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Touya doesn’t like soft things. He doesn’t care for kind words spoken in a whisper or sweet smiles thrown his way under the cover of night. He tells himself that he doesn’t need bullshit like that; it’s weak and he is not weak.
But you – you’re the very definition of the word. You’re all reds and oranges and yellows while he’s black and blue and every shade of grey in between. It’s ridiculous, stupid even. You shroud yourself with warm blankets and cotton candy when you should be wrapping heavy armour around your soul and brandishing a sharpened sword by your side.
After all, that's normal. Building a fortress around your heart is normal, not whatever the fuck you do. Don’t lions have teeth and claws for a reason? It’s because you’re not supposed to let people in, not supposed to show off your vulnerable white underbelly, not supposed to let someone sink their fangs into your skin and pierce.
And, yet.
You make it look so easy, so natural. The way you greet a villain like him with a smile when he knocks on your door in the dead of night, raindrops sliding off his tattered jacket and pooling on your floor. You step into the puddle he leaves behind and your socks soak up the water instantly.
He cringes at the slight furrow in your brows and his body tenses although he knows he shouldn’t. An argument doesn’t come; it never comes. He’s never seen you nock an arrow in his direction even when he’s given you a hundred thousand reasons to. All you do is shake his jacket out and hang it up on the coat rack, the third knob from the left like always. Like that’s his spot. Like it belongs there. Like he belongs there.
The street lights outside your living room window start to look a little more yellow than they were just minutes ago.
“Are you hungry?” you ask him, the same words repeated each time he steps through your threshold. It’s always the same – first the jacket, then the food.
“No,” he tells you, but you disappear into the kitchen anyway. It’s always the same and he’s done this routine enough times to know every step by heart.
So he follows you, not too close but not too far either. Just close enough.
And it’s too late for you to cook because he always shows up a little too late, but you know this already. You know this routine by heart too.
There’s a meal ready for him in a white porcelain bowl covered with plastic wrap. The bowl is one of those old-looking ones with blue vines circling the perimeter. It’s the only one of its kind that you own and it’s the one he always eats from. In the back of his mind and in some twisted way, he thinks of that bowl as his.
Without a word, you yank the plastic wrapping off and stick the bowl inside the microwave. It’s nothing fancy, just fried rice – one of the few dishes you know how to make. You always mix it with peas and carrots and mushrooms even though he hates mushrooms and picks them out every time. He knows you’ve seen him do it. He also knows that you don’t care to cater to his picky palate.
They’re good for you, you always say. Well, a lot of things are good for him, like sunlight and water and eating three meals a day instead of one. Or things like sleeping on a real bed instead of a lumpy couch, real showers instead of dunking his head under the tap of a public restroom and calling that a bath.
So there are a lot of things that are good for him, but he doesn’t care either. He’s fine with the way he is – with the way things are. He’s fine with dropping by unexpectedly and puttering around for a few hours before hopping back out the door and pretending that he doesn’t see the frown on your face every time he leaves. Like he doesn’t notice how your eyes cloud over with shades of blue every time he shrugs off a new cut or burn marring his skin.
But he’s black and blue and grey, and you’re red and orange and yellow. He knows this. You know this. Both of you know this.
And, yet.
When the microwave beeps, you take the liberty of grabbing the bowl, swishing the contents around with a spoon, and placing it in front of his spot at the kitchen table – the one on the left facing the door, because he doesn’t feel right unless the exit is in his sights.
It’s late enough that you’ve already eaten, but you perch down in the seat across from him and watch him eat in silence. You always do this, the watching, the staring, the perceiving. It would unnerve him if he wasn’t so used to it by now.
You eye him like he’s something interesting, something important. He can spot flashes of light in your eyes as he eats, a string of red or a spark of orange that billows like candles in the wind or twinkles like stars in the sky. That does unnerve him – the look in your eyes that he doesn’t know the name of.
But he doesn’t ask, never asks. Instead, he just eats. One bite after the other, pretending not to notice your stare or the little smile tugging at your lips as he reaches the bottom of the bowl.
And when he finishes, you clean up after him. Every so often, he feels kind of bad about it, about having you clean up his mess time and time again, whether that’s an empty bowl on the dinner table or blood-soaked shirts that he throws in your laundry hamper. But you’ve never once complained, so he carries on with the way things have always been.
When he sinks down onto the couch, you follow him and take the seat on his right. “Hey, Touya?”
“What?” he replies, only half alert. The other half of him is running miles ahead, thinking about the way his name sounds when it falls from your lips. It’s so different. Kinder. Sweeter. Softer. You say his name like it’s a holy prayer or a string of diamonds cradled gently between your hands, and the sound tugs at something in his chest that he didn’t know existed.
In a selfish sort of way, he wants to hear it again and again and again.
“Wanna watch a movie?” He doesn’t answer, but you know the routine. You switch on the TV with the push of a button and scroll through the channels until you find some mediocre movie playing. It’s more background noise than anything, but he’s thankful for the lights and sounds that fill up all the spaces within the silence.
And it’s then – it’s always then – that you drape your fluffy throw blanket over the both of you, flashing him a cheeky smile in the process that makes a lump form in the middle of his throat. But then he swallows and it disappears with his saliva.
Tonight, you lean in closer than you normally do, something different for the first time in a while. Your arms brush and after a few minutes, you lay your head against his shoulder. He freezes in place, unused to the feeling.
