well."
"I'm saving up," says Tsukasa flatly, crumpling up the flyer and stuffing it back in his bag. Honestly, he's barely scraping together the exorbitant hospital fees to keep his sister in a bed, a ventilator. If he ever wants any hope of curing her, he needs to get her into Ishigami Clinic's experimental trials—but the wait lists there are long, the bills even longer.
What he's doing isn't enough. It will never be enough.
"Say, would you get paid more if you won more?" says Senkuu suddenly, picking at something in his teeth.
Tsukasa bristles. "What makes you think I don't win?"
"I'm sure you do." Senkuu looks him over, up and down. "But what if you could take on a higher weight class? Or multiple opponents at once? That'll help you rake in the dough, right?"
"That's not how cage fighting works." But it's true that Tsukasa's body has its limits. He can only handle so many fights, and he needs time to knit himself together in between. If he could remove even those limitations—
"Trust me." Senkuu gestures pointedly to the jar at Tsukasa's feet. "I know how to patch you up, right? I could also enhance your reflexes. Teach your muscles new techniques in an instant. Even study your opponents' weaknesses or something, I'm getting fired up just thinking about it. What do you say? Science and muscle, the deadliest combination."
"Deadlier than the poisonous fungi you just put on me?" Tsukasa deadpans, though he does pick up the jar, still half-full of... whatever it is.
"That's the spirit!" Senkuu puts out his hand, and there's something so earnest about it, so unhesitant.
Maybe that's why Tsukasa reaches out and gives it a firm shake.