Yours
This is sort of a short sweet epilogue to this post right here
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"Did you ever meet anyone?" Eli asks the question idly, as he toys with soft brown hair between his fingertips, pulling a lock straight and then watching it fall back against the other man's scalp.
Nine's head rests on his stomach.
Eli's bed is big enough for the two of them, just barely - and it's so different than his memory of Master's enormous bed, how dwarfed even the two of them had been in it on the days they'd spent together, talking in low voices just like this.
There's a bottle of some kind of cold and flu medicine on the bedside table, a little cup beside it with the dregs of purple syrup lining the bottom.
Eli has never taken a single dose of medicine that Nine did not coax down his throat, and this is no different. It was perhaps the third thing Nine did, after hugging him, after crying.
After they both cried, and Antoni mercifully pretended he did not notice.
Beside the medicine is his steaming, fresh fourth mug of elaichi chai and a half-empty Gatorade, and that was Eli's contribution to his own healthcare.
His throat hurts, when he swallows, but it's a pain gone distant thanks to the medicine and the heat of the tea.
He thinks his fever has broken - there is a cool sweat broken out across his brow and his upper lip, and it feels like heaven.
"There isn't anyone else," Nine whispers.
His lips barely move, his eyes are closed. Eli lets his head rest back on the pillow, his own gaze moving slowly over the ceiling. He draws nonsense circles on Nine's skin as he looks.
There's an old water stain there, over in the corner. Eli's thick eyebrows furrow slightly in thought. It looks ancient, fixed but no one bothered to hide it.
His Master would have died before staying in a place with a visible water stain.
Those days with Nine in the Master's house... Nine had been a spark of color, bright life and humor, in a place devoid of it. A delightful imperfection in a place that was so perfectly wrought it seemed everything was icicles.
Clear as glass, and deadly if you couldn't escape its chill.
Here, the sun shines warm through his window. Light chases itself through the cheap paint in the make-your-own-suncatcher that hangs there. His blanket is a quilt made of a thousand ridiculous colors he'd asked for at a thrift store when he went with Kauri, once. There's a couple of squares that remind him of the shadowy woman in his mind. They feel like her clothes, they look like her.
It seems like a sort of respect, to the idea of her, to keep something that reminds him this close.
Eli's eyes trace rainbows bouncing around the ceiling, thrown by the prisms, light broken by the window and the glass. The very makeup of light is heat and joy, messy layers of color.
There is nothing particularly clean, Eli thinks, about sunlight. Not compared to his memories of cold white lights from the ceiling. How long he went having forgotten sunlight entirely, until they he and Nine had been given to his master to go home.
Here, he never closes the curtains. He always welcomes the sun.
"It's been years," Eli says, gently. He rests his hand over the back of Nine's neck, and finds what he's looking for with his thumb - just beneath his ear, a notch of scarring that is invisible unless you know how to find it by touch alone. "Since we were separated. It would be natural to-"
"There isn't anything natural about it," Nine interrupts, rolling slightly onto his back so he can look up towards Eli without looking his place resting on his stomach. "About us. It doesn't matter. Eli... I've been looking for you. Everything else... was just wasting time until I found you again."
Eli's heart twists, a little. It flutters, perhaps. He locks it down as best he can, behind its protective walls. But he can't stop himself from the slight, quiet smile.
It's been so long since he's had a smile in him to give.
"Come now," He says, not quite teasing. "All this time?"
"Yes." It's spoken with Nine's unending sincerity, without hesitation, and those sharp warm eyes are on his own without looking away. "Yes, of course, all that time. I learned computers, I scoured every safehouse, all the records I could find. I learned how to break into WRU looking for you."
"Master hid me," Eli says, and looks away finally. His eyes travel over the silvered edges of the suncatcher. It hangs off a little suction cup stuck to the window, bumping into it occasionally with a soft click when the air being moved by the ceiling fan hits it just right. "We kept moving. He didn't trust WRU. He thought someone helped us escape, that time, someone from inside WRU."
"Bullshit." Nine snorts. "We took a chance, that's all."
"I know, but he did not know that. When I was brought back to him, he was sure we had been freed by someone. That we could not have done it ourselves. I didn't try very hard to prove him wrong." Eli sighs. "I thought it best to be underestimated."
"I still couldn't find you. I was always too late. A week, maybe a month too late. Every place, every time. But I kept trying." Nine rolls over in a sudden rush, and he's still all long limbs and a hint of awkward sharp elbows and knees as he moves up, tucking his head into the side of Eli's neck and sliding arms around his waist.
He isn't any taller than the boy Eli was trained alongside, but he's filled out some. There's a softness to his shoulders now, his cheekbones have blended in with the rest of his face. There's a hint of round along his stomach. Eli shifts, running a hand over it through the fabric of Nine's t-shirt. No longer stick-skinny, now. He's a man who has enough food to eat, and a little more besides.
Tears strike him, with sudden vehement gratitude, that Nine has all the food he needs now.
He turns his head to breathe in the scent of Nine's shampoo. "I found you once."
"I know. I still have it, the suncatcher you sent, I-"
"You said that on the phone before." Eli closes his eyes, and the two of them bask in each other's warmth. Once the only constant in their lives, now they've gone so, so long without.
There is a long pause, comfortable silence.
Finally, but reluctantly, Eli must break it.
"Nine-... what happens now?"
"I don't care," Nine mutters, and he grabs blindly at the edge of a blanket without looking, pulling the many-colored quilt up over the two of them like they used to in Master's house, hiding in the warmth and the dark they had made and lying together, speaking and laughing for hours.
"I can't see you now," Eli protests, but it's half-hearted and both of them know it. There's a hint of light filtering through the squares, and he catches a hint of Nine's nose, the curve of his lips.
"You never needed to see me, before," Nine says, and there's a question, there. Something worried. Maybe a little frightened. "We knew each other better than needing to see."
"We still do, I think," Eli says, a little soothing, and relaxes into the mattress even as he throws his arms around Nine, too. "We are older now. We have been apart. What are we, really, now? Are we friends? People who once knew each other? Nine, please, tell me-"
"Bonded," Nine breathes, with painful relief. "We're bonded, Eli. We always were. You're mine and I'm yours. Remember our promise? They made our hearts the same."
"Of course. I whispered it to myself every single night." Eli turns to speak, lips moving against Nine's hair. "'Before I belong to a master, I belong to you.'"
"I belong to you," Nine replies. He matches the cadence, perfectly. "'Before I am my master's pet'..."
"'I am yours'," Eli finishes, whispering in the dark. "Even now."
"'Before I am alive,'" Nine murmurs, "'I am your bonded."'
"And I am yours."
"Even now."
"Even now."
