I wrote this just to see if I could. My OTP will probably always be Gar/Raven, but my multishipper heart likes a challenge, and now I'm in rarepair hell. Or, my reaction to 2020 has been to find wholesome, happy ships. And Gar and Kori are like literal sunshine together.
the habitual affection of undefined things
The first time it happens, it doesn't mean anything.
Gar is used to wiggly understandings of privacy after six years of living together, especially when the latest Tower infiltration has left the door lock just a little too loose and sticky (of all the doors the HIVE had to mess with, of course it had to be this one). Regardless, it happens too often for anyone to care about knocking anymore, and so when Gar walks into the bathroom humming, eyes half-lidded, green towel slung over his bathrobe, he doesn't hear the sound of the shower water until it's too late.
Gar doesn't notice most things until it's too late, actually, because he's usually lost in his head thinking about literally everything but the world around him. Especially this morning, when he's skipped the common room and the coffee pot and slides the shower door open without realizing someone is already in there.
His yawn drowns out the sound of the bathroom fan, his eyes are squeezed shut with sleep, and he ends up with one foot in the water before he sees Kori blinking at him from behind a froth of shampoo bubbles and wet hair. There is a very brief moment in which Gar has to remember where he is and why, and by the time he realizes that he should turn around to respect one of the Towers' wiggly understandings of privacy, it's a lot too late.
"The shower is occupied," Kori tells him, but the words sound rehearsed. As though she does not particularly care whether or not he is here, but someone, some time, has told her she should care.
Again, six years of living together means things like this happen sometimes.
Gar finds the presence of mind to blink, mumble a red-faced apology, and leave before the memories burn into his retinas.
He thinks that should be the end of it. He mentions it to Vic, who promises to fix the lock, and figures Kori will remember to use the lock next time. Next time, he'll drink his coffee before his shower (maybe he'll take his ADHD meds instead for once) and be at least a little less spaced out and actually hear the water before he tries to get in.
It doesn't mean anything, so Gar just takes it all in stride, moves on.
Except it happens again.
On some lazy Saturday afternoon in midsummer, when the team is holed up in their air-conditioned bedrooms, Jump City is hit with an earthquake. It's not uncommon in California, especially where the Tower sits, and it shouldn't mean anything for the Titans because there's a JC crisis team and a plan for when this happens. The problem, of course, is that it shatters Plasmus' cryotank. Or, rather, it shatters the cryotank of Otto Von Furth, who turns into a giant pile of pink goo and spends the afternoon in City Hall tearing out support beams and terrorizing the local politicians.
Gar is in the middle of a cat nap when the Red Alert blares, and he's working up a bad mood real fast. Not as fast as Raven, though, who is particularly pissy about being interrupted in the middle of reading (what Gar figures must be) a recently released historical analysis of chakras in the context of Indian and Azarathian cultural exchange. Before Dick can get out his usual catchphrase, because no battle feels right without the usual catchphrase, Raven's soul-self slips into Otto at the center of Plasmus and turns a twenty-minute fight into a twenty-second one. Unfortunately, while it's the fastest and most efficient method to return Otto Von Furth to his cryo-tank, it also means that pink goo explodes everywhere, and Gar needs his third shower today.
One to wake up, one to wash off the sweat from six am training, one to recover from this.
He thinks he'll get dry skin at this rate, but Raven has an especially nice lotion from one of her incense and candle shops, and she's usually willing to share if (and only if) Gar picks up her favorite tea bags from the café next to his comic book store. It's all part of the loving transactions of roommates who compromise.
Point being, Gar is soaped up in the shower with 'witchy lavender' lotion, singing at the top of his lungs into a luffa, when he hears the bathroom door click and the rustle of cloth hitting the floor.
It's not until the shower door starts to slide open that he remembers he forgot to lock the door, and he gets a whiff of unmistakable citrus and battery acid. (Gar doesn't need to turn around when his nose is a bloodhound.)
"Hey, Kor," he says, smiling at the wall of the shower instead of looking over his shoulder. She probably won't want an eyeful of his front. "Guess I forgot to lock the door?"
"Oh." There is a thoughtful humming sound, and Gar can't see her expression. "My apologies. I will return later."
Gar overthinks the entire interaction for about twenty minutes, the length of his shower, before he forgets it completely. His brain does that, sometimes. Fixates on a memory and then wipes it from the hard drive. They've been roommates for six years, and Gar has had Raven portal through the bathroom ceiling often enough that nudity isn't the biggest deal on the team anymore (especially not after the mission in Russia, when Dick and Gar got dumped in a river and had to strip out of wet clothes before they died of hypothermia). So, he just makes a mental tick to lock the freaking door next time and falls back into their usual routine.
He and Kori have an established dynamic after six years, and they're not that fussy about the boundaries of privacy, really. They're the only ones with a desperate, aching need to be touching someone, more often than not, and so they are accustomed to taking comfort in each other's arms, shoulders, hands, the solid weight of a body that understands. Little brushes between the monotony of missions and online college courses, and it's never meant more than that. Especially when she sparkles like someone falling in love around Dick all the time, always, and Gar is not so touchy that he crosses the lines of propriety.
It's not until the third time it happens, late at night when Gar can't sleep and thinks the rhythm of the shower might trick his brain into relaxing, that he figures they need to actually talk about it.
"Vin'shu," she swears when she opens the shower door and finds him in the steam.
"We've got to stop meeting like this."
Kori shakes her head and makes a move as if to leave, but Gar wants to figure out how to keep this from becoming a regular thing. He makes a tsk sound in his throat. "Wait a sec—just gotta grab my bathrobe."
Humming, Kori floats onto the sink counter in nothing but a purple T-shirt and flip flops, her hair piled high in a sloppy ponytail. It's a familiar look, the one she usually wears when they wait in line after a sewer fight, and Gar wonders when that happened. When they both got so comfortable around each other half-naked that he's memorized the frayed threads of her oversized shirt.
"It's really late," he says once he's wrapped his robe shut and slumped against the wall six inches away, water pooling everywhere because he didn't actually dry off. "And this has been happening a lot lately. Everything okay?"
"I could not sleep, and I did not think anyone would be in here this late."
She looks honest, Gar thinks. A little worried line in her forehead from the aftermath of this afternoon, this afternoon when Dick punched cement so hard his bones cracked, and Red-X cackled like a demented, risen-again ex-Robin. Except "a little worried" is maybe an understatement, actually, when her face is so very good at smiling through bullshit.
"Shower usually helps," he says finally, cocking his head ever so slightly to the side to see through her happy mask's cracks, "doesn't it?"
"Mm. I like to paint my nails after. It relaxes me."
