(no subject)
title: one day in spring
author: chartre
rating: pg-13
pairing: ryotego
summary: it was a short relationship, his first and tegoshi had fallen in love with a man.
notes: fictional. very old, something i just dug out from the hard drive. :0 a supposed multi-chapter fic, but let's see how this works as a oneshot for now. :D
One Day in Spring
ryotego
And so, he fell in love. Tegoshi fell in love with a man, and his parents dreaded the day he told them. They knew they shouldn’t have agreed when he said he wanted to work as a part-time waiter in that resto & bar. First of all, a waiter wasn’t an occupation to be proud of, his father said; he wouldn’t be able to live properly on a wage that of one, and for the record, the boys in the restaurant looked different. It was bad news, his father warned him.
“I like this boy, mom.”
They let him go because this was what he wanted: freedom, and everything else that came with it, some package deal he pictured. They let him work in that restaurant, let him love a man three years older than him, let him move in with him-maybe because his mother believed a man his age could take good care of their son-after a year they’ve been together while Tegoshi’s mother tried not to cry herself to sleep again that night.
This man was older, and Tegoshi’s mother feared and loved that fact at the same time.
“He’s twenty going on twenty-one, mom!” her son said over a long-distance call with a voice so promising, it was hard for her to control her tears. It wasn’t until she had finally seen him a few weeks after that phone call that she thought he could be okay. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.
He was a late bloomer in his childhood, one who didn’t grow in height until his growth spurt (and somehow that reminded Tegoshi’s mother about her very own son); he had a kind face and a smile that made her remember little Tegoshi’s childhood. Her first impression of him was well: he helped Tegoshi out of the car, carried his school books for him and always kept a smile on his face. He greeted his parents properly, and spoke to his father with much ease and poise. His father had to approve.
They bought an apartment a few months after this meeting, and finally slept together-and other things, but Tegoshi supposed his parents need not know of the latter activity.
There were only two boys working in the resto & bar: a tall blonde who was on kitchen duty (his name was Koyama) and another boy of the same age-only shorter-on pastries. The latter had to be Tegoshi’s boyfriend. There was an open slot for orders and service. Tegoshi wrote a résumé and attended his interview day.
“What’s your name?” Koyama asked during his interview.
“Tegoshi Yuya.” He was still nervous. The man behind him smiled.
“How old are you?”
“I’m eighteen.”
Less than a few more ambiguities ran through his mind as the questions came and came, things like where are you from, are you good with people, why do you want this job. A little more of this and a little more of that, the man behind him simply smiled and kept his laughter to himself.
“What do you think are your weaknesses?”
“This job?”
“No, I mean-”
“I mean it; this is probably the farthest I can go.”
The man behind him laughed out loud this time, and Tegoshi was the most embarrassed boy in the room at that moment. Koyama saw the color crawling from his nose to his ears, and it made him worried, Tegoshi. “Shut up, Ryo. You’re making him nervous.”
So his name was Ryo. Tegoshi remembered that.
He got his job a few days later after a receiving a phone call from the restaurant.
Nothing was ever ordinary since he started working besides the fact that everyone was required to wear a uniform that consisted of a clean and pressed white dress shirt, and black everything else: black tie, black vest, black slacks. Very typical, very western, and very tight in Tegoshi’s pants that it made Ryo snicker, if not laugh right in his presence whenever he saw him. Those were the days he couldn’t stop thinking about how obnoxiously rude this man was, but it wasn’t as if he could do anything about it even in the following weeks to come.
A few more days into the next month, August, these things flew in and flew out casually as if they were nothing more than reproduced words and laughter over and over again. Tegoshi had grown accustomed to them, and to Ryo’s culinary skills in creating popovers without them sinking into the trays. He was also always the first to try any of his new creations. Somehow, Ryo had developed a liking to this boy, favored him for a number of reasons, stupid or not.
“How is it?” Ryo made an apple pie.
“The filling is too sweet for me.”
“You’ve got a horrible tongue!”
“But you asked for my opinion!”
Always the first.
