Miracles - Reita/Ruki 1/1
Title: Miracles
Chapter: 1/1
Rating: R
Pairing & Characters: Reita/Ruki, Uruha, Aoi
Genre: Drama, Romance
Synopsis: Where both search for miracles
But I guess the first does deserve something special.
2.
Miracles
When Ruki is introduced to everyone inside the room, no one tries to make a good first impression. Sallow and moody Uruha nibbles at the jagged edges of his ashy nails. Aoi has an invested interest in the lumps on the wall. Reita on the other hand, is going through a phase of reshaping and redefining himself, so naturally, he ignores Ruki (and much of everything else).
The new boy mutters a barely audible ‘good morning’ to everybody. Reita only replies with an equally quiet ‘hey’ when he sees speckles on the boy’s arm under the light that’s peeking through the blinds - speckles that look like bruised needle marks. He just can’t help it after that.
-
Reita’s legs bump into something in the dark hallway. He looks down and sees a cube.
A cube clad in pajamas.
He nudges the cube with his right foot, and it splays into a human. If he recalls correctly, the name is Ruki.
“Why aren’t you in your room with the others? And don’t tell me you’re lost.”
The cube humors, though fails a little because his eyes are dimmer than the color of Uruha’s nail beds even under the moonlight, “digging my way to Methland.”
Reita wants to believe that Ruki is not all wry humor. So in return, he tries to smile at him, but only then does the sorrow in those words sink under his skin. Instead, he tells the cube to get the fuck back to his room or else.
The cube props himself up and doesn’t say anything anymore, strolls off on bare feet that resemble blasted roots of a dying tree.
And all Reita really wants for tonight is to sleep soundlessly without some junkie thrashing in the adjoining bed.
-
“Come come come come come! You can have breakfast with us!” Aoi twitters and latches onto Ruki’s bare arm. Ruki rubs his sleep-ridden eyes, the ones that are still dabbed with purplish blue bags underneath. He gazes over to Uruha’s bed, all impeccable and wrinkle-free, yet the hollow-cheeked boy is nowhere in sight.
"Uru doesn’t eat with us." Aoi explains.
Reita sinks his head deep in his pillow and shuts his eyes taut. He was going to get up and go to breakfast with Aoi and Ruki when he heard his name, but he thinks he saw those blatant speckles on Ruki’s arm (again) through his foggy eyes. Then he thinks maybe he should just sleep in a bit later than usual.
-
The food is really unspeakable, Ruki likes to believe that it is worse than what he had at home, and it is even harder to chug down the uncooked grits in his oatmeal when Aoi blabbers sore jokes that rub Ruki in the wrong places.
Ruki thanks God when breakfast ends, and grabs a sandwich on his way out.
-
The second time Reita sees Ruki on the same day, the younger is in a sweater with long sleeves. Reita feels the need to apologize for yesterday, because the purple veins under Ruki’s eyes are starting to look like cobwebs, and to Reita, they generate a tad more agony than those speckles. But Ruki only shoves a sandwich into Reita’s hand, and flees before Reita could do more about him.
The patches of skin Ruki brushed upon are starting to peel apart, and Reita doesn’t bother to pinch them back together.
-
"Tough night?" Uruha only dips onto Ruki’s mattress when he finds him thrashing into the bars above his bed.
Ruki doesn’t respond, more like he can’t because his tongue has swollen too large. Uruha watches him as he twists and bends and crackles the buckles in his spine until they are coming undone- and Ruki collapses into a marred lump of thick tears and snots. The hollow-cheeked boy presses Ruki into his even hollower chest, and Ruki really worries that he’s going to tear Uruha’s ribcage apart because he has too less skin to wrap it up. But Uruha stays perfectly intact, his ribs rise and sink with his lungs.
“It’s really really really cold... just please... so cold.” Ruki says through chittering teeth, ramming deeper deeper deeper into Uruha’s open ribcage.
And although Uruha feels like his ribs are going to smash into his lungs, he still buries Ruki under those tenuous bars and whispers into his crown.
