Chapter Text
It was a perfectly normal day in the Land of Departure. The sun was shining in the sky, the flowers were blooming outside, and the castle was peacefully quiet… Yes, everything about it was perfectly normal, Vanitas reminded himself for the hundredth time.
He let out a deep breath and relaxed his hand before readjusting his grip on the knife. It was just another ordinary evening of helping Aqua in the kitchen, and there wasn’t a thing in the world to stress about. Everything was fine, and everyone in their family was safe and accounted for.
Most importantly Ven was safe and accounted for. He knew that—at least logically, he did. But the moment Ven had gone off-world without him, the security he was used to feeling when he had his light nearby had vanished right along with him. In its place, a dreadful anxiety had begun to simmer in the back of his mind, proposing all sorts of horrible, unlikely reasons that might explain why it was taking Ven so long to return.
Sure, he and Terra were probably fine. They could have just gotten held up by a long line at the market, or they could have decided to take a scenic detour on their way back. Or maybe he and Terra had gotten knocked off course by an asteroid in the Lanes Between. Maybe Ven’s armor had gotten damaged and he was lost in the darkness, leaving him vulnerable to the danger lurking out there…
Would he feel it if Ven got hurt out there, while their connection was stretched thin as ever across the galaxy? If something awful happened, would Vanitas be able to tell that his light had gone out? Just the thought of it made him feel ill.
He could feel the panic threatening to boil over as his anxious mind kept wandering back to–
“Vanitas.”
He jumped at the sound of Aqua’s voice right beside him and the sudden hand over his wrist. She pulled his hand—and by extension the knife—away from the cutting board, narrowly preventing him from slicing into his own fingers. He blinked a few times, the half-chopped herbs in front of him coming back into focus, as well as his own hand. It was resting carelessly right where he’d been about to bring the knife down.
Aqua gently pried it away from him. “You need to be more careful,” she scolded, though he could hear the underlying worry in her tone. Worry, or love, as Ven described it. Whichever it was, Aqua was smart enough to leave the word unsaid. That was a degree of vulnerability he preferred to keep strictly between himself and Ven, and she thankfully never pushed it.
Unfortunately, he’d eventually come to understand that this doting, overbearing concern was her way of saying it without saying it. And that understanding had brought with it the raw, uncomfortable feelings he’d been trying to avoid in the first place. Because it wasn’t really the word that was the problem.
“Let me take care of this,” she offered, but it wasn’t actually an offer. He could’ve refused it, if it were. This was an instruction. “I don’t know if knives are a good idea right now.”
He inhaled sharply as her audacity hit him like a slap to the face. She may have been a Keyblade Master—his Master, even—but that didn’t give her the authority to boss him around like he was a child.
…well, maybe that wasn’t a fair assessment of the situation. After all, this had been the third or fourth time he’d gotten distracted like that. He couldn’t really blame her for not wanting to risk him bleeding all over their food… though he hardly felt human enough to bleed right now, what with his light being so far away.
Fair or not, he still didn’t take orders well. Not even on a good day, and not even from his Master. He gritted his teeth, his tense hands slowly curling into fists as they hovered over the cutting board.
“You knew this was going to happen,” Vanitas grumbled, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to keep his breathing even to quell the dark, simmering feeling inside him and keep it inside. This was far from the first time they’d had this conversation though, a fact that only pissed him off more. “Don’t tell me to use a knife if you know you’re not gonna trust me with it.”
Aqua didn’t make a sound beside him, which was just great, because that meant she’d paused her own preparation just to watch him. Like he was volatile, or something. Like he needed to be handled. He wasn’t some reckless child, he was just angry.
“I do trust you, Vanitas.” A phrase that she might’ve paired with a comforting hand on the shoulder, had she been talking to Ven. With Vanitas, she wisely kept her hands to herself. She had enough scars to remind her by now that touching him was never a good idea, even if they’d been inflicted by accident. “My faith in you is exactly why we’re doing this. Do you really want to get into it again?”
Vanitas worked his jaw, keeping his mouth carefully shut. Getting into it was the last thing he wanted. At least this time she was polite enough to ask before prattling any more of that annoying, embarrassing proud-of-you shlock at him. She must have (correctly) interpreted his silence as a no, because again, she didn’t push it.
He heard her set the knife down on the counter and take a step away. When he opened his eyes again, he made sure to keep them far away from hers.
