Work Text:
When asked about the ease with which he’s slipped into Inaba—and out of what he knows everyone for miles around imagines as a glittering, cosmopolitan former life—Souji always finds he doesn’t know how to answer.
It’s not a subtle boast to say that he doesn’t think he’s doing anything special. He doesn’t think there’s anything special to him, really, besides perhaps a talent for careful observation and a genuine (albeit quiet and rarely articulated) interest in knowing things, and people, and the world into which he’s fallen.
He’s never been a talker, but there’s still so much to be deciphered in all the things someone doesn’t say. These are the things Souji watches, the things he waits for—little clues in the shoulders, in the hands, in the eyes. Sliver by sliver, shard by shard, uncovering the person beneath. There are thousands of words’ worth of information in the angle at which someone turns their body toward you during a conversation, and in the particular weight to the silence when they’re saying nothing at all.
The need to know builds at times to a hunger; on good days he calls it a tendency, a proclivity, an inclination. On less good days, or on days that he’s feeling unusually honest with himself, a desire. On his least articulate days, a thing—a thing for touching, and tasting, and the particular small knowledges that you can only cull directly, wordlessly, from someone else’s mouth.
After all, there’s more than one way to read a pair of lips.
Souji wonders, often and at length, what makes a “real” kiss. Is it that it’s on the lips, rather than the cheek or forehead or deposited haphazardly somewhere along the jawline, like the kisser had been aiming for the mouth and veered off-course at the last minute? Is it that both kisser and kiss-ee understand what a kiss potentially means, recognize it as something beyond a weird thing you try to do with your face on the playground because you saw it happen on TV? Or is it—and he’s not sure how much he likes this thought, or the uncomfortable, fluttery feeling it sends into the pit of his stomach, like stage fright, like swallowing a mouthful of feathers—that it’s not “real” unless it’s with someone you actually love?
There’s an especially curious paradox, he finds, to acting out a kiss. On the one hand, it’s all choreography, a director barking orders: put your hand here, turn her face toward yours this way, pull her closer. And, in a way, because it’s a performance, it’s not him grabbing Yumi Ozawa around the waist and pressing his lips to hers, not Souji Seta holding the two of them there, picture-perfect in the middle of the circle of floor that passes for a stage.
But on the other hand, there has to be something about it that’s real. Something tells him it’s Yumi and not Juliet who trembles all the way down to the tips of her toes at the warm ghosting of his breath across her face, whose fingers have clenched of their own accord in the fabric of his shirt front.
There’s some dialogue that’s supposed to come immediately after the kiss ends and the lovers pull away from one another—she probably remembers it from her own script, she highlights all her lines in bright yellow—but as Souji draws his face slowly away from hers the only things registering in his head are her tightly shut eyes and the all-too-authentic flush burning across her cheeks.
For once, Yumi can’t summon up Juliet fast enough to say the line—and it’s just as well, Souji thinks, because he wouldn’t have known how to respond even if she had. It’s a spectacular blunder, this entire minute of unscripted silence in which the two leads do nothing but stand and blink at one another, but the entire room erupts into applause regardless.
When Souji kisses Ai Ebihara on the school rooftop it’s for what might well be the silliest reason in the whole world—to get her to stop crying.
He’s just coaxed her down from the ledge on the other side of the wire fence that surrounds the roof-deck, and his palms are clammy with what can only be fear when he thinks of the toes of her shoes jutting out beyond the concrete, those two or three precarious inches of empty air. There are tear-tracks down her cheeks and Daisuke Nagase’s name on her lips, and she’s spewing five hundred words a minute about love and ugliness and mile-long lists of stupid fashion tips lifted from magazines, and it’s all Souji can do to reach out and draw her a little closer to him in a half-desperate attempt to shut out all the noise.
By all accounts, including her own, Ai’s kissed at least twenty boys in her lifetime. Still, he’s willing to bet that it’s never been quite like this, from the way her body leans into his and her nails dig into his arms as if her legs have buckled out from under her, from the ragged little sobbing sound she makes right up against his mouth.
