Work Text:
Don't hang that head, you know it's nothing I ain't seen before
Bring me your trash, your love as messy as a plum
Bring me your weight, your shame and the devil on your shoulder
When you get here, I'm gonna hold you
Like the heavens hold the sun
It is not often that work brings Brassius to Mesagoza, let alone the Academy, but ever since Hassel assumed a teaching post it has been difficult to avoid a certain gnawing travel bug. The desire to witness Hassel’s work itches in him throughout the day, a minor obsession that never quite goes away no matter how many text messages they exchange. Brassius has always managed to find a perfect vantage of Hassel’s many facets, from artistic excellence to battling acumen, but the imposing walls of the school keep him at a distance from the brilliant shine of this new development. His short-lived attempt at guest speaking in Hassel’s lectures only reinforced the distance.
Luckily, the quarterly changing of the halls gives him every excuse. What manner of modern artist would Brassius be, if he did not avidly peruse the new student work lovingly thumb-tacked to the walls outside the art room? To avoid becoming the old guard, one must eternally embrace the new!
This is the only reason that Brassius packs a notepad and Smolive-selected stickers and sets out to surprise Hassel after work that evening. They have dinner plans, the restaurant undecided as always, since Brassius prefers to survey all options before determining the most evocative farm-to-table masterwork of the day. Too many eat with their stomachs instead of their eyes! Far better to appreciate the ephemeral array of ingredients upon the canvas than to sate the body’s endless urges alone.
Brassius arrives at precisely ten minutes after classes let out, late enough for the rush of children to have passed, but too early for any other teachers to have meandered down to Hassel’s room to request his ever-eager assistance on any projects. The man can scarcely say no to anyone in need. It is no surprise, then, to hear a child’s voice still chirping from the classroom. Brassius simply takes up his post in the hallway, sullenly scowling at any adult foolish enough to turn into the hallway, and begins his portfolio reviews.
A classic household motif: mother, father, two children, and a Litleo embraced at the center by them all. But is there not something in the rays of the sun that envisions an upcoming evolution? As though the suffocating heat of so much affection will become the strength to protect them all? Brassius leaves a three-page list of suggestions of how to expand upon the metaphor and strengthen the piece overall. Sure, the page may not bear many more strands of expertly angled spaghetti, but if the artist intends to revisit the theme then surely the advice will be of use.
A masterful depiction of Echoed Voice in use, splintering into a fractal multitude of Mausholds! Five out of five Smolives, and a thunderbolt sticker. He scribbles a request for a print, if any are to be made available. Crayon can be difficult to duplicate with high fidelity.
“Did you tell her your feelings?”
His ear cannot help but strain to catch Hassel’s warm, compassionate tone.
The child mumbles some answer too soft to hear, and then there is the muffled noise of crying. The child’s crying, of course—there is no muffling Hassel’s own.
Brassius tiptoes down the hall to resume his work from the opposite end. He will give them as much time as they need.
Besides, here is his favorite section of all: the collaborations between trainers and their Pokemon. Each quarter’s section begins with Professor Gible demonstrating the abstract wildness that must be unleashed during the artistic process, a wildness at odds with the taming of Pokemon but which must be allowed to sing for full harmony of being! This time around his piece is a big purple blob in roughly the shape of his form—a full-body imprint, perhaps?—and a collection of carefully constructed cardboard fruit piled into the open mouth. Three-dimensional! His work continues to reach new heights!
“Oh, my dear… None of us escape this life with our hearts intact. It is the very nature of love to hurt, and yet to be worth every agony. Please do not apologize for your tears. Allow yourself to feel each one in full. Here, allow me to make you some tea. It, too, brings us the sweet and the bitter in equal measure. And yet we find it worth it, don’t we? That perfect cup?”
A bouquet of flowers catches Brassius’s eye. Each stem is the imprint of a different Pokemon’s tail, and the flowers a riotous blossoming of their pawprints. Pink tissue paper has been glued atop the canvas to give depth to the outer wrappings of the bouquet, and the carefully-inked smile of a Ditto hides in one corner. Only the somber mood of the classroom keeps Brassius from crying out in delight when he spots it.
