Epilogue: Settling Down...In Chaos
When Mikado woke up, it was to bright sunlight shining on his face and Izaya's nude body wrapped around his equally nude body. His lower back hurt, so he was in no hurry to move, but remembering what had gone on after they'd gotten back from Hitomi's made him blush furiously. For all the auburn eyed man really had a knife fetish and he now had a number of—thankfully small—lacerations all over his body, the experience had felt decidedly...pleasurable. Or, he had just been missing the other man's touch too much. Either way, he didn't think he wanted to go back to 'before', when he was too—shy? Prudish?—to actually participate in such an act. The thought honestly surprised him at first. Not to mention how he'd been too wrapped up in pleasure to even realize he was being cut until after the fact...
"How are you feeling?" Izaya asked curiously, otherwise not moving.
"In what way?" the boy asked dryly. "My ass and back really hurt thanks to you."
The words produced a chuckle, then the man said, "I can't really do anything about that—you just have to get used to it. Or rather, what I can do about it is to repeat the activities of last night so you can get used to it."
"Or stop them entirely."
"After the way you begged me for more?"
When Mikado turned bright red and muttered, "Don't say such embarrassing things," Izaya chuckled and decided not to pursue the thought.
"But actually, I meant after the battle. How are you holding up from that?" the auburn eyed man asked, tone faintly worried.
With a sigh, blue eyes opened to find the man's auburn. "I don't seem to have any physical pain anymore, but I'm still sorting out all the data he gave me before disappearing. Basically, I'm really confused."
"About what?"
"...That guy...Tsukumoya Shinichi...he mentioned it, too—how do people define 'evil'? It's different by culture and religion, and...I honestly...Lucifer really helped us, to alert us to Hitomi so we could stop him, to force bonds between people which wouldn't have happened otherwise, and even to help us in our personal relationships. He was doing things in a very controlled way, knowing our limits and pushing just the right amount for us to bypass them. It was planned, from me finding Celty's head to the attack on the hospital, to my trip to see him before we went to Hitomi's physically. I can't actually say he's evil, given how much he helped us. So...why, to the other angels and to Christians, is he evil?"
"He's not a 'teacher' to them, he's temptation itself," the man replied simply. "He presented himself to them much differently than he did to us, and tried to make himself seem evil to them. For what it's worth, maybe he really does have bouts where he just gets vindictive, and takes it out on them because it's easy, since they already believe he's evil." He paused, then asked, "You know Tsukumoya?"
"Yeah...he was filling me in on a bit of the data you were deliberately not telling me about the cases," Mikado admitted.
Izaya's expression was clearly annoyed by that, and the point was proven when he changed the subject. "About the odd powers you've apparently been using quite extensively..."
"Some of that...a lot of that, actually, should stop once the mark you put on me fades, so a lot of those things won't work anymore, or won't work so well if they do," the boy told him simply.
"Only 'most', not 'all'?" Izaya asked with an amused smirk.
"Yeah, like, until I put a proper shield up around my mind, I had no idea I was actually hearing people's thoughts, and it was creating a perpetual din in my mind—but I was doing that long before you put the mark on me, so I can't exactly lose it now." The amused blue eyes which met somewhat curious auburn held a smirk of their own. "And a few other things, I should still be able to do just fine. By the way, how did everything besides us and him turn out?"
"Oh, there was plenty of fun last night. Celty almost broke my door down when she couldn't find you, but you were sort of asleep by the time we got back and probably didn't notice, and I almost couldn't wake you again. She then headed to the site, but even on our way out, it seemed Awakusu-kai had finished up—Hitomi was quite dead, and so were the zombies, so your new friends were pulling out. You'll have to go to their main house and assure them you're all right, preferably today, since you're back in school tomorrow. I think the police got through the regular traffic in the hub area and to Hitomi's about ten minutes later, where they've been cleaning up and trying to work out what happened since then. Oh, and Kida called about three dozen times, and texted three times as much, so you'd better let him know you're all right," the information dealer smirked.
Pausing for a minute, Mikado asked dryly, "What did you tell him, Izaya?"
With a chuckle and smirk, the man said, "How prudent. I told him you were indisposed in my bed. Of course, you were gasping and moa—"
"Izaya! You didn't talk to him while we were—doing that!" the boy gasped in horror, turning bright red.
Silently, the man handed him his phone, so Mikado took it timidly and began looking through the texts registered in it. There were a whole bunch of the regular 'are you all right?' kind, then a space of several minutes with nothing, and a much larger number of furious texts all claiming Masaomi would kill Izaya for him. With a heart-felt sigh, he realized he really had no choice but to talk with Masaomi, and it was probably better to not go through it at school, or probably all Raira would know his actual relationship with Orihara Izaya in about two minutes.
