Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.
Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.
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Persuasion – chapter five
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Friday:
"You work on what? Cars? Skyscrapers? Death rays? What is it you do for your conglomerate?"
"Law, actually," Rowen said.
Kento kicked back his head, swinging a sports bag in one hand. "You have a science degree."
"Yes," admitted Rowen, following after, one hand in a pocket, shaking the other in an educational manner. "But when it comes to fighting over patents, one needs a scientific mind amidst the professional bickerers!" He threw up his hands with a flourish, his voice expanding to cover a field rimmed with trees and quiet streets and chilly air. He dropped his arms with a sigh. "Otherwise who knows what the hell the patent is talking about anyway?"
"Makes sense," Kento allowed. He tugged off his gloves, stuffed them into his coat pockets before bending over to pull an oblong ball out of his bag. He offered Rowen an extra scarf, lobbing the football at him when the blue-haired man refused with a shake of his head.
"It's better than it sounds. It's actually kind of... interesting." He shivered, watching far away trees in seasonal yellow and red. "I keep trying for workplace apathy, but what can I say, sometimes it's challenging."
He held the football up as if to throw, but there was no one at the other end of the field. He suddenly remembered Ryo was in Africa. Conservation. Experiments in eco-tourism. Ryo's weird ass vacations.
Kento caught the ball Rowen tossed to him instead. He juggled it absently between his hands, puffing a breath at his dark bangs. "So, what about dinner?" he asked.
Rowen shrugged, staring at the field where Ryo should be. He gave up, jogged away from Kento across the grass. "I don't know," he called back. "Call whoever's home?"
Kento launched the football into a spin towards him. Rowen let out a whistle in the easy appreciation of something done right. He couldn't remember when Kento had picked up American football. He thought he remembered Kento joining the soccer team in high school.
"I can do that," agreed Kento, shouting across the distance. "I just... wasn't sure you'd be up for that. I was surprised you even called me, man. You haven't been doing that much. Recently."
"Ah." Rowen hesitated, turning the ball in his fingers, studying the textures in the rough leather. "I'm feeling a little better now."
"How about your girl? I mean, you used to be engaged, my man. What was her name? Amiko? Was she blonde or brunette? Hippy or scrawnier than yo—OOF." Kento clutched the football to his chest.
"Crazy," Rowen quipped. "I decided I couldn't afford the medication."
"Right." Kento grinned, didn't push it. Rowen's nerves smoothed out. The breeze was biting, cutting through his thin coat. He wished he'd brought his fleece headband, wondering when the weather was going to get around to snow. Kento was speaking. "You want to eat out or in?"
Rowen glanced at the sky. "It will be nasty by then. Let's stay in."
"Take out?"
"Can we make Cye cook? It's been years. Please?"
"I dunno," Kento said, slapping the ball against his other palm, surprised. "There's some stuff he hasn't been doing much either."
"I know. He microwaved me leftovers"
"You ate with him? At his apartment?" Kento shook his head, almost a shudder. It was hard to see the motion at the other end of the soccer field and through Kento's big coat. Rowen squinted.
"Yeah, why?" He shouted over the cold wind, dodging back to catch Kento's throw.
"He's got this... soy sauce thing. On everything."
"I didn't notice!" He had, however, noticed other things. He was still struggling, four days later with what happened next. What did one do, seriously, after spending a few hours necking with a best friend?
Maybe he was just on the rebound. He touched the empty space on his ring finger, remembered a rash proposal and a giggling girl with bleached hair. He'd never even introduced her to anyone but Sage. He snorted. Of course he kept her away from them. He'd known even then that he was trying too hard to do the normal thing. That it couldn't really work. Even if Amiko was anything but normal.
Maybe Ryo was still in Africa.
"Only because he's properly embarrassed about it," Kento was shouting back. "Hiding his twisted habits!"
"Ha," said Rowen, and then they were too far away and the wind was too fast to talk about much of anything. He relaxed into the cold in his fingers, the sting of the ball as he caught it and the familiar pissing contest over which warrior of good could chuck an inflated piece of leather farther, faster, and inflict more damage on the receiver.
