Trust 4/4, ff.net version
By Nix Winter
Disclaimers: I do not own Gravitation. The creator has done different things with them and the manga is coming out in the US. I urge you to buy them. It's just in my imagination that Eiri and Shu sat at a beach house and discussed their hearts.
Notes: I had expected this chapter to be a lemon. It's not. I waited. It didn't change. This story was about trust, originally, about speaking one's true name to one's love. I hope I can get a lemon from the next chapter, but for ff.net this story will finish with this chapter.
Warnings!!!! Note! Discussions of their past, spoilers for the series, assumptions about what happened in the garage. It's an angst frothy chapter.
Trust
Eiri stood on the back porch, watching the waves roll in. The sky was blue, the beach white and the ocean endless. Uesugi Eiri felt Japanese, felt like he belonged in this picture. His name was Uesugi Eiri. Behind him, in their beach house, he could hear Shuichi's muffled singing. Eiri didn't even have to turn around to see him to know that he was dancing in the kitchen, headphones on, shorts mostly dusted free of sand and no shirt at all. The singing was muffled because Shuichi was trying to sing without making any sound and he couldn't hear himself. The music was so loud in those headphones that Eiri could hear it all the way out on the porch. Shuichi fit into this picture of Eiri's life too.
The tide was slipping away, pulling at the wet sand each time it fell back. Eiri had expected it to hurt more, this letting go of Yuki. When he'd torn the photo, dropped it into the ocean that day at the amusement park a kind of pain had swelled in him, taking the pain that ate his stomach away and banding his heart until his whole body ached. Surviving can break the heart.
And yet
Here he was. Shuichi loved him. "Hey Brat!"
Pink hair and violet eyes peeked out the open door. "Yu," he paused, "Eiri?"
"So you can hear under those things. I don't know how you manage it." Eiri turned, leaning against the railing, ocean breeze picked up his hair. "Come here?"
Shuichi shoved his headphones off and stepped out on the porch. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It showed in the tension in those slender shoulders, the way his feet took an almost defensive posture. "It's my fault," Eiri said, tilting his head, taking in all of Shuichi, from the sun burn started on his shoulders and nose to the way his knee had started a very slight nervous twitch. "It's my fault you're nervous now. It was because I had to be Yuki and no one could really have Yuki, no one could love him."
"But I love you, Yu... Eiri. I love you, Eiri." Shuichi said, looking if anything a little tenser now.
Uesugi Eiri had never backed down from anything. He hammered his plots until they worked, he forced smiles and faced people who despised him because he didn't look the way a Japanese should. He'd faced the grief he felt over Yuki once he'd made the decision to live. "I know you do, Shuichi. I love you too."
"Eiri!" Shuichi nearly screamed before Eiri found himself wrapped in violet-eyed singer. "Say it again, Eiri!"
"I love you, Shindou Shuichi," Eiri repeated as he scooped his lover up in his arms, one arm under his knees, the other hugging Shuichi close. "I want to put lotion on your shoulders."
"Is it going to be lemon flavored lotion?" Shuichi asked, nuzzling Eiri's shoulder.
"Not really." Eiri said as he set Shuichi down on the bathroom counter and opened the medicine cabinet. "I just wanted to talk, about, uh why I'm such an asshole sometimes."
"It doesn't matter, does it? I mean, just be nice from now on." Shuichi smiled, but it only lasted a moment before it twitched away. "Eiri, it feels weird to call you that, but if you wanna talk, we can talk about whatever you need to. I'll listen."
"Yuki's dead, I shot him." Eiri said, feeling that band tighten around his heart again. Outside on the porch, he'd felt so good, so much like he belonged. Now, now he wondered if he could trust Shuichi at all. The world wasn't fair; giving him a lover he loved with all his being, but maybe couldn't trust. "And then I couldn't let him die."
"Why? Eiri, why did you shot him?" Shuichi asked. His voice had lost that summer at the beach lightness, had lost some element of frivolous Shuichi.
There it was. This was the big thing between them. They'd been dancing around it, from the day Shuichi had showed up in an ugly flower print dress, through Eiri thinking he was going to just die when he got it off him and both of them went through the motions, made love though it hurt, joined, coupled, bruised hearts and tender flesh.
