Fic: Starlight Now (2)
Title: Starlight Now
Characters/Pairings: FaiYuui, some KuroFai, mild KuroYuui, mentions of other characters
Rating: T
Summary: Yuui writes for a living to convince people of his dreams, but cannot convince himself to stop loving his apparently oblivious twin.
A/N: part 2 of the secret santa gift for eijentu. Still not done - this thing seems to have grown teeth and wings and claws, and is digging them all into my brain. Christmas, at least, isn’t technically done and finished until Twelfth Night? ;;;
…Also a quick review of my own fics made me realise I always seem to write Yuui partially depressed or thoroughly confused. Go me.
*****
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
- W. H. Auden, The More Loving One
Dinner is interesting. Fai cooks, chicken and rice and far too much showing-off, and Yuui finds himself cleaning up after him, Kurogane at his elbow, picking rice off the table and floor and out of Kurogane’s disgruntled black hair.
“The very worst kind of dandruff,” Yuui tries to joke, even as Fai (thoroughly absorbed by his ‘culinary masterpiece’) ignores them both and starts warbling along with the radio he’s clicked on, something old and American and probably about the loneliness of the far West or the coldness of hearts or a war. Maybe all three, Yuui doesn’t know the words and doesn’t particularly care. “At least it’s not more fully-cooked - sticky things are harder to remove.”
Kurogane looks up at him - he’s tall, taller than the twins, and has to be seated for Yuui to check the top of his head - and Yuui feels the smile waver at the edges of his mouth at the unblinking look the other wears. (They should send this one to London, dress him in red and black and let him serve the Queen.) “Does your idiot brother usually dump sticky things in your hair?”
Yuui finds himself blushing, a faint thread of pink along his cheekbones, his mind full of pictures but utterly devoid of anything coherent to say.
You fell asleep and the sun shone in through the curtains on you, through the dust motes in the air and late afternoon. It left dapples on your cheeks and nose, and shadows under your slumbering eyes - it made a strange creature of you, sunshine and quiet, a transient mystery of an evening world.
Fai uncaps a black marker pen as Yuui clears away the dishes, leaning forward over his full belly and taking Kurogane’s arm before the other can properly protest. A good meal makes the other a little slow, perhaps - anything to explain why Kurogane sits there obediently as Fai determinedly scrawls a long line of numbers up the length of the other man’s forearm, twisting the limb under his eyes so the nib presses into the softer skin covering the vein. Hard to scrub away.
“Fai,” Yuui says, stops startled at the table when he comes back and sees the numbers at last, upside-down as Kurogane peers at them with a furrowed brow. “Is that-?”
“Yuui’s phone number~” Fai sings, stretching back in his seat with closed eyes and a satisfied smile. “Kuro-fwip might need it someday -”
“To call someone else to haul your drunken ass home?” Kurogane asks, leaves his hand on his arm. His thumb is the size of the first zero; Yuui silently hopes it smears, runs in the rain.
Fai pouts. “Kuro-but has never had to haul me home -”
“I’ve had to put you over my shoulder and carry you after prying your fingers away from the bar - if that’s not hauling, you idiot-brained lush -”
“Kuro-bu matched me drink for drink that night, so I don’t know who he’s calling a lush -”
“I was the only one walking in a straight line.”
Fai folds his arms across his chest. “I could’ve walked in a straight line if I’d really wanted to. But my feet hurt that night and Kuro-jii was being so helpful and offering me a lift, so I decided to take him up on his gracious proposition.”
“You made me carry your wriggling skinny arse because you were too lazy to walk?!”
“We~ll, Kuro-chi has to admit that he makes a good ride -” Fai shifts, scoots to the edge of his seat and leans into his brother’s space. Yuui wraps an arm around him automatically - he can remember the night in question, the end of it, Fai whining at the front door because keys are difficult and falling in a lanky sprawl in Yuui’s arms when Yuui had opened the door to let him in. Warm and heavy, slick sloppy smiles left against Yuui’s shoulder where his wide shirt collar had slipped away.
