Distance Brings You Closer Chapter 8
Title: Distance Brings You Closer (Chapter 8/?)
Author: yukinonamida
Genre: AU, Drama, Angst, Romance, Smut, Friendship
Pairing: Nishikato
Rating: R
Summary: Ryo and Shige were the best of friends until different stresses got to them and they began to grow apart. Ryo's constant verbal abuse to Shige only increases the distance between them, until they become lost in a dangerous relationship with each other. Different feelings begin to surface but is their once strong bond already destroyed beyond repair?
A/N: This chapter is safe~ Back to the angst~
Previous Chapters:
( Chapter 1 )
( Chapter 2 )
( Chapter 3 )
( Chapter 4 )
( Chapter 5 )
( Chapter 6 )
( Chapter 7 )
Chapter 8: The Return
It was a cold and dark morning the day that Nishikido Ryo was scheduled to return to Tokyo.
Kato Shigeaki woke up with chills, partly due to the cold temperature in his apartment, but mostly due to the nerves that shook him knowing that today was the day he had to face Ryo again. He knew that there was a chance Ryo wouldn’t take it well, but there was also a chance that Ryo wouldn’t even care, that he had found someone on his trip and had forgotten all about what had happened before he left. Frankly, he wasn’t sure which scenario would hurt more, but the result had to be the same. From that day forward, they were not friends, they were not lovers, but merely a miniscule employee and his big-shot boss.
~~~
Ryo was expected to be in work at the beginning of lunch hour, according to his secretary. The time flew, yet dragged at the same time. Lunch hour passed, and then another hour afterwards. It came to be 2PM and Ryo had not returned yet.
Shige would be lying if he said he wasn’t worried. Ryo was never late to work; he had always made it a point to be on time. If he said he would be somewhere at 8AM, he was there at 7:59AM. It was strange that two hours after his expected arrival time, he was still nowhere to be seen.
Shige busied himself with finishing up the assignment that he and Koyama had been working on for the past two weeks. He tried to ignore everything else, but his eyes still shot to his watch every few minutes.
When Shige was 10 years old, his father was on a business trip for a few weeks and never came home. Till this day, he still remembers crying in his mother’s arms when he was told that his father was killed in a plane crash due to a faulty part that somehow had gotten past the inspection team. Ever since then, whenever someone was coming or going on a trip, Shige was always extremely anxious, and this time was no exception.
His hands shook as he tried to continue to write; his heart was beating out of his chest and his stomach was in knots.
All of a sudden, he felt someone kick the bottom of his chair and he jumped up and shot his head to the opening of his cubicle.
“Yo~” Ryo said, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
Shige looked up at him like a deer-in-the-headlights.
“What’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Ryo said, raising an eyebrow.
A wave of emotions enveloped Shige as he continued to stare at Ryo. He wanted to get out of his chair and throw his arms around Ryo, causing the last bit of worry in his heart to disappear. He wanted to tell him how much he missed him and how worried he was, and how happy he was to see him again. But he couldn’t.
“Ano…nothing. Welcome back, Nishikido-san.” Shige said, averting his eyes back to his work.
“Oi.” Ryo snapped, kicking the chair again, causing Shige to glare at him with an annoyed look, though he was still shaking.
“I was gone for two weeks and all you say is ‘Welcome back’?” Ryo snarled.
“I have to finish this. It’s due in three hours.” Shige tried to return to his work, but Ryo interrupted him by grabbing his arm and pulling him out of the cubicle towards his office.
While he was being pulled, Shige gave a look of nervousness to Koyama who had seen the whole thing from the copy machine. “Good luck” he mouthed as Ryo opened his office door and pulled Shige in.
~~~
“What the hell do you want?!” Shige yelled as Ryo closed the door behind him and threw Shige into his desk.
“I was talking to you and you have the nerve to ignore me?!” Ryo yelled back. No matter how much he had thought about their situation that morning on the roof, he felt that frustrated feeling once again. He wanted to talk to Shige normally, but this idea had been shattered. He felt his emotions revert back to the way they were before he left, and the next thing he knew, here they were, arguing again.
“It’s due in three hours!” Shige defended.
“I don’t give a shit when it’s due. Where’s the respect?” Ryo glared, more hurt than angry.
“I’m sorry, sir.” Shige bowed his head.
