Imagine being loved by me
Hozier
Yuuko had always felt unfit for the things life gave her. Married early, no degree and having never worked a job, first child born not even a year in. Taichi had been an easy baby for the most part, making up for a traumatic birth that had caused her to bleed so much she'd passed out, missing the first thirty-six hours of his life from the sheer exhaustion of giving him life at all. The easy helped, because she didn't know the first thing about taking care of an infant, didn't have family around to teach her, and Susumu had been discouraged from using all his parental leave, afraid to weather the waters at his new company, a salaryman to the core. When he was older, and she was brave enough to ask, Taichi'd reassured her that he never felt neglected growing up, before his sister came along, but Yuuko knows he's just being kind, that she got so much of those early years wrong.
Collected enough of herself to try again with Hikari, who had been planned at least, rewarded in the effort to count every prenatal vitamin and keep an active regiment and follow all the recommendations the mommy bloggers and talking heads doled out, with a child more ill than ever should be normal, a weak constitution that had a desperate Yuuko convinced that if the something wrong in her couldn't be fixed then she would fix everything outside herself instead, from the foods they ate to the schools the children were sent to the place she'd made Susumu move them when he finally began earning enough. If things couldn't look okay inside, she'd make everything look okay outside, a normal family with normal lives and normal dreams.
That had failed, too. The world seemed all the more happy to go on right past her at a pace she'd never catch, only for another world entirely to come along right after that, a final confirmation that she'd been doomed from the start, unworthy. She knows she shouldn't think this way, but the very dark part at the base of her brain stem still wonders, well, maybe the Digital World wouldn't have seen the empty things it saw in Taichi and Hikari if she had filled them in properly, that if they'd have been well adjusted and complete and not apparently failed so badly in even the invisible ways they wouldn't have been taken in the first place. And maybe then she wouldn't have to still watch them thanklessly give their lives for it again and again, nothing ever enough, the one life lesson she had always been so afraid to pass on.
These are the things she knows if she says aloud to anyone, she'd surely be more openly labeled as unfit, so she stays quiet and busy in the kitchen, away from her family's conversation spoken in low, somber tones in the living room. Susumu is sitting on the couch where Hikari's laying across it, her head on her father's knee, eyes puffy and red. Taichi is standing by the balcony, the blinds drawn, hands in his jeans pockets, looking out the glass doors. Susumu and Hikari are the ones talking, actually. Taichi is saying nothing. This is how Yuuko knows how serious it is.
Keeping herself busy, she turns off the tap, secures the top of the kettle, and sets it back on the stovetop, turning the heat up medium high. Opens the cupboard to take down one more teacup, joining the four she always tends to keep lined up on the counter on matching saucers, force of habit.
Hikari sits up suddenly as Yuuko is measuring out the amount of sugar she tries to remember each of them like, second guessing herself throughout, spills a teaspoon over the counter. Her daughter shouts in anger, "And then what?"
"Hikari." The first word he's spoken in about forty-five minutes. He sounds tired, but not in the way they all are, and have been, the long day refusing to find its end. It's a different weight, heavy with the kind of burdens that frighten her to think of too long. Worse, Yuuko has become so used to this recent quality to her son's voice that she finds herself unable to remember how much lighter it used to be.
Hikari fights back, like he'd taught her. Sticking up for the things she believes in, making it not unknown how, lately, this has not included her brother. "If you want me to stop talking about it, do something about it."
"That's enough." Susumu a little louder than he appears to have intended, forgetting they're not alone. "Don't think you're too grown for me to send you both to your rooms." The joke lands poorly. Hikari's on her feet, passing Yuuko holding the tea tray in the hallway. Her door slams. Susumu puts his face in his hands, rubbing circles into his temples. "Let her hate you for a while. Okay?"
Taichi doesn't reply, back to looking out the balcony doors.
"We need to keep her here. It's not safe for her to be o—,"
"Dad, I know."
"It's not enough to know it, Taichi." Looks at him in open fear, burdening his child with the responsibility of holding his own life together. An embarrassing thing to witness. "When it's family or the world, you don't get to know what you choose. You just do it. There won't be time to think it through."
This is when Yuuko pivots away from the living room at the last moment and turns instead towards Taichi's childhood bedroom. Balances the tray in one hand so she can knock with the other. She doesn't catch his response, muffled through the wooden paneling, but risks the potential awkwardness ahead over the promising escalation behind her.
Back to the door, Yamato's hunched over the desk, almost swallowed up by several small mountains of textbooks, notepads, wired electronic and radio equipment staged through the room. The crackling hum of their frequency makes her pause, adjusting her ears to the whistling low pitch. He's either used to it, or simply can't hear it anymore, scribbling furiously onto a legal pad, gaze swiveling back and forth between the writing paper and the star chart he references. "I told you, I'm not hungry." His muttering not unkind, but not patient either.
"Tea, then?" She looks for a place to set the steaming cup but there isn't a clean one.
