Red is the color of my true love's face.
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This makes the third springkink/kinkfest prompt that refuses to lie in wait for two months before being posted.
Title: Riddle-Game
Fandom: Tokyo Babylon
Characters: Subaru, Seishirou
Words: 2900
Rating: PG. Innuendo, teasing.
Irony Cudgel Index: As far as I can tell he juggles bowling balls, but he's not good at it.
Summary: Stuck in traffic on the Haneda, Subaru suggests a game to pass the time. Everyone wins.
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Riddle-Game
tokyo babylon
Mithrigil Galtirglin
1990.10.11
21:06
Traffic groans around them. Clenched, almost disgusting traffic, thick with smog. “You’d think it would be going the other way,” Seishirou sighs in the driver’s seat, “people crowding the route to the festival…”
Subaru shrugs. The vinyl of his jacket’s been squawking every time he moves, all day, and it’s a little worse when it’s not just rubbing against itself because the pleather upholstery in the clinic’s van is also pretty noisy enough on its own. It’s humid for October, and somewhere over all the smoke from the cars outside the sky is red and begging for rain.
“Or maybe they want to get out so that the tourists have the shrine to themselves for the weekend?” Seishirou laughs-the traffic inches forward barely enough for him to let his foot off the brake-the car groans to a stop again. Subaru wishes they were in the leftmost lane so that he could see over the highway’s edge, something other than cars. “Damn. I really am sorry. If I hadn’t insisted on driving-”
“No, don’t-you don’t have to apologize for anything, Seishirou-san.” Turning away from the window and smiling is true, genuine-and Seishirou really shouldn’t be sorry, Subaru thinks, traffic isn’t anyone’s fault. “I’m-glad you drove me.”
“But you must be even more bored than I am,” Seishirou says, with a good-natured smile of his own. “I can’t imagine staring at the same stretch of the Haneda for forty-five minutes is at all stimulating.”
Something about that word, stimulating-
“-We could play a game?” Subaru offers, trying to stifle the blush.
Another hitch in the car, another meter forward. “What sort of game?”
-and the same something about the way he said that, the same teasing-
“Which is the richest fish?” Subaru asks.
“Easy,” Seishirou answers, “the goldfish-aha!” He lets the car roll forward, brakes evenly, and laughs with an arch when it stops again. “I haven’t played a riddle-game in years.”
Subaru knows he’s also smiling-and feels proud, really, that he’s caused it in someone else-in Seishirou especially? Maybe. “My Grandmother is very good at it. I haven’t played it in a long time either, though.”
“No time like the present,” Seishirou says. The car’s braked enough that he can actually turn to Subaru, cock his head, smile. “My turn. Which animal is always ‘going away’, even though it comes?”
This was one of Grandmother’s favorites. “The monkey,” Subaru answers, osaru, because saru is another way of saying ‘to leave’. But there’s another riddle just like this one-does Seishirou know it too? “And which animal is always ‘going back’?”
“The frog,” Seishirou laughs-kaeru. “I hope you’re not just going to stick to the classics,” he says, leaning a little closer.
The pleather of Subaru’s jacket squirms again.
Seishirou looks like he’s considering the next one as the car creeps forward again. “Although it’s full of holes, it carries water well,” he decides on.
It’s one Subaru either hasn’t heard before or doesn’t remember. He looks out the window and up-clouds hold water? But they’re not full of holes…when the ground’s full of holes it holds water but doesn’t carry it… What carries water other than a bucket or a glass? “Is this one of your own riddles?”
“No, this one I learned in middle school.” When Seishirou starts driving again-it looks like he might be trying to change lanes?-Subaru turns to glance at him. The answer’s not outside, that’s for sure. “Should I give you a hint?”
“No, it’s-”
“The first time someone told me this riddle, I’d just been injured,” he says, like he assumed Subaru meant ‘yes’ with that ‘no’. “A pretty bad cut,” he adds, and he reaches across himself with his right hand, holding it so Subaru can see. “That deep scar right along my lifeline, near the wrist.”
