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It’s not so much the cold as it is the wind. Ryuunosuke hates the cold.
Gin says it’s because he’s sickly (when they say anything at all), Chuuya tells him he needs to eat more, Atsushi thinks it might be poor circulation - they’re all probably right in one way or another, but Ryuunosuke has never taken the time to think too hard about it, for it’s much easier to simply decide that you are not a winter person.
(In the name of full transparency, he’s not a summer person either - hot, sticky, humid, disgusting - but that’s not the point.)
He’s shivering when the wind hits him full force, chilling him through the skin and down to the bone as he and Atsushi stand side by side, watching the sun fall just below the horizon line. Atsushi suffers no such affliction - he smiles into the wind, laughs at it like an old friend, golden rays falling on his face and glowing against his skin. They treat him so kindly, so beautifully, illuminating every scar and turn him into a renaissance painting or a scene plucked from a movie.
Really, they just expose who he is underneath all those rough edges. He’s just simple - in the way a daisy is simple or a cloudless sky is simple.
Unfortunately, a rough cough scratching from his throat complicates the perfect scene - they are coming more often now. Not just the coughs, but the attacks in his lungs that leave him short of breath and gasping for air. He can never tell if it’s the potential worsening of his condition that a doctor had long ago forewarned of, or if he’s simply caught the common cold.
He used to not have a preference. But watching Atsushi’s brown doe eyes flick up and down the length of his body as if to assess his health, as if to caress his soul, makes him hope for the latter.
“You okay, Ryu?” Atsushi’s hand on his wrist is a warm guard against the chill of early autumn - Ryuunosuke shivers.
His voice rasps from his throat when he says, “I’m fine.” Which of course, then, leads to Atsushi unilaterally deciding it’s time for them to go home. The stupid weretiger seems to have a taste for underestimating the strength of Ryuunosuke’s body.
“I’m not frail,” he says as much as they shuffle home under the the ever graying sky. Clouds roll in above them, shaking with the precursory build up to thunder and blotting out the sun - despite it, Atsushi continues to glow as if he’d absorbed the very light of the sun itself. He always glows to Ryuunosuke’s eyes.
Atsushi laughs something golden, “I never said you were.”
“Is it not what you implied by dragging me to your apartment on a perfectly nice day?” He grouches as they take the creaking stairs to Atsushi’s small room on the second floor, boots knocking against wood in sync. “Not to mention that you haven’t taken your hand off my wrist since the park.”
When Ryuunosuke cuts his gaze to the side, Atsushi is simply smiling to himself as if there’s anything at all amusing about Ryuunosuke’s bitter scowl. He often seems to smile at odd things - Ryuunosuke’s disgusted to say he’s enchanted by it.
How could he not be? Atsushi gets dimples when he smiles - just little ones, like small crescents that dent his cheeks. Sometimes Ryuunosuke gets irrationally scared they’ll disappear.
When they reach Atsushi’s apartment, the wearing door opens with a distressed groan, rea raking the cozy space within - there’s something sentimental about it. Even after finally earning a salary within the ADA and outgrowing the small futon he’d been living off of, he always said he didn’t have the heart to move.
“Your apartment is a shithole,” Ryuunosuke says even though the warmth seeps into his bones, soothes the shivering that’s been plaguing him and the cold that’s seemed to have made a permenant home in his chest. His throat feels raw when he tries to speak again, “When are you going to get a new one?”
One hand locking the door behind them, Atsushi raises the other to feel at Ryuunosuke’s forehead.
“You’re definitely running a fever,” he remarks absently before shuffling quickly through the small room. “And I like it here. It’s where I’ve had all my firsts- well, the good ones, you know?”
And then he looks at Ryuunosuke, still shivering and sniffling in the entryway as if he can say the same - as if all the “good firsts” in Ryuunosuke’s life do not revolve around only one person. There’s never been a place that means much of anything to him.
But Atsushi?
Atsushi might as well mean everything to him.
“Yes,” he says, a half truth.
The soft hum of a microwave bursts into the peaceful silence, a dull but placating sound. Ryuunosuke’s restless mind sees fit to use it as white noise as Atsushi shuffles him to the mattress dressed in soft sheets that rests in the middle of the room. He lays Ryuunosuke down with the gentleness of spring sunshine on your skin just as the rain begins to pour, frigid and heavy against the window sill.
“All I have is generic brand chicken soup,” he says, pulling a downy comforter up to Ryuunosuke’s shoulders - the warmth of it eclipses him, weighing on his body, though he wishes Atsushi would fill the empty space beside him. “I know you hate it but you haven’t eaten since this morning. And I think you might be sick-“
Ryuunosuke opens his mouth to protest but Atsushi shuts him down with a gentle palm over his lips.
“And don’t say you’re not. You’ve been sniffling and shivering.”
Ryuunosuke scrunches his stuffed nose in protest, “Allergies.” Is all he has the energy to say, to which Atsushi laughs, soft and demure.
“Sure. Allergies.”
They fall into a comfortable silence then - everything is comfortable with Atsushi. Which is as strange a concept to grasp as the love he’s found himself falling into head first. Especially for a man who’s hardly felt either. But he doesn’t mind it, somehow. He thought being in love with someone should be terrifying, and yet Ryuunosuke is less scared than he’s been in years.
