I should be saying that to you, I think. I can't believe you just tried to shoot me! [ mei's petulance, his arrogance--these are the things that make him, and so he is confident in his knowledge that kazuya won't shoot him, so his mouth curves when he hears the safety click back on, even with the pouty sounding tone that comes out of it. mei's not an idiot--far from it--and he knows that things are on shaky ground. that, really, kazuya had every right to shoot him for good.
he doesn't turn around because of it, keeps himself there, nose still tilted up towards the ceiling. his eyes open, looking up at the tile over his head. there's a thousand questions he has to ask, and kazuya must have a million more, but mei makes a show of moving his suit coat back over his glock. ( the knife slides back up his sleeve, just in case.)
he and kazuya always had that, a relationship at a knifepoint, bickering and arguing. when it was great, it was great. when it was bad, it was hellish. there was no in between and for so long he lived for it, lived for needling reactions out of kazuya that weren't so carefully calculated, taking the mask he wore and ripping it off his face until he made it to the surface. his favorite kazuya wasn't the smirking one, it was the one who snuffled in his ear early in the morning to wake him for breakfast, who practically jammed pocari down his throat when he was sick and locking himself in his room so no one saw him in such a state. the one whos face he can picture now, unguarded, shocked and hurt.
mei did that to him.
the shower's the only sound in the apartment for a moment before he does turn around, considers whipping out his gun and putting it to his chin. they're enemies, now. it's what he should do.
instead, he doesn't. the early morning light makes kazuya's features look handsome, the slope of his nose, his jaw, his messy hair, and mei's heart still squeezes at the sight. for a brief moment, just as he had to resist his gun, he has to resist throwing himself at him, too. mei goes for casual, jamming his hands in his pocket as he leans up as if he's investigating him. ] I knew they were going to have some kind of security detail on Sawamura, but it's you? Who did you piss off to get this assignment?
[ there's an unspoken question to what miyuki said, and mei doesn't acknowledge it. ]
I went to your funeral, Mei. It was either going to be an impostor or a horror movie. [ His hand drops, and Miyuki tries for casual, despite the fact that he can still feel the way something tries to tighten itself up in his chest, ease up into his throat. It's barbed, dangerous, emotions that he thought he'd burned away when he'd watched them lower that casket in the ground, watched them fill the grave with dirt.
Despite whatever their relationship had been like - teeth and blood, rough hands on tender skin, a gentle touch for knitting each other back together even with tough love attached - it had been theirs. It had been the first real one that he'd allowed himself to have, once he succumbed to Mei's constant act as his noisy, persistent shadow, and not only had he lost it through a(n apparently faked) death, he lost it to betrayal. No matter Mei's reasons, he'd left Kazuya behind for whatever this had been, whatever he'd been aiming for in the end.
He wets his lips, watching him turn. Mei looks the same as he had the last time they'd seen one another, soft face and softer hair, belying those sharp eyes of his, the sharper tongue to go with them. He remembers kissing him even with morning breath, listening to him whine until Kazuya'd plied him with another kiss and a mug of something more sugar than coffee.
It's juxtaposed with the noise of the shower, how he'd woken Eijun up with a hand in his hair, gently jostling him with his voice quiet until he finally stumbled to the bathroom.
Whatever passes as his heart these days clenches tight, almost a rattle in his ribcage, as he swallows down that sharp barb in his throat as best he can. The same as he'd reached out this morning for Sawamura, he wants to reach out to touch Mei, to see if he's really there, if the bump he'd felt through the muzzle of his gun had been real. A part of him feels like it's almost forgotten what it felt like to touch him, anyways, when he'd replaced it with gun grips and knives and manhandling tanned brunets instead. ]
All the wrong people. [ He slides on one of his masks easily, razor sharp shitty grin like he's proud of himself. But in the end, he'd practically begged for this assignment, didn't he?
Mei doesn't need to know that. ] How long did it take you to climb out of the cemetery and wash off the grime?
