Fic: Of Angels Watching Round (YnM)
Summary: Most people who come to see Kurosaki-sama have to wait, if they get to see him at all, but then Tsuzuki isn't most people.
AN: Dedicated to Phoebe, without whom this would never have come into being. The latest in Love and Strife (the Three of Swords variations). Alt link. Series Index here.
Of Angels Watching Round
Most people who come to see Kurosaki-sama have to wait, if they get to see him at all, but then Tsuzuki isn't most people.
The doors are high and wide at the end of a long white hallway. He doesn't knock -- nowadays it isn't possible to sneak up on Hisoka and, anyway, the doors only appear to people Hisoka wants to see. It's a neat trick: Muraki and Hisoka working together is kind of scary that way.
Hisoka only glances up by way of hello, hunched over his ivory desk, lit by the soft glow of evening that slides unobtrusively through the long banks of windows. Tsuzuki thinks the sheer scale of the room should make Hisoka look small and a little comical, but somehow it works out just the opposite. Lately Hisoka has discovered the knack of filling up vast spaces instead of being dwarfed by them.
Tsuzuki's in no particular hurry, so he lets Hisoka finish whatever he's writing without interruption, poking at the fragile, expensive looking things scattered about the room. He pauses by a wooden box covered with intricate knot-work to feel the bright tug of active fuda inside like small silver birds beating their wings against the bars of a cage. And lying near the unlit fireplace there's something shadowy that constantly shifts its shape, difficult to see except for a hint of long needle-like teeth. But everything else is the same as always, so he ends up leaning against the back of an over-stuffed chair, bored.
Hisoka is beautiful in the fading light, spare and precise in a white linen shirt buttoned all the way to the throat, intensely focused -- Tsuzuki laughs silently -- on piles of paperwork. It's like using a honed and perfectly balanced sword to chop lettuce.
"So they still make you fill out forms?"
"In triplicate." Hisoka affixes his seal with bright red wax and then signs under it. "Only usually it's gold ink." He shakes some sand onto the paper and then puts it on one of the neat stacks. "Or blood," he adds as an afterthought, preoccupied. A number of vacancies have opened up recently and Hisoka has learned the value of consolidating power in a way he isn't likely to forget anytime soon.
Tsuzuki moves around the desk, nearer, not caring that his scars burn this close to Hisoka, the invisible swirls of old magic twisting across his skin, down his arms and thighs and chest, circling in great looping arcs around his heart. It was Hisoka who brought him back -- Tsuzuki will never forget that -- Hisoka who found the scattered pieces and bound him together again like a book with all the pages torn out. Thinking about it makes the scars around his wrists flicker the faint red-orange of dying embers.
Hisoka has a nice view out his big windows, Tsuzuki decides, even if it's only rows and rows of saplings.
"Only 274 more years and I'd've been back on full pay again."
Hisoka snorts out something that's almost a laugh. "If you didn't blow up anything else before then."
Tsuzuki waits for the suffocating drag of guilt, the wrench of grief -- anything -- and ends up yawning, warm and full and a little sleepy. He looks out at the endless lines of sakura, young, years away from blooming.
No one is sure if they'll grow someday or stay this way forever, because -- as near as anyone can tell -- nobody's ever burned everything down before, and all the gods who might have known are dead.
AN: Dedicated to Phoebe, without whom this would never have come into being. The latest in Love and Strife (the Three of Swords variations). Alt link. Series Index here.
Of Angels Watching Round
Most people who come to see Kurosaki-sama have to wait, if they get to see him at all, but then Tsuzuki isn't most people.
The doors are high and wide at the end of a long white hallway. He doesn't knock -- nowadays it isn't possible to sneak up on Hisoka and, anyway, the doors only appear to people Hisoka wants to see. It's a neat trick: Muraki and Hisoka working together is kind of scary that way.
Hisoka only glances up by way of hello, hunched over his ivory desk, lit by the soft glow of evening that slides unobtrusively through the long banks of windows. Tsuzuki thinks the sheer scale of the room should make Hisoka look small and a little comical, but somehow it works out just the opposite. Lately Hisoka has discovered the knack of filling up vast spaces instead of being dwarfed by them.
Tsuzuki's in no particular hurry, so he lets Hisoka finish whatever he's writing without interruption, poking at the fragile, expensive looking things scattered about the room. He pauses by a wooden box covered with intricate knot-work to feel the bright tug of active fuda inside like small silver birds beating their wings against the bars of a cage. And lying near the unlit fireplace there's something shadowy that constantly shifts its shape, difficult to see except for a hint of long needle-like teeth. But everything else is the same as always, so he ends up leaning against the back of an over-stuffed chair, bored.
Hisoka is beautiful in the fading light, spare and precise in a white linen shirt buttoned all the way to the throat, intensely focused -- Tsuzuki laughs silently -- on piles of paperwork. It's like using a honed and perfectly balanced sword to chop lettuce.
"So they still make you fill out forms?"
"In triplicate." Hisoka affixes his seal with bright red wax and then signs under it. "Only usually it's gold ink." He shakes some sand onto the paper and then puts it on one of the neat stacks. "Or blood," he adds as an afterthought, preoccupied. A number of vacancies have opened up recently and Hisoka has learned the value of consolidating power in a way he isn't likely to forget anytime soon.
Tsuzuki moves around the desk, nearer, not caring that his scars burn this close to Hisoka, the invisible swirls of old magic twisting across his skin, down his arms and thighs and chest, circling in great looping arcs around his heart. It was Hisoka who brought him back -- Tsuzuki will never forget that -- Hisoka who found the scattered pieces and bound him together again like a book with all the pages torn out. Thinking about it makes the scars around his wrists flicker the faint red-orange of dying embers.
Hisoka has a nice view out his big windows, Tsuzuki decides, even if it's only rows and rows of saplings.
"Only 274 more years and I'd've been back on full pay again."
Hisoka snorts out something that's almost a laugh. "If you didn't blow up anything else before then."
Tsuzuki waits for the suffocating drag of guilt, the wrench of grief -- anything -- and ends up yawning, warm and full and a little sleepy. He looks out at the endless lines of sakura, young, years away from blooming.
No one is sure if they'll grow someday or stay this way forever, because -- as near as anyone can tell -- nobody's ever burned everything down before, and all the gods who might have known are dead.