I Weave Unto You
Title: I Weave Unto You
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 4,130
Pairing: Ohno/Nino
Summary: Ohno possesses a supernatural ability: he has colors on his fingers. What he touches leaves a trace, and maybe not always in the ways he intends.
Warnings/Notes: This piece is a bit emotionally supernatural? Or supernaturally emotional? I can't even tell anymore. I've just always wanted to write about Ohmiya's touchy-feeliness without smothering it in fluff. Does it work? IDK, you tell me.
He wasn’t born with colors on his fingers.
At least, that’s what his mother tells him. His first memory of it is after doing finger painting in daycare. He starts by pressing his thumb on the paper three times, one blue thumbprint for every family member, then fading inch-long smears for their bodies, and finally lines made with his pinkie finger for their arms and legs. It becomes a mess by the end of the class, but he remembers being satisfied with his creation when it’s hung on the bulletin board along with everybody else’s. His teacher calls his mom, alarmed for some reason.
Some of the ink never washes off-or at least, it appears that way. Ohno hardly remembers the hospital corridors and the parade of faceless doctors that follow, but never forgets what his mom tells him one day when the hospital visits finally stop.
“The color is alive inside you, Satoshi.”
“Is…is that okay? Am I allowed to keep it?”
“Yes. But you need to keep it close.”
It isn’t ink, but it’s something. There are shots of blue all over most of his fingers on both hands, a light cerulean shade that can pass for veins for the unobservant. The minute his breath hitches, or when he finds himself drawn by something in particular, there is no hiding it. The snaking blue threads glow bright like moonrise. Ohno likes it.
His playmates draw back. I don’t wanna draw with Satoshi, they whine. Ohno doesn’t understand what’s wrong. He draws the same pictures of monkeys and anime characters that they do. The only difference is that he has a hand that glows like primeval tentacles under a star-less night-a difference that he doesn’t really see much as a big deal.
He learns to stuff his hands in his pockets and to draw only inside the refuge of his bedroom. He doesn’t want to be called strange anymore.
*
When his voice breaks, the blue is almost faded. No one notices it unless they know to look for it, and Ohno tells absolutely no one. It’s not a big feat, because he doesn’t relish talking much. He learns that words never match up to what he sees or feels. There are other ways to make himself understood.
He finds himself dancing on a small stage, far from home, three times a day. The fine drapery of his traditional costume hides his limbs, all except his hands.
The instructor always makes him dance in front, even when he doesn’t make any effort to stand out. Ohno is uncomfortable with the sudden deluge of compliments-he feels better when the instructor throws coffee cans at him when he zones out. When eyes are on him, when he feels the sharp edge of jealousy thanks to the attention showered on him, it throws him off.
But not enough to stop dancing well, apparently. “I know not all of you are blessed with Ohno-kun’s graceful fingers, but look at how they tell a story,” the instructor enthuses with a commanding clap.
No one sees the colors-Ohno has checked it himself in the mirrors many times. But his hands are the beginning of movement for him, the opening sentence of a novel, the initial impression of a note in the air. His impulses begin on his fingertips, and instead of the cool calm that the blue would suggest, he feels as if they are on fire. Move, the threads implore him. The music and movement flow inside him.
He is homesick, but dancing feels like breathing. His hands feel the currents moving around him and senses the spaces that his body can occupy. He can only listen and fill those shapes with his limbs.
*
Nino likes touching him. The only reason he allows it is that it excuses him from his own curiosity, from how it would feel like to taper his fingers down the angles of Nino’s shoulder as slowly as he dares. There isn’t a shirt ragged enough to hide the startling grace of Nino’s slim build nor the jut of his collarbones. For the first time in his life, Ohno is sharply aware of another person, of how his breathing changes slightly around him. It started with a joke, Ohno cannot remember now, but it’s become second-nature. Nino touches him, and he allows it.
His touches never feel like a violation-they are more like flowers tenderly tucked in the barrels of rifles, briefly soft against hard planes, playful, yet hushed. Nino huffs into corners of him that he doesn’t know exist and raises hackles that chill his stomach. The first time he ventures to swaths of skin that normally are out of bounds, Ohno doesn’t think it’s anything out of the normal. The fingers curled lightly on his hip bone, the minute tugging on his hair, the hand imprint on the back of his thighs, riding up to his backside-they are all just part of Nino when he walked into his life.
He feels the threads throbbing inside him in recognition, as if they want to jump out of him, out of his skin. Ohno almost tells him out of desperation.
“My hands hurt,” he starts. “For you.” Nino considers him for a moment, then laughs.
“Silly Oh-chan.” He slithers into his chest, not minding their audience, not minding his words. They do not make sense to him either. They are both young, wondering why conversations suddenly have new pretexts, or why they have to navigate layers of meaning, when skin is simple. Skin is easy.
*
They hold hands, and Ohno tries to hold himself in, doesn’t want himself spilling all over the place. He is careful never to light up for Nino. He’s never been the type to be self-conscious, but he doesn’t want to be tied down to what he cannot control, what he cannot understand. Nino doesn’t ask why he never initiates, and Ohno is content with Nino walking into his personal spaces, with Nino soldering to his sides comfortably, with Nino touching him, and never vice-versa. The world rearranges to their gravity. They just are, and Ohno accepts that easily, if not instantly.