No one could even come close to me. [ huffily; as if there could ever be an impostor for narumiya mei. no, he was an original, and that was why he'd been such a good agent. mei was charismatic, friendly, and lethal--he knew six languages and several ways to kill someone before they even realized he was there. he'd charmed assassins out of killing him and angered new ones into chasing him, and never once did anyone think the model agent would betray anyone. it was half of why he did it.
the other half was the corruption: in the end, mei felt he was too big for the agency, and the intersect project (his and kazuya's baby, years they'd spent together encoding it, protecting it) went along with that. he'd never had any intentions of telling him. ]
Did you cry? [ is the jeer, but it's less shitty than mei wants it to be, comes out of him softly. imagining losing kazuya--not knowing he was alive, certainly--scares him a little, and though he was collateral damage, maybe mei should have thought things through before he vanished, before kuramochi shot him, but he did. he thought it through for hours, snuggled up against kazuya's chest late at night, a baseball game static noise in the dark of his apartment. he'd known he couldn't tell him: that it was too much. kazuya was too close with the agency, would have never betrayed reichan's trust.
carlos, shirakawa, itsuki; they wait for him when he returns from this, maybe with a clear conscious and a better head on his shoulders, but right now there's nothing clear about it, except for the way it hurts when he watches kazuya's fake, razor sharp smile. typical. ]
Oh, long enough! You should really thank Kuramochi for not double-tapping, he's softer than you. I'd like to pay him a visit myself, but, you know, dead man walking. [ for a moment, his typical mischief is there, blue eyes sparkling with it even in the early morning sunlight, and it's amazing how easy it is to fall back into this banter, this push and pull that made up their lives for so long. ] I wasn't really expecting to find you here, but it was a nice surprise~
[ Miyuki doesn't hesitate to roll his eyes in response to that, a genuine reaction rather than a forced one. Some measure of sharpness fades from his expression, although it's not all of it, and he sort of just... watches Mei, regards him. The tips of his hair go white gold in sunlight - he's seen it often enough - and it's stark contrast with the shadows of the apartment, lights all off to keep the other occupants from being disturbed. He knows that kitchen like the back of his hand, anyways, he doesn't need much light to get around in there.
He knew Mei's kitchen, too. Domestic as this, and that, happen to both be, it's been a nice feeling to have. Home was lonely for him, and so were hotel rooms, bunkers, beds that he fell into to get information, to take the edge off, whatever needed to be done. But even with both of their sharp edges often laid bare, the lethal intellect and skills they were both in possession of that rubbed wrong some days, it had all softened into something else when it was just them. It didn't matter if it was their separate apartments or shared hotel rooms, they were good together even when their worst could've been bloodthirsty.
It was good, having someone.
So there's no denying that something in Miyuki's expression tightens at Mei's attempt at a jeer, like his mask has been pulled too close, even if he chuckles, low and dark, to cover for it. Losing people is normal in this business. Losing people is normal in his life. He'd thought he'd numbed himself to the idea of it after losing his mother, when it'd been so easy to hear that other agents had been lost on missions, in their own beds at home, on the street.
Hearing from Rei-chan that Mei had broken in and stolen their baby - their baby, the one that he'd painstakingly coded, poured over, all alongside him - only to be gunned down. It'd left him hollow, more so than he'd ever been before. ]
Not something I'd recommend, even for you. He's an assassin's plaything these days, I'm not too sure how well he'd take his toy being riled up. [ Or, shot. Not something that Kazuya would take that well, himself, surprisingly enough. Maybe they're rival agencies on the same project, with a weird, shaky truce, but there's a friendship there even with the fact that Kuramochi was the one to shoot and, supposedly, kill Mei. Obviously he has some reevaluating to do, some black, viscous emotions to reassign elsewhere, but.
No, Mei paying Kuramochi a visit isn't something he'd like, for either of them, despite what they both have done to him. ] Surprise. Not like it's that difficult a job, considering I was on babysitting duty for one loudmouth southpaw before. Why not put me on this detail when I've got the experience?
