and about being okay with it
Rei bent over Kai's finicky portable stove which sat upon the living room table, with his eyebrows knit in hopes that the batter wouldn't absorb this overwhelming gas smell. Rei exhaled the smell forcefully from his nose and adjusted the hesitant burner's temperature. He reached alongside the stove for the bag of bittersweet cacao chips, fished a couple into his mouth, and watched for the pancake to start bubbling within its heart-shaped mould.
The fluorescent ceiling light, vying with the stove for Most Disgruntled piece of machinery, flickered overhead. He could hear its electric hum, like the death rattles of flies caught under plastic. He tilted his head, eyes on the pancake, and listened to something chewing in the white-walls-with-their-corners-aged-brown. Rei might have mentioned it, but he recalled Kai's ugly smile at the concept of extermination. Rei really thought it was worth it?
This dump—? No not really. Rei flipped the pancake. It was universally understood that Kai rebelled against his Good Family Name and/or Human Excess by living in a converted storage closet for deprivation training or something. And no one argued with that. But it irked Rei a little, who with his experience of having to live in squalor, wouldn't have wished it on anyone.
Kai had a place where mice didn't scuttle between couch and cupboard. Home with them. But then—Rei looked at the unembellished trophy case, the extremely old and rather lonely looking team photo. "With them" was just the problem. And Rei better than anyone understood the imperative need sometimes, for the sake of liberty, to abandon even one's home. Not to say Rei considered Kai poetic anywhere except the beystadium (though he had a certain flare for the ironic), but he was like Thoreau, refusing to become a prisoner to Walden Pond.
He sighed and tilted his head in the direction of the door. Attention narrowed at the fire escape, since a car had screeched away and someone been yelling foreign profanities, and had he heard boots ringing metal? Hmmm. Kai was home. From wherever he'd been all night, seeing as it was 7am and Rei had broken in through the window fastened laughably with a rubber band, groceries in hand, at about 6. He moved the pancake to a plate piled with its brethren, and was just lifting the bowl of batter again when Kai unlocked and entered his two-and-a-quarter room "apartment".
Rei turned off the stove and put the batter back down, taking a second to assess Kai's shoulders, hands, and (unsurprised and apathetic) mood before saying in a tone of diplomatic suggestion, "I wish you'd eat breakfast at the dojo more."
"You aren't making breakfast at the dojo today," Kai answered, shrugging haltingly free from his trench coat, the punkish one that made Max and Tyson call him a vampiric Visual Kei star. 'The drummer', Rei had specified, meeting Kai's frown with bared teeth. Not even the bassist, Kai's eyes had seemed to say? Definitely the bassist, Kai's defiant hnph had asserted.
Rei laughed at him then. Now though he just looked up at Kai affectionately, pointed at the plate of whole wheat vegan chocolate chip pancakes, and leaned back onto the rough-brown couch with a handful of cacao. "Maybe I'd do it more if you came more."
Kai smirked weirdly as a result of having spent time among the perverted minds of the Blitzkrieg Boys, and took a second to examine his table's uncustomary spread of ingredients that went into cooking. Little sacks of flour and baking soda and sugar, shakers of salt and cinnamon. A half spent jug of soymilk and canister of vegetable oil. The chocolate chips. The new smell of wheat and gasoline and warmth.
He'd insist all these things return to the dojo later, and Rei insist that they remain, since they weren't from the dojo. They were a gift. From him. Like breakfast.
The pancakes were shaped like hearts, though sometimes a cacao chip had melted and re-hardened at the edges, giving them what appeared to be cancerous growths. For some reason that made Kai more comfortable with them, and he sat down next to Rei, the little muscles of his lower back protesting how fine the rest of him abruptly felt. "Did you break my window getting in here?"
Rei forked him a couple wheat-hearts and handed them over on another of Kai's chipped plates. "I have the highest respect for your window. But what else, since lock-picking isn't one of my many skills, and don't tell me you leave a spare key around. I know you don't. Unless it's in a box under the bridge..?"
Kai levered his fingers out of launcher position and into one capable of holding a fork. Slowly cut and chewed a piece of pancake. Swallowed. Realized he was extremely hungry and Liked This Food when his mouth watered about it. "You could just not come in here," Kai pointed out, because he never kept spare keys.
"Nowhere to plug the stove in out on the fire escape," Rei drawled, then in a change of tack, "Have you checked your mail at the BBA yet?"
Kai shook his head, chewing. Baring no expression but Rei'd be damned if the pancakes weren't perfectly cooked even on the shitty portable. He'd never expected gratitude, and knew Kai's stiffness was neither personal nor voluntary, just the result of what appeared to be a few days of nonstop training. Which explained where he'd disappeared to.
"You should. It's full of flowers," Rei explained, sprinkling some extra cacao chips onto Kai's plate when his pancake seemed underpopulated and Kai was glaring at the symmetry.
"Flowers? Who died?" Kai said, sniggering a little. Spearing a chocolate chip.