Subaru has to turn his head so his mouth doesn’t touch Seishirou’s palm-and, well, so he can actually lower his head to see that. He winces, looks away-toward Seishirou, who doesn’t seem to be hurting anymore, but, still, “That’s a…a good hint,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to.
And then the car jolts, and Seishirou’s hand-
“Sorry,” he says suddenly, prying it sideward and back to the wheel and away from Subaru’s lips because that’s where it was, the palm and the scar-um. “Didn’t hit you, did I?”
“-a sponge?” Subaru guesses.
Seishirou’s glasses shift, and he fixes them with the hand that was just-touching-that was an accident though, right? “You mean the riddle? Exactly right, yes,” he answers, grinning. “It did keep me from concentrating on the cut, though, for a bit. Riddles are good for that. And it’s not like I need to keep my eyes on the road right now,” he adds with something between a laugh and a sigh. “Well, not a lot, I mean. Your turn.”
Subaru nods-that last one was pretty hard, but he knows one a little like it. As far as he knows, Hokuto still doesn’t know the answer to this one. “What’s two brothers running laps on a racetrack?”
“A clock,” Seishirou throws off like it’s nothing. “Hour Hand and Minute Hand.”
“You’re so smart, Seishirou-san.” Subaru leans off the seat, and everything squeaks again, jacket and upholstery.
“I just know a lot about riddles, that’s all-I think traffic might be moving now,” he interrupts himself in a low, kind of hopeful voice, inclined over the steering wheel like a racecar driver. “Come on, we might almost get up to five kilometers an hour…”
Subaru laughs, makes a dramatic effort to hold on to his hat. “I don’t think I can handle going that fast, Seishirou-san!” he jokes, cowering-he wonders when he got so comfortable. Maybe the riddle-game really is that relaxing?
“Well I’d better take things slow with you,” Seishirou chuckles-the car’s moving, so he only glances at Subaru, eyes flickering in the red and white lights outside.
Subaru’s cheeks are getting hot again.
“I wouldn’t want you to get carsick, after all,” Seishirou goes on-laughing. “Other than ‘sick of being in this car’, I suppose.”
That-that makes it easier to say. “Y-your turn, Seishirou-san.”
There’s a big billboard just outside Seishirou’s window right now, towering over the car high enough that Subaru can’t read it-the light kind of drips in from up there, down to around Seishirou’s collar, which is undone, the pins glinting around his loosened tie. “What meets with ‘grandmother’ but not ‘grandfather’?” he asks-using the words that mean his grandparents, baba and zizi.
“Do you have grandparents?” Subaru asks-there might be a hint in that.
Seishirou shakes his head, into and out of the shadow. “I never knew them. Nice try in getting a hint, though.” He smiles, tilts his head. “I can tell you that the hint’s already in the words, though. I don’t need to say anything else for you to know the answer.”
Oh, it’s a sound-riddle then. Subaru nods, tries to think of homonyms for grandmother and grandfather-but isn’t the whole point of the words that there aren’t any? And he can’t ever recall referring to his Grandmother as baba anyway…and he just mentioned her to Seishirou. That strikes him. He repeats the riddle the way Seishirou said it. “What meets with ‘grandmother’ but not with ‘grandfather’…”
The van creeps a few meters forward, stops again to the tune of a good-natured sigh from Seishirou. Subaru hope’s he’s only impatient with the traffic- “Watch me say it,” he says once he’s holding down the brake again, and turns to Subaru. “Look closely.”
He leans in, over the cupholders and map-compartment and change slots, his face-on level with Subaru’s eyes and close, only centimeters away-
“What meets with ‘grandmother’,” he says slow, soft, deliberate, Subaru can feel his breath, “and not with ‘grandfather’?”
