Dare to Move
A/N: I gotta say I have very little patience with both the Takahashi brothers, though I understand and respect their characters; therefore due to my own selfish motives it's going to be a long, convoluted process through which Akihiko falls in love with Takahiro, because if it happened all at once Hiroki would seem like a pretty inconsequential piss in Akihiko's life, and my fic's motive is to show something like the exact opposite. :D
Now that kid!author has had her say, let's go on to thank all my reviewers and alerters once again. I love you all so much it isn't even funny. :P And no, freakylemurcat, flattery does not bore me, so feel free. *cough-review some more-cough* by the way, the backstory of Edward is that there IS no backstory. You can imagine whatevah you like *evil cackle* soulfighter-7, glad to hear from ya :) do write in more often, I don't need humungously long reviews (though I do love those), just a couple of lines is fine too :D
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He was completely normal the next day…except for one thing. He wouldn't touch me. He wouldn't touch me for four whole days.
It had driven him crazy: both the guilt and the longing, and the guilt over the longing as well.
And though he eased up after realizing that I was determined to forget all about it, I swear he's still a bit strange.
Akihiko hadn't really had time to think properly since the day he kissed Hiroki for the second time. Well, it wasn't so much a lack of time as it was a reluctance to think about it at all. He'd created things for himself to do, drowning in his writing for hours on end if nothing else worked. Now, though, he was completely and utterly bored, and his aimless mind wandered blindly into the little pocket of heat marked 'Hiroki' every time it had nothing else to do.
That particular pocket, combined with what he referred to as his new 'manliness', caused problems in more ways than one. He fought the urge to squirm with embarrassment just remembering the number of times his post-orgasmic body had slumped in the shower over the past fortnight, his renegade mouth moaning in the most lewd way imaginable. I seriously thought those kinds of sounds only existed in porn.
Damn it.
He swept a languid look around the classroom, yawning cavernously. Sure enough, everybody was still writing, heads bent over the paper, scrawling away as though their lives depended on it. Akihiko had written out whatever he could and somehow finished the two-hour paper with an hour and forty-five minutes to spare. I think I've got most of it right though. Why is everyone else taking so long?
Yeah, why is everyone taking so long? This desk is so brown…I never noticed the texture before. Well, I did notice the one on my own desk, though. The patterns were rather ugly. All gnarled like an eighty-year-old's fingers. Speaking of old, Tanaka's turning forty-six next month. I should really get him something. We're not exactly throwing parties for domestic help just yet. Haruhiko's proving to be a pain in the ass. Keeps telling me to work hard and all of it; he didn't even exist a year ago, and now he's just taken it upon himself to be my guardian angel or something? Angels…I wonder what happened to that snow angel I made last winter.
Hiroki had found it rather ridiculous.
Uncaring of the heads that snapped up to look at him, he let out a noise of frustration and leaned against the warm wood of his desk. All that to distract himself, and his thoughts had ultimately come full circle to Hiroki again. For all my insistence that it's fine, I can't get him out of my mind…
One thought pinged free from the tension-laden wire that his brain had become.
Move, then. Do something right now before you spend the next ninety minutes driving yourself crazy. Change it.
He picked up his pen, dropped it, and took out a pencil instead. His hand went not to his answer script but to the wood beneath instead.
He stood in the center of the leaves that swirled around him like an autumnal snowstorm, and gazed at the scene before him as though he were seeing it for the last time.
Akihiko surveyed the sentence he'd scribbled onto the desk with a raised eyebrow; then he continued writing.
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He was still writing when the invigilator announced the end of the exam, and didn't look up when his script was taken with the rest. He dimly registered the swoosh of paper lifting, however, and raised his eyes to look at the clock on the wall.
I don't know if I wrote it all out, but at least I didn't have to spend all that time with just my thoughts to keep me company. He threw one last look at the enormous story he'd covered the desk with, shrugged, gathered his things up and left the hall.
The sun shot bullets of brightness into his eyes as he exited the dim school building, and he was too busy shielding his eyes to notice where his feet were taking him. He found himself walking towards his and Hiroki's 'base' before he knew what was going on; indeed, it was only when Hiroki looked up from his book and let out an exclamation of surprise that Akihiko actually realized where he was.
'You're here early. How was your paper?'
'Fine', said Akihiko shortly, hackles rising in trepidation. Meeting the new, oddly distant Hiroki required considerable self-pepping on his part before commencing; he had been completely unprepared to meet him this time, and found himself feeling suffocatingly uncomfortable.
He made his way over to Hiroki, flopped against his usual tree, and extracted a notebook. 'We had Algebra today', he said, by way of conversation. This is the first time I've had to consciously make an effort to talk to him.
His dismay grew when he realized that if things went on this way, Hiroki would soon be no different from the other people in his life.
Hiroki had flipped onto his back and was holding the book up to shield himself from the blinding sunlight. 'It's so bloody hot today.'
'Yeah', said Akihiko tonelessly, as the other boy loosened his tie, dropping the book onto his chest, and shut his eyes. Don't you dare unfasten one more button on that shirt. Guilty or not, Akihiko was still exercising a considerable amount of self-control to prevent himself from ripping the shirt off his friend completely.
After that first real explosion of his in the clearing, he'd rapidly figured out what made releasing more pleasurable and what didn't. Through his self-loathing and nervousness, most of the better things to do involved thinking of Hiroki; the thought I want to make a mess of him, so unfathomable that day at the pool, now resonated in his heart like the tolling of a bell. And it no longer confused him in the slightest. Akihiko was very clear on what he wanted.
A little too clear, perhaps, he thought glumly; his eyes drank in the crinkling of Hiroki's eyelids as they clenched against the glare of the afternoon, then relaxed.
