Estrapade (TsukiKage)

Gaps

A/n --- if u know who the artist is let me know. Bruised up boys shouldn't be this attractive I call it a violation 😡 (jk jk, whoever drew this be hella talented x)

Sometimes words are the worst form of language.

A hundred phrases, a hundred sentences, a hundred hours coughing up blood and phlegm, and yet the air only hums with radio static and the sizzling sun beating on the back of his brother's red chevy pickup truck. Red and silver fluids dribble off a bottom lip and it creates misshapen kanji where it pools at the base of callused palms. This is the best they'll get.

It's the pauses between the spittle that breathes any tangible life. Where air draws weakly, shuddering coarse.

Kageyama looks at Him through the nets where the string hatches out His face, leaving dots of a pale white face, yellow hair like wheat under fluorescent light; He's of dotted fragments, half-missing. In the gaps, Kageyama sees the movement of His eyes, the way they set on Him, the way His mouth curves up.

Watch your back Kageyama's hand flies to the base of his head to act as a shield, almost instinctively. The impact of wayward volleyballs doesn't phase him anymore, yet somehow having Him there, half-made and watching rushes Kageyama into high alert. No ball comes flying and from the other side of the net, He smirks.

Kageyama doesn't understand how a certain sort of look that hasn't had it's evolutionary purpose can drive him into blinded fight or flight. Why his throat tightens at the slightest of inflections in a voice that falls like gravel. It's just teasing, mockery, the light kind of bullying that high school guarantees. Kageyama hates that a scatter of fragments blossom a hundred quivers, pulling, stretching inside his gut.

Got you. Yeah, He's got him.

Perhaps this is evolutionary. The same way his thighs are striped like tigers from stretch marks. Emotions that don't find his tongue contort inside him, joining sinews and swelling off tissue instead of words. Like skin shedding, his muscles shift and fit around them, clenching, growing, tearing. Adaption under the most cursory glance.

They brush elbows, passing by one another to get water bottles. He doesn't glance once, but Kageyama feels himself wreck. Diminishing space and touch reaches Kageyama like a comet to earth. A distant thing, there and real and circling around him but no one really expects it to come, not soon anyway, not now at this velocity. The impact steals away his windpipes.

Kageyama finds their communication throughout the gaps. The nets, the pauses and hesitations. Silver and red are colors that present passion and elegance. Kageyama watches these colors drip down His throat like glue and cherry and the irony of it makes Kageyama laugh. Passion and elegance, imagine that. He begins to laugh too, not with Kageyama but at him, at his delusions. Somehow it's a compromise Kageyama can lick off as easily as the fluids from their wounds.

Passion and elegance is something they are not, but it does lie between them. In the balmed heat that separates two wanting bodies. The restraint. The pause. That is when they are most beautiful.