Shuichi had to stop at the police box and ask directions, twice, but eventually he found his way to the library...
...which had ENTIRELY too many books.
"How am I supposed to find anything in here?" Shuichi wailed, and then jumped when three stern-faced women immediately made hushing sounds, like rattlesnakes that might bite if he stepped the wrong way again. One of them came over and caught him by the jacket sleeve and dragged him over to a computer screen.
"Use the card catalog," she said, and hurried back to her tall and rather wobbly-looking stack of folders.
Shuichi looked at the computer. It didn't look like it had anything to do with cards. But there was a line that said "Type your question here."
Shuichi thought about that one for a long moment. What was his question really? Why doesn't Yuki have any of his own books around the house? or Why doesn't Yuki like noise any more than these people do? or Why am I such a disaster?
He thought the first one would be easiest for the computer, so he started by typing in, "Why doesn't Yuki have any of his own books around the house?"
The computer thought about it for a minute, then came back with a list of 3,024 books and articles to read for the answer.
"What?" Shuichi said, then flinched again at more hisses. "Sorry! Sorry..."
He went back to looking at the list. But none of the books in the first screen were even by Yuki. Some of them were kids' books on "why did it snow at Grandma's house."
Shuichi glared at the computer, and erased the first question, and typed, "Forget the snow. Just tell me about Yuki Eiri, all right?"
The computer beeped at him, and said it couldn't find anything that matched those terms.
Shuichi sighed, and decided he'd better use really simple words for this obviously stupid machine. He erased the question again, and typed very slowly and carefully, "Tell me about Yuki Eiri."
The computer promptly returned one article entitled "Tell me about: Yuki Eiri." It was a popular magazine interview from a couple of years ago.
"That's more like it!" Shuichi said, and then stared at the complicated series of numbers after it. "All right, what does that mean?"
He typed that in, and the computer promptly erased his article information and replaced it with 265 completely irrelevant references to something else entirely.
"No!" Shuichi protested, clutching at the screen. "Give it back!"
A woman with a rather pained expression on her face and an official-looking nametag came over and said, "Can I help you?"
Shuichi turned around and looked up at his newfound angel, and said, "Yes! Tell me how to get this machine to tell me where to find out everything about Yuki Eiri!"
"All right," she said, with the corner of her mouth twitching. "You just had something that you liked?"
"Almost. It had numbers. I just wanted to know what the numbers meant so I asked it and it went--" He stopped short, staring, because she'd just clicked one button and suddenly his article was back. "Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you--"
Smiling, she held up both hands. "Don't worry about it. It's my job."
"Really?" He blinked. "You know everything about Yuki Eiri?"
"No, not me personally. It's my job to know how to find what you want to know. --My name's Horikawa. What's yours?"
"Shindou Shuichi," Shuichi said delightedly. "I'm in Bad Luck."
"No, not anymore, Shuichi-kun," she said, puzzled. "It just takes some practice to learn how to ask the computer..."
Shuichi blinked at her. "No, I mean I'm in Bad Luck. The band."
"Oh. Teenagers' music? That's nice, dear." She patted his head. "I suppose that explains the unusual hair color, then. So you'd like help finding this article?"
Shuichi was a little nonplussed to discover that not everyone in the world knew Bad Luck yet. Maybe he'd have to come back here with Hiro-kun and Fujisaki-kun and initiate them to the wonders of the next great legend of rock (Hiro really had something there). In the meantime, he still had to find out about Yuki, so he nodded vigorously. "And everything else too!"
"Everything?" Horikawa said, blinking. "About him, or everything he's written, or...?"
"Both," Shuichi said. "Everything. Like why he doesn't keep his own books around the house and why he doesn't like noise and why he doesn't like it when I try to make him beer cakes and things like that. And if you can tell me why I'm a disaster in a kitchen I'd be grateful too but that just seems to be a fact, I guess there's no need to talk about 'why' when it's just an 'is'..."
"You know Yuki-sensei?"
A little shyly, Shuichi nodded. "I love him..."
"Doesn't everyone?" Horikawa said with a wistful sigh. "Come on, Shuichi-kun."
