Pour a Little Salt (We Were Never Here) (2/2)
Title: Pour a Little Salt (We Were Never Here), Part 2 of 2
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Nino/Jun
Word count: 12,533
Summary: Nino keeps on time-traveling to the future. It’s always to where Jun is. Or was. Or will be.
Part 1
It is Aiba who brings it up. He dances around it furtively, sitting suspiciously close to Nino, and making the silence unbearable. They know each other too well. Nino feels the walls of the waiting room closing in on him. Aiba scratches at the torn part of his jeans ceaselessly, until even Nino’s monastic gaming concentration breaks.
When Mario dies with a pathetic whimper, he closes his console in irritation.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Nino doesn’t look at Aiba, because he knows that voice. Aiba’s voice is never as innocent as when he actually is.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know better than to hide things from me. I’ve known you too long,” Aiba says, worry coloring his voice. Just then, Jun enters the room with his headphones on. Nino chews on the inside of his mouth. Jun’s face does not betray anything Nino can latch on to, and to be honest, what does Nino expect, anyway? Jun is years away. He wants to say something, anything, because the knowing and not knowing is killing him, but he can’t know yet on what page Jun is.
There’s also the tiny detail that he doesn’t have the right to say anything. He’s confused, more confused than he’s ever been.
Nino knows Aiba is watching him watch Jun. “I’m just tired,” Nino says, suddenly weary.
“Are you sick?”
Nino tears his eyes away from Jun. “What? No.”
“You know you can tell me anything,” Aiba appeals to him.
“You’d forgive me for anything, right?” Nino asks.
“Nino,” Aiba says, his voice growing with concern. “Now you have to tell me.”
“No I don’t, and the answer’s supposed to be ‘yes’,” Nino replies tersely, sensing Jun watching them curiously as he begins to spool the wire of his headphones.
Aiba looks at him strangely and doesn’t say anything else. He stops scratching, his arms crossing in front of his chest defensively. The day Nino can’t reveal something to Aiba is one of his loneliest. He tries not to let it show on his face.
*
He understands and confirms what’s happening to him when he’s been in the middle of the desert for more than two weeks and he still hasn’t been back to Jun’s place once. It’s the longest time in months that he hasn’t seen Jun-not Jun from his own time, but that Jun. Nino has been uncharacteristically excited about the enormous opportunity given to him before everything happened, yet now when he’s in the thick of filming, he can’t seem to fully grasp the magnitude of the work he is doing, what it would mean for his career, and all for the wrong reasons. The cruelest reason.
After another afternoon spent dodging fake bullets and meticulously planned explosions in raggedy fatigues, he attempts to take the edge off and go drinking alone in the hotel bar. It’s nothing fancy, nothing to get excited about, but he welcomes the cold draft beer spilling down easily his throat. He fingers his mobile phone, thumbing through his few contacts, and stopping at ‘J’. It would make no sense, wouldn’t make things better, but he just needs to consider that option because reality is starting to feel like a sham without carefully prepared drinks and a constellation of moles to stare at. Nino is slipping, falling, and he doesn’t know how to stop, or if he even wants to stop, because his head is swirling with thoughts of Jun.
The blinking cursor seems to mirror his state of mind, though. Even if he had something to say, he would be saying it several years too early. Nino orders another serving of beer, as if the cold, sudsy, golden liquid would fill the ache that he is only beginning to recognize for what it is. It’s fucking with his head, and he doesn’t like it. Not one bit.
So this is what lack feels like, he thinks. He wants to do without it but he simply couldn’t imagine how to live without it either. He knows he’s been mistaking dreams for reality but he cannot accept it as simply as that.
“I miss you,” his thumbs type out.
He’s had only a couple of gulps from his newly filled glass when his phone vibrates and rings silently. He presses to answer the phone as he closes his eyes heavily, because it’s just wrong, so wrong, but he just needs someone.
“Me too,” the voice simply says, without preamble.
Nino’s heart twists. “Oh-chan.”
*
He stretches his limbs sleepily, moving away from his body’s dented outline on the couch. His heart races at finding himself awake in a room that has become far too familiar than it should be, a room that he has missed for more than a month. He is used to the headaches, as much as one can get used to them, but he is half grateful and half terrified that it’s possible to travel in his sleep. The gray afternoon sky casts a pale glow around Jun’s apartment-it makes him feel like taking another nap yet again. But there is no forgetting the last time he was here, no ignoring the dull thud masquerading as his heartbeat, no tamping down the anticipation he feels at the thought of seeing Jun again.
Jun picks that moment to step out of his bedroom, fully clothed, as if he had somewhere to go. “You’re here.” His face is blank and unyielding as he stands under the doorframe, and for the first time, Nino knows that whatever happened the last time he was here really happened, that even if he had wanted to take it back, which he doesn’t, he couldn’t.
He stands up carefully, almost shyly. “I’m here,” is all he can say, his fingertips alight in heat, even when his palms are as cold as the Arctic. The irreconcilable feeling is the telltale sign of his anxiety and his trepidation. All he can do is wait.
Jun considers him for a while; it feels like an eternity to Nino. The beat of his heart reaches ridiculous levels when Jun purposefully walks towards him, his steps sure and measured, his eyes hell-bent on nothing except him. Nino feels like he might die any instant, from the way he can’t seem to breathe to the way want is curling up inside him, overpowering him with its intensity-they haven’t even touched, they are just merely breathing in each other’s presence from an inch away. Jun doesn’t say a thing, doesn’t need to say anything, and gently guides Nino’s face with one hand and kisses him. He is in no position to resist, not that he planned to.
