(no subject)
Title: The Celestial, the Divine, the Imperishable (part one)
Pairing: Oshitari/Atobe
Rating: R
Word count: 13, 300
Summary: It's a long, long journey, finding my way back to you.
Notes: Written for crazy_marik for hyouteiexchange. Thanks go out to stelf, g3ssh0ku, theprerogative, and many others who were tremendously gracious in contributing their time to help me finish this fic. :)
At elevation 4680 meters, it was easy to laugh into the mist. It was easy to pretend that, 4680 meters below, there was no one else in the world. It was easy to see gold rings and oceans of white behind closed lids. It felt to be a meter from heaven. It wasn't quite perfect, but for now, it would have to do.
-----
Asphyxiation with use of pepper, pickling of internal organs, skinning alive and sprinkling with salt...
As Calculus trudged on, these forms of Chinese torture, from World History, were beginning to sound very, very humane to Atobe. Finals week landed early this year, just in time to collide with one of his infamous migraines. It was an effort keeping his forehead from greeting the cool, inviting surface of his desk.
Briefly, he wondered whether it would be wiser to try to master the art of sleeping with his eyes open, or to project grossly attentive eyeballs onto his eyelids. Neither, he decided after a moment of thought, was particularly noble of an idea, but the latter meant he could sleep. It was an appealing thought.
Before he could begin to mentally work through the finer details of such a projecting devise, a folded half-sheet of notebook paper flew over his shoulder from behind and landed squarely in his lap. Atobe rolled his eyes up to sneak a glance at Masuoka-sensei, who had her back to the class. He instantly regretted this when the needles pricking at his eyelids performed a merry do-si-do.
He opened the note, careful to keep the rustle of paper to minimum.
What’s the answer to 25 on the homework?
Atobe skimmed the textbook he had cracked open on his desk: Find the square roots of 4(cos 120° + sin 120°). Please express your answer in rectangular form.
His head spun like Cinderella before midnight. He failed to remember how he solved this question last night, or whether or not he even managed to slaughter past problem seven before deciding to attempt suicide with help from his compass. Just as he was about to scratch back, in heavy capital letters, that Oshitari should figure it out for himself, Masuoka-sensei’s voice cut into his frustration-garbled thoughts.
"And there you have it, number 25." She tapped the board and pointed to the answer. "You will be expected to express your answers in rectangular form on the final. If you’re giving me blank looks right now, review it please."
Surely it was Armageddon, Atobe thought, when Oshitari was prompting him to pay attention in class.
At this point, they were dismissed to work on 1-73 odds on page 675 quietly. They might work in small groups if they so chose. Atobe was expecting it when Oshitari pulled up a chair, the other half of the piece of loose leaf paper in hand, and seated himself opposite Atobe, whose textbook stretched between them, a bridge.
Atobe watched as Oshitari’s eyes fluttered over the page once and his pen set to work. Atobe was known for his ability to make daunting tasks appear effortless, but as it was with anything else, there was always someone who did it better.
Atobe tapped his pen twice, unconsciously biting his lip, and ducked his head to start working as well.
"Are you busy tonight?" Oshitari asked. The stroke of his pencil did not break stride.
"Why?" Atobe narrowed his eyes at the crown of Oshitari’s head.
If looked at with squinty eyes, the top of Oshitari’s head was rather like a bird’s nest you would find at a crafts store - the type that was spray-painted different colours and used for outdoor decoration. This, illogically, made Atobe’s headache a little more bearable.
"My sister won twin tickets to Romeo and Juliet for tonight in a raffle and gave them to me."
Atobe massaged his eyebrows which have tensed and knit. "I can’t."
Romeo and Juliet wasn’t Atobe’s favourite, but three hours of Shakespeare beat five hours of wanting to pull a double van Gough so that he would not hear words like "merger" and "stock" and "economic discourse" anymore.
"Another meeting with Very Important People?" Oshitari said it like this, like there were capitals.
"Obviously. But I’m sure you’ll have no problem finding someone to go with you."
Oshitari stopped writing and strummed his fingers across problem 11. His left eyebrow quirked, playful. "Do you sound accusatory?" he asked.
"Yes," Atobe answered, matching Oshitari smirk for smirk.
"I am utterly offended," said Oshitari. He attempted a British accent, for kicks. It sounded Australian.
"As am I. I’ll bet all of England is, too."
The pout that formed on Oshitari’s face made him look pathetic and so much like Shishido’s dog that Atobe almost reached out to pat him on the head.
"What will you do when the blood that spills from my heart runs like rivers into the ocean and stains the seven seas sanguine, Keigo?"
"I will pity the dead fish."
Oshitari sputtered, as if he were horribly insulted. "I hope you stab someone with your salad fork at dinner."
"I will certainly try," Atobe agreed. "No promises, though."
Oshitari shot Atobe a contemptuous look before continuing to work on the review. A small smile crinkled at the corners of his eyes. This was when Atobe realized that Oshitari had let him win. This, though, still made him feel much better than before.
-----
By the time General Music rolled around two periods later, Atobe’s headache was almost ignorable. Or, at the very least, he didn’t feel any particular urge to throw things at the running mouths of his fellow classmates any longer.
There was always much rejoicing in Atobe and Shishido and Mukahi and Oshitari’s music class whenever Suzuki-sensei, their very old and very pregnant music teacher, took the day off to see her ob-gyn. This usually meant that the substitute, a middle-aged man who was never seen without his phone, texting away, would put on a recording and leave the rest of them to watch if they were bored enough.
If her absence was announced in advance, everyone took something to class to keep themselves occupied. If not, they were forced to grit their teeth and bear an hour of a conceited Julliard graduate student’s playing.
Suzuki-sensei’s absence on this particular day had been unannounced. This left Shishido to mope on his own while Oshitari completed a crossword puzzle in a dubious American magazine, Atobe watched the recording with great interest, and Mukahi ogled at the female page-turner’s breasts with even greater interest.
"I bet he’s not even playing that thing right," Shishido scoffed, though all he knew about orchestral instruments was that to make sound, you pulled some horse hair across metal wires.
Mukahi waved at Shishido to shut up. "It’s probably the wood between his legs that’s distracting."
Shishido blinked. "You mean the cello...?"
From behind Shishido, Atobe stabbed him on the neck with the pointed end of his mechanical pencil. "No, idiot. He meant the lewd double entendre."
Just as Shishido began making empty threats at Atobe, Oshitari joined in: "What about double entendres?"
Atobe looked over at Oshitari, and then glared down at Oshitari’s magazine disapprovingly. "What is that?" He had learned to be weary of Oshitari’s reading material. To avoid heavier buzzing behind his eyes, Atobe hadn’t put in his contacts that morning, and as such, saw only a blurry mess when he saw the magazine page. He assumed for the inappropriate. "I can’t believe you would shed daylight onto that thing."
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Oshitari said. He looked up at Atobe, wide-eyed and innocent. "I’m doing a crossword puzzle." He waved the page full of black and white squares at Atobe.
"Are you having fun?"
"I guess." Oshitari shrugged. "I need a five-letter word for 'ambition', though."
"Motivation," Shishido offered, in heavily accented English. Not that he cared. He was now also distracted by the female page-turner onscreen. Or more specifically, her tits.
"Shishido was Cicero in a past life, I’m sure - a man of words."
"Five letters, moron," Mukahi piped up, holding up a hand and ticking his fingers exaggeratedly. "Can’t you count?"
"Shut up, dwarf." Shishido flipped Mukahi the bird.
"Low blow, dickweed. You aren’t the person to talk. I don’t see you breaking five feet."
Shishido saw red that wasn't Mukahi's hair. "Hey! That - "
"Atobe?" Oshitari turned away from Shishido and Mukahi. "What do you think?"
"I think they both need to get a growth spurt. Or get laid." He was distractedly picking at a callus on his thumb.
Shishido and Mukahi stopped trying to cut off airflow from each other’s tracheas and redirected the wrath of pickled prides at Atobe. As far as Oshitari was aware, Atobe had not gotten laid or a growth spurt himself as of late, but he didn’t mention this aloud.
"I meant about the crossword. Five-letter word for 'ambition'."
"He would know," Shishido snorted. "You grew up in London, didn’t you, Atobe?"
For awhile, Atobe didn’t answer. He was silent as he blinked down at his hand.
Mukahi waved a hand in front of Atobe’s face. "Are you sp - "
"Atobe," he echoed.
Shishido rolled his eyes. "What? You like the sound of your - "
"No. A five-letter word for 'ambition'."
Mukahi and Shishido looked at each other; Oshitari looked at Atobe, and Atobe looked past Oshitari’s left shoulder. They all knew this wasn’t about a crossword puzzle anymore. It was about Atobe and his father and all the things that went unspoken but understood all the same.
"It could just as easily be 'Keigo'," Oshitari offered with a smile, breaking the ice.
Atobe smiled back, but to Oshitari it was like looking at a cartoon when he had seen the real thing in the Louvre. Then Atobe turned back to the recording.
The thing was, Oshitari found at the end of music class after he had completed the crossword, that "Atobe" fit perfectly into the puzzle. "Keigo" didn’t.
