Life Expectations [Nabari no Ou, Miharu/Yoi-te, PG]
Title: Life Expectations
Author/Artist: harukami
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for the end of the manga
Prompt: Nabari no Ou, Miharu/Yoite: Touching (stroking and caressing; cuddling or nuzzling; huddling for warmth; hugging; holding hands in public; touching as UST; brief brushes of contact either deliberate or accidental; PDAs; thighs brushing under a table; comic physical entanglements; someone gripping a wounded character's hand) - Sometimes it was enough.
Word count: 2171
Summary: Miharu's life expectations slowly increase as he learns the significance of touching other people.
Miharu's expectations for life in general are extremely low -- not because of pessimism, because that's not it; he expects people to do good things as much as he expects them to do bad ones, and considers that more or less human nature. He's not either a pessimist or an optimist. He can't, generally, afford the degree of passion that either would require. Caring, hoping, having faith, having faith broken -- it's exhausting. Living a day to day life with normal people is exhausting. He knows that, but he's still fallen in love.
He knows that for a fact too, can't even slightly deny it, lies awake sometimes frowning up at the ceiling, thin fingers tangled up in his messy hair, green eyes wide in the darkness, because the sweet pain of love is keeping him awake and making him think. He dwells, generally, on the soft toneless quality of Yoi-te's voice, on the expressions that cross his face -- for all that Kumohira-sensei and the rest think of Yoi-te as the monster, the Kira-user, an emotionless assassin, it isn't even that Yoi-te's good at hiding his feelings. He isn't. When he's killing, the haunted, angry expression on his face is because Yoi-te is haunted and angry -- because Yoi-te started killing to try to erase himself but hates to kill, because Yoi-te seems to really hate the world around him, the world that created him, and turns that feeling inward. When Yoi-te is uncertain, everything about Yoi-te is uncertain, brows creased, lips pursed, eyes wide. When Yoi-te is sad or scared, that's written into every line of his body, it's written into the strain on his face, and sometimes, if it's bad enough, Yoi-te cries. Miharu doesn't cry, typically; he's fairly sure when the next time will be and that thought is always enough to immobilize him with terror. He closes his eyes and pulls at his hair. When Yoi-te is happy...
Miharu, eyes closed, thinks about Yoi-te happy and feels guilty.
***
"Yoi-te? Oi, Yoi-- Miharu, he's asleep, go put a blanket on him."
Miharu looks up at Yukimi's words. Miharu is seated on the floor, ostensibly playing a video game, though truth be told moving the character around the screen got to be too troublesome and instead he let go of the controller and watched the character play out his idle animations. Yoi-te had been watching them as well, from the couch -- the character crouching as if flexing his leg muscles, twisting as if to loosen his back, stretching his arms over his head. Touches of realism, Miharu had thought: it's just a collection of textures over polygons, it doesn't have muscles to stretch, it doesn't get tired or sore or bored from standing around. But, yes, Yoi-te is asleep now, flopped onto his side, like he'd been switched off more than fallen asleep. Upright, then unconscious. Miharu is getting used to this tendency.
"Blanket," Miharu says, and looks at Yukimi.
"Hall closet."
Miharu keeps looking at Yukimi, expectant, and finally with an explosive sigh, Yukimi gets up from his chair in front of the computer and goes to the hall closet, fetching a blanket and flinging it at Miharu. Miharu catches it, eyes wide as it unwinds in his arms, as he has to gather it in against him.
"At least put it on him, brat," Yukimi grumbles, sliding into his computer chair.
"That's a servant's job," Miharu tells Yukimi.
"You--!! Ah, your highness, you want this humble servant touching your whipping boy?" Yukimi's tone is sarcastic, but he also sounds like he's aware.
Miharu feels himself flush. "No," he says
"Then, if you please."
