Leaving (1/1) PG
Jdorama Fic
Title: Leaving (1/1)
Pairing: Hayato/Ryu
Rating: PG
Genre/warnings: dramafic, Gokusen 2; angst
Wordcount: 6,107
Summary: Post-drama, Hayato is released from prison to find Ryu waiting.
A/N: Thanks to kitsune714 and Kou for valuable feedback.
"Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
There the faint signs are left,
coins of time and water,
debris, celestial ash
and the irreplaceable rapture
of sharing in the labour
of solitude and the sand."
- excerpt from "Forget about me," Pablo Neruda, Extravagaria
I. "the wind changed"
It is seven thirty on a Tuesday morning in late April when Yabuki Hayato is released from prison.
When he emerges into the bright, sunlit alley, he lifts his eyes from the asphalt and looks into the face of Odagiri Ryu.
"Hey," Ryu says, shifting where he is leaned against the wall.
"Hey," Hayato says rustily, and then he clears his throat. He wasn't sure what he would find when he stepped through the gates which closed behind him with a clang. He can hear the guard's footsteps retreating.
Ryu's eyes are clear and golden-brown, lit by the light flooding the alley. His hair is a warm auburn color, and long, and a light breeze lifts strands gently from his shoulders so they float for an instant above his slender shoulders.
"Come on," Ryu says, pushing off the wall. Hayato nods once and follows.
*
Ryu drives for hours through unfamiliar country, taking back roads that Hayato is sure he doesn't remember. He quickly loses track of where they are and the road signs pass in a blur. In eight hours they stop only three times.
Long before it comes into view, Hayato senses the sea and the line of the horizon where water meets sky in the distance. He has spent the entire drive like a dog with his window rolled down and his nose pointed into the wind as he tried to see everything that flashed by, everything he hasn't seen in five years.
When the sea appears, a silver-blue plane adjoined to a creamy sky, Hayato can't suppress his sudden intake of breath. Ryu is, of course, silent. Then they are both quiet as they have been for most of the drive, until Ryu slows down and pulls to the side of the road where there is a small lay-by. Hayato climbs out of the car, unfolding his cramped limbs, and he lifts his face sky-wards, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath of salty air. Overhead, seagulls wheel in wide circles, calling out. The shore curves in a graceful arc, sheltering a small village - Hayato can see the distant docks, and there are fishing boats silhouetted on the horizon.
"Where are we?" he asks.
"Almost there," comes Ryu's reply. "Almost home."
Hayato lets the words sink into him, under his skin, which prickles at the idea. Home? Prison was home for five years. While he was incarcerated, the world changed irrevocably outside the prison walls (and inside, so did he), and now he has no home left to which he can return. He thinks about what he would have done if Ryu had not been waiting for him in the alley. Probably walk, and keep walking.
Hayato's eyes take in the view from their vantage point above a steep, grassy drop-off into thick vegetation and gnarled wind-shaped trees that finally give way to dingy sand and heaving waters that crash ashore. It's mid-afternoon and cool; the sun gives off a wan light, so different from the golden light that had lit the alley outside the prison gates and set Ryu's hair aflame.
Hayato watches the weak light sparkle nonetheless on the waves below. He turns to Ryu, whose profile is severe, disjointed from the nose; sea breeze blows the hair back from his face.
"Let's go," Hayato says thickly, and he turns back to the car, not waiting for Ryu.
*
Ryu parks the car behind a small weathered house on stilts beyond the grassy dunes, behind the nondescript sand beach. The wooden siding is gray and the whole structure appears rickety and fragile, as though one really good storm would smash it flat and scatter its timbers up and down the shore. Hayato follows Ryu up the steps. Ryu moves slower than he would have expected.
Once inside, Hayato glances around, noting the spare, tidy space. There is little furniture in the room lined with windows on two sides - a table in the corner, bookshelves between the windows. Ryu points out the bathroom nestled on the left between the kitchen and the bedroom which Hayato can see faces onto the beach. Hayato doesn't realize that he's walked straight across the length of the small house to the door that leads onto the deck until he's fumbling at the lock. Ryu reaches past him to turn the padlock and remove the chain, until Hayato can push the door outward, and he steps onto the wooden floor of the deck.
The sky widens endlessly overhead, expanding into infinity, and Hayato ignores the weight of Ryu's gaze on his back as he finds his way to the railing overlooking the beach. The tide rolls in, restlessly spilling further and further to darken the brownish sand.
*
The breeze raises gooseflesh on his naked skin, but Hayato ignores it as he basks in the complete and utter freedom of standing on the beach in only his skin. He has been locked up and pushed down for years now, shoved around and at the mercy of others - and he is suddenly insane with a joy too big to contain. In fact, tears stream down his face, but he pays even less attention to them than he does to the breeze, or to his own nakedness.
He plunges into the rushing tide and strokes out from the shore, screaming as loud as he can, muscles clenching, fingers stretched out to seize the world all at once, all for himself, all, all, at last.
*
Ryu watches from the deck's railing.
He sees his old friend climb into the sea with outstretched arms, hears his voice, raw and ragged, crying out in something that sounds exactly like pain and exactly like joy.
Ryu wants to look away, but he can't. He remains rooted into place, his chest tight and full, but he can no more explain the feeling that floods him than Hayato who thrashes into the incoming waves without care and without reason.
*
A towel waits for Hayato on the step where he had discarded his clothes. He gratefully uses it to dry off, and then wraps it around his waist. He is shivering uncontrollably as he pads up the steps to the deck, sand gritting beneath each footstep.
Ryu is on the deck, standing over the grill when Hayato tops the final step. A delicious odor of cooking meat wafts toward him. Hayato huddles around the pile of clothes in his arms until Ryu looks over his shoulder.
"Enjoy your swim?" he asks without inflection, and yet his eyebrow arches with the question. He doesn't wait for an answer, turning back to the grill. He gestures with the spatula. "I put some clothes in the bathroom for you."
Hayato finds a sweatsuit and t-shirt waiting for him which he dons after a quick, hot shower. He cleans up as best he can after himself, wiping up all the water he dripped into the house and sweeping away the sand he tracked in. Meanwhile, Ryu sets the table and tells him dinner is ready.
It's a simple meal: grilled steak, steamed potatoes served with a dish of mayonnaise on the side, and a bowl piled high with bright green broccoli. Hayato stares down at the thick slab of meat that Ryu slides onto his plate, and he flushes as he considers the exorbitant cost.
"You didn't have to do all this," he says haltingly.
Ryu shrugs, pulling the other steak onto his plate. "It's your first meal outside. I thought you deserved something special. Right?"
Ryu meets his eyes with that questioning expression, the one that says, "you know I'm right, it's so obvious, isn't it?" Hayato remembers that sometimes that expression made him want to punch Ryu in the mouth.
He doesn't want to punch Ryu in the mouth right now. He feels his face contract with an emotion he can't identify, and he tries to smooth it out, tries to look at Ryu the same way he always has and not feel so helpless and pathetically grateful that someone was waiting for him, that someone brought him home. He knows he shouldn't feel like this. Particularly because it wasn't someone, it was Ryu.
"Thanks," he says after a moment has passed, and he ducks his head. Ryu waves him off.
"Just eat," Ryu replies.
*
"What are you doing out here?" Hayato asks after dinner. They stand together at the deck railing, watching the sky fade from melon to salmon to lavender and then deepen to violet. The sea is still silver-blue, now tinged with flame. Hayato feels something ominous open between them as Ryu shifts uncomfortably.
"Uh...Nothing," he mumbles, forcing Hayato to strain for the words.
