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sometimes, hakkai thinks, loving mitsuya is like knocking on the door of an empty room.
not that hakkai knows for sure that it’s empty, figuratively speaking. it’s just like the sound of knocking on wood, the gentle hollow sound that tapping gives. the echo the noise makes as it bounces off the walls of every surface, a knock from the left, then from the right, and so on until the sound gets fainter and fainter. it’s just that the room feels empty, devoid of any presence that could crack the door open a hopeful sliver and peak their head out, lacking a sweet voice from the inside that stumbled over the messes on the floor while calling out just a moment! as they rushed to scramble to the door. there was no noise, no heaviness that indicated that just maybe, maybe someone might be home.
instead, loving mitsuya feels alot like this: waiting.
waiting like a postman carrying a heavy package, arms filled with the weight as the threshold squeaked under their feet. waiting, as the air shifted in its staleness because nothing in the room, animate or not, had moved. waiting, with no one’s home ringing in his ears because the door had been left unanswered from every knock on the wood or ring of the door bell, and it seemed like no one had inhabited the space for a long while.
hakkai does not mean this in a bad way.
loving mitsuya, more often than not, is the opposite of this. it’s on the couch kisses and a calloused hand on his head, it’s a multitude of hakkai, is that you? in every single tone of mitsuya’s voice. soft, usually, because although mitsuya knows that hakkai is the only one with his house key besides his mother, he likes the domesticity of it, the way the words fall out of his mouth like a habit. sometimes frustrated, when luna and mana—although older—are still being so difficult and mitsuya can’t help the way the emotion flows through his voice. very faint when he’s exhausted, when his sisters are finally put to bed and mitsuya is tired out on the couch and hakkai has nowhere to be but here, next to mitsuya in all his sleepy, pouty eyed glory. yeah, taka-chan, i’m here.
usually, the door to whatever mitsuya is, is open. not particularly wide, hakkai knows this for sure, but just enough for certain people to squeeze through. wide enough for his sisters to run back and forth from, cracked a bit more open for those he’s especially close to in toman to slip through. open just enough, almost too small, for hakkai to duck and weave his way through before mitsuya shuts the door behind him. you’re late, hakkai, hakkai imagines mitsuya saying. you know i can’t just lock you out.
and it’s true. mitsuya has never been particularly closed off or cold, never mean with his touches or comments or gestures. he’s lovely, in the way that he’s kinder than anyone that hakkai’s ever met, prettier than anyone hakkai’s ever seen. loving mitsuya is sometimes like knocking on the door of an empty room, hakkai thinks, and its not because mitsuya is shutting him, or anyone, out. the feeling is more like mitsuya disappearing, moving, retreating into a shell that none of them knew he had (that hakkai had never known he had). it’s times like these where mitsuya fades from his mother-like role, where their friend group finds themselves kind of lost in the aftermath, where hakkai tightens his grip on mitsuya’s shoulders and dares himself to ask how do i help? what can i do? even though the words seem to stick in his mouth and stay there.
he can never ask, never bring himself to do something. instead hakkai stands at the threshold every single time, hand raised and poised in a knock, as he hears the sound echo and echo around him.
mitsuya always comes out from it, settles back into the responsible one, the peace-keeper, the fixer to their very minor problems. occasionally they ask him what happened, if he’s okay, but mitsuya has never been one to incite worry in others. just a little stressed out, mitsuya explains. it was just an off-day.
maybe if hakkai was just a little bit stronger, less lenient and weak-willed when it came to the possibility of inciting a negative reaction from mitsuya, he’d say something. would ask are you sad, taka-chan? it’s okay if you are.
you can be upset with the situation you’re born into. that does not mean you hate it.
but hakkai has always been weak when it came to mitsuya. weak to his wills and wants, dedicated to see the man happy and smiling and beautiful. asking mitsuya anything would risk that, would compromise the way mitsuya slurred his name all soft and buttery, would change the way mitsuya would look at him like they belonged together, in the same house and the same room, intimate and domestic like hakkai hoped the future would be for them.
maybe hakkai was a little selfish too. to let the person he loved suffer just a bit in exchange for mitsuya to just keep loving him a little more, a little longer.
maybe hakkai was a little weak, and a little selfish, and a little stupid, to continue to knock on the door of a presumebly empty room, and not try to find a way in.