PoT: asymmetrical
For sesame_seed for taking a look at it and convincing me that no one was ever going to understand me, but that that is perfectly okay. For one_if_by_land, because we have parallel mission statements. For petronia, because there is a mention of the Little Prince and I always think of you when I think about that.
There are extensive author's notes. Be warned. And first person to guess the artist and the song title othis cut text refers to wins another request.
Fuji says to Tezuka, "You'll be the only person I know when we're there," and Tezuka looks at him with the eyes of a starving man offered cake and wine for a full week before his execution, and that's when Fuji reaches out for him, his fingers long and still and staid as they touch the collar of Tezuka's shirt. His hand is cold as they lightly touch the skin of Tezuka's neck through the white fabric.
In that instant, Tezuka mouths the word 'rin' like he's making his own sound effects for a comic that's never going to be drawn about them, so he says yes because somewhere in there he's made up his mind. It's like Tezuka doesn't realize what he's doing until he wakes up in a cold sweat one morning in the plane. Fuji's pulling the window up to look at the green countryside under them like a patched quilt, and the pilot telling them the temperature and time, and Tezuka's neck hurts from the way he's been sleeping with his head cocked towards Fuji's shoulder.
It's summer when they go, it's summer when they stay, and Tezuka will always think of China as summer, that hot humid musty summer that's tiring and tired all the time, the monsoon season come and gone so the only moisture is sweat, nothing between skin and clothes but more and more layers of sweat. The heat pelts down in ways Tezuka never thought were possible, prickles down his neck and weighs more than anything solid, so Tezuka has his shoulders hunched all the time in China, and sometimes he wakes up in the morning with his mouth open and wordless cries of pain, his throat dry.
That summer in China is like a disease to Tezuka. The sky there isn't blue at all; it's this hazy shade of gray that hurts Tezuka's eyes and reminds him that he doesn't know where he is half the time and the other half of the time can't pronounce the street he's on. The sun makes Fuji's hair lighter, bleaches it a little bit more gold, so he's even more beautiful than Tezuka had ever realized. There is this moment, this brilliant, painless moment of radiance when Fuji stops by an fruit vendor, and the old lady selling there reaches up to touch Fuji's hair as if she had never seen hair that color before. The smell of grapes warming in the sun is heavy. Fuji's smile is serene, the apples bright and almost painted into that scene, the cars seem to move so slow behind them that they make waltz music.
Fuji buysa bag of lychee fruit from the old lady that afternoon, and as soon as he walks away he begins eating them, one at a time, very slowly, his fingers peeling away the red layer of the skin and, just as slow, bringing the fruit to his mouth. When he offers Tezuka some, he turns to Tezuka, one of the small round fruits held by his fingertips, saying, "The reason I love this fruit so much is because it reminds me of you."
"I remind you of a lychee?"
"The skin," Fuji says, flicking ever so gently against the hard outer covering, "is who you try to be. The inside," Fuji continues, discarding the skin carelessly into his bag with the other fruits, "is who you really are. The center," Fuji says, gently pulling the white bits away from the pit and placing them against Tezuka's lips so he has to eat them even though he really doesn't like the overly sweet taste, "is your heart," and Fuji, his fingers still lingering against Tezuka's lips, puts the pit in his mouth and swallows. It's a small, shriveled pit, the kind that are about a fourth of the size of normal lychee seeds and make Tezuka think of old men, but the way Fuji winces when it goes down, the way he presses his lip tight and his throat moves, Tezuka knows it hurts.
It's at that point that Tezuka knows that in China, in Japan, in Germany, in all the world, only Fuji understands him, only Fuji knows him, but it's only in China, it's only in a place where neither of them even barely knows anyone else, that Tezuka has Fuji all to himself, that Fuji's static enough to let himself belong.
It's in China that Tezuka also discovers he's claustrophobic in big crowds, if only because of Fuji. It seems as if he's always worried about something, worried about being left behind and leaving behind that he's always turning around to look at Fuji. The sea of people crowds Tezuka in, but at the same time he's left with just himself, and in China Tezuka has nightmares about nameless things, abstract things, something lonely and dark. He and Fuji both sleeping on the same mattress, a bamboo mat under them, the heat hard on Tezuka's chest, the sound of the air conditioning whirling in the background, and Tezuka turns to Fuji, says, "I had a dream where you left me." Fuji turns around so that's he's facing Tezuka, traces a finger from the edge of Tezuka's temple down to his cheek, says, "Tezuka, you never sleep." Fuji's cheek has the indentations of the pattern of the bamboo mat so there is this little grid on Fuji's face like a Cartesian plane. Tezuka brings his hand up to touch it only to find that Fuji's gotten up and gone. He spends another five minutes in that bed holding onto the barest subtleties that make this different from his dream.
Sometimes Tezuka wonders if he's more afraid of finding Fuji than he is of losing him.