“You’re a beautiful person, you know,” he tells her afterward, and he’s still holding her face in his hands as he says it so she can’t turn away.
“Even like this?”
“Even like this.” Maybe between the kiss and these words she’ll find something she can take at face value, for once.
“You’re full of crap,” she says. Her mascara is running a muddy stream down one side of her face, and there’s a rosy pink smudge at the corner of her mouth where his lips have made a mess of her lipstick, but, just this once, she smiles like she believes him.
Strangely enough, he finds he can never explain how he does it. The physical mechanics of kissing elude him when he attempts to verbalize them, especially in the face of so many questions about coordinating lips, hands, noses, heads, what to do with teeth and tongues and when to do it—and the age-old problem of how to breathe.
Of course no one but Daisuke and Kou would even think of asking him such things in the first place. And of course Daisuke and Kou are staring at him with eyes practically the size of dinner plates, brighter even than the burning fluorescent whiteness of the locker room lights, but all he has for them are lame non-answers. It depends. You just know. You just kind of… go, I guess.
“It’s hard to explain,” is the lame non-answer he finally settles for, though in all fairness it becomes significantly less lame when he follows it up with, “I could show you, though.”
Daisuke reels back, speeding to the other side of the bench faster than Souji’s ever seen him chase a ball, sputtering “S-s-s-show us?!” and spilling panicked S-sounds by the handful. In turn, Kou leans forward, wide-eyed and hesitating, almost like he’s about to kiss Souji himself, and his whisper is breathy and nearly reverent: “You’re okay with kissing guys?”
You can kiss whoever you want to, Souji’s almost tempted to point out, a little sharply, as long as you’re sure they want to kiss you too.
“It’s not that much different from kissing girls,” he says instead, quietly skating over a distinct lack of experience in this particular area, because how different could it possibly be? “I mean, you’re using the same equipment.”
Upon reflection, he’s not sure how reassuring this is, given that Daisuke, at least, wouldn’t know—Souji can almost see the shadow of the Middle School Girlfriend hanging over his head, the girl with whom he’d never even held hands. And for his part Kou seems to be all talk and no action; Souji’s observed more than once how the sight of a certain Chie Satonaka ties his loose tongue up in a million knots.
“My mother says that in France,” he adds, halfheartedly, as if he knows it’s not going to help Daisuke’s nerves, or Kou’s sudden wide-eyed enthusiasm, “kisses are just how they say hello.”
“Kisses with t-t-tongue?”
Souji briefly considers telling Daisuke, very slowly, in the soft gentle voice he finds himself using most often on the kids at the local daycare, that the tongue is also the thing you make words with, so it’s really not that bad, honestly not that much different from saying hello the normal way. At this moment, though, Daisuke’s begun to resemble the tomatoes he and Nanako have growing in their little garden at home, so he backpedals. The last thing he wants is to scare his friend so much he resigns himself to dying a kiss-virgin.
“There doesn’t need to be tongue,” he says instead, in the daycare-voice, like Daisuke’s a seven-year-old who’s been hogging the sandbox for an hour and doesn’t want to let anybody else in, “if you don’t want there to be. Come here; I promise there’s nothing to it.”
When they exit the locker room a half hour later, Souji’s willing to wager that Daisuke’s bloodstream has ascended almost completely into his head; his eyes are glued to the ground in front of him like he’s counting the tiny patches of mud clinging to his shoes, mouth pinched into the thinnest physically possible line, his face practically incandescent. Kou, meanwhile, chatters all the way home about the unexpected softness of Souji’s lips, and the taste of his toothpaste.
It’s only fitting that he kisses Chie on the roof at lunchtime, over a bowl of gyudon.
