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"Tetsu…"
"Hmm?" Tetsurou doesn't glance up from his book--he's over one hundred pages in and just getting to the steamy stuff--but he does pet his hand absently through soft white hair when Bokuto flops down on the couch and plants his head firmly in Tetsurou's lap. It earns him a soft sound that Tetsurou never tires of before Bokuto continues his train of thought.
"Know what I miss?"
Now Tetsurou does look up from his book. Bokuto does this sometimes, gets in these moods where he misses things about what Tetsurou thinks of as before. Before the fangs and the bite and the blood. Before power and eternity and darkness. Before Tetsurou.
Sometimes it’s a small, silly thing, like the garlic shrimp that he used to love and now swears makes him feel awful (no matter how many times Tetsurou has told him that it will not, in fact, kill him). But occasionally Bouto will talk about his sisters and the great nieces and nephews he’ll never meet. Or the sun on his face during those early-morning jogs on the beach. Or the feeling of blood rushing through his veins and his heart thudding in his chest when he gets scared (rare) or excited (frequent).
Sometimes Tetsurou thinks if his heart wasn’t lying useless and dead in his chest, it would shatter into a million pieces for a pair of golden eyes and a smile as bright as the sun he hasn’t felt in decades.
“What?” Tetsurou asks, closing the book and setting it on the arm of the couch. He inspects Bokuto’s face, gauging the severity of his mood in the set of his mouth and the scrunch of his eyebrows. It’s middling, he estimates--nothing as easy to brush aside as garlic shrimp, but his face isn’t as pinched or sad as it is when he talks about his sisters. But then, sometimes with Bo, it's hard to tell.
"Looking in the mirror," Bokuto sighs and relief bubbles up in Tetsurou's chest and comes out in the form of a laugh.
Bokuto’s expression shifts from contemplative to pouty almost immediately and he tries half-heartedly to sit up. Tetsurou stops him with a hand on his chest and a solid attempt at a repentant expression. Bokuto doesn’t buy it, but he does settle back into Tetsurou’s lap with a huff.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I-”
“Liar,” Bokuto interrupts petulantly. Tetsurou pinches his cheek and Bokuto retaliates by snatching his hand away and biting it, not hard enough to puncture him, but not so gentle that his fangs don’t make themselves known.
“Oi!” Tetsuro yelps, but he doesn’t pull away and Bokuto’s smiling now so he can’t be too put out about it. “I’m not making fun,” he says, risking another poke at Bokuto’s cheek. “It just surprised me, that’s all.”
“Why’s that?”
Tetsurou quirks an eyebrow, the beginnings of a smirk pulling at his lips. “Oh, just never took you for the vain type, staring at that cute face in the mirror for hours on end. So narcissistic!”
Bokuto squawks out an offended noise and sits up, swiveling around to face Tetsurou, his knees drawn up to his chest. “I’m not vain! I just,” he puffs his cheeks out (cute) and blows out a rude noise (slightly less cute). “I just...what if I’ve been walking around for the last thirty years with food in my teeth, huh? That’d be embarrassing and I wouldn’t even know it!”
Tetsurou sighs, fond, and turns in his own seat so they’re face-to-face. “Okay, Kou, a few things,” he ticks them off on his fingers. “One, you would definitely feel it if you had food in your teeth for thirty years. Two, it’s called a toothbrush, we’re vampires not monsters!” This earns him a small chuckle and his smirk stretches into a pleased grin. “And three, do you really think I wouldn’t tell you if you had food in your teeth? Your lack of faith wounds me.”
He presses a hand to his chest and flops himself against the back of the couch with as much of a flourish as he can muster, but it’s hard to even pretend to be sad or offended or anything other than deliriously happy with Koutarou grinning at him like that. His fangs glint in the low light of their living space, and Tetsurou wonders if that wide smile would be more menacing than endearing if he were human.
“Okay, point,” Bokuto concedes, resting his chin on his knees thoughtfully. He worms his bare toes under Tetsurou’s leg. “It’s just one of those things, y’know?”
Tetsurou nods. He does know. It’s one of those small things that you wouldn’t think twice about, a reflection, a breath, a pulse, but it’s there all the same, hard as he tries to ignore it. A stark reminder of who--and what--they are when they pass by a store window or peer into the moonlit water during one of their nighttime beach trips.
“Idea,” he says, poking and prodding at Bokuto’s legs until they’re practically intertwined with his own.
Bokuto grins and waggles his eyebrows. “Tetsu, are you gonna try and distract me with-”
“No!” Tetsurou huffs, then considers. “Not yet anyway. I was gonna say I’ll do it. I’ll show you your reflection.”
Bokuto’s face shifts from a lecherous to confused so quickly, it starts another laugh bubbling up in Tetsurou’s chest, but before it can escape, Bokuto is smiling softly at him and saying, “Okay, then. How?”
“Just think of me as your own personal magic mirror,” Tetsurou says.
“Kinda chatty for a mirror.”
“Magic mirrors are chatty by definition, Kou.”