Fuji comes alive in a place where there are too many people and the streets crowd up your mind even when you're not looking at them. He comes alive in a place where, with one look, you can never forget the taste or the feel or the smell, all fetid grace and beautiful restrictions, a world where there are so many boundaries and so many borders made of human skin that it makes Tezuka wonder if there's any such a thing as private space or freedom. And of course there is; Fuji discovers it under his fingernails and between his teeth as he breathes, leaves Tezuka all alone the first five minutes they had arrived at the airport to watch wide-eyed at the horde of people passing through. China's nothing like Tokyo. It's something else; it's wild and uncontrolled and civilized so that Tezuka wants to thrust his hand into the mess and mix it up somehow. It's uncomfortable. It feels like home. It feels like a place where Tezuka could die and no one would know or care.
It's his second time away from Japan and the fear of loss, that strange fear Tezuka only finds in foreign places, is still with him, but he doesn't say anything because Fuji's there whenever Tezuka turns around, and Tezuka wants that to be enough. In this place where nothing's familiar, Fuji's hand seems to be warmer and more real than anything Tezuka could ever ask for. It's strange because in Japan Tezuka had always thought of Fuji as cold, all different variations of it, shocking cold and winter cold and ice cold and that slow subtle cold that happens when you put your bare feet on the ground in the morning. It ends up that in China, where it's even hotter when the sun is gone and where Tezuka is the only person Fuji knows, just as he had promised, Fuji is near-sightedness, asphyxiation, sensitivity, and beauty, but most of all, summer.
Summer, and a heat that's almost perfume. The nape of Fuji's neck or the curve of his wrist, the way he smiles when he finds some small trinket in the market he wants to buy, his delight at learning how to convert money in his head, the tilt of his head as he considered the way Chinese tea tasted, the way he smelled coming out of the shower in the afternoons with a towel drying his hair, walking around his uncle's house almost completely naked, and Tezuka sitting on the bed trying to figure out how he fit in to all this continuity. "Stop thinking," Fuji had said when he pulled Tezuka down on top of him the second night. "Just feel." And the heat of Fuji's body, the heat of the weather, the heat of that summer, had been and still is enough to make Tezuka lose his mind briefly, momentarily, fleetingly, just long enough to make him forget that it won't be forever. He knows that he's only borrowing time, though; Fuji's eyes when he kisses him are somewhere else, somewhere so far away that all Tezuka ever seems to be doing is getting farther away. Fuji's eyes are looking ahead at someplace Tezuka will never be.
But for the moment he still has Fuji, who cups his hand around his cheek when he says to Tezuka, "You're drowning," looking so happy, so satisfied, so giddy and high on something Tezuka can't feel or taste or even see. Fuji says drowning like a religious man prays; Fuji says drowning like he actually means salvation.
Tezuka says drowning like the way he says Fuji's name in his head when no one else can hear him, and Tezuka says drowning so that he can see Fuji's eyes turn languid, dangerous, molten, as deep as summer.
"It's as hot as the desert in Saint Exupéry's book," Fuji tells Tezuka one night, the sheets bunched under his armpits and his voice like a snake in the dark.
"Like in the Little Prince?" Tezuka asks, because Fuji's brought his book with him even here, because Tezuka borrowed it once from the library and thought of Fuji the entire time he was reading it, because Fuji likes to say the title in English with a flourish. "You remind me of him," Tezuka says after a pause.
"Where's my sheep?" Fuji asks, and Tezuka can tell from his voice that he's smiling.
It's a long stretch of silence and Tezuka thinks Fuji's asleep before he whispers, "If you're the little prince, what does that make me?"
"You're the planet," Fuji whispers back sleepily, but not completely slurring and rounding off his words, so Tezuka knows he's only pretending to be woken up. "The planet that nurtures the rose, that gives me volcanoes to cook my food, that gives me flowers and baobabs, that's small enough for me to see sunsets forty-four times when I'm sad." Fuji takes a breath, and then adds, "I should have learned French."
Tezuka dreams of golden snakes that night, golden snakes with venom, and glimmering well water that stretches on for infinity, and a flock of migratory birds that carries Fuji away to China, and himself hanging by a thread in the sky, limbs extended, waiting for Fuji to come back. He dreams of a rose blossoming from his shoulder, its roots sinking deep in his joints and drawing away the calcium and the minerals and the blood away from his bone, and Fuji walking away into a crowd of people, getting smaller and smaller and smaller, just like Tezuka's always been afraid he would do.
Fuji does learn just the barest amount of Chinese though, and sometimes as Tezuka's going to sleep he hears Fuji whispering broken phrases and words and grammar patterns as a lullaby, the fluid sounds slipping out from between his lips, butter-smooth. Tezuka falls asleep to the sound of Fuji's lips and teeth meeting, his tongue scraping gently inside his mouth. Tezuka has a head for Germanic and Romance languages that seem to be stuffed full of consonants, but Chinese escapes him like he's lacking something essential in the understanding of it, in the emphatic movement of it, in the curved and perfect vowels it uses. But Fuji, Fuji who isn't afraid of crowds or heat or anything, Fuji who's smiles and noncommittal sounds are like the four accents to a Chinese syllable, takes to Chinese as if it's born into him. Fuji moves on to mouthing words on Tezuka's stomach, his words round and vaguely circular as he says something soundlessly against that skin, and when Tezuka asks him later what he had said, Fuji just shrugs lightly, smiles, says, "You should learn Chinese, Tezuka."