Kento was nodding in time to their laughter and the obligatory dick jokes when Rowen handed him the ball to be put back into the bag. Bent over, panting after a short, stupid round of tackle football with two, Rowen picked at the grass stains on his knees. His coat was discarded by the bag next to Kento's. He accepted it graciously, shrugged it gingerly over a t-shirt and dirt and sweat.
"This dinner tonight thing," Kento said suddenly. "I can call Sage too, right?"
Rowen stared at him.
"Just these things you haven't been doing recently," Kento went on. "I got the idea Sage was one of them."
"No," Rowen said flatly, and when Kento kept watching him, hunched as he was in obvious denial, added, "Don't call Sage. I will."
Kento seemed satisfied. Nodding sharply, jaw set. "Okay," he said. Rowen shivered and shoved his hands in his pockets.
----
Sage lived in his parent's house, like Kento, sleeping in the same room he'd used for as long as Rowen had known him. It was a weekday afternoon, though raining, when Rowen stepped up to the dojo entrance, knowing he'd interrupt a class and hoping it would be one Sage was teaching so he could stand in the back and watch.
And give fair warning.
He stepped through the door, leaving his sneakers at the entrance and looked across the big room with its springy floor. It was mostly empty of students; a woman a few years older than Rowen and in traditional Kendo dress was cleaning up after a class. A few students helped her while another was talking to the instructor, a vivid, forceful man in his seventies but hardly showing it.
Sage's grandfather looked up sharply, eyes snapping flawlessly to the intruder hovering in an old jacket and grass stains. The student cut off in the middle of a sentence, wary because the kendo instructor was in every way a predator. His old body continuously hummed with energy, in a way even his youngest students did not. To be near him was to be near something possibly dangerous and always inhuman. Like Bushido.
Rowen smiled disarmingly, shrugging. The old man was a lot like Sage in that.
He could see the old man snort and the student relax. Circling around master and apprentice, he wandered towards the back of the room and the muscular woman sweeping the mats.
"Hey, Yayoi," he said when he got close. She glanced up, looking him over once, skeptically, and went back to work. The student helping her, who was in fact older than both of them by at least a decade, peered around his teacher to study the new arrival.
"I've forgotten your face. You'll have to introduce yourself again," Yayoi said finally, not bothering to look at him after her first cursory glance.
Rowen grinned. Yayoi: never kind, always forceful, and often rude. It was like coming home.
"I've forgotten it as well, sadly," he said. "If I could borrow one of your mirrors? I know you have several..." Yayoi thrust the broom at his face, holding it like a wooden Kendo sword. He ducked under it, but out of habit didn't take it from her. No one ever expected him to be any good at martial arts.
"I am never vain, Rowen Hashiba," she warned him. Her face was china pale like her brother's, though her hair was black and gloriously long, tied carefully at the back of her head. Then she smiled. "Only beautiful. Go find my brother. He misses you."
"Is he here?"
"No," Yayoi said, and went back to sweeping.
"Right," Rowen gritted out. The charm of nostalgia was fading from Sage's older sister. "Will he be coming home... soon?"
Yayoi straightened, striding to the small office in the corner of the dojo, abandoning her curious students. She left the broom outside the door. Rowen didn't try to make conversation. She rooted through a desk for a moment before scribbling on a piece of paper, which she handed to him.
"He's visiting Satsuki," she said, pointing to the paper. "The address is there. I'll call him and tell him you're coming."
"Maybe you could give me the number," he suggested hopefully, "and I could call him."
Yayoi stared at him, one eyebrow raised in her alien face. As if to say, 'You come here after so long, you should be glad I make it this easy.' Sometimes the Date family drove him mad.
Sage included.
True to Yayoi's word, Sage was waiting outside Satsuki's building, hiding from the rain beneath a long awning. He was disappointingly real, with his arms held close to his body against the weather and with his head nodding as he hummed to himself to pass the time. Also, his hair was mussed. He did not live up to the memories of stark judgment and cold perfection from which Rowen had been hiding.
