Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It’s a sorry state of coexistence. 

Rain pours down to the poisoned earth. Zanka gazes at the wet of it, the muck of it, beneath his feet from where he stands.

The cold sinks beneath his skin.

Its sound is a mockery of applause.

Warm blood spills through the dark of his clothes.

The voices of supporters nearby and around rise beneath the tremors of the downpour as they move and work. They’re the gears of a multi-wheeled machine, efficient, though worn, with copper rusted and old. Cogs - breathing with a purpose - of a hundred other purposes, rumbling with a force - certain - resolute - and undeterred. And there’s a thought in his head, a loud one, echoing beneath the storm.

His hand goes to the left of his gut.

He breathes out through his mask, eyes falling closed, frustrated, as he works to remember how to breathe again. The blood beneath the wound continues to spread. Warm. He’s not a Cleaner yet. It’s his second week being just a trainee. Just joining when Gris had asked if he wanted to tag along.

He grounds his teeth. The fingers over his wound dig into it. A routine clean-up, something so mundane, and Zanka with his newly-turned vital instrument hadn’t done a single thing but get overwhelmed, lose his footing and need to get saved.

It’s embarrassing.

It’s annoying.

He’d known there wasn’t enough a stick could do against skull bone and blackened steel, but he wanted there to be - enough that it could do. But what the hell was he expecting a stick to do that could only turn into a bigger stick.

It didn’t matter that it made him faster. It didn’t matter that his senses heightened exponentially in a fight. Givers were capable of incredible feats. His feats -

Were just subpar stains on the earth.

…He guessed the stick he chose, just wasn’t loved enough, though he had given it all of him that he possessed. And maybe that’s what it was.

All of him - that wasn’t enough.

Footsteps run up behind him.

“Zanka! Everything alright?”

Zanka lowers his hand turns, his wooden staff, a smaller, battered stick again. Dark hair kept tame beneath a cap, goggles splattered in the drops of the water-rain’s muted storm, choker around his neck.

Follo.

He thinks that’s what the Supporter’s name was.

The older boy searches Zanka’s face, for what, Zanka doesn’t know, before his concerned gaze goes to the carnage of blunt-force trauma-ed trash beasts scattered on the ground.

He whistles.

“All of this with a stick? Wow. That’s impressive. I only got a few swings before I almost got killed.” Sheepishly he slings his hammer into the belt of his waist and adjusts his cap. “I think we would’ve been done for without Gris and the prayers to his charm. They said there were only a few beasts wandering around but this was way more than we were told.”

Zanka looks at him, saying nothing, wondering why he’s bothering to talk so much to him.

Follo’s eyes move from their surroundings back onto him, and suddenly, much more carefully, much closer than before, he studies Zanka’s face. “...You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

He doesn’t consider the wound on him. “...Ain’t nothin’,” rough words drag off his weighted tongue. “It’s just loud. The rain. I ain’t used to havin’ it like this around.”

Follo’s eyes go Zanka's hand over his injury anyway. “Zanka, there’s blood-”

Gris’ voice calls out beneath the rumble of the storm. He lets the handful of supporters who had come out for the patrol know it’s time to pack-it-up and head back home. The falling rain was going to get much worse.

Everyone helps each other get together, and everyone starts to move.

Everyone but Zanka and Follo.

Follo’s eyes rest on Zanka’s own. “You’re bleeding,” he says, ignoring the world around them. “Let me see it?”

“It ain’t mine,” Zanka lies, and if it leaves him curtly, and if he sounds like he wants the matter dropped, like he doesn’t want it to be anything important, it’s because all of it’s true. There’s no need for attention for anything this small. “I didn’t get hurt.”

Follo doesn’t move away from him. He keeps standing there, staying there, and he doesn’t reach out and grab Zanka, but it feels like that’s what he wants to do, so intent is his stare. “Trash doesn’t bleed.”

“Glad we both agree,” Zanka says. 

Follo looks at him stunned.

Zanka straps his vital instrument along his back and doesn’t stick around for any more talk, joining the other Cleaner supports as they pass.

They all fall into disassembled order behind Gris’ larger steps.

Follo doesn’t try to walk beside him. No one really does.

Why would they.

Zanka’s footfalls press steps into the earth before him not yet tread upon, singular and alone; their imprint unlike the uniformed boots of the others he walks among.

In the buckling, rumbling thunder under splitting skies, he thinks maybe the pain of his injury will remind him to dodge better next time around.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

It’s a longer journey than he remembers it being back to base.

The thirty minute venture feels like an agonizing eternity. By the time they’re granted entrance inside, by the time the orange warmth of the towering, old building hits their faces and the rain is shaken off by all those returned - Zanka can’t feel his hands or legs.

His mind rattles in the sounds of all else moving with life around him.

Semiu, at the front desk, greets them each, taking stock of them as much as Gris. Gris - who regards them all with kind words for an unexpected extra job well done.

Enjin is there too. Leaning on the desk, in full uniform, umbrella leaning against the side of the desk in rest along with him. He’s slightly wet. He must’ve gotten back from his own personal assignment while the rest of them had been out.

He hadn’t been back to the headquarters for almost a week.

He greets Gris; comments something with half a smile Zanka can’t hear through muddled ears.

There’s a vague feeling Zanka has, slowly swallowing him, as his mind submerges in drowning down a well of its own self-make. Because he’s realizing something; has begun to feel something, watching how easily everyone around him moves and breathes.

Finding a place here might be impossible after all.

The gathered supporters separate - to the dining hall, to the showers, to their rooms - stretching, chattering among one another - companions and friends.

Zanka hasn’t made those here yet. He hadn’t made them at home either.

Having people who valued him, as a person more than a name. Knowing people who were interested in his well-being, not his achievements or his grades. People who looked at him like he was more than any sort of subpar disappointment for daring to bend away from expectations and look another way.

They didn’t exist for him. 

It’d never been a priority; never been encouraged for him to seek those sincere relationships out. And his classmates had treated him, from the start, like something that couldn’t be touched.

Zanka stiffens the tremors at his mouth born of ire and self-resentment.

…How lame.

Even if he didn’t have anything annoying like a friend there, at least - there - he didn’t have to wake up every day fighting with all the doubts that told him here he couldn't belong.

He starts to walk for his room.

His room here so barren and void of anything important to him besides the bare basics of a bed, it was like living in the den of a cave with only echoes being the reminder of how much of a lone, loser he was.

A hand gets in the way, and holds out gauze his way.

It takes Zanka a moment to process that it’s there; to recognize that the hand belongs to Follo. Follo, who for some reason, had come back to him, in front of him, mouth pressed thin and bottle of antiseptic in his other hand.

“I don’t care what you think,” the older boy says, nothing like the good words of him that had been floating around the base about him being pure-hearted and nice; nothing like the ‘earnest kid from the north’ that everyone liked to look after and train. “If you’re not going to ask for help,” he continues, “then at least take care of the problem yourself.”

In the new lighting, away from the gloom of the storm now rumbling beyond the walls of the base now getting beat by the pelting rain - Follo appears grim. Something knowing in the dull gold-set of his gaze.

Zanka detests it.

He pushes the first-aid back towards Follo, dismissive; fingers numb and cold, growing colder still.

His eyes drift away from where they stand, to the right, to track the few slower members of the Cleaners ambling down the darkened hall that leads towards his own temporary place of rest.

They’re laughing between themselves, telling jokes.

Zanka wonders.

If he had grown up anywhere else besides in the bounds of his hometown, anywhere else beyond the reign of a family with the weight of duty engraved into his bones and fear of insignificance lashed across his skin- if he’d be able to be so uncaringly normal like them.

“What’s wrong with you?” Follo asks, a hint of frustration bleeding loud through his voice.

Zanka ignores him completely and instead follows the Cleaners with distance between himself and them, steps as weighted as the murmurs in his head.

He pretends he doesn’t feel the few sets of eyes from those gathered at Semiu’s desk on the back of his head.

Gris.

He might’ve noticed how poorly Zanka had performed out there.

Maybe he’d tell Enjin once Zanka’s out of sight, how the kid who had resolved to join them as a Cleaner; declared he’d be their best Giver - was really just a hopeless case with a tape-patched stick after all.

That they shouldn’t have let him in.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Exhausted, in his room, he unstraps his vital instrument and rests it by the door.

Then he drags himself and sits on the side of his made-bed, doused, his wet self sinking the mattress in. 

And he sits some more.

And sits.

Corvus had told him he could stay as long as he pleased.

If even Enjin had vouched for him, Zanka must be a trustworthy asset to join their ranks.

But Zanka knew it was only because of who he was; a Nijiku. His ‘training period’, all of what this was, was just to see if Zanka would actually commit.

That’s why they were giving him free reign, wasn’t it?

Why Enjin had told him to ‘jump right into it’ and see if this was what he really wanted to do with himself.

Because what if it wasn’t.

“They disinherited me. I don’t got anywhere else to go,” Zanka had told him.

“Yeah, and that’s pretty awful,” Enjin had said back. “But being here just for the sake of being here isn’t any sort of thing that’ll work out. Not in the long run. You’ve got to have a reason. Being a Cleaner, being a Giver, means in a way by unorthodox definition - not giving up. And if giving up is what brought you to these doors - you won’t last long.”

So Enjin had let him know. 

But Enjin didn’t know - did he? That Zanka had already given up all he had.

The moment he chose the stick off the table in his class. The moment he clutched onto it, ran fingers across its splinters, smoothed them out; committed to its care - because the embarrassment of going back and admitting to his peers and teacher that it was a mistake - that he had made a mistake - was too great a step to fall down.

He chose the stick on purpose.

That’s what he had told his sister.

That’s what he had told his father, that's what he had told his brother, his classmates, his teachers.

He had chosen it to prove that even with a stick, he could rise to take the Golden Throne - and it wasn’t a lie.

All they had to do was watch.

And they had all watched.

As he was disowned, dismissed from Hell Guard and Clan -  for when his measly stick began to respond to his will - it was simply another notch on the wall of disappointments he had built himself for all those around him to see.

And when he had decided to lean all his future into that mere stick, fallen too far into the pit of his own making, of course, of course, he was told to take the path he so chose - and walk.

He hadn’t told Enjin a thing. 

Not about how the disownment destroyed him; how he had given up on being great but furiously, desperately still wanted to be strong.

Strong enough for himself.

Strong enough to be equal with Hyo, if he couldn’t be equal to anything else.

He was Zanka Nijiku, the youngest son of prestige. Gifted with potential.

So long as he pushed himself to the brink, he would succeed.

It was in his name. 

Zanka stares at the ground beneath his feet.

......Enjin wasn't anything to him but a stranger - a literal stranger passing by - who was trying to get water out of a dried up well and happened to find him down there instead.

Everyone here. 

Were just a bunch of strangers he had stupidly forced himself into. 

What would these people care about the privileged problems of a spoiled kid, who had wanted everything, and lost everything, by his own hands? 

Why should they even pretend to? 

They shouldn't have to.

For someone who should be able to do things for himself. 

His sight wavers, growing blurred and dark.

His hands, resting on his legs, fingers curled at his knees, are paler than he thinks they were before; stained more red than he thinks they should be. The sheets where he sits are growing red too. Dark. With a pungent smell of iron and rot.

Weird.

He brings his hands to his gut - far more drenched in blood than it was minutes ago.

How long were those minutes ago?

He absently tries to pinpoint the number as he tries to keep all the red escaping outside of him, inside where it belongs. Huh, he wonders, and wonders some more.

It’s not stopping.

Such a minor wound from a tiny thing like a pile of trash pretending to be a dog?

Maybe he does need the gauze from Follo.

He doesn’t keep any in his room; hadn’t gone on the supply run that woman, Tomme, had offered when she was taking a trip for other Cleaners.

He'd have to go out and find some. 

He stands.

Takes three steps.

And meets the ground.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

He wakes, barely.

An unbearable pain squeezes around his gut, like there are fingers in his gut, digging around, pulling around, for the sake of messing around.

It’s the least peaceful return he’s had to the realm of the living in a while. The taste of a shock, like lightning, sits on his tongue.

“-rotting atrophy-” he hears. “-should be able to purge it all out-”

“-what was he doing?”

Enjin.

That’s Enjin isn’t it?

Zanka has never heard him sound like that before. Disappointed - in him.  

“-seemed to be handling things alright when I turned away-”

Gris. That’s Gris too isn’t it?

A low swear, soft, beneath Enjin’s breath between words Zanka hears and doesn’t fully hear. “....maybe…. wasn’t good enough.”

It’s devastating hearing it from the one person who he thought had been putting the most faith in him - for all the little faith it'd been. 

But Enjin was right, wasn’t he?

Zanka wasn’t.

Good enough.

He can’t cling to the awareness, although he struggles - to defend himself - no - to counter and admit it was his fault for not doing things well - give him a second chance and he’d prove he was better. It was a fluke. He was better than losing like this and falling to the ground.

Something touches him - a soothing hand - warm.

He’s pulled back down into sleep, tears of frustration escaping him with hands too powerless to shove them away. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

It’s hours later - hours - when he wakes again.

His senses tell him it’s night.

His inborn clock that has come to know the very feeling of the day from the muscle memory of rising and sleeping in rotations of the Academy, settled into muscles and into memory. And he’s in his room as if it’s never been left, flat on his back, head slightly raised, covered in two more blankets than he’d had before.

Shadows and shadows and one dim light - its glow from a small, iron-cast lantern, the hue of a hearth, on the desk beside his bed.

Follo sits in a fold-out, plastic chair next to the desk, facing him.

Gazing at him.

He hasn’t changed from his uniform. It should be dry with the amount of time that has passed, but it looks damp like he’d been out in the storm again.

Follo lets him have a minute to process the world around them, then he leans forward, and leans near, lifting a hand.

Zanka flinches. He doesn’t know why.

No one had ever struck him with malicious intent back at home or here; the only one to hurt him for his screwups had always been himself, with more training, less eating, more discipline, more annoyance - than grief.

But Follo’s hand ghosts past his face and brushes under his hair, merely coming to rest against his forehead.

“You’re up,” he comments, a bit annoyed. Relieved. “Finally. It’s been two days. They were thinking about moving you back to the infirmary.”

Zanka hears the words, coming to him like a slow-breaking dawn.

“It was my turn to check on you," Follo adds.

“....What do ya mean…” Zanka starts to ask, voice weak, “it’s been two days?”

“I mean that’s how long you were out,” Follo reiterates. He drops his hand from Zanka's brow and relaxes, settling his hand on Zanka’s chest and easing him back to lying-down as he gets up himself.

Zanka hadn’t even been aware he was sitting up to begin with, but looking down as Follo’s hand leaves off him, he realizes how void of clothes he is. How bare his chest is; wrapped and wrapped from the stomach-to-waist in heavy gauze, clipped with pins.

Follo bends down to the floor and shuffles around with what sounds like a few things before he straightens back up, a wet rag in his hand.

“So you know, that was reckless. And pretty stupid. And stressful. Don’t hide your injuries again. That’s not helpful to any of us. You’re lucky Gris came to check on you after I told him you were hurt. You could’ve died. Cleaners have died from less.”

Zanka tracks the journey of Follo’s hand and the rag, bewildered at what’s happened and what’s still happening, as Follo slips it across his brow.

It’s an unbearably cool relief from a clammy relief Zanka hadn’t registered had been devouring him. He closes his eyes, melting beneath the rescue of it, before remembering where he is, getting a hold of himself, and reopening his eyes - mildly embarrassed.

“...was jus’ a scratch,” he mumbles.

Follo furrows his brows, standing there and looking at him like he thinks Zanka’s an idiot. “A bleeding wound untreated out here can cause rot. The miasma does that - especially worse in the rain. You didn’t learn that where you came from?”

He had learned of it.

It just hadn’t mattered much in the highly-protected, privileged dome of filtered air he got to live within.

He doesn’t answer.

Follo crosses his arms, continues to stare at him, deadly serious, an echo of judgment against Zanka in between them. And for a good stretch of a moment doesn’t speak a single word.

Then he sighs. Relenting.

“...I’m not going to pretend to understand you, or get the reasons for the things you refused and the things you said. But you came here for something, didn’t you? Like everyone else. It can’t have been to die.”

It hadn’t been. But in moments like these, in humiliations like these, sometimes Zanka thinks it’d be fine to. If it happened by chance.

Follo’s eyes go towards the door, and Zanka’s travels there too.

He’s looking at Zanka’s bandaged stick, still leaning there, unmoved from its place of rest.

“You’re fortunate to have a gift others only wish they could have.”

Follo's expression shutters then, and his expression shadows briefly in memory. It’s impossible to tell what they are. Zanka only knows that whatever they are - belong to the rotten sort.

“...I can tell you care,” Follo says. “A lot. And I can tell… you don’t think it’s enough. Maybe it’s not - for what you want. But for now -” Follo brings his eyes back to Zanka, and they are molten, deep amber; a marble left before a fire, reflecting clear. “-know that it’s enough.”

He leaves.

“I’ll let them know you’re awake,” he speaks without looking back, though he offers a casual waving hand behind him in departure. “Rest a little longer. We’ll get you something to eat.” 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

In the week that follows, Zanka is welcomed back into the working rotation of the Cleaners.

Still a trainee - still on-the-job training and field observation to better familiarize himself with the inner workings of an organization so prolific and vital to the perseverance and protection of The Ground.

He’s reminded by a number of supporters more times than he can count to properly strap his mask to his face; to be attentive to the various shapes the trash beasts take on; to be mindful of his ordinary loose and layered clothes that can easily snag and get snagged in attacks, - and was he sure he didn’t want to just toss on the standard uniform of the Cleaners the rest of the supporters had?

No?

Then at least stick close to them when they head out - and don’t venture far.

It’d be irritating if Zanka didn’t know he deserved it. The micromanaging and the scrutiny; the lack of trust.

It’ll take time to build it again - if he even had any with them to begin with. So he bites down the bitterness of it on his tongue and uses it as fuel to perform to excellence.

