[PoT | rikkai] soundtrack
you know (okay, maybe you don't) how I keep promising Jackal and Marui a fic? well, okay, that didn't happen, but everything else did.
[PoT | rikkai] soundtrack
a very small number of parts are true stories, except they were a lot more tedious when you had to actually live through them.
i. another day, just believe (just breathe)
Behind the school field there was a shortcut of mossy alleyways that led in between blocks of drooping-eaved houses to a row of shoplots, all shuttered with bamboo blinds. They weren't supposed to know about it but Niou sometimes came into class late after lunch break and he'd say, "I was in the bathroom," straight to the teacher's face, while the entire front row breathed in the sour-sweet lemongrass and spice on his breath and clothes.
Yagyuu first went with him to the shop one Saturday, and when they sat down Niou leaned against his shoulder the way water spreads over the bottom of a glass, draped an arm around him and dug his chin into Yagyuu's shoulder. Niou had been eating some kind of dried sour plum all morning, in between games; when he mouthed the words to some song on the radio, the smell crept under Yagyuu's lenses, and Yagyuu had to remove the spectacles and wipe his eyes. They were both sticky from three hours on the court and the air inside the shop felt very cool after the fierce, slow burn of the sun; Yagyuu could feel his skin throbbing with his pulse, in time to the muffled, staggered heartbeats of the music.
"You're not pregnant, are you?" he asked.
"Is that your medical opinion?"
"I didn't know you liked sour things."
"I bet Yanagi is going crazy trying to figure it out," Niou said happily.
"That's not usually your reason."
"Usually? What's that word mean?"
"Usually, as in you usually order tom yam here," Yagyuu said, and he watched Niou's eyelids flicker lazily, once, sliding back up smoothly except at the outer corners and the pupils swivelling, heavy and brilliant like light in a marble, to look at him. Niou said, "It's no good outside of school days," and Yagyuu replied, "Marui said that, too," and then Niou laughed and said something really crude and dirty that made the group of college kids at the next table look around.
Their food arrived just then, and, because Yagyuu didn't say anything, Niou announced that the pad thai he'd ordered was really great and Yagyuu ought to try some. His own dish, green chicken curry, left his mouth and nose so numb that on the way back, he said, "Remind me to breathe, if you see that I've stopped."
And Niou just laughed, and he couldn't smell anything then, but just before he went into his house he felt Niou's hand on one shoulder, Niou's chin digging into the other shoulder and a warm whisper against his ear. He recognised the words from the song in the shop, and almost immediately the sharp, sour smell of dried plum made his nose twitch and stomach twist although he knew it couldn't have survived the onslaught of pad thai and cold water since then. But Niou wore his tiger eyes, the ones he used for tricking people, and Yagyuu stared into them for only a very short while before reaching slowly up the back of Niou's neck and catching him by the thin rat-tail of hair Niou always left growing long.
"'Never catch a tiger by his tail'," Niou said, but he only winced when Yagyuu tugged sharply on it, and answered the kiss when it came. And Yagyuu, his mouth burnt dry and numb by the spice, still felt something sour and sharp on his tongue that went like a needle down the spine, and he knew it was purely deceit, but that was what Niou would taste like anyway.
ii. tomorrow never comes until it's too late
They always had about ten minutes in between classes, and the Year 3 rooms were all next to each other, so they would come out and stand around on the boundary line in between classes. Someone would always be looking in one direction for signs of incoming teachers, and someone would always be standing opposite him looking in the other direction. Everyone else either leaned against the class wall, or put an elbow on someone else's shoulder if he was shorter than you and didn't mind.
Yukimura was the only one who liked to sit on the balcony, and when they ran out of things to talk about their eyes always drifted to him because there he was right in front of them. Once, during those pause and hold moments, he stretched his arms out, both sides out and backward, and dipped his head down to hide a yawn. They were three storeys up and Yanagi didn't even know what to feel, but Sanada was there the next time he blinked, feet square and solid as bedrock on the floor and his hand on Yukimura's shoulder, between Yukimura and the well of space beyond the balcony.
