bumblebees. (ch2) re: akame.
bumblebees. (ch 2)
akame.
13,538 words.
31 pages.
chapter 1: here.
soundtrack: "one more night" by the stars (click to listen)
There was a time when Jin had loved Kame, precious little faults and all, and when Kame relished the fact that Jin simply loved him, precious little faults and all despite.
There was a time when Jin drove them all the way out into a deserted stretch of road, bordered by fields speckled with fat sheep just as the rain had begun to rattle from the sky like grains of rice bouncing around in a metal canteen. He sat Kame in the back of their stolen jeep, halfway sprawled across the entire seat and propped up by an elbow on the door handle, popped in a classical music cassette tape and made out to the sing-song of violins, windshield wipers, and the warm rain that dribbled down from each of the plexiglass windows.
It was Jin holding Kame's face in his soft hands and Kame pawing desperately at their clothing, fumbling awkwardly and ignoring the trails of saliva Jin was drawing out from his mouth with his clumsy, teenage kissing techniques; eventually lamenting Jin's stupid undoable buttons, allowing him to suck on Kame's soft collarbone instead.
That night, drug back to the Agency office and panic-stricken, hands clenched around the bottom of his seat and feet tapping nervously on the carpeted floor, Jin had whispered, "Five years from now, Kame, let's do it again, for real this time," and Kame stared down at the floor: indifferent, hair striped with blond and plugs of dirt from the ditch Jin pushed him into in the heat of nibbling the shell of Kame's ear, smears of dandelion pollen at the pink, diamond-shaped corner of his soft, trembling lips.
He was nodding, yes, and quivering in suspended animation -- but he was nodding, and that was good enough for irresponsible Akanishi Jin, who never considered that a nod could mean anything more than "yes, very much so". No one had told him that a nod could mean Please don't stop talking, please don't, I need to hear your voice to know it's all okay. No one told him that he meant more to Kame than a fool-around.
The lashings that night, the red rashes that broke out wherever he had been slapped on either side of his face, on the undersides of his arms: to Jin, they burned until he rubbed them thick with hot creams and took a nap on the dressing room sofa. To Kame, they burned late into the night, late into the next morning, late into the next week, to the cavern of his heart where he knew it could never work.
Watching Jin sleeping, lathered in bengay like sunscreen, Kame knew. There was no five years from now. There was today, that afternoon, maybe next weekend if Jin was really serious about getting together with somebody; but five years in the life of a growing boy?
It wasn't altogether on purpose, but 'Kazuya Kamenashi' had become the sloppily spoken words that burbled out of Jin's fat lips as easily as a slurred yakuza accent, the colloquial 'Ohisa' instead of 'Ohisashiburi'. "Five years from now, Kame, let's do it again." Well, okay, Kame thought. If you're still talking about it five years from now, Jin, I'll do it.
And of course, in five years, the sands of time had scattered and all that was left was an insurmountable pile of misunderstandings and misgivings, missed everythings, in fact; and Jin no sooner brought it up a single other time than Kame ever asked. The uncertainty and the fear of hurt in Kame's character could not be boiled away, and because he didn't want to look needy, to look dependant on Jin -- he'd forgotten how pleasurable it was, on that deep human level, to be needed, and that he wasn't the only person in the world with a large capacity for loneliness.
--
Dying sun in the distance, the long stretch of road ahead, fields full of lazy sheep that dotted either side -- Jin remembered these roads. He wrung his hands on the leather of his Benz steering wheel, thoughtfully, gut twisting with every cinch he pulled tightly into its shape. He ached -- deeply, deeply, deeply ached; and the way the sheep turned its head in the dusty drizzle and stared at him flatly made it all the more worse.
"Fuck you," he said to no one in particular and clutched himself around the waist, rubbing his stomach, staring blankly at his car window blurred with the locomotion of freshwater. He remembered.
It was Kame, hands fumbling all over Jin's body with a youthful sort of awkwardness; it was that Kame. It was Kame, who picked chunks of grass clods on the side of the road and threw them at the statuesque flock of ewes giggling. Who made Jin buy an ice cream he knew he wouldn't touch, and the Jin that ate it and became sick in rainbows of colors, dizzy and terrified in the middle of nowhere regretting that he'd run away with Kame in the first place, what a stupid, stupid idea -- the Kame that laid Jin across his lap in the back seat, pulled up his t-shirt and rubbed his soft stomach in smooth, warm strokes that burned him to the pit of his core? It was that Kame.
Jin held himself; one hand on his belly, one on the steering wheel. His breathing was labored, uncomfortable: in, out, in, in, in, short out, in, desperate out, in, in, deep out, in, stop. Regain control. In, out, in, in, short out. The rain would not let up.
It would never be the same again -- that moment he grabbed Kame and ran away from the recording with all that boyish immortality complex, all that reckless abandon surging through his veins, and poor Kame; poor, dutiful, hard-working Kame who came along not because it was particularly a good idea, or because he didn't know how fiercely the slaps on his sweet face would burn at rehearsals the day after, but because he loved Jin and he wanted it to work --
It was that Kame.
It was that Kame that broke his heart.
The Kame now -- the Jin now -- they were different. Not just older, not just wealthier, but inherently different inside and out; it was that Kame and that Jin that drove him insane. He checked his cell phone -- 8:15, three missed calls, two new text messages -- and buried his head hopelessly in his arms.
Jin pulled the clutch. There was no use. There would be no that "Kame" no more then there would be that "Jin" parked on the side of a deserted road next to a stern looking sheep, waiting for him.
It hurt that Kame had changed: had turned from a fun-loving wild child into a dutiful, boring, soulless human being, but it did not hurt as much as knowing that he, Jin, had changed just as much; if not more.
It was no longer one human being adrift in an unknown sea but two; two who may as well have been men meeting each other for the first time from separate corners of the world and discussing old friends without realizing each was the other. He couldn't rope Kame back if he couldn't tell where the old Kame was, where his line had been cut off, or how long ago -- and though Yamapi always fed him advice like spoonfuls of Barnes & Noble hippie-witchcraft mumbo-jumbo, told him mythological stories and said things would turn out the way they were meant to, he felt it did not readily apply to those places in life red-flagged by failure and hurt and mistakes.
Those were not, he thought, meant to be.
Kame and Jin, losing each other -- that, he thought, was not meant to be.
Time, though it changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. Drowning in those honey brown eyes was the Kazuya that Jin had loved: his best friend, his confidante. And so long as he could still grab Kame's gaze and hold it there, see in his mind's eye the boy he used to walk around holding hands with in rapturous glee, he couldn't help but wonder.
Jin had let Kame go -- and now he was free-floating by himself in the middle of the ocean; together watching the same stars, the same sun, and still millions of miles and perfectly orchestrated chains of chemical reactions away, precise explosions even when Kame was as close as the soft brush of his blonde arm hair against Jin's naked shoulder. The distance between them: from face to face, lip to lip, and one corner of the solar system to the loneliest part of the other, could not be forged.
--
Last row in First Class, nestled by the window, shielded behind the black leather seats in front of him -- just as Kamenashi Kazuya liked it. He opened the tiny bag of peanuts fairy dusted with salt and chewed on a handful thoughtfully, peeling the brown papery bits of skin off with his front teeth.
There were things in life he didn't understand.
There were people in life he didn't understand, and an even greater number who did not understand him to the extent he felt appropriate to claim such (though, admittedly, it never stopped sharp-finger nailed, salon-going public journalists from typing up his life stories with one hand while sucking seafood-flavored cracker dip off the fingers of their other).
He felt quite suddenly as if he had been his whole life a naked hermit crab whose only ambition in life was to find a comfortable place to live, wherever it may be. He felt that for a few hours that day he had found, for the first time in his life, that perfect porcelain shell and buried his bottom in the depths of its hollow caverns that hugged his soft body in a warm embrace. But the moment he tried to stand on his wobbly legs now heavy with the weight of home: something clapped, and twisting cracks like tributaries wound their way up the smooth spires of his shell and it shattered, right down the middle, falling into pieces around him for everyone to see.
One thing about foreign plane trips he liked -- the anonymity. A few recluse Japanese salary man who could jerk themselves off in one hand and count their favorite Morning Musume members off in another but look him straight in the eye, unflinchingly. He wondered if they watched him as hawkeyed as he watched them: listening to their ipods, playing on their laptops, tending to their lives like a delicate symphony orchestra playing music for everyone but them to hear. They wasted their entire lives working hard so they could someday sit passively as an audience to the world rather than the player, the instrument, or the conductor that had made it.
That's why Kame had agreed to go into Johnny's. That's why he continued to show up at rehearsals and backstage meetings and extra help sessions for hours at a time, sweating and bleeding and crying because he just couldn't sing, he just couldn't dance, he just couldn't do anything except stand behind Jin and smile toothily. He wanted to be a somebody: a textbook, magazine, TV show, hundred-years-from-now-immortalized-in-history type of somebody.
Kamenashi Kazuya did not want to fade away. But it was just as well. Things, he realized with humility, had changed -- people had changed -- and paper airplanes in the warm glow of the evening sun at the park were gone. It was years later -- clutching the shower curtain closed with his fist and curled up against the porcelain wall sobbing quietly -- that Kame, too, knew what it really felt like to want to die.
--
4:12 AM.
He stumbled into the dark apartment, didn't bother to fumble for the light switch. A warm body was waiting for him on the floor next to the couch and patted the spot next to it, smiling dimly. It was a routine as old as their fragment in time itself, a stable comfort that Kame felt for once he could fall back on knowing it'd be there indiscriminately. He hadn't even called and said he'd be by. The door was already open.
He set his stuff down on the sofa, sat cross-legged next to the other, and sighed.
Yamapi scooted an inch closer to Kame, who smelled wispily like Nyquil and ginger. "How did it…how did it go?" He bit his lip and tucked his chin in to where he could see Kame's face underneath his long, straight bangs.
Kame paused, trying to find the words nibbling behind his lips. He scratched the carpet with his fingernail. "Not perfect."
Terrible, Pi translated, waited to make sure he had nothing else to say, and scuffled his bangs with a yawn. "You came back pretty quick. How long were you gone, anyways? Two, three --"
"Two days." Kame replied quietly. He stared ahead blankly. "Two days."
"Do you…want to…talk? About it, I mean?"
Talk, Kame did not want to do. Words were a silly thing: weightless in the mind but heavy in the heart, gentle when rolling around the spires of his brain stem but heat-seeking bludgeons when he spit them out of his mouth. Lovely, and only sometimes halfway discomforting, but even words with the same meaning could caress his fragmented soul or slap him in the face depending on how the speaker clicked their tongues and if their hand was cupped like a dome over Kame's or thrumming idly on a wooden post in a field somewhere waiting for the next person to dive headfirst into the conversation hole they'd dug, together. And now, most certainly, was not a time for him to wonder what they meant when Yamapi licked his lips and let the words dribble out with childish, hopeless wonder. They'd be blown softly into the air, light enough with good intention to soothe; but on the way to his ears they'd swell like oily balloons and he'd swallow them whole, let them fall into his heart and carry them around for days and weeks and months -- years.
Talking was something Kame did not want to do.
He lay his head on Yamapi's thick shoulder and exhaled deeply through his nose until his lung palpitated sharply, empty of air, soft. "I just don't know." He murmured, tongue clicking. "I just don't know."
Pi rested one hand on Kame's knee, and with the other he lightly stroked back his smooth caramel hair, thinking on the nature of his neediness. "Yeah. I've heard that one before." He touched his cheek just barely to the top of Kame's head and said it again, looking at the wall in front of them. "Heard that one before."
Kame was exhausted: felt heavy, felt weighed down by the gravity of the universe and the slump of his frail shoulders, the bubbling in the atmosphere and the way he melted heart-first into the pocket of space he inhabited. He thought for a little bit, quietly, but Yamapi kept stroking his hair and even though he still hurt just as much, Kame had somehow forgotten why. He tried to remember curiously, sorting through file cabinets of recent memories looking for one he could vaguely recognize, and then some wispy feeling sort of fell out of his hands and he just glanced at it quickly -- just long enough to see the acidity of it all -- and it backed him up against the corner and he decided it was better to hurt without remembering why, just for a little while. He'd rather not know.
Kame withdrew his breath softly, situating his head deeper into the crook of Yamapi's warm neck. Somewhere in the fuzzy haze behind his eyes a picture began to form, paper heart cut-outs and the faint feeling that somebody was yelling in his ear, dragging him away, whirl winding through time by his rapidly melting brain first, and the last thing he remembered before falling asleep was the soft blanket of time and space and the feeling that he was fading, fading all away.
--
Kame liked the way that Yamapi stroked him.
It was different from Jin, though he didn't want to admit why, the reasoning being a precursor toward some defining plateau of logic he didn't want to acknowledge yet. It was different because Yamapi had always loved Kame -- had always cuddled him, held him, talked to him, gave him a smoke or took him out for beer and ramen, when Jin did and when Jin did not. When Jin stopped caring so much a couple years ago, when he'd tired of the attraction game and when he'd learned the joys of breasts and foreign girls, Yamapi was there; phone line open, door ajar, steaming food on the table, a warm half-uncovered bed.