Time to show that he can be a useful Giver among the Cleaners again.

That despite his own doubts, he’s here to stick around.

Gris checks on him after every excursion they go on together, and it’s every excursion Zanka finds himself on that Gris is there for, because they must’ve decided that the only way Zanka can go out and about in the world with their reputation and their name attached to him, is with a dedicated sitter to make sure he doesn’t die.

The problem it would bring from his family would probably be great.

That was probably the biggest reason for everyone's endless fussing.

He gets to know Tomme more, who earnestly throws herself into each client request with all her heart and chatters, comfortably, between them, knowledgeable of all things related to trash beasts and unrelated beyond.

He gets to better know Follo, who swings his hammer with a fierceness and a dedication that makes Zanka realize the weight of the words Follo had spoken to him nights and nights ago.

How some people wished they could be a Giver with all their might. That Zanka was lucky he got an answer from his twig of a tree branch for his efforts.

And Zanka was lucky.

Lucky that Enjin hadn’t told Corvus to kick him to the curb.

Lucky that Enjin, for one reason or another, hadn’t joined on any commissions Zanka or Gris - or any other ensemble of Cleaners involving Zanka - went to complete.

Zanka’s not keeping track or anything, that’d be completely creepy and weird, but Enjin definitely had stopped sticking to him like glue after Zanka’s first week and a half in the Cleaners.

Whatever. It wasn’t a big deal.

This was the best way for Zanka to grow - being left on his own; to his own devices.

He had gone through it with his elder sister, who he admired. With his elder brother who towered taller than him, adept and great.

Shoulders turned from him in the wake of disappointment wasn’t anything new.

Zanka performed better without an audience watching him anyway. 

Yeah. 

It was better, honestly, if Enjin kept ignoring him with a ten-foot pole. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

“He’s not ignoring you,” Gris tells him one day, in the middle of the day, of an off-day, in the busy dining hall.

The strong stench of canned spray and paint wafts like a cloud and sits and sinks and burns into his eyes and nose like a flashbang of an assault, so it takes Zanka a moment to focus on what Gris is saying.

Someone has put music on.

“Who?”

Gris sits with a can of open spinach and fork in it, in front of him.

“Enjin,” Gris says. “He’s not ignoring you. He’s been busy with a matter in a deadzone at the boss’s request.”

“Oh,” says Zanka. He picks up the slice of pizza on his plate, slimy with cheese, piping hot, with his bare hands and it’s seriously goddamn hot -

He drops it back down with scalded palms, affronted.

Follo, chowing down on food beside him, passes him a fork and knife without even bothering to look.

And Zanka takes them.

Like a scrub of a lame-o.

“Wasn’t thinkin’ bout that,” he lies to Gris.

He stuffs a cut chunk of pizza into his mouth and pretends the surlish twist to his face comes from the food burning his tastebuds to smithereens and not the non-existent-relationship-of-mentorship-and-guidance from the guy he thought it wouldn’t be too bad to try and impress.

He’s noticed that there’s a girl with red hair who tags along with Enjin the most. That Enjin lets her without protest.

Quite the student-mentor-thing they’ve got going on themselves.

"That’s a pretty scary look on your face," Gris comments. "Why not speak with Enjin when he returns? He should be back by the weekend. I doubt he’d mind taking you out if you wanted to do a job together."

"Nah, I think he might," Zanka utters, low.

He ignores the look Follo gives Gris and the look Gris gives to Zanka in return.

"...it’s fine," Zanka tells him. "...We don’t got nothin’ to talk about really.” 

"EXCEPT A CHANGE OF CLOTHES!"

Suddenly, August is there standing beside Gris, hands slammed and splayed on the table, leaning forward in loud, boisterous excitement.

"Zanka! I’ve finally finished! It took a hundred, thousand years to make your uniform you - but I’ve outdone myself this time, I certainly have, with all the comforts of home! Come take a look!"

“What-?” says Zanka.

August doesn’t wait for him to give any sort of sensical thought. Just snags Zanka by the front of his robes and hauls him over the table with enough force to actually kill him.

“Hey, ow, wait-!”

He nearly swallows his fork.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

All the comforts of home.

August’s description of it wasn’t wrong.

The uniform flows like the wear of a Hell Guard, with all the protections for outdoor ventures unique to a Cleaner.

"What do you think?!" August shouts with the power to blow up a car. He zips and zaps, snapping photos around Zanka who’s trying to remove himself from the center of the whirlwind that is that - but he can’t because Follo’s taking up his space, poking and prodding and studying the uniform on him up close.

"What’s this for your hand and arm?" Follo asks, knocking on his wrist guard.

Zanka pulls his arm away. “There's no way you haven't seen one of these before -”

"-you can probably hide something up these other sleeves,” Follo breezes over him. “Do you think your staff will fit?"

"Why would I put my staff in there you idiot-"

"-the shoes don't look very tough. Hey August, I trust in your work but you sure these won’t get easily wet? Everyone else has got thicker boots- "

Zanka maybe starts to strangle Follo where they stand.

Gris separates them.

Zanka takes a moment to collect himself while Follo pretends to cough for his life and Gris asks:

"Well? How does it feel?"

And Zanka, bearings regained, with all the questions and sense he has, says back, "It’s fine, I guess- " 

"Fine? Just fine?!” August shrieks.

"But I don’t get it. Ain’t I just a trainee?"

Gris blinks then studies him. "I’m pretty sure you stopped being one a month ago."

"Yeah." Follo straightens up and regards Zanka with both eyebrows raised. "Don’t you remember? The party we threw for you with all that confetti and those balloons that turned out to be bombs?"

"Cuz you filled them with gunpowder and lit them on fire," Zanka griefs.

Honestly, Zanka thought it’d been a collective-group-murder-attempt from the ‘Cleaners-Anonymous’ to him which they tried to cover up as a welcome celebration with food and drinks. Because he’d been at the headquarters for weeks and weeks before that.

Why suddenly throw him a party then?

“The Vianders only come around once a month,” Follo says as if reading his mind. “For a party like that, we have to request food orders in advance and scrounge up enough pay.”

Oh, Zanka thinks.

Guess that made a little more sense.

But if he had a uniform - and this was his uniform - this was his .... then-

Didn’t that mean... ?

"It’s a real nice uniform," Gris tells him straight. "It’d be a shame for you not to stick around."

Summer makes it muggy.

Makes the heat hot, the air mildly more unpleasant to breathe, and humidity cling.

Zanka could come up with a thousand excuses why he’s slower than usual; could say it was the weather that made him off his game, but he had sure talked off a big game to Follo for no reason, so this was probably just karma. 

“Zanka, you up for a spar?” Follo had asked, coming to him in the basketball court.

Zanka had quit absorbing the polluted sun into his skin and his staff from his cross-legged position of meditation in the middle of the court - and cracked open a mullish eye - to think about it.

A month after gaining his official uniform, since being assigned to taking point with Gris on job requests, since going-all in on his stick-of-a-weapon to the point its wood could kill a man - and -

“...Fine.”

He had risen to his feet, unhurried and slow, the base of his staff touching down briefly to the ground.

“Bring it on. You better come at me like you want me dead,” he had tilted up his chin in mild arrogance, feeling good, the warmth of the sun still sunken in his skin. “There’s no way to get any stronger playin’ pretend.”  

It’s a clap of light in the thwack of steel.

“Geezus, sorry!”

The frantic apology is the only thing Zanka hears for a second - because for a second - he can’t see.

He should’ve just allowed himself to be lazy, for once, for the day.

Hands squeeze his shoulders, urgent and tight. “-anka, you okay?”

Zanka gains his sight back and gets a faceful of jacket. Because that’s where he had fallen. Nose-first into Follo’s chest.

“Am I dead?” he mumbles in mystification, a muffled, unintelligible thing.

Follo’s hammer, fallen by their feet, doesn’t look stained in blood though Zanka thinks it should be, after how hard it had cracked into his skull. He bends down to get the hammer with a hand, his other hand clinging a little tightly to Follo’s uniform.

It feels light in his hand, the hammer, and Zanka stares at it for a moment as it sits warmer in his hand, like it's alive - before backing off of Follo and admiring the balance of the hammer for himself.

“Uh - Zanka?” Follo asks. 

Zanka smiles small. He offers the hammer back to the supporter who had somehow become the closest thing to a real-life… ‘friend’ he ever had.

“Thanks,” he says.

Follo looks at him, terrified. “For what.”

Zanka doesn’t know. “You know.”

“No I don’t,” Follo responds. “Where are you going?”

Zanka isn’t sure. “Somewhere,” he thinks he says aloud. Coolly, because he’s a cool-sorta-fellow, he raises his hand behind him in goodbye and walks towards who-knows-where.

Everything’s looking awful fuzzy; an awful lot discombobulated and tilted on an axis, but he still makes it off the basketball courts, out of the sun, to the assortment of junk-filled trash cans resting by the graffitied entrance leading back inside the base.

He digs through the trash for a bit, confused.

Where’s his stick? His trusty stick? It’s the only stick he ever cared about.

The only stick he reverently praised in the morning and sometimes tucked into bed.

He panics a little.

He starts picking up old kitchen supplies and pieces of warehouse steel out of the garbage and dropping them.

Cicadas from the summer season are somewhere incessantly near and loud -

“Here you go.”

His stick is handed to him.

Zanka accepts it from where it magically appeared next to him, and he takes it with both hands preciously and holds it close to his chest, warmth bubbling within him as he smiles a smile real and fond.

“Wow, thanks.”

“Wow is right,” comes the amused response. “Zanka, right? We met you in that well.”

Zanka definitely had been in a well at some point in his life. Maybe all of it.

He’s dizzy.

His hands and his stick are suddenly much closer to his eyes than he remembers. His forehead is touching his stick now actually, and the boots of his feet are kind of getting closer too.

“Uuup - careful there.” An unfamiliar hand snags his arm and drapes it over a much smaller, lithe shoulder.

A bunch of red hair.

Vibrant green eyes.

He glances out the corner of his eye, confused, suspicious, then confused again. “...Who’re you?”

He’s given a false-looking smile by the girl holding him, although she sounds entirely sincere. “Oh, right. We haven’t gotten a chance to go out anywhere together yet. We’ve totally seen each other around. I’m Riyo.”

Neat name, he admires. She’s kinda neat-looking too.

He gets a little miffed after thinking that.

Riyo?

Ain’t she the one always hangin’ ‘round Enjin?

“...You.”

She snickers, like his ire is hilarious. “Yeah, me. Man,” she chuckles a bit. “Follo really did a number on you. You gonna be alright?”

His weight drastically sags.

“Hold on, let me help!”

His left arm is grabbed and quickly pulled over another shoulder. 

“I’ll carry him,” Follo says. 

“Sure,” Riyo, the-girl-glued-to-Enjin says back.

She releases Zanka lightly but doesn’t move much very far away at all, and Zanka’s noticed for the first time that they’re all walking - have been walking - when the grungy shade of their base envelops Zanka like a blanket of comforting, sleepy warmth.

Follo continues to drag Zanka and his loose, limp legs indoors.

“Fun little fight you guys had while it lasted,” Riyo is saying past Zanka, to Follo.

Zanka closes his eyes.

His cheek is pinched, sharply, and pulled.

“Try and stay awake, Zanka. We’d be in a bad place if you fell into a coma; we barely have enough Givers as it is.” Riyo huffs in good humor after. “You’re getting scary with that hammer, Follo.”

"I really...really... didn’t mean to hit him."

"Ha! Don’t sound so bad about it. It was a real nice feint. Trash beasts outside aren’t gonna apologize when they do us in."

They’re talking and Zanka hears them and he wants to disagree, wants to say that maybe Follo should feel a little bad about bludgeoning him, that maybe a trash beast would apologize for hurting them if they nicely asked, but the world is too many colors and too many lights - and could they please stop swinging him around - and can they please stop bending the ceiling into the floor and molding the walls of the hall on either side of them into one?

“Stop,” he utters, insistent. “Stop,” he says again, gasping and he struggles, trying to go down on his knees and curl into a ball and lie down.

They let him go and he does sink down, palms cradling his eyes as his forehead presses desperately against the dirty and cold floor like he can make it stay in one place if he does.

But it’s so filthy. Filthy, and he’s inhaling the footfalls of dusty, dank boots up his nose from the thirty plus Cleaners who live and work and breathe and traverse the same path he’s on now.

He doesn’t weep, but it’s a damn-near thing. Why is the floor still moving when his eyes are closed.

“...What kinda torture is this…?” he questions to no one, voice pitched and broken high.

“Sheesh,” the voice of Riyo commends from above. “Looks like no one ever hit him like this before. Considering the place he came from where they get hit around all the time, this is impressive. Follo." A thumbs up. "You’re one of a kind!”

“Please stop making me feel bad, I feel awful!” he thinks he hears Follo starting to sob, and a new set of feet approach casually from somewhere far then near, considerately stopping near Zanka’s face-down, tucked-down head.

“Looks like you’ve gotten into something strange." A much older - much, much more familiar - voice joins in. "What’s up with you guys?”

Enjin, Zanka registers.

Answers leave all three of them at once.

“Concussion.”

“Trainin’.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Though Zanka’s answer of 'training' goes straight into the ground, like any semblance of self-respect he could ever have - already buried in the ground.

“Alright…? Riyo?” Enjin checks.

“Concussion,” she repeats. “From training. Follo’s really sorry.”

Enjin really did have a lot of trust in Riyo, didn’t he? Zanka laments. Personally, he hadn’t seen much of Enjin around.

Even after officially joining the ranks, the most he’d gotten were occasional check-ins from the man. Things like:

‘You settling in?’,

‘Good clean-up?’

and ‘How have things been going with your vital instrument?’

Oddly, he hadn’t mentioned anything to Zanka about the time he almost died to a trash beast his first week and a half in the Cleaners.

Zanka guessed there wasn’t anything deep behind it. He knew he was pretty far low on Enjin’s totem-pole despite Enjin encouraging him way back when he was at his lowest low - so it was fine.

It still stung if he thought about it - how back then - he’d heard Enjin say the issue was that he wasn’t good enough.

Well the joke was on him. Zanka had a great completion record going on with Gris and the other supporters and that giant mountain of a man, Delmon.

He was shaping up great despite all the faith Enjin had lost in him. 

“Zanka, you good?” Enjin asks.

Zanka picks his face up out his hands and lifts it from the floor.

He sees, through blips of circles and magical circles and dots and lights, Enjin looking down at him, with his hands in his pockets, and a look of interest on his face.

Zanka scowls, slowly, with all the feeling of a floating noodle and distant, aching thoughts of a brain bruised and sensitive. “Don’t look down on me,” he grouses. “I don’t like it.”

Enjin doesn’t much react; just continues to look at him like Zanka’s said something particularly questionable. “I mean you’re on the ground?” he replies, like he’s offering him a metaphorical hand. “I’m not sure how else you want me to look at you.”

Tch.

Zanka gets up, pulling his stick to his chest with him. He wobbles.

Follo grasps the bottom of his elbow, steadying him, frowning at him in blatant worry.

Zanka looks at Follo’s hand for a long, long time.

Follo looks at him looking at it.

“Zanka took a nice hammer to the head,” Riyo shares as Zanka cautiously removes himself from Follo’s hold and stands in a nauseating amount of disorientation and pain. “He says he’s alright though, so I guess he is.”

“I guess he is,” Enjin agrees, tilting his head at Zanka. “You don’t want to get checked out by our healer?”

Since when did they have one? Did they always have one?

“Don’t need one,” Zanka shakes his head. He quickly regrets shaking his head. Feeling green, tasting green; he swallows back the thick, sickly sensation of being green in his mouth and says: “Don’t need the help.”

Enjin gazes at him, considering him, before taking his word.

“Sure.”

And the guy Zanka had been interested in, had admired and silently been looking up to, looks away from him - towards Riyo and Follo instead.

“Follo, Riyo, this is good timing. I could use your assistance out front.”

“O-kayy,” Riyo drawls, already leaving Zanka’s side.

“Is there a problem?” Follo asks, staying where he is.

The tiniest, quiet, desperate part of Zanka that wants to return to the ground and die there to stop his own head’s misery, fights with his stubbornness telling him he wasn’t that much of a washed-out, loser, dud to say out loud he felt awful cuz he lost at a spar.

“You can call it a problem,” Enjin answers Follo, casually. He turns to go and Riyo goes with him. “Are you coming? It looks like Zanka’s got this on his own.”

Got what on his own?

Zanka wasn’t aware he was supposed to be doing anything, but if Enjin said it, then he guessed he was.

Follo hesitantly follows after Enjin and Riyo. Hesitates the entire six steps it takes for him to catch up to them.

Then he walks with them - and he too leaves Zanka behind.

Sort of.

He turns his head around twice, and each time, without looking, Enjin reaches out and turns Follo’s head back around front. It’d be comical if the sight of them didn’t make Zanka feel like he’d gotten punched in the gut. If he didn’t feel the paper-thin sense of self-worth in him, getting tossed into a ball and thrown out.

His older sister had done the same thing more than once. Walked off after shooting bullets at him he couldn’t dodge, advising him to raise his defense faster; move faster, if he didn’t want to get shot.

Zanka rolls his shoulders and tilts up his chin. Using his vital instrument, his only constant support, maybe his only actual real friend in the entirety of the base, maybe the thing that would be his only true companion in the entirety of the world, Zanka uses it to help walk himself down the hallway after Follo and Enjin and Riyo.

Let him see what the ‘problem’ was too.

He’d take care of it in front of Enjin and prove it.

…Though what he was going to prove, he didn’t know. He’d do it anyway.

He takes two steps, hits the wall - and retches the morning’s breakfast up.

The footsteps stop ahead. Follo’s voice is the last thing he hears.

“Zanka!”

And the footsteps run back. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Once, when he was six, Zanka had twisted his ankle falling off the engawa.

