Taka/ Adagio (Part 1)
"Ada."
"Hmm?"
Adagio turns around. Light filters in between the shutters, illuminating stripes of his skin. The duvet shifts, a soft, rustling sound.
"Yes, my love?" Adagio's foot settles next to Taka's tail. He presses his toes in the dim orange fur and leans into the crook of Taka's neck. He inhales.
Taka falls back into silence. There's nothing but the faint rise and fall of his chest, a heartbeat that might, or might not, be there.
"It's nothing."
He curls up like an unborn fetus. Adagio knows that Taka does this sometimes, when he is in his arms late at night and he gently pushes Adagio's hands away, rolling away to the edge of the bed. In the early hours once the foggy wisps of dawn rise, Taka resumes position close to him. Taka would watch him with a loving gaze but Adagio would only see the exhaustion, the war that had taken place in his head.
Adagio could counsel him, but nothing would come of it. Words may heal wounds but perhaps not scabs, not those as old and haphazard as his. He has lived long enough to understand this.
Still.
"Nightmare?"
"No."
"A memory, then?"
"No."
Adagio wonders what expression Taka is wearing, if seeing it would burn something ancient inside him. Taka's left ear perks, twitching. Adagio registers the noise a moment later, a rat-tat-atat on hard surface. His eyes scan the window. He catches sight of a moth latched to the glass, wings fluttering with a likeness to crabs skittering across a beach. Disjointed.
"You."
Taka's whisper impregnates the air, filling it with an uncertainty that confuses Adagio. He swears he might've felt the blood pump through him. Ridiculous.
"What're you saying?"
"Nothing," Taka insists. His head is angled towards the moth, the twin black eyes on its wings. The symmetry pleases Adagio, though the colors aren't to his artisan taste. Taka wouldn't think that. What would he think? Adagio mulls, figuring that he hasn't the slightest clue.
"It's hurt," Taka says. Adagio focuses his bleary eyes on the glass and sees that, indeed, a red ant has clasped its jaw on the moth's back leg. The moth continues to stutter, sliding up and down the window pane, attempting to kick the ant off.
"So it is."
Taka slips under the blanket, shrugging him off. The heat and suffocation pleases him. When they're pressed against each other, bare skin on skin, Taka reaches out for Adagio's hands and moves them gingerly to his throat, beckoning him to squeeze. They've been sleeping in one bed for months and Adagio knows nothing of him, his family, origins, as if the world had one day decided to conjure him out of thin air.
"I'm all right. Go make coffee, Ada."
This is Taka's polite way of saying get out. Adagio obliges, crawling off the bed all too aware of his headiness- unseemly, for a seraph. When he returns to the room five minutes later, Taka has gotten off the bed. The sheets are neatly folded and he sits on the reading table, legs propped on the velvet-lined cushion atop a stool. He smells the coffee before Adagio enters and turns to face him, breaking out in a broad smile.
"Morning, babe."
Adagio hands him a ceramic mug. He notices that the moth is gone.