Startles a bit, realizes his mistake, looking at her. "Yuuko," like her name apology enough. His blush is a sickly pink under the dim light of the desk lamp. There's flecks of toothpaste still matted between the patches of his five o'clock shadow, stringy blond hair sticking up around the temples, where he's probably been resting his head on his palms, up through the nights. His eyes are heavy, and he's dressed in Taichi's old clothes, a pair of unwashed jeans and the football jersey for the team Taichi'd played with in secondary school. Yuuko knows he's lost weight, but no one talks about it, so she doesn't either.
"Don't let it get cold." She smiles when she finds a suitable spot to place the teacup, over a closed spiral notebook. He snatches it up fast, almost knocking the drink out of her hand.
"No, sorry—it's just, it's not—," and then just stops talking altogether. Looking down at the notebook, the size of his palm. Tea droplets are soaking the cover, the upper right corner.
Yuuko puts the entire tray down on another book stack and sits on the edge of Taichi's old twin bed, opens her palms to him. Yamato is quiet as he passes the notebook over. She wipes up the spilt tea with the end of her linen housework apron, takes extra care over Takeru's name inked on the lower reverse corner, tender to the touch. Hands it back to him, but he doesn't take it.
Instead he looks at her, not fully present. "He never got to use it."
Yuuko makes her smile as kind as possible. "He will."
Yamato nods after a while, accepting the notebook then. Holds it between long, pale fingers, nails bit all the way down, one of his worser anxious habits. Yuuko remembers the first time she'd noticed this tendency, a teenaged Yamato lingering in the entranceway of the same flat, gripping the shoulder strap of his guitar case tight in a curled hand, while a teenaged Taichi unceremoniously dumped another boyfriend on speaker phone at the dinner table, Susumu rolling his eyes as he carried his dishes to the kitchen. "Don't worry," Susumu'd told Yamato, who'd been chewing on a thumbnail, trying his best not to pretend he'd been listening, waiting to walk Taichi to Koushiro's, make the most of the last night of summer break. "I promise to never let him try that on you."
How madly Yamato'd blushed at Susumu's gentle teasing, stammering something Yuuko'd hadn't caught, but made her husband laugh in that way that echoed their son's at his happiest, carbon copies of each other in so many ways. It would be years still before Taichi would come home one winter to tell the two of them what she and Susumu had known from day one, but they'd done their parental, non-interference part to feign surprised delight at the only outcome they'd ever wanted, Yuuko happy to hand over their anniversary wedding band set for Taichi to get remade into the ring he'd give Yamato a month later.
It's the same ring he wears now, and Yuuko nods at it. "I can have that polished. If you'd like. Make it like new? It's been a while, right?"
Yamato looks at his hand, turns his palm over. The brushed surface is a little scratched, the tiniest of nicks heavy to one side. Hadn't taken it off, for anything, in so long the metal had weathered noticeably. Koushiro the one to defend him when Taichi had tried to point out it would just be worse making himself such a public target, a neat reversal of their positions on the matter, because too many things had changed, and far too quickly, Yamato consumed by the search for something solid beneath his feet in all of it, not above desperation. The hope for a thing to be just theirs, gone up in smoke.
Stop taking everything on yourself , in a voice none of them had ever heard Koushiro use before, and certainly not with Taichi, who had looked back at him like they both knew this would be the point they'd mark as the new before and after of their friendship. Still obnoxiously close, impossibly so, finishing each other's sentences in ways that Yamato had always been a little resentful of at his most insecure. But an irrevocable line had still been drawn, at some atomic level, between them, after Takeru. Even Mimi looks at Taichi differently now.
"I like the reminder," glances up at her, a slight smile of reassurance, his old self peeking out behind dark blue corners. "What we've been through." Less a like than a need, if he's honest. What we're doing this for.
Yuuko nods. Her hands are flat on her knees, sat politely on the mattress. She can't hear anything from the other side of the bedroom door she'd left slightly ajar, which may or may not be a good sign. Returns another smile at him. "Is that—?" and nods at the star chart laying face up on the desk.
Yamato picks it up, presenting one side to her. "What most people see," with navigational points she recognizes, outlining familiar constellations, and then flips to the other side. "What we see." This a far more complex accounting, boasting both printed and hand drawn notations plotting newly discovered systems, detailed calculations, spatial relationships. His notes are in three different languages, tiny scribbles in a tidy script.
She squints, looking for the pattern, too. It doesn't make much sense to her even at several glances, but in that highly specialized way that doesn't make her feel wrong for not knowing how to keep up. "Is that where you're looking next?"
"If we can get permission." Drags his chair a bit closer, so he can trace the most recently drawn line for her. "Here's the furthest we've gone with our research on site. Everything after that falls under Canada and Denmark's littoral claims, or did. The UN approved most of Russia's revised petition last year, so the disputed part that maps atmospherically here," drags his fingertip to the part of the chart that bears the majority of his handwritten notations, "is where we won't be able to go until the commission returns the rest of its decision. But that's where a Digital Gate is. Has to be."
