Disclaimer: Kazuya Minekura owns all. If I did, well, there would be a lot more loving going on.

Author's notes: Set before Kenren and Tenpou became the good friends that we see them as at the beginning of Gaiden. I know I don't see any battling going on in Gaiden 9anyone wonder what exactly the army is for?) but here I'm assuming that they do fight, and in spite of their immortality there can be casualties and injuries.

Concrit muchly appreciated! Lots of love for all the support that my reviewers have given me in Gaiden fics. Really.

As Intentions Go

When he came to, his head was throbbing and white light burned into his retina with painful insistency. "Fuck," he muttered. As far as he could see, he was dressed in some kind of gown and currently sprawled out in an undignified mess on a hospital bed.

"Good morning," said someone to his left. He swiveled his head round to look, and was rewarded with a perky smile. "Fuck," he muttered again, voice hoarse. He needed water, damnit. It felt like someone had shoved the hilt of a sword down his throat and possibly done some not-so-delicate probing.

Kenren took the jug from the side table and poured him a glass of water which he gratefully accepted. In the lull between him swallowing and trying to regain use of his vocal chords, the general made small talk. "So," he began conversationally, "you're looking good today, Marshall."

He paused in mid sip and let out a small grunt. His voice couldn't handle sentences just yet.

Kenren took this as assent, continuing. "I mean, given the fact that you were almost stabbed in the guts and had a huge boulder fall onto you. I'd say you look pretty damn good right now."

Tenpou hoped the droll look he shot in the man's direction, coupled with the arched brow, would give the General some indication of his disbelief. "General Kenren," be began slowly, aware that his voice might crack at anytime, "if being almost killed will only earn me a backhanded compliment from you, I think I'll have to try harder next time. Say, being actually killed?"

That earned him an indignant squawk from Kenren, who had moved from the chair at the side to sit on his bed and scowl at him. Tenpou discreetly pulled the sheets up a little further, vaguely hoping it would hide his bare leg where the gown had hitched up when he turned over. It wasn't that he was self conscious (nothing could be further from the truth), or that he wanted to hide anything. It was, he decided with some degree of crabbiness, the cold, and the fact that Kenren, while being the comradely concerned subordinate that he was, had absolutely no conception of personal space.

"…well you wouldn't have wanted that, would you?" he heard Kenren say.

"What?" he asked, because he genuinely hadn't been paying attention and was too exhausted to pretend to have had.

"Flowers and fruit," Kenren clarified, gesturing to a table at a corner that was nearly sagging under the weight of floral baskets. "I didn't get one for you because I thought you didn't like them."

"How thoughtful of you," Tenpou murmured, eyeing the inundated table.

Kenren reached over and deftly plucked a pear from a random basket. "You mind?" he asked, weighing the fruit in his palm and tossing it into the air a few times.

Tenpou thought of saying yes, he minded, just on principle. So he said, "yes," feeling privately amused at the affronted look that Kenren shot him, as though the other man had already had an answer in his head and was only asking out of courtesy. That was Kenren for you, Tenpou thought.

He had been knocked out cold for a good week, and while he entertained no illusions about his popularity with his men, he had expected them to turn up, if not out of the goodness of their heart (even then he had his doubts about that), then at least obligation, or political correctness. What he hadn't been expecting was…this. This display of whatever it was, lurking behind Kenren's customary brusqueness and lack of tact. If he hadn't been on what he was fairly sure was a potent cocktail of drugs designed to put him well and truly into dreamland, Tenpou would have bet anything that lurking behind that smile was genuine concern, or something akin to it.

"Yes, you can have it, General," he said, smiling when Kenren's eyes lit up in happiness. "Take the whole basket, "he heard himself hazily intoning as he drifted off to sleep, "in fact, take all goddamned the baskets."

It had taken a month, but Tenpou was finally up and about again. He would have been discharged sooner, but he'd decided that the chance was way to good to pass up and had spent the remainder of the three weeks after Kenren's first visit lazing around in bed and cheerfully ordering people to get him an assortment of things from his room to keep him occupied.

