[FIC] "Prophesy," YanaKiri, PG
m.e. really should be getting her ass to work. she has less than 3 hours.
apologies, please: will reply to lj posts later. must retrieve head from real life and put it on straight before can hold semblance of decent conservation. conversation.
presenting this as final proof that today is yanakiri day. at least by my timezone.
Prophesy
by MorphailEffect
I'm used to living in orderly spaces.
Everything must be streamlined, everything must be smooth.
This shelf is for reference materials only. That shelf is where the leisure books go. Tea is always served at 4 PM. The crystal bottle of brandy is always at the same place, always half-empty.
The world could run amuck outside these pristine walls. This is where things come together. In the silence and order of this place I reflect on the events of the day. I make my predictions.
Like: tomorrow it might rain.
That's a joke, though. A reminder to myself that no prediction is 100% accurate. In this country, there's always some chance it won't rain.
What I think about are things like grade point averages, evaluation exams, scoresheets... For example, there's a 47% chance this student, who has been sending me love notes since the start of term, will drop my class toward the end of the semester. There is another 80% chance that if she did, she will be able to influence at least two of her buddies into going along.
But if I take time out to do a single brief classroom C&C session, we run up the odds, and there would be a relative 58% chance she would decide to stay.
She is good. Not brilliant, but good, and it would be a shame if she dropped out just because I'd rejected her advances.
Why would anyone want to complicate their lives?
This is my third teaching position. And my second time teaching out of Japan. Things could get remarkably complicated for anyone else, I understand...
But I opt for the clean break. Always. I've severed all ties to my past more than once.
****************
Of course my past finds ways to catch up.
You came back into my life first as a familiar voice hailing me from a good distance: "Sempai! Yanagi-sempai!"
The voice was deeper, but it was definitely yours. I turned to see you jogging up to me, in that bouncy, carefree way you did when you were still in middle school. You were the only mass of motion in the narrow strip of cobblestone we shared.
I stopped walking for you and you pulled yourself up in front of me. If not for the delighted gleam in your eyes, I would have expected you to do a salute. You stuck your hand out for me to shake.
"Do you remember me?"
I almost said "How could I forget?" but I reached out for the hand you offered. "Akaya. What are you doing here?"
You beamed beneath all that curly black hair. I saw your eyes were older, but no less bright.
"What else? I'm here to study, of course!"
You hadn't finished your university education. You'd opted to go overseas to compete in one tournament after another. You made the papers sometimes, did I know?
I knew.
"You got time, sempai? Let's go have coffee!"
"All right," I said. It was in my routine. It was almost time for tea.
****************
I told you about the things I've done, you seemed to hang on to every word.
You even took time to express some admiration for my achievements. Here I was, working on my masters degree and taking on one research grant after another, making the journals, working my name into the conversations of intellectual elite circles all over the world -- and only 24. I was surprised these things mattered to you. I was even more surprised that you let me finish talking...
Then you started telling me about the things you have done. And the list went on and on and you were getting more and more excited.
I said to myself, you haven't changed a bit.
The things you said, I already read about. You were champion in the prestigious Eberstein Tournament four years ago, champion of the prestigious Japan-only Akabane Cup...you'd competed in Wimbledon but never made your coveted singles title. You made quite a fuss about it, too, which I suppose is why sports reporters all over the world continue to adore you as a subject.
You were also arrested for drunk driving in Belgium, drug possession in Italy, disturbance of the peace in Seoul... Never served time, but made a few headlines. An extensive list of false arrests -- I would have said, if I could, that it was quite an achievement for someone who was only 23.
But none of that showed on your face. Sitting across from me at that cafe, leaning your elbows on the table, shoulders hunched, all I could see was your invincible grin -- pure and perfect. You were a young man with the world ahead of him, and no sins to burden you.
And it never came up in the conversation.
We only talked about good things. We never talked about each other's tragedies. We skilfully pretended none existed.
"I'm taking up Philosophy," you said to me brightly. "I dunno, it was just the one subject that agreed with me before I left Rikkai University. You teach Philosophy, don't you, Professor Yanagi?"
I grimaced at the term you used for me. "Some basic subjects," I answered. "I'm only an instructor, Akaya. It'll be a while before I get my professorial chair. And you don't have to call me 'sempai' here anymore. There's no need to be so formal. 'Renji' is all right."
