Shooting Stars

Chapter Seventeen: Learning to Settle


Author's notes: Anyone who expects a beautiful, healthy relationship to grow between Tohma and Ryu-chan now that Tohma's finally given in to hormones and wondering what could be… um, you probably really won't like this chapter terribly much. But I have to say I love it, even (especially) when it grows particularly limey and dark and introspective…

Beware of fanservice and angst ahead, and the slide from September to December. Ooh, and the next chapter will be an interlude :niko: It's been a while since I've posted a song, don't you think?

Before I let you get onto the reading, I have a request. A shoutout to all artists… does anyone feel like drawing me fanart? I plan to make a separate webpage for this story eventually, with art, and side stories, and, yes, probably the unposted lemons (they do exist, you know), as well as recordings of the songs (working on that) for download and so on. So… takers? Artists who aren't too embarrassed to be associated with me? lol

Disclaimer: I own… nothing, actually. I owned the café, but now it's a bar, and Murakami-sensei owns that since it's the same one we see in the series, over and over…


After, we lay awake for a long time. Ryuichi-san was still sprawled almost messily across the bed, his arm draped across my chest the only contact between our bodies, but I could tell he was awake, and thinking, like I was, long after my heart had stopped hammering against my ribs and my mind cleared. That was different. Eiri-kun had always curled into my side and fallen asleep in the afterglow. I had, on more than one occasion, likened his behavior to that of a kitten when he settled against me and fell into immediate sleep the moment my arms came around him. Usually, I had stayed awake for a while after him, free to stroke his hair and listen to his deep, regular breathing before sliding into sleep myself. But in this after, the silence was different, because I was not the only one awake, and there was no slow, regular breathing against my neck, nor a slight, warm body, heavy with sleepiness, curled trustingly at my side-

Stop it.

Even Ryuichi-san had not expected the flash and fire that leapt up so effortlessly between him and myself. For a while, stumbling into my apartment, shedding wet clothes along the way, running into furniture and nearly tripping on rugs, I had been astounded by it. Not even the spontaneous kiss in the rain that had turned into so much more had prepared me. But I thought I might have had a dream like this once, long ago, the last time I had been miserably unhappy, a dream that wasn't quite like a dream, except this time I still had the bruise from running into a table and I wasn't waking by myself, because I couldn't manage to get to sleep-

Stop it. Don't do this.

I had been so starved for affection and contact that I should have scared him, but he had only drawn me on, seemingly unaffected by my pace and my insatiable hunger, only continuing to give, and tearing responses out of me to take for himself. With hands and lips and teeth and tongue he had driven me halfway to madness, demanding without words that I lose myself. I was still not sure whether it had been sex or war that had happened, a frantic battle for dominance which I had only partially won. That was different too, just like the fact that, even after I had had him screaming from pleasure, he did not immediately melt into trusting sleep in my arms, but rolled out from under me to sprawl so that we were barely touching and stayed awake, his mind somewhere else entirely-

Don't do this. Don't think about this.

My body felt light, blissfully battered and wonderful. My mind, though, was not sharing the satisfied exhaustion. It had kicked into full gear as soon as the sex or the war or whatever the hell it had been was over, to tell me that I hadn't even realized I had been afraid of going over the edge and had done so anyway. That was the only thing that had been at all similar to before. I still remembered with crystal clarity that cold night in December and the first time Eiri-kun had come to me, wide-eyed and determined, a first time in many senses of the word, his, mine, ours-

Don't think about this. Stop comparing.

I had been afraid then too, of hurting him, of my own actions, and the fear had hidden itself under the heat. That unforgettable first night that had turned into many nights as we learned from our mistakes, found new ways to touch, to hold, to arouse, to prolong, to drive each other half-wild, had been the only time I had feared with him. After, being with him had made me fearless, invincible. This fear had been different, just as this kind of first had been different. There had been no hesitation on either of our parts, no inexperience to make us cautious. I had gone in knowing what we could bring each other, and he had not been the only one to cry out, and now I was not the only one awake with thoughts that were more dark than anything. It had been the first time I had flown without being anchored in reality, and that was what was so terrifying, especially when it added a new, dark edge to the pleasure-

STOP it!

