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The attic of Cous Coussier in the dead of winter was not a living space for the weak. It wasn't insulated from the cold or wind, having been intended as a craft room and general storage rather than a bedroom. It was crammed full of projects and costumes and decorations, and thus there wasn't room for any sort of heating element without risking a housefire. Also, it had Ankh living in it, which would be enough to put just about anybody off at any time of the year.
Full body cold was new. It spread across the entire human, concentrated at the exposed outer skin. It did not slide sweetly down the throat at Ankh's personal direction. It made the body quiver uncontrollably at intervals once the sun had set, forcing him to choose between the indignity of the quivering or the indignity of wrapping himself up in his red banner like a chrysalis. Chiyoko had come in without knocking and called him a snug little burrito. He had googled 'burrito' and decided that while he could not risk a repeat of the disaster, it was not severe enough to warrant outright murder. Ankh had experienced quite enough of winter through a human body and decided that he didn't like it.
Eiji, on the other hand, would presumably have been sleeping under a bridge somewhere if his slightly less stupid idiot colleagues had not bullied him into a place with a real roof. Bone headed hardiness aside, he had the blanket pulled up to his chin and his arms close to his body instead of sprawling around like a four-legged octopus and was nonetheless doing those involuntary pathetic human body quivers. If he kept doing that, he might get a cold. Then he'd be worse at fighting, and would risk their rightfully stolen Core Medals stolen back away from him! This would be exactly the kind of stupid bullshit to be on the lookout for, and Ankh thought well of himself for having anticipated it.
There was a problem and he had a way out of the problem, which was to grab his banner, toss it on top of Eiji's bed, and then to slide in under the blankets himself and press himself into Eiji's side before either of them could have any opinions about that whole process. Making tactical, sensible snap decisions was a talent that he suspected was inherent to his primary Core Medal. You know, the one that he doesn't hand over as part of the classic TaToBa.
Eiji, half asleep, peered at his battle partner turned sudden bed partner in the fading light. "Ankh...?"
Ankh clicked his tongue, already ready to be done with this entire conversation that hadn't started. "We're using each other for body heat, go to sleep."
"Wait, hold on a moment," was it going to be an entire thing, Ankh was willing to endure yet another inane argument if it would get him what he wanted, but also he did not want to endure yet another inane argument over appropriate behavior. Sometimes you need to throw people off a building for perfectly sensible reasons and then everyone else loses their minds over it, honestly.
"Ankh, are you wearing boots,"
"Of course I'm wearing boots,"
"Don't wear boots to bed, take them off!"
Ankh kicked him, with the boots. At close range, it wouldn't have any momentum, but it communicated his opinion on being ordered around well enough.
"Ow!" Eiji had two usual responses to adversity. The first was to decide what he had originally wanted to do was not important and to go along with whatever was happening. The second was to spring into action and reach out to do whatever the hell his impulses told him to do and damn the consequences. He sat bolt upright and began wrestling Ankh's boots off?? It was often hard to work out how to react to whatever ridiculous thing Eiji had chosen to do at any given moment, but it was always a safe bet to start yelling at him.
"It's a second ice age out there, idiot, of course I'm keeping on whatever I can!"
"You've been out there walking all over the roof; don't get roof gunk in the bed! It's a guest bed!"
Eiji lined up a pilfered boot very pointedly with his own, sitting ready and unlaced on the floor in case he needed to hop out of bed and chase down a Yummy in the middle of the night. Ankh was not impressed by the scolding one bit, and was considering another try at the burrito strategy. Maybe if he put a chair under the doorknob to delay Chiyoko, it would be worth it. And then Eiji opened his mouth and said, too casually:
"You know, you get more heat skin to skin."
"If that's the case, why don't you take your clothes off, huh?"
Ankh grabbed onto Eiji and set about wrestling his shirt off, mostly out of spite. Huh. Shit. Eiji was right, human skin felt very warm, like putting his hand on a Ridevendor after it had been running for a while. Another sensation of something like heat bloomed somewhere in the body's internals. Ankh paused, hand fixed in place, eyes wide. This was - huh. A sudden feeling in one's inner structure usually meant a surprise attack, but it felt, maybe, not awful?
Eiji was not over the fight part of his fight or flight response and furthermore spent a lot more time wrestling with various creatures than Ankh did. He grabbed Ankh's jacket and shoved it down around his elbows with a "hah!". Eiji was good at thinking on his feet now and then, Ankh would admit, but terribly prone to underestimating the cunning of the Greeed. He popped off the body, grabbed the hem of Eiji's poncho, and yanked it over his head while the idiot was grappling around with the detective's dead weight.
