Obsidian (i)

Fuji returns that night when the short hand of the living room clock is just beginning to pass two. He'd been snagged into beer and karaoke by some of the executives in his department -- not an uncommon occurence, but one that doesn't grow less irksome with repitition, and has him toying with the idea of climbing further up the corporate ladder just to free up his evenings. It passes quickly; he and ambition are still on distant terms.

Aniki doesn't dream, Yuuta is wont to say with scorn, and Fuji never denies it, just smiles and nods and politely doesn't mention the fact that he's still pulling in more yen than his brother, whose first business venture floundered and is now working overtime at a low-paying, little-known firm, struggling each month in a race with the bills. Yuuta won't accept the family's money -- his principles have remained remarkably sound over the years -- but Fuji and Yumiko find ways to smooth his path, and they gloss the matter over into non-existence.

"Tadaima," he calls out to the shadows of the empty apartment. A shower would be wise, but he is too tired at the moment for wisdom. Shoes off, tie off, a plum from the fridge that he washes without drying his hands off afterwards, and he walks barefooted towards his study dripping a trail of water behind him.

He calls it his study because it's neither bedroom nor living room, but in actuality it's just a place for him to store those things he doesn't care to display in public: trophies from his youth, family pictures, artwork he'd played around with in college that was almost always some variety of sand or stone, broad strokes of black or beige against blue while his teachers despaired of convincing him to work with anything besides contrast.

He calls it his study, but the name he gives it in his mind is Tezuka's Room, where no one else is allowed. Tezuka has always been able to dominate any space he occupies, and retains this quality even through the metamorphosis.

Fuji approaches the life-size obsidian statue that makes up the centerpiece of the room. Detailed craftmanship depicts a boy on the cusp of adolescence, corners of his mouth tucked down, gaze falling blankly across a photo of the Sahara on the opposite wall. It appears to be finished, complete and perfect, but Fuji knows that there's a small chip missing in the left heel, and before that chip is found, Tezuka Kunimitsu will remain locked in stone, shoved in a storage room with the other mementos of his past.

"Sorry, I know you don't like it when I come home so late. I'll try to get away earlier next time. Did you miss me?"

Tezuka, of course, doesn't answer, but he's never been talkative, so there isn't much to miss. Fuji slides a hand down the side of the Seigaku regular uniform turned black, takes a bite from the plum in the other. It is too sour a fruit for his tastes, but Tezuka used to like them once upon a time, and he always keeps a bag in his refrigerator to consume with a grimace that dissolves his everpresent smile.

"They were on sale at the supermarket, so I bought a bit more than usual. Thoughtless of me, I suppose; I don't know how I'm going to finish them alone. Would you like a bite?"

The silence counts, he decides, as an assent and he reaches up, crushing the flesh of the plum against Tezuka's lips and watching them glisten even further with stained juice. Leans in and laps at the tart liquid to taste a mixture of plum and rock and memory.

Tezuka would never have allowed this while living. He remembers Tezuka's sobriety, the way he held himself aloof as if physical contact was something distasteful, his frown when one of the sempais in the club was caught making out in the eqipment shed -- but following on the heels of that comes the aftermath of their last match, Tezuka leaning over him, the wires of the fence digging into his back, thoughts sliding through his mind with unnerving clarity: 'he's going to kiss me' and then 'I think I want him to', the second more terrifying than the first.

Fuji closes his eyes. He thinks he's still a little bit drunk.

The stone is too cold to make the illusion convincing; he's had lovers in the past, girls from work, boys who blush when he catches their eyes on him, and it's from them that he learns the touch of his skin is cool, 'like a damp towel on the brow when you have a fever,' explained Mariko from Accounting while tracing spirals down his arms. Tezuka's chill is neither soothing nor comforting, more like being tossed into an ice water bath while burning up, and Fuji presses closer against him, shivering, ignoring the edges digging into his skin, thinking that it's just like Tezuka to excel him on every point.

He tosses the rest of the plum over his shoulder, hears the rustle of plastic as it lands in the wastebasket. Three points.