There is no denying to himself that he’s acting recklessly and selfishly, but it’s a kind of recklessness that’s the result of the two of them dancing around it for a long while now, with no one saying anything. He feels the soft slide of lips against lips, the movement more articulate than it could have been had they used it for words. Jun is terribly gentler than he could ever have imagined, but it only dissolves Nino’s resolve further because he could swim, swim forever, in that open-nerved heat, in that unbelievable confluence of time, space, and the impossibly soft pillowing of Jun’s lips against his. He takes everything that he can get, gasps when Jun rucks his shirt up lightly to skim a hand over his bare stomach and feels Jun’s tongue slide against his. He wraps his hand around Jun’s and leads them against his heart; he’s never been this bare and this painfully alive-he wants all of it, all of Jun. The way Jun pushes him to the couch tells him that Jun is not too faraway in how he feels, either.
Nino has been close to other people before, but not quite this close, like he couldn’t live with himself if he can’t get close enough, and there’s a staggering, overwhelming feeling of doing anything just to be even a breath closer, because that distance feels like the difference between life and death. He loves the weight of Jun all over him, more than he could have imagined, because it makes him feel like just this once, he won’t disappear and will stay put, the way he’s begun to want to.
“Thought I lost you,” Jun whispers into his mouth.
“Stop talking.”
Nino tightens his fingers on Jun’s back and ignores everything else, hands searching for a patch of skin to cling on to for as long as he can. He wants so badly to believe that time will stop for them because how can this be wrong?
It’s personal, universal, and unconditional all at the same time, the way Jun is encroaching on him and all he wants to say and doesn’t need to say is ‘yes’.
*
He has known love.
He roams the spaces inside his apartment, viscerally feeling the loss of precious familiarity that he knows he neglected when he had it. Gone are the easels, the haphazard art materials strewn around everywhere, even the dark, strange-looking clay models that had irked him and spooked him in turns. His clothes are gone. The coffee table, the one with the artfully painted splatters, the one he actually made from his own hands, is gone too. But it is in the bathroom when he knows that his heart is truly broken. He stares at the space by the sink where the missing toothbrush used to be. It is the most miniscule detail to get hung up on, but tears still spill down his cheeks. There will be no more of undecipherable morning chatter with their smiles dripping with toothpaste foam.
There will also be no forgetting the cold, distanced voice that he would never be able to un-hear.
“Do I know him?”
Nino had no answer for him; couldn’t even give him that because how does he even begin to explain everything? It was only through the way Ohno shuts the door that Nino fully comprehends just how much he fucked up.
He hates how everything turned out, hates how weak he is. If he really had cared for Ohno the way he firmly believed in his heart, he wouldn’t have let it stretch on painfully the way he allowed it to. Nino is a creature of habit-he had been so secure with the life they had built together, so full of assurance and easy days spent indoors, laughing, doing nothing. He can’t tell when it started not being enough, it started long before he started to time slip, although that did not help things. Ohno’s never been the type to demand anything of him; he didn’t say anything when Nino started clinging on to him violently, acting on guilt and desperation at the same time, didn’t complain when Nino kept on rushing out of rooms, not knowing that he was disappearing somewhere Ohno can’t reach, somewhere where he was giving his heart out to someone else.
How could he tell Ohno that he discovered that there is a hole within him that until recently he didn’t know how to fill? How could he have explained to Ohno that even though he was more than wonderful, more than Nino ever deserved, that he accidentally managed to find someone else whose crooked heart fits perfectly with his own jagged one? That it is someone Ohno knows, or would technically know in the future?
He had returned to their bedroom that night, and the only thing he said to Ohno was the worst possible thing he could say in the bluntest way possible.
“There’s someone else.”
It had broken his heart more than anyone could fathom, had made him feel like he was the most despicable person on the planet, in the whole universe, made him feel like his heart is an ugly, festering place. Ohno had only stood still, like he had known, or had been waiting for it. The silence became cruel and oppressive, and Ohno sat down on the bed, massaging his forehead with one hand, head bowed.
There had been no bargaining, no questions asked, no burst of anger. Ohno knows him all too well.
“I was afraid of that,” he said, his voice soft.
It had almost destroyed Nino right on the spot.
He knows that Ohno will forgive him someday. He also knows that he won’t deserve it. Nino feels wretched and broken and positively inhuman, but he couldn’t have possibly kept Ohno just because he had the dumb luck to be loved by him that way, so silently yet so deeply-that would be worse. Still, nothing would take the pain away from him, not for a long time. Nino doesn’t remember the last time he’s cried this much.
When his head begins to ache, he rushes to wipe away his tears and hope that he doesn’t give anything away. He tucks away his old hopes-they mean nothing now, not when he has cold-bloodedly quashed them all to nothingness-and instead makes room for inevitable uncertainty.
He chooses fear. He knows exactly what he has to do, even if he knows that it would feel like the end of him-he has to do it right.
*
“Don’t you see? I have to leave you so that I can come back to you.”
“No!” Jun rages.
“You don’t understand, Jun.”
“No, don’t say that to me. Tell me from where you are. If this is real, if this meant something to you, tell me. I’m at a slight disadvantage here,” Jun says lamely. “Tell me while you still remember.”
Nino knows Jun doesn’t know what he’s saying, or he does, but he’s saying it in the wrong way and Nino doesn’t feel he has the right to straighten things out and tell him honestly. The weight of his lies bear down heavily on him. “We’ll see.”
