rp log: niou yagyuu; part 2

[phasing-knavery.livejournal.com]

Date: Sunday, 20 November 2005
Warnings: Overanalysis, D1, notsolong. XD
Summary: After Yagyuu's long-overdue birthday celebration, they return to Yags' room. Mixed signals continue, and some semblance of resolution is reached. :D


"Nothing else planned," Niou admitted with a chuckle, ambling along with his own hands in pockets. It was the truth – though only because he was dead broke for the second time in a month – but also a slight shame, given Yagyuu's newfound relaxedness had lightened the atmosphere. They walked back to the Brotherhood gates in relative silence, little small talk feeling the need to pass between them. But then there, "What about you?" the phaser grinned in return. "Anything else you have in mind for this oh-so-special day?"

There were at least a few things, but the question was whether Yagyuu could actually give voice to those thoughts. He still had a million questions circling in his mind, unasked; still found his chilled hands shaking only slightly as he opened the gate and turned before stepping through. "If there isn't anything, ah... else ... I mean..."

He met Niou's eyes with his own matching set, and that quieted his thoughts, stabilised him just enough to say the hell with it and ask. "Do you want to come in?"

Niou’s grin broadened at the cut of hesitation, wondering if he had good enough reason to hang around – now that Yagyuu wasn’t quite Yagyuu, he wouldn’t be so fun to poke at… but on the other hand, barriers were down – he had a feeling maybe some things could be continued, some things started… yeah. Slinking in, he leaned once more on the other’s shoulder and, though he’d last been here not so long ago, donned a Cheshire grin: “Lead the way~”

So he'd been reading right all along. The invite wasn't accepted out of politeness or obligation -- if Niou'd wanted to leave, he'd have gone. The sound of his voice in Yagyuu's ear, asking to lead, recalled a fragment of dream he'd had (and had again); strange, he thought, how even this moment felt more like a dream and less like reality.

He just hadn't thought it possible.

But as he unlocked his own bedroom door, he turned to the phaser beside him, resisted raking pale fingers though the shock of silver hair, and instead just pushed the door open and guided him in. Yagyuu sat on his bed (yes, the bed; the only other seating options were the desk and the floor), tucking one leg underneath him casually. "Welcome back." Let's see where this goes.

Niou seated himself in a mirroring fashion atop the table across the room – same as that day during his Brotherhood stay – because there was stalking the proverbial devil, and then there was lying in bed with him. “It’s good to be back,” he duly returned (but not obliged), grinning lopsidedly and looking around. “A bit’s changed since last time.”

At that, Yagyuu glanced at the black comforter spread beneath him -- a gift from one of his teammates that hadn't gone to waste, considering the sad state of the school's heating system. But it wasn't the décor; it wasn't the chill of the actual temperature -- it was an ease in the tension between them, a slightly better understanding that had been acquired in the almost-month since Niou had stayed here.

"A bit," Yagyuu echoed. "You're ... alright over there?"

“Are you?” Niou countered with a laugh. It amused him to consider what kind of reply Yagyuu’d expected or hoped for with a question like that.

Yes? No? Niou joining him on the comfort of the bed was probably too much to ask. Yagyuu would've wished for things to be simple and straightforward, but they couldn't get much more straightforward than they already were. Could be better, he considered saying, but that was the gold in his eyes.

Expect the unexpected. When Yagyuu'd resigned himself to the thought that he might be being foolish about wanting anything more from Niou, he was kissed; when he dared invite him back to his room, he was stared at. And didn't know what to say. I have something to ask you, maybe, or Why don't you come over here?

Oh, hell, how contrived could you get? What came out, though, was a stilted "I'm fine," that sounded like Yagyuu was anything but.

“You sound like you could use the bathroom,” Niou snickered. And he meant that in your generically constipated sense, thanks. Getting up, he walked over to the book case and ran his fingers over the titles again – their order hadn’t changed. “Inform me,” he said to it, talking to its owner. “Tell me something new and shiny, or ask me a question and let me tell you <3” Turning with wide eyes and a cherry cheery smile, he watched his own eyes in Yagyuu’s face and seated himself casually on the floor, looking up. Lesson 303 - Body Language And Positions of Power.

I want you to stay. Though a free question was equally tempting, if not moreso ... Yagyuu knew he was always welcome to ask, but still feared that any given situation was an inappropriate context for what he wanted to know.

Would you kiss me again? A soft chuckle erupted as he dismissed that outright. He'd already been given enough leeway; he didn't want to press his luck. But there were the two halves fighting inside him; his own mind that wanted to know why still, and Niou's eyes that should grant him the clarity to know the answer to that already, and might just request more intimate touch.

