"But if my silence made you leave, then that would be my worst mistake--
So I will share this room with you, and you can have this heart to break."
--Billy Joel, "And So It Goes"
It was not summer, and it was not fall or spring; whatever season ruled around them was a fierce blaze of blue sky and pink cherry blossoms. The weather was beautiful, at last displaying the steady, clear vibrancy that a Heaven should have: no heat waves, no cold spikes, no sudden rainstorms.
Only in the afterworld, he thought, could a Monday be this lovely.
He had pushed the windows open, and carefully piled the papers on his desk aside, and they had ended up having an absurd, impromptu little picnic of leftover pork buns and slightly singed omelets. (And, really, the omelets weren't quite so bad once you got around the burned bits--there was something to be said for giving a scientist access to one's kitchen.) Birds were calling quietly to one another outside, and somewhere down the hall someone was cursing loudly at the copier.
It was a wonderful thing not to care.
They talked, and this conversation--like so many of their others--was meandering, full of bad puns and teasing innuendo and non sequiturs. Like their other talks, it eventually sloped away into comfortable silence, into the solid wordless message of Watari's fingertips wandering across the back of his hand.
"Yutaka?"
The sound spilled out of him like a jacket slithering off the back of a chair. Watari glanced up, his gaze alert, full of gold and lightning.
"What's up?"
He meant to say Let's go out to dinner tonight. My treat. He meant to say Thank you for listening to me make an utter ass of myself yesterday. He had a thousand different things to communicate, all bottled up at the back of his throat.
What came out was distinctly different.
"I love you."
For a moment his entire body went numb. That poisonous little word love had been leaving its outlines in his dreams for weeks, had been easing its way up his spine little by little until it leaked into his marrow, his nerves, sinking in quietly and without great fanfare. There had been no fireworks, just the strange sweetness of quiet moments--something he was certain, when he felt it, that didn't belong solely to him.
He hadn't planned to put a word to it, hadn't bargained at all on giving it a voice. Whenever he'd heard it spoken aloud, it demanded a response--as a feeling it was simply fact, and existed in a haze of pain or joy or longing, but when it was spoken it was an ultimatum. This is how I feel. Take it or leave it.
He felt as though he had slit himself open, thrown off the swift healing of immortality and made himself a fragile human once more, entirely at someone else's mercy. He felt the strange lurch of a familiar sensation: the knowledge that all that was holding him back from a roar of darkness and fire was a white-knuckle grip on his collar, choking him, keeping him suspended.
Watari's hand pressed a little more firmly over his.
"I love you too."
The entire moment was ridiculous--hell, their entire relationship up to this point had been ridiculous; did rational adults really sneak into broom closets, or kiss on the steps of office buildings, or use search engines as an excuse to flirt?--but it was ridiculously, absurdly intense, full of a dizzy and fierce brilliance. It lingered for a heartbeat, and then it was quiet again, just another part of existence, not overwhelming and not overshadowed.
Watari smiled. Tatsumi felt his mouth quirk and knew he was smiling back.
This was probably going to make everything a great deal more complicated, and he wasn't sure he gave a damn.
"Well," Watari said brightly. "Glad that's over with. Things could have gotten really awkward!"
The laughter came pouring out of them both like a sudden storm of petals torn from trees; Tatsumi was leaning on Watari's shoulder, and he knew without a doubt that this had to be love because nothing else was quite so ridiculous. Watari cuffed his ear affectionately, knocking his glasses askew, and that only made him laugh harder. He reached over in retaliation, hooking an arm around Watari's neck to get him in a headlock, and then Watari's hands were sliding inside his jacket and someone's glasses were clattering against the desk and they were kissing, long and slow and wonderfully familiar...
It was several moments before he realised that the strange coughing noises that sounded so distantly at the edge of his hearing were neither his imagination nor a sputtering air conditioner.
He pulled away and everything was a haze of fuzzy browns and blues--damn, he thought, I wish I didn't hate contact lenses so much--and after a moment of groping around on the desk he'd managed to find the frames, lift them to his face and make the world come back into focus.