“Nino.”
And he can’t help it, he just bursts. “When do I tell you? Tomorrow, when I see you? We have a recording you know. For your new drama where you play some rich dick or something, I don’t know, you’re going around being all sulky about your new perm that there’s no talking to you anyway. But that’s probably ancient history to you now, isn’t it? Don’t you get it? You’re not the same person.”
Jun looks stricken, and Nino almost folds. “But I am the same person. I don’t think I’ll change just like that, and even if I did, my feelings won’t. Not if it’s you. If it’s real now, it should be real then.”
“Jun,” Nino appeals.
“You’ll have me wait all this time, for this?” Jun grabs his hand.
Nino hates how earnest Jun sounds, how earnest Jun is. He’s not making it easy, not that Nino expected it to be. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s not,” Jun says stubbornly.
“You won’t be the one doing the waiting,” Nino replies, his voice mean and wavering, and he wishes it isn’t the case but he has to do it, he has to be firm.
“You won’t even give me a chance?” Nino knows that voice, and he knows that Jun is barely concealing the temper bubbling up beneath.
“It’s not for you to decide,” Nino says, desperate for Jun to stop because he knows he’s not strong enough to resist. “I don’t deserve you. Not now.”
Jun’s face transforms. Nino’s heart is pounding, he wants to reach out to Jun, but he knows it will hurt when Jun slaps his hand away. Frustration is clouding his thinking and he doesn’t know what to say anymore.
“Look, if I tell you earlier before all this, things would be different. Because things were different then. Us, now, maybe this would never have happened. Don’t you understand? Isn’t it clear to you? I don’t want to risk this.” He can’t.
“What you’re only making clear to me right now is the fact that you don’t have faith in me,” Jun says coldly, before he storms from the room. Nino can’t help but feel he has lost something irretrievable, something akin to a small window of chance that had closed with foreboding finality, in complete silence.
“Find me,” Nino says to an empty room. The guilt and pain is too much; it feels like a snake is constricting him on his neck and he can’t fight against it, or more like he’s willing to accept it, almost, because he thinks and feels that he doesn’t deserve to breathe. He doesn’t deserve Jun yet, and maybe not ever.
*
Nino’s back in his own apartment, in his own time. His head does not stop throbbing. Neither does his heart. He’s made a decision. He packs his bags.
*
He waits. Or maybe, he tries to forget. Sometimes he doesn’t even remember what he had meant to do in the first place.
*
It’s Jun-pon when it’s barely been a year. It feels silly and intimate at the same time, and his feelings can’t help but soar when Jun gives him dirty looks for it but still answers to the nickname. He wants to get closer to him in any way that he can, even if he’s forbidden himself to do so in the way that he wants to the most.
*
It’s Jun-shingo when he’s yanking on Jun’s collar and enjoying every bit of it, if only to see Jun squirming, both happy and angry, but mostly squirming at the embarrassment Nino’s putting him through. Nino quite likes that face. To be quite honest, he likes all his faces.
*
He finally gets his chance.
When Nino regains consciousness, he’s alone in the cool locker rooms. He’s lying down on the couch, wearing a fresh shirt, and a wet towel flat on his forehead. The last thing he remembers is the blinding sunlight, the kind Japan only gets during the height of summer, along with the strange landscape that is an empty Kokuritsu stadium. He hears faint strains of an old Arashi song playing in the distance.
Nino is about to get up when the door opens. It’s Ohno.
“Leader,” he rasps, and Nino is surprised by how parched and tired he sounds.
Ohno shakes his head as he walks towards Nino. “You fainted.” His hand guides Nino back down to the firm give of the couch. He reaches into his pocket to get out an orange pill container.
“Hope you don’t mind, I rummaged through your things to get this. You were having one of your headaches, and I think I’m the only one who knows where you keep your meds,” Ohno explains gently, as he gives a pill to Nino and stretches to the side for a bottle of water.
It’s Nino’s turn to shake his head, as he mouths a silent “thank you” to Ohno. He gratefully takes and drinks the medicine. Ohno looks satisfied at that and sits down on the couch, inviting Nino to rest his head on his lap with a small yet achingly familiar gesture.
“Won’t they start looking for you?” Nino asks.
“Not for a bit. Come, rest for awhile,” Ohno says, his voice steady and soothing. Nino complies and crawls his way towards Ohno. His head finds just the perfect spot on Ohno’s lap, just like it has a million times before-Nino has forgotten the special kind of comfort it brings, along with the gentle way Ohno is sifting his fingers through his hair. It’s enough to make him comfortably drowsy and drive away the dregs of the headache he’s just had. He can’t quite nod off though, not with the weight of all the words he’s meant to say to Ohno all these years, words he hasn’t had the opportunity to say. Not when he’s this close.
“Hey,” Nino says, looking up at Ohno.
“Hmm?”
He sits up to Ohno’s small noises of protest. There's no other way to go about it than to be straightforward, because it feels as urgent as it did years ago. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Oh-chan.”
Ohno looks a little surprised at the long-abandoned nickname and levels him with his eyes, though not unkindly. “Nino,” he starts. “You don’t have to.”
“But I do,” Nino says. “You know I do.”
Ohno sighs and rubs the back of his neck, as if he doesn’t know what to do or say. He allows the silence to stretch for what seemed like eternities before he turns to Nino with a stumped expression on his face. “Tell me what you want to hear, then.”
