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It is always dark underground. Simon and Kanima lie side by side in separate cots, restless atop the itchy mattresses, breathing the endless damp of mildew. Simon watches the eventually steady rise and fall of Kamina’s ribs each night with heavy eyes, studying that familiar topography cast in the soon to die flicker of a lantern. They wait for it to burn out, or sleep to come.
Sometimes Simon awakens wheezing from nightmares of choking dust and a crumbling ceiling, bones crushed to fragments beneath the weight of so much earth. He’ll sit bolt upright, the cot creaking beneath him as Kamina drags himself clumsily across the divide, sleep-heavy as he falls beside Simon. He gathers his lanky legs and twines them loosely with Simon’s, drawn up awkwardly in the too narrow space. “Back to bed, little brother,” he murmurs, dragging Simon onto his chest.
Their skin adheres with a film of grime and sweat, and with his cheek pressed to Kamina’s bony sternum, shoulder shoved up into the damp concave of his underarm, Simon will nod off again. If he stirs in the night, he will feel Kamina against him, and somehow that chases the threat of the earthquakes away.
---
There is something Simon wants from Kamina, but he’s not sure what it is. Sometimes he thinks that it is to be real brothers. Brothers who came from the same womb, who share the same blood. But then he will think deeply about this, sitting in a rocky pile of dirt beside his drill while he takes a break, examining all the new scrapes and cuts on his hands from digging. He’ll suck the blood away, thinking, what if this was Kamina’s? What if we were the same?
But then, he’ll realize that it doesn’t matter what his blood tastes like, where it comes from or how thick it is, because it’s not his own grubby finger he wants to suck the sting from, but his not-quite-brother’s. The sick lurch of this truth makes his insides gather and clench in confusion. Then he’ll shake his head, crumbles of earth falling from coarse hair and onto the folds of his pants, and try to forget about all of it.
It always comes creeping back. One night before the lantern dies Simon rolls over, propping himself up on his elbows and asking Kamina in a voice too small for confessions, “Hey, Bro?”
“Yeah buddy?” Kamina answers through a yawn. He has his sunglasses on, even though there is no sun and he is supposed to be sleeping soon.
“Do you ever think about...” he trails off, irritatedly tonguing the inside of his cheek because he hates words, it is always so hard to think of the right one. “Do you ever wish we were real brothers?”
Kamina scoffs loudly enough the bunkmate to his left shifts noisily in her cot, glaring over her shoulder at them. “We are real brothers,” he states as if it were very obvious, as if Simon is crazy for thinking otherwise. “No go to sleep. The digging dust it getting to your head.”
Simon closes his eyes, chest clenching around combined elation and strained, confused disappointment. He doesn’t know why those dual sensations are warring in his chest, and he wishes it were as simple for him as it seems to be for Kamina. With a fading crease trough his brow, he drifts off thinking about blood.
---
Home smells like wet earth and dry earth, like the quiet grey of rock, the red crumble of clay, the glisten of mica. It smells like moldering blankets and the crackle of pigmole fat frying on a stone slab. But mostly, it smells like Kamina. Oppressive and spicy, the sharp cloying bite of teenage sweat, stronger when he lifts his arm to point to the ceiling and to whatever lies beyond it, if anything. “There’s a whole world above us, Bro,” he says, a shining trail of perspiration leading from the matted blue hair in his underarm down the slatted plane of his ribcage, a path Simon cannot stop following with his eyes. “A whole world, and we’re gonna bust up into it. You and me. Ours to explore.”
Simon nods helplessly in agreement every time, believing whatever absurd thing Kamina is saying to him, just because Kamina said it. Kamina is like that. He has the power to fashion conviction from nothing, and perhaps because Simon is nearly always at his feet and craning his neck upwards to look at him, he believes himself so completely it all becomes truth. Simon stands pigeon toed before him, inhaling the bitter musk of home.
Kamina gets skinned elbows and peeling cuticles, just like the rest of them. He’s young and compelling, but he is human. Sometimes he draws rough, calloused fingers down the divot of Simon’s spine before clapping him on the back, Simon nearly buckling under the unforgiving force of it every time, no matter how hard he braces himself for the impact.
“You’re better than everyone else,” Kamina tells him, broad hand heavy and hot on his shoulder. “Better than them all, Bro. They think they’re hot shit, but they have no clue, none at all.” He pulls Simon to his side, crushing and absolute. Simon can’t breathe, and when he does Kamina’s scent is suffocating, but it does not matter, because he’s coming home.