A few days shy of spring during the late night shift, Koyama went home early because his cute little nephew of three just had to be visiting from home, and so they closed the restaurant early. Ryo was in the middle of decorating his last order of cake, Tegoshi cleaning the tables while he stole glances from the busy man.
It wasn’t as if idle minutes like this ever stayed idle for the rest of the hour; something was bound to happen anytime soon but it was unclear to them how that would be brought about.
Tegoshi once sat down with his mother in the living room, told her everything he needed to tell her before he came back to the city.
“Mom, I think I’m in love. And I might have a problem, too.”
Tegoshi was a young, energetic eighteen-year-old, and for his mother to hear such words, it shook her, made her spine shiver with something cool, but she was just so enthusiastic about hearing what he had to say. “What’s her name?”
“That’s the problem,” Tegoshi rubbed the back of his neck. “I like this boy, mom.”
Ryo was a different case: he wasn’t close with his parents, and he realized love through actions because words were never acquaintances with him to begin with. His ability to love was simply and completely dependent on the various little things the significant other did to make him fall in love. He was sentimental about things like these, and it was a beautiful way to love, he thought to himself once, and it made him smile upon seeing Tegoshi’s face.
“I don’t know, I think I like you,” he said that night after finishing the final décor his last cake. Tegoshi was right in front of him, hands fumbling with the rag he used to wipe table with. “...I dunno, I was just thinking.”
“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” Tegoshi brushed past him and walked into the kitchen, hung his apron and took his bag. “Think, I mean.
“You were always better with doing than saying, anyway.”
He left that night a little nerved, perhaps, and it made Ryo question his own abilities. He couldn’t blame him; all this time he had been teasing him about every little thing until he finally might have grown numb from all the cruelty, he knew it was only because he liked this boy, and Tegoshi often made him nervous (even if it was a realization made a little late). He couldn’t blame him if there were mixed signs and feelings.
And as if it were even more surprising-not that it was, Ryo had these notions in his head-Tegoshi came earlier than Koyama did the next morning, saw Ryo working on a new cake, icing all over his hands and he kissed him behind the counter, hands in his hair, icing all over his face.
Koyama arrived a little later, not too long before he could see them like this, Tegoshi sitting on the counter while Ryo stood in front of him between his legs. It wasn’t the sweetest movie-like scene that could be nominated for the Oscars, but the sight of smiles between tender and loving kisses, Tegoshi’s arms around Ryo’s shoulders and the latter’s hands on Tegoshi’s hips, Koyama was simply satisfied. There was some sort of peace in his mind, finally.
It was like this all throughout the day, and it was fairly difficult for Koyama to facilitate them both because they were too well engrossed in teasing and smiling and exchanging glances from time to time. Koyama might as well quit, but that would have to be an exaggeration.
Right before closing time, Koyama entered the kitchen to take his bag and leave, oblivious to what his other two co-workers were most probably up to, until he saw them both inside the storage room through the tiny window. Tegoshi was leaning against the shelves, his hands on Ryo’s arms while the latter kissed him possessively, slowly, intimately-as if the setting could even be more romantic. When Ryo pulled back, Koyama saw in his eyes the gaze that belonged to a man in love-so, so in love-and it dawned on him how Tegoshi looked back with the same loving eyes and a romantic smile pressed on his lips. For a while Koyama felt jealousy; jealousy because he didn’t have anyone to love like that, but it was something he pondered on from time to time when he chanced upon seeing scenes like this. It was normal to him, and he was immediately caught on and he smiled. This had to be the start of a beautiful relationship.
On their first month together, Ryo decided to pick him up from school. He had female blockmates looking at Ryo. They told Tegoshi the man he was with was a good-looking man and that he was quite gentlemanly, quite captivating when he came face to face with Tegoshi and wrapped an arm around his neck. Unfortunately it was the same time they all realized that he had been, in fact, fully taken by a fellow blockmate, a boy their age no less. The worse thing was that they knew who this boy was.
On college, Tegoshi was a freshman in his university. In another school, Ryo was already graduating. On the night of his graduation, the restaurant closed early, and they all celebrated his final success. He was now a fulltime pastry chef and Tegoshi was nothing but ecstatic for him. It was on that same night that Ryo took him to bed, and fell in love all over again for him.