The kettle goes off, and Brassius’s stomach lurches awake with twenty years of conditioning. Hassel will have the biscuits out in a moment. Or leftovers from Professor Saguaro’s lessons…
Hassel sighs at a low pitch of such sudden, aching devastation that Brassius’s heart stumbles in his chest. “To tell the truth, I have a broken heart of my own.”
“Even you?”
“Even me. For a long, long time now.”
Brassius doesn’t mean to eavesdrop, but there is no stopping his curiosity now. Hassel so rarely talks about the time before they met, and Brassius wants to soak in every drop of knowledge about his dearest friend. The more one knows about a living being, the easier it is to adjust the light and soil, to ensure bountiful nutrients for thriving.
And if Hassel is hurting, then Brassius must know so he can fix it. We cannot heal a wound unknown, Hassel always said, specialist visit after doctor appointment after therapy round.
“I’m sure everyone will tell you that time will ease the wound, if not heal it entirely. Maybe it will even be true. It often is. But not every love is the same, and that is precisely what makes love beautiful. So please let your heart beat at its own pace, alright? New love can help fill in the missing pieces—a new hobby, a new adventure, a new friend.”
“But I don’t want a new friend,” sobs the child. “I want her. She’s my best friend. I can’t lose her!”
Hassel is quiet for a while, giving space to the new round of tears. Even when the student wipes at their face and tries to present a brave front, Hassel doesn’t pretend to normalcy or continue apace. He always waits until every emotion runs its course in full color.
Hassel’s heart must be breaking right now to watch this, but Brassius’s is racing. Was he the new friend, the adventure, the distraction? How marvelous to be of such service after all Hassel has done for him in turn!
“Sometimes…” Hassel trails off, then clears his throat. His words waver strangely. “Sometimes you don’t have to. If you love someone else’s happiness more than you love the idea of being with them, then…”
He clenches a fist before him, trying to summon his usual emphatic enthusiasm. “If you love someone else’s happiness, then nothing has to change! You don’t have to lose her! You don’t have to stop loving her either. You only have to let go of the idea of her returning your feelings. Does that make sense? You can stand by her, support her in all her dreams! Then your love still has somewhere to go! I dare say it could even Terrastalize into a new shape entirely!”
Is that what Hassel did? But he hasn’t stood by and supported anyone in particular, not since he entered Brassius’s life.
He’s always been too busy holding up Brassius instead. Fighting for Brassius to find a sliver of happiness in the dark.
“And it doesn’t hurt that way?” the child asks dubiously.
Hassel’s shoulders slump three miserable inches, more damning to Brassius’s heart than any words could be. “Some days it doesn’t. Some days it is as fresh as the moment my heart first broke. I suppose it is not very good advice in the end.” He shakes his head, the long locks of his hair sweeping over his shoulders like a mournful willow tree. “As you can see, we grownups are no better at matters of the heart than anyone else. We all must decide what we are willing to lose.”
I won’t lose you, Brassie. No matter what.
Brassius steps backwards. His hands shake so badly that the sticker sheets slip out of his grasp, and he gathers them frantically, trying not to hear another word from this strange mauled beast holding back all its blood behind its teeth.
“But bravery is nothing to regret! You were brave to confess—braver than many even twice my years! I know you will be brave now, too. You’ll find somewhere for your love to go.”
But Hassel never found anywhere else.
Love leaks out of him like an oil spill, he foundered his own ship in Brassius’s harbor, and Brassius forgets, momentarily, to breathe. He braces a hand against the wall. He tries to work his lungs through the ferocious squeeze of jealous thorns around his chest. Weeds choking a garden he always believed to be thriving.
“Here, let us wind down from these big emotions with some coloring pages. I shall work on a Dragonite myself. The oranges never fail to cheer me, and yet today I think we shall change it up a bit. How will pink suit you, friend? And the stripes of a Zebstrika…one might even call it avantgarde!”
Festering, festering, this rot of failure, this hidden toxin that has poisoned their happiness—Hassel’s happiness—for too long. Brassius tears through the halls at a fever pitch, the school’s labyrinth no match for the exquisite knotwork of anguish that this knowledge has made of his heart. It isn’t right. None of this is right.
