It's day 2 of @ygorarepairweek and I've chosen 'Rain' for today's prompt!
I really love Bambooshipping, and I always kinda get sad whenever I think about how little screentime Kachidoki got compared to what he deserved.
For this piece, I wanted to think about what it'd be like if Yuya and Kachidoki had actually met each other when they were kids, instead of just passing by each other. Maybe they'd meet eachother while taking shelter from a sudden rainstorm?
soooo I found out the fandom was doing arc-v rare pair week again and I got super excited and planned out the ships I wanted to highlight... and then forgot to write the actual fics out in advance. whoops.
Once every fortnight, the Ryozanpaku school’s top student dances with death in the school courtyard as the sun bleeds away another day. Every time he does, his boyfriend is there to watch and admire.
Sakaki Yuuya has little experience with the practice known as sword dancing--dangerous as You Show’s performances tend to get, they hadn’t yet incorporated weapons. But he likes to learn far more than he likes tradition or stagnation. A good Entertainment Duelist knowns there is entertainment galore in risk and conflict, and takes the presence of both as an opportunity to grow. Evolve.
It also helps that it’s Kachidoki Isao doing the sword-swinging. Their interests seldom align perfectly (or at all), but his gruff paramour is so fascinating that he constantly draws Yuuya’s eyes back to him.
The Kachidoki-of-now holds two unreasonably-sharp blades which glint in the setting sun and hurt his secret audience’s eyes. Methodically he twirls them, wrists flexing, body dodging the spinning instruments of his destruction, and that of anyone who gets in his way. Because he’s a daring bastard, he’s bare-chested in the courtyard, risking thousand-cut-death or dismemberment in the name of attuning with his blades. Sweating and dodging bullets.
Yuuya decides that the sweat and the low-hanging pants make him look very appealing. But not enough to disturb. Not yet.
A half hour passes like this. Then Kachidoki turns and hurls one blade into the wooden spear holding up a plastic dummy. With the other blade, he points up at--uh oh.
“How long are you going to hide up there?”
“I wasn’t hiding,” Yuuya counters with dignity, still a little unnerved at how quickly he’s been caught. “I was memorizing your moves. At a safe distance.”
He is an expert in parkour and bungee jumping, so the roof was really the best option for observation. Truly. Honestly.
Kachidoki smirks. It’s small and reserved, but probably visible from space. “Sakaki. If you wanted to be safe from me, you shouldn’t have come looking for me.”
He means before, he means after that weird war with your three doppelgängers who almost unmade reality. Yuuya pretends that he meant after the war, when you caught me lurking around your dad’s school to get a look at you and asked me out, and says “I’ve never wanted to live my life safe.”
“Then come down.”
The younger boy snorts--and complies. His own way. A brief touch to the sides of his shoes is all he needs to activate the built-in wheels, and he uses those and his jacket-cape in tandem to slide down the roof, do the briefest open-air glide, and come to a stuttering stop next to the practice dummy.
He’s promptly patted warmly on the shoulder, which thanks to experience he knows will not preclude a backhanded compliment from following right about--
“Impressive. You managed to get down from a high place without compromising your nose this time.”
--now.
Yuuya grins cheekily at his sword-wielding maniac. Cutting words before would have skewered him, but now he is made of stronger stuff. Hosting and then ejecting a daemonic dragon-human hybrid will do that. Mastering sarcasm also helps. “You know how great it is that you can make one misstep on a stairwell because you’re excited to see your date, and he’ll use his near-perfect recall to remind you of it forever?”
“Your mother had to call a professional otolaryngologist to put your nose back the way it was,” Kachidoki reminds him.
“It’s not even on your face; why do you care so much about my nose?”
“Well--it’s a cute nose.”
Oh.
“Isao,” Yuuya says, then can’t follow up. He’s blushing. They both are. But his old nemesis doesn’t take the words back (he never does), just changes the subject.
“Since you finally came down, grab the sword. I’ll practice with you.”
“On me. And no. That’s not gonna go well. I’ve never even held a real sword!”
Kachidoki--Isao--chuckles. His own version of a belly laugh. “Now is a good time to change that.”
“I’m not sure...”
“...unless you want to be stuck watching me again for a while?”
