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There’s the sound of the bedsheets rustling from where you’re laying, thumbing through a magazine, and Sunday knows you’re getting restless.
Still, trying to ignore it, he presses the pad of his finger to the corner of his textbook and turns the page. There is the crisp sound of the paper’s movement, followed by silence. Merciful silence.
It was a miracle you had even stayed quiet for this long, considering the length of time you two had spent apart. Between the meetings Mister Gopher Wood brought him to, and your new place at the Iris Family after they’d taken you in, it had been a while. It almost made him uncomfortable. The quiet was unusual compared to how you two were as children. The words on the page before him stare grimly back into his eyes with their bold-printed, black ink. A minute passes, and another. What had it said before the sentence he’d literally just read…? All of a sudden he could read the words and yet fail to process them. The side effect of thinking of you, he supposed.
“...Sunday.”
Sunday exhales trapped air in his chest that he wasn’t consciously aware he was keeping there.
You were smiling now, the one you could do without showing your teeth, the slant of your lips tilting up enough for the edges of your eyes to crinkle. You had angled the magazine you were holding downwards. Sunday realizes rather late that the way you’re lying stomach-down on the bed in one of his shirts exposes the skin of your neck, then your collarbone, and then…
He swallows thickly.
“What is it?” Hopefully his tone came out as even as he’d meant it to be.
Golden light seeping in from the windowsill falls across the softness of your hair. His eyes trail across your mouth, your eyes, the familiarity of your face. Everything else was an afterthought.
Your grin widens when he doesn’t seem to notice.
“This is really your magazine?” You drawl, smug and honeyed.
That’s when it clicks. The white-platinum feathers of his wings stiffen, then ruffle and flare out in alarm, muscles straining with realization. He can pinpoint the precise moment that his throat goes dry.
On the vividly printed cover of said magazine was a provocatively posed woman, clad in nothing but two scant pieces of red, velvet fabric overflowing out of her backdrop and draping across her upper chest and lower abdomen.
Sunday’s mouth opens wordlessly, every excuse dying on his tongue from how you’re looking at him like a cat about to pounce on a canary.
“So it is?” You continue. You push yourself up on your elbows, your own wings fluttering rapidly at the sides of your neck.
At this point, you’re leaning towards him and he’s leaning back, his book forgotten while he blinks at you in disbelief. “No, I–”
Before he can protest much, you’ve already discarded the magazine you were pretending to care so much about and looped your arms around his shoulders.
“I can’t believe it! Tell me it isn’t true!” He has to endure you chirping into his ears with your clearly exaggerated bout of distress. You don’t even let him speak. “You would never read something like that!” You cry out.
Sunday just sighs and resigns to having his paperback shut with a slow cascading of pages since you’re so intent on burying your face in his hair and fake-sobbing dramatically. Your voice comes out cloyingly sweet. “You were such a clueless kid…”
Betrayed, you nearly whimper. “Please promise you’ll stay my innocent little Sunny forever…”
His breath catches in his throat and the moment your words hit the air he feels much, much more betrayed than you do, because while he was intimately aware that the entire charade you were pulling on him was only a deliberate bid to annoy him to pay attention to you– his heart rate spikes at the sound of your voice pleading so earnestly. So earnestly for him. If his mouth felt dry from embarrassment a few seconds ago then now he felt as if was choking on it.
Surely, you must have noticed the way the flush blooms across his cheeks, the heat diffusing headily against yours from where you’d nuzzled right besides his feathers and pressed your temple to his face. You pull back slightly to assess the state he’s in and he’s raised a hand to cover part of his mouth, eyebrows furrowing together. Your own mouth falls open into a small ‘o’.
It’s your turn for all the feathers in your wings to flare out. You’re falling over yourself wholly and completely and if Sunday wasn’t still so disarmed by your earlier antics he’d honestly laugh– you looked so repentant it was almost cute. Unfortunately for you, the built-up annoyance wins him over this time, so he’s content to make you suffer a little longer as payback.
“Eh? Noooo, Sunn– Sunday, I’m sorry! I was just kidding! Are you mad at me?” You continue chirping, pressing your face to the flat of his shoulder instead of his hair.
“Because I messed up your reading?” You try again. No response. He turns to look at you more directly, though.
“I’m sorry! I’ll stop teasing you for today–” Is your last attempt at mending things before he lets out a hiss of air despite himself, and it only takes a few more muffled sounds escaping from the palm of his hand coupled with how his eyes narrow and you realize he’s laughing at you.
