sleepless: on this path
if the tone of this is funny, i blame being totally addicted to this song lately. *_*; tsuki by amano tsukiko. [and/or mediafire dl] the vocals are so pretty, and kinda haunting at times. ♥ (though regardless, i can't remember the point of this piece. xD; it was supposed to be a short bridge before hasshi's intro. but uh. obvs turned out not as short. oh well.)
sleepless: on this path
G; 2430w
*
Totsuka knocks twice at the door to the principal’s office with only a slight sense of foreboding. Johnny has called for him.
“Come in.”
He straightens his shoulders and enters the room (definitely a room more than an office), bowing at exactly the right angle with affected diffidence. Though he’s been to Johnny’s office twice before, and neither meeting had had pleasant initial outcomes, he’s past the age of fearing the old man. If anything, that slight, awe-filled trepidation has morphed over the years into something like unshakable respect. (All else aside, Johnny knows what he’s doing and knows it well.) “You asked after me, sir?”
“Totsuka-kun,” Johnny says, his chair turning slowly around behind his big, heavy desk like the larger-than-life boss he is. “How are you?”
Totsuka smiles. “I’m well, thank you. Sleepless is...” He wonders a moment what to say, realising that even Together like we’ve never been apart, and Gaining on Ruthless with no intention of stopping both fall short of the mark. He stays honest: “Sleepless is well.”
Johnny steeples his fingers, a mirroring smile on his face. “I’m glad to hear it, Totsuka-kun...”
“But Sleepness wasn’t what you called me here to ask after, was it?”
Johnny laughs. “Of course not, of course not. You’re here because I have something for you.” And here he inserts a suitably dramatic pause: “Another sacrifice.”
Totsuka can’t keep the surprise from his face-it’s not even dismay yet, just a feeling still incomprehensible. “I don’t...”
“You’ll have heard of him,” Johnny continues regardless. “Hashimoto Ryosuke, a washout from one of Mary’s ill-conceived experiments. I’ve said I will salvage him, and I want you to be the one to do it.”
“I don’t...” Totsuka finds himself tied at a rare loss for words. I don’t want another sacrifice, he wants to say, I’ve only ever wanted my own; but the sentence tangles in its inconceivability. How he could be given a second sacrifice in the first place is beyond his understanding. He tries again. “Kitayama-kun and I...”
Johnny just shakes his head, old smile still as gentle and thoroughly inexorable as ever. “You’re very well established by now, I know. A fine pair. But a strong, young thing like yourself should have more to his ambition than annihilating Ruthless.”
Totsuka stares with the warring thoughts in his head. There is more to his ambition than just a petty rivalry, so much more, but that Johnny is suggesting Kitayama is not enough for what should be is at once offensive and vaguely... terrifying.
“Recall if you will,” Johnny continues, “your time here alone. Before Sleepless. How it was. You know just how cruel young minds can be.” His smile now softens at the sides into a hint of pity that’s almost sadness. “He’s been through a lot, this child of Mary’s. She says her Zeroes do not feel pain, but I would beg to differ and I am sure you’ll see why when you meet him.”
“I... understand,” Totsuka says slowly, slowly feeling the leaden uncertainty in his chest sink lower, take root deeper. He knows a little of what the boy called Hashimoto has been through-there’s not many at the school who don’t. It evokes sympathy. “Still, would not Goseki-kun make a better-”
“A better what?” Johnny chuckles. From behind his fingers, his stare pins the air in Totsuka’s lungs. “A better mentor? A better sacrifice? Please, Totsuka-kun, think your arguments through.” And the topic returns to Hashimoto with easy irreverence: "Treat him as a blank, this boy. Power is halved when names are different, as you are aware, but at your respective levels I’m not expecting it to matter too much.”
Totsuka barely manages a nod, holding very still. Johnny, he reminds himself, has a certain dramatic manner of speaking when he gets on a roll, which shouldn’t necessarily mean anything or hurt at all. “Then...” Totsuka takes a deep breath and raises his eyes, discarding his excuses: “With all due respect, sir, I’d rather not.”
