I wrote!
It's a Stars companion piece and written for the February challenge in tohma_x_eiri. It's obscenely long for something that was supposed to be a drabble, too...
Title: Happy Endings
Genre: Angst/romance
Rating: PG-13 just in case, for Eiri's occasional language
Characters: Somewhat Tohma/Eiri, Eiri/Shuichi (only because it couldn't be avoided...)
Wordcount: 2,412
Description: Shuichi demands why Eiri's books never have happy endings.
Warning: Fits very neatly into Stars-verse and references chapter 19 VERY heavily.
Disclaimer: *checks* Nope, still don't own it.
***
Shuichi had asked him about a week ago, hands on his hips and clearly looking for a confrontation, why his novels never had happy endings. He didn’t really know where this had come from-he very rarely tried to make sense from the workings of his lover’s mind. He had a notion it would only make him tired and irritable, and he was always tired and often irritable anyway, so he left it alone.
At the time of the argument, of course, he only growled that someone with so little talent he couldn’t even manage to write a love song that didn’t make the listener want to gag wouldn’t understand. This, of course, led to Shuichi whining and crying and throwing a tantrum, which invariably led to sex, because it was the best way to shut Shuichi up. After, Shuichi seemed to forget all about his all-important question, and he wasn’t about to remind the boy and argue about it.
For the past several months, Shuichi had been hinting (and by hinting he meant leaving little notes everywhere, writing it on the bathroom mirror in shaving cream, and generally being about as subtle as a jackhammer) that “Yuki should write a book about us.” The demand for happy endings had doubtlessly been connected to that somehow. At the time of the first demand, Eiri’s only response had been a blank stare, and when he hadn’t immediately told Shuichi to go to hell and take his stupid idea with him, that had apparently signified to the pink-haired boy that in fact he was willing to do it-he just needed some convincing.
That was how their relationship worked most of the time-it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Most of the time that was all right, and sometimes it drove him batshit, but they stayed together anyway, over a year now. It had been so long the paparazzi didn’t even seem to care about hounding them anymore. His brother joked that Eiri had finally settled down and gotten married like a good boy (but only at a distance; Tatsuha seemed to be a little afraid of repercussions, and with good cause). It was certainly longer than he’d ever stayed with anyone, and he was more content than he ever remembered being, mostly, except when Shuichi got these random ideas about “advancing our relationship” into his head and wanted to talk about meaningless emotional shit for hours or demanded crazy things-like the book about them.
That was why a week ago, on Valentine’s Day, Eiri had stoically choked down a slice of the horrendous chocolate cake his lover had made trying not to wince so that he didn’t prompt another childish tantrum. Except then Shuichi had suddenly sprung this happy ending shit on him and he found himself too irritated not to snap back, and all his hard work at keeping the peace went down the drain. That was why, when Shuichi came home in tears two days later to inform him he was being dragged out on tour, at gunpoint if need be, Eiri actually felt rather relieved. “So go. What do I care?”
“But it’s Yuki’s birthday this week!”
He rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to his beer. “You’re such a kid. Who cares?”
“I care!” the pink-haired boy insisted adamantly. “It’s my beloved Yuki’s birthday and I’m going to miss it!” This prompted a fresh flood of crocodile tears.
Eiri could feel the headache coming on and downed the rest of the beer to numb it. “It’s not important. I never celebrate my birthday, and I’m not about to start now.” Last year during his birthday they had still been in one of their off phases, so he had never had to counter these arguments before. “I’d lock myself in my office and write even if you were here. I have a deadline in a month. It’s this thing called work. You might want to try it. Supposedly people who call themselves professionals do it occasionally.”
Which led to a tantrum, which led to sex, which led to Shuichi leaving the topic alone until he moped out with a suitcase five days later for his two-week spin across Japan, leaving Eiri with blissful silence to work in-which was exactly how he wanted it. Shuichi was Shuichi, and maybe he loved the idiot nearly as much as he was annoyed by him, but he was too high maintenance for Eiri to have any hope whatsoever of finishing his manuscript while he was underfoot. Besides which, he hadn’t lied. He never celebrated his birthday.
