[JE/NEWS] Game Theory and Equilibriums, chapter three
Title: Game Theory and Equilibriums. Chapter Three: Like Cleopatra, only without the eye-makeup.
Pairing: Pi/Koyama/Shige/Ryo
Author: ezyls_girl. n____n
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: weird angst that reads like crack. and metaphor-abuse.
Summary: This is why Ryo-chan has more friends, why Jin is a deus ex machina, and why Yamapi is most certainly not Cleopatra.
School!AU, Pi-centric.
Notes: Since this is mostly filler-backstory etc etc., I thought I'd post back-to-back (or at least, how fast I am allowed to do back to back). There's a little bit of KAT-TUN, but no Ueda because you have to read his story for that. :D 2410 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 |
--
--
He meets Koyama the day that Ryo-chan calls to tell him that he’s finally found someone he loves. At once, he assumes that it’s the cute, talkative boy Ryo’s been hanging around with, but the flash of cold grins and heated kisses in the club meets his mind and he’s suddenly sure of what’s happened and that’s when he hears a knock at his door.
(The door is not really a door. It’s actually a battered, thin frame that’s supporting a weaker crossing structure-resembles a piece of cardboard even though it’s actually a wooden thing that’s been cut in half lengthwise, three times by the police and once by Ryo-chan when he’d stolen Akanishi’s stash of vodka and gone on a drunken knifing-spree. You’d think that his line of work could offer something a little more pleasurable, but quite honestly it was all you could expect from a furtive high-school-dropout-of-a-drug-dealer.)
Knock, knock.
He’s only slightly bemused. It’s 3:00 am and he is a minute away from closing up shop, but then the door creaks open under the strain of its duct-taped seams, vaguely slushy like a broom sweeping across a museum floor, and he hears the soft voice that echoes through the brownish late-night sky. Four words that he’s certain will never escape his flashbulb memory.
“I want to die.”
(There is no trace of irony as Yamashita thinks to himself that this is certainly the best start to a friendship. Better to start the game than finish it halfway. Because the day he meets Koyama is the day that he begins the arduous task of digging out Koyama’s broken heart. And in the end, it’s worth every single heave he’s put into it.)
--
“If you touch a tree, you become a tree,” he says, feeling very philosophical.
“No, you don’t,” Shige sighs.
--
He doesn’t try to be grim (not really). He doesn’t want to sound like one of those black magic schmucks down on the street whenever he opens a conversation about Greek tragedies -he’s really not- but it doesn’t stop people from treating him like the deus ex machina character of an explosive shonen manga. What is he supposed to do, anyway? It’s not his fault that, wherever he goes, there are car accidents and banks being robbed. Before his dad left his family, they used to call him The Curse-as if he was scary enough. (He can’t be a curse. It’s too Cleopatra for him.) Years later, he’s managed to turn the name into a popular logo, spread his fair share of rumors so that people unconsciously associate The Curse’s weed as a type of brand-name drug, but every now and then it still makes him feel uncomfortable. Yamashita The Curse is God’s little joke on all of them, the one born into the world with not a single birthmark on his body and about three thousand more pounds of bad luck over anyone he meets. Disconcerting, that’s what it is.
He meets Jin that way, when he’s twelve and barely making his grades. Akanishi Jin, self-proclaimed class bully and problem student (but really too much of a hot-blooded fist-fanatic to know any better)-the real deus ex machina, in all its designer leather jacket wannabe-gangster glory.
He’d just finished his job that day helping the old man at the pedestrian coffee shop clean his coffee grinders, and the next thing he knows there’s this blond kid on a motorbike, thirty-thousand yen stolen jewelry hanging around his neck, telling him to hop on for a ride; they need to get away from here fast and the police is looking for a single teenage boy so he’s recruiting a new member for his gang on the spot. (I’m already in a gang, and even if I join your gang it’s not going to help because you’re wearing the freaking jewelry around your neck, he wants to say, but too late-blond kid’s already hooked an arm around his waist, and with strength and agility rivaling Sarutobi Sasuke’s, carries him up and away.)
The invisible bonds start to form after they’ve smashed their way safe into the closest suburban townhouse, when he exchanges name/age/occupation/dick-length with Akanishi. They both read the same series of porn magazine, use the same brand of deodorant, like the same type of girls (though Jin likes submissive sex and has a long-term boyfriend, and he doesn’t).