But Johnny only smiles. “I know, Totsuka-kun. But you’ll do it anyway.”
*
Back outside the office, a call to Kitayama (via the phone, like a normal person to a normal college student) just ends up in voicemail. “Let me know when you’re free~” Totsuka tells the recording, voice light. “It’s nothing urgent.” Because it isn’t. What will happen will happen and things will work out in the end, somehow and eventually.
He wanders back to their shared room, thinking about things and back to things, like ‘just how cruel young minds can be.’ Growing up in this secluded world of ‘truth’ being what you make it and ‘destiny’ being absolute, Totsuka is aware that the way he sees things is fundamentally skewed. Objectively. As with every other kid who’d arrived too young and impressionable. He’d been known as the spare for a good long while-defective-the one who had seemed to serve no purpose, who Destiny had seemed to have forgotten.
And why should any of his peers have thought otherwise? They hadn’t known any better, or seen any other way things should be. Neither had Totsuka himself until Kitayama’s arrival.
But Seven Voices has never been Kitayama's whole world. Though Totsuka knows he’s devoted himself to the school now, and Sleepless ranks among the highest of the Academy's undergraduate pairs, there are all those other people Kitayama still knows outside, places he goes, things he’s done and still does...
A whole other life.
Sometimes, he doesn’t come back to the dorms for twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours.
Whispers abound, but Totsuka understands. More than that, he's quite often grateful-appreciative of some time alone. When Kitayama doesn't return to him, Totsuka relishes the chance to just… enjoy his morning peacefully, among other things savouring the first light of the day without the sound of Kitayama's wretched alarm going off. (He doesn't know how sleep addicts do it, really. He'd go insane if noise had to wake him up every morning.)
He doesn't wonder where Kitayama's gone, or call to ask what he's doing, or who he's with (-who he's doing?). It's not that he doesn't care, it's just... in the end it doesn't really matter.
*
Kitayama calls back at ten to ten that night. “Hey, Tottsu.”
“Hiromitsu~”
There is no beating around the bush: “I won’t be making it back before curfew.”
Totsuka nods. “Staying out, then?” It happens occasionally-even ‘often.’ The staff don’t really check the older ones’ rooms anymore, so long as nothing and no one arrives or leaves during the lockdown hours.
“Want to come with me?”
Ah~ and this happens, too. Totsuka smiles. “It’s a school night, Hiromitsu.”
“You aren’t particularly aiming for college,” Kitayama points out. “And besides, I’m nearly at the gate.”
Totsuka tilts his head. “Nearly...?”
“Well, okay, not quite. I’m parked at the foot of the mountain. I was going to be back but there was an accident the way I went, so traffic was slow.”
“So you drove that far before realising you weren’t going to make it?”
“Pretty much.” Still, Kitayama doesn’t sound too put out. “So I was thinking, I could either crash at my mother’s, bunk at a capsule hotel and shell out for the porn channel, or get you to come with me.”
Scratching the first option from his mind, Totsuka turns amused. “Did you just call me your free porn channel, Hiromitsu?”
“What? No!” He’s laughing though. “You’re better than that.”
“If you’re trying to get me to prove it...”
“I could just ask, you know.”
“I know.”
“And so do I.” Kitayama chuckles. “So what do you say? We can go, I can show you the nightlife...”
Totsuka toes his socks against the carpet and considers asking how much Kitayama has had to drink, but says instead, “Hiromitsu, it’s not as if you’ve never taken me out before.”
The reply is prompt: “Every day is a new day,” Kitayama tells him, and Totsuka gives in at this change of tack with a smile.
“Alright.”
“Bus stop by the gate?”
“As usual,” Totsuka agrees. It's not particularly unsafe. The last bus would have gone past around four hours prior; the mountainside is going to be in all likelihood entirely deserted.
“Better run if you don’t want to get locked in,” Kitayama teases. In the background Totsuka hears him key the ignition.
