for once, a non tezuka/fuji!: of colours and confusion.
If there had been any bystanders they would have told you that yes, Oshitari Yuushi and Mukahi Gakuto were clearly having a fight. For one thing there was a good deal of yelling and vulgar language involved (Mukahi), and for another there was the occasional scathing remark (not of a particularly teasing or friendly ilk) coolly interjected when Gakuto had to pause for breath (Oshitari).
The verbal volley continued until Mukahi, in one single, fluid motion, tiptoed and pressed his lips against the left corner of Oshitari’s mouth; it was awkward because Oshitari’s twenty centimeters on Mukahi meant that Mukahi’s cheekbone bumped Oshitari’s teeth and his hands were splayed out, fingertips pushing against Oshitari’s chest to steady himself.
Oshitari forgot his witty retort, stood stock-still and unresponsive until Mukahi, cheeks scarlet, stamped on his foot, flipped his hair (and the finger at him) and stormed off.
Gakuto was always too good at volleying for him to be able to win, anyway.
*
They’d been doubles partners for something over a year and a half, room-mates for two. Gakuto wasn’t hard to live with, besides the fact that (a) he left his clothes in untidy heaps strewn all over the floor; (b) he never squeezed the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube; (c) he left his cups (unwashed!) in the sink after drinking milk at night; (d) he sprawled out on the floor when studying and spread his notes over every available surface.
Oshitari didn’t mind all that, because his obsessive-compulsiveness when it came to tidiness made up for it - but he ate all Oshitari’s dark chocolate, which was expensive and from Germany and laced with liquor and thus for accompanying romance novels only. On rainy nights he curled up in the squashiest armchair to laugh at Oshitari tearing over his romantic comedies or tragedies, eyes alight with cruel mischief.
And of course he was temperamental. Lately he’d seemed to be avoiding Oshitari, which was ridiculous because Oshitari hadn’t done anything.
The left side of Oshitari’s mouth creased as he touched it, feeling the faint warmth of a wraith-like memory of a kiss-that-wasn’t.
Maybe, said his inner voice, it was because you didn’t do anything.
*
Gakuto was glorious in flight, impossible angles be damned; he always landed on his feet, catlike, and flung back his hair, a vivid splash of crimson against the dull green of the court.
Sometimes Oshitari wonders what it is keeping him tethered when it is obvious to everyone how high he can fly, the arch of his back near parabolic, symmetry suspended in mid-air. The graph without asymptotes, unanchored on the Cartesian plane, defying gravity. It goes against all the rules.
Gakuto lands lightly, looks over his shoulder and winks, his lashes resting like a dark smudge briefly on his fair cheek. Oshitari notes absently that even with tennis practice every day Gakuto doesn’t tan; another of the little mysteries of life that Oshitari has yet to figure out. The angle at which his chin is tilted is almost coquettish, but Oshitari knows that that’s just a thought from reading too many romance novels.
It doesn’t occur to him that Gakuto may have read some of them, sometime.
*
Oshitari isn’t used to being confused. It implies a lack of control of a given situation, which is ridiculous because he’s usually the only one who has things all figured out before they’ve even happened.
Maybe it’s symbolic that all the tennis balls are on his side of the court right now.
*
He watches Gakuto’s hair swing back and forth, a glossy curtain of cherry-red. He thinks of the curtains to a damsel’s boudoir, the sheen on a porcelain teacup rimmed with gold, fleetingly tastes burnt sugar and sake on his tongue.
He’s going insane and he doesn’t know why, the trees loom over him and make alternating stripes of light and shadow. If Gakuto were with him he would be jumping in a crazy zig-zag pattern, landing on every other stripe in some impossible acrobatic position that Oshitari will have to convert half his genes to a rubberband’s to contort into.
And it’s official that he’s lost his mind, now, because he is a science student and obviously rubberbands are not alive so they cannot have genes.
*
Everywhere he goes he sees Gakuto; there a girl with Gakuto’s haircut (though Gakuto looks a lot better with it, obviously), there a child with Gakuto’s height, there a shopkeeper with Gakuto’s eyes and hands, pale and small and delicate, nails the colour of the inside of a shell.
He buys something from the shopkeeper: a frivolous necklace with a violet stone in the pendant, just because he was wondering if she blinks rapidly and the one side of her mouth ticks up first the way Gakuto’s does when he really smiles.
She doesn’t, but he keeps the necklace anyway.
For Gakuto? the traitorous voice in his head whispers; he steadfastly ignores it. After all, if he can tune out Atobe’s long speeches about his own magnificence, Shishido’s histrionics, Ootori’s pining for Shishido, Jirou’s snoring, Kabaji’s Usu and Hiyoshi’s deranged-sounding mutterings, he can tune out anything.
Except, it appears, Gakuto himself.
*
Oshitari is fundamentally a scientist; which is why he doesn’t quite subscribe to the whole fate and astrology thing that most of Hyotei’s female population does.
But he still reads the horoscopes every day, because he is, after all, still a romantic at heart, and it is amusing to tell Atobe that his love life is going to suck for the week and watch him turn the colours of his favourite shirt (red, and various shades of purple)
They tell him that tonight, red Venus will appear, a sign of love.
He loses to Atobe 6-0 at practice, and bitterly reflects that the horoscope didn’t lie, only its timing was a bit off.
*
He’s having insomnia, he insists to himself, and that is the only reason why he is lying on the balcony floor gazing up at a night sky that is starless and empty, an unblemished black velvet shroud.
It’s bloody cold out here, and he can’t bear waiting any longer, so he pushes himself into a standing position -
- only to come face to face with one Mukahi Gakuto, who is holding a blanket and looking half-sheepish, half-angry at being caught in the act of actually bothering about him.
“What - ” Gakuto is the sort of boy who needs lots of sleep; it’s probably midnight and he’s still awake, which doesn’t bode well for tomorrow because Atobe will take their heads off if they mess up again, after the regional finals debacle.
Gakuto cuts him off abruptly.
“I brought it for you, idiot, but since you’re going back in there’s no point, is there?” He turns away, and Oshitari catches his breath because for a moment there Gakuto is almost childlike; the rondure of his cheek and the way his collarbone sticks out, almost painfully sharp, remind him that Gakuto is, after all, entitled to be vulnerable, too.
Oshitari doesn’t know how his brain makes the connection between Venus and red and love and stars and Gakuto’s hair, but make it it does; he catches Gakuto by the wrist, leans down and kisses him.
It’s a fairly unspectacular kiss, because there are no fireworks, and Gakuto isn’t some fluttery, yielding damsel and he gives as good as he gets, so his teeth scrape Oshitari’s lip and his hands are grasping Oshitari’s hair and it hurts. The way Oshitari’s glasses are being pressed into the bridge of his nose are sure to leave angry red dents, too, because Gakuto is getting the hang of this and suddenly kisses back with renewed vigour and aggression.
But Oshitari thinks it dead romantic anyway, like some modern interpretation of Romeo and Juliet only without the annoying relatives and the lousy communication technology.
Though that's just because they're standing on a balcony.
*
Gakuto is quite taken with the nickname Venus, God of Love (Oshitari doesn’t dare to tack on the -dess because the last person to cast aspersions on Gakuto’s masculinity ended up in a nursing home somewhere with a voice an octave or two higher, and he likes his voice and other parts of him right where they are, thank you very much); the other regulars are not, though.
Oshitari doesn’t really care, but he does send a nice thank-you letter to the horoscope writers.