#50: fic: Harbor
Title: Harbor
Pairing: Ohno/Becky
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Ohno takes her hand, still wishing desperately for something to stir in his memory, some faint sign to explain in some part the way Becky looks at him, all yearning and warmth.
Word Count: 8,500~
A/N: Written for phrenk for the je_whiteday exchange. Originally posted here. Huge thanks to g_esquared, calerine, illuvium and forochel for being amazing and wholly encouraging. (Yes, I had a veritable army of people reading this. :x )
Ohno wakes up on an unfamiliar couch in a house he's never been in before.
This is not the first time this has happened.
"Not yet, then," he murmurs to himself, after a pause.
For a long moment he just lies there, enjoying the comfortable warmth of the duvet he is wrapped up in (off-white, with a pretty leaf pattern). He watches the way the sunlight floods in through the open window at the far end of the room.
If he listens a little harder he can hear the sound of waves. He sits up, pushing the duvet aside. A stack of paper on the coffee table catches his attention; he reaches over to pick up the first sheet.
It is a pencil drawing of a beach. The lines look like those he might have made years ago, before he entered art college and learned real shading and all those other proper things. He looks through the rest of the stack. Half of these are his drawings; careful sketches made by another Ohno from another place. The others are by someone else, someone with a steady hand and an eye for details.
He needs to know where he is.
He stands and walks - a little unsteadily - towards the window. There is someone coming. A woman, walking up the beach towards the house.
A beach house. He doesn't remember a beach house.
He doesn't recognise the woman.
The woman is waving, beaming sunnily and swinging a shopping bag as she approaches the veranda. Her bare feet leave sandy, wet prints on the wooden surface.
"Aren't you going to let me in?" she asks, sidling up to the open window where Ohno is standing.
Ohno stares. He can't not. She is an arresting sight, up close: haloed by the sun, her dark hair tumbling down her shoulders. Her eyes are a mesmerising not-quite-green, and as Ohno gazes at them the thought of sunflowers comes to mind.
"Well?" says the woman, resting one arm on the window frame and cocking her head to one side.
"I'm sorry," Ohno tells her, because he does not know what else to say.
"What's wrong?" asks the woman.
Ohno blinks. "I should know who you are, shouldn't I?"
"Oh," the woman says, her grin faltering. "That."
"I'm sorry," Ohno repeats, genuinely so.
"I'm Becky," she replies, smiling again as she reaches through the gap in the window frame to proffer a handshake.
Ohno takes her hand, still wishing desperately for something to stir in his memory, some faint sign to explain in some part the way Becky looks at him, all yearning and warmth.
"Hello," he says.
"Hello," Becky replies. "Now will you let me in?"
After they have washed the seashells she collected and left them to dry by the windowsill, Becky turns to Ohno and says, "Help me with lunch." It is not really a request.
They make curry. He cannot help but notice that the brand she's using is his favourite.
"You seem used to this," says Ohno as he helps her cut the carrots. "Used to me, I mean."
"Well, I have been warned," says Becky. "This is not the first time."
"There were others, then?" Ohno asks, even though he knows there must have been. It's written all over Becky's face when she talks to him - recognition; confusion; hurt, even.
Becky nods. "Two, before you. The first stayed for a week, the second for two. At first I thought it was some sort of amnesia."
Ohno glances up at her. "Amnesia?"
"Imagine what it was like, coming back home one morning and realising that the person in your living room had no memory of you whatsoever," says Becky. "Of course I thought it was amnesia! Even now I'm not certain. Though I suppose your explanations are far too weird for it to be some sort of mental disorder."
"I thought I was going mad," Ohno says. "Especially the first time. They looked and talked like my housemates, except that they weren't."
Nino and Sho had been scientists, in that other existence. When Ohno had come to they had given him lengthy explanations about lateral travel through dimensions and multiple parallel universes. He hadn't believed them until they had shown him footage of Aiba pitching for the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
He still doesn't quite understand their explanations or comprehend the graphs and parameter settings they attempted to show him. He doesn't understand their grand plan to stabilise the flux and bring things back to normal. All he understands is that he may well spend the rest of his life traversing different realities, living different existences.
"Who are you, really?" Becky asks him as they leave the curry to simmer. She cannot quite conceal the curiosity in her voice.
"I'm an artist," says Ohno. "Not a very good one, though. Mostly, I just scrape by with illustrating textbooks."
"Am I-" Becky begins, but falters almost immediately.
"Are you…?"
"Well," says Becky. "One of you said he knew me. That I was somebody famous."
It was entirely possible. He had seen Aiba and Jun on television; Jun had been a famous golfer and Aiba befriended baby pandas and showered elephants every Thursday night.
"No, I don't think I've seen you before," says Ohno.
He would remember her, if he had. He knows he won't forget her.
Becky writes and illustrates picture books; in her free time she also makes strange sculptures out of assorted materials. That is what those seashells are for, she explains.
She is animated when talking about her art and her stories, and she can chatter enough to fill Ohno's silences for him. She's careful to contextualise her comments, though, to make sure she doesn't refer to something that Ohno should understand but cannot. Still, some details slip through.
The other Ohno was a baker, he discovers. He had wandered, utterly confused, until he had landed on Becky's doorstep. That Ohno had made marvellous pastries. He had loved to draw and sometimes he sang, too.
The second Ohno had been the one who had volunteered his services in testing the traverse portal. It hadn't been his fault, really; the scientists had been the ones who had calibrated it wrongly.
He doesn't ask which of the two Becky had fallen in love with.
They go fishing. He's not surprised to hear that his two other counterparts had been equally fond of it. He is surprised, though, when Becky pulls on her own fishing gear and heads out together with him.
"You know, I always dreamt it would be someone else," Becky tells him, gripping on to the rail of the boat as the wind whips through her hair. This time, she doesn't contextualise.
Ohno looks up from his line and straight at her, taking in her artless beauty, the lovely half-smile she's wearing, like she's thinking of something particularly delightful.
"I think I might be in love with you," says Ohno.
"Do you, now?" asks Becky, a smile still playing on her lips.
"Just a hunch."
"Fair enough," Becky says. Her eyes seem to sparkle. "I can live with that."
Ahead of them, the sun begins to cast its first rays over the horizon.
The first time he kisses her is on the beach, when the sun is about to set. They've ventured out with sketchpads and pencils because there's always something interesting to capture, Becky says.
She's right - at this time of the year the beach is only moderately populated, and they find a nice spot from which they can survey a vast stretch of the area.
It is Becky whose pencil stills after a while; Becky who turns to Ohno and says, "I don't know whether to draw you or to kiss you."
So Ohno leans in and cups her cheek with one hand, pressing his lips to hers in the lightest of kisses. It amazes him how easily they fit; how effortlessly familiar this feels. Almost as if at some point before - at some point in another life - they have done exactly this.
And maybe they have, maybe they have lain there in the sunset on a haphazard configuration of brightly-coloured beach towels, limbs in a lazy tangle as they pour everything they have into that one kiss. Becky has one hand clutching Ohno's shoulder and one hand in his hair, fingers sliding down towards the nape of his neck and resting there like she never wants to let him go. Her skin is soft under Ohno's palms, her mouth hot and demanding.
When they pause and part, breath mingling, Ohno thinks he feels something hitch in Becky's chest. It's almost a sob, he thinks; an unspoken grief so at odds with the smile she gives him moments later.
"I think I might be in love with you," Becky whispers.
"Just a hunch?" Ohno asks, shifting just a fraction to kiss her again.
Becky reaches down to where Ohno's hand is resting on the waistline of her dress and curls their fingers together. "Just a hunch."
Nino finds him after the second week. This is Nino the scientist, of course - Ninomiya-sensei, deadly serious and slightly panicked, the first time they met.
Every time Ohno meets him he finds himself surprised all over again that this is not his Nino; not the Nino who shares a room with him and has possibly gone slightly deaf from too much game music blasting in his ears. He wonders if Nino and the others have noticed something different about him. Maybe no new Ohno has slipped in to replace him. He hopes they are not too worried.
"Good news," says Nino, when Becky opens the front door. "We're closer to stabilising the wormhole." He's not actually here; Ohno has already gotten used to the fact. This is a projection the scientists send into the different realities.
"I can't believe you just said the word 'wormhole' with a straight face," Becky tells him. She turns to Ohno. "Who is this?"
"Ninomiya Kazunari," says Nino, not bothering with a handshake. He seems to flicker slightly as he says this. "I'm a physicist on the team."
"Have you never met?" Ohno asks, slightly puzzled.
"No," says Becky. She's got one hand braced on the doorframe in a clear statement that Nino is not welcome here. "I've met the other one, though - Matsumoto."
Nino shrugs. "He must have been following another version of Ohno-san."
"You can follow him?" Becky asks, eyes narrowed.
"We're tracking them as well as we can," says Nino. "My colleague Sakurai is working on the anchoring mechanism, which is why your lengths of stay will be getting longer."
"Okay," says Ohno. He cannot resist the urge to shift just a fraction closer to Becky, to bring one hand to rest at the small of her back.
They do not ask the obvious question that is hanging in the air. How long? Ohno wants to say. He lets his answer be the warmth of Becky's skin through the thin fabric of her dress; the easy way she leans into his touch.
"Trust me," Nino tells him. His eyes dart from Ohno to Becky as if to say, you don't have much time. "We'll fix this."
That evening after Nino leaves, Becky pushes Ohno against the wall of the front passageway and presses into him, runs her hands across his skin like she needs to know he is there, that he is hers in spite of all the contrivances of time and space.
Ohno lets her; lets her kiss him and strip him, quivers under her touches and returns them twofold. When she reaches for the drawstring of his trousers he tugs at the knot of her sundress, mirrored movements perfectly in tandem.
He loves everything about her in those moments, every sound and every shudder; every dip and plane of her body. She jostles for dominance and he lets her take it - lets her take him, because how can he not. Because this is all he can give her, when even the stars acting in concert will not keep them together. One body, and an ocean of love.
The first two times he travelled away had taken place in his sleep.
This time it happens when Ohno is awake and standing in front of the dressing table in Becky's room. Becky has gone out for a meeting with her publishers, and it's the first time he notices the photograph stuck to her mirror: a photograph of him, asleep.
The date on the picture has been coloured over with a marker, and the way his hair lies in the picture makes it almost possible that this is him and not some past other.
