43 - still_ciircee
Do the time warp! This is set sometime during one of Aiba's earlier trips out of town, but some time before the trip on which he meets Sho. Now, back to trying to find a purpose for Shun aside from groping Nino so that he can laugh at Jun and cop a feel off of him. Also: To learn to read. And spell.
Aiba discovers that Spring in the northern most continental states is cold. There are still patches of snow in places and the gravel bank beside the pavement alternates between 'rock-solid frozen' and 'slushy-mess'. His feet feel like they never properly warm up and it makes him miss Captain J curling up beside him in his sleeping bag. He misses the company, too; there is a lot of 'between' in the 'between towns' in these places and there aren't always a lot of rides to go with it.
He can't look at his pictures while he walks but he can make his own. He pictures Captain J as a big, strong dog instead of the sweet puppy. He pictures Captain J leaping for a stick and Mari laughing and smiling and telling him what a good dog he is, what a good, sweet boy. It makes him feel better and less lonely. He's picturing the type of puppy he'd find that he could bring home for Jun when he rounds a sharp bend in the road and is forced to stop.
The road is full of sheep. They're big and covered in puffy curls of white wool and they have dark heads and faces. There are a lot of them. A really, really lot.
"Uwah," Aiba breathes out. "Hello, sheep," he says. He sort of wonders if they'll charge at him like the mountain goats at the zoo used to. "I'm just passing through, okay?"
"Yeah," says a voice in a slow, strange sort of drawl. "Me too, okay?"
Aiba looks up and sees a guy of about his own age, probably a few years older, standing in the middle of a knot of sheep, his arms raised over his head like he's getting mugged for his wallet.
"Hi," Aiba waves at him and gets a neat hand gesture in return. "Can you really get through?" The guy really seems to be having a hard time moving.
"Yeah but…" the guy says, trailing off a bit.
Aiba waits.
"It's really crowded," the guy finishes after a moment. "I think these are people-sheep. Like they're petting me with their heads or something."
"They really like people, huh?" Aiba asks. It's a little troubling because if he goes through, he might have sheep follow him out the other side.
"Yeah," the guy says again, trailing off again. "Somebody probably owns them. There aren't a lot of wild sheep, right?
"I don't think so," Aiba agrees. The guy is close enough that he reaches out a hand to help pull him through. "I'm Masaki," he says as the guy takes it.
"Daigo," says the guy, repeating the cool gesture from earlier. He grabs Aiba's hand again and Aiba pulls. "Thanks," the guy says once he's out. "I'd push you through but I don't think that'd help, right?"
Before Aiba can answer (because it would help-it'd help him but it'd make things bad for Daigo again is the problem) a car barrels around the curve. The driver might be applying the brakes but mostly he or she is honking and swerving through the sheep, which are running. None of them are hit but Aiba thinks this is more to do with the sheep being smart than it does with the skill or smarts of the driver. "Sheep don't drive through crowds of people," Aiba yells at the car's tail lights.
"There, there, Miss Fuzzy," Daigo says, rubbing the head of one sheep. "It's all right, Mrs. Wooly," he says to another, rubbing its head too.
Aiba kneels down and hugs one particularly fuzzy sheep. "Everything is okay…" he looks at Daigo. "Who's this one?" he whispers.
Daigo squints at the sheep. "Stephen Harper," he says.
"Everything is okay, Mr. Harper," Aiba tells the sheep. "We should get them to a pasture or a pen or someplace else safe," he says to Daigo.
"I was just going to say the same thing," Daigo smiles at him and they both stand at the same time.
"Let's do this!" Aiba cheers.
"Yeah!" they say together and Aiba copies Daigo's gesture as they shake on it.
Twenty minutes later, they're out of breath and Aiba is sweating inside his coat but the sheep are all safely away from the road and there's a fence with a big hole in it that they're funneling through. Since the sheep seem capable of seeing themselves back in, Aiba spends his time scouting around for something he can use to fix the fence. They end up propping the fallen board back into place with a few stout branches that are hard and cold with frost.