Shuichi thought about correcting her, then shrugged and smiled to himself. I mean, she's right, isn't she? Everyone loves Yuki... except Yuki himself. I wonder why that is? Maybe the magazine will tell me; he never talks to me about anything like that, but he has to have talked to someone who interviewed him. --Maybe I could interview him. I should learn how to write interviews...
Horikawa-san found him lots of magazines to read and sat him down at a desk with them, and a dictionary in case some of the kanji in the literary-type magazines were too complicated without furigana.
"Doesn't this place have his books too?"
"Yes, dear, but they'd take too long to read today. You don't have a library card, do you?"
"A what?"
"A library card, dear. To check them out and take them home."
Shuichi thought about the last time he'd been at a library. He'd been about six, and he mostly remembered a lot of very tall people constantly going 'shush' or chasing him or getting ladders to pry him off the tops of the bookshelves. But the world had looked a lot more interesting from up there; you could see past all the books. On the ground all you could see were rows and rows of books; from the top you could see down to where other people were.
He didn't actually remember taking any of the books home... he remembered being firmly escorted out the door, but he didn't remember holding any books when someone pushed him through the door.
"...I guess not."
"Come back tomorrow," she said, "and bring a picture ID, and we can get you a library card. Just stay here while you look at these for today, okay? I'll come check on you in a bit and see if there's anything else you need."
"Thank you, Horikawa-sensei!"
"No problem!" she said, smiling. "And... Shuichi-kun... were you serious about a beer cake...? Why on earth...?"
"I don't know. I thought it was a good idea, but nobody else did."
"That... er... yes. Well. We have cookbooks too, when you come back. With lots of pictures of what to do, and, er, what not to do..."
The Yuki he read about in the magazines was impossible. The Yuki in the magazines was chatty and warm and vivid and charming, and talked sagely about prose structure and poetry structure and fusing the two, and the philosophy of the writer's craft, and how to merge the demands of the market with the demands of art, and he was completely not the Yuki who stalked silently around the house with a can of beer or a cigarette and almost never spoke above a grumble.
And he smiled at the cameras, but his eyes were strange. Bright and shining -- and reflecting everything at the surface.
When Shuichi looked into Yuki's eyes, he saw depths there, and shadows, and occasionally a glimmer of something moving behind the shadows, but his eyes so rarely smiled that it was a precious treasure when he saw it. These eyes that stared into the cameras' lenses were all glitter on the surface, and he couldn't see anything at all underneath. What was Yuki doing to these interviewers?
Some of the articles were from before they'd met, about Yuki and a string of girlfriends who rarely seemed to last more than one big media event. And then there were splashy trashy distorted sensationalist pieces about Yuki and various girlfriends -- and Shuichi himself. And speculating about... about things they had no business speculating about. Shuichi hastily shoved them down into the pile.
It was like there was a different Yuki in every article. Sometimes he was abstracted and intellectual and used really complicated words about words, and sometimes he was wistful and romantic and even tender... and Shuichi thought more than once he must have been flirting with the interviewer, for the story to come out sounding that gushy. He decided he was mad at those interviewers, for no particular reason other than that Yuki had been charming with them. Yuki had said things to them he'd never said to Shuichi.
But he'd been saying those things with those bright mirror-shallow eyes, and Shuichi wondered what he would do if Yuki ever did talk to him like that. Whether he'd be delighted, or whether he'd be heartbroken...
...because really, they weren't talking to Yuki at all. Not the person he was every day, not the person who woke up with his hair rumpled and his sheets tangled, who always drank black coffee for breakfast and smoked a cigarette while he read the paper. They were talking to someone Yuki had made up to be interviewed. He was a writer, wasn't he? He kept other characters, other people, living in his mind. If he gave those other people to the interviewers...
Why would he do that, though? Didn't he want people to know the truth?
But then, he always wrote fiction...
One of the interviewers seemed like she had actually read his books. The others all talked about media events or generalities or the novelist's market in general; this one talked about his books, and events in his books. Shuichi read it a lot more carefully.