"Yeah." Gar rubs at his wet eyelashes and figures they might as well talk about it. "Don't think I'll be sleeping tonight either."
She makes a sort of squeaking sound, not quite finding the right words for this afternoon's memories, which live in Gar's head, rent-free. Dick howling like a broken man, tears leaking through the white-film mask as he clawed the empty space where Jason ripped his hood off before teleporting away with another vial of xenothium.
"Yup," Gar says, popping the p, trying to make her laugh. "Won't be getting over the Lazarus Pit zombie thing anytime soon."
"Dick will not speak to me about it."
That clicks a few of the puzzle pieces into place. It at least explains why she didn't notice the water sounds or bathroom lights before she opened the shower door. It definitely explains why they're both lost in their thoughts and ignoring the cold-water floor, and her voice is a little too hard. Done. A little too heartbroken after six years squinting through the bright colors of Dick's circus distractions.
Which Gar wants nothing to do with, thanks.
"You'll have to give him a few days. He just needs time to process, yeah? You know what he's like."
Kori releases a big, heaving sigh, as if she is too tired to argue this point. "I should not keep you. Perhaps some tea will help me sleep. Or perhaps Raven is awake."
"It's fine. I was just about done here anyway. Shower's all yours."
"You are certain?"
"Mhm."
When he stands, stretching his arms overhead, bath robe falling open around his collarbone, he doesn't expect to find her staring. An unreadable expression that twists her lips into the funniest shape, as she traces the outline of his throat almost appraisingly.
"Whoa," he says, covering his chest instinctively. Even though he grins, all sharp-toothed and silly, he knows this is not part of their usual back-and-forth routine. It's half a step over the line of proper, and it makes his ears redden. "Hey. Kor, my eyes are up here."
"I—sorry." She blinks and tilts her head, as if considering something. But then she swallows, and whatever words she wanted to say are gone. "Pleasant shlorvax."
When he leaves the bathroom, Gar spends a long moment wondering if it means something.
Probably not.
Probably not, as in Gar refuses to believe it might mean something.
Kori is loose with her affection, and he's just tactile. And Dick is still there, sort of between them like he usually is, even if he's… you know. A little fucked-up in the head from this afternoon and Jason, and Kori's just a little done with his walls and stopped-up secrets. So no. Gar is not going to overthink this, not when Kori has different ideas about skin and privacy and prefers communal everything, anyway. He knows that, so a couple of interrupted showers and one lingering stare isn't enough for the thought to stick around.
Gar completely forgets it ever happened when he runs into Vic and Dick in the common room. They are sullenly quiet, smashing the video game controllers, and, well, it's not talking about Jason or Red-X or Joker, but sometimes it's better to just be there.
It's another one of those wiggly understandings of privacy they have after living together for six years.
The fourth time it happens, Dick isn't there. And by not there, Gar means he picked up and ran off to Gotham City, impulsive the way he usually is (impulsive as in decisive, as in he's mulled on the thought for weeks and finally doubled down on leaving). Which shouldn't be a problem, since the team has had six years to mesh their cogs together and fine-tune the mechanics of everything, but Dick being gone makes the Tower unbalanced.
Unbalanced as in stilted, as in the usual checks-and-balances are off, as in Raven can't handle the chaos of the three of them without Dick's flat voice as back-up. Which means that no one gets much of anything done. Every time Vic starts to get up, murmuring he should run a predictive software on the xenothium hit-and-runs, Gar whines and clings and tumbles them both back into video games and churlish arguments.
Red-X won't be in Jump City anymore. Not when he's so clearly needling at Dick's self-control, and Dick is back home with his other family, and Jason has surely followed.
Point being, Dick isn't there, here, wherever, and the team is a mess of half-finished paperwork and unprofessional patrols because even though the heroics are branded in their DNA at this point, Dick being gone means they have a couple of weeks to breathe. Breathe, as in let themselves be twenty-something civilians who sometimes go to the arcade in holo-rings and forget that Jump City's life sits on their too-thin, too-young shoulders. (Even if they miss him.)
So the fourth time it happens, Dick isn't there, and the usual checks-and-balances doesn't stop Gar from liking it.
The fourth time it happens, there's no steam or pine-scented body wash or Plasmus goo to wash out the memory. No Dick sitting between him and Kori like an invisible reminder of what Gar can't, shouldn't, overthink. Meaning that when he and Kori flitter up to the roof for their usual petting session (petting session, as in when Gar shifts into cats and puppies and chinchillas, and Kori scratches him all over, a routine since they first moved in and realized they both need this platonic intimacy of touch), there's no one to interrupt.
And you know, it's not that Gar has thought a lot about the late-night shower interactions, or the bright line of Kori's body beneath the stream of water as she swivels her neck and blinks glow-in-the-dark eyes. Because she doesn't care much about nudity the way that the others care about nudity, and Gar stopped caring about it sometime after he realized that animals don't wear clothes. It doesn't mean anything, but also, just maybe, it does.
At sunset on the fourth week since Dick fucked off to Gotham, when Gar lays half-asleep in Kori's lap, toying with her fingers (cat-like, even though he's not a cat this time, because he's too tired to shift), Gar wonders if Dick being gone is an excuse or a reason for why she's been so loose with her touch. Loose with her hugs and her smiles and her tiny winks that she loves since she discovered what they mean. Loose with the habitual affection of undefined things.
"Sorry you don't get fur tonight," he teases, to let off some of the steam of the unspoken tension between them. "But Vic's new obstacle course kicked my ass, and I don't think I could shift if I wanted to."
Humming noncommittally, Kori winds her fingers through his hair, behind his ears, beneath his jawline. Hitting that very particular itch Gar is usually too embarrassed to ask for, but she never makes fun when he goes limp, one leg twitching up.
Tonight, through his half-lidded eyes, Gar thinks she looks lost in thought and distant; there is a hard set to her jaw and the sourest twist of her lips. Like maybe she is still thinking about Dick, even though he's not here and hasn't been here for four weeks, and Gar knows he hasn't called because Kori asks at breakfast every morning, oh-so-very-casually.
"Has anyone heard from Dick?" she asks like clockwork, and they all shake their heads no.
Sometimes, when Gar is not feeling so generous or forgiving, he thinks she deserves more than sullen silences. That she shouldn't have to pry every single secret from Dick's barbed wire mouth and worry about getting scratched in the process. Because yes, Dick talks to her more than he talks to anyone else on the team, but he also just does this sometimes. Disappears without telling anyone why or for how long and expects them to still care when he gets back.
Kori's been dealing with his hot-cold commitment for six years.
Sometimes Gar hates him for doing it. (Mostly, Gar wishes he were here.)