"What do you mean, 'nothing,'" Hayato asks with a frown. He can't imagine Ryu doing nothing. He was still studying in university when Hayato went to prison. Hayato had always felt certain that Ryu was the most likely of their circle of friends to make something of himself. 'Nothing' wasn't part of that equation.
"I mean, nothing."
"So, what? You decided to take a vacation way out here in the middle of nowhere?" Hayato has turned to face Ryu who stares steadfastly at the water and dying sunset. His face is stiff in the light breeze.
Ryu finally shrugs. "I don't do nothing with my time, if that's what you mean."
What's going on? What happened to you? Are you okay? Hayato wants to ask, but he doesn't.
Hayato doesn't ask any of those questions, or anything more. Something in Ryu's face silences the clamor in his head. He takes a deep breath of sea air, and then another.
"Tomorrow," he begins slowly, coming to a decision. "I'll look for work."
Ryu turns to him quizzically. "There's no rush. You can take it easy for a while, if you want. Enjoy being outside."
Hayato meets Ryu's eyes. He thinks: being outside is enough. "It's okay. I want to. I need to do something."
Ryu is silent for a moment before he nods. "Talk to Umezawa-san in the village. I think one of the fishermen's sons went away to university, so he and his wife need help with their restaurant and with their fishing boat."
"Thanks," Hayato says, before hesitating; he hates himself for his uncertainty. "But won't they - I mean, if they find out I was in prison - they probably won't-"
"You don't need to tell them that," Ryu interrupts, "unless you want to. Besides, they don't care. So long as you have a strong back, and you're willing to work hard, they don't care. It's a small village, and there aren't many people. They'll take anyone they can get."
Perfect. Hayato looks away from Ryu, shifting his gaze to the last traces of lavender fading from the sky. The restlessness is an ocean inside him that swells and swells.
II. "for those who know the signs"
Hayato wakes before dawn the next morning, pulls on the clothes he wore out of prison, and he walks thirty minutes up the beach until he reaches the village. Ryu was right - he's offered a job immediately, with hardly any questions asked. They even give him an old set of overalls, work gloves and a pair of rubber boots ("they belonged to my son," the older man with the shock of graying hair explains), so Hayato sets out in a fishing boat as the sun appears behind the village against a pearl-pink sky.
The work isn't too bad: half the time it requires every ounce of Hayato's concentration, and the rest he spends lost in thought as he stares at the endless waves.
He considers everything that changed, everything he lost while he was in prison. His father died three years ago: heart attack. His brother went to Canada for university. He lost touch with every friend but Ryu - one by one they fell away, moved on, grew up, he supposed. Ryu visited him during that first year, but never again after that, although he did send letters. Yankumi was the only one who visited him regularly - he reflects that when she first walked into classroom 3-D all those years ago, he never imagined how glad he might someday be to see her face, or to talk with her. Even if she did seem to have an unhealthy preoccupation with him and Ryu - he remembers that every visit (especially over the last two years), she would ask if he'd heard from Ryu lately, and he can still hear her voice reminding him of the value and importance of friendship.
Ryu is a good friend, Hayato thinks. He must have driven all night to be waiting there for him at seven-thirty in the morning, and then he drove all the way back, too. Hayato hadn't thought about it before, but he realizes it now, and flushes in shame.
*
The days pass easily, and even though it has only been a week, Hayato feels himself adapting to the quiet rhythms of life in the little beach house, and to work in the village, and on the boat; he welcomes the persistent cries of seagulls up and down the seashore and the rising of the sun behind them in the morning until light floods the little house, reflecting off the water, and he looks forward to the sunsets with Ryu after dinner. Sometimes they walk along the water at dusk, and sometimes they sit in chairs on the deck with a six-pack on the floor between them, or at the crest of the beach just before it slants down to the water.
Neither of them speak much. Ryu had never been very talkative; Hayato thinks that Ryu said more in his letters than he ever had in person. He still has all of them: a typed collection that more resembles diary entries with date and time stamps, rather than letters, that Hayato memorized and cherishes, and not just because he received none from anyone else. They are the only things he took with him when he left his cell.
Hayato vaguely recalls that he once talked a lot more than he does now. Bonus feature of a prison sentence (along with the haircuts, the bad food and the constant supervision): it taught him to keep his mouth shut. Hayato learned painfully to control both his tongue and his unruly temper. It had taken him a bit longer to learn the lesson, but he did, especially when it sank in that in prison, he was truly alone. Ryu was no longer there to watch his back. The realization made Hayato feel curiously naked, and for the first time since Ryu's exile during their last year of high school, horribly lonely.
He never thought he'd have to mind his words forever, though. Outside, he longs to ask a dozen questions, but with Ryu, he is careful. He still doesn't know why Ryu is living alone on a dun-colored beach outside a remote village, and it is a puzzle he worries at daily, like a sore tooth.
*
"Where should I sleep?" Hayato asks that first night. Ryu freezes at the question.
"Wherever you want," he replies quietly, and he turns away.
Hayato thinks about this more often that he should; it keeps coming back to him.
Ryu leaves his bedroom door open every night. Hayato found a futon in a closet, and he sleeps on the floor in the "living room" - the sofa-less empty floor space outside both the back door and the kitchen, and from his futon he can see into a wedge of Ryu's bedroom through the open door. Every night, it's the same: he sees Ryu sit on the bed facing the window that looks out on the sea, and he takes off his shirt. In the dim light, Hayato can see the paler shadow of Ryu's back for ten seconds, sometimes longer, before Ryu leans to pull back the covers and he climbs under and out of sight.
In the darkness, Hayato squeezes his eyes shut and unsuccessfully tries to dream about pretty girls with big breasts.
*
There are few secrets in the village. Everyone knows he lives with Ryu. How do you know him? they inquire while he's elbow-deep in engine oil and grease as he tries to tinker with a fitful windlass motor, a handy skill he picked up in prison. They are charmed to discover that he and Ryu are childhood friends and former classmates. Hayato discovers quickly that they are rather fond of Ryu. "Odagiri-kun is a very good boy," his employer's wife tells him with a smile, as she hands a bento to her also-begrimed husband. It's a bad day for fishing (or so Kanzaki-san says, but Hayato suspects it's his arthritis flaring up), so they are using the morning to do necessary maintenance. "You know, I see him walking up and down the beach when the weather is good. He's a writer isn't he?" Her husband grunts noncommittally.
He is? Hayato thinks with a frown, glad that no one can see his face. Is it possible that he knows so little about Ryu now?
"Your friend is a very good boy. He always stops in to say hello to the grandmothers. Such a polite young man."
Right.
She is still talking. Hayato begins to feel slightly resentful, but he stifles it, because she is moving away.
"Yes," the woman says, "I like Odagiri-kun. It's good that you're here, Yabuki-kun. It's very good. I think Odagiri-kun needs some company right now - it must be very lonely for him out here. I think he needs his good friend with him at such a time."
Wait! Hayato wants to scream, but it's too late, she is already making her slow way up from the docks. Hayato clamps his jaw shut, and he burns with curiosity. What does she mean, at such a time. What the hell kind of time was it, anyway?
*
Hayato feels himself unloosening from years of being wound in on himself in a tight protective coil.
Perhaps it is an effect of the wild shore, teeming with life and motion, the wide openness of it all. Perhaps it's just Ryu. Hayato laughs at small things, and he tries to make Ryu laugh, too, finding inspiration in his friend's smile.
Ryu's mother calls at least once a week. Ryu takes his phone down to the beach to talk to her, and when he comes back, he is somber, too-quiet, and he worries his bottom lip. It's the only time Ryu's eyes are tense and restless.
Hayato puts away his questions, and he works extra hard to bring the wide smile back to his friend's face.