“Y-your lips,” Subaru stammers because-because that’s the answer, because he noticed-
“There you go!” Seishirou pulls back to his side of the car, runs a half-open fist along the-steering wheel- “I’m seeing a pattern here. All I have to do is get close to you and all of a sudden-”
“S-Seishirou-san-”
“Ha, are you trying to seduce me now, Subaru-kun?”
“No! No, I mean-I’m sorry-”
“Don’t be sorry,” Seishirou sighs, and-and reaches out to-his fingertips on Subaru’s collar-warm from the wheel- “Your turn now.”
Does he seriously expect Subaru to think?
Pleather creaks, but Subaru can’t tell if he’s-shifting away-
“Ah, finally!” Seishirou suddenly-suddenly takes his hand away and back to the wheel. The car edges up, then curves as it switches lanes, keeps moving-and then Seishirou hangs his head, sullenly. “Serves me right. Now the lane we left is going to start moving.”
“It’s-it’s really okay,” Subaru manages. It sounds more like a question than anything else.
With his bangs hanging into his glasses, Seishirou looks younger-sort of touchable. Not that he looks untouchable usually, except that he, well, does? But now his collar’s undone and he’s frustrated behind his glasses and his knee shifts awkwardly while he holds down the brake and the corners of his mouth are closer together, his cheeks a bit darker.
“I wish I could help,” Subaru says. Once it’s out, it seems incomplete.
Some of the frustration smoothes away, and the scant wrinkles of Seishirou’s smile-he has no dimples, Subaru notices-replace the shadows. “I can teach you to drive, closer to your birthday. And when we’re not stuck on the Haneda.”
“I’d like that,” Subaru says, and can’t hold back the grin. “Thank you so much.”
“It’ll be my pleasure-who’s turn is it to riddle?” he asks before the blush can come back to Subaru’s cheeks, at the way he said everything else.
“Mine, I think.” He thinks. Well, sort of thinks. And that means coming up with another riddle-oh. Sponges. “The more you wipe it, the dirtier it gets,” he says. And then realizes that no, he definitely wasn’t thinking when he said that.
Because Seishirou’s looking at him with raised eyebrows and a-a-a leer.
Subaru gulps. “Um.”
“The answer,” Seishirou says stably and easily, “is ‘a dishtowel’, and you are just about the most adorable thing in the world when you accidentally use sexual innuendo.”
And again.
“Also, red looks especially good on you,” he adds, and reaches over to Subaru’s cheek- “Ah, there,” he mutters, suddenly turning his attention back to the road, which has maybe opened up a little it’s not as if Subaru’s aware of that and. Um. Right. Seishirou drives. Slowly. “Should have prayed to Nichiren and asked for quick travels back at the temple.”
Subaru laughs, but it sounds a lot like a whimper. And that just makes his cheeks get hotter, when he wonders if Seishirou noticed. Of course he noticed. He’s so smart and he’s always looking at Subaru even when he’s not and that’s…it’s frightening but it’s flattering and is the tightening in Subaru’s chest really fear? Or really just fear?
Once the car’s stopped again, Seishirou leans back, tilts his head toward Subaru-smiling. Just smiling. “My turn to riddle, I think,” he says-Subaru watches his mouth now, can’t help it. “You cut it and cut it but it never gets smaller.” The hard shapes of ‘cut’ stand out-but no, this wouldn’t be another phonetic one.
Metaphors, Subaru thinks. Things you use the word ‘cut’ for without using a knife. You ‘cut’ a fine figure in that jacket-Hokuto said that this morning-but no, in some people that’s because it makes them thinner. You…you cut scenes out of a movie, but no, the film gets shorter, and shorter is smaller. You cut etchings and-no. Smaller. And this isn’t the water riddle, that’s the one that goes ‘no matter how many times you cut me, I return to the way I was’. He’ll use that one next. But this one-
“A deck of cards,” Subaru answers. His voice feels stabler, more relaxed.
