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When Kaworu’s music binder drops to the floor, it makes a nice, substantial, myocardial infarction-inducing smack. It is, after all, quite a thick specimen; Kaworu has actually been considering transferring some of his material over to a second volume for a while now, because he’s started to have trouble keeping it closed. The sharp, punctuated noise startles everyone who hasn’t already left the classroom into looking up, and the astute observer may notice the escape-minded figure of Shinji Ikari fleeing the scene of the crime.
Here is what happened.
Kaworu had been idly humming “La Campanella” to himself at his desk as he sorted through his backpack for his sheet music. To his surprise, when he stood with the binder in his arms, Shinji was already there at his desk. Usually, Kaworu went to him, and then they would make the trek to either NERV or the music room together. Kaworu’s automatic response of “Shinji-kun!” became a slightly concerned “… Shinji-kun?” when he caught sight of Shinji’s expression and his “must make Shinji-kun happy” instincts promptly overrode his “Shinji-kun makes me so happy” instincts.
“You appear to be concerned about something. Are you feeling well?” Kaworu asked.
Shinji was avoiding his eyes, a behavior to which Kaworu was already somewhat accustomed. “No, nothing’s wrong,” Shinji said quietly, though Kaworu couldn’t help but notice the way his fingers were nervously rubbing the hem of his shirt and he appeared to be gnawing on the inside of his cheek.
“Are you certain?” Kaworu pressed, lifting his hand that wasn’t cradling the music binder to feel Shinji’s forehead.
“Noit’sfine!” Shinji insisted, catching Kaworu’s wrist with both hands before he could make contact. “It’s just that… uh…” his eyes nervously flickered to his fingers circled around Kaworu’s wrist; Kaworu, for his part, wasn’t sure why he seemed so flustered about it, since nowadays they went about holding hands rather often…
Several desks over, Kensuke elbowed Touji gently and pointed to Shinji and Kaworu, effectively pausing the spirited debate he’d been moderating between Touji and Hikari as to what kind of art is inherently the most pretentious. (For the record, Hikari was arguing for performance concept art; Touji had been on the side of “that horrible modern art where someone dumps condom wrappers on the floor and then they’re surprised when the museum janitor throws it away because everyone else thought it was garbage.”) Upon Kensuke’s instruction, all three of them attempted to stare discreetly at Shinji, who still appeared to be trying to take Kaworu’s pulse.
They didn’t do a very good job, because Shinji gave them an absolutely livid glare, his eye twitching like it was trying to send them expletive-laden messages in Morse code.
“Shinji-kun?” Kaworu gently prompted.
“Uh…” Shinji stalled. He was suddenly very aware of the fact that his thumbs were positioned over Kaworu’s pulse point. Or maybe that was just him feeling the blood pumping in his ears. “Uh… I wanted to tell you…” he paused, hoping that Kaworu would give him another verbal nudge, but he should have known that Kaworu was to polite to interrupt.
“Iwantedtotellyouthatyouplayedreallywellyesterday,” he finally said in one exhalation of his held breath. “Okaybye.”
Kaworu would have said something to the effect of “You’re too kind, Shinji-kun” or “Why are you saying goodbye when we’re seeing each other later today?” if, at that point, Shinji hadn’t leaned forward to hurriedly kiss him on the cheek (well, more like awkwardly bump his face against it, but the sentiment was understood) before sprinting out of the room.
“Um,” said Kaworu. “Um.” And that’s when he’d dropped his music binder.
“Shit!” Mari curses. “I missed it!” Her handy portable camera is in ready position, having been pulled out from the holster of her uniform skirt waistband just a moment too late. Touji, Kensuke, and a few other boys are doing that thing boys do that Mari doesn’t understand where they express their shock by grabbing the fronts of their shirts and waving them rapidly in front of their faces while chanting variations of “Oooohhhhhhhhh” and “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” She rolls her eyes and looks back over at Kaworu, who has joined in their weird Gregorian chant simulation with his repeated “um”s.
“Um,” he says, his hands slowly creeping up to cover his wide eyes.
