Thanks to my sweet readers and my terrific beta, greenflower, as always, and the special contributions of "M" who helped me work out characterization for attractive yet mysteriously oblivious and ambiguously sexual men.

In Ruins

Chapter 19

It wasn't that Satoshi hadn't been kissed before. It wasn't even that he didn't like being kissed; after all, there was something kind of flattering about having one just sprung on him unexpectedly. It was just - he had never felt anything, never thought anything more than 'oh, that's nice' when a girl had launched herself at him from a crowd of admirers. The kiss, the kisser, they had never mattered. He'd never walked away and wanted to kiss, or be subjected to a kiss, again.

Yet when Hikari started kissing him, he didn't feel that familiar indifference. He didn't felt the residue of accomplishment or flattery or anything like that. If anything he was overpowered by a repulsion as tangible as the body pressed against his own. Nothing was left private: Satoshi could feel the curtain of Hikari's hair drape across his shirt, the outside of one of her thighs brushing against the inside of one of his. Her eyes were closed, still tear-encrusted, but he was just absorbed by how small her eyelids actually were and the way her nose clogged up the middle of her face, and by that one red bump near the inside of her right eyebrow that he hadn't noticed before. She was magnified, like a bug pinned and wriggling under the lens of a microscope, consuming his field of vision in an unnatural but painfully distant way.

Satoshi tried to respond, to think, to snap himself out of shock and get away at the least, but he was overwhelmed by the confusion and kissing and closeness, and when the jumbled thoughts whirling around in his brain skidded to a halt, they finally settled on (of all things) an image of Shigeru when they had been working pottery together earlier that morning.

Shigeru'd been... he'd been smiling at Satoshi, leaning in close, pointing something out on the plate that they were passing back and forth between their hands. His hair had been so bright; each russet strand shining like dull copper, almost blond, as they swept past his blue eyes in the breeze.

It was a thought that shouldn't have happened, but it did. It was just, he was there, with Hikari, and then there was Shigeru and then, the longing to switch places, and what if it was Shigeru -

What if I was kissing Shigeru instead -

- And there was this split hair of a moment before he even knew what he was thinking, that the kiss wasn't terrible at all. Satoshi almost even liked it. He could feel on his lips the beginning of a smile.

But then, of course, Hikari shifted, and it all crashed back. He remembered who was kissing him, and the disgust was suddenly more awful than it had ever been on Hikari's behalf alone.

The shock restored enough of his equilibrium that Satoshi was able to break away. He lurched backward, away from Hikari. Freed, he gasped for air and gulped it in as if he'd been drowning for an hour, rather than for mere moments.

He scrambled for a handhold in the grass and only settled back once he found enough dirt to ground his fingers. He tried to ground his breath, but it was too hard when his brain was reeling. He could not overlook the impossible realities before him, either: that Hikari had kissed him, and then of course, that he'd thought of kissing Shigeru, and that had actually made the kiss bearable.

"Hikari," he managed. "You..."

"I'm sorry," she exclaimed. "I'm really sorry about this."

Satoshi could only stare. "You kissed me."

"Yes, I know, and I'm so sorry. I wasn't planning on it all night. I just, I just had to know-" here, she made some ambiguous motion with her hands, "- if we were really connected after all."

"If we are connected," Satoshi ventured, "at all, I don't think it's in the way you tried to show me. I don't see you like that. Like a... a girlfriend."

"I know. I mean, I know that now. It was really obvious that, I... Well, you know. That I had been fooling myself. I think I was wrong about everything. Maybe I wasn't supposed to fit in with the legend after all, and I wasn't supposed to, to love you, and..."

"Look, I get it," said Satoshi, cutting her off. He had no idea why she was still talking about why she had thought it was a good idea to kiss him. It wasn't a good idea, and now it was over, and he really wished she'd just leave the topic alone so he could push it from his mind. After all, it had tainted everything that had been so nice and pleasant about the night.

When she finally spoke, her voice was so soft that Satoshi barely heard it: "Are you mad at me?"

"What?" he asked, confused.

Her voice gained power when it answered him: "I said, 'Are you mad?' You look upset."

