Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.
Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.
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Persuasion – chapter six
----
Rowen sucked at a soda straw, leering subtly at the redhead pushing open the swinging door of the theater lobby. Cye didn't notice; he was throwing up his hands, his coat over one arm, and vowing never to get into anime again. Because, really, it was just the same thing over and over again and didn't Naraku ever die?
The movie hadn't seemed to terribly disappointing to Rowen, but then he hadn't been paying much attention. He pried the plastic top off his drink, peering at the ice the remained in the bottom. Next to him, Cye was pulling on his navy ski coat, so he turned his back and palmed an ice cube, superficially studying the red carpeted lobby. Outside, they walked to Rowen's little Hyundai, and Rowen stepped up and slipped his icy hand under Cye's warm layers, next to skin. Cye screamed bloody murder and nearly twisted Rowen's arm out of its socket.
"I'm a dangerous martial artist, you know," he hissed.
"Errrkh," said Rowen. Then he grinned brilliantly, which he had discovered led to advantageous effects. Cye's grip loosened, his expression smoothed. He leaned forward until they were nose to nose.
And something slid around Rowen's heart.
Awareness of the armor rose up in his mind, chilly like a soft breeze on wet skin. He felt the pull: it was an iron band around them both, constricting until wind was pressed into water. Alien and terrifying.
With wind whipping at his red bangs and his hands tight on Rowen's forearm, Cye kissed him.
----
Kento said, "He can't say mad forever."
Cye lived in a white building across the street from a train station and a half mile away from a decent comic book store that Rowen had learned to love. Today, Kento sat next to him on the front steps and watched him throw peanuts at bicycles.
Rowen stared up at the building's dark windows, digging his thumbnail into the shell of a peanut from the bag propped between his ankles. Shortly, he turned back to the street, imitating a shrug with the tilt of his head.
"I think you're underestimating me," he said.
"Fine. So what'd you do?"
Rowen hesitated, gazing across the street at a bare branched urban tree. Another long moment of thought. He shook his head, returning to his bag of nuts. "Never mind."
Kento sighed explosively. "Right. Whatever."
"Maybe," Rowen mused dreamily, "it's not too late to kill Keisuke, hide the body, and comfort Ryo in his grief."
"I seriously hope you're kidding."
Rowen eyed him. "You have so little faith in my non-murderous nature?"
"No offense, but – hello, Keisuke." Kento's breath puffed white in the cold.
"You all think I'm crazy." Rowen flaked the papery covering off a nut, squinting against the cold. "That it's just because of Ryo."
Kento shrugged. It was noon in December; pedestrians in coats and hats hurried by on the sidewalk in front of them. Rowen flicked his finger and launched a peanut shell from his palm after a passing cyclist. The two of them were bundled up and red-faced on Cye's steps, banished from warmth. Or presumably, Rowen was, with Cye reportedly in a fury, but Kento wasn't so sure he wanted to brave the emotional mess Rowen swore he'd left behind.
"Fine," he said to the blue haired man beside him. "Why don't you like Keisuke if it has nothing to do with Ryo?"
Rowen shot back, "How come you do?"
Kento grimaced, rubbing his gloved hands together, thinking hard. After a moment, he said, "Because he's nice to Ryo."
Rowen paused. "That's it?"
"What'd you want me to say?" Kento demanded. "He can be fun, but he's pretty self-important. Also, even when he's being nice, he still smokes until Ryo goes completely asthmatic on him."
Kento stopped. His face was set in a frown, and he stomped his boot irritably on a lower step. Rowen pursed his lips and did not speak. Eventually, he held out his hand without looking up, offering a peanut on his palm asa cleartoken of peace. Kento took it with a rueful smile.
"...you know Sayoko?" Rowen asked reluctantly, speaking of Cye's elder sister.
"Yeah," Kento said, pulling the nuts from the shell. "I know Sayoko."
"Half the times I see her, she won't even give me the time of day."
