Gift for tia_junan!
To: tia_junan
From: santa-johnny
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
Title: your ex lover is dead
Pairing/Group: Akanishi Jin/Kamenashi Kazuya, Akanishi Jin/Kuroki Meisa
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some angst, some strong language, some implied mentions of abuse/destructive relationship
Notes: I wanted to write a fic about the disintegration of relationships, and I wanted to run a parallel split between Akame and Jin/Meisa but it turned out into more of an exploration of both relationships and how one affects the other, I guess.
Thanks as always to my lovely beta, and the title is stolen off the amazing song your ex lover is dead by stars. This probably wasn't what you were expecting I think but I hope you enjoy this tia_junan!
Also a note:
I suggest you highlight to find another angle.
Summary: There is not enough room for three in this romance
YOUR EX LOVER IS DEAD
PRESENT
Jin is an absolute fuckwit.
He can say this with confidence about himself. He knows there are a few choice words people use to describe him. This is one of them.
At twenty eight he feels the pressures of his age mounting on him. Twenty eight years of living and he has amounted to a wildly successful career as a group, a moderately successful career as an artist, a sometimes successful marriage and a ghost hanging around the back of his shoulders. It clings to his skin, like the heat. It is constantly there.
Meisa shifts around in their bed. He watches the swell of her stomach, lightly rounded from the traces of her pregnancy. her breathing puffs into the air. As she turns and shifts onto her stomach she stretches, reaches out in front of her. He wonders if she is reaching for someone, someone other than him. He watches her, traces a feather light finger down her bare back. In another life he might have been tracing a finger down broader shoulders sloping to a bony spine, ragged edges and sharpness. Here he has a different sharpness, the sharpness that comes with a woman’s body.
Still beautiful, but different.
This wasn’t the reality that he wanted, or even expected but it is the reality that he owns and that is all the difference.
PAST
You are fourteen and playing truth or dare with Yamapi.
I dare you, he says, I dare you to go and annoy that stringy boy over there watching us so he goes away. Go embarrass him or something it’ll be funny.
You look around and see a stick of a boy, a scrawny kid with a broken nose and angry eyebrows. Kamenashi, you think he’s called. You only remember his name because you are fourteen and you think anyone with the last name turtle pear is a total joke.
No way, you scoff, I’m pretty sure being a loser is contagious.
Yamapi laughs though a sharp bark. You know that you should probably impress him. Yamapi is the top here, you are sitting where everyone else wants to be. All eyes are on you as a pair, the golden duo. The future is nothing but bright for you both.
When it first happens though you are fifteen and have mushroom hair, a lazy grin that only a boy of fifteen can wear. Your manager tells you to stick together with Kamenashi so no one gets lost, and you are fifteen and you may be pretty and empty looking but you aren’t stupid. You know that they are trying to promote a friendship with this scrawny, ugly little boy and sell it as a commodity. A package, labelled so the fans know what they are going to get. And you know the fans will buy. They will buy anything if they believe in it enough.
You are waiting for him to fix his hair in the bathroom when the thought slides through you. You shake it away though, a boy who wants to tease another boy is normal. A boy who wants to kiss another boy is crazy, acting on impulse is what kills humans.
It would be fun though, you think. A joke. Pi and the others will laugh with you later for it, the weird strange boy who hasn’t grown into his looks and that no one likes. It’ll embarrass him and make him stop hanging around the outskirts of your group, anyway.
You lean in to surround him but when his eyes meet yours you feel the weight of distance and when his lips meet yours you are engulfed, you realise exactly how deep you have waded, a tidal pool with no life guard and the walls are falling away.
PRESENT
Yamapi comes to see the baby and visit amongst promotions and magazines interviews. He is decked out in a white three-piece suit and Jin feels inadequate in his ratty hoodie and battered jeans, although really, Yamapi is the overdressed one. He trails his eyes over Jin slightly, and his lips curl into a smirk.
You look like shit, he says. Jin shrugs, it’s true after all. He feels like something has been drained out of him lately, the joy he used to find in living has been changed somewhat. Lately he hasn’t even gone outside with a specific purpose. He takes trips to the nearest Lawson and buys magazines and cold bento boxes. He sometimes buys food and cooks. It’s an endless repeat of the same day, the actors in his play are all the same.