Rowen parked, exited into the rain with a quick shudder. It got in his eyes and made him blink like the meeting was more dramatic than it was. He walked right past Sage without saying a word.
Slowly, Sage fell into step beside him. He said, "I was a little surprised when my sister called."
"Yeah," Rowen said vaguely.
"Are we going somewhere?"
"No, just walking." Rowen stuffed his hands into his pockets. Rain dripped down his neck.
Sage reached out, gently pulled Rowen with him below the awning of the brown brick building. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled in. "There's a storm, you know. We can walk later." He frowned, looking Rowen over from head to toe, and Rowen hated him a little bit. "Yayoi said you looked sick, but I think it's the rain."
"I don't look sick. And stop standing there just because it's dry." He walked back into the rain, barely catching the fleeting edge of an expression on Sage's face. "What?"
It was not imaginary. Sage was stricken. And he would not take a step away from the awning. "We should go inside."
Rowen saw a chink in age old armor, and wished for an ice pick. He wanted to draw blood, but the instinct for violence was followed closely by the guilt of a civilized man. "Why are you afraid?" he said instead, aiming for indifference. There was water running everywhere and it made him think of Cye. "Lightning is your symbol. You should like it!"
And Sage replied, far too seriously, "What if it returns the favor?"
Paranoia. Rowen stood at the edge of the street, out of reach, watching the water course down the curbside, and lost himself in his own head. Sage was behind him, a brooding spot of calm, trailing storms wherever he went.
"You shouldn't be out here with me," Sage repeated. "Because of the storm. You want to pretend you're normal, that you're just a businessman in a cubicle, but you can do it later Come. Inside. Now."
"No," Rowen said, and walked away down the street towards a park that would be full of mud puddles and empty swings.
"Rowen," Sage hissed. He stepped forward to grip Rowen's arm in his long fingers. Rowen opened his mouth to give Sage the annotated list of reasons he was such a prick -
But then he stopped thinking because something very horrible happened, and it was his own fault.
----
Mia answered the door in sweater a half a dozen sizes too large, pilfered from Kento's left-behind wardrobe. Sage stood on her door step alone. The storm was leaving in favor of fog, as though it had done what it came here to do. In the false night, his skin and the gold of his hair were unnaturally luminous. The rain had not completely washed away an acrid, disastrous smell.
"You'll have to help," he said, mysteriously. "He's in the car." Then he vanished, ghost-like, into the weather.
"Who?" she said and "Is he drunk?" but there was something somber in Sage's terseness. He never hurried. It was enough to convince her to run.
In was Rowen's car, with Rowen in the back as though asleep. Icy cold and utterly silent, but unmarked. Sage bent over him, peering through the opposite door, and his face was drawn so tightly as to erase all expression. He looked at Mia with empty eyes.
"A hospital wouldn't help," he said. "We don't heal like that."
"No," she agreed. So they did the only obvious thing. Night had fallen and the stars were bright.
----
Rowen opened his eyes to Ryo's face bending over him, holding back dark hair with one hand. Ryo was wearing a coat and a scarf, strange bedside gear, but there was no ceiling. Only stars and the snowy smear of the galaxy across the sky. He shifted, confused, and felt a blanket over him.
Sage's face was stuck in his head, more frightened than he'd ever seen it. Nothing made sense. Ryo touched his shoulder through the cover, worried. He was darker than he had been, the last time Rowen had seen him, but then Ryo soaked up sun like Cye did water.
"Fancy meeting you here," Rowen meant to say and croaked. He closed his eyes against the headache he'd just noticed, but stayed awake.
"Are you okay?"
"We're not camping in some muddy field are we?" he managed quietly. The storm was gone. He was mercifully dry.
"No, we're on the roof. At Mia's."
"Why?"
He felt Ryo shift when he shrugged. "Because we didn't know how to put you in space."
"Ah," Rowen murmured, nodding. "Exposure is by far the better choice."
