[PoT] Cage, PG, Angst/Romance, FujiRyo
Dec. 18th, 2005 07:36 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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chineseinkTitle: Cage
Fandom: PoT
Pairing: FujiRyo
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Middle school and high school relationships rarely last forever. Fuji, Ryoma, and everything after the "happily-ever-after" ends.
[Sequel to Having and Wanting.]
Cage
by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
meitachi
Ryoma can’t look at Fuji anymore. It terrifies him in ways he’ll never admit, not even to himself, because he knows what he’ll find if he looks. He knows what will be waiting for him in Fuji’s gaze (because Fuji is still always watching him) if he turns his head just so.
Nothing.
There is nothing in that blue gaze for him. Not anymore.
Not the amusement it held in the beginning, senpai tormenting kohai only in the most caring of ways. Not the curiosity it held later, a curiosity that was reciprocated in Ryoma and resulted in a tentative first kiss. Not the gentleness of blossoming love (though they generally avoided the use of that word) or the passion of fevered kisses or even the jagged hurt after Ryoma left.
He knows he couldn’t have stayed, knows it the way he knows when victory is within grasp. Still, it feels like he’s swallowed the sun when he thinks about it, an awful analogy, he thinks, but it’s a terrible aching, burning sensation in his stomach as flickers of flame scorch him inside out.
He knows he loves Fuji.
Yet, he left.
Fuji looked at him with wide open eyes, full of unasked questions and a quiet, raw hurt.
It almost tore Ryoma apart to see that, so much so that he considered not leaving because Fuji cared; of course he did, he could tell; he could see the evidence right before his eyes.
But Fuji didn’t say anything.
So Ryoma left.
And now there is nothing left for him in Fuji, he thinks, as he carefully avoids looking at his senpai, ignoring he miniature sun melting away his insides. It’s a far more terrible thing to see the careful emptiness in those blue eyes than to be pierced by the pain and accusations that was there before.
He wants nothing of me.
--
Ryoma doesn’t cry when Tezuka graduates and goes on to Tokyo University. He realizes he does feel sad, but more for the loss of a talented tennis opponent and the company of a friend than the loss of a lover.
Can they be lovers, Ryoma wonders, if love was never involved?
Then he remembers his relationship with Fuji and concludes: yes.
He has never loved Tezuka, has never come close to the tumultuous, dizzying, strangling, lonely, breathtaking joy and sorrow he had with Fuji.
He loved Fuji. He still does.
It was a hard-fought journey to get there, but harder still to leave.
Ryoma loved Fuji.
He is sure that, then, Fuji loved him too. Maybe.
He left because, apparently, Fuji wasn’t sure either.
--
Ryoma knows that Fuji went on to Tokyo University as well, majoring in photography. Though Ryoma and Tezuka have separated, the latter gives the former regular updates on his ex. They have meetings, monthly at the very least, in a small restaurant near the Seishun Gakuen campus where they sit across from each other at a table, order drinks, and avoid talking about the past. Ryoma talks about the tennis club, mostly, and Tezuka talks about his classes and Fuji. The updates have been practically scheduled into their lives.
“Anal as always,” Ryoma says of bespectacled man, mouth twitching.
Tezuka doesn’t deem that with a reply. Instead, he tells Ryoma of seeing Fuji around campus with a girl named Kaneda Momoko. “A friend from the photography club, perhaps,” he comments. “They’re often near the arts building.”
The news cuts through Ryoma like a jagged knife, leaving new wounds upon the old, raw, ragged, and bleeding. He blinks, steeling himself, and assumes a casual smile.
“You don’t have to tell me about Fuji-senpai anymore,” he says almost rudely. “It was a long time ago. I don’t care anymore.”
It’s the first time he’s told Tezuka to stop.
His former captain and lover (why does the word still seem so wrong and out of place?) levels a look at him. Ryoma stares back, unwavering in the face of challenge because five years have not changed him that much. Even if two of those years were with Fuji.
“Do you love him?” asks Tezuka, quietly, not bothering to use the word “still.”
Ryoma looks away.
He is not a liar. Fuji will never make that of him.
--
He is a second year regular on the Seigaku High tennis team. He knows he will become captain next year. That is how things work.
Unless, of course, he leaves Japan.
--
One night, Ryoma closes his math book on his half-finished homework and pulls out a magazine. Horio thrust it at him in class earlier that day but only now is he inspecting it. It’s an art magazine, he notes, and spotlighted in a four-page article on up-and-coming artists is Fuji Syuusuke.
There are two other Tokyo University students mentioned, but Fuji is clearly a top priority; he receives two pages dedicated to himself and his art.
Ryoma slides his fingers over the glossy magazine pages and feels the sharp pang of loneliness. Of regret.
And it is while he is studying the small inset of Fuji rather than the full-page copy his “masterpiece” photograph, his eyes drinking in the familiar but slightly different features of someone he used to know, that the phone rings.
Nanako tells him that it’s a woman named Kaneda Momoko.
