(no subject)
Author's Notes: More ZukaFuji drabbles! I'm feeling disgustingly unwell right now, though. And because of that, I can't think, and I'm losing revision-time, time which I desperately need to cover my end-of-year-examination subjects. But enough of my own troubles - I hope you like the fic! In the master table (here) you will find that they all have the same link, and I have placed them all under one cut. That's because yes, they are drabbles, but they are also interlinked drabbles, so they're meant to be read in sequence. Thank you!
Color
[A tenipuri zukafuji fanfiction][PG-13][slash]
Fuji tells Tezuka that he smells, tastes and hears (not to mention sees) colors. And they fall in love.
Tenipuri = not mine.
Color
8th September 2006/9th September 2006
*
Pink
When Fuji tells Tezuka that he smells, tastes, and hears colors (not to mention sees them), Tezuka isn’t surprised. He should be, he knows, but it fits in with Fuji, Fuji with all his whimsy and the strange, unfathomable curves of his mind.
‘Ah.’ It’s the only answer he can give.
‘Do you know what you sound like, Tezuka?’ Fuji asks, his voice laughing, warm, teasing.
‘No.’
‘You sound pink.’
‘…’ There’s no answer he can give to that.
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘No.’ That, at least, is certain. He’s sure he won’t get to sleep for the next few days if he hears the answer. It’ll be imaginatively Fuji, but imaginative-Fuji-isms can be disturbing.
‘Tezuka, you’re no fun.’
‘Aa.’ Agreement.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Oyasumi, Tezuka.’
‘Oyasumi.’
*
Colorless
Apparently, no one else on the team knows. Fuji’s told it to him and only him, and Tezuka can’t shake the feeling that that means something, in Fuji-logic.
He doesn’t try to figure it out. Tezuka-logic and Fuji-logic aren’t just parallel lines, never to meet. They’re not even on the same plane of existence. Trying to bring them together is like orchestrating a train wreck. If his logic is colorless and clear, Fuji’s is a mad, beautiful rainbow swirl. Trying to apply his logic to Fuji would be to erase that wonderful, profuse confusion.
He lets it happen, because Fuji is inevitable.
He wonders, briefly, when he began to know Fuji so well.
*
Blue
‘Na, Tezuka.’
‘Yes, Fuji?’
‘Remember that day I played Echizen?’
‘In the rain.’
‘Yes. The rain that day was blue.’
Like your eyes, Tezuka wants to tell him. Instead, he asks Fuji, ‘What kind of blue?’
It’s not the response that Fuji expected from him, and there’s a slight crinkling of those eyes in response - since when did he learn to pick up on Fuji’s subtle clues? - before Fuji smiles, gratified that Tezuka seems interested, even if he doesn’t know why he’s happy. ‘Blue like the roar of the world.’
This, then, is Fuji, Tezuka thinks. Fuji, who’s a genius because he doesn’t think the way the rest of them do. But somehow, some way, Tezuka is beginning to comprehend Fuji. To understand what his words mean.
*
Black
The days go by, and Tezuka finds himself fascinated by Fuji’s sense of color.
‘Snow sounds black,’ Fuji announces to him in the morning after the first snowfall of the year, just the night before. They’re walking to school together, bundled up warmly. ‘The silence is so absolute, Tezuka. It just sits on everything, it’s heavy and it weighs the world down and there’re no other sound, just this deep dark black that you could swim in, sink in,’ Fuji says, his head tilted to Tezuka’s.
He breaks off to sneeze, and Tezuka unloops his own scarf from around his neck and throws it around Fuji’s shoulders, turning up his own collar instead.
Fuji smiles at him, and twines the scarf around his neck, so that his nose and mouth are muffled by the wool, those soft lips pressed to the fabric where Tezuka’s skin was, just moments before.
*
Red
‘It tastes red, though,’ Fuji tells him, later in the day, when they’re walking home. It’s snowing again, light flakes peppering the sky and catching in their hair.
‘But what does red taste like?’ Tezuka asks.
‘Like red.’ Fuji delivers the answer point-blank. ‘You wouldn’t ask what sweet tastes like, right? Sweet is sweet. Red is red.’
