Fic-- Lost Boys, Yanagi/Kirihara
ARGH. My computer and internet have been in the process of dying over the past few days...so I had plenty of time to fret over this fic. Honestly, I don't know how it happened. I don't particularly like Yanagi that much. ::shrugs::
Well, enjoy! Concrits = <3
Title: Lost Boys
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Characters: Yanagi/Kirihara
Summary: Everyone must grow up someday.
This is the future.
“I don’t think I ever imagined it like this,” he says. But Kirihara’s hair is as curly as ever, as he picks through your bookshelf and scowls at what he finds. Too many ‘texts’ and ‘works’ and not enough real ‘reading.’ He runs a finger along the rows of spines like he used to drag his racket along the fence- just to hear the sound, see the look on Sanada’s face. For a second, you almost think you recognize something boyish in the quirky disgust at the corners of his mouth.
While he is occupied, you can study him as much as you like. The moments never last long, but they are piercing, and bittersweet, leaving you craving for something that has gone off production. The past? Most likely. You can’t help but do it anyway, look for something familiar in the harder lines in his face.
“Really,” you reply; you know there is never any need to ask a question when you can maneuver the other person into saying what you need them to say. By now, it is habit.
He smiles politely, and you know your world has gone awry.
-
Not that this was the first sign. You have been seeing them everywhere, anywhere. Pathetically obvious places, like the stronger curve of his jaw, or the fuzz on his upper lip that he claims passes for a goatee- though that was one thing you were quick to outlaw. The crude slogans on his shirts and, oh God, the color of his pants. The drinks he ordered that you had never heard of and would never repeat.
“What happened to all your talk about changing?” you ask him. Kirihara snickers at you and dips his tongue into something he calls a Watermelon Pucker Fucker- you’re sure it’s something you would have to get drunk to even order, drunk enough that you stumble while attempting the name.
“All talk. Just like you predicted, Yanagi-sempai- ooh, man, this is good-”
You grab his arm to stop him from sliding off his stool, so instead he slides onto you and laughs like it’s the funniest thing in the world, really, to be pressed together like this. The alcohol and grenadine on his breath make you lightheaded- he stares up at you through his eyelashes and snakes his arms up to run his hands through your hair.
“Oy, sempai. You need a haircut, you boring, boring old man. I bet you haven’t changed it since high school- ah! You know what? We should get out the old yearbooks! Holy crap, that’s just the greatest thing I’ve thought of all day!”
You try, but you can’t get him off- of course, something tells you that, in all honesty, you’re not trying to your full capacity. Even Yanagi Renji drinks- only a fool would come to a bar and order something non-alcoholic. You know the alcohol content for each cocktail and can roughly calculate how many ounces it is possible to consume before your blood-alcohol level reaches its safe limits.
But tonight is different. It is late Tuesday evening, and you are out drinking- your laptop and your cell are sitting out on your kitchen counter. Your pager is off, in your coat pocket, which you’ve forgotten in your closet at home. Tonight, you shut down your mind and quietly forget.
“You want to try some? So, so good- come on, Yanagi-sempai, loosen up or else you’ll get wrinkles. Who needs wrinkles at our age? Watch, though, it’s a little sour...” He presses his elbows into your thighs, tilting his head back for a better look. “You’re turning red, sempai,” Kirihara points out. He is probably right. Your mouth is being thrown for a curveball, sucking itself in like a lemony black hole, and your entire face seizes up and collapses.
He giggles, resting his chin against your chest as you down the rest of the Fucker and hold on for dear life.
-
“Haircut,” he said, and you didn’t believe him at first.
You believe him by the end of the night. The stylist shows you her creation from all sides with a hand mirror, drained and post-menstrual but satisfied, and Kirihara speaks up before you can formulate coherent thought.
“Perfect,” he declares delightedly, passing his fingers over the longer spikes towards the back. You see yourself in the big mirror, hair roughed up and dumped on the wrong side of the tracks, and now your eyes are decidedly open. “Don’t you think it’s a hell of a lot better that way?”
