Team Present, Prompt 5: I can't help to say it would be pink and gray
Title: All Roads Lead to Here
Pairing/Group: Yamapi/ Shige
Rating: R
Warnings: Non-linear story-telling, ‘Through the Looking Glass’ parallels.
Summary: Shige doesn’t know who he is without context, and where there used to be pink, all he sees is gray. Canon. 4.3k
Notes: it’s been a while ;)
--
The first time in almost a year leaves Shige feeling cold, and then it doesn’t.
It’s like the first words of a novel. They either catch you, or they don’t. This novel starts in media res, which Shige normally hates, but he’s pulled in before he can blink.
“If it isn’t Kato Shigeaki,” Yamapi says, dimpling like it hasn’t been eleven months, four album releases, and seven unreturned phone calls between this and their last conversation. Not that Shige is counting. “It’s been awhile.”
Shige considers four responses before he settles on one he likes.
“Who are you again?” he jokes, and Yamapi flinches. Shige, possibly, should have considered five or six responses, and settled on the seventh. Yamapi’s hair is getting long again, shaggy and high maintenance. Shige’s hair has gotten even shorter. “Yamapi, I didn’t mean-“
“Yeah, I know,” Yamapi says, and he flashes teeth. It’s a stage smile. Shige knows because there’s nothing in his eyes. Dead fish jokes are old news, though, and Shige is only doing things the ‘new NEWS’ way, these days. “Just joking, right?” His hair is shiny. His skin is really clear. Shige can see the pores in his nose.
Yamapi always looks a little bit perfect, even when Shige’s not sure how he feels about noticing. His v-neck tee is gray, stonewashed the same as the denim of his jeans.
“You don’t get to be mad at me,” Shige says, more bluntly than he would have said a year ago. “Buy me a drink.”
Shige had come with two friends but they don’t need to be entertained. Shige’s not playing host so much as wingman, and his services haven’t really been required.
“Okay,” Yamapi agrees, and Shige follows him over to the bar, and then he’s tripping and stumbling down the rabbit hole.
--
Koyama had once said ‘there’s no NEWS without Yamapi’, and everyone had laughed, but in a lot of ways, they had all thought it was true.
The good thing about Yamapi and Ryo leaving is that they’ve learned, honestly, that there was, is NEWS without Yamapi. There’s one of them to uphold each letter, and it’s enough.
The bad thing about Yamapi and Ryo’s leaving is that when Yamapi leaves, and it feels more like the cutting of a string, and NEWS is just a kite that’s been abandoned to buffeting seaside winds, in the gray sky of an oncoming storm.
(Fans reach up and grab that string though, and Shige is thankful for that in so many ways.)
((Shige is still feels adrift, for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with music and everything to do with how much he misses Yamapi’s smile.))
“No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise,” but Shige, in October 2011, is traveling alone and aimless on the other side of the looking glass, these days, looking at the real world through a distorted mirror.
--
Shige wakes up in sticky sheets, with sore thighs and a quickly beating heart. The sheets are cotton, and they’re not the thread count he likes.
Yamapi is sitting at the end of the bed in too-loose denim jeans, and it’s not fair that he looks good like this, with no makeup or stylists or effort at all.
Shige, as usual, feels inadequate; disheveled and sweaty and never quite so at ease in his own skin.
“We got kind of drunk last night,” Yamapi says, voice crackling with sleep, and Shige wants to laugh, because that only takes one beer for Yamapi before his face is flushing red and his words are slurring. “So I brought you home.”
“You brought me home,” Shige repeats, and he takes in the bedroom. There’s a black cowboy hat hanging on the wall, and two piles of books in English on the desk, and the sheets atop and underneath him are a dusty pink. “You have pink sheets.”
“I’ve always had pink sheets,” Yamapi says. “When I bought them, they were white, but something red got into the wash.” He’s not looking at Shige. He’s staring at a fixed point on the wall, and his lower lip is swollen. “I don’t like pink that much anymore.”
“I’ve never been here before,” Shige says. “So I wouldn’t know much about always. We don’t have that kind of relationship.”
Yamapi clears his throat. There are red bite marks along it. Shige isn’t wearing trousers. Shige isn’t wearing anything. “I guess you’re right,” he says, and Shige’s head aches as he tries to remember. “I don’t suppose you want breakfast.”
“Breakfast?” Yamapi’s never cooked for him before, either. He’s not sure how a Yamapi prepared [hyphenate Yamapi-prepared?] breakfast will turn out.
It’s a metaphor, Shige thinks, for just how much he’s not sure how anything with Yamapi will turn out. He never has been sure.
“Yeah,” Yamapi says, and he cards a hand through carefully layered hair that hasn’t been brushed, and yet still lies like he’s shooting a photo spread.
Shige is tired enough to believe six impossible things. After all, he has yet to have breakfast.
“Sure,” Shige says, and he’s thinks he hates Yamapi, a little.
--
It’s not the first time they’ve fucked. Nor is it the second, or the third.
Shige remembers another morning he’d woken up sticky and sore, like this, only it was in Shige’s apartment, and Shige had woken up alone.
Three days later, Yamapi had sat with Ryo across a table in a conference room on the third floor of the jimusho and said things were over, and Shige had done nothing, because Shige, at the time, was nothing. Yamapi had looked tired, dark circles under his eyes and dry skin around his mouth.
He’d looked out the window, and the sky had been gray.
“Just like that?” Koyama had said, and Shige had bit his lip hard enough to bleed.
“We’ll be fine, obviously,” Tegoshi sounded confident, but his foot had been tapping anxiously under the table. Massu had pressed a hand down on Tegoshi’s knee.
Shige had deleted Yamapi’s number from his phone.
