Work Text:
Leorio doesn't update his apps until they stop working. This is a roundabout explanation for why it's three in the morning and he's testing the new voice memo feature on his messaging app by texting Kurapika. What better time than when he’s right off his second 24 this week and practically hallucinating with sleep deprivation?
“Hey,” he says, holding his phone too close to his mouth. He pulls it away. Kurapika is going to be able to hear him breathing, all those weird wet mouth sounds. Not sexy. Unless Kurapika thinks it’s sexy? He realizes he hasn’t said anything and the app is still recording. “What’s up? Are you there?”
Stupid question. It’s a recorded message. Kurapika isn’t there. Leorio remembers, and then tries to forget, that he has to be back at the hospital in four and a half hours. “What’s up?” he says again. “What are you doing right now?” And then he takes his thumb off the record button so he doesn’t say anything critically stupid, like “I miss you” or “can I suck on your dick" or “if you get hurt and I find out because you end up in my exam room I’ll kill you myself, you horrible idiot.”
Leorio looks down at the little blue line of the voice recording. Probably it’s better than the voicemails he used to leave, that Kurapika used to ignore. They’ve been texting a little bit, though, which Leorio hopes is a good sign. Nothing big. Maybe Kurapika will text him back tomorrow, and tell him something stupid that Basho did. He throws his phone back onto the bed and goes to brush his teeth. He’s counting down from 120 when there’s a distant ding, and he nearly brains himself on the doorway trying to remove the toothbrush from his mouth and run back to the bedroom at the same time.
It’s a voice message. Kurapika has never sent him a voice message before. “I’m just sitting,” Kurapika says, and Leorio keeps waiting for the rest of the message, but that’s it. He’s sitting. Leorio has his thumb on the record button before he can think better of it.
“You’re sitting in the wrong place, that’s the problem,” he says. “Why don’t you come sit here? I’m in Yorknew.” Obviously. Kurapika knows that. Leorio has been in Yorknew the whole time, and Kurapika has not done anything with that information. He inhales a little bit. “I could take care of you,” he says, and then realizes that’s too much, and Kurapika will be halfway across the world before he even finishes the message, “with a sitting place. Um. I have chairs and stuff to sit on.”
He lifts his thumb off the record button, intending to try and re-record this absolute disaster of a message, but apparently this stupid app wants him to die, because stopping the recording immediately sends it, and Kurapika is probably sitting in his office or his sleek car or a bar somewhere listening to Leorio tell him that he has chairs(??) to sit on(??)
He should finish brushing his teeth. Instead he stares at the generic profile picture next to Kurapika’s name in his phone. He should put a picture of Kurapika in there. Does he have any pictures of Kurapika? Gon had taken one in Yorknew, hadn’t he? Kurapika had been smiling that one time, in the park, and Leorio had felt it like a sudden sharp punch to the gut. He should have thought to look for pictures earlier. This whole time he’s just been moping at an empty gray outline.
[1 new voice message!]
“I love chairs,” Kurapika breathes into Leorio’s ear, and he almost drops the phone. Kurapika sounds sexy, and a little bit tired, and a little bit stupid the way Leorio feels a little bit stupid right now.
Leorio fumbles with his phone keyboards. “Your voice sounds so good. Um,” he says, realizing he doesn’t really know where to go with it now. “I could probably just have you sit on a chair.” Maybe the kitchen chair, where Leorio studied for his exams. Is it the chair thing Kurapika is into? The selfie Leorio had sent a bit ago, he’d been sitting on a chair. Was that why Kurapika had responded?
“We can just do that,” he says. “We can just sit on chairs all night or something. Or maybe,” he starts, and then loses confidence, and continues, “there’s gotta be some material behind that. We can just figure it out. Whatever you want,” he finishes, a little breathlessly. If Kurapika is really into chairs, Leorio can detail chairs all night. He can talk about rungs, and cushions, and balustrades. No, that’s stairs. Well, he can do some googling.
“gtg sry,” Kurapika texts, and Leorio hopes it’s because it’s nearly four now, and not because he’s being shot at. God, tomorrow's shift is going to be brutal.