Reita flips himself over and watches the chest-presser and the chest-digger meshed together from an askew view, and his eyes begin to cramp from tracing their hazy outlines in the dark. He remembers how he sounded just like Ruki when he had his ‘tough nights’ - but not too certain because the wails are getting fuzzy and distant since Ruki’s face is planted inside Uruha’s chest - the one with too little flesh to hold it together. And why can’t it break? Why won’t it break for just one goddamn second so -
Reita hopes it doesn’t get worse than this while he tries to pinch his flared skin back together.
-
He laters learns that he was wrong when the counselor assigns Ruki as his partner for group therapy. Ruki sits, eyelids rimmed in glitter and slathered in soot, fingers fiddling with the frays on his sleeves.
“Stop looking at me like I’m broken, not everyone here’s emotionally damaged.” Sooty lids fold back and reveal cinder dusted eyes, Ruki declares.
Reita believes that ruki’s eyes are still the same shade as the night Reita had bumped into him on the hallway. Reita thinks that maybe the soot on his lids is pouring into his eyes and that’s why they are so gray, however he knows it doesn’t work that way.
“Because really, I’m not, I was just curious.”
Reita scoffs, "Weren’t we all?"
“Yeah. But I was looking for something and I couldn’t find it. Then I heard that it would make me feel fantastic, so I thought it was it. The first time I shot it I didn’t feel much, but the second, third, fourth, and many times after, I felt good, amazing. I thought I had found it, but each time the high ebbed, it went away with it. And I just couldn’t see it any longer, no matter how many times I shot.”
“What were you looking for?” Reita pries.
“Miracles.”
Reita wants to inform him that miracles don’t exist but bites it back because that’s the first time ashes lifted away from Ruki’s eyes, and the pearlescent undertone is too beautiful to disrupt. Rather, he asks what miracles is Ruki looking for.
Ruki shakes his head, “they wouldn’t be miracles if I know them beforehand. But I’ll let you know when I find it, because you’re the first and the only person besides myself to believe in my miracles.”
Reita is curious, “why do you need miracles?”
“Nobody needs miracles, Reita. Miracles happen to us all the time, we just don’t recognize them because we often think that miracles are things like heaven falling over our heads, but really, they’re not always that poetic.”
And we just need to learn how to see.
“By the way, miracle hunter,
“Hmm?”
it’s Akira.”
-
Ruki soon blends into the routine. In most days, he attends classes with Reita and Uruha in the morning and after lunch, they join in for group therapy and counseling. Ruki discovers that Aoi is actually four years older than everyone when he notices that Aoi doesn’t appear in any of his classes. Sometimes the four of them are lucky and would be arranged into one group during therapy.
Sometimes they aren’t and it would be two hours of nodding along and staring at people’s shoelaces.
During some sessions loquacious Aoi recedes into quiet and composed and repeats stories about his alcohol addiction - how he would come home so drunk that he couldn’t turn his door knob and skipped class the other day and more classes the days after and avoided by friends sometimes his own mother. But when Ruki tries to dig for the initiative, Aoi immediately bounces back into his regular self and goes off with some bizarre jokes as if he told someone else’s story.
After dinner Aoi and Uruha are put on laundry duty. They usually return in the middle of the night with a half-asleep Aoi hoisted on Uruha’s back, who is soiled inside out and his ribs become more defined than ever. Ruki and Reita would be awaken by Aoi’s droning hums and Uruha’s loud curses (if they don’t want him to drink the fucking fabric softener then stop putting him on laundry duty). And then the lights beat through their thin sheets and Ruki can’t hide in his bed any longer because everyone’s shuffling around trying to haul Aoi to the bathroom and purge him. Sometimes the lights are flicked off after an hour or two, sometimes they are on for the entire night. The next day Ruki’s eyes would be slapped in red cobwebs all over and his sockets would be sore from absorbing too much light at night, and he would have to lie down somewhere between the breaks in the morning. Often times, Reita finds him and lies beside him, shoulder blade against shoulder blade, smearing fingerprints all over Ruki’s eyelids to rub away scarlet webs. When he’s done, the soot and glitter from Ruki’s eyes would bruise his thumbs so badly, he has to spend days under the faucet trying to wash them off.
