[They were inverses, and stubborn ones — the simultaneous effect of a positive and a negative force trying to assert power over one another. Akira had brandished the dangerous tenderness of an openly-bared heart as an example and invitation to Ryo, always trying to convince him to let go of the seashell armor he had gathered up around him, hoping that the steadiness of a home and someone to care for him would wash away the cold and the brine he'd once felt matting his hair and crusting over his skin. Ryo had never succumbed to that argument, though he had faltered, and that had been enough for Akira. But each and every step of the way Ryo had struggled to impress upon him the foolishness of his so-called empathetic bravery, pointing out what would hurt him and seeking to excise potential threats when he refused to accept either change or distance. This essential difference within the both of them was immutable — it would always be there, to shape both them and their points of view. These fundamental differences would never act as lines of division between them because they originated from the same place — from the overwhelming importance placed in another person, coupled with instinct to protect and defend that which they held most dear. This would only ever draw them back to one another, like the incessant magnetic pull of the poles or the slow cosmic draw of the oceans to the moon.
It was always like that: a push and pull, of words and intent, of actions and reactions. Just as there was no word Ryo said that went unconsidered by Akira, there was no subsequent guiding motion he performed that didn't go without its proper response. They worked together in equal parts to rid him of the jumpsuit, mutually rewarded by the sweep of Akira's hands over the newly-bared skin, the way Ryo's body shuddered beneath his palms at the touch. He would never have gone this far, to settle alongside Ryo with little more than heat and tempered impatience between them, if he had experienced anything else but nearly reckless enthusiasm, in word and voice and etched into every movement of his body. Regardless of what the beast grafted into each and every one of his cells demanded of him, he would've been able to contain it, but as it is — with Ryo's blood seeming to rush just as hot as his own, his breaths echoing in similar discordance, the sweep of his eyelashes hiding a similar level of liquid desire, well. It only turns him on even more, but fortunately it seems matched and met in Ryo, palpable even when his hands aren't directly on him, thick on his tongue even with it kept behind his teeth. He reads it in him the way he would anything else.
Ryo has always been calm, collected, fastidious. It paints his every decision, as it carries over into motion, and it does so in a way that Akira can't even find himself aggravated with because it's so him, that to insist otherwise would be to deface his agency. The shaping of his fingers through the fabric was so slow he could count it with his racing heartbeats, could count it with the breaths that scraped their way up and down his trachea, anticipating what they promised, yearning so much for it that it nearly pressed pleas into his mouth. But, no, sometimes when he was like this, Ryo merely needed a push, and that's what Akira's brusque actions were — where Ryo would weigh and consider his action, constructing it in his mind so that he could perfectly see the outcome before he even sought to enact it, Akira followed his gut. It usually had mixed results. And here it's the same. As his hand had forged its way insistently downward, he leaned in closer, his head ever-so-slightly angled, keeping a seemingly-promised kiss withheld in a vague echo of Ryo's hand against him, though the difference was in his own. His heart gives a sharp hammer as his body reacts to the sudden stroke of his hand; he surges forward to be able to ride this reaction, mouth opening to catch the round of Ryo's bottom lip gently in his teeth at the same moment the gasp broke over them, impressing his ownership over it — though there is a low groan in the back of his throat as Ryo's fingers reflexively curl around him.
It's short-lived. He releases Ryo's lip as soon as that pressure moves away (there's no taste of blood), as soon as the familiarity of the sound of his voice to when he'd broken the skin of his neck with his teeth. That — hadn't been his intention. He's lost for a moment, confused, separating enough from Ryo so that he could see him lift his hand towards himself, presenting the palm. He seems borderline baffled as he draws his tongue up the breadth of his hand (though he can't deny reading the lasciviousness of the action, his breath forming a warm bloom between them as his eyes caught the way his fingers curled into his mouth). He doesn't stop moving at this, though he's keenly aware of the crack of his voice around the shelf of his fingers, the way that his body leaps when the drag of his fingers grow faint enough to only serve as a distant reminder of what they had just done. No, he finally understands when Ryo's hand falls past his waist once more, not distracted from mirroring what he had done just moments prior. His mouth drops open another small increment as his hand bypasses the border of fabric and wraps, warm and slick, around his cock, the movements still characteristically measured but feeling utterly licentious with how easy it is — every ministration before this had been so slow, so tantalizing, so formless and ephemeral, it had stretched out his anticipation to the breaking point of this moment. The spread of his thumb upwards, bare and wet over the head, causes what remainder of air in his lungs to leave him in a low moan; the sensation of that, of the tempo that Ryo's hand begins to find over him — it knocks away everything else, and he can't stop himself from pressing his hips forward slightly into the touch, almost greedy now that what he had yearned for had been given.
But — on the heels of the pleasure thrumming up along the highway of his spine to crash into the base of his skull, he's — frustrated. His mouth closes with a faintly audible click of his jaws, and he removes his hand from Ryo, lifting it up towards him as he ducks his head. There's none of the measured salaciousness, no artistry or form to it. He is all speed and function as he mimics Ryo yet again, his tongue rasping over his palm and the undersides of his fingers. He wastes no time, reaching once more past the interfering boundary of cloth, but then he changes tact, like a train changing its track — his movements become a bit slower, a bit more careful, first little more than the light press of his fingertips as the rough of his palm pass slick over the head of his cock, slowly rotating his hand so that it passed through the gap formed in the curl of his thumb and forefinger, coupled with the pressure of the purlicue of his hand and the meat of his thumb. He strokes him once, slowly and carefully, looking to find a similar ease with the additional wetness. As he does this he angles his head upward, not lifting it but instead pressing his open mouth to Ryo's throat, his tongue running over the shape of his Adam's apple, the ever-so-slight drag of his lower teeth following. They are somewhat discordant, the roughness of that kiss and how methodical the movement of his hand is, but they follow the same tempo for a few beats. Then he lifts his head once more, distributing a single, fleeting kiss to the line of his jaw before returning to where their lips were so close they might nearly touch, though for now all Akira does is bring the rough, affected presence of his breathing to that infinitesimal space, his gaze flicking upwards through heavy eyelashes to capture his own.]
As children, they’d crossed each other naturally like the shadow of the moon against the blue shell of the Earth, the soft swell of the ocean. Ryo was an absent and loveless thing, something to be gazed upon at a distance. But, Akira harbored in him all that was rich and warm and somehow beautiful, the press of his fingers in his like soil to roots or sun to flowers. Where Akira waited, Ryo followed in ways he did not recognize. Like the washing of salt from the earth, little by little Akira had made all of Ryo more hospitable, less opposed to the growth that could come so long as it was him who coaxed Ryo into Spring, no matter how he tried to supplant the tentative, fragile sprigs. Akira had always bloomed to him, even if he could not see it. Akira had always been something welcoming, a being that gathered light instead of merely reflecting it toward what deserved it most.
And here, Ryo finds himself in the grey of comprehension. He knows the composition of chemicals that floods through him, Akira, the bursts of adrenaline and the rush of dopamine. He knows the addictive qualities of what is and what will be, but beneath his explanations yawns something indistinct and weighted — something that draws up smaller gasps where he had once been silent, the skim of Akira’s teeth and tongue at his throat, catching against his lower lip enough to pull up the audible hitch of breath, the instinctual reaction to arch and mold against all that he gives him. Ryo too is greedy in ways he does not recognize, but his body fully crystallizes beneath the heavy stretch of their shared heat against his skin.
Humans chase pleasure their entire lives. They take risks, they plunge forward into feats both moral and immoral, coast in and out of the shadows of society like the way hands coast past hips. Ryo’s justifications are buried in the flesh of him, but the way Akira follows into perfect mirror — the lazy curvature of his hand about his cock, slicked, Ryo finds a matching note in the way he drags the pad of his fingers up the shaft, the careful and calculated application of pressure. Akira’s hand is stronger and rougher in comparison to his own, but he can feel so acutely each effort at softness — the impression of care that Ryo never once took with himself. Akira takes his time, as much Ryo does without ever bringing into the focus the cause. Even as Akira brushes his lips against his jaw, peers at him across the minuscule expanse as he settles back beside him — the recognition willfully blurs. It becomes hazy, the more his body wants, responds in ways far more noticeable to Akira than they would ever be to him.
It’s a minute distance, but the fissure runs deep. It runs painfully into all that Ryo is, but still he finds a way across it. Like the first rush of water over seawalls, the destructive tide brought up by storms — a certain determination to take all that it can back into the dark of its body, pulling back stone and mortar. His nose brushes against Akira’s as he leans in, presses his mouth to the corner of Akira’s lips. It’s soft and it’s fleeting, like the burning of fog off the ocean. It comes back again, in a shudder of a breath, formless words breaking across Akira’s skin like waves against palms. It skims through the whole of what could be but does not quite exist as he presses up into the loose circle of Akira’s fist, his own hand keeping a languid tempo, the next exhalation caught against the mold of his lips as Ryo finally commits to the act after a long draw.
He’d never bothered with others quite like this. Kisses had been perfunctory and performative. But, there’s something compulsive and sharp in him that seeks to do this — and in the moment he indulges what he would typically pass off as baser needs. For a moment, there’s a flare of inquisitive hunger in the way he licks at the seam of Akira’s lips, asks for what he had granted Akira earlier. For a moment, he thinks of the way that Akira had watched him through the sweep of his lashes and his every thought tangles into a indefinable loop that does not allow itself to be undone.
And it pulls taut, like the cast of desire and the welling of all things hot and shapeless he cannot begin to place behind the cage of his ribs.
Akira had always been so transparent. He had been always there for Ryo to read, just as he reads him now, but blinds himself to the most critical edge. Like rainwater across the petals of skeleton flowers, the rubbing of scales off a moth’s wings. There are some things that do not fade under scrutiny. There are some things that Ryo cannot grasp in both his hands, because he keeps them closed. There are some things — and Ryo almost sighs, a sound both low and warm, against the full of Akira’s lips. ]
[No person was meant to navigate life alone. They weren't constructed that way. Maybe Ryo would have a more educated or artful way of putting it, weaving together a loose enough tapestry of evolutionary behavioral theory that would support it or otherwise, painting human beings as the types of creatures that thrived upon cooperation and coordination, almost dependent in a way on connection, on community, on the bonds that could form which could stave away the less desirable trappings of the curse of consciousness and conscience. It certainly seemed that Ryo had tried to be an exclusion to this social tendency, but Akira had been a flaw in that, tethering the other boy to himself in a single fragile moment on the cliffs by the roaring ocean. He hadn't necessarily sought to change him — just to shine light on what he might not notice naturally, hoping that he (already so much smarter and cleverer than Akira could ever be) would come to his own new conclusions. He believes in some small ways it's worked, ways which he would give a faint smile to and keep to himself.
In others he has definitive proof.
By the necessity of his new body he is often rough and brusque in his actions, following the physical demeanor and energy that now feels inherent to himself, but in matters that tangled up between the mind and the heart, his touch can be far more subtle. With their proximity, with his single and determined focus on Ryo, he is cognizant of each and every action and reaction, the jump of skin and the shudder of flesh and the serrated quality of breath — he can sense the tentative warmth of his lips as they search out his own, the somewhat distant sense of something else, hesitant and slightly under-developed, reaching out to its full extent towards him in these moments. They were not something he would lord over Ryo. They are both stubborn to their cores, alternatingly an unstoppable force and an immovable object in different situations. These were things he would also keep to himself, to preserve in himself not the hope but the fervent belief that Ryo was wrong and that one day he would come to realize it. But Akira could be patient for that day, and he would be more than willing to help pile up the conflicting evidence in the meanwhile.