"Isn't like that to Cye," Kento pointed out.
"Yes, exactly. She isn't like that to Cye. And I... It's like I have to admire her taste." Rowen drooped, returned to staring after the rare bicycle that dared the cold.
"It's the same," Kento agreed. "I don't suppose... maybe you should cut Keisuke a little slack?"
Rowen snorted.
"Fine," Kento said with pronounced disgust. Rowen shrugged, but it was a brittle motion.
"You remember," he said, "when I told you it had nothing to do with Ryo? Why I hated him, I mean."
"Yeah."
"I was lying through my teeth about that."
Kento laughed. "You think?" He looked back up the steps towards Cye's building. "At least tell me, why is he mad?"
Rowen shifted, rubbing the back of his neck. "Have you ever read any of the histories Mia has? The ones her grandfather collected?"
"No, never."
"They're – well, they're a little creepy sometimes. Because you realize we didn't fight for very long, and that really, we don't know much about our armors. How else would they get away from us like they do - when Cye accidentally causes thirty foot waves and Sage gets me struck by lightning? Because we're amateurs."
Kento was unimpressed. "I know Cye didn't get mad about that."
"Shut up, I'm not finished. Right, so anyway, the question comes up: how does an armor choose who wears it? And how does it know when to protect its bearer? When Kayura threw me off the castle, I didn't know how to fly, but I did it anyway. I can promise you it wasn't me that did it."
"So? I'm missing something."
"Only the structure of the question itself! 'Choose', 'know'! How can an inanimate object do those things? That's the point, really. They aren't. Inanimate."
Kento leaned forward, wariness pricking in the back of his eyes. "What do you mean?"
It was Kento, after all, who Dais had half-convinced of the inherent violent desires of the armors. That to use them was to become what they were meant to be: raging, soulless evil. All of them had nearly been killed by the effects of that speech, as Kento stared at the battle before him and refused to call his armor even to save his friends. He'd gotten over that. Barely fast enough to avert disaster. He'd become the one of them all who knew his armor best because he never made the mistake of forgetting it was there. Or doubting its power.
"The armors are meant to be able to take care of themselves if their bearers aren't up to snuff," Rowen explained. "They can... influence us. To force a fight. Or a retreat. Like with Kayura and me."
Kento stared.
"Peanut?" Rowen held out the bag politely.
"Uh... no thanks," said Kento.
"Right, sorry." Rowen picked out a nut for himself. His cheeks were flushed. "So... I was thinking, that if the armors are capable of... influencing us in their best interest – "
"What the hell is their 'best interest'!" Kento exploded. They were not alone; a woman with a dozen strands of grey in her hair tugged her son past them hurriedly at Kento's shout.
"Yes, yes," Rowen shushed him with a wave of his hand. He was hunched over his fingers, peeling away a peanut shell in tiny, unnecessary pieces. "Theoretically, it should be our best interest as well.
"But back to the question. The closer the bond between those who wear the armors, the better they function. Especially with Inferno thrown into the equation, right? So here's the problem: when combat isn't reinforcing that bond, what happens? Consider this: that it seeks to continue strengthening those bonds - anyway it can."
Kento breathed out in a long rush of air, heavy with realization and relief. "You mean Cye."
"Yes – "
"Those waves he calls up by accident. That happens because he's been ignoring his armor, is what you're saying. And it's trying to break through."
Rowen blinked. "Er... yes... that does make sense, but that's not what I – "
"And you, because you've been carrying yours around, it hasn't happened to you. But Sage, when he..."
Rowen was staring at him wide-eyed, lips parted and utterly confused.
"That's... not what you meant," Kento guessed.
"Well," Rowen said. He opened his hand and peanut shell and peanut fell in pieces to the sidewalk. "Not as such, no."
Kento waited. Rowen did not explain. "What then?" he prodded.
"Like I said, the bond... between the armors, they want to strengthen it...even if..." He trailed off.
"I told Cye it was the armors' fault," he said numbly.