Your best friend is laughing at you while you’re begging him to forgive you.
Your mouth falls open into another small circle of shock before you reorient yourself and find that you are equally as wordless. The audacity. The nerve.
So you tackle him into the mattress. Simple course of action, really.
The both of you squawk without much grace as you go down, and you swear Sunday specifically sounds like a pigeon although you’ve only seen one once in your life when you were touring outside of Penacony. Maybe that could be the next thing you tease him about.
Right now, you’re too busy seething while your fingers are pulling at his cheeks, his own hands batting them away without much serious weight because he’s still laughing too hard at your befuddlement. “Stop!” He’s telling you breathlessly in between bouts of laughter. “Enough!”
When he finally does manage to grasp both of your wrists in his hands, he’s looking at you plain-faced with those piercing golden eyes of his. It catches you a little off guard. Clearly it unnerves him too, because before he starts speaking he turns away from you and his lips crumple into a thinner, more nervous line.
“...I only have those kinds of magazines because I was looking for you.” The collection of them on the shelf above your head confesses more than his stated admission.
A star bursts behind your head and you’re sure your face is on fire. He what? “Wh–”
“No!” Sunday looks panicked when he parses the implication. “I-It’s an idol magazine!”
“Y-You… you looked at the rest of the pictures too, right?”
You blink once, twice. He could watch the gears turn around in your head with how you were trying to wrap your mind around it. Truthfully, the only ‘lewd’ picture in the whole thing had been the cover page… everything else was gossip, or considerably less raunchy and much more standard glamour shots, photoshoots, advertisements for the next big thing or movie–
At such a revelation, your wings deflate, feathers folding to the side of your neck. The absolute supernova of baffled, flustered frustration you were about to unleash on your poor friend fizzles quietly into nonexistence. A light pink flush settles on your face to match his.
“O–… Oh…”
The two of you stare at each other on his bed for a few seconds.
Those seconds stretch into minutes, and your hair falls over the sides of your face to tickle the skin of your cheeks. The sharpness of his golden irises seem softer now. He doesn’t seem to mind staring back into yours. You looked a little guilty, even, with how your lips press against one another and there’s a slight tenseness to your temple he could recognize from a mile away. Staring at your face was much easier than staring at his book, in any case.
You feel dizzy. He was looking for you?
“I-I’m not that…” You start, voice so soft you’re not sure he could hear you. In the next moment you’re leaning away and pulling your wrists from his fingers. As an attempt to act more composed than you actually are, your palms go to smooth out your wings. You try to act unbothered.
“I’m not that famous yet, you know?”
Then you point at him accusingly. “A-And when I do get famous, I’ll give you my picture personally, with an autograph! It won’t be in some dumb magazine.”
“Plus, you can’t show that to Robin.” You squint. “I want her to see me, too.”
Sunday props himself up on his elbows, readjusting to sit properly after you retract your pointer finger and cross your arms over your chest. He only hums affectionately in response.
“Of course.” He smiles at you, tilting his head.
Your heart feels like it’s rattling around in the bars of its cage at such a simple comment.
“Of course.” You affirm. Blood prickles hot beneath your skin.
In the awkward silence, the lemony yellow spill of the sunlight in the Pavilion glazes over his halo like a glow of divinity. You feel guilty again, almost. Like an idiot, like a fool– here you were teasing him, poking at him and making fun of him and all he’d wanted was to see you again. To look at you, even if it was only through the frozen sliver of time caught in the shutter of a camera.
Sunday, meanwhile, found with practiced ease that you had that repentant expression painted back onto your features. Cute, he thinks to himself when you flop backwards to lay on the mattress. Adorable, he amends the original thought when he pinpoints the reason that you had probably done so to avoid his eyes.
“What’s wrong now?”
You place a hand over your mouth that drifts up your face to hide how you blink owlishly at his question, not knowing what to answer. Your heart crumples in your chest. It feels like you moved on from the earlier affair much too quickly and much too slowly all at once. He’d said it so simply. He was looking for you.
“...Nothing.” You lie.
Sunday scoffs knowingly and lays down besides you.
Between the both of you, he knows you’re lying, and you know that he knows you’re lying, and yet the truth remains unsaid, pulsing threadily in the meager space that separates you like a faltering heartbeat.
