(no subject)
Title: Tomorrow I'll be Gone
Pairing: Yamada x Yuto
Rating/Warnings: PG-15 for dusturbing content?
Word Count: 3375
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and only the words are mine.
Summary: Yuto wakes confused, only snapshots of memories to guide him back to the painful truth.
He feels warm all over, he’s sure there are lips on his throat, the smell of skin, muggy with late summer heat. There’s weight above him, pressing down, grinding, and his head is spinning. He wakes with a name on his lips. “Ryosuke.”
The bed is empty beside him and Yuto shudders. It’s cold, the room is dark and dreary looking and there’s no sign of Yamada. “Ryosuke?” he repeats, but only the silence answers him.
He groans at the ache in his legs when he swings them over the side of the bed and even with one hand on the night-stand it takes far more effort than it should to get to his feet. He spots a crutch leaning against the end of the bed and it strikes him as strange though some kind of instinct tells him to reach for it.
He doesn’t. He turns instead for the night-stand and the packet of cigarettes there. It’s when he reaches out for them that he notices the ring on his finger, it’s unfamiliar and yet the impression left in his skin when he removes it is deep, like it’s well worn.
The ring isn’t the only unfamiliar thing. As the haze of sleep leaves Yuto’s mind he finds he doesn’t recognise the room he’s in at all. It’s small, the furniture simple, all worn, dents and chips covering most of it. It matches the wallpaper, an inoffensive magnolia on every wall, dotted with patches of bare plaster.
He feels a knot forming in his stomach, a knot of worry and confusion because he doesn’t recognise any of this, none of it makes any sense. He makes for the door, his right leg protesting the movement and causing him to half hop until he reaches the door handle and wrenches it open.
The hallway is no more familiar, nor is the sitting room he finds himself in once he’s staggered his way along it. For a brief moment he panics, he doesn’t know if he’s lost, if he’s been kidnapped, drugged, seduced, but then the panicking feeling is quickly overthrown by what feels like a lightning strike inside his head.
The sound of his own scream adds to the jolting in his mind and he grapples blindly for a surface of some kind to stop himself from crumpling to the floor. He finds a table and clings to the solidity of it until the surge of searing pain passes, along with the nausea that follows it.
Only then does he notice the note laying on the table top.
‘Morning Yuto’ it reads. ‘I’m at the market, your breakfast is in the rice cooker and your medicine is in the cup by the sink. Yamada’
A wave of relief rides on another wave of confusion, but sure enough when he looks over, there’s a small pill pot beside the sink. He braces himself to stand, and then limps his way over to it. There are three or four different kinds of tablets in it, different colours and sizes and for a flash of a second he has a really strong urge to tip the brightly colour capsules into the sink. He shakes the thought away though, deciding instead to take them, there has to be one of them in there that’s for the headache.
He moves over to the rice cooker automatically once he’s taken the pills, serving a pile into the bowl beside it and then he’s sitting at the kitchen table, pondering how everything can feel so instinctual and yet unfamiliar.
The rice is still sitting there in the bowl what feels like hour later, when the door opens and a figure walks through it.
“Ryosuke?” Yuto questions when the man looks up. It’s not that he’s unsure if it is Yamada, it definitely is, and yet he looks so unlike himself.
“Yuto.” Yamada replies with a smile, not the bright one Yuto is used to, the one he fell in love with, this smile is pained and doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “You’re up...did you take your medicine?”
There’s that smile again when Yuto nods, it looks so broken that it hurts, Yamada looks so broken. The perfect porcelain of his face is lined and sallow and the untidy black mass of hair framing his face only makes his eyes more sunken, more gaunt. “You look...” Yuto starts, but the words catch in his throat when Yamada turns to him in interest.
Yamada looks at him expectantly for a moment more and then down to Yuto’s bowl. “You should eat your breakfast.” he says breezily, and then he turns for the kitchen. Yuto picks up the spoon from the bowl but he can’t do any more than push the rice around it as he listens to the sounds of Yamada unpacking shopping in the kitchen. He’s humming, yet it’s flat and tuneless, it’s not Yamada, not Hey!Say!JUMP’s Yamada.
