FIC FOR GREATFOUNTAIN (part 1)
For: greatfountain
From: sekky_chan
Title: I'll treat you like a stolen glance at myself
Pairings/Characters: Ueda, Koki. 6!KAT-TUN's member-whatever
Rating: PG
Warnings: Strange characters, strange logics, strange behaviors. Obnoxious teddy bears. Mentions of aliens. Tongue twister.
Summary: Here's the summary about Ueda: he doesn't believe in naivety, honest and trust. He has detached himself from his family. His so-called best friend is probably evil. His moral boundaries lie further than lying and manipulating. So he despites people like Koki. Especially people like Koki. The very person that is residing in his apartment, thanks to Nakamaru.
Notes:
- It's been great fun to write this for greatfountain, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks for my beta and others for being there when I was in distress. You guys are, as always, awesome.
- This fic is set during Junior era, some time between 2004-2005.
- Footnotes for the references can be found at the end of the fic.
part 1 || part 2
Ueda liked Nakamaru a lot.
He liked Nakamaru even when he secretly believed Nakamaru was evil and behind those cheeky smiles and inexplicable self-hugs and seemingly innocent snarls, Nakamaru was highly aware of how emotions and expectations worked (and also deep, dark, forbidden secrets that could destroy a man’s reputation) and used them well into subtly getting people to do as he pleased. That was why everyone found him pleasant; he knew what to do to get them to like him. Just like how he had made friends with Ueda in the first place.
Ueda didn’t really mind that, if he thought hard about it. People only got scared of things they didn’t realize were there; Ueda, he has known since the start. It was because they were the same; they made people liked them by playing out their parts, but it didn’t necessary meant they particularly liked most people.
And also because Nakamaru was probably evil, while Ueda himself could be a little bit cruel.
This was why Ueda was fond of Nakamaru, and he would almost never mind the “favors” Nakamaru asked him to. Especially when he always bribed Ueda with his one true love: Nakamaru’s mother’s homemade mille crepe. Ueda would always happily oblige whatever Nakamaru wanted done, be it cutting practicing or lying for Nakamaru while he cut practicing to hang out with his girlfriend (the second to last arcade game machine in the mall near the training building-- it was soccer).
But lying was one thing. Ueda didn’t mind lying; it was part of how he functioned. Except that while lying was within his moral boundaries, there were things Ueda would never tolerate.
“No.”
He said decisively, leaning back against the seat and watched as Nakamaru -body turning toward Ueda from the passenger seat-- flinch the tiniest bit in a kind of irritating way. The box of mille crepe bumped a little innocently along with the car, probably pretended to mind its own business as the two people stared each other down. Or at least one of them did, because the other had to drive.
Nakamaru pouted-- attempted to, and Ueda had to give him credit for trying his best, but he still looked obscenely, ridiculously annoying.
As they met another red light, he has started to wonder why he had agreed to drive Nakamaru home that evening.
“Please, Ueda. Just this one time!” Nakamaru was clasping his hands and bowing now, not so subtly pushing the crêpe box across the dashboard.
“I don’t get this,” Ueda sighed, massaging his forehead tiredly. “Why can’t he just stay with you?”
“He can’t. Our Moms have each other’s numbers, Ueda. And my sisters will start asking questions and I won’t be able to lie for him.”
If Ueda were being honest with himself, he really, really did like a guy like Nakamaru.
“If you don't help me, I’ll tell everyone about that time that you got drunk and started doing nanpa at m-“
But see, he has told you so. Evil.
He watched in silence as Koki, who was currently quietly sitting on Ueda’s -brand new, if not just a bit untidy- floor, arms hugging his curled legs and chin resting on his knees, looking over at Ueda with big eyes from under his fringe. He was already small, but the way he hunched his shoulders and hid away inside his over-sized coat made him suddenly so tiny and lost. Anybody that looked at him would immediately thought of an abandoned puppy longing to be picked up and hugged and given all the love. Except Ueda suspected Nakamaru has instructed him beforehand to look exactly like that to get to him or something.
Well, lost puppy or not, Ueda would never have taken Koki in.
Koki was, in as few words as possible, transparent. From his point of view, Ueda could clearly see Koki’s fingertips turned white as they unconsciously knead the jeans on his knees, his lower lip chewed on slightly and all his pointless rage and useless emotions reflected in his big, black eyes. He was sinking even lower into the floor, pouting and glaring at the opposite wall like it offended him. He looked no less like he wanted to be there than Ueda wanted him to.
Ueda sighed again.
He saw all of it, has always been able to. Koki was an entity of impulsive, nonsense rebellion, one that acted on the first leap of his heart without looking back to realize how it made him out to be. He was insecure and unaware of it, and yet never ceased to expressing himself in the most annoying way. To Ueda, Koki has always been the loudest, most thoughtless of person; the kind that Ueda usually included into the “surrounding idiots” crowd he has always avoided.
And yet Koki was Nakamaru’s best friend, and it baffled Ueda to see the length Nakamaru would go as Koki’s will.
This time was no different. Apparently, Koki has run away from home yet again -which was not news; everyone and their moms knew Koki skipped school and slept over at Nakamaru’s on monthly basic. Except this time Nakamaru thought it would be funny to pull Ueda in the problem as well.
Ueda was definitely not helping him proves his nonsensical point. Koki had a home, a family that was probably waiting for him to come home for dinner-people that loved him. He had no right to be taken in. He had no right to be here, to look like that in the first place: sitting on Ueda's floor, thinking about running away from home because of whatever petty argument he had had with his family. Thinking it was fair to do so.
Except Nakamaru somehow has known about deep, dark secrets that could destroy a man’s reputation.
When left alone, Koki was surprisingly quiet. Ueda assumed he was just being sulky, even when Ueda told him to take the space in the left corner-- there was a spare set of blanket and pillows that Nakamaru had brought over when Ueda just moved here, saying it was for when he would crash over. Koki moved quietly there and dumped his bags (and a giant Pooh bear with obnoxious grin splattered on its face) on the floor, flopped down onto the folded sheet and pulled out his earphones.
Ueda's eyes followed him from the coffee table, watching him draw his knees to his chest and fidget with the phone.
For a while, the only sound in the empty apartment was Ueda's fingers flipping through the pages of his magazine distractingly.
He had just moved here about a month ago, leaving his family's house in a hurry a week after his twentieth birthday. Bringing nothing but a case of casual clothing, Ueda ended up here: a small, charming apartment in a quiet neighborhood of Iidabashi. Nakamaru had brought all the necessities here after Ueda had made it clear that he would not bother buying any furniture for his new place.
"Furniture means commitment, and it would be hard to leave when you have a commitment to something," he had explained. Nakamaru had rolled his eyes in response, but he also understood.
Ueda has waited twenty years to be able to cut loose of all the chains his parents had put upon his shoulders, all the responsibilities and burdens and guilt of a child who had failed his parents' expectations, a child who had been locked away from his freedom and right to be a normal child. Ueda was over that. He was reclaiming his life, and it was his, his only, and he would let nothing or no one hold him back again.
Funny how Ueda was aware of how messed up that was, and yet it was everything he had ever desired.
He couldn't recreate a better childhood for himself, but he was going to make up for that child. Even when it meant living in a place with no bed, no chair; waking up in the middle of the night just to listen to his own breathing echoing against these empty walls. Ueda preferred this coldness he had created, because it was still better than the coldness that belonged to his parents.
A startling sound pulled Ueda out of his train of thought; he looked up in time to find Koki, still sitting in the corner of the room, but he had his earphones off and was scratching the back of his neck, looking troubled. He shifted so he was sitting cross-legged on the folded sheet and half facing Ueda, eyes darting away when he saw Ueda squinting at him.
"What is it, Koki?" Ueda snapped quietly, before returning to skim through the magazine. Honestly, if he had wanted to stay here, he could at least go to the toilet by himself...
Koki's voice was uncertain, and a quiet wake in this lonely place. "Just... I'm sorry. For troubling you."
Ueda watched as Koki's face started turning red, body obviously resisting from squirming away into himself.
"...Thank you." Koki said with a frown, in a voice so small it might as well have been to himself. It struck something heavy in Ueda's chest, resolving into a dull, beating ache and it was strange, so strange.
Koki was not like this. Koki was supposed to be a troublesome, impulsive rebel; a noisy, annoying presence that existed solely on nonsense frustration of his surroundings. Koki was supposed to be unsympathetic to people like Ueda. Koki was supposed to be...
Except he was sitting there in a corner of Ueda's empty apartment, in his over-sized jacket; small hands hugging his giant teddy bear. Even from Ueda's corner, he could see Koki's face was a faint shade of red, lower lip bitten between his teeth and he was glaring at the offensive wall again. And Ueda has never seen anything more pitiful.
It all seemed so wrong. And yet.
"I worry about him," Nakamaru said to him during break. The two of them sat in a corner of the training room, munching on Nakamaru's mother's sweets. Ueda took a sip of tea from his bottle, before turning slightly to side-eye him.
"Oh now looks who's talking."
"Stop being cynical, Ueda. It doesn't suit you."
He elbowed Nakamaru in the ribs. "I'm being rational, which is what you're not being when it concerns Koki. Has his family called yet?"
"No... This is weird." Nakamaru looked over at Koki, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor on the other side of the room, eyes glued to a comic book. Akanishi was bothering him by messing up his hair, and if it was anything like a normal day in the training room, Nakamaru would already have had to step in to stop a brawl. Instead Akanishi was totally getting away with trying to tie up Koki's fringe; the latter seemed unaware of the on-going assault on his hair.
"He doesn't usually hide anything from me, but this time I have no idea what he's up to." Nakamaru sighed, picking up a piece of umeboshi and made a face at it.
"I don't get it," Ueda sighed, shaking his head as he watched Koki half-heartedly shrug Akanishi off of him.
Ueda didn't really get it, this whole thing. He was used to the Koki who was not living in a corner of his apartment, Koki who was loud and annoying and laughed a lot when he yanked the game controller out of Taguchi's hands just to entertain himself; who clung to Nakamaru and acted like an irritating spoiled pet and got into petty fights with Akanishi or Taguchi or even Ueda himself.