Six missed calls, the still-remembered digits blinking ominously on the caller ID, and then silence.
--
Shige curls into himself sometimes and can’t quite find the way out. When that happens, it’s Keiichiro who drags him to the surface with a sly grin and clever prodding jokes. Shige thinks Koyama was born to be a leader, just like Tegoshi was born to be a singer and Massu was born to make people smile. Nishikido Ryo is a great singer, but Ryo was born to act.
Yamashita Tomohisa is not an exceptional singer or dancer or leader or actor, if Shige is honest, but Yamashita Tomohisa was born to be a star, and Shige tells himself that’s the reason he’s never been able to look away.
Shige’s not quite sure what he was born to be, yet, but he hopes one day to discover it. Until then, he searches inside himself and gets a little lost in the dark gray fog.
Lewis Carroll once said “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Shige has walked down many roads, and they all feel like the wrong direction. The only road that feels right is when he walks closer to Yamapi, because in Yamapi’s shadow no one can see that Shige’s compass is skewed.
“What are you looking for?” Kei asks, and Shige peers at him over his glasses. “When you drift off, looking like a shoujo manga heroine? What are you looking for?”
“Me,” Shige says. He thinks about a childhood of being bullied and an adolescence ignoring the holes that it left behind (and adding new ones.)
“You already know you,” Kei says. Shige doesn’t.
“You once said that NEWS is nothing without Yamapi. Do you still think so?”
Kei grins, like the Cheshire Cat. “What do you think?”
“NEWS is strong,” Shige replies, but NEWS is four people now, brave and certain.
Shige fears that it’s not NEWS that is nothing without Yamapi. He fears that instead, it is Shige, and that, somehow, is infinitely worse.
--
The first time Yamapi kissed Shige, it had left him flushed, lips parted and eyes round. “What?”
“Your hair looks dumb, now,” Yamapi had replied, but his cheeks had been pink, oh so pink, and Shige had recklessly curled a hand in Yamapi’s equally stupid hair and pulled him in to kiss him again. The polyester and vinyl of their costumes squeaked at the rub, and Yamapi had laughed into Shige’s mouth as Shige’s fingers became tacky with hairspray. “I ruined it.”
“Yamashita Pink,” Shige had said, licking his lips as they pulled apart, breathless, and he’d traced, with a disbelieving hand, the blush that descended from Yamapi’s sharp cheekbones, all the way down Yamapi’s neck.
“Yeah,” Yamapi said. “What’s it to you?”
He was shining so brightly it hurt Shige’s eyes.
Yamapi was the unpredictable queen of hearts, and Shige remained a white rose when Yamapi probably wanted nothing but red. In the end, Shige hoped they could compromise on pink.
Maybe, Shige had thought, this is who I am.
--
Koyashige have nothing without NEWS.
It’s not the first time he’s heard it, but it feels more true in October 2011.
--
The seventh unreturned call was from Shige to Yamapi in the beginning of February 2012. Shige calls at four in the morning and the phone rings and rings and rings.
”Read my book,” is what Shige would have said, if Yamapi had answered the phone. ”I bought your crappy single, so read my book.”
But Yamapi hadn’t answered the phone, and Shige had sat in front of the east-facing window of his apartment and waited for sunrise.
But the day was overcast, and even when light tentatively peeked through the clouds, the sky remained overcast and gray.
Shige hasn’t called again.
--
Yamapi sits with his legs spread too wide. He makes enough pancakes to feed an army, but he eats as much as an army, so Shige can understand the logic.
Shige likes logic. Logic is better than sitting in Yamapi’s apartment, at his kitchen table, searching for the right words to say. Logic is better than half-formed memories of last night, Yamapi’s lips sucking on Shige’s protruding hip bones, murmuring I missed you into Shige’s skin.
“Eat more,” Yamapi says. “You look too thin on TV.”
“Who are you to talk?” Shige replies, and his contacts burn in his eyes. He doesn’t have his glasses. His sweatshirt smells like beer. “Are we friends?”
Yamapi swallows and looks down at his plate. It’s pale pink plastic. So is Shige’s. “I don’t know,” Yamapi says. “I thought we were something other than that.”
‘Other than that’ can mean a lot of things. Shige’s not sure if it’s lovers or coworkers, but they’re neither of those.
“I thought you didn’t like pink anymore.” He takes another bite of his pancake. It’s sweeter than he likes. He’s breaking his diet. “I should go.”
“You don’t have to-“ Shige stands from the table and walks toward the door. He feels a bit dizzy.
“This chapter is over,” Shige says, and Yamapi follows him into the hall, muscles tight and mouth tighter. “You ended it and started a new one.”
Yamapi’s got the faint beginnings of stubble on his jaw. The muscle there is tight, like he’s gritting his teeth. Shige, a year ago, would have told Yamapi the dental dangers (--bruxism is a disorder, Yamapi, that can cause severe pain and a misaligned bite in the long term-- but instead he says nothing.
Being a know-it-all is a part of Shige that’s still loose on the seaside, or perhaps it’s buried under the weight of a lot of other things.
“People aren’t books,” Yamapi replies. “Maybe that’s why you’ve never understood them.”
This is the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Shige feels out of place; he’s not crazy enough to sit across from Yamapi and pretend to have figured anything out.
Shige closes the door. It’s not the first time he’s done that, either.
--
Yamapi has a way of touching Shige that makes him feel special. It’s almost the same way he looks at his fans; the way that makes them line up to buy his music even when they don’t like it, and stay up late to watch his dramas even when he’s not the star. It’s the charisma that makes him Johnny’s Golden Boy, and when Yamapi’s hands slide down Shige’s waist it’s like he’s rubbing off on him, and Shige can be golden for a little while, too.
