Gift Fic for sunscribble!
Gift fic for sunscribble
From kis_my_fic2
Title: Only Fools Rush In
Pairings/Characters: Kitayama/Miyata
Rating: G
Summary: AU. Toshiya is hell-bent on gaining the attention of the new guy, but somehow it never turns out right. Hijinks ensue - and the troupe will never be the same again.
Notes: Dear sunscribble, I’m really honoured to be able to write this fic for you for this exchange. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!
Heavily inspired by Zizou Corder’s Lionboy.
Many thanks to my betas for going through this so patiently!♥
Toshiya sits on the floor by the bed, furiously polishing his bright red nose with a small purple handkerchief. He’d dropped it by accident into the toilet a couple of days ago (he still swears that he’d only turned his face and hadn’t expected it to fall right off ) and five soapy rinses and a hundred or so wipes later he is still firmly convinced that the cesspool smell hasn’t completely worn off yet.
A moan from the bed behind startles him into nearly dropping his nose onto the not-particularly-clean wooden floor.
“Yuta!” he whines, whipping around. “I nearly dropped my nose on the floor!”
Yuta, his roommate, shoots him a glare from where he is currently bundled in a cocoon of blankets with an utterly wretched expression on his face.
“Seasick,” he hisses back. “I don’t care about that damn plastic nose right now.”
Toshiya knows from experience that Yuta suffers from motion sickness on any kind of moving vehicle, which unfortunately includes the ship they spend nearly all their time in. (Once, he’d tried to drag Yuta with him onto a ferris wheel during one of their days off, only to regret this when his friend moaned and lolled about for the rest of the ride.)
He never understands why Yuta had chosen to join them despite knowing that he’d be stuck on a boat nearly all the time if he did.
“Try and sleep, maybe it’ll make the seasickness go away,” he sighs, turning his attention back to his nose.
Yuta only grumbles and retreats back into his blankets like a turtle retracting its head back into its shell. A few seconds later, he pokes his face out again.
“I heard from Watta that we’ve got someone new joining us when we stop at Tokyo,” he says blearily. “I wonder who it is.”
Toshiya has been infinitely curious about this new member as well ever since he’d heard it from Fumito, who had overheard it when Kento told Takashi that Wataru had mentioned a new member.
“Well,” he says, rubbing fiercely at a tiny black spot on his nose with the handkerchief, “there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
They dock at Tokyo a week later, and Yuta stumbles out of their cabin on shaky legs to collapse on the outer deck in relief.
Toshiya might have been born and raised in Tokyo, but ever since he joined the troupe several years ago he hasn’t seen it. They tour all around the world, and they’ve stopped at several places in Japan including Kumamoto and Osaka, but never Tokyo.
“Homesick?” laughs a deep voice behind him, and Toshiya spins around to see Fumito stepping out onto the outer deck as well.
Toshiya grins, and shakes his head. Fumito has been his friend ever since he first encountered the troupe after running away from home, and after they both ended up being in the same act they’d only become closer.
“I’m curious as to who the new guy is though,” he says, and Fumito nods sagely.
“I heard that he’s going to be Taisuke’s new partner though, ever since Iida decided to leave and get an office job instead. Tackey’s gone to get him, the new guy.”
“Is that so?”
Tiptoeing, Toshiya peers out at the pier and scans the faces of the crowd gathering to stare at their majestic red ship with golden trimmings. Fumito does the same, except he wobbles a bit while trying to balance on the very tip of his toes so that his head reaches the same height as Toshiya’s.
Behind them, Yuta groans, slowly pulling himself to his feet to take in a breath of fresh air.
Their performance is named The Show (always with emphasis on the capital T), and occasionally given a subtitle such as ‘Kakumei’ or ‘Enbujou’ depending on the routines they perform. The members of the troupe, on the other hand, have no official collective name, though Tackey likes to call them ‘Troopers’ for no particular reason.
The troupe is jointly owned by Tackey (who always insists that nobody use honorifics with his name) and his friend Tsubasa. Tackey is in charge of running the show and coming up with all their routines, while Tsubasa counts the money and hands out their monthly pay and decides how much leave they get and whether they get sponsored day-off trips to amusement parks and such.
They’re unique in being an all-male circus troupe, as well as being one that travels by sea all the time in their large flashy red-and-gold boat. Most of the members discard their surnames and go by first names or nicknames, with only a couple of exceptions. They mostly go around the Asian region, but sometimes travel to Paris or New York or the like as well, and stay there for a month before moving on.
To Toshiya, the familiar ship is home, much more so than his old one back in Tokyo. In his five years he has never once felt homesick or regretted joining the troupe.
A yell distracts Toshiya, and he whips around to see that their sole animal tamer Ryosuke (affectionately known as Hasshi) has joined him and Fumito on the deck, and is currently waving and pointing at someone in the crowd.
“It’s Tackey!” he says excitedly, and when Toshiya squints he can make out their ringmaster’s head of golden hair, and as well as a head of unruly brown hair next to it.
Turning around, he drags Yuta towards the gangplank of the ship where the others are already waiting for their first glimpse of the new member. Carefully, he shoves past Takashi and Kento to stand at the front of their little crowd, just in time to see Tackey begin to walk up the gangplank with the brown-haired person in tow.
Tackey stops to make an announcement to the people at the pier staring at their boat (Toshiya figures it’s probably an advertisement to get them to come and watch The Show), and by the time the two have reached the deck most of the people at the pier have begun to walk off.
“Troopers!” Tackey begins in his majestically loud voice. “This is Hiromitsu, who prefers to be called Mitsu, and from today he’ll be Taisuke’s partner in the trapeze routines.”
Mitsu has mussed-up brown hair that falls into his eyes, and a small slouch as he stands by Tackey’s side, chocolate-brown gaze taking in the people currently staring at him like he’s a museum exhibit on display.