You are far, far too drunk to reply. In fact, you hardly notice as he drags you out of the salon and out onto the street again, until you are struck dumb by the passing headlights and the jeers of passersby. Your mind clicks on again- it is one fifteen A.M., a Wednesday morning for all points and purposes, and there is a meeting to preside over in approximately nine hours.
By that time you, no doubt, will be hung over but entirely composed. That is simply the way you function- it won’t have changed. Nothing can change that quickly.
“Sempai, if we don’t hurry, all the bars are gonna be closed!” Kirihara is one of those regressive drunks; the ones that turn five again once the alcohol really begins to set in. He leans into you, clutching your arm, and gives you the most wheedling look you have ever seen on someone older than fourteen and outside of the entertainment industry. He sways, clumsy and giggling.
“Come with me to my apartment,” you tell him, only because you know he’ll be unconscious before you arrive.
-
The next morning, you wake up with hands and toes completely numb because Kirihara has constructed a cocoon on his side of the bed with your comforter. You are hung over, just as you had predicted, but you start the coffee and run a hot shower, thinking you’ll be able to manage.
Midway through, Kirihara plods into the bathroom, relieves himself, and turns you out of what he calls “his morning shower.” While you stand, dripping, outside the locked door of your own bathroom, you remind yourself that Kirihara is not a morning person, and calling up Sanada these days will not change that.
At the breakfast table, you take your coffee black, but that is the only alteration. Your suit is no less sharp than it is any other Wednesday- your cell and pager have been resuscitated and, with your laptop, stowed away in your bag. Everything is in place, but you waste three and a quarter minutes convincing yourself that you haven’t forgotten something. Three point two five minutes that should never have been lost.
You are just about to leave the table when are your plans are instantly scattered- Kirihara appears in the kitchen doorway, with hair gel and a mission. He hits you before you can foresee what’s coming and you wrestle with him until he has you subdued. The gel is overwhelmingly cold against your scalp, but his hands are warm enough to ease that.
So you are late to work today, but you most certainly have the most fashionable hair in the entire office.
-
You thought it was over then- that he would leave and you would never need to hear from him again. Part of you hopes this. You have a migraine and your hair is sedentary in the wind and against your disbelieving fingers.
But he calls you at work; your cell vibrates while Kurogane is presenting his reservations about the project, so you excuse yourself and step out into the hall with your phone in hand, flicking it open only after your eyes dart a few times over the name.
‘CATALYST’ reads the caller ID, but the number there is Kirihara’s.
“Why are you calling?” You lean against the glass and look down at the street below, feeling a momentary rush of vertigo, just like any other time.
“You forgot your presentation notes,” he says. He stops and hums some nameless tune you feel like you ought to recognize, but your irritation is cursory. Below, cars darting past are forced to a halt at an intersection and a red light.
“I didn’t need them” is your bland, distracted reply.
He snorts, the most inelegant thing you have ever heard from anyone. “I know. That’s why I took them out.”
So that was what you’d forgotten at home. You watch as the traffic light turns green, pinching the bridge of your nose. “Why did you put yourself on speed dial, Akaya?”
“Why do you think? In case you had an emergency.”
The idea is laughable. “I don’t have emergencies.”
Another snort. “Yeah, I know. You don’t have emergencies, you have disruptions. And I’m one of them, is that right?” Yes- he is one of them. A disruption in schedule that even Yanagi Renji could not predict.
“Catalyst. That’s clever of you.”
“Your fault,” he replies- you can almost hear him wet his lips.
The traffic below follows patterns that you have memorized by now. One point one minutes between green lights, negligibly less or more depending on time of day, or the amount of sleep you got the night before. And you find it reaffirming this way- the way the numbers only shift by a few tenths at most.
“You should stop trying to be clever, Akaya. I don’t have the time for this.”
But what you mean is that you don’t have the time or the will to change.
But Kirihara is naïve, or else he still pretends to be. You are hoping it is the former rather than the latter as you listen to the bright, sharp sound of his laugh. “Whatever you say, sempai. Come back early, tonight. You’re really in for a treat, you know- I’m cooking.”
