DISCLAIMER: I don't own them. :sigh:

WARNINGS: A little language. Nothing big though. Pinkie promise.

SPOILERS: None whatsoever.

Okay, this is just shameless fluff. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I keep putting it off and putting it off. Well, here it is. Pathetically short and (hopefully) cute. I need to sleep some more.

SNORKY

To Hell with Courtship

Hakkai was in one of his moods.

He stirred his cup of tea absently, staring out onto the street where a young couple walked arm in arm, smiling at one another and nodding with each step as if to say, "Yeah. This is totally what we expected". They looked at the stars not for curiosity but because this is what young couples did: they sought acceptance from things higher and greater than themselves but never once paid any mind if it was not granted. If was just nice to be official; "we're, like, going steady!"

Hakkai's expression was unreadable, absolutely blank but still had the effect of something tangible just beneath the surface of his skin—something crawling and semi-permanent. It'll stay there long enough to ruin the evening, Gojyo thought mildly, knowing with weathered experience that it may not be the best time to poke and prod.

It was tea with Hakkai. What had they been doing? Something about getting fresh air (veiled attack on Gojyo's nicotine vice) and they had ended up at their favorite tea house whose owners could not, for the life of them, remember that their journey had been successfully completed some six years ago. As a result, they offered their finest tea and their finest table, located outside, completely free of charge. While Hakkai maintained a sturdy front of moral superiority throughout much of his life, he would meekly accept the kind gifts, whispering to Gojyo, "But it would be so rude to decline!"

They arrived and were rewarded with offerings from bowed, gray heads and then sat in silence. Quiet and silence, Gojyo thought, were very different things. Quiet insinuated comfort, a brief lull in conversation that would, in time, end and the friendly banter would continue. Silence, however, was something like a banner, stretched across a vast space proclaiming in loud letters some obvious, if not painful, message which always, always ended in at least three exclamation marks.

And Gojyo could recognize the distinction between the two like he could the distinction between his preferred HiLites and the distasteful Marlboro.

That was silence. There at the sinfully free tea house; that was silence.

But for attention (youngest child thing) Gojyo slurped his tea. He spilt it. He patted the area near Hakkai's relaxed hand dry and took care to press his fingers into the smooth flesh of his wrist. Because he liked to do it, not because he had been so crash as to spill tea on Hakkai's wrist. Just near it.

When all of this failed to rouse any form of physical reaction, Gojyo cleared his throat earnestly as though he had something to say; something important; something that would stand the test of time, be rewritten on his tombstone. A delicate elegy implemented because self-induced clumsiness had failed to arouse a response. He felt shallow, but willing. Honest. Ready.

The green eyes turned on him, and he lost his valiant courage.

Gojyo, instead, said:

"What's up?"

When the words left Gojyo's mouth he felt crude and uncouth; he was there, again, some seven years ago before any of this simplistic courtship had been established. He was the twenty-one year-old who had presumably passed this awkward stage. Standing in front of Hakkai with his well-crafted but poorly rehearsed confession caught somewhere in his trachea but moving, swiftly, to his esophagus where it took on the basic feel and taste of bile. He could have sworn he was done with the foot shifting, with the mumbling, with all of the oddities of liking someone. "Not like, like like, but like, like like. You know?"

And really, young adolescent Gojyo (pre-Hakkai Gojyo, he liked to think) didn't know much or even care to know much in the ways of wooing an object of desire, so this Hakkai-related confession was humiliating in most vulnerable and terrifying way. Courtship, as a word, implied a lengthy space of time over which a target would be seduced—tricked—into becoming comfortable with his presence. Flowers, chocolate, fumbling poetry—these were the things of courtship. Gojyo had become accustomed to a more primitive, faster sort of courtship, one that required only alcohol, cheesy pick-up lines, and a condom.

His 'intendeds' were voluptuous women who twirled their hair in absent-minded fingers, smiled slowly and surely. They looked him up and down and nodded their heads along to his words. Alternately, he could go for the simple-minded or naïve women who were dizzy with flattery and excited by his exoticism. "My God!" they would whisper, delighted, "Red hair! You can't beat that!"