“I’m a cursed deus ex machina,” young Yamashita says, testing his new friend one last time.
“What’s a deus ex machina?” young Akanishi scratches his head, “Can you eat it?”
Yeah, best friends forever, he thinks.
Jin’s entourage arrives later, headed by one Kamenashi, two T’s, a Nakamaru, and Kamenashi’s chauffeur. He finds out then; Akanishi attends the rich-kid school three streets down from his, the same one that Ryo abandoned him for.
(…Though it doesn’t take long for Nishikido to barge in on his friendship with Akanishi. Now that he thinks about it, Ryo does seem to have a knack for barging in on things, despite his small stature and that misleading sarcasm. Ryo’s only redeeming quality from the cold glares and insipid indifference is his friendly frown-in itself contradictory. He swears that Ryo’s frown can light up a ten-story building. Maybe it’s just for comic relief or something, but it’s still pretty damn sexy.)
--
He fancies himself as a law student, if he has actually been able to graduate into a college. (“You fancy too much,” Shige tells him.)
If he could be a lawyer, he would make Ryo’s parents pay for all the damage that has been dealt their children.
If there’s anyone bold, fearless Ryo is afraid of, it’s his old man. He had only met Nishikido-san once before, and he had known from that piercing glare in his eyes that this guy was dangerous, more clinically-insane than all the criminals locked up in the national jail put together, probably much more practiced in the trade of mind games than himself.
It had been the day Ryo’s grandfather has passed away, he’d obviously found it an excuse to drink. The three-million-yen will had been uncovered the same day, labeled clearly To Ryo, the only hope left in this family. Send him to a better school, won’t you?
“And what does he do?” Ryo laughed, bitter and angrier with himself more than anyone else. They were sitting on the ledge of a wire fence next to the garbage dump and chewing tobacco, sneakered-feet dangling off the sides, “He fucking beats the shit out of me and then tells me he’s taking all of the money and putting it in his retirement funds. Says that a good-for-nothing kid like me isn’t going to pay him back, no matter how better of a school they send me off to. Fuck, if the attorney hadn’t stepped in at the last minute, I’d probably never gotten my goddamn share to go to fucking private school.”
He glanced at Ryo, heart skips an unnecessary beat. Under the dim spectrum of a streetlight, the deep bruises on Ryo’s cheek and the hastily patched-up cut above his left eye show up like coins in a water fountain, but they don’t distort his features at all, just make them more pronounced, angles and shadows where he’s never seen angles and shadows before. (He wants to touch the cut, run fingertips over the bruises, he wants to get beat-up by Ryo, too, that’s what makes him the stupid one.)
“You’re…going to private school?”
Ryo flashes him a cold grin. “Yeah. I’ll be having fun with the rich bastards. Tsujimoto-sensei thinks I’ll be smart enough to be competitive, and dad beats me up when I told him what sensei said. Hey, did I ever slut around any of my teachers?”
That was when he decided to quit school.
--
He still remembers Ryo leaving their class. They’d had a water fight in the back-lot of Kusano’s apartment that same day, exploding balloons and gleeful shouts of a youthful existence (You really are growing old, Pi), and now all of them are dripping wet, hunched low beneath the windows of the locker rooms and trying to look presentable for the rest of the school day. Girls have been coming in all day, delivering baked cookies and muffins for Ryo, some of them in mascara-smeared tears. Their friends say goodbye, head off to class, one by one by one by one. Kusano leaves the empty locker rooms with a half-hearted wave and a half-hearted smile. Masuda rushes off quickly, but not before throwing a knitted yellow sweater into Ryo’s arms. And then there’s a new face in the room, he introduces himself as Yokoyama. Ryo-chan’s buddies from Osaka are in town, and they’re going to hit a few places tonight, so you better get your sorry ass outside quick, Nishikido.
And so he gets to spend the last five minutes of his life with a half-naked Ryo in an empty locker room.
“Hey, you take care of yourself, Pi,” the boy shrugs off his dripping wet pants, “I’ve gotta go, now.”
It’s now or never, he had thought, I have to say it. “R-Ryo-chan,” he whispers, softer than he’d expected his voice to sound. Wait, is he trembling?
“Hm? What’s up?” Ryo asks, looks up and then frowns, “Good grief, Yamashita, don’t come crying on my shoulder, okay? I’m wet enough as it is.”
