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To Atsushi, Akutagawa was still more natural disaster than human being, and best treated with the diligence and caution befitting that. Except lately, Atsushi was starting to see through that veneer more and more. After so long thinking of the man as some scary story come to life, a specter of death who did nothing but carry out ruthless orders with terrifying precision, these contradictory moments only muddied the waters further, rather than shedding any kind of light.
It was just hard to continue thinking of someone as an incomprehensible force of nature when you knew what they looked like after a mission, washed out in the stark light of a cheap hotel room. The person dropping to sit heavily on the bed across from Atsushi’s, sighing and pulling his blood-spattered cravat loose, couldn’t be anything but human. Just like anyone else.
But of course, Akutagawa was nothing like anyone else, and there was no one else quite like him. The fact that an hour ago he’d been rending their opponents apart with impersonal savagery would’ve been unthinkable, if Atsushi wasn’t intimately familiar with the practice by now. Even his appearance, with that illusion of frailty - the sickly pale of his skin, the anemic circles under his eyes, the thinness of his delicate fingers - it was all part of the countless juxtapositions that built up around Akutagawa. The cool composure, and the anger following just on its heels. The refined clothes, made into a brutal weapon. The occasional glimpse of human weakness from an otherwise supernatural creature. After months and months of trying, Atsushi still didn’t quite understand how it all fit together.
It wasn’t really frustrating anymore, though. Rather, Atsushi had come to think of it almost as a hobby. Like a high-stakes form of birdwatching, maybe.
This last mission had been particularly exhausting. An entire week of surveillance had finally culminated in a rather anticlimactic battle, considering all the second-guessing and lost sleep involved. Once upon a time, spending a week with no one but Akutagawa for company would’ve been far more grueling than the showdown at the end. But it was different now, although he couldn’t say exactly why. Akutagawa had changed, or maybe it was Atsushi himself. Either way, it was business as usual these days.
The clock on the nightstand read 9:28 p.m., which seemed incompatible with all they’d done that day, and how tired Atsushi felt. Sighing, he swiped the TV remote off the little table and switched the outdated set on, quickly turning the volume down. The low murmur of anonymous voices filled the room.
Akutagawa clicked his tongue in disapproval, standing up and unbuttoning his coat. He didn’t take it off, though. It almost never came off, not even when he slept. Maybe not even when he bathed. Atsushi smothered a giggle at that thought.
“Is that really necessary?” Akutagawa asked, nodding at the TV.
“Mhm,” Atsushi said, not bothering to look up as he flipped channels, half in a trance already.
“If you’re going to be a nuisance, I’ll just kick you out. I paid for this room, you know.”
By now, Atsushi easily recognized the threat as an empty one.
“Sure. Can you get a nicer one next time, though? I know you have the money, I’ve seen your salary.”
“As if I’d spend my salary pampering you,” he said, the same response he gave every time Atsushi complained about their accommodations. “And I’ll take the bathroom first, since you’re just sitting there.”
Atsushi hummed, waving a hand to indicate he should just get on with it. Akutagawa disappeared into the tiny attached shoebox that passed for a bathroom. On TV, Atsushi watched for a while as a man won a tropical cruise on a game show. When it cut to a commercial, he started flipping again. He’d finally decided on an evening drama he and Kyouka sometimes watched when Akutagawa reemerged, now wearing Rashomon over his pajamas and smelling vaguely minty.
"Bathroom’s free,” he said, casting a disdainful look at the TV, where the male lead was halfway through confessing to the female lead.
Atsushi got up immediately, the promise of hygiene easily trumping television. It was a relief to shed the day’s clothes, with their unpleasant sweat-and-blood smell, and step into soft, clean pajamas. He really should bathe, but getting the right water temperature from the hotel’s ancient pipes was a battle he didn’t feel up to fighting at the moment. Akutagawa clearly felt the same way, so it was probably fine.
He settled for washing his face and brushing his teeth and hair, which felt nearly as good. Folding was beyond him as well, so he wadded his dirty clothes up into a ball. Back out in the room, he shoved them carelessly to the bottom of his suitcase, a problem for Future Atsushi to deal with at home.
