kirakira　★☆★

I WILL SURVIVE

2009-11-15T06:52:12Z

I HAVE BEEN MISSING. or my heart has been missing. and I am in the middle of A levels, which is BAD, LIEK. Really bad for a Tenipuri resurgence. And I have totally not been keeping up with the manga beyond what my brother has been telling me. but HOLA, EVERYBODY. I AM NEEDING TO WRITE TEZUKA/ FUJI. SOMETHING. ANYTHING. Please kill me with your prompts. I will churn them out endlessly after the 25th of November. It seems I have missed every fic exchange in the universe (sadfaces). PLEASE GIVE PROMPTS! CRY OF DESPERATION!

ON OTHER THINGS, at present I am hating Pride & Prejudice. Also Othello. Lit on Tuesday boohoohoo.

BENTO DESU

2008-10-02T15:08:00Z

Right so NO I have not died, just that Cambridge + Philippines + PROMOS took my life away for a while but now that it is all over I am back & LEARNING TO MAKE BENTO. Case in point:

The Japanese make all these incredible molds that make life v v v easy even for one as domestically uninclined as I! *happy squirm* Managed to make everything into flower-shape from my hardboiled egg to my fried egg to my onigiri to my carrots, then filled up all the spaces with cherry tomatoes and broccoli yay.

CAMBRIDGE IS REALLY GORGEOUS & I miss it so much! And Mayon was SMOKIN'. Quite literally. Both places were lovely in their own way & THE FOOD WAS GREAT. It was so amazing in the Philippines cos we got a police escort and all everywhere! && we got to stay in UPNISMED and gawk at their museum of geology and peruse the geology library books :D And play around with the rock specimens. (Serpentine! Muscovite! Biotite! Slate! Conglomerate! etc, etc) ++ the Singapore shirts were awesome they said WE ARE VERY GNEISS at the back (Gneiss is pronounced 'Nice', see) so that helped us Make Friends.

OKAY IMMA SLEEP NOW I HAVE TO WAKE UP TO MAKE MORE BENTO TOMORROW :D

NAKA NAKA BEIBU KYOU WA TANOSHII (ASA MADE)~

2008-08-02T00:29:09Z

In a bid to make the prospect of getting out of my cocoon of blankets at 7 in the morning to face the world (i.e. try not to whimper and die at the prospect of double Maths) I set Kitto Daijoubu by Arashi as my alarm ringtone, which has the reverse effect of making me get out of bed and stagger around blearily in an approximation of dancing. At this point I want to wax lyrical about my eternal love for Arashi (Nino's flaily hands and general adorable little-kid-ness & Sho's incomprehensible rapping (LIKE JAY CHOU, only Japanese, and that's because I don't get what he's saying ; ;) & MATSUJUN'S ULTIMATE GH3Y (OMGOMGOMG THEY TOOK THE ANGLE ON HIM IN EYES WITH DELIGHT OFF YOUTUBE this is a tragedy of Othello magnitude!!1! & their *AWESOME LYRICS & their amazing music videos and perfomances) Oh Arashi <3 YOU ARE MY SOUL SOUL.

If you have never heard Kitto Daijoubu: go forth now, the world will be a ~better place~ with flying rainbows and flying hearts.

Cases In Point:
* "Tell me what you want, ah ah, weekend gonna make love ah ah, from monday to sunday every every every day lucky lucky lucky my life" -- Kitto Daijoubu
"Oh love you love you, your eyes with delight" -- Eyes With Delight (which I only heard as OH RUBYOU RUBYOU, YOUR LOFF IS DELIGHT for forever)

NOTE TO SELF: MUST. DO. PW. NOW. I woke up at 7.40 to do filing and Evaluation of Solutions before we go for breakfast at Holland V and I have whiled away my time instead on this black hole called LJ. And I have not packed and I am leaving on Tuesday for two weeks to go to Cambridge!

...epic fail.

decollement @ 2008-07-30T15:38:00

2008-07-30T08:29:00Z

The fact that I am posting twice! in! two! days! says something about my rapid re-descent into PoT fandom (and is also related to clicking around all my old Tezuka/ Fuji mems like THIS ONE and looking at screencaps with adorable ichinen Tez (^o^)b which warrants the lame emoticon. seriously. ++ HELLO TO THE NEW FRIENDS I have made, some of whom I have admired from afar after reading their fic -throws confetti around in spazzy fangirl moment-

alksdfjlasdfj I am insanely hungry now I think I could eat a cow. And to think that we just did a comprehension on Animal Rights. BIOFUELS PRESENTATION WAS OKAY & I am v thankful.

Ack a Woman from the Student Affairs Centre just called to menace me about the blazer I loaned all the way back in like, May ): graaaaarh.

Out of boredom (I have such bad time management inorite :0 ) -

1. Pick any original/fandom character I've ever written. (the former does not apply in my case)
2. Ask this character three (and only 3) questions.
3. a. The character will answer the questions, or
b. I will write you a drabble using your question as a prompt.

OH MY GOD WE'RE BACK AGAIN, the backstreet boys are never uncool

2008-07-29T14:43:33Z

right so the cactuscontinuum fic is finally! concluded! after much angst (thank you to thea and naomi for saving my ass and beta-ing despite pdubs) and it is up so I am feeling marginally less irresponsible. unfortunately my pot_bth fic is due too and I doubt there will be any time in Cambridge to finish it up ie I have to FINISH IT BEFORE I GO cri cri omg why did I sign up for this anyway *______* if I had the time I would be ruminating on why I actually find Oshitari/ Gakuto fic 23084384 times easier to write than Tezuka/ Fuji (there are so many reasons for this omgz) but unfortunately I am supposed to be doing a worksheet on Biofuels (also known as using animal poop to power cars) and my youngest brother is leaping around singing the Pokemon Centre healing song thing so I will just merrily announce that I AM REALLY DEAD FOR THE INTERNATIONAL EARTH SCIENCE OLYMPIAD hereby known as IESO which makes me feel damn terrible about the fact that they are sending me and three people all the way to the Philippines to compete D: against teams like the US, who have their own website and apparently undergo some major intensive training doom sia.

WELL ANYWAY on a more optimistic note: I AM REALLY EXCITED ABOUT A) GOING TO THE UK NEXT TUESDAY B) GOING TO THE PHILIPPINES TO LOOK AT MT MAYON AND STAY IN THE UNIVERSITY HOSTEL WITH CHARLOTTE oh what havoc we will wreak. There are many PoT fans in the Philippines ehhhh how cool right maybe I'll run into some :D :D

College Play

2008-04-20T10:57:52Z

This is an excerpt from the Wedding Scene in College Play.

Mrs Soames (an old woman who pretty much sounds like she's completely on drugs): ... doesn't she make a lovely bride!

George (the groom, in reply to the minister): I do.

I find the above insanely amusing, and have to try hard to suppress my giggles throughout it. I suppose if it gets too bad I can stuff my face into my fake bouquet and pretend to be overcome with emotion.

What I do not find quite as amusing is the following.

Mr Booth: We'll work on the kissing and so on later -waves hand dismissively-

(My co-actor and I look at each other in horror; we're doing Our Town by Thornton Wilder and he is George Gibbs and I Emily Webb, so we are... marrying each other in Act 2. There are a good number of really soppy lines that just call for High School Musical songs to be playing in the background, we have to 'fall into each other's arms', and 'run joyously up the aisle' of the Performing Arts Centre)

Me: Mr Booth... you don't really mean it, do you? We don't have to do the kiss, right...?

Mr Booth (with surprise): Why, of course you do!

IT IS ENTIRELY TOO LATE TO PLAY APRIL FOOL'S JOKES, MR BOOTH. I am going to get lynched by my co-actor's bloody harem (not kidding on that one)! alskdfjalksdjflkjfs.

[fic]

2008-04-14T12:46:51Z

I needed a break from a) the Tezuka/Fuji that is EATING MY LIFE b) Chinese 作文 c) GRAPHING AND LINEAR INEQUALITIES D: so I will do a prompt someone gave me a long! time! ago!
...it turns out I have forgotte how to titrate, so I will tackle that topic another day. uwaaaaa ;_; Ms Goh would be so ashamed of me.

v.
Oshitari remembers that his first advanced chemistry lesson in third year smells like strawberry and cyclohexane.

Gakuto gestures to the empty seat beside him and blows a gum bubble in Oshitari’s face as greeting. The teacher walks past their bench and gives him a dirty look over the top of the wobbly sphere (now inflated to dangerous proportions and obscuring two-thirds of his face), and Oshitari pulls on a rubber glove and pokes gingerly at the bubble. You’re not supposed to be eating in the Chem labs.

The deflated gum plasters itself pinkly to Gakuto’s lips; he waits until Oshitari is reaching for test-tubes in the second drawer before leaning over to grab the squirt bottle of distilled water. When Oshitari looks up he gets hit full in the face with a stream of water that plasters his fringe to his forehead, dripping down his chin and trickling down his neck, droplets spreading damp translucence across his shirt.

Water gun. It’s super effective! Gakuto laughs until he nearly chokes himself on his gum and Oshitari knows that if Shishido were there he’d flick his hair over his shoulder and roll his eyes and mutter super lame. Instead he bangs Gakuto on the back (maybe a little harder than necessary, but it doesn’t matter as long as he doesn’t damage Gakuto permanently because they needs him for doubles) and says wryly, I suppose that was warranted.

Damn right it was, but there is no acid in Gakuto’s tone; they are back in neutral territory.

*

They line up the test tubes in the rack, seven of them, bases rounded like inverted raindrops: if you looked through the top you could see clear to the bottom, speckled marble of the benchtop covered with the carnage of past experiments, yellowish crescents marking the bases of conical flasks and an ugly splotch of dark blue here and there. There is a stain at the far right that Gakuto insists looks like a Pikachu, one ear cocked and two neat round spots of something darker where the cheeks are (possibly iodine), the tail a thin scribble spreading at the end that might’ve been a stream of iron sulphate.

Oshitari thinks (but doesn’t say, because there are potentially explosive chemicals in the vicinity) you are too obsessed with beating Jirou at Pokemon.