"Just one hand, Sanada?" Yukimura asked.
"You weren't really going to fall."
But Sanada didn't take his hand away, even when Yukimura put his hands back on the balcony. Yanagi breathed out, listened to Niou breaking into relieved and noisy laughter, Yagyuu looking at him sideways; Marui, turning away from the drama, dug a small finger into Jackal's ribs which drew no complaint, only a flinch and eventually a pack of gum. Yanagi caught Yukimura looking at him, then, and he said, "Incoming," and everyone jerked around to see whose teacher was on the way, but it was only a second-year tripping past on his way to the bathroom. Niou said to him, "I wanna make a joke about opening your eyes a teechy bit wider but Sanada would kill me," and then he ducked and grinned as Sanada said, "Niou," from the balcony.
It made Yukimura laugh, and for some reason Yanagi thought, that is beautiful but dying, andh e couldn't understand why, until he saw the dry leaves lying in a burst of colour on the balcony's ledge, scattered all over the floor.
Marui and Niou started to throw bits of chalk at each other and then Marui ran into a class, wriggling firmly underneath the desks and making rude noises at Niou, who lunged after him with a broom he'd picked up from a corner. The other occupants of the class roared at them, without effect; Sanada yelled at them to knock it off, but Yukimura didn't say anything and eventually Yagyuu sighed and went inside. Jackal said, "They won't stop until they want to," but he followed, anyway, and stood at the doorway with his arms crossed and shoulders slightly hunched. Yanagi looked at the shape he made, which they had always laughed at before, and when he looked away, Yukimura asked him, "What are you thinking of?"
Yanagi hesitated before he said, "Anubis," and he said it quietly, low, so that Jackal did not hear. Sanada looked confused, but Yukimura just laughed again, saying, "You read too much," and chucking a dead leaf at him.
"He looks like he's waiting," Yanagi insisted. "And he is. Although for different things--"
"He's not Anubis. If he had been called Cat instead would you think he's Baal?"
Yanagi allowed himself a small smile, which he turned away to the side, pretending he was still on sentry duty. "Cat," he said, "is a girl's name."
"I'm lost," Sanada said.
"Anubis ate people's hearts," Yukimura told him, and he spoke at normal volume now, so that Jackal turned around and looked at them with his eyebrows crooked and puzzled. Sanada grunted and said, "Sounds more like Marui," and Marui shouted through the window, "I heard my name," before he squeaked and ran away from incoming Niou and broom.
"The people were already dead, and he only ate their hearts if they were heavier than a feather," Jackal said. "I guess the heavy ones were full of something that tasted good. I mean, uh, I should really go in and break those two up already."
He went into the class, and Sanada repeated, "Something that tasted good," and for a minute they thought he was going to guess at what that was, but he only said, "I told you, that's more like Marui," and Yukimura doubled over with laughter, so that Sanada's hand tightened its grip on his shoulder.
"I think he didn't mean that literally," Yanagi said.
"Then what?"
"Love tastes good," Yukimura said, and Yanagi looked at him, sitting so casually on the balcony with his dark-trousered legs obscuring part of the warning sticker, so that you could only read DANGER and DO NOT and HERE. But Sanada was standing next to Yukimura, facing the classroom doors, and Yanagi knew he couldn't have read the warning at all.
iii. there's no secret to living, just keep on walking
When he woke up the room was dead with quiet and gold with sunlight, and he thought how unnatural that was, that it should be so bright and so silent and him only just awake. Then he heard the bathroom door closing, someone singing, and he got out of bed, carefully, found a packet of aspirin in a drawer and swallowed two without water so that he felt a lump in his throat going slowly downwards for the next few minutes. When Kirihara came out of the bathroom he was waiting, leaning against the wall and rubbing the back of his hand over his eyes.
"There's carrot cake in the fridge," he said, "help yourself. You still don't drink coffee?"
"Anything, I don't wanna make a fuss."
