A/N: This one wound up in a similar tone to "Gluttony;" I do promise more variety in the future.
Pride
"You're too proud to admit you might be in love with me."
Silence greeted Leorio's statement, an icy calm that had been steadily getting less calm and more icy. Kurapika was the only person Leorio knew of who could make locating articles of clothing thrown haphazardly around a room look like an act of dignity. Particularly when the room in question looked like a tornado had come through it recently. To be fair, it had not been clean to begin with--Leorio was, after all, in med school and had little energy for petty things such as picking up after himself--but after Kurapika had arrived, the poor room hadn't stood a chance. They were both known for their tempers, they were both easily provoked by each other, and they were both completely out of patience. Things had been thrown, including books, glasses, and punches. It was a miracle there weren't holes in the walls.
Or maybe there were. Leorio hadn't checked, but he did remember hitting the wall a time or two in frustration. That, of course, was before they had wound up in bed. Strange, to go from such tempestuous fighting to lovemaking--but the extreme of any one emotion usually indicated the other was also present. With Kurapika, hate and love, anger and arousal, were so closely linked to each other and could shift so easily from one to the other and back that it made their relationship indefinable. Important, but unnamed.
When Kurapika had first kissed him it had been more of a bite. In the middle of the worst fight they'd ever had, Leorio raging about something he didn't even understand but was pretending to, seeing that he was pushing Kurapika to tears and strangely satisfied at the visible sign he actually gave a damn. Then suddenly his mouth was stinging and bleeding and Kurapika was gripping his tie and collar like he meant to throw Leorio across the room. But before that happened Leorio grabbed a fistful of Kurapika's hair, also like he meant to throw him, and then they were suspended for a moment--halfway between a bite and kiss, violence and its opposite, and then suddenly they were pressing against each other with the same passion they'd been pushing each other away minutes ago. This relationship had no rules.
So they'd wound up in bed, finally, for the first time in so many years of frustration and repression; hurried, still furious in a way, speaking only when necessary. There were moments when the sex deteriorated into useless fighting for a moment or two again. But then there had been some sort of unspoken surrender, some sort of weary truce; and they had turned to each other with openness, vulnerability, at the very end. And Leorio knew he would remember how that felt for the rest of his life, every day, on his deathbed he would think of being in this disaster zone of a room on a dingy mattress too small for them both. With Kurapika.
Afterwards--utter exhaustion. Both of them completely drained, lying side by side naked and panting and silent, every emotion purged. Leorio wouldn't have minded staying like that for the rest of the night, but eventually Kurapika sat up, touched his hand without looking at him, and started to dress. Leorio asked him where he was going.
Home, Kurapika replied. Home, for him, being on the other side of the world.
The second fight was much tamer, due to sheer exhaustion and nothing else. Leorio had not anticipated it, and he should have. There was no one better versed in denial that Kurapika. It wasn't that he didn't feel; Leorio had a hunch he felt much more than most people did, but he isolated the emotions he chose to act on and ignored the rest, and he did it with the same casual competence most people gave to tasks like driving a car or doing the dishes. He was so good at it that it was possible he even believed what he said, that nothing had changed today. That the fact that they'd tried to destroy each other and wound up making love instead was insignificant, unimportant in their lives. Leorio stayed on the bed and spoke sternly, and Kurapika continued to dress calmly, until Leorio became exasperated enough to finally speak the word they'd both avoided like the plague. "You're too proud to admit you might be in love with me."
Kurapika--fully dressed now, looking like none of this had ever happened--looked at Leorio with his eyebrows slightly raised, and replied coolly, but calmly. "You're too proud to admit I might not."
And then he walked out of the room, without so much of a goodbye, leaving Leorio to wonder which one of them was right. Or if, perhaps, they both were.