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“I have something I’d like to give you.”
Azuma’s heart picks up as he finally ventures the words he’s been thinking for months, and it’s never truly seemed like the right time. He thinks now might be the right time, a perfectly ordinary mid-morning in his room, seated across his coffee table from Homare. There’s nothing special about it. It just feels right, and that’s always been the most important thing to him.
“Truly?” Homare sets his cup down in pleased interest, eyes following Azuma as he stands. “How kind of you. You know your company is enough of a gift for me. A balm, an embrocation for the soul… Ah, but more than that, the divine impulse you instill within my breast with your very presence…” His gaze becomes a bit distant and he puts a habitual hand over his chest as he says, more to the ether than to Azuma, “Your presence… is a present… scintillating… I must remember that.”
“…If you don’t like it, we’ll just pretend this never happened.” A prickle of hesitation slows his steps around the coffee table. It’s too late to stop now, he tells himself. Commit.
“A gift from you?” Homare blinks up at him artlessly, returning to reality. “I find that most unlikely. How could I possibly not like it? I should be honored to receive a stone you found in your shoe.”
“Well.” Azuma chuckles a little nervously, Homare’s casual full-throated adoration hitting him a bit differently from usual in this moment. “We’ll see, hm? Close your eyes and hold out your hand.”
Homare obeys without question, and Azuma’s heart pounds as he leans down, tilting his chin.
Homare makes a little wordless noise of surprise as he feels Azuma’s breath fan across his cheek, freezing in place. He doesn’t pull back from the soft press of Azuma’s lips against his, either, though Azuma doesn’t know whether to interpret his perfect statue-stillness as acceptance or rejection.
He knows exactly how to interpret the wide-eyed look of wonder he sees when he pulls away, though, Homare still holding his breath and looking up at Azuma like he’s watching a new universe unfold in front of his eyes. His hand is still outstretched exactly where he left it.
“Oh,” He says, and Azuma straightens up, smiling as the euphoria filling his heart pours into his bloodstream with a dizzying warmth. “…oh,” Homare repeats, getting to his feet, still looking at him like the lights in Azuma’s eyes are the birth of stars, but now from a slightly higher vantage point.
“So?” Azuma asks, reaching for Homare’s hand. He squeezes it back, as if without noticing. “Do you like it?”
Homare finally blinks, and then his face falls into an expression of exaggerated sorrow, his eyebrows drawing together in regret. For a moment, Azuma’s heart starts to sink, until he realizes just how much Homare is hamming it up.
“Oh, no…” He says woefully, gently cupping Azuma’s cheek with his free hand. “My deepest, most sincere apologies, but I simply cannot accept this gift.” He draws Azuma’s hand up to his chest, taking a step closer and leaning in. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to give it back.”
He suppresses his laugh so that Homare can kiss him, tilting his chin up so the curves of their lips fit together more perfectly. He slips his arm around Homare’s waist and pulls them close together with a soft hum of contentment, his other hand still clasped between their chests.
“…mm, I believe I’ve changed my mind,” Homare murmurs, a little breathless but looking extremely pleased with himself. The tip of his ring finger strokes down the line of Azuma’s jaw. “I’m terribly sorry to impose, but I’ve decided I want it after all. Could you possibly give it back again?”
Azuma turns his face away demurely. “No.”
Homare straightens up. “No??” He asks, looking stricken.
“You gave me a different one than the one I gave you.” Azuma says coolly, but unable to keep a hint of a coy smile off his face. “So you still have the original.”
Homare tilts his head, birdlike, as he reasons that out.
“But I can give you another one.” Azuma breathes through his smile, leaning up. “I have lots.”
Homare sighs.
Azuma looks up from his coloring page to his companion, seated on the loveseat in his room close enough for Azuma to lean on his shoulder, which he is in fact doing. Homare has abandoned the page for the moment, tapping the end of his fountain pen against his chin with eyes closed in deep thought. Azuma finds his eyes drawn to the covers of his composition book; a gift from a friend bound in velvety hand-marbled paper, as eye-catching and elegant as Homare himself, and as opaque. He wouldn’t presume to look over Homare’s shoulder when he hadn’t been invited to do so, wanting to give him his privacy with the words until he’s ready to share them. But he wonders about them, the same as he wonders what’s on Homare’s brilliant, effervescent mind.
"What are you thinking about?" He ventures, voice soft, trying not to demand Homare’s thoughts so much as indicate that he’s interested in hearing them.