Eiri laid his head on Shuichi's shoulder. Shuichi wrapped an arm around Eiri's back, and they both looked at each other in the mirror because they couldn't look at each other directly. To be raped is to be told in a language so deep that the soul understands even if the mind doesn't, to be told that you are less than worthless, that your pain brings another pleasure. Shuichi brought his fingers up and combed them through Eiri's blond hair.
It was a whole in both their souls, a hole too large to cross, as they stared at each other. Tears came easily to Shuichi, as if violet could slide right down his cheek. "Eiri," he said the name slowly, as Eiri's fingers came up to touch the tears on Shuichi's cheek. "We were talking about trust earlier, and you said I should call you by your real name. You gave me your name, I'll show you my heart, my whole soul, everything I am."
"You always do, Shuichi," Eiri said, bringing his fingers back to his mouth and licking the tears away. "I know what Aizawa did to you."
"How do you know," Shuichi asked, his voice gone deadly thin. "The photos?"
"Never developed." Eiri said. "I know, because I see myself in you. I see it in the way you wince in your sleep. In the way you freeze when we make love. I see it in the way you struggle to write. Now listen to me, please."
"Okay," Shuichi squeaked, his knees drawing together even as he held tighter to Eiri.
"I thought, just now, when you asked me about lemon lotion, if I trusted you or not. I thought maybe I had a choice, but I don't. I trust you more than any one I've ever known and if I can't show you my whole heart and soul then I'll never show them to anyone."
Shuichi blinked, bits of information finally catching up to one another. "That's why you shoot him. Because he raped you?" Color drained from Shuichi's cheeks as he said that and Eiri reached up to touch his face again, caress his cheek.
"No. There were two other men. He sold me to them. I was so angry. All the anger that had been in my life till then just strangled out of me. I killed all three of them and Tohma covered it up."
"Eiri," Shuichi said one hand holding Eiri's hand to his face.
"Do you know how I learned that I wasn't," Eiri couldn't say it, couldn't say or find a word that meant dangerous, worthless, vile, diseased.
"How?" Shuichi asked, like he wanted to know the answer too.
Eiri pulled back and took Shuichi's chin between his fingers, looking directly into his eyes. "Because when you were raped, I loved you just the same. What they did, did not change how valuable you were to me, how precious and innocent and creative. I love you just exactly the same and you were willing to kill, to leave Bad Luck anyway, to protect me, even when you thought I didn't want you anymore. So I began to understand that what happened to me didn't ruin me either. Can you really love me, knowing I was raped by two men and that I shoot them and a man I admired in the rage after? Really look me in the eyes and love me?"
"Eiri," Shuichi started, laying a finger over Eiri's lips. "I thought a part of me died that night in the garage. Just stopped. I didn't know how anyone could hate me that much, that I had to have done something real bad, and at first I thought it was because I loved you so much and that it was wrong for me to, to love you, cuz you were a guy. Tohma said it was my fault that you went away and I should have," Shuichi stopped talking eyes dropping until Eiri's finger lifted his chin.
"Did you think about dying?"
Shuichi grimaced his nose wrinkling, "No. I mean, I thought I ought to consider that. It would have honorable. But mostly I just kept thinking I'd be okay if you were near me. I'm bad and greedy."
"So am I," Eiri said sliding his thumb over Shuichi's lips. "I have no right to desire you, to want the pleasures of life. From the moment I met you in the park, the safe numbness I'd been hiding in has faded. Now I either trust you and I learn to live, or I shut down, and I'm lying to myself if I try to believe I have any other options. I love you and that love pulls trust out of me like some happily ever after in one of my books. Don't be angry with yourself for what happened in the garage anymore, Shuichi. It wasn't your fault and it doesn't change how beautiful you are to me, how precious. Do you trust me?"
A silence settled between them, with Shuichi reaching to touch Eiri's face, trace the track of tears he hadn't cried. "Eiri," Shuichi whispered, "I do trust you and if you say it didn't make me ugly or bad, I believe you. There are a million fans out there buying my music, buying posters of me to put on their walls, but none of them see me like you do. It's not just how my heart got hurt by what happened. It's that it hurt. It tore and I screamed and it hurt." Fresh tears burned down his face and from Eiri's eyes as well. "You have to trust me that it's not about you, when I pull away, or when I freeze. It's not about you, because I want your touch, I live for it. I trust you and I crave you."
Eiri found his smile again, just a small smile, but he reached up and brushed his fingers trough Shuichi's hair. "It's this living thing, makes me feel alive when I think about you. I did something auto-erotic once while listening to your CD."
