(no subject)
i have officially written slash for - a boyband. a japanese one, at that. (at least they're cute?)
see more cuteness here.
Or Without
Ryohei remembers, dimly, how it was like when they were fifteen. How Keita was like, really, because he’s never been able to remember much else since Keita stepped into his life.
The first meeting. There was a boardroom, somewhere in central Tokyo, filled with men in blue-grey-black business suits and smart glasses who smiled and bowed. Keita entered with two of them flanking him, all sharp bones and big eyes peering out of a too thin face, beaming like he’d just seen the world. Maybe he had, at that. There was the requisite bowing, polite introductions, more bowing, and then Ryuichi had an arm around Keita’s shoulders, heads bent together as they argued over Squall and Cloud, friendship taking off in a burst of raucous chatter. Ryohei remembers thinking that there was something there then, something beautiful forming as he watched, and there was a sense of satisfaction even as their laughter locked him out, room only for each other in eyes shuttered with mirth.
The first day in their new apartment, Ryuichi claimed the biggest room - “I have so much manga, I really really need the space, please?” - and while Keita chuckled and caved, Ryohei settled into another room and began methodically stacking his books and music up on the bare shelves. The place was stark and sterile, shadowy at the corners and blindingly white along the walls; Ryohei pushed his hair behind his ears, and stalked over to the windows to open them. When Keita bounded in and asked if he wanted takeout ramen for dinner, he was ready, colour rushing back into his face as he smiled and requested extra chashu. The playstation was already plugged in as he walked out, and he saw Ryuichi waving him over to a game of Tekken. He won one, lost three, and found himself giggling along with them as they trash talked and mock fought over the controls.
First night, as Ryohei curled up in blankets that were a little too thin for the impending winter. His eyes were half-closed in the darkness, staring blurrily at the reflections of street lamps in the window. When his door opened and a voice whispered from the darkness in the corridor, he started.
“Ryohei?” A pause, and a soft intake of air. “Are you asleep?”
“No,” Ryohei whispered back, the hush of the room muting his own voice.
A shadow shuffled into the room, and the door clicked shut. Ryohei sat up, and squinted into the darkness. He wished he had his glasses, but they were safe in their leather case, tucked into a pocket of his bag. Then the figure moved closer, and he could see the other boy silhouetted in the faint light from the window.
“I can’t sleep,” Keita admitted, sounding ashamed as his shoulders hunched in.
“Homesick?” And Ryohei was surprised at himself, at the gentleness in his own voice.
Keita shook his head. “It’s - quiet.”
Ryohei was perplexed and slightly amused, enough to pull the blankets up and shift towards the other side of the bed. It was still dark, but he thought he could see the corner of Keita’s mouth curl up in a shy grin before he crawled in and snuggled into the mattress.
Keita didn’t snore.
The days, weeks, months flew past. Ryohei surprised himself by learning how to rap, and Ryuichi surprised him more by developing a flair for it. He thought he made up for it the first time he did a windmill, and Keita gaped; Ryuichi just jumped onto him and demanded to be taught. Ryuichi managed to learn that and more, eventually, but Keita never got interested enough to try. He just watched, and smiled, and when they got home at night, he rubbed nutmeg scented ointment onto Ryuichi’s bruises.
When NEW PARADISE was released, the company got them a new apartment at Daikanyama, on the outskirts of Shibuya. They were introduced to an interior designer after recording one day, and he sat them down with stacks of sketches and diagrams. Ryohei remembers a little -
“Cream or ivory?” Keita asked distractedly, and Ryohei wanted cream, but Ryuichi was faster.
“Ivory,” he exclaimed, and Keita smiled. “Okay.”
- but it was mostly a blur, except that Keita still crept into his room every night, and he suddenly realised that he couldn’t sleep without that perpetual warmth.
Ryuichi had stopped growing at seventeen, Ryohei at eighteen, but Keita kept shooting up. Their stylists grumbled about his wardrobe, and he grinned with a mixture of embarrassment and glee. At night, where he’d used to curl up under Ryohei’s arm, he now stretched out and covered more than half the bed. Sometimes Ryohei would wake up in the middle of the night and feel an arm across his waist, or ankles tangled with his own, but most of the time he just sensed the heat radiating from an inch away, and he’d pull the blankets a little higher.
