Standard disclaimers apply!
Kanda healed. There was little better way to describe the concept; that he was hurt—bleeding, burned, smelling a little like salt and rage—and then he wasn't. Not instantaneous, but quick enough to be noticeable. Just a little something (a frightening, delicious something) Lavi picked up after so many years of waltzing smack into the battlefield, the so-called eye of the storm, with him. Side by side, blow by blow—and of course the bitter one got over the hits the fastest.
So Lavi—he didn't quite get why he did it. The hurting, that is. With the candles and rough-torn fingernails, pushing on clothing, pulling (peeling?) on skin, reluctant pants turned 'What are you doing, idiot?' where the last word came out a shudder. Like palms over splintered wood, almost. As in, it caught.
See, Kanda was what he quietly called beautiful. And when Lavi said it, he meant beautiful, fascinating-that he only needed a spare glance to memorize all the tiny, useless details of his face, but he ended up using as much time as he could steal because he liked it better that way. 'Beautiful' applied to Kanda the way 'handsome' applied to a woman. It was more mature, maybe even more complimentary, than if used in the conventional sense.
And, yeah, he hurt. He hurt Kanda. He wasn't ashamed to admit it (figures that the Bookman instinct took over that way), though sometimes, after the fact was done and Kanda's beautiful-fascinating-handsome skin wasn't quite ready to mend itself, his lips twisted in dissatisfaction.
It was vaguely unsettling, really, when he lay in catatonia after Kanda had rolled over and left, and the first thought he could manually string together was, 'ya know, I think you're actually trying to make him ugly.' Because—maybe?—he was. No one wanted to make love to lips that'd been torn by someone else's teeth. They didn't want to touch or look at shoulders and hips scored in fives. Well, Lavi. He did; but no one else would, and he supposed that was what he relied on.
The shallowness of others, and that Kanda would heal.
Always.
And then, whenever he had the luck to corner Kanda next, Lavi could grin so winningly that even the corner of his mouth twitched upward; pant and moan and feel his heart go faster than his blood could keep up; challenge the law that bodies could only get so close.
He could bruise his hands (they were smaller than Kanda's-and why did he notice that?) on his hips and no one else would take him. Sometimes Kanda even did it back, to his eternal chagrin, because Kanda only let him do things he liked—and oh, god, Kanda liked so much—and things he didn't like, Kanda dealt back in doubles.
"You know, Yuu," Lavi muttered, and he investigated the handprints tinting his thighs with practised deliberation, "I don't think you realize the importance of not breaking me."
There, again, Kanda's mouth turned upwards. Just a little, there at the edges, a sort-of-real, almost-psychotic smile. You could barely see it. And he said, "It'll heal."
You guys might recognize this from the dgm kinkmeme on livejournal. I found it on my harddrive again a few days ago and decided to give it a little polish and put it up on here, since I've been disgustingly inactive with my DGM fanfiction lately.
—