Today’s experiments are self-directed; they fill their test-tubes with 1.5 centimetres of different acids and alkalis and drip pH solution in one drop at a time. Oshitari’s hands are steady and his droplets precisely one drop’s worth in volume; Gakuto finds the whole process inordinately exciting and when he puts in the pH solution it dribbles down the sides in bursts, sliding down in a gradient of colour from colourless to orange to red. He waves the dropper around with wild abandon and Oshitari suppresses a wince for the surface of their lab bench.

It doesn’t matter, Atobe’s father’ll pay to re-tile the benches eventually. Gakuto snaps his rubber gloves with childish mock-menace, chews at his gum with renewed fervour so that Oshitari can hear the wet squelch of his chewing when he leans over to grab the bottle of solution out of danger from Gakuto’s enthusiastic experimentation.

The sunlight falls through the test-tubes and fragments into colours, painting flickering rainbows onto the desk, onto their white shirts, onto their worksheets. (Oshitari waits until Gakuto has turned around to wash out the dropper before doodling a flower and a pot of gold at the edge of Gakuto’s worksheet in pencil.) Their teacher nods approvingly in their direction and Gakuto daringly takes off his left glove and dips his fingers in every test tube, staining them red-orange-yellow-green-blue under Oshitari’s disapproving gaze. He wiggles them at the slight stinging feeling from the acids and Oshitari thinks suddenly of gummy worms dangling in front of a child; aligns his hand with Gakuto’s, noting the half-centimetre difference between their fingertips and feeling the soapy dampness of his fingers faintly through the rubber of the glove.

If Atobe kills you later for destroying your fingers with acid and you can’t hold a racket during practice, don’t say I didn’t warn you, he tells Gakuto, who laughs and flips a blue-tipped finger at him.

*

The bell announces the end of class, and the teacher tells everyone to wash up.

*

I liked the strong acids best, says Gakuto, so they pour that down the sink the last, watching the lazy eddy and swirl of the solution against the cool white stone, thin as water and red as blood.

They peel off their rubber gloves and toss them into the bin. Oshitari’s palms are sticky from sweat but his fingers are powdery; Gakuto yelps in disgust when he wraps a hand around his wrist. He sticks out his tongue with the gum he’s been chewing all lesson at the tip, and Oshitari stares because the gum is now the colour of the gloves they threw away, stretched thin by their hands and blanched greyish-white, and he wonders out loud, where did the colour go?

Gakuto looks at him and breathes strawberry air through his mouth (amyl acetate and fifty-eight other esters and alcohols), shrugs quick and sharp like a bubble going pop. The colours on his fingers are fading to sepia.

He holds up his hand and looks at it, squinching his eyes against the sun. Same way these did, I guess. It doesn't matter, tiptoeing to sling an arm over Oshitari's shoulders.

Oshitari supposes it really doesn't as long as Gakuto's fingers don't fall off.

I AM A GEOG GEEK.

2008-04-13T05:36:19Z

I could possibly be the only person in the world who cracked up at this -->

The five basic metamorphic textures with typical rock types are:

Slaty: slate and phyllite; the foliation is called 'slaty cleavage'

obviously, geologists have a lot more than rocks on their minds.

math and madness

2008-04-12T14:08:33Z

the two above concepts always appear in the same sentence when I think about the first. I believe they have a cause-effect relationship. I will draw a graph to illustrate it someday. aklsdjfalskjflsjdf this unit on Graphing Techniques is driving me a bit insane, I suppose this serves me right for skipping math lectures (in defence: I was sick! and absent from school!) and playing Tetris on my graphing calculator the rest of the time.

On other things, there is a video circulating around class on valval_zai's handphone that is four minutes long and of me completely embarrassing myself while playing pokemon in the RI canteen. Apparently key highlights include me shrieking NO! NO! AAAAAAH I NEED A POTION NOW (and permutations thereof) as well as shaking the DS and going manically YAY YAY YAY EMBERRRRRR BURN, RATTATA, BURN UNDER THE MIGHT THAT IS CHARMANDER, LEVEL 9! HAHAHAHAHA.

....I wouldn't know, nobody's letting me near the vid for fear I delete it. >:/ Also I don't remember doing any of the above, um. Perhaps my brain deletes embarrassing memories automatically, but in that case it is likely that I will only have about 16% of my memories from the day I was born. Which says a lot, really. D:

They cancelled 2.4km run on Friday because of intermittent lightning! Which means we have to run it next Friday instead. Woe!

Chocolate fudge cake yay. Technically it belongs to my sister, who brought it home from her friend's house, but! She is at my aunt's until tomorrow and she's in the papers anyway so I doubt she will begrudge me the cake 0:) since she has NATIONAL FAME already uwaaaaa.

BACK TO MATH, which I have been neglecting for my fic writing >____< ack. vierblith_tefu!!!! I am horribly sorry, my knitting fic petered out so I am reserving it for something else when I do not need to stick tightly to "hobby". I promise I will dedicate it to you when I write it. So now I have this weird pseudo AU that is plotless and long and eating my life completely and I think Fuji is beginning to sound like a stalkerly pedophile aaaaaaah HUGE PANICKY FLAILING.

If you have not seen the musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse = The Bandwagon, GO FORTH NOW AND WATCH IT.

KEYBOARD SMASH

2008-04-09T11:23:14Z

I am here to say in absolute horror that I am completely and utterly stumped on my cactuscontinuum fic D: Which is to say that I know where I want to go with it, and I have a semi-coherent anchoring concept for the whole thing but I don't know how to start it, aaaaaangst and woe. I really need to find a concept beta to throw ideas at or something ASAP. flaaaaaails.

On other things, KYOGRE AT LEVEL 83 <3. I will aspire to get to Battle Tower with at least three level-100 pokemon. Instead of playing Pokemon, however, I should really be catching up on my Economist/ National Geographic backlog or writing _sine her long promised Sirius/ Remus. In my own defence I spent the afternoon being a geog geek and reading my human/ phys geog notes, not even straying to do anything except nap for half an hour. Of course I just read all the fics on balls_it_up and am currently completely braindead, but that is not the point :x at least I can claim some productivity today, right? Yay for huge sheafs of notes on plate tectonics (earthquakes! mantle convection currents! compressional boundaries! love waves, body waves, rayleigh waves! faults!) -has major dork moment- I think geog is as exciting as PoT. aaaaah blasphemy.

College Play casting out tomorrow; there are 23 parts and I will not be shattered if I don't get one because I really want to get into the tech room :O

HOBBIES. WHAT HOBBIES INVOLVE UNRAVELLING OR DECIPHERING THAT I CAN ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND ;_; knitting not inclusive.

Should I get the new Arashi album, since my mother is being so open to the idea? She has marginally disturbing fangirly moments about Nino, but that is possibly a good thing for me. ^_^ NAPFA TOMORROW, cri cri omg, inclined pull ups and sit and reach <-- sometimes i cannot believe that i ever did ballet, since my scores TOTALLY BELIE THIS. this is all my own fault for being a slug and falling sick last week, because now am srzly unfit.

fables drabble for Livvy;

2008-04-07T12:14:14Z

My first! ever! non-PoT drabble on this journal. And the third ever done, the other two being Harry Potter and Hanakimi respectively.

She looks at the bandage wrapped around his hand, changed not two hours ago and already browning at the edges from soil and sweat; she thinks of a peeled apple left out in the air to oxidise.

“I used to think you were irresponsible, you know.” Boy Blue looks up at the sound of her voice. “Sheep in the meadow and cows in the corn and all that.”

“You’re a fine one to talk, Red,” he retorts, but there is no acid in his tone, only a sort of wry, ironic amusement that makes her smile.

“I don’t think they’d have appreciated jazz, anyway.” She carefully doesn’t look at his fingers, loosely curled around the handle of the spade, so badly broken by the Baba Yaga that nobody’s sure if he can ever play any more.

He grins at her, absently pushing back his fringe from where it has fallen over his forehead, his hand trailing a streak of dirt in its wake. “Well, I’m sure you can. Tonight down at the barn the band’s playing, if you want.”

“Clean your nails first, honey,” she tosses over her shoulder, blowing a kiss from lips redder than her name for good measure.

"RAYQUAZA, EXTREMESPEED!!"

2008-04-06T14:55:59Z

I am here for the simple expedient that I need to document my temporary lapse into childhood idiocy, i.e. I nicely asked to borrow my brother's Nintendo DS and spent my evening getting reacquainted with Pokemon (sapphire version, in case anyone was wondering). I was wandering around on route 124 via Swampert's Surf when I decided to go check out my Pokemon collection in Lanette's PC! It turns out I have 111 Pokemon (I think that's quite pathetic D: ) and my brother (who is only organised when it comes to things like this) very kindly organised my pokemon collection into boxes by type. It is inordinately amusing that I have a box, therefore, called eggs, because of the many eggs my Pokemon have apparently laid in the breeding centre and which I have never been bothered to try hatching D: obvs I have No! Maternal! Instincts!

What pleases me is that I can still defeat the Elite Four and the Champion in less that twenty minutes with two Pokemon alone (well, they are level 76 and 82 respectively, but still.) Why am I such a little kid ;_; I am possibly the only person I know who still plays Pokemon at this age. But oh, Kyogre, how I have missed you <3

...also, it turns out that with great insensitivity I named one of my Pokemon UGLY, once. And Pokemon don't get rename tokens alsdfjalskdalsdkfj. Oh well, the folly of youth.

now off to angst about my tremendous unproductivity (because of Pokemon and the presence of Malaysian relatives whose national pastimes are eating and shopping, in that order) and MY UNDONE CHINESE WORKSHEETS and my feminist speech which ends with a combination of BURN THE BRAS!!1! and that Mary Poppins suffragette song. -crosses fingers- please don't let Mrs Lee throw me out of class tomorrow.

because she always comments and is really sweet <3: a drabble-thing, theme of given prompt lullaby. I'm sorry it's so crappy!

lullaby;

Gakuto calls Oshitari at 11.38 p.m. and asks if he will meet him at the telephone box at the corner.

Oshitari is typically calm under all circumstances because there is *nothing he has never been able to deal with eventually, but at this time of the night he is slightly on edge, maybe because it is late and he has been watching yakuza flicks again (if Gokusen constitutes that, which it actually might not), and maybe because this is Gakuto, incendiary and unabashed and unfortunately with a size that supports neither trait.

