Work Text:
It’s dark out. But not really. The moon in the sky and the streetlights overhead prevent anyone in the city from ever being truly in the dark. Despite this, if anyone were to look up from the streets of a certain downtown block of Fukushima at a certain angle on this not-so-dark night, they might catch the slightest glimpse of movement through a window high up on the face of an apartment building. Not that anyone was looking, luckily for the two people in the apartment the window belonged to.
The window in question led into the living room of the apartment: an open, high-ceilinged space that looked as if it were straight out of a furniture catalog. If someone knowledgeable in interior design were to come into the room, they’d note the perfect coordination of the pieces, the way the slight warmth of the white in the sofas contrasted the cool grey of the area rug, the way the abstract wall art piece lent just the right amount of vertical interest opposite the enormous flat-screen television.
Of course, having hired a professional designer to pick all these things out, no one in the room at that moment cared much about the little specifics. In fact, the room had hardly been used up until recently, when one of the figures had made it a habit to visit the apartment more. The other had lived here for years; since he’d begun his current line of work, even. Yet it was only once the visitor came into his life that the room, and the apartment as a whole, began looking less like a catalog and more like a real, lived-in space. It was subtle, but it did not go unnoticed in the above-average eyes of the owner: the small holes in the concrete by the television from when the visitor had first come, unannounced, into his place through a means that he had yet to find out (“No need to attack, birdie, it’s just me.” “How the hell did you get in here?” “I have my ways.”); the faint remnant of a juice stain on the rug that he’d admittedly neglected to attempt removing (“This wouldn’t happen if you’d just watch where you put your stuff!” “You act as if you can’t replace this in the blink of an eye.” “That’s not the–hey, that’s my coffee!”); the handprints burned into the sofa (“Did you…brand my sofa?” “I just gave you the best sex of your life and you care about your sofa?” “Dabi, this is incriminating!” “As if you’re interesting enough to visit.” “Hey!”).
As much as the owner huffed and puffed about the “invasion of his personal space,” by now they’d come to a wordless agreement that the company was welcome, perhaps even enjoyable, when the visitor wasn’t “being annoying about it.”
A sleek coffee table that once occupied the center of the rug in the center of the room had been pushed aside without much care, a small assortment of now-empty dishware and dirtied cutlery lying momentarily forgotten upon it. One plate was left precariously on the edge of the table, a bad habit of the visitor; a once-absentminded idiosyncrasy become a purposeful action to annoy the owner, who was much more specific about these kinds of things.
The plate, as if it knew the fragility of the moment, clung stubbornly onto the edge, even as the slightest tremors from the two’s movements threatened to send it over the edge to the hardwood floor beneath. Later, when cleaning up, the owner would collect it with an eye roll that some might describe as fond, though if asked, would be vehemently denied with a statement conveying general statements of annoyance and being “too done with him at this point to care, honestly.”
As it was, in the impeccably furnished living room pocked with minor imperfections, none of that existed to the two men in the center of it all. Were they to be asked how they came to be there, in each other’s arms, neither of them would have a plausibly deniable answer (“Care for a dance?” “I didn’t know Japan’s most wanted could dance.” “Just this one, Birdie. Well?” “You’re insufferable.” “You love it.”). Not that anyone would ever ask, nor would this moment ever be discussed between them after the fact. But right now, while they were still cast in the warm glow of a sleek floor lamp from the latest fall collection, while the soft notes of a love song reached every corner of the room from a record player being used for the very first time, roles like heroes and villains and labels like enemies and lovers ceased to exist, if only for a moment.
All that did exist was the softness of one’s hair brushing against the other’s cheek as a head was laid on a shoulder, the non-space between a warm stocky hand and a cool slender one, the way those two hands intertwined, and the closeness of the two bodies they belonged to.