The whole endeavor and the doing of a good deed always makes Aiba hungry and as he drops down to sit against the newly repaired fence he swings his backpack into his lap and digs out his bag of candy. "You want anything?" he asks when Daigo sits down next to him.
"Have you got Smarties?" Daigo asks.
Aiba holds out the package to him absently, only looking up when Daigo doesn't take it. "What?" he asks. The package is a bit crushed but most of the powdery little disks are intact.
"What are those?" Daigo asks.
"Smarties," Aiba says, twisting the package to show the name.
"They're not chocolate," Daigo says slowly.
"Chocolate? I've got M&Ms," Aiba offers, finding the package and offering it to him.
"…those are Smarties," Daigo says. "With 'm's on them."
Aiba looks at Daigo and Daigo stares back. "Seriously?" he asks. He's never known that M&Ms had another name.
"Where are we?" Daigo asks.
"But you didn't miss Winnipeg by very much," Aiba repeats. He points at a green road sign in the distance, the white lettering clear despite the falling night. "See, Grand Forks isn't very far away and, if we get a ride, we can probably be at the border in a day."
"I just hope we don't get picked up by the authorities," Daigo says in his slow, thoughtful way. "I'm an illegal alien. And I don't have my passport."
Aiba doesn't have his with, either, which is why he's only walking Daigo part of the way home. "We can tell the cops that we're going to get married," he reassures Daigo. "You just came to pick me up so we could runaway together."
"That's really cool of you," Daigo declares. "Thanks."
They keep walking in companionable silence until it's too dark and cold to want to keep moving. They find a handy copse of trees and some particularly low branches under which they spread out Aiba's sleeping bag. It's a tight fit but for the first time in weeks, Aiba's feet are finally warm.
They don't sleep very much.
"Matsujun?" Aiba asks into crackly reception that his cellphone is providing him.
"Aiba?" Jun's worry comes through loud and clear.
"Hi, Matsujun," says Daigo, angling the mouthpiece a little closer so that Jun can hear him better.
"Who the hell is that?" Jun demands.
"Daigo!" Aiba informs him cheerfully. "I know it's late but we're in the middle of a fight…"
"What?" Jun shrieks.
In the three days since they've met he and Daigo have discovered a shared love of knowing things. Curiosity is what has both of them out on the road; Daigo's curiosity is a little more specific-music and song lyrics-but other than that Aiba feels safe saying that he and Daigo are the same. Daigo thinks so too and explains his concept of 'twenty different kinds of people' and how Aiba is the only other person he's found who fits his 'type'. But even though they're the same, sometimes they disagree. "A fight," Aiba repeats. "I say a group of mushrooms is called a 'ring' and he says they're called a 'troop'," he explains to Jun.
"It's a troop," Jun says faintly. "Aiba are you-" Jun stops and then starts again. "You'd better not be sleeping with some guy you just met," he says. "It's not safe."
Aiba looks at himself and Daigo crammed into his sleeping bag together. "It's just sleeping," he says to Jun at the same time Daigo chimes in with, "It's not like sex-sleeping. We're beyond that."
Jun mutters something under his breath that Aiba ignores and that Daigo very politely pretends he hasn't heard. "You couldn't have called Yoko for this?" Jun asks.
"Yoko wouldn't know," Aiba says. "Jun-chan would."
"Yoko," Jun yells, "what's a group of mushrooms called?"
"It's a troop. Are we getting mushrooms?" Yoko's voice is faint and distant despite the fact that he's clearly shouting at the top of his voice. "We can make mushroom-Swiss burgers if we get Swiss cheese."
"Ask Yoko what a group of cherries is called," Daigo says and Aiba can't tell if Daigo is talking to him or to Jun.
"No!" says Jun.
"Why not?" Daigo asks at the same time as Aiba asks, "How come?"
