The moment he awoke, he Aoba felt an emptiness in his hands and they started to reach for Noiz' little body, missing his warmth. Was it still day? Was it night time? He didn't dare to open his eyes and check and, anyway, day or night meant nothing in that dull bare space where days stretched and mixed.

"Noiz…" he breathed out.

"Aoba, I'm right here".

That… wasn't the voice he expected. It wasn't highpitched and toneless. It was adult, a voice arrived from another dimension. Aoba felt the urge to reject it; perhaps if he closed his eyes more tightly, he would feel again the painful load of that abandoned child that he had to protect.

"Aoba, please, open your eyes, you are making me worry."

He obeyed, of course; how could he ignore that voice? And what he found himself staring at were a pair of gorgeous green eyes, set in a handsome face. Aoba looked around, dazzled. Where was he? Where was the empty room? He needed a couple of heartbeats to recognise his own old bedroom in Midorijima, in Tae's house.

Noiz wrapped him in his arms, and Aoba's agitated mind started to settle down. He closed his eyes again; he was at home, he was okay, Noiz was okay. A tear started rolling down his cheek and, like the day before, a finger that wasn't his wiped it away with care. Aoba opened his eyes again, in time to see how Noiz licked his own wet finger. Aoba chuckled.

"Don't do that…"

"I wanted to check if it was still salty… And yes, the taste is the same as always."

Aoba's pulse started to race again.

"And the rest? How is the rest?"

Noiz didn't answer at first. He was deep in thought, as if considering what his answer should be. Aoba started to worry. Was Noiz alright? What if he had fuck his mind up? He wasn't in a coma like some of his old "victims", but still. He wasn't as used as Sei to use his power, and it still was an unpredictable thing to him.

"Noiz? Is your mind alright?"

"I guess so. I can't notice any change in it."

"But? There is a but, right?"

Instead of replying, Noiz watched Aoba with inquiring eyes and raised a hand to touch his jaw. Then, his hand went up his face, caressing his skin until it arrived to his hair. He kept touching, playing with his blue locks, without a word. Aoba placed his own hand over his boyfriend's, stroking it with his thumb, and then he took it and kissed his knuckles. A gasp escaped through Noiz' semi open lips.

"What do you feel?"

"I feel… you", the boy answered, shaking his head in confusion. "You are warm, and the touch of your skin is so soft… I had imagined so, but it's different. And your hair, too, everything is different."

"Noiz!" Aoba opened his arms and hugged his boyfriend with joy and relief in equal parts. "Then it worked! We did it!"

"But… but I don't understand", Noiz muttered against his shoulder. "Aoba… I can't understand anything!"

Still grinning, Aoba let go of him and glanced at his face.

"What do you mean? What is it that you don't understand?"

Noiz studied his own hands for a moment, as if he couldn't believe they really were able to convey that amount of information to his brain.

"All of my life, I have imagined how everything felt, I built my own world of how everything was. But now, just touching your face and your hair feels different. That means… I have to rebuild all my images of how the world is."

"And isn't it exciting?"

Aoba's smile widened as he grabbed his boyfriend's hands and started stroking them again.

"Does this feels good?" Noiz nodded. "Great. Imagine all the other things that will feel good". The boy's eyes sparkled, and Aoba could easily imagine what was on his mind right then. This pervert kid… "And for the others, for the ones that don't feel good… Well, I'm here to help you with them, alright? If I have survived nineteen years old with headaches and cuts and scratches, you will survive, too!"

Noiz smiled fondly at his boyfriend, looking less puzzled and more reassured than before.

"You are to blame if now I can feel through my skin, so of course you will be responsible for it, hmmm?" the boy said in a low and seductive voice.

He kissed Aoba and pushed him gently on the bed, and Aoba couldn't help to lean back until he was lying down with Noiz covering his body, enjoying the kiss. The sudden music of Aoba's coil made the two of them jump, startled. Aoba tried to push himself upwards, leaning on his side on his forearm, and answered the call.