Your hair is tickling his scarred skin. He can feel the heat from your cheek soaking into his muscles. You’re so close in a way that you’ve never been before and his first instinct is to shove you away, to draw the bridge that leads into his heart and let you drown in the moat with shackles around your wrists.
But then he exhales and the tension leaves him, seeping out of him the same way a wildfire fizzles out after the rain. The next breath comes easier and then the one after that, easier still.
And although his mind hasn’t quieted yet, something about this feels so right. Having you next to him, your head on his shoulder and your fingernails trailing along the back of his hand under the blanket, makes him feel like moss circling the trunk of a thick tree.
He is a carpet of moss soaking up your bright orange rays of sunlight, and he is at home.
So in this house, alone with you, he lets all his worries and his fears burn away into ash and dust. For just one night, he’ll pretend that this life is his to have and to hold, that he can cradle this quiet serenity between his scarred palms and that it won’t burst into bright blue flames before his very eyes.
For just one night, he lets himself be the Touya that you see through your eyes.
You’ve dozed off already, but then again, it’s late. And while he normally would have slipped out like a silent burglar, tonight, he gently peels the blanket away until it melts into a lumpy puddle at his feet. Then he rearranges you carefully, slipping one arm beneath your knees and the other around your shoulders, and wordlessly carries you back to your room.
In an uncharacteristic show of kindness, he deposits you on your bed and tucks the blanket underneath your chin. He knows he should leave now, but something inside of him refuses to budge.
He is moss and he’s tired of endless black and blue and grey. His body aches for sunlight, for reds and oranges and yellows that chase away the shadows that haunt him. He hungers for it in a way that he doesn’t understand but craves all the same.
But although his bones yearn for something beyond words, he doesn’t yet know how to stand under the light of the sun. So he watches you for a moment, memorizing the rhythmic ins and outs of your steady breaths, and resigns himself to a life only half-lived.
This is enough. He doesn’t know how to ask for more.
So he turns for the door, ready to resume the same old dance for yet another night when something grazes his wrist.
It’s you – your hand reaching for his, a sleepy smile on your lips.
“Stay?” you ask in a whisper. And then, because it’s almost like you can see each individual thread that his soul is made of, you add, “Just for tonight?”
And he nods, shivering as you press your soft lips to the line of stitches across the back of his hand. “Just for tonight.”
When he rolls under the covers, he swears your eyes start to light up in a hundred different rainbow colours. There’s red and orange and yellow mixing with his black and blue and grey, and all of a sudden, the darkness of night doesn’t look so steep.
With you, shadows don’t seem so black. Rain doesn’t seem so grey. And his life doesn’t seem so blue. It’s like you’ve injected sunlight directly into his veins with a single smile because now he can’t fathom turning his face away from the sky.
You’ve planted a forest in him without his knowing and he is afraid that he can’t nourish it without you.
But when you lean into his warmth, tucking yourself under his chin and draping his arm around your waist, you’re watering the garden engraved with your name. After so many nights of carefully burying each seed, the fruits of your labour have begun to sprout – slowly and shyly but present all the same.
And for once, Touya doesn’t fight it. He doesn’t fight the desire to close his eyes, bury his nose in your hair, and tug you impossibly closer. In your presence, he’s weightless, like vines of ivy crawling along your skin and burrowing into your bones.
You’re like ivy too, growing subtly up his spine and entwining yourself with each vertebrae that makes him up. With a feather-light touch, you trace the scars on his arms, on his neck, on his chest. Then the pads of your fingers ghost along the stitches on his cheek before dropping back down to grasp his hand.
On his palm, you map out abstract patterns. You’re drawing constellations on his skin and if he closes his eyes, he can pretend that you’re a god painting your finest masterpiece in the sky amongst the stars.
It’s minutes later, when he has his eyes still closed, that he realizes the patterns you’re making aren’t so abstract after all. He has to focus, but he can just barely make out the letters you’re writing on his palm.
First an ‘I’ and then an ‘L’.
His heart stutters as his brain speeds on ahead, already anticipating the ending when the story has hardly just begun.
But then comes an ‘O’ and he knows even when he doesn’t yet.
Before you write your next letter, he can already tell that it’s a ‘V’, and his bright blue eyes snap open.
His watchful gaze doesn’t deter you. You merely stare into his eyes, a gentle smile gracing your face as you trace an ‘E’.
And the rest comes so easily, so naturally, so effortlessly. Y-O-U.
“Touya,” you whisper to finish off your sentence.
It’s the simplest thing, the smallest thing that chips off the last of his armour – the utterance of his name, soft in a way that he’s never heard before.
All at once, he’s engulfed by you, bathing in colours of red and orange and yellow that make his blacks and blues feel like distant dreams.
He doesn’t say it back, doesn’t know if he ever can or ever will, but you know that. You understand without him having to say it – you always do.
So he does nothing except allow you to bring each one of his fingers to your lips to kiss the calluses that lie there, and he tugs you a little bit closer when you finally settle back down to sleep.
As he watches you drift off, he counts your breaths one by one and he is strikingly aware of the steadiness of his heartbeat.
It doesn’t jump, doesn’t thunder, doesn’t stutter. It simply beats in time with yours, like you’re the sun breathing life into his battered soul. Even in the dark, he sees more than just blacks and blues and greys; now he sees reds and oranges and yellows too.
With you, he is a blanket of moss growing on the soil at your feet, and he is finally home where he belongs.