PoT: snails and oysters
(oooh, I know I have to return comments. Sorry guys! I'll get to it.)
For midorinomizu, because she requested it, although I don't think this is quite what she had in mind. For hopsakee, because this is still her 'yaw' universe. For lesstraveled, because I promised her I'd steal her title from her one of these days ('snails and oysters').
Some things never change. They're still a team-in all of the world there might not be change big enough to erase that--but they're not the same team, just as they're not the same people anymore, and so it's almost repulsive to Yanagi to find out that they are still reliving the same scenarios all over again. He had expected better of all of them, expected so much more. Maybe it'll take him forever to swallow this embarrassment and disappointment.
He doesn't tell Marui of course, which just goes to show how much Yanagi has changed this respect. He still knows the truth and still keeps it in his mind all the time, still writes it down, although nowadays just on the back of his hands or halfheartedly on a restaurant napkin (he promises himself he will never write on the margins of his books; he doesn't know if he consciously knows where his old notebooks have gone). The old Yanagi would have said something, if not to Marui, than to Yagyuu or Niou because after all, they have changed. The things that once held true, like the results of a doubles game or the smudge on the lenses of a pair of glasses, no longer matter.
The new Yanagi would consider saying these things. Then the hypocrisy of it all would hit him, and the words, which once came so easily and so quickly, would no longer move past the muscles of his throat.
Once Niou had come out of the shower rooms with a tear in his uniform and Yanagi didn't even bother asking him what happened. Back then Niou and Yagyuu would sometimes close in on one another, their bodies fitting tight and waterproof even in the summer, and there would be things that were known and never spoken about. When Yagyuu was asleep next to Niou on the bus Yanagi would watch Niou put his hands over Yagyuu's ears. They were seashells, the two of them, and Niou's hands reached out for the shell-like rim of Yagyuu's ear as the sea reached out for their toes on the sand.
Yanagi has always thought of Yagyuu and Niou's relationship with analogies like that. Doesn't hold water, a sunken ship-a vessel out to sea. Sailing with a broken mast, an oar bobbing to shore, the single desolate fragment of beach glass hidden in the sand in the winter.
"I want him to listen to my heart as he sleeps," Niou had told Yanagi then, his lips dry with sleep and his voice thick, watching Yanagi's turned head carefully, pulling Yagyuu's head even closer.
Nowadays, it is Marui who says things like that.
You can have mass quantities of data on a single person and still not get any closer to knowing them than a first impression. For instance, Yanagi knows that Marui would rather swim naked than swim with clothing of any sort on, but he doesn't know why, so he doesn't know if this says something about Marui's skin or Marui's personality. Marui likes clean white cotton socks, a carry over from his younger athletic days, but Marui is very random about doing laundry. Yanagi doesn't know whether to interpret this as selective cleanliness or an obsession with clean feet; consequentially he doesn't interpret it all. Marui is full of all sorts of contradictions Yanagi has long learned to ignore. In this fashion, Yanagi actually doesn't know much about Marui. What he knows could probably fit on the palm of his hand if Yanagi writes small. What he knows would probably be only the bibliography of Marui's life.
Yanagi knows Niou more or less the same way. A fascination with the record of olfactory memories which may or may not betray an inherent mistrust in reality, a tendency to lapse into meaningful nostalgic silences and conversations which may reflect an alienation in his current surroundings, a dislike of potpourri which may reflect allergies-these are things that Yanagi associates Niou with, the same half-assed understandings like those of Marui, exacerbated even more by lack of hard qualified observations. Yanagi knows Yagyuu only marginally better, yet even that could all be lies, because what Yagyuu does is not necessarily what Yagyuu is; these are the kind of paradoxes Yanagi realizes they have all become. They have all twisted themselves into heartless riddles with double meanings, even Yanagi himself.
Change used to be so simple; Yanagi takes this as a sign that he is growing old and that soon, before he even realizes it, he will be hunched over a bamboo cane, eating tofu for the rest of his life. He never thought any of them would grow old either (age is another servant of change). In his mind they are always young. Sometimes he can't think of them any other way, and the world he is living in now, full of bus trips and new hotels, becomes a world he doesn't recall having lived in.