"What was?"
"Us."
----
Rowen blew in through the back door. He kicked his way in from the kitchen and halted, wind fluttering the pages of the research papers arrayed on the dining room table.
Mia reigned over it all with a discerning eye, felt pen tapping bouncing absently in her fingers. She looked up as he burst in, her pretty face pulling itself into a puzzled frown. Rowen stood in the kitchen door, dressed in a long, dark wool coat and a trailing scarf. A blue duffle was clenched ominously in his hand.
"Rowen?"
"I just...um... would you mind if I stayed here? Not for long."
Mia set down her pen. "Of course not. Why?"
"Thanks. Don't like my apartment." He waved hastily, leaping up the stairs. The door slammed, and he could feel Mia grimacing at his back from her fortress of essays.
But he needed to run, to flee, and this was the oldest bolt hole he knew. Kento was wrong. Kento thought if you ignored the armor, you lost control of it, that it crept up on you and showed itself when you least expected it. But Rowen hadn't done that. Of the five of them, only he still carried his armor with him in the form of an orb at the end of a chain, bouncing against his breast as he walked. He hadn't been ignoring his armor, he wasn't like Cye or Sage or Ryo. If that's all there was to it, this wouldn't be happening.
His armor was thrumming in his head, along his veins. He felt alive and powerful, like he hadn't since the war. Except there weren't any bad guys left to fight, and he just wanted to be able to go to work in the morning without the itching desire to leap into the air and fly higher and faster than the jetliners leaving trails across the sky.
Because he knew he could if he wanted to.
On his second day at Mia's house, Ryo stood at the edge of the bed and asked him what was wrong. Rowen sat crossed-legged in the middle of the comforter and didn't answer. He was doing crossword puzzles with a tiny pencil in the back of an activity book he'd found in Mia's bathroom.
In the hallway, half hidden by Ryo's body, was a tall, wide man who looked like an American jock. He had honey colored hair and a strong jaw, which was clenched in annoyance. He didn't look at Rowen and Rowen didn't look at him.
His name was Keisuke.
Ryo crouched by the bed and stared at Rowen like the archer was his whole world. Keisuke grimaced. Rowen snapped, and soon enough they left for someplace more welcoming. As Ryo left, he stepped over Rowen's messy duffle, hastily packed with wrinkled clothes and thick wool socks and a single cherry picture frame, resting face down on top of it all.
On the third day, Rowen climbed out the window onto the balcony and tried to fly. He did not now how to do it or what it would be like, only that there was a certainty in his chest that he could do it and that he should. He didn't understand why when this certainty told him to leap from high places he believed it, but when it told him to love Cye, he ran away.
----
Mia came home after Rowen did, usually. She'd come home to see Rowen's red Hyundai in the drive and wonder if on some days he'd just been staying home.
Her house was in order, the research papers graded and stacked on stained wood. Rowen was in his old room with the door closed. Ryo was gone, out with Keisuke, which was either preference or a symptom of lingering anger with Rowen who had a knack for being complicated.
She dropped her bag by her temporary work station in the dining room and padded up the stairs to knock softly on Rowen's door. When he didn't answer, she inched it open, afraid he might be sleeping, but she could see his back through the open window where he stood on the balcony wearing a gray sweater and dark jeans.
Cold air touched her face as she went to the window to close it or call him inside. But when she put her hand on the windowsill, she faltered. Rowen stood on the opposite side of the balcony railing with his hand's propped behind him on the painted wood, knuckles towards her. Hearing her footsteps, he turned his head over his shoulder and smiled.
His feet stood on air, barefoot, supported by nothing at all.
He lifted his hands from the railing and threw out his arms to embrace the world. In her mind, Mia saw gravity reassert itself, and she scrambled out the window in her socks and cardigan, underdressed and panicked.
But Rowen didn't fall. Winds she had not felt outside her front door buffeted his clothes, kicked at his legs like he weighed no more than cardboard. And he didn't fall.
