writing is a painful gift

Maybe we did love each other, somewhere behind our eyelids on the coldest of days when we needed the reassurance that there was still something there. We hadn’t even known each other at the time, did we? It was the middle of 2004, and the airport was a beehive of activity. Honest to God, all I had wanted to do was get out of my terminal, and climb in the nearest taxi to escape the haze of an early morning. Before I made it to the doors, I saw you coming towards me. Well, you weren’t looking for me, but I was looking at you before I could stop myself. I wondered why you were there, what you were doing, and where you were going. 

Were you anything like me? 

Two weeks later I saw your same face in a magazine I’d picked up in passing. I started listening, I started searching, for the same set of eyes I’d came across at the terminal that greeted Narita that morning. When I finally did meet you, and you told me your name, I felt as if I’d oddly known you all of your life. Surely, I was still a kid then, maybe mentally an adult, but still a kid. Oddly enough when you gave me your number, I maintained my cool. 

We met several times.

In cafes between here and Osaka.

I knew I found love in your smile, but you knew as well as I did: It wasn’t going to work. This was years later, when we’d agreed to meet in a cafe in downtown Shibuya. You were trying to avoid the rain as much as I was. 

We didn’t need many words.

Except.

“There’s somebody else.”

We know.

“Let’s do one thing together, Toshiya.” I ask you.

“What’s that?” He asks.

“Let’s walk home together. In the rain.”

To be together, before we go back to our routines that come with the year of 2011. 

Before we can return to being only be friends, and continue to love each other in another time, another place. 

Shibuya. The population’s out in throngs hurrying to make their way across the scramble crossing. Their heads pop up briefly, before Ruki watches above as they only disappear once again. The Starbucks across the road is his current sanctuary  despite the presence of conversations that he could vaguely hear over the sound of his own thoughts. His eyes disappear into the centre of his mocha frappuccino. It’s something new and unusual, because there was a twinge of coconut which made it taste like he was eating a chocolate bar. Not drinking coffee in the least bit. Though despite that, the grande treat was delicious going down, especially for the rising temperature after such a steady week of chilly weather. 

Aah, but. 

It was chilly the day he had a long conversation with Reita, at the same wooden table he was sitting at, while nursing the frappuccino. Reita’s hands were laced under his chin, but Ruki had wondered while his eyes seemed so pensive. That day, he was stirring a spoon through a hot chai latte, while Reita hadn’t made a dent in his yet. 

“You seem different.” Reita said, prompting Ruki to look up. It in no way sounded suspicious. More so, Reita’s tone was too knowing for that. As if he’d uncovered a layer of skin on Ruki that Ruki himself hadn’t found yet.

“In what way?” Ruki asked casually. 

“I know you.” It wasn’t like Reita to beat around any type of bush. If there was one thing about him, he didn’t allow elephants to linger in the room for long. “I know you’re worried. I know you’re stressed. I know you think everything you’re doing is a huge mistake, but I’m here to remind you that you’re human.” 

Ruki swallowed the lump in his throat, and exhaled. He knew what Reita was referring to because Reita has always been like an extension of himself. Reita’s his best friend, and Ruki swears at times that the two of them share a subconscious. Reita’s referring to the nights he’d already spent with Aoi. The nights that involved hair pulling, scratches on bare skin, wrinkles in clothes, and plenty of worries but zero regrets. The flame he’d kept well hidden beneath his skin, engraved into his veins so deep that he swore up and down he could sustain the fever. 

One day, when Aoi was nursing his acoustic guitar, the lights had already been dimmed. A string snapped and caught Ruki’s attention, who casually caressed and wrapped an injured finger. Then it all burnt out to the point of Ruki not being able to remember anything except for when he dreamt at night. Aoi’s scent and body burnt into his flesh, the fever that had overwhelmed him entirely. Their voices couldn’t be heard through slivers in the doors, but Ruki wanted more, more, on top of more. When Ruki couldn’t take living the way he had reduced himself to living, he’d banged on Reita’s door at four o’clock in the morning and told himeverything.

