Arashi: A Golden Moon (10)
AUTHOR: Marineko/mylittlecthulhu
FANDOM: Arashi
PAIRING: Juntoshi
RATING: G
DATE: March 14th, 2011
WORD COUNT: 3,100
NOTES/DISCLAIMERS: I do not own Arashi. This is a continuation of This Year's Sakura, although it could be read on its own. **This chapter written for the Japan Earthquake & Tsunami Relief Fund, as a request by valentinekent
Chapter Nine | Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER TEN | Even If Tomorrow Twists Into Darkness
At a standstill, Jun and Ohno looked at each other, neither wanting to back down from their position. “I don’t want or need this,” Jun eventually said. “We’re too different. And you’re Sho’s friend.”
“I like you just fine, despite our differences. And you’re not with Sho anymore.” He saw the momentary shuttered look pass through Jun’s eyes, and wanted to apologise, but stood his ground instead.
“This isn’t going to work out.” Jun had a feeling that if he were ever to let his guard fall when it came to Ohno, it might just destroy him. “You know that.”
“No, I don’t know.” Ohno’s voice was calm, steady, rational. It made Jun feel like he was the only one who felt lost, suspended on air, and he hated it.
“What do you think would happen? That I would just pack up and leave this place, like Sho did? That I’d give up everything I’ve worked for, for you?”
“You’re unhappy with this place, this job.”
“You don’t know that.” Jun’s voice had become quiet, unsure of himself. “I’m good at what I do.”
“There are other things you’re good at, too.”
“You don’t know that, either.” Jun was hurt, and angry. “You can’t just tell me that I’m more than what I am, and make it true. I only know how to be me, and you don’t even know who that is. You wouldn’t fit into my life.”
Ohno waited until Jun finished. He was angry himself, with the fact that Jun thought so little of himself, with the assumption that Ohno had no place in Jun’s life. He knew it was true. Jun came from a family that everyone had heard of, even if he bore a different surname. The people that Jun knew ranged from the very rich to the very famous. Sometimes they were both. Jun was on a first-name basis with many of the owners or curators of the best galleries in town, and he was one of the first they would call whenever they had something new or interesting in. He was steadily getting offered more, and better, jobs, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that he would get a leading role in a drama, or a film, within the next few years. Ohno, on the other hand, was unemployed, and would never have stepped out of the small town he was from if it wasn’t for his friends. Jun’s idea of a good time included opening nights of some hit stage production or an exhibition, with all the crowd and the extravagance those things came with. Ohno had been through a few of those during his last visit, and he wouldn’t mind never having to do so ever again. Even when it came to exhibitions, he preferred to go later, when there weren’t many people, and he could look at everything in peace. Ohno’s favourite thing would still be a quiet, lazy afternoon on his boat. Jun had hated that boat.
“I know who you are,” he said evenly, in the end. “And I’m not giving up.”
})i({
Jun was upset, he knew. So was he. When Jun left, he turned back to his painting. It was almost done - he was working faster, these days, and but after he was done he would always end up so fatigued he’d spend the whole day sleeping - when his phone rang. He shifted the brush in one hand to the other, and picked up his phone without checking the caller ID.
“Sho, I’m about to go to sleep.”
“You lied to me.”
“I did.” Ohno dropped the brush absently into one of the jars that Jun had left on the table from his last visit. As if Jun was expecting that he’d be there again, and that he would need it again. He smiled, and then said in a more amiable manner to Sho, “I’m fine.”
“Good.” Ohno could hear the change of pace in Sho’s breathing, as Sho hesitated. “Good. About Jun...”
“He’s fine, too.” Ohno was starting to feel amused, even as the anxiousness clouded over him. He had had to make a choice, and he did it. Perhaps it wasn’t the choice he thought he would make; after all, he had always thought that he would never do anything deliberately that would hurt Sho. But situations change. “I guess we should talk.”
“Aiba’s right, then.” Sho sounded like he was talking to himself. He probably was; it was something Ohno was used to. He talked too little and Sho talked too much - together, he listened and Sho talked to himself. Usually. “Satoshi, what if -“ Sho cut himself off, knowing that he was about to say something awful. Ohno knew what he wanted to say. That, too, was normal.