"Look, Mia," he breathed, bending towards her, kneeling on a breeze, "I can fly!"
He sounded all too ordinary, his voice raspy with a sore throat from standing outside shoeless in December. His eyes glittered, his cheeks were bright. His face was full of wonder. Mia stared at the empty air beneath his feet with the wind against her face.
She put her hands to her mouth and without meaning to, mirrored his quietness. "Oh my god."
Rowen giggled, a ridiculous, disbelieving sound, and reached out his hands to her over the balcony, a fleshy bridge from the real to the fantastic. "Oh my god!" she said again, and let him pull her into the grey sky.
"How is this possible?" she cried.
"Don't know," Rowen said and laughed at her arms around his neck, her fingers digging into his shoulder blades. "But it's unbelievable!"
He drew them upwards, above the roof, until they could see the lake spread out beneath them and Mia's house was the size of his hand at arm's length. The wind tossed them little distances, playfully. Mia was a light as a falling leaf; trapped by winds Rowen seemed to have no awareness of controlling. His delight at each new success played across his features for all to see. Mia wondered if she should be a little more nervous about flying with what was obviously a rank amateur.
"Why didn't you do this before?" she asked, speaking into his ear, cheek to cheek, peeking at the horizon past his shoulder. His skin was icy cold.
"I couldn't before," he said. "I don't know how. I just knew I could do it now."
He pulled back to watch her anxiously with his arms tightly around her waist. Her fingernails bit into his shoulder as foreboding uncurled sick fingers in her gut.
"Rowen," she whispered, "what if – what if your armor is reaching out like this because something is going to happen? Something bad?"
Laughter burst from his lips, dying slowly, but then it was gone, and he was staring out towards the lake, at the thick ice creeping away from the shore. By February, it would be completely iced over.
"No," he said. "It's not bad guys. It's... it's Cye. He started it."
"Cye?" she repeated, startled. "How?"
He dipped; the ground neared by half a dozen feet. Mia beat at his shoulders, letting out a shriek.
"Happy thoughts, Rowen! Happy thoughts!" Her eyes were locked onto her little car, on her house and her yard, all in breath-taking miniature far, far below.
"It's OK! OK!" They slowed. The fall transformed into a controlled descent, and their feet touched the balcony to the sound of a cell phone chiming brightly from Rowen's bedside. Shivering now that the excitement had passed, Mia had one leg over the window sill when she noticed Rowen still staring at the sky and dashed back to pull him in after her.
He seemed disoriented by the confinement of four walls and a roof above his head. She could see that his ears and his nose were a bright, rosy red like his fingertips. He didn't have a coat any more than she did, and he was barefoot. She closed the window behind them while Rowen shook his head and breathed hot air onto his fingers. With one motion, she swept the comforter from the bed, spinning it in the air and around his shoulders. He blinked at her and smiled shyly, like a child just becoming aware of some silly thing he's done.
"Forgot my coat," he said.
"That you did." She tucked it around him, pushing him to the bed, and snatched up the cell phone.
"Ami," she read off the digital face, and flashed the display at him.
"Oh!" Rowen grabbed for it, flipping it open hastily. "Hello! Hello?"
Mia went down the kitchen, making hot cocoa mechanically, beginning to feel as dazed as Rowen had seemed upon discovering the laws of physics still in working order on the ground. Her pulse still beat loudly in her ears and she could feel the wind beneath her arms lifting her up like it should never have been able to. Like magic.
Her house! Below her like a doll's house! And Rowen, who wielded this power like instinct and said Cye had given it to him. Or awoken it.
The microwave dinged. She took a mug in each hand, warmth seeping into her fingers and up her arm, but by the time she'd left the kitchen, Rowen was already at the door, cell phone wedged between shoulder and ear, pulling on socks and boots. He shot her an apologetic look, looping shoelaces into tight bows. The peace he'd found above the earth was starkly absent in the frantic movements of his fingers.