Satoshi tried to be very clear. "Look, I wasn't expecting you to do... that."

"Of course you were! Didn't I make it so obvious," Hikari voiced the words as if she were not positing a question.

"Not obvious enough, apparently."

"How so? We were on a date, alone, together. Haruka knew, Tano knew, Shigeru knew-"

"Shigeru knew?" Satoshi's attention was fully on Hikari. He stared at her transfixed, more so than he had been the entire evening. "What do you mean, 'Shigeru knew'?"

"He's known for at least three weeks!"

"Three weeks?" Satoshi repeated, dumb-founded.

"Yes. I could see that he knew in his eyes. Because he looked at me once, like he was..." Here, Hikari cut herself off, and floundered, to Satoshi's frustration.

"What are you talking about?"

"Haven't you noticed, the way he just watches sometimes? He'll just sit there and not really answer questions, but lead you in circles so he gets to know what he wants? It's creepy. I don't like it."

"It's not creepy," Satoshi defended. "He's just being observant because he's a scientist-"

"A what?"

"A scien-" Satoshi paused, remembering that Hikari wouldn't know what that word meant. "He's a person who studies," he corrected himself. "And it's not weird, okay? It's just who he is. He doesn't trust people unless he knows what's going on."

"He should be more like you."

Satoshi was suddenly struck by immense frustration with Hikari. How could she say that?

"You know what? I think you're wrong. I should be more like him," he returned. "Maybe I wouldn't be stuck here, thinking I had a friend and finding out that she wanted more from me!"

Hikari stared at him, evidently shocked by his tone. Satoshi didn't have the energy to care, not when everything in his mind kept circling back to Shigeru.

"Satoshi, it's not like that..." she began, but he cut her off.

"Yeah, it is," he said. "You kissed me. You liked me. I didn't want it."

"Well, then... What do you want?" Hikari asked him, her voice weak with begging.

Satoshi looked towards the ocean. Unsurprisingly, nothing came out of it like an answer from the hidden depths of his mind, but it was worth a try. "I guess," he said to her after a moment, "I just wanna be alone now. Unless you have anything else to say, I'd really rather you just went away."

"If that's what you want," she answered immediately, and Satoshi was genuinely surprised.

He hadn't expected it to be that easy to make her listen to him, nor did he expect her to submit to his request so quickly. When he looked up after what only seemed like a few minutes, she was nowhere in sight. Her exit had been all but noiseless, not marked by the usual jingle of her bangles or even the swish of her hair where it reached the middle of her back. Satoshi was struck by a feeling of strangeness. With nothing else to do, he stood, gathered the remainders of their meal, and returned to the village, too.

By the time he'd made it back to Haruka's, most of Alph had gone to bed and dimmed their lamps and fireplaces. His and Shigeru's room was also dark, and the fire just a pile of low-burning embers. Satoshi could see, even inside the building, that his breath was eking from his mouth in white, ghost-like puffs. It was cooler than usual, then. Later at night. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he looked around the room. Shigeru was stretched out in his bed already, probably deep asleep. Satoshi wondered momentarily why Shigeru hadn't stayed up and waited for him, but at the same time, he couldn't think of any reason for why he'd had that expectation that Shigeru would do something like that. He reluctantly let the thought go, crossed the floor and laid down on his bed quietly. Everything was quiet.

With the fire so low, his bedding was too thin a layer in the cooling room. Even once he slipped in between the cover and his pallet, he felt a slight chill around him, contrasting sharply with the ring of warmth emanating from Shigeru, not even an arm's reach away.

Had they always been this close to each other? he wondered, turning toward his friend. He could smell the scent of soap and dampness lingering around him. With a heavy heart. Satoshi realized that Shigeru must have gone to the bath without him. Without him. Satoshi's heart felt like it was somehow stuck in the wrong part of his chest, and he was choking on it.

He wished it wasn't so dark so he could see Shigeru's face. He just wanted to know if his smile really looked as open as he remembered it being; if his lips looked different up close from a girl's. He'd never focused on the features before, and now it filled him with a definite regret. He would have to wait until morning.

