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“I am not a child!” Seiichirou snaps, knowing even as he does so that he is fighting a losing battle.
Aresh simply glares at him from across the table—their usual at the restaurant, although it has been a while since Seiichirou himself has been here. His arms are crossed, his perfectly shaped eyebrows arched. “Even children know to eat when they’re hungry.”
Seiichirou simmers in his seat, heat rising to his cheeks.
He’d known, though. He isn’t a child—of course he’d known. At the back of his head, there had been an awareness, however barely acknowledged, that he’d begun to slip back into old habits—early mornings, skipped meals, late nights—taking on more work than before and pushing himself to the brink each time so he could meet his own deadlines.
It was important work, he’d convinced himself—it was always important work, especially now that the stability of the kingdom relied on a correctly balanced budget—and he didn’t have to worry about taking in too much magic anymore, not since—
“I hadn’t felt hungry,” he mutters instead, a feeble parry. Even he knows as much. He frowns at the plate laid out before him, full of tsuhash and trinpu, all the food Aresh had figured he liked from this world. Aresh looks at him expectantly, so he spears a piece of the trinpu to put in his mouth. “I just don’t have much of an appetite. Never have.”
Aresh scoffs. “You were always ravenous after we—” he starts to say, catching himself just in time before he turns away, the tips of his ears pink. “I assume that means you haven’t been exercising, either.”
“I have always lived a sedentary lifestyle,” Seiichirou says, ignoring the heat in his face. “It’s never been a problem before.”
“Barely any sleep, barely any food, barely any exercise, and only work and tonics to keep you going.” Aresh counts each item down with his fingers. “And you thought there was no problem with that? That it would never catch up to you? Of course you were going to collapse like you did. Even after building up your magicule immunity, no one in this world is built to live that way.”
“Well, I do!” Seiichirou hisses. “I always did, and I always will. And why is this still your business, anyway?”
Aresh’s face, if it were even possible, gets redder. “Why is it my business—” he sputters, positively steaming.
Seiichirou raises an eyebrow. “Well? Last I checked, I no longer owed you for your magical services—”
Aresh jolts up with a loud clang, hands closed into fists, jaw clenched as he seethes. “My magical ‘services’ were never for sale,” he grits through his teeth, a hushed whisper that sounds louder and angrier than anything he’s ever said that evening. “They were not a transaction for you to measure against, to weigh how much you owe me for until you owed no more. Keeping yourself healthy was not payment so it wouldn’t be a waste of my magic if you didn’t—”
Seiichirou blinks, brow furrowing at his growing confusion. “Then why did it ever matter to you?” he wants to know, baffled. For all that Aresh has spoken more words to him in the last minute than he ever has in the time they’ve known each other, Seiichirou feels like he has grown closer to understanding him more.
Aresh shuts his eyes tight, shaking his head with a sigh. “Blast if I know,” he says, sounding too world-weary for a man as young as he is. He slumps back down in his seat, lips still turned in a frown, and when he speaks again his voice has returned to an even, calm tone. “Finish your food,” he tells Seiichirou. “I’ll escort you to your rooms after. The work can wait until morning.”
The walk back to Seiichirou’s room is quiet and awkward. Aresh marches on beside him, stiff and broody, nothing more than a cursory nod as he drops him off at his door.
But he comes to fetch Seiichirou at his office for lunch the next day, returning to his old, infuriating habit of micromanaging Seiichirou’s meals, and comes by again on the hour as people start to head home, intent on ushering him out. He glares pointedly at the scrolls Seiichirou attempts to stuff into his bag—“No work in the evenings,” he reminds Seiichirou—and walks with him to the restaurant for another meal.
The tension doesn’t fully break during that meal, nor the ones that follow once the week begins to take shape around this familiar pattern of Aresh, once again, poking his nose into Seiichirou’s business. But they don’t have an argument like the one they had that first day, and even sometimes their conversation manages to achieve more than mere civility.
“A third of the time for lunch, really?” Aresh asks once, when the topic of Seiichirou’s old world comes up.
Seiichirou just shrugs. He twirls his fork around some amanan pasta and chews on it thoughtfully. “Maybe even a sixth, if you’re lucky,” he says. “At my old job, you worked through lunch. Ate at your desk to show them just how diligent you were being. It was normal. Lauded, even.”
“You can barely chew your food during that time,” Aresh says, frowning.
“There aren’t really many kingdoms left, either,” Seiichirou says. “So there is nowhere central that we would have lived in. I suppose some places had housing for their workers, but either way, we paid for where we lived out of the salary we earned.”
The way Aresh’s eyes flashed with shock, then narrowed with curiosity, was interesting enough, and he kept asking Seiichirou more questions as he let smaller details of his old world through—the rush-hour trains ferrying people to and from places, the cars and other vehicles that replaced this realm’s horses, the technology that powered that world the way magic did here.
The restaurant is near closing by the time Seiichirou realizes they’ve lingered far too long at dinner, and that as a result, he hadn’t spent that evening thinking about the work left for him to do the next day. Aresh is quiet beside him as they make the trek back to Seiichirou’s room, but it’s a different silence than that first day’s had been.