Taisuke steps out from the crowd, unruly perm proudly sticking out like a lion’s mane, and introduces himself before every other member descends upon Mitsu, screaming their name, patting his back or shaking his hand.
Toshiya tries too, jumping into the fray with a shriek of “My name’s Toshiya!”, but he gets booted out before Mitsu even so much as looks at him. Before he can blink, the crowd of eager members has shepherded Mitsu into the main lobby within the ship, and he is left blinking stupidly at their retreating backs, sprawled on the deck floor.
“He didn’t even glance at me,” Toshiya whines to Yuta, who hauled him to his feet.
“He had tons of people swarming him,” Yuta sighs. “You can introduce yourself another day.”
That day, Toshiya makes a silent vow to do his utmost best to get Mitsu to look at him.
Because Mitsu is new, Tackey decides that he won’t be part of the Tokyo performance, and will only join in when they leave Tokyo and head for Seoul. Even so, Mitsu gets to sit in and watch their final rehearsals before the shows begin.
Toshiya loves final rehearsals. It isn’t a full dress rehearsal per se, but he gets to practice with actual props instead of dummy ones, and he enjoys that. Today he and Fumito are touching up on the new addition to their routine - pie juggling. Of course, it isn’t really actual pies they juggle, just pie tins filled with a lot of stiffly-whipped cream.
Out of the corner of his eye, Toshiya spies Mitsu watching them juggle from the front row in the bit of the arena near them.
“Look at me!” he cries as Fumito tosses him another pie. He tries to throw one back, but in the heat of the moment he gets the angle wrong, and the creamy lump goes flying past Fumito’s face and lands smack-bang in the middle of Mitsu’s.
Toshiya pales.
“…Oops.”
Fumito puts down the rest of his pies and starts laughing.
“He can’t look at you, stupid,” he wheezes in between guffaws. “Not when he’s got cream covering his eyes!”
Mitsu doesn’t seem particularly angry when they manage to wipe the cream off his face, though Taisuke hands Mitsu’s cream-stained shirt to Toshiya and makes him hand-wash it.
The Snowmen (the self-christened group of jugglers) somehow catch wind of this incident, and for the next couple of days they laugh uproariously at Toshiya every time they meet in the hallways.
He ends up taking refuge with Hasshi outside the zebra cages. Hasshi generally spends more time around the lions, but even after knowing that living things of all kinds seem to love Hasshi and thus the animals behave around him, he still doesn’t dare to go near them.
“Maybe you need to do something more impressive,” Hasshi says helpfully, as he distributes hay into several piles to feed the zebras and the two horses. “I’m pretty sure he’ll take notice of you then.”
“What’s impressive, anyway?” Toshiya whines. “I don’t think he likes. First he completely ignores me, then I make a terrible first impression.”
Hasshi laughs.
“The Toshiya I know doesn’t give up that easily,” he says, ruffling Toshiya’s hair. “I’m sure you’ll be able to work something out.”
Toshiya plays with a couple of stalks of hay in his fingers.
“…Yeah.”
His act with Fumito isn’t his only job, as he often has to help Hasshi in his animal segment. This time round, he’s supposed to ride the brown horse and juggle while Tottsu, the tightrope walker Hasshi is strangely extremely fond of, does tricks on the white one.
They run through the routine a couple of times, Toshiya obligingly sitting astride his rather large steed while tossing around seven coloured balls and the occasional bowling pin or milk carton that Takashi flings him from his perch on the dancing zebra in the centre of the ring.
Hasshi calls a break, and Toshiya coaxes his horse to a stop to let it drink some water. He gazes around the ring, and realizes Mitsu is on the other side of the arena, watching Takashi fool around with the zebra.
Fully intending to ride his horse around the ring so he has an excuse to wave at Mitsu like an idiot, he pats the horse’s neck (he’s riding bareback and without any reins) to get it to walk around.
Unfortunately for Toshiya, when Hasshi isn’t leading the horse around it likes him a lot less. Disturbed from its water break, it harrumphs through its nose and shakes, causing a startled Toshiya to fall off onto the sawdust-covered floor, his coloured balls falling down after him and hitting his nose quite a few times.
He can hear Takashi laughing in the background as he groans and rolls over.
“The actual performance is tomorrow, you know,” Yuta scolds him as he applies some ointment to the rather large bruise on Toshiya’s hip.
“I’m trying to get him to look at me,” Toshiya mutters grumpily, pouting.
“Obviously, it’s not working.”
Toshiya flails his arms at Yuta indignantly, but only succeeds in nearly falling off his bed.
“It’s so annoying how I keep messing up in front of him…” Toshiya mumbles a while later.
Yuta gives him a long look, but refrains from saying anything.
Toshiya loves performing.
With his polished red nose attached firmly to his actual one, he grabs his purple polka-dotted costume from the costume manager Wataru before he gets roughed up in the huge mob of performers rushing to grab theirs.
Adjusting his brightly-coloured wig with its corkscrew curls, he gives his shoes one final once-over before ambling over to where Fumito is waiting in the wings.
Fumito is dressed in a costume that has matching polka-dots, but overall gives off a less sloppy feeling than Toshiya’s own. It matches their roles (Fumito likes to call himself the ‘clever clown’ and Toshiya the ‘stupid clown’ though Toshiya is never as pleased with the crude description of his role).
What Toshiya likes best about the two of them having to be little filler acts in between other segments is that he gets to watch nearly the entire performance from the wings. The crowd fills up the arena quickly, and as the lights dim the music begins to play.
A single spotlight focuses on the high wire stretched taut, way above the floor of the ring. Yuta steps out, face a mask of concentration as he stands poised at one end of the wire.