The name brings with it another wave of panic. Hey!Say!JUMP. He’s an idol, and yet nothing about the shabby little apartment screams idol. There’s no posters, no pictures, not a shred of glitter to be seen, there’s no drum-kit, there’s no sign that Hey!Say!JUMP even exist. His spoon clatters to the table and Yamada comes running.
“I...” Yuto starts in explanation but his breath leaves him with a whoosh as he considers the possibility that Hey!Say!JUMP doesn’t exist.
“What’s wrong Yuto?” Yamada - worn, faded Yamada - asks, and he lowers himself into the seat opposite Yuto.
Yuto shakes his head, tries to find the words but he’s so, so lost. “I...I had a dream...” he says eventually, and when Yamada looks at him indulgently “I dreamt we were pop stars...”
The expression falls from Yamada’s face, his eyes for a moment even darker, unguarded, but then he clears his throat, forcing his expression into something more neutral. “That sounds like a nice dream. Are you finished with your rice?” When Yuto doesn’t answer Yamada gets back to his feet, sweeping away with the bowl of untouched rice as he continues. “We’ll do your exercises and then I’ll run a bath.”
Twenty minutes later Yuto finds himself laid out on the floor, a Yoga mat beneath him and Yamada above him, bending Yuto’s right leg and pushing back on it gently. It’s agony, the entire fifteen minutes that the workout takes are agony, the position where Yuto raises his own leg is even harder, hard enough that he’s teary-eyed and out of breath by the time Yamada relents and lets him rest.
“What happened to my leg?” Yuto asks, when he’s caught his breath enough to do so. He’s been mulling it over in his mind but it’s another one of those things, like everything today it seems, where he just can’t quite wrap his head around it.
Yamada looks at him uncertainly but eventually he answers. “You broke it, two breaks at the knee and one at the hip.”
Yuto’s eyebrows furrow. “How did I break it?”
Yamada’s expression forms an equal frown. “You were in an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” Yuto continues.
“A car accident.” Yamada tells him.
Yuto nods, letting the news sink in for a moment. “Is that why I can’t remember anything?”
Yamada’s expression darkens and he takes in a slow rattling breath. His voice is just as unsteady when he answers. “I think that’s enough questions, you should get in the bath while it’s hot.”
Yuto complies when Yamada helps him up, and his leg is so tense and raw that he doesn’t complain when Yamada hands him the crutch to get himself to the bathroom.
He thinks about the new information as he soaks, racks his brain for some memory of it as his fingers trace the scar on his right knee. He can’t remember a thing. He remembers Hey!Say!JUMP and he remembers being an idol, and drumming, and he remembers Yamada’s gentle unhurried lips on his skin, the smell of salt and sand, of summer. And then he remembers waking up this morning and nothing being the same, he feels so lost it almost drowns him.
He can’t help the tears, hates the way they drag sobs up from somewhere low in his chest and the way they bounce of every wall in the tiny cramped bathroom, the sound of his grief amplified.
When he finally manages to pull himself together he has to call Yamada to help him out of the bath. His skin is chilled and pimpling and his leg has seized from sitting in the same position too long. Yamada keeps his red, puffy eyes trained obediently on the wall above Yuto’s shoulder the entire time he’s coaxing Yuto’s stiff body from the water, and then he wraps Yuto in a stiff, dry towel. Yuto watches Yamada’s face the whole time, the careful discipline on it, hiding the pain he can see still residing, dully, in his eyes. He feels sorrowful and yet touched by Yamada’s gentle actions.
When Yamada turns to leave again, Yuto’s hand reaches out on instinct to stop him. For a moment they just look at each other, both a little startled, but when Yuto’s lips part to speak, to say what, he isn’t sure, Yamada turns away.
He finds Yamada in the bedroom a few minutes later, a pair of plain black trousers have replaced his sweatpants and he’s in the process of pulling his shirt off over his head. The sight of the body beneath it is startling. The lean muscular frame Yuto knew is gone, replaced instead by bony hips and a protruding ribcage. More frightening than the weight loss though are the bruises, Yamada’s stomach and chest are covered with them, some almost gone but one or two so fresh the welts look like they might start bleeding any moment. Yamada notices him looking and hurriedly pulls on a short-sleeved shirt of a hideous orange colour. “Where are you going?” Yuto asks quietly.