But he felt like he was already walking on a thin line. He trusted Niou, but feared that one misstep might push him over the edge -- in either direction. It seemed like so much was hanging on this moment, and maybe it was all in Yagyuu's mind, and he bit his own lip and stared at Niou on his floor.

It wasn't Niou's decision. He was just following, and Yagyuu was too scared to lead; he didn't know the steps to take. Niou did, but wouldn't, and that why was the real question, wasn't it? But how to word it...

... maybe he was just waiting to see what he would do. And golden eyes were enough to grant him just an ounce of unpredictability.

Yagyuu pushed himself off the bed and slid onto the floor facing Niou, studying his face as though he might be able to extract the answers telepathically. There. On a level. Manicured fingertips trailed hesitantly down the side of the phaser's cheek. "Why do you force me to take the initiative?" he asked, voice just above a murmur.

Mm, a worthy question; Niou already had the answer. “Because you let me when I do?” he grinned, face turning slightly into the touch by default. And that was the clear truth – each was as passive as the other, difference lying only in choice of said mode. Lightly, he flicked Yagyuu’s nose. “Fun is actions and reactions.” There was much more variability to be found in others, after all. And something even better when others were outside their comfort zones. For someone like Yagyuu, whose said zones were always shifting, the possibilities were infinitely more interesting.

The gesture felt more affectionate than chastising, and Yagyuu's head moved closer to Niou's face as he pulled his hand away. "So you just want to see how I react?" Another murmur, his own hand turning over to graze bare knuckles over Niou's cheek. He was close enough to feel the other's warm, slow breath on his skin; could feel his long, quiet pulse beneath his hand as it came to rest on Niou's neck.

Yagyuu almost wished he could absorb only selected elements. The eyes were good, but a little more would be better, if there were some way he could let himself be just a little bit more than himself but not quite entirely Niou. He tilted his head, examining the other for any change, even subtle. "It -- it isn't just that, is it?"

“It is,” Niou chuckled, but with non-final intonation. Being that the way Yagyuu reacted was his very definition of self, Niou could very truthfully say that he. Was. Interested. In one Yagyuu Hiroshi – except for the fact that to all but one, it wouldn’t sound right. And since Yagyuu didn’t need to hear it, the phrase would remain unsaid.

He remained quiet, waiting. To see Yagyuu’s reaction if he himself did nothing but respond.

Yagyuu didn't move, as still as the other, gold eyes locked on gold eyes. In his mind he imagined a scene where he'd already kissed Niou, where he'd pushed him down into the bed, pressed against him, bodies flush; he imagined the taste of his lips and the salt of his skin, imagined what it might feel like to have him moving beneath him.

But Yagyuu wasn't action, he was reaction: he was formed of the stuff that other people made him. And Niou, usually the active and decisive one, was passive now so Yagyuu wouldn't have to be.

If he didn't want you to touch him, he wouldn't let you. Indecision made time move so slowly, even after Yagyuu knew this was going to be happening again. He didn't let their lips touch, not yet; despite their proximity, he wanted confirmation, so asked just over his breath. "Do you want me to do this?"

Laughter crept up the phaser’s throat, low and slow – he could feel the uncalm, not-anxious warmth of Yagyuu’s face so close – and had really no idea how to be any more open without directly saying ‘Do what you like.’ How could someone be so densely hesitant? It was amusing on the one hand, but frustrating on the other -- no, what I want is to smack you over the head for being so senseless -- He wouldn’t though. No matter what Yagyuu asked, it wasn’t the name of the game.

“I want to see if you will.” If you can. How far you’ll go. If nobody makes you. Face still unreadable, smile still just a smile.

I can't be what I'm not needed to be. His actions had to fit the situation. If Niou was just playing with him, wasn't serious about him, then he'd be a fool -- a selfish fool -- to kiss him. Especially when he was held fully accountable for his actions.

But it was hard to be so clinically objective when Niou was right there, opening himself like some kind of sacrifice, and there was nothing Yagyuu could ask short of sounding even more foolish than he would if he just stopped and did it.

Another breath, matching Niou's, another achingly slow heartbeat, and Yagyuu opened his lips against the corner of Niou's mouth, let them linger, closed his eyes as he felt his barrier weakening to let Niou come through. He flowed though the aperture in his shield, infusing his lips, his face, his voice, his heart, one-by-one and slowly, until Yagyuu was buried just deep enough below the Niou-skin that he couldn't be blamed for doing something so horrendously wrong. He repositioned his face to meet Niou more directly, more assertively than he could hope to manage on his own, tongue grazing the edges of Niou's lips.