Tezuka wants to tell him that in Chinese, some of the characters are the same as the Japanese kanji; Tezuka still knows how to write the character for love; it's the same in both languages. It even sounds similar. He doesn't know how to write the "I" or the "you", but he's gotten an idea how to pronounce them, even if he can't get the accents right, and if that's the only phrase he can learn here, he doesn't care. He'll say the same phrase over and over again until Fuji understands him, until he himself can believe them.
But he doesn't work up the courage. Fuji in China barters with old ladies in the streets, buys strings of jasmine flowers to pin to Tezuka's shirt buttons, adjusts to the nuances of taxi hailing and cursory touring, knows when to bribe and when to tip, falls in love with cheap fans, and without his tennis and ambiguity, seems so real and solid to Tezuka that he's more afraid of losing him than he was in Japan. Tezuka's already lost a lot of things: a game to Atobe, for one, the use of his shoulder for a while, for another, his expectations, for still another. The one thing he doesn't think he can afford to lose is Fuji.
He thinks he's lost his wallet too, lost or stolen he's not sure. One minute it's in his pocket and the next minute his pocket's empty, and Tezuka turns to tell Fuji this but Fuji's already ahead, crowding his way onto a bus, his hand holding onto Tezuka wrist like a bad habit that won't go away. "I hope you have money," Tezuka says to Fuji as they're crowded together on the bus, and Fuji makes a quick little movement of his hips so that he's lined up with Tezuka neatly, both of them sharing their heat so effectively in that enclosed summer air that Tezuka's sweating after a few seconds, and Fuji says, "I always have something you need, Tezuka."
The truth doesn't hurt when Fuji's hair smells like rain and shampoo pressed up against Tezuka's nose, Fuji's back against Tezuka's chest, the sound of the ticket seller on the bus calling out to Fuji who holds a few colored bills in his hand, smiling as he buys both of their tickets. Fuji passes one of the paper-thin tickets into Tezuka's palm and says, "Now you have everything you need."
As they're getting off, Tezuka presses one desperate kiss on the back of Fuji's ear, but doesn't say anything.
Fuji is slick and glints silver in the sun when they're at the Great Wall, surrounded by banisters and film booths and water stands and people. Tezuka's out of breath chasing him there, tired in a way he's sure he's never been when playing tennis. There are more people on the Great Wall than they ever show in photographs. On a wall crammed full of artificial walls, Tezuka's clamped in on himself so much, afraid to talk, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, that Fuji has to touch him twice on the left shoulder to get him to look at the view. Fuji's been carrying a cold bottle of water in his hands, and his fingers leave two small water marks on Tezuka's shirt after he's gone.
Tezuka sets Fuji's camera next to a section of the wall and begins cleaning his glasses against his shirt so he can get his eyes out of the light. Next to him, Fuji's looking at the view and shielding his eyes from the sun before he suddenly asks, out of the blue, "Wouldn't this be the most wonderful place to commit suicide?" His eyes are the same as when he kisses Tezuka, are staring off so far into the hills that Tezuka can't even see where he's looking. "The grass looks so green and soft, and you could just dive right into them like a bed." Fuji stretches out his arms as if he's trying to fly off, stands on his tiptoes and wavers gently, a balancing act; Tezuka has to resist the urge to catch him by his waist to make sure he really doesn't fall off. Murmuring from the corner of his mouth, the way Fuji does when he's trying to hypnotize anyone with his the rise and fall of his voice, he says, "It would be exactly like falling asleep, so tender and sensitive and slow."
His shoulder just the slightest bit wet and cold from the wind and Fuji's touch, Tezuka shivers.
Right as they're about to leave, a dark haired boy stands up at the top of the wall clumsily and pitches forward abruptly. His companion, someone older, almost his father or at least an uncle, wraps his arms protectively around his waist and pulls him back down before he can fall, scowling so hard Tezuka can almost hear it. Nobody dies, but when they're back on the bus, Fuji with both of their bus tickets this time, he turns his head half an inch towards Tezuka, just enough so that Tezuka can see his lips move in the dimming light, "That was tragic, wasn't it?"
There, on the wall, the boy's hair had been very dark and very black, his eyes very wide and scared, but there was something truly fearless and resolute about him, even though he was very small, and Tezuka had thought, at the moment when the boy's footing slipped, that he would have just floated slowly down to the ground, not violently at all. He would have been weightless, small, delicate, vicarious, just like a feather or a piece of cloth, and that's what Fuji's eyes seem like now. Tezuka can only nod mutely, creep two fingers against Fuji's hip as if he were trying to keep Fuji from jumping, and he can see from the almost profile of Fuji's face that Fuji's smiling.
Tezuka mouths the words, "wo ai ni" clumsily against Fuji's arm that night while Fuji's sleeping and spends the whole night waiting for Fuji to wake up, but it never happens.