“Why don’t you start on the dishes, instead?” Another not-offer. A command disguised pathetically as a suggestion. Ven would have called it politeness, but Vanitas knew it was just condescension. And suddenly he couldn’t stand it.
His fists uncurled as claws, directed along with his glare toward the tiled backsplash on the wall. The tension in his heart was as unbearable as having Aqua in his space—he honestly wasn’t sure he could tolerate her being on the same planet as him, right now—and it all compounded until the darkness in his head and in his lungs and behind his teeth felt ready to burst out of him however it could.
But he wasn’t about to prove her right. He could contain himself. Even if it took all his concentration, and all the strength in every muscle in his body.
A fricative hiss lingered between his teeth and lip as he let out a slow, shaky breath. With herculean effort, he straightened out his hands and brought his palms together. The last of the air in his lungs left his lips in a strained whisper.
“Ffffffine.”
He brought his hands apart, palms down, and took another deep breath in. He took a big step back from the counter and from Aqua.
“Fine.” It was the only word he trusted himself to say right now and not regret later. “Fine.”
Without another word or even a glance in Aqua’s direction, he turned and directed himself to the kitchen sink. Behind him, he heard her resume her work, the suffocating quiet easing up a little. It helped to have the water running, as well, to drown out the more audible reminders that she was still in the room with him in the first place.
Vanitas turned the tap on as cold as it would go and brought his hands up under the stream. He let it run over his wrists for a little while as he tried to numb his nerves and calm his racing heart. His pulse pounded in his neck, quick as a rabbit’s and loud as thunder. There was a sharp sting in the rests between each achy heartbeat. If Ven had been there, his own heart would have filled in those gaps seamlessly. But Ven wasn’t there, and that was the whole problem.
It was easy for Vanitas to forget he’d ever been incomplete, before meeting Ven. But when they were apart, it felt like age-old wounds reopening, his soul as raw and lonely as it had ever been all those years before they’d met. The whole separation thing wouldn’t have been so hard if it was simply a matter of pain. Pain was an old friend of Vanitas’s, after all. But the full-body feeling of missing Ven was as unique as it was utterly excruciating. The ache of not being able to reach his other half was steeped in fear and longing. The void he felt in his heart when he let Ven out of his sight overwhelmed him with hopelessness and regret.
The cold water didn’t do much to alleviate that rising tension in his chest. Instead, the mild discomfort just faded into staticky background noise while his mind dwelled on the much louder Ven-shaped discomfort instead. Oh well. It had been worth a shot, at least.
Not seeming to have learned anything from his experience with the knife a few moments ago, he decided to busy his hands again in hopes that it might do a better job of distracting him. He opened the hot water tap and turned down the cold before taking the washing brush and getting started on scrubbing the bowls and utensils in the sink.
Washing the dishes was a simple, almost mindless task, and one he’d done practically every night since he’d moved into the Land of Departure. Initially, he’d shared the chore with Ven fully so the boy could show him how it was done (and make sure he actually did it in the first place). Then eventually Aqua had switched them to a turn-based system to keep them from arguing over who had to do wash and who got to dry. At this point, the boys shared the chore with little attention being paid to who did what. So long as they did it together, that was what mattered.
(That said, Ven was the de facto dish-dryer, since he tended to like standing shoulder to armorless shoulder with Vanitas, and the sink was on the far right side of the counter, with open counter space to its left. Ultimately, Vanitas found the reasoning charming enough to excuse the fact that Ven clearly just wanted the easier of the two jobs.)
Normally he would have put up more of a fight in resisting Aqua’s orders, but however he was feeling was far from normal. His pride sometimes took a rare backseat role whenever his brain and heart found themselves solely focused on the distance between himself and Ven. He mentally prodded at the pain surrounding their connection again and again like a bruise in the hopes that it might summon Ven back sooner. But of course it didn’t. It only made the pain worse.
He knew it wasn’t really the fact that Aqua was treating him like a kid that was upsetting him so much. Her words weren’t what was pricking his eyes with hot tears and making him feel like he had a cannonball in his stomach. As much as he wanted to take it all out on her, she wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that when he lifted a newly-rinsed bowl from the sink and turned to his left, Ven wasn’t there to take it.
What should have been mild disappointment at worst, was so wholly and suddenly devastating that he nearly dropped the dish onto the floor. Nearly, but not quite. He kept it between his slippery fingers just long enough to set it down on the counter, safe from a tragically apt fate of shattering into pieces on the terracotta tile.