It was only then that he noticed Akutagawa had taken his place, perched on the edge of the wrong bed with his eyes glued to the TV. Atsushi went to shoo him back to his own bed, or maybe tease him for getting invested in something he’d clearly thought beneath him, but he drew up short when he saw what Akutagawa was watching.
The drama was still on, and the two leads were now locked in a passionate embrace, kissing under a streetlight in the rain. Kissing quite deeply, in fact.
Atsushi had the sudden, bizarre desire to cover Akutagawa’s eyes like he was a small child. It just felt like something he shouldn’t be seeing. And it felt even more like Atsushi shouldn’t be hovering there too, watching two people make out while Akutagawa sat close enough to touch, even if he hadn’t yet acknowledged his presence.
That level of concentration was honestly baffling, especially since the impassive, blank slate of his face hadn’t changed at all. Atsushi knew better than anyone that there could be all sorts of chaos churning just below that placid surface, but he couldn’t imagine what was going on beneath the mask right now.
“What, uh…what’re you doing?” Atsushi asked, uncertain if it was worse to look at the TV or at Akutagawa. His face was surely turning a horrific shade of red even as he spoke.
“I didn’t realize they showed this kind of thing on TV,” Akutagawa said, as if Atsushi hadn’t spoken at all. Or maybe that was his idea of an answer.
It was an unnecessarily steamy kiss, really. Atsushi was pretty sure he could see tongue.
“Uh, yeah. That’s nighttime programming for you, I guess,” he said absently, preoccupied with an internal debate over using the tiger’s claws to destroy the TV and put an end to this all at once.
Akutagawa tilted his head a little to one side, like he really was some kind of dog. His clinical, detached fascination suggested he was watching a fun science experiment, rather than the world’s longest kiss scene.
An eternity later, the characters finally separated. Atsushi sighed in relief, but it was tragically short-lived. Akutagawa quickly lost interest in the emotional conversation now playing out onscreen, and turned his attention to Atsushi instead.
“Um!” Atsushi said, feeling strangely caught-out now that Akutagawa was looking right at his red face in the unflattering hotel lighting. “You must not watch a lot of TV. If you’ve never seen a kiss scene before.”
“I do not,” Akutagawa confirmed.
“Oh, why’s that?” Atsushi asked, grasping at a change of subject. “You don’t have one at home?”
“I have one. I just don’t use it.” He shrugged. “Obviously I didn’t have one as a child, so I never got in the habit.”
Even if he said ‘obviously,’ Atsushi still knew little about Akutagawa’s past, especially about his life before joining the Port Mafia. If it was anything like Atsushi’s, which he assumed it was, then he absolutely did not want to ask about it right now.
“Gin likes it, though,” he continued. “But she watches those programs about animals and nature. Never these kinds of things. I don’t see the point.”
“The point? Of TV dramas?” Atsushi wondered if he was going to have to explain the appeal of the romance genre to someone who, most likely, didn’t get the appeal of any entertainment whatsoever.
“Of watching people kiss,” Akutagawa clarified.
“Oh.” Atsushi coughed. “Well–”
“I understand the point of pornography,” he said. Atsushi shut his mouth so fast his teeth clacked together audibly. “But this is not porn, clearly. What is the entertainment value, then?”
If Atsushi’s face felt hot before, it was molten now.
“Uh, it’s, it’s like.” He stopped, clearing his throat and trying desperately to gather his thoughts. “If you watch the whole show, you see the characters struggle a lot. Eventually you want them to be happy, so a kiss scene is like…a reward? Something like that.”
Akutagawa was blank as a brick wall, which he really should’ve seen coming.
“Or, in some cases, it’s like wish fulfillment. You see someone else experiencing good things, and imagine it’s you instead.”
The temperature of Atsushi’s face seemed to be increasing inversely to Akutagawa’s comprehension.
"Not that I do that, though,” he said, after the silence stretched on for too long. “That’s not why I watch dramas.”
It sort of was, actually, but no one else needed to know that.
Akutagawa crossed his arms and gave him a long, considering look, as if seeing right through him.