---
While they wait for dinner Kamina does push ups, sits ups. Simons brings him the heaviest rocks he finds while digging and Kamina lifts them, taking one in each hand and doing bicep curls until his palms are black with dirt and sweat has collected in all the valleys and creases of skin and muscle, shining like fools gold. “Come on Bro, let me lift you,” Kamina begs, splayed on his back and reaching for Simon’s ankle. Simon snaps it away shaking his head in incredulity, and Kamina rolls his eyes. “Just lay here on my chest. You’re so little, it’ll be a piece of cake. Come on. Let me.”
Simon knows that in order for Kamina to successfully press him, his hands will have to be all over his board straight body, bracing and gripping and squeezing, and although he does not think about this long enough to figure out why, he knows that it’s not something he can handle. It makes his cheeks hot, his heart quicken and leap so obviously he scoots away from Kamina, worried he’ll hear it.
“How about you do some push ups then. Dunno how you dig so good with those little noodle arms,” Kamina says, stretching his fingers towards the ceiling, the tendons in veins standing out upon his biceps in stark relief.
Simon can feel the heat radiating from his body in waves, and he simultaneously wants to curl up in that warmth and wants to run from it, back to the cold safe quiet of his tunnels. Instead, he raggedly inhales. “I’d rather watch you,” he tells Kamina, poking him in the rib with his toe, unable to fight against the magnetized urge to touch him in some way.
“Oh yeah?” Kamina teases him, flicking the sunglasses off his eyes so he can study Simon with a strange smile. “It’s alright. I don’t blame you, bro.”
Simon flushes, and is uncharacteristically glad they live in darkness.
---
As soon as they meet Yoko, Simon knows Kanima is going to do it with her. Even in his own head, he cannot bring himself to use the word Kanima uses, which is fuck. A word he’s heard Kamina say over and over again when describing his fantasies about various pit girls, a new one each week, soon to be forgotten once Kamina does something stupid and they snub him. A word he’s heard whispered so many nights as they lie on their stomachs on Kanima’s cot, legs propping up a threadbare blanket to hide the tattered magazine Kamina is showing him, the one with all the naked women in ridiculous, uncomfortable looking poses. Simon thinks Yoko looks like one of those girls, slim in the middle with soft curves to balance her out, long hair and bright eyes.
He knows what Kamina wants to do, how he wants to pull fistfuls of that long hair, how he wants to make all those curves undulate with his own solid body. He knows Kamina wants to, and likely will, do it with her. Fuck. She seems game enough, cheeks flushed pink when she looks at Kamina, pink like this new and miraculous sky each night the fiery swell of the sun drops spectacularly into the horizon.
They sleep when that sun falls earthward, and it is no longer always dark. There’s no threat of the world caving in and suffocating them, but still, Simon has nightmares. He lies awake as the sky turns from that rosy pink to a burnt orange, and thinks about Kamina fucking Yoko. He’s not sure why but it makes him feel distantly sad, like he is missing something, missing their underground village and its still teeming life beneath their feet, missing the simplicity of digging. It also makes a sick roiling heat build in his stomach, and he spreads a palm there experimentally, imagining the muscles in Kamina’s golden back ripple and tense as he snaps his spine, thrusting against Yoko’s supple white body, like a drill slicing through mud.
---
The first time they combine, it feels like a revelation. OhSimon remembers thinking, so simple it it seems stupid. This is what I wanted all along. An incredible tingling burn washes over him, an electric warmth like someone is dragging a great hand over the whole of his body, like Lagann is exhaling and he is brushed with the wind of mechanized breath. Every confused part of him fits together in a way it has never fit before, and ceases, at least for a moment, being confused at all. He grips the joysticks in sweat-slick palms, and just knows what to do. His and Kamina’s immense metal body fights like fighting is a dance.
He can hear Kamina whooping and hollering beneath him, and he knows, knows the way he used to know a tunnel was about to cave in, with that base, animal knowing, that Kamina is feeling the same rush of purity as he is. He knows, because he can feel Kamina inside him, the beat of his heart thundering in his own narrow chest. We are real brothers he thinks, but it’s Kamina’s voice in his head, Kamina’s sharp, spicy scent in his lungs.
A heart builds between his narrow, quaking thighs, and it is not until the fight it over he finds the sticky mess smeared into the inside of his shorts, strange and secret.
---
The com is down after a fight, Gurren Lagann still thrumming with the electric madness it uses to repair, the metal hot beneath Simon’s palms. He cries out, letting go, shaking still with battle adrenaline. The corpses of beastmen lie in a litter of metal ruins at Gurren’s feet, he knows this, but there’s still a sliver of panic working its way into his chest, Com’s down he thinks blindly, looking between his feet, can’t contact Kamina.