Yamapi leaves Jin behind and quickly walks to the cradle and stares at the baby for a bit. She mews, and opens her eyes, like she knows someone is there. Yamapi touches her forehead lightly and stares a little more. She has Jin’s eyes, his hungry eyes. She blinks, and closes them again, crawls back into herself.
When he moves back to the living room Jin is sitting on the sofa, his head laced through his hands. He is sitting amongst piles of ratty paper. All of them talk about bright lights and salt sticking to fingers and dark, luminous eyes.
Do you regret it? Leaving KAT-TUN I mean he asks, trailing an eye over Jin’s battered guitar and sheets full of songs that will have no audience. Jin has been writing and writing and writing, he is living on words and melodies, he breathes poetry and rap.
I thought I would be free. I wanted a clean slate, Jin says. Yamapi stares at Jin’s dazed eyes, exhaustion and stress mounting. Yamapi has been stressed working too hard and Jin has been stressed doing nothing. Sitting opposite from each other they form a mirror image, with polished hair and deep lines in their faces. They are both beautiful, and they are both miserable. The golden boy and the dark horse. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
You just have to survive through this winter Jin, he says. There is a planner on the wall and it is curiously blank. A clean slate. Too clean.
He just has to survive through this winter. Johnny’s winter. The barren winter.
PAST
You tangle together in his dressing room on the Gokusen set, you kiss him, hard and fast against the wall. He slams you into his dressing table, dropping his hand held mirror and it shatters as it hits the ground. Aggressive fucking has become your forte, the base and foundation of this relationship built around lust and need. You are both just so angry about this, this reliance on each other, this rabid want that pulses through both your veins. If you think more and try and analyse this it makes you angrier so you don’t. You lean closer and you rip your fury into his mouth.
Later you go to a nearby amusement park with the rest of the cast. You are tired now, you want to be kind. You tug on his hand, and you pull him away, sneaking away from the group. You win pair rings at a sideshow game as a consolation prize, but he laughs and slips one on your pinky. For good luck, he says. On the Ferris wheel you reach out hesitantly to touch the top of his hands and his fingers twitch back and reach for you. You twine your hands, you draw a finger across his face as you lean in for a kiss. You are both learning to be gentle. It is almost romantic.
Afterwards you both kick back in your seats and you teach him how to smoke his first cigarette at you reach the top of the cycle. His hair shines amber in the light, and you want him so much you could cry. The city spreads beneath you, a shining mecca. Look below, at the artificial lights and look up, into the dark pits of his eyes, animal eyes. There is a predator in front of you. Everything is beautiful tonight.
PRESENT
There is a smog hanging over the city. Jin awakes, he blinks, he rises off the couch. Meisa had probably left in a hurry, the glass door to the balcony is slightly ajar and the blinds are open. Her ashtray outside is overflowing and cigarette butts litter the ground but he doesn’t dare to disturb the montage. He shields his eyes, looks away from the balcony.
Jin didn’t want an apartment with a balcony, but Meisa insisted on it.
I need somewhere to escape to, she had said when they were looking for somewhere to live. This apartment had too many rooms and too much space and was ridiculously modern and extravagant and empty and it was perfect for them both. She hides on the balcony and Jin hides in the closet of the guest bedroom and they sit these simultaneously and chain smoke their cigarettes. Meisa is not allowed in the closet and Jin is not allowed on the balcony.
Meisa comes home to Jin playing the guitar in the wardrobe and singing scraps of a new song. He hears the steps of her coming and quickly stops. He walks outside the closet and winds himself around her legs, sinewy. Meisa is looking towards the window. The window to the guest room is open and Jin has a clear view of Tokyo. Opulent, decadent Tokyo. Cities built upon the base of the wealthy and powerful. Jin has almost had enough of these wasted days, these hangdog days. Meisa looks like she has had enough of everything.
Three is too many in a relationship, Meisa says, sitting on the guestroom bed with her toes curled under her feet.
I know, Jin says. I’m trying.