Kirihara followed him to the kitchen and sat on the counter, watching him put water in the filter and grounds in the machine, slice up the cake and put it on plates. He did everything meticulously, one action following the other in a smooth sequence, and he felt Kirihara's eyes on him all the time, the way a cat watches you, without approval or emotion.
"Turn the radio on if you want to," he said.
"Nah. Are you going to the hospital?"
"Later."
"Do I have to go, too?"
"Do you want to?"
Kirihara swung his legs, and the heels made a dull thudding noise against the kitchen cabinets. "I'm tired," he said, then, a beat later, "How is he?"
"I don't know. The last time I saw him he beat Gen-- Sanada at shougi, three times." He handed a plate to Kirihara and picked up his fork, watched Kirihara break off a large chunk of cake with his fingers and lick white frosting off them afterwards. "But he hasn't been able to talk on the phone for very long, lately. I don't know what he'll be like today. The last time he got like this, he would just pretend to go to sleep and wait for us to leave."
"I know."
"You weren't around then."
"I was, I just didn't tell anyone else. Oh this cake is nice." Kirihara wiped the tip of his nose, completely missing a lick of icing smeared across the side of his mouth. "It was a long weekend; I thought I'd go see him, and surprise the rest of you later."
"But you didn't."
"No," Kirihara said. "I was worse than last night. A lot worse. Not in the hospital but once I got outside, and I thought, I shouldn't see the rest of you like that. Went downtown instead and got pissed there."
"There's no one to take care of you downtown."
"It's not me that needs taking care of," Kirihara said. "I mean, if there's going to be someone to take care of me, there should be someone to make him better first, right? I mean, I don't want him to get better just so we can maybe do something again, but just, he's a really nice person and he ought to get better. Not for that other reason. You know."
I know, he thought, like I guess I know now, and he looked at Kirihara's face and read what was still there. There were traces left from the first year when Kirihara had stalked Yukimura relentlessly and from what he thought was a safe distance, and maybe some left from the third year when Yukimura had returned to school, Kirihara's neck had always been marked with dark bruises, and everyone tried to forget that senior high and middle high were only two blocks apart. It had only been for a while, Kirihara had been whisked off to some sports school instead of joining the rest of them, and he thought that maybe the distance had done some of the killing but Yukimura had done most of the rest, without really telling anyone why he'd decided to do so. And the way Yukimura did things was always final, he always did things with grace and tact and subtlety but he always finished his moves completely, without mercy or hope for things to change in the future. No future, he thought, that's it; Yukimura simply did not like to think about the future.
"I hate it how he's always right," Kirihara said, "like when he said I'll get over him, and I did, didn't want to but it just happened like that. It's so weird, you know, I really really really didn't want to but I did."
"It's good," Yanagi said. "You're one of those that can move on."
He reached forward and wiped the stray smear of icing off Kirihara's cheek, watched the boy stare at him, took his hand away and washed his fingers under the sink. Kirihara's face had that intense look of a cat deciding that something was worth paying attention to, suddenly, and he could feel Kirihara's stare on his back, the way he used to feel it arrowing past him and fixing on Yukimura's back, and he said to the window, but I am not. He had a feeling that if he ever wanted this he would only be able to have it now, and there was no telling how long it would last but it would be good and he would have at least the memory of something good, later, if Kirihara decided to move on. But it is terrible, this memory of something good, when you let yourself think how it will never come to be again, and he thought of Yukimura in the hospital and the curtains that he insisted be drawn over the window, as though he was already no longer there.
note, or oh my god you actually reached here: if you can recognise the songs whose lyrics I've slotted into the headings, and you remember the beat and mood of them, that's what each fic felt like when I was slogging through it and wondering if it would ever end.
edit: I am so obscure in my songs it is not funny, will just list them. #1 is some dance song, can't remember by whom but okay that's pretty familiar. #2 is DJ Shadow's 'Six Days', and #3 is UNKLE feat. Richard Ashcroft, 'Lonely Souls'. UNKLE is absolutely smashing and everyone needs to know this song in particular.