Now especially in need of distraction, he grabbed another dish and forced himself to focus as he washed it under the steamy running water. He could concentrate on the dirt he was rinsing away, or the icy-hot water splashing on his hands, or the suds of the soap as they built up in the basin. Anything. Otherwise he’d have to think about why this awful feeling felt so familiar to him. He’d have to think about how it felt just like being abandoned, desperate and lonely, kneeling in the dust. He’d have to remember the first time he’d ever felt real pain, the time he would have given his heart and soul just to see Ven standing in front of him, only to look up and find empty space. An unnatural, unbearable void where his light should have been.
He scrubbed harder, attacking the mess and grime as if it might eradicate this sinking feeling, too. He had to focus on the water, the bristles, the porcelain, or else he’d keep torturing himself with the same question he’d been asking himself all day.
Why the hell did I ever let him out of my sight? What was I even thinking?!
“Vanitas.”
Aqua interrupted his internal crisis again, startling him enough that he actually did drop a dish. The thin thud of cast iron on marble acted as punctuation, a firm period on the end of her demand for his attention. Once again, he didn’t really have the option to refuse. He kept his hands where they were under the running water as he waited for her to continue wasting his time with more criticisms.
“That water’s too hot,” she said, and god, she seemed to have a problem with everything he did today, didn’t she?
He turned over his shoulder to snap at her, making a splash in the sink as he harshly threw the brush down. “If you don’t like how I’m doing it, you can do it yourself, Master.”
He felt his face turning red, both from anger and from the warm steam rising from the sink. But Aqua looked nonplussed, her eyes fixed calmly, infuriatingly on his.
She didn’t say a word as she walked over to him. He had to lean away as she reached past him to turn off the tap, more disgusted than usual at the concept of her touching him. Her hand against his as she took the knife had been plenty. Master or not. He didn’t want anybody to touch him, not unless it was Ven.
She took a step away from him and crossed her arms. “You’re going to burn yourself,” she explained, like he didn’t know how hot water worked. It was a stupid thing to worry about anyway. Water couldn’t burn darkness. And that was all Vanitas was, without the rest of his heart here with him.
Aqua and Vanitas were the same height at this point, but she somehow always managed to look down her nose at him. He had never particularly cared about becoming a Keyblade Master himself, but he thought it might be worth it if it meant that Aqua would stop looking at him like that.
Her brows turned up, betraying some sympathy beneath her otherwise non-reactive stare. Vanitas glared at her.
“Come on,” she sighed. “I know you can do this.”
Vanitas bit his tongue. He wasn’t about to challenge her and admit that he was struggling, even if it was blatantly obvious to both of them. He didn’t want to admit that her scolding and patronizing were all warranted. At the same time, he was too stubborn and too prideful to accept the encouragement, either. He didn’t need her to bolster him. He needed Ven.
She had always pushed Vanitas, though. As his Master, she was always the toughest on him because she had inexplicably high expectations for him. Any time he’d ever lost his cool or lashed out or created an Unversed during training, it had been a result of Aqua pushing and pushing.
So now she was pushing him to stay focused and be present, like she had been all day. But Vanitas felt himself coming up against the limit of his own willpower as he tried to ignore the overwhelming feeling in his heart. There was only so much tension he could take before his patience, good sense and self-restraint went out the window. The voice in the back of his mind had been growing louder and louder, conveniently, tantalizingly reminding him that Ven was merely a dark corridor away, and it was getting harder to refuse that pull.
But he didn’t need to see Ven right now, despite what his heart was screaming at him. He and Aqua both knew that Ven was perfectly safe… wasn’t he?
Again, logically, there was only so much trouble Ven could get into while he was on a grocery run with Terra. It was probably one of the safest “missions” he’d ever been on that involved him and Vanitas being apart. But although Ven had toughed up considerably over years of training, he still had a heart of light, and he was still vulnerable without his darkness. Especially if he was half as distracted by the tension between their hearts as Vanitas was. It was that little bit of helpless uncertainty that was driving Vanitas insane.
The only reason he’d even agreed to this stupid exercise was because everyone else had outnumbered him. It all started when Master Eraqus scared Ven by planting the seed that the two of them might get separated someday. Vanitas had passionately disagreed, saying that he’d like to see anybody try to take Ven away from him, but he was dismissed.
The idea was stupid, and all of them were stupid if they thought anything could ever come between him and his light. Still, they didn’t seem to care.