Nino can feel the sharp barbs that those words represented, and maybe the years have lessened the guilt somewhat, but he’s much too intimate with the feeling to truly forget. “No, it’s not that. I just wanted you to know that it was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” he says, not knowing what exact words would make things right, or even just a semblance of okay.
“Good,” Ohno says.
Nino looks up and is surprised to see Ohno with that small smile that he used to find so much strength from-it is kind, reassuring, and perhaps everything good in this world. He bites his lips because he knows the tears are coming, god, his mother would poke fun at him for days for being such a crybaby, but he stops when Ohno’s smile turns into chuckles.
“You should see your face,” Ohno huffs. The way his eyes crinkle on the edges warms Nino’s heart, and he can’t help but smile too.
“I’d call you cruel but I’m the one asking for forgiveness here, so,” Nino says shakily.
Ohno grabs Nino’s hand. “Done deal, okay? I’ve forgiven you a long time ago,” he says, words both warm and serious. “It’s you.”
And this is where Nino really couldn’t stop the tears. Ohno laughs as he squeezes Nino’s hand, not leaving him alone to his emotions. “Kazu,” Ohno berates him, “just what will your mom say?”
“Say that again,” Nino croaks breathlessly.
“Kazu,” Ohno says, still smiling, and it feels both like coming home and being set free in the wild, where he both belongs. Nino has finally reclaimed a part of himself that he thought was lost to regret and time.
Nino leans on to his shoulders as he wipes away his tears. “She’d say that I shouldn’t cry over boys.”
The way Ohno’s shoulder shakes silently is so beautiful to Nino.
“Now you have to tell me about him,” Ohno says a good while later.
Nino does.
*
Sho is the one who tells Nino that Jun has finally moved to a place of his own, to a place with “a spectacular view of the Tokyo skyline”, as per Jun. Sho doesn’t understand why Nino hugs him, laughing into his ear in a way that Sho almost describes as deranged.
“Sho-chan, Sho-chan,” Nino says, after he lets go, “you are magical.”
All Nino needs is faith to believe that he chose the right thing and didn’t screw up, big time.
*
When it becomes J, it’s been too long, and he’s too close. He likes to joke about how “J” plus “K” is, naturally, a joke.
Ohno doesn’t think it’s too funny.
*
It is his third cup of coffee.
Outside the café window lies a perfect tableau of Tokyo in autumn, leaves scattering away to the slight breeze. Nino warms his hands on the steaming cup as he observes the view, thinking about how seasons change without fail. Everything and everyone must eventually move on, with no exceptions. He has been wondering for a long time if there is anything worth hanging onto when nothing stays the same anyway-he wonders that in his brain, but something deeply buried inside him, dust-ridden and almost forgotten, answers for him with a certainty that he can’t deny.
Nino has always been the type of person to take great pains to seem uninterested and un-invested in things, but he can only lie to himself to a point before everything boils over and scalds him-and after that, he feels like shouting, he feels like tying weights to his feet and jumping in the open water. The afternoon sun casts a faint glow across the table where he is sitting. Nino sips coffee from his cup, feeling strangely grateful for the warmth spilling down his throat.
When he remembers that day in the future, he would swear that he didn’t hear the chimes when the door opened. He would swear that no signs pointed out to him that it would be the day.
“Nino.” It isn’t even a question, nor is it a simple call-out.
Jun looks at him differently, and Nino just knows. Just like that, all those years has come to this moment, to Jun standing in front of him, arms entwined in front of his chest, his face a cross between disbelief and something Nino can’t put his finger on.
All he has to say and did say is, “How?”
“You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?” And with that, Jun drags him off by the wrist to his car. Nino doesn’t need to ask where they’re going.
They don’t talk when Jun slots his car into a parking space, when they find themselves in the claustrophobic elevator that Nino hasn’t ridden in ages, when Jun digs furiously in his pockets for his house key. Nino barely catches a glimpse of the place he’s been longing for when he finds himself backed against the door, the softest touch of lips landing on his, almost like a whisper. His skin remembers effortlessly and can never forget. For the first time ever, he doesn’t question his tears and allows them to spill down the round of his cheeks.
“How?” He asks, still unbelieving that everything went according to plan.
Jun places his hands on Nino’s shoulders, connecting his forehead to Nino’s. “You weren’t making sense, you know?”
“I know,” Nino whispers. “But how?”
Jun opens his eyes. “Leader.”
And Nino reels, reels from how something more than fate has led him to this door again, and he feels so overwhelmed. “What an idiot,” Nino manages to say. He’s unable to meet the penetrating gaze of Jun, doesn’t know how to say everything without bursting all at once.
Jun frames his hands around Nino’s face. “You’re the idiot.” And he kisses Nino again, holds him to all his words, and breathes life into Nino again. There is no missing the tremor in Jun’s face, the unbelieving glint in his eyes, the impossibly gentle way his thumbs are making maps of Nino’s tear-streaked face. “All this time?”
“All this time,” Nino answers shakily.
Jun drowns Nino’s quiet sobs with his lips. “You’re never leaving again,” Jun says, and that’s all Nino’s ever wanted to hear.
He can only curl his arms around Jun’s neck as an answer, and hold on. He had been waiting. Jun tastes the salt on his jaw, tentative and impossibly sweet. They tangle their hands together. It doesn’t matter that in many ways, they are still getting to know each other through the prism of their feelings. It doesn’t matter who’s waited and keened for the other longer. Nino recognizes the clarity and resonance of Jun’s feelings just like he did, all those years ago.