edit2: I am so supposed to be reformatting my computer, but backup has not yet arrived. but it will soon, so I might be extremely late in replying, but really what's new about that? *woe, etcetera*
[PoT | rikkai] soundtrack
a very small number of parts are true stories, except they were a lot more tedious when you had to actually live through them.
i. another day, just believe (just breathe)
Behind the school field there was a shortcut of mossy alleyways that led in between blocks of drooping-eaved houses to a row of shoplots, all shuttered with bamboo blinds. They weren't supposed to know about it but Niou sometimes came into class late after lunch break and he'd say, "I was in the bathroom," straight to the teacher's face, while the entire front row breathed in the sour-sweet lemongrass and spice on his breath and clothes.
Yagyuu first went with him to the shop one Saturday, and when they sat down Niou leaned against his shoulder the way water spreads over the bottom of a glass, draped an arm around him and dug his chin into Yagyuu's shoulder. Niou had been eating some kind of dried sour plum all morning, in between games; when he mouthed the words to some song on the radio, the smell crept under Yagyuu's lenses, and Yagyuu had to remove the spectacles and wipe his eyes. They were both sticky from three hours on the court and the air inside the shop felt very cool after the fierce, slow burn of the sun; Yagyuu could feel his skin throbbing with his pulse, in time to the muffled, staggered heartbeats of the music.
"You're not pregnant, are you?" he asked.
"Is that your medical opinion?"
"I didn't know you liked sour things."
"I bet Yanagi is going crazy trying to figure it out," Niou said happily.
"That's not usually your reason."
"Usually? What's that word mean?"
"Usually, as in you usually order tom yam here," Yagyuu said, and he watched Niou's eyelids flicker lazily, once, sliding back up smoothly except at the outer corners and the pupils swivelling, heavy and brilliant like light in a marble, to look at him. Niou said, "It's no good outside of school days," and Yagyuu replied, "Marui said that, too," and then Niou laughed and said something really crude and dirty that made the group of college kids at the next table look around.
Their food arrived just then, and, because Yagyuu didn't say anything, Niou announced that the pad thai he'd ordered was really great and Yagyuu ought to try some. His own dish, green chicken curry, left his mouth and nose so numb that on the way back, he said, "Remind me to breathe, if you see that I've stopped."
And Niou just laughed, and he couldn't smell anything then, but just before he went into his house he felt Niou's hand on one shoulder, Niou's chin digging into the other shoulder and a warm whisper against his ear. He recognised the words from the song in the shop, and almost immediately the sharp, sour smell of dried plum made his nose twitch and stomach twist although he knew it couldn't have survived the onslaught of pad thai and cold water since then. But Niou wore his tiger eyes, the ones he used for tricking people, and Yagyuu stared into them for only a very short while before reaching slowly up the back of Niou's neck and catching him by the thin rat-tail of hair Niou always left growing long.
"'Never catch a tiger by his tail'," Niou said, but he only winced when Yagyuu tugged sharply on it, and answered the kiss when it came. And Yagyuu, his mouth burnt dry and numb by the spice, still felt something sour and sharp on his tongue that went like a needle down the spine, and he knew it was purely deceit, but that was what Niou would taste like anyway.
ii. tomorrow never comes until it's too late
They always had about ten minutes in between classes, and the Year 3 rooms were all next to each other, so they would come out and stand around on the boundary line in between classes. Someone would always be looking in one direction for signs of incoming teachers, and someone would always be standing opposite him looking in the other direction. Everyone else either leaned against the class wall, or put an elbow on someone else's shoulder if he was shorter than you and didn't mind.
Yukimura was the only one who liked to sit on the balcony, and when they ran out of things to talk about their eyes always drifted to him because there he was right in front of them. Once, during those pause and hold moments, he stretched his arms out, both sides out and backward, and dipped his head down to hide a yawn. They were three storeys up and Yanagi didn't even know what to feel, but Sanada was there the next time he blinked, feet square and solid as bedrock on the floor and his hand on Yukimura's shoulder, between Yukimura and the well of space beyond the balcony.
"Just one hand, Sanada?" Yukimura asked.
