Remix for beltenebra
Title: Glow In The Dark
Rating: PG
Group/Pairing: Koyama/Shige
Warnings: none
Notes: I had so much anxiety about this, I don't even know... so huge thanks to the people who had to put up with me flailing over it. And it's still not perfect but I hope I haven't butchered the wonderful wonderful original!
Link to Original Story: Lantern Light
Link to Original Writer: beltenebra at alifequixotic
Accepting the pheromones of another was not, by any means, a small decision to make - but in Koyama’s case, it was made in the blink of an eye.
The day it happened was ordinary, even drab; it had been damp and overcast all day in anticipation of a heavy rain. Koyama, who was as sensitive to gray weather as his cat, had been curled up in a corner booth of his family's restaurant with a cup of tea and a novel from his Classical Literatures class at university.
Rain had just started to come down when Shige entered, fussing with his dilapidated old umbrella. He spotted Koyama with the quick instinct of a lifetime of best-friendship, and slid into the seat opposite the older man.
“Kei, guess what!” Shige exclaimed. His voice was hushed, but he might as well have been shouting, there was so much suppressed emotion behind his quiet words. “I just came from [girlfriend]’s place and... we’ve decided to accept each other!”
Koyama, still in the middle of highlighting a section in his book, whipped his head up and stared, letting the highlighter drag a lurid yellow mark down the middle of the page.
“Oh... oh, wow, Shige! I... That’s... incredible. I don’t know what to say.”
“Obviously,” snorted Shige. He happily leaned across the counter and slugged Koyama on the shoulder.
And that's when Koyama saw it.
Shige was glowing, in the way that they'd all learned about in high school biology classes, unconsciously releasing his pheromones from his happiness at getting accepted to his dream university. There was a faint golden aura around Shige, so subtle that Koyama would have missed it if he wasn’t so in tune with Shige, his best friend since before they could really remember.
Before it could fade, before he fully realized what a momentous decision he was making and what a wrong moment this was for it, Koyama leaned across the table - under the guise of giving Shige a hug - and accepted Shige's pheromones into his system.
After a moment, Shige pushed him away lightly. "Hey, stop that, people are going to think we're gay for each other or something. Which is exactly the opposite of what I just told you."
Koyama managed a laugh, though he wondered if the effort he was making was obvious. "Who would be gay for a stick-up-the-butt old geezer like you Gesshi? That's gross."
He didn't feel any different after accepting Shige, though all day he'd been expecting some sort of physical reaction to his actions. In school, kids had always asked endless questions - "Will it hurt?" and "Will it make me look different?" and "I can still do everything the way I did before, right?" The kind, elderly biology teacher had answered them all patiently - "You won't be able to feel it at all.”
But still... accepting Shige's pheromones meant that Koyama's DNA was rewriting itself. His entire genetic makeup was changing, so he had expected some physical side effects, perhaps a slight nausea or feeling warmer than usual. (For a couple of days afterwards, he kept putting a hand to his forehead, almost compulsively, to make sure he wasn’t running a temperature.)
He didn't feel any different at all, so much so that he wondered if he’d imagined it all in his head.
He supposed he should have been expecting it, but when he went clubbing with some university friends a week after accepting Shige and sees Yamashita, he was shocked to find that he didn’t feel a thing. Yamashita was in the commerce department at his university, and Koyama had harbored a massive crush on the man for the past few months.
“Hey! Koyama!” Yamashita had called out to him from halfway across the room, shouting to make himself heard above the noise of people and music. “Over here!” He waved a hand, inviting Koyama over.
Feeling a little off balance by the fact that he didn’t feel the little fission of pleasure at seeing Yamashita like he’d done before, Koyama hesitated for a brief moment. Then Takeuchi pushed him forward, and Koyama went over.
“You must be retarded,” Takeuchi scowled, hours later, as they waited under a street light for a taxi. "Yamashita fucking Tomohisa asked you on a date and you refused him."
