Work Text:
“I didn’t know you ate,” X said bluntly, not sure how else to put it. It was a night and day question, as were many questions thought invasive if not about work, despite their elevated status as free-thinking robots and Maverick Hunters on top of that.
“Yes, I do,” Kuwanger replied, sliding himself into the bench seat across from X. The bowls and glasses he carried sloshed their liquid, swung around their edges, but didn’t spill onto the tray. All of it was mildly colored, pureed food save for one plum, cut in half and missing the pit.
He made no motion to continue or redirect the conversation and X didn’t know what else to say, knowing the day had been so slow they weren’t even required to train, so he looked back down to his food and began eating. He took baby bites and only made it through half of a half sandwich before Kuwanger spoke again.
“Would you like to eat outside with me, X?” His food hadn’t been touched and his arms were still loosely crossed, long fingers dangling at their opposite elbow, other hand tucked into his side. He was stuck and unable to eat until he broke through his self-inflicted logic loop.
“Sure,” X piped up, and the two clambered out of their seats towards the back of the room, unnoticed underneath the noise of the mess hall. The wind picked up as they unsealed the door and X covered his tray with his free arm, Kuwanger still managing to balance his fine.
With his chest armor removed, he stood predominantly navy, both in the thin cotton clothing he wore (compared to X’s jumpsuit with its sheer spots at the elbows and the belly) and where his wrists slid out from the sleeves. His feet without the boots were long, featureless, and flat and his shoulders without the epaulets were thin- straight and brittle like the rest of his body. The undersides of his wings glazed over in the dim sunlight and had tender little patterns veined throughout. X wondered what the unprotected sides felt like, if they were delicate… the silence was accentuated by a slight flutter, as if Kuwanger could turn X’s thoughts inside out.
He chose a spot where the shade extended long down the hill and didn’t shift much even with the breeze shaking the tree leaves. The grass was still spotted with dew, leftover from the morning fog. X noticed that the razor edges and upper points of Kuwanger’s horns were covered over, capped with wax on his time off, hazy and unlined in the shade.
He brought a cup to what X assumed were feelers, shaped like little spotlights, and placed one inside the cup, draining the liquid as if sucking through a straw. X watched from behind his friend, the latter spread out long over the grass. Rubber spaces attached his body at the hips and thighs and X wondered if those too were delicate.
“Something on your mind?” Kuwanger asked, turning his head just enough to see X through his peripheral vision. He hadn’t made a dent in his food and X assumed it’d take him a while to drink down everything which he felt hurt by- hurt that his make could conflict with his daily life in such a way.
“I should be asking you that!” X laughed, lightheaded from considering so much at once, but questioned his companion honestly. “You seem distracted today.”
Kuwanger turns back around and stretches his neck to the side, his face closer to where the wind rushes from, making him choose between saying vulnerable things to X’s face or possibly having to repeat them if the wind scatters the sound. He almost doesn't want to talk it out, like he’s supposed to provide the answers. To whatever it may be, whenever it beckons to be solved.
He held out his glass and offered X a drink, if he didn’t mind its owner having drank from it first. X took it in as slowly as Kuwanger would and smiled, watermelon juice glossing his lips sticky. Something was sweet about someone like him ordering something like that. Kuwanger thought that same, unnamedly heart-clutching thing about X with it all over his mouth.
Autumn was coming back around, cut swiftly into yesteryear’s trees- the past indiscernible from the present. Kuwanger didn’t aim to change it, for better or worse.
“It’s alright. And what’s keeping you so busy?” Kuwanger asked in return.
“Just looking at you.” X replied, dreamily honest.
Kuwanger intends to hand the drink back to X, to let him have the rest, but X goes for a sliver of plum instead, sucking violently at it in an attempt to get out the juice. Kuwanger laughs aloud, surprising them both, and slips his hand over X’s wrist, extends his pinky finger outward (though neither wants any distance, not even a finger loose from his grip) and punctures the insides, the juice leaking over both of their hands. So much for quiet gestures. For keeping everything the same.
They laze in the sun for hours, through the afternoon long after the cafeteria’s occupants have scattered like ants. The few returning for a light dinner are merely shadows in the windows.
