an old fairy tale told me the simple heart will be prized again
all we are saying
Ohno Satoshi/Ninomiya Kazunari, Matsumoto Jun/Ninomiya Kazunari BFFery
AU. Jun explores his feminine side, Nino writes poetry, Aiba wants everyone to get along, Sho fails at life, Ohno doesn't.
PG
So much crack, IDEK.
Absolute fiction.
Notes: I apologise for this, I really do. I mean, its working title was 'IN WHICH JUN BECOMES A GIRL :D;;' and I wrote it in favour of ignoring all the papers I have to write for uni while listening to Upside Down (Bouncing Off the Ceiling) OH MY CHILDHOOD. In fact, I'm still listening to it now. DON'T JUDGE ME. Also, I don't think 'paperie' is an actual word. Sadly.
Crossposted to arashirabu
Jun calls three hours after his operation, just as Nino’s about to throw his typewriter off the building from writer's block.
“So,” Nino says, tucking his typewriter back under his arm. “Going bra shopping?”
“I’ve already procured a few pairs online from Victoria’s Secret,” Jun says. He proceeds to tell Nino about the gory details leading up to his breast augmentation.
“- and then,” he says, and Nino can hear him bristling over the phone. “He starts fondling my fucking implants.”
--
Jun gets home the next day. The first thing he does is pull his t-shirt up to reveal his chest.
Nino presses his palms to his cheeks.
“Holy oestrogen.”
Jun smirks.
--
The only reason Nino finds himself heading to the spiffy gourmet food store down their block at 8 a.m. in the morning is because Jun has a sudden craving for Spanish olives stuffed with Gorgonzola cheese, and threw a bitch fit about it.
“You’re becoming a woman. That does not mean you’re suddenly pregnant,” Nino had said.
Jun continued to brew his coffee and hummed Killer Queen under his breath.
“You’re going to get fat,” Nino had said.
Jun punched him in the arm hard enough to hurt.
“Ow.”
So, Nino curses under his breath as he makes his way back to their flat, clutching his typewriter in one arm and a brown paper bag of olives in another. He drops by the spiffy paperie (everything along their street is spiffy; it’s why Jun had okayed their flat on the spot) because he needs to get more ink ribbons for his typewriter. Not because Ohno’s working the morning shift today, no, not at all. The nerve.
The door swings open with the jingling of a bell overhead, as all spiffy shop doors do, and Nino makes a beeline for the counter, where Ohno’s currently messing with some paper. Ohno holds origami classes every Friday at the paperie. Nino never attends, partly because classes are expensive (Ohno, despite his outward appearance, is a crafty and crafty motherfucker) and also because seeing Ohno work those pretty hands for over an hour would lead to Jun complaining about the state of Nino’s sheets, since he’s the one who’s always doing the laundry, what the hell.
“Morning, Oh-chan,” Nino says, leaning too close over the counter.
Ohno lifts his head and smiles sleepily at him.
“What’cha folding?”
“Baby sloth,” Ohno says, and lifts it up for Nino to see. “I still like folding cranes best, though.”
Nino knows, because he knows almost everything about Ohno, from his favourite Hirai Ken song (Strawberry Sex) to the number of pairs of argyle socks he owns (four and a half).
Ohno sniffs the air for a bit, and perks up. “Are those olives,” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I do love olives.”
Nino thrusts the oil-soaked paper bag at him, a little too enthusiastically. “You can have them, then.”
Ohno smiles sweetly.
He rings up Nino’s purchases, and gives him the baby sloth he’d folded. Nino almost frowns. He’d been hoping that Ohno would give him some free typewriter ribbons as he was sometimes wont to do. But Ohno is special, as are his tiny paper creations, so Nino takes it happily and says, “Thank you,” like he means it.
--
As expected, Jun gives him hell when he gets home.
“Where are my olives,” he shouts.
Nino has the decency to look a tad apologetic, but still braces himself for a fight.
“Don’t yell at me,” he yells. “I gave up origami classes with Ohno for your sake, you know.”
It speaks volumes for their friendship that Jun only takes two seconds to process this information, understand it, and grudgingly concede.
