Archive of Our Own

Giyuu had a system.

It was simple, because the most sustainable systems always were: suppress, deflect, endure. Take the pills every morning with water so cold it numbed the inside of his throat. Keep his scent flat. Keep his expression flatter. Sit with the wanting like a stone at the bottom of a river—still, invisible under all that moving water.

He'd been doing it so long it should have been easy.

It wasn't.

"Oi. You're spacing out again."

Sanemi dropped into the seat across from him, tray hitting the cafeteria table hard enough that Giyuu's water bottle rattled. He did this every day—sat like sitting was an act of aggression, took up space with his elbows and his scowl and the broad set of his shoulders. He smelled like rain over hot concrete today, sharp and electric, and Giyuu held his breath for two full seconds before trusting himself to inhale normally.

"I wasn't spacing out."

"You were staring at the wall like it owed you money."

"I was thinking."

"About what?"

You. "Nothing."

Sanemi narrowed his eyes. Giyuu met them without flinching.

"Eat," Sanemi said, and shoved a container across the table. Rice, grilled salmon, pickled vegetables. Homemade—Sanemi's kitchen, Sanemi's hands, packed in a container Giyuu recognized because he had a drawer full of them at home, because Sanemi kept feeding him and kept forgetting to ask for them back, or maybe never intended to.

Giyuu's chest tightened. He opened the container. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me, just eat. You look like shit."

"You always say that."

"Because it's always true." Sanemi was already eating, chopsticks moving with the aggressive efficiency of someone who'd grown up feeding five younger siblings before feeding himself. He chewed, swallowed, pointed his chopsticks at Giyuu's still-closed container. "Eat."

Giyuu opened it. Rice, grilled salmon, pickled vegetables. He took a bite. The salmon was seasoned with miso and ginger, the skin crisped just right. Sanemi cooked like he did everything else—impatiently, aggressively, but with a precision that contradicted every other thing about him.

"Good?" Sanemi asked, without looking up.

"Mm."

"Use your words."

"It's good."

"Damn right it is." Sanemi pulled his phone from his pocket, unlocked it with his thumb, and slid it across the table. "Volume eighteen dropped."

Giyuu looked down. Sanemi's screen showed a manga retailer page—the cover art for the latest volume of a series they'd been following for over a year. It had started as Sanemi's thing. He'd shoved the first volume at Giyuu one afternoon and said read this or I'll spoil it for you, and Giyuu had read it that night, and then the next three volumes back to back, and by the time he surfaced it was four a.m. and he'd texted Sanemi a single line: the author is cruel. Sanemi had responded immediately, because Sanemi was also awake at four a.m. for reasons he never explained, with: TOLD YOU. Now read five.

It had become theirs after that. A shared thing. They talked about it at lunch, argued over character arcs, sent each other panels with zero context. Sanemi read aggressively—tore through chapters, got furious at cliffhangers, held grudges against characters who made bad decisions. Giyuu read slowly and noticed things Sanemi missed, connections between scenes separated by hundreds of pages, and Sanemi would get this look on his face when Giyuu pointed them out—half irritated, half impressed—that made Giyuu's stomach flip every single time.

"When did it come out?" Giyuu asked, scrolling down.

"Yesterday. I checked this morning."

"You checked at what time?"

"None of your business." Which meant five a.m. or earlier, because Sanemi's internal clock ran on a schedule designed for someone with something to prove. "The pre-release reviews are saying the fight scene at the end is insane. Like, full double-page spread, the whole thing."

"Don't spoil it."

"I'm not spoiling it, I'm telling you it exists. There's a difference."

"There isn't."

Sanemi kicked him under the table. Not hard—a tap, his shoe against Giyuu's ankle, casual and grounding. Giyuu's leg tensed and he forced it to relax before the reaction could travel anywhere visible.

"Come with me after class," Sanemi said. "The bookstore on Fifth should have it."

"I can order it online."

"Online takes three days. I'm not waiting three days. Are you?"

Giyuu wasn't. He'd been checking the release date on his own phone for the past two weeks, but admitting that felt like admitting something larger, so he kept his expression flat and took another bite of salmon.

"I can go alone," Sanemi added, reading his silence wrong. "I just figured we'd split it. Fifty-fifty, same as usual."

Same as usual. They'd been doing this since volume nine—walking to the bookstore together after their last class, pooling cash because neither of them had money to waste and sharing a copy made sense when they lived close enough to pass it back and forth. Sanemi always read first because he was faster, then he'd drop it off at Giyuu's apartment, sometimes staying while Giyuu read, scrolling his phone on the couch and making increasingly hostile commentary about whatever Giyuu's face was doing.

Your eyebrows are doing the thing.

What thing?

The thing where you're pissed off but you won't admit it. Who died?

And Giyuu would refuse to answer, and Sanemi would steal the volume out of his hands to check the page, and their fingers would brush over the spine, and Giyuu would spend the next hour with the ghost of that contact seared into his skin like a brand.

Fifty-fifty. Such a mundane arrangement. Two broke university students sharing the cost of a manga volume because it was practical. Except Giyuu had the money. He could afford every volume himself. He split it because splitting it meant a trip to the bookstore together, and a trip to the bookstore meant forty minutes of walking shoulder to shoulder, and Sanemi always wandered the aisles after they found their volume—picking up books he'd never buy, reading back covers out loud in a voice so dismissive it circled back around to affectionate.

"You in or not?"

"I'm in."

"Good." Sanemi pocketed his phone. "Meet me by the east gate at four."

"Okay."

"And if you're late, I'm buying it without you and reading the last chapter out loud on the walk home."

"I won't be late."

"You were late last time."

"That was three minutes."

"Three minutes I had to stand there looking like an idiot. Four o'clock. Don't be late."

Giyuu's mouth twitched. He looked down at his rice so Sanemi wouldn't see it—the fractional softening that wasn't a smile but was close enough to give him away.

They finished eating. Sanemi stole one of Giyuu's pickled radishes without asking—his fingers brushing the edge of Giyuu's container, casual, proprietary—and Giyuu let him, like he always let him.

"Friday," Sanemi said as they gathered their things. "My place. I'm making curry."

"Okay."

"And bring back my containers. You've got like six of them."

"Seven."

"Seven? Shit, what do you even do with them?" Sanemi shouldered his bag and paused, half-turned, like something else was sitting on his tongue. But whatever it was, he swallowed it. "Same time tomorrow?"

"Same time tomorrow," Giyuu said.

Sanemi left. Giyuu sat for another minute, alone at the table, and pressed his thumb against the ridge of the container lid until the plastic edge bit into his skin. 