"Hey," Gar says, when she is silent for another five minutes of absentminded petting, "you okay?"
"Hmm?" She startles out of something, stills her fingers along the curve of his shoulder blade.
"You're quiet tonight."
"I was only thinking."
"Anything worth sharing?"
She laughs, soft and spirited, and flicks his nose as if to chase away the question. The monkeys in Gar's brain clamor for attention, but he shoves them down enough, hisses quiet. Just enough to see the weariness in Kori's shoulders, the very old and tired weight of someone who has been carrying something for far too long.
"Kor," he says, nuzzling his nose into her hand. Which isn't more intimate than usual, it's not.
"We are affectionate with each other," she says finally. So very quietly that he thinks, for a split-second, he imagined it.
"Yeah," he breathes when he realizes it's real, wondering (because there is no one to stop him from wondering) if Dick is touchy-feely like Kori is. If Dick knows how to hug her down from panic and massage the heart of her palm with a smile and a joke. Gar does. Gar's done it a hundred times because he's half-nocturnal and he offered to hug her, that first night she wandered into the common room shivering, shaking off the leftover dregs of a nightmare.
"It is nice."
Nice is one of those words she's learned on Earth, Gar knows. And sometimes he thinks about how nice Dick is, was, and how stupid he's been since Tokyo to let Kori slip through his fingers. (Why the fuck did he leave?)
Maybe, the fourth time it happens, it's Gar's fault. For flicking his thumb over her bare knee (her thigh-high boots are kicked off to the side) and looking for a reaction. When his skin grazes ever so softly over hers, and her breath hiccups as he burrows deeper into her lap, not thinking. It's mostly normal, mostly routine, until her hand drops to his chest and presses down.
Presses down like a firm insistence that he stop, just for a second, while she decides what to do, how she feels about this half-step past proper. Gar stops breathing as she locks eyes with him and very slowly, very deliberately, dances her hands down his chest.
"That's nice," he hears himself say, somewhere very far away. An echo of her silver whispers.
Smiling, she slips her hands a half-beat lower, to his hips, the hard line of the bones, and it's not until they drop to his inner thigh, grazing warm muscle that twitches, that Gar realizes what they're doing.
"Kori," he says, a wrangled gasp.
"Hmm," she hums, as though this is not peculiar, running her thumb in a casual circle down his upper leg.
Gar wonders if he's imagining it. He has to be imagining his purr turning into a moan, and her satisfied little smirk as she pulls her fingers away, back to his hair which is a safe place. This is new, and Gar is not opposed, but Dick is not here to remind him why he should be.
"Uhhh," he says, oh-so-eloquently, waiting for his head to clear. He wants a good response, one that's not muddled by sleepiness or post-scratching haze. But his head is so used to having too many computer tabs open that it is hard to sort through the full nuanced context of what just happened and if Dick being gone has something to do with it. A very small whisper in the back of Gar's head reminds him of Tokyo and rain-wet lips connected. He starts frowning at the big and little dippers overhead, waiting for the right words to fall into his mouth.
Kori laughs before he finds them. Ruffling his hair, she says, "I like that we can do this."
Then she stretches, intentional and long, the taut skin of her torso flexing, and Gar lets himself actually look. He's surprised when heat hits his stomach and curls in to stay.
"Yeah," he says, red-faced because he's staring, and she knows he's staring, and she did it on purpose.
Her fingers stop moving on his chest, over the fabric that covers his left nipple, and waits. Waits for him to tell her to pull away, which he doesn't, waits for him to tell her that they can't, which he doesn't.
They've been roommates for six years, and Kori has never been subtle about her feelings. There's that wiggly understanding of privacy, meaning that Gar hasn't looked too deep into her relationships with other people, but this involves him too. This involves him as a potential, maybe, sort-of something because Dick's been… not there.
And Kori has been standing outside the shower glass.
By week eight, Dick still hasn't come home, even though he's called twice, just long enough to say that he's helping Batman transition a new Robin, that he's working on chasing down Jason. Without them, of course, but he doesn't say that. The Titans gave up on finding Red-X a long time ago, since Red-X is more of a personal problem than a hero problem, anyway. A Gotham problem, now that Dick's gone.
Eight weeks of absence is long enough to shift gears and rewrite efficiency without him (they'd prefer if he were here, of course, but considering it's not an option, they've had to find alternatives). Vic and Raven dutifully resign themselves to the insurance paperwork of buildings and cars that got flipped over; Kori and Gar volunteer to patrol. During press conferences, Gar and Raven tag-team, because his social charisma is pretty good, because her practicality keeps him focused. When a new criminal ring crops up, Vic and Kori take over data analysis and flip through computer code and patterns. It's not familiar, the way their five-person team is familiar, but it's functional (just barely, just enough that the hole where Dick should be, isn't, stops hurting so damn much).
When Kori stares at his empty chair during breakfast, her mouth all tight and pursed, Gar wonders if she's called him outside of team meetings, if she's yelled at Dick to come home and been ignored and forgotten and de-prioritized. Either way, they stop talking about Dick at some point. They tuck his name into their back pockets, out of sight, out of mind, waiting until god-knows-when, until Dick comes back with a sheepish laugh and a half-assed apology for icing them out.
If he had just told them what he needed before he left… If he had just let them help…
Too little, too late.
And in another month of absence and the habitual affection of undefined things, Gar realizes that maybe he should start defining things before it all blows up in his face.
There are wiggly understandings of privacy after living together for six years, and Gar's not sure when the bathroom stopped being one of them, but Kori trips over all her words with laughter, dangling her fingers too close to new routines and dynamics every time she leans into the shower stream and talks through the fogged-up glass. And now that Dick is gone, now that Raven and Vic have to wrap themselves in the stuffy straitjackets of team leadership to keep it all running smoothly, Gar needs Kori's sweet smiles a lot more than he used to.
He needs her stove-top skin to cuddle up against after Raven and Vic force everyone through a training drill. He needs her sinful hands and glittering eyes and mangled idioms, and god, he needs to know if this is something, maybe, or something, never. He needs to know before Dick comes back and she drops him. He needs to know if it's real.
And this is why he blurts it out to Raven during one of their morning rituals. Morning rituals, as in five am, Raven sipping tea on the couch while he plays MegaMonkey: Unleashed on the muted TV screen.
They're both insomniacs anyway, Raven because she doesn't sleep well, Gar because the zoo inside of him can't ever commit to diurnal. So he's pretty damn proud of himself for finding this compromise of friendly conversation in the quiet before the day starts moving. The pre-dawn infinite stillness that stretches out and pulls them both into a strange alternate dimension where they can drop all the snark and sarcasm and terrible jokes and just… be there. Talking.