He’s been found.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Nino/Jun
Word count: 12,533
Summary: Nino keeps on time-traveling to the future. It’s always to where Jun is. Or was. Or will be.
Part 1
It is Aiba who brings it up. He dances around it furtively, sitting suspiciously close to Nino, and making the silence unbearable. They know each other too well. Nino feels the walls of the waiting room closing in on him. Aiba scratches at the torn part of his jeans ceaselessly, until even Nino’s monastic gaming concentration breaks.
When Mario dies with a pathetic whimper, he closes his console in irritation.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Nino doesn’t look at Aiba, because he knows that voice. Aiba’s voice is never as innocent as when he actually is.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know better than to hide things from me. I’ve known you too long,” Aiba says, worry coloring his voice. Just then, Jun enters the room with his headphones on. Nino chews on the inside of his mouth. Jun’s face does not betray anything Nino can latch on to, and to be honest, what does Nino expect, anyway? Jun is years away. He wants to say something, anything, because the knowing and not knowing is killing him, but he can’t know yet on what page Jun is.
There’s also the tiny detail that he doesn’t have the right to say anything. He’s confused, more confused than he’s ever been.
Nino knows Aiba is watching him watch Jun. “I’m just tired,” Nino says, suddenly weary.
“Are you sick?”
Nino tears his eyes away from Jun. “What? No.”
“You know you can tell me anything,” Aiba appeals to him.
“You’d forgive me for anything, right?” Nino asks.
“Nino,” Aiba says, his voice growing with concern. “Now you have to tell me.”
“No I don’t, and the answer’s supposed to be ‘yes’,” Nino replies tersely, sensing Jun watching them curiously as he begins to spool the wire of his headphones.
Aiba looks at him strangely and doesn’t say anything else. He stops scratching, his arms crossing in front of his chest defensively. The day Nino can’t reveal something to Aiba is one of his loneliest. He tries not to let it show on his face.
*
He understands and confirms what’s happening to him when he’s been in the middle of the desert for more than two weeks and he still hasn’t been back to Jun’s place once. It’s the longest time in months that he hasn’t seen Jun-not Jun from his own time, but that Jun. Nino has been uncharacteristically excited about the enormous opportunity given to him before everything happened, yet now when he’s in the thick of filming, he can’t seem to fully grasp the magnitude of the work he is doing, what it would mean for his career, and all for the wrong reasons. The cruelest reason.
After another afternoon spent dodging fake bullets and meticulously planned explosions in raggedy fatigues, he attempts to take the edge off and go drinking alone in the hotel bar. It’s nothing fancy, nothing to get excited about, but he welcomes the cold draft beer spilling down easily his throat. He fingers his mobile phone, thumbing through his few contacts, and stopping at ‘J’. It would make no sense, wouldn’t make things better, but he just needs to consider that option because reality is starting to feel like a sham without carefully prepared drinks and a constellation of moles to stare at. Nino is slipping, falling, and he doesn’t know how to stop, or if he even wants to stop, because his head is swirling with thoughts of Jun.
The blinking cursor seems to mirror his state of mind, though. Even if he had something to say, he would be saying it several years too early. Nino orders another serving of beer, as if the cold, sudsy, golden liquid would fill the ache that he is only beginning to recognize for what it is. It’s fucking with his head, and he doesn’t like it. Not one bit.
So this is what lack feels like, he thinks. He wants to do without it but he simply couldn’t imagine how to live without it either. He knows he’s been mistaking dreams for reality but he cannot accept it as simply as that.
“I miss you,” his thumbs type out.
He’s had only a couple of gulps from his newly filled glass when his phone vibrates and rings silently. He presses to answer the phone as he closes his eyes heavily, because it’s just wrong, so wrong, but he just needs someone.
“Me too,” the voice simply says, without preamble.
Nino’s heart twists. “Oh-chan.”
*
He stretches his limbs sleepily, moving away from his body’s dented outline on the couch. His heart races at finding himself awake in a room that has become far too familiar than it should be, a room that he has missed for more than a month. He is used to the headaches, as much as one can get used to them, but he is half grateful and half terrified that it’s possible to travel in his sleep. The gray afternoon sky casts a pale glow around Jun’s apartment-it makes him feel like taking another nap yet again. But there is no forgetting the last time he was here, no ignoring the dull thud masquerading as his heartbeat, no tamping down the anticipation he feels at the thought of seeing Jun again.
Jun picks that moment to step out of his bedroom, fully clothed, as if he had somewhere to go. “You’re here.” His face is blank and unyielding as he stands under the doorframe, and for the first time, Nino knows that whatever happened the last time he was here really happened, that even if he had wanted to take it back, which he doesn’t, he couldn’t.
He stands up carefully, almost shyly. “I’m here,” is all he can say, his fingertips alight in heat, even when his palms are as cold as the Arctic. The irreconcilable feeling is the telltale sign of his anxiety and his trepidation. All he can do is wait.
Jun considers him for a while; it feels like an eternity to Nino. The beat of his heart reaches ridiculous levels when Jun purposefully walks towards him, his steps sure and measured, his eyes hell-bent on nothing except him. Nino feels like he might die any instant, from the way he can’t seem to breathe to the way want is curling up inside him, overpowering him with its intensity-they haven’t even touched, they are just merely breathing in each other’s presence from an inch away. Jun doesn’t say a thing, doesn’t need to say anything, and gently guides Nino’s face with one hand and kisses him. He is in no position to resist, not that he planned to.