Yamada takes a deep breath. “Work.”
“Work?” Yuto asks, he imagines stage lights and sequins for a moment but then stark reality cuts through the image with Yamada’s words.
“A family restaurant. I’ll be back at eight. I’ll bring dinner...why don’t you rest for a while? If you get hungry there’s some nabe in pots in the fridge.”
Yuto doesn’t want to rest, he doesn’t want to eat nabe either. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, even as he shuffles around the apartment after Yamada as he gets ready to leave. It’s only as he watches Yamada plaster on a smile and wave him goodbye that he realises what he wants to do. He wants to find out what the hell happened.
It takes some time searching but eventually he finds a laptop hidden away in the back of a wardrobe and by some miracle it has both a power cable and internet access, but the bigger shock is when Yuto boots it up and notices the date.
A snort of surprised laughter forces it’s way out because he can’t be gone thirty. The last he remembers they were celebrating JUMP’s 10th anniversary but according to every website he goes on to verify the current date, that anniversary was eight years ago.
He’s barely over the shock of that when he loads up the search engine and gingerly types ‘Nakajima Yuto, car accident.’
The very first link that comes up has pictures - pictures Yuto briefly wishes he hadn’t clicked on. There’s Yamada’s black Porsche, almost unrecognisable in it’s crumpled state, somewhere off a highway, and a few metres in front of it lies a pixelated, human shape. Even with the blurred pixels, it’s not hard for Yuto to recognise himself, it’s not hard to imagine what the blurred mass of red beside his head is. ‘Idol left comatose after drink driving’ the headline claims, and when Yuto scans the rest of the article, his sight obscured intermittently by tears, he picks out phrases like ‘members both worried and appalled’, ‘centre Yamada taking responsibility for member’s actions’ and ‘thankful at least there were no other casualties’.
“No other casualties.” Yuto repeats to himself aloud, his mind flitting back to Yamada’s lessened state, to the hollowness behind his eyes.
It takes a few more hours to put the rest of the pieces into the puzzle, long enough that Yuto has to stop and find some more painkillers for his head. In the medicine cabinet he finds a whole cocktail bar of pill bottles, most of them bearing Yuto’s name, and he gathers them all together along with his aspirin to take back to the laptop on the kitchen table.
He was drink driving it seems, in Yamada’s car, speeding too fast down the motorway when he lost control of the car and went right into the central reservation. The car, according to traffic accident aficionados, appeared to have flipped, sending Yuto out of the windscreen, before rolling and coming to a halt at the edge of the road.
Yuto was left with a broken leg and a shattered skull, leading to an eight month stint in a vegetative state. JUMP tried to carry on for a while without him, but they were never the same and eventually split after Yamada quit the entertainment business to take care of Yuto once he was discharged from the hospital in a state of minimal consciousness.
There are very few reports of Yuto’s progress after leaving the hospital but every few months there are Yamada sightings, new jobs he’s started and then been fired from after the resulting flurry of fan-girls to the scene, but even they fizzle out eventually.
It’s more than Yuto wanted to know, more than he feels like his fragile state can handle and yet he wants to know more too. He wants to know why Yamada quit his entire life to take care of him, why he’d even been drink driving in the first place, why he can still feel Yamada’s lips burning his skin when he concentrates hard enough.
Once he knows more, he wishes even more so that he didn’t. He looks up the names on the medicine bottles, mostly anti-depressants for Yamada, a whole load of fucked up for Yuto.
The medical files he finds stashed away in that same wardrobe confirm that Yuto has regained higher cortical functioning but retains both long and short term memory loss. On top of that it reports that he suffers irrational bouts of violent aggression, social and behavioural disorders and occasional relapses into minimally functioning states. For the first couple of years he’d had 24 hour professional home care assistants but for the last few, despite the medical professionals advice to admit him to a care home, Yuto has only had Yamada.
Why he only has Yamada he isn’t sure, but he thinks the answer may be one of his other questions.
He’s still sitting at the table when Yamada returns home, medical files and medicine bottles scattered all over it and his nose pressed against the laptop screen. He found a pair of glasses that help a little with the headache but he’s pretty sure they’re Yamada’s.
