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Watanuki had learned a stillness few others ever had. It was necessary if he ever wanted a moment of peace without hearing the soft chime of the little metal bell around his neck. But even on quiet days, he could feel it. That tiny shifting weight. Too hot or too cold in turn, sympathetic to the elements in a way his skin wasn’t.
But Doumeki let the conversation fade into silence once more, so with a soreness so familiar Watanuki hardly recognized it anymore, he braced to ignore the chime, and the dull pain it caused him to hear it.
“Will you help her?” Watanuki asked softly, speech making his throat shift under the collar just enough.
His sharp eyes followed the way Doumeki’s hand worked the knife, carving the peach cleanly in half, save for a drop that slid down his tanned thumb and caught in the crease of his palm. Watanuki’s gaze was obvious, but with a resigned sort of starvation.
“I don’t know,” Doumeki said simply, slicing a thin eighth and passing it through one of the gaps in the carving, careful not to leave juice on the finely crafted wood.
Watanuki bent forward to reach it, bell chiming softly as he settled back and brought the fruit to his lips.
“Who is to say the deaths are unnatural?” Doumeki continued, expression carefully neutral and ears and tail calm. But Watanuki could see a tightness in his eye. He could hear room for doubt in his tone.
Watanuki took a bite and found the fruit to fill his mouth with a light sweetness. The tree was finally coming into season.
“But it’s an odd pattern.”
“It is.”
Watanuki frowned, glancing away, ears turning forward and tail curling in quiet anxiety. There were many things he wished he could say, but none of them fair. None that wouldn’t hurt Doumeki a little more. In all these years Watanuki had finally learned at least this type of cheap mercy.
“Will you wait until after the festival?”
Doumeki glanced at him, his line of sight where the wood was thinnest, carved out to form a little pantheon of tiny gods, and Doumeki could watch Watanuki’s pretty eyes avoiding him through the lattice of reaching arms and blessing gestures.
“Is that what you would want from me?” Doumeki asked, finally with a smile, a warmth to his tone.
Watanuki began to speak, but then stopped himself. Doumeki cut another slice and grinned as he ate it, watching the blush cross his face like the sunrise that was starting to bleed over the horizon. “It would be nice,” Watanuki finally managed, so much calmer than the days when he was young, but just as cute, “to sit with you here to watch the fireworks.”
“The view is better from your gate,” Doumeki reminded him.
Watanuki looked back up at him, expression soulful. “But not the company.”
Doumeki’s breath caught, and they stared into each other’s eyes, both lost in the same feeling of adoration, longing, and emptiness.
Until at last it was too much, and Watanuki glanced away again, knees pulling in and tail wrapping protectively around his hip and feet. “Unless you need the time with your followers. I would understand.”
“I’ll be here,” Doumeki almost cut him off to say.
There was a little chime from the bell as Watanuki turned back to him, something on the tip of his tongue, then easing into a small smile, not untroubled, but for all its faults, honest. “Thank you,” Watanuki said quietly.
Doumeki smiled for him, gaze caressing his check, his shoulder, in a comforting way his touch once had before Watanuki’s decisions had trapped him in this prison so cruelly close to home.
“I will count the days,” Doumeki said, cutting and offering another slice. Watanuki finished the one he was holding, then leaned forward again, chime sounding delicate and subtle as he carefully took the next slice, letting their fingertips touch briefly.
He pulled away, a little twist of guilt in his stomach as he saw Doumeki wince with a want that went beyond the physical, but was at the same time profoundly rooted within it.
This time he ate his slice all at once, then licked his fingertips clean. Not in an obvious way, but it didn’t need to be. Nothing about them was obvious. “I’ll bring something to drink.”
It was cruel. It was cruel and they would both pay the price. Yet here they were, falling into these little indulgences again and again.
“The peaches should be at their ripest.”
“And the roof tiles will be warm from the Summer sun.”