He suspects that Nino sometimes gets lonely, just like he does. In a city like theirs, doing the job that they do, there are limits that take them years to adhere to willingly, much less understand.
Ohno sees countless girls, maybe a couple of guys too. There’s also that one older woman who tells him every time that he’s a precious thing, a secret to keep, even though he laughs at her face the first time. She holds her against him, scritches closely-cut fingernails lightly against his scalp, her face innocent, voice calm and reasonable. Months of hiding, of looking for purchase in her, for something honest-he swears in his heart that he’ll know it when he sees it. It’s something he needs to do, something he can do to her that will make it worth it.
The first night, in the heat of the moment when he finally, finally touches her, it happens. Blue coils of light start to surround her neck, wrapping her pale skin in neat x’s, down her slender thighs to her toes, the illumination trembling and primordial. She grips into his shoulders, eyes wild, crying out. He isn’t gentle, not with her. Ohno knows that the crescent nail marks will be there in the morning.
Yes, just like this, she murmurs against the damp sinew of his arm, his dark scent. Ohno wheels her around, her back to him, wondering at the furious patterns of blue on her back. He feels out of control when he comes in a quiet, escalating rush.
When the shower turns on, it’s his cue to leave. The trains aren’t even running yet. It’s like she couldn’t stand to be around him, like he would break, like he couldn’t handle his light. She keeps him as a secret, and guards him jealously, even against herself. The way she brushes him off when they’re done chasing their own orgasms feels like an admonishment.
But she makes Ohno feel so good, a vessel for his energy, somewhere to drown his frustrations about what he’s doing with his life. She’s cold around the edges, but she doesn’t prod him. Ohno finds himself finding what joy he can from both the intimacy and the distance that she gives him-and he simply lights up. He lights her up, draws maps of heat on her skin, the hottest blue of a flame, his hand over her mouth.
They never break up-instead, they dance around it, playing the painful game of who could care less and less and less, because they have never learned to talk beyond the desire that consumed them. Camera flashes blow up in his face. Her nose and eyes are blurred into muffled white and grey on newsprint. Where were they walking to that night? He doesn’t rememer. Had he really made her laugh that much, out in public? Why do other people care what apartment he leaves from, enough to make headlines about it? Why is his manager giving him that look? Why does it have to make Jun’s eyes grave with worry, Aiba’s with compassion, and Sho’s with consideration?
Why does she never take it out on him? Why is she not angry?
His paintings from that time are all furious blue lines and flesh-toned squares. Nino asks him about the stale blue paint stuck on the sides of fingernails. He shrugs. All he thinks about is being told by her that his youth is a liability, that he shines too much, that she cannot bear to contain him anymore, that he is too much. That one last time, he is gentle, and it’s the first time he sees her cry.
“Did you know that it hurts? That it has hurt, all this time,” she says. There is a moment where he doesn’t quite know what she’s saying, then after it, just a deluge, a raging waterfall of understanding. He has hurt her, over and over-when he could have controlled himself.
His apologies evaporate on her skin, against her whispers that she likes it, has always liked it, that she’s sorry, that it never hurt her against her will-and Ohno, Ohno crumbles at what he has done. He cannot forgive her, or himself.
“I’ll wash them off,” Ohno says.
“No one cares, honestly,” Nino whispers, grabbing his hands. “No one cares about your dirty fingers, no one cares about the pictures, about all of that. It’s mostly about what everything’s doing to you.”
“It’s nothing.”
Nino simply holds his hand, and he allows himself to grasp at his knuckles tighter than he ever has before. He realizes that he can stand to be so achingly alone around Nino-and the thought is enough to tide him over for the day, no matter how much he wants to remove the light from his skin, in gashes, in wide strips, violently and completely.
*
When Nino grows distant, slowly but surely, Ohno suddenly finds his surroundings thrown into chaos. It feels like the corners of rooms are beginning to warp towards each other, closing in on him impossibly. His hands are dull, almost normal, and he wonders if it’s Nino’s growing moodiness, or his own implacability.
He has been wanting to disappear, itching to leave everyone’s expectation at the departure gate. He’s thinking Hawaii. India. Okinawa. A mirage of warm places, and importantly, just simply away. It’s not that his heart is not in it anymore-he cannot imagine four other people he can do this with. But he wonders what a quiet life would truly be like, of being free to do as he pleases. He remembers dancing on the stage, much younger than he is now. No one had known his name, and it’s a luxury he would love to have. To be nameless, to pass by peopled streets and not to have to worry about being Ohno Satoshi, the idol.