Shuichi blushed, then laughed, chin to his chest, giggling. "I wonder if I could sing while we, uh," he said, blushing even brighter.
"Come here, let's go watch the sun set," Eiri said, pulling Shuichi from the counter as the smaller singer wrapped his legs around Eiri's waist, his arms around his neck. As Eiri carried him back out to the porch, Shuichi's head on his shoulder, he promised, "I'll kill anyone who hurts you again."
"No," Shuichi said, rubbing his cheek against Eiri's, "Just trust me. I can heal from anything, as long as you still think I'm wonderful."
The sun was golden, red, the beautiful Japanese sun over the ocean as Eiri sat down on the porch steps. To compliment Shuichi so openly, was to say that maybe he wasn't stupid, maybe he was right about Eiri being worth loving. That made it take a couple breaths. "I will always think you're wonderful, Shindou Shuichi, my wild little pink haired lover. I will trust you like the Earth trusts the sun, and I'll orbit around you forever."
"Hey," Shuichi sat up, then shyly, almost as if he was kissing Eiri for the first time, "You be the sun, I'll be the Earth. Cuz you're all golden and I got an Earthy mind."
"Dirty mind," Eiri corrected, "Very dirty."
"Whatever," Shuichi said, slipping off Eiri's lap to sit beside him, holding his hand as they watched the sun slip into twilight. "What if I always flinch, when we have sex?"
"I'll love you and trust you if we never have sex again and I'll be happy so long as we wake up next to each other and you smile at me." He squeezed Shuichi's hand slightly, avoiding his lover's searching look.
"If we never have sex again, we'll wear out a lot of my CDs."
Laughing, Eiri teased, "I thought you used Nittle Grasper CDs."
"Hey! I have your books on CD. That works good." Shuichi laid his head against Eiri's shoulder. Eiri laid his head against Shuichi's head. "Eiri."
"Um?"
For just that moment, it seemed to them that Eiri was the man he would have been if he'd never carried the grief for what Yuki had brought into his life and Shuichi had never gotten trapped in the garage. It wouldn't last this time, but they were in this moment, not some other one.
"Thank you for trusting me."
End of ff.net version
By Nix Winter
Disclaimers: I do not own Gravitation. The creator has done different things with them and the manga is coming out in the US. I urge you to buy them. It's just in my imagination that Eiri and Shu sat at a beach house and discussed their hearts.
Notes: I had expected this chapter to be a lemon. It's not. I waited. It didn't change. This story was about trust, originally, about speaking one's true name to one's love. I hope I can get a lemon from the next chapter, but for ff.net this story will finish with this chapter.
Warnings!!!! Note! Discussions of their past, spoilers for the series, assumptions about what happened in the garage. It's an angst frothy chapter.
Trust
Eiri stood on the back porch, watching the waves roll in. The sky was blue, the beach white and the ocean endless. Uesugi Eiri felt Japanese, felt like he belonged in this picture. His name was Uesugi Eiri. Behind him, in their beach house, he could hear Shuichi's muffled singing. Eiri didn't even have to turn around to see him to know that he was dancing in the kitchen, headphones on, shorts mostly dusted free of sand and no shirt at all. The singing was muffled because Shuichi was trying to sing without making any sound and he couldn't hear himself. The music was so loud in those headphones that Eiri could hear it all the way out on the porch. Shuichi fit into this picture of Eiri's life too.
The tide was slipping away, pulling at the wet sand each time it fell back. Eiri had expected it to hurt more, this letting go of Yuki. When he'd torn the photo, dropped it into the ocean that day at the amusement park a kind of pain had swelled in him, taking the pain that ate his stomach away and banding his heart until his whole body ached. Surviving can break the heart.
And yet
Here he was. Shuichi loved him. "Hey Brat!"
Pink hair and violet eyes peeked out the open door. "Yu," he paused, "Eiri?"
"So you can hear under those things. I don't know how you manage it." Eiri turned, leaning against the railing, ocean breeze picked up his hair. "Come here?"
Shuichi shoved his headphones off and stepped out on the porch. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It showed in the tension in those slender shoulders, the way his feet took an almost defensive posture. "It's my fault," Eiri said, tilting his head, taking in all of Shuichi, from the sun burn started on his shoulders and nose to the way his knee had started a very slight nervous twitch. "It's my fault you're nervous now. It was because I had to be Yuki and no one could really have Yuki, no one could love him."