-----
Upon their first meeting, Oshitari Yuushi had not made a good impression on Atobe. After the initial thirty seconds, Atobe had promptly placed the gangly-looking Kansai boy in the second-lowest level of his mental social hierarchy. The only people lower than Oshitari Yuushi were those who had a history of stepping on his foot in dance class.
Thus, Atobe was Not Amused when he and Oshitari Yuushi were promptly paired up for the first assignment of the year in English class, and he was even less pleasant when they drew Jane Eyre. At age twelve, Atobe had not yet developed any particular interest in females or romance. Having to report on Jane Eyre was the next best thing up from being castrated with a pink jell-o sword.
He had clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes when he saw the title on the slip of paper their teacher had handed him. He was sure that not only was he going to be reading a British romance - "utter rubbish", as his father eloquently put it - he was going to be reading it alone.
Oshitari Yuushi may don glasses and be garbed appropriately in uniform, but his glasses were fake and his school tie was loose and crooked. Oshitari Yuushi wasn't classy at all; the skill Atobe had developed over the summer - Insight, he called it - saw right through his act. Oshitari Yuushi had probably never even read - and will probably never read - a classic in his life. Not even a lame one like Jane Eyre.
As such, it came as a surprise to Atobe when, after class, Oshitari stopped him on the way out the door and said, in the voice that had girls all over school moony-eyed and ridiculous, "Are you free to work this weekend?"
Atobe raised both eyebrows. "No, I am not."
Oshitari nodded, seeming to understand. "Next weekend, then."
Turning on his heels to face Oshitari forward-forth, Atobe pursed his lips in the way that had Shishido accusing him of secretly being eighty.
"I’m busy," Atobe enunciated clearly to assist the mentally incompetent. Not only was Oshitari Yuushi insane and not classy, but he was clearly very dense too, to top it off.
"The project is due two Mondays from now. We will need to meet at some point to complete it."
"Look - " Atobe began and was cut short when a crowd of people complained that they were all going to be late to their next class and grouched something about traffic congestion at Hyoutei. Atobe strode out the door and began toward E231, European History, his next class, and hoped that Oshitari would give it up. To his dismay, however, Oshitari followed patiently.
"Look," Atobe began again, when Oshitari had made it clear that he was not going to leave until their little conflict of interest had been resolved. "I’m going to do it, all right? You can just sit back for now and stand at the front of the class and grin wide when we present it."
"This project isn’t a problem for me, though," Oshitari protested, misunderstanding. "Jane Eyre is one of my favourites."
Atobe willed his legs to carry him to history class faster so that he could be rid of this human parasite with a negative integer for an IQ. Oshitari was much taller, his legs longer, and he kept up with ease.
"Don’t you have somewhere to be?" Atobe demanded.
"European History is my next class," Oshitari answered, and Atobe wanted to ram his head into the alabaster walls of the school. When Atobe didn’t say a further word, just kept shooting through the halls determinedly, Oshitari prompted, "The project..."
Atobe stopped without warning and turned back. Oshitari regarded him, waiting for him to speak.
Sighing with relent, Atobe raised an eyebrow. Someone had to be the bigger person. "This Saturday, three to five pm,” Atobe said. “Just so you know, we are doing this on my terms, at my home. Just bring yourself and that will more than suffice."
Oshitari nodded again in the same way as before, undisturbed. He extended his hand.
Atobe stared down dumbly at it.
"Address," Oshitari explained, handing Atobe a pen.
"Your hand is not an address book," Atobe said. Scanning the thin stack of books in Oshitari’s arms, Atobe slid a black notebook from the pile. He wrote his address and number on the first page.
After Atobe handed Oshitari his notebook back, he turned and strolled breezily into the classroom, his head held high and proud. He, like Oshitari Yuushi, liked to make unforgettable first appearances; he, unlike Oshitari Yuushi, liked to make favourably unforgettable first appearances.
Although, as it turned out, no one, with the exception of Shishido, so much as acknowledged his presence. When the he and Oshitari had entered the classroom, choosing to sit a seat apart, a square of people filled in the desks around Oshitari, shamelessly leaning in to shoot questions like bullets at him. Shishido had only leaned back to asked Atobe if he knew whether or not Oshitari’s parents were really spies overseas.
By the time the weekend rolled around, Atobe was on the verge of hiring spies himself, just to see what the fuss over Oshitari Yuushi was all about.
It was true that he was new and he was interesting because he was new, but the buzz usually faded away after a day or two at Hyoutei. It had been a week, and Oshitari still had a posse of people around him, nodding and laughing and worrying every word he said between their fingers for safekeeping.
This was Hyoutei; this was Atobe’s turf. Whoever said that sharing was caring could go to hell.
In Latin on Thursday, Atobe had begun drafting a list of reasons that Oshitari was trying to steal his thunder and, more specifically, why he was doing so well at it.
Oshitari Yuushi was attractive to maybe those who were into weasels, sure. Oshitari Yuushi had eyes that saw into people, possibly. After a week of class with him, it turned out that Oshitari Yuushi was not unintelligent - far from it, in fact, Atobe reluctantly acknowledged.
But these, in Atobe’s mind, were not reason enough for Oshitari to devastate the unspoken - but widely recognized - caste system at Hyoutei.
When Oshitari arrived on Saturday, having been let in by one of Atobe’s maids, Atobe was still scrunched over his list, racking his brains.
"Who’s an extraterrestrial being?" Oshitari asked. His mouth was an inch from Atobe’s ear, his blue-black hair falling over their shoulders. Atobe jumped a foot. He had not heard Oshitari coming up from behind.
"No one," he said quickly. In an undignified fumbling of arms, he tucked the list into the nearest binder. Giving Oshitari an onceover, Atobe first took note of the tousled locks on Oshitari's head and how carelessly the strands seemed to frame his face, and then, quickly, redirected his attention to the book in Oshitari hand. "That is...?"
"Jane Eyre," Oshitari said, holding it up for Atobe to verify. "I thought the book would be helpful with the project."
"Hm." Atobe stood and swiped the book from Oshitari. The paper was grainy to the touch and dog-eared and brown. "Did you get this from a second-hand bookstore?"
Oshitari shook his head. "No, it’s just old. My sister stole it from our mother when she was ten, and then I stole it from her a few years ago."
Atobe raised an eyebrow. "So...in conclusion, you live amongst a family of thieves?"
Oshitari chuckled good-naturedly. "Alternatively, in conclusion, I wasn't kidding before when I said that Jane Eyre wasn't a problem for me."
Atobe snorted. "We’ll see," he said, running a finger along the worn pages. “Just because you have the book doesn’t mean you underst - ” He narrowed his eyes at the text pencilled in the margins. The letters were uniformed, but they all looked very lazy, like they were recumbent on chaise lounges under the summer sun. "You wrote in your book?"
"Yes. Does this in some way offend your religion?"
"No," Atobe said, "but you shouldn’t write in your book. That’s just..." He was having a hard time summoning a concrete reason that Oshitari shouldn’t write in his book, aside from that his father had always told him it was an awful habit.
"It’s helpful," Oshitari supplied.
Twenty minutes later, Atobe found himself in agreement. They were enthusiastically dissecting each other's views on Jane Eyre at the 40-seat table in the dining room over a plate of cookies and six full pages of notes.
"This is an obsession," Atobe commented. He was on chapter twenty-nine in reading Oshitari’s scribbling, and he couldn’t stop. It was deathly addictive, like literary nicotine.
"One of many," Oshitari agreed cheekily.
"You’ve completely torn Mr. Rochester and Jane apart. It’s like they’re yours," Atobe muttered, mostly to himself. He bit into a cookie and swung his legs under the table as the edges of worn pages flew past his fingers, setting Oshitari’s footnotes in motion - crude animation.
Oshitari nodded wistfully. "I wish," he said, solemn and sincere. "Mr. Rochester lives in a big mansion, and Jane has long legs."
"You don’t know that." Atobe lifted an eyebrow, peeking over the threaded spine to inspect Oshitari. He looked back down at the text, turning the page and coming to see many miniature stick figures in the large top margin chapter thirteen. "And I don’t think self-inserted doodles count as evidence, by the way." He turned the book to face Oshitari.
"Those aren't just doodles," he said, blinking down at the complex of squiggles and lines. "These lines - " Oshitari pointed to the ones extending every which way between stick figures " - propose alternative plotlines to the book: what could have happened had Jane and Mr. Rochester not been the ones for each other."
"But these..." Atobe’s dark brows knit in puzzlement. "They would never work out. And besides, St. John and Mr. Rochester are both male."
Oshitari cocked his head to one side. "And?"
"That’s - that’s wrong," Atobe said.
"Says who?" Oshitari drew Atobe’s eyes from the book curiously.
Oshitari's eyes, Atobe would recall late that evening, were like ocean's magnets - midnight blue and compelling. There was no looking away. Also, later into the night would become the first - though by no means last - waltz of blues and blacks into Atobe's dreams.
-----
It was Monday, the first day of second-trimester finals. There was considerably less chatter than usual at Atobe's table. Since General Music last Monday, Atobe's headache had spiked into a fever. He was having a bad day.