You aren't a hero until you've visited the Great Wall, someone once said, and even though Tezuka's been to the Great Wall, and even though he's said the words once now, Tezuka knows he's still a coward. He'll follow Fuji forever and he'll say silent words against Fuji's skin forever, but it's all him being brave when no one else can see him. It's all him being brave when Fuji's already promised him something, when he has the ground to take something for granted. It's all him being brave in the dark, and the thing is Fuji's waiting for someone who's willing to dive head-first into the hills, who's willing to take that first step off the wall so that he'll be there when Fuji jumps.
At the very least, Fuji's waiting for someone who's willing to jump with him, and Tezuka is so afraid of a lot of things, crowds and loss and, somehow, heights, that he's bogged down with that fear. When Tezuka's hit by claustrophobia, it's as if his shoes are glued to the ground. He'll never be a small boy balancing at the edge of a stone wall, he'll never be light enough to float down gently, he'll end up crashing if he's able to jump at all.
A week later, as Tezuka's packing their suitcases to go back, he finds a couple of things tucked away in a little drawer on Fuji's side of the room. Two bus tickets, old and worn out and quite illegible even if Tezuka could read Chinese, a few rolls of film, a Seigaku school badge that looks too new to be Fuji's, a scrap of notebook paper with their departure date written and circled in pencil, and what Tezuka figures from the bad English summary printed on the back and incorrect actor's names to be a bootleg copy of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." It's in a thin plastic bag, and when Tezuka turns it over, he realizes that Fuji's written, in permanent marker on the bag, "To Ryoma, my Antoine."
Maybe, Tezuka thinks, he isn't the planet after all. He might be the fox to Fuji's Little Prince; he might be something close to the planet but not enough to draw the Little Prince back. He might be tamed and hurt and left for a flower, he might be pining forever, but he doesn't get anything in the end, not laughing stars, not singing stars, not stars at all. Not golden half gray landscapes and the sound of an empty body hitting the sand, not anything.
And well, he says to himself as he puts all of Fuji's possession back in the drawer carefully, trying to make them look untouched, maybe there is something about the fox that wants to be tamed and wants to be hurt and wants to be left by himself. Maybe there is something about the fox that is selfless and knows it has lost, whereas there is something about the author that will not sleep or give up.
Maybe there is something about the Little Prince that defies definition and eludes capture and in the end the only person who ever knows him is himself.
That same afternoon, Fuji develops the photos he had taken at the Great Wall and spreads them out on the bed, rows and rows of green and gray stone, rows and rows of impressive, expansive landscapes, rows and rows of Tezuka's shadow and about-face and the sun filtering at just the right angle to cause little light marks on the image. The best ones are the ones that Fuji's taken of Tezuka or of the Great Wall, but there's a couple decent ones Tezuka's taken of Fuji, both candid and portrait shots. The most artless and tasteless photo, Fuji points out, is the one they had asked someone take of the two of them together leaning up against the wall. But when Tezuka pushes Fuji down on the bed with all the photos spread out and kisses him fiercely, that's the photo Tezuka presses the back of Fuji's hand against, as if the harder he pressed, the more the image would imprint itself on Fuji's skin.
It turns out that that's the only image Fuji has of them together in China. Fuji keeps his promises; Tezuka is, in the end, the only person Fuji knows in China, the only person Fuji loves in China. As they're going back on the plane, as Tezuka watches the green countryside get smaller and smaller and the clouds get whiter and whiter, Tezuka lets himself remember all the things they've thrown away just for that summer, just for that bit of infinite, frenzied, borrowed and bought time. A lot of people, Tezuka knows, a lot of their lives, a lot of the things that mean more to them than life, a lot of things that vaguely followed and haunted then even in China. But if he had to, if he was asked to, if he were given that choice, Tezuka would trade all that in. Fuji in China belonged to Tezuka in the way a patch of sunlight or the name of a flower can belong to someone.
Fuji elsewhere is Fuji in a place where he's someone else's little prince, someone else's loss, someone else's lychee seed, someone else's addict, and someone else's addiction; Fuji elsewhere is Fuji in a place where he loves someone else more than he understands and knows Tezuka; Fuji elsewhere is Fuji in a place where he needs something else more than Tezuka will ever be able to give him.
A/N: "Rin" is apparently the Japanese sound effect that occurs when something cold and shocking touches the skin, like bare ice. Antoine, if anyone hasn't guessed yet, is the author of The Little Prince. Why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? because Jen jumps off the Great Wall. Thank you, sesame_seed, for reminding me of that fact, even though I didn't use it the same way. As for why parallels to the planet instead of the author? ARGH. Go ask Chrissie. I am planning on this being like Eliot's Wasteland, one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the fandom. Who does the Seigaku badge belong to? Yuuta. Why does Fuji keep bus tickets? They are the departure and return tickets for the bus trip to the Great Wall. Is the little boy at the Great Wall supposed to be Ryoma's subsitute? Yes. Is staid a real word? Yes. What city are Tezuka and Fuji in? beats me. Do I think that there is any great unifying theory in my story that redeems it? certainly not!