“Yuto.” Yamada gasps when he enters and the carrier bag in his hand falls to the floor as his hands come up to cover his mouth.
He’s been staring at the photos and his own mental images all day but it still pains him when Yuto looks up to find Yamada, this shell of Yamada, standing in front of him.
The tears are on his cheeks before the words are even out. “I’m so sorry...for everything.” he gasps. Yamada doesn’t answer, he just stands frozen, staring at Yuto until Yuto gets up, almost forgetting his stiff leg as he hobbles over to Yamada. “I’m so sorry Ryosuke...” the scene looks even starker right in front of him than it had on the pages of the laptop. He reaches out to stroke a tear from Yamada’s cheek. “What have I done to you?”
“Yuto?” Yamada asks again, and the tears fall thicker, Yuto’s heart cracks right along with Yamada’s voice as he says “Yutti?”
He can’t bear it, it all hurts so much and the only way he can find to dispel the pain is to press his lips to Yamada’s. It’s heaven, it’s sweet and it’s painful and for the briefest of moments it’s perfect but then Yamada’s hand is firm on his chest, urging him away.
The rejection hurts almost as much as the flash of lightning in his head, or the memory that it brings with it. A stupid fight. They were both drunk, both tired and it was such a stupid thing, Yuto doesn’t even know what it was only Yamada was crying and pushing him away and Yuto was angry, as he so often got when he was drunk - he rarely drank - and he remembers hitting Yamada and storming away. The memory stops there but Yuto knows, he knows that’s when it happened, knows he stormed downstairs and got behind the wheel of Yamada’s Porsche He knows he tore into the night, too drunk, too angry to be driving, driving too fast, and then nothing.
“Ryosuke?” he says, because there are firm hands on his shoulders but his vision is taking a while to come back into focus.
“Yuto?” Yamada’s voice asks back, cautiously.
“What was that?” he realises he’s on his knees, Yamada on the floor too, holding him up.
“It’s kind of like a mini seizure...like a brain glitch...you don’t have them often any more, not when you take your medicine.” Yamada answers.
“I remembered.” Yuto tells him. “About the fight...I saw it...”
“Don’t.” Yamada says, cutting him off. “Please don’t make me think about it”
Yuto shakes his head, he doesn’t continue though, there’s other things he needs to know. “Why are you doing this? Why are you taking care of me?” Yamada doesn’t answer, he just looks down at the ground. “Why have you given everything up for me?”
“Because it’s all my fault.” Yamada says, barely above a whisper “I can’t just abandon you...I loved you...and I let this happen to us.”
His first argument should be that it’s isn’t Yamada’s fault, that Yamada wasn’t the one behind the wheel and yet the first words out of his mouth are. “You loved me? Don’t you still?”
Yamada lets out an unamused laugh, it’s as tired and frail as he is. “Most days you don’t even know who I am...but I’m still here aren’t I?”
Yuto wants to say he loves Yamada too, he feels like he does, like he always had and yet he’s very conscious of the eight years etched on Yamada’s face, the ones he doesn’t remember, it wouldn’t be fair to say it. “It must be hard.” There’s that laugh again, a slight shake of Yamada’s head that would be exasperation if there were any energy in it.
“It’s hard.” Yamada admits. “Some days more than others.”
Yuto remembers the medical report, the sedatives in the medicine cabinet, he remembers the bruises on Yamada’s skin. He reaches unconsciously for Yamada’s abs, the place where the bruising was darkest. “Sometimes I hurt you.”
“That’s nothing.” Yamada says dismissively but he still winces when Yuto’s fingers brush the bruised skin. “You’re scared, it’s only natural...” his head shakes again and then he looks up at Yuto, a fresh wave of pain on his face. “It’s days like this that are harder...”
It hurts, the tortured expression on his face hurts, it’s so desolate, so desperate, Yuto wants nothing more than to kiss it away, to promise him everything will be OK but Yamada’s hand is firm on his chest again when he tries to lean in.
“Yuto don’t.” Yamada argues lightly. “Because it will only hurt me more when I wake up tomorrow morning….”
His words cut off, and for a moment Yuto chases them in the trembling of Yamada’s lips but the silent sobs that break them off say it all.
“When you wake up tomorrow…” Yuto repeats, dreading the confirmation.