He never pushed it on Kame, nor did he ever push himself on Kame, just hoped with all of himself that he'd always be the only other close friend Kame would confide honestly in. There was Ueda, there was Junno, but the thing about Kame was that you could know him for years and never see the miserable pile of secrets he held clenched in fistfuls behind his back. Yamapi could walk into the room, say "Hello Kame" and be greeted first thing with an open palm full of sad little nothings, as if by knowing Jin made him a problem solver. He wished he could be, if for Kame, and he would if the problem had been some bit of his faulty behavior in the first place. But it was not Yamapi that hurt Kame, it was Jin -- and Kame himself, admittedly -- so all Yamapi seemed to be capable of was taking the hand offered to him, dusting off the precious little hurts and petting it softly, for however long Kame needed it.
Tiny, sweet Kamenashi Kazuya -- shy, lonesome, long-legged Kamenashi Kazuya attracted Yamapi in a way Yamapi had never been drawn to a human being before. He visited Jin's house one night on boyish impulse and found Kame curled up on the couch in a silk robe, smelling sweetly of Jin's mother's shampoo, head against one end of a huge Pokemon body pillow watching TV lazily. Pi invited himself to a beanbag on the other side of the living room and stared until he felt there was no way he could look any longer without feeling like some sort of cardinal rule in the friendship of boys was broken.
The way Kame's damp hair fell fluffily in wispy tumbles around his face, the heat that rose from his soft rosy skin and the way the silk clung wetly to certain places and not to others jolted Yamapi like tictacs of pheromones bouncing along the skin between his thighs-- an experience rudely interrupted by the goofy presence of Jin, who made his entrance tripping on a coffee table and was met with only the starriest brown eyes from the drying boy laying on the couch.
Yamashita Tomohisa, then aged 17, decided in that moment that he wanted those same looks from Kamenashi Kazuya himself, and that'd he'd do whatever it would take to get them.
--
Unfortunately, there was one thing Pi loved more than the raging, wild crush he had on a diminutive member of KAT-TUN -- and that was his friendship with Jin. Loyal like a dumb puppy, he put his reckless attractions aside with the knowledge that Kame and Jin were, evidently, destined to be. The sideways glances, the giggles, the low-pitched moaning he'd hear backstage -- there was no reason that ever-faithful Yamashita Tomohisa would budge. His best friend was apparently in love with the long-legged beauty, and there was nothing he could do, nor would want to.
I'm such an awesome friend, Pi thought to himself on a bike ride home after rehearsal one afternoon. God, Jin's a lucky piece of shit to have me. Would Shirota Yuu leave Kame alone? Just for the sake of friendship? He rounded a corner, biting his tongue. Hell no he wouldn't! This is just the kind of sacrifice only a member of the Yamashita family would make. Damn our nobility.
To keep himself focused (as Yamapi was often prone to the complete opposite) he pretended somewhat childishly that it was a conquest, a challenge from the gods: leave Kame alone, and he'd be rewarded most handsomely (perhaps in the form of that new Transformers action figure he had his eyes on); indulge his desires, and he'd be cursed forever. It worked -- for several days and not much longer, when he was sure he was going to give in (Yamapi was young enough to make new friends, after all, Jin would surely forgive him for at least one little fuck up) and could no longer abandon the youthful romanticisms of his unbridled crush.
That was, until, he began learning about the epics of Greek mythology in his low-grade High School literature class. When it came to Zeus, Hera, even Aphrodite (whose wild descendant, his classmates joked, had to have been Koda Kumi), Yamapi was disinterested completely, right up to the day they moved into the stories of Virgil, Roman poet of 90 B.C.
Pi was immediately drawn to the legend of Orpheus and his beautiful wife Eurydice from the first day they read their story: how she was fleeing from the advances of Apollo and bitten by a serpent, sent to the Underworld for all eternity; and how Orpheus, devastated by her death, played music and sang so mournfully that Persephone -- Wife of Hades, who had once been a mortal herself -- pitied him, and offered Orpheus one chance to win her back. It was the only time in History that anyone had been offered a soul back from the rivers of the Underworld -- and it would be the last.
Orpheus was permitted to take her away with him on one condition, that he should not turn around to look at her till they should have reached the upper air. Under this condition they proceeded on their way, he leading, she following, through passages dark and steep, in total silence, till they had nearly reached the outlet into the cheerful upper world, when Orpheus, in a moment of forgetfulness, to assure himself that she was still following, cast a glance behind him, when instantly she was borne away. Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air. Dying now a second time, she yet cannot reproach her husband, for how can she blame his impatience to behold her? "Farewell," she said, "a last farewell," - and was hurried away, so fast that the sound hardly reached his ears.
Yamapi was blown away. Here was Orpheus, so consumed by love for his soul mate Eurydice that he ruined his one chance to bring her back to him. It was, he thought, a perfect way to draw Kame to him without purposefully hurting Jin, or requiring any immediate sort of action. Over the course of a couple years -- what would be the Nobuta wo Produce project that Yamapi so begged for, Seishun Amigo and the subsequent months and months of performances and TV appearances -- they would become closer, bento after shooting and a couple drinks back at Pi's apartment.
And maybe -- even if Jin didn't treat Kame badly, even if Jin was lovely to him -- maybe Kame would like Pi anyways. Maybe he would follow him just like Eurydice.
It was silly back then, and silly years later when Yamapi sat in the dark of night holding the warm, beautiful boy in his arms. But he couldn't help himself from thinking that he had finally done it: he finally had his golden opportunity, and all he had to do was lead Kame from one world into another.
--
After his 21st birthday, Akanishi Jin never loved Kamenashi Kazuya.
Things changed. Intimacy was difficult, forced, came only after the most ferocious of fights. They became better known for screaming into each other's faces until someone was reduced to angry tears than the blend of their personalities in static equilibrium. "You're like an old married couple," Yamapi joked, but it wasn't like that. Jin hated himself around Kame, hated the way Kame could make him feel like the tiniest man on the planet, the most insensitive bastard in the entire world. One day he was there, one day he wasn't, one day there'd be kisses and nibbles on Kame's underarm skin and the next Jin shouted and tripped along the carpet edge on his way out the hotel room doorway, leaving Kame palming his face in that delicate, quiet sort of rage he knew so well.
There was something very hypocritical about it all, how Jin could jerk Kame off behind a silkscreen in the dressing room and then call Yamapi later that night and mention passively that he felt nothing at all in the way of romance.
"He's just a kid, Pi. He doesn't know anything."
He knows everything, Pi wanted to say, you're the one not adding up, but he'd be feeding it into deaf ears.
--
The running dumb-Jin joke began when the boys were fairly small, fairly malleable, and assigned the personable roles they would play the rest of their lives in the entertainment world.
Kame -- Feminine, fragile.
Jin -- Sexy, dumb.
Yamapi -- We haven't the slightest idea.
A mixture of the two? Jin and Kame together, the perfect blend of feminism and boyish ploy…
it could work. Write it down.
"I don't like being the dumb one." Jin whined.
"But you are dumb," Pi laughed, giving him a playful shove on the hotel bed. "Besides. I have to be your guys' sick version of a lovechild. You think you have it bad?"
Kame was slumped in a chair by the window, reading his own letter. From now on, Kamenashi Kazuya, you are expected to behave in a quiet, orderly way. Your list of hair specifications as well as clothing style and subsequent pre-calculated facets of personality - favorite colors, movies, actor/actresses, ideal girls, friendships - are listed on pages 2 through 4. Please memorize them carefully in lieu of magazine as well as television interviews.
"My favorite colors are black, white, and silver." Jin wibbled. "This is crap! I hate black. Who wants to trade?" He extended his letter outwards and shook it desperately.
"Fuck you, I got pink." Yamapi grinned, fist-pumping into the air. "Yoshhhhhh."
"But I like pink -- "
"Can't have it." He hugged his letter to his chest protectively, crinkling the edges. "It got assigned to me; it's mine."
"Man." Jin attempted to throw his paper on the ground angrily but it drifted, light as feather, safely onto the edge of the bed and slipped off. "Oi. Kame. What'd you get?"
"Black and White." Kame yawned.
"Weird. Why'd we get the same ones?"
Kame shrugged. "Dunno." He closed his letter back into a tri-fold and tucked his feet under him in the yellow glare of the table lamp.
Later on that night, scrambling to hide cigarette smoke from several of their associate managers outside the hotel window, Jin set fire to his own letter and began shrieking hysterically. Yamapi managed to put out its flame-engulfed body with several dull thwaps of a nearby pillowcase, but it lay in thin, warm, caramel-brown flakes on the bed sheet.
Jin cried, more out of stress and frustration than anything else. Kame bravely found their bodyguard and had him deliver the message that a new copy was needed, no explanation given save for a mumbled, "He lost it". Three days later, Yamapi retold the story at rehearsals, shouted, "BAKANISHI, BAKANISHI, BAKANISHI!" and thus, despairingly, he came to be.
--
"Kame?" Jin asked. "Do you think I'm dumb?"
Kame blinked, fumbling with the drawstrings of his pajama pants thoughtfully. "Nn. No."
"No?" There was a spike in Jin's pitch, eyebrows arched. He sat up on one arm supporting his head and looked down at Kame. "Seriously?"
"Of course not." Kame folded his thin arms underneath his head and listened to the rain pittering on the roof of the tent before slipping sweetly down the thin fabric walls. "There are people who think with their minds, Jin. And people who think with their hearts."
"And I'm the kind that just thinks with their heart?"
"No. You're the kind that speaks from your heart." Kame whispered raspily, closing his eyes. "That's why people like you. You say the simplest things, the most obvious little idiocies; but they touch you, deep inside somewhere, like someone found a piece of you you'd failed to notice before."
"Like what?" asked Jin, incredulously.
"Like…like those moments when someone describes someone breathing next to you in bed, or what a starfish feels like in your hand, or how you lose your balance just by looking straight up a gigantic tree, and you think, Wow, I never knew someone else knew about that, even though you did. Like those thoughts and words were with you the whole time, but someone just came over, plucked it out of your heart and held it in front of you like you'd never seen it outside of yourself before."
Kame swallowed softly, his Adam's apple sliding slowly in his throat through the dim shadows. "People who make dumb mistakes aren't dumb people, Jin. Don't let people tell you you're stupid if they're being serious." He paused. "I think, sometimes, you're brilliant."
Jin watched Kame breathing tenderly, the warmth that radiated off his body smelling like a comfortable blanket, and he thought to himself: friendship is a lovely thing. Kamenashi Kazuya is a lovely thing.
Years later, he'd re-iterate it again, this time clearer: No, just listen, listen. Please. Because I'm tired and you're the only one who ever really listens to me.
And what do you mean by tha --
You're the only one who doesn't think I'm dumb, Kame. You're the only one who ever stopped to ask me what I was thinking, and honestly, really wanted to know.
Jin lay back down and pulled his blanket up under his nose. "Kame?"
"Nn?"
"How do you know when you love someone?"
Kame opened his eyes again tiredly. "Like…a girl? You know those things, don't you?"
Kame chuckled dryly. His voice was hoarse from lack of sleep, but it was soft and raspy, and beautiful, Jin thought unashamedly. "No, not really."
"You know what I think?"
"What do you think, Jin."
"I think," Jin said, choosing his words with careful patience, "People can fall in love with other people and not have it mean anything romantic. But it's so overpowering that they may think it means something that it doesn't, that they get feelings from it that aren't there --"
"Jin," Kame snorted, "Are you…talking about…"
"What? I -- no." Jin paused. "No! I wasn't talking about being like tha -- I was just saying, about friends, I mean -- well, not friends, but…yes, friends, but not me personally, just, you know, I was. I was just thinking. You know, people always think they have certain feelings for friends, right? I think it's just. Mistaking friendship liking for romantic liking. It's still love but its different. But people just don't know any better. Does that make sense?"
Kame nodded quietly.
"Do you agree?" Jin probed further.
"Nn. Mostly."
He stiffened. "Mostly?"
"Well, I don't think love is about not knowing." Kame yawned. "You know exactly when you're attached to somebody's soul like that, so deeply and inherently. But you're scared of it, aren't you? You're scared that you've lost so much self-control you can't even help but get lost in another human being. And it frightens you, terribly. That there's some part of you inside tied to somebody else so fiercely you couldn't cut it off even if you wanted to. You blame it on other things to try and make yourself forget that you're no longer an independent little factory running by itself -- that you belong to something, now. That something belongs to you."
Jin bit his lip. "So you think -- friends, they could…feel things?"
"Of course."
"And act on them?"
"If they think it's true."
"Does it… make them…make them gay?" Jin stuttered, with such a hideously frightened expression on his face that Kame might have laughed, had he not felt that there was an inkling of very real and very human terror in Jin's pounding heart right now and a bit of himself dangerously riding the waves of his own indirect questions.
"It doesn't make you anything. It's just…you. How you feel. There's no anything. It's just people and other people, Jin, and people trying to adjust to the idea that they don't operate by themselves anymore." Kame finished, rubbing the fuzzy corner of his blanket between thumb and forefinger.
Several crickets chirped seemingly in agreement outside. The air was warm, the breeze was soft, the milky white light of the moon pouring like a thick iridescent paint over their small little tent.
"Kame?" Jin asked.
"Yes, Jin?"
"I'm glad we had this talk."
Kame fell silent. "Me too. Me, too."
"And Kame?"
"Yes, Jin?"
