In The Pre-Dawn
Hitonari's skin under the rising light is as pale as milk. Akane's fingers stroke the thin membrane covering the blue and purple veins in his wrists, gently lifting it to his lips with a post-lovemaking tenderness.
The point guard smiles in his sleep and the fingers curl against a cheek. The talent of these hands is still fresh in Tachibana's memory. A basketball game; all rush and fluidity; like a river, rolling over rocks in it's path but never ceasing. And then afterwards; the same but different; two bodies of water meeting and parting, but always meeting again.
Akane's kisses make their way up the untouched skin untill his nose can nuzzle into the nook of the elbow. He inhales the deep scent of tostesterone and basketball and places a kiss there too. The muscle twitches and he releases the arm, letting it move naturally in it's course to wrap around his waist.
He is moving slowly, for once, apologizing to this body for his long absence. There are creases around the lips and between the eyebrows that look like frowns and shouldn't be there. Akane places his vision of laugh lines and sparkling eyes on a memory of Hitonari's father, trying to imagine what he would look like in thirty years. It doesn't work, so his fingers smooth the wrinkles out instead, erasing them like lines on a chalk board so he can can chart them a new course.
The sun is coming up, and Akane hasn't slept yet tonight. He has been relearning a body that is not his own; a body that has never been awkward with new height or stretching limbs; a body that breathes and sighs and presses closer in the chill before the dawn, so you can see the blood in his body flowing through it's channels after passing through what is only his: a heart.