He opened his eyes to see Ryo annoyed, exhaling strongly. His jacket was half unzipped, his gray scarf falling loosely onto his chest. Rowen stared dumbly at the exposed skin of his neck over the black band shirt and a long curl of black hair Ryo hadn't cut since before Rowen had finished undergrad. "You weren't alone," Ryo said, as if that made it okay.
Rowen felt the air mattress under him now, saw the edges of the little patio on the side of Mia's roof. He turned his head, watching Mia step out of an open skylight in jeans and a pale blue blouse. It probably wasn't very late, he decided, if she was dressed and he could hear sounds of life inside the house.
"Keisuke's on the phone," Mia said, holding the window open expectantly. Ryo looked at her like, 'so?' and didn't so much as flinch towards the house.
For that, Rowen decided whatever had happened was worth it.
"Oh," Mia said suddenly. "You're awake."
"Yeah. And about that. The hell?"
"Sage is furious. He was here until Ryo got home."
"Home?" Rowen stared at Ryo's face. The night and dull colors of his clothing muted his appearance, made him look boring, made Rowen forget he'd periodically been obsessed with soft lips and long eyelashes. "Aren't you in Africa?"
Ryo blinked at him and his disbelief turned into some sort of smile that he shared with Mia, lips parted with something he didn't know how to say.
"It's Saturday," Mia explained, stepping out on the tarred deck, wrapping her arms around herself and shivering. She put a hand to Ryo's shoulder where he sat cross-legged by Rowen's head, adding, "Saturday night."
"Well," said Rowen stonily, and with dawning understanding, "I am an idiot."
Ryo offered softly, watching Mia's feet, "Sage thinks it's his fault though."
Rowen hesitated, flicking his eyes overhead from Virgo to Cassiopeia's crown. "Sorry."
Mia laughed. "You're apologizing to the wrong person!" but Rowen didn't take it back.
"How was Africa?" he asked instead, flexing his fingers painfully underneath the blanket and wondering if this was what other people felt when they were struck by lightning.
"Rainy," Ryo said.
"Really? I always think of antelope looking for water on nature shows."
"It was winter, mostly. Rainy season."
"Oh." Conversation trailed off.
"I want to get something straight," Rowen said finally. "Should I be dead?"
"I figure," Ryo said off-handedly, and Rowen jerked his head to stare at him, seeing Ryo's white teeth bared in an eerie patch of light against the dark.
Fire faded along Rowen's fried nerves. He realized Ryo was grinning at him.
I love you, Rowen said, but silently. Mia went back to the window.
"I'm going to get, Sage," she said, stepping through onto the step ladder below the skylight. "So you can tell him it's not his fault you got hit by lightning."
"But I thought it was his fault. I thought that was the point."
"It's not his fault when you do something stupid," said Ryo.
Rowen pushed himself up to sit with bent knees under the covers, the blanket falling down to his waist. He tried to look casually sexy, but mostly he just felt cold, wishing for a thicker shirt. He didn't want to go inside. There was something powerful about the whole sky spread out above him, around him, swallowing him. He wanted to fall into it.
Sage climbed out of the window, alone. He was wearing a lot of black and green, also a coat and a thin pair of gloves. Almost, his hair and his neck were the only things bright enough for Rowen to see. He met Rowen's eyes calmly, self-incrimination starkly absent.
"I warned you," he said.
"I don't think that's actually any less clichéd than 'I told you so.'"
"I told you so," Sage agreed. He sat cross-legged next to Ryo.
"Okay, I noticed. But at the time, you sounded kind of paranoid."
Ryo laughed. Rowen eyed him but Ryo only stared back with wide, black eyes, their color hidden by the dark. They looked sad, a little regretful, and so clear, even though Rowen could only see them by the occasional reflected star.
Something clicked. Ryo wasn't surprised by what had happened. He'd known that the armors could do this.
Ryo stood like he meant to leave. As if Rowen and Sage needed to be alone.
Rowen was momentarily annoyed. He didn't understand what about this whole thing asked for privacy. It wasn't like it was anybody's fault, and frankly the whole premise made a lot of sense. Of course, Halo attracted lighting. Wasn't it the armor of spirit and thunderbolts? Case closed.