She looks through him when he replies and he knows that she is seeing something in the space behind him, and he feels like he doesn’t exist. There aren’t any layers between them physically but there is a wall between them, a gulf. They have seen each other naked, at their most vulnerable physical states but vulnerability is harder to reveal when it is in the mind. They are polite lovers, deeply entrenched in themselves. They have both lost people they have loved, and they are only making do with each other.
In the bone white prison of the empty walk in wardrobe he sits and he thinks himself into a panic. He thinks he could relive the last two hours of his life before Meisa walked into the room writing a love song about animals and beings with nothing inside. He isn’t though, he is here sitting amongst mothballs and dusty air. His body remains in this cage, an empty husk.
PAST
You walk in after work to find him sitting outside on the wooden chair on your balcony, sunning himself in the last rays as the day collapses on itself. You walk onto the balcony and sit beside him, next to his legs. He turns his body towards you and tugs off your jacket as you close your eyes under the dregs of the daylight. His actions feel natural, like he has been doing this for years.
Thanks, you say, turning your head so you can look him in the eye. I felt like I was suffocating in that, you joke lightly. You reach out and you lace your hands with him and you smile towards the ground as your rings clink together.
I like the Jin that’s free the most, he says, looking straight at you and smiling, his eyes scrunching up. His silly endearing little smile, the least dangerous part of him. He’s shown you many sides of himself and this is the one you like the most, him relaxed, smiling, loving you with no judgement and no interruption.
You lean in and feel the world fall away, once again, and you feel like you can take to the sky. You feel invincible. There is a roar building up in your stomach, a deep-seated hunger sated. You wish you could superimpose this moment, you both caught in the sun, silhouetted against a cloudless sky. And that’s when you realise: you love him, desperately.
PRESENT
Jin wakes up with a start, in a sweat. Its eyes were dark pits. He was trying to escape but the monster ate him. When it kissed him, it swallowed him whole.
PAST
Take a trip down memory lane and watch it all unravel. You can’t say you had made each other very happy at all.
You remember life in snapshots: him getting so angry his eyes snapping, him knowing where to hit exactly when he hurled his words at you, him throwing a vase at you. It was a horrid crystal thing which he loved and you hated. It shattered next to your head and the shards cut your cheek.
And picture this again: you making snide remarks behind his back, you flushing his pills down the drain, you pinning him to the table until his child-like wrists bruised. He had fairy bones for most of the time you were together, you both had split lips from fistfights. You both might have broken something. You remember the look on his face, his eyes patchy with the reflection of rain as you walked down the corridor and your way out of his life.
You have been hurt, but you have hurt back just as viciously. You liked to think you were romantic but the only memories you can conjure when you were together are ones of his tear streaked face, his body crumpling to the ground. And you have cried too, alone, afraid of being truthful to yourself, to this self destructive masquerade of a relationship. This is the sort of game you both played.
Oh yes, you are an expert in hurting, you have dug the teeth in. We are all animals.
You remember sometimes on hazy days with too much sun, when you are dizzyingly drunk, only when you are dizzyingly drunk, you remember pinning each other to the sand, your fingers tracing his salt streaked hair. You remember swapping kisses on lazy afternoons, your legs tangled with bedsheets. You remember it all until you are sober and the anger drains it all away and leaves you as a wasted body, easy pickings for the birds.
.... . .-.. .--.
You are sitting in a 24 hour cafe in America reading about the Titanic for a history class when auburn hair catches the corner of your eye. Kame, you think, until you remember that Kame’s hair is brown now and he is in Japan and you are here. Far, far away.
You hadn’t thought of him too much until you saw that hair. It reminded you so much of him, that’s all, and suddenly you’re remembering everything again. It’s all flooding in past the blockage in your mind. Kame, sitting by a fountain, feeding some ugly pigeons. Kame, blowing smoke rings on your balcony, his eyes reflecting the night scape. Kame, his hands beating a tattoo against your chest as he leans in closer, and closer, and closer.
Then the dreams of him come in torrents. They say that dreams have the power to shape the reality of those in them, taking root in the minds of those asleep, sending them messages that can’t be realised. They say dreams have the power to consume. These days, your dreams have started to feel more alive to you, like they are real moments superimposed in your subconscious, folding themselves into the fabric of your mind.
