PoT: fresh
Er. I don't know. I can't stop, apparently. And soon I will have to call this the "seasonal" arc or something because I noticed the last one was in summer and this one is in spring and I have an idea for a winter one. *laughs* But that's okay. This one isn't as spur of the moment as the last one, so it just completely sounds different. It's funny how much fifteen minutes of mulling will do for your story. Am kind of working off the assumption that Akutsu and Yuuki are sort of poor, but I really don't know if that's canon.
You've never liked apples much. Something about the aftertaste makes you remember the way it felt to kill someone, although that's stupid because you've never killed someone, so it's not as if you could remember it, and you wouldn't think murder had an aftertaste anyway, because it's more of a physical act of taking, wasn't it, as opposed to an act of eating and tasting something.
"Logic, logic," he murmurs as he sits next to you, listening, and you have to resist the temptation to figure out right now if murder has an aftertaste after all, because it would be so satisfying just to bash him into the ground, all the rest of him a red to match his hair.
But if you had to speculate now, you think murder would taste like the iron, almost bloody, lingering taste you have after you've eaten apples or drunken apple juice, the same slippery irritating taste that crawls around in your throat long after you're done. The same garishly, misleadingly sweet taste that makes you mistake apples for a simple fruit, but only later, after your teeth are deep into it, you're forced to take back your words. It's a much more complex fruit than oranges or bananas who peel themselves open.
Evidently, this idea pleases him. He nods, says, "Apples misled the first couple on Earth," his head dozing off to one side suddenly, as if he was bored with the words just as they came out of his mouth.
"Why am I talking to you about this again?" you demand, almost physically pulling away from the conversation, but he grabs you by the shoulder closer to him and says with a psuedo-scholarly look on his face, complete with a tight, fierce little smile, "You have a feeling that I am a significant, undeniable part of your personality that you cannot seem to elude."
"I think you're a pain in the ass," you say, snapping at him.
"But a significant, undeniable, inescapable pain in the ass," he replies, quite proud of himself, and prods you on the side so that you'll keep talking about something else. It takes you a little while to realize he still wants to hear you talk about apples. You can't remember why he started you on this or how he even got you to talk about it.
He probably threatened to steal your cigarettes again unless you talked about something interesting and personal with him, and you didn't have the patience or the money to buy another pack.
Funny, you've never had much trouble with tomatoes, even though he points out that tomatoes are technically called "love apples". You'd think that tomatoes are more like the actual act of murdering, all that red and spurting and bleeding onto the cutting board or hand or whatever, but tomatoes make you think of food or sex, you're not sure which. And this makes him double over laughing, slapping you hard on the back, so you make some kind of disgruntled noise and shift to one side, avoiding his hand. He knows and you know that you're done talking for today. Conversation with him is like a quota. You actually think you've passed your talking quota a little while back with that whole "apples are equivalent to death" thing.
You don't talk to him much now anymore, because he's in high school and you're working with construction crews and doing odd jobs to bring in some more money. It's not like Yuuki brings in enough to send you to school, feed you, and keep herself alive, not to mention she has no self control and bought cosmetics like candy, so you have to do something about the family income. And the odd thing was that the two of you put together looked more like a couple than a parent-child unit, which has always done something to make you feel responsible and guilty when you shouldn't.
Anyway, the next time you see him waiting for you in the streets outside of your job site, he's holding a tomato in his hand. When he sees you he takes out a pocket knife and neatly slices the tomato in half, handing you a portion of it and proceeding to mutilate his part of it by cutting it into smaller and smaller semicircles. You're rubbing your hands dry from the dust and grease with a weak tissue that just keeps redistributing its paper fibers onto your fingers. It takes you a little while just to regard the tomato before you put it into your mouth and watch with vague interest and disgust as his turns into a red mess in his hands.
"I don't have any tissues left," you warn, and he grins.
"It's all right. I can just lick my hand clean, no biggie."
"Just don't use my shirt or something," you say, scowling. "And you should probably run that knife over with water before it rusts."
