and that phantom moon is a window too,
stars look through the darkness
to some summer noon, where our ghosts still move
among the winds that blow...

-Duncan Sheik; The Winds that Blow

 

There were always flowers. Beautiful indigo lilies scattered among high grasses and wildflowers, standing tall and proud amongst the lesser species as they swayed in a summer wind. Amaryllis, Byakko had called them once, grinning at some private joke, fairy lilies. Tsuzuki vaguely remembered Watari telling him that they were supposed to come in white and pink, not purple, but Tsuzuki had a greenhouse full of the mysterious plants at home to prove him wrong. And sometimes there were roses, endless thickets of white wild roses so stained in splotches of pink-red blood it seemed to pour /from/ them, horrid things with thorns that tore at his skin as he passed, desperation nearly choking him in its intensity as it drove him forward.

 

He’d learned to hate roses.

 

Something of dreaming had always followed Tsuzuki into wakefulness, hazy, indistinct images that clung to the forefront of his mind for barely an instant before fading into blackness once more. Mother, sister… always the same face, the same gentle features, indistinct but for the clothes she wore. The one was draped in finery, violet silk to match incandescent eyes and strands of priceless pearl woven into intricately braided hair. The other brash and coltish, so small in worn yukata and pants, wakisashi clutched tightly to her side. Flashes of a young man in an ornately woven yukata of blue and silver, with a countenance so similar to Tsuzuki’s own but for the warm almond eyes half-hidden by stray wisps of shoulder-length hair, human eyes in an entirely human face.

 

Memories like the hazy recollections of childhood, like the dimmer memoirs of ancient mortal men. No matter how well the body was preserved, the mind would tolerate scant few decades of memory before the oldest began to erode, a kind of successive senility that left all but the most precious memories of his life, his living existence, buried beneath the weight of the near two-thirds of a century to follow. It was only in sleep that the battered vaults of Tsuzuki’s memory were unlocked, glimpses of a life filled with sorrow and yearning, horrors left mercifully indistinct even as they drew him toward them with a kind of lurid fascination. He couldn’t see their faces beyond brief glimpses, and no matter how he sought to keep them close upon waking all detail was seeped from the images like an overexposed photograph, leaving him with little beyond random features with which to identify them all.

 

‘Remember us, Asa. Remember that we loved you. That we died for you.’

 

Tsuzuki sat up almost nonchalantly, running a careless hand through sleep tousled hair. His eyes adjusted to the darkness with an uncanny swiftness, a product of his inhuman heritage that he accepted with the same practiced ambivalence with which he accepted everything else. He didn’t bother fumbling for the watch thrown so carelessly onto the nightstand earlier, he’d stopped paying any real mind to the passage of time decades ago and by now the little contraption was merely a convenient cover for his scars, a mechanism by which to gage how pissed off Seiichirou would be when he stumbled into the office in the morning. He fumbled on the floor beside the bed, snatching up the tee shirt he’d shucked and thrown haphazardly to the floor as he’d crawled into bed, too tired to do more than hit the sheets at an ungainly angle and pray for oblivion.

 

So of course, he’d dreamed.

 

The images were indistinct now, hazy colored splotches fading fast and he let them go. He’d long since stopped fighting the process and the current crisis with Hijiri’s demon breathing down their necks assured that a depressive fit on his part would cost lives. He was grateful that at least Hisoka had apparently forgiven him whatever trespass had caused him to disappear for the better part of the assignment, though he was still a little shaky on what exactly that great trespass had been. He was already too pathetically attached to his new partner to feel anything but off balance working solo. The ironic thing was, Hisoka had no idea how right he was about Tsuzuki, about the practiced hopefulness he pushed at other people in the hope that they could maintain the illusions he could not. Tsuzuki knew better than anyone the way inevitability worked, but seeing the guarded hopefulness in Minase Hijiri’s eyes, eyes so damn familiar he couldn’t seem to think straight when they smiled at him, he couldn’t bring himself to stamp out the light of innocence still shining within them. He knew better than anyone how much it hurt when that veneer was ripped away. Let the kid keep his notions of safety for whatever time he had left.