-
Where did he learn to cook, you wonder.
From Jackal? Jackal’s dishes burn off your taste buds- the chili content is eighty-eight percent of the flavor. From Marui, who adds chocolate to everything, no matter the meal or occasion? Or Sanada, whose idea of a balanced diet is rice, miso, and kendo? If Rikkai was ever talented at anything aside from tennis, it wasn’t the culinary arts.
“I learned from you, sempai,” Kirihara proclaims, brandishing his chopsticks at you reproachfully. His hair is tied in pigtails tonight, two little bunches curled against the back of his neck, and he moves around with your unused cookware as if he does know what he is doing.
The microwave, however, your most frequently operated appliance, remains untouched. You are about to ask him exactly what he means, when he turns around, sets your bowl on the table, and understanding dawns upon you.
“Chicken noodle soup.”
“Hai!” He grins so cheekily at you, there can be no doubt that it is far from what you had expected, and he knows it. “Someone told me they were good for colds.”
“You shouldn’t believe things I told you when I was fourteen years old.” But you have no qualms about eating it anyway. Food has never been high on your list of priorities- even at fourteen, when testosterone hit and most of the other boys almost doubled their calorie intake (excluding Marui, who tripled it), you laid out a meal plan for tennis and left it at that. You eat to live- you eat to keep waking up to get to work in the morning and because you are not the sort of man who would forget. The rest is simply unimportant.
Kirihara curls himself into the chair across the table, pushing the chunks of chicken around in his bowl. “Now you’re going to say ‘I don’t have a cold,’ aren’t you? Don’t deny it, sempai.”
You had no such intention, and you tell him so. “I know perfectly well that I’m getting one.”
“I knew you were gonna say that, too.” Pleased now, he hums to himself and begins slurping loudly at his soup. “God, I love chicken noodle.”
There is nothing you can say to that. You fall silent, content to leave him be and too tired to want to deal with much else. Neither of you have bothered to switch on the kitchen lights, and the sun is setting; dim light makes Kirihara look thirteen again. Small and bony, but never awkward, never lanky. The boy who played tennis as if he were possessed: Kirihara Akaya, Rikkaidai Fuzoku’s junior ace. Known as a demon on the courts and an insubordinate brat while off them. It has been more than a decade since then, and only now are you beginning to see that Kirihara has never grown up. Perhaps he was just never meant to; or perhaps he made a conscious choice.
You lose your train of thought when he kicks your foot beneath the table. “Oy, aren’t you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening,” you reply, a little harshly because of the throbbing in your toes. He kicks you again anyway, and you have to bark his name to bring him under control. “Akaya-!”
“Well, good.” He pouts a little, still affronted. But they never lasts long, his sulks, and he is obviously waiting to tell you something urgently important, by the way he chews absently on his spoon. “I need to show you what I dug up today while you were out playing around.”
You allow a lot of things with Kirihara, but this time, you can’t let it pass. “I never play around, Akaya. I go to work everyday to provide for myself.”
“Same idea,” he scoffs. “Look, do you want to see, or not?”
Sometimes, it feels as if you are getting easier and easier to predict.
-
In a matter of minutes, it is easy to see that Kirihara has spent the better part of the day in your office. Your keyboard is pushed off to the side of your desk, precariously balanced on the edge, while a tableau of items has replaced it. Kirihara’s arrangement follows some sort of haphazard pattern that you can’t quite make sense of. Photo-albums, yearbooks. Postcards, scrapbooks, school pamphlets and holiday cards. Your presentation notes have been dumped unceremoniously on the side.
You can feel him watching as you study his work, just waiting for you to speak. When you don’t, he waits- such unusual patience- and leans his head on your shoulder.
“I found these in storage, sempai. Under your bed.”
“I know.” You’ve forgotten that there was so much down there, sitting still and yellowing for years. “There wasn’t room for them anymore.”
Kirihara turns your chin until he can reach your mouth to kiss you. Kiss you- light enough that you hardly notice the flavor of chicken noodle soup. “Is there no more room for me, too?” he asks.