Again there is the quiet divinity of his face, how you swore you could reach out and have your fingers phase through his skin as if this were all a mirage. You blink, slowly, and he remains there laying on the sheets next to you. You blink a second time. He’s still there. A third time. Like you were daring him to disappear. Like it was all too good to be true. It nearly feels like cheating. All of those awful nights performing songs you hated, doing sets you didn’t care for, they’re all worth it, now in this moment. Your hand shifts uncomfortably where it’s lazy and immobile at your waist.
In an instant it’s crashing over you, slavering and horrible and like a bolt of lightning to your stomach full of electric want. Want. Desperately. So earnest and whole that you feel ashamed and your halo wobbles above your head unsteadily and you close your hand into a fist where your fingers dig crescents into your skin with your nails. You want to stay here forever. To stretch this moment into infinity and never let go. To shutter the moment in time and hold on and stare at it for hours, and hours and hours. But you feel so ashamed. How selfish of you to ask of him, you think, even when not a single word of it has left your lips. It was better this way; him a saint and you a martyr.
There is something though, isn’t there?
You flush unimaginably hard when you feel his voice in your mind, poking gently at the barrier. Had you been so obvious? Your guilt builds at the notion of a desire so large and unwieldy that it had begun leaking from your head as easily as water from a burst dam. At first, you don’t reply. Your wings brush the hot skin of your cheeks. Bluntly and nearly sarcastic in your tone, you can’t find your own words so you reuse his.
Of course.
He rolls his eyes. That was the second time.
Ha ha, very funny.
You grin, pleased with yourself.
I know. It’s insane, my charisma.
You weren’t sure how much you liked talking this way compared to conversing in spoken word. Tuning was so effortless when it was only him and you, that exertion wise, it made no difference. But you remember when you were younger you talked at such great length that it would seem to outsiders as if you two stared at one another in silence for hours on end, brooked by laughter and shock and all manner of reactions without the necessary context to prompt them. To be fair to the both of you, it was mainly non-Halovians who were lost on the context. Any other tuner worth the clothes off their back would recognize you were speaking. No, what made you unsure of how you liked it was how his voice melded into yours without resistance– like it was always meant to be there, melting liquid gold inside of your head, warm and familiar. Sometimes so familiar you weren’t sure which thoughts were yours and which were his.
‘The barriers of the heart’ as Miss Maeven Ellis had told you, braiding your hair. You realize too late you were also telling him now. So you start, embarrassed. Sorry. Um, does that mean…
Unable to hide behind his manners and etiquette when it’s his heart speaking, plain and bare, Sunday’s pulse skips. I hope so.
You try to change the subject. Or maybe it’s just where your natural guilt was leading your train of thought. Were you studying? You reach out, honest. Sorry for messing with you like that.
Thoughtlessly, he meets the palm of your hand in his headspace. Sunday closes his eyes. You should stop apologizing. I don’t mind.
Your lips push together tightly. You feel like you’ve moved on too quickly from something again. He hoped so– That between your heart and his heart there was no measurable distance. You weren’t sure what you hoped, so you didn’t know what to say. If he got too close, he would find that selfish desire of yours. Half of you wanted it. Half of you was terrified. To be so close that words failed and there was nothing but the feeling, the touch, the taste and the proximity and the way it stole your breath the farther the signature notes of his voice pressed inside the heady pooling shape of your own thoughts. Sunday. You think, on instinct, not reprimand but not praise. The thought that follows after is one you’re not ready for. You don’t know whose thought it is. All you know is the feeling of his voice in your head is pressing deeper even as you thought his name, closer and closer.
I love you.
And the light pauses and the air goes still and you feel every feather, every quill, every primary in your wings go horribly stiff. Your blood is pounding in your ears as loud as you can hear his paced breaths faltering. You don’t know who said it. He doesn’t know either. You realized after the words when you reached out again, gently turning his feelings over to the light like they were between your nimble fingers just to be sure. He doesn’t know.
You were paralyzed by it. Inarticulate, your tuning cuts out. The weight of it feels heavy on your mouth. Oh god. You think, alone with yourself now. Oh god.
Your head is in a flurry and you have to distract yourself by focusing on his hair. It looks too heavenly. You stare at his eyes to snap you out of it and it doesn’t work either. Finally you land on the thread of his sweater, the knit bulky enough where you can see the threads of yarn. Hand-knit. By who, you wonder? Selfishly, you wished it had been you. So you have to move on to another thing to try and let your panicking mind down easy. The taste of saliva gathering like a film over the flat of your tongue. The weight of it as it goes slowly, thick down your throat. When you close your eyes and try to focus on nothing at all, you hear him shifting around on the mattress, crumpling the sheets with his movement and you just get worse. It doesn’t work. Nothing works.