He stops, reconsiders.
(Now or never? It’ll have to be never, then.)
--
Now, him and Nishikido, they go back-way back, back to the days when they still sold popsicles for a few coins and when Ryo was still dumb and ticklish. He’s never had any trouble remembering Ryo. Nishikido’s like a glaring splinter on the big toe, the more-irritating-than-helpful transcendent being always looking over his shoulder. They’d never failed to look out for each other, from the first days of attending the same nursery school for the poor kids to the year Ryo inherited three million yen from his granddad and moved into a better school district as a result.
He kind of misses Ryo. Only kind of. (If anyone had bothered to ask, he’d be the first to admit that he’s the biggest sap in the universe.)
He’s wanted forever and a day to call it childhood friendship (there’s something incredibly satisfying about the words; gives him a warm feeling of accomplishment that he just can’t gather from jerking off in front of a dirty magazine), but he’s tried to fool himself so many times that it just won’t work anymore-he will want more, he does want more, he’s always wanted more.
Yamapi has loved Nishikido for a long time, now; it’s been eighteen years and one of them is still counting.
His one-sided love affair with Nishikido probably begins with all those stupid metaphors he made up as an excuse to pursue game theory, if only to make sure that the equilibrium of life adds up correctly and doesn’t miss a slice of fat someday on someone in someplace. It’s his very own brand of existentialism-what Shige calls quack science, what Ryo calls sex theory, what Koyama calls inspiration. Using Pi’s equilibrium theory of life, he had calculated his own chewing gum, default orientation=pansexual, and -somewhere along the way- he had found a Nishikido Ryo. The evidence speaks for itself. He had never believed himself to be a Prince Charming, he’s never wanted to sweep some girl off her feet, he had lost hope the moment the neon bracelets disappeared with Ikuta, because for most of his life he had gravitated towards Ryo, hopelessly benign and annoyingly unchangeable as touching a tree and becoming a tree and ending up as the bubblegum flavor in a pack of Wrigley’s when you’d clearly wanted the spearmint.
“Do I turn you on?” At all? He asks Ryo some day and some place, when they’ve finished recalling the standardized math test and he’s finished being a pessimist with a stick shoved up his ass.
It takes Ryo three seconds to choke on his own spit, sputter a little. “What the hell?”
“Do I?” He insists, because it’s kind of important; he’s wanted to know for a long time.
“Of course not!”
(And he should have expected it, but it still hurts. Ryo’s so mean to him.) “Why?”
Nishikido answers indirectly. “It’s one of the reasons I hang around you, you know. Sexual tension is like, one of the worst poisons out there.”
He’s in shock. He’s crashed into a wall and now he’s getting a brain aneurism; epilepsy sounds like heaven. Poison? Is that what it’s like for Ryo? As for himself, how had he come to feel sexual tension, at all? He’d always just known that the childhood friendship bit wasn’t enough for him to chew. But, poison? Has Ryo been chewing poisonous gum, all this time?
(Perhaps he’ll never understand Ryo the way Shige can.)
But he’s making an idiot out of himself. He’s realized a long time ago that you can’t always get what you want. Things never work out perfectly in the end-there are so many dark horses on the chess board. People grow up, acquaintances become friendships, friendships become acquaintances; grass grows greener, skies greyer, prices on canned fish fluctuate up and down. In fact, the only thing that probably won’t change in a million years is the glare on his homeroom teacher’s face.
So he manages to convince himself that it’s a silly attraction, led by harmless child-like fancy, fairy stories that involve happy endings edited by Disney (it was that or porn, he took his pick). Even though he’s loved Ryo forever like the laws of celestial nature, the Earth pulling itself towards the sun, never ceasing and cinching forward a little, year by year, until fate brings it toward the center of the flaming ball of hydrogen-to-helium for the last damn day-he won’t explode.
The sun is just too far away.
And so when he’s got his arms around Ryo’s ex, his nose buried into Koyama’s hair, tuned to the boy’s shallow breathing, he stops himself from picturing Ryo in Koyama’s place, he likes Koyama only, Koyama now.
Somehow, it works.
“It’s okay, I don’t think we’re supposed to get over the first one, anyway,” he declares. It’s time to pick up the shovel and dig until he’s done.
--
TBC.
