Well, here it is. The epilogue/final chapter to "God With A Crush." It's about half the length of the other chapters, so it should be quick way to wrap up the story. Read over lunch, while waiting for a bus, while sitting in a class you don't really want to be in! Read it here, there, anywhere! Okay, enough of this silliness. I'll put some author's notes at the end of the chapter, too, in case you want to read more of my aimless ramblings. Hope you enjoy the final installment!

Disclaimers still apply.

A couple of minutes after he had turned out the lights, Neku felt Joshua slip into bed beside him and entwine their fingers together. It was their routine whenever Joshua was staying the night – for the benefit of Neku's parents, they would make up a small bed on the floor, and Joshua would even lie down on it until a few minutes after Neku had shut off the lights. It was silly, a game of pretend, but Neku didn't know if even Joshua would be able to coax himself out of an awkward situation if one of Neku's parents were to come in and find the two of them tangled up like headphone wires in Neku's bed. Neku didn't particularly want Joshua to smooth-talk his parents, anyway; he'd managed to wean Joshua off almost all forms of psychic influence around them in the last few years, and he didn't want to backtrack that progress. So, they made up the bed every night, and every night Joshua slept in Neku's bed when there was adequate darkness to cover them.

In the morning, Neku always found himself a little bit disappointed that Joshua was once again in the makeshift bed on his floor. His arms, which curled and folded and wove to fit with Joshua's body while they shared the bed, were always wrapped instead around his own torso when he woke.

Neku didn't open his eyes when Joshua took his place between the top sheet and the mattress. He didn't have to, when his breath was warm and his unique energy, humming and instantly recognizable in spite of his human form, was so strong. He hooked a leg around Neku's, and Neku took the cue to incline his head towards the Composer's chest. When they were younger – or rather, when Neku was younger and Joshua was smaller – this had been awkward. They hadn't understood how to fully utilize their lengthening limbs. They hadn't known exactly how they were supposed to fit. Over the years, they had figured it out almost exactly. No more bumping foreheads or elbows bruised from clashing into other bones. While Neku had gained some muscle mass in addition to height (though not nearly as much as Beat had possessed when they were fifteen and playing the Reaper's Game), Joshua had only grown taller, his arms and legs long and thin and willowy. His voice had dropped a bit, too. Sometimes, as Neku was experiencing the negative side-effects of adolescence, he remembered that Joshua was willingly enduring them for the second time. In order to be with him. The thought of it was almost too much to fathom.

"So, Neku," said Joshua, and his voice was so close to Neku's ear that it almost felt like it was in Neku's mind. It was entirely possible that it was. Now that they had firmly established what was and was not okay in regard to psychic abilities, Neku didn't mind Joshua being in his head as much. There had been much discussion, and several "Joshua, it is not okay to imprint on me when you want Ramen Don," conversations, but they were currently at a comfortable place when it came to mental boundaries. Neku wondered, not for the first time, if he would miss having this particular type of connection with Joshua. "Are you excited to start university?"

"I don't know," grumbled Neku, not out of actual uncertainty, but out of weariness towards the question. He felt like he'd answered it a thousand times over the course of the last year. "Are you?" Joshua giggled.

"I've already been," he answered.

"Yeah, but this is different," said Neku. They were going together, this time. This time, it was going to be good. At least, he hoped it would.

"You're right," said Joshua. "It is." He didn't sound excited, and he was resonating uncertainty. The vibe was off-putting enough that Neku had mistaken it for irritation in the past. Like everything else with Joshua, reading this vibe accurately had taken practice and familiarity.

"I'm kind of nervous," admitted Neku, hoping that talking this through might ease some of the tension. "For classes, especially. All the work, and having to get places on time, and being responsible. I'm worried that it'll be too much for me." He paused. The air around them still buzzed with unease. "I guess I'm excited, too, though. Meeting new people might be cool."

"New people," said Joshua, turning the words over on his tongue. "I am quite the humanitarian." Then, without warning: "What if you run off with someone younger and prettier than I am, Neku?" The question, though phrased as a joke, was accompanied by a spike in the surrounding tension. Neku abruptly sat up and switched his desk lamp back on. When he turned to look at Joshua, the Composer was halfway in a sitting up position, looking puzzled.