Having only one hand - being only one hand - was a minor obstacle, compared to the benefits of being free of the distractions of biology, free to achieve the desire that had spread to his very Cores to tear Eiji out of his approximately infinite, or about three, layers of clothing and have him bare before him!
"Ow, ow, watch your nails-!"
Eiji threw the other boot at him and missed because his head was trapped under a poncho. Heh.
"Get back on there, you can't make me strip Hina's brother! That's not okay, Ankh!"
"Don't tell me what I can't do! Take off my pants!"
Eiji extracted himself from the layers of shirt purgatory while swatting back and forth with Ankh, who was either helping or making things worse and did not care which. He cut a much less baggy figure. He still looked bigger than the unoccupied body crumpled on the bed. Muscles. Heaving chest, from exertion. That was about the limit of detail he could make out, without the body. But he did want very much for Eiji to do things because he, Ankh, had told him to. And he wanted to watch it.
"Get back on and I will!"
Hmph. Well... good enough. He ripped the sleeve on his treacherous jacket clean through on the way, and tossed the component parts away somewhere. Plenty of the idiot crew could sew, and now he had sharp senses and two arms available to achieve his goals. However one would categorize this interaction, he was definitely winning it.
"Well? Get to work," Ankh straddled Eiji's lap and pulled his shirt off in one smooth motion. Perching on top of things was ideal. And this way he could put his arms around Eiji and get used to the unidentified feelings tangle that came with being warm in this situation, while the object of the weird feelings was distracted.
"Ankh? Are you... hugging me?" Eiji sounded like he was also trying to dissect what he thought about the situation. Too bad for him, Ankh wasn't going to give him any help there.
"Do you have a problem with that? It's warm, right?"
"No, it's - it's fine. It's really great."
Yeah, that's what he thought. Humans were really into touching each other, that hadn't changed in the last eight centuries and it wouldn't change in the next eight either. He could see the appeal, from this side of it. Eiji drew breath, shakily, which made his back rise and fall - even doing nothing, being asleep, or just sitting in one place trying to find a zipper for five fucking minutes, humans always showed some sign of life. Ankh shoved his face into the crook of Eiji's neck and sighed, deeply, irritated. The body's lungs inflated and deflated.
"Oh, these are nice - what are they, silk?"
Ankh made another put-upon noise. "Yeah, silk. It's not hard to get your hands on." Eight hundred years ago, you'd have had to cross a continent or spend a fortune or both to get your hands on garments of this quality. Now, any jackass with Shingo Izumi's bank account could have as much as he wanted.
Despite all the interested feeling about in the pants region, Eiji did not make any move to remove anything that was not overpants. Possibly it was because he didn't feel like it, or because he was concerned that Ankh would strangle him for taking too many liberties. For some reason, Ankh felt like he would want to strangle him more if it was the first option, but he also did not want to think too deeply about what he would let Eiji get away with at this point. He decided to put it down to a tenet of Eiji's one-man underpants cult. That was better. Well, it was completely stupid, is what it was, but so what else was new. The body's heart was beating so strongly he could feel it pulse all the way to his fingertips, he was hyper aware of every single hip shift and swivel he was obliged to make in order to achieve progress in getting the damn pants off, and also, his back was cold. He had enough new things to deal with at present. Eiji had to keep on being a reliable idiot, reliably.
"Hey. Ankh. You're thinking about something, all of a sudden - you don't think we'll have to fight an underpants Yummy, do you?"
Cripes. Thanks, Eiji. "That's exactly what I needed to hear." Ankh said this with sincerity, and the smug knowledge that the sincerity would make it sound even worse.
"Oh no. You're not making fun of me? Really? I was joking, but the more I think about it, the more I think it could happen. Underwear is pretty important to a lot of people." He thoughtfully ran his fingers along the edge of Ankh's legband. There was no visible or audible crackle, which felt wrong for a gesture that felt like a full body electrical jolt. Eiji could absolutely not discover that he had this power.
"No, you were right the first time, it's completely stupid."
"If Uva comes for my spare set of underpants, would you protect them?"
"Absolutely not."
"Ah, yeah, that's what I should have expected, huh?"
"I don't care about your underpants!"
"Well, if you don't care, I guess I'd better keep my pants on, then!" Sure, he said that right after finally peeling Ankh's completely off, the bastard. That wouldn't stand.