--
“Echizen-san? Echizen Ryoma-san?”
The voice on the other end of the phone is pleasant, soft and cultured.
Ryoma dislikes it immediately and makes no excuses for his bias. He leans back against his desk chair, phone pressed to his ear, and stares at the magazine in his lap.
“Yes,” he says shortly. What can this woman want from him? Their only possible connection is Fuji Syuusuke—his eyes trace smile on the page—and Ryoma had cut that tie a long time ago.
But it is Fuji she wants to talk about, he discovers.
“I understand that it probably isn’t my place to interfere like this,” she says, almost sheepishly. “But I do care for Syuusuke and—“
Syuusuke, thinks Ryoma, and suddenly the sun he swallowed upon leaving Fuji flares back to life after almost a year of dormancy. He can feel the contortion of his guts, stomach twisting painfully, as his fingers tighten around the phone.
“He’d like to see you again,” Kaneda-san says.
“I don’t want to see him,” replies Ryoma abruptly, and hangs up the phone.
Afterwards, he moves to his bed and sits there, staring at those two pages in the magazine. He thinks about fate and coincidences, about the past and present, about warmth and love and laughter and uncertainty and doubt and a maddening loneliness that could not be staved off by mere presence.
His fingers trace the lines that form a face he hasn’t seen in too long, and his math homework remains unfinished that night.
--
Nanjirou is considering moving back to the U.S. “Nicer women” is his leered response when asked why. His wife slaps him upside the head and Ryoma rolls his eyes and leaves the room.
Back to America, he thinks. It has been five years.
--
Fuji liked to make Ryoma scream. He also liked making Ryoma blush, but the screams were more gratifying, he explained to a less-than-thrilled Ryoma, because they were private and harder-won.
He was particularly fond of Ryoma’s collarbone as well, his mouth lingering there for minutes at a time. Ryoma would never mind, too distracted by the talented tongue and being driven mad with the heat of desire. Afterwards, though, he would always pay the price; collared shirts did little to hide the evidence when one was forced to change among a group of nosy senpai practically every day.
Sometimes when he stayed over at Fuji’s, he would wake to the gentle touch of fingers brushing through his hair. It made him feel oddly like Karupin, but left him warm and contented all the same. Fuji liked to tease him about being petted. (Ryoma growled back that the tensai had strange fantasies.)
Ryoma didn’t know if he could call those little actions signs of love.
After all, in the end, Fuji never did open up to him.
Loving like that was too hard and it was the first time Ryoma had given up a challenge.
--
Kaneda Momoko calls again four days later, asking him to reconsider.
Ryoma, who’d thrown the magazine into the trash, flatly refuses.
Then, without warning, a soft, too-familiar voice is in his ear. “Ryoma?” The tentative sound of his name flares something more painful than the sun eating his insides, something deeper in his soul. “That is, Echizen?”
“Fuji-senpai,” he says coolly, frozen in place even as his heart begins leaping of its own will.
“How are you?” Fuji asks politely, making the customary small talk.
They are like strangers now, Ryoma reflects, heart still thudding agonizingly. They have been apart for three years. “Fine,” he remembers to answer, tone not perhaps as polite as it ought to be. He was never good at pretending.
“I hear Seigaku didn’t make it to the Nationals last year,” Fuji comments. “I’m sorry.”
Ryoma moves slowly, carefully, to the doorway of his room, raising a hand to steady himself on the doorframe. “We’ll make it this year,” he says automatically. Then he blinks back sudden tears as he registers Fuji’s last comment. I’m sorry. Is he? Ryoma’s thoughts are no longer on the tennis team but whirling through the last five years. Things might’ve been different…ought to have been…
“Saa, that’s good to hear. And, you, are you doing well?”
“Yeah.” They couldn’t have been different. Not unless he didn’t leave, and then the claim he’d just uttered would be a lie for sure. Ryoma closes his eyes and leans against the doorframe. “What about you, Fuji-senpai?” he asks softly.
Fuji talks for a moment of his classes, very briefly. Then he apologizes again. “I’m sorry Momoko bothered you, Echizen. It’s honestly none of her business and I’m sorry the past was brought up. Your life is good now so let’s not disrupt it with bad memories, ne?”
Syuusuke, thinks Ryoma, nearer to tears than he’s been for years, you were always such a good liar.
I love you, he wants to say, but instead asks, “Have you spoken with Tezuka lately?”
There is a noticeable cooling of Fuji’s tone. “No. I’ve glimpsed him around campus a few times but we don’t speak. He’s very busy, I’m sure, and my schedule is pretty full too…”
Ryoma opens his eyes. If Fuji is still harboring antagonistic feelings toward the man Ryoma left him for…perhaps there is hope. Then Ryoma realizes what a foolish little boy he is, with what childish dreams. It is clear Fuji wants nothing of him now. It was clear three years ago when Ryoma stopped looking at Fuji because it hurt too much. Besides, even if this ridiculous notion of them back together does come to pass, nothing will be different. Fuji will be even less likely to open up.