How dare Hassel waste his love on someone like Brassius, without even extending him the grace to earn it? To know? He has made Brassius the agent of his destruction, sparing him the knowledge while compounding the pain tenfold, and all of it for no reason at all. When did Brassius ever turn him down? Let him down, surely, daily, reliably, but outright rejection? Never. He would not have even needed to think about an answer.
It is not a matter of Brassius’s own feelings, not even a matter of love. What burns in him is transcendent, effusive, and fiercely unwilling to be labeled by the banal conventionalities of affection. He thought Hassel was the same. He thought Hassel simply knew. Somehow. The way Hassel has always known him better than any other, from the first day they met. That all of him is Hassel’s, as much and as little as Hassel wants—
But Hassel doesn’t know how to want.
That’s it, isn’t it.
Hassel never let himself ask, and he broke his own heart to spare Brassius the chance. Better to hide his selfishness, his betrayal of his dearest friendship, his great crime of wanting someone’s happiness. A martyr in the name of love. One never really escapes the hubris of youth after all!
The whole baffling, maddening situation stings behind Brassius’s eyes, halfway to a migraine already. At the first true stab of pain, he stops and takes a breath that feels large enough to bruise his torso from the inside out.
Name the wound: Anger. At lost time, at unwarranted misery, at Hassel. At himself for the impossibility of being mad at Hassel.
Find the source: The misconception—delusion—that Brassius does not love Hassel.
Solve the problem: Confess to Hassel.
The kaleidoscopic clockwork of his brain whirs back into action as forward momentum takes hold. The possibilities are endless, the stakes never higher. Hassel deserves the most incredible confession possible, something to make all his heartache worthwhile. A masterpiece for the only mortal masterpiece Brassius has ever known.
He pauses on the stairs of Mesagoza and gazes back at the towers of the Academy scraping the very heavens. Hassel guards so many treasures within that fabled castle, yet none are truly his to keep, merely placed into his care for a few memorable years. What of his own treasure? A hunt to drag him across the continent, letters and sketches hidden around their favorite places to pique his curiosity with mystery while the many beautiful vistas of Paldea reinvigorated his imagination—terribly romantic, except Hassel didn’t need to earn his love. That implication must be avoided at all cost.
An upfront reward, then… A home-cooked meal always brought a special softness to Hassel’s gaze. Brassius could prepare his favorites, and set the table with the good silverware and put on a baroque playlist for tender ambiance, and then kiss Hassel for dessert. Hm. No, that again privileged a grand finale rather than the simplicity of their hands and hearts intertwined.
If he means to grab Hassel’s hand out of the blue, it should be to hold something they share, to pull Hassel onward to something greater. The perfect date? (Have they been going on them all this time…?) They’ve visited every art museum on the continent, but maybe a concert…or a music museum. Does Paldea have those? He pulls up his Rotom phone in the taxi, flipping frantically through concert announcements to no avail.
By the time Brassius reaches Artazon, he’s burning in his skin. His boots leave behind flecks of black leather from where he picked them apart instead of bloodying his nails. All his dear Pokemon start trailing after him in a parade of concern as he begins to pick apart his house instead.
The kitchen cupboards are far from barren, but there’s nothing he can transmute into a feast so quickly. No spare masterpieces lying around in the workroom, either. He pinches the bridge of his nose and hollers in frustration.
From outside, the nosy host of Sunflora take up the call. They spiral and shiver, their dancing movements like the softening ripples of a pond after Brassius hurls stones into it. He has tried to capture this particular behavior a thousand times so far, mulling over the many types of battle dances and pleasure dances that Pokemon display, but his mind always slides back to a certain work-in-progress boxed up in his basement. Invitation to Dance, he will call it someday. A meditation of the Dragon’s Dance. There would be no more perfect confession gift if his damn hands would get the shapes to work…but no, there is no forcing art. Hassel taught him that. It will bear its fruit eventually. For now, Brassius lets the annoyance go.