You hunger for him, your downy eyed lover. Would you rather choke on that heart, clutching your throat with your slackened hands or would you rather have the heart that is choked on, that indelible delicacy, that reminder that someone out there is trying to love you. You’re being pulled both ways right now: are you the one who is loving or are you the one who is loved? Which one is it? Both pull tears to your eyes and cause you to wake up with wet cheeks and your eyes wide open.
It is harder to conjure his face when you are awake though. Time heals all wounds. They fade together in your mind, some of the biggest moments in your life glazed over with the sheen of one starting to forget. You think about a cigarette glowing against the glass door of your old balcony, the familiarity of the slow speed of a Ferris wheel and the spread of city lights underneath. The way he looked in the surf, the way the salt glinted off his hair. Crinkled eyes and feather light bones. A smile with a split lip. A glint on your pinky. They bring no meaning.
Liar.
PRESENT
At the rehearsal for Countdown they stand at the same table, grabbing food. Jin’s surprised he was invited to Countdown at all, Johnny’s iron fist is a chokehold.
Hi, Jin says I’ve missed you
He turns, angles his body towards yours.
Hi, he says, cocking an eyebrow back at you, a smile hanging off his lips.
It’s been a while Kame, Jin says, scooping the dregs of miso soup into his bowl. I’ve been a fuckwit
Yeah it has. Have you been well, he asks, the consummate gentleman, turning his head to straighten out a kink in his shoulder. Jin swears he can remember the lines of his body, even now, even after all this time, the way his sturdy shoulders pointed into a vulnerable back. He imagines himself marking that body now, taking him apart slowly on the floor. A touch, I used to love you. A kiss, you used to be mine.
Not too bad, the baby keeps me up, Jin says, a lilt in his voice. I dream about you and I wake up drowning
Oh yes, I never got to tell you in person. Congratulations, he says, breaking out into a scrunched up smile, his eyes disappearing into slits.
Suddenly he hears someone’s voice call out Kame’s name. It could be KAT-TUN’s new manager, it could be Koki. And this time, Kame walks away from him.
Later your manager walks up to you and hisses that you better play nice with Kamenashi, he suggested you be allowed to perform.
You’re somehow not surprised.
Later after a few drinks you corner him in the bathroom and try to kiss him. He punches you in the corner of your mouth and while you bleed he lights a cigarette and breathes smoke in your face. You left me, Jin. Let it go. The flicker of flame from his lighter shines into your eyes, reflecting a want, or need to feel something other than shame.
PRESENT
When Jin gets back form Countdown Meisa stands against the wall next to the glass looking out to the balcony, the light from the end of her cigarette a fleck in the night. She picked up Jin’s smoking habit and now she always smells like something is burning. She chokes the cigarette back like she wants to char herself from the inside out. She is wearing a shawl carelessly draped over her thin gym clothes and you know she has been out running. The slight roundness that was left from carrying the baby is gone. It is like the baby never existed inside her. She is starting the shooting for a drama tomorrow. Tomorrow she will be the breadwinner again and Jin will wake up three hours after she leaves the house to a blank calendar and instructions on how to prepare milk formula for their child. It has been a long winter.
“You thinking of someone?” she asks into the night.
“No,” he says. Kame
She turns her head towards his, her eyes cutting.
“How is he?” she asks, and Jin knows he’s been caught out. Her sharp gaze makes him nervous, she is on the attack, a lithe beast with her claws outstretched. There have only been three people who can cut Jin down with a gaze; Johnny is one, she is another and the last person remains unnamed between them, a gulf in this relationship, the predator in this menagerie.
From where he is standing he notes that she is beautiful, strikingly so. Her hair, dyed brown for the role is slightly scruffy, framed against features so precise they might be carved from stone. Sometimes he wakes up with her by his side and he can’t believe that they co-exist in the same apartment. She is funny, she is down to earth, she knows how to make miso soup exactly the way he likes it now. Their daughter is beautiful. He thinks he can grow to love her. He just needs some time. He just needs to stop dreaming and leave behind the closet where he slips up sometimes and thinks of a shadow who used to be his lover. It is a season to pretend, and everyone who moves within these walls is an expert.
Kame, he thinks. Kame, Kame, Kame.
