[FIC] one thousand pieces. pg. arashi, nino/jun, 4369 words.
Title: One Thousand Pieces
Groups: Arashi
Pairing/Genre: Nino/Jun, established relationship
Rating: PG
Word Count: 4369 words
Summary: Aiba buys Nino and Jun a 1,000-piece puzzle as a house-warming present.
Notes: Written for satsumatsu for ninoexchange 2013, originally posted here.
First of all, big ups to nino_mod! I love this exchange. Thanks to my beta, the lovely phrenk, who held my hand and made this fic far better than I could have done myself.
There's a large table in the space between the living room and kitchen in Nino and Jun's apartment. To the casual observer, it's a dining table, but they never eat there. One half of the table is covered in puzzle pieces, picture side up but scattered haphazardly over the space. The other half of the table is the puzzle in progress, a 1,000-piece twilight cityscape of Tokyo. It was a present from Aiba on the night they moved in, "for when the power goes out."
"Doesn't he know it would be more annoying to play this in the dark?" Nino said later that night, inspecting the box as Jun poured some wine.
"Let's try it now, then," Jun suggested, taking the box and peeling the plastic away.
Nino shrugged and sat down, taking a sip of wine as Jun spilled the pieces out of the box. He picked up a couple of pieces that had fallen to the ground and placed them on the table, starting to flip and organize them into a flat sea of pieces. Nino watched Jun work for a moment, the careless concentration on his features, before he joined in, moving his glass of wine to arm's length to give them more room.
They sifted through the pieces in silence, and a stillness fell over the apartment. They hadn't had a moment to themselves all day between movers and well-wishers, and the full weight and reality of the decision - which had just been an idea so far - settled around them in the silence.
Jun was the first to break it, sitting back and taking a sip of wine as Nino flipped the last couple of pieces and shuffled them flat on the table. "Do you think we made the right decision?"
Nino surveyed the table. "It wouldn't make any sense to arrange them with the cardboard facing up, would it?" He looked up in time to catch Jun's unimpressed face and smiled. "I think we made the right decision." There was certainty in his voice, even though he knew that only time would answer the question.
Jun knew that, too, but he needed the reassurance. They'd talked through all the pros and cons, of course, and weighed them in making their decision, but now there was no more talking to be done, and neither of them could be sure that they hadn't underestimated the cons. Luckily, none of the cons had to do with how they felt about one another. If their lives were more free, they'd have moved in together much earlier. Jun shook his head to dismantle his negative thoughts and took another sip of wine before leaning over the collection of pieces, plucking out one with a flat edge.
"Let's see how much of the border we can get done over this bottle of wine," he said, picking up another flat piece and grinning over at Nino.
Two hours and a bottle of wine later, they had managed to piece together most of the border. They spent most of the time in comfortable silence, their thoughts and fears percolating quietly in the background as they walked around the table drinking wine, stealing each other's pieces, blitzing through a section of building, and lamenting the large, bland expanse of purple-blue night sky at the top.
With one piece missing from the border, Nino slid his arms around Jun as he finished the last of the wine. Jun reflexively wrapped his arm around Nino's shoulders, but Nino pulled back, Jun's wallet in his hands. Jun frowned. "I thought I said no pick-pocketing."
Nino ignored him. "This is the last piece of the border," he said, and the piece appeared between his fingers. He opened Jun's wallet and unzipped the space for coins that Jun never used. Inside was one of Nino's guitar picks from the night they took the painful first steps of their relationship, and a one yen coin from 1902 that Jun's grandfather gave him at his high school graduation. Nino tucked the puzzle piece into the space and zipped it closed again. "It will be the last piece of the whole puzzle, and when we're done with it, we'll go to Paris and buy a new one."
Jun grinned. "So romantic," he sighed, putting his wine glass back on the table and sliding his free arm around Nino's waist.
"I was going to say Iran, but I wasn't sure they'd have the nicest cityscapes," Nino replied dryly, returning Jun's wallet to his back pocket. Jun huffed a laugh but didn't reply, and they remained at the table, wrapped in a loose embrace for a few minutes, silence pulling their heavy eyelids closed.
The next morning, Nino was the first to leave the apartment for a sunrise drama shoot. His morning routine was thrown off with the new space and some essential things still hidden in boxes, so he found himself sitting at the dining table with a mug of coffee, trying to clear the cobwebs by idly counting the puzzle pieces. A shower helped, as did eating a banana from the fruit basket Sho had given them, and he felt mostly alive by the time his manager called from downstairs, though something tugged at the back of his mind. As he picked up his keys from the hook by the door, he realized what it was, and turned back into the house.
Jun woke hours later, his schedule clear until an evening taping, and he made his way around the apartment, taking stock of it in the early morning sun. Apart from the furniture and the coffee machine, most things were still packed in boxes, which made the dining room table and the puzzle on it look delightfully lived-in. As he got closer, he noticed a piece of paper sticking out from beneath a newly added piece of the puzzle.
One step closer to Paris, it read in Nino's hurried handwriting. Your turn.
Jun smiled at the note, but didn't take his turn until the next morning, when he woke first. They continued to take turns adding one piece per day, and a habit quickly formed, remaining constant as the rest of the apartment fluctuated. Over time, boxes were unpacked, meals cooked, disagreements resolved, wine drunk and sex had, but the only thing that changed about the table was that pieces moved from one side to the other.