Sometimes Shige’s not sure if it’s Yamapi he wants, or what Yampi represents. But Yamapi’s skin flushes a dull pink, and his eyes glimmer, and it’s the most beautiful thing Shige’s ever seen, every damn time, and he figures it doesn’t matter.
Under Yamapi’s gaze, as they slide together hot and slow, Shige thinks the whole world is a lovely shade of rose.
--
“It is genuinely disturbing,” Ryo says, when they meet by chance in March at a birthday party, “how transparent you are.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I read your book,” Ryo says, and Shige reaches up to loosen his tie. It’s a dull burnished silver, almost gray. He’s overdressed, as usual, and Ryo is underdressed, as usual. “You’re so hopeless.” It’s raining outside, too, and Ryo’s hair is wet. He’s got it pulled under a baseball cap, though, so Shige guesses he doesn’t care. “So slow.”
Shige licks his lips, and feels like he’s late. (so very late)
--
An eighth call, from an unrecognized number. “Hello?”
“Don’t hang up.”
“You changed your number,” Shige says, the words tumbling slow like syrup from his mouth.
“In January,” Yamapi replies. “When I got back from the US. You know I change it every couple of years.”
“You should stop giving your number to random French girls in bars,” Shige says. “Then you wouldn’t have to.”
“What do you know about my exploits with French girls?” Yamapi laughs, and Shige closes his eyes.
January. That’s before Shige had tried to call him on the old one.
“I’ve always been a fairly good reader.” Shige thinks the words sound sharper than he intends.
“Fair enough.”
He wonders if Yamapi would have answered, if he had dialed the right number. “Why are you calling?”
“To say ‘I’m sorry’,” Yamapi replies. His voice is hesitant, and it’s strange, because Yamapi has never been hesitant. Yamapi has been many things, but hesitant is not one of them. Yamapi has been a demanding brat his whole life, wrapping senpai and kouhai alike around his knotted fingers and pulling them along like puppets.
“Sorry for what?”
“Yesterday morning,” Yamapi says. “The book thing.”
“Not anything else?”
Yamapi is quiet. “What else is there?”
Leaving me, Shige thinks, but Yamapi never left him. Shige had pushed him away.
(It’s hard to admit this, sometimes, because it’s easier if Shige pretends Yamapi abandoned him. Far easier to pretend that than to acknowledge that Shige had never liked himself enough to think someone else might actually want him.)
“Do you want to get dinner?” Shige asks, and Yamapi’s breath catches in his throat. Shige can hear it through the phone. Yamapi’s voice is always nasal, but it’s thinner than usual when he responds.
“Yeah,” Yamapi says. “Yeah.”
--
Yamashita Tomohisa is so very sure. “I want to do this,” he says, and then he does it. “I want to go there,” he says, and then he goes.
Shige’s wants are all tangled up in can’ts and won’ts, and the knowledge of that eats him up inside sometimes.
--
”It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” said the White Queen to Alice, and like Alice, Shige can sometimes only live in yesterdays. He swears they were pink when they happened, but now they are a faded gray in the recesses of his mind, and when he takes the recollections out to look at them carefully, when he’s alone, the pink of Yamapi’s lips and the sweetness of his tongue as it curled around Shige’s feels painfully distant.
--
Shige had been jealous of Yamapi, once upon a time. Jealous of the way Yamapi carried himself. Jealous of the way he found his place so easily while Shige casted around for an empty spot to fill.
But then Yamapi had pulled Shige into his web. “I like you,” Yamapi had said. “So smart.” Yamapi grinned. “I’ll know a lawyer, some day. Will you get me out of trouble?”
“Not if you deserve to be in trouble,” Shige had said, and Yamapi had laughed, and Shige had fallen in love with that laugh.
Shige’s changed a lot since then. So has Yamapi, Shige thinks. In the eleven months of silence, Yamapi has only grown more mysterious.
He wonders sometimes, absently, if he’s still jealous of Yamapi, or if he’s just resentful that the distance between them professionally echoes the distance between them personally.
That distance, in Shige’s mind, is compounded by the high gray walls Shige erects around moments of absolute joy that he knows he can’t forget.
--
“I’d prefer to be called Tomo,” Yamapi says, his face grainy on Shige’s mother’s guest room television, and Shige wonders if it’s Yamapi’s turn to wonder who he is. Shige can’t help but feel validated that he isn’t alone in being lost.
--
Yamapi ‘s lips brushed Shige’s ear. “Why so sad?”
“I don’t know what I’m good at.” It had sounded whiny and pathetic when he had said it aloud. “Yet.”
“Kissing,” Yamapi had replied, and sucked Shige’s lower lip into his mouth, and Shige had believed him.
--
“If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things.”
Shige doesn’t believe much these days. He’s seen people come and go.
Akanishi is the latest casualty of the system, although Shige thinks Akanishi became a casualty years ago.
He hopes Yamapi isn’t next, with the way they tread so deep into each others’ footsteps.
Selfishly, it’s because Shige thinks the only thing harder than loving a star is watching that star fall.
The sky is gray enough without losing that last bit of brightness.
--
When Shige was nine, he’d been shoved back into the mud by bullies so many times he began to welcome it.
Being shunted in as a member of NEWS is sort of like that, only there’s a lot more makeup and much higher stakes.
“It’s like KKKitty,” Kei says, “only we get to debut.”
“Yes,” Shige agrees, and the first time they’re all together he looks at Nishikido and Yamapi and Kusano, with their fans and their confidence and their talents, and feels inadequate.
--
Shige creates an imaginary cat. He knows Wagahai better than he knows himself.
