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 Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2021 6:16 pm
“Where did you get those?”
Lovely was beginning to feel like he might be a little oblivious.
Not about the important things; there were certain fundamentals about life that were obvious and unavoidable, except by the truly inept, which he was not. He wasn’t like his mother, who often feigned ignorance, nor was he unintelligent despite the few oddities that could be found in his education. Lovely was knowledgeable, perceptive, and generally well-informed.
Which was why it kept coming as a shock to him when he noticed things about Ilian a little late in the game.
“When did you get those?”
It wasn’t that Lovely didn’t pay attention. He did. All the time. He knew Ilian backwards and forwards and upside-down. He knew all the bland, boring minutiae of Ilian’s life, from which messy, lazy habits he couldn’t quite kick, to his food preferences, from his daily routines, to his hopes and dreams for the Negaverse. Even when it came to topics Ilian didn’t often discuss, such as his parents, his older brother, and much of his past prior to the age of fourteen, Lovely still knew, to an extent, what Ilian had been through, and how those things made Ilian feel.
But, much like the sudden realization that other people found Ilian attractive, there were times when Lovely all of a sudden recognized something about Ilian that had been staring him in the face all along.
“How did you get those?” Lovely sputtered, his intense stare locked on Ilian’s briefly exposed abdomen.
They got coffee together on Saturday mornings, always from the same little café a block out two outside their neighborhood. They’d jog after, because… Actually, Lovely didn’t really know why. They did it one morning, and it was a tolerable way to pass the time, and Ilian seemed alright with it, maybe even liked it, so they kept doing it when the weather permitted, and Lovely chose not to complain because he liked doing things with Ilian, and he liked feeling like Ilian liked doing things with him.
So. They were jogging. Then they weren’t, because it was hot as ******** and they stopped for water. They were both sweating, so Lovely wasn’t exactly surprised when Ilian pulled up his shirt to wipe at his face, but because he was already staring at Ilian and thinking about how he normally hated jogging but didn’t mind it with Ilian, he had another one of those moments when he noticed something he’d technically already noticed — given that they lived together and touched one another and… other things — but hadn’t truly processed until that very moment.
Since when did Ilian, once a short, undernourished twerp, have abs?
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Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2021 5:41 pm
”Huh?” he blinked.
Ilian had no idea what Lovely was talking about. Nothing about him was new. He was wearing the same clothes he always wore (until Lovely bought him new clothes because he was too thrifty to bother with getting new clothes for himself). He had the same shoes he’d worn every time they went jogging. He had the same haircut as he always did, although he had a headband that held his stupidly curly hair back and out of his face.
It wasn’t until he lowered his shirt from rubbing at his face did he realize Lovely was staring at his stomach. He frowned and looked down at himself, not thinking there was much of anything for Lovely to be fussing about. He certainly didn’t look like he belonged in some fashion magazine. He wasn’t broad shouldered, and he was still growing into the height he’d gained over the past year.
“My abs?” he continued to frown, pulling his shirt decisively back down. “I don’t know. When did we start jogging?”
He watched Lovely cautiously, now using his sleeve to rub at his face because he didn’t want Lovely ogling him and then getting all uppity about things that he really didn’t need to get uppity about.
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Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2021 6:04 pm
Lovely sputtered.
Truly, there was no other appropriate reaction.
Ilian had abs. Defined abs. They were visible and… and there! They’d obviously been there for quite some time, too. One didn’t just have defined abs one day. It would have been a gradual process, which might explain why Lovely hadn’t thought to point them out before, why it hadn’t registered in his brain that Ilian suddenly had abs, because it wasn’t sudden at all.
Certainly Lovely saw them before, touched them, knew of their existence in the same way he knew of Ilian’s curls, but his brain had not acknowledged the difference between twenty-two year old adult Ilian with abs and short, scrawny teen Ilian without abs until… well, until now.
“I… When did we…?”
Complete sentences escaped him at the moment. Lovely shook his head, like he could somehow get his brain working again if he rattled it around enough.
“I’m pretty sure you don’t get abs from jogging,” he said when he could make himself speak again, staring at Ilian’s abdomen even with Ilian’s shirt lowered, like he could see through the material, or couldn’t tear his eyes away. “You have to do crunches, and… planks, and… that sort of stuff. Eat healthy...”