They never talk about things like that, Nino and him. So when Ohno, subdued by beer and post-concert exhaustion, confesses his feelings of not wanting to be there anymore, Nino understandably looks at him like he’s someone new. Even in the noisy bar, he could hear Nino without him saying a thing. He drinks the last of his draft beer, subtly signaling for another one. Ohno wonders when they started to drift, when even the smallest line on Nino’s smooth face feel like months of neglect, of never seeking him out, of just sheer missing him. Age is startling on Nino, the creep of his 30s slow but almost out of place in his dog-like features. Ohno wants to trace the lines besides his mouth, those parentheses that have only come out in recent years. He sips his beer instead.
Later, as they huddle together, sides touching, as snow flurries all over Sapporo, Nino asks him.
“When?”
His breath billows out as a white, whispy cloud. Somehow, a sense of panic grips his heart at Nino’s tone. “It’s not a done thing. I’m not leaving tomorrow or anything like that.”
“But you’re thinking about it.”
Ohno is about to say something when their manager arrives with the van. The heater is stifling, but it’s nothing compared to what he wants to say to Nino. When they reach their floor, Nino walks in front of him, hands stuffed in his coat. He takes out his card key, the click of the lock mechanism awfully audible-or maybe it’s just their combined silence. Ohno hovers behind him.
Nino turns around, eyes shaded. “If you’re waiting, don’t. I’m not going to ask.”
So Ohno doesn’t say anything either. Instead, he follows Nino inside his room, notes how clean it is, how he has brought almost nothing with him to the tour. Nino removes his coat and throws himself down on the bed. Ohno follows suit, toe-ing off his boots, wondering why this doesn’t feel weird, like he’s just revisiting something that’s always existed.
They don’t face each other. Instead, they find themselves looking up at the white ceiling. He doesn’t have to strain to hear Nino breathing, the sheets rustling whenever he adjusts his position.
“If you leave-and this is not a threat-we will be over. The five of us,” Nino says. “It won’t work, not without you, or if anyone is missing.”
“I know,” Ohno replies, because it’s a truth that they’ve become intimate with through the years, that they have become who they are because it was the five of them, not one less, not one more. Nino folds the pillow under his head in half, propping himself up higher.
“Where would you even go?”
“Nino.”
“No, humor me, Oh-chan.”
He closes his eyes. “I want to dance for myself, or maybe paint,” he starts, and he doesn’t stop. He tells Nino about all the places he would go to, about how he would probably botch things up in some way because of the language barrier. He confesses that he wants to make friends with people who’s never seen his face on a billboard, that he wants summer to last forever. Nino casually throws his ankle over his, finally facing him, and Ohno opens his eyes, opens his heart, tells Nino that he is afraid of what it means to be constantly having to rein himself in, that it’s impossible. He tells Nino that one day, everyone will know, that he doesn’t deserve the spotlight, that he has hurt someone, that the regret is brutal, that it hurts him to grow apart from Nino, that he knows that there are new spaces between them, shapes and silences that he cannot discern. That out of everything, it makes him want to bolt the most, that Nino is being distant, that he himself can’t touch him, not yet, because how could Nino want the same thing?
Somehow, they both know that Ohno has crossed a line, and they stop and stare at each other in waking recognition of it.
“You want to be touched?” Nino asks, eyes wide. “By me.”
And they’re not playing anymore, they’re not kids anymore, not Juniors just fucking around like boys. Ohno licks his lips and nods.
“And you are afraid of touching me?”
“I’m not a saint, Nino,” he says, voice soft.
He reaches out for Ohno’s face, and Ohno could swear that Nino’s face emitted a light of their own. He feels brittle under his touch.
“I’m not asking for you to be. In fact, it’s pretty stupid how you’ve never ever talked so much as you did just now, not to me anyway, but it’s only to let me know just how much you’ve never understood me.”
Ohno’s heart racing at having Nino so close. “I try.”
Nino closes his eyes, taking his hand away. “I won’t be the reason for you staying or not. That’s unfair, and you know it.” After a moment, he opens his eyes again. “You have to want me, despite of everything. Because that’s the way I’ve always wanted you.”
Ohno thinks his heart has stopped altogether. He is about to say something when Nino leans over the side table and switches off the light. “Let’s sleep, Oh-chan.”
He gives up for tonight, missing the touch of Nino’s hand. “Okay.”
Nino turns away from him.
*
Everyone else hasn’t arrived yet. Nino is by the deserted catering room, waiting for the studio coffee machine to finish dripping a less than stellar cappucino. There’s something dear but also terribly dangerous about how his loose-fitting jeans drape on his hips, the hem of his frayed shirt barely concealing it. So artless, so mindless, Ohno thinks. He doesn’t know when he started looking this much-at Nino, at the details that make him, him. But he knows he’s always looked. Nino, small as he is, takes up every room, commands residence even in unrelated thoughts.
It’s been a year since their conversation in a hotel that he doesn’t even remember. Somehow, he knows that Nino is skirting around him, like he is about to bolt. Nino doesn’t touch him.
Nino rubs the ridiculous 4 a.m. call-time out of his eyes, the humming, mechanical sounds of the coffee machine drowning out the production din outside. It’s true-the biggest realizations simmer in the background for a long time, only for it to come up in the most incovenient moment. Ohno feels awake now. The impulse throbs in his hands, stronger than ever. More than anything, he trusts in his feelings-that he won’t break him, that he is not that kind of person.