Letting the blanket unwind again so he can spread it out, Miharu grabs the edge and trails it along behind him, then drops it on the floor. Yoi-te's legs are still hanging off the front of the couch even though he's crumpled to the side, and Miharu gets down on one knee, then the other, picking up Yoi-te's legs carefully. Though long, they're light and thin, the hard muscles of Yoi-te's calves the only thing between his skin and his bone. Unlike Miharu, who can't stand the feeling of having food inside him, Yoi-te eats and eats a lot, but his body is still devouring itself from the inside out, far beyond what Yoi-te can actually take in. Still, it feels good, though invasive, to do this, to move Yoi-te's legs, tuck his arms into a more comfortable position, daringly -- daringly -- brush his hair back from soft thin dry cheeks with no sign of stubble. Yoi-te lets out a soft sigh and Miharu jerks his hand back, eyes wide.
He becomes aware that Yukimi is watching them and hurriedly ducks, picks up the blanket, drapes it over Yoi-te, and then turns, pads to Yukimi's side, and sits down on Yukimi's computer desk.
"Oi, this thing isn't supposed to take a human's weight," Yukimi says, but Miharu ignores it because they're both aware that he's underweight and Yukimi using it as an excuse to try to feed him more isn't going to work.
Instead, he watches Yukimi for a bit. "You know," he says.
Yukimi rubs his head awkwardly. "You're not exactly inconspicuous," he says, and it strikes Miharu again that this man, who gives off the impression of being just muscle, the hired-thug type, is actually a journalist who uses words like 'inconspicuous' and watches what goes on around him like he may someday need to write about it. "Look, it doesn't bother me."
"It would bother Yoi-te," Miharu says. "So don't tell."
"I'm not so sure of that," Yukimi mutters.
"He doesn't want love."
"He might not want to want it," Yukimi says, "but really to not want love? Does a person like that exist?"
"It would make things hard," Miharu says.
Yukimi considers this, leaning back and frowning, watching him. "Harder than you two already being the centre of each other's universes?"
Miharu covers his ears briefly, trying to block out the too-blunt truth, then lets his hands drop; it's true, he knows, Yoi-te loves him the same way he loves Yoi-te. It's a fact of their existence. But putting it into words creates too much reality for it. It removes the safe zone of deniability. "If we are," he says, "then yes. Because being in love means relationships. Relationships mean other things. Attachment. Touch. Kissing. Sex. Things Yoi-te won't want."
"Do you?"
"If I did," Miharu says, "that would be hard on Yoi-te. That's the point. Because if I'm the centre of his universe, if I wanted to have sex with Yoi-te, then Yoi-te will want to provide for me. But he will also not want to, because he doesn't want things like that. I don't know why, but he absolutely does not want things like that. Like his body's the last secret he'll take with him. And Yoi-te's Yoi-te, so he will listen to his wants and not do it. But he'll be tormented. By wanting to make me happy. He already has enough of that to deal with. Yoi-te's already suffering enough with wanting to make me happy while knowing he's on a path that I don't want for myself. That I only want for him. So there's no point. We can love each other better if we don't treat it like love."
Yukimi is silent a long few moments, not watching him anymore, just watching his computer screen. Then he reaches out a lanky, scarred arm and ruffles Miharu's hair. It's too gentle; it feels bad inside Miharu's heart. "You go play your game," Yukimi tells him.
Miharu returns to the video game and spends a while pondering the character's equipment. Some time passes before Yoi-te sinks down next to him, still wrapped in the blanket. Yoi-te's warm, slight weight settles against his side and Yoi-te leans his head on Miharu's shoulder.
Out of the corner of his eye, Miharu looks at him.
Yoi-te is sleepy, as if he's about to drop off again any second. He's silent, and Miharu wonders if Yoi-te had heard them, and how much he'd heard if so. But Yoi-te doesn't bring it up, just drops one of his hands to cover Miharu's as he pillows himself against Miharu and falls back asleep.