Still, a part of Ryoma is considering enduring that living hell again, if only for the moments were Fuji would smile at him, pure and unadulterated. The times he could touch Fuji, kiss him, hold him and be held…
“It was nice hearing from you,” Ryoma says politely, and he and Fuji hang up on gracious terms.
Ryoma thinks about his lie and wonders if everything else he’s been telling himself isn’t a lie as well.
--
Echizen Ryoma, Echizen Nanjirou’s son and tennis wonder in his own right, will not become captain of the Seigaku High tennis team. He is moving back to America at the end of the school year.
California, where he used to live.
Home? he wonders.
--
The cherry trees are blooming when Ryoma meets with Tezuka. Leaving the stuffiness of the little restaurant behind, they head instead to a nearby park. Side by side, they walk silently through the park, each lost in their own thoughts. There are things they could say to each other, but both deem it unnecessary. Superfluous, even.
Tezuka tried to organize some sort of Seigaku reunion (the regulars at least) to see Ryoma off, but everyone lives such different lives now. It is difficult to arrange any sort of meeting between nine people, some of whom rarely keep in touch with each other anymore.
Ryoma, though feeling particularly reticent that day, does take the time to reassure Tezuka that it is all right. He knows he doesn’t want to see Fuji anyway.
“I emailed them all your flight information,” Tezuka says as the keep along the path. The sun beats down warmth on the crisp spring air and their footfalls are rhythmic on the asphalt. “They will be able to go to the airport if they want.”
Ryoma nods and turns to watch the sakura drift on the breeze. He wonders when the ache will fade.
Put out my sun, he thinks desperately. He wants to forget.
--
In one of those strange quirks of fate, the kind of coincidence that convince people that the world is conspiring against them, Ryoma runs into Fuji the day before he leaves Japan. It is unexpected, to say the least, and leave both parties standing still, looking at each other in uncertainty.
“Echizen,” Fuji greets him formally. “Good afternoon.”
Of all the street tennis courts in Tokyo, Ryoma despairs to himself, why this one? What is Fuji doing there anyway? Ryoma has come to say goodbye but Fuji doesn’t seem to have any business there.
“What are you doing here?” Ryoma asks bluntly.
An almost familiar smile flickers across Fuji’s face, nostalgic for the briefest of moments before it is replaced by the cordial (if slightly unnerving) smile he reserves for the general public. “Tactfulness is a virtue,” he chides before replying, “I’m taking pictures for a class assignment.”
Ryoma looks at the complicated and clearly hi-tech camera hanging around the other’s neck. “I see,” he lies politely and says nothing more. Instead, he watches the games on the courts, automatically critiquing the players’ techniques and styles mentally, picking out strengths and weaknesses.
Fuji stands and watches with him for awhile.
The rhythmic thwack-thwack of the tennis ball hitting the racket and then the ground soothe Ryoma’s frazzled nerves. Some things will always be the same. His eyes are trained on the pair on the nearest court, following the volley between the fairly evenly-matched opponents. Two boys, probably both in high school, run over the green courts, their breaths harsh against the sun-baked air. Ryoma watches them intently and it isn’t until the far opponent misses a smash that Ryoma, concentration broken, realizes the camera beside him is clicking away.
He looks up to observe Fuji at work and swallows hard, starting, when he discovers that he is the subject of the photographs, not the match.
“What are you doing?” he demand, but he is too unsettled to quell the unspoken question in his voice.
Fuji’s smile is different now, not the polite mask he usually presents to the world. It is not one Ryoma remembers either but it looks almost bittersweet. I’ll call that one ‘Knowledge,’” he says, lifting the camera again in time to catch Ryoma’s wide-eyed expression. Click. “And that one,” he continues, lowering the camera, “is ‘My Cage.’” He shakes his head slightly as his smile returns to its former distance.
Ryoma knows better to ask for clarification. This is Fuji, after all. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he blurts out.
Fuji turns his head away and watches the resumed matches. “I know.” There is a brief silence between them, but, to Ryoma, it stretches to eternity on all sides, unable to be breached. The words that were never said were what drove them apart last time.
Ryoma’s throat tightens, stomach clenching, and the sun turns somersaults along his stomach lining. “Goodbye, senpai,” he says, not looking at the man who is the boy he loved, grown up.
He is aware of Fuji’s eyes on his back as he walks away.
--
His last suitcase lies open on the floor of his room. Most of his things have been packed. Only large, unwieldy items, like furniture, remain. (His mother plans to stay behind an extra week to make sure the furniture is properly shipped off.)
He is leaving Japan tomorrow on a 9:24 am flight.
He wonders why this photo album is one of the last things he packs.
A gift from Fuji for Christmas their second year together, the album is full of photos of him and Fuji together or separate, depending on who took the picture. (He has a similar album, only full of the Seigaku regulars, that Fuji gave him for his birthday the day before.) Ryoma flips through it, studying the boy he used to be and the boy he used to love.
