50 sentences; kameda (3/5)
◄ #11-20
#21 - Life
They were enemies before they were friends; they were strangers even as they were friends; they made each other bleed and cry to the point that everyone including them thought they wouldn’t last, but the day KAT-TUN lost their third letter, Ueda looked Kame dead in the eye and said, “I’m not stopping”, and in that moment, Kame had never felt closer to anyone.
#22 - Jealousy
It goes on for months until Ueda finally gets it and corners Kame with his fists balled, “all this shit with Nakamaru-are you testing me?” and Kame doesn’t even feign, has the nerve to close in so that the slightest movement will send their lips colliding-the same game he’s been playing with Nakamaru-“It took a while,” Kame breathes, “but congratulations, you’ve just passed.”
#23 - Hands
Their hands told stories: one bruised with swollen and cracked knuckles, the other creased and blistered along the palm; when they wrapped around each other, the grip solid and their thumbs tentatively circling wounds, they told another story all together: one not of romance, but of a bond forged on common ground and comfort.
#24 - Taste
They’ve almost made it through dinner and Kame is on his best, most natural behaviour; he slouches when he thinks he’s sitting too straight, laughs and chews on his homemade gyoza when Ueda catches him watching too closely, and it’s their last course and, check, Kame is breathing properly-until Ueda wrinkles his nose in sudden distaste, “wait-you put shrimp in this, didn’t you?”
#25 - Devotion
“But like, isn’t there a really important baseball game happening today? I mean it has to be pretty huge if even I know about it,” Ueda says for the fourth time, still puzzled as to why Kame is still in his apartment scoffing at his lack of proper wine glasses instead of crapping his pants in joy out in some baseball stands; his confusion is answered when Kame starts humming the same tune he had been humming when Ueda had first kissed him on an autumn evening-exactly a month ago today.
#26 - Forever
They’re combustible-more fire and gasoline than oil and water; they’re not made for promises, not because they can’t commit but because they commit too much, and there’s too much ferocity between them that if the promise that was never made was to break, neither of them could survive the fallout unburnt.
#27 - Blood
Ueda has tasted blood many times-it’s filled his mouth since he was a trainee, taking a punch to the face by Kamenashi, and whenever he slips up in the boxing ring, the pungent, copper-tinged flavour explodes in the crevices of his teeth and Ueda laps it up like a bloodhound-no, a wolf-but what really quenches him is the hiss Kame releases when Ueda bites down hard, tugging at a broken lip that will be swollen for days-I bleed, you bleed.
#28 - Sickness
There are perks to visiting a sick Kame, Ueda quickly learns; not only is watching Kame micro-manage his affairs over the phone-propped up against the throne of his pillows and engulfed in his white bathrobe, looking little more than the king of marshmallows-entertainment of itself, but the heat tends to make him deliriously honest, to the point that he’ll tug on Ueda’s sleeve and tell him how much he’s been missed, a vulnerability that Kame would never expose otherwise.
#29 - Melody
Sometimes, Kame is struck into silence by everything that Ueda Tatsuya is, everything he encompasses, the formidability and the fragility; it’s the same hands that, encased in gloves, fell rivals twice his size that now dance delicately along the piano keys, weaving vibrations that make Kame’s heart thrum-and it’s those same fingertips that run down his spine much later, with Tatsuya’s music never leaving his ears.
#30 - Star
“It’s just… you seemed too cool to be real, you were unreachable,” Kame slurs out with his head propped up on his elbow, breath reeking of one expensive beers too many, and Ueda suddenly has the ironic epiphany that he is to Kame what Kame is to Nakamaru-a star, whatever that means.