Repost etc.
Reposting from shoneenclub's last contest (they've got a new one starting up which I will pimp later!).
And I'm sorry I wasn't around like I said I would be. I managed to infect Taiyou with really nasty virus that Ed called a 'root kit'. Whatever it was, it took him the better part of a week to clear it out. I'll be around now, I hope, if a bit turned around. My work schedule just flipped and Ed is currently out of state on business. PLUS my CSM's wedding is fast approaching! Par-tay!
For now:
Title: Nowhere with you
Summary: Heat + Nino = Sho stealing his passport
Rating: G
Nowhere with you
"My vitamins are sticky," Nino said into his phone, the plastic already gummy and grungy feeling in his hand.
"It's humid," Sho replied. He sounded tired and Nino glanced at the clock. Five in the morning; Sho had probably only just got to sleep a few hours ago. "Nino?"
Nino shook himself. "I don't like it," he said. "It's too hot."
"All right," Sho said. Nino heard the sound of rustling sheets.
He'd have felt bad except it was too hot, too humid, and much too early in the morning. "Good." He hung up and took his sticky vitamins, putting the useless cap back on the bottle before he went to shower and get ready for work.
Sho followed him home that night, through the muggy Tokyo summer. Nino ignored him and took a cold shower, listening to Sho rummaging around his apartment with no real thoughts at all. He slumped out of the bathroom and flopped on his bed, towel only haphazardly around his waist. "Hot," he told his too-warm-already sheets.
"Mm," Sho agreed from Nino's closet. He pulled his head out and then the rest of himself. He wasn't holding anything but he looked thoughtful. "Get some sleep," he said quietly, turning on the electric fan on the bedside table.
Nino yawned up at him. It was too hot to be awake. "Were your vitamins sticky today?" he asked.
Sho leaned over him and brushed his wet hair back from his forehead. "No. I put them in the fridge when the heat sets in."
"Huh," Nino said, closing his eyes. Sho had warm hands but it was hot enough that they felt almost cool in comparison to the surrounding air. And they were dry, untouched by the tacky humidity. "Fridge." The fan was making a nice breeze, cool enough to actually make a difference.
"Good night, Nino" Sho said and Nino fell asleep to the sound of Sho locking his apartment door behind him.
Nino kept track of his schedule-he had a manager but, at the end of the day, it was Nino's responsibility to get himself to work like a conscientious adult. So he was aware of the way his jobs were getting rearranged: this interview being changed to a phone interview to be done during this commute, that photo shoot getting moved up a day, this segment taping moving back a day. After a week of high temperatures and careful watching, Nino was looking at a nearly four day gap in his work load. He scratched his chin idly while he looked at it. "Tomorrow," he said.
Sho glanced over. "Yeah," he said.
Rolling over on his floor-so much cooler than his bed-Nino watched Sho packing his suitcase. "Do I need my passport?"
"Already got it from your manager," Sho told him, folding a pair of jeans into the open case. "And your immunization record."
"Should I take some vitamin C?" Nino asked, rolling over again. He wondered if those, too, were mushy from the heavy summer air, the oppressive wet heat.
"There's some stuff in your water," Sho said, adding in a sweater. "I've been putting it in for a few days."
Nino pillowed his head on his arms. "I thought I felt healthier lately," he said.
Sho laughed.
"Keflavik International Airport ," Nino mangled the name, looking at the airline ticket that Sho handed him. "Where's that?"
But Sho had already disappeared into the international crowd of Narita, on his way to the plane.
Shrugging Nino went to the ticket counter and handed it over, lying when the counter attendant asked if he'd packed his bag himself and if it had been with him the whole time. It had been with Sho and that, to Nino, counted. "Hey," he said as he watched his suitcase disappear. "Where am I going?"
The guy looked confused. "Gate eleven?"
It was exactly the kind of answer Sho would have given him and so Nino nodded and left.
Sho was already in his seat on the plane when Nino found it, headphones on and hat pulled low over his eyes. Nino dropped in to the seat next to him and pulled out his DS, starting up his game.
"I bought the seat next to you, too," Sho said, eyes closed. "It's a long flight."