---
Nino worked it out at one point, the number of days it should take them to finish the puzzle. Jun had been in Taipei for two weeks on some elaborate drama finale, and the unchanging puzzle highlighted just how long he'd been gone. So Nino sat at the table, ice cubes melting in a glass of Hibiki, and he counted the pieces - twice, just to be sure. Then, on his third pour of whisky, he got his laptop and looked up the date 869 days from Jun's return.
"Two years from now, June 14, we'll be in Paris," Nino said as soon as Jun picked up his hotel phone.
"What?" Jun was tired, but not woken, and he could hear that Nino had been drinking, but he didn't have the energy to say anything.
"If you don't leave again, I mean," Nino clarified, crunching on an ice cube. "If you don't leave, and I don't leave, we'll be in Paris on June 14 in two years."
It took a moment through the haze of exhaustion, but Jun soon understood. He sighed. "I'll be home in no time. Three days."
"Four," Nino corrected him, because he'd gone to the countdown webpage he'd made when Jun left. He frowned and sipped some more whisky. "I miss you." His tone was angry, but Jun knew there was sadness behind it.
"I miss you, too," Jun said gently. "I'll put down my next piece soon. We'll be back on the road to Paris in no time."
---
The puzzle remained a private endeavor, though it was almost by default since they didn't really have guests. After they had been in the apartment for nearly a year, they were nominated to host the annual Arashi anniversary dinner. They didn't object, but over breakfast the next morning as Jun considered the puzzle pieces and Nino watched him choose, it occurred to them both that they would rather hide it than explain it and endure teasing from the peanut gallery.
"We can't move it," Jun said, fingering a piece of sky. It seemed apropos of nothing, but Nino was on the same train of thought.
"But we can't eat over it," Nino said, taking a sip of coffee.
"We could put a tablecloth over it," Jun suggested, but visions of Aiba tugging on the material and pulling their masterpiece over the corner made him screw up his nose. Nino saw Ohno doing pencil rubbings over the bumps in his mind's eye and pulled a similar face.
"We could get a piece of glass, put a tablecloth over that?" Neither of them could think of a better idea, so they ordered a custom piece of opaque glass that day, and it arrived just in time. When the dinner party was over, they kept the large sheet of glass in the laundry room, tablecloth folded over the top of it, for the next time they had guests.
---
Eighteen months into the puzzle's life, one-third of the way through its completion, a persistent knock woke Nino in the middle of the night. He opened the door to a Aiba, who was drenched and clearly in shock, shaking in the October air. Nino pulled him indoors, fully awake now as he helped Aiba out of his shoes and steered him towards the bathroom.
"What happened?" Nino finally asked as the bathroom door closed behind them, plugging the bath and running the hot water. Aiba just stood there, blinking and looking a million miles away. "Masaki," Nino repeated, more forcefully this time, and Aiba snapped back to the moment. "What happened?"
"I, um," Aiba started, stammering as Nino started unbuttoning his shirt. Nino mumbled for him to go on, and Aiba shook his head. "I was in an accident."
"What?" Nino stopped unbuttoning Aiba's shirt and looked for signs of injury or blood, his heartbeat quickening immediately.
"It's... I'm okay," Aiba said vaguely. "A bike... this guy was zooming along on his bike and I- he didn't see me, and I didn't see him. He swerved, but the road was wet." He shook his head, rattling himself from the memory. "I called an ambulance, and stayed with him until I could hear the sirens. He was bleeding, and hurt, but I didn't know how badly. I couldn't... I didn't want to be there when the ambulance came."
"Okay," Nino said, pressing his hands firmly on Aiba's shoulders. "It's okay. It'll be okay." He waited for Aiba to meet his eyes, and then he repeated "it's okay," nodding. Aiba nodded in response, which meant the message had sunk in, so Nino helped him remove the rest of his clothes and get into the warm bath. "You stay here, I'll wash your clothes and get the couch ready for you to sleep on. I'll leave the door open. Just call out if you need anything."
Aiba nodded, but did a double-take a second later. "I don't want to wake Jun-kun."
Nino shook his head, piling the sopping wet and cold clothes in his arms. "He's shooting until four. He won't be back before sunrise. Don't worry about it."
Half an hour later, Nino had put the clothes in the washing machine, put sheets on the couch, and found some of Jun's old sweatpants and a t-shirt for Aiba to sleep in. He sat on the toilet next to the bath and pulled a towel from the rack. "Feeling better?" he asked, folding the towel over his arms. Aiba certainly looked warmer, and at once more awake and more tired than he had when he'd arrived at the door.
"Yes," Aiba said simply. "Thank you."
Nino nodded, and held Aiba's eyes for a moment. "You might not have done the right thing tonight, but you didn't do anything wrong." It was a subtle distinction, but one that perfectly described the grey area they lived in. Aiba's eyes started to water and Nino pulled a hand from the towel and pressed it to the back of Aiba's head. "Don't worry. We'll deal with everything tomorrow. For now, just tell me what you need to get to sleep, okay?"
Aiba sniffed back the tears that threatened and took a deep breath. "Would some whisky be too much to ask?"
