are there angels or devils crawling here? [ fic ]
awake
jiro/aaron | r, 5734 words, canon
replacements don't always fit so well.
Mornings, Aaron wakes up and the sun is always in his eyes.
He sleeps closest to the door, because when he comes into Jiro’s room at midnight, Jiro is always curled in the far left corner of the bed, as if he is unconsciously trying to fly out the window above him.
The right side of the bed is always untouched, and every time Aaron slides between the sheets, he feels strangely cold. Sometimes Jiro wakes up, blinking and trying to recognize Aaron through the thick haze of sleep. Sometimes he stays quiet, and the night passes by like the eye of a hurricane, silent and ominous.
The alarm starts to buzz at 8:26 AM. The portable is propped up on the nightstand closest to Jiro’s side of the bed, the red flashing numbers winking in and out until Aaron crawls across the deserted mattress and slams his open palm against the snooze button. He doesn’t know why he can never think enough to just hit ‘reset’ instead, but every single morning he palms snooze over and over again until his whole arm is numb and he is too tired to make it back to his side of the bed anymore, and flops down onto Jiro’s pillow, falling asleep for another five minutes with the rays of sunshine trying to pry his eyelids apart before the buzz, buzz, buzz starts up one more time. One of these days, Aaron thinks, he’s going to break the damn thing and then Jiro will get mad even though he never looks at it.
Jiro isn’t there today when Aaron wakes up, the usual light of day searing into his eyes. The room and its organized mess is largely devoid of the older boy’s presence. A few pieces of jewelry are gone from the desk where Jiro lays them out every time they go on trips, but Aaron can’t remember which ones except for the beaded bracelet Jiro always wears. Aaron wonders if Jiro even notices that he comes anymore.
It is the ninety-sixth day already. Aaron hates numbers, but this time log has always kept a tick in his mind. Opening an eye, his blurry eyes adjust to the numbers on the clock reading 9:34 AM. There is noise vibrating in his ears, coming through the white pillows, and Aaron realizes after a moment that it’s the shower.
“Dadong?” He calls tentatively.
There is no answer, but he can feel the tension in the air change.
Surprised, he sits up, fumbles for his glasses, jams them on his face, and scrambles out of bed. Stumbles once, twice on the carpet, knocks into the bathroom door chin-first, and manages to catch his hand in the doorjamb before finally twisting the door open.
Jiro’s laptop is propped up on the toilet seat cover, and a string of unrecognizable melodies hiss through the steam of the showerhead. Aaron’s toothbrush is sitting in Jiro’s cup alongside Jiro’s own, and Aaron thinks that Jiro must have taken the care to replace it there after he was done brushing his teeth. Small favors. That must be why he keeps coming back, Aaron thinks, still rubbing his injured chin, and squeezes paste onto his orange toothbrush with more force than necessary.
The shower squeaks off as Aaron is spitting foam out into the sink, and a minute later, a dark head appears, towel around his waist, another one placed haphazardly over Jiro’s head.
Aaron waits as Jiro wipes a corner of the mirror free of fog and towels off his hair, waits for him to say something, but all that’s heard is the hissing of fleece against hair and skin and the music wafting from the laptop, piano keys and a crooning voice. Aaron is brushing his teeth, and brushing, and brushing until all that’s left in his mouth is three-fourths saliva and a growing burn, but still Jiro is concentrating on styling his hair, a routine that would require something like the earth to explode first before he stopped. Aaron remembers Jiro telling him that on the day after his father died, he forgot to eat and wore his shirt inside out, but his hair still looked pretty amazing.
“Didn’t your mom, like… get mad?” Aaron had asked, watching Jiro play with his small tub of hair wax.
Jiro had snorted. “Why would she be mad?”
“I don’t know,” Aaron responded. “Weren’t you supposed to… burn money, or sweep his grave, or… tear your hair out the whole day? No, come on,” he’d added, his irritation growing as Jiro outright laughed. “I’m serious.”
“My dad would never want me to tear my hair out,” Jiro had said with a sober face, and Aaron remembers the next part the best: Jiro had reached over and purposely tugged on Aaron’s own hair, which was longer back then and always tickling his forehead. Then Jiro had said smugly, “How’s this: If I die before you, I expect a lot of hair-tearing.”
And at the time, Aaron, fed up with the stupid haircut their group stylist had given him, had thought, fine by me.
Jiro finishes with his hair and slides past Aaron, who is brushing his gums raw by now, on the way out to retrieve some clothes for the day.
“Wait,” Aaron says, but it comes out as an indistinct gurgle. He bends over, spits, and wipes his mouth. “Wait,” he repeats, and his arm instinctively comes out and accidentally elbows Jiro, who has stopped in his tracks, squarely in the chest.
The older boy grimaces, rubbing his chest.
“Sorry,” Aaron says. Jiro shrugs and stands, waiting.
“Um.” And suddenly, Aaron has nothing to say. The silence ticks by, marked only by the laptop music and a faint drip-dripping of water from the water spigot.
“Can you tell me what the song is saying?” Jiro suddenly asks.
Aaron blinks. “What?” He is surprised that Jiro has initiated conversation, a first in a long while.
Jiro gestures at his laptop, his other hand still on his chest. “It’s in English.”
“Oh.” Aaron makes an effort to listen to the song, the singer’s raw voice still belting out the tune against a piano and pounding bass. But his English isn’t good enough to keep up, and he wishes Calvin were here, or that he had Calvin’s brain for a moment, before struggling to retrieve the right words in Mandarin.
“I think it’s about… going downstairs? Somewhere?” Aaron looks at the confused expression on Jiro’s face before feeling his face grow hot. “I’m not sure, they’re singing too fast.”
“Oh.” Jiro is obviously not satisfied with Aaron’s lackluster explanation, but he shrugs and gives Aaron a small smile. “Okay. Cool.” He swivels around to open the door, and Aaron looks to see his hand snake out by its independent accord and grab Jiro by the wrist. Jiro’s hand is cool in his own sweltering hot palm.
“Dadong.” Aaron says, and he feels Jiro sigh. The older boy doesn’t turn around, and the doorknob is still clutched in his free hand, the knuckles in Jiro’s hand white.
“Dadong,” Aaron repeats, because that’s all he can think to say right now, or ever, when he touches Jiro.
He thinks that Jiro is probably wondering if he’s gone nuts, but the older boy is still standing there complacently, his muscles tensed.
After a moment, Jiro tries to move forward again, and Aaron’s head clears of its haze.
“Can’t we just-”he starts, but Jiro shakes his head almost imperceptibly, the ends of his hair still dripping onto the nape of his neck at the back where he can’t reach it so well to style.
Aaron’s fingers curl slightly around Jiro’s cold, loose grip, and he can’t tell if the moisture is from his sweaty palm or the remnants from Jiro’s shower. “Dadong,” he says a third time, and he takes a step forward to close the gap between them. Aaron rests his forehead ever so slightly against the small of Jiro’s back, smelling him all peppermint shower gel and oranges and skin, his glasses pressed against his eyes and their hands jammed between their two bodies, and Jiro’s breath catches in his throat.
“Don’t,” Jiro says softly, and then he is tugging his hand out of Aaron’s and disappearing into the expansive hotel room.