"Thanks," Nino said, kicking up the armrest and spreading out until the flight attendant came to tell him to sit up and buckle his seat belt so that the plane could take off.
"Welcome to Reykjavik," a smiling lady said as Nino clambered off the second, smaller plane. He wasn't sure where he'd changed flights, only that he'd been sleeping soundly in the air-conditioned dryness of the first plane when it had happened and that he'd gone right back to sleep when he'd finished the move. He could only assume that Sho had propped him up and buckled him for the remaining flight.
"Where?" Nino asked, blinking at her, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. The word sounded pretty, sharpish and tumbly, when the lady said it but it didn't tell him much.
"Iceland," Sho said, his hand at Nino's back, pushing him through the passport check and to the baggage claim.
Nino looked at his watch. It said it was early, just before sunrise, but the light outside the airport had a sunset tint to it. "Time?" he asked.
Sho heaved both of their bags free and nodded in the direction of a sign with a picture of a car on it. "Yesterday afternoon," he answered, heading for a counter that had a row of keys behind it. "Don't reset your watch."
Nino stretched while Sho yapped at people in English. "I didn't reset it in California," he confided as Sho lead him outside. It was cool and crisp, fresh somehow despite the large city he could feel buzzing around them. "It's nice," he said. "Don't wreck it," he said about the car that Sho unlocked.
"I'm not going to," Sho said, grinning at him from behind the wheel. "Hop in."
He hopped in.
"A hot spring?" he asked, as Sho stopped the car less than an hour later. "Really?"
"Blue Lagoon," Sho said. "It's the result of a geothermal project with warm seawater brought in to-"
Nino tuned him out and sank down in the warm, blue water, the scent of minerals and the feel of Sho beside him somehow familiar and alien at the same time. It felt good after the cold of the plane and the cool of the open car windows.
After, Sho drove. The city streets giving way to highways, giving over to a simple double-lane road that wound through green hills dotted with different colored flowers. Mountains rose up around them and lakes rolled in cobalt waves. It was breathtaking, the openness of the land around them. As night fell they passed through small villages and tiny towns, other cars flashing by like occasional fireflies.
Nino pillowed his head against his window, rolled up most of the way against the chill night. "Are we lost?" he asked.
He looked over in time to see Sho smiling at him in the glow of the dashboard. "No. See that light stain over there?" When Nino looked at the sky and then looked back, Sho nodded. "That's where we're going."
Iceland was small, Nino guessed, because they reached the town more quickly than he'd have guessed. There was a hotel that looked…not like a chain hotel. It looked European and rustic, spacious like the country around them. Nino smiled shyly at the warm welcome they received at the front desk. It was obvious that these people had no clue who either of them were and Nino felt more valued than he would have if they had recognized him. "Thank you," he said politely, bowing as he took the key. Sho was busy loading his arms with maps and brochures and pamphlets.
"Where are we?" Nino asked when they were in their room. He stripped down to his boxers and looked out at the small town they were in. It was so small that most of the places he could see had their windows wide open to the night, to anybody who might come by.
"Kirkjubæjarklaustur," Sho said, a messy tangle of sound.
"Bless you," Nino said dryly, ignoring his open suitcase and crawling in to the bed. He discovered that it was almost more like an ultra plush futon than a western bed; he rolled in it. It wasn't nighttime in Tokyo and he's slept a lot on the planes but it was summer, it was concert season, and he was always under-slept when it was. It was night where he was and that was what was important at the moment.
"We're outside of Skaftafell National Park," Sho protested, pulling on pajamas. "Vatnajökull gl-"
"Quit making up words," Nino said, patting the spot beside him.
"I'm not making up words," Sho said, getting in beside him and turning off the bedside lamp. "It just sounds like I am."
There was a darkness that was more complete than Tokyo could ever manage, even during a blackout. It was like being in the forest, only there were no camera crews and no bugs, just Sho beside him talking about things Nino wasn't even listening to.
"Good night," he said, curling up and wrapping himself around him.
"'Night, Nino," Sho murmured, curling up with him in the warmth and softness.
When Nino woke up he couldn't remember where he was. He knew he was in another country and that was the extent of it. He also knew that Sho was with him and that was more than enough to go on. He wriggled around in the mass of bedding and bandmate until Sho woke up and smacked him.
