PoT: enough
For tongari and aishuu.
There was once a little boy who would get into accidents a lot, falling down or getting hit or tripping, so that he would go home to his mother bruised and bleeding often. She would fuss over him, denying him the privilege of the scraped elbows and skinned knees that were a badge to boys of that age. She kept him white and whole, and he resented that so much that on his ninth birthday, he rode his bike straight into a parked car.
All he has left of that incident, though, is a small scar on his knee where he had split it against the sidewalk. He had healed soon enough, much to his mother's relief. Bruises fade and scratches mend; those are the things that always heal with time.
When Kirihara tells this story, he talks like the memory is something that happened so long ago that it must have happened to someone else. He's already separated himself from the Kirihara of newly nine years old. But touching the scar right under the fold of Kirihara's tennis shorts, Yanagi is convinced that even if Kirihara's forgotten, his body still hasn't. Kirihara's knee and skin still remember that day and take it with him always, proof of the price he paid for forgetting.
Somewhere in Kirihara, just like that scar on the knee, the need to be hurt is still there. Yanagi knows this. Kirihara wants Sanada to be gentle with him, but he takes the beatings instead, so often and so hard that sometimes it makes Yanagi flinch. Kirihara wants Yukimura to scold him, to be angry, to feel more than impersonal affection, but he lets Yukimura pet his hair and treat him softly like a petulant child or pet. Kirihara wants everything that's impossible, wants everything that can cause him pain.
That's why Kirihara hurts other people too. It's that kind of pain he wants more than anything, pain that will leave scars, people like Sanada who will leave behind wounds so deep and so painful inside of you that they never heal, people like Yukimura who tear away pieces of you so large that you're never whole again.
"Genichirou is not a bike accident," Yanagi says to Kirihara, because he knows Kirihara doesn't listen and doesn't understand. "Genichirou is not a car. He is not anything that is stationary, despite his sound exterior and metallic finish. Genichirou is a person."
"Are you talking to yourself again, Yanagi-senpai?" Kirihara says, and later that afternoon when he's been beaten again, sweating and panting on the side bleachers with his racket clamoring against the ground as he speaks, "He's a goddamn ass, is what he is."
Yanagi hands him a towel. "Genichirou means well. Yukimura-buchou would want you to try to understand." And so Kirihara nods, as always, and bitches silently to himself, moving his lips with his head hidden under the towel. Maybe afterwards Yanagi will approach Sanada and all of them will go to visit Yukimura in the hospital. Kirihara will pick up a scraggly flower from the courtyard to give to Yukimura on a whim, and for once Sanada will say nothing. When they are in Yukimura's room Yanagi will not talk unless he has to so Sanada can hold a conversation through Kirihara's interruptions, and for once all of them will be happy. Yukimura will balance Kirihara's flower behind his ear, threaded through his hair, and smile when he talks so that Sanada will, for a few precious squeezed-out moments, stop worrying. But when they leave they'll take the long way back. Kirihara will frighten some kids running down the sidewalk, chasing them for a while. Sanada, for his part silent, will strike up an antagonism with Kirihara over Kirihara's purchase of a snow cone, and Kirihara will eventually drop some of the shaved ice and syrup down Sanada's shirt, starting a whole argument with Yanagi when Yanagi presses paper napkins against Sanada's neck and tries to get him to let it go.
Yanagi will think, Yukimura would know what to do, except he knows that if Yukimura was really here, they wouldn't be like this. Yukimura would have made everything right. Yukimura always did.
His train of thought usually ends up there and goes no further, though the truth is that afterward the visit to the hospital (Kirihara didn't bring a flower but candy instead, smiling and strewing wrappers on Yukimura's bed, and Sanada had been tense the entire way through so that Yukimura almost had to touch the back of his hand to calm him down; Kirihara did buy a snow cone but was repressively cowed by Sanada's impassive silence, and Yanagi had forgotten to get paper napkins, so Kirihara had sticky hands for the rest of the trip), Yanagi goes to Sanada's house to practice calligraphy, holed up away in Sanada's room with the smell of ink and thin paper. Kirihara is downstairs watching TV and grazing his way through Sanada's food even though Sanada, obviously irritated by the fact that Kirihara tagged along, tells him not to touch anything if he can help it. Through the floor Yanagi can just barely hear the noise of the television turned to some awful afternoon kids' show with a lot of sound effects. Sanada grits his teeth.