Which they’d been doing since last summer, more or less, once Lovely had access to his trust fund.
The eating, not the crunches and the planks, at least in Lovely’s case.
“And... lots of protein,” he finished lamely. “You don’t just get abs like that by accident.”
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Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2021 6:29 pm
The sputtering wasn’t necessary, or at least that was what Ilian thought. His eyebrows furrowed a little, wary about what Lovely was stumbling over his words about. It really wasn’t that big of a deal, in Ilian’s opinion.
“I started using the gym equipment we have downstairs when we started jogging,” he explained, although he thought Lovely knew that. Or maybe he didn’t. Ilian did usually work out when Lovely was at work. Now that he actually had time to take care of himself and his body. Eating healthy was weird after eating just enough to get by for years of his life.
He felt physically better, at least. Like he actually had real energy and not just forcing his body to process what was put into it.
After a moment, a small grin found its way onto his face as he decided that he was amused by Lovely’s reaction. “Do you want me to flex, too?” Because just having abs was stupid.
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Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2021 2:20 pm
Lovely sputtered again, because it was entirely necessary.
“Do I want you to what?”
Ilian was poking fun at him; Lovely was certain of it. Something about his reaction was amusing to Ilian, whether it was the sputtering or the gawking or the shock, Lovely didn’t know, but he knew he didn’t like it.
What did Ilian have to flex? His arms?
Okay, well, yes, his arms did look a little more toned than they had last year. Lovely checked, tearing his eyes away from Ilian’s abdomen so he could stare at his arms instead. They were nice arms. Very fit. Not bulky, but no longer the gangly things they used to be either. That must have been gradual, too. Obviously. Toned arms were a lot like abs; they didn’t just sprout up at random.
Lovely looked from Ilian’s arms, to his own. Upper body strength wasn’t his forté. It didn’t used to be Ilian’s either.
What did he need muscles for anyway???
“What the ********…” Lovely said, a little quiet, a little breathless, a little rattled.
He could feel another crisis coming on.
Perhaps it was already upon him.
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Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2021 7:09 pm
Ilian snorted softly, clearly amused by Lovely’s reaction, but didn’t make a big deal about it. He had no idea that Lovely hadn’t noticed already. It wasn’t as though he announced that he was working out while Lovely was at work, but surely Lovely would have felt them? Maybe not.
“Breathe. It’s not that big a deal,” he said as he did not flex, but instead wiped at his face again before taking another quick sip of water.
Or at least Ilian didn’t think it was that big of a deal. But he was a General, and while he had magical strength, he didn’t want to be caught off guard by a senshi that decided to attack him. And if anything happened to him or Lovely as civilians, he wanted to be able to do something.
“Do you want to look at my legs too?” he outright teased now, because it was amusing to see Lovely speechless like this. He held out his leg to show off a calf, just because.
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Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:13 pm
“Do I want to look at your—”
Lovely cut himself off, both because there was no point in repeating Ilian’s question back to him, and because he had no appropriate answer except to gawk and sputter more. His eyes dropped to Ilian’s calf; it was there and it looked very nice, so it’d be a shame to let the offer go to waste, but he only stared for a few seconds at most before lifting his gaze to meet Ilian’s eye.
He would glare in disapproval if his brain wasn’t spiraling.
The worst part of it all was that Ilian looked good. Like this. He looked good like this. Lovely thought Ilian looked good the way he used to be, too, but he’d also always thought there might be some emotional bias there. From the beginning, his affection (gross) for Ilian had been based on their connection, on their shared experiences. Ilian’s appearance was secondary. He was attractive because Lovely cared for him (yuck); otherwise, Lovely never would have bothered to look enough to deem him cute.
Other people noticed Ilian, especially now. Lovely noticed people noticing. Not at this very moment (they’d stopped in a relatively unpopulated area, surrounded by more trees than people), but often, when they were out, people looked.
And Lovely felt…
Well, he felt not good enough. It didn’t matter that he didn’t measure up physically anymore; he could solve that discrepancy if he wanted to. It mattered that Ilian was friendly and attractive, and Lovely, while undeniably gorgeous, was a b***h. The moment he opened his mouth to talk was when most people decided a slim body and a pretty face wasn’t worth the aggravation.
Most people. But not Ilian.
Not yet, anyway.