‘I listened to you today’ is not a particularly meaningful gift, even if it is the truth. How does he express that Hassel is integral to his continuing existence without sounding like some selfish prick begging for a rebound? You can’t say that without threatening the reverse: if you leave me, I’ll—
His head thunks against the thin strip of wall between two framed portraits, one by Arboliva when all she could do was hop from paint tray to paper and back. He had never thought to offer her that piece of paper. Probably never would’ve. It was Hassel who started it out in the courtyard of his shithole apartment, laying out a rainbow of paper paint bowls for their Pokemon to play in, to take everyone’s mind off the fact Brassius could barely sit up in his fucking bed that day.
There’s probably a reason all his Pokemon keep drawing Hassel living with them even now, huh.
Hell. If he thinks of it like that, then proposing in art becomes derivative. They’ve beaten him to this apparently inevitable farce—miracle?—by years. His own Pokemon…Brassius can’t help but feel proud, despite it all.
He drifts to the treat jar to reward them, then stops with the jar in his hands. The scent of cherry and cinnamon blanks out his mind for one blissful moment.
And then he remembers: Dinner. He was meant to pick Hassel up for dinner. He stood Hassel up for dinner.
There are three unread texts on his phone, and no missed calls, and Hassel the absolute saint has simply assumed Brassius got caught up in a project or a match or any of the other million competing maelstroms sprouting between his ears at any given moment. Before he lets himself think, he shoots off a message: Inspiration struck. Join me in Artazon?
Three blinking dots appear in their chat at once.
[Hass] On my way in ten.
There. Crisis averted.
Panic crashes over him the moment he sets down his phone. Was Hassel…waiting? Has Hassel been waiting? All this time? For Brassius to be different, to be better, to not forget him alongside all the rest of life’s necessities?
Or did he stand in the Academy lobby, waiting in fond confusion like an abandoned Rockruff?
Ridiculous. Brassius forces himself to envision the truth of the matter: Hassel surely headed home, cracked open a book, and set a timer to check in every fifteen minutes to see if Brassius emerged from the void. He would raise an eyebrow at the silence, and crack a smile as soon as his eyes skimmed over the eternal excuse of inspiration. He would understand. He wouldn’t love Brassius without understanding.
All this time.
Brassius can’t stop and think about it, or Hassel will find him here on his knees still trying to process the magnitude of Hassel loving him, as if it is something to be understood in a few hours instead of a lifetime.
Ah. That got the panic flaring all over again.
Focus.
Hassel is on his way, and Hassel cannot be allowed to suffer another moment of thinking himself unloved. And frankly, Brassius cannot imagine having a Normal conversation with Hassel without bringing it up. He isn’t Larry, he can’t just fake normalcy for days upon days while he crafts some proposal—confession!!—of divine perfection. Hassel finds beauty in everything. If he can find it in Brassius, he’ll find it in a dinner of peanut butter and celery sticks, too. Everything else can wait as long as Hassel’s heart rests joyous tonight.
So Brassius grabs a basket, shakes it out over the couch in case any stray Applin have wriggled inside, and dashes out to the corner shop for picnic ingredients. The clerk’s service smile never falters as Brassius barks out his orders, then asks for advice on the perfect date location, as if it is stocked back behind the Klawf Klaws. The windmill? The maze? His (their) garden?
He scrambles back to the house to fill a travel thermos of lemonade for his sprouts. What is he missing… A blanket? Yes, of course. The ground is soft and dry this time of year, but if Hassel is coming directly from the Academy, he will still be wearing his suit. Far more bothersome to launder than leather. Tableware! Dishes and spoons for the potato salad, and whatever un-bored apples are still fresh in the refrigerator, and their travel sketchbooks and watercolors and graphite and brushes and erasers and—
The long string of bells on the front door bursts into a giddy cacophony as Hassel lets himself in. At once Brassius loops his arm through the basket handle and dashes to meet him.
“Ha—“
His mouth opens for their usual greeting, then stays open on a gasp.