Instead, he is a stranger. (Instead, he is the stranger.)
On the bus, Marui sits with the window on one side and Niou on the other. They sit very close, ignoring the armrest between them. The tip of Niou's elbows are almost the same red of Marui's hair, but his the backs of his hands are still white while he and Marui hold hands surreptitiously on their laps where they think no one can see. With the window down Yanagi can already smell the fishing town they're approaching. The breeze that comes in and circulates between them like an excited puppy is cool and easy. The seats seem smaller and stiffer than Yanagi remembers them being. Yanagi's eyelids are itchy. He wants to sleep; instead he traces physics equations on the window and leaves a lot of fingerprints over the passing image of the sea through the glass.
Jackal, who sees everything, has borrowed one of the boats from the locals. Niou has his pants rolled up to mid thigh and is helping Jackal push it in the water, his hands full of poles and bait. Yanagi stands on the rocky shore with flat pebbles in his pocket, skipping them expertly across the water so that they hop at least three times before drowning. His fingers are raw from the slippery rough rocks, but he doesn't mind so much. He likes the way they fly across the surface of the water, spinning. It's as if they are swimming or floating for their momentary lives before they die.
(Yanagi has long realized he has a tendency to be morbid if left to his own thoughts for long periods of time.)
"I've never been good at skipping rocks," Marui says as he slides into Yanagi's side. Marui has his hands in his pockets though they're empty. Yanagi can smell the salt clean of the water, the overly sweet scent of Marui's shampoo. Marui had washed his hair this morning and let it air dry, and the tips of his hair are still wet, brushing along the edge of Marui's jaw. Yanagi rolls the pebble he has in his hand over once before, smiling to himself, he turns to Marui.
"It's easy, you just-" Yanagi draws his hand back, flicks his wrist, lets it go, and the pebble disappears across the water, making sharp popping noises along the way.
Marui rolls his eyes. "You just what, really?"
"Throw. You just throw them." Yanagi does it again, and again, and each time the pebbles leap from his hands perfectly into the water. He does this in compensation; he's never known the right words. His hands fit the stones without gaps. He shows it to Marui, the flat gray nondescript rock that Marui picks up and rubs between his palms like he's keeping it warm.
"I can't" (Marui arches his arm wrong) "throw these things correctly," Marui says as he tries, but he makes a move that looks like he's hitting a serve instead, and the rock drowns itself miserably in the water.
Yanagi smiles. "You can't throw it so hard. You want it to float, not to sink. Like a boat, see. You let go of it."
Marui picks up more rocks and tries again, imitating the curve of Yanagi's wrist, the snapping motion he makes. The sounds of his rocks sinking plip-plop into the water are so gentle, but Yanagi's rocks are almost silent now as they skim the surface alongside Marui's throws. It's like they're making music.
The boat Niou and Jackal are on slides into view from afar. Niou is waving at Marui, smiling, and Marui waves back, throwing an apologetic laugh to Yanagi before he strips down to his underwear, leaving his socks as little crumpled bundles in his shoes. Yanagi calls after him that he'll catch a cold, but Marui shakes his head. He wades out into the water, his skin glowing against the darker water. When the water level gets above his waist, Marui starts to swim smooth stroke after smooth stroke to Niou's boat. Niou pulls Marui up onto the boat when they get close, the water dripping off of Marui in sheathes of silver. Jackal yells at them, pointing to the fishing gear, but Marui and Niou are ecstatic like newlyweds or children. They kiss instead, frantically and hyper, and wave to Yanagi who stands by himself on the shore.
Yanagi waves back. He skips rocks close to their boat like he's shooting arrows, like flat heavy flying fish. After a while, picking his way across the shore, amassing flat pebbles in his pockets, he pretends he is a boat with nobody on it and therefore cannot sink.
"It's my birthday tomorrow," Yanagi says, his hands in his pockets that are now empty. Marui is back on shore and somewhere to Yanagi's right Niou and Jackal are pulling the boat in, empty-handed and not patient enough for fish. Marui's putting his shirt on, still in his wet underwear, and he turns to Yanagi with his rolled up socks in his hands.
