encaustic, 1/3
Title: Encaustic
Pairing(s): Ohno/Nino
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~23,000
Summary: Come help with the farm. Art school won't miss you for one month, right? Ohno works on an acerola farm and Nino is the paper boy.
Notes: This very large AU is based on this prompt, which was being offered during the ohmiya drabble/short story contests: Ohno works on an acerola farm and Nino is the paper boy. As you can see, this isn't really a short story. I have too much to say about this fic, but this isn't the place for it. So just two huge, huge thank-yous: aeslis for cheering me on with this, being a SERIOUSLY amazing beta and catching my psychic!Nino (he doesn't exist anymore, sorry), and Caetlin, who does not have an LJ but helped me to no end on some of the more delicate processes of art. We took a painting class together. She got the real A, I just got an A for effort.
EDIT 7/2/09: There is now a whole version of this fic over at Dreamwidth, because they are cool and allow more than 10,000 words per post. So if you would rather read this in one whole chunk as opposed to three, mosey on over.
ENCAUSTIC - a painting technique in which molten wax is blended with pigments and then fused onto a surface with intense heat, which renders the image permanent.
i.
When Ohno gets the postcard he is ridiculously excited. Come help with the farm, it says, in calligraphy from some ancient school that only his mother knows how to paint, with all the grace in her body. Art school won't miss you for one month, right?
It turns out that she is wrong, and all of Ohno's professors, after having a friendly reminder of who Ohno Satoshi is, are devastated. It is the last term before the next school year and the exhibitions are all calling for the best students--Ohno is one of them, even though he hardly ever says anything, and so his teachers send him off with promises to create some things to bring back and show off.
"Have fun," they all say, patting him on the back. "You will love Okinawa! The ocean is beautiful and the sun dazzles like no other!"
Ohno has never been to Okinawa. His parents moved there to inherit some hundred year-old acerola farm, and while Ohno admits that he likes the fruit and loves his family, he is not really looking forward to harvest time.
ii.
Harvest time is hell. Ohno is bent over every single day and he feels like he has been in the same position for his entire life just after six hours of working in the trees. When he stands, he swears his back cracks in eight different places.
"What a baby," says his sister as she hands him an empty tray--a call for a new batch. "Art school has turned you into mush, Satoshi. It's pathetic."
Ohno is indignant and sticks his chin out, but can't do anything more than grunt. The sun in Okinawa seems an orange monster compared to the tiny child of a sun that rises over Tokyo. He almost misses the smog, but has to remind himself that this air is good for him. Sea salt cleanses the body, after all. He read it somewhere.
"Satoshi, pick!" someone calls to his far left, and Ohno buries his head in a tree and breathes deeply.
iii.
On the third day, he is excused.
His sister isn't too happy about it, and sulks all throughout breakfast, dishwashing, and suiting up for the day. "I can't believe this," she mutters as she ties a towel forcefully around her head. "Your pansy ass has only been here for three days and they're already letting you off. Tell me, Satoshi," she says, knotting the headband with a jerk, "tell me how long I've been here."
Ohno sits for a minute, staring blankly at the shoes lined neatly against the entrance wall, and then mumbles, "A year."
He feels sincerely apologetic, and wishes he could somehow comfort his sister--he knows that she really wants a husband and an apartment in Osaka and her own oven to bake in--but he also knows that he hasn't done anything wrong. Art school had been a goal since he was twelve, when he took a field trip to the art museum and the college kids there had been so nice to him and had complimented his drawings, even though they were truly only doodles in a math textbook. But that had been encouragement enough, and his parents--especially his mother--had told him that if he worked for it, he would be just fine.
Eight years later, and everything worked out exactly the way it was supposed to. He made it into the first semester, full honors, all of the teachers loving his work (though not exactly remembering his name). And here is his sister, a beautiful girl, ready to get out into the world and say I do instead of harvesting acerolas in the crushing heat.
"Sorry," he says to her as she slides open the door with her foot. It's bad manners, and she would always call him out on that, but he can't find it in him to do the same.
She looks at him, not for long, and then shrugs before turning away. "I shouldn't be mad," she confesses. "You're doing fine, Satoshi. Just fine."
He missed her, all her opinions and her stubbornness and her way of loving, which sometimes hurt. She pinches him, now, and tells him that she's happy for him, really she is. He doesn't fully believe her until dinner, when she gives him an extra-large glass of acerola juice with a third helping of rice.
iv.
The night on the island runs by in stilts, chopping up the twilight into slivers of violet that Ohno wishes he could bottle up and bring back to Tokyo with him. Every day so far has been a flurry of burning reds and evergreen and too much blue above his head; it is an overwhelming amount of color, even for Ohno. It almost makes him miss his dorm room, all its grays and off-whites. But not quite.
Ohno doesn't sleep most days until after midnight. He tries to go to bed early because that's important when you have to work the next day, says his mother, but past the zero hour all the colors come out to splinter the neutral tones of his bed sheets and throw streaks of lilac and moon-color over his body. He thinks to himself, as the night wears on and his eyes grow heavy, that these shades are purely of the island. He has never seen anything like them in any art supply store in Tokyo.
He tries to stay up to wait for the tropical hues to greet him, the playful pinks and all of the oranges that Okinawa has in its treasure chest of a sun. But he never can; he is too tired, there is too much work to do. Eventually all the thoughts in his head clear away and the colors fade, too, as Ohno falls into dreams of swirling lines and giant spaces of white to fill in.
v.
The next day, the paper boy shows up.
"Ah, so sorry!" he says before he has even turned into their courtyard. Ohno is on break, and eating watermelon like a complete pig. He is also not wearing a lot of clothing, but he figures that this is Okinawa and it's perfectly acceptable practice, in such heat, if a man in his early twenties is sitting on his own veranda, wearing a threadbare tank top and old boxer shorts soaked pale pink in watermelon juice.
When the boy finally turns the corner, Ohno is glad of his assumption.
"I don't usually look like this when people move in," says the boy after a pause, smiling with only one upturned corner of his mouth. He is dripping sweat from his brow and the ends of his hair are spiked with moisture. "I wasn't aware of your, uh, visiting."
Sweat Boy (Ohno calls them as he sees them) is wearing striped shorts and a white tank top that looks newer and cleaner than the one Ohno is wearing, but thinner; Ohno can see clearly the color of the boy's skin through the fabric. It clings to his torso where his bones jut out, and Ohno can tell already that he has the body of a teenage boy, all angles and topographical surprises.
"Do you live here?" Ohno asks, taking another bite of watermelon and slurping loudly. Then he remembers that his mother used to teach at a finishing school. "Oh--do you want some?"
Laughing, Sweat Boy tosses the newspaper down onto the veranda and plops down next to it. "Of course I live here," he says, and Ohno swears he sees him wink. "And only if it's okay?"
Ohno carefully removes, with his pinky, a line of seeds from his slice. "This entire one's mine. Go ahead," he says, nudging the plate over with his knee. "I'm visiting from school."
"I'm Nino--Ninomiya," Nino says, picking up the smallest piece of melon with only his thumb and forefinger. It reminds Ohno of the way baby birds eat--the tiniest portions between the tips of their beaks. "I'm your age, then."
As he chews Ohno watches the sweat fall from a long strand of Nino's hair onto his shoulder, where it slides down from the rounded edge to the inside of his forearm and disappears. "Ohno Satoshi," he mumbles, still affixed on the drop, which has reappeared near Nino's wrist.
"Right," Nino says, nibbling at his watermelon. "The acerolas. I know you--your family, anyway."
They eat in silence for a few minutes, and then Nino puts the melon rind back on the plate carefully, near the edge so that it is not touching any of the other slices. He gets up and Ohno watches him stretch, every single muscle revealed for only a second underneath the surface of skin.