Yuuko has stopped looking at the chart, studying his bowed face instead, the resolved expression. If anyone could will possibility into being, she'd have thought it would be Taichi. Supposes that there's a lot you take of someone into yourself, when you're this inevitable. "Well, until they finish their review, I suppose you'll have to be—,"
"—creative," finishes Yamato, nodding.
Her smile appears without her realizing it. "Patient."
Has enough self-regard to appear a little mollified by this, but doesn't correct himself. Yuuko understands why, so doesn't judge. The bargains she made, barters she offered, lengths she's gone, to try to make up for her own failures with her family's wellbeing made his seem so minor, harmless, reasonable. If anything, Yuuko relates to excessive desperation.
He's close enough to reach, so she does, tucking a stringy curl of his hair behind his ear, motherly affection. "Either way, you've worked hard, Yamato. It's time for a break." Like a child, he obediently gets off the chair when she takes him by the hand, opens the bedroom door. Walks him down the hallway to the bath, where she tests the temperature of the water in the soaking tub first, and then sets up the rest of the room, borrowing Susumu's shampoos and soaps, arranging them neatly for her son-in-law. "I'll bring you some clothes," she tells him, smiling with reassurance when his first instinct is to glance numbly around the bath, more than a week since his last.
Taichi's looking at her, stepped forward to the threshold of the living room, when she emerges back into the corridor. "You got him to take a shower?" The surprise in his deep voice tinged a bit hoarse, like he'd been yelling, and behind him she sees Susumu leaning over the balcony, neck bent and spine rigid, his hands tight on the railing, the doors pulled half-open. Hikari's bedroom door is still shut, with only silence coming from behind it.
"A bath," says Yuuko, hesitant. Maybe this hadn't been a good decision, going by her instincts, handling the situation on her own. "I thought that would be better."
Taichi moves before she's done explaining, unintentionally brusque, knocking his shoulder roughly into the doorpost of his old bedroom in the rush to get more of his clean clothes, grabbing his own towel. Yuuko almost says something about it, insist on a new towel at least, fresh washcloth, but Taichi is already opening the bathroom door, closing it behind him, a full stop to the abrupt end of any possible conversation. Only one thing ever on his mind, these days.
Yamato's eyes are closed where he sits on the small wash stool under the shower head, the steam from the soaking bath Yuuko had drawn already filling the room, but even unliving he'd sense the weight of his presence anywhere, the matter that makes up the two of them existing far beyond known reach. Doesn't speak to him either, no need, for now. Instead listens to Taichi pick up the clothes he'd discarded in the small room adjoining the bath space, cleaning up after him without a complaint. Yamato reaches for where he thought he'd seen Yuuko leave the shampoo, but then Taichi's fingers move through his hair, smoothing the wet curls back, picking up the bottle to squeeze some of the liquid into his own palm, begin to wash. "You need a haircut. This is getting gross." He means to tease lightly, which Yamato understands on some unaddressed level.
"Yeah." He's quiet, surrendered. Taichi surprisingly tender, and Yamato unexpectedly permissive. His shoulders are sunken, posture not the same. Due back at the base in the next month, according to the documents outlining his emergency family leave, but he's aware that no doctor would clear him for a full return in his current state. He wouldn't, if it were up to him. But Yamato has so long been used to carrying broken things around his head and pretending he isn't that he doesn't find it altogether insulting when other people finally notice the same. At least this time, the cause is evident, and eight prefectures away at their grandmother's property in rural Shimane. Mountain air can heal anything, Hiroaki's convinced. That, and less people around overall, which made Daisuke feel safer, their daughter now homeschooled. Not that this matters. Takeru no longer leaves the house.
Taichi pulls down the detachable shower head to rinse the shampoo out, creating a barrier for the soapy water with the side of his hand, protecting his eyes. Yamato reaches up then, takes hold of his wrist, "I can do this part myself."
"How's that any fun?" Thumbing a trickle of water from his angled chin.
Yamato frowns. "I can."
"Mm," and helps him up with the same hand Yamato still holds.
After he's settled in the bath, up to his chest in soothing warm water, he expects Taichi to start talking, or leave him to rest. Neither happens. Yamato sets his arm on the rim of the soaking tub, and Taichi, still clothed, leans his cheek there, full contact. He doesn't let himself look over, unable to bear it much more. "I'm okay. Stop being nice to me."
"Okay," and gets to the point, which Yamato saw coming. Something like relief at normalcy in the routine, shame at being the burden for breaking from it, months later. He should be better by now. "I need to leave for General Assembly for a while. Just a little while." Taichi pauses, voice as small as it's ever been. "Ask me to stay."
Yamato turns his neck, meeting his steady gaze at last. Only one person in two entire worlds he loves as much.
So he asks.
"Let my brother live in the Digital World. Taichi—," because he's drawn himself off Yamato's arm, recoiling entirely, muscles contracting through his neck as they do when he's trying to restrain himself, bite back his words, and about to fail, "—it's where he wants to be. It's where he'll feel safest. Takeru, and Daisuke, and—it's where they can all be safe. Not here."