Jin clenched his teeth together and pushed out his lips - that thing he did when trying to hold back some aggressive bit of his psyche struggling out of his mouth and into the air, that awkward, desperate sort of move when it was all threatening to explode out of him in stringy sets of babbling thoughts. "I…well. If I die tomorrow, you know. I'm glad we're friends and you're here with me. I'm a lot lonelier when I'm missing you."
Kame smiled softly and turned over to face the wall of the tent. "I'm glad to be sure of you."
"What?" Jin said quickly, but Kame seemed to have already slipped into sleep as quietly as he had arisen from it earlier. Trembling, Jin patted the ball of Kame's tiny shoulder with an awkward sense of something more he wanted to say but couldn't, even if Kame had been awake after all.
Moon overhead, forest around them, and the stirs of tiny life outside marveling at the magic of two souls wrapping around each other for the first time: Jin, too, drifted away.
--
Two years later, Kame fumbled for a cigarette with his frostbitten hands, shuddering in the icy wind that crystallized every particle in his skin with painful, crackling snaps. Jin took a desperate drag off his own smoke and leaned only the tiniest bit closer to Kame, shielding off one knife of ferocious wind on the cement stairs outside of their studio.
"Jin," Kame shivered, "The weather's not going to get better. We should do something this winter. Go somewhere nice, somewhere warm."
"KAT-TUN." Jin said quietly, sniffling.
"Fuck KAT-TUN." Kame coughed, having said it for the first time, and stared out at the vast expanse of dry, white frost biting into the landscape of what was his entire world. "I don't think I can survive another winter here."
Jin yawned, scratched his burning red ear and scuffed one of his boots on a piece of gum stuck underneath the overhang of the metal rail. He said nothing in response. It was not the winter that made Kame cold, it was the human condition of loneliness -- and Jin had learned that he, like the soft white snow that smothered the very beauty it depended upon, didn't have to give a damn.
--
Yamapi stood, arms barring his apartment doorway, stricken.
"Let me go, Yamashita. Let me go or tell me what you want."
Pi made a laughing sort of noise similar to a quiet, under-the-breath cluck, slammed the front door shut and shoved his way into the kitchen, pacing. "You know what I want? Here's what I want: I want to wake up one morning under the following conditions. One, I had a full night's sleep that was not interrupted by Kame coming into my room uninvited and crying about how Jin doesn't love him. And Two, that the first thing I do that morning is anything but receive a text message from Jin whining about how Kame doesn't love him. Three--"
Kame grabbed the edge of the wall and swung himself into the kitchen, stumbling. "Wait, wait, wait, what? What about the morning part? What about Jin --"
Yamapi laughed. Right there, out loud, head tipped back kind of laughing, eerie and surreal. "Really? You didn't know? See, now, that's just me. I thought it was obvious for only the last, what, 5? 6 years? But you know, I understand. Maybe I wouldn't know it either if I wasn't the one constantly taking the calls." He snorted again. "You really didn't know? Maybe I should tell you. Maybe I should tell you so you'd understand."
"Understand what--"
"Tell you how Jin really feels, Kame." Pi began, pacing the kitchen again, side to side, alternating between swinging his arms and crossing them behind his neck. "I bet you'd be surprised, wouldn't you? I bet you'd wonder why I told you. How I could love you so much, all the damn time, let you cry in my arms and buy you food and smother you in compliments and then call Jin and say, 'Come get your boyfriend.' I bet you'd wonder why I gave you away night after night after night, right back to someone who'd tear out all the stitches I tied you back together with. Don't you know how much it hurts to say goodbye, Kame? Don't you know how much it hurts to hand over the living breathing colony of cells you love more anything in the entire world every single day of your life?"
Kame had shrunk back into the shadow of the hallway, trembling, but Pi advanced.
"You don't really love me, Pi, and Jin doesn't love me, he doesn't lo--"
"The reason I did it was because of you, Kame. I believed in you. I believed in you, and I believed that there was only one person in this world you could ever love --" He stopped himself, eyes swollen tenderly, fingers trembling over the neck of a cobalt blue glass vase he won from a fair years ago, back when things were normal, back when things were okay. He remembered bringing it back home and showing it to Kame a few weekends later -- that glisten in Kame's eyes, the way he smiled and picked it up in his powdery white hands, the way he talked about how valuable it was because they were using cobalt in the nosecones of rockets now and someday it was going to be worth a lot of money, even if it was just a fair trinket; but Yamapi loved to hear Kame talk about valuable things, beautiful things, things he wanted, even if it wasn't Yamapi himself.
"--that you loved Jin so terribly but could never have him, because he never felt the same, and how similar we were, Kame -- how much I loved you, how much I wanted you to be crying about me, just once, just once I could hurt you just as badly as he could, but I couldn't - I trusted you when you told me how much he meant to you, how badly your heart hurt, and I was noble, Kame, and I left you alone, but I fucking can't do this anymore --"
All at once the end of his sentence burnt off like a black string of dynamite, and he threw the vase at the wall, and it shattered into icy smithereens. Yamapi sank down, back against the kitchen cabinets and buried his head in his arms, muffling his own dry sobs.
"Jin loves you." Yamapi wailed deeply into the crook of his elbow as Kame sat up slowly against the tinkling of glass. "Jin loves you, and he tells me every day, and he tells me how scared he is and he doesn't know if he should or if it's real or why he can care so much about you but you still fight all the time, and how much it hurts him to hurt you, and how he wishes things were different just this one fight and you wouldn't run away and leave him by himself in the dark anymore, and he loves you, Kame, and he loves you so damn much that it's heartbreaking, and you two goddamn idiots don't even know because you're too busy crying to me to see what the real problem is…"
"W--what problem?"
He shuddered, still. "The problem! Oh, the problem. The problem that the only problem you two have is wondering why you can hate each other so much but you still run back to one another's company the very next day without a second thought. That problem -- you must have heard it, Kame, coming from that little voice inside of you. I've whispered it into your ears enough over the years. I hoped you'd never hear. Like it was my little secret, my little desperate, painful secret, the instant cure for Jin and Kame. And I knew it all along."
Kame ignored the glass fragments burning icily along the white skin of his right arm and scooted onto the kitchen floor. "Yamashita….I…are you --"
"Stay away." Yamapi swung his arm across the floor in a soft round arc, sweeping away the glass with his sweatshirt sleeve. "I don't feel like fighting it tonight. Do you need me to say it?"
Kame shook his head.
"I would." Pi said flatly, with a deep sort of sadness. "I would if you wanted me to. But you still don't understand what's really going on." He closed his eyes, leaning against the cabinet door. "Don't you see, Kame? There's no future for us. Me and You, it's impossible."
"And why not?" Kame didn't know why he of all people should be asking -- wasn't he the naïve one, pretending not to notice the way Yamapi looked at him in the dark, the way his hand gravitated toward the small of his back, the way he always had to reach out and touch him as if to make certain he was still there? You're stupid, Kame thought, to convince yourself that Yamapi is more than a gentle friend. But he wasn't.
Their personalities meshed, in some strange way -- where Kame and Jin were complete opposites, Pi and Kame were quite close, though Pi was just as much a buffoon as Jin. He was more sensitive, though, less like a boyish goofy sort of man who had to be saying something every single second and getting a boisterous reaction of some kind in response. Pi was quiet, impassive, content to just sit in silence communicating with the thrums of his pulse beating off his wrist and onto Kame's leg as they read a magazine together. Kame liked not having to feel like he was always combating some dramatic reputation he'd built with Jin, always trying not to look weak or as a fragile as he really was. It wasn't that he could be weak or fragile around Pi, either -- but that, Jin aside, when he was with Pi, Kame simply wasn't. He was just Kame, just Kame sipping some tea scanning articles not about the entertainment industry next to Yamapi in the warm glow of the sunshine, languidly.
And Pi had thought about it, too. He'd thought about it every time Kame curled into his body on the couch and quivered, trembling, trying not to cry until he exhausted himself to sleep, every time he sent a text message with a couple tiny blinking hearts playfully dancing between meaning something and absolutely nothing. At which side did the dance end? Why couldn't it work? Why couldn't Jin go off and live his own life, why couldn't Pi step forward and be with Kame after all?
"You're refusing to look at it with realistic sensibility, Kame." He finally settled on, drearily. "Look around. The one person in this world you could be guaranteed would love you back, Kame, who would you want it to be? Snap of the fingers and it's Jin. You don't even have to think about it, you know why?"
Pi pointed at Kame's quivering chest. "Because he's buried in your heart, burning there, right at the beginning and end of every word you speak and every thought that flitters through your mind. He's always first for you, Kame. First for everything, because he's a part of you, as much as you're a part of yourself."
"Then," Kame sneered, frustrated with how uncomfortable finding some happy medium between logic and emotions was going, with how difficult it was uncovering the easy answer he felt for sure must be laying around somewhere in the open light, "why does he turn me away? Tell me, Yamashita, why he feels the need to --"
"He's not perfect, Kame." Yamapi said quietly, swallowing the death of him squeezed up in the pocket of his throat. "But you know, faults and all -- he's perfect for you."
Kame re-adjusted his himself onto the floor and twisted the ring on his pinky around again and again. Somewhere, deep in the apartment complex a hallway or so away, a washing machine whirred calmly.
"Don't pretend you don't know it." Yamapi murmured. "Don't pretend to ignore your own feelings. We're comfortable together, Kame, but you don't stay awake at night wanting me to hold you, do you? You don't sit in the empty train car and cry because I came to work and refused to get close enough to barely touch you, do you? You don't look at your body in the mirror and think, It's all for Yamapi, it's all for Yamapi, do you? That's why, Kame. That's why we couldn't work. We lay around and go places as familiar friends, but Jin is the first love that pushed you against the fence in elementary school and kissed you with his lips shut tight, gave you an extra candy more than everyone else on your Valentines Day card.
"Sometimes," he continued, a bit timidly, "I think that you need him to hurt you. That you can't be in a meaningful relationship if someone isn't making you bear some kind of weight. But that's when I realized -- you don't need to hurt to love somebody. But you need Jin to love somebody. Even if he hurts you, even if he wrings you in his hands and squeezes out all of that Kazuya Kamenashi into the ground in little driblets….it has to be Jin. You know somewhere that no matter how badly he hurts you he'll never let you go because he loves you, frightfully, dangerously. It has to be Jin."
There was nothing more to be said. The autonomic ticking of the clock clicked in the next room and time went on, a boundary built, some kind of wall that sprouted from the earth between them in that moment and no longer could Kame see Yamapi but for the faint outline of his eyes just over the stone edge where he could still push his words forth.
"We can never go back after this, can we?" Kame finally implored, stiffly. "It'll never be the same again, us two?"
Yamapi paused. "It's been done." He said quietly, and with that snipped the first binding tie.
--
"Akanishi Jin, what do you nee--"
"Come get him."
"..Pi? Is that you? What's going o--"
"Come get him, Jin. Call me back when you're at the airport."
Click.
--
It was their first fight in five months, if only because of distance, and it happened in a dreary New York hotel room at 11PM, fourth floor, dark for all but the first few feet from the window spilling the light from electric billboard signs onto the carpet.
"I don't know what your problem is." He began.
"Me neither, Kame. Why don't you tell me. Tell me what I did wrong this time." Jin said flatly, and laid down on his bed stretched out like a corpse, staring at the ceiling.
"Everything." Kame sniffed. "Everything, Jin, everything."
"Go on."
"You stupid fuck--" he cried out, throwing his pillow across the room. "You had to fucking leave, you had to leave when things were most important, you had to go and be a dumb piece of shit and stick your dick in places it didn't have to be, you had to--"
"Go on." Jin whispered softly again.
"Go on? Go on with what? How you've ruined KAT-TUN, all of our lives you selfish fucking pig--"
"Cut out the formalities, Kame. KAT-TUN is fine. We're all fine."
"We're not fine, we're going down, we're going to get suspended just like News, we're not fine--"
"You're not fine." Jin corrected. "You're not fine, and I'm not fine."
"Jin's always fine." Kame spat, whirling around to face the window and wipe his cheek hurriedly in the blue light. "Don't fuck with yourself. Jin's fine."
"Jin's not fine." Jin corrected.
"Always. Always fine Jin going off to study abroad after--"
"Don't say i--"
"I'll say whatever I want to, you selfish fucking prick. You buy me a bagel and you think everything's going to be fine? You push me into the subway bathroom and think that by sticking your tongue in my mouth I'll forgive you? Just like old times?"
Jin curled over on his side to face the other wall papered with yellowed violets, silent and impassive.
"It doesn't work that way anymore, Jin. What the hell were you thinking?"
"I was thinking that maybe--"
"That maybe what? That maybe I was some 12 year old girl with rabbit teeth who'd suck your dick if you shoved her down there hard enough--"
"Yeah, because Kame's so available for a good fuck at a moment's notice, he'd know--"
"I'd know alright, you asshole, 'at a moment's notice' was the only time you'd touch me anyways."
"Fuck you."
"Fuck you, too." Kame grabbed his other pillow and hugged it around himself, buried his face open-mouthed into its soft body and stared at the floor. "You can't dance, either. Fuck you."
"Fuck your stupid shit, Kame. Fuck it to hell. Go ahead and try to yell at me about my fucking dancing because you're not brave enough to say what's really wrong--"
Kame leapt up, marched over with all the swiftness of a midnight caper and grabbed for Jin, who began kicking wildly and flailing in all directions. "Oi oi oi --"
"You--" Kame yelled and Jin pulled him by the arm roughly onto the bed, beating him with the pillow originally thrown at him minutes before.