One day in spring, a day that could have been any given day of the year, on the hour of the restaurant’s closing time, someone decided to try and grace himself with the power to manipulate life and all the forces that surrounded it.
He had failed miserably.
Normally, they both went home together, Ryo’s hand through Tegoshi’s, or his arm around the boy’s neck, but tonight Ryo decided to leave work earlier than Tegoshi to complete some errands he had left off to do that morning. Koyama looked at him as if he knew what Ryo had already planned ahead, and let him go. Tegoshi embraced him one last time before he left, told him he’d see him at home in a bit after finishing up.
It was a night of all sorts right after Ryo left, starting off with the butcher across the street running out of his meatshop, eyes towards only one side of the road. Everyone else had gone off to that same direction, even Koyama and Tegoshi.
No one in the restaurant heard the commotion just outside: the truck, the spill, the sirens from the ambulances. Tegoshi called Ryo to tell him all that happened, his handphone ringing and ringing and ringing.
“That must have been terrible!” Koyama cried out upon arriving at the scene. “Good thing no one got hurt.”
The funeral was held two weeks later after Tegoshi visited him everyday in the hospital. He had, in fact, survived and spent his last two weeks with Tegoshi, but he knew that leaving him would somehow kill the boy inside. It had already been almost two years, just a few more months before their second anniversary. They already made plans of sorts for that special day. Now Tegoshi could only suppress his tears as friends and family passed him by, pat him on the back as they said their heartfelt condolences, but really, were they heartfelt?
It was a short relationship, his first and Tegoshi had fallen in love with a man. It was something no on expected but it did happen, and he was happy. Happy, but in a society like this, he knew a relationship like that could never be fully accepted by the norm. It wasn’t his fault; he simply fell in love.
Now he was just falling, and failing.
His parents were devastated, told him that he could come back home and they’d sell the apartment because they were afraid of him living alone in a house that contained broken memories and sooner or later, mold and dust. They were simply overprotective, but Tegoshi could only keep silent for awhile as he looked at them stunned and displeased.
“I want to keep our apartment. We’re never going to sell it.”
Tegoshi went home alone that evening, and it was the first time in a long time that he felt so indifferent to the world. Someone couldn’t forgive him for loving a man, he thought, and now he couldn’t forgive himself either for loving him so much so dearly.
He went to bed alone, the lamp beside him lit in flickering light. His eyes fluttered open and close all through out the night, stirring and stirring, looking at the vast space beside him. He reached for it, stretched his hand out as far as he could reach, only hoping for warmth to fill the gap that spread through and through beside him, taunting him as it grew wider and wider. It had been empty for sometime now, and something inside him crawled deep in fear and in so much agony, telling him it was going to stay empty for the rest of his life in that apartment. For the first time in a long time, Tegoshi was alone, and he was afraid to admit that he was desperately lonely.
For nights and weeks back, he slept soundly with arms wrapped so possessively around him, lips on Tegoshi’s neck, and he can tell that he was smiling. In the middle of the night, Tegoshi would turn around to face him, his lips brushing on his and he felt safe by the warmth of his breath on his cheek. He would nuzzle so close to his lover’s side, and an arm would automatically wrap around his shoulder.
“Ryo,” he called out to him, sat down on the bed feeling cold and numb. An arm weighed him down on his shoulder, as it quickly wrapped around Tegoshi’s neck. He could feel the breath on his collar, trailed kisses on his shoulder. “What is it,”
This was the longing feel he was desperate for. “I can’t sleep,” his voice was audible but hoarse and broken. “I can’t fall asleep alone.”
Another arm wrapped around his neck. “Sure you can. I’m right here.”
He was so desperate. “Ryo,” he whispered his name and it felt just satisfying feeling the slide of his name in his tongue, but the satisfaction grew livid, grew apart in just moments after. Tegoshi held onto the warm arms that overwhelmed him.
“I’m right here.”
Tegoshi closed his eyes.
“Why did you have to go?”
“I’m right here.”