Pretty omega. 

That was what people said when they thought he couldn't hear, and sometimes when they didn't care if he could. Pretty and cold and strange. He'd been hearing it since middle school, since his scent first came in sweet and clean like rain and every alpha in his class started paying attention and Giyuu started wearing scent patches because the attention made his skin crawl.

Sanemi had never called him pretty. Sanemi called him an idiot, a stubborn bastard, an antisocial disaster. Sanemi insulted him with a ferocity that felt more honest than any compliment Giyuu had ever received, and that was one of the thousand reasons Giyuu was in love with him.

Thousands. He'd stopped counting somewhere around the third month of their friendship, when the number got too big and the feeling got too heavy and none of his usual defenses worked against it anymore.

He closed the container. Stacked it with the other seven at home later that night, in the drawer he never opened when anyone was around, because seven containers from a person who fed you without being asked was not a collection—it was a shrine, and he knew it, and he kept them anyway.

Giyuu had been alone for most of his life. After Tsutako died, the silence that had always been comfortable became permanent—calcified into something he wore like a second skin. He went to class, did his homework, ate by himself, went home. People tried, sometimes. Sat next to him, attempted conversation, gave up when his responses came back in monosyllables. They always gave up. He didn't blame them. He knew he was hard to talk to, hard to know, hard to want around for longer than it took to realize he wasn't going to make the effort easy.

Sanemi didn't give up.

Sanemi sat down at his bench on a Thursday in October—the bench in the courtyard where Giyuu ate lunch every day, alone, without exception—and said, "Move over."

Giyuu didn't move over. "There's room."

"Yeah, if I wanted half my ass hanging off the edge. Move."

Giyuu moved. Sanemi sat, close enough that their shoulders pressed together through their jackets, and started eating like this was something they did. Like he belonged there.

"Shinazugawa," Giyuu said after a full minute of silence.

"What?"

"Why are you here?"

Sanemi chewed. Swallowed. Didn't even look at him. "Felt like it."

That was the entire explanation. Felt like it. As if choosing to sit with the campus ghost was a casual impulse, like picking a different route to class. Giyuu waited for the punchline, the dare, the friend hiding around the corner filming it for a laugh. None of it came. Sanemi sat, and ate, and eventually started talking—about the professor he hated, about the fight he'd gotten into last weekend, about his youngest brother's school play—and Giyuu listened and said very little and at the end of lunch, Sanemi stood up and said, "Same time tomorrow."

It wasn't a question.

He came back the next day. Giyuu was already there, and Sanemi dropped beside him without greeting and said, "You got a group for Urokodaki's class?"

Giyuu didn't look up from his food. "No."

"No as in you're still looking, or no as in you're planning to do it alone like a psycho?"

"I'll do it alone."

"He said he's not accepting solo submissions. The whole point is group collaboration or whatever."

Giyuu didn't answer right away. He'd heard the professor say that. He'd also calculated the odds of walking up to an already-formed group and asking to join and decided that doing the entire project himself and eating the penalty was preferable. Every cluster of desks in that class had closed ranks within the first ten minutes. People paired off with friends, roommates, people they already knew—and Giyuu had sat in his corner seat and watched it happen with the detached resignation of someone who'd been picked last or not at all enough times that the sting had gone numb.

"Everyone has groups already," he said.

"Yeah, no shit. That's why I'm asking." Sanemi bit into a rice ball and talked through it. "We've got three. Rengoku, me, and Mitsuri. We need a fourth."

"You could ask someone else."

"I'm asking you."

The directness of it hit like a shove. Giyuu looked at him—really looked, searching for the catch, the obligation, the pity—and found none of it. Sanemi was chewing his rice ball and staring back point-blank at Giyuu.

"I don't—" Giyuu started.

"You don't what? Work well with others? Yeah, I figured. You'll be fine. Rengoku does enough talking for five people and Mitsuri's so nice it's physically impossible to have a bad time around her. You just have to show up and do your share." He swallowed. "Which, knowing you, will be more than your share, so we'd be the ones benefiting."

Giyuu's fingers tightened around his chopsticks. The logical answer was no. No was safe. No preserved the distance, kept the walls standing, prevented the inevitable moment when people in a group realized that Giyuu's silence wasn't concentration but a fundamental inability to connect, and started working around him instead of with him.

But Sanemi had just asked like it cost him nothing, and the professor wouldn't accept solo submissions, and Giyuu couldn't find a refusal that held up under any scrutiny.

"Okay," he said.

"Good. We're meeting at that café on Fifth at five. The one with the decent coffee. You free?"

"At five?"

"Yeah. That's when everyone's done with classes. You free or not?"

He was. He had nothing at five, or at six, or at any point in his evening, because his schedule after classes was a blank stretch of empty apartment and silence, but saying I'm always free felt like handing over something too honest, so he just said, "I'm free."

"Five o'clock. Don't be late." Sanemi fished his phone from his pocket. "Give me your number so I can send you the address."

Giyuu gave him his number. Watched Sanemi type it in, thumbs moving fast, the screen reflecting off the scar tissue on his knuckles. A moment later, Giyuu's phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn't check it. He already knew what it would feel like—Sanemi's name on his screen for the first time, a line of connection that hadn't existed sixty seconds ago—and he needed a moment before he let himself look.

He went to the café at five. 

Rengoku greeted him with enough warmth to heat the entire room, and Mitsuri smiled so brightly Giyuu had to look away, and Sanemi kicked the empty chair out from the table toward him and said, "Sit." And Giyuu sat, and they planned the project, and Giyuu said less than everyone else but more than he expected, and when he offered an idea, Rengoku said it was excellent, and Sanemi said told you he'd be useful with a roughness that passed for pride if you knew where to look.

Giyuu walked home at seven-thirty with Sanemi's contact saved in his phone and a group chat notification blinking on his screen.

The third day, Sanemi brought him a canned coffee. Set it on the bench between them without comment. It was black, unsweetened—the kind Giyuu drank, which meant Sanemi had noticed. Giyuu looked at the can and then at Sanemi and said, "Thank you."

"Don't read into it. The vending machine gave me two."

It hadn't. 

Vending machines didn't do that. But Giyuu opened the can and drank it and didn't push.

By the end of the first week, Giyuu had learned that Sanemi had five younger siblings and that Genya, the second oldest, was starting high school in the spring. That their father had died when Sanemi was fourteen, and their mother worked double shifts to keep all of them in school, and Sanemi picked up two part-time jobs on top of his classes to take some of the weight off her. That he still made lunches from scratch because convenience store food was, in his words, "garbage that costs money." That he hated quiet rooms, loved horror movies, and read manga on his phone during lectures he didn't respect, which was most of them.