“I don’t want an apology.” Ryo snapped, feeling his emotions well up and fight to surface.
“Then what do you want? What do you want me to say?” Shige said, still facing his head down in shame.
“I just want you to talk to me!” Ryo yelled as a hidden emotion finally escaped the walls of his heart.
Shige looked up and met Ryo’s hurt eyes. They stayed like that for what must have been a minute before Ryo caught himself and looked away.
“I mean…a ‘How was the trip’ would have been nice.” Ryo mumbled, trying to corral his racing emotions back into one place.
Shige studied him because for the first time in a long time, he saw a look of sincerity in his face.
Ryo looked back at him and snapped Shige out of it. “Well?”
“Ah-…How was your trip, sir?” Shige said as he stood up straight.
Ryo looked at him painfully. Even though they were the words he wanted to hear, the ‘sir’ at the end made him feel emptier than before he had said anything.
“It sucked.” Ryo said bluntly.
“Sorry to hear that, Nishikido-san.” Shige responded robotically.
“Aren’t you going to ask why it sucked?” Ryo pleaded.
“Sorry. Why did it suck?” Shige responded, again as if the words were being forced out of his throat with no emotion backing them.
Ryo sighed angrily and walked over to Shige. Shige tensed but Ryo just pushed him away from his desk mercilessly and sat down in his chair.
“Just forget it.” Ryo said as he sorted through the hundreds of papers left on his desk.
Shige’s heart broke as he looked back at Ryo and rubbed the spot on his arm where Ryo’s hand had painfully pushed him.
“I’m sor-“
“I said forget it! I get the point, you don’t care.” Ryo glared at him before returning to his papers.
“There’s something I have to say to you.” Shige said anxiously, knowing this was the worst possible time to bring it up. But he had to do it.
Ryo slammed the papers on his desk and looked up at Shige. “What?”
Shige looked into Ryo’s eyes and his heart ached. “Whatever we were doing after work the week before you left…it…it can’t happen anymore.”
Ryo leaned back in his chair and looked to the ground before looking up at Shige again.
“I had a feeling you would say that.” Ryo said, his eyes blank and dark.
“Is that okay?” Shige said, trying desperately to read Ryo’s expression.
“Why the hell does it matter what I think about it?”
“Because…I..”
Their eyes met once again, and the feelings of pain and heartache filled the thick air around them.
“It didn’t mean anything to you either, I get it.” Ryo looked to the right of Shige to avoid further eye contact.
“No…that’s not tr-“
“Why are you still here? You don’t want to talk to me, you don’t want anything to do with me.”
Ryo looked up at him with a glare that pierced right through Shige’s soul.
“So, tell me. Why are you still here?”
“I don’t want to leave things like this…” Shige mumbled desperately.
“Like what? I don’t think I misinterpreted anything you said, so what is there you could possibly fix?”
“I..I don’t hate you…I just think things would be better if we went back to the days before we had that fight here. We should go back to being just a normal employee and his boss…nothing more than that.”
The words drove nails into Ryo’s pounding chest. “That was supposed to help things?”
“I…I don’t know what else to do…”
“I’ll tell you what you can do. The door’s over there. “ Ryo said as he glared at Shige. “Leave.”
The tears welled up in both of their eyes as Shige left the office, increasing the gap between them.
Ryo pushed the papers onto the floor with one sweep, turned the chair around, and he let all of his emotions take over as tears fell uncontrollably from his eyes.
~~~
Koyama was waiting nearby, pretending to pour a cup of coffee, and he ran over to Shige as he left the room. Shige looked at him with tears lining his eyes and Koyama just nodded, grabbed their coats, and led him towards the door going outside.
“Let’s take our break now, hmm?” he said gently as they reached the door.
~~~
Out on one of the picnic benches on the grass outside, Koyama comforted Shige as he cried into his chest.
“What happened, Shige?” Koyama said as he looked painfully at his friend who had not spoken once since he left Ryo’s office.
Once again, Shige responded by crying harder, and Koyama knew that he was not yet ready to talk.
“It hurt…” Shige mumbled a few minutes later.
“Hmm?” Koyama asked gently.
“Here..” Shige said, grabbing at the material over his chest. “It hurt..so…so much, Kei-chan…”
“More than you prepared for, huh…”
Shige nodded as he sniffled. “He thinks that it didn’t mean anything to me. But it did, Kei-chan…I just couldn’t tell him that. And that is what hurt me… I think he misunderstood…”
“You couldn’t have prevented that, don’t be mad at yourself.”