Nino shook his head and left the towel and clothes for Aiba as he went to the kitchen. He next saw Aiba sitting at the dining room table, surveying the puzzle and its pieces. Nino handed him a generous pour of whisky and sat down at the opposite chair. "We've enjoyed your present," he said with a small smile. "I suppose I should have been nicer about it."
Aiba took a mouthful of whisky and closed his eyes as it warmed the back of his throat on its way down. "I don't know if this is good progress or not," he said. "I thought 1,000 pieces sounded impossible, like it would take forever. This is pretty good, but I guess it's been a while."
"A year," Nino nodded, taking a sip from his own whisky. "We only do it now and then." Nino tried to keep his features neutral, but the smile Aiba gave him was knowing.
"I'm glad you like it," he said, tracing the perimeter until he found the gap in the rectangle. "Isn’t the border the easiest part?”
"It's not ready yet."
The next morning, Nino woke to Jun crawling into bed with his clothes on. "Why is Aiba-chan on the couch?" Jun mumbled into Nino's neck, arm curling around his waist and legs pressing against the backs of Nino's. The memories from the night before rushed back to the front of Nino's mind and he groaned.
"I'll tell you later," he said, maneuvering himself over to face Jun, whose eyes were already closed. "But now, I need to wake up." Their schedules had been alternating for far too long, and he missed spending time in bed with Jun. He leaned in for a long, comfortable kiss, before he could tell that Jun's mind was slipping into dreamland. "And you need to sleep."
Jun made a grumpy noise in the back of his throat, his eyes remaining closed. "Okay," he conceded, "but why did he add a piece?"
"I think he needed to," Nino admitted.
Jun vaguely nodded his head. "It's okay," he said. "It's his puzzle, too."
---
On the second anniversary of their moving in, Nino and Jun had their first big fight. Nino's sister was getting married. It had been a long time coming, as she'd been living with her boyfriend for nearly seven years, but their mother had instilled in both her and Nino an unshakable fear of marrying too early. She was finally taking the plunge, though, and it meant a lot to Nino on an individual level, but it meant something entirely different to him and Jun.
Nino told Jun about his sister's engagement over a hotpot dinner, sitting under the kotatsu and drinking cold beer.
"That's great," Jun replied. "You and your mother must be happy for her."
"I'm surprised mom didn't have a heart attack," Nino said wryly, tugging a piece of cabbage free. "I am happy for her. It's been hard. That level of commitment is... enviable. It's impossible to tell mom you're happy with someone."
Most of the time, Jun knew what Nino was trying to say. They were both oblique when they spoke about their feelings, but they'd known each other for so long that it very rarely happened that they couldn't understand what was being said between the lines. But the things Jun heard between these lines shook the very ground of their relationship, and he had to put down his bowl and chopsticks to regain his balance.
"Nino," he said, slowly and carefully as he chose his words before he said them, "have you told your mother about us?"
Nino looked sharply at Jun, not with anger but fear. The same uncertainty that had built in Jun ripped through Nino in an instant and he nearly knocked over his beer as he put down his chopsticks. "No," he said as quickly as he could. "No, I couldn't."
It made sense, Jun tried to reason through the panic, it made complete sense after what Nino had just said about his mother, but that didn't stop the pain in his heart from growing. His throat constricted and he found it difficult to breathe, let alone speak, but he needed to know. "You haven't told her anything? Not that we're living together, not that we've been... for years? Nothing?"
It had never been a question for Nino before. Telling anyone - his mother especially - just wasn't an option. The rest of the group knew, one select manager knew, but it wasn't something to be broadcast. His mother was an important part of his life, and she knew almost everything about him, but there was one thing he could never tell her.
"She knows how I feel," Nino explained. "Just not who I feel that way about." Fear gripped his heart. "Have you told your family?"
"Of course!" Jun exclaimed with a little more volume than he'd anticipated. "They're my family! I came out to my parents a month after I worked it out for myself. They know everything, especially about us. You’re not just a footnote in my story."
Nino worked his jaw, trying to find a way to explain to Jun that he was the most careless fool with what should have been his closest-kept secret. "I can't talk about this right now," he said instead, pushing himself out from beneath the kotatsu.
Jun grabbed his wrist. "No, we're talking about this. You need to tell your mother. Does she even know you're gay?"
"Of course not," Nino snapped, snatching his wrist back but not moving further. "My mother is on a need-to-know basis, and she does not need to know that."
"Nino, I am not getting in your closet with you," Jun said, gripping into the blanket of the kotatsu tight so that his hands wouldn't shake. Tears pricked the back of his eyes because he knew what he was saying was right. He just hadn't realized Nino wasn't on the same page.
"You don't have to. Our families never see each other, it's not like your mother's going to call mine to chat about how lovely it is their sons are fucking." Nino could hear the blood rushing past his ears, and his skin felt prickly and his stomach churned as he spoke.
Jun shook his head, swallowing back a large lump in his throat. "That's not the point."
"Then what is the point? This closet you're talking about not being in, you are. We both are. Unless you're prepared to get on national television and announce it, that closet door is firmly closed. You and I, Arashi, our managers, the entire fucking agency is in the closet with us. What difference does it make if I tell my mother? She's got a poisonous tongue, and it wouldn't matter if you were a woman or a man or a dog, she tries to ruin any relationship my sister or I have." Nino felt faint from the rush of truth escaping, things they'd only whispered about before and things he'd never admitted to anyone. He knew what Jun was trying to say, but it only worked on one of those normal people with normal mothers. Nino was not that person.