They were all concerned that neither boy was prepared to think clearly and react rationally if such a thing ever happened. Which was complete bullshit, in Vanitas’s opinion. If they got separated, his singleminded focus on getting back to Ven would be an advantage, if anything. He’d tried to explain that, but the others had just brushed him off.
So when a low-stakes opportunity to exercise their separation tolerance presented itself in the form of a shopping trip off-world, Ven had…. well, he hadn’t jumped on it per se, but he’d thought it might be a good idea for him and Vanitas to try spending the afternoon apart under controlled conditions.
Ven had tried to convince him it was for the best, but he hadn’t really needed to—it wasn’t like Vanitas could say no at that point. The two were alike in more ways than they were different, and they both had a considerable stubborn streak. While Ven was flexible about most things, trying to change his mind once he’d truly made it up was an exercise in futility, even for Vanitas. And with everyone else on Ven’s side, there was no room to argue… or at least nobody was willing to listen if he did.
Still… the persistent frown on Ven’s face as they’d lingered in the courtyard that morning saying their goodbyes suggested that he wasn’t fully convinced, either.
Vanitas took a tense breath in as he and Aqua stared at each other. However he was spared from deciding whether to raise his voice and continue to argue when he felt something shift in his heart. It was a big shift too, one that radiated as a shudder throughout his entire body as a new sensation rushed through his veins. No, not new… familiar.
It was the instant and total relief of sitting down after spending hours on his feet; of sinking into a warm bath after an exhausting day of training. It was the comfort of finally coming home from a years-long journey.
It was Ven.
Vanitas turned his head instantly in the direction of the doorway and saw Aqua curiously do the same in his periphery. Outside the kitchen and down the hall, Vanitas heard the heavy sound of the castle’s front door, but he didn’t need to hear them approach to know who it was. Ven was back and he was coming their way, as the disorienting and rapid release of tension inside Vanitas’s chest also confirmed.
“Come on! No running in the hall, Ven,” came Terra’s half-hearted call from the foyer, but it didn’t sound like Ven was listening at all, his footsteps echoing as quick and loud as ever.
It took all the self-restraint Vanitas still had in him not to run out of the kitchen, find Ven, and sweep him off his feet. Thankfully, it was just a matter of seconds until the sounds of running in the hall came to a sudden stop as they watched Ven skid to a halt in the doorway. His eyes locked onto Vanitas’s and it was like finding an oasis in the desert. Like being lost at sea and spotting another boat in the distance. Like…
…oh hell, nothing came close to this feeling. Certainly not some ordinary, cliche crap like that. Why was he wasting time thinking about it, anyway?
His eyes trailed down Ven’s form as he stood frozen in place, grocery bags in hand, with his arms held out at his sides like a dork. Only the immense shock of relief in finally reuniting could ever give pause to the instinctual, tireless pull between them. They stood and stared for a moment while the world restored itself around them. It felt like the full range of color was coming back to their vision, starting with each other’s eyes.
Then suddenly there was a hand on Ven’s shoulder, prompting both boys to jump slightly as Terra appeared beside him in the doorway. At last, Ven broke their eye contact to look up at him and the trance they’d both been under fell away along with it.
“Okay, Romeo,” Terra began, prompting a chuckle from Aqua. “You two can catch up after we put groceries away.” He brought his hand up and Ven crinkled his nose as Terra rustled his hair. Still, he laughed at the friendly roughhousing. After all, if Ven was feeling anything like how Vanitas did, it was hard not to be in a good mood.
Aqua leaned over back into Vanitas’s field of vision. “And you can finish helping me chop those herbs for the marinade.” He looked at her and found that the vaguely amused-yet-proud smile on her face didn’t bother him nearly as much as it had earlier. Just like Ven laughing with Terra, it was like everything had gotten a hundred shades rosier the instant they saw each other—even the things that usually bugged them. “How’s that sound?”
Before Vanitas could decline her generous offer to keep him away from Ven for any longer today, Ven spoke up instead.
“Actually, I could use Vani’s help with the stuff on the top shelf!” He smiled innocently, holding his hands—and the mass of shopping bags—in front of himself.
Vanitas raised an eyebrow at him, as did Terra and Aqua. Ven was barely an inch shorter than him, and that inch certainly didn’t make the difference between whether he could reach the top shelf of the pantry. More suspiciously, Ven never let Vanitas get away with bragging about their height difference, ever. If this was an excuse to rope Vanitas into helping with his chore, it wasn’t a very believable one.