Except for the past two days, he had woken up at night to the sound of Koki mumbling in his sleep, the sight of him curling up on the too big mattress, small hands clutching at the giant yellow bear like it were protecting him. Like a wounded, lost child craving for affection.
Koki cleaned up his apartment and put his clothes in the washing machine without him knowing, and later refused to look at him in the eyes when he attempted to tell him to stop.
When their eyes did meet, though, Koki always jerked away, a faint blush crept across his cheeks and he frowned intensely at anything else except Ueda.
He thought of shyness and amused himself by deliberately watching Koki from across the room sometimes, staring until he had to look back.
Ueda blamed it on Koki’s obliviousness, but slowly he picked up on Koki's little quirks, the puffing of his cheeks and his hands playing at his nape and his small frown when he slept (not that he was staring, that would be quite weird) and everything was so sudden he couldn't take all of it in.
"Get what?" Nakamaru asked, passing him the umeboshi.
"...Koki."
Koki and all that he was, what Ueda has always assumed of him and how it was all crumbling down because he was now all up in Ueda's face. Ueda would have been fine with an annoying, lazy, clumsy house guest; with not knowing the reasons of Koki's actions, what ran through his mind and how utterly irrelevant he was to him>. Except now he couldn't turn a blind eye because beneath all that facade, what Koki had always claimed himself to be, Ueda had seen a glimpse of something else entirely different.
It amazed and frustrated him both, and ignited a different sort of cloying annoyance in his chest now when he looked at Koki.
He wasn't sure if it was annoyance, or morbid intrigue.
"How can you even be friends with him, it must be so exhausting."
Nakamaru laughed at this, and took the bottle of tea from his hand. "It's not like it's easy being your friend, you know."
"At least I'm straightforward." Ueda muttered offhandedly, but Nakamaru scoffed at him.
"You're blunt! And anyway, he'll probably flee home before you can actually be friends with him, so just be cool with it."
Their conversation died when Akanishi -finally getting what he wanted- got smacked over the head by Koki's book, and Nakamaru had to stalk over to pull Koki off of him.
Kamenashi started grumbling about how none of them were being mature like him, and Taguchi was too engrossed in his new controller (it has like THREE new settings, guys!!!), too busy marvelling at Earth's technology to actually notice what was going on.
Ueda put on his headphones and put the sweet box in his lap. He would ponder Koki's entire existence later, but for now, he just had to keep the rest of the sweets from Nakamaru.
He didn't tell Nakamaru about it, but the next night he was jerked out of his sleep by Koki's ringtone and his sluggish whisper of "Hello?"
Koki had tried to keep his voice as quiet as he could, but in this utter silence draping over the apartment, Ueda could clearly hear Koki's end of conversation.
"Where are you calling from? Is it okay like this?"
"Yeah... I'm fine."
"Is it cold out there?"
"Go back to your room, then."
"...Goodnight."
Ueda waited until the sound of Koki curling up on the mattress had subsided and cracked open his eyes. Koki had his back at him; he looked so small and lost in the darkness, buried in the mountain of pillows and blanket, hiding away from the world.
He kept staring at Koki's back until a small sound -a whimper- bubbled up in all their silence and dissolved just as Ueda registered it. In the darkness and the invisible wall that separated them, Koki couldn't hear his sigh.
He had never thought that he would ever witness Koki cry.
Koki greeted him in the morning with the sight of his puffy eyes and red nose. He went to work with a big hoodie on and a pair of glasses, pretending like Ueda wasn't aware of it at all.
Ueda should probably have acted the same. Getting this over without the knowledge of Koki's quiet sobs in the middle of the night, the mysterious phone call, Koki's curled figure and his small, small hands clutching the pillow.
Ueda was not raised to care.
He knew it, regretted it, but admitted he could do nothing to fix it. As years of his childhood were wasted and he grew older and bitterer in the cramped walls of his big, empty room, realizing how cold the world he has been living in was; full of expectations and responsibilities, disappointments and guilt a child shouldn’t have had to bear; Ueda has long come to the conclusion that feelings were secondary.
If he didn’t feel anything, there would be no guilt. If there was no guilt, nothing and no one could do anything to hurt him. That way, he was safe. His heart was safe.
But that afternoon he saw Koki's trembling finger pushing the button on the vending machine, his hunched shoulders catching a thin shadow in the hallway; and maybe it was because of Nakamaru hopeless stare at Koki's back earlier, or it was the flashbacks to the night before, the tiny bubbling sounds of agony, or the sight of Koki biting his lower lip and staring distractedly at the glass...
It ignited this itching feeling in his chest, raising and lumping in his throat and he felt like doing something, or just saying something, at all.
"So what's your deal?"
He would never forget the look Koki gave him in that instance as he jerked and raised his head; big swollen eyes so exhausted and miserable. It struck something horrible in Ueda's chest, setting a heavy, rusty gear to shift, like seeing a cold, wet puppy shaking in the rain and feeling the need to give it a warm, tight hug and never let go. But then the mask came back and the puppy hid away behind droopy, careless eyes and a half-hearted shrug of his shoulder.
"Nothin'. Just don't know which to choose." He gestured aimlessly at the vending machine, facing the other side of the hallway, probably in vain hope that Ueda would take that and leave.
He squinted at that. "Don't bullshit me, Koki."
"What?" Koki snapped, but Ueda could already pick up on Koki's shoulders turning away from him, as if hiding away into his big hoodie.
"Listen, even Taguchi is wondering about your miserable ass these past few days. Just throw them a bone so they'll stop bugging about it."
"So?! Is it your business to ask?"
"Koki..."
But Koki wasn't listening anymore. He stepped away from Ueda, arms flailing like he was thinking it looked threatening and his face was red all over.
"Just leave me alone, okay! You people think you're so good at controlling your feelings and--and you think that's so cool!!" He was glaring and his hands curled into fists, but when Ueda took a step forward, he took a step back, shoulders jerking away, trying to shield himself in hopeless advance. It was all so miserable, and each movement Koki took it felt like something stabbing in Ueda's stomach; a cold, coiling thing retching up to his middle, and for a moment of bare instinct he shot out his hand, grabbing Koki's clenched fist in mid-air.
For all that Koki seemed bony and small, his hand felt even smaller in Ueda's grip, and he never expected that what he would feel was the immediate impression that he could crush him with ease if he ever wanted to. It was Koki; Koki who wore baggy clothes and talked big and got into brawls with people; Koki who all the juniors were scared of because he always looked so threatening. And yet in this moment, Koki felt like he was made out of cardboard.
Koki's eyes widened and he finally snapped out of it, looking up at Ueda in renewed fear He tried to tug free of his hand, but that only made Ueda tightened his grip.
"Let go!!"
"Listen you brat. It's a common rule that when someone is trying to be sensible and asking you what's wrong, at least have the decency to act nicely about it. Why don't you just be a grown up and accept our help because some people in this group are clearly concerned about you."
He watched as Koki flinched at his words, brows furrowed and he hung his head down a bit-- another telltale-- as his struggle against Ueda's hand weakened. Ueda was so ready to have it; the thrill of peeling and peeking under Koki’s skin. It was no longer just about feeling concerned or sympathetic, but to seek to revel his morbid curiosity.
"Ueda?"
He turned around to find Nakamaru shaking his head slowly at him, and Akanishi looking over between them in confusion. In that distracting second, Koki yanked free from his grip and ran away before Ueda could catch a glimpse of him.
Their first attempt at a conversation ended like that; a door slammed shut; broken and unfulfilled. The silence of it rang hollow in Ueda's chest
"So he ran away from home? Again? How old is he, anyway?" Kamenashi exclaimed, pacing back and forth in the dressing room, phone in hand.
Lounging on the couch, legs on the armrest, Akanishi commented with awe. "That's kinda cool, though."
"It's not "cool", Jin. Why can't he act like an adult, like me? He can't just run away every time he wants to win an argument."
Akanishi scoffed. "Please, you were the one whining to our manager for ice cream the other day. Adult my foot." At this, Kamenashi grabbed a magazine on the make-up table and threw it at him. It quickly escalated into magazines and hair products flying across the room and scattering on the floor.
"Be careful of the icing, boys," Nakamaru offered absent-mindedly as he came to stand next to Ueda at the make-up table. "So what's your problem, Ueda?"
He looked up wearily from his hands to side-eye Nakamaru. "My problem, is that I can't understand your best friend. He pisses me off. Take him back!" He watched as Nakamaru hopped on the table and gave him a half-hearted shrug.
"I thought it's just the usual brothers' brawl, you know. But now that I think about it, refusing to stay at my place and forbid me to reveal his whereabouts is a bit..."
"A bit."
Nakamaru hit him on the arm.
"I'll try to figure it out, okay? And don't be mad at Koki just now, he didn't mean it." Ueda scoffed at this while rubbing his arm. Despite looking lanky and possessing fragile hands, Nakamaru could deliver some stinging physical abuse when he felt like it.
"He might not even gonna come back to my place tonight."
Ueda watched as Nakamaru slowly smiled at him, all secrets and understanding; he looked comical like this, and Ueda would have laughed out loud except suddenly he had a speculation if all of this was just a way for Nakamaru to get his two best friends together.
"Ah, but he will."
Bastard.
"Hahaha. Right."
"You see, Koki is like a puppy. Even if you kicked him, he'll roll back to you eventually. He might look like he was angry at you, but he's not really."
"And Akanishi is actually not stupid; he's just faking it, obviously."
Nakamaru hit him again. "I mean, Koki acts like he's angry at people because he always thinks that nobody likes him. He was yelling at you because he probably thought you hated him."
"What kind of logic is that?"
Nakamaru dropped a wrapped strawberry-flavored candy from his pocket in Ueda's hand before leaning back against the mirror, popping another candy in his mouth. At the other end of the room, Taguchi started yelling in pain because Akanishi was kicking him for "dropping the icing on the carpet, again".
