Chapter Text
It had taken barely a week of sharing a bed for Darui to notice that C had the strangest preoccupation with his heartbeat.
As with most peculiar habits, things had started out innocuously.
It had been something of a surprise to discover that C was not, as Darui had admittedly assumed, the type of pragmatic, eager-to-leave kind of lover who was all cleaned up and halfway out the door the minute the deed was done.
Despite his impatient personality, Darui got the distinct impression that, given the opportunity, C would quite happily content himself with staying in bed, head resting on Darui’s chest and lazily tracing patterns against his naked skin and legs all tangled up for hours until they both eventually had to get up for work in the morning.
Not that Darui minded.
C had been a constant and dependable presence by his side for years. The sound of his breathing slowing down when he inevitably fell asleep and the steady thrum of his chakra network had quickly become a well-loved source of comfort.
Three days had passed by the time Darui first picked up on C’s tendency to stay plastered to his left, despite repeated complaints about him being a “furnace with abs” beforehand.
After another two days, casually noticed that the rhythm C’s fingers usually drummed against his ribs didn’t follow the ticking of his old alarm clock as he’d been assuming up until then, but rather the beat of his own heart.
After Darui realises, he quietly shrugs it off.
Medical-nin’s habits, he supposes and pokes C’s shoulder.
“Oi, any particular reason you’ve been obsessively checking my pulse lately?”
Already half-asleep, C doesn’t even bother to open his eyes. He pinches Darui’s side in retaliation and chuckles to himself at the shrill sound that earns him. He mutters something that sounds a lot like “awful diet” and “myocardial infarction” but the words come out muffled against Darui’s left pectoral and Darui decides to take them as the grudging “I love you” that they are, instead.
(Darui doesn’t remember a whole lot about that mission in Frost Country.)
(He doesn’t know that, for nearly one and a half minutes, he had no heartbeat.)
(C does.)
(And he’ll treasure the sound until the day his own heart gives out.)