Disclaimer:
Gravitation is property of
Murakami Maki and Tokyopop. Its use here generates no profit and no
infringement is intended.
Rating:
R, 'cause it's Yuki.
Summary:
Something is horribly wrong here.
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Yuki
realized years ago, after his disastrous first book and best-selling second
that most people didn't want love stories; they hadn't been in love. They wanted an illusion, something to which
they could cling in the day to day monotony of their boring marriages and
lives. He wasn't a romance writer, he thought privately, so
much as a fantasy novelist. So long as
the age old boy meets girl plot didn't get old, he'd be popular, and the public
would be in a permanent haze of rose-colored Novocain.
Yuki
thought his drivel as disgusting as it was well-loved publicly and found
himself deleting away novels after they'd been published, opening the
original copy on his laptop and simply hitting backspace until rows of words
disappeared, and he felt better, if not good.
Now, seven years, and ten best-sellers later,
deleting never got anything out of his system anymore, just pushed it back in. He felt
the physical press of words and periods and exclamations through his pores,
until they flowed backward into his chest and Yuki found it hard to breathe for
their mass in his lungs.
It
was a foreign sensation, to have his writing reverberate in his chest when for
so long it'd become formulaic.
For
days, weeks, Yuki considered it a sign that he was losing his touch, regressing
to the stupid, naïve freshman in college who spent all hours in the computer
lab, tapping the "L" key and trying to think of a way to start the
novel that would reshape the face of modern Japan.
Then, he realized he was overcomplicating the
situation, and that like most things gone wrong in his recent life, there was a
logical, simple reason why.
-----
Shuuichi looked at him with wide, imploring
eyes. "Why is my stuff in the
foyer?" he asked.
Yuki lit another cigarette and said, "You're
leaving."
The trouble with repetitive threats was that after
a while they stopped being efficacious.
Yuki remembered the early days of their -- whatever the hell it was,
when the vaguest suggestion Yuki was going to make the boy leave had him
begging and in tears, which had been loud to the point where Yuki told him to
shut up or go immediately.
The silence that had fallen then was short, but
blessed, and mostly unperturbed, and when Yuki crossed from his office to the
kitchen for more beer or coffee or another lighter, he'd occasionally see
Shuichi hunched over his keyboard, enormous headphones plugged in. And sometimes, when Yuki lingered long
enough in the doorway of his office to notice, he'd see a look of frustrated
concentration cross Shuuichi's features as he erased and rewrote, rewrote and
crossed out, and finally the light of mild satisfaction as he left most of
whatever he'd committed, and changed an eighth note at the end.
For no good reason, Yuki liked to watch Shuuichi's
fingers as he tried out the different melodies, and hummed the lyrics to
himself, barely a breath of the voice that had gotten him so famous and
well-loved by stupid girls in
He
was staring at Shuuichi's hands, one stuck casually in his pocket, a thumb
hooked through the belt loop and the other picking up one of his CDs, stacked
with the rest in the foyer, when Shuuichi finally spoke:
"Are
you still writing?" Shuuichi asked.
He did not sound at all panicked about the fact that he was about to
become homeless.
"You're
leaving," Yuki repeated, frowning around his cigarette. Was the boy loosing his hearing? It wouldn't be surprising,
what with all those ridiculous Nittle Grasper CDs
that he cranked to ungodly decibels and those live house concerts with three
hundred shrieking fangirls.
Shuuichi
did something that looked suspiciously like rolling his eyes. Cheerily, he said, "Right, right. Of course I am." Yawning, he kicked a pair of neon pink
Converse sneakers to the left and stepped around Yuki, running his hands
through his blond hair slowly, eyelids drifting down sleepily.
"Did
you not hear me?" Yuki asked, horrified.
There was something very wrong.
Waving
one hand dismissively Shuuichi picked his way through his belongings, yawning,
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Happy Valentine's Day to
you, too."
Snorting,
Yuki stomped back to his office and kicked the door mostly shut. He opened his most recent attempt to market
drivel to page sixteen, where he'd left off that morning, right before he'd
felt the oppressive presence of all of Shuuichi's being there at once
and immediately needed to have him vacate the premises, despite him not being
on the premises at all.
After
twenty minutes of glaring determinedly at the screen and not hearing anybody
leave, Yuki threw back his chair and glanced out to find Shuuichi's things
still in the foyer.
-----
Mute
rage, Yuki realized, was pointless.
But
then, he could think of nothing to shout, either.
After
about fifteen minutes more of no productivity, he'd abandoned his computer in
disgust, cursed its creators, their mothers, and the very earth upon which they
walked with their dirty feet, and stormed off to the kitchen to find something
large and sharp with which to destroy the heathen deathbeast
sitting in his office.
And
out of sheer, morbid curiosity, wandered down the hall on quiet steps until he
nudged open the bedroom door.
He
heard it first: Shuuichi's techno, on low, low volume, so quiet he could barely
trace out the bones of a melody, sliding in the air. And by the time Yuki's vision focused, the
song had already fallen silent, gliding into the next track seamlessly in
Yuki's expensive stereo, just as there came a soft sighing sound from the bed,
where Shuuichi was burrowed beneath the covers.
