[drabble] Paint Me a Blue Sky
Title: Paint Me a Blue Sky
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx )
Pairing: Hikanoo
Genre: Angst/Fluff
Summary: Hikaru wants to know the reason why.
Notes: Request for Saki (shiroikazex ).
~
“Let’s break up.”
Inoo’s voice was soft, and emotionless, and Hikaru felt it cutting through his heart like a sharp knife.
“W-what?”
“I said, let’s break up,” Inoo repeated, eyes as dead as his voice boring into Hikaru’s.
“But why?” Hikaru whispered, voice hoarse with dread.
Inoo’s eyes fluttered shut, and when they opened again, Hikaru thought he saw something flash in those deep black pools - regret? - before the veil covered them again and the eyes were empty once more.
“This relationship is obviously not working any more. It’s better to break it off now.”
“We’ve only been together for barely a month!” spluttered Hikaru, and Inoo gave him another long look.
“And it has been long enough to show me that there is no we. Goodbye, Hikaru.”
Inoo spun on his heel and walked away through the pouring rain. Hikaru watched him go, following that familiar beloved silhouette until is disappeared into the silver veil of sleek raindrops.
The world collapsed around his ears, and Hikaru tilted his head to the swirling skies to cry.
~
Hesitantly, his hand reached out to the imposing wooden door.
An instant before his knuckles impacted the wood, he pulled his arm back again.
Come on, he told himself, you can do this.
He swallowed, and reached out his trembling arm again to rap on the door sharply, once, twice, thrice.
A click of the lock, and the door was pulled open.
“What do you-”
Inoo stopped mid-sentence.
“Hikaru.”
“…Hey,” Hikaru said, the butterflies in his stomach suddenly coming back with a vengenance.
“Why are you here?”
The voice was cold and unfeeling, and Hikaru winced.
“About that day, you didn’t mean it, right? It was a joke, wasn’t it? Tell me it was a joke.”
The face remained impassive, as if it was chiseled from stone.
“I’m sorry.”
The door was slammed shut in his face, but not before Hikaru caught sight of something utterly curious behind Inoo.
Why did he have so many packing boxes?
~
Inoo looked at the closed door, one hand still on the door handle.
It hurt, it really did, to keep pushing Hikaru away from himself like this. It was killing him inside, and he knew it was probably killing Hikaru as well.
“It’s for the best,” he whispered.
But saying it was infinitely easier than believing it.
Ignoring the tears prickling at the corners of his eyes, he knelt down among his packing boxes and resumed what he had been doing.
It’s all for the best.
~
Inoo didn’t turn up for practice the following Monday.
“Where’s Inoo?” Hikaru asked to the room at large.
Nobody answered.
The lanky boy did not turn up halfway through practice like he sometimes did, panting and sweaty after running to the jimusho, shrieking an apology for being late due to a university event of some kind.
Hikaru dialed Inoo’s number at break, fingers punching through the familiar numbers with ease.
Finally, after hanging up on voicemail for the fifteenth time, he gave up.
Maybe he just fell sick, he consoled himself.
Squeezing his eyes shut for a brief moment, he kept his keitai and headed back to practice.
~
After practice Hikaru decided to go visit Inoo again.
Bidding a swift goodbye to the rest of JUMP, he jammed his cap on his head ran out of the jimusho.
But when he finally reached Inoo’s flat, whatever hope had been lingering in his heart promptly disappeared.
The lights were off, the place was eerily silent, and when Hikaru knocked nobody came to the door. Frustrated, he dug out his keitai and tried to call Inoo once again.
He was redirected to voicemail again.
“Inoo,” he whispered hoarsely, pressing the ‘end call’ button, “where are you?”
But the night gave him no reply.
~
“Inoo-kun will be involved in a full-time exchange programme in Hokkaido for two years,” their manager revealed a couple of days later, “During the course of this programme, he will not be able to come for any practices.”
The news slowly sank in, and it finally dawned on Hikaru why he had been unable to contact Inoo.
And then he remembered. That day, when Inoo had broken up with him, that flash of emotion in those eyes. It hadn’t been regret.
It had been deep sadness.
There was something fishy, Hikaru realized, about the whole break-up. It had been too sudden, too scripted…
And perhaps too convenient.
~
A week after he had moved into his new flat in Sapporo, Inoo awoke near midnight to a knock on the door. Blearily, he rolled out of bed to see who it was.
“Inoo?”
Inoo blinked in surprise. It was Hikaru, looking slightly exhausted and standing on his doorstep.
“…Hikaru? How did you find me?”
“Your mother gave me your new address. I got the earliest flight possible to Sapporo, and well…here I am.”
“Why…” Inoo’s voice was hoarse, “why did you come?”
“I want to know the reason, Inoo. The real reason. Why did you break up with me?”
Inoo plastered the scowl back on his face.
“Because,” he said, “the relationship is obviously not working-”
“Don’t give me any of that rubbish!”
Hikaru’s fists were clenched, and a spark of rare anger danced in the younger boy’s eyes.
“I…”
“Why, Inoo?” Hikaru sounded like a child now, voice quavering and full of hurt and misunderstanding. “Why?”
And suddenly all the stone walls Inoo had erected around his heart came tumbling down.
“It’s a long distance relationship,” he whispered at last, voice almost lost in the night air, “It would never work out. We’d drift apart. Isn’t it better to end it quickly rather than have to go through the pain of the ties between us slowly fraying?”
Hikaru frowned.
“We could make it work.”
“You have work,” murmured Inoo, “and I have my programme. We’d be too busy.”
Inoo bit his lip and turned his gaze away, as the tell-tale prickle of tears appeared again. His knees wobbled, and he sank to the floor at his door.
He heard a slight rustle, and then Hikaru was kneeling next to him, skinny arms wrapped around his frame in a painfully familiar gesture.
“Don’t give up, Inoo. How do you know it won’t work until you try?”
“But…”
Hikaru sighed.
“I’m not willing give up yet, Inoo,” he said quietly, “are you?”
“…No,” Inoo replied at last, voice quivering, “not yet.”
And Hikaru smiled softly.
“Then let’s give this our best shot, ne?”
“Y-yeah.”
A small smile blossomed on Inoo’s face.
You paint me a blue sky, but then come back to turn it to gray.
But no storm can last forever, so even at the end of that lonely storm,
there will definitely be a rainbow waiting for me…
For us.