To the best of his ability Akira is careful. Though there is an undeniable pressure burning bright inside of him, thrumming through his veins, pressing against the thin barrier of his skin, he wrestles it down and overpowers it, keeping it restrained as he otherwise mimics a similar pace as Ryo's, hand naturally forming to whatever he notices elicits the best response from him, very little falling through the cracks of his visual and physical attention. That is, of course, until the almost indiscernible turn of his head, the feather-light touch of his lips to the corner of his mouth. He feels something in it as it retreats, something lingering in the air like a half-finished statement. Akira hangs on those invisible words, his eyes lidding heavily once more at the slick stimulation of Ryo's hand up and down his length — the distinct press of Ryo's hips into his hand. His rough breath blooms tense and hot against the side of Ryo's face, the pace of his hand increasing for a few strokes, the circle of his fingers tightening ever-so-slightly, rippling around the shape of his cock to try to push him just a bit further — before he calms and returns to the previous tempo, he leashes himself, because that insistent force within him doesn't want to wait, it wants to batter and break its way free, to pull exultation from Ryo by force and take it from him for his own pleasure as well, but it — like so many other things on a daily basis he enforces control over, ever unwilling to become something like that.
Those impulses become much quieter as Ryo finally capitalizes on what he'd been alluding to — Akira had waited for him with all the patience he can muster, eyes flickering up once through his lashes to look at him, an expression caught between concern and something a little more difficult to name (something soft, yearning, quietly expectant) settling onto his face. He wouldn't bypass what he was deliberating to kiss him; he waited until Ryo came to that decision his own, the light ghosting sensation of his lips finally solidifying into the full press of his lips against his own, moving with their own impetus and intent, aided by the inquiry of the hot sweep of tongue against the closed line of his mouth. It ran through Akira's body like an electric shock; he twinges at the honest desire of it, personal and plain, and he is stalled by this for the briefest of moments before he rushes into compliance. His lips part, and his tongue slips forward to taste at the inside of his lip, at the border of his teeth — but he doesn't follow-through with the instinct to press more than that, instead taking a slightly more passive role. It had been Ryo that had initiated this this time, after all, and he waits, wanting, for him to take his advantage in that. Because the noisier, more avaricious pieces of himself seem to grow a little bit more subdued when Ryo does something like that — the gravitational pull towards him, towards every single little thing he did was so much stronger than that personal division.
Though it's not something he can chase from himself entirely. There's aspects and elements of it that bake themselves into his physicality, into his mien, from a slight increase to the heat radiating from his body to the quick, harsh-edged quality to his breathing. There's much to this that he wants to continue to cling to — the impossible closeness he feels to Ryo, with so few barriers remaining (now that they've coordinated to knock a few of the remaining ones down). Regardless of the baseness of his straightforward, bodily desire, Akira is an emotional and sentimental creature, and it's the strength of that which reduces the shear heat of his body to just these few noticeable aspects —
But it's an internal struggle that would continue as the moments pass by, marked by its own quiet attrition.]
[ He’d grown around the impression Akira had left behind.
In his first days in America, Ryo found himself retracing the shape of their last memory, worn smooth by dedication like waves to stone or perhaps Orpheus to Eurydice, his footsteps followed so long as he did not look back to see if Akira was there behind him after all. He recalls that, until they could no longer see the shape of one another against the bright and rolling hills, Akira had watched him go.
He remembers thinking he’d have like to have returned. He would have liked to have trekked back, just long enough to rub the soft pads of his thumbs across the damp skin beneath Akira’s dark eyes and told him not to cry. Not anymore. But, Akira had always told him it was Ryo who cried too. Akira had always cried when Ryo couldn’t, his heart unable to comprehend what it was it felt. He remembers the way Akira’s small hand had balled up in the front of his red shirt, so close to where the sticky ache welled up behind Ryo’s ribs too. He remembers thinking he’d come to find Akira again. Somehow.
He thinks now that it feels almost the same now, as Akira gives and retreats — gives again with the subtle change of pacing, the constriction of his fingers. He thinks Akira follows so dutifully in the path that he’s laid for him, as much as Ryo follows his. Akira’s hand about him is a vivid heat, his palm as grounding as it is freeing, his exploratory touches enough to pull from him breaths both waning and uneven. Each sensation, the stirring something tidal and reaching. Each pass breaks off a little more of him. Each exhalation Akira presses against the pale of his skin makes him forget the hardest boundaries of himself, his harsh edges eroded into something soft and pliant. Wanting.
Where Akira struggles with the basest parts of himself, Ryo struggles to keep all that he is aligned. All that is left is so fragile, fleeting. He holds onto it tightly, because that is all he has ever done. He can't name what it is that rests in the depths of himself. In the dark, Akira's affections are a fixed point on a horizon he's always known, but can't fully contain. It waits for Ryo to let them come. And he does, in some ways. He does in ways he isn't fully sure of. But, Akira —
They'd always been so stubborn. Akira's ideologies skim across him as much as Ryo's skim across Akira. Yet, he'd never belittled Akira for all that he held within. He had never faulted him for his thoughts, had never held himself above them. Akira's perspectives, his thoughtfulness, his consideration for all that the world thought was unforgivable and unpalatable in him — Akira's body yields to him as much as Ryo's yields to him. Each small, blistering sound is swallowed up by the heat of Akira's mouth as he licks in, traces the blunt edge of teeth and the harder points of canines. Ryo's gentleness for him was incomparable. Irrefutable, when placed beside any other. He takes such time to map anything Akira relents to him, presents to him with a willingness so bright it sears across each separation. Akira tastes warm and sweet, metallic across the tip of his tongue. And Ryo knows it is himself, a part of him.
There's a low sound that breaks at the base of his throat before he can contain it, the lines of his body alight with the realization. It moves through him like an undertow, something he can't pin down. He can't raise his head above it. He doesn't wonder what will happen if he doesn't.
Instead, Ryo's curls his fingers a little tighter — makes a firmer circle with his thumb and index finger, stroke him slow and even from base to head. There's no pause between as he curves his wrist, catches just below the ridge. Akira's cock still strains against his palm. And like Akira, there is no deeper concern for himself. There is only what he can do, what he can provide him — and he pulls back just enough to catch the meat of Akira's bottom lip between his teeth. It's a momentary hold, but — the returning kiss isn't without its own pressure. There's no lightness in it, firmer and surer. It's a balm, as much as it is something else. ]
[In the wake of the sorrow of losing his childhood friend, of his parents removing themselves from his life, of moving someplace so huge and loud and crowded and new, of being grafted onto a surrogate family, he had clung to optimism that Ryo would find some sort of happiness in America. With no number or address or email to use to keep in contact with him, that blind hope had been all that he had to link him to his friend — that, and the fledgling feeling that he'd see him again one day that he'd carried at the fragile core of his heart, sheltered like a flame from mercenary winds. It'd been a quiet, soft feeling of relief that'd bloomed in his heart when his mom had sent him the link to one of Ryo's webshows, embedded in an excitable message about "that boy you used to play with when you were kids." He was okay, but — there it grew conflicted. Because Akira could tell immediately he wasn't happy, but at least he was okay, and he had seemingly found some kind of renown and prestige. That he had hadn't surprised him at all. It'd always felt like he was destined for some sort of greatness.
Akira had never been like that; he quietly accepted that he had been born and destined for mediocrity, only breaking from that tentative mold when power had been chanced upon him. He tried not to question it. He merely accepted his lot, as he always had, doing what he could to learn to anticipate its occasionally-hazardous sways, grateful for its reckless strength which gave him — finally — some means of helping Ryo beyond the emotional scaffolding of their friendship. Even with this uneven lack of equity in his mind between them, he had rejected thoughts of deserving, the much truer line of belonging running so deep and so strongly between them that it shattered any such flimsy concerns. He simply knew that he belonged with Ryo, that together they were so much greater than the sum of their parts, their strengths and weaknesses overlapping in such a way that it made them almost seamless. No, they did not begrudge one another those weaknesses or idolize too highly those strengths, accepting of even the aspects they disagreed with.
It's what you did, when you cared for someone.
It is a give and take, a push and pull, a wax and wane, an ebb and flow — a continuous conversation, a ceaseless compromise. It's that way now, with hands goading, lips guiding, the restless energy running throughout them willing. Ryo's tongue slipping into his mouth elicits a sudden rush of hot excitement, his breath escaping as a huff. He kisses him back, meeting him at the places of his examination, tongue running slick and flush against his own. He'd forgotten about the faint taste of blood. It'd run into everything else, the coppery taste transmuted sweet and heady on his tongue, shared with Ryo's. As ever there is a small, immutable gulf in their demeanor, with Ryo never seeming to break from being careful and deliberate, though Akira gave in so easily to thrill and impulse and sharp, unabashed want. It's uniquely excruciating. Every indication of Ryo's interest and initiative to himself and to his body cuts into him deep, makes him bleed for more, and fast, and yet — he is so damn slow, so damn gentle and measured, and the soft and gentle human core at him aches even stronger for this, clinging to the depth of affection that it seemed to belie, ever susceptible to such displays from Ryo — but he's no entirely that kid anymore, and the rest of him is wearing thin, running ragged, less and less likely to be able to keep going on like this —
Ryo seems to react as if he knows, and maybe he does — Akira's always worn so much on his sleeve, projecting all the rest, and his readiness to the increase in tightness of his hand around him, the slow but strong draw, the deft manipulation of his wrist is — in a word, apparent. He throbs, staggers and breaks the pace of their kiss with a sizable gasp, his body seizing up for a moment, hand growing still and tight at the base of Ryo's cock. Teeth catch at his lip, and it seems for a moment almost a knowing sort of gesture, and Akira is moaning in a way that trails into something almost like a growl into Ryo's mouth as he returns to kiss him, grateful for the determination and intent in the circuit of his movements, meeting it and surpassing it, fraught with a heat and a pressure he can't properly keep contained any longer. His hand resumes its movement, keeping a steady and quicker pace as it runs up and down his length, lacking any and all subtle demonstrations (because this body of his was not made for finesse). His other, free up until this point, twists to tangle into the loose bedding; his hips push forward again; he kisses Ryo with a fierceness he's kept at bay thus far, trading his gasping breaths for the taste and heat of his mouth and tongue until his head swims and forces him to break it if just for a moment, gulping at a lungful of air.]
Ryo, [is what accompanies the following, rushing exhale. His eyes flick upwards to find his and — it should be easy, he should be able to just ask, but he can't, the interconnecting inputs of his body and heart and mind all tangled into an inconceivable snarl that he couldn't possibly attempt to fathom in real time. Instead he gives a labored breath, leaning forward and angling his head so that his forehead taps against Ryo's as his eyes fall nearly closed once more, focusing on reining in his ratcheting body temperature, the desperate bellows of his breath. He stays there, as if Ryo would more easily glean from him what he needed to communicate through topical osmosis, taking from him the burden of translating into words the riot that was running through this body of his, catching in his throat and coiling, hot and eager, in the pit of his stomach.]
[ He doesn't remember the day he was accepted into a prestigious university. He doesn't remember the day he graduated, at the top of his class, his speech something he placed only the barest of thought into. He doesn't remember the congratulatory murmurs that rose up around him when his first major paper was published. But, what he does remember is the smell of the Earth on the day of an eclipse. He does remember the curiosity and life that had sparked up in the dark of Akira's eyes, set upon him as though he were as pale and as treasured as the moon. He remembers explaining the transfiguration of the rays of the sun, the way the break between leaves became pinholes of light instead the gray cast of shadow. He remembers treading out into the damp, the blue of his umbrella a match for the dull cover of the sky, the first drops of rain cold and slick down the back of his neck as he shielded Akira and the cat he so wanted to protect though it suffered and struggled until the very end.
