Kanda opened his eyes, and for a moment lay perfectly still, basking uncomfortably in the disorientation of a sudden awakening. For just a moment, he closed his eyes again seeking to ground himself in something temporal, something far from the realm of his dreams.
It was night. He was in bed, the sheets beneath him cool and fresh, and the stars were still out. The whistle of wind.
The gentle creep of footsteps.
He opened his eyes, and was immediately blinded by a jagged spear of light as his door cracked open, careful hands pushing it open as slowly as possible to avoid making a sound.
Kanda braced himself upright, watching through the fan of his fingers as Alma slipped through, feline in his silent grace, the details of his silhouette detailed only by the sliver of slatted light coming through the door and the soft, indistinct glow of the moon.
Kanda felt as though he had departed one dream only to step into another.
Alma was barefoot, wearing soft pajama pants and a plain shirt with his uniform coat on top— an incongruous look. He seemed to have thrown it over himself as an afterthought, something to stave off the persistent cold of the night as he roamed the halls. A pity that afterthought hadn't made way to include socks or shoes. His feet were probably freezing.
His expression was harder to make out, half-cast in darkness. It wasn't hard for Kanda to imagine, though, what that expression might be; wide eyes, a worried mouth, browline knit into a hesitant set. Ashamed, yet infinitely hopeful.
"If you're going to sneak into my room, at least shut the goddamn door behind you," he said, voice rough with sleep.
Alma froze, caught by surprise. He hadn't expected to wake Kanda, though he should've known better. He'd never quite been able to get a knack for getting the drop on Kanda, despite nine years' worth of wasted attempts. After a beat, he complied sheepishly. The door swung shut with a gentle click, leaving them alone in the soft, shadowy darkness.
"Not gonna to tell me to go back to bed?"
Although Alma phrased the question as if were challenge, there was no bite to it. He knew this was an interruption— and only wanted to know if it was a welcome one. As if Kanda could possibly turn Alma away.
Kanda snorted, bracing his head with one hand as he fought to shake the drowsy music of sleep from his system. It was the middle of the night, and Alma was here, pressing into Kanda's room. Wake up. Focus.
"Like that's stopped you before," Kanda said, blinking several times in succession just to refresh his system. "Stubborn ass."
"Pot, kettle, black," Alma bit back, and though his words were cut to insult, his relief was betrayed by the undercurrent of an unsteady sigh. Kanda could hear the smile seeping in his voice, though he couldn't see it. One of Kanda's favorite kinds of smiles, too; a soft curve of a thing that always seemed to communicate the subtle suggestion of a kiss. "Hey, admit it, you're glad to see me."
"It's the middle of the night. I can't see you at all," Kanda huffed, temper growing thin. He gestured grandly around the pitch black room with to punctuate his point. Alma hummed in response.
"Then maybe I should come a little closer."
Alma's silhouette warped and shifted, padding across the room gently until he was immediate. The details of his body sketched themselves in; the gooseflesh spreading across his neck, the soft tuft of his bedhead, the glint of his eyes. Kanda shifted, drawing the sheets away from his body, and Alma took advantage to plant one knee firmly on Kanda's mattress and sidle into bed next to him. His thigh slid against Kanda's, an invasion of personal space so casual in nature that Kanda's first instinct was to tense up.
"I don't remember inviting you into my bed," Kanda said, tone clipped. Still, he edged back against the mattress, moving to accommodate Alma rather than refute him. Apparently, Alma had ditched the coat before reaching Kanda's bed, because his arm was bare where it brushed against Kanda's. His skin was warm. Soft. The soft vibrations of Alma's laughter was translated from between their bodies like an electrical current.
Beautiful.
"Well, you can go ahead and try kicking me out, if you want," Alma said, sounding so strangely out of breath. He seemed to be chasing Kanda's warmth, desperately pressing himself into every place their bodies intersected, agonized by the threat of separation. "But I have it on good authority that I'm a stubborn ass."
His laughter died out, and a silence came down between them. The current, however, did not halt. Kanda frowned, hands sliding down Alma's shoulder to grip him by his forearm. There was a persistent tremor, there; one possessing the entirety of Alma's body.
It was cold, but not that cold. Kanda's irritation dissipated as quickly as it had risen.
Of course there was something wrong. Kanda had been an idiot not to suspect it from the start.
"You were having a bad dream," Kanda said, blank. He shifted against Alma's side, fingers trailing gently down the length of his arm to meet curve of his wrist. Alma's pulse jumped beneath Kanda's fingers, body warm and flush— not to the point of fever, thankfully.
"Was I?" Alma took hold of Kanda's busy fingers, tangling them lazily with his own. He ran his nails lightly over Kanda's knuckles.
Kanda pinched him and said, "Alma."