Nakamaru made a thoughtful sound.
"It's not that he doesn't trust others, but more like, Koki doesn't even like himself."
"Huh?"
"Normally if one loves himself just a little bit, they would never do such things. But Koki always expected himself to be hated, even considers it an obvious fact. In other words, he thinks that nobody likes him."
The faint taste of strawberry on his tongue suddenly faded. Ueda dropped his head on his hands, fingers massaging his temples. "Weirdo." And Nakamaru laughed at this, digging out a chocolate candy.
"I don't think any of us is normal." They both glanced at Taguchi. "Anyway, despite his self-loathing, Koki loves people. He needs us to remind him that he's loved, even if it's just a little bit. Approved. That's why he does all those weird things anyway."
Ueda groaned into his hands. "That just means he's a big baby." Above him, Nakamaru chuckled as he unwrapped the candy for him.
"That just means he likes you so much, Ueda."
Nakamaru's phone rang off as he passed the candy in Ueda's hand. He hopped off the table and excused himself, and Ueda didn't see him again that afternoon.
Ueda re-wrapped the chocolate candy and put it in his pocket, just as Taguchi came whining to Uepi about how Akanishi snatched his gameboy away, but all he could hear was those last words spoken to him.
"That just means he likes you so much," his foot. As if that made things different. He remembered Koki's small fist in his palm and the way it felt, the way it made him felt; and cursed Nakamaru under his breath.
Evil bastard.
Love has always been a hot and torturous thing in Ueda. Scalding, like swallowing an ingot of hot lead, almost too heavy to bear. All relationships were meaningless, fleeting like the smiles he exchanged daily, because people were as cold and pretentious as the walls he was made to build around himself.
Ueda always felt it hard to deal with human beings around him, even when he has practiced the perfect mechanism of fake smiles and mentally tuned out the voices of those he deemed nonsense. But even doing that was too much and sometimes he ended up feeling exhausted just from smiling at the face in front of him, and yet he had to keep doing it, because showing his vulnerability was not something he was grown to do.
That was why Ueda has always found certain type of people unbearable.
People like Koki, to be precise.
Koki was... transparent. Koki wore his heart on his sleeve; he smiled too earnestly too easily and screamed bloody murder at people just as easy. Koki was that kind of person: he couldn't pretend throughout that he was honestly mad at something for so long. He could be running away from someone because of anger, but he would come back to them later and sitting at their doorstep, wrapped up in his over-sized jacket, knees drawn to his chest, looking utterly like a pet waiting for its master to come home.
Ueda wondered in a moment's short if Koki was aware of this tendency of his own.
When he moved closer to unlock the door, Koki carefully peered up at him from his spot. A cautious stare; unsure of whether Ueda had forgiven him or if he was going to shred him to pieces within any seconds given. The only sound between them was the clanking of the keys, he could feel Koki’s stare and his very light breaths, picturing Koki’s fingers fidgeting as they wrapped around his knees. And Ueda felt the thrill of it: the satisfaction when he made Koki believing he was at his mercy.
It was easy, slipping into this mindset, being in charge of something. Or in this case, someone. The fact that it was Koki made it even easier. Even more thrilling.
Koki needed him. Somehow, he thought. Somehow. Koki was not weak, but he was dependant. On mere attention, affection, like he was always deprived of it.
He opened the door and watched in silence as Koki meekly hugged his bag closer to himself, hesitantly standing up and stepped inside without a word. He didn’t need to; his pleading, guilty eyes were feeding Ueda with plenty of very good sensation.
Keeping a straight face, he walked past Koki, who was still standing awkwardly at the genkan, watching Ueda’s every move intensely.
“Get in, and start cleaning. And I want dinner to be ready when I got out of bath.” He threw Koki a look while taking off his coat, dumping it on the floor as Koki scrambled to take off his shoes. He couldn’t fight the smirk that was creeping across his face, though, so he turned away and started walking to the bathroom, hands digging in pockets for wallet and changes.
Something small and round and plastic-wrapped rolled in his palm, and he looked down to find the chocolate candy he has kept from Nakamaru earlier.
What’s with Nakamaru and his sweets fixation anyway? He always seemed to have some snacks hidden somewhere nearby. It was sort of dubious, if he thought about it.
“Here,” He called, and tossed the candy toward Koki. Big eyes stared down at it before glancing up at him in uncertainty. It was all so amusing. “For you,” he said.
“Oh. Uhm, Ueda?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry. About… the afternoon. Please don’t be mad at me.”
He almost laughed then, turning around to look at Koki. But the sight that greeted him: Koki on his haunches, small hands clutching at Ueda’s coat, those big, pleading eyes and that inferno pout.
“He likes you very much,”
Ueda was sure then that maybe he was in some evil schemes with the intention to mess with his head. He mentally cursed, and had to turn away when he felt his cheeks were beginning to burn like the back of his eyelids.
Damn him, Koki.
And that evil bastard with his ridiculous secret smile.
“Never mind that.” He muttered.
Ueda managed to walk away, but not far enough for Koki’s next words to fall out of his hearing distance. He cursed the fact that he could probably see Koki smiling too, corners of his mouth lifted up in a cat-like grin. So bright. So naïve. Such simplicity.
No deep, dark intentions. No fake, pretentious masks. Just relief and happiness all over.
“Thanks, Ueda.”
It was a slow and quiet afternoon; Koki was out to bother unfortunate people on the streets, they had no more practice or meeting for the rest of the day, so Ueda decided to have a little me-time. A cup of hot milk Earl Gray and newly baked buttered breads from the store down the complex, he was all set. He was trying to ignore the eyes of the obnoxious Pooh bear to focus on his book when the phone rang.
He really should have looked at the caller ID before picking it up. His mother’s voice rose on the other end and he fought the urge to immediately hang up.
“Tatsuya.”
“Mum.”
She cleared her voice a little bit, and Ueda heard shuffling sounds mingled in with her usual business tone. She barked a distant order to a maid before returning to the phone.
“I just wanted to tell you that we recently cleared the basement and found some of your stuff in it.”
“I see.” He rubbed his eyes, focusing on the stars bursting behind his eyelids rather than her voice. It twisted horrible things in his stomach and made him want to hurl.
“…How are you holding up? I guess Nakamaru-kun is still looking after you. You know you can come back whenever, if you’ll just apologize to your father and I-“
“Why are you calling?” He snapped, and it sounded harsher than he intended, but the angriness of it resolved his own irritation somehow.
“Right. We had your stuff in boxes already. I thought you might want them back,” He heard her voice trembling in a short second. “We have no use for them here anymore.”
“…Sure. I’ll see about it.”
Ueda hung up the phone. He could see his mother still on the line, listening to the monologue of beep, beep, beep; walking downstairs and stopped at his old room. The closed door that held his childhood -or remnants of it; memories of days she had opened the door to check up on him, clean up his room, flipping through his homework. His mind flashed to the night his sister stomped out of the house, to the terror that wound his heart when he realized he might have lost her forever.
“Hm,” He said aloud. “Sad.”
He looked around his empty apartment. The silence of it when Koki wasn’t there--a vast space of nothing-- suddenly struck him; a flash, a surge of sight. Fatigue and light-headness hit him in the stomach like a steel bar.
He put down the phone and walked over the kitchen counter. Leaving a note to Koki on the used grocery list. He pondered for a short second before writing down: Running to the store. Suddenly crave ice cream. Back soon.
With that, he grabbed his car key and his coat, and headed out of the door.
When he came back it was already dark and the sky just kept getting darker, heavy and threatening; like there was going to be a storm. It was filling up with rain clouds the color of steel wool.
A perfect metaphor for Ueda’s mood right now.
Koki opened the door for him, wearing a pair of orange sweatpants and his God is a DJ t-shirt. He took a moment to appreciate Ueda and his boxes.
“You said ice cream…” He began uncertainly, and Ueda snapped before Koki could worsen his mood further.
“Would you help me carry one, or would you get the heck out of my way?” But his throat felt like swallowing glass.
The boxes were stacked up against the wall in the kitchen corner, and Ueda went straight to his mattress and dropped down in an exhausted heap. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, Koki watched with his big eyes, in silence from the kitchen counter, as if followed Ueda’s every movement. Attentive. Wondering but never asked.
Ueda thought maybe he should get a real pet to stop himself from confusing that Koki was one of his.
He was staring at the boxes -they haven’t been opened since being brought here two days ago. The rubber ball bounced against the wall and back into his waiting hand, and sometimes he threw it at Koki’s head just to see the other turned around to give him a death glare so he would snicker. Distractions are important, he told himself. Koki’s fake anger has started to become more entertaining.
His mother still looked the same as when he last saw her; a mildly older version of his sister, chin held high, beautiful hair tied neatly into a bun. She still wore those expensive silk kimonos, her skin still smooth and her lips still red.
Her eyes were, as always, still just as cold; a beautifully, heatless shade of grey.
Ueda walked past her as she opened the door for him, didn’t want to hear her greetings; her eyes always watching, policing for desperation he didn’t bear. He strolled down the hallway leading to the basement, didn’t look at the photos displayed on the walls along the way. There was his sister in those photos, smiling, half smiling, or not smiling at all. She had her arm around him in those photos, wrapping herself around him, surrounding him. Protecting him.
He didn’t realize mother was trailing after him, her sock-covered steps quiet like how he remembered them, coming down the hall to the door of his room.
“I had your boxes piled at the top of the stairs. Though the new helpers might get something mixed up, so I suggest you check again before bringing them home.”
He almost laughed out loud, but the fatigue hit his stomach, rising up against his throat and he was too busy swallowing it to make any disdain sound. He opened the door to the basement.
A tall stack of cardboard boxes blocked his way. He gave them a little nudge -not meant for them to tumble down to the bottom of the stairs, which they did.
“Well,” His mother frowned and paused at the door, and he felt the familiar coldness crept up his nape again. “I’ll leave you with them then. Ask the butler to open the gate for you when you’re done.” And then she was gone.