"Yamato." Utters his name like a confession, but laced in something dangerously close to resentment, this argument one they had had for months. Stop making me the bad guy.
Takes a breath, trying to dam the flood. "I'll—I know the Digital Gates are UN controlled now, I know it's restricted access, I know what the law says, but there has to be—there are other Gates, right? Outside of jurisdiction? I've been looking, I know—and I know if I had more help, I could—look, just look at what I've found on the charts, in the Northwest Passage, right? Look at the frequencies I'm tracking—,"
"Yamato—stop." Head bowed, eyes shut tight.
He doesn't. Speaks even faster. "It's better there, you know it is, you know they'd be okay there, they'd have their partners again and we could, I could visit, and I could make sure he's still going—that we wouldn't have to be afraid to leave him on his own there, right? Please, it's—you wouldn't have to do anything, I figured out a loophole, just look at what I found, okay? We don't have to wait for the UN to get involved—I'll just work it out with Koushiro, or Jou, or—,"
"Please stop."
Yamato sits up sharply, water sloshing. Almost choking now, over his words, shattered. Begging him. "Don't say it's not up to you. Make an exception. Choose me."
Taichi doesn't answer for a long time. Doesn't look at him for even longer. Knuckles thin where he's gripping the edge of the tub. "I am."
His mouth opens. "If that's what this is," before he can think to take it back, lashing out on impulse, "why would I want you to stay?"
He looks at him then, eyes red rimmed around dark brown. Nods to himself after a moment, the corner of his bottom lip chapped where he's bit into it, somewhere in all that they'd said to each other, and all they wouldn't do. "Okay. I'll call you when I land. I love you." Turns away without giving him a chance to say it back, breaking their rule with each other. Making an exception.
Yuuko is still in the kitchen, Susumu retired for the night, when Taichi closes the bathroom door behind him, tending to the last teacup washed and dried with a clean hand towel. Hesitates to return the cup to its place on the counter when she sees the look on his face. "Taichi?"
"Sorry," muttering a bit. Shuffles to the side, making space for her to pass through the narrow corridor, but she hadn't planned on leaving.
Gestures helplessly to the stove, or in that general direction. "Do you—I just put the dishes away, but are you—I can make more tea?"
"I'm okay."
This doesn't seem to be true, his visible exhaustion making him so much older than she's prepared for, but Yuuko doesn't have much faith in her own decisions, her assessment of the situation, which needs matter. "Okay," she says. Easier to agree, and agreeable in general, these days. Otherwise, she's not sure how she could still be standing, under all this weight.
"Mom?" Staring at the ground. His shoulders are the lowest they've been all evening. Not much holding him up anymore. "Can I have a hug, please?"
"Oh!" Startled, Yuuko puts down the teacup and the towel at once, wiping her hands off on her linen apron. "I can—yes, I can do that."
Lifts his face, a bleak little laugh. "I know. You're good at it."
She's already opening her arms, letting her son bend into them. An awkward posture, now that he's grown so much, but she keeps her feet flat on the floor anyway, wants him to reach for her, the way he would as a child. She pats his back slowly, soothing. "One good thing."
"All good things."
"Well." Leaves it at that, because she can't think of anything else to say, how else to make the good thing last.
(Lover be good to me)
Hozier
Whatever little proof of a higher power Yamato had entertained in years past finds a favorable boost whenever he sees her. This time, she's sitting on the small bench outside Jou's apartment block, an assortment of packed and packaged food organized into an insulated grocery tote next to her, a Mimi assignment, most likely. Yamato a more than decent cook, and Jou, too, but Mimi doesn't like competition. Drops his leather messenger bag at her feet, clears a spot beside her. "How're you doing?"
Hikari tilts her head into her palm, elbow balanced on a bent knee. Her skirt is tucked neatly beneath her, teacher's smock still tied about a thin waist. "Lonely. You?"
Skips past the question, grateful that she lets him. "Break it off with another boyfriend?"
"Are you shaming me?" Smiling at him, easy on the eyes.
Scoffs, feigning insult. "Just want to know how to color-code him in my mental shit list."
Muffles the laugh with her hand, straightening her posture. Leans back on both arms, raising her face to the orange sunset stretched above them. "What are your categories?"
Yamato shrugs, shoulders loosened. "Don't mention by name, avoid their neighborhood at all costs, eviscerate on sight." Her eyes go big and round at the last one, mouthing it back silently. He shrugs again, "I'm territorial."
"To put it kindly." Adding in an easy manner, without thinking too much of it, the Yagami way, "But still honored."
He waits for her to continue, then stops waiting. "And why are you lonely?"
"The same reason you are." Hikari watches him closely from the edge of her vision, about as unsubtle as she's ever been.
The pieces come together then, an unhappy puzzle. "No favors for you either, then."
"Wouldn't have asked for one." Shakes her head. "I've been part of too many protests. I should have expected to be on the blacklist." An overall sensible summation of her Digital World visa re-application result, but the sting of the routine rejection is enough to make him wince, too.