Companionable, almost.
Maybe even comfortable.
“You’ve been eating regularly now,” Aresh says once they reach his door, speaking just before Seiichirou can bid him good evening. He glances at Seiichirou with a furrowed brow, something like hesitation clouding his gaze.
“I have,” Seiichirou says slowly. “Haven’t you made sure of that?”
Aresh nods. “And you haven’t been taking your work home with you.”
Seiichirou shakes his head. “You’ve made sure of that as well.” He opens his door a little wider, showing Aresh his empty desk. “Or would you like to inspect it further? What are you trying to say?”
“You still look tired,” Aresh says, an outstretched arm faltering in the space between them, as though he’d tried to reach out to cup Seiichirou’s cheek and caught himself halfway through. “It’s been a week and a half. You’d looked better at this point. Before.”
Seiichirou shrugs. “Don’t take it to heart—sleep has never come easy to me,” he admits. “There is only so much you can do.”
“But you were sleeping better before,” Aresh points out.
Seiichirou purses his lips. “I was tired enough then,” he says. “Exhaustion usually does the trick. That’s why I work as long as I do. I work until I can sleep, because if I don’t, I’ll stay awake until I can’t any longer. Before, when I wasn’t yet immune to magic, I was—it was—”
Seiichirou catches himself in time, letting the words hang in the air between them. But Aresh can piece the rest of it together himself, and Seiichirou watches realization dawn on his face, a rising flush of deep red.
“It wasn’t every day,” Aresh manages to come up with.
“And yet, apparently, it was enough,” Seiichirou says, his voice as dry as he can make it. His smile wry. “A happy side effect of—well. But that’s neither here nor there, now, as I’m sure there are tonics I can take here for sleeping, if you’ll let me—”
Seiichirou had turned around to enter his room, half to end the conversation, half to hide his own flustered face from Aresh. He’d started to wave it off, laugh it off, let the topic die at his stoop, where hopefully its awkwardness won’t keep him up at night.
But, as always, Aresh has other plans.
“What if—” he says, a strong grip wrapped around Seiichirou’s wrist. His voice too close to Seiichirou’s ear, the huff of breath he exhales hot against Seiichirou’s neck. “What if you let me instead?”
Seiichirou laughs, more air than solid sound. “I am not so hopeless that you need to continue sacrificing your body simply for my—”
Aresh steals the rest of his words away, closing his mouth over Seiichirou’s in a kiss he really, really should have seen coming.
He’d known the feeling, after all, of Aresh’s hand on his arm, the press of his body against the line of his back, the searing heat of his tongue against Seiichirou’s own. He’s nudged back into his room, the door closing behind them as his back hits the wall, his arms automatically wrapping around Aresh’s neck, knees weakening at the slide of Aresh’s palm down his sides. The curl of his tongue inside his mouth, the breadth of strong, broad shoulders beneath his touch. The fierce, insistent nips on his lips and the wet slide of mouth bruising his neck, licking down to the hollow of his throat. The dark eyes flashing from beneath long lashes, full lips around the words, “This is no sacrifice to me,” as Aresh drops to his knees, hands against the back of Seiichirou’s thighs and cheeks against the straining tightness in his groin before he looks up again, voice raw as he asks. “Will you let me?”
Just like habit, too, it becomes all too easy to fall back into Aresh’s arms.
Seiichirou has always enjoyed it—his warmth, his touch, the strength cording beneath well-defined muscles as he takes the lead, lifting one of Seiichirou’s legs over his shoulder, angling his angular, handsome face up before taking Seiichirou down fully in his mouth, hot wet tongue a brand against his skin, the hollow of his cheeks tight around him.
Seiichirou nearly buckles down, were it not for Aresh guiding one of his hands over to hold onto his hair so he can hold himself steady. “What are you doing—” Seiichirou gasps, eyes wide as he looks down at Aresh, at the way his full lips wrap around his cock as he slowly pulls back with a pop. “We never—you’ve never—”
“I’m not here to get you used to magic,” Aresh says, tongue darting out to lick a drop of precome trickling down Seiichirou’s length. “But I wanted to. Problem?”
“I suppose this will tire me either way,” Seiichirou murmurs, crying out when Aresh bites down on the inside of his thigh. “What was that for?!”
“Will you stop thinking in balance sheets?” Aresh asks.
“But that’s—isn’t that why you—” Seiichirou pauses, caught by the way Aresh’s gaze flickers briefly, the heat of his anger shuttering away to reveal a glimpse of hesitation, maybe. “Isn’t it? Or else why would you—”
“Would you let me, if only because I wished to?”
“But why?” Seiichirou wants to know. He may be new to this world but he certainly wasn’t born only yesterday. No matter how he looked at it, there is no reason a strong, high-ranking, attractive man of Aresh’s caliber would even spend one iota of his time on a salaryman like Seiichirou. It’s not self-deprecation—Seiichirou sees things in numbers, plain and simple, with no remorse or regret. It simply does not add up.
