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A date with pizza and beer in his room wasn’t exactly much, but Diarmuid figured that buying himself something good to eat and playing video games was better than doing nothing. Especially on Valentine’s Day.
Taking a bite of the cheesy bread he’d gotten from the cafeteria, it wasn’t hard to understand why Master had used the term “comfort food” to explain it. It was almost enough to keep everything he was trying not to think about at bay - all of the festivities he was missing out on, the way he was by himself when he should have been with Cu, and the upsetting conversation he’d had with him two weeks earlier that was to blame for it.
“You know, there’s a holiday coming up in a couple weeks,” he’d said to Cu after they’d finished training. They were sitting on the bench outside the shower room, Diarmuid’s hair hanging limp around his shoulders while Cu’s clung to his back, the steam warm on their mostly bare skin. “I heard that it’s common for couples to celebrate their relationship on that day, or to give gifts to show appreciation.”
“Mm,” Cu grunted in acknowledgment, as he took a sip of the energy drink he had on hand.
“In the Western world, the tradition is to go on a nice date. So I was wondering if you’d like to try doing something like that ourselves. There’s this place I heard about from Artoria - ”
“No thanks. Stuff like that’s a waste of time for us.”
Well, okay. It wasn’t as if Diarmuid had been that attached to the idea, or felt any sense of compulsion toward it. But he had thought it sounded like fun, not to mention a good chance for them to do something outside their usual rotation of activities. Maybe they could have nice wine and give each other roses and… teddy bears? He’d heard that was part of the celebration. But did Cu have to say that? He was used to how blunt he could be, but that had stung. Waste of time? Was it so wrong, so silly of him to have wanted to do something special, something out of the ordinary with Cu? Sure, the berserker tended to be negative, but did he care at all about how his words might make Diarmuid feel?
No, maybe not, he figured, taking a sip of beer to wash down the realization, and another after that to make himself really accept it. Maybe he was just a distraction for Cu - an outlet for that endless appetite of his. Maybe it was silly to want to get closer to him. Maybe he ought to just content himself with what they already had. No one else could light him up the way Cu did - push him to limits he hadn’t even known he’d wanted to reach, remind him that there was still life left to be lived even after more than one painful past. Who was he to dwell on whether or not Cu cared about the same things he did? That was to be expected in any relationship. Yes, he was fine with this. He was just being oversensitive - he’d get over it soon.
So he had told himself, and went right on to avoid him for the next two weeks anyway. It wasn’t a deliberate decision - he just didn’t have the heart to seek Cu out. He passed him a time or two in the hallway, and smiled at him just like he normally would, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop and actually greet him - he just hurried on by as if he had somewhere to be. At least he could rest reassured that Cu didn’t seem to have noticed how he was feeling, which meant he wouldn’t be needlessly worrying about him when he hadn’t actually done anything wrong.
Yet a voice kept telling him that this wasn’t really what he wanted to be doing, a voice that even now, several cans of beer in, refused to be drowned out. At first, he’d only felt a little empty, finding the hollow spot in his life that shouldn’t have been there easy enough to ignore. But that hollow spot was starting to ache now, rot seeping into it and spreading out from his heart to the rest of his body. Various phantom sensations overtook his mind whenever he couldn’t stop it from wandering - the scrape of Cu’s teeth against his neck before he sank them in and held on tight, the quiet comfort of being folded up against him in bed. At some point, he’d set the handheld console he’d been playing down, and propped his arm up on the kotatsu table in front of him, resting his chin on his hand and letting his gaze linger on the wall. His eyelids drooped shut a time or two, and he felt his head being tugged ever more toward the surface of the table.
At some point, a noise awoke Diarmuid from what he realized had been sleep, and with a blink or two he lifted himself out of the fuzzy sea of darkness he’d found himself in. Glancing across the room, his eyes perceived a figure, towering and muscular, standing in the corner. He searched its outline for explanation, but finding only shadow there, it was only seconds before he was out again.
The next time he woke up, it was the throb of a headache that did it. Several empty beer cans and an empty takeout box were the first things he noticed as his vision came back into focus, and they didn’t exactly fill him with pride. The dimness in the room stood out to him like it hadn’t earlier - only the light in the small hallway near the door was on. It was clear that there wasn’t much to do but clean up and go to bed at this point, but he remembered that the pumpkins he had planted before he passed out would be ready to harvest if he played just another day. He’d just play that one last day first - it’d give him a slightly better note to end his real-life day on. Thoughts of the actual rowan trees he was growing in Chaldea’s greenhouse crossed his mind, and he added going to tend them to the first slot on his to-do list for the next day.
