deercountry | i know that the sun is here with me

Paul sits up at Kaworu's awkwardness, setting his stick aside and holding out his hand to coax him closer. There's no answering awkwardness in him, only sympathy, and a tinge of worry in the thin line that forms between his eyebrows.

"I'll introduce you to him. We'll eat something together. It's fish, but I'll get you something you like better." Summoning a simple object is easy here, the memory's familiarity working in his favour. "We'll talk. It's not going to be anything bad."

"I don't want to eat in front of your father." Kaworu mumbles, even as he steps closer, drawn to the extended hand like a curious fawn in a forbidden garden. When he reaches Paul, he steps closer instead of taking the offered hand, so that it hovers over his slim waist as though the second before an embrace is frozen in time.

"I don't know what to say to a father."

Paul sets his hand down against where the slight dip inward of Kaworu's waist is muffled by his coat, increasing worry deepening the notch between his brows.

"You don't have to say anything special." He puts a slight coaxing weight into his hand, attempting to draw Kaworu closer yet. "...you don't have to say anything at all, if you don't want to."

He wants Kaworu to meet his father, but he doesn't want it badly enough to push him into anything that he doesn't want to do. At the same time, he doesn't know how deep this case of nerves goes, or what the right thing to do to alleviate it is yet.

"What's worrying you?"

The angel moves closer, removing the gap between them, he presses his nose against Paul's shoulder and feels the roughness of the fibers that form the jacket. He can feel Paul's longing for him to stay. A gentle pull, like the tide, and nothing like a fearsome riptide.

"I've never met a father. I don't know how humans act around them."

Gendo Ikari was the only one he'd met. And that man may have had a son but he was not a father.

Better. Paul slips both his arms around Kaworu's waist and settles him into his lap like he's done a thousand times before, tilting his head to lean against the angel's as he lets his eyes half-close.

"It depends on the father, and the human." Paul can answer this question. He draws a slow circle on the small of Kaworu's back, humming a frequency to harmonize with his S2 engine.

"With my father...you don't have to act any special way. You can treat him like the Old Man, if that helps, or you can treat him like...well, I don't suppose you respect anyone very much, so make someone up, hm?" Paul kisses Kaworu's temple, teasing in only the gentlest of senses.

Kaworu sinks into Paul's arms like a stone into a pond, letting those long limbs envelop him as he sinks to the bottom. He makes a soft sound at the explanation of fathers and sons adding to the soft little chorus of frequencies. He understands that, of course. But he doesn't even know where to begin all the same.

"...I could just respect your father because he's yours."

Paul draws in a slight breath he doesn't need, then squeezes Kaworu so tightly that it must hurt at least a little, a compulsive gesture of closeness. Sometimes love is like that.

"That should do the trick," Paul says, at the same time as the heavy steps of someone striving to be overheard in the forest become audible to him. He gives Kaworu another gentle press against him before gingerly shifting him to sit at his side instead, with an apologetic murmur around his hairline.

He keeps Kaworu close, lacing their fingers together between them, and straightens his spine as his father emerges from the treeline, blinking.

The angel trembles a little at the approach of the tall man and ducks his face down to hide his face in the back of Paul's shoulder. He has reason to fear all men. He has reason to dislike all men. Men were the ones who molded him with such an unkind hand after all. It was one thing to meet Paul's father in a tomb and another in a place that feels very real.

He knows he should show deference to Paul's father, an important man in the universe and even more to the boy he loves. So he forces himself to raise his head and look upwards into those steel gray eyes, peeking out from behind Paul like a fawn in the underbrush.

The quickest path to disarming Duke Leto is to appear before him disarmed yourself. Paul couldn't have coached Kaworu towards a method better suited to soften his father's already gentle regard; Paul would have never asked Kaworu to act frightened.

"Hello," Paul greets his father, his arm firmly around Kaworu's shoulders still, keeping him close and safe, and Leto glances between the two boys and their differing stances. He meets his son's half-protective, half-pleading eyes, and he adjusts the strap of the satchel over his shoulder.

"Hello, Paul," Leto says, kindly, "And hello to...?"

"Kaworu, sir," Paul answers, rubbing a circle on Kaworu's upper arm his father's eyes flit over to track, "He's with me."