He cannot stay to find out.
(When Becky returns she finds Ohno standing at her dressing table, holding the photograph of himself in faint confusion.
"What does this mean?" he asks, handing her the photograph.
On the back: It's not a hunch, it's a fact. - Satoshi)
Ohno comes to just as the plane touches down at Haneda airport. Jun and Aiba are there, dozing a couple of seats away from him. Sho is there too, scrutinising a copy of the Yomiuri Shimbun.
Only Nino is looking at him, watching him with strange expression on his face.
"Where's -" he begins, but stops himself before he can finish the question. Where's Becky.
Three weeks of living at the beach house has made him too vulnerable. He shuts his eyes again, willing himself back there. He doesn't want this.
He doesn't want this.
He opens his eyes; nothing has changed. It's the first reality, other than his own, where all of them are together. He is curiously relieved to see this. As always, though, there is something off about the picture; the disorienting sensation that he doesn't actually belong here.
Nino reaches over and takes Ohno's wrist.
"You're a different Ohno, aren't you?" he says. "You've travelled again."
"Yes - wait - you know?" Ohno asks.
"You're skin's even browner than the last one," Nino points out. "Don't worry. Only Arashi knows."
"Arashi?" Ohno repeats blankly.
Nino jerks his head towards the others. "That's the five of us."
He is interrupted by the announcement stating that the seatbelt sign has been turned off and they are free to disembark. A cheery-looking representative invites them to follow her.
"Listen," Nino whispers, still not letting go of Ohno's wrist. "Don't mess this up for yourself - for any of your selves. Just follow my lead."
The Ohno in this reality never went to art school. At some point in his childhood, he had managed to gain a place in Johnny's Entertainment. The Ohno in this reality meets the others when they debut together on a boat in Hawaii, in a storm of confusion and nerves.
At least, that is what the videos tell Ohno.
The others fill him in as much as he can, and Nino is somehow never far away in the days that follow Ohno's arrival. He holds on to Ohno's elbow when they are filming their variety programmes and whispers things in his ear - what to do now; what to say next.
His manager has put him on a semi-break, but even with the reduced schedule there is still too much to do and too little time to think. Being an idol has always looked reasonably easy on the outside, but now that he actually has to be one, Ohno realises exactly how exhausting it can be.
He discovers a talent for dancing he never knew he had before, but lacks the years of practice the other Ohno must have had. Their choreographer privately expresses worry over how sluggish he's been over the past few weeks.
"It's as if you're not yourself," she tells him.
But I'm not, Ohno thinks. "I'm very sorry," he says instead.
Amidst all this, he knows one thing - he needs to find Becky.
He doesn't have to look far.
Becky is everywhere - in CMs and on posters, appearing on variety programmes and singing on music shows. She has just returned from a location shoot in Europe, according to Aiba, who also offers to get hold of her schedule.
Ohno finds Becky before Aiba can get back to him. He stumbles across her dressing room one morning entirely by accident, when he gets lost in the TBS building on the way to his own green room.
She is as gorgeous in this incarnation as she is in Ohno's memory, her hair framing her face in a short bob, her smile dazzling as always.
"Ohno-san," she says when she catches sight of him in the mirror.
There is none of that recognition in Becky's face when she looks at Ohno, only polite familiarity. And yet he feels a tangible sense of relief, just from standing in that doorway, mesmerised all over again by those same eyes, that familiar, lovely face. A sense of having come home.
This must be how Ohno's Becky must have felt, to keep returning to a vacant doppelganger and to love him all the same. She is stronger than he ever was, Ohno thinks.
That enthrallment must show on his face, because Becky smiles uncertainly and asks, "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Hello," says Ohno.
"Hello, Ohno-san," Becky replies. "Is something wrong?"
For one rash moment all he wants to do is close the distance between them. To say, I think I might be in love with you, as if to invoke some sort of secret code between them that will make Becky somehow remember those seemingly endless days on that sun-drenched beach.
The moment passes, and Ohno says instead, "Would you like to go fishing with me?"
"Wait," says Becky. "Sorry?"
"Fishing," says Ohno, trying to keep his voice steady even though his heart is pounding in his chest. "Would you like to go fishing?"
Becky looks confused, and then, with sudden realisation, she blushes. "What - like a date?" she asks.
"If you want it to be," says Ohno.
"You're asking me on a date?" asks Becky, bolder now.
"I'm asking you to come fishing with me," Ohno tells her.
Becky blinks, like this is a surprise to her, but not altogether an unpleasant one. "When?"
"Whenever," says Ohno. "Preferably soon. Now, even, if you like."
"Okay," Becky says slowly. "But why?"
"I think you might be good at it," says Ohno.
Becky raises an eyebrow. "Do you, now?"
Ohno shrugs. "Just a hunch."
"Don't do it," says Nino.
"It's not a good idea," says another Nino.
They are both seated on the couch in the green room when Ohno walks in. It is very disconcerting.
"Isn't there some sort of rule against the two of you meeting like this?" asks Ohno.
"Well, he's not really here," says Nino-on-the-left, reaching over to pass a hand through Ninomiya-sensei. "So I suppose it's all right."
"Strange," says Ohno. "I've never thought to try that before."
"What I was saying," Nino continues, "is that dating Becky here probably isn't something you want to do."
Ohno frowns. "Wait, how did you know-"
"Did you think I'd keep something like this from myself?" says Nino.
"Look," says Ninomiya-sensei, "we have things more or less under control, and once we get you back to your own reality we'll be locking down the system. You're not going to be here for long."
It then hits Ohno, what Nino means. Don't do to this Becky what has already happened to another.
He feels sick all of a sudden, like he can't get enough air. He thinks he stumbles backwards but catches his balance before Nino can reach for him.
"You'll be home soon, Oh-chan," says Nino, steadying him with familiar hands.
Ohno closes his eyes and isn't sure he knows where that is.
He draws.
Another Ohno in another reality might have done something else to ease the itch under his skin. He might have hidden himself away in the kitchen and baked for hours, perhaps, absorbing himself in the tedium of kneading dough and mixing batter. He might have danced until his body ached.
Ohno draws, because that is what he knows best. He doesn't do anything fancy, even though Arashi's Ohno possesses more art materials than Ohno in his own reality can ever dream of buying with his own unreliable income. Instead, he sits in their empty dressing room with a notebook and a ball point pen, and watches the lines escape onto paper.
He is leaving behind evidence for any of the other Ohnos who might come across this reality, for the Ohno who belongs here. He draws their lives - the small 2LDK where four of them (and sometimes Aiba) have to constantly jostle for their own space; the bakery he found himself in for a short five days. He draws the beach house, tries to capture the way the light falls in the morning.
It is everything and nothing, a desperate attempt at remembering a string of dreams. His mind moves too fast for his hand; when his pen runs dry he casts around for another one and keeps going.
He draws Becky. Both Beckys, both equally luminous in his mind's eye. He has memorised her from a hundred different angles; he can draw her in his sleep.
This, he writes, is the woman you might be in love with.
When the world shifts beneath him, he is prepared.
"Wake up," says Jun, throwing open the curtains and stalking over to yank the covers off Ohno's bed. "We're already five minutes behind schedule."
Ohno throws an arm over his face at the sudden brightness, groaning as he rolls over.
"No seriously, you're going to be late," Jun tells Ohno, sitting down on the side of the bed and giving Ohno's shoulder a hard shake.
"Okay," says Ohno, defeated. "Okay. I'm up."
The first thing Ohno sees when he opens his eyes is a portrait photograph of a woman he does not recognise. It takes up half the wall opposite the bed. She cuts a striking figure in her three-piece suit, looking at something in the distance with an almost knowing smile on her face.
"Honestly, you sleep too much. Jet lag's just an excuse," says Jun, sliding off the bed and heading for the door. "And stop ogling Meisa, you'll see her in person soon enough."
"Meisa?" Ohno repeats.
"I know you get off on waking up to a life-size photograph of your girlfriend, but we really don't have time for that," Jun tells him. "Although I'm flattered you used one of mine," he adds quickly. "I'm particularly proud of that photoshoot."
"Wait," Ohno says. "Girlfriend?"
"Look," says Jun. "Do you actually want to be late for the opening of your own exhibition? Wear these." He tosses a pair of trousers and a shirt in Ohno's direction.
"When?" says Ohno, struggling to pull on the trousers. "Her, I mean."
"You're asking me when you started dating Meisa?" asks Jun, looking slightly incredulous. "I don't know. I don't even think you actually told me. I found out from a magazine. And then suddenly you were putting up photos of her in your multiple apartments."
"Ah," says Ohno, even though he doesn't comprehend any of this.
"Done?" asks Jun, before Ohno can finish doing up the buttons of his shirt. He doesn't wait for an answer before taking Ohno by the shoulders and ushering him out the door.
It is only when they are in the car that Ohno realises what Jun has just been saying.
"Wait - I'm having an exhibition?"
It is only natural that Ohno has dreamed of holding his own gallery exhibition at some point. He would be curious to see how other people respond to his art, and it would be nice to see his own work framed and displayed in a proper gallery, as opposed to cluttering the walls and corners of their apartment.
What Ohno has not dreamt of, however, is this.
There is a throng of reporters waiting when they arrive at the gallery in Ginza, possibly even more than he ever experienced during his time in Arashi. SATOSHI OHNO, reads the large billboard over the entrance, FIRST TOKYO EXHIBITION IN FIVE YEARS.
"You see," says Jun, as a gallery representative hurries to open the car door, "Japan has missed you."
The press conference is very well-ordered, considering the frenzy that takes place just half an hour before. It begins with a gallery viewing, which means that Ohno actually has a chance to see the exhibition before answering questions about what his other self has created.
It is stunning - a selection of works over the span of Ohno's career, arranged thematically according to periods of his life.
This Ohno has lived in England for the past seven years. At twenty-two his debut exhibition caught the attention of numerous art critics, which very quickly led to international acclaim.
It's easy to see why; the paintings in that one-year period utilise colour in ways that Ohno has never dreamed about. Everywhere he looks he sees a joyous clash of hues, his lines bold and confident. There is a sort of reckless daring in many of them; even his rendition of a street in Shinjuku appears to feature buildings practically bursting with unbridled joy.
"It's a pity you refused to exhibit so many of the others," says Jun, appearing beside him. "But I suppose there's no point in upsetting Meisa with that - wait."
