Silence
It was snowing outside, and Tatsumi watched it from the balcony of his apartment, steam curling from the cup of tea he was holding in one hand.
Tatsumi liked snow. It reminded him of Tsuzuki.
They hadn’t been partners for very long when they had gotten caught in a snowstorm while on a case. Tatsumi had come back from the reconnaissance he had been doing to find Tsuzuki standing outside their hotel, watching the snowflakes swirl in the light from the nearby street.
“What are you doing, standing out here in the cold?” Tatsumi had asked. He had been growing accustomed to having to shepherd Tsuzuki sometimes, as if he were an idiot child.
“I like snow,” Tsuzuki had said. “It’s so quiet.”
Tatsumi had stood with him for a minute, only half-understanding. It was true that snow made things quiet. The inches piling up on the ground muffled all noise. Snow had a special kind of quiet to it. Not a crushing, ringing silence. Just a soft, gentle absence of noise.
Tatsumi knew that silence could be a terrible thing. The silence after an argument. Silence after someone’s soul had departed. Silence that came when two people simply did not understand each other and could not communicate. Standing there, watching Tsuzuki watch the snow, he wondered what kind of silence Tsuzuki considered his own. Tatsumi knew that most of the other Shinigami considered him not only reserved and aloof, but difficult to talk to.
Tsuzuki had a silence of his own. Tatsumi had noticed that it struck at odd moments. He could be bubbly and silly one moment, but the next he had a faraway look in his eyes, and his torrent of words would gradually diminish until he was simply sitting, not saying a word. Tatsumi hated it when he did that. He didn’t know what to do about it, how to deal with it.
That, of course, had been years before.
Tatsumi had learned how to deal with Tsuzuki’s noise and with Tsuzuki’s silences, and even if he wasn’t always comfortable with the way things were between them, he was learning to accept it. And Tsuzuki had learned him, as well. They had learned when the quiet was good and when it was horrible, and they knew when to speak and when to enjoy the silence between them.
He startled a little when he felt a touch on his shoulder, and glanced to one side to see Tsuzuki resting his chin against him. He arched an eyebrow at the other Shinigami. “How did you know I’d be out here?”
“You always are, when it snows,” Tsuzuki said.
Tatsumi sipped his tea. “I suppose.”
“I like snow,” Tsuzuki said. “It reminds me of you.”
They stood and watched the snow fall, wrapped in a silence that was all their own.