Keita was the first to get a girlfriend. Ryohei can’t quite remember her name - Makiko, or Machiko, or maybe it was Maiko - but she was small and cute in Keita’s arms, and her skin was pale and translucent, like the freshest cream. There were many others after that; they came and went like business associates, lasting only as long as Keita felt like entertaining them. Ryohei didn’t know them all, didn’t care to know them at all, and the ones he saw were the ones that Keita didn’t manage to hide.
The first time Keita stopped coming over at night was during the break after the System of Alive tour. Ryohei lay awake under the comforter, still curled into a ball even though he had the entire bed to himself. When Keita came stumbling into the apartment at four in the morning, Ryohei was in the kitchen nursing his third cup of coffee, and he watched in silence at the doorway as Keita staggered drunkenly down the corridor and collapsed in the living room.
“Ryohei?” That familiar voice, hoarse and raspy from too much alcohol, called out into the emptiness of the room, and Ryohei hurried over to help the other boy up. Up close, Keita reeked of smoke and musk, lips kiss-swollen and hair mussed, and his lanky frame was spread decadently across the white couch. He was still mumbling under his breath when Ryohei returned from the bathroom with a warm towel to wipe him down, eyes half-lidded and drugged. His face and neck were warm and flushed, and so were his hands, Ryohei found out, when they reached out to grip his wrists with surprising strength.
“Ryohei?”
Calling for him, again, and Ryohei felt something hard in his throat, something that he couldn’t quite manage to swallow. “Yeah?”
Keita sat up, head swaying dizzily, and Ryohei was pulled forward as Keita tried to stay upright, until he ended up sprawled on his knees beside the couch. Keita’s face was right above his, and he froze like a deer in headlights, muscles tense and ready to snap. This close, he could smell a flowery, girlish scent clinging to the collar of Keita’s shirt, and he felt like throwing up.
“Ryohei,” Keita mumbled again, almost incoherently, then toppled over, crushing Ryohei to the ground. Heavy, slow breathing, familiarly regular, and Ryohei knew that he was asleep.
Before they began the recording for Prime of Life, they moved out into their own pads. They lived near each other still, for convenience and mutual comfort, but Ryohei enjoyed the additional quiet. He’d persuaded himself to stop missing Keita, and it was easier when he remembered that he wouldn’t have to face Keita’s nameless, faceless girls in the morning anymore. Except that now, when he went over, he could see hints of femininity in the pink aprons folded neatly into kitchen drawers, low-fat milk in the refrigerator, peach-scented facial foam on the sink.
“Girlfriend?” Ryuichi asked artlessly, laughing and patting him on the back.
“Three months,” Keita replied, with a heady grin, and Ryohei had smiled too. Asked for her name, her photograph, remarked on her prettiness. Her skin was smooth and radiant, like peaches, but her face was a blur in his vision.
“What?”
“He broke up with her,” Ryuichi repeated. “Didn’t he tell you?”
Ryohei shook his head dumbly. Hand curling around his cup of sencha, he mechanically took another sip. It burned his tongue, and in a moment of courage, he asked, “When?”
Ryuichi chewed on his mouthful of ramen and furrowed his brows in concentration. “About a month ago, I think. You know, that time when you pulled a muscle.”
Ryohei remembered. He’d strained a ligament while doing a six-step, and had to stay home for a week.
Keita hadn’t visited.
As the new tour neared, rehearsals got increasingly brutal. Bruises flowered across his skin, and he wished he was darker, like Ryuichi, who managed to hide sleep deprivation behind a smile and injuries behind his hyperactivity.
The three of them spent all their time together, and it felt almost normal again, the noise and clamour a soothing balm after months of silence. Ryuichi still laughed, Keita still grinned, and Ryohei smiled his part into the harmony, feeling satisfied with the temporary peace. He didn’t have time to think as they talked and danced and sang; it was just work and rest, and sometimes the warmth of Ryuichi giving him a goodnight hug.