This was how they had bonded at first, Yanagi and Sanada, over black and white, curves and planes, and they're constantly returning themselves back to it as if every once in a while they need to wipe the slate clean and start over again. The brush tip is small in comparison to the practice paper for Yanagi, which is white and vast and expansive. It's open for anything, so slowly, character by character, Yanagi fills it in. Sometimes his wrist is a little weak, but Sanada's hand is still strong over Yanagi's grip, like always, like it had been before.
"I liked your hair better when it was longer, Renji," Sanada says as he leans over to move Yanagi's hand ever so slightly, almost touching the wet ink on the paper with the tip of his finger as he shows how the strokes should curve. Sanada is bent over Yanagi, one hand on the paper and the other hand on the brush Yanagi's fingers are wrapped around. Yanagi wonders if he listens hard enough, if he can't just feel Sanada's heartbeat, even though Sanada's chest isn't touching Yanagi's back.
"You always did like long hair," Yanagi says, thinking of Yukimura, Yukimura's long, thin, brittle fingers tugging at the ends of his hair to straighten it before Sanada enters the room, the small sweaty strands sticking out of Yukimura's headband before the illness struck, Yukimura's hair spread out on the pillow. Remembers Yukimura in the hospital, out of Sanada's earshot, refusing to get a haircut. Yanagi's hair had never been like Yukimura's, slightly curly and full. His hair had always been fishbone straight and just as skinny too, like twigs in the winter or the tall grass around ponds, and Yanagi turns his attention back to the poem he's copying. He barely notices Sanada's hand ghosting at the edges of his temples and the back of his neck where his hair used to reach down to. Doesn't give it a second thought.
"Your hair was longer than his, back then," Yanagi hears Sanada say distantly. Sanada sounds like he's so far away. Yanagi almost takes his concentration away from his brush and ink because he has a feeling he has to find Sanada before Sanada's gone forever, completely and totally vanishing from Yanagi's life.
But all that is past now. Yanagi knows that; it's possible, Yanagi considers, that Sanada doesn't, even though it had been Sanada and Yukimura both who ended it. His hair, and Inui, and doubles, and people vanishing from his life without a second thought, all that had gone, replaced by singles matches and calligraphy and multiplication in threes and solidarity together, solidarity apart.
(Inui had once e-mailed Yanagi just to ask, "Are you happy?" Yanagi, who knew that Inui would do something of that sort, to ask why or what or how, even who, had told Inui the same thing. "All that is the past now and will never be again." And he knows that Inui still understands vacant vague answers from him. When they were younger they were telepathic; now, they merely understand.)
Kirihara catches them like that from the doorway. Sanada's hand is haunting the ghost of Yanagi's hair, Yanagi paused over the paper so that the character he's writing ends up becoming a gigantic ink spot. Kirihara says, "Yanagi-senpai, are you done yet?" Kicks Sanada's doorframe as if it deserved some kind of punishment for just being there. Bares his teeth, almost growls with the roll of Yanagi's name.
Yanagi can feel the mental snap in Sanada, the sudden rigidity that passes all the way down from his body, right into the fingernails of the hand on Yanagi's paper. Yanagi finishes the last character of the poem and compares it against Sanada's example. Sanada's calligraphy is so beautiful and pure that it's almost incomprehensible. Yanagi's looks perfunctory and unromantic with hard strokes, writing like he's printing, like he's recording poetic data on the mountains or the fields or the streams. He waits for Sanada to critique it before he reconsiders Kirihara at the door.
As always, as before, there is work to do.
