Chapter 12: Shifts I: Egoist
The Uke Flu
Chapter Twelve: Shifts I
It did not take Hiroki long, as he sat there on the couch in the silence of their front room, to realize that he had just tremendously fucked up.
This whole semuke scenario is more than a little mind blowing, but still…
Hiroki was furious with himself that he had so immediately jumped into his own insecurities, without pausing for even an instant to consider what Nowaki had been going through.
Obviously, Nowaki being pregnant was beyond huge, particularly given the circumstances.
And then there was just such an awful irony in this whole situation.
Before he met Nowaki, he had been really quite a promiscuous person, though unhappily so. Hiroki suddenly remembered a particularly rampant time when he was in college.
Akihiko, concerned for his health and safety, not realizing that he was part of the equation in his friend's seeming insatiability, had once gone so far as to confront him about his reckless conduct. Hiroki's amethyst-eyed counsel had reprimanded him quite harshly, warning him that if he didn't moderate his behavior, he would soon find himself having exchanged more fluids than Tokyo's leading sperm bank.
Sadly, Akihiko had not been that far off.
For him, to have had this history and then for his devoted Nowaki, lover of one and recipient of only the most sporadic plantings of Kamijou seed (well, in that particular manner anyway), to end up in the family way, struck Hiroki as horribly unjust.
Hiroki also knew it must have killed Nowaki to have to tell him he'd conceived, given how openly oppositional he had always been about the whole idea of having children in the first place. He knew beyond the shadow of a doubt too that Nowaki would be carrying and keeping the baby. Given his history, for Nowaki there would be no other option. His heart squeezed with conviction as he realized that even if Nowaki hadn't been expecting him to be happy about the situation, he might of at least been hoping for some modicum of support.
And how do I respond to Nowaki's life-changing news?
By accusing the most loyal person I know of something terrible and low. Hiroki's cheeks burned with shame. He leaned back into the couch and tried to massage the cramping furrow out of his forehead.
He thought about Nowaki grappling for the last several months with his work schedule, not to mention the majority of the chores, while feeling all the effects of the Flu. Nowaki had, as always, borne the burden without complaint.
Hiroki had no doubt when Nowaki had been troubled with the symptoms he'd withheld mentioning them because he hadn't wanted to trouble him. That was just Nowaki's way. It had been awful of him then to have accused the man of any devious withholding. Nowaki would have never come as far as he had if he had been one to be vocal about his personal discomforts.
Hiroki grimaced as he contemplated how hard his partner had worked and struggled to get where he was.
How is having this baby going to affect Nowaki's career prospects now?
It had honestly never been that important to Hiroki that Nowaki equal or surpass him professionally. In fact, if he was honest, he had always been a little leery about what might happen when Nowaki did. Still Hiroki knew how much it meant to Nowaki to achieve: it was terribly important to him.
Now there's a baby and this whole semuke thing.
No wonder Nowaki had seemed so out of sorts last night. As if being sick wasn't enough to deal with, Hiroki knew now that Nowaki's identity and his future had just been tweaked in a major way. Nowaki's position in the social hierarchy of things, through no fault of his own, had just irrevocably shifted for the rest of his life.
That has got to be a tremendous thing to deal with, even for someone as humble and easy going as that big goof.
The more Hiroki thought about things, however, it was surprisingly easy for him to adjust to the whole semuke concept. Given what he had read, it actually made a lot of things about Nowaki, which had always puzzled him, suddenly make sense.
After all, Nowaki had always seemed to him a rather mythical character anyways: the man was just so extraordinary, really, and certainly, in so many ways, different from the vast number of semes that Hiroki had known.
A rare smile quirked the corners of Hiroki's mouth at how the Dr.'s gay unicorn analogy; somehow it fit, particularly given the phallic/sexual subtext of the original myth.
Pushing through this potentially distracting literary pondering, Hiroki realized that harder actually than accepting the semukeness of his lover, was the idea that he was going to be a father. And not just that he was going to be a father, but that he was the father.
This was a concept that he had never previously entertained as a possibility for his life.
It bothered Hiroki, for some reason he did not yet understand, that in this accomplishment, albeit accidental, there was something that sparked a small new glow in him.
Hiroki felt disconcerted, lost, and incredibly fearful, but underneath all of this he also felt proud in a way that he hadn't ever experienced before.
It was amazing to him as he began to process his feelings that, while nothing had yet really changed yet, somehow with Nowaki's declaration of pregnancy, everything had nonetheless suddenly shifted.
In his life, Hiroki had thought he had long moved well past feeling ashamed of being yaoi. He knew that he was not a coward; he had faced his share of adversity and prejudice and had managed to stay relatively intact.
He'd rationalized that any reticence he felt about letting people know about this particular aspect of his life came in part, from the fact he was naturally a private person who did not like people intruding into his affairs; that his reluctance to be overt was also informed by his desire to simply be allowed to live a quiet and peaceful life.
Hiroki had never thought himself particularly uncomfortable with being an uke either, though it did try his pride at times. In truth, he had always loved the feeling of having his ass filled with a good dick… particularly Nowaki's. But now, with this news, he realized that perhaps he had not been entirely honest with himself.
He found himself thinking about Akihiko's depictions of him, well, of all ukes actually, in the BL novels the man wrote. (He did read them occasionally, not that he would ever admit this.) It annoyed him, the shallowness and stereotypical way in which Akihiko's ukes were portrayed. Even his Hiroki "character," while more developed than most BL ukes, often fell into familiar and condescending tropes.
Hiroki also considered Miyagi and his banter. All the jokes he'd endured from Miyagi as they had grown more aware of each other's private lives; the jibes the man made about his junior's limping and sore backsides.
Most of all he remembered a comment made by his father: that if he had to be yaoi, "Why couldn't you at least have the decency to be the one on top?"
Actually, in his younger days, he had been the penetrator, more than once, in fact.
Hiroki acknowledged to himself, for the first time perhaps, that while he didn't really desire to be a seme, there was something that had long been fueling his tendency towards anger and his secrecy about his ukeness. There was something that he had been desiring but had never attained with these other men in his life, both yaoi and straight: equity.
After all they were all men, the preference of someone's sexual position should not have an effect on the rest of one's position in life. But it did, and this had bothered him immensely.
Hiroki was shocked to find, that in the revelation of Nowaki's situation… their situation, he now somehow felt validated, equalized, even if this sense was real only in his own mind.
It troubled him greatly too that this sensation of equalization had come from an event that would only diminish Nowaki now in these same men's eyes.
He also realized that with Nowaki, he had felt an equality all along. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have been able to stay together with the man for all the years that they had.
Understanding this now, Hiroki finally grasped that while Nowaki's incredible, unbelievable news had just altered everything, there was one thing it didn't change: when he got right down to the bottom of it, he simply could not imagine his life without Nowaki in it.
With or without a baby.
Hiroki pushed himself up off the couch and headed towards the bedroom.
He did not want Nowaki to spend one more second in there grappling with his recent discovery alone. His giant had struggled through too much in his life on his own and now Nowaki needed to be assured that whatever happened, his partner would be at his side.
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