"So... Good night," he heard himself saying to Shigeru awkwardly. The words, once spoken, were completely ineffectual. Shigeru's breathing continued unchanged, and Satoshi decided that he'd been foolish for having broken the silence at all.

He put his hands behind his head, and stared at the blank stretch of the ceiling. He waited for sleep until he couldn't see any more.

Satoshi could sense the vague shift in the air when he woke. The sun was at its usual place, but the room was cold. He rubbed his upper arms in his hands, resisting the urge to shiver when his warm hands pressed against his goose-bump-risen flesh. The sensation threw him off balance, and did some work in stealing away his sleep. He processed that Shigeru was awake and dressed as usual, sitting before a weak flicker of flames in the fire pit, absent of breakfast. Surely, he thought, that alone wasn't enough to make the room so cold?

Satoshi pulled back his blanket and realized that Shigeru must have given his up in the middle of the night, for it was a heavy weight against Satoshi's legs. Satoshi could only focus on two things; the impenetrably blank expression on Shigeru's face, and the pan with all its tea, a burnt film floating on the top of the brew like a bellied-up fish.

He ladled it into his cup, and sipped it deliberately.

"Where's breakfast," he asked at end.

"Don't know," Shigeru answered. His voice took on a forced lightness. "Doesn't matter. There's no point."

"No point," Satoshi repeated. He stared at Shigeru and willed rational thinking to return to him. Instead, he found himself focusing on the stubborn expression that curved on Shigeru's lips. They were thin lips, Satoshi noticed, with a slight trace of stubble, nothing like Hikari's, ah, that was a thought he wanted to avoid, and quickly diverted his mind to other, more immediate wonders: Shigeru, it seemed, had resigned them not to eat and didn't look willing to brook an argument.

He thought of a question for Shigeru without much trouble. Just when he was about to pose the question of why Haruka hadn't yet brought her morning supplies of breads and fruits, a man's yell carried in from the street. All at once, Satoshi honed in on the source of the noise. The door curtain rippled with the shape of a large man, who seemed to be letting out a long and unhappy cry. From his arms there seemed to be a great heaving - a shadow passed over the wall opposite the windows; and then, in a sudden burst of sound, there was the sound of pottery breaking outside the door, pieces shattering like a cacophony of voices.

Shigeru, much the same, nearly doubled over where he stood.

"Shigeru!" Satoshi cried and reached out to grab onto his waist, but Shigeru pulled away too quickly and left Satoshi clutching at air.

"No! I'm fine," he snapped out, but breathlessly.

Satoshi dropped his hand, listening as some shouted curses carried into the room from outside: a gruff voice letting out his low complaint; the shrill tones of a woman; the distinct grating noises of pottery being moved and kicked around and stepped on.

"It was just the neighbors," said Satoshi. "I think - I think he just dropped something."

Satoshi looked at Shigeru in concern. Surely that the neighbors existed wasn't new knowledge to either of them. But, he wondered if Shigeru's response hadn't had to do with that. What if he had thought the noise had come from something else?

No matter how hard Satoshi looked at him, Shigeru ignored the gaze with what was probably an offended pride. For a moment, Satoshi felt a flame of resentment churning in his stomach, but he bit it down. It was probably just hunger.

"I hope Haruka comes with the food soon," he said.

That was apparently, enough to break Shigeru from the end of his trance. His head snapped up, and he looked at Satoshi was such plain appraisal that Satoshi momentarily thought he'd been stripped bare.

"Is that all you can think about? The food? Are you really content to keep doing this forever?"

Satoshi couldn't understand why Shigeru's voice had grown so brusque. "Keep doing what?"

"Acting like everything's normal. Like this is our lives."

"I-" Satoshi started, but as the words settled into their place behind his ears, he found he could not finish all that he had framed to speak. He tried, instead, a weak return: "This is - I mean, these are - our lives, right?"

"No," said Shigeru with vehemence. "No. Just because we're alive, and we're here, it doesn't make this our lives. This place is not my life, this place is some... something else. I want to leave. I'm sick of this place. I want to go back."

"I thought you were happy here," said Satoshi. As soon as the words were out, he knew they were the wrong ones.