***
In a way, Miharu thinks, much, much later, they did make love in the only ways they could, with Yoi-te's body a forbidden zone and the topic one that could never be broached. They made love by sitting and looking at the stars together with fingers brushing each other on the seat between them. They made love when Yoi-te washed Miharu's feet clean from dirt and injuries. They made love every time Yoi-te leaned against him as he slept. They made love whenever they huddled together for warmth late nights on the run, whenever he flung himself into Yoi-te's arms for a hug, whenever Yoi-te seized his hand when they needed to run. They made love when Yoi-te died in Miharu's arms dreaming of warmth and domesticity and a life together that would never come to be. They made love, too, when Miharu remembered Yoi-te, perhaps more purely and thoroughly than ever before -- when Yoi-te came rushing back into him, filled him completely, filled all those aching, lonely places that had felt the lack of Yoi-te when he didn't know who or what Yoi-te even was, hauled him out from the drowning depths of his own despair, held him close and warm so their existences mingled and he'll carry that love with him for the rest of his life even if he has to live it out alone. At night he dreams of Yoi-te, and they never have sex, never even kiss, but they press close in his dreams so he can feel Yoi-te's warmth and his breath on Miharu's face and the steady pulse of his heart and, when that happens, he wakes shaken and revelatory and that is like making love too, he thinks.
It's not sex, not bodies moving into each other, not orgasms -- though, Miharu has heard, sex of course does not necessitate orgasm. As Yoi-te had wished, his body ended up being the last great secret, so secret that he never even left a corpse. But Miharu is satisfied. He's satisfied. He wishes for more and more Yoi-te, too late to have him, but he's satisfied.
Yukimi comes out, takes a seat on the porch with him. He moves awkwardly, as he always does these days -- getting up and down is hard for him with only one arm, and Yukimi's carrying two mugs of hot lemonade in his hand, which makes it even harder. But once down he sighs -- like he's relieved, which is probably true; Yukimi's in pain when he strains himself -- and puts the mugs down, then pushes one close to Miharu.
"What're you daydreaming over?" Yukimi asks.
Miharu picks up his mug and holds it between two hands, gazing down at the honeyed lemon floating in the cup. "I'm still in love," he tells Yukimi.
"Yeah," Yukimi says, and Miharu briefly wonders if Yukimi's agreeing that Miharu is, or if Yukimi had been in love himself -- perhaps in their position, unable to say it and make it harder for the poor struggling person he loved, but perhaps that is absurd, and he knows that Yukimi will brush it off if asked, whether it's true or untrue. "Are you lonely?"
"Kind of," Miharu says. "Kind of not."
"Because he's not gone," Yukimi agrees. "Just dead."
"Yes," Miharu says, and, embarrassingly, cries into his drink a little. Yukimi puts his arm around Miharu and doesn't say anything for a long while. Miharu thinks about the comfort offered in that small gesture and finally says, "I wanted a million more years of life with him. I wanted to make him okonomiyaki again."
"Yeah," Yukimi says, and nods towards the lemonade, understandingly. "But we don't have a million years together with anyone. We're just human. All we've got is our lifetime, whatever that ends up being, yeah? And maybe that's not the end. Just the end of one thing. But..."
"Maybe not all," Miharu says. "Because dead isn't -- because Yoi-te exists. He exists inside me and you. He exists inside our words, in talking about him right now, in our thoughts, our feelings, our memories. When Yukimi is gone, Yukimi will exist inside me too. If I go first, I'll exist inside Yukimi. Inside Raimei, inside Kumohira-sensei..."
Touch, he thinks; it's not just physical, and that must be why, must be how they could make love with the barest of touches, because their relationship was a relationship so every way they touched each other's lives was like making love. But he's touched other people's lives too, in different ways, and Yoi-te, too, had touched other people's lives; he exists inside everyone now, and everyone he knows will exist inside someone else, and those people will exist inside other people too, and perhaps they do have a million years, he thinks, and curls a little tighter against Yukimi's supportive side, cries a little more, and then drinks his lemonade.