Way before Reita could brush the sleep out of his face and even process the words to tell Ruki that Uruha was asleep in the next room. Though, he understood where Ruki was coming from. The fear of acting on his own, wild, humanistic desires that could provoke dire consequences. Rui came back to Reita’s face across from him at that lone Starbucks table. 

“It goes above and beyond the roles of gender. Your heart’s got a mind of its own. I’m going to tell you what I tell myself everyday: keep your lines drawn between personal and pleasure, even if we’re doing something taboo by somewhat crossing them. You have to be able to approach him without seeing him only as a lover. He has to be the same old bandmate too, in a way.” 

Ruki’s mind is moving as fast as the cross walk that extended out the window. Reita’s right, and Ruki is well aware that if he doesn’t get a grip on himself, he was going to lose his mind.

That could be the end of him.

The end of everyone else as well, which he didn’t want. 

“You’re right.”

“Of course I am. I know you. Like I know you don’t like wild potatoes, right?” 

Reita’s words ring in the back of his mind while he laughs to himself. He’s back to being alone, and admitting what he had been running from for the past couple of months. He didn’t like him, he in fact loved him. He loved Reita too, but in that brotherly fashion that could’ve never reached out of the borders of plantonic. Aoi he loved with a certain amount of sincerity and aggression. 

“I have to do this.” 

“Do what?” 

The voice surprised him out of his lull, and the presence of another body causes his breathing to hike. Especially when he inhales the familiar cologne he had became accustomed to. 

“Yuu.” Ruki felt the hand fall on his shoulder, and Aoi’s fingers caress with discreet affection. 

I’m only human. 

“Can I join you?”

Of course. You can join me forever.

“Please. Sit down.”

When Aoi sat down across from him, his smile no longer had to focus on the presence of time. He’d tell him when they were not under the watchful eye of Shibuya, nor Starbucks.

Uruha hums something that describes spring.

His voice is considerably drowned out by the soft plucks of strings on acoustic guitar, but Aoi can still hear the vibrations in his throat. His eyes twitch behind his eyelids, and his chest rises and falls as his body rustles in the sheets its entangled in. Uruha remains in a corner of the bedroom, with his eyes cast off somewhere between the window and Aoi’s bare backside in bed. Slivers of light had already begun to graze him, and they had been up till dawn yet again. The morning is frozen behind the glass, but Uruha feels nothing but the warmth behind his eyes and on his skin. 

When Aoi wakes up, he has the tune in his head, and he’s threading each acoustic note with a smile that says everything beyond ‘good morning’. 

Music was their savior, their strength, their will to breathe. It existed in the very blood that ran through their veins and the mangled breathes of air they’d take together. In the fury of passionate moments, among the ones where their backs were turned to each other. They held onto each other with melodies and distant unspoken words until they collided behind the privacy of closed doors. Fingers running up sweat soaked backsides, nails lingering on the surface of skin and breathing so hard they couldn’t make sense of anything else. Nothing else but each other. Uruha didn’t realize when the lines between them had eventually blurred, but it wasn’t a perplexing transition or anything he had to think about.

It just had felt right from day one. 

On stage, Aoi has a teardrop pick between his lips, and pants. The lights are sweltering and he brushes sweat glazed fingertips over his and chuckles. Though Aoi can’t hear him laugh, he can watch it through his eyes and feel it through the presence of electric guitar. Aoi teases the crowd, but he’s teasing Uruha more. Later, they don’t say anything. Aoi’s on the floor with his shirt embedded on him with sweat and Uruha watches from above, until his hand brushes his shoulder, and they slip out together with hands in danger of falling into each other all together. 

Uruha continuously communicates as loudly as he can through the use of strings forever. Even three years later, when he’s playing the same melody he had played so long ago at their wedding ceremony across the Atlantic Ocean. Faces remain silent but Aoi cries behind his hand and breathes out. 

