PoT: vagrant
For dinghy. Because I was originally going to write winter as just between Sengoku and Akutsu, before I realized that I was forgetting Yuuki.
Winter comes when neither of you notice it, both of you turned the other way, he with his arms slung around your shoulders so he's at a slant and you with your eyes fixed ahead as if you could make him disappear that way.
The truly unfair thing about it all, you think, has to be the fact that he still looks tanned. That day, right before it had gotten truly cold and it had rained just hard enough to catch both of you sopping wet right outside your house, you invite him in for a change in clothes and an umbrella. You can still see the tan lines from his t-shirts and shorts when he takes off his clothes, standing there wet and cold and naked down to his underwear in your living room while you try to find a shirt that would fit him.
"I'll have to give this all back to you tomorrow, you know," and he's pulling on a pair of your old pants that's ripped in the back right above the ankle.
"Just don't wave it around saying, 'Akutsu, I have to give you back your pants!'" you say, thudding the handle of one of Yuuki's flowered umbrellas against his chest. He smiles, so you know he's thinking about it. Sitting at your dinner table, the umbrella in front of him like some virginal sacrifice, he folds his hands together in front of him, grins at you from behind his squinting eyes so that you can see the dark circles under his eyes better.
"You should sleep more," you tell him, flicking him viciously in his temple to make up for the fact that you sound like you're trying to look after him. His skin is warm, though not feverish. The wisps of hair around his forehead are dripping water onto his skin one silent quivering drop at a time.
"You're worried?"
"No," you say, and kick the leg of his chair because he's turned around backwards on it so he can watch you attempt to make tea without scalding yourself. "It's just that you're so stupid you probably wouldn't remember otherwise." He laughs and trips you as you pass by for the cups, so you bite the side of your cheek as you stumble, listening to him humming under his breath a melody you're sure you've heard before only because it's his voice.
He stays for dinner. He and Yuuki chatter at ridiculous speeds throughout the meal while you stab your chopsticks into your food with your lips pursed. But you still can't block out his voice ("You're such a talented young woman, Yuuki-chan, raising Jin all by yourself and still looking this beautiful!" "Why, Sengoku-kun, you're making me blush!" "You look prettier that way. Obviously Jin didn't take after you--") and you can't block out his face, that euphoric happiness, so you don't say anything, don't even get up and excuse yourself from the table when you're done eating. There's something so precarious about this balance, you realize, and something in you doesn't want to interrupt it.
Yuuki had put his clothes in the dryer before dinner, so his clothes are dry by the time he's supposed to leave. He's stripping down in your room this time instead of in the living room because, he says matter-of-factly, "It wouldn't be polite, with Yuuki-chan there and all." You watch his arms flex, watch the fabric stretch over his head and his hair tumble easily back into place as he buttons his shirt and tosses his head. You keep your mouth drawn in that half-hesitant half-menacing line to keep it from quivering, and it's not until he has his back to you when you finally get around to asking, "What are you here for, anyway?"
He turns his head over his shoulder. He's buttoning his shirt, his shirt cuffs still open and his tie looped around his neck loose and wrinkled. "It was raining, Jin," he says, smiling; you can't conjure up an image of him not smiling. You're still motionless when he's starting to open the door to leave, and you actually have to run to catch him before he leaves. You hold onto his wrist for a long, long time, considering. He buttons his shirt cuff while he waits for you. After a while, he starts tugging, even though he knows that you're the kind of person that can break his wrist in two seconds.
You let him go.
All his girlfriends this winter are blonde and skinny, pale and pink, delicate with warm voices and nimble hands, so he holds hands with them down the hallways. You don't care for any of them, but he forces you to walk with him too, chasing you down if you're not there with him during lunch or breaks or after school. You don't make a point of knowing their names. He switches them as soon as you start to get a vague idea, and all their faces are the same. But it's always you that he walks home with.
It's all that blonde hair, so when you go home and you see him in your kitchen with a girl, the first thing you think of, stupidly, is that for some reason he's brought his girlfriend to your house by accident, and you're wondering what the fuck he's doing with her in your house when she turns around, and it's Yuuki saying, "How's school, Jin?"
"Don't you have work?" you ask.
Yuuki shrugs apologetically and smiles, gesturing for you to come closer. "I did, but I got the early shift today. I was going to come pick you up at the school, but Sengoku-kun came to visit me at the caf¨¦. We both got caught in the snow. Sengoku-kun didn't even have a coat."