Author/Artist: harukami
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for the end of the manga
Prompt: Nabari no Ou, Miharu/Yoite: Touching (stroking and caressing; cuddling or nuzzling; huddling for warmth; hugging; holding hands in public; touching as UST; brief brushes of contact either deliberate or accidental; PDAs; thighs brushing under a table; comic physical entanglements; someone gripping a wounded character's hand) - Sometimes it was enough.
Word count: 2171
Summary: Miharu's life expectations slowly increase as he learns the significance of touching other people.
Miharu's expectations for life in general are extremely low -- not because of pessimism, because that's not it; he expects people to do good things as much as he expects them to do bad ones, and considers that more or less human nature. He's not either a pessimist or an optimist. He can't, generally, afford the degree of passion that either would require. Caring, hoping, having faith, having faith broken -- it's exhausting. Living a day to day life with normal people is exhausting. He knows that, but he's still fallen in love.
He knows that for a fact too, can't even slightly deny it, lies awake sometimes frowning up at the ceiling, thin fingers tangled up in his messy hair, green eyes wide in the darkness, because the sweet pain of love is keeping him awake and making him think. He dwells, generally, on the soft toneless quality of Yoi-te's voice, on the expressions that cross his face -- for all that Kumohira-sensei and the rest think of Yoi-te as the monster, the Kira-user, an emotionless assassin, it isn't even that Yoi-te's good at hiding his feelings. He isn't. When he's killing, the haunted, angry expression on his face is because Yoi-te is haunted and angry -- because Yoi-te started killing to try to erase himself but hates to kill, because Yoi-te seems to really hate the world around him, the world that created him, and turns that feeling inward. When Yoi-te is uncertain, everything about Yoi-te is uncertain, brows creased, lips pursed, eyes wide. When Yoi-te is sad or scared, that's written into every line of his body, it's written into the strain on his face, and sometimes, if it's bad enough, Yoi-te cries. Miharu doesn't cry, typically; he's fairly sure when the next time will be and that thought is always enough to immobilize him with terror. He closes his eyes and pulls at his hair. When Yoi-te is happy...
Miharu, eyes closed, thinks about Yoi-te happy and feels guilty.
***
"Yoi-te? Oi, Yoi-- Miharu, he's asleep, go put a blanket on him."
Miharu looks up at Yukimi's words. Miharu is seated on the floor, ostensibly playing a video game, though truth be told moving the character around the screen got to be too troublesome and instead he let go of the controller and watched the character play out his idle animations. Yoi-te had been watching them as well, from the couch -- the character crouching as if flexing his leg muscles, twisting as if to loosen his back, stretching his arms over his head. Touches of realism, Miharu had thought: it's just a collection of textures over polygons, it doesn't have muscles to stretch, it doesn't get tired or sore or bored from standing around. But, yes, Yoi-te is asleep now, flopped onto his side, like he'd been switched off more than fallen asleep. Upright, then unconscious. Miharu is getting used to this tendency.
"Blanket," Miharu says, and looks at Yukimi.
"Hall closet."
Miharu keeps looking at Yukimi, expectant, and finally with an explosive sigh, Yukimi gets up from his chair in front of the computer and goes to the hall closet, fetching a blanket and flinging it at Miharu. Miharu catches it, eyes wide as it unwinds in his arms, as he has to gather it in against him.
"At least put it on him, brat," Yukimi grumbles, sliding into his computer chair.
"That's a servant's job," Miharu tells Yukimi.
"You--!! Ah, your highness, you want this humble servant touching your whipping boy?" Yukimi's tone is sarcastic, but he also sounds like he's aware.
Miharu feels himself flush. "No," he says
"Then, if you please."