"Oh, Yuki," Shuichi whispered, and then shoved his chair back and scooped up his jacket and ran.Q: What I find most intriguing about your works, Yuki-sensei, is that you don't end the stories where most people would. You distract us from that -- the prose is beautiful, almost fragile, like an image captured in acid-washed crystal, or rain-wet shadows of autumn leaves -- but you never end the story where most of us expect.
Yuki: Where most romance novelists would end it, you mean?
Q: Yes, I suppose so. You never give your characters a happily-ever-after. The point where they're happiest is somewhere in the middle, but then events keep happening to them after that. Sometimes I almost don't want to read through to the ends; I'm sorry.
Yuki: Don't be. My business is giving people their fantasies; if you want to stop in the middle and imagine a happily-ever-after, I won't object. You can find in my books what you want to find -- something that makes you happy while you read them.
Q: But that's not what you write.
Yuki: People don't really want to read about someone whose life is perfect in ways they can never have. People want to read about things that their life could be. Taking backgrounds from some old archetypes, because fairy tales are novels at their simplest -- Cinderella will always be more popular than Sleeping Beauty, because almost nobody was born a princess. Cinderella becomes what the reader wants; Sleeping Beauty just is, and there's nothing anyone could do to become her. And who would want to? She spends a hundred years not moving, waiting for someone else to come and change her life.
...But again, there's nothing worth writing about the time after Cinderella's happily ever after, because that's not how the world is. If you're not changing, you're dead. So, as my shallow fiction-warped gesture at something that looks like integrity -- it's never the same as it was when they thought they had their fairytale ending. Because it has to reflect enough of this world to satisfy what you need, rather than just what you want.
Q: But sometimes they're happy at the end too, aren't they? Those are the ones I like best...
Yuki: Like I said, I'm in the business of giving people their fantasies. And people wouldn't keep reading my books if they always knew how they were going to end.
Q: So you're saying that it just has to change. Sometimes they're sad, sometimes they're still happy, just in a different way... it just has to change, like the world.
Yuki: There are limits on my imagination. No matter what, life always goes on. Sometimes that's all that keeps you going, that life will be different later; and sometimes you hate that time will take away anything you think you can hold.
...I'm a professional liar, in a way; but more than that, I'm a professional crafter of small sculpted pieces of this world. Even I can't lie that convincingly. There is no such thing as a happily-ever-after -- just a happily-for-a-while.
"YUUUUUUKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII--!"
Oh, God, now what...
Yuki barely had time to save his latest draft and push his chair back before Shuichi crashed in through the office door and flung himself into Yuki's arms sobbing.
"Yuuuukiiii! It's so sad -- why is it so sad? I don't want it to be like that --"
Resignedly, Yuki ran down a quick mental checklist. Nothing smells melted or burned, can't be the kitchen; he doesn't drive, can't have hit an animal. He doesn't have a pet so it can't have gotten hit. He doesn't have a fish so it can't be floating on the top of a tank somewhere. He writes all the lyrics for Bad Luck so it can't be some tragedy song he didn't know about. Back to the drawing board.
"What are you on about this time?"
"I -- I know -- there can't really be a happily forever, but -- it can be a really really long time, can't it? I promise. It can be happily for a really really long time. So you don't have to worry about that, okay? So can you try not to be so sad?"
After a moment, Yuki said, "And something has changed this fundamental fact of the universe in the past five minutes?"
"Horikawa-sensei at the library gave me all these articles about you and one of them was really really sad and you said you didn't think there was a happily ever after. And that's so sad. And I think -- I guess you're not wrong, not really, but the happily for a while can really be a long while -- I promise -- I really do --"
"You believed something you read in a magazine?" Yuki said tiredly. "You're a media target yourself. Haven't you had enough absolute nonsense written about you to take it all with a grain of salt already?"
"But this one was different," Shuichi said. "I mean, the rest of them sounded like they were talking to some Ultra Mega Weird Space Alien from like Outer Space or something and it just borrowed your head for taking pictures of, but anyway that... that really sounded like you, and..."
"Moron." Yuki ruffled Shuichi's hair despite himself. "I don't write science fiction. The ones from Imagine and Neotype were talking to Hirano Komori; the ones from Kadokawa Sunday, Vision, and Asahiya Mainichi were talking to Shitada Jun. Not a space alien in the lot. So which one were you panicking over?"