The door is standing ajar, and Aaron feels his short temper flaring up as he stares at his vague reflection in the still-fogged mirror.
The alarm clock reads 9:58. His jaw clenches and he stands still for a short while, wanting to stamp his feet like a child.
Finally, he stalks over to the laptop and crouches down so he is eyelevel with the screen. Jiro’s iTunes is open, and the play list playing is titled a single name in Mandarin. Yuzhe, it says.
On Aaron’s birthday last year, after the whole party nonsense and festivities had died down, Aaron had gone up to the roof to contemplate growing a whole year older by himself. The sky was dark and scattered with a few stars, and there was a light breeze that blew his hair out of his eyes. He’d gotten bored after about ten minutes but was still reluctant to go back inside, when Jiro and Danson had appeared, each carrying a Styrofoam plate of birthday cake.
It was the first time he met Danson. The boy was a little shorter and paler than Aaron had imagined, with Jiro towering over him almost as much as he did with Aaron. But Danson had a quiet composure about him, an unconscious light he walked in that made Aaron a little more privy to the knowledge of why Jiro admired him like he did.
The way Jiro laughed, and talked, and even moved around the other boy was even different, so animated, more like the charismatic, silly Jiro that he pulled out for stage presences than the one Aaron knew that was a bit more quiet, mature, and protective.
Danson had gotten an extra piece of cake, and he held the vanilla pastry out to Aaron. “Cake for the birthday boy,” he’d said. Aaron had smiled and shook his head.
“I’m too full, thank you.”
Jiro had pinched his arm. “Are you for real? You’re all skin and bone, Ahbu. Eat some more.”
“Give him yours,” Danson teased Jiro, “You could definitely do without another piece.”
And Jiro had cried out in indignation, setting his cake down on the roof ledge before he tried punching Danson, who backed away and swatted Jiro’s half-hearted attempts away easily with his own hands.
In the hubbub, Aaron had quietly watched the Jiro’s piece of his birthday cake drop off the roof and splatter on the sidewalk stories below, the plastic fork following with a tinny clatter that he could hear clearly even all the way up here with the wind.
And he concluded that he definitely didn’t like this Jiro, this noisy, juvenile stranger he turned into when he was with Danson-but then, he had never seen Jiro so happy.
The following night, Aaron almost doesn’t want to go to Jiro’s room. His own bed is untouched, the housekeeping-made bedspread still neatly done up except for a crumple in the corner where he sits to watch TV or tie his shoes. But it is habit, or hunger, and before long, he is standing at the foot of Jiro’s bed again, afraid to get in.
Jiro is huddled in a heap on his side, facing the window as always. A single ray of moonlight cuts the boy in half, separating his torso from his legs. When Aaron finally scoots in, the light reaches him as well, touching his chin.
Aaron lies on his back for a moment, staring at the dark ceiling and the single red dot of the smoke detector, before rolling on his side away from Jiro, fully intent upon falling asleep.
When he wakes up around an hour later after a restless, half-awake slumber, he finds himself in the same position they’d been in this morning except ten times more pathetic. His forehead is pressed against Jiro’s back again, and his arm is slung around Jiro’s waist in an embrace. His grip tightens when he realizes what he’s been doing, and Jiro stirs in his sleep.
Disconcerted, Aaron shrinks back, scooting backwards on the mattress until he’s almost at the edge. He really should just go back to his bed where he would have the whole thing to himself, he thinks, but instead, places a pillow between their two bodies before he allows himself to fall asleep again, dreaming nonsense about going downstairs and crashing.
And Aaron wakes up with the sun in his eyes like always, with his right arm numb from pressing snooze and Jiro nowhere in sight. He falls back asleep for a minute, and when he wakes up, he rolls over to see Jiro brushing his teeth, his laptop playing another American song.
After a moment, Jiro catches Aaron staring at him from the bed, and stops for a moment before nodding in acknowledgment and resuming the forwards-backwards brushing motion. Aaron’s toothbrush is lying carefully on a towel for the moment.
Aaron rubs grit and burning sun out of his eyes.
Today is the ninety-seventh day.
After their press conference and dinner with VTV and playing a brief round of Smash Brothers with Calvin and Zun in Zun’s room, Zun asks where Jiro’s been lately.
“He didn’t even eat his shrimp at dinner,” Zun says seriously. Aaron represses the urge to laugh and shrugs instead.
“Why’re you asking me?”
“You guys are the closest,” Zun replies easily. Aaron scoffs, wondering if they know that these days, Jiro barely even says one word to him.
“Well I’m sure he’s fine,” Aaron says, but half an hour later, he’s knocking on Jiro’s door again. He hears music being turned off and footsteps shuffling to the entrance before the door is cracked open.
“Hey,” Jiro says, and his voice is scratchy with disuse.
Jiro looks tired, and his edges look frayed like an old photograph. “Are you all right?” Aaron wonders aloud.
Jiro nods and attempts to laugh, but it comes out as a croak. “Yea.” There is a pause, Aaron not wanting to disturb him, Jiro looking blank, before he catches on a bit too late. “Do you… come in,” he says, and steps aside.
It is like entering a graveyard. Though the sun is almost gone, and the twilight is slowly turning into night, Jiro’s room is submersed in darkness. The curtains are shut, and the only light in the room is coming from the laptop, perched on the right side of Jiro’s bed where Aaron sleeps at night. The light is casting an eerie blue-green glow on Jiro’s face as he stands awkwardly in front of the bed, Aaron facing him by the door. Aaron frowns.
“Tell me, is it nice under your rock?”
It’s mostly said for laughs, but Jiro just looks embarrassed. “I um, lost track of time I guess.” He turns the music back on, and it’s the same type of music, a singer crying in tune to soft instrumentals.
The same song comes back on, and Aaron makes another attempt at deciphering it. “I think it’s about angels or God or something.”
“What?” Jiro looks at him blankly, and Aaron points at the laptop.
“The song.” Jiro nods.
“Oh.”
“Can I turn the lights on?” Aaron tries, and Jiro looks like he’ll say yes for a moment before he sits down.
“I, uh-I don’t think I can be in it, right now,” he says.
You have no idea, Aaron thinks, and all he can see of Jiro’s face are his haunted, brooding eyes, dark circles underneath even though Jiro goes to bed earlier than any of them.
Ninety-eighth.
The day Danson left, they were supposed to be featured on 100% Entertainment. The program was delayed half an hour waiting for Jiro and the management (and Aaron) had called him about seven hundred times with no answer before Show Luo asked if they wanted to postpone because the audience was getting antsy. “I’m really sorry,” Aaron had apologized, wondering why he was saying sorry for somebody he wasn’t even responsible for.
“Is he sick or something?” Show had asked, and Aaron had shrugged that he had no idea. The whole van ride back, while Zun and Calvin were bickering about where to eat for dinner, Aaron felt like he was sitting on a bed of nails, barely able to keep his seat while they bumped through the crowded streets of Taipei. The moment they reached the hotel, Aaron sprang out of the vehicle, mumbled something about changing clothes, and bounded all the way to Jiro’s room, forgetting the place had elevators.
The door was ajar, and there was a strange thick gray haze not unlike smog when Aaron entered. The temperature was about ten degrees higher than it was outside, and Aaron felt himself sweating almost immediately.