--
Nino lugs his Underwood to work everyday, because he aims to stay true to his artistic integrity and not write with the spiffy new computers the company provides them with. Nino has an aversion to all things spiffy.
Sho is the only one at work who knows that Nino’s being intentionally difficult and pretentiously hippie with his attachment to his typewriter but doesn’t call him out on it. He writes for the business section of the newspaper, churning out pages full of economic jargon and complex graphs which he draws himself using Microsoft Office. All Nino writes is short stories and poems for the lifestyle section, which few people care for, and the occasional game review, which nobody really cares for.
Nino decides that his contribution to The Okinawan Gazette that week should be a poem dedicated to Jun, because he feels somewhat guilty about the olives.
“What’cha writing,” Sho pipes, peering over his cubicle.
“Poem for Jun,” Nino says, chewing on his lower lip with his fingers poised over his typewriter keys. Inspiration is about to strike him anytime now, he can feel it.
“Oh. Whatever for?”
Nino waves a hand in his general direction. “The Olive Incident.”
“Huh,” Sho says.
“Yep.”
Nino cracks his knuckles. Anytime now. Sho clucks his tongue disapprovingly.
“Well, I’ll be off now. I just submitted my article. Good evening,” he says, and slings his satchel over his shoulder just to have it slide off.
“Show-off,” Nino says.
--
Inspiration does not strike. Nino takes a coffee break and rings Aiba up for no good reason. Aiba listens to him with rapt attention as Nino describes Jun’s breast augmentation, gory details and all.
“- and then, the surgeon starts fondling his fucking -”
“NINOMIYA KAZUNARI, WHAT ARE YOU DOING,” Jun says very loudly.
Nino wrinkles his nose. “Is Jun there with you?”
“No,” Aiba says, sounding positively delighted. “He found a way to hack into our phone conversation! Our Jun-pon is so smart.”
Nino can feel Jun seething over the phone.
“WHY ARE YOU TELLING EVERYONE ABOUT MY BOOB JOB,” Jun seethes.
“Technically, you can’t call it a boob job because you never had breasts to begin with, I don’t think. The proper term is ‘augmentation mammaplasty’.”
“Oh, Sho-chan’s here at my flat, by the way,” Aiba then decides to announce.
“WHAT.”
“I put you guys on speaker!”
Jun makes a sound like a dying cat. Nino is enjoying himself immensely.
“Joy,” he says.
“Nino,” Sho warns.
“Go home, Sakurai,” someone says.
“You are such a cunt, Nino.”
“You wish you had a cunt.”
“You son of a -”
“Language!”
“Go home, Sakurai.”
“GUYS,” Aiba says. “LET’S GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.”
“SHUT UP, YOKO.”
“Actually, it was John Lennon who sang Give Peace A Chance, though one might understandably presume that it was Yoko Ono who sang it, since it was released as a single by the Plastic Ono Band in 1969 for -”
“YOU HAVEN’T GONE HOME YET?”
--
Nino’s sheets don’t get washed for the next week.
--
“It’s awfully short,” Taichi finally says after twenty minutes of silence, and Nino wonders not for the first time why Taichi was made senior editor of The Okinawan Gazette.
“It’s a haiku, Kokubun.”
“That’s Senior Editor Taichi to you, Ninomiya,” he bristles. “And do you really need a dedication for this whatchamacallit?”
“I do.”
Taichi looks at him doubtfully.
“I won’t take coffee breaks for the next week. Month.”
Taichi sighs.
--
(For Jun, who read my stories second but loved them first.)
I like you for what
You have in between your ears
Not between your legs.
--
Nino eats his warm rice and egg rolls slowly while Jun reads the papers and lingers too long at the lifestyle section. He tries to be quiet but finally sniffs too loudly for Nino to pretend that he can’t hear him.
“Man, it must suck to have to take those hormone pills,” Nino says gently. “I hope this won’t be a permanent thing. When you become a woman.”
Jun doesn’t say anything, but hiccoughs rather adorably.