He drops to his knees, sliding from the sweat-slick chair and banging on the metal floor with his fist. “Bro!” he calls, voice hoarse and ripped sounding. “Kamina!”
As always, there’s a spectacular tear in Gurren’s cockpit, three inches or so of space between the slope of Lagann’s drill-head and edge of the floor. Simon peers down into it, and Kamina’s feral, thrilled smile wavers into view mike a mirage. “Good fight, Bro,” he caws, teeth flashing brilliantly. He slides his hand up into the fissure, wide-knuckled brown fingers caressing the scored spiral of Simon’s drill. Simon he shivers like it’s his own body, like Kamina is touching him rather than Lagann. Relief floods over him and he smiles back, reaching to brush his fingertips across Kamina’s hand.
“Hey,” Kamina says suddenly in a thick voice, releasing the drill to grip Simon’s hand. He holds him there, thumb rubbing intimately over the tender inside of Simon’s wrist, eyes locked on him through the crack in their joined machines. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” Simon breathes, throat tight, pulse thundering beneath Kamina’s fingertips. They stare eat each other for a moment, bodies joined at the juncture between Gurren and Lagann, consciousness still linked through quantum interface. It feels like looking into a mirror, like hearing his own voice echo back to himself over a great canyon.
For a moment, Simon can feel Kamina in his mind, feel him wanting to pull him into Gurren’s cockpit, drag his body across the divide and crush him. He can feel his own want searing back at him, light reflected off a magnifying glass, and he gasps, heating up under Kamina’s touch.
Then, Kamina lets him go. “I knew you would be,” he mumbles, as the com flickers back on.
---
Simon cannot stop thinking about Kamina gripping him through their cockpits. He will push it down, beneath black water in is mind, but again it will resurface, bobbing shoreward, swollen and un-drownable. His stomach has been twisted into a loose knot ever since the fight, and each time he remembers the feeling of Kamina’s calloused thumb dug into his wrist, it tightens.
The sun sets and they are alone, Leeron tending to repairs, Yoko lost to target practice in a nearby quarry. Her shots keep echoing across the desert, the ground shuddering beneath his and Kamina’s backs as they lie side by side atop an unrolled knapsack.
“She’s gonna call every gunman in a twenty-file mile radius to our camp,” Kamina grumbles, forearm pressed to Simon’s. “If she keeps up all that noise.”
He says it with a fondness that makes Simon’s tense up, and for the millionth time, he wonders about Kamina and Yoko. “Can I ask you something?” he murmurs, eyes downcast.
“Shoot,” Kamina answers.
“Have you and Yoko done it yet?” The words fall out of him messily, like the dirt of a tunnel cave-in. His cheeks feel impossibly hot.
“Done it? Done what?” Kamina replies, sneering, reaching for Simon’s hair to muss it beneath his palm, making it clear he knows exactly what Simon is referring to.
Simon wiggles out from under him, fairly certain he can’t handle being touched by Kamina right now. “You know. fucked.” The word hangs heavy between them, and for a moment Kamina’s mouth is slack, shocked as he gazes at Simon. Then his face colors, and he snaps it closed. “Why do you think I wanna fuck Yoko?”
Simon shrugs. “Thought you guys had a thing, maybe. She likes you. She’s pretty, I dunno. I just thought.”
Kamina rolls over onto his back, huffing air out of his lungs in what sounds like irritation. He slides a palm between the cotton wrap across his abdomen and the low-slung hem of his pants, thumbing absently over the fabric, and Simon has to look away. “So you thought we’d fuck?” he asks, pulling his glasses down from his hair over his eyes, hiding them.
“Well. Yeah.”
“Simon. You’re dumb,” he grumbles, eyes shut decidedly beneath the lenses of his glasses. Then he rolls over onto his side, so that Simon has nothing to study but the slumped, defensive shape of his back.
---
It’s raining, and before they have a chance to combine, Simon gets thrown from Lagann and skids down a ravine, his mouth tasting of grit and storm. Knees skinned and jaw aching from its impact with wet rock, Simon rises to sit, dazed and clumsy, fingers coming back from his swolen temple sticky with blood. He can’t think straight. Blinking rapidly in the find mist of rain, he sees Gurren fighting from the corner of his eye, like a streak of gore in the darkness, the slam and grind of metal on metal echoing in time with his breath.