The simple wooden stretch of a porch winding around their family’s modest but grand dwelling, a foot above the ground, and his foot had somehow misjudged the step-off, and he’d hit the white pebbles of the garden on the other side.

Goka had come across him nearly thirty minutes later, back from the Academy. There were books tucked under his older brother’s arm, a practice staff hooked around his back, and gun at his waist.

He’d frowned when he saw Zanka.

“What are you doin’?”

“I fell,” Zanka had said.

Goka hadn’t said anything after that.

He had simply stood there some more, frowning some more in wait, until they had waited several minutes in total silence. Then Goka had said -

“You won’t get up?”

“I can’t. My ankle hurts.”

His older brother had glanced around them, still frowning the same, old frown. Then his older brother had cautiously, carefully, set his books down on the ground - as if he was doing something grievously wrong.

And he had knelt before Zanka, giving him his back, looking over his shoulder at him.

“Get on.”

Zanka hadn't. He had just blinked. Cuz he had already decided to sit and wait until his ankle stopped hurting, then get up and test out how good he could walk on it - wanting to hide it from their parents that he’d gotten hurt just by walking.

“Hurry up,” Goka had said, brows furrowing in vexation.

At the command, Zanka's arms had automatically slipped around his older brother’s neck. “What about your books?”

“I’ll come back n’ get them. You need to watch where you walk. What if I hadn’t passed by?”

Then Zanka would still be on the ground. Obviously.

He had rested his forehead in the crook of Goka’s neck.

For someone who was always so distant, so serious and cold and busy, committing himself to all the tenets of their family, Goka sure was awfully warm. More than studying books, he ran drills on Academy grounds for hours even after their classes were dismissed.

It was kinda nice of him to stop for a second and help Zanka out.

Kinda nice he got to be with his big brother for a bit.

Even if it was for a reason so dumb. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Right. That’s right.

Once there was a time when they mattered a bit more to each other than expectations and responsibilities. It had been a bit more clear, that though there were differences in their years and their lives that kept them in different places, and in different spaces  - they were still family.

And being family meant something.

Before they grew up. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

He hadn’t let go of Goka back then. Not very easily.

He had stayed attached to his brother who kept strong hands hooked beneath his knees, even after Goka had carried him the back way to his room, and they had both kept staying where they were until Kyouka had happened to pass by, double-back, and slowly ask what they were doing and why.

Goka and Zanka had both suddenly panicked and frantically searched for an excuse.

Despite getting caught - Goka hadn’t let him drop. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

He’s carried on the back of a stronger guy.

Zanka keeps his head buried in the neck it’s in - the neck tattooed with ink; the skin beneath it comfortably cold.

It’s a relief for his eyes that spin and dip and swoop even when closed. Gratefully, he squeezes his arms tighter around the wide shoulders of the one carrying his useless weight.

“Zanka, are you trying to choke me?”

“Sorry.” Zanka wonders who he’s miserably apologizing to. “I didn’t mean to fall.”

Enjin says nothing to that.

Zanka squeezes his arms one more time around Enjin, til all the strength he has within him is gone and gotten out. Then he goes limp.

Defeated and loose.

Fine with giving up on himself for the hundredth time.

Follo and Riyo aren’t there.

They must’ve gone to take care of whatever problem it was that Enjin had mentioned earlier on. Zanka recalls it with a thrumming, buzzing remembrance in his head. He doesn’t feel any better, but he does feel more cognizant of himself - more like himself - now.

Why were his only impressions given to Enjin so stupidly bad?

He’s not a kid. Sixteen was basically an adult.

He should be better than…whatever this is. Geez.

“I can walk,” he mumbles.

“You can’t,” Enjin says.

His older sister had said the same thing, in Zanka’s room, knelt in front of him on the floor as he sat on a cushion and Goka waited beside them.

She had held Zanka’s ankle with consideration.

“You got yourself real hurt bein’ careless. That’ll set you back n’ behind. Watch yourself better, Zanka. If Goka hadn’t been takin’ the back way home, you’d have gotten left there on the ground ‘til we noticed you were missin’ tomorrow.”

It’d been the same sort of thing when Zanka had crawled himself down that well.

He had put himself into the shitty situation - like he always put himself in shitty things - and realized he’d put himself in a well too deep with not enough footholds to climb out, so resigned to stay down there until he starved to death and died.

His siblings hadn’t noticed he was gone. They were busy, grown adults, entrusted with rank and duty. So there’d been no one to pull him out of the well.

His classmates, even if they were to pass by him, wouldn’t try and help him out either. Why would they? He was a piece of rotten privilege they could finally get out of the way.

For weeks and weeks, he had just wanted to quit livin’ in his own skin. Couldn’t stand that he had ever thought he was better than everyone else. He was disgusting.

He should have never been found by Riyo and Enjin. They should have left him, told him that it was true he’d amount to nothing, and gone on their way.

“There’s nothing wrong,” Enjin says in the middle of Zanka’s loathing thoughts, "with being hurt.”

He keeps walking with Zanka on his back to somewhere Zanka doesn’t know.

The halls of the base are long and they all look the same.

Zanka’s frustrated, not hurt. His body is tired, more tired than his mind, and his mind is twisted, caught by places and times far away, far off elsewhere, to when - despite all his self-hate - he had still, still, wanted to be found.

The well had been uncomfortable, the mossy rock old and weathered and damp from the previous fall of rain. He’d been cold for hours.

His tear is hot.

The few that follow the first, come out before he can tell them to stay the hell inside.

Enjin continues to walk, unperturbed. “I could’ve sworn Follo told you before, didn’t he?” he says. “Back when you got yourself clawed by a trash beast and kept it to yourself. Something along the lines of letting other people help you. I can’t say I disagree. What’s the point in struggling? Who are you doing it for? Do you think denying yourself the things you need will somehow make you feel better?”

He talks as if he knows.

Like he’s lived it himself.

He denies his own questions spoken to Zanka.

“…I don’t think that’s the case. You just want to keep feeling low when you’re low; keep letting yourself hate yourself, so that when you go lower, get lower from the world around you, you have an excuse to stay as sorry as you are.”

Zanka doesn’t have anything to say. He’s right.

Steadily, Enjin speaks on. “It makes me wonder, Zanka. What did you drag yourself out of that well for? Getting out of it means accepting that you’ll still get punched down by your own weaknesses and life. Getting out of it means making the choice to change. The way you are now, you might as well have stayed down there and let yourself waste away.”

Zanka wishes Enjin would put him down.

Enjin shifts him then, then gets a better hold tucked under his knees, and lightly adjusts how he carries Zanka’s weight. “Of course, I’d prefer if you stayed above ground, and it’s a good thing that you’re here. The reason you joined the Cleaners is to get stronger, isn’t it? Knowing when you need help is a type of strength too you need all the willpower in the world to accept.”

Zanka hears him.

It’s humiliating anyway; upsetting anyway. And it’s the truth - all of what he’s saying.

Zanka isn’t an idiot.

He knows what’s good for him.

Following-through with those things, telling himself doing those things would go anywhere, was what he battled with.

Shit. Today was supposed to be a good day for him.

How hard had Follo swung that swung that freaking hammer?

He doesn’t tell Enjin that the reason he had joined the Cleaners was to be by Enjin’s side; and he doesn’t tell Enjin that the reason he had dragged himself out of the well was because Enjin had stirred the first dead ember of belief in him that told him he had some worth left, because even if it’s not a lie, doesn’t it make him sound lame?

But maybe that’s the point.

Enjin’s asking him to admit it and be okay with it aloud.

Embrace the worst parts of himself, to make a better self.

He cries a bit more, the tears between himself and Enjin. “I’m such a loser,” he laments.

And for the first time, between themselves, Enjin sounds amused. “If you think that's what you are, who am I to change your mind? But that’s the first step, isn't it? Knowing what you don’t want to be and what you’d like to be. We can brainstorm together. What’s the ideal ‘you’ you’re looking for? Strong, right?”

“...Yeah.”

“What else? Stoic and cool?”

It sounds too much like his brother. Reminds him too much of Hyo.

“...Just cool,” Zanka mumbles.

“Someone strong and cool, doesn’t sound too hard to reach,” Enjin muses. “Alright.”

He walks much more comfortably and its oddly much more comfortable than Zanka thinks it should be with hideous, gross tears all up on the shoulder of the still-coolest-guy Zanka knows.

“Look,” Enjin says, eventually, amicably, but entirely firm. “I’m not gonna coddle you for the choices that you make, let’s make that clear between us. I’m not gonna tell you you’re right with absolution, and I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong. But I’ll tell you that no matter what, we’re here to help. All of us are. If you need help, I’ll help you. If you ask for help, I’ll help you. When you’re too stubborn to admit you need it, guess what, I’ll still eventually help you. I get it. You didn’t have the sort around you before who might’ve been willing to reach out and drag you from that well. It wasn’t my place back then either to physically drag you out and force you from a place you were so deadset on staying in. But you’re here, and you made it here, and this is what’s the most important. So."

Enjin tells him clear.

"Speak up. Shout it out. Or cry - you can let it out like that too. You’ve got nothing to prove to any of us, only things to keep proving to yourself. So that ideal in your head - that guy you wanna be - chase after it comfortably, without fear.”

There’s a girl with piercing eyes and snow-white hair.

There’s his elder brother and his elder sister.

There’s a voice belonging to a guy who spoke to him from above the well.

There’s only one ideal Zanka’s had for months.

It’s you, he thinks, loud. He gets a little red. Enjin. The ideal I’m chasin’ is stupidly you.

“Uh - Zanka? I can’t tell if you’re laughing or crying, but neither of it is loud enough to be anything but creepy. Knock it off? I’m scared.”

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

He’s left to rest in the presence of several others in the lounge. Vaguely, he notices someone with a really big hat with hands by his head.

A friendly-looking man and a kid with a binky and a kid dressed like a dragon curiously watch in.

He guessed he was concussed after all.

By the end of whatever healing session Zanka had gets done, he’s no longer full of tumultuous, embarrassing emotions or self-pitying thoughts.

He feels like a cloud struck with lightning.

Eyes on the cracked ceiling, he lets his absent mind sit, leaning back on the couch, hand on his forehead that no longer hurts. Enjin’s relaxed in the sunken spot of the couch next to him, manspreading, playing cards with Gris and that guy with the kids who had introduced himself to Zanka as Bro Santa.

Bro Santa, Zanka thinks, staring up. …What the hell is that name. 

Although Zanka's own name had thrown him for a loop when he was smaller. So.

“Zanka,” Gris muses, setting down a card as Enjin scowls and Bro Santa worries his lip from what looks like a-soon-to-be-loss. “Speak to Follo when you get the chance. He thinks he’s killed you.”

“He’s good with his hammer,” Zanka says, eyes still glued to the ceiling. He thinks about the moment before the older boy had clocked him over the head.

Follo had been moving fast to begin with, and Zanka had been moving backwards, caught off guard by it, when Follo had capitalized on the sudden shift of power between them. In that instant, he’d moved swifter, switched the hand he swung with, and changed his grip without changing momentum, and Zanka - simply hadn’t adjusted in time.

Zanka could already tell Follo would surpass him in leaps and bounds. Just from their usual spars; just from the look in Follo’s eyes every time Follo came after him - with an intensity that said no matter what - he wasn’t giving up on himself yet. He was the sort to forge ahead and forge forward, like his hammer, made of steel, until a shape was born.

Zanka’s furrows his brow. Hm…?

Now that his head is clear, he remembers what had been the most striking part of that hammer hitting him -

It hadn’t been the metal.

It’d been the minor pressure of disorientation; something that had pressed against his anima like a mallet battering a shield. Startling him enough in the mugginess of the noon heat - before the speed and force Follo showed - to not react.

“He’ll probably be a Giver. Soon.”

Silence at his words.

For so long, Zanka takes notice and drags his gaze down from above.

He doesn’t know why they look so surprised.

“What makes you say that?” asks Bro Santa.

“His hammer,” Zanka tells them.

They hadn’t ever noticed?

“It breathes like a vital instrument.” 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

There’s no lingering embarrassment in the days that follow from what transpired with him and Enjin, or over the words they exchanged.

He thinks it’s because a certain sort of acceptance has crawled and made a bed for him instead. He stops trying to be good enough to get noticed by everyone else - everyone else has already noticed him.

He stops trying to think about how others see him, and thinks about how he wants to be seen by himself when he looks behind him to see who’s trying to catch up to the ‘ideal’ he is.

Enjin sure was something.

Making Zanka realize the foleys of himself while bolstering his spirits two times now.

That guy is really freaking cool!

“What are you crying about?” Riyo questions, across from him at breakfast one week later.

Zanka, caring for his stick in the middle of the table - with a little too much enthusiasm - not really caring if it’s in the way of anyone else’s food - scowls and looks away from her. “I’m not cryin'.”

“You definitely are. That concussion totally changed you. You sure it didn’t rewire your brain?”

“It wasn’t the concussion,” Zanka squints.

Riyo sticks a piece of vibrant, yellow pineapple in her mouth. "It wasn't?" Her smile becomes more genuine, teasing, with her eyes. “Then it must've been Enjin. He told me later you kinda freaked him out. Something about you laughing on his back out of nowhere.”

“I didn’t do that.”

“You didn’t?” Riyo turns her head and searches the crowded mess hall, packed and busy and loud with good energy from the morning visit from the Vianders bringing fresh fruits and produce conjured. “Heyyy! Enjin!” she starts to randomly call, earning more than a number of heads turned in their direction. “Zanka says -”

Zanka lunges across the table and tries to shut her up. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

He and Riyo get sent out with Follo and Tomme and Gris and several other supporters later on.

He and Riyo work, surprisingly, well together.

Semiu takes note. “That was efficient. You make a good frontline defense,” she compliments Zanka. “Particularly to Riyo’s frontline offense.”

She tosses them two large pouches of coins.

“They paid us extra. Said you were just the ‘most-well-mannered-pair-of-Givers’ they met. They were, apparently, overwhelmed by the sight of promising, helpful youth. There’s a few other jobs that could use your help. You interested?”

Zanka reaches for one of the pouches of money.

Riyo reaches for the other.

They glance at one another. 

They’re in a town nearby, enjoying the respite from a task-well done.

Dusk washes, canting shadows through the hues, pretty, dark and lively, purple, black and blue.

Riyo walks alongside him as he walks alongside Follo, their steps unsynchronized, sounding off on the cusps of near-unison. Five other Cleaners, all supports, meander close-by, taking time for themselves to enjoy the night.

“I never wanna fight trash beasts in musty, dark tunnels again,” Zanka darkly grumbles.

He thought he’d been sprinting around a corner, down another tunnel to lure a beast from a supporter trying to get themselves out the sewer’s waters. What he had run into instead was the open black mouth of a tunnel-sized trash beast’s mouth.

Riyo had saved him but her splicing kick hadn’t been able to save much else.

He reeks, abhorrently, like rotten bananas and sewer stench.

Riyo snickers at his contempt. “You’re gonna need a week-long shower, Zanka, to even begin washing that smell out. Want us to figure out a mail system?”

“For what?”

“So we can mail you your food. Otherwise we’re all gonna have to wear pinclothes over our noses in the mess hall.”

Zanka wallows.

Riyo sticks by him regardless of her jokes and his trash-riddled stench.

Follo, also doesn’t seem bothered, more preoccupied with the greasier, enticing smells of fried rice and boiled seafood. He’s nearly salivating at the mouth, amber eyes eagerly searching around.

“Hold on, I’ll see if I can get us something,” he says, before running off, energy in his step.

Riyo looks after him with interest, in the direction of crowded food stands he dives into. “He’s definitely got an appetite.”

“Yeah.” Zanka isn’t surprised. With the amount of hard work Follo put into everything, it was a good thing. All of them had a tendency to devour food like a bunch of monsters after a good fight anyway.

And Zanka could put up a good fight now - with the steel his staff had transformed to.

“I still haven’t figured out what you like eating the most out here,” Riyo comments. Her eyes slyly slide his way.  “What is it anyway?”

“Whatever’s good,” Zanka says. “Don’t matter to me.”

“Lies. There’s definitely something more specific.”

There is. Salty things. Bitter things. Plainer things.

The food he used to eat back at home.

He doesn’t mind eating the other foods out here though. They’d become familiar.

“There’s nothin’ specific,” he tells Riyo. He crosses his arms; tucks his hands comfortably into his sleeves, dismissive but eyes narrowing as they walk. “As long as nothin’ Follo brings back is still alive.”

They had formed a habit between them - or maybe it was that Zanka was finally being pulled into the habits of the Cleaners much easier than before. 

Sometimes when Follo got snacks, he got them for everyone and shared. Sometimes Riyo picked up a bag of goods, casually sharing in a good mood. Sometimes, Zanka, mullishly counted coins and anguished for too long over what exactly those he was with would want after a tough job. The other Cleaners, assigned with them on those jobs, also occasionally took turns.

He wasn’t used to it.

…But it wasn’t bad.

He and Riyo head a little ways-away, to a stand full of toy trinkets like two-sided drums, plastic flutes, and beaded charms.

Riyo drags him around and fits random pieces of jewelry on him, bemused, and holds a large nail-of-an-earring at his ear. “You interested in getting them pierced?”

Zanka had never thought about it.

He had been staring at Enjin’s piercings a lot lately, though.

Now with her question, he realizes she had likely been watching him watch Enjin.

He coughs, cheeks mildly heating, and looks off. But he doesn’t move away from her or the earring. “...It wouldn’t be the worst sorta thing.”

Riyo’s eyes crest, gleaming in sharp excitement. “Hmm? Is that so? I think we can find something here tonight.”

“Wait,” his eyes go back to her. “Tonight? That’s way too -”

“Zanka? ….Oi. Zanka! Is that you?”

Riyo pauses. Her gaze shifts off to the side to see who’s calling out, and Zanka follows her eyes.

It takes him a second to understand what he’s seeing.

The uniform of the Hell Guard.

