Work Text:
Evening: bronze through the windows, honeysuckle overflowing the sills, the wine bottle on the counter half-drunk and lit all the way through, its own microcosmic miracle. In this house, it seems, anything is possible. Leorio is soaping the dishes in the sink and Kurapika watches him, the lean curve of his back, how the light puddles amber in the thumbprints of his spine when he reaches to pull down the drying rack. He’s wearing his favorite shirt— my lucky shirt, as he so likes to say, beaten so soft in the washer it’s like satin, with vague yellow stains in the pits and some obscure underground band’s logo clinging for dear life to the front. It’s an inch too short because he’s been wearing it since he was nineteen, and he is mournfully attractive.
Kurapika unfolds further from the sofa, drawing his legs up and atop the cushions, elbows tucked over the back. Seven months ago this house was a heap of rotting wood, its windows blown out and the door a mouthful of jagged teeth. Leorio, in typical fashion, arrived with a truck bed full of paint buckets and broken bricks and a water cooler the size of Zepile’s vintage boombox. Full of first-day ambition, he rolled up his sleeves and said, You sit tight, honey, I got this, and Kurapika had kissed the back of his neck and retreated to the shade with Gon and Killua to sip a soda and wait for Leorio to call uncle.
He didn’t, though. Something within drove him forward, all six feet and loose change of him, to build something beautiful of the blackened wreck. Kurapika was with him the second day and the day after, joined eventually by Basho and Gon and Bill, when Her Majesty spared him the hours, scraping mold from the beams and laying down concrete that Gon periodically had to mash back into paste. Pails of sweat and a little blood for this prim, pretty cottage, two stories high with a cellar that contains only casks and some canned goods.
Leorio dries his hands noisily on the kitchen rag, then wipes them again on his trousers as he turns away from the gleaming plates. “Slob,” Kurapika says reproachfully, then shrieks when Leorio takes this as his cue to dive over the back of the couch and nearly concusses Kurapika on the coffee table.
For all his many minute faults, Leorio is appropriately sheepish while Kurapika huffs and swats and berates. “You’re just irresistible, is all,” he explains, like that makes everything all right. Kurapika, who is weaker than he ever imagined possible, melts like butter. They both realize the couch is conveniently big and Leorio has been diligent about his upper-arm routine at the same time, and soon the ridiculous smile on Leorio’s face becomes the ridiculous smile on Kurapika’s.
It’s telling how Leorio continues to make Kurapika feel as giddy as he did when Kurapika was seventeen, so angry and so bitter and so desperate for absolution. Him and Gon and Killua pinpricks of light in the endless, obliterative storm of his vengeance. Kurapika smothered then what he felt were unbearably childish observations, like the curl Leorio’s fingers made in his jeans pocket, or the way his affected scowl blurred with sleep after sundown, or how handsome the cut of his jaw was when he wasn’t flapping it and making a fool of himself. At first Kurapika called himself a hormonal teenager, and then unforgivably sentimental. Towards the end of the road, run ragged by his years of rage, Kurapika could only call himself stupid.
The knife of his agony was so keen it dulled everything else: sun through a magnifying glass, rendered deafening. As calculative and methodical as he molded himself to be, Kurapika attempted to burn down any warmth he held for anything. Love has no place in a dead man walking. Whenever his resolve wavered, Emperor Time tolled in his temple, and he remembered what all of this was for. It would be cruel to hold others close when they were inevitably going to lose him.
He underestimated Leorio. Gon and Killua. Melody and Basho and Izunavi and Hanzo. He underestimated everyone, the heights to which a human being could believe in another who was reaching new depths in seeing how low he could go.
Kurapika winds his arms around Leorio’s neck and holds him close. His scruff scuds Kurapika’s cheek.
He likely has some idea of what Kurapika gave to be here, curled sweetly together with him in a quiet house on the lakeside in the middle of nowhere. After all, he was part of the guillotining of the Spider, so crucial the plan never would have worked without him. It’s the plain truth: Melody simply doesn’t have the requisite height to reach the pedals of a four-door car.
Yes, Leorio must have an inkling. He’s seen Kurapika’s brutality, the coldest he could be. He’s seen Kurapika grit his teeth into a sickle of a smile when the raw gore of victory finally sank into his bloody, beating heart. He’s seen Kurapika grimy and unshowered and insomniac, and haplessly drunk on Melody’s homebrew moonshine, and so delirious with fever he began to cry, insensate, desolate, in his dying mother tongue. Leorio has even washed for him the bits of Chrollo’s gore that splattered his bare knees, one pristine and one all but shattered; Kurapika knows keenly that Leorio has seen him at his lowest and ugliest.
Kurapika presses his hand to the unselfconscious march of Leorio’s heart. It’s loud, thudding against Kurapika’s palm, brazen and fearless and utterly unstoppable, like it couldn’t care less that an infamous Blacklist Hunter sits mere inches from it.
“You astonish me,” Kurapika tells his husband plainly.
“Ooh, tell me more. Talk dirty to me, baby,” Leorio says, to which there is no appropriate reaction but to smash his face into the couch cushions.