“You’ll be gone.”
Pairing: Yamada x Yuto
Rating/Warnings: PG-15 for dusturbing content?
Word Count: 3375
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and only the words are mine.
Summary: Yuto wakes confused, only snapshots of memories to guide him back to the painful truth.
He feels warm all over, he’s sure there are lips on his throat, the smell of skin, muggy with late summer heat. There’s weight above him, pressing down, grinding, and his head is spinning. He wakes with a name on his lips. “Ryosuke.”
The bed is empty beside him and Yuto shudders. It’s cold, the room is dark and dreary looking and there’s no sign of Yamada. “Ryosuke?” he repeats, but only the silence answers him.
He groans at the ache in his legs when he swings them over the side of the bed and even with one hand on the night-stand it takes far more effort than it should to get to his feet. He spots a crutch leaning against the end of the bed and it strikes him as strange though some kind of instinct tells him to reach for it.
He doesn’t. He turns instead for the night-stand and the packet of cigarettes there. It’s when he reaches out for them that he notices the ring on his finger, it’s unfamiliar and yet the impression left in his skin when he removes it is deep, like it’s well worn.
The ring isn’t the only unfamiliar thing. As the haze of sleep leaves Yuto’s mind he finds he doesn’t recognise the room he’s in at all. It’s small, the furniture simple, all worn, dents and chips covering most of it. It matches the wallpaper, an inoffensive magnolia on every wall, dotted with patches of bare plaster.
He feels a knot forming in his stomach, a knot of worry and confusion because he doesn’t recognise any of this, none of it makes any sense. He makes for the door, his right leg protesting the movement and causing him to half hop until he reaches the door handle and wrenches it open.
The hallway is no more familiar, nor is the sitting room he finds himself in once he’s staggered his way along it. For a brief moment he panics, he doesn’t know if he’s lost, if he’s been kidnapped, drugged, seduced, but then the panicking feeling is quickly overthrown by what feels like a lightning strike inside his head.
The sound of his own scream adds to the jolting in his mind and he grapples blindly for a surface of some kind to stop himself from crumpling to the floor. He finds a table and clings to the solidity of it until the surge of searing pain passes, along with the nausea that follows it.
Only then does he notice the note laying on the table top.
‘Morning Yuto’ it reads. ‘I’m at the market, your breakfast is in the rice cooker and your medicine is in the cup by the sink. Yamada’
A wave of relief rides on another wave of confusion, but sure enough when he looks over, there’s a small pill pot beside the sink. He braces himself to stand, and then limps his way over to it. There are three or four different kinds of tablets in it, different colours and sizes and for a flash of a second he has a really strong urge to tip the brightly colour capsules into the sink. He shakes the thought away though, deciding instead to take them, there has to be one of them in there that’s for the headache.
He moves over to the rice cooker automatically once he’s taken the pills, serving a pile into the bowl beside it and then he’s sitting at the kitchen table, pondering how everything can feel so instinctual and yet unfamiliar.
The rice is still sitting there in the bowl what feels like hour later, when the door opens and a figure walks through it.
“Ryosuke?” Yuto questions when the man looks up. It’s not that he’s unsure if it is Yamada, it definitely is, and yet he looks so unlike himself.
“Yuto.” Yamada replies with a smile, not the bright one Yuto is used to, the one he fell in love with, this smile is pained and doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “You’re up...did you take your medicine?”
There’s that smile again when Yuto nods, it looks so broken that it hurts, Yamada looks so broken. The perfect porcelain of his face is lined and sallow and the untidy black mass of hair framing his face only makes his eyes more sunken, more gaunt. “You look...” Yuto starts, but the words catch in his throat when Yamada turns to him in interest.
Yamada looks at him expectantly for a moment more and then down to Yuto’s bowl. “You should eat your breakfast.” he says breezily, and then he turns for the kitchen. Yuto picks up the spoon from the bowl but he can’t do any more than push the rice around it as he listens to the sounds of Yamada unpacking shopping in the kitchen. He’s humming, yet it’s flat and tuneless, it’s not Yamada, not Hey!Say!JUMP’s Yamada.