“Well done.” The cars in the next lane are moving-lights spin and wind and progress behind Seishirou’s window, filter in through his hair and his smile.
This time the blush on Subaru’s cheeks is prouder, more ‘warm’ than ‘hot’. “My turn?”
“Go ahead.”
Subaru smiles, a little. “No matter how many times you cut me, I return to the way I was.” He remembers fooling Hokuto with this one before-and a few of the clan elders, but doesn’t know from whom he heard it first.
There’s another breach in the traffic, and Seishirou’s attention is on it-still not enough that he can do more than ride the brake, but enough that the next exit sign is close enough for both of them to read now, even over all the cars. Still two more to go before the Hamasakibashi. Subaru watches Seishirou glance at it as well, and laugh, low and breathy. “Water,” Seishirou says. “I had to think about it for a moment, but the exit sign reminded me.”
Bayshore Route, it says. It’s the one that heads to the bridge, coming up.
He goes on, “Unless you actually remove or add water, you can’t displace it. And even then, its surface always flattens. That’s a good riddle, Subaru-kun.”
“Thank you,” Subaru says. His jacket chirps, he looks down. “Your turn now.”
There’s a flash of something across Seishirou’s jaw-actual light from outside, or just a shift in his expression? It’s hard to tell. Glancing at Subaru, he starts-oh, this is going to be- “Since we’re on the subject of water, what always puts on wet clothes and is stripped when they’re dry?”
The sounds of the jacket, the seat, and something in Subaru’s throat twist in the air. “I-um. A clothesline.” Not as-not as bad as he thought it would be. And not so hard to guess- “What comes apart at daytime and stays together all night?” Oh no!
“You are trying to seduce me, aren’t you.”
“S-Seishirou-san, I-”
“Eyelids,” he answers, leaning across the cupholders again-voice lower-cars outside stable and still and billboards looming, black- “If we’re going to play that game-what’s sucked in from the bottom and let out the mouth?”
No. Words. None at all. Never. The-the car’s so warm and it’s starting to rain outside and the engine is humming up through the seat-the band of his hat is tight-the world is-fogging-
“Ci-ci-cigarette smoke?” he thinks he might have said aloud, maybe.
That-that smirk shines. “Exactly. Your turn, now.”
How does Seishirou expect him to do anything with-with- “The-the more I withstand, the-smaller I get-”
“A candle,” he answers in a breath like it’s nothing, like it’s easy, like he’s centimeters away and that, that’s the sound of the seatbelt being pushed to the limit. His collar’s undone. His lips are so near. His hands are off the wheel.
The sky is red.
“Two things that are useful, two things that are iron,” he says like a song, and maybe it was one, and one of his hands is on Subaru’s jacket, “one keeps and one kills, but they have the same name.”
Subaru doesn’t answer.
Pleather squeaks-and then car horns, engines, pebble-sounds and stutters, whirling shoving lights and someone shouting-
“Fine, fine!” Seishirou half-shouts back, pulling away to glare out the window and get back to the wheel and-and drive, just another few meters forward. The van-creeps, from one stopping place to another. And. And Subaru breathes.
With another exasperated sigh, Seishirou turns the windshield wipers on. There aren’t any billboards in the way now-Over Seishirou’s shoulder the bridge gleams along the bay, the drizzle and the red sky haloing the lights.
“Ha, take a look-Tokyo’s blushing even worse than you are, Subaru-kun.” There’s enough road ahead now to drive, really drive, but he’s still somehow looking at Subaru, the way he’s always looking at Subaru. “I wonder if I did something to offend.”
“N-nothing,” Subaru whispers. His jacket shifts, croaks. “Nothing at all, Seishirou-san.”
---
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Riddles from:
Japanese Riddles I
Elizabeth I. Moore and W. D. Preston
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1951), pp. 122-134
About the festival of O-Eshiki.