"Yeah? It is, isn't it?" Marui looks up, then back at Yanagi, and his face leaps up in a beautiful smile. "Here's an early happy birthday, then," Marui says, and throws his arms around Yanagi's neck, kissing him sloppily on the lips. Marui is salt and sea air. For all of Marui's inappropriateness, it's a surprisingly chaste kiss. Yanagi thinks of cuddling on winter nights or sharing soap in the locker room showers together, of the kiss that Niou gave Marui on the boat, of Niou and Yagyuu pressed together during afternoon naps. When Marui breaks away, he reaches for his pants and says, "Hold on a sec. I'll give you a piece of gum too."
Yanagi touches his mouth, says, "All right," and turns his head back to look at the water.
Oh yes, he thinks. Marui and his gum and the way he would go through packs and packs a week when they were in junior high. If Marui's chewing gum, they used to say, at least he's not eating. Marui and his gum and Marui and his hunger, the way he was always hungry and needed just that little bit of sugar to get him through the day. Constantly chewing and hungry and restless, that was Marui, like his mouth and his stomach and his entire body couldn't stop. (Yanagi had written down his notebooks back then, 'One day, Marui will get what he wants.' But he has, he tells himself, forgotten all of that.)
And now Marui is older, and Marui isn't so hungry any more, isn't so restless anymore, doesn't chew gum all that much anymore, but he--his mind, his mouth, his heart, his entire existence--still can't stop.
Yanagi thinks of all the things he'll never do with Marui, things that Niou has done with Yagyuu, things that Marui will do with Niou. Yanagi will never get drunk with him, will never find Marui's clothes scattered on his bed as if they were his own. He will never forget Marui's birthday by accident, will never have to rush out at the end of tournaments to buy a gift or to miss a date because he was buying flowers. He will never cook for Marui in the mornings and burn his fingers. He will never have Marui make soup for him when he is sick. He will never complain about hair clogging up his sink. He will never go skinny-dipping with Marui in the middle of the night with nothing between them but water. He will never carve his and Marui's name on a tree together, will never maneuver Marui under the mistletoe at Christmas to kiss him stupid. He will never call Marui after they have hung up the phone to say "I love you" again. And he will never hold hands with Marui on the bus, when they think no one is watching, or hold hands with Marui on the beach, not caring who sees them, or hold hands with Marui in the dark, grasping each other's fingers so tight against one another that they can feel the blood rushing through their veins under their skin.
That night Yanagi goes to sleep with his hands over his ears, trying to hear the sound of his heart. He's done that once before, when Marui was sharing a room with him, and in the morning Marui had said, "When you put your hands over your ears, what are you listening to?"
"Nothing, really," Yanagi had said. "You can't hear anything."
"I guess that's the point," Marui had replied. (That had been some time before Nara, but after Hokkaido, and oh, such a long, long time before this trip to Kyuushuu.)
And the Yanagi of then had thought the same that the Yanagi of now does:
'No. It's not.'
A/N: Oh my god, behold notes that don't make sense but are actually relevant! The idea of the hands covering the ears comes from chapter...2? of "Mushishi", where it talks about the mushi "ah" and "un", hence "ahun", as in "aun no kokyuu", which means to inhale or exhale or to work perfectly together (Niou and Yagyuu! also the original idea behind Momo and Ryoma's Ah-Un! Doubles). At the same time, if you cover up your ears, the ah actually dissolves because it can't take the sound of the movement of your arm muscles, not, as I wrote in here, the sound of the heartbeat. The "snail and oysters" title, which in 'bri's reference I think went back to the deleted scene of Spartacus that talked about sexual preferences, works really well, because ahs and uns in "Mushishi" are supposed to look like snails and reside in a person's ear. And a person's ear, of course, looks like a shell on the outside and has a curvy snail-like cavity inside. Also, putting shells to one's ear = trying to hear the sea? If you press your palms really hard to your ears you can kind of hear something that sounds a lot like it. <3 to you all. don't eat me.