So February twenty-second he sat and stared at the blank document on his screen, thinking about happy endings.
It had been easy to snap at Shuichi about it because that required no thought. The truth of it was, his novels ended in disaster time after time simply because they did. He never planned out his endings, and it wasn’t as though he gained some sort of sadistic pleasure from shattering people’s hopes over and over. He had had a psychiatrist suggest once that it was his own cynicism and lack of fulfillment that caused it to happen. He had changed shrinks the very next day, because his writing was his writing, damn it, and had nothing to do with his personal life whatsoever. He had followed that up by getting himself pitifully drunk and calling Tohma to rant about it, something he only did when he was too drunk to know any better. Most of that conversation was a haze in his memory, but he did remember Tohma saying, “You’ve got the right of it, Eiri-kun. Real beautiful stories never have happy endings.” Eiri could imagine him just from his tone of voice at that moment, almost, with quiet pain in long-lashed eyes that should have looked ridiculous on a male face, and a sweet, deceiving smile. It was the look he always wore when he talked like this. Because the mental image irritated him and he was smashingly drunk, Eiri had thrown down the telephone.
That had been months ago, anyway, but it was something that stayed graven on his mind, one of those useless things that shouldn’t have kept coming back, but did. It pissed him off even more than the shrink’s opinion, but it wasn’t as if he could simply fire Tohma. Tohma was too much the only true constant in his life, even if he, too, drove him batshit. Rather like Shuichi, actually. But Eiri hated him when he had that quiet sadness in his eyes because he could sense that behind that look there were secrets, hundreds of them untold. Tohma gave off an air of knowing things, things Eiri felt like he should know but didn’t. It frightened him and irritated him and pulled him towards his sister’s soft-spoken husband, with his long-fingered musician’s hands and his cool green eyes and his quietly lying smiles. He thought sometimes everything about Tohma was actually a lie.
But everything about him was a lie too, so that was all right.
That was why it was Tohma he called when he was too drunk to know any better-they were alike in that way, and Tohma was the only one who really understood.
The document on his computer screen was filling with words, a love scene, beautiful in its simplicity. Outside of his window, snow fell, cloaking everything in silence. It was one of the things he had remembered recently under his shrink’s unrelenting efforts. When he was younger, once upon a time and long ago in a place that was too fuzzy in his mind to be reality, he had loved the snow. “I like watching the snow falling. It makes me think of you.” He remembered that phrase, too, pulled out of a past too blurred to make sense. Yuki, probably. Yuki meant snow.
Yuki meant merciless headaches, and snow meant half-formed memories.
The words on the page kept flowing. He stopped, scrolling up to see what he had written and fix any errors he might have made.
“Time slows down when it’s snowing, and the world gets smaller. There’s nothing except you.”
He stared at the two sentences on the page feeling a bizarre sense of déjà vu. His head pounded when he tried to remember where it was familiar from. As always when he spent too long trying to clarify his past the images he could call up came without any rhyme or reason.
His high school in New York. A four-poster bed with an intricately worked quilt. The sound of the ocean. “My birthday’s tomorrow.” Flying down an empty rain-slick road. The crinkling eyes of a smiling elderly waitress. Lavender-scented sheets. Quiet ticking as he fell asleep. Feeling warm, so warm despite the wind’s efforts to rip his jacket off of him. “That sounds like something out of a book.” A soft, worn rug on the bare skin of his back. Snow outside the bay windows, snow on his lashes, snow melting in his bare hands.
Nonsense.
He cursed softly and stood with the intention of finding a beer before going back to the frustrating document. The phone rang. He snatched it up, ready to snap at whoever was on the other end because he wanted someone to blame, and he was fairly sure it was Shuichi anyway, because who else would dare call his cell phone when they knew he was working, damn it? “What the hell do you want?”