Still, Ven stepped away from Terra and started to make his way towards the far wall of the kitchen. He looked over his shoulder and stopped walking for a moment when Vanitas didn’t immediately join him. But with a subtle nod in the direction of the walk-in pantry, he had Vanitas wrapped around his finger and following after him. Vanitas wasn’t sure the others noticed the way Ven was exaggerating the sway of his hips, offset from the slight sway of the bags he was carrying, but he did. He scoffed to himself—Ven hardly needed to try and allure him, at this point.
Before Ven could reach the door, Vanitas hurried past him so he could hold it open, considering how the other boy’s hands were already full. (Much like running in the halls, opening doors with one’s foot was generally frowned upon inside the castle.) He let it shut behind them, then watched with his arms crossed as Ven walked in and let the shopping bags fall heavily at his feet. Ven rolled his shoulders out and Vanitas instinctively stepped closer so he could put his hands on his back to help.
Before he could, however, Ven whirled around and laid his own hands flat against Vanitas’s chest. He felt the wind get knocked out of him when his back hit the shelf behind him, then again when Ven caught his lips in a hungry, insistent kiss. There was no room between them to take a breath, but somehow it still felt like coming up for air after a day of being apart. He settled his hands on Ven’s lower back, leaning back and basking in the contact he’d been sorely missing. The contact. The attention. The connection.
Ven’s hands slid up Vanitas’s neck to hold his face in place—as if Vanitas had any intentions of moving from where he was. Ven’s thumbs were dry and soft as he stroked them back and forth over Vanitas’s cheeks, complementing the wonderfully wet press of his tongue as it ran across the seam of Vanitas’s lips, demanding more access.
Vanitas obliged in the form of a hushed, breathless groan while Ven proceeded to eliminate any remaining space between their bodies. Every inch of contact between them brought both tension and relief, whether it was skin on hot skin, teasing touches over clothes, or just the friction of fabric against fabric. It felt like standing in a sunbeam, or dipping into a cool lake on a hot day. Vanitas was honestly feeling a little dizzy from it all, so he let the shelves support his weight while Ven had his way with him.
As one of Ven’s hands slid over to rest on Vanitas’s shoulder, the other slipped down between them in a blind, well-practiced motion. He pressed the heel of his palm between the other boy’s legs as he trailed messy kisses down his jaw, and Vanitas could swear he’d never gotten so hard so fast in his life.
“I missed you,” Ven muttered, keeping his lips glued to Vanitas’s neck. The words came out mushy and wet. With the little presence of mind he was bothering to keep, Vanitas thought idly that it was a waste of saliva. He could think of much better places Ven could be putting it instead of on his neck.
Between the hot press of Ven’s tongue on his skin and the slow, rhythmic tightening of Ven’s grasp overtop his pants, Vanitas’s mouth began to water. He ran his tongue over his palate and imagined it was Ven’s.
“My heart felt so empty without you…” Ven whined, his teeth gently, clumsily scraping along Vanitas’s jugular vein. The hand on his shoulder drifted down to his bicep and he felt nails bite into the exposed skin, his gloves still lying abandoned by the sink.
“It was awful.”
Vanitas bit his own lip and resisted the temptation to say I told you so. Partly because it seemed like Ven—needy, desperate, shameless little Ven—had already learned his lesson, and partly because he figured that those few hours apart might not have been in vain after all if they made Ven act like this.
“I know,” was what he settled on; Ven could read into the words however he pleased.
In response, whether as punishment or as a reward, Ven lifted his head to kiss Vanitas’s mouth again. It was a noisy, humid mess of soft lips and dull teeth as their breaths came quicker and heavier.
“I never wanna feel empty again,” Ven shook his head slightly, brushing his nose against Vanitas’s cheek. It was louder than a whisper, but still too soft for Vanitas to feel the sound buzz under his hands, even as he slid them higher up Ven’s jacket. Just inches away, blue eyes reflected an unnatural gold, thin haloes darting left and right.
Vanitas was about to nod in agreement, but he didn’t get very far before his lower lip was caught between Ven’s teeth. He stilled his head just as Ven stilled the hand that was fondling him. Meanwhile, his other hand let up its grip and trailed ticklishly downwards. Vanitas lowered his arm so Ven could reach his goal and resume his hold, this time over his wrist. Transfixed, he watched Ven’s eyes as he felt him guide his hand lower down Ven’s back, and lower still until it was resting squarely over his ass.
