The Lost - Wolf at the Door
Title: The Lost - Wolf at the Door
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Matsumoto Jun/Sakurai Sho
Summary: He and Jun are productive members of society, and the more they work, the more they forget about the hole they’ve been trying so hard to dig themselves out of these past few years.
Notes/Warnings: In order to follow along, you will have to have read The Lost and The Lost: Redux written by myself and katmillia. Sorry for the lengthy homework assignment, but this is set in the same universe approximately 5 years after the events of Redux. Of course, you don't HAVE to, but it might not make much sense to you.
Sho reaches his twenty-ninth birthday, and the headaches start. It’s easy to write it off as work stress. He pops an aspirin or two and downs a glass of water. An aspirin or two becomes three or four, and he keeps the bathroom door closed so the light won’t wake Jun when the pain strikes in the middle of the night.
He’s been putting in sixty, seventy hour weeks lately. He’s not getting enough sleep. He’s eating garbage. That’s probably it.
Sho usually plans his meals a day in advance, letting Jun pamper him a bit by putting together a bento for him the night before. It’s better than if Sho tried to cook himself, but Jun’s busy too. He settles for something quick from the convenience store. A candy bar for lunch. He’d go to the gym, but the kilos are falling off anyhow from stress.
He and Jun are productive members of society, and the more they work, the more they forget about the hole they’ve been trying so hard to dig themselves out of these past few years.
But he knows that headaches aren’t supposed to last this long. He’s supposed to be delivering a presentation in an hour, but instead he’s on some internet doctor website frightening himself. Migraines. Maybe. But his headaches aren’t the same. His are more like someone inside his head has a pick-axe and just set up shop in one place, jabbing at him sharply until he can’t see straight. Pressure and pressure and pressure building until the meds start to kick in, and it subsides.
There’s no such thing as a headache for Sho, not any longer. He doesn’t know a lot about neurology, that’s for damn sure, but it’s been a while since his last check-up. Years since he last went in and got the all clear. Who is the Prime Minister? What year is it? Very good, Sakurai-san.
He sits in his office and closes the laptop, shutting his eyes. He names the Prime Minister. He knows the year. He knows what he had for breakfast yesterday (nothing) and he remembers the last vacation he went on (Los Angeles - he hopes Nino’s shaved off that awful goatee). He knows these things today, right now.
Jun gets home from work after 9 pm that night, shaking a new bottle of aspirin. “We ran out. You should have told me.”
Sho just nods and turns up the volume for the soccer game.
--
Aiba doesn’t like the place Sho’s chosen for lunch. Sho notices, even though he has to spend half the time checking messages from the office. Aiba doesn’t like the building because the one across the street is still condemned. It never got rebuilt. It sits there as a reminder of things that Aiba will carry for the rest of his life, things Sho will only know secondhand.
Aiba doesn’t actually say anything about it. He doesn’t have to. He continues his stories about his daughter’s first school play, and Sho likes knowing that one of them in their strange circle of friends has something to be happy about.
“She was a tree,” Aiba says, focusing on adding an ungodly amount of sauce to his chicken. “She was the very best tree in the play. Well, she was the only one, but if there were more trees, she’d still be the best. And I’m not saying this because she’s my kid or anything...”
Sho nods and turns his phone off. He wants to hear about the little girl and the play and the trees. It’s something he can focus on, something he can remember. If he doesn’t remember anything else about this long overdue meal, he’ll remember that Aiba’s daughter was a tree.
“You’re okay, Sho-chan?” Masaki asks, “I think you’ve added enough salt to that, don’t you think?”
He stops himself, setting the shaker down. Sho’s focusing so hard on...focusing that common sense is leaving him. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Working hard?”
“Yeah,” he says, cutting through his pork cutlet and avoiding the now salted vegetables. “They keep me busy.”
“That’s what Jun’s always saying,” Aiba says.
He knows that Aiba’s looking for something else, can tell by the way he’s watching. Aiba doesn’t catch everything, but when he does, it’s difficult to shake him off. “I’m fine,” he tells him, hoping that his smile looks genuine enough.
A headache starts while they’re arguing about paying the tab, and he slaps down his credit card with a little more force than necessary. Aiba slips the extra breath mints into his jacket pocket and eases off.
“Just job stress, Sho-chan?”
He nods and flags down the waiter. “Just job stress.”