The music launches into a crescendo, the melody blossoming into a beautifully majestic tune. Cymbals crash, and Yuta launches into his routine, joined by Tottsu and Goseki as they dance nimbly on a thin metal wire.
The Show has begun.
When he and Fumito slip backstage after their main segment (they’re the only two clowns in the troupe), Toshiya breathes a sigh of relief. Despite his slip-ups during rehearsals, they’d managed to pull off a perfect performance, all the way up to the pie juggling, and had left the stage amid great applause.
Nevertheless, as he flings flowers out to the audience while perched on his brown horse in the finale (after having changed out of his clown costume and into a less loud one for the animal segment), his mind wanders off and begins crafting more strategies to capture Mitsu’s attention.
Only pure luck keeps him from falling off his horse, but still he absentmindedly ends up throwing flowers into Kento’s face as his horse turns around.
The Show ends without a hitch, and while most of the performers head for their cabins to scrub off thick makeup he follows Hasshi. He helps to brush down the horses and zebras while Hasshi feeds the lions.
“Any luck with that Mitsu?” Hasshi asks as they lead the horses into their stalls.
Sighing, Toshiya shakes his head, and Hasshi thumps his back.
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you had a crush on him or something!” he laughs, before going off to fetch the lions’ dinner from the fridge.
Hasshi’s words plague Toshiya the whole night.
He continues to try and get Mitsu’s attention throughout their whole time in Tokyo.
Once, he tries to juggle eight bowling pins at once, which is more than even what the Snowmen use at once, It backfires spectacularly, and he ends up with a terribly sore spot on his head after all the bowling pins came falling down on him.
Another time, he tries to do acrobatics on horseback like Tottsu, only to end up falling off his horse and into its water trough.
“Maybe you should try being a little more subtle about it,” Yuta tells him dryly.
Toshiya looks up from where he is polishing his shoes.
“‘Subtle’ isn’t in my dictionary,” he replies brightly, before turning his attention back to his shoes.
Yuta just rolls his eyes and sighs.
Three weeks later they leave Tokyo, and began to head for Seoul.
Mitsu starts rehearsing with Taisuke and the rest of the trapeze artists in their new routine, and Toshiya often watches them when he’s not busy rehearsing his own acts. He’s always loved to watch the trapeze performances whenever he’s on standby at the wings, and so he often sits in the front row and watches them twirl around with ease.
Mitsu takes to the routine extremely quickly, and soon he is swinging from trapeze to trapeze with as much ease as the others, the smile never leaving his face throughout the whole thing.
Toshiya is enchanted.
Now that Mitsu is busy with his own rehearsals, Toshiya finds that he can no longer try to catch his attention by doing weird things during his rehearsals. He tries to figure out what he can do instead, but ends up drawing a blank.
Somehow along the way, Fumito seems to have gotten the impression that Toshiya has a major crush on Mitsu and can’t seem to express his feelings in the correct way. He starts trying to give Toshiya ‘love advice’ (and dubs himself the ‘love guru’ in the process), and no matter how much Toshiya tells him to stop Fumito just keeps badgering Toshiya with new little bits of advice.
“Why don’t you just tell him directly?” he says one day as they walk to the props room together. “Like, instead of doing weird things, you could just say directly how you feel.”
“Impossible,” Toshiya replies. “He’s not even paying much attention to me in the first place.”
“Write to him?” Fumito suggests, shrugging.
Brushing past Toshiya, Fumito throws open the door of the props room and starts rummaging for a couple of chairs to use in their next act after the acrobats perform.
Write to him? Toshiya thinks.
“Fumito,” he says slowly, walking into the props room, “I think that for once your advice is actually useful, after all.”
Later that night, Toshiya eyes a single post-it stuck to his pillow. Twirling his pen in his fingers, he contemplates what to write.
Why don’t you notice me? he writes at last, and folds it into a tiny envelope-like shape before he chickens out. Writing Mitsu’s name on the outside in clumsy katakana, he slips out of his cabin, making sure Yuta doesn’t wake when he opens the door.
Mitsu shares a cabin with Taisuke, and Toshiya stands outside the door for a good ten minutes before he is absolutely certain that both people within the cabin are asleep. Quickly, he slips his folded post-it underneath the cabin door, before hightailing it back to his own cabin, burrowing under his own blankets.
The next day Mitsu shows no obvious sign of having received the note, but Toshiya can be extremely persistent when he wants to be.
Every night, after making sure his miserably seasick roommate has fallen asleep, he writes a new note and slips it under Mitsu’s cabin door before running away.
At rehearsals he ignores Fumito’s prodding about his supposed crush on Mitsu, and instead throws himself into practicing all his routines. If anybody is surprised by his sudden lack of weird behaviour during rehearsals, they don’t say a thing, though Toshiya intercepts some meaningful glances from Fumito here and there (but he has no idea what they mean anyway).
He writes whatever he feels like writing at that moment on Mitsu’s notes, from You were amazing at rehearsal today to Why don’t you like, comb your hair properly or something.
He has no idea if Mitsu actually reads them, but just writing them keeps him happy enough.
One day, he ends up sitting in the arena, watching in awe as the trapeze artists run through their routine again. Taisuke had added a new bit to their overall choreography, and Mitsu’s face is a mask of determination as he does his best to get it down.
They somersault in the air, round and round before they grab the hands of someone else already swinging by his legs on the wooden trapeze bar. Another swing, and he gets tossed up to a waiting trapeze, positioned higher up.
Toshiya watches as the trapeze artists essentially juggle themselves between the four trapeze bars for a while, and then they all stop and retreat back to the platform.
He sees Mitsu smile in satisfaction once he has reached the safety of the platform, and suddenly his heart does its own little somersault in his chest for no apparent reason.
Only later does he realize he has a goofy smile plastered onto his face.
Fumito tells him he’s in love.
Toshiya ignores the possibility, and vows never to share his secrets with his friend again.