Jun could see he'd hit a nerve, but this was a conversation they needed to get through. "If it doesn't matter, you should tell her."
Nino shook his head. The churning in his stomach had turned into proper nausea. There was a reason he'd never brought this up. "The more she knows, the more she has to hurt me with."
"So when? When will you tell her? When my parents want to meet yours? When we've been living together for five years? Ten? When we want something more, to commit to each other in some other way? When she's on her death bed not knowing who you've loved your whole life, who's loved you and taken care of you and been taken care of by you?" Jun was sliding past his point and into the dangerous territory of the future, and he knew it. He shook his head and flexed his fingers to calm himself. "She's your mother. She wants you to be happy, even if she doesn't express it well. I don't see how keeping this from her is doing you or her any good."
"You don't know my mother." Nino stood, and Jun didn't stop him this time. He grabbed his keys and wallet and left unceremoniously. Jun picked idly at the food for a while, before he quietly cleaned up and went to bed.
Nino returned in the middle of the night after spending a few hours driving aimlessly around the city listening to music to drown out his thoughts, though every now and then he caught himself in his recurring day terror of his mother’s admonishment. His imagination was ruthless, picking at the very heart of all the insecurities he'd ever had about his relationship with Jun, and he knew that part of it was just a projection of his own fears, but not all of it was. This was the first relationship he'd ever told his mother about, because he'd seen the subtle (and not so subtle) jabs she took at his sister's relationships.
He'd also felt the sting when his scandals turned up in the paper. "You should never trust someone like that," she'd told him, stabbing the photo in the magazine. Even though Nino tried not to take any of what she said to heart, it was difficult to face his fears.
Upon Nino’s return, though, he found his thoughts settled, the balance between emotion and reason restored. The logical part of his mind agreed with Jun. His mother was a good person and did, in the end, want the best for him. Her aggression came from her own painful past, and neither Nino nor his sister should have ever put up with her behavior for so long. But not taking a stand was only doing a disservice to his relationship with Jun, and Nino knew that. It was a high emotional hurdle to clear, but after everything he’d already been through, it was the right thing to do.
By morning, Nino had left the apartment again, but Jun woke to find a piece added to the puzzle - the tip of Tokyo Tower - along with a note, written in a very deliberate hand, I'm staying at my mother's this weekend. Come for dinner on Monday.
---
Between touring, recording and individual work travel, the puzzle's lifespan became much longer than what Nino had initially calculated. Three years after starting it, Nino and Jun stumbled through their front door, already drunk from the crank-up party for Nino's latest drama. Jun made his way to the kitchen to get them some water, but Nino only made it to the dining table, plonking down in a chair in front of the nearly-completed puzzle.
"Hey," he called, voice unnecessarily loud. "I want to finish the puzzle."
Jun returned to the living room without water, a bottle of wine instead resting on his thigh as he sat next to Nino. "What's the hurry?" he asked, leaning over to catch Nino's earlobe between his teeth, his hand sliding high over Nino's inner thigh.
Nino's vision was already blurry, but his eyes crossed for a moment as Jun's fingers teased higher on his leg, and he pushed out a breath as he tried to focus. "I want to go to Paris with you already. I want to drink Champagne at the top of the Eiffel Tower and walk through the eighth Arrondissement and hold hands in the Louvre and just... have so much sex, everywhere, every room of the hotel suite, dirty bathrooms at a Metro station, the back row of an art house movie theatre.... Please?"
Jun was having trouble focusing, too, so he just closed his eyes and caught Nino's mouth in a searing kiss. They forgot how to breathe and had to come up for air eventually; Jun almost dropped the bottle of wine as the oxygen rushed to his head. Then, through heavy breathing, he remembered there was a point. "We'll finish the puzzle. We'll talk to the agency tomorrow and get the time off. But for now," he said, putting the bottle of wine on the floor and pulling Nino into his lap, "we've got our own apartment to defile."
---
They didn't plan the day they finished the puzzle. Work got in the way, and they couldn't bring themselves to stop the routine of adding one piece per day, so it remained in a state of limbo with one piece missing for nearly three weeks. The night before they left for Paris, they packed and sat at the dining table with two glasses of the same wine they'd been drinking on the night they moved in.
They hadn't discussed the moment, but it felt like a ritual. Not an ending - because they weren't moving, or breaking up, or anything - but it felt like the start of a tradition. The threads that brought and held their lives together were messy, tangled and painful. The puzzle was one of the few that they had total control over. It was theirs; they had built it and put it together.
They didn't say anything for a long time, the bottle of wine slowly emptying as they sat in silence, contemplating the three years and 1,000 pieces behind them. It wasn't just a pretty picture of Tokyo at twilight, it was their story, and each piece had its place.
Eventually, Jun pulled out his wallet and retrieved the puzzle piece from the coin pocket, placing it beside the empty space in the border. He poured the last two glasses of wine left in the bottle and raised his glass. Nino lifted his own, and he could practically feel the warmth radiating from Jun's expression. When Jun spoke, it was as though Nino had already heard it.
"I love you."