--
He doesn’t make it through the rest of the afternoon and calls off early, barely making it to the couch when he gets back to the apartment. Jun wakes him when it’s already dark out, fingers ghosting along his forehead.
Jun wants to know what’s wrong, so he cooks. He makes sure to uncork a bottle of wine in an attempt to get Sho talking. The nap has only reduced the throbbing in his head to a dull ache. But since it’s Jun, he talks about a hundred other things in hopes that Sho will get annoyed and just blurt out what’s bothering him.
They’ve been together, trusting one another for as long as Sho can remember. Literally. It’s always been Jun sitting at his side on the couch, pulling up the blanket when they’re too exhausted from a long day of work to get up and go to bed. It’s always been Jun’s brown eyes behind the simple metal frames reassuring and comforting him like no one else could. It’s always been Jun, so why can’t he talk to him about this?
Because maybe it’s not just a headache, and if it can happen to Sho, it might happen to Jun. If Sho doesn’t voice it, it’s not real. It’s not something Jun will worry over, not something that will make Jun worry so much he won’t sleep. Sho will bear it, endure it. Alone.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” Jun asks, clearly hurting.
“We are talking,” Sho complains, picking up his plate to get seconds.
Jun catches him by the wrist as he’s walking past, squeezes. “No, I’m talking. You’re on another planet.”
He sets the plate down, bending forward to brush his lips against Jun’s. Jun allows it, lets Sho run his hand through his hair briefly before shoving him away. “Don’t. Sho...don’t,” Jun warns him just the once before picking up Sho’s plate himself and rinsing it off.
Sho heads for the bedroom instead, still a little hungry as he hears the dishwasher kick on.
--
Jun’s already left for work when Sho wakes and discovers the other half of the bed hasn’t even been slept in. They’ve had squabbles here and there before. Sho sometimes wonders if they were just as serious and stubborn before the world went crazy.
He barely makes it through his morning shave when it hits, hard enough to send him to the toilet. Nothing comes up, but the nausea keeps him on the cool bathroom tile, eyes watering. Was he going to forget? Was this how it started? When the infection had been cured, they said he was fine. They’d checked and rechecked. There was the irreplaceable, but then there was everything else. Everything else was supposed to be fine.
He crawls back to the bedroom and gets his phone, hesitating on Jun’s name for as long as he can keep his eyes focused on it. Sho snaps the phone closed, leaning back against the bed and pulling his knees up to his chest. The nausea finally starts to subside, and he goes to work.
Sho works until 6:00 PM and catches a drink with one of his friends from human resources. He gets all the details he needs about just how far his medical coverage through the company goes before dropping money on the counter and catching his train.
Jun doesn’t try to get any answers out of him that night. The headaches don’t come, and he’s less irritable on account of it. Jun follows him to the bedroom this time, pushing him back against the pillows, apologizing with each frenzied collision of their mouths and their hips. Sho apologizes too, whispering Jun’s name as they come down and he wipes a bead of sweat from Jun’s brow.
He’s apologizing in advance for what he’s not going to tell him.
--
With his symptoms and his memory retention, the doctor he sees assures him it probably has nothing to do with “that” disease and his “preexisting condition.” An MRI and a lumbar puncture are scheduled, and Sho almost wishes he could just endure the headaches.
He asks Aiba to drive him to and from the hospital. Sho suspects that he hasn’t really had a check-up in a while because of all the poking and prodding he’d gotten years earlier. He and Jun had been success stories, after all.
“Does Jun know what’s going on?” Aiba asks as they park in the outpatient lot.
Sho shakes his head, and Aiba frowns.
“Why not? You told me the doctor said it had nothing to do with what happened to you before. It’s not something that will affect him, too.”
He laughs as they step through the glass doors. Whatever Sho has, Jun will want to bear it tenfold. He will do anything to spare Jun, even if it’s just for one more day. Every day with Jun at his side is a day worth waking up for. He hopes he has more than a few of those days left.
Aiba hugs him tight, even though Sho’s in the hospital gown feeling a little too exposed. He tries to relax, letting Masaki just hold on to him. There is so much that Aiba knows about him that Sho himself didn’t know and so much about Jun as well. He’ll never tell. Aiba never says a word, but Sho feels genuinely scared when Aiba starts to cry.
Sho lost nearly everything about who he was at twenty-three. Now at twenty-nine, he may lose it all over again. Hasn’t he been cursed enough? Why him? Why him and not someone else? Months in a Korean hospital and the stigma when he returned home. The scars from his skin grafts that have faded but won’t ever fully go away.