There were tears in their eyes.
author: chartre
rating: pg-13
pairing: ryotego
summary: it was a short relationship, his first and tegoshi had fallen in love with a man.
notes: fictional. very old, something i just dug out from the hard drive. :0 a supposed multi-chapter fic, but let's see how this works as a oneshot for now. :D
One Day in Spring
ryotego
And so, he fell in love. Tegoshi fell in love with a man, and his parents dreaded the day he told them. They knew they shouldn’t have agreed when he said he wanted to work as a part-time waiter in that resto & bar. First of all, a waiter wasn’t an occupation to be proud of, his father said; he wouldn’t be able to live properly on a wage that of one, and for the record, the boys in the restaurant looked different. It was bad news, his father warned him.
“I like this boy, mom.”
They let him go because this was what he wanted: freedom, and everything else that came with it, some package deal he pictured. They let him work in that restaurant, let him love a man three years older than him, let him move in with him-maybe because his mother believed a man his age could take good care of their son-after a year they’ve been together while Tegoshi’s mother tried not to cry herself to sleep again that night.
This man was older, and Tegoshi’s mother feared and loved that fact at the same time.
“He’s twenty going on twenty-one, mom!” her son said over a long-distance call with a voice so promising, it was hard for her to control her tears. It wasn’t until she had finally seen him a few weeks after that phone call that she thought he could be okay. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.
He was a late bloomer in his childhood, one who didn’t grow in height until his growth spurt (and somehow that reminded Tegoshi’s mother about her very own son); he had a kind face and a smile that made her remember little Tegoshi’s childhood. Her first impression of him was well: he helped Tegoshi out of the car, carried his school books for him and always kept a smile on his face. He greeted his parents properly, and spoke to his father with much ease and poise. His father had to approve.
They bought an apartment a few months after this meeting, and finally slept together-and other things, but Tegoshi supposed his parents need not know of the latter activity.
There were only two boys working in the resto & bar: a tall blonde who was on kitchen duty (his name was Koyama) and another boy of the same age-only shorter-on pastries. The latter had to be Tegoshi’s boyfriend. There was an open slot for orders and service. Tegoshi wrote a résumé and attended his interview day.
“What’s your name?” Koyama asked during his interview.
“Tegoshi Yuya.” He was still nervous. The man behind him smiled.
“How old are you?”
“I’m eighteen.”
Less than a few more ambiguities ran through his mind as the questions came and came, things like where are you from, are you good with people, why do you want this job. A little more of this and a little more of that, the man behind him simply smiled and kept his laughter to himself.
“What do you think are your weaknesses?”
“This job?”
“No, I mean-”
“I mean it; this is probably the farthest I can go.”
The man behind him laughed out loud this time, and Tegoshi was the most embarrassed boy in the room at that moment. Koyama saw the color crawling from his nose to his ears, and it made him worried, Tegoshi. “Shut up, Ryo. You’re making him nervous.”
So his name was Ryo. Tegoshi remembered that.
He got his job a few days later after a receiving a phone call from the restaurant.
Nothing was ever ordinary since he started working besides the fact that everyone was required to wear a uniform that consisted of a clean and pressed white dress shirt, and black everything else: black tie, black vest, black slacks. Very typical, very western, and very tight in Tegoshi’s pants that it made Ryo snicker, if not laugh right in his presence whenever he saw him. Those were the days he couldn’t stop thinking about how obnoxiously rude this man was, but it wasn’t as if he could do anything about it even in the following weeks to come.
A few more days into the next month, August, these things flew in and flew out casually as if they were nothing more than reproduced words and laughter over and over again. Tegoshi had grown accustomed to them, and to Ryo’s culinary skills in creating popovers without them sinking into the trays. He was also always the first to try any of his new creations. Somehow, Ryo had developed a liking to this boy, favored him for a number of reasons, stupid or not.
“How is it?” Ryo made an apple pie.
“The filling is too sweet for me.”
“You’ve got a horrible tongue!”
“But you asked for my opinion!”
Always the first.