"Because-no, Satoshi," Jun's voice becomes a little more muffled sounding. "I'm not mad. No-"
Aiba knows that Ohno is standing near to Jun because Jun isn't raising his voice. He can't hear him at all, though, because Ohno mumbles a lot and slouches even more. "Hi, Oh-chan!" he calls, hoping he'll hear in case Jun doesn't pass on the message.
"Hi, Oh-chan," Daigo echoes.
"He says 'hi' to both of you," Jun reports. Then (obviously) to Satoshi, "Yeah, he's with some weirdo and they're asking me stupid questions like 'what's a group of cherries called'."
"Underclassmen?" Ohno's voice is loud and clear, even louder and clearer than Jun's outraged noise of aggravation.
The phone call ends with a sharp snap and Aiba is suddenly and completely homesick. "I'm going to go pee," he tells Daigo and scrambles out of the bag to go lean against a pine tree.
Daigo answers his phone when it rings a few minutes later. "Hi, Matsujun," Daigo says. "He's peeing on a pine tree." Aiba returns to the sleeping bag only when Daigo closes the phone and puts it back into his bag for him. "It's a 'swing'," Daigo says softly. "He said he used the office computer to look it up."
"Matsujun is a kind person," Aiba says, letting himself drift closer to Daigo, wondering if he can store up the feeling of warmth and un-lonely for later the way he does with candy.
"I'm homesick too," Daigo says as they curl together.
They exchange addresses at the border and walk backward away from it, waving until Daigo falls into a ditch and Aiba picks up a ride. "I'll send you my first CD," Daigo yells as Aiba climbs into the little subcompact.
Aiba leans out the window. "I'll send you postcards!" he promises.
He sends Daigo postcards from the more interesting places, things with interesting facts on them. Sometimes he scribbles down things he learns or experiments he thinks of and sometimes he suggests song lyrics.
When he gets home again months later he spends a long, long time there. One day a package arrives at Johnny's. It's a CD and the last track is twenty minutes long. There is a 'secret' song at the end; it's called 'Two of a Type' and has stupid lyrics like 'a ring of troops' and 'a swing of underclassmen'.
Aiba sends Daigo a postcard from Ohno's shop and gets a ride out of town the next day.
Aiba discovers that Spring in the northern most continental states is cold. There are still patches of snow in places and the gravel bank beside the pavement alternates between 'rock-solid frozen' and 'slushy-mess'. His feet feel like they never properly warm up and it makes him miss Captain J curling up beside him in his sleeping bag. He misses the company, too; there is a lot of 'between' in the 'between towns' in these places and there aren't always a lot of rides to go with it.
He can't look at his pictures while he walks but he can make his own. He pictures Captain J as a big, strong dog instead of the sweet puppy. He pictures Captain J leaping for a stick and Mari laughing and smiling and telling him what a good dog he is, what a good, sweet boy. It makes him feel better and less lonely. He's picturing the type of puppy he'd find that he could bring home for Jun when he rounds a sharp bend in the road and is forced to stop.
The road is full of sheep. They're big and covered in puffy curls of white wool and they have dark heads and faces. There are a lot of them. A really, really lot.
"Uwah," Aiba breathes out. "Hello, sheep," he says. He sort of wonders if they'll charge at him like the mountain goats at the zoo used to. "I'm just passing through, okay?"
"Yeah," says a voice in a slow, strange sort of drawl. "Me too, okay?"
Aiba looks up and sees a guy of about his own age, probably a few years older, standing in the middle of a knot of sheep, his arms raised over his head like he's getting mugged for his wallet.
"Hi," Aiba waves at him and gets a neat hand gesture in return. "Can you really get through?" The guy really seems to be having a hard time moving.
"Yeah but…" the guy says, trailing off a bit.
Aiba waits.
"It's really crowded," the guy finishes after a moment. "I think these are people-sheep. Like they're petting me with their heads or something."
"They really like people, huh?" Aiba asks. It's a little troubling because if he goes through, he might have sheep follow him out the other side.
