FULL SUMMARY: Kurogane Suwa is a man going no where with his life. After several years of military service to escape his fracturing family, he finds himself wondering through his days with no reason for living. Until he meets Fai, a happy-go-lucky stranger who is running from his past. Kurogane sees easily through Fai's facade to the terrified man underneath, and finds perhaps the one person more alone than he is. But helping Fai isn't just difficult; it's dangerous. As Kurogane is drawn towards the man who feels more familiar than he should, he encounters dangers and love, and realizes that old wounds never really go away.
Hi everyone! Yes, yes I know I'm like 700 years late to this fandom, but I thought I might as well post anyways for people who still visit and are hardcore Tsubasa fans like myself! I'm not the best at summaries, so let me just say that this story will be (hopefully) full of mystery, suspense, agonizingly angsty romance, and much, much more. I really hope you enjoy and share your thoughts and opinions with me :)
P.S. the title is from "The Trapeze Swinger" by Iron and Wine who you should totally check out if you haven't already. The rest of the titles will be from songs I listen to for each chapter.
Happy reading!
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"Ships are launching from my chest
Some have names but most do not..."
- Welcome Home, Son by Radical Face
Ch 1: Some Have Names But Most Do Not
"That's certainly an interesting bracelet you've got there, young man," his father says. Kurogane blinks blurrily, looking around. His mother and father are seated across from him at the dinner table, drinking the red wine they only get out on special occasions. As he watches, his father nods at something next to him and gestures with his glass. Kurogane turns.
The first thing he sees is a wrist. His father is right; the bracelet is quite different than anything he's ever seen. It's a phoenix made of thin silver links, the wings wrapping around the arm to hold it in place. The beak points towards the elbow with a delicate mouth and cutout eyes, and the tail travels down the hand where it wraps around a slim middle finger.
Slowly, the man withdraws his hand and picks up his own wine glass. Kurogane is the only one not drinking it seems. He's only sixteen though, so he supposes it makes sense. He looks again at his companion, but the man's face is a soft blur of pale colors and golden hair.
"Thank you, Mr. Suwa. It's a family heirloom actually, from my mother's side."
It seems odd, the fact that he knows this voice, he knows this bracelet, but the face escapes him. His companion is tall, thin, beautiful. But that's where Kurogane's knowledge fails. What do his eyes look like? His mouth? Surely, Kurogane knew once. Surely it's still somewhere in his brain, waiting to come ripping forwards. But the man's face remains a blur, even as he lifts his fork with a bite of chicken, and places it on his tongue.
The three adults at the table continue to discuss quietly. The unknown man tells the Suwa's of his time in an orphanage, his travels with his brother that dissolve into ridiculous tales of wooed women and teenage foolishness. They tell him of their time in college, where they met, and the like. Where Kurogane was born, his first day of preschool, his little league team. It's all perfectly normal.
But Kurogane is baffled. Here he is eating dinner, with his parents and a nameless, faceless man who feels like an old friend and is treated like a guest of honor.
"Kurogane, darling, are you feeling all right?" his mother asks, looking at him over her rice. She's worried, has that little crease between her eyebrows, and he realizes that she must've been calling his name for a while. He starts to say something but before he can, the man moves.
He lifts that pale hand, fingers moving delicate through the air—like a dance. Always dancing. The man is long and lean and gangly and awkward, can't walk without tripping on his own feet, but his hands are beautiful, move like there's a song no one else can hear but him—and places a cool palm to Kurogane's face.
His mouth goes bone dry, like he's been walking in the desert for days, weeks. His stomach thrills into his chest with sharp little kicks. Ba-bum ba-bum ba-bum-
The cold of the phoenix is startling, and then so is the man's flesh, chilled from his wine glass. "He feels a little hot," the man says, and Kurogane can almost picture a frown on a perfect, pale face. "Bit of a low fever."
"'m fine," Kurogane mumbles, glancing away.
The man's fingers remain at his hairline long after his assessment, and eventually Kurogane pulls back. Slowly, the man drops his hand back to his side, almost reluctantly. Kurogane can feel the warmth on his face, the whole new choking sensation that comes from embarrassment. Why does he feel like this? Why does his skin burn where the man touched him?
His mother tuts and slaps her husband's arm, distracting Kurogane. "I told you, you were working him too hard in the dojo! With school and wrestling he doesn't have time for your obsession."
His father shrugs. "He's almost seventeen. A little hard work does him good."
She gives him a look from the very corner of her eye. "And yet when you were seventeen all you had time for was chasing girls and fighting in the parking lot."
Kurogane's father gives a stern look that he can tell is just a tease. "And that's why I discipline Kurogane: so he can be a better man than I am." And then he turns, with a sudden fondness on his face that is one-hundred percent authentic and lifts his cup to his son. "He already is."
His mother smiles and lifts her glass as well. "To Kurogane," she says.
"To Kurogane," echoes the man.
Kurogane doesn't understand why a stranger's words are the ones he craves most.
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He drops his pen with a disgusted sigh. He hadn't even realized he'd been falling asleep at his desk, not until the dream crept up on him. Family dinners? Faceless men? Kurogane shakes his head angrily.
His dream feels like a memory, but those are only so reliable with him; one day he was a high schooler, attending classes, hanging out with friends, playing sports. And the next he was in a hospital, not knowing how he got there. A fall, said his mother. Four stories. She never mentioned how he fell, or why he was on the fourth floor when their apartment was on the third, or, most importantly, why it felt like something was missing when she recounted his junior year.
But that's what he has; memories of classes and boys in wrestling uniforms, and then sterile white walls. When they first drove back from the hospital, all Kurogane could see was the window above his bedroom, the one where he supposedly fell from. It was clear the apartment was empty, even from the outside; despite its pristine conditions, it looked as if no one had occupied it in years. It had been empty when the Suwa family moved in and, according to his mother, had stayed that way.
Sometimes Kurgoane thinks about that portion of his life, confined to the bed while his head knitted itself back together, and thinks that maybe the doctors made a mistake; his brain feels as empty as that apartment.
He asked to go inside once. After the police tape was taken down. He went to the bedroom and opened the window. His fingers found the ledge on the outside, two inches of pebbled concrete. He stared at his hands, trying to remember if he hung on, if his fingers were torn open on the rough surface, trying to keep himself from going over. There were bruises on his arms that still hadn't quite healed. He studied the lines, the marks that had faded into soft yellow patches along the back of one wrist then wrapped around to the front.
If he hung on at all, he probably didn't do it by himself.
So who held him?
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After another hour of his eyes slowly closing, Kurogane decides—infuriating as it is—to call it a day. He's exhausted; not the yawning, rubbing your eyes kind of tired, but the dead-while-walking, bone-deep pressure that settles on your joints and clings to you after weeks of not sleeping.
Not from lack of trying. In the military, Kurogane was a good sleeper. His officers told them to get some rest and that was what he did; close your eyes, shut up and let your brain cool itself down for a few hours.
Even after deaths and gunshots and men screaming as they died, he still closed his eyes every time he was told without so much as a roll or yawn first.
And now, in the goddamned city on a fancy featherbed that Tomoyo insisted would be good for his back, the only thing that comes when he shuts his eyes are dreams. Nightmares. Memories. Whatever you want to call them.
Dying soldiers, screaming for their families before they go quiet. Tomoyo sobbing in his arms after a date. His mother, shriveled and grey like the last time he saw her alive. A man with no face that makes Kurogane's heart pound.
Ghosts of the past. As far as Kurogane is concerned, they should all just fuck off back to their graves.