Dialing the phone, he waited for Masaomi to pick up—only to hear him yell before he could say anything, "You idiot, Mikado! How could you have fallen into such an obvious trap! Wait, he used drugs, he forced you, right? I swear I'll kill him and string his guts up across Sunshine Sixty and let the crows eat it for dinner!"
As the bleached blond went on with more like that, the black haired boy just held the phone away from his face as he stared at it and Izaya laughed at the tirade. The words were furious and came quickly, so all Mikado even could do was just hold the phone away from his ear and wait for him to finish. Not that it was hard to hear him by doing so, just that it wasn't breaking his eardrums anymore, and the words came through clearly. In the end, while Izaya killed himself laughing on the bed beside the black haired boy, it took Masaomi almost an hour to stop.
When both sides finally fell silent, Mikado tentatively held the phone to his ear and asked, "Are you done yelling now so we can talk?"
Silence followed for a minute, then a sharp, "Well enough," came back in a normal talking voice which still held plenty of anger.
"Well...I didn't realize he answered the phone while we were...er...yeah, anyway, so I think I should tell you I let him do it, no, I wasn't drugged, and no, you can't kill him. Yet, anyway." A glance at the man showed him raising an amused brow.
"...How can you fall into a trap like that willingly?" Masaomi asked with a clear glare coming out in his voice.
"Er...because I'm having fun. Because he keeps me guessing. Anyway, everything else, with the street fight and the zombies and the electrocuting cold bubble, are all resolved, so things can get back to normal. That is, if you stop calling so often my boyfriend feels he has to answer just to irritate you with something you don't need to know. I don't mind you checking on me...but three dozen calls in under two hours is a little much, don't you think?" Mikado asked in amusement.
Again, a long silence followed, then a sigh sounded before the bleached blond on the other end of the line asked, "Did you kill that Hitomi guy?"
"No, the Awakusu-kai guys did—he was their enemy more than mine."
"It's all over the news, and they even said they found an illegal lab and all the servants had been experimented on...all that, just since police got there in the middle of the night," Masaomi informed his friend with a sigh.
"I see. Then it's really all resolved. So, let's move forward," the blue eyed boy answered with a smile.
"...Okay. Just...Don't let him answer your phone anymore."
"...You think I can stop him when I'm busy with something else?"
The phone went dead a moment later, so Mikado sighed and set the phone aside as he said to his older boyfriend, "He's right to say you shouldn't be answering my phone, though." As the man smirked, the younger of them gave a wry grin and said, "Though, I already know you won't stop if it means you can tease someone."
After a minute, Izaya surprised the boy by sighing. "Well, I guess now we should discuss the actual terms of our relationship. I'd rather not lose you again, so...you may be right and it would be more prudent to actually...share more, both ways, not just one." It was paining Izaya to say it, but he had to relent—another God had said so, after all, and had said very simply that he'd never reach his desired goal if he kept up the way he was going. "I still want to play my games, with you and with others, but maybe I can indicate when I want to play one? When it's you, anyway. I can't say I always will give you an explanation, just an indication—I want to see your reaction to an unexpected event, after all."
To his surprise, the boy nodded. "But if it's something like seeing what unknown seals are going to do, you have to tell me so we can test it properly. If it's general reactions to more...physical things, you can get away with just an indication. I don't mind playing. But you have to start telling me all the information you know about the cases we're working on, even if you don't tell me where you got the data—I know you want to keep your contacts to yourself. See, I'm good at solving problems if I have all the information, and I can't solve them half as well when I only have part of it. Though, it was pretty nice of you to drop the data about Hitomi in my lap—I realized you were leading me there, but I didn't know you planned on joining me."
With a chuckle and a smirk, Izaya rolled over on top of his younger partner and said, "I think I can live with that. And here's one more point—you called the King the weakest piece on the board, but here's another reality. Since I'm above humans, I don't have a piece on the board at all, and whether the King is weaker than the Queen is rather irrelevant, don't you think?"
Mikado blinked, then gazed up at the man and grinned wryly. "Then, after all this, I'm not your 'Queen' anymore, since I don't exactly belong on the board, either."
"You think so? No, you're not my level yet, so you're still my Queen, and I fully intend on having you in the truest sense of the word."
With that, he leaned down and kissed the boy deeply, even as said boy blushed furiously—and let him do it.
Though, when they broke the kiss, Mikado couldn't help but chuckle and say, "If that's what you think, I'm going to have to start giving your own medicine back to you."
"In what way?" the man ask curiously.
"I get to test you, too, the same way you do me," the boy replied impishly.
Izaya snorted and grinned as he agreed, "Bring it on! Show me how much you can grow."
All done! Thanks for reading!