He listens to the I love you that’s always been reserved just for him.

walk thin lines, tracing the color of our breaths with our eyes. white.

fingers, we can only feel one another’s, and it doesn’t feel like the blood is circulating through our veins but we’re fine with that.

we’re fine because we have each other.

it’s the dead of winter and not a soul breathes but our own right now. 
what’s the hour?

the sun set long ago, and we’re still walking, despite the sores of our feet aching. the bay is cold, our reflection greets us. your face is buried in the collar of your jacket.

your face eventually disappears into my shoulder, and I feel you inhale, exhaling warm pants. out here, I hold you close, where the cold can’t reach.

“wataru” it’s soft, and I can barely hear it, and your body shivers.

without thinking, my coat drops over your shoulders, and I bare it. my jacket’s two sizes too big on you, and you disappear into it.

“wataru, let’s race to the horizon.”

“climb on my back and we’ll meet the constellations on it’s edge.”

It was one of those nights where I was suffering insomnia, sitting up in my bed with the candles I had bought in South Africa left half burnt on the dresser of my bed room. I could hear nothing but the occasional car disappear down the street outside the window of my apartment, until I returned to the haze of writing down lyrics on paper towels that were left strewn beside my bed. A car engine hasn’t stopped running outside the window, but I don’t notice. I don’t notice until there’s movement outside my hallway. Through the sliver of my bedroom door, the rap of knuckles against my door throws off my thoughts. There’s a lot of them, and I wonder even now, as the clock blazed two o’clock in the morning, who’d demand my company. 

Abandoned work for the meantime, and Heart sleeps as if nothing exists in her bed in the living room. She barely raises her head, and tucks her face farther away into her tail as early morning passes in. Who is at my door is surprising. It’s him, and he’s staring at me when I open the door as if he hasn’t slept in days. Though I wasn’t about to let my guard down. Days before, when the man had laid his guitar down, he’d said you know I kind of like you. Well, damn, because that had been my mentality too, and my stomach ached for the entirety of the evening thanks to you. 

Damnit, Yuusuke. I can get nothing out of you that’s not cryptic. It’s like pulling teeth, and even now, I bet you’re not going to tell me what you’re doing here. “Come in.” My voice is low, and he makes himself at home in the comfort of the dim living room. All I had asked of him was to let me see what was inside of his eyes, since the day he had walked away. That was my only request for him. He disappeared down the steps of the station and only returned once, and that was to pick up his guitar stand from the studio. They erased all traces of him from that place, but he’d already gotten so far under my skin, that everything still reminded me of him. Even now, when he had walked by me, I smelt the familiar scent of the Calvin Klein that still makes me turn around in the hallway of the studio, expecting to see his face. 

“I’m sorry.” I hear you say, and your hands are on your knees. 

“For what?” No greetings. No nothing. All of that is left unsaid because we honestly don’t need to say it again. 

“For running.”

I know what he means. On several levels. The night after, when limbs entangled into limbs and I could trace the skin of his bare back with one finger. When he held my hand and roughly awoke my senses and spoke of the world in heavy pants and sweat that burrowed in our depths. When his eyes had met my own and we’d said everything we had been wanting to say for years and years, and I was all ready. Though he was not. He left the morning after, and I had to untangle my emotions out of sheets but all I could think about was his bedroom eyes that took me to the edge of the earth. I stood rigid for a time, but then I re-called that Suga Yuusuke was human. 

“I didn’t judge you too harshly.” I took the seat beside me, and I noticed he visibly relaxes, and his hand falls against my leg. Vaguely I wonder if this is why he’s here. That he can’t sleep and had been tossing and turning until his thoughts were loud enough to bring him here. His hair isn’t too out of place, but his shirt doesn’t match his pants, and his shoes had been hastily thrown on. His hand tensed, and I noticed that his grip had gotten rough, until it bled through the fabric of my pajama pants. 

“I still shouldn’t have fucking done that. I was up in the air, tossed through the ringer about this and that. My future, our future, how I pushed, scratched and clawed my way out. Then I had to go and tie it into my personal life. Then I had to go, and disappoint you. I’m sorry.” 