He grabs three plasters and a coat off the rack and slams the door behind him; nearly falls headlong down the stairs in his haste and swears loudly. The fuck! echoes around the stairwell, uck-uck-uck trailing off faintly, and Oshitari thinks wryly that maybe it expresses his sentiments exactly when he steps into something unidentifiable and squashy on the third flight down.

At this time of the night the neighbourhood looks like an excerpt from a yakuza flick set: window panes patterned with grime, streetlamps with their oily yellow lights that cast flickering shadows that could be trees, could be silhouettes (but are probably just figments of Oshitari’s imagination)

Gakuto is leaning against the telephone booth further up ahead, briefly illuminated in the glare of a passing car’s headlights; a thin stream of smoke issues from between his fingers to twine a grey halo above his head. When he sees Oshitari he drops the cigarette and casually grinds it under his heel.

Oshitari doesn’t know if he’s relieved to see that the images he was conjuring up (Gakuto slumped on the ground in a pitiful huddle of grey coat, hair spilled strikingly like blood on the pavement, telephone dangling uselessly, its cord wrapped around Gakuto’s wrist) remain entirely imaginary, or annoyed that Gakuto has interrupted his Thursday night movie ritual.

***

Say something, Yuushi! Gakuto looks up at him and grins brightly, teeth white in the dark.

Oshitari cannot help but be suspicious. What for?

Gakuto holds up a tape recorder. Been having insomnia, and you know I hate drinking warm milk, and I remember always falling asleep when you tried to read me sections of that romance novel crap.

Oshitari clutches his chest in mock-hurt. You wound me, my love.

Yeah, see how effective you are? I’m already falling asleep on my feet here. Gakuto yawns exaggeratedly and blinks sleepily at Oshitari, who cannot help but laugh and drag Gakuto in the direction of home.

*excepting Atobe and his preuccupation with purple, frills, and insistence on the prominent featuring of whipped cream at team parties.

"I have traced it all the way back to the exact date of the destruction of music,

2008-04-05T18:27:59Z

and I believe it was - the introduction of American Idol."

I just watched We Will Rock You, which is AN AWESOME BEYOND BELIEF MUSICAL, not just because of the Queen songs but also thanks to the witty pop cultural references, list of which is below under the cut because too much flaily incoherence at this time of the night is. Not so good for the flist.

1. "Calling all chairmen, chairwomen, chairtransexuals, chair-androgynous-artificial-life-forms,"
2. "There was... a music homogenisation. It started with... boybands. Boys in bands, girls in bands, a boy and a girl in a band, boys who looked like girls in a band, girls who looked like boys..."
3. "And you old pop stars... fade away." "YOU'RE SENDING US TO DISNEYLAND?!"
4. "Okay, I'll be the groupie. .... d'you want to see my tits?" (this said by an OLD MAN who reminded me more of my econs teacher than anything. aaaaaaah bad mental images.)
4b. and the same old man again: "Now I'm a runner (?) as well as a groupie. Does this mean I have sex with myself? Oh well, nothing changes then."
5. "...and the most badass person of them all (<-- in reference to famous rockers), VICTORIA BECKHAM!!!"
6. "So Brian May, being the last member to be executed, got a last wish - and that was to play a guitar solo before he died. He managed to delay his death by three and a half days."
7 "We need a set of wheels." "BICYCLE! BICYCLE!" "We can't turn up at Wembley Stadium on a bicycle!" "We can go on my Harley! *vroom! vroom!* ...well, it's actually a nice clean Japanese bike, but that's alright, it makes the right noises."

you'd have to watch this to understand the sheer and complete brilliance of this *__________* aaaah my mind is a pile of mush. I was so embarrassing with all my shouting and fangirling that my parents gave up and joined in at the end to stand up and shout / wave/ cheer with me and the rest of the audience.

All My Love - Ohno Satoshi

Gakuto lies with his arms folded under his head on the school roof and watches the clouds pass over his head, white and flecked through with sunlight. The sky is flatly and solidly blue, maybe fading faintly grey at the edges, like a border creeping in slowly; but it is still vast, vast beyond his sight and comprehension. He cannot see to the end of it, it is limitless and that frightens him just a little: but it is how he feels when he thinks about what he feels about Oshitari.

1000 Oceans - Tori Amos
He doesn’t cry because that’s not what boys do even in bad romantic movies: just watches Gakuto move down the line of Hyotei regulars and say goodbye one by one (patting Jirou’s head, a Jirou sombre and silent and startlingly awake for once; touching Shishido briefly on the shoulder, playfully miming a yank at Ohtori’s chain)

When Gakuto reaches him he looks up and murmurs, you know I’m not going to say sorry, right? Even if I’m ditching you, you bastard, you’ll be fine in singles while I’m off leaping around on sponge mats, and Oshitari smiles, smiles despite whatever that is stuck somewhere in his throat (he cannot distinguish the trachea from the oesophagus now, even if he can in theory, on tests) because that’s what boys in romantic movies do, grin and bear with it (chin up, chest out) and ignore the imminent distance of oceans, the vehicles that are the metaphors of leaving.

One Day More - Les Miserables

One day to Nationals. They’re cutting class to sit on the top step of the entrance stairway (gleaming marble patterned with irregular swirls; this fascinates Gakuto inordinately), rolling pencils between their fingers like cigarettes and watching the breeze scatter leaves here and there over the grounds, the inexorable gravity pulling them down, down, patches of brown and orange landing haphazardly like deflated parachutes against the uniformly green and manicured lawn.

Gakuto sees one leaf soaring against the wind, lifted higher and higher until it is lost in the glare of the sunlight, and he looks over at Oshitari and knows that despite the cautionary tale of Icarus and his too-close sojourn to the sun, together maybe they can fly.

Special Needs - Placebo

Oshitari Yuushi remembers Mukahi Gakuto at fifteen, slight and childish and obscene, red hair and good legs and a half-hearted dimple in his left cheek that he pressed his finger into when thinking, always impatient. You heard him before you saw him, and what you heard was usually vulgar; a voice with an intrinsically mocking lilt.

He didn’t need him back then.

At nineteen Gakuto stumbles through the door past twelve every night, too-skinny wrists and too-sharp collarbones, cheekbones and too-large eyes (purpled in and around) and voice raw and husky from smoke. He stands on the balcony in the cold, more often than not without a coat, and sleeps huddled up on the sofa because he doesn’t want to wake Oshitari by opening the room door.

He doesn’t need him now, either; he might love him, but that's another thing altogether.

Roxie - Renee Zellweger

He’s on the billboards, on the radio, on the buses, in the papers, on Gakuto’s fucking packet of juice, still with that (supposedly charming but really just completely smug) smirk that says I know something you don’t, honey, and his hair sticking out every which way.

The girls in Gakuto’s class have little paper cutouts of him on their desks and can recite all his interviews word for word from start to finish; the boys in his class suddenly adopt Kansai-accents, drawling out words like they’ve been drenched in tar, slow and viscous and slurred at the ends. The opticians across Japan report a shortage of glasses with circular frames.

After the thirty-seventh time someone has asked him if he really used to play doubles with Oshitari Yuushi, Gakuto calls Oshitari to shout at him for being a egocentric attention whore, breaking a record three months of frosty silence -

and ends up somehow with a dinner date instead.

(and another drabble, actually done to Love Situation by Arashi with lullaby also as a theme; I went overtime with that one though. >____<)

a/n: on average I had four minutes to finish each, so if they suck it is not really my fault. I think. >__________< i like comments. -is hopeful-

我是失败者。

2008-04-04T09:47:55Z

The thing about being Chinese, I realise, is that every story imaginable has a moral to it.

No, seriously. My Chinese textbook has what would be really beautiful stories, about Singapore's fading chinatown and falling flowers as a metaphor for the passing of one's father and stuff like that, but they are all irrevocably and inevitably ruined! by the subsequent moralising. things like FILIAL PIETY and DON'T LOSE THE CULTURE and DON'T FORSAKE OUR CHINESE ROOTS.

TEN WHOLE YEARS OF THIS. And the rest of this year, too. alksjdfalskdfj my whole life in Chinese class thus far has been a giant exercise in morality. not on, 政府, not on. maybe this is entirely a Singaporean thing, but I doubt it.

so much chinese homework to do over the weekend cri cri omg. flaaaaaail.

part two of that epic tezuka/ fuji

2008-04-01T14:39:23Z

Part One

Tezuka watches Fuji disappear into the clubroom during practice, wonders when the slant and fall of his fringe became so familiar. He was afraid things might be awkward, but he's forgotten that this is Fuji and Fuji slips into places, situations effortlessly, realigning the edges around himself such that his presence never unduly calls attention to itself. If this means that they behave normally to each other then Fuji will, and Tezuka is not one to falter.

His brief inattention is enough for things to become chaotic, as junior high boys left alone is an action akin to leaving a lighted match in the hands of a compulsive serial arsonist. Momo trips over his shoelace and falls into Inui, who is holding a particularly noxious concoction in a conical flask that does nothing to hide either its lurid, shifting colours or the fumes emanating from it, and who loses balance and spills it onto Kaidoh.

Silence falls over the court, partly because Tezuka’s expression does not bode well for anyone involved and mostly because Inui’s compound appears to have the potency of concentrated sulphuric acid and appears to be eating a smoking hole right through the elbow of Kaidoh’s regular jersey.

Kaidoh chooses to ignore Inui’s role in all this and goes straight for Momo, grabbing him by the collar; the impact of this forces them to stumble backwards, and - Tezuka is sure he closed his eyes in pained anticipation, here - crash into Fuji, just emerging from the clubroom.

The only thing Tezuka can think of is how similar the expression of startled bemusement he is wearing now is to that evening’s.

*
They’ve managed to get Fuji over to sit on the bench, an honour he acknowledges with a faint, wry quirk of the lips. Ryuuzaki-sensei is at a teachers’ meeting, which leaves Tezuka to do the honours of administering first aid (he doesn’t trust the first-years enough, and he certainly doesn’t want his Singles Two player coming down with gangrene and losing his leg from knee-down)

His fingertips are dry and slightly rough; there are inkstains smeared faintly and at random over them (this is the hazard of smoothing out completed homework with damp hands). He knows they are lingering too long but not why; the iodine is staining his fingers yellow-brown ochre, a single drop escaping the gauze and pooling between his second and third fingers. The moments of carelessness continue to tally up.