Official ones.

Two faces, familiar to him, wear the gear. A youth with gray hair. Another with a ponytail, and dark undercut beneath. Their matching dark eyes show amazement and disbelief. 

They stride up to Zanka and Riyo, like they’re meeting with old friends they’ve known all their lives.

“Man!” the one with gray hair exclaims. His hand goes to rub at the back of his neck. “I almost doubted my eyes, but you’re easy to pick out in a crowd. Especially with the company you keep.” He drops his hand and draws back a bit, appalled. “Sheesh. Did you fall in something? Smells like trash.”

"Sorry." Riyo isn’t smiling when she addresses them. Her eyes are flat. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Oh, we definitely wouldn’t have,”  the other youth - the one with the dark ponytail - smiles. There’s nothing nice about it, despite how nice it appears. “We don’t make a point to get involved with Cleaners or Givers unless we have to. Different standards and all that.”

He tilts his head a bit, and the dark of his ponytail falls over his shoulder as he considers Zanka and as he contemplatively gives Riyo a look.

“...You are Cleaners, right? Must be, with the uniform you’ve got on.”

“If you already knew, why ask,” Zanka, at long last, speaks up.

He doesn’t like the way they look at Riyo.

It’s like how they had looked at Hyo when she had first joined. The girl from the slums who had somehow made her way into their academy, something settled in around them, better than them, in every way.

'She was supposed to be beneath them.'

“Well, didn’t want to make assumptions.” the first youth with gray hair responds. A sort of helpless humor creases his brow.  “We could never know when it comes to you. None of us ever thought you’d turn your back on your family and sell your allegiance elsewhere.”

“Half of the class just assumed you lost your mind and went off somewhere to die after getting kicked out,” ponytail adds, shaking his head on a chuckle. “It was funny how they would rather believe that then your claims about joining the Cleaners.”

His classmates share a laugh.

A heat warms beneath Zanka’s skin.

Not a pleasant one; but one that curdles, foul, in irritation. Bleeding with the beginnings of humiliation. He doesn’t need the dirty laundry of his past airing out around Riyo.

He sends her a glance.

Her face hasn’t changed since she and Zanka had been interrupted. 

Her green eyes sit on his old classmates - and sit.

It’s the flattest expression, the most impassive he’s seen in all the time they’ve worked together.

She had been there at the well when Zanka had poured out his life story so despondently to Enjin, thinking he wouldn’t be alive much longer to care. But neither she or Enjin or anyone knew the details of what had transpired between the time he first met them, and the time he walked his disinherited self to the Cleaners.

He doesn’t want her to hear anymore of it.

“Well. Looks like I’m still alive,” is what Zanka settles on saying, “-doin’ well as ever.” He makes to leave; gets several steps away with Riyo at his side - before the arm of his old classmate drapes around his shoulder from behind.

Riyo keeps walking.

Zanka keeps walking.

His old classmate with gray hair stays clinging on.

“Aw c’mon don’t be like that. We were just joking, didn’t mean anything by it. You’re still so serious.”

Zanka stops walking.

“You know, Hyo left too,” his classmate says. “I guess the Hell Guard wasn’t the place for her either. Which is crazy - I mean we were all so sure she’d rise up in the ranks.”

Like we thought you would.

It goes unsaid.

Zanka looks over his shoulder, with probably too much of a glare because his classmate lets go of him immediately and backs away.

They’re next to the building of a restaurant now, a few small tables filled with chattering people outside.

The uniforms of the Hell Guard catch a few of their eyes. So do the uniforms of the Cleaners.

They’re both prolific groups.

One an amalgamation of personal ambitions, cluttering ideologies and the goodwill to help; the other a unified, unshakeable front of power, as upholders of the actual state of law.

…He didn’t know Hyo had left.

“Where is she?” Zanka asks.

“Hyo?” his old classmate, dark-ponytail, asks back, also walking back up to them to catch up. “Not sure,” he shrugs. “She didn’t stay too much longer after you left. She said something about how none of us were enough stimulation to be interesting. Whatever that means. It was better for us when she left anyway. More opportunity, y’know. Anyway, it’s been long enough that we don’t remember where she said she was going - or if she even said she was going anywhere.”

“You…don’t remember?” Zanka says, in mild disbelief.

“Should we?" Gray-hair asks. "I mean, no one really mentions you anymore either. You got disowned and stuff. Also your name’s like taboo. No one wants your elder sister hunting them down for saying your name. I’d say we’re all better off not remembering things that aren't a part of us anymore. ”

There must be something on Zanka’s face then. Something not great. Because his old classmates smile small between themselves at it.

He wonders if they’re so comfortable being honest about their thoughts and feelings because there’s no repercussion hanging over their head.

Maybe he should've thrown these two harder into the ground in the old days when they sparred.

Zanka is a Nijiku but no longer of the clan.

Now one owes him false smiles, false interest or half-hearted praise.

He could laugh at himself.

How had he ever thought climbing in the ranks at the Academy would earn him everyone’s veneration and appreciative respect?

Gray-hair tilts his head and points.

At Lovely Assistaff strapped across his back.

“Nice you’ve kept that stick though. Hope it’s getting you places.”

Zanka smiles at them, appreciatively, with murderous intent. These guys weren't even in a field-deployed unit. He could tell by the crest they were. They were allotted to standard guard.

Well nothing like getting an evening workout in, running back the good ole’ days with a spar to remind these guys of all the great times they had on the floor with Zanka standin’ over them -

He reaches behind him for his stick.

Gray hair notices - and his eyes grow wide with a laugh.

“Oh! Please don’t poke me to death with that -”

A hammer flies between them.

Lodging into the wall of the restaurant beside their heads.

Bursting wood.

His old classmates, who very nearly got their skulls caved in, yelp and leap back.

Zanka blinks and turns his head as a Follo, suddenly, apologetically, jogs over.

Those outdoors the small, cozy restaurant don’t much react, watching with interest instead as they eat, like they’re watching a show.

“Oh, sorry!” Follo sheepishly smiles and rubs the back of his neck, sharing a small glance with Riyo, before reaching in between all of them to yank his hammer out of the wall. “I saw a really ugly bug and it was making a lot of noise so I thought I’d hit it. But I guess I missed.”

“Are you crazy?!” Zanka’s old classmate sputters, dark-ponytail, his eyes nearly bugged out. “That could’ve killed us!”

Follo holds his trusty hammer, in both palms as he regards them, confused. He’s in front of Zanka, not so much in front of Riyo, and he tilts his head, in a mimicry of how Zanka’s classmates had done so to Zanka just moments before. “A little hammer like this? Isn’t the Hell Guard made of much tougher stuff? My bad. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t scare us,” gray-hair scowls. “We were just caught off guard.”

“Ah, seems kinda dangerous to not be paying attention to your surroundings as our protectors. But it’s fine. You must’ve had a long day at work,” Follo sympathizes. “With all the walking around.”

“Follo, don’t be silly,” Riyo finally speaks - the  smile back on her face as she chides him. Her eyes are alight with some sort of hard-to-define glow. It’s not amusement, but it is a certain kind of pleasure. “Walking around is nothing for these guys. It’s practically all they do. They’ve gotta be really good at it!”

Zanka's classmates glower.

Riyo ignores both of them, turning her whole body towards Zanka and Follo. “We’re the ones left to do the real dirty work. All the hard and unsavory stuff only Givers can do, right?”

“Yeah, sounds about right,” Follo agrees, despite the fact he’s not a Giver himself. Though it doesn’t matter. Supporter or Giver, they all put their lives on the line and work together as Cleaners.

Follo stows his hammer; gives Zanka’s old classmates a kind, if not pitying look.

“I get how we’re not the same. Not everyone is able to properly cherish important things; much less dedicate their lives to it - and fight for it.”

Zanka’s classmates don’t say a single thing. They look hella pissed though.

Follo smiles and stays smiling and they all stay there doing nothing - until Follo’s stomach rumbles.

Zanka breaks the stalemate; breaks the silence left behind from Follo’s words, and meets Follo’s gaze as the older boy coughs and pretends he isn’t embarrassed.

“...All that time and you didn’t eat?”

“There were too many things here. I got distracted.”

They leave then, together with Riyo.

And leave his classmates behind.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

The words of his classmates stick in his head regardless, even as they walked back to the main street; even as they poked around at different stalls, taste-testing various, curious, greasy meats and snacks on toothpicks and in tiny paper cups. Follo and Riyo are much quieter than when they first came to the town.

It’s only after they find the other scattered Cleaners who’d been exploring the nearby shops, after they all gather and begin venturing the rest of the main street in the life of night together - that Follo decides to bring up what happened.

"Who were those guys anyway?”

Zanka keeps his eyes ahead, the dizzying lights of the market blinking sunspots and flickers in the very imprints of his brain. “Fellows from a past - who never learned ta keep their mouths shut,” he gripes. “...Nothin’ to waste time thinkin’ about."

Though he is.

Follo sighs. He walks beside Zanka, close enough that his arm starts brushing up against Zanka’s own with every step. “Alright. If that’s the end of it. But I’m seriously starving. We’ve been walking forever today, and the prices for anything good here are higher than a mountain. We should ask Semiu if we can start getting half pay for jobs in advance.”

Zanka agrees.

He doesn’t voice it aloud.

“That just depends on how trustworthy they find us,” Riyo joins in. “It happens sometimes with repeat clients. Or when they like us, for being ‘honesty-trustworthy-kids’ ,” she snickers. Her elbow sticks itself into his rib on his other side - an exact mirror of how they’d been before they’d gotten split off.

It’s familiar, Zanka thinks, how often he and Riyo and Follo walk like this when they’re in each other's company.

It’s a lot, in all the times they’ve been sent together out on jobs.

Comforting - in a way he won't say aloud.

“I’m not in the mood for weird animal eyeballs tonight,” he says. It comes out random.

“No?” Follo questions, going along regardless. He rubs his chin, eyes searching the golden-lit streets. “That’s fine. They cost an arm and a leg anyway.…What about a few drinks instead? They give free snacks with them.”

“We’re not legal,” Riyo reminds him.

Follo glances at her.

She glances back.

“I’m a law-abiding citizen,” Follo says. “I would never do anything illegal. I have too much of a conscience.”

“Do you?” Riyo says back. “Me too. I couldn’t ever go along with it.”

Zanka, in between them, catches how absolutely onboard with the idea Riyo is despite her words.

"...But there is no legal drinking age in the North," Follo shares. "Actually, they used to feed us kids spoonfuls of alcohol to warm us up whenever we stayed outside the town's protection for too long. Tasted awful though. They gave us straight one-hundred proof."

Riyo tilts her head. "Ha! I guess they taught you how to make it too?"

"Yeah. They did. How did you...?"

Riyo spins on her heels, hands clasping behind her back - and she regards the rest of the Cleaner crew meandering a few paces away from them, mysteriously not answering Follo's curious question.

“How about it?” she offers, perking up, eyes wide and cattish in her wide grin. “Wanna get drinks? There’s no bed time for any of us. We’re free from all the big adults.”

The gaggle of Cleaners, only one of them older than Follo, exchange looks.

Riyo keeps smiling at them. “No Gris.”

The gaggle of Cleaners look between themselves, slower again.

So Riyo repeats it slower again.

“...No. Gris.”

The Cleaners break out into equally large grins.

“We’re totally going to get in trouble!” one yahoos.

“I just turned seventeen!” another brags. “Follo’s an old man anyway, so it should be fine even if we get caught. We can put the blame on him.”

“I’m seventeen too? How am I an old man?!” Follo exclaims. “And what do you mean ‘put the blame on me’?! Miguel’s right there.” He points with force. “He’s twenty-three!”

“Yeah,” says ‘Miguel’, dark eyes, dark hair; entirely unfazed. “But Gris likes you the most. And you're turning eighteen eventually, soon enough. In like half a year. So.” He points, much more relaxed, in Follo's direction. “You take the blame for our poor decisions.”

“Heck no! What kind of messed up logic is that?!”

Riyo slings a comfortable arm around Zanka’s neck as Follo and Miguel and the other supporters get into an argument over favoritism in the supporter ranks. “Zankaaa.”

Zanka drags his eyes away from the commotion they’re causing in the middle of the street.

Riyo leans in close, talking low enough, calm enough, for her words to stay just in between them.

“You don’t have to join in on the drinking, truthfully I won’t. But join us for the company? Don’t sit outside alone while everyone has a good time inside. It’d be nice to have you around.”

“...No,” Zanka says, frowning. “I’ll go in. I could use a drink.”

Riyo blinks at him, moderately surprised. “Oh? Have you drunk before? You? Zanka-the-rule-stickler, you?”

He hadn't 'drunk' before. 

“...and who are you callin’ a rule-stickler?” Zanka grumps. “Not a problem if I have or haven’t tried it, right? Weren’t you gonna randomly pierce my ears?”

“You wanna do that too?” Riyo asks, like Zanka’s making her night an even better night.

Zanka crosses his arms. The itch in him, left in him, from his classmates is a reminder of who he was in the past that he wants to get away from.

“Yeah,” he says, refusing to look at her. “Sure. Might as well. We’re already out here, ain’t we?“

“Look at you,” Riyo admires in jest. “You sound like you’ll get a tattoo next.”

….Zanka considers it.

Riyo watches him.

Zanka shakes his head.

Riyo nods at the choice, and nods at him.

Something more serious rests quietly behind her gaze nonetheless.

“Do what you want, Zanka. I’ll look out for you.” 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

It takes longer than Zanka thought it would to get a hole in his ear.

It hurts, and Follo and Riyo and Miguel and the other supporters leer at him in mirth behind raised hands as he pretends it doesn’t, and they crowd around the vendor’s stall after, pressing up around him, testing out different earrings. Beating down his self-esteem whilst simultaneously raising it up.

“Okay, how about this,” Miguel suggests after they ditch the most-horrendous set of clown-face earrings that should have never been made.

What did they even put them in his ears for?

The group of hyenas. 

Miguel shows them a set of edgy, gothic black earrings, a single long, black spike dangling from a thick hoop.

“This is decent right? Fits the size of the huge hole we accidentally put - I mean, we chose to get you pierced with.”

What did he mean by accidentally?

He just said accidentally didn’t he.

“Hey,” says Zanka. “What did you mean -?”

The earrings are quickly bought. They’re hooked and clasped, and the holes made are securely filled.

“Nice,” smiles Riyo. “It’s still gonna hurt for a while.”

He wonders if she’s talking about the earrings or his own complicated feelings.

He wonders if it matters.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

There’s a rinky-drink karaoke dive tucked in the corner of the most degenerate gathering of establishments and broken-window shops.

If they put all their coins together they can rent out a room.

Inclusive drinks and snacks.

It’s a no-brainer.

Their designated driver of the night, Miguel, tells them he’ll do his best to stay sober so they can get back to base in one piece - but honestly - it's a lost cause from the start.

Belted songs, sloshes of ale and sweet drinks and beer, microphones torn from speaker boxes, bowls of free nuts and chips and pretzels over the tables, over the lumpy, gray couch - it’s loud, it’s crowded - it’s completely irresponsible - and Zanka to his own chagrin - finds himself smiling, horrifically sharing in the fun.

He and Riyo share a duet of the most girly-pop song to ever hit his ears. He and all the other Cleaners sing, horribly, a banging chorus of rock. Follo starts crying in the middle of a solo ballad, before Riyo puts on rap and he starts rapping through the grief.

Zanka hides his laugh - and promptly spills his own drink over him - as he trips over nothing and hits the wall.

When the others start fighting over the only working mic left, Riyo drags Zanka to the corner of the couch and plops down. She enthusiastically encourages him to share his best moments from his time in the Hell Guard, asks about what sort of place he lived in, the size of the rooms, the secrets of the town, their rituals -

"What kind of place are you imaginin’ it to be?!”

Eventually, it winds down.

Mostly because everyone is too wasted to make much fuss or noise.

Riyo casually scrolls through the songs options on the grainy, vibrant karaoke screen, ankles kicked up on the table.

Zanka, now on the floor, in the corner on the other side of the small room, sits there and watches, a bit absently-minded, peacefully buzzed.

And look at him, feeling ‘buzzed’.

He was really the worst of the Nijiku wasn’t he?

He huffs to himself, not particularly as self-deprecating as he thinks the thought should normally make him. This sort of thing was unthinkable for him. Even only one month ago.

How the mighty have fallen.

His ears throb and ache. Did he make a stupid decision again? Get too careless? Too ahead of himself? His sister had piercings. It shouldn't be a big deal.

A thumb brushes, interested, above his right earring, mindful of its swollen red. “I always wondered if I should get one myself,” Follo says, calmly breaking into his thoughts. “I feel like I’d get it caught in something or somehow get it ripped out. Being clumsy isn’t fun.”

There’s a dented, tin mug in his other hand. Held a little too loosely to be secure.

It’s tilted, spilling bitter cider onto his foot.

Zanka watches it for a second, before reaching over and straightening it up.

Follo blinks down at the cup - then sets it down on the colored carpet.

They sit for a time in as much silence a karaoke room with others in it can have.

It’s the ‘buzz’ in him - that makes Zanka speak - as he rests his chin on his knees already pulled to his chest.

“...Why do I still wanna go back?”

Follo doesn’t say anything.

“Why do I never wanna see it again? I never said I wanted to leave it. They’re keepin’ me away. I didn’t have a choice.”

Follo shuffles, sitting back against the wall behind them much more settled in than before. And he says:

“Can’t imagine any good reason to disown someone for having a gift in something else. Is that normal where you come from?”

“Only normal because of my family name,” Zanka snorts. “If it was anyone else, maybe they…” he trails off. It was expected the most promising youths in the southern ward, close to Kamuatari, would enroll in the Academy.

He hadn’t known of anyone growing up who ever talked about swearing their livelihood to the Cleaners.

“...Nah, forget it,” he smile in rue. “It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t important enough for it to be a big deal that I got sent away. It was just an embarrassment.”

