The Eye of the Beholder
written in 2002 and unlikely to be finished any time soon -- just that there were two reasons I wanted to post this:
(A) One reviewer asked if I'd ever written Gravi fanfic so I wanted to post this for browsing and say hi, yes I did, and thanks for actually reading my webpage!
(B) (slightly toning down the rantage) The last review I got on Side Effects (and on a couple other things too) was someone complaining about how long it's been since I updated -- except it was particularly irritating on Side Effects since I just posted the one-shot with the explicit purpose of saying "look, I had an attack of real life, but I'm not slacking off for no purpose." People who complain about "why haven't you updated?" seem to have no concept of the fact that my providing their entertainment is not more important than my ability to sleep or work or keep my job.
And I'm having a sudden attack of sympathizing with Yuki about the grouchy writer syndrome. I have a life, and a more-than-full time job, and I was lucky to get four or five hours of sleep per night this past month! I did not have time to write fanfiction when I was busy dealing with real life commitments including the job that actually pays me to keep a roof over my head. Comments like "Why haven't you updated" or "Why aren't you writing" or "I'm not going to bother to log in since you haven't updated" (yes, I got that one too) don't make me want to update faster -- they make me want to beat my head against the screen, scream, and ignore the damn computer until I get done fuming about how much people who've never worked a writing job fail to understand that fanfiction is a lower priority than things that pay so that you can keep your apartment roof over your head... snarl fume growl... yeah, I'm having a very Yuki day right now. .
Saying "I'm looking forward to more" is not a problem at all -- that's encouraging, and says that the review writer understands that real life happens. I've got no problems with that. I like that kind of review and am grateful to get them.
I've just got major problems with people who complain that I'm slow and demand updates like they're a right and whine when they don't get updates as fast as they want. I'm a professional. Pay me to write, and you get updates on your schedule, because that's what pros do in exchange for the pay. But nobody pays for fanfic. That means nobody gets to demand updates, because real life and the jobs that pay have GOT to come first.
anyway, on with the reformat and paste job...
"You're married?" Ryuuichi said, looking up from where he was tying Kumagoro's ears around a pencil. "When did that happen?"
"Seven years ago," Sakano said, rueful. "If you don't mind, Sakuma-san, the original point was..."
"Did I give you a wedding present?"
"Sakuma-san," Hiroshi said, "can you wait just a minute?"
"Not if I didn't give him a wedding present for seven whole years! Did I?" Ryuichi asked anxiously.
"Yes, you did, Sakuma-san," Sakano said, gathering his patience, and reflecting that life around the combination of Ryuichi and Shuichi had to be very good practice for handling babies who, sooner or later, turned into first three-year-olds and then seven-year-olds. "So anyway, what I've been trying to say--"
"What was it?"
"My wife is... well... having a difficult time, and..."
"No, the wedding present!"
Even Shuichi sighed. That, Sakano thought, was rather a case of the pot and the kettle, but still... "It was a stuffed bunny, Sakuma-san."
"So the baby will have a Kumagoro to play with," Ryuichi said, relieved. "That's fine, then." He went back to knotting Kumagoro's ears around the pencil, then tried to write something with it. Maybe Kumagoro was going to be a credited lyricist on their next album... Sakano called his mind back to the meeting's purpose with a shake of the head.
"So I was wondering," he said for about the dozenth time, "if N G might be willing to shift our schedules around so that Bad Luck could stay around Tokyo for rehearsals and recording, rather than another tour? Bad Luck was already scheduled to start work on another CD four months from now; if we could move that forward a little... I... um... I really don't want to leave her, at a time like this... if it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience..."
"Inconvenience?" Touma said quietly. "You're talking about your child, Sakano-kun. That's more than worth any inconvenience, isn't it?"
"You're talking about your child," K added dryly. "You're going to have at least eighteen years of inconvenience to deal with. Better start practicing now."
"That's not as reassuring as it could be, you know," Sakano mumbled, polishing his glasses on the tail of his shirt.