"Stop! --"
"You stop--"
"Let go of me--" Kame regained himself, climbed on top of Jin and began pummeling his chest furiously. For a few seconds Jin laughed, hair mussed in the glow of the bedside table lamp, and then he noticed Kame's eyelids flushed pink in the light, hiccupping and biting his bottom lip, whispering Fuck you, Fuck you, Fuck you Fuck you Fuck you Fuck you Fu--
"Kame?"
He grabbed Jin's shirt in two fistfuls and held him there beneath him, choking in child-like bursts, Jin silent and face plastered in open-mouthed concern.
"Kame?"
"Shut up." Kame stammered, and twisted the cotton material in between his clenched fingers, eyes squeezed shut tightly.
"You know I didn't mean it, right?" Jin backtracked worriedly, sitting up on his elbows. "Just another stupid argument, Kame, you know I was just kidding--"
"But you weren't," Kame mumbled, and let go softly, lip quivering, eyes glazed. "But you weren't."
--
Jin rubbed the leather seat underneath him with his fingernail. "I hope you have a good excuse, Pi. I don't have the money to be flying over to Japan every single day --"
"Look, if you want to play these games and be coy about it, go ahead."
"If it's about Kame, we've been through it before, Pi. It wasn't my idea to fly back and rescue Kamenashi Kazuya from the throes of grief and angst again, so if you're going to try and pin that on me --"
"As much as you hate it," Pi said indignantly, "You would have come back anyways."
"I'm in a taxicab, Pi, I--"
"Answer the question."
"What question?"
"Do you love Kame." Pi said pointedly, and Jin didn't pounce on the glaring inaccuracy, perhaps because he, too, knew where the conversation had been headed anyways.
"Way to put it bluntly--"
"Do you love Kame?"
"As a friend." Jin stammered quickly. "As a friend, in a blanket sort of term, yeah, I guess--"
"And nothing more?"
Silence.
"I like girls, you know--"
"I didn't ask if you liked girls, Jin, I asked if you loved Kame. Loved him in that way."
"I don't know, Pi." Jin patted his jacket absent-mindedly for a packet of cigarettes he wouldn't be allowed to smoke anyways. "I--" one pat on the left, "Honestly--" a second on the right, "Don't--" one at the bottom, "Know--" and he groaned.
It's just people and other people, Jin, and people trying to adjust to the idea that they don't operate by themselves anymore.
"Be honest."
Jin grumbled, rubbing his temples, staring at some point on the advertisement stapled to the back of the driver's seat. "It's not about being honest, Pi. It's about knowing what the hell it's all about in the first place."
Pi curled up in his chair, pulled apart the curtains and gazed out at the dark cityscape quietly. Sorry, Yamapi. I know we said we'd never do it like this. I'm looking out for you, you know. But it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do.
"You might be happy with someone else. 2.5 kids and a Minivan and an extra 10 pounds on your stomach -- but there's a problem with that called Kamenashi Kazuya, and the fact that Jin -- deny it as he will -- can't fucking stand to see Kame hurt unless he's the one who did it. The thought of him an ocean away from you, inaccessible, dazed -- it'd kill you. It wouldn't matter how pretty she was or how much you thought you loved her, Jin, because Kame would tear you into the tiniest pieces without even brushing his fingers across your cheek. You'd watch him on TV and people would say, 'He looks so happy gaining weight and working hard on that new Drama', but you'd know better. You'd know it was a smokescreen and that bastard only tried to look perfect when he was breaking.
"That's what would get you years from now, in the dark of the night, Jin -- that you destroyed someone, and that you couldn't fix it this time."
Jin drowned in a complacent silence, letting Pi's words dance in the reflection of the taxicab window. "There's nothing I have to say," he responded dully, scratching his pant leg. "There's nothing I have to say except that I think Kame loves me more than I ever could love him, even if I tried."
"And why?" Yamapi demanded, pausing before an obnoxious guffaw. "Wait, right. I should've known--"
"It's not that--"
"How old was she this time, Bakanishi? 12? 11? Am I getting warmer or colder?"
"Don't you fucking start this, Pi, don't you fucking start this right now --"
"Au contraire, Jinny, I think now is the perfect time. Tell me, do the nurses at the Abortion clinic know you on a first-name basis? Are you booked in advance? Are they all carrying the firstborn of the Akanishi family, too?"
"You know what, Pi? Fuck you and--"
"And you're a coward running away from all of his problems, just like always, Jin. Just like always. Did you even consider how much that could've hurt? Not even the first one to know, the first person you should have turned to... You should've seen him, Jin. You should've seen him when he read the headline, shaking, pale--"
"That's the point!" Jin finally screamed, and the taxi swerved; veered every which way for several seconds before angry yelling in English and the sound of Jin seemingly hyperventilating, choking out the most incomprehensible words that came out in buttered gasps. "That's the fucking p-point, Yamapi, that's the point, we're not good enough for each other."
"And what's 'good enough'?"
"Good enough is…it's Kame not running back to me just because he feels like he should. It's about me not apologizing to him just because I feel like I'd miss him if he was gone. He's not even there, Pi. Kame's been gone for a long time but I'm still hung up like he's going to just fucking wake up one day and be Kazuya again--"
"He still is, Jin. He's still there. I've seen it. That familiar spark, it's there. But you've forgotten how to get to him. He hasn't changed much, he just behaves a bit differently, a bit older, that's all. You need to learn him again. Don't think you haven't holed yourself up, too."
"Me?"
"You know," He continued ignorantly, "People don't really change as they get older. I mean, you're more Jin than you were when you were a kid. Kame's more Kame than he used to be. Just because everything's different doesn't mean anything's changed. Neither of you knows who you really are anymore yet you still expect him to know you. You expect yourself to know him. That's why it doesn't work, Jin. You cuddle Kazuya but you pick fights with Kamenashi. You've made him two different people."
Jin rubbed his finger on the window in little circles, round and round and round, light puncturing through his fingertips in a warm, orange glow trailing behind the tail of a newspaper-grey airplane lifting into the bright heavens, stomach full of little people going places he might've liked to a while before.
"It's not about just being friends again." He finally said, twisting his ankle underneath the driver's car seat, caught in the hook of the seatbelt. "I don't know how to be 'just friends' with him, Pi."
Yamapi licked his lip and leaned back in the chair, phone tucked in the crook of his shoulder, fingers intertwined on his chest and tapping in the gleam of his yellowish reflection in the window overlooking the night sky -- city lights glowing dimly, dotting the polygons of city buildings like dalmation spots.
"Then be more."
--
It was in breaking Jin down to the core of his dumb, guarded heart to pull out the stringy, throbbing arteries pumping blood full of I love you, Kame that Yamapi realized he'd had it wrong all along. It was never he, Orpheus, playing the lyre while his Eurydice Kame danced around him in fields of flowers. It was Jin who had Kame from the beginning -- and it was Yamapi, Apollo, chasing after Kame so dangerously close that he slipped, was bitten by misunderstanding, and fell away into the dark. It was not Yamapi who was to rescue Kame. It was not Yamapi, looking over his shoulder with debilitating fright, that could lead Kame back to the sun.
It was Jin.
Jin, who knew Kame loved him so much that he could turn away and walk in the opposite direction countless lifetimes full of a million miles and still know Kame was right there behind him, drawn by his very presence, the disturbance his body made in the air when he brushed against the world.
It was then, in that moment, that Yamapi learned how badly it hurt to lose something you'd never really had. That he'd have to say goodbye not because he was noble, not because he wanted the best for Jin, but because he now knew that somewhere in the cosmos, it wasn't to be. He now knew by the way Kame sought an empty bedroom rather than his (albeit slightly slacked) arms-- this, Yamapi owned: he had met destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
--
Kame lay in the comforter, silent, impassive, eyes wide open, perhaps breathing a bit heavier because of the heat and lack of oxygen in the pocket underneath the blankets, but nothing more.
No Jin, and now Yamapi outside; there was something very lonely about being in bed by yourself, Kame thought. There was something very lonely about hearing voices and recognizing them but not enough to know what was being said. Where had things gone wrong? When did he lose his grasp on reality? When did he let himself go so far that the lack of that touch, that caress, that warm body resulted in the incapacity to feel, to live?
You blame it on other things to try and make yourself forget that you're no longer an independent little factory running by itself -- that you belong to something, now. That something belongs to you.
Maybe it was over. Maybe Jin had finally had enough. Maybe he was chasing some impossible dream, some old bond that just wasn't strong enough to pull two strangers back together again. Maybe Jin was always just going to be an old friend he'd lose contact with along the way, gradually, and maybe as little as a year or two later, completely and irreversibly. Yamapi could not will himself to have Kame, and Jin had all but abandoned him -- who, then, was he existing for? Who was Kame but that boy next to Jin, the legs resting on his lap, the arms wrapped around his neck, the knowing look onstage during a National TV conference saying I know what it feels like to have everyone judging you, but just know that you're not alone, okay?
He put his palms in front of his face and breathed in the smell of the blankets, hot and fuzzy, suffocating. He couldn't leave but he couldn't stay here, couldn't stay here and or leave the bed much less walk out the room, couldn't see the world and no longer had anybody whom he could confide in honestly. Maybe he was overreacting. You are overreacting, you idiot, he breathed. You're not going to die. Jin doesn't want you, Yamapi despises you in some weird, obsessive, sad sort of way, but that's okay. You're not dead. You won't die. You're fine. You're fine. You're fine.
But he wasn't, and every time he whispered You're fine he had to fight back his own weak little guffaw. He wasn't fine. He was far from fine. He had been finer back in New York eating dinner across from Jin in an angry silence, or at least as much anger as he could muster -- in truth, every cold glare he shot was just a fog machine to hide how closely he was listening to Jin sipping his glass of wine, the sound of his chewing, the way his cheeks puffed out with twin bulging pockets of crab salad, the napkin laid across his warm lap, his wrists resting against the table edge with utensils in hand at the ready, how sweetly he smiled when his face was downcast and his eyelashes fluttering, bangs tussled --
God, Kame shook, gut wrenching. This was dangerous. This was obsessive, this was heartbreaking, this was as real as he could ever be beneath the stage lights and behind the microphones and in front of the hair stylists and before millions of people with paying tickets. This was who Kame was -- simply the extension piece that kicked Jin playfully on the bottom when he messed up his dance choreography mid-performance, who sobbed not because of his mid-concert back injury but because of the friend with a hand rested behind him and guiding Kamenashi 'Emotional Leaning Tower of Pisa' Kazuya along wordlessly, who only felt like some semblance of a human being when another one was wrapped around him like the vibrant spinning body around the static core of an atom.
What kind of Kamenashi Kazuya am I if I'm not--
And then, suddenly, there was the sensation of light and a cold burst of air, of being lifted away, of wrapping his legs around a pair of perfect hips and his skinny arms on its broad shoulders -- and when he buried his head in Jin's hair he pressed his face deeply into his hot neck and hiccupped in the smell of his warm, familiar fragrant skin, and jetlagged Jin just held Kame's tiny body and carried him away out of Yamapi's bedroom like an aching child instead of a lonely human being -- out the door, the hall, across the street several blocks away, through different worlds that Kame had never been through: worlds where he'd no doubt been hurt and hurt again, but for the first time, finally -- retrieved.
--
Originally, six months in America learning English was to be the much-needed 'break' for Akanishi Jin. It had now been extended indefinitely and changed location to the Eastern coast of Kenya, a place Jimmy had recommended -- "The kind of beach you roll yourself six feet under into and lap up the sand in mouthfuls, it's so sweet from the tropical breeze". It helped that Yamapi was seriously considering it as a possible location for Toma's "going away party", whatever "going away party" meant (pseudo-engagement, sex; the kind of thing more prevalent in Jin's friendship circles these days, by and large).
Several feet away, overlooking the languid blue sea stood the most vibrant sort of human being -- warmly tanned, secured around every limb by a thin pudgy layer of soft fat, the dyes that had been bleached in his shoulder-length hair washed out by saltwater and restored to a soft jet black that blew in silky tendrils with the wind. He turned around and giggled -- laughed open-mouthed, for the first time in years, toothy grin shining brightly (they'd given up smoking menthol cigarettes several months before) and never, Jin noticed, had Kazuya looked so beautiful, so radiantly gorgeous in the sunshine, so uninhibitedly and absolutely overjoyed.
He still is that Kazuya, Jin. He's still there.
Jin took Kame by the hand, intertwined their fingers, swung arms in unison down a quiet little beach millions of miles away from the nearest familiar star. "All you'd need is a chubby baby in a knapsack and we're all set for some Picture-Perfect Family album," Kame laughed, and Jin thought: That wouldn't be so bad, Kazuya.
I'm glad to be sure of you.
"The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough."
- George Moore
--
Dedicated to someone very special to me.
This took a long time to write because 1) i am a very slow writing perfectionist, and 2) halfway through the writing of this piece i sort of clumsily fell in love myself. but it's here, and I hope Bumblebees fans aren't too disappointed.
comment if you like. tell me. what did you like? what was nice? what made your heart hurt, your spine tingle? ask me questions. i had a reason for every word i ripped out of my soul and put to paper. you can always email me at astromechafic@gmail.com too, if you'd like. i'll respond to every one i get. thank you, as always.
akame.