*
"Why do you like it here?" Hayato asks one Saturday afternoon, thinking it's a safe question that shouldn't tread on Ryu's unspoken boundaries. They've borrowed a small sailboat from one of the fishermen in the village and Ryu, in dark sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a t-shirt that billows in the wind, guides the boat across the water, tacking in a lazy zig-zag pattern with the wind.
"Watch your head," Ryu says sharply; Hayato ducks to avoid the boom as it swings around and the sail snaps crisply. Ryu keeps a steady hand on the tiller and he's quiet for a long time.
"It's beautiful," he says at last, surprising Hayato who had nearly given up on getting an answer.
"Lots of places are beautiful," Hayato counters. "Why here?"
Ryu shrugs slowly as though he is easing an invisible burden on his shoulders. "I don't know. Sometimes you find a place...that feels right. That feels like home. I never had that before." He went silent for a little while before speaking again. "I got tired of having too many people around. I could never just be alone, and I-I need that, I guess."
"Um," Hayato begins. "Except you're not alone."
"Eh?" Ryu casts him a quizzical glance.
"You're not alone right now," Hayato says dryly.
"Oh." Ryu pauses. "Well, you're allowed. I want you here." He frowns. "You know that, don't you?" He shoots Hayato an expression of alarm. "Wait - you're not leaving, are you?"
"No," Hayato laughs. "You're stuck with me for now."
"Good," Ryu sighs in obvious relief. "I want you here," he repeats firmly, and Hayato suddenly feels very warm.
And then Ryu murmurs in an undertone, as though to himself, but Hayato hears it anyway, and he puzzles over it later: "-a little longer. Just a little longer."
*
Four weeks after Hayato's arrival at the small beach house, he comes home from work a bit early to find Ryu gone. Hayato doesn't think twice - Ryu often goes out - drives to the next town, or goes walking. But Ryu is always home for dinner, and although Hayato doesn't think about it much, he looks forward to their quiet evenings together. Ryu has no television or video games - only a laptop that Hayato seldom sees him touch, and plenty of books, so the old Hayato would have been bored out of his skull. Now, after staring at concrete walls and prison bars for five years, watching the infinite ocean and the limitless sky are quite enough entertainment. When they walk on the beach, he notices everything - seagulls hunting for food, the tiny crabs that dart into the surf, the wet gleam of the scattered stones washed by the tide. Occasionally he itches to visit Tokyo, but he doesn't want to go there alone, at least not yet, and he senses that Ryu isn't interested in leaving his seaside refuge.
Hayato prepares a simple dinner: rice, vegetables, fish, and he thinks that Ryu's meals always taste better. He sets the table. He has a beer, and he waits. Seven, and then eight o'clock come and go without any sign of Ryu. Hayato is starving, so he calls Ryu's cell phone only to discover it ringing in the bedroom. Seconds later, the door bangs open and then shut, and Hayato pounds down the creaky steps to the beach.
At first he walks with a frown creasing his forehead, but soon he's jogging up the beach away from the village, foreboding clutching at his throat. He tries to be calm, but he can hear the panicky edge in his voice as he calls out into the falling darkness. He wishes he'd thought to bring a flashlight.
And then he trips over something, a soft-hard lump, and he sprawls forward on his hands and knees. The "lump" makes a muffled noise, and Hayato knows he's found Ryu.
"Hayato," he hears as he tries to scramble backward, and there is a hand on his arm, arresting him where he is rolled back on his haunches. Ryu sits up, leans into him slightly. His voice sounds sleepy. "Why is it so dark?"
"Ryu! Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"No."
Hayato fumbles at his watch, but then he realizes it's too dark to see the dial. "It's late!" he barks. "It's after nine. What the fuck are you doing out here?"
Hayato is furious: his voice is shaking, and so is he, a measure of how anxious he'd become. He hears Ryu chuckle and sees only the shine of his eyes in the darkness.
"I was reading," Ryu says in a drowsy voice. "I must have fallen asleep."
Hayato finally notices that Ryu's small hand is soothingly rubbing his arm.
"Well," Hayato sputters angrily. "Next time, don't. Or," he continues in a slightly calmer voice, "at least take your cell phone with you."
He's sure that Ryu is smiling at him; he can feel it somehow.
"Okay," Ryu replies. "Sorry."
Hayato's breath catches. Ryu's hand is on his shoulder now, and his heart races, thumping madly in his chest.
"Ryu-" he begins.
"I'm sorry," Ryu says again. "I didn't mean to worry you." There's something in his voice, in his words that tugs irresistibly at Hayato, and he flushes hot. Unsteadily, he reaches out with blind hands and lowers his head. He nearly jumps when their foreheads touch. His fingers connect and tighten around Ryu's arm which feels too thin, glass-delicate under his hand.
"Okay," Hayato breathes, not trusting his voice anymore. Ryu's hand lays against his neck, the lightest touch.
Ryu shifts slightly. "It's okay," he murmurs against Hayato's cheek. He doesn't move any further, though; he stills and waits, and Hayato's thought processes dissolve into a messy swirl. He can feel his heart beating in his throat, until he moves just a little, just enough, and that's all it takes.
"Is it?" Hayato asks incoherently.
Ryu's lips are warm and very soft.
"Yes," Ryu exhales. "Yes, of course."
III. "the black daylight of space"
Two months later, Hayato wakes to the sound of Ryu vomiting in the bathroom. He scrambles from their bed and rushes into the small blue-tiled room to find Ryu sprawled on the floor with his thin arms wrapped around the toilet. Ryu wipes his hand over his mouth and looks up, over his shoulder. He's crying, and his nose runs, and he's very pale.
"Call my parents," he says, shuddering helplessly. "And Yankumi."
Frightened, Hayato obeys, using Ryu's cell phone. He doesn't remember what he says on the phone at all.
After, Ryu refuses to answer his questions. Instead, he laboriously cleans himself, changes into jeans and a long sweater and he climbs down to the beach where he sits for hours, wrapped in a blanket, on the sand.
*
Ryu's parents arrive first, sometime after noon. Before they arrive, Hayato steels himself for the inevitable unpleasantness. He has never liked Ryu's stern father, and he knows that Odagiri-san has always considered him a bad influence on his only son. He's certain the old man must know that he spent the last five years in prison, and Hayato is sure that Ryu's father doesn't care whether or not he was actually guilty of the crime for which he served time. While Hayato is too worried to think about anyone's bad opinions of him, a tiny part of him still childishly rebels against being unfairly judged.
When he opens the door and welcomes them in, he remembers that he forgot to brush his hair, and he hopes that he cleaned well enough to minimize the traces of his own occupancy in Ryu's bare house. He's so concentrated on being correct and formal as Odagiri-san sweeps him with his gaze that he's completely taken aback when Ryu's mother covers her face with her hands and begin to weep.
Hayato's frown deepens, his gaze flickering between them. Odagiri-san puts an arm around his wife and comforts her.
After a few moments, she grows calmer, and dries her tears carefully with a handkerchief from her elegant purse. Odagiri-san straightens to his full height.
"Please, where is Ryu-kun?" he asks, meeting Hayato's eyes directly. Hayato takes them out to the deck and shows them where Ryu is still perched on the sand, wrapped in a blanket, despite the warm day. He watches in astonishment as both of Ryu's parents, dressed smartly in suit and dress, climb down the steps to the beach and they sit on the sand, heedless of their clothes, flanking their son.
Ryu turns to his mother and Hayato is sure he sees wetness glisten on Ryu's face as his mother wraps her arms around him, and then Hayato is startled further when Ryu's father pulls both of them into the circle of his arms, pressing his cheek to the top of his son's head. They huddle in a tight, miserable cluster until Hayato can't watch anymore, and he goes back inside the house.