Hiroshi reached over and scrubbed his knuckles over the top of Shuichi's head. "What's wrong?" he asked. "I'd have thought you'd have been bouncing off the walls with an excuse to stay around the house for six whole months. ...Don't tell me you're fighting with him again."
"No, just..." Shuichi stopped, and heaved a huge sigh. "It's like walking on eggshells, you know? He's trying to finish a book, the editor's always calling to nag him, so he's under too much pressure, so he gets so mad when I break things or make noise, I've been living on takeout ramen whenever we don't eat at a concert hall, and..." He sighed again. "And... Hiro... I mean... I... um... I can't, can I."
"Can't what?" Hiroshi said, and took a swig from a can of soda.
"I can't... I mean... I just... can't..." He stopped, and gulped hard, and said, "I can't be everything he needs, can I. I can't... have his child..."
Hiroshi sprayed a fountain of cola across the street, and spent a while clutching at a nearby lamp-post hacking and wheezing.
Shuichi gave him a half-lidded glare. "Oh, shut up, you moron."
"Me?" Hiroshi choked. "Shuichi no baka -- what, you think if he just screws you often enough, you'll get pregnant or something?"
With his cheeks stained as brilliant pink as his hair, Shuichi smacked him across the back of the head indignantly. "NO! I... I just... I mean... Sakano-san's got a family. Seguchi-san's got a family. Noriko-san's got a family. K-san's got a family. Everybody else has got a family. Yuki-san's got a family too, he just runs from them, but I... um... I wonder if sometimes that's why he... hurts so much. Because he needs a family. I mean... a child. I mean, he can yell and shout at me, but he wouldn't yell at a child like that, would he? Maybe he needs someone more... pure than me, someone who could just love, like a child, and... that's one thing I can't ever give him..."
Hiroshi bit back his first five or six responses to that while he was relearning how to breathe. Responses like What do you mean he wouldn't yell at a child like that? If he can treat you like a piece of leftover chewing-gum he hasn't bothered to scrape off the sole of his shoe... and Someone who'd love him more purely -- or irrationally -- than you? Shuichi, who do you think qualifies for that? Buddha?
Finally, he managed to get a lungful of air that wasn't half adulterated with carbonated beverage, and said, "Look. There's nothing to do about what you can't give him, is there. Just start with the stuff you can give him, okay? Like not burning half the kitchen down while he's trying to concentrate..."
"That was an accident," Shuichi mumbled.
"...or losing him three chapters of revisions when his computer shuts down when you blow half the house's fuses trying to plug too many appliances into the same power strip..."
"...but I just wanted to bake him a cake to encourage him and..."
"Do it someplace else," Hiroshi suggested. "Then just take the cake home, done, baked, frosted, not setting off the fire alarm, and not blowing half the house's circuits. Then he gets to see the good parts and you get to hide the bad parts."
Shuichi was looking at him like he now held the solution to all of life's problems. "Hiro-kun, you're a genius! ...Where, though?"
Hiroshi was mentally kicking himself even as he heard his mouth saying, "You can try it at my place."
His mind was already filling up with clouds of black smoke, irate neighbors with sudden power outages, scorch marks on the walls, and howling landlords, as Shuichi said delightedly, "Sure! Thanks, Hiro!"
Yuki heard Hiroshi's motorcycle roar away, and silently braced himself for the inevitable incoming whirlwind of noise and commotion and hysteria...
...except that it didn't come. And that was, in its own way, even harder to ignore. He heard the door squeak and a small anxious hiss of Shuichi's breath, and then, a few minutes later, a floorboard squeak, and then nothing.
He stared at the screen intently, trying just to get back to work... except that the sound of nothing was echoing louder than any normal tempest.
Finally, with a groan, Yuki pushed the screen of the laptop closed and stalked over to his door and slid it open. "Now what?"