Halfway into the tour, Keita developed a new hobby of tickling people, and he practised the most on Ryuichi. Ryohei would watch as they wrestled, the ache in his chest carefully controlled as he tsked at their antics and never offered to join in. Once, he’d walked into the dressing room to find Keita bent over Ryuichi, faces close enough to kiss. He had murmured an embarrassed “sorry”, and closed the door behind him.
He never asked about it, after, and Keita never tried to explain.
Their fans brought them all the way to Taiwan, and their first time out of Japan was a whirlwind of promotional activities. Talk shows, press conferences, throngs of fans who followed them in vans and buses and taxis; the heat and the incomprehensible Mandarin gave Ryohei headaches, and he sat immobile in his hotel room until Ryuichi coaxed him out with promises of iced desserts. At the last concert, the fans sang him an early birthday song after the second encore. He felt better then, felt saner and more controlled as he smiled genuinely for the first time in days. Keita grinned too, and clapped when they were done.
“One more song?” he asked in Mandarin, and the fans screamed in response. Waving at the crew, Keita mouthed something that Ryohei couldn’t quite see, and the first bars of Close to You began playing. Keita grinned again, impish and mischievous now, and enunciated in slow, clear Japanese - “For Ryohei.”
Ryuichi laughed, and walked over to sling an arm around him. Ryohei could feel something in his chest twist, could feel his teeth clenching until his jaw throbbed in time with the beat, even as he tried to smile and nod his thanks.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Ryuichi told him, over the phone.
“What?”
“Just - stop being silly.”
Ryohei stared stupidly at the receiver. “What?”
But Ryuichi had already hung up.
The doorbell rings at almost midnight, and Ryohei looks up from the television. He thinks it might Ryuichi coming over to explain that odd conversation, but when he opens the door, it’s Keita in his habitual slouch, hands buried in his coat pocket and face ducked down between his shoulders.
“It’s you,” Ryohei says, and he wonders how many times he’s going to be struck dumb today.
“Yeah,” Keita says, shuffling. His face is strangely stiff, and he stares intently at Ryohei. “Can I come in?”
Ryohei is quiet for a moment, then nods and pulls a pair of slippers out of the shoe closet.
The silence in the living room is unbearable, and Ryohei tries to think of something to say. Something neutral and harmless, something that won’t betray his headache and that odd tenderness in his throat.
“You want something to drink?”
Keita seems taken aback, at first, but then he shakes his head. “No - no, I’m alright.”
Another pause, and then - “I have something for you. For your birthday. I wanted to be the first one.” He laughs nervously, hesitant and curiously breathy in the quiet of the room, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small box.
“Thanks,” Ryohei says, as he reaches out an awkward hand to accept it.
“Aren’t you - aren’t you going to open it?” Keita asks hopefully.
Ryohei shrugs, begins to tear the wrapping, and when he lifts the lid, he sees something glint amidst mounds of blue fluff. He stares blankly. “You’re giving me a key?”
“It’s the -” Keita stops abruptly, like he can’t quite get the words out. But then he blinks, and his eyes narrow in concentration. “It’s the key to my room.”
“Oh,” Ryohei says, dumbly, and he feels like his mind is stagnant and inert, like he should know something that he doesn’t. And then he realises.
“Oh.”
Keita is panicked, flustered, and although his face remains rigid, Ryohei can see his eyes darting about the room. “Are you - I mean, you don’t -”
“Yeah,” Ryohei says. Smiles slowly, as the tightness in his chest eases, and he starts to breathe again.
“So,” Keita begins again, shy now, even as his grin threatens to take over his entire face. “Can I -”
“Yeah.”
And Keita inches closer, until their faces are aligned. The warm light softens Keita’s usually sharp features, and Ryohei doesn’t feel a trace of fear as large hands cup his cheek, curl around his neck. His eyes flutter close when soft lips touch his, and Keita smells like vanilla, warm and familiar around him.
“Was that okay?” Keita asks when they stop.
And Ryohei, who hasn’t stopped smiling, says, “Yeah.”
windmill, sixstep: breakdance moves; watch Ryohei do them in the Kirei Da video
Daikanyama: upmarket, urban district
see more cuteness here.