“I’m not going to back off,” he said. “Not even for you.” He waited for a response - for Sho to lash out with anger, or hurt, or both. He heard a sharp intake of breath, but that was it. “I’m sorry.”
He heard a shuffle on the other line, and whispers. When a voice spoke out again, it wasn’t Sho’s, but Aiba’s. “Oh-chan, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Aiba sounded disappointed, and Ohno knew why. Once, when they were young, they had made a pact to never let a girl come between any of them. Jun was no girl, but the same principle applied. Or should apply. It was supposed to be understood that his friends came first. They did, for the most part. But Jun wasn’t just some guy. He was one of them, even if he didn’t know it yet. Even if no one else had acknowledged it yet. “Tell Sho I’m sorry.”
“He knows.” There was a pause as Aiba tried to think of what to say. He was used to silence with Ohno. They usually understood each other that easily. But over the distance, connected only through the phone line, silences could take a different quality, and meanings could change. “It’s just a shock to him right now, I think. It’s okay. It’ll be okay. Just - take care, okay?”
“I always do.”
“Not you. You’re careful to the point where you never do anything. That’s why in a way, I’m actually glad about what you’re doing now. But Jun - he’s kind of fragile, I think.”
“‘Handle with care,’” Ohno murmured. “He’s stronger than you think.”
})i({
No sooner than the time it took to hit the ‘end call’ button, his phone rang again. Pressing the ‘receive’ button, Ohno resisted a sigh. He loved his friends, but they could be the most annoying people in the world, sometimes.
He didn’t even have the time to greet Nino before his friend’s voice blared over the phone. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I went to see Oguri from One Art,” he replied casually. “Since I avoided doing that the last time I was here.”
“You know that’s not what I was talking about,” Nino shot back. Then, in a much calmer tone, he continued, “I hope you’re thinking things through before you act.”
“Jun is capable of taking care of himself.”
“I wonder about that,” Nino mused. “But even so, what about you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You know that you’re not going to get him to move here. You know that you don’t like the life where you are, that he’s just going to get more famous as time goes on, and you’re going to hate dealing with that.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I know.”
“Have you given these things any thought at all? What about the fact that the two of you are too different from each other?”
“I’ve thought about it.” From the first time he’d met Jun, he had thought about it. “I’ll be fine, Nino.”
“And Sho?”
“He has Aiba. He’ll be fine, too.”
})i({
Jun didn’t see Ohno the next day. It didn’t take a lot of effort - Ohno was cooped up in the guest room, working on something, while Jun had work. By the time he was finished, and reached home, he was so tired that he went straight to sleep - or at least, tried to. He knew that Ohno was still awake, and working, and he wondered what Ohno was working on. He wondered what Ohno had sold to One Art. He had called Toma up earlier in the day, during a break, but the only thing Toma had told him was “it’s not a portrait.”
That alone had him piqued. He knew that Ohno didn’t only do portraits, but they were what Ohno did best, and did the most. Why would the first painting he sell not be a portrait?
I’m not giving up, Ohno had said.
When he first heard the words, Jun thought his mind had completely blanked out, for a moment. He wanted to retort, to say something that would make Ohno regret his words, something that would make Ohno hate him. But he couldn’t, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. He just couldn’t; when he opened his mouth to speak he felt like something was choking him. Instead, he left, before Ohno could see the flush of pleasure rising up to his face, before he could allow himself to think, perhaps.
})i({
The third day since Ohno’s unexpected arrival, Jun went to One Art. It was the first day of a two-week break he had before his schedule became hectic again. He’d hardly had a day off in weeks, although he did have several half-days. His manager, knowing that he was going to be even busier soon, made sure to clear up his time in between. He wasn’t completely free; the reason he was going to be busy was because of a new stage play that he was going to be in. It had been some time since he had last done a play - he did work in a few when he was younger, but started to concentrate on modeling and television soon after. This was the first time he was going to get a somewhat big supporting role, and he had more lines to remember than he was used to. He was glad for the time off, as it gave him time to go through his script.
