HIS HEART.
after everything they’d been through, there was true joy in engaging in the mundane activities of a couple in love. to lay in bed with erebus, each in one another’s arms, simply dozing off was a treat shinjiro had thought he’d never be able to savor again at one point. funny, how it had all worked out in the end. funny now, not funny then. there had been little humor in those days.
he laid with closed eyes, savoring erebus’ hands in his hair. then the question. a part of shinjiro’s brain disconnected for a moment. would you ever want to be a god? he thought back to the young boy he’d been so long ago, thought about how he would have - how he did - done anything for that type of power. but he had always known it to be impossible. you could make as many deals with the devil as you fancied but you could never be a god. not with the gore on your hands, shinjiro.
at least that’s what they’d told him. in a much more real sense, he had just known it wasn’t in the realm of possibility because no magic on earth was capable of deifying a man. not even a man as determined as shinjiro. so to hear his lover, his heart, ask him such a question as if it hadn’t remained a locked door to shinjiro for decades left him blinking owlishly.
he considered his words carefully and half thought of sitting up but, even with shock creeping up his spine, detested the thought of leaving erebus’ arms. instead, he leaned back to look at his heart in the eye. there were many questions he wanted to ask, but the one he spoke was a simple, “why?”
part of him knew there was only one reason erebus would ask this question, but that part was quieted by a more rational side of shinjiro. the side that wouldn’t accept anything not spoken. he needed erebus to tell him the words he felt he already half-knew.
erebos did not understand the question that had been posed to him in response to his own. ❛ why? ❜ had been thrown at him, in all its peculiarity, and without any thought he parried back with a confused ❝ why not? ❞
he gazed back head on as though he could peruse for answers within his beloved’s eyes, his eyebrows knitted and all telling of the state of bewilderment that the chthonic god now found himself in. was his question really worth any means of further probing? apparently it did, if his dearest thought it so, even if erebos himself clearly believed otherwise.
a mistake he made, if he had any intent on remaining on the topic at hand at all, was that the rest of shinjiro’s face was also in erebos’ current view. his attention quickly enough latched back onto dark as shadow strands and his fingers took to fiddling with them once more, his cheeks growing a pale shade of pink from his delight and his voice an almost reverent murmur.
❝ oh, shin. your hair looks absolutely perfect, it feels wonderfully soft too. have you been using that hair mask? ❞ the one erebos had gotten for them not too long ago, the one with that pleasant scent that erebos somehow found himself always gravitating towards.
it brought him an odd sense of gratification, the domesticity to be found in sharing bath products and in turn the same aromas that such products typically came with. there was no way for the two of them to smell entirely identical, this much the god of darkness was aware of. but erebos was rather content with that; he quite liked the scent that shinjiro would give off after a bath, more so than the fragrance from the original products themselves.