Silence, then a cheerful, “Oh dear, I seem to have caught you at a bad time, Eiri-kun.” And this, this was even worse than Shuichi, because he would quietly take the verbal abuse without showing any sign of weakness, and right now, Eiri wanted someone else to be hurting like he was.
“I’m working,” he said, stalking to the kitchen and ripping into an unopened carton of beer. He popped the top of the can open and took a swallow, but it didn’t help. “And don’t call me that.”
The voice on the other end of the line was amused. “Yes, I gathered as much. You’re particularly cheerful when you work. Is it not going well?”
“What the hell do you want, Seguchi?”
“Now I’m wounded!” But he didn’t sound it. His voice stayed smooth as satin and unperturbed. “I was just watching the snow falling, and decided to call you. You’re Yuki now, right? Snow, Yuki-san. Too difficult to resist.”
I like watching the snow falling. It makes me think of you.
“I don’t have time for this.”
“That’s all right then. I just wanted to see how you were doing with Shindou-san gone, but you seem to be in good shape. That and wish you a happy birthday.”
“My birthday’s tomorrow,” he growled.
“Yes, but I’m calling you today,” he said blithely.
But I’m kidnapping you today.
His headache was going to split his head open any moment now. There was something wrong, so wrong with his head-there were images and smiles and conversations and laughter and he didn’t understand any of it, almost as if it was all in some unknown foreign language, and in his mind green eyes watched him with a small compassionate smile and knowing and he wanted to smack that smiling face because it knew everything and he knew nothing at all. “Go to hell, Seguchi.”
“With how often you send me there, you should realize I never stay where you want me.”
He was tired, too tired to deal with this. “I need to write. If you didn’t need anything but to wish me a happy birthday, you’ve done it, so go do whatever it is you were doing.”
“Of course.” At last, there was pain in the smooth voice, like ripples on the surface of water, but Eiri gained no pleasure from it. “I should know better than to bother you when you’re working. It’s just that…”
“What?” he asked, taking a long swallow of beer.
“Nothing.” There were walls between them, and distance. Since Shuichi, Tohma had pushed at him less and less frequently. In some ways, they had become perfect strangers, and Eiri rarely though anymore that the touch of a cool, long-fingered hand inspired nostalgia, that he remembered those green eyes before they were shuttered against the world, that it had been a very long time since he had heard his brother-in-law laugh. And he never called Tohma anymore except when he was too drunk to know better and instinct took over. Because he didn’t care and he had his own life and that was the way he wanted it.
Wasn’t it?
“Hey, Seguchi…”
“Yes?” There was something in his voice that Eiri heard so rarely he didn’t know what to call it. On anyone else, it might be called despair.
“The day before my birthday… my sixteenth birthday,” he clarified. It would have had to be that one. He could remember the others. “It snowed… didn’t it?”
Silence on the other end of the line, then, “Yes, it snowed.”
For some reason, that made him inexplicably sad. He felt as if he were standing on the edge of something-all he had to do was ask. Tohma could tell him, and he would understand the jumbled images in his mind. Then maybe he would remember the place with lavender-scented sheets and who snow once reminded him of. But that was cheating. It wasn’t his memory if he couldn’t remember it himself, and he was too proud to ask someone else to tell his life back to him, and too scared, and besides, it didn’t matter because the past was past. So instead of asking, he only said, “Thanks. I have to go write.”
“Happy birthday,” he heard as he took the phone away from his ear and pushed the button to end the call.
He sat back down at the desk and looked at the three pages he had managed to type. As always when he wrote happy, sweet scenes he felt strangely hollow and unfulfilled. With a glare at the half-empty beer can, he picked up where he had left off. The couple fell asleep, fingers linked, as snow fell outside the window, making the rest of the world unimportant.
Maybe this time he would try writing a happy ending…
You’ve got the right of it, Eiri-kun. Real beautiful stories never have happy endings.
…But probably not.