"There's a 68% chance it will rain today," Yanagi says, turning towards Kirihara with the very edges of his mouth slightly turned up. "I apologize, Akaya, for leaving my umbrella at school."
Sanada is putting away the brushes and the ink. He knocks his knuckles firmly against the grinding stone for the ink, almost spilling it. Yanagi, turning around quickly, assumes it's an accident, but instead Sanada has it all under control and he says without missing a beat, "It's all right. You may borrow one of mine."
"Genichirou," Yanagi starts to say, but Kirihara interrupts, "Well?"
Sanada raises his head in the briefest of glances and says again, "Renji, it's all right." When they're downstairs, he hands Yanagi the umbrella as Kirihara is slipping on his shoes. Yanagi wants to tell Sanada his lie, that it's not 68% at all, in fact it's closer to 35%, and he really wishes Sanada would actually hear what he's saying instead of just listening. He has the speech already in his head as if he had written it down a long time ago and memorized it just for this moment. But he doesn't say anything, instead watches Sanada's hand leave the umbrella and return to his side.
In the background the TV that Kirihara had neglected to turn off blares away to itself.
"Sorry for inconveniencing you," Yanagi says.
"Don't--"
"Be careless. I know."
Yanagi lets Kirihara shove them out the door. Walking home together, to keep Yanagi from truly becoming a liar, it really does start to rain. Yanagi opens the umbrella and asks Kirihara if he wants to get in with him, but Kirihara shakes his head, shoulders his book bag, and shoves his other hand deep into his pockets. "I'm not afraid of the rain," he says defiantly, looking up at the sky, letting the raindrops slide off his half-closed eyelids. They walk slowly side by side because Yanagi tells Kirihara that he'll get the same amount of wet regardless of how fast they walk; and in any case, Kirihara likes the rain and their shoes with wet flat soles are bad for running. Yanagi is more worried about the state of Kirihara's books. Kirihara isn't and refuses to let Yanagi carry his bag as well. Occasionally Kirihara brushes by the spokes of Yanagi's umbrella. The rain slips onto the flat slopes of Kirihara's uniform. Kirihara doesn't worry about that either. He holds his palms out in front of him after a while, watching the rain collect on his palms. He still has his wristband on. It gets heavier with the rain, but he won't take it off.
"You really should listen to what I say, Kirihara. You have a high chance of getting sick being wet like that."
Kirihara cocks his head to one side. Yanagi watches him from under the slanted cover of Sanada's umbrella. Kirihara has a mouth like a split cranberry, a vivid color and always saying sour and bitter and piercing things, and it doesn't move much as he says, "Don't worry."
Kirihara smiles oddly as if he is young and innocent and unhurt again and says, "I always hear everything you say."
The water sliding off the roof of Kirihara's house thuds against the ground in a steady rhythmic line as they round the corner and arrive at the front door. Yanagi listens to it patiently as Kirihara stalls before walking up to the door. The front of Kirihara's pants and shirt are completely wet. Strangely enough, his back isn't. Yanagi holds the umbrella up for Kirihara as he unlocks the door. Before Sanada can make up his mind whether or not to say goodbye, Kirihara has him inside the house, the door shut firmly behind him, Sanada's umbrella dripping inanely on the floor.
There are a lot of things that Yanagi wishes he could tell Sanada but knows that he never will. Sometimes he almost does, like when he was standing in front of the door with Sanada's umbrella in his hand like an anchor. He had been afraid then, of something he couldn't voice then but had somehow thought Sanada would know, and the sound of the television behind him and Kirihara shuffling with his shoes had erased the fear when he wasn't paying attention to them. Yanagi knows that Sanada would never understand things like how it is easier to keep Yukimura between them, but not Kirihara. How it is essential for them to move as three people because they have always been three people, how their dynamic shifts when they are just two. How Yukimura is not Kirihara and will never be Kirihara, nor would Kirihara ever be Yukimura, and so it is not the same, keeping it between Sanada and himself.