Shuichi stood frozen in the middle of the living-room floor, obviously caught mid-tiptoe. His face and hair and clothes were streaked with black and white in approximately equal proportions -- it smelled like something had charred, and the white looked suspiciously like flour. Yuki shut his eyes briefly and rubbed at his temples, the other hand patting at a shirt pocket to see if he had any cigarettes left.
"I'm sorry," Shuichi said miserably.
"For what?"
"I... er... I didn't want to disturb you, I thought I wasn't making any noise..."
Yuki thought about this new and interesting revelation for a moment, then decided against explaining about the strangeness of the absence of noise, since it might discourage him from making future attempts at something lower than 120 decibels. Not for the first time, he wondered if Shuichi's constant high-volume lifestyle was due to his eardrums having been permanently damaged by the hours spent on stage surrounded by loud music.
Instead, he asked, "What happened to you this time?"
"Umm... there was... kind of a fire. At Hiroshi's place. Just a small one, but..."
"What, did you try to cook something again?"
Shuichi flinched. "I said I was sorry..."
"Never mind. Just get the soot off before you sit on anything." He walked back into his office and shut the door.
"No," K said.
"But K-saaaaan!" Shuichi begged, clutching at his knees. "Hiro-kun says I can't bake at his place again or his neighbors will lynch him and even I know better than to ask Sakano-san right now and I really really want to bake Yuki-san a cake because he's almost done with his book and he's really tired and he needs something to cheer him up and--"
"I said no," K said again, and thumbed loose the safety on the revolver shoved through the back of his belt.
"But Noriko-saaaaan..."
"But Tatsuha-saaaaan..."
Shuichi stared at the door to Seguchi Touma's office with a trembling hand raised to knock. And kept staring, for fifteen minutes, completely petrified between need and dread. Then, finally, defeated, he put his hand down and slunk away.
"Really? You mean it, Sakuma-san?" Shuichi's eyes took up about three quarters of his skull when they went all shimmery like that. Ryuichi wondered how he did it.
"Really!" Ryuichi said. "But it has to be a carrot cake!"
"It does? ...why?"
"Kumagoro wants to help too," Ryuichi said earnestly. "Kumagoro wants to go on that cooking show. And of course Kumagoro only likes to bake carrot cakes; he's a rabbit, you know."
"But Yuki-san hates vegetables."
"Yuki-san hates anything that isn't beer and cigarettes, doesn't he?" Ryuichi asked.
Despondent, Shuichi said, "You might be right. And I'm not beer or cigarettes, am I..."
Ryuichi's brows crooked together. "That could be a problem."
Somewhere, Shuichi was melting something plastic with some horrible gear-disintegrating noises. And the rest of the week had been so amazingly quiet... Yuki groaned, thinking he should have known better than to hope it might last, and stalked out into the kitchen.
"I'm sorry!" Shuichi said desperately. There was a cheap hand mixer smoking on the countertop, and a bowl full of something that smelled both scorched and fermented, and a combination of flour, egg shells, and... yes, beer foam... dripping from the counters.
"What in the hell do you think you're doing with that -- that -- what is that...?"
"I... I wanted to bake you a cake... but Sakuma-san said you hated everything that wasn't beer and cigarettes and I thought he might be right and a cigarette cake sounded like a really horrible idea and I know I heard somebody say something about beer batter once and -- and -- I'm sorry, Yuki --"
Yuki ran a hand down his face. "You were making me a beer cake."
Miserably, Shuichi nodded. "Except I didn't know when you use beer instead of water it doesn't mix right, I put the beaters in and it kind of exploded or something, maybe it's the fuzz like when you shake them, I don't know, but..."
"Listen to me," Yuki said. "Listen close. No beer cakes. Got it? No beer cakes. No beer cookies. No beer anything. Just stay the hell out of the kitchen, all right? The last thing I need right now is another remodeling crew. Just stay out of the kitchen."
He stormed back into the office, shut the door, locked it, and tried not to think too hard about the smell of scorched beer that still perfumed the entire house for fear he might either strangle the brat or start laughing, and the last thing he needed to do was encourage the little fool to make more life-and-sanity-shattering experiments with electric appliances. How he'd managed not to electrocute himself on Hiroshi's guitar and amps...