And it was halfway impossible not to cry, because my body felt so fantastic and my mind kept wandering back to things I should not have been thinking about, finished things, lost things, unchangeable things. But I didn't, couldn't, because I wasn't the only one awake, like I had been in the before, and now, in the after, my thoughts were a jumble and I knew even without looking at the clock that it was practically dawn and I would not be sleeping, and if neither of us slept, one of us would have to talk, and I had no idea what to say-

"What are you thinking about?" I had always known Ryuichi-san must be braver than me, so it only stood to reason that he would speak first.

"I'm not sure. Too many things. You, mostly." And whether I just helped or hurt myself.

"Do you feel better?" he asked. I opened my eyes to see he was regarding me from across the bed, though he made no move to come closer.

"I haven't decided," I answered honestly, because I could never lie when he watched me with his eyes like that.

"I'm not asking you if you're all right," he said softly. "I know you're not all right. I'm only asking if anything from the time I dragged you out of the building helped at all."

"Probably," I replied. "I needed to relax." Oh yes, good way to describe what just happened.

The arm across my chest moved, the hand wandering down my chest with feather-light touches, stopping again to rest on my stomach. A smile touched his eyes when he saw my involuntary shiver. I was nowhere near ready for another battle with the inferno that grew between us, but the light, seemingly unobtrusive touches made me long for it, anyway. "You were wound tighter than a spring," he told me. "I was afraid you were going to explode." His smile grew a little wicked, the hand began to wander lower. "Figuratively speaking. Mostly."

That was enough to get a smile on my face, and a slightly breathless laugh. Between those singularly uncharacteristic words and his hand's skipping from just below my stomach to explore my thigh, there was enough to think about that the dark thoughts were mostly pushed out of my mind. "I think I did."

He laughed too, and pulled me towards him. But instead of continuing his rather interesting activities once I had willingly settled into his arms, he only stroked a hand gently down my back, then stopped moving, simply holding me. "I wish you weren't so torn about this," he said into my hair. "I'm not asking anything from you right now. You need something to hold on to. Please, let me be that something."

"That's all you want?" I asked, allowing myself to relax now, and realizing I really was more tired than I had imagined.

"It's all I'm asking," he corrected me gently, shifting to settle more comfortably. I was the one curled into his arms now, my head settled against his shoulder, and it was warm and comfortable and strangely comforting in its unfamiliarity. "Hold on to me. Don't think about anything else for a little while. Go to sleep."

My arms settled around his waist and I did.


It occurred to me that this was the second time in less than a month that Ryuichi-san came in to work wearing my clearly oversized clothing when Noriko-san gave us narrow-eyed, speculative looks upon our entrance to the studio. There just hadn't been enough time once we had finally woken up for more than a quick shower and a hastily gulped down lunch; then I had had to speed as it was just to get us to Shinjin by two. The only thing she said, though, apart from an automatic greeting, was, "If we don't manage to be productive after getting the morning off, I think we should start planning our funerals."

"What a cheerful thought," I sighed, but settled into a chair next to her as she started up the computer into which she had been entering all the fragments and pieces of melody she had received from me while I was in New York. "Probably accurate, though."

Ryuichi-san made a face and turned around the chair next to mine to sit in it backwards, leaning on the chair back and watching the pages of notes scroll by as Noriko-san browsed through the "random" file. His face reflected in the monitor was unreadable, but most traces of the child were gone. He, too, was worried.

"Four songs at least to fill out the new disk," Noriko-san said, continuing to send the music whizzing by. "At least one of them needs to be…" she grimaced, "better than the last one," she finally decided on her words.

I, too, watched the music going by. There was a great deal of potential in some of it, I knew, but some of it had just been playing around and most of it was just sketches. It needed polishing and rearranging to be the sort of thing we were known for. I knew it was because of me that we were in this situation, but bizarrely enough neither of them seemed to be blaming me. "A month and a half to do it," I added. "Which would be easy if we were working at full power. We're not."

"Tohma-"

"It's true, Ryuichi-san," I cut him off, giving him a hint of a smile to show it wasn't him I was angry with. "I'm saying it because it's not something that can easily be ignored. We're professionals."

