[Log - Kakashi and Ayame] Starman
[Backlogged to oh...late January, very early February. Parts played respectively, written over AIM]
The ceiling was steadily warping. For the past few hours she’d been watching it, how it moved when the people upstairs walked over it. She’d started to be able to see where it was sagging from age, and tell it apart from waterlogged spots.
Her ability to focus on the patterns of the ceiling had long dwindled as her exhaustion played with her eyes. She was seeing things. But she was used to it.
Ayame couldn’t remember being able to see straight for more than a second. She’d always glossed over what her eyes told her with her mind. She always would. It made her life easier, made it happy.
Her lips pulled slightly to the side. She couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a grimace.
She was happy.
She sniffed and blinked, pressing her eyes shut and rubbing them when they stung. She’d been staring too long and they had dried out.
Kakashi stumbled into the living room, collapsing onto the couch without greeting his-- the apartment's other occupant. He wasn't one for unnecessary energy expenditure and formalities were wasted on Ayame.
"Sakura's coming over tomorrow at 11." No question. There would be no debates about it; Ayame would accept it because that was simply her way.
His guitar sat across his lap, pressed against his bare stomach. The orange book dangled over the neck, open to the page he'd last been reading. Tequila, his most accessible drug of choice, rested in his hand which in turn rested against his chest. The slur to his words indicated that he'd already had an early start on the drinking.
She was used to the sounds of Kakashi’s stumbling around the apartment. She didn’t find it annoying or endearing, just…familiar, common. It just was. In the same way that the hollow sound echoing inside the body of the guitar as it knocked against his stomach, was familiar. In the same way that the slight slosh of poisonous liquid inside the glass tequila bottle was familiar. In the same way that the ruffle of the worn pages in his book was familiar. Ayame hadn’t read a book since she left school. She wasn’t sure why.
Her eyes rolled to the side so she could look at him as he spoke to her for the first time that day. She hummed faintly in the back of her throat, acknowledging what he was telling her. She would make sure she wasn’t around. Kakashi didn’t like having her around other people.
She didn’t like seeing those other people around him.
He picked up the book and tossed it between them, wrapping his fingers around the neck of the guitar and straightening it in his lap, where it clicked against the buttons of his jeans. The moments between them were nearly always silent, their communication usually composed of affirmative and negative grunts. Sometimes, there wasn't even that.
He remembered the tone that Tsunade had used when asking about her, his roommate. It was suggestive; the kind that was used in tandem with nudges and winks. That was the first time anyone had openly spoken to him about his relationship with Ayame. Truth be told, he had no idea what that was.
"Any requests?"
Ayame flinched slightly as the book thumped loudly on the floor. An unusual sound, abrupt and violent like a slap. But it wasn’t on purpose, she knew. The echo of it faded, her ears tuning in to the soft sounds of his hands adjusting the well loved guitar.
And then his voice again, she relished how it always managed to roll over her senses. It took a second for what he was saying to register in her mind.
She blinked again, her eyes were sore again but they weren’t dry. She smiled, small and shy as she rolled onto her side and faced him. Her knees curled up to her chest, her head resting against her arm. There was a faint spark lighting her eyes, turning them from dull brown to warm chocolate.
“Starman.” She replied, her voice soft and low. “In Portuguese.” She added, her small smile growing a slightly teasing edge.
He stared at her blankly for a moment or two, scarred eye blinking before the right. Kakashi knew she had to be trying at some sort of humor, but his sense of it was skewed by alcohol and an eternity of fake smiles. And the charm of their half-assed relationship was that he didn't have to be fake. She would take him either way.
He began the riff, the slide of his fingers across the frets adding as much to the song as the vocals, which he started a few seconds in. Every Bowie lyrics was law to him, even the "Hey La La's." He offered her a thin smile, scarcely more than the upturn of his pale, chapped lips. He licked them and they stung, saliva catching on the cuts and cracks.
"Didn't know what time it was, the lights were low... I leaned back on my radio...." He sang with half-slurred vibratos and a hoarse tone that just barely touched his vocal charm.
Her eyelids drooped, wanting to close but unable to, too captivated by how he let himself sink into the music. It had been a very long time since he had let her watch while he played, even longer since he had asked for her preference. She couldn’t help the swell of that warm emotion under her rib cage. She’d only ever associated that warmth with him. She’d called it love. Her parents had called it obsession. She’d settled on devotion as the years had passed.