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This makes the third springkink/kinkfest prompt that refuses to lie in wait for two months before being posted.
Title: Riddle-Game
Fandom: Tokyo Babylon
Characters: Subaru, Seishirou
Words: 2900
Rating: PG. Innuendo, teasing.
Irony Cudgel Index: As far as I can tell he juggles bowling balls, but he's not good at it.
Summary: Stuck in traffic on the Haneda, Subaru suggests a game to pass the time. Everyone wins.
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Riddle-Game
tokyo babylon
Mithrigil Galtirglin
1990.10.11
21:06
Traffic groans around them. Clenched, almost disgusting traffic, thick with smog. “You’d think it would be going the other way,” Seishirou sighs in the driver’s seat, “people crowding the route to the festival…”
Subaru shrugs. The vinyl of his jacket’s been squawking every time he moves, all day, and it’s a little worse when it’s not just rubbing against itself because the pleather upholstery in the clinic’s van is also pretty noisy enough on its own. It’s humid for October, and somewhere over all the smoke from the cars outside the sky is red and begging for rain.
“Or maybe they want to get out so that the tourists have the shrine to themselves for the weekend?” Seishirou laughs-the traffic inches forward barely enough for him to let his foot off the brake-the car groans to a stop again. Subaru wishes they were in the leftmost lane so that he could see over the highway’s edge, something other than cars. “Damn. I really am sorry. If I hadn’t insisted on driving-”
“No, don’t-you don’t have to apologize for anything, Seishirou-san.” Turning away from the window and smiling is true, genuine-and Seishirou really shouldn’t be sorry, Subaru thinks, traffic isn’t anyone’s fault. “I’m-glad you drove me.”
“But you must be even more bored than I am,” Seishirou says, with a good-natured smile of his own. “I can’t imagine staring at the same stretch of the Haneda for forty-five minutes is at all stimulating.”
Something about that word, stimulating-
“-We could play a game?” Subaru offers, trying to stifle the blush.
Another hitch in the car, another meter forward. “What sort of game?”
-and the same something about the way he said that, the same teasing-
“Which is the richest fish?” Subaru asks.
“Easy,” Seishirou answers, “the goldfish-aha!” He lets the car roll forward, brakes evenly, and laughs with an arch when it stops again. “I haven’t played a riddle-game in years.”
Subaru knows he’s also smiling-and feels proud, really, that he’s caused it in someone else-in Seishirou especially? Maybe. “My Grandmother is very good at it. I haven’t played it in a long time either, though.”
“No time like the present,” Seishirou says. The car’s braked enough that he can actually turn to Subaru, cock his head, smile. “My turn. Which animal is always ‘going away’, even though it comes?”
This was one of Grandmother’s favorites. “The monkey,” Subaru answers, osaru, because saru is another way of saying ‘to leave’. But there’s another riddle just like this one-does Seishirou know it too? “And which animal is always ‘going back’?”
“The frog,” Seishirou laughs-kaeru. “I hope you’re not just going to stick to the classics,” he says, leaning a little closer.
The pleather of Subaru’s jacket squirms again.
Seishirou looks like he’s considering the next one as the car creeps forward again. “Although it’s full of holes, it carries water well,” he decides on.
It’s one Subaru either hasn’t heard before or doesn’t remember. He looks out the window and up-clouds hold water? But they’re not full of holes…when the ground’s full of holes it holds water but doesn’t carry it… What carries water other than a bucket or a glass? “Is this one of your own riddles?”
“No, this one I learned in middle school.” When Seishirou starts driving again-it looks like he might be trying to change lanes?-Subaru turns to glance at him. The answer’s not outside, that’s for sure. “Should I give you a hint?”
“No, it’s-”
“The first time someone told me this riddle, I’d just been injured,” he says, like he assumed Subaru meant ‘yes’ with that ‘no’. “A pretty bad cut,” he adds, and he reaches across himself with his right hand, holding it so Subaru can see. “That deep scar right along my lifeline, near the wrist.”