"Oh come on, it's not like he's, I don't know, a celebrity or the president or something." Unconcerned, Koyama was more focused on flagging down the cab passing by across the street.
"No, but it's Yamashita. Only like, the hottest guy on campus. I mean damn, you couldn't have thrown him my way or something if you didn't want him?"
At this, Koyama just laughed and pushed Takeuchi into the waiting cab.
The unfortunate thing was, Koyama thought regretfully afterwards, that Takeuchi was actually right. Yamashita was a nice person, as well as attractive, and if it hadn't been for Shige, he would have jumped at the opportunity for a date with Yamashita. Even more unfortunate, this wasn't an isolated incident. As though by some perverse law of inverses, the moment he'd accepted Shige and rendered himself incapable of being attracted to others, potential dates seems to come in droves.
The positive side was, Koyama supposed, that he was able to confirm that he'd really changed, biologically.
His mother saw through him at once.
“Kei,” she said, gently putting her hand on top of his one morning at breakfast. “You’ve accepted, haven’t you?”
“No, what gave you that idea?” He denied it at first, in the instinctual way he used to do in high school when he’d sneak home late after being on a date. But of course he knew that accepting someone was a much bigger deal than silly high school romances and, as much as he would have liked to have kept it as a secret, he couldn’t blatantly lie about it to his mother. He nodded, not meeting her eyes.
“The person you accepted, is it...” She paused for a moment, searching his face. “Shall I invite the Katos over for dinner this week?”
“...I’m sorry,” Koyama said regretfully, “I wish it could have been a nice girl, someone who could give you grandchildren to carry on the Koyama name.”
“Kei,” she admonished, “You’ve always liked boys more than girls and we’ve always known about it, and you’ know that’s not important to your father and me. We don’t want you to be tied to someone you don’t care for.”
“But it was my duty, as the son. Plus, with the population on such a decline, too...”
“The population has been in a slow decline for centuries. It’s just the natural order of things. It’s ridiculous to even think that you’re worried about that. What is it really, Kei-chan?”
“It... Itwasn’tmutual,” he muttered, speaking hurriedly so that his words ran together.
She just looked at him for a moment, expression inscrutable. He was expecting - he wasn’t really sure what - astonishment, maybe, or dismay, but was surprised when she sounded almost irritated when she spoke. “Don’t try to be all noble and suffer unrequited love. One-sided acceptance never ends well, you know.”
Koyama looked down at the pattern on the tablecloth with feigned interest. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah... I’ll work on it.”
The thing was, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to tell Shige.
Koyama and Shige had been friends for as long as the two of them could remember, and Koyama knew his best friend well. As teens, they’d discussed the topic of future mates many times, Shige making lists upon lists of traits that he was looking for and Koyama simply hoping to find someone nice. This was, of course, a topic that came up often between most good friends. Everyone took careful, meticulous consideration on the subject of life partners, and Koyama’s impulse decision to accept his best friend was certainly rare.
Shige was the carefully rational type, who would make pro/con lists for every decision he had to make and weigh each carefully - but Koyama also knew which factors would weigh more than others, and he was sure that the younger man would feel compelled to return Koyama’s acceptance. He could hear Shige’s reasoning in his head - “you’re my best friend, I can’t let you remain one-sided” and “at least I know we’d always get along well” - but Koyama wanted Shige to be able to choose a mate of his own accord, at his own pace.
He also wanted Shige to love him for himself, not out of a feeling of obligation, though that was definitely something he wouldn’t admit to out loud.
As a literature major, Koyama had done a lot of reading for classes. His curriculum had covered a wide range of genres, from histories and epics to fables and youth fiction. Koyama, sentimental and always interested in people, had always preferred the classical romances.
"What about modern romances?" Kusano, his neighbor from across the street and Shige's classmate, had questioned him over a bowl of ramen one time. "There's this awesome new manga that just came out - biopunk, adventure, lots of steamy romance, everyone has sex with everyone. Doesn’t it sound awesome?" He nudged Koyama's arm with his elbow.
