[ryo/shige] filling the spaces
title: filling the spaces
pairing: ryo/shige
rating: r
words: 2534
summary: love had been beautiful and powerless.
note: for tokeruyouna.
Shige breaks up with him one day over the phone, voice calm and neutral, betraying nothing.
"Why?" Ryo asks after an hour of listening to Shige's arguments about how they're much better off apart.
Shige says, "I've moved on."
Ryo just stops himself in time from saying, liar.
He wishes he was able to be satisfied with simple reasons.
… …
When they come across each other again backstage at Best Artist, Shige with his arms around Koyama trying to prevent him from launching a tickle attack and Ryo caught mid-sentence in a conversation with Yamapi while entering the dressing room, there isn't any outright awkwardness.
"Hi," says Shige, and smiles.
"Hi," says Ryo, and if his smile is more awkward than usual, it's still big and sincere.
Koyama gives up tickling Shige and goes off with Tegoshi to compete with him on some handphone game. Shige sits near Ryo and they start talking about work; completely harmless and easy to carry on until they're interrupted by staffers and allowed to move away from each other naturally. Shige looks good and his skin is a little flushed, possibly from the excitement of being in a full group again, and Ryo detects nothing in his voice aside from pleased familiarity and friendliness; "I'm so tired from filming for Soukon," he's saying, "all that running, you and Yamashita-kun are so lucky that you aren't being made to do things like that."
He's always been good at talking, Ryo remembers. Always been good at filling in the spaces.
A staff member comes in then to brief them about the setup of the show. The spaces, Ryo thinks, as they move away from each other to collect a printout of the stage layout.
He hadn't thought, four months ago when he'd gotten that call, that there would be such a huge space between them now.
… …
"Supper?" He says casually when it's all over and everyone's packing to go home.
Shige combs his hair down; without his makeup and the gelled hair, he looks more like the Shige that Ryo had once loved (he'd resolved to use past tense three months ago) and it makes things just a little bit complicated.
"Just us?" Shige asks. Ryo leans against the wall and tries not to notice that the rest are conspicuously avoiding looking at them. At least they're more successful at being tactful, he reflects, recalling the amount of times Hina has tried to wheedle out of him a full account of the breakup.
He looks down at his feet, studies the patterns on the tiled floor. "Yes," he says.
Shige doesn't say anything. He finishes combing his hair and looks into the mirror silently, thoughtfully, and Ryo is suddenly tempted to say, you promised to be amicable, you were the one who used that word.
But he doesn't say it, and Shige shakes his head. Maybe next time, I've got something on tonight with a friend.
"Shige?"
"I'm sorry."
Ryo fists the hem of his shirt. "You've said it, next time."
Shige smiles, but it's the sort of smile that he used to give Ryo four years back when they were just starting out and Shige hadn't liked him at all. Strange, Ryo thinks, how we've come so far and yet we've arrived at where we started.
Minutes after Shige leaves, Ryo still detects traces of his cologne in the air. He really does, even though he knows it's impossible; Shige hadn't been wearing cologne.
… …
Yamapi tries to be subtle, but he's dying to talk about it and Ryo knows it; he knows Yamapi too well.
"It's okay," he sighs, leaning back on the chair and studying the bubbly yellow of his beer. "You don't have to hint; I know you want to talk about Shige and I."
Yamapi looks relieved. "Is there a Shige and you?" he says. "Or not anymore?"
"I thought Koyama would have told you."
"He hasn't told me anything," Yamapi says, and adds as an afterthought, "I don't think he knows much. Shige hasn't been very talkative about this whole…thing."
Ryo looks around him, at the groups of laughing university students and office workers enjoying their spare hours and couples drinking at the bar, oblivious to everything but themselves. "Probably because there isn't much to tell. But yes, we broke up four months ago. We decided that being in a relationship wasn't for us anymore."
Yamapi hesitates and Ryo, to save both of them the trouble of further delicately-phrased questioning, continues, "You know we haven't been seeing each other much with our schedules being so conflicting - it's weird, now that I think back on it, doesn't it seem as though the company deliberately scheduled us like that so that we wouldn't get to see each other? Hmm, food for thought. Anyway, I was in Osaka and he called me one day and we talked it out and he said he didn't want it anymore, he was moving on, so I said okay, if that's the case then we'll break up." He drinks a bit of his beer, it tastes bitter, he thought he'd grown to love the bitterness but he doesn't like it tonight. "Amicable," he says. "He used that word. Damn law students. You see, we're amicable now."
