Work Text:
"What's this?"
In Philippe's hands was a small, dense, raggedy journal. Strewn about the floor were stacks and scatterings of heavy binders, stuffed folders, old project proposals, piles of notes from past efforts, loose papers and documents galore, as well as the two tired men tasked with sorting them all. Their contents were mostly a disorganized mystery; potentially too confidential to allow anyone else to sort through. Every item was either to be filed appropriately elsewhere, or marked for destruction.
Corbeau rose from his crouch amidst the piles, stiff joints popping, and stepped over the miniature fortress of bound paper surrounding him.
He recognized the object in Philippe's hands right as it was pried open, its pages flipped through by large, delicate fingers.
Lines and lines and lines of handwriting in pen.
"That can get tossed," Corbeau said, leaning over Philippe's shoulder with a bracing hand on the man's back. "I'm surprised it's still here. Thought I got rid of them all."
"What is it, though?" Philippe brought the pages closer. "Must be written in code or something..."
Ah. A really old one, then. Corbeau withheld his smile and decided it'd be more fun to withhold the answer, too.
"What makes you think there's a secret message?" He straightened up behind his kneeling partner, hand gravitating to the buzz of Philippe's mohawk and tracing along the border of it, feeling his lover's skull. Frontal, parietal, occipital, and back again. "Tell me what you see."
Philippe gave the impression of squinting at the pages. Corbeau stole a look downwards. Based on the writing slant, it was really, really old. Arceus, that scrawl screamed desperation.
"This says... Spring menu? Petilil Au Lait. Matcha, steamed milk, mint. Roserade Latte, rose syrup, cinnamon, blueberry... Coffee orders, boss? It's got the prices and everything."
Corbeau bit his lip. Old memories, endearing in hindsight. Sitting at that warm café, copying down whatever text he could see using his brand new glasses. Writing and writing and writing until his little hand ached.
"I'm impressed you can decipher that. What else?" he prompted, still stroking Philippe's head around the edges of his hair.
Philippe flipped to later in the book. "Here, we've got..."
Philippe took a long moment to parse the text before orating it. He clearly recognized it as prose of some kind, because he cleared his throat and let his voice deepen naturally, setting a better stage for the words to clarify themselves from the muddy Murkrow scratch upon the page:
How like a star you rose upon my life,
Shedding fair radiance o'er my darkened hour.
At your uprise swift fled the turbid strife
Of grief and fear, so mighty was your... power? Power. Think I got that right, boss...
"Impressive!" Corbeau applauded lightly and clapped Philippe on the shoulder. "No wonder the Syndicate brats are always begging you to read them stories. You have a great voice for it."
He remembered the circumstances: a thrown-away poetry book, lifted from a gutter and hoarded like treasure. Water had melted some of the words away, so when he copied various poems for practice, he was forced to fill in some blanks on his own based on what would rhyme and fit the meter. He remembered his hesitation over potentially getting it wrong, like he'd be personally spitting on the author's grave for daring to alter such carefully crafted words—and then ditched the worry entirely, as he was already spitting plenty by defacing their work with such shitty handwriting in the first place.
"Café menus and now poetry..." Philippe turned to another page. "More poetry." Flip. Flip. "These here are street names. Aren't these..." Recognition straightened Philippe's back. "Those were all near my old territory, boss! What does it mean?"
He couldn't take it anymore. Corbeau laughed a little, and took an easy seat on the floor at the man's side, gesturing for the journal. He thumbed through the pages until he was closer to the end.
"There is no meaning. The words were just a means to an end." He leaned against Philippe's side, scanning the page nostalgically. Oh, wow, his Q's were so different back then...
"Just a...? There's no way you wrote this, boss," Philippe scoffed. "I've seen your handwriting, it's immaculate."
"You think I came off the streets able to use a pen like that?" He chastised Philippe with a nudge of his elbow. "Don't disparage all my hard work, Philippe. I put a lot of hours into practicing what most kids already went through at school, copying down anything I could see."
Philippe went quiet the way he always did when Corbeau chose to mention some aspect of how he grew up.
It was no secret between them that Corbeau practically raised himself on the streets, with interventions here and there from interested adults, like that Kantonian creep (he knew now exactly who that man was, and was grateful for everything the guy did for him—but being a small kid pestered by some sneering grown-up in a long coat and felted hat justified the unflattering label), or the less savory adults here and there whose motivations for helping him were less overtly selfish. Corbeau just preferred to not dwell on those days; their memories served him very little anymore.
In Corbeau's mind, his life was split into two major eras: pre-Philippe, and everything else.
There were a lot of things pre-Philippe that Corbeau was happy to put to rest; he wasn't that vulnerable little kid anymore. On the outside, at least. Structurally. Materially. Every so often, some old ghost would catch up and bother him a little, but Corbeau didn't care much about that. What actually mattered was the everything else, after Philippe had become such a huge part of his life and changed it for the better. Rough patches notwithstanding.
(That Philippe seemed to get uncomfortable whenever Corbeau did mention the odd past struggle made it even easier to keep that lid closed.)
"I'm not surprised you don't recognize the handwriting," he said, amused at how a different page of poetry looked like it was written by a... well. Exactly what it was written by. "This was long before I realized I was allowed to use my left hand. I just saw everybody else using their right, so I thought I should do the same if I wanted my words to look pretty on paper. As you can see, it didn't exactly work out for me."
A soft arm wrapped around his waist and pulled him closer to Philippe's side. He happily tilted and got more comfortable, legs folding to one side underneath him.
"How long ago was this one, boss?"
"Mm... Before I met you, for sure." A relic of a bygone age. "There were other journals like this one that looked a lot nicer. I'd sit down and drill lines over and over because I wanted to change how my writing looked. I didn't want shitty penmanship of all things to remind people of my background, so, I changed it. Now I can write pretty even in my sleep."
"And you threw all those other books away?" Philippe asked.
Corbeau turned the ratty journal over in his hands, fingers exploring the memory of the cheap cardboard cover, the frayed binding at the very bottom.
"Filled 'em and tossed 'em," he confirmed. "Not sure why I let this one stick around... Good thing you noticed it. It can go in the burn pile."
"Wait!" The arm around him tensed, and Corbeau looked up curiously. "If you don't want anybody to see it, then..."
Oh, adorable.
"You want it?" Corbeau twisted against Philippe's side, a teasing grin splitting his face. "This old thing? Why, it's barely legible."
"It belonged to you, boss." Philippe's face went a little pink, and his arm turned more possessive, stealing some of Corbeau's breath in the process. "I can't let something like that get thrown away. You worked hard on it. And I don't have anything from you that came from this long ago. If you don't want it, let me have it. I'll keep it safe."
Sentimental old man... Corbeau's chest warmed, and he tapped the filled notebook against his palm in thought. It looked and felt so much smaller now. In Philippe's hands, even more so.
"Say please."
"Boss."
"Alright, alright. You can have it." He held it up—only to jerk it back before Philippe could take it. "But! If you won't say please, then at least say thank you. You know how I like to take my payment."
Philippe grumbled something that included the words 'little' and 'brat,' permissible only because it was grumbled with love. Corbeau found himself hauled into Philippe's lap, and grinned when his cheek was kissed with all proper decorum—one firm peck that tickled thanks to the facial hair.
Corbeau passed the old journal into a waiting palm. "All yours. Enjoy the eye strain."
He slid off Philippe's lap as the notebook was tucked carefully into an inner pocket of Philippe's suit. His lower back bumped into a hard plastic corner of something. A stack of 3-ring binders that weighed several hefty pounds each, containing god knows what.
Right. They were in the middle of housekeeping.
"If you find anything else you want to keep, keep it," he casually said, prying the cardboard lid off a nearby document box to see what dusty treasures could be incinerated later. "So long as it doesn't take up space in the office. And isn't confidential. Or implicating. Or evidence that should have been destroyed a long time ago. You know the drill."
He sensed Philippe's smile even with his back turned.
"Of course, boss. And... thank you. Again. I'll treasure it."
That ratty little thing. Philippe did have a track record, Corbeau fondly supposed. He'd take excellent care of it, like those old pages belonged to some gilded manuscript and not a cheap drugstore notebook.
"It'll have a better home with you than anywhere else," Corbeau warmly said. "I happen to know that from experience."