On the second last day before he was discharged he was propped up against the wall with pillows and calmly reading a book on insect life cycles (carefully hidden in a thick, dry volume on military tactics), feeling at peace with everyone and everything in the world. He watched the orderly scuttle meekly out to get him the tenth cup of jasmine tea in an hour and smiled benignly. Barring the nagging ache at the base of his spine and the still tender gash at his side, he was perilously close to being happy.

"Mmmm," he hummed in contentment. Idly he licked a finger and turned the page.

Kenren entered during mid afternoon, just when the rain was starting up. Tenpou set the book face down on his lap and gave him a smile, one of those that made his eyes curve happily upwards into a crescent. "Hello," he greeted, setting his spectacles down next to his cup.

Kenren raised an eyebrow at the empty cups that had gathered at the side table. Tenpou sighed, and said by way of explanation, "they had small cups." Which wasn't a lie, but the reason he'd asked for all that tea was to keep the orderly in charge suitably entertained. He imagined working in a hospital couldn't get more exciting than this.

Without waiting for an invitation Kenren perched himself on the edge of the bed, producing his hipflask and offering a cup to him. Tenpou felt like admitting that he was rather bloated as it was, but it was sake, and seeing as Kenren was the one offering him sake (man had expensive taste), who was he to turn it down? He took the proffered cup and sipped. Ah, the good stuff.

"When're ya getting out?" Kenren asked.

"Hmmm?" he said, vaguely aware that he was being addressed. "Soon, I should think."

"It's been a whole month."

"Well. Yeah," he said affably, peering shortsightedly into his cup. Was that an ant he saw in there? But the sake was good, no doubt about it. "Actually, I was thinking of moving my office here."

"No shit," Kenren said, searching Tenpou's face for signs that the other man was joking. When he realised that the Marshall was being perfectly serious, he coughed. "Uh, there're no bookshelves," he said, in attempt to point out the obvious impracticalities of such a decision.

"Maa," Tenpou said. "I guess they go under the bed, then?"

Kenren sighed and gave Tenpou an absent pat on the shoulder. Sometimes it was a little difficult to believe that this man was one of the most brilliant military tacticians in heaven. The guy just didn't act like it. He settled for looking out of the window and saying, "just get outta here quickly, okay? People are starting to miss you already."

Tenpou smiled a little ruefully. "I'll be out in a few days," he promised. "And then we can have a drink."

Kenren paused and considered mentioning that if all Tenpou wanted was a drink, they could have one here, and as a matter of fact, anywhere, as long as there were two of them and they had something to drink, but thought the better of it when he saw Tenpou groping along the edge of the table for his spectacles. "Yeah, sure," he said, cursing his eloquence. "I mean, yeah, I'll look for you."

Tenpou hmmed a little when his fingers brushed his spectacles and sent the cup of half-finished tea tumbling onto the bed. He stared at the stain on the sheets for a while, only looking up when he found his book taken gently away and wiped down with the front of a shirt.

"Please do," Tenpou said, feeling fuzzy around the edges and quite happy and warm after the sake. He stared at the quizzical expression on Kenren's face and smiled a little. "The drink," he clarified.

Tenpou nestled back into the pillows and fluffed the blanket a bit, making sure that he avoided the spreading wet patch that was growing in the corner. He remembered two things before he drifted off into sleep again, the first being that his book had been carefully cleaned and should be alright, and second being that Kenren had very gently tucked the blanket more snugly around him before exiting.

He fell asleep with the wind on his face and the tinkling of wind chimes in his ear.