"Well, I come by when I can," Nino says, already walking back. "I'll see you tomorrow, maybe, Ohno-san."
Ohno wants to correct him--you're the paper boy, aren't you? Won't you come back every day?--but figures that this would only make him sound needy, like he is a little boy just moved in from the big bad city and wants, craves, a friend his age to play ball and catch bugs with. So he just waves, even though Nino is turned the other way. Still, he thinks, it's the thought that counts.
vi.
Two slices of watermelon are waiting for Ohno on the kitchen table when he comes in for break the next day. The house is shady and breezy, and he has the first piece of melon in his hand before the rest of him is even on a chair. The first few bites cool him down immediately and he stretches out, content, across the table.
He is slurping away at the second piece and counting the number of seeds on the plate when he hears a crash outside. For a second he thinks that maybe he should get up to make sure that nobody is trying to break into their house, but his feet just don't seem to be cooperating, so he remains sitting and keeps on chewing. He keeps listening just to be sure, but he doesn't hear anything much except for some rustling.
Then--
"This is what I get for coming back," somebody mutters, and Ohno freezes mid-chew.
He gets up slowly, still clutching at his watermelon slice, and tiptoes to the sliding doors where he gently pushes the frame back. Through the tiny space he manages to catch a glimpse of somebody, small and thin, hobbling along the edge of the veranda.
"Um," Ohno says, sticking his entire face out of the doorway now, "are you okay?"
Nino looks up. "I am," he says, "but your cat might not be."
Ohno is pretty sure that his family doesn't have a cat, unless his sister is keeping one secretly, and he tells Nino this as they walk around the house to the site of the crash. Nino explains that he was just coming by to drop off the paper when he noticed a commotion, and when he turned he saw something furry, a falling box, and then lots and lots of dust.
"I guess they're just hungry," is how he finishes his story. He and Ohno are standing side-by-side right next to the wreckage (even though it's actually only an overturned box full of leaves). "They probably thought they could find something in the box."
"Poor cats," Ohno says, and he means it. "I'd let them have some watermelon if they just asked."
"Is that so," Nino asks, though it sounds more like a statement than anything he's really curious about.
Ohno thinks about it. "Well, we have a lot of watermelons since we get them from down the road," he explains, gesturing lamely in a random direction. He's not entirely sure where this conversation is going, but from the way Nino is trying to slowly edge his way over to the kitchen, he thinks he knows.
And for a second it annoys him--who does this kid think he is, that I'm going to give him all of my watermelons?--but Nino is standing there, lips curving into a maybe-smile, expecting sweet things and an invitation into Ohno's kitchen. He's got one of his hands on the veranda, fingertips barely touching the wood, like he's about to sit down and stay anyway even if Ohno says no.
Well, he thinks, still squinting at Nino, there is nothing wrong in paying the paper boy with food for all the work he does (or says he does). It's the thought that counts, after all, even if they are practically strangers and Ohno likes to keep his food for himself.
So Ohno lets Nino into his kitchen, where he sits on the opposite end of the table and eats a slice of melon that is only slightly meatier than the one he had yesterday. It's an improvement in Ohno's eyes, and he is even more pleased when Nino promises, cross his heart, to deliver the paper the next day without fail.
"How much do we owe you?" Ohno yells when Nino is just a rippling pin in the distance, so tiny that Ohno has to squint against the sun to make sure he is not seeing a mirage.
Nino just raises an arm and waves.
vii.
Ohno quickly discovers that the local newspaper is not really full of news. Instead, there are entire pages devoted to weather forecasts, harvest predictions, and upcoming bargains at the supermarket in town. There are perhaps one or two sidebars devoted to Japanese and worldwide news, but they seem to be there more to fill up white space than anything.
"Well, that's what's important to us farmers," Ohno's father grunts when his son dares to ask. "That other stuff comes up on the television a lot. I don't need to read about it again if I've already heard it."
This baffles Ohno, who, after living for so long in a city like Tokyo, has come to believe that the world revolves around daily numbers, bulletins from the warfront, and stock market feeds. Here, though, in the deepest reaches of Okinawa, he is not so sure.
So he brings it up the next day over watermelon.
"Your dad is right," Nino says, nodding, after Ohno has explained himself. "I mean, everyone down here just cares about what they grow and how it'll grow, you know, stuff like that. What you think is news," he mumbles, pausing to extract a few seeds from the last bite of his slice, "they think of as just extra stuff from the 'outside world.'"
Ohno is nodding, but he is paying more attention to the way Nino is nibbling on his melon and how there is a thin, very pink line of watermelon juice running from his bottom lip to the underside of his chin. It contrasts sharply with the skin tone there, which is pale, though not quite white. Not knowing the name of the color annoys Ohno, until he realizes that this is Nino's neck he is thinking of. Surely there is something wrong with that.
Nino has delivered the morning paper faithfully for the past three days, and every single time there is watermelon on the table to be shared by the both of them. While they eat, they talk, which is a little better than the two of them going out to catch beetles or throw baseball pitches at each other. Ohno is grateful that Nino has not mentioned the fact that his watermelon slices have gotten bigger and bigger since the first day he delivered the paper, and Ohno doesn't talk about the way Nino is getting a little bolder with their pseudo-friendship each time he arrives. Today, he has his feet up on the edge of Ohno's chair (and it is a little strange, but it's not like he minds at all; Nino's toes wiggle every so often and it's somehow extremely fascinating).
"Why?" Nino asks, cutting into Ohno's thoughts. "I mean, do you learn a lot about current events in college?"
Ohno absently looks away from Nino's feet. "Not really. I go to art school."
Nino frowns and Ohno can't help but wonder if it's because he doesn't believe it. But then again, it's not like he looks all that intelligent, even with glasses on and a stack of books in his hand. "So you draw?" he finally asks, looking straight at Ohno. "Or do you paint?"
"Both," Ohno replies, and again he feels like he's not sure where Nino is trying to take this conversation. But he plays along, because he doesn't want to go back outside to work, and also because he would feel bad if he had to push Nino's feet off the chair. "I sculpt, too." He pauses. "Sometimes out of newspaper."
"And melon rinds?" Nino suggests, tapping at his finished pieces of melon. "What about squashed acerolas? The fruit of your labor?"
"Ah," Ohno says, smiling now. "That's for the ink."
There's a smear of almost transparent red across the bottom of Nino's chin. Ohno wants to reach out and touch it, to say, ink like that, and thinking about streaks of ink makes him want a bunch of pens in his hand and a thick piece of paper on the table, fresh and unscarred.
Nino reaches up to wipe his chin with his fingers, and Ohno is just a little let down.
"Well," Nino says, pushing his plate away, so far across the table that his fingertips brush the edge of Ohno's hand, "I should be going."
His feet slide off the chair, but his fingers linger for longer seconds until Nino finally turns to leave. He is halfway out the door when he mentions something about how the evening edition of the paper sometimes comes in late, so he will try to bring it to them sometime in the next week.
"Okay?" he says, and walks away slowly. "Bye, watermelon kid."
Ohno just hums something in reply. He is only kind of listening; there is a certain way the sunlight grabs Nino that makes him a part of the scenery--twenty, thirty, fifty colors rolled into one upright position. Ohno tries to count them all, and uses what he remembers from classes to label the hues, but Nino picks up the pace as he walks down the road. Soon he is just another heat wave, and Ohno has to look away.
viii.