His
bleach-blond hair peeked out over the comforter, and his shoes and clothes were
scattered on his side -- and since when had Shuuichi earned a side of Yuki's
bed? -- haphazard, inside-out, exhausting to even look
at.
Yuki
knew the right thing to do was to wake the boy up and make him leave
immediately. Deadline was drawing
uncomfortably close and Shuuichi was some form of human writer's block.
Yuki
stood there stock still and glared. If
he played his cards right, he could theoretically roll Shuuichi right out of
bed, which would both wake the idiot up and make a very satisfying thump that Yuki
was nearly convinced would kick start his writing again.
But
then all of a sudden, for no reason at all, he was exhausted, spread so thin
that he could feel the light wearing through his skin. He glanced at the clock blearily and realized
that it was only seven in the evening -- though granted, the last time he'd
checked the clock, it was seven in the evening, too, yesterday. He remembered that all the words had started
to run together, but he couldn't quite remember when he'd last seen Shuuichi.
Though
he had to have been there, at least sometimes, Yuki thought to himself, mind
slowing like molasses and fighting yawns.
There were cups and plates and his ashtray had only been half-filled,
despite knowing that he'd smoked through at least three packs in the last --
how long had he been in there, writing?
The windows to the office had been opened at some point and there were
sweatshirts in the room, lettered with embarrassing slogans like "BOY
TOY" and "SEXY PRETTY," which undoubtedly belonged to Shuuichi.
Yuki
rubbed his face and wondered when Shuuichi had managed to permeate his entire
life. The boy was like a cancer, Yuki
decided with a scowl, fast moving and infinitely infectious. One day, Yuki would wake up and there would
be Shuuichi's face, growing out of his arm, beaming and talking about a new
single or how much he loved Yuki, neither of which Yuki approved.
Part
of him was having trouble wrapping his mind around the idea that it had been
two years since he'd found a pink-haired moron on his front step, frowning with
an earnestness imbued only in the truly stupid and glaring at him with big
eyes. Part of him was still in denial
that the pink-haired moron had managed to get through four different hair
styles, two different hair colors, eight pairs of
sneakers, what felt like six billion boxes of strawberry Pocky
-- and was still living in Yuki's house, refusing to leave.
Shuuichi,
Yuki thought distractedly, was -- big.
This huge, walking, talking, annoying bundle that never seemed to go
away except when he did, and then he showed up on television and in magazines,
glittering and well-lit, sexy and boyish still.
What
would all those Bad Luck fans think, Yuki smirked, if they saw their idol and
dream lover rolled up in bed like a particularly unattractive caterpillar, hair
sticking out in all directions, face red with sleep and drooling on Yuki's
pillow. There was no leather club gear
here, no makeup or shining lip gloss or leather straps -- just Shindou Shuuichi in ancient track shorts and a Nittle Grasper t-shirt, unabashed and tired.
Then
again they'd probably think it was sexy, in a messy, domestic sort of way.
Very
messy, Yuki thought, as Shuuichi rolled over, hair falling in his face as blue
eyes blinked open slowly.
Damn
Shuuichi, Yuki thought as he kicked off his slippers and unbuttoned his shirt,
for taking up all the space with his shoes and his clothes and his being there.
"Yuki?" Shuuichi asked, raspy with sleep.
Yuki
groaned in disgust, and too-tired to bother shouting
or exiling Shuuichi from his home or bed, pulled the sheets aside as Shuuichi
yawned, catlike and honey-slow.
"Move,"
Yuki instructed gruffly, though the command seemed more drowsy than demanding.
He
didn't bother kicking off his pants, just slid in between the sheets on his bed
and felt sleep come for him as soon as his head hit the pillow. Shuuichi curled up to his chest, murmuring,
"Did you finish the story?"
Yuki
sighed and threw his arm over Shuuichi's midsection -- because the boy was in
the way of where he wanted to be, and for no other reason, he assured himself
distantly -- drawing in a slow, warm breath.
He felt all those words he'd tried to remove pushing against his
ribcage, as tangible as any sheaf of papers, alive and fluttering and
dangerously real: as naïve as he'd been those years he'd been in college, while
his youth was still terrifyingly recent, fresh like a gash on his skin. But this was different, Yuki thought
curiously, drifting away, this was golden and rounded, warm and strangely pink,
like Shuuichi's hair when they'd first met.
The
muses had the power to make lies seem like truths, and truths like lies, or
truth as it's fundamental existence -- power in prose,
Yuki remembered reading; Hesiod or Herodotus, some
rotting Greek lyricist. Truth, it
seemed, was a matter of perspectives; and the rose-colored Novocain that he'd
been administering for years must have seeped in through the skin of his fingertips,
traced its way into his head.
His
heart gave one, two overfull thumps of contentment before he ordered it to stop
immediately.
"Yuki?" Shuuichi asked again, drowsy and sweet in his
embrace.
"What?"
Yuki said shortly, closing his eyes.
"Happy
Valentine's Day for real this time," the boy murmured slowly. He pressed closer into Yuki's chest, warm and
angled, all elbows and knees. "Did
you finish your story?"
"Shut
up," Yuki instructed. "It'll
be years before this is done."
Shuuichi
murmured something that sounded like agreement and Yuki slept, dreamless.
-----
The end.
-----