Nothing to worry about, Tezuka. I’ve seen worse on Yuuta as a five year old, he used to fall a lot in the playground, you know. Tezuka looks at Fuji over the rims of his lenses, notes the crease at the corner of his mouth that is trying to be one half of a smile belying his heroic dismissal, and cannot help but try to be gentler.

You think about him a lot. That’s never been a question, but Tezuka can see where it might start to be a problem. They’ve had this conversation before in a hallway, over the pretext of a borrowed English dictionary that had post-it tabs sticking out at the important pages, little purple and blue and green rectangles, scraps of paper with Tezuka’s neat penmanship listing synonyms.

Fuji ducks his head, averts his face. Saa, maybe.

When Tezuka finishes taping down the gauze he stands abruptly, brushing off his knees. He looks down at Fuji’s neatly-bandaged shin and says the only thing he can: Don’t let your guard down. The unsaid again is implicit, and Fuji raises his eyes to Tezuka’s and replies impishly, Of course, buchou.

It takes Tezuka the rest of practice to realise that Fuji has never actually called him buchou before.

*
After practice, Fuji smilingly deflects everyone’s concern, waves them all off to their own after-school pursuits. Kikumaru lingers, unwilling to leave his best friend; but Fuji tips his chin gently in the direction of the bus stop and says, Oishi’s waiting for you. You shouldn’t make him worry any more than he already does.

Tezuka emerges from the clubroom to find Fuji ensconced quietly on the bench, idly toeing at a brown leaf trailing weakly on the ground, dragged along by the spring breeze.

You should’ve gone home.

By myself, Tezuka? Fuji opens his eyes, wide and guileless. Aren’t you worried I might be suffering from severe internal bleeding and collapse on the way home?

You and I both know that you aren’t, Fuji, and you told everyone else you were fine even though Momoshiro offered to give you a lift home on the back of his bike. Tezuka is proud of himself for keeping the edge out of his tone; it’s been a trying enough week, and the dream he’s had haunts him enough that every time he looks over at Fuji he expects him to resemble a blimp in an oversized jersey.

Still, the residual guilt from that evening is enough for him to stay in step with Fuji until they get to the road junction where they usually part. It’s been a silent walk, which is not unusual for him but is for Fuji, who usually finds something to comment on: be it the applicability of probability in daily life (illustrated by the frequency of alternating ice-cream and takoyaki stands on every street corner) or the curious dimple at Tezuka’s left elbow, visible only when he holds his racket loosely while waiting for an opponent’s serve.

Tezuka feels strangely cheated at not being able to acquiesce to things, as he usually does.

*
At the road junction Fuji finally says something, tilting his head to the right as he does, as if it’s a query.

You know, you don’t always need to look up to see the sky. Fuji points at a fragment of mirror on the road, glinting silver and filled with shifting blue and white.

Were he the superstitious sort this is what Tezuka would have replied: Broken mirrors mean seven years’ bad luck. Instead he says, Someone might drive over that.

Fuji waits for the lights to change, then limps (rather exaggeratedly, thinks Tezuka, not used to seeing Fuji doing anything in excess) out to retrieve the shard.

Always so civic-minded, Tezuka. He shrugs one shoulder easily, the motion like a ripple across a lake. Here.

Fuji grabs Tezuka’s hand and deposits the piece of glass into it, carefully placing it in the cupped hollow of the palm so that Tezuka doesn’t get cut by the edges. Then he runs off (in spite of his injury), turning back after twenty paces to flutter his fingers cheerily; leaving Tezuka standing alone on the pavement with a handful of sky.

*
The glass is a cold strip across his palm, clean lines and unequal angles. Tezuka curls his fingers (one by one) around it carefully and sticks his hand into his coat pocket.

He’s not sure if this is forgiveness or a promise, it could be both; and it is enough.

any reviews are welcome; i like feedback of any kind (:

decollement @ 2008-03-31T19:30:00

2008-03-31T11:35:25Z

i.
Some days when Gakuto is feeling particularly mellow he pulls up a chair beside the kitchen door and waits for Oshitari to begin his nightly violin practice. The strains of the melody wail faintly through the gap between the floor and the door; Gakuto always makes sure to close it because he doesn’t want Yuushi to see him caring enough to listen and Atobe calls him a philistine regularly enough that he doesn’t want to debunk that myth. It takes more effort to be underestimated than it should.

Sure, Yuushi isn’t top-notch soloist standard (yet), but there is something about the way he pushes his fringe back from his forehead earnestly, distractedly and the flick of his wrists as he draws the bow back and forth that Gakuto is sure would earn him a thousand fans in a heartbeat.

The last note of whatever symphony he’s playing lingers in the air: tremulous, yearning. Gakuto brushes the heel of his palm abruptly over his cheekbone; his hand comes away with a line glistening across it, a shaky graph of an irrational function.

ii.
Some nights Oshitari abandons his violin practice in favour of sprawling loosely over the couch with a tub of ice-cream and a movie. The former is a half-and-half of rum and raisin and belgian chocholate; the latter a soppy tearjerker with a happy ending, replete with confetti and sunsets on park benches and weddings. The tub leaves a wet ring of condensation wherever he leaves it when he’s fiddling with the remote, which was and continues to be finicky and won’t let him rewind to the important bits, like kissing scenes.

It has always puzzled him, whether people instinctively know where to put their noses when they kiss, if this is an inborn trait because it seems to be essential enough to reproduction and the continuation of the human species in general. He spends his time in the next math class calculating a general formula for ascertaining the optimum angle of inclination of one’s head (taking into account variance in height and positioning of mouth in relation to the rest of the face, with an optional coefficient to account for eyes being open or closed. He hasn’t yet figured out how to work in the degree of experience and the unit of measurement he should be using for it - days? Weeks? Number of times previously attempted, and whether they were successful or not?) because the teacher is only on advanced calculus and he was done with that in first year.

He taps his pen idly on the edge of the desk and wonders if the gender of the parties involved is significant.

*
Gakuto flings his bag down beside the door with an angry huh of expelled breath, mumbling incomprehensibly about Atobe and Kantoku.

Oshitari looks up and raises a questioning eyebrow. I think you need more calcium, Gakuto. That might help with your moodswings.

Shut up. Gakuto’s retort is half-hearted and lacking its usual bite. Shove over.

Oshitari shifts obligingly. Would you like to help me in an experiment, Gakuto? It will be entirely to your benefit, of course.

Hmm? Gakuto is half draped over the arm of the sofa, limp and quiescent, cheek pressed up against the ridiculously embroidered cushions that Atobe gave them as a room-warming present. When he sits up he will have shallow pink sleep-lines in the approximation of a floral pattern spread across his cheek like a three-dimensional blush, but Oshitari sees no need to remind him of this.

Oshitari scoops ice-cream out of the tub, making sure there is a precisely equal amount of chocolate and rum and raisin on the spoon. Puts it in his mouth and holds it there, a diminishing hemisphere of cold, heady sweetness on the tongue; mentally he calculates the angle of inclination - and when he’s sure he’s got the figure right, leans over to kiss Gakuto.

Gakuto sits up with a yelp, eyes snapping open; his forehead bumps Oshitari’s hard enough to bruise. What the hell was that, Yuushi!

Oshitari just looks at him and smiles, slow and smooth with his eyes dark like wine, and says, A scientific experiment. And making sure you get your daily calcium intake.

Gakuto picks up the cushion he'd been lying on and flings it at Oshitari.

iii.
When Oshitari cuts class he is languishing on the stairs leading up to the roof, a lollipop stick poking out from between his lips. He props himself up on his elbows, leaning his head back to watch the strip of sky visible between the top step and the door frame; sometimes it is clear blue sponged with white, cotton-candy twirls of cloud, sometimes grey and hazy. On rainy days the water sometimes seeps in and trickles down the steps, pooling at the foot in a dusty puddle. Those are the days he sits on the banister.

Gakuto knows that this is where Oshitari goes, he knows that Oshitari doesn’t like people coming into his personal space. But he is not people, he is Gakuto, and that makes all the difference in the world.

The stairwell is dark and shadowy and Gakuto stumbles over the lanky stretch of Oshitari’s limbs the first time he finds him there. He looks with distaste at the step next to Oshitari, who catches him staring and draws a crooked smiley face in the dust with a long, delicate finger.

Gakuto opts to perch gingerly on the banister instead.

He watches Yuushi unwrap his lollipop (today it is heart-shaped, swirling pink-and-white around a red centre) the clear plastic crinkling loudly in the quiet. It is probably the love offering of one of the many girls so enamoured of Yuushi’s voice; Yuushi’s steady supply of confectionary can be partly credited to the allure of the velveteen drawl that is his voice.

He waits until Yuushi has been lolling it around in his mouth for a good three minutes before he pushes off the banister with both hands and bounds over to snatch it out his mouth, sticking it in his own. He could have asked for it from the very begnning, but sometimes he just likes being contrary. It doesn’t take much to gross Yuushi out because Yuushi’s father is a doctor and he has a phobia of sharing saliva: sure enough a corner of his mouth twitches in undisguised horror at Gakuto’s audacity and daring.

If you fall sick tomorrow that’s your own fault. He starts, and is cut off by Gakuto flashing him a victory sign, lips already slickly red from the artificial, cherry-flavoured colouring.

*
Gakuto sucks on the lollipop and tries to hum a song at the same time; Oshitari can taste the sound at the back of his throat, the vague memory of the third layer of sweetness dissolved off.

*
Gakuto realises that this is the closest they get to kissing without actually doing it.

iv.
They jaywalk across the road in front of the ramen stand near Hyotei; Gakuto doesn’t care about rules and Oshitari cares only when they suit him, and neither want to muster up the energy to walk a hundred metres to the traffic light.

A spring breeze ruffles the leaves of the trees above their heads, their branches interspersed with buds. There are stray petals (curling, browning at the edges) caught in the cracks on the pavement, casualties of the flowers that prematurely bloomed.