"With what?" begins Ohno, but Jun has stopped abruptly.
"You said you weren't going to let this go up," Jun murmurs, glancing over at something behind them. "Why the change of heart?"
Ohno turns and sees a large assemblage in the middle of the wall. Almost filling the entire canvas is a single eye, half painted in and half outlined with a blend of materials. What draws his attention is the iris. It is comprised of hundreds of pieces of different-coloured glass that catch the light to dazzling effect, shades of green and grey and the occasional amber.
When he takes a step back it is clear that they are arranged in what is unmistakeably a sunflower.
"Jun-kun," says Ohno slowly, "you need to tell me-"
He is interrupted by a gallery representative who appears at his elbow, bowing profusely.
"Ohno-sensei, the reporters are waiting," she tells him.
He cannot do this. He cannot give a press conference about an exhibition he knows nothing about, especially since there is something he cannot place about that painting; something so painfully, beautifully familiar. Something about Becky.
"Ohno-sensei," asks one reporter, "what is it like returning to Japan?"
At the back of the room, Jun is giving him a look that quite clearly means, answer the question properly, or else.
"Good," says Ohno. "It's good to be in Tokyo."
"But you once said you were never going to return, that Japan was," and here she peers down at her notebook, "I quote - 'a place of shadowed memories'."
"Well," says Ohno, "things change."
Another reporter raises his hand. "Does this have anything to do with Kuroki-san?" he asks.
"I'm sorry, but Ohno-sensei will not be answering any questions about his personal life," interrupts the moderator.
"It's a question about his inspiration," says another reporter abruptly. "Surely you'd allow that."
Ohno glances over at him and has to resist the urge to call out in recognition. His hair is combed very differently and he is wearing glasses, but that reporter is unmistakeably Sho.
"I mean," Sho continues, "you clearly draw your inspiration from the people around you. Is Kuroki-san a large factor now?"
There is a pause in which everyone in the room regards Ohno expectantly. Out of the corner of his eye Ohno can see the moderator opening her mouth to deflect that question, but he leans forward to reply before she can do so.
"I don't know," says Ohno, entirely honest. "You've seen the paintings. Maybe you can tell me."
There is a murmur of laughter among the reporters.
"I really do want to know what you think," says Ohno, because if anyone can provide some insight it will be Sho.
"I think-" Sho begins, before pausing to take a deep breath. "I think she inspires you less than you'd like us to think."
"What makes you think that?" asks Ohno.
"Well, thematically speaking, a lot of your recent works appear to be about loss," says Sho. "Not overtly, at least, but you seem to keep returning to the ideas of memory and time."
Another reporter raises her hand. "What about Ohno-sensei's portraits of Kuroki-san? How would you account for that?"
Sho clears his throat, looking uncomfortable. "They do suggest the same depth of feeling present in those earlier works on display, but when I was looking at them just now they seemed somehow more… deliberate."
A woman near the front row gives a little gasp at this. Some of the reporters are murmuring now, many of them peering intently at Ohno to see what his response will be.
"Thank you for your honest opinion," Ohno tells Sho.
"I'm a big fan of yours, really," says Sho, clearly relieved.
"What's your favourite piece, then?" asks Ohno, even though a representative at the back is making a sign at the moderator as if to indicate that they're running out of time.
"That's easy," says Sho. He turns and points at the assemblage Ohno and Jun were looking at moments before. "Becky."
"Jun-kun," says Ohno urgently, catching hold of his arm and pulling him to one corner. "What happened, with Becky and me?"
"In a figurative sense?" asks Jun.
"No, what happened?"
"Well," says Jun, looking slightly perplexed, "you broke up."
"We dated?" asks Ohno.
Jun raises an eyebrow. "Yes, that's generally what people do before they break up," he says. "Look, Ohno-kun. Are you all right?"
"No," says Ohno. "No, I'm not. Why would I do that?"
"I don't know," Jun tells him. "People change. You were with her for almost six years, after all."
The Ohno in this reality has met Becky and been with her for six years.
It makes sense: he can see it his art, in vivid overtones that have mellowed over time into something warmer but equally filled with emotion. For six years this Becky has been the spark behind Ohno's work, the reason behind the vitality of his lines and the focus in his structures. And at some point in those six years, this Ohno has done something to lose her.
"That was a mistake," says Ohno.
"What was a mistake?" asks Jun.
"Leaving Becky was a mistake," Ohno tells him. "I don't know what the reasons were but I know it shouldn't have happened."
"Right," says Jun, pulling his arm away from Ohno's grip. There is something like anger in the way he says this. "And you're admitting this one year later."
"The point is that I'm admitting it," says Ohno.
"Tell me honestly," says Jun. "Is this why you came back?"
"Maybe," says Ohno. He looks around at the gallery, at the glittering assemblage at the heart of it. "I can't see any other reason."
"Okay," says Jun, exhaling sharply. He folds his arms across his chest. "What's your plan?"
Ohno doesn't have a plan; hasn't had one since he was pulled from his room into one reality after another. This is Becky, though, and while Ohno knows very little of what happened here between them, he does know that she is far too much to lose, in any universe.
"You know where she is, don't you?" asks Ohno. "Take me there."
Becky lives in a low-rise apartment building an hour's drive from the gallery. When Ohno reaches the third floor it is immediately apparent which unit she is living in; hers is the only door with a colourful little wooden figure affixed underneath the peephole.
He has come up here in a rush; it is only after he rings the doorbell and hears the sound of someone coming to answer the door that he realises, with a jolt, exactly what he is about to attempt.
"Just one second," says a muffled voice from behind the door.
It is reckless and probably ill-advised, miles away from what he might have done just two months ago, back in his own reality. But Ohno two months ago would not have envisaged the warm beauty of those weeks at the beach house, or the curious frisson of delight he had experienced when chancing upon that dressing room.
Ohno two months ago would not have experienced the distinct, heady reality of loving a person he might not even have the chance to meet in his own universe.
A moment later, the door swings open.
The man standing at the entrance is unmistakeably Aiba.
"Hello," says Aiba, looking slightly puzzled. After a pause, he asks, "Have I met you before?"
Before Ohno can reply, they are interrupted by someone calling out from inside the house. "-Aiba-kun? Who is it?"
Ohno realises, with an icy feeling, that it is Becky.
"I'll need to get the final designs to Ninomiya-san by the evening," says Becky, appearing in the entranceway. She freezes, however, the moment she catches sight of Ohno.
"Hello," says Ohno.
"Hello," says Becky, her voice tight. "What are you doing here?"
"There was an exhibition," Ohno tells her. "And then Jun-kun drove me over."
"Do you know each other?" asks Aiba, still clearly nonplussed. The easy way he's leaning against the doorframe - as if he belongs there, standing in that doorway beside Becky - makes something like jealousy surge in Ohno's chest.
"Aiba-kun," says Becky, "could you give us a moment?"
"Sure," says Aiba, after a pause. "Should I head out for a bit?"
Becky nods briefly, not taking her eyes off Ohno. "That would be great," she says.
"I'll be back in half an hour," says Aiba, giving Ohno one last quizzical glance before slipping out the door.
"Aren't you going to ask me to let you in?" asks Becky when Aiba has left. The way she says it is a little bit rueful, with no trace of the infectious animation Ohno has always been fascinated by.
"Only if you want me to," says Ohno.
"It's better than standing out in the corridor," says Becky, turning around abruptly and heading into the house.
She is the same age as the other two Beckys that Ohno has met, but there is something about her that seems somehow older. It might be the floral shift dress she's wearing, or the way she has pulled her hair back into a long braid that falls down her back. It is most likely the way she looks at Ohno; full of something like weariness and faded affection.
The living room of the apartment is filled with all sorts of knick-knacks and interesting keepsakes. The coffee is table covered with sheets of paper that, on closer inspection, appear to contain various costume designs. Becky gathers them up quickly and slides them back into a large folder, gesturing for Ohno to sit.
"Well?" says Becky, sitting down opposite him.
"Why did we break up?" asks Ohno.
Becky makes an agitated sound. "I don't even think you can technically call it a break-up, Satoshi-kun," she says. "I think near the end we just drifted until we weren't together. You stopped paying attention. I had my work."
Ohno wonders what it must be like, to be with someone long enough that all the relationship's sharp dips and highs are rubbed down into plateaus. To be so myopically close that they can slip apart without either one noticing.
This is what Ohno wants to say: That there is something cosmic happening between them - an unseen, uncontrollable force pulling together with all the vast power of the universe. He wants to tell her that the other Ohno has made a monumental mistake.
What he says, instead, is, "I think I might be in love with you."
For a second Becky looks taken aback. Then her expression hardens. "Don't do that," she tells him.
"I came back for you," Ohno continues, "I'm pretty sure of that."
"Perhaps you did," says Becky, "but you can't just turn up and say these things. You can't just come in and sit there looking at me like that."
"How am I looking at you?" asks Ohno.
"I don't know," says Becky, "like it's the first time you've set eyes on me."
"That's because it feels like it is," says Ohno.
"Don't try to charm me," says Becky. "It's never worked."
"I'm not trying," Ohno tells her.
"You're right," says Becky. "You don't use words in that way. That's what made me notice you, back then."
"And now?" asks Ohno.
"And now I know you're telling the truth," says Becky, "but I don't know why."
"I want to ask," says Ohno, "if there is any possibility of us starting over again."
It is reckless because Ohno cannot promise her anything. He cannot promise her that they will work out if they give each other a second chance, because this is not his reality. He doesn't know their history - he doesn't know how they met, even - and he doesn't know what the Ohno from this reality planned to do.
"You know I can't answer a question like that," Becky says.
"I know," says Ohno. "You don't have to answer me now. Just - consider it."
"Okay," says Becky slowly. "I will. But I need you to go now."
"Okay," Ohno replies, rising from his seat. "Before I forget - tickets." He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the envelope Jun had given him. "For my exhibition."
"Thank you," says Becky, taking the envelope with a small smile.
"I'll go now," Ohno tells her, heading for the entranceway and crouching to put on his shoes.
It is only when Ohno is almost out the door that Becky says, "In case you were wondering-"
"Yes?" says Ohno, turning round.
"Aiba-kun and I…" she says. "He's the director of photography for Ninomiya-san's new film. The one I'm working on. In case you thought we were…"
"Oh. Okay," says Ohno, unable to stop himself from smiling. "I'm relieved."