He thinks maybe he should be embarrassed about how often he plays that two-second message. It’s just the way Kurapika had sounded. There’s a little intake of breath right before he speaks, and he elongates his R just a little bit, sitting on it. Like he’s comfortable. Like he’d sound if he were in Leorio’s kitchen, or at the desk he has crammed under the window, or perched on the little rickety metal chair on the balcony where Leorio goes to stare blankly out at the city sometimes after a bad shift.
Leorio is beginning to realize that all of his chairs really suck. He should do something about that, right? He told Kurapika he could come over, and all he has for Kurapika to sit on are shitty prefab chairs he picked up off Griggslist. He can’t really spin a fantasy about particleboard. So he goes down to the marketplace, and he talks to Zepile, who turns out to know a guy who knows a guy.
He’s not buying them for Kurapika. He’s a grown adult. He should have furniture that doesn’t wobble. He has money now, because thanks to the Hunter Association his med school loans are interest-free, so he can afford to shell out for a hand-carved cherry dining room set with matching drop-leaf table. He gets a crazy discount on it, anyway, because the chairs need refinishing. So he asks Zepile how to refinish a chair, and they spend a couple of his precious days off crouched in the courtyard of his building with mineral spirits and a succession of dirty rags. He buys Zepile some beers and pizza in exchange, and they shoot the shit, and it’s kind of satisfying, the same way that tying off a particularly neat series of stitches is satisfying. The chairs look great afterwards. Really expensive, like something a real doctor would have in his house. He sends a picture to Kurapika, and Kurapika says “nice” in response. So he’s on the right track, absolutely.
When the light hits the wood it glows almost red, which definitely isn't the reason Leorio bought the chairs. He also definitely doesn’t jerk off about them for the next week, thinking about Kurapika sitting on one of his new chairs with his thighs spread. No, Kurapika doesn’t spread his thighs. He always sits straight, like he’s ready to jump back up at any minute. His muscles would be a little taut, probably. Or maybe he crosses his legs now, one ankle over his thigh, the way Leorio does when he wants to make himself feel more like a big shot. Kurapika is a big shot now, and he needs people to think he’s dangerous.
Leorio doesn’t like to imagine Kurapika changing his fussy little mannerisms to fit in better with a bunch of shitty murderers. He tries thinking about something else. Kurapika on the chair, in those loose white trousers. Maybe they’d be a little wet, like he’d come in from the rain or something. He’d come in from the rain, just to dry off, so Leorio could take care of him. He’d be drinking a mug of tea, with a coaster. Leorio doesn’t own coasters right now, but he makes a mental note to fix that. Anyway. The wet pants, clinging to the muscle in Kurapika’s thighs, the curve of his stomach folded a little over the cinched waist. He’d have to take the pants off, so he wouldn’t ruin the wood. So then Kurapika naked on the chair, his feet perched on the rung. The light hair on his calves, the smooth grain of the chair arms cupping his body, the rounded curves of the turned wood rail under Kurapika's feet. Kurapika's dick, dripping onto the seat, where it will leave a stain if no one cleans it up. Leorio could clean it up. He’s careful with the things that matter.
“These are nice,” Kurapika says, in the fantasy, with the same breathy intonation as in the recording Leorio’s listened to enough to wear it out. “I love your chairs.”
Leorio comes.
Yes, maybe he should be a little embarrassed. He sends another picture of the chairs to Kurapika, just in case. “Didn’t know wood could be so comfortable!” he captions.
“craftsmanship” says Kurapika, and then a thumbs up emoji.
After that he gets a nicer office chair for his desk, this buttery-soft leather with great back support and fully adjustable armrests. You really can’t spend too much on good back support. He knows the physical therapists at the hospital, but not well enough to get a deal, so really this is money he’s saving down the road. And it’s adjustable, so anyone else could sit in it and be just as comfortable. Theoretically speaking.
He does jerk off in the chair, because it's in front of his computer and now he can watch porn without getting a cramp in his lower back. His usual fare isn't really doing it for him tonight. He closes the window and its accompanying pop ups, and leans back into his new chair and thinks about Kurapika running his fine-boned hands over the leather. Leorio's always careful to be neat in the chair, and he keeps his pants on the whole time, so he doesn’t have to peel his thighs off the leather and leave weird sweat marks behind.