"If you say so." Yamapi sounds doubtful.
"You saw us, didn't you? We talked. We're fine. Don't worry, we're not going to cause the group any trouble and the managers will be sleeping peacefully knowing that the plan of keeping Nishikido and Kato apart has been a rousing success."
"Ryo-chan," says Yamapi.
"Great success," Ryo says, clapping his hands and nodding.
"Ryo-chan," Yamapi persists. "You're crying."
Ryo reaches up and touches moisture on his cheeks. "Oh," he says.
It's four in the morning when they leave the pub. He isn't drunk.
… …
It's late afternoon and he's cooking pasta in the kitchen, watching the tomato-based sauce bubble slowly in the pan, when his handphone notifies him that he has received a message.
I did say next time, Shige says in text form. I'm free tomorrow night after ten.
… …
He keeps his face from grimacing when Shige applies lotion onto the cut on his knee. They'd had an amicable supper (he'd forgotten how easy it was to use food as a substitute for continuous conversation) and he'd been so close to making it, so close to getting out of their supper alive and with nerves intact, when some drunk had decided to dump a glass bottle on the pavement and he'd stepped right on it and gone bowling over.
"The pavement is ten feet wide and you just had to step on that," Shige'd said, a touch of their old banter coming back, and Ryo had felt affection and embarrassment rushing upon him.
"I don't get drunk anymore," he says now, watching Shige carefully rolling a bandage around his knee, and he doesn't get drunk he isn't drunk but he's light-headed, he feels he might be floating, might not actually hit the ceiling this time. "Shige, did you hear that?"
"Yes," says Shige, looking up at him with a little frown. "I'm close enough to hear you, you know."
"When I get drunk I think of you."
Shige's fingers turn cold against his skin.
"Being amicable doesn't stop the pain, does it?" He leans down to examine Shige's face. "Does it, Shige? No, I don't think so."
Shige turns his face away. Ryo grabs his chin and Shige slaps his hand, shoves him back against the couch. "So much for not getting drunk," he snaps.
"What the fuck," Ryo says, pushing himself up, "you don't have to act as though I'm going to violate you."
"I said before that I've moved on." Shige moves away from him to the window. "Don't go all drama queen on me, it's not going to change anything."
"Liar," says Ryo. His head is fuzzy and he wonders if he might be drunk after all; if there are emotions in him strong enough to invoke the feeling of intoxication. He still feels, vaguely, the touch of Shige's hand on his knee. "You tell the most marvelous, ridiculous, unbelievable lies."
"I'm not lying. And if you're going to continue accusing me of that, I'm leaving."
"Liar," he says again, stupidly. Or maybe not.
He knows that tone in Shige's voice, the bluster of anger to cover the uncertainty underneath.
Shige walks past him and he hears the door opening and closing, and a silence that says there's nobody left.
He leans his head against the couch and closes his eyes; it's so easy now, somehow, to say and do all the wrong things.
… …
I'm sorry. I behaved like an idiot.
Half an hour later, the reply; You did.
I'm sorry.
… …
The next time they meet is for the Music Station Super Live rehearsal. He's the third to arrive, and when he walks into the dressing room Massu and Shige are chatting across the width of the room about the new movie Avatar. Ryo greets them and sits on a chair feeling like the biggest fool in the universe when Shige looks at him.
"It's okay," Shige says, and Massu, startled, asks "What?"
Shige smiles now, a small, less generic smile, but Ryo's still feeling like the biggest, most unforgivable fool.
… …
He still dreams of Shige sometimes, of Shige's mouth and arms and legs and ass, of him moving into Shige, the heat and tightness and rightness of it, of them entwined around each other. He dreams of pulsing inside Shige, of pushing in and out, of kissing his chest and neck and shoulders, of fondling his hips and running his hands over Shige's body, over the corners and spaces that he still remembers vividly.