He kissed her cheek, vanished out the door with a cup of chocolate. Mia stood in her dining room, a warm mug in her hands, and felt weighted down by gravity.
----
Once upon a time:
Sage met Rowen's fiancé in a most inauspicious way. On a Wednesday night in summer, he stood at the window watching two shadows giggle their way to his doorstep. They passed beneath a street light, glinting blue and blonde. He opened the door even as the girl held her swaying finger over the bell.
"What did you do to her? How much has she had to drink?"
Someone had stenciled a heart on Rowen's cheek in red face paint. At Sage's question, he tapped itonce awkwardly with the whole length of his finger, smearing it down to his jaw. "Drink? I don't know... she's always like this... Neh, Ami-chan?"
Ami-chan laughed and nipped at his ear. Rowen grinned with delight.
Sage surveyed the giggling girl skeptically as she oozed over Rowen, the dead straw hair, the bent barrettes, and the spiraling lines of the clouds tattooed around her thin neck. "Rowen, what is it you aren't telling me?"
With his blue brows raised, the tall archer was surprised, but he quickly brightened. "Oh! Um... we're engaged?"
Sage had no words to say.
----
Rowenhadn't been expecting the phone call. There hadn't been any talk at all for months. He was reasonably certain he'd have heard if she'd died. Now suddenly he lands on Mia's balcony and there she is, calling him back to an uncomfortable reality with the familiar sound of a cell phone ring. So he'd dashed out the door to an old meeting spot, one of his shoelaces in an indecipherable knot and spilling hot cocoa across the passenger seat.
When he saw her sitting on the bridge in her leggings and galoshes, she was so completely as he remembered her that for a moment he was unmoored in time. But it had been six months, and he was already reviewing a mental list of all the things he would and would not tell her about his Life since Her.
He had not yet made up his mind about Cye.
She looked up from the paperback propped on her knees with its cover curled back around the spine, and he realized that she had nothing new to tell him. She was the same easily distracted girl, the one who had never failed to be surprised to see him, forever reaching up on her toes to touch his improbable hair.
From there, everything was simple but painful. Because she had not changed, he could see in every movement how he had fallen for her that first time and in doing so, nearly fell all over again. But she looked up at him with cool eyes empty of rekindled romance and handed him the last bag of his things. He'd never had any of hers; she was a girl proud of her neuroses, and she didn't leave anything behind.
(He remembered that he had loved watching her rearrange his book shelf once a week, smiling at the distressed peeps that marked her progress.)
When she left, bobbing her head to mental melodies, he realized that in the entirety of their romance he had never been enough of a disturbance in her life that his removal could leave a scar. Was that a requirement of love? Not only a joy to have but an agony to lose? Must life before love, which had once been more than adequate, now seem pallid and crude?
Amiko walked away. She was humming the tune of his philosophical despair. Perhaps thirty feet below him flowed a sorry excuse for a river, rolling languidly over rocks and brush on its way into the aqueduct to begin its passage through civilization.
Then, as it had been recently, he felt Strata stir, picking at stray whistles and whips, breezes and zephyrs. They surged together into a wind, blowing across the river and into him and through. The armorrose inhis mind like a favorite song playing in the background, inaudible except for its familiarity. He was aware that no one else on the bridge had noticed it, rooted to the ground like humans should be. Only he was too light, like a paper crane, and he knew all of sudden that he was going to fall. The wind would toss him over the bridge, down to the rocks of the shallow river.
He could already feel them in his head, rushing up to hit him. It was as disorienting a sensation as kissing Cye.
Then, as if the thought had called it, he felt the water, so much stronger and majestic in his head than it was in the concrete ditch beneath, singing on its way to the sea. Pulling him back to earth. He opened his eyes; found himself standing there, safely grounded, right where he had been with a hand on the rail.
At the end of the bridge was Cye.
