D reaches for a piece of chocolate, and Leon can only watch.
He's not sure this is what he expected when he eventually found the bastard. Slapping him silly, maybe. Yelling until his lungs tore apart, definitely. Shoving Chris' drawing at him, and telling him he missed that idiotic son of a bitch? Sure.
Ending up in bed together, sweat and other questionable fluids drying on his skin while he stares as D slips piece after piece of the bonbons Leon had brought him past his dark lips? Not so much.
Leon's glad, he thinks. He's finally found him, after years of looking and near-misses and enough frustration to make him want to pull out his hair; D looks exactly the same. Then again so does Leon for the most part, though twenty years of searching have long since come and gone; D isn't the only supernatural creature around, and certainly not the only one who has penchant for interesting gifts. Leon might have done a few favours, here and there, unknowing of who he was pleasing and not particularly caring as long as they weren't harming anyone who didn't deserve it; in some cases, the ones he pleased have paid him back - with interest.
It's funny how D hasn't noticed. It's funny how he still looks as aloof and as smirky and smug as ever, like he doesn't care - but Leon likes to think he's gotten a bit better at discerning what lies behind the smug looks and the certainty of his expression.
D is afraid.
He doesn't think D had taken into consideration how humans are supposed to age, when he first started this chase instead of breaking things cleanly between them. Leon remembers looking up the petshop in the police database, back when stopping by for tea time was not yet routine, habit, comfort; D's family has never stayed in a place for longer than two or three years, as far as the archives are concerned. The Count might talk all he likes about the fleeting life of the human race, the regrets and hatred they leave behind, but for him- For D, there's no aging. There is death, yes, but not out of old age when it comes to humans and similar beings - it comes from a bullet, a knife, from drowning or choking on poison rather than the slow aging of the cells. He doesn't stick around long enough to bear witness to it.
Leon wants to think that D wouldn't have let it drag on this far if he had remembered, known aging and mortality better than just as a fact lost in storage somewhere in his maze of a mind. Wouldn't let Leon reach his forties, and then his fifties and sixties and eighties until he was hobbling from place to place with weak knees and a weaker mind, following the ghost of someone he had once known. He supposes he's proven D right, however. Leon hasn't aged in a long time.
He leans forward, captures the next piece of chocolate with his own lips, fingers, tongue. D watches, eager. There is a glint to his eyes - one golden, one purple, and oh, how Leon has missed their unrelenting gaze - as they track the movement of his mouth, a predator studying his prey.
Leon isn't a prey anymore.
He slithers above D, holding himself steady with the flex of his arms as he invades the Count's mouth with his own, chasing the sweet flavour hiding behind the chocolate. Is it here, behind his teeth? Beneath his tongue or above or around? Leon takes the time to investigate it deeply, sliding his own tongue warm and slick against D's until his head falls back and the Count's dark hair is spread in a pillow once more. It's so dark, contrasting with the white silk of the pillow, and it just figures D would have fancy sheets as well but his hair- Leon buries his nose in D's neck, inhaling its scent with an open mouth and his tongue dragging against the sweat of his skin, tasting, wanting. D is like the sea, like the tides, waiting to snare him and bring him in and never let him go.
It's been twenty years, and neither of them have dared let go.
They're a mess. A mess of hot, sticky flesh, dragging and catching and pulling at fingers and skin and hair and claws, claws against his back, scoring deep groves that make him cry out and then D's biting into his shoulder and-
"Promise me," Leon breathes into him, breathless and as steady as he can make himself be when he's just spent himself against D's thigh, when he has just learned exactly what kind of noises D makes when his drags his teeth across his neck, when this thing that has been twenty years in the making has finally come to fruition."Promise you won't leave again. Not without me."
He can feel D's smile against his hair, his clawed fingers carding through the strands. "My dear Leon," he says, and it's his name, his name, D has barely ever called him by his name- "I don't think you'd ever let me."
And Leon has grown in a lot of ways, but this is not one of them. "Damn straight," he grunts, oddly pleased that D has acknowledged his force of will.
D hums, a laugh echoing inside his ribs. "Shall I repeat what I already asked twice before, then?"
Steady. His voice is so steady, so sure, but Leon has his ear against the Count's chest and can feel his heart skip once, twice, and so he only nips at his collarbone as an affirmation. "Whatever it is, third time is the charm."
Though, frankly, he has no clue as to what the Count is referring to. It better not be a request for him to leave, though - not that Leon wouldn't do it if D asked but-
But.
D's never asked, he doesn't think. And if he did- If D does ask him to leave, in this very moment, Leon thinks it'll break him for good.
"I've asked you this before," D confesses. He's already said as much, but Leon takes it as it is - a different tone, a different shade to his voice that speaks to admissions and hushed things. "And you have refused, though at the time I did not mean it as I do now. Stay forever, Leon?"
He remembers. Remembers eyes sparkling and sly, a teasing grin and clasped hands as he waited for the bluster and shouting so typical of their relationship back then. "'Or at least overnight?'," he quotes back at D.
D studies a strand of blond hair intently, but does not reply.
Leon gets himself back up on his elbows. There is a method to this, to finding the truth in D's avoidance of a proper reply: he knows how to study D. He wanders his gaze across the contrasting eyes, looking down to where the Count's hands are folded and tight, bone-white with tension, to the red mouth where any turn has been studiously put away for the moment, to the vein in his neck where he can sense more than feel the blood rushing, anxious and fast. He studies D.
There's little else he knows so well.
There's little else he wants to know so well.
He could tell him that he doesn't drop his whole life at the drop of a hat for just anyone. He could tell him that he's met more dragons and kirins and mermaids than he can count, and none of them have ever left him with his chest so tight with awe as D. He could tell him that he's traded his pride and fear and mortality for a chance at hearing such words from D's mouth, and now that he's finally hearing them, there is nothing that would keep him away. But what comes out is nothing but what he needs to say, wants and needs with a burning so deep it will never become ash in the wind: "Yes."
Leon been looking for forever for twenty years now.
And now, he's finally found it.