"Like hell you are, Eiji!" Ankh snarled, shoving him over. Those pants were coming off. Proving that he wasn't completely stupid, the first thing Eiji did was to grab Ankh at the elbow so he couldn't fly off and shred his remaining clothes to ribbons. Hmph. Now, if he used his legs to pin Eiji's other arm - like so - that gave him a free hand at Eiji's waist, and then! ...And then Eiji flipped them both over with the core strength of a guy who does this sort of thing a whole lot, in full armor. Flipped them, blankets at all, clean onto the floor with a Sagazou-esque crash.
They both lay there, panting. Entwined. Ankh wasn't sure if he could actually extract himself or make any progress on his current mission without breaking somebody's arm. Which would have been a no-brainer if medals had been at stake, of course, but this....
This was so, so stupid. Ankh went limp, less out of defeat than of questioning his entire life choices of the evening, and also because this was almost comfortable, if you ignored the mutual armlocks, which he wasn’t. It wasn't any substitute for a pair of fire-fueled wings, but his back was certainly warm.
"Eiji," he ground out, "If anyone was going to make an underpants Yummy, it would be Gamel, and we scattered him into a big heap of medals all over that park. Your underpants are safe, you massive idiot."
"That's actually - really reassuring, for you."
"Take off your pants."
Like magic, like alchemy, some component of this stupid sequence of events had lined up correctly with how humans interacted with the world. The results: Eiji doing exactly what Ankh had ordered him to do in the first place, with a light chuckle and a rustle of fabric. It put him off balance, in much the same way it did to be in a fight and have your opponent dash off in the middle of it. Although, in this case, it was more like having his opponent hold up a hand and say hold on a moment and start handing over all of its Cell Medals.
Disconcerting or not, if Ankh wanted something, he was going to take it. So, of course, he snatched all the blankets and took the cozy spot on the bed Eiji had been lying on all evening.
"Now get back in here."
Eiji very gingerly nudged him to the side bit by bit, clearly not wanting to risk another round of Idiot Wrestlemania. Ankh let him have the pillow. This wasn't generosity, it was because he didn't want the pillow. What he wanted for that purpose, and what he claimed, was Eiji's chest.
"You lost all of our hot air with that stunt, you'd better make up for it."
"All right," Eiji said peaceably and put his arms around Ankh before Ankh could grab him and make him do it. What's more, he ran his fingers through Ankh's hair. Huh. All right, then. He didn’t hate that. The back of the body’s neck wasn’t a particularly vulnerable point, as far as he was concerned. He elected to completely ignore what else he might have been expecting.
“I don’t understand you.” He really didn’t. He hadn’t particularly meant to say so out loud, but typically, if Ankh felt like saying something, he would, without much care for what anyone else thought about it.
“You too, huh? I don’t get you either, a lot of the time. I think that’s because we’re you and me, not because I’m a human and you’re a Greeed or anything like that.”
“You’re not wrong. Humans are too wrapped up in their own business to understand anybody else.” It was one of the few entirely understandable things about them.
“Ouch. I do okay, I think. Of course, I’d rather think the best of people if I can, you know?”
“I already know you’re stupid, Eiji.”
“It’s pretty stupid, yeah. But I’d rather feel bad about being stupid than feel bad about not reaching out, though.” Yeah, yeah. That was the entire heart and soul of how Ankh had gotten him to wear the belt. So obviously he couldn’t entirely object to Eiji’s whole weirdo complex about throwing himself head first at every single problem he encountered in person.
“Quit worrying about it. The way you are now is pretty convenient for me, after all,”
Even if it’s annoying, he was about to say. Then Eiji put his mouth on the side of Ankh's face for some reason, and everything currently swirling around in his consciousness came to a halt.
"Hey," he growled, entirely out of reflex.
"Good night, Ankh." The idiot then pretended to fall asleep. Ankh could hear his heart thumping away crystal clear. He had two thirds worth of the senses of a hawk and was wrapped around every single square centimeter of Eiji's telltale biology. Fine. Eiji was still warm and had finally shut up, this is what he had wanted when he had crawled in here in the first place.
The consequences for getting what he had wanted, in this case, were getting what he wanted, which made him loose and comfortable and possibly an idiot as well. This is what getting what you wanted meant, it meant that you weren't sharp and alert with wanting more. The stupid human body was so content that he could almost forget that he was a sparse stack of less than half of his truest self. It was still better than being two, which was better than being one. He wanted more than that. He wanted his fire, his wings, his power. He wanted a body with all nine medals and all five senses.
And if he wanted something or someone besides that, it wasn’t anybody’s business but his own.