Torrent was coming towards him, breathless, worried, with something clenched in his fist. Rowen knew what it was; he could feel his own pressing against his chest like a lead weight. He remembered that iron band constricting as Cye kissed him, his armor calling to Cye's, pulling them together without bothering to ask whether he liked it that way or not. It was still as frightening as it had been a week ago.
So he ran. Because he'd always been a little claustrophobic.
----
Mia met Rowen at the back door as he stepped inside, grabbing his arm so he couldn't pass. He suddenly remembered that not three hours ago, he had been more than a hundred feet above the earth, flying without his shoes on.
(Kento was wrong. Rowen knew what he felt when he kissed Cye. This wasn't the same as Sage or Ryo, whose armor had the decency to go haywire around their own elements and not latch onto another of their kind with creepy, nonconsensual consequences.)
The room was the laundry room, luxurious in the winter with hot water pipes heating the stone tiles beneath one's feet. Rowen basked in warm air against his face, shivering quietly beneath his coat.
Mia said very quietly, "Ryo and Keisuke have broken up. Don't make a scene." Then she was stepping past him the way he had come, scooping up a laundry basket as she went.
Rowen stayed where he was, stuck in one spot. Everything had gone cold.
Opportunity, it seemed, knocked at its own discretion with a firm grasp of irony in its raised fist.
"So he's single?" he asked, his voice rich with self-mockery.
"Rowen!" Mia snapped from behind him, pulling warm clothes from the dryer.
He straightened, setting his shoulders, and strode through the kitchen door, feeling that he had only a limited supply of determination and it was therefore was vital to get things done quickly before supplies ran out.
There were boxes in the hallway; two of them and a brown paper bag which brought to mind his own goodie bag of rejection, clenched in his hand, chock full of returned clothing, an old toothbrush, and a purple plastic comb.
Ryo was there also, damp from the shower, crouched in gray sweat pants and not much else, poking listlessly through one of the boxes. He looked up at Rowen's energetic entrance, his long black hair down and tangled, sticking a little to his neck.
"What's this?" Rowen asked, deceptively casual, halting only when he towered over the other man. Ryo pushed himself up with his hands on his thighs.
"Nothing," he said dully, as though the world no longer held any meaning. His head dipped, and long, fine hair fell across his face like a web of midnight. There was a flush across his cheeks, under his dark skin. He looked bereft and slightly feverish and, to Rowen's eyes, devastatingly sensual.
Rowen cleared his throat, staring down at Ryo's bare back and the ridge of his spine under caramel skin. For a shadow of an instant, he debated mentioning that he'd thought Keisuke was kind of a fuck. Instead, he lifted Ryo's face delicately with one hand along his jaw and kissed him with great passion and little sweetness. It was the gratification of years of longing and terror both, and Ryo hit the wall with a sound of surprise that never left Rowen's mouth.
In so much as Rowen could think at all, leaning into Ryo and touching Ryo's skin, it came to him that he needed to tell someone about this. That the impossible had happened and at least one other person out of the five billion on the planet had to know.
As he thought this, he wondered if Cye were still angry with him because he of all people would understand the euphoria pulling Rowen off his feet.
His next thought, sensibly enough, was to wonder how he could possibly tell Cye about this.
That was when Ryo punched him.
"What the fuck?" Ryo shouted, when Rowen looked so surprised, sprawling across the floor and pressing two fingers against his split lip.
"Ow! What the hell!"
"What were you doing!"
"I thought you were single. You're not? Shit, you punched me. God damn OW."
"That – doesn't – how does that make SENSE?"
"Oh, come on! Like you weren't dating him just to piss people off!"
"What!"
Ryo took a step towards him, and Rowen never knew exactly what he meant to do because Mia was suddenly there putting a hand to Ryo's slick chest, demanding of both of them: "What the hell is going on here? What are you two thinking?"
Ryo backed away, crossing his arms and staring at Rowen with his absurd eyes. Blue, dark and deep. Rowen rolled to his knees, head bent towards his feet with his left hand held stiffly in front of him, blood on his finger tips. He stared at it morosely just as Ryo said, indignantly, "He kissed me!"