“Um,” he says, his ears and the still visible edges of his face steadily darkening.
“Um,” he says, his knees folding, causing him to slide down into a sitting position with his legs bent at uncomfortable angles. “Um. Uh. Um…”
Asuka, who had been present for the whole show, runs over to lean out the door and shout down the hallway, “Good God, Stupid Shinji, you’ve broken him!”
Meanwhile, in the background, Kaworu has graduated from “um” to “I don’t understand.” Mari crouches beside him and unsuccessfully tries to peek around the barrier of his long fingers. Damn piano playing yaoi hands, she thinks. You shouldn’t get to have both. That’s an unfair combination.
“Hey, Moon Prince,” she says, in the wheedling tone people resort to when they’re reading Goodnight Moon out loud and Go the Fuck to Sleep in their heads. “Hey. Hey there. You all right?”
“I don’t understand,” Kaworu groans from behind his hands.
“Yes, I’ve heard.”
“I don’t understand.”
Asuka, who has returned to the grisly crime scene, props her elbows up on the nearest desk, leans forward with her head resting on her hand, and casually says, “Wow. What was that about? Did you two have sex or something?”
“I… what?” Kaworu finally lowers his hands to look at her in bewilderment.
“Did you…” Asuka intones patronizingly, pointing to Kaworu. “Have…” Here she makes grasping motions with her free hand. “Sex.” She’s about to provide some visual aides by way of some no doubt innovative hand gestures for this last part, but Mari reaches up to grab her wrist, shaking her head disapprovingly.
“No!” Kaworu says, looking offended.
“Were you planning on having sex tonight?”
“No,” Kaworu repeats, and Asuka thinks, looking at the uneven blotchy way his face is flushed, that she’s finally found something Kaworu doesn’t look good doing.
The previous night
“Aw, Shinji, you blinked!”
Shinji regards the copy of the photograph that Mari had slipped into his shoe locker with the message “Kaworu <3s Shinji” written in pink pen on the back. (The ink is, incidentally, the exact shade of her plug suit, and some small part of Shinji that isn’t preoccupied with being embarrassed - maybe his gallbladder - has to admire her commitment to her brand.) Excepting that small bit of him, though, the rest of his body is cringing at what the eyes are seeing, and those don’t stay open for long, being in the direct line of fire, as ‘t were. But even after Shinji stuffs it back in its envelope, he lasts a grand total of about twenty seconds before he peeks at it again to start the whole cycle over. Because horrible embarrassment aside, it is serving as his inspiration.
Shinji thinks that as far as the him in the image goes, blinking is really the least of the issues there. Asuka had put it a bit more candidly when, after Mari had looked at the preview image and complained about the blinking, she grabbed the camera from her, took one look at the screen, and said, “It looks like you’re about to sneeze.”
“Aw, it’s like you’re allergic to affection. That’s adorable,” Mari had added on her second look, dodging Shinji’s frustrated swipes at the camera all the while.
Now that the camera’s safe with her and the “Delete” button sufficiently out of Shinji’s reach, Mari seems to have deemed it acceptable for him to finally see the picture in question. And, well… Asuka hadn’t been wrong. In addition to his squinting eyes and whatever weird, distorted shape he’s making with his mouth, there’s also a dark blush that can be seen taking over the bottom half of Shinji’s neck, which certainly does nothing to help the resemblance to an allergic reaction.
The source of Shinji’s phantom sneeze is on photo-Shinji’s right. Even Kaworu-kun in picture form is considerate, Shinji thinks, noting that even leaning over to surprise-kiss Shinji’s cheek, Kaworu barely intrudes on Shinji’s half of the picture, hands resting primly in his lap. And he looks as happy as a clam, the bastard. A very gay, albino clam.