He is waiting, you realize distantly, for an answer. His eyes are full of focus; clear, expectant, dark and serious. Your throat is dry and your computations fail you. There is, after all, no formula that can calculate what you need to say.
You press on anyway, even knowing already that you’ll inevitably fail. “You haven’t changed, Akaya.”
He closes his eyes. “Haven’t I?” And then it is certain: you have been wrong from the beginning. Your hypothesis is shredded instantly by the expression on Kirihara’s face. “Hmm.”
“You might take that as a compliment, if you’d like.”
“I guess I will.” He barely smiles- it makes you wonder if he’s about to sulk. But he doesn’t. “Well? Aren’t you going to ask why I came around here?”
“I thought that was supposed to be obvious, Catalyst-san.”
And there is his snort again. “That was a joke.”
Your hand drifts towards the photo album nearest to you, filled with newspaper clippings and, on the open page, a picture of the entire team as you remember it. Thirteen-year old Kirihara has his eyes closed where he poses with his arm slung around your neck- you don’t have a single picture of him with his eyes open. ‘I hated red-eye,’ he claims. Your own reasons for going through life close-eyed are less simple.
“I came to tell you something, sempai.”
“Ah.” You run the point of one finger across the photograph, along his hair. “Then tell me. It’s been two days.”
He starts to play with your hair again, already bored with the conversation. “That’s just it. I think I changed my mind.”
“Whatever you think is best.”
He nods a little, looking thoughtful. “I need a while longer,” he says musingly, before he bites your ear.
-
It takes days. You don’t think about it- you don’t keep track. It is simpler that way, with him, letting everything stretch and loosen until your schedules sag, sometimes breaking entirely from lack of tension. You have learned not to take showers in the morning, and that, no matter what he claims, Kirihara is ultimately unable to cook.
Yes, it takes days, and this is generally how they go: Kirihara stays and you build the rest of your plans around him. You eat, sleep, live. The days stretch on to accommodate him, and the few times you ask him what he came to say, Kirihara replies that he still has to make up his mind.
Sometimes, you want to kill him, but more frequently, you just want him to touch you. He is beautiful and smooth in the dark, curled on the other side of your bed like a child. Those nights, you feel your heartbeat quicken by degrees and your body temperature rise, and your hands slide down your body, beneath the sheets. Sometimes you can convince yourself that they are his hands on you.
Afterwards, you sleep without touching him, feeling strange and adolescent. Once, he woke up; he woke and didn’t speak, only wrapped his arms around you, enclosing you, and whispered to you the nonsense words used to soothe frightened boys to sleep. And he kissed you, sometimes, but all his kisses were always chaste.
-
You find his letter one evening after work.
It sits atop your keyboard, which has been replaced to its rightful perch at the epicenter of your desk. You lift it, and the typed pages are too heavy in your hands- typed, the first line tells you, because his handwriting is infamously illegible. He borrowed one of your suits, he says, and left his old clothes in the coat closet in the hall. The photo albums, postcards, scrapbooks- they are back in their storage bin, stowed away beneath your bed.
It’s time to grow up, he says. Goodbye, Yanagi-san.
The letter tells you other things: his reasons, his excuses, a wife, a three-year-old daughter in the states- but you stop, unwilling to read further. You look up with unfocused eyes, and you can see Kirihara by the window. The light is dim and he looks puckish and un-embraceable with his wild eyes like slits, unwilling to open them for the camera.
“I don’t think I ever imagined it like this,” he says, thirteen again, and beautiful.
And you want to catch hold of him, to keep him here with you, but you don’t. The image fades, and your hair grows long again, so you can trim it. Your apartment grows more silent by the day.
But it suits you. This is what everyone besides him expected, after all. Soon, you stop regretting it, because there is never the time- your life never stops long enough for you to look back.
But you have the pictures framed and mounted all across your walls, surrounding you. You leave voice mail on CATALYST’s cell, which is never answered. You move on- this is the future, after all- but you hesitate sometimes at the door, looking for something that you can’t quite remember.