The name brings with it another wave of panic. Hey!Say!JUMP. He’s an idol, and yet nothing about the shabby little apartment screams idol. There’s no posters, no pictures, not a shred of glitter to be seen, there’s no drum-kit, there’s no sign that Hey!Say!JUMP even exist. His spoon clatters to the table and Yamada comes running.
“I...” Yuto starts in explanation but his breath leaves him with a whoosh as he considers the possibility that Hey!Say!JUMP doesn’t exist.
“What’s wrong Yuto?” Yamada - worn, faded Yamada - asks, and he lowers himself into the seat opposite Yuto.
Yuto shakes his head, tries to find the words but he’s so, so lost. “I...I had a dream...” he says eventually, and when Yamada looks at him indulgently “I dreamt we were pop stars...”
The expression falls from Yamada’s face, his eyes for a moment even darker, unguarded, but then he clears his throat, forcing his expression into something more neutral. “That sounds like a nice dream. Are you finished with your rice?” When Yuto doesn’t answer Yamada gets back to his feet, sweeping away with the bowl of untouched rice as he continues. “We’ll do your exercises and then I’ll run a bath.”
Twenty minutes later Yuto finds himself laid out on the floor, a Yoga mat beneath him and Yamada above him, bending Yuto’s right leg and pushing back on it gently. It’s agony, the entire fifteen minutes that the workout takes are agony, the position where Yuto raises his own leg is even harder, hard enough that he’s teary-eyed and out of breath by the time Yamada relents and lets him rest.
“What happened to my leg?” Yuto asks, when he’s caught his breath enough to do so. He’s been mulling it over in his mind but it’s another one of those things, like everything today it seems, where he just can’t quite wrap his head around it.
Yamada looks at him uncertainly but eventually he answers. “You broke it, two breaks at the knee and one at the hip.”
Yuto’s eyebrows furrow. “How did I break it?”
Yamada’s expression forms an equal frown. “You were in an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” Yuto continues.
“A car accident.” Yamada tells him.
Yuto nods, letting the news sink in for a moment. “Is that why I can’t remember anything?”
Yamada’s expression darkens and he takes in a slow rattling breath. His voice is just as unsteady when he answers. “I think that’s enough questions, you should get in the bath while it’s hot.”
Yuto complies when Yamada helps him up, and his leg is so tense and raw that he doesn’t complain when Yamada hands him the crutch to get himself to the bathroom.
He thinks about the new information as he soaks, racks his brain for some memory of it as his fingers trace the scar on his right knee. He can’t remember a thing. He remembers Hey!Say!JUMP and he remembers being an idol, and drumming, and he remembers Yamada’s gentle unhurried lips on his skin, the smell of salt and sand, of summer. And then he remembers waking up this morning and nothing being the same, he feels so lost it almost drowns him.
He can’t help the tears, hates the way they drag sobs up from somewhere low in his chest and the way they bounce of every wall in the tiny cramped bathroom, the sound of his grief amplified.
When he finally manages to pull himself together he has to call Yamada to help him out of the bath. His skin is chilled and pimpling and his leg has seized from sitting in the same position too long. Yamada keeps his red, puffy eyes trained obediently on the wall above Yuto’s shoulder the entire time he’s coaxing Yuto’s stiff body from the water, and then he wraps Yuto in a stiff, dry towel. Yuto watches Yamada’s face the whole time, the careful discipline on it, hiding the pain he can see still residing, dully, in his eyes. He feels sorrowful and yet touched by Yamada’s gentle actions.
When Yamada turns to leave again, Yuto’s hand reaches out on instinct to stop him. For a moment they just look at each other, both a little startled, but when Yuto’s lips part to speak, to say what, he isn’t sure, Yamada turns away.
He finds Yamada in the bedroom a few minutes later, a pair of plain black trousers have replaced his sweatpants and he’s in the process of pulling his shirt off over his head. The sight of the body beneath it is startling. The lean muscular frame Yuto knew is gone, replaced instead by bony hips and a protruding ribcage. More frightening than the weight loss though are the bruises, Yamada’s stomach and chest are covered with them, some almost gone but one or two so fresh the welts look like they might start bleeding any moment. Yamada notices him looking and hurriedly pulls on a short-sleeved shirt of a hideous orange colour. “Where are you going?” Yuto asks quietly.