--
Oooh~ Will there be a confrontation next? I -do- wonder. 8D This is just getting lamer by the day, isn't it? /shot.
Pairing: Pi/Koyama/Shige/Ryo
Author: ezyls_girl. n____n
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: weird angst that reads like crack. and metaphor-abuse.
Summary: This is why Ryo-chan has more friends, why Jin is a deus ex machina, and why Yamapi is most certainly not Cleopatra.
School!AU, Pi-centric.
Notes: Since this is mostly filler-backstory etc etc., I thought I'd post back-to-back (or at least, how fast I am allowed to do back to back). There's a little bit of KAT-TUN, but no Ueda because you have to read his story for that. :D 2410 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 |
--
--
He meets Koyama the day that Ryo-chan calls to tell him that he’s finally found someone he loves. At once, he assumes that it’s the cute, talkative boy Ryo’s been hanging around with, but the flash of cold grins and heated kisses in the club meets his mind and he’s suddenly sure of what’s happened and that’s when he hears a knock at his door.
(The door is not really a door. It’s actually a battered, thin frame that’s supporting a weaker crossing structure-resembles a piece of cardboard even though it’s actually a wooden thing that’s been cut in half lengthwise, three times by the police and once by Ryo-chan when he’d stolen Akanishi’s stash of vodka and gone on a drunken knifing-spree. You’d think that his line of work could offer something a little more pleasurable, but quite honestly it was all you could expect from a furtive high-school-dropout-of-a-drug-dealer.)
Knock, knock.
He’s only slightly bemused. It’s 3:00 am and he is a minute away from closing up shop, but then the door creaks open under the strain of its duct-taped seams, vaguely slushy like a broom sweeping across a museum floor, and he hears the soft voice that echoes through the brownish late-night sky. Four words that he’s certain will never escape his flashbulb memory.
“I want to die.”
(There is no trace of irony as Yamashita thinks to himself that this is certainly the best start to a friendship. Better to start the game than finish it halfway. Because the day he meets Koyama is the day that he begins the arduous task of digging out Koyama’s broken heart. And in the end, it’s worth every single heave he’s put into it.)
--
“If you touch a tree, you become a tree,” he says, feeling very philosophical.
“No, you don’t,” Shige sighs.
--
He doesn’t try to be grim (not really). He doesn’t want to sound like one of those black magic schmucks down on the street whenever he opens a conversation about Greek tragedies -he’s really not- but it doesn’t stop people from treating him like the deus ex machina character of an explosive shonen manga. What is he supposed to do, anyway? It’s not his fault that, wherever he goes, there are car accidents and banks being robbed. Before his dad left his family, they used to call him The Curse-as if he was scary enough. (He can’t be a curse. It’s too Cleopatra for him.) Years later, he’s managed to turn the name into a popular logo, spread his fair share of rumors so that people unconsciously associate The Curse’s weed as a type of brand-name drug, but every now and then it still makes him feel uncomfortable. Yamashita The Curse is God’s little joke on all of them, the one born into the world with not a single birthmark on his body and about three thousand more pounds of bad luck over anyone he meets. Disconcerting, that’s what it is.
He meets Jin that way, when he’s twelve and barely making his grades. Akanishi Jin, self-proclaimed class bully and problem student (but really too much of a hot-blooded fist-fanatic to know any better)-the real deus ex machina, in all its designer leather jacket wannabe-gangster glory.
He’d just finished his job that day helping the old man at the pedestrian coffee shop clean his coffee grinders, and the next thing he knows there’s this blond kid on a motorbike, thirty-thousand yen stolen jewelry hanging around his neck, telling him to hop on for a ride; they need to get away from here fast and the police is looking for a single teenage boy so he’s recruiting a new member for his gang on the spot. (I’m already in a gang, and even if I join your gang it’s not going to help because you’re wearing the freaking jewelry around your neck, he wants to say, but too late-blond kid’s already hooked an arm around his waist, and with strength and agility rivaling Sarutobi Sasuke’s, carries him up and away.)
The invisible bonds start to form after they’ve smashed their way safe into the closest suburban townhouse, when he exchanges name/age/occupation/dick-length with Akanishi. They both read the same series of porn magazine, use the same brand of deodorant, like the same type of girls (though Jin likes submissive sex and has a long-term boyfriend, and he doesn’t).
“I’m a cursed deus ex machina,” young Yamashita says, testing his new friend one last time.