There should be a tally. This is what Ohno thinks after he has finished his sixth tray of the day on Friday morning, a week and a half after his first day in the orchard. There should be a tally somewhere on the farm, and if there were such a tally Ohno's line would be steadily growing right now, the hash marks splitting into new ones by the second, representing all of the trays, so many of them, that Ohno has filled with cherries--
"Mom, I've done my twelve, can I go now?"
Ohno throws his sixth tray dejectedly to the side.
"Hey, Satoshi, make sure you put away the cherries where you're supposed to," his sister says as she hurries past him, already pulling off her gloves, tugging at her towel. "Oh my gosh, you're only on your sixth?"
Ohno just looks at her. But she pays him no mind and just rushes into the house to get ready for her date with a country boy down the road whose name is Yamamoto--first name forgotten, but it's not like it really matters in the end. They are going to Naha, the city, in his car.
"Have fun!" calls his mother cheerily, waving her hat to the little truck that is driving away now, kicking up the dirt behind it. Ohno can see his sister, a perfumed form of denim and pearls, smiling coquettishly in the passenger seat.
For the next few hours his mother sighs to herself, over and over again, and in between trays turns to stare wistfully at the road in front of the house. It worries Ohno, mostly because he has never seen his mother like this before, and wonders if she needs to go lie down. It is hotter than hot today--the reds aren't even familiar to Ohno anymore. They've stopped being colors and have turned into deadly sirens with fires for eyes that go after the humans, stealing body fluids and dehydrating everything in sight.
Dusk starts to settle in only a few hours after Ohno's sister has left, and he puts away his trays for the day, still thinking of and hoping for the tally. As he walks silently beside his mother toward the house, she takes his hand as they near the entrance and he turns to her, expecting words, but she just smiles sadly at him.
She lets him go at the doorway, to prepare dinner. "We'll have one less anyway," she sighs again, and Ohno bites his lip. "Since your sister is out with Yamamoto-kun."
"Ah, well, she always eats too much anyway," Ohno says, trying to be helpful, and his mother laughs, her other hand coming up to stifle the sound. Then she pats her son on the elbow and tells him to be nice, and also to go get the paper.
ix.
Ohno was not aware that the evening paper came with a free dinner guest.
"I was just dropping it off," Nino says amusedly as he sets the paper down onto the veranda. "You're deaf, aren't you? I definitely told you I was coming back tonight."
Ohno does not remember that. All he can recall are thoughts of Nino's feet on his chair and the watermelon seed contest that they had (whoever had the most seeds on their plate in thirty seconds won the last slice)--nothing about Nino coming back to deliver the evening paper.
"I don't have any watermelons for you," he says finally.
For some reason this strikes Nino as entirely too hilarious and Ohno is almost stunned to see him this way: Nino's laughter makes him bend over and his face brightens considerably. He has, Ohno thinks, a cute face, and right now, a smile that Ohno would kill to draw. His fingers twitch again, and a strong tug in his stomach reminds him briefly of the colors he sees in his bed at night, and his awful forgetfulness; why didn't he bring any of his colored pencils, his watercolors--?
There are still tiny puffs of laughter tumbling from Nino's mouth and Ohno has to smile. "Wait," Nino says, still kind of breathless, "You do know that I actually get paid to do this job, right? In money, not in fruit."
Ohno has to think about it. In the back of his mind surely he had some knowledge that Nino was getting a weekly, or perhaps monthly, wage for his work, and that he wasn't just delivering newspapers for the fun of it (because Ohno has gotten the hint that Nino doesn't exactly love to work).
But a part of him chose to believe that Nino came to his house with the paper every day because Ohno gave him watermelons and an air-conditioned environment and a break. And sometimes, Ohno knows--though his parents would beg to differ--that kind of reward is better than actual money. He doesn't dwell on it much, because he doesn't get paid himself. But he knows it's the truth.
"Yeah," Ohno answers a little indignantly, but he doesn't look at Nino when he says it. "I know that."
Nino just shakes his head. "Sure," he says, though his lips are still twitching, and picks up the newspaper. Ohno can see that he has ink all over his hands, smudged jet-black streaks on his nails and muted rainbows smothering his palms. It's just a little too uncanny, and Ohno is sure that somebody from Tokyo has to be playing a joke on him.
He accepts the paper from Nino and then blurts out, before he can stop himself, "Do you want to have dinner with us?"
Nino stills and Ohno automatically prepares himself for rejection, for that stinging punch to the gut that he has received so many times from countless girls and his sculpture professor, who is a hard grader and an alcoholic. His fingers tighten around the coil of paper in his hand and he sucks in a breath, already planning to make his dad get the newspaper from now on, even if he has to pick three extra trays of acerolas a day to seal the deal--
Ohno looks over when he feels Nino's hand on his shoulder.
"Well," Nino says, breath tickling the edge of Ohno's neck, "as long as you insist paying me with food, then I don't see why not."
He has this look on his face that says let's go, shall we and his fingers are ghosting Ohno's elbow. Part of Ohno wants to tell Nino that he never insisted on anything, but he knows that arguing with a boy like him would just be tiring. So he leads the way.
x.
Nino introduces himself to Ohno's parents first as Ninomiya Kazunari and then as "the paper boy." It is such an ambiguous title and yet Ohno feels like it is the best way to describe him, unless he goes off on a full-on description about how in the afternoons he is Sweat Boy, or boy with the rainbow palms. But Ohno will keep that to himself.
"Ah, yes!" his mother says, beaming so brightly it's almost inappropriate. She has always loved guests, though, and Ohno is not one to deny his mother's small pleasures. "Thank you for all your hard work. I really feel like we don't pay you enough..."
"No, it's just fine," Nino says, and he has a smile on his face that Ohno is positive he reserves only for mothers and girlfriends (he wonders if he can borrow it to use in his sculpture class). "Anyway, your son gives me all the watermelon I could ask for."
Ohno's mother almost swoons. "Yes, well, I taught him to treat people nicely," she says joyfully as she ushers them all into the living room. "It's all because of--oh, let me just tell you a little bit about my teaching days. Satoshi, set the table, please. You've heard all of this already."
He does, and tries to make as much noise as possible in the kitchen without having his mother notice. Nino keeps shooting him looks over his mother's shoulders, and Ohno just blinks back at him.
At the table, Nino is given, along with the most rice, the condensed version of all the finishing school stories combined. Ohno listens to his mother speak, in the kindest language, about her unruly girls and knitting classes and exam time behavior--and then decides that as long as the hotpot is unoccupied, he might as well start. All of that talking to Nino about food, it seems, just made him hungry.
He has a thick piece of meat hanging off the edge of the bowl when his mother finally notices. "Satoshi," she snaps, and Ohno jumps. It's been a while since he has had to deal with a woman's moods, but he has already discovered that the heat in Okinawa just makes them worse. "We have a guest and you're already going first? You know that's rude."
Nino coughs, but Ohno hears him snort anyway. He watches mournfully as the piece of meat gets swept away by broth bubbles, and this time Nino doesn't try to hide his snicker.
"Boys," Ohno's mother says sternly. "Manners at the dinner table, please."
Five minutes later Ohno feels Nino's elbow jab him in the gut.
xi.
Ohno quickly learns that extended periods of time with Nino are nothing less than painful.
"It's not my fault you're not more sufficiently padded," Nino says to him after dinner, when he's clearing the table without having been asked. "I have long arms, and you were sitting too close to me."
"I was not," Ohno mumbles as he stacks the saucers on the table. "You were sitting too close to me."
Behind the empty pitcher of acerola juice, Nino snickers. "Yeah," he says, but Ohno isn't too sure whether he's agreeing or not. "But you can make it up to me. Let me see your room when we're done," he says, and disappears into the kitchen before Ohno can say anything.