Mia turned a disbelieving stare on the tall man with the bloody lip kneeling like a supplicant on her floor.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time," admitted Rowen, wiping at his lip with the back of his hand.
"Of all the – " Mia stopped, and Rowen dared to look up. A lanky seventeen year old was gawking at them from the living room doorway, a textbook open in his hands, a pencil perched precariously behind his ear.
"Holy shit," the teenager said, staring vacantly at the scene laid out before him.
"Uh," Rowen cleared his throat awkwardly. "Hi, Yuli."
----
"Look, all I'm saying is it's possible to get a crush on someone of the same sex without being sexually attracted to that person. It happens."
Yuli had kicked back on the kitchen table, one arm crossed over his chest with his hand resting in the crook of the opposite arm, the other gesturing to emphasize his points. He moved without subtlety, and his eyes slid off of Rowen like worn soles on a wet floor.
Rowen stood nearby, bent over the newspaper, smoothing the page with one hand, holding his toothbrush between his teeth. Under any other circumstances he would have left Yuli behind a dozen tactless sentences ago, but he had been barred from the second floor under the assumption that if given a second chance, Ryo might really break his jaw.
Déjà vu. At least Cye hadn't been violent.
He'd expected Cye to be hurt. To feel rejected when Rowen told him the truth: that they'd only been attracted because their armors were reacting strangely. That it was a fluke and false in every way. Also, that he was sorry about it.
Instead, Cye told him he had the IQ of a drunken, brain damaged parakeet if he believed such a thing. It had been those words exactly; Rowen had made an effort to remember them. There had been something so very Cye about the phrase.
"People are unwise to link sex and affection so irreversibly," Yuli rambled. "The human heart is a complicated thing. Just because you have a crush on another man, doesn't make you queer – "
He'd deserved the punch, of course, for all he wasn't sure he felt any sincere remorse. Ryo was sex on two legs and didn't know it. Which made it worse.
But he felt a hundred times the fool. There was a big wad of stupid lodged in his chest that ached with a physical pain. He was surprised to feel it catch as he breathed. It felt a little bit like his heart, which explained how romantics over millennia could have mistaken it for the organ of love.
Love and pain. All the best pop songs insisted they were inseparable. Could so many bestsellers be wrong?
He browsed the sports page while he worked on his molars, ignoring Yuli's rambling shock with the ease of indifference. His toothpaste was cool wintergreen, and he would smell of lifesavers in his sleep.
('Rowen,' Cye's voice raged in his head, 'why would my armor be pulling at yours? That's Inferno's job, not mine! Why don't you go after him?'
Rowen had walked out. Snatched up his bag of groceries, peanuts enclosed, and caught Kento on the stairs.)
Yuli was still talking. Rowen took the toothbrush from his mouth.
"Just to be clear," he said, speaking loudly to drown out the incoherence caused by a mouth full of toothpaste. "Are you trying to reform me? Sexually?"
Yuli stared.
"Because," Rowen went on, "I'm all for reform through sexual means. Good fun to be had all around with that." He bent back to his newspaper, tucking the toothbrush into his cheek.
"That's – That's not what I meant."
"That's utterly what you meant," Rowen said, without looking up. "And in about two and a half seconds, you're going to extend the olive branch of peace by telling me that you too had this totally antisex mancrush on Ryo... "
(Cye screamed at him, 'YOUR ARMOR DID NOT MAKE YOU GAY.')
"I was not!"
"SO WERE." Rowen spit lifesaver-tasting toothpaste into the sink. A small oversight: in the presence of any of the Ronins, when he wasn't speaking like a formal essay gone wrong, Yuli forgot he was no longer eight. "And just for the record," Rowen added, jabbing his toothbrush in Yuli's direction,"to call what I feel for Ryo platonic is like calling Columbus' stupid idea a shortcut to the Indies."