Tezuka nods. Sometimes he’ll think that he’s getting somewhere, and then he’ll run into a block, something that he doesn’t understand. He’d like to think it doesn’t matter, but somehow, it’s beginning to.
Fuji senses this, and says, ‘Open your mouth, Tezuka. Catch a snowflake.’
Tezuka regards him for a moment, wondering if Fuji’s serious, but the shorter boy only laughs and teases, ‘Don’t worry. No one’s around to see their buchou catch snowflakes on his tongue like a three-year-old.’
Tezuka smiles, catching the reference to Fuji’s supposed age - since he’s a leap year baby, he’s slightly over three - and opens his mouth and tilts his head back, letting a snowflake flutter down on unseen wings, to rest on his tongue.
It flares for a moment before it vanishes, the sensation sharp and not unpleasant, and maybe, just maybe, he knows what Fuji is talking about, feels the way Fuji feels.
Fuji laughs and sticks out his tongue to catch a snowflake too.
*
Brown
Fuji wears the scarf all winter. Tezuka doesn’t ask him to return it, and Fuji makes no move to give it back. People noticed, at first - is that buchou’s scarf Fuji-senpai is wearing? Looks like it, yeah - but after three months of seeing it curled around Fuji’s neck, familiarity and silence dulled the edge of rumor. There is only so much you can say.
The weather turns gradually warmer, though, and one day Fuji returns the scarf to him. Tezuka tucks it into his tennis bag and forgets it till he gets home. Then he takes it out, and when he touches it, he feels not only the texture of the wool, but also a light, honey-hazelnut brown that deepens with a caress.
*
Purple
Fuji plays a ranking match against Tezuka. During the tiebreak, he lunges for the ball and lets it go past, crashes into the ground. Tezuka wins.
But the upsurge of concern he feels startles even himself for a moment, the way his heart lodges in his throat at the sight of Fuji’s bleeding knees. He keeps a sedate face, though, as he helps Fuji up, wondering whether Fuji will ever be willing to play him seriously.
Fuji tells him that usually defeat is a dark angry purple, like a bruise, livid and stark against his skin. But defeat at the hands of Tezuka is a deep, burnished bronze satisfaction. And that’s why he has no desire to win. Victory might not feel as good.
Tezuka cleans up the battered knees, and as he feels that strange twist in his belly for what seems like the hundredth time in a week, wonders if Fuji knows that in some ways, he may have won already.
*
Green
It’s a cliché, but green is for jealousy, because as Fuji sees yet another girl approach Tezuka with yet another love letter (Fuji imagines that he can smell the perfume rising off it - Poison by Christian Dior, or is that just what he thinks, that phantom inflammatory scent?) the world suddenly goes green.
Nothing really, only a slight, pale tinge at the edges of things, but enough to make it all look so subtly different, so terribly wrong.
Tezuka rejects the girl, though, as always, and the color recedes, like a miasma of chlorine gas, and the bitter, tart taste of green apples in his mouth goes away too.
Fuji is too self-aware to not understand.
*
Grey
Whenever they touch - little, accidental brushes, at tennis practice, in class, or maybe not-so-accidental, because this is Fuji and there is very little that happens that Fuji does not know about and control, at least to some extent - there’s a little quicksilver-grey bolt that leaps from the point of contact and skitters through Tezuka.
He grips the handle of his racket - or the strap of his schoolbag, or the air, whatever happens to be there at the time - and wages a little inner battle.
Grey, then, is the ambivalence of how he feels, that no-color in-between that reflects both the desire to reach out and take a proper hold, and the mercurial sudden fear of what happens after that. Grey, then, is that no man’s land between black oblivion and white desire.
*
White
When he finally reaches out, Fuji reaches for him too.
And the world is so much white noise around them, so much pointlessness, like interference on a television screen. Fuji is in full color, though, the blue of the Seigaku tennis jersey, the brown of his hair and his sun-touched-skin, and the cerulean of his eyes, and the warm softness of his lips for which there is no color and no way to describe them, not really, only that this is Fuji and this is now -
This, then, is desire, the hasty touches and the warmth, and the white release of all that tension as they kiss, as he presses against Fuji and gasps as the world fades to a pinprick of angelic white, and Fuji shakes and tries to move ever closer to Tezuka.