They had agreed, as a collective group, that there would be no exceptions sought regarding the newly announced visitors and temporary human residents policy for Digital World travel, Japan having been the first country party to the interworld treaty but the eleventh to open applications to the general public. There were still holdouts dissenting loudly from how the UN had until that point defined categories for travel and the authorized use of Digital World resources, shipping and economic trade routes, and evaluation criteria for intellectual property claimants to cooperative research developed with the aid of Digital Monster allies, the latter one to which even Koushiro had objected for the commission's conservative interpretation. The consequences of all this continue, but the immediate impact is that their group hadn't been able to have an Odaiba Memorial crossworld reunion in years because they legally couldn't, Hikari, Mimi, Miyako, and Ken with the most stalled visa applications under their belt. Yamato had yet to apply at all.
She smiles again at him now, nodding at the bulging tote next to her. "You should have heard Mimi's two personalities arguing about how much food to pack for you."
"She could send me a grocery store's worth and I'd still visit," rolling his eyes. "Tell her that."
"Tell her yourself, or better yet text her. She's been blowing up the group thread for days."
Slightly less amused now, his friends' more meddlesome manners a burden of consideration not always worth suffering. Usually easier to bear when Sora's around to sponge off the excess, or redirect Mimi and Jou to more productive forms of over compensation, but her father hadn't been well for almost a week now. Yamato knows this is why Mimi is behaving more eccentric than typical, an empath to the core. Reminds himself this when he glances warily at the tote Hikari's pushing towards him on the bench. Mimi is not known for her subtlety.
"She's not worried about me starving, but about Taichi coming to see me."
Hikari is kind, even with the obvious, her face lit in the soft orange hues of the dying sunlight. "I don't think you can blame us."
"No," agrees Yamato, "probably not."
He sits straighter, fingertips numbed and tingling in the way they get these days, on this subject. A side effect of the medication regimen JAXA's chief medical advisor had him following. It helped noticeably with the chronic headaches, the vertigo space sickness. It also meant for weaker muscle retention and temporary nervous affects at the oddest times, until Anna pointed out how his blood pressure would spike anytime someone mentioned what she called "Commander Ishida and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Taboo."
"You should be able to visit, record or not. The visa lottery has never made sense. How's it right?"
Hikari shakes her head again. "I don't think politics is about what's right. Things got clearer, when I realized that." She looks directly at him then. "He just realized it a lot earlier."
"You forgive him so easily." Not an indictment, but not much more either. This, a familiar posture.
She shrugs. "So do you."
Yamato doesn't reply, knows on some level that she hadn't expected one. Gestures at the tote bag instead. "Sure you don't want to take some with you? Jou's never home."
She leans forward with such transparent eagerness he laughs. "Tell me everything about her."
"Haven't met her yet," smiling through a cheeky grin, feeling like a teenager, "but Jou seems happy."
"He hasn't brought her home?" The visible disappointment even more funny, assuming by how much she's needling him that she's been dispatched to report back.
"Not if I'm home." Or at least Yamato can't be sure, but guesses not since he'd took up the spare room, a temporary living arrangement brought about entirely due to the fact that he'd overstayed at Sora and Mimi's far too long despite their sincere pleas to the contrary, and Jou's flat became the logical compromise, close as it is to his physical therapist's office and the countdown to his return to the research base dependent on a clean bill of health.
Hikari nods, solemn. "Be sure to put it in the group chat," grinning when that makes him laugh. She stands then, dusting her hands on her teacher's smock. Lets him kiss her cheek when he hugs her. "Just listen, okay?" Whispered into his ear, unable to help herself. Loyal. "You know he says the most when he's not saying anything out loud."
Yamato waits for her retreating shadow to clear the block before he picks up the messenger bag, slinging it over one shoulder, and takes the grocery tote strap onto his other. Balances the uneven weight while punching in Jou's entrance code on the digital lock, prodding the front door open with his knee. Drops both bags in a shout of alarm when Taichi looks up from the entranceway step he's sitting on, phone in his hand.
"How the fuck did you get in here?"
Taichi looks confused by the question, and more than a little out of it, like the mere sight of him, after months apart, is enough to snap the air from his chest. Yamato slides his back for the doorpost, an instinctive, self-preserving retreat, a state of panic overriding all other sense. How he does this, he'll never know. Magnetic.
Gestures vaguely with a hand at the door keypad. "He's had the same entrance code since uni."
"That's not safe." Knows he sounds stupid, but he has never been so thrown off. It's at least three hours before Taichi'd said he'd come by to talk, two before Jou had told him he'd be back from work. I want to see him, too, the convenient pretense. Sword and shield.
"Convenient, though." Shrugging, still staring up at him.
Yamato looks down at the tote, mostly to have something else to look at, anything else. "You just missed 'Kari."
Taichi holds up his phone. It's his personal mobile rather than the work cell he usually also keeps on him, the one Yamato had gotten used to seeing less and less. "Gonna see her after. Guess she broke up with another boyfriend?" Speaking more warmly now, eyes glinting in the hallway lights, "I can see why. Takeru and Dai've set a standard, right? The whole world could burn and it'd be the two of them still standing at the end."