He is happy, he really is.
From: santa-johnny
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
Title: your ex lover is dead
Pairing/Group: Akanishi Jin/Kamenashi Kazuya, Akanishi Jin/Kuroki Meisa
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some angst, some strong language, some implied mentions of abuse/destructive relationship
Notes: I wanted to write a fic about the disintegration of relationships, and I wanted to run a parallel split between Akame and Jin/Meisa but it turned out into more of an exploration of both relationships and how one affects the other, I guess.
Thanks as always to my lovely beta, and the title is stolen off the amazing song your ex lover is dead by stars. This probably wasn't what you were expecting I think but I hope you enjoy this tia_junan!
Also a note:
I suggest you highlight to find another angle.
Summary: There is not enough room for three in this romance
YOUR EX LOVER IS DEAD
PRESENT
Jin is an absolute fuckwit.
He can say this with confidence about himself. He knows there are a few choice words people use to describe him. This is one of them.
At twenty eight he feels the pressures of his age mounting on him. Twenty eight years of living and he has amounted to a wildly successful career as a group, a moderately successful career as an artist, a sometimes successful marriage and a ghost hanging around the back of his shoulders. It clings to his skin, like the heat. It is constantly there.
Meisa shifts around in their bed. He watches the swell of her stomach, lightly rounded from the traces of her pregnancy. her breathing puffs into the air. As she turns and shifts onto her stomach she stretches, reaches out in front of her. He wonders if she is reaching for someone, someone other than him. He watches her, traces a feather light finger down her bare back. In another life he might have been tracing a finger down broader shoulders sloping to a bony spine, ragged edges and sharpness. Here he has a different sharpness, the sharpness that comes with a woman’s body.
Still beautiful, but different.
This wasn’t the reality that he wanted, or even expected but it is the reality that he owns and that is all the difference.
PAST
You are fourteen and playing truth or dare with Yamapi.
I dare you, he says, I dare you to go and annoy that stringy boy over there watching us so he goes away. Go embarrass him or something it’ll be funny.
You look around and see a stick of a boy, a scrawny kid with a broken nose and angry eyebrows. Kamenashi, you think he’s called. You only remember his name because you are fourteen and you think anyone with the last name turtle pear is a total joke.
No way, you scoff, I’m pretty sure being a loser is contagious.
Yamapi laughs though a sharp bark. You know that you should probably impress him. Yamapi is the top here, you are sitting where everyone else wants to be. All eyes are on you as a pair, the golden duo. The future is nothing but bright for you both.
When it first happens though you are fifteen and have mushroom hair, a lazy grin that only a boy of fifteen can wear. Your manager tells you to stick together with Kamenashi so no one gets lost, and you are fifteen and you may be pretty and empty looking but you aren’t stupid. You know that they are trying to promote a friendship with this scrawny, ugly little boy and sell it as a commodity. A package, labelled so the fans know what they are going to get. And you know the fans will buy. They will buy anything if they believe in it enough.
You are waiting for him to fix his hair in the bathroom when the thought slides through you. You shake it away though, a boy who wants to tease another boy is normal. A boy who wants to kiss another boy is crazy, acting on impulse is what kills humans.
It would be fun though, you think. A joke. Pi and the others will laugh with you later for it, the weird strange boy who hasn’t grown into his looks and that no one likes. It’ll embarrass him and make him stop hanging around the outskirts of your group, anyway.
You lean in to surround him but when his eyes meet yours you feel the weight of distance and when his lips meet yours you are engulfed, you realise exactly how deep you have waded, a tidal pool with no life guard and the walls are falling away.
PRESENT
Yamapi comes to see the baby and visit amongst promotions and magazines interviews. He is decked out in a white three-piece suit and Jin feels inadequate in his ratty hoodie and battered jeans, although really, Yamapi is the overdressed one. He trails his eyes over Jin slightly, and his lips curl into a smirk.
You look like shit, he says. Jin shrugs, it’s true after all. He feels like something has been drained out of him lately, the joy he used to find in living has been changed somewhat. Lately he hasn’t even gone outside with a specific purpose. He takes trips to the nearest Lawson and buys magazines and cold bento boxes. He sometimes buys food and cooks. It’s an endless repeat of the same day, the actors in his play are all the same.