Nino smiled and touched his glass to Jun's. "To us."
Groups: Arashi
Pairing/Genre: Nino/Jun, established relationship
Rating: PG
Word Count: 4369 words
Summary: Aiba buys Nino and Jun a 1,000-piece puzzle as a house-warming present.
Notes: Written for satsumatsu for ninoexchange 2013, originally posted here.
First of all, big ups to nino_mod! I love this exchange. Thanks to my beta, the lovely phrenk, who held my hand and made this fic far better than I could have done myself.
There's a large table in the space between the living room and kitchen in Nino and Jun's apartment. To the casual observer, it's a dining table, but they never eat there. One half of the table is covered in puzzle pieces, picture side up but scattered haphazardly over the space. The other half of the table is the puzzle in progress, a 1,000-piece twilight cityscape of Tokyo. It was a present from Aiba on the night they moved in, "for when the power goes out."
"Doesn't he know it would be more annoying to play this in the dark?" Nino said later that night, inspecting the box as Jun poured some wine.
"Let's try it now, then," Jun suggested, taking the box and peeling the plastic away.
Nino shrugged and sat down, taking a sip of wine as Jun spilled the pieces out of the box. He picked up a couple of pieces that had fallen to the ground and placed them on the table, starting to flip and organize them into a flat sea of pieces. Nino watched Jun work for a moment, the careless concentration on his features, before he joined in, moving his glass of wine to arm's length to give them more room.
They sifted through the pieces in silence, and a stillness fell over the apartment. They hadn't had a moment to themselves all day between movers and well-wishers, and the full weight and reality of the decision - which had just been an idea so far - settled around them in the silence.
Jun was the first to break it, sitting back and taking a sip of wine as Nino flipped the last couple of pieces and shuffled them flat on the table. "Do you think we made the right decision?"
Nino surveyed the table. "It wouldn't make any sense to arrange them with the cardboard facing up, would it?" He looked up in time to catch Jun's unimpressed face and smiled. "I think we made the right decision." There was certainty in his voice, even though he knew that only time would answer the question.
Jun knew that, too, but he needed the reassurance. They'd talked through all the pros and cons, of course, and weighed them in making their decision, but now there was no more talking to be done, and neither of them could be sure that they hadn't underestimated the cons. Luckily, none of the cons had to do with how they felt about one another. If their lives were more free, they'd have moved in together much earlier. Jun shook his head to dismantle his negative thoughts and took another sip of wine before leaning over the collection of pieces, plucking out one with a flat edge.
"Let's see how much of the border we can get done over this bottle of wine," he said, picking up another flat piece and grinning over at Nino.
Two hours and a bottle of wine later, they had managed to piece together most of the border. They spent most of the time in comfortable silence, their thoughts and fears percolating quietly in the background as they walked around the table drinking wine, stealing each other's pieces, blitzing through a section of building, and lamenting the large, bland expanse of purple-blue night sky at the top.
With one piece missing from the border, Nino slid his arms around Jun as he finished the last of the wine. Jun reflexively wrapped his arm around Nino's shoulders, but Nino pulled back, Jun's wallet in his hands. Jun frowned. "I thought I said no pick-pocketing."
Nino ignored him. "This is the last piece of the border," he said, and the piece appeared between his fingers. He opened Jun's wallet and unzipped the space for coins that Jun never used. Inside was one of Nino's guitar picks from the night they took the painful first steps of their relationship, and a one yen coin from 1902 that Jun's grandfather gave him at his high school graduation. Nino tucked the puzzle piece into the space and zipped it closed again. "It will be the last piece of the whole puzzle, and when we're done with it, we'll go to Paris and buy a new one."
Jun grinned. "So romantic," he sighed, putting his wine glass back on the table and sliding his free arm around Nino's waist.
"I was going to say Iran, but I wasn't sure they'd have the nicest cityscapes," Nino replied dryly, returning Jun's wallet to his back pocket. Jun huffed a laugh but didn't reply, and they remained at the table, wrapped in a loose embrace for a few minutes, silence pulling their heavy eyelids closed.
The next morning, Nino was the first to leave the apartment for a sunrise drama shoot. His morning routine was thrown off with the new space and some essential things still hidden in boxes, so he found himself sitting at the dining table with a mug of coffee, trying to clear the cobwebs by idly counting the puzzle pieces. A shower helped, as did eating a banana from the fruit basket Sho had given them, and he felt mostly alive by the time his manager called from downstairs, though something tugged at the back of his mind. As he picked up his keys from the hook by the door, he realized what it was, and turned back into the house.
Jun woke hours later, his schedule clear until an evening taping, and he made his way around the apartment, taking stock of it in the early morning sun. Apart from the furniture and the coffee machine, most things were still packed in boxes, which made the dining room table and the puzzle on it look delightfully lived-in. As he got closer, he noticed a piece of paper sticking out from beneath a newly added piece of the puzzle.
One step closer to Paris, it read in Nino's hurried handwriting. Your turn.
Jun smiled at the note, but didn't take his turn until the next morning, when he woke first. They continued to take turns adding one piece per day, and a habit quickly formed, remaining constant as the rest of the apartment fluctuated. Over time, boxes were unpacked, meals cooked, disagreements resolved, wine drunk and sex had, but the only thing that changed about the table was that pieces moved from one side to the other.