Despite that, he didn’t want to be home. Ohno had woken up around noon. Jun left almost immediately, wondering why he felt like he was being chased away from his own house. He didn’t even know why he had to leave in the first place, but told himself that he needed the space to think. He couldn’t think with Ohno around.
He was apprehensive as he walked in the main entrance to the gallery. It wasn’t the first time he was going in to see something they newly acquired. It wasn’t the first time that he was going in to see the work of an artist whose work he loved, or an artist that he helped Shun or Toma discover. And yet, it felt different.
“Jun!” Toma called out, the moment he noticed the model. “Here to see Ohno-san’s painting?” He was grinning so widely that Jun almost backed away.
“Shun told me that he had several new acquisitions in,” he said. He spoke carelessly enough, although his emphasis on the word “several” only served to amuse Toma.
“Yeah, they’re still in the office, though. Go on and check them out, I’ll be there with you in a sec.”
Jun headed towards the office, glancing back at Toma once, suspiciously. When Toma just smiled and waggled his fingers back at Jun, though, Jun shrugged and pushed the door into the room. The trouble with being friends with these people, Jun thought, was that they stopped treating one as a customer. Jun hit the switch for the office lights, and looked around, wondering where Shun would have stacked Ohno’s painting.
Because to say that Shun had “several” new acquisitions was like saying Jun “kind of” hated mess. The office had three or four sets of framed paintings being stacked upright against one side of the wall, while the desk had a small mountain of cylinder-shaped packages, still wrapped, probably with rolled up works inside. Since Toma claimed to have seen Ohno’s painting, Jun assumed that it wouldn’t be in any of the packages. He went to the nearest stack of paintings, and looked through them one by one.
Each was more brilliant than the next, and he paused every now and then to admire the use of colour in one, the elegant brush stroke in another. There was a portrait of a child that he liked, because it caught a certain kind of impishness in the child’s expression that reminded Jun of Ohno’s sketches of Aiba. He found himself tempted to purchase a few of them, even though he knew that he had run out of wall space for new works a long time ago, and actually had more than a few being kept in storage. He was trying to talk himself out of getting a particular abstract work when he came across it. The one he had been looking for.
He hadn’t known what to expect, since Toma had told him it wasn’t a portrait. He hadn’t even known that he’d recognise it for sure without looking at the signature. In the end, there had been no reason for him not to know that it was Ohno’s.
Many shades of blue, and many shades of black. A vast blue sky, at dawn or twilight. (He knew it was twilight.) A tangle of black, intercrossing and connecting and spreading out into a far, unreachable distance. It was beautiful, and it was heartbreaking, the way the lines seemed to go on forever into a faraway place that got darker and darker until it faded to pitch black. Tremulously, he took it out of the stack, and looked at the label Shun had pasted on the back for easy identification. It listed, penciled in with Shun’s simple handwriting, two names, together with the price and title - A Complicated Longing.
Jun was painfully shy. Not many people realise this, even among his friends. He tried so hard not to be, or at least not to appear so. If there was one thing that he didn’t feel self-conscious about, though, was his body. It would have been hard to do his work if he was. The first time he realised that people tended to stare at him, that he drew attention to himself no matter what he did, he wished that there was a way to be invisible. There was something about having complete strangers look at him or talk to him in a certain way, that made him feel like he was being betrayed by his own self at times. It was as if he no longer belonged to himself. But he learned to get used to it, and he had got to a place where he no longer felt uncomfortable when he had his pictures taken, even during the rare times when the photo shoots were more daring than he would have liked. He had done a lot of work that he wasn’t necessarily proud of, but none of them had ever made him feel as vulnerable, or as exposed.
})i({
Ohno was good at waiting. Some people (usually Nino) had called him stubborn because of this, but he thought that it was merely that he was good at waiting - for an argument to peter out, for someone else to say something so he wouldn’t have to, for the customer service at the supply store he got his mail orders from to actually pick up his calls. He never understood the need to rush, and he didn’t like big changes, preferring instead for things to turn the way they naturally would.
So when it came to Jun, he knew from the beginning that it might be a long wait, but he wasn’t afraid of taking his time.