That Nino is different, has always been different.
That he himself is not terrible, but that’s not much. And there is a kind of release in that.
*
It’s his seventh exhibition.
He holds his breath when four men walk towards where he is, patches of bright in the all-black hallway, dim and moody like he had intended. They are just meters away; they haven’t even seen him yet. He watches them, their gazes varying on one of his light streaked canvasses.
“4x4,” he hears Sho reading out loud.
Ohno wonders if they are easily recognizable in the way that he sees them-a bright, mauve-red for Sho’s bruised lips, the reverse inclination of Jun’s torso, done in pale flesh and sinewy muscle, the blackhole of Aiba’s eye specked with the darkest navy. And Nino, Nino’s soft, pillowy hands, bright blue and dragon green veins against an almost-white.
They are all rippled with light, the light that he has always kept for himself. He had searched everywhere for the right oil paint, the right consistency. They are lit in fragments, in the different ways that Ohno feels for them.
Painting the four of them was never something he planned, but it was all that consumed him for half a year. He ached for an understanding of them, his comrades for so long, so near and familiar that sometimes they had resembled caricatures: caricatures that never came near the dearness that they have always occupied in his memories. He had panicked-he doesn’t ever want to lose the feeling of each, of five, of those fevered years.
Later, when they are grabbing drinks in a repurposed and now painfully hip bodega-a location researched by Sho-Jun asks him, point-blank and in his serious Jun way, why he chose those particular body parts. “Why is it my back?”
“Isn’t that easily the most beautiful part of you? The strongest?”
Jun sips on his whisky. “You’re saying that with a straight face.”
“You have a lovely back, it’s honestly the best.”
“It took you until we're all here in New York in a random bar to say it?"
They all look at each other, a collective measurement that they’ve all but mastered every nuance of, before they burst out laughing. He has long been forgiven. Ohno tries not to react when Nino slips his warm hand into his under the table, squeezing gently.
He looks at him, sees the peppered white on his temples. Nino is still beautiful. His fingers wrap around Nino’s, muscle memory moving his thumb against his soft skin. Nino’s gaze is petulant and straight out of 2004, but he doesn’t waver.
When he turns back to the other three, their eyes are wide.
*
A stranger jogs up the stairs from the subway. She huffs through the exertion, when something catches her eye to the right. Through the windows of what looks to be a muted bar, she sees two men hunched beside each other.
Their skin is wrapped in subtle coils of snaking blue.
*
“This view sucks,” Nino says.
He stands up, consumed with a desire to reach out like he never has before. Nino flinches when Ohno suddenly, but gently, reaches out to hug him from behind. He smells like the downy warmth of laundry rooms and a certain spiky Nino-ness. Tokyo Tower gleams from far away, a small red insect in a sea of sleeplessness.
“What are you doing?”
“Can I,” he murmurs. His chin finds rest on the slope of Nino’s shoulder.
It’s when he relaxes into his touch, his spine neatly slotting into Ohno’s chest, that the corners return to where they should be and a rush of warmth engulfs him from the inside. It’s been years, yet the tufts of Nino’s hair against his muzzle catapults him back to the feverish days of youth. Of blond hair, of hands held haphazardly, of singing about a girl hiding her angel wings.
They breathe together. Ohno closes his eyes, seeing better that way. It feels good to be this close to him, to be the one embracing Nino, to holding what has always been confusingly just in reach.
“There really are blue things,” Nino whispers, a touch alarmed.
His eyes fly open in surprise. Blue threads sprout from his fingers, wrapping around his arms, circling around Nino’s torso and neck. They glow with a blue-grey tinge, pressing against Nino’s skin with just the slightest pressure. Ohno imagines the skin under the fabric giving way, lines cleaving to him, blood rushing to his pores. The blue slithers tighter around Nino with his every thought, growing brighter in his eyes the longer he imagines.
He loosens his arms, expecting Nino to jump away. “Does it hurt?”
Instead, he drapes his arms over Ohno’s, urging him to come closer again. “No. But what are they?” he asks, his voice a touch smaller, older than Ohno’s used to.
“I don’t know either. I’ve always had them, but never this bright.” Never with you, not until now-he breathes, unheard. Nino twists in his arms, his skin looking even paler against the ropes of light. The golden hues in his eyes are sharp-edged tonight, and Ohno knows that something between them has fundamentally changed-all because he touched him first.
He had come back too see this fevered light of his dreams become true.
“You’ve really become a strange old man now, Oh-chan. It’s not a term of endearment anymore,” Nino says, and Ohno feels him giving in, feels the light nudging against his skin in softer waves, feels Nino as he never has before.
Tokyo feels like home again. Ohno holds him.
“You won’t hurt me,” Nino murmurs.
They twist their necks, lips meeting for the first time. Ohno’s eyes prick with tears.
*
Ohno never hides his light from him anymore.
He holds his hands.
*
“Kazu.” He doesn’t let go until the last moment, the colors slowly disappearing from his fingers. The lightest trace of cornflower blue, and then no more.