"You're worried?" he asks and lifts both eyebrows happily, so you cuff him on the side of his head, and both of you walk towards the direction of your house in silence, him eating what he could of his tomato and you just walking. Rounding the last corner and seeing the familiarity of your neighborhood rolling in all around you, he says wickedly, "Like sex, huh?" and you hit him again.
"Well, don't worry," he chirps, his tongue catching a tomato seed between his third and fourth finger deftly, giving you the impression that if he were a girl that move would have been very, very sexy. "All fruits are supposed to represent sex in one way or another."
You think, but you're not sure because you never remember these things, that you dream in wet pinks and gentle red that night.
On your birthday, you still go to work, put on a pair of dirty jeans-- you find the dirt and grime never really wash off-- and a work shirt, pulling a hardhat over your head, and heft your share of iron around. When it's close to closing time, you catch sight of him, neat and as clean as ever in a school uniform, and you have the petty need to ignore him for as long as you can. After a while you finally climb down and, dirty hand clutching the front of his shirt loosely, ask, "What?"
He hands you a little wrapped package, warm, and you can smell baking soda and sugar coming off him in little waves. "Happy birthday, Akutsu," he says, giving you that quirky smile he always makes whenever he feels exceptionally like pissing you off.
You grab the box like it's going to explode in your hands into millions of flour fragments, and say threateningly, "I'm not remembering yours."
"No big surprise," he says. "And anyway, it's unlucky for people with your arrangement to keep in mind numbers."
"Maybe for your birthday I'll throw out that stupid fortune book you always cart around."
"Maybe for my birthday you'll play tennis with me again," he says, and he does this thing with his voice that you can remember him doing to you a long time ago, when he first got you to talk to him, not a whine or even a hint of one, but something closer to sounding like a very good imitation of a spoiled puppy who was getting kicked, or something. You never think much about it, just sort of accept it as one of those inevitabilities of life, like tax and death and tea.
"I'm out of practice," you say gruffly, but he's still smiling, taking it like a joke like he always does, "Akutsu, you've never been in practice."
Getting back to your job, you stop all of your co-workers' jokes about wives and marriage in their throat with a look in the general direction of their necks.
At home Yuuki unwraps the package and takes out an apple pie, which only further convinces you that you need to do some serious bodily damage to him the next time you see him. She cuts the pie into little pieces and forces some of it down your throat after you're done with dinner. Sitting there, staring at your fork and plate and the remains of some of the pie crust in the center of the plate, you hear her say from the kitchen where she's pouring a glass of water, "You should tell Sengoku-kun to come around. He never does anymore."
"He's busy," you say, leaving the dirty dishware on the table and stalking towards the bathroom where you reach for your toothbrush automatically. It's strange that you can stand the taste of bad liquor and hand rolled cigarettes with bad tobacco but the taste of apples can still leave you almost retching.
"You know, Jin," she says distantly, "it was really very nice of Sengoku-kun to remember you birthday." You spit sharply into the sink once, twice, and run the toothbrush across your teeth another time before rinsing out your mouth. "Jin?" she asks. You don't answer, just stand there watching the water swirl down the sink. "Don't you find it interesting that you're always attracting the cheerful ones? Like Taka-kun? I wonder why they never rub off on you?"
You snap the lights off to the bathroom and can taste in the back of your throat the mint of your toothpaste just barely masking over the taste of milk and apples.
That night you sleep with your windows half open so you can hear the sound of the wind outside just barely whistling because it's spring. You've always hated spring because of how depressingly hopeful everything was around you, the leaves bursting into green, everything smelling sweet and light and soft.
Leaves in spring remind you of Granny Smith apples, the worst kind, because there's nothing in those apples but the taste of apples. They're not like Fuji apples or Red Delicious apples that have another taste to them, like they're halfway artificial and not quite fruit. Granny Smith apples have a taste to match their color, and you remember their color, because quite appropriately they're just barely a shade lighter than the color of his eyes, the color of the Yamabuki tennis uniform, and the color of his voice when he sounds hopeful, the season of spring all caught up in his throat, and everything about him so overwhelmingly green that when you turn away from him, there's an afterimage of red.