“So you’ve never done that yourself? Kissed someone, I mean.”
Atsushi was going to die. Akutagawa was closer to killing him off now than he’d ever been in the past, and he didn’t even know it.
“I…no, I haven’t,” he said, faintly. He seemed to be moving past ordinary embarrassment and into some advanced, previously undiscovered level of mortification.
A thought occurred to him, and he voiced it without really thinking. Well, turnabout was fair play and all that.
“What about you?”
Akutagawa scoffed. “When would I have time for that kind of ridiculous thing? And that’s not something people like me do, anyway.”
Atsushi frowned. Something about that response didn’t sit well with him.
“Why not? Why couldn’t you kiss someone, if you wanted to?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Akutagawa raised an eyebrow. “Hellhounds don’t kiss people. To begin with, there’s no one who wants to kiss a scary murderer.”
He rolled his eyes at the last part, as if he wasn’t definitely both scary and a murderer, but Atsushi let it pass. For some reason, he was now determined to convince Akutagawa that even Port Mafia dogs could do things like kissing.
“What about Dazai-san?” he asked.
Akutagawa narrowed his eyes. “What about him?”
Bringing up Dazai around Akutagawa was always playing with fire, but he was the best evidence Atsushi could think up on the spot.
“I bet Dazai-san kissed people when he was in the Mafia,” he said. “He flirts with everyone. Even if no one wants to die with him, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t kiss him.”
Akutagawa blinked owlishly as he considered those words, an unreadable look in his flat black eyes.
"Oh. Does that, um…does that bother you?” Atsushi asked.
“Does what bother me?”
Atsushi hesitated, but it seemed to be a real question, rather than a trap waiting to be sprung.
“That Dazai-san might have…I mean, most likely he did…kiss somebody? Or multiple somebodies?”
More blinking. The rapid beat of Akutagawa’s long eyelashes was a little hypnotic.
“No?”
He scrunched his nose up a bit, an unexpectedly endearing expression of bewilderment. Atsushi couldn’t look away, even as alarm bells rang in his head over the fact that he’d just thought of Akutagawa as endearing.
“Why would that bother me?”
Atsushi had never known him to hide his feelings behind any kind of subterfuge, so it was safe to assume this reaction was genuine. Just like that, Atsushi had the answer to a question he hadn’t even realized he’d been burning to ask. And he’d managed to ask it in a way that didn’t result in Rashomon julienning him into a tiger salad. He couldn’t help but feel unduly pleased, even in the midst of such a hazardous conversation.
“No reason, I guess,” he said, smiling despite himself. “But see? If he can do it, that means you can do it too.”
“Regardless of how true that is, it’s of little importance,” Akutagawa said. “It would only be a pointless distraction.”
“How do you know it’s not important?” Atsushi demanded. “You’ve never done it, so you can’t know that for sure.”
“What, are you offering?” he asked, unimpressed.
“I – huh?” Atsushi nearly choked. His stomach swooped oddly, like he’d just missed a few steps going down a steep staircase.
“Whether it’s important or not, the fact remains that people aren’t exactly lining up to kiss the Port Mafia’s ‘rabid dog.’ And I can’t foresee that changing anytime soon. So, since you’re pushing so much, does that mean you’re offering?”
Atsushi couldn’t answer, struck silent by the ungentle, all-encompassing weight of epiphany. He nodded numbly.
“Yeah,” he said, too blindsided to remember he should be embarrassed. “I guess I am, actually.”
Akutagawa unfolded his arms, mirroring Atsushi’s surprise. The astonished drop of that defensive posture made Atsushi feel like he was finally gaining some ground in the conversation.
That is, until Akutagawa shifted on the bed, leaving a space that Atsushi was clearly meant to fill.
“Oh, right now?” he asked, temporary confidence abandoning him. A hand came up to tug nervously on his uneven bangs.
“Why not? You’re backing out?” Akutagawa shrugged one shoulder. “You can. It makes no difference to me.”
Somehow, that was vaguely offensive. Atsushi frowned, marching over and sitting down so hard they both bounced slightly on the lumpy mattress.