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 4,130
Pairing: Ohno/Nino
Summary: Ohno possesses a supernatural ability: he has colors on his fingers. What he touches leaves a trace, and maybe not always in the ways he intends.
Warnings/Notes: This piece is a bit emotionally supernatural? Or supernaturally emotional? I can't even tell anymore. I've just always wanted to write about Ohmiya's touchy-feeliness without smothering it in fluff. Does it work? IDK, you tell me.
He wasn’t born with colors on his fingers.
At least, that’s what his mother tells him. His first memory of it is after doing finger painting in daycare. He starts by pressing his thumb on the paper three times, one blue thumbprint for every family member, then fading inch-long smears for their bodies, and finally lines made with his pinkie finger for their arms and legs. It becomes a mess by the end of the class, but he remembers being satisfied with his creation when it’s hung on the bulletin board along with everybody else’s. His teacher calls his mom, alarmed for some reason.
Some of the ink never washes off-or at least, it appears that way. Ohno hardly remembers the hospital corridors and the parade of faceless doctors that follow, but never forgets what his mom tells him one day when the hospital visits finally stop.
“The color is alive inside you, Satoshi.”
“Is…is that okay? Am I allowed to keep it?”
“Yes. But you need to keep it close.”
It isn’t ink, but it’s something. There are shots of blue all over most of his fingers on both hands, a light cerulean shade that can pass for veins for the unobservant. The minute his breath hitches, or when he finds himself drawn by something in particular, there is no hiding it. The snaking blue threads glow bright like moonrise. Ohno likes it.
His playmates draw back. I don’t wanna draw with Satoshi, they whine. Ohno doesn’t understand what’s wrong. He draws the same pictures of monkeys and anime characters that they do. The only difference is that he has a hand that glows like primeval tentacles under a star-less night-a difference that he doesn’t really see much as a big deal.
He learns to stuff his hands in his pockets and to draw only inside the refuge of his bedroom. He doesn’t want to be called strange anymore.
*
When his voice breaks, the blue is almost faded. No one notices it unless they know to look for it, and Ohno tells absolutely no one. It’s not a big feat, because he doesn’t relish talking much. He learns that words never match up to what he sees or feels. There are other ways to make himself understood.
He finds himself dancing on a small stage, far from home, three times a day. The fine drapery of his traditional costume hides his limbs, all except his hands.
The instructor always makes him dance in front, even when he doesn’t make any effort to stand out. Ohno is uncomfortable with the sudden deluge of compliments-he feels better when the instructor throws coffee cans at him when he zones out. When eyes are on him, when he feels the sharp edge of jealousy thanks to the attention showered on him, it throws him off.
But not enough to stop dancing well, apparently. “I know not all of you are blessed with Ohno-kun’s graceful fingers, but look at how they tell a story,” the instructor enthuses with a commanding clap.
No one sees the colors-Ohno has checked it himself in the mirrors many times. But his hands are the beginning of movement for him, the opening sentence of a novel, the initial impression of a note in the air. His impulses begin on his fingertips, and instead of the cool calm that the blue would suggest, he feels as if they are on fire. Move, the threads implore him. The music and movement flow inside him.
He is homesick, but dancing feels like breathing. His hands feel the currents moving around him and senses the spaces that his body can occupy. He can only listen and fill those shapes with his limbs.
*
Nino likes touching him. The only reason he allows it is that it excuses him from his own curiosity, from how it would feel like to taper his fingers down the angles of Nino’s shoulder as slowly as he dares. There isn’t a shirt ragged enough to hide the startling grace of Nino’s slim build nor the jut of his collarbones. For the first time in his life, Ohno is sharply aware of another person, of how his breathing changes slightly around him. It started with a joke, Ohno cannot remember now, but it’s become second-nature. Nino touches him, and he allows it.
His touches never feel like a violation-they are more like flowers tenderly tucked in the barrels of rifles, briefly soft against hard planes, playful, yet hushed. Nino huffs into corners of him that he doesn’t know exist and raises hackles that chill his stomach. The first time he ventures to swaths of skin that normally are out of bounds, Ohno doesn’t think it’s anything out of the normal. The fingers curled lightly on his hip bone, the minute tugging on his hair, the hand imprint on the back of his thighs, riding up to his backside-they are all just part of Nino when he walked into his life.
He feels the threads throbbing inside him in recognition, as if they want to jump out of him, out of his skin. Ohno almost tells him out of desperation.
“My hands hurt,” he starts. “For you.” Nino considers him for a moment, then laughs.
“Silly Oh-chan.” He slithers into his chest, not minding their audience, not minding his words. They do not make sense to him either. They are both young, wondering why conversations suddenly have new pretexts, or why they have to navigate layers of meaning, when skin is simple. Skin is easy.
*
They hold hands, and Ohno tries to hold himself in, doesn’t want himself spilling all over the place. He is careful never to light up for Nino. He’s never been the type to be self-conscious, but he doesn’t want to be tied down to what he cannot control, what he cannot understand. Nino doesn’t ask why he never initiates, and Ohno is content with Nino walking into his personal spaces, with Nino soldering to his sides comfortably, with Nino touching him, and never vice-versa. The world rearranges to their gravity. They just are, and Ohno accepts that easily, if not instantly.