"Yeah," the guy says again, trailing off again. "Somebody probably owns them. There aren't a lot of wild sheep, right?
"I don't think so," Aiba agrees. The guy is close enough that he reaches out a hand to help pull him through. "I'm Masaki," he says as the guy takes it.
"Daigo," says the guy, repeating the cool gesture from earlier. He grabs Aiba's hand again and Aiba pulls. "Thanks," the guy says once he's out. "I'd push you through but I don't think that'd help, right?"
Before Aiba can answer (because it would help-it'd help him but it'd make things bad for Daigo again is the problem) a car barrels around the curve. The driver might be applying the brakes but mostly he or she is honking and swerving through the sheep, which are running. None of them are hit but Aiba thinks this is more to do with the sheep being smart than it does with the skill or smarts of the driver. "Sheep don't drive through crowds of people," Aiba yells at the car's tail lights.
"There, there, Miss Fuzzy," Daigo says, rubbing the head of one sheep. "It's all right, Mrs. Wooly," he says to another, rubbing its head too.
Aiba kneels down and hugs one particularly fuzzy sheep. "Everything is okay…" he looks at Daigo. "Who's this one?" he whispers.
Daigo squints at the sheep. "Stephen Harper," he says.
"Everything is okay, Mr. Harper," Aiba tells the sheep. "We should get them to a pasture or a pen or someplace else safe," he says to Daigo.
"I was just going to say the same thing," Daigo smiles at him and they both stand at the same time.
"Let's do this!" Aiba cheers.
"Yeah!" they say together and Aiba copies Daigo's gesture as they shake on it.
Twenty minutes later, they're out of breath and Aiba is sweating inside his coat but the sheep are all safely away from the road and there's a fence with a big hole in it that they're funneling through. Since the sheep seem capable of seeing themselves back in, Aiba spends his time scouting around for something he can use to fix the fence. They end up propping the fallen board back into place with a few stout branches that are hard and cold with frost.
The whole endeavor and the doing of a good deed always makes Aiba hungry and as he drops down to sit against the newly repaired fence he swings his backpack into his lap and digs out his bag of candy. "You want anything?" he asks when Daigo sits down next to him.
"Have you got Smarties?" Daigo asks.
Aiba holds out the package to him absently, only looking up when Daigo doesn't take it. "What?" he asks. The package is a bit crushed but most of the powdery little disks are intact.
"What are those?" Daigo asks.
"Smarties," Aiba says, twisting the package to show the name.
"They're not chocolate," Daigo says slowly.
"Chocolate? I've got M&Ms," Aiba offers, finding the package and offering it to him.
"…those are Smarties," Daigo says. "With 'm's on them."
Aiba looks at Daigo and Daigo stares back. "Seriously?" he asks. He's never known that M&Ms had another name.
"Where are we?" Daigo asks.
"But you didn't miss Winnipeg by very much," Aiba repeats. He points at a green road sign in the distance, the white lettering clear despite the falling night. "See, Grand Forks isn't very far away and, if we get a ride, we can probably be at the border in a day."
"I just hope we don't get picked up by the authorities," Daigo says in his slow, thoughtful way. "I'm an illegal alien. And I don't have my passport."
Aiba doesn't have his with, either, which is why he's only walking Daigo part of the way home. "We can tell the cops that we're going to get married," he reassures Daigo. "You just came to pick me up so we could runaway together."
"That's really cool of you," Daigo declares. "Thanks."
They keep walking in companionable silence until it's too dark and cold to want to keep moving. They find a handy copse of trees and some particularly low branches under which they spread out Aiba's sleeping bag. It's a tight fit but for the first time in weeks, Aiba's feet are finally warm.
They don't sleep very much.
"Matsujun?" Aiba asks into crackly reception that his cellphone is providing him.
"Aiba?" Jun's worry comes through loud and clear.
"Hi, Matsujun," says Daigo, angling the mouthpiece a little closer so that Jun can hear him better.
"Who the hell is that?" Jun demands.