“What’s a deus ex machina?” young Akanishi scratches his head, “Can you eat it?”
Yeah, best friends forever, he thinks.
Jin’s entourage arrives later, headed by one Kamenashi, two T’s, a Nakamaru, and Kamenashi’s chauffeur. He finds out then; Akanishi attends the rich-kid school three streets down from his, the same one that Ryo abandoned him for.
(…Though it doesn’t take long for Nishikido to barge in on his friendship with Akanishi. Now that he thinks about it, Ryo does seem to have a knack for barging in on things, despite his small stature and that misleading sarcasm. Ryo’s only redeeming quality from the cold glares and insipid indifference is his friendly frown-in itself contradictory. He swears that Ryo’s frown can light up a ten-story building. Maybe it’s just for comic relief or something, but it’s still pretty damn sexy.)
--
He fancies himself as a law student, if he has actually been able to graduate into a college. (“You fancy too much,” Shige tells him.)
If he could be a lawyer, he would make Ryo’s parents pay for all the damage that has been dealt their children.
If there’s anyone bold, fearless Ryo is afraid of, it’s his old man. He had only met Nishikido-san once before, and he had known from that piercing glare in his eyes that this guy was dangerous, more clinically-insane than all the criminals locked up in the national jail put together, probably much more practiced in the trade of mind games than himself.
It had been the day Ryo’s grandfather has passed away, he’d obviously found it an excuse to drink. The three-million-yen will had been uncovered the same day, labeled clearly To Ryo, the only hope left in this family. Send him to a better school, won’t you?
“And what does he do?” Ryo laughed, bitter and angrier with himself more than anyone else. They were sitting on the ledge of a wire fence next to the garbage dump and chewing tobacco, sneakered-feet dangling off the sides, “He fucking beats the shit out of me and then tells me he’s taking all of the money and putting it in his retirement funds. Says that a good-for-nothing kid like me isn’t going to pay him back, no matter how better of a school they send me off to. Fuck, if the attorney hadn’t stepped in at the last minute, I’d probably never gotten my goddamn share to go to fucking private school.”
He glanced at Ryo, heart skips an unnecessary beat. Under the dim spectrum of a streetlight, the deep bruises on Ryo’s cheek and the hastily patched-up cut above his left eye show up like coins in a water fountain, but they don’t distort his features at all, just make them more pronounced, angles and shadows where he’s never seen angles and shadows before. (He wants to touch the cut, run fingertips over the bruises, he wants to get beat-up by Ryo, too, that’s what makes him the stupid one.)
“You’re…going to private school?”
Ryo flashes him a cold grin. “Yeah. I’ll be having fun with the rich bastards. Tsujimoto-sensei thinks I’ll be smart enough to be competitive, and dad beats me up when I told him what sensei said. Hey, did I ever slut around any of my teachers?”
That was when he decided to quit school.
--
He still remembers Ryo leaving their class. They’d had a water fight in the back-lot of Kusano’s apartment that same day, exploding balloons and gleeful shouts of a youthful existence (You really are growing old, Pi), and now all of them are dripping wet, hunched low beneath the windows of the locker rooms and trying to look presentable for the rest of the school day. Girls have been coming in all day, delivering baked cookies and muffins for Ryo, some of them in mascara-smeared tears. Their friends say goodbye, head off to class, one by one by one by one. Kusano leaves the empty locker rooms with a half-hearted wave and a half-hearted smile. Masuda rushes off quickly, but not before throwing a knitted yellow sweater into Ryo’s arms. And then there’s a new face in the room, he introduces himself as Yokoyama. Ryo-chan’s buddies from Osaka are in town, and they’re going to hit a few places tonight, so you better get your sorry ass outside quick, Nishikido.
And so he gets to spend the last five minutes of his life with a half-naked Ryo in an empty locker room.
“Hey, you take care of yourself, Pi,” the boy shrugs off his dripping wet pants, “I’ve gotta go, now.”
It’s now or never, he had thought, I have to say it. “R-Ryo-chan,” he whispers, softer than he’d expected his voice to sound. Wait, is he trembling?
“Hm? What’s up?” Ryo asks, looks up and then frowns, “Good grief, Yamashita, don’t come crying on my shoulder, okay? I’m wet enough as it is.”
He stops, reconsiders.