He’s watching, somewhat hesitant, but his walls are caving in. I can see into his eyes, just a little, but it’s more than I could’ve seen weeks prior. We’d known each other for years, and our feelings had always been some jumble of mismatched and chaotic emotions. Small storms that boiled beneath our beings and rattled ourselves to the cores of our existence. Suddenly, it’s no longer important about what was done in the past. It had gotten them to the present day, and the thing that mattered was that he had came back. He’d came back in his uncertainty and didn’t know what to expect. 

“I forgive you for being human.” 

His face is suddenly pressed into my neck, and his hand crosses over my lap. Body warmth came and went, but this lingered with his lips against my skin and trickling murmurs of ‘I’m really sorry’. To us, this couldn’t mean ‘goodbye’, and I’m going to reassure him until the sun rises on both of our backs. This time he’ll stay even after I fall asleep, because I can hear him breathing against the hollow of my throat come six or seven before he slips his way into my dreams. 

I forgive you. 

His legs can’t support the weight of his body. His knees are digging into the floor of the hospital room, while his right hand hangs onto the railing of the hospital bed. His fingers are slipping as his body is exhausting itself onto the ground completely, but he refuses to let go. Fingerprints are left behind on the metal rails, and Ruki’s knuckles are losing their color - a shade of pale that’s suffocating for oxygen. He didn’t remember anything outside of running into the room, which felt like hours past, and sliding out of the chair he had pressed up against the bed.

So far, he hadn’t heard anything. Not even a rustle of a thigh against bed sheets or the sound of a groan from within a throat. He was motionless and buried under bandages and masks, with IV needles prodded under the surface skin of his hands. Ruki’s not ready to say good bye, and keeps an ear on the heart monitor as his fingers fall from the railing of the bed. He’s sinking completely, buried on the floor with his palms pressed against his face as his nails scrape against the skin of his cheeks. 

“You have to live.”

He’s begging between his fingers, his eyes refusing to look up. Tears are struggling to hide themselves against the creases of his eyes, but they fall, and Ruki feels one streak its way down the side of his nose. He hadn’t had any want, or need to pray until that moment, but if any particular deity could’ve heard him, he would’ve asked them to spare him. Just a little longer. Just a little longer to allow their lives together to be able to begin. 

“Just a little longer.” His words are strained between his teeth, and he worries the skin on his bottom lip before releasing. He tastes a tear that had escaped and stained his upper lip. 

Was the country crying?

 He couldn’t hear anything else but the sound of what felt like gravel kneading against itself above his head. His breath was pressed back in through his mouth by means of the cement wall that had pinned itself on top of his body. Another hoisted up his back, while his hand was the only thing that would be gifted to what could be called freedom. The air against his fingertips wasn’t clean, it was congested with smog that seeped through the cracks of the cement and filtered its way into his lungs. Each time he attempted to move a portion of himself, his skin screamed in agony, and the trickle of blood seeped from a gash in his temple, gracing its way down to the curve of his ear. He was alive, but on fire. He couldn’t see any flames, but they felt as if they were already licking every vein and squeezing each muscle. 

Was he crying? 

Somewhere above the debris, a female voice droned out of the air, words begging for some sort of help. Once, twice a third time before the thud of her body hit the cracked pavement, her breath exhaled and inhaled before silence resurfaced. He wasn’t quite sure what had occurred, but if death was present here - he wasn’t going to die here. Not yet. He wasn’t ready to give into it.

He had too much to go home too.

See you soon.

There was no light. His eyelids were fogged with smoke, but he could see his face. That smiling face that watched him leave the apartment with his reflection in the wide windows of the living room. 

I’ll go home. 

Ruki.

