Work Text:
It’s a thought that keeps him up at night.
Sometimes, when the night air is just right, when the moon’s light is peaking just slightly out of his curtains, and he can hear the cries of crickets, he wakes up - a disruption in the peace. He wakes up, can’t go back and he doesn’t understand why, so he thinks.
Originally, it was something that had to do with his trauma from those two years ago, shooting a woman who shouldn’t have been hurt so badly. Occasionally, he’d wake up and still feel the sturdy, cooling metal of a gun in his trembling hands, the lingering feelings of fear and regret enough to keep him awake for a week. He’d cried those nights.
Now, it’s something less severe, much so. Maybe.
Now, he stays awake when he suddenly awakens in the middle of the night, sometimes with Daisuke sleeping with him, sometimes without - and he thinks about his courtship. How proud he is to be courting someone so strong, whose trauma does not define their character, who stands firm inside and out after the murder of the one person who mattered most to him at the time. He hasn’t been sleeping in bed with his partner for long, but he hasn’t once seen him awaken in the night and start thinking and then start crying. Not like Haru.
He thinks of all that his boyfriend has endured, occasionally wonders how he juggles it all. He thinks of the life he’d had before they met, how lonely he may have been in such a rich home, or how much fun he’d had spending all of his money in whatever rich expenditure he’d embarked on.
Then, those thoughts lead to the current predicament: what does he have to offer Daisuke? And that’s what really keeps him up.
He’s rich. Haru doesn’t make enough money in a month to even make it to what one wheel on his least expensive car costs. Haru can’t provide for him like that, not on his current salary. He can’t buy Daisuke everything the world has to offer, not like the Omega can do for him.
Haru can cook? That’s one. Daisuke seems to enjoy what he makes - as long, that is, as it’s to his tastes. Luckily, the Alpha would say that he knows the man’s tastes by now…
...but Daisuke enjoys a lot of foods that Haru can never dream to make. He likes coffee that comes in grounds straight from Brazil. He eats meals that cost more than a month’s rent in Haru’s apartment building and he eats them from good china with sterling silver cutlery. What Haru whips up is amatuer at best, just quick things that he can take to work and back. He buys things from the supermarket down the street that are close to expiration because he knows he’d use it out in only a few days; Daisuke probably eats meals delivered straight from the farmhouse.
Haru can’t cater to those tastes.
They trust each other completely. They enjoy each other’s company, of course. However, that comes with being work partners. Not mates. What functions in work relation does not always translate the same way in romantic relation.
Is what he has enough? Is he enough? Can he help Daisuke when he needs it most? Can he be the person he wants to see every morning and night, without feeling an inkling of regret? Without Daisuke thinking, oh, what it could have been?
How does Haru do that - how does he be that? - when he can’t even find a reason as to why he’s good enough as a mate for him?
Sometimes he looks down at Daisuke in the night, if they’re sleeping in his apartment, and wonders why he had ever said agreed to a courtship. At times, he looks at the raven when they are at work or so, asking him in his mind because he never racks up enough courage to ask him out loud.
Why? Why am I good enough for you?
He hates the incessant questions like these that chirp like birds in his brain. It makes him feel like he feels inadequate because the man’s rich and he’s...well, not. No, Haru feels such a way because he has absolutely no idea - not one - of what he has the ability to provide to Daisuke as a potential mate.
If, that is, this courtship lasts.
...Oh, God.
Sometimes, when an innocent rain begins to patter against the surface of buildings and roads - when people don’t have their umbrella out just yet and they get hit by the sudden droplets, Daisuke is taken back 19 years in the past. The feeling of rain in his hair, trailing down his forehead and shimmying down his back, the numb he’d felt that distant night - it all comes back like sliding on a glove.
He can feel it all so vividly. Still see his mother’s corpse in the living room and his father, who looks back carefully like something is amiss. At that moment in his life, he’d been so, so scared of getting caught by the bad man that he’d ventured further in the balcony, distancing himself from the reality. In that balcony, he’d gotten so wet. He had gotten so cold. He hadn’t been able to feel much of anything, however, than the numbing shock that comes after bad news.
Now, when he feels rain on his head, he feels that vibrating numb again; he hears that tingling in the back of his head, a siren screeching, “Something bad happened!”, trying to wake him up, trying to get him to leave that chasm of empty feeling. And it scares him, because once you leave the dark, everything comes to light: the moment, the reality, the senses. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, from the rivers of emotion that comes with closing the door behind him.