Everyone must grow up someday. But at night, you are a child again, and everyone else is lost as well.
Well, enjoy! Concrits = <3
Title: Lost Boys
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Characters: Yanagi/Kirihara
Summary: Everyone must grow up someday.
This is the future.
“I don’t think I ever imagined it like this,” he says. But Kirihara’s hair is as curly as ever, as he picks through your bookshelf and scowls at what he finds. Too many ‘texts’ and ‘works’ and not enough real ‘reading.’ He runs a finger along the rows of spines like he used to drag his racket along the fence- just to hear the sound, see the look on Sanada’s face. For a second, you almost think you recognize something boyish in the quirky disgust at the corners of his mouth.
While he is occupied, you can study him as much as you like. The moments never last long, but they are piercing, and bittersweet, leaving you craving for something that has gone off production. The past? Most likely. You can’t help but do it anyway, look for something familiar in the harder lines in his face.
“Really,” you reply; you know there is never any need to ask a question when you can maneuver the other person into saying what you need them to say. By now, it is habit.
He smiles politely, and you know your world has gone awry.
-
Not that this was the first sign. You have been seeing them everywhere, anywhere. Pathetically obvious places, like the stronger curve of his jaw, or the fuzz on his upper lip that he claims passes for a goatee- though that was one thing you were quick to outlaw. The crude slogans on his shirts and, oh God, the color of his pants. The drinks he ordered that you had never heard of and would never repeat.
“What happened to all your talk about changing?” you ask him. Kirihara snickers at you and dips his tongue into something he calls a Watermelon Pucker Fucker- you’re sure it’s something you would have to get drunk to even order, drunk enough that you stumble while attempting the name.
“All talk. Just like you predicted, Yanagi-sempai- ooh, man, this is good-”
You grab his arm to stop him from sliding off his stool, so instead he slides onto you and laughs like it’s the funniest thing in the world, really, to be pressed together like this. The alcohol and grenadine on his breath make you lightheaded- he stares up at you through his eyelashes and snakes his arms up to run his hands through your hair.
“Oy, sempai. You need a haircut, you boring, boring old man. I bet you haven’t changed it since high school- ah! You know what? We should get out the old yearbooks! Holy crap, that’s just the greatest thing I’ve thought of all day!”
You try, but you can’t get him off- of course, something tells you that, in all honesty, you’re not trying to your full capacity. Even Yanagi Renji drinks- only a fool would come to a bar and order something non-alcoholic. You know the alcohol content for each cocktail and can roughly calculate how many ounces it is possible to consume before your blood-alcohol level reaches its safe limits.
But tonight is different. It is late Tuesday evening, and you are out drinking- your laptop and your cell are sitting out on your kitchen counter. Your pager is off, in your coat pocket, which you’ve forgotten in your closet at home. Tonight, you shut down your mind and quietly forget.
“You want to try some? So, so good- come on, Yanagi-sempai, loosen up or else you’ll get wrinkles. Who needs wrinkles at our age? Watch, though, it’s a little sour...” He presses his elbows into your thighs, tilting his head back for a better look. “You’re turning red, sempai,” Kirihara points out. He is probably right. Your mouth is being thrown for a curveball, sucking itself in like a lemony black hole, and your entire face seizes up and collapses.
He giggles, resting his chin against your chest as you down the rest of the Fucker and hold on for dear life.
-
“Haircut,” he said, and you didn’t believe him at first.
You believe him by the end of the night. The stylist shows you her creation from all sides with a hand mirror, drained and post-menstrual but satisfied, and Kirihara speaks up before you can formulate coherent thought.
“Perfect,” he declares delightedly, passing his fingers over the longer spikes towards the back. You see yourself in the big mirror, hair roughed up and dumped on the wrong side of the tracks, and now your eyes are decidedly open. “Don’t you think it’s a hell of a lot better that way?”
