young heart; khr
Title: Young Heart
Pairing: Gokudera/Yamamoto, Yamamoto/girls.
Summary: It takes years of convincing to push Gokudera away.
Young Heart
They're eighteen, and Yamamoto is asking Gokudera with his big, brilliant smile, "Why do you hate me so much?"
Gokudera gives him an honest answer.
-
They're fifteen.
At school (again), and Gokudera is all red - not the fiery colour he gets when he argues, but the soft, embarrassed one that looks a little scared, Yamamoto thinks. It's how he always looks when they leave the locker room together (always together) with Yamamoto's arm slung around him tight, and he's making that face every day in gym class like the whole world is coming to an end, or he's going to be sick.
"You okay?" Yamamoto asks, once, and when he tries to feel out Gokudera's temperature with his hand, Gokudera bats it away and doesn't meet his eyes at all.
He snarls, hisses, "No, you jackass, leave me the fuck alone," so Yamamoto assumes he's okay.
-
They're sixteen and a half and Gokudera is dying in Namimori hospital.
Yamamoto cries because Gokudera isn't awake to see, nobody can see, and he even once boldly reaches out and touches the back of Gokudera's limp hand with his fingertips just to see if it's warm. (It is; he makes himself forget, later.)
Gokudera groans and Yamamoto rubs his wet eyes quickly, smiles big, and wants to cry again when Gokudera's eyes finally reopen but makes sure that he doesn't.
-
Yamamoto dates a lot of girls when he's (they're) young. Sweet, smiley, soft girls. (They don't taste sickly and addictive like smoke and ash or bite him with sharp, angry teeth, but his dad likes them all, so he tries to, too. But after his third failed relationship his dad starts to worry, so he puts more pictures up on his wall of bikini models, American actresses, takes down the calendar of baseball players he once shamefacedly jerked off to. When his dad looks at his new room they both smile - smile and pretend Yamamoto is still a good son.)
-
Gokudera is worse for it than he is. Everything about him is so expressive and so loud and so disagreeable. He is rattling deep in Yamamoto's blood like an ugly song, always stomping around inside and all around his head. But Yamamoto can hide it.
They go to a bar in Italy where someone murmurs to someone about Gokudera being a 'fag', about his hair and his clothes and the weak way he looks.
Yamamoto presses the ice to Gokudera's eye afterwards. Gokudera doesn't look at him or speak to him once, and Yamamoto knows that he's just heartbroken over the fact that he understands Italian now, too.
-
Bianchi tries to set Gokudera up with girl after girl. He says no, every time, says that he's busy with the family and looks like he desperately wants to believe himself. He rolls his shoulders, blows out a mouthful of smoke, and Yamamoto's heart always feels squeezed and beating frantically before Gokudera says, "No," again.
"I promised her a date," Bianchi insists, frowning. She waves the slip of paper in her hand with the girl's number on it, and Yamamoto plucks it without thinking.
He slips it into his pocket and pats it. She smiles at him, and for a brief second Gokudera is staring, pale-eyed at him, looking betrayed, then they look away from each other and keep trying to move on.
-
Yamamoto thinks of him and holds her close, imagining a different scent, a skinnier, flatter body, a tighter clutch around him. She says his name over and over and Yamamoto mouths his into the pillow, lips stretched wide into a noiseless scream around his name.
-
"Why do you hate me so much?" Yamamoto asks, and then Gokudera grabs him abruptly by the shirt and pulls him into a painfully close, wet kiss, his eyebrows drawn together and his face familiarly red.
For an instant, Yamamoto surges into it, swallowing all the breath from Gokudera's body and wishing he could have him all, inch by inch, somewhere safe and close by his heart, always.
Then they pull apart, and Yamamoto smiles, apologetically. Gokudera is staring at him with all the hurt he's hidden away since they were sixteen, just a big-eyed, lonely teenager for one moment that Yamamoto desperately wants to forget but knows he won't this time, not ever.
"I'm sorry, Gokudera," he says, and he is. More than anything.