---
Nino worked it out at one point, the number of days it should take them to finish the puzzle. Jun had been in Taipei for two weeks on some elaborate drama finale, and the unchanging puzzle highlighted just how long he'd been gone. So Nino sat at the table, ice cubes melting in a glass of Hibiki, and he counted the pieces - twice, just to be sure. Then, on his third pour of whisky, he got his laptop and looked up the date 869 days from Jun's return.
"Two years from now, June 14, we'll be in Paris," Nino said as soon as Jun picked up his hotel phone.
"What?" Jun was tired, but not woken, and he could hear that Nino had been drinking, but he didn't have the energy to say anything.
"If you don't leave again, I mean," Nino clarified, crunching on an ice cube. "If you don't leave, and I don't leave, we'll be in Paris on June 14 in two years."
It took a moment through the haze of exhaustion, but Jun soon understood. He sighed. "I'll be home in no time. Three days."
"Four," Nino corrected him, because he'd gone to the countdown webpage he'd made when Jun left. He frowned and sipped some more whisky. "I miss you." His tone was angry, but Jun knew there was sadness behind it.
"I miss you, too," Jun said gently. "I'll put down my next piece soon. We'll be back on the road to Paris in no time."
---
The puzzle remained a private endeavor, though it was almost by default since they didn't really have guests. After they had been in the apartment for nearly a year, they were nominated to host the annual Arashi anniversary dinner. They didn't object, but over breakfast the next morning as Jun considered the puzzle pieces and Nino watched him choose, it occurred to them both that they would rather hide it than explain it and endure teasing from the peanut gallery.
"We can't move it," Jun said, fingering a piece of sky. It seemed apropos of nothing, but Nino was on the same train of thought.
"But we can't eat over it," Nino said, taking a sip of coffee.
"We could put a tablecloth over it," Jun suggested, but visions of Aiba tugging on the material and pulling their masterpiece over the corner made him screw up his nose. Nino saw Ohno doing pencil rubbings over the bumps in his mind's eye and pulled a similar face.
"We could get a piece of glass, put a tablecloth over that?" Neither of them could think of a better idea, so they ordered a custom piece of opaque glass that day, and it arrived just in time. When the dinner party was over, they kept the large sheet of glass in the laundry room, tablecloth folded over the top of it, for the next time they had guests.
---
Eighteen months into the puzzle's life, one-third of the way through its completion, a persistent knock woke Nino in the middle of the night. He opened the door to a Aiba, who was drenched and clearly in shock, shaking in the October air. Nino pulled him indoors, fully awake now as he helped Aiba out of his shoes and steered him towards the bathroom.
"What happened?" Nino finally asked as the bathroom door closed behind them, plugging the bath and running the hot water. Aiba just stood there, blinking and looking a million miles away. "Masaki," Nino repeated, more forcefully this time, and Aiba snapped back to the moment. "What happened?"
"I, um," Aiba started, stammering as Nino started unbuttoning his shirt. Nino mumbled for him to go on, and Aiba shook his head. "I was in an accident."
"What?" Nino stopped unbuttoning Aiba's shirt and looked for signs of injury or blood, his heartbeat quickening immediately.
"It's... I'm okay," Aiba said vaguely. "A bike... this guy was zooming along on his bike and I- he didn't see me, and I didn't see him. He swerved, but the road was wet." He shook his head, rattling himself from the memory. "I called an ambulance, and stayed with him until I could hear the sirens. He was bleeding, and hurt, but I didn't know how badly. I couldn't... I didn't want to be there when the ambulance came."
"Okay," Nino said, pressing his hands firmly on Aiba's shoulders. "It's okay. It'll be okay." He waited for Aiba to meet his eyes, and then he repeated "it's okay," nodding. Aiba nodded in response, which meant the message had sunk in, so Nino helped him remove the rest of his clothes and get into the warm bath. "You stay here, I'll wash your clothes and get the couch ready for you to sleep on. I'll leave the door open. Just call out if you need anything."
Aiba nodded, but did a double-take a second later. "I don't want to wake Jun-kun."
Nino shook his head, piling the sopping wet and cold clothes in his arms. "He's shooting until four. He won't be back before sunrise. Don't worry about it."
Half an hour later, Nino had put the clothes in the washing machine, put sheets on the couch, and found some of Jun's old sweatpants and a t-shirt for Aiba to sleep in. He sat on the toilet next to the bath and pulled a towel from the rack. "Feeling better?" he asked, folding the towel over his arms. Aiba certainly looked warmer, and at once more awake and more tired than he had when he'd arrived at the door.
"Yes," Aiba said simply. "Thank you."
Nino nodded, and held Aiba's eyes for a moment. "You might not have done the right thing tonight, but you didn't do anything wrong." It was a subtle distinction, but one that perfectly described the grey area they lived in. Aiba's eyes started to water and Nino pulled a hand from the towel and pressed it to the back of Aiba's head. "Don't worry. We'll deal with everything tomorrow. For now, just tell me what you need to get to sleep, okay?"
Aiba sniffed back the tears that threatened and took a deep breath. "Would some whisky be too much to ask?"