Subaru has to turn his head so his mouth doesn’t touch Seishirou’s palm-and, well, so he can actually lower his head to see that. He winces, looks away-toward Seishirou, who doesn’t seem to be hurting anymore, but, still, “That’s a…a good hint,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to.
And then the car jolts, and Seishirou’s hand-
“Sorry,” he says suddenly, prying it sideward and back to the wheel and away from Subaru’s lips because that’s where it was, the palm and the scar-um. “Didn’t hit you, did I?”
“-a sponge?” Subaru guesses.
Seishirou’s glasses shift, and he fixes them with the hand that was just-touching-that was an accident though, right? “You mean the riddle? Exactly right, yes,” he answers, grinning. “It did keep me from concentrating on the cut, though, for a bit. Riddles are good for that. And it’s not like I need to keep my eyes on the road right now,” he adds with something between a laugh and a sigh. “Well, not a lot, I mean. Your turn.”
Subaru nods-that last one was pretty hard, but he knows one a little like it. As far as he knows, Hokuto still doesn’t know the answer to this one. “What’s two brothers running laps on a racetrack?”
“A clock,” Seishirou throws off like it’s nothing. “Hour Hand and Minute Hand.”
“You’re so smart, Seishirou-san.” Subaru leans off the seat, and everything squeaks again, jacket and upholstery.
“I just know a lot about riddles, that’s all-I think traffic might be moving now,” he interrupts himself in a low, kind of hopeful voice, inclined over the steering wheel like a racecar driver. “Come on, we might almost get up to five kilometers an hour…”
Subaru laughs, makes a dramatic effort to hold on to his hat. “I don’t think I can handle going that fast, Seishirou-san!” he jokes, cowering-he wonders when he got so comfortable. Maybe the riddle-game really is that relaxing?
“Well I’d better take things slow with you,” Seishirou chuckles-the car’s moving, so he only glances at Subaru, eyes flickering in the red and white lights outside.
Subaru’s cheeks are getting hot again.
“I wouldn’t want you to get carsick, after all,” Seishirou goes on-laughing. “Other than ‘sick of being in this car’, I suppose.”
That-that makes it easier to say. “Y-your turn, Seishirou-san.”
There’s a big billboard just outside Seishirou’s window right now, towering over the car high enough that Subaru can’t read it-the light kind of drips in from up there, down to around Seishirou’s collar, which is undone, the pins glinting around his loosened tie. “What meets with ‘grandmother’ but not ‘grandfather’?” he asks-using the words that mean his grandparents, baba and zizi.
“Do you have grandparents?” Subaru asks-there might be a hint in that.
Seishirou shakes his head, into and out of the shadow. “I never knew them. Nice try in getting a hint, though.” He smiles, tilts his head. “I can tell you that the hint’s already in the words, though. I don’t need to say anything else for you to know the answer.”
Oh, it’s a sound-riddle then. Subaru nods, tries to think of homonyms for grandmother and grandfather-but isn’t the whole point of the words that there aren’t any? And he can’t ever recall referring to his Grandmother as baba anyway…and he just mentioned her to Seishirou. That strikes him. He repeats the riddle the way Seishirou said it. “What meets with ‘grandmother’ but not with ‘grandfather’…”
The van creeps a few meters forward, stops again to the tune of a good-natured sigh from Seishirou. Subaru hope’s he’s only impatient with the traffic- “Watch me say it,” he says once he’s holding down the brake again, and turns to Subaru. “Look closely.”
He leans in, over the cupholders and map-compartment and change slots, his face-on level with Subaru’s eyes and close, only centimeters away-
“What meets with ‘grandmother’,” he says slow, soft, deliberate, Subaru can feel his breath, “and not with ‘grandfather’?”