“Please don’t speed, Hiromitsu.”
“I’ll be there when I get there,” Kitayama promises. “Wait for me.”
“I will.” Of course.
As he hangs up, Totsuka thinks really it’s not as if he’s ever done anything but.
*
Still, he is only half surprised (mostly pleased) when Kitayama hands him a plastic bag of appealing drinks and snacks as he gets in the passenger seat. “You knew I’d agree?”
“Aren’t you mostly agreeable?” Kitayama grins.
“I can be contrary sometimes.” The argument is for propriety’s sake.
“You’re agreeable to me.”
“Anybody would be, compared to Taisuke.”
Kitayama chuckles, pulling out of the bus bay. “True enough. But it’s not like we argue all the time, you know?”
“I know, I know,” Totsuka smiles. “Just most of the time.”
A comfortable silence hangs for a while as Kitayama guides his car smoothly around the mountain road. Upward, Totsuka notes, as opposed to back down. “Anyway,” Kitayama says at length, “You had something to tell me?”
“Right.” Totsuka had almost willfully forgot, as much as he should know by now that Kitayama thinks about these things more than anyone else. He shifts to sit on his hands, looking through the front windscreen. “Johnny gave us a second fighter.”
Kitayama’s response isn’t much of one, admittedly, for all Totsuka’s runaway thoughts of explosions and melodramatic disownings. He should’ve known better. (Well, his logical mind had; but his childish Inner Tottsu has never been much for commonsense). With one eyebrow just slightly raised, glancing briefly over, Kitayama says, “Gave you another fighter, you mean?”
Totsuka frowns, but mostly to himself. “Aren’t I Sleepless? Aren’t we one?” Again, a token protest.
Kitayama laughs lightly enough. “A fighter can’t have a fighter, Tottsu. That’s just a silly concept, even to me.”
“Hiromitsu...”
“So, who is it?” Nothing changes. Scarcely Kitayama’s tone of voice nor his hands on the wheel or the weight of his foot on the accelerator. Totsuka wonders if this is good or bad.
He answers neutrally enough: “Hashimoto Ryosuke.”
“Ah, that one. The overgrown kid. You call him Hasshi, right?”
Totsuka’s brow twitches into a slight frown he almost can’t help, but displays consciously. “You’re taking this rather well.” His remark comes a touch sharp in tone. He feels immature, unsure of how he should be dealing with it all. And Kitayama. But he should know.
“Shouldn’t that be my line?” Kitayama asks, innocently enough. Totsuka’s shoulders relax just slightly. It’s not the flippant Should I be jealous? that might’ve been expected, that might’ve annoyed Totsuka irrationally. Instead, Kitayama just gives a thin, sidelong glance and Totsuka thinks absently that his brown eyes are just as pretty-if not moreso-when narrowed in calculative thought, as when wide and exuberantly joyful. “I know it’s a big deal around these parts. Having just one fighter. Just one sacrifice.”
Totsuka bows a concession. “It is.”
Kitayama nods, almost practical in his report: “I know that. But I don’t feel it.” He touches a hand to his heart, his other steady as ever on the wheel. “I’m sorry if you were expecting something else, but...”
“You joined this cult too late to be brainwashed,” Totsuka supplies with a lopsided grin. He looks out over the mountainside forest that blurs past in the late-evening lack of light.
“Effectively, yeah,” Kitayama grins. “That’s the thing. I’ve thought about this.”
Totsuka shows a little surprise. “About us getting split up?”
“Effectively, yeah...” Kitayama laughs when Totsuka rolls his eyes. “Well, not permanently-more like... I don’t mind what you do with him. No no no, don’t take that the wrong way!” he hurries to assure, laughing, when Totsuka looks like he’s going to launch a superficial protest about pedophilia. “I just mean, a fighter and sacrifice have to be close. You’ll need to spend time with each other. I know that.”
“You know that,” Totsuka echoes.
“Because you taught me,” Kitayama says with a smile he knows Totsuka can’t resist.