And she was a simple enough girl that these few and far between moments made her life worthwhile.
She felt the soft vibration in her throat, she was humming along. But she knew better than to let it be heard.
The chorus swelled and so did he, chest rising with the volume. His eyes closed and he ignored his audience of one as he always did. Long digits moved on instinct, gliding along strings and fingerboard as if neither had any real impact on the song. The guitar, adored as it was, now did nothing more than keep his fingers busy.
"There's a starman waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds. There's a starman waiting in the sky, he's told us not to blow it 'cause he knows it's all worthwhile...."
The bottle in his lap, supported by both guitar and stomach, slipped and spilled its contents onto his lap. The liquor seeped into his jeans and the couch, dark puddles crawling along the fabric. He ignored that too.
Ayame watched the bottle fall, watched the liquor be ignored. She pushed herself to her feet, tugging gently at the thin, short skirt of her black dress and moving into the kitchen to find some dishtowels to mop it up with.
She crouched back down on the ground, being very careful to stay out of Kakashi’s bubble of personal space, especially since he was playing. She really didn’t want to break his concentration. He was beautiful when he was drowning.
And despite her care to keep that careful distance between them, it wasn't enough. He paused abruptly, fingers still white from where they pressed, hand still hanging in mid-air where it strummed. His expression stiffened for a few spare moments before contorting into one of the slightest irritation. To one such as him, however, the change would have been monumental.
No words were spoken; no words needed to be spoken. There was his displeasure and it hung thick and rank in the air. It was unclear as to what caused such a reaction. Maybe it was just her movement. Even so, he carefully lifted his guitar and let it rest against the side of the couch.
"Is the TV fixed?"
Pop. She was so cold all of a sudden that she shivered. The long muscles framing her spine tensed as she shrunk in on herself, head bowing. Ayame set the towels on the floor within his reach and moved away. The only speed on her knees was crawling.
“I didn’t know it was broken…” She admitted, her voice whispering past barely parted lips.
She sat on the floor on the other side of the room, knees pulled up and tucked under her chin, hands curled against the bare skin of her thighs. Goose bumps.
She knew she should look away, leave even, but she was still connected, even though he’d suddenly slammed his side of the connection closed.
She stared at his feet. Bare, like hers. Longer though, and wider. The bones in them more defined, stronger.
Her toes rubbed together.
Silence reigned for a minute or two. He stared at the wall where the TV was located, eyes blurring as they faded in and out of focus before he finally pulled a soft pack of cigarettes from his pocket. The said pack was shaken until a single solitary cigarette rose from the others, an old bar trick. He extracted it with pale, chapped lips and lit it with a flick of the lighter he also kept in the pack.
"How are you paying for rent this month? Are you even working?" A bold declaration of self-imposed ignorance on her living situation. Kakashi didn't know when she woke or when she slept, whether or not she did either. She was a shadow, drifting in and out of his presence with the dimming and brightening of their unshaded lamps.
Her eyes slid away from his toes and onto the floor. She could feel the goose bumps crawl along her shoulders and the underside of her arms.
“I still have enough saved up from my last job.” Ayame mumbled against her knees as her eyes, dull brown, studied scars in the hardwood floor. She didn’t bother elaborating about what the job had been, or how much they had paid her. He didn’t care so long as the bills were paid.
The cold was deepening, slowly pressing into her skin from both the outside and the inside. The numbness was settling like a suffocating blanket over her mind.
"I got a little job. I'm teaching one of our neighbors to play guitar." She knew this already, Kakashi was sure. He said it in an attempt to flesh in the conversation before it collapsed once more into nothing. Not that quiet bothered him. Quite the contrary.
It had just been too long since he'd last spoken to anyone. He was starting to feel that he had sunk completely into reticence.
"Pink-haired girl."
Had he filled his social quota for the day? He stood, the couch groaning under his weight. Beneath his pale skin, muscles tightened as he stretched, the depressing remnants of his days with a personal trainer and an image consultant.
Was he trying to hurt her? To cut her? Trying to remind her that there was nothing extraordinary about her, like pink hair? Pointing out that she had never been good enough for him to teach?