You don't care. Suddenly the kitchen is too warm and smells like sugar and cocoa. You hadn't noticed it at first. It's still snowing outside. He's wearing one of your shirts again, a different one, but still not his; you can see that his shoulders aren't broad enough to fill it. You're standing in the doorway with your coat dripping melted snow onto the ground and your hands and nose numb with the cold, at a loss for words, until Sengoku strides over and offers to help you out of your coat. "Don't touch me," you snarl, but he's already starting to help you with the buttons, pushing it off your shoulders, so you have no choice. He takes one of your hands afterwards, rubbing it in between his two warmer chocolate-smelling ones. You step on his foot snappishly to get him to stop trying to warm you up.
There's a moment in there, when he's bringing his foot up to his waist and trying to soothe the pain by jumping up and down on the other foot, that you think you're going to see what he's really like, when you're under all those flesh-colored smiles and under all his little gimmicks and really standing there face to face with him with his eyes on you and him not smiling. You've learned long ago that pain, especially physical pain, makes people honest. But he just pivots around on his standing foot, leans against your cold, cold shoulder for balance, and, wheeling like he was pretending to be a defunct windmill, makes vaguely parental clucking noises at you. The hands that he wraps around your elbow are so warm, suddenly, burning and hot, and Yuuki is giving the two of you a weird look, because you at a angle to the ground with your elbow firmly caught in his hands, and he's dragging you to the table even though you both know you're taller and bigger and stronger.
There's a chipped cup of hot chocolate waiting on the table for you too. Folding your freezing fingers around it reluctantly, you suddenly miss the father that you might or might not have ever had. And sitting across from him, the tips of your toes occasionally brushing his under the table, you realize for the first time that for Sengoku, the face is always easy to control. For him, there are only 17 muscles responsible for smiling, 43 for frowning, and the only one worth worrying about is the single, gigantic, conglomerate muscle responsible for thinking: the heart.
Which only makes it hurt more, of course, when later you're entering the kitchen while they're washing the dishes, and you realize that what you see isn't some monster with two heads and no arms but Sengoku hugging Yuuki from behind, his face tucked into the crook of her neck. She has a white plate in her hands that's dripping water and soapsuds into the sink. His hair seems to be so much redder, less orange than it usually is. More vibrant, actually, you amend in your mind, and it's only because he's leaning against Yuuki's blonde hair, but you remember that the first time you met him you wondered how anyone could hair the color of goldfish without drowning.
Now he's standing so tall and straight with your mother pressed against him and the kitchen counter. You can't move. It looks so different from what you've always imagined the two of them to be like, bathed in the half-sick glow of the dinner table lights, or the two of them in Yuuki's caf¨¦, both of them freezing in the cold, cold air conditioning, and Sengoku working his pick-up lines assured that you're not there to stop him. The way you've imagined it, you've always unintentionally stuck yourself in somehow, either as really being there or as being some unmentionable absence plaguing the both of them. Here, though, with the smell of dishwashing detergent and wet towels, you don't fit in at all. You're not supposed to be a part of it, not at all, so you stand stiffly where you're stuck and waiting.
Sengoku has his hands resting gently against Yuuki's belly, and you're not paying attention to anything they're saying, really, just watching the way their bodies don't move against each other, don't fit in with each other, but look so right anyway, fixed crazy lines of tapioca drink colors and margarita shapes. You don't listen until Yuuki twists her head around despite Sengoku's nose behind her ear and says, "Sengoku-kun, I'm old enough to be your mother--"
"But you're not," he says, cutting in. "You're his mother."
You go back upstairs. The way he says 'his', the way he spits out the words, you've never heard anyone put that much agony and pain into his voice before. You've never heard anyone hurt that much. You didn't even think it was possible for him to hurt that much.
Afterwards he comes into your room without knocking. You're stretched out on you bed facing the wall so you don't have to look at him when he comes in and so that he doesn't have an opportunity to divine your secrets from your face. The lights are off. He leaves them that way as he stands a foot or so away from you. He's breathing evenly and rhythmically because by now you should have realized that's how all people keep alive, with their hearts and their smiles and their oxygen.
He says, "You don't look so good. Do you feel okay?"
He says, "I'll see you tomorrow, Jin."
He says, "Remember not to get sick on me."
His voice is louder in your room than it was in the kitchen muffled against Yuuki's skin, so it hits you harder with all its incurable unjustifiable happiness that you know can't be true, and before you let him go one more time, you sit up quick enough on your bed so that the pillow crashes against the floor and ask him the question that you know you should never put into words.
Instead of answering, he just looks at you for a while, long and hard.