Occasionally, he’d look in a random direction and see a a dead woman with short black hair lying on her back as red blossoms on her chest. At times that lying woman is a man, standing and looking back at him with piercing blue eyes which nearly glow. And he’d fight to feel nothing, because where he’d be would not be the time nor the place to break down about something that had occurred when he was eight. Most wouldn’t be able to tell the change in him, anyway. In Suzue’s presence, she’d pass him concerned glances and a turned head when he’d stare back.
Now, Daisuke’s with Haru. Haru, who was previously blind. Haru, who can now see his differences in mood, in posture, in demeanor. His boyfriend, who takes notice of it all immediately, when the rain begins to soak through his clothes and hair and his sharp blue eyes are dulling in flashbacks.
His (maybe) mate, who takes his horrid beige jacket off of himself in a terrible sense of self-preservation and puts it over the Omega’s dampening head, enveloping Daisuke with the warmth of his body heat and his ginger-mint scent. It doesn’t help the past, but it keeps Daisuke from living in it whenever the rainwater seeps into his hair and clothing like it had that night nearly two decades ago.
He doesn’t know if Haru understands this, how his actions affect him. How amazing it is that he doesn’t need to spend money to let Daisuke forget, even for a minute, what lies in the past with his younger self. How Daisuke can finally forget with his presence here, rooting him to the ground. How his stubbornness and loudness and impulsiveness is refreshing compared to the near-mute obedience of Suzue and the servants in the manor, to the quiet, tedium his life had been before.
Then Haru would take him to his apartment, where the walls are close together and the inside is warm and smells a lot like the Alpha; unlike the cold, odorless, spacious interior of the Kambe estate. Haru rubs off his dark, damp hair with a dry towel, then he gets Daisuke in his dry clothes, and they, too, are large and smell of mint and ginger over the Omega’s slim, pale body. Haru sits them both atop his bed after drying off himself as well, then covers them in a soft blanket, and puts on something mundane on his TV over the sound of rain pattering atop various surfaces and over the biting thoughts that would begin to swirl in his head.
Sometimes, Daisuke falls asleep as the rain continues to fall, nestled in the scents and presence of Haru.
Other times, he succumbs to the voices in his head, goes numb outside as his attention is pulled in. It’s as if the world’s gone dark and the rain will never cease.
Every now and then, even if he hates how stupid it is, he starts crying - most of the time without realizing it until Haru makes that particular croon and sweetens his scent to comfort him, despite Daisuke not knowing he’s in need of comfort until that moment. And he starts crying - silent at first, but it get progressively louder -, because it reminds him of what a mother would do, and he no longer has one. His whines would pitch high like a pathetic Omega, sobs making them cut and waver, as his eyes are taken by a sea of water.
Haru stays for it all; He waits patiently for him to fall asleep through whatever show is put the television. He withstands his emptiness as Daisuke’s taken in by the numbing chasm. He withstands the ugly tears and the piercing whines and the overbearing scent of heavy cinnamon and dark chocolate that’s more bitter than it should be.
The ending result is always the same. At some point, when Daisuke’s waking up, when Daisuke gains feeling again from the numb, when Daisuke’s tears cease to fall and his scent is more air than clouds - Haru’s food waits for them. Half the time, the Alpha has him stay put for him to cook, feeling like he needs some space to regain himself. Other times, the food is already there for them to eat, Daisuke was just asleep long enough to get it done. Sometimes Haru has him help, a distraction from the return of his dark past.
Haru’s food is always nice. It’s always warm and affectionate.
The food he gets at the manor is also nice, but it carries with it a cold like steel, as if it were created and not cooked. Haru’s food feels like it were made for him. The Alpha knows what he likes, sometimes he adds more spice or sweet to fit his tastes. Often, he uses ingredients Daisuke enjoys, then - when they are seated at Haru’s little wooden table - picks out the raven’s favorite parts to place them in his plate when he thinks his attention is on the TV or out the window.
They go to sleep together because Daisuke does not want to go back to a manor that holds too many memories for a night, and Haru wouldn’t want to let him go anyway. Right before he falls into slumber with a warm embrace, he often wonders how he was able to find an Alpha like this. After all he's done to him. After all he's said. Even though he lacks the ability to do things that Omegas typically can. And yet the taller man still stays, as if it's his rightful place, as if it's where he has to be. Hopefully, it is.
Daisuke hopes that Haru understands all that he is to him, all the help he brings him, all the comfort, and just how much he wants to get to the day in which he officially has the right to call him his mate.
Haru may never know quite how much his presence means to him, but Daisuke intends on displaying it just enough that there will never be a day in which he questions it.