Shuichi blinked at him, sniffling. ''...Who are they? Hirano-san and Shitada-san..."
"Fictional characters," Yuki growled. "From my books. I write books. Remember?" He reached back and pulled one at random off the desk and bonked Shuichi on the head with it lightly. "Books. Paper. Fiction."
"But why do you lie to them...? When... when people ask about you..."
"That's my job," Yuki said. "I lie to people for three hundred pages at a time, and they pay me for it."
Shuichi gulped back the last of the tears, rubbing his face. "But... that's not right. I mean... people go to my concerts to see me. People read interviews to read about you..."
"People don't want to know about a middle-aged chain-smoking alcoholic recluse," Yuki said tiredly. "They want fantasy. My publishers pay me to feed their fantasies. I oblige, since I have a good enough imagination to make it more interesting than the truth. And they send me money and leave me alone to go write the next book."
"L-leave... oh!" Shuichi went stiff. "I'm sorry! I forgot... I... er... I'll go..." He blinked at more tears. "And I was trying so hard to be good..."
Yuki sighed, and ruffled his hair again. "You have been," he said, "except for the hangover-from-hell cake. Never mind. Just let me get through this edit and the signings next week, and then you can have me back for a while. Until it comes back from the editors. Okay?"
Shuichi nodded, and reached up to take the book Yuki had bonked him with. "Is this one of yours? So you do have them after all..."
"Don't read that one," Yuki said, and took it back.
"Why not?"
"You wouldn't like the ending." He turned around, ran a fingertip lightly across the shelf, and pulled out another one instead. "If you want, here. But I can't imagine you sitting still long enough to read it. --Don't you have music to be writing or something?"
"Well, yeah, but it's hard to write music without singing it..."
"Go ahead and sing," Yuki said. "Just no mikes and gigawatt speakers."
"Really? ...it wouldn't bother you?"
"If it bothers me," Yuki said dryly, "trust me, you'll be the first to hear about it."
Sheepishly, Shuichi nodded, and picked up the book and himself and crept, elaborately quiet, toward the door. But he hesitated in the doorway.
"Yuki?"
"Hmm?"
"It really can be happily for a long time, you know."
Silently, Yuki got up and walked toward him; Shuichi flinched reflexively.
"Sorry! Sorry, I'm going now--" He put a hand on the door to shut it.
Yuki caught the door short, and drew Shuichi close enough to kiss for a long silent moment. When he finally let him go again, Shuichi slid down the doorframe, pink-cheeked and gasping.
"Y-yu-yuki... uh... um..."
"For God's sake," Yuki said, "I'm a novelist. You don't think I could ignore a lead-in line like that, do you? Go write your song."
"Hiiiiiroooooooooo!"
Wincing and holding the handset away from his ear, Hiroshi asked, "Now what?"
"Yuuukiiii looooves meeeeee....!"
"He'd be an idiot not to, wouldn't he?" Hiroshi said, both indulgent and exasperated. "What about those
songs?"
"Oh yeah! No problem. I'll go write some..." (click)
Shaking his head in bemusement, Hiroshi hung up again.
Frankly, Hiroshi liked it better when Shuichi was in one of his "slightly less sure Yuki loved him" moods.
"Yuki hates me" mostly produced cascades of tears and no music, so that was bad, but "I think he loves me" produced some interestingly wistful stuff and some high-energy "hey we're perky and enthusiastic, what's not to love" stuff.
Unadulterated "Yuki loves me" produced tooth-rotting sugar-silliness. With horrible cliched lovey-dovey rhymes. If this kind of thing was what had blown into Yuki's hands that first night, Hiro could almost forgive him for the attitude. Almost. Hiroshi tried to think of a more tactful approach than the one Yuki had taken, though.
"This one's all about Yuki, right?"
"You can tell, huh?"
Hiroshi bit back the Gee, I think the fifty-foot neon signs kind of got the point across, and said, "I like the melody. Are you sure you want to put lyrics to it at all? Or do you want this one to be the one you give him as an instrumental?"