The floating screen showed the face of an unknown man, who started to speak quickly in German. Confused, Aoba glanced at Noiz, who came closer in order to appear in the coil's view. He answered the man in the same fast German, leaving Aoba dazed and able to understand just isolated words now and then. He heard 'coffee shop', 'kitchen' and some days of the week. Then Noiz moved aside again and the man started to speak really slow to Aoba in German. He asked him his name, if he was going to stay in Karlsruhe, if he liked to work in a kitchen. Aoba understood the questions, more or less, and answered in his hesitant German. He felt really self-conscious. Please, let my sentences be not too wrong… By his side, Noiz was hiding a chuckle behind his fist, what didn't help him to calm his nerves at all. The man in the screen called for Noiz again, and turned to his fast speech that Aoba couldn't follow at all, and then the call was ended.

"So? Tell me!"

Noiz laughed and reached for Aoba's hands.

"Congratulations, you have your first job in Europe!"

"Whaaat? But… but…" Aoba's mind was about to explode with confusion. So that had been his job interview, really? But what about Midorijima? "But Noiz, I wanted to stay with Sei for a while!"

"Relax… I've explained him that we are now on holidays in Japan, and that we are not coming back until January, when the schools start, and he is okay with that. The employee they have to replace will work until the end of the year anyway. The job is in that coffee shop we go sometimes on Saturdays, the one that is in front of the park."

"Really? I love that place! And the baristas are always very friendly and polite."

"You will be working in the kitchen, not at the till or the coffee machine."

Aoba nodded.

"That's fine for me. That way I don't need much German."

"That's what the man has said, that he just needed that you were able to understand simple instructions. I'm… well, I'm happy for you, but it's not a dream job at all, you realise, don't you?"

"I'm okay with that! It's perfect until I improve my German, and everything will suit me just to avoid being bored and feeling useless at home."

Noiz bit his lower lip.

"I… was going to suggest my father to hire you for the warehouse or for delivering mail in the office…"

"No! I told you I didn't want to work for your father, didn't I? The coffee shop suits me better."

"You sure?"

Aoba answered with an almost caste kiss on his boyfriend's lips. They gazed at each other's eyes for a moment. He knew it was a lame thought, but the amount of love he could see in Noiz' eyes took his breath away.

"Noiz…" he let his index go down the curve of Noiz' jaw and further down, until he reached the fabric of his t-shirt. "Before we were interrupted by the call, I was thinking there's something you haven't let me do since the very beginning…"

"What do you mean?" Noiz frowned, but his eyes had a mischievous glint.

"Lie down on my bed, come on. I will show you what I mean."

Two minutes later, their shirts had vanished and Noiz was lying on his back with his wrists tied up his head, on the headboard.

"He! I haven't seen this part of you in a while!" Noiz snickered.

"Well, I assure you it's still here", Aoba muttered in a low voice loaded with lust, crawling up Noiz' body until he was straddling his hips.

"Hmmm? Are you going to do me?"

"What?!"

And suddenly that familiar expression of a deer caught in the headlights was again on Aoba's face, and Noiz burst laughing heartily. Aoba blushed deeply, embarrassed, and punched his boyfriend on the shoulder; it was a hit without heat, but Noiz winced.

"Oh, sorry! Did it hurt?" Aoba rushed to apologise, mortified. Now Noiz could feel everything, not only the good stuff but also pain, he needed to remember.

"It was… different, again". Noiz grinned with satisfaction. "I don't mind, do whatever you want to me."

That didn't help Aoba's blush to subside. At all. But the young man decided to ignore his boyfriends teases and focus on what he wanted to do. Slowly, with measured and cat-like movements, he leaned down and kissed Noiz deeply, caressing the hard line of his jaw with his left hand. Then, after a moment, with his eyes still glued to Noiz ones, he moved back a bit and lowered his body again to reach for Noiz neck, sucking and biting the soft flesh with care. He kept looking back to his boyfriend's face to check his reaction: Noiz was staring at him with his mouth agape and his small eyebrows high on his forehead, his breathing already hitched. Aoba grinned with mischief.

"You know", he commented in a whisper, "every time I did this to you, you always had that bored expression on your face… when you didn't ask me specifically to stop it. Is it so boring now, hmmm?"

The boy shook his head. His cheeks were tinged in a light pink, and Aoba thought he only had seen him so cute and sexy very few times. While he kept working on every inch of Noiz's skin that he could reach, arms, shoulders, nipples, ribs, he realised that even though he of course enjoyed all the attention Noiz always gave to his body, a part of him missed being on top and having the control of their intimate moments. There was a sense of power in being able to decide when Noiz would wriggle and pant because the impatience was taking the best of him, Aoba's tongue going inside the creases of his groin but never touching his hard-on, and watching the way Noiz looked at him with undisguised hunger, but unable to sit up or touch him, and growing desperate together when their cocks brushed in a tantalising way, with too soft and short touches, instead of the hard pushes the two of them were craving right then.