A few days shy of spring during the late night shift, Koyama went home early because his cute little nephew of three just had to be visiting from home, and so they closed the restaurant early. Ryo was in the middle of decorating his last order of cake, Tegoshi cleaning the tables while he stole glances from the busy man.
It wasn’t as if idle minutes like this ever stayed idle for the rest of the hour; something was bound to happen anytime soon but it was unclear to them how that would be brought about.
Tegoshi once sat down with his mother in the living room, told her everything he needed to tell her before he came back to the city.
“Mom, I think I’m in love. And I might have a problem, too.”
Tegoshi was a young, energetic eighteen-year-old, and for his mother to hear such words, it shook her, made her spine shiver with something cool, but she was just so enthusiastic about hearing what he had to say. “What’s her name?”
“That’s the problem,” Tegoshi rubbed the back of his neck. “I like this boy, mom.”
Ryo was a different case: he wasn’t close with his parents, and he realized love through actions because words were never acquaintances with him to begin with. His ability to love was simply and completely dependent on the various little things the significant other did to make him fall in love. He was sentimental about things like these, and it was a beautiful way to love, he thought to himself once, and it made him smile upon seeing Tegoshi’s face.
“I don’t know, I think I like you,” he said that night after finishing the final décor his last cake. Tegoshi was right in front of him, hands fumbling with the rag he used to wipe table with. “...I dunno, I was just thinking.”
“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” Tegoshi brushed past him and walked into the kitchen, hung his apron and took his bag. “Think, I mean.
“You were always better with doing than saying, anyway.”
He left that night a little nerved, perhaps, and it made Ryo question his own abilities. He couldn’t blame him; all this time he had been teasing him about every little thing until he finally might have grown numb from all the cruelty, he knew it was only because he liked this boy, and Tegoshi often made him nervous (even if it was a realization made a little late). He couldn’t blame him if there were mixed signs and feelings.
And as if it were even more surprising-not that it was, Ryo had these notions in his head-Tegoshi came earlier than Koyama did the next morning, saw Ryo working on a new cake, icing all over his hands and he kissed him behind the counter, hands in his hair, icing all over his face.
Koyama arrived a little later, not too long before he could see them like this, Tegoshi sitting on the counter while Ryo stood in front of him between his legs. It wasn’t the sweetest movie-like scene that could be nominated for the Oscars, but the sight of smiles between tender and loving kisses, Tegoshi’s arms around Ryo’s shoulders and the latter’s hands on Tegoshi’s hips, Koyama was simply satisfied. There was some sort of peace in his mind, finally.
It was like this all throughout the day, and it was fairly difficult for Koyama to facilitate them both because they were too well engrossed in teasing and smiling and exchanging glances from time to time. Koyama might as well quit, but that would have to be an exaggeration.
Right before closing time, Koyama entered the kitchen to take his bag and leave, oblivious to what his other two co-workers were most probably up to, until he saw them both inside the storage room through the tiny window. Tegoshi was leaning against the shelves, his hands on Ryo’s arms while the latter kissed him possessively, slowly, intimately-as if the setting could even be more romantic. When Ryo pulled back, Koyama saw in his eyes the gaze that belonged to a man in love-so, so in love-and it dawned on him how Tegoshi looked back with the same loving eyes and a romantic smile pressed on his lips. For a while Koyama felt jealousy; jealousy because he didn’t have anyone to love like that, but it was something he pondered on from time to time when he chanced upon seeing scenes like this. It was normal to him, and he was immediately caught on and he smiled. This had to be the start of a beautiful relationship.
On their first month together, Ryo decided to pick him up from school. He had female blockmates looking at Ryo. They told Tegoshi the man he was with was a good-looking man and that he was quite gentlemanly, quite captivating when he came face to face with Tegoshi and wrapped an arm around his neck. Unfortunately it was the same time they all realized that he had been, in fact, fully taken by a fellow blockmate, a boy their age no less. The worse thing was that they knew who this boy was.
On college, Tegoshi was a freshman in his university. In another school, Ryo was already graduating. On the night of his graduation, the restaurant closed early, and they all celebrated his final success. He was now a fulltime pastry chef and Tegoshi was nothing but ecstatic for him. It was on that same night that Ryo took him to bed, and fell in love all over again for him.