Your smile was conspiratorial.
"I can't be informal with you if you're going to be my teacher, sempai."
****************
A teacher is one thing -- a tutor is another -- and an alternative flatmate is something else. I didn't end up so much teaching you as having you over at my flat every other night for study sessions.
You still don't have a good grasp of English. Which is to be expected. You never had the patience to learn things that were being drilled into your head as "must learn." You had always been one of those students who had to be guided, not forced.
And I have to admit: I liked having you over.
Even if you messed up the shelves, never cleaned up after yourself, and drank tea any time you wanted.
I've always acknowledged my own arrogance: having someone to teach plays on a sort of vanity, a knowledge that I'm superior to someone else.
Having you around, I recalled what I used to feel when I played the substitute teacher for those elementary school classes (Sadaharu had laughed so hard)...those times when I taught the children in the neighborhood how to play tennis. Those times when teaching was also fun.
Sadaharu had always been at my side, learning from me. Teaching me.
I'd had to leave him when I couldn't learn from him anymore. I'd had to leave Seiichi and Genichirou, but they were old enough to understand.
But you...
You looked up at me across the table with that invincible boyish grin saying, in a language I never bothered to master, "You ain't seen nothin' yet."
I could always smile back at that look. But I was never sure how it made me feel. I'm never sure how I feel about things, or if it even matters... you'll always be looking back at me like that, daring me to keep my eye on you, telling me you can always break my predictions and rise above yourself.
I just smiled.
The old man in me said there was nothing that could not be explored to its limit. Nothing like that in the world exists.
****************
"Why is that bottle half-full?" you asked me once, in a bad fit of distraction. You had your chin in your hand.
"Half-empty," I corrected, without thinking. "It's a gauge. If it's half-empty, it means it's time for me to buy a new bottle. I keep a full bottle in the bar until the old bottle becomes half-empty again."
This didn't seem to make sense to you. I didn't need to look up to know your eyes were glazing over. "Is it good brandy?"
Not that a discussion about alcohol would have made you pay more attention to your notes. "The best I've ever come across for that cost."
"Good brandy's meant to be drunk," you droned, "to the last drop."
When you said that, I thought it safe to predict the brandy would be all gone the next time you visited.
But when you did, you had a freshly-bought crystal bottle tucked under your arm. You took down the half-empty bottle and saved it for after we finished the study session.
You did this every time you saw the bottle on the mantelpiece half-empty. I got the hint the third time you did this, and took down the bottle.
So in that sense, we broke the equilibrium of the room together.
****************
I should've kept the liquor out of your reach to begin with.
You never came to me drunk. But you never refused a glass. And sometimes you ended up sleeping over. Leaving the messed up sheets on the sofa in the morning and sleeping in almost a little too late. I had to take you to class to make sure you attended. Sometimes you leaned against my arm stumbling, mumbling incoherent words from last night's study session through a hangover.
All I knew was that you went home to the flat you shared with a few other boys with entirely too much money and entirely too much free time. I'd seen it and thought it was a decent enough place...
But there were some things that didn't occur to me to think about.
When I wasn't looking, who was taking care of you?
You tried to be with me at every free moment, disrupting my schedule and looking the most unrepentant sort of child for it. I recognized it only as a form of self-protection: in this country, people spoke in English. And you never found it easy to make friends, much less English-speaking ones.
Sometimes we hung out. We jokingly referred to those moments as "dates." I took you to boring places and you took me to places full of light and shadow. You knew people, it seemed, of questionable moral character -- and you knew how to speak with them, even if you didn't know how to speak their language.
It took no effort for me to reconcile that Akaya -- the one in the papers, the one who never showed himself to me -- with the one who insisted on calling me "sempai."
There are no tragedies between us.
But if there was one, it would lie in how well I know you.
****************
I always tell myself "It might rain tomorrow."
Somehow I'd also started to tell myself that even if i wasn't with you, you were going to be safe, you were going to stay indoors and dry.
After the first year's exam season ended, I took to wondering if you would never come for another study session again.
I wasn't expecting it when one night, you came knocking. Outside these pristine walls, it was raining the hardest it had rained in a long time.
You were drenched to the bone. There were bruises on your face and arms...you had your arms around yourself, and you winced beneath my gaze.
I stood waiting for you to begin.