He suspects that Nino sometimes gets lonely, just like he does. In a city like theirs, doing the job that they do, there are limits that take them years to adhere to willingly, much less understand.
Ohno sees countless girls, maybe a couple of guys too. There’s also that one older woman who tells him every time that he’s a precious thing, a secret to keep, even though he laughs at her face the first time. She holds her against him, scritches closely-cut fingernails lightly against his scalp, her face innocent, voice calm and reasonable. Months of hiding, of looking for purchase in her, for something honest-he swears in his heart that he’ll know it when he sees it. It’s something he needs to do, something he can do to her that will make it worth it.
The first night, in the heat of the moment when he finally, finally touches her, it happens. Blue coils of light start to surround her neck, wrapping her pale skin in neat x’s, down her slender thighs to her toes, the illumination trembling and primordial. She grips into his shoulders, eyes wild, crying out. He isn’t gentle, not with her. Ohno knows that the crescent nail marks will be there in the morning.
Yes, just like this, she murmurs against the damp sinew of his arm, his dark scent. Ohno wheels her around, her back to him, wondering at the furious patterns of blue on her back. He feels out of control when he comes in a quiet, escalating rush.
When the shower turns on, it’s his cue to leave. The trains aren’t even running yet. It’s like she couldn’t stand to be around him, like he would break, like he couldn’t handle his light. She keeps him as a secret, and guards him jealously, even against herself. The way she brushes him off when they’re done chasing their own orgasms feels like an admonishment.
But she makes Ohno feel so good, a vessel for his energy, somewhere to drown his frustrations about what he’s doing with his life. She’s cold around the edges, but she doesn’t prod him. Ohno finds himself finding what joy he can from both the intimacy and the distance that she gives him-and he simply lights up. He lights her up, draws maps of heat on her skin, the hottest blue of a flame, his hand over her mouth.
They never break up-instead, they dance around it, playing the painful game of who could care less and less and less, because they have never learned to talk beyond the desire that consumed them. Camera flashes blow up in his face. Her nose and eyes are blurred into muffled white and grey on newsprint. Where were they walking to that night? He doesn’t rememer. Had he really made her laugh that much, out in public? Why do other people care what apartment he leaves from, enough to make headlines about it? Why is his manager giving him that look? Why does it have to make Jun’s eyes grave with worry, Aiba’s with compassion, and Sho’s with consideration?
Why does she never take it out on him? Why is she not angry?
His paintings from that time are all furious blue lines and flesh-toned squares. Nino asks him about the stale blue paint stuck on the sides of fingernails. He shrugs. All he thinks about is being told by her that his youth is a liability, that he shines too much, that she cannot bear to contain him anymore, that he is too much. That one last time, he is gentle, and it’s the first time he sees her cry.
“Did you know that it hurts? That it has hurt, all this time,” she says. There is a moment where he doesn’t quite know what she’s saying, then after it, just a deluge, a raging waterfall of understanding. He has hurt her, over and over-when he could have controlled himself.
His apologies evaporate on her skin, against her whispers that she likes it, has always liked it, that she’s sorry, that it never hurt her against her will-and Ohno, Ohno crumbles at what he has done. He cannot forgive her, or himself.
“I’ll wash them off,” Ohno says.
“No one cares, honestly,” Nino whispers, grabbing his hands. “No one cares about your dirty fingers, no one cares about the pictures, about all of that. It’s mostly about what everything’s doing to you.”
“It’s nothing.”
Nino simply holds his hand, and he allows himself to grasp at his knuckles tighter than he ever has before. He realizes that he can stand to be so achingly alone around Nino-and the thought is enough to tide him over for the day, no matter how much he wants to remove the light from his skin, in gashes, in wide strips, violently and completely.
*
When Nino grows distant, slowly but surely, Ohno suddenly finds his surroundings thrown into chaos. It feels like the corners of rooms are beginning to warp towards each other, closing in on him impossibly. His hands are dull, almost normal, and he wonders if it’s Nino’s growing moodiness, or his own implacability.
He has been wanting to disappear, itching to leave everyone’s expectation at the departure gate. He’s thinking Hawaii. India. Okinawa. A mirage of warm places, and importantly, just simply away. It’s not that his heart is not in it anymore-he cannot imagine four other people he can do this with. But he wonders what a quiet life would truly be like, of being free to do as he pleases. He remembers dancing on the stage, much younger than he is now. No one had known his name, and it’s a luxury he would love to have. To be nameless, to pass by peopled streets and not to have to worry about being Ohno Satoshi, the idol.