We were young then, he thinks, and then wonders if three years has really made that much of a difference.
He doesn’t know Fuji anymore, after three years. They’ve been living lives separate of each other. If Ryoma loves Fuji Syuusuke, he loves the one of three years ago, the sixteen-year-old who couldn’t return his feelings.
It hurt so much then, he remembers. It hurt that Fuji didn’t love him the way he loved Fuji.
Ryoma closes the album and places it back into his suitcase. He zips up the black case carefully, knowing it stores treasured memories. Thirteen-year-old Echizen Ryoma is in there, young, confused, in love, and hurt. And in there with him is a young Fuji Syuusuke who didn’t love Ryoma the way Ryoma wanted to be loved, and wasn’t prodigy enough to teach Ryoma that love came in all different shapes, sizes, gestures, smiles, and trusts.
Ryoma is going to America tomorrow.
He is leaving some things behind.
--
At 9:10 the next morning, they board American Airline flight 1289 and settle into their seats.
At 8 o’clock, they file their way through airport security and are herded through check-in hell. An hour later, they wait at Gate C-21.
At 7:50, Ryoma, his baka oyaji, and Nanako say their goodbyes. Tezuka is there, naturally, and surprisingly, so is Oishi, Kikumaru, and Kaidoh.
At 6 o’clock, Ryoma wakes up and knows that today he is leaving Japan.
The cherry trees on the temple grounds wave sakura goodbyes.
-
owari
-
Epilogue
It has been two months since Ryoma has returned to the United States. He’s relearned his American accent and continues playing tennis. As he technically finished his second year in high school in Japan, he doesn’t have to enroll in an American high school for the last two months of their school year. This fall, he will be a senior.
On June 1, he receives a long-distance call from Fuji.
“Where did you get this number?” he asks in his typically tactless manner. (His Japanese hasn’t suffered too much as his mother insists they continue speaking it at home.)
“Tezuka, of course,” Fuji replies.
Ryoma doesn’t know what to say.
Fuji says, “I’m sorry.”
Ryoma sits down hard at the kitchen table, staring blankly at the bowl of fake fruit garnishing its center. Afternoon sunlight streams in a nearby window. He absorbs the little details of the moment, from the dust motes dancing in the sun rays, to the feel of the phone under his hand, and then he finds his voice. “It’s okay,” he says. “I was young. And stupid.”
“Me, too.”
He laughs at that, the last vestiges of any bitterness he has harbored melting away. “You’re a tensai, Fuji-senpai.” It’s amazing how the honorific can still roll of his tongue so easily. Some things even time can’t change.
“I don’t play tennis anymore.”
Ryoma isn’t altogether surprised. He says so.
“Saa, Ryoma—“ a pause, hesitant, “May I still call you that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the picture I took of you the day before you left?”
Ryoma thinks back to that day on the street courts, sun shining bright down on him and the boy beside him. “There were many,” he says.
“‘My Cage,’” clarifies Fuji.
“Yes.”
“I’d like to send you a copy.”
“That’s fine.”
They talk more and it is surprisingly easily. Fuji discusses how much he likes his photography professor and why, he mentions some of the projects he’s undertaking and even Ryoma can hear the excitement in his voice. Ryoma talks of the move back, of readjusting to a new-old culture and home. He mentions the new fan club he’s been plagued with because American girls are almost as scary as Japanese girls.
Still, many things that haven’t been said remain unsaid because there is no longer a need to voice them. Instead they catch up on three years worth of being apart, until Ryoma’s conscience pricks him about the phone bill.
Fuji assures him not to worry about it and promises to send the picture straightaway.
When Ryoma talks to Tezuka about it later, via email this time, he is informed that “My Cage” won first prize in a large and well-established photography competition and is currently on display in a well-known Tokyo art museum. Ryoma wonders briefly why Tezuka didn’t mention this before until he remembers more or less demanding a cease to the Fuji updates.
The photo portrait arrives two weeks later. The entire Echizen family exclaims over it (some in more bad taste than others) and Ryoma decides to hang it in his room, perceived egotism be damned. He studies it and finds himself surprised by his own face, his own expression of surprise rendered timeless in a snapshot. Almost distantly, he wonders why Fuji chose the title he did.
Later, he calls Fuji to thank him and they talk long enough to rack up the bill on Ryoma’s end.
They decide an email correspondence will be cheaper.
Who knows, thinks Ryoma as he serves a tennis ball at his poor opponent’s head the next day on the community courts, he may even go back to Japan for a visit soon.
American Fanta is just not the same as Ponta, after all, and Fuji did promise to keep a special stock.
--
Posted: 04.01.2005
--
Notes:
Written in a consecutive 2 ½ hours by hand, edited, typed, and re-edited.
This spans three years, from the end of Fuji and Ryoma’s two-year relationship to when Ryoma returns to American at sixteen.
Christmas, in Japan, is a holiday for lovers, sort of like Valentine’s Day in the U.S. Presents are exchanged, romantic dinners are held, and proposals are often made. New Year’s is the big family holiday.