"I thought you'd be," Becky tells him. She flashes him a quick grin. "It was nice seeing you. Ineloquent as always."
In that split second it is all Ohno can do not to lean in and kiss her, brief and soft like the goodbye he knows it is going to be.
The moment passes. He turns and leaves.
"Well," says Jun, later, "she didn't exactly date you because you had a way with words."
"Jun-kun," says Ohno, "do you know how Becky and I met?"
"You told me," Jun says, as they enter the hidden viewing room from which they can observe everyone at the exhibition. "You met at an art gallery. That's why I gave you those tickets."
"That explains a lot," says Ohno. It explains Becky's smile when she took the envelope. He wonders what his ineloquent confession, made without context or knowledge of the past, must have sounded like to her. What significance she had attached to his words that he would not have known to intend. Perhaps he's convinced her - he hopes desperately that this is the case. Perhaps he has just exacerbated this Ohno's mistake.
Ohno cannot stay to find out, however; through the tinted glass he sees a familiar figure entering the gallery. It is clear even from a distance that Nino is not there to look at the pieces on display; he is glancing at faces instead, wandering through the sections in search of someone.
"-are you listening to me?" Jun is saying.
"Yes?" Ohno replies.
"I was saying that the question now is what you're going to tell Meisa-san," says Jun.
"I'll tell her the truth," says Ohno, watching Nino check his watch impatiently. "I'll tell her I'm sorry."
"And when are you planning to do that?" asks Jun.
This time, the shift is different; or maybe he's just prepared for it. He feels it coming like a cocoon of noise surging up around him; sound and force and vertigo.
"Remind me," Ohno tells Jun. "I'll forget. Remind me."
Ohno is awoken by a cold draft that is coming in through the partially open window across the room. He wriggles a bit, curling his legs up so that his entire body will fit under the blanket. The bedsprings make an ominous grating noise as he does so. He needs to buy a new mattress. Nino needs to learn how to shut the window properly.
Wait.
This is his bed. This is his squashy pillow and the odd-smelling Doraemon blanket the others had given him on his birthday last year.
Ohno sits up. On the other side of the room is Nino's bed, almost completely covered by sheet music and laundry of dubious freshness. Perched precariously on a rickety side table is his synthesizer.
Cautiously, Ohno climbs out of bed. He cannot help but move at a painstaking pace, as if at any moment this reality will vanish before his eyes and he will find himself somewhere else again.
He emerges into the living room to find Aiba fast asleep on the sofa, still in his uniform from his shift at the restaurant. Under normal circumstances this would be nothing out of the ordinary, but to Ohno it is an overwhelmingly comforting sight.
"I'm back," he murmurs, taking in the familiar squalor of their apartment - the kitchen table now colonised by research materials for Sho's PhD thesis and the corresponding beer cans; the mass of cables and game consoles lying in a tangled snarl below the television. The unwashed dishes in the sink festering underneath Jun's neatly-written sign exhorting them to 'PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER OURSELVES'.
"I'm back," Ohno says again, louder this time. He moves to stand over the sofa. "Aiba-chan."
Aiba rolls over, almost sliding off the sofa as he does so, and cracks his eyes open just a fraction to squint at Ohno.
"Oh," says Aiba. "You've emerged. Nino will be happy."
"I'm really glad to see you," says Ohno, meaning it more than Aiba can possibly understand. He's glad to see this Aiba; his Aiba, not star pitcher Aiba or Arashi's Aiba. Not the Aiba who seemed so at ease standing in the doorway of Becky's house.
Becky.
"Are you all right?" asks Aiba curiously. "You've been acting really strange."
"Strange?" Ohno asks.
"Well," says Sho, who has emerged from the other room, "among other things, you submitted your latest illustrations two weeks in advance, baked Jun-kun the most delicious cake known to mankind for his birthday-"
"-it was really good-" Aiba interjects helpfully.
"- and then you locked yourself in your room, working on one of your paintings," says Sho. "Leaving Nino roomless and prone to ejecting us from our own beds at ridiculous times in the morning."
"Ejecting?" Ohno repeats.
"Yes, he crawls in while we're sleeping and edges us out somehow," Sho tells him, exasperated. "All I know is that in the morning I wake up on the floor with the vibrating Totoro pillow."
The mental image is so hilarious, so Sho, and Ohno is so relieved to have returned, that he laughs without meaning to.
"I'm sorry," says Ohno as penitently as he can manage, but the effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that he cannot keep from grinning.
"No you're not," says Sho.
"Can we see it, then?" asks Aiba. "The thing you were working on."
In his confusion Ohno did not notice the canvas when he first woke up, but it's there when all three of them crowd into the room.
It is a picture of a shoreline in the starkest of hues, the ocean filled out with vivid strokes and exuberant clashes of colour. Not all of it was created by the same hand, however; a section of the painting seems more cautious, somehow, more interested in the finer details than the confident depiction of shadow and light.
The point of the painting is not realism but a rush of emotion, the rise and crash and surge of feeling.
"It's amazing," says Sho. "This is - this is powerful."
Ohno might not have painted this but he knows exactly where this is. He recognises that familiar surf, the particular arc of the shoreline as it snakes towards the horizon. He remembers looking up at that same sky and seeing the same colours jump out at him.
"It's missing something," Ohno says, after some thought. He is missing something.
That painting of the sea is not the piece that wins the KDDI Corporation International Grand Prix that year; after all, Ohno cannot quite claim to have painted it. He submits something else instead - a mixed media work featuring silkscreen prints of Nino in profile over various landscapes in flux. (When it wins first place, one reviewer reverently and mistakenly describes it as 'a meditation on Japan's hikikomori phenomenon'. Nino, naturally, is greatly displeased with the assumption that every young man with a game controller and bad posture is a shut-in.)
When he wins another prestigious competition three months later (with an installation piece involving fifty clay sculptures of grandparents in Japan), Ohno finds himself faced with at least six different galleries offering to hold his debut exhibition. New editions of the language textbook series Soy japonés! now include the words 'illustrated by Ohno Satoshi' on their covers.
Ohno does not let any of this get to him, however. He uses the prize money he receives to rent a studio space so Nino can sleep in a room that doesn't smell of oil pastels and paint. When the seventh gallery approaches him he lays all the information packs out on the coffee table in the living room with a post-it with 'help me pick? - Oh-chan' scrawled on it. He keeps up a cycle of finishing something and getting caught up in another project almost immediately after. He draws from people he meets; takes a train out into the suburbs and captures a town in a series of cheeky caricatures.
"It feels like something huge happened," says Jun, on one of the rare occasions when he returns home early from the office. "Like you left us for a while and came back so full of something."
That's exactly right, thinks Ohno. "You've worked hard today," he says instead, standing up to retrieve two cans of beer from the refrigerator.
He doesn't draw Becky. He could, if he wanted to. He could fill dozens of sketchbooks with her; knows that he could win another five competitions with just her smile alone. Ohno doesn't want to, though. He doesn't want mind and memory to smooth out any of the lines and imperfections on her face, to further highlight the fact these other realities will never be his.
Ohno's debut exhibition takes place at a small gallery in Aoyama. It is packed from the opening, and Ohno finds himself having to sign so many copies of Soy japonés! (and the occasional Korean edition) that by the third day he chooses to sequester himself in a back room.
He doesn't leave, though. He thinks about Jun in another reality, telling him matter-of-factly, you met at an art gallery. He cannot stop himself from hoping that things will somehow turn out the same way.
The others are almost embarrassingly proud of him. Jun cuts or prints out every single review he can get his hands on (most of them glowing) and starts a scrapbook in their apartment. When Nino is not composing demo tracks for the latest Dragon Quest, he lurks around the award-winning hikikomori canvas demanding to know what unsuspecting gallery viewers think about the piece. Also, Ohno is not certain if the intermittent but steady flow of students from Sho's Introduction to Econometrics seminar groups will ever taper off.
On the second last day, Aiba and the entire wait staff of The Zü Restaurant and Bar decide to descend upon the gallery. Ohno suddenly finds the space filled with the delighted chatter of a dozen more people, each as exuberant and easily excitable as Aiba.
"It's almost company policy," explains a man who introduces himself as Daigo. "Have you never been to The Zü?"
"It's always been rather out of my price range," Ohno tells him. "Is the food as good as Aiba-chan says it is?"
"It's better," says Daigo, giving him a wink before ambling off to examine Grandparents #39 and 40.
The layout of the exhibition is such that the eye is instantly drawn towards a particular spot at the end of the room. In the original plan, that spot had been set aside for the Grand Prix piece.
The canvas that hangs there now is the painting of the sea. Mounted on a wall and properly lit, it is even more striking; both calming and strangely moving at the same time.
What catches Ohno's eye at this point, however, is not the painting but the person standing in front of it. Their back is to Ohno but he can recognise those limbs and shoulders anywhere, that particular way of standing.
It is Becky.
There is a vertiginous moment in which Ohno thinks he might not be able to speak. When Becky turns around, he knows he cannot.
"You like it too?" she asks, grinning.
Ohno nods mutely.
"You know, when I first caught sight of it I thought it looked really familiar," Becky continues, "but there's nothing on the title card saying where it is." She leans over to peer at it again.
"Scene, By Another Self," she reads. "Way to be descriptive. Hey," she says, glancing up at Ohno. "Are you all right?"
Before Ohno can reply, however, Aiba comes bounding up to them. "I see you found him first!" he exclaims, before turning to Ohno. "She was looking for you."
"Oh," says Becky, with sudden realisation. "Oh. Did you paint this?"
"Well-" Ohno begins.
"Yes, he did," says Aiba. "He locked himself in his room for days while he was working on this."
"Introduce me," demands Becky imperiously. "Wait, I'll do it myself." She turns to Ohno, proffering a handshake. "Hi, I'm Becky."
"Hello," says Ohno, taking her hand.
"Hello," Becky replies, smiling, and in that moment it is as if something in the universe - in every universe - has fallen perfectly, beautifully into place.
The End
-----
Further note: Title taken from the song by Vienna Teng. Yes, Britishism nitpickers (I know you are out there, lol), this is why the title is missing that all-important 'u'.
♫ Music was a huge driving force behind this fic, from start to finish. Here is a mix of what I was listening to.