“Does everything need a reason?” Aresh asks. He’s still knelt before Seiichirou, but where before he knelt in service, rousing Seiichirou, now he looks at him almost like a wounded puppy. His palm is rough against Seiichirou’s thigh, warm as he slowly rubs heat into it. He turns his face to nose the flesh there, press a reverent kiss to skin. “If I knew what caused it, would I have let you consume my thoughts the way you had? The way you continue to?”
“Don’t—don’t talk like that,” Seiichirou says. His hand is still tangled in Aresh’s hair, so he softens his touch to stroke his fingers through the silken strands gently.
Aresh sighs into his touch, and Seiichirou feels the thumping jackrabbit beat of his heart against his chest. Aresh has always been handsome; it has just never occurred to Seiichirou before that it was something he could allow himself to enjoy. “If you would like to find sleep another way—”
“No,” he says, his palm sliding down to cup Aresh by the cheeks. To tilt his face up to meet his gaze. He had missed him, he can say as much now, relieved to find maybe he’d been allowed to, after all. “I mean. I don’t want to sleep at all, just yet.”
Aresh surges up just as Seiichirou leans down to meet him halfway, lips slotting together in an open-mouthed kiss. Aresh licks into Seiichirou’s mouth, lips sweet with the wine he’d had with dinner. Strong hands find the back of Seiichirou’s thighs, Aresh lifting him up with a single heave, Seiichirou’s legs wrapping around his waist naturally as Aresh carries him to bed.
Maybe it’s because this time, they come together without the artifice of responsibility or obligation. No pretense of a favor being done. Maybe it’s because this time, Seiichirou learns what it’s like to be with Aresh without the hazy delirium of magic sickness.
Maybe it’s because it’s been a while, and all Seiichirou has had to go by is the memory of trysts from before, blurring around the edges even as he had tried to commit them to memory, chasing his own pleasure in the quiet solitude of late nights.
Whatever it is, Seiichirou feels every sensation sharply, in high resolution.
Each slide of skin against bare skin is a visceral firebrand, the alternating heat of Aresh’s touch versus the tingle of anticipation in the places he has yet to leave his mark on a delicious contrast. His lips are soft velvet versus the firm cut of his jaw, rough with faint stubble as Seiichirou’s mouth presses feverish kisses to his cheek, his chin. His back is pure lean muscle, hard and unyielding beneath Seiichirou’s palms, but his fingers are gentle and careful even as he slides spit-soaked digits inside Seiichirou, opening him up glacially slow.
“I’m not made of glass,” Seiichirou gasps, his hips bucking into the touch, frustration seeping into his movements. He cries out when Aresh stretches him wider, feels the acute ache of needing to be filled so sharply—it has been so long without Aresh—that he doesn’t realize he’s pushed Aresh onto his back until he’s sinking down on him, a low moan punched out of his lungs at the sensation of Aresh bottoming out inside him.
Aresh groans, head thrown back and eyes shut tight, his fingers digging into Seiichirou’s hips. He breathes out a curse—or maybe it’s a prayer—the muscles in his thighs taut beneath Seiichirou’s legs while Seiichirou slowly begins to roll his hips against Aresh. “You’re going to be the death of me,” Aresh breathes, voice shakier than Seiichirou has ever heard it.
Seiichirou lifts himself up slightly, biting his lower lip to keep from moaning when he sinks back down again—slow, deliberate, delicious. “I thought I was going to be the death of me,” he manages on his next exhale, yelping when Aresh rolls him onto his back and thrusts, deep and wonderful and all-consuming.
“Not if I can help it,” Aresh tells him, his lips curling up in laughter against Seiichirou’s as he kisses him, sweet as his promise.
It’s late during the hour of light when Seiichirou wakes from one of the deepest sleeps he’s had in a long while, limbs like jelly and body floating like air. There’s a heat against his back, a heavy weight against his side, the pointed nose of a still-sleeping commander pressed against the back of his shoulder.
“We’re late,” Seiichirou murmurs, pushing against Aresh to wake him. “We’re going to be late for work.”
“We already are, so what’s another hour’s delay?” Aresh points out, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. His hair is a bird’s nest in the morning, eyelids still heavy with drowsiness. He wraps an arm around Seiichirou’s waist, tugging him back to nuzzle his face against the crook of his neck. “In fact,” he says, his palm skittering down to Seiichirou’s stomach, palming him between his legs, “why don’t we take the rest of the day off?”
“I’ve got so much left to—”
“I’ll let you work late tomorrow,” Aresh whispers in his ear, teeth gently nipping at its lobe. His grip, similarly, makes quite a convincing argument against him. “And I’ll even bring you lunch at your desk, so you can catch up then.”
“Sounds too good to be true,” Seiichirou says, keening in Aresh’s hold. “Whatever happened to balanced—oh, yes, just like that—balanced meals?”
“We’ll make up for it,” Aresh tells him, tilting his chin up to kiss him deeply. “Today, it’s nothing but exercise and sleep for you.”
“Okay,” Seiichirou murmurs, melting into the touch.
Perhaps the work can wait until the next morning.