Chapter Text
i. kiss
When Eiji picks Ash up from the airport he’s trying so desperately to contain himself, his fervor, his puppy dog tendencies. He knows he’s bouncing, he knows he’s unfettered energy. Sing’s words still echo in his ears though, painfully raw.
“Just be slow. He’s not himself. He’s changed.”
Eiji knows this change. This desperate grasp at the disintegrating remains of ones self. He’s been here before and he’s survived and Ash will too.
But still he tones down the ‘golden retriever’. He stands, hands shoved into his pockets, just outside the arrival gate and waits as the crowds of people disembark from the large Boeing 737 that stands, frigid, on the runway.
Eiji allows himself one moment of pensive fantasy. He remembers his own trip back across the ocean as though it were yesterday. The rough seat, the overly polite stewardess. The cold window that he’d forced his forehead up against, squeezing his eyes closed, trying to dampen the gaping betrayal.
Ash hadn’t shown up.
He’d reasoned with himself for months afterwards that of course Ash wouldn’t have shown up. He couldn’t just walk away from his life. He couldn’t escape that easily. He was smart, and thoughtful, and dangerous, and had it been a matter of flying across the world to remove himself from the violence of his being, then he’d have done it long before meeting Eiji.
But still, it was painful. A visceral thing. Bone deep it settled, waking Eiji at night with its raspy voice, filling his head with its niggling doubts.
He didn’t come because he didn’t care enough for you.
Now though, it’s been three years. They’ve spoken over the phone, they’ve spoken over Skype, and they’ve watched each other grow, change, fill out, ascend into adulthood. They’ve written manuscripts to each other, containing their daily lives, their daily thoughts, their daily ruminations. Containing the small spaces of pure, unadulterated paper that lay empty between each penciled word but are full of unspoken poetry.
He didn’t come because the violence would have followed and Eiji now knows with the depth of his soul that Ash would not relent in this decision until he had severed that part of his life completely.
The people push past him in waves, and he catches whispered fragments of Japanese conversation as they pass him. There are smiles, and exclamations, and joy as individuals find their people, and still Eiji waits, waits, until he sees the flash of golden hair, reflecting the sunlight that streams in the floor to ceiling windows.
“Ashu,” he murmurs, and the bouncing in his feet resumes. He stays in one place, letting the balls of his feet soak in his energy and reverberate it up once more and again and again and again, until Ash is standing in front of him.
Ash cocks his head, and grins, egocentric and beautiful and so very Ash and Eiji can’t help himself any longer. He smells like plane, and people, and dust, and he’s grown even taller in the last three years then Eiji had imagined, but so has Eiji, though it is a far more incremental thing. He springs forward on the tips of his toes and throws his arm around Ash, burying his face in the perfect spot between his neck and his collarbone.
“Hey, big brother.”
He feels Ash speak more than he hears it—that deep reverberation that echoes in his chest. Eiji smiles against his neck then pushes away, giving into Ash’s boundaries, letting him have his space. He remembers how Ash doesn’t like to be in close quarters, how he stiffens and holds himself almost caustically. He is surprised at the easy going smile on Ash’s face here, after being contained for close to 33 hours. Sitting close enough to other people that their skin might touch at any moment.
He sees the way the smile pushes at the corners of Ash’s mouth though, and understands then. It’s a show. It’s staged. And he remembers then, how it’s always practiced like this, in the daylight.
Eiji would sigh, but it doesn’t matter. Ash is here, Ash is home.
He reaches up for the barest of moments, wanting to run his hands through the silken strands of golden blond, but stops himself. It can wait.
“Did you had a suitcase?” He speaks, tongue once more tripping over English that he hasn’t had to use but sparingly in years. Their Skype sessions hardly count—there he’s teaching Ash Japanese.
“Yes I had a suitcase,” Ash says, straight, monotonous, teasing. He reaches out then and does touch Eiji’s hair—runs his fingers through the straight, disheveled strands. “Longer,” he comments, watching Eiji with honest eyes.
There is a flicker of warmth between them and Eiji flushes, ducks down out of Ash’s reach and turns to walk towards baggage claim.
“It makes me look tougher. You know. Now that I am a New York gangster.”
He hears Ash laugh behind him, and then he catches up. The warmth between them is a stunning thing and Eiji can’t help the wide smile that blooms on his face. He turns to watch Ash and notes his smile growing as well, this time organically, not forced, not hard.
“I’ve missed you,” Ash says, and it’s so perfectly beautiful in delivery that Eiji can almost ignore the whispered bereavement that comes on it’s heels. “I’m sorry.”
This statement is full of intricacies. It’s triple sided in it’s utterance.
This is a thing of beauty, a thing of fragility, and a thing of utter terror.
The sunlight pools at their feet as they walk, blissful, unaware, and Eiji shivers.
***
Eiji lives on the fifth floor of a small studio apartment—the type of apartment that is typically reserved for hipsters and graduate students and ‘artistes’. He doesn’t mind the flights of stairs that run zig-zagging up the building. He avoids the elevators at all costs. They are shiny, and new, and they smell of a certain brand of bleach.
They remind him of hospitals and hospitals are not places of joy.
Instead he leads Ash ever upwards, listening to the man trudge and groan dramatically behind him. Eiji just continues on, and smiles. His legs are muscular, athletic, and though it is only a few flights of stairs, and though it is only a walk to unconstrained domesticity, sometimes he looks out the small windows on each floor and notes the perfect window boxes full of blues and reds and oranges. Sometimes he watches the breeze tug gently at the leaves, and pretends he’s flying once more.
Inside, he shoulders off Ash’s bag and watches Ash kick off his shoes at the door—brown canvas, no longer bright red.
He’s uncharacteristically quiet now, and Eiji watches him carefully, waiting for something, waiting for a crack.
It’s daylight still though, and Ash is nothing but perfection when the sun shines.
“Are you hungry?” Eiji finally asks.
“No.”
“It is too bad for you. I have wonderful Japanese cooking. I have prepared all week for my husband to return home.”
Ash cracks a grin at that and lets out a huff of air that sounds curiously like ‘pshhh’ and almost like ‘shit’ and nothing like ‘I don’t love you anymore.’
“Come on,” Eiji appeals. “You know you are wanting this.”
Ash looks to the ceiling, rueful and almost boyish in his avoidance of whatever this is. “I thought you Japanese loved us Americans. Where’s my All-American Beef Hotdog, wife?”
Eiji spares no moment of indecision, he reaches forward and smacks the back of Ash’s head. Ash grunts in surprise, and for a moment they shed three years of distance and become teenagers again—rolling over the spotless bamboo flooring of the apartment, the wood muffling their grunts and kicks and pokes and shoves.
Ash ends up on top because he’s Ash and Eiji squirms underneath him, refusing to give in, laughing and kicking and just like that, Ash lowers his head and Eiji stills, a hair away from bright jade, a whisper away from flesh, a moment away from eternity.
“Ash, I—” Eiji, starts, and then he presses his head up, desperate to taste his mouth.
Ash stiffens and rolls off of him, and just like that, eternity has dissolved.
“Ash?”
“I need to take a shower.” It’s blunt this time, no sign of the brightly colored boy who’d been so close. It’s dry and humorless and Eiji, pushes himself up with a slow nod.
“Bathroom is just around the corner there on your left. Bedroom is down the hall. I can take your bags in?” The question hangs in the air, thick and morbidly out of place.
“I got it,” Ash calls, and shoulders the backpack before disappearing down the hall.
Eiji watches him go, and as the chasm yawns ever wider between them he closes his eyes.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”