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The first time it dawns on Roberto they’re at Munich International Airport, not half a day off the end of their last case with Hiraga’s passport burning a hole in Roberto’s pocket. It’s 3:36 AM, and they’re tucked into the back of the boarding lounge, and Hiraga’s legs are thrown over the seat dividers- dirty shoes on clean cassock be damned- and they’re laughing at some video or other Hiraga’s pulled up on his phone.
That is, Hiraga’s laughing at it, in that breathy, tight-chested way you only get after you’ve battled it out with mutated choir boys in an underground concert hall, and you’ve spent the last six hours exploring a city you’ve slogged through countless times on your own for the very first time with someone you hold dear, with maybe 11 hours of sleep total to tie yourself through the past week, and Roberto’s sure Hiraga tilted his phone over at some point to show him the video but really, Roberto’s smiling because Hiraga is.
In reality, he should be quite annoyed by the circumstances. Roberto’s probably spent as much time arguing with airline staff in his life as he has holed away in the Vatican Archives, and it’s not exactly convenient being shepherded from one case right onto another without even the time for a load of laundry. But as it stands? The crinkle in Hiraga’s nose offsets the plastic armrest boring into his back. The way his head has turtled into the jacket he let Roberto throw over his robes is enough to make up for the third announcement delay on their flight filtering through the overhead speakers.
Roberto swallows thickly.
It’s worse than he thought.
“Hey.”
Hiraga’s eyes glance up to his, phone lifted to his ear and his brow furrowed, presumably trying to listen to the very important audio that must accompany the puppy video.
“…Are you thirsty? You haven’t drank any water since we left the lodgings, have you?”
Hiraga smiles, half open-mouthed in that way he does when the extent of Roberto’s care is both surprising and expected, as if he’d been waiting for him to ask. “Oh. Some water would be nice, don’t you think?”
He tilts his head as he says it, and there’s his nose crinkling again, and it’s everything in Roberto’s power to not look away from the maw of the beast.
“I’ll… go see if any of the stores are open.” But he doesn’t move right away, it’s not in him to push Hiraga’s legs off his own, so he waits as his Hiraga stares, and narrows his eyes, and then bursts into a tired laugh when he realizes and kicks them off with a flourish.
“Please hurry, Roberto.” Hiraga calls as he walks away. “There’s one with a bunny on this page, but I remember how much you liked Miffy, so I want to watch it with you too!”
But Roberto does not hurry. And his head is spinning. And it’s not pleasant, it does not feel like being wine-drunk on a starry night, or being tossed by the waves of a gentle sea, or any of the other lovely, light metaphors of the novels he clandestinely snuck sticky notes into the pages of in his school days.
His index finger brushes against Hiraga’s passport as he tucks his hands in his pockets, and it burns.
He stops first in the bathroom, and after a moment in the doorway, finds himself standing by the sinks. He pulls his hands out his pockets slowly, washes them, and he does not look in the mirror.
The weight of his head threatens to roll it right off his shoulders, and it’s not pleasant like they all said it would be, it doesn't tingle, it doesn’t glow, and it hurts.
It must be love, he thinks.
It must be love.
————
Maybe it started like this.
Roberto is twenty-four years into life and two months into a partnership he never asked for, surrounded by however many manuscripts on phonosemantics he could carry back from the shelf, and the library is still, but not quiet.
Across the table from him Hiraga taps his fingers on the desk in a rhythmic pattern, almost mathematically timed at the frequency with which he flips a page. His hair falls over his eyes and Roberto reads the same paragraph over and over, an intrusive thought making him wonder not for the first time what it would feel like if he leaned over and tucked it back.
“Well! Nothing in here either.” Hiraga slams the book shut and Roberto winces, half from the violence of the act and half from being shaken out of his daze, but he doesn’t say anything. It’s not the newness of the relationship that holds him back, God knows Roberto doesn’t have a problem pressing the importance of his opinion, regardless of present company. But something about his new partner has been gnawing at the back of his mind, begging him not to mess this one up.