Akira may harbor in him the idea that he was always average and ordinary before Ryo invited him into the truth of the world, but Ryo had always known that that perception was an inaccuracy. So close to the source of oneself, it was difficult to see anything at all as extraordinary. And though Ryo could not name or admit what it was that Akira had always meant to him, it had been enough for him to seek him out above all else and above all others. It had been enough to know that Akira's heart, one that could even warm the darkness of Ryo's own, could defeat the greatest evils he'd ever come to know. It had been enough for Ryo to find himself here, exposed and raw beneath the tide of Akira's attention, his heart and blood shot through with chemicals, his hair tangled and his free hand grasping at anything at all to steady him.
There's such small spaces left, such small and unconquerable expanses. Ryo almost shuts his eyes against it. That same pleasure and that same ache pulls all in him close and taut, a current caught against the coast of his body. It courses just below the skin, a hungry and wanting thing. Like all of humanity, it asks for its fill and more, his nerves prickling with each indefinable nuance of touch. There's only so much that one individual can consume, process. Each breath, each glance, each brush of rough fingers against the most receptive parts of him — he remembers the way it had always eventually overwhelmed, like deltas rushed with the melt of mountain snows, the salinity of the sea inundated and balanced in equal turns. But, this is a sensitivity he's never experienced. He's too aware of what it is Akira does, too aware of each gasp he pulls from his mouth. He's too aware of how warm he is against him, around him, beside him. He can't fill his lungs enough to even out the shallows of his breaths, the way that his name pressed so near to him hooks into something starved and neglected inside him. It keeps his voice at bay, as he lifts his eyes to him. It holds it, until it pushes forward all at once.
He'd always said his name like it meant more than it did. Akira had always given it something more than emptiness.
But, Ryo knows what is demanded in the language of Akira's body. It's something he's understood since he was small, translated in what ways he could like a reflex. He's just as much a part of Akira as Akira is a part of him. ]
You don't have to hold back, [ he breathes, his voice a tangible and weighted thing. It pitches amid the softer sounds he tries to keep back, broken over his tongue and teeth like ice in Spring. Their disruption is plain, unrelenting. It's almost painful, as his hips instinctively cant up to follow the heat of Akira's palm. Ryo doesn't stall. His fingers have learned of tender spots, the movements that have gained him the most traction in the desire to weave a clearer arousal. The pace he sets strays far from slow, exploratory — but, the attention is there. The same, calculated edge thins into liquid understanding underscored with the shape of directives. ]
Akira, [ he murmurs. He knows the form of his name. He knows the way it molds together, but has no concept of the way it falls like a psalm, strung like beads of a rosary each time it leaves his tongue. He finds it again, weighted, but soundless. His lips shape it, but nothing comes. It does not need to. It is an assurance, written in just as clearly as if he'd spoken it. Just as clearly as the way he keeps so near to him, each breath shared and taken between them. ]
[Ryo had always felt remote, in one way or another. Even when Akira had dropped to his knees as a kid and held him as closely as he could, tethering him to a world he felt he might just slip away from if he'd remained inert, he'd felt impossibly far away — as if the cold, damp, brine-crusted body he'd crushed to himself had been a projection of someone lost hundreds of miles out at sea. Time had narrowed that distance, but it had never closed it. He had always kept up towering walls around himself through their childhood, walls which Akira had occasionally circumvented but never for long, finding only the briefest moments of emotional clarity (but those which shined most brightly in his mind). Even when he had rushed back into his life, he had felt that same arms-length feeling in him, except it had changed with the ten years they had spent apart. Ryo played a part; he wore a mask of what Akira assumes he thought people expected of him, something which made the path before him easier to walk than how it had been ten years ago. And between them — Akira trusts him implicitly, something which had only lapsed once, and even then it had coiled through his veins like the venom of a snake. Even if Ryo kept things from him, even if those things were pieces of himself, Akira would trust him with it. Surely he had a reason.
And surely one day he would recognize that he would be safe to finally let down that carefully-maintained facade. As it was now, it was simply something else that he readily accepted — there were few people as emotionally-open as Akira, so it certainly didn't make sense to him, but in so many ways Ryo was far beyond his understanding. He accepted him in all of them.
In the end, regardless of all of his reflections and protections, Ryo invariably grew close to him, paradoxical of his emotional isolationism. In the end, they were two people who had been damaged and shaped by the world they had come from, clinging fast to one another to minimize the feeling of solitude that was pervasive in such a place.
If that was what this was, if it was just clinging to human connection when found, or something to distract the mind from other more serious topics of thought, or just the blind and honest pursuit of pleasure and release, then he'd throw himself into it without seecond thought. But — it didn't really feel like just that, at least not to him, at least not when it's Ryo, someone who has existed at the crux of what he held dear. It's penned in undercurrent, just beneath the surface of harsh breaths and tense muscles and taut flesh, like a treacherous riptide slowly drawing him out into deep ocean. But if that was the way of things, Akira would go willingly; he would brave it because Ryo had always been a deep, unfathomable ocean to him, but one he always found himself drawn back to.
It is a singular, unique sort of indulgence that the same flood of sensation he currently grapples with is something which also besets Ryo; Akira is no technican, this body sometimes feeling like a blunt tool he does what he can to manipulate, but it's plain in the way it shakes apart his usually-seamless composure, revealing a kind of tenderness behind those fractured planes. It instills in him an excitement which brims over what he can attempt to contain, drawing him tight, filling him with a restless energy. There is a sphere of silence embedded in the discordanced of their breathing after he presses his name into the space between them, one which he can sense in that selfsame space, feel running as electric tension beneath Ryo's skin. Their eyes lock for a moment and Akira is lost in the blue that he imagines he can see despite the wash of the darkness, his own growing dark and liquid, yearning, wanting, trusting as the reply spills past Ryo's lips in a breathy rush and he replies in nonverbal hoarseness, his whole body shuddering to the attention of Ryo's fingers, the definitive increase in pace which delivered what Akira had felt himself yearning for in the pit of his gut but in its entirety and all at once. Now it's the turn of his voice to quake as it escapes his throat, and for a brief moment a shard of clarity emerges from the crush of sense and pleasure as a recognition of vague irony: that there's no way he could hold back, that Ryo does and always has brought forth from him all that he could bear.
It's different. It's a small, stupid thought, but he realizes it sharply — that, with himself, the delivery of this moment had always been something personally authored, but he has no such control here, nothing except the determination to keep himself from succumbing in entirety, hand keeping pace even as his avenues of thought became not crowded but flooded, washed over entirely with everything that could no longer be kept at bay. The sound of Ryo's voice wrapping around the syllables of his name fills his attention, and — it isn't a single second, like a moment's flash of lightning. It rolls through him like a tide, from the press of his hips into Ryo's hand, the surge that raced down the highway of his spine to crash against where it met the base of his skull, forcing his voice from him as a crushed moan, his eyes growing heavily-lidded and unseeing as he comes — considerably (he's long since accepted he has no control in this) — in Ryo's hand, everything else splintering off and shaking apart into muscles drawn to the point of peak tension before easing into relax, drowned out in the overwhelming feeling of relief and pleasure at that release.
For a moment, he stalls, but his determination to bring Ryo here with him shakes him out of it, his hand resuming its movement with his fingers finding all the places and meting out all gestures which they'd learned had brought the sharpest response, despite the faint quiver instilled in them by the lingering aftermath of climax.] Ryo, [there's a worn quality to the timbre of his voice now, but a roughness as well, an unyielding tenacity.] You too. [Because none of it would mean half as much to him if Ryo didn't follow right after him, and he draws as close as he can manage, wanting to see and to hear and to feel as much as he could, impressing as much ownership over this as he could manage, just as he had willingly given himself to Ryo just moments before.]
The smoothness of his expressions, the webbing of words. Ryo Asuka, pristine and perfect in all the ways that counted to all that viewed him like the reflection of the moon across the ocean. He was a cold, wan light. He did not encourage the unfurling of petals to himself, the stretch of green and guileless bodies. But, Akira had rowed through the distance between himself and the opposing shore, dipped his hands into the waters of his silence and held him as much as he could hold him, the surface of him rippling and transmuting like rivers of molten silver. No matter how far away Ryo was, it was Akira that bound him to the soil of his skin, the careful body of his words. In rare moments, where Ryo still could not peel away all that separated him from Akira like so many veils, his touches would bleed into him, change him in ways he could not understand or did not wish to.
But, he had changed. He had transformed into something new, something different under the persuasion of Akira's empathy, tenderness. His thoughts, forever centralized on him without admitting why, focus still upon Akira now. He watches as each, small gesture unravels and unwinds. He observes and knows as he pieces him apart.
Humans are expressive in ways they have no understanding of. A point of contact is a request, a command — a lie. Thousands and thousands of years of language formulation, threaded into flesh and sinew. Even now, though Ryo believes not at all in love, there's a warmth and devotion that suffuses in the scant spaces between as Akira pleas in a tongue that's more animal than human, but human even so. Ryo's eyes, though he has no knowledge of it, are dark and transfixed as he pulls for more with the press of his thumb, the calloused pad of his index finger. He coaxes Akira through the throes his body casts over him, his assurances silent and secreted in the way his breaths ache at each grey shadow between the valleys of his ribs. It's okay, he wants to say. And he does, in the way he watches him — in the way he keeps close. For all the clear longing and wanting in Akira's eyes — the reflection he receives in response is bright and hot. No matter what Ryo thinks and feels he knows, there's a tangled stream of emotion that wells up, like sand stirred at the bottom of the ocean. No matter how knotted, there's something indefinable and inchoate that rests there, a steady constant in the background of it all. It's a hungry and desirous thing, both possessive and protective. He has no name for it, because there is no name for it.
That's what he's always believed. That's what he's always thought, as Akira's voice rises hoarse and low in the aftermath. His name shapes itself as a need on Akira's tongue and Ryo shivers at the sudden movement of his palm. There's a languidness in this now, a natural exhaustion in the sound you too.
You too, he says. You too. ]
Yeah, [ he breathes, the syllables stretched and scattering. It hitches up in his throat, his lashes fluttering. Recognition of agreement falls long moments after, along with the soft exhalation of Akira's name. It's something he can't retrieve, lost now to the heavy buzz of quiet.
There's no definitive point of clarity, no momentous rush of understanding. Akira had been his only concern, his only focus through all of this. Akira had been — the insistence burns along his skin, brushes through him like the lick of ocean salt at scraped knees. He remembers, vaguely, the way it dappled the slow wash of waves in the color of his blood. He remembers, more clearly, the way Akira had pressed his hand into his. How many times had they done that in their youth? How many occasions had he found himself drawn inexorably into Akira's orbit, a pale satellite to all that he was? How long had Akira discerned more about Ryo than Ryo himself?
Words fragment in his mouth, crumble like seashells along the shore. His hand unfurls like the pale caps of waves, slick with all that he's taken from him. He fumbles for the curvature of his hip, tries to form anything at all, but the sounds constellate across his tongue and fall shallow and soft against the sheets, flickering and fleeting like tidal pools. It doesn't come at all once — build all at once. But, it's his voice and his touch — the relentless and gentle stimuli that presses into him like a current until there's nothing he can take anymore.
Something fragile in him lets go. It takes any thought with it, a sudden and consuming roar of sensation that pulls together and then pulls apart. It quarters down the length of his body, reaches out. It sears through to the very edges of him, presses out through his fingertips. Every muscle trembles and tightens — a static surge of sound swallowing up the start of a word, a phrase. It frays into a gasp, thin and high.
He doesn't know when he's closed his eyes, as much as he knows when he opens them his chest is heaving and his body is hot — that something and everything in him has fractured into raw and vulnerable shards. Akira's hand is almost too much, erring into over-stimulation. He shudders and curls into it, the stickiness of his cum caught up against the rough of Akira's fingers, the flat plain of his own stomach. He blinks, once, as something prickles at the back of his eyes — fades, in the next moment as he seeks out Akira through the dimness.