-
It’s after a while when all four of them are present at lunch. It’s when Uruha’s cheeks and chest are finally filling up a little, when Ruki’s withdrawal symptoms have alleviated, and when Reita agrees to sit at the same table with his roommates. Yet Aoi’s jokes are still getting colder and colder no matter what.
The dynamics are the same though, Ruki slurping his noodles and swallowing bitter complaints about the food; Reita chewing a little too loud. But when Uruha is present at lunch, or any meal in the day, Aoi’s jokes are not the only things that are unbearable.
"His sister found his head ducked in the toilet, along with his own vomit." Reita told Ruki once, "but it’s not like they didn’t know before, my guess is that the signs were pretty obvious when his ribs were starting to grow too sharp."
Uruha announces with a blank face that he’ll be going home soon because his physician (his brows jerked as he said it) said he’s been gaining weight and will be back at a ‘healthy’ body weight in no time if he doesn’t relapse. Reita slurs something like ‘good luck’ between teeth clashing together, Aoi claps on Uruha’s shoulder and explodes into large clumps of gags and laughters (he’s choking on his noodles and those that he stole from Uruha’s bowl) and continues to drown beneath his daily dose of ‘humor’. Ruki feigns a smile at the fuller-cheeked boy, his fingers are groping for something under the table. He prays that his shoulder is not telling it all.
Reita chews slower when he feels a bony wrist knocking into his own. When the bump-and-brush becomes incessant, Reita tries to pinch-and-slap. He finds a pinky sliding into his palm, wriggling inside and fingering at the burns. The fingers are icier than window glass at night, but they are nice, they are awfully smooth. Reita wraps his own around frigid little fingers, and strokes about those harsh joints and skinny bones and higher and higher up to the small knob on his wrist and higher and higher into the sleeve of his sweater and meets speckles - they are like tiny craters meteorites left behind and god, Reita can’t remember the last time he had reached the stars.
Maybe the peeled open skin is never going to close back together.
-
Reita walks up to the ‘advice box’ displayed in the hall. He fishes out a crumbled slip, and nearly laughs out loud at ‘you should use easier materials for the floor so I can dig my way faster to Methland.’
Then he remembers the first time those words were uttered to him, and no matter how much he tries, they still sting like smashed bottle glass.
-
Ruki finds Reita perched on the rails of the balcony, a joint in hand. The sky is blacker than the soot on Ruki’s eyelids, and it really is too nippy to be out in a pajama top and shorts. Ruki joins him on the rails nonetheless, legs shaking because at the bottom, the sea waves are pummeling the rocky shore, and it is not quite the moment to fall yet.
"Tough night?” Ruki only asks when he notices that Reita’s noseband is off and he never found out why Reita hides his nose. Ruki had seen worse.
Reita doesn’t speak. He shifts to face Ruki - there’s an endearing bump along the bridge of his nose. When he sees that Ruki’s eyes are the blackest he’s ever seen, he stuffs him a joint.
“You look like you need one.” Reita justifies, marijuana on his breath. Ruki lights it on the end of Reita’s joint and takes a deep drag. The smoke of weed swirled with salty wind washes over his lungs instantaneously.
The marijuana kicks in fast. Under the high the boys start telling each other their stories and homes between giggles and gags, voices mixed with burnt weed and salt and wet soiled sand. Reita says that back at home they had sea just like the one underneath - but not really because he had never seen it for himself. Yet he knew it was there because every time it rained the sky would smell like fish and rocks and he would sit behind his cracked window at home watching other kids skipping in swim trunks with surf boards and their slicked hair glistened under the sun. He had to watch over his father who was constantly inebriated and a mother whom he wasn’t even sure is his real mother, so that the dad wouldn’t drink himself to death without anyone knowing and the mom wouldn’t run away taking all their money - if they had much to begin with. Reita started using drugs in the first year of highschool, first weed, later much harder dope. He was able to find a few dealers who were willing to cut him deals because even though Reita earned money from the deli he worked at off school, the amount was never enough to fill his pockets. And when he didn’t have enough money for dope, he stole, and got caught almost each time. He got beat up and his belongs were taken. In one such incidence, his nose was broken after it was punched with iron-knuckled fists. He bled and bruised and was bandaged in many parts of his body, but he only stopped stealing after his nose was broken. His verdict was that even after his nose had healed, an irregular bump grew on the bridge and it made him look more crooked than he already was.