There is no denying to himself that he’s acting recklessly and selfishly, but it’s a kind of recklessness that’s the result of the two of them dancing around it for a long while now, with no one saying anything. He feels the soft slide of lips against lips, the movement more articulate than it could have been had they used it for words. Jun is terribly gentler than he could ever have imagined, but it only dissolves Nino’s resolve further because he could swim, swim forever, in that open-nerved heat, in that unbelievable confluence of time, space, and the impossibly soft pillowing of Jun’s lips against his. He takes everything that he can get, gasps when Jun rucks his shirt up lightly to skim a hand over his bare stomach and feels Jun’s tongue slide against his. He wraps his hand around Jun’s and leads them against his heart; he’s never been this bare and this painfully alive-he wants all of it, all of Jun. The way Jun pushes him to the couch tells him that Jun is not too faraway in how he feels, either.
Nino has been close to other people before, but not quite this close, like he couldn’t live with himself if he can’t get close enough, and there’s a staggering, overwhelming feeling of doing anything just to be even a breath closer, because that distance feels like the difference between life and death. He loves the weight of Jun all over him, more than he could have imagined, because it makes him feel like just this once, he won’t disappear and will stay put, the way he’s begun to want to.
“Thought I lost you,” Jun whispers into his mouth.
“Stop talking.”
Nino tightens his fingers on Jun’s back and ignores everything else, hands searching for a patch of skin to cling on to for as long as he can. He wants so badly to believe that time will stop for them because how can this be wrong?
It’s personal, universal, and unconditional all at the same time, the way Jun is encroaching on him and all he wants to say and doesn’t need to say is ‘yes’.
*
He has known love.
He roams the spaces inside his apartment, viscerally feeling the loss of precious familiarity that he knows he neglected when he had it. Gone are the easels, the haphazard art materials strewn around everywhere, even the dark, strange-looking clay models that had irked him and spooked him in turns. His clothes are gone. The coffee table, the one with the artfully painted splatters, the one he actually made from his own hands, is gone too. But it is in the bathroom when he knows that his heart is truly broken. He stares at the space by the sink where the missing toothbrush used to be. It is the most miniscule detail to get hung up on, but tears still spill down his cheeks. There will be no more of undecipherable morning chatter with their smiles dripping with toothpaste foam.
There will also be no forgetting the cold, distanced voice that he would never be able to un-hear.
“Do I know him?”
Nino had no answer for him; couldn’t even give him that because how does he even begin to explain everything? It was only through the way Ohno shuts the door that Nino fully comprehends just how much he fucked up.
He hates how everything turned out, hates how weak he is. If he really had cared for Ohno the way he firmly believed in his heart, he wouldn’t have let it stretch on painfully the way he allowed it to. Nino is a creature of habit-he had been so secure with the life they had built together, so full of assurance and easy days spent indoors, laughing, doing nothing. He can’t tell when it started not being enough, it started long before he started to time slip, although that did not help things. Ohno’s never been the type to demand anything of him; he didn’t say anything when Nino started clinging on to him violently, acting on guilt and desperation at the same time, didn’t complain when Nino kept on rushing out of rooms, not knowing that he was disappearing somewhere Ohno can’t reach, somewhere where he was giving his heart out to someone else.
How could he tell Ohno that he discovered that there is a hole within him that until recently he didn’t know how to fill? How could he have explained to Ohno that even though he was more than wonderful, more than Nino ever deserved, that he accidentally managed to find someone else whose crooked heart fits perfectly with his own jagged one? That it is someone Ohno knows, or would technically know in the future?
He had returned to their bedroom that night, and the only thing he said to Ohno was the worst possible thing he could say in the bluntest way possible.
“There’s someone else.”
It had broken his heart more than anyone could fathom, had made him feel like he was the most despicable person on the planet, in the whole universe, made him feel like his heart is an ugly, festering place. Ohno had only stood still, like he had known, or had been waiting for it. The silence became cruel and oppressive, and Ohno sat down on the bed, massaging his forehead with one hand, head bowed.
There had been no bargaining, no questions asked, no burst of anger. Ohno knows him all too well.
“I was afraid of that,” he said, his voice soft.
It had almost destroyed Nino right on the spot.
He knows that Ohno will forgive him someday. He also knows that he won’t deserve it. Nino feels wretched and broken and positively inhuman, but he couldn’t have possibly kept Ohno just because he had the dumb luck to be loved by him that way, so silently yet so deeply-that would be worse. Still, nothing would take the pain away from him, not for a long time. Nino doesn’t remember the last time he’s cried this much.
When his head begins to ache, he rushes to wipe away his tears and hope that he doesn’t give anything away. He tucks away his old hopes-they mean nothing now, not when he has cold-bloodedly quashed them all to nothingness-and instead makes room for inevitable uncertainty.
He chooses fear. He knows exactly what he has to do, even if he knows that it would feel like the end of him-he has to do it right.
*
“Don’t you see? I have to leave you so that I can come back to you.”
“No!” Jun rages.
“You don’t understand, Jun.”
“No, don’t say that to me. Tell me from where you are. If this is real, if this meant something to you, tell me. I’m at a slight disadvantage here,” Jun says lamely. “Tell me while you still remember.”
Nino knows Jun doesn’t know what he’s saying, or he does, but he’s saying it in the wrong way and Nino doesn’t feel he has the right to straighten things out and tell him honestly. The weight of his lies bear down heavily on him. “We’ll see.”