For midorinomizu, because she requested it, although I don't think this is quite what she had in mind. For hopsakee, because this is still her 'yaw' universe. For lesstraveled, because I promised her I'd steal her title from her one of these days ('snails and oysters').
Some things never change. They're still a team-in all of the world there might not be change big enough to erase that--but they're not the same team, just as they're not the same people anymore, and so it's almost repulsive to Yanagi to find out that they are still reliving the same scenarios all over again. He had expected better of all of them, expected so much more. Maybe it'll take him forever to swallow this embarrassment and disappointment.
He doesn't tell Marui of course, which just goes to show how much Yanagi has changed this respect. He still knows the truth and still keeps it in his mind all the time, still writes it down, although nowadays just on the back of his hands or halfheartedly on a restaurant napkin (he promises himself he will never write on the margins of his books; he doesn't know if he consciously knows where his old notebooks have gone). The old Yanagi would have said something, if not to Marui, than to Yagyuu or Niou because after all, they have changed. The things that once held true, like the results of a doubles game or the smudge on the lenses of a pair of glasses, no longer matter.
The new Yanagi would consider saying these things. Then the hypocrisy of it all would hit him, and the words, which once came so easily and so quickly, would no longer move past the muscles of his throat.
Once Niou had come out of the shower rooms with a tear in his uniform and Yanagi didn't even bother asking him what happened. Back then Niou and Yagyuu would sometimes close in on one another, their bodies fitting tight and waterproof even in the summer, and there would be things that were known and never spoken about. When Yagyuu was asleep next to Niou on the bus Yanagi would watch Niou put his hands over Yagyuu's ears. They were seashells, the two of them, and Niou's hands reached out for the shell-like rim of Yagyuu's ear as the sea reached out for their toes on the sand.
Yanagi has always thought of Yagyuu and Niou's relationship with analogies like that. Doesn't hold water, a sunken ship-a vessel out to sea. Sailing with a broken mast, an oar bobbing to shore, the single desolate fragment of beach glass hidden in the sand in the winter.
"I want him to listen to my heart as he sleeps," Niou had told Yanagi then, his lips dry with sleep and his voice thick, watching Yanagi's turned head carefully, pulling Yagyuu's head even closer.
Nowadays, it is Marui who says things like that.
You can have mass quantities of data on a single person and still not get any closer to knowing them than a first impression. For instance, Yanagi knows that Marui would rather swim naked than swim with clothing of any sort on, but he doesn't know why, so he doesn't know if this says something about Marui's skin or Marui's personality. Marui likes clean white cotton socks, a carry over from his younger athletic days, but Marui is very random about doing laundry. Yanagi doesn't know whether to interpret this as selective cleanliness or an obsession with clean feet; consequentially he doesn't interpret it all. Marui is full of all sorts of contradictions Yanagi has long learned to ignore. In this fashion, Yanagi actually doesn't know much about Marui. What he knows could probably fit on the palm of his hand if Yanagi writes small. What he knows would probably be only the bibliography of Marui's life.
Yanagi knows Niou more or less the same way. A fascination with the record of olfactory memories which may or may not betray an inherent mistrust in reality, a tendency to lapse into meaningful nostalgic silences and conversations which may reflect an alienation in his current surroundings, a dislike of potpourri which may reflect allergies-these are things that Yanagi associates Niou with, the same half-assed understandings like those of Marui, exacerbated even more by lack of hard qualified observations. Yanagi knows Yagyuu only marginally better, yet even that could all be lies, because what Yagyuu does is not necessarily what Yagyuu is; these are the kind of paradoxes Yanagi realizes they have all become. They have all twisted themselves into heartless riddles with double meanings, even Yanagi himself.
Change used to be so simple; Yanagi takes this as a sign that he is growing old and that soon, before he even realizes it, he will be hunched over a bamboo cane, eating tofu for the rest of his life. He never thought any of them would grow old either (age is another servant of change). In his mind they are always young. Sometimes he can't think of them any other way, and the world he is living in now, full of bus trips and new hotels, becomes a world he doesn't recall having lived in.