“Did you really… read through it all?” Roberto bites his tongue at the awkwardness of his own tone. “That was quite fast, Hiraga.”
“More or less” Hiraga tilts his head, birdlike as he leans in, and he presses an index finger to his plump bottom lip. “We’re just looking for any information on ancient Greek phonosthemes, aren’t we? If I scan the page for keywords instead of going through each sentence, we’ll be through fairly quickly!”
This is also the first time that Roberto notices the nose crinkle. The first time he stops, takes a flash frame of the moment and commits it to memory, something screaming in his head to remember the precise way Hiraga’s cupid’s bow dips as he smiles. This is far more important than whatever potentially case-saving information might be held in the yellowing manuscript in his hands, it insists.
“Like a human search bar,” He mutters, and Hiraga hears, and his smile grows at the praise, though Roberto isn’t sure himself whether he meant it as such.
“Well! You know, Roberto,” The fingertip pressed to his lip inches up to the tip of his nose, and his gaze turns deadly serious. “I think it’s important to keep our partnership as honest and pure as we can, so I must confess something to you.”
Roberto’s mouth runs dry.
“…I smelled what you brought in for lunch yesterday. I thought that if we finished early, I might follow you out as you go and ask you for a bite.”
You can have it all, The thought slips out before he can stop it.
Roberto’s sits up stiffly, opens his mouth to respond, before retuning to his slouch.
“Hiraga,”
The boy in question holds up two hands, expression still friendly, but brow slightly furrowed now. “If you’re too hungry, just tell me, I won’t mind!”
“Why don’t we share.”
Roberto learns another thing here, how little convincing it takes with Hiraga, how easily he places his trust once he assumes goodwill. The boy simply nods, holds up a fist, then grabs the book next to him, somehow flipping through at an even faster pace than before.
He returns to his own book, but he knows this research session is on Hiraga’s shoulders. He has tomorrow’s groceries to brainstorm.
————
They manage to fly out of Munich before the day breaks, after only the fourth delay, and the evening finds them already knee-deep in investigation, trekking a beach along the Amalfi coast, just late enough for the sun’s rays to flood the scene with the eerie, still amber of a maritime sunset.
A local church claims that at night, sand sweeps in from nowhere and forms “Godly patterns” in front of the alters. Roberto thinks that if what he saw in the pictures was an act of God, then He may want to consider going back to art school.
Hiraga leads, a few feet ahead as he scours for the best place to take his next sand sample. The wind tousles his silky hair made textured by the salt air, revealing the close shave underneath.
Roberto wants to run his fingers through. Wants to grab on and hold.
He takes mercy on himself this time, and looks away. The spaces between wool and cotton and skin underneath his cassock grow hotter with every second spent under the setting Campanian sun, and he focuses on the discomfort, welcoming the distraction the more stifling it becomes. Heat, and pressure, and stick, the heavens themselves coercing him down, weighing him lower, dragging him to-
“…..Roberto? Robertooo?”
When had they stopped walking?
“Ah, what was that, Hiraga?”
And then Hiraga spins around to face him, head coming to cover the precise spot where the sun hangs in the sky and for a split second its rays shine out from all ends of his face like a halo, a crown, his face in shadow but the glint of his toothy smile in light, and Roberto’s mind races between divinity and blasphemy and love and hate and death and sex and forever and-
“Do you know what carcinization is, Roberto?” His hands are folded behind him as he begins to walk backwards now, light as a feather in his own robes.
“I think I do. But feel free to tell me anyway.”
Hiraga smirks, not maliciously, as a smirk tends to be, but a calculated smile spread over half of his face. He stops in his tracks again as they come up to a rocky outcropping on the beach (Roberto wonders if he has eyes in the back of his head) and side-stepping, starts to make his way around Roberto, gaze tracing across the ground as he speaks.