She bit her lip. She didn’t like these thoughts; she didn’t like these mental accusations.
Kakashi didn’t care enough to load his words when he spoke to her. The thought burned behind her eyes. No, not the thought, the knowledge.
She sniffed and blinked, her eyes were stinging again. She needed…she needed.
She rocked onto the balls of her feet and stood in one fluid motion, a moment of grace that was never expected from her.
She smoothed her skirt, eyes firmly on the ground and reminded her feet that what she needed was waiting in her bedroom.
Her ankle rolled with her first step and she stumbled faintly before she caught herself and took another.
Kakashi watched her as she left, all too aware of what she intended to do and what it would do to her. Had he not been the victim of his own vices, some far worse than hers, he would have been disgusted. Instead, he was sympathetic, a rare enough emotion coming from him, even rarer when directed toward Ayame.
Of course, he had said something or done something to stoke the need in her. It wasn't arrogance or vanity for him to think that he had driven her to drug use. It was simple knowledge. He followed her, bare feet hitting the hardwood with just the slightest of smacks.
So cold. Ayame couldn’t feel the wood beneath her feet or hear the sound her dry skin made against it. Her eyes had unfocused again, too blurry to tell the wall from the floor or to find the door to her room. She moved partly by habit, partly by memory and partly blind, one hand rising and faintly extending. Extended fingers brushed against the wall and she used them lead the way to her doorframe. The digits trailed down, more wood, to the doorknob, cool metal under her hand. So cold.
She twisted it and pushed in, blinking hard in effort to remind her eyes to work. Her bed was bare, a padded mattress on the floor with a limp pillow and a thin sheet balled up on it. The walls were white…were, had been. She didn’t know what color they were now. She pushed the door closed behind her.
The door closed as he approached it and his eyes and poorly planned words met nothing but chipped wood and the muted sounds of her on the other side. Once again, he was met with a decision to make. And he thought he'd left those behind with the fame.
Kakashi cleared his throat deeply. From the other side, she would hear it; the walls might as well have been rice paper. And then he turned and crossed the hall to his own room where he would proceed to blare music and smoke himself into oblivion.
The ceiling was steadily warping. For the past few hours she’d been watching it, how it moved when the people upstairs walked over it. She’d started to be able to see where it was sagging from age, and tell it apart from waterlogged spots.
Her ability to focus on the patterns of the ceiling had long dwindled as her exhaustion played with her eyes. She was seeing things. But she was used to it.
Ayame couldn’t remember being able to see straight for more than a second. She’d always glossed over what her eyes told her with her mind. She always would. It made her life easier, made it happy.
Her lips pulled slightly to the side. She couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a grimace.
She was happy.
She sniffed and blinked, pressing her eyes shut and rubbing them when they stung. She’d been staring too long and they had dried out.
Kakashi stumbled into the living room, collapsing onto the couch without greeting his-- the apartment's other occupant. He wasn't one for unnecessary energy expenditure and formalities were wasted on Ayame.
"Sakura's coming over tomorrow at 11." No question. There would be no debates about it; Ayame would accept it because that was simply her way.
His guitar sat across his lap, pressed against his bare stomach. The orange book dangled over the neck, open to the page he'd last been reading. Tequila, his most accessible drug of choice, rested in his hand which in turn rested against his chest. The slur to his words indicated that he'd already had an early start on the drinking.
She was used to the sounds of Kakashi’s stumbling around the apartment. She didn’t find it annoying or endearing, just…familiar, common. It just was. In the same way that the hollow sound echoing inside the body of the guitar as it knocked against his stomach, was familiar. In the same way that the slight slosh of poisonous liquid inside the glass tequila bottle was familiar. In the same way that the ruffle of the worn pages in his book was familiar. Ayame hadn’t read a book since she left school. She wasn’t sure why.
Her eyes rolled to the side so she could look at him as he spoke to her for the first time that day. She hummed faintly in the back of her throat, acknowledging what he was telling her. She would make sure she wasn’t around. Kakashi didn’t like having her around other people.
She didn’t like seeing those other people around him.
