cigsandbeer | IC INBOX

It's some ten minutes later when the door to the Engine Room opens. Gojyo hangs back a little, letting Hakkai go in first.

Bet Jedao regrets getting Gojyo that key now.

Hakkai leans against the doorframe, peering in with one hand shading his eyes against the glare of the million twinkling indicator lights.

"Jedao-shei?" he calls. "Let's go home. You should drink some water and get to sleep."

"Traitor," Jedao mutters, with a brief dirty look at Gojyo. He's curled up in a bean bag under the bronze-and-marble foosball table, drinking from what looks like a jug of Everclear with a bendy straw.

"Don't wanna. Be mean."

He can feel the awful joke of his breach codename wriggling through him like a parasitic worm; he wants to shuffle forward, wants to kneel for Hakkai, wants to say it -

It'll only hurt both of them, though. It's good, that Hakkai doesn't love him like Kujen loved him.

Edited 2025-09-30 14:43 (UTC)

Rather gently, one shoulder leaning on the door jamb just to the safe side of too far, Hakkai remarks, "I don't think you're going to say anything I can't handle, no matter how mean you are. It's a breach. I understand."

It's how breaches are: they pry open all the ill-closed seams in a heart. Hakkai has been cruel, after breaches. Sometimes it's better to be alone, but if Jedao is this upset, Hakkai thinks he maybe shouldn't be.

It can also help to know that someone is there who is real.

"I didn't say you couldn't handle it, I said I didn't want to," Jedao insists mulishly.

"Yes, well, I don't want you getting sad and smashed with only the Barge for company," Hakkai sighs. "Come home? Please?"

"She's good company," Jedao mutters. He leans over and pats the floor with the arm not holding the jug. "Even if I can't get the frogs."

"Yes, well, she can keep you company in our room, but I can't keep you company in the engine room anymore," Hakkai points out. "And the frogs are back in the walls."

This probably sounds incoherent to Gojyo, but Hakkai remembers the little frogs that had come out of the bronze bulkheads after the Barge's impoundment. He'd been fond of them.

"Anyway," he adds, "if you're texting Gojyo, you must need more company than just the Barge."

"He has bad taste," Jedao argues. Looking over Hakkai's shoulder in an attempt to make eye contact with Gojyo - "You have bad taste and you should feel bad."

The truth can only be suppressed for so long.

"Wha-- Excuse you!"

Gojyo argues back, meeting Jedao's eye for a moment before turning his head away in mortification.

"H-how do you even--"

How does Jedao even know? Unless Hakkai told him? But why would he even do that, unless...

Gojyo catches himself, and in a desperate attempt to not have to acknowledge anything, to Hakkai (without looking at him):

"Y-you see? Total gibberish."

Ah. So that was the topic, after all. Hakkai sighs out a breath and leans a little bit more heavily on the frame of the engine-room door.

"Armand isn't so bad," he says, because he is being so fair and reasonable about this, and Gojyo's insecurities will just have to deal with all of the implications.

Jedao gives a huge sigh. 'Az' had been - if not exactly a good friend, he had still been one. And after discussing Vash, against his will Jedao understands him a little better. This will not prevent him from sulking.

"He's fine or whatever. Still."

Argh!

"Both of you--!!

Fine, have fun sitting in the doorway all night with a drunkard, then!"

Gojyo angrily fishes up a cigarette and lights it while he starts stomping off.

Edited 2025-10-01 14:17 (UTC)

"I wouldn't have realized you were sleeping with him if you hadn't jumped a foot away from him when you saw me there," Hakkai snaps, loud and clear, because -- well, all right, he is angry that Gojyo's making his own insecurity about Armand their problem because they dared to find out. And because it hurts that Gojyo lashes out when Hakkai cares in a way he doesn't want, maybe. And because he's been storing up this fight since they didn't have it while locked up together in Zero last month, maybe.

Or because it's late and Jedao is drunk and sad and Hakkai is already feeling a little too rejected to deal with Have fun sitting in the doorway all night, maybe.