Giyuu offered very little in return. He answered when asked and deflected when he could and Sanemi let him, which was the part that confused him most—Sanemi, who had the patience of a lit fuse with everyone else, seemed willing to sit in Giyuu's silence without demanding more. Other people treated Giyuu's quiet like a wall they needed to scale. Sanemi treated it like weather. It was there. He dressed for it. He didn't complain.

The second week, Sanemi asked about Tsutako.

They were walking back from the courtyard—side by side, not touching, Giyuu keeping a precise six inches of distance between their arms—and Sanemi said, without preamble, "Rengoku mentioned you had a sister."

Giyuu's step didn't falter. His expression didn't change. "I did."

"Had. Past tense."

"Yes."

Sanemi said nothing for long enough that Giyuu thought he'd let it go. Then, "How old were you?"

"Twelve."

Another silence. Sanemi didn't say I'm sorry. He didn't say that must have been hard or you can talk to me about it or any of the things people said when they wanted to feel like they'd helped without doing anything. He said, "My dad died when I was fourteen."

It sat between them without fanfare. Just a fact, offered at the same temperature Giyuu had offered his—cool, level, stripped of performance.

"I'm sorry," Giyuu said.

"Nah, don't be. He was a jerk." Sanemi's jaw was tight, but his voice was flat—rehearsed, like he'd said it enough times that the words had worn smooth. "Made our mom's life a living hell. She's better off. We all are."

"But I'm sorry about your sister." His voice had dropped. "That's different."

They didn't talk about it again. They didn't need to. But something shifted after that—a lock turning, a door that had been cracked swinging fully open. Giyuu stopped measuring the distance between their arms when they walked.

By the third week, he'd started looking for Sanemi in the courtyard before Sanemi arrived, his eyes scanning the crowd for white hair and sharp edges, his pulse doing something stupid every time he found them. Sanemi had friends—loud but kind people who orbited him with the gravitational pull of someone who burned bright—and Giyuu sometimes saw him across campus with Rengoku or Mitsuri or Uzui, most of the time Obanai, laughing at something, shoving someone, alive in a way that made Giyuu's chest ache from a distance. But at lunch, Sanemi came to the bench. Every day. Like it was marked on his schedule, like Giyuu's company was an appointment he refused to cancel.

Nobody had ever done that before. Nobody had ever picked Giyuu on purpose, day after day, with no sign of tiring.

By the second month, Giyuu was so deep in it that he could see the bottom and it was nowhere close.

He didn't tell anyone. There was no one to tell.

The worst part—and Giyuu had ranked them, because his brain wouldn't stop tallying the ways he suffered—was how physical Sanemi was.

He didn't mean anything by it. That was what made it excruciating. Sanemi was tactile with everyone, an alpha who communicated through proximity and force and casual touches that burned like brands on Giyuu's skin. He threw arms over his friends' shoulders. He shoved people when they annoyed him. He grabbed, pulled, pushed, leaned. It was just how he existed in the world, all that energy and intensity pouring out through his hands.

But when it was directed at Giyuu—when those hands landed on him—his whole body went to war with itself, every instinct pulling toward the contact while his face stayed blank and his breathing stayed even and his heart tried to crack through his ribs.

Sanemi grabbing his wrist to drag him away from a conversation Giyuu was clearly dying in. Sanemi flicking his forehead when he said something too blunt. Sanemi slinging an arm across his shoulders as they walked, heavy and warm, the weight of it pressing Giyuu's suppressant-dulled scent glands against the heat of his body.

Once, Sanemi fell asleep on him during a movie at Rengoku's apartment. Just tipped sideways and landed on Giyuu's shoulder with the full trusting weight of unconsciousness, his breath warm through Giyuu's shirt, his scent unguarded in sleep—deeper, softer, all that sharpness sanded down to something that made Giyuu want to press his face into Sanemi's hair and breathe until he forgot his own name.

He didn't. He sat rigid against the couch cushions for two and a half hours until the movie ended and Rengoku gently shook Sanemi awake, and later, in his own apartment, Giyuu pressed his face into the shoulder of his own shirt where Sanemi's scent still clung and breathed until it was gone.

The routine survived. It always did. But the cracks were getting harder to ignore.

The night it happened was unremarkable.

That was the cruelest part, how ordinary it was—a Friday at Sanemi's apartment, leftovers reheated and eaten in front of his laptop with some action movie Sanemi had been ranting about playing on screen. Giyuu sat on the opposite end of the couch with his knees drawn up and his socked feet tucked under the blanket Sanemi had thrown at him without being asked, because Sanemi had memorized every one of Giyuu's tells even if he'd never admit it, and cold feet were one of them.

The movie ended. Sanemi's commentary dwindled from aggressive dissection to occasional muttering to silence. Giyuu glanced over and found him asleep.

He hadn't drifted—Sanemi had gone out like a switch. Head tipped against the back of the couch, chin tucked slightly to one side, lips parted. The laptop's glow caught the edges of his scar, turned the sharp lines of his face into something softer. He breathed through his mouth when he was this deeply under, Giyuu knew. This useless, intimate knowledge that he shouldn't have and couldn't unlearn.

Giyuu looked at him.

He let himself. This was the only time—these stolen minutes when Sanemi's consciousness was elsewhere and Giyuu could set down the weight of wanting him for just long enough to remember what his own heartbeat sounded like without it. He gently traced the shape of Sanemi's jaw, the scar that split his face, his hands lying open on his thighs with the palms up, defenseless. Sanemi asleep was tender—someone Giyuu wanted to press his mouth against and ruin himself with.

His stomach flipped—that helpless, fluttering drop he'd never learned to brace for, no matter how many times it hit.

He'd been holding this in for three years. Three years of sitting next to Sanemi and wanting to lean in. Three years of hearing Sanemi say his name—Giyuu, just Giyuu, no honorific, as if the syllables belonged to him—and feeling it settle somewhere irreversible. Three years of watching Sanemi live with all that ferocity and wanting him and saying nothing.

But that was the problem. The silence he'd always worn so comfortably had become a cage, and he was locked inside it with this feeling that kept growing, and there was no room left.

He opened his mouth. He didn't plan it. There was no decision, no conscious choice to speak.

"I love you."

It was so small, barely a sound—more like the ghost of a whisper, spoken into the space between them with no expectation of being heard, because being heard was never the point. The point was saying it. Letting it exist outside of him for one single second so the pressure eased enough to survive another day.