Koyama had blushed at the suggestion and accidentally sloshed some of his ramen soup onto the counter top.
"Kusano," Shige had said in an exasperated voice, handing Koyama a pile of napkins for his spill. "Just because you're perverted and depraved, don't drag Kei-chan down with you."
"Just because you're too old to get it up anymore doesn't mean Koyama can't enjoy some ...quality reading."
"Oi-!"
"Maa, maa," Koyama had put a placating hand between the two of them to act as a separator. "No need to argue, you kids. Kusacchi, why don't you give me a list of recommendations and I'll check them out when I have time, okay?"
(He hadn’t seen Kusano stick his tongue out at Shige later, or Shige kick Kusano under the table.)
Truth be told, Koyama didn't have the time for outside reading, and had tucked Kusano's list away in his planner, to be forgotten until much later.
He found himself flipping through his planner and digging out the paper the summer after he graduated. Finally free of the constant stress of homework and exams, Koyama found himself with an excess of time on his hands and thoughts on his brain.
Shige was away for the month, on an overseas exchange program to study for a month, and Koyama found himself filling up the free time he would normally have spent hanging out with his best friend reading Kusano's horribly trashy sci-fi romances and mooning about Shige instead.
"Did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys her receptors for pheromones; sensing the change, the male fly does the same. When two flies love each other they do it so hard that they can never love anything else ever again. If either one of them dies before procreation can happen, both sets of genetic code are lost forever. Now that is dedication."
Koyama put down the book he was reading for class. He tilted his chair back so that it was balancing on the back legs and stared at the ceiling, marveling at the world this author had created. The science fiction novel was written on a simple pretext - it was a simple switch of the biological workings of the planet's creatures, giving humans the power to choose and choose again their mates, and taking that choice away from the creatures.
He wondered what it would be like to live in such a world, to be able to love and mate and then change his mind. Ever the optimist, he liked to think that people would be happier. Nobody would be chained to partners they'd mistakenly mated with - perhaps when too young, or in a moment of bad judgment - and would have the freedom to make mistakes.
Take Yokoo, for instance, who worked part-time at their restaurant on the weekends. He and Koyama, being around the same age, had struck up a friendship, and Yokoo was always telling Koyama about the strained atmosphere at his house. His parents had accepted each other when they were young and in the throes of first love; the love didn’t last, and now they were stuck with the bitter remembrance of what it had been to love, yet unable to love each other or anyone else.
Yokoo’s parents had stuck with each other, for the sake of their family, but Koyama knew there were many others who had simply separated, choosing to live apart from their ill-chosen mate. There were still others who, hesitant to make a choice they would regret, never made a choice at all, and remained alone and lonely their whole lives.
“It’s so stupid,” Yokoo had railed more than once, scrubbing at a dirty spot on a table with a vengeance. “They’re always in a different corner of the house, doing their own thing, not talking to each other. Do you think parents feel that way about us sometimes, too? Forced to love us biologically and hating it?”
“No, to love is a choice. It’s not being able to love others that becomes not an option for us,” Koyama replied with conviction, “Sometimes I think all those people who are unhappy and unloving with their mates are simply not making the right choice. Same for all the ones who don’t mate, thinking loneliness is preferable to being stuck with someone they’ll end up hating.”
“Ah, so you think my parents are simply choosing to not love each other?”
“N-no! Yokoo-san!” Koyama had caught the twinkle in Yokoo’s eyes, but flailed a bit anyway, wanting to leave no room for misunderstandings. “That’s not what I meant at all!”
“Oh come on, I was just joking. I think you’re right. I think people are quick to blame biology for their own mistakes, rather than taking responsibility and perhaps making a change for the better.
The second time Shige burst into the Koyamas' restaurant during a downpour, Koyama braced himself for another announcement that would knock him off his feet. He was helping out, wiping down the serving counter at the front and putting all sorts of sundry items to rights.