You are far, far too drunk to reply. In fact, you hardly notice as he drags you out of the salon and out onto the street again, until you are struck dumb by the passing headlights and the jeers of passersby. Your mind clicks on again- it is one fifteen A.M., a Wednesday morning for all points and purposes, and there is a meeting to preside over in approximately nine hours.
By that time you, no doubt, will be hung over but entirely composed. That is simply the way you function- it won’t have changed. Nothing can change that quickly.
“Sempai, if we don’t hurry, all the bars are gonna be closed!” Kirihara is one of those regressive drunks; the ones that turn five again once the alcohol really begins to set in. He leans into you, clutching your arm, and gives you the most wheedling look you have ever seen on someone older than fourteen and outside of the entertainment industry. He sways, clumsy and giggling.
“Come with me to my apartment,” you tell him, only because you know he’ll be unconscious before you arrive.
-
The next morning, you wake up with hands and toes completely numb because Kirihara has constructed a cocoon on his side of the bed with your comforter. You are hung over, just as you had predicted, but you start the coffee and run a hot shower, thinking you’ll be able to manage.
Midway through, Kirihara plods into the bathroom, relieves himself, and turns you out of what he calls “his morning shower.” While you stand, dripping, outside the locked door of your own bathroom, you remind yourself that Kirihara is not a morning person, and calling up Sanada these days will not change that.
At the breakfast table, you take your coffee black, but that is the only alteration. Your suit is no less sharp than it is any other Wednesday- your cell and pager have been resuscitated and, with your laptop, stowed away in your bag. Everything is in place, but you waste three and a quarter minutes convincing yourself that you haven’t forgotten something. Three point two five minutes that should never have been lost.
You are just about to leave the table when are your plans are instantly scattered- Kirihara appears in the kitchen doorway, with hair gel and a mission. He hits you before you can foresee what’s coming and you wrestle with him until he has you subdued. The gel is overwhelmingly cold against your scalp, but his hands are warm enough to ease that.
So you are late to work today, but you most certainly have the most fashionable hair in the entire office.
-
You thought it was over then- that he would leave and you would never need to hear from him again. Part of you hopes this. You have a migraine and your hair is sedentary in the wind and against your disbelieving fingers.
But he calls you at work; your cell vibrates while Kurogane is presenting his reservations about the project, so you excuse yourself and step out into the hall with your phone in hand, flicking it open only after your eyes dart a few times over the name.
‘CATALYST’ reads the caller ID, but the number there is Kirihara’s.
“Why are you calling?” You lean against the glass and look down at the street below, feeling a momentary rush of vertigo, just like any other time.
“You forgot your presentation notes,” he says. He stops and hums some nameless tune you feel like you ought to recognize, but your irritation is cursory. Below, cars darting past are forced to a halt at an intersection and a red light.
“I didn’t need them” is your bland, distracted reply.
He snorts, the most inelegant thing you have ever heard from anyone. “I know. That’s why I took them out.”
So that was what you’d forgotten at home. You watch as the traffic light turns green, pinching the bridge of your nose. “Why did you put yourself on speed dial, Akaya?”
“Why do you think? In case you had an emergency.”
The idea is laughable. “I don’t have emergencies.”
Another snort. “Yeah, I know. You don’t have emergencies, you have disruptions. And I’m one of them, is that right?” Yes- he is one of them. A disruption in schedule that even Yanagi Renji could not predict.
“Catalyst. That’s clever of you.”
“Your fault,” he replies- you can almost hear him wet his lips.
The traffic below follows patterns that you have memorized by now. One point one minutes between green lights, negligibly less or more depending on time of day, or the amount of sleep you got the night before. And you find it reaffirming this way- the way the numbers only shift by a few tenths at most.
“You should stop trying to be clever, Akaya. I don’t have the time for this.”
But what you mean is that you don’t have the time or the will to change.
But Kirihara is naïve, or else he still pretends to be. You are hoping it is the former rather than the latter as you listen to the bright, sharp sound of his laugh. “Whatever you say, sempai. Come back early, tonight. You’re really in for a treat, you know- I’m cooking.”
-
Where did he learn to cook, you wonder.