"You weren't really going to fall."
But Sanada didn't take his hand away, even when Yukimura put his hands back on the balcony. Yanagi breathed out, listened to Niou breaking into relieved and noisy laughter, Yagyuu looking at him sideways; Marui, turning away from the drama, dug a small finger into Jackal's ribs which drew no complaint, only a flinch and eventually a pack of gum. Yanagi caught Yukimura looking at him, then, and he said, "Incoming," and everyone jerked around to see whose teacher was on the way, but it was only a second-year tripping past on his way to the bathroom. Niou said to him, "I wanna make a joke about opening your eyes a teechy bit wider but Sanada would kill me," and then he ducked and grinned as Sanada said, "Niou," from the balcony.
It made Yukimura laugh, and for some reason Yanagi thought, that is beautiful but dying, andh e couldn't understand why, until he saw the dry leaves lying in a burst of colour on the balcony's ledge, scattered all over the floor.
Marui and Niou started to throw bits of chalk at each other and then Marui ran into a class, wriggling firmly underneath the desks and making rude noises at Niou, who lunged after him with a broom he'd picked up from a corner. The other occupants of the class roared at them, without effect; Sanada yelled at them to knock it off, but Yukimura didn't say anything and eventually Yagyuu sighed and went inside. Jackal said, "They won't stop until they want to," but he followed, anyway, and stood at the doorway with his arms crossed and shoulders slightly hunched. Yanagi looked at the shape he made, which they had always laughed at before, and when he looked away, Yukimura asked him, "What are you thinking of?"
Yanagi hesitated before he said, "Anubis," and he said it quietly, low, so that Jackal did not hear. Sanada looked confused, but Yukimura just laughed again, saying, "You read too much," and chucking a dead leaf at him.
"He looks like he's waiting," Yanagi insisted. "And he is. Although for different things--"
"He's not Anubis. If he had been called Cat instead would you think he's Baal?"
Yanagi allowed himself a small smile, which he turned away to the side, pretending he was still on sentry duty. "Cat," he said, "is a girl's name."
"I'm lost," Sanada said.
"Anubis ate people's hearts," Yukimura told him, and he spoke at normal volume now, so that Jackal turned around and looked at them with his eyebrows crooked and puzzled. Sanada grunted and said, "Sounds more like Marui," and Marui shouted through the window, "I heard my name," before he squeaked and ran away from incoming Niou and broom.
"The people were already dead, and he only ate their hearts if they were heavier than a feather," Jackal said. "I guess the heavy ones were full of something that tasted good. I mean, uh, I should really go in and break those two up already."
He went into the class, and Sanada repeated, "Something that tasted good," and for a minute they thought he was going to guess at what that was, but he only said, "I told you, that's more like Marui," and Yukimura doubled over with laughter, so that Sanada's hand tightened its grip on his shoulder.
"I think he didn't mean that literally," Yanagi said.
"Then what?"
"Love tastes good," Yukimura said, and Yanagi looked at him, sitting so casually on the balcony with his dark-trousered legs obscuring part of the warning sticker, so that you could only read DANGER and DO NOT and HERE. But Sanada was standing next to Yukimura, facing the classroom doors, and Yanagi knew he couldn't have read the warning at all.
iii. there's no secret to living, just keep on walking
When he woke up the room was dead with quiet and gold with sunlight, and he thought how unnatural that was, that it should be so bright and so silent and him only just awake. Then he heard the bathroom door closing, someone singing, and he got out of bed, carefully, found a packet of aspirin in a drawer and swallowed two without water so that he felt a lump in his throat going slowly downwards for the next few minutes. When Kirihara came out of the bathroom he was waiting, leaning against the wall and rubbing the back of his hand over his eyes.
"There's carrot cake in the fridge," he said, "help yourself. You still don't drink coffee?"
"Anything, I don't wanna make a fuss."
Kirihara followed him to the kitchen and sat on the counter, watching him put water in the filter and grounds in the machine, slice up the cake and put it on plates. He did everything meticulously, one action following the other in a smooth sequence, and he felt Kirihara's eyes on him all the time, the way a cat watches you, without approval or emotion.
