Okuyasu finally picked up.
Which was a good thing, because Josuke didn't wanna seem fussy or overbearing. 'twas a lost cause anyway, his mom would tell him, given that he had been anxious ever since he came home from the supposed double date that afternoon, and had walked from one end of the hall to the other over forty time (yes, she counted up until forty), mumbling to himself, hands firmly in his pants' pockets because he knew the moment he stopped holding it tight he would ruin his pomp by running his hand through his hair in frustration. An emotion that he caused to himself, his mom would remind him, because he refused to just walk over to Okuyasu's house and knock.
When the boy in question finally picked up, Josuke was a bit stiff from the draft in the hallway as well as from the tension built up by being stubborn. Okuyasu's voice only just managed to break through.
"Josuke?"
He sounded a bit hoarse. "Yeah, dude, I'm here," Josuke said. The tension didn't leave him immediately like he hoped. "You didn't come."
"Fuck, sorry about that. I'm jus'... 'm not in the best mood right now. Didn't wanna ruin it for you guys."
"Shit, what happened? You okay?" Josuke could hear something fell on the floor with a metallic clunk. "What's that?"
"Oh it's- 's the paint can. I'm fixin' up big bro's room upstairs. Been meaning to for a while now so... It's." Okuyasu trailed off.
Josuke felt his shoulders stiffen up a bit more.
"It's some'n to do."
Josuke bit his lip. After a moment of consciously picking off all traces of anxiety from his manners, he said, calmly, "I'm gonna come over."
"No, dude, y'don't have to!" Okuyasu immediately barked, with something like panic in his tone. "I'm a bummer right now," he added, almost sheepishly. "It's dumb, it'll go away on its own. Jus' some'n from the class."
"Don't even think of it as me coming over to comfort you if that's better." Josuke had to actively try to stay nonchalant now. "I'm helping with the room fixin'. It's gonna take the rest of the night with just you. That cool?"
He just caught his free hand moving towards his head on its own when Okuyasu sighed and he could hear the paint can being picked up. "Fine. I'm gonna be upstairs, let yaself in when you're over."
By August 1999, Okuyasu had been sleeping in the guest room downstairs for ten months.
Keicho was a private person, and nobody could blame him at that. No kid would want to leave their toys trailing about when their father was so quick to anger. Keicho had faced so much of that misdirected rage, had put himself between his father and his younger brother so many times, that anything he had that wasn't broken he held on with an almost death grip. His routines, his CD collection, his rules, his own anger. He never learned to let go, and Okuyasu, whom Morioh had given more chances than it ever did his brother, had been feeling something like pity for that, and then guilty for pitying his brother.
He didn't really want to use Keicho's room again, especially when he never got his brother's permission. When Keicho had left balancing the book in Okuyasu's hand, their life became a clash between Okuyasu's fussing about trying to take care of things and Keicho's own rhythm and order, the solution to which that they came up with being that Keicho got the entirety of the second floor to himself. Okuyasu didn't mind – everything was simple with him, really – but after Keicho's death he felt even more out of place in that part of the house.
"It's fine if you wanna seal it off, dude," Josuke told him one evening when he stayed the night, "you're the one living here. It's not like people know or care about that stuff, either way." Josuke was smart, but he also believed in courtesy and manners even though he had been subjected to so much of the opposite of that, and it made for a strange kind of trust in humanity. One that was different from Okuyasu's own.
So in the end he decided to only seal Keicho's room. He had been slowly packing everything his brother left behind in the house into small carboard boxes and stashing them in the hallway. He wanted to keep a whole afternoon and evening free just to fix up the room itself, but he didn't think today would be it.
"Yeah, Koichi actually steered me home the moment we were sure you wouldn't show," Josuke said mid-sweep. "I don't think Yukako mind. Actually I'm pretty sure Yukako doesn't really want me there third wheeling them. Gotta say I was about the same."
"Sorry for leaving you hangin'," Okuyasu repeated, just as apologetic as when he said it the first time.
"It's not your fault you aren't well, dude," Josuke stood up straight, free hand in his pocket. "Though a word beforehand would be good. But you were home late from the class, right?"
