The idea for this bit me one day. And it's been a while since I've had some free time, so I decided to sit down and pound it out. Inspired by the 42 Days Challenge numero tres. Written while listening to songs that make me ridiculously happy, strangely enough.
Warnings: Language, Karot's usual Burial-Era Hakkai-And-Gojyo ensues
Gojyo forgot his keys. Of all things, that afternoon Gojyo had forgotten to grab his keys. After a good twenty minutes of circling the house and pounding on the door, he had resigned himself to the fact that Hakkai was indeed out. Gojyo had plunked down on the stoop, leaning against the door with both spine and skull, and sat waiting and staring into the sky.
Gojyo forgot his keys. Gojyo also forgot his watch. And his ambition. He could have gone out again, walked back into town and won dinner off of someone else. He could have found a lovely lady and treated her to a nice, great, mind-blowing time. But here Gojyo sits, locked out of his own house, for some amount of time he has been unable to measure. All Gojyo knows is that the sky is darkening, slowly but surely, even though the heat of summer yet hangs heavy and oppressive from the trees.
Then, by and by, taking his sweet time, Hakkai walks into view. His arms are empty except for a thin sheaf of papers tucked against his hip. When he sees Gojyo, he waves.
"What are you doing out here, Gojyo-san?" asks Hakkai, reaching into his pocket. When the hand returns, a reassuring glint of metal instantly brightens Gojyo's mood.
"Enjoying the humidity," Gojyo responds, grinning wryly. He scrambles out of the way so that Hakkai might open the door, and follows the brunette inside.
Hakkai sets the papers down on the small card table they have been using as a dining room, immediately heading for the kitchen. Once he reaches the coffee machine, he smiles and picks up the keyring on the counter beside it. "Did you forget something?" he asks, tossing the item to Gojyo. The redhead catches it and shoves it into his pocket with a bit of a huff. Hakkai continues on, grabbing a bag of carrots from the refrigerator. "I'm sorry the conference ran long, but, well, I stumbled onto a very important topic with my last parent. I assume you have yet to eat, Gojyo-san."
"Right you are," Gojyo responds, taking a seat at the card table and eyeing the top sheet of paper Hakkai set upon it. Beside the familiar, measured strokes of Hakkai's writing is a decidedly more feminine hand. "It must have been a hell of a talk," he comments, curiosity piqued.
Hakkai smiles a bit. "Yes, to put it your way." He grabs a knife and begins skinning carrots into the sink. "You do know June-san, don't you?" he asks, deftly handling the blade.
Gojyo nods with a grin, his mind jumping miles ahead of the conversation. "Pretty thing. Brunette, right?" He can practically feel the leer falling off of his face. "You spent hours talking to her? You beast."
The rhythm of Hakkai's chopping falters. His smile is lovely and his eyes are closed. "Are you implying that I might be so unprofessional as to engage in physical relations with the parent of one of my students?" he asks, slowly and deliberately, though not without a reflexive chuckle at the end.
Gojyo's eyes are on the paper and he only hears the laughter. He laughs as well, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Hey, if you've got the opportunity, right? I was wondering when you'd stop being such a cold fish so you could come out with me. I mean, you're insane at poker and you know all the girls talk about you. It's about time you took advantage of it."
"Ah." Hakkai nods and resumes chopping a carrot, his pace measured as he severs piece after piece from the whole. "A cold fish?" he repeats.
Gojyo grins, making a show of examining the handwriting he cannot read. "No offense or nothin' but, yeah! I mean, you gotta stop mopin' sometime and get back on the field. Live in the present. Tang ain't a forever-type offer."
Hakkai's knuckles are white as his hand rocks against the cutting board, edging his fingers closer and closer to the blade. "Gojyo, this is an honest opinion, and you may disregard it as you please. You despicable hypocrite. You damnable roach, you try to talk to me about living in the present?"
Gojyo is taken aback, and it is a while before he responds. "Geez, Hakkai, I was just saying…"
"Saying nothing. How dare you. You haven't got the right to assume I am anything like you because you can't presume to know me. And you haven't got the right to just brush off the better part of my life, maybe even the best part of my life, hah, thanks to the machinations of your own perverted brain. Live in the present, you say? How can you tell me that when you've said the same things about blood as I?" As Hakkai speaks, his voice raises in volume, but not speed or pitch.
"That's completely different!" Gojyo snarls, unthinking. He is tensed, ready to fight, temperature rising with summer night and personal fury. "You can always find another girl to fuck. I had one childhood, one mother, one brother!"
Hakkai finally looks up at Gojyo, setting the knife down with clanging gentleness so that the sound echoes in the deadly, hot silence. "I," he responds, "had one sister."
Gojyo fights the urge to shove his fist into his mouth. Or into Hakkai's. "God damn! You can't ever let up, can you?" he cries. "I try to lighten stuff up around here, make a few jokes, and everything's a fucking personal affront with you and then you pull the guilt trip!"
"Perhaps if you landed upon more suitable topics," Hakkai jabs, "instead of personal attacks."
"Cold. Fish." Gojyo is still sitting in the chair, the paper forgotten, gripping the edge of the table to remain seated. Splinters dig into the pads of his fingers, lifted by the pressure he exerts. "It's not an attack 'cause I'm being honest. You spend all your time either here or at your job and when a chick like June walks in you can't tell me you don't feel anything! It's inhuman!"