"Hiroo-ooo-ooo!" (hic) "Yuuuuki haaates me--" (sniffle choke) "--because I can't cook and I burn things and -- and -- and I'm not beer--!"
"What?"
"I said--" (choke sniffle sob)
"Never mind," Hiroshi said, rubbing his temples, "I heard you the first time, I don't think I want to hear it again. Where are you now?"
"Just don't forget next time," Hiroshi said tiredly. "Just stay away from electricity for a while. Don't fry his computer. Don't burn down his kitchen. And don't repaint it with beer foam and cake mix either."
"But -- but -- I wanted to bake him a cake...!"
"And we decided you needed to do that somewhere else, remember?"
"But nobody else would let me bake at their house!"
"Because we all know what happens when you set foot in a kitchen!" Hiroshi retorted.
"Hirooooo!" Shuichi sniffled at tears, with enormous tear-shimmery eyes wavering. "You're so mean..."
"Listen," Hiroshi said. "How about this. We go buy a cake--"
"But I want to make it myself!"
"--We go buy a cake," Hiroshi repeated, "a white cake. And we go buy some colored frosting. And you decorate it. So you made him a cake and nothing gets burned or short-circuited or bled on..."
"Really?" Shuichi scrubbed at his tear-streaked face, and said, "He won't mind that I didn't bake it myself...?"
Hiroshi bit back the first response of He'll be grateful you didn't bake it yourself, if he's got any taste buds left after the chain-smoking, and said instead, "Trust me."
"Hirooooooo--! The strawberry flavor spilled all over and I tried to erase it but it just -- "
Face in one hand, Hiroshi said, "Shuichi, I told you you can't erase frosting!"
Tonight, when the door creaked cautiously open, a staggeringly strong scent of strawberry food flavoring came drifting in after it. Yuki shoved the laptop back and buried his face in both crossed arms on the desk.
Not tonight. Please, God, not tonight, I haven't got the patience left to deal with some new disaster right now...
A few minutes later, there were water sounds and splashing sounds coming from the bathroom.
I think I can trust him to wash himself without drowning himself in the process. Can't I? Please, God...
"No wonder Yuki hates me," Shuichi said, miserable. "Not only am I not beer, I can't even make him a cake..."
"Look," Hiroshi said. "You're a rock star, not a chef. So why are you trying to be a chef? If you want to give him something, give him something you're good at. Write a song for him."
And even you can't burn down or short-circuit part of his house while you're writing music, Shu-chan. Or else I've been underestimating your powers of chaos for half our lives...
I hope I haven't been underestimating your powers of chaos for half our lives...
"I'll screw that up too," Shuichi said. "I screw up everything, don't I?"
"Not everything," Hiroshi said. "You're very good at being my best friend, you know? And a couple million people think you're very good at singing." And you're very good at loving that sour-faced ingrate who doesn't appreciate how much you care about him. But I can't say that to you, can I.
"But Yuki says I've got no talent at lyrics..."
"So write something instrumental. I'll help you play it."
The next thing he knew, Shuichi was hugging him until his ribs creaked. "Hiroooooo--! You're a genius...! You could have been a doctor no problem, you know--"
Half laughing and half wheezing, Hiroshi rumpled Shuichi's unkempt thatch of shaggy pink hair. "But then who'd be the guitarist for the next great legend of rock?"
"Damn straight! You know, that'd be a great ad campaign--" Shuichi hopped on top of Hiroshi's desk and started posing. "Bad Luck: The next great--"
"Shuichi, the desk--!"
"Hiro! I'm trying to be inspired here!" He tapped a foot against the top of the desk and rubbed his chin. "The next great legend of--"
The desk's makeshift leg decided it was tired of Shuichi's antics, and toppled out from under the desk. The desk followed it down. Finally, as if startled by the reminder of the existence of gravity, Shuichi landed in the middle of the entire mess.