It is nothing special, really. Hassel has always filled the breadth of the doorway with his smile, but when he crouches to say hello to Breloom and Lilligant, the setting sun frames him in rays of liquid gold. A shroud of burning starshine? Trite. No, it is something in the captivating domesticity of it, a slow drip of nectar into the mouth of the parched, the quiet heart of the home now beating strong. Brassius has seen this sight a thousand times. His eyes have never burned so sharply he felt the urge to pry them out and engrave the image within them forever.
“Another gorgeous day in Artazon,” Hassel says by way of greeting as he stands. There is a sprig of lavender tucked behind his ear. A pop of color amid golden fields of rye.
The hills at sunset. Yes.
The moment Hassel hangs up his jacket on the coat rack, Brassius grabs his wrist and hauls him out into the street. “Come!”
Their running paces never align. Brassius darts through the fields like a graceless Deerling, veering wildly to avoid clusters of particularly lovely flowers, while Hassel huffs along with the measured momentum of someone trapped in too many gym classes as a child. Sometimes Brassius thinks he hears laughter at his back—more shards of affection to burrow deep into his skin and ache—and it’s all he can do to run even faster, pushing his body to the point of collapse so that there will be no thinking, no talking himself out of what he needs to do.
Brassius should have clipped a bouquet, but as he crests one last hill and catches sight of the sweeping breadth of fiery sky embracing the shimmering cerulean sea, stretching out into infinity beyond the verdant cliffs, even he thinks: good enough. Poppies and bluebonnets and firewheels dot the dusk in teeming constellations, and Brassius chooses the spot for their blanket with care while Hassel lets out his team for their evening frolic.
“What was the inspiration?”
Brassius looks up in blank confusion from where he’s been crouched stacking stones on the corners of the blanket.
“Your text, my dear.” Hassel’s hands settle upon his hips, as if threatening to reach into his pocket and demonstrate proof of reality. His crows’ feet crinkle in the twilight. Brassius wants to rub graphite across them and derive their secret etchings beneath his thumbs.
Instead, he spreads his arms wide in triumphant display and lifts his head to the heavens. “The picnic! When I beheld the skies today, I knew I could not bear to cage you within the walls of some restaurant!”
“Nor I you.”
Brassius looks back to his rocks, unable to meet the soft smile with which Hassel says those words. If not for the weights in his hands he might just fly away. Love fizzes in his veins, the sweetest poison he knows, but it has never been like this. He doesn’t have nerves. He has passions, demons! He has kissed a thousand nameless faces in his life, a muse for every moment, and there is simply no reason for it to affect him like this.
Unless it is something he, too, has never allowed himself to want. A cowardice thriving in their quiet moments of domesticity.
He should’ve brought champagne.
“Hass.”
Hassel turns to him, a frown beginning to furrow his brow as he parses the rough desperation ravaging that single word, and Brassius surges up on his knees.
Simplicity itself. The whirling tempest of doubt eases the moment his lips touch Hassel’s, replaced in an instant with the frenetic electricity of the unknown. Brassius tamps down on the wild urge to crawl into his lap before they even break for their first breath. He must at least wait for Hassel’s world to register this monumental change in the elements, and for those lax lips to part in a smile.
It will take Hassel a while to process this. He reacts to change decisively, with a leader’s confidence, but his heart has always been slower to accept new realities: of safety, of care, of love. No matter. Brassius packed all of the linen napkins to serve as handkerchiefs. When it hits, he will be ready.
For now, Brassius pulls away just enough to press their foreheads together. What will it look like when Hassel’s heart is nourished at last, instead of merely overflowing? His hands itch for his sketchbook, but there will be greater joy in admitting it to Hassel someday, that his first thought was envisioning himself waiting pen in hand to capture The Moment.
There will be so many more Moments to capture, now, that it steals his breath away without even needing another kiss.
But Hassel shifts minutely away, breaking their skin contact. He tips his head up towards the sky. When he finally opens his eyes, grief paints his expression in the split second before he steels himself to blankness. “I see. I thought I heard someone in the hallway earlier, but I had hoped it was not you.”
Brassius scowls at the words and the distance both. “What has that to do with anything?”
“Everything! You were never meant to hear all that selfish nonsense. It is nothing you need concern yourself with, Brassie.” Hassel takes a shaky breath, and then his features snap to a particular smile: the precise, polite nothingness with which Brassius has watched him turn away family members in public year after year.