Or Without
Ryohei remembers, dimly, how it was like when they were fifteen. How Keita was like, really, because he’s never been able to remember much else since Keita stepped into his life.
The first meeting. There was a boardroom, somewhere in central Tokyo, filled with men in blue-grey-black business suits and smart glasses who smiled and bowed. Keita entered with two of them flanking him, all sharp bones and big eyes peering out of a too thin face, beaming like he’d just seen the world. Maybe he had, at that. There was the requisite bowing, polite introductions, more bowing, and then Ryuichi had an arm around Keita’s shoulders, heads bent together as they argued over Squall and Cloud, friendship taking off in a burst of raucous chatter. Ryohei remembers thinking that there was something there then, something beautiful forming as he watched, and there was a sense of satisfaction even as their laughter locked him out, room only for each other in eyes shuttered with mirth.
The first day in their new apartment, Ryuichi claimed the biggest room - “I have so much manga, I really really need the space, please?” - and while Keita chuckled and caved, Ryohei settled into another room and began methodically stacking his books and music up on the bare shelves. The place was stark and sterile, shadowy at the corners and blindingly white along the walls; Ryohei pushed his hair behind his ears, and stalked over to the windows to open them. When Keita bounded in and asked if he wanted takeout ramen for dinner, he was ready, colour rushing back into his face as he smiled and requested extra chashu. The playstation was already plugged in as he walked out, and he saw Ryuichi waving him over to a game of Tekken. He won one, lost three, and found himself giggling along with them as they trash talked and mock fought over the controls.
First night, as Ryohei curled up in blankets that were a little too thin for the impending winter. His eyes were half-closed in the darkness, staring blurrily at the reflections of street lamps in the window. When his door opened and a voice whispered from the darkness in the corridor, he started.
“Ryohei?” A pause, and a soft intake of air. “Are you asleep?”
“No,” Ryohei whispered back, the hush of the room muting his own voice.
A shadow shuffled into the room, and the door clicked shut. Ryohei sat up, and squinted into the darkness. He wished he had his glasses, but they were safe in their leather case, tucked into a pocket of his bag. Then the figure moved closer, and he could see the other boy silhouetted in the faint light from the window.
“I can’t sleep,” Keita admitted, sounding ashamed as his shoulders hunched in.
“Homesick?” And Ryohei was surprised at himself, at the gentleness in his own voice.
Keita shook his head. “It’s - quiet.”
Ryohei was perplexed and slightly amused, enough to pull the blankets up and shift towards the other side of the bed. It was still dark, but he thought he could see the corner of Keita’s mouth curl up in a shy grin before he crawled in and snuggled into the mattress.
Keita didn’t snore.
The days, weeks, months flew past. Ryohei surprised himself by learning how to rap, and Ryuichi surprised him more by developing a flair for it. He thought he made up for it the first time he did a windmill, and Keita gaped; Ryuichi just jumped onto him and demanded to be taught. Ryuichi managed to learn that and more, eventually, but Keita never got interested enough to try. He just watched, and smiled, and when they got home at night, he rubbed nutmeg scented ointment onto Ryuichi’s bruises.
When NEW PARADISE was released, the company got them a new apartment at Daikanyama, on the outskirts of Shibuya. They were introduced to an interior designer after recording one day, and he sat them down with stacks of sketches and diagrams. Ryohei remembers a little -
“Cream or ivory?” Keita asked distractedly, and Ryohei wanted cream, but Ryuichi was faster.
“Ivory,” he exclaimed, and Keita smiled. “Okay.”
- but it was mostly a blur, except that Keita still crept into his room every night, and he suddenly realised that he couldn’t sleep without that perpetual warmth.
Ryuichi had stopped growing at seventeen, Ryohei at eighteen, but Keita kept shooting up. Their stylists grumbled about his wardrobe, and he grinned with a mixture of embarrassment and glee. At night, where he’d used to curl up under Ryohei’s arm, he now stretched out and covered more than half the bed. Sometimes Ryohei would wake up in the middle of the night and feel an arm across his waist, or ankles tangled with his own, but most of the time he just sensed the heat radiating from an inch away, and he’d pull the blankets a little higher.