From somewhere in the middle of the pile of debris, there came a heartfelt wail of misery. "Hiroooooooo! I'm such a complete disaster... no wonder Yuki hates me..."
Hiroshi reached over and started gingerly extracting broken pieces of wood. "Look," he said, "let's just write up a checklist. Things to do. Things not to do. Like not standing on a desk whose broken leg is propped up by three old textbooks. Right? Let's just make a list..."
Somewhat battered and the worse for wear, but very determined, Shuichi sat down very carefully on Yuki's sofa and thumbed over another page in the notebook, written out by Shuichi under Hiroshi's determined supervision, with a couple of margin notes in Hiroshi's hand.
"Jeez, Hiro," Shuichi mumbled, "what can I do?" Then he reflexively clamped a hand over his mouth, and mumbled, "Sorry..."23. Don't walk in front of cars when going across street.
24. Don't shout 'Tadaima!' at top of lungs and go flip on TV. Go put on Walkman instead.
24b. Don't sing along with Walkman either.
25. Don't go into kitchen. See also 7, 13, and 19.
26. Don't jump on furniture.
26b. Don't dance on furniture.
26c. Don't drum on furniture.
26d. Don't do anything else on furniture for which furniture was not designed.
27. Laundry. Just one scoop of laundry soap, not whole box.
28. No more beer cakes. See also 7, 13, 19, and 25. (Hiroshi had marked this one IMPORTANT POINT, SHUICHI.)
29. Avoid electrical appliances when possible.
There were no snarling sounds from the office, so Shuichi decided it must not have been a major transgression; he breathed a sigh of relief and flipped another page. They were mostly don'ts too.
With a sigh, he flipped back to the front of the notebook, where Hiroshi had listed the top three in big letters.
He'd complained that those were too vague and didn't give him any actual guidance on why not to go into the kitchen, so Hiroshi had made up the next 57 rules on the spot. But more and more they were just looking like variations on the first three.How not to bother Yuki while he's writing.
1. Don't destroy, electrocute, burn, disfigure, or maim anything, including yourself, for as
long as you can manage.2. Don't make noise for as long as you can manage.
3. Try to be quiet and inconspicuous when you do end up destroying, electrocuting,
burning, disfiguring, or maiming things, including yourself.
Shuichi flopped over on the sofa and looked around the large and rather empty room for something to do. --Correction. Something quiet and non-breakable to do.
The last time he'd gotten this many lectures on how to behave, he'd been in a library. Maybe that was it, maybe something about books just rubbed off on people like that; maybe that was why Yuki was so cranky about noise, that librarian had been too...
Library.
Books.
Books were very quiet.
And Yuki wrote them, too.
Shuichi sat bolt upright, as though he'd just been hit by a lightning bolt.
Yuki wrote books. He could go read some of Yuki's books. There had to be some of Yuki's books around, didn't there?
It didn't take all that long to search the bookshelves in the living room, because there weren't any bookshelves in the living room. Or in the bedroom. Or anywhere else. Shuichi sat down on the sofa again and thought about this.
Why does someone who writes books not keep them around? Doesn't he like his own books?
But then... they weren't cigarettes or beer. Sakuma-san's offhand analysis seemed to be getting more and more unwilling reinforcement all the time...
Well, if there weren't any of Yuki's books here, he'd have to go to where Yuki's books were.
"I'm going to the library!" Shuichi called without thinking about it, and scooped up his notebook and his jacket and ran out, the front door banging shut behind him.
Two seconds later, the office door slammed open, and Yuki stood wild-eyed in the doorway, staring after him. "You're going to the WHAT?"
After a few minutes of silence, Yuki thought, Auditory hallucination, maybe? I've been shut up in that room with my own imagination for so many weeks now...
Still, tense from some unease he didn't know how to name, he sighed and turned around and headed back to his desk.
A minute later, he went to the kitchen, grabbed a beer, and headed back to his desk. God, I've got to get this thing written before I completely lose my mind...