Point of this moment being, Raven keeps her magic on the pulse of the Tower's relationships, and Gar knows this because she makes a point to talk to him on the bad days (when his head is so loud that he can't focus on anything else). So if something's off-kilter with Kori, with Dick, she'll know. And Gar really wants to know because Kori has been acting just outside her realm of usual (which is a thin line on good days, because sometimes Kori's interpretation of normal is really freaking weird).
"What's going on with Dick and Kori?" comes out of his mouth a lot too fast and explosive to even pretend to take it back, and Gar is so very thankful that Raven swirls her mug without looking at him, wholeheartedly disinterested in his latest hyperfixation.
"Why do you care?" she asks, not the kind to gossip, and this is probably just across that line of wiggly privacy. Especially since she is not much interested in relationships (Gar knows, because he spent too long nursing a crush that went nowhere, and her flat face of disbelief when he talks about dating at all is answer enough).
"I… don't. I mean, I do, but I just realized—are they still? Together?"
Raven gives him a sharp look, just barely tempered with a smile that curls toward curiosity. Which Gar doesn't like, not even a little, because it means she can see right through him and can feel all those prickly little thoughts and impulses that he gets around Kori. "Together?" she says, the barest twitch of her eyebrow, her throat clenched as if she's trying very hard not to laugh.
"I thought they were after Tokyo. For a little. Until they weren't. Or, well, I thought that were just trying to keep it on the down-low, and we all know what Dick's like, and I thought it would just take another couple of months before they were together-together."
"Again," says Raven, oh-so-mockingly, "why do you care?"
It's not really mocking, because Gar knows what Raven is like, that she's just a lot of barbs and no bite. That she bares her fangs and demon eyes just to scare people off. But it's not great that she's doubled down on why, since now the conversation is stagnated.
"Never mind," he says, more confused now than he was last month on the roof with Kori's hands on his thigh.
"You missed the extra life in the banana tree," Raven points out, nodding at the TV.
"Oh. Thanks."
Gar likes the subtle ways that Raven cares, and sometimes that's memorizing the maps of his favorite video games and subbing in for his subpar attention skills. After six years together, he knows she's not affectionate the way that Kori is. Not loose with her fingers and her cuddles. Still. Still, he forgets sometimes.
"What are you doing?" Raven asks when he leans into her shoulder and starts nuzzling in.
"Cuddling."
"Empath." It sounds like a dirty word in her mouth, and he remembers too late that skin contact thins the lines between their brains and explodes her head with noise. "If you want cuddling, go to Kori."
Which is probably the best advice she could give under these circumstances, and Gar figures why the hell not.
She's the only one with answers, anyway.
Nine weeks. Nine weeks since Dick packed his bags and slipped on sunglasses instead of a mask, when he walked to the airport and didn't look back (because he gets to do that, with his human-colored skin and real identity and fancy credit cards). Two months since Gar stared after the broad line of his shoulders in a bomber jacket, wistfully thinking that six years ago, Dick was perfect.
Perfect, as in the kind of hero worship Gar got up to in his down time with the Doom Patrol, and there's been enough time to finagle that expectation into something more nuanced and complex. Dick is… complicated. Even when he slips back into his circus persona, a shit-eating grin spread wide, he carries himself at a distance. And sure, sure there are times when Dick forgets to lone-hero them, when his trust issues are sitting still and unbothered, but there's always the relapse. The long hours in the research room while he spirals chaotically with his temple twitching and his long fingers white-knuckled around the handle of his coffee mug. The team knows how to work around it now, mostly, and sometimes Kori pulls him out of it, but Dick's not the kind of person who really wants to change.
Sometimes, Gar thinks that maybe he can tell enough jokes and smile just big enough that Dick won't pull away, that Kori might hug so hard that Dick realizes the team isn't going anywhere without him. But there's always the next down cycle. The next self-flagellating low. And they're currently weathering one long-distance, too far away to do anything but wait.
"When do you think Dick is coming home?" he asks the next time he walks into the bathroom and finds her silhouette in the water stream. It's three am; no one else will be here for hours, and Gar is tired of not quite knowing how this all fits together. Not knowing if there's an eventual end to the unbalanced newness of different routines.
"The shower is occupied," she says, the words just as rehearsed as last time.
"I'm not looking. I've literally got my back to the shower door."
"Oh."
He toys with the loose frays of his bathrobe and breathes in the hot steam, picking up that sharp lemon perfume that Kori always seems to smell like. "So, when do you think he's coming home?"
"I wish I knew."
Gar hates how snipped short her voice is. How Dick's stopped talking to her since he left, how she's been hanging onto his pinky finger promises and silent communicator for the faintest hint of a return date. And Gar loves Dick, will always love Dick, but maybe they've crossed the line of healthy.
"So he hasn't—?"
"No."
"And are you still…?"
"Still?" she echoes.
"Together." He asks it impulsively, cringing as soon as it falls out and slaps the air between them, slaps the conversation into silence.
After a long, sticky beat of nothing, Kori clears her throat. "I do not understand."
"I'm—sorry, I didn't mean to say—forget I—not my business."
But suddenly the shower door slides open, where Kori is frowning, water slicking down her bare skin, steaming against the green flicker of her hands. She doesn't bother to put on a towel this time, staring at him shamelessly. "Not your business?"
"It's just—" He chokes on a flush, feels it going to his ears, but this is not all the way over the wiggly understandings of privacy. Not until she acknowledges it.
"Just?"
"You've been in love with him since forever. Ever since you kissed him six—seven?—years ago."
"I was acquiring English," she says stiltedly, frowning harder as if she is seeing his insecurity for the first time. "I did not know it was romantic."
"Not then, but now. And Tokyo. Also. Also, that's not even what I asked," Gar says hysterically, unable to tear his eyes away from her face, frozen with his arms crossed over his bathrobe while she stands half-in the shower. Unable to put words to what he really wants to know, which has less to do with Dick and more to do with her hands on his thighs at sunset. "You've been avoiding Dick. Or—something."
"He does not wish to speak with me about Jason or Gotham." Cold droplets sprinkle the ground as she pulls herself toward him, as she slides onto the bench outside the shower glass and curls her legs into her chest, the flaming ends of her hair spitting against all the water. "I thought…"
Instead of finishing the sentence, her nose crinkles; her shoulders shrug.
"Still?"
"Still."
Laughing a little uncontrollably, Gar sets a hand on her knee to squeeze. It doesn't mean anything, just like the last two months don't mean anything, and it's just another way to comfort her. To apologize for Dick's shittiness, even though they both love him, even though they want him to come home. "I'm sorry."
