Work Text:
It hadn’t started as love.
Back when they were still teenagers, before Maruki’s reality and Akechi's inevitable death. It was a way to blow off steam, a way to take out their frustration with the unfairness of the world and how it had treated them. It started with a proposition from Akechi on the same night he texted him “I’m alone right now.” He showed up the Leblanc, despite the rain, despite everything that was going on during their third semester. He showed up
“I want to have sex with you”
Akira had hesitated, just for a moment, before pulling him close and kissing him roughly, roughly enough to take every frustration out on him. Roughly enough to feel the clink of their teeth and taste the blood in their lips as they bit at each other.
Back in high school, it was nothing more than tension and exhaustion disguised as convenience — two boys carrying too much, finding a way to let it all out where no one could see.
They didn’t talk about it.
After late nights spent planning, fighting, pretending — sometimes one of them would show up at the other’s door. It wasn’t tenderness, not then. It was release. Akechi would sneer something sharp, Akira would smirk back, and somehow they’d end up pressed together, all words burned out of them by touch.
But somewhere in the months that followed, something shifted.
Between the silences and the stolen nights, the air between them softened. They learned each other’s secrets— how Akechi’s hands trembled after missions, how Akira’s voice grew quieter when he was worried. What began as a habit turned into gravity.
By the time graduation came, neither could pretend it was just “blowing off steam” anymore.
Now, years later, the world outside was sleeping. Rain pressed gentle fingers against the windowpane, and the golden light of the bedside lamp made the world shrink to just the two of them — two silhouettes caught between shadow and silence.
Akechi sat with his back against the headboard, half-dressed, a towel slung around his shoulders, droplets of water still sliding from his hair. Akira sat at the edge of the bed, cross-legged, staring with the same thoughtful, lost —lovestruck look he always gave his husband.
He thought Akechi looked beautiful like this, bare and naked for his eyes only. He let his eyes linger on the scars on his body, he had many; a few from the years of abuse and neglect he faced as a child, stretching out on different patches of his skin. A few long stretches on his thighs from before he had Akira was there for him to take his frustration and anger out on, back when he had different methods to make the feelings go away. And of course, the blunt scar in the middle of his chest, where Akira had once lost him back in Shido's palace.
Akechi never mentioned them. He never had to.
Akira had seen them enough times—sometimes brushed beneath clothing as they dressed, other times catching the faint outline in dim light when Akechi thought he wasn’t looking. The world had carved pieces out of him; the kind of wounds no apology could erase.
“Stop staring,” Akechi murmured, voice breaking the silence.
He wasn’t looking at Akira, but his reflection in the window—a shadowed outline against Shibuya’s muted glow.
“You’ll make me self-conscious.”
Akira didn’t answer at first. Instead, he reached out, fingers brushing over the faint line that curved across Akechi’s ribs, following it reverently as though reading a map. His voice was quiet, deliberate.
“I’m memorizing them.”
That made Akechi laugh softly—half a scoff, half disbelief.
“That’s absurd. They’re not worth remembering.”
Akira leaned forward until his lips ghosted over the same scar. “They are to me.”
He pressed a kiss there, then another, trailing them like a confession down to where Akechi’s heartbeat pulsed faintly beneath skin. Akechi went still. The sharp intake of breath wasn’t surprise—it was restraint, as though the weight of being loved this way was too much to bear.
“Akira…” Akechi whispered, his voice trembling between plea and surrender. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to,” Akira interrupted gently. His words vibrated against Akechi’s skin.
“You shouldn’t have to hide where you’ve been. Not from me.”
Akechi turned then, slow and deliberate, and for once, he didn’t wear a mask—no sly smile, no careful detachment. Just rawness. The kind that only came from being seen too deeply.
He reached up, fingers curling in Akira’s hair as if to steady himself. “You always do this,” he murmured.
“You make the things I hate about myself sound sacred.”
Akira smiled faintly, brushing another kiss just below Akechi’s jaw, where another faint scar hid. “Maybe they are.”
The words lingered in the quiet, their breaths mixing—steady, synchronized.
Akechi’s fingers trembled as they slid down to Akira’s cheek, tracing the faint smudge of ink from his day at the café.
“You’re ridiculous,” he said, voice barely more than a whisper.
“Maybe,” Akira said, pressing his forehead against Akechi’s. “But I mean it.”
For a long moment, they just stayed there—no masks, no lies, no duties. Just two boys in a dimly lit room, wrapped in the soft gravity of knowing each other too well.
Outside, the rain began to ease, and the world felt cleaner for it.
When Akechi finally leaned in to kiss him, it wasn’t out of passion or impulse. It was quiet, fragile, and painfully sincere—like he was still learning what it meant to be loved without condition