Something New
“Are you sure about this?” Misaki sounded nervous, and his fingers fidgeted at Saruhiko’s hip.
“Are you sure about this?” Misaki sounded nervous, and his fingers fidgeted at Saruhiko’s hip.
They weren’t on the same page, they didn’t think the same thoughts, and they didn’t feel the same way. Not anymore. Once, they had—or it felt like it. Both of them had wanted to destroy the world they no longer belonged in, both of them wanted their own small world with each other. Both of them wanted power.
Now here they were with Homra, and they had it, and all Misaki could talk about were the people who’d claimed him as their own.
Saruhiko was beginning to realize Misaki had wanted another family, while Saruhiko had just wanted Misaki.
It was almost bewildering, just how excited Misaki would get when Saruhiko let him play with the game he was working on or even look over his shoulder as he hacked through some supposedly secure system.
No one had ever been excited because Saruhiko did something for them or let him be around them. The only reward he’d ever received for creating before had been the immediate destruction of whatever he’d made.
“That’s amazing!” Then there was Misaki, eyes aglow, voice alight, and something lit up inside Saruhiko in response.
He found himself unable to quite hold in a smile.
Saruhiko woke suddenly. He didn’t move, though his heart beat too hard in his chest. But he didn’t live in that house any more, and the unfamiliar warm weight slotting comfortably against him wasn’t anyone dangerous. It was Misaki.
Saruhiko didn’t move, trying to process the arm slung easily over his waist, the breath evening out against the back of his neck, the way every part of his own body felt taut with tension, but he didn’t want to move or startle Misaki awake—or away.
He couldn’t quite make himself relax, but he stayed still until morning, feeling it.
The beanie had never been decorative. It kept people from bothering him, just as the loose sweatshirt served its own purposes to hide some of Yata’s less common features. He’d never liked leaving his tail out in public where anyone could grab it and pull and he’d only ever let one person give him scritches behind his ears, and that was a long time ago.
Yata wasn’t normally the fastest in picking up on conversation around him in the bar, but today he seemed particularly out of it.
“Are you all right?” Kamamoto asked.
He only got a mumbled reply, barely intelligible with Yata’s mouth buried in his arms on the counter.
“What’s wrong, Yata?” Kusanagi asked.
Yata looked up, blushed bright red. “What do you do when someone kisses you?”
The bar went quiet.
He blushed harder, buried his entire face.
“It depends,” Kusanagi answered. “Either you say you’re not interested or you kiss them back.”
“He’s interested.”
“It’s gotta be Fushimi.”
“Shut up!”
Wanting Misaki like this was a discovery, unpleasant and unwelcome burning in his belly. It was easier when they were friends, then when they were enemies, easier than looking at Misaki’s cheerful face and realizing he wasn’t content to be friends again, even best friends.
“Saru! Pay attention!”
Saruhiko didn’t really need to pay that much attention to win the video game, but it would be helpful to think a little less about how distracting Misaki was and more on winning against him.
He didn’t. He leaned over, shoved the controller out of a startled Misaki’s hands, and kissed him.
There’s an angry goose whose job it is to know these things. They say the reason so few people meet their soulmate is because the goose can only herd around one soul at a time in the direction of their mate and until the goslings grow up, the country just has too many people to get through before it’s your turn.
Every country has its own soul guide. Theirs is the angry goose. Yata always wondered but didn’t dare ask if someone else had the happy goose. Had he asked, his mother would have told him, they’re all angry, dear, they’re overworked.
He doesn’t really think anything of it when he’s skateboarding past a park and there are birds flying up startled from the ground, making small angry sounds at his disturbance. Not until a very loud angry honking doesn’t fly up. Instead it follows him, startling him back into careening right off the skateboard into the grass.
And there’s an angry goose in his face. It thrusts its beak at him as if it wants him to get moving.
Fushimi Saruhiko was prepared for many kinds of craziness to be a part of his workday, but the last thing he expected was a certain familiar redheaded skateboarder to come tearing through Scepter 4 chased by a honking, biting goose close on his heels. Misaki crashed into Saruhiko’s desk, and the goose stopped to glare at them both with one beady eye.
It gave one last smug honk and waddled away.