He wonders if Kurapika is neat when he jerks off. He seems like he would be, like jerking off would be something he does as carefully and assuredly as he does everything else. Leorio’s seen Kurapika at the ragged edges of his control, though. In Yorknew, and back on the boat, he’d been furious and shaking and red-eyed. So maybe if he was really into it, he’d get a little messy. He’d lose control a little bit.
Leorio thinks about Kurapika’s thighs trembling on the buttery-soft leather of the desk chair while he lets Leorio suck him off. He’d clutch the armrests. Leorio would have to hold him still, because the chair has an adjustable tilt and also a very smooth swivel.
“I love chairs,” the recording of Kurapika says, and Leorio comes harder than he means to and has to google how to spot-clean leather.
Leorio's next purchase is a big cushy armchair. He’d been tempted by a very beautiful period wingback that Zepile had alerted him to, but when he’d tested it out it had been so uncomfortable that even the gorgeous curvature of its clawfoot legs couldn’t tempt him. He gets the squashiest, softest chair he can find instead. It looks like it fell off the bed of a truck, and Leorio can fit his entire body onto it if he curls up, which is really saying something because he’s not a very small person. If he’s not careful after a long shift sometimes he falls asleep in the chair before he even gets his shoes off.
He doesn’t know if Kurapika will like it. It’s not beautiful, in the way that comfortable things rarely are, and it wasn’t particularly expensive, even though he bought it at a real furniture store and not from an impoverished student. But when he’d seen it in the window he’d immediately thought about Kurapika curled up in the corner of it, like a cat. Not even in a sexy way.
He’s a little worried about how few of his fantasies about Kurapika would actually be sexy to an outside observer. Mostly in his fantasies Kurapika is just comfortable, and relaxed. Sometimes he smiles a little.
He tries broaching the topic with Zepile on one of the nights he comes over to drink beers and play mediocre poker, at which they both try to cheat.
“The weirdest thing I ever jerked off to?” Zepile says, slapping at Leorio’s hand where he’s trying to slip an extra card onto the table. “When I was a teen I got weirdly fixated on mechs. You know, the fantasy giant robots. Those shows were always full of beautiful naked women inside the robots, which is normal, but I was getting boners when I walked by the mechanic shop to get to school, so I panicked and had to stop watching them.”
“So if someone was into tables or something, that would be pretty normal?”
“Is this why you’ve been refurnishing your apartment?”
“No,” Leorio says, feeling his face get hot. “It’s not for me. It’s for— someone else. Never mind.”
“You know I don’t judge,” Zepile says. “I used to do art commissions on the side before I figured out the forgery thing. People will pay you to draw anything, and I do mean anything. If you’re into chairs, follow your bliss.”
“I’m not into chairs!”
"Sure," Zepile says, and Leorio is so frustrated and distracted he almost doesn't notice when Zepile plays a hand with two aces of spades.
He sends Kurapika a picture of the armchair in the middle of the afternoon, except it's the middle of the night for him because he's been awake since 11 the previous morning. It has a matching footrest, which Leorio likes because he can stretch his legs out instead of letting them sort of dangle over the armrest like he has with every previous armchair he's ever had. He could sit on the footrest and give Kurapika a foot massage, if Kurapika wanted. He doesn't think Kurapika wears very comfortable shoes.
Kurapika sends back a smiley face with a nose, which Leorio shouldn't find charming and does.
you should come test it out, he types, pushing his luck.
maybe i will, Kurapika replies. Leorio is so pleased his co-resident asks him if he's got a hot date, and he has to make up a lie about a hot blond, a story that definitely won't come back to bite him in the ass.
Despite the text, Leorio doesn’t really think Kurapika will come by. It’s been a while since they were all together in Yorknew. Leorio doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the criminal underworld, but sometimes he checks the hunter websites, and the rumblings he does hear aren’t encouraging. Kurapika’s busy, tracking down the eyes. He has time to text occasionally, and to send Leorio two-second voice memos about chairs. He does not have time to drop by for a long weekend.