"At the end." This odd echo, sounding nowhere. Something in his chest sinks past the point of irritation. If Taichi notices, he doesn't acknowledge it.
"Those from her?" Eyeing the packaged food with more interest.
"Mimi and Sora."
"Well." Grinning as he looks between the bag and Yamato's suspicious frown. "Good you're eating. You look good, too." Gets to his feet, and Yamato pushes himself to the opposite wall of the narrowed entranceway. "Feel good?"
"Stop being nice to me."
His smile falters, thin-lipped, leaning one shoulder into the corridor wall. Casual, like all of this is nothing at all. "How am I supposed to be then?"
He snaps, "You know the fuck how."
"An asshole?" Pitched voice raised, so Yamato raises his back.
"A coward."
He says it to hurt, but Taichi's heard this all before. "Well. Sorry to disappoint you." In this dismissive tone that Yamato sees right through.
Instead, he just laughs, drives it in harder. "Disappoint me? That implies I had different expectations. You're the one who always needed us more."
Taichi stares so long that when he does speak, it's a little startled. "Okay. You're right." An admission so simple, and too honest. Yamato closes his mouth. Taichi taps the heel of his foot to the wall behind him, this unstructured rhythm. Perhaps the only giveaway of how badly he'd hurt him. "Probably always been a little pathetic that way. Needing you."
Yamato doesn't correct him. He might have been the one left waiting, left wondering, for so long at the start, but he also knows he's always held all the cards, even then. "Everyone's pathetic at this." A consolatory platitude, but rooted in truth, because Yamato doesn't lie.
"This," with the question mark implied in the eyebrow he raises, too.
Fixes him a look, and Taichi shrugs, blameless. "I'll take it. I know what I'm like."
"Limitations might be a better thing to know."
"Says the kettle."
"I'm almost cleared," which is mostly true, and not the point. Is more frustrated that he's arguing about this with him, and worse that Taichi isn't even arguing back. This exact performance a frequent occurrence early on in their relationship, too, the number of times Yamato'd discover the quarrel he'd picked with him hadn't even registered as a fight at all from Taichi's perspective. You're just always so emotional, and astonishingly unaware that that was one of the worst things to call an emotional person. Figured you just needed to let it out.
He's tapping his foot again, a nervous habit. "And when you are?"
Yamato should say it's not their business anymore, to worry about each other. "Then I am." Pauses, the lightest of hesitations. "Have a lot more hours scheduled at base. Since there aren't as many pilots at the moment."
Taichi isn't stupid, so he doesn't take the bait. Lifts a hand from the pocket of his slacks to run under a clean shaven chin, square jawline. Cuts to the chase. "Well, Michael said there's been movement on the congressional hearing for the JAXA-ISS mission."
Yamato leans his head back to the wall. "Not my mission."
He looks like he'll say something, first, but then keeps going. "If they form a hearing, they'll ask for statements. Michael says to call him when they reach out to you, if they haven't already."
Waits for the next part, or any part, a posture of withheld indifference. Frowns when Taichi simply stops speaking to look at his work phone pulled from his pocket, quiet dings of incoming missives. "Wouldn't know if they have, if you're here to ask about that. They'd need to go through JAXA channels for statements."
"They will," Taichi looking fully at his mobile now, held in both hands as his thumbs fly across the keyboard, the sound of an email being sent, and then another. "Anyway, it's up to you, the director, all the sciencey big wigs."
Ignoring the butchering of his profession, Yamato watches him continue to answer his messages, like he isn't standing right there, an arm's length apart. "This could have been a phone call."
"No, it couldn't." Holds the side button, powers the phone off. His expression hasn't changed even with the interruption, the claims to his attention. Puts the mobile away again. "I'm here because I think you should give a statement."
"If they want us to say—,"
Taichi shakes his head, interjects brusquely, "Not 'us.' Not JAXA. You, Yamato. And when it happens, you should be honest. Since you can be, now." This subtle indirect the part that makes Yamato close his mouth, his left hand making a fist near his thigh, where his arm hangs at his side.
He feels a sharp twist in his temple, that spike in his blood pressure. "So what, even our divorce is political fodder to you?"
"It's not anything to me." Eyes flashing, voice finally quick to the anger he'd been holding back. Yamato feels oddly satisfied by it, to have crossed the threshold at last. Enough pretend play.
"If it's something I'm supposed to bring up at an actual hearing, then—,"
Sharp toned, "It's not a hearing—it's a statement for a hearing. And I don't fucking care what you bring up, I can't get involved in—,"
Yamato pulls his back off the wall, whole body rigid. "Now you can't get involved?"
Taichi shrinks back, without becoming any smaller. His eyes close and then open. "Will you let me finish?"
"No," snaps Yamato. "You don't get the last word between us anymore."
Has the audacity to laugh. "When the fuck have I ever had the last word?"
"We're here," in a violent emphasis, "like this, because that is all you've ever had, Taichi, and fuck what the rest of us think."