"Turn the radio on if you want to," he said.
"Nah. Are you going to the hospital?"
"Later."
"Do I have to go, too?"
"Do you want to?"
Kirihara swung his legs, and the heels made a dull thudding noise against the kitchen cabinets. "I'm tired," he said, then, a beat later, "How is he?"
"I don't know. The last time I saw him he beat Gen-- Sanada at shougi, three times." He handed a plate to Kirihara and picked up his fork, watched Kirihara break off a large chunk of cake with his fingers and lick white frosting off them afterwards. "But he hasn't been able to talk on the phone for very long, lately. I don't know what he'll be like today. The last time he got like this, he would just pretend to go to sleep and wait for us to leave."
"I know."
"You weren't around then."
"I was, I just didn't tell anyone else. Oh this cake is nice." Kirihara wiped the tip of his nose, completely missing a lick of icing smeared across the side of his mouth. "It was a long weekend; I thought I'd go see him, and surprise the rest of you later."
"But you didn't."
"No," Kirihara said. "I was worse than last night. A lot worse. Not in the hospital but once I got outside, and I thought, I shouldn't see the rest of you like that. Went downtown instead and got pissed there."
"There's no one to take care of you downtown."
"It's not me that needs taking care of," Kirihara said. "I mean, if there's going to be someone to take care of me, there should be someone to make him better first, right? I mean, I don't want him to get better just so we can maybe do something again, but just, he's a really nice person and he ought to get better. Not for that other reason. You know."
I know, he thought, like I guess I know now, and he looked at Kirihara's face and read what was still there. There were traces left from the first year when Kirihara had stalked Yukimura relentlessly and from what he thought was a safe distance, and maybe some left from the third year when Yukimura had returned to school, Kirihara's neck had always been marked with dark bruises, and everyone tried to forget that senior high and middle high were only two blocks apart. It had only been for a while, Kirihara had been whisked off to some sports school instead of joining the rest of them, and he thought that maybe the distance had done some of the killing but Yukimura had done most of the rest, without really telling anyone why he'd decided to do so. And the way Yukimura did things was always final, he always did things with grace and tact and subtlety but he always finished his moves completely, without mercy or hope for things to change in the future. No future, he thought, that's it; Yukimura simply did not like to think about the future.
"I hate it how he's always right," Kirihara said, "like when he said I'll get over him, and I did, didn't want to but it just happened like that. It's so weird, you know, I really really really didn't want to but I did."
"It's good," Yanagi said. "You're one of those that can move on."
He reached forward and wiped the stray smear of icing off Kirihara's cheek, watched the boy stare at him, took his hand away and washed his fingers under the sink. Kirihara's face had that intense look of a cat deciding that something was worth paying attention to, suddenly, and he could feel Kirihara's stare on his back, the way he used to feel it arrowing past him and fixing on Yukimura's back, and he said to the window, but I am not. He had a feeling that if he ever wanted this he would only be able to have it now, and there was no telling how long it would last but it would be good and he would have at least the memory of something good, later, if Kirihara decided to move on. But it is terrible, this memory of something good, when you let yourself think how it will never come to be again, and he thought of Yukimura in the hospital and the curtains that he insisted be drawn over the window, as though he was already no longer there.
note, or oh my god you actually reached here: if you can recognise the songs whose lyrics I've slotted into the headings, and you remember the beat and mood of them, that's what each fic felt like when I was slogging through it and wondering if it would ever end.
edit: I am so obscure in my songs it is not funny, will just list them. #1 is some dance song, can't remember by whom but okay that's pretty familiar. #2 is DJ Shadow's 'Six Days', and #3 is UNKLE feat. Richard Ashcroft, 'Lonely Souls'. UNKLE is absolutely smashing and everyone needs to know this song in particular.
edit2: I am so supposed to be reformatting my computer, but backup has not yet arrived. but it will soon, so I might be extremely late in replying, but really what's new about that? *woe, etcetera*