"But I love you, Yu... Eiri. I love you, Eiri." Shuichi said, looking if anything a little tenser now.
Uesugi Eiri had never backed down from anything. He hammered his plots until they worked, he forced smiles and faced people who despised him because he didn't look the way a Japanese should. He'd faced the grief he felt over Yuki once he'd made the decision to live. "I know you do, Shuichi. I love you too."
"Eiri!" Shuichi nearly screamed before Eiri found himself wrapped in violet-eyed singer. "Say it again, Eiri!"
"I love you, Shindou Shuichi," Eiri repeated as he scooped his lover up in his arms, one arm under his knees, the other hugging Shuichi close. "I want to put lotion on your shoulders."
"Is it going to be lemon flavored lotion?" Shuichi asked, nuzzling Eiri's shoulder.
"Not really." Eiri said as he set Shuichi down on the bathroom counter and opened the medicine cabinet. "I just wanted to talk, about, uh why I'm such an asshole sometimes."
"It doesn't matter, does it? I mean, just be nice from now on." Shuichi smiled, but it only lasted a moment before it twitched away. "Eiri, it feels weird to call you that, but if you wanna talk, we can talk about whatever you need to. I'll listen."
"Yuki's dead, I shot him." Eiri said, feeling that band tighten around his heart again. Outside on the porch, he'd felt so good, so much like he belonged. Now, now he wondered if he could trust Shuichi at all. The world wasn't fair; giving him a lover he loved with all his being, but maybe couldn't trust. "And then I couldn't let him die."
"Why? Eiri, why did you shot him?" Shuichi asked. His voice had lost that summer at the beach lightness, had lost some element of frivolous Shuichi.
There it was. This was the big thing between them. They'd been dancing around it, from the day Shuichi had showed up in an ugly flower print dress, through Eiri thinking he was going to just die when he got it off him and both of them went through the motions, made love though it hurt, joined, coupled, bruised hearts and tender flesh.
Eiri laid his head on Shuichi's shoulder. Shuichi wrapped an arm around Eiri's back, and they both looked at each other in the mirror because they couldn't look at each other directly. To be raped is to be told in a language so deep that the soul understands even if the mind doesn't, to be told that you are less than worthless, that your pain brings another pleasure. Shuichi brought his fingers up and combed them through Eiri's blond hair.
It was a whole in both their souls, a hole too large to cross, as they stared at each other. Tears came easily to Shuichi, as if violet could slide right down his cheek. "Eiri," he said the name slowly, as Eiri's fingers came up to touch the tears on Shuichi's cheek. "We were talking about trust earlier, and you said I should call you by your real name. You gave me your name, I'll show you my heart, my whole soul, everything I am."
"You always do, Shuichi," Eiri said, bringing his fingers back to his mouth and licking the tears away. "I know what Aizawa did to you."
"How do you know," Shuichi asked, his voice gone deadly thin. "The photos?"
"Never developed." Eiri said. "I know, because I see myself in you. I see it in the way you wince in your sleep. In the way you freeze when we make love. I see it in the way you struggle to write. Now listen to me, please."
"Okay," Shuichi squeaked, his knees drawing together even as he held tighter to Eiri.
"I thought, just now, when you asked me about lemon lotion, if I trusted you or not. I thought maybe I had a choice, but I don't. I trust you more than any one I've ever known and if I can't show you my whole heart and soul then I'll never show them to anyone."
Shuichi blinked, bits of information finally catching up to one another. "That's why you shoot him. Because he raped you?" Color drained from Shuichi's cheeks as he said that and Eiri reached up to touch his face again, caress his cheek.
"No. There were two other men. He sold me to them. I was so angry. All the anger that had been in my life till then just strangled out of me. I killed all three of them and Tohma covered it up."
"Eiri," Shuichi said one hand holding Eiri's hand to his face.
"Do you know how I learned that I wasn't," Eiri couldn't say it, couldn't say or find a word that meant dangerous, worthless, vile, diseased.
"How?" Shuichi asked, like he wanted to know the answer too.
Eiri pulled back and took Shuichi's chin between his fingers, looking directly into his eyes. "Because when you were raped, I loved you just the same. What they did, did not change how valuable you were to me, how precious and innocent and creative. I love you just exactly the same and you were willing to kill, to leave Bad Luck anyway, to protect me, even when you thought I didn't want you anymore. So I began to understand that what happened to me didn't ruin me either. Can you really love me, knowing I was raped by two men and that I shoot them and a man I admired in the rage after? Really look me in the eyes and love me?"
