The Things That Matter - Tatta Hitotsu no Koi - G
Author: anamuan
Title: The Things That Matter
Pairing: Nao/Hiroto (Tatta Hitotsu no Koi)
Word Count: 663
Rating: G
A/N: Birthday Christmas New Year's fic for kitsune714. I am sorry it took me so long to get it to you. You've probably forgotten I promised it. Thanks to the ever lovely mycroftnext for the excellent-as-usual beta job.
Whenever she asked Hiroto about the whale lamp, he’d always shrug one shoulder and said, “Well. It was mostly Ren’s idea.” When she pressed him for more details, he’d only half-smile-a quick upward turn of the left corner of his mouth-and press a kiss to her lips.
Nao had always been content to leave it at that. He always told her the important things, so if the whale’s birth wasn’t considered important to him-even if she wondered-she could live with that. Mostly.
Nao kept the lamp on an end table in their living room. When she visited, Nao’s mother inevitably remarked on the whale: “But darling, it doesn’t go with anything.”
Nao always smiled, sometimes trailing a finger through the fiberglass ‘water’ rising from its spout, sometimes not, and replied, “It’s not the sort of piece that goes with things.” Then the kettle would finish boiling and Nao would serve her mother tea in the kitchen, and that was that.
But defending the whale-defending her choices-didn’t mean she wasn’t allowed to wonder.
Ren never brought up the whale either. He seemed to think that whatever the whale might mean, it was obvious and needed no comment. But his face lit up every time he saw it, sitting atop its table, smiling at the world. Smiling a bit like Ren himself when Nao thought about it, bright and unreserved despite the hardships of its childhood-maybe even bright and unreserved because of those hardships. Seeing him, them, in that light, Nao found she couldn’t bear to ask him either. Because having to ask about something so obvious was too much like mocking.
The story came to her eventually. Filtered through different stories and friends and pieced together like quilt-work over years and miles.
Kou mentioning how the colorful pieces of glass had covered the battered kitchen table-top for weeks; how he’d tried to talk Hiroto into letting him use them as chips for a poker-night once, and how Hiroto had good-naturedly thrown him out of the house for that particular quip, leaving him to yell, “Maji de!?” back up the steps.
At a Christmas Eve party at their house, Yuko reminiscing about how much they’d wanted to spend Christmas Eve with their boyfriends when they were younger, and how it had never seemed to work out; following Ayuta remembering how secretive and how happy Hiroto had been leading up to the Christmas Eve the year they’d all met and wondering what he was up to.
Nao herself, cleaning out the back of the closet and finding the letter that had been left with the whale. She and Yuko had stumbled over it in the shipyard one rainy December day.
There were holes, probably, in what Nao could pull together from half-remembered scraps and off-hand comments. It was a ragged quilt, faded with age and stress, but the hard, bright colors of all the intensity of adolescence shone through in places. It wasn’t everything, but it was what she could get. So the story came together and she could not deny its underlying truth. It wasn’t the making of the lamp that really mattered. The love that laboured over the whale that had slowly taken shape on a kitchen table, striving to reach the double deadline: Christmas Eve and Nao’s birthday, that was an old love, a love that died soon thereafter, years and years ago. Hiroto always told her the important things. To Hiroto, making the whale wasn’t important. Not anymore.
But the love that kept the whale, treasured it and bragged about it in the living room, that was a new love, a love with a strong steady heartbeat and happy whale-smile. Every day the whale lived on the corner table next to the couch was a day Hiroto took as a promise of a love that still lived, reborn with the dawn. That was what was important to him. And Nao, she could live with that.
Title: The Things That Matter
Pairing: Nao/Hiroto (Tatta Hitotsu no Koi)
Word Count: 663
Rating: G
A/N: Birthday Christmas New Year's fic for kitsune714. I am sorry it took me so long to get it to you. You've probably forgotten I promised it. Thanks to the ever lovely mycroftnext for the excellent-as-usual beta job.
Whenever she asked Hiroto about the whale lamp, he’d always shrug one shoulder and said, “Well. It was mostly Ren’s idea.” When she pressed him for more details, he’d only half-smile-a quick upward turn of the left corner of his mouth-and press a kiss to her lips.
Nao had always been content to leave it at that. He always told her the important things, so if the whale’s birth wasn’t considered important to him-even if she wondered-she could live with that. Mostly.
Nao kept the lamp on an end table in their living room. When she visited, Nao’s mother inevitably remarked on the whale: “But darling, it doesn’t go with anything.”
Nao always smiled, sometimes trailing a finger through the fiberglass ‘water’ rising from its spout, sometimes not, and replied, “It’s not the sort of piece that goes with things.” Then the kettle would finish boiling and Nao would serve her mother tea in the kitchen, and that was that.
But defending the whale-defending her choices-didn’t mean she wasn’t allowed to wonder.
Ren never brought up the whale either. He seemed to think that whatever the whale might mean, it was obvious and needed no comment. But his face lit up every time he saw it, sitting atop its table, smiling at the world. Smiling a bit like Ren himself when Nao thought about it, bright and unreserved despite the hardships of its childhood-maybe even bright and unreserved because of those hardships. Seeing him, them, in that light, Nao found she couldn’t bear to ask him either. Because having to ask about something so obvious was too much like mocking.
The story came to her eventually. Filtered through different stories and friends and pieced together like quilt-work over years and miles.
Kou mentioning how the colorful pieces of glass had covered the battered kitchen table-top for weeks; how he’d tried to talk Hiroto into letting him use them as chips for a poker-night once, and how Hiroto had good-naturedly thrown him out of the house for that particular quip, leaving him to yell, “Maji de!?” back up the steps.
At a Christmas Eve party at their house, Yuko reminiscing about how much they’d wanted to spend Christmas Eve with their boyfriends when they were younger, and how it had never seemed to work out; following Ayuta remembering how secretive and how happy Hiroto had been leading up to the Christmas Eve the year they’d all met and wondering what he was up to.
Nao herself, cleaning out the back of the closet and finding the letter that had been left with the whale. She and Yuko had stumbled over it in the shipyard one rainy December day.
There were holes, probably, in what Nao could pull together from half-remembered scraps and off-hand comments. It was a ragged quilt, faded with age and stress, but the hard, bright colors of all the intensity of adolescence shone through in places. It wasn’t everything, but it was what she could get. So the story came together and she could not deny its underlying truth. It wasn’t the making of the lamp that really mattered. The love that laboured over the whale that had slowly taken shape on a kitchen table, striving to reach the double deadline: Christmas Eve and Nao’s birthday, that was an old love, a love that died soon thereafter, years and years ago. Hiroto always told her the important things. To Hiroto, making the whale wasn’t important. Not anymore.
But the love that kept the whale, treasured it and bragged about it in the living room, that was a new love, a love with a strong steady heartbeat and happy whale-smile. Every day the whale lived on the corner table next to the couch was a day Hiroto took as a promise of a love that still lived, reborn with the dawn. That was what was important to him. And Nao, she could live with that.