*
When Yankumi arrives an hour later, Hayato meets her at the door, and he's frantic.
"What's going on?" he demands. "Ryu won't tell me anything, and-"
"-and you're scared," Yankumi finishes. "I know. I'm sorry, Hayato-kun. Can you be patient a little while longer? I need to talk to Ryu first."
Hayato wants to howl and his fists clench as he fights the urge to rip things apart.
"Fine," he agrees at last. "He's outside with his parents."
"I thought so," she says softly. "We'll wait for them.
Hayato remembers his manners, then, and he makes tea. They sit at the worn table in the corner of windows and sip tea in silence for a long time until they hear footsteps climbing up to the deck. Hayato opens the door to let them in.
Yankumi stands and greets Ryu's parents who gravely thank her for coming. She meets their eyes with compassion and exchanges a measured glance with Hayato before she excuses herself, leaving him alone with them.
"Um," he says uncertainly.
Ryu's father takes a deep breath and Hayato watches in shock as they both bow to him, bending low at the waist.
"Thank you very much," Odagiri-san says, "for looking after our son."
Hayato's heart races in shock and dismay.
"Please continue to look after him," Ryu's mother says, without lifting her head. "Please."
"Of course," Hayato replies slowly, bewildered and very scared. "Yes, I will. He's my friend."
Ryu's father straightens and his face is drawn, and there is a sadness in his eyes that pierces Hayato. Numbly, he watches them leave. Choked by fear, it is all he can do not to run out to Ryu and demand to know what's going on.
Finally, Yankumi comes back. "Let's take a walk," she says.
"Where's Ryu?" he asks obstinately, but then he hears the car engine start and pull away. Hayato is silent as he listens to it fade.
Yankumi sighs and takes his arm. "Come on."
*
It's almost dinner-time by the time Hayato stumbles back to the little house. He lifts his gaze to the stars that wheel endlessly overhead, and turns back to the lights of the village that twinkle merrily along the curve of the shoreline. He looks at Yankumi, whose face is calm, and yet he can see the clear pain in her eyes that she's determinedly held back all afternoon. I have to be that strong, he thinks, and then he stops. I have to be stronger.
"Why?" he asks of no one, of everyone. His throat is raw, an agony.
Yankumi drops her eyes before looking back up at him steadily. "There is no 'why,' Hayato," she says. "It just is."
He stares back at her with dry, burning eyes. He spent his tears during their walk on the beach, and now...now, he squares his shoulders and looks up at the house. The light is on. Ryu is back.
"Go on," Yankumi says softly. "He's waiting for you."
Despair seizes Hayato again, and he struggles for a moment to push it off. She rests her hand on his shoulder and squeezes him firmly.
"Do your best, ok?" she says, giving him a final squeeze, and then she turns to climb up the slope of grass and sand, and walks back to her car.
Hayato waits, sucking in deep lungfuls of the humid sea air, until she is gone, and he's wrapped in darkness.
*
-he insisted on this, coming out here. He's tired. Try to understand, Hayato.
-I don't understand. I can't understand this.
-You have to. You have to respect him, respect what he wants. Let him keep his dignity. He wants this. He wants it to be like this. You don't know what he went through for the last four years. It was horrible, awful. We never thought he'd last this long.
-Why won't he fight? There has to be something else-
-There isn't.
-but-
-Let him have this. We can be strong for him. You can be strong for him. There isn't any time left.
-Is it really so bad?
-Yes, Hayato. Yes, it is.
*
He opens the door.
Ryu is slumped at the table, both arms outstretched in front of him; his hands lay palm-up and empty. Hayato can't think, can't speak as he watches Ryu wither beneath his gaze.
Ryu finally shudders. "I've been so selfish," he chokes, and Hayato knows that he's crying, silently, tearlessly. Still, he can't speak, his throat too tight for useless words.
"I should never have brought you here," Ryu continues, and now there are tears, and his face crumples. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he whispers over and over, scrubbing his fingers fiercely into the worn wood of the table.
In a daze, Hayato walks around the table, leans down, and pulls Ryu up to him, into his chest. Ryu is limp, trembling.
"Shut up," he says roughly. "I never want to hear you say that again."
IV. "the invisible man"
Ryu's mother packs up the small apartment she rented in the village for that last month so she could visit her only son every day.
Hayato walks on the beach at twilight, a cool late September breeze ruffling his shaggy hair away from his face. He hears tears in the sea until he realizes he's listening to himself.
Behind him, the little gray house is empty, lightless, soulless. It belongs to him, now, a parting gift.
Less than five months he lived in that house, and it feels like longer, years somehow.
Everything whispers to him - Ryu is everywhere he turns - murmuring from the grass on the dunes, in the early moonlight on the waves that rush toward him. Wrecked, Hayato cries out, screaming wordlessly on the barren shore. The sea swallows his sorrow and washes away his footsteps in the sand.
*
In November, the wind comes ashore off the sea and the house shivers and trembles. Hayato's skin prickles at each vibration along the floorboards, at each rattle of the window. I'm not alone, he thinks, looking up from one of Ryu's books. Sometimes he's sure that he can hear someone breathing beside him, but he doesn't look. He closes his eyes and waits for the touch on his shoulder that means he belongs to someone.
On Christmas Eve he drinks by himself until he passes out, and when he wakes up, cold, stiff and unbearably alone, he crawls into Ryu's closet where he huddles until he can breathe again.
*
There is a part of him that nurses a small but steady flame of anger. Yankumi asked him to try to understand, and so he tried, and he respected Ryu's desire to have solitude, to live simply and calmly, to share those days only with him, with his parents, with Yankumi. But it was hard not to feel betrayed by all the time spent not knowing. - and Hayato still feels that betrayal keenly. If only, he thinks rebelliously, if only I had known... If only he had known, and then what? He likes to think he would have treasured their summer more, but he knows that's impossible and a lie.
It isn't until a frozen black February night when he thinks that at last he understands why Ryu did it.
*
Despite the late winter chill, he runs on the beach at dusk, tracing the arc of their long walks along the shore, and it comes to him suddenly: he remembers Ryu laughing, laughing so hard at something stupid Hayato had said that he jack-knifed in on himself, shaking with mirth until he couldn't breathe. Hayato hopes that he will never forget the sound of that unrestrained laughter, of Ryu's voice, or the steadiness in Ryu's eyes.
You gave me this. You did this. I thought I had lost everything - five years of my life gone, just like that. My home, my family, my friends. But at the end of it, at the end of it, you gave me something precious.
What gratitude could be paid for such gifts? Home, friendship, love - all these he was given freely. To lose everything, but to gain something new, something different. Memories to cherish for a lifetime, and a life to live - and a promise to fulfill: to go on, and to thrive.
Hayato runs headlong into the fading day chased by Ryu's laughter echoing in his ears.
*
The sun hangs low in the eastern sky like a glowing pink pearl on the spring morning when Hayato gently closes the back door and locks the little gray house for the last time. He woke before dawn and sat on the beach watching the dark waves and their voices soothed him. It's time, they whispered soft, soft.
Hayato doesn't look back when he drives away. He doesn't look back, and he doesn't cry, and he doesn't leave alone.
FIN
NOTES:
- Begun: 2007.04.18 | Finished: 2007.04.27
- The section titles (I-IV) throughout the fic are taken from lyrics to "Ocean Cloud" by Marillion; full lyrics can be found here.
- This fic was largely written to The Fountain original film soundtrack, a superb piece of music composed by Clint Mansell and performed by Kronos Quartet and Mogwai. I can't say enough good things about this OST.
- There's a first time for everything. This is the first fic that made me cry while writing it. And I don't mean that I got a little teary, either.