After that whiteness, returning to the world makes everything seem brighter, clearer, the colors sharp and crisp and defined.
And there is a color for love, and that color is Fuji Syuusuke.
Color
[A tenipuri zukafuji fanfiction][PG-13][slash]
Fuji tells Tezuka that he smells, tastes and hears (not to mention sees) colors. And they fall in love.
Tenipuri = not mine.
Color
8th September 2006/9th September 2006
*
Pink
When Fuji tells Tezuka that he smells, tastes, and hears colors (not to mention sees them), Tezuka isn’t surprised. He should be, he knows, but it fits in with Fuji, Fuji with all his whimsy and the strange, unfathomable curves of his mind.
‘Ah.’ It’s the only answer he can give.
‘Do you know what you sound like, Tezuka?’ Fuji asks, his voice laughing, warm, teasing.
‘No.’
‘You sound pink.’
‘…’ There’s no answer he can give to that.
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘No.’ That, at least, is certain. He’s sure he won’t get to sleep for the next few days if he hears the answer. It’ll be imaginatively Fuji, but imaginative-Fuji-isms can be disturbing.
‘Tezuka, you’re no fun.’
‘Aa.’ Agreement.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Oyasumi, Tezuka.’
‘Oyasumi.’
*
Colorless
Apparently, no one else on the team knows. Fuji’s told it to him and only him, and Tezuka can’t shake the feeling that that means something, in Fuji-logic.
He doesn’t try to figure it out. Tezuka-logic and Fuji-logic aren’t just parallel lines, never to meet. They’re not even on the same plane of existence. Trying to bring them together is like orchestrating a train wreck. If his logic is colorless and clear, Fuji’s is a mad, beautiful rainbow swirl. Trying to apply his logic to Fuji would be to erase that wonderful, profuse confusion.
He lets it happen, because Fuji is inevitable.
He wonders, briefly, when he began to know Fuji so well.
*
Blue
‘Na, Tezuka.’
‘Yes, Fuji?’
‘Remember that day I played Echizen?’
‘In the rain.’
‘Yes. The rain that day was blue.’
Like your eyes, Tezuka wants to tell him. Instead, he asks Fuji, ‘What kind of blue?’
It’s not the response that Fuji expected from him, and there’s a slight crinkling of those eyes in response - since when did he learn to pick up on Fuji’s subtle clues? - before Fuji smiles, gratified that Tezuka seems interested, even if he doesn’t know why he’s happy. ‘Blue like the roar of the world.’
This, then, is Fuji, Tezuka thinks. Fuji, who’s a genius because he doesn’t think the way the rest of them do. But somehow, some way, Tezuka is beginning to comprehend Fuji. To understand what his words mean.
*
Black
The days go by, and Tezuka finds himself fascinated by Fuji’s sense of color.
‘Snow sounds black,’ Fuji announces to him in the morning after the first snowfall of the year, just the night before. They’re walking to school together, bundled up warmly. ‘The silence is so absolute, Tezuka. It just sits on everything, it’s heavy and it weighs the world down and there’re no other sound, just this deep dark black that you could swim in, sink in,’ Fuji says, his head tilted to Tezuka’s.
He breaks off to sneeze, and Tezuka unloops his own scarf from around his neck and throws it around Fuji’s shoulders, turning up his own collar instead.
Fuji smiles at him, and twines the scarf around his neck, so that his nose and mouth are muffled by the wool, those soft lips pressed to the fabric where Tezuka’s skin was, just moments before.
*
Red
‘It tastes red, though,’ Fuji tells him, later in the day, when they’re walking home. It’s snowing again, light flakes peppering the sky and catching in their hair.
‘But what does red taste like?’ Tezuka asks.
‘Like red.’ Fuji delivers the answer point-blank. ‘You wouldn’t ask what sweet tastes like, right? Sweet is sweet. Red is red.’
Tezuka nods. Sometimes he’ll think that he’s getting somewhere, and then he’ll run into a block, something that he doesn’t understand. He’d like to think it doesn’t matter, but somehow, it’s beginning to.
Fuji senses this, and says, ‘Open your mouth, Tezuka. Catch a snowflake.’