He thought it was deserted at first because when Jiro was in a room, the music or some sort of other noise-him talking on the phone, perhaps-was always on, and right now the room was oddly silent. But he found Jiro underneath the covers, curled up a ball way over on the left side. Something about the air felt like the deep breath before something terrible happens, the silent moment of false peace in a horror movie building towards the inevitable climax.
When he dared to crouch down and lift the covers a little to inspect his face, he found that Jiro was fast asleep.
Having no idea what was going on yet, but knowing something was wrong nevertheless, Aaron decided not to wake Jiro up and yell at him for failing to show, and instead crawled into bed beside him and took off his shirt to ease his skin from the heat, complacently waiting it out until Jiro naturally woke up.
The next thing he knew, his eyes were fluttering open, and the sun was gone, and Jiro was watching him, his face seemingly peaceful on the pillow, and Aaron was deceived into thinking nothing was wrong after all.
“Are you okay?” Aaron had whispered in a slurred voice, rolling towards him, and Jiro had smiled, copying his motion so they were lying on their sides face to face. Jiro wasn’t wearing a shirt either, Aaron noticed, but for some reason, he never felt self-conscious about his thin frame with Jiro even though Jiro was always tan and toned.
“I like you there,” Jiro said, and they were so close that his breath fanned the hair out of Aaron’s eyes.
Aaron hadn’t paused at all before responding. “I can be here more often,” he’d said, not really comprehending the weight of his words at the time or the fact that Jiro would not be able to get out of bed for a month afterwards, and Jiro had shifted his hand just enough so that Aaron knew that he was lying on top of it, that they were in a sort of horizontal one-armed hug.
Aaron wished he knew at the time that he wasn’t Jiro’s miracle, that he wasn’t his healing salve in the place of the hole that Danson had gouged out. He was just a band-aid, a temporary cover from the wound underneath. Eventually he would have to be ripped off.
But that day on the bed, Jiro had rested his free hand on Aaron’s cheek, and the grayish tinge in the room hadn’t looked so threatening anymore.
That was day one.
A couple mornings after, Aaron gets fed up with all the American music, and after he finishes getting dressed, he crosses his arms.
“Dadong.”
Jiro pauses from lacing up his shoes. “Ahbu,” he returns cautiously, recognizing the edge in Aaron’s voice that he knows all too well from Aaron’s earlier days when he still threw tantrums.
The look in Jiro’s eyes almost makes Aaron stop, but he then another guitar riff from the laptop throws him back on track and he plows on ahead. “I really wish you’d stop listening to that music.”
Jiro stops mid-tie. “What?”
Aaron knows why Jiro is surprised; up until now, Aaron has been half-blind, choosing to ignore things leftover from Jiro-and-Danson. “I mean, you can’t understand it,” he continues, “I can barely understand it, and unless you’re playing it for Calvin’s benefit, in which case you should move four doors down, it really doesn’t have a purpose to be on, much less all the time.”
Suddenly he feels like he’s looking at Jiro through a mirror after his shower, all misted up, and Jiro’s eyes are hooded, the older boy seeming to forget what exactly he’s doing for a moment as he looks at his shoes with a blank expression.
“It’s not the soundtrack of our life,” Aaron finishes.
“You know why it’s on,” Jiro replies flatly.
“Why? Why don’t you tell me why? Is it going to bring him back?” Aaron asks snidely, and he can see Jiro flinch. He immediately wishes he didn’t just say that, but maybe he should be a little more selfish.
“No,” Jiro says after a minute.
“Then what the hell!”
At this point, Jiro has given up on tying his shoes, or he’s forgotten how to, and his left combat boot trails two tendrils of black lace, zigzagging through the white carpet of the room like cracks in a porcelain plate.
“I really don’t understand,” Aaron says. “It’s been ninety-nine days, Wang Dongcheng. Ninety-nine. I’m not even making that number up. Do you know how long that is?” Aaron hopes Jiro does, because Aaron’s not that good at math and he’s not in the mood to convert days to months.
“I need to remember him,” Jiro says, and his tone of voice is in between that of a little boy’s who has just been caught doing something bad, and one of someone in mourning. “It’s all I have.”
Aaron feels a low, black fury bubbling in his chest, and his hands are balled into fists, Jiro’s sheets inside them. “Well I’m glad that my presence is clearly so important to you.” He can’t keep himself from snarling. “I don’t even know why I keep coming back to your fucking room. You don’t even look at me.”
“Then don’t,” Jiro suddenly snaps back. “Don’t come back.” He stands, and Aaron temporarily remembers how short he is compared to the older boy, even more so because he is still sitting down. Lately, it hasn’t been so apparent because Jiro has been folding into himself, neatly dividing his body in half. “I’ve never asked you to come,” Jiro continues, and Aaron can’t help himself, the anger just keeps bubbling over like an overflowing dam, all the unspoken words he’s thought at some point rushing forth through the gates.
“Yea, you’re right-but we both know where you’d be if I didn’t,” Aaron replies swiftly. He actually isn’t even sure Jiro’s ever thought about suicide, but words aren’t really representations of themselves right now. They’re just said to have something to say.
Jiro takes a step towards Aaron. His own anger seems suddenly bone-weary, pierced through with hurt. “You knew what you were getting yourself into,” he says defensively. “You knew.”
“I thought you were like any other sane person!” Aaron explodes. “I thought you’d go through those stages of breaking up-there are like, four of them or something-and where we’re at right now, you should be at fucking stage seventy-nine!”
“You don’t understand!” Jiro shouts back, and Aaron hopes for god’s sake that the walls are soundproof, because if not, the whole hotel is going to hear this nonsensical argument, and Wu Zun is going to somehow tie it back to food. “You don’t know what we went through!” Jiro’s gritting his teeth, and he can’t even look Aaron in the eye anymore. He seems to be shrinking again. “You don’t know,” he echoes, and trails off.
Aaron looks at Jiro standing pathetically before him, and he wants to shake him, to punch him, to beat him into becoming the person he once knew and was in awe of. “I don’t know?” He hears himself saying. “Ah Lan-remember her? She’s under the ground. The girl I was ready to-to spend the rest of…” Aaron can’t finish the sentence. He shakes his head and starts again. “And you?”
The whole room has bated breath. Aaron lets himself finish. “Yuzhe left you with nothing but a damn CD you can’t even understand.”
Jiro looks void of emotion, drained and empty.
“Just leave,” he breathes, and that is the thing, through it all, that Aaron has been dreading. The alarm clock says 10:02.
“I was always leaving,” Aaron retorts, remembers to grab his toothbrush, and slams the door in his wake with as much dignity as he can muster.
When Aaron tore a ligament, he thought his world was ending. He remembers falling, and Jiro catching him and gently setting him down in a sitting position atop a crate as Zun scurried around looking for ice and their manager called the ambulance and Calvin generally became a harried nuisance as he nagged at everyone and shouted directions at people they didn’t know. That was the first time he’d cried in front of them because it hurt so bad, and afterwards he felt ashamed because he was supposed to be an adult, a man.
