Fulcrum
As much as he hates to admit it, even to himself, he's come to rely on the General in a thousand small ways, as a friend, caretaker, comrade-in-arms, secretary and political tool. It's ironic, really, that the rumors placed him in the role of wife when Kenren was the one who kept house. He could find things in his office now. It would be distressing if he weren't so fascinatingly capricious, if he didn't imbue the buzzing silence of the palaces and halls, the sakuras and the water gardens, with something close to life.
Love is a mortal emotion. In Heaven there is only enmity and alliance, interest or the lack thereof and the boredom which accretes in layers on anything unchanging. He himself hasn't ever changed, nor have the General's exploits, if off-color barroom stories can be trusted. Since the day Kenren Taisho had woken him from a sound sleep to report for duty there had been nothing between them but increasing awareness of what was already there.
Even if the General is beautiful in his feral, slightly tawdry way; even if Tenpou has never matched another person like this before, not even Konzen whose company he still enjoys after millennia, nothing can grow between them. They can only discover each other once. No matter how well a key fits a lock, they will wear each other out given time.
The reason the rumors grate on him, that Litouten's knowing smirk was more intolerable than his unsubtle swat to Tenpou's masculinity, is precisely because it's not true. The more often he hears that he's fucking his General, the more he wishes he was or could be. But by now he knows that there isn't enough space in him for someone else, that sex, even just the admission of desire speeds any relationship to its inevitable conclusion.
In a place where there is no death, a loss of significance is the only destruction.
And anyway, who was it that said the sweetest moment is that of anticipation?
~*~
Had he been able to think back on it later, he might have recognized that night as the fulcrum. Not as the butterfly's wing that began the earthquake; no, the ovum of their ultimate act of desperation was the moment he unearthed Tenpou's beautiful face from the strata of his books, the urgent memo from his loins to his brain (or was it the other way around?) that This One Needed Him Badly.
No one else had ever needed him quite like Tenpou's mouth on his that night. And if there was a certain chill to the Marshal that evening, if, in the set of his jaw and the line of his brow lurked that same look of stubborn, subtly desperate decision he wore when he tried to subdue an army of youkai unaided, Kenren's concern was quickly washed away by his ardent response to the Marshal's need.
Whatever else could be said about him, he was a helpful kind of guy.