“Would you meet me again tonight? This time around the front?” he gestured in the distance, pointing forward as if through the building.
“Of course.” X spoke everything like the sincerest oath but this promise felt especially heavy, laid like a third being amongst the grass, held like a breath.
☆
On the opposite side of the command center, facing the concrete with no trees breaking up the buildings, all with lights burnt out and mild, they sat side by side with their sleeves pulled down over their hands.
“The universe is burning, X,” broken to his friend solemnly, in mourning for what logic, passion, hysteria could no longer backtrack on. Kuwanger didn’t retract his hand but hadn’t realized he’d outstretched it, laid on X’s shoulder, nearly his neck. The skin was pliable, gave a sweet millimeter or two when pressed near the veins. He wanted to feel his face too.
X in return was so quickly accepting, of the sentiment and the touch, but leaned into the graze whereas he bit back at the words. “There must be some way to stop it.”
“Forever? Are even we salvageable forever?”
“No, no, just… just until it’s time.”
“Even if we survive it, live through and die with it, it matters to you what happens to everyone else after us. Whether or not you’re there to see it, I can see it’s bothering you. Bothering you that it cannot be stopped, especially by you.”
He wants words. He wants words desperately but they will not come. They are at a loss, do not know how to remedy continuing properly into the morning when the night is a hellscape, alarmingly indicative of a catastrophic future. They cannot fix it tonight nor any of the nights to come. It splinters and swells but they are no closer to remedying it than they were at lunchtime.
X hiccups a breath. Kuwanger aches. Fingers splayed, centimeters between, and they don’t look at one another.
To lay in the sun with the breeze only dusting over him, to be shelled like a chestnut and placed face up, body open... but he could feel heat creeping under his skin, above the metal but below the velvet flesh, heat he somehow knew made that wish for peace so much harder to obtain. Tubes of boiling water that would rise to his brain and kill him. Rare heat for such a cool frame.
X pressed his face forward and let it touch whatever, wherever, nothing on Kuwanger indicative of “human” features save for his eyes. He pressed his nose to the middle crease that separated but did not split the even sides.
“We have to sleep sometime,” X whispers, the last light in the distance dead at midnight, set on a timer in an unoccupied space. “But I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
☆
Will you stay with Zero and me? Something about the other hunter made Kuwanger skittish- always on edge as the other was just as powerful and eager to fight but Zero brawled, he spat and snarled, and for such a high ranked hunter, he would risk injury to get even a minor hit in.
But his sharpness drew Kuwanger in, like a body to a knife. He was enticing in the opposite way of X but one strand of hair curled loose at his mouth where if looked at like the veins of Kuwanger’s wings or X’s soft eyes, it felt so good it bled into the erotic.
Though the urge to keep his feelings secret persevered, it was prominent in Zero as well; they wanted so badly to dip their hands where the wax was hot but not painful, to admit and be accepted in return- hell, X wouldn’t’ve reciprocated with either of them if he thought they didn’t want it enough to be honest.
Did it make them tough to act like this? Did it hurt more than to say what they wanted? If they were enticed so easily by the quiet, honest words of others, why did they think it so hard to be that way in return?
But they softened in their own, shared way- words would walk them dizzy, make them feel too unguarded, but touch could never hurt them, though it made them heavier, like one shared, anxious thing.
Zero ghosted his fingers over the junction of cartilage to skin on Kuwanger’s back, pocketing his fingers where it was so soft he felt his own legs go limp before Kuwanger’s did. Kuwanger curled his fingers around the back of Zero’s neck, underneath the flow of hair. He rubbed his fingers against the grain, in the space between the muscles right before the skull. It’s something gentle for the both of them- feels like a first.
Maybe that fever subsides. He doesn't boil and cook and shrivel and die, shrimplike with his pigment lost, or buglike as he is, dead with his legs tucked in. Maybe something is released instead, peeled away rather than forced open. Maybe they are both definitive and good for once.
They nestle into each other again but less frantic and tight, made tired by their earlier, aggressive hold. No armor no violence. X finds his way to them both, lighthouse instead to the ships.
This ultimately solves nothing but it’s the one thing they decide they can save tonight, for however long as the universe burns on around them. Something they’ll keep in mind as it burns their bones and melds them together, forever.