The point is, it's clearly time for a fight.

"Whatever!"

Gojyo is making his insecurity about them? It's the two of them that can't leave it alone and keep commenting on it to Gojyo! He doesn't stop, although he pauses in his steps enough to make sure they can hear him:

"You're both oh-so-okay with it, and then you keep making fucking jokes! Fucking hypocrites!"

"Go on," Hakkai calls at Gojyo's retreating back, "why don't you tell me what jokes I've made, because I've been serious about this the whole time!"

And, actually, he would like to know what Gojyo thinks he was joking about.

"I wasn't joking either," Jedao puts in, although his voice is small and uncertain, rather than angry. He crawls out from under the foosball table and up to the threshhold, leaning over it to press his shoulder against Hakkai's leg, get a supportive hand on his ankle.

"Do you want me to stop him running away?" he adds to Hakkai in a whisper that Gojyo can probably hear anyway.

There's no need to stop Gojyo: after one more angry stomp, the next is more of a step, until he stops completely. Furiously puffing his cigarette.

No way. No fucking way is this for real. They're trying to pull the stupidest fucking joke in all existence.

But. Some things maybe kind of makes sense, if it's not a joke.

Give him a moment to respond. Or turn around, for that matter.

"No, don't stop him," Hakkai says quietly to Jedao - though not so quietly that he can't be overheard, either. If Gojyo doesn't want to talk, forcing him to stay won't help.

He is angry. But he's a little hurt, too, and the colorless quiet of his tone gives it away.

"Okay, but -" Jedao starts, and doesn't know how to finish. You're such a pain, Gojyo had said, but he'd turned up anyway, even though Jedao is fine, really, would have drunk himself into a stupor and been fine tomorrow. Why did you come, he wants to ask, and doesn't, because it's hard to imagine any answer that isn't a deflection, isn't insisting he doesn't care, and it'll hurt Hakkai that he said it, even if it isn't true.

But they don't want him to go, maybe, is the truest end to that sentence. It doesn't seem to matter, though.

It's that colourless note to Hakkai's tone that does it - Gojyo knows that to be genuine hurt, and it's subtle enough not to be fake.

After a moment, he turns around to face them, face part-dubious, part-astounded.

"If..." He tries again: "If you two are pulling my leg, I'm kicking both of your heads in."

"Did you really think it was a joke?" Hakkai says in return, bewildered. His hand slips down to Jedao's hair and rests there butterfly-light, seeking reassurance as much as offering it. A joke.

Well, it does put a different spin on the way Gojyo's gotten uncomfortable and angry every time either of them have tried to say anything on the topic. He'd thought they both understood what they'd been saying -- yes, Hakkai'd talked around directly admitting his feelings, but that's how they talk to each other. Yes, Gojyo had talked around an outright rejection, but Hakkai had been getting the message loud and clear every time: I hate the thought that you care about me more or differently than Goku and Sanzo, I'm not into men, if I am into men it's none of your business.

Did he really think it was a joke, all this time?

"I'm not joking," Jedao says, giving Hakkai's ankle a little squeeze of reassurance in turn. "I'm dead serious and scared of saying anything half the time because it seems like you'll laugh anyway."

And since they aren't joking, Gojyo laughing must mean they are the joke.

"I--"

Gojyo takes half a step back in the face of Hakkai's outright anger. Then, defensively:

"W-well, yeah, obviously! You were going on about me carrying men to bed and, and-- saying I must've been scared to be hit on--

What the hell else was I supposed to think??"

"That you were the person I cared most about for years, and that never meant you had to care about me as anything but a friend, but it's still a little much to realize all the times you told me I shouldn't take something the wrong way because you don't like men just meant you didn't want me, specifically," Hakkai says, and -- well, it does come out a little angrier than he'd meant it to.

He might still be angry about it, as much as he's been trying to swallow it down.

He swallows again, and adds, because it's true, "You don't have to-- I value you. As a friend. But I felt like a fool."

He and Jedao had been the joke, and Hakkai doesn't like being the joke.

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