He thinks that being with Sanada is rather like tilting your head back in the rain and drowning yourself by inhaling the water. It happens slowly, just like that, and when you don't notice it, but there comes a time when you know you can't breathe anymore and you know you're drowning and going to die. Yanagi has never drowned. Yet he knows this must be the same kind of desperation.
(Yukimura, before regionals, lying on his bed propped up against the pillows. Yanagi was outside looking in from the doorway, pretending that they cared whether or not he was there, pretending that they just couldn't see him. Yukimura had raised one of his hands to the edge of Sanada's face and said, "Take me with you." And Sanada had said nothing in return, just closed his eyes against that touch, and nodded once, right into the groove of that palm.)
Yanagi doesn't think of Sanada as he is standing in the entranceway to Kirihara's house. Yanagi recalls him later, when his mouth is tracing a line up the inside of Kirihara's thigh slowly, one touch after another. He thinks about Sanada, about Yukimura, about that time when Kirihara had fallen so hard sliding into a shot on the courts that he scraped open the skin down one side of his leg. Yanagi had been the one who patted that raw skin down with antiseptic, a cotton swab in one hand and the other hand on Kirihara's knee, right above the scar, to keep it from moving. Kirihara had both his hands on the bench, fisting the jacket of his jersey and hissing as Yanagi's hand moved.
"This is going to hurt," Yanagi had said a little too late.
"You're the only one I trust," Kirihara had replied, the last of his words disappearing as Yanagi pressed the cotton pad firmly against Kirihara's leg.
This is Kirihara's body, Yanagi had repeated to himself as he wiped gently along the edges of the scrape. This is not Kirihara. This is what was hurt in the bike accident, aged nine; this is not what was hurt out there on the courts. This is not Kirihara, because Kirihara is something that can never be hurt, even though he wants to be. It was something elemental Yanagi had to remember, if he was to survive. It was something important, something Yanagi should never forget.
Now he remembers, and in remembering, thinks of this inherent duality, the way it controls everything Kirihara does and doesn't do. Kirihara's skin is wet and slightly damp from the rain. His arms and his fingers and his mouth tremble under Yanagi's mouth. This is another form of keeping each other warm, Yanagi tells himself as he traces the scar on Kirihara's knee once more, even though Kirihara has always wanted things like a house on fire. Kirihara's touches evaporate against Sanada's skin, light and airy and totally unlike him. "This is not about Genichirou," Yanagi whispers like a lover into Kirihara's hair when Kirihara, asleep, can't hear him. "This is not about Yukimura. This is not about hurting or pain. This is not about destructibility or the things we do to hurt one another. This is about you and me and what is between us. This is about this."
And this time even the rain can't keep him from lying.
...He was right, no one touched you--touch,
Marilyn, as you knew, is such a gentle thing.
So gentle you touch me even now
Who never came into my room or lay your
Life frail as a rose petal against my face.
-"Envoi (for marilyn)", from "Orphans", by David Ray
A/N: "Kirihara has always wanted like a house on fire" inspired by the line from "Big Machine", by Goo Goo Dolls: "living like a house on fire". I am not sure how much of this story actually derived inspiration from David Ray's envoi to "Orphans". For some reason, I think none at all. Paranthesis inspiration entirely from Danica (rondaview), who borrowed her inspiration from someone else, so it is one big gacking circle. I tell myself a lot that just because I like a story doesn't mean it's good, which holds true so much for this story. I don't think any of the characters are who they should be, nor are they in any way true to their original forms, so in that respect I have failed utterly. I seem to have created a situation under which the real Rikkai gang would make a story; instead I have used bad substitutes with their names, like stunt doubles, except with less acting. Yet I'm strangely fond of this story. It might be because I actually tried to make it continous without leaning on section breaks as a crutch. I remember rhoddlet used to say that she was forever traumatized by a line that Picasso or something once had said, about how a good artist can draw a bull from the neck and branch outwards, but a great artist can start from the horns and work the entire way down. Or something to that effect. And that traumatized me as well, when she said it, so. This started out as an attempt for Rikkai gen. I have in this respect failed miserably as well. um.
