Eighteen

Every year on the Sixth of June, Kanda Yuu did his very best to be absolutely nowhere near Home. He was, in fact, known to engage in some fairly extreme efforts to avoid being between the walls of the Black Order's motherhouse as his natal day approached: he had, over the years, invited himself on missions assigned to other apprentices of General Theodore (Mari and Daisya had, over the years, also gotten quite used to this and, moreover, knew better than to wish him a happy birthday anywhere public), crawled out of the Infirmary on his hands and knees and successfully hid for a full eighteen hours in the mountains of paperwork cluttering the Chief of Operations' office, and, on one memorable occasion, let himself be talked into a shopping trip in London with Rinali Li rather than suffer himself to be subjected to the Order's idea of a birthday party. It wasn't that he objected to the acknowledgement of his birth per se; he did, however, object rather strenuously to having that acknowledgement made into the centrepiece of a public spectacle involving streamers and banners and bunting and a cake large enough to have several small children baked inside it, a piece of which he would be required to consume if he emerged from his quarters at any time between dawn and midnight. On those rare occasions when he could not manage a timely escape, he invariably ended up hiding in his room, or the belfry, or some obscure and rarely tenanted portion of the motherhouse, and were it not for the mercy of sweet Rinali brining him a supper tray, he would never get a taste of Jerry's special birthday lotus-root tempura and shrimp soba, because even Jerry's best cooking was not worth the amount of glittery paper he would have to wash out of his hair to obtain it otherwise.

"Oh honestly, Yuu, it can't be that bad," Ravi, damn his eye, was laughing about it, sprawled across the foot of his bed and looking up at him where he sat brooding on how to go about getting away this year.

"How would you know? You're never here for your birthday," Kanda replied, peevishly.

"I might be, this year." Ravi grinned the most smackably annoying grin in the universe. "And I'm definitely going to be here for yours. So I say again…how bad can it possibly be?"

"You have no idea," Darkly. "Mari and Daisya are in the field already, damn them, I think Komui did that on purpose. General Theodore is somewhere in Italy. Rinali has been plotting something for days, I know it. And I'd bet anything it has something to do with bunting," A fierce and righteous passion entered his voice, "I hate bunting."

Ravi sat up and laid the back of one hand on his forehead. "Are you certain you're feeling all right, Yuu? I mean, passionate declarations of hatred for innocuous wads of fabric are the sort of thing I associate with fairly advanced cases of malarial – "

He batted the concerned hand away. "You'll see what I mean. In two days time this place is going to be drowning in primary-coloured stupidity."

It was the Fourth of June, and he already felt like a wolf with its leg caught in a trap.



The Fifth of June dawned offensively bright and cheerful over the highest peak of the motherhouse's high roof.

"…Good morning, Yuu. Dare I ask what brings you all the way up here this fine day?"

"Good morning, bastard. You're in a meddlesome temper right now, aren't you?"

"…I – "

"That was a rhetorical question. You're always in a meddlesome temper. I," Contemplatively, "am considering strategies."

"Strategies."

"Yes. Specifically: would flinging myself off the edge here be more than enough to kill me or just enough to hurt that I'd be comatose and in a full body cast tomorrow, so no one would feel compelled to seek me out and annoy me?"

"Yuu. Come down off the gargoyle right now or I'll signal the sniper team in the belfry to shoot you with a tranquilliser dart."



On the Sixth of June, Kanda Yuu very simply refused to get out of bed. The sun rose and he heroically ignored every impulse of self-discipline that demanded he rise with it and repair to the training level for his daily callisthenics regimen; he merely pulled his pillow over his head to block out the gradually increasing level of light. The morning waned, and rather than expose himself to the celebration-addled attentions of his comrades, he made use of the object he had acquired the day previous, after Ravi had talked him down off the edge and he'd sat through two interminable hours of psychological evaluation; he was sure that the Infirmary would never miss a chamber pot, they had hundreds. Midday came round and Rinali knocked softly at his door, asking if he wanted a lunch tray in her sweetest and most winsome voice; he remained silent, despite the twinges of conscience and chivalrous sentiment that rebelled against treating a woman badly. Gradually, shadows took the place of sun in his room, and soon the only light was that cast by the dimly glowing petals of his flower.