“Well, you know Roberto, it’s funny how when you ask someone their favourite animal, it’s always a puppy, or a horse, you’ll never hear them answer with anything like a snake, or a spider, or a crab. They’re too ugly, too unlike us. But, ah,” he hops over a piece of driftwood, continuing his dance around the rocks.
“Creatures evolve from creatures. And through evolutionary history on this planet, so many different creatures have evolved from their own shape into a shape that resembles a crab, that scientists created a whole name for the phenomeno- OH!” He dives behind a boulder and Roberto continues to stare, the sun beating across the back of his neck a little less pressing now. He misses it.
When Hiraga pops up moments later, not only is his cassock miraculously not covered in sand, but with two hands he grips-
“Atlantic blue crab. Invasive species around here, did you know?” he observes.
But Roberto quickly remembers to pick his jaw up off the floor and lurches forward, arm outstretched, and hisses “Hiraga!”, which seems to have the desired effect as Hiraga jumps, and his hands empty his hard-earned prize back onto the sand.
For a moment they stand in silence, watching their crustaceous friend, unphased, find another rock to scuttle under.
A bead of sweat drips down Roberto’s forehead and he briefly wonders if he should regret yelling, but his common sense tells him to pull his arm back, smooth down his frock. “You know can’t just pick up animals like that, especially not ones with- with pincers.”
Hiraga silently makes his way back over through rocks, til he’s not six inches in front of Roberto. His eyes point slightly downward at Roberto’s chest and his heart burns, as if stripped bare by that gaze, however illogical, until he slowly tilts it up to meet the taller man’s.
“…But did you get what’s wonderful about it? It’s quite cute, honestly. A crab may not be anyone on Earth’s favourite, but God, all the way in heaven, has taken a liking to her anyway.”
The wind, growing ever-so-slightly colder, blows through Hiraga’s hair again, and a thick piece falls right over his right eye.
He doesn’t move it. He blinks once, twice, and waits.
Heaven. Earth. It’s hard to explain these concepts to someone who doesn’t implicitly understand them, in the very root of their nature. Roberto’s mind has and will always feel too narrow. Like a square block going through a round hole.
Thirty seconds, or an hour passes. Roberto’s hand shakes as he lifts it, but it steadies as it comes into Hiraga’s view and he gingerly brushes the strand back behind the other ones.
Suddenly, Hiraga’s mouth forms an ‘O’, and his line of sight moves to something just past Roberto’s shoulder.
“The sun is setting. I do need that sample before dark so we can send it to Lauren to cross-reference with the church sand in the morning.”
His shoulder brushes against Roberto’s as he springs past him into motion, leaving him to stare a moment into the searing core of the half-hooded sun.
Roberto first wonders if he dropped dead, right then and there, whether Hiraga would be brought in as a suspect.
He wonders if the sharp piece of driftwood two feet away would do the job.
And then he wonders how on earth he just noticed flip-flops peeking out from the bottom of Hiraga’s robes when they never had a chance to pack for the beach.
————
Or perhaps it started here.
Roberto is sixteen, and the morning light is streaming through the windows of his homeroom classroom, white, white light reflected off the freshly laid snow outside, and Roberto is alone.
Precisely, it’s is Roberto’s thirty-fourth morning starting his school day alone, Trust him, he knows, he’s been counting. As the other students file in he sits up straight in his chair, staring at the clock, and the door, and his ever-empty letter box, one after the other in a cycle.
His leg under the table absentmindedly shakes his desk.
A group of older boys enter the classroom, chatting as they make their way to the back, but Roberto hardly breaks trance to register the potential for threat until one of them slams his fist down on his desk as he passes by, opening it to a palm that presses down.
Roberto immediately freezes, and the shaking ceases. Every hair on the back of his neck stands, and his gaze does not move from where it was interrupted on the clock. The boy gives him a wink that Roberto does not see, his gaggle laughs, and they move on.
Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t breathe. They’ll see you. Don’t breathe. Don’t think. They’ll hear you. Don’t-
But before Roberto gets a chance to truly panic their teacher waltzes in, the tinny click-clack of Miss Casagrande’s kitten heels enough to effectively shut the room up.
She dumps an armful of papers on her desk and Roberto returns briefly to his cycle as she begins to sort through them, but before she can begin with the morning announcements, a knock sounds on the door.
Call it a hunch. Call it divine insight. Call it living every waking moment with so much dread in your stomach and anxiety filling up your throat threatening to bubble over that anything would have set you off. But Roberto hears the hesitation in the knock.
And he knows.
The rest of the scene he can only recall from the outside. A ghost standing in the corner of the classroom, staring at his his own body. (Maybe spirit would be more appropriate, when he remembers his current line of work? His soul? He doesn’t like to be so hasty to assume he has one).
The headmaster opens the door, but he does not enter. He gestures Miss Casagrande outside and the silhouettes of their heads are visible through the frosted glass, but nary a sound makes its way through.
Roberto stares. He stared a lot, in those days. Before him. After him.
She reenters alone, the softer click-clack as she comes to stand in front of her desk revealing more reservation than her straight back and high chin might want to. For a strange, pregnant moment she simply stands there, gaze narrow as ever as she surveys the two dozen wide-eyed boys staring back at her.
And then it’s over. She clasps her hands together, walks around back to her seat, and begins the morning announcements, words of bio homework and hymns and todays lunch possibilities crowding the air once more.
The boys well-engrossed in the conversation of the last few free minutes of their advisor period, nobody except Roberto notices when she quietly walks over and removes the name card Josef Bartridge, in Roberto’s own swirling calligraphy, from the shelf of student letter boxes.
————
Roberto and Hiraga and Amalfi at twilight, and it has a nice ring to it, the words tumble around in Roberto’s mind. Roberto and Hiraga, Hiraga and Roberto.
The church they’re investigating is further inland but the officials were gracious enough to house them right in town, a beautiful hillside apartment with a view of the sea. The town is quiet for this time on a Friday but Roberto is grateful for it, the sound of their footsteps on cobblestone, alone, together, is calming.
He wants to listen; he doesn’t want to think. Thinking just grows more and more dangerous these days.
“Oh dear, Roberto,” he hears a chuckle next to him. “It must still be almost 20 degrees out. You can’t be cold under all those layers.”
Roberto is confused for a moment, he’s been near-suffocation all evening. But he follows Hiraga’s gaze to his left hand gripping his right upper arm- how did he not feel his unclipped nails digging through the wool?
“Ah,” He first loosens his grip, then decides to drop his arm altogether. He always forgets that Hiraga is more perceptive than he seems, even if the conclusions don’t always hit the mark. Usually the thought titillates. Today, it unnerves.
“Ah?” The streetlights begin to flicker on as they continue their way up the hilly street, admittedly at more of a stroll than a march. They cast the ridges and valleys of Hiraga’s face in a harsh shadow, the otherworldly side to his looks putting the familiar to rest in the inky light.
Roberto is unsure whether to put effort into a response, or remain as silent as his mind is trying to be. As a compromise, he coughs into his fist.
Hiraga gives him a pointed glance and veers toward him, bumping his shoulder against Roberto’s. “You’re so quiet today. I’m not used to being the Roberto of the conversation.” He pauses. “I think I know the reason, by the way. Shall I tell you my guess?”
Roberto’s blood runs cold.
He knew he hadn’t been masking well enough god what was with him it’s too late he’ll find out he’ll-
Breathe. Roberto breathes.
He tastes salt, and bougainvillea, and a hint of cigarette smoke.
“The… reason?”
“Yes. For the sand patterns. Santa Trofimena’s miracle.”
…Ah.