"Professional enough not to send ourselves on guilt trips over something we can do nothing about, I hope," Noriko-san snapped and turned her narrowed violet eyes on me. "If you can fix it, fix it. If you can't, shut up and do your best." Clearly, she wasn't in the best of moods.

Ryuichi-san immediately teared up. "You're mean Noriko-chan!" he accused her. "We're all in this together!"

"Together, yes, but I'm the part that's malfunctioning," I cut him off again. "She's only telling the truth."

"You can't force yourself to compose!" Ryuichi-san insisted. "Whether or not we argue about this, it isn't going to change that!"

"Then why are we arguing?" I asked, my voice taking on a hard edge despite myself. "You can't keep saving me forever!"

"You're too hard on-"

"Shut. Up. Both of you," Noriko-san said through clenched teeth. "Before I grab you both by the collar and bang your heads together before handing you over to K. And I know for a fact you like both of those shirts, Tohma-kun. You don't want bullet holes in them." She turned back to the computer. "Now then, children, if we can all get along, I was thinking we need to do something about this."

She had pulled up one of the more finished sketches. She pressed the playback key, and the computer began to play mechanically. I remembered writing this one down, one long, snowy Sunday afternoon near the end of January, the lights inside on to dampen the quiet whiteness outside. There was a fireplace in the main room of the apartment, one Mrs. Smith usually used as a space to display flowers and candles, but that day there was actually a small fire flickering, because Eiri-kun had wanted it. We had still been on the initial high then, wanting to keep the other close, and he had been there, curled into the loveseat with a book and a cup of tea, as well as a slice of the apple pie Mrs. Smith had made us the day before, only he had fallen asleep, and I spent half my energy watching the light skimming over his golden head. I had been so distracted that the melody I had been playing softly wandered constantly, never settling into one key and one mood. When this fragment had come out, I only noticed it after I was playing through the refrain a second time, because the mood was more melancholy and nostalgic than happy, the last thing I would have expected my mind to come up with. So I had written it down quickly, intending to come back to it another day because I didn't want to explore the sadness when the snow was falling outside the window and the room was flickering with firelight and scented with cinnamon, and really, working on Sunday when I could pull him into my arms and be steeped in the warmth and fall into a light, contented catnap was ridiculous.

He had murmured as I squeezed into the really undersized loveseat with him, then kissed my hand (the easiest thing to reach) sleepily and said, "Pretty. Whatever it was."

"Are you awake?"

"Mmm. No. Go to sleep."

"Tohma?" I shook myself free of the powerful hold of the memory, confused for a moment to see Ryuichi-san and Noriko-san watching me curiously. "Are you sleeping?" Ryuichi-san said. "You have kind of a blank look in your eyes."

Lovely. Now I'm dreaming about him when I'm awake. The music was going through its fourth loop now, still mechanically precise as always with a computer. "I really hate that computer," I said instead of answering him, and stood up to go to the piano. "It never catches the… feeling."

I put my hands on the keys and played through what there had been with pauses, dynamics, putting the emotions that were still so fresh in my memory back in the music. I didn't notice at first that I was modifying it, cleaning it, polishing, changing chords, teasing out the feelings and the sense of the music. But as the song steadily began to change, take on form, as I stopped playing what was on the page and started adding what I remembered, even I realized what was happening. As I finished it, I looked up to see Noriko-san had tears in her eyes, and had temporarily borrowed Kumagoro to hug him.

Ryuichi-san's smile was so luminous it seemed to light up the room. "The music is back," he said.

And I realized he was right; even now that I was no longer playing, the shifting melodic line that had been gone was once again in the back of my mind, faintly distracting because it had been gone so long. I knew there was shock and naked pleasure written across my face. One of the missing pieces had fallen back into place. "It's back," I agreed, completely staggered.

Then Noriko-san was hugging me, and I wasn't sure whether she was laughing or crying, but her grip was so tight it was almost uncomfortable. "We're going to be all right," she kept repeating. "We're going to make it. We're going to be all right."


The summer that had seemed to last a lifetime finally succumbed to fall. The days became cool and the nights cold, and rain came more and more often, cool, soft rain that dampened the sound of the city and made me want to throw open my windows and let in the rustling quiet.