Halfway through his eighth failed game of tic-tac-toe of the period against Oshitari, Shishido suddenly looked up and around. "Where’s Atobe? It’s...quieter than usual."
Mukahi jabbed his thumb at the figure sitting five seats down, head in hand, food (courtesy of Kabaji) untouched. "Death is that way."
Shishido followed the line of Mukahi’s finger, glanced past Atobe and then does a double-take. He gaped. "Were you buried alive and then dug up again?" he hollered.
Immediately, he dodged the piece of chicken that flew at him, a sauce-stained projectile. It landed on his makeshift tic-tac-toe board and bounced away. Staring down at the brown circular imprint the chicken left, Shishido realized, belatedly, the reason that no one chose to sit within a three-meter radius of Atobe that day.
Oshitari took the game again. "Leave Atobe alone," he advised. "He has a temperature."
"Then he should go home." Shishido was unsympathetic.
Oshitari drew a new board, four sloppy lines that meet at different angles. Two and two intersect; not one touches all three others. "It’ll take something short of cancer to keep him home, I think."
"Lame," Shishido declared. He sounded like he was addressing a whole football field of people in an important call for revolution. Several heads in the cafeteria turn. None of them, unfortunately, was the head of the girl whose attention for which Shishido vied.
"At least he hasn’t lost nine consecutive times," Mukahi quips, devouring a rice ball whole, "at a game no one who’s potty-trained even plays." He talked loudly, too, and the girl with the full, red lips from Chemistry turned. Shishido wanted to die.
"Get a megaphone why don’t you," Atobe growled, managing to summon no real heat. All the heat pooled at the surface of his skin.
Shishido threw Oshitari a look, as if seeking approval to kick Atobe’s ass from the school back to his house. And maybe choke Mukahi while he’s at it. Oshitari shrugged, insouciant as ever. Scowl firm in place, Shishido drew his circle on the centre square.
Oshitari smiled pleasantly at Shishido before opening his mouth to pop the personal bubble Atobe had blown around himself.
"No one thinks any less of you for staying home because you're sick, you know," Oshitari said, and then added as an afterthought, "Or maybe you don’t know?"
A muscle in Atobe's jaw tightened. Oshitari had struck bull’s-eye. Atobe’s eyes were a little glazed over as they settle unsteadily on Oshitari’s face. "I’m fine," he said.
"Today’s the first day of finals."
"I realise that. Your point?"
"If you want valedictorian, you have to place first."
"Tell me something I don’t know."
"You’ll have to work for it."
"I do."
"With a fever?"
Oshitari didn’t have to take his eyes from the game board to see that Atobe was looking murderous, and that the silver determination in his eyes was answering yes, of course.
"You underestimate the intelligence of your fellow classmates, Atobe."
Atobe’s gaze was razor-sharp now as he drilled icicles into Oshitari’s left ear. "I’m fine."
Oshitari shrugged and Atobe might have noticed something that differentiated this shrug from the shrug Oshitari had answered Shishido’s look with a minute earlier had there not been a sledgehammer pounding at his sanity, threatening its collapse.
"Suit yourself."
Oshitari placed his mark, and took the tenth game.
-----
Atobe had kept to his word and worked through finals week with a fever. The problem was, he made it out the other side of the log with an even more vicious fever. By Sunday, he was burning over a hundred. He questioned how exactly he was going to make it to Greece the very next day.
He knew his fever burned him delirious, but that didn’t mean he knew how to make it better. That was the job of his family’s personal doctors, all of whom he had by that point deemed incompetent. Even Oshitari, who had offered to take care of him and excused him from the nurses' crowding that made his head spin faster, was doing a better job.
Or, at the very least, he was trying.
"If you’re going to say, 'I told you so', say it now while I can still understand you," Atobe said. The design imprinted into the ceiling was beginning to blend, a kaleidoscope gone wrong, and the fuzz at his ear was white noise. Atobe always burned high fevers.
"I’m not," Oshitari said, peeking his head out from the adjoined bathroom. "I told your doctors I would take care of you, not lecture you." Bringing the freshly wrung towel to Atobe’s forehead, Oshitari sat down on the stool next to the bed. "Better?"
"No," Atobe said, because it was still dripping wet. When Oshitari reached to take the cloth from his forehead again, Atobe added, "But it’s fine. Leave it."
Oshitari nodded. Through his heat-hazed eyes, Atobe could see Oshitari fidgeting with a thermometer, unkempt hair falling past his collarbone. Oshitari was in dire need of a haircut, Atobe thought. At the same time, it occurred to him that Oshitari looked much more attractive when he wasn’t trying to be. The thoughts pushed at each other. The former won out.
"Are you planning to do anything about your mop while you're in China?"
Oshitari looked down at Atobe. "My mop makes me princely. Divinely princely, actually. Why would I want to do something about it?"
"You are lifetimes from divinity, Yuushi. Your mop makes you look like a hobo," Atobe corrected. "The type I might pick off the side of the road if I was feeling generous."
Oshitari seemed to perk up at the idea. "I'd like that. I like your house."
Atobe looked at him dryly. "With my house comes my father. He would tell you to stop dirtying the carpets with your bourgeois filth."
"If you can still talk like that, I suspect there was something wrong with this thing." Oshitari waved the thermometer, which still read one hundred three, a zero degree amelioration compared to three hours ago.
"Or your ability to read it," Atobe suggested. He tried to smirk and chuckle, but ended up in a fit of coughs instead, a hacking mess under discomfort that pressed like an extra quilt against his chest.
"Hey..." Oshitari started, no doubt to say something like "take it easy" - but he didn't. Instead, he stood and disappeared out of Atobe’s line of vision. When he returned, he had a cup of water in his hands.
After cushioning too many pillows behind Atobe, Oshitari helped him into a slouched sitting position and peeled the wet towel from his head. The cool touch of the glass to his lips startled Atobe. The press of Oshitari's hand against his neck electrified him. Oshitari’s touch burned hotter than Atobe's skin, leaving a trail of fire that seared everything in its path black.
Atobe wanted to do many things then: He wanted to tell Oshitari that he was perfectly capable of drinking water on his own; that his fever hadn’t burned a hole through his head and pushed him into a stage of profound retardation quite yet. He wanted to bat Oshitari’s hand away. He wanted to turn his nose and sniff indignantly in the way that he knew made other people, Shishido especially, want to stuff a sock down his mouth.
The part that dominated his mind presently - the irrational part of him - wanted to take water from Oshitari’s lips. He would wager that they were much warmer than the glass.
"You’re thinking too much," Oshitari pointed out, setting the glass on Atobe’s bedside. "Rest. I’ll be right here when you need me."
Atobe thought about this for a moment. His irrational brain danced and stomped and demanded to be heard. "Be right here," he said. He patted the space next to him. He figured that with a fever burning this high, he could always file for insanity if necessary.
"You don’t want that." Oshitari looked vaguely amused, like he thought everything that came from Atobe's mouth now was a joke.
Atobe clicked his tongue. "The fever hasn’t fried my brains yet." He lifted open his covers.
"No." Oshitari frowned, serious.
"Yuushi."
Trying to push the covers back over Atobe’s body, Oshitari shook his head. "Don’t do this."
"I want to." He thought he deserved to be a child once more before he was pelted into the world of adulthood. He didn’t have much time.
Oshitari looked at the door, at the carpet, and then back at Atobe. Wordlessly, he went to turn the lock horizontal. He slipped hesitantly in next to Atobe, who smiled contentedly. He inched in to Oshitari's warmth like a flower, or maybe a moth.
Oshitari felt like he was doing something he shouldn’t, like he was taking advantage of someone who was drunk, who wouldn’t remember this in the morning as he would. But then he reminded himself that they were only lying side by side, after all.
As he watched Atobe’s eyes slide shut and breathing slow, Oshitari took off his glasses and set it next to the empty glass of water. He looked up at the ceiling and silently added this onto a long list of almosts.
-----
In two days' time, he would be on a plane to China, and he would wonder if Atobe would conveniently forget this all and leave the crushing weight of the memory of fingers entwined underneath goose down all to him.
---
After a week spent in first Beijing and then Shanghai, Oshitari decided that, in essence, Chinese megacities were not all too different from Tokyo. Obviously, people spoke a different language; obviously, the artefacts in museum were Chinese; and sure, the shadier streets were littered with homeless beggars, many of whom had flagged Oshitari down with outstretched hands that would have been a rarer sight in Tokyo.
But the thing was, there was nothing outstanding that jumped out at Oshitari, pointed fingers, and said, "See? This is China."
Oshitari’s sister and mother, on the other hand, shared no such sentiment. Instead of remaining another week at Shanghai, Oshitari headed off to Yunnan alone. A wise decision, he thought.
Yunnan was another land. Skies bluer than the prettiest cornflower framed the ceiling, crisply green grass carpeted the ground, and countless smiling tribal people bedecked in their own handiwork warmed the air. The misfortune was that Oshitari was having a difficult time revelling in the beauty of this land. His mind had been a drifting log all vacation: it bumped against shore occasionally; mostly, though, it floated aimlessly.
