Gina pulled him insid and shut the door behind them with the kind of finality that meant she had things to say and intended to say all of them.
She turned to face him.
Four years.
That was how long they had been doing this, patching together a life from whatever was available.two orphans who had found each other at the kind of age where finding someone who didn't leave felt like the most important thing in the world.
They had growm up side by side, learned to fend for themselves side by side, and eventually scraped together enough between them to afford this house, which was structurally questionabel but theirs, and a life that was meager but functioning.
Gina had been the one who kept things organised, who set the rules and enforced them and made sure Hikaru ate properly when heforgot.
She was younger than him and had never once behaved like it.
He thought of her as a little sister.
That was what he told himself, reliably and consistently, every time she stood close enough that he could feel the warmth of her, every time she laughed and the sound of it rearranged his thoughts without permission, every time she looked at him with those eyes and he had to find something else to look at quickly.
Little sister. He applied the word carefully and often.
It didn't really work, but he kept trying.
"You went into the astral realm," she said, and her voice had that particular quality it got when she was managing something stronger than she wanted to show, "with no preparation. No rest. On the day you awakened."
She looked at him steadily. "What if something had happened? What if something dangerous…"
"I knew nothing would happen," Hikaru said.
"You knew?" She breathed. "How could you possibly have known that?"
"Because of him," Hikaru said, and summoned Nameless.
The air shifted and then Nameless was simply there, standing in the middle of their small front room with his usual expression, which was to say no expression, occupying the space with the same quiet absolute presence he always had.
Gina made a sound and stepped back. Her eyes went wide. "Why is there another person in our house?"
"He's not a person," Hikaru said, then reconsidered. "He is a person, but he's.. my awakening was unusual."
he ran a hand through his hair. "I got blessed by the summoner god. Apparently. Which means instead of summoning beasts, I summon humans. Or people like him."
He nodded at Nameless. "And he's stronger than me, which is why I felt confident going in. I wasn't being reckless. I had a very capable escort."
Gina looked at Nameless for a long moment.
Then she lookede back at Hikaru.
Something in her face shifted through several positions before settling somewhere that was reluctant but marginally satisfied.
"Fine," she said. "You're off the hook."
Hikaru nodded, accepting this with appropriate gravity.
She had already turned toward Nameless, moving closer with the focused curiosity she brought to things that interested her.
She looked him over carefully, his face, his bearing, the stillness that was somehow different from ordinary stillness, and reached out to touch his arm the way you might check whether something was real.
"So this is a summon," she said, more to herself than anyone. Then, with complete sincerity: "He's quite beautiful, isn't he. And so expressionless." She tilted head slightly. "What's his name."
Something moved in Hikaru's chest. Jealousy.
"Nameless," he said.
Gina turned. "Sorry?"
"Nameless. That's his name."
She stared at him. Then she looked at Nameless.
Then back at Hikaru, with the expression of someone reassessing a situation they thought they understood. "You couldn't have given him something better than Nameless?"
"What's wrong with it?" Hikaru said.
She sighed, the particular sigh she reserved for things she had decided not to fully engage with, and let it go.
Hikaru reached into the bundle he'd been carrying and held out the clothes and the fragrance. "These are for you," he said.
Gina's expression changed completely.
She looked at what he was holding, then at him, and then she made a sound of pure delight and closed the distance between them so fast he barely registered it before her arms were around him and her face was pressed against his shoulder.
The warmth of her went through him like something lit.
He stood very still and felt his face do things he was grateful she couldn't currently see.
Her hair was near his jaw and she was soft against him in ways that his brain kept insisting on cataloguing despite his repeated instructions to stop, and he thought with some desperation that she had to know.
She had to know what she did to him. There was no version of reality in which she was unaware of this.
She pulled back, eyes bright, already examining the fabric with her hands.
Does she actually not know she's tormenting me?
He genuinely could not tell.
"I want to try it on," she said, and her hands went to the hem of her current dress with the casual efficiency of someone about to simply resolve the situation immediately.