He went down the stairs, passed the running washing machine, onto the back room; dragging the stack of boxes, grabbing a marker, and a tape gun. It was dark. A cotton pull cord brushed his arm and he yanked it; squinting as the single bulb that dangled at the center of the room brightened.
Stacks of boxes overflowing with papers. His old bike that his father bought him when he was eleven. His sister’s broken lamp. A whole room full of junk.
He grabbed a stack of papers from the first box. At the top of the page a kid had scrawled in imperfect culinary, “What I Did This Summer”. In the corner was his sister’s words written in red ink: GOOD JOB. His old schoolwork.
The second box, another shelf of junk. He found a pile of loose papers with numbers, columns of figures, and the words Mutual Fund Allocation. His father’s work. He threw the whole pile out, and reached for the small chest at the bottom of the box.
The post-it note on top said, For Tatsuya in his sister’s writing. It was an old-fashioned jewelry chest with corners covered in faded gold; decorative tooling and metal trims made it look kind of fancy. The slightly curved lid displayed the name Hara in raised leather letters.
Hara was his sister’s name.
The fatigue hitting him then was almost too much to bear.
Koki’s cry snapped him out of his trance. He looked around: Koki had been lying on his stomach on the floor in front of Ueda, working on his mid-term essays. The whimpering that he was hearing came from the kitchen though, so he leaned over to catch Koki clutching at his finger, eyes scrunched in pain.
Ueda sighed.
“Cupboard, left drawer.” He waited until Koki started struggling to get the first aid kit to sneak at mean chuckle at him. “What were you doing cutting yourself?”
“I was hungry!” Koki protested, lips pouting. “There’s nothing in the fridge except some suspicious hard blue… triangle thing.” He put the kit down at Ueda’s feet before crouching down; bleeding finger jutting out and big eyes stared up at him expectedly.
Ueda started cleaning the wound by pouring an unnecessary amount of alcohol all over the finger, smirking as Koki started wailing and writhing, but unable to get away because Ueda has gotten a firm grip on his wrist.
Koki’s wrist was bony, but also so very small. Ueda could have crushed it with ease. Like Koki was made of cardboard and Ueda was Superman.
He ran clean tissues over the finger, wiping away bright red blood.
“Oh, you mean the cheese?”
“Dude, that’s no cheese! Your Galaxy 7 couldn’t cut through it!”
Ueda genuinely laughed then, watching Koki relaxing in his palm and finally, laughed with him, shoulders awkwardly stiffing in the afford of not shaking too much.
So it has become like this, Ueda thought as he fit the adhesive bandage over the wound. It has become him and Koki, laughing away in his apartment, he no longer felt too weird about the out of place Pooh bear in the corner, or Koki’s big eyes staring up at him, Koki pouting as the bandage fell tighter than necessary around his finger, Koki pulling back and roll around on the floor…
Koki, lifting his upper body off the ground, resting his weight on scraped elbows and peering at him amusingly.
“Thanks,” he said sheepishly.
“You’re welcome.”
Koki snickered. “You need to reconsider your living style though. Start with consuming actual food instead of moon rocks.”
“But I borrowed some self-help books from Taguchi,” He said, already in the mood for joking around. A little bit. “They said moon rock-like cheeses are the best for your human form’s health. You should read one. I have Consume necessary nutrients, Breathe sufficient air… and Chicken Soup for Moon Aliens, etcetera.”
That sent Koki into a helpless giggling fit and it made Ueda swelled a little inside as he watched Koki hid his flushed face in his hands, but his shaking shoulders still gave him away.
“I think Nakamaru also enjoys Chicken Soup.” He continued. “Though he likes his low-fat and heart healthy. You know how old people are.”
“Oh God, stop it~”
They laughed with each other for a while, ditching absent band mates and managers and instructors from work; Ueda picked up the rubber ball and started throwing it at Koki’s head again. Koki scrambled around to catch the ball as it came rolling at his side.
Great. Now Ueda was playing catch with him.
“Still, though,” Koki said, suddenly sobered as he wriggled his way to pass the ball back to Ueda.
“You need to get some food. Maybe a pet later to keep you company.”
“I already have one.” The ball bounced off Koki’s forehead, bounced a few more times on the ground until Koki picked it up.
“Where?” Koki demanded.
“You.” He snickered, and then quickly added. “If you decided to latch on me forever.”
He has expected self-mocking laughter when he said that. Given Koki’s sense of humor, he should have acted the way Ueda expected him to. He should have turned around and make a dog-like pose, demand Ueda to pet him on the head and make it comfortably awkward for both of them.
Except that he stopped grinning and in a split moment, Ueda saw the eyes of that terrified kid again. The kid that wanted to run away crying and hiding behind his Pooh bear. But then the mask came down and he was Koki again.
Rebellious Koki. Joking-around Koki. So Koki dug his head down and nuzzled up Ueda’s folded leg.
“Pet me, wan!”
Ueda sighed. “Honestly, Koki, tell me. Why the hell did you even run away?”
The silence that followed was telltale. Ueda unconsciously reached out and toyed with a strand of Koki’s hair with his fingers.
“I… wanted to try living alone?” Koki tried, lamely so, and Ueda snorted.
“Please. You’re just a big baby who has access to a giant gangsta wardrobe. You can’t live alone.”
“I can!” Koki protested, but didn’t pull away as Ueda started ruffling his hair. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.
“You can’t.”
“Can!”
“Repeat after me. Namamuginamagomenamatamaga. Namamuginamagomenamatamaga. Namamuginamagomenamatamaga.”
Koki stiffed, and hesitated for three seconds. “N-namamugi namagome namatamaga, namamugini- Arg!!“ Ueda grinned.
“Th-that doesn’t have anything to do with living alone!!” He rolled away and laid on his stomach, pretending to sulk.
“Yeah, I just wanted to see you fail. But no, you still can’t live alone. You’re not mature enough.” Oh great. Now he was sounding like Kamenashi. “You need your family, Koki.”
“Whatever.” Koki faced the opposite wall now, refused to look at Ueda. He could even hear the sulking and pouting in his voice.
“You just don’t want me here.”
But it was not true. Not anymore. Ueda wasn’t sure if it was the side effects of the horrible visit back home -his mother and all those pictures and his sister’s chest...
He didn’t know the answer for that question, but he was sure of one thing; as his foot crept across their distance and he started poking Koki’s back with his toes.
Ueda no longer not wanted Koki here. He would rather have- If only Koki was his.
If only.
Koki’s hands were as small as his body. Bony, aligned and yet, so soft, and his palms were so hot, it felt like he was being touched by fireflies.
Curious fingertips were now dancing across Ueda’s palm, running along the ridges and each dips of his rough skin, feeling as light as feather. It was ticklish, but Ueda let Koki entertained himself, turning his hand up and down, pressing in softer spots, as if to feel Ueda’s pulse, or waiting for something to appear on his skin.
“Ueda…”
Koki’s voice woke him from his thought, and he tore his eyes away from the magazine page, colors now all blurred together in his vision.
“What?”
He watched as Koki ran his finger along the straight line in the middle of his palm, tracing feathery circles absentmindedly.
"Wanna see my escape pod?"
Ueda shut his eyes as a wave of wind hit his face. A pair of goggles would have been nice, he thought to himself. Trees and buildings and lamp posts were rushing away from them as Koki sped up and Ueda heard the bike roared before everything in his ears whooshed out and replaced by thick, wallowing bags of air.
"Do you even have a license to drive this?!" He leaned closer over Koki's shoulder and yelled. Normally Ueda wasn't too big of being this physically close to anybody, but he wasn't going to risk his life while he was sitting perked on Koki's bike and when they were rushing at about seventy miles per hour.
Or something similar.
He heard Koki's muffled laughter as it was swept backward by the wind.
"Relax, Ueda! I won't drive you to the hospital!"
Right.
He squinted one eye open and caught the sight of Koki's pony tail (highlighted hair tickling his cheek) peeking out from under the big helmet and his hand moved away from Koki's small waist to flick the hair away from his face before returning to where it was.
Ueda made a mental note not to mention this to anybody until the day he died.
He wasn’t sure of why he had said yes to this utter madness. Brainwashed, probably, but in that instance when Koki was looking at him with those big, hopeful eyes and that cat smile…
It felt like hours have passed when he had his eyes closed, he was starting to enjoy the roar of wind in his ears and the splashes of light swirling away behind his eyelids when they slowed down, Koki killed the engine and Ueda felt they came to a sudden halt.
The orange lights on the dock greeted him as he opened his eyes again. Koki has already taken off his helmet and walked over to the white railing, looking back at him and grinned. Everything seemed to bath in a mellow yellow and blurred around the edges into the starry background.
Koki waited as Ueda walked closer carefully and leaned against the railing before turning toward him, his face slightly red under the orange light.
"What do you think?"
He looked around from the dark, purple sky to the twinkling stars to the brightly lit bridge off to their left and finally back at Koki. From this angle Koki looked like he was glowing, but Ueda was not so sure.
"How do you know this place?"
Koki leaned back on his arms over the railing. "My Mom used to take me here when I was upset. She bought me ice cream and such; they used to sell it here."
Ueda made an acknowledge nod.
"She also taught me how to feel better when I'm down. It really works. Wanna know?"
"It depends if you would look stupid doing it or not... Yeah I do. How?"
He heard Koki laughed and shuffled away from the railing and he turned, watching as Koki stood neatly on the pavement, eyes looking back at him.
Koki hopped forward.
One.
Two.
Three times.
“That’s it?”
Koki shrugged. “What else do you expect?”
Ueda shook his head slowly. “Okay… And I thought Taguchi was weird.” That earned him a pout and he laughed.
“Don’t compare me to that alien. I have done this since I was a kid, you know. ‘Hop three times, and all of your distress goes away’, my mom has said.” He watched as Koki came back to stand next to him, leaning over the railing.
“Yeah well, maybe it does. For people with simple minds.”
“Hey!”
He laughed out loud, and Koki joined him. That night they stood at the dock, watching cars passing by from afar. The whole world lit up in glamorous orange and Koki’s big, shiny smile.