Oshitari steps over the metal road divider in one fluidly efficient movement. (This is the secret to being called a tensai; knowing the value of economy, never giving more than is necessary for the semblance of effortlessness.)

He turns back and holds out a hand to Gakuto. Is it too high for you? The inflection in his voice is solicitous and faintly mocking; the underlying affection is not apparent to an outsider.

Bastard. Gakuto somersaults over, landing neatly and lightly on both feet.

But he takes Oshitari’s hand anyway, and they run with gleeful abandon across the road, ignoring the frantic horning of the cars coming at them and the fact that they are late for tennis practice.

You are only young once.

a/n 1: comments are v appreciated, as disjointed as this is! \(^_^)/
a/n 2: I wonder if anyone would want to give me prompts for writing Oshitari/ Gakuto drabbles/ fics, because these days I find myself at quite an impasse; if anyone would just drop a comment and I'd be glad to try!

decollement @ 2008-03-28T19:03:00

2008-03-28T11:06:03Z

ULTIMATE FAIL AT WRITING WITTY EXCHANGES. I'm going to stick to Oshitari/ Gakuto (cries)

“Keigo,” says Oshitari in the middle of episode three of Hana Yori Dango, “I don’t like sauteed cauliflowers.”

Atobe looks up from his careful division of dinner into equal nutritional portions.

“And there aren’t any champagne grape gummies in the candy dish either. Pick out only the strawberry cream chocolates from the tray for me, will you? I don’t want any of the others.”

“I see your descent into your second childhood has begun at an exponential rate.”

“You did say you wanted a fine evening of wining and dining, did you not? So since you provided the dining, I’m providing the whining.” Oshitari pushes his glasses up and steeples his fingers, smirking at his own wit. The unspoken and I take any opportunity to annoy the hell out of you, of course hangs in the air between them. His smirk widens.

Atobe suppresses a snort because such a neanderthal, uncouth display is below him. If this is what enforced company with that lout of Rokkaku, the one with the terrible puns -- Kurobane, is it? -- does, he’s banning Yuushi from ever attending a Junior Senbatsu camp ever again.

“Laps tomorrow.” He grinds out between gritted teeth. The beginnings of a headache are slowly but surely manifesting themselves, after an entire evening of hearing Oshitari’s velvet drawl used incongruously to protest childishly at everything from the colour of the drapes to the widescreen TV making MatsuJun’s face look unusually fat.

“But Keiiiiiiiigo-chan, I only want to be in yours.” Oshitari has draped himself casually over Atobe’s legs, folding his arms behind his head and closing his eyes in utter bliss. His elbow is jabbing Atobe in a really awkward place; Atobe wouldn’t put it past him to feign typical childlike unawareness of the concept of personal space.

Atobe gives in to his baser instincts and rolls his eyes. “Quit it with the whining, Yuushi, or I’m cutting your sweet supply.”

“Why, that’s very paternal of you, Keigo.”

“I’m sure you were devilspawn as a child.” Atobe grimaces at the thought.

“So if you’re being all paternal and you say I’m the spawn of the devil, what does that make you now, then?”

“Shut up.”

decollement @ 2008-03-26T20:47:00

2008-03-26T12:53:36Z

Um, happy birthday, uralimpiel. I doubt I will ever finish this, and I might not continue it, considering its epic fail at being funny (i'm completely sirius. though sirius is dead bellatrix killed him ha ha ha), even if there are many bits I did not put in, like Momotaro and Fuji being a cross-dressing h0 and Tezuka in a purple silk suit and a penguin-patterned tie being a ~~King Pimp~~ producer/director type and Hyotei and St Rudolph outgaying each other in musicals and Fudomine and their angsty monologues. *_______* i'm really sorry~~

“...And this is the Seigaku boys’ drama club.”

Echizen Ryoma, newly arrived from the land of Hollywood, looked up from under the diamante-studded rim of his white cap and pursed his lips thoughtfully.

“Sensei. Why are they located in the tennis courts?”

The sensei blinked.

“They used to be the tennis club until... Well, nobody really knows why, but the rumour is that -” he dropped his voice - “they imbibed something completely contraband and this... This is the outcome.” He nervously fiddled with his tie and cleared his throat before continuing. “But naturally all this is a rumour, their sudden behavioural turnaround is justifiable under the combined conditions of extreme stress and physical exertion that are self-imposed. The school has been endeavouring to counsel them and provide the necessary support through this trying period for both these students and their family...”

Ryoma tried very hard not to roll his eyes. He saw no point in euphemising they took too much pot into a nice, neat PG-phrase for twelve-year-old ears. He’s lived in America for over a decade. Been there, done that.

But this, he supposed, was Japanese society: overwhelmingly polite and disapproving of deviance.

He sauntered casually over to the sign-up board, ensuring that he had child actor expression #3 on (“I am too cool for the world and their grandma” TM) and that his posture was at just the right degree of slouch, coupled with a slightly defiant tilt of the chin. The three boys at the sign-up table immediately looked slightly intimidated. Probably only stagehands, thought Ryoma scornfully. Two had the most hideous haircuts he had ever seen (half a coconut shell and an extra from that lame show Prison Break) and the last had a monobrow shaped exactly like a sine graph.

“Whatever,” he mumbled to himself. “Is this where I sign up for drama club?”

Prison Break boy appeared to be too overawed by his cool vibes to speak, which left Coconut Hair to pipe up cheerily, “Yeah! Are you a first year too?”

Ryoma nodded briefly.

“Oh then you’ll be in the fanclub and stagehand division. Like us!” He was rudely interrupted by Monobrow, who swelled, declaring loudly and loftily, “EVEN THOUGH I, HORIO, HAVE TWO YEARS’ ACTING EXPERIENCE AND HAVE PLAYED ROLES FAR BEYOND A NORMAL HUMAN’S ABILITIES --”

Just as Ryoma was seriously contemplating sacrificing his cap for the greater good, by ending the noise pollution that was Monobrow’s voice by stuffing it down his throat, Prison Break boy cut in, looking scandalised.

“Horio-kun! You only ever played a duck and a rampaging dinosaur that got killed in the first scene and came back as a rock later! And that was in the kindergarten and elementary plays!” This interjection started a huge debate that gave Ryoma a tremendous headache; these three were obviously only destined for the plebian roles of noisemaking rabble. Extras.

He tugged his cap over his eyes and walked off towards the tennis courts, where the real action was happening.

*

The first thing he saw upon entering the courts was a board outlined liberally in shiny tinsel, header emblazoned in (alternating pink and purple letters) glitter across the top and underlined with a fuchsia boa for good measure.

The whole effect was incredibly gay, which was perhaps the point; once he got closer and the sunlight bouncing off the glitter was less blinding, he was able to read the header properly.

It read, YOU GOT GAY?

“...,” thought Ryoma.

The lavender sheets of paper stapled on below appeared to be the audition and improvisation schedules for the day. it turns out that there are eight roles to be filled in the newest play, with one understudy for all eight roles, which makes nine.

Ryoma adjusted his cap and slipped his thumbs into the belt hooks of his pants, standing in position #93 (I Am Actually A Yakuza Member, So Now I’m Gonna Kick Your A**). He was going to show them something they would never forget, and he wasn’t even planning to include any nudity.

*

Eiji first noticed that there was someone new on the court when, instead of turning in admiration at his dramatic entrance (today he turned up in a tartan kilt borrowed off Hyotei’s Mukahi Gakuto in preparation for the audition for Lady Macbeth, slamming open the tennis court gate and cartwheeling in with as much imperiousness as one could muster while trying to not inadvertently flash the world), everyone was instead huddled in a silent (the term actually means, in drama club terms, hushed stage whispering) mass around court one. Even the metallic clang of the gate against the fence did not pull their attention from what was happening onstage; he pouted and made his way over to Oishi, who was so engrossed that it took a good poke from Eiji’s sharp elbow into his solar plexus to get his attention.

“Eiji! What was that for?”

“Oishiiiii~ Nobody is paying attention to me, nya! What’s going on?” Eiji tried to sound royally displeased; he succeeded in sounding like a two-year-old.

“There’s a freshman onstage, doing improv against Kaidoh. And-” Oishi paused for dramatic effect, because that was what was normally done in these circles - “he’s actually outwitting him.”

That doesn’t say a lot, thought Eiji. Kaidoh only hissed in response to pretty much everything, which explains why he always got all the villain roles, either as the evil mastermind who turns up at the end and looks menacing for all of three minutes before he dies, or the creepy stalker-cum-bodyguard who weaves sinuously in and out of the shadows and looks menacing at appropriate moments.

Admittedly the hisses did vary according to context, but dialogue content variation was usually quite an alien concept to Kaidoh. At combined rehearsals he and Hyotei’s Kabaji did Expressive Monosyllable practice with each other, usually accompanied by Momoshiro’s derisive laughter and Shishido’s loudly-expressed disdain (“that is violently uncool”).

The trick in winning improv against Kaidoh, as Eiji figured out a while ago, is to move him into verbally expressing something that isn’t Fshuuuuu or any derivative of such. The only people who were capable of this are Momoshiro, Inui and Fuji -- and, it seemed, the new freshman, who gave Kaidoh a truly pitiful look, the sort worn by kittens stuck in trees or drowning in puddles. His eyes were huge and liquid and golden and in that instant, Eiji knew that Kaidoh was a goner.

When Kaidoh went aaaahhhhh and reached out as if to pat the freshman on the head, there was a moment of genuine, stunned silence before the eruption into scattered applause and chatter.

So the freshie did have some real promise. Eiji caught the smug confidence in his eyes as he turned away, and cracked his knuckles in anticipation of being a good senpai, ready to reveal the world of gay debauchery that had once been the junior high tennis circuit.

The boy wouldn’t know what had hit him.

decollement @ 2008-03-24T00:16:00

2008-03-23T16:42:34Z

A/N: Timeline is marginally screwy :( And I have no idea if I ought to continue or not, it's going in a funny direction. Plus this is the first time I have ever written purely from a Tezuka POV. It is a tiring thing. Also, I actually really like Arashi and Kame and Jin, so no insult is intended with the mention of JE (which is really, really awesome.)