Yuuya’s eyes glint. “You know--”
--and he’s immediately cuffed on the head by Isao, curse his height. Curse it to hell.
“Draw the other sword, Yuuya. I could do with a dance partner.”
“Since you asked so nicely,” the other mumbles. But he does extract the sword from that poor dummy so he can take up a botched version of a stance. The mention of dancing piques his interest as usual--movement is life, and dancing is the highest form of entertaining, even if it has to involve pointy objects that could probably kill him in the next ten minutes.
“Promise you won’t stab me?”
Isao’s eyes gleam. “I might poke you a little.”
“Gross.”
It still doesn’t sound too bad. Between learning something new and getting to spend time with Isao... he’ll probably do all right.
Why answer one day-prompt with bambooshipping when you could answer tw--
Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--
SLAM.
“Yuuya! When are we gonna have our du--”
As Shuin’in Sora came hurtling into the living room shouting at max volume, he got an unpleasant surprise: Kachidoki Isao was glaring at him from the couch, where he’d been bent over Yuuya as though he were about to kiss him, holy shit--
“--ack! What’re you doing? This living room is public space, you know!”
“You are disturbing Yuuya’s sleep,” Kachidoki said smoothly, slowly and without any warmth. “Go play somewhere else. I’ll send him to see you when he wakes up. Or not.”
Sora pouted, but he was a little unsettled by the older duelist, even after having known him for a few years. He left with much less fanfare.
Alone again at last with his longtime boyfriend, Kachidoki let out a groan and sported a pout of his own.
Damn it! Forgot which eyelash cluster I stopped at. Now I’ve got to start all over.
Ever since Yuuya started his mid-math homework-nap a few hours ago, Kachidoki had been taking advantage of the peace and quiet to count his boyfriend’s eyelashes. Once when they were out for their customary rainbow sherbet ice cream, Yuuya had claimed that he had a whopping 232 upper eyelashes on each eye. When Kachidoki snorted and asked him to prove it, he’d just laughed and insisted that he couldn’t count them all efficiently; better if his partner did it while he was asleep.
Perhaps he expected the suggestion to startle him, but Kachidoki was undaunted. Watching his boyfriend sleep was no challenge; closely studying him was no hardship. As he prepared to start over, he carefully mussed Yuuya’s red and green hairs together before pushing them off his forehead and out of his way for the recount.
The next thing he knew, Yuuya was prodding him awake.
Wait.
Awake?! Shit.
“Isao, wake up. I’ve gotta know!”
“Knowha’?” he grumbled, trying to remember what he’d fallen asleep in the middle of. It seemed so important at the time.
“Isao, how many eyelashes do I have? You were supposed to be counting!”
Oh! He’d drifted off counting those things. The last number that he remembered saying was 121, but who knew? “Lost track. Doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Yuuya whined. “Come on, I even went back to sleep after Sora busted in here, and that was hard to pull off!”
Kachidoki just responded by pulling the overexcited entertainer into a close cuddle, and resting their heads together. His voice was still groggy and rough, but firm as ever. “Don’t care, Yuuya. I’m tired. Count later; sleep now.”
“But--! Oh okay fine, I’ll just count yours for you later instead. Night.”
“Zzzz.”
“I’m home!”
Sakaki Yoko’s shout got no answer--not even from Yuzu or Sora, the two munchkins most likely to be galloping around like they lived here too. She was puzzled at first, until she made it to the living room to see why.
Yuuya was fast asleep on the couch, curled around his cute-but-still-heavily-mom-screened boyfriend Kachidoki Isao. It looked like they had been out for hours--yep, sure enough, there was Yuuya’s unfinished math homework on the floor.
Yoko snapped a quick pic of them, chuckling, then moved to make dinner and prepare for the fallout tomorrow after school. Kachidoki might look adorable with her son under soft light, but even he couldn’t convince Yuuya to turn his stuff in on time.
Lateness continues. A thousand apologies, but thanks to someone I still have to live with, I doubt I will catch up at all this week. Especially when we get to day 6.
But that’s okay because bambooshipping. Thanks to @yuugo for being the first to write this ship and showing me that I wasn’t alone in this particular shipping heaven when I bothered to check the tags lmao.