"Do not be. I know that he is not… accustomed to expressing himself. Especially in matters that are concerning his family."
"We're his family."
"His family before us."
Gar hears the underlying bitterness. He could ask about it, if he wanted to know when it all soured, but he thinks that falls into a certain category of private. "Oh."
"He will talk when he is ready. Even if it is not with me."
"That sucks. He's still…" Gar makes a sort of convoluted gesture with his hands, trying to get back to the root issue, the question she still hasn't answered. "You know?"
"You know?" she laughs, pulling heavy red hair over her shoulder to braid through the knots, and her biceps bulge ever so slightly, making Gar dry swallow.
"Your special someone or—whatever."
"He is my friend."
"And that's… all?"
"That is all," she says, and he expects her voice to be melancholy. It's not. It's a little wistful, mostly fond. "You thought we were more?"
"Thought you wanted to be more." Gar keeps his eyes straight ahead to keep from memorizing the lines of her body, even though he shouldn't really care about this anymore. Too used to their shower routine and her lack of regard for nudity.
Kori only shrugs and leans into the wall, resting her head on Gar's shoulder. "I thought once, perhaps."
"Oh," he says, surprised. The air punches out of him, all genuine and sincere. Because he knows they've been off-kilter since Tokyo, but he thought it was—something. Something they were both too private to advertise, something they wanted to keep to themselves.
Except this means that the past nine weeks have been intentional; this means that Kori has had over a year to get over—was there anything to get over?—the relationship that wasn't, isn't, and Gar's heart suddenly hiccups straight to his throat. Their bodies, six inches apart with only steam and bathroom humidity between them, feels gossamer, delicate. Like he could push through and tilt this dynamic into… something.
"So you were never…?"
"Never more than the thought of maybe," Kori murmurs, and then her fingers find their way into his right hand and start rubbing, breaking the gossamer lines between them, and when she presses a soft kiss to his palm ("It is sweet of you to worry," she says), Gar wonders if he is more than a stand-in. More than the convenient alternative, more than offbrand.
Dick comes home, sometime during the twelve-week mark, wearing nothing but shame and apologies, sometime after Gar has lost count of the showers and wandering hands and half-steps over the line of proper. Dick comes home, different in a way that no one can quite put their finger on, different in a way that means he carries himself with a lighter, melancholy smile that borders on distant.
Distant, until a stiff dinner (the team refuses to acknowledge that they are more comfortable with his empty chair than his presence) until afterwards, when Dick requests a team meeting and sits them down around the couch, sucking on the inside of his cheek, awkwardly.
Gar is relieved—so fucking relieved that Dick's finally on the upswing after whatever the hell happened with Red-X slash Jason—but he's not quite… ready. To forgive him for three months of relearning the entire team's dynamics, for three months of bruised hearts and anger, for three months of thinking that Kori might actually like—well. Well, Gar's not quite ready.
By the time Dick comes home, Gar is selfishly used to life without him. He doesn't want to step back from the newly established routines of intimacy with Kori. Thinking, reasonably, that Dick will remember what he left and want it back. Thinking that Kori has loved Dick shamelessly for six or seven years of maybe, and maybe might turn into definitely now that Dick's got a new costume and a new name and looks like he's done running away.
Done running away, as in his mouth is twisting open after dinner and finally putting words to the bullshit he's put them through. Done running away, as in he finally explains, slow and stilted, why he had to leave, what he did in Gotham. How Bruce Wayne is tied to Batman, why Jason is demented.
It's the first time since Ding Dong Daddy that he's folded back his mask and blinked blue eyes. The first time his confessions are more than bare bones and vagueness. The first time that Gar is hearing it all laid out, that Gotham—being back in Gotham—has realigned Dick's understanding of family, and that he's finalized the goodbyes that should have happened years ago. That if there is a next time, another family emergency of supervillain proportions, he'll ask for their help instead.
In summary, Dick's here to stay.
And he's sorry.
For a long beat of insecurity in the immediate aftermath of confessions, Gar wants to push him away. He wants to yell that the team learned how to function without him, that he and Kori have figured out—something—without him. But maybe it's the lightness in Dick's eyes, the sense of a weight that's finally been shed and burned and resolved, that makes Gar remember just how much he's missed him. How much he loves him, even when he's a dick.
They end up hugging instead.
Awkward until it isn't, until Gar squeezes into the warmth of a body that he hasn't touched in three months, until he breathes in the familiar smell of woodshop and cologne and gets lost in the arms of Vic and Raven and Kori crowding around them, breathing slow and intentional. Like they're all trying so very hard not to cry and break down, like they've wanted to since he left, even though they couldn't. Even though they have pretended to be okay in his absence because Jump City needs them, and god, Gar hates him for leaving. Hates him for wiggling so deep into his definition of family that the last forever has been unbearable.
He didn't even know he was struggling to breathe until now.
Now that Dick is home, Gar feels like his head is finally bursting above water, gasping, not drowning.
"You're not allowed to do that ever again," he says in the middle of tangled limbs, surprised at how vehemently it comes out of his mouth.
"I'm sorry," Dick repeats, and that's—something.
One of those phrases that Gar might need to hear twelve times before it finally sinks in because it's hard to rewrite assumptions about who Dick is as a person (even if he's different now, happier).
So by the time Dick comes home, Gar is just trying to work through the baggage of abandonment and loss that's not permanent. He doesn't have the emotional fortitude to think about how this ripple affects his relationship with Kori, and he resigns himself to stepping back from their habitual routines of coping. Even if he's lost count because it's so regular now, that his brain filters out the numbers. So unthinkingly written into their everyday dynamic that Gar messes up (too often) and curls into Kori's side on the couch, in an ocean of blankets and staticky hair. Every time he and Kori come back two hours late from patrol because they are so easily lost in flying and skyscraper roofs, Gar expects Dick to give him side-eye and cough, ever so slightly.
He's waiting, like a bundle of nerves, for Kori to confess that she and Dick are together, that they have moved past the potential of maybe, that Gar will need to find someone else to pet him, to hug him, to talk to him during hour-long showers when he has to wash off the blood of a battle gone wrong. The worst part of it all, is that Gar does not blame her. Or him. Not if it makes them happy.
(But god, it would make him happy if they weren't—whatever.)
Except, here is the thing.
No one says anything.
Vic doesn't pull him aside for one of their "we need to talk" drives. Raven doesn't frown at him behind the veneer of her latest sociology and religious studies textbook for skewing the emotional vibrations or whatever the hell of the Tower. And even though Kori disappears into Dick's room some evenings, wearing a jaded smile that's getting closer and closer to genuine, she hasn't stopped meeting Gar in the bathroom and sitting next to him naked while they talk about anything and everything but Dick.