Shige snatched the dish rag out of his hand and said without preamble, “Oh forget that Kei, let’s go for a drive. I feel like seeing the ocean today.”
“You say that like you’re planning to take me out for a drive, instead of asking me politely to take you out for a drive as you should be, hmm?”
Just to tease Shige, Koyama began refilling an empty soy sauce bottle slowly, pouring a tiny trickle of liquid from a larger jug of soy sauce into the smaller table-top containers. Scowling, Shige reached across the counter and lifted the bottom of the bigger jar, to hurry up the process.
“Come on Kei, it’s a nice day. If we leave now, we can be back in time before the dinner rush, and I’ll even help you with these stupid soy sauce bottles, okay?”
Koyama looked at Shige out of the corner of laughing eyes. “Fine, I will take you for a drive in exchange for free slave labor. Let’s go~”
It wasn't until Koyama was dropping Shige off at his house at night that Shige said what Koyama expected he'd been meaning to say all day.
"We broke up."
Koyama turned to Shige with a searching gaze, but didn't say anything.
Shige nodded, understanding the silent question Koyama was asking him. "We didn't go through with... accepting each other."
"Oh," replied Koyama, a bit at a loss for words. He wasn't sure if he was happy for himself, or disappointed for his friend, or maybe even disappointed on his own behalf. He'd gotten so used to the idea of being in a tragic-romantic, one-sided acceptance that he hadn't really thought about any other possibilities.
“It must’ve been, like, I don’t know, wedding jitters or something. But we just kept putting it off and putting it off, even though we’d decided to do it, and eventually the whole thing just fell apart...” Shige had opened up the car door on his side already, but the two of them ended up sitting and talking in Koyama’s car for another forty minutes.
That night, Koyama dreamed about kissing Shige. He dreamt of how it would feel to have Shige’s wind-chapped lips pressing back against his own, and Shige’s cold fingers gripping his own. There might have been more to the dream, but it was all he could remember when he woke up.
‘That’s what it would be like,’ he thought to himself. The thought echoed in his head all day.
It was such a beautiful summer night, warm and quiet in a way that could relax a person's very bones. Koyama felt the sounds of the city - cicadas in the trees, cars rumbling by on the main street two blocks away, the murmur of a neighbor's television downstairs - slowly winding him down, pulling down his guard with a soothing hand. It was the perfect kind of night for romantic confessions and starlit kisses.
He had been going on as usual, trying to preserve his usual cheerful stream of chatter about inane things, when they both noticed the fireflies. With Shige so close to him, brushing against him, he couldn't help but think of Kusano's silly sci-fi romance where the people got to choose and the flies were the ones who mated for life.
Koyama felt resentful towards the fireflies, even as he sang to call them nearer.
"They're searching for their beloved. Isn't it romantic, Shige?"
In some perverse part of his psyche, he wanted Shige to refute the statement. He wanted Shige to scoff at his sentimentality, to tell him that he was just being his silly, idealistic, misty-eyed self, and of course flies could mate a billion times and have orgies and all sorts of ridiculous things because they weren't sentient beings, they were just flies.
"They're just tiny insects, it's not like they know what they're doing." Shige said, practically, "It's just a mating ritual."
But Koyama also wanted Shige to just understand. He wanted Shige to look at him and see his glow and decided that Koyama was someone he would love all his life. He wanted Shige to perhaps realize that Koyama was someone he had already loved all his life.
"I think it's beautiful. Like hearts calling out to each other, each one just a tiny light in the darkness. I think it's meant to give us hope that there is someone out there looking for you just like you're looking for them..."
Hardly realizing what he was doing, Koyama leaned in, drawn towards Shige, until he could feel his own breaths reverberating in the air between them.
"Can't you see the glow, Shige?"
He hadn’t really meant to say anything, certainly hadn’t planned or prepared for it, but by the time the words slipped out it was too late anyway. He'd already been emitting his own glow for Shige to see, perhaps for a very long time, perhaps for longer than he'd realized, perhaps always.