He doesn't know what compels him in the long stretch after, only that he wants. He doesn't think about how the sheets stick to his skin, how the chemical rush folds under his skin like a leaden fog. He doesn't think about about the whys, his mind still and silent as he presses his lips to what skin he can reach first, graceless and lingering.
He thinks instead of how he can hear his own heart, timed to the rough pull of Akira's breath. ]
[It had truly seemed to him that no one else would do what he did — would step in and cling to a stranger, to offer warmth and assurances, to offer them a single tether to keep them on the surface of this planet. Because in that single tenuous and formative moment in which Akira had looked into the nameless boy's cold, distant blue eyes, he had recognized that no one before had done such a thing, that there were that many years of accumulated evidence to argue that no one ever would. So Akira had. It had been a simple decision, and one that he had never once in his life thought better of. To Akira, people naturally wanted to be heroes — or, at least, the good in them wanted them to become as such to others, to offer all that they could so that this time they had together on Earth would be its possible best. He and Ryo had been guardians and shepherds to one another however they could as they'd grown up, and even after they had separated, coming to see Ryo and his confidence, his control, his acclaim, his sway with other people — it had inundated Akira to the point of drowning in a sense of pride, knowing that it was him who had been by Ryo's side through (what he perceived as) his most critical time. That they both in turn encouraged strengths and minimized weaknesses in one another, laying the foundation of a friendship and a partnership that would withstand the threat of demons, the sudden transposition to a station in deep space, and whatever else could possibly be thrown at them.
They had always galvanized one another into change, and so it's no wonder that a single paradigm shift in their relation to one another could affect so much — or connect so many disparate pieces of how they felt for one another that had up until this point been separate and neglected. It's why there's no dragging concern or doubt as they press unrelentingly forward, feeling less like this is a path being blazed at breakneck speed and more like it was simply a constellation that they had always had the stars for, but it had taken this long for them to take notice of the overarching form.
Akira doesn't feel a shred of shame or self-consciousness, and why the hell should he? He's always revealed the full extent of his heart to everyone he met, his only line of defense his disarming earnestness, and there was no one he'd entrusted more to than Ryo. From that day, gray and dreary, on the cliffs by the roaring ocean to the moment they had perched precarious before dark, imperious doors leading into a dangerous unknown, lurid with the unbridled pursuit of base urges and thudding music, he had always pledged to Ryo everything that he had to give. Though in a drastically different arena this is simply an extension of everything else — yet another fragment of who he was that he could push into Ryo's waiting hands, encouraging the protective curl of his fingers, to keep close to himself the full understanding of who he was. The wild, raucous edge of his more uncontrollable mercenary lusts that he kept forcibly tamed by the strength of his heart, fostering within him the keen edge of want which he couldn't possibly deny (and didn't even try to hide) but also the twin sense of heartfelt consideration which dug out a depth to it all that belied far more than just the sating of base hungers.
There's a bone-deep weariness that's begun to sink down into him, but Akira allows himself no moment to rest and feel the aftermath of pleasure pool and eddy in his body — no, he laces his veins with the uncharacteristic nature of Ryo's voice, the way it feels like if he applied just a bit of pressure he could feel it begin to splinter into countless pieces beneath the press of his fingertips. It's all the motivation he needs. He has a single falter, his body flinching in response to the movement of Ryo's hand from his cock to rest at his hip, nerves harshed by the ache of hyper-sensitivity that nearly caused him to cow, though he recovers with a shudder of breath and a renewed determination to his attentions. Akira isn't the type to tease — he presses forward with an intrinsic straight-forwardness, painstakingly attentive to the reactions to the shape and path of his hand, the movement of his fingers. Even now his heart races away with him, too thrilled by the novelty of it, of Ryo's voice stringing out thin and wordless all as he forces him forward, ever onward, occasionally breathing semi-verbal encouragement and very nearly crooning a few spared words of how beautiful he is, displayed in this facet of himself hidden from everyone else but him, something that he claims possessively and selfishly.
It is a universal constant that there is only so far one can go. Just as this had been the first time Akira had given over the control of carnal pleasure to someone else, this is the first he has ever exacted it, and he keeps it all. The involuntary taut strain of his entire body which then rocked into sudden laxation broken only by the synaptic static which lingered afterward in frayed nervous pathways, the silence broken with the pitched gasp of his voice which resonated in his ears like the shattering of something expensive and delicate and rare.
Ryo cums, and they fall into stillness, bodies succumbing to the exhaustion which comes in the wake of being so thoroughly spent. Akira slumps towards the sheets, heart racing in this moment before it would even begin to consider settling, his breath still coming harsh and fast as he felt how the air settled against his skin, faintly damp with sweat. He can sense that Ryo is in a similar state, and he retrieves his hand as carefully as he can, a slow smile spreading across his face only to give way to a quiet, tired laugh as Ryo stirs, edges forward. He feels the somewhat-familiar but yet also still entirely too new sensation of lips pressed near the line of his jaw, and that laugh — just another sudden, nearly uncontrollable release of something from his body — quiets and dies away. He moves, adjusts, head lifting from the bed and angling just so, so that he could meet Ryo's lips with his own this time, sharing with him a kiss that is slow yet simple, unadorned, something which he intends to help ease them both through a moment that might've been otherwise overwhelming.
He separates from him and then slumps back to the sheets once again, inching as close to him as he could. It's only a vague sense of him that he can see through the curtain of his eyelashes and with the close proximity, so instead he focuses on how their breathing and the racing rates of their heartbeats begin to finally slow, at long last reaching a resting pace as the fervor of the moment passes into the warm crush of night.
Another long moment passes, and Akira considers saying something, the options ranging wide from something vaguely humorous to crack through the thick shell of meaning to what just happened, to something which resembled the slow, molten procession of emotions which crowded within the confines of his ribcage — something which still probably wouldn't give any of them justice.
In the end, he doesn't say anything. He is simply far more content to preserve the moment.]
To Ryo, the earnest complexities of his character were more than Ryo himself could give. Subsumed by the transparent image he cast, all who glanced over him had seen something pale and ephemeral, a concept to hang hopes and accolades on. They had not seen Ryo, beneath the blaze of his intelligence and the density of his conversations. They'd seen no one, but still he'd reflected for all the good it would do. But, Akira had given him something that wholly for him. Akira had given him the whole of his friendship, his kindness, his patience. Akira had given him a place to rest. He'd told Ryo where it was safe to disarm, to reroute to words instead of the brunt of his violence.
But, Ryo could never capture that same gentleness. Not with others. He could never let himself wish to relate to others, to take their traumas as his own. He could never manage it, but Akira's warm expressions bloomed for him all the same as though he were not an inhospitable plain, the dim wash of the moon. Akira had taken Ryo's efforts, pinned them to his chest, and Ryo allowed them to stay there because — Akira's voice is dark and low, a thrum that strokes through the full of him like a current. No matter the fractured avenues of language, Ryo had long understood him. He paths their deficits with substitutions — the heat of his breath, the damp of their skin, the way Akira answers his unformed request with the increasingly familiar press of his lips against his. His body hums beneath the tenderness of it, a prospect he's never allotted to anyone, but Akira.
Akira, who slumps beside him — settles in so close that Ryo can only recall the full of his frame, can count the fall of his lashes. The dark of his eyes are rested on him and it is something felt more than observed as Ryo sinks back against the mattress, bracketed by the bubble of profundity that keeps contained the moment. Like Akira, he finds there are no words for him to salvage, for reasons he cannot discern amid the evening keel of their breathing.
Instead, he finds a way to talk without them. He lays his fingertips against Akira's open palm, skims the meat of them along the lines that fortune's laid its claim to. Ryo doesn't wonder, even in all of his sentimentality, if fate had long ago had drawn their straws like humanity's older Gods. He does not wonder if they'd ordained to him the sea, only to take it back. He does not wonder if he now walks along the Styx, Akira's footsteps borrowed from the world above, a willing shade of sound behind him. What he does think of is that they'd once laid like this, side-by-side in clearly divided circumstance, their eyes cast up to their own vaster tapestry of emptiness and spoke only of the moon. He remembers the cool of stone beneath his back, the scuff of Akira's yellow shoes as he kicked his feet in protest. He remembers so much of him, that even now if he were to shut his eyes, he could visual the full of him — down to the barest details of his skin.
Even now. Even now that he'd been forged by Ryo's instrumentations, blood and bone the magnum opus of the nebulous and indefinable qualities petrified in the pit of his chest. But, still, he'd laid an altar. Still, Akira's instinctual and implicit bond to him is what had saved him in the end — a hapless approximation of a desirous Pygmalion, the golden crown of his head rested at the feet of beasts instead. For all that he had burdened Akira with, Akira had accepted each scrap of favor he could give. For all that he'd placed upon his shoulders as though a heavy mantle, Akira had withstood it. For Akira, Ryo would do anything. Even if all in him cannot metamorphose into the bright of admittance, the sentiment lays beneath the sediment of the foundation they'd both laid in their youth. Akira was everything. Akira was his. And Akira, even after all their distance, was the only individual he had ever wanted.
And yet, it all remains stubbornly dormant. It sleeps like the waters off the Arctic, a desert of ice he leaves all thoughts of love in. Miles into himself, even the thaw of Akira's attention cannot penetrate to the softer body of it, but it aches a little more each time another mark to open him to the core is hewn. Every attempt Akira has ever made is not in vain, no matter how Ryo would deny it. There is something in him and he knows its edges, but he will not let himself call it by its name.
But, Ryo drinks in all of him. Without guilt and without shame, the blue of his eyes follow every aspect, each valley and crease of flesh that he can bear witness to in the dimness — his lips curving up without ever having say. ]
[Their world — and, by extension, this world that they had been shoved into — could move so fast, change so fast. The very fabric of how you understood everything could warp and tear in the same time it took for one to draw breath into their lungs. Human beings were only meant to process so much so quickly, and Akira had circumvented his own shortcomings by turning towards instinct for guidance. The correlation of his human and demonic impulses was a complex matrix; there were areas where it overlapped, such as the desire for force and violence bleeding over into protectiveness, though the rest was as disparate as oil and water. Now in the aftermath of some escalating impulsiveness (easily carried out due to the mutuality of it) he feels both sides cooling down: that which pursued pleasure jealously and that which sought out to reach out to another and incite the same in them. It's an odd dichotomy, and it sits a little uncomfortably. Akira attempts to mediate, to rest in-between.
But the delicate state of the atmosphere which existed between them eased the division, allowing him to slowly step away from it as it smoothed over and calmed into only a passing concern. He can feel the air settling against his skin now that stillness has finally claimed them; he can sense that it's chilly, though such things barely bother him anymore. He wonders blithely for a moment if it was something that would bother Ryo — but such things had never really seemed to concern him. These considerations were things that folded like a house of cards to a stern puff of air as he felt the soft points of Ryo's fingertips on his palm, tracing patterns which folded into and crossed over one another as time passed. Somehow, Ryo always managed to do this. Paradoxical to everything he claimed to be, everything which every other person saw, he presented such a close and intimate facet to Akira that it often felt dizzying at its advent, something he was sluggish to respond to. His fingers twitch and then curl inwards, making the faintest contact with Ryo's, even as they continue to trace.
As close as they have been in these last few minutes, he remarks inwardly that he believes he's closest to him here, in this brief and fragile moment.
This time it wasn't necessarily the world itself that had changed, but them, finally looking past what paper-thin inhibitions they had constructed and rapidly giving in to attentions and desires which they had for so long plastered over. There is much left behind in the implications and understandings that Akira would be slow to sort through, but as he lays here, thinking of himself and Ryo and the two of them, he feels nothing but contentedness with the situation; the kind of ease which ensues after a long-neglected tension has finally been addressed.
Time could have faded away like this, and perhaps at some point his consciousness would've finally given out and he would've gladly submitted to sleep and leave the rest of it for what stood for morning here. But — for a variety of reasons, that simply would not do. As much as it pained him, the moments one wished for most to last had to be drawn to a close; such was the relentless path of time's arrow.