--
That night, Jun cooks Wagyu steaks with the garlic butter sauce that Nino loves. While the sauce is simmering, he discreetly strips Nino’s bed and washes his sheets.
After dinner Nino breaks out their alcohol stash and mixes caipisakes and smoky martinis for them both. They lean against the wall and watch Spanish soap operas on Canal Uno (besides phone conversations, Jun is also rather gifted in tinkering with foreign television transmission).
They get sloshed.
Nino sips on his second mint julep against his better judgment. Jun mixes himself a Bloody Mary in a highball glass. He still has enough sense to make scathing comments about the couple writhing on leopard print and green velvet sheets on the TV.
“There is a difference, between Fashionably Gaudy and Revoltingly Lurid,” he sniffs.
“Preach it, sister,” Nino says.
Jun pelts him on the head with a lime.
“Ow.”
Nino is about two seconds away from becoming utterly and blissfully unconscious when Jun suddenly shoves himself into Nino’s face. Nino does not shriek.
“You want to bang him, don’t you? That crane machine of yours, from the paperie,” Jun says, all Tabasco-eyed and pepper-lipped. “You want to bang him, and get knocked up with his bulldozers and grapple trucks.”
Nino would like to point out that the crane machine in question has nothing to do with civil engineering but is of the origami variety, but he feels sated and happy, sprawled on the tatami mat. Jun’s exasperated smirk feels familiar and warm, just like the knowledge that Jun cuts and keeps all of Nino’s stories and articles in a cookie tin hidden in his dresser; that he cuts them all as neatly and as carefully as he did with the haiku, and what this says about how Jun feels about everything Nino’s ever written.
Nino goes to sleep.
--
Nino wakes up with a motherfucking bitch of a hangover.
He drags himself to the paperie, however. He needs more ribbons because he wasted them on several drafts of the goddamn haiku.
“I feel like dying,” he says.
Ohno smiles at him, like Nino turns up everyday with tatami imprints on his cheek and smelling of rubbing alcohol and vomit. He leans over the counter and kisses Nino on the cheek.
“Would you like some free ribbons,” he asks.
Nino clutches his typewriter shyly.
Ohno Satoshi/Ninomiya Kazunari, Matsumoto Jun/Ninomiya Kazunari BFFery
AU. Jun explores his feminine side, Nino writes poetry, Aiba wants everyone to get along, Sho fails at life, Ohno doesn't.
PG
So much crack, IDEK.
Absolute fiction.
Notes: I apologise for this, I really do. I mean, its working title was 'IN WHICH JUN BECOMES A GIRL :D;;' and I wrote it in favour of ignoring all the papers I have to write for uni while listening to Upside Down (Bouncing Off the Ceiling) OH MY CHILDHOOD. In fact, I'm still listening to it now. DON'T JUDGE ME. Also, I don't think 'paperie' is an actual word. Sadly.
Crossposted to arashirabu
Jun calls three hours after his operation, just as Nino’s about to throw his typewriter off the building from writer's block.
“So,” Nino says, tucking his typewriter back under his arm. “Going bra shopping?”
“I’ve already procured a few pairs online from Victoria’s Secret,” Jun says. He proceeds to tell Nino about the gory details leading up to his breast augmentation.
“- and then,” he says, and Nino can hear him bristling over the phone. “He starts fondling my fucking implants.”
--
Jun gets home the next day. The first thing he does is pull his t-shirt up to reveal his chest.
Nino presses his palms to his cheeks.
“Holy oestrogen.”
Jun smirks.
--
The only reason Nino finds himself heading to the spiffy gourmet food store down their block at 8 a.m. in the morning is because Jun has a sudden craving for Spanish olives stuffed with Gorgonzola cheese, and threw a bitch fit about it.
“You’re becoming a woman. That does not mean you’re suddenly pregnant,” Nino had said.
Jun continued to brew his coffee and hummed Killer Queen under his breath.
“You’re going to get fat,” Nino had said.
Jun punched him in the arm hard enough to hurt.
“Ow.”