Hasn’t it been enough?
--
The tumor in his head isn’t terribly large, but the pressure is the cause of his headaches. He can touch the darker mass on the MRI, knowing that it’s inside of him. The doctor can’t say for sure whether the trauma from the infection years earlier had made him more susceptible or not. The medical journals are only starting to publish studies about the long-term ramifications of the disease.
“Disease or no,” the doctor says, “maybe you were just due for a brain tumor, Sakurai-san.”
They schedule a biopsy, and it’ll take a few days for him to recover. Aiba just lets him sleep the whole way back to the apartment. He can’t lie to Jun, not about this. He can’t make up a business trip when they’re going to be poking a needle through a hole in his skull in a week to see if the tumor’s going to kill him or not.
Sho’s never been good with big news or important confessions. When Jun walks in the door, he’s sitting on the couch with the MRI envelope on the coffee table. He takes out the results, letting Jun look at them for a few minutes in silence.
“I’ve got a biopsy scheduled for Tuesday morning,” Sho says. “To see if it’s cancer or not.”
Jun nods, easing open the envelope and sliding the results back in. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Sho asks. “That’s it, just okay?”
He doesn’t expect Jun to get up and head for the bedroom. It’s only when he hears drawers and the closet door opening and closing that he gets up to see what’s happening. Jun’s got a duffel bag, and he’s shoving clothes into it.
“What are you doing?” he asks, trying to stand in Jun’s way, but Jun just moves around him to grab socks and slam the drawer closed. “Jun, stop.”
He expected Jun to be angry, sure, but there’s an emptiness growing in the pit of Sho’s stomach as Jun zips up the bag and slings it over his shoulder. He trails Jun to the door like a dog, pleading for him to stay. “I should have told you sooner. And I’m sorry...”
“You should have told me the second you suspected something was wrong,” Jun tells him when he’s got the door open and a foot out in the hall. He has to be in shock, the same shock Sho’s in. The MRI made it real.
“I know. Jun, I know that. Just listen to me...”
“You should have trusted me.”
Sho tries to pull Jun back inside. “I trust you! I trust you more than anyone I know. Jun, I need you.”
Jun wrenches his arm free. “You need me when it’s convenient. You need me when it works for you.”
The door shuts, and Sho doesn’t know what to do. He can’t bring himself to follow Jun. Maybe Jun just needs to process what’s happening, he convinces himself. He shoves the MRI envelope in his work bag, keeping it out of sight. Sho tries to sleep on the couch, smelling Jun’s scent on the blanket.
Aiba calls him at two in the morning to let him know that Jun’s staying with him in Chiba. Aiba doesn’t say anything else and hangs up. Sho balls the blanket up in his fists.
--
Sho counts down the days to the biopsy, trying to lose himself in his work. Being the most dependable person in his department means his bosses are willing to grant him a lot of leeway. Putting in seventy hour weeks has earned him respect.
There’s a tumor in his head like a ticking time bomb. Benign or malignant, he may have just ruined the only relationship that will ever make sense in his life. What’s left of it. Sho has a hard time remembering the last time he told Jun that he loves him, that he appreciates how Jun takes care of him and makes it seem effortless.
Sho doesn’t know how to say these things. The things that matter most.
--
Tuesday comes, and they tell him to count backwards from one hundred.
100 and he remembers waking up confused in Korea and the equally scared person in the bed beside him.
99 and he remembers Nino in the convenience store telling him just what Jun had meant to him.
98 and he’s mad. So mad at his father that he storms out of the house. Jun kisses him first.
97 and the years go by.
96 and Jun walks out the door.
95 and-
--
His head is a little sore, but the hospital’s got some really nice painkillers. And Sho’s been in hospital a lot longer than this before. It’ll be a few days before there’s results.
Aiba brings him food. “I finally got off my ass and had the pictures printed,” he announces happily, as if that special Aiba brand of positivity alone will ensure a good diagnosis. He hands Sho a print of a little girl dressed as a tree.
“Losing her teeth, huh?”
Aiba nods and takes the picture back to tack it up on the board next to the bed. “We got a new camera, so half of them have my thumb in the shot. Becky says I’m hopeless.”
“But she married you anyway,” Sho points out.
