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.