Babysitting?! [ he's sure sawamura needs a babysitter, but he totally, absolutely does not! honestly. this time the whiny edge does sneak back into his tone, a little incredulous because narumiya mei does Not need babysitting (yes he does), and it's a little easy to rile him up too, like it always has been. he's known forever that kazuya takes some kind of sick pleasure in setting him off, but mei can't help himself but react to it anyway. he's always been that way, reactive, and if kazuya brought out his worst, he definitely brought out his best, too. it's one of the things that mei found so absolutely, irresistibly attractive about him: they might have made each other worse, but they made each other better, too. ]
He knows about the intersect, doesn't he? [ the playfulness fades from mei's tone in a second, though, and mei drops the thing with kuramochi, drops everything else. if kazuya's here, that means that sawamura never passed it along at all: that he still has it. talk about needing babysitting. if you give an idiot a supercomputer, what does he do with it? hoard it, apparently. still, mei would rather have the intersect in sawamura's hands than anyone else's--there was a reason why he chose him--and there's some kind of karmic hilarity in it being kazuya that got stuck with him because of it. they're all interconnected in this business, aren't they.
mei takes a step closer. sometimes he's a whiny, childish kitten; other times he's a predator. here he's somewhere in the middle, heavy with the decision that he had made but not aiming to harm kazuya. he'd rather not.
he's done that enough already. ] I came to see what he did with it, but I guess I got my answer.
[ lifting his head, mei regards kazuya for a moment. his eyes are a lovely shade of golden brown behind those stupid glasses of his, and for a moment he feels the urge to pull them off, to kiss him between his off furrowed brows like he used to do when they were in bed together, lighten up, kazuya! and when he looks at him, the old, familiar phrase comes out, affection bleeding into his tone. it's all fondness, maybe just a little wistful, the annoyance faked. ] If you keep frowning like that, you'll give yourself wrinkles.
Babysitting. [ The smirk that Kazuya manages this time is more genuine, amused and teasing, aiming to rile him up further in that same way that he once delighted in. Admittedly, there's a caution to it as he watches him, unmoving in response to his own movements closer. He angles his head easily, something assessing in his gaze. His mouth says one thing, smiles another, but his eyes betray him despite his best efforts to shutter it away. Even years of training can't hide the way hurt edges at the corners, leaving them tighter, distance between them that's unlikely to ever be crossed again.
With the question, he hums, soft and quiet. His fingers twitch at his side, loose on the left and still curled around the comfortable grip of his beretta. His posture doesn't read as aggressive or cautious, simply loose, and not even in the way that says he's prepared to spring. Just... early morning conversation in the dim light, flannel pajama pants baggy around his waist and shirt worn butter soft from college, with a familiar face in what should be a familiar situation. ]
He knows about the intersect - didn't, at first, but he sure did after he opened the file and fried his computer even more. [ Before Kazuya had dropped it, anyways, and it'd practically shattered. But he doesn't tell him that, and he doesn't tell him the details of how Eijun's come to hoard the information that was stored in those images. Because maybe Mei is the person he loved, once, but right now -
Right now, they're enemies, and it's his job to protect Eijun at the cost of his own life. Soft as he might be, Mei still has that predatory twist to his walk.
Even if he makes Kazuya laugh, leaning in a little more towards him like it's still natural. Maybe it is, in some part of him. That familiar phrase is disarming, but he knows better than to drop all of his walls in response to it. He's not so conditioned to roll over and expose himself when he's been hurt by the very person telling him to lighten up. ] You've probably already given me greys, so why not wrinkles, too?
He opened it? [ well... mei must have given him too much credit. sawamura is a treasure as always, it seems. you just can't fix stupid, even with a heart that big. that means he probably knows more about the intersect than kazuya is letting on, because that lack of intelligence means a lot of space for something else. you can almost see the calculations going in his blue eyes, gaze intense as he considers what could have happened to someone who actually watched the entirety of the images in the intersect.