(Gar is scared of what she has to say about him.)
(Gar is still figuring out what he has to say about him.)
Dick being back is wholly wonderful and awful at the same time, in that Gar can shift some of his responsibilities over, and Vic and Raven are smiling more than they have in a long time. Because Dick being back means that someone else is in charge of everyone's lives. Because Dick has to make the tough calls when there's a massive prison outbreak, and the JCPD are panicking. But Dick being back also means that Gar has to learn how to trust him again, and Dick being back means that Gar's insecurity is back full-force, non-stop.
(Dick would be horrified if he knew, because Dick has spent a lot of time since meeting Steve and the Doom Patrol building Gar's self-confidence back up.)
It's one of these wiggly understandings they have together, and most of the time, Gar really loves him for learning how to be a better leader than Steve, for figuring out how to separate Beast Boy from Gar. Because Gar needs a softer hand, because Beast Boy just operates on an 'act now, talk later' code of interpersonal relations. Which maybe is something that Gar needs to work through, the way he's boxed up his hero identity and real name into different corners of his head, but the point is—the point is that Gar would never forgive himself for hurting Dick.
And if that means loving Kori wholly platonically, well. Well, he'll learn to adjust.
Every morning, when Kori's foot taps his beneath the breakfast table, twining their ankles together, Gar tries—he tries—to pull away. But she is so very familiar and comfortable, the routine of their skin connecting so normal, that he thinks—no one can see. It's beneath the table. Not rubbing this in anyone's face, not advertising. And when they coordinate showers together, Gar reminds himself that no one knows they sit naked together, one shower door apart. Intimately together in a way that just sort of… makes sense. Maybe they don't have to hurt Dick, if their displays of affection are on the down-low, behind locked doors, undefined.
But still.
Still, he knows that it will blow up eventually, and when it's weekly movie night, and Raven's turn to pick (horror), Gar clenches his fists into tight knots to keep from grabbing Kori's hand. Knowing that the excuses he makes won't hold up if they are obvious about it now, even if the spray of black-and-white blood of the psychological thriller sends a chill down his spine, and he desperately wants to cling to a warm body and lemon-scented skin. It's just—Dick has made such a concerted effort for the last week and a half to reacquaint himself with Gar's life (inviting him to the gym, to the arcade, to the beach) that Gar can'tblatantly confess with actions what his mouth hasn't yet said. That he likes Kori in a way that is three steps past proper, in a way that Dick could have had if he'd wanted, in a way that means Gar loves her.
But in the middle of the internal panicking, when Gar startles at another spray of fake guts, Kori confesses the secret for him. Nonchalant, because confidence is sewn into the seams of her smiles and hands, she loops her arm around his shoulders with a lazy yawn. So obvious that surely everyone sees, so unthinkingly casual that he can't pull away. All Gar does is half-gasp and melt as her fingers wind through his hair. Firm, practiced. And Gar knows that Dick is staring, that the tension is about to spill over.
"It is not so scary," Kori murmurs in a voice so quiet he is forced to lean in. Her lips are nearly flush to his earlobe, her exhale warm on his skin. "I will warn you of the next jump scare."
Vic and Raven, who are used to this, say nothing.
It's Dick's expression, when Gar glances over apprehensively, that pulls him up short. It's a little (a lot) gob smacked, his lips ever so slightly parted.
"Thanks, Kor," Gar tells her in a breathless, tight voice, but his head tilts toward Dick. Asking without asking because he can't stand it if this breaks the team dynamics, which have been so careful and tentative now that Dick is home.
So Gar looks over, not breathing, waiting for a sign that this won't change anything, and eventually Dick just sort of—nods. Smiling, slowly and then fully, he turns back to the movie, as if to pretend this is not unusual. Nothing to comment on. Nothing amiss.
"There is a jump scare approaching," says Kori into Gar's ear, right before a skeletal hand slices someone's throat, and he buries his head into her chest, feeling better, lighter, than he has in months.
The fifth time that Gar takes Kori to his favorite vegetarian café on the corner of fifty-first and Bathhouse, he figures maybe he should ask if they're dating. Ask, as in actually communicate instead of indefinitely operate in the gray zone of assumed feelings and commitments, which hasn't been bad or anything, but—well. Well, maybe he is infatuated with the breathy fall of her voice when she laughs and the easy way she loves, like it's just habit at this point, and maybe he wants to be sure that the feeling is mutual.
After six years of living together, there are wiggly understandings of privacy in the Tower, meaning that Gar tries not to ask about the romantic entanglements between and across teammates, but he is involved this time. Implicated in a relationship that has not been vocalized or defined, and so maybe he pulls out that pin in his self-control and lies in wait for the right moment to ask about their unnamed game of affectionate routines.
Which just so happens to be the sixth time that Gar takes Kori to his favorite vegetarian café on the corner of fifty-first and Bathhouse, in the long silence after he asks if she knows Swahili.
For two o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, the café is a loud murmur of busy, thick with crowds of college students who are picking up a late lunch in between classes at JCU two blocks down. Gar and Kori, sipping on bright pink lemonades and splitting a plate of lettuce wraps and cabbage rolls, are insignificant in holo-rings and sweatshirts. Which is nice, sort of. That everyone's eyes glaze right over them.
And as soon as the question slips out, Kori's head droops to one side like a wilted lily. Her eyes are bright, uncanny, even if her silver ring has turned them a soft moss color that passes for human. "No," she says, licking her lips in a way that is not at all subtle. "Why do you ask?"
As if she doesn't know.
He's asking because it's a question that might answer everything. Because he has spent the last few months trying not to second-guess their relationship every time Dick walks in on them cuddling, but Kori is not shy, and Gar is not dumb. Not about this.
He shrugs, mimicking casual. "Because I do."
Kori hums, hand dropping to the faded stretch of jeans over his knee and squeezing (he is almost one hundred percent certain, at this point, that she has a thing for his legs). "I see. You are offering."
"Yup." It takes all of his self-control not to ramble right now. To hold in the spray of self-doubt until she says no, until she slams the door shut on fourteen weeks of unthinking flirting.
"What other languages do you know?"
"Um, French. Mostly fluent in Spanish. Kind of figured you'd have learned those from Dick, though I did spend a few months learning Klingon, back when I was on Space Trek, so there's, um. That."
Kori is quiet for a very long time, and Gar stops breathing for at least thirty seconds. Counting in the silence while he waits for her to turn him down, so he can stop overthinking the whole naked conversations at three am thing. The casual grooming on the roof of the Tower thing. The Dick-is-back-but-you're-not-in-love-with-him thing.
