(Un)spoken (Gravitation, Eiri/Shuichi) for betterinorange
I was prompted with "quiet me (one character trying to calm another down)" by betterinorange
Title: (Un)spoken
Fandom: Gravitation
Pairing: Eiri/Shuichi (or...the other way around? sort of? almost?)
Rating: PG-13 (or a ridiculously light R)
Disclaimer: Gravitation and its characters do not belong to me.
Word Count: 531
It was the loudest silence they’d ever shared.
Eiri lay on his back with the palm of one hand over his face and Shuichi turned onto his side to watch him. Eiri’s panic was wordless, the only sign he felt anything at all was the erratic fall and rise of his chest. Shuichi could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen the other man like this and he didn’t want to think about why he was seeing it now, didn’t want to think about why he hadn’t left the bed, didn’t want to think about any of this, really, especially not the incredible way it’d felt in that first moment when he’d just started to push inside-
They’d tried. And it was good enough that they’d tried, right? He could live with the mere fact that Eiri had been willing to try.
He wanted to say so, he wanted to say something. Through the quiet, he knew Eiri’s thoughts, his memories, were deafening to the writer. Shuichi didn’t want to lose him to them-guilt that he couldn’t go through it, that he’d pushed the singer off and away from him; fear that Shuichi had seen in the clench of his jaw from the moment they started to the moment they stopped; regret that he’d agreed in the first place; recollections of the old apartment in New York; and anger, anger he always seemed to save solely for himself, no matter who else deserved it.
Shuichi opened his mouth to speak, but the name he was so used to and definitely could not say at the moment was on his tongue, so he stopped and struggled to think through his nerves and the dissipating heat of arousal before he tried again. “Eiri?”
It took him some time to answer and it wasn’t with words, nothing more than an exhale of acknowledgement.
Several sentences battled in Shuichi’s throat; so often, he was the one who needed calming and Eiri was so rarely pushed to the point of being like this in front of him, that finding the right thing to say-or anything to say at all-felt strange and confusing.
“It’s really okay, you know.” As soon as he said it, he expected no response and that was exactly what he got. His fingers scrunched up their bedsheets as he pressed on, “Actually, it’s…probably better we don’t do it this way.” This earned him a scoff, which he saw as improvement. “No, I’m serious. You know I always finish too quickly anyway, so I’d probably suck at it.”
He still didn’t talk, but he made a sound that was close enough to a chuckle for Shuichi to be hopeful. Eiri lifted his hand after another moment and looked at him with eyes that were dry-thank god; when Eiri cried it felt like the end of the world-and, though guardedly troubled, relieved. Shuichi moved toward him and was welcomed into a one-arm embrace, close enough to press his ear to his lover’s chest.
The silence that followed was different, quieter, and Shuichi’s own reassurance was found in the heartbeat he could feel and hear as it slowly relaxed beneath him.