Every thought Hikaru had evaporated at once.
"Will you not…" His voice cam out slightly higher than intended. He cleared his throat. "Could you not go somewhere private to change?"
Gina looked up at him.
There was a smile at the corner of her mouth that he didn't entirely trust. "Oh," she said. "It just slipped my mind."
She disappeared into the bedroom.
Hikaru stood in the middle of the room for a moment.
Then he exhaled, picked up the food, and went to the kitchen to put it away, which gave him something to do with his hands and his face and .his general situation.
When he came back out, she was already there.
He stopped.
The clothes fit her the way he'd hoped they would, which was to say well, but the reality of seeing her in them was different from imagining it in a shop while second-guessing himself.
She stood in the soft light of the room and she was, he didn't have a better word for it, radiant.
Like something that had always been there had been given the conditions it needed to be fully visible.
He felt two things at the same time.
The first was happiness,, clean and simple and warm.
The second was something quieter and more complicated, the understanding that she had always looked like this.
That the girl he came home to every night, the one who scolded him and fed him and kept this fragile house running, had always been this beautiful, and the only thing that had muffled it was that neither of them had ever had enough.
He made himself a promise, standing there in the doorway, that he was going to fix that.
That he was going to make sure she never lacked again.
That this was the last time he would look at her and feel the shadow of what they couldn't afford.
"Can you smell it?" she asked, meaning the fragrance.
"You smell good," he said.
She smiled, pleased. Then she looked at him more critically, nostrils flaring slightly in a theatrical way. "You, on the other hand," she said, "smell like the astral realm. And sweat."
She tilted her head toward Nameless. "Don't you think?"
Nameless considered this. Then he shrugged.
But Hikaru caught it, the slight barely-there shift at the corner of Nameless's eyes.
The ghost of something that on anyone else would have been amusement.
Traitor, Hikaru thought, with feeling.
He bathed, changed into the new clothes he'd bought for himself, and came back out running a hand through his hair. "Do I look alright?" he asked.
Gina turned.
Her face went red.
Not gradually, suddenly, completely, like a switch had been thrown.
She made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and the beginning of a word and then she turned away with a speed that was almost suspicious.
"What's wrong?" Hikaru asked hastily.
"Nothing," she said, to the wall. "Nothing is wrong."
Hikaru looked at the back of her head. Weird, he thought, and sat down to eat.
Dinner was loud on his end and complicated on hers.
Hikaru ate with the focused enthusiasm of someone who had spent a long day earning it, working through his bowl with an efficiency that left little room for self-consciousness.
He was hungry and the food was good and that was the entirety of his attention.
Gina could not focus on her food.
She tried.
She made the attempt, repeatedly, picking up her spoon and directing her eyes at her bowl and performing the actions of a person eating dinner.
But her gaze kept moving without her permission, sliding sideways across the table to where he was sitting, and each time it did she found something new to quickly look away from.
His hair, dark and gelled back in a way she wasn't used to, showed his face fully for the first time in what felt like forever.
And his face, without the constant pinched worry she had grown so accustomed to seeing on it that she'd stopped registering it as an addition. was pretty. she hadn't realised.
She had known he wasn't unpleasant to look at in some distant unexamined way, the way you know a fact without it meaning anything.
But the haggard harassed version of Hikaru she had catalogued without thinking was gone, and what was left in its place was confident and clean-lined and..
His lips.
She looked down at her bowl fast enough to be embarrassing.
She was picking up her spoon and making a serious effort at soup when he looked up.
"Is something wrong?" he asked.
She inhaled the soup.
The coughing started immediately, the kind that took over the whole body and didn't leave room for dignity, and she heard him move before she saw him, felt the rush of displaced air,
then he was beside her, close, one hand on her back and one on her arm, patting and saying something concerned that she couldn't fully hear because she was choking and also because he was touching her and he smelled like the new soap and the new clothes and she could feel the warmth of his hand through the fabric and..
She choked harder.