The silence after swallowed it whole.

Giyuu exhaled. His hands were shaking—he pressed them flat against his thighs and waited for the trembling to stop. 

Stupid. 

It was so stupid, talking to a sleeping person like the words would dissolve in the air and leave no trace. But the relief was undeniable, this tiny loosening in his chest, like a valve releasing pressure he'd held for so long his body had forgotten what normal felt like.

He looked at Sanemi one more time. Studied how sleep had softened him, how his chest rose and fell.

Then he stood, pulled the blanket from his own legs, and draped it over Sanemi instead. Tucked it at the edges, because Sanemi ran cold in his sleep even though he'd never admit it. Giyuu knew this because he knew everything about Sanemi that didn't matter, and everything about Sanemi that did, and knowing everything about someone and not being able to reach for them was its own kind of grief.

He let himself out. The door closed behind him with a soft click.

On the couch, under the blanket that smelled like Giyuu.

Sanemi opened his eyes.

Sanemi didn't sleep that night.

He lay on the couch where Giyuu had left him, wrapped in a blanket that smelled like his best friend, and stared at the ceiling and tried to make sense of something that had knocked every thought in his head sideways.

I love you.

Giyuu's voice. Low and stripped bare, trembling at the edges in a way Sanemi had never heard from him because Giyuu didn't tremble. Giyuu didn't sound like that, ever. But that whisper had, and the rawness of it had punched through Sanemi's half-sleep before he could brace for it.

He'd frozen. Held his breath so long his lungs burned, and didn't move, and didn't open his eyes. And then Giyuu had covered him with the blanket, tucked it at the edges, and left. And Sanemi had lain there with his pulse going haywire and the word fuckcycling through his head on repeat.

I love you.

Such small words. Three syllables total. 

How the fuck did three syllables rearrange everything?

The weekend was hell.

Sanemi went for a run at five a.m. Saturday because lying still made his skin itch, and he ran until his lungs burned and his calves cramped and still none of it was loud enough to drown out the echo. He showered, ate standing over the sink, checked his phone six times in an hour and found no messages from Giyuu, which was normal—Giyuu wasn't a texter, Giyuu communicated in single words and long silences and the rare full sentence that hit like a bullet—but today the empty notification screen felt different. Today it felt like evidence.

How long? 

That was the question that kept circling, a vulture over a carcass. How long had Giyuu been carrying this? Weeks? Months? Sanemi thought about the timeline—three years of friendship, three years of lunches and late nights and Giyuu's steady presence at the edge of every gathering—and something lurched in his chest.

Three years. It had been three years, hadn't it? From the beginning, maybe. 

He sat on his kitchen floor with his back against the cabinets, jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached, and tried to think about this rationally. Giyuu loved him. Giyuu—who flinched away from every extended hand, who'd built walls so high that most people didn't bother trying to climb them—loved Sanemi. Had maybe loved him for years. Wanting him. Hiding it with that infuriating calm while Sanemi—

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

The memories hit in a cascade, recontextualized and vicious. Every time Giyuu tensed under his hands and Sanemi assumed it was discomfort. Every time Giyuu looked at him a beat too long before cutting his gaze away. How Giyuu had gone rigid when Sanemi fell asleep on his shoulder at Rengoku's, sitting frozen and unmoving for hours—Sanemi had teased him about it the next day, called him weird for not just shoving him off, and Giyuu had said "you looked tired" in that flat voice and Sanemi had let it go because everything with Giyuu was flat, everything was neutral, everything was —

A lie. 

It had all been a lie. 

Every blank stare, every word, every instance of I'm fine and it's nothing and the practiced, meticulous blankness that Sanemi had spent three years reading as indifference. Giyuu hadn't been indifferent. Giyuu had been drowning three feet away from him and Sanemi hadn't seen it because Giyuu drowned quietly, without thrashing, without asking for a hand.

And here was the other thing—the thing Sanemi couldn't outrun no matter how many miles he put on the pavement.

He wasn't upset. 

He wasn't uncomfortable. 

He wasn't any of the things he should have been upon learning that his omega best friend had feelings for him.

He was relieved.

The realization dropped through him like a stone through water. He sat on his kitchen floor and thought about Giyuu's face and Giyuu's voice and Giyuu's stubborn, terrible devotion, and the feeling that cracked open inside him wasn't surprise—it was recognition. Something slotting into place that had been misaligned for years, and the relief of it hit so hard his hands shook.

Oh, shit.

Because Sanemi had been doing this too, hadn't he? 

Lying. 

Calling it friendship when he got irrationally pissed at alphas who stared at Giyuu too long in the hallway. Calling it concern when he tracked Giyuu's eating habits and sleep patterns with an obsessive attention he couldn't shut off. Calling it habit when the first thing he thought about every morning was whether he'd see Giyuu today, and the best part of every day was the answer being yes.

His friends had seen it. Rengoku with his knowing smiles. Mitsuri asking so when are you two going to figure it out? like it was an inevitability and not a fantasy. Even Obanai, who never said anything unnecessary, giving Sanemi a flat look once and saying, "You know that's not how you act about a friend."

Sanemi had shut every single one of them down. Told them they were insane. Told Rengoku to mind his own business, told Mitsuri there was nothing to figure out, told Obanai to fuck off. And he'd believed it, because believing it was easier than the alternative, and Sanemi had never met a difficult truth he couldn't bully into submission.

But you couldn't bully this. You couldn't punch your way through the sound of someone's voice breaking open in the dark.

He picked up his phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.

What was he supposed to say? I heard you. I know. I think I feel the same way, I think I've felt it for years, I think I've been a fucking idiot. No. Texting that to Giyuu would be like throwing a grenade through a window—Giyuu would read it, panic, and disappear so fast Sanemi would never find him again.

He had to do this in person. He had to be standing in front of Giyuu when the truth came out, close enough to stop him from running.

But not yet. Not until he could trust his own mouth to form words that wouldn't destroy this.

Monday.

Giyuu was already at the bench when Sanemi arrived. Sitting in his usual spot, back straight, lunch on his knees, face turned toward the courtyard.

Sanemi sat down. Their shoulders brushed. Giyuu didn't tense—or if he did, he hid it so fast that even Sanemi couldn't catch it.

"Hey," Sanemi said.

"Hey."

Normal and flat, as if Friday hadn't happened. As if those three whispered words had dissolved into the air exactly as Giyuu intended.