"We need to have a conversation," said Neku resolutely. "Face-to-face. In the light."

"Whatever about?" asked Joshua. "And aren't you worried about your parents finding us cohabitating, as it were?"

"That's not important right now," said Neku. "Do you think I'm going to leave you once we get to university?" Joshua shook his head, locks swishing gently with the movement. When Joshua was being wholly sincere, Neku thought, he was beautiful. Sure, he was always nice to look at, but there was something special about those times that he didn't try to cover up what he was thinking or feeling that transformed him. Honestly, Neku had never fully noticed how lovely he was until he had stopped acting like an asshole for five minutes and let his guard down.

"That's not it," said Joshua. "I don't expect you to leave. It's only that, if you do…" There existed an abundance of ways Joshua could finish that thought, and Neku knew every one of them by heart. So much planning had gone into making the arrangements for Neku and Joshua to room together, to go to school together, to just be together. So much careful orchestration and strategy and attention to detail. Joshua hadn't made Neku aware of the full extent of the maneuvering. He insisted that Neku had enough going on in his life without having to worry about the semantics of his abdication on top of everything. Still, from what Neku had gathered, the process was incredibly in-depth.

Uzuki and Kariya hadn't been willing to take on the role of Composer full-time, after all. Well, Kariya hadn't been willing to. Uzuki would have been more than thrilled to accept the position, but the two were only of any use as a pair. When Joshua went back to the UG after he and Neku had gotten together, they had peacefully returned to their roles as Harriers. In the years following, Neku never found the stomach to ask what had become of them. Joshua had selected another worthy Reaper as Conductor, a girl with blue hair and a promising Imagination who had requested Reaper status after her partner's Erasure. Since then, Joshua had asked that she fill in for him whenever he visited Neku in the RG. Whether or not this was bending the rules was beyond Neku, but he certainly appreciated it.

"When university starts up, I'll quietly appoint her Composer, relinquish my demigod status, and slip out without any needlessly bloody revolution," Joshua had told Neku, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. Neku knew that it wasn't. The process didn't just involve finding a replacement Composer and stepping down, it also involved the return of Joshua's mortality. From what Neku understood, once you had a say in being in the UG, you weren't supposed to be able to go back. Not permanently, anyway. He knew that Hanekoma was going to be heavily involved in executing this plan, which probably meant that it was a lot more difficult than Joshua was letting on.

"You've got a lot riding on this, huh?" asked Neku.

"Oh, no," said Joshua, waving a hand. "I'm only giving up my job, my nigh-immortal status, and my entire way of life in order to live with you in a university dorm with a communal bathroom."

"Ugh." Neku wrinkled his nose. "I hadn't even thought about the bathroom thing."

"Neku, be serious." There was a smile on his face as he slowly wrung his hands in his lap. A few years ago, Joshua's fingers would have stayed still. There would have been no change in his demeanor as he talked about a subject that distressed him, and he would have tried to deflect from the conversation with clever, irritating little remarks or questions fired back at Neku. And Neku wouldn't have bothered looking deep enough to see that for every word Joshua said, there were a thousand words behind it he was too fearful to say outright. Whether or not they actually went through with this plan, they had shaped one another, and there was no erasing that.

"Joshua," he said. "We've fought so fucking hard for the last couple years to make this work with us. We compromised, and we fought, and we struggled, and we looked at every possible solution a thousand times. And now, after all that, we're finally going to get to be together, and you're worried that I'm going to leave you? Do you really think I'd throw all that away?" He locked his fingers with Joshua's. "I love you."