it's probably a miracle he didn't die, too. whoops. mei will be sure to send him a nice bottle of whiskey or something for messing up his psyche a little bit. mei laughs. ] Of course he did! Sawamura, he's a real piece of work~
[ with that settled, the predatory nature disappears, to a point. mei's stepped closer to him now, looking up at him with confidence as he always does. if anyone's ever seen said confidence crack, though, its kazuya, who has been there with him for every success and every failure. every night of mei locking himself in his apartment, furious and tempestuous for doing something wrong, every morning of cold fury at the gun range, practicing, practicing, practicing. his ego is obnoxious, but it's earned, and his hard days are there just like anyone else's.
it feels weird to lie to kazuya, now, feels weird to treat him as an enemy, but that doesn't mean mei isn't willing to do it, and he's sure kazuya is the same. he imagines if he attacked him, he'd get a bullet to the brain in a second--kazuya's good like that. picks up what he puts down, on his level. it'd be a good fight.
they don't have to be enemies, but mei's smart enough to know for sure this is a kind of goodbye.
he huffs a laugh that's humorless and lifts his hand--the one without a knife in his sleeve--fearless. miyuki has every chance to grab his wrist and break it in half, but mei's not scared. his hand comes up--and it's to flick kazuya right between the eyebrows. ] When you lose this good face of yours, you'll have nothing to fall back on but your nasty personality, Kazuya. Remember that!
[ and if kazuya leaning in is natural, then it's the same for mei, like a magnet drawn into him.
Of course he opened it, what did you expect when you sent the e-mail to him in the first place? Getting that was like getting a direct challenge from you. [ Mei and Eijun might have been roommates, friends, but it didn't take very long for Miyuki to figure Eijun out, unpredictable as he is. If there's one thing you can count on, it's the fact that Sawamura Eijun will never say no to a challenge, whether it's a legitimate one or something he's perceived as one. Contact from someone that messed up his life? Yeah, that'd count.
But he doesn't say more on it, because Mei is not all bark like some small, yappy dog. No, that look in those blue, blue eyes of his give away more intellect than most people would suspect out of his personality and that face.
He knows this the same way he knows that the hand Mei lifts up towards him doesn't contain a knife, and won't. More than once Kazuya has had one of them held to his throat, thrown at his face, taken them off of him when they were exchanging heated kisses instead of heated blows. So he just watches him rather than his hand, even if his own right hand twitches again around his gun grip. It's not so much an aborted attempt to aim at him, but rather indecision on whether he should finally holster the gun or not.
The flick doesn't necessarily surprise him, but he does flinch with it. Some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders, the rigid set of his spine, but all he does at first is lift his free hand up to rub his thumb against his forehead. ] That's true, and nobody wants to deal with how shitty I am for long after they realize that's what I'm hiding with my charm and dashing good looks.
[ Except, apparently Mei, who he finally touches, even if it's just a brush of fingertips against his wrist as his hand comes back down. There's a pulse, there, fleeting as it is. There's warmth and smooth, vulnerable skin around thin bone.
Except, apparently, Eijun, but the shower is just white noise that he half-tracks. ]
[ mei doesn't even disagree with him about his charm and dashing good looks, because it is true. kazuya is charming, is good looking, as true as the fact that mei knows a lot of his confidence is pretty fake. miyuki kazuya is the kind of person you have to crack open to understand, and even after years of working together, of dating, stolen kisses and and arguments, mei still has only just touched the surface.
he knows how to read kazuya, that's true. he can usually tell what he's thinking: it's why they make such a good pair as a team. but beyond that? he's a mystery, guarded and careful where mei is brash and open. he knew that betraying him would hurt him, though, and he did it anyway.
mei cares about a lot of things in life, but he'd throw every single one of them away for his ambition. miyuki kazuya was no exception to that rule.
now, though, the touch of his fingers against his skin lights a fire in him, something that had gone unkindled for a long time. mei doesn't hesitate when he brings his hand down, but he takes another step closer. open. unarmed. all he does is chuckle at his commentary, looking up at him with something like a missed opportunity in his blue eyes. ] I can't stay long--I should have left already.
[ he never once thinks of saying sorry. ] Tell Sawamura hey for me.