“Y-your lips,” Subaru stammers because-because that’s the answer, because he noticed-
“There you go!” Seishirou pulls back to his side of the car, runs a half-open fist along the-steering wheel- “I’m seeing a pattern here. All I have to do is get close to you and all of a sudden-”
“S-Seishirou-san-”
“Ha, are you trying to seduce me now, Subaru-kun?”
“No! No, I mean-I’m sorry-”
“Don’t be sorry,” Seishirou sighs, and-and reaches out to-his fingertips on Subaru’s collar-warm from the wheel- “Your turn now.”
Does he seriously expect Subaru to think?
Pleather creaks, but Subaru can’t tell if he’s-shifting away-
“Ah, finally!” Seishirou suddenly-suddenly takes his hand away and back to the wheel. The car edges up, then curves as it switches lanes, keeps moving-and then Seishirou hangs his head, sullenly. “Serves me right. Now the lane we left is going to start moving.”
“It’s-it’s really okay,” Subaru manages. It sounds more like a question than anything else.
With his bangs hanging into his glasses, Seishirou looks younger-sort of touchable. Not that he looks untouchable usually, except that he, well, does? But now his collar’s undone and he’s frustrated behind his glasses and his knee shifts awkwardly while he holds down the brake and the corners of his mouth are closer together, his cheeks a bit darker.
“I wish I could help,” Subaru says. Once it’s out, it seems incomplete.
Some of the frustration smoothes away, and the scant wrinkles of Seishirou’s smile-he has no dimples, Subaru notices-replace the shadows. “I can teach you to drive, closer to your birthday. And when we’re not stuck on the Haneda.”
“I’d like that,” Subaru says, and can’t hold back the grin. “Thank you so much.”
“It’ll be my pleasure-who’s turn is it to riddle?” he asks before the blush can come back to Subaru’s cheeks, at the way he said everything else.
“Mine, I think.” He thinks. Well, sort of thinks. And that means coming up with another riddle-oh. Sponges. “The more you wipe it, the dirtier it gets,” he says. And then realizes that no, he definitely wasn’t thinking when he said that.
Because Seishirou’s looking at him with raised eyebrows and a-a-a leer.
Subaru gulps. “Um.”
“The answer,” Seishirou says stably and easily, “is ‘a dishtowel’, and you are just about the most adorable thing in the world when you accidentally use sexual innuendo.”
And again.
“Also, red looks especially good on you,” he adds, and reaches over to Subaru’s cheek- “Ah, there,” he mutters, suddenly turning his attention back to the road, which has maybe opened up a little it’s not as if Subaru’s aware of that and. Um. Right. Seishirou drives. Slowly. “Should have prayed to Nichiren and asked for quick travels back at the temple.”
Subaru laughs, but it sounds a lot like a whimper. And that just makes his cheeks get hotter, when he wonders if Seishirou noticed. Of course he noticed. He’s so smart and he’s always looking at Subaru even when he’s not and that’s…it’s frightening but it’s flattering and is the tightening in Subaru’s chest really fear? Or really just fear?
Once the car’s stopped again, Seishirou leans back, tilts his head toward Subaru-smiling. Just smiling. “My turn to riddle, I think,” he says-Subaru watches his mouth now, can’t help it. “You cut it and cut it but it never gets smaller.” The hard shapes of ‘cut’ stand out-but no, this wouldn’t be another phonetic one.
Metaphors, Subaru thinks. Things you use the word ‘cut’ for without using a knife. You ‘cut’ a fine figure in that jacket-Hokuto said that this morning-but no, in some people that’s because it makes them thinner. You…you cut scenes out of a movie, but no, the film gets shorter, and shorter is smaller. You cut etchings and-no. Smaller. And this isn’t the water riddle, that’s the one that goes ‘no matter how many times you cut me, I return to the way I was’. He’ll use that one next. But this one-
“A deck of cards,” Subaru answers. His voice feels stabler, more relaxed.