 

Of course it had all gone to hell rather nicely, and the false bravado his encouragement had built up in the boy had led Hijiri to take enough risks to weaken his already declining life energies. The division would probably have been digging them both out from under a pile of rubble if Hisoka hadn’t shown up just in time to help him drag the kid off. The demon had still managed to compel Hijiri to play its violin before any of them had even realized he knew where it was hidden. The thing was handing them their asses so thoroughly Tsuzuki would almost have considered sending Hijiri on before whatever painful demise the demon had in store could be enacted, if he hadn’t known it would cost a five year old her life. But everyone still expected him to pull a plan out of thin air--because he was the oldest, because he seemed so damn sure of himself whenever it was time to give Hijiri a pep talk. He’d probably asked for it, but in all honesty Tsuzuki had been making it up as he went along since the day he’d entered the division. All the faith in the world would do nothing for his planning skills, which usually involved hitting whatever threat was stupid enough to show its face with as much firepower as the Shikigami could muster until it went away.

 

Tsuzuki pulled himself up, kicking the stubborn coverlet from his feet as he headed towards the door, padding silently through the guest wing. The problem was that this particular demon wasn’t stupid enough to take him on in the open, at least not yet, and until it made its incorporeal self solid enough for him to take on he could do nothing but wait for its next move. They’d managed to convince Hijiri to stay in Meifu after their latest mishap, dragging Kazusa along for the ride and putting them both into protective custody until Watari figured out what exactly they were up against. Or until it reared its demonic head, but either way the problem would be dealt with on their terms this time. No more chasing Hijiri around the schoolyard and hoping he could be there in time. If the demon wanted the boy so badly it would have to risk walking into the division to get him.

 

It was probably only a matter of time before the thing attacked. It seemed to value Kazusa’s soul enough to be persistent, and if she really could see the demon as she had described to Hijiri then the thing was right to be worried. A few years older and Kazusa would have made a formidable Shinigami with that power, but even with all that spiritual energy nobody was very useful at five. Highly entertaining and adorably distracting, perhaps, but never useful.

 

That thought brought him back to Hisoka, his own little bundle of untapped potential. Tsuzuki knew his partner thought him the superior of the two at least as far as brute strength was concerned, and while Tsuzuki wasn’t naïve or humble enough to disagree, he knew that the difference lay more in Hisoka’s lack of experience than skill. Shinigami were paired very carefully to allow each partner to keep the other in check, and he was certainly not delusional enough to think that Enma would ever have allowed a true weakling to tag along after someone as dangerous as himself. Amateur, yes, but never someone without the potential to take him on in one form or another. The amount of untapped power his partner had at his disposal was startling, Tsuzuki had sensed it in him when they’d merged in Nagasaki and he knew it was only a matter of time before Hisoka gained enough control to trigger whatever latent ability he possessed.

 

Tsuzuki wasn’t sure whether to look forward to that day or fear it for Hisoka’s sake. Hisoka desperately wanted to be his equal; Konoe-san had told him of their little omyoujitsu lessons and Tsuzuki had even augmented a few of them, the irony of which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so dangerous. Working that hard to reach a level of power that was inevitable anyway was ridiculous, but apparently no one had told Hisoka of his potential or more importantly, the risks involved in utilizing it. Whether that was for fear of exacerbating his already formidable inferiority complex or some ulterior motive was unclear, but Tsuzuki knew that empathy was a dangerous power. The only other empath he’d known in his tenure at EnmaCho had been driven mad by his power, sanity slowly eaten away as the years progressed and the ability grew within him. He’d done amazing things in the interim, things Tsuzuki was sure Hisoka had never even imagined were possible with such a seemingly passive power, but he’d been a miserable, destructive bastard while he did them. He didn’t want that for Hisoka. Couldn’t stomach the idea of watching his young partner destroy himself as the decades passed and the power roiled within him, and Tsuzuki refused to allow Enma or his council to manipulate Hisoka while he still had a say in it.

 

And he did have a say. If pushed hard enough Enma-sama knew in all his omniscient wisdom that Tsuzuki would put his foot down, let the darkness within him out to tear at the fabric of Meifu in retaliation. It was the real reason Enma was so desperate to find a way to control him, the reason why he’d been forced into this tertiary existence when all he’d wanted was peace.