And he remembers the hospital bed, the other three and their assistants taking shifts watching over him for the first five nights. He remembers the wheelchair he had to sit in, frail and sick, and the crutches he carried on the sidelines watching the other three dance their choreography whilst he generally felt useless. He remembers Wu Zun running around town searching for all his favorite foods, and Calvin bringing him his well-wishes from his fans and telling him stupid jokes, and his parents with their worried, pallid faces, and Jiro hovering around like a mother hen, snapping at the hospital staff when they hung around too long hoping for autographs or hurt Aaron’s leg.
He’d felt embarrassed for about three months, so small and helpless, and knows that both Zun and Calvin got a little uncomfortable around him when he expressed those insecurities or cried in front of them.
But he remembers Jiro, way before Danson ever came into their lives, Jiro always there, always wiping his tears away, and carrying him on his back everywhere even when Jiro was himself sleep deprived and exhausted and falling down, and playing around with his crutches so Aaron wouldn’t be the only one limping. He’d gone with Aaron to his physiotherapy, jump-roping beside him, and he carried his ice packs and his knee brace for him in his trendy backpack. A part of Aaron didn’t like Jiro seeing him struggle and fail sometimes, but when he cried or complained or grimaced, Jiro’s response was always the same.
“Only one of us needs to be at one hundred percent,” he would joke, dabbing at Aaron’s cheeks with the soggy Kleenex. “And obviously it’s me right now.”
“You’re older,” Aaron would reason agreeably, nose stuffy. And Jiro would act disappointed.
“Aw, you’re right. So,” he’d said with a grin on his face, “Cry all you want.” As an after note, he would rub his chin thoughtfully before adding, “You might want to stop when you hit thirty I think, because at that point it just kind of gets in the way of being the man of the house.”
Then Aaron would punch him.
When he thinks back on it, injuring his leg was the closest he ever came to real happiness
That night, Aaron cautiously approaches the bed. He’d tried knocking, but there was no answer, and he thought Jiro might’ve been asleep already, which was better because he didn’t really want Jiro to know he was here tonight. But when he lies down, something brushes against his arm and Jiro is awake, awash in red light from his alarm clock.
“Can we just not talk?” Aaron asks, and he thinks he sees a hint of a smile etched on Jiro’s face.
“You’re talking, Ahbu,” he responds, and suddenly Jiro’s head is against Aaron’s chest, their limbs tangled and Aaron not knowing where his body ends and Jiro’s begins. They haven’t touched like this for so long. And for once Aaron isn’t the younger brother, the di di that Jiro has to look out for; he feels something wet against his shirt and realizes that this is the first time Jiro has cried in front of him for something other than his mother.
Aaron carefully cradles Jiro against his body, and Jiro seems so fragile in his arms. He is warm, so blessedly warm; Aaron isn’t shivering against the untouched sheets. It is deathly uncomfortable, but Aaron winds his fingers in Jiro’s hair which normally nobody is allowed to touch, and slowly drifts off to sleep with more security than he’s felt in a long time.
In the morning, Aaron wakes up and there is no sun. He realizes that, for the first day in a while, the sun has been covered by clouds, and the clouds have seemingly settled around everything like a blanket. Also, for the first time, the alarm clock isn’t what is waking Aaron up. He shifts his head, realizing his arms are still numb and his body is stiff and his head is pounding-and Jiro is sitting up, turned away with his head bowed, his elbows propped up on his knees. His hair is sticking up in the back, and as the alarm starts to buzz, Jiro’s hand comes out to slap it silent again.
The quiet is like after a first snow-everything is still. The laptop is beside Jiro on the nightstand, and a song is on pause-Aaron feels a ball of resentment curdling in the pit of his stomach, but when he squints, he realizes its his song, the one on their first album that he sang when he was fresh-faced and not even sure which emotions to insert into his voice, about willing not to love somebody.
He isn’t sure what that means right now.
Aaron reaches out to brush Jiro’s arm with a heavy hand, and the older boy looks over his shoulder at Aaron, on his bed and free of any onstage presence, with mussed hair and drowsy eyes and still half in sleep’s clutches.
“I’m not coming back,” Aaron tells him.
Jiro nods, dropping his head, and Aaron closes his eyes again.
They are in a continuous cycle of sleeping and waking, and everything in between is gray.
One hundred.
after
Aaron’s own bed feels strange to him. He has accepted the fact that he can’t sleep without Jiro at his side, and thinks that he might take up a new profession as an insomniac and count his sleepless nights instead. It is around five AM by the time Aaron thinks he might be teetering on the edge of sleep, and indeed he wonders if he is dreaming when a dark shadow materializes at the foot of his bed.
“Dadong?” He asks, the tone of his voice betraying him and sounding hopeful instead of just curious, and then, Jiro is crashing into him from behind, arms ferociously encircling Aaron’s torso so much that Aaron thinks his ribs must be crushing, and Jiro’s lips are pressed on Aaron’s shoulder.
They lay like that for a while, and Aaron is trying to figure out a way he can survive without breathing when Jiro finally loosens his grip.
“I want to move forward, Ahbu,” Jiro says, and Aaron can hear the doubt and the lie in his voice, “But….”
“I know,” Aaron interjects, and those two words seem to cover everything else. What else is there to say, after all? Nothing can help them, can help him; Aaron hopes that he can cover Jiro’s gaping wound a bit longer.
“This isn’t fair to you,” Jiro says, and Aaron knows he means it.
Before Aaron can stop himself, he says, “Only one of us needs to be at one hundred percent, right?”
He feels Jiro’s lips curling in a tiny smile against the nape of his neck.
“You know that song?” Aaron asks when it’s been nothing but their uneven breaths in and out for a bit. “The one you wanted me to translate.” Jiro doesn’t say anything. “I figured it out I think. It’s about-”
“Don’t tell me,” Jiro murmurs. “I don’t want to know.”
They lapse into silence. Aaron rolls over on his back, and Jiro follows suit.
Aaron’s eyes have been closed for a while when Jiro says, “Three months, eleven days.”
“What?” Aaron says.
“Since Yuzh-since… you’ve been in my room.” Underneath the blanket, Jiro’s hand finds Aaron’s in silent apology for the slip-up, but right now, in a half-conscious state with Jiro’s hand in his, all Aaron can think about again is Jiro’s name in his mind, over and over.
“That’s one hundred and two days,” Aaron finally reports.
“No,” Jiro says, “One hundred and three.”
Aaron’s eyes snap open to look at Jiro, who almost looks like he’s grinning smugly.
“You weren’t ever that good at math, Ahbu,” he says. Aaron considers punching him again, but decides that now is not the time.
“Anyways, it’s day one now,” Jiro says. Aaron looks at the ceiling, feels Jiro’s hand under the covers, and is strangely content.
“How do you figure that?”
“Because. I’m over here in your room.” Jiro looks around, lifting his head. “Nice,” he jokes. Aaron might be wrong, but he thinks that Jiro doesn’t sound sorry about that at all.
It is quiet for another long period of time, and Aaron is almost asleep when he hears Jiro groan. When he opens his eyes again, he sees Jiro squinting against a ray of light, and he realizes that it is dawn.
“It’s so bright,” Jiro comments, scooting over to Aaron’s side of the bed.
Aaron smiles. “Yea.”
“You should do something about that,” Jiro says, and that is the last thing Aaron hears before he finally drifts off to sleep.
note: written for wad who asked for danson/jiro/aaron and lots of angst. i'm sorry this thing turned out to be such a beast.
jiro/aaron | r, 5734 words, canon
replacements don't always fit so well.