"There were no large factories around this area," Oshitari pointed out, his gaze sliding from the thick pads of snow beyond the window of the minivan they were riding up the mountain to his tour guide, a Naxi woman in her early twenties. He spoke in English because it was universal, a language they both spoke and understood well enough. "Why is that?"
She took her eyes off the mountain path and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "Of course not. Smoke was melt snow mountain. Urbanize make lots heat."
"But eventually, Yunnan will need to urbanize, no?"
"We have," she said. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. "Us tribal people, we not always do tourism. Modern civilization pushing us."
"Is that so," Oshitari said, distracted. The steady downfall of snow held a certain degree of alluring hypnosis.
"You still listen to me?"
Oshitari met her narrowed and petulant gaze. She reminded him of Atobe a little. Briefly, he thought that she would make a good winter fling.
"Yes," he said, chuckling the thought off. "Yes, I am."
She eyed him, suspicious with tinges of playful, before going on. "Use to be, we go in and out of each other’s homes free, and no one ever ask money of neighbour. Now, everything do about the money. No money, no food, no friend, no nothing."
"That isn’t - "
"Yes, it is," she said. "We like your people now. People never happy with what they have, right? We want more. More mean be people like you."
Before Oshitari’s eyes, there were only the spiralling dots of snow in the air. He considered her words. "You still have your traditions and garbs."
She thought this through and nodded. "Yes."
Though they were 2170 meters above sea level, the atmosphere inside the car was dense. It was evident by the loose set of her shoulders that she had come to tolerate her new lifestyle, but tolerance and acceptance were not the same. Through Atobe, Oshitari saw as much.
"What do the triangles on your headdress symbolise?"
"This?" She touched one of the red and yellow pieces. Oshitari nodded. "Marriage propose."
This piqued Oshitari’s interest. "Oh?"
"Oh," she echoed pointedly. Some of the playful petulance from before was back.
"How might that work, exactly?" Oshitari pushed.
She pursed her lips and sighed long-sufferingly. "If someone want marry me, they take my triangle. It is only part of my headdress I allow give away."
Oshitari smiled at her, broad and charming. "Would you give one to me?"
"I mention that who propose to me go to my home and do three year hard labour to prove them worthy, yes?" She smirked. "Is not whether I give to you. It is whether not you can take."
Oshitari laughed, low and lively.
Then, they stopped and the Naxi woman cut the ignition.
"Because it is winter, we cannot driver high," she explained. "If you want travel higher, you take gondola."
"By myself?" Oshitari pouted at her. "Who will save me if I slip?"
She threw him a withering glance over her shoulder as she locked up the minivan. "I suppose I go with you," she grumbled. "Very sue-happy, you people are these day."
As they hiked some ways up the hill, they watched the gondolas swing precariously in the mountain breeze.
"This is safe?" Oshitari asked.
"I don’t die with you." She ushered him on the first cart that swung by.
For a whole fifteen seconds, there was silence. And then: "If you were to estimate the distance from here to those trees down there - "
The Naxi guide looked like she wanted to leap from the gondola and fall into the thick forest of pines herself just so that she would be far, far from Oshitari. "Is it you, or all Japanese act this way?"
Oshitari replied with a cheerful shrug.
She rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Look to your heart content and don't kill us."
Oshitari laughed into the mist. The gondola was pulling them closer and closer to the sun. The clouds seemed within reach. Up here, there was nothing he could see of the world below. It was 99 percent perfect. He looked down at the rolling rifts of the mountain.
One percent wasn’t much, but if one imagined the mountaintop as an entity, a living creature, it was one thing if the one percent missing was a hair or a fingernail. But when it was the heart, it was a whole new story.
-----
"Congratulations! You have won - "
"THE ACADEMY OF KNOWLEDGE OF OSAKA wishes to invite you - "
"Did you know? Seventy percent of all Caucasian women are at risk - "
Atobe checked down his list of emails, tossing more than half into the trash. Worthless spam wiggled their way too often into his inbox; this grated on his nerves.
Once he was finished with housekeeping, he looked down the list of names that were left, and sighed. He was in Greece, looking through emails from people in Tokyo. There was something wrong in the nature of that sentence.
Greece in winter was nothing like Greece in spring. It had been Atobe’s mother who had been curious about Greece in the winter, but now even she was regretting having ever suggested it.
Winter had evaporated far before it could ever sit and settle in the sky. Atobe felt cheated of the season. He wanted to see the sea winds loft snowflakes into the windowpane. He wanted back the weak light that illuminated from the sky and earth both. He wanted to be blinded at first sight by the endless, seamless stretches of cotton white. He wanted.
Their house in Greece was large, certainly, but everywhere Atobe went, he ran the risk of bumping heads with his father. Throughout the years, Atobe had learned that prison wasn’t behind iron bars. Prison was a room with crisply knotted curtains that fell to the floor. Prison was clean, white walls. Prison was expensive flooring, antiques, furniture, but not even a shadow of life.
Prison was his father.
Recently, whenever they spoke, it was about two things: whether Atobe had chosen a university’s entrance exam to take yet, and if so, which one?
It had started small. Maybe as a wad of mucus in Atobe’s throat. But overtime, it expanded - expanded until it became something that was suffocating and pressed the breath from Atobe’s chest.
Fundamentally, the universities were what he wanted; it was the little details that weren't quite right. They were all kind of what he could see in his future, but not really.
A mechanical bell, high and clear, startled him out of his thoughts. Oshitari’s name was at the top of his list of senders, in bold. Since they had departed for opposite sides of the world, they had not exchanged words. Atobe chewed the inside of his cheek, and then clicked it open.
To: Atobe Keigo
From: Oshitari Yuushi
Subject: [None]
Date: Sunday, December 23, 4:10pm (local)
Good.
- Yuushi
Atobe blinked, and scrolled down the page, looking for more, only to find nothing but advertisements.
Good. Good? What was that even supposed to mean? Good what? Atobe wished valiantly at this point that Oshitari would follow standard rules of grammar from time to time.
The four-letter word pried, fingers stiff and resolute, at the very foundations of Atobe's sanity. With much indignant mental puffing, Atobe supposed that this was probably Oshitari's intention.
To: Oshitari Yuushi
From: Atobe Keigo
Subject: Re: [None]
Date: Sunday, December 23, 4:12am (local)
Explain.
Atobe tapped his finger on the keyboard and hit send, satisfied. A word for a word. That was fair.
The next day, Oshitari shot another email Atobe’s way. In it, however, contained not an explanation.
To: Atobe Keigo
From: Oshitari Yuushi
Subject: [None]
Date: Sunday, December 24, 5:32am (local)
Things.
- Yuushi
Atobe had never been fond of word games. Months from graduation, everything was about time, and it was the one thing that he always seemed short on. Atobe was very tempted to call Oshitari up and demand an explanation. This, though, would require admitting defeat. His pride picketed in protest.
This frustration was for naught, he found out two days short of a week later. By the fifth day, nothing was to be doubted about where Oshitari was headed. By the thirteenth day, all was revealed. Atobe had a complete thought on his hands:
Good things don't wait around forever for people to come to their senses.
This sentence sounded familiar, like he had read or heard of it from somewhere, but like many other things at this stage of his life, the recollection was a befuddled mess of inorganic figures, too far and too dark for him to reach or see.
Good things don't wait around forever for people to come to their senses.
Atobe thought about this, tracing his eyes over the pattern of the wood flooring. Why would Oshitari send him something like this?
A pair of large, stocking-clad feet obstructed his view of the spindly wood-designs. He looked up, and met the eyes of his father.
"Good evening, Keigo," his father greeted.
Atobe bit his cheek to keep himself from pointing out that it was only four. He wasn’t entirely sure what the recent, seemingly arbitrary surges of defiance were all about, but he had a good idea.
"Good evening," Atobe echoed.
"Were you considering your options for university? You still have not yet made a choice."
Not your choice, but a choice. Atobe wanted to laugh. "No, Father, I have not."
"In a month's time, you must decide."
Atobe’s fingers curled into his palm underneath the table. He knew this. He didn’t need his father to tell him. "Of course. I will."
His father nodded. "That is all. Dinner is in thirty minutes," he said, and walked away.
Watching his father's shadow stride away, Atobe's hands itched to throw something at it. His father was shoving him off a diving board with brute force. The amount of force was directly proportional to the amount of resistance.
Some days, he wished he and his father would scream at each other. Scream and scream and scream until laryngitis stopped them both. At least this would mean that they cared enough to get angry with each other.
Atobe looked down at the table, where just moments before he had traced Oshitari's message. The letters bled into each other in his head, faster and faster and faster - a merry-go-round gone out of control - until gradually, the plate began to slow and something clicked.
It wasn't like the bold and brilliant illumination of a light bulb. The flame of realisation had been barely a flicker, but it was enough for Atobe to be torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to push his fist though a wall. He wouldn’t have thought so before, but he guessed Oshitari and his father shared a common vein.
Only, when it was Oshitari nudging and coaxing him along, the height of the platform didn't seem daunting at all, the sting of the water as he plunged head-first was not nearly as painful or shocking, and the water that invaded his eyes would help to clear his vision. With Oshitari, it was all so simple.