They’ve been training together long enough for him to be familiar with her stance and the patterns of her favorite moves, all the shouted, semi-coherent battle cries she’s lifted from hours upon hours of rented kung fu movies. He’d like to think he knows how to spot an opening, when to go in for the metaphorical kill—which, in this case, is a brief lull in her usual steady stream of chatter about fighting and manga and cute dog videos, after she puts down her chopsticks and takes a long, deep swallow of water.
Later he’ll chalk it up to being distracted by the movements of her mouth—Chie’s mouth is always moving, always pursing and grimacing and smiling and babbling. It’s impossible not to watch, but that’s nothing, he finds, compared to the way it feels. Chie’s lips are chapped, and her teeth clack a little awkwardly against his when she turns her head, and there’s the taste of sweet soy sauce and the distinct gamey flavor of that strange meat gum she likes so much mingling on her tongue and in her breath, but he doesn’t mind, because all these things are Chie. Nothing is more Chie than the small, high-pitched noise of surprise she makes, which segues seamless and smooth into the wide, unbridled spread of her mouth as she grins into the kiss, straight across from ear to ear.
“What’d you have to go and do that for?” She’s trying to be stern but it isn’t working; her cheeks are too flushed and her eyes too bright, and he knows that as soon as she gets her breath back, she’ll laugh. “You’re dangerous, Souji-kun!”
“I’m sorry,” he tells her, pseudo-gravely, a wicked little spark in his eye for half a second the only perceptible giveaway. “I won’t do it again.”
He’d pretend to be a bit more guilty, but he never gets to because there’s the laugh, ringing out tinny and loud as the bell that summons them back from lunch, telling him there’s no reason for him to apologize.
“Are they talking about us, do you think?”
They’re sitting side by side on the tatami in a tea room at the inn. Yukiko is whisking the tea to a pale green froth in the bowl before her and doesn’t answer right away, but he knows she’s turning the question over with every smooth circle her hand makes.
“They won’t stop asking me about you,” she finally says, passing the bowl to him and gesturing for him to drink. She sounds faintly aggrieved—but in a loving way, he thinks, like the gossip isn’t entirely unwelcome, footnoted as it is by years and years of care. “I keep telling them they have the wrong idea.”
“Do they have the wrong idea, though?” He raises an inquiring eyebrow at her, and tries not to wince when it earns him a slap on the arm.
Of course she chooses not to answer, lowering her gaze to the tea bowl and asking instead, “How does it taste?”
The tea is perfect. It’s always perfect, but Souji finds he doesn’t know how to talk about tea any more than he knows how to talk about the two of them, about what other people might think they are beyond these circular, teasing questions, so he decides he’s not going to answer either. Instead he reaches out, slides his hand around the smooth pale column of her neck and up, cradling the back of her head, long hair spilling dark and nearly liquid through his fingers. She leans back a little into the touch, her hands clasped behind his shoulders and guiding him gently toward her, and when he breathes in she smells like soap and peach perfume and clean, freshly aired tatami mats.
It’s no secret that Yukiko is lovely—you’d be hard-pressed to count the number of heads that turn when she walks past, that keep turning even after sixteen years in this tiny town where all the faces are the same. Souji’s aware, though, that there are many kinds of beautiful, and it’s gratifying to be (at least for now) the only one who knows this kind—who can trace with his eyes the graceful curves of her mouth up close, delicate chin, dark eyelashes.
“Can I get a kiss, Souji-senpai?”
Rise is, typically, the only person ever to ask him directly. It’ll be his gift to her, she says, something nice for her to remember him by when he goes home to the city and she returns to her career in the spring. Out of habit, Souji glances down at the way her lips frame the question—that full, glossy little rosebud of a mouth, bubblegum-pink in its sweetness—and of course it’s a yes. There’s barely any need to think about it when he smiles at her, easy and bright as afternoon, and draws her forward by the hand.
Rise’s a professional, so none of this is new. She’s probably had to go through the motions enough times for this or that film, this or that music video, to fall effortlessly back into the choreography of it. Her hands begin in his hands, then run up his arms and link behind his neck to close the gap between them until they’re standing chest to chest. His own hands settle above her waist, molding to the gentle arch of her spine, and he imagines it’s nothing short of cinematic—the two of them here atop the hill, leaves falling around them, the requisite soft, romantic violin music that accompanies such scenes already playing in their heads.