Mornings, Aaron wakes up and the sun is always in his eyes.
He sleeps closest to the door, because when he comes into Jiro’s room at midnight, Jiro is always curled in the far left corner of the bed, as if he is unconsciously trying to fly out the window above him.
The right side of the bed is always untouched, and every time Aaron slides between the sheets, he feels strangely cold. Sometimes Jiro wakes up, blinking and trying to recognize Aaron through the thick haze of sleep. Sometimes he stays quiet, and the night passes by like the eye of a hurricane, silent and ominous.
The alarm starts to buzz at 8:26 AM. The portable is propped up on the nightstand closest to Jiro’s side of the bed, the red flashing numbers winking in and out until Aaron crawls across the deserted mattress and slams his open palm against the snooze button. He doesn’t know why he can never think enough to just hit ‘reset’ instead, but every single morning he palms snooze over and over again until his whole arm is numb and he is too tired to make it back to his side of the bed anymore, and flops down onto Jiro’s pillow, falling asleep for another five minutes with the rays of sunshine trying to pry his eyelids apart before the buzz, buzz, buzz starts up one more time. One of these days, Aaron thinks, he’s going to break the damn thing and then Jiro will get mad even though he never looks at it.
Jiro isn’t there today when Aaron wakes up, the usual light of day searing into his eyes. The room and its organized mess is largely devoid of the older boy’s presence. A few pieces of jewelry are gone from the desk where Jiro lays them out every time they go on trips, but Aaron can’t remember which ones except for the beaded bracelet Jiro always wears. Aaron wonders if Jiro even notices that he comes anymore.
It is the ninety-sixth day already. Aaron hates numbers, but this time log has always kept a tick in his mind. Opening an eye, his blurry eyes adjust to the numbers on the clock reading 9:34 AM. There is noise vibrating in his ears, coming through the white pillows, and Aaron realizes after a moment that it’s the shower.
“Dadong?” He calls tentatively.
There is no answer, but he can feel the tension in the air change.
Surprised, he sits up, fumbles for his glasses, jams them on his face, and scrambles out of bed. Stumbles once, twice on the carpet, knocks into the bathroom door chin-first, and manages to catch his hand in the doorjamb before finally twisting the door open.
Jiro’s laptop is propped up on the toilet seat cover, and a string of unrecognizable melodies hiss through the steam of the showerhead. Aaron’s toothbrush is sitting in Jiro’s cup alongside Jiro’s own, and Aaron thinks that Jiro must have taken the care to replace it there after he was done brushing his teeth. Small favors. That must be why he keeps coming back, Aaron thinks, still rubbing his injured chin, and squeezes paste onto his orange toothbrush with more force than necessary.
The shower squeaks off as Aaron is spitting foam out into the sink, and a minute later, a dark head appears, towel around his waist, another one placed haphazardly over Jiro’s head.
Aaron waits as Jiro wipes a corner of the mirror free of fog and towels off his hair, waits for him to say something, but all that’s heard is the hissing of fleece against hair and skin and the music wafting from the laptop, piano keys and a crooning voice. Aaron is brushing his teeth, and brushing, and brushing until all that’s left in his mouth is three-fourths saliva and a growing burn, but still Jiro is concentrating on styling his hair, a routine that would require something like the earth to explode first before he stopped. Aaron remembers Jiro telling him that on the day after his father died, he forgot to eat and wore his shirt inside out, but his hair still looked pretty amazing.
“Didn’t your mom, like… get mad?” Aaron had asked, watching Jiro play with his small tub of hair wax.
Jiro had snorted. “Why would she be mad?”
“I don’t know,” Aaron responded. “Weren’t you supposed to… burn money, or sweep his grave, or… tear your hair out the whole day? No, come on,” he’d added, his irritation growing as Jiro outright laughed. “I’m serious.”
“My dad would never want me to tear my hair out,” Jiro had said with a sober face, and Aaron remembers the next part the best: Jiro had reached over and purposely tugged on Aaron’s own hair, which was longer back then and always tickling his forehead. Then Jiro had said smugly, “How’s this: If I die before you, I expect a lot of hair-tearing.”
And at the time, Aaron, fed up with the stupid haircut their group stylist had given him, had thought, fine by me.
Jiro finishes with his hair and slides past Aaron, who is brushing his gums raw by now, on the way out to retrieve some clothes for the day.
“Wait,” Aaron says, but it comes out as an indistinct gurgle. He bends over, spits, and wipes his mouth. “Wait,” he repeats, and his arm instinctively comes out and accidentally elbows Jiro, who has stopped in his tracks, squarely in the chest.
The older boy grimaces, rubbing his chest.
“Sorry,” Aaron says. Jiro shrugs and stands, waiting.
“Um.” And suddenly, Aaron has nothing to say. The silence ticks by, marked only by the laptop music and a faint drip-dripping of water from the water spigot.
“Can you tell me what the song is saying?” Jiro suddenly asks.
Aaron blinks. “What?” He is surprised that Jiro has initiated conversation, a first in a long while.
Jiro gestures at his laptop, his other hand still on his chest. “It’s in English.”
“Oh.” Aaron makes an effort to listen to the song, the singer’s raw voice still belting out the tune against a piano and pounding bass. But his English isn’t good enough to keep up, and he wishes Calvin were here, or that he had Calvin’s brain for a moment, before struggling to retrieve the right words in Mandarin.
“I think it’s about… going downstairs? Somewhere?” Aaron looks at the confused expression on Jiro’s face before feeling his face grow hot. “I’m not sure, they’re singing too fast.”
“Oh.” Jiro is obviously not satisfied with Aaron’s lackluster explanation, but he shrugs and gives Aaron a small smile. “Okay. Cool.” He swivels around to open the door, and Aaron looks to see his hand snake out by its independent accord and grab Jiro by the wrist. Jiro’s hand is cool in his own sweltering hot palm.
“Dadong.” Aaron says, and he feels Jiro sigh. The older boy doesn’t turn around, and the doorknob is still clutched in his free hand, the knuckles in Jiro’s hand white.
“Dadong,” Aaron repeats, because that’s all he can think to say right now, or ever, when he touches Jiro.
He thinks that Jiro is probably wondering if he’s gone nuts, but the older boy is still standing there complacently, his muscles tensed.
After a moment, Jiro tries to move forward again, and Aaron’s head clears of its haze.
“Can’t we just-”he starts, but Jiro shakes his head almost imperceptibly, the ends of his hair still dripping onto the nape of his neck at the back where he can’t reach it so well to style.
Aaron’s fingers curl slightly around Jiro’s cold, loose grip, and he can’t tell if the moisture is from his sweaty palm or the remnants from Jiro’s shower. “Dadong,” he says a third time, and he takes a step forward to close the gap between them. Aaron rests his forehead ever so slightly against the small of Jiro’s back, smelling him all peppermint shower gel and oranges and skin, his glasses pressed against his eyes and their hands jammed between their two bodies, and Jiro’s breath catches in his throat.
“Don’t,” Jiro says softly, and then he is tugging his hand out of Aaron’s and disappearing into the expansive hotel room.
