[JE/NEWS] Game Theory and Equilibriums, chapter two
Title: Game Theory and Equilibriums. Chapter Two: Like a pack of gum only three times less sour.
Pairing: Pi/Koyama/Shige/Ryo
Author: ezyls_girl. n____n
Rating: PG-15
Warnings: Absurdly-childish writing. Overactive imaginations regarding other people's sex lives.
Summary: Yamapi's life-story; that is to say, how he became a drug dealer.
School!AU, Pi-centric.
Notes: This chapter is for fairy_illusions as well, because I wouldn't have posted it otherwise. Maybe I should just dedicated the whole fic to her and be done with it. 2308 words.
Previously:
PART I ----- | prologue | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four |
PART II ---- | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six |
PART III ---- | chapter one
--
--
chapter two - Like a pack of gum only three times less sour
“I miss Uchi,” Ryo is strangely expressionless, “Pi, I miss him so much.”
“I know,” he says, feels a little like a bastard when he does.
“Wish he was here...”
“I know.”
“Do you think he’s ever gonna come back?”
And then Ryo’s crying, and he’s taken aback; Ryo hasn’t ever cried like this before. It looks more like he’s having a panic attack, breathing deeply and then stopping short like he’s choked on something particularly bony. It’s so scary that he’s afraid he might have to perform the Heimlich maneuver. He pushes Ryo’s head forward into his chest, wraps him in a hug. And for once, his friend doesn’t resist. He just continues to sob, dribble snot and shiver like he’s been reclaimed as a pathetic victim of Queen Mab in a dream of colliding half-truths. Crybabies will be crybabies.
He hugs Ryo tighter, doesn’t say anything. And he thinks it’s just another fact that Ryo’s so wrapped up in his misery that he doesn't hear his friend’s rapidly beating heart.
(Because everyone, at some point, falls for Nishikido Ryo.)
Not even because he’s attractive or radiates that type of feeling, but just because it’s all a part of the game he plays.
It has been over seven years since he has last seen Ryo cry.
He’s kind of worried about it, but at the same time, strangely glad.
Worried, because Ryo’s always been too subtle, too suspicious about his own feelings. In a room containing over five individuals, Ryo refuses to show anything but sneers and cold glares and his trademark poorly-disguised anger. He wouldn’t ever cry in front of girls (or girly guys), and he would laugh whenever he felt particularly sad. It was so twisted.
He’s worried about Ryo.
But he’s glad, too (just a little) that his friend doesn’t display his real emotions too often.
Because he’s afraid of the Nishikido that cries.
∞∞
There was a girl. He doesn’t even remember her name anymore, and she wasn’t much to look at, at first glance, but there was something about her that made her cute. Really cute, the kind of cute that everyone grows attached to, the kind that has you smiling along with her smile. He remembers her now. She was a very talented street dancer, and wore a lot of plastic bracelets; about fifty on each arm at once. All neon-colored. There was this one time when she hosted a dance show at the community theater with a group of her friends. He had saved three months’ worth of his paycheck while working as a supermarket grocery-hauler in order to go see the performance. The only memory he has left of that show were the bracelets. They had flashed in the dark, back and forth, like someone had turned on a siren and forgotten to shut it off. He had come out of the theater feeling dizzy.
His mother had scolded him; it was in one of the few times that she had ever gotten angry with her son. He could’ve used that money for a lot of things. Clothes, books, condoms. But he had to go and waste it on some mediocre dance show.
The girl was stabbed a few years later, on a side street during the middle of the night. A trail of neon pink bracelets had caught the attention of the police. She was in the ER for two weeks until her parents finally admitted that they didn’t have enough money to pay for a full recovery, and so she was sent to a school in Shikoku for disabled children. It was the last he heard of her.
He had found out, later, that it was his best friend who had done it. And when he had asked the boy why, he received no response save for a second disappearance. And that was the last he heard of Ikuta.
--
“So is this all do you do for a living, now?” Koyama asks him.