--
Fanfiction Index
Contact me: shontosgarden at gmail dot com
p2
Title: Leaving (1/1)
Pairing: Hayato/Ryu
Rating: PG
Genre/warnings: dramafic, Gokusen 2; angst
Wordcount: 6,107
Summary: Post-drama, Hayato is released from prison to find Ryu waiting.
A/N: Thanks to kitsune714 and Kou for valuable feedback.
"Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
There the faint signs are left,
coins of time and water,
debris, celestial ash
and the irreplaceable rapture
of sharing in the labour
of solitude and the sand."
- excerpt from "Forget about me," Pablo Neruda, Extravagaria
I. "the wind changed"
It is seven thirty on a Tuesday morning in late April when Yabuki Hayato is released from prison.
When he emerges into the bright, sunlit alley, he lifts his eyes from the asphalt and looks into the face of Odagiri Ryu.
"Hey," Ryu says, shifting where he is leaned against the wall.
"Hey," Hayato says rustily, and then he clears his throat. He wasn't sure what he would find when he stepped through the gates which closed behind him with a clang. He can hear the guard's footsteps retreating.
Ryu's eyes are clear and golden-brown, lit by the light flooding the alley. His hair is a warm auburn color, and long, and a light breeze lifts strands gently from his shoulders so they float for an instant above his slender shoulders.
"Come on," Ryu says, pushing off the wall. Hayato nods once and follows.
*
Ryu drives for hours through unfamiliar country, taking back roads that Hayato is sure he doesn't remember. He quickly loses track of where they are and the road signs pass in a blur. In eight hours they stop only three times.
Long before it comes into view, Hayato senses the sea and the line of the horizon where water meets sky in the distance. He has spent the entire drive like a dog with his window rolled down and his nose pointed into the wind as he tried to see everything that flashed by, everything he hasn't seen in five years.
When the sea appears, a silver-blue plane adjoined to a creamy sky, Hayato can't suppress his sudden intake of breath. Ryu is, of course, silent. Then they are both quiet as they have been for most of the drive, until Ryu slows down and pulls to the side of the road where there is a small lay-by. Hayato climbs out of the car, unfolding his cramped limbs, and he lifts his face sky-wards, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath of salty air. Overhead, seagulls wheel in wide circles, calling out. The shore curves in a graceful arc, sheltering a small village - Hayato can see the distant docks, and there are fishing boats silhouetted on the horizon.
"Where are we?" he asks.
"Almost there," comes Ryu's reply. "Almost home."
Hayato lets the words sink into him, under his skin, which prickles at the idea. Home? Prison was home for five years. While he was incarcerated, the world changed irrevocably outside the prison walls (and inside, so did he), and now he has no home left to which he can return. He thinks about what he would have done if Ryu had not been waiting for him in the alley. Probably walk, and keep walking.
Hayato's eyes take in the view from their vantage point above a steep, grassy drop-off into thick vegetation and gnarled wind-shaped trees that finally give way to dingy sand and heaving waters that crash ashore. It's mid-afternoon and cool; the sun gives off a wan light, so different from the golden light that had lit the alley outside the prison gates and set Ryu's hair aflame.
Hayato watches the weak light sparkle nonetheless on the waves below. He turns to Ryu, whose profile is severe, disjointed from the nose; sea breeze blows the hair back from his face.
"Let's go," Hayato says thickly, and he turns back to the car, not waiting for Ryu.
*
Ryu parks the car behind a small weathered house on stilts beyond the grassy dunes, behind the nondescript sand beach. The wooden siding is gray and the whole structure appears rickety and fragile, as though one really good storm would smash it flat and scatter its timbers up and down the shore. Hayato follows Ryu up the steps. Ryu moves slower than he would have expected.
Once inside, Hayato glances around, noting the spare, tidy space. There is little furniture in the room lined with windows on two sides - a table in the corner, bookshelves between the windows. Ryu points out the bathroom nestled on the left between the kitchen and the bedroom which Hayato can see faces onto the beach. Hayato doesn't realize that he's walked straight across the length of the small house to the door that leads onto the deck until he's fumbling at the lock. Ryu reaches past him to turn the padlock and remove the chain, until Hayato can push the door outward, and he steps onto the wooden floor of the deck.
The sky widens endlessly overhead, expanding into infinity, and Hayato ignores the weight of Ryu's gaze on his back as he finds his way to the railing overlooking the beach. The tide rolls in, restlessly spilling further and further to darken the brownish sand.
*
The breeze raises gooseflesh on his naked skin, but Hayato ignores it as he basks in the complete and utter freedom of standing on the beach in only his skin. He has been locked up and pushed down for years now, shoved around and at the mercy of others - and he is suddenly insane with a joy too big to contain. In fact, tears stream down his face, but he pays even less attention to them than he does to the breeze, or to his own nakedness.
He plunges into the rushing tide and strokes out from the shore, screaming as loud as he can, muscles clenching, fingers stretched out to seize the world all at once, all for himself, all, all, at last.
*
Ryu watches from the deck's railing.
He sees his old friend climb into the sea with outstretched arms, hears his voice, raw and ragged, crying out in something that sounds exactly like pain and exactly like joy.
Ryu wants to look away, but he can't. He remains rooted into place, his chest tight and full, but he can no more explain the feeling that floods him than Hayato who thrashes into the incoming waves without care and without reason.
*
A towel waits for Hayato on the step where he had discarded his clothes. He gratefully uses it to dry off, and then wraps it around his waist. He is shivering uncontrollably as he pads up the steps to the deck, sand gritting beneath each footstep.
Ryu is on the deck, standing over the grill when Hayato tops the final step. A delicious odor of cooking meat wafts toward him. Hayato huddles around the pile of clothes in his arms until Ryu looks over his shoulder.
"Enjoy your swim?" he asks without inflection, and yet his eyebrow arches with the question. He doesn't wait for an answer, turning back to the grill. He gestures with the spatula. "I put some clothes in the bathroom for you."
Hayato finds a sweatsuit and t-shirt waiting for him which he dons after a quick, hot shower. He cleans up as best he can after himself, wiping up all the water he dripped into the house and sweeping away the sand he tracked in. Meanwhile, Ryu sets the table and tells him dinner is ready.
It's a simple meal: grilled steak, steamed potatoes served with a dish of mayonnaise on the side, and a bowl piled high with bright green broccoli. Hayato stares down at the thick slab of meat that Ryu slides onto his plate, and he flushes as he considers the exorbitant cost.
"You didn't have to do all this," he says haltingly.
Ryu shrugs, pulling the other steak onto his plate. "It's your first meal outside. I thought you deserved something special. Right?"
Ryu meets his eyes with that questioning expression, the one that says, "you know I'm right, it's so obvious, isn't it?" Hayato remembers that sometimes that expression made him want to punch Ryu in the mouth.
He doesn't want to punch Ryu in the mouth right now. He feels his face contract with an emotion he can't identify, and he tries to smooth it out, tries to look at Ryu the same way he always has and not feel so helpless and pathetically grateful that someone was waiting for him, that someone brought him home. He knows he shouldn't feel like this. Particularly because it wasn't someone, it was Ryu.
"Thanks," he says after a moment has passed, and he ducks his head. Ryu waves him off.
"Just eat," Ryu replies.
*
"What are you doing out here?" Hayato asks after dinner. They stand together at the deck railing, watching the sky fade from melon to salmon to lavender and then deepen to violet. The sea is still silver-blue, now tinged with flame. Hayato feels something ominous open between them as Ryu shifts uncomfortably.
"Uh...Nothing," he mumbles, forcing Hayato to strain for the words.