He squashes the tiny little voice in his head that agrees with Fumito.
When Hasshi finds out about his notes, he is quite confused.
“I thought you don’t do subtle,” he points out as he brushes one of the zebras.
Toshiya shrugs, kicking idly at the hay strewn across the floor.
“If I did anything showier and caused him to fall off the trapeze Taisuke would have my head on a silver platter before I could even say horse.”
“…Ah.”
Silence falls while Hasshi packs up his grooming kit, the clattering echoing around the large cabin.
“You sure you won’t be annoying him or anything?”
Stunned into silence, Toshiya can only blink dumbly at Hasshi - that thought has never crossed his mind.
Oh shit, he thinks as he begins to consider the possibility.
Still, that night he finds himself going down the familiar corridors with a post-it clutched in his hand.
He’d written one nicely, only to blink and realise that he’d unconsciously written something he hadn’t intended to, so he folded it up and pushed it to the side of his pillow in order to write a fresh one.
When he’s done he stretches a bit, puts down his pen and then grabs his folded-up post-it, writes Mitsu’s name on it, and then heads off down his now-familiar path.
The lights are on, however, so he squats down by the door and stays silent, waiting for the people within the cabin to go to sleep so he can slip his note under the door.
There is a click sound (probably the bathroom door, he thinks) and then there are voices.
“Still looking at that note from your secret admirer?” Taisuke’s voice.
A quiet laugh.
“My eyes have stars in them, apparently.” The slightly deeper voice is Mitsu’s. Toshiya tenses slightly as the memory of writing those very words resurfaces in his mind.
“Isn’t it getting rather annoying? I mean, whoever he is, he’s quite like a stalker, you know.”
“I think I might know who’s writing me these, except I don’t know his name.”
Amusement colours Mitsu’s voice, and Toshiya can hear a snort - presumably from Taisuke.
“It doesn’t bother you? If it was me, I’d get rather annoyed.”
“You have a short fuse, that’s different.” A short bark-like laugh erupts, along with a yelp of indignation. “It is slightly annoying though, I guess…”
Mitsu trails off, but Toshiya has heard enough.
This is not how I intended it to be.
Heart hammering, he scrambles to his feet and runs, accidentally dropping the post-it clenched in his hands in his haste to go somewhere, anywhere really, just away from that cabin.
“It’s annoying, but I really don’t mind,” Mitsu’s voice drifts out from under the door, but Toshiya never hears it.
His feet carry him to the deck outside.
The night is quiet; the sailors who usually bustle around fiddling with the ropes and sails are mostly asleep now, save for one young-looking one who shoots him a strange look as he heads straight for the railings of the deck and drapes himself over them.
Toshiya knows it’s not like him to mope for long, so he stares at the dark waves lapping against the side of the huge circus boat and tries to think of happy things.
Footsteps pound, and suddenly he hears the door leading from inside burst open.
It is Mitsu, panting in the illuminated doorway with a scrap of paper in his hand, shooting a searching glance at Toshiya’s face. Recognition sparks in his eyes, but Toshiya is eyeing the suspiciously familiar paper in Mitsu’s hand with a sinking feeling in his gut.
“You’re the pie guy,” Mitsu blurts out, and Toshiya winces - it kind of sucks that that incident is how he gets remembered by.
“I’m Toshiya,” he finds himself saying. “I’m a clown.”
“Figured,” Mitsu shrugs, then holds up the paper. “You wrote this?”
“…Yeah,” replies Toshiya, figuring that Mitsu would probably find out anyway sooner or later - Hasshi wasn’t reputed to be the best secret-keeper, after all.
Mitsu blinks, and then unfolds the paper to look at the message inside. Flipping it around to show Toshiya, he asks: “You really mean it?”
Squinting, Toshiya does his best to make out his handwriting in the poor lighting.
I like you, it says, and Toshiya pales as he realizes that the paper Mitsu’s holding was the one he hadn’t meant to take at all.
He sputters for a bit as his mistake sinks in, and Mitsu laughs a little at his reaction.
“But- How- What-”
“You mean it?” Mitsu asks again.
“I thought you thought I was annoying!” Toshiya bursts out, and Mitsu blinks at him - now it’s his turn to be at a loss for words.
“You told Taisuke,” he says, no longer caring that he’s rambling. “You told him my notes were annoying you.”
And then Mitsu laughs, and all Toshiya can do is stare at him quizzically until he calms down.
“It did get kind of annoying after I discovered five different ways to describe my hair,” Mitsu grins, walking towards Toshiya. “That didn’t mean I didn’t like the notes, though.”
“It…didn’t?” Toshiya is extremely confused now.
A shake of Mitsu’s head, and suddenly Toshiya’s heart becomes considerably lighter.
“I was happy to get them. All of them.” Mitsu’s fingers tighten on the paper he’s holding up, and Toshiya smiles slightly at the emphasis.
Toshiya knows his smile is wobbly now, and before he realizes what he’s doing his arms are around Mitsu and he’s crying out of happiness into the other man’s shoulder (Mitsu doesn’t hate him, and the thought is very very happy indeed). Mitsu pats his back awkwardly, and tries to ignore the furtive glances the sailor on night watch is sending their way.
A sudden click resounds, followed by a manic cackle. Toshiya springs away from Mitsu as if burned, only to see Fumito waving a camera and looking like Christmas had come early.
It takes Toshiya two seconds to figure out what had happened, and he chases Fumito back inside the ship with a roar of rage, intent on getting his hands on the photos before they get turned into potential blackmail.
“You know what, I think I’m starting to like you,” Mitsu says later, after Toshiya has gleefully tied Fumito up with their colourful gag handkerchiefs and shoved him into the closet holding the toilet cleaning supplies.
Toshiya laughs, and reaches for Mitsu’s hand.