Kurogane snarls.
“What’s that?” Yuui asks - Kurogane’s fingers have slipped over a strange smudge at the end of the numbers on his arm, something with too many edges to be a mistake.
Fai perks. “It’s a fox!”
Kurogane frowns at the smudge. “…It looks like an attempt at a deformed hedgehog with a furry sausage attached to its rear end.”
“It’s a fox,” Fai repeats, a little more mulishly, his cheek pressed to the lines of Yuui’s jumper. The wool crackles with static where it meets his hair, tingling. “For Yuui. Because he’s different from a kitty and not at all grumpy enough to be a puppy like Kuro-tan.”
“Oi -” Kurogane objects.
Yuui frowns as well, just a little, carding his fingers through his brother’s hair. There’s rice there too, electricity sparking over his hand - Fai just smiles at him winsomely, London Evening Blue. “Foxes are thieves.”
“Foxes are storytellers,” Fai says, and leans more heavily into his brother’s chest.
“…Foxes are smart,” Kurogane says, and crosses his arms so the drawing and the number alongside it are hidden against his dark shirt. “Amongst other things.”
“He’s very…perceptive,” Yuui says when Kurogane is gone, when Fai lets the curtain swing closed after watching Kurogane’s retreat down the pathway outside and asks what his brother thinks of his colleague.
“One of his more unfortunate traits,” Fai replies, smile somewhere between wistful and wry. It aches a little to watch him wear it. “But isn’t he cute?”
[Fai digs out his somewhat battered violin case from where it’s abandoned at the back of his wardrobe, heaving aside years of junk and clothing to flick the latches open and breathe in the scent of polished wood, old wine-red velvet and rosin inside. Folded music with crinkled edges slips out of the pouch on the inside of the lid, all pencil marks and smudgy grey thumbprints much smaller than Fai’s hands are now, but the bow still fits, the violin fits, the rest tucked under Fai’s chin and his fingers feeling their way across the strings at the neck.
I, he tells a bewildered Yuui, sure and triumphant even though neither of the twins has laid a hand on an instrument in at least two years (Yuui remembers - a piano, with smooth white keys, a friend of a friend’s party, being half-drunk and implored to play a song. Yesterday, something slow; Fai had been worse for wear and crooned the words into his ear), am going to write you your melodies.
Fai - Yuui starts. Stops and feels a headache throb at his temples. Pinches his nose and sighs. Breathe in, breathe out. Fai, why do you insist on doing this?
Because you won’t, Fai says, cradling his violin in his hands like a small, precious child, bow dangling lax on the edge of a fingertip. Any of their old secondary school conductors would weep at the sight. You won’t ever, Yuui, will you?]
You’re terribly good, you know - at ruling and destroying, piece by piece, all my castles in the sky.
They have a radio in the kitchen, and one upstairs. More correctly - they had a radio in the kitchen, but now they have a radio in pieces in the kitchen (the one upstairs is hopefully still intact), shiny and sharp and all over the place as Fai pokes at it with a screwdriver. His day off.
“We have to cook in here, you know,” Yuui tells him, leans in the doorway with an empty mug in his hands. He came for coffee, a quick boost so he can go back to writing - he’ll be talking to his editor soon, but this. This. This is distracting.
“I’ll buy pizza,” Fai says, and doesn’t look up from dismembering the radio. It lived a noble life.
Yuui comes in to put his mug down on the countertop, and grabs a can of pepsi from the fridge. Cold caffeine it is. “I don’t want pizza.”
“Picky,” Fai huffs and blows a wisp of his fringe out of his eyes - he’s due another haircut soon -, but Yuui is gone already, back to work.