 

Now he was almost grateful for it, padding into a lit living area to find his partner slumped across an uncomfortable looking loveseat, the leather-padded monstrosities used to decorate the reception areas of EnmaCho. He was in an excruciating position, head bent at an awkward angle against the couch back, fingers clutched around a book left open against his chest. Someone had tried to cover him with a blanket, Watari perhaps, or the Gushoshin, but had only really succeeded in catching it around his knees where they twisted under him against the cushions. It was the kind of crick inducing, contortionist position usually only achieved by people belted into cars, but somehow Hisoka had managed to remain partially upright even as his body relaxed into sleep, and Tsuzuki wondered if he’d actually managed to fall asleep reading. He was glad for Hisoka’s presence, the steady stolid encouragement the empath offered without even being aware of it. Tsuzuki’d had some real prizes for partners in his day, but even Seiichirou failed to move him the way Hisoka could by simple proximity. It baffled him, and he wondered if another person would have questioned it, but after seventy years with the division Tsuzuki had learned to take what comfort he could whenever it was offered and run with it.

 

He was moving forward before he’d even realized it, stopping just short of where Hisoka sat, looking down at him. Hisoka was beautiful, even with his features thrown into shadow by the back lighting from a window beyond there was no dimming the simmering glow of raw psychic energy the youth emitted, a faint flicker in the darkness for those sensitive enough to see it. Tsuzuki had always been sensitive, a little too much so if Seiichirou was to be believed, and the unwitting hold his partner had somehow managed to gain over him still surprised him. Tsuzuki found himself overcome at the oddest times with the sudden urge to touch, to soothe, to simply be near Hisoka, and without any real reason to deny his impulses usually ended up exerting considerable charm on the skittish object of his interest until his partner allowed him whatever contact he was craving. He wasn’t sure where all this was headed. Tsuzuki didn’t think he’d been properly in love with anyone, ever, even the strange dance he seemed forever engaged in with Seiichirou paled in comparison to this perplexing new development, the actual physical ache that rose up in his chest at the thought of Hisoka’s earlier disappointment. He hadn’t meant to hurt his partner, but Hisoka was wary of Tsuzuki’s affections, edgy and watchful and any given situation was another unspoken test Tsuzuki was made to pass, another hurdle he would have to jump if he ever expected Hisoka to trust him. Something in him desperately wanted his partner’s approval, needed the assurance that Hisoka would be by his side. However absurd the idea might have been for a man his age to spend most of his time attempting to prove his worthiness to a sixteen year old, he couldn’t seem to check the impulse when Hisoka got that thin lipped scowl on his face, the little scrunch of skin between his eyes as his brows drew together in consternation.

He supposed that was rather pathetic, but he didn’t mind. Hisoka at least wanted to trust him enough to hesitate before brushing him off the way he had so many of their coworkers.

 

“Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?”

 

He jerked at the croaking whisper, focusing on sleepily amused green eyes, slitted incandescence peeking out from behind feathered lashes. Hisoka yawned, the kind of kittenish expression that involved his entire face scrunching in on itself as his jaw stretched, and Tsuzuki smiled, reaching down to pluck the book from his partner’s hands.

 

“I could ask you the same thing,” he murmured, leaning down to kneel beside the couch. He slipped a tattered bookmark into Hisoka’s place before putting the book onto an end table, patting it affectionately. “We have beds, you know.”

 

“Mhmn,” Hisoka hummed, nodding agreeably. He frowned muzzily at the blanket rucked around his hips for a moment before shrugging, leaning back against the couch and throwing his hands above his head to stretch, arching his back. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep here.”

 

The movement exposed the tiniest sliver of midriff and Tsuzuki’s eyes focused on that pale, scarred skin as his partner absently stared at the ceiling. He wanted to touch it, to rub the pads of his fingers over the raised skin and watch Hisoka’s reactions, but he knew what a violation that would be, a shattering of the hard won trust between them in an instant of callousness. He settled for petting a hand over Hisoka’s hair, fingers tangling into blonde tresses as fine and soft as a child’s. It was one of the many inconsistencies of Hisoka’s appearance, trapped forever in the spindly awkwardness of adolescence, and Tsuzuki found it inordinately amusing that a soul so painfully adult should be trapped in a body whose voice would forever crack embarrassingly under stress. Hisoka pressed into the touch, responding the way Tsuzuki liked, the way he did only when he’d forgotten himself and the annoyingly stringent façade he held up to ward off the attentions of others. Not that it wasn’t a perfectly understandable precaution given what had brought him to EnmaCho, but Tsuzuki enjoyed the rare moments when his guard dropped, when he was too blitzed out or emotionally drained to contain his longing reactions to the simple contact Tsuzuki couldn’t help but provide, a thousand little touches throughout the day that wouldn’t have been notable with anyone but Hisoka.