[ because it's unspoken that "i should have left already" meant something more like "this is the last time", because he thinks it might be. this was fate telling him to get in his goodbyes, but mei's ignoring them, even if the urge to reach up to cradle his face and kiss him is still there, as if it was just a rainy sunday morning in their apartment, alone. ]
[ In Kazuya's hand, the weight of his gun is heavy, a reminder of the divide that stands between them now. Betrayal is a lingering wound, one that rubs itself raw at the faintest memory, and it's not one that he suffers lightly. Whatever they'd had, no matter how toxic it might've been at the end of the day, it was theirs. It was his, and he let himself have it for once in his life instead of dismissing it and remaining detached as always.
He should holster it, put it away along with the hurt if only for this goodbye. (Because that's what it is, it's goodbye.)
Miyuki knows he shouldn't. Mei betrayed more than just him, this isn't just personal.
He does anyways.
Reaching out this time once his hand is empty, he brushes his fingers just barely along the curve of Mei's jaw, and then he's cupping his face in a rough palm, thumb sweeping over his cheek as he ducks in and presses their lips together. It's lingering rather than fleeting, and his left hand comes up to join it
Layers upon layers built up to protect himself, to show the world a confident farce - fake it 'til you make it, they say - Miyuki isn't the type to let people understand him. Mei came close, peeling away layers and making his bed in them, tearing them apart in his tantrums, leaving them in tatters in their failures and their accomplishments. He left a trail of destruction in his wake, and Miyuki's still working to compile it all together, to reinforce it to protect himself from this happening again, to make people believe he's not hurting still from the loss, the knife in his back.
But here, now, it's all the more obvious in his touch, the way he kisses Mei, putting emotion he'd never say aloud into it. It's nothing like his bruising kisses, the drag of teeth, that left their mouths flushed and plush.
It, truly, is a goodbye to everything they were. Because for as different as they were, are, they still were partners. They still worked in tandem, like clockwork, on their best days, no matter how their bad ones ended. And Miyuki came to enjoy Mei's early morning whining, his energy bursting at the seams when he got going, the sharp white of his smile and his sly, deft fingers.
And he mourned the loss of it in every way a man can. ]
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nah
he doesn't turn around because of it, keeps himself there, nose still tilted up towards the ceiling. his eyes open, looking up at the tile over his head. there's a thousand questions he has to ask, and kazuya must have a million more, but mei makes a show of moving his suit coat back over his glock. ( the knife slides back up his sleeve, just in case.)
he and kazuya always had that, a relationship at a knifepoint, bickering and arguing. when it was great, it was great. when it was bad, it was hellish. there was no in between and for so long he lived for it, lived for needling reactions out of kazuya that weren't so carefully calculated, taking the mask he wore and ripping it off his face until he made it to the surface. his favorite kazuya wasn't the smirking one, it was the one who snuffled in his ear early in the morning to wake him for breakfast, who practically jammed pocari down his throat when he was sick and locking himself in his room so no one saw him in such a state. the one whos face he can picture now, unguarded, shocked and hurt.
mei did that to him.
the shower's the only sound in the apartment for a moment before he does turn around, considers whipping out his gun and putting it to his chin. they're enemies, now. it's what he should do.
instead, he doesn't. the early morning light makes kazuya's features look handsome, the slope of his nose, his jaw, his messy hair, and mei's heart still squeezes at the sight. for a brief moment, just as he had to resist his gun, he has to resist throwing himself at him, too. mei goes for casual, jamming his hands in his pocket as he leans up as if he's investigating him. ] I knew they were going to have some kind of security detail on Sawamura, but it's you? Who did you piss off to get this assignment?
[ there's an unspoken question to what miyuki said, and mei doesn't acknowledge it. ]
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Despite whatever their relationship had been like - teeth and blood, rough hands on tender skin, a gentle touch for knitting each other back together even with tough love attached - it had been theirs. It had been the first real one that he'd allowed himself to have, once he succumbed to Mei's constant act as his noisy, persistent shadow, and not only had he lost it through a(n apparently faked) death, he lost it to betrayal. No matter Mei's reasons, he'd left Kazuya behind for whatever this had been, whatever he'd been aiming for in the end.