Once again, we were dominating the charts. Once again, the days were filled with rehearsals and composing and arranging and media appearances and the press. Once again, we received awed looks as we walked down the halls of Shinjin, once again we were drowning in offers to host programs on the radio and television, once again we were on billboards all over Tokyo, once again a concert tour was being mapped out.

Slowly, life regained its color. There were good days and bad ones, honest smiles, laughter, and jokes. My dreams faded into obscurity as I struggled to stop remembering them. There were still nights when I woke suddenly from something vivid and disorienting, but I had only to reach out my arms, and there was someone to hold and anchor me back in reality.

It was a strange relationship that had developed between myself and Ryuichi-san. Very little seemed to have changed from the way we had been before, but when the day was over and we left the studio, invariably it was together. On occasion, he dragged me someplace, though this became rarer as the mania around us grew.

To my vast surprise, we really did find ourselves often in the small bar that I had so despised the first night he had brought me there, and Ryuichi-san was right, it was not the same, but it was not terrible or hateful for it. The bartenders knew us now, and on the rare occasions it was necessary, would unobtrusively lock down so that the two or three of us could sit and speak in peace. I grew fond of it in my own way, though it inspired nostalgia each time we walked through the doors. That was the way our relationship was too, somehow not quite the sort of thing it should have been, yet comfortable and even quietly lovely, sometimes.

There was no incredible gravitational pull between us, nothing that dizzied and disoriented. Instead, his presence at my side grounded me, something I found vastly relieving after being so disconnected for so long. And though I felt nothing pulling me towards him, no strange force that made me want to watch him as he slept for hours, my eyes would occasionally wander the room absently until I found him, as if to make sure he was still there, and when he smiled or waved at me, it warmed me, just a little bit. And even without that strange, intoxicating, endless sea of emotion I had drowned in before, desire and heat rose between us easily, and I never slept alone anymore, whether he followed me home or the other way around.

On the rare occasions I thought about it, I couldn't quite pin down what I felt towards him: a certain mix of affection, desire and dependence that was difficult to qualify. But it was clear I did depend on him, and as we became used to each other, as we discovered each other's bodies and thoughts little by little in the following months, he became such an integral part of my existence that I could no longer quite imagine the days and nights without him.

"Love is different, you know, for different people," Noriko-san told me once. "And even for the same person, I think. You can never have the same love twice. I think maybe we're not supposed to try to define it." I wasn't sure what had prompted her to say something like that to me one day during one of our quickly snatched lunch breaks while Ryuichi-san was off scouring every candy machine in the building for milk-flavored pocky. I knew she knew, of course. The three of us had few secrets, even when something was not said aloud. But even without words, the subtle change that our private relationship had caused in the public one could not have escaped her notice. She never offered advice or criticism, so we didn't discuss it. That was the closest she had ever come to acknowledging her awareness aloud.

"Saa…" was all I said, biting into a sandwich and glancing at my watch to make sure we weren't late for costume fittings. But what she had said gave me a strange sort of peace. I stopped trying to make sense of my relationship with Ryuichi-san, letting it carry me along tranquilly. In a way, I thought maybe this warm, unobtrusive comfort might have been better in the long run than the overwhelming heat and constant longing I knew as "love". At least, I told myself so often enough that I started to believe it.

We never discussed the status of our relations with him, either, not even when we lay awake in the afterglow, limbs tangled, still wrapped lightly around each other, hearts slowing to a regular pattern from the erratic pulse they beat when we came together. Sex had never stopped being a sort of war with us, just like the first time, and we had never quite found any real measure of tenderness. The idea of slow, languid lovemaking seemed a thing of the distant past, one I could hardly remember. It was as if we were afraid to look under the fire, which was easy, to examine what was underneath, which was not. At least, I was afraid, and he knew and never pushed me in that direction.

We did talk, though, sometimes for hours, about thoughts and music and friends and family. There were subjects that were unspoken taboos, but he seemed to instinctively know which ones not to touch, so we lay them aside, and I found myself growing almost fearless with someone again. The tenderness came only after, once we were falling into drowsiness that preceded the deep, exhausted sleep of the overworked. I often fell asleep first, now, with his hand lightly stroking my hair.

And as I settled into this pattern, fall slipped by to be replaced with the freezing rains that heralded the arrival of winter. There were no calls from Kyoto. After a while, I taught myself not to wait for them.