There’s a Jun-shaped elephant in the room, and there’s only so much Sho can say about the pictures from the play or what it must be like to get a needle through your head (Sho doesn’t know - he was out) before the conversation drifts in that direction.
“How is he?” Sho asks.
“Cleaning,” Aiba complains. “He works ten hours and comes back to help me in the kitchen. On the plus side, it beats having to hire some lazy high schooler to do it.”
Sho smiles. Aiba’s good at dodging questions.
“The doctor says they’ll have a definitive answer on Friday. It would mean a lot to me if he...” he starts, mouth suddenly very dry.
Aiba takes the lid off of some pork dumplings and hands Sho a pair of chopsticks. “I’ll tell him.”
--
It’s benign. It’s not going to kill him.
It’s operable, too, and he’ll get a month off of work and a scar that’ll be invisible as soon as his hair grows back over it. The doctor says that like it’s a positive thing.
The doctor also smiles and says he’ll still have headaches for a few months as his body heals. Better than radiation and chemotherapy, Sho rationalizes. Better than death. It’s still major surgery, and he’s terrified as he goes back to his room to gather his things and be officially discharged.
He’s barely through the door, and Jun’s embracing him, squeezing him so tight Sho can hardly breathe. He doesn’t mind.
“It’s not malignant,” he says in relief, “they’re just going to cut me open and yank it out.”
Jun’s crying, his weight sagging against him as Sho reveals the good news. Brain surgery is scary, but living without Jun would be worse. “I’m sorry,” Jun says. “I shouldn’t have run. You needed me, and I just got angry.”
“I was scared,” he says, realizing that it’s not so horrible to admit out loud. He wishes it didn’t take a tumor to kick him in the ass and remind him of what’s most important. “I was scared that if something like this could happen to me, it could happen to you too. But I should have told you. I was wrong.”
“We’re both wrong,” Jun tells him, kissing his forehead. Jun never says he’s wrong, and Sho almost wants to tell him that. But he doesn’t and just holds on. “I think that’s why we work so well.”
Sho smiles. “No matter how stupid we are, no matter how much we yell and we fight, we always find each other.”
He kisses Jun first, giving and not just taking, righting the balance between them. Life throws them curve after curve, but Sho decides to let it slide.
He and Jun will always find each other.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Matsumoto Jun/Sakurai Sho
Summary: He and Jun are productive members of society, and the more they work, the more they forget about the hole they’ve been trying so hard to dig themselves out of these past few years.
Notes/Warnings: In order to follow along, you will have to have read The Lost and The Lost: Redux written by myself and katmillia. Sorry for the lengthy homework assignment, but this is set in the same universe approximately 5 years after the events of Redux. Of course, you don't HAVE to, but it might not make much sense to you.
Sho reaches his twenty-ninth birthday, and the headaches start. It’s easy to write it off as work stress. He pops an aspirin or two and downs a glass of water. An aspirin or two becomes three or four, and he keeps the bathroom door closed so the light won’t wake Jun when the pain strikes in the middle of the night.
He’s been putting in sixty, seventy hour weeks lately. He’s not getting enough sleep. He’s eating garbage. That’s probably it.
Sho usually plans his meals a day in advance, letting Jun pamper him a bit by putting together a bento for him the night before. It’s better than if Sho tried to cook himself, but Jun’s busy too. He settles for something quick from the convenience store. A candy bar for lunch. He’d go to the gym, but the kilos are falling off anyhow from stress.
He and Jun are productive members of society, and the more they work, the more they forget about the hole they’ve been trying so hard to dig themselves out of these past few years.
But he knows that headaches aren’t supposed to last this long. He’s supposed to be delivering a presentation in an hour, but instead he’s on some internet doctor website frightening himself. Migraines. Maybe. But his headaches aren’t the same. His are more like someone inside his head has a pick-axe and just set up shop in one place, jabbing at him sharply until he can’t see straight. Pressure and pressure and pressure building until the meds start to kick in, and it subsides.
There’s no such thing as a headache for Sho, not any longer. He doesn’t know a lot about neurology, that’s for damn sure, but it’s been a while since his last check-up. Years since he last went in and got the all clear. Who is the Prime Minister? What year is it? Very good, Sakurai-san.
He sits in his office and closes the laptop, shutting his eyes. He names the Prime Minister. He knows the year. He knows what he had for breakfast yesterday (nothing) and he remembers the last vacation he went on (Los Angeles - he hopes Nino’s shaved off that awful goatee). He knows these things today, right now.