Sanemi ate. Giyuu ate. They sat in silence, and for the first time in three years, the silence was unbearable—not because Giyuu had changed but because Sanemi had, and now every silence between them was full of everything they weren't saying.

He watched Giyuu from the corner of his eye. The downcast lashes, the straight line of his mouth, his fingers wrapped around his water bottle with deliberate control. Pretty omega. That's what people said, and Sanemi had always bristled at it without examining why, had wanted to grab anyone who reduced Giyuu to a face and a designation and slam them into a wall—and he'd called that protectiveness, too, hadn't he? Just looking out for a friend. Just being loyal.

God. He really was a fucking idiot.

"You're staring," Giyuu said, without looking up.

"No I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm looking in your general direction. There's a difference."

Giyuu's mouth twitched. Not a smile but a fractional softening that Sanemi had learned to read as amusement. Three years of learning to read him, and only now it was hitting Sanemi what all that attention meant.

The lunch period ended. They separated for afternoon classes. Giyuu bid him goodbye the same way he always did, and walked away, and Sanemi stood there with his hands in his pockets and his jaw tight and thought, tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow.

He didn't do it tomorrow.

Or the day after, or the day after that. Because every time he got close—every time they were alone and the words gathered in his throat—he looked at Giyuu's face and saw all the ways it could go wrong. Giyuu's expression shutting down. Giyuu's voice flattening into that detached monotone he used on strangers. Giyuu withdrawing, receding, disappearing into that practiced loneliness he'd survived in for years before Sanemi kicked the door open.

The fear was paralyzing. Sanemi didn't do fear—he did anger, action, brute-force solutions to problems that would have been better served by patience. But this wasn't a problem he could solve with his fists. This was Giyuu, and Giyuu was fragile in all the ways he refused to acknowledge, and Sanemi would rather swallow glass than break him.

So he waited. And while he waited, Giyuu started to disappear.

It wasn't obvious. 

Giyuu was subtle about self-destruction—always had been. He still showed up to the bench, still sat in his spot, still ate whatever Sanemi brought him. But the texts got shorter. The invitations got declined. Friday movie night, which had been sacred and immovable for two years, suddenly had conflicts. Giyuu was busy—a word he'd never used before because he'd never needed to, because his calendar was empty in a way that used to make Sanemi furious with the rest of the world for overlooking him.

He was pulling away. Inch by inch, thread by thread, with the same measured precision he brought to everything. And Sanemi recognized it. Giyuu was removing himself. Creating distance before the loss of closeness could happen to him, because if he chose it, at least it wouldn't be a surprise.

It hit Sanemi like a slap. Giyuu had done this before—retreated from people before they could leave him, cut his own losses, folded himself smaller until the gap closed without anyone noticing.

Giyuu was preparing to lose him. And he was going to do it so quietly that Sanemi wasn't supposed to notice until it was done.

Fuck that.

Fuck that.

Thursday evening. A week and a half since the confession. Giyuu had cancelled on dinner and Sanemi stood in his own kitchen reading the text and felt something snap.

I ate already, go without me

He grabbed his jacket and walked.

Giyuu's apartment was on the third floor. Sanemi took the stairs two at a time and knocked hard enough that the door rattled in its frame.

Footsteps. A pause—probably checking the peephole. Then another pause, longer, and Sanemi could picture Giyuu on the other side, weighing his options, calculating the cost of opening up versus the cost of pretending he wasn't home.

The lock turned.

Giyuu opened the door halfway. He was in soft clothes—an old sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up, loose pants—and his hair was damp from a shower, hanging in his face, and his eyes were very blue and very guarded.

"Sanemi."

"Let me in."

"It's late."

"I don't care."

"I was going to—"

"Giyuu.” Sanemi’s voice was firm. “Let me in."

Giyuu's mouth closed. He held Sanemi's gaze for three seconds—something raw flickered through his expression, too fast to catch, and then the mask came back down—and stepped aside.

Sanemi walked in. The apartment was clean, bare, impersonal in a way that still pissed him off even after three years. No photos on the walls, no clutter, no evidence that someone with a heartbeat lived here. Just books and a single plant on the windowsill and a pair of slippers by the door that Sanemi had bought him as a joke and Giyuu had kept without comment.

He turned around. Giyuu stood by the door, arms loose at his sides, watching him.

"You're avoiding me," Sanemi said.

"I'm not."

"Don't. Don't do that, don't lie to me."

"I'm not lying. I've been—"

"Busy. Yeah. You said." He took a step closer. Giyuu didn't step back, but something in his posture shifted—a tightening, a brace. "Except you're never busy, Giyuu. You don't do busy. So don't stand there and tell me I'm imagining it."

The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on. Giyuu's expression didn't change—but his hands did. His fingers curled at his sides, just slightly, the only tell he had left.

"I'm not…" he said, his voice so even and controlled it was maddening. "I just need some space."

"Space from what?"

"From—" Giyuu stopped. The hesitation lasted less than a second, but Sanemi caught it, because he caught everything when it came to Giyuu, because his brain had apparently dedicated ninety percent of its processing power to this one person and he was only just realizing it.

"From you," Giyuu said, flat and final. "I need space from you."

It should have hurt. It did hurt—a pain right through the center of his chest. But the pain burned down to fury, and the fury burned down to certainty. Giyuu didn't mean it how he wanted it to sound.

"Why?"

"Sanemi—"

"Tell me why!"

"Because I need to." The composure was thinning. Giyuu's voice had gained an edge, something desperate underneath the control, and his eyes were too bright. "Just accept it. You don't need a reason."

"Like hell I don't." Sanemi closed the distance between them—two steps, three, until he was close enough to see the pulse jumping in Giyuu's throat, to smell the clean water and cedar cutting through the suppressant's blankness. "You're my best friend. You're trying to disappear on me. I think I deserve a reason."

"You don't want this reason."

"Try me."

"Sanemi."

"I heard you."

The words dropped between them like a blade.

Giyuu stopped. Everything about him stopped—deeper than his usual composure, as if every organ had shut down at once. His eyes widened by a fraction. The color drained from his face so fast that Sanemi thought for a panicked second that he was going to pass out.

"...What?"

"Friday night. On the couch." Sanemi held his gaze and willed his voice to stay steady. "I wasn't asleep."

The silence stretched. Giyuu stared at him, and Sanemi watched the understanding register—watched it hit and sink in and do damage, watched three years of guarded concealment collapse in real time behind those blue eyes. The mask didn't come back up. For the first time, it just... wasn't there. And underneath it, Giyuu looked terrified.

"Forget it," Giyuu said. His voice had gone thin. "It doesn't matter. I didn't mean—"

"Don't."