"What do you mean, 'nothing,'" Hayato asks with a frown. He can't imagine Ryu doing nothing. He was still studying in university when Hayato went to prison. Hayato had always felt certain that Ryu was the most likely of their circle of friends to make something of himself. 'Nothing' wasn't part of that equation.
"I mean, nothing."
"So, what? You decided to take a vacation way out here in the middle of nowhere?" Hayato has turned to face Ryu who stares steadfastly at the water and dying sunset. His face is stiff in the light breeze.
Ryu finally shrugs. "I don't do nothing with my time, if that's what you mean."
What's going on? What happened to you? Are you okay? Hayato wants to ask, but he doesn't.
Hayato doesn't ask any of those questions, or anything more. Something in Ryu's face silences the clamor in his head. He takes a deep breath of sea air, and then another.
"Tomorrow," he begins slowly, coming to a decision. "I'll look for work."
Ryu turns to him quizzically. "There's no rush. You can take it easy for a while, if you want. Enjoy being outside."
Hayato meets Ryu's eyes. He thinks: being outside is enough. "It's okay. I want to. I need to do something."
Ryu is silent for a moment before he nods. "Talk to Umezawa-san in the village. I think one of the fishermen's sons went away to university, so he and his wife need help with their restaurant and with their fishing boat."
"Thanks," Hayato says, before hesitating; he hates himself for his uncertainty. "But won't they - I mean, if they find out I was in prison - they probably won't-"
"You don't need to tell them that," Ryu interrupts, "unless you want to. Besides, they don't care. So long as you have a strong back, and you're willing to work hard, they don't care. It's a small village, and there aren't many people. They'll take anyone they can get."
Perfect. Hayato looks away from Ryu, shifting his gaze to the last traces of lavender fading from the sky. The restlessness is an ocean inside him that swells and swells.
II. "for those who know the signs"
Hayato wakes before dawn the next morning, pulls on the clothes he wore out of prison, and he walks thirty minutes up the beach until he reaches the village. Ryu was right - he's offered a job immediately, with hardly any questions asked. They even give him an old set of overalls, work gloves and a pair of rubber boots ("they belonged to my son," the older man with the shock of graying hair explains), so Hayato sets out in a fishing boat as the sun appears behind the village against a pearl-pink sky.
The work isn't too bad: half the time it requires every ounce of Hayato's concentration, and the rest he spends lost in thought as he stares at the endless waves.
He considers everything that changed, everything he lost while he was in prison. His father died three years ago: heart attack. His brother went to Canada for university. He lost touch with every friend but Ryu - one by one they fell away, moved on, grew up, he supposed. Ryu visited him during that first year, but never again after that, although he did send letters. Yankumi was the only one who visited him regularly - he reflects that when she first walked into classroom 3-D all those years ago, he never imagined how glad he might someday be to see her face, or to talk with her. Even if she did seem to have an unhealthy preoccupation with him and Ryu - he remembers that every visit (especially over the last two years), she would ask if he'd heard from Ryu lately, and he can still hear her voice reminding him of the value and importance of friendship.
Ryu is a good friend, Hayato thinks. He must have driven all night to be waiting there for him at seven-thirty in the morning, and then he drove all the way back, too. Hayato hadn't thought about it before, but he realizes it now, and flushes in shame.
*
The days pass easily, and even though it has only been a week, Hayato feels himself adapting to the quiet rhythms of life in the little beach house, and to work in the village, and on the boat; he welcomes the persistent cries of seagulls up and down the seashore and the rising of the sun behind them in the morning until light floods the little house, reflecting off the water, and he looks forward to the sunsets with Ryu after dinner. Sometimes they walk along the water at dusk, and sometimes they sit in chairs on the deck with a six-pack on the floor between them, or at the crest of the beach just before it slants down to the water.
Neither of them speak much. Ryu had never been very talkative; Hayato thinks that Ryu said more in his letters than he ever had in person. He still has all of them: a typed collection that more resembles diary entries with date and time stamps, rather than letters, that Hayato memorized and cherishes, and not just because he received none from anyone else. They are the only things he took with him when he left his cell.
Hayato vaguely recalls that he once talked a lot more than he does now. Bonus feature of a prison sentence (along with the haircuts, the bad food and the constant supervision): it taught him to keep his mouth shut. Hayato learned painfully to control both his tongue and his unruly temper. It had taken him a bit longer to learn the lesson, but he did, especially when it sank in that in prison, he was truly alone. Ryu was no longer there to watch his back. The realization made Hayato feel curiously naked, and for the first time since Ryu's exile during their last year of high school, horribly lonely.
He never thought he'd have to mind his words forever, though. Outside, he longs to ask a dozen questions, but with Ryu, he is careful. He still doesn't know why Ryu is living alone on a dun-colored beach outside a remote village, and it is a puzzle he worries at daily, like a sore tooth.
*
"Where should I sleep?" Hayato asks that first night. Ryu freezes at the question.
"Wherever you want," he replies quietly, and he turns away.
Hayato thinks about this more often that he should; it keeps coming back to him.
Ryu leaves his bedroom door open every night. Hayato found a futon in a closet, and he sleeps on the floor in the "living room" - the sofa-less empty floor space outside both the back door and the kitchen, and from his futon he can see into a wedge of Ryu's bedroom through the open door. Every night, it's the same: he sees Ryu sit on the bed facing the window that looks out on the sea, and he takes off his shirt. In the dim light, Hayato can see the paler shadow of Ryu's back for ten seconds, sometimes longer, before Ryu leans to pull back the covers and he climbs under and out of sight.
In the darkness, Hayato squeezes his eyes shut and unsuccessfully tries to dream about pretty girls with big breasts.
*
There are few secrets in the village. Everyone knows he lives with Ryu. How do you know him? they inquire while he's elbow-deep in engine oil and grease as he tries to tinker with a fitful windlass motor, a handy skill he picked up in prison. They are charmed to discover that he and Ryu are childhood friends and former classmates. Hayato discovers quickly that they are rather fond of Ryu. "Odagiri-kun is a very good boy," his employer's wife tells him with a smile, as she hands a bento to her also-begrimed husband. It's a bad day for fishing (or so Kanzaki-san says, but Hayato suspects it's his arthritis flaring up), so they are using the morning to do necessary maintenance. "You know, I see him walking up and down the beach when the weather is good. He's a writer isn't he?" Her husband grunts noncommittally.
He is? Hayato thinks with a frown, glad that no one can see his face. Is it possible that he knows so little about Ryu now?
"Your friend is a very good boy. He always stops in to say hello to the grandmothers. Such a polite young man."
Right.
She is still talking. Hayato begins to feel slightly resentful, but he stifles it, because she is moving away.
"Yes," the woman says, "I like Odagiri-kun. It's good that you're here, Yabuki-kun. It's very good. I think Odagiri-kun needs some company right now - it must be very lonely for him out here. I think he needs his good friend with him at such a time."
Wait! Hayato wants to scream, but it's too late, she is already making her slow way up from the docks. Hayato clamps his jaw shut, and he burns with curiosity. What does she mean, at such a time. What the hell kind of time was it, anyway?
*
Hayato feels himself unloosening from years of being wound in on himself in a tight protective coil.
Perhaps it is an effect of the wild shore, teeming with life and motion, the wide openness of it all. Perhaps it's just Ryu. Hayato laughs at small things, and he tries to make Ryu laugh, too, finding inspiration in his friend's smile.
Ryu's mother calls at least once a week. Ryu takes his phone down to the beach to talk to her, and when he comes back, he is somber, too-quiet, and he worries his bottom lip. It's the only time Ryu's eyes are tense and restless.
Hayato puts away his questions, and he works extra hard to bring the wide smile back to his friend's face.