And Brassius of all people knows its cost.
“Please, let us simply forget,” Hassel pleads. “Let us have this lovely picnic and watch the sunset and—“
“Hassel.”
“You won’t, will you? Of course you won’t. You’re a damned Mabosstiff when you sink your teeth into something…” The smile slips, and all at once Hassel teeters on the edge of incomprehensible misery. He rakes a hand back into his hair, and Brassius knows he isn’t gripping at the roots but digging his sharp nails into the scalp itself.
“I was always so careful. All to waste, now.” Hassel’s bark of ugly laughter ricochets across the fields like a strike of thunder, a single crack in the bedrock showing the poison within. “You’d think at my age I’d remember to close the damn door!”
Brassius laughs, too.
He throws back his head and laughs until he can’t breathe at all, then holds up a finger for a gobsmacked Hassel to give him time to laugh an entirely new set of lungs away. He knows a little something about poison, you see. And even more about thorns. How to shrivel the roots of the most virulent weeds, and to carve out the rot before it spreads. And when he is truly well and done, when he has laughed this madness past its banks and let it slip away into awkward silence, he reaches into the picnic basket for one of the napkins and wipes his own tears away.
Then he tosses the used linen into Hassel’s lap. “At your age I’d expect you to know the difference between gratitude and hunger.”
“I—“
“That’s what you think of me. I’m grateful. You saved me, so I must owe you this.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Hassel urges quietly.
“I am well aware! And still I spent all day trying to figure out when I broke your heart, when here you have broken it all on your own.” Brassius grabs Hassel by the ears and hauls him in for another kiss, this time without the gentle niceties. “With your duty. With my debts. Perhaps it is a simple equation for a man of honor. Yet tell me: when have you ever gotten me to do anything so easily? Am I not the most infuriatingly stubborn bastard of your acquaintance?”
Hassel opens his mouth to argue, and Brassius bites him back into silence. The moment Brassius breaks skin, just a bit, he plasters the wound anew with feral affection. There is no going back now that he knows Hassel’s taste upon his tongue.
“Too many sunflower metaphors,” Brassius growls against his cheek. Hassel’s face is hot beneath his cupped palms, and if he burns them both alive in this then at least they’ll share a pyre. “They’ve all gone to your head, Hass. As if I turn towards you simply to feed your ego, as axiomatic as the sun.”
“That isn’t—“
Brassius smothers him in another round of stinging nettle kisses, willing him to understand, planting his roots too deep in Hassel’s flesh for him to ever weed away. “You will not take this from me now that I have it.”
The smallest cry breaks in the back of Hassel’s throat, and Brassius finally eases back only enough to stroke his hands through that golden hair. “Please,” Brassius hums in comfort this time. “You have hoarded this too long, my dragon.”
He feels Hassel’s hands tremble at his hips, wavering like autumn leaves in the wind unsure when to fall. The next kiss is no less ferocious, but Brassius allows Hassel to decide its ending, and then the beginning that follows. The shade of Hassel’s lips changes as they kiss, again, again, a slow-swelling bruise lovelier than any ephemeral sunset could dream.
And as those kisses turn achingly tender, sweet and lazy as molasses, only then does Hassel finally begin to cry. It is quiet at first. No great torrent of emotion, no surge cresting over the riverbanks. A gentle mist at best, it sets Hassel’s cheeks shining with dewdrops.
When Hassel’s mouth next opens to speak, Brassius kisses him again just to feel his lips shift into a pinched, frustrated smile.
“Might I speak,” Hassel mumbles teeth to teeth.
“Might I kiss you while you do?” Brassius raises a barren brow in challenge.
Hassel gazes at him for all of two seconds before leaning in to devour him once more, more, more. He must feel it too, this blaze of youthful frenzy pushing him to reclaim time that was never truly lost, for they were together, always, yet ravenous still.