Part two.
Pairing: Oshitari/Atobe
Rating: R
Word count: 13, 300
Summary: It's a long, long journey, finding my way back to you.
Notes: Written for crazy_marik for hyouteiexchange. Thanks go out to stelf, g3ssh0ku, theprerogative, and many others who were tremendously gracious in contributing their time to help me finish this fic. :)
At elevation 4680 meters, it was easy to laugh into the mist. It was easy to pretend that, 4680 meters below, there was no one else in the world. It was easy to see gold rings and oceans of white behind closed lids. It felt to be a meter from heaven. It wasn't quite perfect, but for now, it would have to do.
-----
Asphyxiation with use of pepper, pickling of internal organs, skinning alive and sprinkling with salt...
As Calculus trudged on, these forms of Chinese torture, from World History, were beginning to sound very, very humane to Atobe. Finals week landed early this year, just in time to collide with one of his infamous migraines. It was an effort keeping his forehead from greeting the cool, inviting surface of his desk.
Briefly, he wondered whether it would be wiser to try to master the art of sleeping with his eyes open, or to project grossly attentive eyeballs onto his eyelids. Neither, he decided after a moment of thought, was particularly noble of an idea, but the latter meant he could sleep. It was an appealing thought.
Before he could begin to mentally work through the finer details of such a projecting devise, a folded half-sheet of notebook paper flew over his shoulder from behind and landed squarely in his lap. Atobe rolled his eyes up to sneak a glance at Masuoka-sensei, who had her back to the class. He instantly regretted this when the needles pricking at his eyelids performed a merry do-si-do.
He opened the note, careful to keep the rustle of paper to minimum.
What’s the answer to 25 on the homework?
Atobe skimmed the textbook he had cracked open on his desk: Find the square roots of 4(cos 120° + sin 120°). Please express your answer in rectangular form.
His head spun like Cinderella before midnight. He failed to remember how he solved this question last night, or whether or not he even managed to slaughter past problem seven before deciding to attempt suicide with help from his compass. Just as he was about to scratch back, in heavy capital letters, that Oshitari should figure it out for himself, Masuoka-sensei’s voice cut into his frustration-garbled thoughts.
"And there you have it, number 25." She tapped the board and pointed to the answer. "You will be expected to express your answers in rectangular form on the final. If you’re giving me blank looks right now, review it please."
Surely it was Armageddon, Atobe thought, when Oshitari was prompting him to pay attention in class.
At this point, they were dismissed to work on 1-73 odds on page 675 quietly. They might work in small groups if they so chose. Atobe was expecting it when Oshitari pulled up a chair, the other half of the piece of loose leaf paper in hand, and seated himself opposite Atobe, whose textbook stretched between them, a bridge.
Atobe watched as Oshitari’s eyes fluttered over the page once and his pen set to work. Atobe was known for his ability to make daunting tasks appear effortless, but as it was with anything else, there was always someone who did it better.
Atobe tapped his pen twice, unconsciously biting his lip, and ducked his head to start working as well.
"Are you busy tonight?" Oshitari asked. The stroke of his pencil did not break stride.
"Why?" Atobe narrowed his eyes at the crown of Oshitari’s head.
If looked at with squinty eyes, the top of Oshitari’s head was rather like a bird’s nest you would find at a crafts store - the type that was spray-painted different colours and used for outdoor decoration. This, illogically, made Atobe’s headache a little more bearable.
"My sister won twin tickets to Romeo and Juliet for tonight in a raffle and gave them to me."
Atobe massaged his eyebrows which have tensed and knit. "I can’t."
Romeo and Juliet wasn’t Atobe’s favourite, but three hours of Shakespeare beat five hours of wanting to pull a double van Gough so that he would not hear words like "merger" and "stock" and "economic discourse" anymore.
"Another meeting with Very Important People?" Oshitari said it like this, like there were capitals.
"Obviously. But I’m sure you’ll have no problem finding someone to go with you."
Oshitari stopped writing and strummed his fingers across problem 11. His left eyebrow quirked, playful. "Do you sound accusatory?" he asked.
"Yes," Atobe answered, matching Oshitari smirk for smirk.
"I am utterly offended," said Oshitari. He attempted a British accent, for kicks. It sounded Australian.
"As am I. I’ll bet all of England is, too."
The pout that formed on Oshitari’s face made him look pathetic and so much like Shishido’s dog that Atobe almost reached out to pat him on the head.
"What will you do when the blood that spills from my heart runs like rivers into the ocean and stains the seven seas sanguine, Keigo?"
"I will pity the dead fish."
Oshitari sputtered, as if he were horribly insulted. "I hope you stab someone with your salad fork at dinner."
"I will certainly try," Atobe agreed. "No promises, though."
Oshitari shot Atobe a contemptuous look before continuing to work on the review. A small smile crinkled at the corners of his eyes. This was when Atobe realized that Oshitari had let him win. This, though, still made him feel much better than before.
-----
By the time General Music rolled around two periods later, Atobe’s headache was almost ignorable. Or, at the very least, he didn’t feel any particular urge to throw things at the running mouths of his fellow classmates any longer.
There was always much rejoicing in Atobe and Shishido and Mukahi and Oshitari’s music class whenever Suzuki-sensei, their very old and very pregnant music teacher, took the day off to see her ob-gyn. This usually meant that the substitute, a middle-aged man who was never seen without his phone, texting away, would put on a recording and leave the rest of them to watch if they were bored enough.
If her absence was announced in advance, everyone took something to class to keep themselves occupied. If not, they were forced to grit their teeth and bear an hour of a conceited Julliard graduate student’s playing.
Suzuki-sensei’s absence on this particular day had been unannounced. This left Shishido to mope on his own while Oshitari completed a crossword puzzle in a dubious American magazine, Atobe watched the recording with great interest, and Mukahi ogled at the female page-turner’s breasts with even greater interest.
"I bet he’s not even playing that thing right," Shishido scoffed, though all he knew about orchestral instruments was that to make sound, you pulled some horse hair across metal wires.
Mukahi waved at Shishido to shut up. "It’s probably the wood between his legs that’s distracting."
Shishido blinked. "You mean the cello...?"
From behind Shishido, Atobe stabbed him on the neck with the pointed end of his mechanical pencil. "No, idiot. He meant the lewd double entendre."
Just as Shishido began making empty threats at Atobe, Oshitari joined in: "What about double entendres?"
Atobe looked over at Oshitari, and then glared down at Oshitari’s magazine disapprovingly. "What is that?" He had learned to be weary of Oshitari’s reading material. To avoid heavier buzzing behind his eyes, Atobe hadn’t put in his contacts that morning, and as such, saw only a blurry mess when he saw the magazine page. He assumed for the inappropriate. "I can’t believe you would shed daylight onto that thing."
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Oshitari said. He looked up at Atobe, wide-eyed and innocent. "I’m doing a crossword puzzle." He waved the page full of black and white squares at Atobe.
"Are you having fun?"
"I guess." Oshitari shrugged. "I need a five-letter word for 'ambition', though."
"Motivation," Shishido offered, in heavily accented English. Not that he cared. He was now also distracted by the female page-turner onscreen. Or more specifically, her tits.
"Shishido was Cicero in a past life, I’m sure - a man of words."
"Five letters, moron," Mukahi piped up, holding up a hand and ticking his fingers exaggeratedly. "Can’t you count?"
"Shut up, dwarf." Shishido flipped Mukahi the bird.
"Low blow, dickweed. You aren’t the person to talk. I don’t see you breaking five feet."
Shishido saw red that wasn't Mukahi's hair. "Hey! That - "
"Atobe?" Oshitari turned away from Shishido and Mukahi. "What do you think?"
"I think they both need to get a growth spurt. Or get laid." He was distractedly picking at a callus on his thumb.
Shishido and Mukahi stopped trying to cut off airflow from each other’s tracheas and redirected the wrath of pickled prides at Atobe. As far as Oshitari was aware, Atobe had not gotten laid or a growth spurt himself as of late, but he didn’t mention this aloud.
"I meant about the crossword. Five-letter word for 'ambition'."
"He would know," Shishido snorted. "You grew up in London, didn’t you, Atobe?"
For awhile, Atobe didn’t answer. He was silent as he blinked down at his hand.
Mukahi waved a hand in front of Atobe’s face. "Are you sp - "
"Atobe," he echoed.
Shishido rolled his eyes. "What? You like the sound of your - "
"No. A five-letter word for 'ambition'."
Mukahi and Shishido looked at each other; Oshitari looked at Atobe, and Atobe looked past Oshitari’s left shoulder. They all knew this wasn’t about a crossword puzzle anymore. It was about Atobe and his father and all the things that went unspoken but understood all the same.
"It could just as easily be 'Keigo'," Oshitari offered with a smile, breaking the ice.
Atobe smiled back, but to Oshitari it was like looking at a cartoon when he had seen the real thing in the Louvre. Then Atobe turned back to the recording.
The thing was, Oshitari found at the end of music class after he had completed the crossword, that "Atobe" fit perfectly into the puzzle. "Keigo" didn’t.