The buzz has quickly gone.

He feels unsettled, a heaviness coming with it, sinking down in him.

“...I should have figured it sooner. They don’t care… ‘bout me. It’s the things I would’ve brought for them in my achievements they cared about the most. S’fine. That that’s the case.”

In their tiny tucked corner in the mess of the room as some sort of unserious song called ‘Candy Mountain’ starts to play - Riyo’s choice - Follo says-

“It’s not fine.”

With a certainty. Loudly.

Zanka’s brows furrow. He looks over.

Follo looks ahead, his own brow bent, a mild frown at his mouth. “They should care. About you. Even if you weren’t the same as what they liked, they should still check in and ask and….” he clams up.

He hadn’t been talking about Zanka there - had he?

Follo shakes his head.

Turns his head and meets Zanka’s gaze, and his eyes in the light are dark, shadowed and intense.

“People who care, shouldn’t let go. And people who do care, don’t easily let go. Don’t let others decide your worth. You’re more than the memories they have of you, if you’ve changed. And isn’t that enough? Knowing that you’re making yourself enough?”

Zanka stares at him. Loosely, mystified, he asks, “...When’d you get so wise?”

Follo smiles small. He averts his gaze, cheeks tinged with a warmth. “...That’s…. What Gris told me once. When I was beating myself up. For not feeling like enough, though I wanted to. Y’know, I’ve wanted to be a Giver forever.” He brings a hand up through the back of his hair and roughs it a bit, in embarrassment. “You don’t have to listen to me or anything,” he mumbles.

Zanka can’t tear his eyes away from the Cleaner next to him; who from the start - had never stopped looking at him and seeing the unspoken parts of himself so clearly.

“...I don’t get it. I never got it. Why’d you ever start wantin’ to talk to me?”

Years in the Academy, and no classmate had ever talked to him like this - tried to know him like this - knew him - and listened enough to know him like this.

Follo rests his own chin down on his arms over his knees, cheeks still red, eyes returned to looking at nothing in particular ahead of them. “Sometimes you just like someone. Want to get to know them. Want to be their friend. Doesn’t have to be a reason why. And… you’re not a bad guy. I… think it’s a shame. If you think you are.”

Zanka thinks about those words.

Thinks about Enjin. About Follo and Gris. And Tomme.

The Cleaners who drag him into their group meals and depend on him as he depends on them on jobs out in the field.

He thinks about Riyo.

Someone he spends the most time with next to Follo, but still knows near-nothing about.

“Oh.” Zanka realizes it simply then. As if it all makes sense why he gravitates to the noise they make in the base that’s become his home. “I like you guys.”

It was a foreign feeling - because he hadn’t liked a single person in his class at the Academy - because they hadn’t liked him as a person; let alone entertained the idea of truly having him as a friend.

A bit goofily, a smile spreads across his face. It makes him laugh the tiniest amount for all of its ridiculousness. And it’s his first laugh, for the first time among any of the Cleaners, that carries itself lightly aloud.

Follo looks at him, startled, chin lifting off his arms. “Zanka? You alright?”

Was it that unusual if he laughed? He used to laugh all the time back at home over things others never laughed at. He’d been starting to think his humor was broken.

Maybe it still is.

He reaches for the set-aside cup of half-spilled alcohol by Follo’s foot. “Nev’r better.”

He attempts to swallow it down.

His mouth is completely missed. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

“Come on,” Follo says some amount of unknown time later. “There had to be some good people in your class?”

They’ve made it to the table by the couch Riyo’s lying sideways on, singing deep and low and matching zero words on the screen with zero attempted effort.

“We were all awful,” Zanka insists. He’s sitting on someone’s face-down body. He’s not sure whose it is. “ ‘Least my specific class was. ‘Cept for Hyo.”

“Hyo?” Follo’s brows pinch in concentrated thought with no actual thought behind it. “Who’s that?”

“Som'one else on the list of people who beat my ass. She was pretty.” Zanka frowns, thoughts drifting. “...She probably still is.”

Follo frowns.

And frowns and frowns and frowns.

“...I liked a girl once,” he says.

He frowns even more, something awfully upset on his face before he looks at Zanka and suddenly says -

“Hey. I beat you with a hammer once, remember? Do I get to be on the list?”

And he sounds so hopeful - so invested - Zanka throws a handful of broken pretzels at his face and relishes in the floundering scream as Follo flies back into the couch. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Zanka wakes on that couch after blacking out.

Riyo plays with his hair. His head is in her lap.

His mouth feels sticky as his eyes, as his hands, as his uniform. He clutches his vital instrument like a stuffed toy to his chest. His head pounds so hard it feels like it’s breaking out of his skull.

“Hey, Zanka,” she greets, “you ever think about switching this up?”

He mumbles, unintelligible, nausea in his throat, seeing but feeling blind.

“It’s in your face when you fight. We should figure something out.”

“Could be worth trying,” says Enjin.

Enjin.

Resting his arms on the back of the couch, looking down.

He’s dressed in uniform, Umbreaker in tow. All Zanka can think is that Enjin’s not supposed to be here. Enjin gazes at him, as if reading his mind. Or maybe there’s some sort of expression of terror on Zanka's face, matching the inside terror he feels.

“I’ve been keeping an eye out on how your missions have been coming along,” Enjin explains. “Self-missions and missions together - since the boss asked me to put together a team for him. Didn’t expect to find you all like this.”

He leans back from the couch. He doesn’t look particularly bothered; not even upset.

He looks at Riyo, pointedly. “You’re not old enough to drink.”

"I didn’t,” Riyo smiles.

Enjin’s eyes roam across the utterly trashed karaoke room and the bodies of the Cleaners flopped more than lifelessly around. Like a crime-scene.

“None of these guys are legal.”

“Follo and Miguel are,” Riyo says, like that changes anything.

"Follo's seventeen."

"It's fine in the North."

"Neat. This is the East." 

"Whoops."

Enjin sighs.

And sighs again.

“...There’s not enough room in my car. We’re going to have to call for another to come out.” He utters then, beneath his breath, “Gris is gonna give me an earful.” 

He walks around the couch, stepping over Follo’s comatose body.

He peels Zanka off the couch.

Zanka nearly hurls at the motion.

He’s slung over Enjin’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes in what must be an obvious punishment for their illegal excursion. Then Enjin stoops and grabs a hold of Follo with his spare arm, carrying him under the arm like a piece of laundry.

Riyo nudges a few of the less-plastered Cleaners awake with her toe; grabs a few of the ones near-death by the back of their collars and lightly drags them along as they all depart.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

“...Zanka,” Enjin says, after they’ve hit the street - as the fresh, hot air of the busy dark still vibrant in the early hours of the darker early morning hits his bleary, inebriated face. “You have a good time?”

“...Don’ wanna do that again,” Zanka weakly gets out.

“Oh good.” Enjin hoists him up a bit, with a toss, the motion nearly causing all of Zanka’s alcohol-poisoned innards to spill out. “Guess I can save you the lecture then.”

Zanka gurgles unintelligibly.

There’s a smile in Enjin’s voice.

“Neat earrings by the way. They suit you.” 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Back at base they’re all communally dumped in the showers, clothes on, cold water spraying down.

It makes something of a commotion.

Semiu watches with a raised brow as they’re all marched, sopping wet, to the mess hall and fed real food.

And as they fight back headaches and shivers, miserably-wrapped in towels and huddled in the barren dining room, Gris indeed does stand before them, and speaks to them for hours.

Until they want to die.

It’s September and it’s colder and Zanka coughs.

At dinner, Tomme gives him a look of concern over the table and asks, “You okay?”

He’s fine.

He’d just choked on a chicken bone.

That night, he goes to bed early in the room everyone had seemed to want to take part in decorating months ago, even though he’d tried his hardest to shove them back out the door.

It’s not a good sleep, and it’s hot beneath his sheets, and he tosses them off before dragging them back on, and angrily balling them up and throwing them back off of him again.

He walks down the hall twice, barefoot, - though he’d never usually walk barefoot - and he gets water and stands around in the empty reception hall, with a third cup of water in his hand, unable to get the niggling, dry feeling out of his throat.

“...Zanka,” says Semiu.

He looks over.

Well. The almost empty reception hall.

“Is everything alright?”

“Yeah,” he automatically responds. “Peachy. Jus…couldn’t sleep.”

Semiu studies him; lifts a brow at him. Her glasses are temporarily off, settled on top one of the many stacks of paper on her desk. “Are you nervous about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Your mission with Enjin,” Semiu answers, looking somewhat surprised he of all people would forget.

Zanka quickly remembers.

The first official mission of the newly-formed Team Akuta made of Riyo - who had apparently always been a part of Enjin’s unofficial team, and that explained a lot, lot more - and Zanka, who had been newly brought into it, with a few others. Picked for their certain capabilities and complimentary assets.

Capabilities. Zanka was fully capable in their eyes.

He could raise his chin high at that.

At Lovely Assistaff, the staff that had become his greatest asset, and now got to be a better asset on a team led by Enjin.

ENJIN. 

He didn’t know what was going on with his body, but he wasn’t going to miss out on any mission like this because of it.

He clears his burning throat and faces Semiu.

“...D’ya… got any sleeping pills?”

She doesn’t. But she does ask if he’s getting sick.

“Never gotten sick,” he tells her, feelin’ proud for it.

“Well you might be sick now,” she tells him back. "Since you're here and not back at your protected ward."

The ache in his throat, the bodily exhaustion, and inability to suffer either heat or cold - and Zanka thinks about Semiu using these as reasons to decide to pull him from the mission if she thinks he's sick just because of a few once-or-twice sniffs.

“I’m alright, I swear.”

Semiu’s glasses are back on her face and she gazes at him, arms crossed, for so long, he gets frightened.

“Please,” he tries. “This ain’t anythin’ to make a fuss over. It’s allergies.”

“Do you have allergies?” Semiu pragmatically asks.

No. “Yeah, sure do,” he plasters on a smile, eyes wandering as he tries to make up a story that doesn’t sound like utter bullshit. “Uh, I got them bad all the time back home. All the trees when the weather got warm kept blowin’ around all the pollution n’ stuff.”

Semiu isn’t impressed. “Isn’t Kamuatari inside of an air-filtered dome?”

Zanka keeps smiling.

He smiles at her, near begging.

She closes her eyes, uncrosses her crossed leg, and sighs. A reach into the drawer of her desk and she opens a bottle and shakes out a few pills. “For the congestion of your ‘allergies’. I’m letting you go because of who you’re going with tomorrow. Don’t get crazy ideas on what I’ll allow in the future.”

He nearly melts into the floor in relief. “Thanks,” he smiles for real. “ ‘preciate it, Big Sis.”

She blinks at him. Multiple times. He swallows down the pills, and is halfway done drinking the water, when he notices the way she’s looking at him.

He pauses, head tilted back, cup to his mouth. “...Somethin’ wrong?”

She pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, and relaxes back in her chair. “No. It’s nothing. Get some rest, kid.”

He does.

Wakes feeling remarkably better the next morning when it’s time to head out.

“Ready to clean?” Riyo questions when they run into each other in the hall.

He finishes checking his bag for the right supplies and his gas mask as they walk - just in case. “Yeah.”

“You sure?” Riyo pries, smiling. “You’ve got major eyebags, man. Is it because we're traveling with Enjin? You got too excited to sleep?”

He flushes a little and walks a little faster ahead of her. “I ain’t a little kid -”

“Oh, hey Enjin!” Riyo shouts.

Zanka whips back around, a little too eagerly.

Riyo stands there, hands on her hips.

Alone.

Zanka horrendously glowers.

When Enjin pats the side of his beige vehicle parked out front and beckons for them all to get in, Riyo’s still snickering like she thinks Zanka’s the most hilarious guy on earth.

He pretends she doesn’t exist and instead tries not to look so obvious in his fast walk to get to the passenger seat.

“I see better from the front,” is what he says to no one.

Riyo, behind him, answers anyway, eyes slant in tickled amusement. “Whatever you say. It's all yours.”

But it doesn’t matter who’s saying what, because when Zanka gets around the car and opens the passenger door - there's already someone else there. 

He yelps and flies back. Back into Riyo who lightly catches his weight before nudging him off and helping herself to the backseat. 

“Oh yeah,” Enjin says, already sliding into the driver's seat. “This is Eishia. She's a part of Team Akuta too. One of our most vital members, technically, as our only healer. You’ve met her plenty of times before, haven’t you?” He sticks the key in the ignition of the jeep, and strange pop disco music Zanka would've never expected such a tough-looking, cool guy like Enjin to play, comes blasting out the stereo.

When Zanka stays standing - eyes not quite returned to their normal settled place in his head - heart still thudding hard at the scare - Enjin furrows his brow and looks past their team healer to reiterate: 

“Eishia. Reliable a healer as you'll ever get. She helped you out with your concussion ages ago. Do you…not remember her?”

He looks concerned. Concerned for Zanka’s head. 

“I remember,” Zanka lies. Not a whole lie.

...So she had been the one with the big hat. Right. 

Zanka fiddles with his stick. Slings it across his back.

“Nice ta meetcha.” 

The girl with the big hat he definitely now remembers seeing around the base in the past few months, and now definitely, vaguely, remembers helping him with bumps and bruises and cuts from trash beast encounters and non-related combat incidents - glances up from her lap.

Quickly her eyes move towards him. She holds his gaze.

“Did you want to sit here? I can move to the back if you'd prefer.” 

Was he some kinda asshole?

Zanka shakes his head, feels a headache at the motion, and sticks on a smile. “No worries! I didn't see you, that was my mistake. I'll just go to the back. I see best from those windows anyway.”

“Thought you saw best from the front?” Riyo calls up.

Zanka scowls in her direction, a scowl she can't even see from her laid-down position in the trunk. “Shuddap will ya?”

“Zanka,” Enjin drawls, somewhat impatiently, mildly confused, yet equally entertained. He drums his fingers on the wheel. “We've got places to go. Get in.” 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

It's a long sixteen mile ride. 

Zanka wasn't sure what he'd been envisioning riding in Enjin's car would be like, but it definitely hadn’t been the horrifically bumpy journey and tailspins of death while a playlist of old school mixtapes and synthesized dance beats cycled through the speakers. 

The Cleaner's base often bounced to music during off hours of the day, hangouts and meals.

But this? This? 

He'd been given to Gris the night they'd gotten drunk as hell at karaoke to ride in the older man's car. Now Zanka understands that Enjin had actually been giving him a mercy back then, not ridding himself of Zanka's drunk self because Zanka still reeked of garbage bananas and beer. 

“Mm?” Enjin wonders - after Zanka throws himself out the car once they park - as Zanka goes down on his hands and knees - in the middle of the abandoned ruins marked on their map. “You get carsick that easily?”

Was he joking? Screwing around?

Zanka sucks in oxygen like a madman through his mask and debates on whether or not to tell his new leader, Enjin - the Enjin - the truth.

What if he got kicked out of the team? 

“You're stressing over weird things again,” Riyo chuckles, coming to stand beside him.

Riyo, Enjin’s number-one-companion - probably wouldn’t get it. 

Eishia places a soothing hand on his shoulder, and soon Zanka is up, falling into step among their team, at Enjin's heels.

The adrenaline brought on from the journey-of-hell between base to here soon dwindles. Eishia's eyes linger on the back of him as she walks close behind him, although he's not too sure why.

He didn't think he did anything in the car ride to get on her bad side or draw her extra attention. 

Was this about the passenger seat?

Was she actually the scary, quiet sort to hold grudges?

…Did she carry tiny knives? 

As he contemplates whether or not to hide his exposed back from their team healer, Enjin and Riyo continue to fall into a conversation in front of him. Something about the chances of this request being a lure towards a trap targeting them, or whether the request was being completely truthful about the dwelling of a hideous trash beast among this place, gargantuan - the size of a kaiju.

“If there is one, it's awfully good at lying down,” Enjin deducts. “D'you think they sleep?” 

“That'd be interesting,” Riyo responds, also taking a glance around. “They’d look more harmless lying around belly-up. Like a dog. Maybe we can teach them to play fetch.”

“Oh?! Good idea! That would make cleaning them up a whole lot easier. We could teach them how to play fetch right into an incinerator.”

…Were these the kinds of conversations Riyo and Enjin normally had together?

Zanka considers Riyo as he walks a sizable distance behind her and Enjin. He had come to learn in all his time spent with Riyo so far, that she was far more talkative and expressive than he assumed. Much brighter, for how laid-back she was too.

He had picked up bits and pieces from her in between their jobs together - about her past.

Enough to know that she carried a gun, and just like Zanka, Enjin had been the one to save her from where she’d been.

It… made sense they were close. From what she told him, she had been at Enjin’s side for years. In comparison, this being Zanka’s first excursion out with Enjin like this, Zanka was just somebody who…

His thoughts drift off and stop.

Lovely Assistaff - trembles between his shoulder blades.

He draws it in an instant.

Riyo looks back immediately and Enjin stops.

But Zanka’s not looking at any of them, eyes a little wide, focused in their intent, and he hurls his stick through the gap between Enjin and Riyo without warning - anima sparking - blazing blue. It zooms straight into a large heap of garbage stacked before a collapsed building entrance.

The spinning staff, transformed to steel, blasts the trash apart - and pings off the corner of a ginormous black-steel horn.

Quickly, Zanka watches where his staff flies off, where it continues to burn, stuck in the dirt upright along the desert-earth among all the pieces of flung trash.

Enjin's hand pushes him back, and Enjin follows the push, Umbreaker opening as a sudden slew of acidic sludge is spat their way.

His umbrella hisses, scorched.

Riyo has already moved to a position of defense beside Eishia, both behind Zanka. 

“Well.” Enjin’s mouth wryly quirks. “Look at that.”

Peeking from around the curve of Enjin's vital instrument, Zanka catches sight of it. 

The trash beast they were sent to eradicate. The one that had apparently been evaporating any and all poor souls who set foot into this isolated place in search of shelter, goods or rest. 