"And so?" Nino asked, rubbing the top of his head.
Sho yawned so wide that his jaw popped. "You'll see," he said, throwing back the blankets and getting out of bed. "Bring a sweater."
The first thing that happened was breakfast-there was some sort of porridge and sausage and bread and cheese and even lamb. "They knew YOU were coming," he said as he watched Sho shovel it down. Sho pointed at him and Nino went back to sampling a bit of everything so that he wasn't accidentally rude.
"See," Sho said, pointing at the ground. "It's a natural phenomenon."
Nino looked at the ground. It looked like a stone floor had been laid out unbound in the grass. "Stones are natural phenomenon?" he asked skeptically.
"No, not the-well, they are but they're not stones," Sho told him.
Nino tuned him out, looking at the stones and the flat, grassy plains as Sho tried to explain to him about the columns of basalt that sat in the earth like so many fortune sticks in a canister, only the ends showing. "It's nice," he interrupted.
He meant it. He liked the idea of fortune sticks inside the planet, waiting to reveal their secrets.
Glaciers were cold, Nino discovered. Logically he knew that glaciers were giant sheets of ice hundreds of meters thick, that they didn't melt (much) and were cold. Very, very cold. But knowing it logically didn't help the fact that he was cold despite the sweater and the rented snow-gear and Sho's warm body blocking the wind.
"Cold!" he whined at Sho's back, louder than he'd have liked to be because he had to be heard over the buzz of the snowmobile's engine.
Sho killed the engine. "I know!" he sounded cheerful and enthusiastic. "It's really, really cold!" He got off the machine and Nino hunched against the slightly whippy wind. "Ahh, I really thought there'd be more snow up here."
Nino looked around. "How come there's ice but no snow?" he asked. "Don't explain it to me," he said when Sho opened his mouth.
Sho laughed. "I wasn't going to because I don't know. When I saw there was snowmobile rentals I thought there would be snow. I thought we could have a snowball fight."
Nino looked away, smiling even as he snorted. "A snowball fight. We're not kids."
"I'm not old," Sho said and the next thing Nino knew something hard and cold had bounced off his chest. He looked down.
"Did you just throw a ball of ice at me?" he asked incredulously.
Sho grinned.
"We're going to have bruises," Nino said, holding one of their makeshift snowballs (a chunk of ice) to the swelling spot on his head. "You get to explain why that is."
"Hey, there's water," Sho called back, looking over a rise in the ice. "Liquid water. You know, under the glacier there are-"
"I'm sure," Nino said, walking over and tugging Sho away from the water. "And I'm also sure it's freezing and if you go in it you will die a horrible death because I won't warm you up."
"Hypothermia-" Sho started.
Nino threw his chunk of ice at him.
"Sho?" Nino lifted a pewter cup shaped like a horn and looked at the price sticker.
"Hm?" Sho was looking at a rack of trucker caps with flags and maps stitched on them.
"Why are we here?" He didn't mean the big city they were in (the capital city, Sho had told him) or even the gift shop.
He knew Sho knew what he meant because Sho smiled at him over a vial of volcanic ash. "You said your vitamins were sticky."
Nino handed the horn-cup to him. "So you flew me halfway around the world" he was assuming it was halfway, at least "for one day only, just to put me in the fridge?"
Sho laughed. "Something like that."
It was hot in Tokyo, so humid that it was like walking around in a bowl of soup just to stand on the sidewalk. Merciless sun and too many bodies, tall buildings that held the heat in their very bones.
Nino took a deep breath as he waited for the company car to pick him up. It clogged in his lungs, almost too thick. "Sho?"
"Hm?" Sho adjusted the strap on his bag, looking down the street, looking to see if the crowd of women had figured out who they were.
"Thanks."
Sho tapped down the brim of Nino's new hat, the one with the jumble of letters and letter-like things that Nino couldn't pronounce but that Sho (sort of) could. "Anytime."
It was too hot, too humid, too early in the day but Nino reached out and put his hand in Sho's, waiting for the van to come and the heat to break, for winter to come and for Sho to take him someplace else, someplace away from it all, for a day.