Instead, he is a stranger. (Instead, he is the stranger.)
On the bus, Marui sits with the window on one side and Niou on the other. They sit very close, ignoring the armrest between them. The tip of Niou's elbows are almost the same red of Marui's hair, but his the backs of his hands are still white while he and Marui hold hands surreptitiously on their laps where they think no one can see. With the window down Yanagi can already smell the fishing town they're approaching. The breeze that comes in and circulates between them like an excited puppy is cool and easy. The seats seem smaller and stiffer than Yanagi remembers them being. Yanagi's eyelids are itchy. He wants to sleep; instead he traces physics equations on the window and leaves a lot of fingerprints over the passing image of the sea through the glass.
Jackal, who sees everything, has borrowed one of the boats from the locals. Niou has his pants rolled up to mid thigh and is helping Jackal push it in the water, his hands full of poles and bait. Yanagi stands on the rocky shore with flat pebbles in his pocket, skipping them expertly across the water so that they hop at least three times before drowning. His fingers are raw from the slippery rough rocks, but he doesn't mind so much. He likes the way they fly across the surface of the water, spinning. It's as if they are swimming or floating for their momentary lives before they die.
(Yanagi has long realized he has a tendency to be morbid if left to his own thoughts for long periods of time.)
"I've never been good at skipping rocks," Marui says as he slides into Yanagi's side. Marui has his hands in his pockets though they're empty. Yanagi can smell the salt clean of the water, the overly sweet scent of Marui's shampoo. Marui had washed his hair this morning and let it air dry, and the tips of his hair are still wet, brushing along the edge of Marui's jaw. Yanagi rolls the pebble he has in his hand over once before, smiling to himself, he turns to Marui.
"It's easy, you just-" Yanagi draws his hand back, flicks his wrist, lets it go, and the pebble disappears across the water, making sharp popping noises along the way.
Marui rolls his eyes. "You just what, really?"
"Throw. You just throw them." Yanagi does it again, and again, and each time the pebbles leap from his hands perfectly into the water. He does this in compensation; he's never known the right words. His hands fit the stones without gaps. He shows it to Marui, the flat gray nondescript rock that Marui picks up and rubs between his palms like he's keeping it warm.
"I can't" (Marui arches his arm wrong) "throw these things correctly," Marui says as he tries, but he makes a move that looks like he's hitting a serve instead, and the rock drowns itself miserably in the water.
Yanagi smiles. "You can't throw it so hard. You want it to float, not to sink. Like a boat, see. You let go of it."
Marui picks up more rocks and tries again, imitating the curve of Yanagi's wrist, the snapping motion he makes. The sounds of his rocks sinking plip-plop into the water are so gentle, but Yanagi's rocks are almost silent now as they skim the surface alongside Marui's throws. It's like they're making music.
The boat Niou and Jackal are on slides into view from afar. Niou is waving at Marui, smiling, and Marui waves back, throwing an apologetic laugh to Yanagi before he strips down to his underwear, leaving his socks as little crumpled bundles in his shoes. Yanagi calls after him that he'll catch a cold, but Marui shakes his head. He wades out into the water, his skin glowing against the darker water. When the water level gets above his waist, Marui starts to swim smooth stroke after smooth stroke to Niou's boat. Niou pulls Marui up onto the boat when they get close, the water dripping off of Marui in sheathes of silver. Jackal yells at them, pointing to the fishing gear, but Marui and Niou are ecstatic like newlyweds or children. They kiss instead, frantically and hyper, and wave to Yanagi who stands by himself on the shore.
Yanagi waves back. He skips rocks close to their boat like he's shooting arrows, like flat heavy flying fish. After a while, picking his way across the shore, amassing flat pebbles in his pockets, he pretends he is a boat with nobody on it and therefore cannot sink.
"It's my birthday tomorrow," Yanagi says, his hands in his pockets that are now empty. Marui is back on shore and somewhere to Yanagi's right Niou and Jackal are pulling the boat in, empty-handed and not patient enough for fish. Marui's putting his shirt on, still in his wet underwear, and he turns to Yanagi with his rolled up socks in his hands.