A singular eye.

The head of a serpent with a hissing tongue - and it's really goddamn large.

The rest of its body - 

“Think it's in the building behind it or under the ground we're standing on?” Enjin asks.

He continues to stand before Zanka, one hand still against him guarding him, as Umbreaker is spun a little idly in his other hand. Shaking off the lingering sludge - as the trash beast lifts its head, looking angry at its plan to attack-in-ambush being exposed.

“My bets on the building,” Riyo decides.

Her gaze is on a window high up on what must be the forty-second desecrated floor of the building that-once-was. 

Zanka sees why right away.

The tail of the trash beast is now sticking out of it, rattling madly in the furious warning of a next attack. 

“Zanka,” Enjin compliments. “Nice job identifying the threat. But you've lost your vital instrument.”

And - that’s fair - His mind’s on too high of an alert to take Enjin’s words any wrong sort of way. The serpent beast cracks open its fanged maws - and unleashes a rattling bellow.

"Prepare yourselves," says Enjin. "We're going at it." 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Zanka gets his staff back eventually.

After nearly a quarter of the city ruins have been permanently destroyed. 

After Enjin has taken a chunk of rock to the head, and Eishia heals Enjin up, and Riyo nearly gets run through by the serpent's horn - Zanka takes the risk and draws its attention from their team leader currently downed. 

Spat sludge burns through the cloth of his leg, scorching skin. 

He takes the pain, sweeps his staff along the ground, and bullets a path - in a flash - zigzagging the further spat globs of skin-melting spit.

Put this thing down. 

There’s a desperation in him. A reality getting into him - that even with those as capable as Riyo and Enjin and Eishia at his side, they can still die. 

He wasn’t sure when he had forgotten that.

Lovely Assistaff is a catchpole, a mancatcher in all its exemplar, and the irony of it being the most used weapon by authorities chasing down lawless is not lost on him from the origin of his clan's glory. But his catchpole is as blunt as it is large. 

Blunt force won't cut through this beast's skin and scales.

Won't wound it. Won't make it bleed or hurt, as it needs to be hurt for them to live. 

He leaps above the monster's sweeping tongue, hooks his legs around its singular horn and drags his weapon up, upside-down, for all he's worth. 

His vital instrument responds. 

Blades and spikes.

Splitting reptilian skin.

Zanka has a moment to recognize his instrument's change to his will, before he seizes the momentum and rakes Lovely Assistaff through the serpent's hissing mouth - and through its left eye. 

Blinded, it thrashes. 

He rolls along the expanse of its wide, flat head and brings his weapon down through its other eye. 

Acid. 

It splashes over his hands, singes the sleeves of his arms - burns along his neck.

In anger, the beast rears back its head, and bleeding purple wet from its blinded eyes, strikes him with the side of its tail. 

Violently, he's thrown into a nearby wall. It craters at his back, rupturing something in him, breaking bone. 

Blood explodes out his mouth. 

When he goes down, he goes down, and doesn't get back up. 

Dizzily, he catches sight of Eishia running his way, her visage blinking in and out of sight - speaking to him - hands on him.

Enjin’s up. He’s drawing his arm back, eyeing the beast with his umbrella beginning to whir and spin-bladed like a drill - like he’s going to throw it straight into the madly flailing, defenseless beast - before he seems to realize something and stops himself from delivering the final blow.

Zanka’s eyes drift to the trash beast and the fight.

He sees a glimpse of red - as Riyo takes the lead instead, splitting into the belly of the beast with the kind of gifted finesse only someone trained from birth could ever hope to have.

Her scissors reap an upwards massacre of scale and flesh, and she meets her instrument high up in the sky to hook her feet into its hold and swing-sling the cutting blades through the monster's neck.

Decapitation. 

Acidic blood rains down. 

“Eishia,” Zanka gurgles out, reaching out, attempting, trying to pull her down beneath him. 

She'll get burned.

An umbrella shields them both.

Enjin. He crouches at their sides.

His hand momentarily grasps the side of Zanka's face, squeezing it in assurance, before letting go. “Well done.”

Zanka's not too sure if Enjin had witnessed what had actually happened- him getting thrashed by the snake - but he's not going to not take the compliment.

Not in this banged-up state.

It'd be nice to believe, even if it wasn't true, that he hadn't been the worst part of Enjin's brand-new team.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Lovely Assistaff bears his name. 

Enjin sits across from him in the dilapidated crumbles of disintegrated walls of places that were once places people called home, and tells him the meaning. 

“Looks like it's evolved." He inhales the cancerous stick between two cupped hands, before relaxing back and letting the smoke blow out. “With your own abilities - and growing strength. It happens sometimes to Givers highly in-tune with their instrument. It accommodates, and reshapes.” 

He looks mildly pleased. But Zanka doesn't know. Had he gotten stronger? He had ended up on the ground again despite it.

Eishia finishes healing Riyo from her burn wounds and comes to join them, carefully taking a hold of Zanka's acid-bitten arms and beginning to get to work.

He thinks, as he watches her, as he watches his injuries lessen in severity, then clear, and the pain that comes with it, dulls, then goes away - that Enjin had been right about her.

She sure is incredibly vital.

Without her - wouldn't they be so out-of-commission in the fight, they'd be dead? 

Riyo had destroyed the trash beast on her own. Enjin had granted them their shield. Zanka had... thrown his staff at the thing, poked its eyes out, and gotten slapped. 

...Yep. That checks out, he agrees with himself. 

Nothin’ much to do about it, except try not to let it happen again, he guessed. 

Also. How in the world Eishia was electrocuting them while healing them, was a real amazement. 

There were still tons of vital instruments on The Ground Zanka needed to learn about.

“Um.” Eishia speaks up in the calm silence that had befallen them all. She tends to his face with small, nipping shocks lighting off her fingers - glancing into his eyes - glancing away to his burns - and back to his eyes. “You move quite well. It's impressive how fast you are with a vital instrument that looks so heavy from top-down.”

Heavy? 

Zanka hadn't thought about his weapon as being heavy. It was weighted, at most, but not so weighed that he couldn't toss it around and hurl it along the ground.

It was the anima present within him - the same anima that made the impossible possible among animated monstrosities made of literal trash -  that ignited his core; granting strength on a level ordinary non-Givers would never be able to attain. 

The most he did was bear the weight of his staff - that weight of it - that had in turn - become the most vital part of his soul. 

This simple re-wrapped stick.

Broken, fixed, broken, abandoned, broken, loathed, and broken again as it was despised. As it was cared for. Apologized to. Studied. Practiced with every day, near every night, in moments of silence; in moments of waking work. 

Work from Zanka given to it, to understand; to comprehend - why this stick was his.

His family didn’t agree with those who tied their dependence to useless junk, but Zanka in his acceptance - of his past - of his choices - of the people around him he silently decided to make his home - had come to take pride in it. 

The useless junk that revealed his true self. And still became something in the hands of his true self.

And now, according to Enjin, it had leveled up again, in a different way.

Something great bearing his own name.

And... 

Zanka’s eyes fall on his vital instrument resting along his lap.

He gazes at his name.

...

His name.

Like the luminescent sea-glow blue of anima, leagues lighter than the natural dark sapphire of his eyes. 

Not the name of his clan, of anyone great - of any legacy that came before.

This stick born from his failures and missteps, busted and taped for any and all to see, that had come to realize itself fully, even entrenched in the rotten depths of his soul.

“...I guess I practiced a lot,” is what he says after an eternity of silence. “Thanks. For the healin’. We really couldn't be without you.” 

“It's nothing. I'm glad I could help." Eishia's mouth curves slightly down. “...By the way. ...Did you want any medication for your fever? I can't heal you from that.”

Zanka’s eyes bug-out.

Caught.

Riyo and Enjin look at him, twin eyebrows raised.

Smoke drifts - from Enjin's cigarette.

Eishia doesn't look away. 

Zanka’'s not sure why he ever thought she was the sort to shy away. In all his times speaking to her today, never once had her gaze wavered away.

“I'm... it' ain’t a fever.”

“I'm quite certain it is,” she softly disagrees. “I noticed it earlier this morning by the car. You were pre-symptomatic last night even though everyone else thought you were choking on a bone, and showed signs of illness since last week while allergies caught up with a number of the others in the base.  My big brother kept talking in the lab about how often you coughed and blew your nose. He made a song out of it before I mentioned you might be unwell. Looking at you now, your skin is clammy, your face pale, your eyes unfocused in the direction of my voice. Your pupils often wander and struggle to return. I really am impressed you were fighting like this.” 

Zanka opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. 

Enjin gets to his feet and exhales from the effort, joints audibly creaking, heaviness heard. “Alright.” His cigarette is put out on a jutting piece of tall stone. His golden eyes rest on Zanka in light exasperation. “Back to the car. You can sleep on the way home.”

Home. The simple word registers first in Zanka's fog-addled mind.

He had… tentatively started thinking about the base as his home to return to after jobs.

It was why he’d reluctantly kept all the furniture moved into his room by the others, making it a place for him; his to own for as long as he stayed. But hearing it from Enjin was… 

The part about having to drive back sixteen miles with Enjin's rough driving skills suddenly sinks in.

Zanka pales.

As Eishia frets and Riyo helps him to his feet, he wonders how feasible it is to make a camp for himself among the rubble - and wait for Gris to come get him the next day instead. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

The car rattles like the rattling of the trash beast they’ve destroyed, but there's nothing violent about it and nothing dangerously frightening about leather seats stained in grime and dirt.

Enjin plays the music low.

He eases over bumps; doesn't fly over them to make the car lift and soar.

Zanka doesn't know when his eyes glued to the outside passing landscape of cracked earth and dirt becomes the sight of utter darkness, but by the time it does, Riyo's fast asleep against him, and he can't quite manage to drag his eyelids open again.

She must’ve been even more exhausted than him.

The feat she had accomplished was crazily great.

He slouches back against her; slides down a bit in their now dusty, dirty seats.

He would never dare to fall asleep like this back at the Academy. Not in the classroom - not in his home - not even in his room.

But.

Like the shared meals with the rest of the Cleaners, like their random habits of tugging him into their business, like how he’d fallen into training with them a little - giving a few pointers a little - on how to utilize their weapons carried into the field with them for self-defense. Like the reading while other Cleaners played games among themselves in the lounge. Like all the roaming together, talking together, working as a team -

He thinks - it’s not anything horrible to get used to.

In this place he can call for certain, if he’d like - his home. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

They're greeted with the smiles of Gris and Tomme, arriving coincidentally, at the same time from a missive of their own.

A couple of other Cleaners are with them.

Zanka, rubbing sleep from his eyes, faintly recognizes a number of them. They clap him on the back in welcome as they pass and ask him to join for dinner.

“Sorry, this guy has a date by the name of 'B-E-D',” Enjin steps in, resting a solid hand onto Zanka’s shoulder and lightly squeezing it before Zanka can start to wander off with them. "You'll have to try again later." 

Gris takes a good look at them all. 

“I take it, it went well.”

Riyo yawns beside them, stretching her arms up high.

“Oh yeah.” Enjin takes his hand off Zanka's shoulder and ruffles his hair - mindful. Like he can tell in the arrival back to base, how fast and deeply Zanka's general sense of well-being was plummeting to the ground. “Zanka here's got a hell of an eye. I had a feeling why months ago you started having him take point, but it was nice to witness it firsthand.” 

Zanka furrows his brows.

Is he hallucinating? Enjin sounded awfully proud. 

Had he sounded like that when it ever came to Zanka before? 

“Observation and strategy. Finding enemy weakness and understanding how to exploit it to our advantage,” Enjin ticks off on a mental list. “I've told him how great he's done on our first mission as a team, but maybe he needs to hear it from his original leader first.” 

“I’m not a leader,” Gris responds, but he smiles small at Zanka nonetheless. Warmth in his pale eyes, satisfaction in his tone. “Sounds like you make for a valuable asset to the team. I’m sure you’ll continue to be great in the future jobs ahead.” 

“Uh-huh,” Riyo chimes in, yawning loud and large again. “He sure will.” 

Her arm falls over Zanka's shoulders. It's a familiar thing he's gotten used to. He lets her drag him off and she tells them all:

“Now it's time to go to bed.”

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

When the fever hits, it hits.

He's visited in his bedroom in the days that follow by Eishia who offers pills and soothing salts, and by Gris who checks in on his health without fail and talks to him, sharing stories until Zanka passes out into unconsciousness and later wakes, confused, on when he’d ever shut his eyes to rest.

Riyo’s there too - like a postage stamp. Stuck to him. Because she’s caught his sickness, and makes sure he knows it - as she continually crowds into his bed. 

“You have enough room, scooch over!” 

“Your elbow’s in my rib, in my rib!” 

Pillows and blankets get tangled, smushed and tucked beneath their arms and legs.

Zanka gives up on doing anything about it.

They share sickly talks about the random things of The Ground, The Cleaners and each other's personal likes, dislikes and habits.

They eat with Tomme sometimes, and sometimes with a few other couple supporters dropping in on their time off.

Semiu comes by with a care package and surveys his room, and returns the next day with a humidifier and portable air purifier.

“I can’t stress enough,” she tells him and Riyo, “how much proximity to someone else ill  doesn’t make anyone heal faster.”

“We know,” Riyo answers, fluffing the pillow behind her head. Zanka’s pillow - which she hits him with - as she adjusts it to her liking against the wall of the bed.

Semiu sighs and leaves them to their nonexistent peace.

Follo visits on the weekend, sharing weekly exploits, good and bad, from his own ventures on his own assigned teams that happened while Zanka and Riyo were confined to bed.

“You know,” he says after he’s done telling a story about his foot getting stuck in a pool of mud. “I was planning on coming here to give you a piece of my mind about you going out while sick. But you’re alive so I guess I can’t complain.”

Zanka flatly looks at him. “Thanks.”

Follo offers a crookedly hitched-up grin, handsome and pleased. “I'm just happy you let yourself get treated without a fuss. It almost feels like a cause for celebration.”

“Don’ hafta be so weird about it,” Zanka grumbles, scratching his cheek, looking away.

Follo grabs the hand at his cheek and pulls it down, holding it as he stands beside the bed and Zanka with joking-earnesty. “No seriously, it’s amazing.” He shakes his hand up and down. “Are you even the same Zanka I met months ago? Let me feel good about your happiness.”

Zanka flushes and snatches his hand away, aggrieved. “I ain’t happy! Shuddap!”

Follo’s smile grows.

Riyo, lounging at Zanka’s side against the same pillow as him with her ankles crossed, asks - “Did you want me to leave the room or…?”

Follo sputters. Zanka rolls his eyes. He knows what she’s getting at but climbing up the wrong tree. He just thinks Follo slathers him with too much appreciation and praise for doing the bare minimum.

…Still.

He could get what Follo meant by his words at least. Even though he denied it - a part of him is happy - just a bit - about it too.

That he seems to be doing something right - a lot more things right - for himself and those around him. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Enjin makes an appearance in-uniform the day Zanka feels all his strength returning. “You two have a lot of energy,” he greets as he helps himself inside Zanka’s room. He’s walked in on the middle of Zanka getting folded like a pretzel by Riyo who’d been teaching him an overly-complicated technique to break out of a grapple. She might’ve just been messing around. “Nice to see you getting along.”

“We've always gotten along,” Riyo responds. She releases her air-cutting hold on Zanka's throat and rolls off him. She offers him a hand, which he takes, as he staggers, pulled to his feet. “You've been gone for a while.” 

“Sure have.” Enjin lopsidedly grins and holds two crimson chokers on the fingers of a hand. “Had to get these adjusted. Zanka, I've added my blood to yours. In hindsight, that should’ve been done before we headed out. That was my fault.” 

Yeah. Zanka had forgotten about that. Hadn’t even thought to ask about it as their team headed out that day. 

But... 

Enjin’s blood is on his communicator now? 

It shouldn’t make Zanka so creepily enthused, but it does.

Despite probably being able to read Zanka’s thoughts loud and clearer than whatever morphed expression of bizarreness has taken over Zanka’s face, Enjin still smiles at him.

And Enjin still tells him like he means it: 

“Good to see you up.” 

Zanka doesn’t know what to do with that. 

It’s not like there’s any sort of actual friendship between them. They’ve barely begun to interact beyond a weekly basis. But he guesses it’ll be different now that they’re on one team.

It already is more different.

I mean… Enjin’s here of his own will, speakin’ to me in my room. 

That’s a change. He could jump out his window from happiness and delude himself into thinking he could fly.

Enjin holds out Zanka’s choker closer to him when Zanka doesn’t move to take it - like Riyo had with hers.

Cheeks warm, a bit unsure, but stupidly pleased nonetheless, Zanka grabs the smaller choker meant for him and clips the communicator around him. 

Its weight is a comfort. 

He rubs his wrist beneath it, gently feeling his own pulse with his thumb. It flutters quick and strong. When did the Cleaners around him notice how much he disliked having it around his neck like a collar - like a leash - confining him. When had they let Enjin know?

They couldn’t know about the frustration, and time spent alone in his room back in the town he was from, cursing himself, beating himself up, running too hard, not breathing enough, in his desperation and vicious drive to stay at the top. He doesn’t want a weight cutting off his breath.

Not while he still breathes - and lives. 

“It’ll be important to keep it on you at all times,” Enjin reminds them both as Zanka quits thinking so much. “Moreso with this new team arrangement. You’ll still be handling tasks on your own, not like that’s going to change. I know when you’re out with Gris and the others, you tend to stay in packs, but you never know when a call might come in from me or the boss. When we’re needed as a team to move out, we’ll move out."

It sounds too good to be true.

"In our trusty rover.”

It is too good to be true. 

All bubbling warmth and gushiness blooming flowers in Zanka at the certainty that this team,- his place in the team - is certified for certain - 

Gets swiftly trampled over-foot. 

He doesn't know how he's going to survive Enjin's rides of death.