“Why the ******** are you—” Lovely cut himself off again, suddenly conscious of being too hostile. He paused to take a breath, held it until the irritability eased, then let the air gust out and asked, “Why did you start… this?”
He waved a hand around, indicating the whole of Ilian’s body.
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Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:50 pm
The hostility was enough to have Ilian backing off with the teasing. He didn’t mean anything by it, he just thought it was amusing that Lovely took it so seriously that he only just noticed that Ilian had been working out.
“I was tired of feeling like I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to like how I looked. I don’t know,” he shrugged. He wasn’t a vain person, and that was pretty obvious in the way he dressed. He was so used to just wearing what he had for years that he didn’t bother developing a style or whatever it was that people thought were important.
But he had been harassed his whole life about how he looked. From his curly hair to his darker than caucasian skin to his random dark freckles that dotted here and there. He’d been small and scrawny, and he wanted something different, especially now that he was taller.
“Does it bother you?” he asked, not liking that he felt self conscious after finally feeling decent about himself, but Lovely was his partner, and it was only fair that he had a say in what happened, he supposed.
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Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2021 6:39 pm
“Of course it doesn’t bother me,” Lovely said, aware all the while that he sounded bothered.
It had nothing to do with how Ilian looked and everything to do with how people would look at him — and a little to do with Ilian’s answer, which touched at Lovely’s guilty conscience, so often buried beneath the rest of him that it only really came out when Ilian was involved.
Was it his fault that Ilian felt like he couldn’t do anything, that he didn’t like the way he looked? Lovely did have a habit of snarking at him and contradicting him and pointing out displeasing aspects of his appearance, which were few and far between these days, but he had harassed Ilian about taking care of his hair before, and he commented on Ilian’s clothing every time Ilian outgrew something. Hell, one of their first interactions at the age of fourteen had involved Lovely shoving one of his own suits at Ilian and telling him to “wear something nicer” at one of their recitals because “you should respect your talent instead of going on stage looking like you rolled out of the trash.”
Lovely paled at the memory.
Compliments did not come as easily to him as insults, but... should he try?
Clearing his throat, Lovely snatched the water from Ilian simply to have something to do, sipping at it while he forced himself to mumble, “You look good.”
Frustratingly, his cheeks rapidly filled with color.
“You know, if the s**t I say makes you feel bad, you can tell me to shut the ******** up,” Lovely continued. He turned his head to stare off into the trees, but kept flicking his gaze back toward Ilian every few seconds. “You look good, I just… I noticed before, but didn’t really notice, because…”
Lovely shrugged, unable to put it into words.
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Posted: Mon Aug 09, 2021 6:00 pm
“I’m not going to tell you to shut up,” Ilian frowned, his eyebrows knit together in confusion. “I don’t care what you say. I don’t really care what anyone else says. It’s just… grating, you know? Like, after a while it becomes your identity, and I don’t want being a nobody to become my identity.”
He was aware he probably made no sense at all, but he also didn’t know how to make it clear to Lovely that he could tell him whatever he wanted and Ilian wouldn’t say anything about it.
“It doesn’t make me feel bad, it just… becomes a part of me, I guess. I don’t know what I’m talking about. But,” he paused, because it was his turn to look away and stare off into the trees. “Thanks. I was wondering if you noticed, but I thought maybe you just didn’t care, but. Thanks.”
His cheeks felt warm but only because it was from the sun and from running, that was all. “You look good too. I mean, I’ve always liked how you look, so,” he shrugged. “I thought you looked like an angel when we first met. And then you opened your mouth and I really don’t think angels should be saying the things you said.”
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Posted: Mon Aug 16, 2021 6:56 pm
Something heavy and vital sank from Lovely’s chest into his stomach. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe, thrown back to dinner with his mother and older brothers, suffering their stares and their judgement and all their bullshit assumptions.
I don’t want being a nobody to become my identity.
It was Ilian’s identity, in a way, whether he wanted it to be or not. He was one person in a world of billions. Other than Lovely, Ilian had no family. As far as Lovely was aware, Ilian had no history. If the Negaverse brought about his premature end, Ilian would have no future.
“I always care,” Lovely mumbled, gaze lowered to the ground.
He cared far more than he wanted to admit. He cared so much it kept him up at night, tossing and turning with anxiety and fear, touching Ilian just to reassure himself that Ilian was still there; then, when he finally fell asleep, the nightmares came, dark dreams of blood and death and loneliness. He cared so much he didn’t have any words adequate enough to explain the extent of it, because no one else meant to him what Ilian did.