"I'm already over it," Alma murmured. There was a bitter taste to his words, and a hard set to his face. He'd never been a particularly good liar, too honest and too raw in his emotions. On a protective impulse, Kanda reached around Alma to wrap him in an embrace, and Alma responded to it desperately, curling up against Kanda's body. "I just needed to see you, okay? I'm fine, now. It's fine."
"It's fine," Kanda intoned, testing the words. Alma slung his legs over Kanda's hips as if to straddle him, aligning the both of them so that they were sitting chest-to-chest, as close as two people could possibly come. Kanda could have almost interpreted the motion as sexual, had it not been for the way Alma buried his face into the crook of Kanda's neck. There was nothing sexy about this, about the way he shivered and shook with real, palpable fear.
"You always run so hot, Yuu." Alma's hands wandered around to grip at Kanda's shoulders. "It's freezing tonight, but you're still so hot. Why is that?"
Kanda said nothing, knowing that if he waited long enough, Alma would continue. Alma couldn't bear any kind of silence for too long, especially while his own thoughts were brimming with such explosive force. His nails were digging into Kanda's skin, tight enough to be painful, but not so much that Kanda felt obligated to shake him free.
"Do you remember," Alma went on, speaking against the column of Kanda's neck, "waiting between regenerations? I remember... lying on the ground, feeling my body weave itself back together. Muscles knitting back— back over sinew, over bone. Being remade, and then broken again. Yuu. Yuu, the pain, the pain was..."
Alma trailed off, lips pursing into a hard line. Kanda said nothing, still. He stared over Alma's back, watching the moonlight shudder over the surface of the door.
The pain, he knew, was indescribable.
Alma turned his head slightly, speaking now against the point where Kanda's shoulder met his back, breath unsettling the long fall of Kanda's hair.
"I would think of you, then. Think of how the same thing was happening to you, too, somewhere else. It made me so, so mad. But it also made me feel a little less lonely. Because someone was sharing my pain. Even now."
Kanda wondered if he ought to find that selfish. In the end, it hardly mattered. He reached up to touch Alma's hair, still mussed with sleep. He carded it back, and Alma released a breath, like Kanda's touch was a balm soothing him of some great, intolerable pain.
"There's no one else like me, Yuu. No one but you. We're the same."
Alma shifted against Kanda, restless, squeezing his thighs to box and bracket Kanda into this desperate, needy embrace. The tremor of rage, which Kanda had first misinterpreted as one of fear, had returned in full force. White-hot fury was clawing its way up from marrow of Alma's bones. It was a sick, raw, never-resting thing. It was shaking off of Alma like dust. Like ashes.
"We should have burned them for what they did. I should have..."
Kanda scratched likely at the back of Alma's neck, and Alma braced himself against Kanda's body, overcome with emotion.
"I would die for you, Yuu," he said, speaking in a rush. His voice was wrung tight; he sounded like he was barely containing the overwhelming impulse to cry. "I would kill for you."
Alma's weight shifted, abrupt. Alma pushed himself back, leaning up so that their eyes might find each other in the darkness. Alma's eyes were glistening brighter and brighter, glassing over with the tears he would not shed until he could no longer control himself.
He ducked back in, just for a moment, to kiss Kanda flush on the bottom lip. Shivery slow.
"I hope you understand what I'm saying," Alma licked his lips and swallowed. He took a deep, stuttering breath. "How much I love you. In love, I mean."
They watched each other for a long moment, during which Kanda could not speak. All the same, something in his chest was bursting. It filled him with warmth, no, something more than warmth. Fire. Beautiful, heaven-sent, destructive fire. Alma worried at his lower lip with his teeth, searching Kanda's eyes for the answer he could not find in his lips.
Kanda flexed his shoulders and threaded his fingers through Alma's hair. He kissed him, slowly, and against Alma's lips with his eyes closed, Kanda said, "Okay."
Alma laughed brokenly and kissed Kanda again, brief. His bottom lip trembled against Kanda's. Alma tasted like cardamon and cream and, faintly, copper, like maybe he'd been bleeding.
"Okay?" Alma repeated, like Kanda had said something both very funny and very sad, which was maybe actually the case. "I want you to understand. I need you to understand what I'm saying. I love you. I would do anything, Yuu. Anything I had to."
Anything for me, or anything for us? Kanda wondered. He didn't bother saying it out loud, though. This was Alma. There was no way in hell he'd understand the difference.
"I know that," Kanda said instead, rough, open. Speaking against Alma's lips felt a lot like kissing, and so he returned to that for a moment; the liquid glide of tongue, the stir of loving heat. Alma squirmed against it, gasping when Kanda released his lips. "I know, and I'm telling you... okay."
"Don't tell me okay," Alma all but begged, clutching at Kanda's shoulders. Kanda angled his face away, temporarily fraught with shame. "Tell me you love me back."
"I do."
Alma buried his face into the crook of Kanda's neck, shaking his head rapidly.