***
X-posted to: tohma_x_eiri, gravi_muse_meet
Title: Happy Endings
Genre: Angst/romance
Rating: PG-13 just in case, for Eiri's occasional language
Characters: Somewhat Tohma/Eiri, Eiri/Shuichi (only because it couldn't be avoided...)
Wordcount: 2,412
Description: Shuichi demands why Eiri's books never have happy endings.
Warning: Fits very neatly into Stars-verse and references chapter 19 VERY heavily.
Disclaimer: *checks* Nope, still don't own it.
***
Shuichi had asked him about a week ago, hands on his hips and clearly looking for a confrontation, why his novels never had happy endings. He didn’t really know where this had come from-he very rarely tried to make sense from the workings of his lover’s mind. He had a notion it would only make him tired and irritable, and he was always tired and often irritable anyway, so he left it alone.
At the time of the argument, of course, he only growled that someone with so little talent he couldn’t even manage to write a love song that didn’t make the listener want to gag wouldn’t understand. This, of course, led to Shuichi whining and crying and throwing a tantrum, which invariably led to sex, because it was the best way to shut Shuichi up. After, Shuichi seemed to forget all about his all-important question, and he wasn’t about to remind the boy and argue about it.
For the past several months, Shuichi had been hinting (and by hinting he meant leaving little notes everywhere, writing it on the bathroom mirror in shaving cream, and generally being about as subtle as a jackhammer) that “Yuki should write a book about us.” The demand for happy endings had doubtlessly been connected to that somehow. At the time of the first demand, Eiri’s only response had been a blank stare, and when he hadn’t immediately told Shuichi to go to hell and take his stupid idea with him, that had apparently signified to the pink-haired boy that in fact he was willing to do it-he just needed some convincing.
That was how their relationship worked most of the time-it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Most of the time that was all right, and sometimes it drove him batshit, but they stayed together anyway, over a year now. It had been so long the paparazzi didn’t even seem to care about hounding them anymore. His brother joked that Eiri had finally settled down and gotten married like a good boy (but only at a distance; Tatsuha seemed to be a little afraid of repercussions, and with good cause). It was certainly longer than he’d ever stayed with anyone, and he was more content than he ever remembered being, mostly, except when Shuichi got these random ideas about “advancing our relationship” into his head and wanted to talk about meaningless emotional shit for hours or demanded crazy things-like the book about them.
That was why a week ago, on Valentine’s Day, Eiri had stoically choked down a slice of the horrendous chocolate cake his lover had made trying not to wince so that he didn’t prompt another childish tantrum. Except then Shuichi had suddenly sprung this happy ending shit on him and he found himself too irritated not to snap back, and all his hard work at keeping the peace went down the drain. That was why, when Shuichi came home in tears two days later to inform him he was being dragged out on tour, at gunpoint if need be, Eiri actually felt rather relieved. “So go. What do I care?”
“But it’s Yuki’s birthday this week!”
He rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to his beer. “You’re such a kid. Who cares?”
“I care!” the pink-haired boy insisted adamantly. “It’s my beloved Yuki’s birthday and I’m going to miss it!” This prompted a fresh flood of crocodile tears.
Eiri could feel the headache coming on and downed the rest of the beer to numb it. “It’s not important. I never celebrate my birthday, and I’m not about to start now.” Last year during his birthday they had still been in one of their off phases, so he had never had to counter these arguments before. “I’d lock myself in my office and write even if you were here. I have a deadline in a month. It’s this thing called work. You might want to try it. Supposedly people who call themselves professionals do it occasionally.”
Which led to a tantrum, which led to sex, which led to Shuichi leaving the topic alone until he moped out with a suitcase five days later for his two-week spin across Japan, leaving Eiri with blissful silence to work in-which was exactly how he wanted it. Shuichi was Shuichi, and maybe he loved the idiot nearly as much as he was annoyed by him, but he was too high maintenance for Eiri to have any hope whatsoever of finishing his manuscript while he was underfoot. Besides which, he hadn’t lied. He never celebrated his birthday.