"Will you stop being so oblivious, Satoshi, for once in your life? Do I look happy?"

"You did-" Satoshi stopped. "You did."

And then things started, belatedly, to click into place. In a rush, it became clear why Shigeru had panicked when he'd heard the small accident outside their door, why Shigeru had been so irritable since they'd woken up - it was, after all, the morning after he had vanished without telling Shigeru anything.

Shigeru wasn't happy. At least not primarily. It seemed like he was scared.

"Even so," Satoshi began hesitantly. "I don't think you're totally miserable. We're still having fun, aren't we?"

Shigeru smiled faintly. "Well, you certainly are."

Satoshi could have sworn there was another layer of meaning to the sentence, but he didn't understand.

It didn't grow warmer as the day progressed, though the sun remained a faithful time-keeper as it marched across the cloudless sky. Satoshi complained about the changed weather frequently, and that fact alone kept Shigeru from making a show of how much he wished for another layer of clothes. At least, it seemed, their time decorating pots under the tree was over, and their jobs were more aligned with Alph's new climate. They were moved to the kiln, and were learning to gage the heat of flames, to sift the coal, and to hold the clay on a pallet with a steady, even hand.

It was a nice distraction from the two conversations that had come in the wake of Satoshi's disappearance the night before.

The temperature of the fire was strong. His mind supplied him that the kiln had to be at least 250 degrees Celsius to do its work. He could tell that this was the case quite easily: in spite of the chill he'd felt earlier in the day, and the steadily more-freezing drafts that swung in around the edge of the house and onto his back, he was sweating freely by lunch time.

Their first meal of the day was heartily welcomed as a reprieve for both his singed skin and his starving stomach. Shigeru sat at the edge of the table in no hurry to go back to learning the workings of the potter's kiln. Satoshi, unsurprisingly, was faster to voice this than Shigeru. He got the reward of his efforts when Tano stooped on his cane, and said with deep consideration in his voice, "In that case, Satoshi, why don't you gather more materials for the clay, and come back by mid-afternoon?"

Shigeru wasn't letting Satoshi out of his sight again. Not if he could help it. Satoshi spoke up before Shigeru even had a chance to contest the decision.

"Why don't Shigeru and I just go together? We're really efficient that way," he insisted. And then he was out the door, leaving Shigeru to follow behind him with a shrug and a half-bitten-off goodbye.

Satoshi strode down the lane, following its wandering limestone steps until they were trodding the bitter-root red dirt outside the furthest edges of town. As they stood and searched for a patch of ground without any scrubs or stones, Satoshi was quiet; he was almost pensive. It wasn't unattractive, but it was a face that Shigeru was so unaccustomed to that it momentarily took him aback. Shigeru was tired of being surprised, but not too tired to keep himself from growing edgy.

"How's this spot?" he finally asked Satoshi, who shrugged, noncommittal. They began to break into the ground. Only the distant sound of the wind crashing against the edge of the cliffs below Alph, and even more distant bird song, drifted in the thin air between them before Satoshi found his voice at last.

"You seem to be learning about using the kiln really quickly," he commented.

"What, you're not?"

"I don't know. I couldn't really focus on anything Tano was saying."

Shigeru tucked his shovel into the ground and pressed it down with his foot. The dirt gave and crumbled in. "What do you mean," he huffed.

"I was so hungry," Satoshi flashed him an easy smile. "It's too hard to work without breakfast."

"I didn't used to eat breakfast before Alph," Shigeru admitted. "I don't think Grandpa ever made it seem really important."

"But... breakfast is delicious."

"Food is delicious; breakfast just happens to be food that is eaten in the morning. I wasn't used to eating food in the morning before I came here, so I guess it's easier for me to go without it every now and then."

"Oh yeah? I heard your stomach rumbling," Satoshi challenged.

"Are you admitting to hearing things again?"

"Come on, it was as loud as an earthquake. Tano heard you, too."

"I'm pretty sure he was commenting about your gastronomical explosion; not mine. I'm starting to think your stomach has its own language."

"Oh man, do you know how awesome that would be..."

Shigeru let Satoshi's reply fall over him like a warm blanket.

