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Izumi wakes to hands gently shaking his shoulder. “Sena,” he hears, and with a sigh he blearily cracks his eyes open. Leo’s face is right in his, and as he watches Izumi’s eyes open Izumi can see his lips quirk in a smile. “Good morning, Sena,” he says in a whisper, voice cheerful, and drops a kiss to Izumi’s forehead.
Delirious, Izumi can only stare at him for a few seconds before shifting his gaze slowly towards a window. The sky is pitch black, not even the moon in view. He glances towards the clock on his nightstand, and it reads 04:03. Izumi heaves another sigh and nearly shuts his eyes again. “Leo… Leo-kun,” he says hoarsely, voice quiet and rough with sleep, “it’s the middle of the night. What do you want.”
“It’s your birthday,” Leo says, as if it were obvious. “We have to celebrate, you know. I have something for you in the living room,” he continues, and gently shakes Izumi’s shoulder again. “You have to see it, Sena.” Leo moves his hand from his shoulder to his hair and ruffles it gently, teasing, grinning when Izumi swats his hand away.
“It’s the middle of the night,” Izumi says again. “Why couldn’t this have waited until morning?” He’s already resigned himself, though—he knows Leo won’t let him go back to sleep now—and so he pushes himself to sit, watching Leo’s expression turn delighted. Annoyed as he is, he can’t help but feel a flare of fondness at the expression.
Leo rolls off of the bed and onto his feet and holds out a hand. His hair curls around his chin and shoulders, loose from its usual ponytail, and his sleep clothes are rumpled. Izumi can see the hairband on his wrist, a neon green colour he could see easily even in the dark. Izumi is sure he doesn’t look much better. He wonders vaguely whether Leo had slept at all during the night or if he’d gotten up at four in the morning for this and takes his hand, letting him pull him to standing.
Together they leave the room and walk down the hall, steps quiet, hands clasped loosely together. Leo hums a part of A Little Sena Izumi. Leo has written hundreds of songs since that one, plenty of them for Izumi, but for some inexplicable reason it seems like one of his songs he likes most—enough so that he hasn’t posted it anywhere, like he does a majority of his other songs that he writes for Izumi. It’s a song that exists only on their iPods.
Leo stops at the end of the hallway, standing on the threshold of the room. “If you turn on the lights I’m going back to bed,” Izumi says, looking dubiously at the light switch. Leo only turns to give him a secretive smile and pats his hand, a silent gesture to stay there, before walking across the room to fiddle with what sounded like a candle.
The lighter flickered on and Izumi watched as Leo lit the candle, holding it carelessly in his hands before setting it back down along with the lighter and turning back to Izumi. “It’s the jasmine one you like,” he says proudly. The flickering of the candle casts odd shadows onto Leo, and his figure changes the barest amount with the light. He walks back across the room and pulls Izumi gently towards the couch, then walks off somewhere else the moment he sits down and returns with a small speaker.
Dropping gracelessly to the couch, he sets the speaker on the table in front of them with a quiet click and plugs it into the iPod he produces from his pocket. “A song for you,” Leo announces, glancing towards Izumi with a smile, and after fiddling with it for a moment notes begin to play out of the speaker, and he drops the iPod to the table next to it.
Izumi glances at the iPod screen, and the song is only titled Sena’s Birthday Song with no artist or album. He smiles shortly and leans back against the couch, closing his eyes and simply listening. He feels Leo’s head rest on his shoulder and his fingers come to play with Izumi’s, but Izumi doesn’t move away.
The song has no words and is completely instrumental. Izumi thinks it’s in the style of a waltz. The dynamics are soft, the notes intricate, and Izumi finds the song beautiful, as he does so many of Leo’s songs. Leo has written hundreds of songs for Izumi, by now, but still he wonders what it is about him that inspires Leo to write such beautiful music.
As the song comes to a decrescendo, Izumi hears Leo whisper to him. “Sena,” he says. “I set the song on repeat. You noticed it, right, that it’s a waltz? Let’s dance to it.” His excitement colours his voice, and Izumi feels Leo’s cheek shift on his shoulder. He’s sure that if he opened his eyes and looked towards Leo, he’d meet his eyes. “We did it a long time ago, remember?”
He remembered, of course. Leo had gone through a fascination with ballroom dances in the beginning of their second year, and because Izumi knew the basics of a lot of them from ballet, he’d made Izumi dance all of them with him. “It wasn’t that long ago, you know,” is all Izumi says, but he opens his eyes finally and looks back at Leo anyway. Leo’s hair falls into his eyes, his cheek is red where it rests on Izumi’s shoulder, and the smile he aims at Izumi is lopsided.
Leo lets go of Izumi’s hand and stands up, watching Izumi with soft eyes. “Come on, Sena,” he says quietly, as the beginning of the song replays. He runs an absent hand through his hair, which falls straight back into his eyes. Izumi breathes in and stands, following after Leo who immediately begins moving towards the clear space of the room as if he can’t dance soon enough. He stops when he’s far enough from any furniture and holds out a hand towards Izumi, lifting both of their arms together when Izumi takes it and snaking his other arm around to Izumi’s back, insistent on the leading position as he’d always been.
He hums six notes in time with the song, and on the seventh they begin to dance, steps careful as to not move too far and run into something. Leo’s hands are warm in his, his eyes even more so when Izumi feels he can meet them. Halfway through the song, Leo murmurs again, “It’s been a long time.” He glances away from Izumi to somewhere beyond his shoulder. “We should dance together like this more.”
“Only if it’s not at four in the morning,” Izumi says. Leo quirks a smile at him, and at the drop of an octave in the song, suddenly twirls him. Izumi gives him a look, but says nothing. As the song continues, Leo begins twirling him intermittently, expression brightening every time he does. Izumi is sure his expression is a little more soft than it should be, a little too happy, but Leo says nothing, and even when the song ends and begins again, they keep spinning around the room, watching each other quietly.