Nino shook his head and left the towel and clothes for Aiba as he went to the kitchen. He next saw Aiba sitting at the dining room table, surveying the puzzle and its pieces. Nino handed him a generous pour of whisky and sat down at the opposite chair. "We've enjoyed your present," he said with a small smile. "I suppose I should have been nicer about it."
Aiba took a mouthful of whisky and closed his eyes as it warmed the back of his throat on its way down. "I don't know if this is good progress or not," he said. "I thought 1,000 pieces sounded impossible, like it would take forever. This is pretty good, but I guess it's been a while."
"A year," Nino nodded, taking a sip from his own whisky. "We only do it now and then." Nino tried to keep his features neutral, but the smile Aiba gave him was knowing.
"I'm glad you like it," he said, tracing the perimeter until he found the gap in the rectangle. "Isn’t the border the easiest part?”
"It's not ready yet."
The next morning, Nino woke to Jun crawling into bed with his clothes on. "Why is Aiba-chan on the couch?" Jun mumbled into Nino's neck, arm curling around his waist and legs pressing against the backs of Nino's. The memories from the night before rushed back to the front of Nino's mind and he groaned.
"I'll tell you later," he said, maneuvering himself over to face Jun, whose eyes were already closed. "But now, I need to wake up." Their schedules had been alternating for far too long, and he missed spending time in bed with Jun. He leaned in for a long, comfortable kiss, before he could tell that Jun's mind was slipping into dreamland. "And you need to sleep."
Jun made a grumpy noise in the back of his throat, his eyes remaining closed. "Okay," he conceded, "but why did he add a piece?"
"I think he needed to," Nino admitted.
Jun vaguely nodded his head. "It's okay," he said. "It's his puzzle, too."
---
On the second anniversary of their moving in, Nino and Jun had their first big fight. Nino's sister was getting married. It had been a long time coming, as she'd been living with her boyfriend for nearly seven years, but their mother had instilled in both her and Nino an unshakable fear of marrying too early. She was finally taking the plunge, though, and it meant a lot to Nino on an individual level, but it meant something entirely different to him and Jun.
Nino told Jun about his sister's engagement over a hotpot dinner, sitting under the kotatsu and drinking cold beer.
"That's great," Jun replied. "You and your mother must be happy for her."
"I'm surprised mom didn't have a heart attack," Nino said wryly, tugging a piece of cabbage free. "I am happy for her. It's been hard. That level of commitment is... enviable. It's impossible to tell mom you're happy with someone."
Most of the time, Jun knew what Nino was trying to say. They were both oblique when they spoke about their feelings, but they'd known each other for so long that it very rarely happened that they couldn't understand what was being said between the lines. But the things Jun heard between these lines shook the very ground of their relationship, and he had to put down his bowl and chopsticks to regain his balance.
"Nino," he said, slowly and carefully as he chose his words before he said them, "have you told your mother about us?"
Nino looked sharply at Jun, not with anger but fear. The same uncertainty that had built in Jun ripped through Nino in an instant and he nearly knocked over his beer as he put down his chopsticks. "No," he said as quickly as he could. "No, I couldn't."
It made sense, Jun tried to reason through the panic, it made complete sense after what Nino had just said about his mother, but that didn't stop the pain in his heart from growing. His throat constricted and he found it difficult to breathe, let alone speak, but he needed to know. "You haven't told her anything? Not that we're living together, not that we've been... for years? Nothing?"
It had never been a question for Nino before. Telling anyone - his mother especially - just wasn't an option. The rest of the group knew, one select manager knew, but it wasn't something to be broadcast. His mother was an important part of his life, and she knew almost everything about him, but there was one thing he could never tell her.
"She knows how I feel," Nino explained. "Just not who I feel that way about." Fear gripped his heart. "Have you told your family?"
"Of course!" Jun exclaimed with a little more volume than he'd anticipated. "They're my family! I came out to my parents a month after I worked it out for myself. They know everything, especially about us. You’re not just a footnote in my story."
Nino worked his jaw, trying to find a way to explain to Jun that he was the most careless fool with what should have been his closest-kept secret. "I can't talk about this right now," he said instead, pushing himself out from beneath the kotatsu.
Jun grabbed his wrist. "No, we're talking about this. You need to tell your mother. Does she even know you're gay?"
"Of course not," Nino snapped, snatching his wrist back but not moving further. "My mother is on a need-to-know basis, and she does not need to know that."
"Nino, I am not getting in your closet with you," Jun said, gripping into the blanket of the kotatsu tight so that his hands wouldn't shake. Tears pricked the back of his eyes because he knew what he was saying was right. He just hadn't realized Nino wasn't on the same page.
"You don't have to. Our families never see each other, it's not like your mother's going to call mine to chat about how lovely it is their sons are fucking." Nino could hear the blood rushing past his ears, and his skin felt prickly and his stomach churned as he spoke.
Jun shook his head, swallowing back a large lump in his throat. "That's not the point."
"Then what is the point? This closet you're talking about not being in, you are. We both are. Unless you're prepared to get on national television and announce it, that closet door is firmly closed. You and I, Arashi, our managers, the entire fucking agency is in the closet with us. What difference does it make if I tell my mother? She's got a poisonous tongue, and it wouldn't matter if you were a woman or a man or a dog, she tries to ruin any relationship my sister or I have." Nino felt faint from the rush of truth escaping, things they'd only whispered about before and things he'd never admitted to anyone. He knew what Jun was trying to say, but it only worked on one of those normal people with normal mothers. Nino was not that person.