But if there was a will... he would, somehow...find a way.

Riyo preens at his side and gives his back a few slapping pats. “There, there, Zanka! We’ll get you a bag. We’ll write your name on it too!” 

“I don’t need it,” he refuses, holding onto pride and lie for no reason. 

"Well if you’re saying it, I guess it must be true. You interested in going for a ride right now?” Riyo offers in amazement. “Let’s do it! It’d be so much fun, wouldn’t it?” 

“N-no need fer all that,” Zanka hastily denies. “I’m still - I ain’t recovered yet.” He coughs into his fist, very lightly. Very fake.

Whatever.

It’ll make some kind of point. 

“Too bad then,” Riyo laments. She hums and takes some time to pretend think before offering a solution he never asked for. “How about the next time we go out and have to take the car, you can sit up front and enjoy the ride as much as you want.” 

Zanka gives her the dirtiest look in human existence.  

She regards him with a smirk, smugly, smug. 

Enjin glances between them. Considering something. Maybe reliving something from another time and place, an unreadable look in his eyes.

Softly, a sincere curve of fondness tugs at his mouth.

“Well,” he says, “Here's to all our future successes, Team Akuta.”  

They’re asked to save a girl. 

A girl kidnapped for being a Giver among a settlement of the poverty-stricken poor - in the middle of a crime-run city, without order, a place of trouble the Hell Guard had not yet purged. 

The rooftop is a battlefield. Ice locks his legs in place. His weapon breaks it apart.

He moves - towards Eishia - as the man who kidnapped that Giver, that little girl, launches an attack at their team healer.

He shoves her out the way.

He tanks the blow, staff flipped swiftly in his hands - over his shoulder - to stop the swung-down icepick meant to break his bone.

The reverberation shakes him head-to- toe.

Teeth grit, it takes all of his strength, to push back and up and throw the man’s icepick off.

Quick as lightning, a downwards cut and sweep, in an attempt to knock the bigger man off-balance, if not off his feet. But the man is bigger, broader, heavily scarred, and all he does is drop his thick boot down on the flat of Zanka’s blade, trapping it in place.

Zanka curses in his head.

An icepick a vital instrument - now as large as a frosted nail. The man doesn’t bother to use it. The back of his arm catches Zanka on the chin, staggering him.

He’s kicked across the roof next.

Zanka flies and tumbles and rolls, palm skidding, scraping across rooftop stone. 

They’ll be paid handsomely if they bring this dangerous man back alive.

The close-knit community of gathered orphans rescued from trader rings, watched over by their elder, weathered guardians. Wanted the man - to give him a terrible punishment. 

But the one who had taken the girl is a Raider and he’s strong.  

So Semiu had grimly shared in their debriefing.

Raiders. Givers with their own agenda; an agenda not known to their organization of Cleaners yet.

In other words - a threat Zanka had never encountered before. But they’re rotten people, Zanka knows. And that’s enough for him, to show not an ounce of mercy to the Raider at hand.

If he even gets the chance. 

He gets to a knee, stick supporting his weight.

His breath coalesces, tongue tasting frost, throat frigid as his lungs. Bangs in his eye, scowling, glowering, he breathes and breathes, breathes for air and tries to breathe. 

“Zanka!” his name is shouted, urgent, loud. 

Follo.

Zanka quickly lifts his head. 

A curve of jutting ice rips upwards from the ground, towards Zanka still downed on his knees.

He throws his arms up. It’s a useless defense. The jutting ice breaks it apart and throws him hard.

Eishia’s arms try to catch him. It’s Follo behind her who bears the brunt of their tossed weight. They slide to the edge of the roof, a collective of yelps and grunts and oofs.

They hit the edge of the roof and stop. 

Hastily they struggle to disentangle.

“Follo! Zanka!” Riyo calls out from the roof of the building next to the one they’re on.

Enjin steps in front of her, and like a bulwark, tanks a blast of blinding light as Umbreaker opens up.

The little girl forced to fight, is who they’re up against.

Such a powerful Giver.

Her capabilities pushed to the extreme, her own anima tearing her apart.

Zanka can see her across from Enjin and Riyo, tattered cloak and broken chains around her ankles - clutching a plastic star-shaped wand in hand -holding back tears.

She’s hurt and hurting; he can hear her voice in his head.

The words she must’ve carefully spoken many times, now cried aloud.

“Shining Star!”

Thousands of lights like gathered stars spread over the sky.

A dome beneath the night.

The stars fire down.

Follo tackles Zanka and Eishia beneath him as the roof is torn apart.

They’re going to die.

“What was she doing before?” Zanka asks about the girl to Enjin as they pile into the car. “As a Giver?” 

“From reports?” Enjin contemplates. “Healing others. Miraculously, from near-impossible ailments. People who couldn’t walk. Coughs that couldn’t stop. Finding lost items for townsfolk lost for years.” 

“If someone like that was out there, wouldn’t we have heard of them before?” 

“I wonder about that. If she’s only just become a Giver, no. And if reports of her being a child are true. Well…” Enjin’s eyes briefly wander towards Riyo relaxing in the backseat. Maybe Zanka’s not supposed to see it. Enjin brings his gaze back out front. Starts the ignition. “What circumstances would it take for someone as young as that to care so much about an object that is has that kind of strength?” 

He’s serious for a moment. Much more serious than usual. 

“Follo, Zanka, I’ll trust you with the defense. This’ll be a full team effort. It could get ugly fast.” 

A shield and it raises over them all.

Gris.

Did he jump over from Enjin and Riyo’s roof?

It doesn’t matter.

The roof is blasted apart.

Six stories of pure cement. Among bone-breaking rubble, they plummet down.

Enjin yells for them.

For Gris. For Eishia. For Follo and Zanka.

It’s the last thing Zanka hears. 

Ringing white.

 In a white and ringing space. 

He's in a well, sitting down, smaller than before.

His stick is a stick.

He looks up.

He wishes he’d be good enough to be found.

Good enough to sit on a Throne.

"What does that get you?" the girl with snow white hair and crystalline eyes asks. She doesn't join him down the well. "What does that mean to you?"

It doesn't mean anything.

Above the well, the hands of his brother and sister reach down.

That's right. The Golden Throne means nothing. It never meant anything to him.

But having it would at least mean…

He continues to look up.

Ah.

He’s too far down below.

His siblings hands don’t reach.

He can't be seen.

Zanka wakes facedown, in a puddle of murk and filth.

His head pounds. Pounds and pounds and throbs. He must’ve only blacked out for a minute. He can hear the sounds of combat happening far, far up above.

Is it Enjin?

He struggles to think.

Is it Riyo?

He struggles to move.

It must be them fighting. Since he’s fallen down here.

These tunnels underground the city, the unstable earth the poor buildings of the poorer city had been carelessly built upon. Dark and damp. Wet and cold.

He lays there for a moment. His body feels like a bruise. Then he forces himself up. His hands buckle beneath him. Fingers squelching in disgusting filth, he pushes himself back up. 

Eishia…

The safety of a healer took priority above all else. He glances around.

She’s there in the shadows, nearly ten feet away, on her side, unmoving, battered, and small. Gris’ hulking body wraps around her. Next to his head, the giant slab of a rock that must’ve knocked him out cold.

Zanka struggles to understand the sight - then realizes one of them is missing. He looks around again - he looks behind him.

“Follo-”

Follo on his back, bleeds from behind the head, hat knocked off.

Uncannily still.

The little girl stands beside him, in petrified distress, clutching at her plastic wand. “I’m - sorry,” she gets out, her breath scared and young and young.

It’s not her fault.

“I - don’t - want to - hurt -”

Is Follo dead?

Mind full of noise, Zanka staggers to his feet. An ocean, and it roars, thundering in his ears. His body quakes with the pain of a fall from far, far away.

He stares at Follo, stunned, and disbelieving.

In all their missions, in all their jobs, none of them had died. It wasn’t a thing that happened.

He doesn’t accept it. 

"I'm sorry - if it hurts." A trembling whisper among the tumbling in his head. "I can - make it - go away."

The girl speaks it as if being commanded to from another miles above, shaking, weakly weeping.

That was what the Giver who had taken her had been forcing her to do. Using her as a weapon to make real people go away, evaporated to dust - by a wish of oblivion forced upon them. 

Zanka isn't hurt.

Not hurt like Gris, or like Eishia or like Follo.

But he had seen a wish regardless. Known that wish that had never happened.

There are stars above. Beneath a night sky that shouldn't exist where they are. They force his eyes up to witness their lights. Their twinkling lights.

The wondrous sight of their infinity holds him still.

"Please...." shakes her voice, quieter than before. Begging. "...death."

Her words drag his gaze back down.

He resists the pull of the stars above.

In the dredge of the tunnel, he looks at her. Looks at her.

She's barefoot. Her feet are dirty and small. This close he can see the imprint of harsh red in the shadow of the broken chains shackled to ankles sallow and underfed.

Mangled, strands of golden wheat hair.

Gray eyes, full not of the world's wonder - but of its filth. 

Maybe once she had used her gift to grant others things they wished to have the most; to be able to find what they lost; to be able to feel a nearing hope.

Not anymore.

Was this what she wanted now too? To forget? The painful things that hurt her. The painful things she couldn’t forget.

If she could just get rid of them, she wouldn’t feel pain again....?

He understands it.

He takes a step forward.

Then another.

And another, his vital instrument in hand.

She doesn't try to run away. Small hands twisting over her vital instrument, just a children's toy, she stands and flinches, waiting for a blow to come. 

"...I saw somethin'," he rasps out, stopping in front of her. Beside Follo's body. "When I fell."

"It was your wish," she whispers. 

"...Yeah. It was." Zanka lowers before her. His eyes rest on Follo as he kneels. He gazes at the body laid out.

Until he sees the stilted, unsteady breaths of the barely breathing chest.

He's alive.

Relief, weary, floods into his body. He feels his own self breathe. 

"What's your wish?" Zanka asks. 

"...It doesn't matter," the girl whispers again. 

" 'Course it does." Zanka, with his hands, grasps the shackles on her ankle, and pushing, forcing his own energy into its steel, forcing it to bend - makes it break apart.

The girl doesn't move.

Zanka throws the chains away, as far out of sight, as they will go.

When he lifts his head and looks up, the girl's frightened eyes are wide upon him.

He holds her gaze.

Like Eishia wouldn't, like Follo wouldn't, like Enjin wouldn't - he doesn't look away.

He thinks about the lessons learned among the Cleaners.

Those who have helped him. Changed him.

Taken the time to understand him.

It pushes him to tell her; to let her know, though his body hurts and his head feels unwell.

"...If it hurts it’s okay to say it. If you’re angry, that’s okay too." He thinks about her small hopes; what she must've been forced to endure. He tells her, sincerity, fierceness, in every word. "You don’t have to pretend. That’s what makes it hurt the worse. Take it from The Ground's biggest pretender around." 

Gris' kindness. Eishia's persistence.

Follo's care.

"If you wanna beat the brakes off that Raider who took ya, just say it too. Shout it out you want him gone, and I'll do it. But don't hide it - how you really feel. Let us help you, now that we're here." 

Her legs tremble. Her knees knock.

Her eyes spill with tears.

"A big sister said wishes were enough to change the world. I wanted to stay home. He took me from home." She throws back her head and sobs. The star illusion above them breaks to falling dust. Snowing down. "I want to go back."

She falls back on the ground, sitting, and crying, crying loud.

It hurts in him to hear.

He listens to it anyway - to understand.

Her wand has lost its shimmer. Dull, yellow plastic, dirtied, cracked and bent.

Zanka gazes at it.

Wonders if it was given to her by that big sister.

Wonders where that big sister has gone.

He stands up and looks up.

The sounds of fighting above the earth, high up on the rooftops they had plunged down from, have stopped.

Does that mean Enjin and Riyo have won?

He huffs to himself, despondent, worn, relieved, suddenly feeling weak.

It's funny. 

....Standing down here... feels like standing at the bottom of a well.

He lowers his head.

He needs to help Follo. Needs to check on Eishia. Needs to wake Gris. Then they need to get back above, take this girl with them, meet back with Enjin and 

His chest is cold.

Strange, he thinks.

He hadn’t heard a thing.

The girl's falling stars twinkle down around him as he sways.

As his hand comes to his chest, where his heart is, where a chunk of ice stabs through.

Blood stains the front of his uniform. Drips from the corner of his mouth.

His throat is full of crimson wet he can’t keep down.

Frost and it clings to him, neck and clothes and skin.

Real strange.

The girl in front of him screams.

The man behind him yanks his icepick out.

Zanka topples forward.

He still can’t hear a thing. 

Riyo doesn’t kill anymore.

She goes for the throat anyway, and gets a side knife partway through the Raider's neck before Enjin yanks her by the back of her jacket - behind him - away. 

Blood sprays.

Not enough of it.

Umbreaker puts the man's face straight into the ground.

He doesn't get back up.

Because this is what had been asked of them, to bring that guy back alive - he gets left alive.

And Enjin won’t kill.

Not in front of Riyo; not in front of a kid.

She knows he won’t.

But Zanka doesn’t have a pulse.

She holds him, picking him slightly off the ground, over her knees.

His blood stains her hands.

She stares down at him.

He’s frigid; freezing cold. His head rests in the crook of her arms, as if he’s asleep.

Ice crests his neck to cheek.

She touches and lays her hand on his neck. The frostflakes refuse to melt.

She’s nudged aside.

She lets go of him, and Enjin takes him - turning him over - stripping him of his uniform jacket to get to the wound underneath.

Zanka's blood is dark. Thick, like molasses, rich and slow as it bleeds out - staining the canvas of his skin. She doesn’t need to see the slight pinch to Enjin’s brow and the graveness of his face to know this is a problem.

Of course it’s a problem.

Isn’t Zanka dead?

Enjin tells her to get Eishia, and to wake Gris - and Riyo goes to do it - Enjin’s voice muddled words heard from the water she sinks under in her head; from the water above her head.

Gris wakes first.

Splattered in mud; disoriented, but not disoriented enough that he can't tell something has gone straight-to-hell. He's on his comms instantly, stirring Eishia with his other hand, and Riyo turns once she sees that - to go back to Zanka's side.

The little girl who had dropped Zanka and them down here - she’s dead silent now - in utter shock - staring at Zanka’s corpse.

That's what it looks like to Riyo.

A corpse.

She's seen a lot of them.

Made a lot of them herself.

Eishia comes over to help the body whiter-than-white itself. Enjin's bloody hands lift from the gaping hole in Zanka's chest. Her smaller hands fill the space.

Follo wakes.

Slow to stir; slow to sit, and sitting up alone. He looks around him, and Riyo watches as his unsettled, uncertain eyes take in their surroundings - and take in Zanka on the ground.

He’s moving forward on one knee.

He’s getting up from his other.

He’s going to Zanka, silent, wide-eyed, and alarmed, stumbling like he’s witnessing the death of someone else.

As if he had seen someone lying still like this before.

He kneels across from Eishia and Enjin, and Enjin looks at him, as if to say something, to tell him to step away -before he sees something in Follo’s face - and closes his mouth shut.

Skin stitched, sutured, blood stilled.

Things are put back together, with a hideous scar from the immediate treatment, from the surging electricity brought from Eishia’s travel plug, but Zanka still doesn't breathe, and still doesn't move.

Because that's what dead bodies do.

They don't move.

Riyo thought. They were going to have more time together.

Her and Zanka.

She was really starting to like him. The guy older than her, who had stuck himself down a well to die, climbed out, still wanting to die, until Follo's hammer had given him a good enough whack to the head and Enjin showed him that if Zanka wanted to be left behind, then he would be left behind, but even if he got left behind - they’d be there for him.

Zanka didn’t need to have faith in them. He just needed to have faith in himself.

More faith than doubts. 

Zanka's classmates at his Academy didn't know a thing. 

Someone like Zanka forgettable?

Someone like Zanka, with nowhere to belong?

It was nice Follo had stepped in to shut their mouths before she did it for them herself. 

Eishia shocks his heart.

Follo's hands press compressions into the chest, pressing his ear to bloody chest, not caring about the mess.

Enjin gets up and moves away, to the Raider, lying unconscious a few feet away. And he gazes down at the Raider, a very blank, yet somehow considering look on his face.

As if weighing something in his head.

She wonders - what it is.

His eyes go to Riyo and she holds his gaze, the barest ghost of a painted smile at her mouth.

It must look as empty as she feels.

Enjin’s forehead creases. 

Gris goes to him then, and Riyo hears pieces of their conversation. 

Relays something from Cleaner's HQ. About back-up. About support.

It’s a little late for that, Riyo thinks. 

They don't exactly need support now.

Everything's already done.

Eishia speaks. Follo moves back.

She attempts to jump-shock Zanka's heart back to life for the fifth time.

Zanka twitches. 

For a moment, they all still.

A noise, weak. Blood from his mouth.

Noises of someone drowning in themself and fighting to live.

He struggles. 

His chest deflates, his lungs deflate, his breath stutters again, too weak for air. Follo's hand slides instantly to the curve of Zanka's neck. Without hesitation - he bends over and down - and sinks their mouths together, breathing life into lungs so intent on letting life slip away.

Eishia sources the problem.

The icepick missed his heart.

Its vicious frigid anima from the weapon that had crept and tried to cage itself around his heart, had punctured through his lung instead.

Blood had filled inside. 

Zanka breathes on his own. Continues, battling, to keep breathing on his own.

It's enough.

Follo pulls away.

Zanka watches him, eyes barely open, hand fumbling, trying to lift itself off the ground.

Follo grabs it - and looks for a moment in his utter relief- like he'll bend back down and put his mouth on Zanka again. 

He doesn't.

"He’s stabilizing, " Eishia says. “But he needs more advanced treatment. Someone who can do more than me. I can’t -”

"I know where to go," Enjin speaks. Clearly, for the first time, it seems - to Riyo's ears. "I'm driving. Let's go."