He staggers, tries to stand, head pounding. The other gunman resembles a rat, small and gunmetal grey with beady black eyes, and it keeps blending into the silver sky behind it, so that is disappears. Simon hears Kamina bellowing madly inside Gurren, a primal, joyous cry followed by the crunch of metal crumpling around a vast fist. The rat falls smoking to the ground, and so does Simon.
Kamina ejects and races across the desert, sandals squelching in the slippery layer of wet mud as he skids towards Simon, making fists in his jacket once he is finally atop him. Simon blinks, feeling blinded as Kamina rucks the hair out of his eyes and holds one open with thumb and forefinger. “Good thing I didn’t need you to exterminate that vermin this time, Bro,” he huffs, carding hands through Simon’s bangs. “You sure took a tumble.”
His voice is its usual pitch and timbre, brash and certain as if nothing in the world could ever break his heart. But beneath that, Simon can sense the tremor in him, a current of underlying fear as he studies Simon’s scrapes, the swelling on his temple. “Jesus,” he mumbles, too close, eyes all pupil, skin hot and rain-slicked beneath Simon’s hands. He’s breathing too hard, breath Simon can see in the cold. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine,” Simon mumbles, eyes half lidded, the throb in his head ebbing somewhat in Kamina’s broad, firm grip. “Bro, I’m fine.”
Kamina doesn’t believe him. He is staring, rain coursing in rivulets down his face, dripping from his hair. Somewhere in the distance Simon hears Leeron and Yoko calling for them, and he tries to twist from Kamina’s grip.
Finally he lets go, clambering up and offering a hand to Simon, pulling him unsteadily to your feet. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he scolds, throwing his arm around Simon’s wet shoulder, both of them stumbling towards Lagann. He waves towards the rest of their crew, fingers digging gently into Simon’s ribs. “Or I’ll have to kill you. Dunno what I’d do without you.”
Simon slumps against Kamina’s ribs, nodding to himself, thinking the same.
---
That night they sleep inside Gurren, curled up in the cockpit and against each other, nestled tightly like they used to in Simon’s cot. It’s terrifically quiet inside the machine, its thick metal body silencing the sounds from outside, the rain and the rustle of wind, the sucking sound of dry, cracked earth finally drinking. Simon’s face is pressed into Kamina’s throat, his lips against his pulse. He’s drowsy but he doesn’t want to sleep; he wants to remember this, he wants to remember every second of it.
Kamina’s arm, heavy across his side, shifts. “Hey,” he says, gripping Simon’s wrist to still his hand. “Quit messing with your bandage. If you don’t stop, that thing is never gonna heal.”
“Sorry,” Simon whispers, breath stifled against Kamina’s skin, salty under his open mouth. They both freeze, Kamina tightening his arm around Simon, drawing him closer, so close he can feel their heartbeats trapped together.
Kamina’s breath is suddenly coming out quick and rough, his body pressing Simon up against the wall of the cock-pit, sharp metal jutting into his back. “Hey,” he says again, just like he said as his hand slid up the side of Lagann’s drill tip, the same gravity at his words, voice thick and low.
Simon doesn’t know what to do. He thinks it will break it if he says anything, so he just tilts his head back, eyes wide and shining in the dark, breath wild against Kamina’s hand as it moves to brush across his brow, his cheek, heavy and solid.
With rough digits Kamina parts Simon’s lips and teeth, managing to grab the tip of his tongue between a calloused thumb and forefinger. He tastes like salt and desert, like iron and oil and blood and home. Simon can’t breathe, he can only tremble, eyes half-lidded and all pupil, cheeks hot and red. Kanima swallows, licks his own lips. Then he scrapes against Simon’s tongue with his dirty thumbnail, and the world feels like it is coming apart.
“Are you gonna drill all the way to heaven with this?” Kamina asks, but it is not his usual voice, the one full of certainty and fire, the one that fashions truth from dust. This voice is shaking, shaking like his other hand as it rubs up Simon’s back, beneath his shirt. “Huh?”
Simon can’t say anything around the fingers in his mouth, so he just nods mindlessly, pressing his body into all of Kamina’s solid angles and planes, desperate and clumsy.
“Close your eyes,” Kamina tells him.
Simon does so without thinking; he always does what Kamina tells him to, it’s easy, he can’t help it. His breath shudders out of him, humid in his own face since Kamina is leaning over him so closely now, trapping their exhalations together. Rough fingers slide from him in a thin patina of spit, and suddenly warm lips brush against his own, soft and chaste at first, the whole world smelling like Kamina. Kamina’s sweat and Kamina’s fear, Kamina’s dirty hair as it dusts across Simon’s brow.