He wets his lips, watching him turn. Mei looks the same as he had the last time they'd seen one another, soft face and softer hair, belying those sharp eyes of his, the sharper tongue to go with them. He remembers kissing him even with morning breath, listening to him whine until Kazuya'd plied him with another kiss and a mug of something more sugar than coffee.
It's juxtaposed with the noise of the shower, how he'd woken Eijun up with a hand in his hair, gently jostling him with his voice quiet until he finally stumbled to the bathroom.
Whatever passes as his heart these days clenches tight, almost a rattle in his ribcage, as he swallows down that sharp barb in his throat as best he can. The same as he'd reached out this morning for Sawamura, he wants to reach out to touch Mei, to see if he's really there, if the bump he'd felt through the muzzle of his gun had been real. A part of him feels like it's almost forgotten what it felt like to touch him, anyways, when he'd replaced it with gun grips and knives and manhandling tanned brunets instead. ]
All the wrong people. [ He slides on one of his masks easily, razor sharp shitty grin like he's proud of himself. But in the end, he'd practically begged for this assignment, didn't he?
Mei doesn't need to know that. ] How long did it take you to climb out of the cemetery and wash off the grime?
no subject
the other half was the corruption: in the end, mei felt he was too big for the agency, and the intersect project (his and kazuya's baby, years they'd spent together encoding it, protecting it) went along with that. he'd never had any intentions of telling him. ]
Did you cry? [ is the jeer, but it's less shitty than mei wants it to be, comes out of him softly. imagining losing kazuya--not knowing he was alive, certainly--scares him a little, and though he was collateral damage, maybe mei should have thought things through before he vanished, before kuramochi shot him, but he did. he thought it through for hours, snuggled up against kazuya's chest late at night, a baseball game static noise in the dark of his apartment. he'd known he couldn't tell him: that it was too much. kazuya was too close with the agency, would have never betrayed reichan's trust.
carlos, shirakawa, itsuki; they wait for him when he returns from this, maybe with a clear conscious and a better head on his shoulders, but right now there's nothing clear about it, except for the way it hurts when he watches kazuya's fake, razor sharp smile. typical. ]
Oh, long enough! You should really thank Kuramochi for not double-tapping, he's softer than you. I'd like to pay him a visit myself, but, you know, dead man walking. [ for a moment, his typical mischief is there, blue eyes sparkling with it even in the early morning sunlight, and it's amazing how easy it is to fall back into this banter, this push and pull that made up their lives for so long. ] I wasn't really expecting to find you here, but it was a nice surprise~
no subject
He knew Mei's kitchen, too. Domestic as this, and that, happen to both be, it's been a nice feeling to have. Home was lonely for him, and so were hotel rooms, bunkers, beds that he fell into to get information, to take the edge off, whatever needed to be done. But even with both of their sharp edges often laid bare, the lethal intellect and skills they were both in possession of that rubbed wrong some days, it had all softened into something else when it was just them. It didn't matter if it was their separate apartments or shared hotel rooms, they were good together even when their worst could've been bloodthirsty.
It was good, having someone.
So there's no denying that something in Miyuki's expression tightens at Mei's attempt at a jeer, like his mask has been pulled too close, even if he chuckles, low and dark, to cover for it. Losing people is normal in this business. Losing people is normal in his life. He'd thought he'd numbed himself to the idea of it after losing his mother, when it'd been so easy to hear that other agents had been lost on missions, in their own beds at home, on the street.
Hearing from Rei-chan that Mei had broken in and stolen their baby - their baby, the one that he'd painstakingly coded, poured over, all alongside him - only to be gunned down. It'd left him hollow, more so than he'd ever been before. ]
Not something I'd recommend, even for you. He's an assassin's plaything these days, I'm not too sure how well he'd take his toy being riled up. [ Or, shot. Not something that Kazuya would take that well, himself, surprisingly enough. Maybe they're rival agencies on the same project, with a weird, shaky truce, but there's a friendship there even with the fact that Kuramochi was the one to shoot and, supposedly, kill Mei. Obviously he has some reevaluating to do, some black, viscous emotions to reassign elsewhere, but.