I've talked enough. Much love to all of you.
There was once a little boy who would get into accidents a lot, falling down or getting hit or tripping, so that he would go home to his mother bruised and bleeding often. She would fuss over him, denying him the privilege of the scraped elbows and skinned knees that were a badge to boys of that age. She kept him white and whole, and he resented that so much that on his ninth birthday, he rode his bike straight into a parked car.
All he has left of that incident, though, is a small scar on his knee where he had split it against the sidewalk. He had healed soon enough, much to his mother's relief. Bruises fade and scratches mend; those are the things that always heal with time.
When Kirihara tells this story, he talks like the memory is something that happened so long ago that it must have happened to someone else. He's already separated himself from the Kirihara of newly nine years old. But touching the scar right under the fold of Kirihara's tennis shorts, Yanagi is convinced that even if Kirihara's forgotten, his body still hasn't. Kirihara's knee and skin still remember that day and take it with him always, proof of the price he paid for forgetting.
Somewhere in Kirihara, just like that scar on the knee, the need to be hurt is still there. Yanagi knows this. Kirihara wants Sanada to be gentle with him, but he takes the beatings instead, so often and so hard that sometimes it makes Yanagi flinch. Kirihara wants Yukimura to scold him, to be angry, to feel more than impersonal affection, but he lets Yukimura pet his hair and treat him softly like a petulant child or pet. Kirihara wants everything that's impossible, wants everything that can cause him pain.
That's why Kirihara hurts other people too. It's that kind of pain he wants more than anything, pain that will leave scars, people like Sanada who will leave behind wounds so deep and so painful inside of you that they never heal, people like Yukimura who tear away pieces of you so large that you're never whole again.
"Genichirou is not a bike accident," Yanagi says to Kirihara, because he knows Kirihara doesn't listen and doesn't understand. "Genichirou is not a car. He is not anything that is stationary, despite his sound exterior and metallic finish. Genichirou is a person."
"Are you talking to yourself again, Yanagi-senpai?" Kirihara says, and later that afternoon when he's been beaten again, sweating and panting on the side bleachers with his racket clamoring against the ground as he speaks, "He's a goddamn ass, is what he is."
Yanagi hands him a towel. "Genichirou means well. Yukimura-buchou would want you to try to understand." And so Kirihara nods, as always, and bitches silently to himself, moving his lips with his head hidden under the towel. Maybe afterwards Yanagi will approach Sanada and all of them will go to visit Yukimura in the hospital. Kirihara will pick up a scraggly flower from the courtyard to give to Yukimura on a whim, and for once Sanada will say nothing. When they are in Yukimura's room Yanagi will not talk unless he has to so Sanada can hold a conversation through Kirihara's interruptions, and for once all of them will be happy. Yukimura will balance Kirihara's flower behind his ear, threaded through his hair, and smile when he talks so that Sanada will, for a few precious squeezed-out moments, stop worrying. But when they leave they'll take the long way back. Kirihara will frighten some kids running down the sidewalk, chasing them for a while. Sanada, for his part silent, will strike up an antagonism with Kirihara over Kirihara's purchase of a snow cone, and Kirihara will eventually drop some of the shaved ice and syrup down Sanada's shirt, starting a whole argument with Yanagi when Yanagi presses paper napkins against Sanada's neck and tries to get him to let it go.
Yanagi will think, Yukimura would know what to do, except he knows that if Yukimura was really here, they wouldn't be like this. Yukimura would have made everything right. Yukimura always did.
His train of thought usually ends up there and goes no further, though the truth is that afterward the visit to the hospital (Kirihara didn't bring a flower but candy instead, smiling and strewing wrappers on Yukimura's bed, and Sanada had been tense the entire way through so that Yukimura almost had to touch the back of his hand to calm him down; Kirihara did buy a snow cone but was repressively cowed by Sanada's impassive silence, and Yanagi had forgotten to get paper napkins, so Kirihara had sticky hands for the rest of the trip), Yanagi goes to Sanada's house to practice calligraphy, holed up away in Sanada's room with the smell of ink and thin paper. Kirihara is downstairs watching TV and grazing his way through Sanada's food even though Sanada, obviously irritated by the fact that Kirihara tagged along, tells him not to touch anything if he can help it. Through the floor Yanagi can just barely hear the noise of the television turned to some awful afternoon kids' show with a lot of sound effects. Sanada grits his teeth.
