A/N: Tada! The Gravi fic that I never expected to write. This is all your fault, Siyi-chan.
Concrits are particularly appreciated- Happy Holidays, everyone! Not that this is festive, or genuinely cheerful, or anything... --;;
Summary: Yuki wrestles with his habits and dependences, and his compulsive nature when it comes to smoking, writing, and relationships. It becomes clearer and clearer that all three are irreversibly entangled together.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Nope. Though I did get a tablet for Christmas. Squee!
queer linguistics
Yuki lights a cigarette. "I don't think you understand," he says.
For once, Shuichi is blessedly silent. This is fortunate; Yuki isn't sure he can stand to hear that voice right now. He holds the cigarette between his lips and closes his eyes a little as he inhales, drawing the smoke into himself. The feeling is always exquisite: though it burned at first, and sometimes it still burns.
Of course, now he enjoys it even when it does.
He sits like this frequently these nights, smoking in the dark bedroom with Shuichi asleep beside him. And it has begun to feel comfortable, in a way.
Ash falls from the end of his cigarette and settles in little flecks of pale dust all over the sheets. There is ash everywhere, now, and a lingering scent of secondhand smoke saturated into all the furniture. It is in everything he owns- it is in his clothes- it is embedded into Shuichi's skin.
Comfortable, that isn't quite the word. He leans back and the headboard fits itself into the crook of his neck- that is uncomfortable. Conversation with his sister, or his editor, or even Tohma, these days- they are all uncomfortable, stilted, and briefly agonizing.
But even now he remembers, from his days studying English: 'un-' is a prefix denoting opposites, reversing the order of existence. Conversation, and the soreness at the back of his neck that he refuses to remedy- those are definite, uncompromising frames of reference. He uses them to put the rest of his life in two piles and, once again, life is instantly sorted out by grammar.
-
The day is bright in the city, another one of those afternoons when he can't look up past the horizon as they walk.
"Look." Yuki-sensei puts a finger on the page. It takes a moment to make out where he's really pointing. Though Sensei has perfected the art of walking and reading and navigating city traffic all at once, the same can't be expected for everyone. It has taken time to even get used to the flow of this city, which is somehow immeasurably different than the flow of Tokyo.
Sensei's hand steadies as they wait at the crosswalk, and the words come into focus, little by little. "Here's the phonetic spelling. Try it again, Eiri."
The light flashes green- they begin walking again, and Eiri puts a hand out to steady the book enough to read. He studies the page. There is the word, sitting at the head of the line so innocently, as if coyly hiding the devilish turns of its R's and L's. He doesn't know what it means- Sensei has this policy of pronouncing before understanding.
"Resh- lesh-" he begins.
Then Sensei stops him from stepping off the curb, managing, just barely, to save him from oncoming traffic.
They spend awhile giving and refuting apologies, before Yuki-sensei laughs, kindly, and closes the book. "Never mind," he says, giving a small smile. "We'll save work for some other afternoon, when it isn't so nice out." Sensei reaches out to ruffle his hair and Eiri grins thankfully as they make their way towards Central Park.
"Just say it with me once more, please, Eiri. It's not as hard as you think. Sound it out."
When Sensei asks like that, of course he can't refuse. Eiri agrees, and they say it together. Just once. Eiri's voice is soft and a little hesitant on each syllable, unsure of where the emphasis might go, while Sensei speaks with some sort of lazy easiness that comes from frequent use.
"Lechery." In his eagerness, Eiri finishes just slightly late. Once his mouth closes around the word, his eyes widen in exhilaration, and he turns his head to look up at his Sensei for approval.
Sensei nods, leaning in to kiss Eiri softly on the temple. (His eyes, half-lidded, are unfocused.)
"Yes, exactly," is his reassurance.
(But God, I was happy then. I didn't know. I didn't know...well, ignorance is bliss. I find myself wishing for those days with a terrible, twisted sort of need. There is this tightness and pressure in my throat that now only a lethal dose of nicotine can relieve. I ache- this gets me sick sometimes, a constant, all-over pain that cannot be pinpointed or diagnosed. I don't go to doctors for it anymore.)
"I know what lechery means," he tells her.
Yuki lights a cigarette. He cups his hand over the tip and the lighter, sheltering both from the wind until he can see that faint red glow at the end, and then flicks the lighter shut. He rubs his thumb fondly over the bright metal before tucking it back in his pocket, puffing briskly all the while.
His sister, across the table, sends him a look of faint disapproval. "You smoke too much, Eiri," she says finally. Both her hands and eyes linger on her wineglass, the contents untouched.
"You think I'm some sort of twisted old man, playing around with a boy that age."