 

“Take mine then.” He fluffed Hisoka’s hair, grinning as his partner woke enough to scowl and bat his hand away. “I’m not going to get anymore sleep, and heading home by now is pointless.”

 

“What time is it?”

 

Tsuzuki shrugged, hand creeping back to wrap around Hisoka’s under the guise of checking the blonde’s watch. It read something like two thirty-five or two forty, he’d never been very good with traditional watches. “Late,” he murmured, splaying Hisoka’s fingers against his own, inspecting the thin digits spread out against his larger palm and rubbing his thumb across his partner’s knuckles. “Or early. Depends on your perception.”

 

Their eyes locked, and a spark of something indefinable passed over Hisoka’s eyes, flitting away before he could identify it. Hisoka rolled his eyes at the inane answer, carefully focused on Tsuzuki’s face as the older man laced their fingers together, tipping his head to the side to track the sudden webbing of alabaster skin against the darker tones of his own. He understood his partner’s hesitance, whatever script they’d been following since that first meeting in Nagasaki probably forbade Hisoka this intimacy, but as far as he was concerned the moment called for it. The dilemma was solved like most others when it came to his relationship with Hisoka, a tacit agreement to ignore the liberties he was taking. Tsuzuki briefly wondered how far he could push before Hisoka pushed back, probably would have tested the theory had it been anyone else, but with Hisoka things were different. He didn’t want to push, not if he didn’t know it would get him the desired result, and he couldn’t stand to think that his own inanity would cost the proud young man he had come to know the remnants of his tattered dignity. It wasn’t easy. For all his arguments to the contrary, Hisoka was far more sensitive than his steely demeanor would suggest, and Tsuzuki had a hard time reigning himself in enough to keep from setting his partner off. He thought it was worth it though, if only to see the way Hisoka’s eyes glazed with pleasure as he ran the pads of his fingers over the pale wrist in his hand, tickling the smooth skin of his forearm just under the place where the scarring began.

 

“Huh,” Hisoka murmured absently, tipping his head back against the arm of the loveseat. “Maybe I should just turn in.”

 

He made no move to actually get up however, leaning back enough to highlight the pale arch of his throat in the lamplight, and Tsuzuki sucked in a harsh breath in lieu of further movement. It was hard to stop himself from moving forward, from breaching the space between them and slipping his tongue between those loosely parted lips, to share the warmth Hisoka ignited in him. It was a desperate kind of wanting, the kind he’d never been good at resisting, never really needed to before, and he didn’t like it. For the first time he found himself on the aggressive end of the chase, with a weird amalgamation of amused fascination and childish annoyance that he had to wait for Hisoka to come around before he could have him. Animalistic thoughts, perhaps, and Seiichirou would have scolded him if he’d talked about it, but he wasn’t as civilized as his old friend. Wasn’t a lot of things, and that was the crux of his problem. Tsuzuki was never sure what kind of monster the years had made of him, but he would not cheapen the tenuous attachment growing between them for the sake of his ego. And that’s what this was all about, in the end, his own childish impatience that a sixteen year old held enough sway to make him wait after seventy years of being pursued by the most powerful denizens of Meifu. Never mind that he hadn’t wanted most of that attention, ambiguity with Seiichirou aside, the constant accommodation hadn’t done much for his impulse control.

 

And that was the great cosmic joke. In the end, he was as childish as he pretended to be.

 

===============================

 

You learn something new every day.

 

Or in Tsuzuki’s experience, once every great while amongst the monotony you learned something profound enough to remember. But it was Ruka’s favorite saying, and while he didn’t remember all that much about the woman he could clearly remember being fifteen, rolling his eyes as she dusted off that particular gem of clichéd wisdom in typical motherly fashion. If it were true that Tsuzuki had learned several new things today, not the least of which was the fact that a sleepy Hisoka was a surprisingly tactile creature, clinging to Tsuzuki with all the youthful insistence the older Shinigami had never thought his partner possessed. After Hisoka had attempted to rise, graphically demonstrating the recklessness of walking while under the influence of an interrupted sleep cycle--a maneuver which caused the unfortunate demise of an antique table lamp--it had taken Tsuzuki nearly an hour to help his partner into bed. Even longer to extricate himself from the deceptively frail hand that clamped around his wrist when he’d made to leave.