"Daigo!" Aiba informs him cheerfully. "I know it's late but we're in the middle of a fight…"
"What?" Jun shrieks.
In the three days since they've met he and Daigo have discovered a shared love of knowing things. Curiosity is what has both of them out on the road; Daigo's curiosity is a little more specific-music and song lyrics-but other than that Aiba feels safe saying that he and Daigo are the same. Daigo thinks so too and explains his concept of 'twenty different kinds of people' and how Aiba is the only other person he's found who fits his 'type'. But even though they're the same, sometimes they disagree. "A fight," Aiba repeats. "I say a group of mushrooms is called a 'ring' and he says they're called a 'troop'," he explains to Jun.
"It's a troop," Jun says faintly. "Aiba are you-" Jun stops and then starts again. "You'd better not be sleeping with some guy you just met," he says. "It's not safe."
Aiba looks at himself and Daigo crammed into his sleeping bag together. "It's just sleeping," he says to Jun at the same time Daigo chimes in with, "It's not like sex-sleeping. We're beyond that."
Jun mutters something under his breath that Aiba ignores and that Daigo very politely pretends he hasn't heard. "You couldn't have called Yoko for this?" Jun asks.
"Yoko wouldn't know," Aiba says. "Jun-chan would."
"Yoko," Jun yells, "what's a group of mushrooms called?"
"It's a troop. Are we getting mushrooms?" Yoko's voice is faint and distant despite the fact that he's clearly shouting at the top of his voice. "We can make mushroom-Swiss burgers if we get Swiss cheese."
"Ask Yoko what a group of cherries is called," Daigo says and Aiba can't tell if Daigo is talking to him or to Jun.
"No!" says Jun.
"Why not?" Daigo asks at the same time as Aiba asks, "How come?"
"Because-no, Satoshi," Jun's voice becomes a little more muffled sounding. "I'm not mad. No-"
Aiba knows that Ohno is standing near to Jun because Jun isn't raising his voice. He can't hear him at all, though, because Ohno mumbles a lot and slouches even more. "Hi, Oh-chan!" he calls, hoping he'll hear in case Jun doesn't pass on the message.
"Hi, Oh-chan," Daigo echoes.
"He says 'hi' to both of you," Jun reports. Then (obviously) to Satoshi, "Yeah, he's with some weirdo and they're asking me stupid questions like 'what's a group of cherries called'."
"Underclassmen?" Ohno's voice is loud and clear, even louder and clearer than Jun's outraged noise of aggravation.
The phone call ends with a sharp snap and Aiba is suddenly and completely homesick. "I'm going to go pee," he tells Daigo and scrambles out of the bag to go lean against a pine tree.
Daigo answers his phone when it rings a few minutes later. "Hi, Matsujun," Daigo says. "He's peeing on a pine tree." Aiba returns to the sleeping bag only when Daigo closes the phone and puts it back into his bag for him. "It's a 'swing'," Daigo says softly. "He said he used the office computer to look it up."
"Matsujun is a kind person," Aiba says, letting himself drift closer to Daigo, wondering if he can store up the feeling of warmth and un-lonely for later the way he does with candy.
"I'm homesick too," Daigo says as they curl together.
They exchange addresses at the border and walk backward away from it, waving until Daigo falls into a ditch and Aiba picks up a ride. "I'll send you my first CD," Daigo yells as Aiba climbs into the little subcompact.
Aiba leans out the window. "I'll send you postcards!" he promises.
He sends Daigo postcards from the more interesting places, things with interesting facts on them. Sometimes he scribbles down things he learns or experiments he thinks of and sometimes he suggests song lyrics.
When he gets home again months later he spends a long, long time there. One day a package arrives at Johnny's. It's a CD and the last track is twenty minutes long. There is a 'secret' song at the end; it's called 'Two of a Type' and has stupid lyrics like 'a ring of troops' and 'a swing of underclassmen'.
Aiba sends Daigo a postcard from Ohno's shop and gets a ride out of town the next day.