Yamada takes a deep breath. “Work.”
“Work?” Yuto asks, he imagines stage lights and sequins for a moment but then stark reality cuts through the image with Yamada’s words.
“A family restaurant. I’ll be back at eight. I’ll bring dinner...why don’t you rest for a while? If you get hungry there’s some nabe in pots in the fridge.”
Yuto doesn’t want to rest, he doesn’t want to eat nabe either. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, even as he shuffles around the apartment after Yamada as he gets ready to leave. It’s only as he watches Yamada plaster on a smile and wave him goodbye that he realises what he wants to do. He wants to find out what the hell happened.
It takes some time searching but eventually he finds a laptop hidden away in the back of a wardrobe and by some miracle it has both a power cable and internet access, but the bigger shock is when Yuto boots it up and notices the date.
A snort of surprised laughter forces it’s way out because he can’t be gone thirty. The last he remembers they were celebrating JUMP’s 10th anniversary but according to every website he goes on to verify the current date, that anniversary was eight years ago.
He’s barely over the shock of that when he loads up the search engine and gingerly types ‘Nakajima Yuto, car accident.’
The very first link that comes up has pictures - pictures Yuto briefly wishes he hadn’t clicked on. There’s Yamada’s black Porsche, almost unrecognisable in it’s crumpled state, somewhere off a highway, and a few metres in front of it lies a pixelated, human shape. Even with the blurred pixels, it’s not hard for Yuto to recognise himself, it’s not hard to imagine what the blurred mass of red beside his head is. ‘Idol left comatose after drink driving’ the headline claims, and when Yuto scans the rest of the article, his sight obscured intermittently by tears, he picks out phrases like ‘members both worried and appalled’, ‘centre Yamada taking responsibility for member’s actions’ and ‘thankful at least there were no other casualties’.
“No other casualties.” Yuto repeats to himself aloud, his mind flitting back to Yamada’s lessened state, to the hollowness behind his eyes.
It takes a few more hours to put the rest of the pieces into the puzzle, long enough that Yuto has to stop and find some more painkillers for his head. In the medicine cabinet he finds a whole cocktail bar of pill bottles, most of them bearing Yuto’s name, and he gathers them all together along with his aspirin to take back to the laptop on the kitchen table.
He was drink driving it seems, in Yamada’s car, speeding too fast down the motorway when he lost control of the car and went right into the central reservation. The car, according to traffic accident aficionados, appeared to have flipped, sending Yuto out of the windscreen, before rolling and coming to a halt at the edge of the road.
Yuto was left with a broken leg and a shattered skull, leading to an eight month stint in a vegetative state. JUMP tried to carry on for a while without him, but they were never the same and eventually split after Yamada quit the entertainment business to take care of Yuto once he was discharged from the hospital in a state of minimal consciousness.
There are very few reports of Yuto’s progress after leaving the hospital but every few months there are Yamada sightings, new jobs he’s started and then been fired from after the resulting flurry of fan-girls to the scene, but even they fizzle out eventually.
It’s more than Yuto wanted to know, more than he feels like his fragile state can handle and yet he wants to know more too. He wants to know why Yamada quit his entire life to take care of him, why he’d even been drink driving in the first place, why he can still feel Yamada’s lips burning his skin when he concentrates hard enough.
Once he knows more, he wishes even more so that he didn’t. He looks up the names on the medicine bottles, mostly anti-depressants for Yamada, a whole load of fucked up for Yuto.
The medical files he finds stashed away in that same wardrobe confirm that Yuto has regained higher cortical functioning but retains both long and short term memory loss. On top of that it reports that he suffers irrational bouts of violent aggression, social and behavioural disorders and occasional relapses into minimally functioning states. For the first couple of years he’d had 24 hour professional home care assistants but for the last few, despite the medical professionals advice to admit him to a care home, Yuto has only had Yamada.
Why he only has Yamada he isn’t sure, but he thinks the answer may be one of his other questions.
He’s still sitting at the table when Yamada returns home, medical files and medicine bottles scattered all over it and his nose pressed against the laptop screen. He found a pair of glasses that help a little with the headache but he’s pretty sure they’re Yamada’s.
“Yuto.” Yamada gasps when he enters and the carrier bag in his hand falls to the floor as his hands come up to cover his mouth.