--
“The reason you irritate me is because you keep throwing yourself pity parties,” Nishikido says to him one day, when they’re getting ready to film an acoustic set. It’ll be released as a special. They’re performing four songs. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
Shige swallows as Kei nudges him comfortingly with an elbow.
“Well,” Nishikido says, “there are your eyebrows, but those are almost so wrong they’re right.”
In front of Nishikido, he feels shrunken down, like he’s the smallest he’ll ever be. Perhaps that’s why he fits through the tiny door in front of him, and on the other side of it, he finds a lot of things he never expected.
--
“In your own time is okay,” Yamapi says to him, later. “You’ll figure it out in your own time.” Yamapi isn’t a great leader, but Shige follows him anyway, because he’s not sure where else to go.
It doesn’t seem possible that any road is the right one, when all of them seem wrong.
--
“I wanted to be you, once,” Shige tells Yamapi over dinner. Yamapi is dressed in a soft looking sweatshirt, and there’s a knit cap pulled down over his ears.
Yamapi furrows his brows. “I like you, though.” Yamapi clears his throat, and sets down his chopsticks. “I like Shigeaki the way he is.” Yamapi’s lips curl. “Whether he’s using kanji or katakana to spell it.”
“You know about that?”
“I’m a fairly good reader,” Yamapi says, and feels the corners of his mouth lift in a genuine smile.
Yamapi is so bright, and the light of him feels nice across Shige’s eyelids.
The pink lettering on Yamapi’s sweatshirt is familiar. The good kind of familiar.
“And now?”
“Now,” Shige says, “I want to be me.”
--
Shige writes a book because he can’t stop himself. He creates Daiki and Shingo, and gives them a friendship that echoes. He pours insecurities and secret thoughts he will never be able to say aloud into his manuscript and when it’s finished, he closes his laptop with finality and crawls into his bed to sleep for three days.
“I finished my book,” he tells Kei, and Kei blinks at him in surprise.
“Already?”
“I’m never going to look at it again,” Shige swears, only that night he does, and the feelings come rushing back.
Only he does, and in the words spilled out like an overturned mug of coffee, he finds himself.
In Daiki and Shingo, he finds his own insecurities weaved in among the longing, and Shige wonders if the reason everything has looked so gray is because he’s closed his eyes to all the pink.
Relationships are complex, and the most complicated relationship in Shige’s life is the one he has with himself.
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Shige submits his book to an agent, and when it’s accepted, he feels like he’s running the fastest he’s ever run in his life, and it finally feels fast enough.
Shige is exactly on time.
--
It would not be so bad, Shige thinks, to sit down at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
--
“I left for a lot of reasons,” Yamapi whispers into Shige’s stomach, his lips soft on the sensitive skin. He’s hazy and languid with pleasure as Yamapi’s fingers find all the places he’s always known. Maybe, between them, there is an always, after all. “But-“
“That’s all right,” Shige says. “I left for a lot of reasons, too.”
10,000 character interviews and writing a novel and finding the things about himself that are worth something. Holding up one of NEWS’s four letters. Buffeting in the wind as he attempts to anchor himself into something that isn’t Yamapi’s shadow.
“But you’ve come back,” Yamapi says, and then licks and bites at the pulse point of Shige’s neck, leaving behind what is undoubtedly a blotch of pink skin in his wake. “I lied.” He laughs. “I think I still like pink after all.”
--
Shige will never be Yamashita Tomohisa. That’s all right, though, because one Yamashita Tomohisa, just one Yamashita Pink, is more than enough, and Shige’s got him right here next to him, their heads curled together as they stare out the window of Yamapi’s apartment and out toward the street below. It’s minutes to sunrise.
Shige is Shige, and that’s enough. Yamapi seems to think so too. Maybe he always has, and it is only Shige who had found himself lacking.
“A novelist,” Yamapi muses. “Better or worse than a French model?”
“Did you ever read my book?” Shige asks, and Yamapi’s lips twitch, light brown hair falling into his eyes as he turns to regard Shige with bright eyes.
“Of course,” Yamapi says, and he squeezes Shige’s hand in his own. “Of course I did.” Shige swallows and blinks to clear a suddenly hazy gaze.
“And?” He keeps his tone light, and Yamapi laughs, the same way he laughs when Akanishi says something monumentally stupid, or when Tegoshi sidles up to him with that childlike expression that means he wants something. “Don’t laugh at me like that.”
Yamapi doesn’t listen, though. Instead, he leans sideways and presses a sloppy kiss to the side of Shige’s mouth, too wet to be delicate, and Shige grimaces. “It was melodramatic,” Yamapi says. “More Takeuchi Naoko than Murakami Haruki.”
“Shut up,” Shige mutters. “No one writes like Murakami, anyway.”
“Hey, Shige?” Yamapi asks, and he’s still too close, breath hot on Shige’s ear and cheek. His thumb rubs slow circles into the patch of skin between Shige’s thumb and forefinger, where his pen rests when he’s writing.
“Yeah?”
“You want to go see the fireworks sometime?” Daiki and Shingo go to see the fireworks together. Before things go wrong. Before they’re separated. This is Yamapi pulling Shige close. This is Yamapi asking Shige if it’s all right now, between them.
(Now that Shige knows who he is without Yamapi, it is time to figure out who he is with Yamapi, all over again.)
“My next book will be better,” Shige says, and Yamapi grins at him, smile stretching across his whole face.
“What are you going to write about?”
“People who have figured things out, falling back together,” Shige says, and Yamapi pauses, and licks at his lips.
“That does sound better,” he says, after a long pause, and then he takes Shige’s face between both his hands and kisses him.
Everything, in Shige’s half-lidded gaze, is pink. It’s the sunrise, he knows, just casting its glow, but it is also a metaphor.