Pairing: Gokudera/Yamamoto, Yamamoto/girls.
Summary: It takes years of convincing to push Gokudera away.
Young Heart
They're eighteen, and Yamamoto is asking Gokudera with his big, brilliant smile, "Why do you hate me so much?"
Gokudera gives him an honest answer.
-
They're fifteen.
At school (again), and Gokudera is all red - not the fiery colour he gets when he argues, but the soft, embarrassed one that looks a little scared, Yamamoto thinks. It's how he always looks when they leave the locker room together (always together) with Yamamoto's arm slung around him tight, and he's making that face every day in gym class like the whole world is coming to an end, or he's going to be sick.
"You okay?" Yamamoto asks, once, and when he tries to feel out Gokudera's temperature with his hand, Gokudera bats it away and doesn't meet his eyes at all.
He snarls, hisses, "No, you jackass, leave me the fuck alone," so Yamamoto assumes he's okay.
-
They're sixteen and a half and Gokudera is dying in Namimori hospital.
Yamamoto cries because Gokudera isn't awake to see, nobody can see, and he even once boldly reaches out and touches the back of Gokudera's limp hand with his fingertips just to see if it's warm. (It is; he makes himself forget, later.)
Gokudera groans and Yamamoto rubs his wet eyes quickly, smiles big, and wants to cry again when Gokudera's eyes finally reopen but makes sure that he doesn't.
-
Yamamoto dates a lot of girls when he's (they're) young. Sweet, smiley, soft girls. (They don't taste sickly and addictive like smoke and ash or bite him with sharp, angry teeth, but his dad likes them all, so he tries to, too. But after his third failed relationship his dad starts to worry, so he puts more pictures up on his wall of bikini models, American actresses, takes down the calendar of baseball players he once shamefacedly jerked off to. When his dad looks at his new room they both smile - smile and pretend Yamamoto is still a good son.)
-
Gokudera is worse for it than he is. Everything about him is so expressive and so loud and so disagreeable. He is rattling deep in Yamamoto's blood like an ugly song, always stomping around inside and all around his head. But Yamamoto can hide it.
They go to a bar in Italy where someone murmurs to someone about Gokudera being a 'fag', about his hair and his clothes and the weak way he looks.
Yamamoto presses the ice to Gokudera's eye afterwards. Gokudera doesn't look at him or speak to him once, and Yamamoto knows that he's just heartbroken over the fact that he understands Italian now, too.
-
Bianchi tries to set Gokudera up with girl after girl. He says no, every time, says that he's busy with the family and looks like he desperately wants to believe himself. He rolls his shoulders, blows out a mouthful of smoke, and Yamamoto's heart always feels squeezed and beating frantically before Gokudera says, "No," again.
"I promised her a date," Bianchi insists, frowning. She waves the slip of paper in her hand with the girl's number on it, and Yamamoto plucks it without thinking.
He slips it into his pocket and pats it. She smiles at him, and for a brief second Gokudera is staring, pale-eyed at him, looking betrayed, then they look away from each other and keep trying to move on.
-
Yamamoto thinks of him and holds her close, imagining a different scent, a skinnier, flatter body, a tighter clutch around him. She says his name over and over and Yamamoto mouths his into the pillow, lips stretched wide into a noiseless scream around his name.
-
"Why do you hate me so much?" Yamamoto asks, and then Gokudera grabs him abruptly by the shirt and pulls him into a painfully close, wet kiss, his eyebrows drawn together and his face familiarly red.
For an instant, Yamamoto surges into it, swallowing all the breath from Gokudera's body and wishing he could have him all, inch by inch, somewhere safe and close by his heart, always.
Then they pull apart, and Yamamoto smiles, apologetically. Gokudera is staring at him with all the hurt he's hidden away since they were sixteen, just a big-eyed, lonely teenager for one moment that Yamamoto desperately wants to forget but knows he won't this time, not ever.
"I'm sorry, Gokudera," he says, and he is. More than anything.