So Akira finally speaks up in earnest, his tone of voice warm but also a bit hoarse, one again wearing itself for proper use.] So, uh. [and the idealized moment they had shared there was already fading, not able to stand up under the scrutiny of prolonged reality, but at least they would have its memory.
He gives a single laugh. It's a little sluggish, a little offbeat, but it feels right to him.] We should probably — clean up, a bit. Yeah?
[Idealism always suffers under the bright, garish light of reality.]
[ Time was a fickle thing, a concept that moved and bent. To Ryo, it had always been less linear than what humanity perceived, an endless continuity spanning off in infinite directions and down infinite paths. Time was enormous, immense. As he knew it, as some humans knew it, there was little time spent on the whole of whatever was and whatever could be. He knew that forever and eternity were definitions even he could not conceive and so, in the whole of what had happened between them, the dilation of time was natural — pleasant. It settled into his bones like a low tide settles back into the dip of continental shelves, the trenches carved by the ocean's persistence — ancient and unknowable impacts. When he was young, he'd wonder which inundated craters once held the body of the moon.
He'd wonder if they'd ever find it. And here, he wonders if there's any real need at all for time to weave back into fabricated comprehension. He wonders if he needs to look away from Akira at all, if there's any purpose in ceasing the steady and tidal movements of his fingers across the rough of his broad palm.
He knows that there is and Akira knows that there is, but for a while — it's welcome, wanted. Once upon a time, it wasn't something he would have allowed. Once upon a time, he wouldn't have thought he'd be here in this bed with Akira beside him, as worn smooth and silent as he is. ]
Yeah, [ he murmurs, breathes eventually — the tips of his fingers brush brief and slow against the gentle roof that Akira's created with his own. It's an absent admission to the rush of reality, not unlike the fleeting goodbyes they'd once give at the door. He recalls that on some nights the tension in the tight circle of Akira's arms was almost painful to relinquish, rescind. He knows now what he knew then, that in the whole of his physiology, the whole of his psychology, he'd craved the consistency and constancy of any touch that Akira could give. Ryo, who had only let so few trade contact with his skin, had only ever found that comfort in him — that bloom of oxytocin, the slow roar of his heart. And this new proximity too, as uncertain and hungry as it is, skims against that familiarity in its residual chrysalis.
Still, his speech carries forward no further motivation to leave the mess they'd created. He knows that the tackiness that coats him will feel no better with time, that eventually the heat of his body will subside and leave him to something less preferred. He knows all these things, but in the interim between waking and sleep, the sound of Akira's laugh washes over him and he blinks against the dimness — heavy-lidded as something heavy and warm unfurls in his chest, brings up something that is rarer to ever pass his lips. It's no more than an exhalation, a quiet puff of air, but it's something that can be marked as an echo. Ryo, in all of his life, can't remember the last time he'd laughed at all for something that wasn't crafted by the shock of adrenaline — he can't remember if he ever had as he finally moves to stretch, long and lazy, languid. It's not unlike a cat, one palm flat to the bed levering him up.
He leans a little, the usually impeccable lay of his hair framing his face in knotted curls as he searches out Akira's form in the darkness. ] We should shower.
[ As much as it's a statement, it's also a question. While he's waiting for an answer, he lists back into his own space, bending just a little to peel the rest of his jumpsuit from his body. It wouldn't do to trip out of bed after all that, especially with the way it's shucked down around his legs. ]
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It was always like that: a push and pull, of words and intent, of actions and reactions. Just as there was no word Ryo said that went unconsidered by Akira, there was no subsequent guiding motion he performed that didn't go without its proper response. They worked together in equal parts to rid him of the jumpsuit, mutually rewarded by the sweep of Akira's hands over the newly-bared skin, the way Ryo's body shuddered beneath his palms at the touch. He would never have gone this far, to settle alongside Ryo with little more than heat and tempered impatience between them, if he had experienced anything else but nearly reckless enthusiasm, in word and voice and etched into every movement of his body. Regardless of what the beast grafted into each and every one of his cells demanded of him, he would've been able to contain it, but as it is — with Ryo's blood seeming to rush just as hot as his own, his breaths echoing in similar discordance, the sweep of his eyelashes hiding a similar level of liquid desire, well. It only turns him on even more, but fortunately it seems matched and met in Ryo, palpable even when his hands aren't directly on him, thick on his tongue even with it kept behind his teeth. He reads it in him the way he would anything else.
Ryo has always been calm, collected, fastidious. It paints his every decision, as it carries over into motion, and it does so in a way that Akira can't even find himself aggravated with because it's so him, that to insist otherwise would be to deface his agency. The shaping of his fingers through the fabric was so slow he could count it with his racing heartbeats, could count it with the breaths that scraped their way up and down his trachea, anticipating what they promised, yearning so much for it that it nearly pressed pleas into his mouth. But, no, sometimes when he was like this, Ryo merely needed a push, and that's what Akira's brusque actions were — where Ryo would weigh and consider his action, constructing it in his mind so that he could perfectly see the outcome before he even sought to enact it, Akira followed his gut. It usually had mixed results. And here it's the same. As his hand had forged its way insistently downward, he leaned in closer, his head ever-so-slightly angled, keeping a seemingly-promised kiss withheld in a vague echo of Ryo's hand against him, though the difference was in his own. His heart gives a sharp hammer as his body reacts to the sudden stroke of his hand; he surges forward to be able to ride this reaction, mouth opening to catch the round of Ryo's bottom lip gently in his teeth at the same moment the gasp broke over them, impressing his ownership over it — though there is a low groan in the back of his throat as Ryo's fingers reflexively curl around him.
It's short-lived. He releases Ryo's lip as soon as that pressure moves away (there's no taste of blood), as soon as the familiarity of the sound of his voice to when he'd broken the skin of his neck with his teeth. That — hadn't been his intention. He's lost for a moment, confused, separating enough from Ryo so that he could see him lift his hand towards himself, presenting the palm. He seems borderline baffled as he draws his tongue up the breadth of his hand (though he can't deny reading the lasciviousness of the action, his breath forming a warm bloom between them as his eyes caught the way his fingers curled into his mouth). He doesn't stop moving at this, though he's keenly aware of the crack of his voice around the shelf of his fingers, the way that his body leaps when the drag of his fingers grow faint enough to only serve as a distant reminder of what they had just done. No, he finally understands when Ryo's hand falls past his waist once more, not distracted from mirroring what he had done just moments prior. His mouth drops open another small increment as his hand bypasses the border of fabric and wraps, warm and slick, around his cock, the movements still characteristically measured but feeling utterly licentious with how easy it is — every ministration before this had been so slow, so tantalizing, so formless and ephemeral, it had stretched out his anticipation to the breaking point of this moment. The spread of his thumb upwards, bare and wet over the head, causes what remainder of air in his lungs to leave him in a low moan; the sensation of that, of the tempo that Ryo's hand begins to find over him — it knocks away everything else, and he can't stop himself from pressing his hips forward slightly into the touch, almost greedy now that what he had yearned for had been given.
But — on the heels of the pleasure thrumming up along the highway of his spine to crash into the base of his skull, he's — frustrated. His mouth closes with a faintly audible click of his jaws, and he removes his hand from Ryo, lifting it up towards him as he ducks his head. There's none of the measured salaciousness, no artistry or form to it. He is all speed and function as he mimics Ryo yet again, his tongue rasping over his palm and the undersides of his fingers. He wastes no time, reaching once more past the interfering boundary of cloth, but then he changes tact, like a train changing its track — his movements become a bit slower, a bit more careful, first little more than the light press of his fingertips as the rough of his palm pass slick over the head of his cock, slowly rotating his hand so that it passed through the gap formed in the curl of his thumb and forefinger, coupled with the pressure of the purlicue of his hand and the meat of his thumb. He strokes him once, slowly and carefully, looking to find a similar ease with the additional wetness. As he does this he angles his head upward, not lifting it but instead pressing his open mouth to Ryo's throat, his tongue running over the shape of his Adam's apple, the ever-so-slight drag of his lower teeth following. They are somewhat discordant, the roughness of that kiss and how methodical the movement of his hand is, but they follow the same tempo for a few beats. Then he lifts his head once more, distributing a single, fleeting kiss to the line of his jaw before returning to where their lips were so close they might nearly touch, though for now all Akira does is bring the rough, affected presence of his breathing to that infinitesimal space, his gaze flicking upwards through heavy eyelashes to capture his own.]
no subject
As children, they’d crossed each other naturally like the shadow of the moon against the blue shell of the Earth, the soft swell of the ocean. Ryo was an absent and loveless thing, something to be gazed upon at a distance. But, Akira harbored in him all that was rich and warm and somehow beautiful, the press of his fingers in his like soil to roots or sun to flowers. Where Akira waited, Ryo followed in ways he did not recognize. Like the washing of salt from the earth, little by little Akira had made all of Ryo more hospitable, less opposed to the growth that could come so long as it was him who coaxed Ryo into Spring, no matter how he tried to supplant the tentative, fragile sprigs. Akira had always bloomed to him, even if he could not see it. Akira had always been something welcoming, a being that gathered light instead of merely reflecting it toward what deserved it most.
And here, Ryo finds himself in the grey of comprehension. He knows the composition of chemicals that floods through him, Akira, the bursts of adrenaline and the rush of dopamine. He knows the addictive qualities of what is and what will be, but beneath his explanations yawns something indistinct and weighted — something that draws up smaller gasps where he had once been silent, the skim of Akira’s teeth and tongue at his throat, catching against his lower lip enough to pull up the audible hitch of breath, the instinctual reaction to arch and mold against all that he gives him. Ryo too is greedy in ways he does not recognize, but his body fully crystallizes beneath the heavy stretch of their shared heat against his skin.
Humans chase pleasure their entire lives. They take risks, they plunge forward into feats both moral and immoral, coast in and out of the shadows of society like the way hands coast past hips. Ryo’s justifications are buried in the flesh of him, but the way Akira follows into perfect mirror — the lazy curvature of his hand about his cock, slicked, Ryo finds a matching note in the way he drags the pad of his fingers up the shaft, the careful and calculated application of pressure. Akira’s hand is stronger and rougher in comparison to his own, but he can feel so acutely each effort at softness — the impression of care that Ryo never once took with himself. Akira takes his time, as much Ryo does without ever bringing into the focus the cause. Even as Akira brushes his lips against his jaw, peers at him across the minuscule expanse as he settles back beside him — the recognition willfully blurs. It becomes hazy, the more his body wants, responds in ways far more noticeable to Akira than they would ever be to him.
It’s a minute distance, but the fissure runs deep. It runs painfully into all that Ryo is, but still he finds a way across it. Like the first rush of water over seawalls, the destructive tide brought up by storms — a certain determination to take all that it can back into the dark of its body, pulling back stone and mortar. His nose brushes against Akira’s as he leans in, presses his mouth to the corner of Akira’s lips. It’s soft and it’s fleeting, like the burning of fog off the ocean. It comes back again, in a shudder of a breath, formless words breaking across Akira’s skin like waves against palms. It skims through the whole of what could be but does not quite exist as he presses up into the loose circle of Akira’s fist, his own hand keeping a languid tempo, the next exhalation caught against the mold of his lips as Ryo finally commits to the act after a long draw.
He’d never bothered with others quite like this. Kisses had been perfunctory and performative. But, there’s something compulsive and sharp in him that seeks to do this — and in the moment he indulges what he would typically pass off as baser needs. For a moment, there’s a flare of inquisitive hunger in the way he licks at the seam of Akira’s lips, asks for what he had granted Akira earlier. For a moment, he thinks of the way that Akira had watched him through the sweep of his lashes and his every thought tangles into a indefinable loop that does not allow itself to be undone.