"So I don't know what I'm doing here," you greeted eventually, in a voice that broke with pain and the cold. "I don't have anything to learn..." You trailed off, shivering, looking at your shoes.
I said "Come inside."
I still don't know why I let you in.
Curiosity?
If so, it would have been a sort of curiosity I'd never suffered before.
You trailed water across the floor. The room vibrated with your shivers. Your very presence seemed to disturb the stillness, like it did the first time I let you walk through the door, not suspecting it would ever come to this...
The brandy was somewhere safe and locked. All the smells I could recognize on you were of earth and rain.
I handed you a towel and said I was going to make you something hot.
You grabbed me by the arm as I was passing. Your grip was strong, your fingers bit into my flesh.
"I knew you were teaching here," you said, too weak even for this room, "that's why I came here. Did you know that?"
I didn't answer. You stood and you pulled me closer to you. You weren't meeting my gaze at first. And then, suddenly, you were looking into me.
I stood frozen by your stare, desperate and at the same time distant. I was facing a person in a dream.
"Sempai, I'm not" -- your fingers on the protest dying on my lips -- "the smartest person in the world. I don't know why I do the things I do." -- trailing down, down the skin of my neck, my collarbone -- "I don't think about what's going to happen. About the consequences. But somehow I already know." -- playing with the top button of the shirt I wore -- "It's all going to happen anyway and I can't help it..."
The first thing I felt was not your lips on mine. Or your other hand on the back of my neck, drawing me down and close.
It was the cool surface of your broken skin against my cheek.
I think, as my arm snakes around your waist, and my fingers tangle in your hair, that the world could rage all it wants outside these walls which hide us.
I want to stay here with you and exhaust all the learning.
To the last drop.
****************
But these aren't orderly spaces anymore.
I'm not sure what's going to happen next.
(I wonder if you ever knew how hard it had been to build this sort of calm. How many things I'd had to leave behind.
And if I'll ever care how many sacrifices you've had to make to get here.)
I can draw up a number of scenarios...none of which I see coming true. It's only logic and it stops somewhere. The way emotions stop somewhere.
You've learned some things I haven't. Of the two of us, you have the power to see what lies beyond this.
Tell me what you think will happen now.
apologies, please: will reply to lj posts later. must retrieve head from real life and put it on straight before can hold semblance of decent conservation. conversation.
presenting this as final proof that today is yanakiri day. at least by my timezone.
Prophesy
by MorphailEffect
I'm used to living in orderly spaces.
Everything must be streamlined, everything must be smooth.
This shelf is for reference materials only. That shelf is where the leisure books go. Tea is always served at 4 PM. The crystal bottle of brandy is always at the same place, always half-empty.
The world could run amuck outside these pristine walls. This is where things come together. In the silence and order of this place I reflect on the events of the day. I make my predictions.
Like: tomorrow it might rain.
That's a joke, though. A reminder to myself that no prediction is 100% accurate. In this country, there's always some chance it won't rain.
What I think about are things like grade point averages, evaluation exams, scoresheets... For example, there's a 47% chance this student, who has been sending me love notes since the start of term, will drop my class toward the end of the semester. There is another 80% chance that if she did, she will be able to influence at least two of her buddies into going along.
But if I take time out to do a single brief classroom C&C session, we run up the odds, and there would be a relative 58% chance she would decide to stay.
She is good. Not brilliant, but good, and it would be a shame if she dropped out just because I'd rejected her advances.
Why would anyone want to complicate their lives?
This is my third teaching position. And my second time teaching out of Japan. Things could get remarkably complicated for anyone else, I understand...
But I opt for the clean break. Always. I've severed all ties to my past more than once.
****************
Of course my past finds ways to catch up.
You came back into my life first as a familiar voice hailing me from a good distance: "Sempai! Yanagi-sempai!"
The voice was deeper, but it was definitely yours. I turned to see you jogging up to me, in that bouncy, carefree way you did when you were still in middle school. You were the only mass of motion in the narrow strip of cobblestone we shared.
I stopped walking for you and you pulled yourself up in front of me. If not for the delighted gleam in your eyes, I would have expected you to do a salute. You stuck your hand out for me to shake.
"Do you remember me?"
I almost said "How could I forget?" but I reached out for the hand you offered. "Akaya. What are you doing here?"
