(no subject)
Happy birthday, Sakurai.
In honor of your impending hip replacement, have a birthday present. ♥
Title: Life for Art's Sake
Fandom: Arashi
Characters: Sakurai Sho, Matsumoto Jun
Pairing: Sakumoto
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sho is an overworked, overtired college student. Jun -- well, Jun is not.
Notes: Uh. None for once? :D Enjoy.
Sho is tired and it is starting to show on his face. He is barely 21 and his eyes are underlined thickly in charcoal, a permanent crease residing between his eyebrows. He's given up on wearing his contact lenses - between his Keio workload and his part-time jobs, he doesn't have the time to fumble at the sink of his too-small, too-dim one room apartment. He has exactly two square feet to himself, the rest taken up by books and his bed and a one-burner stove. He doesn't mind the size; he isn't home often enough to feel anything about the place.
Sho does his homework on the train and during breaks at work, sneaking glances at the business section of newspapers. He focuses on economics rather than current events, and so he can explain the recent drop in the Russian stock market but needs a moment to remember who Japan's current prime minister is. He serves udon at night at a busy restaurant to drunk salarymen and drunker OLs, and on the weekends he helps man a bookstore in the heart of the city. He took the second job hoping for some quiet, but the store has a large tarento section and Sho was appointed to make sure no magazines are vandalized or stolen. They never are, and from the syllables that spill from the constantly gathered teenagers like waterfalls of gossip, Sho can recognize most celebrities even though he doesn't know why they're famous. The first time he hears the name Arashi, he thinks it's a new car Subaru is releasing.
Sho would admit if asked that he is, perhaps, a little lonely, but he does not allow himself the time to ponder his social life. Economics, papers, and work: Sho knows nothing else. He sleeps in snatches of time that he measures in fifteen minutes, and he hasn't been able to soak in a furo in years. He barely has time to let the water warm before he showers.
He is fraying around the edges, thread by thread coming loose until one day, he is sure, he will irreparably fall apart.
Sho is dozing on his feet on the train one morning, fingers wrapped around the metal ring above his head, when he is jostled from the side. He tries to see through the fog of sleep, but his glasses are in his bag, and all he knows is that the person has faintly curling black hair.
“Sorry,” they mumble, and Sho nods faintly, registering the voice as male before he drifts back to sleep. The incident is forgotten by the time the train stops at Shinagawa station and he is stumbling off in the direction of the restaurant.
On his shift that weekend at the bookstore, a woman asks him for the latest edition of a magazine from a small publisher, “the one with Matsumoto Jun on the cover.”
Sho tells her it's not in stock yet. The name means nothing to him.
A new semester to Sho means cutting back on work hours in order to focus on writing papers, preparing presentations, creating speeches on American economics and the Japanese motor industry. He takes an art history class as his fine arts elective, knowing his ease with writing papers would serve him better than frustrated hours spent at a sketchpad ever would. On the first day, someone slides into the seat next to him five minutes after the class has started. He is too busy scribbling down important dates from the syllabus in order to create a work schedule, but he catches a glimpse of dark hair out of the corner of his eye.
Sho is shuffling his things together, calculating a luxurious twenty five minute nap in the student lounge of the business school if he has canned soup from the vending machine for lunch when a voice next to him says, “It's you.”
Sho turns, surprise etched across his face. The boy next to him is unfamiliar, but his hair is feathered around his face and Sho is entranced by the mole sitting on his upper lip.
“We met on the train. Or, well, I bumped into you.” The boy smiles a little, embarrassed, and Sho smiles back an apology. He doesn't remember.
“It's a little weird to remember that, I know, but I see you at the station a lot. We end up on the same Yamanote train a lot, the one that leaves at 6:13.” The boy flushes as Sho watches, so lightly Sho wonders if he's just imagining things. “I'm glad, though. It's nice to have kind of a familiar face in the class.” The boy regains his dignity; a few fingers softly rest on the back of Sho's palm, purple nails catching his attention. “Let's get lunch,” the boy suggests, and Sho forgets his tiredness and agrees.
Sho gets katsu curry from the school cafeteria, going two hundred yen over budget. He decides on homemade onigiri for dinner tonight; lunch is special today and he doesn't mind changing his schedule. Lunch is usually from a vending machine, eaten on the run between classes and after stolen catnaps. To be able to sit and talk with someone is a luxury worth more than two hundred yen, but this is all he has and so he takes it.