At last Brassius pulls them down to lie upon the picnic blanket so Hassel’s tears have a faster path to the ground, rather than running over his chin and soaking into his collar. He kisses Hassel’s forehead, lets his hands roam and soak in the warmth of his body. And now that Hassel is free to speak his fill, he seems to have no words left at all. His heart beats under Brassius’s palm, and his chest heaves with his weeping.
“When did you know?” Brassius asks.
He is curious, yes, but more than that he knows Hassel needs a distraction. The sun has vanished in its trek around the globe, and the stars have not yet brightened in full.
Hassel sighs and tucks his face into Brassius’s hair, his hands moving to lightly curl around Brassius’s waist. “…Ten years ago.”
“Hass.”
“It was your gallery opening for Levincia’s bicentennial. I’d been busy with my Master’s for months, and I missed your entire creation period. I wouldn’t let myself miss the unveiling for anything.”
Brassius scrunched up his nose in memory. They’d wanted a full exhibition glorifying the teamwork of Electric types and humans, and instead Brassius gave them an abstract depiction of a Mow Rotom tearing through civilization like a thresher, just as humans had used and abused nature in turn. Not among his most popular work, but a solid warning about hiring him for corporate nonsense. “Was that when I stood on the table and lectured that loathsome critic about his Kalosian bias?”
The arms around him give a little squeeze. “You were certainly in your element. And when you saw me, you asked me to walk you home to Artazon. It took us hours, and we talked past midnight out under the stars. I kept threatening to carry you. The moment we reached your house, you sat down to rest your legs and fell asleep wearing my overcoat. I had been missing you terribly, wondering if I still had any place in your life, and to see you like that… I wanted to see it every day of my life. I still do.”
There’s no way Brassius can raise his head to face Hassel after that, no matter how much he wants to. This giddiness in him cannot yet be contained—mania he knows how to handle, but Butterfrees in his stomach? Mortifyingly delightful.
And the idea of him wearing Hassel’s clothes affecting Hassel so devastatingly? What else can he do but tangle his fingers in the soft cable-knitting of Hassel’s sweater, wondering how it will feel against his bare skin when he wears it tomorrow. There must be so many more sparkling gems to find in the impossible depths of Hassel’s heart; Brassius must take care not to break it open in search of further treasure.
“Are there rules?” Brassius asks on a low rumble, unwilling to leave his new nest upon Hassel’s chest.
“Rules?”
“…About how am I allowed to love you.” About going too fast. Too far. Too much.
The first answer he gets is Hassel’s lips parting in another kiss upon his brow. “None I wouldn’t let you break, Brassie.”
“Mm.”
That isn’t quite right, but Brassius can’t put his finger on why. Maybe it’s the vague excusal of all the grief Brassius has put him through over the years. Carte blanche acceptance, when Brassius wants so much better for Hassel than the man he has been.
Or perhaps it is the meekness of surrender, when Brassius wants Hassel to take.
He mulls it over as they finally, reluctantly, disentangle themselves enough to finally partake of the meager picnic offerings. They both used to subsist on far worse fare than sourdough and prosciutto, and in far worse places than in the clear air under a magnificent host of stars. Brassius tosses avocado peels down the hill for the lurking dragons to snap out of the air while Flapple sneaks off with a full tortilla. The earlier lightning charge begins to ease.
But Hassel’s amber eyes are still ringed red with emotion, and every time Brassius looks at him, he wonders.
Will Hassel still hold back? Will he take Brassius at face value but say good enough, and never crack open his own chest to bare every last vulnerability? Not that Hassel has to. A man can live without carving himself down to bone and letting the elements feast on whatever remains.
Well, probably. Brassius wouldn’t know.
But he can’t let Hassel keep a single secret from fear of Brassius’s reaction. Not again. And if he lets Hassel leave tonight without making that eminently clear, he’ll never forgive himself.
It’s nearly midnight when Hassel reluctantly begins to tidy their things back into the basket. He recalls his Pokemon one by one, as if Brassius will not invite him to stay the night and release each one back into the living room. And he does all of this with Brassius wrapped firmly around his left arm, gazing fixedly at his face in thought.
“Let me walk you home?” Hassel asks, his voice even quieter now that they are alone.