And Totsuka says nothing, leaning his head back and sinking bonelessly into the passenger seat. “Did I now...” He feels the amusement rolling off Kitayama in waves, and beneath it a solid faith and unshakable confidence-everything attractive about Kitayama Hiromitsu under his skin. Totsuka closes his eyes and reaches out to the feeling, just listening to Kitayama’s voice as at length he forms words again.
“It’s just... you know, what I’ve thought is that we are the only two who bear this name...”
“We are,” Totsuka murmurs to prove he isn’t sleeping.
“And we aren’t Zeroes, who can be broken with any old separation spell...”
“We aren’t.”
Kitayama nods. “So we are the only ones who can make or break our name.”
“That’s true.”
“So, no matter who or what else is added to the equation...” There’s a pause, and Totsuka wonders briefly if Kitayama is searching for the right words. But it doesn’t feel like that is the case. Kitayama smiles. “It’s not that I don’t care, you know. It’s just that it doesn’t matter in the end.”
...in the end it doesn't really matter.
Totsuka almost wants to laugh, for a long half-moment, at himself and his own unfounded worries. He should have known, Destiny really had known her own business all along. And so too did the old man Johnny. As soon as a smile curves at his lips, he feels it reflect in Kitayama’s heart. He doesn’t look up. “Eyes on the road, Hiromitsu.”
And Kitayama laughs, a teasing, knowing edge to his tone. “Yes, Tottsu. Whatever you say.”
*
There’s not much at the summit, just a small carpark and a lookout. They’ve been there before. The closest thing to 'nightlife' around is a haze of fireflies by the way and Kitayama reclines his seat without hesitation, laying back. Intent on sleep.
“You need a convertible,” Totsuka decides, looking up at the roof. The stars beyond it are surely riveting.
“Want to sponsor me?”
Totsuka chuckles. “I’m sure somebody more practical would say a hacksaw costs less.”
“Nobody is taking a hacksaw to my car,” Kitayama says, a quiet rumble. "It's fine as it is."
His breathing evens out soon enough.
Turning to watch him sleep, his form barely an outline in the moonlight shadow, Totsuka thinks vaguely that Kitayama is probably right. And smiles to himself. Nothing needs changing at all.
sleepless: on this path
G; 2430w
*
Totsuka knocks twice at the door to the principal’s office with only a slight sense of foreboding. Johnny has called for him.
“Come in.”
He straightens his shoulders and enters the room (definitely a room more than an office), bowing at exactly the right angle with affected diffidence. Though he’s been to Johnny’s office twice before, and neither meeting had had pleasant initial outcomes, he’s past the age of fearing the old man. If anything, that slight, awe-filled trepidation has morphed over the years into something like unshakable respect. (All else aside, Johnny knows what he’s doing and knows it well.) “You asked after me, sir?”
“Totsuka-kun,” Johnny says, his chair turning slowly around behind his big, heavy desk like the larger-than-life boss he is. “How are you?”
Totsuka smiles. “I’m well, thank you. Sleepless is...” He wonders a moment what to say, realising that even Together like we’ve never been apart, and Gaining on Ruthless with no intention of stopping both fall short of the mark. He stays honest: “Sleepless is well.”
Johnny steeples his fingers, a mirroring smile on his face. “I’m glad to hear it, Totsuka-kun...”
“But Sleepness wasn’t what you called me here to ask after, was it?”
Johnny laughs. “Of course not, of course not. You’re here because I have something for you.” And here he inserts a suitably dramatic pause: “Another sacrifice.”
Totsuka can’t keep the surprise from his face-it’s not even dismay yet, just a feeling still incomprehensible. “I don’t...”
“You’ll have heard of him,” Johnny continues regardless. “Hashimoto Ryosuke, a washout from one of Mary’s ill-conceived experiments. I’ve said I will salvage him, and I want you to be the one to do it.”
“I don’t...” Totsuka finds himself tied at a rare loss for words. I don’t want another sacrifice, he wants to say, I’ve only ever wanted my own; but the sentence tangles in its inconceivability. How he could be given a second sacrifice in the first place is beyond his understanding. He tries again. “Kitayama-kun and I...”