Hiroki's mouth began to move. 'Hey, Akihiko.'
'Yeah?' It came out a bit jumpy, like I'm afraid he'll know I've been watching. He felt like a child asking the captain of the base for permission to stay all over again.
'You never gave me the next part of that story', Hiroki said idly; a yawn wove itself into the latter half of his sentence as he tried to swallow it. 'Give it to me as soon as you're done. It was really good.' A growly chuckle followed. 'Not that everything you write isn't.'
The story he was referring to, Akihiko remembered, was one that he'd shown Hiroki before the kiss; he'd completely forgotten that he was supposed to be showing Hiroki the rest of it. 'Oh, that—I finished it ages ago. Here.' He drew out another notebook and Hiroki reached for it in mid-toss, eyes still shut.
'What I don't get', he mumbled, eyes fighting to stay open in the merciless sunshine, 'is why your protagonist is always so damn tormented.'
Akihiko let out a snort of laughter. 'It's called being human.'
'Yeah, don't I know it', said Hiroki dryly, turning over onto his stomach again. He rolled an inch or two away from his original spot in the process, leaving a strip of flattened grass in his wake. Yawning again, he flipped the pages of Akihiko's notebook until he found where he'd left off, and began reading. The frown slipped in without effort.
Akihiko smiled to himself at the sight. Somehow he seems more normal than usual today…
Or maybe I'm the one who's been acting strange, he thought suddenly. Hiroki's naturally the kind of person who prefers to be alone. I guess I've been a little creepy lately—but how else can I react when I see the face of the person I jerk off to?
Maybe now that I've pretty much written all that tension out of my head, things will be the same again. At least, I can hope that they will be.
A breeze rippled through the clearing and both the boys closed their eyes, reveling in the respite. Hiroki seemed to sigh with content, and briefly dipped his head so his bangs brushed the grass: green stalagmites and brown stalactites met in a dance that Akihiko, lust-torn as he was, found inhumanly erotic.
That sort of thinking only gets me in trouble, and if possible, affects him worse than it does me. Akihiko knew that better than anyone by now. But when I see him like this…I really can't help myself.
'Hey. Bakahiko.'
Would it be okay for me to push him down right now…?
'Huh?'
'The grammar in this paragraph is all off.'
'Oh?' said Akihiko vaguely.
'Yeah. Check this out.' The notebook was shoved under his nose, and a slim finger glided over the page, pointing out his errors. 'It's freakin' infested. What were you thinking?'
Akihiko squinted at the paragraph in question. It had been written on the evening of the kiss when Akihiko had finally gathered enough feeling in his legs to return to his house. He'd locked himself up in his room immediately, ignoring Tanaka's half-hourly knocks, and written until he collapsed out of hunger. 'Uh, um…wasn't thinking straight at the time', he muttered. Hiroki huffed. 'Pull your socks up. These two pages suck.'
He calmly rolled back to his original position and continued reading. Akihiko regarded him with a mildly concerned eye.
He's seriously back to normal? He somehow knew, however, that more likely than Hiroki being 'back to normal' was that Akihiko himself had woken up from whatever daze he'd been in. He scowled a bit at this realization, and then relaxed with an inaudible sigh. Looks like that advice I gave myself to 'move' worked.
I wonder what the owner of that desk will think when they see that it's covered with some nonsensical story, Akihiko thought, in an attempt to distract himself from the fabric-clad curve of Hiroki's shoulders as they hunched in his belly-down posture. Though I should really have rubbed it out first. The story wasn't particularly autobiographical, but as a largely therapeutic exercise it had certainly absorbed a great deal of his terseness.
Probably one of the most 'tormented' stories I've ever written.
He chuckled, remembering Hiroki's comment and his reply. The story itself had been rather standard: his usual spiels about solitude and the like...but something was different. Though he'd sensed the heavy-handedness of his style improve and lighten considerably over the time he'd known Hiroki, he could have sworn that the story he'd clothed his exam desk with was possibly even more painfully lonely than anything he'd written even in England. And that was the kind of shit I'm glad I didn't bring here with me.
I really am scared of losing him, he thought, as a fresh wave of wonder crashed upon his heart's shoreline. I don't think I've ever felt this way about anything else before.
And since I don't want to lose him, it's best that I shelve these dangerous impulses right now when I can still see them coming. Now if only I knew how.
…I don't think I'm done with moving yet. Problem is, I don't know which direction to move in.
'Bakahiko', mumbled Hiroki, not raising his eyes from Akihiko's notebook, 'the ending's horrible. Change it.'
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'Usami,
I'm the person who usually sits on this desk during classes, and when I came by the class after school hours to take something I'd forgotten I couldn't help reading the story you wrote here. It's obviously incomplete, but I found it really interesting, so if you have time after finishing your paper today, please continue. I would like to read what happens next!
Takahashi Takahiro'
Akihiko studied the note on the desk with a mixture of amusement and mortification. What kind of person actually wants to read more of that sort of thing?
But when he finished writing and looked at the amount of time he had left, he switched his pen for a pencil and began to write. It's still called 'moving'.
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A/N: Buahaha :D All right, after some introspection I've decided the elder Takahashi's kinda cute when he isn't being stupid. Next chappie you're going to be seeing something suspiciously akin to a fanboy!Takahiro. Hehe. I just thought he'd be like that, since that was the way he was shown in the manga ("Usami! You're so cool!" much?) lolol. I imagine as a teenager he'd have been kinda starstruck by someone like Akihiko, specially before his parents' death matured him somewhat (okay, a hell of a lot. Poor guy).