“And…” Shige sobbed, “before he came back, he was late and I thought something happened to him…I thought he might’ve gotten hurt or worse…” Shige held on tighter as he said these words. “I don’t want to lose him, Kei-chan. I can’t lose him…”
“You’re not going to lose him, Shige. He’s fine, right? Nothing bad happened. And don’t worry…he’ll come back to you, you just have to be patient…the worst part is over.”
Shige nodded and continued to cry.
~~~
“Nishikido-san.” His boss said as he stood in the doorway of Ryo’s office. “What are you doing here? You deserve a day off after all that happened in China.”
Ryo looked up from the document he was reading over. “There was something I needed to see here.”
“Oh, well if you’re done, you should go home early. You look tired; your eyes are all swollen.” The boss said, and Ryo was actually surprised at how kind he was being.
“Eh, I guess you’re right. I am really tired.” Ryo said as he stood up.
“Yeah, we’ll talk about everything tomorrow.”
~~
Shige had stopped crying, and they stood up from the bench.
“I guess we should get that assignment finished.” Shige said to him, smiling.
“Yeah…especially after all that hard work.”
Ryo exited the building, fixing his coat. He looked up and saw Shige in the distance, laughing and smiling with someone.
“I guess if you could call laughing ‘work’” Shige giggled.
“We got it done, though!” Koyama smiled.
Ryo stared blankly at the scene between the two. He hadn’t seen the expression on Shige’s face in a long time….since the last time they went out together.
Why is Shige laughing like that with that Koyama guy? Oh, I see how it is. That’s why you couldn’t care less about me now. You found a new friend.
Ryo got into his car and put his keys in the ignition.
Fine, laugh like that with him. Smile at him like you used to smile at me. Fine! I get the point, Shige.
I..
I get it.
Ryo rode home in silence, both not knowing what to think and not wanting to think about anything at the same time. Nothing made sense, and nothing mattered anymore. The time he knew was coming yet had dreaded like the plague had come.
Shige had moved on.
A/N: Sad >_< Annnnngssssssst.
Comments make me happy!~~
Author: yukinonamida
Genre: AU, Drama, Angst, Romance, Smut, Friendship
Pairing: Nishikato
Rating: R
Summary: Ryo and Shige were the best of friends until different stresses got to them and they began to grow apart. Ryo's constant verbal abuse to Shige only increases the distance between them, until they become lost in a dangerous relationship with each other. Different feelings begin to surface but is their once strong bond already destroyed beyond repair?
A/N: This chapter is safe~ Back to the angst~
Previous Chapters:
( Chapter 1 )
( Chapter 2 )
( Chapter 3 )
( Chapter 4 )
( Chapter 5 )
( Chapter 6 )
( Chapter 7 )
Chapter 8: The Return
It was a cold and dark morning the day that Nishikido Ryo was scheduled to return to Tokyo.
Kato Shigeaki woke up with chills, partly due to the cold temperature in his apartment, but mostly due to the nerves that shook him knowing that today was the day he had to face Ryo again. He knew that there was a chance Ryo wouldn’t take it well, but there was also a chance that Ryo wouldn’t even care, that he had found someone on his trip and had forgotten all about what had happened before he left. Frankly, he wasn’t sure which scenario would hurt more, but the result had to be the same. From that day forward, they were not friends, they were not lovers, but merely a miniscule employee and his big-shot boss.
~~~
Ryo was expected to be in work at the beginning of lunch hour, according to his secretary. The time flew, yet dragged at the same time. Lunch hour passed, and then another hour afterwards. It came to be 2PM and Ryo had not returned yet.
Shige would be lying if he said he wasn’t worried. Ryo was never late to work; he had always made it a point to be on time. If he said he would be somewhere at 8AM, he was there at 7:59AM. It was strange that two hours after his expected arrival time, he was still nowhere to be seen.
Shige busied himself with finishing up the assignment that he and Koyama had been working on for the past two weeks. He tried to ignore everything else, but his eyes still shot to his watch every few minutes.
When Shige was 10 years old, his father was on a business trip for a few weeks and never came home. Till this day, he still remembers crying in his mother’s arms when he was told that his father was killed in a plane crash due to a faulty part that somehow had gotten past the inspection team. Ever since then, whenever someone was coming or going on a trip, Shige was always extremely anxious, and this time was no exception.