You've never liked apples much. Something about the aftertaste makes you remember the way it felt to kill someone, although that's stupid because you've never killed someone, so it's not as if you could remember it, and you wouldn't think murder had an aftertaste anyway, because it's more of a physical act of taking, wasn't it, as opposed to an act of eating and tasting something.
"Logic, logic," he murmurs as he sits next to you, listening, and you have to resist the temptation to figure out right now if murder has an aftertaste after all, because it would be so satisfying just to bash him into the ground, all the rest of him a red to match his hair.
But if you had to speculate now, you think murder would taste like the iron, almost bloody, lingering taste you have after you've eaten apples or drunken apple juice, the same slippery irritating taste that crawls around in your throat long after you're done. The same garishly, misleadingly sweet taste that makes you mistake apples for a simple fruit, but only later, after your teeth are deep into it, you're forced to take back your words. It's a much more complex fruit than oranges or bananas who peel themselves open.
Evidently, this idea pleases him. He nods, says, "Apples misled the first couple on Earth," his head dozing off to one side suddenly, as if he was bored with the words just as they came out of his mouth.
"Why am I talking to you about this again?" you demand, almost physically pulling away from the conversation, but he grabs you by the shoulder closer to him and says with a psuedo-scholarly look on his face, complete with a tight, fierce little smile, "You have a feeling that I am a significant, undeniable part of your personality that you cannot seem to elude."
"I think you're a pain in the ass," you say, snapping at him.
"But a significant, undeniable, inescapable pain in the ass," he replies, quite proud of himself, and prods you on the side so that you'll keep talking about something else. It takes you a little while to realize he still wants to hear you talk about apples. You can't remember why he started you on this or how he even got you to talk about it.
He probably threatened to steal your cigarettes again unless you talked about something interesting and personal with him, and you didn't have the patience or the money to buy another pack.
Funny, you've never had much trouble with tomatoes, even though he points out that tomatoes are technically called "love apples". You'd think that tomatoes are more like the actual act of murdering, all that red and spurting and bleeding onto the cutting board or hand or whatever, but tomatoes make you think of food or sex, you're not sure which. And this makes him double over laughing, slapping you hard on the back, so you make some kind of disgruntled noise and shift to one side, avoiding his hand. He knows and you know that you're done talking for today. Conversation with him is like a quota. You actually think you've passed your talking quota a little while back with that whole "apples are equivalent to death" thing.
You don't talk to him much now anymore, because he's in high school and you're working with construction crews and doing odd jobs to bring in some more money. It's not like Yuuki brings in enough to send you to school, feed you, and keep herself alive, not to mention she has no self control and bought cosmetics like candy, so you have to do something about the family income. And the odd thing was that the two of you put together looked more like a couple than a parent-child unit, which has always done something to make you feel responsible and guilty when you shouldn't.
Anyway, the next time you see him waiting for you in the streets outside of your job site, he's holding a tomato in his hand. When he sees you he takes out a pocket knife and neatly slices the tomato in half, handing you a portion of it and proceeding to mutilate his part of it by cutting it into smaller and smaller semicircles. You're rubbing your hands dry from the dust and grease with a weak tissue that just keeps redistributing its paper fibers onto your fingers. It takes you a little while just to regard the tomato before you put it into your mouth and watch with vague interest and disgust as his turns into a red mess in his hands.
"I don't have any tissues left," you warn, and he grins.
"It's all right. I can just lick my hand clean, no biggie."
"Just don't use my shirt or something," you say, scowling. "And you should probably run that knife over with water before it rusts."
"You're worried?" he asks and lifts both eyebrows happily, so you cuff him on the side of his head, and both of you walk towards the direction of your house in silence, him eating what he could of his tomato and you just walking. Rounding the last corner and seeing the familiarity of your neighborhood rolling in all around you, he says wickedly, "Like sex, huh?" and you hit him again.