13,538 words.
31 pages.
chapter 1: here.
soundtrack: "one more night" by the stars (click to listen)
There was a time when Jin had loved Kame, precious little faults and all, and when Kame relished the fact that Jin simply loved him, precious little faults and all despite.
There was a time when Jin drove them all the way out into a deserted stretch of road, bordered by fields speckled with fat sheep just as the rain had begun to rattle from the sky like grains of rice bouncing around in a metal canteen. He sat Kame in the back of their stolen jeep, halfway sprawled across the entire seat and propped up by an elbow on the door handle, popped in a classical music cassette tape and made out to the sing-song of violins, windshield wipers, and the warm rain that dribbled down from each of the plexiglass windows.
It was Jin holding Kame's face in his soft hands and Kame pawing desperately at their clothing, fumbling awkwardly and ignoring the trails of saliva Jin was drawing out from his mouth with his clumsy, teenage kissing techniques; eventually lamenting Jin's stupid undoable buttons, allowing him to suck on Kame's soft collarbone instead.
That night, drug back to the Agency office and panic-stricken, hands clenched around the bottom of his seat and feet tapping nervously on the carpeted floor, Jin had whispered, "Five years from now, Kame, let's do it again, for real this time," and Kame stared down at the floor: indifferent, hair striped with blond and plugs of dirt from the ditch Jin pushed him into in the heat of nibbling the shell of Kame's ear, smears of dandelion pollen at the pink, diamond-shaped corner of his soft, trembling lips.
He was nodding, yes, and quivering in suspended animation -- but he was nodding, and that was good enough for irresponsible Akanishi Jin, who never considered that a nod could mean anything more than "yes, very much so". No one had told him that a nod could mean Please don't stop talking, please don't, I need to hear your voice to know it's all okay. No one told him that he meant more to Kame than a fool-around.
The lashings that night, the red rashes that broke out wherever he had been slapped on either side of his face, on the undersides of his arms: to Jin, they burned until he rubbed them thick with hot creams and took a nap on the dressing room sofa. To Kame, they burned late into the night, late into the next morning, late into the next week, to the cavern of his heart where he knew it could never work.
Watching Jin sleeping, lathered in bengay like sunscreen, Kame knew. There was no five years from now. There was today, that afternoon, maybe next weekend if Jin was really serious about getting together with somebody; but five years in the life of a growing boy?
It wasn't altogether on purpose, but 'Kazuya Kamenashi' had become the sloppily spoken words that burbled out of Jin's fat lips as easily as a slurred yakuza accent, the colloquial 'Ohisa' instead of 'Ohisashiburi'. "Five years from now, Kame, let's do it again." Well, okay, Kame thought. If you're still talking about it five years from now, Jin, I'll do it.
And of course, in five years, the sands of time had scattered and all that was left was an insurmountable pile of misunderstandings and misgivings, missed everythings, in fact; and Jin no sooner brought it up a single other time than Kame ever asked. The uncertainty and the fear of hurt in Kame's character could not be boiled away, and because he didn't want to look needy, to look dependant on Jin -- he'd forgotten how pleasurable it was, on that deep human level, to be needed, and that he wasn't the only person in the world with a large capacity for loneliness.
--
Dying sun in the distance, the long stretch of road ahead, fields full of lazy sheep that dotted either side -- Jin remembered these roads. He wrung his hands on the leather of his Benz steering wheel, thoughtfully, gut twisting with every cinch he pulled tightly into its shape. He ached -- deeply, deeply, deeply ached; and the way the sheep turned its head in the dusty drizzle and stared at him flatly made it all the more worse.
"Fuck you," he said to no one in particular and clutched himself around the waist, rubbing his stomach, staring blankly at his car window blurred with the locomotion of freshwater. He remembered.
It was Kame, hands fumbling all over Jin's body with a youthful sort of awkwardness; it was that Kame. It was Kame, who picked chunks of grass clods on the side of the road and threw them at the statuesque flock of ewes giggling. Who made Jin buy an ice cream he knew he wouldn't touch, and the Jin that ate it and became sick in rainbows of colors, dizzy and terrified in the middle of nowhere regretting that he'd run away with Kame in the first place, what a stupid, stupid idea -- the Kame that laid Jin across his lap in the back seat, pulled up his t-shirt and rubbed his soft stomach in smooth, warm strokes that burned him to the pit of his core? It was that Kame.
Jin held himself; one hand on his belly, one on the steering wheel. His breathing was labored, uncomfortable: in, out, in, in, in, short out, in, desperate out, in, in, deep out, in, stop. Regain control. In, out, in, in, short out. The rain would not let up.
It would never be the same again -- that moment he grabbed Kame and ran away from the recording with all that boyish immortality complex, all that reckless abandon surging through his veins, and poor Kame; poor, dutiful, hard-working Kame who came along not because it was particularly a good idea, or because he didn't know how fiercely the slaps on his sweet face would burn at rehearsals the day after, but because he loved Jin and he wanted it to work --
It was that Kame.
It was that Kame that broke his heart.
The Kame now -- the Jin now -- they were different. Not just older, not just wealthier, but inherently different inside and out; it was that Kame and that Jin that drove him insane. He checked his cell phone -- 8:15, three missed calls, two new text messages -- and buried his head hopelessly in his arms.
Jin pulled the clutch. There was no use. There would be no that "Kame" no more then there would be that "Jin" parked on the side of a deserted road next to a stern looking sheep, waiting for him.
It hurt that Kame had changed: had turned from a fun-loving wild child into a dutiful, boring, soulless human being, but it did not hurt as much as knowing that he, Jin, had changed just as much; if not more.
It was no longer one human being adrift in an unknown sea but two; two who may as well have been men meeting each other for the first time from separate corners of the world and discussing old friends without realizing each was the other. He couldn't rope Kame back if he couldn't tell where the old Kame was, where his line had been cut off, or how long ago -- and though Yamapi always fed him advice like spoonfuls of Barnes & Noble hippie-witchcraft mumbo-jumbo, told him mythological stories and said things would turn out the way they were meant to, he felt it did not readily apply to those places in life red-flagged by failure and hurt and mistakes.
Those were not, he thought, meant to be.
Kame and Jin, losing each other -- that, he thought, was not meant to be.
Time, though it changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. Drowning in those honey brown eyes was the Kazuya that Jin had loved: his best friend, his confidante. And so long as he could still grab Kame's gaze and hold it there, see in his mind's eye the boy he used to walk around holding hands with in rapturous glee, he couldn't help but wonder.
Jin had let Kame go -- and now he was free-floating by himself in the middle of the ocean; together watching the same stars, the same sun, and still millions of miles and perfectly orchestrated chains of chemical reactions away, precise explosions even when Kame was as close as the soft brush of his blonde arm hair against Jin's naked shoulder. The distance between them: from face to face, lip to lip, and one corner of the solar system to the loneliest part of the other, could not be forged.
--
Last row in First Class, nestled by the window, shielded behind the black leather seats in front of him -- just as Kamenashi Kazuya liked it. He opened the tiny bag of peanuts fairy dusted with salt and chewed on a handful thoughtfully, peeling the brown papery bits of skin off with his front teeth.
There were things in life he didn't understand.
There were people in life he didn't understand, and an even greater number who did not understand him to the extent he felt appropriate to claim such (though, admittedly, it never stopped sharp-finger nailed, salon-going public journalists from typing up his life stories with one hand while sucking seafood-flavored cracker dip off the fingers of their other).
He felt quite suddenly as if he had been his whole life a naked hermit crab whose only ambition in life was to find a comfortable place to live, wherever it may be. He felt that for a few hours that day he had found, for the first time in his life, that perfect porcelain shell and buried his bottom in the depths of its hollow caverns that hugged his soft body in a warm embrace. But the moment he tried to stand on his wobbly legs now heavy with the weight of home: something clapped, and twisting cracks like tributaries wound their way up the smooth spires of his shell and it shattered, right down the middle, falling into pieces around him for everyone to see.
One thing about foreign plane trips he liked -- the anonymity. A few recluse Japanese salary man who could jerk themselves off in one hand and count their favorite Morning Musume members off in another but look him straight in the eye, unflinchingly. He wondered if they watched him as hawkeyed as he watched them: listening to their ipods, playing on their laptops, tending to their lives like a delicate symphony orchestra playing music for everyone but them to hear. They wasted their entire lives working hard so they could someday sit passively as an audience to the world rather than the player, the instrument, or the conductor that had made it.
That's why Kame had agreed to go into Johnny's. That's why he continued to show up at rehearsals and backstage meetings and extra help sessions for hours at a time, sweating and bleeding and crying because he just couldn't sing, he just couldn't dance, he just couldn't do anything except stand behind Jin and smile toothily. He wanted to be a somebody: a textbook, magazine, TV show, hundred-years-from-now-immortalized-in-history type of somebody.
Kamenashi Kazuya did not want to fade away. But it was just as well. Things, he realized with humility, had changed -- people had changed -- and paper airplanes in the warm glow of the evening sun at the park were gone. It was years later -- clutching the shower curtain closed with his fist and curled up against the porcelain wall sobbing quietly -- that Kame, too, knew what it really felt like to want to die.
--
4:12 AM.
He stumbled into the dark apartment, didn't bother to fumble for the light switch. A warm body was waiting for him on the floor next to the couch and patted the spot next to it, smiling dimly. It was a routine as old as their fragment in time itself, a stable comfort that Kame felt for once he could fall back on knowing it'd be there indiscriminately. He hadn't even called and said he'd be by. The door was already open.
He set his stuff down on the sofa, sat cross-legged next to the other, and sighed.
Yamapi scooted an inch closer to Kame, who smelled wispily like Nyquil and ginger. "How did it…how did it go?" He bit his lip and tucked his chin in to where he could see Kame's face underneath his long, straight bangs.
Kame paused, trying to find the words nibbling behind his lips. He scratched the carpet with his fingernail. "Not perfect."
Terrible, Pi translated, waited to make sure he had nothing else to say, and scuffled his bangs with a yawn. "You came back pretty quick. How long were you gone, anyways? Two, three --"
"Two days." Kame replied quietly. He stared ahead blankly. "Two days."
"Do you…want to…talk? About it, I mean?"
Talk, Kame did not want to do. Words were a silly thing: weightless in the mind but heavy in the heart, gentle when rolling around the spires of his brain stem but heat-seeking bludgeons when he spit them out of his mouth. Lovely, and only sometimes halfway discomforting, but even words with the same meaning could caress his fragmented soul or slap him in the face depending on how the speaker clicked their tongues and if their hand was cupped like a dome over Kame's or thrumming idly on a wooden post in a field somewhere waiting for the next person to dive headfirst into the conversation hole they'd dug, together. And now, most certainly, was not a time for him to wonder what they meant when Yamapi licked his lips and let the words dribble out with childish, hopeless wonder. They'd be blown softly into the air, light enough with good intention to soothe; but on the way to his ears they'd swell like oily balloons and he'd swallow them whole, let them fall into his heart and carry them around for days and weeks and months -- years.
Talking was something Kame did not want to do.
He lay his head on Yamapi's thick shoulder and exhaled deeply through his nose until his lung palpitated sharply, empty of air, soft. "I just don't know." He murmured, tongue clicking. "I just don't know."
Pi rested one hand on Kame's knee, and with the other he lightly stroked back his smooth caramel hair, thinking on the nature of his neediness. "Yeah. I've heard that one before." He touched his cheek just barely to the top of Kame's head and said it again, looking at the wall in front of them. "Heard that one before."
Kame was exhausted: felt heavy, felt weighed down by the gravity of the universe and the slump of his frail shoulders, the bubbling in the atmosphere and the way he melted heart-first into the pocket of space he inhabited. He thought for a little bit, quietly, but Yamapi kept stroking his hair and even though he still hurt just as much, Kame had somehow forgotten why. He tried to remember curiously, sorting through file cabinets of recent memories looking for one he could vaguely recognize, and then some wispy feeling sort of fell out of his hands and he just glanced at it quickly -- just long enough to see the acidity of it all -- and it backed him up against the corner and he decided it was better to hurt without remembering why, just for a little while. He'd rather not know.
Kame withdrew his breath softly, situating his head deeper into the crook of Yamapi's warm neck. Somewhere in the fuzzy haze behind his eyes a picture began to form, paper heart cut-outs and the faint feeling that somebody was yelling in his ear, dragging him away, whirl winding through time by his rapidly melting brain first, and the last thing he remembered before falling asleep was the soft blanket of time and space and the feeling that he was fading, fading all away.
--
Kame liked the way that Yamapi stroked him.
It was different from Jin, though he didn't want to admit why, the reasoning being a precursor toward some defining plateau of logic he didn't want to acknowledge yet. It was different because Yamapi had always loved Kame -- had always cuddled him, held him, talked to him, gave him a smoke or took him out for beer and ramen, when Jin did and when Jin did not. When Jin stopped caring so much a couple years ago, when he'd tired of the attraction game and when he'd learned the joys of breasts and foreign girls, Yamapi was there; phone line open, door ajar, steaming food on the table, a warm half-uncovered bed.
