BREAKING THE GAME
CHAPTER TWO
“Are you going to tell me what actually happened last night or not?” Hisoka eventually demanded.
Two hours into the working day and, barriers or no, the welter of Tsuzuki’s emotions was seeping out into the air and interfering with Hisoka’s attempts to read his email.
And worrying him to distraction, of course, though Hisoka wasn’t about to bring that up. This time he couldn’t even guess at what might be wrong. His first thought had been that Muraki had returned, but Hisoka wasn’t sensing enough revulsion in his partner for that to be likely. Instead he was getting guilt, longing and the echo of a sharp physical pain. Strangest of all, the whole thing was overlaid with sexual desire.
Ick.
Hisoka’s least favourite emotion on a list of quite a few.
Given a choice, he’d have shut himself up like a clam and cleared out to the library. But sitting in front of him was an unhappy Tsuzuki... So Hisoka gritted his teeth and asked casually, in the’“normal social interaction’ way he’d been practising recently, “What’s wrong with you this morning?”
Tsuzuki, who was lolling in his chair with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cookie – amazingly still only half-eaten – in the other, smiled sheepishly and gave up all pretence of interest in his computer screen.
“That obvious, is it?”
“I don’t need to be an empath, a block of wood could work it out,” Hisoka stared ferociously at his own screen, zipping the mouse about too fast and almost losing a document. “Look, I thought we’d cleared this up after Kyoto. You weren’t going to shut me out any more. Anyway, if you don’t wake up soon, I’m going to go tell Watari he’s got a nice immobile test subject.”
Hisoka could hear his partner placing the coffee and biscuit carefully on the desk.
“Sorry, Hisoka. I really must be worrying you if you’d say all that.”
“Idiot,” growled Hisoka, cursing himself for unable to think of anything more intelligent, and cursing Tsuzuki for being so fucking right.
The older shinigami leant back again, clasping his hands behind his head.
“I had a row with Tatsumi,” he said.
Oh gods, that explained the hormones. A lovers’ tiff, with added denial.
Hisoka felt his cheeks reddening. He’d promised himself he’d be cool about this. He’d had time to get used to the idea, after all. Not long after Hisoka arrived, at some office party, a drunken Watari had inducted Hisoka into the secrets of the birds, the bees and the shinigami. Wakaba and Terazuma. The Hokkaido “sisters”. Watari and anyone willing to wear a certain garment. Konoe and... euw. But primarily Tatsumi and Tsuzuki, a relationship whose component parts sincerely believed it was forty years dead. “It’s... it’s Wagnerian,” Watari had asserted, waving his arms to indicate the magnitude of his colleagues’ delusion.
Hisoka had seen the problem close up himself, on the occasions Tatsumi had tried to foist Tsuzuki off onto him. As if a heart the size of Tsuzuki’s was only going to have room for one person.
Tatsumi’s attempts at self-abnegation had seemed ridiculous at the time, though Hisoka was grateful for the encouragement the older man had given him to take a chance and open himself to Tsuzuki’s friendship. Now however, stuck in a room facing the reality of Tsuzuki’s overwhelming emotions, the possibility of his partner making a choice seemed much more real. Compared to Tsuzuki’s century, Hisoka had such a meagre stock of experience that he just felt a fool.
It wasn’t the gay thing that bothered him, though that was an extra aspect of strangeness. It was the fact that he didn’t understand what was happening to his friend, and couldn’t compete with it.
Underneath Hisoka’s responsible concern, a tiny, selfish fear hatched itself: Tatsumi, don’t take my friend away.
Damn, I’m a little idiot, Hisoka thought miserably. And I try to tell myself I’m grown-up.
“What are you thinking?” Tsuzuki asked curiously.
Hisoka started, hauling himself back from the mental odyssey that had launched itself in his brain in the space of about five seconds.
“Nothing... Ha. That’ll teach you to dodge paperwork. And I suppose Tatsumi ate you for breakfast?”
“It was... more complicated than that. We forgot the paperwork.”
“Tatsumi forgot paperwork?!” Hisoka latched onto this detail. Joking was comfortable.
Tsuzuki seemed amused, in a sad sort of way. “I’ve known him for forty years, and I’ve discovered there are some things that can make even our secretary drop his documents. He was even young once, believe it or not.”
“I know you’ve known him for forty years,” Hisoka retorted, a little snappishly even for him. “Are you going to tell me what actually happened last night or not?” he demanded. If this was coming, he wanted to get it over with.
Ooh, grown-up talk. Poor little boy, he can’t hack it.
Hisoka gritted his teeth again, trying to make his face the picture of sensible, compassionate, un-freaked interest.
“I think you’ve guessed by now.”
“Yep,” chirped Hisoka nonchalantly. Then he wondered if he’d spoken the word too fast or too slow. Shit, if he was really nonchalant, he wouldn’t be thinking about that. Shit shit shit.
Tsuzuki had his elbows on the table and his chin on the backs of his folded hands, studying his partner. Gods, the bastard had probably worked out not only that Hisoka was uncomfortable and trying to hide it, but that he was uncomfortable about being uncomfortable, and trying to hide that as well. Exactly who was the empath round here?