When he couldn't stand it anymore, and just then, Aoba took the lube from the top drawer of his night table and poured a squirt on his fingers. Looking Noiz in the eye, he pushed two fingers inside his own butt hole, regretting not being able to give his boyfriend more of a show: from his lying position, he was sure Noiz couldn't see the way his thighs trembled with every push of his slicked fingers. The boy could use his imagination to supply images for that, of course, and maybe he was doing exactly that, because suddenly his pierced dick gave a couple of little jumps, as if it was yelling that it wanted to join the action as soon as possible. Grinning, Aoba lowered his head until he could lick at those metal pieces on Noiz' erection, lapping at them until they were wet and glistening, and then he curled his tongue around the slit, just a little bit, because the way Noiz was bucking his hips told Aoba everything would end too soon if he stayed down there too much time.

So he sat up after a moment, and after stopping to rub their dicks together (Ohmygod, those piercings feel too good against my dick, and the boy's hips jumped while groaning loudly), Aoba took his boyfriend's cock in his hand and placed it against his entrance. Chuckling at Noiz' desperate face, he still teased him a little bit, brushing the head against his hole two or three times; it felt delicious, but of course Aoba was as gone for words as Noiz right then, and he needed the real thing, and he needed NOW. He leaned on Noiz' torso and felt his hole stretch and swallow the totality of Noiz' cock, piercings and all, until his butt cheeks were touching the boy's pubic hair. He had to stop for a moment to get air into his lungs. Behind him, Noiz growled and started trashing his whole body, muttering his name again and again in a desperate litany. Balancing his body on Noiz' shoulders, Aoba started to move, trying to go slowly, allowing just a circular push of his hips against the boy's crotch, without taking it out a single inch, focussed on the pleasurable feeling of stretch, of being completely full, of owning Noiz' dick.

"Aoba!"

That wasn't a whisper anymore, but a full body shudder accompanied of a broken plea. Aoba gasped in surprise at seeing a tear in the corner of Noiz' eyes.

"Are you alright? Is this too much, do you need to stop?"

The boy shook his head.

"Just… move, I can't take it anymore. It's… too much, too intense."

Aoba could really relate, as it was how he felt the first times, especially the first times being on the receiving end. And sometimes, even now, with Noiz.

He sat up and started moving his hips up and down on Noiz' dick, keeping a good rhythm, forcing his thighs to support all the stress, feeling them tremble slightly when Noiz' face started to be too contorted in pain to hold back anymore and he started to impale himself harshly on every push, varying the angle to where it felt better, leaning back a bit to thrust his hips onwards and make the hard iron inside of him go still deeper, sweeter, feeling too good to be real. And then Noiz yelled his name and bucked his whole body, and before Aoba could reach for his own erection, still untouched except for some rubbing against Noiz' pubis, he felt his orgasm coming, prompted perhaps by the beyond description feeling of being filled with Noiz' seed, warm and wet and so, so sweet. He gave two, three thrusts and he was right there, his mind flying and trying to catch up with Noiz, suddenly in that place where just the two of them could dwell.

And it was sadly too short, it always was, and he came back to real Noiz and their pleasure, their mixed sweat and heavy breathing. While regaining his five senses and his heartbeats slowly calmed down, he wondered, not for the first time, if that cosy place inside of his mind where he met Noiz during orgasm was similar to where his different consciousnesses inhabited during all those years, a place where their souls could join, even though his bodies only had that consolation price that was sex, with its mirage of true union.

Aoba untied Noiz and finally rested on top of his body, feeling at last his arms wrapping him up in a tight embrace.

"Aoba…"

He rested his weight on his forearms to look at Noiz' face. He had a relaxed smile that Aoba hadn't seen before on him.

"Are you alright?" he asked, still a little unsure of the outcome of his power.

"I am. Thank you."

Their hug tightened again, and Aoba noticed a wetness on his face, and for a moment he couldn't guess whose were the tears that stained both their faces. Noiz wiped his own cheek, astonished, and then smiled again at his boyfriend.

"You sure you are going to stick with me? I might be a little lost right now without you."

"Always, meine Liebe", Aoba answered with his own fond smile, kissing him.