*
"Why do you like it here?" Hayato asks one Saturday afternoon, thinking it's a safe question that shouldn't tread on Ryu's unspoken boundaries. They've borrowed a small sailboat from one of the fishermen in the village and Ryu, in dark sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a t-shirt that billows in the wind, guides the boat across the water, tacking in a lazy zig-zag pattern with the wind.
"Watch your head," Ryu says sharply; Hayato ducks to avoid the boom as it swings around and the sail snaps crisply. Ryu keeps a steady hand on the tiller and he's quiet for a long time.
"It's beautiful," he says at last, surprising Hayato who had nearly given up on getting an answer.
"Lots of places are beautiful," Hayato counters. "Why here?"
Ryu shrugs slowly as though he is easing an invisible burden on his shoulders. "I don't know. Sometimes you find a place...that feels right. That feels like home. I never had that before." He went silent for a little while before speaking again. "I got tired of having too many people around. I could never just be alone, and I-I need that, I guess."
"Um," Hayato begins. "Except you're not alone."
"Eh?" Ryu casts him a quizzical glance.
"You're not alone right now," Hayato says dryly.
"Oh." Ryu pauses. "Well, you're allowed. I want you here." He frowns. "You know that, don't you?" He shoots Hayato an expression of alarm. "Wait - you're not leaving, are you?"
"No," Hayato laughs. "You're stuck with me for now."
"Good," Ryu sighs in obvious relief. "I want you here," he repeats firmly, and Hayato suddenly feels very warm.
And then Ryu murmurs in an undertone, as though to himself, but Hayato hears it anyway, and he puzzles over it later: "-a little longer. Just a little longer."
*
Four weeks after Hayato's arrival at the small beach house, he comes home from work a bit early to find Ryu gone. Hayato doesn't think twice - Ryu often goes out - drives to the next town, or goes walking. But Ryu is always home for dinner, and although Hayato doesn't think about it much, he looks forward to their quiet evenings together. Ryu has no television or video games - only a laptop that Hayato seldom sees him touch, and plenty of books, so the old Hayato would have been bored out of his skull. Now, after staring at concrete walls and prison bars for five years, watching the infinite ocean and the limitless sky are quite enough entertainment. When they walk on the beach, he notices everything - seagulls hunting for food, the tiny crabs that dart into the surf, the wet gleam of the scattered stones washed by the tide. Occasionally he itches to visit Tokyo, but he doesn't want to go there alone, at least not yet, and he senses that Ryu isn't interested in leaving his seaside refuge.
Hayato prepares a simple dinner: rice, vegetables, fish, and he thinks that Ryu's meals always taste better. He sets the table. He has a beer, and he waits. Seven, and then eight o'clock come and go without any sign of Ryu. Hayato is starving, so he calls Ryu's cell phone only to discover it ringing in the bedroom. Seconds later, the door bangs open and then shut, and Hayato pounds down the creaky steps to the beach.
At first he walks with a frown creasing his forehead, but soon he's jogging up the beach away from the village, foreboding clutching at his throat. He tries to be calm, but he can hear the panicky edge in his voice as he calls out into the falling darkness. He wishes he'd thought to bring a flashlight.
And then he trips over something, a soft-hard lump, and he sprawls forward on his hands and knees. The "lump" makes a muffled noise, and Hayato knows he's found Ryu.
"Hayato," he hears as he tries to scramble backward, and there is a hand on his arm, arresting him where he is rolled back on his haunches. Ryu sits up, leans into him slightly. His voice sounds sleepy. "Why is it so dark?"
"Ryu! Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"No."
Hayato fumbles at his watch, but then he realizes it's too dark to see the dial. "It's late!" he barks. "It's after nine. What the fuck are you doing out here?"
Hayato is furious: his voice is shaking, and so is he, a measure of how anxious he'd become. He hears Ryu chuckle and sees only the shine of his eyes in the darkness.
"I was reading," Ryu says in a drowsy voice. "I must have fallen asleep."
Hayato finally notices that Ryu's small hand is soothingly rubbing his arm.
"Well," Hayato sputters angrily. "Next time, don't. Or," he continues in a slightly calmer voice, "at least take your cell phone with you."
He's sure that Ryu is smiling at him; he can feel it somehow.
"Okay," Ryu replies. "Sorry."
Hayato's breath catches. Ryu's hand is on his shoulder now, and his heart races, thumping madly in his chest.
"Ryu-" he begins.
"I'm sorry," Ryu says again. "I didn't mean to worry you." There's something in his voice, in his words that tugs irresistibly at Hayato, and he flushes hot. Unsteadily, he reaches out with blind hands and lowers his head. He nearly jumps when their foreheads touch. His fingers connect and tighten around Ryu's arm which feels too thin, glass-delicate under his hand.
"Okay," Hayato breathes, not trusting his voice anymore. Ryu's hand lays against his neck, the lightest touch.
Ryu shifts slightly. "It's okay," he murmurs against Hayato's cheek. He doesn't move any further, though; he stills and waits, and Hayato's thought processes dissolve into a messy swirl. He can feel his heart beating in his throat, until he moves just a little, just enough, and that's all it takes.
"Is it?" Hayato asks incoherently.
Ryu's lips are warm and very soft.
"Yes," Ryu exhales. "Yes, of course."
III. "the black daylight of space"
Two months later, Hayato wakes to the sound of Ryu vomiting in the bathroom. He scrambles from their bed and rushes into the small blue-tiled room to find Ryu sprawled on the floor with his thin arms wrapped around the toilet. Ryu wipes his hand over his mouth and looks up, over his shoulder. He's crying, and his nose runs, and he's very pale.
"Call my parents," he says, shuddering helplessly. "And Yankumi."
Frightened, Hayato obeys, using Ryu's cell phone. He doesn't remember what he says on the phone at all.
After, Ryu refuses to answer his questions. Instead, he laboriously cleans himself, changes into jeans and a long sweater and he climbs down to the beach where he sits for hours, wrapped in a blanket, on the sand.
*
Ryu's parents arrive first, sometime after noon. Before they arrive, Hayato steels himself for the inevitable unpleasantness. He has never liked Ryu's stern father, and he knows that Odagiri-san has always considered him a bad influence on his only son. He's certain the old man must know that he spent the last five years in prison, and Hayato is sure that Ryu's father doesn't care whether or not he was actually guilty of the crime for which he served time. While Hayato is too worried to think about anyone's bad opinions of him, a tiny part of him still childishly rebels against being unfairly judged.
When he opens the door and welcomes them in, he remembers that he forgot to brush his hair, and he hopes that he cleaned well enough to minimize the traces of his own occupancy in Ryu's bare house. He's so concentrated on being correct and formal as Odagiri-san sweeps him with his gaze that he's completely taken aback when Ryu's mother covers her face with her hands and begin to weep.
Hayato's frown deepens, his gaze flickering between them. Odagiri-san puts an arm around his wife and comforts her.
After a few moments, she grows calmer, and dries her tears carefully with a handkerchief from her elegant purse. Odagiri-san straightens to his full height.
"Please, where is Ryu-kun?" he asks, meeting Hayato's eyes directly. Hayato takes them out to the deck and shows them where Ryu is still perched on the sand, wrapped in a blanket, despite the warm day. He watches in astonishment as both of Ryu's parents, dressed smartly in suit and dress, climb down the steps to the beach and they sit on the sand, heedless of their clothes, flanking their son.
Ryu turns to his mother and Hayato is sure he sees wetness glisten on Ryu's face as his mother wraps her arms around him, and then Hayato is startled further when Ryu's father pulls both of them into the circle of his arms, pressing his cheek to the top of his son's head. They huddle in a tight, miserable cluster until Hayato can't watch anymore, and he goes back inside the house.