-> part 2
From: sekky_chan
Title: I'll treat you like a stolen glance at myself
Pairings/Characters: Ueda, Koki. 6!KAT-TUN's member-whatever
Rating: PG
Warnings: Strange characters, strange logics, strange behaviors. Obnoxious teddy bears. Mentions of aliens. Tongue twister.
Summary: Here's the summary about Ueda: he doesn't believe in naivety, honest and trust. He has detached himself from his family. His so-called best friend is probably evil. His moral boundaries lie further than lying and manipulating. So he despites people like Koki. Especially people like Koki. The very person that is residing in his apartment, thanks to Nakamaru.
Notes:
- It's been great fun to write this for greatfountain, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks for my beta and others for being there when I was in distress. You guys are, as always, awesome.
- This fic is set during Junior era, some time between 2004-2005.
- Footnotes for the references can be found at the end of the fic.
part 1 || part 2
Ueda liked Nakamaru a lot.
He liked Nakamaru even when he secretly believed Nakamaru was evil and behind those cheeky smiles and inexplicable self-hugs and seemingly innocent snarls, Nakamaru was highly aware of how emotions and expectations worked (and also deep, dark, forbidden secrets that could destroy a man’s reputation) and used them well into subtly getting people to do as he pleased. That was why everyone found him pleasant; he knew what to do to get them to like him. Just like how he had made friends with Ueda in the first place.
Ueda didn’t really mind that, if he thought hard about it. People only got scared of things they didn’t realize were there; Ueda, he has known since the start. It was because they were the same; they made people liked them by playing out their parts, but it didn’t necessary meant they particularly liked most people.
And also because Nakamaru was probably evil, while Ueda himself could be a little bit cruel.
This was why Ueda was fond of Nakamaru, and he would almost never mind the “favors” Nakamaru asked him to. Especially when he always bribed Ueda with his one true love: Nakamaru’s mother’s homemade mille crepe. Ueda would always happily oblige whatever Nakamaru wanted done, be it cutting practicing or lying for Nakamaru while he cut practicing to hang out with his girlfriend (the second to last arcade game machine in the mall near the training building-- it was soccer).
But lying was one thing. Ueda didn’t mind lying; it was part of how he functioned. Except that while lying was within his moral boundaries, there were things Ueda would never tolerate.
“No.”
He said decisively, leaning back against the seat and watched as Nakamaru -body turning toward Ueda from the passenger seat-- flinch the tiniest bit in a kind of irritating way. The box of mille crepe bumped a little innocently along with the car, probably pretended to mind its own business as the two people stared each other down. Or at least one of them did, because the other had to drive.
Nakamaru pouted-- attempted to, and Ueda had to give him credit for trying his best, but he still looked obscenely, ridiculously annoying.
As they met another red light, he has started to wonder why he had agreed to drive Nakamaru home that evening.
“Please, Ueda. Just this one time!” Nakamaru was clasping his hands and bowing now, not so subtly pushing the crêpe box across the dashboard.
“I don’t get this,” Ueda sighed, massaging his forehead tiredly. “Why can’t he just stay with you?”
“He can’t. Our Moms have each other’s numbers, Ueda. And my sisters will start asking questions and I won’t be able to lie for him.”
If Ueda were being honest with himself, he really, really did like a guy like Nakamaru.
“If you don't help me, I’ll tell everyone about that time that you got drunk and started doing nanpa at m-“
But see, he has told you so. Evil.
He watched in silence as Koki, who was currently quietly sitting on Ueda’s -brand new, if not just a bit untidy- floor, arms hugging his curled legs and chin resting on his knees, looking over at Ueda with big eyes from under his fringe. He was already small, but the way he hunched his shoulders and hid away inside his over-sized coat made him suddenly so tiny and lost. Anybody that looked at him would immediately thought of an abandoned puppy longing to be picked up and hugged and given all the love. Except Ueda suspected Nakamaru has instructed him beforehand to look exactly like that to get to him or something.
Well, lost puppy or not, Ueda would never have taken Koki in.
Koki was, in as few words as possible, transparent. From his point of view, Ueda could clearly see Koki’s fingertips turned white as they unconsciously knead the jeans on his knees, his lower lip chewed on slightly and all his pointless rage and useless emotions reflected in his big, black eyes. He was sinking even lower into the floor, pouting and glaring at the opposite wall like it offended him. He looked no less like he wanted to be there than Ueda wanted him to.
Ueda sighed again.
He saw all of it, has always been able to. Koki was an entity of impulsive, nonsense rebellion, one that acted on the first leap of his heart without looking back to realize how it made him out to be. He was insecure and unaware of it, and yet never ceased to expressing himself in the most annoying way. To Ueda, Koki has always been the loudest, most thoughtless of person; the kind that Ueda usually included into the “surrounding idiots” crowd he has always avoided.
And yet Koki was Nakamaru’s best friend, and it baffled Ueda to see the length Nakamaru would go as Koki’s will.
This time was no different. Apparently, Koki has run away from home yet again -which was not news; everyone and their moms knew Koki skipped school and slept over at Nakamaru’s on monthly basic. Except this time Nakamaru thought it would be funny to pull Ueda in the problem as well.
Ueda was definitely not helping him proves his nonsensical point. Koki had a home, a family that was probably waiting for him to come home for dinner-people that loved him. He had no right to be taken in. He had no right to be here, to look like that in the first place: sitting on Ueda's floor, thinking about running away from home because of whatever petty argument he had had with his family. Thinking it was fair to do so.
Except Nakamaru somehow has known about deep, dark secrets that could destroy a man’s reputation.
When left alone, Koki was surprisingly quiet. Ueda assumed he was just being sulky, even when Ueda told him to take the space in the left corner-- there was a spare set of blanket and pillows that Nakamaru had brought over when Ueda just moved here, saying it was for when he would crash over. Koki moved quietly there and dumped his bags (and a giant Pooh bear with obnoxious grin splattered on its face) on the floor, flopped down onto the folded sheet and pulled out his earphones.
Ueda's eyes followed him from the coffee table, watching him draw his knees to his chest and fidget with the phone.
For a while, the only sound in the empty apartment was Ueda's fingers flipping through the pages of his magazine distractingly.
He had just moved here about a month ago, leaving his family's house in a hurry a week after his twentieth birthday. Bringing nothing but a case of casual clothing, Ueda ended up here: a small, charming apartment in a quiet neighborhood of Iidabashi. Nakamaru had brought all the necessities here after Ueda had made it clear that he would not bother buying any furniture for his new place.
"Furniture means commitment, and it would be hard to leave when you have a commitment to something," he had explained. Nakamaru had rolled his eyes in response, but he also understood.
Ueda has waited twenty years to be able to cut loose of all the chains his parents had put upon his shoulders, all the responsibilities and burdens and guilt of a child who had failed his parents' expectations, a child who had been locked away from his freedom and right to be a normal child. Ueda was over that. He was reclaiming his life, and it was his, his only, and he would let nothing or no one hold him back again.
Funny how Ueda was aware of how messed up that was, and yet it was everything he had ever desired.
He couldn't recreate a better childhood for himself, but he was going to make up for that child. Even when it meant living in a place with no bed, no chair; waking up in the middle of the night just to listen to his own breathing echoing against these empty walls. Ueda preferred this coldness he had created, because it was still better than the coldness that belonged to his parents.
A startling sound pulled Ueda out of his train of thought; he looked up in time to find Koki, still sitting in the corner of the room, but he had his earphones off and was scratching the back of his neck, looking troubled. He shifted so he was sitting cross-legged on the folded sheet and half facing Ueda, eyes darting away when he saw Ueda squinting at him.
"What is it, Koki?" Ueda snapped quietly, before returning to skim through the magazine. Honestly, if he had wanted to stay here, he could at least go to the toilet by himself...
Koki's voice was uncertain, and a quiet wake in this lonely place. "Just... I'm sorry. For troubling you."
Ueda watched as Koki's face started turning red, body obviously resisting from squirming away into himself.
"...Thank you." Koki said with a frown, in a voice so small it might as well have been to himself. It struck something heavy in Ueda's chest, resolving into a dull, beating ache and it was strange, so strange.
Koki was not like this. Koki was supposed to be a troublesome, impulsive rebel; a noisy, annoying presence that existed solely on nonsense frustration of his surroundings. Koki was supposed to be unsympathetic to people like Ueda. Koki was supposed to be...
Except he was sitting there in a corner of Ueda's empty apartment, in his over-sized jacket; small hands hugging his giant teddy bear. Even from Ueda's corner, he could see Koki's face was a faint shade of red, lower lip bitten between his teeth and he was glaring at the offensive wall again. And Ueda has never seen anything more pitiful.
It all seemed so wrong. And yet.
"I worry about him," Nakamaru said to him during break. The two of them sat in a corner of the training room, munching on Nakamaru's mother's sweets. Ueda took a sip of tea from his bottle, before turning slightly to side-eye him.
"Oh now looks who's talking."
"Stop being cynical, Ueda. It doesn't suit you."
He elbowed Nakamaru in the ribs. "I'm being rational, which is what you're not being when it concerns Koki. Has his family called yet?"
"No... This is weird." Nakamaru looked over at Koki, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor on the other side of the room, eyes glued to a comic book. Akanishi was bothering him by messing up his hair, and if it was anything like a normal day in the training room, Nakamaru would already have had to step in to stop a brawl. Instead Akanishi was totally getting away with trying to tie up Koki's fringe; the latter seemed unaware of the on-going assault on his hair.
"He doesn't usually hide anything from me, but this time I have no idea what he's up to." Nakamaru sighed, picking up a piece of umeboshi and made a face at it.
"I don't get it," Ueda sighed, shaking his head as he watched Koki half-heartedly shrug Akanishi off of him.
Ueda didn't really get it, this whole thing. He was used to the Koki who was not living in a corner of his apartment, Koki who was loud and annoying and laughed a lot when he yanked the game controller out of Taguchi's hands just to entertain himself; who clung to Nakamaru and acted like an irritating spoiled pet and got into petty fights with Akanishi or Taguchi or even Ueda himself.