Poll Team Present Prompt 5
Pairing/Group: Yamapi/ Shige
Rating: R
Warnings: Non-linear story-telling, ‘Through the Looking Glass’ parallels.
Summary: Shige doesn’t know who he is without context, and where there used to be pink, all he sees is gray. Canon. 4.3k
Notes: it’s been a while ;)
--
The first time in almost a year leaves Shige feeling cold, and then it doesn’t.
It’s like the first words of a novel. They either catch you, or they don’t. This novel starts in media res, which Shige normally hates, but he’s pulled in before he can blink.
“If it isn’t Kato Shigeaki,” Yamapi says, dimpling like it hasn’t been eleven months, four album releases, and seven unreturned phone calls between this and their last conversation. Not that Shige is counting. “It’s been awhile.”
Shige considers four responses before he settles on one he likes.
“Who are you again?” he jokes, and Yamapi flinches. Shige, possibly, should have considered five or six responses, and settled on the seventh. Yamapi’s hair is getting long again, shaggy and high maintenance. Shige’s hair has gotten even shorter. “Yamapi, I didn’t mean-“
“Yeah, I know,” Yamapi says, and he flashes teeth. It’s a stage smile. Shige knows because there’s nothing in his eyes. Dead fish jokes are old news, though, and Shige is only doing things the ‘new NEWS’ way, these days. “Just joking, right?” His hair is shiny. His skin is really clear. Shige can see the pores in his nose.
Yamapi always looks a little bit perfect, even when Shige’s not sure how he feels about noticing. His v-neck tee is gray, stonewashed the same as the denim of his jeans.
“You don’t get to be mad at me,” Shige says, more bluntly than he would have said a year ago. “Buy me a drink.”
Shige had come with two friends but they don’t need to be entertained. Shige’s not playing host so much as wingman, and his services haven’t really been required.
“Okay,” Yamapi agrees, and Shige follows him over to the bar, and then he’s tripping and stumbling down the rabbit hole.
--
Koyama had once said ‘there’s no NEWS without Yamapi’, and everyone had laughed, but in a lot of ways, they had all thought it was true.
The good thing about Yamapi and Ryo leaving is that they’ve learned, honestly, that there was, is NEWS without Yamapi. There’s one of them to uphold each letter, and it’s enough.
The bad thing about Yamapi and Ryo’s leaving is that when Yamapi leaves, and it feels more like the cutting of a string, and NEWS is just a kite that’s been abandoned to buffeting seaside winds, in the gray sky of an oncoming storm.
(Fans reach up and grab that string though, and Shige is thankful for that in so many ways.)
((Shige is still feels adrift, for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with music and everything to do with how much he misses Yamapi’s smile.))
“No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise,” but Shige, in October 2011, is traveling alone and aimless on the other side of the looking glass, these days, looking at the real world through a distorted mirror.
--
Shige wakes up in sticky sheets, with sore thighs and a quickly beating heart. The sheets are cotton, and they’re not the thread count he likes.
Yamapi is sitting at the end of the bed in too-loose denim jeans, and it’s not fair that he looks good like this, with no makeup or stylists or effort at all.
Shige, as usual, feels inadequate; disheveled and sweaty and never quite so at ease in his own skin.
“We got kind of drunk last night,” Yamapi says, voice crackling with sleep, and Shige wants to laugh, because that only takes one beer for Yamapi before his face is flushing red and his words are slurring. “So I brought you home.”
“You brought me home,” Shige repeats, and he takes in the bedroom. There’s a black cowboy hat hanging on the wall, and two piles of books in English on the desk, and the sheets atop and underneath him are a dusty pink. “You have pink sheets.”
“I’ve always had pink sheets,” Yamapi says. “When I bought them, they were white, but something red got into the wash.” He’s not looking at Shige. He’s staring at a fixed point on the wall, and his lower lip is swollen. “I don’t like pink that much anymore.”
“I’ve never been here before,” Shige says. “So I wouldn’t know much about always. We don’t have that kind of relationship.”
Yamapi clears his throat. There are red bite marks along it. Shige isn’t wearing trousers. Shige isn’t wearing anything. “I guess you’re right,” he says, and Shige’s head aches as he tries to remember. “I don’t suppose you want breakfast.”
“Breakfast?” Yamapi’s never cooked for him before, either. He’s not sure how a Yamapi prepared [hyphenate Yamapi-prepared?] breakfast will turn out.
It’s a metaphor, Shige thinks, for just how much he’s not sure how anything with Yamapi will turn out. He never has been sure.
“Yeah,” Yamapi says, and he cards a hand through carefully layered hair that hasn’t been brushed, and yet still lies like he’s shooting a photo spread.
Shige is tired enough to believe six impossible things. After all, he has yet to have breakfast.
“Sure,” Shige says, and he’s thinks he hates Yamapi, a little.
--
It’s not the first time they’ve fucked. Nor is it the second, or the third.
Shige remembers another morning he’d woken up sticky and sore, like this, only it was in Shige’s apartment, and Shige had woken up alone.
Three days later, Yamapi had sat with Ryo across a table in a conference room on the third floor of the jimusho and said things were over, and Shige had done nothing, because Shige, at the time, was nothing. Yamapi had looked tired, dark circles under his eyes and dry skin around his mouth.
He’d looked out the window, and the sky had been gray.
“Just like that?” Koyama had said, and Shige had bit his lip hard enough to bleed.
“We’ll be fine, obviously,” Tegoshi sounded confident, but his foot had been tapping anxiously under the table. Massu had pressed a hand down on Tegoshi’s knee.
Shige had deleted Yamapi’s number from his phone.
Six missed calls, the still-remembered digits blinking ominously on the caller ID, and then silence.