*
When Yankumi arrives an hour later, Hayato meets her at the door, and he's frantic.
"What's going on?" he demands. "Ryu won't tell me anything, and-"
"-and you're scared," Yankumi finishes. "I know. I'm sorry, Hayato-kun. Can you be patient a little while longer? I need to talk to Ryu first."
Hayato wants to howl and his fists clench as he fights the urge to rip things apart.
"Fine," he agrees at last. "He's outside with his parents."
"I thought so," she says softly. "We'll wait for them.
Hayato remembers his manners, then, and he makes tea. They sit at the worn table in the corner of windows and sip tea in silence for a long time until they hear footsteps climbing up to the deck. Hayato opens the door to let them in.
Yankumi stands and greets Ryu's parents who gravely thank her for coming. She meets their eyes with compassion and exchanges a measured glance with Hayato before she excuses herself, leaving him alone with them.
"Um," he says uncertainly.
Ryu's father takes a deep breath and Hayato watches in shock as they both bow to him, bending low at the waist.
"Thank you very much," Odagiri-san says, "for looking after our son."
Hayato's heart races in shock and dismay.
"Please continue to look after him," Ryu's mother says, without lifting her head. "Please."
"Of course," Hayato replies slowly, bewildered and very scared. "Yes, I will. He's my friend."
Ryu's father straightens and his face is drawn, and there is a sadness in his eyes that pierces Hayato. Numbly, he watches them leave. Choked by fear, it is all he can do not to run out to Ryu and demand to know what's going on.
Finally, Yankumi comes back. "Let's take a walk," she says.
"Where's Ryu?" he asks obstinately, but then he hears the car engine start and pull away. Hayato is silent as he listens to it fade.
Yankumi sighs and takes his arm. "Come on."
*
It's almost dinner-time by the time Hayato stumbles back to the little house. He lifts his gaze to the stars that wheel endlessly overhead, and turns back to the lights of the village that twinkle merrily along the curve of the shoreline. He looks at Yankumi, whose face is calm, and yet he can see the clear pain in her eyes that she's determinedly held back all afternoon. I have to be that strong, he thinks, and then he stops. I have to be stronger.
"Why?" he asks of no one, of everyone. His throat is raw, an agony.
Yankumi drops her eyes before looking back up at him steadily. "There is no 'why,' Hayato," she says. "It just is."
He stares back at her with dry, burning eyes. He spent his tears during their walk on the beach, and now...now, he squares his shoulders and looks up at the house. The light is on. Ryu is back.
"Go on," Yankumi says softly. "He's waiting for you."
Despair seizes Hayato again, and he struggles for a moment to push it off. She rests her hand on his shoulder and squeezes him firmly.
"Do your best, ok?" she says, giving him a final squeeze, and then she turns to climb up the slope of grass and sand, and walks back to her car.
Hayato waits, sucking in deep lungfuls of the humid sea air, until she is gone, and he's wrapped in darkness.
*
-he insisted on this, coming out here. He's tired. Try to understand, Hayato.
-I don't understand. I can't understand this.
-You have to. You have to respect him, respect what he wants. Let him keep his dignity. He wants this. He wants it to be like this. You don't know what he went through for the last four years. It was horrible, awful. We never thought he'd last this long.
-Why won't he fight? There has to be something else-
-There isn't.
-but-
-Let him have this. We can be strong for him. You can be strong for him. There isn't any time left.
-Is it really so bad?
-Yes, Hayato. Yes, it is.
*
He opens the door.
Ryu is slumped at the table, both arms outstretched in front of him; his hands lay palm-up and empty. Hayato can't think, can't speak as he watches Ryu wither beneath his gaze.
Ryu finally shudders. "I've been so selfish," he chokes, and Hayato knows that he's crying, silently, tearlessly. Still, he can't speak, his throat too tight for useless words.
"I should never have brought you here," Ryu continues, and now there are tears, and his face crumples. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he whispers over and over, scrubbing his fingers fiercely into the worn wood of the table.
In a daze, Hayato walks around the table, leans down, and pulls Ryu up to him, into his chest. Ryu is limp, trembling.
"Shut up," he says roughly. "I never want to hear you say that again."
IV. "the invisible man"
Ryu's mother packs up the small apartment she rented in the village for that last month so she could visit her only son every day.
Hayato walks on the beach at twilight, a cool late September breeze ruffling his shaggy hair away from his face. He hears tears in the sea until he realizes he's listening to himself.
Behind him, the little gray house is empty, lightless, soulless. It belongs to him, now, a parting gift.
Less than five months he lived in that house, and it feels like longer, years somehow.
Everything whispers to him - Ryu is everywhere he turns - murmuring from the grass on the dunes, in the early moonlight on the waves that rush toward him. Wrecked, Hayato cries out, screaming wordlessly on the barren shore. The sea swallows his sorrow and washes away his footsteps in the sand.
*
In November, the wind comes ashore off the sea and the house shivers and trembles. Hayato's skin prickles at each vibration along the floorboards, at each rattle of the window. I'm not alone, he thinks, looking up from one of Ryu's books. Sometimes he's sure that he can hear someone breathing beside him, but he doesn't look. He closes his eyes and waits for the touch on his shoulder that means he belongs to someone.
On Christmas Eve he drinks by himself until he passes out, and when he wakes up, cold, stiff and unbearably alone, he crawls into Ryu's closet where he huddles until he can breathe again.
*
There is a part of him that nurses a small but steady flame of anger. Yankumi asked him to try to understand, and so he tried, and he respected Ryu's desire to have solitude, to live simply and calmly, to share those days only with him, with his parents, with Yankumi. But it was hard not to feel betrayed by all the time spent not knowing. - and Hayato still feels that betrayal keenly. If only, he thinks rebelliously, if only I had known... If only he had known, and then what? He likes to think he would have treasured their summer more, but he knows that's impossible and a lie.
It isn't until a frozen black February night when he thinks that at last he understands why Ryu did it.
*
Despite the late winter chill, he runs on the beach at dusk, tracing the arc of their long walks along the shore, and it comes to him suddenly: he remembers Ryu laughing, laughing so hard at something stupid Hayato had said that he jack-knifed in on himself, shaking with mirth until he couldn't breathe. Hayato hopes that he will never forget the sound of that unrestrained laughter, of Ryu's voice, or the steadiness in Ryu's eyes.
You gave me this. You did this. I thought I had lost everything - five years of my life gone, just like that. My home, my family, my friends. But at the end of it, at the end of it, you gave me something precious.
What gratitude could be paid for such gifts? Home, friendship, love - all these he was given freely. To lose everything, but to gain something new, something different. Memories to cherish for a lifetime, and a life to live - and a promise to fulfill: to go on, and to thrive.
Hayato runs headlong into the fading day chased by Ryu's laughter echoing in his ears.
*
The sun hangs low in the eastern sky like a glowing pink pearl on the spring morning when Hayato gently closes the back door and locks the little gray house for the last time. He woke before dawn and sat on the beach watching the dark waves and their voices soothed him. It's time, they whispered soft, soft.
Hayato doesn't look back when he drives away. He doesn't look back, and he doesn't cry, and he doesn't leave alone.
FIN
NOTES:
- Begun: 2007.04.18 | Finished: 2007.04.27
- The section titles (I-IV) throughout the fic are taken from lyrics to "Ocean Cloud" by Marillion; full lyrics can be found here.
- This fic was largely written to The Fountain original film soundtrack, a superb piece of music composed by Clint Mansell and performed by Kronos Quartet and Mogwai. I can't say enough good things about this OST.
- There's a first time for everything. This is the first fic that made me cry while writing it. And I don't mean that I got a little teary, either.
--
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