From Jackal? Jackal’s dishes burn off your taste buds- the chili content is eighty-eight percent of the flavor. From Marui, who adds chocolate to everything, no matter the meal or occasion? Or Sanada, whose idea of a balanced diet is rice, miso, and kendo? If Rikkai was ever talented at anything aside from tennis, it wasn’t the culinary arts.
“I learned from you, sempai,” Kirihara proclaims, brandishing his chopsticks at you reproachfully. His hair is tied in pigtails tonight, two little bunches curled against the back of his neck, and he moves around with your unused cookware as if he does know what he is doing.
The microwave, however, your most frequently operated appliance, remains untouched. You are about to ask him exactly what he means, when he turns around, sets your bowl on the table, and understanding dawns upon you.
“Chicken noodle soup.”
“Hai!” He grins so cheekily at you, there can be no doubt that it is far from what you had expected, and he knows it. “Someone told me they were good for colds.”
“You shouldn’t believe things I told you when I was fourteen years old.” But you have no qualms about eating it anyway. Food has never been high on your list of priorities- even at fourteen, when testosterone hit and most of the other boys almost doubled their calorie intake (excluding Marui, who tripled it), you laid out a meal plan for tennis and left it at that. You eat to live- you eat to keep waking up to get to work in the morning and because you are not the sort of man who would forget. The rest is simply unimportant.
Kirihara curls himself into the chair across the table, pushing the chunks of chicken around in his bowl. “Now you’re going to say ‘I don’t have a cold,’ aren’t you? Don’t deny it, sempai.”
You had no such intention, and you tell him so. “I know perfectly well that I’m getting one.”
“I knew you were gonna say that, too.” Pleased now, he hums to himself and begins slurping loudly at his soup. “God, I love chicken noodle.”
There is nothing you can say to that. You fall silent, content to leave him be and too tired to want to deal with much else. Neither of you have bothered to switch on the kitchen lights, and the sun is setting; dim light makes Kirihara look thirteen again. Small and bony, but never awkward, never lanky. The boy who played tennis as if he were possessed: Kirihara Akaya, Rikkaidai Fuzoku’s junior ace. Known as a demon on the courts and an insubordinate brat while off them. It has been more than a decade since then, and only now are you beginning to see that Kirihara has never grown up. Perhaps he was just never meant to; or perhaps he made a conscious choice.
You lose your train of thought when he kicks your foot beneath the table. “Oy, aren’t you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening,” you reply, a little harshly because of the throbbing in your toes. He kicks you again anyway, and you have to bark his name to bring him under control. “Akaya-!”
“Well, good.” He pouts a little, still affronted. But they never lasts long, his sulks, and he is obviously waiting to tell you something urgently important, by the way he chews absently on his spoon. “I need to show you what I dug up today while you were out playing around.”
You allow a lot of things with Kirihara, but this time, you can’t let it pass. “I never play around, Akaya. I go to work everyday to provide for myself.”
“Same idea,” he scoffs. “Look, do you want to see, or not?”
Sometimes, it feels as if you are getting easier and easier to predict.
-
In a matter of minutes, it is easy to see that Kirihara has spent the better part of the day in your office. Your keyboard is pushed off to the side of your desk, precariously balanced on the edge, while a tableau of items has replaced it. Kirihara’s arrangement follows some sort of haphazard pattern that you can’t quite make sense of. Photo-albums, yearbooks. Postcards, scrapbooks, school pamphlets and holiday cards. Your presentation notes have been dumped unceremoniously on the side.
You can feel him watching as you study his work, just waiting for you to speak. When you don’t, he waits- such unusual patience- and leans his head on your shoulder.
“I found these in storage, sempai. Under your bed.”
“I know.” You’ve forgotten that there was so much down there, sitting still and yellowing for years. “There wasn’t room for them anymore.”
Kirihara turns your chin until he can reach your mouth to kiss you. Kiss you- light enough that you hardly notice the flavor of chicken noodle soup. “Is there no more room for me, too?” he asks.