So when Kurapika does show up on his doorstep, Leorio doesn’t initially hear the doorbell because he’s doing the dishes, half-singing along to the citypop he’s blasting loud enough to rattle his plates. He answers the door and immediately regrets that he’s wearing his rattiest sweatpants, because it isn’t one of his neighbors complaining about the noise. It’s Kurapika, looking exactly like Leorio had imagined, his hair falling softly around his face, his shoulders held too tight. His mouth quirks in something that isn’t quite a smile. In the kitchen Mariya Takeuchi is crooning about just playing games, and Leorio thinks he’s never been so in love.
Then Kurapika stops leaning heavily against the doorframe and sags forward. Leorio tries to catch him, fails, and drops him on the threshold of his apartment. Leorio’s hands are still wet from the dishes, but there’s a spreading dampness masked by the darkness of Kurapika’s suit. “Shit,” Leorio says.
Five stitches and a change of clothes later, Kurapika is wearing Leorio’s second-nicest sweatpants and sitting on one of his new kitchen chairs. Aside from the stitches, it could be Leorio’s well-worn fantasy, although he’d forgotten to buy coasters, so Kurapika is resting his mug of tea on a takeout menu.
Leorio clears his throat. Maybe he shouldn’t be horny about this. Kurapika is probably very tired, on account of the five stitches and minor blood loss. Most of the blood hadn’t been his, which Leorio is uncomfortably pleased by. “Well,” he says. “You’re on one of my chairs.”
“I am.” Kurapika’s voice is a little hoarser than the recording.
“Does it, um,” Leorio says. “Does it feel nice?”
“This is one of the new ones?” Kurapika looks around, runs his thumb over the edge of the table. Leorio suppresses a shudder. “You’re right. It is pretty comfortable for a wooden chair.” He’s so restrained, as always, but his pleasure is obvious. Leorio grips the counter, wishing he were wearing something other than loose sweatpants that will make it very obvious if he gets a boner. But maybe Kurapika won’t mind.
“I’m glad,” he says. “I’m glad you like to sit in them.”
“Leorio,” Kurapika says, and sets his mug down on the takeout menu. He’s not very far away, because Leorio’s kitchen is not very large. Leorio wants to be closer to him, and also doesn’t know how to ask for that. “Come here,” Kurapika says, and he’s smiling, and he looks so tired and lovely.
Leorio comes over, and finds himself sort of weirdly looming over Kurapika. “You’re here,” he says again, stupidly. “On one of my chairs.”
“Yeah,” Kurapika breathes, and yanks Leorio down by the tshirt he got at the bodega down the street and kisses him. Kurapika is kind of a shitty kisser, as it turns out. He bites a lot, and he must not have managed to clean up all the blood because Leorio can taste it in his mouth. Leorio is getting a crick in his neck from being hunched over Kurapika like this. The chair is creaking slightly under their combined weight. It’s perfect.
“Can we move somewhere that isn’t this chair?” Kurapika runs a hand up Leorio’s side, and Leorio makes a noise he hasn’t heard come out of his mouth since middle school band class.
“Sure,” Leorio says. “I have an armchair, or there’s the balcony— well, we probably shouldn’t go to the balcony. Or my desk, I got a new desk chair. It tilts.”
“I was thinking maybe a bed. You have one of those, right? It’s not just well-appointed chairs?”
“Right!” Leorio squeaks. “Yes, I have a bed. I have so many beds. I mean, I really only have one bed and it’s not really— can you do that again please— wait, actually, I can’t think when you’re doing that—“
Kurapika makes a little noise against Leorio’s collarbone, and Leorio realizes it’s laughter. He hasn’t heard Kurapika laugh in so long. He made Kurapika laugh. He made Kurapika laugh at him while they were making out.
“Hey,” he says, puffing up a little. “Hey, what’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Kurapika says. “Nothing.”
“You can’t laugh at the bed. I haven’t gotten a new bed yet. I didn’t think there was a reason to.”
“I promise I won’t laugh at the bed.”
