rabenhorst | (no subject)

Title: You Make Me Happy
Author:

fonulyn
Rating: PG
Pairing: Toshiya/Die
Disclaimer: I own no one, only my dirty imagination.
Summary: What has been the happiest moment of your life? It turns out that the question is surprisingly hard to answer, at least to Die. And not because he wouldn’t come up with happy moments. But because he has too much to choose from.
Comments:

fonulyn: This was written on a beautiful prompt, and honestly speaking I really am proud of how it turned out. I don’t even really know why, but it feels kinda special to me and reading it again makes me smile at least :) So as today I was in need for something nice and happy, I thought I’d share it with you too! Besides, since

diextoshiyalove doesn’t have its own advent-event, I wanted to give at least a small treat in form of a ficcie. I hope you enjoy!

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Plus, the archive.

You Make Me Happy

It was a typical boring Monday evening show, and actually Die wasn’t even really watching it. He had just been too lazy to get up and reach for the remote so he should switch off the TV. Slowly, he was flipping through a magazine that rested on his lap, curled in the furthermost corner of his slightly worn couch. Until, suddenly, something caught his attention. He raised his gaze up to look straight at the TV screen, and he could’ve sworn that his heart missed several beats.

“What has been the happiest moment of your life?”

The question made Die stop. He didn’t even realize that on the show, a young woman with an annoyingly high-pitched voice was giving her answer, because he was so focused on the question itself. What had been the happiest moment of his life? At first his thoughts were rushing, like a herd of sheep running from a wolf so fast they were tripping over each other and everything turned into a blurry mess. Thousands of small glimpses were flashing through his mind, and he couldn’t catch a single one of them as they slipped through his fingers every time he tried to reach out for them.

He closed his eyes, the magazine on his lap long forgotten, and after taking a deep breath his racing mind was beginning to calm down. The images began to form, get clear, and somehow he wasn’t surprised of the content. There was one special person dominating his thoughts, and it instantly made Die smile as he knew he should’ve expected that.

The happiest moment of your life.

His eyes were still closed as he leaned back, just relaxed and allowed his mind to take over. Take him to the happiest moments he had ever experienced. And the first thing he thought of was chocolate brownies.

Somehow, Die had managed to catch the cold of the century. Never in his life had he felt so incredibly sick, his head close to exploding every time he took a breath, nausea making it impossible for him to even sleep at nights. At first he had been grateful that the band was on break, since that gave him almost a week to just recover and sleep it off. It turned out, though, that a week wasn’t even nearly enough. A week later he was still coughing up a lung several times a day, couldn’t taste anything, not that he would’ve even had the appetite to eat in the first place.

The red of his hair was even fading, and when he dragged himself to the bathroom he stood endless minutes in front of the mirror just watching himself, how he almost looked like he was withering away. He was turning from a vibrant colour painting to an aged black and white newspaper picture. He didn’t like it all. Frustrated, he simply headed back to bed to get some more sleep, after calling Kaoru to let him know he couldn’t make it to work for a few days still. It shouldn’t be that big of a problem, they were only beginning to record their second real album, so in the beginning his presence wouldn’t be irreplaceable.

Next thing Die noticed was that he woke up to an unfamiliar sound. At an instant he was wide awake, lying on his back and holding his breath as he just listened. There it was again. There was someone else in the apartment in addition to him. Cursing under his breath, Die quickly sat up only to notice that it hadn’t been such a great idea. His head was hammering, felt like it would just crack open any second, and he almost felt like passing out as the blackness was lingering on the edges of his vision. Finally he got a grip though, and impatiently unwrapped himself from the blanket that had been twined around his long, lean legs.

He only pulled on worn tracksuit pants, in addition to the t-shirt he had already been wearing, and slowly stalked towards the kitchen where the sounds seemed to be coming from. He had no idea what anyone would want from his kitchen, or his apartment in general since the most valuable thing he owned was his guitar and he kept it in his small bedroom. He didn’t even own a TV right now, and thus the thought of a burglar just seemed all too absurd. Especially when there was a pair of shoes discarded somewhere close to the front door, a pair of very familiar looking shoes at that.

Die’s fever-hazed mind hadn’t yet managed to piece together the familiarity of those shoes and who they might remind him of, when he finally stepped into the kitchen only to freeze in the doorframe. Toshiya. It was his friend and the bassist of their band, standing in the middle of the kitchen with huge red kettle gloves in his hands and a messy apron tied on his waist. His hair was sticking up, some flour stuck on his cheek and the kitchen didn’t look much better, almost like someone had just dropped a bomb there. Yet, Toshiya was smiling so brightly that it was impossible to be mad at him, just impossible.

Before Die even had the time to ask anything, Toshiya quickly bent down to get something from the oven. Curiously, the older man leaned forward, a dozen of questions already on the verge of spilling from his lips, but he only got shooed out of the kitchen and back to the living room. Toshiya even made sure that he sat on the couch, and wrapped a fluffy blanket around him to keep him warm. Afterwards he bounced back into the kitchen, returning a moment later with two mugfuls of hot chocolate and a big plate.

Chocolate brownies. He had baked brownies and cut them into big heart-shaped pieces. Now the pile of brownies was placed right under Die’s nose, and he couldn’t help but to smile as he took one. He couldn’t smell anything, much less taste anything as the cold had made sure of that.

Yet, those were the best brownies he had ever gotten.

Thinking of that moment still made Die smile and remember how Toshiya had promised him he would bake him more brownies once he could actually taste them and enjoy them properly. It hadn’t been an empty promise and even now, ten years later, the bassist would at times decide that now it was time for more chocolate brownies. Heart shaped ones. Die had already almost decided that he had found the happiest moment of his life, but then his mind drifted further and into another memory he held dear.

