After Peerless leaves them—leaves Ritsuka with a glare so ostentatiously vile it was probably in admiration, Soubi with nothing, as though even the post-battle pleasantries could be sent to fighter through sacrifice—Soubi kisses Ritsuka behind his ears. Ritsuka sputters. Soubi kisses him again to interrupt the sputtering, stands, takes his wrist, and begins a lecture about technique, clods of slush flying whenever he feels strongly about a metaphor; the low thrum of his voice carries Ritsuka through the snow-veiled streets and comfortable thoughts about food. They return home, remove their boots. There are still some noodles, to Ritsuka's relief. And then Soubi goes to the wall by the kitchen, raises his hands above his head, lays his palms flat against the worn stucco, and stops moving, other than the slow work of his lungs.
Magic battlegrounds have become ordinary. Face enough gravity distortion, or whips built from skeins of stars, and you learn to survive longer than the awe. Soubi always has new methods of bewildering Ritsuka ready, though, plucking them from that weird purple overcoat for all Ritsuka knows. He tries bumping Soubi with the bottle of tonkotsu mix. "What are you doing?"
"I'm tired. You aren't, so you should eat."
"You should sleep," Ritsuka says. His mental eye helpfully corrects the scene by inserting a pillow under Soubi's chin. "Horizontally! On your bed."
"Your stomach's rumbling like a cat," Soubi says.
The same tone could have been used on their robovac. Reaching for Soubi's shoulder, Ritsuka finds himself stymied by the lack of the cooperation he never realized Soubi was granting, every time he'd managed before. The same principle holds for conversations; after Soubi progresses from verbal to nonverbal non-answers, Ritsuka gets the sense that of the two walls he's facing, the painted one will peel away first. He could employ other tactics, like tickling or jumping, although with his promised growth spurt AWOL between You have to catch up to Yuiko by Setsubun! and My Ritsuka never drank milk, grabbing both of Soubi's hands seems as feasible as a double-pump dunk.
He tries, "I'll wash the dishes if you eat too," because he should, but he's just fanning his own hunger. Soubi mostly eats as a distraction: for others.
Ritsuka takes dinner into his room, and closes the door.
From the ground their new building is an eyesore, victim of an architect born in the wrong era to build the arrow loops and European pinnacles she really wanted. Ritsuka likes the spaces she unintentionally created instead: a canopied garden fenced by rain barrels, an alleyway through which frosted shapes pass like ghosts.
He had struggled to explain it to Soubi once, on the way to some Septimal Moon challenge or another. The way his camera never captured the spreading of light. Soubi had nodded, breathing a warm cloud of smoke over Ritsuka's face as he leaned in and pinched his cheek. "Ritsuka is very possessive," Soubi'd said, "he can't share the things he owns with the lens," before the earnest line of his lips gave up. Soubi's sense of humor in the wild, Ritsuka had thought, with exasperation, feeling—
That's the thing about Soubi. Whether Soubi makes him happy, which his most recent therapist has all-but-begged him to confirm or deny to "progress", is whether having a brother makes him happy, or magic makes him happy. They keep him up at night, speckled with goosebumps, yet they fill him with something so ineffably validating that he can fall asleep thinking about Seimei cradling him in toddler photos, Seimei lean and already prickly, brushing the edge of Ritsuka's ear like a knife; all the power bound in a spell field, released or swallowed at a word; the ring of bandages around Soubi's throat. Storybook scars, thornily closed. Ritsuka, Hashimoto-sensei might equally have asked, is happiness the permanent feeling of wanting to hold your hand over your mouth?
In an overheard call, Ritsu had yelled at Soubi The sacrifice designs the fighter to his will! It is dysfunctionally perverse for a blank fighter to design his sacrifice. But Ritsuka is what he remembers, and so there's a lot of Soubi in whatever Ritsuka is, too.
That Ritsuka has to fit in the spaces Soubi creates, right?
He empties his soup bowl.