Letting the blanket unwind again so he can spread it out, Miharu grabs the edge and trails it along behind him, then drops it on the floor. Yoi-te's legs are still hanging off the front of the couch even though he's crumpled to the side, and Miharu gets down on one knee, then the other, picking up Yoi-te's legs carefully. Though long, they're light and thin, the hard muscles of Yoi-te's calves the only thing between his skin and his bone. Unlike Miharu, who can't stand the feeling of having food inside him, Yoi-te eats and eats a lot, but his body is still devouring itself from the inside out, far beyond what Yoi-te can actually take in. Still, it feels good, though invasive, to do this, to move Yoi-te's legs, tuck his arms into a more comfortable position, daringly -- daringly -- brush his hair back from soft thin dry cheeks with no sign of stubble. Yoi-te lets out a soft sigh and Miharu jerks his hand back, eyes wide.
He becomes aware that Yukimi is watching them and hurriedly ducks, picks up the blanket, drapes it over Yoi-te, and then turns, pads to Yukimi's side, and sits down on Yukimi's computer desk.
"Oi, this thing isn't supposed to take a human's weight," Yukimi says, but Miharu ignores it because they're both aware that he's underweight and Yukimi using it as an excuse to try to feed him more isn't going to work.
Instead, he watches Yukimi for a bit. "You know," he says.
Yukimi rubs his head awkwardly. "You're not exactly inconspicuous," he says, and it strikes Miharu again that this man, who gives off the impression of being just muscle, the hired-thug type, is actually a journalist who uses words like 'inconspicuous' and watches what goes on around him like he may someday need to write about it. "Look, it doesn't bother me."
"It would bother Yoi-te," Miharu says. "So don't tell."
"I'm not so sure of that," Yukimi mutters.
"He doesn't want love."
"He might not want to want it," Yukimi says, "but really to not want love? Does a person like that exist?"
"It would make things hard," Miharu says.
Yukimi considers this, leaning back and frowning, watching him. "Harder than you two already being the centre of each other's universes?"
Miharu covers his ears briefly, trying to block out the too-blunt truth, then lets his hands drop; it's true, he knows, Yoi-te loves him the same way he loves Yoi-te. It's a fact of their existence. But putting it into words creates too much reality for it. It removes the safe zone of deniability. "If we are," he says, "then yes. Because being in love means relationships. Relationships mean other things. Attachment. Touch. Kissing. Sex. Things Yoi-te won't want."
"Do you?"
"If I did," Miharu says, "that would be hard on Yoi-te. That's the point. Because if I'm the centre of his universe, if I wanted to have sex with Yoi-te, then Yoi-te will want to provide for me. But he will also not want to, because he doesn't want things like that. I don't know why, but he absolutely does not want things like that. Like his body's the last secret he'll take with him. And Yoi-te's Yoi-te, so he will listen to his wants and not do it. But he'll be tormented. By wanting to make me happy. He already has enough of that to deal with. Yoi-te's already suffering enough with wanting to make me happy while knowing he's on a path that I don't want for myself. That I only want for him. So there's no point. We can love each other better if we don't treat it like love."
Yukimi is silent a long few moments, not watching him anymore, just watching his computer screen. Then he reaches out a lanky, scarred arm and ruffles Miharu's hair. It's too gentle; it feels bad inside Miharu's heart. "You go play your game," Yukimi tells him.
Miharu returns to the video game and spends a while pondering the character's equipment. Some time passes before Yoi-te sinks down next to him, still wrapped in the blanket. Yoi-te's warm, slight weight settles against his side and Yoi-te leans his head on Miharu's shoulder.
Out of the corner of his eye, Miharu looks at him.
Yoi-te is sleepy, as if he's about to drop off again any second. He's silent, and Miharu wonders if Yoi-te had heard them, and how much he'd heard if so. But Yoi-te doesn't bring it up, just drops one of his hands to cover Miharu's as he pillows himself against Miharu and falls back asleep.
