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It's 28 degrees Celsius on a humid Tokyo afternoon, and somewhere out on the rooftop, Mishima Lisa is hanging the laundry. In the cooler shadows below, Twelve looks over Nine's desk chair and tuts without interest at the open laptop screen, then lifts Nine's mobile phone with the guiltless ease of a practised pick-pocket. He holds it out in the light and taps at it twice with his index finger. "You were listening."
Nine finishes the line he is typing, then closes a terminal window and leans away from Twelve's body heat. "I'm always listening."
"Hmm," Twelve agrees, smiling. He's following back and forth wherever Nine leans, which is a poor choice of games in this weather, but Twelve does not always act in the best interests of anyone's personal comfort. The warmth is like a relentless undertow pulling at Nine's limbs. He hasn't slept, and exhaustion is a constant pressure in his temples, a tension behind his eyes that aches for the relief.
"Bluish grey," Twelve announces, verging on a singsong. "Like the sky just after rain."
Nine wonders who this ebullient attitude is meant to benefit now, but it's never been a productive train of thought. Three of his machines have stopped responding to ping, though that's not an urgent matter any more either. Five hasn't made her move yet, and she will, but she'll follow the rules of the game or her victories won't count. He's done all he can do for the Mishima situation. It might be prudent to capitulate to a break when his concentration's been so disrupted--which is almost certainly why Twelve has disrupted it, after all.
Nine withdraws his hands from the keyboard, pushes up the bridge of his glasses, and says, "What?"
"Your voice."
"I didn't ask."
He's never asked, because he's never needed to know, he's never faced the comparison before; but at least Twelve tells it like any other fact, and not a consolation.
Twelve only laughs, quiet and breathy, and swings around to lean over Nine's other shoulder for no particular reason Nine can discern. He's mindful of pressure where it might cause any pain to Nine's injured back, but his chin is heavy where it rests, and Nine will begin to sweat soon from the proximity. Troublesome, because he's adjusted the frequency of his bathing on account of the burns and the inexorable presence of Mishima, with her shallow panic and haunted eyes. "No," Twelve is agreeing again, and smiling even wider, like a laundry soap-smelling cheshire cat in Nine's peripheral vision. "You've never asked. But, you know--sometimes it's also lighter. Fading to white, like a summer sky instead. Warm and a little hazy. I like it."
It's not hard to read ahead in this exchange. Twelve makes little effort to avoid telegraphing intentions where Nine is concerned. His affinity's always been for mechanics, forces acting on bodies, actions and reactions; Nine wins at their games of strategy because Twelve is more interested in Nine's actual response than in his potential ones. "I'm trying to work," Nine says at last, but he isn't, not anymore.
Twelve's also very quick to call him a sadist, when it's his own whims that always win, in the end. "Don't you want to know when?"
"Not especially." There are things he'd rather know; like, where have you been, Twelve, and how far are you now and what is it that you're chasing--
Twelve's mouth is too close to his ear, his breath too warm on Nine's pulse. "I think you do. You hate it when there's anything you don't know."
The physical response is something outside Nine's control, but he does nothing to reciprocate the teasing--not now, when there's no privacy to speak of. It's not a virtue they've ever valued between them, but Nine has adjusted more than his bathing schedule on account of Mishima Lisa. In any case, Twelve is typically contented with the involuntary flush that creeps over Nine's skin. It's not as though he has any particular motivation to follow through; logically speaking, this can't be what he's looking for if he's had it all along.
"I'm sure it doesn't matter," Nine decides to say instead, and he lets his eyes fall shut, but only for a moment. "Since you'll tell me anyway."
Twelve huffs out another amused breath and a guilty shiver runs down Nine's spine. Abruptly Twelve's bent near in half so that his hands can rest, unmoving, seemingly innocent, atop Nine's own in his lap. "I'll tell you," he's murmuring, "in the bath. We have to put lotion on your back and I'll close the door, because you're so modest."
Nine curls his fingers into his palms, but Twelve strokes his knuckles instead, a feather-light touch that he nonetheless can't ever seem to escape. "We don't have time for this," he tries, but he thinks back to the pitch of Twelve's voice on the rooftop when he'd said, just the two of us, and in the end he closes his eyes to the wandering warmth of Twelve's palms, sliding from Nine's hands to his inner thighs, back and forth, a soft, relentless pressure. He's so tired, and part of him hates this awareness of his body, a reminder of their separateness and the fracturing clock of their biology; another part of him is terrified all the time now, and still another part--
"If you're in a hurry," Twelve whispers, hot and damp at the shell of Nine's ear, "we can always do it right here." Nine can't lean away any more, trapped in the circle of Twelve's arms, and it's so difficult to keep his eyes open, to watch the screen or the door or the wry curve of Twelve's smile, because Twelve is mouthing a line down the slope of his neck to his shoulder, and Twelve is stroking his cock through his trousers. He's hard, he's so hard and he wants it, he wants to feel this human again, to feel Twelve drawing his blood to the surface of his skin like a tidal pull, flushing through him in a rush of colour and heat as though he's the one with the synaesthesia.
"Not here," Nine manages to say, his own voice humiliatingly breathless in his ears--and a condition is as good an affirmative as any, as good as any surrender. Even when he wants to hold back, because he's three moves ahead in his mind and Twelve never sacrifices a queen, even when he knows how to win--
But right now he is tired, and warm, a little hazy, and they don't have much time at all.