There are a lot of things Tezuka could blame this mess he’s in on. It might have been the heady euphoria at winning Nationals, something Inui might’ve slipped into the drinks (he wouldn’t put it past Inui to attempt to ‘lighten him up’ by creating some Super Inui Rabu-rabu Ready Juice Deluxe just for him), it might have been the light, translucently amber, a sepia-tinged wash. The same light filled Fuji’s eyes with honey, outlined the angle of his cheekbone and the curve of his neck and his collarbones, jutting out over his polo shirt collar.

He remembers feeling warmth coiling in the base of his chest, a feeling he associated previously only with tennis, the feel of the shock reverberating up his arm as his racket contacts the ball with a smack, watching it skim the net and hit a precise spot on the baseline. The phantom feeling of a gold medal, weighing heavy and solid around his neck.

They walked home together after, because Fuji’s house is only a few streets away from Tezuka’s and Tezuka wasn’t comfortable with the thought of Fuji walking home alone, tired from the day’s handover ranking matches as he is. Fuji has never told him explicitly but he knows that there have been instances in trains, on buses, in alleys (Fuji tells Eiji and Eiji tells Oishi and Oishi tells him); he doesn’t doubt that Fuji can take care of himself, but the slight shaking of Fuji’s hands as he lifted the cup of green tea to his lips didn’t escape his notice.

*

At the door of Fuji’s house Fuji turns and touches him lightly on the elbow.

Thank you, Tezuka. Would you like to come in? Yumiko’s out with her boyfriend and Yuuta and my parents aren’t at home at this time, usually.

They go through this ritual regularly; Tezuka walks Fuji home, Fuji asks him to come in - though whether out of politeness or a real desire for his company, Tezuka doesn’t speculate - and Tezuka always declines. In all his years with the Seigaku regulars he’s never been to anyone’s house but Oishi’s, and the last because it was strictly necessary and nothing more.

Today, though, his chest is still full of the curiously light feeling (in hindsight it is recklessness, carelessness) so he says yes, and Fuji’s eyes open wide in startlement before he smiles crookedly and turns to fumble with the lock. It evidently doesn’t take much to surprise Fuji when one doesn’t mean to.

Tezuka blinks. Fuji’s eyes are full of light again, the moon and the streetlamps mingling, reflecting. This is an important moment to remember; this is a point of reference for Tezuka.

Fuji kicks his shoes off and leaves them haphazardly where they land, toes pointing in different directions. It isn’t his house but it still pains Tezuka, who neatly aligns his shoes perpendicular to the door, parallel to each other. When he’s sure Fuji has walked off down the hallway he nudges them into some semblance of order.

The cactus on the hallway table seems to either be staring at him in bemused horror or sniggering at his obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Tea? Fuji calls dulcetly down the hallway. His house is tidy and looks lived-in the way Tezuka’s does not, scuffmarks on the floor and sweaters draped over chairs and papers scattered over tables.

If it’s not any trouble, calls back Tezuka.

Fuji reappears at the door of the kitchen balancing a tray with two cups and a plate of biscuits. The steam from the tea wafts its way over to Tezuka in languid tendrils, forming a curious sort of white halo effect around Fuji’s head. They pad up the stairs in their socked feet, pausing only for Fuji to point out and coo over Yuuta’s topless baby picture on the wall (a devious glint of the eyes accompanies the announcement: if he ever becomes famous I’m going to auction it off on eBay. Alternatively I could just send copies anonymously to every girl in St Rudolph's on his birthday, and Tezuka thanks his stars again that he doesn’t have siblings), and for Tezuka to carefully manuever around one of Fuji’s more prickly cactus specimens, left (decoratively, insists Fuji) near the side-edge of a step.

Fuji’s room is not the explosion of chaos Tezuka subconsciously expected; instead there are even rows of cacti arranged on the windowsill and all the clothes present are nicely and crisply folded at the foot of the bed. What does confuse him is the shelf full of Hanakimi manga and Hana Yori Dango DVDs; as does the presence of a few NEWS and Arashi and (most horrifyingly) a KAT-TUN CD. In a bid to pretend ignorance he takes off his glasses, ostensibly to clean them but more to avoid seeing anything else horrifying, like the Kama Sutra -- which he’d actually already seen at Oishi’s house (Oishi had blushed an unattractive shade of brilliant scarlet and stammered that Kikumaru had bought it for him thinking it was a book on Zen meditation; but he isn’t very good at lying and anyway Tezuka is far less obtuse and prudish than everyone thinks him).

His temporary loss of vision, however, means that when he turns around he finds himself chest-to-nose with Fuji, who nearly drops the cup of tea he is proffering in surprise.

This is the part where everything is unclear; he remembers looking down at Fuji, searching and unsmiling and unsure, before leaning down and awkwardly pressing his lips against Fuji’s. Fuji doesn’t yield softly and gently like girls are supposed to, doesn’t do anything at all except maybe open his mouth a little in a slight ‘o’ of surprise. The nape of his neck is a warm curve against Tezuka’s palm, the fine wisps of his hair faintly ticklish.

*

It takes Fuji dropping the cup of tea to break them out of it. The sharp noise makes them spring apart and Fuji wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before looking at Tezuka. For once he isn’t smiling at all, and the tilt of his chin is defiant, speculative, dangerous, challenging. Tezuka's never been too good with synonyms.

Before he can say anything, Tezuka bolts. Bang, goes the door from downstairs.

The tea seeps slowly over the floor, a stain spreading from the centre outwards, inching towards Fuji’s feet like the tide coming in.

*

He is walking down a street towards the school when he passes a pregnant figure in an empire-line dress the exact shades of blue and white on the Seigaku regular’s jersey. The blue’s an unusual enough colour that he has to turn around to look at it; even from the back the silhouette is familiar, wispy brown hair and pixie-delicate angularity -

Fuji?

The person turns from the shop window, full of (Tezuka notes with mingling dismay and satisfaction) miniaturised tennis equipment.

Ah, Tezuka. I was wondering when you would find out. Fuji smiles, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that he is standing in broad daylight, in public, a boy with curves where there shouldn’t be.

This is physically impossible, he tells Fuji. We didn’t --You’re a boy and I pay attention in Biology class and you’re --

But Tezuka, you’re only fifteen, what do you know of impossibilities? Fuji walks over, slides his arms around Tezuka’s neck and leans in so close that Tezuka could count the faint sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose if he wanted to.

An elderly couple walks past and smiles indulgently at them; a motorcycle goes past and someone shouts - in Momoshiro’s voice - hey, buchou, get a room!

(Tezuka makes a mental note to make Momoshiro run many, many laps for irreverence at their next tennis practice session.)

S’not like you’re in any position to talk about physical impossibility either. Just think about it. Fuji’s breath is warm on Tezuka’s ear, his voice raw silk and ricepaper. The Tezuka Zone? It isn’t everyone who can do that, you know.

Tezuka wants to say something about taking responsibility and appropriate decorum and public displays of affection but that gets lost along the way somewhere in the hollow at the base of Fuji's throat; before he knows it he’s kissing Fuji in the middle of the street, in full view of anyone and everyone.

To his surprise Fuji draws away after a while and looks at him, eyes open and alight with meaning, and says simply, So what are you going to do about it?

Tezuka tries to form a coherent reply but the only thing that comes out of his mouth is twenty laps -- and there is a moment of silence, when Fuji’s mouth briefly twists into a bitter line before settling into a smile of resigned, unutterable sadness. I see. He walks away, dignified despite the unreality of his physique, and though Tezuka wants to say no, stop and run after him there is suddenly a rising clamour of buchou, buchou behind him , a faceless mass of Seigaku players, and he is torn between the team that needs him and going after Fuji and it feels like he is being torn apart but --

-- Tezuka jerks awake and looks at the clock beside his bed, the colon in the 2:29 blinking serenely at him.

Sometimes he almost wishes he was a normal teenage boy, with normal, embarrassing dreams for that age demographic -- but then again normal teenage boys don’t usually have the word demographic in their vocabulary.

Tezuka stares up at the blank ceiling, hoping for some kind of answer to appear, maybe a message from the tennis powers that be. When it appears there are none forthcoming he pulls his blanket miserably over his head and closes his eyes. This is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a Zero-Shiki, wondering what to do about the ball that rolls casually to a stop and waits silently at his feet, the outcome of his own creation, his own doing.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, a little voice says snarkily, mada mada dane, buchou.

*

Echizen never quite understands why Tezuka makes him run a record hundred and twenty-five laps for being merely three minutes late for the next practice.

Comments are seriously loved/ appreciated. As is any feedback for improvement \(^_^)/

when sad, write Tezu/ Fuji.

2008-02-16T16:51:52Z

Fuji hates that Tezuka is so inscrutable, but if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be as interesting. Things of value require effort, waiting, patient unravelling; constant force applied on lines of stress, on faults in a rock will shatter it.

Only Tezuka never shows his stress and if he has any faults, Fuji cannot find them; he is like water, not the wave crashing in bursts of white foam but the insidious liquid trickle of a brook, passing around the rock, over the rock, all-encompassing, looking for a weakness - that in this instance, perhaps, is not there.

*

Tezuka hates that Fuji is so evasive, the slip-slide of silk on skin. They are like a graph and its asymptote, tending towards and never intersecting, on and on and on until the end of the page, to infinity and beyond.

To make the equation equal one must apply the same steps on either side, but Fuji is unpredictable; he is the physical expression of a one-to-many function, which technically does not and cannot exist. Under any given circumstance there are many things he could do, but the one he picks is always the unseen possibility.

*

Fuji is five again, remembering when he took art classes because Yumiko had to go for piano at the centre anyway and his mother didn’t know what else to do with him. The rest of the children in his class painted summer scenes: beaches and parks full of people, clumsy beige strokes and a stripe of red for the mouth, a buttercup-yellow sun sending visible UV rays (a paradox, that), haphazard streaks of acid green meant as grass.