When he gets to thirty-three, she leans in and exhales across his lips. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Unless you did not mean now—"
Gar kisses her before he can think about it, which is how he does most things. Impulsively.
He almost slips on the rim of the table, but he steadies himself on Kori's forearm and finds her lips, tentative and slow, tasting the sweet tang of peanut sauce leftover from lunch. Which has been a long time coming, almost four months in the making, and even though it's not a perfect kiss (because he nearly falls off his chair from moving so quickly), it's a good one. Not-quite-yet-familiar, and she is different than Tara, than Garth, but Gar prefers her hums and half-lidded eyes and the feeling that they are alone together, even if the café is still crowded around them.
As he pulls away (thinking, of course, that three or four seconds is long enough to learn another language), Kori makes an impatient sound. Her hand tangles in the back of his hair and reels him back in, where her tongue slips between his lips, where she swallows Gar's instinctive moan. Her fingers catch the sensitive spot behind his ear and scratch, which is unfair because she knows how much that spot makes him purr, and Gar is flushed, kissing his teammate under the glamor of holo-rings and civvies.
"Kori," he tries to say against her mouth, and she exhales six inches back between them.
Her smile is smug, her lips swollen, pink.
"Your mouth is gaping," she says in Swahili, and Gar swallows hard. Presses his lips together.
"You—you got it then?"
"Mmhmm."
"And you, uh. Had to use tongue for that?"
"No," she says sweetly, hands back in his hair, gently urging him back into the warmth of her mouth because she doesn't care about public displays of affection, has never cared about what other people think, and he's just thinking he could get used to this when—
Their belts start buzzing.
Which means a Titan alert, which means they can't stay, which means they don't get to talk about the kiss in terms of this ongoing relationship that they never seem to define. It's—fine. Mostly. Because Gar is in love with her, whatever category of love they fall into, and he will be content to keep loving her forever, even if it is not traditional in the sense of milestones that most couples on Earth like to hit.
Because he'll take what he can get, if it's her. Because he doesn't think she could hurt him even if she wanted to. Because even if kisses are platonic on Tamaran, she's lived on this planet for six or seven years, and their first kiss, a lot too desperate and perfectly needy, means that they're another step closer to admitting—something.
Anything at all.
And an hour after his mouth stops tingling with the memory of her, while watching Vic clean up a gash on Kori's shoulder from another battle gone slightly-less-than-perfect, Gar realizes that he's okay with waiting forever. Because he'll gladly keep falling into the smell of her citrus hair, her Frankenstein idioms, her carefully guarded boxes of trauma.
"Gar," says Vic, holding out the needle and thread, clearing his throat, which pulls Gar out of his thoughts like a plunger.
Suddenly he is in the med-bay staring at the metallic blood on Kori's back, the road rash on the back of Dick's elbows, the dented metal on Vic's breastplate. And when Vic gestures again, Gar realizes what he is asking.
"You're not—gonna do it?"
"Rae skipped med-bay check-up, which means she probably broke something and doesn't want me to know. Unless you'd rather—?"
"—no, I can—I can finish up here," Gar interrupts, because experience has taught him (after a lot of false-starts and mistakes) that Vic is best at talking Raven down when she's injured and stubborn. Because when Gar tries, Raven likes to use highfalutin magic words and pretend she is perfectly capable of healing herself.
(She's not.)
(She doesn't like it when Gar says so.)
"It's been a while since I've done anyone else's stitches," he says to Kori in a low voice, as soon as the door swings shut, forgetting that they aren't alone. That Dick is there for the long, drawn out hisses of skin getting sewn up, the soft laughter when Gar tells jokes to keep her from crying, the soft hands that are everywhere and nowhere because nothing is off limits anymore. The unnamed tension of this afternoon's kiss.
"I'll just—" Dick gestures at the door, throwing a red cotton ball into the trash, brushing past them in a way that feels more respectful than anything else. Like he wants them to have privacy for whatever-this-is, like one of those wiggly understandings after six years of living together.
"You don't have to—"
They are both offered a blue-eyed smile that crinkles crow lines. Can see the unspoken acceptance of—something—that has been building for months without him, despite him, because of him.
"Don't forget to anesthetize first," he says with a crooked grin, and Gar's not naïve. He won't delude himself into believing that Dick is one hundred percent okay with the changes that happened during twelve weeks in Gotham, but just maybe (in this moment), Gar believes that Dick is happy for them.
For finding a relationship that is easy and good, which is too rare in the world of heroics.
"Was he being weird?" Gar asks impulsively in the leftover emptiness, not quite over the newness of being in love with a woman whose hair is made of fire, a woman who is so full of tender delirium that it smokes from her smiles—
"No more than usual," says Kori, tilting her head up ever so slightly so that Gar can feel her breath on his lips.
His lungs catch. Flutter.
He falls into their second kiss.
He'll gladly fall forever.
Though Gar is known for talking, the words that whistle through his teeth, he never quite finds the time to define the lines of this more-than-platonic dynamic they've established three steps to the left of friendship. Scared, maybe, to offset the balance of temporary utopia, the honeymoon bubble (that is not explicitly a honeymoon bubble) in case she changes her mind, in case he ruins it. Ruins this relationship without labels, this sweet understanding they seem to have, this intimacy that dances between them.
Late nights when she wanders into his bedroom with sleep-puffed eyes and a blanket, mumbling in a language he can't understand, Gar thinks this is easier than breathing. When she slips into his bed (because sometimes she slips into his bed) and presses up against him, and they become two question marks spooned, he wonders why it took so long to rewrite his heart in love. It's new, in that way that means his insecurity hasn't completely dispersed, and sometimes he worries she will forget why she feels—something. For him.
But every time he catches her smiling in the bathtub, when she spikes his hair with soap bubbles and smiles her shit-eating grin, when Gar kisses the mischief off her lips now that he knows he is allowed to, when he stops overthinking this natural progression of them finding in each other what they can't find with the others, everything feels right. Right, as in good, as in they-don't-need-to-talk-about-it.
Gar is too used to overrunning his mouth. Just this once, he won't lock down (out loud) the exclusivity of their relationship, so that he doesn't have to acknowledge (out loud) that he's in love.
He'd rather live in an endless daydream, where they don't have to tell anyone but each other that six months of showers has ended in a vulnerable tug-of-rope. He doesn't want to overbalance. Doesn't want to face plant in mud.
But unsaid things don't usually remain so, and when he sits in bathwater, half-covered in white suds and purple bath bombs (that he coerced from Raven in exchange for his cooking), watching Kori draw pictures in the water with the tip of one finger, three words finally get past his usual common-sense filter and clunk into the tub, awkwardly.