And it pulls taut, like the cast of desire and the welling of all things hot and shapeless he cannot begin to place behind the cage of his ribs.
Akira had always been so transparent. He had been always there for Ryo to read, just as he reads him now, but blinds himself to the most critical edge. Like rainwater across the petals of skeleton flowers, the rubbing of scales off a moth’s wings. There are some things that do not fade under scrutiny. There are some things that Ryo cannot grasp in both his hands, because he keeps them closed. There are some things — and Ryo almost sighs, a sound both low and warm, against the full of Akira’s lips. ]
no subject
In others he has definitive proof.
By the necessity of his new body he is often rough and brusque in his actions, following the physical demeanor and energy that now feels inherent to himself, but in matters that tangled up between the mind and the heart, his touch can be far more subtle. With their proximity, with his single and determined focus on Ryo, he is cognizant of each and every action and reaction, the jump of skin and the shudder of flesh and the serrated quality of breath — he can sense the tentative warmth of his lips as they search out his own, the somewhat distant sense of something else, hesitant and slightly under-developed, reaching out to its full extent towards him in these moments. They were not something he would lord over Ryo. They are both stubborn to their cores, alternatingly an unstoppable force and an immovable object in different situations. These were things he would also keep to himself, to preserve in himself not the hope but the fervent belief that Ryo was wrong and that one day he would come to realize it. But Akira could be patient for that day, and he would be more than willing to help pile up the conflicting evidence in the meanwhile.
To the best of his ability Akira is careful. Though there is an undeniable pressure burning bright inside of him, thrumming through his veins, pressing against the thin barrier of his skin, he wrestles it down and overpowers it, keeping it restrained as he otherwise mimics a similar pace as Ryo's, hand naturally forming to whatever he notices elicits the best response from him, very little falling through the cracks of his visual and physical attention. That is, of course, until the almost indiscernible turn of his head, the feather-light touch of his lips to the corner of his mouth. He feels something in it as it retreats, something lingering in the air like a half-finished statement. Akira hangs on those invisible words, his eyes lidding heavily once more at the slick stimulation of Ryo's hand up and down his length — the distinct press of Ryo's hips into his hand. His rough breath blooms tense and hot against the side of Ryo's face, the pace of his hand increasing for a few strokes, the circle of his fingers tightening ever-so-slightly, rippling around the shape of his cock to try to push him just a bit further — before he calms and returns to the previous tempo, he leashes himself, because that insistent force within him doesn't want to wait, it wants to batter and break its way free, to pull exultation from Ryo by force and take it from him for his own pleasure as well, but it — like so many other things on a daily basis he enforces control over, ever unwilling to become something like that.
Those impulses become much quieter as Ryo finally capitalizes on what he'd been alluding to — Akira had waited for him with all the patience he can muster, eyes flickering up once through his lashes to look at him, an expression caught between concern and something a little more difficult to name (something soft, yearning, quietly expectant) settling onto his face. He wouldn't bypass what he was deliberating to kiss him; he waited until Ryo came to that decision his own, the light ghosting sensation of his lips finally solidifying into the full press of his lips against his own, moving with their own impetus and intent, aided by the inquiry of the hot sweep of tongue against the closed line of his mouth. It ran through Akira's body like an electric shock; he twinges at the honest desire of it, personal and plain, and he is stalled by this for the briefest of moments before he rushes into compliance. His lips part, and his tongue slips forward to taste at the inside of his lip, at the border of his teeth — but he doesn't follow-through with the instinct to press more than that, instead taking a slightly more passive role. It had been Ryo that had initiated this this time, after all, and he waits, wanting, for him to take his advantage in that. Because the noisier, more avaricious pieces of himself seem to grow a little bit more subdued when Ryo does something like that — the gravitational pull towards him, towards every single little thing he did was so much stronger than that personal division.
Though it's not something he can chase from himself entirely. There's aspects and elements of it that bake themselves into his physicality, into his mien, from a slight increase to the heat radiating from his body to the quick, harsh-edged quality to his breathing. There's much to this that he wants to continue to cling to — the impossible closeness he feels to Ryo, with so few barriers remaining (now that they've coordinated to knock a few of the remaining ones down). Regardless of the baseness of his straightforward, bodily desire, Akira is an emotional and sentimental creature, and it's the strength of that which reduces the shear heat of his body to just these few noticeable aspects —
But it's an internal struggle that would continue as the moments pass by, marked by its own quiet attrition.]
no subject
In his first days in America, Ryo found himself retracing the shape of their last memory, worn smooth by dedication like waves to stone or perhaps Orpheus to Eurydice, his footsteps followed so long as he did not look back to see if Akira was there behind him after all. He recalls that, until they could no longer see the shape of one another against the bright and rolling hills, Akira had watched him go.
He remembers thinking he’d have like to have returned. He would have liked to have trekked back, just long enough to rub the soft pads of his thumbs across the damp skin beneath Akira’s dark eyes and told him not to cry. Not anymore. But, Akira had always told him it was Ryo who cried too. Akira had always cried when Ryo couldn’t, his heart unable to comprehend what it was it felt. He remembers the way Akira’s small hand had balled up in the front of his red shirt, so close to where the sticky ache welled up behind Ryo’s ribs too. He remembers thinking he’d come to find Akira again. Somehow.
He thinks now that it feels almost the same now, as Akira gives and retreats — gives again with the subtle change of pacing, the constriction of his fingers. He thinks Akira follows so dutifully in the path that he’s laid for him, as much as Ryo follows his. Akira’s hand about him is a vivid heat, his palm as grounding as it is freeing, his exploratory touches enough to pull from him breaths both waning and uneven. Each sensation, the stirring something tidal and reaching. Each pass breaks off a little more of him. Each exhalation Akira presses against the pale of his skin makes him forget the hardest boundaries of himself, his harsh edges eroded into something soft and pliant. Wanting.
Where Akira struggles with the basest parts of himself, Ryo struggles to keep all that he is aligned. All that is left is so fragile, fleeting. He holds onto it tightly, because that is all he has ever done. He can't name what it is that rests in the depths of himself. In the dark, Akira's affections are a fixed point on a horizon he's always known, but can't fully contain. It waits for Ryo to let them come. And he does, in some ways. He does in ways he isn't fully sure of. But, Akira —
They'd always been so stubborn. Akira's ideologies skim across him as much as Ryo's skim across Akira. Yet, he'd never belittled Akira for all that he held within. He had never faulted him for his thoughts, had never held himself above them. Akira's perspectives, his thoughtfulness, his consideration for all that the world thought was unforgivable and unpalatable in him — Akira's body yields to him as much as Ryo's yields to him. Each small, blistering sound is swallowed up by the heat of Akira's mouth as he licks in, traces the blunt edge of teeth and the harder points of canines. Ryo's gentleness for him was incomparable. Irrefutable, when placed beside any other. He takes such time to map anything Akira relents to him, presents to him with a willingness so bright it sears across each separation. Akira tastes warm and sweet, metallic across the tip of his tongue. And Ryo knows it is himself, a part of him.
There's a low sound that breaks at the base of his throat before he can contain it, the lines of his body alight with the realization. It moves through him like an undertow, something he can't pin down. He can't raise his head above it. He doesn't wonder what will happen if he doesn't.
Instead, Ryo's curls his fingers a little tighter — makes a firmer circle with his thumb and index finger, stroke him slow and even from base to head. There's no pause between as he curves his wrist, catches just below the ridge. Akira's cock still strains against his palm. And like Akira, there is no deeper concern for himself. There is only what he can do, what he can provide him — and he pulls back just enough to catch the meat of Akira's bottom lip between his teeth. It's a momentary hold, but — the returning kiss isn't without its own pressure. There's no lightness in it, firmer and surer. It's a balm, as much as it is something else. ]
no subject
Akira had never been like that; he quietly accepted that he had been born and destined for mediocrity, only breaking from that tentative mold when power had been chanced upon him. He tried not to question it. He merely accepted his lot, as he always had, doing what he could to learn to anticipate its occasionally-hazardous sways, grateful for its reckless strength which gave him — finally — some means of helping Ryo beyond the emotional scaffolding of their friendship. Even with this uneven lack of equity in his mind between them, he had rejected thoughts of deserving, the much truer line of belonging running so deep and so strongly between them that it shattered any such flimsy concerns. He simply knew that he belonged with Ryo, that together they were so much greater than the sum of their parts, their strengths and weaknesses overlapping in such a way that it made them almost seamless. No, they did not begrudge one another those weaknesses or idolize too highly those strengths, accepting of even the aspects they disagreed with.
It's what you did, when you cared for someone.
It is a give and take, a push and pull, a wax and wane, an ebb and flow — a continuous conversation, a ceaseless compromise. It's that way now, with hands goading, lips guiding, the restless energy running throughout them willing. Ryo's tongue slipping into his mouth elicits a sudden rush of hot excitement, his breath escaping as a huff. He kisses him back, meeting him at the places of his examination, tongue running slick and flush against his own. He'd forgotten about the faint taste of blood. It'd run into everything else, the coppery taste transmuted sweet and heady on his tongue, shared with Ryo's. As ever there is a small, immutable gulf in their demeanor, with Ryo never seeming to break from being careful and deliberate, though Akira gave in so easily to thrill and impulse and sharp, unabashed want. It's uniquely excruciating. Every indication of Ryo's interest and initiative to himself and to his body cuts into him deep, makes him bleed for more, and fast, and yet — he is so damn slow, so damn gentle and measured, and the soft and gentle human core at him aches even stronger for this, clinging to the depth of affection that it seemed to belie, ever susceptible to such displays from Ryo — but he's no entirely that kid anymore, and the rest of him is wearing thin, running ragged, less and less likely to be able to keep going on like this —
Ryo seems to react as if he knows, and maybe he does — Akira's always worn so much on his sleeve, projecting all the rest, and his readiness to the increase in tightness of his hand around him, the slow but strong draw, the deft manipulation of his wrist is — in a word, apparent. He throbs, staggers and breaks the pace of their kiss with a sizable gasp, his body seizing up for a moment, hand growing still and tight at the base of Ryo's cock. Teeth catch at his lip, and it seems for a moment almost a knowing sort of gesture, and Akira is moaning in a way that trails into something almost like a growl into Ryo's mouth as he returns to kiss him, grateful for the determination and intent in the circuit of his movements, meeting it and surpassing it, fraught with a heat and a pressure he can't properly keep contained any longer. His hand resumes its movement, keeping a steady and quicker pace as it runs up and down his length, lacking any and all subtle demonstrations (because this body of his was not made for finesse). His other, free up until this point, twists to tangle into the loose bedding; his hips push forward again; he kisses Ryo with a fierceness he's kept at bay thus far, trading his gasping breaths for the taste and heat of his mouth and tongue until his head swims and forces him to break it if just for a moment, gulping at a lungful of air.]
Ryo, [is what accompanies the following, rushing exhale. His eyes flick upwards to find his and — it should be easy, he should be able to just ask, but he can't, the interconnecting inputs of his body and heart and mind all tangled into an inconceivable snarl that he couldn't possibly attempt to fathom in real time. Instead he gives a labored breath, leaning forward and angling his head so that his forehead taps against Ryo's as his eyes fall nearly closed once more, focusing on reining in his ratcheting body temperature, the desperate bellows of his breath. He stays there, as if Ryo would more easily glean from him what he needed to communicate through topical osmosis, taking from him the burden of translating into words the riot that was running through this body of his, catching in his throat and coiling, hot and eager, in the pit of his stomach.]
no subject
Akira may harbor in him the idea that he was always average and ordinary before Ryo invited him into the truth of the world, but Ryo had always known that that perception was an inaccuracy. So close to the source of oneself, it was difficult to see anything at all as extraordinary. And though Ryo could not name or admit what it was that Akira had always meant to him, it had been enough for him to seek him out above all else and above all others. It had been enough to know that Akira's heart, one that could even warm the darkness of Ryo's own, could defeat the greatest evils he'd ever come to know. It had been enough for Ryo to find himself here, exposed and raw beneath the tide of Akira's attention, his heart and blood shot through with chemicals, his hair tangled and his free hand grasping at anything at all to steady him.