His grin is sour, even on his own lips. “I’m not a very cool person to hang around with, ne.”
“Better than me.”
But if there had been one thing in the world that he was good at, it was making excuses. Excuses for everything. Positive damage control, in a sense. He likes twisting connotations around. It suits his way of life. He was like an experiment gone bad, released into the wild by his dad, raised by his mother, bullied by his teachers, never having enough money to go around and always arriving at school in old leather jackets and ten-year-old pants-the typical stuff that poor kids don six days a week (the seventh day they go around butt-naked or in old pajamas while the clothes make their run in the laundromat. He knows because he’s in charge of washing clothes at the coin-laundry.)
It didn’t take long for school to turn into The Living Hell. He had taken to dropping his pencil on the multiple-choice questions to find a correct answer, and alternating between no sufficient information given and is this a rhetorical question? During their junior high school days, he met up with Ryo about once every two months. They must have spent at least thirty-thousand yen that year buying boxes of instant Korean barbeque, bringing it to his place and stuffing each other into pigs while Nishikido complained to him about the snotty kids and Things That Rich Girls Lack. (A pretty track slut keeps coming on to him. He’s also annoyed with the resident smartass, who’s got it in for him because his best friend wants to get in Ryo’s pants.)
“I always get the short end of the stick,” Ryo bitches, jabbing himself in the cheek with the takeout chopsticks.
He wants to tell Ryo how much shorter his stick is, then thinks twice about it; Ryo-with-the-perverted-mind might take it the wrong way. (And he’s pretty sure that, down there, his is a little longer than Ryo’s, anyway.)
It came as no surprise to him, then, when he -having just entered junior high- is offered a deal on marijuana.
(“Hey, kid, want some of this stuff?” the man asks, reaching into the half-torn pocket of his greasy jeans and fishing out a small brown paper bag.
“What is it?” He knew what it was.
“It’s good. Got it imported from India. They grow the best grass.”
He took the clump of weed out of its paper wrapping, weighing it in his hand. It’s probably around three ounces give or take a few grams, judging from the size and density. It looks a little damaged, though. One of the corners of the plastic wrap is a little loose; it looks as though it had been hastily wrapped. He does not point this out to the drug dealer.
“How much?”
“How much you got?”
He shrugs, bought it and sold it off for double the amount.)
He took a literature proficiency test the year after he dropped-out and it was enough to earn him a certificate. He never told his mother about dropping-out, but presented her with the diploma -ribbon-tied and fancy-sealed, no less- with a smile. She was none the wiser.
And well, what do you know? Yamashita Tomohisa was intelligent and officially a member of functioning society.
“What a life story,” Koyama says.
“What a life story,” he agrees.
--
Koyama’s really sick. His trip to the local clinic revealed a fever of 41.3˚.
“Please don’t send me home.” He whispers, “I called my parents already. They’re fine with me staying over here.”
“They're fine with you staying at Ryo’s house," he corrects sternly, "But how did you make a call? You can barely move.”
“I stole your phone.”
He frowns. The prepaid card and its minutes had all been accounted for. What was he talking about?
“I’m not completely incompetent, you know,” Koyama continued, his voice now just a hoarse rasp above the blanket, “I just want to die.”
“I didn’t think you were completely incompetent, Kei.”
“Good. Because Shige always says that. And he trips over air.”
It’s the first time in months that Koyama has mentioned Shige.
--
He doesn’t remember where exactly he had had the conversation with Shige, but he decides that they must’ve talked to each other in a soccer field, the one north of the shopping wall and a little farther along the banks of a dirty gutter. They start off talking about his favorite analogy-the one about life being a stick of gum. When you chew on it first, there’s a rush of flavor, burst of senses permeate the environment, and the multitude of colors, smells, tastes, and touches overwhelm until you can just stand there, wide-eyed and dangling, chewing the bit. The world is a big place, its people strangers among each other. And then, after a little while longer, it begins to grow old. The flavor isn’t anything new, now, the body has adapted, the soft outer shell of the candy deteriorates until all that’s left is the tougher, tasteless gel-the kind that should just be taken out and stuck under a table.