Fandom: PoT
Pairing: FujiRyo
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Middle school and high school relationships rarely last forever. Fuji, Ryoma, and everything after the "happily-ever-after" ends.
[Sequel to Having and Wanting.]
Cage
by
meitachiRyoma can’t look at Fuji anymore. It terrifies him in ways he’ll never admit, not even to himself, because he knows what he’ll find if he looks. He knows what will be waiting for him in Fuji’s gaze (because Fuji is still always watching him) if he turns his head just so.
Nothing.
There is nothing in that blue gaze for him. Not anymore.
Not the amusement it held in the beginning, senpai tormenting kohai only in the most caring of ways. Not the curiosity it held later, a curiosity that was reciprocated in Ryoma and resulted in a tentative first kiss. Not the gentleness of blossoming love (though they generally avoided the use of that word) or the passion of fevered kisses or even the jagged hurt after Ryoma left.
He knows he couldn’t have stayed, knows it the way he knows when victory is within grasp. Still, it feels like he’s swallowed the sun when he thinks about it, an awful analogy, he thinks, but it’s a terrible aching, burning sensation in his stomach as flickers of flame scorch him inside out.
He knows he loves Fuji.
Yet, he left.
Fuji looked at him with wide open eyes, full of unasked questions and a quiet, raw hurt.
It almost tore Ryoma apart to see that, so much so that he considered not leaving because Fuji cared; of course he did, he could tell; he could see the evidence right before his eyes.
But Fuji didn’t say anything.
So Ryoma left.
And now there is nothing left for him in Fuji, he thinks, as he carefully avoids looking at his senpai, ignoring he miniature sun melting away his insides. It’s a far more terrible thing to see the careful emptiness in those blue eyes than to be pierced by the pain and accusations that was there before.
He wants nothing of me.
--
Ryoma doesn’t cry when Tezuka graduates and goes on to Tokyo University. He realizes he does feel sad, but more for the loss of a talented tennis opponent and the company of a friend than the loss of a lover.
Can they be lovers, Ryoma wonders, if love was never involved?
Then he remembers his relationship with Fuji and concludes: yes.
He has never loved Tezuka, has never come close to the tumultuous, dizzying, strangling, lonely, breathtaking joy and sorrow he had with Fuji.
He loved Fuji. He still does.
It was a hard-fought journey to get there, but harder still to leave.
Ryoma loved Fuji.
He is sure that, then, Fuji loved him too. Maybe.
He left because, apparently, Fuji wasn’t sure either.
--
Ryoma knows that Fuji went on to Tokyo University as well, majoring in photography. Though Ryoma and Tezuka have separated, the latter gives the former regular updates on his ex. They have meetings, monthly at the very least, in a small restaurant near the Seishun Gakuen campus where they sit across from each other at a table, order drinks, and avoid talking about the past. Ryoma talks about the tennis club, mostly, and Tezuka talks about his classes and Fuji. The updates have been practically scheduled into their lives.
“Anal as always,” Ryoma says of bespectacled man, mouth twitching.
Tezuka doesn’t deem that with a reply. Instead, he tells Ryoma of seeing Fuji around campus with a girl named Kaneda Momoko. “A friend from the photography club, perhaps,” he comments. “They’re often near the arts building.”
The news cuts through Ryoma like a jagged knife, leaving new wounds upon the old, raw, ragged, and bleeding. He blinks, steeling himself, and assumes a casual smile.
“You don’t have to tell me about Fuji-senpai anymore,” he says almost rudely. “It was a long time ago. I don’t care anymore.”
It’s the first time he’s told Tezuka to stop.
His former captain and lover (why does the word still seem so wrong and out of place?) levels a look at him. Ryoma stares back, unwavering in the face of challenge because five years have not changed him that much. Even if two of those years were with Fuji.
“Do you love him?” asks Tezuka, quietly, not bothering to use the word “still.”
Ryoma looks away.
He is not a liar. Fuji will never make that of him.
--
He is a second year regular on the Seigaku High tennis team. He knows he will become captain next year. That is how things work.
Unless, of course, he leaves Japan.
--
One night, Ryoma closes his math book on his half-finished homework and pulls out a magazine. Horio thrust it at him in class earlier that day but only now is he inspecting it. It’s an art magazine, he notes, and spotlighted in a four-page article on up-and-coming artists is Fuji Syuusuke.
There are two other Tokyo University students mentioned, but Fuji is clearly a top priority; he receives two pages dedicated to himself and his art.
Ryoma slides his fingers over the glossy magazine pages and feels the sharp pang of loneliness. Of regret.
And it is while he is studying the small inset of Fuji rather than the full-page copy his “masterpiece” photograph, his eyes drinking in the familiar but slightly different features of someone he used to know, that the phone rings.
Nanako tells him that it’s a woman named Kaneda Momoko.
--
“Echizen-san? Echizen Ryoma-san?”