They had lived together before. Yata had seen Saruhiko clothed and unclothed, half asleep with his hair sticking up or neatly put together in formal wear. There was really no reason on the first night they were rooming together again that he should be gobsmacked by the sight of his best friend wandering out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel.
Saruhiko ran a hand through his hair absently, new scars and new muscle visible on his lean frame, and he looked good.
Saruhiko blinked at him. “Are you burning dinner?”
Yata swore and snatched it off the burner.
Saruhiko went to bed cold because Misaki turned the heat off at night, forgetting they were both there now to share the bill. He always woke up halfway through the night, practically sweltering under Misaki’s body heat because Misaki was an irrepressible cuddler who used his bedmate like a body pillow.
A few halfhearted elbow jabs never seemed to wake him and shoving him right off only resulted in a repeat occurrence before Saruhiko even managed to get back to sleep.
“You’re a horrible bedmate,” he complained in the morning.
Misaki scoffed, knowing he’d still choose to sleep with him.
Saruhiko would probably never get tired of Misaki turning red and flustered (more…)
Misaki actually had terrible aim. Not that Saruhiko was complaining. (more…)
Yata would never in a million years admit he liked the uniform. No matter Saruhiko actually looked good in it, he looked good in anything, and Yata hated everything that reminded him of the Blues stealing his best friend away.
It was just because Saruhiko always wore one now that Yata saw it in his dreams. Only because it was Saruhiko, not the uniform, that most of his more private fantasies saw the buttons half undone, Saruhiko looking disheveled, but not actually undressed. Yata didn’t actually want to imagine Saruhiko naked.
Then it wasn’t a dream anymore.
“Leave it on.”
One minute, there was a knife grazing his skin; the next, a knife ripping through his shirt; and it only made Yata’s face light up with a more ferocious grin than a moment before.
Aura on aura, they wrestled and tumbled, and the manic gleam in Saruhiko’s eye only found an answer in Yata’s—not a protest.
They didn’t plan it, didn’t make any conscious decision one way or another, just cut through clothes, bit through skin, and pressed mouth to mouth and hips to hips, and suddenly neither of them were fighting each other but fighting for their pleasure.
“I’m not eating that,” Saruhiko said flatly without bothering to look up from typing.
Yata scowled. “It’s just dip!”
Saruhiko shot him an even flatter look. He pushed up his glasses with the most condescending sigh. “I know what’s in guacamole.”
Avocadoes. Vegetables.
Fate seemed determined to saddle Yata with a partner that wouldn’t know how to take care of himself if someone explicitly taught him how. “Fine,” he snapped. “Sleep by yourself tonight.”
Saruhiko looked startled, then narrowed his eyes, deciding how much Yata meant it.
Yata stared back.
Saruhiko weighed vegetables against chastity and clicked his tongue. “Fine.”
He’d almost lost Saruhiko.
Yata didn’t like to think of himself as weak or clingy, but he’d lost so much. Saruhiko, Totsuka, Mikoto, HOMRA for a while, almost Anna, and his red aura and power. He wasn’t going to lose Saruhiko again.
“Stop glaring,” Saruhiko chided, annoyed, from the hospital bed.
He’d lost a lot of blood in the fight with Sukuna and Yata knew a line of stitches ran up the side of his leg. “Shut up, Monkey.” You nearly died without me ever knowing.
Saruhiko stared but settled back comfortably.
They were together again, found instead of lost.
His entire childhood had been a long line of broken things, things that guy had burned, things he’d torn apart and unraveled and left as gifts to his only child. Saruhiko had never had anything he cared about that had ever lasted whole.
Misaki was different. Misaki was his friend, and he’d left when that guy had come. He’d left and hadn’t been just another broken thing.
Saruhiko didn’t know why he thought it would last. He’d wanted to destroy the world with Yata, remake it, and somehow along the way, they’d taken fire to each other and broken everything.
It’s past midnight. Yata can’t sleep. He tosses and turns on the pillow, rolls over, huffs a sigh, trying to ignore the empty space where Saruhiko used to sleep, trying to ignore the quietness in their little place.
Saruhiko has always been quiet, but somehow it never felt like this.
Yata clenches his fists and buries his face in the pillow, trying to ignore the hot, tight feeling in his chest. Saruhiko betrayed them (him), left them (him). He isn’t coming back.
The room is empty of anyone but Yata. There’s no one there to mock or watch him cry.