"It's my armor," Sage explained, as if Rowen didn't already know.
"Alright, fine. Should I have known about this before?"
Sage considered, watching the archer and the swordsman by the makeshift bed. Something in his face turned a little calculating and he caught Ryo's wrist as the other man tried to leave, jerking him down so he fell across Sage's knees like a blanket. Rowen thought it was about the strangest thing he had ever seen.
"NO," Ryo said, going a little panicked. Sage blocked a vicious jab at his stomach, grabbed Ryo's wrist and twisted. Rowen stared because they were wrestling, which Sage absolutely never did.
Sage won, trapping Ryo across his lap with only his legs free where the only thing he could easily kick was Rowen's face. Rowen looked at Ryo pinned and furious in Sage's lap with his shirt riding up, a line of caramel skin under Sage's fingers, and knew that Ryo, as always, had no idea when he flirted with the borders of sexual deviancy.
Ryo made a second bid for freedom and Sage sighed, a certain resigned understanding on his face that turned Rowen's cheeks scarlet. He ripped Ryo's right arm away from his body, pulling up the sleeve of the jacket and the long-sleeve shirt underneath.
Spiraling around Ryo's forearm was a scar Rowen had never seen before, nasty and pale against brown skin. Ryo froze.
Without thought, Rowen lunged, getting a hold of an arm and dragging. Ryo weighed less than he remembered and fell, unresisting, across Rowen's bed. Rowen tried to remember when Ryo's obsession with long sleeve shirts had started. Summer, before Africa. He remembered Ryo pulling some bullshit about not feeling the heat. Coming from him, it had almost sounded plausible.
"What is that?" Rowen asked, hollow. Ryo didn't answer.
It looked like a burn scar, the skin strangely warped, like soggy pizza crust. Like someone had wrapped a rope from Ryo's wrist to his elbow, two inches between coils. A rope that had burned hot enough to scar someone who could stand in a volcano and not sweat.
"It was the same as the storm," Sage commented. "Things act up around us. Admittedly, this was a little... stranger."
"I understand the basics," Rowen snapped. "I want to know how you got burned." He glanced at Sage. "How did I miss this? Am I the only one who doesn't know?"
Now Sage hesitated. "I don't know." He looked at Ryo, who flinched and wrenched his arm from Rowen's grip.
"No," Ryo confessed finally after Sage stared at him patiently. He pulled his legs up to his chest, crossing his arms over his knees. "I didn't... tell anybody else."
"Why not?" Sage asked.
"It wasn't Keisuke's fault," Ryo said, awkwardly. The excuse sounded empty in the open sky. Unsaid: Rowen wouldn't have cared whose fault it was. He hated Keisuke anyway.
Rowen said, "Okay. Explain."
"There was a party," Ryo said finally, watching Sage. "I didn't know anybody there. I went with Keisuke. People were playing around with a painted circle and bad costumes – they were trying to raise a demon for fun. It was all stupid and harmless, but it sort of... got real when I came in. There was a – I don't know what it was, but it looked like a dragon, except cat sized and burning from the inside out. It came out of the circle and burned the carpet."
He watched Rowen reach out to trace the scar with his finger as he spoke. There was a distinct feeling of Rowen being allowed to do so. Rowen wanted Keisuke to walk in and get an eyeful of his lap-skipping, too-sensuous boyfriend and Rowen's fingers trailing down his arm. Ryo added, "I think it tried to kill me."
"You think?" echoed Rowen.
"I don't know what it wanted to do. It's dead now."
"Good." Rowen met Sage's gray eyes, questioning.
Sage said, "Cye has trouble with waves. On boats."
"Is that why he stopped doing research? I thought he wanted to be a professor. Now I don't know what he thinks he's doing."
"No," Sage said. "But that was part of it. As for you, or Kento, I don't know." He looked away and possibly blushed, but his face was a picture of shadows on shadows, and it was impossible to tell. "I get people struck by lightning."