The back door opened. Someone stomped across the laundry room's heated tile floor. Cye appeared at the kitchen door, red cheeked from the cold.
"Hello," he said, seeing Yuli first, "have you seen Mia...?" Then as Rowen winced with his back to Cye by the sink: "You! Is this where you've been? What are you doing – trying to get back to your mother's womb?"
Rowen wiped his mouth on a dishtowel, laying his toothbrush by the sink. He said slowly, "This house you mean? Nine months is about right, come to think of it. Though all that popping in and out must have been odd."
"Mia's upstairs with Ryo," Yuli said. "But walk lightly. Ryo's pissed as hell."
Cye blinked, derailed. "Pissed? Why?"
The question fell into a sudden silence. Yuli hesitated, and Rowen whirled, abruptly anxious. "Please, please, take back that question."
"What on earth?" Cye said.
Yuli crowed, "He kissed him!"
Cye demanded, "Who?"
Rowen moaned, "Anything but this."
Unsympathetic, Yuli pointed at the man cringing by the sink. "He – " Yuli aimed his finger towards the ceiling at an invisible warrior, "kissed HIM."
"RYO?" Cye shrieked.
And Rowen roared, leaping away from the counter, "WHY IS THIS A NEW DEVELOPMENT!"
Cye said, "You are not in love with Ryo!"
"I SO FUCKING AM."
"Don't be an idiot! You spend a dozen days in hell with a guy and you turn it into an obsession. He is NOT DEAD. Sex will not raise your confidence in this fact, you bloody necrophiliac! Get OVER it!"
Rowen thrust out a hand, pointing past Cye's shoulder. Mia was in the doorway, an empty cocoa mug in hand. "And HER?" he said "She does it too!"
"Does what?" Mia asked with steely calm. Yuli let out a breath. The fury in the room plunged.
"He says he's in love Ryo," Cye said after a pause and at a far less excited volume.
For a moment, Mia merely stared, as though she had expected something of far greater earth-shattering importance. Then she smiled, a little twitch of her lips, coming into the room at a saunter, stopping in front of Rowen with a hand on her hips. "But he is so cute when he sleeps," she said. "How can you resist?" She leaned past him to drop the empty mug in the sink. "Well?"
He grinned down at her. "Have you seen the way he hugs his pillow?"
"Forget the pillow; the tiger!"
"Oh, remember when – "
"YES." She pressed her hands palm to palm in front of her face and seemed barely able to suppress a fangirlish squeal.
Yuli sat on the kitchen table, head in his hands. "This is not happening," he moaned. "You guys are so embarrassing."
Mia only laughed at him, but Rowen froze, staring over her shoulder to where Ryo stood at the foot of the servant's stair. Ryo had a hand on the wall, one foot still on the steps, and a face like a storm cloud. Mia turned.
"Whoops," she murmured, meant for Rowen's ears alone. He didn't answer. Something in his face had turned ridiculous, past caring and a little reckless.
"Hey," he said, "fuck you too," with a smile and twist in his voice and an ache behind his ribs. He put at arm to Mia's waist, and as she yelped in surprise, he dipped her and kissed her in one smooth Hollywood motion.
"Whmpf," Mia said; and then, annoyed: "Rowen!"
Ryo reached him in two long strides across the kitchen floor. Ryo, understandably, decked him again. Cye stared, Yuli swore in a tiny voice, "shit."
And Rowen didn't hit the floor.
A lazy wind spun cartwheeled through the room, prompting Mia to put her hands to her head to control her hair. Ryo seemed trapped in place, staring at the magic trick performed before his eyes. And Rowen – Rowen stretched out, his body caught in the motion of the fall, arms thrown out, one leg half kicked up, with a foot of nothing separating his body from the floor.
Stuck there, he contemplated the white expanse of Mia's ceiling while air pressed against his back like goose down.
"I swear to god, Ro," Yuli managed finally, "if the tiger comes in, you have to kiss him too."
"Oh, hell," Rowen said.