The end. Really.
There are extensive author's notes. Be warned. And first person to guess the artist and the song title othis cut text refers to wins another request.
Fuji says to Tezuka, "You'll be the only person I know when we're there," and Tezuka looks at him with the eyes of a starving man offered cake and wine for a full week before his execution, and that's when Fuji reaches out for him, his fingers long and still and staid as they touch the collar of Tezuka's shirt. His hand is cold as they lightly touch the skin of Tezuka's neck through the white fabric.
In that instant, Tezuka mouths the word 'rin' like he's making his own sound effects for a comic that's never going to be drawn about them, so he says yes because somewhere in there he's made up his mind. It's like Tezuka doesn't realize what he's doing until he wakes up in a cold sweat one morning in the plane. Fuji's pulling the window up to look at the green countryside under them like a patched quilt, and the pilot telling them the temperature and time, and Tezuka's neck hurts from the way he's been sleeping with his head cocked towards Fuji's shoulder.
It's summer when they go, it's summer when they stay, and Tezuka will always think of China as summer, that hot humid musty summer that's tiring and tired all the time, the monsoon season come and gone so the only moisture is sweat, nothing between skin and clothes but more and more layers of sweat. The heat pelts down in ways Tezuka never thought were possible, prickles down his neck and weighs more than anything solid, so Tezuka has his shoulders hunched all the time in China, and sometimes he wakes up in the morning with his mouth open and wordless cries of pain, his throat dry.
That summer in China is like a disease to Tezuka. The sky there isn't blue at all; it's this hazy shade of gray that hurts Tezuka's eyes and reminds him that he doesn't know where he is half the time and the other half of the time can't pronounce the street he's on. The sun makes Fuji's hair lighter, bleaches it a little bit more gold, so he's even more beautiful than Tezuka had ever realized. There is this moment, this brilliant, painless moment of radiance when Fuji stops by an fruit vendor, and the old lady selling there reaches up to touch Fuji's hair as if she had never seen hair that color before. The smell of grapes warming in the sun is heavy. Fuji's smile is serene, the apples bright and almost painted into that scene, the cars seem to move so slow behind them that they make waltz music.
Fuji buysa bag of lychee fruit from the old lady that afternoon, and as soon as he walks away he begins eating them, one at a time, very slowly, his fingers peeling away the red layer of the skin and, just as slow, bringing the fruit to his mouth. When he offers Tezuka some, he turns to Tezuka, one of the small round fruits held by his fingertips, saying, "The reason I love this fruit so much is because it reminds me of you."
"I remind you of a lychee?"
"The skin," Fuji says, flicking ever so gently against the hard outer covering, "is who you try to be. The inside," Fuji continues, discarding the skin carelessly into his bag with the other fruits, "is who you really are. The center," Fuji says, gently pulling the white bits away from the pit and placing them against Tezuka's lips so he has to eat them even though he really doesn't like the overly sweet taste, "is your heart," and Fuji, his fingers still lingering against Tezuka's lips, puts the pit in his mouth and swallows. It's a small, shriveled pit, the kind that are about a fourth of the size of normal lychee seeds and make Tezuka think of old men, but the way Fuji winces when it goes down, the way he presses his lip tight and his throat moves, Tezuka knows it hurts.
It's at that point that Tezuka knows that in China, in Japan, in Germany, in all the world, only Fuji understands him, only Fuji knows him, but it's only in China, it's only in a place where neither of them even barely knows anyone else, that Tezuka has Fuji all to himself, that Fuji's static enough to let himself belong.
It's in China that Tezuka also discovers he's claustrophobic in big crowds, if only because of Fuji. It seems as if he's always worried about something, worried about being left behind and leaving behind that he's always turning around to look at Fuji. The sea of people crowds Tezuka in, but at the same time he's left with just himself, and in China Tezuka has nightmares about nameless things, abstract things, something lonely and dark. He and Fuji both sleeping on the same mattress, a bamboo mat under them, the heat hard on Tezuka's chest, the sound of the air conditioning whirling in the background, and Tezuka turns to Fuji, says, "I had a dream where you left me." Fuji turns around so that's he's facing Tezuka, traces a finger from the edge of Tezuka's temple down to his cheek, says, "Tezuka, you never sleep." Fuji's cheek has the indentations of the pattern of the bamboo mat so there is this little grid on Fuji's face like a Cartesian plane. Tezuka brings his hand up to touch it only to find that Fuji's gotten up and gone. He spends another five minutes in that bed holding onto the barest subtleties that make this different from his dream.
Sometimes Tezuka wonders if he's more afraid of finding Fuji than he is of losing him.