His hands shook as he tried to continue to write; his heart was beating out of his chest and his stomach was in knots.
All of a sudden, he felt someone kick the bottom of his chair and he jumped up and shot his head to the opening of his cubicle.
“Yo~” Ryo said, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
Shige looked up at him like a deer-in-the-headlights.
“What’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Ryo said, raising an eyebrow.
A wave of emotions enveloped Shige as he continued to stare at Ryo. He wanted to get out of his chair and throw his arms around Ryo, causing the last bit of worry in his heart to disappear. He wanted to tell him how much he missed him and how worried he was, and how happy he was to see him again. But he couldn’t.
“Ano…nothing. Welcome back, Nishikido-san.” Shige said, averting his eyes back to his work.
“Oi.” Ryo snapped, kicking the chair again, causing Shige to glare at him with an annoyed look, though he was still shaking.
“I was gone for two weeks and all you say is ‘Welcome back’?” Ryo snarled.
“I have to finish this. It’s due in three hours.” Shige tried to return to his work, but Ryo interrupted him by grabbing his arm and pulling him out of the cubicle towards his office.
While he was being pulled, Shige gave a look of nervousness to Koyama who had seen the whole thing from the copy machine. “Good luck” he mouthed as Ryo opened his office door and pulled Shige in.
~~~
“What the hell do you want?!” Shige yelled as Ryo closed the door behind him and threw Shige into his desk.
“I was talking to you and you have the nerve to ignore me?!” Ryo yelled back. No matter how much he had thought about their situation that morning on the roof, he felt that frustrated feeling once again. He wanted to talk to Shige normally, but this idea had been shattered. He felt his emotions revert back to the way they were before he left, and the next thing he knew, here they were, arguing again.
“It’s due in three hours!” Shige defended.
“I don’t give a shit when it’s due. Where’s the respect?” Ryo glared, more hurt than angry.
“I’m sorry, sir.” Shige bowed his head.
“I don’t want an apology.” Ryo snapped, feeling his emotions well up and fight to surface.
“Then what do you want? What do you want me to say?” Shige said, still facing his head down in shame.
“I just want you to talk to me!” Ryo yelled as a hidden emotion finally escaped the walls of his heart.
Shige looked up and met Ryo’s hurt eyes. They stayed like that for what must have been a minute before Ryo caught himself and looked away.
“I mean…a ‘How was the trip’ would have been nice.” Ryo mumbled, trying to corral his racing emotions back into one place.
Shige studied him because for the first time in a long time, he saw a look of sincerity in his face.
Ryo looked back at him and snapped Shige out of it. “Well?”
“Ah-…How was your trip, sir?” Shige said as he stood up straight.
Ryo looked at him painfully. Even though they were the words he wanted to hear, the ‘sir’ at the end made him feel emptier than before he had said anything.
“It sucked.” Ryo said bluntly.
“Sorry to hear that, Nishikido-san.” Shige responded robotically.
“Aren’t you going to ask why it sucked?” Ryo pleaded.
“Sorry. Why did it suck?” Shige responded, again as if the words were being forced out of his throat with no emotion backing them.
Ryo sighed angrily and walked over to Shige. Shige tensed but Ryo just pushed him away from his desk mercilessly and sat down in his chair.
“Just forget it.” Ryo said as he sorted through the hundreds of papers left on his desk.
Shige’s heart broke as he looked back at Ryo and rubbed the spot on his arm where Ryo’s hand had painfully pushed him.
“I’m sor-“
“I said forget it! I get the point, you don’t care.” Ryo glared at him before returning to his papers.
“There’s something I have to say to you.” Shige said anxiously, knowing this was the worst possible time to bring it up. But he had to do it.
Ryo slammed the papers on his desk and looked up at Shige. “What?”
Shige looked into Ryo’s eyes and his heart ached. “Whatever we were doing after work the week before you left…it…it can’t happen anymore.”
Ryo leaned back in his chair and looked to the ground before looking up at Shige again.
“I had a feeling you would say that.” Ryo said, his eyes blank and dark.
“Is that okay?” Shige said, trying desperately to read Ryo’s expression.
“Why the hell does it matter what I think about it?”
“Because…I..”