The door is standing ajar, and Aaron feels his short temper flaring up as he stares at his vague reflection in the still-fogged mirror.
The alarm clock reads 9:58. His jaw clenches and he stands still for a short while, wanting to stamp his feet like a child.
Finally, he stalks over to the laptop and crouches down so he is eyelevel with the screen. Jiro’s iTunes is open, and the play list playing is titled a single name in Mandarin. Yuzhe, it says.
On Aaron’s birthday last year, after the whole party nonsense and festivities had died down, Aaron had gone up to the roof to contemplate growing a whole year older by himself. The sky was dark and scattered with a few stars, and there was a light breeze that blew his hair out of his eyes. He’d gotten bored after about ten minutes but was still reluctant to go back inside, when Jiro and Danson had appeared, each carrying a Styrofoam plate of birthday cake.
It was the first time he met Danson. The boy was a little shorter and paler than Aaron had imagined, with Jiro towering over him almost as much as he did with Aaron. But Danson had a quiet composure about him, an unconscious light he walked in that made Aaron a little more privy to the knowledge of why Jiro admired him like he did.
The way Jiro laughed, and talked, and even moved around the other boy was even different, so animated, more like the charismatic, silly Jiro that he pulled out for stage presences than the one Aaron knew that was a bit more quiet, mature, and protective.
Danson had gotten an extra piece of cake, and he held the vanilla pastry out to Aaron. “Cake for the birthday boy,” he’d said. Aaron had smiled and shook his head.
“I’m too full, thank you.”
Jiro had pinched his arm. “Are you for real? You’re all skin and bone, Ahbu. Eat some more.”
“Give him yours,” Danson teased Jiro, “You could definitely do without another piece.”
And Jiro had cried out in indignation, setting his cake down on the roof ledge before he tried punching Danson, who backed away and swatted Jiro’s half-hearted attempts away easily with his own hands.
In the hubbub, Aaron had quietly watched the Jiro’s piece of his birthday cake drop off the roof and splatter on the sidewalk stories below, the plastic fork following with a tinny clatter that he could hear clearly even all the way up here with the wind.
And he concluded that he definitely didn’t like this Jiro, this noisy, juvenile stranger he turned into when he was with Danson-but then, he had never seen Jiro so happy.
The following night, Aaron almost doesn’t want to go to Jiro’s room. His own bed is untouched, the housekeeping-made bedspread still neatly done up except for a crumple in the corner where he sits to watch TV or tie his shoes. But it is habit, or hunger, and before long, he is standing at the foot of Jiro’s bed again, afraid to get in.
Jiro is huddled in a heap on his side, facing the window as always. A single ray of moonlight cuts the boy in half, separating his torso from his legs. When Aaron finally scoots in, the light reaches him as well, touching his chin.
Aaron lies on his back for a moment, staring at the dark ceiling and the single red dot of the smoke detector, before rolling on his side away from Jiro, fully intent upon falling asleep.
When he wakes up around an hour later after a restless, half-awake slumber, he finds himself in the same position they’d been in this morning except ten times more pathetic. His forehead is pressed against Jiro’s back again, and his arm is slung around Jiro’s waist in an embrace. His grip tightens when he realizes what he’s been doing, and Jiro stirs in his sleep.
Disconcerted, Aaron shrinks back, scooting backwards on the mattress until he’s almost at the edge. He really should just go back to his bed where he would have the whole thing to himself, he thinks, but instead, places a pillow between their two bodies before he allows himself to fall asleep again, dreaming nonsense about going downstairs and crashing.
And Aaron wakes up with the sun in his eyes like always, with his right arm numb from pressing snooze and Jiro nowhere in sight. He falls back asleep for a minute, and when he wakes up, he rolls over to see Jiro brushing his teeth, his laptop playing another American song.
After a moment, Jiro catches Aaron staring at him from the bed, and stops for a moment before nodding in acknowledgment and resuming the forwards-backwards brushing motion. Aaron’s toothbrush is lying carefully on a towel for the moment.
Aaron rubs grit and burning sun out of his eyes.
Today is the ninety-seventh day.
After their press conference and dinner with VTV and playing a brief round of Smash Brothers with Calvin and Zun in Zun’s room, Zun asks where Jiro’s been lately.
“He didn’t even eat his shrimp at dinner,” Zun says seriously. Aaron represses the urge to laugh and shrugs instead.
“Why’re you asking me?”
“You guys are the closest,” Zun replies easily. Aaron scoffs, wondering if they know that these days, Jiro barely even says one word to him.
“Well I’m sure he’s fine,” Aaron says, but half an hour later, he’s knocking on Jiro’s door again. He hears music being turned off and footsteps shuffling to the entrance before the door is cracked open.
“Hey,” Jiro says, and his voice is scratchy with disuse.
Jiro looks tired, and his edges look frayed like an old photograph. “Are you all right?” Aaron wonders aloud.
Jiro nods and attempts to laugh, but it comes out as a croak. “Yea.” There is a pause, Aaron not wanting to disturb him, Jiro looking blank, before he catches on a bit too late. “Do you… come in,” he says, and steps aside.
It is like entering a graveyard. Though the sun is almost gone, and the twilight is slowly turning into night, Jiro’s room is submersed in darkness. The curtains are shut, and the only light in the room is coming from the laptop, perched on the right side of Jiro’s bed where Aaron sleeps at night. The light is casting an eerie blue-green glow on Jiro’s face as he stands awkwardly in front of the bed, Aaron facing him by the door. Aaron frowns.
“Tell me, is it nice under your rock?”
It’s mostly said for laughs, but Jiro just looks embarrassed. “I um, lost track of time I guess.” He turns the music back on, and it’s the same type of music, a singer crying in tune to soft instrumentals.
The same song comes back on, and Aaron makes another attempt at deciphering it. “I think it’s about angels or God or something.”
“What?” Jiro looks at him blankly, and Aaron points at the laptop.
“The song.” Jiro nods.
“Oh.”
“Can I turn the lights on?” Aaron tries, and Jiro looks like he’ll say yes for a moment before he sits down.
“I, uh-I don’t think I can be in it, right now,” he says.
You have no idea, Aaron thinks, and all he can see of Jiro’s face are his haunted, brooding eyes, dark circles underneath even though Jiro goes to bed earlier than any of them.
Ninety-eighth.
The day Danson left, they were supposed to be featured on 100% Entertainment. The program was delayed half an hour waiting for Jiro and the management (and Aaron) had called him about seven hundred times with no answer before Show Luo asked if they wanted to postpone because the audience was getting antsy. “I’m really sorry,” Aaron had apologized, wondering why he was saying sorry for somebody he wasn’t even responsible for.
“Is he sick or something?” Show had asked, and Aaron had shrugged that he had no idea. The whole van ride back, while Zun and Calvin were bickering about where to eat for dinner, Aaron felt like he was sitting on a bed of nails, barely able to keep his seat while they bumped through the crowded streets of Taipei. The moment they reached the hotel, Aaron sprang out of the vehicle, mumbled something about changing clothes, and bounded all the way to Jiro’s room, forgetting the place had elevators.
The door was ajar, and there was a strange thick gray haze not unlike smog when Aaron entered. The temperature was about ten degrees higher than it was outside, and Aaron felt himself sweating almost immediately.