Nino is already on the first step of the stairs when Ohno comes out of the kitchen with leftover soap bubbles drifting down his arms. Nino takes one look at him and shakes his head.
"You have," he says, and gently swipes his hand down Ohno's arm, "soap bubbles on you, still. You're kind of a mess, aren't you?" But he's grinning, and Ohno knows that's a good thing.
Nino climbs the stairs like he lives there. He only sort of waits for Ohno to catch up, and there are not even that many stairs for him to catch up on--he just likes to keep his own pace, which is not a very fast one. With each step Nino turns to make sure that Ohno is still behind him, and of course he always is, but Nino's face, his eager expression, both startles and amuses Ohno.
"It's the one on the--," Ohno starts to say as he is only a few steps away from the top of the staircase.
"Left," Nino finishes casually, and then his lips curve into a sly line. "Lucky guess?"
Ohno accepts it all without even thinking and agrees with Nino without really turning the thought over in his head. "Yeah, you're lucky," he says as he pushes open the door in front of them.
It's not much, but Ohno secretly thinks that his room is some sort of architectural masterpiece. In reality it is far from that--the paint is peeling, the hardwood floor creaks in too many places and the window is too large for any sort of privacy--and yet in Ohno's head it is three million steps above his drab studio apartment. It is something close to heaven.
He has the room with the balcony and the window leading out to the landing takes up the entire wall facing his bed. The view goes far beyond the neighborhood and extends all the way out to the ocean, which is why Ohno took down the curtains his mother had put up as soon as he could. When the sun rises and sets on the sea there is a sudden palette of colors on his white bedroom walls, every color on the wheel and each one in between revealing itself in pale shadows where the paint still is. And where it isn't, the light seeps through the hairline cracks in the wall; it reminds Ohno of the way the paints bleed into the water when he cleans his brushes.
Ohno tries to imagine what his room would be like without the window, but he can't--or maybe he stops himself before the image comes up. Whichever one it is, he just doesn't feel right imagining a room of his own without light and shade and color. It's all kinds of wrong to him, and he won't go there even in his head.
"Ah, you--," Nino says, and Ohno looks up at the window before he realizes that Nino is the one talking. "You have sketchbooks?"
Oh, Ohno thinks, frowning, those. "It's all old stuff," he says nonchalantly. "I don't have any new ones."
"Why not?" Nino asks. He's already pulling out the stacks from the shelves and lining them up in front of him, ready to flip through Ohno's drawings for the next day or two. Ohno plops down next to Nino on the floor and arranges the books in a neat pile, taking care to assemble all of the stray pages in straight stacks.
"I mean," Nino continues, wondering aloud, "isn't this your job?"
Ohno has never thought of it that way before and it disturbs him, a little, to think of his windowpane utopia and pangs to draw as some sort of occupation, something that he is forced to do. He blinks, uncomprehending, and then says, "It's my hobby." To him, this is a fact of nature.
Nino nods and opens the first sketchbook carefully, fingers pressing only against the very edges of the heavy paper. When the cover finally gives way and the first page comes into view Ohno hears Nino exhale, and it's surprising to him that Nino would be so delicate about something like this.
But he is. He treats every page in the same way and he rests his eyes on every sketch for at least five minutes, pupils wandering, lost, all over the hazy lines and undefined shapes. He gets through three sketchbooks this way and Ohno can feel his crossed legs numbing but it would be too difficult to get up right now and anyway he is fine right here, watching Nino.
Behind them the sun is setting and there is a tangerine glow playing round the edges of Nino's ears. When he moves, so does the light, and Ohno is mesmerized by the radiant dancing spots on the sketchbook and across the backs of Nino's hands. The farther the sun sinks the more Ohno feels like he is losing something as Nino fades into an almost-darkness.
When Nino puts aside the last sketchbook and looks up Ohno knows he should look away--common sense tells him to--but he doesn't feel like listening to it. He keeps his eyes fixed on Nino.
Nino says something, and Ohno has to jar himself out of his own little world.
"What?" he asks, coming slowly back to reality.
"I said," Nino says, re-stacking the books, "that you're pretty good at this."
Something in Ohno's chest rattles. "That's what my mom tells everyone," he says, and looks away quickly. Nino laughs, and the sound is bright like sunlight breaking through the darkness of the room.
xii.
Ohno's sister comes back just before midnight and just after Nino has left. They pass each other on the road leading into the house and he bows, politely and just the way he should, but she is too baffled and tipsy to do much of anything back to him.
"Who was that?" she asks her brother when they're sitting at the table, after he has made a pot of tea. "It was a boy!"
He smiles. "Very good, 'nee-chan," and she just pinches his elbow.
Still, Ohno isn't sure what to tell her. He's sure that his night was nothing compared to his sister's--from the looks of it, and her vague, two-minute explanation, she lost a pearl earring on the dance floor and Yamamoto-kun tried to make a pass at her but she fended him off with a cocktail stick.
Nothing as exciting happened in the Ohno household, and Ohno recounts the entire night to his sister: they had hotpot and Ohno was not allowed to have nearly as much meat as he wanted, their mother recounted her entire teaching career to Nino throughout dinner, and their father said two words the entire time as per usual. He doesn't tell her about his bruises or the sketchbooks.
She laughs about everything else, though, and reaches across the table to pat her brother's hand. "You know mom loves any kind of company and dad--well, yeah..." She trails off, looking into space, and absentmindedly swirls the tea in her cup.
Then she asks, "What else, what else?"
Nothing, he says, that's all.
He looks down into his cup. What can he tell her, after all, that wouldn't make him seem like a crazy person, like a love-struck fool?
"Nothing? Really?" asks his sister, staring intently at Ohno, her head tilted and cheeks flushed pink with slight intoxication. "But he came here at--around seven, right? What did you all do for four and a half hours?"
Ohno takes a hurried sip of his tea and ends up burning his tongue. "We--talked," he says, hoping that his sister won't catch the hesitation in his voice, or, even worse, ask what they talked about.
To his relief, she only nods and then downs the rest of her tea in one long gulp. "I'm just glad to see you've made a friend, Satoshi," she says, still grinning. "Maybe you'll quit complaining as much."
He wants to protest, to say, I never complained, but she gets up then and wobbles to her bedroom unsteadily. Ohno watches her go and then, when she is out of sight, exhales. He lets it all go, for one second, even though he knows in the back of his mind that this is all far from over.
xiii.
Tonight, in Ohno's bedroom, the sky is all about him, closing in on him, taking all the uncertainties in his head and squeezing them until they produce an inkling of sad gray. He lies awake, sheets kicked to the floor, and pouts at the world outside of his window. He doesn't want to look at the colors tonight, not if they're going to do anything but taunt him.
So he sketches with his fingers, instead. The air inside of the house is comfortable, if slightly muggy, and Ohno sleeps without a shirt on, so when he lifts his hands to stretch his fingers above his head he can see the lines of shadow splayed across his bare chest. After a brief stint of shadow animals (because Ohno will never tire of that childhood game, even when he is fifty, he just knows it), he draws.
Just going through the motions of sketching calms him down. His fingers behave as if they are holding a pencil and the long sweeps of his wrist and the movement of his entire arm are the same, were he using a piece of paper instead of the air. He draws from memory, but doesn't think, and then he starts to lay down the colors for his masterpiece--the shade of the sand on the beach nearby for skin, the dark chocolate warmth of the palm tree trunks for eyes, for shadows. In his head he lifts the island palette off the earth and smoothes it over what he has created.
Of course he knows who it is, when it is finished. Even if his eyes only see the ceiling, he knows.
It scares him a little--what do you do, after all, when you don't even know what's going on inside of your own head?--but he figures that something will happen, something that will let him know which way to go.