Jun gets home from work after 9 pm that night, shaking a new bottle of aspirin. “We ran out. You should have told me.”
Sho just nods and turns up the volume for the soccer game.
--
Aiba doesn’t like the place Sho’s chosen for lunch. Sho notices, even though he has to spend half the time checking messages from the office. Aiba doesn’t like the building because the one across the street is still condemned. It never got rebuilt. It sits there as a reminder of things that Aiba will carry for the rest of his life, things Sho will only know secondhand.
Aiba doesn’t actually say anything about it. He doesn’t have to. He continues his stories about his daughter’s first school play, and Sho likes knowing that one of them in their strange circle of friends has something to be happy about.
“She was a tree,” Aiba says, focusing on adding an ungodly amount of sauce to his chicken. “She was the very best tree in the play. Well, she was the only one, but if there were more trees, she’d still be the best. And I’m not saying this because she’s my kid or anything...”
Sho nods and turns his phone off. He wants to hear about the little girl and the play and the trees. It’s something he can focus on, something he can remember. If he doesn’t remember anything else about this long overdue meal, he’ll remember that Aiba’s daughter was a tree.
“You’re okay, Sho-chan?” Masaki asks, “I think you’ve added enough salt to that, don’t you think?”
He stops himself, setting the shaker down. Sho’s focusing so hard on...focusing that common sense is leaving him. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Working hard?”
“Yeah,” he says, cutting through his pork cutlet and avoiding the now salted vegetables. “They keep me busy.”
“That’s what Jun’s always saying,” Aiba says.
He knows that Aiba’s looking for something else, can tell by the way he’s watching. Aiba doesn’t catch everything, but when he does, it’s difficult to shake him off. “I’m fine,” he tells him, hoping that his smile looks genuine enough.
A headache starts while they’re arguing about paying the tab, and he slaps down his credit card with a little more force than necessary. Aiba slips the extra breath mints into his jacket pocket and eases off.
“Just job stress, Sho-chan?”
He nods and flags down the waiter. “Just job stress.”
--
He doesn’t make it through the rest of the afternoon and calls off early, barely making it to the couch when he gets back to the apartment. Jun wakes him when it’s already dark out, fingers ghosting along his forehead.
Jun wants to know what’s wrong, so he cooks. He makes sure to uncork a bottle of wine in an attempt to get Sho talking. The nap has only reduced the throbbing in his head to a dull ache. But since it’s Jun, he talks about a hundred other things in hopes that Sho will get annoyed and just blurt out what’s bothering him.
They’ve been together, trusting one another for as long as Sho can remember. Literally. It’s always been Jun sitting at his side on the couch, pulling up the blanket when they’re too exhausted from a long day of work to get up and go to bed. It’s always been Jun’s brown eyes behind the simple metal frames reassuring and comforting him like no one else could. It’s always been Jun, so why can’t he talk to him about this?
Because maybe it’s not just a headache, and if it can happen to Sho, it might happen to Jun. If Sho doesn’t voice it, it’s not real. It’s not something Jun will worry over, not something that will make Jun worry so much he won’t sleep. Sho will bear it, endure it. Alone.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” Jun asks, clearly hurting.
“We are talking,” Sho complains, picking up his plate to get seconds.
Jun catches him by the wrist as he’s walking past, squeezes. “No, I’m talking. You’re on another planet.”
He sets the plate down, bending forward to brush his lips against Jun’s. Jun allows it, lets Sho run his hand through his hair briefly before shoving him away. “Don’t. Sho...don’t,” Jun warns him just the once before picking up Sho’s plate himself and rinsing it off.
Sho heads for the bedroom instead, still a little hungry as he hears the dishwasher kick on.
--
Jun’s already left for work when Sho wakes and discovers the other half of the bed hasn’t even been slept in. They’ve had squabbles here and there before. Sho sometimes wonders if they were just as serious and stubborn before the world went crazy.
He barely makes it through his morning shave when it hits, hard enough to send him to the toilet. Nothing comes up, but the nausea keeps him on the cool bathroom tile, eyes watering. Was he going to forget? Was this how it started? When the infection had been cured, they said he was fine. They’d checked and rechecked. There was the irreplaceable, but then there was everything else. Everything else was supposed to be fine.