Just as his thoughts began to drift to what he’d do after that, he heard the click of the doorknob. He froze, and put the game down immediately - why hadn’t he locked the door at a time like this? This was supposed to be private, but there was only so much he could do about it now. Into the room stepped Cu, clad in just sweatpants like he often was when he was doing nothing in particular, holding in his hands an oddly shaped box that was both shiny and red. Diarmuid’s cheeks burned as his eyes darted to the mess in front of him. “I - I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting you -”
Cu was staring at the mess on the table, though he looked more lost in thought than disgusted. “Today meant a lot to you,” he muttered, the chagrin in his voice quiet but audible.
“Well, yes.” It wouldn’t serve any purpose to either of them to deny it at this point. “It’s alright, though. It was just an idea.” It had mattered to him, but it was all out the window now. He felt like a fool, but even that he was already starting to forget about, a surge of feeling welling up in his chest quicker than he could understand it. He wanted to get up and take Cu’s hand, to let him take him wherever he wanted to go, to leave whatever this had been about behind.
Cu knelt down on the opposite side of the kotatsu and handed him the red box he’d held in his hands. Velvet lace in pink and red decked its edges, the outline heart-shaped. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright,” Diarmuid told him again as he accepted the box, everything that had been eating at him washed clean and pure already. It wasn’t as if he’d been ignoring Cu out of spite, but he worried he might have taken it that way. Stupid, selfish, he thought of himself for having not at least tried to talk things over with him. Maybe he’d never learn.
Inside the box were chocolates of various shapes and sizes arranged on a bed of tinsel. Compared to others he’d seen before, these looked homemade, by either a small child or someone with the same level of artistic skill. Some were dusted with sprinkles or sparkles, applied too heavily in some cases, revealing a lack of restraint by the decorator. Others had designs drawn on them with icing - Diarmuid guessed that some of those blobs were supposed to be hearts - another might have been a flower, but it looked almost at least as much like a snowflake. However unartful their decoration was, Diarmuid could feel himself beaming as he looked the chocolates over. “If I may ask, where did you get this?”
“I made it,” Cu said with a perfectly straight face. “With Medb.” He admitted this last detail with what seemed like both reluctance and compulsion, like he wanted to confess something.
“Oh?”
Cu nodded. “She invited me to make them with her, and I said I wasn’t interested. Told her what I told you. And she said that she doesn’t see what you see in me. That I’m cruel.”
He seemed to only be recounting what happened - Diarmuid didn’t get the sense that he was seeking either agreement or disagreement from him, although he had a nagging suspicion that the conversation was maybe a little more harrowing than Cu was letting on.
“She’s right. So I changed my mind.” Cu glanced at the chocolates, wearily. “I can’t promise you they taste any good.”
He picked up one that had been molded into the shape of a rose, not because it mattered, but because he was happy to have them either way. He’d only tried chocolate a couple before, so it wasn’t like he had much to compare it to, but even so, he found that he liked this better. It wasn’t too sweet, the richness of the chocolate more pronounced than he remembered the others he’d had. Perhaps even his taste buds were biased, but he didn’t care either way. “It’s not bad at all. I like it.”
“Hm. Good.” Neither spoke again for a moment. “I guess it’s too late to go on a date now,” Cu finally said.
“Perhaps so. But there will be other times.” It hit Diarmuid that he hadn’t prepared a return gift for Cu. Flustered at his empty-handedness, he stammered out, “I-I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to give you in return right now.”
“Doesn’t matter. I don’t need things like that.”
And Diarmuid, eager as he was to do for Cu what Cu had done for him, believed him. “Then let me give you what you do need instead.”
A scowl threatened to overtake Cu’s face, though he did his best to hold it back. “I don’t need --” he started, before cutting himself off in the middle of something they both knew wasn’t true. “Fine. You asked for it, though.”
Yes, he had. Cu came over and scooped him up, the ease with which he did never failing to make Diarmuid’s heart forget for a split second whether he was in this realm or the other one.
Larger and mightier than any other, powerful whether on the battlefield or in bed, when Cu took him without hesitation, Diarmuid found that it was like ceding to the dark of the night itself. His beloved shadow - he really had missed him.