He never pushed it on Kame, nor did he ever push himself on Kame, just hoped with all of himself that he'd always be the only other close friend Kame would confide honestly in. There was Ueda, there was Junno, but the thing about Kame was that you could know him for years and never see the miserable pile of secrets he held clenched in fistfuls behind his back. Yamapi could walk into the room, say "Hello Kame" and be greeted first thing with an open palm full of sad little nothings, as if by knowing Jin made him a problem solver. He wished he could be, if for Kame, and he would if the problem had been some bit of his faulty behavior in the first place. But it was not Yamapi that hurt Kame, it was Jin -- and Kame himself, admittedly -- so all Yamapi seemed to be capable of was taking the hand offered to him, dusting off the precious little hurts and petting it softly, for however long Kame needed it.
Tiny, sweet Kamenashi Kazuya -- shy, lonesome, long-legged Kamenashi Kazuya attracted Yamapi in a way Yamapi had never been drawn to a human being before. He visited Jin's house one night on boyish impulse and found Kame curled up on the couch in a silk robe, smelling sweetly of Jin's mother's shampoo, head against one end of a huge Pokemon body pillow watching TV lazily. Pi invited himself to a beanbag on the other side of the living room and stared until he felt there was no way he could look any longer without feeling like some sort of cardinal rule in the friendship of boys was broken.
The way Kame's damp hair fell fluffily in wispy tumbles around his face, the heat that rose from his soft rosy skin and the way the silk clung wetly to certain places and not to others jolted Yamapi like tictacs of pheromones bouncing along the skin between his thighs-- an experience rudely interrupted by the goofy presence of Jin, who made his entrance tripping on a coffee table and was met with only the starriest brown eyes from the drying boy laying on the couch.
Yamashita Tomohisa, then aged 17, decided in that moment that he wanted those same looks from Kamenashi Kazuya himself, and that'd he'd do whatever it would take to get them.
--
Unfortunately, there was one thing Pi loved more than the raging, wild crush he had on a diminutive member of KAT-TUN -- and that was his friendship with Jin. Loyal like a dumb puppy, he put his reckless attractions aside with the knowledge that Kame and Jin were, evidently, destined to be. The sideways glances, the giggles, the low-pitched moaning he'd hear backstage -- there was no reason that ever-faithful Yamashita Tomohisa would budge. His best friend was apparently in love with the long-legged beauty, and there was nothing he could do, nor would want to.
I'm such an awesome friend, Pi thought to himself on a bike ride home after rehearsal one afternoon. God, Jin's a lucky piece of shit to have me. Would Shirota Yuu leave Kame alone? Just for the sake of friendship? He rounded a corner, biting his tongue. Hell no he wouldn't! This is just the kind of sacrifice only a member of the Yamashita family would make. Damn our nobility.
To keep himself focused (as Yamapi was often prone to the complete opposite) he pretended somewhat childishly that it was a conquest, a challenge from the gods: leave Kame alone, and he'd be rewarded most handsomely (perhaps in the form of that new Transformers action figure he had his eyes on); indulge his desires, and he'd be cursed forever. It worked -- for several days and not much longer, when he was sure he was going to give in (Yamapi was young enough to make new friends, after all, Jin would surely forgive him for at least one little fuck up) and could no longer abandon the youthful romanticisms of his unbridled crush.
That was, until, he began learning about the epics of Greek mythology in his low-grade High School literature class. When it came to Zeus, Hera, even Aphrodite (whose wild descendant, his classmates joked, had to have been Koda Kumi), Yamapi was disinterested completely, right up to the day they moved into the stories of Virgil, Roman poet of 90 B.C.
Pi was immediately drawn to the legend of Orpheus and his beautiful wife Eurydice from the first day they read their story: how she was fleeing from the advances of Apollo and bitten by a serpent, sent to the Underworld for all eternity; and how Orpheus, devastated by her death, played music and sang so mournfully that Persephone -- Wife of Hades, who had once been a mortal herself -- pitied him, and offered Orpheus one chance to win her back. It was the only time in History that anyone had been offered a soul back from the rivers of the Underworld -- and it would be the last.
Orpheus was permitted to take her away with him on one condition, that he should not turn around to look at her till they should have reached the upper air. Under this condition they proceeded on their way, he leading, she following, through passages dark and steep, in total silence, till they had nearly reached the outlet into the cheerful upper world, when Orpheus, in a moment of forgetfulness, to assure himself that she was still following, cast a glance behind him, when instantly she was borne away. Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air. Dying now a second time, she yet cannot reproach her husband, for how can she blame his impatience to behold her? "Farewell," she said, "a last farewell," - and was hurried away, so fast that the sound hardly reached his ears.
Yamapi was blown away. Here was Orpheus, so consumed by love for his soul mate Eurydice that he ruined his one chance to bring her back to him. It was, he thought, a perfect way to draw Kame to him without purposefully hurting Jin, or requiring any immediate sort of action. Over the course of a couple years -- what would be the Nobuta wo Produce project that Yamapi so begged for, Seishun Amigo and the subsequent months and months of performances and TV appearances -- they would become closer, bento after shooting and a couple drinks back at Pi's apartment.
And maybe -- even if Jin didn't treat Kame badly, even if Jin was lovely to him -- maybe Kame would like Pi anyways. Maybe he would follow him just like Eurydice.
It was silly back then, and silly years later when Yamapi sat in the dark of night holding the warm, beautiful boy in his arms. But he couldn't help himself from thinking that he had finally done it: he finally had his golden opportunity, and all he had to do was lead Kame from one world into another.
--
After his 21st birthday, Akanishi Jin never loved Kamenashi Kazuya.
Things changed. Intimacy was difficult, forced, came only after the most ferocious of fights. They became better known for screaming into each other's faces until someone was reduced to angry tears than the blend of their personalities in static equilibrium. "You're like an old married couple," Yamapi joked, but it wasn't like that. Jin hated himself around Kame, hated the way Kame could make him feel like the tiniest man on the planet, the most insensitive bastard in the entire world. One day he was there, one day he wasn't, one day there'd be kisses and nibbles on Kame's underarm skin and the next Jin shouted and tripped along the carpet edge on his way out the hotel room doorway, leaving Kame palming his face in that delicate, quiet sort of rage he knew so well.
There was something very hypocritical about it all, how Jin could jerk Kame off behind a silkscreen in the dressing room and then call Yamapi later that night and mention passively that he felt nothing at all in the way of romance.
"He's just a kid, Pi. He doesn't know anything."
He knows everything, Pi wanted to say, you're the one not adding up, but he'd be feeding it into deaf ears.
--
The running dumb-Jin joke began when the boys were fairly small, fairly malleable, and assigned the personable roles they would play the rest of their lives in the entertainment world.
Kame -- Feminine, fragile.
Jin -- Sexy, dumb.
Yamapi -- We haven't the slightest idea.
A mixture of the two? Jin and Kame together, the perfect blend of feminism and boyish ploy…
it could work. Write it down.
"I don't like being the dumb one." Jin whined.
"But you are dumb," Pi laughed, giving him a playful shove on the hotel bed. "Besides. I have to be your guys' sick version of a lovechild. You think you have it bad?"
Kame was slumped in a chair by the window, reading his own letter. From now on, Kamenashi Kazuya, you are expected to behave in a quiet, orderly way. Your list of hair specifications as well as clothing style and subsequent pre-calculated facets of personality - favorite colors, movies, actor/actresses, ideal girls, friendships - are listed on pages 2 through 4. Please memorize them carefully in lieu of magazine as well as television interviews.
"My favorite colors are black, white, and silver." Jin wibbled. "This is crap! I hate black. Who wants to trade?" He extended his letter outwards and shook it desperately.
"Fuck you, I got pink." Yamapi grinned, fist-pumping into the air. "Yoshhhhhh."
"But I like pink -- "
"Can't have it." He hugged his letter to his chest protectively, crinkling the edges. "It got assigned to me; it's mine."
"Man." Jin attempted to throw his paper on the ground angrily but it drifted, light as feather, safely onto the edge of the bed and slipped off. "Oi. Kame. What'd you get?"
"Black and White." Kame yawned.
"Weird. Why'd we get the same ones?"
Kame shrugged. "Dunno." He closed his letter back into a tri-fold and tucked his feet under him in the yellow glare of the table lamp.
Later on that night, scrambling to hide cigarette smoke from several of their associate managers outside the hotel window, Jin set fire to his own letter and began shrieking hysterically. Yamapi managed to put out its flame-engulfed body with several dull thwaps of a nearby pillowcase, but it lay in thin, warm, caramel-brown flakes on the bed sheet.
Jin cried, more out of stress and frustration than anything else. Kame bravely found their bodyguard and had him deliver the message that a new copy was needed, no explanation given save for a mumbled, "He lost it". Three days later, Yamapi retold the story at rehearsals, shouted, "BAKANISHI, BAKANISHI, BAKANISHI!" and thus, despairingly, he came to be.
--
"Kame?" Jin asked. "Do you think I'm dumb?"
Kame blinked, fumbling with the drawstrings of his pajama pants thoughtfully. "Nn. No."
"No?" There was a spike in Jin's pitch, eyebrows arched. He sat up on one arm supporting his head and looked down at Kame. "Seriously?"
"Of course not." Kame folded his thin arms underneath his head and listened to the rain pittering on the roof of the tent before slipping sweetly down the thin fabric walls. "There are people who think with their minds, Jin. And people who think with their hearts."
"And I'm the kind that just thinks with their heart?"
"No. You're the kind that speaks from your heart." Kame whispered raspily, closing his eyes. "That's why people like you. You say the simplest things, the most obvious little idiocies; but they touch you, deep inside somewhere, like someone found a piece of you you'd failed to notice before."
"Like what?" asked Jin, incredulously.
"Like…like those moments when someone describes someone breathing next to you in bed, or what a starfish feels like in your hand, or how you lose your balance just by looking straight up a gigantic tree, and you think, Wow, I never knew someone else knew about that, even though you did. Like those thoughts and words were with you the whole time, but someone just came over, plucked it out of your heart and held it in front of you like you'd never seen it outside of yourself before."
Kame swallowed softly, his Adam's apple sliding slowly in his throat through the dim shadows. "People who make dumb mistakes aren't dumb people, Jin. Don't let people tell you you're stupid if they're being serious." He paused. "I think, sometimes, you're brilliant."
Jin watched Kame breathing tenderly, the warmth that radiated off his body smelling like a comfortable blanket, and he thought to himself: friendship is a lovely thing. Kamenashi Kazuya is a lovely thing.
Years later, he'd re-iterate it again, this time clearer: No, just listen, listen. Please. Because I'm tired and you're the only one who ever really listens to me.
And what do you mean by tha --
You're the only one who doesn't think I'm dumb, Kame. You're the only one who ever stopped to ask me what I was thinking, and honestly, really wanted to know.
Jin lay back down and pulled his blanket up under his nose. "Kame?"
"Nn?"
"How do you know when you love someone?"
Kame opened his eyes again tiredly. "Like…a girl? You know those things, don't you?"
Kame chuckled dryly. His voice was hoarse from lack of sleep, but it was soft and raspy, and beautiful, Jin thought unashamedly. "No, not really."
"You know what I think?"
"What do you think, Jin."
"I think," Jin said, choosing his words with careful patience, "People can fall in love with other people and not have it mean anything romantic. But it's so overpowering that they may think it means something that it doesn't, that they get feelings from it that aren't there --"
"Jin," Kame snorted, "Are you…talking about…"
"What? I -- no." Jin paused. "No! I wasn't talking about being like tha -- I was just saying, about friends, I mean -- well, not friends, but…yes, friends, but not me personally, just, you know, I was. I was just thinking. You know, people always think they have certain feelings for friends, right? I think it's just. Mistaking friendship liking for romantic liking. It's still love but its different. But people just don't know any better. Does that make sense?"
Kame nodded quietly.
"Do you agree?" Jin probed further.
"Nn. Mostly."
He stiffened. "Mostly?"
"Well, I don't think love is about not knowing." Kame yawned. "You know exactly when you're attached to somebody's soul like that, so deeply and inherently. But you're scared of it, aren't you? You're scared that you've lost so much self-control you can't even help but get lost in another human being. And it frightens you, terribly. That there's some part of you inside tied to somebody else so fiercely you couldn't cut it off even if you wanted to. You blame it on other things to try and make yourself forget that you're no longer an independent little factory running by itself -- that you belong to something, now. That something belongs to you."
Jin bit his lip. "So you think -- friends, they could…feel things?"
"Of course."
"And act on them?"
"If they think it's true."
"Does it… make them…make them gay?" Jin stuttered, with such a hideously frightened expression on his face that Kame might have laughed, had he not felt that there was an inkling of very real and very human terror in Jin's pounding heart right now and a bit of himself dangerously riding the waves of his own indirect questions.
"It doesn't make you anything. It's just…you. How you feel. There's no anything. It's just people and other people, Jin, and people trying to adjust to the idea that they don't operate by themselves anymore." Kame finished, rubbing the fuzzy corner of his blanket between thumb and forefinger.
Several crickets chirped seemingly in agreement outside. The air was warm, the breeze was soft, the milky white light of the moon pouring like a thick iridescent paint over their small little tent.
"Kame?" Jin asked.
"Yes, Jin?"
"I'm glad we had this talk."
Kame fell silent. "Me too. Me, too."
"And Kame?"
"Yes, Jin?"