He crawls back to the bedroom and gets his phone, hesitating on Jun’s name for as long as he can keep his eyes focused on it. Sho snaps the phone closed, leaning back against the bed and pulling his knees up to his chest. The nausea finally starts to subside, and he goes to work.
Sho works until 6:00 PM and catches a drink with one of his friends from human resources. He gets all the details he needs about just how far his medical coverage through the company goes before dropping money on the counter and catching his train.
Jun doesn’t try to get any answers out of him that night. The headaches don’t come, and he’s less irritable on account of it. Jun follows him to the bedroom this time, pushing him back against the pillows, apologizing with each frenzied collision of their mouths and their hips. Sho apologizes too, whispering Jun’s name as they come down and he wipes a bead of sweat from Jun’s brow.
He’s apologizing in advance for what he’s not going to tell him.
--
With his symptoms and his memory retention, the doctor he sees assures him it probably has nothing to do with “that” disease and his “preexisting condition.” An MRI and a lumbar puncture are scheduled, and Sho almost wishes he could just endure the headaches.
He asks Aiba to drive him to and from the hospital. Sho suspects that he hasn’t really had a check-up in a while because of all the poking and prodding he’d gotten years earlier. He and Jun had been success stories, after all.
“Does Jun know what’s going on?” Aiba asks as they park in the outpatient lot.
Sho shakes his head, and Aiba frowns.
“Why not? You told me the doctor said it had nothing to do with what happened to you before. It’s not something that will affect him, too.”
He laughs as they step through the glass doors. Whatever Sho has, Jun will want to bear it tenfold. He will do anything to spare Jun, even if it’s just for one more day. Every day with Jun at his side is a day worth waking up for. He hopes he has more than a few of those days left.
Aiba hugs him tight, even though Sho’s in the hospital gown feeling a little too exposed. He tries to relax, letting Masaki just hold on to him. There is so much that Aiba knows about him that Sho himself didn’t know and so much about Jun as well. He’ll never tell. Aiba never says a word, but Sho feels genuinely scared when Aiba starts to cry.
Sho lost nearly everything about who he was at twenty-three. Now at twenty-nine, he may lose it all over again. Hasn’t he been cursed enough? Why him? Why him and not someone else? Months in a Korean hospital and the stigma when he returned home. The scars from his skin grafts that have faded but won’t ever fully go away.
Hasn’t it been enough?
--
The tumor in his head isn’t terribly large, but the pressure is the cause of his headaches. He can touch the darker mass on the MRI, knowing that it’s inside of him. The doctor can’t say for sure whether the trauma from the infection years earlier had made him more susceptible or not. The medical journals are only starting to publish studies about the long-term ramifications of the disease.
“Disease or no,” the doctor says, “maybe you were just due for a brain tumor, Sakurai-san.”
They schedule a biopsy, and it’ll take a few days for him to recover. Aiba just lets him sleep the whole way back to the apartment. He can’t lie to Jun, not about this. He can’t make up a business trip when they’re going to be poking a needle through a hole in his skull in a week to see if the tumor’s going to kill him or not.
Sho’s never been good with big news or important confessions. When Jun walks in the door, he’s sitting on the couch with the MRI envelope on the coffee table. He takes out the results, letting Jun look at them for a few minutes in silence.
“I’ve got a biopsy scheduled for Tuesday morning,” Sho says. “To see if it’s cancer or not.”
Jun nods, easing open the envelope and sliding the results back in. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Sho asks. “That’s it, just okay?”
He doesn’t expect Jun to get up and head for the bedroom. It’s only when he hears drawers and the closet door opening and closing that he gets up to see what’s happening. Jun’s got a duffel bag, and he’s shoving clothes into it.
“What are you doing?” he asks, trying to stand in Jun’s way, but Jun just moves around him to grab socks and slam the drawer closed. “Jun, stop.”
He expected Jun to be angry, sure, but there’s an emptiness growing in the pit of Sho’s stomach as Jun zips up the bag and slings it over his shoulder. He trails Jun to the door like a dog, pleading for him to stay. “I should have told you sooner. And I’m sorry...”
“You should have told me the second you suspected something was wrong,” Jun tells him when he’s got the door open and a foot out in the hall. He has to be in shock, the same shock Sho’s in. The MRI made it real.
“I know. Jun, I know that. Just listen to me...”
“You should have trusted me.”
Sho tries to pull Jun back inside. “I trust you! I trust you more than anyone I know. Jun, I need you.”