You beamed beneath all that curly black hair. I saw your eyes were older, but no less bright.
"What else? I'm here to study, of course!"
You hadn't finished your university education. You'd opted to go overseas to compete in one tournament after another. You made the papers sometimes, did I know?
I knew.
"You got time, sempai? Let's go have coffee!"
"All right," I said. It was in my routine. It was almost time for tea.
****************
I told you about the things I've done, you seemed to hang on to every word.
You even took time to express some admiration for my achievements. Here I was, working on my masters degree and taking on one research grant after another, making the journals, working my name into the conversations of intellectual elite circles all over the world -- and only 24. I was surprised these things mattered to you. I was even more surprised that you let me finish talking...
Then you started telling me about the things you have done. And the list went on and on and you were getting more and more excited.
I said to myself, you haven't changed a bit.
The things you said, I already read about. You were champion in the prestigious Eberstein Tournament four years ago, champion of the prestigious Japan-only Akabane Cup...you'd competed in Wimbledon but never made your coveted singles title. You made quite a fuss about it, too, which I suppose is why sports reporters all over the world continue to adore you as a subject.
You were also arrested for drunk driving in Belgium, drug possession in Italy, disturbance of the peace in Seoul... Never served time, but made a few headlines. An extensive list of false arrests -- I would have said, if I could, that it was quite an achievement for someone who was only 23.
But none of that showed on your face. Sitting across from me at that cafe, leaning your elbows on the table, shoulders hunched, all I could see was your invincible grin -- pure and perfect. You were a young man with the world ahead of him, and no sins to burden you.
And it never came up in the conversation.
We only talked about good things. We never talked about each other's tragedies. We skilfully pretended none existed.
"I'm taking up Philosophy," you said to me brightly. "I dunno, it was just the one subject that agreed with me before I left Rikkai University. You teach Philosophy, don't you, Professor Yanagi?"
I grimaced at the term you used for me. "Some basic subjects," I answered. "I'm only an instructor, Akaya. It'll be a while before I get my professorial chair. And you don't have to call me 'sempai' here anymore. There's no need to be so formal. 'Renji' is all right."
Your smile was conspiratorial.
"I can't be informal with you if you're going to be my teacher, sempai."
****************
A teacher is one thing -- a tutor is another -- and an alternative flatmate is something else. I didn't end up so much teaching you as having you over at my flat every other night for study sessions.
You still don't have a good grasp of English. Which is to be expected. You never had the patience to learn things that were being drilled into your head as "must learn." You had always been one of those students who had to be guided, not forced.
And I have to admit: I liked having you over.
Even if you messed up the shelves, never cleaned up after yourself, and drank tea any time you wanted.
I've always acknowledged my own arrogance: having someone to teach plays on a sort of vanity, a knowledge that I'm superior to someone else.
Having you around, I recalled what I used to feel when I played the substitute teacher for those elementary school classes (Sadaharu had laughed so hard)...those times when I taught the children in the neighborhood how to play tennis. Those times when teaching was also fun.
Sadaharu had always been at my side, learning from me. Teaching me.
I'd had to leave him when I couldn't learn from him anymore. I'd had to leave Seiichi and Genichirou, but they were old enough to understand.
But you...
You looked up at me across the table with that invincible boyish grin saying, in a language I never bothered to master, "You ain't seen nothin' yet."
I could always smile back at that look. But I was never sure how it made me feel. I'm never sure how I feel about things, or if it even matters... you'll always be looking back at me like that, daring me to keep my eye on you, telling me you can always break my predictions and rise above yourself.
I just smiled.
The old man in me said there was nothing that could not be explored to its limit. Nothing like that in the world exists.
****************
"Why is that bottle half-full?" you asked me once, in a bad fit of distraction. You had your chin in your hand.
"Half-empty," I corrected, without thinking. "It's a gauge. If it's half-empty, it means it's time for me to buy a new bottle. I keep a full bottle in the bar until the old bottle becomes half-empty again."
This didn't seem to make sense to you. I didn't need to look up to know your eyes were glazing over. "Is it good brandy?"
Not that a discussion about alcohol would have made you pay more attention to your notes. "The best I've ever come across for that cost."
"Good brandy's meant to be drunk," you droned, "to the last drop."
When you said that, I thought it safe to predict the brandy would be all gone the next time you visited.