“That’s good enough for me.”
fin.
From kis_my_fic2
Title: Only Fools Rush In
Pairings/Characters: Kitayama/Miyata
Rating: G
Summary: AU. Toshiya is hell-bent on gaining the attention of the new guy, but somehow it never turns out right. Hijinks ensue - and the troupe will never be the same again.
Notes: Dear sunscribble, I’m really honoured to be able to write this fic for you for this exchange. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!
Heavily inspired by Zizou Corder’s Lionboy.
Many thanks to my betas for going through this so patiently!♥
Toshiya sits on the floor by the bed, furiously polishing his bright red nose with a small purple handkerchief. He’d dropped it by accident into the toilet a couple of days ago (he still swears that he’d only turned his face and hadn’t expected it to fall right off ) and five soapy rinses and a hundred or so wipes later he is still firmly convinced that the cesspool smell hasn’t completely worn off yet.
A moan from the bed behind startles him into nearly dropping his nose onto the not-particularly-clean wooden floor.
“Yuta!” he whines, whipping around. “I nearly dropped my nose on the floor!”
Yuta, his roommate, shoots him a glare from where he is currently bundled in a cocoon of blankets with an utterly wretched expression on his face.
“Seasick,” he hisses back. “I don’t care about that damn plastic nose right now.”
Toshiya knows from experience that Yuta suffers from motion sickness on any kind of moving vehicle, which unfortunately includes the ship they spend nearly all their time in. (Once, he’d tried to drag Yuta with him onto a ferris wheel during one of their days off, only to regret this when his friend moaned and lolled about for the rest of the ride.)
He never understands why Yuta had chosen to join them despite knowing that he’d be stuck on a boat nearly all the time if he did.
“Try and sleep, maybe it’ll make the seasickness go away,” he sighs, turning his attention back to his nose.
Yuta only grumbles and retreats back into his blankets like a turtle retracting its head back into its shell. A few seconds later, he pokes his face out again.
“I heard from Watta that we’ve got someone new joining us when we stop at Tokyo,” he says blearily. “I wonder who it is.”
Toshiya has been infinitely curious about this new member as well ever since he’d heard it from Fumito, who had overheard it when Kento told Takashi that Wataru had mentioned a new member.
“Well,” he says, rubbing fiercely at a tiny black spot on his nose with the handkerchief, “there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
They dock at Tokyo a week later, and Yuta stumbles out of their cabin on shaky legs to collapse on the outer deck in relief.
Toshiya might have been born and raised in Tokyo, but ever since he joined the troupe several years ago he hasn’t seen it. They tour all around the world, and they’ve stopped at several places in Japan including Kumamoto and Osaka, but never Tokyo.
“Homesick?” laughs a deep voice behind him, and Toshiya spins around to see Fumito stepping out onto the outer deck as well.
Toshiya grins, and shakes his head. Fumito has been his friend ever since he first encountered the troupe after running away from home, and after they both ended up being in the same act they’d only become closer.
“I’m curious as to who the new guy is though,” he says, and Fumito nods sagely.
“I heard that he’s going to be Taisuke’s new partner though, ever since Iida decided to leave and get an office job instead. Tackey’s gone to get him, the new guy.”
“Is that so?”
Tiptoeing, Toshiya peers out at the pier and scans the faces of the crowd gathering to stare at their majestic red ship with golden trimmings. Fumito does the same, except he wobbles a bit while trying to balance on the very tip of his toes so that his head reaches the same height as Toshiya’s.
Behind them, Yuta groans, slowly pulling himself to his feet to take in a breath of fresh air.
Their performance is named The Show (always with emphasis on the capital T), and occasionally given a subtitle such as ‘Kakumei’ or ‘Enbujou’ depending on the routines they perform. The members of the troupe, on the other hand, have no official collective name, though Tackey likes to call them ‘Troopers’ for no particular reason.
The troupe is jointly owned by Tackey (who always insists that nobody use honorifics with his name) and his friend Tsubasa. Tackey is in charge of running the show and coming up with all their routines, while Tsubasa counts the money and hands out their monthly pay and decides how much leave they get and whether they get sponsored day-off trips to amusement parks and such.
They’re unique in being an all-male circus troupe, as well as being one that travels by sea all the time in their large flashy red-and-gold boat. Most of the members discard their surnames and go by first names or nicknames, with only a couple of exceptions. They mostly go around the Asian region, but sometimes travel to Paris or New York or the like as well, and stay there for a month before moving on.
To Toshiya, the familiar ship is home, much more so than his old one back in Tokyo. In his five years he has never once felt homesick or regretted joining the troupe.
A yell distracts Toshiya, and he whips around to see that their sole animal tamer Ryosuke (affectionately known as Hasshi) has joined him and Fumito on the deck, and is currently waving and pointing at someone in the crowd.
“It’s Tackey!” he says excitedly, and when Toshiya squints he can make out their ringmaster’s head of golden hair, and as well as a head of unruly brown hair next to it.
Turning around, he drags Yuta towards the gangplank of the ship where the others are already waiting for their first glimpse of the new member. Carefully, he shoves past Takashi and Kento to stand at the front of their little crowd, just in time to see Tackey begin to walk up the gangplank with the brown-haired person in tow.
Tackey stops to make an announcement to the people at the pier staring at their boat (Toshiya figures it’s probably an advertisement to get them to come and watch The Show), and by the time the two have reached the deck most of the people at the pier have begun to walk off.
“Troopers!” Tackey begins in his majestically loud voice. “This is Hiromitsu, who prefers to be called Mitsu, and from today he’ll be Taisuke’s partner in the trapeze routines.”
Mitsu has mussed-up brown hair that falls into his eyes, and a small slouch as he stands by Tackey’s side, chocolate-brown gaze taking in the people currently staring at him like he’s a museum exhibit on display.