“This?”
Ruki brushes his finger over the bump, staining the smell of weed onto Reita’s skin. Reita is about to pick the finger off - but a little too slow when he finds himself held between the deep puckers of Ruki’s lips. But they quickly flutter away only to land on the small bump along Reita’s nose, pressing kisses and flaked skin over and over. Reita, under the bitter and chapped caresses of the younger, slips his fingertips behind Ruki’s ears and rubs lazy patterns onto the skin. All at once, the boys find themselves enmeshed between aching gasps, coarse fingertips, and unbuttoned pajama tops. Their hands graze each other like cold sand papers, leaving streaks weeping in a color that’s a few shades too deep, and evoking sporadic kisses into random places on their bare chests - anywhere their lips can reach.
Ruki falls off the rails onto Reita’s dangling torso, mouth gliding southwards. Reita’s fingers are threaded in Ruki’s golden locks, nails ruined in black soot - yet they are still grabbing, searching for Ruki’s soot littered eyelids, still trying to paint themselves a denser black. Because when all is finished - and it will no matter how desperately fast their breaths are now - these lingering smudges will be the only traces of Ruki’s existence. The monochromatic child that easily fades into the crowd, the one who gropes for ‘miracles’ and greater truths; the cherry-lipped boy who pants vacant syllables of Akira Akira into the gaps between his ribs; and the first person to teach him the pain of heartache.
It’s a naive tenderness, a childish compassion that spreads through the ridges of fingerprints and then anchors deep beneath the bones, waiting to be brushed upon again.
And when it does, the pain will still feel fresh, the soot will still be vivid, and the nostalgic miracles will still clatter inside Reita’s ribs - but never further down.
Because after all, miracles are not always poetic,
and Ruki is not the only one.
-
Miracles. Fin.
Chapter: 1/1
Rating: R
Pairing & Characters: Reita/Ruki, Uruha, Aoi
Genre: Drama, Romance
Synopsis: Where both search for miracles
But I guess the first does deserve something special.
2.
Miracles
When Ruki is introduced to everyone inside the room, no one tries to make a good first impression. Sallow and moody Uruha nibbles at the jagged edges of his ashy nails. Aoi has an invested interest in the lumps on the wall. Reita on the other hand, is going through a phase of reshaping and redefining himself, so naturally, he ignores Ruki (and much of everything else).
The new boy mutters a barely audible ‘good morning’ to everybody. Reita only replies with an equally quiet ‘hey’ when he sees speckles on the boy’s arm under the light that’s peeking through the blinds - speckles that look like bruised needle marks. He just can’t help it after that.
-
Reita’s legs bump into something in the dark hallway. He looks down and sees a cube.
A cube clad in pajamas.
He nudges the cube with his right foot, and it splays into a human. If he recalls correctly, the name is Ruki.
“Why aren’t you in your room with the others? And don’t tell me you’re lost.”
The cube humors, though fails a little because his eyes are dimmer than the color of Uruha’s nail beds even under the moonlight, “digging my way to Methland.”
Reita wants to believe that Ruki is not all wry humor. So in return, he tries to smile at him, but only then does the sorrow in those words sink under his skin. Instead, he tells the cube to get the fuck back to his room or else.
The cube props himself up and doesn’t say anything anymore, strolls off on bare feet that resemble blasted roots of a dying tree.
And all Reita really wants for tonight is to sleep soundlessly without some junkie thrashing in the adjoining bed.
-
“Come come come come come! You can have breakfast with us!” Aoi twitters and latches onto Ruki’s bare arm. Ruki rubs his sleep-ridden eyes, the ones that are still dabbed with purplish blue bags underneath. He gazes over to Uruha’s bed, all impeccable and wrinkle-free, yet the hollow-cheeked boy is nowhere in sight.