Shige's always welcoming in his dreams, as eager and loving as he'd been before he started growing distant in the last five months; no. He doesn't dream of a distant Shige. It's always Shige during the height of their relationship when love and seduction and sensuality were so ready, when he'd thought that he would be this happy forever; forever is such a bleak word. Shige is moving under him, moving to his rhythm, he loves Shige so much. He can't bear the weight of it; the hateful finality of remaining in that love; and then he's coming in his hands and waking up to tears on his pillow.
It has been four months, but he still isn't used to sleeping alone.
… …
The bedroom stinks when he wakes. He turns over and realises that the smell is coming from himself; a smell of stale alcohol and unwashed clothes and the faint traces of vomit. He doesn't remember anything.
"Awake?" says someone, and he squeezes one eye open to see Shige and Yamapi sitting on the floor by the wall, staring at him.
"What?" he mumbles.
"You got drunk last night," Yamapi says. "After the performance we went out for drinks, remember?"
Ryo feels his head with a hand that he isn't sure is attached to the rest of his body. He doesn't remember.
"I think it's a case for you, Shige," Yamapi says, standing up. "I'll leave you to it."
He closes the door behind him and they're alone together again. Ryo doesn't entirely want to be in this situation where he can't remember anything and it's obvious that he's done something he shouldn't have.
Shige remains staring at him for a while. Ryo has always hated that unspeaking, neutral expression that Shige puts on whenever he doesn't want anyone to read his feelings. He hates it even more now.
"When we got together, it was the happiest period of my life," Shige says at last.
"Must we do this now?" Ryo asks.
"Why, do you have another time in mind?"
Ryo thinks it over. "No." He raises himself slightly on the bed. "I guess you should continue then."
"I realise I didn't really…give a reason for our breakup." Shige remains sitting against the wall, legs drawn up, knees apart.
"You've already given me one."
"I…" Shige meets his eyes briefly, almost pleadingly. "Hear it from me again, then."
He doesn't argue. He listens, instead, to the words coming out of Shige's mouth, the story that Shige is telling of two boys who'd fallen in love, so much in love that they defied the Jimusho's regulations and the threat of the media to remain together. They'd had good times, had been the best of friends, had visualized their shared futures. He tries not to listen to what comes after that, but he doesn't have a choice; he listens to it anyway, the stumbling account of growing up and growing apart, the changing of feelings, the falling out of love.
"I haven't fallen out of love," he says at that point.
Shige holds his hand; sometime during the course of the story, he'd moved across the room to sit down by the bed. "Maybe you haven't yet," he says gently, "but hearts do change, Ryo. I wish we could have remained together but I've changed; I'm no longer the Shige that you love. Don't dwell on it anymore; let's move on. You've seen that we can still get along, just…not as lovers. I want us to continue getting along."
Which, of course, is the nicest thing that your ex can say when he's keeping from you the real reason why he doesn't want you around anymore.
Ryo is sick of the cruelty of nice things.
… …
When they don't see each other again for months, time spreading and growing cold in the distance between them, Ryo ceases to see Shige in every cloud he sees, every curve of steam rising from coffee.
He's able to smile and touch hands and talk naturally when they meet up for a magazine photoshoot, and he's able to sling his bag over his shoulder and leave at the end of the day without succumbing to the need to get Shige to himself for a few private moments.
He thinks it might be able to work after all, this whole business of getting along.
… …
Koyama informs him half a year later that Shige has found somebody new. Ryo looks at the handphone photograph that Koyama shows him; the 'somebody new' is a girl with curly bobbed hair and an adorable smile. Koyama says that Shige's parents are delighted that he has found such a lovely girlfriend. Ryo smiles and says that it's nice that Shige seems to be happy.
… …
That night, he finds that he doesn't blame Shige after all for not being able to find the words to explain how he'd given in to society's pressure.
It's not an easy thing to explain.
… …
He still dreams of them sometimes; the two boys who'd once been in love.
It had been a beautiful thing hadn't it, being in love? Beautiful and powerless.
He's sure that one day, he'll be okay with remembering what a failure it had been.
He still dreams of the two foolish boys who'd once visualized a shared future.
end
~ It has been a terribly long time and I apologise for the fail and lack of direction in this fic =/
~ To tokeruyouna, I deviated so much from your prompt that I refuse to tell you which one it is. alskdjh I'm so sorry!
pairing: ryo/shige
rating: r
words: 2534
summary: love had been beautiful and powerless.
note: for tokeruyouna.