The voice on the other end of the phone is pleasant, soft and cultured.
Ryoma dislikes it immediately and makes no excuses for his bias. He leans back against his desk chair, phone pressed to his ear, and stares at the magazine in his lap.
“Yes,” he says shortly. What can this woman want from him? Their only possible connection is Fuji Syuusuke—his eyes trace smile on the page—and Ryoma had cut that tie a long time ago.
But it is Fuji she wants to talk about, he discovers.
“I understand that it probably isn’t my place to interfere like this,” she says, almost sheepishly. “But I do care for Syuusuke and—“
Syuusuke, thinks Ryoma, and suddenly the sun he swallowed upon leaving Fuji flares back to life after almost a year of dormancy. He can feel the contortion of his guts, stomach twisting painfully, as his fingers tighten around the phone.
“He’d like to see you again,” Kaneda-san says.
“I don’t want to see him,” replies Ryoma abruptly, and hangs up the phone.
Afterwards, he moves to his bed and sits there, staring at those two pages in the magazine. He thinks about fate and coincidences, about the past and present, about warmth and love and laughter and uncertainty and doubt and a maddening loneliness that could not be staved off by mere presence.
His fingers trace the lines that form a face he hasn’t seen in too long, and his math homework remains unfinished that night.
--
Nanjirou is considering moving back to the U.S. “Nicer women” is his leered response when asked why. His wife slaps him upside the head and Ryoma rolls his eyes and leaves the room.
Back to America, he thinks. It has been five years.
--
Fuji liked to make Ryoma scream. He also liked making Ryoma blush, but the screams were more gratifying, he explained to a less-than-thrilled Ryoma, because they were private and harder-won.
He was particularly fond of Ryoma’s collarbone as well, his mouth lingering there for minutes at a time. Ryoma would never mind, too distracted by the talented tongue and being driven mad with the heat of desire. Afterwards, though, he would always pay the price; collared shirts did little to hide the evidence when one was forced to change among a group of nosy senpai practically every day.
Sometimes when he stayed over at Fuji’s, he would wake to the gentle touch of fingers brushing through his hair. It made him feel oddly like Karupin, but left him warm and contented all the same. Fuji liked to tease him about being petted. (Ryoma growled back that the tensai had strange fantasies.)
Ryoma didn’t know if he could call those little actions signs of love.
After all, in the end, Fuji never did open up to him.
Loving like that was too hard and it was the first time Ryoma had given up a challenge.
--
Kaneda Momoko calls again four days later, asking him to reconsider.
Ryoma, who’d thrown the magazine into the trash, flatly refuses.
Then, without warning, a soft, too-familiar voice is in his ear. “Ryoma?” The tentative sound of his name flares something more painful than the sun eating his insides, something deeper in his soul. “That is, Echizen?”
“Fuji-senpai,” he says coolly, frozen in place even as his heart begins leaping of its own will.
“How are you?” Fuji asks politely, making the customary small talk.
They are like strangers now, Ryoma reflects, heart still thudding agonizingly. They have been apart for three years. “Fine,” he remembers to answer, tone not perhaps as polite as it ought to be. He was never good at pretending.
“I hear Seigaku didn’t make it to the Nationals last year,” Fuji comments. “I’m sorry.”
Ryoma moves slowly, carefully, to the doorway of his room, raising a hand to steady himself on the doorframe. “We’ll make it this year,” he says automatically. Then he blinks back sudden tears as he registers Fuji’s last comment. I’m sorry. Is he? Ryoma’s thoughts are no longer on the tennis team but whirling through the last five years. Things might’ve been different…ought to have been…
“Saa, that’s good to hear. And, you, are you doing well?”
“Yeah.” They couldn’t have been different. Not unless he didn’t leave, and then the claim he’d just uttered would be a lie for sure. Ryoma closes his eyes and leans against the doorframe. “What about you, Fuji-senpai?” he asks softly.
Fuji talks for a moment of his classes, very briefly. Then he apologizes again. “I’m sorry Momoko bothered you, Echizen. It’s honestly none of her business and I’m sorry the past was brought up. Your life is good now so let’s not disrupt it with bad memories, ne?”
Syuusuke, thinks Ryoma, nearer to tears than he’s been for years, you were always such a good liar.
I love you, he wants to say, but instead asks, “Have you spoken with Tezuka lately?”
There is a noticeable cooling of Fuji’s tone. “No. I’ve glimpsed him around campus a few times but we don’t speak. He’s very busy, I’m sure, and my schedule is pretty full too…”
Ryoma opens his eyes. If Fuji is still harboring antagonistic feelings toward the man Ryoma left him for…perhaps there is hope. Then Ryoma realizes what a foolish little boy he is, with what childish dreams. It is clear Fuji wants nothing of him now. It was clear three years ago when Ryoma stopped looking at Fuji because it hurt too much. Besides, even if this ridiculous notion of them back together does come to pass, nothing will be different. Fuji will be even less likely to open up.