 

He didn’t know whether to be grateful for the wayward sign of his partner’s affections or annoyed that it didn’t get him anywhere. Hisoka was too tired to protest his advances, and as much as it pained him to leave when everything in him was desperate to crawl into bed with the younger Shinigami, that, like so many other thoughts that bounced around his ancient brain when he was close to his partner, would have been a gross breach of trust. Coupled with visions of the violence that would erupt if Hisoka woke to find Tsuzuki curled around him, he’d managed to back away, slinking off in search of suitable distraction from this newfound ambivalence, one more to worry through and add to the pile.

 

He found it in the likeliest of places, wandering through the twisting, inter-dimensional halls of the Diet building to find the lamp oil still burning--metaphorically, at least--in Watari’s lab. The familiar battered doors of the lab were plastered with random comic strips, yellowed, cracking periodicals curling beneath the newer pages and a garish, orange and black sign that read ‘Yes! We’re open!’ in blocky western script. Tsuzuki had always liked the double doors leading into Watari’s lab, the satisfying way they swung inward to crack against the wall with a little force behind an entry. It was dramatic, sending papers flying and mechanical creatures scattering in every direction as a blond head poked out from behind a computer, eyes red-rimmed and puffy beneath glasses that mirrored fuzzy, warped reflections of the screen in front of them. The engineer blinked in fuzzy uncertainty, cocking his head at Tsuzuki as the older man paused in the doorway, affording 003 a wide berth as she flitted about his head, squawking indignantly.

 

“I’m a pedophile,” he offered by way of greeting, sighing in overdone distress and plopping in front of a laptop closed on the other side of Watari’s desk.

 

“Um…okay,” Watari offered, brow furrowing as he turned away from the computer. “I guess I’ll bite. I could use a break, anyway.”

 

He folded his hands in front of him, leaning forward into the desk, and Tsuzuki smiled. Watari had always been like that, completely unflappable in his own offbeat way and perfectly willing to wander off on whatever obtuse tangent Tsuzuki could think up so long as it afforded him a chance to gain insight into the older man’s thought processes. It drove Seiichirou nuts to watch them, knowing that Watari had no real idea what they were driving at beyond the vaguest notions and confounded by the thought that the engineer could just /ask/ and make his own life that much easier. It all had something to do with abstraction and observation, some half-assed interpretation of Freudian theory Tsuzuki had never bothered to remember except when there were actual Rorschach inkblots waved in front of his face. The fact remained that Seiichirou and Watari were the only two people he bothered to confide in at all, who could even begin to understand where he was coming from without the benefit of a ridiculously long back storytelling session and that was a priceless commodity.

 

Tsuzuki didn’t really care what Watari’s motivations were as long as it kept him from asking unnecessary questions. And unlike Seiichirou, who Tsuzuki loved dearly but often found himself fighting the urge to scold, Watari would actually take the time to play with him. It wasn’t all efficiency and dire warnings with the blond, and work was not done simply because it was assigned. Watari enjoyed his work, found even his own failures amusing if they were impressive enough, and lived in a world where everything had possibility if it could be manipulated correctly. It was an idea that had fascinated Tsuzuki from the time he’d met the blond, the little mortal scientist prattling on about his latest discovery and his university’s newest scientific toy. He’d been killed before he’d gotten much farther in his research, which Tsuzuki knew frustrated his friend to no end, but Watari hadn’t lived through the kind of unyielding pain that made the rest of the office what they were. He could still look at life and see possibility instead of the potential for disaster.

 

At the moment he was waiting patiently for Tsuzuki to speak, the picture of supportive attention as he tapped a pencil across the desk. “So…” he began, waving the pencil vaguely into the air. “You’re a pedophile, huh? Should I be worried about Kazusa?”

 

“No!” Tsuzuki shouted, horrified. “It’s not her! I’m not that bad!”

 

Watari snickered. “So what, you’ve come to tell me that you’re crushing on Bon like the entire office doesn’t already know?”

 

“The entire…”

 

“Office. Knows.”

