A day had passed since the news about California had been discovered, but that didn't mean Souichi's mood had improved at all—it had only evolved into something new.
Yesterday was like a cavalcade of gunmen all shooting at once: quick, loud, and explosive. Today, however, was like a tank crawling up a hill; the climb may have been slow, but the approach was low and thunderous, and while much more contained, the firing power was even more frightening.
The door had gotten a break this morning, being slid open and closed slowly rather than shoved to the point of near-destruction, and rather than in a ball of rapidly flailing limbs, Souichi had entered the lab in a slow trudge—his feet didn't even leave the ground.
Tetsuhiro was half-working, half-hiding in the corner where they stored the live cultures, watching through a gap in the shelves as Souichi made his slow advancement through the lab. His head hung down over his shoulders, and Tetsuhiro could practically see the cloud of darkness circling around him as he walked.
"Morinaga," he said with a voice as cold as steel. "Where are you? I know you're in here."
Tetsuhiro had not planned to die on this day, especially not before 9 AM, but he knew a worse fate would await him if he tried to hide any longer. So, drawing a breath, he stepped out of the corner, just close enough to a pair of scissors if things got too heated. "Yes, Senpai?"
"I wanted to inform you that from today on, I'll be dropping out of the university." He had absolutely no emotion in his voice; it was like the deepest, blackest void.
"Dropping out? What do you mean, dropping out? We're almost halfway through the year already."
"That is true, but there is something else that's gotten my attention, a new path in life that I have to follow."
"New...path…?" He supposed it wasn't impossible, but it did seem a little wasteful—Souichi was a first-year doctoral student, after all, as well as extremely dedicated to his research.
"Yes. I've decided I'm going to become the governor of California."
Tetsuhiro stared. "You—you what?"
"You heard me—the governor of California. I'm going to become it."
Had he not known any better, he would've laughed, but instead he just stared in disbelief. "And...why is that?"
It looked like something out of a horror movie. His head turned in Tetsuhiro's direction slowly, mechanically, and in his bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes there lay nothing but rage. "So I can destroy all the gays and the countries that produce them."
If possible, Tetsuhiro's eyes widened even further. "Senpai...you can't just say that sort of thing. It's...inappropriate, at the least." Especially considering that he had one such gay standing right there in the room with him.
"I'm gonna do it," he said, more and more anger dripping into his voice with every word. "I'm gonna do it, and the first person I'm gonna do it to is that fucker Kurokawa!" He smashed his fist on the counter, sending a few beakers to the ground.
As he made to swing his arm and knock even more things off the counter—among them some very potent, very toxic chemicals—Tetsuhiro grabbed him from behind in an attempt to restrain him. While that did succeed in keeping the bottles intact, it did not succeed in calming Souichi down, nor prevent him from continuing his indiscriminate flailing.
"How fucking dare he?!" he shouted. "Thinking he can just waltz into my life and steal my brother away from me and then trap him in marriage and have me just sit there quietly and accept it?! He must think that since he's in a foreign country I can't get to him, but guess what—there are planes for a reason!"
Except this was absolutely not the reason. "Senpai, I beg you, please calm down before you hurt yourself!"
"The only one who's gonna get hurt is him! Him and all the other fags—every single one of them is gonna hurt, I'll make sure of that!"
For being so lithe, he was surprisingly strong, managing to drag Tetsuhiro along with him for a few feet despite holding him back with all his strength. "I get that you miss your brother, but genocide is going too far, even for you! Just calm down, please? We can drink at my place tonight if you like!"
"I'm gonna kill him…I'm gonna kill that cocksucker and all his cocksucker cohorts!"
"You can have as much as you want—my treat! Just please, for the sake of every American, please calm down!"
It had taken a good twenty minutes, but Souichi had managed to scream himself into exhaustion, and though the lab was a mess, nothing too toxic had been spilled. Despite being hopelessly unreasonable throughout the whole ordeal, Souichi had apparently heard the part about being treated to free alcohol and found it appealing enough to agree. They hadn't spent much time together outside of school, so Tetsuhiro wasn't the most familiar with his drinking habits, but he did know that in times of emotional duress, the amount someone was willing to drink increased dramatically, so he made sure to stock up on as much as he could afford.