Johnny just shakes his head, old smile still as gentle and thoroughly inexorable as ever. “You’re very well established by now, I know. A fine pair. But a strong, young thing like yourself should have more to his ambition than annihilating Ruthless.”
Totsuka stares with the warring thoughts in his head. There is more to his ambition than just a petty rivalry, so much more, but that Johnny is suggesting Kitayama is not enough for what should be is at once offensive and vaguely... terrifying.
“Recall if you will,” Johnny continues, “your time here alone. Before Sleepless. How it was. You know just how cruel young minds can be.” His smile now softens at the sides into a hint of pity that’s almost sadness. “He’s been through a lot, this child of Mary’s. She says her Zeroes do not feel pain, but I would beg to differ and I am sure you’ll see why when you meet him.”
“I... understand,” Totsuka says slowly, slowly feeling the leaden uncertainty in his chest sink lower, take root deeper. He knows a little of what the boy called Hashimoto has been through-there’s not many at the school who don’t. It evokes sympathy. “Still, would not Goseki-kun make a better-”
“A better what?” Johnny chuckles. From behind his fingers, his stare pins the air in Totsuka’s lungs. “A better mentor? A better sacrifice? Please, Totsuka-kun, think your arguments through.” And the topic returns to Hashimoto with easy irreverence: "Treat him as a blank, this boy. Power is halved when names are different, as you are aware, but at your respective levels I’m not expecting it to matter too much.”
Totsuka barely manages a nod, holding very still. Johnny, he reminds himself, has a certain dramatic manner of speaking when he gets on a roll, which shouldn’t necessarily mean anything or hurt at all. “Then...” Totsuka takes a deep breath and raises his eyes, discarding his excuses: “With all due respect, sir, I’d rather not.”
But Johnny only smiles. “I know, Totsuka-kun. But you’ll do it anyway.”
*
Back outside the office, a call to Kitayama (via the phone, like a normal person to a normal college student) just ends up in voicemail. “Let me know when you’re free~” Totsuka tells the recording, voice light. “It’s nothing urgent.” Because it isn’t. What will happen will happen and things will work out in the end, somehow and eventually.
He wanders back to their shared room, thinking about things and back to things, like ‘just how cruel young minds can be.’ Growing up in this secluded world of ‘truth’ being what you make it and ‘destiny’ being absolute, Totsuka is aware that the way he sees things is fundamentally skewed. Objectively. As with every other kid who’d arrived too young and impressionable. He’d been known as the spare for a good long while-defective-the one who had seemed to serve no purpose, who Destiny had seemed to have forgotten.
And why should any of his peers have thought otherwise? They hadn’t known any better, or seen any other way things should be. Neither had Totsuka himself until Kitayama’s arrival.
But Seven Voices has never been Kitayama's whole world. Though Totsuka knows he’s devoted himself to the school now, and Sleepless ranks among the highest of the Academy's undergraduate pairs, there are all those other people Kitayama still knows outside, places he goes, things he’s done and still does...
A whole other life.
Sometimes, he doesn’t come back to the dorms for twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours.
Whispers abound, but Totsuka understands. More than that, he's quite often grateful-appreciative of some time alone. When Kitayama doesn't return to him, Totsuka relishes the chance to just… enjoy his morning peacefully, among other things savouring the first light of the day without the sound of Kitayama's wretched alarm going off. (He doesn't know how sleep addicts do it, really. He'd go insane if noise had to wake him up every morning.)
He doesn't wonder where Kitayama's gone, or call to ask what he's doing, or who he's with (-who he's doing?). It's not that he doesn't care, it's just... in the end it doesn't really matter.
*
Kitayama calls back at ten to ten that night. “Hey, Tottsu.”
“Hiromitsu~”
There is no beating around the bush: “I won’t be making it back before curfew.”