Except for the past two days, he had woken up at night to the sound of Koki mumbling in his sleep, the sight of him curling up on the too big mattress, small hands clutching at the giant yellow bear like it were protecting him. Like a wounded, lost child craving for affection.
Koki cleaned up his apartment and put his clothes in the washing machine without him knowing, and later refused to look at him in the eyes when he attempted to tell him to stop.
When their eyes did meet, though, Koki always jerked away, a faint blush crept across his cheeks and he frowned intensely at anything else except Ueda.
He thought of shyness and amused himself by deliberately watching Koki from across the room sometimes, staring until he had to look back.
Ueda blamed it on Koki’s obliviousness, but slowly he picked up on Koki's little quirks, the puffing of his cheeks and his hands playing at his nape and his small frown when he slept (not that he was staring, that would be quite weird) and everything was so sudden he couldn't take all of it in.
"Get what?" Nakamaru asked, passing him the umeboshi.
"...Koki."
Koki and all that he was, what Ueda has always assumed of him and how it was all crumbling down because he was now all up in Ueda's face. Ueda would have been fine with an annoying, lazy, clumsy house guest; with not knowing the reasons of Koki's actions, what ran through his mind and how utterly irrelevant he was to him>. Except now he couldn't turn a blind eye because beneath all that facade, what Koki had always claimed himself to be, Ueda had seen a glimpse of something else entirely different.
It amazed and frustrated him both, and ignited a different sort of cloying annoyance in his chest now when he looked at Koki.
He wasn't sure if it was annoyance, or morbid intrigue.
"How can you even be friends with him, it must be so exhausting."
Nakamaru laughed at this, and took the bottle of tea from his hand. "It's not like it's easy being your friend, you know."
"At least I'm straightforward." Ueda muttered offhandedly, but Nakamaru scoffed at him.
"You're blunt! And anyway, he'll probably flee home before you can actually be friends with him, so just be cool with it."
Their conversation died when Akanishi -finally getting what he wanted- got smacked over the head by Koki's book, and Nakamaru had to stalk over to pull Koki off of him.
Kamenashi started grumbling about how none of them were being mature like him, and Taguchi was too engrossed in his new controller (it has like THREE new settings, guys!!!), too busy marvelling at Earth's technology to actually notice what was going on.
Ueda put on his headphones and put the sweet box in his lap. He would ponder Koki's entire existence later, but for now, he just had to keep the rest of the sweets from Nakamaru.
He didn't tell Nakamaru about it, but the next night he was jerked out of his sleep by Koki's ringtone and his sluggish whisper of "Hello?"
Koki had tried to keep his voice as quiet as he could, but in this utter silence draping over the apartment, Ueda could clearly hear Koki's end of conversation.
"Where are you calling from? Is it okay like this?"
"Yeah... I'm fine."
"Is it cold out there?"
"Go back to your room, then."
"...Goodnight."
Ueda waited until the sound of Koki curling up on the mattress had subsided and cracked open his eyes. Koki had his back at him; he looked so small and lost in the darkness, buried in the mountain of pillows and blanket, hiding away from the world.
He kept staring at Koki's back until a small sound -a whimper- bubbled up in all their silence and dissolved just as Ueda registered it. In the darkness and the invisible wall that separated them, Koki couldn't hear his sigh.
He had never thought that he would ever witness Koki cry.
Koki greeted him in the morning with the sight of his puffy eyes and red nose. He went to work with a big hoodie on and a pair of glasses, pretending like Ueda wasn't aware of it at all.
Ueda should probably have acted the same. Getting this over without the knowledge of Koki's quiet sobs in the middle of the night, the mysterious phone call, Koki's curled figure and his small, small hands clutching the pillow.
Ueda was not raised to care.
He knew it, regretted it, but admitted he could do nothing to fix it. As years of his childhood were wasted and he grew older and bitterer in the cramped walls of his big, empty room, realizing how cold the world he has been living in was; full of expectations and responsibilities, disappointments and guilt a child shouldn’t have had to bear; Ueda has long come to the conclusion that feelings were secondary.
If he didn’t feel anything, there would be no guilt. If there was no guilt, nothing and no one could do anything to hurt him. That way, he was safe. His heart was safe.
But that afternoon he saw Koki's trembling finger pushing the button on the vending machine, his hunched shoulders catching a thin shadow in the hallway; and maybe it was because of Nakamaru hopeless stare at Koki's back earlier, or it was the flashbacks to the night before, the tiny bubbling sounds of agony, or the sight of Koki biting his lower lip and staring distractedly at the glass...
It ignited this itching feeling in his chest, raising and lumping in his throat and he felt like doing something, or just saying something, at all.
"So what's your deal?"
He would never forget the look Koki gave him in that instance as he jerked and raised his head; big swollen eyes so exhausted and miserable. It struck something horrible in Ueda's chest, setting a heavy, rusty gear to shift, like seeing a cold, wet puppy shaking in the rain and feeling the need to give it a warm, tight hug and never let go. But then the mask came back and the puppy hid away behind droopy, careless eyes and a half-hearted shrug of his shoulder.
"Nothin'. Just don't know which to choose." He gestured aimlessly at the vending machine, facing the other side of the hallway, probably in vain hope that Ueda would take that and leave.
He squinted at that. "Don't bullshit me, Koki."
"What?" Koki snapped, but Ueda could already pick up on Koki's shoulders turning away from him, as if hiding away into his big hoodie.
"Listen, even Taguchi is wondering about your miserable ass these past few days. Just throw them a bone so they'll stop bugging about it."
"So?! Is it your business to ask?"
"Koki..."
But Koki wasn't listening anymore. He stepped away from Ueda, arms flailing like he was thinking it looked threatening and his face was red all over.
"Just leave me alone, okay! You people think you're so good at controlling your feelings and--and you think that's so cool!!" He was glaring and his hands curled into fists, but when Ueda took a step forward, he took a step back, shoulders jerking away, trying to shield himself in hopeless advance. It was all so miserable, and each movement Koki took it felt like something stabbing in Ueda's stomach; a cold, coiling thing retching up to his middle, and for a moment of bare instinct he shot out his hand, grabbing Koki's clenched fist in mid-air.
For all that Koki seemed bony and small, his hand felt even smaller in Ueda's grip, and he never expected that what he would feel was the immediate impression that he could crush him with ease if he ever wanted to. It was Koki; Koki who wore baggy clothes and talked big and got into brawls with people; Koki who all the juniors were scared of because he always looked so threatening. And yet in this moment, Koki felt like he was made out of cardboard.
Koki's eyes widened and he finally snapped out of it, looking up at Ueda in renewed fear He tried to tug free of his hand, but that only made Ueda tightened his grip.
"Let go!!"
"Listen you brat. It's a common rule that when someone is trying to be sensible and asking you what's wrong, at least have the decency to act nicely about it. Why don't you just be a grown up and accept our help because some people in this group are clearly concerned about you."
He watched as Koki flinched at his words, brows furrowed and he hung his head down a bit-- another telltale-- as his struggle against Ueda's hand weakened. Ueda was so ready to have it; the thrill of peeling and peeking under Koki’s skin. It was no longer just about feeling concerned or sympathetic, but to seek to revel his morbid curiosity.
"Ueda?"
He turned around to find Nakamaru shaking his head slowly at him, and Akanishi looking over between them in confusion. In that distracting second, Koki yanked free from his grip and ran away before Ueda could catch a glimpse of him.
Their first attempt at a conversation ended like that; a door slammed shut; broken and unfulfilled. The silence of it rang hollow in Ueda's chest
"So he ran away from home? Again? How old is he, anyway?" Kamenashi exclaimed, pacing back and forth in the dressing room, phone in hand.
Lounging on the couch, legs on the armrest, Akanishi commented with awe. "That's kinda cool, though."
"It's not "cool", Jin. Why can't he act like an adult, like me? He can't just run away every time he wants to win an argument."
Akanishi scoffed. "Please, you were the one whining to our manager for ice cream the other day. Adult my foot." At this, Kamenashi grabbed a magazine on the make-up table and threw it at him. It quickly escalated into magazines and hair products flying across the room and scattering on the floor.
"Be careful of the icing, boys," Nakamaru offered absent-mindedly as he came to stand next to Ueda at the make-up table. "So what's your problem, Ueda?"
He looked up wearily from his hands to side-eye Nakamaru. "My problem, is that I can't understand your best friend. He pisses me off. Take him back!" He watched as Nakamaru hopped on the table and gave him a half-hearted shrug.
"I thought it's just the usual brothers' brawl, you know. But now that I think about it, refusing to stay at my place and forbid me to reveal his whereabouts is a bit..."
"A bit."
Nakamaru hit him on the arm.
"I'll try to figure it out, okay? And don't be mad at Koki just now, he didn't mean it." Ueda scoffed at this while rubbing his arm. Despite looking lanky and possessing fragile hands, Nakamaru could deliver some stinging physical abuse when he felt like it.
"He might not even gonna come back to my place tonight."
Ueda watched as Nakamaru slowly smiled at him, all secrets and understanding; he looked comical like this, and Ueda would have laughed out loud except suddenly he had a speculation if all of this was just a way for Nakamaru to get his two best friends together.
"Ah, but he will."
Bastard.
"Hahaha. Right."
"You see, Koki is like a puppy. Even if you kicked him, he'll roll back to you eventually. He might look like he was angry at you, but he's not really."
"And Akanishi is actually not stupid; he's just faking it, obviously."
Nakamaru hit him again. "I mean, Koki acts like he's angry at people because he always thinks that nobody likes him. He was yelling at you because he probably thought you hated him."
"What kind of logic is that?"
Nakamaru dropped a wrapped strawberry-flavored candy from his pocket in Ueda's hand before leaning back against the mirror, popping another candy in his mouth. At the other end of the room, Taguchi started yelling in pain because Akanishi was kicking him for "dropping the icing on the carpet, again".
Nakamaru made a thoughtful sound.