“So if you decide to chew a new piece of gum, you’ll die?” Shige asks.
He thinks about it for a while, frowns. “Well…some people spit it out entirely. But some learn to deal with life, ne. So they sometimes add a new piece of gum into their mouth to liven up the flavor.”
“How do you do that?”
“It’s called dating,” he explains, proud of having thought up such a perfect theory.
“Are you seriously going to compare dating to two pieces of chewed-up gum?” Shige is now incredulous and a little more than uncomfortable.
“Just makes you want to go out and buy a pack of Trident, doesn’t it?”
Shige shrugs. “Well, I wouldn’t know.”
“You wouldn’t?”
Shige lies back down on the grass, murmurs. “Because the worst trait of humanity is being unable to forget what’s already happened.”
Shige has a point, he thinks. Ryo-chan’s had far more than his fair share of gum-chewing. He must have a really sour-tasting piece of gum.
“What’s happened to your gum, then?” He asks, not expecting any answer. Shige, he has come to realize, is hardly direct when he feels the situation too difficult to brave. He starts making up excuses, one-or-two-worded responses that make him seem more like a rock than an actual human.
“I dunno, it’s really complicated to make it all boil down to a single piece of gum,” Shige manages after a moment, and these words make him very uneasy. Shige should never sound like a weepy schoolgirl. It doesn’t suit him, and it’ll lead to future distress if he doesn’t stop this now.
“You know what I think of when you talk about complications?” he said, “I think you’re having an affair with a married woman.”
Shige looks at him like he’s just swallowed a frying pan. “What?”
“Yup. You want to hear my version of your ‘complicated’ relationship?”
“I'm vaguely curious.”
“I think you met her in a bar. You were just stopping there for a beer, and she was having martinis. She’s rich, and she wears a lot eye makeup, red lipstick and nail polish. So you sit down next to her, she looks up. Eyes meet, sparks flash. You share a little idle chat about annoying people and the tasteless frills on the homosexual bartender’s uniform. And the next thing you know, she’s pulling you into her empty penthouse apartment -her husband’s away during the day, so she’s got loads of spare time and nothing to do- and when you ask her what she’s doing, she brushes a finger against your lips and orders you out of your clothes. The foreplay's quick and genius. She pushes you against the wall, runs her hand all over your chest. Her voice is breathy and sort-of sultry, like the ones in the sexy porn videos shot in a desert caravan with the smooth-skinned Egyptian women. And so then you fuck her all day, and pretty soon it’s on a set schedule-Saturdays and halfway into Sunday if you could, but her husband comes home at six, so you always finish before five-thirty.”
Shige has a numb, slightly-mollified expression written across his face.
“And that’s not enough. Soon the two of you are meeting up on week days, too. She spends all day thinking up nasty things for the two of you to do when her husband’s away. She goes shopping in those specialty stores for vibrators and sex toys and lacy bras, so that when you get there you can do her in every position imaginable and unimaginable, against a wall, on the floor, with handcuffs and leather belts. She gives blow jobs worthy of a prostitute with a million bucks. She’s got her polished-nails digging into your ass when she sucks you off, and she pats your head when you’re done coming, like a mother pats a child. You always go to her apartment-she never visits you and she doesn’t let you have her phone number -you don’t even know her name- and when both of you have had enough fun, you don’t speak a word to each other until she gives you the date of the next afternoon she’s free for raunchy sex.”
“…”
“That’s what I would call a complicated relationship, ne. I read about it in a book.”
“You have a really overactive imagination,” Shige finally says.
He grins cheekily, “Understatement, Shige-chan.”
“And you watch porn?”
To which he replies, rather frankly, “I’m a drug dealer. People don’t like to associate with our kind in that way, so I have to think of different ways to get off.”
(In reality, he’s only seen one porn video once, and with Jin, but he’s not about to let Shige know that. He’s got a crowd to impress.)
TBC
OTL. Comments are wonderful?
