Title: Hear This Prayer
Character/Pairing/Group: Crow/Yuusei
Prompt: #40: That One Lie
Rating: PG? Just to be safe?
Genre: Angst/Romance
Pairing: Crow/Yuusei, or more correctly, Crow -- Yuusei
Summary: Crow is always honest. Right?
Notes: Title from the Cher single "Song for the Lonely." Lyrics are kinda-sorta relevant, if you really care enough to look them up.
Crow never lied. He prided himself on it, in fact – on not glossing, gilding, bending, stretching, twisting, or otherwise changing the truth into something it was not. At most he was guilty of the occasional exaggeration, which was the main reason Ushio had been willing to co-sign a loan for Crow to start his own business.
He was the ultimate contradiction: an honest thief. It had gained him a lot of favour with the people who, conversely, should have been the wariest; Aki's parents trusted him to get her home safely and on time when she visited at the garage, Security had sped him through tracker-disabling instead of putting him on probation after the new Domino legal system got underway, and even his customers – the people he would most have expected to shy away after their seventeen years of being bombarded by marker propaganda – were willing to invite him into their homes or back offices for a glass of water after he finished unloading. Maybe it was his smile; maybe it was his size; maybe it was historical proof, or something else entirely. Whatever the reason, people simply didn't question whether or not he was telling the truth, and he repaid them by being constantly truthful.
Yuusei never lied either. He had a habit of omitting portions of the truth (even Crow still wasn't entirely sure where Yuusei'd gotten some of the parts for Aki's D-wheel – they couldn't be taken from a junkyard, but there certainly weren't any receipts), and there were times when he'd change the subject rather than answer a direct question, but as far as Crow knew, Yuusei never actually lied. It was the main reason Crow had asked Yuusei to work with him – Crow was fast at maths and found bookkeeping incredibly easy (except for the part where he could never seem to do more than break even), but Yuusei was better at keeping an inventory, and that, Crow had learned early on, was crucial to being reliable.
They worked well together. They were friends. Crow knew Yuusei almost better than he knew himself, and he was fairly certain Yuusei could say the same about him. They were honest. Crow had never told Yuusei a lie, even when it would have been in his better interest to do so; Yuusei had returned the favour.
"Crow, be honest . . . do you love him?"
It was amazing how few words it took to tell that one lie.