Yamapi leaves Jin behind and quickly walks to the cradle and stares at the baby for a bit. She mews, and opens her eyes, like she knows someone is there. Yamapi touches her forehead lightly and stares a little more. She has Jin’s eyes, his hungry eyes. She blinks, and closes them again, crawls back into herself.
When he moves back to the living room Jin is sitting on the sofa, his head laced through his hands. He is sitting amongst piles of ratty paper. All of them talk about bright lights and salt sticking to fingers and dark, luminous eyes.
Do you regret it? Leaving KAT-TUN I mean he asks, trailing an eye over Jin’s battered guitar and sheets full of songs that will have no audience. Jin has been writing and writing and writing, he is living on words and melodies, he breathes poetry and rap.
I thought I would be free. I wanted a clean slate, Jin says. Yamapi stares at Jin’s dazed eyes, exhaustion and stress mounting. Yamapi has been stressed working too hard and Jin has been stressed doing nothing. Sitting opposite from each other they form a mirror image, with polished hair and deep lines in their faces. They are both beautiful, and they are both miserable. The golden boy and the dark horse. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
You just have to survive through this winter Jin, he says. There is a planner on the wall and it is curiously blank. A clean slate. Too clean.
He just has to survive through this winter. Johnny’s winter. The barren winter.
PAST
You tangle together in his dressing room on the Gokusen set, you kiss him, hard and fast against the wall. He slams you into his dressing table, dropping his hand held mirror and it shatters as it hits the ground. Aggressive fucking has become your forte, the base and foundation of this relationship built around lust and need. You are both just so angry about this, this reliance on each other, this rabid want that pulses through both your veins. If you think more and try and analyse this it makes you angrier so you don’t. You lean closer and you rip your fury into his mouth.
Later you go to a nearby amusement park with the rest of the cast. You are tired now, you want to be kind. You tug on his hand, and you pull him away, sneaking away from the group. You win pair rings at a sideshow game as a consolation prize, but he laughs and slips one on your pinky. For good luck, he says. On the Ferris wheel you reach out hesitantly to touch the top of his hands and his fingers twitch back and reach for you. You twine your hands, you draw a finger across his face as you lean in for a kiss. You are both learning to be gentle. It is almost romantic.
Afterwards you both kick back in your seats and you teach him how to smoke his first cigarette at you reach the top of the cycle. His hair shines amber in the light, and you want him so much you could cry. The city spreads beneath you, a shining mecca. Look below, at the artificial lights and look up, into the dark pits of his eyes, animal eyes. There is a predator in front of you. Everything is beautiful tonight.
PRESENT
There is a smog hanging over the city. Jin awakes, he blinks, he rises off the couch. Meisa had probably left in a hurry, the glass door to the balcony is slightly ajar and the blinds are open. Her ashtray outside is overflowing and cigarette butts litter the ground but he doesn’t dare to disturb the montage. He shields his eyes, looks away from the balcony.
Jin didn’t want an apartment with a balcony, but Meisa insisted on it.
I need somewhere to escape to, she had said when they were looking for somewhere to live. This apartment had too many rooms and too much space and was ridiculously modern and extravagant and empty and it was perfect for them both. She hides on the balcony and Jin hides in the closet of the guest bedroom and they sit these simultaneously and chain smoke their cigarettes. Meisa is not allowed in the closet and Jin is not allowed on the balcony.
Meisa comes home to Jin playing the guitar in the wardrobe and singing scraps of a new song. He hears the steps of her coming and quickly stops. He walks outside the closet and winds himself around her legs, sinewy. Meisa is looking towards the window. The window to the guest room is open and Jin has a clear view of Tokyo. Opulent, decadent Tokyo. Cities built upon the base of the wealthy and powerful. Jin has almost had enough of these wasted days, these hangdog days. Meisa looks like she has had enough of everything.
Three is too many in a relationship, Meisa says, sitting on the guestroom bed with her toes curled under her feet.
I know, Jin says. I’m trying.