The picture joins the ranks of evidence that Shinji keeps in a drawer in his bedroom. Present occupants of the drawer include a layer of notes that Kaworu’s left him. Some examples:
“Shinji-kun! Somebody told me that our eye colors go very well together. I wanted you to know that I don’t require any external indicators of our compatibility, but I also think it’s a very nice sentiment. (⌒‿⌒)”
“Shinji-kun! Makinami has informed me that the symbols < and 3 are often used in conjunction to form the likeness of a human heart. I don’t think it’s terribly anatomically correct, but I like the idea. <3 <3 <3<3 <3 <3<3 <3 <3<3 <3 <3<3 ← I’m not just drawing those; I’m also putting them there because of how much I like you. <3”
“Hello, Shinji-kun. This is a friendly reminder that I think I was born to meet you. Okay. I just wanted to write that again. Have a good day, Shinji-kun. <3”
The title that Shinji has given this assemblage of materials in his mind is “Evidence for the case that the relationship between Nagisa Kaworu and Ikari Shinji is the most unfair thing to ever exist, including when you open a bag of chips and half of it is air.” He hasn’t actively assigned it that title, but that’s the subconscious vibe he gets every time he thinks about it. As it turns out, anxiety is a hell of a wordsmith. Shinji’s subconscious also likes to supply him every once in a while with a nice collage of memory fragments that Shinji would rather not think about. Thick, humid, hazy atmosphere. An ambient interplay between cicadas and mosquitoes. White fingers making themselves at home in the space between Shinji’s. “When have I ever lied to you, Shinji-kun?” “You’d lie if you thought it’d make me happy.”
It seems to Shinji that Kaworu is always working to make him happy. He remembers Kaworu looking hopefully at him with his outstretched hands clutching their first, elementary piano duets, and how at the time he’d thought it was so unusual for Kaworu to ask him for anything. It wasn’t fair. And it was thus that the Third Child declared, “Starting now, Kaworu-kun, I’ll definitely make you happy.”
Kaworu is still reeling a bit after his sync test. (“Ooh, drawls Asuka sarcastically, “only 350% sync ratio, Moon Prince? Tsk tsk.”) He hasn’t seen Shinji at all since school let out, but he would very much like to.
“Huh. Moon Prince really is shaken up,” Mari muses, looking over at the spot where Kaworu sits, eyes glazed over. She busies herself with poking him repeatedly to no avail for several minutes until the door whooshes open and Kaworu’s body suddenly flails to life.
“Shinji-kun!”
Shinji marches determinedly to their table and smacks his palm down on the surface. Kaworu and Mari jump in their seats, and Asuka looks on from where she’s draped herself in the chair on the other side of the room. Even Rei’s paying attention - it’s hard to tell sometimes, because “unnerving stare” is her default setting regardless of what she’s looking at, but now she’s blinking even less than usual.
“Shinji-kun?” Kaworu asks, nervously taking in Shinji’s expression. “Are you angry with me?”
“No,” Shinji says, his voice cracking. He cringes, clears his throat, and tries again. “No, Kaworu-kun.” The corner of his mouth contorts itself in a general upwards direction to make an uncomfortable smile imitation.
“Shinji-kun, do you have something in your eye? It keeps twitching…”
“I’m fine. I wanted to give you back your card,” Shinji says, sliding his hand over to reveal Kaworu’s NERV personnel card beneath his hand.
“Did you… take my card?”
“Found it.”
“Where?”
“Does it really matter?” Shinji asks, his voice cracking again. “A-anyway,” he pauses to clear his throat several times more for good measure. “It’s a good thing I have your card, Kaworu-kun. Because… because…”
Kaworu anxiously takes note of what he thinks is a developing tic in Shinji’s cheek. He’ll have to look into that later and make sure it isn’t symptomatic of anything serious.
“Because…”
Shinji-kun shouldn’t grind his teeth like that; he’ll get cavities, Kaworu thinks.
“Because… I’m checking you out.”
The room is so quiet that when Kaworu blinks in confusion, Mari fancies she can hear it.
“What the fuck,” Asuka says. But Shinji’s already out the door, and now she has to take up the mantle of explaining the fine, subtle art of pickup linery to a very lost-looking Kaworu.
“You did the right thing coming to me,” Hikari says, nodding serenely. “I will, of course, keep our conversations in the strictest confidentiality. Tell Hikari, dear. Hikari knows.” She pushes a cup of tea forward across the table to her guest.