Something bumped against the window, striking the panes with a tinkle of breaking glass, admitting a cool breath of evening air into his room's stiflingly warm confines. Outside the window, the most bizarre of all the sights he had ever encountered on his birthday met his gaze: a squadron of four wireless golem units, flying in formation, a package tied to them by means of loops of heavy twine. He pushed the window open wide enough to allow them entry and untied their burden, after which they promptly flitted away again with a somewhat disgruntled air about them. Inside the package was a note and several neatly folded articles of clothing; he slit the wax seal on the note and read:

Get dressed and come down to the woods. You know the place. – R.

The fabric of the first garment was smooth and cool and almost impossibly soft beneath his hands, and moreover a shade of blue so dark it was nearly black, a hue that could only flatter his colouring no matter what time of day he wore it. Upon closer examination, it proved to be a tunic of some kind, a long tunic that, on him, fell to his knees and was slit up the sides to the waist, its neckline and front and full sleeves stiff with tasteful embroidery in complementary paler shades, dragons and birds of fire and clouds. A pair of loose pantaloons hid beneath the tunic, undecorated except for the elaborately carved horn toggles that held them closed. After years of wearing little more than his uniform and assorted bandages, it felt rather like wearing nothing at all: the air felt heavier on his skin than the clothing did. Lastly were a pair of leather sandals, which he slipped on and found them perfectly sized, and a length of silken ribbon thickly sewn with impossibly tiny pearls, with which he tied up his hair. The entire effect, he was forced to admit as he examined it in his room's small mirror, was fairly spectacular and the product of someone with excellent taste and access to his measurements.

He smelled a trap.

He slung Mugen's sword belt about his hips, because the note hadn't said to come unarmed, and proceeded to make his escape. It was, in truth, much easier to evade detection sneaking out of the motherhouse by night; in his particular case, it involved climbing out his window, inching down the ledge to a point where he could drop to the next level down without passing anyone else's window, and from there simply climbing the statuary-encrusted façade until he reached the ground. The motherhouse's vast central compound was ringed in a park of mature timber, some of the trees older than the foundation of the Black Order itself, and while the tower was visible from anywhere in the wood by virtue of its sheer size, many were the places in the wood that couldn't be seen directly from the tower. One of them clung to the edge of the escarpment, heavily shaded by grandfather trees and hidden within the tangle of their roots, half-grotto and half-clearing, where they'd passed many a wasted afternoon in the brief time that they were actually children together here. As he approached, moving quickly and making use of the ground cover to hide himself from any possible observers, he caught a flicker of coloured light amid the trees.

The grotto was lit from above by a half-dozen lamps, elaborately worked metal frames with panes of amber glass, burning a wonderfully fragrant oil that managed to be neither overpowering nor cloyingly sweet. Among roots the thickness of a grown man's body, on a natural bowl of flat stone and flat-beaten earth, a small outpost of civilization had been constructed: a small table, set with a magnificent profusion of tiny lacquered wooden dishes, surrounded on all sides by reed mats and pillows and cushions in a hundred different shades and patterns of silk. Ravi sat cross-legged among them, smiling mischievously up at him as he made his way down the natural staircase of roots and stones, dressed in a precise duplicate of the clothing he himself wore, but in a shade of green that would have shamed emeralds. For an instant, all he could think of were those strange Eastern fables about beautiful princes kidnapped by dragons who were also gods and the lengths to which heroes would go to rescue them.

"Happy birthday, Yuu," Ravi rose to help him down the last of the way; he let his hand be taken, and let himself be guided to an impossibly, sensuously comfortable seat cradled in cushions. He laid Mugen on a pillow of black silk shot through with silver threads, which had clearly been provided for just that purpose.

For an instant, he couldn't think of anything to say in response to that beyond, "You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble. Someone's going to have a fit."

"Of course I should have. I can understand not wanting a spectacle made of it," A laugh lurked in his friend's voice, "but you do only turn eighteen once. And it should be special. Tea?"