This time Hassel holds the basket. Their knuckles brush together as they trudge back up the hills at an easy stride. The lavender fell out of Hassel’s hair hours ago, and each touch of wildflower against his boot makes Brassius’s fingers itch to pick another one.
When they reach the house, Brassius turns and leans back against the door. “Hass?”
“Yes?”
“Put down the basket.”
Perplexed yet playing along as obediently as ever, Hassel lowers the basket to the stone walkway.
“Recall the first time you ever wanted to kiss me.”
“Is this the new passcode for the door?”
“Recall it! Hold it there in your mind’s eye!”
The corners of Hassel’s lips twitch unbearably upward. “And kiss you like that?”
“Precisely!”
It is different this time. As Hassel steps forward to box him in, those broad shoulders not just filling the doorway but removing all hope of escape, those big hands moving to cup Brassius’s head, the brazen warning of Hassel’s sharp eyes glittering as he leans in to steal the breath from Brassius’s throat—but the kiss itself is the same. Firm, but the same.
Something squirms miserably in his gut, and when the kiss breaks Brassius spits out, “Is that all?”
His back strikes the door in the next moment, helpless against the sudden weight of Hassel’s body bearing down on his. This time all gentleness and hesitation have been replaced by a zealous passion, the same all-consuming zest for life with which Hassel approaches every semester, every battle, every disaster that lays them low. Hassel kisses him with tongue and tooth and breathes into him like Brassius is something he’s bringing back to life from the ashes.
For a boneless moment of bliss, Brassius forgets where he ends and Hassel begins. Then he tangles his hands into Hassel’s hair and pulls. “More.”
“You want the first time?” Hassel growls into his ear, gnawing at the soft skin at the hinge of his jaw in between breaths. “I knew it for love ten years ago, but that wasn’t the first. I learned hunger in your shape long before.”
Twenty years of genteel temperance vanish in an instant as Hassel seizes upon him, all civility flayed from his spirit until only ravenous desperation remains. He gets a knee between Brassius’s thighs, claws splayed across the narrow span of his stomach, and Brassius tastes the echoes of the man Hassel used to be. In the shadows before they found the sun. In seedy flophouses and workshops cobbled from the ruins of abandoned warehouses where Brassius carved himself up into carrion for the wolves, refusing to care about a world that didn’t care about him.
Until there was Hassel. Until Hassel refused to see anything but value in Brassius and dragged him toward more fertile earth where he could thrive.
In another world, Hassel dragged him into dark corners of devilish clubs to kiss him something like this, all sharp edges and singular intensity, brimming with barely restrained vitality as he learned to live among mere mortals instead of his divine kind.
The deafening crowd roars around them, blood pounding in Brassius’s ears as the world around them collapses into a cataclysm of visceral desire. A brutal display of their varying lung capacity, Brassius notes woozily, but he is too busy moaning around Hassel’s tongue. A shame they never did this while Hassel still had it pierced. He gasps Hassel’s name like it is inspiration itself, eureka anew, yet no groan or whimper sways him as he drinks Brassius down until nothing remains.
Brassius only realizes he’s still breathing when he feels Hassel panting at the hollow of his throat.
“There you are, my love,” Brassius rasps victoriously. He wraps his arms around Hassel’s shoulders to ground them both, pulled towards his true north even as the world spins. “All of my love.”
Hassel moves just enough to glance up. He has never been precisely this red before, Brassius thinks.
What a lovely color.
Far too frazzled for this time of the evening, Hassel ducks his head back down. His hands are still firmly planted on Brassius’s hips. “Brassie…you truly…”
Brassius frees a hand to fumble for the doorknob behind him. They have much to discover, let alone discuss, and there is no need to traumatize the neighbors quite so soon.
“You truly have no self-preservation whatsoever!” Hassel finishes, caught somewhere between apologetic and apoplectic over nearly suffocating Brassius on his tongue. There’s a lecture in there about to bloom, and Brassius can’t wait to learn a thousand new ways to distract and confound and fluster this magnificent treasure in his arms.
For now, Brassius simply leans down to Hassel’s ear with a fiendish grin.
“Says the man who ravished me on the porch. Shall we take this inside, my love?”