Then Shige leaned in and kissed him, accepted him.
Rating: PG
Group/Pairing: Koyama/Shige
Warnings: none
Notes: I had so much anxiety about this, I don't even know... so huge thanks to the people who had to put up with me flailing over it. And it's still not perfect but I hope I haven't butchered the wonderful wonderful original!
Link to Original Story: Lantern Light
Link to Original Writer: beltenebra at alifequixotic
Accepting the pheromones of another was not, by any means, a small decision to make - but in Koyama’s case, it was made in the blink of an eye.
The day it happened was ordinary, even drab; it had been damp and overcast all day in anticipation of a heavy rain. Koyama, who was as sensitive to gray weather as his cat, had been curled up in a corner booth of his family's restaurant with a cup of tea and a novel from his Classical Literatures class at university.
Rain had just started to come down when Shige entered, fussing with his dilapidated old umbrella. He spotted Koyama with the quick instinct of a lifetime of best-friendship, and slid into the seat opposite the older man.
“Kei, guess what!” Shige exclaimed. His voice was hushed, but he might as well have been shouting, there was so much suppressed emotion behind his quiet words. “I just came from [girlfriend]’s place and... we’ve decided to accept each other!”
Koyama, still in the middle of highlighting a section in his book, whipped his head up and stared, letting the highlighter drag a lurid yellow mark down the middle of the page.
“Oh... oh, wow, Shige! I... That’s... incredible. I don’t know what to say.”
“Obviously,” snorted Shige. He happily leaned across the counter and slugged Koyama on the shoulder.
And that's when Koyama saw it.
Shige was glowing, in the way that they'd all learned about in high school biology classes, unconsciously releasing his pheromones from his happiness at getting accepted to his dream university. There was a faint golden aura around Shige, so subtle that Koyama would have missed it if he wasn’t so in tune with Shige, his best friend since before they could really remember.
Before it could fade, before he fully realized what a momentous decision he was making and what a wrong moment this was for it, Koyama leaned across the table - under the guise of giving Shige a hug - and accepted Shige's pheromones into his system.
After a moment, Shige pushed him away lightly. "Hey, stop that, people are going to think we're gay for each other or something. Which is exactly the opposite of what I just told you."
Koyama managed a laugh, though he wondered if the effort he was making was obvious. "Who would be gay for a stick-up-the-butt old geezer like you Gesshi? That's gross."
He didn't feel any different after accepting Shige, though all day he'd been expecting some sort of physical reaction to his actions. In school, kids had always asked endless questions - "Will it hurt?" and "Will it make me look different?" and "I can still do everything the way I did before, right?" The kind, elderly biology teacher had answered them all patiently - "You won't be able to feel it at all.”
But still... accepting Shige's pheromones meant that Koyama's DNA was rewriting itself. His entire genetic makeup was changing, so he had expected some physical side effects, perhaps a slight nausea or feeling warmer than usual. (For a couple of days afterwards, he kept putting a hand to his forehead, almost compulsively, to make sure he wasn’t running a temperature.)
He didn't feel any different at all, so much so that he wondered if he’d imagined it all in his head.
He supposed he should have been expecting it, but when he went clubbing with some university friends a week after accepting Shige and sees Yamashita, he was shocked to find that he didn’t feel a thing. Yamashita was in the commerce department at his university, and Koyama had harbored a massive crush on the man for the past few months.
“Hey! Koyama!” Yamashita had called out to him from halfway across the room, shouting to make himself heard above the noise of people and music. “Over here!” He waved a hand, inviting Koyama over.
Feeling a little off balance by the fact that he didn’t feel the little fission of pleasure at seeing Yamashita like he’d done before, Koyama hesitated for a brief moment. Then Takeuchi pushed him forward, and Koyama went over.
“You must be retarded,” Takeuchi scowled, hours later, as they waited under a street light for a taxi. "Yamashita fucking Tomohisa asked you on a date and you refused him."