He was waiting, that evening. Jun had left soon after he woke up, when he was still too groggy to register what was going on. He’d finished his new painting. Something inside him was already stirring to work on the next. It was a first, for him - for each painting to spur on the next, like they all belonged to each other, a story in many parts. In a way, he supposed, they were. He had always insisted that his paintings were a hobby, something he liked to do between jobs. It was something he was engrossed in, something that he revels in. But it was a hobby, the way Nino played games or Aiba volunteered at the animal shelter in a nearby town every other weekend.
Lately, he wasn’t so sure. The new paintings were different, he thought. They felt different, somehow. But another part of him asked if it was really true, or if he had always felt the same anxiousness over his work before.
A whole evening, Ohno waited, thinking about how from the first thing he had ever drawn - a rude caricature in a classmate’s notebook - he had grown to need it more and more, despite having never really needed anything prior to that first drawing. There was a restlessness, a dissatisfaction that had always been there, under so many layers of patience and calm.
He was waiting, when he turn the key turn. He felt his entire self turn with the sound, Pavlov’s dog perking up at the sound of the bell.
Jun didn’t walk in; he strode. It was funny, but it made Ohno think of the English word, and how it originated from a German word, one that also meant to quarrel or to fight. (And all this time he had thought that he never listened to Sho’s rambles, he mused.) The word had never seemed more apt, because Jun looked like he was spoiling for a fight.
Jun stopped in the middle of the room, staring him down. Ohno stared back. Jun’s expression told him that the model was waiting for something - an explanation, an apology, possibly a plea for mercy.
It was too bad for Jun, Ohno thought, that Ohno was better at waiting.
He couldn’t tell how long their staring match lasted, but he could almost draw it out on his sketchbook, a silence that screamed in its loudness, a moment stretched through time and charted in a map or a graph.
Then, finally giving in, Jun broke the silence.
“You broke into my darkroom.”
~ to be continued ~
Chapter Nine | Chapter Eleven
Marineko's Notes:
Am sleepy. Have to get ready for work in an hour or two...
A note/reminder - this chapter written for the Japan Earthquake & Tsunami Relief Fund. Thank you, valentinekent, for donating!
FANDOM: Arashi
PAIRING: Juntoshi
RATING: G
DATE: March 14th, 2011
WORD COUNT: 3,100
NOTES/DISCLAIMERS: I do not own Arashi. This is a continuation of This Year's Sakura, although it could be read on its own. **This chapter written for the Japan Earthquake & Tsunami Relief Fund, as a request by valentinekent
Chapter Nine | Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER TEN | Even If Tomorrow Twists Into Darkness
At a standstill, Jun and Ohno looked at each other, neither wanting to back down from their position. “I don’t want or need this,” Jun eventually said. “We’re too different. And you’re Sho’s friend.”
“I like you just fine, despite our differences. And you’re not with Sho anymore.” He saw the momentary shuttered look pass through Jun’s eyes, and wanted to apologise, but stood his ground instead.
“This isn’t going to work out.” Jun had a feeling that if he were ever to let his guard fall when it came to Ohno, it might just destroy him. “You know that.”
“No, I don’t know.” Ohno’s voice was calm, steady, rational. It made Jun feel like he was the only one who felt lost, suspended on air, and he hated it.
“What do you think would happen? That I would just pack up and leave this place, like Sho did? That I’d give up everything I’ve worked for, for you?”
“You’re unhappy with this place, this job.”
“You don’t know that.” Jun’s voice had become quiet, unsure of himself. “I’m good at what I do.”
“There are other things you’re good at, too.”
“You don’t know that, either.” Jun was hurt, and angry. “You can’t just tell me that I’m more than what I am, and make it true. I only know how to be me, and you don’t even know who that is. You wouldn’t fit into my life.”