She disengages from him slowly, draws back inch by painstaking inch like she’s making sure he’ll be able to pick out every little detail of her face as their eyes drift back open. He can feel the warm gust of her breathless giggle against his face even as she unlocks her arms from around his neck and grabs him by the arm instead, settling her head against his shoulder in a much more familiar pose for the two of them.
“That was so nice,” she says. “So easy. I’d kill to have you as a co-star on something.”
He wonders if that’s a subtle nod to his acting skills. He’s almost sure that it is when she adds, “Thanks for being my first kinda-real kiss, Senpai.”
You wouldn’t expect it from the way he talks—Kanji’s the best of all of them at creating what is essentially noise pollution with his words, especially when he’s in a foul mood—but his mouth is probably one of the softest Souji’s ever known. The unexpectedly pristine state of Kanji’s face, in general, is a jealously guarded secret Souji’s only managed to learn by getting in so close, the skin smooth and clear from what probably amounts to hours of washing and scrubbing and exfoliating at his mother’s gentle but persistent behest.
There’s a tentativeness to the way Kanji kisses, a balking, hedging hesitation. The first time, Souji remembers fondly, he didn’t do much more than screw his eyes shut and pucker his lips outward like a fish, and the amount of coaching he’s needed since then is less a hassle to Souji than an endearing side-effect of wanting, so badly it must hurt sometimes, not to screw up something so important.
I know it’s creepy as fuck, he had said, but please, Senpai, you’re the only one I can ask.
“You can always pretend I’m someone else, if that’ll make it easier,” he says, after assuring Kanji for what is possibly the hundredth time today that the door to his room is locked and, anyway, nobody’s home. “Do you have somebody in mind?”
“K-kinda,” Kanji admits. His eyes are practically burning holes in the floor and he looks like Hell will freeze over before he can be persuaded to raise them, and Souji recognizes at this point that it’s wise not to ask who, at least not yet.
“Is that what you do when you kiss someone?” he asks, after a pause. “Pretend they’re someone else?”
“I try not to. It’s not polite.” He wants to say of course not, with conviction—it’s something he owes, probably, to everyone he’s ever kissed—but he knows that wouldn’t be telling the whole truth. “I’ve just… I’ve never kissed anyone I didn’t want to.”
This time, strangely enough, it’s Kanji who’s pressing, even if his hands are tense and restless, tracing nervous spirals into the wood grain of the floor. “Do you have someone you do wanna kiss, though, that you haven’t yet?”
Maybe, Souji thinks, it’s good for both of them that they’re getting all this practice.
Naoto’s mouth is pale; there’s almost a hardness to the lines of her lips that gives them a certain gravitas, like the mouth of a statue. Souji’s seen that mouth move—seen it quirk to the side in the faintest of smiles, or pull into a wire-thin line in anger or disgust or deep contemplation, but always its movements are small, measured, decorous as her oddly formal speech.
At the moment it’s drawn downward at the corners in the barest imaginable ghost of a frown. She has too much restraint to part those lips and begin to worry the lower one between her teeth, but Souji can tell from the way her hand has lain idle against the door of her shoe locker for nearly a minute, neither pulling open nor pushing closed, that she’s very nearly there.
“Is something wrong?” he asks in a low murmur, careful to disrupt neither the silence of the near-empty hallway nor Naoto’s frowny little reverie. “You look a little upset.”
She startles at the sound of his voice, but recovers quickly enough to meet his eyes and school her face into a more neutral expression. “I’m sorry, Senpai. I’m just at a loss as to what to do about these letters.”
So she’s still getting them, then. “Do you ever read them?”
“I perused the first few I received, months ago,” she says. “But I stopped. I have to confess I’m not… adept at dealing with confessions, much less formulating suitable responses.”