Keita was the first to get a girlfriend. Ryohei can’t quite remember her name - Makiko, or Machiko, or maybe it was Maiko - but she was small and cute in Keita’s arms, and her skin was pale and translucent, like the freshest cream. There were many others after that; they came and went like business associates, lasting only as long as Keita felt like entertaining them. Ryohei didn’t know them all, didn’t care to know them at all, and the ones he saw were the ones that Keita didn’t manage to hide.
The first time Keita stopped coming over at night was during the break after the System of Alive tour. Ryohei lay awake under the comforter, still curled into a ball even though he had the entire bed to himself. When Keita came stumbling into the apartment at four in the morning, Ryohei was in the kitchen nursing his third cup of coffee, and he watched in silence at the doorway as Keita staggered drunkenly down the corridor and collapsed in the living room.
“Ryohei?” That familiar voice, hoarse and raspy from too much alcohol, called out into the emptiness of the room, and Ryohei hurried over to help the other boy up. Up close, Keita reeked of smoke and musk, lips kiss-swollen and hair mussed, and his lanky frame was spread decadently across the white couch. He was still mumbling under his breath when Ryohei returned from the bathroom with a warm towel to wipe him down, eyes half-lidded and drugged. His face and neck were warm and flushed, and so were his hands, Ryohei found out, when they reached out to grip his wrists with surprising strength.
“Ryohei?”
Calling for him, again, and Ryohei felt something hard in his throat, something that he couldn’t quite manage to swallow. “Yeah?”
Keita sat up, head swaying dizzily, and Ryohei was pulled forward as Keita tried to stay upright, until he ended up sprawled on his knees beside the couch. Keita’s face was right above his, and he froze like a deer in headlights, muscles tense and ready to snap. This close, he could smell a flowery, girlish scent clinging to the collar of Keita’s shirt, and he felt like throwing up.
“Ryohei,” Keita mumbled again, almost incoherently, then toppled over, crushing Ryohei to the ground. Heavy, slow breathing, familiarly regular, and Ryohei knew that he was asleep.
Before they began the recording for Prime of Life, they moved out into their own pads. They lived near each other still, for convenience and mutual comfort, but Ryohei enjoyed the additional quiet. He’d persuaded himself to stop missing Keita, and it was easier when he remembered that he wouldn’t have to face Keita’s nameless, faceless girls in the morning anymore. Except that now, when he went over, he could see hints of femininity in the pink aprons folded neatly into kitchen drawers, low-fat milk in the refrigerator, peach-scented facial foam on the sink.
“Girlfriend?” Ryuichi asked artlessly, laughing and patting him on the back.
“Three months,” Keita replied, with a heady grin, and Ryohei had smiled too. Asked for her name, her photograph, remarked on her prettiness. Her skin was smooth and radiant, like peaches, but her face was a blur in his vision.
“What?”
“He broke up with her,” Ryuichi repeated. “Didn’t he tell you?”
Ryohei shook his head dumbly. Hand curling around his cup of sencha, he mechanically took another sip. It burned his tongue, and in a moment of courage, he asked, “When?”
Ryuichi chewed on his mouthful of ramen and furrowed his brows in concentration. “About a month ago, I think. You know, that time when you pulled a muscle.”
Ryohei remembered. He’d strained a ligament while doing a six-step, and had to stay home for a week.
Keita hadn’t visited.
As the new tour neared, rehearsals got increasingly brutal. Bruises flowered across his skin, and he wished he was darker, like Ryuichi, who managed to hide sleep deprivation behind a smile and injuries behind his hyperactivity.
The three of them spent all their time together, and it felt almost normal again, the noise and clamour a soothing balm after months of silence. Ryuichi still laughed, Keita still grinned, and Ryohei smiled his part into the harmony, feeling satisfied with the temporary peace. He didn’t have time to think as they talked and danced and sang; it was just work and rest, and sometimes the warmth of Ryuichi giving him a goodnight hug.