Fuji comes alive in a place where there are too many people and the streets crowd up your mind even when you're not looking at them. He comes alive in a place where, with one look, you can never forget the taste or the feel or the smell, all fetid grace and beautiful restrictions, a world where there are so many boundaries and so many borders made of human skin that it makes Tezuka wonder if there's any such a thing as private space or freedom. And of course there is; Fuji discovers it under his fingernails and between his teeth as he breathes, leaves Tezuka all alone the first five minutes they had arrived at the airport to watch wide-eyed at the horde of people passing through. China's nothing like Tokyo. It's something else; it's wild and uncontrolled and civilized so that Tezuka wants to thrust his hand into the mess and mix it up somehow. It's uncomfortable. It feels like home. It feels like a place where Tezuka could die and no one would know or care.
It's his second time away from Japan and the fear of loss, that strange fear Tezuka only finds in foreign places, is still with him, but he doesn't say anything because Fuji's there whenever Tezuka turns around, and Tezuka wants that to be enough. In this place where nothing's familiar, Fuji's hand seems to be warmer and more real than anything Tezuka could ever ask for. It's strange because in Japan Tezuka had always thought of Fuji as cold, all different variations of it, shocking cold and winter cold and ice cold and that slow subtle cold that happens when you put your bare feet on the ground in the morning. It ends up that in China, where it's even hotter when the sun is gone and where Tezuka is the only person Fuji knows, just as he had promised, Fuji is near-sightedness, asphyxiation, sensitivity, and beauty, but most of all, summer.
Summer, and a heat that's almost perfume. The nape of Fuji's neck or the curve of his wrist, the way he smiles when he finds some small trinket in the market he wants to buy, his delight at learning how to convert money in his head, the tilt of his head as he considered the way Chinese tea tasted, the way he smelled coming out of the shower in the afternoons with a towel drying his hair, walking around his uncle's house almost completely naked, and Tezuka sitting on the bed trying to figure out how he fit in to all this continuity. "Stop thinking," Fuji had said when he pulled Tezuka down on top of him the second night. "Just feel." And the heat of Fuji's body, the heat of the weather, the heat of that summer, had been and still is enough to make Tezuka lose his mind briefly, momentarily, fleetingly, just long enough to make him forget that it won't be forever. He knows that he's only borrowing time, though; Fuji's eyes when he kisses him are somewhere else, somewhere so far away that all Tezuka ever seems to be doing is getting farther away. Fuji's eyes are looking ahead at someplace Tezuka will never be.
But for the moment he still has Fuji, who cups his hand around his cheek when he says to Tezuka, "You're drowning," looking so happy, so satisfied, so giddy and high on something Tezuka can't feel or taste or even see. Fuji says drowning like a religious man prays; Fuji says drowning like he actually means salvation.
Tezuka says drowning like the way he says Fuji's name in his head when no one else can hear him, and Tezuka says drowning so that he can see Fuji's eyes turn languid, dangerous, molten, as deep as summer.
"It's as hot as the desert in Saint Exupéry's book," Fuji tells Tezuka one night, the sheets bunched under his armpits and his voice like a snake in the dark.
"Like in the Little Prince?" Tezuka asks, because Fuji's brought his book with him even here, because Tezuka borrowed it once from the library and thought of Fuji the entire time he was reading it, because Fuji likes to say the title in English with a flourish. "You remind me of him," Tezuka says after a pause.
"Where's my sheep?" Fuji asks, and Tezuka can tell from his voice that he's smiling.
It's a long stretch of silence and Tezuka thinks Fuji's asleep before he whispers, "If you're the little prince, what does that make me?"
"You're the planet," Fuji whispers back sleepily, but not completely slurring and rounding off his words, so Tezuka knows he's only pretending to be woken up. "The planet that nurtures the rose, that gives me volcanoes to cook my food, that gives me flowers and baobabs, that's small enough for me to see sunsets forty-four times when I'm sad." Fuji takes a breath, and then adds, "I should have learned French."
Tezuka dreams of golden snakes that night, golden snakes with venom, and glimmering well water that stretches on for infinity, and a flock of migratory birds that carries Fuji away to China, and himself hanging by a thread in the sky, limbs extended, waiting for Fuji to come back. He dreams of a rose blossoming from his shoulder, its roots sinking deep in his joints and drawing away the calcium and the minerals and the blood away from his bone, and Fuji walking away into a crowd of people, getting smaller and smaller and smaller, just like Tezuka's always been afraid he would do.
Fuji does learn just the barest amount of Chinese though, and sometimes as Tezuka's going to sleep he hears Fuji whispering broken phrases and words and grammar patterns as a lullaby, the fluid sounds slipping out from between his lips, butter-smooth. Tezuka falls asleep to the sound of Fuji's lips and teeth meeting, his tongue scraping gently inside his mouth. Tezuka has a head for Germanic and Romance languages that seem to be stuffed full of consonants, but Chinese escapes him like he's lacking something essential in the understanding of it, in the emphatic movement of it, in the curved and perfect vowels it uses. But Fuji, Fuji who isn't afraid of crowds or heat or anything, Fuji who's smiles and noncommittal sounds are like the four accents to a Chinese syllable, takes to Chinese as if it's born into him. Fuji moves on to mouthing words on Tezuka's stomach, his words round and vaguely circular as he says something soundlessly against that skin, and when Tezuka asks him later what he had said, Fuji just shrugs lightly, smiles, says, "You should learn Chinese, Tezuka."