Tsuzuki and Kurosaki were standing on the threshold of his office, staring at him open-mouthed.
Eventually, he'd long since realised, the office would have to know that they were seeing each other--no secret was sealed forever, particularly not when it involved two people. Tatsumi had reconciled himself a month or two before to the idea that Tsuzuki would know about them someday, and that it would be all right, because whatever had once existed between them had evolved into a long goodbye. If he--or anyone in the office, for that matter--knew he was happy, then so be it.
Having it happen so suddenly, however, and having it happen by way of his co-workers witnessing something intimate, was another matter entirely.
Damn, he thought, and realised rather distantly that his ears were burning.
"Hey, guys," Watari said brightly, and in that moment Tatsumi was sure he'd never wanted quite so badly to throttle him.
The look on Tsuzuki's face was at once horrifying and hilarious: it had the distinct quality of betraying the fact that he'd just absorbed too much information, much like a teenager who had just walked in on his parents having sex. Kurosaki, on the other hand, merely looked disgusted, and little prickles of projected emotion rolled off of him, stinging like nettles or high grass.
"Get a room," he said pointedly, and then added, "At home."
Tsuzuki made a small choked noise, and mumbled something that didn't sound like a real word at all. Spots of red were beginning to creep across his cheeks, and he looked as if he were about to try to speak again, but then Kurosaki was grabbing his arm and dragging him out, and the door slammed shut so hard that the entire doorframe rattled perilously.
Somewhere outside, a bird trilled, the cheerful sound echoing off of the Bureau's walls. Tatsumi had no idea how he restrained himself from hurling a stapler at the window.
"Well," Watari said, after a long stretch of silence. "That was interesting."
"That's really not the word I'd use."
"Hey, look on the bright side. It's only Monday. Things can still get a lot worse--"
"Yutaka, stop talking."
He felt a slim hand knock at his ear again, and for a single moment he conceded that perhaps it wasn't as bad as he might have imagined.
After the concession, however, came resignation to the fact that dealing with the rumour mill for the rest of the day would probably be far more trouble than it was worth, and he let Watari persuade him to go home at two o'clock.
So I will share this room with you, and you can have this heart to break."
--Billy Joel, "And So It Goes"
It was not summer, and it was not fall or spring; whatever season ruled around them was a fierce blaze of blue sky and pink cherry blossoms. The weather was beautiful, at last displaying the steady, clear vibrancy that a Heaven should have: no heat waves, no cold spikes, no sudden rainstorms.
Only in the afterworld, he thought, could a Monday be this lovely.
He had pushed the windows open, and carefully piled the papers on his desk aside, and they had ended up having an absurd, impromptu little picnic of leftover pork buns and slightly singed omelets. (And, really, the omelets weren't quite so bad once you got around the burned bits--there was something to be said for giving a scientist access to one's kitchen.) Birds were calling quietly to one another outside, and somewhere down the hall someone was cursing loudly at the copier.
It was a wonderful thing not to care.
They talked, and this conversation--like so many of their others--was meandering, full of bad puns and teasing innuendo and non sequiturs. Like their other talks, it eventually sloped away into comfortable silence, into the solid wordless message of Watari's fingertips wandering across the back of his hand.
"Yutaka?"
The sound spilled out of him like a jacket slithering off the back of a chair. Watari glanced up, his gaze alert, full of gold and lightning.
"What's up?"
He meant to say Let's go out to dinner tonight. My treat. He meant to say Thank you for listening to me make an utter ass of myself yesterday. He had a thousand different things to communicate, all bottled up at the back of his throat.
What came out was distinctly different.
"I love you."
For a moment his entire body went numb. That poisonous little word love had been leaving its outlines in his dreams for weeks, had been easing its way up his spine little by little until it leaked into his marrow, his nerves, sinking in quietly and without great fanfare. There had been no fireworks, just the strange sweetness of quiet moments--something he was certain, when he felt it, that didn't belong solely to him.
He hadn't planned to put a word to it, hadn't bargained at all on giving it a voice. Whenever he'd heard it spoken aloud, it demanded a response--as a feeling it was simply fact, and existed in a haze of pain or joy or longing, but when it was spoken it was an ultimatum. This is how I feel. Take it or leave it.