It was their first real tour in Europe, in a city Die couldn’t have even named as he had long ago gotten mixed up with all these foreign names and pronunciations. It was new, it was exciting and they enjoyed every single day in a whole new level. At the same time it was tiring, both mentally and physically, and a part of Die was already waiting for the moment when they would finally go back home again. Back to a language he understood without troubles, back to familiar places, back to routines he was familiar with. It wasn’t that he didn’t like travelling and new experiences, he was simply beginning to be tired about it all.

That was when they stayed in a hotel and had to share rooms. They were told that they should pair up since there wasn’t even one single room available in the hotel, some of the rooms even with double beds. Like naturally, Die had paired up with Toshiya in the lobby, and when they headed to their room together it became very clear that they had indeed gotten a room with only a double bed instead of two separate ones. A small double bed. They had shared a room before, no problem, sometimes they had even slept in the same bed when they had both been drunk enough to drop. The problem now, was that neither of them was drunk. It made Die feel a little awkward and he hesitated a little when he approached the bed.

Toshiya obviously noticed the hesitation in his friend, and thus didn’t waste a single second before taking action. In one huge leap he was standing on the bed, only to throw his bag somewhere to the floor heedlessly so he could grab a pillow instead. Grinning, he gestured for the guitarist to follow suit, explaining everything shortly and effectively.

“Pillow fight!”

Die didn’t even have the time to react to the words in any way, before a big fluffy pillow hit him straight on his face, forcing all air from his lungs as he was so effectively taken by surprise. Instinctively he grabbed the pillow, laughing as he realized that the bassist indeed was being serious about that. Or serious as in, how serious can you be about a pillow fight? Toshiya released a loud war-cry, throwing another pillow at his friend only to then notice that it had left him completely unarmed. With malicious grin, the older man of course took the opportunity given to him so he could attack the younger one mercilessly.

It was only half an hour later when they stopped, lying beside each other on their completely messed up bed, so out of breath that neither of them could even speak a single word. They were both grinning though, their eyes sparkling, and nothing felt awkward any longer. After a while Toshiya naturally reached out his hand only to grab Die’s, twining their fingers in a familiar gesture.

That night they both slept well.

That night also marked something that Die liked to think as a new era in their lives. Somehow it had brought them closer, as silly as it might sound, and afterwards they had always volunteered to room together, even secretly hoping for a double bed and some new pillow fights that never came. It wasn’t that they would’ve suddenly changed drastically, or that they would’ve jumped from one situation to another. It simply was a smooth transition, something that developed with time and something they both enjoyed equally well. Neither of them really noticed when they went from friendly chats to flirting, from flirting to making out, from making out to actually living together.

Their lives might not have been straight from a storybook romance, but that didn’t mean that it was any less perfect for them. Somewhere in the dead of night Die wrote long letters where he told the younger man what was going on in his head, but he never sent those. He didn’t have to. Toshiya was able to read his mind anyways, always seemed to be on the same wavelength. So the evening they first slept in their common apartment, together and knowing that this was something major, Die decided to burn those letters.

Who needed words when there was something special like the bond they shared?

The special bond had already started with their first kiss. They were out drinking with their bandmates, all five of them getting more or less plastered. They were chatting and laughing, telling jokes and feeling more relaxed than in ages. When Toshiya was drunk his hands began to wander and before Die even noticed it, there was a palm resting on his thigh, stroking slowly through the fabric of his jeans. The touch was innocent enough, and yet there was something so suggestive in it that it had instantly managed to make Die blush.

Later that evening they were left alone in the table for a moment and Toshiya kissed him.

It took a few heartbeats before the realization struck Die that Toshiya was actually really kissing him. His scent was so close, closer than ever before, he tasted of mint and cigarettes and alcohol, his lips were a little bit dry and the way he moved his tongue was somewhere between bold and tentative, almost suggestive. Die could feel his head spin and there was no way he wouldn’t make the most of that moment. A little too hastily he moved in to deepen the kiss, tilting his head and moving closer to the bassist, and somehow in the process he managed to bite his lower lip.

It made Toshiya laugh and he pulled back, automatically wiping his lips with the back of his hand to see just how much damage the other man had done with his eagerness. Die already opened his mouth to apologize, but was cut off by a set of soft lips landing on his own again.

That definitely wasn’t the last kiss they shared that night.

The more Die thought of the happiest moment of his life, the more convinced he was that such thing did not exist. There wasn’t one single incident that had made him happier than anything else. Dozens of nice memories flashed by his mind already when he as much as began to think of it, almost all of them connected to Toshiya one way or another. There was a boring interview where Toshiya had slipped him a small note, telling him he loved him or telling him he had already made nice plans for the evening once they would be free again. There was a note that the bassist hastily scribbled over his own fingers in the lack of paper, just to tell Die he had missed him.

There was a spontaneous roadtrip they had taken when Toshiya decided at 4 am that he wanted to go see the city lights. Not the lights of the city they lived in, no, but one at the opposite side of the whole country. They had been sleeping in the car and just living on love and life. There were home cooked meals when Toshiya had felt like playing a super-chef, while Die wasn’t even allowed into the kitchen except for to grab a beer from the fridge or to throw a frozen pizza into the oven. Any other kind of cooking always led to him being hazardous to both himself and to others, so handling sharp objects was forbidden for him.

In short, Die’s whole life was filled with moments he had enjoyed to the fullest, and he simply couldn’t pick one that would’ve fit the description of being the best moment of his life.

When he thought it couldn’t get any better, it always did.

The best moment of his life was defined again every single time Toshiya looked him in the eye.