This was how they had bonded at first, Yanagi and Sanada, over black and white, curves and planes, and they're constantly returning themselves back to it as if every once in a while they need to wipe the slate clean and start over again. The brush tip is small in comparison to the practice paper for Yanagi, which is white and vast and expansive. It's open for anything, so slowly, character by character, Yanagi fills it in. Sometimes his wrist is a little weak, but Sanada's hand is still strong over Yanagi's grip, like always, like it had been before.
"I liked your hair better when it was longer, Renji," Sanada says as he leans over to move Yanagi's hand ever so slightly, almost touching the wet ink on the paper with the tip of his finger as he shows how the strokes should curve. Sanada is bent over Yanagi, one hand on the paper and the other hand on the brush Yanagi's fingers are wrapped around. Yanagi wonders if he listens hard enough, if he can't just feel Sanada's heartbeat, even though Sanada's chest isn't touching Yanagi's back.
"You always did like long hair," Yanagi says, thinking of Yukimura, Yukimura's long, thin, brittle fingers tugging at the ends of his hair to straighten it before Sanada enters the room, the small sweaty strands sticking out of Yukimura's headband before the illness struck, Yukimura's hair spread out on the pillow. Remembers Yukimura in the hospital, out of Sanada's earshot, refusing to get a haircut. Yanagi's hair had never been like Yukimura's, slightly curly and full. His hair had always been fishbone straight and just as skinny too, like twigs in the winter or the tall grass around ponds, and Yanagi turns his attention back to the poem he's copying. He barely notices Sanada's hand ghosting at the edges of his temples and the back of his neck where his hair used to reach down to. Doesn't give it a second thought.
"Your hair was longer than his, back then," Yanagi hears Sanada say distantly. Sanada sounds like he's so far away. Yanagi almost takes his concentration away from his brush and ink because he has a feeling he has to find Sanada before Sanada's gone forever, completely and totally vanishing from Yanagi's life.
But all that is past now. Yanagi knows that; it's possible, Yanagi considers, that Sanada doesn't, even though it had been Sanada and Yukimura both who ended it. His hair, and Inui, and doubles, and people vanishing from his life without a second thought, all that had gone, replaced by singles matches and calligraphy and multiplication in threes and solidarity together, solidarity apart.
(Inui had once e-mailed Yanagi just to ask, "Are you happy?" Yanagi, who knew that Inui would do something of that sort, to ask why or what or how, even who, had told Inui the same thing. "All that is the past now and will never be again." And he knows that Inui still understands vacant vague answers from him. When they were younger they were telepathic; now, they merely understand.)
Kirihara catches them like that from the doorway. Sanada's hand is haunting the ghost of Yanagi's hair, Yanagi paused over the paper so that the character he's writing ends up becoming a gigantic ink spot. Kirihara says, "Yanagi-senpai, are you done yet?" Kicks Sanada's doorframe as if it deserved some kind of punishment for just being there. Bares his teeth, almost growls with the roll of Yanagi's name.
Yanagi can feel the mental snap in Sanada, the sudden rigidity that passes all the way down from his body, right into the fingernails of the hand on Yanagi's paper. Yanagi finishes the last character of the poem and compares it against Sanada's example. Sanada's calligraphy is so beautiful and pure that it's almost incomprehensible. Yanagi's looks perfunctory and unromantic with hard strokes, writing like he's printing, like he's recording poetic data on the mountains or the fields or the streams. He waits for Sanada to critique it before he reconsiders Kirihara at the door.
As always, as before, there is work to do.
"There's a 68% chance it will rain today," Yanagi says, turning towards Kirihara with the very edges of his mouth slightly turned up. "I apologize, Akaya, for leaving my umbrella at school."