"It's not that he doesn't trust others, but more like, Koki doesn't even like himself."
"Huh?"
"Normally if one loves himself just a little bit, they would never do such things. But Koki always expected himself to be hated, even considers it an obvious fact. In other words, he thinks that nobody likes him."
The faint taste of strawberry on his tongue suddenly faded. Ueda dropped his head on his hands, fingers massaging his temples. "Weirdo." And Nakamaru laughed at this, digging out a chocolate candy.
"I don't think any of us is normal." They both glanced at Taguchi. "Anyway, despite his self-loathing, Koki loves people. He needs us to remind him that he's loved, even if it's just a little bit. Approved. That's why he does all those weird things anyway."
Ueda groaned into his hands. "That just means he's a big baby." Above him, Nakamaru chuckled as he unwrapped the candy for him.
"That just means he likes you so much, Ueda."
Nakamaru's phone rang off as he passed the candy in Ueda's hand. He hopped off the table and excused himself, and Ueda didn't see him again that afternoon.
Ueda re-wrapped the chocolate candy and put it in his pocket, just as Taguchi came whining to Uepi about how Akanishi snatched his gameboy away, but all he could hear was those last words spoken to him.
"That just means he likes you so much," his foot. As if that made things different. He remembered Koki's small fist in his palm and the way it felt, the way it made him felt; and cursed Nakamaru under his breath.
Evil bastard.
Love has always been a hot and torturous thing in Ueda. Scalding, like swallowing an ingot of hot lead, almost too heavy to bear. All relationships were meaningless, fleeting like the smiles he exchanged daily, because people were as cold and pretentious as the walls he was made to build around himself.
Ueda always felt it hard to deal with human beings around him, even when he has practiced the perfect mechanism of fake smiles and mentally tuned out the voices of those he deemed nonsense. But even doing that was too much and sometimes he ended up feeling exhausted just from smiling at the face in front of him, and yet he had to keep doing it, because showing his vulnerability was not something he was grown to do.
That was why Ueda has always found certain type of people unbearable.
People like Koki, to be precise.
Koki was... transparent. Koki wore his heart on his sleeve; he smiled too earnestly too easily and screamed bloody murder at people just as easy. Koki was that kind of person: he couldn't pretend throughout that he was honestly mad at something for so long. He could be running away from someone because of anger, but he would come back to them later and sitting at their doorstep, wrapped up in his over-sized jacket, knees drawn to his chest, looking utterly like a pet waiting for its master to come home.
Ueda wondered in a moment's short if Koki was aware of this tendency of his own.
When he moved closer to unlock the door, Koki carefully peered up at him from his spot. A cautious stare; unsure of whether Ueda had forgiven him or if he was going to shred him to pieces within any seconds given. The only sound between them was the clanking of the keys, he could feel Koki’s stare and his very light breaths, picturing Koki’s fingers fidgeting as they wrapped around his knees. And Ueda felt the thrill of it: the satisfaction when he made Koki believing he was at his mercy.
It was easy, slipping into this mindset, being in charge of something. Or in this case, someone. The fact that it was Koki made it even easier. Even more thrilling.
Koki needed him. Somehow, he thought. Somehow. Koki was not weak, but he was dependant. On mere attention, affection, like he was always deprived of it.
He opened the door and watched in silence as Koki meekly hugged his bag closer to himself, hesitantly standing up and stepped inside without a word. He didn’t need to; his pleading, guilty eyes were feeding Ueda with plenty of very good sensation.
Keeping a straight face, he walked past Koki, who was still standing awkwardly at the genkan, watching Ueda’s every move intensely.
“Get in, and start cleaning. And I want dinner to be ready when I got out of bath.” He threw Koki a look while taking off his coat, dumping it on the floor as Koki scrambled to take off his shoes. He couldn’t fight the smirk that was creeping across his face, though, so he turned away and started walking to the bathroom, hands digging in pockets for wallet and changes.
Something small and round and plastic-wrapped rolled in his palm, and he looked down to find the chocolate candy he has kept from Nakamaru earlier.
What’s with Nakamaru and his sweets fixation anyway? He always seemed to have some snacks hidden somewhere nearby. It was sort of dubious, if he thought about it.
“Here,” He called, and tossed the candy toward Koki. Big eyes stared down at it before glancing up at him in uncertainty. It was all so amusing. “For you,” he said.
“Oh. Uhm, Ueda?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry. About… the afternoon. Please don’t be mad at me.”
He almost laughed then, turning around to look at Koki. But the sight that greeted him: Koki on his haunches, small hands clutching at Ueda’s coat, those big, pleading eyes and that inferno pout.
“He likes you very much,”
Ueda was sure then that maybe he was in some evil schemes with the intention to mess with his head. He mentally cursed, and had to turn away when he felt his cheeks were beginning to burn like the back of his eyelids.
Damn him, Koki.
And that evil bastard with his ridiculous secret smile.
“Never mind that.” He muttered.
Ueda managed to walk away, but not far enough for Koki’s next words to fall out of his hearing distance. He cursed the fact that he could probably see Koki smiling too, corners of his mouth lifted up in a cat-like grin. So bright. So naïve. Such simplicity.
No deep, dark intentions. No fake, pretentious masks. Just relief and happiness all over.
“Thanks, Ueda.”
It was a slow and quiet afternoon; Koki was out to bother unfortunate people on the streets, they had no more practice or meeting for the rest of the day, so Ueda decided to have a little me-time. A cup of hot milk Earl Gray and newly baked buttered breads from the store down the complex, he was all set. He was trying to ignore the eyes of the obnoxious Pooh bear to focus on his book when the phone rang.
He really should have looked at the caller ID before picking it up. His mother’s voice rose on the other end and he fought the urge to immediately hang up.
“Tatsuya.”
“Mum.”
She cleared her voice a little bit, and Ueda heard shuffling sounds mingled in with her usual business tone. She barked a distant order to a maid before returning to the phone.
“I just wanted to tell you that we recently cleared the basement and found some of your stuff in it.”
“I see.” He rubbed his eyes, focusing on the stars bursting behind his eyelids rather than her voice. It twisted horrible things in his stomach and made him want to hurl.
“…How are you holding up? I guess Nakamaru-kun is still looking after you. You know you can come back whenever, if you’ll just apologize to your father and I-“
“Why are you calling?” He snapped, and it sounded harsher than he intended, but the angriness of it resolved his own irritation somehow.
“Right. We had your stuff in boxes already. I thought you might want them back,” He heard her voice trembling in a short second. “We have no use for them here anymore.”
“…Sure. I’ll see about it.”
Ueda hung up the phone. He could see his mother still on the line, listening to the monologue of beep, beep, beep; walking downstairs and stopped at his old room. The closed door that held his childhood -or remnants of it; memories of days she had opened the door to check up on him, clean up his room, flipping through his homework. His mind flashed to the night his sister stomped out of the house, to the terror that wound his heart when he realized he might have lost her forever.
“Hm,” He said aloud. “Sad.”
He looked around his empty apartment. The silence of it when Koki wasn’t there--a vast space of nothing-- suddenly struck him; a flash, a surge of sight. Fatigue and light-headness hit him in the stomach like a steel bar.
He put down the phone and walked over the kitchen counter. Leaving a note to Koki on the used grocery list. He pondered for a short second before writing down: Running to the store. Suddenly crave ice cream. Back soon.
With that, he grabbed his car key and his coat, and headed out of the door.
When he came back it was already dark and the sky just kept getting darker, heavy and threatening; like there was going to be a storm. It was filling up with rain clouds the color of steel wool.
A perfect metaphor for Ueda’s mood right now.
Koki opened the door for him, wearing a pair of orange sweatpants and his God is a DJ t-shirt. He took a moment to appreciate Ueda and his boxes.
“You said ice cream…” He began uncertainly, and Ueda snapped before Koki could worsen his mood further.
“Would you help me carry one, or would you get the heck out of my way?” But his throat felt like swallowing glass.
The boxes were stacked up against the wall in the kitchen corner, and Ueda went straight to his mattress and dropped down in an exhausted heap. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, Koki watched with his big eyes, in silence from the kitchen counter, as if followed Ueda’s every movement. Attentive. Wondering but never asked.
Ueda thought maybe he should get a real pet to stop himself from confusing that Koki was one of his.
He was staring at the boxes -they haven’t been opened since being brought here two days ago. The rubber ball bounced against the wall and back into his waiting hand, and sometimes he threw it at Koki’s head just to see the other turned around to give him a death glare so he would snicker. Distractions are important, he told himself. Koki’s fake anger has started to become more entertaining.
His mother still looked the same as when he last saw her; a mildly older version of his sister, chin held high, beautiful hair tied neatly into a bun. She still wore those expensive silk kimonos, her skin still smooth and her lips still red.
Her eyes were, as always, still just as cold; a beautifully, heatless shade of grey.
Ueda walked past her as she opened the door for him, didn’t want to hear her greetings; her eyes always watching, policing for desperation he didn’t bear. He strolled down the hallway leading to the basement, didn’t look at the photos displayed on the walls along the way. There was his sister in those photos, smiling, half smiling, or not smiling at all. She had her arm around him in those photos, wrapping herself around him, surrounding him. Protecting him.
He didn’t realize mother was trailing after him, her sock-covered steps quiet like how he remembered them, coming down the hall to the door of his room.
“I had your boxes piled at the top of the stairs. Though the new helpers might get something mixed up, so I suggest you check again before bringing them home.”
He almost laughed out loud, but the fatigue hit his stomach, rising up against his throat and he was too busy swallowing it to make any disdain sound. He opened the door to the basement.
A tall stack of cardboard boxes blocked his way. He gave them a little nudge -not meant for them to tumble down to the bottom of the stairs, which they did.
“Well,” His mother frowned and paused at the door, and he felt the familiar coldness crept up his nape again. “I’ll leave you with them then. Ask the butler to open the gate for you when you’re done.” And then she was gone.