It was all gone within the first two hours, and so was Souichi.
How he was still able to talk, let alone use his motor skills, Tetsuhiro had no idea, but he'd practically shotgunned every can he'd had, and they now lay around him on the floor like some kind of protective ring. Not only that, however, he'd also torn through a full pack of cigarettes, and there wasn't enough air freshener in the world that could get the smell of tobacco out of the room.
"What do you mean, there's no more left?!"
"I mean, there's no more left," Tetsuhiro replied tersely, gesturing to the cans scattered about."You drank it all."
"Then go get more! There's a store like two blocks away."
Tetsuhiro retrieved a trash bag and began cleaning up the mess. "I'm not getting you more. You've had plenty already."
"You don't know anything about plenty." Souichi threw his can at Tetsuhiro's head, which of course missed but not by as much as one would think.
"But I do know that I'm not about to take your ass to the hospital when you get alcohol poisoning."
"Oh, so you'd just let me die, then?"
"You won't die if you stop drinking."
"Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do!" Souichi exclaimed, falling onto his back and sending some of the cans scattering. "My little brother's in America getting married to another man, and I can't do anything about it."
"That's not a bad thing, you know." He grimaced as he dumped the ashtray. "He's not a little kid anymore—let him breathe a little."
"But it's so wrong," he groaned, rolling petulantly onto his side so his back faced Tetsuhiro. "I just don't understand why being gay is so easy for him but for me it's such a fucking ordeal!"
Tetsuhiro's entire body froze, and with robotic slowness he turned his head to Souichi. "What...did you just say?"
"I said, he's out there, in America, with that cocksucker, livin' this happy gay life, and yet here I am, alone and sad. Why's he have to have it so easy, huh? What's so different about him and me?"
He couldn't believe it. He absolutely could not believe what he was hearing. Souichi Tatsumi, the university's resident tyrant and proud homophobe, was gay? This was...there was no way. There was no way that this could be true. He was just drunk; he had no idea what he was actually saying. This was all just drunken, stress-induced babbling that he'd probably forget when the morning came. But still…
"Well, you're straight, aren't you? That's a pretty big difference, I think."
He scoffed and rolled onto his back. "Straight. If only. Then my life would've been so much easier. I could've just found a girl, gotten married, maybe had some kids, and lived a normal life. But no, nothing can ever be that simple. I mean, not like I didn't try. I've dated girls before, but it never lasted more than a few months. Shit, even sex wasn't that great. Yeah, I came, but it wasn't like a happy 'came.' It was just...empty. Y'know what I mean?"
Tetsuhiro knew exactly what he meant. After the incident in Fukuoka, he'd fully believed that his heart had died, and he'd spent most of his nights drifting about various bars and taking partner after partner to bed, sometimes without even remembering their name. He was a cesspool of self-loathing, absolutely repulsed by his behavior and yet believing it was all that he deserved. Souichi, however, had resparked in him all the emotions he'd believed to be dead for so long, and he didn't even know it. Tetsuhiro had to wonder where he'd be right now if it wasn't for him.
"Hey," Souichi said, his voice surprisingly clear considering his heavy intoxication. "What's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"You know...fuckin' another guy?"
He didn't know what to say. In the five years he'd known the man, Tetsuhiro had never thought this would happen. Maybe this wasn't just drunken babbling after all; maybe he really was gay.
"Well, I've never done it with a girl, so I can't really compare the two, but for me sex has always been really...I don't know...natural, I guess. I'd always felt kinda out of place, even before realizing I was gay, and I definitely struggled with for awhile, but loving men and having sex with men just...felt right. The doubt, the fear, the insecurity, it all just...washes away. And in that moment, no matter how brief, there's only happiness. Joy. Even...even love."
Souichi remained silent, which he supposed was fair. The drunken brain takes much longer to process things, after all. So he continued cleaning up the cans, all the while awaiting a response, but none came. When Tetsuhiro had managed to destroy the can barrier and moved closer to Souichi, he couldn't resist a smile. He'd fallen asleep at some point, his chest rising and falling slowly and evenly, his face all flushed from drinking.