“Well done.” The cars in the next lane are moving-lights spin and wind and progress behind Seishirou’s window, filter in through his hair and his smile.
This time the blush on Subaru’s cheeks is prouder, more ‘warm’ than ‘hot’. “My turn?”
“Go ahead.”
Subaru smiles, a little. “No matter how many times you cut me, I return to the way I was.” He remembers fooling Hokuto with this one before-and a few of the clan elders, but doesn’t know from whom he heard it first.
There’s another breach in the traffic, and Seishirou’s attention is on it-still not enough that he can do more than ride the brake, but enough that the next exit sign is close enough for both of them to read now, even over all the cars. Still two more to go before the Hamasakibashi. Subaru watches Seishirou glance at it as well, and laugh, low and breathy. “Water,” Seishirou says. “I had to think about it for a moment, but the exit sign reminded me.”
Bayshore Route, it says. It’s the one that heads to the bridge, coming up.
He goes on, “Unless you actually remove or add water, you can’t displace it. And even then, its surface always flattens. That’s a good riddle, Subaru-kun.”
“Thank you,” Subaru says. His jacket chirps, he looks down. “Your turn now.”
There’s a flash of something across Seishirou’s jaw-actual light from outside, or just a shift in his expression? It’s hard to tell. Glancing at Subaru, he starts-oh, this is going to be- “Since we’re on the subject of water, what always puts on wet clothes and is stripped when they’re dry?”
The sounds of the jacket, the seat, and something in Subaru’s throat twist in the air. “I-um. A clothesline.” Not as-not as bad as he thought it would be. And not so hard to guess- “What comes apart at daytime and stays together all night?” Oh no!
“You are trying to seduce me, aren’t you.”
“S-Seishirou-san, I-”
“Eyelids,” he answers, leaning across the cupholders again-voice lower-cars outside stable and still and billboards looming, black- “If we’re going to play that game-what’s sucked in from the bottom and let out the mouth?”
No. Words. None at all. Never. The-the car’s so warm and it’s starting to rain outside and the engine is humming up through the seat-the band of his hat is tight-the world is-fogging-
“Ci-ci-cigarette smoke?” he thinks he might have said aloud, maybe.
That-that smirk shines. “Exactly. Your turn, now.”
How does Seishirou expect him to do anything with-with- “The-the more I withstand, the-smaller I get-”
“A candle,” he answers in a breath like it’s nothing, like it’s easy, like he’s centimeters away and that, that’s the sound of the seatbelt being pushed to the limit. His collar’s undone. His lips are so near. His hands are off the wheel.
The sky is red.
“Two things that are useful, two things that are iron,” he says like a song, and maybe it was one, and one of his hands is on Subaru’s jacket, “one keeps and one kills, but they have the same name.”
Subaru doesn’t answer.
Pleather squeaks-and then car horns, engines, pebble-sounds and stutters, whirling shoving lights and someone shouting-
“Fine, fine!” Seishirou half-shouts back, pulling away to glare out the window and get back to the wheel and-and drive, just another few meters forward. The van-creeps, from one stopping place to another. And. And Subaru breathes.
With another exasperated sigh, Seishirou turns the windshield wipers on. There aren’t any billboards in the way now-Over Seishirou’s shoulder the bridge gleams along the bay, the drizzle and the red sky haloing the lights.
“Ha, take a look-Tokyo’s blushing even worse than you are, Subaru-kun.” There’s enough road ahead now to drive, really drive, but he’s still somehow looking at Subaru, the way he’s always looking at Subaru. “I wonder if I did something to offend.”
“N-nothing,” Subaru whispers. His jacket shifts, croaks. “Nothing at all, Seishirou-san.”
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Riddles from:
Japanese Riddles I
Elizabeth I. Moore and W. D. Preston
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1951), pp. 122-134
About the festival of O-Eshiki.
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