There's such small spaces left, such small and unconquerable expanses. Ryo almost shuts his eyes against it. That same pleasure and that same ache pulls all in him close and taut, a current caught against the coast of his body. It courses just below the skin, a hungry and wanting thing. Like all of humanity, it asks for its fill and more, his nerves prickling with each indefinable nuance of touch. There's only so much that one individual can consume, process. Each breath, each glance, each brush of rough fingers against the most receptive parts of him — he remembers the way it had always eventually overwhelmed, like deltas rushed with the melt of mountain snows, the salinity of the sea inundated and balanced in equal turns. But, this is a sensitivity he's never experienced. He's too aware of what it is Akira does, too aware of each gasp he pulls from his mouth. He's too aware of how warm he is against him, around him, beside him. He can't fill his lungs enough to even out the shallows of his breaths, the way that his name pressed so near to him hooks into something starved and neglected inside him. It keeps his voice at bay, as he lifts his eyes to him. It holds it, until it pushes forward all at once.
He'd always said his name like it meant more than it did. Akira had always given it something more than emptiness.
But, Ryo knows what is demanded in the language of Akira's body. It's something he's understood since he was small, translated in what ways he could like a reflex. He's just as much a part of Akira as Akira is a part of him. ]
You don't have to hold back, [ he breathes, his voice a tangible and weighted thing. It pitches amid the softer sounds he tries to keep back, broken over his tongue and teeth like ice in Spring. Their disruption is plain, unrelenting. It's almost painful, as his hips instinctively cant up to follow the heat of Akira's palm. Ryo doesn't stall. His fingers have learned of tender spots, the movements that have gained him the most traction in the desire to weave a clearer arousal. The pace he sets strays far from slow, exploratory — but, the attention is there. The same, calculated edge thins into liquid understanding underscored with the shape of directives. ]
Akira, [ he murmurs. He knows the form of his name. He knows the way it molds together, but has no concept of the way it falls like a psalm, strung like beads of a rosary each time it leaves his tongue. He finds it again, weighted, but soundless. His lips shape it, but nothing comes. It does not need to. It is an assurance, written in just as clearly as if he'd spoken it. Just as clearly as the way he keeps so near to him, each breath shared and taken between them. ]
no subject
And surely one day he would recognize that he would be safe to finally let down that carefully-maintained facade. As it was now, it was simply something else that he readily accepted — there were few people as emotionally-open as Akira, so it certainly didn't make sense to him, but in so many ways Ryo was far beyond his understanding. He accepted him in all of them.
In the end, regardless of all of his reflections and protections, Ryo invariably grew close to him, paradoxical of his emotional isolationism. In the end, they were two people who had been damaged and shaped by the world they had come from, clinging fast to one another to minimize the feeling of solitude that was pervasive in such a place.
If that was what this was, if it was just clinging to human connection when found, or something to distract the mind from other more serious topics of thought, or just the blind and honest pursuit of pleasure and release, then he'd throw himself into it without seecond thought. But — it didn't really feel like just that, at least not to him, at least not when it's Ryo, someone who has existed at the crux of what he held dear. It's penned in undercurrent, just beneath the surface of harsh breaths and tense muscles and taut flesh, like a treacherous riptide slowly drawing him out into deep ocean. But if that was the way of things, Akira would go willingly; he would brave it because Ryo had always been a deep, unfathomable ocean to him, but one he always found himself drawn back to.
It is a singular, unique sort of indulgence that the same flood of sensation he currently grapples with is something which also besets Ryo; Akira is no technican, this body sometimes feeling like a blunt tool he does what he can to manipulate, but it's plain in the way it shakes apart his usually-seamless composure, revealing a kind of tenderness behind those fractured planes. It instills in him an excitement which brims over what he can attempt to contain, drawing him tight, filling him with a restless energy. There is a sphere of silence embedded in the discordanced of their breathing after he presses his name into the space between them, one which he can sense in that selfsame space, feel running as electric tension beneath Ryo's skin. Their eyes lock for a moment and Akira is lost in the blue that he imagines he can see despite the wash of the darkness, his own growing dark and liquid, yearning, wanting, trusting as the reply spills past Ryo's lips in a breathy rush and he replies in nonverbal hoarseness, his whole body shuddering to the attention of Ryo's fingers, the definitive increase in pace which delivered what Akira had felt himself yearning for in the pit of his gut but in its entirety and all at once. Now it's the turn of his voice to quake as it escapes his throat, and for a brief moment a shard of clarity emerges from the crush of sense and pleasure as a recognition of vague irony: that there's no way he could hold back, that Ryo does and always has brought forth from him all that he could bear.
It's different. It's a small, stupid thought, but he realizes it sharply — that, with himself, the delivery of this moment had always been something personally authored, but he has no such control here, nothing except the determination to keep himself from succumbing in entirety, hand keeping pace even as his avenues of thought became not crowded but flooded, washed over entirely with everything that could no longer be kept at bay. The sound of Ryo's voice wrapping around the syllables of his name fills his attention, and — it isn't a single second, like a moment's flash of lightning. It rolls through him like a tide, from the press of his hips into Ryo's hand, the surge that raced down the highway of his spine to crash against where it met the base of his skull, forcing his voice from him as a crushed moan, his eyes growing heavily-lidded and unseeing as he comes — considerably (he's long since accepted he has no control in this) — in Ryo's hand, everything else splintering off and shaking apart into muscles drawn to the point of peak tension before easing into relax, drowned out in the overwhelming feeling of relief and pleasure at that release.
For a moment, he stalls, but his determination to bring Ryo here with him shakes him out of it, his hand resuming its movement with his fingers finding all the places and meting out all gestures which they'd learned had brought the sharpest response, despite the faint quiver instilled in them by the lingering aftermath of climax.] Ryo, [there's a worn quality to the timbre of his voice now, but a roughness as well, an unyielding tenacity.] You too. [Because none of it would mean half as much to him if Ryo didn't follow right after him, and he draws as close as he can manage, wanting to see and to hear and to feel as much as he could, impressing as much ownership over this as he could manage, just as he had willingly given himself to Ryo just moments before.]
no subject
The smoothness of his expressions, the webbing of words. Ryo Asuka, pristine and perfect in all the ways that counted to all that viewed him like the reflection of the moon across the ocean. He was a cold, wan light. He did not encourage the unfurling of petals to himself, the stretch of green and guileless bodies. But, Akira had rowed through the distance between himself and the opposing shore, dipped his hands into the waters of his silence and held him as much as he could hold him, the surface of him rippling and transmuting like rivers of molten silver. No matter how far away Ryo was, it was Akira that bound him to the soil of his skin, the careful body of his words. In rare moments, where Ryo still could not peel away all that separated him from Akira like so many veils, his touches would bleed into him, change him in ways he could not understand or did not wish to.
But, he had changed. He had transformed into something new, something different under the persuasion of Akira's empathy, tenderness. His thoughts, forever centralized on him without admitting why, focus still upon Akira now. He watches as each, small gesture unravels and unwinds. He observes and knows as he pieces him apart.
Humans are expressive in ways they have no understanding of. A point of contact is a request, a command — a lie. Thousands and thousands of years of language formulation, threaded into flesh and sinew. Even now, though Ryo believes not at all in love, there's a warmth and devotion that suffuses in the scant spaces between as Akira pleas in a tongue that's more animal than human, but human even so. Ryo's eyes, though he has no knowledge of it, are dark and transfixed as he pulls for more with the press of his thumb, the calloused pad of his index finger. He coaxes Akira through the throes his body casts over him, his assurances silent and secreted in the way his breaths ache at each grey shadow between the valleys of his ribs. It's okay, he wants to say. And he does, in the way he watches him — in the way he keeps close. For all the clear longing and wanting in Akira's eyes — the reflection he receives in response is bright and hot. No matter what Ryo thinks and feels he knows, there's a tangled stream of emotion that wells up, like sand stirred at the bottom of the ocean. No matter how knotted, there's something indefinable and inchoate that rests there, a steady constant in the background of it all. It's a hungry and desirous thing, both possessive and protective. He has no name for it, because there is no name for it.
That's what he's always believed. That's what he's always thought, as Akira's voice rises hoarse and low in the aftermath. His name shapes itself as a need on Akira's tongue and Ryo shivers at the sudden movement of his palm. There's a languidness in this now, a natural exhaustion in the sound you too.
You too, he says. You too. ]
Yeah, [ he breathes, the syllables stretched and scattering. It hitches up in his throat, his lashes fluttering. Recognition of agreement falls long moments after, along with the soft exhalation of Akira's name. It's something he can't retrieve, lost now to the heavy buzz of quiet.
There's no definitive point of clarity, no momentous rush of understanding. Akira had been his only concern, his only focus through all of this. Akira had been — the insistence burns along his skin, brushes through him like the lick of ocean salt at scraped knees. He remembers, vaguely, the way it dappled the slow wash of waves in the color of his blood. He remembers, more clearly, the way Akira had pressed his hand into his. How many times had they done that in their youth? How many occasions had he found himself drawn inexorably into Akira's orbit, a pale satellite to all that he was? How long had Akira discerned more about Ryo than Ryo himself?
Words fragment in his mouth, crumble like seashells along the shore. His hand unfurls like the pale caps of waves, slick with all that he's taken from him. He fumbles for the curvature of his hip, tries to form anything at all, but the sounds constellate across his tongue and fall shallow and soft against the sheets, flickering and fleeting like tidal pools. It doesn't come at all once — build all at once. But, it's his voice and his touch — the relentless and gentle stimuli that presses into him like a current until there's nothing he can take anymore.
Something fragile in him lets go. It takes any thought with it, a sudden and consuming roar of sensation that pulls together and then pulls apart. It quarters down the length of his body, reaches out. It sears through to the very edges of him, presses out through his fingertips. Every muscle trembles and tightens — a static surge of sound swallowing up the start of a word, a phrase. It frays into a gasp, thin and high.
He doesn't know when he's closed his eyes, as much as he knows when he opens them his chest is heaving and his body is hot — that something and everything in him has fractured into raw and vulnerable shards. Akira's hand is almost too much, erring into over-stimulation. He shudders and curls into it, the stickiness of his cum caught up against the rough of Akira's fingers, the flat plain of his own stomach. He blinks, once, as something prickles at the back of his eyes — fades, in the next moment as he seeks out Akira through the dimness.
He doesn't know what compels him in the long stretch after, only that he wants. He doesn't think about how the sheets stick to his skin, how the chemical rush folds under his skin like a leaden fog. He doesn't think about about the whys, his mind still and silent as he presses his lips to what skin he can reach first, graceless and lingering.
He thinks instead of how he can hear his own heart, timed to the rough pull of Akira's breath. ]
no subject
They had always galvanized one another into change, and so it's no wonder that a single paradigm shift in their relation to one another could affect so much — or connect so many disparate pieces of how they felt for one another that had up until this point been separate and neglected. It's why there's no dragging concern or doubt as they press unrelentingly forward, feeling less like this is a path being blazed at breakneck speed and more like it was simply a constellation that they had always had the stars for, but it had taken this long for them to take notice of the overarching form.