He thought it was deserted at first because when Jiro was in a room, the music or some sort of other noise-him talking on the phone, perhaps-was always on, and right now the room was oddly silent. But he found Jiro underneath the covers, curled up a ball way over on the left side. Something about the air felt like the deep breath before something terrible happens, the silent moment of false peace in a horror movie building towards the inevitable climax.
When he dared to crouch down and lift the covers a little to inspect his face, he found that Jiro was fast asleep.
Having no idea what was going on yet, but knowing something was wrong nevertheless, Aaron decided not to wake Jiro up and yell at him for failing to show, and instead crawled into bed beside him and took off his shirt to ease his skin from the heat, complacently waiting it out until Jiro naturally woke up.
The next thing he knew, his eyes were fluttering open, and the sun was gone, and Jiro was watching him, his face seemingly peaceful on the pillow, and Aaron was deceived into thinking nothing was wrong after all.
“Are you okay?” Aaron had whispered in a slurred voice, rolling towards him, and Jiro had smiled, copying his motion so they were lying on their sides face to face. Jiro wasn’t wearing a shirt either, Aaron noticed, but for some reason, he never felt self-conscious about his thin frame with Jiro even though Jiro was always tan and toned.
“I like you there,” Jiro said, and they were so close that his breath fanned the hair out of Aaron’s eyes.
Aaron hadn’t paused at all before responding. “I can be here more often,” he’d said, not really comprehending the weight of his words at the time or the fact that Jiro would not be able to get out of bed for a month afterwards, and Jiro had shifted his hand just enough so that Aaron knew that he was lying on top of it, that they were in a sort of horizontal one-armed hug.
Aaron wished he knew at the time that he wasn’t Jiro’s miracle, that he wasn’t his healing salve in the place of the hole that Danson had gouged out. He was just a band-aid, a temporary cover from the wound underneath. Eventually he would have to be ripped off.
But that day on the bed, Jiro had rested his free hand on Aaron’s cheek, and the grayish tinge in the room hadn’t looked so threatening anymore.
That was day one.
A couple mornings after, Aaron gets fed up with all the American music, and after he finishes getting dressed, he crosses his arms.
“Dadong.”
Jiro pauses from lacing up his shoes. “Ahbu,” he returns cautiously, recognizing the edge in Aaron’s voice that he knows all too well from Aaron’s earlier days when he still threw tantrums.
The look in Jiro’s eyes almost makes Aaron stop, but he then another guitar riff from the laptop throws him back on track and he plows on ahead. “I really wish you’d stop listening to that music.”
Jiro stops mid-tie. “What?”
Aaron knows why Jiro is surprised; up until now, Aaron has been half-blind, choosing to ignore things leftover from Jiro-and-Danson. “I mean, you can’t understand it,” he continues, “I can barely understand it, and unless you’re playing it for Calvin’s benefit, in which case you should move four doors down, it really doesn’t have a purpose to be on, much less all the time.”
Suddenly he feels like he’s looking at Jiro through a mirror after his shower, all misted up, and Jiro’s eyes are hooded, the older boy seeming to forget what exactly he’s doing for a moment as he looks at his shoes with a blank expression.
“It’s not the soundtrack of our life,” Aaron finishes.
“You know why it’s on,” Jiro replies flatly.
“Why? Why don’t you tell me why? Is it going to bring him back?” Aaron asks snidely, and he can see Jiro flinch. He immediately wishes he didn’t just say that, but maybe he should be a little more selfish.
“No,” Jiro says after a minute.
“Then what the hell!”
At this point, Jiro has given up on tying his shoes, or he’s forgotten how to, and his left combat boot trails two tendrils of black lace, zigzagging through the white carpet of the room like cracks in a porcelain plate.
“I really don’t understand,” Aaron says. “It’s been ninety-nine days, Wang Dongcheng. Ninety-nine. I’m not even making that number up. Do you know how long that is?” Aaron hopes Jiro does, because Aaron’s not that good at math and he’s not in the mood to convert days to months.
“I need to remember him,” Jiro says, and his tone of voice is in between that of a little boy’s who has just been caught doing something bad, and one of someone in mourning. “It’s all I have.”
Aaron feels a low, black fury bubbling in his chest, and his hands are balled into fists, Jiro’s sheets inside them. “Well I’m glad that my presence is clearly so important to you.” He can’t keep himself from snarling. “I don’t even know why I keep coming back to your fucking room. You don’t even look at me.”
“Then don’t,” Jiro suddenly snaps back. “Don’t come back.” He stands, and Aaron temporarily remembers how short he is compared to the older boy, even more so because he is still sitting down. Lately, it hasn’t been so apparent because Jiro has been folding into himself, neatly dividing his body in half. “I’ve never asked you to come,” Jiro continues, and Aaron can’t help himself, the anger just keeps bubbling over like an overflowing dam, all the unspoken words he’s thought at some point rushing forth through the gates.
“Yea, you’re right-but we both know where you’d be if I didn’t,” Aaron replies swiftly. He actually isn’t even sure Jiro’s ever thought about suicide, but words aren’t really representations of themselves right now. They’re just said to have something to say.
Jiro takes a step towards Aaron. His own anger seems suddenly bone-weary, pierced through with hurt. “You knew what you were getting yourself into,” he says defensively. “You knew.”
“I thought you were like any other sane person!” Aaron explodes. “I thought you’d go through those stages of breaking up-there are like, four of them or something-and where we’re at right now, you should be at fucking stage seventy-nine!”
“You don’t understand!” Jiro shouts back, and Aaron hopes for god’s sake that the walls are soundproof, because if not, the whole hotel is going to hear this nonsensical argument, and Wu Zun is going to somehow tie it back to food. “You don’t know what we went through!” Jiro’s gritting his teeth, and he can’t even look Aaron in the eye anymore. He seems to be shrinking again. “You don’t know,” he echoes, and trails off.
Aaron looks at Jiro standing pathetically before him, and he wants to shake him, to punch him, to beat him into becoming the person he once knew and was in awe of. “I don’t know?” He hears himself saying. “Ah Lan-remember her? She’s under the ground. The girl I was ready to-to spend the rest of…” Aaron can’t finish the sentence. He shakes his head and starts again. “And you?”
The whole room has bated breath. Aaron lets himself finish. “Yuzhe left you with nothing but a damn CD you can’t even understand.”
Jiro looks void of emotion, drained and empty.
“Just leave,” he breathes, and that is the thing, through it all, that Aaron has been dreading. The alarm clock says 10:02.
“I was always leaving,” Aaron retorts, remembers to grab his toothbrush, and slams the door in his wake with as much dignity as he can muster.
When Aaron tore a ligament, he thought his world was ending. He remembers falling, and Jiro catching him and gently setting him down in a sitting position atop a crate as Zun scurried around looking for ice and their manager called the ambulance and Calvin generally became a harried nuisance as he nagged at everyone and shouted directions at people they didn’t know. That was the first time he’d cried in front of them because it hurt so bad, and afterwards he felt ashamed because he was supposed to be an adult, a man.