"Pretty awesome," he admitted. The return to their banter had soothed him better than any distraction could have afforded, and he leaned against his shovel with a smile.

It was nearly the end of the afternoon when Satoshi finally breached the subject that he had been avoiding, and that had been hovering on the edge of Shigeru's mind.

"So. Last night," he began mildly as he poured a bucket of water on the kiln. "I think that Hikari and I went on a date."

Steam escaped from the mouth of the rocky basin in a low and sputtered hiss, growing so thick in the twilight that Shigeru quickly lost his view on Satoshi's face.

"Yeah. I figured," said Shigeru tightly, picking up his own filled bucket with a too-strong grip. It was true; he had known that Hikari was attracted to Satoshi, but hearing the evidence stated so baldly filled him with a simmering, jealous rage that he had to press down immediately; that he had to snuff out as summarily as an over-heated kiln.

After all, he had to be logical about this. And reasonable. He had no claim on Satoshi - whether or not he was in love with Satoshi had no effect on what Satoshi chose to do. He was free to do whatever he liked. Free to like whoever he wanted. Free to go on dates with slutty priestesses. It was his choice.

"Tano wouldn't tell me anything except who you were with, but when you came back so late, I figured that something had happened," Shigeru continued vaguely. He focused his eyes firmly on the ground as he lifted his bucket."Well? How did it go?"

"She kissed me."

The entire bucket was unturned before Shigeru knew better, and the kiln replied with a violent hiss and streamers of steam lunged into the air.

"Congratulations," Shigeru heard himself saying - and was pleased that his voice sounded even. He was even more pleased to see a scowl twist on the bottom half of Satoshi's face, just barely visible through the swirling smoke.

"That's not what it's like," said the pair of frowning lips. Shigeru focused on them like they were all he could see; and they were. He straightened his shoulders.

"It's not?"

"'s not," Satoshi replied. He took his bucket and lifted it with less ease than Shigeru had. Grimacing, he said, "Aren't you supposed to be the observant one? You don't see Hikari coming back today to see me, do you?"

The water fell on the rocks. Hisssss. Hisssss.

Shigeru puffed out a hot ball of sarcasm to match. "Oh, I get it," he said. "She's not here because you said something insensitive and ruined the moment."

"Yeah. I ruined the moment when I pushed her away," Satoshi corrected him.

"Why?"

"It's not like I wanted to hurt her feelings... but yeah. I told her it was impossible. She, uh, didn't take it well."

"Cried?" Shigeru asked. This time, he couldn't keep a strain of hope from his voice.

"Yeah."

Shigeru nodded, unable to find any appropriate words to speak. He thought about feelings and impossibilities and relief, and not the least bit of guilt for Hikari because Satoshi, inexplicably, didn't like her - and then it was almost too much. Too much to keep it in. Satoshi already knew that he was gay. What was one more secret off of his chest? He'd tell Satoshi, he decided on impulse. He'd tell Satoshi about Haruka like him, too, and about everything.

"Satoshi, -"

"Hey, did you feel that?" Satoshi interrupted. He stood as if trapped in the frame of a moment, his bucket of water submerged in the icy water of the Trough, his chin lifted up and his eyes on the descending twilight sky. Shigeru copied him, lifting his face as well, and was caught by the touch of something cold attaching itself to the base of his nose.

"Was that a-"

"-snowflake?" Shigeru finished for him. He brought up his hand, and let one land onto the center of his palm. It was - for all of a few seconds - a tiny, immaculate ice creation, before it broke apart into a tiny droplet of water. Not wasting any time, another snowflake caught onto the arm of his sleeve. It melted quickly into the fabric like a shadow, like it had never been there after all.

"It's really snowing!" exclaimed Satoshi. "Shigeru, is this normal? Does it snow in Alph?"

Shigeru just looked and looked. The sun shone behind a flurry of tumbling white flakes, as if it were laughing at him; as if it were withholding from him the punch-line of some cosmic joke.

"How should I know?" he muttered. All thoughts of telling Satoshi about Haruka, Hikari, and himself were forgotten for the time being. He dumped another bucket of water on the kiln, and the steam shot up against the snowfall with a thin but resolute hisssss.