Tezuka wants to tell him that in Chinese, some of the characters are the same as the Japanese kanji; Tezuka still knows how to write the character for love; it's the same in both languages. It even sounds similar. He doesn't know how to write the "I" or the "you", but he's gotten an idea how to pronounce them, even if he can't get the accents right, and if that's the only phrase he can learn here, he doesn't care. He'll say the same phrase over and over again until Fuji understands him, until he himself can believe them.
But he doesn't work up the courage. Fuji in China barters with old ladies in the streets, buys strings of jasmine flowers to pin to Tezuka's shirt buttons, adjusts to the nuances of taxi hailing and cursory touring, knows when to bribe and when to tip, falls in love with cheap fans, and without his tennis and ambiguity, seems so real and solid to Tezuka that he's more afraid of losing him than he was in Japan. Tezuka's already lost a lot of things: a game to Atobe, for one, the use of his shoulder for a while, for another, his expectations, for still another. The one thing he doesn't think he can afford to lose is Fuji.
He thinks he's lost his wallet too, lost or stolen he's not sure. One minute it's in his pocket and the next minute his pocket's empty, and Tezuka turns to tell Fuji this but Fuji's already ahead, crowding his way onto a bus, his hand holding onto Tezuka wrist like a bad habit that won't go away. "I hope you have money," Tezuka says to Fuji as they're crowded together on the bus, and Fuji makes a quick little movement of his hips so that he's lined up with Tezuka neatly, both of them sharing their heat so effectively in that enclosed summer air that Tezuka's sweating after a few seconds, and Fuji says, "I always have something you need, Tezuka."
The truth doesn't hurt when Fuji's hair smells like rain and shampoo pressed up against Tezuka's nose, Fuji's back against Tezuka's chest, the sound of the ticket seller on the bus calling out to Fuji who holds a few colored bills in his hand, smiling as he buys both of their tickets. Fuji passes one of the paper-thin tickets into Tezuka's palm and says, "Now you have everything you need."
As they're getting off, Tezuka presses one desperate kiss on the back of Fuji's ear, but doesn't say anything.
Fuji is slick and glints silver in the sun when they're at the Great Wall, surrounded by banisters and film booths and water stands and people. Tezuka's out of breath chasing him there, tired in a way he's sure he's never been when playing tennis. There are more people on the Great Wall than they ever show in photographs. On a wall crammed full of artificial walls, Tezuka's clamped in on himself so much, afraid to talk, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, that Fuji has to touch him twice on the left shoulder to get him to look at the view. Fuji's been carrying a cold bottle of water in his hands, and his fingers leave two small water marks on Tezuka's shirt after he's gone.
Tezuka sets Fuji's camera next to a section of the wall and begins cleaning his glasses against his shirt so he can get his eyes out of the light. Next to him, Fuji's looking at the view and shielding his eyes from the sun before he suddenly asks, out of the blue, "Wouldn't this be the most wonderful place to commit suicide?" His eyes are the same as when he kisses Tezuka, are staring off so far into the hills that Tezuka can't even see where he's looking. "The grass looks so green and soft, and you could just dive right into them like a bed." Fuji stretches out his arms as if he's trying to fly off, stands on his tiptoes and wavers gently, a balancing act; Tezuka has to resist the urge to catch him by his waist to make sure he really doesn't fall off. Murmuring from the corner of his mouth, the way Fuji does when he's trying to hypnotize anyone with his the rise and fall of his voice, he says, "It would be exactly like falling asleep, so tender and sensitive and slow."
His shoulder just the slightest bit wet and cold from the wind and Fuji's touch, Tezuka shivers.
Right as they're about to leave, a dark haired boy stands up at the top of the wall clumsily and pitches forward abruptly. His companion, someone older, almost his father or at least an uncle, wraps his arms protectively around his waist and pulls him back down before he can fall, scowling so hard Tezuka can almost hear it. Nobody dies, but when they're back on the bus, Fuji with both of their bus tickets this time, he turns his head half an inch towards Tezuka, just enough so that Tezuka can see his lips move in the dimming light, "That was tragic, wasn't it?"
There, on the wall, the boy's hair had been very dark and very black, his eyes very wide and scared, but there was something truly fearless and resolute about him, even though he was very small, and Tezuka had thought, at the moment when the boy's footing slipped, that he would have just floated slowly down to the ground, not violently at all. He would have been weightless, small, delicate, vicarious, just like a feather or a piece of cloth, and that's what Fuji's eyes seem like now. Tezuka can only nod mutely, creep two fingers against Fuji's hip as if he were trying to keep Fuji from jumping, and he can see from the almost profile of Fuji's face that Fuji's smiling.
Tezuka mouths the words, "wo ai ni" clumsily against Fuji's arm that night while Fuji's sleeping and spends the whole night waiting for Fuji to wake up, but it never happens.