 

Watari’s head cocked to the side, blond hair splaying across his features and falling into amused amber eyes. Tsuzuki sat back, pushing away from the desk and his friend’s altogether too entertained expression, crossing his arms over his chest and affecting his deadliest pout. Despite what the rest of the office believed, most of his expressions were not the random, hopelessly innocent things they looked. They were calculated, well placed and easily used to manipulate even the stoniest of coworkers into allowing him his way.

 

“The pouty puppy eyes!” Watari grinned, purposefully oblivious. “We’re pulling out the big guns tonight, aren’t we? What happened?”

 

“Nothing,” Tsuzuki replied, turning away sullenly to study the emperor penguin as she waddled her way across the desk with a tray of fresh coffee for the two Shinigami and resisting the urge to slap the scientist for his immunity. “Nothing happened. Trust me, I’ve been clinging to self-control for so long I don’t think I could fall apart without causing a massive explosion.” He paused, running a nervous hand through his hair and wondering if even /he/ could tell whether he’d meant that metaphorically or literally. “I just…when I’m with him I feel so close to snapping, like I can go through the motions but my thoughts hit this abhorrent track and won’t derail without a whole lot of sake and a night of public drunkenness, you know?”

 

“Nope!” Watari chirped, patting the penguin on the head as she retreated with the tray, busily adding enough cream to his beverage to obliterate any trace of coffee flavor. It was a well known fact that Watari hated coffee, but somehow always ended up guzzling it anyway for the caffeine content, diluting the sacred beverage of offices everywhere past the point of recognition. “Elaboration is a wonderful thing, Tsuzuki.”

 

Tsuzuki watched his friend stir in some honey, the western kind that came in little bottles shaped like bears that seemed an unending source of amusement for the engineer.

 

“I want him,” Tsuzuki murmured, eyes tracking the movement of his friend’s hands as Watari continued to concentrate on mixing his drink. “So much it hurts sometimes. And after everything that’s happened I don’t think he’ll ever want /anybody/ like that. But I can’t stop, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep myself from acting before I do something awful and I don’t want to hurt him like that because dammit I think I really /need/ him.”

 

He was rambling, a jumble of words coming faster and faster until Tsuzuki wasn’t really sure what he was saying, and Watari’s hands stilled, carefully placing the spoon he’d been using against a napkin and folding his hands over the top of his coffee mug.

 

A gold-blonde eyebrow arched. “Melodramatic, much?” the engineer muttered, shaking his head. “Lest we doubt that you’re a little gay boy. Okay, first of all, you can stop the born again Christian sex-is-bad blitz right now. You and I both know there’s no godly edict that says sexual urges are the root of all evil and if you insist on becoming a killjoy I’ll be forced to throw many a blunt object at your head. Second, Bon’s a big boy, he can make up his own mind about these things and he’s not helpless. If, by some insane coincidence you manage to go psycho rapist on us we both know he’ll kick your ass into next Tuesday just on general principle. Third--and this is by far my most important point--I hate to break it to you, buddy boy, but you are not a pedophile.”

 

Tsuzuki blinked. “I’m not?”

 

“Nah, for that to be true he’d have to be like, eight.”

 

That brought a sudden picture of Kazusa to mind, and Tsuzuki slapped his forehead in disgust. Maybe if he rattled his brain enough it would stop sending him freakish ideas. It was like his mind was short circuiting, impulses crossing over like bad wiring and the results were truly disturbing.

 

“Hey, don’t hit yourself!” Watari admonished, snickering. “Ever play that game? You know, take a little kid’s arm and whack ‘em over the head with it a couple of times? They get so confused…”

 

“Watari, focus.”

 

“Oh yeah.” Watari paused, bringing a hand to sheepishly scratch at the back of his neck. “Sorry, buddy. It’s all about you from here on in.”

 

Tsuzuki took a moment to dump a sugar packet--or six--into his own coffee, petting 003 as she flitted over to demand his attention. “So…” he murmured, grinning as the little owl crawled into his lap. “I’m /not/ a pedophile?”

 

“Nope,” said Watari a sudden grin blooming over his features. “Technically you’d be a hebephile.”

 

Tsuzuki groaned. “This is you not helping.”

 

“What?” the engineer said defensively. “He’s sixteen. If you had a paraphilia, you’d be a hebephile.”