Matsumoto Jun is beautiful. He seems like a private person, but his body language speaks encyclopedias detailing Jun's desire for friendship. He is meticulously dressed with polished metal accessories and perfectly styled hair and Sho likes him immediately. When Sho startles Jun into laughter, Jun forgets to cover his mouth; the ice king breaks into sudden summer, and Sho has to take a drink of water and hopes he isn't as transparent as he thinks he is.
That night after work, Sho dreams of purple nails and silver jewelry pressed ice cold against his burning skin. He wakes up gasping, hard as diamonds and skin beaded with sweat.
At first, he sees Jun twice a week, in class and at lunch, meetings Sho has carefully penciled into his planner and budget. He doesn't tell Jun that their meetings are the highlight of his week, a blessed respite from the usual workschoolworkschoolwork, but he knows by Jun's movements relaxing and his touches coming easier that Jun understands.
Soon they are having lunch every day in an unspoken agreement. They talk about everything: Sho tells him all about the bookstore and the teenaged girls and who, really, comes up with band names like Arashi and SMAP? Jun replies with comments about Sho's sweatshirts (always two, sometimes more - classrooms get cold) and tales from his fashion design classes. “And then,” Jun would say fervently, his eyes narrowed in disgust, “She pulled out sweatpants that looked like jeans. As her final design project! And expected the professor to praise her!”
Sho decides he will never wear his pair around Jun, and furthermore, to start wearing his contact lenses again.
Early in the semester, they partner up for a presentation in their art history class. Sho graciously lets Jun pick the artist they're to research; Jun has hinted at an artistic background beyond fashion design and all Sho knows about art is what he has memorized for exams. Jun picks Léon Bonnat; Sho agrees and makes a note in his planner to enjoy more art during the semester break.
They decide to work in Jun's apartment; Sho goes over on a sunny Saturday, the light warming his face as he walks from the train station to the building, but even the bright sunshine of early spring can't penetrate through his nervousness. Jun's apartment building looks like every other apartment building in Tokyo, and Sho wonders why he expected something else, something grander and otherworldly perfect, something more like Jun.
Jun lets him into an apartment three times the size of Sho's, decorated with modern furniture and richly toned walls that makes Sho feel he is existing inside a jewel when the light spangles on them through the blinds. Jun has already prepared prints of paintings they'll be showing, and Sho stares at them, swallowing hard. He is overwhelmed. The colors used in the artwork are deep, the lines exact and the work is laden with more depth than many photographs Sho has seen; but in these paintings of young girls and old men, all Sho can see is Jun. Jun's mole-spattered skin, his eyes that turn gold in sunshine, the shadows that lay within the lines and dips of his face - they are reflected so strongly in the paintings he's chosen that Sho has to turn away.
Jun is focused and diligent and Sho is grateful that the work is split evenly. Jun creates the presentation while Sho writes the paper, helped by the meticulous notes Jun wrote beforehand about each painting they chose. “You're busier than I am,” Jun shrugs when Sho looks at him, wide-eyed about the extra work Jun didn't have to do. “Anyway, it helps me, too.”
If Jun were an economist, Sho thinks, together they could take over the world.
Jun smiles a little when he finds the perfect font and Sho wants to kiss his laugh lines. Instead, he asks Jun to pass him the print of Roman Girl at a Fountain and accidentally touches Jun's fingers where they rest on the deep green of the girl's skirt.
Sho adjusts his schedule to be more open for time with Jun. It is always written in his planner in pencil, tentative and impermanent even though Jun has never canceled a meeting. Jun, however, starts getting busier and the activities marked “-- with Jun” become less frequent. Jun just says he's found a job and Sho doesn't feel like it's his place to inquire.
Sho is invited to Jun's place for dinner one Sunday night, and it is already dark when he walks over. Around the city, the trees are beginning to flower, but the majority of the trees on Jun's block are still bare and hold nothing but promises. Jun makes him pasta and offers him wine and laughs when Sho admits that he can only make cold sandwiches. The wine is better than anything Sho has tasted before, spreading dark on his tongue and making him feel warm. When Jun leans in to kiss him, all Sho can think is that the wine tastes better on Jun than it does alone.
Sho is hesitant, wanting to explore, but Jun is confident and sure. Fingers weave through Sho's hair and make him inhale sharply and lean forward to grasp at fabric unseen. Jun grins against Sho's mouth and does something with his tongue that makes Sho gasp again and when they pull away, Sho can see the hope dancing across Jun's cheeks.
Sho tries, in his serious way, to talk about what we are and what does this mean for us, but Jun, clever Jun, stops him with kisses. Sho skips his way home that night and writes the best paper of his college career.