"Uru doesn’t eat with us." Aoi explains.
Reita sinks his head deep in his pillow and shuts his eyes taut. He was going to get up and go to breakfast with Aoi and Ruki when he heard his name, but he thinks he saw those blatant speckles on Ruki’s arm (again) through his foggy eyes. Then he thinks maybe he should just sleep in a bit later than usual.
-
The food is really unspeakable, Ruki likes to believe that it is worse than what he had at home, and it is even harder to chug down the uncooked grits in his oatmeal when Aoi blabbers sore jokes that rub Ruki in the wrong places.
Ruki thanks God when breakfast ends, and grabs a sandwich on his way out.
-
The second time Reita sees Ruki on the same day, the younger is in a sweater with long sleeves. Reita feels the need to apologize for yesterday, because the purple veins under Ruki’s eyes are starting to look like cobwebs, and to Reita, they generate a tad more agony than those speckles. But Ruki only shoves a sandwich into Reita’s hand, and flees before Reita could do more about him.
The patches of skin Ruki brushed upon are starting to peel apart, and Reita doesn’t bother to pinch them back together.
-
"Tough night?" Uruha only dips onto Ruki’s mattress when he finds him thrashing into the bars above his bed.
Ruki doesn’t respond, more like he can’t because his tongue has swollen too large. Uruha watches him as he twists and bends and crackles the buckles in his spine until they are coming undone- and Ruki collapses into a marred lump of thick tears and snots. The hollow-cheeked boy presses Ruki into his even hollower chest, and Ruki really worries that he’s going to tear Uruha’s ribcage apart because he has too less skin to wrap it up. But Uruha stays perfectly intact, his ribs rise and sink with his lungs.
“It’s really really really cold... just please... so cold.” Ruki says through chittering teeth, ramming deeper deeper deeper into Uruha’s open ribcage.
And although Uruha feels like his ribs are going to smash into his lungs, he still buries Ruki under those tenuous bars and whispers into his crown.
Reita flips himself over and watches the chest-presser and the chest-digger meshed together from an askew view, and his eyes begin to cramp from tracing their hazy outlines in the dark. He remembers how he sounded just like Ruki when he had his ‘tough nights’ - but not too certain because the wails are getting fuzzy and distant since Ruki’s face is planted inside Uruha’s chest - the one with too little flesh to hold it together. And why can’t it break? Why won’t it break for just one goddamn second so -
Reita hopes it doesn’t get worse than this while he tries to pinch his flared skin back together.
-
He laters learns that he was wrong when the counselor assigns Ruki as his partner for group therapy. Ruki sits, eyelids rimmed in glitter and slathered in soot, fingers fiddling with the frays on his sleeves.
“Stop looking at me like I’m broken, not everyone here’s emotionally damaged.” Sooty lids fold back and reveal cinder dusted eyes, Ruki declares.
Reita believes that ruki’s eyes are still the same shade as the night Reita had bumped into him on the hallway. Reita thinks that maybe the soot on his lids is pouring into his eyes and that’s why they are so gray, however he knows it doesn’t work that way.
“Because really, I’m not, I was just curious.”
Reita scoffs, "Weren’t we all?"
“Yeah. But I was looking for something and I couldn’t find it. Then I heard that it would make me feel fantastic, so I thought it was it. The first time I shot it I didn’t feel much, but the second, third, fourth, and many times after, I felt good, amazing. I thought I had found it, but each time the high ebbed, it went away with it. And I just couldn’t see it any longer, no matter how many times I shot.”
“What were you looking for?” Reita pries.
“Miracles.”
Reita wants to inform him that miracles don’t exist but bites it back because that’s the first time ashes lifted away from Ruki’s eyes, and the pearlescent undertone is too beautiful to disrupt. Rather, he asks what miracles is Ruki looking for.
Ruki shakes his head, “they wouldn’t be miracles if I know them beforehand. But I’ll let you know when I find it, because you’re the first and the only person besides myself to believe in my miracles.”
Reita is curious, “why do you need miracles?”
“Nobody needs miracles, Reita. Miracles happen to us all the time, we just don’t recognize them because we often think that miracles are things like heaven falling over our heads, but really, they’re not always that poetic.”