OOH LOOKIE HERE IS THIS A NEW CHAPTER?
Pairing: Pi/Koyama/Shige/Ryo
Author: ezyls_girl. n____n
Rating: PG-15
Warnings: Absurdly-childish writing. Overactive imaginations regarding other people's sex lives.
Summary: Yamapi's life-story; that is to say, how he became a drug dealer.
School!AU, Pi-centric.
Notes: This chapter is for fairy_illusions as well, because I wouldn't have posted it otherwise. Maybe I should just dedicated the whole fic to her and be done with it. 2308 words.
Previously:
PART I ----- | prologue | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four |
PART II ---- | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six |
PART III ---- | chapter one
--
--
chapter two - Like a pack of gum only three times less sour
“I miss Uchi,” Ryo is strangely expressionless, “Pi, I miss him so much.”
“I know,” he says, feels a little like a bastard when he does.
“Wish he was here...”
“I know.”
“Do you think he’s ever gonna come back?”
And then Ryo’s crying, and he’s taken aback; Ryo hasn’t ever cried like this before. It looks more like he’s having a panic attack, breathing deeply and then stopping short like he’s choked on something particularly bony. It’s so scary that he’s afraid he might have to perform the Heimlich maneuver. He pushes Ryo’s head forward into his chest, wraps him in a hug. And for once, his friend doesn’t resist. He just continues to sob, dribble snot and shiver like he’s been reclaimed as a pathetic victim of Queen Mab in a dream of colliding half-truths. Crybabies will be crybabies.
He hugs Ryo tighter, doesn’t say anything. And he thinks it’s just another fact that Ryo’s so wrapped up in his misery that he doesn't hear his friend’s rapidly beating heart.
(Because everyone, at some point, falls for Nishikido Ryo.)
Not even because he’s attractive or radiates that type of feeling, but just because it’s all a part of the game he plays.
It has been over seven years since he has last seen Ryo cry.
He’s kind of worried about it, but at the same time, strangely glad.
Worried, because Ryo’s always been too subtle, too suspicious about his own feelings. In a room containing over five individuals, Ryo refuses to show anything but sneers and cold glares and his trademark poorly-disguised anger. He wouldn’t ever cry in front of girls (or girly guys), and he would laugh whenever he felt particularly sad. It was so twisted.
He’s worried about Ryo.
But he’s glad, too (just a little) that his friend doesn’t display his real emotions too often.
Because he’s afraid of the Nishikido that cries.
∞∞
There was a girl. He doesn’t even remember her name anymore, and she wasn’t much to look at, at first glance, but there was something about her that made her cute. Really cute, the kind of cute that everyone grows attached to, the kind that has you smiling along with her smile. He remembers her now. She was a very talented street dancer, and wore a lot of plastic bracelets; about fifty on each arm at once. All neon-colored. There was this one time when she hosted a dance show at the community theater with a group of her friends. He had saved three months’ worth of his paycheck while working as a supermarket grocery-hauler in order to go see the performance. The only memory he has left of that show were the bracelets. They had flashed in the dark, back and forth, like someone had turned on a siren and forgotten to shut it off. He had come out of the theater feeling dizzy.
His mother had scolded him; it was in one of the few times that she had ever gotten angry with her son. He could’ve used that money for a lot of things. Clothes, books, condoms. But he had to go and waste it on some mediocre dance show.
The girl was stabbed a few years later, on a side street during the middle of the night. A trail of neon pink bracelets had caught the attention of the police. She was in the ER for two weeks until her parents finally admitted that they didn’t have enough money to pay for a full recovery, and so she was sent to a school in Shikoku for disabled children. It was the last he heard of her.
He had found out, later, that it was his best friend who had done it. And when he had asked the boy why, he received no response save for a second disappearance. And that was the last he heard of Ikuta.
--
“So is this all do you do for a living, now?” Koyama asks him.
His grin is sour, even on his own lips. “I’m not a very cool person to hang around with, ne.”
“Better than me.”