You aren't a hero until you've visited the Great Wall, someone once said, and even though Tezuka's been to the Great Wall, and even though he's said the words once now, Tezuka knows he's still a coward. He'll follow Fuji forever and he'll say silent words against Fuji's skin forever, but it's all him being brave when no one else can see him. It's all him being brave when Fuji's already promised him something, when he has the ground to take something for granted. It's all him being brave in the dark, and the thing is Fuji's waiting for someone who's willing to dive head-first into the hills, who's willing to take that first step off the wall so that he'll be there when Fuji jumps.
At the very least, Fuji's waiting for someone who's willing to jump with him, and Tezuka is so afraid of a lot of things, crowds and loss and, somehow, heights, that he's bogged down with that fear. When Tezuka's hit by claustrophobia, it's as if his shoes are glued to the ground. He'll never be a small boy balancing at the edge of a stone wall, he'll never be light enough to float down gently, he'll end up crashing if he's able to jump at all.
A week later, as Tezuka's packing their suitcases to go back, he finds a couple of things tucked away in a little drawer on Fuji's side of the room. Two bus tickets, old and worn out and quite illegible even if Tezuka could read Chinese, a few rolls of film, a Seigaku school badge that looks too new to be Fuji's, a scrap of notebook paper with their departure date written and circled in pencil, and what Tezuka figures from the bad English summary printed on the back and incorrect actor's names to be a bootleg copy of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." It's in a thin plastic bag, and when Tezuka turns it over, he realizes that Fuji's written, in permanent marker on the bag, "To Ryoma, my Antoine."
Maybe, Tezuka thinks, he isn't the planet after all. He might be the fox to Fuji's Little Prince; he might be something close to the planet but not enough to draw the Little Prince back. He might be tamed and hurt and left for a flower, he might be pining forever, but he doesn't get anything in the end, not laughing stars, not singing stars, not stars at all. Not golden half gray landscapes and the sound of an empty body hitting the sand, not anything.
And well, he says to himself as he puts all of Fuji's possession back in the drawer carefully, trying to make them look untouched, maybe there is something about the fox that wants to be tamed and wants to be hurt and wants to be left by himself. Maybe there is something about the fox that is selfless and knows it has lost, whereas there is something about the author that will not sleep or give up.
Maybe there is something about the Little Prince that defies definition and eludes capture and in the end the only person who ever knows him is himself.
That same afternoon, Fuji develops the photos he had taken at the Great Wall and spreads them out on the bed, rows and rows of green and gray stone, rows and rows of impressive, expansive landscapes, rows and rows of Tezuka's shadow and about-face and the sun filtering at just the right angle to cause little light marks on the image. The best ones are the ones that Fuji's taken of Tezuka or of the Great Wall, but there's a couple decent ones Tezuka's taken of Fuji, both candid and portrait shots. The most artless and tasteless photo, Fuji points out, is the one they had asked someone take of the two of them together leaning up against the wall. But when Tezuka pushes Fuji down on the bed with all the photos spread out and kisses him fiercely, that's the photo Tezuka presses the back of Fuji's hand against, as if the harder he pressed, the more the image would imprint itself on Fuji's skin.
It turns out that that's the only image Fuji has of them together in China. Fuji keeps his promises; Tezuka is, in the end, the only person Fuji knows in China, the only person Fuji loves in China. As they're going back on the plane, as Tezuka watches the green countryside get smaller and smaller and the clouds get whiter and whiter, Tezuka lets himself remember all the things they've thrown away just for that summer, just for that bit of infinite, frenzied, borrowed and bought time. A lot of people, Tezuka knows, a lot of their lives, a lot of the things that mean more to them than life, a lot of things that vaguely followed and haunted then even in China. But if he had to, if he was asked to, if he were given that choice, Tezuka would trade all that in. Fuji in China belonged to Tezuka in the way a patch of sunlight or the name of a flower can belong to someone.
Fuji elsewhere is Fuji in a place where he's someone else's little prince, someone else's loss, someone else's lychee seed, someone else's addict, and someone else's addiction; Fuji elsewhere is Fuji in a place where he loves someone else more than he understands and knows Tezuka; Fuji elsewhere is Fuji in a place where he needs something else more than Tezuka will ever be able to give him.
A/N: "Rin" is apparently the Japanese sound effect that occurs when something cold and shocking touches the skin, like bare ice. Antoine, if anyone hasn't guessed yet, is the author of The Little Prince. Why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? because Jen jumps off the Great Wall. Thank you, sesame_seed, for reminding me of that fact, even though I didn't use it the same way. As for why parallels to the planet instead of the author? ARGH. Go ask Chrissie. I am planning on this being like Eliot's Wasteland, one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the fandom. Who does the Seigaku badge belong to? Yuuta. Why does Fuji keep bus tickets? They are the departure and return tickets for the bus trip to the Great Wall. Is the little boy at the Great Wall supposed to be Ryoma's subsitute? Yes. Is staid a real word? Yes. What city are Tezuka and Fuji in? beats me. Do I think that there is any great unifying theory in my story that redeems it? certainly not!
The end. Really.