So, Nino curses under his breath as he makes his way back to their flat, clutching his typewriter in one arm and a brown paper bag of olives in another. He drops by the spiffy paperie (everything along their street is spiffy; it’s why Jun had okayed their flat on the spot) because he needs to get more ink ribbons for his typewriter. Not because Ohno’s working the morning shift today, no, not at all. The nerve.
The door swings open with the jingling of a bell overhead, as all spiffy shop doors do, and Nino makes a beeline for the counter, where Ohno’s currently messing with some paper. Ohno holds origami classes every Friday at the paperie. Nino never attends, partly because classes are expensive (Ohno, despite his outward appearance, is a crafty and crafty motherfucker) and also because seeing Ohno work those pretty hands for over an hour would lead to Jun complaining about the state of Nino’s sheets, since he’s the one who’s always doing the laundry, what the hell.
“Morning, Oh-chan,” Nino says, leaning too close over the counter.
Ohno lifts his head and smiles sleepily at him.
“What’cha folding?”
“Baby sloth,” Ohno says, and lifts it up for Nino to see. “I still like folding cranes best, though.”
Nino knows, because he knows almost everything about Ohno, from his favourite Hirai Ken song (Strawberry Sex) to the number of pairs of argyle socks he owns (four and a half).
Ohno sniffs the air for a bit, and perks up. “Are those olives,” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I do love olives.”
Nino thrusts the oil-soaked paper bag at him, a little too enthusiastically. “You can have them, then.”
Ohno smiles sweetly.
He rings up Nino’s purchases, and gives him the baby sloth he’d folded. Nino almost frowns. He’d been hoping that Ohno would give him some free typewriter ribbons as he was sometimes wont to do. But Ohno is special, as are his tiny paper creations, so Nino takes it happily and says, “Thank you,” like he means it.
--
As expected, Jun gives him hell when he gets home.
“Where are my olives,” he shouts.
Nino has the decency to look a tad apologetic, but still braces himself for a fight.
“Don’t yell at me,” he yells. “I gave up origami classes with Ohno for your sake, you know.”
It speaks volumes for their friendship that Jun only takes two seconds to process this information, understand it, and grudgingly concede.
--
Nino lugs his Underwood to work everyday, because he aims to stay true to his artistic integrity and not write with the spiffy new computers the company provides them with. Nino has an aversion to all things spiffy.
Sho is the only one at work who knows that Nino’s being intentionally difficult and pretentiously hippie with his attachment to his typewriter but doesn’t call him out on it. He writes for the business section of the newspaper, churning out pages full of economic jargon and complex graphs which he draws himself using Microsoft Office. All Nino writes is short stories and poems for the lifestyle section, which few people care for, and the occasional game review, which nobody really cares for.
Nino decides that his contribution to The Okinawan Gazette that week should be a poem dedicated to Jun, because he feels somewhat guilty about the olives.
“What’cha writing,” Sho pipes, peering over his cubicle.
“Poem for Jun,” Nino says, chewing on his lower lip with his fingers poised over his typewriter keys. Inspiration is about to strike him anytime now, he can feel it.
“Oh. Whatever for?”
Nino waves a hand in his general direction. “The Olive Incident.”
“Huh,” Sho says.
“Yep.”
Nino cracks his knuckles. Anytime now. Sho clucks his tongue disapprovingly.
“Well, I’ll be off now. I just submitted my article. Good evening,” he says, and slings his satchel over his shoulder just to have it slide off.
“Show-off,” Nino says.
--
Inspiration does not strike. Nino takes a coffee break and rings Aiba up for no good reason. Aiba listens to him with rapt attention as Nino describes Jun’s breast augmentation, gory details and all.
“- and then, the surgeon starts fondling his fucking -”
“NINOMIYA KAZUNARI, WHAT ARE YOU DOING,” Jun says very loudly.
Nino wrinkles his nose. “Is Jun there with you?”
“No,” Aiba says, sounding positively delighted. “He found a way to hack into our phone conversation! Our Jun-pon is so smart.”
Nino can feel Jun seething over the phone.
“WHY ARE YOU TELLING EVERYONE ABOUT MY BOOB JOB,” Jun seethes.