Kurapika breaks his promise, because Leorio’s bed is a twin brass bed with shiny knobs that he got off the sidewalk (not the mattress, though, the mattress is new.) It looks like something you’d find in a children’s bedtime storybook. It barely fits Leorio. It definitely does not fit two grown adults.
“Why,” Kurapika says, “did you replace your entire dining room set and not your bed? How do you even fit into this? You’re almost two meters tall.”
There is no sentence Leorio can say here that isn’t deeply incriminating, and also most of his blood is in his dick, so he doesn’t bother to come up with an excuse. “You love chairs.”
“I— oh my god, Leorio,” Kurapika says, and then he’s kissing Leorio up against the door. Leorio should maybe be irritated by the way Kurapika just pushes him wherever he wants him with the vague air of a housewife at the market bustling someone out of her way, but unfortunately he just finds it really hot.
“You really refurnished your apartment because of one sentence I said at three in the morning,” Kurapika says, spitting onto his hand and pulling down the waistband of Leorio’s sweatpants where the elastic has worn through. This really isn’t fair. How is Leorio supposed to form words like this, when Kurapika’s careful fingers are wrapped around his dick?
“I don’t love chairs that much, you know,” Kurapika continues, on the upstroke. “It’s not like, a fetish. I just didn’t know what to say.”
“Gahhngh,” Leorio says. He twitches his hips. It’s really good, embarrassingly good, to be touched by Kurapika like this, with his pants shoved down and his shirt shoved up because they were both too impatient to actually remove any clothes. He’s also rapidly becoming aware that it’s not going to be quite enough for him. Maybe it’s the position, up against the wall like this. Maybe it's—
“Everything good there?” Oh no, Kurapika’s pulling his hand away. “You’re making this face.”
“I have a big armchair in the living room,” Leorio says. “We’ll both fit on that.”
“Leorio,” Kurapika says, “do you have a chair fetish?”
“Noo,” says Leorio, unconvincingly. “I just think it would be more comfortable if we sat down, and it’s a nice chair. I’d like you to try it out.”
“Oh my god,” Kurapika says, “you do.”
“I don’t!” Leorio yelps. “I want you to be comfortable! And you said that thing about loving chairs in your bedroom voice, or what I assume is your bedroom voice, although now that we’re actually in my bedroom you just have a normal voice, and I jerked off to it for several months thinking about you sitting in chairs, and now that you’re here touching my literal dick apparently I need a chair to be present for anything to happen. Please make me stop talking. This is the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to me since my cousin convinced me—“
Blessedly, Kurapika has put his fingers into Leorio’s mouth, rendering him both much, much hornier and incapable of saying any more incriminatingly dumb shit. He didn’t even know that fingers in his mouth was a thing he could be into, but he also hadn’t know he had a latent chair thing. He thinks, with some distress, that he may just have a Kurapika thing.
“Good,” Kurapika says, and Leorio lets out an embarrassing kind of whimper. “Let’s go to the living room, then, hmm?” And then he— oh god— leads Leorio by hooking a finger into his mouth and pulling him along behind him. Leorio has never been harder in his entire life, including the first time he ever saw a dirty magazine after Pietro's shitty cousin found that box in the vacant lot.
In the living room Kurapika arranges Leorio on the big squashy armchair, and then ignores the footrest and climbs on top of him. It turns out Leorio was right. They do both fit. He can’t even be smug about it because Kurapika is on top of him, and all of the blood he would usually use to be smug is elsewhere.
“You have such a nice chair,” Kurapika breathes into Leorio’s ear. “I could sit here all day.”
“Ohhhhh fuck,” Leorio says, and comes all over Kurapika’s hand.
Kurapika moves to wipe his hand on Leorio’s chair, and Leorio lurches forward and grabs his arm, and Kurapika makes him lick his own cum off of his fingers instead, which should be gross but mostly makes Leorio wish he was tasting Kurapika’s cum and not his own.
Kurapika settles back onto Leorio’s legs, a pleased little smirk on his face. He looks self-satisfied, and really beautiful, both of which make Leorio want to bite him. When he nips at the meat of Kurapika’s shoulder Kurapika makes a sweet little sigh that Leorio would really like to hear again. He does his best to figure it out.