"You only turn seventeen once, too, you idiot," Kanda replied tartly, but accepted the bowl he was given, richly golden and thick with spice on his tongue and not the slightest bit of too-sweet. "Oh, that's wonderful."

"Daisya brought it back for me from Georgia," Fragrant steam filled the air as he began stirring and serving from the many tiny dishes on the table. "Here, try some of this…it's from Morocco, and I thought you'd like the flavour of it…"

There was not, in fact, a single sweet thing on the table: there was, instead, the famous lotus-root tempura and shrimp soba, curries of vegetables and meat, tart and hot Eastern pickles, rice golden with saffron and half-dozen different sorts of nut-meats, fish and fowl in sauces salty and smoky and perfectly balanced with the tang of five different spices. For dessert, there were tiny balls of green tea ice cream, bitter and endlessly refreshing, wrapped in shells of rice flour. From somewhere, Ravi produced a dark bottle and two tiny cordial glasses: the beverage was pale pink and smooth, just faintly sweet and rich with the fragrance of roses; just sipping it slowly filled his entire head with the scent and he laid back in the pillows when his fourth glass was done, feeling full and satisfied and yet somehow absurdly light all at once. It took him a long moment to remember how to say what he wanted to say in English.

"What…was that? It was wonderful." He was, he realized, having a very hard time concentrating on anything but how good he felt at that particular moment and decided that he didn't care.

A chuckle. "Mead. Rhodomel, actually – it's from an old medieval recipe I found. It's made from honey and rose petals."

"Honey? It wasn't that sweet," He objected and half-lifted his head to look up at Ravi, standing above him with a perfectly idiotic smile on his face.

"That's because it's also rather alcoholic. The fermentation process makes the honey less sweet." Ravi knelt astride his thighs, effectively pinning him into his cradle of cushions, though he couldn't think of a reason to object to this precisely.

"Alcoholic." It took a moment for that to make complete sense to him. "Oh. I'm…a little drunk then?"

"Actually, I suspect you're quite a lot drunk." Ravi, on the other hand, did not appear to be drunken at all, which he found vaguely unfair. "Yuu?"

"You should drink more then, this is quite nice." He blinked. "Yes?"

"I'm going to kiss you now." He proceeded to do so and Kanda found that quite satisfactory, as well. "God, Yuu."

"Mmmm." Somehow, his arms found their way around Ravi's neck and shoulders, quite independent of any orders of his, and pulled his friend down into a somewhat longer series of explorations. He found he quite liked the way Ravi tasted, spicy with the same spices he had been eating, sweet with the same rose-sweetness. Ravi's roughly-calloused, oh-so-very gentle hands found their way under his tunic and soon he was naked from the waist up, his throat and chest and navel being graced with kisses. He tangled his hand in that inviting mess of red hair. "Was…this part of your plan?"

"…Yes." Ravi's tongue dipped into his navel and the sensation filled him with such unbearable heat that he nearly gasped at the pain of it. "Well…not the getting-you-drunk part. That just happened. But this…? Oh, yes. I've missed you so much, Yuu."

Kanda closed his eyes. "…I've missed you, too." His grip tightened fractionally. "Let's…not stop."

"I wouldn't think of it." Ravi's head dipped lower and Kanda allowed his world to dissolve into sensation around him and himself to melt with it. He would not regret this, or turn it away, or him, or the pleasure it gave them both. His friend had clearly learned a great deal on his sojourns to the four corners of the Earth, and those lessons had been about more than dry history. In the end, he couldn't continue swallowing his own cries; the joy his lover gave him was too great, too sweetly prepared for, too passionately offered.

Afterward, they lay entangled together, Ravi's greater size and weight a pleasant burden on his chest and belly, his whole body still trembling with the ecstasy of it, and, he was surprised to discover, that his lover was doing so, as well. He stroked a hand over the hard-muscled shoulder resting against his breast. "Only once, hmmm?"

"Oh, God, I hope not," Ravi whispered against his neck.

"Of course not," He whispered in reply, "You don't turn eighteen for another two months."