Part two
Pairing(s): Ohno/Nino
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~23,000
Summary: Come help with the farm. Art school won't miss you for one month, right? Ohno works on an acerola farm and Nino is the paper boy.
Notes: This very large AU is based on this prompt, which was being offered during the ohmiya drabble/short story contests: Ohno works on an acerola farm and Nino is the paper boy. As you can see, this isn't really a short story. I have too much to say about this fic, but this isn't the place for it. So just two huge, huge thank-yous: aeslis for cheering me on with this, being a SERIOUSLY amazing beta and catching my psychic!Nino (he doesn't exist anymore, sorry), and Caetlin, who does not have an LJ but helped me to no end on some of the more delicate processes of art. We took a painting class together. She got the real A, I just got an A for effort.
EDIT 7/2/09: There is now a whole version of this fic over at Dreamwidth, because they are cool and allow more than 10,000 words per post. So if you would rather read this in one whole chunk as opposed to three, mosey on over.
ENCAUSTIC - a painting technique in which molten wax is blended with pigments and then fused onto a surface with intense heat, which renders the image permanent.
i.
When Ohno gets the postcard he is ridiculously excited. Come help with the farm, it says, in calligraphy from some ancient school that only his mother knows how to paint, with all the grace in her body. Art school won't miss you for one month, right?
It turns out that she is wrong, and all of Ohno's professors, after having a friendly reminder of who Ohno Satoshi is, are devastated. It is the last term before the next school year and the exhibitions are all calling for the best students--Ohno is one of them, even though he hardly ever says anything, and so his teachers send him off with promises to create some things to bring back and show off.
"Have fun," they all say, patting him on the back. "You will love Okinawa! The ocean is beautiful and the sun dazzles like no other!"
Ohno has never been to Okinawa. His parents moved there to inherit some hundred year-old acerola farm, and while Ohno admits that he likes the fruit and loves his family, he is not really looking forward to harvest time.
ii.
Harvest time is hell. Ohno is bent over every single day and he feels like he has been in the same position for his entire life just after six hours of working in the trees. When he stands, he swears his back cracks in eight different places.
"What a baby," says his sister as she hands him an empty tray--a call for a new batch. "Art school has turned you into mush, Satoshi. It's pathetic."
Ohno is indignant and sticks his chin out, but can't do anything more than grunt. The sun in Okinawa seems an orange monster compared to the tiny child of a sun that rises over Tokyo. He almost misses the smog, but has to remind himself that this air is good for him. Sea salt cleanses the body, after all. He read it somewhere.
"Satoshi, pick!" someone calls to his far left, and Ohno buries his head in a tree and breathes deeply.
iii.
On the third day, he is excused.
His sister isn't too happy about it, and sulks all throughout breakfast, dishwashing, and suiting up for the day. "I can't believe this," she mutters as she ties a towel forcefully around her head. "Your pansy ass has only been here for three days and they're already letting you off. Tell me, Satoshi," she says, knotting the headband with a jerk, "tell me how long I've been here."
Ohno sits for a minute, staring blankly at the shoes lined neatly against the entrance wall, and then mumbles, "A year."
He feels sincerely apologetic, and wishes he could somehow comfort his sister--he knows that she really wants a husband and an apartment in Osaka and her own oven to bake in--but he also knows that he hasn't done anything wrong. Art school had been a goal since he was twelve, when he took a field trip to the art museum and the college kids there had been so nice to him and had complimented his drawings, even though they were truly only doodles in a math textbook. But that had been encouragement enough, and his parents--especially his mother--had told him that if he worked for it, he would be just fine.
Eight years later, and everything worked out exactly the way it was supposed to. He made it into the first semester, full honors, all of the teachers loving his work (though not exactly remembering his name). And here is his sister, a beautiful girl, ready to get out into the world and say I do instead of harvesting acerolas in the crushing heat.
"Sorry," he says to her as she slides open the door with her foot. It's bad manners, and she would always call him out on that, but he can't find it in him to do the same.
She looks at him, not for long, and then shrugs before turning away. "I shouldn't be mad," she confesses. "You're doing fine, Satoshi. Just fine."
He missed her, all her opinions and her stubbornness and her way of loving, which sometimes hurt. She pinches him, now, and tells him that she's happy for him, really she is. He doesn't fully believe her until dinner, when she gives him an extra-large glass of acerola juice with a third helping of rice.
iv.
The night on the island runs by in stilts, chopping up the twilight into slivers of violet that Ohno wishes he could bottle up and bring back to Tokyo with him. Every day so far has been a flurry of burning reds and evergreen and too much blue above his head; it is an overwhelming amount of color, even for Ohno. It almost makes him miss his dorm room, all its grays and off-whites. But not quite.
Ohno doesn't sleep most days until after midnight. He tries to go to bed early because that's important when you have to work the next day, says his mother, but past the zero hour all the colors come out to splinter the neutral tones of his bed sheets and throw streaks of lilac and moon-color over his body. He thinks to himself, as the night wears on and his eyes grow heavy, that these shades are purely of the island. He has never seen anything like them in any art supply store in Tokyo.
He tries to stay up to wait for the tropical hues to greet him, the playful pinks and all of the oranges that Okinawa has in its treasure chest of a sun. But he never can; he is too tired, there is too much work to do. Eventually all the thoughts in his head clear away and the colors fade, too, as Ohno falls into dreams of swirling lines and giant spaces of white to fill in.
v.
The next day, the paper boy shows up.
"Ah, so sorry!" he says before he has even turned into their courtyard. Ohno is on break, and eating watermelon like a complete pig. He is also not wearing a lot of clothing, but he figures that this is Okinawa and it's perfectly acceptable practice, in such heat, if a man in his early twenties is sitting on his own veranda, wearing a threadbare tank top and old boxer shorts soaked pale pink in watermelon juice.
When the boy finally turns the corner, Ohno is glad of his assumption.
"I don't usually look like this when people move in," says the boy after a pause, smiling with only one upturned corner of his mouth. He is dripping sweat from his brow and the ends of his hair are spiked with moisture. "I wasn't aware of your, uh, visiting."
Sweat Boy (Ohno calls them as he sees them) is wearing striped shorts and a white tank top that looks newer and cleaner than the one Ohno is wearing, but thinner; Ohno can see clearly the color of the boy's skin through the fabric. It clings to his torso where his bones jut out, and Ohno can tell already that he has the body of a teenage boy, all angles and topographical surprises.
"Do you live here?" Ohno asks, taking another bite of watermelon and slurping loudly. Then he remembers that his mother used to teach at a finishing school. "Oh--do you want some?"
Laughing, Sweat Boy tosses the newspaper down onto the veranda and plops down next to it. "Of course I live here," he says, and Ohno swears he sees him wink. "And only if it's okay?"
Ohno carefully removes, with his pinky, a line of seeds from his slice. "This entire one's mine. Go ahead," he says, nudging the plate over with his knee. "I'm visiting from school."
"I'm Nino--Ninomiya," Nino says, picking up the smallest piece of melon with only his thumb and forefinger. It reminds Ohno of the way baby birds eat--the tiniest portions between the tips of their beaks. "I'm your age, then."
As he chews Ohno watches the sweat fall from a long strand of Nino's hair onto his shoulder, where it slides down from the rounded edge to the inside of his forearm and disappears. "Ohno Satoshi," he mumbles, still affixed on the drop, which has reappeared near Nino's wrist.
"Right," Nino says, nibbling at his watermelon. "The acerolas. I know you--your family, anyway."
They eat in silence for a few minutes, and then Nino puts the melon rind back on the plate carefully, near the edge so that it is not touching any of the other slices. He gets up and Ohno watches him stretch, every single muscle revealed for only a second underneath the surface of skin.