Homare glances over at him from beneath long, dark eyelashes. “You."
Azuma breathes a laugh. “Good answer.”
“But of course.” Homare says immodestly, looking back down to the book for long enough to flip the ribbon bookmark down and gently close it. “I’m considering what you said to me when we first became lovers.”
“What specific thing did I say?”
“When I— in jest, of course— asked for our first kiss back, you told me I had not returned it.” Homare says pensively, slowly turning his pen over and over between his fingers. “And I realized that you were indeed correct.”
“And?” Azuma prompts gently.
“My current poetic inspiration revolves around this, the revelation that I… I still have all the kisses I have ever been given.” He closes his eyes in thought. Azuma tilts his head, considering.
“I’ve never thought about it that way, but you’re right.”
“Aren’t I?” Homare says rhetorically, and not even in a self-aggrandizing way. “All of us do. They are gifts that once given cannot truly be returned, or lost, or given away or replaced. So where do they go? They must be stored within us, eternally, indelibly, for better or for worse.” He nods to himself.
Azuma resists the urge to point out that kisses aren’t physical objects, because he knows Homare knows this, and he’s being so cute about it right now. And maybe he’s right in a sense, and they are metaphysical objects. That’s intriguing, in a way, and instills them with a new sense of importance; something that can be given but never taken away.
It makes him think about all the kisses he’s regretted giving, all the ones he’s refrained from giving and later regretted deferring, and all the ones he wanted to leave in the past. And then he wonders why he’s focusing on the misses and not the hits; why the first thing to mind isn’t gratitude that he still has something from people he loved and won’t see again, even if it’s something immaterial.
“You also said that you ‘had lots.’” Homare begins again, interrupting his train of thought. “But I believe that to be a vast understatement. It is not as if you would ever run out, yes?”
“No, I don’t see how I’d run out.” Azuma laughs. “Or anyone else, really.”
“Indeed! Thus, I believe you are already in possession of an infinite number of kisses.” He taps his pen against his chin again, eyes still closed, eyebrows drawing together slightly in consternation. “This is what troubles me so. What possible meaning could there be in giving a single kiss when the recipient already has an inexhaustible supply?”
Phrased in that convoluted way, it takes Azuma a moment to come up with the answer. “But they’re different.” He says, simply.
Homare stares into the middle distance for a moment as he considers, then visibly brightens up as he reaches a sudden conclusion. “Precisely!” He says decisively, turning to give Azuma a huge smile. “That’s precisely it! The kiss is irrevocably changed by the act of being given! When it is merely the potential for a kiss, it is mutable and fluid, but once bestowed upon a cherished companion, it is inscribed with the moment of giving, the feelings thereof. That is what makes it worth having!”
Azuma smiles back indulgently. Personally, he’d thought that was reasonably self-evident— even assuming a kiss is some kind of metaphysical object with a meaningful existence, being shared is what gives it that meaning— but he’ll happily sit around watching Homare come to self-evident conclusions all day if he’s allowed. That moment of epiphany is what makes Homare tick.
“Ah, but there are more factors in play.” Homare muses. “You may already have an infinite amount, but… Hmm. There is more than one type of infinity, you understand.”
“There is?”
“Of course. The first kind is the smallest, the kind you could count to, if you had infinite time to do it. But there are other kinds.”
Azuma tilts his head again in genuine interest, and Homare seems to take it as a signal to continue.
“It is impossible, for instance, to count all the potential numbers between zero and one. The first would obviously be zero, but the second… the second is infinitely small, a zero followed by an endless string of zeros, and somewhere at the end of infinity, a one. Except that, of course, infinity has no end. Impossible.” He shakes his head. “But the first type of infinity is the number of whole numbers, or the number of minutes in forever, or the number of kisses each of us could potentially give, if we could live eternally.”
He looks back at Azuma, an odd smile on his face. He looks like he’s planning something. “In which case, the gift itself does have some meaning. I know not, and cannot tell you, the number of kisses which you contain right now. But…”
Azuma returns the surprise kiss Homare leans over to give him then with a smile of his own, heel of his hand resting on Homare’s neck, fingertips tracing the shell of his ear.
“But I can now tell you that that number has just increased by one.” He says when he pulls back, as always, looking enormously pleased with himself.
Azuma laughs, leans in, and bestows upon Homare one more gift from his inexhaustible supply.