Their eyes met once again, and the feelings of pain and heartache filled the thick air around them.
“It didn’t mean anything to you either, I get it.” Ryo looked to the right of Shige to avoid further eye contact.
“No…that’s not tr-“
“Why are you still here? You don’t want to talk to me, you don’t want anything to do with me.”
Ryo looked up at him with a glare that pierced right through Shige’s soul.
“So, tell me. Why are you still here?”
“I don’t want to leave things like this…” Shige mumbled desperately.
“Like what? I don’t think I misinterpreted anything you said, so what is there you could possibly fix?”
“I..I don’t hate you…I just think things would be better if we went back to the days before we had that fight here. We should go back to being just a normal employee and his boss…nothing more than that.”
The words drove nails into Ryo’s pounding chest. “That was supposed to help things?”
“I…I don’t know what else to do…”
“I’ll tell you what you can do. The door’s over there. “ Ryo said as he glared at Shige. “Leave.”
The tears welled up in both of their eyes as Shige left the office, increasing the gap between them.
Ryo pushed the papers onto the floor with one sweep, turned the chair around, and he let all of his emotions take over as tears fell uncontrollably from his eyes.
~~~
Koyama was waiting nearby, pretending to pour a cup of coffee, and he ran over to Shige as he left the room. Shige looked at him with tears lining his eyes and Koyama just nodded, grabbed their coats, and led him towards the door going outside.
“Let’s take our break now, hmm?” he said gently as they reached the door.
~~~
Out on one of the picnic benches on the grass outside, Koyama comforted Shige as he cried into his chest.
“What happened, Shige?” Koyama said as he looked painfully at his friend who had not spoken once since he left Ryo’s office.
Once again, Shige responded by crying harder, and Koyama knew that he was not yet ready to talk.
“It hurt…” Shige mumbled a few minutes later.
“Hmm?” Koyama asked gently.
“Here..” Shige said, grabbing at the material over his chest. “It hurt..so…so much, Kei-chan…”
“More than you prepared for, huh…”
Shige nodded as he sniffled. “He thinks that it didn’t mean anything to me. But it did, Kei-chan…I just couldn’t tell him that. And that is what hurt me… I think he misunderstood…”
“You couldn’t have prevented that, don’t be mad at yourself.”
“And…” Shige sobbed, “before he came back, he was late and I thought something happened to him…I thought he might’ve gotten hurt or worse…” Shige held on tighter as he said these words. “I don’t want to lose him, Kei-chan. I can’t lose him…”
“You’re not going to lose him, Shige. He’s fine, right? Nothing bad happened. And don’t worry…he’ll come back to you, you just have to be patient…the worst part is over.”
Shige nodded and continued to cry.
~~~
“Nishikido-san.” His boss said as he stood in the doorway of Ryo’s office. “What are you doing here? You deserve a day off after all that happened in China.”
Ryo looked up from the document he was reading over. “There was something I needed to see here.”
“Oh, well if you’re done, you should go home early. You look tired; your eyes are all swollen.” The boss said, and Ryo was actually surprised at how kind he was being.
“Eh, I guess you’re right. I am really tired.” Ryo said as he stood up.
“Yeah, we’ll talk about everything tomorrow.”
~~
Shige had stopped crying, and they stood up from the bench.
“I guess we should get that assignment finished.” Shige said to him, smiling.
“Yeah…especially after all that hard work.”
Ryo exited the building, fixing his coat. He looked up and saw Shige in the distance, laughing and smiling with someone.
“I guess if you could call laughing ‘work’” Shige giggled.
“We got it done, though!” Koyama smiled.
Ryo stared blankly at the scene between the two. He hadn’t seen the expression on Shige’s face in a long time….since the last time they went out together.
Why is Shige laughing like that with that Koyama guy? Oh, I see how it is. That’s why you couldn’t care less about me now. You found a new friend.
Ryo got into his car and put his keys in the ignition.
Fine, laugh like that with him. Smile at him like you used to smile at me. Fine! I get the point, Shige.
I..
I get it.
Ryo rode home in silence, both not knowing what to think and not wanting to think about anything at the same time. Nothing made sense, and nothing mattered anymore. The time he knew was coming yet had dreaded like the plague had come.
Shige had moved on.
A/N: Sad >_< Annnnngssssssst.
Comments make me happy!~~