Still, a part of Ryoma is considering enduring that living hell again, if only for the moments were Fuji would smile at him, pure and unadulterated. The times he could touch Fuji, kiss him, hold him and be held…
“It was nice hearing from you,” Ryoma says politely, and he and Fuji hang up on gracious terms.
Ryoma thinks about his lie and wonders if everything else he’s been telling himself isn’t a lie as well.
--
Echizen Ryoma, Echizen Nanjirou’s son and tennis wonder in his own right, will not become captain of the Seigaku High tennis team. He is moving back to America at the end of the school year.
California, where he used to live.
Home? he wonders.
--
The cherry trees are blooming when Ryoma meets with Tezuka. Leaving the stuffiness of the little restaurant behind, they head instead to a nearby park. Side by side, they walk silently through the park, each lost in their own thoughts. There are things they could say to each other, but both deem it unnecessary. Superfluous, even.
Tezuka tried to organize some sort of Seigaku reunion (the regulars at least) to see Ryoma off, but everyone lives such different lives now. It is difficult to arrange any sort of meeting between nine people, some of whom rarely keep in touch with each other anymore.
Ryoma, though feeling particularly reticent that day, does take the time to reassure Tezuka that it is all right. He knows he doesn’t want to see Fuji anyway.
“I emailed them all your flight information,” Tezuka says as the keep along the path. The sun beats down warmth on the crisp spring air and their footfalls are rhythmic on the asphalt. “They will be able to go to the airport if they want.”
Ryoma nods and turns to watch the sakura drift on the breeze. He wonders when the ache will fade.
Put out my sun, he thinks desperately. He wants to forget.
--
In one of those strange quirks of fate, the kind of coincidence that convince people that the world is conspiring against them, Ryoma runs into Fuji the day before he leaves Japan. It is unexpected, to say the least, and leave both parties standing still, looking at each other in uncertainty.
“Echizen,” Fuji greets him formally. “Good afternoon.”
Of all the street tennis courts in Tokyo, Ryoma despairs to himself, why this one? What is Fuji doing there anyway? Ryoma has come to say goodbye but Fuji doesn’t seem to have any business there.
“What are you doing here?” Ryoma asks bluntly.
An almost familiar smile flickers across Fuji’s face, nostalgic for the briefest of moments before it is replaced by the cordial (if slightly unnerving) smile he reserves for the general public. “Tactfulness is a virtue,” he chides before replying, “I’m taking pictures for a class assignment.”
Ryoma looks at the complicated and clearly hi-tech camera hanging around the other’s neck. “I see,” he lies politely and says nothing more. Instead, he watches the games on the courts, automatically critiquing the players’ techniques and styles mentally, picking out strengths and weaknesses.
Fuji stands and watches with him for awhile.
The rhythmic thwack-thwack of the tennis ball hitting the racket and then the ground soothe Ryoma’s frazzled nerves. Some things will always be the same. His eyes are trained on the pair on the nearest court, following the volley between the fairly evenly-matched opponents. Two boys, probably both in high school, run over the green courts, their breaths harsh against the sun-baked air. Ryoma watches them intently and it isn’t until the far opponent misses a smash that Ryoma, concentration broken, realizes the camera beside him is clicking away.
He looks up to observe Fuji at work and swallows hard, starting, when he discovers that he is the subject of the photographs, not the match.
“What are you doing?” he demand, but he is too unsettled to quell the unspoken question in his voice.
Fuji’s smile is different now, not the polite mask he usually presents to the world. It is not one Ryoma remembers either but it looks almost bittersweet. I’ll call that one ‘Knowledge,’” he says, lifting the camera again in time to catch Ryoma’s wide-eyed expression. Click. “And that one,” he continues, lowering the camera, “is ‘My Cage.’” He shakes his head slightly as his smile returns to its former distance.
Ryoma knows better to ask for clarification. This is Fuji, after all. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he blurts out.
Fuji turns his head away and watches the resumed matches. “I know.” There is a brief silence between them, but, to Ryoma, it stretches to eternity on all sides, unable to be breached. The words that were never said were what drove them apart last time.
Ryoma’s throat tightens, stomach clenching, and the sun turns somersaults along his stomach lining. “Goodbye, senpai,” he says, not looking at the man who is the boy he loved, grown up.
He is aware of Fuji’s eyes on his back as he walks away.
--
His last suitcase lies open on the floor of his room. Most of his things have been packed. Only large, unwieldy items, like furniture, remain. (His mother plans to stay behind an extra week to make sure the furniture is properly shipped off.)
He is leaving Japan tomorrow on a 9:24 am flight.
He wonders why this photo album is one of the last things he packs.
A gift from Fuji for Christmas their second year together, the album is full of photos of him and Fuji together or separate, depending on who took the picture. (He has a similar album, only full of the Seigaku regulars, that Fuji gave him for his birthday the day before.) Ryoma flips through it, studying the boy he used to be and the boy he used to love.
We were young then, he thinks, and then wonders if three years has really made that much of a difference.