Then, one night, he found someone he had assumed was a vagrant lying in the middle of the path to his house. A vagrant who cooked as well as he cleaned, which was as well as he smiled, which was as well as he scolded for ashes on the kitchen counter. And Gojyo had been polite enough to hide his old ingredients for courtship in a (now) rarely opened drawer in the said (ash-free) kitchen.

The altered method of wooing was startling, but acceptable. It was worth it, after all, to find someone who smiled more than he breathed. It was worth it to meet someone in the rain and not feel the need to say, "it's raining outside, so why don't we get wet, too?"

"What's up?"

He wished, for an instance, that Sanzo were there with his gun. It would have been quick. Painless.

Hakkai studied him curiously like he did Gojyo's mismatched socks. Not quite disdain, not quite disgust. Something akin to pity and shock.

Then he turned back to the street, to the lovesick couple parading about as if that night, that very night were an affirmation of everything they thought was true. "This love is the love!"

He rested his chin on his palm, eyes hooded and wondering and wary.

Gojyo sat back in his chair, arms folding instinctively and defensively because everything, to Gojyo, can be an attack.

And they sat there.

When fresh tea arrived, Gojyo pulled his body back to the table and hunched over his cup and Hakkai's, taking care to refill them both to the brim.

He handed the cup over to his companion who took no notice of it, still watching the figures in the street Gojyo had mentally dubbed Those Bastards for unwittingly ruining his… what was that again? A date? He shook his head. Calling an outing with Hakkai a date was like calling Hakkai himself a boyfriend; in another place, another time it would fall from his lips with familiarity. But Gojyo disliked the casual feeling it left with him. Hakkai was more than that.

Those Bastards had ruined the evening, which sounded grander and greater than their mortal existences; it was universal and true.

Hakkai sighed quietly, soft and gentle like an simple exhale. But Gojyo had been there for seven-ish years (not at the table, though it was beginning to feel that way to him) and he understood these things. If he didn't accept them, then he could at least understand mannerisms, tics, habits.

Since silence had a habit of making him stir-crazy, Gojyo tried again:

"So."

He liked it, the sound of it. Noncommittal and somewhat austere, it lacked a general message but still possessed a barren purpose. It would lead into something else, open a new, less painfully dull and tense page. If Hakkai took the bait.

Which he didn't. Because Cho Hakkai doesn't do things the easy way. Always the hard way.

Turning from Those Bastards, Hakkai looked at him and managed a smile with an air of absolute defeat, something akin to a crushed butterfly or a wet cat.

"So." He agreed painfully.

Gojyo reflected, thoughtfully, on the way Hakkai's eyes still retained something of that bitter amusement he must have worn as he watched Those Bastards. His smile wavered, then disappeared completely as he met Gojyo's somewhat offended gaze with his own.

"Is it because they're new?"

Gojyo came to a slow realization that the voice was his own, and assumed the same startled expression he saw on Hakkai.

"Pardon?"

He considered his options: he could start laughing (a solution that only seemed to work for Hakkai), he could turn the table over, throw tea in Hakkai's face and run for his life, or he could continue on this thread of conversation which was dangerous, potentially devastating, but still conversation. The silence stretched between them for a few moments, heavy with confusion on both of their parts until Gojyo summoned up enough bravado to thunder on.

"What I mean is, are you so hung up on those two idiots in the street because they're still new to this stuff? Or is it something else?"

Gojyo realized that he was afraid of an answer. The words left a bitter taste in his mouth. Why had Hakkai been watching Those Bastards?

Was it because they were young and in love and he wished them well? Was it because he envied their passionate love, because they looked at each other with the intensity of fresh, new hope? Was it because they hadn't been together for seven years and so they hadn't sat stoically through the harder, less advertised moments of a long, often strenuous relationship (paying bills, spring-cleaning, silent free tea sessions)?