Ideally, Sho wants to perform the waltz he thinks everyone in a new relationship dances: the confusion, the insecurity, the hesitant late night phone calls straight from a shoujo manga. But Jun is a man who doesn't deal in nonsense and instead of Sho's awkward dancing, he pulls Sho so they fall together into something solid: hand-holding on their way home, study nights in their apartments, Jun-made matching bentos. Jun sends Sho good night texts full of emoji and sparkly banners on the top and Sho wonders, trapped in his labyrinth of papers and textbooks, when he got to be so lucky.
One day at work at the bookstore soon after Sho gets comfortable with the word “together”, a girl in pigtails and a rolled up uniform skirt comes in and asks for a magazine with Matsumoto Jun on the cover. Sho is a little startled, but the name is common enough that he smiles at the coincidence.
When he leads the woman to the shelf the magazine is kept, his hands begin to tremble. He finishes the transaction on autopilot, stuck in emotional quicksand. He is afraid to let out a breath because he doesn't know if he can take a new one in.
Sho presses buttons on the cash register as Jun stares up at him, glitter on his cheeks and a smirk on his lips.
Jun shrugs when Sho asks him about it at lunch, crinkling plastic filling the silence as he opens melon pan. His nails are orange today, his accessories gold-plated. “It's nothing,” he says. Sho, however - Sho knows magazines, and Jun being on the cover of that particular one is not a trifle, nor is it a one-off gig. Sho doesn't know how to feel about Jun's blossoming celebrity, his face plastered on magazines that Sho is asked to sell.
“I didn't think it'd be a big deal.” Jun's voice is becoming clipped, defensive. Sho can't look at him. He knows his shame is flaming red streaks across his face, upset by his own jealous reaction. He doesn't know if he can share Jun with the girls of Japan, dealing with Jun's schedule and having to hide that they are “together”. In the end, he doesn't voice his fear, just his frustrations at being kept in the dark. In the end, Jun walks away from his bread and from Sho, leaving Sho in a cold cafeteria that suddenly feels very empty.
That night, Sho doesn't receive a good night text and he has the worst sleep he's had in months, waking up exhausted and upset.
Life resumes as it was pre-Jun, only now Sho feels his threads unraveling faster. He is more irritable, less meticulous, and the quality of his papers drop. He tries to go back to his lunchtime naps and canned soup routine, but he can only lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. His body refuses to sleep.
The spring marches on and every morning Sho finds his boots, left outside his door the night before, filled with flower petals. He wants to show Jun because he knows it will make him smile, sprinkle Jun's hair with more petals and kiss him in a pile of pink and white. Instead he upturns his boots over the balcony and watches the petals flutter slowly until they hit the ground.
Jun has begun to briskly walk out of class the moment it ends, long gone by the time Sho has his bag ready.
Sho sells Jun's magazines at the bookstore, increasing in number every week, and pretends he's not buying copies for himself.
He leaves the bookstore one Friday night, tired, but not tired enough to go home. He walks without purpose, through parks and over bridges, until suddenly, he is in front of Jun's apartment. Sho closes his eyes and tries to keep himself from unraveling entirely.
“What do you want?” a tired voice interrupts Sho, a familiar voice that Sho wants to trap in a locket around his neck forever. Jun is standing eight feet away, closer than he's been in weeks, wearing a new peacoat the color of cigarette ash. He looks exhausted, eyeliner still smudged on his eyelids.
Sho's throat has closed up and he can't speak. Instead, he pulls out Jun's newest magazine from his bag. He stands there, holding it to his chest and he wonders if the pages are fluttering with the wind or from the beating of his heart.
“I'm not going to apologize for my job,” Jun says flatly. “This is what I want to do, what I've always wanted to do, and it doesn't matter how much I like you, I want to work more - ” He is interrupted by the sight of Sho opening his bag to reveal every magazine Jun had appeared in. The bag's straps are beginning to rip from the weight and he cradles it to his chest.
Jun doesn't move and Sho sighs, hope fading from the center of his torso. He feels sick, a hole burning through his stomach.
Jun breathes out. “I'm not going to make it easy for you, you know.” Jun's necklaces jingle together as he takes a step closer. “Photoshoots.” Step. “Interviews.” Step. “Maybe some acting. I'll spend nights out with beautiful actresses in swanky bars.” Step. “Get involved in scandals. Rumors that I'm dating so-and-so. Serial television shows that send me across Japan and maybe the world.”
“Frankly, I don't want to make it easier for you.” Jun stops a foot away from Sho and doesn't smile.
Fortunately, Sho always could read Jun easier than he could anything else. He takes Jun's hands, red painted nails bright in the darkness, and meets him in the middle.