-----
Upon their first meeting, Oshitari Yuushi had not made a good impression on Atobe. After the initial thirty seconds, Atobe had promptly placed the gangly-looking Kansai boy in the second-lowest level of his mental social hierarchy. The only people lower than Oshitari Yuushi were those who had a history of stepping on his foot in dance class.
Thus, Atobe was Not Amused when he and Oshitari Yuushi were promptly paired up for the first assignment of the year in English class, and he was even less pleasant when they drew Jane Eyre. At age twelve, Atobe had not yet developed any particular interest in females or romance. Having to report on Jane Eyre was the next best thing up from being castrated with a pink jell-o sword.
He had clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes when he saw the title on the slip of paper their teacher had handed him. He was sure that not only was he going to be reading a British romance - "utter rubbish", as his father eloquently put it - he was going to be reading it alone.
Oshitari Yuushi may don glasses and be garbed appropriately in uniform, but his glasses were fake and his school tie was loose and crooked. Oshitari Yuushi wasn't classy at all; the skill Atobe had developed over the summer - Insight, he called it - saw right through his act. Oshitari Yuushi had probably never even read - and will probably never read - a classic in his life. Not even a lame one like Jane Eyre.
As such, it came as a surprise to Atobe when, after class, Oshitari stopped him on the way out the door and said, in the voice that had girls all over school moony-eyed and ridiculous, "Are you free to work this weekend?"
Atobe raised both eyebrows. "No, I am not."
Oshitari nodded, seeming to understand. "Next weekend, then."
Turning on his heels to face Oshitari forward-forth, Atobe pursed his lips in the way that had Shishido accusing him of secretly being eighty.
"I’m busy," Atobe enunciated clearly to assist the mentally incompetent. Not only was Oshitari Yuushi insane and not classy, but he was clearly very dense too, to top it off.
"The project is due two Mondays from now. We will need to meet at some point to complete it."
"Look - " Atobe began and was cut short when a crowd of people complained that they were all going to be late to their next class and grouched something about traffic congestion at Hyoutei. Atobe strode out the door and began toward E231, European History, his next class, and hoped that Oshitari would give it up. To his dismay, however, Oshitari followed patiently.
"Look," Atobe began again, when Oshitari had made it clear that he was not going to leave until their little conflict of interest had been resolved. "I’m going to do it, all right? You can just sit back for now and stand at the front of the class and grin wide when we present it."
"This project isn’t a problem for me, though," Oshitari protested, misunderstanding. "Jane Eyre is one of my favourites."
Atobe willed his legs to carry him to history class faster so that he could be rid of this human parasite with a negative integer for an IQ. Oshitari was much taller, his legs longer, and he kept up with ease.
"Don’t you have somewhere to be?" Atobe demanded.
"European History is my next class," Oshitari answered, and Atobe wanted to ram his head into the alabaster walls of the school. When Atobe didn’t say a further word, just kept shooting through the halls determinedly, Oshitari prompted, "The project..."
Atobe stopped without warning and turned back. Oshitari regarded him, waiting for him to speak.
Sighing with relent, Atobe raised an eyebrow. Someone had to be the bigger person. "This Saturday, three to five pm,” Atobe said. “Just so you know, we are doing this on my terms, at my home. Just bring yourself and that will more than suffice."
Oshitari nodded again in the same way as before, undisturbed. He extended his hand.
Atobe stared down dumbly at it.
"Address," Oshitari explained, handing Atobe a pen.
"Your hand is not an address book," Atobe said. Scanning the thin stack of books in Oshitari’s arms, Atobe slid a black notebook from the pile. He wrote his address and number on the first page.
After Atobe handed Oshitari his notebook back, he turned and strolled breezily into the classroom, his head held high and proud. He, like Oshitari Yuushi, liked to make unforgettable first appearances; he, unlike Oshitari Yuushi, liked to make favourably unforgettable first appearances.
Although, as it turned out, no one, with the exception of Shishido, so much as acknowledged his presence. When the he and Oshitari had entered the classroom, choosing to sit a seat apart, a square of people filled in the desks around Oshitari, shamelessly leaning in to shoot questions like bullets at him. Shishido had only leaned back to asked Atobe if he knew whether or not Oshitari’s parents were really spies overseas.
By the time the weekend rolled around, Atobe was on the verge of hiring spies himself, just to see what the fuss over Oshitari Yuushi was all about.
It was true that he was new and he was interesting because he was new, but the buzz usually faded away after a day or two at Hyoutei. It had been a week, and Oshitari still had a posse of people around him, nodding and laughing and worrying every word he said between their fingers for safekeeping.
This was Hyoutei; this was Atobe’s turf. Whoever said that sharing was caring could go to hell.
In Latin on Thursday, Atobe had begun drafting a list of reasons that Oshitari was trying to steal his thunder and, more specifically, why he was doing so well at it.
Oshitari Yuushi was attractive to maybe those who were into weasels, sure. Oshitari Yuushi had eyes that saw into people, possibly. After a week of class with him, it turned out that Oshitari Yuushi was not unintelligent - far from it, in fact, Atobe reluctantly acknowledged.
But these, in Atobe’s mind, were not reason enough for Oshitari to devastate the unspoken - but widely recognized - caste system at Hyoutei.
When Oshitari arrived on Saturday, having been let in by one of Atobe’s maids, Atobe was still scrunched over his list, racking his brains.
"Who’s an extraterrestrial being?" Oshitari asked. His mouth was an inch from Atobe’s ear, his blue-black hair falling over their shoulders. Atobe jumped a foot. He had not heard Oshitari coming up from behind.
"No one," he said quickly. In an undignified fumbling of arms, he tucked the list into the nearest binder. Giving Oshitari an onceover, Atobe first took note of the tousled locks on Oshitari's head and how carelessly the strands seemed to frame his face, and then, quickly, redirected his attention to the book in Oshitari hand. "That is...?"
"Jane Eyre," Oshitari said, holding it up for Atobe to verify. "I thought the book would be helpful with the project."
"Hm." Atobe stood and swiped the book from Oshitari. The paper was grainy to the touch and dog-eared and brown. "Did you get this from a second-hand bookstore?"
Oshitari shook his head. "No, it’s just old. My sister stole it from our mother when she was ten, and then I stole it from her a few years ago."
Atobe raised an eyebrow. "So...in conclusion, you live amongst a family of thieves?"
Oshitari chuckled good-naturedly. "Alternatively, in conclusion, I wasn't kidding before when I said that Jane Eyre wasn't a problem for me."
Atobe snorted. "We’ll see," he said, running a finger along the worn pages. “Just because you have the book doesn’t mean you underst - ” He narrowed his eyes at the text pencilled in the margins. The letters were uniformed, but they all looked very lazy, like they were recumbent on chaise lounges under the summer sun. "You wrote in your book?"
"Yes. Does this in some way offend your religion?"
"No," Atobe said, "but you shouldn’t write in your book. That’s just..." He was having a hard time summoning a concrete reason that Oshitari shouldn’t write in his book, aside from that his father had always told him it was an awful habit.
"It’s helpful," Oshitari supplied.
Twenty minutes later, Atobe found himself in agreement. They were enthusiastically dissecting each other's views on Jane Eyre at the 40-seat table in the dining room over a plate of cookies and six full pages of notes.
"This is an obsession," Atobe commented. He was on chapter twenty-nine in reading Oshitari’s scribbling, and he couldn’t stop. It was deathly addictive, like literary nicotine.
"One of many," Oshitari agreed cheekily.
"You’ve completely torn Mr. Rochester and Jane apart. It’s like they’re yours," Atobe muttered, mostly to himself. He bit into a cookie and swung his legs under the table as the edges of worn pages flew past his fingers, setting Oshitari’s footnotes in motion - crude animation.
Oshitari nodded wistfully. "I wish," he said, solemn and sincere. "Mr. Rochester lives in a big mansion, and Jane has long legs."
"You don’t know that." Atobe lifted an eyebrow, peeking over the threaded spine to inspect Oshitari. He looked back down at the text, turning the page and coming to see many miniature stick figures in the large top margin chapter thirteen. "And I don’t think self-inserted doodles count as evidence, by the way." He turned the book to face Oshitari.
"Those aren't just doodles," he said, blinking down at the complex of squiggles and lines. "These lines - " Oshitari pointed to the ones extending every which way between stick figures " - propose alternative plotlines to the book: what could have happened had Jane and Mr. Rochester not been the ones for each other."
"But these..." Atobe’s dark brows knit in puzzlement. "They would never work out. And besides, St. John and Mr. Rochester are both male."
Oshitari cocked his head to one side. "And?"
"That’s - that’s wrong," Atobe said.
"Says who?" Oshitari drew Atobe’s eyes from the book curiously.
Oshitari's eyes, Atobe would recall late that evening, were like ocean's magnets - midnight blue and compelling. There was no looking away. Also, later into the night would become the first - though by no means last - waltz of blues and blacks into Atobe's dreams.
-----
It was Monday, the first day of second-trimester finals. There was considerably less chatter than usual at Atobe's table. Since General Music last Monday, Atobe's headache had spiked into a fever. He was having a bad day.