Akira doesn't feel a shred of shame or self-consciousness, and why the hell should he? He's always revealed the full extent of his heart to everyone he met, his only line of defense his disarming earnestness, and there was no one he'd entrusted more to than Ryo. From that day, gray and dreary, on the cliffs by the roaring ocean to the moment they had perched precarious before dark, imperious doors leading into a dangerous unknown, lurid with the unbridled pursuit of base urges and thudding music, he had always pledged to Ryo everything that he had to give. Though in a drastically different arena this is simply an extension of everything else — yet another fragment of who he was that he could push into Ryo's waiting hands, encouraging the protective curl of his fingers, to keep close to himself the full understanding of who he was. The wild, raucous edge of his more uncontrollable mercenary lusts that he kept forcibly tamed by the strength of his heart, fostering within him the keen edge of want which he couldn't possibly deny (and didn't even try to hide) but also the twin sense of heartfelt consideration which dug out a depth to it all that belied far more than just the sating of base hungers.
There's a bone-deep weariness that's begun to sink down into him, but Akira allows himself no moment to rest and feel the aftermath of pleasure pool and eddy in his body — no, he laces his veins with the uncharacteristic nature of Ryo's voice, the way it feels like if he applied just a bit of pressure he could feel it begin to splinter into countless pieces beneath the press of his fingertips. It's all the motivation he needs. He has a single falter, his body flinching in response to the movement of Ryo's hand from his cock to rest at his hip, nerves harshed by the ache of hyper-sensitivity that nearly caused him to cow, though he recovers with a shudder of breath and a renewed determination to his attentions. Akira isn't the type to tease — he presses forward with an intrinsic straight-forwardness, painstakingly attentive to the reactions to the shape and path of his hand, the movement of his fingers. Even now his heart races away with him, too thrilled by the novelty of it, of Ryo's voice stringing out thin and wordless all as he forces him forward, ever onward, occasionally breathing semi-verbal encouragement and very nearly crooning a few spared words of how beautiful he is, displayed in this facet of himself hidden from everyone else but him, something that he claims possessively and selfishly.
It is a universal constant that there is only so far one can go. Just as this had been the first time Akira had given over the control of carnal pleasure to someone else, this is the first he has ever exacted it, and he keeps it all. The involuntary taut strain of his entire body which then rocked into sudden laxation broken only by the synaptic static which lingered afterward in frayed nervous pathways, the silence broken with the pitched gasp of his voice which resonated in his ears like the shattering of something expensive and delicate and rare.
Ryo cums, and they fall into stillness, bodies succumbing to the exhaustion which comes in the wake of being so thoroughly spent. Akira slumps towards the sheets, heart racing in this moment before it would even begin to consider settling, his breath still coming harsh and fast as he felt how the air settled against his skin, faintly damp with sweat. He can sense that Ryo is in a similar state, and he retrieves his hand as carefully as he can, a slow smile spreading across his face only to give way to a quiet, tired laugh as Ryo stirs, edges forward. He feels the somewhat-familiar but yet also still entirely too new sensation of lips pressed near the line of his jaw, and that laugh — just another sudden, nearly uncontrollable release of something from his body — quiets and dies away. He moves, adjusts, head lifting from the bed and angling just so, so that he could meet Ryo's lips with his own this time, sharing with him a kiss that is slow yet simple, unadorned, something which he intends to help ease them both through a moment that might've been otherwise overwhelming.
He separates from him and then slumps back to the sheets once again, inching as close to him as he could. It's only a vague sense of him that he can see through the curtain of his eyelashes and with the close proximity, so instead he focuses on how their breathing and the racing rates of their heartbeats begin to finally slow, at long last reaching a resting pace as the fervor of the moment passes into the warm crush of night.
Another long moment passes, and Akira considers saying something, the options ranging wide from something vaguely humorous to crack through the thick shell of meaning to what just happened, to something which resembled the slow, molten procession of emotions which crowded within the confines of his ribcage — something which still probably wouldn't give any of them justice.
In the end, he doesn't say anything. He is simply far more content to preserve the moment.]
no subject
To Ryo, the earnest complexities of his character were more than Ryo himself could give. Subsumed by the transparent image he cast, all who glanced over him had seen something pale and ephemeral, a concept to hang hopes and accolades on. They had not seen Ryo, beneath the blaze of his intelligence and the density of his conversations. They'd seen no one, but still he'd reflected for all the good it would do. But, Akira had given him something that wholly for him. Akira had given him the whole of his friendship, his kindness, his patience. Akira had given him a place to rest. He'd told Ryo where it was safe to disarm, to reroute to words instead of the brunt of his violence.
But, Ryo could never capture that same gentleness. Not with others. He could never let himself wish to relate to others, to take their traumas as his own. He could never manage it, but Akira's warm expressions bloomed for him all the same as though he were not an inhospitable plain, the dim wash of the moon. Akira had taken Ryo's efforts, pinned them to his chest, and Ryo allowed them to stay there because — Akira's voice is dark and low, a thrum that strokes through the full of him like a current. No matter the fractured avenues of language, Ryo had long understood him. He paths their deficits with substitutions — the heat of his breath, the damp of their skin, the way Akira answers his unformed request with the increasingly familiar press of his lips against his. His body hums beneath the tenderness of it, a prospect he's never allotted to anyone, but Akira.
Akira, who slumps beside him — settles in so close that Ryo can only recall the full of his frame, can count the fall of his lashes. The dark of his eyes are rested on him and it is something felt more than observed as Ryo sinks back against the mattress, bracketed by the bubble of profundity that keeps contained the moment. Like Akira, he finds there are no words for him to salvage, for reasons he cannot discern amid the evening keel of their breathing.
Instead, he finds a way to talk without them. He lays his fingertips against Akira's open palm, skims the meat of them along the lines that fortune's laid its claim to. Ryo doesn't wonder, even in all of his sentimentality, if fate had long ago had drawn their straws like humanity's older Gods. He does not wonder if they'd ordained to him the sea, only to take it back. He does not wonder if he now walks along the Styx, Akira's footsteps borrowed from the world above, a willing shade of sound behind him. What he does think of is that they'd once laid like this, side-by-side in clearly divided circumstance, their eyes cast up to their own vaster tapestry of emptiness and spoke only of the moon. He remembers the cool of stone beneath his back, the scuff of Akira's yellow shoes as he kicked his feet in protest. He remembers so much of him, that even now if he were to shut his eyes, he could visual the full of him — down to the barest details of his skin.
Even now. Even now that he'd been forged by Ryo's instrumentations, blood and bone the magnum opus of the nebulous and indefinable qualities petrified in the pit of his chest. But, still, he'd laid an altar. Still, Akira's instinctual and implicit bond to him is what had saved him in the end — a hapless approximation of a desirous Pygmalion, the golden crown of his head rested at the feet of beasts instead. For all that he had burdened Akira with, Akira had accepted each scrap of favor he could give. For all that he'd placed upon his shoulders as though a heavy mantle, Akira had withstood it. For Akira, Ryo would do anything. Even if all in him cannot metamorphose into the bright of admittance, the sentiment lays beneath the sediment of the foundation they'd both laid in their youth. Akira was everything. Akira was his. And Akira, even after all their distance, was the only individual he had ever wanted.
And yet, it all remains stubbornly dormant. It sleeps like the waters off the Arctic, a desert of ice he leaves all thoughts of love in. Miles into himself, even the thaw of Akira's attention cannot penetrate to the softer body of it, but it aches a little more each time another mark to open him to the core is hewn. Every attempt Akira has ever made is not in vain, no matter how Ryo would deny it. There is something in him and he knows its edges, but he will not let himself call it by its name.
But, Ryo drinks in all of him. Without guilt and without shame, the blue of his eyes follow every aspect, each valley and crease of flesh that he can bear witness to in the dimness — his lips curving up without ever having say. ]
no subject
But the delicate state of the atmosphere which existed between them eased the division, allowing him to slowly step away from it as it smoothed over and calmed into only a passing concern. He can feel the air settling against his skin now that stillness has finally claimed them; he can sense that it's chilly, though such things barely bother him anymore. He wonders blithely for a moment if it was something that would bother Ryo — but such things had never really seemed to concern him. These considerations were things that folded like a house of cards to a stern puff of air as he felt the soft points of Ryo's fingertips on his palm, tracing patterns which folded into and crossed over one another as time passed. Somehow, Ryo always managed to do this. Paradoxical to everything he claimed to be, everything which every other person saw, he presented such a close and intimate facet to Akira that it often felt dizzying at its advent, something he was sluggish to respond to. His fingers twitch and then curl inwards, making the faintest contact with Ryo's, even as they continue to trace.
As close as they have been in these last few minutes, he remarks inwardly that he believes he's closest to him here, in this brief and fragile moment.
This time it wasn't necessarily the world itself that had changed, but them, finally looking past what paper-thin inhibitions they had constructed and rapidly giving in to attentions and desires which they had for so long plastered over. There is much left behind in the implications and understandings that Akira would be slow to sort through, but as he lays here, thinking of himself and Ryo and the two of them, he feels nothing but contentedness with the situation; the kind of ease which ensues after a long-neglected tension has finally been addressed.
Time could have faded away like this, and perhaps at some point his consciousness would've finally given out and he would've gladly submitted to sleep and leave the rest of it for what stood for morning here. But — for a variety of reasons, that simply would not do. As much as it pained him, the moments one wished for most to last had to be drawn to a close; such was the relentless path of time's arrow.
So Akira finally speaks up in earnest, his tone of voice warm but also a bit hoarse, one again wearing itself for proper use.] So, uh. [and the idealized moment they had shared there was already fading, not able to stand up under the scrutiny of prolonged reality, but at least they would have its memory.
He gives a single laugh. It's a little sluggish, a little offbeat, but it feels right to him.] We should probably — clean up, a bit. Yeah?
[Idealism always suffers under the bright, garish light of reality.]
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He'd wonder if they'd ever find it. And here, he wonders if there's any real need at all for time to weave back into fabricated comprehension. He wonders if he needs to look away from Akira at all, if there's any purpose in ceasing the steady and tidal movements of his fingers across the rough of his broad palm.
He knows that there is and Akira knows that there is, but for a while — it's welcome, wanted. Once upon a time, it wasn't something he would have allowed. Once upon a time, he wouldn't have thought he'd be here in this bed with Akira beside him, as worn smooth and silent as he is. ]
Yeah, [ he murmurs, breathes eventually — the tips of his fingers brush brief and slow against the gentle roof that Akira's created with his own. It's an absent admission to the rush of reality, not unlike the fleeting goodbyes they'd once give at the door. He recalls that on some nights the tension in the tight circle of Akira's arms was almost painful to relinquish, rescind. He knows now what he knew then, that in the whole of his physiology, the whole of his psychology, he'd craved the consistency and constancy of any touch that Akira could give. Ryo, who had only let so few trade contact with his skin, had only ever found that comfort in him — that bloom of oxytocin, the slow roar of his heart. And this new proximity too, as uncertain and hungry as it is, skims against that familiarity in its residual chrysalis.
Still, his speech carries forward no further motivation to leave the mess they'd created. He knows that the tackiness that coats him will feel no better with time, that eventually the heat of his body will subside and leave him to something less preferred. He knows all these things, but in the interim between waking and sleep, the sound of Akira's laugh washes over him and he blinks against the dimness — heavy-lidded as something heavy and warm unfurls in his chest, brings up something that is rarer to ever pass his lips. It's no more than an exhalation, a quiet puff of air, but it's something that can be marked as an echo. Ryo, in all of his life, can't remember the last time he'd laughed at all for something that wasn't crafted by the shock of adrenaline — he can't remember if he ever had as he finally moves to stretch, long and lazy, languid. It's not unlike a cat, one palm flat to the bed levering him up.
He leans a little, the usually impeccable lay of his hair framing his face in knotted curls as he searches out Akira's form in the darkness. ] We should shower.
[ As much as it's a statement, it's also a question. While he's waiting for an answer, he lists back into his own space, bending just a little to peel the rest of his jumpsuit from his body. It wouldn't do to trip out of bed after all that, especially with the way it's shucked down around his legs. ]