So February twenty-second he sat and stared at the blank document on his screen, thinking about happy endings.
It had been easy to snap at Shuichi about it because that required no thought. The truth of it was, his novels ended in disaster time after time simply because they did. He never planned out his endings, and it wasn’t as though he gained some sort of sadistic pleasure from shattering people’s hopes over and over. He had had a psychiatrist suggest once that it was his own cynicism and lack of fulfillment that caused it to happen. He had changed shrinks the very next day, because his writing was his writing, damn it, and had nothing to do with his personal life whatsoever. He had followed that up by getting himself pitifully drunk and calling Tohma to rant about it, something he only did when he was too drunk to know any better. Most of that conversation was a haze in his memory, but he did remember Tohma saying, “You’ve got the right of it, Eiri-kun. Real beautiful stories never have happy endings.” Eiri could imagine him just from his tone of voice at that moment, almost, with quiet pain in long-lashed eyes that should have looked ridiculous on a male face, and a sweet, deceiving smile. It was the look he always wore when he talked like this. Because the mental image irritated him and he was smashingly drunk, Eiri had thrown down the telephone.
That had been months ago, anyway, but it was something that stayed graven on his mind, one of those useless things that shouldn’t have kept coming back, but did. It pissed him off even more than the shrink’s opinion, but it wasn’t as if he could simply fire Tohma. Tohma was too much the only true constant in his life, even if he, too, drove him batshit. Rather like Shuichi, actually. But Eiri hated him when he had that quiet sadness in his eyes because he could sense that behind that look there were secrets, hundreds of them untold. Tohma gave off an air of knowing things, things Eiri felt like he should know but didn’t. It frightened him and irritated him and pulled him towards his sister’s soft-spoken husband, with his long-fingered musician’s hands and his cool green eyes and his quietly lying smiles. He thought sometimes everything about Tohma was actually a lie.
But everything about him was a lie too, so that was all right.
That was why it was Tohma he called when he was too drunk to know any better-they were alike in that way, and Tohma was the only one who really understood.
The document on his computer screen was filling with words, a love scene, beautiful in its simplicity. Outside of his window, snow fell, cloaking everything in silence. It was one of the things he had remembered recently under his shrink’s unrelenting efforts. When he was younger, once upon a time and long ago in a place that was too fuzzy in his mind to be reality, he had loved the snow. “I like watching the snow falling. It makes me think of you.” He remembered that phrase, too, pulled out of a past too blurred to make sense. Yuki, probably. Yuki meant snow.
Yuki meant merciless headaches, and snow meant half-formed memories.
The words on the page kept flowing. He stopped, scrolling up to see what he had written and fix any errors he might have made.
“Time slows down when it’s snowing, and the world gets smaller. There’s nothing except you.”
He stared at the two sentences on the page feeling a bizarre sense of déjà vu. His head pounded when he tried to remember where it was familiar from. As always when he spent too long trying to clarify his past the images he could call up came without any rhyme or reason.
His high school in New York. A four-poster bed with an intricately worked quilt. The sound of the ocean. “My birthday’s tomorrow.” Flying down an empty rain-slick road. The crinkling eyes of a smiling elderly waitress. Lavender-scented sheets. Quiet ticking as he fell asleep. Feeling warm, so warm despite the wind’s efforts to rip his jacket off of him. “That sounds like something out of a book.” A soft, worn rug on the bare skin of his back. Snow outside the bay windows, snow on his lashes, snow melting in his bare hands.
Nonsense.
He cursed softly and stood with the intention of finding a beer before going back to the frustrating document. The phone rang. He snatched it up, ready to snap at whoever was on the other end because he wanted someone to blame, and he was fairly sure it was Shuichi anyway, because who else would dare call his cell phone when they knew he was working, damn it? “What the hell do you want?”