He waits for the all the children to finish squabbling over the colours and then takes what is left of the watercolours, charcoal grey and dull brown and ice blue and the pale green of moss agate. When the teacher wanders over she smiles at his picture as if to say very nice, dear, but Fuji reads the puzzlement in her gaze as clear as day. He’s divided the paper in two lengthwise and drawn the exact same thing on either side, carefully mirroring every detail, down to the wistfully drooping willow tree leaves and the crumbling stones at the bottom-left-corner of the castle; the only differences are the blue of sky on one half and the silver-grey of lake on the other, the drawing on the latter is smudgier, edges blurred and less defined.

Years later when he finds the painting again between the pages of an old exercise book he smoothes out the wrinkles in the paper, yellowed with age and flaking at the edges, colours faded like an overexposed photograph, and pins it up on his wall. For every blessing he thinks of, he dabs a brush into a little round pot of pink paint, a delicate colour that awakens remembrance of the scent of dying roses, and adds a tiny sakura petal to the lake.

Eventually the lake becomes a whole sea of pink, and the castle reflection is no longer visible. Fuji likes it better that way, because it is no longer symmetrical; the lake is now more than a mirror, it is in itself a thing of beauty to be admired, no longer secondary to the castle.

*

When Tezuka is eight he learns an important lesson about responsibility because several of the koi in the pond die when he cleans the filter carelessly, being in a hurry to go for tennis practice; this upsets the chemical balance in the water.

Nobody scolds him, because that is not the way his family works, but what is left unsaid says more than any words could. It goes without saying that even tennis is no excuse for irresponsibility; Tezuka is more sensitive than he is given credit for, and his mother’s slightly grieved look and his grandfather’s unusual terseness at the dinner table cut deeper than he admits.

Responsibility, therefore, is something due to all living things; a fundamental principle of life, as is the need to do things well. It is from this lesson that he derives yudan sezu ni ikou.

Will continue this after next week, as pointlessly plotless as it might be.

vday part two!

2008-02-14T22:43:42Z

It is time to implement Plan B: a picnic in the park.

Gakuto is bouncing on the balls of his feet and talking about the girl in his class who refuses to take a bloody hint and sod off because god, there is no way I could ignore the way she shrieks, I swear the note is high enough to smash the chandelier in the Hyotei foyer and every bloody window for ten miles around; but Oshitari is more interested in the way the breeze is blowing his hair in a berry-hued cloud around his head.

(He makes a note to himself: stop being so obsessed with Gakuto’s hair. It’s just hair. Everyone has hair! Even if people like Atobe have whole epic love affairs with theirs, and Shishido used his as a - rather unseemly - sacrifice to redeem his position on the team, in typical melodramatic fashion and poor taste.)

They walk past a fenced-off field. There are children in it, little boys and girls in their school uniforms; their laughter is high and clear, carried over by the breeze. Oshitari turns to Gakuto but Gakuto is no longer beside him because he has moved to the fence, fingers curling around the wires, over the vines that have carefully twined their way up. He isn’t looking at the children: instead his head is tilted upwards, eyes half-shut to avoid staring directly at the sun.

Oshitari looks up and realises that Gakuto is staring at the children’s kites, indeterminately dark shapes against a cloudless sky. The look on his face is faintly wistful; Oshitari has never fully understood his obsession with flight.

Gakuto’s mobile rings and he jumps and curses, struggling to get it out of his pocket; Oshitari gallantly takes his bag from him, earning himself a look of gratitude.

A flower from the plant on the fence falls to the ground, landing beside Gakuto’s foot.

“Yeah?... Oh. Fine, whatever. ... No, I don’t want to come home for dinner. What? No.”

He turns and walks off abruptly, crushing the flower vindictively and kicking at the pebbles on the path along the way. Between them there is an awkward silence, because Oshitari’s not always sure what he can say when Gakuto gets like this.

They finally get to the field with the huge tree in the centre of it; Gakuto flops down on the cleanest grass patch he can find with a frustrated huh noise. Oshitari pats the ground before he sits down, neatly and elegantly, cross-legged. When he looks up Gakuto is rolling his eyes.

“You’re an anal retentive, Yuushi.” They’ve had this exchange lots of times in different variations, because Oshitari does things like smooth out the creases and dogears in Gakuto’s worksheets, straighten his stationery on his desk in their room, sort the clothes in his own cupboard by colour (there is a disproportionate amount of purple, all of which originates either from Atobe as birthday or Christmas gifts or Atobe’s colour-themed parties), and arrange the food in the fridge according to its expiry date (earliest on the top shelf, latest on the bottom, chocolate in the little compartment at the top. Gakuto takes a perverse pleasure in undoing all this careful arrangement; the way he sees it, someone’s going to do it anyway and that someone might as well be him, since it torments Yuushi so much.

The exchange is also usually a precursor to a fight. Oshitari mentally sighs and braces himself.

Unexpectedly enough Gakuto doesn’t start pulling out past examples of his ‘ridiculous behaviours’ and hurling them at him. Instead he flips over and lies on his stomach, propping his chin up on one hand.

“Do you think I’m weird, Yuushi?”

Oshitari blinks. Gakuto has never asked him a question like this before: it is not in their relationship to ask each other affirming questions because neither has ever lacked attention or recognition.

Before he can answer Gakuto is talking again, about his family and their expectations and how they hate his flashy acrobatics, the colour of his hair and his outrageous self-assurance, how they want him to grow up and dye his hair black again, cut it off so he looks like a boy and not one of those delinquents on the streets, to stop playing tennis and focus on his studies and just stop being such a deviant. His parents wanted a quiet, confident, good-looking and intelligent son, a normal boy with normal interests, perhaps sufficiently athletic to win competitions: someone to be a credit to the family.

The unsaid someone like you hangs in the air between them.

Gakuto falls silent and stares moodily up at the leaves above, at the light weakly seeping through the canopy. Between them there is the sound of the leaves rustling against each other, faint whispers of sound.

“Maybe I could give up tennis,” he says finally, and Oshitari feels his heart stop for a moment before Gakuto continues. “But that would leave you without a partner, and I’d be a bastard if I did that. Besides, acrobatics by itself is bo-ring.”

In the distance the kites are still bobbing, mere specks moving warily around each other. It appears that two of the kites have gotten tangled.

He’s never seen Gakuto look this tired, or sound this defeated before; the degree of vulnerability is frightening, because it means Gakuto is offering him trust that he’s not sure he has the right to have.

Oshitari hesitates for a moment, then proffers his shoulder. With anyone else it would be an incredibly odd gesture, but it feels alright with Gakuto, who leans his head against Oshitari’s shoulder and loses some of the bitterness from the line of his mouth.

They stay like that for a while, and when Gakuto looks at him and a corner of his mouth crooks upwards in an attempt at his usual smile Oshitari realises that there are some things that one doesn’t need to confess, after all.

*

The kites stay aloft until sunset; they watch them slowly disappear and then Oshitari walks Gakuto home, Gakuto’s fingers curled tightly around Oshitari’s wrist.

decollement @ 2008-02-15T06:31:00

2008-02-14T22:39:54Z

Title: (There isn't actually one, besides The Vday Fic, really)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Oshitari/ Gakuto
A/N: This is the second part to the vday fic; it didn't come out quite like I wanted, though. :( And I'm sorry for double posting! But LJ won't let me delete the invalid link, I don't know why. Thank you to those who told me the link didn't work!

Happy Vday, everyone! ^_^

(It is time to implement Plan B: a picnic in the park.)

[fic]

2008-02-14T09:34:57Z

The Mandatory Vday Fic, in stages. (Stage 1)

2008-02-11T17:13:53Z

A/N: I hope I finish this by Vday; school is being a bitch though, and I'm not sure this is quite up to standard :x Please excuse sad attempts at humour and plot. If you do not get the Jin ref, go google it, the song cracks me up so much.

Oshitari Yuushi is widely acknowledged to be a tensai nearly equal to Fuji Syuusuke of Seigaku.

This implies that he should not at all be incapable of coming up with a perfectly good plan to celebrate Valentine’s Day with Mukahi Gakuto. He has a good deal of background research, for one thing, and an entire arsenal of resources at his disposal.

The only problem with all his preparation is: (a) aforementioned has no idea of his feelings; (b) all background research applies exclusively to females, because very few people have caught on to the idea of writing romance novels about boys that don’t involve poncey outfits, fighting, dodgy descriptions of a carnal ilk, more fighting, etc etc etc.

None of which apply to Gakuto, really. (except the fighting, but that’s only when Gakuto meets Kikumaru Eiji in the street without either of their doubles partners around to halt the fireworks. Then there is real trouble.)

Oshitari groans and buries his head in his hands. They should really have a how-to manual for this. Or at least a commiseration club, success stories inclusive.

Speaking of success stories, though -

*
Ootori is beginning to look just the slightest bit unnerved by Oshitari having trapped him into a corner of the clubroom and looking at him in a predatory manner over the rims of his glasses.

No point in beating around the bush, since if he got caught Shishido would be beating him around the head. Oshitari takes the plunge.

“So, Ootori. I have a couple of questions for you.” Ootori is nervously fiddling with the chain around his neck, twisting and untwisting, glints of silver threading through his fingers.

“Since I think it was pretty obvious to everyone except Shishido himself that you were - if I might be so blunt - pining for him, when and how exactly did let him know?” Oshitari crosses his arms over his chest and waits for the answer; it will come, because Ootori is hardly capable of saying no, especially to a senpai and even to such a direct and potentially mortifying question as this one.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

“Senpai....” he manages weakly, before Oshitari’s mental countdown hits zero and the blush that was originally a mere flake of pink on either cheek at the start of the question has bloomed into a full-fledged crimson flush.

Bingo.

*

Oshitari reviews his notes carefully. Apparently the trick to this is to find somewhere nice (“Where both of you will feel comfortable,” were Ootori’s exact words. He did dispense pretty good advice once his initial prudishness had dissipated); in Shishido and Ootori’s case this was... A street tennis court.

How surprising.

He supposes that Gakuto would be pretty happy in a gymnasium, but he might die from an aneurysm remembering the *disastrously embarrassing ordeal that was his gymnastics module test. Perhaps a dance club, then? Or there might be some truth in that song that boyband-which-Gakuto-learns-dance-moves-off’s member - is his name Jin? - sang, the one with the lyric in English that goes go club get drunk. Well. He’s not sure that’s the... desired outcome, so he crosses that off the list, too.