Hakkai's smile is gone, though his words are still calm, if matching in volume with Gojyo's. "I stay in the house all day because I live with a sloppy child who has no idea how to really take care of himself, and I spend all of my free time cleaning up after his messes. I also am possessed of a thing called self-restraint, though I'm sure the term has never entered your vocabulary."
The first statement rings so soundly in Gojyo's head that he barely registers the second one. Before he can stop himself, he is on his feet, though he does not advance. "If you hate it so fuckin' much here, you can get the hell out. If I'm such a burden on you I'm sure you can find another place to live," he growls, trying to keep his voice from cracking even as he says it.
"Talk about personal affronts!" Hakkai shouts, smugness evident in the change in his posture. He rolls his shoulders back, leaning forward and narrowing his eyes. "You see how it is? Cockroach. Half-blood! Taboo! Unworthy! Dirty bastard! All the names I've avoided, all of the topics I've sidestepped because you didn't want to talk about it while you wave my past life in my face all the time! Your habits are much worse than mine, but you never see me teasing you about being a slut!"
"Shut up!" Gojyo yells, clamping his hands over his ears. "You shut the hell up!"
"Why should I? You never did," says Hakkai, firmly and loudly. He takes a few steps away from the cutting board, away from the knife, out of the kitchen and toward Gojyo. "Always jabbing about taking me out, loosening me up, breaking me down. Did you ever think I might just like where I am now?"
"No!" Gojyo cries, turning angrily on Hakkai, dropping his hands into sweating fists at his sides. "You're so fuckin' fake all the time I've got no idea what the hell's going on with you! You're never straight with me at all! Until now and all I know is you think I'm a whore which makes me wonder why I ever wanted to know you in the first place. Can you believe it?" Gojyo begins advancing toward Hakkai, though he does not yet rear his fist to strike. The room is boiling, roiling with long-kept resentment and the physical heat of the night. "I worried! Thought maybe you'd like to get an airing every once in a while and talk to people your own age!"
"You want straight?" Hakkai responds, yelling bluntly into Gojyo's face. "Here's straight! June talked to me for hours about her son and how it's becoming near impossible for her to manage a job that will pay her enough to let them survive and raise her son at the same time! We discussed homework options for Ben so that he might be able to work around town to supplement his mother's income because he'll make more than a woman. I comforted her, let her confide in me about where Ben's father is now." Hakkai's voice hitches, all prior softening at the mention of the child disappearing in the face of rage. "He came through town one day, won her in a game of Blackjack, and was gone by morning! He left her with a child, a mistake of a child, and more debt than she can handle. Her family won't take her, her neighbors talk behind her back, and it won't be long before the children catch on and use it against Ben! Do you know the person that sprang to mind? I thought about you." Hakkai turns away. "I worried Ben would grow up the way you did, with people only focused on the way he was conceived. It's tearing June apart and it's going to happen to him, too. She gave me her address because I suggested that he talk to you."
Gojyo takes a few steps back, sitting down and putting his forehead on his hand and his elbow on the table. He laughs wryly. "The last person you want him associating with is me. He'll turn out like his dad; you know that."
Hakkai does not respond, but returns to the kitchen and resumes chopping vegetables. Celery crunches under his blade.
Gojyo examines the paper again, running his thumb over the ink. "She can write, huh? I didn't know June was that educated."
"Yes," Hakkai responds, a bit hoarsely. "She has a fantastic mind."
"That's a shame she's so overworked." Gojyo sets the paper down and pulls his sweat-laden shirt collar away from his neck. "It's so hot in here," he complains, pulling the shirt off over his head.
"Open a window," Hakkai murmurs, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, not so much an acknowledgement of the heat as an effort at keeping his cuffs clean. Gojyo gets up and does so, turning his shirt right side out as he goes. Instead of dropping the item on the floor, however, he saunters out of the room and pitches it into the hamper in the bathroom.
When he comes back, Hakkai ignores him. Gojyo lets it be, resuming his seat at the card table and fishing a deck of cards out of his back pocket. Although he despises Solitaire, he begins a game to fill the void.
Ice trails down his spine and he gives a yelp. Hakkai presents Gojyo with a beer and sits across from him, opening one of his own. "Red nine on the black ten," he advises, taking a sip. Gojyo takes the suggestion, flipping the exposed card with a grunt.
He begins a new pile with the ace afforded him. "You meant every word, didn't you," he murmurs. "I did."
Hakkai chuckles. "I know."
"We gonna talk any more about it?" Gojyo asks, not daring to look up.
"I'm sick of talking."
Gojyo shrugs. "Me too."
The steady slap of Gojyo turning cards over. Water boiling. Frying crickets and their repetitive refrains. Gojyo wins his game.
Nervously, Gojyo begins shuffling the cards. "Hey," he mutters, knowing Hakkai can hear him but unsure of any other way to begin the sentence, "d'you still want me to talk to June's kid?"
Hakkai laughs. "Not really. It was a whim brought on by a sudden attack of nostalgic allusion. I'll know better next time." And as soon as the words drop, Hakkai glances over to see if they land.
Gojyo grins wryly at the cards in his hands. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah."