Work Text:
Aoki's eyelashes fluttered. His cheeks were flushed, bare chest heaving.
Ida continued to gaze at him.
The room was so silent that Aoki could hear the scratch of Ida’s pencil on canvas–although Aoki’s breathing, loud even to his own ears, was beginning to drown that out.
Aoki couldn’t help but shudder as Ida’s eyes traced over his body, completely bare save for the silk sheet draped across his thighs.
“Look at me.”
Aoki slowly lifted his chin, breath catching as he met Ida’s gaze.
He was sure that his blush was spreading rapidly to his chest and shoulders. He wondered if Ida could capture that on canvas, too.
“That’s it,” Ida murmured. Aoki savored the scant syllables Ida could spare, focused as he was on his task.
Since he couldn’t read or use his phone, Aoki amused himself by watching Ida work.
Ida’s hands were smudged with charcoal. His hair, which had gotten longer since they started college, was tousled.
And his eyes.
Whether he studied Aoki’s body in person or its likeness that he was translating onto the canvas, Ida was always looking at him.
And there was a world of emotion in Ida’s eyes when he looked at Aoki.
It was times like these when Aoki desperately wished that he had any artistic talent to speak of.
Ida was the beautiful one, the one who deserved to have his features immortalized in paint, clay, or marble.
Aoki suddenly met Ida’s eyes and realized that his boyfriend was gazing at him, sketch all but forgotten.
“You look happy,” Ida observed. “What are you thinking about?”
“Your mother” seemed to be the only appropriate response. Aoki had given up trying to be mature around his boyfriend eons ago. Ida seemed to like him just as he was, anyway.
Ida snorted, charcoal-stained hand flying to cover his laugh, and that was beautiful, too.
“Please don’t talk about my mother while you’re naked.”
“Why do I have to be naked anyway, you pervert?”
“Because,” Ida said smoothly, and then completely stopped talking. He picked up his pencil and continued his sketch.
Aoki stared at him, deadpan. “Can’t argue with that.”
“I could sketch you for hours,” Ida murmured, half to himself. He glanced at whatever face Aoki was making and grinned. “You have a myriad of expressions. It’s hard to pick just one.”
“A myriad, huh?” Aoki pouted at him.
Ida’s eyes widened. “Keep pouting,” he said breathlessly. His hand flew over his canvas, adding more details to his sketch.
“A myriad,” Aoki muttered.
“It means ‘a lot’ or ‘countless.’ We learned that word in high school,” Ida said.
Aoki squawked. “I know what it means, you jackass! Why do you get to be both an artist and a poet while also being in the STEM field?”
“If I’m such a jackass, why are you dating me?”
Aoki pouted at him. Ida looked pleased. “Keep pouting,” he said again.
Annoyed as he was, Aoki obediently kept his lower lip jutting out like he was strung by a bee.
“Beautiful,” Ida murmured, mostly to himself.
Aoki’s heart stuttered. He knew he was reaching shades of red beyond the capacity of the human skin, but he could do nothing about it, since he was stuck posing for Ida’s pervy painting.
“Isn’t this kind of sexy?” Aoki ventured after a while. “I’m sitting here naked and you’re taking highly elaborate nudes.”
Ida hummed. “You’re always sexy.”
Aoki felt heat pool in his gut. “Oh?”
“But I respect my subject,” Ida continued, “no matter how sexy he is.”
“Really,” Aoki murmured. He ran a hand over his own chest, breath hitching.
Ida’s breath hitched, too, Aoki noticed.
Pleased with himself, Aoki let his fingers wander the bare expanse of skin, gasping a soft Kousuke as he did so.
“Souta,” Ida said.
Aoki basked under the heat of his boyfriend’s gaze. “Mm…”
Ida swallowed. His fingers were trembling when he brought them to the canvas.
“You’re distracting me,” he said gruffly.
“Really?” Aoki dropped his hands, beaming as if he had just received the best compliment ever.
Ida’s eyes softened, already used to the abrupt changes of Aoki’s demeanor. “Just like you always do.”
Aoki smiled at him, and Ida must have found that interesting because he started sketching again.
“At this rate, I will have to sketch you for hours,” Ida said. “I don’t know how you manage to be so dynamic when you’re just sitting still.”
Aoki blushed. Ida shook his head, bemused. “And now you’re shy again. Just a moment ago, you were hellbent on seducing me.”
Aoki attempted to shrug nonchalantly, even if his blush had already traveled to his bare shoulders. “What can I say? I’m a complex person.”
Ida raised his eyebrows. “Your shawl is slipping.”
“My wha–hey!” Aoki yelped. He reached for the silk fabric that protected his virtue from being violated by Ida’s probing eyes and secured it around his hips.
The corner of Ida’s mouth lifted into a smirk–and oh, no, that expression was just plain deadly, especially since it was a fairly recent development so Aoki hadn’t built sufficient immunity from it yet.
“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”
Aoki squeaked. He snatched the silk to hide his face with it–
–and then belatedly realized that he had just flashed his boyfriend.
He raced to cover himself, cheeks on fire. “Don’t draw that!” he yelped.
Ida laughed. “I wasn’t going to.”
Aoki pouted. “Kousuke-kun is mean.”
Ida smiled, far too sincerely given the circumstances. “And Souta is cute.”
Aoki could definitely set their apartment on fire at this rate, with how furiously he was blushing.
At least Ida was having the time of his life, chuckling as he added the finishing touches to his work.
After a while, Ida set his pencil down and finally crossed the invisible barrier between the artist and the subject. He took the bathrobe from one of their armchairs and draped it over Aoki’s shoulders.
“We’re done for the day.”
Still blushing a little, Aoki stood and tied the sash around his waist. “Finally.”
Ida kissed his temple softly. “Would you like to see?”
Aoki couldn’t help but smile. “Okay.”
Keeping his arm around Aoki, Ida led him to the canvas.
Aoki squinted at Ida’s work for a moment.
And then his eyes widened.
He was staring at himself, but at the same time, he wasn’t.
Because the image on the canvas wasn’t just Aoki Souta–it was Aoki Souta through Ida Kousuke’s eyes.
Each stroke of his pencil, especially the strokes that formed his likeness, was bestowed tenderly on canvas. Aoki’s eyes were bright with love and humor, his plump lip was pushed out in a pout, and both the hardness and the softness of his body was conveyed with such lifelike detail.
Ida did somehow make him look more handsome than he normally was in real life, but it wasn’t because he embellished or enhanced anything.
No, the artwork certainly depicted Aoki in all his glory, blemishes and all–but even those were so lovingly depicted that they ceased to look like imperfections.
“Hey.”
It was only when Ida brushed a tear from his cheek that Aoki realized he was crying.
“I didn’t think it was that bad,” Ida joked, but the concern in his voice was unmistakable.
Aoki shook his head vehemently. “It’s not–”
He choked back a sob. Ida circled him with his arms, rubbing his back.
“Souta,” he murmured.
Aoki buried his face in Ida’s chest for a while.
Once he had calmed down, he cupped Ida’s face. Stared intently into his eyes.
“I love you, too,” Aoki told him.
Ida smiled. “It’s that obvious, huh?”
Aoki felt a tsunami of tears coming, heading straight for Ida’s shirt.
“I wish I could draw you,” Aoki muttered after a while.
Ida chuckled. ”You did, remember? Back in high school.”
Aoki smacked him on the shoulder, squirming with embarrassment as he remembered his drawing, the one that made Ida look like an anthropomorphic worm creature with bulging eyes. “Jerk,” he grumbled.
“To be fair, it did kind of look like me.”
“If you went through a black hole,” Aoki muttered.
Ida grinned. “I kept it, you know.”
“Great. My humiliation is complete.”
There was poetry in the way Ida laughed.
Despite himself, Aoki could feel the words begin to form in his head as his chest swelled with emotion.
Maybe he wasn’t an artist, but the words wouldn’t stop flowing in his head as Ida kissed him, caressed him, held him close.
Aoki squeezed his eyes shut before gently pushing him away. “I guess I have something to show you, too,” he mumbled.
“Hm? What is it?”
“Hold on.”
Aoki rushed into their bedroom, throwing his closet open. He reached for a faded, tattered shoebox buried under a pile of old winter gear.
Before he could lose his nerve, Aoki ran back to where he left Ida, whom he left standing in the middle of the room, confused.
Aoki bowed deeply, mostly so he didn't have to look at Ida’s dumb face. He held out the shoebox with both hands as if it were confession chocolate. “H-Here!”
A pair of warm hands clasped his, helping him cradle the old shoebox. “Thank you,” he heard Ida say sincerely.
Aoki scowled at the floor. “You don’t even know what it is yet! For all you know, there could be–like, taxidermied ferrets in there or something.”
Even without looking at him, Aoki knew that Ida was tilting his head and blinking. “Are there taxidermied ferrets in there?”
“No!” Aoki finally stood up straight (mostly because his back was beginning to hurt). “Just–ugh, just open it, okay?”
Ida carefully opened the box.
He was quiet for a moment.
“Are these…?”
“It’s a lot of different stuff. Poems, prose, and…yeah.”
Aoki plopped down on the divan, suddenly exhausted.
Ida sat with him. He gingerly lifted the misshapen stack of papers.
Somehow, his attention was drawn to the crumpled-up sheet of paper at the very bottom of the pile, which was halfway to the point of being papier-mâché.
“Oh…” Aoki’s eyes suddenly went wide with panic. “Wait!”
It was too late. As if he played basketball instead of volleyball, Ida expertly managed to guard the paper from Aoki’s grabby hands.
“Kousuke!”
“Please let me read it.”
There was a tinge of desperation in Ida’s usually composed face that finally made Aoki relent.
“Fine,” he grumbled.
And with that, Ida practically devoured the contents of the crumpled paper, which was…a love letter.
After reading it twice over, Ida gently set it back down in the box.
Aoki could not, for the life of him, meet his boyfriend’s eyes.
“Really?” Ida said quietly.
Aoki shuddered. He couldn’t speak, but his hand somehow found its way to Ida’s.
“It’s how I felt back then–and, um. How I feel right now.”
“Back then…?”
“I guess…when we got back together. After the Illumination Festival."
Ida hummed. “I see.”
Aoki squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m sor–”
“I want that, too,” Ida interrupted.
He lifted Aoki’s chin, forcing him to meet his earnest gaze. “Everything.”
Aoki gulped. “E-Everything?”
“Yes. ‘Until a myriad of wrinkles helps us keep count of the years.’ Everything.”
Aoki flushed. “Stop! Th-That’s plagiarism!”
“A myriad.” Ida smiled. “You’re a really good writer. Even if you were using our vocab list from junior year.”
Aoki scowled. “Hey, I wrote poems about you that were actually refined by master writers in workshops, and you chose to read that…that thing first.”
“There’s nothing better than an unfiltered Aoki,” Ida said. He rested their joined hands on the shoebox. “But I’ll definitely read and enjoy all of these.”
Aoki pouted. “Of course you will. They’re all about you.”
“They’re all about you, too,” Ida corrected. He squeezed Aoki’s hand. “Just like all my paintings and sketches of you are about me. How I see you.”
“I mean, I gue–wait, did you say paintings and sketches? As in, plural?”
Ida smiled. “Of course. I said so, didn’t I? I could sketch you for hours–and I do. Pretty often, actually.”
Aoki gave his boyfriend a wobbly smile. “Thank you.”
Ida ruffled his hair, and Aoki settled into his arms for the rest of the night.
Eventually, they both fell asleep, and as if they were actually in a painting, neither moved an inch from each other’s side.