The lens through which a thing is examined defines the boundaries of the understanding of the thing. It determines the narrative structure that must be built to establish the scaffolding of any understanding, the story about the thing that allows it to be articulated to the self. The trick of understanding is not perfect knowledge, a stochastic impossibility, but constructing a lens with sufficient practical scope.
Moon-eyed and bewildered, Midoriya so close that the heat of his skin is nearly tangible on Paul's, Paul discovers that he's left something out of the lens.
It had made sense that Midoriya would want to kiss Kaworu. Paul understands the pull he exerts, his heart such a brave and open thing when he trusts you enough to put it in your hands. And he's starting to understand the other kind of appeal in the slim, fey lines of him pressed against his side, barely there friction he wants more of even as he works through this unexpected shift.
But it's not a shift for anyone else. He's the only one who didn't see it, and he doesn't know what that means. He knows he's attractive by almost anyone's standards, and here they are, enmeshed in each other after a morning of flirtation, and he still doesn't understand why Midoriya would want to kiss him. He didn't understand why Kaworu wanted to, still wants to. It's one thing to be welcome as an observer. It's another to be invited in.
(Sometimes he thinks he's missing something from his own lens, that something else hides in the grey shadowed blindspots of his understanding of what he is, something small and human and mundane.)
He makes a fumbling search for Kaworu's hand, lacing their fingers together like he's bracing to jump from the roof with him again. He looks at him through dark and green and pale until he trusts what he sees, and he flits back to Midoriya, a mirror of his uncertainty.
Then he closes his eyes and the distance between them, the kiss soft and careful, as much question as answer: this? he asks, with cracked lips and the faltering of his breathing, with the squeeze of his hand, with me?
no subject
Moon-eyed and bewildered, Midoriya so close that the heat of his skin is nearly tangible on Paul's, Paul discovers that he's left something out of the lens.
It had made sense that Midoriya would want to kiss Kaworu. Paul understands the pull he exerts, his heart such a brave and open thing when he trusts you enough to put it in your hands. And he's starting to understand the other kind of appeal in the slim, fey lines of him pressed against his side, barely there friction he wants more of even as he works through this unexpected shift.
But it's not a shift for anyone else. He's the only one who didn't see it, and he doesn't know what that means. He knows he's attractive by almost anyone's standards, and here they are, enmeshed in each other after a morning of flirtation, and he still doesn't understand why Midoriya would want to kiss him. He didn't understand why Kaworu wanted to, still wants to. It's one thing to be welcome as an observer. It's another to be invited in.
(Sometimes he thinks he's missing something from his own lens, that something else hides in the grey shadowed blindspots of his understanding of what he is, something small and human and mundane.)
He makes a fumbling search for Kaworu's hand, lacing their fingers together like he's bracing to jump from the roof with him again. He looks at him through dark and green and pale until he trusts what he sees, and he flits back to Midoriya, a mirror of his uncertainty.
Then he closes his eyes and the distance between them, the kiss soft and careful, as much question as answer: this? he asks, with cracked lips and the faltering of his breathing, with the squeeze of his hand, with me?