Sanada is putting away the brushes and the ink. He knocks his knuckles firmly against the grinding stone for the ink, almost spilling it. Yanagi, turning around quickly, assumes it's an accident, but instead Sanada has it all under control and he says without missing a beat, "It's all right. You may borrow one of mine."
"Genichirou," Yanagi starts to say, but Kirihara interrupts, "Well?"
Sanada raises his head in the briefest of glances and says again, "Renji, it's all right." When they're downstairs, he hands Yanagi the umbrella as Kirihara is slipping on his shoes. Yanagi wants to tell Sanada his lie, that it's not 68% at all, in fact it's closer to 35%, and he really wishes Sanada would actually hear what he's saying instead of just listening. He has the speech already in his head as if he had written it down a long time ago and memorized it just for this moment. But he doesn't say anything, instead watches Sanada's hand leave the umbrella and return to his side.
In the background the TV that Kirihara had neglected to turn off blares away to itself.
"Sorry for inconveniencing you," Yanagi says.
"Don't--"
"Be careless. I know."
Yanagi lets Kirihara shove them out the door. Walking home together, to keep Yanagi from truly becoming a liar, it really does start to rain. Yanagi opens the umbrella and asks Kirihara if he wants to get in with him, but Kirihara shakes his head, shoulders his book bag, and shoves his other hand deep into his pockets. "I'm not afraid of the rain," he says defiantly, looking up at the sky, letting the raindrops slide off his half-closed eyelids. They walk slowly side by side because Yanagi tells Kirihara that he'll get the same amount of wet regardless of how fast they walk; and in any case, Kirihara likes the rain and their shoes with wet flat soles are bad for running. Yanagi is more worried about the state of Kirihara's books. Kirihara isn't and refuses to let Yanagi carry his bag as well. Occasionally Kirihara brushes by the spokes of Yanagi's umbrella. The rain slips onto the flat slopes of Kirihara's uniform. Kirihara doesn't worry about that either. He holds his palms out in front of him after a while, watching the rain collect on his palms. He still has his wristband on. It gets heavier with the rain, but he won't take it off.
"You really should listen to what I say, Kirihara. You have a high chance of getting sick being wet like that."
Kirihara cocks his head to one side. Yanagi watches him from under the slanted cover of Sanada's umbrella. Kirihara has a mouth like a split cranberry, a vivid color and always saying sour and bitter and piercing things, and it doesn't move much as he says, "Don't worry."
Kirihara smiles oddly as if he is young and innocent and unhurt again and says, "I always hear everything you say."
The water sliding off the roof of Kirihara's house thuds against the ground in a steady rhythmic line as they round the corner and arrive at the front door. Yanagi listens to it patiently as Kirihara stalls before walking up to the door. The front of Kirihara's pants and shirt are completely wet. Strangely enough, his back isn't. Yanagi holds the umbrella up for Kirihara as he unlocks the door. Before Sanada can make up his mind whether or not to say goodbye, Kirihara has him inside the house, the door shut firmly behind him, Sanada's umbrella dripping inanely on the floor.
There are a lot of things that Yanagi wishes he could tell Sanada but knows that he never will. Sometimes he almost does, like when he was standing in front of the door with Sanada's umbrella in his hand like an anchor. He had been afraid then, of something he couldn't voice then but had somehow thought Sanada would know, and the sound of the television behind him and Kirihara shuffling with his shoes had erased the fear when he wasn't paying attention to them. Yanagi knows that Sanada would never understand things like how it is easier to keep Yukimura between them, but not Kirihara. How it is essential for them to move as three people because they have always been three people, how their dynamic shifts when they are just two. How Yukimura is not Kirihara and will never be Kirihara, nor would Kirihara ever be Yukimura, and so it is not the same, keeping it between Sanada and himself.