“I think you should be a little more invested in this,” he said, leaning forward to intrude into Akutagawa’s space more than he’d ever dared to before. Well, at least in a non-violent context. If they were going to kiss, that was fine, right?
Akutagawa retreated a few inches, although it might’ve just been reflexive. From here, his wide eyes didn’t look quite so empty. Underneath the bland smell of the hotel’s soap, and the lingering tang of blood from their day’s work, Atsushi caught a hint of something warm and sharp. Like cloves mixed with pine, or the smell of the city in autumn, it was something he recognized from the time he’d worn Rashomon. Was it the smell of that shadowy monster, or Akutagawa himself? For some reason, he really wanted to know.
“Are you just going to stare like that?” Akutagawa asked, cutting through Atsushi’s scattering thoughts. Despite his derisive tone, he looked off-balance too.
“Uh, no,” Atsushi said, sheepish. “I’m gonna do it. Okay? I’m really gonna do it now. Like, right now.”
He wasn’t sure if he was warning Akutagawa or himself, at this point.
In front of him, Akutagawa relaxed his entire body. Or, no, that wasn’t quite right – he seemed to be holding perfectly still, like a snake’s inertia before it strikes. It was unnerving, and not even the mismatched combination of his flannel pajama pants and Rashomon’s elegantly shaped coat, which Atsushi had always privately considered very amusing, was enough to lessen the intimidation factor. But still, he could work with it.
“Okay, that’s good,” he said, his hands coming up to flutter awkwardly around Akutagawa’s shoulders before settling uncertainly against the rough fabric. “Just like that, don’t move. Uh, here I go.”
He winced at that last addition, which sounded ridiculously stupid even as it came out of his mouth. Still, Akutagawa didn’t react, possibly wasn’t even listening at all.
Even now, leaning in close enough that the white tips of Akutagawa’s hair brushed his cheeks, Atsushi couldn’t quite believe what was happening. It felt so far from the realm of possibility, yet not quite unreal enough to be a dream. The gleam in those dark eyes, the spicy smell of cloves, the warm, rapid exhales so close to his mouth – it was all too vivid. Somehow, he actually did have such an untouchable apparition of a person literally under his fingertips.
Atsushi hesitated, millimeters from pressing their lips together. Was he really going to do this? The idea alone was ridiculous, and Akutagawa should’ve tried to gut him just for voicing it. In fact, maybe he was going to. Maybe it was all a trick, and Akutagawa was –
Staring at him, almost unblinking, so still he might have turned to stone. And suddenly, that stillness didn’t feel so much like a primal threat. Thinking about it, didn’t it seem more like…willingness? Or even, impossibly enough, a kind of submission? Atsushi glanced from his lips, just slightly parted, back to his dark eyes. He couldn’t tell if they were issuing a challenge or asking a question.
Either way, Atsushi intended to answer. He moved all at once, closing the miniscule gap between them with a force that surprised even himself. Akutagawa was…startlingly, wonderfully warm. Atsushi’s eyes slid shut all on their own, and his hands pulled on Akutagawa’s shoulders until they were pressed together completely.
Akutagawa met him, then, the softness of his lips in contrast to the sudden demanding pressure. It was a little awkward, lacking grace or ease, but Atsushi still gasped against his mouth, against the hand that came up to curl at the back of his head and hold him in place as they moved together.
Somehow, it wasn’t violent in quite the way he’d imagined – in fact, it wasn’t anything like he’d imagined at all. Akutagawa did seem like he was trying to figure out how to devour him like Rashomon would, swiping his tongue into Atsushi’s mouth hungrily with every gasp, but it was nothing Atsushi couldn’t keep up with. Nothing he wasn’t trying to do himself. The push and pull between them felt natural, not dangerous, like the moon and the tides.
Even when Akutagawa bit down hard on his lower lip, it didn’t feel anything like the fierce battles of their past. There was no anger, no vicious struggle, just a shocking heat that sparked along Atsushi’s spine, tingling all the way to his fingertips. And inside him, something was opening up, exponentially faster until he almost couldn’t breathe with it. An intense, aching longing. Like seeing a comet cross the night sky, it was the uncertain loneliness of witnessing something beautiful that you might never see again.
