Disclaimer: I do not own Gravitation or the characters Eiri Yuki or Shindou Shuichi, I'm just taking them out to play without profit in the making.
Morpheus
It's going to be one of those nights, Eiri can tell, as his dreams take a turn for the worse.
He can always tell when the nightmare begins, having relived it time and time again courtesy of his subconsciousness, but there's no stopping it once the wheels start rolling. Therapy and time have done their part to fend off the trauma but it is like trying to clean off muck from centuries-old oil paintings – you would have to wipe away the original picture underneath the soot as well to be rid of it all.
Again and again, Kitazawa's words reach his ears, slurred and laced with too much cheap booze. 10 dollars exchange hands, the wine bottle shatters on the floor and gathers up again and shatters and gathers and Eiri cannot breathe, cannot move, surely he will suffocate from the weight crushing his chest in before they will hurt him... But no, hands are reaching out to him, grasping his shoulders and jostling him, grabbing at his clothes, and he still can't move...
"Eiri?"
... Hands on his shirt's lapels, tugging, no please, not this again, let his heart not break again with a gunshot...
"Eiri! Eiri, wake up!"
The hands that reach out to him are not the rough, glove-like hands of the thug – they are small and warm and do not pry into his clothes uninvited. One is resting on the curve of his jaw, the other one on his shoulder. Eiri still cannot move, but his eyes must be open because he can see the ceiling and make out the irritating small stain of pink that Shuichi's hair colouring experiments have left there.
"You we're having nightmares again, Eiri." If he could move or talk, the writer would snap something scathing at his partner but his chest still feels like it's going to cave in.
"Just breathe, just keep on breathing, it's going to ease up soon," Shuichi whispers and obstructs his inspection of the pink spatter by gazing into his eyes. Small fingers move to his temples and begin stroking the sensitive soft spots, and for the moment Eiri doesn't really mind not being able to snap back.
He concentrates on trying to curl his toes to activate his muscles and tries to keep calm and concentrate on Shuichi's stream of one-sided conversation. They both know from previous experience that Eiri having panic attack on top of sleep paralysis is not something pretty and this damned feeling of helplessness triggers it all too easily.
Curl, goddamn toes. Curl.
Eiri's starting to shiver by the time his reluctant body finally wakes up enough to allow him movement and resting his back against Shuichi's warm, lithe chest here in the darkness is not a shame even on Eiri's rigidly proud standards. The singer can be relied upon not to pry for details or attempt intimacies at this point, and when Eiri gets up for a shower Shuichi does not even ask to accompany him.
Tact from Shindou Shuichi, Eiri muses sardonically, and all it takes is mutual trauma at the hands of strangers. The hot water on his skin is a blessing of purification, and when Eiri steps out of the shower he finally feels like a person again. The sheets have been changed and a clean pair of pyjamas has been laid out for him – sometimes Eiri wonders where all this surprising thoughtfulness truly comes from. Oh, Shuichi has more empathy for other people than is good for him, but his ways of manifesting it are more than often...
Eiri looks up from the buttons of his navy pyjama top to find a can of cold beer presented to him – any sensible person would serve tea to a stressed lover, but perhaps it is to Shuichi's credit that he discards such pretence and embraces the writer's idiosyncrasies, he muses as he pops the tab and drinks deep. The brat has already slipped under the covers, burrowing into the blankets as if he had no idea what Eiri woke up from thirty minutes ago. But he knows, oh, he knows, and still there was no small-hearted cheap pity in those luminous violet eyes when they bore into his, only understanding.
He doesn't want me for money or sex. He just wishes to be close to me. Eiri's own words, said seemingly aeons ago, and still so very true. Could it be... love?
Love, Eiri decides as he pulls the blanket over himself and spoons against Shuichi's back, has a tendency to shape the mundane and the frightening into tolerable and endearing and one should consider a man wary of its power and presence cautious and wise.
Cautious, wise and a damnable fool, he thinks to himself as he buries his nose in pink hair the exact shade of the spatter in the ceiling.