One day in spring, a day that could have been any given day of the year, on the hour of the restaurant’s closing time, someone decided to try and grace himself with the power to manipulate life and all the forces that surrounded it.
He had failed miserably.
Normally, they both went home together, Ryo’s hand through Tegoshi’s, or his arm around the boy’s neck, but tonight Ryo decided to leave work earlier than Tegoshi to complete some errands he had left off to do that morning. Koyama looked at him as if he knew what Ryo had already planned ahead, and let him go. Tegoshi embraced him one last time before he left, told him he’d see him at home in a bit after finishing up.
It was a night of all sorts right after Ryo left, starting off with the butcher across the street running out of his meatshop, eyes towards only one side of the road. Everyone else had gone off to that same direction, even Koyama and Tegoshi.
No one in the restaurant heard the commotion just outside: the truck, the spill, the sirens from the ambulances. Tegoshi called Ryo to tell him all that happened, his handphone ringing and ringing and ringing.
“That must have been terrible!” Koyama cried out upon arriving at the scene. “Good thing no one got hurt.”
The funeral was held two weeks later after Tegoshi visited him everyday in the hospital. He had, in fact, survived and spent his last two weeks with Tegoshi, but he knew that leaving him would somehow kill the boy inside. It had already been almost two years, just a few more months before their second anniversary. They already made plans of sorts for that special day. Now Tegoshi could only suppress his tears as friends and family passed him by, pat him on the back as they said their heartfelt condolences, but really, were they heartfelt?
It was a short relationship, his first and Tegoshi had fallen in love with a man. It was something no on expected but it did happen, and he was happy. Happy, but in a society like this, he knew a relationship like that could never be fully accepted by the norm. It wasn’t his fault; he simply fell in love.
Now he was just falling, and failing.
His parents were devastated, told him that he could come back home and they’d sell the apartment because they were afraid of him living alone in a house that contained broken memories and sooner or later, mold and dust. They were simply overprotective, but Tegoshi could only keep silent for awhile as he looked at them stunned and displeased.
“I want to keep our apartment. We’re never going to sell it.”
Tegoshi went home alone that evening, and it was the first time in a long time that he felt so indifferent to the world. Someone couldn’t forgive him for loving a man, he thought, and now he couldn’t forgive himself either for loving him so much so dearly.
He went to bed alone, the lamp beside him lit in flickering light. His eyes fluttered open and close all through out the night, stirring and stirring, looking at the vast space beside him. He reached for it, stretched his hand out as far as he could reach, only hoping for warmth to fill the gap that spread through and through beside him, taunting him as it grew wider and wider. It had been empty for sometime now, and something inside him crawled deep in fear and in so much agony, telling him it was going to stay empty for the rest of his life in that apartment. For the first time in a long time, Tegoshi was alone, and he was afraid to admit that he was desperately lonely.
For nights and weeks back, he slept soundly with arms wrapped so possessively around him, lips on Tegoshi’s neck, and he can tell that he was smiling. In the middle of the night, Tegoshi would turn around to face him, his lips brushing on his and he felt safe by the warmth of his breath on his cheek. He would nuzzle so close to his lover’s side, and an arm would automatically wrap around his shoulder.
“Ryo,” he called out to him, sat down on the bed feeling cold and numb. An arm weighed him down on his shoulder, as it quickly wrapped around Tegoshi’s neck. He could feel the breath on his collar, trailed kisses on his shoulder. “What is it,”
This was the longing feel he was desperate for. “I can’t sleep,” his voice was audible but hoarse and broken. “I can’t fall asleep alone.”
Another arm wrapped around his neck. “Sure you can. I’m right here.”
He was so desperate. “Ryo,” he whispered his name and it felt just satisfying feeling the slide of his name in his tongue, but the satisfaction grew livid, grew apart in just moments after. Tegoshi held onto the warm arms that overwhelmed him.
“I’m right here.”
Tegoshi closed his eyes.
“Why did you have to go?”
“I’m right here.”
There were tears in their eyes.