Taisuke steps out from the crowd, unruly perm proudly sticking out like a lion’s mane, and introduces himself before every other member descends upon Mitsu, screaming their name, patting his back or shaking his hand.
Toshiya tries too, jumping into the fray with a shriek of “My name’s Toshiya!”, but he gets booted out before Mitsu even so much as looks at him. Before he can blink, the crowd of eager members has shepherded Mitsu into the main lobby within the ship, and he is left blinking stupidly at their retreating backs, sprawled on the deck floor.
“He didn’t even glance at me,” Toshiya whines to Yuta, who hauled him to his feet.
“He had tons of people swarming him,” Yuta sighs. “You can introduce yourself another day.”
That day, Toshiya makes a silent vow to do his utmost best to get Mitsu to look at him.
Because Mitsu is new, Tackey decides that he won’t be part of the Tokyo performance, and will only join in when they leave Tokyo and head for Seoul. Even so, Mitsu gets to sit in and watch their final rehearsals before the shows begin.
Toshiya loves final rehearsals. It isn’t a full dress rehearsal per se, but he gets to practice with actual props instead of dummy ones, and he enjoys that. Today he and Fumito are touching up on the new addition to their routine - pie juggling. Of course, it isn’t really actual pies they juggle, just pie tins filled with a lot of stiffly-whipped cream.
Out of the corner of his eye, Toshiya spies Mitsu watching them juggle from the front row in the bit of the arena near them.
“Look at me!” he cries as Fumito tosses him another pie. He tries to throw one back, but in the heat of the moment he gets the angle wrong, and the creamy lump goes flying past Fumito’s face and lands smack-bang in the middle of Mitsu’s.
Toshiya pales.
“…Oops.”
Fumito puts down the rest of his pies and starts laughing.
“He can’t look at you, stupid,” he wheezes in between guffaws. “Not when he’s got cream covering his eyes!”
Mitsu doesn’t seem particularly angry when they manage to wipe the cream off his face, though Taisuke hands Mitsu’s cream-stained shirt to Toshiya and makes him hand-wash it.
The Snowmen (the self-christened group of jugglers) somehow catch wind of this incident, and for the next couple of days they laugh uproariously at Toshiya every time they meet in the hallways.
He ends up taking refuge with Hasshi outside the zebra cages. Hasshi generally spends more time around the lions, but even after knowing that living things of all kinds seem to love Hasshi and thus the animals behave around him, he still doesn’t dare to go near them.
“Maybe you need to do something more impressive,” Hasshi says helpfully, as he distributes hay into several piles to feed the zebras and the two horses. “I’m pretty sure he’ll take notice of you then.”
“What’s impressive, anyway?” Toshiya whines. “I don’t think he likes. First he completely ignores me, then I make a terrible first impression.”
Hasshi laughs.
“The Toshiya I know doesn’t give up that easily,” he says, ruffling Toshiya’s hair. “I’m sure you’ll be able to work something out.”
Toshiya plays with a couple of stalks of hay in his fingers.
“…Yeah.”
His act with Fumito isn’t his only job, as he often has to help Hasshi in his animal segment. This time round, he’s supposed to ride the brown horse and juggle while Tottsu, the tightrope walker Hasshi is strangely extremely fond of, does tricks on the white one.
They run through the routine a couple of times, Toshiya obligingly sitting astride his rather large steed while tossing around seven coloured balls and the occasional bowling pin or milk carton that Takashi flings him from his perch on the dancing zebra in the centre of the ring.
Hasshi calls a break, and Toshiya coaxes his horse to a stop to let it drink some water. He gazes around the ring, and realizes Mitsu is on the other side of the arena, watching Takashi fool around with the zebra.
Fully intending to ride his horse around the ring so he has an excuse to wave at Mitsu like an idiot, he pats the horse’s neck (he’s riding bareback and without any reins) to get it to walk around.
Unfortunately for Toshiya, when Hasshi isn’t leading the horse around it likes him a lot less. Disturbed from its water break, it harrumphs through its nose and shakes, causing a startled Toshiya to fall off onto the sawdust-covered floor, his coloured balls falling down after him and hitting his nose quite a few times.
He can hear Takashi laughing in the background as he groans and rolls over.
“The actual performance is tomorrow, you know,” Yuta scolds him as he applies some ointment to the rather large bruise on Toshiya’s hip.
“I’m trying to get him to look at me,” Toshiya mutters grumpily, pouting.
“Obviously, it’s not working.”
Toshiya flails his arms at Yuta indignantly, but only succeeds in nearly falling off his bed.
“It’s so annoying how I keep messing up in front of him…” Toshiya mumbles a while later.
Yuta gives him a long look, but refrains from saying anything.
Toshiya loves performing.
With his polished red nose attached firmly to his actual one, he grabs his purple polka-dotted costume from the costume manager Wataru before he gets roughed up in the huge mob of performers rushing to grab theirs.
Adjusting his brightly-coloured wig with its corkscrew curls, he gives his shoes one final once-over before ambling over to where Fumito is waiting in the wings.
Fumito is dressed in a costume that has matching polka-dots, but overall gives off a less sloppy feeling than Toshiya’s own. It matches their roles (Fumito likes to call himself the ‘clever clown’ and Toshiya the ‘stupid clown’ though Toshiya is never as pleased with the crude description of his role).
What Toshiya likes best about the two of them having to be little filler acts in between other segments is that he gets to watch nearly the entire performance from the wings. The crowd fills up the arena quickly, and as the lights dim the music begins to play.
A single spotlight focuses on the high wire stretched taut, way above the floor of the ring. Yuta steps out, face a mask of concentration as he stands poised at one end of the wire.
The music launches into a crescendo, the melody blossoming into a beautifully majestic tune. Cymbals crash, and Yuta launches into his routine, joined by Tottsu and Goseki as they dance nimbly on a thin metal wire.