“I’m not trying to freeze you out of my life, I promise,” Tsuzuki assured him before the silence could extend for too long. “If it was just me, it would be OK. But Tatsumi…”
“Is about as emotionally outgoing as… well, as me.” Hisoka finished the sentence for him.
Tsuzuki rewarded this admission with a giant, dishevelled grin.
“You’ve got it,” he nodded, becoming more serious. “Last night, we just… sorted something out between us. I don’t think the problem will come up again. We’ll probably even be on speaking terms again at some point; give it a decade or two.”
“So the… problem is over?”
“Yep.”
Everything about Tsuzuki’s body language and emotional aura contradicted the lightness of his tone, but he kept up that damned grin until he forced acknowledgement from Hisoka.
As they locked stares, the empath tried to resist the temptation the temptation to probe behind that buffering wall of sunny resignation. He truly tried, but his idiot partner, thinking to share a moment of understanding as if Hisoka was a normal person, would look at him in that way, would relax his walls for just a second.
Hisoka didn’t get much. Just one clear, shocking fact: Tsuzuki had not spent last night making sweet love with Tatsumi, or even having a shouting match.
Tatsumi had hit him.
~~~~~~~~~~
“Hisoka, why have you gone so quiet?”
The question had come, then.
Hisoka looked at his watch. It was still half an hour until lunch.
“Because you have,” he growled. “It’s given me a chance to get some work done for once.”
Or it would have done if Tsuzuki hadn’t been practically suffocating him with hormones.
“No,” said Tsuzuki a bit sadly. “This isn’t a happy-busy-grumpy Hisoka silence,” he lowered his brows and hunched over in his chair like a gawky teenager – a painfully accurate imitation of the pose Hisoka knew he struck when trying to pretend he wasn’t amused by Tsuzuki’s antics. “It’s a real silence.”
Hisoka hid behind his computer screen.
“Please don’t,” said Tsuzuki.
Gods, thought Hisoka, at least he’s stopped giving out lust vibes.
“Didn’t we just have this conversation?” he said. “The one where we say nice things about not shutting each other out.”
“Yes... So don't shut me out of whatever you're angry about.”
"I'm not angry," Yes he was, but forget that for now. "I just don't understand... why you let him hit you.” Hisoka gave up the pretence, sat up straight and stared at Tsuzuki directly, feeling his hurt and confusion blazing out through his red cheeks as well as his empathy. “Did you really think I wouldn’t sense it?”
Tsuzuki’s face crumpled. “Oh, Hisoka, it wasn’t like that... I didn’t mean you to see...”
“Then you’d better not partner with an empath! You’ve been broadcasting all morning, are you really still trying to kid yourself it’s over between you two? I may not have a hundred years of experience messing up relationships, but I know hitting someone you love is bad news. Why would Tatsumi do that to you?”
“Would you believe... because I asked him to?”
And Tsuzuki’s emotions, even through all the barriers Hisoka had built up for his own sanity, said that this was true.
“I don’t understand,” said Hisoka simply, fighting the waves of Tsuzuki’s sensations, fighting his fear, fighting the fact that his scars were beginning to itch and burn. Then he took a deep breath. “I want to understand, even if it hurts. Are you willing to show me?”
A long sigh. “No, Hisoka, I can’t,” came the gentle but terrible words. “If it were just me, yes. But it wouldn’t be fair to Tatsumi. You know how private he is.”
Stupid little boy, he should stay out of grown-ups’ business.
Tsuzuki hadn’t said this aloud. Tsuzuki would never even think it. It was just true, true, true.
Kyoto had been an aberration. In fact, it hadn’t even been that. After all, Hisoka had only been able to get the lab key because Muraki’s pimp friend had inexplicably decided to give up in the middle of their fight. He had only survived Touda’s flames because Tatsumi had lifted them out. And it had been Tsuzuki who had made the final decision about whether or not to die. All Hisoka had done was pout and throw tantrums, and other people, grown-ups, had found that cute enough to pay it some fleeting attention. Now things were back to normal.
The stench of secrets and sex filed the air. Hisoka’s scars flared and burned, reminding him how much he knew of intimacy and how much he couldn’t have, an unborn dream soured into an eternal nightmare.
Tsuzuki stop looking at me with FUCKING pity!
Hisoka slammed his chair back, so that the leg hit the wall, jarring his whole body. “I didn’t ask to be mixed up in your stupid mess!” he yelled, jumping up. “You should try living with this,” he slapped his forehead, his resentment of his empathy feeling easy to deal with compared to the ache of the scars and all it represented. “Try playing at privacy then! All right, keep your barriers up – I don’t want to see what’s in there, because I already know what’s going on. You’re still sick, Tsuzuki. It’s no surprise after what Muraki –” a stab of pain at that name. “Did to you. What I can’t believe is that Tatsumi is taking advantage of it.”
“Hisoka, please,” said Tsuzuki miserably as soon as his partner stopped for breath. “I’ve told you it won’t happen again. Tatsumi made that clear enough.”
“I have?”
A voice to their right stopped Hisoka as he was starting on his retort. He faltered, startled into forgetting his pain. He hadn’t felt any kind of emotional presence approaching. And there was only one person in the office who could shield like that.
“Exactly what have I made clear? And what in Meifu is all this shouting about?”
Tatsumi.
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