And we just need to learn how to see.
“By the way, miracle hunter,
“Hmm?”
it’s Akira.”
-
Ruki soon blends into the routine. In most days, he attends classes with Reita and Uruha in the morning and after lunch, they join in for group therapy and counseling. Ruki discovers that Aoi is actually four years older than everyone when he notices that Aoi doesn’t appear in any of his classes. Sometimes the four of them are lucky and would be arranged into one group during therapy.
Sometimes they aren’t and it would be two hours of nodding along and staring at people’s shoelaces.
During some sessions loquacious Aoi recedes into quiet and composed and repeats stories about his alcohol addiction - how he would come home so drunk that he couldn’t turn his door knob and skipped class the other day and more classes the days after and avoided by friends sometimes his own mother. But when Ruki tries to dig for the initiative, Aoi immediately bounces back into his regular self and goes off with some bizarre jokes as if he told someone else’s story.
After dinner Aoi and Uruha are put on laundry duty. They usually return in the middle of the night with a half-asleep Aoi hoisted on Uruha’s back, who is soiled inside out and his ribs become more defined than ever. Ruki and Reita would be awaken by Aoi’s droning hums and Uruha’s loud curses (if they don’t want him to drink the fucking fabric softener then stop putting him on laundry duty). And then the lights beat through their thin sheets and Ruki can’t hide in his bed any longer because everyone’s shuffling around trying to haul Aoi to the bathroom and purge him. Sometimes the lights are flicked off after an hour or two, sometimes they are on for the entire night. The next day Ruki’s eyes would be slapped in red cobwebs all over and his sockets would be sore from absorbing too much light at night, and he would have to lie down somewhere between the breaks in the morning. Often times, Reita finds him and lies beside him, shoulder blade against shoulder blade, smearing fingerprints all over Ruki’s eyelids to rub away scarlet webs. When he’s done, the soot and glitter from Ruki’s eyes would bruise his thumbs so badly, he has to spend days under the faucet trying to wash them off.
-
It’s after a while when all four of them are present at lunch. It’s when Uruha’s cheeks and chest are finally filling up a little, when Ruki’s withdrawal symptoms have alleviated, and when Reita agrees to sit at the same table with his roommates. Yet Aoi’s jokes are still getting colder and colder no matter what.
The dynamics are the same though, Ruki slurping his noodles and swallowing bitter complaints about the food; Reita chewing a little too loud. But when Uruha is present at lunch, or any meal in the day, Aoi’s jokes are not the only things that are unbearable.
"His sister found his head ducked in the toilet, along with his own vomit." Reita told Ruki once, "but it’s not like they didn’t know before, my guess is that the signs were pretty obvious when his ribs were starting to grow too sharp."
Uruha announces with a blank face that he’ll be going home soon because his physician (his brows jerked as he said it) said he’s been gaining weight and will be back at a ‘healthy’ body weight in no time if he doesn’t relapse. Reita slurs something like ‘good luck’ between teeth clashing together, Aoi claps on Uruha’s shoulder and explodes into large clumps of gags and laughters (he’s choking on his noodles and those that he stole from Uruha’s bowl) and continues to drown beneath his daily dose of ‘humor’. Ruki feigns a smile at the fuller-cheeked boy, his fingers are groping for something under the table. He prays that his shoulder is not telling it all.
Reita chews slower when he feels a bony wrist knocking into his own. When the bump-and-brush becomes incessant, Reita tries to pinch-and-slap. He finds a pinky sliding into his palm, wriggling inside and fingering at the burns. The fingers are icier than window glass at night, but they are nice, they are awfully smooth. Reita wraps his own around frigid little fingers, and strokes about those harsh joints and skinny bones and higher and higher up to the small knob on his wrist and higher and higher into the sleeve of his sweater and meets speckles - they are like tiny craters meteorites left behind and god, Reita can’t remember the last time he had reached the stars.
Maybe the peeled open skin is never going to close back together.
-
Reita walks up to the ‘advice box’ displayed in the hall. He fishes out a crumbled slip, and nearly laughs out loud at ‘you should use easier materials for the floor so I can dig my way faster to Methland.’