Jin clenched his teeth together and pushed out his lips - that thing he did when trying to hold back some aggressive bit of his psyche struggling out of his mouth and into the air, that awkward, desperate sort of move when it was all threatening to explode out of him in stringy sets of babbling thoughts. "I…well. If I die tomorrow, you know. I'm glad we're friends and you're here with me. I'm a lot lonelier when I'm missing you."
Kame smiled softly and turned over to face the wall of the tent. "I'm glad to be sure of you."
"What?" Jin said quickly, but Kame seemed to have already slipped into sleep as quietly as he had arisen from it earlier. Trembling, Jin patted the ball of Kame's tiny shoulder with an awkward sense of something more he wanted to say but couldn't, even if Kame had been awake after all.
Moon overhead, forest around them, and the stirs of tiny life outside marveling at the magic of two souls wrapping around each other for the first time: Jin, too, drifted away.
--
Two years later, Kame fumbled for a cigarette with his frostbitten hands, shuddering in the icy wind that crystallized every particle in his skin with painful, crackling snaps. Jin took a desperate drag off his own smoke and leaned only the tiniest bit closer to Kame, shielding off one knife of ferocious wind on the cement stairs outside of their studio.
"Jin," Kame shivered, "The weather's not going to get better. We should do something this winter. Go somewhere nice, somewhere warm."
"KAT-TUN." Jin said quietly, sniffling.
"Fuck KAT-TUN." Kame coughed, having said it for the first time, and stared out at the vast expanse of dry, white frost biting into the landscape of what was his entire world. "I don't think I can survive another winter here."
Jin yawned, scratched his burning red ear and scuffed one of his boots on a piece of gum stuck underneath the overhang of the metal rail. He said nothing in response. It was not the winter that made Kame cold, it was the human condition of loneliness -- and Jin had learned that he, like the soft white snow that smothered the very beauty it depended upon, didn't have to give a damn.
--
Yamapi stood, arms barring his apartment doorway, stricken.
"Let me go, Yamashita. Let me go or tell me what you want."
Pi made a laughing sort of noise similar to a quiet, under-the-breath cluck, slammed the front door shut and shoved his way into the kitchen, pacing. "You know what I want? Here's what I want: I want to wake up one morning under the following conditions. One, I had a full night's sleep that was not interrupted by Kame coming into my room uninvited and crying about how Jin doesn't love him. And Two, that the first thing I do that morning is anything but receive a text message from Jin whining about how Kame doesn't love him. Three--"
Kame grabbed the edge of the wall and swung himself into the kitchen, stumbling. "Wait, wait, wait, what? What about the morning part? What about Jin --"
Yamapi laughed. Right there, out loud, head tipped back kind of laughing, eerie and surreal. "Really? You didn't know? See, now, that's just me. I thought it was obvious for only the last, what, 5? 6 years? But you know, I understand. Maybe I wouldn't know it either if I wasn't the one constantly taking the calls." He snorted again. "You really didn't know? Maybe I should tell you. Maybe I should tell you so you'd understand."
"Understand what--"
"Tell you how Jin really feels, Kame." Pi began, pacing the kitchen again, side to side, alternating between swinging his arms and crossing them behind his neck. "I bet you'd be surprised, wouldn't you? I bet you'd wonder why I told you. How I could love you so much, all the damn time, let you cry in my arms and buy you food and smother you in compliments and then call Jin and say, 'Come get your boyfriend.' I bet you'd wonder why I gave you away night after night after night, right back to someone who'd tear out all the stitches I tied you back together with. Don't you know how much it hurts to say goodbye, Kame? Don't you know how much it hurts to hand over the living breathing colony of cells you love more anything in the entire world every single day of your life?"
Kame had shrunk back into the shadow of the hallway, trembling, but Pi advanced.
"You don't really love me, Pi, and Jin doesn't love me, he doesn't lo--"
"The reason I did it was because of you, Kame. I believed in you. I believed in you, and I believed that there was only one person in this world you could ever love --" He stopped himself, eyes swollen tenderly, fingers trembling over the neck of a cobalt blue glass vase he won from a fair years ago, back when things were normal, back when things were okay. He remembered bringing it back home and showing it to Kame a few weekends later -- that glisten in Kame's eyes, the way he smiled and picked it up in his powdery white hands, the way he talked about how valuable it was because they were using cobalt in the nosecones of rockets now and someday it was going to be worth a lot of money, even if it was just a fair trinket; but Yamapi loved to hear Kame talk about valuable things, beautiful things, things he wanted, even if it wasn't Yamapi himself.
"--that you loved Jin so terribly but could never have him, because he never felt the same, and how similar we were, Kame -- how much I loved you, how much I wanted you to be crying about me, just once, just once I could hurt you just as badly as he could, but I couldn't - I trusted you when you told me how much he meant to you, how badly your heart hurt, and I was noble, Kame, and I left you alone, but I fucking can't do this anymore --"
All at once the end of his sentence burnt off like a black string of dynamite, and he threw the vase at the wall, and it shattered into icy smithereens. Yamapi sank down, back against the kitchen cabinets and buried his head in his arms, muffling his own dry sobs.
"Jin loves you." Yamapi wailed deeply into the crook of his elbow as Kame sat up slowly against the tinkling of glass. "Jin loves you, and he tells me every day, and he tells me how scared he is and he doesn't know if he should or if it's real or why he can care so much about you but you still fight all the time, and how much it hurts him to hurt you, and how he wishes things were different just this one fight and you wouldn't run away and leave him by himself in the dark anymore, and he loves you, Kame, and he loves you so damn much that it's heartbreaking, and you two goddamn idiots don't even know because you're too busy crying to me to see what the real problem is…"
"W--what problem?"
He shuddered, still. "The problem! Oh, the problem. The problem that the only problem you two have is wondering why you can hate each other so much but you still run back to one another's company the very next day without a second thought. That problem -- you must have heard it, Kame, coming from that little voice inside of you. I've whispered it into your ears enough over the years. I hoped you'd never hear. Like it was my little secret, my little desperate, painful secret, the instant cure for Jin and Kame. And I knew it all along."
Kame ignored the glass fragments burning icily along the white skin of his right arm and scooted onto the kitchen floor. "Yamashita….I…are you --"
"Stay away." Yamapi swung his arm across the floor in a soft round arc, sweeping away the glass with his sweatshirt sleeve. "I don't feel like fighting it tonight. Do you need me to say it?"
Kame shook his head.
"I would." Pi said flatly, with a deep sort of sadness. "I would if you wanted me to. But you still don't understand what's really going on." He closed his eyes, leaning against the cabinet door. "Don't you see, Kame? There's no future for us. Me and You, it's impossible."
"And why not?" Kame didn't know why he of all people should be asking -- wasn't he the naïve one, pretending not to notice the way Yamapi looked at him in the dark, the way his hand gravitated toward the small of his back, the way he always had to reach out and touch him as if to make certain he was still there? You're stupid, Kame thought, to convince yourself that Yamapi is more than a gentle friend. But he wasn't.
Their personalities meshed, in some strange way -- where Kame and Jin were complete opposites, Pi and Kame were quite close, though Pi was just as much a buffoon as Jin. He was more sensitive, though, less like a boyish goofy sort of man who had to be saying something every single second and getting a boisterous reaction of some kind in response. Pi was quiet, impassive, content to just sit in silence communicating with the thrums of his pulse beating off his wrist and onto Kame's leg as they read a magazine together. Kame liked not having to feel like he was always combating some dramatic reputation he'd built with Jin, always trying not to look weak or as a fragile as he really was. It wasn't that he could be weak or fragile around Pi, either -- but that, Jin aside, when he was with Pi, Kame simply wasn't. He was just Kame, just Kame sipping some tea scanning articles not about the entertainment industry next to Yamapi in the warm glow of the sunshine, languidly.
And Pi had thought about it, too. He'd thought about it every time Kame curled into his body on the couch and quivered, trembling, trying not to cry until he exhausted himself to sleep, every time he sent a text message with a couple tiny blinking hearts playfully dancing between meaning something and absolutely nothing. At which side did the dance end? Why couldn't it work? Why couldn't Jin go off and live his own life, why couldn't Pi step forward and be with Kame after all?
"You're refusing to look at it with realistic sensibility, Kame." He finally settled on, drearily. "Look around. The one person in this world you could be guaranteed would love you back, Kame, who would you want it to be? Snap of the fingers and it's Jin. You don't even have to think about it, you know why?"
Pi pointed at Kame's quivering chest. "Because he's buried in your heart, burning there, right at the beginning and end of every word you speak and every thought that flitters through your mind. He's always first for you, Kame. First for everything, because he's a part of you, as much as you're a part of yourself."
"Then," Kame sneered, frustrated with how uncomfortable finding some happy medium between logic and emotions was going, with how difficult it was uncovering the easy answer he felt for sure must be laying around somewhere in the open light, "why does he turn me away? Tell me, Yamashita, why he feels the need to --"
"He's not perfect, Kame." Yamapi said quietly, swallowing the death of him squeezed up in the pocket of his throat. "But you know, faults and all -- he's perfect for you."
Kame re-adjusted his himself onto the floor and twisted the ring on his pinky around again and again. Somewhere, deep in the apartment complex a hallway or so away, a washing machine whirred calmly.
"Don't pretend you don't know it." Yamapi murmured. "Don't pretend to ignore your own feelings. We're comfortable together, Kame, but you don't stay awake at night wanting me to hold you, do you? You don't sit in the empty train car and cry because I came to work and refused to get close enough to barely touch you, do you? You don't look at your body in the mirror and think, It's all for Yamapi, it's all for Yamapi, do you? That's why, Kame. That's why we couldn't work. We lay around and go places as familiar friends, but Jin is the first love that pushed you against the fence in elementary school and kissed you with his lips shut tight, gave you an extra candy more than everyone else on your Valentines Day card.
"Sometimes," he continued, a bit timidly, "I think that you need him to hurt you. That you can't be in a meaningful relationship if someone isn't making you bear some kind of weight. But that's when I realized -- you don't need to hurt to love somebody. But you need Jin to love somebody. Even if he hurts you, even if he wrings you in his hands and squeezes out all of that Kazuya Kamenashi into the ground in little driblets….it has to be Jin. You know somewhere that no matter how badly he hurts you he'll never let you go because he loves you, frightfully, dangerously. It has to be Jin."
There was nothing more to be said. The autonomic ticking of the clock clicked in the next room and time went on, a boundary built, some kind of wall that sprouted from the earth between them in that moment and no longer could Kame see Yamapi but for the faint outline of his eyes just over the stone edge where he could still push his words forth.
"We can never go back after this, can we?" Kame finally implored, stiffly. "It'll never be the same again, us two?"
Yamapi paused. "It's been done." He said quietly, and with that snipped the first binding tie.
--
"Akanishi Jin, what do you nee--"
"Come get him."
"..Pi? Is that you? What's going o--"
"Come get him, Jin. Call me back when you're at the airport."
Click.
--
It was their first fight in five months, if only because of distance, and it happened in a dreary New York hotel room at 11PM, fourth floor, dark for all but the first few feet from the window spilling the light from electric billboard signs onto the carpet.
"I don't know what your problem is." He began.
"Me neither, Kame. Why don't you tell me. Tell me what I did wrong this time." Jin said flatly, and laid down on his bed stretched out like a corpse, staring at the ceiling.
"Everything." Kame sniffed. "Everything, Jin, everything."
"Go on."
"You stupid fuck--" he cried out, throwing his pillow across the room. "You had to fucking leave, you had to leave when things were most important, you had to go and be a dumb piece of shit and stick your dick in places it didn't have to be, you had to--"
"Go on." Jin whispered softly again.
"Go on? Go on with what? How you've ruined KAT-TUN, all of our lives you selfish fucking pig--"
"Cut out the formalities, Kame. KAT-TUN is fine. We're all fine."
"We're not fine, we're going down, we're going to get suspended just like News, we're not fine--"
"You're not fine." Jin corrected. "You're not fine, and I'm not fine."
"Jin's always fine." Kame spat, whirling around to face the window and wipe his cheek hurriedly in the blue light. "Don't fuck with yourself. Jin's fine."
"Jin's not fine." Jin corrected.
"Always. Always fine Jin going off to study abroad after--"
"Don't say i--"
"I'll say whatever I want to, you selfish fucking prick. You buy me a bagel and you think everything's going to be fine? You push me into the subway bathroom and think that by sticking your tongue in my mouth I'll forgive you? Just like old times?"
Jin curled over on his side to face the other wall papered with yellowed violets, silent and impassive.
"It doesn't work that way anymore, Jin. What the hell were you thinking?"
"I was thinking that maybe--"
"That maybe what? That maybe I was some 12 year old girl with rabbit teeth who'd suck your dick if you shoved her down there hard enough--"
"Yeah, because Kame's so available for a good fuck at a moment's notice, he'd know--"
"I'd know alright, you asshole, 'at a moment's notice' was the only time you'd touch me anyways."
"Fuck you."
"Fuck you, too." Kame grabbed his other pillow and hugged it around himself, buried his face open-mouthed into its soft body and stared at the floor. "You can't dance, either. Fuck you."
"Fuck your stupid shit, Kame. Fuck it to hell. Go ahead and try to yell at me about my fucking dancing because you're not brave enough to say what's really wrong--"
Kame leapt up, marched over with all the swiftness of a midnight caper and grabbed for Jin, who began kicking wildly and flailing in all directions. "Oi oi oi --"
"You--" Kame yelled and Jin pulled him by the arm roughly onto the bed, beating him with the pillow originally thrown at him minutes before.