The tightness in Roberto’s chest should relieve itself as he nods with understanding, but it doesn’t. He falls slightly out of step with Hiraga as the boy shuts his eyes and folds his delicate hands behind his back. Roberto has always loved that, loves the way he can see the cogs turning.
“Do you remember, what that errand boy called Father Francesco as he grabbed our bags, before correcting himself? He called him Doc.” Hiraga gestures out with his right hand.
“Before we left for the beach, while Father Francesco was showing you the grounds, I had the child take me to his office. His degree is still hung proudly on his wall, a PhD in Geophysics.” Hiraga’s raises his left hand to parallel the right. “So who might be the only one to know enough about the sand composition in the area and geomagnetism to rig some sort of programmable device to move the sand in whatever way he pleases?”
Hiraga’s hands draw together in a cup, the movement as fluid as the ambient sound of the waves that surround them in this town no matter how far they seem to be from the shore. He opens his eyes, a shy smile gracing his lips. “So the first thing we should do in the morning is have them check out under the floor for us. Almost too easy, don’t you think?”
For a moment, Roberto is granted a brief reprieve from his eternal cycle of longing and penance by the draw of the mystery. He turns the pieces over in his mind, happy to blindly trust Hiraga’s assessment of the physics of it all.
Eventually satisfied, he nods. “You’re right. It almost is too easy. We’ll follow the lead, but I wouldn’t feel too assured in the idea of wrapping up early.”
A sly look from Hiraga. “And why not? Our flight back hasn’t been booked yet, we’re in no rush. Maybe Saul just noticed what we all noticed.”
“And what would that be?”
It’s then that Hiraga does something utterly inconceivable, but utterly Hiraga.
He doesn’t know the consequences of his skin meeting Roberto’s. He doesn’t have to worry about the ice, or the burn, or the blinding, searing want.
If Roberto were a romantic, he might have one day looked back and said that there, on that hilly street looking out at the reflection of the newly-awoken stars in the Tyrrhenian Sea, that there, with the cicadas singing and the smell of something sweet in the wind, Hiraga took his hand for the very first time.
But that’s not quite what Hiraga does. He reaches out, and wraps one of those delicate, cold hands around Roberto’s wrist.
“That you might be in need of a vacation.”
He tugs. And Roberto lets him lead.
————
Roberto knows the truth. It probably started here.
Officer Puglisi’s hand is hot, and clammy, and it drowns Roberto’s own tiny one, curled up in a fist inside.
He’s not lead so much as dragged hurriedly through the crowd, and the people towering around him on all sides are yelling, cameras are flashing, but Roberto doesn’t understand if they’re angry with him, or with the officer, or whether they’re angry at all.
Officer Puglisi mutters non-stop but Roberto can’t make out anything of use, his gruff smoker’s growl obscuring the words.
He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand.
His arm hurts.
Bruno, he distinguishes from the cries of one of the- They must be reporters right?- as he’s shepherded into the courthouse.
He’s passed from the officer to another man in a suit, and together they must walk down the hall at some point, but Roberto isn’t processing things so linearly. The important-looking man places a hand on his shoulder, he blinks, and suddenly, he’s being embraced by an older, stockier woman.
He recognizes his aunt by smell before sight. His own mother used to wear the same cheap perfume.
The voices continue to swirl.
Berto, come now, poor thing, who dressed him in that sweater?, bit of a swarm out there, at least you managed a brush through those curls of his, oh dear and he’s only a boy, there’s a hole in the sleeve, oh Naomi, Naomi, Naomi, Naomi, can you hear me?, Roberto?, can we please get you a snack, Berto?, he’s normally so bright, it’s not as if he could have gone dumb, we can’t stay here, please, something, anything, boy?,
Roberto can’t tell where the hurt in his body ends and his head starts.
The words don’t just get caught in his throat. They stay stuck in his mind. Ideas, fully-formed abstract thought, that Roberto cannot manage to to remember how to string into words in the first place.