"Well, don't worry," he chirps, his tongue catching a tomato seed between his third and fourth finger deftly, giving you the impression that if he were a girl that move would have been very, very sexy. "All fruits are supposed to represent sex in one way or another."
You think, but you're not sure because you never remember these things, that you dream in wet pinks and gentle red that night.
On your birthday, you still go to work, put on a pair of dirty jeans-- you find the dirt and grime never really wash off-- and a work shirt, pulling a hardhat over your head, and heft your share of iron around. When it's close to closing time, you catch sight of him, neat and as clean as ever in a school uniform, and you have the petty need to ignore him for as long as you can. After a while you finally climb down and, dirty hand clutching the front of his shirt loosely, ask, "What?"
He hands you a little wrapped package, warm, and you can smell baking soda and sugar coming off him in little waves. "Happy birthday, Akutsu," he says, giving you that quirky smile he always makes whenever he feels exceptionally like pissing you off.
You grab the box like it's going to explode in your hands into millions of flour fragments, and say threateningly, "I'm not remembering yours."
"No big surprise," he says. "And anyway, it's unlucky for people with your arrangement to keep in mind numbers."
"Maybe for your birthday I'll throw out that stupid fortune book you always cart around."
"Maybe for my birthday you'll play tennis with me again," he says, and he does this thing with his voice that you can remember him doing to you a long time ago, when he first got you to talk to him, not a whine or even a hint of one, but something closer to sounding like a very good imitation of a spoiled puppy who was getting kicked, or something. You never think much about it, just sort of accept it as one of those inevitabilities of life, like tax and death and tea.
"I'm out of practice," you say gruffly, but he's still smiling, taking it like a joke like he always does, "Akutsu, you've never been in practice."
Getting back to your job, you stop all of your co-workers' jokes about wives and marriage in their throat with a look in the general direction of their necks.
At home Yuuki unwraps the package and takes out an apple pie, which only further convinces you that you need to do some serious bodily damage to him the next time you see him. She cuts the pie into little pieces and forces some of it down your throat after you're done with dinner. Sitting there, staring at your fork and plate and the remains of some of the pie crust in the center of the plate, you hear her say from the kitchen where she's pouring a glass of water, "You should tell Sengoku-kun to come around. He never does anymore."
"He's busy," you say, leaving the dirty dishware on the table and stalking towards the bathroom where you reach for your toothbrush automatically. It's strange that you can stand the taste of bad liquor and hand rolled cigarettes with bad tobacco but the taste of apples can still leave you almost retching.
"You know, Jin," she says distantly, "it was really very nice of Sengoku-kun to remember you birthday." You spit sharply into the sink once, twice, and run the toothbrush across your teeth another time before rinsing out your mouth. "Jin?" she asks. You don't answer, just stand there watching the water swirl down the sink. "Don't you find it interesting that you're always attracting the cheerful ones? Like Taka-kun? I wonder why they never rub off on you?"
You snap the lights off to the bathroom and can taste in the back of your throat the mint of your toothpaste just barely masking over the taste of milk and apples.
That night you sleep with your windows half open so you can hear the sound of the wind outside just barely whistling because it's spring. You've always hated spring because of how depressingly hopeful everything was around you, the leaves bursting into green, everything smelling sweet and light and soft.
Leaves in spring remind you of Granny Smith apples, the worst kind, because there's nothing in those apples but the taste of apples. They're not like Fuji apples or Red Delicious apples that have another taste to them, like they're halfway artificial and not quite fruit. Granny Smith apples have a taste to match their color, and you remember their color, because quite appropriately they're just barely a shade lighter than the color of his eyes, the color of the Yamabuki tennis uniform, and the color of his voice when he sounds hopeful, the season of spring all caught up in his throat, and everything about him so overwhelmingly green that when you turn away from him, there's an afterimage of red.