Ohno waited until Jun finished. He was angry himself, with the fact that Jun thought so little of himself, with the assumption that Ohno had no place in Jun’s life. He knew it was true. Jun came from a family that everyone had heard of, even if he bore a different surname. The people that Jun knew ranged from the very rich to the very famous. Sometimes they were both. Jun was on a first-name basis with many of the owners or curators of the best galleries in town, and he was one of the first they would call whenever they had something new or interesting in. He was steadily getting offered more, and better, jobs, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that he would get a leading role in a drama, or a film, within the next few years. Ohno, on the other hand, was unemployed, and would never have stepped out of the small town he was from if it wasn’t for his friends. Jun’s idea of a good time included opening nights of some hit stage production or an exhibition, with all the crowd and the extravagance those things came with. Ohno had been through a few of those during his last visit, and he wouldn’t mind never having to do so ever again. Even when it came to exhibitions, he preferred to go later, when there weren’t many people, and he could look at everything in peace. Ohno’s favourite thing would still be a quiet, lazy afternoon on his boat. Jun had hated that boat.
“I know who you are,” he said evenly, in the end. “And I’m not giving up.”
})i({
Jun was upset, he knew. So was he. When Jun left, he turned back to his painting. It was almost done - he was working faster, these days, and but after he was done he would always end up so fatigued he’d spend the whole day sleeping - when his phone rang. He shifted the brush in one hand to the other, and picked up his phone without checking the caller ID.
“Sho, I’m about to go to sleep.”
“You lied to me.”
“I did.” Ohno dropped the brush absently into one of the jars that Jun had left on the table from his last visit. As if Jun was expecting that he’d be there again, and that he would need it again. He smiled, and then said in a more amiable manner to Sho, “I’m fine.”
“Good.” Ohno could hear the change of pace in Sho’s breathing, as Sho hesitated. “Good. About Jun...”
“He’s fine, too.” Ohno was starting to feel amused, even as the anxiousness clouded over him. He had had to make a choice, and he did it. Perhaps it wasn’t the choice he thought he would make; after all, he had always thought that he would never do anything deliberately that would hurt Sho. But situations change. “I guess we should talk.”
“Aiba’s right, then.” Sho sounded like he was talking to himself. He probably was; it was something Ohno was used to. He talked too little and Sho talked too much - together, he listened and Sho talked to himself. Usually. “Satoshi, what if -“ Sho cut himself off, knowing that he was about to say something awful. Ohno knew what he wanted to say. That, too, was normal.
“I’m not going to back off,” he said. “Not even for you.” He waited for a response - for Sho to lash out with anger, or hurt, or both. He heard a sharp intake of breath, but that was it. “I’m sorry.”
He heard a shuffle on the other line, and whispers. When a voice spoke out again, it wasn’t Sho’s, but Aiba’s. “Oh-chan, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Aiba sounded disappointed, and Ohno knew why. Once, when they were young, they had made a pact to never let a girl come between any of them. Jun was no girl, but the same principle applied. Or should apply. It was supposed to be understood that his friends came first. They did, for the most part. But Jun wasn’t just some guy. He was one of them, even if he didn’t know it yet. Even if no one else had acknowledged it yet. “Tell Sho I’m sorry.”
“He knows.” There was a pause as Aiba tried to think of what to say. He was used to silence with Ohno. They usually understood each other that easily. But over the distance, connected only through the phone line, silences could take a different quality, and meanings could change. “It’s just a shock to him right now, I think. It’s okay. It’ll be okay. Just - take care, okay?”
“I always do.”
“Not you. You’re careful to the point where you never do anything. That’s why in a way, I’m actually glad about what you’re doing now. But Jun - he’s kind of fragile, I think.”
“‘Handle with care,’” Ohno murmured. “He’s stronger than you think.”
})i({
No sooner than the time it took to hit the ‘end call’ button, his phone rang again. Pressing the ‘receive’ button, Ohno resisted a sigh. He loved his friends, but they could be the most annoying people in the world, sometimes.
He didn’t even have the time to greet Nino before his friend’s voice blared over the phone. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I went to see Oguri from One Art,” he replied casually. “Since I avoided doing that the last time I was here.”
“You know that’s not what I was talking about,” Nino shot back. Then, in a much calmer tone, he continued, “I hope you’re thinking things through before you act.”
“Jun is capable of taking care of himself.”
“I wonder about that,” Nino mused. “But even so, what about you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You know that you’re not going to get him to move here. You know that you don’t like the life where you are, that he’s just going to get more famous as time goes on, and you’re going to hate dealing with that.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I know.”