◊ And in case you were wondering about beach house Becky...
Pairing: Ohno/Becky
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Ohno takes her hand, still wishing desperately for something to stir in his memory, some faint sign to explain in some part the way Becky looks at him, all yearning and warmth.
Word Count: 8,500~
A/N: Written for phrenk for the je_whiteday exchange. Originally posted here. Huge thanks to g_esquared, calerine, illuvium and forochel for being amazing and wholly encouraging. (Yes, I had a veritable army of people reading this. :x )
Ohno wakes up on an unfamiliar couch in a house he's never been in before.
This is not the first time this has happened.
"Not yet, then," he murmurs to himself, after a pause.
For a long moment he just lies there, enjoying the comfortable warmth of the duvet he is wrapped up in (off-white, with a pretty leaf pattern). He watches the way the sunlight floods in through the open window at the far end of the room.
If he listens a little harder he can hear the sound of waves. He sits up, pushing the duvet aside. A stack of paper on the coffee table catches his attention; he reaches over to pick up the first sheet.
It is a pencil drawing of a beach. The lines look like those he might have made years ago, before he entered art college and learned real shading and all those other proper things. He looks through the rest of the stack. Half of these are his drawings; careful sketches made by another Ohno from another place. The others are by someone else, someone with a steady hand and an eye for details.
He needs to know where he is.
He stands and walks - a little unsteadily - towards the window. There is someone coming. A woman, walking up the beach towards the house.
A beach house. He doesn't remember a beach house.
He doesn't recognise the woman.
The woman is waving, beaming sunnily and swinging a shopping bag as she approaches the veranda. Her bare feet leave sandy, wet prints on the wooden surface.
"Aren't you going to let me in?" she asks, sidling up to the open window where Ohno is standing.
Ohno stares. He can't not. She is an arresting sight, up close: haloed by the sun, her dark hair tumbling down her shoulders. Her eyes are a mesmerising not-quite-green, and as Ohno gazes at them the thought of sunflowers comes to mind.
"Well?" says the woman, resting one arm on the window frame and cocking her head to one side.
"I'm sorry," Ohno tells her, because he does not know what else to say.
"What's wrong?" asks the woman.
Ohno blinks. "I should know who you are, shouldn't I?"
"Oh," the woman says, her grin faltering. "That."
"I'm sorry," Ohno repeats, genuinely so.
"I'm Becky," she replies, smiling again as she reaches through the gap in the window frame to proffer a handshake.
Ohno takes her hand, still wishing desperately for something to stir in his memory, some faint sign to explain in some part the way Becky looks at him, all yearning and warmth.
"Hello," he says.
"Hello," Becky replies. "Now will you let me in?"
After they have washed the seashells she collected and left them to dry by the windowsill, Becky turns to Ohno and says, "Help me with lunch." It is not really a request.
They make curry. He cannot help but notice that the brand she's using is his favourite.
"You seem used to this," says Ohno as he helps her cut the carrots. "Used to me, I mean."
"Well, I have been warned," says Becky. "This is not the first time."
"There were others, then?" Ohno asks, even though he knows there must have been. It's written all over Becky's face when she talks to him - recognition; confusion; hurt, even.
Becky nods. "Two, before you. The first stayed for a week, the second for two. At first I thought it was some sort of amnesia."
Ohno glances up at her. "Amnesia?"
"Imagine what it was like, coming back home one morning and realising that the person in your living room had no memory of you whatsoever," says Becky. "Of course I thought it was amnesia! Even now I'm not certain. Though I suppose your explanations are far too weird for it to be some sort of mental disorder."
"I thought I was going mad," Ohno says. "Especially the first time. They looked and talked like my housemates, except that they weren't."
Nino and Sho had been scientists, in that other existence. When Ohno had come to they had given him lengthy explanations about lateral travel through dimensions and multiple parallel universes. He hadn't believed them until they had shown him footage of Aiba pitching for the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
He still doesn't quite understand their explanations or comprehend the graphs and parameter settings they attempted to show him. He doesn't understand their grand plan to stabilise the flux and bring things back to normal. All he understands is that he may well spend the rest of his life traversing different realities, living different existences.
"Who are you, really?" Becky asks him as they leave the curry to simmer. She cannot quite conceal the curiosity in her voice.
"I'm an artist," says Ohno. "Not a very good one, though. Mostly, I just scrape by with illustrating textbooks."
"Am I-" Becky begins, but falters almost immediately.
"Are you…?"
"Well," says Becky. "One of you said he knew me. That I was somebody famous."
It was entirely possible. He had seen Aiba and Jun on television; Jun had been a famous golfer and Aiba befriended baby pandas and showered elephants every Thursday night.
"No, I don't think I've seen you before," says Ohno.
He would remember her, if he had. He knows he won't forget her.
Becky writes and illustrates picture books; in her free time she also makes strange sculptures out of assorted materials. That is what those seashells are for, she explains.
She is animated when talking about her art and her stories, and she can chatter enough to fill Ohno's silences for him. She's careful to contextualise her comments, though, to make sure she doesn't refer to something that Ohno should understand but cannot. Still, some details slip through.
The other Ohno was a baker, he discovers. He had wandered, utterly confused, until he had landed on Becky's doorstep. That Ohno had made marvellous pastries. He had loved to draw and sometimes he sang, too.
The second Ohno had been the one who had volunteered his services in testing the traverse portal. It hadn't been his fault, really; the scientists had been the ones who had calibrated it wrongly.
He doesn't ask which of the two Becky had fallen in love with.
They go fishing. He's not surprised to hear that his two other counterparts had been equally fond of it. He is surprised, though, when Becky pulls on her own fishing gear and heads out together with him.
"You know, I always dreamt it would be someone else," Becky tells him, gripping on to the rail of the boat as the wind whips through her hair. This time, she doesn't contextualise.
Ohno looks up from his line and straight at her, taking in her artless beauty, the lovely half-smile she's wearing, like she's thinking of something particularly delightful.
"I think I might be in love with you," says Ohno.
"Do you, now?" asks Becky, a smile still playing on her lips.
"Just a hunch."
"Fair enough," Becky says. Her eyes seem to sparkle. "I can live with that."
Ahead of them, the sun begins to cast its first rays over the horizon.
The first time he kisses her is on the beach, when the sun is about to set. They've ventured out with sketchpads and pencils because there's always something interesting to capture, Becky says.
She's right - at this time of the year the beach is only moderately populated, and they find a nice spot from which they can survey a vast stretch of the area.
It is Becky whose pencil stills after a while; Becky who turns to Ohno and says, "I don't know whether to draw you or to kiss you."
So Ohno leans in and cups her cheek with one hand, pressing his lips to hers in the lightest of kisses. It amazes him how easily they fit; how effortlessly familiar this feels. Almost as if at some point before - at some point in another life - they have done exactly this.
And maybe they have, maybe they have lain there in the sunset on a haphazard configuration of brightly-coloured beach towels, limbs in a lazy tangle as they pour everything they have into that one kiss. Becky has one hand clutching Ohno's shoulder and one hand in his hair, fingers sliding down towards the nape of his neck and resting there like she never wants to let him go. Her skin is soft under Ohno's palms, her mouth hot and demanding.
When they pause and part, breath mingling, Ohno thinks he feels something hitch in Becky's chest. It's almost a sob, he thinks; an unspoken grief so at odds with the smile she gives him moments later.
"I think I might be in love with you," Becky whispers.
"Just a hunch?" Ohno asks, shifting just a fraction to kiss her again.
Becky reaches down to where Ohno's hand is resting on the waistline of her dress and curls their fingers together. "Just a hunch."
Nino finds him after the second week. This is Nino the scientist, of course - Ninomiya-sensei, deadly serious and slightly panicked, the first time they met.
Every time Ohno meets him he finds himself surprised all over again that this is not his Nino; not the Nino who shares a room with him and has possibly gone slightly deaf from too much game music blasting in his ears. He wonders if Nino and the others have noticed something different about him. Maybe no new Ohno has slipped in to replace him. He hopes they are not too worried.
"Good news," says Nino, when Becky opens the front door. "We're closer to stabilising the wormhole." He's not actually here; Ohno has already gotten used to the fact. This is a projection the scientists send into the different realities.
"I can't believe you just said the word 'wormhole' with a straight face," Becky tells him. She turns to Ohno. "Who is this?"
"Ninomiya Kazunari," says Nino, not bothering with a handshake. He seems to flicker slightly as he says this. "I'm a physicist on the team."
"Have you never met?" Ohno asks, slightly puzzled.
"No," says Becky. She's got one hand braced on the doorframe in a clear statement that Nino is not welcome here. "I've met the other one, though - Matsumoto."
Nino shrugs. "He must have been following another version of Ohno-san."
"You can follow him?" Becky asks, eyes narrowed.
"We're tracking them as well as we can," says Nino. "My colleague Sakurai is working on the anchoring mechanism, which is why your lengths of stay will be getting longer."
"Okay," says Ohno. He cannot resist the urge to shift just a fraction closer to Becky, to bring one hand to rest at the small of her back.
They do not ask the obvious question that is hanging in the air. How long? Ohno wants to say. He lets his answer be the warmth of Becky's skin through the thin fabric of her dress; the easy way she leans into his touch.
"Trust me," Nino tells him. His eyes dart from Ohno to Becky as if to say, you don't have much time. "We'll fix this."
That evening after Nino leaves, Becky pushes Ohno against the wall of the front passageway and presses into him, runs her hands across his skin like she needs to know he is there, that he is hers in spite of all the contrivances of time and space.
Ohno lets her; lets her kiss him and strip him, quivers under her touches and returns them twofold. When she reaches for the drawstring of his trousers he tugs at the knot of her sundress, mirrored movements perfectly in tandem.
He loves everything about her in those moments, every sound and every shudder; every dip and plane of her body. She jostles for dominance and he lets her take it - lets her take him, because how can he not. Because this is all he can give her, when even the stars acting in concert will not keep them together. One body, and an ocean of love.
The first two times he travelled away had taken place in his sleep.
This time it happens when Ohno is awake and standing in front of the dressing table in Becky's room. Becky has gone out for a meeting with her publishers, and it's the first time he notices the photograph stuck to her mirror: a photograph of him, asleep.
The date on the picture has been coloured over with a marker, and the way his hair lies in the picture makes it almost possible that this is him and not some past other.