Ven leaned in, brushing his lips against Vanitas’s cheek as he whispered. “Make me feel full again, Vani.”
Vanitas shuddered as he suddenly became aware of just how everywhere Ven was—in his face, against his chest, over and under his hand, closing in tighter around him—and he felt himself nodding again before he could think any better of it.
His brain was lagging about ten steps behind, processing Ven’s touch only marginally faster than his words, and hardly bothering to process anything beyond that at all. Including the voice outside the door. Muffled but loud, getting louder, but not coming from Ven, so who cared?
Ven cared, apparently, since he pulled away from Vanitas entirely with a prompt step backwards. As the fog of him immediately began to clear, the embarrassment of where they were and what they’d been doing became clearer, as well. Clearer still were the fast-approaching footsteps outside.
“Hey boys, do you see the rock salt in there?”
Vanitas let out a dissatisfied sigh as he let his head fall back to thud against a shelf.
Terra. Could be worse…
The door handle began to turn and Vanitas watched as Ven quickly ran a hand through his hair, then over his mouth. By the time the door opened, he was the picture of innocence, aptly illuminated by the light from the hallway. Vanitas on the other hand…
…well, suffice it to say he was glad he was still in the shadows.
He clasped his hands in front of himself as inconspicuously as possible in an effort to cover the problem Ven had left him with. As unobservant as Terra was, he didn’t feel like taking any chances on being found out. If he had to guess, foreplay in the pantry was probably a bit more serious of an offense than running in the halls. He wasn’t really eager to find out how much worse, in any case.
Ven beamed at Terra and nodded. “Yep! Salt’s on the top shelf, right up there!” He pointed up above Vanitas’s head.
Still none the wiser, Terra gave him a thumbs-up.
“Oh, great.” He redirected his oblivious smile to Vanitas, who shrunk a bit under the attention. “Can you grab it, Vanitas?”
Vanitas had barely croaked out an umm before Ven took a casual step in front of him, mercifully limiting Terra’s view a bit more.
“I can get it,” Ven offered, and for a moment Vanitas felt some tension in him release. At least he wouldn’t have to walk into the light to give the stupid salt to Terra, along with a humiliating eyeful of what he’d just nearly walked in on.
But that tension instantly spiked again when Ven turned to actually get the damn thing off the shelf, stepping right back inside Vanitas’s bubble, chest to chest. Pressed for space, Vanitas had no choice but to move his hands away again, opting to keep them flat against the shelf behind himself as he kept his head tilted to the side.
The pressure of Ven’s hips against his must have been deliberate as he slowly got up on his tiptoes. The familiar shape of Ven’s hard-on pressed against his own in a maddening, teasing grind. Though it must have seemed perfectly innocuous from where Terra was standing, because he didn’t say a thing.
Bracing one hand on Vanitas’s chest, Ven raised his other arm to reach for the container, blocking Vanitas’s face from view and ensuring that the incredulous scowl from the boy underneath him was perfectly, ironically private.
Private and apparently ignored, as Ven quickly grabbed the salt and stepped away without sparing Vanitas a glance in the process. As he turned back to Terra, Vanitas tried to spy subtly at Ven’s pants, which somehow managed to disguise what he knew he’d felt a moment ago. How was that remotely fair?
Cool-headed as ever, Ven walked right up in his enchanted fucking pants to hand off the container and send Terra back on his way to the kitchen. One the two were alone again, Ven looked over his shoulder with an infuriating smile. What probably looked like an innocent, sunny smile from the doorway reached Vanitas as a dark, sinister smirk in profile.
Vanitas growled, watching his volume while the door was still open. “You little tease…”
Ven turned around fully and shrugged. Also infuriating.
“Sorry,” Ven lied. “It was just so good to see you!” Vanitas glared at him.
“I guess I got carried away!” Ven giggled and Vanitas glared even harder.
Vanitas stepped forward until he was close enough to slip his fingers under the straps of Ven’s harness. He made a fist over the buckle and yanked. Ven appeared totally unfazed as he was tugged another inch closer.
“Why don’t we go back to our room, and you can finish what you started?” Vanitas snarled.
Ven eyed him with endless amusement. He knew Ven was trying to piss him off, and it was working. Of course it was—that boy was an expert at getting on his nerves at this point.