Jun could see he'd hit a nerve, but this was a conversation they needed to get through. "If it doesn't matter, you should tell her."
Nino shook his head. The churning in his stomach had turned into proper nausea. There was a reason he'd never brought this up. "The more she knows, the more she has to hurt me with."
"So when? When will you tell her? When my parents want to meet yours? When we've been living together for five years? Ten? When we want something more, to commit to each other in some other way? When she's on her death bed not knowing who you've loved your whole life, who's loved you and taken care of you and been taken care of by you?" Jun was sliding past his point and into the dangerous territory of the future, and he knew it. He shook his head and flexed his fingers to calm himself. "She's your mother. She wants you to be happy, even if she doesn't express it well. I don't see how keeping this from her is doing you or her any good."
"You don't know my mother." Nino stood, and Jun didn't stop him this time. He grabbed his keys and wallet and left unceremoniously. Jun picked idly at the food for a while, before he quietly cleaned up and went to bed.
Nino returned in the middle of the night after spending a few hours driving aimlessly around the city listening to music to drown out his thoughts, though every now and then he caught himself in his recurring day terror of his mother’s admonishment. His imagination was ruthless, picking at the very heart of all the insecurities he'd ever had about his relationship with Jun, and he knew that part of it was just a projection of his own fears, but not all of it was. This was the first relationship he'd ever told his mother about, because he'd seen the subtle (and not so subtle) jabs she took at his sister's relationships.
He'd also felt the sting when his scandals turned up in the paper. "You should never trust someone like that," she'd told him, stabbing the photo in the magazine. Even though Nino tried not to take any of what she said to heart, it was difficult to face his fears.
Upon Nino’s return, though, he found his thoughts settled, the balance between emotion and reason restored. The logical part of his mind agreed with Jun. His mother was a good person and did, in the end, want the best for him. Her aggression came from her own painful past, and neither Nino nor his sister should have ever put up with her behavior for so long. But not taking a stand was only doing a disservice to his relationship with Jun, and Nino knew that. It was a high emotional hurdle to clear, but after everything he’d already been through, it was the right thing to do.
By morning, Nino had left the apartment again, but Jun woke to find a piece added to the puzzle - the tip of Tokyo Tower - along with a note, written in a very deliberate hand, I'm staying at my mother's this weekend. Come for dinner on Monday.
---
Between touring, recording and individual work travel, the puzzle's lifespan became much longer than what Nino had initially calculated. Three years after starting it, Nino and Jun stumbled through their front door, already drunk from the crank-up party for Nino's latest drama. Jun made his way to the kitchen to get them some water, but Nino only made it to the dining table, plonking down in a chair in front of the nearly-completed puzzle.
"Hey," he called, voice unnecessarily loud. "I want to finish the puzzle."
Jun returned to the living room without water, a bottle of wine instead resting on his thigh as he sat next to Nino. "What's the hurry?" he asked, leaning over to catch Nino's earlobe between his teeth, his hand sliding high over Nino's inner thigh.
Nino's vision was already blurry, but his eyes crossed for a moment as Jun's fingers teased higher on his leg, and he pushed out a breath as he tried to focus. "I want to go to Paris with you already. I want to drink Champagne at the top of the Eiffel Tower and walk through the eighth Arrondissement and hold hands in the Louvre and just... have so much sex, everywhere, every room of the hotel suite, dirty bathrooms at a Metro station, the back row of an art house movie theatre.... Please?"
Jun was having trouble focusing, too, so he just closed his eyes and caught Nino's mouth in a searing kiss. They forgot how to breathe and had to come up for air eventually; Jun almost dropped the bottle of wine as the oxygen rushed to his head. Then, through heavy breathing, he remembered there was a point. "We'll finish the puzzle. We'll talk to the agency tomorrow and get the time off. But for now," he said, putting the bottle of wine on the floor and pulling Nino into his lap, "we've got our own apartment to defile."
---
They didn't plan the day they finished the puzzle. Work got in the way, and they couldn't bring themselves to stop the routine of adding one piece per day, so it remained in a state of limbo with one piece missing for nearly three weeks. The night before they left for Paris, they packed and sat at the dining table with two glasses of the same wine they'd been drinking on the night they moved in.
They hadn't discussed the moment, but it felt like a ritual. Not an ending - because they weren't moving, or breaking up, or anything - but it felt like the start of a tradition. The threads that brought and held their lives together were messy, tangled and painful. The puzzle was one of the few that they had total control over. It was theirs; they had built it and put it together.
They didn't say anything for a long time, the bottle of wine slowly emptying as they sat in silence, contemplating the three years and 1,000 pieces behind them. It wasn't just a pretty picture of Tokyo at twilight, it was their story, and each piece had its place.
Eventually, Jun pulled out his wallet and retrieved the puzzle piece from the coin pocket, placing it beside the empty space in the border. He poured the last two glasses of wine left in the bottle and raised his glass. Nino lifted his own, and he could practically feel the warmth radiating from Jun's expression. When Jun spoke, it was as though Nino had already heard it.
"I love you."
Nino smiled and touched his glass to Jun's. "To us."