But if there had been one thing in the world that he was good at, it was making excuses. Excuses for everything. Positive damage control, in a sense. He likes twisting connotations around. It suits his way of life. He was like an experiment gone bad, released into the wild by his dad, raised by his mother, bullied by his teachers, never having enough money to go around and always arriving at school in old leather jackets and ten-year-old pants-the typical stuff that poor kids don six days a week (the seventh day they go around butt-naked or in old pajamas while the clothes make their run in the laundromat. He knows because he’s in charge of washing clothes at the coin-laundry.)
It didn’t take long for school to turn into The Living Hell. He had taken to dropping his pencil on the multiple-choice questions to find a correct answer, and alternating between no sufficient information given and is this a rhetorical question? During their junior high school days, he met up with Ryo about once every two months. They must have spent at least thirty-thousand yen that year buying boxes of instant Korean barbeque, bringing it to his place and stuffing each other into pigs while Nishikido complained to him about the snotty kids and Things That Rich Girls Lack. (A pretty track slut keeps coming on to him. He’s also annoyed with the resident smartass, who’s got it in for him because his best friend wants to get in Ryo’s pants.)
“I always get the short end of the stick,” Ryo bitches, jabbing himself in the cheek with the takeout chopsticks.
He wants to tell Ryo how much shorter his stick is, then thinks twice about it; Ryo-with-the-perverted-mind might take it the wrong way. (And he’s pretty sure that, down there, his is a little longer than Ryo’s, anyway.)
It came as no surprise to him, then, when he -having just entered junior high- is offered a deal on marijuana.
(“Hey, kid, want some of this stuff?” the man asks, reaching into the half-torn pocket of his greasy jeans and fishing out a small brown paper bag.
“What is it?” He knew what it was.
“It’s good. Got it imported from India. They grow the best grass.”
He took the clump of weed out of its paper wrapping, weighing it in his hand. It’s probably around three ounces give or take a few grams, judging from the size and density. It looks a little damaged, though. One of the corners of the plastic wrap is a little loose; it looks as though it had been hastily wrapped. He does not point this out to the drug dealer.
“How much?”
“How much you got?”
He shrugs, bought it and sold it off for double the amount.)
He took a literature proficiency test the year after he dropped-out and it was enough to earn him a certificate. He never told his mother about dropping-out, but presented her with the diploma -ribbon-tied and fancy-sealed, no less- with a smile. She was none the wiser.
And well, what do you know? Yamashita Tomohisa was intelligent and officially a member of functioning society.
“What a life story,” Koyama says.
“What a life story,” he agrees.
--
Koyama’s really sick. His trip to the local clinic revealed a fever of 41.3˚.
“Please don’t send me home.” He whispers, “I called my parents already. They’re fine with me staying over here.”
“They're fine with you staying at Ryo’s house," he corrects sternly, "But how did you make a call? You can barely move.”
“I stole your phone.”
He frowns. The prepaid card and its minutes had all been accounted for. What was he talking about?
“I’m not completely incompetent, you know,” Koyama continued, his voice now just a hoarse rasp above the blanket, “I just want to die.”
“I didn’t think you were completely incompetent, Kei.”
“Good. Because Shige always says that. And he trips over air.”
It’s the first time in months that Koyama has mentioned Shige.
--
He doesn’t remember where exactly he had had the conversation with Shige, but he decides that they must’ve talked to each other in a soccer field, the one north of the shopping wall and a little farther along the banks of a dirty gutter. They start off talking about his favorite analogy-the one about life being a stick of gum. When you chew on it first, there’s a rush of flavor, burst of senses permeate the environment, and the multitude of colors, smells, tastes, and touches overwhelm until you can just stand there, wide-eyed and dangling, chewing the bit. The world is a big place, its people strangers among each other. And then, after a little while longer, it begins to grow old. The flavor isn’t anything new, now, the body has adapted, the soft outer shell of the candy deteriorates until all that’s left is the tougher, tasteless gel-the kind that should just be taken out and stuck under a table.