“wataru, would you stop war if you were god?”
ruki asks him without saying the words
creases in his face are caked in dirt
his eyes are the only portion of himself that lives
lips are still, fingers encased in stale blood
the departing sun laughed until it sputtered above
ruki’s fingers twitch and wataru can see his eyes move
up, pupils re-directing themselves towards his face
wataru’s jaw tenses and he doesn’t move
his shadow cast over his body
three minutes and shells scream above his head
his grip is numb, around ruki’s left arm, and he shields him

”I won’t let you die here, not like this”
wataru took off his last bit of shelter
a torn plaid t-shirt, green and black
he wraps it around ruki’s injured arm, blood squeezes between skin
he can’t see the bullet, but ruki makes a noise
a storm of fury in his throat, trapped in pain
there was going to be nothing to save them both
he presses his palms flat against the wound
then he breathes out for fourty-five minutes

silence in the air

there’s a scream followed by a thud, heard an hour in
the grass moans, high across the horizon
wataru finds the strength to curl his arms under his body

hoist

he carries him through the thicket and listens
the sound of their heartbeats against bruised rib cages
”I’ll stop war by letting you live”
ruki’s legs and arms are covered in purple bruises
wataru’s skin is red and white and his fingers are burnt
he shakes as he carries him, across the final check point
the red cross is waiting there, dozens of foreign eyes on him
he breathes and can understand their gazes
amid the chaos there was suddenly peace

only for ruki

”take him” wataru says and holds him out
”the war needs to end”
he disappears at dusk leaving ruki delirious with his scent
five hours later, ruki wakes up in a hospital bed
and finds that he’s alone

seven hours after he sees a missing person’s report
the list is long, writen on the wall of a self-made hospital
he sees a man shake his head, and pick up a marker
in brought black ink, he watches him write,

’miyawaki wataru’

seconds after the television shouted that the war had ended.

die understands the color of hunger
it is painted on an orange canvas
behind shinya on the street corner
shinya doesn’t know die sees him waiting
the sun is at his back and hungry
or perhaps these are die’s own feelings
when shinya moves towards the curb
die wants to move as well ‘wait, don’t leave.’

shinya leaves when the light turns green
it’s late now, their rehearsal ran late
he knows what shinya will do when he arrives home
die stops at the same corner and waits
the light is red and the sun is beginning to set
he arrives outside of shinya’s complex fifteen minutes later

he has his hands in his pockets and looks up
shinya’s light is on on the sixth floor
his curtains are drawn, and they’re plain white
he heads in and uses the stairs that day
by the time he knocks, the sun is sideways between buildings
when shinya opens the door, he doesn’t look surprised

“did you follow me home?” he asks him.
die looked sheepish and his hair is in his face
“something like that”
shinya’s hand falls against his chest and listens

thump.

die relaxes under the touch and disappears behind the door
shinya’s hand falls away but die grips his wrist
fingers slip up to his and entwine
shinya’s particular about many things
die didn’t understand him half the time
though, this was part of the appeal

shinya was picky yet he chose him
die was lucky - even if he didn’t deserve it

“let me explain again how I feel about you”

shinya chuckles

“again?”

“again”

the sun was gone but still rose in shinya’s eyes
the projected flame of die’s hunger

he had a minute of failure,
chords stung between his fingers
the pick dropped and hit the scuff of his boot
”shit” muffled under damp lips
he couldn’t concentrate
which chord was which, he normally knew
toshiya was watching, breath normal
though kaoru could hear it over the strings
in and out, curiosity building due to kaoru’s pause

“Let’s do that again”
kaoru urges but toshiya’s laughing behind his back
not spitefully but lighthearted and respectful
“Let’s take a break”
normally, kaoru wouldn’t but toshiya sounds persistant
he sets his guitar down, and doesn’t utter a word
cigarette between lips, toshiya becomes his shadow
outside it’s cold but kaoru doesn’t feel it
nicotine pressed between lips, toshiya watches

“it’ll come full circle, it always does”
toshiya says after a long moment of standing still
kaoru’s eyebrows relax and the line in his lips creases
he needed toshiya’s optimism.

“you always say that, about everything”
kaoru chuckles out smoke, and brushes an inked elbow against his arm

“including us”
kaoru flicks the cigarette
in favor of finding the corner of toshiya’s lips
in the privacy of the waiting sun behind the studio
their shadows entwined briefly on the cement sidewalk
then they were back to being band mates

“will you ever stop?”
toshiya asks with a smile, checking his bass set up
kaoru turns around and raises a brow

“only when we go home together”