He felt as though he had slit himself open, thrown off the swift healing of immortality and made himself a fragile human once more, entirely at someone else's mercy. He felt the strange lurch of a familiar sensation: the knowledge that all that was holding him back from a roar of darkness and fire was a white-knuckle grip on his collar, choking him, keeping him suspended.
Watari's hand pressed a little more firmly over his.
"I love you too."
The entire moment was ridiculous--hell, their entire relationship up to this point had been ridiculous; did rational adults really sneak into broom closets, or kiss on the steps of office buildings, or use search engines as an excuse to flirt?--but it was ridiculously, absurdly intense, full of a dizzy and fierce brilliance. It lingered for a heartbeat, and then it was quiet again, just another part of existence, not overwhelming and not overshadowed.
Watari smiled. Tatsumi felt his mouth quirk and knew he was smiling back.
This was probably going to make everything a great deal more complicated, and he wasn't sure he gave a damn.
"Well," Watari said brightly. "Glad that's over with. Things could have gotten really awkward!"
The laughter came pouring out of them both like a sudden storm of petals torn from trees; Tatsumi was leaning on Watari's shoulder, and he knew without a doubt that this had to be love because nothing else was quite so ridiculous. Watari cuffed his ear affectionately, knocking his glasses askew, and that only made him laugh harder. He reached over in retaliation, hooking an arm around Watari's neck to get him in a headlock, and then Watari's hands were sliding inside his jacket and someone's glasses were clattering against the desk and they were kissing, long and slow and wonderfully familiar...
It was several moments before he realised that the strange coughing noises that sounded so distantly at the edge of his hearing were neither his imagination nor a sputtering air conditioner.
He pulled away and everything was a haze of fuzzy browns and blues--damn, he thought, I wish I didn't hate contact lenses so much--and after a moment of groping around on the desk he'd managed to find the frames, lift them to his face and make the world come back into focus.
Tsuzuki and Kurosaki were standing on the threshold of his office, staring at him open-mouthed.
Eventually, he'd long since realised, the office would have to know that they were seeing each other--no secret was sealed forever, particularly not when it involved two people. Tatsumi had reconciled himself a month or two before to the idea that Tsuzuki would know about them someday, and that it would be all right, because whatever had once existed between them had evolved into a long goodbye. If he--or anyone in the office, for that matter--knew he was happy, then so be it.
Having it happen so suddenly, however, and having it happen by way of his co-workers witnessing something intimate, was another matter entirely.
Damn, he thought, and realised rather distantly that his ears were burning.
"Hey, guys," Watari said brightly, and in that moment Tatsumi was sure he'd never wanted quite so badly to throttle him.
The look on Tsuzuki's face was at once horrifying and hilarious: it had the distinct quality of betraying the fact that he'd just absorbed too much information, much like a teenager who had just walked in on his parents having sex. Kurosaki, on the other hand, merely looked disgusted, and little prickles of projected emotion rolled off of him, stinging like nettles or high grass.
"Get a room," he said pointedly, and then added, "At home."
Tsuzuki made a small choked noise, and mumbled something that didn't sound like a real word at all. Spots of red were beginning to creep across his cheeks, and he looked as if he were about to try to speak again, but then Kurosaki was grabbing his arm and dragging him out, and the door slammed shut so hard that the entire doorframe rattled perilously.
Somewhere outside, a bird trilled, the cheerful sound echoing off of the Bureau's walls. Tatsumi had no idea how he restrained himself from hurling a stapler at the window.
"Well," Watari said, after a long stretch of silence. "That was interesting."
"That's really not the word I'd use."
"Hey, look on the bright side. It's only Monday. Things can still get a lot worse--"
"Yutaka, stop talking."
He felt a slim hand knock at his ear again, and for a single moment he conceded that perhaps it wasn't as bad as he might have imagined.
After the concession, however, came resignation to the fact that dealing with the rumour mill for the rest of the day would probably be far more trouble than it was worth, and he let Watari persuade him to go home at two o'clock.