“Are you me now?” the phaser said, voice soft. It wasn’t much of a question – none, actually, since Niou kissed with his eyes open and Yagyuu was definitely no longer Yagyuu. But eyes traced down the lines of his own face and – Are you me, or do you just look like me? If Yagyuu became Niou to get this done because that was… what he felt he needed…

Did that still count as Hiroshi taking the initiative? Niou held back another laugh. Trying to straighten out logic didn’t get much more screwed up than that.

You can do this. Implying that Yagyuu, on his own, could not. Niou took risks; Yagyuu made sure that everything he did was a sure shot, that he would always be right.

"Don't know," he said. "Depends. You've been me for a while now, haven't you?" Yagyuu knew that that wasn't quite true, either, but he'd been passive, and that meant he wasn't quite all Niou.

The phaser felt like he was talking nose an inch away from a mirror as he voiced his thoughts. “Not quite. You wouldn’t bait; you wouldn’t’ve done it for a reason…” No, it hadn’t been Hiroshi; it didn’t count.

Well… it might. It would depend. Slipping his hands around Yagyuu’s neck, Niou combed his fingers through the mullet and plaited loose silver strands the way Ryoma usually did.

"What reason's that?" Yagyuu laughed, tilting his head at the feel of deft fingers in his hair. Being Niou felt so much lighter than being himself; he didn't have to think and re-think every turn of phrase, every small action. But neither did it mean that he would stop asking.

“A moot one now,” Niou grinned in return, pushing himself up to sit up properly with his legs in crossed. He tapped Yagyuu twice on the forehead. “I wanted to see how you’d go with nothing to mirror; how far you could take things as Hiroshi~ but… seems that you can’t?” His tone was teasing now, soft but not kind. “You had to be me.”

And soon as it was explained, Yagyuu felt like he'd lost the game. How could he win, after all, when he had to muddle through without knowing the rules? Worse, Niou was right in deducing why Yagyuu had bothered to let the morph occur. Strike two.

But that added to the tension building between them, and Yagyuu tried to cast it off as casually as Niou might. "That's a problem?"

“Wrong thing to say, if you’re not going to be yourself,” the phaser chuckled as he stared through his other. Hands rested on knees now, palms down and still; Niou kept his voice quiet, articulating carefully. “I’m not the played type.”

Thinking a little about that, he sat back, headtilted. Posed an honest, open question, no intonation, a small smile and it was back to genuine curiosity: “How well do you think you know me?”

Not well at all, and it was back to things that he would say in his own skin but not the one he currently occupied. He could, maybe, shake off the morph, but then he couldn't act, couldn't do, would be back to thinking and overthinking and being stuck running in one place for too long. That wouldn't work.

"'pparently not as well as you know me, never mind powers or anything." That was right -- turn it back on the other one, don't keep the conversation stuck on himself. His own smile was a bit wry, considering the situation. "Look," he added, with a deep breath and a sigh to recompose himself, or just some part of himself, something to let him say what Hiroshi needed to say but for some reason couldn't. "Look." And he shifted, sitting back on his hips to get a good look at Niou proper. "You probably know me better than I know me. That's ... the way it happens. And I'll run in circles thinking too much about how I'm not anything or what I want to be, and I won't be able to come up with anything besides saying 'what I'm needed to be'. I don't have any better answer. Sorry for that -- yeah, sorry -- because that's something I ... wish I had." As opposed to should have.

"You, on the other hand." Another shift, closer, cross-legged to mirror Niou's pose. "You're stronger. You're direct. You're ..." -- fingers trailed down his cheek again -- "a mystery." Soft smile. "I like mysteries." Chuckle. "What I want to know is what you like. Tell me, hm?" Leaning back on his hands, open, listening, ready.

The phaser shook his head, eyes softening now. “I like confidence,” he said. Pause. “A lack of indecision.” And he was more than aware these were both things Yagyuu Hiroshi did not have. But he also knew that they were things unrelated to mutation, power or upbringing.

"Is that what you want from me?" Because Yagyuu was sure that Niou already had that, not just in himself but also in the form of one Echizen Ryoma.

But Yagyuu could be that, certainly. If that was what he needed to be. Headtilt, considering. "Do you want anything from me?"

From anyone else, that could’ve been just another question, but to Niou’s ears, Yagyuu was essentially asking what he should become. In truth…? The phaser’s eyes unfocused, letting his thoughts wander a moment. “…no. I think you’re a curiosity. I think you’re not grounded. I… want to see what your limits are.” Yeah, that was it. There was, to Niou, as things currently stood, no real attraction to Yagyuu himself, but rather the challenge he posed, the possibilities he represented. “Limits if you have them,” he amended. “And what ‘could be’ if you can think you don’t.”