The first time you had ever met him, he made you shake his hand, and then you learned gradually that touch is an impenetrable thing that can't be given back. The last time he was in your room, you had held him back with your hand, with the touch that the two of you share; this time, your words are weaker than your hand, so he leaves anyway.
But neither of you talk about it. There's nothing to say. The two of you have both done wrong: you by assuming and he by executing, you by asking and he by not answering. What he owes you and what you owe him, both of you keep straight in your minds, but you know that payday will never come. What you can compensate for you can still never take back, and what he can compensate for he can never undo. It's winter; outside the cold doesn't forgive or forget anything; inside it's warm enough to scorch, especially when he echoes that day in the kitchen and takes your hand into his hot tanned ones to warm it up. Sometimes there's so much heat that it drives you crazy, if you weren't to begin with, so all the time, he can be sitting at the edge of your bed cutting his toenails or he could be sprawled out on your floor, spread-eagled on his homework, and the only thing you can think about his that warmth that you don't have, that he gives you, that you can never take away.
You're always cold. You know what it is. Bad circulation, and you don't think enough with the one muscle that doesn't think, the one that does his thinking for him.
Christmas, and Yuuki gives him a hand-knitted scarf, slightly knotty, in a dark forest green patterned with white. You've never been so insanely jealous before in your life when you see her give it to him, even though Yuuki gets you a brand-new bike, far more practical for you than a scarf. But the thing about that is that Yuuki doesn't have any time in between work and keeping the household together for the two of you-three now, since Sengoku's over so much he might as well have lived here-and for her, Sengoku's scarf is a triumph over precious free time. It means something, you sure, and you annoy Yuuki so much with the question of why that eventually she slams her palm down on the dinner table and says, "Honestly, Jin, if you want a scarf so much I'll buy you one!"
"That's not the point," you scowl back weakly. You ask yourself that night, 'Well, what is?' and when you answer your own question, you're falling asleep badly, on the wrong shoulder. In the morning you wake up and your neck is sore; you've already told yourself to forget everything, and the air outside when you start for school is dry and cold.
It comes on a day he's at your house, surrounded by paper and notebooks, and he has his elbows all over reams and reams of badly taken notes when he says, "You should drop by my house sometime. We can study for the exams together."
You nod before you even think about it, because you've learned that the best way to deal with him is to agree with everything he says and make up excuses for why not later. When what he says runs through your head finally, one quick word after another, you get up and reach for your cup of water first so you can have something to hold in your hand while you talk. He follows you with his eyes even though he's pretending to read a history book upside down. You clear your throat, intending it to sound firm, but only managing to get a forced, insincere sort of cowardice from it, and lower your voice so it's more vibration than it's sound as you say, "I'm not taking the exams."
He's still smiling up at you from his handwriting and printed text, "What do you mean you're not taking--" and then stops when he sees your expression hasn't changed. He flips over so he's lying on his back now, folding the history book over his face with steady, tanned fingers, and says into the pages, "I forgot. You don't know how to make a joke. Not even about things like this."
You put the glass of water on the floor and make your way over to him, kneeling beside his head. He can't see you because he still has his face pressed to the book. Somehow the fact that neither of you can look each other in the eyes makes you brave; somehow the fact that he isn't watching your hand shake as you lift the book off his face makes it easier. You kiss him, upside down and clumsily, the first time since that night in the kitchen with Yuuki, and you have your hand on his shoulder to keep him from moving. He's straining against you now to lean up, so you press harder because you don't know if he wants to escape. You've let him go twice already. You can't afford to let him go again.
When he finally does break free, he pushes you down against the floor, and you let him, even though he shoves you right into your glass of water so your shirt's soaking wet. But he doesn't mind. Later, after you're both breathless and impatient, he stops and puts his head down on your chest, right on the wet spot because he doesn't care, and you let him do that too, engrossing yourself in the way his cheek is warm and mildly lukewarm in cycles with the heaving of your chest.
He murmurs into your wet shirt, "Don't ever change," and you pretend that you can't hear him and continue to stare up at the ceiling, the leg that he's laying on steadily falling asleep. One of your hands is halfway up like you're about to touch his hair, but you change your mind. You think of his eyes.
You're not brave after all.
After school the next day you do go over to his house, following him mindlessly since you've forgotten the last time you've been to his house. The streets are labyrinthine and empty and--you curse under your breath-- still cold. He has Yuuki's scarf knotted around his neck, and his breath is the same white as the yarn, though not as thick. You put this on the list of things you could be angry at him for, the list that's so long now you think it could gift-wrap you. You don't have gloves. When you're in his house, sitting on the floor beside the couch and wondering when all of these lectures passed you by in class while lighting a cigarette, your fingers are thick, your hand unsteady. He reaches out for you. You think he's going to trap your hands in his again to warm them up, but instead he just lights your cigarette for you and tells you that there aren't any ashtrays in his house.
