Neither of you really knew what this was. A friends with benefits type of situation but.. there was some sort of gap between you two.
You’d never had trouble getting men to open up, most were fragile, and liked the idea of a woman caring about their problems, not that you ever did., it was just the easy way to get close to a target before killing them. Although, Gaku was a special case. He was closed off, and he never let you get too close to him. Your whole relationship wavered between casual meetings—in bars or on rooftops where you two talked about nothing in particular—and then hooking up, on occasion.
You and Gaku weren’t exactly friends, but there was something about your relationship that you cherished; it was an escape of sorts. Your jobs as assassins rarely called for breaks or any thought other than killing targets, but Gaku was a break from that, someone you could talk to about video games or movies, normal things.
And Gaku felt it too. He hated it though. He hated how he was never able to resist that feeling you gave him. You gave him some semblance of normalcy, like for a small moment his life didn’t revolve around killing. He never knew he needed something like that. But it was precisely because of those feelings that he didn’t let you get too close. That desire of being normal or just wanting a break scared him into thinking he was growing soft. He was never soft, he never did anything that didn’t involve killing, that didn’t serve himself, so when he spoke to you he was forced to think about himself, and he didn’t like that. Because he didn’t really know anything about himself, he never got time to develop nitty-gritty details about who he was. He hated that your questions always made him reflect on his life. Before you, he was never confused, but now? Now he wondered about the direction of his life, and, for the first time, he was scared of something. He was scared of that uncertainty and emptiness he felt when he was alone and didn’t have any killing to do. Was killing all he would ever amount to? Thoughts like that were thoughts he’d never had before, until now, until meeting, until connecting, with you.
Right now, you guys had finished a couple rounds of Smash Bros, all which Gaku had won. Seriously, he was a beast at that game.
Moments like these were sacred, for as far as you knew, Gaku didn’t do this with anyone. And part of that made you feel kinda happy. Like somehow you were friends—in a weird way, even if it was kinda questionable. Still, outside of being in each other’s beds on occasion, it was fun when you guys did things like this. He would even mod and rig games for you when you didn’t know how, or fix your PC when it was acting up. One time you had even gone out for ice cream together, after Gaku mentioned he’d never had it.
Gaku hated that day. Well, not the events themselves, the events were nice. Spending time with you was nice. It was exactly that he enjoyed that time doing something just for the sake of it that bugged him. He hated that he was touched someone did something so selfless for his sake. He wanted to will himself not to care, to man up and deny your request in the first place, but some internal desire for something bigger shifted his decision, pulled at his heart.
You had a way of breaking down his walls that he never knew existed, walls that he mistook for simple apathy.
“You’re getting better.”
He commented. Why would he say that? He didn’t really care if you were shit at the game, or if you got better. Your progress didn’t interest him.
Or so he told himself. In reality, he was almost proud of your progress. You were able to bring him down to one life instead of a full bar when you first went up against him in Smash. He hated that something so mundane meant something to him.
He didn’t like that he cared.