Which leaves a) the planetarium; b) the park, for a (hopefully romantic) picnic; c) the amusement park, because there’s a bouncy castle there.

*
He’s always thought the planetarium would be a good place for a date; stars and the connotations of ‘heavenly bodies’ and whatnot. Evidently he has reckoned without Gakuto’s short attention span.

“Come on, Yuushi, there’s nothing happening! Why’re we lying on these stupid chairs staring up at a stupid dark ceiling with stupid little white lights anyway?” Gakuto’s tirade is punctuated with yawns, and his eyes are fluttering shut.

Oshitari’s not sure how anyone could not find astrology exciting, but he tries to explain it to Gakuto anyway, the precision of the orbits, the comets trailing light, drawing rainbows of light across the sky, chasing the edges of the galaxy; the dying of the stars, black holes with their endless hunger.

(Sometimes, though, the romantic in him thinks that the black holes could just be lonely, because they are no longer beautiful, no longer stars that people look at and long for, they are the absence of what people yearn for.)

Midway through his explanation about the Little Dipper he looks closely at Gakuto and realises that he is fast asleep. It is one of the few times he has seen Gakuto completely at ease, without the tension in the line of his spine and the nervous energy that ignites at the smallest spark; Gakuto looks extraordinarily small in the dark, huddled on his chair in the dark. Without his usual larger-than-life presence he suddenly looks too delicate, all angles and spindly limbs, palely luminous in the dark, quite possibly as distant and unattainable as the moon.

Oshitari stifles the urge to reach over and smooth away the hair falling (quite beguilingly) over his forehead; Gakuto sighs and turns over, murmuring a little in his sleep - and suddenly flails. His arm is a sudden stripe of warmth across Oshitari’s stomach, and Oshitari stills and forgets to breathe for a few long moments.

Eventually he relaxes and leans back in his chair, feels the leather of the seat against the back of his neck, textured and smelling of polish, of age, listens to Gakuto breathing evenly beside him.

With moments like this, it is okay to wait a while more to tell the truth.

*

It is time to implement Plan B: a picnic in the park.

oshitari/ gakuto #2

2008-01-15T06:45:22Z

The thing about making bets with Yuushi, realizes Gakuto somewhere in the middle of lunch, is that the outcomes of all the bets they could possibly make are rigged. Every single damn one.

This isn’t because Yuushi is omniscient or anything of the sort, because he doesn’t always know what’s going to happen next (like the time Atobe tripped over a sleeping Jirou and dropped his racket, and instead of exploding at Jirou for sleeping in the middle of the clubroom floor or ordering Kabaji to defenestrate him he actually dropped to his knees instead and shouted imperiously – with a hint of panic, really - for ice to put on the bruise already blooming over Jirou’s knee, while Jirou sat up and wrinkled his nose bemusedly at the chaos; Yuushi had been as equally as flabbergasted as everyone else) and he certainly doesn’t know everything, much as he likes to pretend he does.

But thus far every bet they’ve made has ended in humiliating defeat for Gakuto, something his pride finds it hard to swallow, time after time. The worst was the one where he bet he could finish his Math homework without losing his temper and throwing something out of frustration: he’d smashed one of the only five remaining cups they had, vindictively making sure it was Yuushi’s favourite one, just so he could bear Yuushi’s gloating since he had lost the bet anyway.

Only Yuushi didn’t gloat like Gakuto thought he would, but instead applied antiseptic on the cut on Gakuto’s palm with gentle hands and patiently explained the solution step by step, soothing his frazzled nerves with tender kindness.

Perhaps he simply knows Gakuto too well. It’s a rather frightening thought, that someone else has who you are completely decoded, so that to them you are easily predictable, easily read; a known specimen under the microscope.

But the idea that Yuushi might lose interest in him is more frightening still. Which might explain his rashness in challenging Yuushi to see who can last longer without seeking out the company of the other; he needs to prove to himself that he can survive without Yuushi, that they are not a single entity like Shishido-and-Ootori are, but they are two people, separate and distinct and existing independently of each other. Free of the need to breathe the same air, of the mess of having a relationship.

Maybe he wants to see, too, how much he means to Yuushi, if he’s merely an available body, something of a novelty. But Yuushi doesn’t betray any sense of loss or regret (or anything at all, for that matter), simply pushes up his glasses and murmurs, We’ll see, Gakuto, low and quiet. The sound of his voice is a hollow reverberation in Gakuto’s ribcage, the tonelessness a wrench at his heart.

Gakuto, for once, chooses flight and not fight; he shoves his hands into his pockets and walks away.

*
It’s been nearly a week, so far. Gakuto is proud of himself for having made it this far, for not having given in. For not losing.

It doesn’t matter that there is an empty space in the bed beside him now, cold and accusingly white where before there was the sprawl of human warmth and the spread of dark hair over a pillow; some nights he wakes up and wonders hazily why am I alone? before catching himself. He has odd dreams about waiting alone at bus-stops, walking through uniformly grey buildings by himself, watching leaves fall and build up in piles, scattered by the breeze. Mundane things that people can only ever bear when they have company.

He walks slowly along the corridor, listens to his footsteps echoing behind him. Up ahead a girl looks around surreptitiously and slips a letter into someone’s locker; altruism isn’t an innate part of Gakuto, but he hopes it turns out well, for her.

At least somebody will be happy.

*

Tennis practice is the worst, because nobody knows that he and Yuushi aren’t talking but everyone realizes there’s something wrong because he’s said less than ten words today and they weren’t an insult, a complaint or anything vulgar.

Even Shishido is starting to look a little concerned, now.

He can’t even play properly: the knowledge that Yuushi is close enough to touch is a leaden weight in his chest and his fingers ache with the effort of not reaching out. A ball sails over his head but he doesn’t seem to be able to muster up the effort to reach for it, instead he is concentrating on getting rid of the ache that seems to have finally taken over the entirety of his chest, dull and relentless and choking.

If he could he would’ve laughed at Atobe’s expression of apoplectic displeasure as he drops his racket and runs off the court into the toilet, leaning his head against the cool marble of the cubicle wall; but he feels a bit too much like throwing up to open his mouth even a fraction.

If this is what withdrawal feels like, he thinks wearily, I’ll never take drugs.

*

On the thirteenth day of their bet he has a sudden epiphany. The reason why life sucks quite as much as it does now is not because Yuushi is not in it; merely because he is used to a reassuring presence beside him, constant companionship.

This explains the fact that he has a sleeping Jirou slumped on his shoulder, curls wispily ticklish against the bare skin of his arm. Somehow this wasn’t what he was envisioning, because while Jirou is a nice boy he lacks the alertness of most.

Plus Atobe is hovering slightly threateningly in the general vicinity, shooting pointed looks at Gakuto; more threatening still is Kabaji looming behind, an inselberg in the desert, towering a few heads over the crowds. Gakuto is almost too glad to relinquish Jirou to them, and not only because Jirou shows signs of being about to start drooling.

He isn’t going to own that he actually misses Yuushi, misses the velvet croon of his voice threaded through with sardonic amusement and the deftness of his fingers as he ties Gakuto’s tie for him in the morning, his ridiculously girly notes, penmanship riddled with unnecessary flourishes; the indolent languor with which he lounges in the armchair in the evening, eyes filled with flickering shadows in the dim evening light.

His pencil lead snaps. To his horror he has written Yuushi’s name where his own ought to be; he stares morosely down at his Economics worksheet and contemplates accidentally-on-purpose landing on his head a few times after performing the Moon Salute.

*

Two weeks and one day: Gakuto is kissing somebody whose name he forgot three minutes after he asked it. There is something digging into his hip, it is painful and irksome but at least it means that there is some immediacy to this and he feels less disconnected to his body. Tomorrow a bruise will form, surely.

His teeth scrape the other person’s bottom lip. It feels vaguely ridiculous to him, this; that he is exchanging saliva with someone else because the loneliness is eating him up from the inside, turning him into a Gakuto-shell, empty and incomplete. Yuushi is nothing like this, he is burnt wine and liquorice and rosewater scent, subtle and unfathomably addictive.

There is nothing for it, then. He shoves the other boy away (stale cigarette smoke and cheap chocolate) and runs to the Chemistry labs.

*

The light coming in through the lab windows is harsh; it bleaches the blank bench-tops to a sterile, skeletal white and Yuushi’s face is too angular, cheeks hollow and filled with shadow, the lower rim of his eyes smudged with purplish-black.

Gakuto realizes with a pang that perhaps he isn’t the only one who’s been suffering: Yuushi hardly remembers to eat if there isn’t anyone to forcefully tear him away from his stupid theorems, and he would forget to sleep if the need for rest wasn’t programmed by default into his body.

Yuushi looks up and catches sight of Gakuto, flushed and untidy in the doorway. Something flashes in his eyes briefly before his expression settles into its usual composed alertness; something that might have been hope, might have been relief. His mouth twists up ironically, wryly, and Gakuto braces himself for the smug I told you so that he probably completely deserves –

- but instead there is suddenly an arm around his shoulders and another around his waist and his face is pressed into Yuushi’s shoulder; he breathes in the familiar cologne desperately, like he’s dying, and thinks, maybe losing isn’t so bad after all.

kirakira ★☆★

I WILL SURVIVE

BENTO DESU

NAKA NAKA BEIBU KYOU WA TANOSHII (ASA MADE)~

decollement @ 2008-07-30T15:38:00

OH MY GOD WE'RE BACK AGAIN, the backstreet boys are never uncool

College Play

[fic]

I AM A GEOG GEEK.

math and madness

KEYBOARD SMASH

fables drabble for Livvy;

"RAYQUAZA, EXTREMESPEED!!"

"I have traced it all the way back to the exact date of the destruction of music,

我是失败者。

part two of that epic tezuka/ fuji

decollement @ 2008-03-31T19:30:00

decollement @ 2008-03-28T19:03:00

decollement @ 2008-03-26T20:47:00

decollement @ 2008-03-24T00:16:00

when sad, write Tezu/ Fuji.

vday part two!

decollement @ 2008-02-15T06:31:00

[fic]

The Mandatory Vday Fic, in stages. (Stage 1)

oshitari/ gakuto #2

kirakira　★☆★