"Maybe." Now worrying her wedding ring, picking at the clear stone set atop it that is worth more than most men's fortunes. It's just like Mika, always fretting over something trivial. She wears her nails down to stubs and has to get manicures weekly.
She and Tohma certainly seem like the perfect combination, he thinks. In his mind, Yuki sees Tohma with his washed-out eyes that have been bleached by too many stage lights and long business meetings, beneath his eternally sedate black hat. He doesn't need to look across the table to see Mika with the worry-lines already wearing into her proud forehead, and her pursed, thin lips.
And it occurs to him, letting the smoke go stale in his mouth. He is twenty-five next month, and if he doesn't do something soon, they will take him down with them. And then, it would be nothing to succumb to the past they always linger on, just as Mika lingers and worries over everything and nothing, just as Tohma fades white as bone.
"Please, Eiri. Are you listening to me?"
He isn't. He tells her so, pushes his chair back, puts on his jacket, and leaves.
Yuki takes the boy home that night and fucks him. Yes, 'fucks' him, though Yuki despises the word- it is cheap, and coarse, and rough. It is whores in filthy lonely streets against raw brickwork- it is slurred speech and slang- but sometimes it is what he needs, and there is no other word to describe it. (If anything, I always look for the perfect word.)
After he is spent, breath slowly quieting, heartbeat decelerating and falling back into time, the boy, sticky, sentimental, tries to curl up in his arms. He is bony, a tangle of ill-matched limbs. He is too young to know better, or too stupid.
But Yuki humors him. Perhaps that makes him a fool as well, but he accommodates and nearly manages to fall asleep without a cigarette.
It is warm. The boy presses his face into Yuki's chest and gives a little sigh. "I wish me and you could stay together, forever," he says quietly, in English.
Within five minutes, the boy is thrown out, shirtless- not that anyone gives a damn. Yuki stands in the doorway and pitches the shirt back in his face. The boy shrinks back from the throw, or maybe from Yuki's expression.
"Get out of my sight. Get your scrawny ass and your hideous grammar out of my sight."
The boy is gone in a heartbeat, just as quickly as he came. Yuki suppresses the urge to scream after him and just manages to lock himself inside. And he laughs. He laughs at it all- being young and stupid, and breaking everyone's hearts, even your own. Some days and nights, he wishes he could forget. Mostly, he aches just to remember.
This is as close as we come, he tells himself.And so he fumbles for a cigarette and stands beneath the artificial light of the kitchen, smoking away his youth.
(And occasionally I think that it was easier even then. Even those days were easier to understand. I picked up vices and contemplated things I believed to be relevant and meaningful. Age makes things complicated. Shuichi makes me age at double the usual pace. And yet I still pathetically cling to my vices, but now have begun to have my qualms about them, and I never bother with so-called deep thoughts anymore. I churn out my romances and have long stopped caring about what happens to my characters.)
"There were other ones, before you," he says.
Yuki lights a cigarette, then pauses, going still as he glances toward the boy. For a moment, he almost expects a response. Some stir of overwhelmingly pink hair against the pillowcase, probably, gets to his pulse and makes it stutter that way. But then, Shuichi is asleep, dead to the world for the next few hours. Yuki is as good as alone.
He closes his eyes and pulls his naked knees to his chest, and he sighs, again, as if it hurts; a sharp release of smoke. "Twice, maybe. I can't remember." It takes him a moment to realize what he's repeating, and another moment to think to laugh. "But I say that far too often."
By then, telling it is inevitable. He is a writer, first and foremost- his life is sectioned by tales and strictly observed linguistics. This story, he knows, is just another cliché- How I Learned to Smoke.
(The first one drugged me up and made it seem as if I was the instigator. He played innocent and, in the meantime, learned to seduce me with mascara, and never let slip, as he was sliding me cigarettes under the table, that he was the one pushing me up against the wall. By the time I had him figured out, he had turned himself into a necessity. He made me unable to function without him, and once I'd broken the habit, I realized I couldn't sleep without a smoke.)
Yuki stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray and finally feels sleep descend as the smoke begins to settle. It is always like this- his brain, through weeks of conditioning almost ten years ago, has made some sort of reflexive connection. A dependence, a habit. All this time has passed, and still...
It isn't comfortable. He knows what discomfort is, but his definition of 'comfort' is, at best, uncertain- it is vague, frustratingly indecisive, and every effort to put his usual boundaries around it is a waste of time. He has found something he cannot put into words, something his mother, exasperated, used to say was never likely to occur.
He shudders as he slides beneath the covers and habitually brushes ash from the line of Shuichi's cheek.
For now, he'll let it go.