"What am I supposed to use to put out the cigarette with, then?" you ask, attempting an unruffled tone of voice, but it's either the cigarette or the way his fingers were so much like wildfire against your hands earlier that shakes your voice, you don't know.
You recall that once upon a time you weren't like this at all, that nothing mattered to you except yourself and Yuuki, that all there was to life was this one central unfocused pain everywhere, in you and coming from other people, and nothing could change that.
He's underlining something rapidly on a page of notes, and he holds up his hand at the same time, palm side up, fingers slightly bent in so you can see his lifelines. "I don't mind a couple of scars," he says distractedly. Like always, he's still smiling.
Pain, mental and physical, although physical more so, makes people honest; you're no exception. You lower the cigarette end closer and closer to his hand. He doesn't flinch, doesn't move his fingers at all, keeps scribbling in that notebook of his, and in the last moment you get up, put the cigarette end back in your mouth, flustered, and shove both your hands in your pocket as you say gruffly, "Forget it."
Sengoku never studies normally, so when he does get the notion to study, it's in endless, rapid, hysterical bursts, like now. You watch him for a little while, getting more and more bored, occasionally getting up so you could run water over your cigarette to put it out. The sound of his pens and his pencils is a monotonous thing that seems to go on forever, like nothing can stop him, not hunger or the ache in his fingers or fatigue. Eventually you fall asleep against the couch to that sound, with a slipping thought of how much this is going to cramp your neck when you wake up. You let your eyes loosen their focus as you close them so he's nothing more than a blur of red-orange and white and light, burnt peach.
It's as you're waking up that you hear him. You can just barely see him through your eyelashes; he's leaning over across the table corner for you, his fingers just barely touching your cheek, and he's saying in a steady rapid pace without stops or sense, "It's always been you, Jin--it couldn't have been anyone else--Jin, can't you just believe me--can't you just this once--it's always been about you--"
You know the one thing you can hate him for now, this thing. You hate him for telling you the things you most wanted and dreaded to hear when you're pretending to be asleep; you hate him for this soft touch on your cheek that you can't even hold on to or brush away because you're not supposed to have felt it; you hate him for his voice, so quiet that you can barely hear it; you hate him for the way he smiles at you when you pretend to wake up, all misleading bravado and painless obliviousness, as if it wasn't his voice at all, as if they weren't his words at all, as if it was all your imagination. You hate him from the deepest, deepest ends of your heart. You hate him from your stomach, your heart, your temples, your fingers, your lips. You hate him so much and so hard and so vibrantly so that that's all you think you are, this moving, speaking, breathing cohesion of hate for him as he walks you home.
In front of your door, you reach for his hand now as he touches the back of your wrist, and this time you turn your hand around to try to grab him and keep him still. The first time you met him, he made you shake his hand. His fingers had been warmer than anybody's had had ever been, although his touch then was light and playful and held nothing but that touch. Since then you have touched him many times. Each time it seems as if he was warmer than he was the last time. He can never change; touch is a contract that once given can never be broken; touch is a gift that once given can never be taken back. Whether he or you want it, he and you have both given it. In front of your house, before he rings the doorbell and Yuuki enters and his face explodes into a nameless happiness, you hold on to his wrist, you hold him to that thing he promised you the very first time you met him, you hold him to every time he has ever touched you or kissed you or told you secrets you didn't hear because you were asleep.
You're a man freezing in the cold, and you need his warmth to keep alive, but you haven't forgotten that in the end, you're not brave after all.
And once again, you let him go.
A/N: I know this sounds strange in context with "fresh", the spring part, but it actually does sort of make sense now that I go back in think about it. Something in the dynamic between Sengoku and Akutsu has changed between the autumn story and the spring story, especially between summer and spring, and it may not have been Yuuki that I had planned on in the beginning, but when Erin brought up her request, it did make sense. Anyway. Sorry Chrissie, I know I said that winter wasn't going to be all angsty, but uh. ^^;;
Well! *brushes hands off* My very first arc. *laughs* I'm so proud. *basks into after-writing glory* Which I'm sure is going to fade as soon as I hit the "post" button, I'm so predictible like that! And no, you are not allowed to laugh at me when I tell you that I really did write this entire fic to the song that's playing right now. If you do start laughing, I'll-- I'll-- POUT.