(I’ve been waiting for this one. Also, considering ship naming ‘rules’ have been broken 3,000 times by now, could we please break another and rename this ship berserkshipping? Because that’s what I desire in my darkest heart. ^^)
Neither one of them talks about three things: their fathers, their war tours, or their tempers.
It’s hard (at first) to start a relationship with someone when so many sensitive subjects are already off-limits. But Sakaki Yuuya didn’t choose Kachidoki Isao on his own. They chose each other, and kept gravitating toward one another like twin suns; always burning inside, gleaming outside.
Yuuya and Kachidoki bond over rainbow sherbet ice cream and martial arts. The latter is Kachidoki’s passion of course, but its similarities in form and function to Action Dueling stir and fan Yuuya’s interest. In exchange, Yuuya takes him out for that ice cream by the lake. The two activities become inextricable from then on.
Not mentioning their shortcomings or their crimes against one another, which echo loudly behind every word and deed anyway, is an ingrained habit by the time Maiami learns they’re dating. It takes a while to bend this trend.
One day, Kachidoki and Yuuya go to get arm tattoos. The line is out-the-door full of rebellious college students and summer school truants, so they go to the arts and crafts supply store instead and Yuuya ends up inking his boyfriend’s arm at the dog park.
“I didn’t ever see you as the type to get tattoos,” he says breezily as he colors in one part of a twin lightning bolt--then he feels like falling into a black hole for even hinting at Kachidoki’s own “rebellious phase”. Those occult rainbow markings still gave him nightmares.
His purple-haired partner just gives him a really, really long Look before shrugging and picking a bug out of his hair without changing expression.
“...Hey, quit twitching and shivering or your other lightning bolt won’t come out right!”
Two months after Kachidoki visits and enjoys Yuuya’s first performance he says, “I should meet your father.”
Just out of the blue.
The Pendulum founder sputters and drops his radish-colored wig from last night’s musical. It’s the first time Kachidoki has even acknowledged that he knows Yuuya’s father came home from the war. (But see, when Yuuya asked Kachidoki to meet his father before he just got a flippant “When I finish my training and meet him myself, so can you.” Which, wow.)
“Y-You want... you want to... I m-mean sure, it’s no problem, it’s just that he’s been really busy rebuilding his reputation! So he might be really busy...”
I barely see him myself, he doesn’t say, but Kachidoki seems to understand that anyway. Yuushou’s return had not erased what his initial departure had wrought, not that he seemed to notice. He divides most of his time these days between ceremonial duels and dinner dates with Yuuya’s mother, which is fine, except that he has a son too.
Kachidoki doesn’t rescind his request, but he doesn’t push it either.
“Tell me about the Lancers,” Kachidoki says another time. They’re spooning on Yuuya’s couch, watching late night true-crime, and Yuuya was playing with the tails of Kachidoki’s purple hair like a cat would. The question causes him to accidentally yank a few strands out; his stone-cold paramour doesn’t even flinch.
“Is it already time to trade me in?” he teases.
“No, I mean--your time with them. Going to war, when it’s completely against your nature. How... was it?”
Yuuya hesitates--bites his lip--fiddles with the remote. We’ve done so well not talking about the dimensional war, or our own duels, or any of that old pain. It doesn’t help that he’s a little more emotional about all this than Kachidoki, or the other Lancers, or his parents, or...
There’s a pressure on the crown of his head, right around the strand that always sticks up. Then again. Kachidoki is kissing him. He talks slowly, but puts weight in every word, settling Yuuya’s nerves and keeping him still.
“Sakaki,” he eventually says, “not talking about Academia, Zarc or duel schools worked fine before when we were starting this. I don’t want to get to a point where it... doesn’t work fine.”
Oh.
“There’s no future without a past,” Kachidoki continues, looking straight into Yuuya’s scarlet eyes. “I want us to have a future--so we need to have the past too.”
Yuuya can’t bring himself to blurt out more than haphazard feelings and impressions about the Lancers and his time in the resistance that night. And it takes them both a while to feel comfortable mentioning other personal things they’d previously made off-limits--days, weeks, months. But gradually they merge their bumpy past with their smooth present.