He cannot stay to find out.
(When Becky returns she finds Ohno standing at her dressing table, holding the photograph of himself in faint confusion.
"What does this mean?" he asks, handing her the photograph.
On the back: It's not a hunch, it's a fact. - Satoshi)
Ohno comes to just as the plane touches down at Haneda airport. Jun and Aiba are there, dozing a couple of seats away from him. Sho is there too, scrutinising a copy of the Yomiuri Shimbun.
Only Nino is looking at him, watching him with strange expression on his face.
"Where's -" he begins, but stops himself before he can finish the question. Where's Becky.
Three weeks of living at the beach house has made him too vulnerable. He shuts his eyes again, willing himself back there. He doesn't want this.
He doesn't want this.
He opens his eyes; nothing has changed. It's the first reality, other than his own, where all of them are together. He is curiously relieved to see this. As always, though, there is something off about the picture; the disorienting sensation that he doesn't actually belong here.
Nino reaches over and takes Ohno's wrist.
"You're a different Ohno, aren't you?" he says. "You've travelled again."
"Yes - wait - you know?" Ohno asks.
"You're skin's even browner than the last one," Nino points out. "Don't worry. Only Arashi knows."
"Arashi?" Ohno repeats blankly.
Nino jerks his head towards the others. "That's the five of us."
He is interrupted by the announcement stating that the seatbelt sign has been turned off and they are free to disembark. A cheery-looking representative invites them to follow her.
"Listen," Nino whispers, still not letting go of Ohno's wrist. "Don't mess this up for yourself - for any of your selves. Just follow my lead."
The Ohno in this reality never went to art school. At some point in his childhood, he had managed to gain a place in Johnny's Entertainment. The Ohno in this reality meets the others when they debut together on a boat in Hawaii, in a storm of confusion and nerves.
At least, that is what the videos tell Ohno.
The others fill him in as much as he can, and Nino is somehow never far away in the days that follow Ohno's arrival. He holds on to Ohno's elbow when they are filming their variety programmes and whispers things in his ear - what to do now; what to say next.
His manager has put him on a semi-break, but even with the reduced schedule there is still too much to do and too little time to think. Being an idol has always looked reasonably easy on the outside, but now that he actually has to be one, Ohno realises exactly how exhausting it can be.
He discovers a talent for dancing he never knew he had before, but lacks the years of practice the other Ohno must have had. Their choreographer privately expresses worry over how sluggish he's been over the past few weeks.
"It's as if you're not yourself," she tells him.
But I'm not, Ohno thinks. "I'm very sorry," he says instead.
Amidst all this, he knows one thing - he needs to find Becky.
He doesn't have to look far.
Becky is everywhere - in CMs and on posters, appearing on variety programmes and singing on music shows. She has just returned from a location shoot in Europe, according to Aiba, who also offers to get hold of her schedule.
Ohno finds Becky before Aiba can get back to him. He stumbles across her dressing room one morning entirely by accident, when he gets lost in the TBS building on the way to his own green room.
She is as gorgeous in this incarnation as she is in Ohno's memory, her hair framing her face in a short bob, her smile dazzling as always.
"Ohno-san," she says when she catches sight of him in the mirror.
There is none of that recognition in Becky's face when she looks at Ohno, only polite familiarity. And yet he feels a tangible sense of relief, just from standing in that doorway, mesmerised all over again by those same eyes, that familiar, lovely face. A sense of having come home.
This must be how Ohno's Becky must have felt, to keep returning to a vacant doppelganger and to love him all the same. She is stronger than he ever was, Ohno thinks.
That enthrallment must show on his face, because Becky smiles uncertainly and asks, "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Hello," says Ohno.
"Hello, Ohno-san," Becky replies. "Is something wrong?"
For one rash moment all he wants to do is close the distance between them. To say, I think I might be in love with you, as if to invoke some sort of secret code between them that will make Becky somehow remember those seemingly endless days on that sun-drenched beach.
The moment passes, and Ohno says instead, "Would you like to go fishing with me?"
"Wait," says Becky. "Sorry?"
"Fishing," says Ohno, trying to keep his voice steady even though his heart is pounding in his chest. "Would you like to go fishing?"
Becky looks confused, and then, with sudden realisation, she blushes. "What - like a date?" she asks.
"If you want it to be," says Ohno.
"You're asking me on a date?" asks Becky, bolder now.
"I'm asking you to come fishing with me," Ohno tells her.
Becky blinks, like this is a surprise to her, but not altogether an unpleasant one. "When?"
"Whenever," says Ohno. "Preferably soon. Now, even, if you like."
"Okay," Becky says slowly. "But why?"
"I think you might be good at it," says Ohno.
Becky raises an eyebrow. "Do you, now?"
Ohno shrugs. "Just a hunch."
"Don't do it," says Nino.
"It's not a good idea," says another Nino.
They are both seated on the couch in the green room when Ohno walks in. It is very disconcerting.
"Isn't there some sort of rule against the two of you meeting like this?" asks Ohno.
"Well, he's not really here," says Nino-on-the-left, reaching over to pass a hand through Ninomiya-sensei. "So I suppose it's all right."
"Strange," says Ohno. "I've never thought to try that before."
"What I was saying," Nino continues, "is that dating Becky here probably isn't something you want to do."
Ohno frowns. "Wait, how did you know-"
"Did you think I'd keep something like this from myself?" says Nino.
"Look," says Ninomiya-sensei, "we have things more or less under control, and once we get you back to your own reality we'll be locking down the system. You're not going to be here for long."
It then hits Ohno, what Nino means. Don't do to this Becky what has already happened to another.
He feels sick all of a sudden, like he can't get enough air. He thinks he stumbles backwards but catches his balance before Nino can reach for him.
"You'll be home soon, Oh-chan," says Nino, steadying him with familiar hands.
Ohno closes his eyes and isn't sure he knows where that is.
He draws.
Another Ohno in another reality might have done something else to ease the itch under his skin. He might have hidden himself away in the kitchen and baked for hours, perhaps, absorbing himself in the tedium of kneading dough and mixing batter. He might have danced until his body ached.
Ohno draws, because that is what he knows best. He doesn't do anything fancy, even though Arashi's Ohno possesses more art materials than Ohno in his own reality can ever dream of buying with his own unreliable income. Instead, he sits in their empty dressing room with a notebook and a ball point pen, and watches the lines escape onto paper.
He is leaving behind evidence for any of the other Ohnos who might come across this reality, for the Ohno who belongs here. He draws their lives - the small 2LDK where four of them (and sometimes Aiba) have to constantly jostle for their own space; the bakery he found himself in for a short five days. He draws the beach house, tries to capture the way the light falls in the morning.
It is everything and nothing, a desperate attempt at remembering a string of dreams. His mind moves too fast for his hand; when his pen runs dry he casts around for another one and keeps going.
He draws Becky. Both Beckys, both equally luminous in his mind's eye. He has memorised her from a hundred different angles; he can draw her in his sleep.
This, he writes, is the woman you might be in love with.
When the world shifts beneath him, he is prepared.
"Wake up," says Jun, throwing open the curtains and stalking over to yank the covers off Ohno's bed. "We're already five minutes behind schedule."
Ohno throws an arm over his face at the sudden brightness, groaning as he rolls over.
"No seriously, you're going to be late," Jun tells Ohno, sitting down on the side of the bed and giving Ohno's shoulder a hard shake.
"Okay," says Ohno, defeated. "Okay. I'm up."
The first thing Ohno sees when he opens his eyes is a portrait photograph of a woman he does not recognise. It takes up half the wall opposite the bed. She cuts a striking figure in her three-piece suit, looking at something in the distance with an almost knowing smile on her face.
"Honestly, you sleep too much. Jet lag's just an excuse," says Jun, sliding off the bed and heading for the door. "And stop ogling Meisa, you'll see her in person soon enough."
"Meisa?" Ohno repeats.
"I know you get off on waking up to a life-size photograph of your girlfriend, but we really don't have time for that," Jun tells him. "Although I'm flattered you used one of mine," he adds quickly. "I'm particularly proud of that photoshoot."
"Wait," Ohno says. "Girlfriend?"
"Look," says Jun. "Do you actually want to be late for the opening of your own exhibition? Wear these." He tosses a pair of trousers and a shirt in Ohno's direction.
"When?" says Ohno, struggling to pull on the trousers. "Her, I mean."
"You're asking me when you started dating Meisa?" asks Jun, looking slightly incredulous. "I don't know. I don't even think you actually told me. I found out from a magazine. And then suddenly you were putting up photos of her in your multiple apartments."
"Ah," says Ohno, even though he doesn't comprehend any of this.
"Done?" asks Jun, before Ohno can finish doing up the buttons of his shirt. He doesn't wait for an answer before taking Ohno by the shoulders and ushering him out the door.
It is only when they are in the car that Ohno realises what Jun has just been saying.
"Wait - I'm having an exhibition?"
It is only natural that Ohno has dreamed of holding his own gallery exhibition at some point. He would be curious to see how other people respond to his art, and it would be nice to see his own work framed and displayed in a proper gallery, as opposed to cluttering the walls and corners of their apartment.
What Ohno has not dreamt of, however, is this.
There is a throng of reporters waiting when they arrive at the gallery in Ginza, possibly even more than he ever experienced during his time in Arashi. SATOSHI OHNO, reads the large billboard over the entrance, FIRST TOKYO EXHIBITION IN FIVE YEARS.
"You see," says Jun, as a gallery representative hurries to open the car door, "Japan has missed you."
The press conference is very well-ordered, considering the frenzy that takes place just half an hour before. It begins with a gallery viewing, which means that Ohno actually has a chance to see the exhibition before answering questions about what his other self has created.
It is stunning - a selection of works over the span of Ohno's career, arranged thematically according to periods of his life.
This Ohno has lived in England for the past seven years. At twenty-two his debut exhibition caught the attention of numerous art critics, which very quickly led to international acclaim.
It's easy to see why; the paintings in that one-year period utilise colour in ways that Ohno has never dreamed about. Everywhere he looks he sees a joyous clash of hues, his lines bold and confident. There is a sort of reckless daring in many of them; even his rendition of a street in Shinjuku appears to feature buildings practically bursting with unbridled joy.
"It's a pity you refused to exhibit so many of the others," says Jun, appearing beside him. "But I suppose there's no point in upsetting Meisa with that - wait."