"Stop! --"
"You stop--"
"Let go of me--" Kame regained himself, climbed on top of Jin and began pummeling his chest furiously. For a few seconds Jin laughed, hair mussed in the glow of the bedside table lamp, and then he noticed Kame's eyelids flushed pink in the light, hiccupping and biting his bottom lip, whispering Fuck you, Fuck you, Fuck you Fuck you Fuck you Fuck you Fu--
"Kame?"
He grabbed Jin's shirt in two fistfuls and held him there beneath him, choking in child-like bursts, Jin silent and face plastered in open-mouthed concern.
"Kame?"
"Shut up." Kame stammered, and twisted the cotton material in between his clenched fingers, eyes squeezed shut tightly.
"You know I didn't mean it, right?" Jin backtracked worriedly, sitting up on his elbows. "Just another stupid argument, Kame, you know I was just kidding--"
"But you weren't," Kame mumbled, and let go softly, lip quivering, eyes glazed. "But you weren't."
--
Jin rubbed the leather seat underneath him with his fingernail. "I hope you have a good excuse, Pi. I don't have the money to be flying over to Japan every single day --"
"Look, if you want to play these games and be coy about it, go ahead."
"If it's about Kame, we've been through it before, Pi. It wasn't my idea to fly back and rescue Kamenashi Kazuya from the throes of grief and angst again, so if you're going to try and pin that on me --"
"As much as you hate it," Pi said indignantly, "You would have come back anyways."
"I'm in a taxicab, Pi, I--"
"Answer the question."
"What question?"
"Do you love Kame." Pi said pointedly, and Jin didn't pounce on the glaring inaccuracy, perhaps because he, too, knew where the conversation had been headed anyways.
"Way to put it bluntly--"
"Do you love Kame?"
"As a friend." Jin stammered quickly. "As a friend, in a blanket sort of term, yeah, I guess--"
"And nothing more?"
Silence.
"I like girls, you know--"
"I didn't ask if you liked girls, Jin, I asked if you loved Kame. Loved him in that way."
"I don't know, Pi." Jin patted his jacket absent-mindedly for a packet of cigarettes he wouldn't be allowed to smoke anyways. "I--" one pat on the left, "Honestly--" a second on the right, "Don't--" one at the bottom, "Know--" and he groaned.
It's just people and other people, Jin, and people trying to adjust to the idea that they don't operate by themselves anymore.
"Be honest."
Jin grumbled, rubbing his temples, staring at some point on the advertisement stapled to the back of the driver's seat. "It's not about being honest, Pi. It's about knowing what the hell it's all about in the first place."
Pi curled up in his chair, pulled apart the curtains and gazed out at the dark cityscape quietly. Sorry, Yamapi. I know we said we'd never do it like this. I'm looking out for you, you know. But it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do.
"You might be happy with someone else. 2.5 kids and a Minivan and an extra 10 pounds on your stomach -- but there's a problem with that called Kamenashi Kazuya, and the fact that Jin -- deny it as he will -- can't fucking stand to see Kame hurt unless he's the one who did it. The thought of him an ocean away from you, inaccessible, dazed -- it'd kill you. It wouldn't matter how pretty she was or how much you thought you loved her, Jin, because Kame would tear you into the tiniest pieces without even brushing his fingers across your cheek. You'd watch him on TV and people would say, 'He looks so happy gaining weight and working hard on that new Drama', but you'd know better. You'd know it was a smokescreen and that bastard only tried to look perfect when he was breaking.
"That's what would get you years from now, in the dark of the night, Jin -- that you destroyed someone, and that you couldn't fix it this time."
Jin drowned in a complacent silence, letting Pi's words dance in the reflection of the taxicab window. "There's nothing I have to say," he responded dully, scratching his pant leg. "There's nothing I have to say except that I think Kame loves me more than I ever could love him, even if I tried."
"And why?" Yamapi demanded, pausing before an obnoxious guffaw. "Wait, right. I should've known--"
"It's not that--"
"How old was she this time, Bakanishi? 12? 11? Am I getting warmer or colder?"
"Don't you fucking start this, Pi, don't you fucking start this right now --"
"Au contraire, Jinny, I think now is the perfect time. Tell me, do the nurses at the Abortion clinic know you on a first-name basis? Are you booked in advance? Are they all carrying the firstborn of the Akanishi family, too?"
"You know what, Pi? Fuck you and--"
"And you're a coward running away from all of his problems, just like always, Jin. Just like always. Did you even consider how much that could've hurt? Not even the first one to know, the first person you should have turned to... You should've seen him, Jin. You should've seen him when he read the headline, shaking, pale--"
"That's the point!" Jin finally screamed, and the taxi swerved; veered every which way for several seconds before angry yelling in English and the sound of Jin seemingly hyperventilating, choking out the most incomprehensible words that came out in buttered gasps. "That's the fucking p-point, Yamapi, that's the point, we're not good enough for each other."
"And what's 'good enough'?"
"Good enough is…it's Kame not running back to me just because he feels like he should. It's about me not apologizing to him just because I feel like I'd miss him if he was gone. He's not even there, Pi. Kame's been gone for a long time but I'm still hung up like he's going to just fucking wake up one day and be Kazuya again--"
"He still is, Jin. He's still there. I've seen it. That familiar spark, it's there. But you've forgotten how to get to him. He hasn't changed much, he just behaves a bit differently, a bit older, that's all. You need to learn him again. Don't think you haven't holed yourself up, too."
"Me?"
"You know," He continued ignorantly, "People don't really change as they get older. I mean, you're more Jin than you were when you were a kid. Kame's more Kame than he used to be. Just because everything's different doesn't mean anything's changed. Neither of you knows who you really are anymore yet you still expect him to know you. You expect yourself to know him. That's why it doesn't work, Jin. You cuddle Kazuya but you pick fights with Kamenashi. You've made him two different people."
Jin rubbed his finger on the window in little circles, round and round and round, light puncturing through his fingertips in a warm, orange glow trailing behind the tail of a newspaper-grey airplane lifting into the bright heavens, stomach full of little people going places he might've liked to a while before.
"It's not about just being friends again." He finally said, twisting his ankle underneath the driver's car seat, caught in the hook of the seatbelt. "I don't know how to be 'just friends' with him, Pi."
Yamapi licked his lip and leaned back in the chair, phone tucked in the crook of his shoulder, fingers intertwined on his chest and tapping in the gleam of his yellowish reflection in the window overlooking the night sky -- city lights glowing dimly, dotting the polygons of city buildings like dalmation spots.
"Then be more."
--
It was in breaking Jin down to the core of his dumb, guarded heart to pull out the stringy, throbbing arteries pumping blood full of I love you, Kame that Yamapi realized he'd had it wrong all along. It was never he, Orpheus, playing the lyre while his Eurydice Kame danced around him in fields of flowers. It was Jin who had Kame from the beginning -- and it was Yamapi, Apollo, chasing after Kame so dangerously close that he slipped, was bitten by misunderstanding, and fell away into the dark. It was not Yamapi who was to rescue Kame. It was not Yamapi, looking over his shoulder with debilitating fright, that could lead Kame back to the sun.
It was Jin.
Jin, who knew Kame loved him so much that he could turn away and walk in the opposite direction countless lifetimes full of a million miles and still know Kame was right there behind him, drawn by his very presence, the disturbance his body made in the air when he brushed against the world.
It was then, in that moment, that Yamapi learned how badly it hurt to lose something you'd never really had. That he'd have to say goodbye not because he was noble, not because he wanted the best for Jin, but because he now knew that somewhere in the cosmos, it wasn't to be. He now knew by the way Kame sought an empty bedroom rather than his (albeit slightly slacked) arms-- this, Yamapi owned: he had met destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
--
Kame lay in the comforter, silent, impassive, eyes wide open, perhaps breathing a bit heavier because of the heat and lack of oxygen in the pocket underneath the blankets, but nothing more.
No Jin, and now Yamapi outside; there was something very lonely about being in bed by yourself, Kame thought. There was something very lonely about hearing voices and recognizing them but not enough to know what was being said. Where had things gone wrong? When did he lose his grasp on reality? When did he let himself go so far that the lack of that touch, that caress, that warm body resulted in the incapacity to feel, to live?
You blame it on other things to try and make yourself forget that you're no longer an independent little factory running by itself -- that you belong to something, now. That something belongs to you.
Maybe it was over. Maybe Jin had finally had enough. Maybe he was chasing some impossible dream, some old bond that just wasn't strong enough to pull two strangers back together again. Maybe Jin was always just going to be an old friend he'd lose contact with along the way, gradually, and maybe as little as a year or two later, completely and irreversibly. Yamapi could not will himself to have Kame, and Jin had all but abandoned him -- who, then, was he existing for? Who was Kame but that boy next to Jin, the legs resting on his lap, the arms wrapped around his neck, the knowing look onstage during a National TV conference saying I know what it feels like to have everyone judging you, but just know that you're not alone, okay?
He put his palms in front of his face and breathed in the smell of the blankets, hot and fuzzy, suffocating. He couldn't leave but he couldn't stay here, couldn't stay here and or leave the bed much less walk out the room, couldn't see the world and no longer had anybody whom he could confide in honestly. Maybe he was overreacting. You are overreacting, you idiot, he breathed. You're not going to die. Jin doesn't want you, Yamapi despises you in some weird, obsessive, sad sort of way, but that's okay. You're not dead. You won't die. You're fine. You're fine. You're fine.
But he wasn't, and every time he whispered You're fine he had to fight back his own weak little guffaw. He wasn't fine. He was far from fine. He had been finer back in New York eating dinner across from Jin in an angry silence, or at least as much anger as he could muster -- in truth, every cold glare he shot was just a fog machine to hide how closely he was listening to Jin sipping his glass of wine, the sound of his chewing, the way his cheeks puffed out with twin bulging pockets of crab salad, the napkin laid across his warm lap, his wrists resting against the table edge with utensils in hand at the ready, how sweetly he smiled when his face was downcast and his eyelashes fluttering, bangs tussled --
God, Kame shook, gut wrenching. This was dangerous. This was obsessive, this was heartbreaking, this was as real as he could ever be beneath the stage lights and behind the microphones and in front of the hair stylists and before millions of people with paying tickets. This was who Kame was -- simply the extension piece that kicked Jin playfully on the bottom when he messed up his dance choreography mid-performance, who sobbed not because of his mid-concert back injury but because of the friend with a hand rested behind him and guiding Kamenashi 'Emotional Leaning Tower of Pisa' Kazuya along wordlessly, who only felt like some semblance of a human being when another one was wrapped around him like the vibrant spinning body around the static core of an atom.
What kind of Kamenashi Kazuya am I if I'm not--
And then, suddenly, there was the sensation of light and a cold burst of air, of being lifted away, of wrapping his legs around a pair of perfect hips and his skinny arms on its broad shoulders -- and when he buried his head in Jin's hair he pressed his face deeply into his hot neck and hiccupped in the smell of his warm, familiar fragrant skin, and jetlagged Jin just held Kame's tiny body and carried him away out of Yamapi's bedroom like an aching child instead of a lonely human being -- out the door, the hall, across the street several blocks away, through different worlds that Kame had never been through: worlds where he'd no doubt been hurt and hurt again, but for the first time, finally -- retrieved.
--
Originally, six months in America learning English was to be the much-needed 'break' for Akanishi Jin. It had now been extended indefinitely and changed location to the Eastern coast of Kenya, a place Jimmy had recommended -- "The kind of beach you roll yourself six feet under into and lap up the sand in mouthfuls, it's so sweet from the tropical breeze". It helped that Yamapi was seriously considering it as a possible location for Toma's "going away party", whatever "going away party" meant (pseudo-engagement, sex; the kind of thing more prevalent in Jin's friendship circles these days, by and large).
Several feet away, overlooking the languid blue sea stood the most vibrant sort of human being -- warmly tanned, secured around every limb by a thin pudgy layer of soft fat, the dyes that had been bleached in his shoulder-length hair washed out by saltwater and restored to a soft jet black that blew in silky tendrils with the wind. He turned around and giggled -- laughed open-mouthed, for the first time in years, toothy grin shining brightly (they'd given up smoking menthol cigarettes several months before) and never, Jin noticed, had Kazuya looked so beautiful, so radiantly gorgeous in the sunshine, so uninhibitedly and absolutely overjoyed.
He still is that Kazuya, Jin. He's still there.
Jin took Kame by the hand, intertwined their fingers, swung arms in unison down a quiet little beach millions of miles away from the nearest familiar star. "All you'd need is a chubby baby in a knapsack and we're all set for some Picture-Perfect Family album," Kame laughed, and Jin thought: That wouldn't be so bad, Kazuya.
I'm glad to be sure of you.
"The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough."
- George Moore
--
Dedicated to someone very special to me.
This took a long time to write because 1) i am a very slow writing perfectionist, and 2) halfway through the writing of this piece i sort of clumsily fell in love myself. but it's here, and I hope Bumblebees fans aren't too disappointed.
comment if you like. tell me. what did you like? what was nice? what made your heart hurt, your spine tingle? ask me questions. i had a reason for every word i ripped out of my soul and put to paper. you can always email me at astromechafic@gmail.com too, if you'd like. i'll respond to every one i get. thank you, as always.