The Show has begun.
When he and Fumito slip backstage after their main segment (they’re the only two clowns in the troupe), Toshiya breathes a sigh of relief. Despite his slip-ups during rehearsals, they’d managed to pull off a perfect performance, all the way up to the pie juggling, and had left the stage amid great applause.
Nevertheless, as he flings flowers out to the audience while perched on his brown horse in the finale (after having changed out of his clown costume and into a less loud one for the animal segment), his mind wanders off and begins crafting more strategies to capture Mitsu’s attention.
Only pure luck keeps him from falling off his horse, but still he absentmindedly ends up throwing flowers into Kento’s face as his horse turns around.
The Show ends without a hitch, and while most of the performers head for their cabins to scrub off thick makeup he follows Hasshi. He helps to brush down the horses and zebras while Hasshi feeds the lions.
“Any luck with that Mitsu?” Hasshi asks as they lead the horses into their stalls.
Sighing, Toshiya shakes his head, and Hasshi thumps his back.
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you had a crush on him or something!” he laughs, before going off to fetch the lions’ dinner from the fridge.
Hasshi’s words plague Toshiya the whole night.
He continues to try and get Mitsu’s attention throughout their whole time in Tokyo.
Once, he tries to juggle eight bowling pins at once, which is more than even what the Snowmen use at once, It backfires spectacularly, and he ends up with a terribly sore spot on his head after all the bowling pins came falling down on him.
Another time, he tries to do acrobatics on horseback like Tottsu, only to end up falling off his horse and into its water trough.
“Maybe you should try being a little more subtle about it,” Yuta tells him dryly.
Toshiya looks up from where he is polishing his shoes.
“‘Subtle’ isn’t in my dictionary,” he replies brightly, before turning his attention back to his shoes.
Yuta just rolls his eyes and sighs.
Three weeks later they leave Tokyo, and began to head for Seoul.
Mitsu starts rehearsing with Taisuke and the rest of the trapeze artists in their new routine, and Toshiya often watches them when he’s not busy rehearsing his own acts. He’s always loved to watch the trapeze performances whenever he’s on standby at the wings, and so he often sits in the front row and watches them twirl around with ease.
Mitsu takes to the routine extremely quickly, and soon he is swinging from trapeze to trapeze with as much ease as the others, the smile never leaving his face throughout the whole thing.
Toshiya is enchanted.
Now that Mitsu is busy with his own rehearsals, Toshiya finds that he can no longer try to catch his attention by doing weird things during his rehearsals. He tries to figure out what he can do instead, but ends up drawing a blank.
Somehow along the way, Fumito seems to have gotten the impression that Toshiya has a major crush on Mitsu and can’t seem to express his feelings in the correct way. He starts trying to give Toshiya ‘love advice’ (and dubs himself the ‘love guru’ in the process), and no matter how much Toshiya tells him to stop Fumito just keeps badgering Toshiya with new little bits of advice.
“Why don’t you just tell him directly?” he says one day as they walk to the props room together. “Like, instead of doing weird things, you could just say directly how you feel.”
“Impossible,” Toshiya replies. “He’s not even paying much attention to me in the first place.”
“Write to him?” Fumito suggests, shrugging.
Brushing past Toshiya, Fumito throws open the door of the props room and starts rummaging for a couple of chairs to use in their next act after the acrobats perform.
Write to him? Toshiya thinks.
“Fumito,” he says slowly, walking into the props room, “I think that for once your advice is actually useful, after all.”
Later that night, Toshiya eyes a single post-it stuck to his pillow. Twirling his pen in his fingers, he contemplates what to write.
Why don’t you notice me? he writes at last, and folds it into a tiny envelope-like shape before he chickens out. Writing Mitsu’s name on the outside in clumsy katakana, he slips out of his cabin, making sure Yuta doesn’t wake when he opens the door.
Mitsu shares a cabin with Taisuke, and Toshiya stands outside the door for a good ten minutes before he is absolutely certain that both people within the cabin are asleep. Quickly, he slips his folded post-it underneath the cabin door, before hightailing it back to his own cabin, burrowing under his own blankets.
The next day Mitsu shows no obvious sign of having received the note, but Toshiya can be extremely persistent when he wants to be.
Every night, after making sure his miserably seasick roommate has fallen asleep, he writes a new note and slips it under Mitsu’s cabin door before running away.
At rehearsals he ignores Fumito’s prodding about his supposed crush on Mitsu, and instead throws himself into practicing all his routines. If anybody is surprised by his sudden lack of weird behaviour during rehearsals, they don’t say a thing, though Toshiya intercepts some meaningful glances from Fumito here and there (but he has no idea what they mean anyway).
He writes whatever he feels like writing at that moment on Mitsu’s notes, from You were amazing at rehearsal today to Why don’t you like, comb your hair properly or something.
He has no idea if Mitsu actually reads them, but just writing them keeps him happy enough.
One day, he ends up sitting in the arena, watching in awe as the trapeze artists run through their routine again. Taisuke had added a new bit to their overall choreography, and Mitsu’s face is a mask of determination as he does his best to get it down.
They somersault in the air, round and round before they grab the hands of someone else already swinging by his legs on the wooden trapeze bar. Another swing, and he gets tossed up to a waiting trapeze, positioned higher up.
Toshiya watches as the trapeze artists essentially juggle themselves between the four trapeze bars for a while, and then they all stop and retreat back to the platform.
He sees Mitsu smile in satisfaction once he has reached the safety of the platform, and suddenly his heart does its own little somersault in his chest for no apparent reason.
Only later does he realize he has a goofy smile plastered onto his face.
Fumito tells him he’s in love.
Toshiya ignores the possibility, and vows never to share his secrets with his friend again.