Ven looked down as he brought up his own hands to hold Vanitas’s. Gently, he began to pry his fingers away to release himself. Vanitas let him, though he had half a mind to pull even harder, instead.
“Aw, I would…” Ven winced as he dragged the word out, as if he were truly disappointed. “...but I promised I’d help finish dinner.”
He held Vanitas’s now-free hand in his and lowered it to his side. With the other, he gestured to the untouched shopping bags lying on the floor of the pantry. “Plus, we still need to put all of these away.”
Vanitas squeezed Ven’s hand tightly, but Ven was ignoring him in favor of staring at the groceries. Vanitas leaned to the side to put himself in the boy’s line of sight.
“Are you trying to kill me?” he asked. “You wanna make the χ-blade right here in the kitchen fucking pantry?”
Ven rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t be dramatic, Vani. It’s only a couple more hours.” He closed his eyes briefly as he nodded and mocked Vanitas with his gracious smile. “Then I promise I’m all yours.”
Vanitas narrowed his eyes and sneered, even as Ven brought his hands up to delicately frame his face once more.
“Any way you want me,” Ven specified, his fond eyes skillfully riding the line between earnest and teasing. Sometimes, it seemed like Ven lived on that line.
He planted a sweet, chaste kiss on Vanitas’s lips. “Promise.”
Vanitas raised his chin a bit as he unconsciously began to chase Ven’s departing lips, a pathetic movement which he tried to recover from by pouting instead. He belatedly realized that the whole thing just made him look even more pathetic, especially as he felt his glare falter against Ven’s endeared, smug smirk. Three years and he’d still never outlasted him in a staring contest… though to be fair, these were hardly the ideal circumstances if he wanted to try and break that streak.
Despite doing his very best to be a nuisance, Ven still sent a shiver down Vanitas’s spine every time he looked at him. The idle, innocent way he licked his lips made a familiar heat pool in his stomach, returning his mind to the matter of his stupid, annoying, still-very-present hard-on. He wouldn’t have any luck getting rid of it as long as Ven was here, crowding against him in a dark room.
So gently but firmly, Vanitas placed a hand on Ven’s chest and pushed until the boy took a step back.
“Fine,” he grumbled as he turned and knelt down, finally attending to the pile of groceries on the floor. When he looked back up, Ven had an amused eyebrow raised. Vanitas rolled his eyes.
“Get out of here then, and go help with dinner.” He did his smarmiest impression and made a face, but all he got for his trouble was a snicker. Whatever. “Surely you won’t begrudge me a couple minutes to cool down. Alone.”
Vanitas diverted his gaze again, remembering that the goal was to stop thinking about how Ven was driving him crazy. Maybe if he just did the work and pretended he wasn’t there, Ven would get bored and leave him in peace.
He did not. Instead, Ven just hummed and rocked back on his heels as he watched Vanitas stand back up, arms now full of spices and preserves. Midway through reaching up to place a jar on the shelf, he paused and gave Ven another good glare.
“You’re gonna pay for this, by the way. I hope you know that.” He tried to channel some of Ven’s effortless confidence, but he must’ve missed the mark because Ven just laughed again.
Ven took one step closer, already back in Vanitas’s personal space. “You sure?” he sing-songed, bobbing his head side to side. “Look who’s doing whose chores right now.” He punctuated the jibe by tapping his finger on the tip of Vanitas’s nose.
He was damn lucky that Vanitas’s arms were full, or else he would’ve found himself with his own back against the shelves, getting a taste of his own medicine. As it was, Vanitas just stood there, red-faced and stuttering as he tried to find the words to express the indignant feeling rising in his chest. But Ven, quick as ever on his feet, took the opportunity to duck away, having gotten the last word.
In a blink, Ven disappeared down the hallway, leaving Vanitas with a teasing wave of his hand and a cheerful call behind him.
“Thanks, Vani!”
Vanitas growled.
“Welcome home, asshole!” he called right back, scowling at the poor, innocent box of something-or-other that sat along the invisible line between himself and the other boy. He could sense his heart moving away, and he bet he was skipping too, from how proud of himself he looked.
“Language!” He heard Ven’s scandalized shout, even as he kept walking away.
The corner of his frown twitched as he felt a traitorous smile coming on. Annoying as it was, Ven wouldn’t be his light if he didn’t give as good as he got. This was the Ven he’d been missing.
And, yeah. He was absolutely going to pay for this.