Tezuka regards him for a moment, wondering if Fuji’s serious, but the shorter boy only laughs and teases, ‘Don’t worry. No one’s around to see their buchou catch snowflakes on his tongue like a three-year-old.’
Tezuka smiles, catching the reference to Fuji’s supposed age - since he’s a leap year baby, he’s slightly over three - and opens his mouth and tilts his head back, letting a snowflake flutter down on unseen wings, to rest on his tongue.
It flares for a moment before it vanishes, the sensation sharp and not unpleasant, and maybe, just maybe, he knows what Fuji is talking about, feels the way Fuji feels.
Fuji laughs and sticks out his tongue to catch a snowflake too.
*
Brown
Fuji wears the scarf all winter. Tezuka doesn’t ask him to return it, and Fuji makes no move to give it back. People noticed, at first - is that buchou’s scarf Fuji-senpai is wearing? Looks like it, yeah - but after three months of seeing it curled around Fuji’s neck, familiarity and silence dulled the edge of rumor. There is only so much you can say.
The weather turns gradually warmer, though, and one day Fuji returns the scarf to him. Tezuka tucks it into his tennis bag and forgets it till he gets home. Then he takes it out, and when he touches it, he feels not only the texture of the wool, but also a light, honey-hazelnut brown that deepens with a caress.
*
Purple
Fuji plays a ranking match against Tezuka. During the tiebreak, he lunges for the ball and lets it go past, crashes into the ground. Tezuka wins.
But the upsurge of concern he feels startles even himself for a moment, the way his heart lodges in his throat at the sight of Fuji’s bleeding knees. He keeps a sedate face, though, as he helps Fuji up, wondering whether Fuji will ever be willing to play him seriously.
Fuji tells him that usually defeat is a dark angry purple, like a bruise, livid and stark against his skin. But defeat at the hands of Tezuka is a deep, burnished bronze satisfaction. And that’s why he has no desire to win. Victory might not feel as good.
Tezuka cleans up the battered knees, and as he feels that strange twist in his belly for what seems like the hundredth time in a week, wonders if Fuji knows that in some ways, he may have won already.
*
Green
It’s a cliché, but green is for jealousy, because as Fuji sees yet another girl approach Tezuka with yet another love letter (Fuji imagines that he can smell the perfume rising off it - Poison by Christian Dior, or is that just what he thinks, that phantom inflammatory scent?) the world suddenly goes green.
Nothing really, only a slight, pale tinge at the edges of things, but enough to make it all look so subtly different, so terribly wrong.
Tezuka rejects the girl, though, as always, and the color recedes, like a miasma of chlorine gas, and the bitter, tart taste of green apples in his mouth goes away too.
Fuji is too self-aware to not understand.
*
Grey
Whenever they touch - little, accidental brushes, at tennis practice, in class, or maybe not-so-accidental, because this is Fuji and there is very little that happens that Fuji does not know about and control, at least to some extent - there’s a little quicksilver-grey bolt that leaps from the point of contact and skitters through Tezuka.
He grips the handle of his racket - or the strap of his schoolbag, or the air, whatever happens to be there at the time - and wages a little inner battle.
Grey, then, is the ambivalence of how he feels, that no-color in-between that reflects both the desire to reach out and take a proper hold, and the mercurial sudden fear of what happens after that. Grey, then, is that no man’s land between black oblivion and white desire.
*
White
When he finally reaches out, Fuji reaches for him too.
And the world is so much white noise around them, so much pointlessness, like interference on a television screen. Fuji is in full color, though, the blue of the Seigaku tennis jersey, the brown of his hair and his sun-touched-skin, and the cerulean of his eyes, and the warm softness of his lips for which there is no color and no way to describe them, not really, only that this is Fuji and this is now -
This, then, is desire, the hasty touches and the warmth, and the white release of all that tension as they kiss, as he presses against Fuji and gasps as the world fades to a pinprick of angelic white, and Fuji shakes and tries to move ever closer to Tezuka.
After that whiteness, returning to the world makes everything seem brighter, clearer, the colors sharp and crisp and defined.
And there is a color for love, and that color is Fuji Syuusuke.