He squashes the tiny little voice in his head that agrees with Fumito.
When Hasshi finds out about his notes, he is quite confused.
“I thought you don’t do subtle,” he points out as he brushes one of the zebras.
Toshiya shrugs, kicking idly at the hay strewn across the floor.
“If I did anything showier and caused him to fall off the trapeze Taisuke would have my head on a silver platter before I could even say horse.”
“…Ah.”
Silence falls while Hasshi packs up his grooming kit, the clattering echoing around the large cabin.
“You sure you won’t be annoying him or anything?”
Stunned into silence, Toshiya can only blink dumbly at Hasshi - that thought has never crossed his mind.
Oh shit, he thinks as he begins to consider the possibility.
Still, that night he finds himself going down the familiar corridors with a post-it clutched in his hand.
He’d written one nicely, only to blink and realise that he’d unconsciously written something he hadn’t intended to, so he folded it up and pushed it to the side of his pillow in order to write a fresh one.
When he’s done he stretches a bit, puts down his pen and then grabs his folded-up post-it, writes Mitsu’s name on it, and then heads off down his now-familiar path.
The lights are on, however, so he squats down by the door and stays silent, waiting for the people within the cabin to go to sleep so he can slip his note under the door.
There is a click sound (probably the bathroom door, he thinks) and then there are voices.
“Still looking at that note from your secret admirer?” Taisuke’s voice.
A quiet laugh.
“My eyes have stars in them, apparently.” The slightly deeper voice is Mitsu’s. Toshiya tenses slightly as the memory of writing those very words resurfaces in his mind.
“Isn’t it getting rather annoying? I mean, whoever he is, he’s quite like a stalker, you know.”
“I think I might know who’s writing me these, except I don’t know his name.”
Amusement colours Mitsu’s voice, and Toshiya can hear a snort - presumably from Taisuke.
“It doesn’t bother you? If it was me, I’d get rather annoyed.”
“You have a short fuse, that’s different.” A short bark-like laugh erupts, along with a yelp of indignation. “It is slightly annoying though, I guess…”
Mitsu trails off, but Toshiya has heard enough.
This is not how I intended it to be.
Heart hammering, he scrambles to his feet and runs, accidentally dropping the post-it clenched in his hands in his haste to go somewhere, anywhere really, just away from that cabin.
“It’s annoying, but I really don’t mind,” Mitsu’s voice drifts out from under the door, but Toshiya never hears it.
His feet carry him to the deck outside.
The night is quiet; the sailors who usually bustle around fiddling with the ropes and sails are mostly asleep now, save for one young-looking one who shoots him a strange look as he heads straight for the railings of the deck and drapes himself over them.
Toshiya knows it’s not like him to mope for long, so he stares at the dark waves lapping against the side of the huge circus boat and tries to think of happy things.
Footsteps pound, and suddenly he hears the door leading from inside burst open.
It is Mitsu, panting in the illuminated doorway with a scrap of paper in his hand, shooting a searching glance at Toshiya’s face. Recognition sparks in his eyes, but Toshiya is eyeing the suspiciously familiar paper in Mitsu’s hand with a sinking feeling in his gut.
“You’re the pie guy,” Mitsu blurts out, and Toshiya winces - it kind of sucks that that incident is how he gets remembered by.
“I’m Toshiya,” he finds himself saying. “I’m a clown.”
“Figured,” Mitsu shrugs, then holds up the paper. “You wrote this?”
“…Yeah,” replies Toshiya, figuring that Mitsu would probably find out anyway sooner or later - Hasshi wasn’t reputed to be the best secret-keeper, after all.
Mitsu blinks, and then unfolds the paper to look at the message inside. Flipping it around to show Toshiya, he asks: “You really mean it?”
Squinting, Toshiya does his best to make out his handwriting in the poor lighting.
I like you, it says, and Toshiya pales as he realizes that the paper Mitsu’s holding was the one he hadn’t meant to take at all.
He sputters for a bit as his mistake sinks in, and Mitsu laughs a little at his reaction.
“But- How- What-”
“You mean it?” Mitsu asks again.
“I thought you thought I was annoying!” Toshiya bursts out, and Mitsu blinks at him - now it’s his turn to be at a loss for words.
“You told Taisuke,” he says, no longer caring that he’s rambling. “You told him my notes were annoying you.”
And then Mitsu laughs, and all Toshiya can do is stare at him quizzically until he calms down.
“It did get kind of annoying after I discovered five different ways to describe my hair,” Mitsu grins, walking towards Toshiya. “That didn’t mean I didn’t like the notes, though.”
“It…didn’t?” Toshiya is extremely confused now.
A shake of Mitsu’s head, and suddenly Toshiya’s heart becomes considerably lighter.
“I was happy to get them. All of them.” Mitsu’s fingers tighten on the paper he’s holding up, and Toshiya smiles slightly at the emphasis.
Toshiya knows his smile is wobbly now, and before he realizes what he’s doing his arms are around Mitsu and he’s crying out of happiness into the other man’s shoulder (Mitsu doesn’t hate him, and the thought is very very happy indeed). Mitsu pats his back awkwardly, and tries to ignore the furtive glances the sailor on night watch is sending their way.
A sudden click resounds, followed by a manic cackle. Toshiya springs away from Mitsu as if burned, only to see Fumito waving a camera and looking like Christmas had come early.
It takes Toshiya two seconds to figure out what had happened, and he chases Fumito back inside the ship with a roar of rage, intent on getting his hands on the photos before they get turned into potential blackmail.
“You know what, I think I’m starting to like you,” Mitsu says later, after Toshiya has gleefully tied Fumito up with their colourful gag handkerchiefs and shoved him into the closet holding the toilet cleaning supplies.
Toshiya laughs, and reaches for Mitsu’s hand.
“That’s good enough for me.”
fin.