 

“So now I’m a reclassified pervert.” 003 flew out from under the desk, squawking indignantly as Tsuzuki’s head hit the table with a resounding thud. “How is this helping?”

 

Watari reached out to pat halfheartedly at Tsuzuki’s shoulder, biting his lip to keep from grinning at the older man. “Look. You’re not a paraphiliac, okay? In order to really have a disorder you’d have to require a specific kind of person to get off at all, so unless you’ve started jonesing for other sixteen year olds…”

 

There was a pause, and Tsuzuki found himself looking anywhere but at amber eyes he just /knew/ were narrowing in sudden concentration. He didn’t need to tell Watari about his unfortunate attraction to Hijiri, the engineer would figure it out soon enough and he didn’t feel particularly sorry about it given that the boy looked like he was Hisoka’s long lost twin brother. Hisoka himself had been somewhat less than pleased to find the boy, responding to Tsuzuki’s fascination with a cold detachment that bordered on anger, and office inquiries about the possibility of relation to the violinist were met with sharp remonstrations and caustic remarks about the impossibility of tracking the infidelities of his aristocratic ancestors. Tsuzuki thought Hijiri was a nice kid, and the attraction was there, but it was all tangled up in yearning for Hisoka.

 

“Man, you’re priceless, you know that?”

 

“There’s two of them! It’s not my fault!”

 

Tsuzuki frequently had moments, when Seiichirou’s glasses flashed just so or that particular vein in the Chief’s forehead stood out in stark relief against his reddening face, when he wondered whether there should have been more of a filtering process between his thoughts and his voice. It seemed most days that whatever first came to mind as an appropriate response to a particular situation inevitably popped out of his mouth, and while that ignorance of the finer points of tact deflected all but the most observant of his colleagues from recognizing his darker impulses, it didn’t do much to stimulate the best response from the people around him.

 

At the moment he sat impatiently waiting for the theatrics to end while Watari, in his usual mocking manner, took a moment to double over his desk as he pounded at the wooden frame and chortled in that deranged-mad-scientist manner he’d worked so hard to perfect. It wasn’t his genuine laugh, Tsuzuki knew, that was saved for occasions slightly more serious than half-assed banter at three in the morning. This was merely the auditory component of Watari’s gleeful penchant to indulge in lampooning the reputation he’d gained over the decades in Meifu by becoming twice the insane eccentric he was rumored to be.

 

“A likely story!” the scientist chuckled, fingers slapping against the desk. “Oh, but to be there when Bon finds out about this!”

 

“Why am I talking to you about this?” Tsuzuki demanded. “Like I can’t torture myself well enough…”

 

He trailed off, watching as 003 settled on the blonde’s shoulder, snorting in owlish disapproval as the body beneath her continued to shake. He knew why he was telling all this to Watari, the engineer knew it as well and it was the very same reason the blonde was laughing his ass off. A little distraction went a long way among immortals, and where he and Watari had anything to say about it, decorum was sacrificed to keep focus from settling on the morbidity of their jobs and pseudo-lives. It was one of those unobtrusive preventative measures Konoe had instituted when he came into office, a preemptive strike against the madness that inevitably overcame older Shinigami. It hadn’t taken much more than a gradual slackening of rules in the once ceremonially-laden division, a little less monitoring of the Shinigami’s private activities and over the decades the office had become a different place entirely. Tsuzuki could clearly remember his first discussions with Konoe-san about the older man’s plan to change the then decorous and over-hierarchical division of demon hunters into something more useful in the changing world of the Meiji era. Few people realized that it was Konoe-san’s revolutionary spirit that made the division the haphazardly efficient place it was today, and in the light of the skepticism the man had faced in his quest to bring down the old regime and bring life, so to speak, to the Shokan Division, he deserved whatever credit he could get.

Watari took off his glasses, wiping at his eyes as the last choking snickers subsided. ”For the witty commentary that Tatsumi-san can’t provide?” he asked, throwing Tsuzuki a particularly shrewd look over the top of his coffee.

 

Tsuzuki knew what Watari was driving at, knew that Seiichirou would be, if not exactly hurt, then distinctly nonplussed later if he realized that the two of them had been bonding without him. A nonplussed Seiichirou was an invariably messy creature; he’d probably manage to convince himself that Tsuzuki didn’t trust him well enough to confide in him. Which was dumb on so many different levels Tsuzuki didn’t bother contemplating it beyond awareness enough to frown at Watari and chuck a piece of wadded napkin at him in retaliation. “You know why I can’t bring this to him, Watari, fake-stupid doesn’t go with your outfit.”