Shige breaks up with him one day over the phone, voice calm and neutral, betraying nothing.
"Why?" Ryo asks after an hour of listening to Shige's arguments about how they're much better off apart.
Shige says, "I've moved on."
Ryo just stops himself in time from saying, liar.
He wishes he was able to be satisfied with simple reasons.
… …
When they come across each other again backstage at Best Artist, Shige with his arms around Koyama trying to prevent him from launching a tickle attack and Ryo caught mid-sentence in a conversation with Yamapi while entering the dressing room, there isn't any outright awkwardness.
"Hi," says Shige, and smiles.
"Hi," says Ryo, and if his smile is more awkward than usual, it's still big and sincere.
Koyama gives up tickling Shige and goes off with Tegoshi to compete with him on some handphone game. Shige sits near Ryo and they start talking about work; completely harmless and easy to carry on until they're interrupted by staffers and allowed to move away from each other naturally. Shige looks good and his skin is a little flushed, possibly from the excitement of being in a full group again, and Ryo detects nothing in his voice aside from pleased familiarity and friendliness; "I'm so tired from filming for Soukon," he's saying, "all that running, you and Yamashita-kun are so lucky that you aren't being made to do things like that."
He's always been good at talking, Ryo remembers. Always been good at filling in the spaces.
A staff member comes in then to brief them about the setup of the show. The spaces, Ryo thinks, as they move away from each other to collect a printout of the stage layout.
He hadn't thought, four months ago when he'd gotten that call, that there would be such a huge space between them now.
… …
"Supper?" He says casually when it's all over and everyone's packing to go home.
Shige combs his hair down; without his makeup and the gelled hair, he looks more like the Shige that Ryo had once loved (he'd resolved to use past tense three months ago) and it makes things just a little bit complicated.
"Just us?" Shige asks. Ryo leans against the wall and tries not to notice that the rest are conspicuously avoiding looking at them. At least they're more successful at being tactful, he reflects, recalling the amount of times Hina has tried to wheedle out of him a full account of the breakup.
He looks down at his feet, studies the patterns on the tiled floor. "Yes," he says.
Shige doesn't say anything. He finishes combing his hair and looks into the mirror silently, thoughtfully, and Ryo is suddenly tempted to say, you promised to be amicable, you were the one who used that word.
But he doesn't say it, and Shige shakes his head. Maybe next time, I've got something on tonight with a friend.
"Shige?"
"I'm sorry."
Ryo fists the hem of his shirt. "You've said it, next time."
Shige smiles, but it's the sort of smile that he used to give Ryo four years back when they were just starting out and Shige hadn't liked him at all. Strange, Ryo thinks, how we've come so far and yet we've arrived at where we started.
Minutes after Shige leaves, Ryo still detects traces of his cologne in the air. He really does, even though he knows it's impossible; Shige hadn't been wearing cologne.
… …
Yamapi tries to be subtle, but he's dying to talk about it and Ryo knows it; he knows Yamapi too well.
"It's okay," he sighs, leaning back on the chair and studying the bubbly yellow of his beer. "You don't have to hint; I know you want to talk about Shige and I."
Yamapi looks relieved. "Is there a Shige and you?" he says. "Or not anymore?"
"I thought Koyama would have told you."
"He hasn't told me anything," Yamapi says, and adds as an afterthought, "I don't think he knows much. Shige hasn't been very talkative about this whole…thing."
Ryo looks around him, at the groups of laughing university students and office workers enjoying their spare hours and couples drinking at the bar, oblivious to everything but themselves. "Probably because there isn't much to tell. But yes, we broke up four months ago. We decided that being in a relationship wasn't for us anymore."
Yamapi hesitates and Ryo, to save both of them the trouble of further delicately-phrased questioning, continues, "You know we haven't been seeing each other much with our schedules being so conflicting - it's weird, now that I think back on it, doesn't it seem as though the company deliberately scheduled us like that so that we wouldn't get to see each other? Hmm, food for thought. Anyway, I was in Osaka and he called me one day and we talked it out and he said he didn't want it anymore, he was moving on, so I said okay, if that's the case then we'll break up." He drinks a bit of his beer, it tastes bitter, he thought he'd grown to love the bitterness but he doesn't like it tonight. "Amicable," he says. "He used that word. Damn law students. You see, we're amicable now."