"I miss sex."
It's three degrees removed from what he wanted to say, what he tried to verbalize, but now that he's said it, he wants to know how she'll bow around the question and weave him an actual answer. Maybe it's that nudity and sex stopped feeling like out-of-bound topics two months ago. Maybe it's that she's here so often that he has not had the privacy of a shower to resolve the issue alone.
She's the only one, anyway, who is as blunt about it as he is. No secret whispers or closed doors or admonishments that "my sex life is private, Gar." Not like the others who blush, or clam up, or go quiet or—if it's Vic—tell him to mind his own damn business. Best friends apparently have at least one conversation that's off limits.
No. Kori is usually happy to talk about the mechanics of kissing on Tamaran, the evolution of lips and tongues on other planets and in other galaxies. Kori likes to walk him through the reproductive system of Tamaraneans, when he asks, when he's curious, when he wonders if he could shift his anatomy to match (it's a short-lived project).
Right now, in the aftermath of three clunky words (which aren't I love you, like they were supposed to be), Kori hums and flaps at the water from where she is leaned over the rim of the tub. "How long has it been?"
"Ohhhhh, we're not giving it a number," he says, a little too loud because he doesn't know how to redirect the conversation back to—whatever. "Nope. Nuh-uh. Haven't really had a lot of hook-ups what with the secret identity and heroics and training regimes. Not since Garth, anyway." Then, because he feels a pluck of curiosity, "You?"
"Too long."
"Too long because…?" he teases. Dangerously, recklessly. He sounds too casual for how casually he's propositioning her. Naked in the bathtub with her three inches away breathing steam and the smell of pine fresh body wash. Nothing but bubbles between them.
Her voice catches, confused, and then—"Because I did not think you wanted to."
"You didn't think I—wanted to," Gar echoes, feeling suddenly, irrevocably bare beneath the bath water. His throat has a pulsing heart in it, clogged with disbelief.
When she peeks up at him through red lashes and tangled hair, her bottom lip is pulled between her teeth. A sort of hesitation that he's not used to seeing on her. It's ill-fitting.
"We have showered together."
Which is objectively true. After battles, when he is too impatient to wait to wash off sweat, when their kisses are drowned out by the bathroom fan, when he is only half-submerged in the hot water stream, when he tries not to second guess their understanding of nudity. Not platonic, exactly, but not an expectation of more either. (He couldn't do that to her.)
He says, "Yeah, I know." Hollowly. Stupidly.
"I thought, since you made no sign of interest, that you did not want—"
"—but I never said I—"
"—you never say," she interrupts, eyebrow tufts connecting together, voice pitching up. "We have been committed for months, and you still do not—"
She cuts herself off short.
Breathless, Gar realizes that the gray in between of not talking is finally blowing up in his face. That they should have had this conversation weeks ago, before their crossed lines of proper got tangled up with hurt. "You just said we're—committed."
"Are we not?" she asks, halfway to shrill. Gar is so used to her face that he sees the pain flash over it, turn down the corners of her mouth.
He leans forward impulsively. Water streams from his arm as he lifts it from the tub to caress her cheek, the way he always does. The habitual affection they have built into their friendship, easy as breathing (not as easy as talking, apparently). "I thought, since Dick came home, that you wouldn't want—this."
"Xhal, tarq'in vo chlor'bakt."
After so many nights of murmuring together, Gar catches half the meaning, hears the word oblivious. But he's not, he's—he's been waiting for months for the right moment to finally tilt them all the way into—
"It has been months," she says, eyes flashing like neon, "since Dick has come home, and you still think I—that he and I are together?"
"I just thought—if you changed your mind."
"I am in love with you," she says, so breathtakingly honest and matter of fact that Gar forgets to be mad she said it first. "If I were interested in another, you would have known months ago. Before we started the traditions of the shower and the bath and the after-nightmare cuddles and—"
"Slow down," Gar says, cottoning on to his idiocy. "Slow down, there's a lot that you're saying, and I want to make sure—I don't want to mess this up."
"I am perfectly okay if you do not like sex or wish to have it with me, but please stop with the self-deprecating and the insecurity because I cannot—"
"—Kori—"
"—and now I am doing the rambling, and it was not supposed to go like this." She buries her face in her forearms, looking wholeheartedly frustrated, and Gar hates that dejected wrinkle in her nose, the embarrassed way she hides.
"Kori," he repeats, a soft murmur as he tucks a flaming strand of her hair behind one ear.
In response, she offers a noncommittal hum.
"It's not that I doubt—you. It's just, the last few months? Have been perfect, and I was scared that if I—if we—talked about it, then I'd say something stupid, or you'd say—I don't know. I'm starting to think we should have had this talk months ago."
When he pauses, to gather his thoughts into a coherent string, she blinks through her hair at him. "You are usually so very good at talking."
He laughs, bright and hysterical. "God, I know, I usually don't know when to shut up, but it's—it's you, so I wasn't sure what you wanted. I mean, we're both… We're both physical, right? And then physical meant something different than what it usually meant for us, and I started thinking—you remember all those questions I asked? About kissing on Tamaran?"
A muffled "mm."
"I was trying to figure out if you liked it the way I liked it, and then I got in my head about Dick, even though I know that you're not—whatever. Because I'm not him—even though you don't care about—what I'm trying to say is—I love you." That's not quite it. He's said these words enough times, before the three am showers, before the kisses, that she already knows. "I'm in love with you, and I was just trying to be—respectful. Since nudity is different on Tamaran, and you acted like it wasn't weird, so I was trying not to overthink it."
"You are"—a quick slip of a smile—"in love with me?"
"Yeah, and I'm not expecting anything from you, just because we're…" Committed.
"Because we are…?"
"Together," Gar says, committing to the word the way he's been afraid to, letting it fill the corners of his mouth, and then she surges forward to kiss him, more tender than fierce. As though she wants this confession, this ill-timed definition, to be soft in their memories afterwards.
"Say it again," she says, smiling too hard to keep their lips connected, her legs dipping into the water as she straddles his lap and presses their chests together.
"Together."
She kisses like she smiles, sunshine yellow and warm, and he can feel his mouth burning from it, turning all raw and pink and perfect because he's been starved for this vocalized commitment, and now that he has it—now that they are out loud devoted—Gar thinks he'll always lose the ability to make words and conversation. Around her.
"Together," he gasps as she swallows his moans, and that's—something.
Something that only took six months and six years of wiggly understandings of privacy and habitual affection to define.
Come yell at me in the comments! (Did I get anyone else to sorta ship it?)