speaksoftlylove | FIC - Pleasure's Set Upon Slow Release

blood blockade battlefront/death parade
aligula/ginti
1710 words; trustfelled
for bella

Arbiters, she discovers early on, are weird when it comes to liking things.

They weren't designed to like things, to want things, to have preferences or favorites, and for the most part Ginti and Decim don't. Once in a while, though, things will emerge in places that she isn't expecting them: Decim likes tea and boy-band pop music, of all things, and Ginti very definitely has friends, despite his insistences to the contrary.

She meets them once, Ginti's friends, a pair of arbiters named Novem and Tria, and it's immediately obvious that they're empty in a way that Ginti is not – blank-voiced and dead behind the eyes and disinterested in questioning much of anything that's said to or asked of them. In other words, they're polite but as people they're slightly horrifying, and it's not in a fun way, and Aligula smiles and teases her way through lunch that day and sort of hopes she never has to spend any time alone in a room with them.

Ginti, apparently, sees nothing wrong with them, but he's different around them just the same; he isn't calmer, but he's subdued, any flares of temper bitten back in favor of silence or monosyllabic answers delivered downward into the table. She's known for a while that Ginti and Decim are different, but it's only then that it really hits her (because even Decim is muted but he's not quite like that), and she has to wonder if Novem and Tria notice – if they know, if they suspect, if it even occurs to them to question.

Either way, it's obvious that Ginti knows, and it's likewise obvious that it's not something he's going to talk about, and the train back to the tower manages to be both familiar and not – the emptiness and safety of the car they're sitting in is strange, will probably never stop being strange, but the sound of wheels on track is rhythmic and steady, the heavy clacking accompanied by the soft swing of her legs where they're dangling off the seat.

His friends, she tells him when they're back at the bar on the twentieth floor, are interesting people. (And she immediately hates herself for not finding a better adjective, but if that's the sort of thing he's used to dealing with she can see why he uses it so much.)

At first, he doesn't say anything, and the silence hangs empty for so long that she wonders if he's going to; she's about to prod him again before he just leans forward over the bar, propping his chin in his hand and actually looking at her like he's trying to figure out what she's getting at. To his credit, he doesn't correct her and insist they aren't his friends.

He agrees eventually, though. Yeah.

Yeah, they're interesting people.

Decim is also an interesting person, though it's different from the way Tria and Novem are interesting – he's actually interesting, despite his bluntness and lack of anything resembling a proper facial expression, and while he doesn't have any embarrassing stories about Ginti and him when they were kids together, if they ever were, that doesn't mean that he doesn't have stories.

And sometimes she'll sit in Quindecim with him (and the raz stoli cosmos are wonderful but they're different when Decim makes them, for reasons she doesn't bother thinking about for too long) and they'll talk about booze and idols and special things, about the advice that Quin gave the both of them to find something they treasure. And sometimes they'll talk and the conversations are strange and a little sad in ways, sometimes they're about simple things like names – simple things that she asks about later when she's back in Viginti, idle questions that come when they're between guests and Ginti doesn't seem too agitated or distracted to answer her.

He doesn't know, Ginti tells her once, if he had a name before the one he has now; Nona just told him one day, and he accepted it, and Nona called him Juri once when he asked for another one and he just accepted that, too.

And she thinks about it for a while, and can't really argue with it any; it's kind of how names are, they're given to you by someone else and you either accept it or you don't, it's just kind of weird because Nona's his boss and not his mom.

Though that line of thought always comes with a pause attached – Nona did create them, after all. Or something.

It's always accompanied with a volley of vaguely flustered shouting – and it's easier to tell when the shouting is flustered as opposed to when it's angry, now; the former is endearing and the latter makes her want to shout back, makes her want to say things that she'll probably regret later and so she ultimately doesn't say them. Because they don't really have time to waste on regrets and hurting each other, and because she still doesn't know what to do with the notion that she actually cares about whether she hurts him or not, besides.

Sometimes, she has to admit, she wants him to hurt, she wants him to remember even if she won't have to later; even so, that's a bit of selfishness that's just going to have to be part of the way things are, it's something she's going to allow herself, and honestly, if he minded all that much he wouldn't have kept her.

Granted, there are a lot of things Ginti does mind, and a lot of things he doesn't; finding the line is a bit of a production sometimes, but it's usually worth it once she can get him to do something he normally wouldn't, just because she asked him to.

That said, it takes a bit of convincing to get him to lay his head in her lap; he just gives her the most awkward look for the longest time, and apparently he requires something just short of a gilded invitation (or maybe a subpoena, that might work too) before he looks like he's even going to consider it. She offers instead a pout and a whine that's still erring on the side of playful, and that seems to be good enough; it manages to coax the usual eyeroll and incredibly put-upon sigh out of him before he lays back, and he lets his eyes slide closed as she plays with his hair, and for a while there's just silence and closeness and for once in Ginti's miserable existence he doesn't complain or question too much.

He looks up at her after a moment, though – and to his credit, it's a good, long moment – and when he speaks it's to ask her about the craziest thing she's ever done in the name of love, and a laugh escapes her before she can help it; he always remembers that sheet of questions at the most unexpected moments, and she just keeps playing with his hair while she tries to come up with an answer.

And eventually she has to admit that what comes to mind probably isn't the craziest, but she's pretty sure that sticking around in limbo and trying to teach a death god to understand love is probably way up there; it's kind of nice when he just sort of smirks a bit and agrees with her, without anything sharp behind the words.

She lets him close his eyes again before asking him one in return, because that's how she always used to play this game with Juri and it's certainly going to be how she plays it with Ginti now; she asks the one that was just above his on the sheet, the one that wants to know what the person being asked likes about their partner, and there's no hesitation or self-consciousness in it when she asks.

Perhaps surprisingly, there's no hesitation or self-consciousness in it when he answers; he doesn't bother looking at her, just keeping his eyes closed as he tells her that she's interesting.

The noise that particular word gets out of her is perhaps spectacularly indignant – because everything is Interesting, as far as arbiters are concerned, and surely she's not like everything else – and he lets the pause go on just long enough to make it plain that if he's learned anything from her in the time that she's been here, it's how to tease her; the smirk crossing his features afterwards is attractive in a highly unfair sort of way, and he reaches up to play with her hair a little to calm her down before he continues.

He admits fairly readily that he doesn't know what he likes about her, because that's the way things are. Because he's an arbiter, and they aren't designed to like things. And he pauses once that's out there, and the silence spans a good distance between them before he says anything else, long enough that she's started to become convinced that maybe this time, he won't.

But eventually he does, and when he does it's to repeat something he said during the game – that he was running it because he was looking for something, that he was trying to figure something out.

He doesn't think the thing he was looking for was her, per se; they both know it, just from the way he says it. But maybe it's something she can show him eventually, because she's the sort of person that will stick around in limbo to try to teach a death god to understand love and that's different and Interesting and if he thinks about it he likes that she did that, and he lets that line of thought drop off into another awkward bit of silence while she tries to figure out what the actual hell to do with that.

This pause is shorter, though, and brought to an abrupt end with all the tact and social grace of a sledgehammer to the face by the notion that he thinks she's at least a nine (a confession that couldn't be more strained if she waterboarded it out of him), and when she laughs she buries her face in her hands and tells him that it's not nice to keep things like that to himself for so long.

And while he looks sort of like he'd rather be anywhere but where he currently is, he doesn't seem inclined to actually go anywhere, either.