They never talk about things like that, Nino and him. So when Ohno, subdued by beer and post-concert exhaustion, confesses his feelings of not wanting to be there anymore, Nino understandably looks at him like he’s someone new. Even in the noisy bar, he could hear Nino without him saying a thing. He drinks the last of his draft beer, subtly signaling for another one. Ohno wonders when they started to drift, when even the smallest line on Nino’s smooth face feel like months of neglect, of never seeking him out, of just sheer missing him. Age is startling on Nino, the creep of his 30s slow but almost out of place in his dog-like features. Ohno wants to trace the lines besides his mouth, those parentheses that have only come out in recent years. He sips his beer instead.
Later, as they huddle together, sides touching, as snow flurries all over Sapporo, Nino asks him.
“When?”
His breath billows out as a white, whispy cloud. Somehow, a sense of panic grips his heart at Nino’s tone. “It’s not a done thing. I’m not leaving tomorrow or anything like that.”
“But you’re thinking about it.”
Ohno is about to say something when their manager arrives with the van. The heater is stifling, but it’s nothing compared to what he wants to say to Nino. When they reach their floor, Nino walks in front of him, hands stuffed in his coat. He takes out his card key, the click of the lock mechanism awfully audible-or maybe it’s just their combined silence. Ohno hovers behind him.
Nino turns around, eyes shaded. “If you’re waiting, don’t. I’m not going to ask.”
So Ohno doesn’t say anything either. Instead, he follows Nino inside his room, notes how clean it is, how he has brought almost nothing with him to the tour. Nino removes his coat and throws himself down on the bed. Ohno follows suit, toe-ing off his boots, wondering why this doesn’t feel weird, like he’s just revisiting something that’s always existed.
They don’t face each other. Instead, they find themselves looking up at the white ceiling. He doesn’t have to strain to hear Nino breathing, the sheets rustling whenever he adjusts his position.
“If you leave-and this is not a threat-we will be over. The five of us,” Nino says. “It won’t work, not without you, or if anyone is missing.”
“I know,” Ohno replies, because it’s a truth that they’ve become intimate with through the years, that they have become who they are because it was the five of them, not one less, not one more. Nino folds the pillow under his head in half, propping himself up higher.
“Where would you even go?”
“Nino.”
“No, humor me, Oh-chan.”
He closes his eyes. “I want to dance for myself, or maybe paint,” he starts, and he doesn’t stop. He tells Nino about all the places he would go to, about how he would probably botch things up in some way because of the language barrier. He confesses that he wants to make friends with people who’s never seen his face on a billboard, that he wants summer to last forever. Nino casually throws his ankle over his, finally facing him, and Ohno opens his eyes, opens his heart, tells Nino that he is afraid of what it means to be constantly having to rein himself in, that it’s impossible. He tells Nino that one day, everyone will know, that he doesn’t deserve the spotlight, that he has hurt someone, that the regret is brutal, that it hurts him to grow apart from Nino, that he knows that there are new spaces between them, shapes and silences that he cannot discern. That out of everything, it makes him want to bolt the most, that Nino is being distant, that he himself can’t touch him, not yet, because how could Nino want the same thing?
Somehow, they both know that Ohno has crossed a line, and they stop and stare at each other in waking recognition of it.
“You want to be touched?” Nino asks, eyes wide. “By me.”
And they’re not playing anymore, they’re not kids anymore, not Juniors just fucking around like boys. Ohno licks his lips and nods.
“And you are afraid of touching me?”
“I’m not a saint, Nino,” he says, voice soft.
He reaches out for Ohno’s face, and Ohno could swear that Nino’s face emitted a light of their own. He feels brittle under his touch.
“I’m not asking for you to be. In fact, it’s pretty stupid how you’ve never ever talked so much as you did just now, not to me anyway, but it’s only to let me know just how much you’ve never understood me.”
Ohno’s heart racing at having Nino so close. “I try.”
Nino closes his eyes, taking his hand away. “I won’t be the reason for you staying or not. That’s unfair, and you know it.” After a moment, he opens his eyes again. “You have to want me, despite of everything. Because that’s the way I’ve always wanted you.”
Ohno thinks his heart has stopped altogether. He is about to say something when Nino leans over the side table and switches off the light. “Let’s sleep, Oh-chan.”
He gives up for tonight, missing the touch of Nino’s hand. “Okay.”
Nino turns away from him.
*
Everyone else hasn’t arrived yet. Nino is by the deserted catering room, waiting for the studio coffee machine to finish dripping a less than stellar cappucino. There’s something dear but also terribly dangerous about how his loose-fitting jeans drape on his hips, the hem of his frayed shirt barely concealing it. So artless, so mindless, Ohno thinks. He doesn’t know when he started looking this much-at Nino, at the details that make him, him. But he knows he’s always looked. Nino, small as he is, takes up every room, commands residence even in unrelated thoughts.
It’s been a year since their conversation in a hotel that he doesn’t even remember. Somehow, he knows that Nino is skirting around him, like he is about to bolt. Nino doesn’t touch him.
Nino rubs the ridiculous 4 a.m. call-time out of his eyes, the humming, mechanical sounds of the coffee machine drowning out the production din outside. It’s true-the biggest realizations simmer in the background for a long time, only for it to come up in the most incovenient moment. Ohno feels awake now. The impulse throbs in his hands, stronger than ever. More than anything, he trusts in his feelings-that he won’t break him, that he is not that kind of person.