He is waiting, you realize distantly, for an answer. His eyes are full of focus; clear, expectant, dark and serious. Your throat is dry and your computations fail you. There is, after all, no formula that can calculate what you need to say.
You press on anyway, even knowing already that you’ll inevitably fail. “You haven’t changed, Akaya.”
He closes his eyes. “Haven’t I?” And then it is certain: you have been wrong from the beginning. Your hypothesis is shredded instantly by the expression on Kirihara’s face. “Hmm.”
“You might take that as a compliment, if you’d like.”
“I guess I will.” He barely smiles- it makes you wonder if he’s about to sulk. But he doesn’t. “Well? Aren’t you going to ask why I came around here?”
“I thought that was supposed to be obvious, Catalyst-san.”
And there is his snort again. “That was a joke.”
Your hand drifts towards the photo album nearest to you, filled with newspaper clippings and, on the open page, a picture of the entire team as you remember it. Thirteen-year old Kirihara has his eyes closed where he poses with his arm slung around your neck- you don’t have a single picture of him with his eyes open. ‘I hated red-eye,’ he claims. Your own reasons for going through life close-eyed are less simple.
“I came to tell you something, sempai.”
“Ah.” You run the point of one finger across the photograph, along his hair. “Then tell me. It’s been two days.”
He starts to play with your hair again, already bored with the conversation. “That’s just it. I think I changed my mind.”
“Whatever you think is best.”
He nods a little, looking thoughtful. “I need a while longer,” he says musingly, before he bites your ear.
-
It takes days. You don’t think about it- you don’t keep track. It is simpler that way, with him, letting everything stretch and loosen until your schedules sag, sometimes breaking entirely from lack of tension. You have learned not to take showers in the morning, and that, no matter what he claims, Kirihara is ultimately unable to cook.
Yes, it takes days, and this is generally how they go: Kirihara stays and you build the rest of your plans around him. You eat, sleep, live. The days stretch on to accommodate him, and the few times you ask him what he came to say, Kirihara replies that he still has to make up his mind.
Sometimes, you want to kill him, but more frequently, you just want him to touch you. He is beautiful and smooth in the dark, curled on the other side of your bed like a child. Those nights, you feel your heartbeat quicken by degrees and your body temperature rise, and your hands slide down your body, beneath the sheets. Sometimes you can convince yourself that they are his hands on you.
Afterwards, you sleep without touching him, feeling strange and adolescent. Once, he woke up; he woke and didn’t speak, only wrapped his arms around you, enclosing you, and whispered to you the nonsense words used to soothe frightened boys to sleep. And he kissed you, sometimes, but all his kisses were always chaste.
-
You find his letter one evening after work.
It sits atop your keyboard, which has been replaced to its rightful perch at the epicenter of your desk. You lift it, and the typed pages are too heavy in your hands- typed, the first line tells you, because his handwriting is infamously illegible. He borrowed one of your suits, he says, and left his old clothes in the coat closet in the hall. The photo albums, postcards, scrapbooks- they are back in their storage bin, stowed away beneath your bed.
It’s time to grow up, he says. Goodbye, Yanagi-san.
The letter tells you other things: his reasons, his excuses, a wife, a three-year-old daughter in the states- but you stop, unwilling to read further. You look up with unfocused eyes, and you can see Kirihara by the window. The light is dim and he looks puckish and un-embraceable with his wild eyes like slits, unwilling to open them for the camera.
“I don’t think I ever imagined it like this,” he says, thirteen again, and beautiful.
And you want to catch hold of him, to keep him here with you, but you don’t. The image fades, and your hair grows long again, so you can trim it. Your apartment grows more silent by the day.
But it suits you. This is what everyone besides him expected, after all. Soon, you stop regretting it, because there is never the time- your life never stops long enough for you to look back.
But you have the pictures framed and mounted all across your walls, surrounding you. You leave voice mail on CATALYST’s cell, which is never answered. You move on- this is the future, after all- but you hesitate sometimes at the door, looking for something that you can’t quite remember.
Everyone must grow up someday. But at night, you are a child again, and everyone else is lost as well.