As his small body is crushed into embraces and patted and arranged into neat lines and directed down hall after hall, he wishes once more that he hadn’t been so bad.
He wishes he could take it back.
————
Hiraga always finds his way to the couch.
His usual nesting spot is Roberto’s prized green velvet sofa, with its rough patch on top of the back left cushion where Hiraga always perches his feet when he’s lying back, heavy-lidded after a big meal.
This apartment’s sofa is upholstered in a rough beige cotton, but Hiraga’s legs find their way up all the same. They didn’t have time for a proper grocery run but Santa Trofimena was kind enough to stock their fridge with enough cheese and meat and fruit for at least a semi-decent charcuterie board.
Roberto feels eyes on him, the back of his neck prickling as he finishes up the dishes at the sink. But every time he turns back, that gaze flits back onto the single wine glass on the coffee table, and each time, it’s a little more empty than before.
It’s quiet, except for the sound of running water, and for the faint sound of classical music seeping from an open window a floor below them in through their own.
“It’s quite good, you know. If you’d like a sip. They stocked enough for the both of us, there’s far too much in that cupboard for just me if we’re to take advantage of our vacation.”
Roberto allows himself a soft half-smile into the privacy of the water-filled sink. “We’re not on vacation yet, Hiraga.”
“So you admit that you think we will be soon?”
“I’ll admit that you seem a little too eager to wrap up this mystery to be my Hiraga.”
…My Hiraga. The words hang in the air, and Roberto lets them. They’re innocuous enough.
He’s traveled dozens of cities with his partner. He’ll hopefully have the chance to travel dozens more. But this is the first city he’s travelled with Hiraga since he’s realized. The first city where he must face the fact that he spends his life in various apartments caring day in and day out for the man he loves in places where no one knows their names, places where no one would ever think twice, and understand what the relentless chasm in his stomach has been trying to tell him, in words, instead of abstract feeling.
It’s funny how things stay the same, even as everything changes.
“Roberto.”
“Mm?”
“Will you please come here already?”
He is alone, in an apartment in another city, caring for the man he loves. Of course, Roberto wipes his hands down on a kitchen towel, and he comes.
Hiraga can no longer be said to be lying on the couch so much as he is half hanging off it, legs hooked around the top. Roberto had showered and changed into capris and a white button-down as soon as they had gotten in but Hiraga, as always, remains in that damn cassock.
“If someone walked in and saw us right now, what do you think they’d see?”
From his upright angle Roberto technically looks up at Hiraga instead of down and his features in this unfamiliar state look older, wiser. Roberto notices the glaze in his eyes, though. He’s too well-trained not to miss it.
“I’m not sure. At this time at night, with you dressed like that? Maybe, late night confession?”
Hiraga shakes his head.
“Then what would they see?”
Hiraga’s movements are not as fluid as earlier, and his wrists lay ever so limp as he gestures between the two of them. “You upright, me upside down. You in white, myself in black. And when we face in towards each other like this to talk? Yin, and yang.” he says as if stating the obvious.
Roberto is still not quite sure why he was called over here and the sweet spell of domesticity is beginning to ever so slightly wear off, his anxiety never straying too far around the corner. He shifts in his seat, hands coming to rest under his own thighs. “I suppose they might. Well, what now? There isn’t much to do until we can ring up the tests in the morning, I think I saw a chessboard around if-”
But Hiraga props himself up on his elbows, pulling himself up and over, until he matches Roberto, back upright in his seat. He takes in a long breath and upon exhale, the tension dissipates from his body, and he falls in to rest his cheek upon Roberto’s shoulder.
The itch, the burn in Roberto’s fingertips returns. He thinks of a touch, a caress, just a simple smooth down of his partner’s hair that could express every thought and fear and proclamation of devotion that courses through him.
What he does instead is clenches his jaw. “…Tired, I take it?”
