Notes: 75 minutes. The reverse order thing was really tricky. Basically, write a story backwards-- from back to front.
Challenge: Reverse Order (tm)
Summary: Bearing the consequences can be difficult, as Fuji finds out.
Disclaimer: Konomi-sensei owns all.
Accidents
It wasn't difficult to say that if a sealed box of metaphorical letters was the only testimony to the fact that he was once, if ever, in love, then it was time to decimate its contents of questionable truths. (Fuji prefers the term i sneaky unsaid lies /i . In his world the two are frequently inseparable and almost never mutually exclusive.)Time to the scatter ashes, and move on.
It was raining that day. Hazy light streaming in, the colour of shadows. The walls in his room were dark sheets of frosted glass. In the spaces between his words and Tezuka's he wandered aimlessly around and tried to fill in the Tezuka-shaped hole with emptiness and cold tea.
Leaving seemed hard in theory but easy in practice. Directly contrary to whatever lessons life and tennis had taught him—but admittedly love wasn't his idea of predictability. If life were an experiment with a best-fit curve, love would be the anomalous result.
The day Fuji said goodbye he expected no fuss from Tezuka, and got none. In a way it hurt him; the way Tezuka seemed unfeeling and almost amphibian in the way his eyes mechanically focused at a point three inches to the right of Fuji's left ear as Fuji calmly recited the list of factors (all obviously highly improbable and totally untrue) that had presumably led to his decision to leave. What ate at Fuji afterward wasn't Tezuka's lack of reaction or the fact that he didn't protest, but the way he looked serious as though whatever nonsense Fuji was spouting was actually i true /i .
Having Tezuka was child's play, but holding onto him, owning him, and perhaps (as Fuji would say when he was feeling particularly reckless) loving him required a blindness and stupidity that could only be the result of suspending all attempts at logical reasoning.
It hadn't always been the case that all their conversations were tangles of barbs and insinuations—there was a time (Fuji told him self he did remember, and still does remember distinctly) when silences were swelling gently with laughter and something like (dare he say it, even when in his mind it lay neatly in the compartment labeled "lies") love. Not quite loaded like now, tersely compressed and subtly radiating the unmistakable aura of "come any nearer and I'll ignore you for life" Tezuka-ness. Fuji might be depressed or tired, or crying, or dead, but Tezuka wouldn't know, or if he did (freak accident—news must have been broadcast over national TV), he didn't have to care.
Cats have nine lives and Fuji has nine masks (nine is an arbitrary number, 20 000 would do just as fine), but even then when the nine lives have been spent cats do die, just as some part of Fuji has to, and will. Mask after mask he sheds slowly and unwillingly, almost trembling (with anger? He wonders), as he mentally measures and tries to quantify the extent of his vulnerability.
Regret was something that didn't come easily to him, but even just thinking about it made him feel twinges of something akin to loss.
Fuji didn't exactly remember what happened, but when he did permit himself to allow it the light possibility of tenuous truth, the basic instinct of self-preservation would kick in and tell him, no, he i really /i didn't want to go there. It had been mildly entertaining and quite exciting, even by his standards. Giddiness and heat, of which the latter moved to places he didn't care to admit; places including but certainly not confined to a certain appendage located somewhere along the regions of his lower body.
It is a mistake he made, and the burden of the consequences were his, and his only, to bear.
Once, Fuji accidentally (he can swear on that point), kissed Tezuka.
The End
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