"It's happened before?" Rowen stopped tracing the dragon scar, looking up at Sage with his fingers curled around Ryo's wrist. For his part, Ryo was mostly silent. Rowen realized belatedly that Ryo had just gotten home from a flight across two continents and was probably getting hit by jet-lag on top of all of this. He touched Ryo's hair in apology, though he doubted Ryo was up to subtlety.
But Ryo murmured, "It's okay."
Sage didn't hear, thinking of Rowen's question, staring at the sky. Rowen wondered if Sage knew the same constellations he did. He couldn't revel in the hint of discomfort on Sage's face when his nerves were still shooting tiny pains like needles from his toes and the tips of his fingers. From Sage's lightning strike.
"No," Sage said. "It's never happened before. But it's felt... close. I don't think I could have protected anyone else." For a moment, his face was open, pained. Guilt mixed with the pain of Rowen's faulty nerves. "Anyone who wasn't one of us."
"I'm an idiot," Rowen promised. "I'm a really big idiot and it's not your fault. And I'm fine. I'm really, really hard to kill. I survived Kayura. Remember?"
"Maybe," Sage said dryly, but his face flickered with gratitude and Rowen tried to be satisfied. Then he said, thoughtfully, "Cye called us after you got hit. Even Ryo was clueless until he came home and we told him, but Cye called us."
Now even Ryo was watching Rowen curiously and Sage was smiling very slightly. Rowen said, "Oh? Did he?"
"Yeah," Sage said, and he was smiling visibly, "he did."
They lapsed into silence. The wind, brushing cold air against their faces, was a balm on Rowen's fading pain. His head felt heavy and his skin felt raw. At his side, Ryo's breathing deepened, exhaustion finally winning out over tension. It was not restful, like maybe it should have been. He wanted to be up, running, dancing. He wanted to remind his body that he was alive and healthy and powerful.
"I want to get up," he said.
"Why don't you?" asked Sage reasonably, leaning against the low wall that surrounded the patio. The whole thing was really a tarred depression in the greater slope of the pointed roof. Rowen tilted his head back, grinning stupidly, feeling the soft rise of Ryo's ribs against his arm where Wildfire slouched against him.
"He's asleep," Rowen explained. Sage laughed, reaching out to tug at the gray scarf around Ryo's neck. Rowen hissed at him. "Nonononopleasedon't."
"It's cold," Sage countered reasonably. "You got what you needed from it, I think. And the only reason nobody else has bothered us is they think they'd interrupt some kind of battle to the death."
Rowen stared at him. Sage said tiredly, "No one's really sure if you can stand me anymore."
Ryo shifted, opening his eyes. His expression clouded with confusion at finding himself on Mia's roof, lying next to Rowen.
"Yo," said Rowen. "You're not in Kansas anymore. You can tell – no giraffes."
Ryo opened his mouth, possibly to tell Rowen whether there were or were not in fact giraffes in just wherever he had been, but Sage interrupted.
"Rowen."
Somewhere there was the strength to answer honestly. Rowen groped for it, felt it brush his fingertips. "You ask too many questions," he said. "I don't like answering them sometimes. And I can never just brush you off."
He curled his body, wrapping a hand around Ryo's elbow and putting his head down against the slick fabric of the coat over Ryo's shoulder, breathing in his hair. It was strange moment, pressed together in what really could have been his deathbed, maybe, and Ryo let him do it.
He felt like he was in high school again. Just by being there, by smelling of cinnamon and wood smoke, Ryo reminded him that he'd saved the world once and everything else was just an epilogue.
Cye would find that horrifying. Better not tell him.
"I'm sorry," Sage said.
"No, it's me. I should be sorry."
"Have you seen Amiko?" Sage asked, and Rowen grimaced. Why did everyone insist on bringing up his ex-fiancé at every opportunity?
"No, and please don't ever mention her again." Ryo shifted, made a sound like a soft growl. Rowen pulled back.
"That won't go over well," Sage said calmly. "I think I'm the only one who ever met her. There are other interested parties."