We’re combining, he thinks, which is ridiculous, but somehow makes this easier, makes it something he can swallow without question. We do this all the time. But no one’s gonna die this way, no beastmen, no gunmen. His mind whites out with static and one of them makes a noise, a low, surprised groan and it might be him but he thinks it’s Kamina, because then the kiss changes.
Kamina licks into his mouth, the hot, slick tip of his tongue flicking up beneath the ridge of his teeth, feeling him everywhere like he’s terrified he’s gonna forget the taste if he doesn’t get deep enough. There’s the warm drag of breath, incisors clicking together and Kamina’s broad hands squeezing over his shoulders, rubbing down the soft plane of his stomach where his insides are writhing and melting, palms rough and wild and perspiration damp. Simon does not want it to end so he chases Kamina’s lips with his own when they break apart, gasping.
Kamina holds him down, eyes a terrible, flint black flash of darkness before he shuts them tight and ducks down to mouth clumsily across Simon’s damp brow, along the edges of his bandage. “Fuck,” he mumbles, pushing his thumb into Simon’s lower lip, dust-gritty and metallic tasting. He moves to cover Simon’s body with his own, weight crushing for a moment before he pushes to his hands and knees, vaulted above Simon’s prone frame like the ceiling of the underground, quaking with tremors. Simon’s head knocks against the base of Gurren’s pilot-seat, but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care.
“What are you doing to me,” Kamina mumbles, voice low and dangerous as it scrapes out his throat. He can’t stop touching, hands raking down Simon’s sides, blunt nails making him squirm and writhe upon the knapsack. “I shouldn’t do this.”
“Don’t,” Simon tells him, a panicked flicker of terror rearing up in his chest. Maybe it’s because they’re inside Gurren and there’s left-over energy from their last combination, maybe it’s from years of digging holes and learning from the earth. Maybe it is just a senseless premonition, but Simon knows that this, whatever it is, cannot last, will not last. He has to get whatever he can out of Kamina now, in this moment. He reaches for Kamina’s wrists, holding them in place, keeping them steady upon his own skin. “I want you to,” he pants, hips bucking clumsily. Please He is about to say, but Kamina’s tongue chokes him silent.
Rain thunders against Gurren’s metal skin, a sad and lonely song, and Kamina doesn’t try to stop himself again.
---
In the quiet, still darkness, Kamina sleeps, but Simon cannot. He lays with his head on Kamina’s chest, riding the slow, rhythmic rise and fall, inhaling deeply to wake himself each time he begins to drift off. He doesn’t care how exhausted he is come sunrise, he wants to keep this night forever. Occasionally Kamina will stir, eyes opening blearily and a slow smile spreading on his lips. “That really happened, huh?” He mumbles at some point, fingers reaching up to comb through Simons hair. “Thought maybe I dreamt you up”
“Nope,” Simon answers, voice echoing slightly in Gurren’s hollow insides.
“You’re such a kid,” Kamina says then, voice reedy and sleep-thick as he examines Simon, his soft cheeks and smooth chest. He swallows, thumbing across Simon’s lips as he looks at him. “Guess that makes me pretty sick.”
Simon shrugs. “I don’t care,” he murmurs, lips against Kamina’s sternum where the skin is sticky and stretched tight. “It seems right. Like it was supposed to happen.”
Kamina yawns, chest expanding so much under Simon’s weight he nearly rolls off of him. He settles back down, fingers snagging in Simon’s hair before his hand falls back down to his side, limp with exhaustion. Then, his eyes fall on the drill hanging from Simon’s neck, and he reaches up again to touch its glinting tip in the darkness. “You’re still gonna take us to heaven, right little brother?” His voice is hardly a whisper, and something about it makes Simon’s stomach clench. “Gonna pierce straight up into that sky you didn’t believe existed?”
He finds Simon’s lips in the dark, breath heavy and damp as he kisses him, pulling him in by the cord around his neck. Simon thinks of blood, of shooting stars, his palms spread across the cobalt twists of ink on Kamina’s shoulders, invisible in the dark.
They kiss and they kiss and he thinks of heaven burning brightly above them, an impossible void. Of course we’ll make it there he thinks with certainty, tugging at Kamina’s lips with his teeth, shifting so that he is straddling him, hips working in desperate, graceless thrusts. There are no more ceilings to crumble, no more underground to be crushed beneath. Simon feels infinite in Kamina’s arms, falling stars and blood. Of course.
---