Kurapika likes a lighter touch than he does, and his balls are more sensitive than Leorio’s. He’s wetter than Leorio, too, enough that there’s a damp spot on the front of Leorio’s second nicest sweatpants. This might be a problem. He doesn’t have that many sweatpants.
When Leorio shoves a hand up his shirt to get at more skin he’s delighted to discover that Kurapika’s sensitive here too. It makes his stomach hurt a little, thinking about how lightly Kurapika likes to be touched, and what he’s been doing with his careful hands these days instead. He distracts himself with Kurapika’s small soft sounds, the thin skin at the junction of his thigh where the femoral beats steady, the way his dick twitches when Leorio thumbs the head. It’s not what he’d imagined. It’s better.
“You look beautiful,” he says, into the hollow of Kurapika’s throat. Kurapika arches back into the arm Leorio has around his back, and Leorio moves his hand down a little, cautious of his fresh stitches. “Can’t believe I get to see you like this.” It sounds like bad porn dialogue, but he means it. It feels impossible that Kurapika is here. The dim lamp on the end table gives Kurapika’s open mouth the kind of soft glow that only old movies and memories get. “You should— you should sit here all the time,” Leorio says. “On this chair, or on me, or whatever you want. You should always be here.”
“Please,” Kurapika says, and Leorio thinks he sounds desperate, or maybe just afraid.
“You can have it,” Leorio says. “Whatever you want.”
“You can’t— fuck!” Kurapika yanks on Leorio’s hair and kisses him, biting too hard again. And then he stops biting, and Leorio realizes he’s coming almost silently, little shuddering gasps into Leorio’s mouth as he braces against Leorio’s shoulders and tries to hold himself still.
“Your arm,” he says, trying to encourage Kurapika to loosen his grip a little. Kurapika is maybe the only person in the world who gets less relaxed after coming.
“It’s fine,” Kurapika says, still a little shaky from orgasm. His hands are trembling where they’re fisted in Leorio’s shirt, and so are his arms, fine tremors all the way through his body.
He’s crying, Leorio realizes, with some panic. Oh fuck, he lured Kurapika into his apartment and shoved his hand down his pants and told him some insane bullshit about chairs and wanting to keep him here like some sort of deranged freak, and now Kurapika is weeping silently into Leorio’s neck. He runs a hand up Kurapika’s back, avoiding the bandage, and tries fruitlessly to think of something to say.
“Tell me about your chairs,” Kurapika says, after a few minutes.
“Okay,” Leorio says. He’d said whatever Kurapika wanted, and he’d meant it. If Kurapika wants to hear about Leorio scouring websites made by guys with uncle names about the difference between half-lap and mortise-and-tenon joints, that’s what he’ll get. He shifts Kurapika so that he won’t have to use his shoulder muscles to hold himself up, and starts to tell the story of how he got kicked out of the bazaar because he threatened a furniture dealer with bodily harm over the last 300 jenny. Kurapika laughs in the places Leorio thought he would, and Leorio can feel his weight, warm and solid across his thighs.
Nothing’s fixed, not really. Leorio isn’t stupid, okay? He knows Kurapika will leave in the morning. His quest isn’t over. Kurapika didn’t ask him to quit medical school, and Leorio won’t ask him to quit his search. But he’s here tonight, and Leorio can make sure he’s warm and safe and cared for. He’ll get Kurapika his third-nicest pair of sweatpants to change into, and maybe he’ll make them some curry udon with the egg almost raw the way that Kurapika likes. He thinks he has some wilted carrots in the fridge. Kurapika probably isn’t getting a lot of vegetables. Mafiosos mostly eat meat and pasta, right? They can eat it in the kitchen, and maybe afterwards Kurapika will let Leorio give him a blowjob on the kitchen chairs. And then they can sleep— well, not in Leorio’s bed. But Kurapika can take the bed, and Leorio can be on the futon he pulls out for Zepile when he stays over after poker night.
Leorio hasn’t been a doctor for very long. But he knows a lot about doing the best you can with what you have. Kurapika came by once. He’ll come by again. Leorio can be patient and sit tight; after all, his chairs are very comfortable.