--
Shige curls into himself sometimes and can’t quite find the way out. When that happens, it’s Keiichiro who drags him to the surface with a sly grin and clever prodding jokes. Shige thinks Koyama was born to be a leader, just like Tegoshi was born to be a singer and Massu was born to make people smile. Nishikido Ryo is a great singer, but Ryo was born to act.
Yamashita Tomohisa is not an exceptional singer or dancer or leader or actor, if Shige is honest, but Yamashita Tomohisa was born to be a star, and Shige tells himself that’s the reason he’s never been able to look away.
Shige’s not quite sure what he was born to be, yet, but he hopes one day to discover it. Until then, he searches inside himself and gets a little lost in the dark gray fog.
Lewis Carroll once said “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Shige has walked down many roads, and they all feel like the wrong direction. The only road that feels right is when he walks closer to Yamapi, because in Yamapi’s shadow no one can see that Shige’s compass is skewed.
“What are you looking for?” Kei asks, and Shige peers at him over his glasses. “When you drift off, looking like a shoujo manga heroine? What are you looking for?”
“Me,” Shige says. He thinks about a childhood of being bullied and an adolescence ignoring the holes that it left behind (and adding new ones.)
“You already know you,” Kei says. Shige doesn’t.
“You once said that NEWS is nothing without Yamapi. Do you still think so?”
Kei grins, like the Cheshire Cat. “What do you think?”
“NEWS is strong,” Shige replies, but NEWS is four people now, brave and certain.
Shige fears that it’s not NEWS that is nothing without Yamapi. He fears that instead, it is Shige, and that, somehow, is infinitely worse.
--
The first time Yamapi kissed Shige, it had left him flushed, lips parted and eyes round. “What?”
“Your hair looks dumb, now,” Yamapi had replied, but his cheeks had been pink, oh so pink, and Shige had recklessly curled a hand in Yamapi’s equally stupid hair and pulled him in to kiss him again. The polyester and vinyl of their costumes squeaked at the rub, and Yamapi had laughed into Shige’s mouth as Shige’s fingers became tacky with hairspray. “I ruined it.”
“Yamashita Pink,” Shige had said, licking his lips as they pulled apart, breathless, and he’d traced, with a disbelieving hand, the blush that descended from Yamapi’s sharp cheekbones, all the way down Yamapi’s neck.
“Yeah,” Yamapi said. “What’s it to you?”
He was shining so brightly it hurt Shige’s eyes.
Yamapi was the unpredictable queen of hearts, and Shige remained a white rose when Yamapi probably wanted nothing but red. In the end, Shige hoped they could compromise on pink.
Maybe, Shige had thought, this is who I am.
--
Koyashige have nothing without NEWS.
It’s not the first time he’s heard it, but it feels more true in October 2011.
--
The seventh unreturned call was from Shige to Yamapi in the beginning of February 2012. Shige calls at four in the morning and the phone rings and rings and rings.
”Read my book,” is what Shige would have said, if Yamapi had answered the phone. ”I bought your crappy single, so read my book.”
But Yamapi hadn’t answered the phone, and Shige had sat in front of the east-facing window of his apartment and waited for sunrise.
But the day was overcast, and even when light tentatively peeked through the clouds, the sky remained overcast and gray.
Shige hasn’t called again.
--
Yamapi sits with his legs spread too wide. He makes enough pancakes to feed an army, but he eats as much as an army, so Shige can understand the logic.
Shige likes logic. Logic is better than sitting in Yamapi’s apartment, at his kitchen table, searching for the right words to say. Logic is better than half-formed memories of last night, Yamapi’s lips sucking on Shige’s protruding hip bones, murmuring I missed you into Shige’s skin.
“Eat more,” Yamapi says. “You look too thin on TV.”
“Who are you to talk?” Shige replies, and his contacts burn in his eyes. He doesn’t have his glasses. His sweatshirt smells like beer. “Are we friends?”
Yamapi swallows and looks down at his plate. It’s pale pink plastic. So is Shige’s. “I don’t know,” Yamapi says. “I thought we were something other than that.”
‘Other than that’ can mean a lot of things. Shige’s not sure if it’s lovers or coworkers, but they’re neither of those.
“I thought you didn’t like pink anymore.” He takes another bite of his pancake. It’s sweeter than he likes. He’s breaking his diet. “I should go.”
“You don’t have to-“ Shige stands from the table and walks toward the door. He feels a bit dizzy.
“This chapter is over,” Shige says, and Yamapi follows him into the hall, muscles tight and mouth tighter. “You ended it and started a new one.”
Yamapi’s got the faint beginnings of stubble on his jaw. The muscle there is tight, like he’s gritting his teeth. Shige, a year ago, would have told Yamapi the dental dangers (--bruxism is a disorder, Yamapi, that can cause severe pain and a misaligned bite in the long term-- but instead he says nothing.
Being a know-it-all is a part of Shige that’s still loose on the seaside, or perhaps it’s buried under the weight of a lot of other things.
“People aren’t books,” Yamapi replies. “Maybe that’s why you’ve never understood them.”
This is the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Shige feels out of place; he’s not crazy enough to sit across from Yamapi and pretend to have figured anything out.
Shige closes the door. It’s not the first time he’s done that, either.
--
Yamapi has a way of touching Shige that makes him feel special. It’s almost the same way he looks at his fans; the way that makes them line up to buy his music even when they don’t like it, and stay up late to watch his dramas even when he’s not the star. It’s the charisma that makes him Johnny’s Golden Boy, and when Yamapi’s hands slide down Shige’s waist it’s like he’s rubbing off on him, and Shige can be golden for a little while, too.