Her mouth moves then; his gaze strays downward to follow the shape of her lips as they make the sidelong smile, small and hesitant. Rueful, this time. Almost sad. It’s more telling than looking into her eyes. “I find the idea of love frightening, it seems.”
He knows it must pain her to have to admit such an incapacity. He opens his mouth, ready to answer, ready to tell her that, really, he understands, more than she could possibly know. That, for all that his lips are loose and his hands free, he doesn’t know what to do with the word love either—where to keep it, what it means, how even to begin to imagine it. It’s like a magic trick neither of them know enough to pick apart, a handful of seemingly nonsensical words and some spell being cast out of sight.
But because these kinds of explanations come more easily to him, he leans in—slowly, to give her time to move away if she wants to—and kisses her. It’s the barest brush of his mouth against the stone lines of hers, more a touch than anything else, and Souji counts it as a small blessing that she doesn’t tense up or pull away. Instead, after only a split-second’s hesitation, he feels her breathe out, feels her lips move gently against his—half a sigh, half a kiss back.
“Was that scary?”
“Terrifying.” Naoto’s voice is, suddenly, slightly hoarse. “It was… pleasant.”
“I understand,” he says, leans one shoulder against the lockers and smiles down at her in the hope that she’ll believe. “I hope you have many more pleasant ones, with someone you care for.”
More pleasant, but also more terrifying—they both know this, so there’s no need to say it aloud. She smiles back, but there’s just a little steel in her eyes, that calculating look of hers that tells him she’ll be watching him. Maybe she’s started to pick up the threads of the mystery that trail behind Souji as he dances from person to person, from kiss to kiss, winding them around her fingers in an attempt to untangle the answer.
“I wish the same for you,” she says.
When asked about Yosuke, Souji always finds he doesn’t know how to answer.
There’s a reason he doesn’t look at him too much, and it actually has very little to do with the fact that sometimes Yosuke moves so fast it’s nearly impossible to follow him with your eyes—always talking, fidgeting, shifting, arms flailing above his head in exuberance or dismay. If Souji looks at him, he knows he’ll begin to trace, begin trying to fill in gaps—sketch out the planes of skin beneath his clothes, count the bones of his ribs and spine and throat, trace the shape of his lips and theorize how best to kiss them, how to move, and the age-old problem of how to breathe.
He tries to convince himself that it’s no different from the others, but he knows it’s also nothing like. You can kiss anyone you want to, he always tells himself, as long as you know they want to kiss you too. There’s a precipice yawning down into darkness where terror and desire intersect, and in Souji’s head and in his heart he sees Yosuke’s standing right at the edge of it—but how could Yosuke possibly know? How could he have any idea?
Yosuke sits at the desk right behind his in the classroom, and that stretch of a few feet feels like the ocean. There are maybe fifteen people with them in the room this morning, the others trickling in slowly before the first bell, but there may as well be a hundred.
“Did you want something, partner?”
Souji wants so much, so badly. On good days he calls it a tendency, an inclination, a slight positive feeling in the general direction of the boy who’s supposed to be his best friend. On bad days, or honest days, a hunger—the kind that makes him curl into a ball on the floor of his room, sweating and suddenly breathless and scrabbling away with his fingers at his own skin, trying desperately to shake off the sensation of being touched by something he can only imagine. For all the knowledge he’s accumulated on the subject of tasting and touching, of faces and hands and mouths, Yosuke remains a blank space in his mind, a mere outline traced in pencil, because most days Souji can’t even figure out how to tell the difference between what’s really there and what appears in his dreams.
Suddenly Souji finds he’s paying an unprecedented amount of attention to his own mouth—how to seize hold of that particular part of his mask and make it move, how to force the muscles of his face into a familiar, inscrutable half-smile.
“No,” he says, and it takes every last drop of strength in his body and in his soul not to stumble over the words. “It’s okay.”
Souji turns, fixes his eyes forward, and breathes.