"Well, I come by when I can," Nino says, already walking back. "I'll see you tomorrow, maybe, Ohno-san."
Ohno wants to correct him--you're the paper boy, aren't you? Won't you come back every day?--but figures that this would only make him sound needy, like he is a little boy just moved in from the big bad city and wants, craves, a friend his age to play ball and catch bugs with. So he just waves, even though Nino is turned the other way. Still, he thinks, it's the thought that counts.
vi.
Two slices of watermelon are waiting for Ohno on the kitchen table when he comes in for break the next day. The house is shady and breezy, and he has the first piece of melon in his hand before the rest of him is even on a chair. The first few bites cool him down immediately and he stretches out, content, across the table.
He is slurping away at the second piece and counting the number of seeds on the plate when he hears a crash outside. For a second he thinks that maybe he should get up to make sure that nobody is trying to break into their house, but his feet just don't seem to be cooperating, so he remains sitting and keeps on chewing. He keeps listening just to be sure, but he doesn't hear anything much except for some rustling.
Then--
"This is what I get for coming back," somebody mutters, and Ohno freezes mid-chew.
He gets up slowly, still clutching at his watermelon slice, and tiptoes to the sliding doors where he gently pushes the frame back. Through the tiny space he manages to catch a glimpse of somebody, small and thin, hobbling along the edge of the veranda.
"Um," Ohno says, sticking his entire face out of the doorway now, "are you okay?"
Nino looks up. "I am," he says, "but your cat might not be."
Ohno is pretty sure that his family doesn't have a cat, unless his sister is keeping one secretly, and he tells Nino this as they walk around the house to the site of the crash. Nino explains that he was just coming by to drop off the paper when he noticed a commotion, and when he turned he saw something furry, a falling box, and then lots and lots of dust.
"I guess they're just hungry," is how he finishes his story. He and Ohno are standing side-by-side right next to the wreckage (even though it's actually only an overturned box full of leaves). "They probably thought they could find something in the box."
"Poor cats," Ohno says, and he means it. "I'd let them have some watermelon if they just asked."
"Is that so," Nino asks, though it sounds more like a statement than anything he's really curious about.
Ohno thinks about it. "Well, we have a lot of watermelons since we get them from down the road," he explains, gesturing lamely in a random direction. He's not entirely sure where this conversation is going, but from the way Nino is trying to slowly edge his way over to the kitchen, he thinks he knows.
And for a second it annoys him--who does this kid think he is, that I'm going to give him all of my watermelons?--but Nino is standing there, lips curving into a maybe-smile, expecting sweet things and an invitation into Ohno's kitchen. He's got one of his hands on the veranda, fingertips barely touching the wood, like he's about to sit down and stay anyway even if Ohno says no.
Well, he thinks, still squinting at Nino, there is nothing wrong in paying the paper boy with food for all the work he does (or says he does). It's the thought that counts, after all, even if they are practically strangers and Ohno likes to keep his food for himself.
So Ohno lets Nino into his kitchen, where he sits on the opposite end of the table and eats a slice of melon that is only slightly meatier than the one he had yesterday. It's an improvement in Ohno's eyes, and he is even more pleased when Nino promises, cross his heart, to deliver the paper the next day without fail.
"How much do we owe you?" Ohno yells when Nino is just a rippling pin in the distance, so tiny that Ohno has to squint against the sun to make sure he is not seeing a mirage.
Nino just raises an arm and waves.
vii.
Ohno quickly discovers that the local newspaper is not really full of news. Instead, there are entire pages devoted to weather forecasts, harvest predictions, and upcoming bargains at the supermarket in town. There are perhaps one or two sidebars devoted to Japanese and worldwide news, but they seem to be there more to fill up white space than anything.
"Well, that's what's important to us farmers," Ohno's father grunts when his son dares to ask. "That other stuff comes up on the television a lot. I don't need to read about it again if I've already heard it."
This baffles Ohno, who, after living for so long in a city like Tokyo, has come to believe that the world revolves around daily numbers, bulletins from the warfront, and stock market feeds. Here, though, in the deepest reaches of Okinawa, he is not so sure.
So he brings it up the next day over watermelon.
"Your dad is right," Nino says, nodding, after Ohno has explained himself. "I mean, everyone down here just cares about what they grow and how it'll grow, you know, stuff like that. What you think is news," he mumbles, pausing to extract a few seeds from the last bite of his slice, "they think of as just extra stuff from the 'outside world.'"
Ohno is nodding, but he is paying more attention to the way Nino is nibbling on his melon and how there is a thin, very pink line of watermelon juice running from his bottom lip to the underside of his chin. It contrasts sharply with the skin tone there, which is pale, though not quite white. Not knowing the name of the color annoys Ohno, until he realizes that this is Nino's neck he is thinking of. Surely there is something wrong with that.
Nino has delivered the morning paper faithfully for the past three days, and every single time there is watermelon on the table to be shared by the both of them. While they eat, they talk, which is a little better than the two of them going out to catch beetles or throw baseball pitches at each other. Ohno is grateful that Nino has not mentioned the fact that his watermelon slices have gotten bigger and bigger since the first day he delivered the paper, and Ohno doesn't talk about the way Nino is getting a little bolder with their pseudo-friendship each time he arrives. Today, he has his feet up on the edge of Ohno's chair (and it is a little strange, but it's not like he minds at all; Nino's toes wiggle every so often and it's somehow extremely fascinating).
"Why?" Nino asks, cutting into Ohno's thoughts. "I mean, do you learn a lot about current events in college?"
Ohno absently looks away from Nino's feet. "Not really. I go to art school."
Nino frowns and Ohno can't help but wonder if it's because he doesn't believe it. But then again, it's not like he looks all that intelligent, even with glasses on and a stack of books in his hand. "So you draw?" he finally asks, looking straight at Ohno. "Or do you paint?"
"Both," Ohno replies, and again he feels like he's not sure where Nino is trying to take this conversation. But he plays along, because he doesn't want to go back outside to work, and also because he would feel bad if he had to push Nino's feet off the chair. "I sculpt, too." He pauses. "Sometimes out of newspaper."
"And melon rinds?" Nino suggests, tapping at his finished pieces of melon. "What about squashed acerolas? The fruit of your labor?"
"Ah," Ohno says, smiling now. "That's for the ink."
There's a smear of almost transparent red across the bottom of Nino's chin. Ohno wants to reach out and touch it, to say, ink like that, and thinking about streaks of ink makes him want a bunch of pens in his hand and a thick piece of paper on the table, fresh and unscarred.
Nino reaches up to wipe his chin with his fingers, and Ohno is just a little let down.
"Well," Nino says, pushing his plate away, so far across the table that his fingertips brush the edge of Ohno's hand, "I should be going."
His feet slide off the chair, but his fingers linger for longer seconds until Nino finally turns to leave. He is halfway out the door when he mentions something about how the evening edition of the paper sometimes comes in late, so he will try to bring it to them sometime in the next week.
"Okay?" he says, and walks away slowly. "Bye, watermelon kid."
Ohno just hums something in reply. He is only kind of listening; there is a certain way the sunlight grabs Nino that makes him a part of the scenery--twenty, thirty, fifty colors rolled into one upright position. Ohno tries to count them all, and uses what he remembers from classes to label the hues, but Nino picks up the pace as he walks down the road. Soon he is just another heat wave, and Ohno has to look away.
viii.