"The whole thing, Yuu. Please."
Awkwardly, tentatively, Kanda put his hands on the small of Alma's back. Alma's voice sounded usually high and breakable. It reminded Kanda a lot of the way Alma used to beg and whine as a kid, asking Kanda to play with him or whinging after the scientists for special little privileges. Light and warbling and childish.
Childish. That was definitely an interesting adjective to ascribe to Alma. What was more interesting was that the more he thought about it, the more Kanda thought it to be completely true. Someone who didn't know Alma as well might have called it regression, but Kanda knew better. Regression implied a return to a previous state; Alma had no previous state. He hadn't changed at all, not from the day Kanda had first seen his face and touched his hand. He was still possessed by the same bouts of fearful rage, the same moodiness, and the same violent fits of happiness. In the last nine years, he'd discovered no new joys or passions; he was paralyzed in the only habits he knew. For Alma, loving Kanda— loving Yuu— was his only option.
Love justified his continued survival.
"I love you, Alma," Kanda said. Mechanistically. Fatalistically. Masochistically.
"Say it again," Alma said, breath caught. And so Kanda did. It hurt. It hurt to say it, not because it was a lie, but because it was true; the only thing Kanda was certain of in his whole fucking life.
Alma drew his head back to look directly at Kanda. He couldn't hold himself back from tears for any longer; they were streaming down his face openly, now, diamonds in the dark. Normally, this sort of thing would've made Kanda vaguely uncomfortable, but that night, he felt he could handle it. Kanda put his hand on Alma's cheek, cupping it gently. Alma all but collapsed into the touch.
Alma's had been the first face Kanda had seen. the first hand he'd touched. It had been then, in that first touch, that he'd staked his claim on Kanda. They were irreparably intertwined and bound together like two halves of an atom right before division. Their separation now would spell chaos and destruction.
Alma would certainly make sure of it, in any case.
"Think it's too late for us to run away?" Alma said. His voice broke on the last syllable. The sound drove the stake in Kanda's heart a few centimeters deeper.
"Don't be ridiculous," Kanda said, relieved he sounded more like himself than he felt. He reassured Alma by massaging a soft circle against his back. "Where the hell would we go?"
"I don't know," Alma sniffed, laughing again. It was a real laugh this time. That was nice. "Somewhere nice. Somewhere we can be together."
"We're already together, stupid."
Alma smacked Kanda on the shoulder. Despite that, Kanda's response actually seemed to satisfy him, at least a little. He immediately replaced his slap for his head, curling back up against Kanda, breathing in the familiar scent of him.
"You know what I mean. Somewhere with just the two of us. Somewhere without the war."
Somewhere without the world, you mean, Kanda thought. The place you want to run to, Alma— the place with only us— it doesn't exist. We'd be running forever.
Kanda wasn't smart, but he was smart enough to know there was a whole world out there, one bigger than the both of them. Alma might want to make his life one room stacked with the things he liked best, but Kanda couldn't bear to commit himself to such a prison.
Not even a prison so full of loving echoes.
Not while he remembered her, and her love of the world, and that there was freedom to be found there, somewhere.
Kanda pressed a controlled kiss to the curve of Alma's neck and moved to his ear, tasting the sweat beaded there.
Alma, you won't be satisfied until we're fucking living inside of one another.
"We should have burned them," Alma breathed. He put his lips against Kanda's, kissing absently and without purpose. He was a near-yet-far thing. He was flush and hot in Kanda's lap, and he was a thousand miles away; somewhere Kanda could not hope to reach him, deep in a dark daydream somewhere beyond the veil of tears. "We should've burned this all, burned this all to the ground..."
"Well, there'd be nothing left for us if we did," Kanda said, low, but not unkind. Alma's teeth grazed over the corner of his mouth, and he was silenced for a moment while Alma explored the shape and texture of his lower lip. "It's fine. Alright? It's... it's fine."
Tomorrow, they would pick up their Innocence and button up their uniforms and it would be fine, everything, and they would stagger forwards on decimated legs, and their bruises would fade upon forming, and they would grateful to the merciful God that overlooked their anathema and allowed them to suffer together and not alone.
"We're the same," Alma said, firm, not a question.
Kanda nodded, knowing it wasn't true, knowing he'd never have the words or the will to explain to Alma how he'd gotten something so simple so very wrong.
"You love me back," Alma said. He twined his arms around Kanda's neck and held them there, looking half-crazed with lovestruck hope.
"Yes," Kanda replied, because he'd never been given the choice not to love Alma. Alma had been a kindness in a cold place, but never, ever a choice.
"Okay," Alma said. He smiled, big and broken. Wiped at his tears with his hands. "Okay. Then let's go to bed."
Kanda kissed Alma, long and deep and needy, hating, hating, hating, but with so much love, so much love.
They slept like men already dead.