"Yeah."
"Goto-sensei holding you up again?"
"Nah, he's nice." He would be, after Josuke and Okuyasu dragged him out of some serious troubles last month. He was also a nice man in general. Okuyasu thought his writing style really didn't reflect that.
Josuke raised an eyebrow at his answer. Well, Josuke would have a different impression of Mister Goto Azuma, moderately famous novelist, given that the one who had to take a pen in the arm to grab the man (then under a Stand's control) was him and not Okuyasu. That kind of viciousness must keep people wary for a long time. Not to mention the apology gift they got was a place in Goto's ten-hour creative writing course organized by the uni, which was of no use to Josuke, but which Okuyasu snatched right up.
Outside of that event though, Goto-sensei was a mild-mannered, if a bit emotional and wordy person. He had anguish in his heart, sure, but he told Okuyasu once in class, in the tone of someone who was citing their name and age, that he wanted to love everything and anything more than he wanted to wallow in his sadness, so he channeled all of it into his writing and left his personal life free for his other emotions. Okuyasu found that a good way to do things as any.
"I'm gonna trust you on that," Josuke said after a stretch of silence. Okuyasu grinned. "Anyway, something happened during the writing class then?"
"Yeah- well, nah, but yeah." Okuyasu rubbed his hands nervously under Josuke's confused look. "I mean, kinda? Goto-sensei gave us a prompt, and then I wrote something sad, and it bummed me out. 's all."
Josuke's eyes grew wide. "Oh," he said, "huh."
"Yeah, it's dumb. Tolja don't mind it."
"It's not dumb if it bums you out, dude." Josuke leaned the broom against the desk and stepped closer to Okuyasu. His pomp looked almost plastic-ish under the buzzing light of the room. Okuyasu blinked when he held his biceps with both his hands. "I like you happy, Okuyasu. We gotta go there somehow, and I'm not a waiting man."
Okuyasu looked at Josuke, eyes somehow brighter than the light should've made them, hands holding him firm as if willing him to believe. As if that had ever been necessary. He took a deep breath, and broke out in a grin.
"Thought so. You're a musical man."
"Hell yeah I am." The grin crept up onto Josuke's face, and he dragged Okuyasu in for a quick hug. "So, what's that piece you wrote today about?"
"I mean, you can read it."
It must be impossible for Josuke's eyes to grow wider than this. This was maximum wide eye for him. "Really?"
"'s not fine art or some'n, but if you're cool with that, why the hell not. Wait here."
Josuke waited in Keicho's half-cleaned room while Okuyasu went downstairs to fetch his notebook. Goto-sensei didn't care what his students did with what they wrote after class ("It's yours," he had said, with passion, "and me telling you what to do with what's inherently yours is against everything I live for. Any experience you have with your own writing is deeply personal and unique, and if that includes setting your drafts on fire and inhaling the smoke, who am I to keep that from you?" He seemed to actually got misty-eyed at that idea.), but Okuyasu liked the man, and he thought keeping the things he wrote in his class in order was a way to show respect to a good teacher. Or it could at least make up for his terrible handwriting.
He flipped through the notebook as he went back upstairs. Man, he wrote more than he thought he did.
"Here," he handed the notebook – opened to the correct page – to Josuke, who had finished sweeping the room and was bouncing on the balls of his feet in a subdued excitement. Josuke seemed extra careful with his hold on the thing.
"It's a poem?" Okuyasu didn't think that was actually meant to be a question, but he faltered a bit nonetheless.
"It's- yeah. You aren't into that?"
"Dude, I barely read actual literature no matter what kind, that's not the thing. I'm just... poems are supposed to be even more about emotions than, like, novels and shit, right? I, uh..."
Josuke bit his lip. Okuyasu tried to follow the thread of logic.
"Goto-sensei said our writing is whatever we will it to be. If ya worry this won't be manly and cool, I'm gonna. I'm gonna will it into being for ya."