"Oh come on, it's not like he's, I don't know, a celebrity or the president or something." Unconcerned, Koyama was more focused on flagging down the cab passing by across the street.
"No, but it's Yamashita. Only like, the hottest guy on campus. I mean damn, you couldn't have thrown him my way or something if you didn't want him?"
At this, Koyama just laughed and pushed Takeuchi into the waiting cab.
The unfortunate thing was, Koyama thought regretfully afterwards, that Takeuchi was actually right. Yamashita was a nice person, as well as attractive, and if it hadn't been for Shige, he would have jumped at the opportunity for a date with Yamashita. Even more unfortunate, this wasn't an isolated incident. As though by some perverse law of inverses, the moment he'd accepted Shige and rendered himself incapable of being attracted to others, potential dates seems to come in droves.
The positive side was, Koyama supposed, that he was able to confirm that he'd really changed, biologically.
His mother saw through him at once.
“Kei,” she said, gently putting her hand on top of his one morning at breakfast. “You’ve accepted, haven’t you?”
“No, what gave you that idea?” He denied it at first, in the instinctual way he used to do in high school when he’d sneak home late after being on a date. But of course he knew that accepting someone was a much bigger deal than silly high school romances and, as much as he would have liked to have kept it as a secret, he couldn’t blatantly lie about it to his mother. He nodded, not meeting her eyes.
“The person you accepted, is it...” She paused for a moment, searching his face. “Shall I invite the Katos over for dinner this week?”
“...I’m sorry,” Koyama said regretfully, “I wish it could have been a nice girl, someone who could give you grandchildren to carry on the Koyama name.”
“Kei,” she admonished, “You’ve always liked boys more than girls and we’ve always known about it, and you’ know that’s not important to your father and me. We don’t want you to be tied to someone you don’t care for.”
“But it was my duty, as the son. Plus, with the population on such a decline, too...”
“The population has been in a slow decline for centuries. It’s just the natural order of things. It’s ridiculous to even think that you’re worried about that. What is it really, Kei-chan?”
“It... Itwasn’tmutual,” he muttered, speaking hurriedly so that his words ran together.
She just looked at him for a moment, expression inscrutable. He was expecting - he wasn’t really sure what - astonishment, maybe, or dismay, but was surprised when she sounded almost irritated when she spoke. “Don’t try to be all noble and suffer unrequited love. One-sided acceptance never ends well, you know.”
Koyama looked down at the pattern on the tablecloth with feigned interest. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah... I’ll work on it.”
The thing was, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to tell Shige.
Koyama and Shige had been friends for as long as the two of them could remember, and Koyama knew his best friend well. As teens, they’d discussed the topic of future mates many times, Shige making lists upon lists of traits that he was looking for and Koyama simply hoping to find someone nice. This was, of course, a topic that came up often between most good friends. Everyone took careful, meticulous consideration on the subject of life partners, and Koyama’s impulse decision to accept his best friend was certainly rare.
Shige was the carefully rational type, who would make pro/con lists for every decision he had to make and weigh each carefully - but Koyama also knew which factors would weigh more than others, and he was sure that the younger man would feel compelled to return Koyama’s acceptance. He could hear Shige’s reasoning in his head - “you’re my best friend, I can’t let you remain one-sided” and “at least I know we’d always get along well” - but Koyama wanted Shige to be able to choose a mate of his own accord, at his own pace.
He also wanted Shige to love him for himself, not out of a feeling of obligation, though that was definitely something he wouldn’t admit to out loud.
As a literature major, Koyama had done a lot of reading for classes. His curriculum had covered a wide range of genres, from histories and epics to fables and youth fiction. Koyama, sentimental and always interested in people, had always preferred the classical romances.
"What about modern romances?" Kusano, his neighbor from across the street and Shige's classmate, had questioned him over a bowl of ramen one time. "There's this awesome new manga that just came out - biopunk, adventure, lots of steamy romance, everyone has sex with everyone. Doesn’t it sound awesome?" He nudged Koyama's arm with his elbow.