“Nino.”
And he can’t help it, he just bursts. “When do I tell you? Tomorrow, when I see you? We have a recording you know. For your new drama where you play some rich dick or something, I don’t know, you’re going around being all sulky about your new perm that there’s no talking to you anyway. But that’s probably ancient history to you now, isn’t it? Don’t you get it? You’re not the same person.”
Jun looks stricken, and Nino almost folds. “But I am the same person. I don’t think I’ll change just like that, and even if I did, my feelings won’t. Not if it’s you. If it’s real now, it should be real then.”
“Jun,” Nino appeals.
“You’ll have me wait all this time, for this?” Jun grabs his hand.
Nino hates how earnest Jun sounds, how earnest Jun is. He’s not making it easy, not that Nino expected it to be. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s not,” Jun says stubbornly.
“You won’t be the one doing the waiting,” Nino replies, his voice mean and wavering, and he wishes it isn’t the case but he has to do it, he has to be firm.
“You won’t even give me a chance?” Nino knows that voice, and he knows that Jun is barely concealing the temper bubbling up beneath.
“It’s not for you to decide,” Nino says, desperate for Jun to stop because he knows he’s not strong enough to resist. “I don’t deserve you. Not now.”
Jun’s face transforms. Nino’s heart is pounding, he wants to reach out to Jun, but he knows it will hurt when Jun slaps his hand away. Frustration is clouding his thinking and he doesn’t know what to say anymore.
“Look, if I tell you earlier before all this, things would be different. Because things were different then. Us, now, maybe this would never have happened. Don’t you understand? Isn’t it clear to you? I don’t want to risk this.” He can’t.
“What you’re only making clear to me right now is the fact that you don’t have faith in me,” Jun says coldly, before he storms from the room. Nino can’t help but feel he has lost something irretrievable, something akin to a small window of chance that had closed with foreboding finality, in complete silence.
“Find me,” Nino says to an empty room. The guilt and pain is too much; it feels like a snake is constricting him on his neck and he can’t fight against it, or more like he’s willing to accept it, almost, because he thinks and feels that he doesn’t deserve to breathe. He doesn’t deserve Jun yet, and maybe not ever.
*
Nino’s back in his own apartment, in his own time. His head does not stop throbbing. Neither does his heart. He’s made a decision. He packs his bags.
*
He waits. Or maybe, he tries to forget. Sometimes he doesn’t even remember what he had meant to do in the first place.
*
It’s Jun-pon when it’s barely been a year. It feels silly and intimate at the same time, and his feelings can’t help but soar when Jun gives him dirty looks for it but still answers to the nickname. He wants to get closer to him in any way that he can, even if he’s forbidden himself to do so in the way that he wants to the most.
*
It’s Jun-shingo when he’s yanking on Jun’s collar and enjoying every bit of it, if only to see Jun squirming, both happy and angry, but mostly squirming at the embarrassment Nino’s putting him through. Nino quite likes that face. To be quite honest, he likes all his faces.
*
He finally gets his chance.
When Nino regains consciousness, he’s alone in the cool locker rooms. He’s lying down on the couch, wearing a fresh shirt, and a wet towel flat on his forehead. The last thing he remembers is the blinding sunlight, the kind Japan only gets during the height of summer, along with the strange landscape that is an empty Kokuritsu stadium. He hears faint strains of an old Arashi song playing in the distance.
Nino is about to get up when the door opens. It’s Ohno.
“Leader,” he rasps, and Nino is surprised by how parched and tired he sounds.
Ohno shakes his head as he walks towards Nino. “You fainted.” His hand guides Nino back down to the firm give of the couch. He reaches into his pocket to get out an orange pill container.
“Hope you don’t mind, I rummaged through your things to get this. You were having one of your headaches, and I think I’m the only one who knows where you keep your meds,” Ohno explains gently, as he gives a pill to Nino and stretches to the side for a bottle of water.
It’s Nino’s turn to shake his head, as he mouths a silent “thank you” to Ohno. He gratefully takes and drinks the medicine. Ohno looks satisfied at that and sits down on the couch, inviting Nino to rest his head on his lap with a small yet achingly familiar gesture.
“Won’t they start looking for you?” Nino asks.
“Not for a bit. Come, rest for awhile,” Ohno says, his voice steady and soothing. Nino complies and crawls his way towards Ohno. His head finds just the perfect spot on Ohno’s lap, just like it has a million times before-Nino has forgotten the special kind of comfort it brings, along with the gentle way Ohno is sifting his fingers through his hair. It’s enough to make him comfortably drowsy and drive away the dregs of the headache he’s just had. He can’t quite nod off though, not with the weight of all the words he’s meant to say to Ohno all these years, words he hasn’t had the opportunity to say. Not when he’s this close.
“Hey,” Nino says, looking up at Ohno.
“Hmm?”
He sits up to Ohno’s small noises of protest. There's no other way to go about it than to be straightforward, because it feels as urgent as it did years ago. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Oh-chan.”
Ohno looks a little surprised at the long-abandoned nickname and levels him with his eyes, though not unkindly. “Nino,” he starts. “You don’t have to.”
“But I do,” Nino says. “You know I do.”
Ohno sighs and rubs the back of his neck, as if he doesn’t know what to do or say. He allows the silence to stretch for what seemed like eternities before he turns to Nino with a stumped expression on his face. “Tell me what you want to hear, then.”