Tetsuhiro lingered there far longer than he should've, but he couldn't help it. Souichi was a ball of bad-tempered aggression on a good day, but in this state, sleeping soundly in a drunken daze, he looked like a gentle little flower. Just begging to be picked…
He shook his head. No matter his own feelings, he couldn't take advantage of him like this—that wasn't right. Besides, what good was having sex if one of them didn't enjoy it?
Gingerly Tetsuhiro placed his arms under Souichi's shoulders and legs and lifted him up onto his bed. He may have been severely drunk, but something about leaving Souichi to sleep on the floor seemed cruel. It was just good hospitality.
Tetsuhiro laid him on the bed with great care, as if he were some porcelain doll, and brushed the hair away from his face. He looked so pretty, so delicate and small...maybe he couldn't have sex with him, but he could at least do something tiny. So he leaned down and pressed a sweet, gentle kiss to Souichi's forehead. He lingered there longer than he probably should've, but it just felt so warm and sweet. Who knew if an opportunity like this would ever come up again, let alone any time soon? He wanted to savor this moment as long as he could.
Slowly, hesitantly, Tetsuhiro pulled away, just as Souichi let out a little groan and twitched his eyes part-way open. He looked from side to side and furrowed his brow.
"I'm sorry for waking you. I didn't want you sleeping on the floor, so I moved you up to my bed. Don't worry, I'll just take the futon for—"
It happened in an instant.
One moment he was talking, and the next he was silent, quieted completely by a pair of lips on his own. Souichi cupped Tetsuhiro's cheek with one hand, the other propping him up just enough for their lips to meet.
He was stunned. What was he supposed to do? Souichi was kissing him—kissing him! He was drunk and half-asleep, yes, but a kiss was a kiss regardless! He should've pulled away, should've broken it off and gotten him to bed, but...he couldn't move. It was a soft kiss, and of course messy, but still, it was the warmest, most beautiful thing he'd experienced in years. His heart was swelling, his cheeks were reddening, and against his will, he could feel himself hardening. His eyelids grew heavy, his body relaxed, and slowly, with just enough control, he lowered Souichi back down to the bed and kissed him back. His lips were so sweet, so soft, and the tiny noises drifting up from his throat were so, so cute…
How long they kissed, he did not know, but when Souichi pulled back, Tetsuhiro yearned for more. "Hey," he whispered, the words practically floating against Tetsuhiro's lips. "I...I wanna do it."
Tetsuhiro blinked a few times, but he couldn't shake himself of his pleasure-induced stupor. "Do...it…?"
"Yeah...with...with you…"
"Senpai…"
"I mean it. I wanna feel the way you do. I wanna...feel right…"
He'd said it so quietly, so faintly, that Tetsuhiro wondered if he was dreaming. But regardless of it being real life or fantasy, no matter how wrong he knew it was, hearing Souichi say those words like that…
He captured Souichi's lips once more.
Y'all have NO IDEA how hard it is for me to write this and NOT call the characters Tetsuda and Tyrannus. (For reference, I'm revising one of my other AU fics, Hellacious, alongside rewriting KSB, and I changed Tetsuhiro and Souichi's names to Tetsuda and Tyrannus, respectively, so I have to check myself every once and awhile to make sure I don't slip their names in accidentally).
Also did y'all ever notice that their first sex scene is on the floor? It took me literal YEARS to notice that they weren't actually on the bed, instead just down on the floor with Souichi's back against the bed frame (which, thinking back, REALLY must have hurt when they started actually having sex since he would've kept ramming into it).
Anyway, trying to figure out how to do this scene was way more difficult than I expected, and while I did still use the "Souichi was drunk" trope from the original, the way both of them handle it in the aftermath will be different. It's implied in the original that Tetsu feels bad in the later volumes about being so forceful, but he never really addresses how rapey and manipulative he was in Volumes 1-3 (ESPECIALLY Volume 3, I have WORDS about what happened on that street), so that's my justification for keeping the drunk sex thing in this version. And don't worry, the actual sex scene is coming next chapter. Hopefully it won't be too bad—I'm VERY rusty.
~Anton