But Hiraga is not tired, Roberto can see that as he tilts up to meet Roberto’s gaze, nuzzling over his shoulder in the process. Those eyes are still hazy, but they’re awake.
“It hurts me, you know.”
Roberto doesn’t answer.
“You’re keeping something from me, and I know it, but I can’t understand it. And I don’t know how to ask you to let me.”
Roberto never understood the appeal of wine. The taste in his mouth is bitter enough all on its own.
“I…” Hiraga shifts his body again but it’s not to grant Roberto reprieve, no, no God would never be so merciful. Hiraga’s face now finds itself nestled in the crook of his neck and his hand rests on his shoulder. His long eyelashes tickle Roberto’s skin, and he suppresses a shiver.
“You’ve grant me everything I’ve ever wanted, Roberto, and even that which I never knew I wanted. You’ve never asked for anything in return. I’ve always thought I’ve given you my all, but I never realized that maybe that wasn’t as valuable a gift as the gift of you was to me. That you needed more.”
The breath from his mouth is hot, when he speaks. Roberto doesn’t know why he expected it to be cold, inhuman. That’s what was special about Hiraga, wasn’t it? That despite it all, despite everything about him screaming holy and otherwise, he was no less mortal than the rest of them.
Roberto’s own mouth is dry. He doesn’t feel himself whispering the words, only hears them after they’ve been spoken, and he’s still not entirely sure he isn’t simply thinking them into the ether between them.
“O..Only you.”
“Only me?” He feels the smile against his neck. “Don’t say such things. You know how greedy I can be, Roberto.”
“I do.”
“You’ve granted me everything I’ve ever wanted, my friend. Grant me something new.”
And then Roberto turns his head to Hiraga’s face just inches from his own, Hiraga’s knees tucked under himself. His breath is close enough to feel hot over his own lips, close enough to taste the wine in the air between them.
“Something I’ve never asked for.” Hiraga accents the request with a gloved hand gripping at the chest of his white button down, and Roberto feels like he’s made of paper, the panic rising in his chest that he’s about to rip.
He sees what he wants to be seeing. Roberto has always recognized the unreliability of his narration, he knows the lengths of code-breaking that he is willing to go for to solve a puzzle on the job, and he knows just as well the way those patterns seep into his own sticky daydreams, desperate for a way to justify, to assuage, to give hope, to feed him the lie that he’s not as disgusting as he feels every moment around this man, that maybe he too could-
It’s not his name that jars Roberto back to the present, but the sudden cold at his shoulder.
Hiraga has returned to sitting, back straight as would be against a chapel pew, and with an almost palpable drop in atmospheric pressure, the moment is over.
Roberto is safe.
Hiraga is zeroed in at his hands in his lap, turning them over, studying, twice, thrice. After a moment, he seems to solve whatever he was looking for as he turns back to Roberto and gives him a kilowatt smile, one so convincing that Roberto almost doesn’t realize the way it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Well at the very least, you’ll sing me a song, won’t you?” His smile dims into something softer, more breakable, but more real nonetheless.
“As if I could ever deny you,” Roberto lies.
As Hiraga’s head settles all-too-comfortably into his lap and his eyes succumb to the lingering exhaustion of the late night prior, Roberto too succumbs to the little magnets surely woven into his partner’s hair, and finally runs his fingers though, rubbing small circles over his scalp as his voice clashes with the soft music that continues to drift through their window.
Dio, come ti amo
non è possibile
avere tra le braccia
tanta felicita.
————
If you asked Hiraga, he’d tell you it started like this.
Well, his brain has always had a foggier time holding onto memory than it does atomic weights and volumetric heat capacities, but he’ll laugh, and tell you it’s the feeling behind the memory that counts, isn’t it?
A late summer sun filtering gently through leaves, that he remembers for certain.
Old buildings, surrounded by history, lost, alone on a desperate search for his own new start.
“Josef!”
His name.
A book.
A boy.
A beginning.