"So he is." Leto settles down on a log perpendicular to theirs, a motion Paul is becoming achingly refamiliar with. "It's all right, Kaworu. If my son invited you here, you're my guest as well."

The angel buries his face in Paul's shoulder as if to shut the world out. He wants to. But instead he pulls his face away and lets his eyes pass over Paul's fingers clutching his arm and then over to Paul's determined expression. It makes him want to be good. But he doesn't quite know what that is yet. And he can't bear to call the man "sir".

Desperately he searches for something to say but it feels like trying to grasp a cloud. He sputters out-

"Why are you out here? It's cold. Don't you live in a castle?"

Leto is in the midst of pulling off his gloves with his teeth when Kaworu pipes back up, so his first burst of low, throaty laughter emerges around a knot of leather before his fingers come clear and he pulls the glove from his mouth, eyes crinkled and twinkling with genuine good humour.

"Sometimes a little cold is what you need to clear your head," Leto says, wrapping his packet of fish and wire on his lap, "That, and you can't get stars like this from a castle courtyard."

The lapse in protocol seems to bother him not at all. Paul relaxes some of the protective set of his arm, a minute shift that only Kaworu will be able to notice.

"Do you want a blanket for your legs?" Paul asks, softly.

"I don't like the cold. I grew up with only summer."

Also Paul and Deku hover and concern themselves with him when he gets cold. Kaworu glances sideways at Paul and sinks into his shoulder, making up for the miniscule distance the relaxation created. His red eyes follow Leto's hands as they wrap the packet. The hands are gentle, he can tell. He doesn't know why he expected them to be strict. He offers a small shake of the head to refuse the offer before looking up at the sky.

"Do you do this often?"

"Not from Caladan, I take it," Leto says, as if the fact isn't obvious in the cadence of Kaworu's voice. The duke doesn't quite have his son's ear for accents, but he knows his world well.

"Yes. Whenever we have the chance." Paul fills in, watching alongside Kaworu as his father spears the fish and offers them the ends of skewers. Paul takes both of those intended for him and Kaworu, which raises his father's eyebrows another curious degree.

"Not as often as I'd like." Leto sits back on his log and suspends his fish over the fire, slowly rotating their shiny scales in the smoke. "It's a good place to talk. You know no one is out here listening."

It's probably best for Paul to handle the fish, romantic gesture or not. So Kaworu doesn't think anything of it, he just rests his chin against Paul's bicep and watches his father like with cat-like curiosity but kittenish shyness.

"I see. What do you talk about that requires such privacy?"

"Oh, the usual." Leto shrugs, casually. "Assassinations, coups, religious schisms, secret r- "

"Please," Paul says, in strangled teenage affront, the edge of real panic kept nearly completely out of his voice, "Be serious. We don't talk about any of that. It's only..."

How does he explain father and son talk to Kaworu, who never had one of his own? How does Paul explain it to himself?

"The most important things," Leto supplies, slipping into the gap Paul left, "The ones that are difficult to speak about."

"Like love?"

Kaworu supplies because the other things all sound pretty boring which means they're all probably important to Paul. And he knows parents are supposed to teach their children about the world. And certainly love is part of it.

He wishes someone had taught him about love before he met Paul and Midoriya. Before he met Shinji.

"Like love."

Leto's voice turns softer than it has been yet, the ripple of surprise that comes with the word of a different kind than his initial startled recognition of a newcomer by the fire. His gaze flits to his son, gentle, and somehow (in a flicker of the light, perhaps, or a stray shadow of the moon) slightly bruised.

"Is that what we're talking about now, Paul?"

It's all there's ever been to talk about. Paul feels the tender weight of Kaworu against his side like a command. He meets his father's eyes and nods, once.

"Yes," Paul says, simply.

"Well," Leto says, after a moment, "I suppose that settles which of us you take after."

"Is it your mother? Because you don't look that much alike. You and your father." Kaworu tugs impatiently, demanding, at Paul's sleeve. He's curious and he wants to know the answer. Regardless, he settles into Paul's side, cat-like, all wide eyed and expecting.

"What do you say about love then?"

i know that the sun is here with me | december catch-all

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