When You Wake Up In Kyoto
Disclaimer: don't own
Notes: Day 22 of the 30 Day Cheesy Tropes Challenge by ghiraher on tumblr: online relationship
Kiyoshi looks down at his hands again, flexing them in his lap where they lie empty and upturned. They're what led him here, from the very beginning of this whole thing many months ago hunched over a public library computer typing in words, the things he typed about as he'd tried to fit his fingers to the keys properly (he had never managed to master touch-typing and rarely needed it, still rarely types anything and he had never had his own computer until a few months prior to now) were his hands and what he made with them; he had articulated gestures on a screen where they glimmered in and out of focus on another screen, one all the way in Kyoto, where he's headed. He had bought the train tickets with his own hands, pressing hard at the buttons on the touch-screen, thick glass unyielding to his normally powerful hands. These hands are what got him the money to take the week off, to venture toward the unknown, to another who makes his living by his hands in a very different way.
The rain splashes off the window outside; he cannot see the countryside as it passes, cannot enjoy the view—he digs his phone out of his pocket. There are no new messages, no sudden cancellations—but even if Mibuchi has second thoughts, is coy and cagey sometimes, he's not one to back down from something like this at the last minute. He's clever enough to have found a back door sooner, tactful enough to have ended things before they got too far, wouldn't tease if there was something behind it. At least that's the impression Kiyoshi's gotten from what they've learned so far from each other, albeit from behind screen after screen.
The first time Kiyoshi Teppei had ever communicated with Mibuchi Reo was a little over eight months ago, after he'd settled into the small town where his uncle lived and began to prepare to take over his role as town handyman. Initially the residents had been wary, but Kiyoshi's grin had been disarming enough (as it always is) and he'd easily been absorbed into their midst as a long-lost son they'd always had a place for. He would spend his evenings in the public library, reminded of his friends back home in Tokyo—Hyuuga, Riko, Furihata, Kuroko, and all of their favorite books. Some days he'd pick out a historical thriller that Hyuuga would have read cover-to-cover five times in a week, sometimes a cheerful mystery novel that seemed right up Furihata's alley. It had been terribly sentimental of him, remaining attached to bonds that are now rusted through, but it had been comforting.
He'd never expected to miss the city so much but he had, the people and the bustle and the late-night activity; the public library and a hole-in-the-wall sushi bar were the only places open past early evening here and so he'd come back again and again even after he'd managed to tire of the books. He'd begun reserving computers, looking things up on websites—facts and figures, basketball scores, e-mails, things he could just as well look up on his uncle's old computer.
And then he'd gotten the message, another piece of spam that he'd hesitated to delete, an ad for a dating site. He'd been single, of course, never had a real boyfriend in his life—there was Makoto, but Makoto wasn't a boyfriend per se rather than someone he'd been attached to against his will and could not escape from, someone to whom he'd been drawn to while they'd both resented the tangled bonds between them, perhaps more than they'd resented each other at times.
Being the bored, single handyman that he was, he'd signed up for it on a whim. It had been easy enough putting a picture of a basketball as his profile picture and checking boxes—interested in men, interested in those who share traits, even the traits themselves. It had been quite introspective, deciding what he really liked. Sports, good food, delicate things, and working with his hands had been the only really important ones, the only ones that had seemed at first to relate exactly to him. He'd checked a few more on a lark, remembering Riko's words about lying on the internet and wondering how things were going with her and that gamer boyfriend of hers—they'd met online, hadn't they?
And he had submitted his profile and promptly forgotten all about it after he'd gotten home and begun to help his aunt with dinner.
A week later, Mibuchi Reo had messaged him and in the public library he'd typed up a reply, half-confused before he had remembered what this was for. Mibuchi lived in Kyoto and he made pastries and candy; he created delicate marzipan creatures and thin icing sculptures and he'd send pictures if Kiyoshi wanted to look. He'd wondered if Kiyoshi was stylish, if he liked tarot—Kiyoshi had replied ambiguously to the first and with a firm negative to the second, although he wasn't completely uninterested. Perhaps he sounded too boring, like too much of a hick for this Mibuchi person who seemed to crave sophistication, and perhaps that would be the end of it—he could hear Hyuuga in his head telling him to present himself perhaps a little less honestly and had rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Mibuchi had responded, enclosing the pictures of his adorable marzipan cats, held out in long and lacquered fingers—presumably Mibuchi's own. They had been nice hands, obviously well taken care of, and Kiyoshi had imagined very inappropriate things about them that night. Perhaps they weren't Mibuchi's but he hadn't really cared about that in the moment, some kind of earthly high hitting him in the chest and making him feel like he was finally getting somewhere in the world, even if that somewhere was just jacking it to a stranger's manicure. Mibuchi's final words stuck in the back of his mind—that it didn't matter so much if he wasn't stylish because he could tell things about him from his words and his tarot reading. What these things were he didn't say. Kiyoshi had fallen asleep having decided that Mibuchi was quite crafty.
Indeed, he had turned out to be a kindred spirit, sharing amusing gossip about friends Kiyoshi did not know but somehow entertained him anyway, listening to Kiyoshi's tales of small-town work and his family, encouraging him to get a laptop so they could video chat, shit-talking about basketball, a game he apparently knew as well as Kiyoshi did. They exchanged pictures and those were indeed Mibuchi's polished fingers, as well-placed around a small confection as they were on the side of his jaw in a perfect pose. He had, Kiyoshi decided (and remarked to him in an e-mail) very nice eyelashes. Mibuchi replied that he had worked on his makeup especially for Kiyoshi that morning and Kiyoshi could not quite tell if it was sarcastic or not.
Five months after they had begun to exchange e-mails they actually set up a video chat, had heard each other's voices for the first time—Mibuchi's had been just as he'd imagined, husky with a hint of mirth. His eyes had danced in the dim light of his room in Kyoto and he'd been receptive—if he didn't like Kiyoshi at least he was a good actor. And Kiyoshi, at the end of that, had been able to confirm, if only to himself, that he did like Mibuchi Reo an awful lot.
And that is not the problem; the problem is not that they like each other. They're adults who can deal with this shit much better than passive-aggressive teenagers or schoolyard kids with missing teeth or college students who hide behind beer as their number one excuse. The problems are distance, attachment to the places in this world that they have found, Mibuchi to his hometown of Kyoto and Kiyoshi to the town where his uncle and aunt laid down their roots before he was born, the hours between them on even the fastest train that are making Kiyoshi restless with the rain pouring down on the window and the coolness of the air conditioner turned up too high in the heat of the summer, the restlessness of wanting to get up and roam and stretch and the stiffness of his bum knee, flexing his hands in his lap. He has taken bigger risks in the path but he's still not sure if they were worth the price, and here he is getting himself into emotional debt with someone he barely knows and is not sure he can trust.
Perhaps if he can sleep the rest of the way it will be sunny when he wakes up in Kyoto.