“Ahhh,” Bokuto nods seriously, a spark of amusement just behind his wide eyes. “Well, then, carry on.”
“Thank you,” Tetsurou hums, and brings a hand up to touch Bokuto’s hair. “The hair is….very good,” he murmurs, just barely brushing his fingertips over the black and white strands.
“So descriptive, oh magic mirror,” Bokuto teases, but he leans into Tetsurou’s touch and makes a small satisfied sound in the back of his throat when Tetsurou relents and pushes his hand more fully into his hair. Tetsurou nearly forgets the point of the exercise for a moment.
“It’s soft,” he continues, ignoring Bokuto’s provocation. “And the color should look ridiculous, I mean honestly, it really should, but it doesn’t. It stands out, just like you.” He brushes his fingers over Bokuto’s forehead, tracing his hairline. “And you’ve got this, like, widow’s peak thing going, very on brand by the way, and the way it falls around your face,” he tousles the front just a little, pushing it this way and that, and smiles. “It’s very good.”
“Remember when I used to spike it?”
Tetsurou smirks. “Can’t believe I had the hots for you even back then.”
“Hey!” Bokuto whines. “You said I looked cool!”
“Mmm,” Tetsurou leans in and presses a kiss to the point of Bokuto’s widow’s peak. "You did," he says, smiling against cool skin. "You do," he amends before Bokuto can protest.
“Okay, you can keep going now.”
So Tetsurou does. He cups Bokuto’s face and smooths his thumbs over his eyebrows, bold and expressive. He presses a kiss to the scar that slices through the left one and listens to Bokuto tell the story of how he got it--an incident involving a trick bike and a shoddy homemade ramp and a dare from his oldest sister that Tetsurou’s heard at least twelve different versions of. He still laughs.
He tells Bokuto about his eyes and the way they crinkle up at the corners when he laughs. They’re warm and bright like the edges of the sunset’s reflection in the water, at least the way he remembers it, just before it bleeds from gold into oranges, pinks, and purples. He tells Bokuto that he doesn’t miss the sun, not that much anyway, because it’s right there in Bokuto’s eyes.
“So sappy, Tetsu!” Bokuto presses his hands to his face, hiding a blush that doesn’t appear.
Tetsurou tugs Bokuto’s hands away from his face and pulls him in, lying back against the arm of the couch and allowing him to be comfortably caged in by thick arms. They’re practically nose to nose and Tetsurou is momentarily distracted picturing what Bokuto would look like with a dusting of pink over his cheeks or creeping up his neck. Cute.
“Did you blush a lot?” he asks, a smirk creeping its way onto his face. “Before?”
“Um,” Bokuto thinks for a moment, his nose scrunching up a little the way it always does when he concentrates--he’ll have to remember to tell Bokuto that when he gets there--and he shrugs. “I dunno, maybe? Probably not any more than anyone else does. Why?”
“Hmm, I guess you just have a look about you,” he says with mock seriousness.
“What kind of look is that?”
“Like you would probably blush a lot, whenever you get flustered,” Tetsurou chuckles softly when Bokuto’s ever-expressive eyebrows shoot up incredulously. He starts to protest, but Tetsurou cuts him off before he can start. “Yeah, you’d definitely get all pink here,” he leans in and brushes his lips against the pale skin high up on Bokuto’s cheekbones. “And here,” he continues, nosing his way upwards and biting the shell of his ear. Bokuto hisses and shivers at the scrape of Tetsurou’s fangs. He’s not always as mindful of them as Bokuto is of his own, though that seems to suit the both of them just fine.
“Yeah, well, you have a look about you like you’d like making me blush!”
Tetsurou draws back and smiles, soft and toothy and in love. “Got me there, Kou,” he says. He reaches up to trace a finger down Bokuto’s nose and taps the slightly upturned tip (cute). “Now where was I?”
Bokuto smiles back, sunset eyes roaming Tetsurou’s face in a way that warms his skin--not really, of course, but it’s something like phantom limb pain, only pleasant--and he thinks Bokuto would probably have been really good at making him blush, too. Bokuto catches his hand and presses a kiss just inside his wrist, right at the point where he’s sure his pulse would be fluttering wildly if he had one. “Right here,” he murmurs against Tetsurou’s skin.
“But I’m not done!”
“After,” Bokuto says, and kisses him, slow and thorough. He pulls Tetsurou apart and pieces him back together with lips and teeth and tongue in a way that has him gasping for breath he hasn’t needed in decades.
And after, tangled in their sheets and each other, Tetsurou does pick up where he’d left off, mumbling softly into Bokuto’s hair about his nose and the way it scrunches when he thinks too hard, or smells something good to eat and his strong carved-from-marble jaw and his lips and oh does Tetsurou have things to say about Bokuto’s lips. He could write volumes on Bokuto’s lips.
“Thank you, Tetsu,” Bokuto’s voice is soft and sleepy and muffled into Tetsurou’s chest and even though the sun’s barely set and it’s almost time to eat, he thinks they can stay like this a little longer.
They’ve got all the time in the world, after all.