“Who’s this?” her little sister demands, scowling at the two of them from behind the kitchen doorframe.
“You’re not kissing, are you?” their youngest sister chimes in, matching the former’s tone and stance exactly.
“No, he’s interested in kissing someone else,” Hikari reassures them. “Remember the guy who was here a while ago because he wanted to learn how to cook for his boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“He was cute.”
“Well,” Hikari gestures toward Shinji, “this is the boyfriend.”
“Nice to meet you,” Shinji says with a timid little finger wave.
“Ooohhhhh.”
“Your boyfriend’s cute.”
“Is Hikari couples counseling you?”
“Yes,” confirms Hikari before Shinji can raise an objection. “And we’re going to be talking about gross couple things like kissing, so you don’t want to hang around, anyway.”
“Ew,” says the first sister, and thus, both Horakis the Younger are safely discouraged from hovering about the premises.
“Excellent,” says Hikari conspiratorially before she heaves a massive pile of books onto the table with a resounding thud. Its constituent tomes consist of volumes upon volumes of shoujo manga. “I only brought out the stuff from the first shelf of my collection, but I figured it’s still a good place to begin,” she says, patting the top of the pile like it’s the flank of a trusty steed.
“Where do I even start?” Shinji wonders, still processing the size of the heap.
“Doesn’t matter. Pick any one.”
Shinji runs the titles on the spine past his eyes for something that looks promising. December Everlasting by the Sea. Dawn Haunted Ballad. Diary of Marshmallow. Dream of No Promises.
Hikari can tell by the look on his face that the sensory overload is getting to be a bit overwhelming for Shinji’s untrained mind, so she reaches for a book toward the bottom of the pile and carefully wiggles it out to present it to him. “Here.”
“A Cup of Boyfriend 1999,” Shinji reads. He holds the book like the sparkles on the cover are going to crawl up his arm and infect him with the shoujo aesthetic until his eyes are twice their normal size and his lips shine with the brilliance of a thousand radiant sunbeams and he can’t even eat a potato chip without it breaking into an array of sparkling, gently floating fragments that surely can’t be good for visibility. Or something like that.
“Just skim through and stop if you see something interesting. I’ll start from the other end of the pile.” Hikari picks the topmost volume from its lofty perch and proceeds to flip through the pages intently. Shinji follows her example, albeit somewhat reluctantly. But it’s not as if he can ask Mari or Asuka for help. So there they sit, with only the sound of pages turning and Shinji’s occasional throat-clearing as he examines these hallowed texts of romance. Every so often, Hikari tries to give him a helpful push.
“What do you think of accidentally falling into a suggestive position? That’s a really popular one,” she offers, holding open a copy of Blossom Ribbon Nostalgia, Volume 7 and a copy of Sunflower Candy Apocalypse, Volume 4, both turned to prime examples of their respective heroines in just such a compromising position.
“I think everyone watching would get a lot more out of that than Kaworu-kun would,” Shinji says, needing only a cursory glance to know that’s not something he would like to try at all.
“Kabe-don?” Hikari asks some ten minutes later, with several diagrammatic examples. (They were actually regular illustrations that Hikari had supplemented with notes and step-by-step instructions in the page margins, because she’s been Shinji’s class rep and a member of Team Kawoshin long enough to know that in matters of the heart, Shinji is not the brightest shoujo sparkle around the senpai.)
Shinji gets a sort of psychic premonition in which he sees himself slamming his hands up against the wall Kaworu’s leaning against only to immediately lose his nerve while Kaworu insistently asks, “What’s wrong, Shinji-kun? Do you have a bad leg? I can carry you, Shinji-kun. Shinji-kun, let me carry you.”
“No,” he says firmly.
“Tsundere?”
“The whole objective of this was to find ways to show him that I like him, remember?”
“Right, right.”
Shinji also turns down crossdressing, letting Kaworu walk in on him changing, and following Kaworu around from a distance so that he can conveniently run into him when he’s turning a corner. “Yeah, that wouldn’t work from a logistic standpoint, anyway,” Hikari says of this last one. “Since Nagisa-kun always goes where you go. It’s actually really cute.”