"—it's not—"

"Giyuu. Don't tell me you didn't mean it."

"Why not?" And there it was—the crack. The composure splitting at the seams, three years of silence fracturing, and what spilled through the cracks was grief and want and a resignation so complete it made Sanemi's blood boil. "What good does it do? You know now, fine. You know. So let me deal with it the only way I know how, and give me the space I'm asking for, and in a few months it'll be—"

"A few months?"

"—fine, it'll be fine, I'll—"

"You'll what? Disappear? Cut me off? Go back to eating alone and acting like you don't exist?" Sanemi was closer now, close enough that the heat of his body was bridging the gap, and his voice had dropped low and rough. "You'll go back to being alone because that's easier than telling me the truth to my face?"

"It's not about easy—"

"Then what's it about? Huh? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you decided how this ends without ever giving me a say in it."

Giyuu's breath caught. His lips parted and nothing came out, and Sanemi could see the war happening behind his eyes—the pull toward honesty fighting the survival instinct that had kept him hidden for so long.

"You weren't supposed to hear it," Giyuu said at last. Barely above a whisper. "I just needed to—I just needed it to be real for one second. Outside of my head. I didn't—" His voice cracked. "I didn't want it to ruin this."

Something inside Sanemi broke—broke open, like a door giving way under sustained pressure, and everything he'd been holding behind it came flooding forward.

"Say it again."

Giyuu flinched. "What?"

"Say it again. To my face. While I'm looking at you."

"I can't—"

"You can." Sanemi's hand came up. Not grabbing—reaching. His fingers closed around Giyuu's wrist, gentle in a way he didn't know he was capable of, and Giyuu's pulse hammered against his thumb so hard he could count the beats. "Giyuu. Say it again."

Giyuu's eyes were wet. He blinked hard, jaw tight, fighting it—but his lashes were damp and his mouth was trembling and he looked wrecked in a way Sanemi had never seen from him. He looked at Sanemi and his mask was gone and his armor was gone and there was nothing between them but air and honesty and the three years of distance that Sanemi was about to annihilate.

"I love you," Giyuu said. His voice shook. "I can't make it stop. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I—"

Sanemi kissed him.

It wasn't gentle or smooth—it was three years of misdirected energy finally finding its target. Sanemi's mouth on Giyuu's, one hand still around his wrist and the other coming up to grip the side of his jaw, pulling him in, holding him still, keeping him. Giyuu made a sound against his lips—a small, broken thing, half gasp and half sob—and for one horrible second he didn't respond and Sanemi thought I read this wrong, I read this wrong—

Then Giyuu kissed him back.

His hands came up and gripped the front of Sanemi's jacket and he kissed him like he was drowning and Sanemi was air, desperate and clumsy and shaking, and the taste of him—past the suppressants, past the control—was sweet and clean and so unbearably right that Sanemi's knees buckled.

They broke apart gasping. Sanemi pressed his forehead against Giyuu's and breathed him in and said, "Don't apologize."

Giyuu's fingers tightened in his jacket. "You—"

"I'm an idiot. I've been an idiot for three years. Everyone else figured it out and I was too fucking stubborn to see it, and I swear to God, Giyuu, if you try to disappear on me after this I will kick down every door between us."

A sound escaped Giyuu—small, involuntary, something between a laugh and a fracture. "You can't just—"

"I can. I will. I'm doing it right now." Sanemi pulled back enough to look at him. Giyuu's face was open in a way Sanemi had never seen—flushed, undone, his lips red and his eyes wide and his entire body trembling with the effort of being this exposed.

"I love you too," Sanemi said. The words came out rough, raw, stripped of every defense he'd ever built. "I've loved you too, and I'm pissed at myself for how long it took, and if you need to hear it again I'll say it as many times as you want."

Giyuu looked at him. Searched his face for the lie, the trick, the impending disaster—and didn't find one. His grip on Sanemi's jacket loosened. His hands slid up, slow and uncertain, until his palms rested flat against Sanemi's chest, over his heart, and the touch was so tentative, so fragile, that Sanemi felt his own throat close.

"Okay," Giyuu whispered. "Okay."

Sanemi kissed him again. Softer this time, but not by much—there was too much between them, too many years of compression, too much want packed into too small a space. Giyuu opened for him and the sound he made was small and wrecked and Sanemi wanted to swallow it, keep it, hear it for the rest of his life.

They stumbled backward. Giyuu's back hit the wall and Sanemi crowded into him, one hand braced beside Giyuu's head, the other sliding down to grip his hip through the thin material of his pants. Giyuu arched into the contact—a small, involuntary roll of his body—and his scent shifted.

Sanemi froze.

It was—different. Behind the suppressant, behind the rigid chemical wall Giyuu had been maintaining for years, something was bleeding through—warm and sweet and thick enough to taste on the back of Sanemi's tongue. He breathed in and his hindbrain lit up with a recognition so deep it felt genetic—omega, here, yours—and a growl built in his chest before he could stop it.

Giyuu's breath stuttered. "My scent—"

"I can smell you." Sanemi's voice had dropped. Lower, rougher, dragged down by instinct and want. He pressed his nose to the curve of Giyuu's neck, where the scent gland pulsed beneath the skin, and even through the suppressant patch the sweetness was enough to make his head swim. His fingers found the edge of the patch—a small, skin-colored square just below Giyuu's jaw—and he paused.

"Can I?"

Giyuu's breath hitched. He hesitated for half a second, then nodded.

Sanemi peeled it off slowly. The adhesive pulled at Giyuu's skin, and Giyuu winced, and then the patch was gone and Giyuu's scent hit him full and unfiltered and Sanemi's knees nearly buckled.

Lilies and rainfall and underneath it sweet and alive—Giyuu's real scent, the one he'd been smothering since he was fifteen, pouring off his skin in waves now that the barrier was gone. Sanemi buried his face in Giyuu's neck and breathed and breathed and couldn't stop, his hands gripping Giyuu's waist, his whole body leaning into him like gravity had shifted.

"Fuck." His voice came out wrecked. "Fuck, Giyuu, you smell so good." He found the second patch, lower, near the collarbone, and peeled that one too, and the scent doubled and Giyuu shuddered against the wall and Sanemi thought he might actually lose his mind. "It's a goddamn shame you've been hiding this."

Giyuu's head tipped back against the wall. His breathing was fractured, his fingers curling into Sanemi's shoulders. "People stared. I didn't like it."