That Nino is different, has always been different.
That he himself is not terrible, but that’s not much. And there is a kind of release in that.
*
It’s his seventh exhibition.
He holds his breath when four men walk towards where he is, patches of bright in the all-black hallway, dim and moody like he had intended. They are just meters away; they haven’t even seen him yet. He watches them, their gazes varying on one of his light streaked canvasses.
“4x4,” he hears Sho reading out loud.
Ohno wonders if they are easily recognizable in the way that he sees them-a bright, mauve-red for Sho’s bruised lips, the reverse inclination of Jun’s torso, done in pale flesh and sinewy muscle, the blackhole of Aiba’s eye specked with the darkest navy. And Nino, Nino’s soft, pillowy hands, bright blue and dragon green veins against an almost-white.
They are all rippled with light, the light that he has always kept for himself. He had searched everywhere for the right oil paint, the right consistency. They are lit in fragments, in the different ways that Ohno feels for them.
Painting the four of them was never something he planned, but it was all that consumed him for half a year. He ached for an understanding of them, his comrades for so long, so near and familiar that sometimes they had resembled caricatures: caricatures that never came near the dearness that they have always occupied in his memories. He had panicked-he doesn’t ever want to lose the feeling of each, of five, of those fevered years.
Later, when they are grabbing drinks in a repurposed and now painfully hip bodega-a location researched by Sho-Jun asks him, point-blank and in his serious Jun way, why he chose those particular body parts. “Why is it my back?”
“Isn’t that easily the most beautiful part of you? The strongest?”
Jun sips on his whisky. “You’re saying that with a straight face.”
“You have a lovely back, it’s honestly the best.”
“It took you until we're all here in New York in a random bar to say it?"
They all look at each other, a collective measurement that they’ve all but mastered every nuance of, before they burst out laughing. He has long been forgiven. Ohno tries not to react when Nino slips his warm hand into his under the table, squeezing gently.
He looks at him, sees the peppered white on his temples. Nino is still beautiful. His fingers wrap around Nino’s, muscle memory moving his thumb against his soft skin. Nino’s gaze is petulant and straight out of 2004, but he doesn’t waver.
When he turns back to the other three, their eyes are wide.
*
A stranger jogs up the stairs from the subway. She huffs through the exertion, when something catches her eye to the right. Through the windows of what looks to be a muted bar, she sees two men hunched beside each other.
Their skin is wrapped in subtle coils of snaking blue.
*
“This view sucks,” Nino says.
He stands up, consumed with a desire to reach out like he never has before. Nino flinches when Ohno suddenly, but gently, reaches out to hug him from behind. He smells like the downy warmth of laundry rooms and a certain spiky Nino-ness. Tokyo Tower gleams from far away, a small red insect in a sea of sleeplessness.
“What are you doing?”
“Can I,” he murmurs. His chin finds rest on the slope of Nino’s shoulder.
It’s when he relaxes into his touch, his spine neatly slotting into Ohno’s chest, that the corners return to where they should be and a rush of warmth engulfs him from the inside. It’s been years, yet the tufts of Nino’s hair against his muzzle catapults him back to the feverish days of youth. Of blond hair, of hands held haphazardly, of singing about a girl hiding her angel wings.
They breathe together. Ohno closes his eyes, seeing better that way. It feels good to be this close to him, to be the one embracing Nino, to holding what has always been confusingly just in reach.
“There really are blue things,” Nino whispers, a touch alarmed.
His eyes fly open in surprise. Blue threads sprout from his fingers, wrapping around his arms, circling around Nino’s torso and neck. They glow with a blue-grey tinge, pressing against Nino’s skin with just the slightest pressure. Ohno imagines the skin under the fabric giving way, lines cleaving to him, blood rushing to his pores. The blue slithers tighter around Nino with his every thought, growing brighter in his eyes the longer he imagines.
He loosens his arms, expecting Nino to jump away. “Does it hurt?”
Instead, he drapes his arms over Ohno’s, urging him to come closer again. “No. But what are they?” he asks, his voice a touch smaller, older than Ohno’s used to.
“I don’t know either. I’ve always had them, but never this bright.” Never with you, not until now-he breathes, unheard. Nino twists in his arms, his skin looking even paler against the ropes of light. The golden hues in his eyes are sharp-edged tonight, and Ohno knows that something between them has fundamentally changed-all because he touched him first.
He had come back too see this fevered light of his dreams become true.
“You’ve really become a strange old man now, Oh-chan. It’s not a term of endearment anymore,” Nino says, and Ohno feels him giving in, feels the light nudging against his skin in softer waves, feels Nino as he never has before.
Tokyo feels like home again. Ohno holds him.
“You won’t hurt me,” Nino murmurs.
They twist their necks, lips meeting for the first time. Ohno’s eyes prick with tears.
*
Ohno never hides his light from him anymore.
He holds his hands.
*
“Kazu.” He doesn’t let go until the last moment, the colors slowly disappearing from his fingers. The lightest trace of cornflower blue, and then no more.