“So if you decide to chew a new piece of gum, you’ll die?” Shige asks.
He thinks about it for a while, frowns. “Well…some people spit it out entirely. But some learn to deal with life, ne. So they sometimes add a new piece of gum into their mouth to liven up the flavor.”
“How do you do that?”
“It’s called dating,” he explains, proud of having thought up such a perfect theory.
“Are you seriously going to compare dating to two pieces of chewed-up gum?” Shige is now incredulous and a little more than uncomfortable.
“Just makes you want to go out and buy a pack of Trident, doesn’t it?”
Shige shrugs. “Well, I wouldn’t know.”
“You wouldn’t?”
Shige lies back down on the grass, murmurs. “Because the worst trait of humanity is being unable to forget what’s already happened.”
Shige has a point, he thinks. Ryo-chan’s had far more than his fair share of gum-chewing. He must have a really sour-tasting piece of gum.
“What’s happened to your gum, then?” He asks, not expecting any answer. Shige, he has come to realize, is hardly direct when he feels the situation too difficult to brave. He starts making up excuses, one-or-two-worded responses that make him seem more like a rock than an actual human.
“I dunno, it’s really complicated to make it all boil down to a single piece of gum,” Shige manages after a moment, and these words make him very uneasy. Shige should never sound like a weepy schoolgirl. It doesn’t suit him, and it’ll lead to future distress if he doesn’t stop this now.
“You know what I think of when you talk about complications?” he said, “I think you’re having an affair with a married woman.”
Shige looks at him like he’s just swallowed a frying pan. “What?”
“Yup. You want to hear my version of your ‘complicated’ relationship?”
“I'm vaguely curious.”
“I think you met her in a bar. You were just stopping there for a beer, and she was having martinis. She’s rich, and she wears a lot eye makeup, red lipstick and nail polish. So you sit down next to her, she looks up. Eyes meet, sparks flash. You share a little idle chat about annoying people and the tasteless frills on the homosexual bartender’s uniform. And the next thing you know, she’s pulling you into her empty penthouse apartment -her husband’s away during the day, so she’s got loads of spare time and nothing to do- and when you ask her what she’s doing, she brushes a finger against your lips and orders you out of your clothes. The foreplay's quick and genius. She pushes you against the wall, runs her hand all over your chest. Her voice is breathy and sort-of sultry, like the ones in the sexy porn videos shot in a desert caravan with the smooth-skinned Egyptian women. And so then you fuck her all day, and pretty soon it’s on a set schedule-Saturdays and halfway into Sunday if you could, but her husband comes home at six, so you always finish before five-thirty.”
Shige has a numb, slightly-mollified expression written across his face.
“And that’s not enough. Soon the two of you are meeting up on week days, too. She spends all day thinking up nasty things for the two of you to do when her husband’s away. She goes shopping in those specialty stores for vibrators and sex toys and lacy bras, so that when you get there you can do her in every position imaginable and unimaginable, against a wall, on the floor, with handcuffs and leather belts. She gives blow jobs worthy of a prostitute with a million bucks. She’s got her polished-nails digging into your ass when she sucks you off, and she pats your head when you’re done coming, like a mother pats a child. You always go to her apartment-she never visits you and she doesn’t let you have her phone number -you don’t even know her name- and when both of you have had enough fun, you don’t speak a word to each other until she gives you the date of the next afternoon she’s free for raunchy sex.”
“…”
“That’s what I would call a complicated relationship, ne. I read about it in a book.”
“You have a really overactive imagination,” Shige finally says.
He grins cheekily, “Understatement, Shige-chan.”
“And you watch porn?”
To which he replies, rather frankly, “I’m a drug dealer. People don’t like to associate with our kind in that way, so I have to think of different ways to get off.”
(In reality, he’s only seen one porn video once, and with Jin, but he’s not about to let Shige know that. He’s got a crowd to impress.)
TBC
OTL. Comments are wonderful?
OOH LOOKIE HERE IS THIS A NEW CHAPTER?