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The first time Saejima touches him, Majima feels like screaming. Panickedly considers the option of just jumping out the open window and splattering forty stories down.
Being grabbed by the knees and slammed face first into a chain link fence he can take. Being punched until his ears ring, he deserves it.
But this soft touch, Saejima’s massive hands on his hips, warm through the damp terrycloth of his bathrobe, are too much. He knows he’s been sidestepping him too much, and that’s how they ended up like this, sleepily face to face in the kitchen, Saejima searching for his eye with endless patience.
Majima has just slowly started to accept he doesn’t deserve to die for what he’s done. He’s not sure he can be convinced that his brother could, or should, settle for what little is left of the man he was sworn to. He can’t possibly live up to the Majima in Saejima’s heart, and they should accept that before anybody gets his hopes up.
“Hey. You gonna keep avoidin’ me or what.”
After twenty years of dealing with Kiryu-chan’s complex vocabulary of silences and minute expression changes, it’s a shock to the system to be reunited with the most direct, no-nonsense person he’s ever known. He’s even less inclined to bullshit than he was when they got separated. He lost so much time. So much.
Majima owes him this, at least.
“Sorry. Just...overwhelmed.”
Saejima’s hands slide off his hips. Majima can breathe a little better but he’s still considering running away.
“I don’t mind if ya don’t want me that way anymore, bro,” says Saejima. “I saw the way ya and Kiryu look at each other.”
Are they that obvious? Shit.
“It’s not that.” He spent twenty five years yearning for Saejima’s weight over him, his big hands, his brash needy kisses. Even when he was too far gone in his own drugged up trauma and ended up hurting himself with those fantasies, even when they turned sick and twisted and violent, he still wanted him. He spent a long time trying to find him in Kiryu, and an equally long time trying not to forget him when he found Kiryu in there instead, just as beautiful.
“Ya gonna start with that not deserving it shit again?”
They had a long discussion about this, after Yasuko’s real funeral. Majima finally mentioned anagura, and the horror in Saejima’s eyes made him feel nauseous. He doesn’t want him to be sorry for what happened to him. He doesn’t want him to regret what he did even more.
Majima sighs, dropping his head on Saejima’s big chest. His heart is hammering. He’s nervous, like the teenager he was when all of this hadn’t gotten between them. “I don’t think you deserve this, bro. I’m not the guy you knew anymore. There ain’t much left of that guy.”
“There’s at least an eye left,” he mutters, palm cupping his undercut, one finger under the eyepatch strap. Majima tilts his head a little, letting him pull it off.
When he looks up Saejima’s got that soft, warm smile on his face that makes his knees go wobbly, even thirty years later. He’d do anything for this smile. He’d go back to the hole for two decades for this smile.
Saejima kisses his missing eye. Majima can’t breathe.
He knows it’s gross. The butchers who stuck a white hot iron into his destroyed socket weren’t exactly thinking of his looks, just of keeping him alive to suffer longer. The nerves are all screwed up, some broken and some too sensitive, and Saejima’s stubble-dotted kiss feels like a stab and a saint’s touch all at once.
Saejima kisses his nose, right on the bump.
Majima wonders if he remembers he was the first one who broke it, all those years ago.
Big hands cup his face and there’s nothing he could do to stop the kiss from happening.
Saejima still kinda kisses like a teenager. It makes his heart hurt.
He can also still grab him by the ass and lift him up and carry him like he weights nothing, not even breaking the kiss, not even when they blindly bump into furniture and doorframes on the way to Majima’s bed. Tosses him onto the mattress, tugs at his bathrobe, and now Majima is naked. Not hiding anything from his better half anymore. Every scar and mark and badly healed bullet hole, every scar refilled with ink and every backalley stitch-job that left the skin puckered and washed out.
He expects to see disgust, or at least pity on his face, but when he manages to look up, Saejima is scanning his body with a focused frown.
“Told ya. Not much left of the guy you knew,” he sighs.
Saejima grabs his ankle and pulls it up, sending Majima on his back with a squeal. He presses his rough fingertips to his Majima’s calf, one for every almost faded little scar right under his knee. “Remember how you got this?”
“Yeah, your piece of shit bike sent us both into a ditch. You had to pull the spokes of the front wheel right outta my leg.”
“It was a piece of shit, wasn’t it.” He chuckles.