But when you did, you had a freshly-bought crystal bottle tucked under your arm. You took down the half-empty bottle and saved it for after we finished the study session.
You did this every time you saw the bottle on the mantelpiece half-empty. I got the hint the third time you did this, and took down the bottle.
So in that sense, we broke the equilibrium of the room together.
****************
I should've kept the liquor out of your reach to begin with.
You never came to me drunk. But you never refused a glass. And sometimes you ended up sleeping over. Leaving the messed up sheets on the sofa in the morning and sleeping in almost a little too late. I had to take you to class to make sure you attended. Sometimes you leaned against my arm stumbling, mumbling incoherent words from last night's study session through a hangover.
All I knew was that you went home to the flat you shared with a few other boys with entirely too much money and entirely too much free time. I'd seen it and thought it was a decent enough place...
But there were some things that didn't occur to me to think about.
When I wasn't looking, who was taking care of you?
You tried to be with me at every free moment, disrupting my schedule and looking the most unrepentant sort of child for it. I recognized it only as a form of self-protection: in this country, people spoke in English. And you never found it easy to make friends, much less English-speaking ones.
Sometimes we hung out. We jokingly referred to those moments as "dates." I took you to boring places and you took me to places full of light and shadow. You knew people, it seemed, of questionable moral character -- and you knew how to speak with them, even if you didn't know how to speak their language.
It took no effort for me to reconcile that Akaya -- the one in the papers, the one who never showed himself to me -- with the one who insisted on calling me "sempai."
There are no tragedies between us.
But if there was one, it would lie in how well I know you.
****************
I always tell myself "It might rain tomorrow."
Somehow I'd also started to tell myself that even if i wasn't with you, you were going to be safe, you were going to stay indoors and dry.
After the first year's exam season ended, I took to wondering if you would never come for another study session again.
I wasn't expecting it when one night, you came knocking. Outside these pristine walls, it was raining the hardest it had rained in a long time.
You were drenched to the bone. There were bruises on your face and arms...you had your arms around yourself, and you winced beneath my gaze.
I stood waiting for you to begin.
"So I don't know what I'm doing here," you greeted eventually, in a voice that broke with pain and the cold. "I don't have anything to learn..." You trailed off, shivering, looking at your shoes.
I said "Come inside."
I still don't know why I let you in.
Curiosity?
If so, it would have been a sort of curiosity I'd never suffered before.
You trailed water across the floor. The room vibrated with your shivers. Your very presence seemed to disturb the stillness, like it did the first time I let you walk through the door, not suspecting it would ever come to this...
The brandy was somewhere safe and locked. All the smells I could recognize on you were of earth and rain.
I handed you a towel and said I was going to make you something hot.
You grabbed me by the arm as I was passing. Your grip was strong, your fingers bit into my flesh.
"I knew you were teaching here," you said, too weak even for this room, "that's why I came here. Did you know that?"
I didn't answer. You stood and you pulled me closer to you. You weren't meeting my gaze at first. And then, suddenly, you were looking into me.
I stood frozen by your stare, desperate and at the same time distant. I was facing a person in a dream.
"Sempai, I'm not" -- your fingers on the protest dying on my lips -- "the smartest person in the world. I don't know why I do the things I do." -- trailing down, down the skin of my neck, my collarbone -- "I don't think about what's going to happen. About the consequences. But somehow I already know." -- playing with the top button of the shirt I wore -- "It's all going to happen anyway and I can't help it..."
The first thing I felt was not your lips on mine. Or your other hand on the back of my neck, drawing me down and close.
It was the cool surface of your broken skin against my cheek.
I think, as my arm snakes around your waist, and my fingers tangle in your hair, that the world could rage all it wants outside these walls which hide us.
I want to stay here with you and exhaust all the learning.
To the last drop.
****************
But these aren't orderly spaces anymore.
I'm not sure what's going to happen next.
(I wonder if you ever knew how hard it had been to build this sort of calm. How many things I'd had to leave behind.
And if I'll ever care how many sacrifices you've had to make to get here.)
I can draw up a number of scenarios...none of which I see coming true. It's only logic and it stops somewhere. The way emotions stop somewhere.
You've learned some things I haven't. Of the two of us, you have the power to see what lies beyond this.
Tell me what you think will happen now.