Kenren hadn't been by to see him for at least a month already, so when Kenren dropped casually by his office late one evening just as he was locking up, Tenpou was suitably surprised. "General, could you," he said, puffing a bit as he balanced a stack of books in the crook of his arm, "help me?" Kenren took a stack of books of Tenpou and watched in amusement as the other man struggled to keep a s bundle of scrolls from escaping. When Tenpou finally shut the door and set off down the corridor with him in tow, Kenren finally had the presence of mind to ask round a tall stack of books he was balancing, "where are we going?"

"To my quarters, of course." Tenpou said, not even pausing to let up his pace. "Light reading material."

"Right," Kenren muttered. Light probably didn't refer to the weight of all the paper.

Tenpou opened the door and set the scrolls down onto his desk. "Books go over there on the shelf," he said. "The one just below the cactus." Kenren grunted and complied, slotting the books neatly in and resisting the urge to tidy the mess in the shelves around it. When he turned around, he found the other man on the bed, cross legged with a pillow in his lap. "Come'ere," Tenpou said. He patted the space on the bed beside him. Kenren walked over and lay down beside Tenpou with his hands behind his head. "What?" he asked.

Tenpou supposed the best time to ruminate on the consequences of an action would certainly not be after the action was committed, but in this case, he decided to hell with tactics, so he leaned over Kenren and placed his hands to either side of the general's head. "General Kenren," he said with what he hoped was gravity and solemnness. "I am going to ask you one question." He paused and shifted his weight onto one arm, using the other to push his spectacles up from where they were slipping on his nose. "And you will answer it with 'yes' of 'no'."

"Yessir," Kenren replied a little nervously. "But—"

Tenpou smiled disarmingly and sat back down, removing his hands from their post beside Kenren's head. "Do you," he interjected, "object to engaging in relations of a sexual nature with me?"

There was a pause as Tenpou watched comprehension dawn slowly on Kenren. "Whaaat?" Kenren all but sputtered, looking incredulously at his superior. "You mean all that time you were thinking about it? And you didn't say a word?"

Tenpou lifted his shoulders into an elegant shrug. "No, General. It has just occurred to me that our intentions might coincide." He waited for the our to sink in, wondering if perhaps it was a tactical miscalculation, some flaw in his estimation of probability, or a grievous misinterpretation of another's intentions. Nothing was ever certain, although there were a great many things that were highly likely—it wouldn't be the first time that he'd made a mistake, and it wouldn't be the last. This though, Tenpou hoped would be a correct guess, even in the face of the unpredictability that he had thrown into his calculations, just because it was Kenren.

"Marshall," Kenren said with excruciating slowness, like he was waiting for something in the room to snap. Tenpou wondered just how many rejections were running through Kenren's head at the moment—there were so many reasons to refuse his highly unorthodox request. He could imagine a few of the responses, and wondered if Kenren would go through all the trouble to let him down gently. It wasn't a proposition of love; it wasn't even about any kind of emotion (he'd chosen his words carefully), but a dismissal of any sort would sting, if not his pride, then something else.

"I accept," Kenren whispered, observing the Marshall out of the corner of his eye.

Tenpou was closely acquainted with probability, chance, and failure. For all his mercuriality and seemingly haphazard vagueness, he could take on loss without actually losing, because he knew, just knew with every fibre of his frame that one day he would really lose, so before that day nothing was a loss but a small setback. He was a strategist, and he was a planner, but now was the time of action and words could prattle on without anything being said— to hell with it, he decided, and leaned over to give Kenren a quick nip on the lobe of his ear.

"Great!" Tenpou proclaimed cheerfully, barely concealed relief flooding his body as he tugged at the fly of Kenren's pants. "Shall we begin?" he said.

Kenren pulled Tenpou down for a tight embrace. "Shall we begin, you say…"he murmured softly, already thinking of a million ways to make this worth their while. It wasn't quite what he had been looking for: he'd been expecting something more, maybe something less impersonal and nebulous, but this was about as good as it got, and he was going to grab it. He nuzzled Tenpou's neck. Yeah, he thought, this he could definitely work with.

Privately, Tenpou watched him, and thought the same.

The End

170607