Halfway through his eighth failed game of tic-tac-toe of the period against Oshitari, Shishido suddenly looked up and around. "Where’s Atobe? It’s...quieter than usual."
Mukahi jabbed his thumb at the figure sitting five seats down, head in hand, food (courtesy of Kabaji) untouched. "Death is that way."
Shishido followed the line of Mukahi’s finger, glanced past Atobe and then does a double-take. He gaped. "Were you buried alive and then dug up again?" he hollered.
Immediately, he dodged the piece of chicken that flew at him, a sauce-stained projectile. It landed on his makeshift tic-tac-toe board and bounced away. Staring down at the brown circular imprint the chicken left, Shishido realized, belatedly, the reason that no one chose to sit within a three-meter radius of Atobe that day.
Oshitari took the game again. "Leave Atobe alone," he advised. "He has a temperature."
"Then he should go home." Shishido was unsympathetic.
Oshitari drew a new board, four sloppy lines that meet at different angles. Two and two intersect; not one touches all three others. "It’ll take something short of cancer to keep him home, I think."
"Lame," Shishido declared. He sounded like he was addressing a whole football field of people in an important call for revolution. Several heads in the cafeteria turn. None of them, unfortunately, was the head of the girl whose attention for which Shishido vied.
"At least he hasn’t lost nine consecutive times," Mukahi quips, devouring a rice ball whole, "at a game no one who’s potty-trained even plays." He talked loudly, too, and the girl with the full, red lips from Chemistry turned. Shishido wanted to die.
"Get a megaphone why don’t you," Atobe growled, managing to summon no real heat. All the heat pooled at the surface of his skin.
Shishido threw Oshitari a look, as if seeking approval to kick Atobe’s ass from the school back to his house. And maybe choke Mukahi while he’s at it. Oshitari shrugged, insouciant as ever. Scowl firm in place, Shishido drew his circle on the centre square.
Oshitari smiled pleasantly at Shishido before opening his mouth to pop the personal bubble Atobe had blown around himself.
"No one thinks any less of you for staying home because you're sick, you know," Oshitari said, and then added as an afterthought, "Or maybe you don’t know?"
A muscle in Atobe's jaw tightened. Oshitari had struck bull’s-eye. Atobe’s eyes were a little glazed over as they settle unsteadily on Oshitari’s face. "I’m fine," he said.
"Today’s the first day of finals."
"I realise that. Your point?"
"If you want valedictorian, you have to place first."
"Tell me something I don’t know."
"You’ll have to work for it."
"I do."
"With a fever?"
Oshitari didn’t have to take his eyes from the game board to see that Atobe was looking murderous, and that the silver determination in his eyes was answering yes, of course.
"You underestimate the intelligence of your fellow classmates, Atobe."
Atobe’s gaze was razor-sharp now as he drilled icicles into Oshitari’s left ear. "I’m fine."
Oshitari shrugged and Atobe might have noticed something that differentiated this shrug from the shrug Oshitari had answered Shishido’s look with a minute earlier had there not been a sledgehammer pounding at his sanity, threatening its collapse.
"Suit yourself."
Oshitari placed his mark, and took the tenth game.
-----
Atobe had kept to his word and worked through finals week with a fever. The problem was, he made it out the other side of the log with an even more vicious fever. By Sunday, he was burning over a hundred. He questioned how exactly he was going to make it to Greece the very next day.
He knew his fever burned him delirious, but that didn’t mean he knew how to make it better. That was the job of his family’s personal doctors, all of whom he had by that point deemed incompetent. Even Oshitari, who had offered to take care of him and excused him from the nurses' crowding that made his head spin faster, was doing a better job.
Or, at the very least, he was trying.
"If you’re going to say, 'I told you so', say it now while I can still understand you," Atobe said. The design imprinted into the ceiling was beginning to blend, a kaleidoscope gone wrong, and the fuzz at his ear was white noise. Atobe always burned high fevers.
"I’m not," Oshitari said, peeking his head out from the adjoined bathroom. "I told your doctors I would take care of you, not lecture you." Bringing the freshly wrung towel to Atobe’s forehead, Oshitari sat down on the stool next to the bed. "Better?"
"No," Atobe said, because it was still dripping wet. When Oshitari reached to take the cloth from his forehead again, Atobe added, "But it’s fine. Leave it."
Oshitari nodded. Through his heat-hazed eyes, Atobe could see Oshitari fidgeting with a thermometer, unkempt hair falling past his collarbone. Oshitari was in dire need of a haircut, Atobe thought. At the same time, it occurred to him that Oshitari looked much more attractive when he wasn’t trying to be. The thoughts pushed at each other. The former won out.
"Are you planning to do anything about your mop while you're in China?"
Oshitari looked down at Atobe. "My mop makes me princely. Divinely princely, actually. Why would I want to do something about it?"
"You are lifetimes from divinity, Yuushi. Your mop makes you look like a hobo," Atobe corrected. "The type I might pick off the side of the road if I was feeling generous."
Oshitari seemed to perk up at the idea. "I'd like that. I like your house."
Atobe looked at him dryly. "With my house comes my father. He would tell you to stop dirtying the carpets with your bourgeois filth."
"If you can still talk like that, I suspect there was something wrong with this thing." Oshitari waved the thermometer, which still read one hundred three, a zero degree amelioration compared to three hours ago.
"Or your ability to read it," Atobe suggested. He tried to smirk and chuckle, but ended up in a fit of coughs instead, a hacking mess under discomfort that pressed like an extra quilt against his chest.
"Hey..." Oshitari started, no doubt to say something like "take it easy" - but he didn't. Instead, he stood and disappeared out of Atobe’s line of vision. When he returned, he had a cup of water in his hands.
After cushioning too many pillows behind Atobe, Oshitari helped him into a slouched sitting position and peeled the wet towel from his head. The cool touch of the glass to his lips startled Atobe. The press of Oshitari's hand against his neck electrified him. Oshitari’s touch burned hotter than Atobe's skin, leaving a trail of fire that seared everything in its path black.
Atobe wanted to do many things then: He wanted to tell Oshitari that he was perfectly capable of drinking water on his own; that his fever hadn’t burned a hole through his head and pushed him into a stage of profound retardation quite yet. He wanted to bat Oshitari’s hand away. He wanted to turn his nose and sniff indignantly in the way that he knew made other people, Shishido especially, want to stuff a sock down his mouth.
The part that dominated his mind presently - the irrational part of him - wanted to take water from Oshitari’s lips. He would wager that they were much warmer than the glass.
"You’re thinking too much," Oshitari pointed out, setting the glass on Atobe’s bedside. "Rest. I’ll be right here when you need me."
Atobe thought about this for a moment. His irrational brain danced and stomped and demanded to be heard. "Be right here," he said. He patted the space next to him. He figured that with a fever burning this high, he could always file for insanity if necessary.
"You don’t want that." Oshitari looked vaguely amused, like he thought everything that came from Atobe's mouth now was a joke.
Atobe clicked his tongue. "The fever hasn’t fried my brains yet." He lifted open his covers.
"No." Oshitari frowned, serious.
"Yuushi."
Trying to push the covers back over Atobe’s body, Oshitari shook his head. "Don’t do this."
"I want to." He thought he deserved to be a child once more before he was pelted into the world of adulthood. He didn’t have much time.
Oshitari looked at the door, at the carpet, and then back at Atobe. Wordlessly, he went to turn the lock horizontal. He slipped hesitantly in next to Atobe, who smiled contentedly. He inched in to Oshitari's warmth like a flower, or maybe a moth.
Oshitari felt like he was doing something he shouldn’t, like he was taking advantage of someone who was drunk, who wouldn’t remember this in the morning as he would. But then he reminded himself that they were only lying side by side, after all.
As he watched Atobe’s eyes slide shut and breathing slow, Oshitari took off his glasses and set it next to the empty glass of water. He looked up at the ceiling and silently added this onto a long list of almosts.
-----
In two days' time, he would be on a plane to China, and he would wonder if Atobe would conveniently forget this all and leave the crushing weight of the memory of fingers entwined underneath goose down all to him.
---
After a week spent in first Beijing and then Shanghai, Oshitari decided that, in essence, Chinese megacities were not all too different from Tokyo. Obviously, people spoke a different language; obviously, the artefacts in museum were Chinese; and sure, the shadier streets were littered with homeless beggars, many of whom had flagged Oshitari down with outstretched hands that would have been a rarer sight in Tokyo.
But the thing was, there was nothing outstanding that jumped out at Oshitari, pointed fingers, and said, "See? This is China."
Oshitari’s sister and mother, on the other hand, shared no such sentiment. Instead of remaining another week at Shanghai, Oshitari headed off to Yunnan alone. A wise decision, he thought.
Yunnan was another land. Skies bluer than the prettiest cornflower framed the ceiling, crisply green grass carpeted the ground, and countless smiling tribal people bedecked in their own handiwork warmed the air. The misfortune was that Oshitari was having a difficult time revelling in the beauty of this land. His mind had been a drifting log all vacation: it bumped against shore occasionally; mostly, though, it floated aimlessly.