"Cye goes to school with her. I'm not planning on telling him. Can we go now?" He pushed at Ryo's back. Ryo rolled off while Rowen kicked back the covers, rising unsteadily to his feet. His nerves felt bare, unreliable, but the sky was seeping into him, soothing them. He wondered if he shouldn't stay out here, breathe in the empty space, but he didn't think he could stand it, and besides, Ryo was awake. There wasn't much reason left to sleep.
He climbed inside, trying to pretend that Ryo hadn't gone first to spot him on the ladder, hands hovering at his waist. Or that he needed it, stumbling at the last step into Ryo's arms, which were jet-lagged but strong. Sage came last, watching Rowen's gracelessness, a little haunted behind his porcelain face.
Something flared at Rowen's chest. He stared down, pulling the chain from his shirt with the large, flashing orb at the end of it. He hadn't felt it outside, not even when Ryo's body should have been crushing it against his sternum.
Cye was standing at the landing, watching with his hands crossed over his chest. His skin was weathered, oldish. There was a half a second when Rowen couldn't imagine who he was, thought he was seeing an old science teacher from high school back to haunt him. The man at the end of the hall was too old. His hair had been cut. His clothes were grad student clothes, nothing he had to iron, absent-mindedly laundered. Cye frowned at the expression, and Rowen rubbed at his face.
"Aaugh," he said and Ryo put stabilizing hands to his ribs, startled. "I feel like I'm a teenager again. It's this house. I must be sixteen and a half. No! Fifteen!"
"Shock therapy," Cye suggested, then winced. "Sorry."
"Never mind." Sage pushed past, disappearing downstairs.
"That was bad," Cye remarked when he'd gone.
"That was funny," Rowen retorted, grinning. Cye had hickie below the collar of that shirt. Rowen stared at it, wondering if he could get Cye to blush, but Cye was watching Ryo's fingers on Rowen's ribs. There was no censure on his face. There wasn't anything at all.
Subdued, Rowen followed him downstairs and didn't give Ryo any reasons to hold him up.
Cye's shirt was cream colored, pressed and starched, though Cye had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. Mia breathed a silly comment in Rowen's ear as she passed by: "It's not his. I made him change it."
"Change his shirt?" he repeated, catching hold of her blouse.
She pushed a platter of snacks into his hand. "You could see his entire neck."
Rowen stared at her, feeling like the most obvious person in the world and suddenly without courage. Abandoning the snack bowl on a counter, he staged his escape. Exeunt Rowen. Which was like an exit only better because it sounded French.
He'd meant to hide upstairs in his old room, but when he turned, he found that Cye had followed him up, lounging against the door frame with his hands behind his back and biting his lip. Pink-cheeked but sneaky. Rowen backpedaled, scrambling for the desk lamp.
Cye blinked in the light, his eyes gone very green. "You know," Rowen said, fingers in a death grip on the knob of the lamp. "I have issues. I'm probably not worth it."
"Oh, I don't mind issues," said Cye slowly. "I just like blue."
Rowen frowned. His nerves still sparked with lightning. "Fine."
Cye flinched a little. "I can go." He looked pained and suddenly very embarrassed.
"Fuck," Rowen said, rubbing his face with his hands. "And fuck you too. It's complicated." He went to his old desk and began, quite without direction, to pull books from the shelf Mia had bought him years ago. The books were worn and bent, missing covers. They were not old so much as well used.
In the doorway, Cye grinned cheekily. "Fucking is okay." Rowen ignored him. After a moment, Cye began to talk softly, aimlessly.
"I know it's strange, to think that we can do these things accidentally. That on a still day, the ocean might rise up and pay tribute, just because I'm there, when I didn't ever want it to. Up until now, which of us didn't feel like we had two lives? There were hero things and human things, and they stayed separate."
Rowen hesitated, his hand on the cover of a Murakami novel. Like the sea, Cye's voice had a natural calm, a familiar rhythm to be found in the flow of words, come anger or sadness or laughter.
"I ruined my sister's beach party last year," Cye was saying."I didn't know I could do it, and I didn't know what to do about it. But the waves were so high, nobody could swim. I had to rescue two of them before they all gave up."