"If you say so." Yamapi sounds doubtful.
"You saw us, didn't you? We talked. We're fine. Don't worry, we're not going to cause the group any trouble and the managers will be sleeping peacefully knowing that the plan of keeping Nishikido and Kato apart has been a rousing success."
"Ryo-chan," says Yamapi.
"Great success," Ryo says, clapping his hands and nodding.
"Ryo-chan," Yamapi persists. "You're crying."
Ryo reaches up and touches moisture on his cheeks. "Oh," he says.
It's four in the morning when they leave the pub. He isn't drunk.
… …
It's late afternoon and he's cooking pasta in the kitchen, watching the tomato-based sauce bubble slowly in the pan, when his handphone notifies him that he has received a message.
I did say next time, Shige says in text form. I'm free tomorrow night after ten.
… …
He keeps his face from grimacing when Shige applies lotion onto the cut on his knee. They'd had an amicable supper (he'd forgotten how easy it was to use food as a substitute for continuous conversation) and he'd been so close to making it, so close to getting out of their supper alive and with nerves intact, when some drunk had decided to dump a glass bottle on the pavement and he'd stepped right on it and gone bowling over.
"The pavement is ten feet wide and you just had to step on that," Shige'd said, a touch of their old banter coming back, and Ryo had felt affection and embarrassment rushing upon him.
"I don't get drunk anymore," he says now, watching Shige carefully rolling a bandage around his knee, and he doesn't get drunk he isn't drunk but he's light-headed, he feels he might be floating, might not actually hit the ceiling this time. "Shige, did you hear that?"
"Yes," says Shige, looking up at him with a little frown. "I'm close enough to hear you, you know."
"When I get drunk I think of you."
Shige's fingers turn cold against his skin.
"Being amicable doesn't stop the pain, does it?" He leans down to examine Shige's face. "Does it, Shige? No, I don't think so."
Shige turns his face away. Ryo grabs his chin and Shige slaps his hand, shoves him back against the couch. "So much for not getting drunk," he snaps.
"What the fuck," Ryo says, pushing himself up, "you don't have to act as though I'm going to violate you."
"I said before that I've moved on." Shige moves away from him to the window. "Don't go all drama queen on me, it's not going to change anything."
"Liar," says Ryo. His head is fuzzy and he wonders if he might be drunk after all; if there are emotions in him strong enough to invoke the feeling of intoxication. He still feels, vaguely, the touch of Shige's hand on his knee. "You tell the most marvelous, ridiculous, unbelievable lies."
"I'm not lying. And if you're going to continue accusing me of that, I'm leaving."
"Liar," he says again, stupidly. Or maybe not.
He knows that tone in Shige's voice, the bluster of anger to cover the uncertainty underneath.
Shige walks past him and he hears the door opening and closing, and a silence that says there's nobody left.
He leans his head against the couch and closes his eyes; it's so easy now, somehow, to say and do all the wrong things.
… …
I'm sorry. I behaved like an idiot.
Half an hour later, the reply; You did.
I'm sorry.
… …
The next time they meet is for the Music Station Super Live rehearsal. He's the third to arrive, and when he walks into the dressing room Massu and Shige are chatting across the width of the room about the new movie Avatar. Ryo greets them and sits on a chair feeling like the biggest fool in the universe when Shige looks at him.
"It's okay," Shige says, and Massu, startled, asks "What?"
Shige smiles now, a small, less generic smile, but Ryo's still feeling like the biggest, most unforgivable fool.
… …
He still dreams of Shige sometimes, of Shige's mouth and arms and legs and ass, of him moving into Shige, the heat and tightness and rightness of it, of them entwined around each other. He dreams of pulsing inside Shige, of pushing in and out, of kissing his chest and neck and shoulders, of fondling his hips and running his hands over Shige's body, over the corners and spaces that he still remembers vividly.