Winter comes when neither of you notice it, both of you turned the other way, he with his arms slung around your shoulders so he's at a slant and you with your eyes fixed ahead as if you could make him disappear that way.
The truly unfair thing about it all, you think, has to be the fact that he still looks tanned. That day, right before it had gotten truly cold and it had rained just hard enough to catch both of you sopping wet right outside your house, you invite him in for a change in clothes and an umbrella. You can still see the tan lines from his t-shirts and shorts when he takes off his clothes, standing there wet and cold and naked down to his underwear in your living room while you try to find a shirt that would fit him.
"I'll have to give this all back to you tomorrow, you know," and he's pulling on a pair of your old pants that's ripped in the back right above the ankle.
"Just don't wave it around saying, 'Akutsu, I have to give you back your pants!'" you say, thudding the handle of one of Yuuki's flowered umbrellas against his chest. He smiles, so you know he's thinking about it. Sitting at your dinner table, the umbrella in front of him like some virginal sacrifice, he folds his hands together in front of him, grins at you from behind his squinting eyes so that you can see the dark circles under his eyes better.
"You should sleep more," you tell him, flicking him viciously in his temple to make up for the fact that you sound like you're trying to look after him. His skin is warm, though not feverish. The wisps of hair around his forehead are dripping water onto his skin one silent quivering drop at a time.
"You're worried?"
"No," you say, and kick the leg of his chair because he's turned around backwards on it so he can watch you attempt to make tea without scalding yourself. "It's just that you're so stupid you probably wouldn't remember otherwise." He laughs and trips you as you pass by for the cups, so you bite the side of your cheek as you stumble, listening to him humming under his breath a melody you're sure you've heard before only because it's his voice.
He stays for dinner. He and Yuuki chatter at ridiculous speeds throughout the meal while you stab your chopsticks into your food with your lips pursed. But you still can't block out his voice ("You're such a talented young woman, Yuuki-chan, raising Jin all by yourself and still looking this beautiful!" "Why, Sengoku-kun, you're making me blush!" "You look prettier that way. Obviously Jin didn't take after you--") and you can't block out his face, that euphoric happiness, so you don't say anything, don't even get up and excuse yourself from the table when you're done eating. There's something so precarious about this balance, you realize, and something in you doesn't want to interrupt it.
Yuuki had put his clothes in the dryer before dinner, so his clothes are dry by the time he's supposed to leave. He's stripping down in your room this time instead of in the living room because, he says matter-of-factly, "It wouldn't be polite, with Yuuki-chan there and all." You watch his arms flex, watch the fabric stretch over his head and his hair tumble easily back into place as he buttons his shirt and tosses his head. You keep your mouth drawn in that half-hesitant half-menacing line to keep it from quivering, and it's not until he has his back to you when you finally get around to asking, "What are you here for, anyway?"
He turns his head over his shoulder. He's buttoning his shirt, his shirt cuffs still open and his tie looped around his neck loose and wrinkled. "It was raining, Jin," he says, smiling; you can't conjure up an image of him not smiling. You're still motionless when he's starting to open the door to leave, and you actually have to run to catch him before he leaves. You hold onto his wrist for a long, long time, considering. He buttons his shirt cuff while he waits for you. After a while, he starts tugging, even though he knows that you're the kind of person that can break his wrist in two seconds.
You let him go.
All his girlfriends this winter are blonde and skinny, pale and pink, delicate with warm voices and nimble hands, so he holds hands with them down the hallways. You don't care for any of them, but he forces you to walk with him too, chasing you down if you're not there with him during lunch or breaks or after school. You don't make a point of knowing their names. He switches them as soon as you start to get a vague idea, and all their faces are the same. But it's always you that he walks home with.
It's all that blonde hair, so when you go home and you see him in your kitchen with a girl, the first thing you think of, stupidly, is that for some reason he's brought his girlfriend to your house by accident, and you're wondering what the fuck he's doing with her in your house when she turns around, and it's Yuuki saying, "How's school, Jin?"
"Don't you have work?" you ask.
Yuuki shrugs apologetically and smiles, gesturing for you to come closer. "I did, but I got the early shift today. I was going to come pick you up at the school, but Sengoku-kun came to visit me at the caf¨¦. We both got caught in the snow. Sengoku-kun didn't even have a coat."