Taichi gives nothing away, his expression even across his face. Doesn't even blink. Yamato's aware, in that moment, that he's never seen Taichi at work, behind those closed Security Council doors, the person he is when he's weighing the balance of two worlds, making the choices none of them have ever been able to stomach, all of this bigger than any of us. That as much as he knows him, loved him, loves him, there is a part of Taichi he is not allowed to see, or know, because they both understand he would not love him the same again if he did. Yamato might have told himself this would never happen, but it already had.
After a hard silence, Taichi casts a hand through his hair, undoing the shaped curls. "Call Michael when you have time. He'll walk you through it. Don't feel like you have to hold anything back."
Yamato rolls his eyes. The pinching at his temple pulses stronger. "Pretty sure perjury is a liability."
"You're a foreign national. They can't do shit to you."
"That's not—," and stops. Staring at him in the flattest shade of blue. "You're not."
"Technically I am," and shrugging it off.
Ignores him, putting the pieces together, sharper than most. "That's why this isn't a phone call."
Taichi considers the speed at which he's made the connection, rather than the connection itself. Appraising him in tinged amusement, unsurprised, like there's time to be distractedly impressed when the stakes are this high. "What happens to me's not worth basing this decision on. These are all hypotheticals."
Yamato sighs, the pulsing rising to a prickling pattern. "You're such an asshole."
"I'm telling you to testify," says Taichi, frowning again. "How's that wrong?"
"What's right about it?" Yamato's blinking quickly by then, and not for the new information. "What's been right about any of this?" but stops himself before the end of the sentence in his head. Lets his fist uncurl at his side, the tension in his body leak. Somehow always does, after minutes, if Taichi's around, even when the rest of him is reeling. His head is pounding. "Why were you easier to deal with before us?"
"Probably because I didn't like me then either." Laughs as he says this, like it's a perfectly normal thing to say, to think, believe.
"Sure," playing along, muttering, distracted by the pinpricks in his vision. Leans his back to the wall, careful to make it appear casual. "Not much to like, on either side."
"How you eat pizza with a knife and fork."
"You eat hamburg steak with ketchup."
"Good ketchup," and not the least bit ashamed, "and you can blame Mimi for that one."
"Her shit taste doesn't have to be your shit taste."
Looking softly at him. "I get it right sometimes."
Yamato is quiet, staring past him. Can't trust himself otherwise. "Not this though."
"No," agrees Taich, just as quiet. "Not this."
He turns a bit, braced on one side to the wall, chewing at his lip. "They're really coming after you over that call."
"It's not so specific." Taichi speaks easily, lighthearted. A challenge met and matched, and on to the next. "Your face isn't launching a thousand ships or anything."
Yamato's lips twitch at that, something he doesn't particularly like himself for giving away this quickly. "Neither is yours."
"And yet you can't get away from it." Bending slightly at the waist, teasing smile.
"You tracked me to Jou's front door."
"Wanted to see how he's treating you." Feigns a dramatic scan of the empty flat beyond Yamato's shoulder. "Have you met her?"
An echo of Hikari's gossipy face flashes before him in her older brother's. Yamato shakes his head. "Haven't."
"Have you heard her?" Waggling his brow. "Or have I got to have another talk with Jou about the importance of being generous?"
Snorts, holding back a laugh, "Don't torture him."
"He's the one torturing us. Can't believe he's finally getting it on the regular, and won't even spill the details."
"Yes, highly suspect," and rolls his eyes again when the sarcasm sails by undeterred. "Why would he want something to be just theirs?"
"Exactly!" Mutters, disgruntled, still looking about the apartment, "What don't we all know about each other? Like how you babble."
"Babble?" Glancing with that effortless arc to one brow that Taichi doesn't trust himself around for a second either. "That's you."
Laughs, "Yeah, me. But you?" Shakes his head, all too pleased to remind him of the kinds of things only he knows. "You go full French for, like, an entire minute. Not even good French."
It's the eye twitch that gives Yamato away. "I'm fluent."
"Not when you're getting railed, you're not." Laughs again at the face Yamato makes, the hint of pink on his high cheekbones. "Taking out the French and Japanese linguistic traditions like a bilingual disgrace."
The pink turns a darker red. "Shut up."
"That's what I mean, sweetheart. You don't." Smiling thickly, mouth closed. "When it's good."
Yamato could go through all the calculations again, not a difference to be made. His head still hurts, a thunderclap over his right browbone. Knows his voice is shaky, but can't seem to find the point anymore. He just wants him. "Nothing's good. Outside of you."
Taichi's off the wall, then in front of him, crossing the length of the corridor before the half second it would take for Yamato to regret saying what he has can catch up to either of them. His thumbprint on his bottom lip, chin cupped in his hand. Yamato opens his mouth, takes two of his fingers over his tongue. The color of Taichi's eyes change, in that way they always do, when it's about to be good.
First, business. "When's Jou back?"
"Would it matter—?" and can't even get the last word out before Taichi's on him, a year and some change too long to be without.