Silence, then a cheerful, “Oh dear, I seem to have caught you at a bad time, Eiri-kun.” And this, this was even worse than Shuichi, because he would quietly take the verbal abuse without showing any sign of weakness, and right now, Eiri wanted someone else to be hurting like he was.
“I’m working,” he said, stalking to the kitchen and ripping into an unopened carton of beer. He popped the top of the can open and took a swallow, but it didn’t help. “And don’t call me that.”
The voice on the other end of the line was amused. “Yes, I gathered as much. You’re particularly cheerful when you work. Is it not going well?”
“What the hell do you want, Seguchi?”
“Now I’m wounded!” But he didn’t sound it. His voice stayed smooth as satin and unperturbed. “I was just watching the snow falling, and decided to call you. You’re Yuki now, right? Snow, Yuki-san. Too difficult to resist.”
I like watching the snow falling. It makes me think of you.
“I don’t have time for this.”
“That’s all right then. I just wanted to see how you were doing with Shindou-san gone, but you seem to be in good shape. That and wish you a happy birthday.”
“My birthday’s tomorrow,” he growled.
“Yes, but I’m calling you today,” he said blithely.
But I’m kidnapping you today.
His headache was going to split his head open any moment now. There was something wrong, so wrong with his head-there were images and smiles and conversations and laughter and he didn’t understand any of it, almost as if it was all in some unknown foreign language, and in his mind green eyes watched him with a small compassionate smile and knowing and he wanted to smack that smiling face because it knew everything and he knew nothing at all. “Go to hell, Seguchi.”
“With how often you send me there, you should realize I never stay where you want me.”
He was tired, too tired to deal with this. “I need to write. If you didn’t need anything but to wish me a happy birthday, you’ve done it, so go do whatever it is you were doing.”
“Of course.” At last, there was pain in the smooth voice, like ripples on the surface of water, but Eiri gained no pleasure from it. “I should know better than to bother you when you’re working. It’s just that…”
“What?” he asked, taking a long swallow of beer.
“Nothing.” There were walls between them, and distance. Since Shuichi, Tohma had pushed at him less and less frequently. In some ways, they had become perfect strangers, and Eiri rarely though anymore that the touch of a cool, long-fingered hand inspired nostalgia, that he remembered those green eyes before they were shuttered against the world, that it had been a very long time since he had heard his brother-in-law laugh. And he never called Tohma anymore except when he was too drunk to know better and instinct took over. Because he didn’t care and he had his own life and that was the way he wanted it.
Wasn’t it?
“Hey, Seguchi…”
“Yes?” There was something in his voice that Eiri heard so rarely he didn’t know what to call it. On anyone else, it might be called despair.
“The day before my birthday… my sixteenth birthday,” he clarified. It would have had to be that one. He could remember the others. “It snowed… didn’t it?”
Silence on the other end of the line, then, “Yes, it snowed.”
For some reason, that made him inexplicably sad. He felt as if he were standing on the edge of something-all he had to do was ask. Tohma could tell him, and he would understand the jumbled images in his mind. Then maybe he would remember the place with lavender-scented sheets and who snow once reminded him of. But that was cheating. It wasn’t his memory if he couldn’t remember it himself, and he was too proud to ask someone else to tell his life back to him, and too scared, and besides, it didn’t matter because the past was past. So instead of asking, he only said, “Thanks. I have to go write.”
“Happy birthday,” he heard as he took the phone away from his ear and pushed the button to end the call.
He sat back down at the desk and looked at the three pages he had managed to type. As always when he wrote happy, sweet scenes he felt strangely hollow and unfulfilled. With a glare at the half-empty beer can, he picked up where he had left off. The couple fell asleep, fingers linked, as snow fell outside the window, making the rest of the world unimportant.
Maybe this time he would try writing a happy ending…
You’ve got the right of it, Eiri-kun. Real beautiful stories never have happy endings.
…But probably not.
***
X-posted to: tohma_x_eiri, gravi_muse_meet