Totsuka nods. “Staying out, then?” It happens occasionally-even ‘often.’ The staff don’t really check the older ones’ rooms anymore, so long as nothing and no one arrives or leaves during the lockdown hours.
“Want to come with me?”
Ah~ and this happens, too. Totsuka smiles. “It’s a school night, Hiromitsu.”
“You aren’t particularly aiming for college,” Kitayama points out. “And besides, I’m nearly at the gate.”
Totsuka tilts his head. “Nearly...?”
“Well, okay, not quite. I’m parked at the foot of the mountain. I was going to be back but there was an accident the way I went, so traffic was slow.”
“So you drove that far before realising you weren’t going to make it?”
“Pretty much.” Still, Kitayama doesn’t sound too put out. “So I was thinking, I could either crash at my mother’s, bunk at a capsule hotel and shell out for the porn channel, or get you to come with me.”
Scratching the first option from his mind, Totsuka turns amused. “Did you just call me your free porn channel, Hiromitsu?”
“What? No!” He’s laughing though. “You’re better than that.”
“If you’re trying to get me to prove it...”
“I could just ask, you know.”
“I know.”
“And so do I.” Kitayama chuckles. “So what do you say? We can go, I can show you the nightlife...”
Totsuka toes his socks against the carpet and considers asking how much Kitayama has had to drink, but says instead, “Hiromitsu, it’s not as if you’ve never taken me out before.”
The reply is prompt: “Every day is a new day,” Kitayama tells him, and Totsuka gives in at this change of tack with a smile.
“Alright.”
“Bus stop by the gate?”
“As usual,” Totsuka agrees. It's not particularly unsafe. The last bus would have gone past around four hours prior; the mountainside is going to be in all likelihood entirely deserted.
“Better run if you don’t want to get locked in,” Kitayama teases. In the background Totsuka hears him key the ignition.
“Please don’t speed, Hiromitsu.”
“I’ll be there when I get there,” Kitayama promises. “Wait for me.”
“I will.” Of course.
As he hangs up, Totsuka thinks really it’s not as if he’s ever done anything but.
*
Still, he is only half surprised (mostly pleased) when Kitayama hands him a plastic bag of appealing drinks and snacks as he gets in the passenger seat. “You knew I’d agree?”
“Aren’t you mostly agreeable?” Kitayama grins.
“I can be contrary sometimes.” The argument is for propriety’s sake.
“You’re agreeable to me.”
“Anybody would be, compared to Taisuke.”
Kitayama chuckles, pulling out of the bus bay. “True enough. But it’s not like we argue all the time, you know?”
“I know, I know,” Totsuka smiles. “Just most of the time.”
A comfortable silence hangs for a while as Kitayama guides his car smoothly around the mountain road. Upward, Totsuka notes, as opposed to back down. “Anyway,” Kitayama says at length, “You had something to tell me?”
“Right.” Totsuka had almost willfully forgot, as much as he should know by now that Kitayama thinks about these things more than anyone else. He shifts to sit on his hands, looking through the front windscreen. “Johnny gave us a second fighter.”
Kitayama’s response isn’t much of one, admittedly, for all Totsuka’s runaway thoughts of explosions and melodramatic disownings. He should’ve known better. (Well, his logical mind had; but his childish Inner Tottsu has never been much for commonsense). With one eyebrow just slightly raised, glancing briefly over, Kitayama says, “Gave you another fighter, you mean?”
Totsuka frowns, but mostly to himself. “Aren’t I Sleepless? Aren’t we one?” Again, a token protest.
Kitayama laughs lightly enough. “A fighter can’t have a fighter, Tottsu. That’s just a silly concept, even to me.”
“Hiromitsu...”
“So, who is it?” Nothing changes. Scarcely Kitayama’s tone of voice nor his hands on the wheel or the weight of his foot on the accelerator. Totsuka wonders if this is good or bad.
He answers neutrally enough: “Hashimoto Ryosuke.”
“Ah, that one. The overgrown kid. You call him Hasshi, right?”