He went down the stairs, passed the running washing machine, onto the back room; dragging the stack of boxes, grabbing a marker, and a tape gun. It was dark. A cotton pull cord brushed his arm and he yanked it; squinting as the single bulb that dangled at the center of the room brightened.
Stacks of boxes overflowing with papers. His old bike that his father bought him when he was eleven. His sister’s broken lamp. A whole room full of junk.
He grabbed a stack of papers from the first box. At the top of the page a kid had scrawled in imperfect culinary, “What I Did This Summer”. In the corner was his sister’s words written in red ink: GOOD JOB. His old schoolwork.
The second box, another shelf of junk. He found a pile of loose papers with numbers, columns of figures, and the words Mutual Fund Allocation. His father’s work. He threw the whole pile out, and reached for the small chest at the bottom of the box.
The post-it note on top said, For Tatsuya in his sister’s writing. It was an old-fashioned jewelry chest with corners covered in faded gold; decorative tooling and metal trims made it look kind of fancy. The slightly curved lid displayed the name Hara in raised leather letters.
Hara was his sister’s name.
The fatigue hitting him then was almost too much to bear.
Koki’s cry snapped him out of his trance. He looked around: Koki had been lying on his stomach on the floor in front of Ueda, working on his mid-term essays. The whimpering that he was hearing came from the kitchen though, so he leaned over to catch Koki clutching at his finger, eyes scrunched in pain.
Ueda sighed.
“Cupboard, left drawer.” He waited until Koki started struggling to get the first aid kit to sneak at mean chuckle at him. “What were you doing cutting yourself?”
“I was hungry!” Koki protested, lips pouting. “There’s nothing in the fridge except some suspicious hard blue… triangle thing.” He put the kit down at Ueda’s feet before crouching down; bleeding finger jutting out and big eyes stared up at him expectedly.
Ueda started cleaning the wound by pouring an unnecessary amount of alcohol all over the finger, smirking as Koki started wailing and writhing, but unable to get away because Ueda has gotten a firm grip on his wrist.
Koki’s wrist was bony, but also so very small. Ueda could have crushed it with ease. Like Koki was made of cardboard and Ueda was Superman.
He ran clean tissues over the finger, wiping away bright red blood.
“Oh, you mean the cheese?”
“Dude, that’s no cheese! Your Galaxy 7 couldn’t cut through it!”
Ueda genuinely laughed then, watching Koki relaxing in his palm and finally, laughed with him, shoulders awkwardly stiffing in the afford of not shaking too much.
So it has become like this, Ueda thought as he fit the adhesive bandage over the wound. It has become him and Koki, laughing away in his apartment, he no longer felt too weird about the out of place Pooh bear in the corner, or Koki’s big eyes staring up at him, Koki pouting as the bandage fell tighter than necessary around his finger, Koki pulling back and roll around on the floor…
Koki, lifting his upper body off the ground, resting his weight on scraped elbows and peering at him amusingly.
“Thanks,” he said sheepishly.
“You’re welcome.”
Koki snickered. “You need to reconsider your living style though. Start with consuming actual food instead of moon rocks.”
“But I borrowed some self-help books from Taguchi,” He said, already in the mood for joking around. A little bit. “They said moon rock-like cheeses are the best for your human form’s health. You should read one. I have Consume necessary nutrients, Breathe sufficient air… and Chicken Soup for Moon Aliens, etcetera.”
That sent Koki into a helpless giggling fit and it made Ueda swelled a little inside as he watched Koki hid his flushed face in his hands, but his shaking shoulders still gave him away.
“I think Nakamaru also enjoys Chicken Soup.” He continued. “Though he likes his low-fat and heart healthy. You know how old people are.”
“Oh God, stop it~”
They laughed with each other for a while, ditching absent band mates and managers and instructors from work; Ueda picked up the rubber ball and started throwing it at Koki’s head again. Koki scrambled around to catch the ball as it came rolling at his side.
Great. Now Ueda was playing catch with him.
“Still, though,” Koki said, suddenly sobered as he wriggled his way to pass the ball back to Ueda.
“You need to get some food. Maybe a pet later to keep you company.”
“I already have one.” The ball bounced off Koki’s forehead, bounced a few more times on the ground until Koki picked it up.
“Where?” Koki demanded.
“You.” He snickered, and then quickly added. “If you decided to latch on me forever.”
He has expected self-mocking laughter when he said that. Given Koki’s sense of humor, he should have acted the way Ueda expected him to. He should have turned around and make a dog-like pose, demand Ueda to pet him on the head and make it comfortably awkward for both of them.
Except that he stopped grinning and in a split moment, Ueda saw the eyes of that terrified kid again. The kid that wanted to run away crying and hiding behind his Pooh bear. But then the mask came down and he was Koki again.
Rebellious Koki. Joking-around Koki. So Koki dug his head down and nuzzled up Ueda’s folded leg.
“Pet me, wan!”
Ueda sighed. “Honestly, Koki, tell me. Why the hell did you even run away?”
The silence that followed was telltale. Ueda unconsciously reached out and toyed with a strand of Koki’s hair with his fingers.
“I… wanted to try living alone?” Koki tried, lamely so, and Ueda snorted.
“Please. You’re just a big baby who has access to a giant gangsta wardrobe. You can’t live alone.”
“I can!” Koki protested, but didn’t pull away as Ueda started ruffling his hair. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.
“You can’t.”
“Can!”
“Repeat after me. Namamuginamagomenamatamaga. Namamuginamagomenamatamaga. Namamuginamagomenamatamaga.”
Koki stiffed, and hesitated for three seconds. “N-namamugi namagome namatamaga, namamugini- Arg!!“ Ueda grinned.
“Th-that doesn’t have anything to do with living alone!!” He rolled away and laid on his stomach, pretending to sulk.
“Yeah, I just wanted to see you fail. But no, you still can’t live alone. You’re not mature enough.” Oh great. Now he was sounding like Kamenashi. “You need your family, Koki.”
“Whatever.” Koki faced the opposite wall now, refused to look at Ueda. He could even hear the sulking and pouting in his voice.
“You just don’t want me here.”
But it was not true. Not anymore. Ueda wasn’t sure if it was the side effects of the horrible visit back home -his mother and all those pictures and his sister’s chest...
He didn’t know the answer for that question, but he was sure of one thing; as his foot crept across their distance and he started poking Koki’s back with his toes.
Ueda no longer not wanted Koki here. He would rather have- If only Koki was his.
If only.
Koki’s hands were as small as his body. Bony, aligned and yet, so soft, and his palms were so hot, it felt like he was being touched by fireflies.
Curious fingertips were now dancing across Ueda’s palm, running along the ridges and each dips of his rough skin, feeling as light as feather. It was ticklish, but Ueda let Koki entertained himself, turning his hand up and down, pressing in softer spots, as if to feel Ueda’s pulse, or waiting for something to appear on his skin.
“Ueda…”
Koki’s voice woke him from his thought, and he tore his eyes away from the magazine page, colors now all blurred together in his vision.
“What?”
He watched as Koki ran his finger along the straight line in the middle of his palm, tracing feathery circles absentmindedly.
"Wanna see my escape pod?"
Ueda shut his eyes as a wave of wind hit his face. A pair of goggles would have been nice, he thought to himself. Trees and buildings and lamp posts were rushing away from them as Koki sped up and Ueda heard the bike roared before everything in his ears whooshed out and replaced by thick, wallowing bags of air.
"Do you even have a license to drive this?!" He leaned closer over Koki's shoulder and yelled. Normally Ueda wasn't too big of being this physically close to anybody, but he wasn't going to risk his life while he was sitting perked on Koki's bike and when they were rushing at about seventy miles per hour.
Or something similar.
He heard Koki's muffled laughter as it was swept backward by the wind.
"Relax, Ueda! I won't drive you to the hospital!"
Right.
He squinted one eye open and caught the sight of Koki's pony tail (highlighted hair tickling his cheek) peeking out from under the big helmet and his hand moved away from Koki's small waist to flick the hair away from his face before returning to where it was.
Ueda made a mental note not to mention this to anybody until the day he died.
He wasn’t sure of why he had said yes to this utter madness. Brainwashed, probably, but in that instance when Koki was looking at him with those big, hopeful eyes and that cat smile…
It felt like hours have passed when he had his eyes closed, he was starting to enjoy the roar of wind in his ears and the splashes of light swirling away behind his eyelids when they slowed down, Koki killed the engine and Ueda felt they came to a sudden halt.
The orange lights on the dock greeted him as he opened his eyes again. Koki has already taken off his helmet and walked over to the white railing, looking back at him and grinned. Everything seemed to bath in a mellow yellow and blurred around the edges into the starry background.
Koki waited as Ueda walked closer carefully and leaned against the railing before turning toward him, his face slightly red under the orange light.
"What do you think?"
He looked around from the dark, purple sky to the twinkling stars to the brightly lit bridge off to their left and finally back at Koki. From this angle Koki looked like he was glowing, but Ueda was not so sure.
"How do you know this place?"
Koki leaned back on his arms over the railing. "My Mom used to take me here when I was upset. She bought me ice cream and such; they used to sell it here."
Ueda made an acknowledge nod.
"She also taught me how to feel better when I'm down. It really works. Wanna know?"
"It depends if you would look stupid doing it or not... Yeah I do. How?"
He heard Koki laughed and shuffled away from the railing and he turned, watching as Koki stood neatly on the pavement, eyes looking back at him.
Koki hopped forward.
One.
Two.
Three times.
“That’s it?”
Koki shrugged. “What else do you expect?”
Ueda shook his head slowly. “Okay… And I thought Taguchi was weird.” That earned him a pout and he laughed.
“Don’t compare me to that alien. I have done this since I was a kid, you know. ‘Hop three times, and all of your distress goes away’, my mom has said.” He watched as Koki came back to stand next to him, leaning over the railing.
“Yeah well, maybe it does. For people with simple minds.”
“Hey!”
He laughed out loud, and Koki joined him. That night they stood at the dock, watching cars passing by from afar. The whole world lit up in glamorous orange and Koki’s big, shiny smile.
-> part 2