“Have you given these things any thought at all? What about the fact that the two of you are too different from each other?”
“I’ve thought about it.” From the first time he’d met Jun, he had thought about it. “I’ll be fine, Nino.”
“And Sho?”
“He has Aiba. He’ll be fine, too.”
})i({
Jun didn’t see Ohno the next day. It didn’t take a lot of effort - Ohno was cooped up in the guest room, working on something, while Jun had work. By the time he was finished, and reached home, he was so tired that he went straight to sleep - or at least, tried to. He knew that Ohno was still awake, and working, and he wondered what Ohno was working on. He wondered what Ohno had sold to One Art. He had called Toma up earlier in the day, during a break, but the only thing Toma had told him was “it’s not a portrait.”
That alone had him piqued. He knew that Ohno didn’t only do portraits, but they were what Ohno did best, and did the most. Why would the first painting he sell not be a portrait?
I’m not giving up, Ohno had said.
When he first heard the words, Jun thought his mind had completely blanked out, for a moment. He wanted to retort, to say something that would make Ohno regret his words, something that would make Ohno hate him. But he couldn’t, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. He just couldn’t; when he opened his mouth to speak he felt like something was choking him. Instead, he left, before Ohno could see the flush of pleasure rising up to his face, before he could allow himself to think, perhaps.
})i({
The third day since Ohno’s unexpected arrival, Jun went to One Art. It was the first day of a two-week break he had before his schedule became hectic again. He’d hardly had a day off in weeks, although he did have several half-days. His manager, knowing that he was going to be even busier soon, made sure to clear up his time in between. He wasn’t completely free; the reason he was going to be busy was because of a new stage play that he was going to be in. It had been some time since he had last done a play - he did work in a few when he was younger, but started to concentrate on modeling and television soon after. This was the first time he was going to get a somewhat big supporting role, and he had more lines to remember than he was used to. He was glad for the time off, as it gave him time to go through his script.
Despite that, he didn’t want to be home. Ohno had woken up around noon. Jun left almost immediately, wondering why he felt like he was being chased away from his own house. He didn’t even know why he had to leave in the first place, but told himself that he needed the space to think. He couldn’t think with Ohno around.
He was apprehensive as he walked in the main entrance to the gallery. It wasn’t the first time he was going in to see something they newly acquired. It wasn’t the first time that he was going in to see the work of an artist whose work he loved, or an artist that he helped Shun or Toma discover. And yet, it felt different.
“Jun!” Toma called out, the moment he noticed the model. “Here to see Ohno-san’s painting?” He was grinning so widely that Jun almost backed away.
“Shun told me that he had several new acquisitions in,” he said. He spoke carelessly enough, although his emphasis on the word “several” only served to amuse Toma.
“Yeah, they’re still in the office, though. Go on and check them out, I’ll be there with you in a sec.”
Jun headed towards the office, glancing back at Toma once, suspiciously. When Toma just smiled and waggled his fingers back at Jun, though, Jun shrugged and pushed the door into the room. The trouble with being friends with these people, Jun thought, was that they stopped treating one as a customer. Jun hit the switch for the office lights, and looked around, wondering where Shun would have stacked Ohno’s painting.
Because to say that Shun had “several” new acquisitions was like saying Jun “kind of” hated mess. The office had three or four sets of framed paintings being stacked upright against one side of the wall, while the desk had a small mountain of cylinder-shaped packages, still wrapped, probably with rolled up works inside. Since Toma claimed to have seen Ohno’s painting, Jun assumed that it wouldn’t be in any of the packages. He went to the nearest stack of paintings, and looked through them one by one.
Each was more brilliant than the next, and he paused every now and then to admire the use of colour in one, the elegant brush stroke in another. There was a portrait of a child that he liked, because it caught a certain kind of impishness in the child’s expression that reminded Jun of Ohno’s sketches of Aiba. He found himself tempted to purchase a few of them, even though he knew that he had run out of wall space for new works a long time ago, and actually had more than a few being kept in storage. He was trying to talk himself out of getting a particular abstract work when he came across it. The one he had been looking for.