“Technically, you can’t call it a boob job because you never had breasts to begin with, I don’t think. The proper term is ‘augmentation mammaplasty’.”
“Oh, Sho-chan’s here at my flat, by the way,” Aiba then decides to announce.
“WHAT.”
“I put you guys on speaker!”
Jun makes a sound like a dying cat. Nino is enjoying himself immensely.
“Joy,” he says.
“Nino,” Sho warns.
“Go home, Sakurai,” someone says.
“You are such a cunt, Nino.”
“You wish you had a cunt.”
“You son of a -”
“Language!”
“Go home, Sakurai.”
“GUYS,” Aiba says. “LET’S GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.”
“SHUT UP, YOKO.”
“Actually, it was John Lennon who sang Give Peace A Chance, though one might understandably presume that it was Yoko Ono who sang it, since it was released as a single by the Plastic Ono Band in 1969 for -”
“YOU HAVEN’T GONE HOME YET?”
--
Nino’s sheets don’t get washed for the next week.
--
“It’s awfully short,” Taichi finally says after twenty minutes of silence, and Nino wonders not for the first time why Taichi was made senior editor of The Okinawan Gazette.
“It’s a haiku, Kokubun.”
“That’s Senior Editor Taichi to you, Ninomiya,” he bristles. “And do you really need a dedication for this whatchamacallit?”
“I do.”
Taichi looks at him doubtfully.
“I won’t take coffee breaks for the next week. Month.”
Taichi sighs.
--
(For Jun, who read my stories second but loved them first.)
I like you for what
You have in between your ears
Not between your legs.
--
Nino eats his warm rice and egg rolls slowly while Jun reads the papers and lingers too long at the lifestyle section. He tries to be quiet but finally sniffs too loudly for Nino to pretend that he can’t hear him.
“Man, it must suck to have to take those hormone pills,” Nino says gently. “I hope this won’t be a permanent thing. When you become a woman.”
Jun doesn’t say anything, but hiccoughs rather adorably.
--
That night, Jun cooks Wagyu steaks with the garlic butter sauce that Nino loves. While the sauce is simmering, he discreetly strips Nino’s bed and washes his sheets.
After dinner Nino breaks out their alcohol stash and mixes caipisakes and smoky martinis for them both. They lean against the wall and watch Spanish soap operas on Canal Uno (besides phone conversations, Jun is also rather gifted in tinkering with foreign television transmission).
They get sloshed.
Nino sips on his second mint julep against his better judgment. Jun mixes himself a Bloody Mary in a highball glass. He still has enough sense to make scathing comments about the couple writhing on leopard print and green velvet sheets on the TV.
“There is a difference, between Fashionably Gaudy and Revoltingly Lurid,” he sniffs.
“Preach it, sister,” Nino says.
Jun pelts him on the head with a lime.
“Ow.”
Nino is about two seconds away from becoming utterly and blissfully unconscious when Jun suddenly shoves himself into Nino’s face. Nino does not shriek.
“You want to bang him, don’t you? That crane machine of yours, from the paperie,” Jun says, all Tabasco-eyed and pepper-lipped. “You want to bang him, and get knocked up with his bulldozers and grapple trucks.”
Nino would like to point out that the crane machine in question has nothing to do with civil engineering but is of the origami variety, but he feels sated and happy, sprawled on the tatami mat. Jun’s exasperated smirk feels familiar and warm, just like the knowledge that Jun cuts and keeps all of Nino’s stories and articles in a cookie tin hidden in his dresser; that he cuts them all as neatly and as carefully as he did with the haiku, and what this says about how Jun feels about everything Nino’s ever written.
Nino goes to sleep.
--
Nino wakes up with a motherfucking bitch of a hangover.
He drags himself to the paperie, however. He needs more ribbons because he wasted them on several drafts of the goddamn haiku.
“I feel like dying,” he says.
Ohno smiles at him, like Nino turns up everyday with tatami imprints on his cheek and smelling of rubbing alcohol and vomit. He leans over the counter and kisses Nino on the cheek.
“Would you like some free ribbons,” he asks.
Nino clutches his typewriter shyly.