 

Watari’s head tipped, cheek resting against an upturned palm as he lazily sipped at his drink. “Do you really want me to respond to that, oh legendary office numbskull?”

 

“No,” Tsuzuki answered, finally rousing awareness enough to pick up his own beverage. “No, I’m pretty sure I can live without a reiteration of your usual ‘be nice to Boss Man’ spiel, but thanks for asking.”

 

He tipped his cup at the younger man before angling his head back, gulping half the drink in one go. He closed his eyes as the bitter brew washed down his throat to the accompanying scalding, hot enough to burn but receding almost instantaneously as his preternatural anatomy repaired itself. Coffee in Meifu was often kept above scalding if only because Kacho claimed the sting of it woke him more thoroughly than caffeine ever could, a negligent little detail that had nearly proved disastrous the first time Hijiri had asked for a cup, before anyone had thought to wonder how much damage such a brew could do to a mortal.

 

Watari was still staring at him in that holier-than-thou don’t-think-I-don’t-know-what-you’re-thinking way that made Tsuzuki’s darker impulses rear at his audacity. It had always been that way between them, since Watari had first waltzed into their lives and declared himself Seiichirou’s keeper. It wasn’t that Tsuzuki resented him for it, he knew as well as the engineer how hard Seiichirou worked himself to keep Tsuzuki safe and sane, and the Kagetsukai needed someone he was willing to lean on close at hand. But the fact was, Tsuzuki’s relationship with Seiichirou was a tangled webbing of ideological gibberish and bittersweet feeling and as much as Tsuzuki wanted to help his friend, Seiichirou would never accept comfort from him if only because he /wanted/ it so much. It was an insane, circular philosophy, but Tsuzuki had to respect it, and as much as Watari knew that there were times Tsuzuki knew the blonde still resented him for refusing to break that cycle, and he resented Watari right back for being needed at all.

 

“Okay, look,” said Watari, “I can see the discussion devolving far more rapidly than usual so why don’t we cut to the chase and I’ll tell you what I honestly think about the Bon situation, kay?”

 

That snapped Tsuzuki back from his increasingly maudlin musings and he nodded, grateful for the distraction. “Go ahead.”

 

Watari smiled his thanks, whether for allowing the careful sidestep or simply to reassure him that whatever lay between them wasn’t heavy enough to break their friendship, fingers absently ringing the rim of his mug.

 

“I’d say jump him if it were anyone else, but with Hisoka it’d probably only get you kicked in places you’d rather not see bruising so I feel that you should maybe edge your way along for a little while longer until you can find a good way to tell him how you feel. If you don’t you’re going to massively obsess, mope about for decades on end and generally drive the entire office slowly insane.” He paused, throwing Tsuzuki a brief speculative glance before nodding, saluting him with his coffee mug. “So I say go for it. What can it hurt? A little shounen ai never killed anyone who was already dead.”

 

He was grinning again, and Tsuzuki had a moment to consider his suggestion--ludicrously worded, even for Watari. The man was altogether too cavalier about the whole situation, which made Tsuzuki edgy. He knew that Watari was close to Hisoka, or as close to the taciturn teenager as one was likely to get without physical damage and Watari had never taken friendship lightly. Which either meant that he was pushing Tsuzuki towards the younger Shinigami because he knew that the results would be favorable, or…

 

“You’ve got money riding on this, don’t you?”

 

Watari at least had the sense to look abashed, and Tsuzuki took pity on him, laughing along with his rambling, improbable explanations for his behavior and peppering the conversation with half-hearted barbs. That was why he had come to Watari, after all. No matter how many times they butted heads or came to some existential impasse, the conversation never failed to devolve into utter absurdity and that absurdity never failed to distract him. Later he would stumble back to the guest quarters, slightly worse for wear and chugging superheated coffee, probably crawl into bed with Hisoka despite his better judgment just to watch his partner pitch a fit. Hijiri would be amused by their antics, and Gushoshin would attempt to calm them both enough to get some work done before nightfall plunged them all back into the red.

 

Nothing ever changed.