You don't care. Suddenly the kitchen is too warm and smells like sugar and cocoa. You hadn't noticed it at first. It's still snowing outside. He's wearing one of your shirts again, a different one, but still not his; you can see that his shoulders aren't broad enough to fill it. You're standing in the doorway with your coat dripping melted snow onto the ground and your hands and nose numb with the cold, at a loss for words, until Sengoku strides over and offers to help you out of your coat. "Don't touch me," you snarl, but he's already starting to help you with the buttons, pushing it off your shoulders, so you have no choice. He takes one of your hands afterwards, rubbing it in between his two warmer chocolate-smelling ones. You step on his foot snappishly to get him to stop trying to warm you up.
There's a moment in there, when he's bringing his foot up to his waist and trying to soothe the pain by jumping up and down on the other foot, that you think you're going to see what he's really like, when you're under all those flesh-colored smiles and under all his little gimmicks and really standing there face to face with him with his eyes on you and him not smiling. You've learned long ago that pain, especially physical pain, makes people honest. But he just pivots around on his standing foot, leans against your cold, cold shoulder for balance, and, wheeling like he was pretending to be a defunct windmill, makes vaguely parental clucking noises at you. The hands that he wraps around your elbow are so warm, suddenly, burning and hot, and Yuuki is giving the two of you a weird look, because you at a angle to the ground with your elbow firmly caught in his hands, and he's dragging you to the table even though you both know you're taller and bigger and stronger.
There's a chipped cup of hot chocolate waiting on the table for you too. Folding your freezing fingers around it reluctantly, you suddenly miss the father that you might or might not have ever had. And sitting across from him, the tips of your toes occasionally brushing his under the table, you realize for the first time that for Sengoku, the face is always easy to control. For him, there are only 17 muscles responsible for smiling, 43 for frowning, and the only one worth worrying about is the single, gigantic, conglomerate muscle responsible for thinking: the heart.
Which only makes it hurt more, of course, when later you're entering the kitchen while they're washing the dishes, and you realize that what you see isn't some monster with two heads and no arms but Sengoku hugging Yuuki from behind, his face tucked into the crook of her neck. She has a white plate in her hands that's dripping water and soapsuds into the sink. His hair seems to be so much redder, less orange than it usually is. More vibrant, actually, you amend in your mind, and it's only because he's leaning against Yuuki's blonde hair, but you remember that the first time you met him you wondered how anyone could hair the color of goldfish without drowning.
Now he's standing so tall and straight with your mother pressed against him and the kitchen counter. You can't move. It looks so different from what you've always imagined the two of them to be like, bathed in the half-sick glow of the dinner table lights, or the two of them in Yuuki's caf¨¦, both of them freezing in the cold, cold air conditioning, and Sengoku working his pick-up lines assured that you're not there to stop him. The way you've imagined it, you've always unintentionally stuck yourself in somehow, either as really being there or as being some unmentionable absence plaguing the both of them. Here, though, with the smell of dishwashing detergent and wet towels, you don't fit in at all. You're not supposed to be a part of it, not at all, so you stand stiffly where you're stuck and waiting.
Sengoku has his hands resting gently against Yuuki's belly, and you're not paying attention to anything they're saying, really, just watching the way their bodies don't move against each other, don't fit in with each other, but look so right anyway, fixed crazy lines of tapioca drink colors and margarita shapes. You don't listen until Yuuki twists her head around despite Sengoku's nose behind her ear and says, "Sengoku-kun, I'm old enough to be your mother--"
"But you're not," he says, cutting in. "You're his mother."
You go back upstairs. The way he says 'his', the way he spits out the words, you've never heard anyone put that much agony and pain into his voice before. You've never heard anyone hurt that much. You didn't even think it was possible for him to hurt that much.
Afterwards he comes into your room without knocking. You're stretched out on you bed facing the wall so you don't have to look at him when he comes in and so that he doesn't have an opportunity to divine your secrets from your face. The lights are off. He leaves them that way as he stands a foot or so away from you. He's breathing evenly and rhythmically because by now you should have realized that's how all people keep alive, with their hearts and their smiles and their oxygen.
He says, "You don't look so good. Do you feel okay?"
He says, "I'll see you tomorrow, Jin."
He says, "Remember not to get sick on me."
His voice is louder in your room than it was in the kitchen muffled against Yuuki's skin, so it hits you harder with all its incurable unjustifiable happiness that you know can't be true, and before you let him go one more time, you sit up quick enough on your bed so that the pillow crashes against the floor and ask him the question that you know you should never put into words.
Instead of answering, he just looks at you for a while, long and hard.