***
In a way, Miharu thinks, much, much later, they did make love in the only ways they could, with Yoi-te's body a forbidden zone and the topic one that could never be broached. They made love by sitting and looking at the stars together with fingers brushing each other on the seat between them. They made love when Yoi-te washed Miharu's feet clean from dirt and injuries. They made love every time Yoi-te leaned against him as he slept. They made love whenever they huddled together for warmth late nights on the run, whenever he flung himself into Yoi-te's arms for a hug, whenever Yoi-te seized his hand when they needed to run. They made love when Yoi-te died in Miharu's arms dreaming of warmth and domesticity and a life together that would never come to be. They made love, too, when Miharu remembered Yoi-te, perhaps more purely and thoroughly than ever before -- when Yoi-te came rushing back into him, filled him completely, filled all those aching, lonely places that had felt the lack of Yoi-te when he didn't know who or what Yoi-te even was, hauled him out from the drowning depths of his own despair, held him close and warm so their existences mingled and he'll carry that love with him for the rest of his life even if he has to live it out alone. At night he dreams of Yoi-te, and they never have sex, never even kiss, but they press close in his dreams so he can feel Yoi-te's warmth and his breath on Miharu's face and the steady pulse of his heart and, when that happens, he wakes shaken and revelatory and that is like making love too, he thinks.
It's not sex, not bodies moving into each other, not orgasms -- though, Miharu has heard, sex of course does not necessitate orgasm. As Yoi-te had wished, his body ended up being the last great secret, so secret that he never even left a corpse. But Miharu is satisfied. He's satisfied. He wishes for more and more Yoi-te, too late to have him, but he's satisfied.
Yukimi comes out, takes a seat on the porch with him. He moves awkwardly, as he always does these days -- getting up and down is hard for him with only one arm, and Yukimi's carrying two mugs of hot lemonade in his hand, which makes it even harder. But once down he sighs -- like he's relieved, which is probably true; Yukimi's in pain when he strains himself -- and puts the mugs down, then pushes one close to Miharu.
"What're you daydreaming over?" Yukimi asks.
Miharu picks up his mug and holds it between two hands, gazing down at the honeyed lemon floating in the cup. "I'm still in love," he tells Yukimi.
"Yeah," Yukimi says, and Miharu briefly wonders if Yukimi's agreeing that Miharu is, or if Yukimi had been in love himself -- perhaps in their position, unable to say it and make it harder for the poor struggling person he loved, but perhaps that is absurd, and he knows that Yukimi will brush it off if asked, whether it's true or untrue. "Are you lonely?"
"Kind of," Miharu says. "Kind of not."
"Because he's not gone," Yukimi agrees. "Just dead."
"Yes," Miharu says, and, embarrassingly, cries into his drink a little. Yukimi puts his arm around Miharu and doesn't say anything for a long while. Miharu thinks about the comfort offered in that small gesture and finally says, "I wanted a million more years of life with him. I wanted to make him okonomiyaki again."
"Yeah," Yukimi says, and nods towards the lemonade, understandingly. "But we don't have a million years together with anyone. We're just human. All we've got is our lifetime, whatever that ends up being, yeah? And maybe that's not the end. Just the end of one thing. But..."
"Maybe not all," Miharu says. "Because dead isn't -- because Yoi-te exists. He exists inside me and you. He exists inside our words, in talking about him right now, in our thoughts, our feelings, our memories. When Yukimi is gone, Yukimi will exist inside me too. If I go first, I'll exist inside Yukimi. Inside Raimei, inside Kumohira-sensei..."
Touch, he thinks; it's not just physical, and that must be why, must be how they could make love with the barest of touches, because their relationship was a relationship so every way they touched each other's lives was like making love. But he's touched other people's lives too, in different ways, and Yoi-te, too, had touched other people's lives; he exists inside everyone now, and everyone he knows will exist inside someone else, and those people will exist inside other people too, and perhaps they do have a million years, he thinks, and curls a little tighter against Yukimi's supportive side, cries a little more, and then drinks his lemonade.