He hadn’t known what to expect, since Toma had told him it wasn’t a portrait. He hadn’t even known that he’d recognise it for sure without looking at the signature. In the end, there had been no reason for him not to know that it was Ohno’s.
Many shades of blue, and many shades of black. A vast blue sky, at dawn or twilight. (He knew it was twilight.) A tangle of black, intercrossing and connecting and spreading out into a far, unreachable distance. It was beautiful, and it was heartbreaking, the way the lines seemed to go on forever into a faraway place that got darker and darker until it faded to pitch black. Tremulously, he took it out of the stack, and looked at the label Shun had pasted on the back for easy identification. It listed, penciled in with Shun’s simple handwriting, two names, together with the price and title - A Complicated Longing.
Jun was painfully shy. Not many people realise this, even among his friends. He tried so hard not to be, or at least not to appear so. If there was one thing that he didn’t feel self-conscious about, though, was his body. It would have been hard to do his work if he was. The first time he realised that people tended to stare at him, that he drew attention to himself no matter what he did, he wished that there was a way to be invisible. There was something about having complete strangers look at him or talk to him in a certain way, that made him feel like he was being betrayed by his own self at times. It was as if he no longer belonged to himself. But he learned to get used to it, and he had got to a place where he no longer felt uncomfortable when he had his pictures taken, even during the rare times when the photo shoots were more daring than he would have liked. He had done a lot of work that he wasn’t necessarily proud of, but none of them had ever made him feel as vulnerable, or as exposed.
})i({
Ohno was good at waiting. Some people (usually Nino) had called him stubborn because of this, but he thought that it was merely that he was good at waiting - for an argument to peter out, for someone else to say something so he wouldn’t have to, for the customer service at the supply store he got his mail orders from to actually pick up his calls. He never understood the need to rush, and he didn’t like big changes, preferring instead for things to turn the way they naturally would.
So when it came to Jun, he knew from the beginning that it might be a long wait, but he wasn’t afraid of taking his time.
He was waiting, that evening. Jun had left soon after he woke up, when he was still too groggy to register what was going on. He’d finished his new painting. Something inside him was already stirring to work on the next. It was a first, for him - for each painting to spur on the next, like they all belonged to each other, a story in many parts. In a way, he supposed, they were. He had always insisted that his paintings were a hobby, something he liked to do between jobs. It was something he was engrossed in, something that he revels in. But it was a hobby, the way Nino played games or Aiba volunteered at the animal shelter in a nearby town every other weekend.
Lately, he wasn’t so sure. The new paintings were different, he thought. They felt different, somehow. But another part of him asked if it was really true, or if he had always felt the same anxiousness over his work before.
A whole evening, Ohno waited, thinking about how from the first thing he had ever drawn - a rude caricature in a classmate’s notebook - he had grown to need it more and more, despite having never really needed anything prior to that first drawing. There was a restlessness, a dissatisfaction that had always been there, under so many layers of patience and calm.
He was waiting, when he turn the key turn. He felt his entire self turn with the sound, Pavlov’s dog perking up at the sound of the bell.
Jun didn’t walk in; he strode. It was funny, but it made Ohno think of the English word, and how it originated from a German word, one that also meant to quarrel or to fight. (And all this time he had thought that he never listened to Sho’s rambles, he mused.) The word had never seemed more apt, because Jun looked like he was spoiling for a fight.
Jun stopped in the middle of the room, staring him down. Ohno stared back. Jun’s expression told him that the model was waiting for something - an explanation, an apology, possibly a plea for mercy.
It was too bad for Jun, Ohno thought, that Ohno was better at waiting.
He couldn’t tell how long their staring match lasted, but he could almost draw it out on his sketchbook, a silence that screamed in its loudness, a moment stretched through time and charted in a map or a graph.
Then, finally giving in, Jun broke the silence.
“You broke into my darkroom.”
~ to be continued ~
Chapter Nine | Chapter Eleven
Marineko's Notes:
Am sleepy. Have to get ready for work in an hour or two...
A note/reminder - this chapter written for the Japan Earthquake & Tsunami Relief Fund. Thank you, valentinekent, for donating!