Sometimes Shige’s not sure if it’s Yamapi he wants, or what Yampi represents. But Yamapi’s skin flushes a dull pink, and his eyes glimmer, and it’s the most beautiful thing Shige’s ever seen, every damn time, and he figures it doesn’t matter.
Under Yamapi’s gaze, as they slide together hot and slow, Shige thinks the whole world is a lovely shade of rose.
--
“It is genuinely disturbing,” Ryo says, when they meet by chance in March at a birthday party, “how transparent you are.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I read your book,” Ryo says, and Shige reaches up to loosen his tie. It’s a dull burnished silver, almost gray. He’s overdressed, as usual, and Ryo is underdressed, as usual. “You’re so hopeless.” It’s raining outside, too, and Ryo’s hair is wet. He’s got it pulled under a baseball cap, though, so Shige guesses he doesn’t care. “So slow.”
Shige licks his lips, and feels like he’s late. (so very late)
--
An eighth call, from an unrecognized number. “Hello?”
“Don’t hang up.”
“You changed your number,” Shige says, the words tumbling slow like syrup from his mouth.
“In January,” Yamapi replies. “When I got back from the US. You know I change it every couple of years.”
“You should stop giving your number to random French girls in bars,” Shige says. “Then you wouldn’t have to.”
“What do you know about my exploits with French girls?” Yamapi laughs, and Shige closes his eyes.
January. That’s before Shige had tried to call him on the old one.
“I’ve always been a fairly good reader.” Shige thinks the words sound sharper than he intends.
“Fair enough.”
He wonders if Yamapi would have answered, if he had dialed the right number. “Why are you calling?”
“To say ‘I’m sorry’,” Yamapi replies. His voice is hesitant, and it’s strange, because Yamapi has never been hesitant. Yamapi has been many things, but hesitant is not one of them. Yamapi has been a demanding brat his whole life, wrapping senpai and kouhai alike around his knotted fingers and pulling them along like puppets.
“Sorry for what?”
“Yesterday morning,” Yamapi says. “The book thing.”
“Not anything else?”
Yamapi is quiet. “What else is there?”
Leaving me, Shige thinks, but Yamapi never left him. Shige had pushed him away.
(It’s hard to admit this, sometimes, because it’s easier if Shige pretends Yamapi abandoned him. Far easier to pretend that than to acknowledge that Shige had never liked himself enough to think someone else might actually want him.)
“Do you want to get dinner?” Shige asks, and Yamapi’s breath catches in his throat. Shige can hear it through the phone. Yamapi’s voice is always nasal, but it’s thinner than usual when he responds.
“Yeah,” Yamapi says. “Yeah.”
--
Yamashita Tomohisa is so very sure. “I want to do this,” he says, and then he does it. “I want to go there,” he says, and then he goes.
Shige’s wants are all tangled up in can’ts and won’ts, and the knowledge of that eats him up inside sometimes.
--
”It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” said the White Queen to Alice, and like Alice, Shige can sometimes only live in yesterdays. He swears they were pink when they happened, but now they are a faded gray in the recesses of his mind, and when he takes the recollections out to look at them carefully, when he’s alone, the pink of Yamapi’s lips and the sweetness of his tongue as it curled around Shige’s feels painfully distant.
--
Shige had been jealous of Yamapi, once upon a time. Jealous of the way Yamapi carried himself. Jealous of the way he found his place so easily while Shige casted around for an empty spot to fill.
But then Yamapi had pulled Shige into his web. “I like you,” Yamapi had said. “So smart.” Yamapi grinned. “I’ll know a lawyer, some day. Will you get me out of trouble?”
“Not if you deserve to be in trouble,” Shige had said, and Yamapi had laughed, and Shige had fallen in love with that laugh.
Shige’s changed a lot since then. So has Yamapi, Shige thinks. In the eleven months of silence, Yamapi has only grown more mysterious.
He wonders sometimes, absently, if he’s still jealous of Yamapi, or if he’s just resentful that the distance between them professionally echoes the distance between them personally.
That distance, in Shige’s mind, is compounded by the high gray walls Shige erects around moments of absolute joy that he knows he can’t forget.
--
“I’d prefer to be called Tomo,” Yamapi says, his face grainy on Shige’s mother’s guest room television, and Shige wonders if it’s Yamapi’s turn to wonder who he is. Shige can’t help but feel validated that he isn’t alone in being lost.
--
Yamapi ‘s lips brushed Shige’s ear. “Why so sad?”
“I don’t know what I’m good at.” It had sounded whiny and pathetic when he had said it aloud. “Yet.”
“Kissing,” Yamapi had replied, and sucked Shige’s lower lip into his mouth, and Shige had believed him.
--
“If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things.”
Shige doesn’t believe much these days. He’s seen people come and go.
Akanishi is the latest casualty of the system, although Shige thinks Akanishi became a casualty years ago.
He hopes Yamapi isn’t next, with the way they tread so deep into each others’ footsteps.
Selfishly, it’s because Shige thinks the only thing harder than loving a star is watching that star fall.
The sky is gray enough without losing that last bit of brightness.
--
When Shige was nine, he’d been shoved back into the mud by bullies so many times he began to welcome it.
Being shunted in as a member of NEWS is sort of like that, only there’s a lot more makeup and much higher stakes.
“It’s like KKKitty,” Kei says, “only we get to debut.”
“Yes,” Shige agrees, and the first time they’re all together he looks at Nishikido and Yamapi and Kusano, with their fans and their confidence and their talents, and feels inadequate.
--
Shige creates an imaginary cat. He knows Wagahai better than he knows himself.