Shige's always welcoming in his dreams, as eager and loving as he'd been before he started growing distant in the last five months; no. He doesn't dream of a distant Shige. It's always Shige during the height of their relationship when love and seduction and sensuality were so ready, when he'd thought that he would be this happy forever; forever is such a bleak word. Shige is moving under him, moving to his rhythm, he loves Shige so much. He can't bear the weight of it; the hateful finality of remaining in that love; and then he's coming in his hands and waking up to tears on his pillow.
It has been four months, but he still isn't used to sleeping alone.
… …
The bedroom stinks when he wakes. He turns over and realises that the smell is coming from himself; a smell of stale alcohol and unwashed clothes and the faint traces of vomit. He doesn't remember anything.
"Awake?" says someone, and he squeezes one eye open to see Shige and Yamapi sitting on the floor by the wall, staring at him.
"What?" he mumbles.
"You got drunk last night," Yamapi says. "After the performance we went out for drinks, remember?"
Ryo feels his head with a hand that he isn't sure is attached to the rest of his body. He doesn't remember.
"I think it's a case for you, Shige," Yamapi says, standing up. "I'll leave you to it."
He closes the door behind him and they're alone together again. Ryo doesn't entirely want to be in this situation where he can't remember anything and it's obvious that he's done something he shouldn't have.
Shige remains staring at him for a while. Ryo has always hated that unspeaking, neutral expression that Shige puts on whenever he doesn't want anyone to read his feelings. He hates it even more now.
"When we got together, it was the happiest period of my life," Shige says at last.
"Must we do this now?" Ryo asks.
"Why, do you have another time in mind?"
Ryo thinks it over. "No." He raises himself slightly on the bed. "I guess you should continue then."
"I realise I didn't really…give a reason for our breakup." Shige remains sitting against the wall, legs drawn up, knees apart.
"You've already given me one."
"I…" Shige meets his eyes briefly, almost pleadingly. "Hear it from me again, then."
He doesn't argue. He listens, instead, to the words coming out of Shige's mouth, the story that Shige is telling of two boys who'd fallen in love, so much in love that they defied the Jimusho's regulations and the threat of the media to remain together. They'd had good times, had been the best of friends, had visualized their shared futures. He tries not to listen to what comes after that, but he doesn't have a choice; he listens to it anyway, the stumbling account of growing up and growing apart, the changing of feelings, the falling out of love.
"I haven't fallen out of love," he says at that point.
Shige holds his hand; sometime during the course of the story, he'd moved across the room to sit down by the bed. "Maybe you haven't yet," he says gently, "but hearts do change, Ryo. I wish we could have remained together but I've changed; I'm no longer the Shige that you love. Don't dwell on it anymore; let's move on. You've seen that we can still get along, just…not as lovers. I want us to continue getting along."
Which, of course, is the nicest thing that your ex can say when he's keeping from you the real reason why he doesn't want you around anymore.
Ryo is sick of the cruelty of nice things.
… …
When they don't see each other again for months, time spreading and growing cold in the distance between them, Ryo ceases to see Shige in every cloud he sees, every curve of steam rising from coffee.
He's able to smile and touch hands and talk naturally when they meet up for a magazine photoshoot, and he's able to sling his bag over his shoulder and leave at the end of the day without succumbing to the need to get Shige to himself for a few private moments.
He thinks it might be able to work after all, this whole business of getting along.
… …
Koyama informs him half a year later that Shige has found somebody new. Ryo looks at the handphone photograph that Koyama shows him; the 'somebody new' is a girl with curly bobbed hair and an adorable smile. Koyama says that Shige's parents are delighted that he has found such a lovely girlfriend. Ryo smiles and says that it's nice that Shige seems to be happy.
… …
That night, he finds that he doesn't blame Shige after all for not being able to find the words to explain how he'd given in to society's pressure.
It's not an easy thing to explain.
… …
He still dreams of them sometimes; the two boys who'd once been in love.
It had been a beautiful thing hadn't it, being in love? Beautiful and powerless.
He's sure that one day, he'll be okay with remembering what a failure it had been.
He still dreams of the two foolish boys who'd once visualized a shared future.
end
~ It has been a terribly long time and I apologise for the fail and lack of direction in this fic =/
~ To tokeruyouna, I deviated so much from your prompt that I refuse to tell you which one it is. alskdjh I'm so sorry!