It's Valentine's Day in eight minutes. That gives Deidara plenty of time to finish painting the terracotta pot of some sort of succulent that looked pretty and unlike any other littering the apartment. Paint covers his fingers and sticks under his nails in a sea of pinks, blues, and yellows, but the end result - a custom pot, just for Gaara - is worth it.
Gaara notices the little things first.
He notices pop hits on the radio. Over the course of his time with Deidara the banal, meaningless drivel, nothing but auto-tuned lyrics marketed for the clueless masses, begins to seep into his long drives with lovestruck insidiousness until he knows enough of the lyrics to cringe after the first few decadent chords.
He notices as he settles on the couch for movie night, nestled against Deidara’s chest with a blanket drawn over them both, and is able to recognize the dizzy, tingling sensation in the pit of his stomach as something other than nausea.
He notices, as the train jostles him against hundreds of sweaty and smelly bodies on his commute home from work, how his desire for a high is nearly matched by his desire for that sharp tongue and golden hair and fingers flecked with clay, where the very concept of home had ceased to be define by four shrinking walls in his brother’s cramped Queens apartment and had instead become a living, breathing person.
He notices, and he begins to imagine, in his dreams, in the periphery of his vision, a world beyond the bus schedule or texts from his dealer and into the next weeks and next months, into not merely a reluctantly inevitable future, but a better one, one shaped concretely by his own hands instead of letting himself fall into the fog of time that had swallowed more regrettable years than he could count.
He knows what it means, he realizes, late one night with his partner’s breath catching the curve of his ear, with a cold foot stroking the back of his calf in an act more intimate than any sex he’s ever had. Knows it and shoves it deep into the recesses of his mind, where it festers like the corpse of a rat rotting in the wall on a hot summer’s day. It does not fade there and it does not wither. His subconscious acts as a fertilizer and with every beat of his heart the it, the unnameable, thrives with an incessant need he did not know he possessed. As the holiday of romance and sweets rears its head for the third time since these young men first met Gaara greets it with greater disdain than ever before, like one might regard an acquaintance after a difficult disagreement.
On the day itself he examines the pot with a keen eye and the soft smile to which only Deidara is privy - barely there, hidden, as though he expects to bring trouble simply for simply experiencing the affection that roots it. The bold streaks of the brush and the the bright, eclectic colors are everything Gaara is not, and for this reason he finds himself afraid to let it slip from his grasp, even simply to set it down.
“I didn’t get anything for you.” The same rare hesitance emerges again as he struggles to unwind his thoughts into a single, untangled thread, struggles still to force them out, treading a minefield of new territory. “But there’s somewhere I want to take you. On the first week of March, when you’re on break.”