You’re sure that this is a mirage now, truly, because the next time you open your eyes is when his hand touches the skin of your cheek. It drifts up to your temple, right above the corner of your eyebrow as you blink back to reality. He brushes a lock of hair out of your face apologetically. Like something is his fault. I’m sorry, he wants to say. You looked so scared. I…
But he can’t think of it. He can’t speak. Just as inarticulate as you are. Instead he’s watching the coming and going of your breathing, how your chest heaves up and down, so panicked at the thought of love it made him feel shameless in comparison. It was true, maybe he was shameless; even if he could bring himself to apologize, Sunday confesses to the back of his mind that the sentiments behind it would come up empty. Whoever had said it, for once in his life, he was not sorry. If anything, he was thankful, and the taste of letting himself have something as selfish as this dissolved so sweet and hot on his senses he wouldn’t give it up for a thousand Oak Cake Rolls. He couldn’t reign it back, the feel of it dark and needy and rising up in his throat without warning.
The thought is like a stake through your heart. …Have you ever kissed anyone before?
And you know it's him asking.
You’re too shocked to answer, staring at him dumbfounded with your mouth wide open, silent. What kind of question was that? Was it meant to confuse you so much that you stopped thinking about your earlier problem? Because it nearly did.
That is until he leans in to touch his lips to yours, the press and weight of them the most unfamiliar thing that you could think of him as you’d never had it before– you knew his mind more intimately than this. But the warmth was the same. The shock disarms you, it renders you stupider than the first in a way that conversing through tuning never did until now.
You can’t even close your eyes from how quickly he withdraws. You chase him for a fraction of a second before you know to stop yourself. The words repeat in your head like a mantra. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. But the terror doesn’t. It’s something else.
“Please don’t be scared.”
You hear it in his speaking voice. Instinctually you know that he’s saying it physically so as to not influence how you’re feeling. To let you come down yourself. It makes your heart swell enough to become far too full– fit to bursting with that something else.
I’m not. You answer on instinct.
“...I-I’m not.” You repeat. Both ways felt clumsy.
Hesitantly, cautiously, you’re leaning in closer. Your palm cups the back of his hand that was still rubbing tender circles into the flushed skin of your cheek. To reassure him, you convince yourself. This is to reassure him and not for me. Not for me and my terrible, sinful want, intense enough to tear the world in a million pieces and make it whole again.
You have it again, finally. The press of his lips against yours. It is still a foreign feeling. You want to make it familiar. And you say ‘finally’ in your head almost crying because you just feel so, so guilty for it– ‘finally’ like you hadn’t just kissed him a minute ago, less than a minute ago and it had already felt like an eternity since he’d left you. You want to tell him about the softness of his knuckles as your fingers ghost over each ridge and valley. You want to tell him about his long, perfect lashes when you tilt your head like they seemed to do in movies whenever people kissed and yours brush against his. You wanted to tell him all of this and more. You wanted it more than anything. You wanted it forever.
The two of you part with shaking gasps of air and wide eyes, feathers a blur of greyish white and the color he’d recognize as yours from a single fallen plume. And now you’re panting, lying in bed listening to each other's breathing. You feel nauseous, but not in a bad way, necessarily. Your kiss was longer than his kiss. You want to throw up and you’re not sure why.
You don’t exactly know how to move forward from this. There’s the nagging, itching urge to say sorry but you remember his soft chastising of your endless apologies. I don’t mind, he had said. Nervously you try to gulp down every other nagging thought making your heart throb irrationally into the bones of your ribcage. Sunday’s voice drags you back.
“W-Wait… So… Have you?” He stutters, staring at you in shock.
“What?” You blink.
“H-Have you… Have you ever kissed anyone before, I mean?”
“Huh?”
You have to stare back at him blankly for a few more moments before you return to normal function. “Oh.”
“No, um…”
Your eyes narrow into a squint, embarrassed. “Just you.”
Then why was it so good? Is the follow up question he wanted to find the answer to but would be far too mortified to even ask. Thankfully, you speak again before he can think about it for too long and end up flustering himself entirely from the efforts of his own mind.
“...Don’t just stare at me.”
Sunday swallows, caught. He hadn’t even realized he’d been looking at you in this quiet for so long. “I…”
I’ve never kissed anyone before, either.
He tells you worldlessly, golden warmth of his voice blooming throughout the expanse of your chest once more. Was he embarrassed to say it out loud? A grin cracks across your face without remorse.