Koyama had blushed at the suggestion and accidentally sloshed some of his ramen soup onto the counter top.
"Kusano," Shige had said in an exasperated voice, handing Koyama a pile of napkins for his spill. "Just because you're perverted and depraved, don't drag Kei-chan down with you."
"Just because you're too old to get it up anymore doesn't mean Koyama can't enjoy some ...quality reading."
"Oi-!"
"Maa, maa," Koyama had put a placating hand between the two of them to act as a separator. "No need to argue, you kids. Kusacchi, why don't you give me a list of recommendations and I'll check them out when I have time, okay?"
(He hadn’t seen Kusano stick his tongue out at Shige later, or Shige kick Kusano under the table.)
Truth be told, Koyama didn't have the time for outside reading, and had tucked Kusano's list away in his planner, to be forgotten until much later.
He found himself flipping through his planner and digging out the paper the summer after he graduated. Finally free of the constant stress of homework and exams, Koyama found himself with an excess of time on his hands and thoughts on his brain.
Shige was away for the month, on an overseas exchange program to study for a month, and Koyama found himself filling up the free time he would normally have spent hanging out with his best friend reading Kusano's horribly trashy sci-fi romances and mooning about Shige instead.
"Did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys her receptors for pheromones; sensing the change, the male fly does the same. When two flies love each other they do it so hard that they can never love anything else ever again. If either one of them dies before procreation can happen, both sets of genetic code are lost forever. Now that is dedication."
Koyama put down the book he was reading for class. He tilted his chair back so that it was balancing on the back legs and stared at the ceiling, marveling at the world this author had created. The science fiction novel was written on a simple pretext - it was a simple switch of the biological workings of the planet's creatures, giving humans the power to choose and choose again their mates, and taking that choice away from the creatures.
He wondered what it would be like to live in such a world, to be able to love and mate and then change his mind. Ever the optimist, he liked to think that people would be happier. Nobody would be chained to partners they'd mistakenly mated with - perhaps when too young, or in a moment of bad judgment - and would have the freedom to make mistakes.
Take Yokoo, for instance, who worked part-time at their restaurant on the weekends. He and Koyama, being around the same age, had struck up a friendship, and Yokoo was always telling Koyama about the strained atmosphere at his house. His parents had accepted each other when they were young and in the throes of first love; the love didn’t last, and now they were stuck with the bitter remembrance of what it had been to love, yet unable to love each other or anyone else.
Yokoo’s parents had stuck with each other, for the sake of their family, but Koyama knew there were many others who had simply separated, choosing to live apart from their ill-chosen mate. There were still others who, hesitant to make a choice they would regret, never made a choice at all, and remained alone and lonely their whole lives.
“It’s so stupid,” Yokoo had railed more than once, scrubbing at a dirty spot on a table with a vengeance. “They’re always in a different corner of the house, doing their own thing, not talking to each other. Do you think parents feel that way about us sometimes, too? Forced to love us biologically and hating it?”
“No, to love is a choice. It’s not being able to love others that becomes not an option for us,” Koyama replied with conviction, “Sometimes I think all those people who are unhappy and unloving with their mates are simply not making the right choice. Same for all the ones who don’t mate, thinking loneliness is preferable to being stuck with someone they’ll end up hating.”
“Ah, so you think my parents are simply choosing to not love each other?”
“N-no! Yokoo-san!” Koyama had caught the twinkle in Yokoo’s eyes, but flailed a bit anyway, wanting to leave no room for misunderstandings. “That’s not what I meant at all!”
“Oh come on, I was just joking. I think you’re right. I think people are quick to blame biology for their own mistakes, rather than taking responsibility and perhaps making a change for the better.
The second time Shige burst into the Koyamas' restaurant during a downpour, Koyama braced himself for another announcement that would knock him off his feet. He was helping out, wiping down the serving counter at the front and putting all sorts of sundry items to rights.
Shige snatched the dish rag out of his hand and said without preamble, “Oh forget that Kei, let’s go for a drive. I feel like seeing the ocean today.”