There should be a tally. This is what Ohno thinks after he has finished his sixth tray of the day on Friday morning, a week and a half after his first day in the orchard. There should be a tally somewhere on the farm, and if there were such a tally Ohno's line would be steadily growing right now, the hash marks splitting into new ones by the second, representing all of the trays, so many of them, that Ohno has filled with cherries--
"Mom, I've done my twelve, can I go now?"
Ohno throws his sixth tray dejectedly to the side.
"Hey, Satoshi, make sure you put away the cherries where you're supposed to," his sister says as she hurries past him, already pulling off her gloves, tugging at her towel. "Oh my gosh, you're only on your sixth?"
Ohno just looks at her. But she pays him no mind and just rushes into the house to get ready for her date with a country boy down the road whose name is Yamamoto--first name forgotten, but it's not like it really matters in the end. They are going to Naha, the city, in his car.
"Have fun!" calls his mother cheerily, waving her hat to the little truck that is driving away now, kicking up the dirt behind it. Ohno can see his sister, a perfumed form of denim and pearls, smiling coquettishly in the passenger seat.
For the next few hours his mother sighs to herself, over and over again, and in between trays turns to stare wistfully at the road in front of the house. It worries Ohno, mostly because he has never seen his mother like this before, and wonders if she needs to go lie down. It is hotter than hot today--the reds aren't even familiar to Ohno anymore. They've stopped being colors and have turned into deadly sirens with fires for eyes that go after the humans, stealing body fluids and dehydrating everything in sight.
Dusk starts to settle in only a few hours after Ohno's sister has left, and he puts away his trays for the day, still thinking of and hoping for the tally. As he walks silently beside his mother toward the house, she takes his hand as they near the entrance and he turns to her, expecting words, but she just smiles sadly at him.
She lets him go at the doorway, to prepare dinner. "We'll have one less anyway," she sighs again, and Ohno bites his lip. "Since your sister is out with Yamamoto-kun."
"Ah, well, she always eats too much anyway," Ohno says, trying to be helpful, and his mother laughs, her other hand coming up to stifle the sound. Then she pats her son on the elbow and tells him to be nice, and also to go get the paper.
ix.
Ohno was not aware that the evening paper came with a free dinner guest.
"I was just dropping it off," Nino says amusedly as he sets the paper down onto the veranda. "You're deaf, aren't you? I definitely told you I was coming back tonight."
Ohno does not remember that. All he can recall are thoughts of Nino's feet on his chair and the watermelon seed contest that they had (whoever had the most seeds on their plate in thirty seconds won the last slice)--nothing about Nino coming back to deliver the evening paper.
"I don't have any watermelons for you," he says finally.
For some reason this strikes Nino as entirely too hilarious and Ohno is almost stunned to see him this way: Nino's laughter makes him bend over and his face brightens considerably. He has, Ohno thinks, a cute face, and right now, a smile that Ohno would kill to draw. His fingers twitch again, and a strong tug in his stomach reminds him briefly of the colors he sees in his bed at night, and his awful forgetfulness; why didn't he bring any of his colored pencils, his watercolors--?
There are still tiny puffs of laughter tumbling from Nino's mouth and Ohno has to smile. "Wait," Nino says, still kind of breathless, "You do know that I actually get paid to do this job, right? In money, not in fruit."
Ohno has to think about it. In the back of his mind surely he had some knowledge that Nino was getting a weekly, or perhaps monthly, wage for his work, and that he wasn't just delivering newspapers for the fun of it (because Ohno has gotten the hint that Nino doesn't exactly love to work).
But a part of him chose to believe that Nino came to his house with the paper every day because Ohno gave him watermelons and an air-conditioned environment and a break. And sometimes, Ohno knows--though his parents would beg to differ--that kind of reward is better than actual money. He doesn't dwell on it much, because he doesn't get paid himself. But he knows it's the truth.
"Yeah," Ohno answers a little indignantly, but he doesn't look at Nino when he says it. "I know that."
Nino just shakes his head. "Sure," he says, though his lips are still twitching, and picks up the newspaper. Ohno can see that he has ink all over his hands, smudged jet-black streaks on his nails and muted rainbows smothering his palms. It's just a little too uncanny, and Ohno is sure that somebody from Tokyo has to be playing a joke on him.
He accepts the paper from Nino and then blurts out, before he can stop himself, "Do you want to have dinner with us?"
Nino stills and Ohno automatically prepares himself for rejection, for that stinging punch to the gut that he has received so many times from countless girls and his sculpture professor, who is a hard grader and an alcoholic. His fingers tighten around the coil of paper in his hand and he sucks in a breath, already planning to make his dad get the newspaper from now on, even if he has to pick three extra trays of acerolas a day to seal the deal--
Ohno looks over when he feels Nino's hand on his shoulder.
"Well," Nino says, breath tickling the edge of Ohno's neck, "as long as you insist paying me with food, then I don't see why not."
He has this look on his face that says let's go, shall we and his fingers are ghosting Ohno's elbow. Part of Ohno wants to tell Nino that he never insisted on anything, but he knows that arguing with a boy like him would just be tiring. So he leads the way.
x.
Nino introduces himself to Ohno's parents first as Ninomiya Kazunari and then as "the paper boy." It is such an ambiguous title and yet Ohno feels like it is the best way to describe him, unless he goes off on a full-on description about how in the afternoons he is Sweat Boy, or boy with the rainbow palms. But Ohno will keep that to himself.
"Ah, yes!" his mother says, beaming so brightly it's almost inappropriate. She has always loved guests, though, and Ohno is not one to deny his mother's small pleasures. "Thank you for all your hard work. I really feel like we don't pay you enough..."
"No, it's just fine," Nino says, and he has a smile on his face that Ohno is positive he reserves only for mothers and girlfriends (he wonders if he can borrow it to use in his sculpture class). "Anyway, your son gives me all the watermelon I could ask for."
Ohno's mother almost swoons. "Yes, well, I taught him to treat people nicely," she says joyfully as she ushers them all into the living room. "It's all because of--oh, let me just tell you a little bit about my teaching days. Satoshi, set the table, please. You've heard all of this already."
He does, and tries to make as much noise as possible in the kitchen without having his mother notice. Nino keeps shooting him looks over his mother's shoulders, and Ohno just blinks back at him.
At the table, Nino is given, along with the most rice, the condensed version of all the finishing school stories combined. Ohno listens to his mother speak, in the kindest language, about her unruly girls and knitting classes and exam time behavior--and then decides that as long as the hotpot is unoccupied, he might as well start. All of that talking to Nino about food, it seems, just made him hungry.
He has a thick piece of meat hanging off the edge of the bowl when his mother finally notices. "Satoshi," she snaps, and Ohno jumps. It's been a while since he has had to deal with a woman's moods, but he has already discovered that the heat in Okinawa just makes them worse. "We have a guest and you're already going first? You know that's rude."
Nino coughs, but Ohno hears him snort anyway. He watches mournfully as the piece of meat gets swept away by broth bubbles, and this time Nino doesn't try to hide his snicker.
"Boys," Ohno's mother says sternly. "Manners at the dinner table, please."
Five minutes later Ohno feels Nino's elbow jab him in the gut.
xi.
Ohno quickly learns that extended periods of time with Nino are nothing less than painful.
"It's not my fault you're not more sufficiently padded," Nino says to him after dinner, when he's clearing the table without having been asked. "I have long arms, and you were sitting too close to me."
"I was not," Ohno mumbles as he stacks the saucers on the table. "You were sitting too close to me."
Behind the empty pitcher of acerola juice, Nino snickers. "Yeah," he says, but Ohno isn't too sure whether he's agreeing or not. "But you can make it up to me. Let me see your room when we're done," he says, and disappears into the kitchen before Ohno can say anything.