Finally, they settle on something Shinji thinks he can get behind.
“Chocolates!” Hikari announces, proudly displaying A Cup of Boyfriend 1999’s Valentine’s Day chapter. “You like cooking, Ikari-kun. Can you bake?”
“Um, I could try,” Shinji mumbles from behind whatever volume of whatever series he’s currently skimming - after a while they all sort of look the same to him. “But Valentine’s Day is still months away.”
“He gave chocolate to you when it wasn’t Valentine’s Day,” Hikari replies with ease. She’s already pushed herself away from the table to rummage through the cabinets above the counter. “It’ll be self-referential, or something. It’ll be fun.”
Shinji agrees because by this point he’s been sitting here forever and his ass is kind of numb because he doesn’t have one to save him from these hard chairs and his legs are feeling kind of cramped and now the Kaworu in his head won’t stop offering to carry him. Shortly afterward, he departs from the Horaki residence with a copy of a recipe for homemade chocolate that Hikari likes to make with her sisters and several volumes of Blossom Ribbon Nostalgia in his backpack. “Just in case,” Hikari had said as she’d zipped them in.
Asuka finds Shinji curled up into a ball on the kitchen floor making wounded animal noises.
“What’s up your ass? Ugh, never mind. I don’t want to know. Hey,” she says, perking up when she sees the chunks of dark chocolate scattered about the wax papered countertop. She snaps off a piece to taste. “Not bad, Stupid Shinji.”
“I can’t give those to Kaworu-kun,” Shinji groans into the floor. “They suck.”
“I should have known it was boy drama with you,” Asuka says in between chews. “More for me, then.”
Shinji feebly waves his cocoa powder-smeared arm in a gesture of surrender.
But Asuka still sets aside a small box’s worth and breaks into Kaworu’s shoe locker the next morning to place them inside with a note bearing Shinji’s name.
Later that morning, Kaworu opens his locker, and then he opens the note taped to the top of the box that reads:
List of things that are cute:
-You
XOXO your boyfriend
“I know you wrote this,” Kaworu says to Asuka after class, note in hand.
Asuka twirls her finger in a mock celebratory gesture. “Wooo. Good for you. You want a cookie?”
“No thank you. I have chocolates.” Kaworu shakes the box to demonstrate. “I want you to tell me why Shinji-kun is avoiding me. He keeps running off somewhere as soon as classes end and I don’t know where.”
“Who can say?” Asuka asks airily with an innocuous gaze skyward.
“I see,” says Kaworu. “I shall seek assistance elsewhere, then.”
“You did the right thing coming to me,” Hikari says with a magnanimous gentility. “I will, of course, keep our conversations in the strictest confidentiality. Now, Nagisa-kun…” She slides Kaworu a cup of tea. “Tell Hikari, dear. Hikari knows.”
Meanwhile, at Misato’s apartment, Shinji nearly tramples Pen-Pen as he runs barefoot down the hall to his room shouting, “Cello! I can learn that cello duet for him!”
He’s so preoccupied refamiliarizing himself with his first instrument that when he distractedly replies to a text from Kaworu (“Are you doing all right, Shinji-kun? There’s nothing wrong, is there?”), he doesn’t stop to think of the implications of his response.
The convenience store cashier cranes his neck over the counter, trying to see what this kid is actually buying.
“I am not making a purchase,” Kaworu says, and when the cashier changes gears to looking for other customers, he adds, “Nobody else is making a purchase either. I am here to ask for your assistance.”
“Um, okay? But you have to stop looking at me like that,” the cashier says.
“Like what?”
The cashier (let us call him something flashy as recompense for his ephemeral role in this tale, like Alistair Albrecht) apprehensively backs away from Kaworu’s intense stare. “All… grim.”
Kaworu suddenly realizes what he’s doing and softens his features. “Apologies,” he says, smiling calmly. “Could you please tell me what this means?” He places his phone on the counter, the text message with Shinji already displayed. It reads:
-Are you doing all right, Shinji-kun? There’s nothing wrong, is there?