--
“The reason you irritate me is because you keep throwing yourself pity parties,” Nishikido says to him one day, when they’re getting ready to film an acoustic set. It’ll be released as a special. They’re performing four songs. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
Shige swallows as Kei nudges him comfortingly with an elbow.
“Well,” Nishikido says, “there are your eyebrows, but those are almost so wrong they’re right.”
In front of Nishikido, he feels shrunken down, like he’s the smallest he’ll ever be. Perhaps that’s why he fits through the tiny door in front of him, and on the other side of it, he finds a lot of things he never expected.
--
“In your own time is okay,” Yamapi says to him, later. “You’ll figure it out in your own time.” Yamapi isn’t a great leader, but Shige follows him anyway, because he’s not sure where else to go.
It doesn’t seem possible that any road is the right one, when all of them seem wrong.
--
“I wanted to be you, once,” Shige tells Yamapi over dinner. Yamapi is dressed in a soft looking sweatshirt, and there’s a knit cap pulled down over his ears.
Yamapi furrows his brows. “I like you, though.” Yamapi clears his throat, and sets down his chopsticks. “I like Shigeaki the way he is.” Yamapi’s lips curl. “Whether he’s using kanji or katakana to spell it.”
“You know about that?”
“I’m a fairly good reader,” Yamapi says, and feels the corners of his mouth lift in a genuine smile.
Yamapi is so bright, and the light of him feels nice across Shige’s eyelids.
The pink lettering on Yamapi’s sweatshirt is familiar. The good kind of familiar.
“And now?”
“Now,” Shige says, “I want to be me.”
--
Shige writes a book because he can’t stop himself. He creates Daiki and Shingo, and gives them a friendship that echoes. He pours insecurities and secret thoughts he will never be able to say aloud into his manuscript and when it’s finished, he closes his laptop with finality and crawls into his bed to sleep for three days.
“I finished my book,” he tells Kei, and Kei blinks at him in surprise.
“Already?”
“I’m never going to look at it again,” Shige swears, only that night he does, and the feelings come rushing back.
Only he does, and in the words spilled out like an overturned mug of coffee, he finds himself.
In Daiki and Shingo, he finds his own insecurities weaved in among the longing, and Shige wonders if the reason everything has looked so gray is because he’s closed his eyes to all the pink.
Relationships are complex, and the most complicated relationship in Shige’s life is the one he has with himself.
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Shige submits his book to an agent, and when it’s accepted, he feels like he’s running the fastest he’s ever run in his life, and it finally feels fast enough.
Shige is exactly on time.
--
It would not be so bad, Shige thinks, to sit down at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
--
“I left for a lot of reasons,” Yamapi whispers into Shige’s stomach, his lips soft on the sensitive skin. He’s hazy and languid with pleasure as Yamapi’s fingers find all the places he’s always known. Maybe, between them, there is an always, after all. “But-“
“That’s all right,” Shige says. “I left for a lot of reasons, too.”
10,000 character interviews and writing a novel and finding the things about himself that are worth something. Holding up one of NEWS’s four letters. Buffeting in the wind as he attempts to anchor himself into something that isn’t Yamapi’s shadow.
“But you’ve come back,” Yamapi says, and then licks and bites at the pulse point of Shige’s neck, leaving behind what is undoubtedly a blotch of pink skin in his wake. “I lied.” He laughs. “I think I still like pink after all.”
--
Shige will never be Yamashita Tomohisa. That’s all right, though, because one Yamashita Tomohisa, just one Yamashita Pink, is more than enough, and Shige’s got him right here next to him, their heads curled together as they stare out the window of Yamapi’s apartment and out toward the street below. It’s minutes to sunrise.
Shige is Shige, and that’s enough. Yamapi seems to think so too. Maybe he always has, and it is only Shige who had found himself lacking.
“A novelist,” Yamapi muses. “Better or worse than a French model?”
“Did you ever read my book?” Shige asks, and Yamapi’s lips twitch, light brown hair falling into his eyes as he turns to regard Shige with bright eyes.
“Of course,” Yamapi says, and he squeezes Shige’s hand in his own. “Of course I did.” Shige swallows and blinks to clear a suddenly hazy gaze.
“And?” He keeps his tone light, and Yamapi laughs, the same way he laughs when Akanishi says something monumentally stupid, or when Tegoshi sidles up to him with that childlike expression that means he wants something. “Don’t laugh at me like that.”
Yamapi doesn’t listen, though. Instead, he leans sideways and presses a sloppy kiss to the side of Shige’s mouth, too wet to be delicate, and Shige grimaces. “It was melodramatic,” Yamapi says. “More Takeuchi Naoko than Murakami Haruki.”
“Shut up,” Shige mutters. “No one writes like Murakami, anyway.”
“Hey, Shige?” Yamapi asks, and he’s still too close, breath hot on Shige’s ear and cheek. His thumb rubs slow circles into the patch of skin between Shige’s thumb and forefinger, where his pen rests when he’s writing.
“Yeah?”
“You want to go see the fireworks sometime?” Daiki and Shingo go to see the fireworks together. Before things go wrong. Before they’re separated. This is Yamapi pulling Shige close. This is Yamapi asking Shige if it’s all right now, between them.
(Now that Shige knows who he is without Yamapi, it is time to figure out who he is with Yamapi, all over again.)
“My next book will be better,” Shige says, and Yamapi grins at him, smile stretching across his whole face.
“What are you going to write about?”
“People who have figured things out, falling back together,” Shige says, and Yamapi pauses, and licks at his lips.
“That does sound better,” he says, after a long pause, and then he takes Shige’s face between both his hands and kisses him.
Everything, in Shige’s half-lidded gaze, is pink. It’s the sunrise, he knows, just casting its glow, but it is also a metaphor.
Poll Team Present Prompt 5