You really still are my innocent little Sunny.
The unspoken word of your head-voice hits him as sharply as cupid’s arrow, clean and precise through the fourth intercostal space of his ribs–
“Shut up.” He says verbally this time.
It’s your turn; your eyes crinkle at the edges the same way they had when you were leafing through the magazine, waiting to strike. And your laughter hits the air. Oh, how the breath is knocked from his lungs, how suddenly he’s bleeding from that punctured space between his hollowed bones as he almost drowns in it –the sound of your mirth fluttering into the dewlight sunbeams above the two of you like birdsong. Well, we are birds. He notes to himself mentally. Not that it snaps him out of his stupor at all, wallowing in the soft balm that is your happiness on his nerves.
It’s a bit much if he was being honest. You were almost in tears at this point, your shoulders rattling from the effort. Sunday huffs, one of his hands moving upwards to palm at his messied hair in exasperation. Any longer and he’d scold you for making so much noise. But he doesn’t. You know he won't. Eventually, your shoulders steady, then go still. The creases in your shirt, a size too big, smooth themselves out as you relax.
The two of you were closer. You’d only noticed it at this moment. Closer than when you two first laid down. It had felt so natural being this close you hadn’t paid it any mind. It made sense– you two had gotten close enough to touch noses mere minutes ago; but as you drink in the ink-dark, navy blue centers of his eyes it becomes much, much clearer to you. His feathers aren’t as sleek as he usually keeps them. The pristine white plumage is ruffled, and you want to reach out and preen it for him. You gulp down that urge.
Sunday finds another way that you’re just like him, because you’d been looking on in silence long enough for him to want to say don’t just stare at me too. He tamps the feeling away. Was there something on his face?
“...I really missed you.” You confess, voice soft as you avert your eyes to focus on his glimmering halo.
It was larger, more intricate than yours, and floating at the back of his head rather than above him like a crown. It would be funny to trace your fingers around the edges. Your halos were only tangible within dreams… But maybe you just liked to distract yourself whenever you said something you meant.
“I missed you too.” He answers steadily, firm and without hesitation.
Your voice falters, even softer.
“...I wish every day could be like this.”
He’s not so sure what to say now.
Your eyes had dropped to the pillow beneath your head, something bittersweet underneath the colors of your tone. He wished the same. But saying I wish for that too felt clunky and unwieldy in his mouth. Like the building blocks in a toddler’s hand trying to prop up a wobbling tower. In the corner of his vision he can see your fingers tighten their grip into the side of the pillow. He is silent. Your hand squeezes the fabric, then goes limp. Cautiously, his mind reaches for yours.
His touch recoils at the first time you gently shut him out. Glancing into the windows it’s the same, over and over; I wish every day could be like this. I wish every day could be like this.
Your heart aches. If you said it a thousand times, maybe it would have come true. But your shame scorches your tongue to stillness. Tomorrow you would return to the Iris Family. Tomorrow, you would dedicate yourself to practice. Tomorrow your room would be cool and plush and kept, just as you had left it, and without Sunday. You feel slack as a doll where you’re lying, and you never want to get up.
But today… Today was perfect.
You drag your gaze back upwards and guilt hits you like a hunger pang when you see his tortured face, worry for you so unambiguous even a blind man would have recognized it. Yes, you blink, throat tight, today is perfect. You didn’t want to ruin it. Not for him. He deserved this. He deserved to be happy.
“Sorry… I…” You say simply, voice just as meek as before. You didn’t mean to shut him out, is what you wanted to say. Sunday shakes his head before you can, expression shifting. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
He smiles and you’re positive that your heart is melting, pouring all over your guts in a mess.
“You promised me you would get famous, right?” He soothes and you nod weakly.
“And that you’d get me your picture, with an autograph even.” A fragile, quivering handful of a laugh slips from your mouth. He smiles wider, more insistent.
Your best friend is an angel.
“So… it’s okay if we aren’t always together. I’m always rooting for you.”
He sounds so earnest that you believe him instantly. You believe him more than yourself.
“You know that... right?”
You reach out and he feels it diffuse through him in a heartbeat, like blood pumping down to his very fingertips.
Of course.
His physical hand matches where it feels like you touch inside one another’s tangle of thoughts. Your skin is just as warm. Sunday’s palm presses to your palm, his pulse to your pulse, and your fingers interlace as tight as maybells woven into a flowercrown.
Of course.