"I know that," said Joshua. "And I also know enough about humans that I am painfully aware that that's not how it always works. Sometimes, things fall apart no matter how hard you fight for them. Sometimes people grow in opposite directions and end up hating each other, or, or they just become incompatible. Sometimes there are problems and pain and being in love…" he slipped his palm out of Neku's "…isn't enough. Neku, you know I want this to work out, but I love you at least as much as you love me, and if something happens—" When Neku kissed Joshua, he could practically taste the relief. Of course, there was also irritation there at being cut off in the middle of a sentence, but a few ruffled feathers on either side were par for the course when it came to Joshua and Neku. It was nothing compared to the blowups they'd had when they were fifteen or even sixteen, before they'd gotten a solid sense of how the other was feeling. Leaning out of the kiss, Joshua frowned and said:

"You know that won't make this go away, right?"

"I know," said Neku. "I just wanted to, okay?" It had only been seconds since the kiss, but already Neku could see the gears turning in Joshua's head, sense his worry clouding the air in the room. "Look, there's no way I can guarantee that we're going to stay together, and that we're never going to make each other miserable. That's insane, and impossible. But that's a risk we're going to have to take. You can't seal yourself off to a world of possibilities because you've already convinced yourself that you know what's gonna happen. Remember what happened the last time you did that?" Joshua rolled his eyes.

"You had to bring that up," said Joshua. "If everyone could go for a week without mentioning the time I almost destroyed Shibuya, I would be eternally grateful."

"You have to admit, it was kind of a big deal," said Neku, laughing.

"Yes, yes, and I'm very sorry," said Joshua, and even though he tried to make it sound sarcastic, Neku knew that he was. Neku personally thought that he had felt sorry about it for a long time and just didn't want to admit it. When he thought about it, Neku realized that he himself didn't even like to admit that he had put his shoes on the wrong feet, so for a being that could be classified as a god to admit that nearly axing a whole district full of people was not the best idea had to be at least a hundred times harder. Probably more.

"Do you see what I was saying, though?" Neku asked. "Sometimes you have to open yourself up to the possibility of getting hurt to get what you want. So, I'm all in."

"Really?" asked Joshua. Neku exhaled loudly and far too dramatically, smiled, and gripped Joshua's hand tightly in his own.

"Yeah, really," he said.

"Me, too," said Joshua softly. He kissed Neku gently on the lips as Neku reached to switch off the lamp. They lay back down, limbs shifting into place, eyes closing, comfortable darkness settling back over them. Tomorrow morning, Neku would once again awaken to find Joshua sleeping on the floor, but he his heart would lurch a little bit beneath his sternum, knowing that things were going to change soon. Later on, there would be university and new people and new classes, new ways for Neku and Joshua to expand their worlds. New ways to come a little closer to understanding each other. There would never come a time when they could completely and totally comprehend one another, and Neku knew that, but that idea didn't make him sad anymore. Because behind it, there was the prospect of getting closer and closer, and making progress and then taking a few steps back, and feeling frustrated and angry only to close the distance a tiny bit more and realize that there was still some value in trying. Maybe they wouldn't spend the rest of their lives together, but, as of this moment, they could, and they would have time to figure out what they wanted to do as they went along.

"It'll be wonderful," said Neku quietly, planting a kiss somewhere along the line of Joshua's jaw. Joshua was smiling, he could tell. A few seconds passed, and Neku added: "As long as you don't try to wipe out Shibuya again."

At first, he thought that Joshua wouldn't respond. Then:

"That was one time!"

And, at the same moment, the two burst into giggles that stole their breath and shook their twined-together bodies.

It was going to be wonderful.

So, yeah, that's the end of that! Hope you guys liked it. I've been feeling a little down lately, so I tried to make the epilogue happy as a kind of reward to myself for getting through the semester alive. I hope it wasn't too ridiculously sweet or fluffy or out of character for you guys. But, yeah, thank you so much for reading all the way through my first chaptered fic. Unless you, like, decided to read the epilogue and not the rest of the story. In which case, thanks for reading the epilogue, and I hope you enjoyed it, but why did you do that? Seriously?

Ah, I need to go to sleep. But I just want everyone who read this to know how much I appreciate all of you. Especially anyone who reviewed/favorited/added it to alerts. It seriously made my day when I got the notifications, so thank you a lot. You can even review the epilogue, too, if you want!

Thanks bunches and peace out,

Sunny D.