The flatness of the delivery—even now, even with Sanemi's mouth on his throat and his scent seeping through every crack in his defenses—made Sanemi want to laugh and break something at the same time. Of course Giyuu had buried himself. Of course he'd taken the thing that made him vulnerable and locked it away with the same ruthless efficiency he applied to everything about himself that hurt.

Sanemi pressed his mouth to Giyuu's pulse point—just lips, warm and firm, against the racing beat beneath his skin. "You don't have to hide from me."

Giyuu shuddered. His whole body went tight, then loose, then tight again—a cycle of resistance and surrender that Sanemi could feel rippling through him. "I know," he said, and his voice was small, and it was honest.

They made it to the bedroom.

Barely. 

Giyuu's apartment was small—the hallway was six steps at most—but they stopped twice. The hallway was a blur of mouths and hands and Giyuu's back against surfaces, Sanemi pressing into him at every available opportunity because now that he'd started touching Giyuu he couldn't stop, his body making up for years of restraint with a single-minded intensity that left no room for hesitation. Giyuu pulled at his jacket, his shirt, his belt—fingers urgent and clumsy, hands that shook with every buckle and button—and Sanemi let himself be undressed because the feeling of Giyuu's hands on his bare skin was a revelation he hadn't known he was waiting for.

They fell onto the bed tangled together. Sanemi over Giyuu, braced on his forearms, looking down at him—and the sight hit him so hard it stalled his breath. Giyuu, spread out beneath him, lips swollen, hair fanned dark against the pillow, his sweatshirt rucked up to expose a strip of pale stomach. His eyes were half-lidded, his chest heaving, and his scent was everywhere—blooming through the suppressant in waves, sweet and deep and intoxicating, an omega in the early flush of arousal, and every alpha impulse Sanemi had ever buried was clawing to the surface.

"Tell me to stop," Sanemi said. "If you need me to stop."

"I don't." Giyuu's hand came up and touched his face. Fingertips tracing the scar, the sharp line of his jaw, the shape of his mouth. His expression was open and aching and so full of want that it made Sanemi's vision blur. "I've wanted this. I've wanted you. Don't stop."

Sanemi kissed him like it was the last thing he'd ever do. Deep, thorough, a kiss that left no room for doubt—and Giyuu met him stroke for stroke, his tongue sliding against Sanemi's, his body rising off the mattress to press against him.

Clothes came off in pieces. Sanemi pulled the sweatshirt over Giyuu's head and discovered that his skin was as pale and smooth as it looked, warm under Sanemi's rough palms, and Giyuu's breath hitched when Sanemi's hands mapped his ribs, his waist, the dip of his hip bones. Giyuu tugged at Sanemi's shirt until it was gone and then stared—openly, without pretense—at the planes of his chest, the corded muscle, the scars that marked his torso. His fingers traced one, a long ridge across Sanemi's side from a fight in high school, and the gentleness of the touch made Sanemi's stomach clench.

"You're staring," Sanemi murmured against his jaw.

"You're worth staring at."

The words punched the air out of his lungs. He dropped his forehead against Giyuu's collarbone and laughed, rough and breathless, because what else could he do? 

This man. 

This impossible, infuriating, devastating man who hid a love confession in a whisper and delivered a compliment like a weather report.

He worked his way down Giyuu's body. Mouth on his throat, his collarbones, his chest. Giyuu's reactions were restrained—bitten-off breaths, small shifts of his hips, fingers tightening in the sheets—but Sanemi was fluent in Giyuu's restraint by now, and he could read the want in every suppressed sound. He wanted to break through it. Wanted to find out what Giyuu sounded like when he stopped holding back.

When Sanemi's mouth reached the waistband of his pants, Giyuu's hand shot into his hair.

"Wait." His voice was ragged. "I want—" He paused. Swallowed. "I want to feel you. All of you. I've wanted it for so long, I don't want to—"

He couldn't finish. Couldn't say I don't want to rush this, couldn't admit to the years of daydreaming and longing and silent, desperate hoping. But Sanemi heard it. He heard everything Giyuu didn't say, the same way he'd learned to read every expression Giyuu didn't make.

"Then we'll go slow," Sanemi said. He kissed Giyuu's hip bone, felt the muscle twitch beneath his lips. "We'll go whatever speed you need."

They undressed the rest of each other with a tenderness that felt foreign to both of them—Sanemi, who lived at full volume, and Giyuu, who lived behind glass. But here, in the low light of Giyuu's sparse bedroom, they found a register that belonged only to them. Slow hands and held breaths and the electric weight of skin meeting skin with nothing between them.

Giyuu was wet. Slick and trembling and so responsive to every touch that his composure crumbled inch by inch, and Sanemi watched it happen with a reverence he hadn't known he possessed. He worked Giyuu open with his fingers, slowly, and Giyuu's hips rolled against his hand and his head pressed back into the pillow and the sounds that escaped him were small, breathless, bitten-short.

"Sanemi." Giyuu's voice broke on his name. His hand found Sanemi's wrist—not stopping him, holding on. "Please."

Sanemi leaned down and pressed his mouth to the hinge of Giyuu's jaw. 

He pulled his hand away slowly, and Giyuu made a small sound at the loss—involuntary, barely there, but Sanemi caught it and held onto it. He pressed his forehead to Giyuu's and said, "Do you have condoms?"

Giyuu blinked. The question seemed to take a moment to reach him through the haze, and when it did, a flush crept up his neck. He shook his head.

"No."

"No?"

"I don't—" Giyuu's jaw tightened. His gaze slid to the side, and the embarrassment in it was so raw it made Sanemi's chest ache. "I've never needed them. There's no one." A pause, and then, quieter: "I've never been with anyone. So you don't have to worry."

Sanemi's brain stalled. He stared at Giyuu—flushed, looking anywhere but at him, jaw set like he was bracing for judgment—and something twisted in his chest.

"Shit," Sanemi said. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "I'm your first?"

Giyuu's silence was answer enough. The flush had spread to his ears.

Sanemi swallowed hard.

"We don't have to," he said. "We can—"

"I want to." Giyuu's eyes came back to his, steady and certain even through the flush. His hand found the back of Sanemi's neck, fingers pressing into the muscle there. "I want to feel you. I want—" His voice dropped. "I want it to be you. Just you. Nothing between us."

Sanemi's breath left him in a rush. He turned his head and pressed his mouth to Giyuu's palm, and Giyuu's fingers trembled against his lips.

"Okay," Sanemi said. "Okay."