Gris picks up the girl Zanka had saved, carefully, noting the chains from her ankles tossed away, as she hiccups in silent grief.

Zanka's jacket is half-pulled over him, a bloodied mess.

Riyo thinks August will be over the moon to fix it back up. Her smile, feeling fragile, stays on her, falsified and still, like wax. It’s hard to swallow. Her eyes brim with wet relief, no different than the relief Follo must’ve felt. 

“Thank goodness,” she says. Her smile hitches up a bit. She stands next to Enjin as Enjin stands with Zanka cradled carefully in his arms. “Zanka,” she says.

He gazes at her, weakly, like he’s not sure where he is; like he’s fighting all the pain in him - to stay where he was anyway. She tucks his hair behind an ear. His eyes close as her knuckles brush over his brow at the gesture.

“It’s always in the way,” she says about his hair. “We really need to figure something out later.” 

She steps back.

Enjin leaves her to bring the knocked-out Raider with them - which she does. By gripping the greasy hair of the man hard enough to rip it out. 

Next time.

She'll be fast enough to save Zanka's life before he dies.

The dining hall is loud.

Zanka, seated at a table unoccupied in a corner away from everyone else, pushes a bent metal spoon around in his plastic container of jello. His old haori, his casual one for resting, drapes over his shoulders. 

It's really, really loud.

Music shakes the walls and floors. Food spreads over the tables. Remnants of confetti litter the floor, colorful and shiny, in perfect little squares. He's not particularly hungry, but he's here nonetheless.

Feels like he has to be.

They're celebrating his survival after all.

So they say.

Zanka’s pretty sure they’re all mostly happy about the Vianders making their monthly stop-around. It wasn’t like every Cleaner knew Zanka. They were in-and-out constantly. It was the solid crew of a handful of supporters alongside the Givers Zanka knew best, who were really celebrating his life.

Which was fine by him.

The memory he had of events was scattered. Too scattered to recall the full picture. Like a story that had happened in another life, to someone else.

He was told by Corvus that they had been paid extraordinarily well for the job.

Because apparently what had happened was so out-of-the-ordinary it warranted a visit by the boss himself to explain the few things that had happened to Zanka, while Zanka had been recovering in a long, long rest.

Regardless, it was money in all their pockets. A sizable amount in Team Akuta’s. 

Given to them, not by the rundown city they had further destroyed in the battle that led to his ‘death’ - but by the Hell Guard.

For eradicating a major threat. And allowing the Hell Guard to take the first steps in disassembling the syndicate that had begun amassing influence and power within the southeast sector. 

His elder sister had signed the letter.

She hadn't written anything about Zanka; hadn't written anything to Zanka.

Of course, no one in his family had.

But he knew at least that if he actually did die, they would have collected his body.

A pride thing.

Or something.

The girl they had saved.... the Giver...had lowered her wand. Brought back to her community, her family, her home, Corvus told him that the Giver who had quickly rose to recognition in pockets of The Ground - had stopped her healing, wish-giving sessions.

"Perhaps one day, she'll return to it," Corvus had said, with the barest impression of a smile. "But for now, it seems she's intent in taking time for herself to heal." 

She had sent him a letter.

He had tucked it away in the folds of a book Gris had gifted to him months ago.

'He took a lot. I'm angry. I won't forget, so I can remember my first wish again.' 

She thanks him after for still being alive.

If their paths will cross again, he doesn't know.

His own path seems better set in stone.

It'd been told to him Eishia would be pulled back from the direct front-lines. For practicality's sake. August had delivered the news personally whilst making fixes to Zanka's bloodied uniform.

He had also tried sticking a defibrillator into its stitchwork which both Eishia and Zanka had to fight to get out. 

“WHAT ELSE WILL BRING YOU BACK TO LIFE, BOY, IF MY WONDERFUL LITTLE SISTER ISN’T THERE?!” 

“This thing’s a tickin’ time bomb! It’s got way too much freakin’ juice to it!” Zanka had exclaimed back - before the exertion made him keel over and clutch at his recovering wound. 

“Big brother, please leave it alone!” Eishia had cried, flying to Zanka in a hurry. 

August - thank god - had. 

It'd been a solid month.

A whole long month since he had ‘died’ and been brought back to life. 

Half a year total since Zanka had joined the Cleaners, after leaving from home.

He feels like it's been a thousand years longer.

He feels like a thousand things have changed.

"Zanka, you were here after all! I told them you'd probably hate the noise, but I'm pretty sure now this was just an excuse for the people who wanted to see you, to be able to see you."

Zanka doesn't look up as Enjin takes the seat on the bench across from him.

"I don't blame 'em," Zanka replies, still pushing at his jello, still looking down, distantly distracted by his own thoughts. "Pretty sure they thought you guys were jokin' about me bein' alive."

"We'd be sick as hell in the head for that,” Enjin says. “What sort of impression do you have of me, Zanka?”

A good one.

But Enjin did have weird ways of solving problems. Even Zanka could acknowledge that. 

“Oi. Zanka. Why aren’t you answering?” 

Zanka pretends the jello is calling his attention more than Enjin. 

“Hey Zanka!” Enjin exclaims. 

Riyo's hands - from where she stands behind Zanka, half over him - finally come to a rest in his hair. She’d been back there for ages, messing around with it. Zanka was pretty sure she hadn’t been doing anything for the first fifteen minutes except try to figure out the truth of whether his hair naturally grew in two shades of color - or it was a box-dyed scam. 

“Are ya done?” he asks. 

Riyo hums, leaning her weight over his shoulder. “I don’t know. What do you think?" she asks to Enjin. "We've been trying new styles all night. Something that says 'cool' without looking like he's trying as hard as he is."

Free to look up, Zanka raises his chin and makes a grumpy face at her.

She sticks her tongue out. 

Enjin tilts his head to-and-fro in consideration, seriously considering the question, and after a long minute of all the considering, makes a motion with his hands.

"Rather than going for the gel-up like mine, why not try pushing his hair together -” he indicates Zanka's bangs in a V-down shape. "- like this."

Riyo tries it.

His hair is styled into place.

She leans away with delight.

"Looking fresh, Zanka! How do you feel?"

"Normal," he flatly responds. He reaches up anyway and touches at his hair. “Like all you did was just tuck my hair behind my ears.” 

“Yeah!” Riyo brightly says. “That’s all I did. Who knew the solution was as easy as that?”  

Zanka looks at her in utter disbelief. 

Riyo smiles. “We can still get gel for you if you really want to keep it in place. That sort of stuff is fun too.” 

He shifts, reluctant, where he sits. “...Fine.” 

Enjin watches them. He rests his arms on the table, and gazes at Zanka - and after a moment of letting Zanka and Riyo's conversation end, speaks of something else.

"Zanka. I didn't tell you when you woke; wanted to give you space to recover. But I’ll tell you now. You gave us a hell of a scare. All of us. For future reference, don't do it again."

"It wasn't like I planned it," Zanka says, put out. His cheeks heat regardless at the way Enjin’s looking at him - like Zanka’s incredibly important to him. Though that was likely just a thought of delusion.

The passage of time here at the Cleaners had never diminished those. 

Still, it was true that Enjin had visited more than once in between Zanka's bedrest and self-confinement to his room. That Enjin had brought him things.

Snacks. Magazines. Immunity drinks in tiny bottles.

A few of those visits he had even stayed longer than to just drop things off. Sitting on the edge of Zanka’s bed, chatting briefly with him about random, mundane things. 

Never for as long as Riyo did, never for the sort of conversations Zanka ended up having with Gris and August and Eishia who took time out of their days to frequent by and stay by for longer hours. 

But Enjin came.

And that was enough to fill Zanka with supremely idiotic happiness for years.

The only one he hadn't seen at all was -

"Yo, Follo. You guys came back at the right time," Enjin greets in welcome. 

Follo, in full Cleaner uniform, hat in his hand, moves through the shuffling dining hall crowd, drawing near. There's a pinched look on his face; a knit to his brows - a troubled, troubled light in the dark of his eyes.

Gris calmly follows behind him with Tomme.

The smell of sweat and hard work from the desert outdoors accompanies them, with flushes of exertion well-spent across their cheeks and jaws.

Tomme gives Zanka a small smile, genuine in its sincerity. "Hey there, you. Are you enjoying the party?"

Well no one had set any balloons with gunpowder inside them on fire this time.

So.

He gives his uneaten jello a look, and takes time to think. "If everyone else is enjoyin' it, I think it's fine."

"That's a real typical thing you'd say," Enjin softly snorts.

He gets up - maybe to get food. But-  

Abruptly, very abruptly, nearing shoving Enjin out of the way - Follo takes Enjin’s place, and sits down with a thud. His clenched fist holds his hat in a near-bunched ball on the table.

Enjin's eyebrows raise.

Gris comfortably folds his arms.

Behind Zanka, Riyo starts giggling, very quietly, at his back.

Zanka feels a small frown start to tug at his lips. They all in on something or what?

Never mind the fact that the other Supporter seemed to have all but vanished from the base whenever Zanka glanced around for him -

"I'm sorry I kissed you!" Follo suddenly exclaims.

Loud enough over the music it turns a few heads.

Zanka stares. 

"I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry you're still alive," Follo goes on. "I would do it again to save you, I don't care. So -" he stops talking, horribly flushed, ashamed and red.

Zanka stares some more at him.

And more.

What.

"What?"

Enjin coughs - and coughs - and hides a poor laugh. "Follo.... I think that might've been one of the few things Zanka forgot."

It's a slow horror that creeps over Follo's face. Before seizing his entire body still.

He doesn't move.

Riyo offers reassurance with - frankly - an evil smile, horribly, horribly amused. "Huh? That was a kiss? I thought you were giving Zanka the CPR he needed to breathe, but it turned out this whole time it was a really long kiss. Hey, isn't that interesting?" she glances towards Enjin, who grins, and agrees.

"Man, it sure is. I wasn't going to say anything at the time, but I guess it's out of the bag. To be young and full of love again!" 

Enjin bursts into obnoxious cackles.

Follo covers his face with his hands.

He might be crying. It's hard to tell.

"Is that why I never saw you?" Zanka asks.

"No," Follo denies, doing his best to sink into the floor and never again return. "...Yes."

Zanka's not too sure why Follo's getting all twisted up about it. CPR sounded exactly like what Follo would do in a situation like that.

And no, he doesn't remember it.

But what he feels towards the Supporter is a calm feeling unchanging.

"Thanks," he says.

Enjin and Riyo quit snickering like a pair of demons.

Gris' smile spreads.

Follo lowers his hands, ever-so-slightly, from his face.

Finally, finally, Zanka tells him what he had never said, back the very first day they'd been sent together out into the field. With all the gratitude he has - he tells Follo: 

"I owe you. For saving my life."

Things go back to normal.

As normal as normal gets in The Ground, in the Cleaner's HQ; in the routines among their crew.

He goes on jobs alone. He goes on jobs with others. He eats sometimes in large groups, and eats sometimes in the company of only himself.

He trains. He reads. He walks.

If Riyo joins him, it's fine. If no one does, that's fine too.

They get busy.

There's an unusual uptick in trash beast activity. Enjin spends more and more time on his own in No Man's Lands, on personal errands he never talks about.

Zanka spends more and more time running a hand along his staff, thinking about his victories, his defeats, his eagerness to get back out and try again.

Eishia explains to him when he asks about different treatments for an injured body. August, eavesdropping in, pops in to give his own 'expert' opinion. Zanka picks up a few books on the human body and medicine to study. 

Follo keeps a distance, and Follo lingers near, and Follo is Zanka's first savior, and Zanka’s first friend next to Riyo, and that is something Zanka won’t forget.

He takes care to look after Follo from afar; sometimes directly, with bags of snacks and miscellaneous-bought store items - like Enjin had given  to him.

And when they sit in the same space, if they talk, they talk. If they don't, they don't.

It's comfortable all the same.

"Do you still have nightmares?" Follo asks.

"...They come n' go," Zanka reluctantly admits.

They do.

An odd sort of collection of dreams where stars fall and claws drag him to a grave of ice, and he bleeds while his elder brother and elder sister look down - down at him - drowning - in the bottom of a mud-filling well.

"Talk to me about them," Follo suggests. "I'll listen."

Follo listens.

Riyo asks.

Enjin never asks.

He manages to find Zanka, regardless, no matter the hour or the time, when the surfacing nightmares come at their worst.

He takes Zanka out to the hoop lot when that happens, throws a ball at him, lightly puts him in a one-on-one game - and laughs until he wheezes as he easily beats Zanka - as Zanka misses all shots and continually gets the ball knocked out of his hands.

Because Enjin’s big as hell. 

He gets so focused on trying to outmaneuver Enjin on those nights, by the time he’s dragging his loser-losered feet back to his room, the only thing he does is fall into a black and fuzzy, revenge-filled sleep.   

He still hears nothing from the Hell Guard.

It's as expected.

It's alright. 

Winter passes. Zanka starts to forget the coldness of death.

The days turns to weeks and the weeks turn to months. He walks with better certainty. Works with better efficiency. His steps sink the muck and filth in boots that tread the same path as those around him ahead. A greater part of a multi-wheeled machine.

They sweep across The Ground.

"You sure are dependable," Semiu calmly commends. "Unlike someone who's been doing nothing but sleep in lately. Thanks for all your hard work, Zanka."

"Hey!" Enjin exclaims. "I work hard too! You've got a terrible case of favoritism going on!" 

Zanka heads out, relaxed, secretly proud, on his third job of the day.

Distantly, in the southern ward of Kamuatari, Zanka knows the cold will have crawled away, and that sprigs of wood will have begun to green with the promise of blooms. As surely as he knows that soft dews like marbles will exist on the new growths of the bowing branches of wood. Stagnant.

Catching the light of the sun.

In the east, beneath the muggy stars of the loud and polluted night, the arid air presses warm against his skin, scorching his throat. His mask hangs around his neck.

Tomme fiddles with a collection a boxed fireworks on the ground of the base's rooftop.

August stuffs a rocket launcher. Eishia frantically tries to get him to stop will all the volume the soft loudness her panicked voice will go.

A number of supporters grab rusted, painted barrels as makeshift chairs.

Others try and string up a horrifying pinata of papier-mâché.

"Well at least we know never to try anything ourselves again," Miguel had commented when Zanka had first laid eyes on the atrocity.

"What did you even put in it?" Zanka had asked.

"Oh y'know," Miguel had shrugged. "This and that. Shouldn't go too badly."

Zanka had stared. 

Now Zanka stands a decent enough distance away from the small gaggles of Cleaners enjoying themselves on the roof around him, a funky-looking cup with a paper umbrella and curly straw in it, in hand.

"What are the odds of us getting blown up?" Follo asks, standing next to him.

Zanka thinks about the people they're with. "Stupidly high."

"Yeah." Follo casually eats fruit off the skewer he holds. "Thought so too."

They celebrate Zanka's seventeenth birthday.

There aren't any candles.

Riyo sticks sparklers in the cake instead, and every Cleaner who had joined them for the small, impromptu party, keeps an incredibly large distance between themselves and Zanka and the cake as they tell him to make a wish and blow them out.

"Like hell! This shit's shady as hell!"

Enjin and Gris arrive, ascending the rooftop stairs from below, in time to watch the cake that's caught on fire - get thrown off the roof.

They carry a cooler of extra drinks and stereo.

The night turns lively.

Zanka gets an assortment of practical gifts useful for weapon and gear maintenance out on the field.

The fireworks launch off. Bursting, breaking, high above their heads, in the darkened sky. Green and orange, golden and red.

Tomme whoops, excitedly, on the rooftop's ledge, pleased.

Gris looks just as pleased. "She got them from Canvas Town for a really good deal."

Hot embers, smoke and the shells of the fireworks suddenly fall back down towards them.

The Cleaners scatter, diving for shelter, as Tomme shouts out apologies. 

Zanka stays where he is as Gris dives to protect Follo's head with the hideous pinata Miguel had made.

Rest in peace to that thing.

And good riddance, Zanka thinks.

"Happy birthday, Zanka" Riyo says, comfortably at his side. "I hope it's everything you ever wanted." 

Zanka looks at her from the corner of his eye and wonders if she's being serious. Judging from the mirthful, cattish beaming grin she's got on - she's definitely not. 

Enjin's umbrella shields them from the falling, scorching embers of the firework show gone wrong. He stands a little behind them, the smile on his face matching the one in his voice. "Well - not the worst celebration we've had."

He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a small box.

He offers it to Zanka.

Zanka takes it, surprised.

Hesitantly, he opens it.

Riyo peers over. Her eyes light up. "Oh nice, Enjin! Did you notice Zanka sulking about losing his old ones in that trash swamp last week?"

"Pretty hard not to. He looked miserable," Enjin responds, amused. He turns his amusement towards Zanka next. "What do you think? Wanna put them in now or -?"

He cuts himself off as Zanka, nostrils flaring, shaking terribly, holds the box of tasseled earrings in his quaking palm. 

"I'm...so honored -" Zanka expresses with all the overflowing, overwhelming sincerity he has to give. "Really, really - honored. Thanks a bunch. I'll serve ya for life-"

Enjin makes a face at him, disturbed. "Yeah, no? I'll pass on that. But feel free to take the earrings with you when you eventually go to live your life somewhere else-"

"I ain't goin'," Zanka warbles, big-eyed, mouth pushing out, in burning tears of dedication, "anywhere else." 

Enjin sighs.

But in the sigh, his smile does return.

He reaches out, and ruffles the front of Zanka's hair. 

"...Suit yourself." 

The days go on and on. 

Zanka falls into the familiarity of it.

The certainty and purpose and shenanigans in this place of his - he's gratefully calling home. 

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Then Enjin finds a kid and gives him to Zanka.

A kid from above - from above - fallen like a rotten wish he never asked for.

☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎v☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎☔︎︎

Rudo.

And Zanka watches as everything he's learned to overcome, spills between his hands again.