He doesn’t know Fuji anymore, after three years. They’ve been living lives separate of each other. If Ryoma loves Fuji Syuusuke, he loves the one of three years ago, the sixteen-year-old who couldn’t return his feelings.
It hurt so much then, he remembers. It hurt that Fuji didn’t love him the way he loved Fuji.
Ryoma closes the album and places it back into his suitcase. He zips up the black case carefully, knowing it stores treasured memories. Thirteen-year-old Echizen Ryoma is in there, young, confused, in love, and hurt. And in there with him is a young Fuji Syuusuke who didn’t love Ryoma the way Ryoma wanted to be loved, and wasn’t prodigy enough to teach Ryoma that love came in all different shapes, sizes, gestures, smiles, and trusts.
Ryoma is going to America tomorrow.
He is leaving some things behind.
--
At 9:10 the next morning, they board American Airline flight 1289 and settle into their seats.
At 8 o’clock, they file their way through airport security and are herded through check-in hell. An hour later, they wait at Gate C-21.
At 7:50, Ryoma, his baka oyaji, and Nanako say their goodbyes. Tezuka is there, naturally, and surprisingly, so is Oishi, Kikumaru, and Kaidoh.
At 6 o’clock, Ryoma wakes up and knows that today he is leaving Japan.
The cherry trees on the temple grounds wave sakura goodbyes.
-
owari
-
Epilogue
It has been two months since Ryoma has returned to the United States. He’s relearned his American accent and continues playing tennis. As he technically finished his second year in high school in Japan, he doesn’t have to enroll in an American high school for the last two months of their school year. This fall, he will be a senior.
On June 1, he receives a long-distance call from Fuji.
“Where did you get this number?” he asks in his typically tactless manner. (His Japanese hasn’t suffered too much as his mother insists they continue speaking it at home.)
“Tezuka, of course,” Fuji replies.
Ryoma doesn’t know what to say.
Fuji says, “I’m sorry.”
Ryoma sits down hard at the kitchen table, staring blankly at the bowl of fake fruit garnishing its center. Afternoon sunlight streams in a nearby window. He absorbs the little details of the moment, from the dust motes dancing in the sun rays, to the feel of the phone under his hand, and then he finds his voice. “It’s okay,” he says. “I was young. And stupid.”
“Me, too.”
He laughs at that, the last vestiges of any bitterness he has harbored melting away. “You’re a tensai, Fuji-senpai.” It’s amazing how the honorific can still roll of his tongue so easily. Some things even time can’t change.
“I don’t play tennis anymore.”
Ryoma isn’t altogether surprised. He says so.
“Saa, Ryoma—“ a pause, hesitant, “May I still call you that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the picture I took of you the day before you left?”
Ryoma thinks back to that day on the street courts, sun shining bright down on him and the boy beside him. “There were many,” he says.
“‘My Cage,’” clarifies Fuji.
“Yes.”
“I’d like to send you a copy.”
“That’s fine.”
They talk more and it is surprisingly easily. Fuji discusses how much he likes his photography professor and why, he mentions some of the projects he’s undertaking and even Ryoma can hear the excitement in his voice. Ryoma talks of the move back, of readjusting to a new-old culture and home. He mentions the new fan club he’s been plagued with because American girls are almost as scary as Japanese girls.
Still, many things that haven’t been said remain unsaid because there is no longer a need to voice them. Instead they catch up on three years worth of being apart, until Ryoma’s conscience pricks him about the phone bill.
Fuji assures him not to worry about it and promises to send the picture straightaway.
When Ryoma talks to Tezuka about it later, via email this time, he is informed that “My Cage” won first prize in a large and well-established photography competition and is currently on display in a well-known Tokyo art museum. Ryoma wonders briefly why Tezuka didn’t mention this before until he remembers more or less demanding a cease to the Fuji updates.
The photo portrait arrives two weeks later. The entire Echizen family exclaims over it (some in more bad taste than others) and Ryoma decides to hang it in his room, perceived egotism be damned. He studies it and finds himself surprised by his own face, his own expression of surprise rendered timeless in a snapshot. Almost distantly, he wonders why Fuji chose the title he did.
Later, he calls Fuji to thank him and they talk long enough to rack up the bill on Ryoma’s end.
They decide an email correspondence will be cheaper.
Who knows, thinks Ryoma as he serves a tennis ball at his poor opponent’s head the next day on the community courts, he may even go back to Japan for a visit soon.
American Fanta is just not the same as Ponta, after all, and Fuji did promise to keep a special stock.
--
Posted: 04.01.2005
--
Notes:
Written in a consecutive 2 ½ hours by hand, edited, typed, and re-edited.
This spans three years, from the end of Fuji and Ryoma’s two-year relationship to when Ryoma returns to American at sixteen.
Christmas, in Japan, is a holiday for lovers, sort of like Valentine’s Day in the U.S. Presents are exchanged, romantic dinners are held, and proposals are often made. New Year’s is the big family holiday.
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