Totsuka’s brow twitches into a slight frown he almost can’t help, but displays consciously. “You’re taking this rather well.” His remark comes a touch sharp in tone. He feels immature, unsure of how he should be dealing with it all. And Kitayama. But he should know.
“Shouldn’t that be my line?” Kitayama asks, innocently enough. Totsuka’s shoulders relax just slightly. It’s not the flippant Should I be jealous? that might’ve been expected, that might’ve annoyed Totsuka irrationally. Instead, Kitayama just gives a thin, sidelong glance and Totsuka thinks absently that his brown eyes are just as pretty-if not moreso-when narrowed in calculative thought, as when wide and exuberantly joyful. “I know it’s a big deal around these parts. Having just one fighter. Just one sacrifice.”
Totsuka bows a concession. “It is.”
Kitayama nods, almost practical in his report: “I know that. But I don’t feel it.” He touches a hand to his heart, his other steady as ever on the wheel. “I’m sorry if you were expecting something else, but...”
“You joined this cult too late to be brainwashed,” Totsuka supplies with a lopsided grin. He looks out over the mountainside forest that blurs past in the late-evening lack of light.
“Effectively, yeah,” Kitayama grins. “That’s the thing. I’ve thought about this.”
Totsuka shows a little surprise. “About us getting split up?”
“Effectively, yeah...” Kitayama laughs when Totsuka rolls his eyes. “Well, not permanently-more like... I don’t mind what you do with him. No no no, don’t take that the wrong way!” he hurries to assure, laughing, when Totsuka looks like he’s going to launch a superficial protest about pedophilia. “I just mean, a fighter and sacrifice have to be close. You’ll need to spend time with each other. I know that.”
“You know that,” Totsuka echoes.
“Because you taught me,” Kitayama says with a smile he knows Totsuka can’t resist.
And Totsuka says nothing, leaning his head back and sinking bonelessly into the passenger seat. “Did I now...” He feels the amusement rolling off Kitayama in waves, and beneath it a solid faith and unshakable confidence-everything attractive about Kitayama Hiromitsu under his skin. Totsuka closes his eyes and reaches out to the feeling, just listening to Kitayama’s voice as at length he forms words again.
“It’s just... you know, what I’ve thought is that we are the only two who bear this name...”
“We are,” Totsuka murmurs to prove he isn’t sleeping.
“And we aren’t Zeroes, who can be broken with any old separation spell...”
“We aren’t.”
Kitayama nods. “So we are the only ones who can make or break our name.”
“That’s true.”
“So, no matter who or what else is added to the equation...” There’s a pause, and Totsuka wonders briefly if Kitayama is searching for the right words. But it doesn’t feel like that is the case. Kitayama smiles. “It’s not that I don’t care, you know. It’s just that it doesn’t matter in the end.”
...in the end it doesn't really matter.
Totsuka almost wants to laugh, for a long half-moment, at himself and his own unfounded worries. He should have known, Destiny really had known her own business all along. And so too did the old man Johnny. As soon as a smile curves at his lips, he feels it reflect in Kitayama’s heart. He doesn’t look up. “Eyes on the road, Hiromitsu.”
And Kitayama laughs, a teasing, knowing edge to his tone. “Yes, Tottsu. Whatever you say.”
*
There’s not much at the summit, just a small carpark and a lookout. They’ve been there before. The closest thing to 'nightlife' around is a haze of fireflies by the way and Kitayama reclines his seat without hesitation, laying back. Intent on sleep.
“You need a convertible,” Totsuka decides, looking up at the roof. The stars beyond it are surely riveting.
“Want to sponsor me?”
Totsuka chuckles. “I’m sure somebody more practical would say a hacksaw costs less.”
“Nobody is taking a hacksaw to my car,” Kitayama says, a quiet rumble. "It's fine as it is."
His breathing evens out soon enough.
Turning to watch him sleep, his form barely an outline in the moonlight shadow, Totsuka thinks vaguely that Kitayama is probably right. And smiles to himself. Nothing needs changing at all.