"It's not that, dummy." Josuke smacked him over the head with the notebook. He was smiling again though, so Okuyasu didn't mind. "I just don't think I can get the whole experience without you, like, walking me through it. Since you're the one with the emotions in this poem and all. So can you..."
Okuyasu grabbed the notebook. He looked at Josuke, and then at the words on the page between them, and then tentatively finished that hanging thought. "...recite it for ya?"
"Forget it if it bums you out again, okay?" Josuke held his hands up. "I'm cool either way. I wanna read it properly, sure, but if it's gonna ruin the night for you then forget it."
Okuyasu stood there with his own notebook in his hand, with his boyfriend, in his brother's room that they were cleaning. He looked at Josuke, and then up at the buzzing light, and then at Keicho's CD collection on the shelf, newly dusted.
Finally he took a deep breath and said, "I'm not gonna hold onto it like that, dude." And then he took Josuke's hand and said, "Let's come up to the roof for a bit."
They left Keicho's room behind and went up to the attic, from where they climbed their way awkwardly up onto the Nijimuras' newly re-tiled roof. August was too early to feel chilly at night in Morioh, but there were winds, and the sky was wide open. Okuyasu thought it was a good place as any to give the poem a reading.
They settled on the warm tiles, and then Okuyasu had to stand up to go get a flashlight, and when he came back to the roof Josuke was still there – as if he would go away the moment Okuyasu blinked – the notebook balanced on his thigh.
"Ready," Josuke said once Okuyasu had sit back down snug next to him, partly as a question and partly as a confirmation of his own status, and Okuyasu nodded.
"Alright."
Okuyasu had never recited a poem before. His mom was a storyteller when she was alive, but there was a long stretch of time during which her conditions worsened slowly and the occasions lessened until both her and the stories were gone. His dad wasn't a wordy man, not outside of anger and grief. Keicho really would rather have silence than a human voice outside of his own, and again Okuyasu couldn't blame him for that. Or even question it, really, not when Keicho had his CDs and treasured them so. Outside of all that, Okuyasu had also never been good at school. He had other things to do, and the few literature classes he actually sat in for never saw him chosen by a teacher to read anything out loud from the textbook.
So, Okuyasu didn't really know what he was doing, no. But he was also a simple man, and right now it was doing it or not doing it. And Josuke had casted his vote – the only one that counted here and now.
"It's called 1999," he said, and found his voice a bit raspy. He didn't figure out to clear his throat.
.
Cigarette butt on the ground
he chose one to pick up
and hold like a torch
Hand over head
Whispers like smoke
flow
.
1999
numbers he carried
one
in his left pocket
on the pad
along the line
into the waves
.
it's important, that's what he said
.
Cigarette butt in the air
His hand red
His eyes red
through them, the sky orange
twilight is for a while,
if statues are the same
.
1999
replays dissolve
into statics
into waves
away
one
on his lips
.
I didn't mean it like that,
or was it
I never told him,
or even
I don't think he knows,
that's what he said
.
Cigarette butt against the sky
futile
1999
variables
one
dissolved into the waves
.
my name is doubt,
and his I never got
.
1999
I met two ghosts in Morioh.
.
.
They were quiet a long time after that. When Josuke spoke up, he sounded like he just cried a bit. "Dude, that's so fucking sad."
Okuyasu tried to keep himself from shining the flashlight on Josuke to see if he really had been crying. "For real? I don' even know what it's exactly about anymore. Jus' a buncha, uh, concepts put together randomly."
"It got emotions into me, alright? So it's good to me, deal with it."
"It makes you sad!"
"It's good sad though. Like listening to a late artist's album sad." Josuke threw an arm around Okuyasu's shoulders. "That's how art is."
"Sure," Okuyasu harrumphed, but then smiled to himself, just a bit.
The two sat there on the roof well into the night. At one point they found their hands intertwined; Okuyasu let himself lean into the contact, flashlight and notebook laid aside, essentially forgotten. Late night breeze felt like sleep.
"The point of that poem is that I love you," he said, and let it be.
The hand in his own tightened, and Josuke replied, with all the conviction his being could store, "I know, dude. Love you too."