Nino is already on the first step of the stairs when Ohno comes out of the kitchen with leftover soap bubbles drifting down his arms. Nino takes one look at him and shakes his head.
"You have," he says, and gently swipes his hand down Ohno's arm, "soap bubbles on you, still. You're kind of a mess, aren't you?" But he's grinning, and Ohno knows that's a good thing.
Nino climbs the stairs like he lives there. He only sort of waits for Ohno to catch up, and there are not even that many stairs for him to catch up on--he just likes to keep his own pace, which is not a very fast one. With each step Nino turns to make sure that Ohno is still behind him, and of course he always is, but Nino's face, his eager expression, both startles and amuses Ohno.
"It's the one on the--," Ohno starts to say as he is only a few steps away from the top of the staircase.
"Left," Nino finishes casually, and then his lips curve into a sly line. "Lucky guess?"
Ohno accepts it all without even thinking and agrees with Nino without really turning the thought over in his head. "Yeah, you're lucky," he says as he pushes open the door in front of them.
It's not much, but Ohno secretly thinks that his room is some sort of architectural masterpiece. In reality it is far from that--the paint is peeling, the hardwood floor creaks in too many places and the window is too large for any sort of privacy--and yet in Ohno's head it is three million steps above his drab studio apartment. It is something close to heaven.
He has the room with the balcony and the window leading out to the landing takes up the entire wall facing his bed. The view goes far beyond the neighborhood and extends all the way out to the ocean, which is why Ohno took down the curtains his mother had put up as soon as he could. When the sun rises and sets on the sea there is a sudden palette of colors on his white bedroom walls, every color on the wheel and each one in between revealing itself in pale shadows where the paint still is. And where it isn't, the light seeps through the hairline cracks in the wall; it reminds Ohno of the way the paints bleed into the water when he cleans his brushes.
Ohno tries to imagine what his room would be like without the window, but he can't--or maybe he stops himself before the image comes up. Whichever one it is, he just doesn't feel right imagining a room of his own without light and shade and color. It's all kinds of wrong to him, and he won't go there even in his head.
"Ah, you--," Nino says, and Ohno looks up at the window before he realizes that Nino is the one talking. "You have sketchbooks?"
Oh, Ohno thinks, frowning, those. "It's all old stuff," he says nonchalantly. "I don't have any new ones."
"Why not?" Nino asks. He's already pulling out the stacks from the shelves and lining them up in front of him, ready to flip through Ohno's drawings for the next day or two. Ohno plops down next to Nino on the floor and arranges the books in a neat pile, taking care to assemble all of the stray pages in straight stacks.
"I mean," Nino continues, wondering aloud, "isn't this your job?"
Ohno has never thought of it that way before and it disturbs him, a little, to think of his windowpane utopia and pangs to draw as some sort of occupation, something that he is forced to do. He blinks, uncomprehending, and then says, "It's my hobby." To him, this is a fact of nature.
Nino nods and opens the first sketchbook carefully, fingers pressing only against the very edges of the heavy paper. When the cover finally gives way and the first page comes into view Ohno hears Nino exhale, and it's surprising to him that Nino would be so delicate about something like this.
But he is. He treats every page in the same way and he rests his eyes on every sketch for at least five minutes, pupils wandering, lost, all over the hazy lines and undefined shapes. He gets through three sketchbooks this way and Ohno can feel his crossed legs numbing but it would be too difficult to get up right now and anyway he is fine right here, watching Nino.
Behind them the sun is setting and there is a tangerine glow playing round the edges of Nino's ears. When he moves, so does the light, and Ohno is mesmerized by the radiant dancing spots on the sketchbook and across the backs of Nino's hands. The farther the sun sinks the more Ohno feels like he is losing something as Nino fades into an almost-darkness.
When Nino puts aside the last sketchbook and looks up Ohno knows he should look away--common sense tells him to--but he doesn't feel like listening to it. He keeps his eyes fixed on Nino.
Nino says something, and Ohno has to jar himself out of his own little world.
"What?" he asks, coming slowly back to reality.
"I said," Nino says, re-stacking the books, "that you're pretty good at this."
Something in Ohno's chest rattles. "That's what my mom tells everyone," he says, and looks away quickly. Nino laughs, and the sound is bright like sunlight breaking through the darkness of the room.
xii.
Ohno's sister comes back just before midnight and just after Nino has left. They pass each other on the road leading into the house and he bows, politely and just the way he should, but she is too baffled and tipsy to do much of anything back to him.
"Who was that?" she asks her brother when they're sitting at the table, after he has made a pot of tea. "It was a boy!"
He smiles. "Very good, 'nee-chan," and she just pinches his elbow.
Still, Ohno isn't sure what to tell her. He's sure that his night was nothing compared to his sister's--from the looks of it, and her vague, two-minute explanation, she lost a pearl earring on the dance floor and Yamamoto-kun tried to make a pass at her but she fended him off with a cocktail stick.
Nothing as exciting happened in the Ohno household, and Ohno recounts the entire night to his sister: they had hotpot and Ohno was not allowed to have nearly as much meat as he wanted, their mother recounted her entire teaching career to Nino throughout dinner, and their father said two words the entire time as per usual. He doesn't tell her about his bruises or the sketchbooks.
She laughs about everything else, though, and reaches across the table to pat her brother's hand. "You know mom loves any kind of company and dad--well, yeah..." She trails off, looking into space, and absentmindedly swirls the tea in her cup.
Then she asks, "What else, what else?"
Nothing, he says, that's all.
He looks down into his cup. What can he tell her, after all, that wouldn't make him seem like a crazy person, like a love-struck fool?
"Nothing? Really?" asks his sister, staring intently at Ohno, her head tilted and cheeks flushed pink with slight intoxication. "But he came here at--around seven, right? What did you all do for four and a half hours?"
Ohno takes a hurried sip of his tea and ends up burning his tongue. "We--talked," he says, hoping that his sister won't catch the hesitation in his voice, or, even worse, ask what they talked about.
To his relief, she only nods and then downs the rest of her tea in one long gulp. "I'm just glad to see you've made a friend, Satoshi," she says, still grinning. "Maybe you'll quit complaining as much."
He wants to protest, to say, I never complained, but she gets up then and wobbles to her bedroom unsteadily. Ohno watches her go and then, when she is out of sight, exhales. He lets it all go, for one second, even though he knows in the back of his mind that this is all far from over.
xiii.
Tonight, in Ohno's bedroom, the sky is all about him, closing in on him, taking all the uncertainties in his head and squeezing them until they produce an inkling of sad gray. He lies awake, sheets kicked to the floor, and pouts at the world outside of his window. He doesn't want to look at the colors tonight, not if they're going to do anything but taunt him.
So he sketches with his fingers, instead. The air inside of the house is comfortable, if slightly muggy, and Ohno sleeps without a shirt on, so when he lifts his hands to stretch his fingers above his head he can see the lines of shadow splayed across his bare chest. After a brief stint of shadow animals (because Ohno will never tire of that childhood game, even when he is fifty, he just knows it), he draws.
Just going through the motions of sketching calms him down. His fingers behave as if they are holding a pencil and the long sweeps of his wrist and the movement of his entire arm are the same, were he using a piece of paper instead of the air. He draws from memory, but doesn't think, and then he starts to lay down the colors for his masterpiece--the shade of the sand on the beach nearby for skin, the dark chocolate warmth of the palm tree trunks for eyes, for shadows. In his head he lifts the island palette off the earth and smoothes it over what he has created.
Of course he knows who it is, when it is finished. Even if his eyes only see the ceiling, he knows.
It scares him a little--what do you do, after all, when you don't even know what's going on inside of your own head?--but he figures that something will happen, something that will let him know which way to go.
Part two