"Eiri," Shuichi started, laying a finger over Eiri's lips. "I thought a part of me died that night in the garage. Just stopped. I didn't know how anyone could hate me that much, that I had to have done something real bad, and at first I thought it was because I loved you so much and that it was wrong for me to, to love you, cuz you were a guy. Tohma said it was my fault that you went away and I should have," Shuichi stopped talking eyes dropping until Eiri's finger lifted his chin.
"Did you think about dying?"
Shuichi grimaced his nose wrinkling, "No. I mean, I thought I ought to consider that. It would have honorable. But mostly I just kept thinking I'd be okay if you were near me. I'm bad and greedy."
"So am I," Eiri said sliding his thumb over Shuichi's lips. "I have no right to desire you, to want the pleasures of life. From the moment I met you in the park, the safe numbness I'd been hiding in has faded. Now I either trust you and I learn to live, or I shut down, and I'm lying to myself if I try to believe I have any other options. I love you and that love pulls trust out of me like some happily ever after in one of my books. Don't be angry with yourself for what happened in the garage anymore, Shuichi. It wasn't your fault and it doesn't change how beautiful you are to me, how precious. Do you trust me?"
A silence settled between them, with Shuichi reaching to touch Eiri's face, trace the track of tears he hadn't cried. "Eiri," Shuichi whispered, "I do trust you and if you say it didn't make me ugly or bad, I believe you. There are a million fans out there buying my music, buying posters of me to put on their walls, but none of them see me like you do. It's not just how my heart got hurt by what happened. It's that it hurt. It tore and I screamed and it hurt." Fresh tears burned down his face and from Eiri's eyes as well. "You have to trust me that it's not about you, when I pull away, or when I freeze. It's not about you, because I want your touch, I live for it. I trust you and I crave you."
Eiri found his smile again, just a small smile, but he reached up and brushed his fingers trough Shuichi's hair. "It's this living thing, makes me feel alive when I think about you. I did something auto-erotic once while listening to your CD."
Shuichi blushed, then laughed, chin to his chest, giggling. "I wonder if I could sing while we, uh," he said, blushing even brighter.
"Come here, let's go watch the sun set," Eiri said, pulling Shuichi from the counter as the smaller singer wrapped his legs around Eiri's waist, his arms around his neck. As Eiri carried him back out to the porch, Shuichi's head on his shoulder, he promised, "I'll kill anyone who hurts you again."
"No," Shuichi said, rubbing his cheek against Eiri's, "Just trust me. I can heal from anything, as long as you still think I'm wonderful."
The sun was golden, red, the beautiful Japanese sun over the ocean as Eiri sat down on the porch steps. To compliment Shuichi so openly, was to say that maybe he wasn't stupid, maybe he was right about Eiri being worth loving. That made it take a couple breaths. "I will always think you're wonderful, Shindou Shuichi, my wild little pink haired lover. I will trust you like the Earth trusts the sun, and I'll orbit around you forever."
"Hey," Shuichi sat up, then shyly, almost as if he was kissing Eiri for the first time, "You be the sun, I'll be the Earth. Cuz you're all golden and I got an Earthy mind."
"Dirty mind," Eiri corrected, "Very dirty."
"Whatever," Shuichi said, slipping off Eiri's lap to sit beside him, holding his hand as they watched the sun slip into twilight. "What if I always flinch, when we have sex?"
"I'll love you and trust you if we never have sex again and I'll be happy so long as we wake up next to each other and you smile at me." He squeezed Shuichi's hand slightly, avoiding his lover's searching look.
"If we never have sex again, we'll wear out a lot of my CDs."
Laughing, Eiri teased, "I thought you used Nittle Grasper CDs."
"Hey! I have your books on CD. That works good." Shuichi laid his head against Eiri's shoulder. Eiri laid his head against Shuichi's head. "Eiri."
"Um?"
For just that moment, it seemed to them that Eiri was the man he would have been if he'd never carried the grief for what Yuki had brought into his life and Shuichi had never gotten trapped in the garage. It wouldn't last this time, but they were in this moment, not some other one.
"Thank you for trusting me."
End of ff.net version