Atsushi has just gotten into the rhythm of running his fingers through Ryuunosuke’s hair gone frizzy with the dry cold when the microwave makes the mistake of incurring Ryuunosuke’s wrath by choosing that very moment to beep. Atsushi isn’t alone in his distressed sigh at the piercing noise, nor is he alone in the matching frowns they wear as Ryuunosuke is left alone, feeling deprived without Atsushi’s sating presence beside him.
It takes him approximately five minutes to pour the soup into one of two bowls Atsushi owns (maybe it gives Ryuunosuke a big head to know that one of those bowls is for him) if the electric clock next to his mattress is to be believed. But those moments feel like hours. His overdramatic mind posits that he may very well die if Atsushi doesn’t pick up the damn pace.
But eventually, the weretiger is back at his side, soup in tow, prying his laptop open with his spare hand to display a show with the volume cranked so low Ryuunosuke is barely sure it’s audible by humans. And the bowl of soup is set to the side as Atsushi blissfully, blessedly, slips under the covers beside him.
He’s in an awkward half sit against the wall, only a pillow perched under his back for support - Ryuunosuke knows it can’t be comfortable. But he doesn’t say anything about it. In fact, all he does is pull Ryuunosuke onto his lap, gathering him in welcoming arms that act as a warm shield against the the storm that picks up its pace outside.
It’s wonderful - so few things in his life are wonderful, but this is one of them.
Sometimes he can’t help but wonder when it’s all going to fall apart.
He can’t help the bitter pessimist in him that waits with bated breath for the other shoe to drop, for Atsushi to come to his senses and finally leave him on the street corner like an abandoned plaything.
He tells himself he wouldn’t be terribly surprised if that happened.
“You love me too much,” the thought occurs to Ryuunosuke and he blurts it out without properly assessing it. Atsushi is the only person who can make him talk before he thinks.
Atsushi looks down at him through a curtain of cream colored hair, bright eyes boring into his own as callused hands tuck his hair behind his ears. It’s almost unbearable, the tenderness in his gaze and the gentleness of his touch; something old and instinctual in Ryuunosuke wants to squirm away from the feeling.
But he doesn’t.
He’s trying to get in the habit of staying, these days.
Feeling weary and mushy around the edges he can only lean into Atsushi’s hand and close his eyes, “You chose the wrong person.” He doesn’t want to see the way Atsushi’s soft expression sours, but he needs to let it be known, lest Atsushi be under the mortifying impression that Ryuunosuke is anything less than fully self-aware.
There’s nothing more humiliating than being perceived as ignorant, just as there would be nothing more heartbreaking than Atsushi trying to break the news to him in the gentlest way possible - because Atsushi is, at his core, a gentle man - that Ryuunosuke is not boyfriend material…not relationship material at all, really. Mori once told him that soldiers are not made to be loved. Ryuunosuke has never been considered malleable or compliant, but the more Atsushi loves him, the more he begins to believe his boss.
“Why would you say something like that?” Atsushi’s voice comes softly on the waves of quiet that surround them.
Ryuunosuke sighs against his palm, “Because it’s true.”
“It’s not true.”
“I’m not made to be loved, Atsushi,” he opens his eyes to stare at the laptop, eyes feeling suddenly heavy and mind processing very little other than Atsushi’s heartbeat against his ear. “I’m not one of those people. Who the world benefits from having in it.”
Above him, he hears a sigh and he knows he’s won. He’s often wrong - but today, he’s right, and Atsushi knows it. They both know it.
And then, at barely a whisper, the weretiger muses, “Very few people are.” And a callused thumb strokes soft against his cheek. “The world is full of people who never leave a legacy behind.”
Finally, he’s starting to understand.
“But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in it, or that they don’t deserve love or happiness. You don’t have to leave the world better than you came into it to be worth something,” Atsushi says, and his words are careful as if he’s choosing each one for Ryuunosuke’s ears only - tears burn as they well up in his throat. “Our lives are so short and small…the world doesn’t matter.”
Then with hands so gentle Ryuunosuke feels as though he could happily fall apart in them, Atsushi manhandles his head so that their eyes meet. Atsushi’s eyes are so beautiful, deep pools of chcolate and gold swirling around one another, indecisive irises unable to choose a shade.
“I don’t care if the world loves you or not. I love you and that’s all that matters.”
And maybe Ryuunosuke does cry then, the cold having warn off so that his cheeks are not numb enough to not feel the tears rolling tracks down them. Kind hands wipe them as they fall - Ryuunosuke closes his eyes into the feeling. He doesn’t know how to thank Atsushi for loving him in spite of a world that wants nothing more than his absence.
So he curles instead against Atsushi’s warmth and cries softly, silently, until he runs out of tears, Atsushi’s fingers never ceasing their gentle caress through his hair. He cries until his body aches from holding his eyes open and he finally succumbs to the least turbulent rest he’s had in quite some time, carrying whispered words with him into dreams.
“Sleep tight, Ryu. I’ll be here when you wake up.”