And I'm sorry I wasn't around like I said I would be. I managed to infect Taiyou with really nasty virus that Ed called a 'root kit'. Whatever it was, it took him the better part of a week to clear it out. I'll be around now, I hope, if a bit turned around. My work schedule just flipped and Ed is currently out of state on business. PLUS my CSM's wedding is fast approaching! Par-tay!
For now:
Title: Nowhere with you
Summary: Heat + Nino = Sho stealing his passport
Rating: G
Nowhere with you
"My vitamins are sticky," Nino said into his phone, the plastic already gummy and grungy feeling in his hand.
"It's humid," Sho replied. He sounded tired and Nino glanced at the clock. Five in the morning; Sho had probably only just got to sleep a few hours ago. "Nino?"
Nino shook himself. "I don't like it," he said. "It's too hot."
"All right," Sho said. Nino heard the sound of rustling sheets.
He'd have felt bad except it was too hot, too humid, and much too early in the morning. "Good." He hung up and took his sticky vitamins, putting the useless cap back on the bottle before he went to shower and get ready for work.
Sho followed him home that night, through the muggy Tokyo summer. Nino ignored him and took a cold shower, listening to Sho rummaging around his apartment with no real thoughts at all. He slumped out of the bathroom and flopped on his bed, towel only haphazardly around his waist. "Hot," he told his too-warm-already sheets.
"Mm," Sho agreed from Nino's closet. He pulled his head out and then the rest of himself. He wasn't holding anything but he looked thoughtful. "Get some sleep," he said quietly, turning on the electric fan on the bedside table.
Nino yawned up at him. It was too hot to be awake. "Were your vitamins sticky today?" he asked.
Sho leaned over him and brushed his wet hair back from his forehead. "No. I put them in the fridge when the heat sets in."
"Huh," Nino said, closing his eyes. Sho had warm hands but it was hot enough that they felt almost cool in comparison to the surrounding air. And they were dry, untouched by the tacky humidity. "Fridge." The fan was making a nice breeze, cool enough to actually make a difference.
"Good night, Nino" Sho said and Nino fell asleep to the sound of Sho locking his apartment door behind him.
Nino kept track of his schedule-he had a manager but, at the end of the day, it was Nino's responsibility to get himself to work like a conscientious adult. So he was aware of the way his jobs were getting rearranged: this interview being changed to a phone interview to be done during this commute, that photo shoot getting moved up a day, this segment taping moving back a day. After a week of high temperatures and careful watching, Nino was looking at a nearly four day gap in his work load. He scratched his chin idly while he looked at it. "Tomorrow," he said.
Sho glanced over. "Yeah," he said.
Rolling over on his floor-so much cooler than his bed-Nino watched Sho packing his suitcase. "Do I need my passport?"
"Already got it from your manager," Sho told him, folding a pair of jeans into the open case. "And your immunization record."
"Should I take some vitamin C?" Nino asked, rolling over again. He wondered if those, too, were mushy from the heavy summer air, the oppressive wet heat.
"There's some stuff in your water," Sho said, adding in a sweater. "I've been putting it in for a few days."
Nino pillowed his head on his arms. "I thought I felt healthier lately," he said.
Sho laughed.
"Keflavik International Airport ," Nino mangled the name, looking at the airline ticket that Sho handed him. "Where's that?"
But Sho had already disappeared into the international crowd of Narita, on his way to the plane.
Shrugging Nino went to the ticket counter and handed it over, lying when the counter attendant asked if he'd packed his bag himself and if it had been with him the whole time. It had been with Sho and that, to Nino, counted. "Hey," he said as he watched his suitcase disappear. "Where am I going?"
The guy looked confused. "Gate eleven?"
It was exactly the kind of answer Sho would have given him and so Nino nodded and left.
Sho was already in his seat on the plane when Nino found it, headphones on and hat pulled low over his eyes. Nino dropped in to the seat next to him and pulled out his DS, starting up his game.
"I bought the seat next to you, too," Sho said, eyes closed. "It's a long flight."
"Thanks," Nino said, kicking up the armrest and spreading out until the flight attendant came to tell him to sit up and buckle his seat belt so that the plane could take off.