He noted, suddenly, that he never did have a taste for the overly romantic displays of affection and that he would probably never prance around in the street with his arm around Hakkai unless he was drunk, which did tend to happen. Once he had bought a bouquet, but had abandoned it forlornly in the bushes on his return to their home, the pathetic petals drifting in lazy circles skyward. Every so often, he would whisper a discrete, "I love you" to Hakkai, though every time Hakkai returned the favor Gojyo would expect him to follow up with an, "I'm dying" or an "I'm leaving your sorry ass."

He had always assumed Hakkai conducted their relationship in a similar manner. He would cook extravagant dinners or buy obscene amounts of cigarettes even if he claimed to detest the smell, but so far as Gojyo knew there had never been any chocolate and certainly no poetry. Did he really want that sort of expressive, exciting relationship? Did he want rose petals and Valentine's Day celebrations that went beyond getting smashed and laid?

Hakkai's mouth fell open, then closed. He turned to see Those Bastards leaving (finally, Gojyo thought) but was still apparently drawing a blank.

"Oh, come on Hakkai." Gojyo began, trying very hard to sound casual and comforting, though something inside was warping in fear (he assumed his spleen because it would just figure). "Seven years sure beats the hell out of their one evening. Just forget it. We have everything we could possibly want, right?"

And then he felt incredibly stupid.

Right? He relived that one word over and over again in his mind, realizing with particular accuracy how forced it had sounded, how desperately his vocal cords had constrained. How much his entire world hung on that question mark. Right? It made a question of a declaration, threw an inquiry into the definite. Right?

He didn't know or care to know how courtship worked. He didn't give a damn about that happy couple or stuffed teddy bears or diamond rings in velvet boxes. Hakkai was bummed about their lost opportunity for 'romance'. They had lost their first year of togetherness to a mission that, in the end, had rewarded them with bragging privileges and an indefinite supply of free tea.

To Gojyo, though, who regarded most prominent life milestones as nothing special, the idea of courtship seemed dull and lifeless. What, in his mind, it came down to was the knowledge that that person could cope with your presence for seven years and not take every opportunity to take you down a notch or two. It came down to knowing that, bouquet or no bouquet, he could return home and still find someone waiting for him. It came down to knowing that, without implementing a cheesy pick-up line, he could still get laid.

Hakkai was still sitting there, looking up now at the first few brave stars, eyes softened by a look Gojyo couldn't quite identify.

Was he thinking about that last word? Right? Hakkai could nod his head and lean closer to Gojyo, but since this movement was not being carried out, Gojyo assumed the worst. Hakkai was honestly trying to answer the question in his mind. Did he have everything he could possibly want, right? The answer to that question frightened Gojyo. Hakkai wasn't stupid. If he just gave their tentative, if not extensive, relationship a good, hard look Gojyo could very well be looking for a new roommate who would, every now and then, double as the love of his life.

He thought, for a few moments, of relating his opinions on love to Hakkai in hopes of alleviating the emotional fatigue suddenly wrought by an apparition of missed opportunity, but decided against it. It wasn't in his cards to say those sort of things, and he was sure that Hakkai would collapse in a heap if he did. It was just to strange for them, for their candle-less, poetry-less, melodrama-less relationship. He could fall down on one knee and swear to always be there for him. When they grew as old and gray as the tea house patrons, Gojyo would still eat Hakkai's food as voraciously as before, even if it possessed the consistency of Jell-O. When his hands shook and his monocle reached a thickness requiring centimeters to measure, Hakkai would still laugh at Gojyo's outlandish sayings and theories.

But Gojyo figured it went without saying. Sure, they could traipse around the market, arms tightened around each other and watching the sky for a falling star, but why can't sitting through tea while making an ass of himself prove to be any less romantic? It was all the same to him; Hakkai was there, and that defined his life.

So, feeling it was the higher road, Gojyo lit a cigarette, scooted his chair a few inches closer to Hakkai's, and placed his hand on Hakkai's tea dampened sleeve. Because it was romantic. Because it was love.

owari