He thinks that being with Sanada is rather like tilting your head back in the rain and drowning yourself by inhaling the water. It happens slowly, just like that, and when you don't notice it, but there comes a time when you know you can't breathe anymore and you know you're drowning and going to die. Yanagi has never drowned. Yet he knows this must be the same kind of desperation.
(Yukimura, before regionals, lying on his bed propped up against the pillows. Yanagi was outside looking in from the doorway, pretending that they cared whether or not he was there, pretending that they just couldn't see him. Yukimura had raised one of his hands to the edge of Sanada's face and said, "Take me with you." And Sanada had said nothing in return, just closed his eyes against that touch, and nodded once, right into the groove of that palm.)
Yanagi doesn't think of Sanada as he is standing in the entranceway to Kirihara's house. Yanagi recalls him later, when his mouth is tracing a line up the inside of Kirihara's thigh slowly, one touch after another. He thinks about Sanada, about Yukimura, about that time when Kirihara had fallen so hard sliding into a shot on the courts that he scraped open the skin down one side of his leg. Yanagi had been the one who patted that raw skin down with antiseptic, a cotton swab in one hand and the other hand on Kirihara's knee, right above the scar, to keep it from moving. Kirihara had both his hands on the bench, fisting the jacket of his jersey and hissing as Yanagi's hand moved.
"This is going to hurt," Yanagi had said a little too late.
"You're the only one I trust," Kirihara had replied, the last of his words disappearing as Yanagi pressed the cotton pad firmly against Kirihara's leg.
This is Kirihara's body, Yanagi had repeated to himself as he wiped gently along the edges of the scrape. This is not Kirihara. This is what was hurt in the bike accident, aged nine; this is not what was hurt out there on the courts. This is not Kirihara, because Kirihara is something that can never be hurt, even though he wants to be. It was something elemental Yanagi had to remember, if he was to survive. It was something important, something Yanagi should never forget.
Now he remembers, and in remembering, thinks of this inherent duality, the way it controls everything Kirihara does and doesn't do. Kirihara's skin is wet and slightly damp from the rain. His arms and his fingers and his mouth tremble under Yanagi's mouth. This is another form of keeping each other warm, Yanagi tells himself as he traces the scar on Kirihara's knee once more, even though Kirihara has always wanted things like a house on fire. Kirihara's touches evaporate against Sanada's skin, light and airy and totally unlike him. "This is not about Genichirou," Yanagi whispers like a lover into Kirihara's hair when Kirihara, asleep, can't hear him. "This is not about Yukimura. This is not about hurting or pain. This is not about destructibility or the things we do to hurt one another. This is about you and me and what is between us. This is about this."
And this time even the rain can't keep him from lying.
...He was right, no one touched you--touch,
Marilyn, as you knew, is such a gentle thing.
So gentle you touch me even now
Who never came into my room or lay your
Life frail as a rose petal against my face.
-"Envoi (for marilyn)", from "Orphans", by David Ray
A/N: "Kirihara has always wanted like a house on fire" inspired by the line from "Big Machine", by Goo Goo Dolls: "living like a house on fire". I am not sure how much of this story actually derived inspiration from David Ray's envoi to "Orphans". For some reason, I think none at all. Paranthesis inspiration entirely from Danica (rondaview), who borrowed her inspiration from someone else, so it is one big gacking circle. I tell myself a lot that just because I like a story doesn't mean it's good, which holds true so much for this story. I don't think any of the characters are who they should be, nor are they in any way true to their original forms, so in that respect I have failed utterly. I seem to have created a situation under which the real Rikkai gang would make a story; instead I have used bad substitutes with their names, like stunt doubles, except with less acting. Yet I'm strangely fond of this story. It might be because I actually tried to make it continous without leaning on section breaks as a crutch. I remember rhoddlet used to say that she was forever traumatized by a line that Picasso or something once had said, about how a good artist can draw a bull from the neck and branch outwards, but a great artist can start from the horns and work the entire way down. Or something to that effect. And that traumatized me as well, when she said it, so. This started out as an attempt for Rikkai gen. I have in this respect failed miserably as well. um.
I've talked enough. Much love to all of you.