He parted from it very reluctantly. Akutagawa was still close enough for Atsushi to hear the slight wheeze on every deep inhale, and his eyes were unrecognizable, burning white-hot. Atsushi stared and stared, the feeling in his chest continuing to expand until there was no room for anything else.
Shit, Atsushi thought, and that was about the extent of his current cognitive abilities. He’d wanted this apparently, wanted it more than he'd let himself know, but now it seemed like a terribly reckless thing to have done. In the end, had he been the one taking all of this too lightly?
Akutagawa turned to stare at the TV, but he was clearly not really seeing the mascot character that danced across the screen, advertising a local grocery chain. He coughed into his hand, briefly hiding the redness of his lips.
“I see,” was all he said, his voice rasping slightly like it always did after he coughed.
Atsushi had no idea what that meant. He could barely hear the words over the rush of blood in his ears. Did that lackluster reaction mean Akutagawa wasn’t feeling anything at all? Was it just Atsushi, then, who’d made a terrible miscalculation?
That dangerous line of thinking was cut off when Akutagawa reached up, absently, and ran a hand across his hair, smoothing down the places Atsushi had disrupted. Against the dark strands, the tremor in his thin, pale fingers was clearly visible.
“You did like it,” Atsushi blurted, emboldened by a rush of relief.
Akutagawa jolted, eyes snapping back to Atsushi. He opened his mouth, probably to protest, but he didn’t get the chance. Following a faint suspicion, Atsushi reached out with the tiger’s lightning fast reflexes, pressing against the pulse point in Akutagawa’s neck. He actually hissed in response, like an aggravated cat, swatting Atsushi’s hand away so vigorously he nearly fell off the bed. His coat twitched unnaturally, but ultimately Rashomon stayed dormant.
It was too late, anyway. Atsushi had felt his pulse, thundering in a perfect imitation of his own. He grinned, smug, and two twin spots of faint pink appeared on Akutagawa’s cheeks.
“I thought so,” Atsushi said, triumphant. “Stop trying to act all cool!”
“Touch me like that again and I’ll make a new coat out of you, Were-tiger,” he spat, but Atsushi could see right through him now.
“Really?” he asked, feigning innocence. “But I won’t be able to kiss you anymore, then.”
Akutagawa leapt to his feet, brow twitching, but there wasn’t so much as a crackle from Rashomon.
“Who cares about that?” he asked, scowling, sweeping past Atsushi towards his own bed.
He wasn’t going to get off that easy, though. Atsushi jumped up too, following after him.
“Aw, you don’t want to go again?” he asked, still grinning from ear to ear. “That’s too bad. Because I do.”
Akutagawa whirled around. His eyes stayed steely even as Atsushi inched closer until they were nearly nose-to-nose. The bold declaration implied more confidence than Atsushi truly felt, but he was starting to realize a direct approach worked best on this particular person.
"You–”
He broke off, leaning to the side and doubling over in a harsh coughing fit. Atsushi dared to act on the impulse he always had at these times, and put a hand on his back. When it wasn’t thrown off, he started moving it in slow, soothing circles.
“Are you okay?” he asked, softer and without the teasing edge, when it was over.
Akutagawa didn’t answer, but he also didn’t take offense to it the way he once would have.
“You want to…do it again?” he asked instead, each word coming slowly.
“Yeah,” Atsushi breathed, nodding. He smiled again, open and honest. “Maybe, like, a lot.”
He watched Akutagawa closely, vigilant for the tiniest reaction. But when his face relaxed, every tense line smoothing away, it was clear and bright as the sunrise. Though he’d never really seen Akutagawa make such a face, he understood the meaning right away: relief, happiness, peace. All the things he was feeling, too.
“Fine, then.” Akutagawa straightened up, meeting Atsushi’s eyes with all his usual strength. “But this time, don’t make me wait so long.”
Atsushi laughed. He couldn’t do that even if he wanted to. And he didn’t, at all, so he fulfilled that person’s request at once.