"There were no large factories around this area," Oshitari pointed out, his gaze sliding from the thick pads of snow beyond the window of the minivan they were riding up the mountain to his tour guide, a Naxi woman in her early twenties. He spoke in English because it was universal, a language they both spoke and understood well enough. "Why is that?"
She took her eyes off the mountain path and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "Of course not. Smoke was melt snow mountain. Urbanize make lots heat."
"But eventually, Yunnan will need to urbanize, no?"
"We have," she said. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. "Us tribal people, we not always do tourism. Modern civilization pushing us."
"Is that so," Oshitari said, distracted. The steady downfall of snow held a certain degree of alluring hypnosis.
"You still listen to me?"
Oshitari met her narrowed and petulant gaze. She reminded him of Atobe a little. Briefly, he thought that she would make a good winter fling.
"Yes," he said, chuckling the thought off. "Yes, I am."
She eyed him, suspicious with tinges of playful, before going on. "Use to be, we go in and out of each other’s homes free, and no one ever ask money of neighbour. Now, everything do about the money. No money, no food, no friend, no nothing."
"That isn’t - "
"Yes, it is," she said. "We like your people now. People never happy with what they have, right? We want more. More mean be people like you."
Before Oshitari’s eyes, there were only the spiralling dots of snow in the air. He considered her words. "You still have your traditions and garbs."
She thought this through and nodded. "Yes."
Though they were 2170 meters above sea level, the atmosphere inside the car was dense. It was evident by the loose set of her shoulders that she had come to tolerate her new lifestyle, but tolerance and acceptance were not the same. Through Atobe, Oshitari saw as much.
"What do the triangles on your headdress symbolise?"
"This?" She touched one of the red and yellow pieces. Oshitari nodded. "Marriage propose."
This piqued Oshitari’s interest. "Oh?"
"Oh," she echoed pointedly. Some of the playful petulance from before was back.
"How might that work, exactly?" Oshitari pushed.
She pursed her lips and sighed long-sufferingly. "If someone want marry me, they take my triangle. It is only part of my headdress I allow give away."
Oshitari smiled at her, broad and charming. "Would you give one to me?"
"I mention that who propose to me go to my home and do three year hard labour to prove them worthy, yes?" She smirked. "Is not whether I give to you. It is whether not you can take."
Oshitari laughed, low and lively.
Then, they stopped and the Naxi woman cut the ignition.
"Because it is winter, we cannot driver high," she explained. "If you want travel higher, you take gondola."
"By myself?" Oshitari pouted at her. "Who will save me if I slip?"
She threw him a withering glance over her shoulder as she locked up the minivan. "I suppose I go with you," she grumbled. "Very sue-happy, you people are these day."
As they hiked some ways up the hill, they watched the gondolas swing precariously in the mountain breeze.
"This is safe?" Oshitari asked.
"I don’t die with you." She ushered him on the first cart that swung by.
For a whole fifteen seconds, there was silence. And then: "If you were to estimate the distance from here to those trees down there - "
The Naxi guide looked like she wanted to leap from the gondola and fall into the thick forest of pines herself just so that she would be far, far from Oshitari. "Is it you, or all Japanese act this way?"
Oshitari replied with a cheerful shrug.
She rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Look to your heart content and don't kill us."
Oshitari laughed into the mist. The gondola was pulling them closer and closer to the sun. The clouds seemed within reach. Up here, there was nothing he could see of the world below. It was 99 percent perfect. He looked down at the rolling rifts of the mountain.
One percent wasn’t much, but if one imagined the mountaintop as an entity, a living creature, it was one thing if the one percent missing was a hair or a fingernail. But when it was the heart, it was a whole new story.
-----
"Congratulations! You have won - "
"THE ACADEMY OF KNOWLEDGE OF OSAKA wishes to invite you - "
"Did you know? Seventy percent of all Caucasian women are at risk - "
Atobe checked down his list of emails, tossing more than half into the trash. Worthless spam wiggled their way too often into his inbox; this grated on his nerves.
Once he was finished with housekeeping, he looked down the list of names that were left, and sighed. He was in Greece, looking through emails from people in Tokyo. There was something wrong in the nature of that sentence.
Greece in winter was nothing like Greece in spring. It had been Atobe’s mother who had been curious about Greece in the winter, but now even she was regretting having ever suggested it.
Winter had evaporated far before it could ever sit and settle in the sky. Atobe felt cheated of the season. He wanted to see the sea winds loft snowflakes into the windowpane. He wanted back the weak light that illuminated from the sky and earth both. He wanted to be blinded at first sight by the endless, seamless stretches of cotton white. He wanted.
Their house in Greece was large, certainly, but everywhere Atobe went, he ran the risk of bumping heads with his father. Throughout the years, Atobe had learned that prison wasn’t behind iron bars. Prison was a room with crisply knotted curtains that fell to the floor. Prison was clean, white walls. Prison was expensive flooring, antiques, furniture, but not even a shadow of life.
Prison was his father.
Recently, whenever they spoke, it was about two things: whether Atobe had chosen a university’s entrance exam to take yet, and if so, which one?
It had started small. Maybe as a wad of mucus in Atobe’s throat. But overtime, it expanded - expanded until it became something that was suffocating and pressed the breath from Atobe’s chest.
Fundamentally, the universities were what he wanted; it was the little details that weren't quite right. They were all kind of what he could see in his future, but not really.
A mechanical bell, high and clear, startled him out of his thoughts. Oshitari’s name was at the top of his list of senders, in bold. Since they had departed for opposite sides of the world, they had not exchanged words. Atobe chewed the inside of his cheek, and then clicked it open.
To: Atobe Keigo
From: Oshitari Yuushi
Subject: [None]
Date: Sunday, December 23, 4:10pm (local)
Good.
- Yuushi
Atobe blinked, and scrolled down the page, looking for more, only to find nothing but advertisements.
Good. Good? What was that even supposed to mean? Good what? Atobe wished valiantly at this point that Oshitari would follow standard rules of grammar from time to time.
The four-letter word pried, fingers stiff and resolute, at the very foundations of Atobe's sanity. With much indignant mental puffing, Atobe supposed that this was probably Oshitari's intention.
To: Oshitari Yuushi
From: Atobe Keigo
Subject: Re: [None]
Date: Sunday, December 23, 4:12am (local)
Explain.
Atobe tapped his finger on the keyboard and hit send, satisfied. A word for a word. That was fair.
The next day, Oshitari shot another email Atobe’s way. In it, however, contained not an explanation.
To: Atobe Keigo
From: Oshitari Yuushi
Subject: [None]
Date: Sunday, December 24, 5:32am (local)
Things.
- Yuushi
Atobe had never been fond of word games. Months from graduation, everything was about time, and it was the one thing that he always seemed short on. Atobe was very tempted to call Oshitari up and demand an explanation. This, though, would require admitting defeat. His pride picketed in protest.
This frustration was for naught, he found out two days short of a week later. By the fifth day, nothing was to be doubted about where Oshitari was headed. By the thirteenth day, all was revealed. Atobe had a complete thought on his hands:
Good things don't wait around forever for people to come to their senses.
This sentence sounded familiar, like he had read or heard of it from somewhere, but like many other things at this stage of his life, the recollection was a befuddled mess of inorganic figures, too far and too dark for him to reach or see.
Good things don't wait around forever for people to come to their senses.
Atobe thought about this, tracing his eyes over the pattern of the wood flooring. Why would Oshitari send him something like this?
A pair of large, stocking-clad feet obstructed his view of the spindly wood-designs. He looked up, and met the eyes of his father.
"Good evening, Keigo," his father greeted.
Atobe bit his cheek to keep himself from pointing out that it was only four. He wasn’t entirely sure what the recent, seemingly arbitrary surges of defiance were all about, but he had a good idea.
"Good evening," Atobe echoed.
"Were you considering your options for university? You still have not yet made a choice."
Not your choice, but a choice. Atobe wanted to laugh. "No, Father, I have not."
"In a month's time, you must decide."
Atobe’s fingers curled into his palm underneath the table. He knew this. He didn’t need his father to tell him. "Of course. I will."
His father nodded. "That is all. Dinner is in thirty minutes," he said, and walked away.
Watching his father's shadow stride away, Atobe's hands itched to throw something at it. His father was shoving him off a diving board with brute force. The amount of force was directly proportional to the amount of resistance.
Some days, he wished he and his father would scream at each other. Scream and scream and scream until laryngitis stopped them both. At least this would mean that they cared enough to get angry with each other.
Atobe looked down at the table, where just moments before he had traced Oshitari's message. The letters bled into each other in his head, faster and faster and faster - a merry-go-round gone out of control - until gradually, the plate began to slow and something clicked.
It wasn't like the bold and brilliant illumination of a light bulb. The flame of realisation had been barely a flicker, but it was enough for Atobe to be torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to push his fist though a wall. He wouldn’t have thought so before, but he guessed Oshitari and his father shared a common vein.
Only, when it was Oshitari nudging and coaxing him along, the height of the platform didn't seem daunting at all, the sting of the water as he plunged head-first was not nearly as painful or shocking, and the water that invaded his eyes would help to clear his vision. With Oshitari, it was all so simple.
Part two.