The first time you had ever met him, he made you shake his hand, and then you learned gradually that touch is an impenetrable thing that can't be given back. The last time he was in your room, you had held him back with your hand, with the touch that the two of you share; this time, your words are weaker than your hand, so he leaves anyway.
But neither of you talk about it. There's nothing to say. The two of you have both done wrong: you by assuming and he by executing, you by asking and he by not answering. What he owes you and what you owe him, both of you keep straight in your minds, but you know that payday will never come. What you can compensate for you can still never take back, and what he can compensate for he can never undo. It's winter; outside the cold doesn't forgive or forget anything; inside it's warm enough to scorch, especially when he echoes that day in the kitchen and takes your hand into his hot tanned ones to warm it up. Sometimes there's so much heat that it drives you crazy, if you weren't to begin with, so all the time, he can be sitting at the edge of your bed cutting his toenails or he could be sprawled out on your floor, spread-eagled on his homework, and the only thing you can think about his that warmth that you don't have, that he gives you, that you can never take away.
You're always cold. You know what it is. Bad circulation, and you don't think enough with the one muscle that doesn't think, the one that does his thinking for him.
Christmas, and Yuuki gives him a hand-knitted scarf, slightly knotty, in a dark forest green patterned with white. You've never been so insanely jealous before in your life when you see her give it to him, even though Yuuki gets you a brand-new bike, far more practical for you than a scarf. But the thing about that is that Yuuki doesn't have any time in between work and keeping the household together for the two of you-three now, since Sengoku's over so much he might as well have lived here-and for her, Sengoku's scarf is a triumph over precious free time. It means something, you sure, and you annoy Yuuki so much with the question of why that eventually she slams her palm down on the dinner table and says, "Honestly, Jin, if you want a scarf so much I'll buy you one!"
"That's not the point," you scowl back weakly. You ask yourself that night, 'Well, what is?' and when you answer your own question, you're falling asleep badly, on the wrong shoulder. In the morning you wake up and your neck is sore; you've already told yourself to forget everything, and the air outside when you start for school is dry and cold.
It comes on a day he's at your house, surrounded by paper and notebooks, and he has his elbows all over reams and reams of badly taken notes when he says, "You should drop by my house sometime. We can study for the exams together."
You nod before you even think about it, because you've learned that the best way to deal with him is to agree with everything he says and make up excuses for why not later. When what he says runs through your head finally, one quick word after another, you get up and reach for your cup of water first so you can have something to hold in your hand while you talk. He follows you with his eyes even though he's pretending to read a history book upside down. You clear your throat, intending it to sound firm, but only managing to get a forced, insincere sort of cowardice from it, and lower your voice so it's more vibration than it's sound as you say, "I'm not taking the exams."
He's still smiling up at you from his handwriting and printed text, "What do you mean you're not taking--" and then stops when he sees your expression hasn't changed. He flips over so he's lying on his back now, folding the history book over his face with steady, tanned fingers, and says into the pages, "I forgot. You don't know how to make a joke. Not even about things like this."
You put the glass of water on the floor and make your way over to him, kneeling beside his head. He can't see you because he still has his face pressed to the book. Somehow the fact that neither of you can look each other in the eyes makes you brave; somehow the fact that he isn't watching your hand shake as you lift the book off his face makes it easier. You kiss him, upside down and clumsily, the first time since that night in the kitchen with Yuuki, and you have your hand on his shoulder to keep him from moving. He's straining against you now to lean up, so you press harder because you don't know if he wants to escape. You've let him go twice already. You can't afford to let him go again.
When he finally does break free, he pushes you down against the floor, and you let him, even though he shoves you right into your glass of water so your shirt's soaking wet. But he doesn't mind. Later, after you're both breathless and impatient, he stops and puts his head down on your chest, right on the wet spot because he doesn't care, and you let him do that too, engrossing yourself in the way his cheek is warm and mildly lukewarm in cycles with the heaving of your chest.
He murmurs into your wet shirt, "Don't ever change," and you pretend that you can't hear him and continue to stare up at the ceiling, the leg that he's laying on steadily falling asleep. One of your hands is halfway up like you're about to touch his hair, but you change your mind. You think of his eyes.
You're not brave after all.
After school the next day you do go over to his house, following him mindlessly since you've forgotten the last time you've been to his house. The streets are labyrinthine and empty and--you curse under your breath-- still cold. He has Yuuki's scarf knotted around his neck, and his breath is the same white as the yarn, though not as thick. You put this on the list of things you could be angry at him for, the list that's so long now you think it could gift-wrap you. You don't have gloves. When you're in his house, sitting on the floor beside the couch and wondering when all of these lectures passed you by in class while lighting a cigarette, your fingers are thick, your hand unsteady. He reaches out for you. You think he's going to trap your hands in his again to warm them up, but instead he just lights your cigarette for you and tells you that there aren't any ashtrays in his house.