He picked up the book and tossed it between them, wrapping his fingers around the neck of the guitar and straightening it in his lap, where it clicked against the buttons of his jeans. The moments between them were nearly always silent, their communication usually composed of affirmative and negative grunts. Sometimes, there wasn't even that.
He remembered the tone that Tsunade had used when asking about her, his roommate. It was suggestive; the kind that was used in tandem with nudges and winks. That was the first time anyone had openly spoken to him about his relationship with Ayame. Truth be told, he had no idea what that was.
"Any requests?"
Ayame flinched slightly as the book thumped loudly on the floor. An unusual sound, abrupt and violent like a slap. But it wasn’t on purpose, she knew. The echo of it faded, her ears tuning in to the soft sounds of his hands adjusting the well loved guitar.
And then his voice again, she relished how it always managed to roll over her senses. It took a second for what he was saying to register in her mind.
She blinked again, her eyes were sore again but they weren’t dry. She smiled, small and shy as she rolled onto her side and faced him. Her knees curled up to her chest, her head resting against her arm. There was a faint spark lighting her eyes, turning them from dull brown to warm chocolate.
“Starman.” She replied, her voice soft and low. “In Portuguese.” She added, her small smile growing a slightly teasing edge.
He stared at her blankly for a moment or two, scarred eye blinking before the right. Kakashi knew she had to be trying at some sort of humor, but his sense of it was skewed by alcohol and an eternity of fake smiles. And the charm of their half-assed relationship was that he didn't have to be fake. She would take him either way.
He began the riff, the slide of his fingers across the frets adding as much to the song as the vocals, which he started a few seconds in. Every Bowie lyrics was law to him, even the "Hey La La's." He offered her a thin smile, scarcely more than the upturn of his pale, chapped lips. He licked them and they stung, saliva catching on the cuts and cracks.
"Didn't know what time it was, the lights were low... I leaned back on my radio...." He sang with half-slurred vibratos and a hoarse tone that just barely touched his vocal charm.
Her eyelids drooped, wanting to close but unable to, too captivated by how he let himself sink into the music. It had been a very long time since he had let her watch while he played, even longer since he had asked for her preference. She couldn’t help the swell of that warm emotion under her rib cage. She’d only ever associated that warmth with him. She’d called it love. Her parents had called it obsession. She’d settled on devotion as the years had passed.
And she was a simple enough girl that these few and far between moments made her life worthwhile.
She felt the soft vibration in her throat, she was humming along. But she knew better than to let it be heard.
The chorus swelled and so did he, chest rising with the volume. His eyes closed and he ignored his audience of one as he always did. Long digits moved on instinct, gliding along strings and fingerboard as if neither had any real impact on the song. The guitar, adored as it was, now did nothing more than keep his fingers busy.
"There's a starman waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds. There's a starman waiting in the sky, he's told us not to blow it 'cause he knows it's all worthwhile...."
The bottle in his lap, supported by both guitar and stomach, slipped and spilled its contents onto his lap. The liquor seeped into his jeans and the couch, dark puddles crawling along the fabric. He ignored that too.
Ayame watched the bottle fall, watched the liquor be ignored. She pushed herself to her feet, tugging gently at the thin, short skirt of her black dress and moving into the kitchen to find some dishtowels to mop it up with.
She crouched back down on the ground, being very careful to stay out of Kakashi’s bubble of personal space, especially since he was playing. She really didn’t want to break his concentration. He was beautiful when he was drowning.
And despite her care to keep that careful distance between them, it wasn't enough. He paused abruptly, fingers still white from where they pressed, hand still hanging in mid-air where it strummed. His expression stiffened for a few spare moments before contorting into one of the slightest irritation. To one such as him, however, the change would have been monumental.
No words were spoken; no words needed to be spoken. There was his displeasure and it hung thick and rank in the air. It was unclear as to what caused such a reaction. Maybe it was just her movement. Even so, he carefully lifted his guitar and let it rest against the side of the couch.
"Is the TV fixed?"
Pop. She was so cold all of a sudden that she shivered. The long muscles framing her spine tensed as she shrunk in on herself, head bowing. Ayame set the towels on the floor within his reach and moved away. The only speed on her knees was crawling.
“I didn’t know it was broken…” She admitted, her voice whispering past barely parted lips.