"Welcome to Reykjavik," a smiling lady said as Nino clambered off the second, smaller plane. He wasn't sure where he'd changed flights, only that he'd been sleeping soundly in the air-conditioned dryness of the first plane when it had happened and that he'd gone right back to sleep when he'd finished the move. He could only assume that Sho had propped him up and buckled him for the remaining flight.
"Where?" Nino asked, blinking at her, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. The word sounded pretty, sharpish and tumbly, when the lady said it but it didn't tell him much.
"Iceland," Sho said, his hand at Nino's back, pushing him through the passport check and to the baggage claim.
Nino looked at his watch. It said it was early, just before sunrise, but the light outside the airport had a sunset tint to it. "Time?" he asked.
Sho heaved both of their bags free and nodded in the direction of a sign with a picture of a car on it. "Yesterday afternoon," he answered, heading for a counter that had a row of keys behind it. "Don't reset your watch."
Nino stretched while Sho yapped at people in English. "I didn't reset it in California," he confided as Sho lead him outside. It was cool and crisp, fresh somehow despite the large city he could feel buzzing around them. "It's nice," he said. "Don't wreck it," he said about the car that Sho unlocked.
"I'm not going to," Sho said, grinning at him from behind the wheel. "Hop in."
He hopped in.
"A hot spring?" he asked, as Sho stopped the car less than an hour later. "Really?"
"Blue Lagoon," Sho said. "It's the result of a geothermal project with warm seawater brought in to-"
Nino tuned him out and sank down in the warm, blue water, the scent of minerals and the feel of Sho beside him somehow familiar and alien at the same time. It felt good after the cold of the plane and the cool of the open car windows.
After, Sho drove. The city streets giving way to highways, giving over to a simple double-lane road that wound through green hills dotted with different colored flowers. Mountains rose up around them and lakes rolled in cobalt waves. It was breathtaking, the openness of the land around them. As night fell they passed through small villages and tiny towns, other cars flashing by like occasional fireflies.
Nino pillowed his head against his window, rolled up most of the way against the chill night. "Are we lost?" he asked.
He looked over in time to see Sho smiling at him in the glow of the dashboard. "No. See that light stain over there?" When Nino looked at the sky and then looked back, Sho nodded. "That's where we're going."
Iceland was small, Nino guessed, because they reached the town more quickly than he'd have guessed. There was a hotel that looked…not like a chain hotel. It looked European and rustic, spacious like the country around them. Nino smiled shyly at the warm welcome they received at the front desk. It was obvious that these people had no clue who either of them were and Nino felt more valued than he would have if they had recognized him. "Thank you," he said politely, bowing as he took the key. Sho was busy loading his arms with maps and brochures and pamphlets.
"Where are we?" Nino asked when they were in their room. He stripped down to his boxers and looked out at the small town they were in. It was so small that most of the places he could see had their windows wide open to the night, to anybody who might come by.
"Kirkjubæjarklaustur," Sho said, a messy tangle of sound.
"Bless you," Nino said dryly, ignoring his open suitcase and crawling in to the bed. He discovered that it was almost more like an ultra plush futon than a western bed; he rolled in it. It wasn't nighttime in Tokyo and he's slept a lot on the planes but it was summer, it was concert season, and he was always under-slept when it was. It was night where he was and that was what was important at the moment.
"We're outside of Skaftafell National Park," Sho protested, pulling on pajamas. "Vatnajökull gl-"
"Quit making up words," Nino said, patting the spot beside him.
"I'm not making up words," Sho said, getting in beside him and turning off the bedside lamp. "It just sounds like I am."
There was a darkness that was more complete than Tokyo could ever manage, even during a blackout. It was like being in the forest, only there were no camera crews and no bugs, just Sho beside him talking about things Nino wasn't even listening to.
"Good night," he said, curling up and wrapping himself around him.
"'Night, Nino," Sho murmured, curling up with him in the warmth and softness.
When Nino woke up he couldn't remember where he was. He knew he was in another country and that was the extent of it. He also knew that Sho was with him and that was more than enough to go on. He wriggled around in the mass of bedding and bandmate until Sho woke up and smacked him.