Halfway into the tour, Keita developed a new hobby of tickling people, and he practised the most on Ryuichi. Ryohei would watch as they wrestled, the ache in his chest carefully controlled as he tsked at their antics and never offered to join in. Once, he’d walked into the dressing room to find Keita bent over Ryuichi, faces close enough to kiss. He had murmured an embarrassed “sorry”, and closed the door behind him.
He never asked about it, after, and Keita never tried to explain.
Their fans brought them all the way to Taiwan, and their first time out of Japan was a whirlwind of promotional activities. Talk shows, press conferences, throngs of fans who followed them in vans and buses and taxis; the heat and the incomprehensible Mandarin gave Ryohei headaches, and he sat immobile in his hotel room until Ryuichi coaxed him out with promises of iced desserts. At the last concert, the fans sang him an early birthday song after the second encore. He felt better then, felt saner and more controlled as he smiled genuinely for the first time in days. Keita grinned too, and clapped when they were done.
“One more song?” he asked in Mandarin, and the fans screamed in response. Waving at the crew, Keita mouthed something that Ryohei couldn’t quite see, and the first bars of Close to You began playing. Keita grinned again, impish and mischievous now, and enunciated in slow, clear Japanese - “For Ryohei.”
Ryuichi laughed, and walked over to sling an arm around him. Ryohei could feel something in his chest twist, could feel his teeth clenching until his jaw throbbed in time with the beat, even as he tried to smile and nod his thanks.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Ryuichi told him, over the phone.
“What?”
“Just - stop being silly.”
Ryohei stared stupidly at the receiver. “What?”
But Ryuichi had already hung up.
The doorbell rings at almost midnight, and Ryohei looks up from the television. He thinks it might Ryuichi coming over to explain that odd conversation, but when he opens the door, it’s Keita in his habitual slouch, hands buried in his coat pocket and face ducked down between his shoulders.
“It’s you,” Ryohei says, and he wonders how many times he’s going to be struck dumb today.
“Yeah,” Keita says, shuffling. His face is strangely stiff, and he stares intently at Ryohei. “Can I come in?”
Ryohei is quiet for a moment, then nods and pulls a pair of slippers out of the shoe closet.
The silence in the living room is unbearable, and Ryohei tries to think of something to say. Something neutral and harmless, something that won’t betray his headache and that odd tenderness in his throat.
“You want something to drink?”
Keita seems taken aback, at first, but then he shakes his head. “No - no, I’m alright.”
Another pause, and then - “I have something for you. For your birthday. I wanted to be the first one.” He laughs nervously, hesitant and curiously breathy in the quiet of the room, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small box.
“Thanks,” Ryohei says, as he reaches out an awkward hand to accept it.
“Aren’t you - aren’t you going to open it?” Keita asks hopefully.
Ryohei shrugs, begins to tear the wrapping, and when he lifts the lid, he sees something glint amidst mounds of blue fluff. He stares blankly. “You’re giving me a key?”
“It’s the -” Keita stops abruptly, like he can’t quite get the words out. But then he blinks, and his eyes narrow in concentration. “It’s the key to my room.”
“Oh,” Ryohei says, dumbly, and he feels like his mind is stagnant and inert, like he should know something that he doesn’t. And then he realises.
“Oh.”
Keita is panicked, flustered, and although his face remains rigid, Ryohei can see his eyes darting about the room. “Are you - I mean, you don’t -”
“Yeah,” Ryohei says. Smiles slowly, as the tightness in his chest eases, and he starts to breathe again.
“So,” Keita begins again, shy now, even as his grin threatens to take over his entire face. “Can I -”
“Yeah.”
And Keita inches closer, until their faces are aligned. The warm light softens Keita’s usually sharp features, and Ryohei doesn’t feel a trace of fear as large hands cup his cheek, curl around his neck. His eyes flutter close when soft lips touch his, and Keita smells like vanilla, warm and familiar around him.
“Was that okay?” Keita asks when they stop.
And Ryohei, who hasn’t stopped smiling, says, “Yeah.”
windmill, sixstep: breakdance moves; watch Ryohei do them in the Kirei Da video
Daikanyama: upmarket, urban district