university arc #3b: seasons of love
Link to part 1 is here.
Outside it is dark; the lamps attempt, feebly, to dispel the darkness, an unsure orange bloom in the night. Fuji wonders if the stars are watching like Neil Gaiman says they do, if there are little princes traversing the galaxy, suffering wanderlust and wonderlust both.
Lust is such an ugly word, uncontrolled desires and impatience and base implications, reeking of desperation. What he feels for Tezuka has never been that: it is instead the need to reach out and feel something solid, something that isn’t a vague notion or impossibly heroic ideal. It isn’t a thrill with every beat of his heart, more the burn of helpless need that is not dependency; it fills him, overflows, surely he glows with this yearning, some days.
In a way it’s an avenue to the end to the one kind of love he knows how to give, stifling and protective and ultimately destructive. This is why he holds back, in declaring affection and bestowing it, his fear of domination. (but whether of himself, or by himself, he isn’t sure.)
Beneath him the bench is a regular pattern of gaps and wood, firm against his tailbone. In the dark he can feel the crudely scratched marks, rough scarring incongruous against the grain of the wood, possibly swear words or phone numbers (because prank calls are better than none.)
The thing about genius is that you can afford to choose how much you want to give, because there is no limit but the degree of your want. Fuji revels in the freedom of this, has never known any different, easily mastered the art of making things look easy.
Odd, how different it is with Tezuka. If he had to describe it he would say it feels like an infringement of his negative liberty, almost a compulsion, a coercion into perseverance. But in many ways it makes him a better person, this thing, it makes him try harder, be gentler and more accommodating, practice forgiveness and compromising. Greater positive liberty, then.
It’s colder than he thought it would be, the chill seeping through the little spaces between the fibres of his coat, into his bones. Tezuka might be worried, might have called the police, might even now be running frantically through the streets calling for him, at the expense of his dignity and self-composure. There could be white floodlights cutting wide white swathes across the grounds, a mournfully howling dog in the distance, a lone bat winging its way home, an eerie herald of dark.
Fuji looks up at the sky, at the silvery moon, beautiful and mysterious from a distance, the stuff of romance and sonnets and poetry; pockmarked up close, luminously alone.
(There was a story about a Chinese poet who drowned because he reached for the moon’s reflection in the water: but he doesn’t see the moral in that (unless it’s don’t imbibe too much alcohol, that he can understand). He tried, didn’t he, at the very least. Died trying.)
The boys in his class used to tease him; good-naturedly, of course, because boys are like that. He had too much of an imagination, they said, too much intelligence. He stared out of the window during class at the leaves on the tree in the courtyard, watching the leaves changing colours, wrote compositions about their bleeding yellow-orange-red outwards from the stalk, detaching and catching on the air currents, one-winged butterflies in their quest to be whole and mate as real ones do; severed goldfish tails jagged at the edges, lost in space. During lunch he arranged his bento according to colour, took the laughter and the teasing and the lack of understanding into himself, returned it with a smile that was only slightly shaky for the first term.
He should quit deluding himself, because Tezuka doesn’t go to people (another thing to resent Echizen for, though it isn’t his fault that he is brilliant and young and full of potential that he isn’t afraid to fulfill, because he has a never-ending source of it), he just waits and eventually his natural magnetism kicks in, people re-align themselves towards him, gravitate in his direction.
Fuji clutches his coat at the neck with one hand, sticks his other hand into his pocket, and walks in the general direction of home.
*
When he finally gets back there is only a note on the door in Tezuka’s writing, a single line scrupulously straight across the paper, evenly spaced words.
Gone to bed, key in the usual place.
Tezuka defies expectation easily, transcends it: but he doesn’t, where it actually matters.
*
They leave the house together the next morning, because it’s pretty much impossible to avoid someone you live with, and they do have the same class. But they take care not to accidentally-brush, as if overnight someone has carefully demarcated the boundaries of personal space and it is unthinkable to overstep them, a crossing of the demilitarized zone. Washing up after breakfast becomes a tiresome and complicated ritual, resembling a bizarre mating dance that really means mutual avoidance.
The class they share isn’t something they’re both terribly passionate about, it’s to do with physical geography and has nothing very much in common with either medicine or photography. Tezuka chose it as a rare indulgence to himself, because he likes mountains and nature; Fuji chose it simply because it hasn’t got anything to do with what he’s majoring in and what he learns might make for good dinner conversation (“Lake overturn is when carbon dioxide is released from the bottom of a lake and suffocates things. It killed 1,800 people in Cameroon. Also, the Yellowstone National Park caldera might explode any time.”)
Right now they’re doing the continental drift theory, as proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1915. That the seven continents were once a giant landmass is an amazing thing to Tezuka, as is the fact that the mountains he so respects are the cumulative result of little movements, a few centimeters a year. There is only that much distance between him and Fuji, now: if he so wished he could shift his weight a little to the right and bump their elbows together.
He’s forgotten to factor in the geologic time scale, the eons needed for the collision. One needs to think in millions of years, not minutes. It could take that much time to understand Fuji, more to chart the path they’re taking, figure out whether they’re converging, diverging, chafing each other. And beneath everything there is that which simmers, semi-molten and perpetually only on the verge of solidifying, never verbalized.
Possibly it is time for something to give: he is not as dense as Fuji thinks he is, and since subduction could be a sort-of illustration of the meaning of compromise, something good might come of it all. Good as mountains, hopefully.
*
Fuji stops doodling on his handout when a note lands on the centre of his desk, folds crisp and corners aligned.
Dinner at five, there’s a photography exhibition downtown open until ten, and the park is open all night.
There are little ink blots on the notepaper, irregularly placed between the parallel lines, the result of wet ink and hurry.
You have tennis practice until seven, Tezuka.
Tezuka looks at Fuji over the rims of his glasses, severely. He could be a teacher speaking to a particularly slow child; Fuji fights the sudden irrational urge to giggle.
The note lands back on his desk.
It wasn’t a suggestion, Fuji. But I would like to add that the street tennis courts are open all night, too.
Fuji twists in his seat, looks up at Tezuka and the corners of his mouth crook upwards in a syncline of a smile.
Of course, Tezuka.
Maybe Tezuka does exceed all expectations, after all.
A/N: the geog class thing was a prompt from
uralimpiel, and I couldn't resist D: being a geog geek is fun.