Nino can feel the sharp barbs that those words represented, and maybe the years have lessened the guilt somewhat, but he’s much too intimate with the feeling to truly forget. “No, it’s not that. I just wanted you to know that it was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” he says, not knowing what exact words would make things right, or even just a semblance of okay.
“Good,” Ohno says.
Nino looks up and is surprised to see Ohno with that small smile that he used to find so much strength from-it is kind, reassuring, and perhaps everything good in this world. He bites his lips because he knows the tears are coming, god, his mother would poke fun at him for days for being such a crybaby, but he stops when Ohno’s smile turns into chuckles.
“You should see your face,” Ohno huffs. The way his eyes crinkle on the edges warms Nino’s heart, and he can’t help but smile too.
“I’d call you cruel but I’m the one asking for forgiveness here, so,” Nino says shakily.
Ohno grabs Nino’s hand. “Done deal, okay? I’ve forgiven you a long time ago,” he says, words both warm and serious. “It’s you.”
And this is where Nino really couldn’t stop the tears. Ohno laughs as he squeezes Nino’s hand, not leaving him alone to his emotions. “Kazu,” Ohno berates him, “just what will your mom say?”
“Say that again,” Nino croaks breathlessly.
“Kazu,” Ohno says, still smiling, and it feels both like coming home and being set free in the wild, where he both belongs. Nino has finally reclaimed a part of himself that he thought was lost to regret and time.
Nino leans on to his shoulders as he wipes away his tears. “She’d say that I shouldn’t cry over boys.”
The way Ohno’s shoulder shakes silently is so beautiful to Nino.
“Now you have to tell me about him,” Ohno says a good while later.
Nino does.
*
Sho is the one who tells Nino that Jun has finally moved to a place of his own, to a place with “a spectacular view of the Tokyo skyline”, as per Jun. Sho doesn’t understand why Nino hugs him, laughing into his ear in a way that Sho almost describes as deranged.
“Sho-chan, Sho-chan,” Nino says, after he lets go, “you are magical.”
All Nino needs is faith to believe that he chose the right thing and didn’t screw up, big time.
*
When it becomes J, it’s been too long, and he’s too close. He likes to joke about how “J” plus “K” is, naturally, a joke.
Ohno doesn’t think it’s too funny.
*
It is his third cup of coffee.
Outside the café window lies a perfect tableau of Tokyo in autumn, leaves scattering away to the slight breeze. Nino warms his hands on the steaming cup as he observes the view, thinking about how seasons change without fail. Everything and everyone must eventually move on, with no exceptions. He has been wondering for a long time if there is anything worth hanging onto when nothing stays the same anyway-he wonders that in his brain, but something deeply buried inside him, dust-ridden and almost forgotten, answers for him with a certainty that he can’t deny.
Nino has always been the type of person to take great pains to seem uninterested and un-invested in things, but he can only lie to himself to a point before everything boils over and scalds him-and after that, he feels like shouting, he feels like tying weights to his feet and jumping in the open water. The afternoon sun casts a faint glow across the table where he is sitting. Nino sips coffee from his cup, feeling strangely grateful for the warmth spilling down his throat.
When he remembers that day in the future, he would swear that he didn’t hear the chimes when the door opened. He would swear that no signs pointed out to him that it would be the day.
“Nino.” It isn’t even a question, nor is it a simple call-out.
Jun looks at him differently, and Nino just knows. Just like that, all those years has come to this moment, to Jun standing in front of him, arms entwined in front of his chest, his face a cross between disbelief and something Nino can’t put his finger on.
All he has to say and did say is, “How?”
“You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?” And with that, Jun drags him off by the wrist to his car. Nino doesn’t need to ask where they’re going.
They don’t talk when Jun slots his car into a parking space, when they find themselves in the claustrophobic elevator that Nino hasn’t ridden in ages, when Jun digs furiously in his pockets for his house key. Nino barely catches a glimpse of the place he’s been longing for when he finds himself backed against the door, the softest touch of lips landing on his, almost like a whisper. His skin remembers effortlessly and can never forget. For the first time ever, he doesn’t question his tears and allows them to spill down the round of his cheeks.
“How?” He asks, still unbelieving that everything went according to plan.
Jun places his hands on Nino’s shoulders, connecting his forehead to Nino’s. “You weren’t making sense, you know?”
“I know,” Nino whispers. “But how?”
Jun opens his eyes. “Leader.”
And Nino reels, reels from how something more than fate has led him to this door again, and he feels so overwhelmed. “What an idiot,” Nino manages to say. He’s unable to meet the penetrating gaze of Jun, doesn’t know how to say everything without bursting all at once.
Jun frames his hands around Nino’s face. “You’re the idiot.” And he kisses Nino again, holds him to all his words, and breathes life into Nino again. There is no missing the tremor in Jun’s face, the unbelieving glint in his eyes, the impossibly gentle way his thumbs are making maps of Nino’s tear-streaked face. “All this time?”
“All this time,” Nino answers shakily.
Jun drowns Nino’s quiet sobs with his lips. “You’re never leaving again,” Jun says, and that’s all Nino’s ever wanted to hear.
He can only curl his arms around Jun’s neck as an answer, and hold on. He had been waiting. Jun tastes the salt on his jaw, tentative and impossibly sweet. They tangle their hands together. It doesn’t matter that in many ways, they are still getting to know each other through the prism of their feelings. It doesn’t matter who’s waited and keened for the other longer. Nino recognizes the clarity and resonance of Jun’s feelings just like he did, all those years ago.
He’s been found.