He’s been staring at the photos and his own mental images all day but it still pains him when Yuto looks up to find Yamada, this shell of Yamada, standing in front of him.
The tears are on his cheeks before the words are even out. “I’m so sorry...for everything.” he gasps. Yamada doesn’t answer, he just stands frozen, staring at Yuto until Yuto gets up, almost forgetting his stiff leg as he hobbles over to Yamada. “I’m so sorry Ryosuke...” the scene looks even starker right in front of him than it had on the pages of the laptop. He reaches out to stroke a tear from Yamada’s cheek. “What have I done to you?”
“Yuto?” Yamada asks again, and the tears fall thicker, Yuto’s heart cracks right along with Yamada’s voice as he says “Yutti?”
He can’t bear it, it all hurts so much and the only way he can find to dispel the pain is to press his lips to Yamada’s. It’s heaven, it’s sweet and it’s painful and for the briefest of moments it’s perfect but then Yamada’s hand is firm on his chest, urging him away.
The rejection hurts almost as much as the flash of lightning in his head, or the memory that it brings with it. A stupid fight. They were both drunk, both tired and it was such a stupid thing, Yuto doesn’t even know what it was only Yamada was crying and pushing him away and Yuto was angry, as he so often got when he was drunk - he rarely drank - and he remembers hitting Yamada and storming away. The memory stops there but Yuto knows, he knows that’s when it happened, knows he stormed downstairs and got behind the wheel of Yamada’s Porsche He knows he tore into the night, too drunk, too angry to be driving, driving too fast, and then nothing.
“Ryosuke?” he says, because there are firm hands on his shoulders but his vision is taking a while to come back into focus.
“Yuto?” Yamada’s voice asks back, cautiously.
“What was that?” he realises he’s on his knees, Yamada on the floor too, holding him up.
“It’s kind of like a mini seizure...like a brain glitch...you don’t have them often any more, not when you take your medicine.” Yamada answers.
“I remembered.” Yuto tells him. “About the fight...I saw it...”
“Don’t.” Yamada says, cutting him off. “Please don’t make me think about it”
Yuto shakes his head, he doesn’t continue though, there’s other things he needs to know. “Why are you doing this? Why are you taking care of me?” Yamada doesn’t answer, he just looks down at the ground. “Why have you given everything up for me?”
“Because it’s all my fault.” Yamada says, barely above a whisper “I can’t just abandon you...I loved you...and I let this happen to us.”
His first argument should be that it’s isn’t Yamada’s fault, that Yamada wasn’t the one behind the wheel and yet the first words out of his mouth are. “You loved me? Don’t you still?”
Yamada lets out an unamused laugh, it’s as tired and frail as he is. “Most days you don’t even know who I am...but I’m still here aren’t I?”
Yuto wants to say he loves Yamada too, he feels like he does, like he always had and yet he’s very conscious of the eight years etched on Yamada’s face, the ones he doesn’t remember, it wouldn’t be fair to say it. “It must be hard.” There’s that laugh again, a slight shake of Yamada’s head that would be exasperation if there were any energy in it.
“It’s hard.” Yamada admits. “Some days more than others.”
Yuto remembers the medical report, the sedatives in the medicine cabinet, he remembers the bruises on Yamada’s skin. He reaches unconsciously for Yamada’s abs, the place where the bruising was darkest. “Sometimes I hurt you.”
“That’s nothing.” Yamada says dismissively but he still winces when Yuto’s fingers brush the bruised skin. “You’re scared, it’s only natural...” his head shakes again and then he looks up at Yuto, a fresh wave of pain on his face. “It’s days like this that are harder...”
It hurts, the tortured expression on his face hurts, it’s so desolate, so desperate, Yuto wants nothing more than to kiss it away, to promise him everything will be OK but Yamada’s hand is firm on his chest again when he tries to lean in.
“Yuto don’t.” Yamada argues lightly. “Because it will only hurt me more when I wake up tomorrow morning….”
His words cut off, and for a moment Yuto chases them in the trembling of Yamada’s lips but the silent sobs that break them off say it all.
“When you wake up tomorrow…” Yuto repeats, dreading the confirmation.
“You’ll be gone.”