"Why take such interest in me, then?" Yagyuu asked, already feeling the morph fading slowly from his skin, hearing his voice crack as it turned back to his own.

He'd been reading Niou wrong this entire time, if there hadn't been even a sliver of attraction towards Yagyuu. It didn't hold: the conversations, the gifts, the kisses -- what were they for, if this was all a game to Niou?

…what had it been? The phaser didn’t miss the change in voice and his gaze remained on the Yagyuu’s shifting face. “You caught my eye,” he said – the simple truth. He didn’t forget much, but even that day stood out from the rest: a warm late autumn afternoon, a tall, ageless young man overdressed in a mall, not standing out, but neither standing in quite as much as he’d like. A small brush and a strange glance backward. The clear stamp of unremarkability. “And held my attention.” What else could it be?

“You still do.”

Correction, then: it wasn’t that he lacked attraction to Yagyuu – merely that the attraction wasn’t based on anything physical. And wouldn’t that have been laughable anyway, given the power to change appearance at will…

Yagyuu considered that. That made more sense; it seemed to click easier than all this talk of games and limits and boundaries. The game, then, was just Niou's way of learning more about Yagyuu -- how he defined himself, how he would act in any given situation. It was a strange extension of their conversations.

And he could live with that. Some small part of him still begged to ask why, why someone as unremarkable as himself had any rein at all on Niou's attention, but he set it aside. It ... wasn't as important as the fact that at that moment, the attention really was his.

He wasn't going to apologise for kissing him, but: "Have I acted out of line?" Because he didn't want to offend. "Or in accordance with your ... expectations?"

Niou found himself chuckling again, turning the questions over in his mind. What to say? Yagyuu both very much had, and very much hadn’t. From the obvious (not expecting him to be a mutant at the first invite to tea, for starters), to the not so (the way Niou’d thought Yagyuu would better understand him and his reasoning simply because he’d morphed his personality – which had apparently been wrong to expect).

“That mightn’t be a valid question,” he said instead, noting the room’s weird atmosphere now – not much tense, but far from relaxed, and not quite open despite the topics at hand. “You’ve always been a polar opposite, after all.” The distance between them was the line.

But was that a good thing?

A moment of consideration, and Yagyuu determined that it was neither good nor bad, but simply a statement of fact, as far as Niou was concerned. An observation.

So here they were, opposites, one with a crush and one without, one far too concerned with doing the right thing at any time and the other playing by his own rules. Speaking to Niou was like speaking to some fundamental part of himself that he'd somehow lost contact with amidst all of the regulations and tradition forming Yagyuu's own personality and dictating his actions. Morphing capabilities aside, there was some part of him, however small, buried beneath the layers of propriety, that wanted desperately to shake the careful balance of his world. Niou was the erratic flap of a butterfly's wings, the shift in the air that would cause the torrential downpour later on.

Was that why he was attracted to him? Was it more a question of what he meant than how he looked?

"Opposite but equal," he murmured. It meant that the line blurred.

“Exactly.”

Niou grinned, relaxed again. This was the Yagyuu he was the most comfortable with – the Hiroshi Yagyuu, the default. Naturally and of course.

It didn’t by any stretch of the imagination mean he’d let things be, though – that would go against the way the game was played. He’d probably never stop pushing Yagyuu to be other things until and unless there was nothing else to be. That was the whole appeal after all, what was possible, and his own nature dictated that curiosities were to be explored until one could read them through and through and through.

“You’re okay with that?” he asked, but then wondered if Yagyuu knew, to him, all that ‘that’ entailed. He thought he did, assumed so as always – but he now knew for sure that with Yagyuu, it depended on circumstance if that assumption would be correct. If Niou’d set up the right conditions remained to be seen… but presently, he decided it didn’t matter this time: Hiroshi wouldn’t mind; Yagyuu would find out.

Okay with ... being an opposite, then, a reflective element that was bound to the other in a way that wasn't sexual. Niou's advances -- his gifts and questions -- hadn't meant nothing, but neither had they meant something, at least not in the way that Yagyuu had interpreted. He'd seen what he wanted to see.

And he knew he couldn't simply dissolve this ... attraction, this crush, but perhaps it might abate -- or morph -- over time. He wasn't being rejected.

He was being freed.

Hiroshi nodded, a small smile creeping along his features. "I'm okay with that," he said.