Kisses his way up Yamato's neck, follows his jawline. A hand coursing through the cropped hair at the back of Yamato's head, the other grasping him by the hip, using his own weight to press his back into the wall. Manages a "How do you want it?" before Taichi sinks a fresh mark to the left side of his collarbone with his teeth, licking to soothe the pleasured wince Yamato makes, a lasting impression.
"I don't care." Sighs through a groan when Taichi drops to the floor in front of him, undoes the zipper of his jeans, pulls him from his black cotton briefs, learned experience guiding every seamless movement. They've always made this part look easy. "You choose. You know." For once, Yamato doesn't want to think about how to feel, right or wrong. He just wants him.
"Tell me." Holding Yamato's gaze through the first stroke, then the first thick slide down Taichi's throat, jaw split wide to accommodate him, an obscene demonstration of muscle memory, and one that just about cleaves something primal in Yamato's head clean in two. Pulls off him just enough to say it again, clearly, so Yamato can't mistake his meaning, what his submission is meant to signal, "How do you want it? What do you need?"
Doesn't immediately take Yamato back in his mouth, teasing the length of him with the flat of his tongue instead. Taichi's other hand gentle where he finds a grounding hold on Yamato's waist, thumb pressed into the groove of his hipbone just past the open band of his jeans. His touch almost reverent, respectful, calling forward a new religion.
But there isn't time for consideration, a slow and full encounter. There isn't time at all, if he's really about to let this happen. So Yamato grunts in impatience, fisting a handful of dark brown curls, a warning. "I want you to stop fucking being nice, and I need you to fuck me."
Taichi hums, agreeable, which is usually when he's his most dangerous. Looking up at him with a smile as he stays kneeling between Yamato's legs in business slacks and a pressed white button-up, knotted pinstripe tie half done with his sleeves rolled to the elbows and diplomatic lanyard thrown over a shoulder. Like he doesn't know exactly where the sight of him like this is supposed to lead them, or what it means, how much it'll cost, to put a man like him on his knees. Yamato tightens his grip on Taichi's hair, guides himself back into his mouth in a rough snap of his hips, watches Taichi's long eyelashes flutter, his throat constrict, then expand. A soft whine, this ache of a sound that feels remarkably close to the aching thing in Yamato's chest, looking at him in a daze, and then he catches up.
There isn't a language Taichi speaks better than this. It should be infuriating, the way he moves across his body like well charted territory, mapping discoveries Yamato hadn't even known of himself. Has them both panting naked over Jou's spare mattress in what feels like minutes and also hours, finishing his work in the hallway with such expert and novel precision Yamato's hips buckle, biting the pillow to keep the sob inside when he comes into Taichi's fist, every last one of the dark, throbbing clouds in his head clearing.
Not a second of relief, but isn't seeking any, the dam hewn open, this flood of unquenchable want. Taichi already rolling him onto his stomach, leaving a trail of hickeys along his spine with his mouth, bending him into position, three fingers deep. Yamato lets himself go slack, stubborn even now. "No," slurring muffled into the duvet, heat spun, unable to keep a thought together, if it's not about him. "Wanna look at you." And does at the first press into him, arches onto his back beneath Taichi, breathing so hard and scattered Taichi leans down to kiss him through the last tight stretch, then stills, his mouth open, when he reaches the hilt.
"Move," Yamato orders after a euphoric minute of savoring not, voice wobbling, close to begging, edged out. Splayed welt-ridden thighs hung astride over his, Taichi's hand under one knee, holding him open. Raises an arm to the headboard Taichi's other hand grips tight, anchored, slipping his fingers through his. Taichi mutters something like his name or maybe something else, against Yamato's mouth, drops his face to the column of Yamato's neck. They don't have time for this, all Yamato can think, unwilling to linger, let himself memorize the feel of him again, after all the months he'd spent wearing it off, a year and some change. He doesn't want to hold this in his head anymore. Tired of dying these little deaths without him.
Lifts a bent leg to smack the heel of an ankle to Taichi's lower back. "Move. Please, I need—," choking over an altogether surrendered sort of groan, a mixed string of French curses punctuating every one of Taichi's long strokes. Catches a glimpse of that stupid smirk in the half-second of clarity before his eyes roll back, "Oh, shut up, shut up—," and then another botched attempt at coherent speech, sure he's lost the capacity for any at all, biting through Taichi's bottom lip, weakly pressing kisses anywhere Yamato can reach. Taichi makes it easy, even with the overstretched angle, held skin to skin, always so hot to the touch, branding him like a solar flare.
It's worse than the end of the world, how soon the impression of him leaves the mattress, the woven blend cooling faster than Yamato's ready for it. Keeps his eyes closed through the sounds of Taichi getting dressed again, turning his work cell back on, the click of the front door, the echo of his footsteps matched in their softness only by the last thing Taichi tells him, head bowed to awkwardly kiss the top of Yamato's ear, make sure Yamato hears it. Gathers the duvet together anyway, presses his face into the fabric, trying to remember, to keep some of this fading warmth around him.