Fic: 16.5°C
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
The truth is I changed persons and tenses a couple of times before settling on second, present, so, haha, please tell me if you see anything odd. In relation to the title, 16.5 degrees is fairly chilly for the hotter months around here (I SPEAK NOT FOR THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN ICELAND).
Inspired by the above snippet from the poem As I Walked Out One Evening by Wystan Hugh Auden. For
arrankaara because you are sweet and talented and asjksdjksl; drew me Gokuderaaa. <33Title: 16.5°C
Characters/Pairing: 8059
Word Count: 787
Excerpt: "Close quarters means sharing, even the things you’d rather keep to yourself – that last bit of disinfectant at the bottom of the bottle, toothpaste, nightmares, hope."
It’s summer, so you think the sudden rain may be disturbing Gokudera, even though it’s not entirely unwelcome, and cuts apart the slough of built-up heat and loss and blame. Blame shifts like water, sticks to you like sweat, and you do what you used to do when you were a child and someone sneezed on your arm; you reached for their clean shirt with vengeful, groping hands. (Look, the seasons are turning, oh, when will this ever end?)
But for the most part all of you remain unaffected, watching the clouds gather on Giannini’s high-resolution screens, as though the outside world were something from TV. No matter how its explosions rock your heart, your feet and body stay unmoved. This is how they live now. This is how to keep living. And hasn’t it worked so far? Haven’t they learned their lesson? (Tsuna, Tsuna, Tsuna.)
You have become something of a weatherman. Swift changes have Gokudera ill at ease; cold bouts bring low blood pressure, sleep that’s hard to wake from. If the air is cooler, crisper, Lambo is a bundle of static energy, not to be allowed near anything with a plug, especially the coffee-maker.
You need socks to navigate the concrete floors now, scrounging blankets from unlikely places, finding excuses to lean in and steal body heat, scratch Uri under the chin. Predictably, Gokudera’s feet remain bare, even as he hops about the base and curls his toes. No socks in July because July is supposed to be warm; you wonder who makes up these rules and why Gokudera bothers to follow them.
You think he may have inherited superstition from his long line of mafia forefathers. He sees importance in things he can’t predict - like sporadic showers, drops in temperature. Superstition and suspicion are close brothers after all, and no one can deny the use of the latter, not in this day and age, not without crossing their fingers. (Stick a needle in your eye; hope to die, to die, to die.) In some ways, it isn’t surprising. Gokudera’s need for order and absolute, systematic control rivals even Hibari’s. (You don’t really get it, but that’s not surprising either; Gokudera was always good at maths in school, while you were average at everything that wasn’t baseball.)
Here we come to the crux of the matter: recently, you haven’t felt like yourself.
Maybe it’s from seeing the same grey blur for sky; maybe this is the first sign of old age (at twenty-four, twenty-five) and the bitterness has finally caught up to you. You’re sick. Not sick like Lal (not that kind of sick, not yet), sick to the stomach, sick in the head, heartsick. You have dreams where you wash your hands in basins of red water; you lurch awake to discover flecks of blood in the sink. Not all of it is yours. Close quarters means sharing, even the things you’d rather keep to yourself – that last bit of disinfectant at the bottom of the bottle, toothpaste, nightmares, hope. (You’re not sure how you ended up in a future like this, where there isn’t enough of anything to go around. Time is the real villain. It’s taken a fancy to the ones you adore, snatching them away in a breath, coughing when you would kiss.)
Madness. You’re descending into it; can’t climb out of your feelings anymore; can’t pull out the thorn that’s in your body. And Gokudera knows. Gokudera knows. (So, this is the real crux, the root that’s taken hold and can’t be dug out.) You’ve done this for a long time; observing each other carefully, like lovers, skirting each other’s eyes, propping each other up without touching. Gokudera knows, and you can tell from the way he tracks you, presses his face to your dirty clothes in the laundry (as if you were Tsuna, as if you were numbered among the dead).
You must be crazier than you thought because his pain sets something curling in your belly; it’s attractive, and your self-control is unraveling in the face of it, of that overwhelming, pre-emptive grief. It’s not fair to start anything between you, not when there’s no chance of finishing, when whoever doesn’t die is left to pick up the pieces (because you both know there’s only one way left to go, and that’s in place of the other).
But the door pushes open easily (too easily) and you can’t seem to locate the last dredges of your resolve. Gokudera freezes, startled into looking at you, really looking – and the edge is somewhere behind you; you’re beyond caution or admonition now (so what if the world is ending? Hayato is right there –)
He whimpers into your mouth.