"And so?" Nino asked, rubbing the top of his head.
Sho yawned so wide that his jaw popped. "You'll see," he said, throwing back the blankets and getting out of bed. "Bring a sweater."
The first thing that happened was breakfast-there was some sort of porridge and sausage and bread and cheese and even lamb. "They knew YOU were coming," he said as he watched Sho shovel it down. Sho pointed at him and Nino went back to sampling a bit of everything so that he wasn't accidentally rude.
"See," Sho said, pointing at the ground. "It's a natural phenomenon."
Nino looked at the ground. It looked like a stone floor had been laid out unbound in the grass. "Stones are natural phenomenon?" he asked skeptically.
"No, not the-well, they are but they're not stones," Sho told him.
Nino tuned him out, looking at the stones and the flat, grassy plains as Sho tried to explain to him about the columns of basalt that sat in the earth like so many fortune sticks in a canister, only the ends showing. "It's nice," he interrupted.
He meant it. He liked the idea of fortune sticks inside the planet, waiting to reveal their secrets.
Glaciers were cold, Nino discovered. Logically he knew that glaciers were giant sheets of ice hundreds of meters thick, that they didn't melt (much) and were cold. Very, very cold. But knowing it logically didn't help the fact that he was cold despite the sweater and the rented snow-gear and Sho's warm body blocking the wind.
"Cold!" he whined at Sho's back, louder than he'd have liked to be because he had to be heard over the buzz of the snowmobile's engine.
Sho killed the engine. "I know!" he sounded cheerful and enthusiastic. "It's really, really cold!" He got off the machine and Nino hunched against the slightly whippy wind. "Ahh, I really thought there'd be more snow up here."
Nino looked around. "How come there's ice but no snow?" he asked. "Don't explain it to me," he said when Sho opened his mouth.
Sho laughed. "I wasn't going to because I don't know. When I saw there was snowmobile rentals I thought there would be snow. I thought we could have a snowball fight."
Nino looked away, smiling even as he snorted. "A snowball fight. We're not kids."
"I'm not old," Sho said and the next thing Nino knew something hard and cold had bounced off his chest. He looked down.
"Did you just throw a ball of ice at me?" he asked incredulously.
Sho grinned.
"We're going to have bruises," Nino said, holding one of their makeshift snowballs (a chunk of ice) to the swelling spot on his head. "You get to explain why that is."
"Hey, there's water," Sho called back, looking over a rise in the ice. "Liquid water. You know, under the glacier there are-"
"I'm sure," Nino said, walking over and tugging Sho away from the water. "And I'm also sure it's freezing and if you go in it you will die a horrible death because I won't warm you up."
"Hypothermia-" Sho started.
Nino threw his chunk of ice at him.
"Sho?" Nino lifted a pewter cup shaped like a horn and looked at the price sticker.
"Hm?" Sho was looking at a rack of trucker caps with flags and maps stitched on them.
"Why are we here?" He didn't mean the big city they were in (the capital city, Sho had told him) or even the gift shop.
He knew Sho knew what he meant because Sho smiled at him over a vial of volcanic ash. "You said your vitamins were sticky."
Nino handed the horn-cup to him. "So you flew me halfway around the world" he was assuming it was halfway, at least "for one day only, just to put me in the fridge?"
Sho laughed. "Something like that."
It was hot in Tokyo, so humid that it was like walking around in a bowl of soup just to stand on the sidewalk. Merciless sun and too many bodies, tall buildings that held the heat in their very bones.
Nino took a deep breath as he waited for the company car to pick him up. It clogged in his lungs, almost too thick. "Sho?"
"Hm?" Sho adjusted the strap on his bag, looking down the street, looking to see if the crowd of women had figured out who they were.
"Thanks."
Sho tapped down the brim of Nino's new hat, the one with the jumble of letters and letter-like things that Nino couldn't pronounce but that Sho (sort of) could. "Anytime."
It was too hot, too humid, too early in the day but Nino reached out and put his hand in Sho's, waiting for the van to come and the heat to break, for winter to come and for Sho to take him someplace else, someplace away from it all, for a day.