The juice has been licked clean by now, and he transfers his attentions to the bridge of Tezuka's nose, his knife-slash cheeks, down to the throat left bare by an open collar, having to standing on tiptoe in the process. "Ne, Tezuka, you're not going to make me do all the work? How rude of you."

'Fuji.' He supplies sound and special effects by himself, imagining Tezuka's sigh and frown, the resignation in his voice. Fuji enjoys eliciting that reaction from people, goes out of his way to do so, but no one ever achieves that exact shade of sufferance, the precise intonation he hears in his mind. No one he's met in his twenty-eight years of life has ever come close to Tezuka Kunimitsu at fourteen, whose image is the one that comes to mind when he contemplates the word perfection. 'Fuji, don't.'

"Don't you be such an old stick in the mud," he murmurs against Tezuka's unyielding abdomen, hands sliding down creases in the jacket that will never, now, be straightened. In his mind he is still fourteen, and can say such things to Tezuka without sounding like a living joke.

Fourteen, and summer has just arrived, golden and sticky-sweet like the honey Yuuta likes to stir into drinks. The sun is high, the sky unmarred blue, and Tezuka stands on a grassy knoll, watching the children below swing their racquets in a drill exercise. There is a hint of wistfulness in his gaze to those who know what to look for, and Fuji desires nothing more at this moment than to wipe it away.

He uses the advantage of surprise to push Tezuka down on the grass, laughing at the dichotomy of Tezuka's disapproving expression with his lopsided glasses, straddling Tezuka's waist and being greatly daring with his hands; fourteen, and he has never taken a lover, the knowledge that guides his movements snatched from dreams of a longer, emptier life, but worth it in the way they make Tezuka bite his lips, grip hard, turn his face into the grass amidst a flurry of dragonfly wings.

"Don't think," he says, pressing a kiss in the crook of Tezuka's elbow, "about anything at all," and takes his own advice while moving down, down, down. The chants of the first-years can still reach their ears, carried by the wind: "One-two! One-two!"

The pleasure draws out like an uncoiling rope, fluid and continuous, stretching from him to Tezuka towards a distant and unknown infinity. He is plucking this half-grown child from his innocence and doesn't stop, doesn't care; in this universe with its fragile eggshell walls, he is innocent himself. "Tezuka," he says as he scrapes his palms against stone, "Tezuka" as he moves, "Tezuka Tezuka Tezuka" in another endless line until the two merge and pleasure becomes simply that utterance of Tezuka's name, the curl of his tongue, "Tezuka" as the sky falls apart like a broken mirror with its myriad reflections, and Fuji comes the closest he's ever been to that concept called love.

When it's over he slumps to the floor, cheek pressed tightly against Tezuka's thigh, eyes still closed against afterimages of sharp edges and glint of glass. His body hurts all over. The flush of warmth brought by consummation fades quickly, leeched away by stone, and he wonders how he looks at this moment, a salaryman closing in on thirty, kneeling before the statue of a young boy in an attitude of worship and debauchery. He wonders how it will be when Tezuka wakes to a generation stretching between them.

Pushing himself up, away, heading for the shower that's become a necessity rather than an option, he puts these questions from his mind. Aniki doesn't dream, but Yuuta is wrong, after all, about this and so many other things. Tezuka is Fuji's dream, the one certainty he clutches at in the eddies of a shifting world.

The shower is quick, and his sheets are soft and silken as he sinks his bruised body into them gratefully. The alarm is set for six-thirty. Work tomorrow, more spreadsheets, more backstabbing co-workers, more Hamasaki Ayumi songs over cans of beer that he never drinks, but for now there is only sleep and the chance to dream.

Tezuka beckons down the road, standing straight and solitary, face tilted away from the sun, and Fuji runs to him, allowing his breath to quicken and the wind to tear his hair into a mess. "Thank you for waiting," he'll say when he reaches Tezuka, and Tezuka will lift an eyebrow, turn away, continue down his path, but Fuji will grab his hand before it's out of reach, and while the rest of the world revolves around money and fact and an endless parade of practical concerns, they'll walk the rest of the way together.