He lined himself up and paused—pressed against Giyuu's entrance without pushing in, just the blunt heat of him resting there, and Giyuu's entire body went taut. Sanemi rocked forward, slow, grinding against him without entering, and Giyuu's hips stuttered, and his breath broke apart, and his fingers dug into Sanemi's arms hard enough to bruise.

"Sanemi—" Half plea, half demand. "Alpha, please."

He sank into Giyuu slowly. Felt him stretch, open, his body giving way for Sanemi with a trust that bordered on annihilation. Giyuu's breath stopped. His back arched. His nails dug into Sanemi's shoulders—the first rough, uncontrolled thing he'd done all night—and the noise he made was nothing like the controlled, composed sounds from before—raw and shattered and full of every word he'd never let himself say out loud.

Sanemi held still. Pressed their foreheads together. Breathed Giyuu's air. "Look at me."

Giyuu's eyes opened—wet and blown dark, vulnerable beyond anything Sanemi had ever seen from him, every layer stripped back, down to the terrified, wanting person who had spent his life convinced that this wasn't something he got to have.

"I'm here," Sanemi said. "I'm not going anywhere."

He moved. Slow, then not. Giyuu matched him—hips lifting, legs wrapping around Sanemi's waist, hands gripping his back with a desperation that left marks. The sweetness of his scent intensified with every thrust, flooding the room, saturating the sheets, and Sanemi breathed it in like a man starving. He wanted to live inside this smell for the rest of his life.

Giyuu got louder. Not by much, but the sounds broke through in gasps and fractured syllables; Sanemi's name twisted into shapes that didn't sound like language anymore. All of it—composure, mask, walls—gone, and what was left was just a man in love being loved back for the first time, and the enormity of it trembled through his entire body.

Sanemi was losing his mind.

Giyuu was so tight around him, so hot and slick and pulling—every thrust dragged a grip from Giyuu's body that made Sanemi's vision white out at the edges. He'd been on the edge since the first push in, teeth gritted, every muscle in his arms shaking with the effort of holding himself together because he wanted this to last. He wanted to give Giyuu more, wanted to drag this out until they were both ruined, but Giyuu kept clenching around him—involuntary, rhythmic, his body reacting faster than his control could catch—and every time he did, Sanemi felt the thin thread of his restraint fray a little further.

"Giyuu—" His voice came out wrecked, barely recognizable. "You're gonna make me—fuck, I can't—"

Giyuu's legs tightened around his waist, pulling him deeper, and his hips rolled up to meet Sanemi's next thrust, and that was it—that was the thread snapping, the last scrap of control burning away.

When Giyuu came apart, he let out a drawn-out shudder, a gasp that cracked at the edges, his body pulling Sanemi deeper, his scent blooming full and sweet and unrestrained. Sanemi followed him over the edge, buried inside him, mouth pressed to the juncture of his neck and shoulder—not biting, not yet, but close, close enough that the intention was a promise.

Giyuu felt it—the warmth of Sanemi spilling inside him, filling him, spreading slow and deep. His breath caught on something between a gasp and a sigh, and his arms tightened around Sanemi's back, holding him there, keeping him close. He didn't want him to pull away. Not yet. Not when he could still feel every pulse of it, every aftershock, Sanemi's hips stuttering against his in the last unsteady rhythm of release.

They lay tangled together in the wreckage of it, breathing hard and shaking. Giyuu's face tucked into Sanemi's neck, his body still trembling with aftershocks, his scent settling into something warm and content—and Sanemi tightened his arms and held him like he could physically prevent the world from taking this away.

"I love you," Sanemi murmured into his hair. Rough, spent, so low it was barely there. "I love you."

Giyuu's fingers curled against his chest, and he pressed closer, and said nothing, and said everything.

Sanemi woke up first.

Gray light through thin curtains, the hum of the building's heating, an unfamiliar ceiling—and Giyuu.

Giyuu, curled against his side with one hand resting flat on Sanemi's chest, right over his heart. His face was slack with sleep, his lashes dark against his cheeks, his lips parted. His hair was tangled. There was a mark on his collarbone from Sanemi's teeth, from hours ago—and his scent was unguarded in sleep, clean and sweet and layered with something that smelled like satisfaction.

Sanemi stared at him. Let himself stare without pretending it was something else.

Giyuu's face, Giyuu's presence, this stubborn, impossible, beautiful man who'd loved him in silence for three years and would have kept loving him in silence forever if the words hadn't slipped out at the wrong time.

Or the right time. The exact right time.

He brushed a strand of hair from Giyuu's face. Giyuu stirred. His lashes flickered, and his hand twitched against Sanemi's chest, and then his eyes opened—clear, blue, momentarily unguarded—and found Sanemi's face.

Confusion flickered first, then memory—and then a blush so sudden that it swept from his cheeks to his ears to the back of his neck, and his expression collapsed into something caught between mortification and wonder.

"Morning," Sanemi said.

Giyuu stared at him. Didn't move his hand from Sanemi's chest. "...Morning."

"You gonna run?"

Giyuu blinked at him. Sleep-slow, still surfacing. "No," he said. And then, after a pause, said softly. "Are you going to ask me that every morning?"

The word every hit Sanemi somewhere behind the ribs. Every morning. As in more than this one. As in Giyuu was already thinking past today.

"Maybe," Sanemi said. "Depends on if you keep looking at the door."

"I wasn't looking at the door. We're at my apartment. Where am I gonna go?"

"You were thinking about it."

Giyuu's mouth twitched. "I was thinking about whether you'd want coffee."

Sanemi exhaled. He pulled Giyuu closer—an arm around his waist, firm and possessive—and Giyuu came without resistance, tucking against him like it was easy, like they'd done this a hundred times.

"I still can't believe you confessed to me while I passed out on the couch," Sanemi muttered into his hair.

"I thought you were asleep."

"Yeah, that's the problem. You've been in love with me for three years and that’s the best that you could manage."

"I wasn't expecting an audience."

Sanemi snorted. Pressed his lips to Giyuu's lips. "You're unbelievable."

"You like me anyway."

"I do." Sanemi's voice softened. Dropped to something low and sure. "I do."

Giyuu didn't speak for a long time. His breathing evened out against Sanemi's chest, slow and steady, and his hand stayed where it was—open, resting, no longer gripping. The tension that lived permanently in his shoulders was gone.

"Sanemi," Giyuu said softly.

"Yeah."

"Thank you for… everything."

It took a second. Then Sanemi remembered the beginning of everything, disguised as an impulse, disguised as nothing.

Sanemi's arm tightened around him. He pressed his face into Giyuu's hair and breathed in his scent.

"Yeah," he said. "Me too."

fin.