She looks through him when he replies and he knows that she is seeing something in the space behind him, and he feels like he doesn’t exist. There aren’t any layers between them physically but there is a wall between them, a gulf. They have seen each other naked, at their most vulnerable physical states but vulnerability is harder to reveal when it is in the mind. They are polite lovers, deeply entrenched in themselves. They have both lost people they have loved, and they are only making do with each other.
In the bone white prison of the empty walk in wardrobe he sits and he thinks himself into a panic. He thinks he could relive the last two hours of his life before Meisa walked into the room writing a love song about animals and beings with nothing inside. He isn’t though, he is here sitting amongst mothballs and dusty air. His body remains in this cage, an empty husk.
PAST
You walk in after work to find him sitting outside on the wooden chair on your balcony, sunning himself in the last rays as the day collapses on itself. You walk onto the balcony and sit beside him, next to his legs. He turns his body towards you and tugs off your jacket as you close your eyes under the dregs of the daylight. His actions feel natural, like he has been doing this for years.
Thanks, you say, turning your head so you can look him in the eye. I felt like I was suffocating in that, you joke lightly. You reach out and you lace your hands with him and you smile towards the ground as your rings clink together.
I like the Jin that’s free the most, he says, looking straight at you and smiling, his eyes scrunching up. His silly endearing little smile, the least dangerous part of him. He’s shown you many sides of himself and this is the one you like the most, him relaxed, smiling, loving you with no judgement and no interruption.
You lean in and feel the world fall away, once again, and you feel like you can take to the sky. You feel invincible. There is a roar building up in your stomach, a deep-seated hunger sated. You wish you could superimpose this moment, you both caught in the sun, silhouetted against a cloudless sky. And that’s when you realise: you love him, desperately.
PRESENT
Jin wakes up with a start, in a sweat. Its eyes were dark pits. He was trying to escape but the monster ate him. When it kissed him, it swallowed him whole.
PAST
Take a trip down memory lane and watch it all unravel. You can’t say you had made each other very happy at all.
You remember life in snapshots: him getting so angry his eyes snapping, him knowing where to hit exactly when he hurled his words at you, him throwing a vase at you. It was a horrid crystal thing which he loved and you hated. It shattered next to your head and the shards cut your cheek.
And picture this again: you making snide remarks behind his back, you flushing his pills down the drain, you pinning him to the table until his child-like wrists bruised. He had fairy bones for most of the time you were together, you both had split lips from fistfights. You both might have broken something. You remember the look on his face, his eyes patchy with the reflection of rain as you walked down the corridor and your way out of his life.
You have been hurt, but you have hurt back just as viciously. You liked to think you were romantic but the only memories you can conjure when you were together are ones of his tear streaked face, his body crumpling to the ground. And you have cried too, alone, afraid of being truthful to yourself, to this self destructive masquerade of a relationship. This is the sort of game you both played.
Oh yes, you are an expert in hurting, you have dug the teeth in. We are all animals.
You remember sometimes on hazy days with too much sun, when you are dizzyingly drunk, only when you are dizzyingly drunk, you remember pinning each other to the sand, your fingers tracing his salt streaked hair. You remember swapping kisses on lazy afternoons, your legs tangled with bedsheets. You remember it all until you are sober and the anger drains it all away and leaves you as a wasted body, easy pickings for the birds.
.... . .-.. .--.
You are sitting in a 24 hour cafe in America reading about the Titanic for a history class when auburn hair catches the corner of your eye. Kame, you think, until you remember that Kame’s hair is brown now and he is in Japan and you are here. Far, far away.
You hadn’t thought of him too much until you saw that hair. It reminded you so much of him, that’s all, and suddenly you’re remembering everything again. It’s all flooding in past the blockage in your mind. Kame, sitting by a fountain, feeding some ugly pigeons. Kame, blowing smoke rings on your balcony, his eyes reflecting the night scape. Kame, his hands beating a tattoo against your chest as he leans in closer, and closer, and closer.
Then the dreams of him come in torrents. They say that dreams have the power to shape the reality of those in them, taking root in the minds of those asleep, sending them messages that can’t be realised. They say dreams have the power to consume. These days, your dreams have started to feel more alive to you, like they are real moments superimposed in your subconscious, folding themselves into the fabric of your mind.