-It’s nothing :)
The muzak playing in the background coordinates nicely with Alistair Albrecht’s blank stare.
“I don’t follow.”
“I am unable to ask any of my classmates, as they are well-intentioned and as a result may not be entirely truthful. I thus require an impartial third party. Please tell me what you think this means.”
“I think ‘it’s nothing’ is kind of self-explanatory.”
“Then what is this?” Kaworu asks pleasantly, though he taps a bit impatiently on the “:)”.
“A smiley face?”
“I am aware of this,” Kaworu says, the slightest cloud of frustration darkening his otherwise sunny tone. “Please inform me of its contextual significance. Does its presence mean that it’s not nothing? I don’t know.”
“Ah,” says Alistair Albrecht, suddenly seeming to catch the drift of the conversation. “Girl troubles?”
“No. What do girls have to do with anything?”
“I - Forget it. It’s nothing.”
“What is this fixation the Lilin have with saying it’s nothing when they don’t mean it?” Kaworu sighs.
“Is this supposed to be some kind of performance art?” Alistair Albrecht inquires as he once again scans the store, this time looking for cameras.
“Of course not,” says Kaworu indignantly. “Everyone knows that’s inherently the most pretentious kind of art. I suppose I shall look elsewhere for counsel. Thank you for your time, though.” Having said this, Kaworu takes back his phone and exits the convenience store without another word so that he may continue his quest.
“Hey, Stupid Shinji, since it looks like you’re sleeping on the kitchen floor now, does this mean I get your room?” Asuka asks around the fourth time she trips over Shinji’s recumbent form.
“Uuuuuurgggrrrrggugh.”
“Big boy words, Stupid Shinji; you can do it.”
“He saw me studying the cello music at school today and now he probably thinks I’m trying to avoid playing piano with him.”
“But… that is what you’re doing.”
“Yeah, but he probably thinks I’m avoiding him because I don’t like him when I’m really avoiding him because I like him.”
“There, there,” Asuka recites in monotone as she uses her foot to sweep a path through the sheet music that’s strewn about Shinji on the floor. “How do you even know he could tell it was cello music?”
“The butt clef,” Rei appears over her shoulder to say.
“Can you not?” Asuka hisses, swatting Rei away. “Go help Misato with whatever it is you came here for.”
“She’s right,” Shinji laments.
“The hell is a butt clef?”
Rei picks up a piece of sheet music and points to the clef in question. “Butt clef.”
“Huh.” Asuka squints at it. “For once you were right, First. It does kinda look like a butt.”
“It’s the C clef,” Shinji corrects, rolling over to bury his face in the paper pile Asuka made. “Piano doesn’t use it.”
“That’s fascinating,” says Asuka. She doesn’t sound the least bit fascinated. “I guess you’ll just have to go talk to him with your big boy words. Oh no.” She gives him a gentle but firm kick in his side. “Make it sooner rather than later. Mari won’t stop hounding us and asking when you’re going to give her some new material for the blog.”
The next afternoon finds Shinji and Kaworu back in their customary places on the piano bench, though they’re not playing anything. Shinji’s sitting on his hands, and Kaworu’s wringing his in his lap.
“Um,” Kaworu says.
“Uh,” Shinji says.
“Thank you for coming here with me again, Shinji-kun.”
“Oh. Uh… no problem.”
The bench squeaks a little as they both fidget.
“Kaworu-kun?”
“Shinji-kun?”
“I, um… want you to know that I wasn’t learning that cello music because I’m tired of playing duets with you.”
“Oh, I know that.”
“Really?” Shinji works up the courage to turn his head and look at Kaworu’s face, where he can detect no trace of falsehood. “How?”
“Because, Shinji-kun,” Kaworu leans over the edge of the bench to pull something from his backpack, and Shinji immediately recognizes the flowery art on the cover of Diary of Marshmallow, Volume 12, “I have also been reading shoujo manga. And what I have gleaned from my reading is that me seeing you with cello music is exactly the sort of scenario that’s rife with possibilities for comic misunderstanding. So I didn’t worry about it. I figured you just wanted to keep up your cello practice.”