Jun wrenches his arm free. “You need me when it’s convenient. You need me when it works for you.”
The door shuts, and Sho doesn’t know what to do. He can’t bring himself to follow Jun. Maybe Jun just needs to process what’s happening, he convinces himself. He shoves the MRI envelope in his work bag, keeping it out of sight. Sho tries to sleep on the couch, smelling Jun’s scent on the blanket.
Aiba calls him at two in the morning to let him know that Jun’s staying with him in Chiba. Aiba doesn’t say anything else and hangs up. Sho balls the blanket up in his fists.
--
Sho counts down the days to the biopsy, trying to lose himself in his work. Being the most dependable person in his department means his bosses are willing to grant him a lot of leeway. Putting in seventy hour weeks has earned him respect.
There’s a tumor in his head like a ticking time bomb. Benign or malignant, he may have just ruined the only relationship that will ever make sense in his life. What’s left of it. Sho has a hard time remembering the last time he told Jun that he loves him, that he appreciates how Jun takes care of him and makes it seem effortless.
Sho doesn’t know how to say these things. The things that matter most.
--
Tuesday comes, and they tell him to count backwards from one hundred.
100 and he remembers waking up confused in Korea and the equally scared person in the bed beside him.
99 and he remembers Nino in the convenience store telling him just what Jun had meant to him.
98 and he’s mad. So mad at his father that he storms out of the house. Jun kisses him first.
97 and the years go by.
96 and Jun walks out the door.
95 and-
--
His head is a little sore, but the hospital’s got some really nice painkillers. And Sho’s been in hospital a lot longer than this before. It’ll be a few days before there’s results.
Aiba brings him food. “I finally got off my ass and had the pictures printed,” he announces happily, as if that special Aiba brand of positivity alone will ensure a good diagnosis. He hands Sho a print of a little girl dressed as a tree.
“Losing her teeth, huh?”
Aiba nods and takes the picture back to tack it up on the board next to the bed. “We got a new camera, so half of them have my thumb in the shot. Becky says I’m hopeless.”
“But she married you anyway,” Sho points out.
There’s a Jun-shaped elephant in the room, and there’s only so much Sho can say about the pictures from the play or what it must be like to get a needle through your head (Sho doesn’t know - he was out) before the conversation drifts in that direction.
“How is he?” Sho asks.
“Cleaning,” Aiba complains. “He works ten hours and comes back to help me in the kitchen. On the plus side, it beats having to hire some lazy high schooler to do it.”
Sho smiles. Aiba’s good at dodging questions.
“The doctor says they’ll have a definitive answer on Friday. It would mean a lot to me if he...” he starts, mouth suddenly very dry.
Aiba takes the lid off of some pork dumplings and hands Sho a pair of chopsticks. “I’ll tell him.”
--
It’s benign. It’s not going to kill him.
It’s operable, too, and he’ll get a month off of work and a scar that’ll be invisible as soon as his hair grows back over it. The doctor says that like it’s a positive thing.
The doctor also smiles and says he’ll still have headaches for a few months as his body heals. Better than radiation and chemotherapy, Sho rationalizes. Better than death. It’s still major surgery, and he’s terrified as he goes back to his room to gather his things and be officially discharged.
He’s barely through the door, and Jun’s embracing him, squeezing him so tight Sho can hardly breathe. He doesn’t mind.
“It’s not malignant,” he says in relief, “they’re just going to cut me open and yank it out.”
Jun’s crying, his weight sagging against him as Sho reveals the good news. Brain surgery is scary, but living without Jun would be worse. “I’m sorry,” Jun says. “I shouldn’t have run. You needed me, and I just got angry.”
“I was scared,” he says, realizing that it’s not so horrible to admit out loud. He wishes it didn’t take a tumor to kick him in the ass and remind him of what’s most important. “I was scared that if something like this could happen to me, it could happen to you too. But I should have told you. I was wrong.”
“We’re both wrong,” Jun tells him, kissing his forehead. Jun never says he’s wrong, and Sho almost wants to tell him that. But he doesn’t and just holds on. “I think that’s why we work so well.”
Sho smiles. “No matter how stupid we are, no matter how much we yell and we fight, we always find each other.”
He kisses Jun first, giving and not just taking, righting the balance between them. Life throws them curve after curve, but Sho decides to let it slide.
He and Jun will always find each other.