You hunger for him, your downy eyed lover. Would you rather choke on that heart, clutching your throat with your slackened hands or would you rather have the heart that is choked on, that indelible delicacy, that reminder that someone out there is trying to love you. You’re being pulled both ways right now: are you the one who is loving or are you the one who is loved? Which one is it? Both pull tears to your eyes and cause you to wake up with wet cheeks and your eyes wide open.
It is harder to conjure his face when you are awake though. Time heals all wounds. They fade together in your mind, some of the biggest moments in your life glazed over with the sheen of one starting to forget. You think about a cigarette glowing against the glass door of your old balcony, the familiarity of the slow speed of a Ferris wheel and the spread of city lights underneath. The way he looked in the surf, the way the salt glinted off his hair. Crinkled eyes and feather light bones. A smile with a split lip. A glint on your pinky. They bring no meaning.
Liar.
PRESENT
At the rehearsal for Countdown they stand at the same table, grabbing food. Jin’s surprised he was invited to Countdown at all, Johnny’s iron fist is a chokehold.
Hi, Jin says I’ve missed you
He turns, angles his body towards yours.
Hi, he says, cocking an eyebrow back at you, a smile hanging off his lips.
It’s been a while Kame, Jin says, scooping the dregs of miso soup into his bowl. I’ve been a fuckwit
Yeah it has. Have you been well, he asks, the consummate gentleman, turning his head to straighten out a kink in his shoulder. Jin swears he can remember the lines of his body, even now, even after all this time, the way his sturdy shoulders pointed into a vulnerable back. He imagines himself marking that body now, taking him apart slowly on the floor. A touch, I used to love you. A kiss, you used to be mine.
Not too bad, the baby keeps me up, Jin says, a lilt in his voice. I dream about you and I wake up drowning
Oh yes, I never got to tell you in person. Congratulations, he says, breaking out into a scrunched up smile, his eyes disappearing into slits.
Suddenly he hears someone’s voice call out Kame’s name. It could be KAT-TUN’s new manager, it could be Koki. And this time, Kame walks away from him.
Later your manager walks up to you and hisses that you better play nice with Kamenashi, he suggested you be allowed to perform.
You’re somehow not surprised.
Later after a few drinks you corner him in the bathroom and try to kiss him. He punches you in the corner of your mouth and while you bleed he lights a cigarette and breathes smoke in your face. You left me, Jin. Let it go. The flicker of flame from his lighter shines into your eyes, reflecting a want, or need to feel something other than shame.
PRESENT
When Jin gets back form Countdown Meisa stands against the wall next to the glass looking out to the balcony, the light from the end of her cigarette a fleck in the night. She picked up Jin’s smoking habit and now she always smells like something is burning. She chokes the cigarette back like she wants to char herself from the inside out. She is wearing a shawl carelessly draped over her thin gym clothes and you know she has been out running. The slight roundness that was left from carrying the baby is gone. It is like the baby never existed inside her. She is starting the shooting for a drama tomorrow. Tomorrow she will be the breadwinner again and Jin will wake up three hours after she leaves the house to a blank calendar and instructions on how to prepare milk formula for their child. It has been a long winter.
“You thinking of someone?” she asks into the night.
“No,” he says. Kame
She turns her head towards his, her eyes cutting.
“How is he?” she asks, and Jin knows he’s been caught out. Her sharp gaze makes him nervous, she is on the attack, a lithe beast with her claws outstretched. There have only been three people who can cut Jin down with a gaze; Johnny is one, she is another and the last person remains unnamed between them, a gulf in this relationship, the predator in this menagerie.
From where he is standing he notes that she is beautiful, strikingly so. Her hair, dyed brown for the role is slightly scruffy, framed against features so precise they might be carved from stone. Sometimes he wakes up with her by his side and he can’t believe that they co-exist in the same apartment. She is funny, she is down to earth, she knows how to make miso soup exactly the way he likes it now. Their daughter is beautiful. He thinks he can grow to love her. He just needs some time. He just needs to stop dreaming and leave behind the closet where he slips up sometimes and thinks of a shadow who used to be his lover. It is a season to pretend, and everyone who moves within these walls is an expert.
Kame, he thinks. Kame, Kame, Kame.
He is happy, he really is.