“Sure was.” He’s not sure where he’s going with this. But he lets him continue.
Saejima runs his palms up his thighs, touching yet ignoring the revolting criss-cross of scars on the most sensitive spots, and goes right for the jagged hole under his hipbone. “And this one?”
“You have one too,” mutters Majima, finally realizing what’s going on. “We climbed over the gate of that Western villa and got caught in the spikes.”
“Heh. Yeah. Skewered like the weenies we were.”
“Kyoudai. Why’re you doing this?”
Saejima pulls one hand away, lifting his hair to show his eyebrow. The first scar Majima got him, back when he was still clumsy with a knife. “Just cuz we got extra layers of scars on top, that don’t mean we ain’t the same dumbasses underneath,” he says, with that finality and certainty he has when he says something oddly wise.
Majima chuckles, a quiet calm finally spreading into him. He was such a fool, thinking Saejima would be disgusted of him the way he’s disgusted of himself.
“Ya think they tore up the old Majima but,” Saejima traces the warped knife-and-gunshot mess on his stomach he got while he was still chasing Kiryu-chan, as if he knows he considers those scars across his navel as the sign of his freedom, the last marks left from his chains finally snapping. “All they did was make him stronger.”
“Ya think?” he mutters, and twines his fingers with Saejima’s, pulling them up to kiss his rough knuckles. Lots of scars on these hands, too - yet he knows he can still make the cutest little wooden animals. Could handle a baby kitten so gently it wouldn’t even mew. “I never felt as weak as when i saw yer face again.”
Saejima lies down at his side, squeezing Majima’s hand. “Me either. But like...mostly cuz ya got real hot.”
“I’m sorry? I was always hot!”
“Ya were cute. Now you’re real fuckin’ hot.”
Majima finds himself laughing, the bear trap that had been closed around his heart for over two decades finally loosening its jaws. It’s hard to hate himself when Saejima is looking at him like that. “Not gonna lie, ya grew into yer big-ass face pretty good too.”
Saejima kisses him, and now it doesn’t feel like there’s endless layers of darkness and loneliness and other bodies between them. “Kyoudai. Where ya keep your tanto?”
“Hm? Should be by the door. Why?”
Saejima gets up and leaves the room, leaving him there still naked and disoriented. A tiny, stubborn part of him is insisting that this is it. Saejima is going to slit his throat and he’s gonna die in his arms and it’s going to be perfect. But he squashes it when Saejima comes back, wiping the blade with a cotton bud.
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Disinfectin’ this shit. God knows how much goon blood ya got on it.”
“Lots,” chuckles Majima.
Saejima straddles him, Majima’s tanto looking like a toy in his big hand. “I ain’t gonna hurt ya.”
“I know,” he breathes as the blade whispers over his chest.
It’s not pain, more like a warm sting, four times, just under the edges of his tattoo where his heart is thumping like crazy. Saejima brushes his fingers over the tingling skin and lifts them bloody.
“I got clawed by a Taiga, huh?”
Saejima blushes. “Something like that.”
“Gimme that.”
Saejima offers him the tanto handle first, leans closer so Majima can hold it against his chest comfortably. He’s close enough Majima can point the tip of the blade right where his heart his beating, the thrum visible even under his large chest.
Just two little stabs under the pec, close together, just deep enough to bead with blood. Just deep enough to leave a scar.
“Snakebite?”
“Snakebite,” he smiles, pulling himself up to taste his brother’s blood. “Now we got a new layer to start fresh on. Together.”
“See? I knew ya couldn’t have changed that much,” he laughs, trailing bloody fingers along his jaw. “Still a big ol’ sentimental softie.”
“Look who’s talking!” Majima squirms under him, but he isn’t really mad. “Yer the one who started cutting me up to cheer me up!”
“And it worked, didn’t it.” He’s entirely too smug about this, and Majima absolutely needs to kiss him.
Somehow all they went through couldn’t quite harden that heart they split in half so many years ago, it’s still bleeding and warm between them as they roll together and get tangled in the sheets, and kiss, and rediscover every inch of each other all over again, the old and the new alike.
Saejima’s hands still brought Majima the peace he’d been longing for since ‘85. Just not the way he’d convinced himself he wanted. The way that was right. The way that left them both a future to build back on top of the ruins.
Together.