It's nearly nightfall. Next to the kitchen Soubi's figure divides, salmon where the narrow window above the sofa casts light over it and murky where it does not. His hands are still up, chevrons of color over his knuckles, his wrists no longer steady with effort. It strikes Ritsuka, as he picks his way across the room, that Soubi hadn't shed his coat in his hurry to hurt himself in the most subdued way possible.
Ritsuka says, "If I order you to answer me, will you?"
That lifts a few strands of hair at the lit side of Soubi's mouth. "Order me."
"I've given you at least five orders not to lie or omit anything, and you do it anyway!" Ritsuka says, but he wraps his arms around Soubi's waist nonetheless and considers the puzzle in its wound-up state. His hands find Soubi's ribs beneath his coat lining and shirt, ridge by trough by ridge. He'd thought Soubi would be warm to the touch—the heater is doing its creaky best—but this is feverish, as though the fire in Peerless' field had left its heat residue under Soubi's skin. Ritsuka inhales, lets go of Soubi, touches his nose to Soubi's coat while he forces himself to edit the question particle and justification Soubi does not need out of his sentences. He says, "Get off this wall. Answer my questions."
Soubi drops to his feet like a folding chair: a mess of limbs that somehow unfurls itself into a clean kneeling figure facing him, back starkly straight.
"Would you have taken your boots off if we didn't have carpet?"
"No."
"Did Peerless do something to you when we fought?"
"No."
"Were you standing here because of the battle, though?"
"It reminded me. I wanted," Soubi says. The pause sounds honest. He swipes at his hair. Ritsuka peers at the half-revealed face, which after the ramen bowl and darkening sky he's been staring at for most of the last hour, is startlingly beautiful again. He carefully cusps Soubi's chin in his hands while he waits.
"I wanted you to use me, so I would feel safe."
"From," Ritsuka starts, but the problem isn't safe from. If nothing else the piercing incident must have shown Soubi, vividly, that Ritsuka would never be able to tear him open in that particular way. He doubts Ritsu ever raised a match for Soubi within the enclosure of a spell arena, either.
He recalls Soubi crashing through the Aoyagi door one evening, electricity bounding around him, how he'd vaulted onto Ritsuka in his bed and clutched him so insistently he feared both smothering and electrocution (to top a death by awful awareness of Soubi's body jutting into his); Soubi saying I betrayed you. Ritsuka hadn't been hurt by him, then, or by much worse than Soubi's superficially manipulative demands for kisses.
He also recalls Mikado saying Nisei was thrilled to be used on me by Seimei, and abruptly two things leap out at him: thrilled to be used, first, with a clarity that makes him swallow to have Soubi bent before him; and then the uses to which one could become accustomed, given a director without Ritsuka's nausea at violence.
Ritsuka says, tentatively, "You wanted to be safe for me?"
"You must be able to do anything to me, to know that I will do anything for you," Soubi whispers. His cheekbones are brilliantly hot under Ritsuka's palms. "A gate blocks whoever doesn't have the key. You have it, and so it must open only for you. Please don't let me break a promise ever again—"
Soubi has collapsed into Ritsuka, the knees of Ritsuka's pants pleating in his fingers. He is likely not dry-eyed; Ritsuka tucks his own hands into Soubi's hair and pulls Soubi's nose up to his collar, so he doesn't have to see. There is magic leaking from Soubi in quantities that may short out the neighborhood.
"Ritsuka," Soubi says, "please show me you won't—"
Ritsuka's mind furnishes the image of his mother tying him to a chair: his gut now churns with the kind of power she thought would ruin him. He wants his tail to lie primly around his hips, and to hold his hand over his mouth. Instead he traces over the nape of Soubi's neck, the closed eyelids, the crenellated links of his spine, the hot thighs as Soubi begins to rock back and forth, too deliberately for it to be misery. The marked hollows of his throat. Under Ritsuka's touch, Soubi's breaths feel like water surging from a cracked dam, until Ritsuka applies enough pressure to stop their escape altogether. Soubi makes a noise like he does not miss the air.
Ritsuka kisses Soubi on the crown of his head, and feels a spell-field bloom.
"Go stand against the wall, dummy, until I decide what to do with you," Ritsuka says.
A/N: All feedback appreciated.