"What am I supposed to use to put out the cigarette with, then?" you ask, attempting an unruffled tone of voice, but it's either the cigarette or the way his fingers were so much like wildfire against your hands earlier that shakes your voice, you don't know.
You recall that once upon a time you weren't like this at all, that nothing mattered to you except yourself and Yuuki, that all there was to life was this one central unfocused pain everywhere, in you and coming from other people, and nothing could change that.
He's underlining something rapidly on a page of notes, and he holds up his hand at the same time, palm side up, fingers slightly bent in so you can see his lifelines. "I don't mind a couple of scars," he says distractedly. Like always, he's still smiling.
Pain, mental and physical, although physical more so, makes people honest; you're no exception. You lower the cigarette end closer and closer to his hand. He doesn't flinch, doesn't move his fingers at all, keeps scribbling in that notebook of his, and in the last moment you get up, put the cigarette end back in your mouth, flustered, and shove both your hands in your pocket as you say gruffly, "Forget it."
Sengoku never studies normally, so when he does get the notion to study, it's in endless, rapid, hysterical bursts, like now. You watch him for a little while, getting more and more bored, occasionally getting up so you could run water over your cigarette to put it out. The sound of his pens and his pencils is a monotonous thing that seems to go on forever, like nothing can stop him, not hunger or the ache in his fingers or fatigue. Eventually you fall asleep against the couch to that sound, with a slipping thought of how much this is going to cramp your neck when you wake up. You let your eyes loosen their focus as you close them so he's nothing more than a blur of red-orange and white and light, burnt peach.
It's as you're waking up that you hear him. You can just barely see him through your eyelashes; he's leaning over across the table corner for you, his fingers just barely touching your cheek, and he's saying in a steady rapid pace without stops or sense, "It's always been you, Jin--it couldn't have been anyone else--Jin, can't you just believe me--can't you just this once--it's always been about you--"
You know the one thing you can hate him for now, this thing. You hate him for telling you the things you most wanted and dreaded to hear when you're pretending to be asleep; you hate him for this soft touch on your cheek that you can't even hold on to or brush away because you're not supposed to have felt it; you hate him for his voice, so quiet that you can barely hear it; you hate him for the way he smiles at you when you pretend to wake up, all misleading bravado and painless obliviousness, as if it wasn't his voice at all, as if they weren't his words at all, as if it was all your imagination. You hate him from the deepest, deepest ends of your heart. You hate him from your stomach, your heart, your temples, your fingers, your lips. You hate him so much and so hard and so vibrantly so that that's all you think you are, this moving, speaking, breathing cohesion of hate for him as he walks you home.
In front of your door, you reach for his hand now as he touches the back of your wrist, and this time you turn your hand around to try to grab him and keep him still. The first time you met him, he made you shake his hand. His fingers had been warmer than anybody's had had ever been, although his touch then was light and playful and held nothing but that touch. Since then you have touched him many times. Each time it seems as if he was warmer than he was the last time. He can never change; touch is a contract that once given can never be broken; touch is a gift that once given can never be taken back. Whether he or you want it, he and you have both given it. In front of your house, before he rings the doorbell and Yuuki enters and his face explodes into a nameless happiness, you hold on to his wrist, you hold him to that thing he promised you the very first time you met him, you hold him to every time he has ever touched you or kissed you or told you secrets you didn't hear because you were asleep.
You're a man freezing in the cold, and you need his warmth to keep alive, but you haven't forgotten that in the end, you're not brave after all.
And once again, you let him go.
A/N: I know this sounds strange in context with "fresh", the spring part, but it actually does sort of make sense now that I go back in think about it. Something in the dynamic between Sengoku and Akutsu has changed between the autumn story and the spring story, especially between summer and spring, and it may not have been Yuuki that I had planned on in the beginning, but when Erin brought up her request, it did make sense. Anyway. Sorry Chrissie, I know I said that winter wasn't going to be all angsty, but uh. ^^;;
Well! *brushes hands off* My very first arc. *laughs* I'm so proud. *basks into after-writing glory* Which I'm sure is going to fade as soon as I hit the "post" button, I'm so predictible like that! And no, you are not allowed to laugh at me when I tell you that I really did write this entire fic to the song that's playing right now. If you do start laughing, I'll-- I'll-- POUT.