Then he remembers the first time those words were uttered to him, and no matter how much he tries, they still sting like smashed bottle glass.
-
Ruki finds Reita perched on the rails of the balcony, a joint in hand. The sky is blacker than the soot on Ruki’s eyelids, and it really is too nippy to be out in a pajama top and shorts. Ruki joins him on the rails nonetheless, legs shaking because at the bottom, the sea waves are pummeling the rocky shore, and it is not quite the moment to fall yet.
"Tough night?” Ruki only asks when he notices that Reita’s noseband is off and he never found out why Reita hides his nose. Ruki had seen worse.
Reita doesn’t speak. He shifts to face Ruki - there’s an endearing bump along the bridge of his nose. When he sees that Ruki’s eyes are the blackest he’s ever seen, he stuffs him a joint.
“You look like you need one.” Reita justifies, marijuana on his breath. Ruki lights it on the end of Reita’s joint and takes a deep drag. The smoke of weed swirled with salty wind washes over his lungs instantaneously.
The marijuana kicks in fast. Under the high the boys start telling each other their stories and homes between giggles and gags, voices mixed with burnt weed and salt and wet soiled sand. Reita says that back at home they had sea just like the one underneath - but not really because he had never seen it for himself. Yet he knew it was there because every time it rained the sky would smell like fish and rocks and he would sit behind his cracked window at home watching other kids skipping in swim trunks with surf boards and their slicked hair glistened under the sun. He had to watch over his father who was constantly inebriated and a mother whom he wasn’t even sure is his real mother, so that the dad wouldn’t drink himself to death without anyone knowing and the mom wouldn’t run away taking all their money - if they had much to begin with. Reita started using drugs in the first year of highschool, first weed, later much harder dope. He was able to find a few dealers who were willing to cut him deals because even though Reita earned money from the deli he worked at off school, the amount was never enough to fill his pockets. And when he didn’t have enough money for dope, he stole, and got caught almost each time. He got beat up and his belongs were taken. In one such incidence, his nose was broken after it was punched with iron-knuckled fists. He bled and bruised and was bandaged in many parts of his body, but he only stopped stealing after his nose was broken. His verdict was that even after his nose had healed, an irregular bump grew on the bridge and it made him look more crooked than he already was.
“This?”
Ruki brushes his finger over the bump, staining the smell of weed onto Reita’s skin. Reita is about to pick the finger off - but a little too slow when he finds himself held between the deep puckers of Ruki’s lips. But they quickly flutter away only to land on the small bump along Reita’s nose, pressing kisses and flaked skin over and over. Reita, under the bitter and chapped caresses of the younger, slips his fingertips behind Ruki’s ears and rubs lazy patterns onto the skin. All at once, the boys find themselves enmeshed between aching gasps, coarse fingertips, and unbuttoned pajama tops. Their hands graze each other like cold sand papers, leaving streaks weeping in a color that’s a few shades too deep, and evoking sporadic kisses into random places on their bare chests - anywhere their lips can reach.
Ruki falls off the rails onto Reita’s dangling torso, mouth gliding southwards. Reita’s fingers are threaded in Ruki’s golden locks, nails ruined in black soot - yet they are still grabbing, searching for Ruki’s soot littered eyelids, still trying to paint themselves a denser black. Because when all is finished - and it will no matter how desperately fast their breaths are now - these lingering smudges will be the only traces of Ruki’s existence. The monochromatic child that easily fades into the crowd, the one who gropes for ‘miracles’ and greater truths; the cherry-lipped boy who pants vacant syllables of Akira Akira into the gaps between his ribs; and the first person to teach him the pain of heartache.
It’s a naive tenderness, a childish compassion that spreads through the ridges of fingerprints and then anchors deep beneath the bones, waiting to be brushed upon again.
And when it does, the pain will still feel fresh, the soot will still be vivid, and the nostalgic miracles will still clatter inside Reita’s ribs - but never further down.
Because after all, miracles are not always poetic,
and Ruki is not the only one.
-
Miracles. Fin.