Shuichi's eyes widened. "I'd completely forgotten about that! Thanks, Hiro!"
Saved. Hiroshi produced a grin, and said, "Any time." I wonder if I can get that line to work more than once...
Shuichi kept headphones plugged into the portable keyboard he'd put on the living room table, because if it was going to be a surprise for Yuki, then he didn't want Yuki hearing it eighty-five times before he gave it to him. But now that he could work from their house through the days too, he was noticing something that worried him.
Yuki slept a little every night, but lately he got up at dawn to go work some more. Shuichi had been assuming he slept more while the house was empty. But he didn't seem to be doing that anywhere near as often as he ought to. Or eating either. And Shuichi was fairly sure that living on beer, black coffee, and cigarettes for more than a couple of days wasn't a good idea for anyone. Especially someone on medication.
He wasn't sure what it was Yuki took to keep his fever and the coughing under control, but beer was probably not high on the list of good things to take it with, not to mention the cigarettes. Except that Shuichi remembered he really shouldn't go into the kitchen to try to do something about it either because he'd probably completely accidentally blow something up if he did...
Shuichi paced around the keyboard for a while, thinking. It would have to be subtle, or Yuki would growl at him. Going in and tying his wrists to the rolling chair with his necktie and kidnapping him to some restaurant that served people who were tied up in desk chairs was not subtle, for example.
And Yuki hated takeout ramen, with or without beer.
What went with beer and cigarettes naturally?
Shuichi brightened. Americans! Americans did beer and cigarettes all the time. Yuki had spent a while in America. Maybe that was where he'd learned it. American food... hot dogs, fried chicken, pizza... all of which went with beer...
Americans were not subtle either. Hmm.
Well, Americans were more subtle than the necktie-and-rolling-desk-chair approach. He could improve on the theory after some practice.
Shuichi ran and grabbed the phone book and started paging through it.
"What is that smell?" Yuki asked from the doorway of his office, coughing a little and waving a hand in front of his face to try to ward off the scent wafting out of the cardboard box.
Delighted with the success of his attempt at extracting Yuki from behind the desk, Shuichi said, "Pizza! With calamari and corn and asparagus and I think those used to be pineapple, I'm not sure, it's hard to tell with the squid ink sauce..."
"Jesus H. Christ on a stick. Only in Japan..." Yuki turned back toward his desk.
"Oh no you don't!" Shuichi tackled him around the knees. "You came out here; you're going to eat something that isn't beer! Americans eat pizza with beer all the time. So you can too..."
One eyebrow twitching, Yuki said, "Americans do not eat pizza like that."
"But they said it was Hawaiian style! Okay, so you've been to New York, maybe it's different there. But they promised me this was Hawaiian style seafood pizza, it's got pineapple and everything..." Shuichi looked up at him with every ounce of pleading he could muster. "And you're coughing again. Haven't you been taking your medicine?"
"It dulls my mind too much. I don't have time to be sitting around in a fog. ...And whether you believe it or not, that is not Ha-"
Shuichi scrambled up his pants leg like an overambitious kitten and rested the back of his hand against Yuki's forehead. "And your temperature's too high too. You sit down and eat dinner and I'm going to go find your medicine and..."
Yuki extracted him by the scruff of the neck and held him dangling midair at arm's length.
"Look," he said sourly, "let's make a bargain here. You don't make me eat that -- substance -- and I'll go take my medicine and eat dinner and whatever else you like. Deal?"
Shuichi blinked a couple of times.
Well, this isn't quite how I imagined it going, but I suppose it got me there anyway. Good enough. Remember to add to the notebook: Hawaiian-style pizza has kick-ass powers of Yuki-persuasion...
"Sure thing!" he said happily, and sat down in front of the pizza box.
Watching him, Yuki said faintly, "You're actually going to put that into your mouth, aren't you. --On purpose."
Already chewing on a slice, Shuichi gulped hastily and nodded. "I like pineapple."
"I think I'm going to be ill."
"I know!" Shuichi said, and took another bite of pizza. "I keep telling you the doctor said to take your medicine every day, not just when you remember it!"
"Never mind..."