"With what?" begins Ohno, but Jun has stopped abruptly.
"You said you weren't going to let this go up," Jun murmurs, glancing over at something behind them. "Why the change of heart?"
Ohno turns and sees a large assemblage in the middle of the wall. Almost filling the entire canvas is a single eye, half painted in and half outlined with a blend of materials. What draws his attention is the iris. It is comprised of hundreds of pieces of different-coloured glass that catch the light to dazzling effect, shades of green and grey and the occasional amber.
When he takes a step back it is clear that they are arranged in what is unmistakeably a sunflower.
"Jun-kun," says Ohno slowly, "you need to tell me-"
He is interrupted by a gallery representative who appears at his elbow, bowing profusely.
"Ohno-sensei, the reporters are waiting," she tells him.
He cannot do this. He cannot give a press conference about an exhibition he knows nothing about, especially since there is something he cannot place about that painting; something so painfully, beautifully familiar. Something about Becky.
"Ohno-sensei," asks one reporter, "what is it like returning to Japan?"
At the back of the room, Jun is giving him a look that quite clearly means, answer the question properly, or else.
"Good," says Ohno. "It's good to be in Tokyo."
"But you once said you were never going to return, that Japan was," and here she peers down at her notebook, "I quote - 'a place of shadowed memories'."
"Well," says Ohno, "things change."
Another reporter raises his hand. "Does this have anything to do with Kuroki-san?" he asks.
"I'm sorry, but Ohno-sensei will not be answering any questions about his personal life," interrupts the moderator.
"It's a question about his inspiration," says another reporter abruptly. "Surely you'd allow that."
Ohno glances over at him and has to resist the urge to call out in recognition. His hair is combed very differently and he is wearing glasses, but that reporter is unmistakeably Sho.
"I mean," Sho continues, "you clearly draw your inspiration from the people around you. Is Kuroki-san a large factor now?"
There is a pause in which everyone in the room regards Ohno expectantly. Out of the corner of his eye Ohno can see the moderator opening her mouth to deflect that question, but he leans forward to reply before she can do so.
"I don't know," says Ohno, entirely honest. "You've seen the paintings. Maybe you can tell me."
There is a murmur of laughter among the reporters.
"I really do want to know what you think," says Ohno, because if anyone can provide some insight it will be Sho.
"I think-" Sho begins, before pausing to take a deep breath. "I think she inspires you less than you'd like us to think."
"What makes you think that?" asks Ohno.
"Well, thematically speaking, a lot of your recent works appear to be about loss," says Sho. "Not overtly, at least, but you seem to keep returning to the ideas of memory and time."
Another reporter raises her hand. "What about Ohno-sensei's portraits of Kuroki-san? How would you account for that?"
Sho clears his throat, looking uncomfortable. "They do suggest the same depth of feeling present in those earlier works on display, but when I was looking at them just now they seemed somehow more… deliberate."
A woman near the front row gives a little gasp at this. Some of the reporters are murmuring now, many of them peering intently at Ohno to see what his response will be.
"Thank you for your honest opinion," Ohno tells Sho.
"I'm a big fan of yours, really," says Sho, clearly relieved.
"What's your favourite piece, then?" asks Ohno, even though a representative at the back is making a sign at the moderator as if to indicate that they're running out of time.
"That's easy," says Sho. He turns and points at the assemblage Ohno and Jun were looking at moments before. "Becky."
"Jun-kun," says Ohno urgently, catching hold of his arm and pulling him to one corner. "What happened, with Becky and me?"
"In a figurative sense?" asks Jun.
"No, what happened?"
"Well," says Jun, looking slightly perplexed, "you broke up."
"We dated?" asks Ohno.
Jun raises an eyebrow. "Yes, that's generally what people do before they break up," he says. "Look, Ohno-kun. Are you all right?"
"No," says Ohno. "No, I'm not. Why would I do that?"
"I don't know," Jun tells him. "People change. You were with her for almost six years, after all."
The Ohno in this reality has met Becky and been with her for six years.
It makes sense: he can see it his art, in vivid overtones that have mellowed over time into something warmer but equally filled with emotion. For six years this Becky has been the spark behind Ohno's work, the reason behind the vitality of his lines and the focus in his structures. And at some point in those six years, this Ohno has done something to lose her.
"That was a mistake," says Ohno.
"What was a mistake?" asks Jun.
"Leaving Becky was a mistake," Ohno tells him. "I don't know what the reasons were but I know it shouldn't have happened."
"Right," says Jun, pulling his arm away from Ohno's grip. There is something like anger in the way he says this. "And you're admitting this one year later."
"The point is that I'm admitting it," says Ohno.
"Tell me honestly," says Jun. "Is this why you came back?"
"Maybe," says Ohno. He looks around at the gallery, at the glittering assemblage at the heart of it. "I can't see any other reason."
"Okay," says Jun, exhaling sharply. He folds his arms across his chest. "What's your plan?"
Ohno doesn't have a plan; hasn't had one since he was pulled from his room into one reality after another. This is Becky, though, and while Ohno knows very little of what happened here between them, he does know that she is far too much to lose, in any universe.
"You know where she is, don't you?" asks Ohno. "Take me there."
Becky lives in a low-rise apartment building an hour's drive from the gallery. When Ohno reaches the third floor it is immediately apparent which unit she is living in; hers is the only door with a colourful little wooden figure affixed underneath the peephole.
He has come up here in a rush; it is only after he rings the doorbell and hears the sound of someone coming to answer the door that he realises, with a jolt, exactly what he is about to attempt.
"Just one second," says a muffled voice from behind the door.
It is reckless and probably ill-advised, miles away from what he might have done just two months ago, back in his own reality. But Ohno two months ago would not have envisaged the warm beauty of those weeks at the beach house, or the curious frisson of delight he had experienced when chancing upon that dressing room.
Ohno two months ago would not have experienced the distinct, heady reality of loving a person he might not even have the chance to meet in his own universe.
A moment later, the door swings open.
The man standing at the entrance is unmistakeably Aiba.
"Hello," says Aiba, looking slightly puzzled. After a pause, he asks, "Have I met you before?"
Before Ohno can reply, they are interrupted by someone calling out from inside the house. "-Aiba-kun? Who is it?"
Ohno realises, with an icy feeling, that it is Becky.
"I'll need to get the final designs to Ninomiya-san by the evening," says Becky, appearing in the entranceway. She freezes, however, the moment she catches sight of Ohno.
"Hello," says Ohno.
"Hello," says Becky, her voice tight. "What are you doing here?"
"There was an exhibition," Ohno tells her. "And then Jun-kun drove me over."
"Do you know each other?" asks Aiba, still clearly nonplussed. The easy way he's leaning against the doorframe - as if he belongs there, standing in that doorway beside Becky - makes something like jealousy surge in Ohno's chest.
"Aiba-kun," says Becky, "could you give us a moment?"
"Sure," says Aiba, after a pause. "Should I head out for a bit?"
Becky nods briefly, not taking her eyes off Ohno. "That would be great," she says.
"I'll be back in half an hour," says Aiba, giving Ohno one last quizzical glance before slipping out the door.
"Aren't you going to ask me to let you in?" asks Becky when Aiba has left. The way she says it is a little bit rueful, with no trace of the infectious animation Ohno has always been fascinated by.
"Only if you want me to," says Ohno.
"It's better than standing out in the corridor," says Becky, turning around abruptly and heading into the house.
She is the same age as the other two Beckys that Ohno has met, but there is something about her that seems somehow older. It might be the floral shift dress she's wearing, or the way she has pulled her hair back into a long braid that falls down her back. It is most likely the way she looks at Ohno; full of something like weariness and faded affection.
The living room of the apartment is filled with all sorts of knick-knacks and interesting keepsakes. The coffee is table covered with sheets of paper that, on closer inspection, appear to contain various costume designs. Becky gathers them up quickly and slides them back into a large folder, gesturing for Ohno to sit.
"Well?" says Becky, sitting down opposite him.
"Why did we break up?" asks Ohno.
Becky makes an agitated sound. "I don't even think you can technically call it a break-up, Satoshi-kun," she says. "I think near the end we just drifted until we weren't together. You stopped paying attention. I had my work."
Ohno wonders what it must be like, to be with someone long enough that all the relationship's sharp dips and highs are rubbed down into plateaus. To be so myopically close that they can slip apart without either one noticing.
This is what Ohno wants to say: That there is something cosmic happening between them - an unseen, uncontrollable force pulling together with all the vast power of the universe. He wants to tell her that the other Ohno has made a monumental mistake.
What he says, instead, is, "I think I might be in love with you."
For a second Becky looks taken aback. Then her expression hardens. "Don't do that," she tells him.
"I came back for you," Ohno continues, "I'm pretty sure of that."
"Perhaps you did," says Becky, "but you can't just turn up and say these things. You can't just come in and sit there looking at me like that."
"How am I looking at you?" asks Ohno.
"I don't know," says Becky, "like it's the first time you've set eyes on me."
"That's because it feels like it is," says Ohno.
"Don't try to charm me," says Becky. "It's never worked."
"I'm not trying," Ohno tells her.
"You're right," says Becky. "You don't use words in that way. That's what made me notice you, back then."
"And now?" asks Ohno.
"And now I know you're telling the truth," says Becky, "but I don't know why."
"I want to ask," says Ohno, "if there is any possibility of us starting over again."
It is reckless because Ohno cannot promise her anything. He cannot promise her that they will work out if they give each other a second chance, because this is not his reality. He doesn't know their history - he doesn't know how they met, even - and he doesn't know what the Ohno from this reality planned to do.
"You know I can't answer a question like that," Becky says.
"I know," says Ohno. "You don't have to answer me now. Just - consider it."
"Okay," says Becky slowly. "I will. But I need you to go now."
"Okay," Ohno replies, rising from his seat. "Before I forget - tickets." He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the envelope Jun had given him. "For my exhibition."
"Thank you," says Becky, taking the envelope with a small smile.
"I'll go now," Ohno tells her, heading for the entranceway and crouching to put on his shoes.
It is only when Ohno is almost out the door that Becky says, "In case you were wondering-"
"Yes?" says Ohno, turning round.
"Aiba-kun and I…" she says. "He's the director of photography for Ninomiya-san's new film. The one I'm working on. In case you thought we were…"
"Oh. Okay," says Ohno, unable to stop himself from smiling. "I'm relieved."