“Oh.”
“My research has instead led me to worry about this,” Kaworu continues, sternly holding up his phone, which displays the text with the irksome smiley face.
Shinji actually laughs a little when he realizes how worked up Kaworu must have gotten. “That - that actually is nothing. I’m sorry, Kaworu-kun,” he says, feeling comfortable enough now to lean a bit closer. “I was distracted at the time; I didn’t think about what it looked like to you.”
Now it’s Kaworu’s turn to say, “Oh,” and he inches a bit closer, too. “Then why has Shinji-kun been acting so strangely and avoiding me lately?”
Shinji hums tiredly and tilts his head to rest on Kaworu’s shoulder, figuring that if he’s going to talk the talk he might as well walk the walk while he’s at it. “That’s because I like you, Kaworu-kun.”
“I know that,” Kaworu says, trying to angle his head in such a way that will allow Shinji to see his puzzled expression. “You wouldn’t spend time with me if you didn’t.”
“No,” Shinji murmurs, closing his eyes to make this easier. “I mean, when you hold my hand and rub your nose against my ear and tell me how much you like me - that’s how I like you.” He feels Kaworu’s shoulder tense up, and he thinks he hears him make a little squeaking sound, but he keeps his eyes firmly shut so as not to interrupt his momentum.
“I was learning that cello song for you, you know. So you could do a duet with your violin.”
“But I’m perfectly happy playing piano with you,” Kaworu protests.
“Hm,” Shinji hums again. “I know. You’re always going on about making me happy. And you’re always doing things for me, and back when you asked me to play that string duet with you - I mean, you never ask for anything. And you asked for that.” He shifts his head on Kaworu’s shoulder so that his eyes are pressed into Kaworu’s shirtsleeve. “I want to make Kaworu-kun happy.”
When Kaworu responds, he turns his head to rest against Shinji’s where it lies. “Shinji-kun does make me happy,” he says, his voice thick. “You make me so happy, Shinji-kun. You don’t need to prove anything to me.”
A few seconds pass before Shinji feels something drop into his hair.
“Kaworu-kun?”
“Shinji-kun.”
“Are you crying?”
Kaworu lets out the breath he’d been holding, and the telltale stuttering cadence of it answers Shinji’s question for him. He buries his face further into Shinji’s hair, and Shinji thinks in between the sharp intakes of breath he can hear him saying something that sounds like “…’ve waited so long,” but he’s not sure. He just rests like this until Kaworu speaks again.
“Shinji-kun?”
“Kaworu-kun,” Shinji says, surprisingly calm, liking this call-response rhythm they’ve established between them.
“May I hold you?”
“Yes.”
Kaworu holds him. Shinji still doesn’t open his eyes.
“Shinji-kun?”
“Kaworu-kun.”
“I love you. Do you know that?”
Shinji pauses, opens his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Hey, Shinji-kun,” Kaworu says, once they’ve both composed themselves a bit. His eyes are still watery, but they look happy as they peep out at Shinji from behind the volume of Sunflower Candy Apocalypse he holds open. He points to the panel depicting the two main love interests eskimo kissing. “We could try that.”
“We could try that,” Shinji agrees, before he leans in and tries it.
The next week when they’re playing piano, Kaworu lifts Shinji’s hand in between practice runs to kiss his fingers.
A few days later, when Kaworu is rubbing his nose against Shinji’s ear, he kisses that, too.
“Marvelous, marvelous,” cackles Mari as she watches Kaworu stoop down over Shinji’s desk one day to rub noses. “Gays in their heaven, all’s right with the world. And with the blog,” she supplies, clicking the button on her camera to her heart’s content.
“Makinami is taking more pictures than usual today,” Kaworu says, a little absentmindedly.
“Yeah,” Shinji replies. “I told her to have her camera ready and to take a picture cause it’ll last longer.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing,” Shinji says, before he pulls Kaworu down to kiss him on the lips.
“Ugh, Kaworu! You blinked!”
THE END.