And he remembers the hospital bed, the other three and their assistants taking shifts watching over him for the first five nights. He remembers the wheelchair he had to sit in, frail and sick, and the crutches he carried on the sidelines watching the other three dance their choreography whilst he generally felt useless. He remembers Wu Zun running around town searching for all his favorite foods, and Calvin bringing him his well-wishes from his fans and telling him stupid jokes, and his parents with their worried, pallid faces, and Jiro hovering around like a mother hen, snapping at the hospital staff when they hung around too long hoping for autographs or hurt Aaron’s leg.
He’d felt embarrassed for about three months, so small and helpless, and knows that both Zun and Calvin got a little uncomfortable around him when he expressed those insecurities or cried in front of them.
But he remembers Jiro, way before Danson ever came into their lives, Jiro always there, always wiping his tears away, and carrying him on his back everywhere even when Jiro was himself sleep deprived and exhausted and falling down, and playing around with his crutches so Aaron wouldn’t be the only one limping. He’d gone with Aaron to his physiotherapy, jump-roping beside him, and he carried his ice packs and his knee brace for him in his trendy backpack. A part of Aaron didn’t like Jiro seeing him struggle and fail sometimes, but when he cried or complained or grimaced, Jiro’s response was always the same.
“Only one of us needs to be at one hundred percent,” he would joke, dabbing at Aaron’s cheeks with the soggy Kleenex. “And obviously it’s me right now.”
“You’re older,” Aaron would reason agreeably, nose stuffy. And Jiro would act disappointed.
“Aw, you’re right. So,” he’d said with a grin on his face, “Cry all you want.” As an after note, he would rub his chin thoughtfully before adding, “You might want to stop when you hit thirty I think, because at that point it just kind of gets in the way of being the man of the house.”
Then Aaron would punch him.
When he thinks back on it, injuring his leg was the closest he ever came to real happiness
That night, Aaron cautiously approaches the bed. He’d tried knocking, but there was no answer, and he thought Jiro might’ve been asleep already, which was better because he didn’t really want Jiro to know he was here tonight. But when he lies down, something brushes against his arm and Jiro is awake, awash in red light from his alarm clock.
“Can we just not talk?” Aaron asks, and he thinks he sees a hint of a smile etched on Jiro’s face.
“You’re talking, Ahbu,” he responds, and suddenly Jiro’s head is against Aaron’s chest, their limbs tangled and Aaron not knowing where his body ends and Jiro’s begins. They haven’t touched like this for so long. And for once Aaron isn’t the younger brother, the di di that Jiro has to look out for; he feels something wet against his shirt and realizes that this is the first time Jiro has cried in front of him for something other than his mother.
Aaron carefully cradles Jiro against his body, and Jiro seems so fragile in his arms. He is warm, so blessedly warm; Aaron isn’t shivering against the untouched sheets. It is deathly uncomfortable, but Aaron winds his fingers in Jiro’s hair which normally nobody is allowed to touch, and slowly drifts off to sleep with more security than he’s felt in a long time.
In the morning, Aaron wakes up and there is no sun. He realizes that, for the first day in a while, the sun has been covered by clouds, and the clouds have seemingly settled around everything like a blanket. Also, for the first time, the alarm clock isn’t what is waking Aaron up. He shifts his head, realizing his arms are still numb and his body is stiff and his head is pounding-and Jiro is sitting up, turned away with his head bowed, his elbows propped up on his knees. His hair is sticking up in the back, and as the alarm starts to buzz, Jiro’s hand comes out to slap it silent again.
The quiet is like after a first snow-everything is still. The laptop is beside Jiro on the nightstand, and a song is on pause-Aaron feels a ball of resentment curdling in the pit of his stomach, but when he squints, he realizes its his song, the one on their first album that he sang when he was fresh-faced and not even sure which emotions to insert into his voice, about willing not to love somebody.
He isn’t sure what that means right now.
Aaron reaches out to brush Jiro’s arm with a heavy hand, and the older boy looks over his shoulder at Aaron, on his bed and free of any onstage presence, with mussed hair and drowsy eyes and still half in sleep’s clutches.
“I’m not coming back,” Aaron tells him.
Jiro nods, dropping his head, and Aaron closes his eyes again.
They are in a continuous cycle of sleeping and waking, and everything in between is gray.
One hundred.
after
Aaron’s own bed feels strange to him. He has accepted the fact that he can’t sleep without Jiro at his side, and thinks that he might take up a new profession as an insomniac and count his sleepless nights instead. It is around five AM by the time Aaron thinks he might be teetering on the edge of sleep, and indeed he wonders if he is dreaming when a dark shadow materializes at the foot of his bed.
“Dadong?” He asks, the tone of his voice betraying him and sounding hopeful instead of just curious, and then, Jiro is crashing into him from behind, arms ferociously encircling Aaron’s torso so much that Aaron thinks his ribs must be crushing, and Jiro’s lips are pressed on Aaron’s shoulder.
They lay like that for a while, and Aaron is trying to figure out a way he can survive without breathing when Jiro finally loosens his grip.
“I want to move forward, Ahbu,” Jiro says, and Aaron can hear the doubt and the lie in his voice, “But….”
“I know,” Aaron interjects, and those two words seem to cover everything else. What else is there to say, after all? Nothing can help them, can help him; Aaron hopes that he can cover Jiro’s gaping wound a bit longer.
“This isn’t fair to you,” Jiro says, and Aaron knows he means it.
Before Aaron can stop himself, he says, “Only one of us needs to be at one hundred percent, right?”
He feels Jiro’s lips curling in a tiny smile against the nape of his neck.
“You know that song?” Aaron asks when it’s been nothing but their uneven breaths in and out for a bit. “The one you wanted me to translate.” Jiro doesn’t say anything. “I figured it out I think. It’s about-”
“Don’t tell me,” Jiro murmurs. “I don’t want to know.”
They lapse into silence. Aaron rolls over on his back, and Jiro follows suit.
Aaron’s eyes have been closed for a while when Jiro says, “Three months, eleven days.”
“What?” Aaron says.
“Since Yuzh-since… you’ve been in my room.” Underneath the blanket, Jiro’s hand finds Aaron’s in silent apology for the slip-up, but right now, in a half-conscious state with Jiro’s hand in his, all Aaron can think about again is Jiro’s name in his mind, over and over.
“That’s one hundred and two days,” Aaron finally reports.
“No,” Jiro says, “One hundred and three.”
Aaron’s eyes snap open to look at Jiro, who almost looks like he’s grinning smugly.
“You weren’t ever that good at math, Ahbu,” he says. Aaron considers punching him again, but decides that now is not the time.
“Anyways, it’s day one now,” Jiro says. Aaron looks at the ceiling, feels Jiro’s hand under the covers, and is strangely content.
“How do you figure that?”
“Because. I’m over here in your room.” Jiro looks around, lifting his head. “Nice,” he jokes. Aaron might be wrong, but he thinks that Jiro doesn’t sound sorry about that at all.
It is quiet for another long period of time, and Aaron is almost asleep when he hears Jiro groan. When he opens his eyes again, he sees Jiro squinting against a ray of light, and he realizes that it is dawn.
“It’s so bright,” Jiro comments, scooting over to Aaron’s side of the bed.
Aaron smiles. “Yea.”
“You should do something about that,” Jiro says, and that is the last thing Aaron hears before he finally drifts off to sleep.
note: written for wad who asked for danson/jiro/aaron and lots of angst. i'm sorry this thing turned out to be such a beast.