"I thought you'd be," Becky tells him. She flashes him a quick grin. "It was nice seeing you. Ineloquent as always."
In that split second it is all Ohno can do not to lean in and kiss her, brief and soft like the goodbye he knows it is going to be.
The moment passes. He turns and leaves.
"Well," says Jun, later, "she didn't exactly date you because you had a way with words."
"Jun-kun," says Ohno, "do you know how Becky and I met?"
"You told me," Jun says, as they enter the hidden viewing room from which they can observe everyone at the exhibition. "You met at an art gallery. That's why I gave you those tickets."
"That explains a lot," says Ohno. It explains Becky's smile when she took the envelope. He wonders what his ineloquent confession, made without context or knowledge of the past, must have sounded like to her. What significance she had attached to his words that he would not have known to intend. Perhaps he's convinced her - he hopes desperately that this is the case. Perhaps he has just exacerbated this Ohno's mistake.
Ohno cannot stay to find out, however; through the tinted glass he sees a familiar figure entering the gallery. It is clear even from a distance that Nino is not there to look at the pieces on display; he is glancing at faces instead, wandering through the sections in search of someone.
"-are you listening to me?" Jun is saying.
"Yes?" Ohno replies.
"I was saying that the question now is what you're going to tell Meisa-san," says Jun.
"I'll tell her the truth," says Ohno, watching Nino check his watch impatiently. "I'll tell her I'm sorry."
"And when are you planning to do that?" asks Jun.
This time, the shift is different; or maybe he's just prepared for it. He feels it coming like a cocoon of noise surging up around him; sound and force and vertigo.
"Remind me," Ohno tells Jun. "I'll forget. Remind me."
Ohno is awoken by a cold draft that is coming in through the partially open window across the room. He wriggles a bit, curling his legs up so that his entire body will fit under the blanket. The bedsprings make an ominous grating noise as he does so. He needs to buy a new mattress. Nino needs to learn how to shut the window properly.
Wait.
This is his bed. This is his squashy pillow and the odd-smelling Doraemon blanket the others had given him on his birthday last year.
Ohno sits up. On the other side of the room is Nino's bed, almost completely covered by sheet music and laundry of dubious freshness. Perched precariously on a rickety side table is his synthesizer.
Cautiously, Ohno climbs out of bed. He cannot help but move at a painstaking pace, as if at any moment this reality will vanish before his eyes and he will find himself somewhere else again.
He emerges into the living room to find Aiba fast asleep on the sofa, still in his uniform from his shift at the restaurant. Under normal circumstances this would be nothing out of the ordinary, but to Ohno it is an overwhelmingly comforting sight.
"I'm back," he murmurs, taking in the familiar squalor of their apartment - the kitchen table now colonised by research materials for Sho's PhD thesis and the corresponding beer cans; the mass of cables and game consoles lying in a tangled snarl below the television. The unwashed dishes in the sink festering underneath Jun's neatly-written sign exhorting them to 'PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER OURSELVES'.
"I'm back," Ohno says again, louder this time. He moves to stand over the sofa. "Aiba-chan."
Aiba rolls over, almost sliding off the sofa as he does so, and cracks his eyes open just a fraction to squint at Ohno.
"Oh," says Aiba. "You've emerged. Nino will be happy."
"I'm really glad to see you," says Ohno, meaning it more than Aiba can possibly understand. He's glad to see this Aiba; his Aiba, not star pitcher Aiba or Arashi's Aiba. Not the Aiba who seemed so at ease standing in the doorway of Becky's house.
Becky.
"Are you all right?" asks Aiba curiously. "You've been acting really strange."
"Strange?" Ohno asks.
"Well," says Sho, who has emerged from the other room, "among other things, you submitted your latest illustrations two weeks in advance, baked Jun-kun the most delicious cake known to mankind for his birthday-"
"-it was really good-" Aiba interjects helpfully.
"- and then you locked yourself in your room, working on one of your paintings," says Sho. "Leaving Nino roomless and prone to ejecting us from our own beds at ridiculous times in the morning."
"Ejecting?" Ohno repeats.
"Yes, he crawls in while we're sleeping and edges us out somehow," Sho tells him, exasperated. "All I know is that in the morning I wake up on the floor with the vibrating Totoro pillow."
The mental image is so hilarious, so Sho, and Ohno is so relieved to have returned, that he laughs without meaning to.
"I'm sorry," says Ohno as penitently as he can manage, but the effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that he cannot keep from grinning.
"No you're not," says Sho.
"Can we see it, then?" asks Aiba. "The thing you were working on."
In his confusion Ohno did not notice the canvas when he first woke up, but it's there when all three of them crowd into the room.
It is a picture of a shoreline in the starkest of hues, the ocean filled out with vivid strokes and exuberant clashes of colour. Not all of it was created by the same hand, however; a section of the painting seems more cautious, somehow, more interested in the finer details than the confident depiction of shadow and light.
The point of the painting is not realism but a rush of emotion, the rise and crash and surge of feeling.
"It's amazing," says Sho. "This is - this is powerful."
Ohno might not have painted this but he knows exactly where this is. He recognises that familiar surf, the particular arc of the shoreline as it snakes towards the horizon. He remembers looking up at that same sky and seeing the same colours jump out at him.
"It's missing something," Ohno says, after some thought. He is missing something.
That painting of the sea is not the piece that wins the KDDI Corporation International Grand Prix that year; after all, Ohno cannot quite claim to have painted it. He submits something else instead - a mixed media work featuring silkscreen prints of Nino in profile over various landscapes in flux. (When it wins first place, one reviewer reverently and mistakenly describes it as 'a meditation on Japan's hikikomori phenomenon'. Nino, naturally, is greatly displeased with the assumption that every young man with a game controller and bad posture is a shut-in.)
When he wins another prestigious competition three months later (with an installation piece involving fifty clay sculptures of grandparents in Japan), Ohno finds himself faced with at least six different galleries offering to hold his debut exhibition. New editions of the language textbook series Soy japonés! now include the words 'illustrated by Ohno Satoshi' on their covers.
Ohno does not let any of this get to him, however. He uses the prize money he receives to rent a studio space so Nino can sleep in a room that doesn't smell of oil pastels and paint. When the seventh gallery approaches him he lays all the information packs out on the coffee table in the living room with a post-it with 'help me pick? - Oh-chan' scrawled on it. He keeps up a cycle of finishing something and getting caught up in another project almost immediately after. He draws from people he meets; takes a train out into the suburbs and captures a town in a series of cheeky caricatures.
"It feels like something huge happened," says Jun, on one of the rare occasions when he returns home early from the office. "Like you left us for a while and came back so full of something."
That's exactly right, thinks Ohno. "You've worked hard today," he says instead, standing up to retrieve two cans of beer from the refrigerator.
He doesn't draw Becky. He could, if he wanted to. He could fill dozens of sketchbooks with her; knows that he could win another five competitions with just her smile alone. Ohno doesn't want to, though. He doesn't want mind and memory to smooth out any of the lines and imperfections on her face, to further highlight the fact these other realities will never be his.
Ohno's debut exhibition takes place at a small gallery in Aoyama. It is packed from the opening, and Ohno finds himself having to sign so many copies of Soy japonés! (and the occasional Korean edition) that by the third day he chooses to sequester himself in a back room.
He doesn't leave, though. He thinks about Jun in another reality, telling him matter-of-factly, you met at an art gallery. He cannot stop himself from hoping that things will somehow turn out the same way.
The others are almost embarrassingly proud of him. Jun cuts or prints out every single review he can get his hands on (most of them glowing) and starts a scrapbook in their apartment. When Nino is not composing demo tracks for the latest Dragon Quest, he lurks around the award-winning hikikomori canvas demanding to know what unsuspecting gallery viewers think about the piece. Also, Ohno is not certain if the intermittent but steady flow of students from Sho's Introduction to Econometrics seminar groups will ever taper off.
On the second last day, Aiba and the entire wait staff of The Zü Restaurant and Bar decide to descend upon the gallery. Ohno suddenly finds the space filled with the delighted chatter of a dozen more people, each as exuberant and easily excitable as Aiba.
"It's almost company policy," explains a man who introduces himself as Daigo. "Have you never been to The Zü?"
"It's always been rather out of my price range," Ohno tells him. "Is the food as good as Aiba-chan says it is?"
"It's better," says Daigo, giving him a wink before ambling off to examine Grandparents #39 and 40.
The layout of the exhibition is such that the eye is instantly drawn towards a particular spot at the end of the room. In the original plan, that spot had been set aside for the Grand Prix piece.
The canvas that hangs there now is the painting of the sea. Mounted on a wall and properly lit, it is even more striking; both calming and strangely moving at the same time.
What catches Ohno's eye at this point, however, is not the painting but the person standing in front of it. Their back is to Ohno but he can recognise those limbs and shoulders anywhere, that particular way of standing.
It is Becky.
There is a vertiginous moment in which Ohno thinks he might not be able to speak. When Becky turns around, he knows he cannot.
"You like it too?" she asks, grinning.
Ohno nods mutely.
"You know, when I first caught sight of it I thought it looked really familiar," Becky continues, "but there's nothing on the title card saying where it is." She leans over to peer at it again.
"Scene, By Another Self," she reads. "Way to be descriptive. Hey," she says, glancing up at Ohno. "Are you all right?"
Before Ohno can reply, however, Aiba comes bounding up to them. "I see you found him first!" he exclaims, before turning to Ohno. "She was looking for you."
"Oh," says Becky, with sudden realisation. "Oh. Did you paint this?"
"Well-" Ohno begins.
"Yes, he did," says Aiba. "He locked himself in his room for days while he was working on this."
"Introduce me," demands Becky imperiously. "Wait, I'll do it myself." She turns to Ohno, proffering a handshake. "Hi, I'm Becky."
"Hello," says Ohno, taking her hand.
"Hello," Becky replies, smiling, and in that moment it is as if something in the universe - in every universe - has fallen perfectly, beautifully into place.
The End
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Further note: Title taken from the song by Vienna Teng. Yes, Britishism nitpickers (I know you are out there, lol), this is why the title is missing that all-important 'u'.
♫ Music was a huge driving force behind this fic, from start to finish. Here is a mix of what I was listening to.
◊ And in case you were wondering about beach house Becky...