“You say that like you’re planning to take me out for a drive, instead of asking me politely to take you out for a drive as you should be, hmm?”
Just to tease Shige, Koyama began refilling an empty soy sauce bottle slowly, pouring a tiny trickle of liquid from a larger jug of soy sauce into the smaller table-top containers. Scowling, Shige reached across the counter and lifted the bottom of the bigger jar, to hurry up the process.
“Come on Kei, it’s a nice day. If we leave now, we can be back in time before the dinner rush, and I’ll even help you with these stupid soy sauce bottles, okay?”
Koyama looked at Shige out of the corner of laughing eyes. “Fine, I will take you for a drive in exchange for free slave labor. Let’s go~”
It wasn't until Koyama was dropping Shige off at his house at night that Shige said what Koyama expected he'd been meaning to say all day.
"We broke up."
Koyama turned to Shige with a searching gaze, but didn't say anything.
Shige nodded, understanding the silent question Koyama was asking him. "We didn't go through with... accepting each other."
"Oh," replied Koyama, a bit at a loss for words. He wasn't sure if he was happy for himself, or disappointed for his friend, or maybe even disappointed on his own behalf. He'd gotten so used to the idea of being in a tragic-romantic, one-sided acceptance that he hadn't really thought about any other possibilities.
“It must’ve been, like, I don’t know, wedding jitters or something. But we just kept putting it off and putting it off, even though we’d decided to do it, and eventually the whole thing just fell apart...” Shige had opened up the car door on his side already, but the two of them ended up sitting and talking in Koyama’s car for another forty minutes.
That night, Koyama dreamed about kissing Shige. He dreamt of how it would feel to have Shige’s wind-chapped lips pressing back against his own, and Shige’s cold fingers gripping his own. There might have been more to the dream, but it was all he could remember when he woke up.
‘That’s what it would be like,’ he thought to himself. The thought echoed in his head all day.
It was such a beautiful summer night, warm and quiet in a way that could relax a person's very bones. Koyama felt the sounds of the city - cicadas in the trees, cars rumbling by on the main street two blocks away, the murmur of a neighbor's television downstairs - slowly winding him down, pulling down his guard with a soothing hand. It was the perfect kind of night for romantic confessions and starlit kisses.
He had been going on as usual, trying to preserve his usual cheerful stream of chatter about inane things, when they both noticed the fireflies. With Shige so close to him, brushing against him, he couldn't help but think of Kusano's silly sci-fi romance where the people got to choose and the flies were the ones who mated for life.
Koyama felt resentful towards the fireflies, even as he sang to call them nearer.
"They're searching for their beloved. Isn't it romantic, Shige?"
In some perverse part of his psyche, he wanted Shige to refute the statement. He wanted Shige to scoff at his sentimentality, to tell him that he was just being his silly, idealistic, misty-eyed self, and of course flies could mate a billion times and have orgies and all sorts of ridiculous things because they weren't sentient beings, they were just flies.
"They're just tiny insects, it's not like they know what they're doing." Shige said, practically, "It's just a mating ritual."
But Koyama also wanted Shige to just understand. He wanted Shige to look at him and see his glow and decided that Koyama was someone he would love all his life. He wanted Shige to perhaps realize that Koyama was someone he had already loved all his life.
"I think it's beautiful. Like hearts calling out to each other, each one just a tiny light in the darkness. I think it's meant to give us hope that there is someone out there looking for you just like you're looking for them..."
Hardly realizing what he was doing, Koyama leaned in, drawn towards Shige, until he could feel his own breaths reverberating in the air between them.
"Can't you see the glow, Shige?"
He hadn’t really meant to say anything, certainly hadn’t planned or prepared for it, but by the time the words slipped out it was too late anyway. He'd already been emitting his own glow for Shige to see, perhaps for a very long time, perhaps for longer than he'd realized, perhaps always.
Then Shige leaned in and kissed him, accepted him.