“I’m…” A terrible person, he wanted to say. Certainly not an angel.
“You’ve tolerated me for years,” Lovely said instead. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, held the water bottle with both hands to keep them occupied, looked at the dirt path because honesty made him too uneasy to look at Ilian. “When we were younger, when you got hurt, you would come to me, and I… I wasn’t always nice, but you still…”
He still threw pebbles at Lovely’s window.
“I never said it, but… it meant a lot to me. So, I’m just… I’m trying to say that… you’ve never been a nobody to me.”
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Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 5:51 am
Ilian knew it was difficult for Lovely to talk about things like feelings. So for him to tell Ilian that he always cared and to bring up how when they were younger that he wasn’t always nice was something of a surprise.
“You didn’t tell me not to,” Ilian pointed out. Otherwise he might not have shown up to ask for help when he got hurt. And had the same frozen bag of peas thrown at him and told not to bleed on the floor and given a first aid kit but never actually helped with getting his bandages on. Lovely would watch, but Ilian didn’t know much about patching himself up back then. It never turned out well, but thankfully he never seemed to stay injured for long.
“I’m sorry I got you in trouble with your family. I know it wasn’t me, but they never exactly liked me. Not your brothers at least.” Probably due to the fact that he was a nobody, showing up at all hours of the night to throw rocks at Lovely's window.
Except to Lovely. Which caused the corners of Ilian’s mouth to twitch into a smile.
“I know. And I didn’t just tolerate you. I liked being around you. I didn’t care if you were mean, because I could tell that you cared. At least somewhat. You would let me borrow your suits for recitals and you definitely didn’t have to do that. But you did.”
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Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:26 am
Lovely allowed himself to feel uncomfortably warm and uncharacteristically soft inside for about five seconds, before he told himself the warmth was from the heat of the sun and the softness was uncalled for.
He wanted to say something snarky to get them back on normal footing, maybe take the opening Ilian provided by bringing up the suits and their recitals again to joke about how humiliating it would have been to continue to earn his spot as runner up next to a delinquent from Hillworth. Only it wasn’t a joke, because Lovely had been humiliated, had shoved a suit at Ilian for that very reason. He felt guilty for it now, just a little, enough that his stomach turned and he couldn’t meet Ilian’s eye when he thought about how awful he’d been as a teenager.
Still was awful, sometimes. Certainly not worth the trouble Ilian went through in dealing with thim.
Ilian stuck around. Dealt with Lovely’s moods. Said he cared, blurted it out in Negaspace like he couldn’t hold it in any longer. You know I love you, right?
Lovely put his hand on Ilian’s arm, stared very hard at the dark freckle near Ilian’s eye instead of looking him in the eye directly.
“Don’t apologize,” Lovely mumbled. “I’d leave my family a hundred times over if it meant—”
Too much, the discomfort in his brain told him. Abort, abort. Lovely tried to ignore it, tried to finish the thought, but the discomfort won the way it always did, and he was left floundering for something else to say.
He settled with action instead of words. Lovely stepped closer, pressed the briefest of kisses against Ilian’s cheek, near the freckle he used as a focal point, then turned to run off before Ilian could do or say anything else, pretending the heat in his cheeks was a sunburn and the fluttering in his stomach was nausea instead of butterflies.
“I’ll leave you behind if you don’t hurry up!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Stop staring at my a** and let’s go! This heat is disgusting!”
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Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:08 am
He could see the thoughts turning over in Lovely’s head, could see it in the way he refused to make eye contact with him, but still touched his arm. Ilian felt himself holding his breath when Lovely told him not to apologize. That he would leave his family a hundred times over it if meant--
What? To be with him?
Ilian would blame the heat of the day for the pink in his cheeks.
He was both disappointed and relieved when Lovely followed up his thoughts with a kiss to his cheek. He didn’t know if he was ready to process Lovely actually talking about his feelings, but he could appreciate the kiss. Maybe one day they would be able to be open with each other. But since they both knew how the other felt, it didn’t really matter, did it?
“I don’t know, you’re a pretty fast jogger,” he said after him as a grin twitched onto his lips, absolutely purposefully lagging behind just a bit so he could stare at Lovely’s a**, because why not?
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