She sat on the floor on the other side of the room, knees pulled up and tucked under her chin, hands curled against the bare skin of her thighs. Goose bumps.
She knew she should look away, leave even, but she was still connected, even though he’d suddenly slammed his side of the connection closed.
She stared at his feet. Bare, like hers. Longer though, and wider. The bones in them more defined, stronger.
Her toes rubbed together.
Silence reigned for a minute or two. He stared at the wall where the TV was located, eyes blurring as they faded in and out of focus before he finally pulled a soft pack of cigarettes from his pocket. The said pack was shaken until a single solitary cigarette rose from the others, an old bar trick. He extracted it with pale, chapped lips and lit it with a flick of the lighter he also kept in the pack.
"How are you paying for rent this month? Are you even working?" A bold declaration of self-imposed ignorance on her living situation. Kakashi didn't know when she woke or when she slept, whether or not she did either. She was a shadow, drifting in and out of his presence with the dimming and brightening of their unshaded lamps.
Her eyes slid away from his toes and onto the floor. She could feel the goose bumps crawl along her shoulders and the underside of her arms.
“I still have enough saved up from my last job.” Ayame mumbled against her knees as her eyes, dull brown, studied scars in the hardwood floor. She didn’t bother elaborating about what the job had been, or how much they had paid her. He didn’t care so long as the bills were paid.
The cold was deepening, slowly pressing into her skin from both the outside and the inside. The numbness was settling like a suffocating blanket over her mind.
"I got a little job. I'm teaching one of our neighbors to play guitar." She knew this already, Kakashi was sure. He said it in an attempt to flesh in the conversation before it collapsed once more into nothing. Not that quiet bothered him. Quite the contrary.
It had just been too long since he'd last spoken to anyone. He was starting to feel that he had sunk completely into reticence.
"Pink-haired girl."
Had he filled his social quota for the day? He stood, the couch groaning under his weight. Beneath his pale skin, muscles tightened as he stretched, the depressing remnants of his days with a personal trainer and an image consultant.
Was he trying to hurt her? To cut her? Trying to remind her that there was nothing extraordinary about her, like pink hair? Pointing out that she had never been good enough for him to teach?
She bit her lip. She didn’t like these thoughts; she didn’t like these mental accusations.
Kakashi didn’t care enough to load his words when he spoke to her. The thought burned behind her eyes. No, not the thought, the knowledge.
She sniffed and blinked, her eyes were stinging again. She needed…she needed.
She rocked onto the balls of her feet and stood in one fluid motion, a moment of grace that was never expected from her.
She smoothed her skirt, eyes firmly on the ground and reminded her feet that what she needed was waiting in her bedroom.
Her ankle rolled with her first step and she stumbled faintly before she caught herself and took another.
Kakashi watched her as she left, all too aware of what she intended to do and what it would do to her. Had he not been the victim of his own vices, some far worse than hers, he would have been disgusted. Instead, he was sympathetic, a rare enough emotion coming from him, even rarer when directed toward Ayame.
Of course, he had said something or done something to stoke the need in her. It wasn't arrogance or vanity for him to think that he had driven her to drug use. It was simple knowledge. He followed her, bare feet hitting the hardwood with just the slightest of smacks.
So cold. Ayame couldn’t feel the wood beneath her feet or hear the sound her dry skin made against it. Her eyes had unfocused again, too blurry to tell the wall from the floor or to find the door to her room. She moved partly by habit, partly by memory and partly blind, one hand rising and faintly extending. Extended fingers brushed against the wall and she used them lead the way to her doorframe. The digits trailed down, more wood, to the doorknob, cool metal under her hand. So cold.
She twisted it and pushed in, blinking hard in effort to remind her eyes to work. Her bed was bare, a padded mattress on the floor with a limp pillow and a thin sheet balled up on it. The walls were white…were, had been. She didn’t know what color they were now. She pushed the door closed behind her.
The door closed as he approached it and his eyes and poorly planned words met nothing but chipped wood and the muted sounds of her on the other side. Once again, he was met with a decision to make. And he thought he'd left those behind with the fame.
Kakashi cleared his throat deeply. From the other side, she would hear it; the walls might as well have been rice paper. And then he turned and crossed the hall to his own room where he would proceed to blare music and smoke himself into oblivion.