Fai’s radio hisses into French just after four o’ clock, Mireille Mathieu on a foreign channel. Everything is rewired to catch the waves across the Channel and keep them, let them drift up through the floorboards to Yuui’s study, French music and Fai attempting to sing along even though he doesn’t know the words.
Yuui pauses to smile at his laptop’s keyboard, ruefully eye the time blinking at him in the bottom-right, and goes back to work.
[Scales - Fai plays scales, up and down each string by turn before spreading across them, staccato. London Bridge Is Falling Down, oh he plays London Bridge until Yuui wants to stab his brother with his own bow, his own fingertips tightening on pens and mug-handles until they’re so very close to breaking.
And he hates it, he hates it, asks Fai to stop because falling down, falling down is drowning out all the worlds he’s trying to transmute to paper and smothering them in noise.
Fai, pedantic, see-saws into endless Twinkle, Twinkle instead, and Yuui storms out of the house and into November with his blue scarf flapping, cracking the air. Forget-me-not, My Fair Lady. Slams the door.]
There’s a morning. (There always is.) It’s cold and raining and the raindrops patters off the windowpanes, terribly dreary. Fai burrows into his bedcovers and refuses to be budged from his nest, and when Yuui fights to pull the duvet away from his brother’s lanky frame Fai pulls him down onto the bed, limbs akimbo, clinging to him like a barnacle, mistletoe in the crook of their small garden tree. Yuui protests, squirms - but Fai laughs and clings tighter, rolls them around and over so Yuui lies flat on his back and glaring up at where Fai leans over him, sleep-warm and lovely, hair and blankets around his face and shoulders. His cheeks are pink; Fai wears a flushed smile well, down the line of his throat with his laughter, a pleasant sound from a mouth made too easy for kissing, pursed out into a teasing pout when Yuui doesn’t immediately play along.
“Yuui’s cold,” Fai lilts, laughs and snuggles into the crook of his brother’s neck and ignores the hissed get off.
“Fai’s lazy,” Yuui retorts in a sharper mockery of Fai’s sing-song tones, trying to raise his leg and put his knee between their bodies, shove Fai away. He’s fully-dressed and ready for the day already - it’s stifling under the blankets, too hot and too much Fai. Everywhere - the elder Fluorite had showered and washed his hair the night before, and his pillows smell of his apple shampoo. “And Fai has work - would you stop that?” Fai is nuzzling him for God’s sake; his nose is sharp and warm and his breath tickles. It’s too much. “Fai!”
Fai's eyes are very large in their surprise, Yuui notes, and very blue in the way Yuui can never get in a mirror’s reflection. “Yuui -”
Yuui pushes at his brother, grips his hands in the linen-cotton of Fai’s pyjama-top and shoves, something a little too fierce and angry for the grey morning, worn in the sleepy worried creases in Fai’s brow as he lands on his side, heavy and confused.
Fai reaches out for him again, regardless. “Yuui -”
Yuui pulls away, pulls away sharply and leaves him, and goes out for a long, long walk. He eventually comes back with a white hot chocolate cradled between his hands, to an empty house.
There’s a note kept up by a smiley-cloud magnet on the fridge. Fai’s scrawl: I’m sorry. Call me? x
Yuui doesn’t call. He stays in and writes nothing all day, goes out with friends when the evening falls and rolls back in at four am to crawl into his bed and sleep like a dead thing. It takes him three cups of as-good-as-black coffee, two pop-tarts and until one o’ clock the following afternoon to think around his hangover and realise Fai hasn’t been home in all that time either.
Since his work hasn’t called looking for him, Yuui figures his brother is fine.
I like you, I love you and oh, I hate you so.
- There’s a type of sapphire called London Evening, or London Blue, because (as you might guess from the name) its deep colour is supposed to represent the colour of the twilight sky over London. Perhaps the colour can be seen because evening lasts for a long while in Britain - the evenings further south, on the European continent or in the Americas, seem to come and go in the blink of eye.
- Yesterday, by The Beatles.