No, Mei paying Kuramochi a visit isn't something he'd like, for either of them, despite what they both have done to him. ] Surprise. Not like it's that difficult a job, considering I was on babysitting duty for one loudmouth southpaw before. Why not put me on this detail when I've got the experience?
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He knows about the intersect, doesn't he? [ the playfulness fades from mei's tone in a second, though, and mei drops the thing with kuramochi, drops everything else. if kazuya's here, that means that sawamura never passed it along at all: that he still has it. talk about needing babysitting. if you give an idiot a supercomputer, what does he do with it? hoard it, apparently. still, mei would rather have the intersect in sawamura's hands than anyone else's--there was a reason why he chose him--and there's some kind of karmic hilarity in it being kazuya that got stuck with him because of it. they're all interconnected in this business, aren't they.
mei takes a step closer. sometimes he's a whiny, childish kitten; other times he's a predator. here he's somewhere in the middle, heavy with the decision that he had made but not aiming to harm kazuya. he'd rather not.
he's done that enough already. ] I came to see what he did with it, but I guess I got my answer.
[ lifting his head, mei regards kazuya for a moment. his eyes are a lovely shade of golden brown behind those stupid glasses of his, and for a moment he feels the urge to pull them off, to kiss him between his off furrowed brows like he used to do when they were in bed together, lighten up, kazuya! and when he looks at him, the old, familiar phrase comes out, affection bleeding into his tone. it's all fondness, maybe just a little wistful, the annoyance faked. ] If you keep frowning like that, you'll give yourself wrinkles.
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With the question, he hums, soft and quiet. His fingers twitch at his side, loose on the left and still curled around the comfortable grip of his beretta. His posture doesn't read as aggressive or cautious, simply loose, and not even in the way that says he's prepared to spring. Just... early morning conversation in the dim light, flannel pajama pants baggy around his waist and shirt worn butter soft from college, with a familiar face in what should be a familiar situation. ]
He knows about the intersect - didn't, at first, but he sure did after he opened the file and fried his computer even more. [ Before Kazuya had dropped it, anyways, and it'd practically shattered. But he doesn't tell him that, and he doesn't tell him the details of how Eijun's come to hoard the information that was stored in those images. Because maybe Mei is the person he loved, once, but right now -
Right now, they're enemies, and it's his job to protect Eijun at the cost of his own life. Soft as he might be, Mei still has that predatory twist to his walk.
Even if he makes Kazuya laugh, leaning in a little more towards him like it's still natural. Maybe it is, in some part of him. That familiar phrase is disarming, but he knows better than to drop all of his walls in response to it. He's not so conditioned to roll over and expose himself when he's been hurt by the very person telling him to lighten up. ] You've probably already given me greys, so why not wrinkles, too?
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it's probably a miracle he didn't die, too. whoops. mei will be sure to send him a nice bottle of whiskey or something for messing up his psyche a little bit. mei laughs. ] Of course he did! Sawamura, he's a real piece of work~
[ with that settled, the predatory nature disappears, to a point. mei's stepped closer to him now, looking up at him with confidence as he always does. if anyone's ever seen said confidence crack, though, its kazuya, who has been there with him for every success and every failure. every night of mei locking himself in his apartment, furious and tempestuous for doing something wrong, every morning of cold fury at the gun range, practicing, practicing, practicing. his ego is obnoxious, but it's earned, and his hard days are there just like anyone else's.
it feels weird to lie to kazuya, now, feels weird to treat him as an enemy, but that doesn't mean mei isn't willing to do it, and he's sure kazuya is the same. he imagines if he attacked him, he'd get a bullet to the brain in a second--kazuya's good like that. picks up what he puts down, on his level. it'd be a good fight.
they don't have to be enemies, but mei's smart enough to know for sure this is a kind of goodbye.
he huffs a laugh that's humorless and lifts his hand--the one without a knife in his sleeve--fearless. miyuki has every chance to grab his wrist and break it in half, but mei's not scared. his hand comes up--and it's to flick kazuya right between the eyebrows. ] When you lose this good face of yours, you'll have nothing to fall back on but your nasty personality, Kazuya. Remember that!