"It was Valentine's Day this weekend, so your American fans sent you presents." Rei frowned indulgently. "The press might like an appreciative statement about it, ne. More importantly, Taka led a hunt but you weren't here or anywhere. He wanted to give this to you."
Kai looked askance at Rei coolly handing over a piece of construction paper that read in Tyson's messy print "HAPPY PALENTINE'S DAY." It said something smaller too but Kai seemed reluctant to touch it. He speared another chocolate chip instead, and ate it. "…I've been training. With the Blitzkrieg Boys."
Well, naturally. Looked like his hands needed to be soaked. "Ah," Rei lightly replied in the tone of an abject trap, "So they're not staying here with you?" listening for the gears in Kai's head to turn with painful conciliatory creaking. The 'Tiger glanced at Kai's slightly hunched shoulders and his fingers twitched, some energetic benevolence wanting at them. But Kai would never ask.
Kai was busy thinking. He recalled the drive over, where the Russian team among whom he'd been uncomfortably squashed had played one of its favorite and most imaginative travel games: How to Best Kill Rei. Clockwise from the driver's seat, Tala had suggested, "Defenestration." Ian, "Food poisoning." Kai, looking out the passenger side window, "…of old age, in his sleep." Spencer, "Rail gun." "REPEAT. SPENCER'S OUT," Ian had protested, in which case it skipped along to Bryan, who said without hesitation, "Ebola."
At present, Kai put down his half-finished plate and regarded the raw palms of his hands. "No," he replied. No they were not staying at his place. Particularly since he'd had a foreboding feeling on the way up, and seeing his window propped open from the street had confirmed the suspicions. Like clockwork, were he gone too long, one of them, namely Rei—
"Not with Tyson," Rei said.
"Bryan's with them, you want that in the dojo, where you—" Kai snapped, eyes on the skin peeling off his knuckles. Like the Fact of Bryan explained everything! Or it should have! Of course it did. Rei's eyes narrowed and he lunged, knocking Kai in a pinwheel of pulled limbs unceremoniously off the couch, past the table, and onto the floor. Following up to sweep a foot and relieve the Hiwatari of his propped elbows and knees so that Kai landed fully on his face with a half swear half "umph,"—and then Rei sat on his back.
Kai groaned, mind racing, too sore to get free. The most disgruntled machine in any room. "I don't need you to protect me," Rei took the opportunity to tell him from on high, rather pleasantly in fact, before digging his fingertips into his captain's suddenly available shoulders. "I'm not a weakling, I'm not so afraid." The muscles reacted by bunching in terror and then relaxing in pain. "I'm not afraid at all, actually, so you might as well have them over here. Hey, not hurt are you?"
Kai went limp under the massage like they tell you to in car crashes, or when being a possum, but his breathing came in sharp, betraying hisses as Rei kneaded insistently into him. His very skin drew back, shuddering, unused to contact.
"The only way to reach an understanding is through contact! Shush that, you're fine," Rei happily observed. And Rei leaned over him, chest to Kai's back, this expanse of steady strength juxtaposed against a body which Kai had to will to stop cringing. Hands to stop stinging. But Rei mercifully ignored the effort, and continued in his captain's ear, "I appreciate you tryin' ta act noble, Kai. Seriously. But I'm not a princess. None of us are. We can take care of you as much as you can us, so… come to breakfast sometimes.
"At risk of playing the fortune cookie: it's not about being perfect, it's about deserving each other. Anyway you're a sorry excuse for a white knight, getting this wound up from a little training," and Rei sat back, pressing his knuckles alongside Kai's spine. Kai who'd been working through his possible replies, face a storm of rage born from embarrassment. Kai who, cheek pressed to the frayed carpet, couldn't help but steadily decompress when the tension had been neither personal nor voluntary to start with. Kai who tried not to worry about Tala and them driving by here again—after all he'd told them to wait for his call. Sorry excuse for a white knight.
Kai had hoped Rei wouldn't be there to meet him, see him, like, this and want to do something about it like this. But Palentine's Day. The pancakes, what could he do. It always seemed to hurt too much, getting free. Even if he didn't go to them, Rei broke in and brought it home. So with effort Kai folded his arms more comfortably beneath his head and listened to Rei observe they'd need witch hazel for his torn fingers, and umphed noncommittally and hissed in periodic pain, and tried to wait out the strange-feeling idea that in his line of sight, some cacao chips had scattered and were melting, and his carpet would smell like breakfast with them.
He listened to Rei attempt to drown out the wall-mice with soft Chinese song. And tried to concentrate on not flinching and deserving this, and thought reluctantly thanks and mostly succeeded. "Silly, Kai. Try to ask," Rei murmured, and then continued singing.
A/N: (And then Rei steps out for a second and returns to find Kai hog-tied by the Lilliputians like they did to Gulliver. jk.) In which Kai's apartment gets even worse, and I utterly fail at producing romantic chemistry between these two, DESPITE the imminent Big Gay Wedding.
Oh well, love is love is love, platonic or otherwise.