"Was she mad?"
"How would she know it was me? No, she was mad this year, when I refused to go anywhere near it."
Cye was sitting on the desk, swinging a leg. As Rowen watched, he tilted his head so that the bruise on his skin was no longer hidden by the collar of a borrowed shirt. It was Ryo's. Which kind of made Rowen feel like Cye was walking around in drag – like Mia flirting with him in Ryo's ratty corduroy jacket a year ago, but Mia knew how to push his buttons like no other person alive. Cye was just trying to hide a hickie.
Cye said suddenly, "This is about Ryo."
"Yeah," said Rowen.
"What would you say to me, if I were Ryo?" Cye wondered, and grabbed at his wrists. It was meant to be flirty. It was just annoying. Rowen didn't like emotional things. He preferred things he was good at.
But he let his head fall back in consideration anyway, making faces at the top of his bookshelf. He turned his hands over Cye's wrist, creeping up his arms to the elbows and pulling Cye towards him.
"You'll think I'm very strange," he said.
Cye raised an eyebrow. Rowen's breath smelled of tomato sauce and spice.
"I mean," said Rowen, "that I don't talk to Ryo. It wasn't something we ever did. He was just... around."
"Well. If you did talk to him."
"I would say," Rowen explained, "that you make me want to save the world."
Cye stared at him and a slow, wondering smiled spread across his face. Rowen dropped Cye's arms, flustered, and turned back to his books. Then Cye was tossing his head and hiding any wonder behind a theatrical show of nonchalance.
"Doesn't sound like a bad thing," he said, in character. "I am the selfless heroic type. Perhaps we have something in common?"
Rowen grinned suddenly, rakishly, with his hands on the spine of an old samurai action story. "No," he told the shelf. "It doesn't work that way. Because the world doesn't need saving anymore, and I need to pay my taxes."
Cye laughed, which Rowen had been waiting for. Turning his head, Rowen watched Cye's eyes shut, counting each individual eyelash as it touched his skin. He was nothing at all like Ryo, but Rowen was tired of that particular ache. Cye opened his eyes and smiled, showing white teeth against pink lips. Rowen dropped the book and kissed him then, on his old desk surrounded by dusty science fiction. He tugged at Ryo's shirt on Cye's body, snapping off a button, but this was Cye, and he didn't want Cye to smell like cinnamon.
Cye was smiling at him, amused. He didn't understand, but Rowen was losing his taste for explanations. Ryo was the one that he knew almost better than himself and what good had that done? He threw the shirt across the room. Cye touched his face, his neck, leaned down to kiss the hollow place above his collar bone.
Power engulfed him, the same familiar power that had brought him back from death and healed him on a rooftop. He saw the earth from the place of Strata's power, encased in sapphire light far above ground. He didn't remember how to get back down.
Somewhere on earth, Cye helped him pull his shirt over his head, breathless and smiling as Rowen smiled. There was a hand on his thigh and his head was thumping with power, chanting Strata Strata Strata Strata. He was kissing Cye in Mia's house and there was a sky above him, giant, endless.
Beneath him, an ocean.
"Rowen," Cye said, and for a second the voice was the sound of waves against an unseen shore. He started; he was in his own head again, his hands resting on Cye's shoulders, but he couldn't remember what they were doing there. Cye touched something on his chest, and he felt the armor orb of Strata resting there. "Are you going to take that off?"
"I... don't know. Should I?" The marble was cool against his skin. Its power flared as Cye rolled it between his fingers, and Rowen was suddenly terrified that it would pull him away again, to the endless place between water and sky.
"You're the only one who still carries it around," Cye murmured. "Why?"
"I'm paranoid," he said breathlessly. "Look, I'll take it off."
"Alright," Cye said, and shrugged. He'd felt nothing. Rowen left it on the floor beside the bed, hidden under his discarded shirt, and didn't shudder away from Cye's hands pulling him back to the bed.
Soon the memory faded into something entirely more pleasant.