"Yeah? It is, isn't it?" Marui looks up, then back at Yanagi, and his face leaps up in a beautiful smile. "Here's an early happy birthday, then," Marui says, and throws his arms around Yanagi's neck, kissing him sloppily on the lips. Marui is salt and sea air. For all of Marui's inappropriateness, it's a surprisingly chaste kiss. Yanagi thinks of cuddling on winter nights or sharing soap in the locker room showers together, of the kiss that Niou gave Marui on the boat, of Niou and Yagyuu pressed together during afternoon naps. When Marui breaks away, he reaches for his pants and says, "Hold on a sec. I'll give you a piece of gum too."
Yanagi touches his mouth, says, "All right," and turns his head back to look at the water.
Oh yes, he thinks. Marui and his gum and the way he would go through packs and packs a week when they were in junior high. If Marui's chewing gum, they used to say, at least he's not eating. Marui and his gum and Marui and his hunger, the way he was always hungry and needed just that little bit of sugar to get him through the day. Constantly chewing and hungry and restless, that was Marui, like his mouth and his stomach and his entire body couldn't stop. (Yanagi had written down his notebooks back then, 'One day, Marui will get what he wants.' But he has, he tells himself, forgotten all of that.)
And now Marui is older, and Marui isn't so hungry any more, isn't so restless anymore, doesn't chew gum all that much anymore, but he--his mind, his mouth, his heart, his entire existence--still can't stop.
Yanagi thinks of all the things he'll never do with Marui, things that Niou has done with Yagyuu, things that Marui will do with Niou. Yanagi will never get drunk with him, will never find Marui's clothes scattered on his bed as if they were his own. He will never forget Marui's birthday by accident, will never have to rush out at the end of tournaments to buy a gift or to miss a date because he was buying flowers. He will never cook for Marui in the mornings and burn his fingers. He will never have Marui make soup for him when he is sick. He will never complain about hair clogging up his sink. He will never go skinny-dipping with Marui in the middle of the night with nothing between them but water. He will never carve his and Marui's name on a tree together, will never maneuver Marui under the mistletoe at Christmas to kiss him stupid. He will never call Marui after they have hung up the phone to say "I love you" again. And he will never hold hands with Marui on the bus, when they think no one is watching, or hold hands with Marui on the beach, not caring who sees them, or hold hands with Marui in the dark, grasping each other's fingers so tight against one another that they can feel the blood rushing through their veins under their skin.
That night Yanagi goes to sleep with his hands over his ears, trying to hear the sound of his heart. He's done that once before, when Marui was sharing a room with him, and in the morning Marui had said, "When you put your hands over your ears, what are you listening to?"
"Nothing, really," Yanagi had said. "You can't hear anything."
"I guess that's the point," Marui had replied. (That had been some time before Nara, but after Hokkaido, and oh, such a long, long time before this trip to Kyuushuu.)
And the Yanagi of then had thought the same that the Yanagi of now does:
'No. It's not.'
A/N: Oh my god, behold notes that don't make sense but are actually relevant! The idea of the hands covering the ears comes from chapter...2? of "Mushishi", where it talks about the mushi "ah" and "un", hence "ahun", as in "aun no kokyuu", which means to inhale or exhale or to work perfectly together (Niou and Yagyuu! also the original idea behind Momo and Ryoma's Ah-Un! Doubles). At the same time, if you cover up your ears, the ah actually dissolves because it can't take the sound of the movement of your arm muscles, not, as I wrote in here, the sound of the heartbeat. The "snail and oysters" title, which in 'bri's reference I think went back to the deleted scene of Spartacus that talked about sexual preferences, works really well, because ahs and uns in "Mushishi" are supposed to look like snails and reside in a person's ear. And a person's ear, of course, looks like a shell on the outside and has a curvy snail-like cavity inside. Also, putting shells to one's ear = trying to hear the sea? If you press your palms really hard to your ears you can kind of hear something that sounds a lot like it. <3 to you all. don't eat me.