(Now or never? It’ll have to be never, then.)
--
Now, him and Nishikido, they go back-way back, back to the days when they still sold popsicles for a few coins and when Ryo was still dumb and ticklish. He’s never had any trouble remembering Ryo. Nishikido’s like a glaring splinter on the big toe, the more-irritating-than-helpful transcendent being always looking over his shoulder. They’d never failed to look out for each other, from the first days of attending the same nursery school for the poor kids to the year Ryo inherited three million yen from his granddad and moved into a better school district as a result.
He kind of misses Ryo. Only kind of. (If anyone had bothered to ask, he’d be the first to admit that he’s the biggest sap in the universe.)
He’s wanted forever and a day to call it childhood friendship (there’s something incredibly satisfying about the words; gives him a warm feeling of accomplishment that he just can’t gather from jerking off in front of a dirty magazine), but he’s tried to fool himself so many times that it just won’t work anymore-he will want more, he does want more, he’s always wanted more.
Yamapi has loved Nishikido for a long time, now; it’s been eighteen years and one of them is still counting.
His one-sided love affair with Nishikido probably begins with all those stupid metaphors he made up as an excuse to pursue game theory, if only to make sure that the equilibrium of life adds up correctly and doesn’t miss a slice of fat someday on someone in someplace. It’s his very own brand of existentialism-what Shige calls quack science, what Ryo calls sex theory, what Koyama calls inspiration. Using Pi’s equilibrium theory of life, he had calculated his own chewing gum, default orientation=pansexual, and -somewhere along the way- he had found a Nishikido Ryo. The evidence speaks for itself. He had never believed himself to be a Prince Charming, he’s never wanted to sweep some girl off her feet, he had lost hope the moment the neon bracelets disappeared with Ikuta, because for most of his life he had gravitated towards Ryo, hopelessly benign and annoyingly unchangeable as touching a tree and becoming a tree and ending up as the bubblegum flavor in a pack of Wrigley’s when you’d clearly wanted the spearmint.
“Do I turn you on?” At all? He asks Ryo some day and some place, when they’ve finished recalling the standardized math test and he’s finished being a pessimist with a stick shoved up his ass.
It takes Ryo three seconds to choke on his own spit, sputter a little. “What the hell?”
“Do I?” He insists, because it’s kind of important; he’s wanted to know for a long time.
“Of course not!”
(And he should have expected it, but it still hurts. Ryo’s so mean to him.) “Why?”
Nishikido answers indirectly. “It’s one of the reasons I hang around you, you know. Sexual tension is like, one of the worst poisons out there.”
He’s in shock. He’s crashed into a wall and now he’s getting a brain aneurism; epilepsy sounds like heaven. Poison? Is that what it’s like for Ryo? As for himself, how had he come to feel sexual tension, at all? He’d always just known that the childhood friendship bit wasn’t enough for him to chew. But, poison? Has Ryo been chewing poisonous gum, all this time?
(Perhaps he’ll never understand Ryo the way Shige can.)
But he’s making an idiot out of himself. He’s realized a long time ago that you can’t always get what you want. Things never work out perfectly in the end-there are so many dark horses on the chess board. People grow up, acquaintances become friendships, friendships become acquaintances; grass grows greener, skies greyer, prices on canned fish fluctuate up and down. In fact, the only thing that probably won’t change in a million years is the glare on his homeroom teacher’s face.
So he manages to convince himself that it’s a silly attraction, led by harmless child-like fancy, fairy stories that involve happy endings edited by Disney (it was that or porn, he took his pick). Even though he’s loved Ryo forever like the laws of celestial nature, the Earth pulling itself towards the sun, never ceasing and cinching forward a little, year by year, until fate brings it toward the center of the flaming ball of hydrogen-to-helium for the last damn day-he won’t explode.
The sun is just too far away.
And so when he’s got his arms around Ryo’s ex, his nose buried into Koyama’s hair, tuned to the boy’s shallow breathing, he stops himself from picturing Ryo in Koyama’s place, he likes Koyama only, Koyama now.
Somehow, it works.
“It’s okay, I don’t think we’re supposed to get over the first one, anyway,” he declares. It’s time to pick up the shovel and dig until he’s done.
--
TBC.
--
Oooh~ Will there be a confrontation next? I -do- wonder. 8D This is just getting lamer by the day, isn't it? /shot.