[ and if kazuya leaning in is natural, then it's the same for mei, like a magnet drawn into him.
(the shower's still going in the background.) ]
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But he doesn't say more on it, because Mei is not all bark like some small, yappy dog. No, that look in those blue, blue eyes of his give away more intellect than most people would suspect out of his personality and that face.
He knows this the same way he knows that the hand Mei lifts up towards him doesn't contain a knife, and won't. More than once Kazuya has had one of them held to his throat, thrown at his face, taken them off of him when they were exchanging heated kisses instead of heated blows. So he just watches him rather than his hand, even if his own right hand twitches again around his gun grip. It's not so much an aborted attempt to aim at him, but rather indecision on whether he should finally holster the gun or not.
The flick doesn't necessarily surprise him, but he does flinch with it. Some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders, the rigid set of his spine, but all he does at first is lift his free hand up to rub his thumb against his forehead. ] That's true, and nobody wants to deal with how shitty I am for long after they realize that's what I'm hiding with my charm and dashing good looks.
[ Except, apparently Mei, who he finally touches, even if it's just a brush of fingertips against his wrist as his hand comes back down. There's a pulse, there, fleeting as it is. There's warmth and smooth, vulnerable skin around thin bone.
Except, apparently, Eijun, but the shower is just white noise that he half-tracks. ]
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he knows how to read kazuya, that's true. he can usually tell what he's thinking: it's why they make such a good pair as a team. but beyond that? he's a mystery, guarded and careful where mei is brash and open. he knew that betraying him would hurt him, though, and he did it anyway.
mei cares about a lot of things in life, but he'd throw every single one of them away for his ambition. miyuki kazuya was no exception to that rule.
now, though, the touch of his fingers against his skin lights a fire in him, something that had gone unkindled for a long time. mei doesn't hesitate when he brings his hand down, but he takes another step closer. open. unarmed. all he does is chuckle at his commentary, looking up at him with something like a missed opportunity in his blue eyes. ] I can't stay long--I should have left already.
[ he never once thinks of saying sorry. ] Tell Sawamura hey for me.
[ because it's unspoken that "i should have left already" meant something more like "this is the last time", because he thinks it might be. this was fate telling him to get in his goodbyes, but mei's ignoring them, even if the urge to reach up to cradle his face and kiss him is still there, as if it was just a rainy sunday morning in their apartment, alone. ]
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He should holster it, put it away along with the hurt if only for this goodbye. (Because that's what it is, it's goodbye.)
Miyuki knows he shouldn't. Mei betrayed more than just him, this isn't just personal.
He does anyways.
Reaching out this time once his hand is empty, he brushes his fingers just barely along the curve of Mei's jaw, and then he's cupping his face in a rough palm, thumb sweeping over his cheek as he ducks in and presses their lips together. It's lingering rather than fleeting, and his left hand comes up to join it
Layers upon layers built up to protect himself, to show the world a confident farce - fake it 'til you make it, they say - Miyuki isn't the type to let people understand him. Mei came close, peeling away layers and making his bed in them, tearing them apart in his tantrums, leaving them in tatters in their failures and their accomplishments. He left a trail of destruction in his wake, and Miyuki's still working to compile it all together, to reinforce it to protect himself from this happening again, to make people believe he's not hurting still from the loss, the knife in his back.
But here, now, it's all the more obvious in his touch, the way he kisses Mei, putting emotion he'd never say aloud into it. It's nothing like his bruising kisses, the drag of teeth, that left their mouths flushed and plush.
It, truly, is a goodbye to everything they were. Because for as different as they were, are, they still were partners. They still worked in tandem, like clockwork, on their best days, no matter how their bad ones ended. And Miyuki came to enjoy Mei's early morning whining, his energy bursting at the seams when he got going, the sharp white of his smile and his sly, deft fingers.
And he mourned the loss of it in every way a man can. ]