The weather had moved into the rains of spring, but the chill of winter lingered in the night, making the air cool around Kazuma's face as he slept. The walls were too thin to keep much of the cold from seeping inside, and the soft patter of rain, just a few steps warmer than the harsh scattering of hail, sounded on the roof, and against the windows. Warm as he was beneath the thick quilt, Kazuma often found he could not sleep on nights like these. Were he a less healthy man, he might perhaps have some old injury to blame, some old broken bone resenting the weather. As it was, it seemed he could only blame some wound in his heart or mind aching for the cold, but those sort of poetics had never appealed to him much.
It was best not to lie in bed awake, he had always thought. Too much time spent alert in bed would trick your body, and then you'd never get a proper night's rest again. He had a few books and newspapers in the sitting room that had been calling for his attention lately; time spent with the recent headlines would have him weary enough quickly. Kazuma rose from bed, shivering just enough to let the chill know that he recognized its existence, and quietly moved from his bedroom to walk in the wrong direction.
He'd begun to wonder a few years ago if it was no longer appropriate for him to do things like this. When Kyou was small, but old enough to insist that he was far too grown-up to share a room with his shishou, Kazuma had rarely gone more than a night or two without turning the other way down the hall, coming to stand before the other door, and sliding it open just enough to see. The windows in that room were high and only let in thin streams of light on the clearest night. Sometimes it would take him a quarter of an hour of staring, eyes adjusting to the darkness, to catch the rise and fall of Kyou's chest. He had found that on nights when the moon was clearer, he would linger even longer.
Kyou did not seem too affected by the cool air. Perhaps Kazuma was simply getting old. The boy's blanket was kicked sideways so that only one corner hung over his chest and stomach. His limbs were bare and sprawled at angles. Kyou battled in his sleep, too, it seemed. One hand was curled into a fist around an edge of the blanket, holding tightly even as the boy slept. His hand was paler now than it had been a few months ago, before the winter had drained away the sun's color. There were calluses on his palms, and his skin was dry and cracked at the knuckles partly from training, although more from the share of chores that he growled at daily. It had been some weeks perhaps, or maybe months, since Kazuma had touched Kyou's hands with his own, but he could clearly remember the youth and strength that lurked in his bones.
Kyou never would wake when Kazuma would watch him, and for that, he was glad. It felt like it would be hard to explain his presence, when he knew that really he would need no explanation at all. Kyou would smile in that sleepy way, making him look like a child again, and reassure his strange old shishou that everything was fine. Unless, of course, it wasn't.
His grandfather's hand had been the color of old parchment. He had never touched it, but he would have guessed it to feel the same. But then, perhaps it would be smooth from lack of work, from lack of anything.
Kazuma's eyes caught on the muscles in Kyou's thigh, the fluidity of the way tendon slid down into bone beneath the skin. He could not see the scars on Kyou's knees from a childhood of scrapes and falls, but the feel of them beneath his fingers came with only the slightest beckoning of memory. He was so young yet. Kazuma let out his breath, the one he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and slid the door shut without a sound.
He spent about an hour in the sitting room staring at the same headline, then returned to bed to sleep, despite the cold.