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maayacolabackup-
It is by its breath
That autumn's leaves of trees and grass
Are wasted and driven.
So they call this mountain wind
The wild one, the destroyer.
--Funya no Yasuhide, 22
-
Jin, over the past few months, had worked his way back into being a constant in Kame's life, and never is that more apparent than now, when suddenly he's gone again. Kame still sees him every day, on set, but mostly they aren't filming together, because Saigou is off having samurai battles and Honoko is giving lifeless dance performances swallowed in grief and misery. It's good they aren't acting opposite each other right now, because Jin won't meet Kame's eyes, and Kame thinks his world feels really dark without Jin's luminous smile brightening it up.
It feels the same as it felt the last time Jin abruptly withdrew from him, physically present but completely emotionally unavailable, only worse, because this time he knows why, and he doesn't know how to make it better.
Kame doesn't want to think about the way his heart leaps into his throat when Jin brushes past him to get to the coffee, as they stand at the edge of the set while Maki films the conclusion to one of the movie's subplots. He also doesn't want to think about the way his heart sinks back down heavily when Jin walks away again without saying a word.
As usual, Kame doesn't know what to do. As usual, Kame doesn't know what he wants.
Kame wants to curl up in the corner now and wrap his arms around his knees and see if Jin will come and sit next to him.
He also wants to run his fingers through Jin's wild dark hair, but he thinks that might be Honoko and not Kame. It's all so confusing.
When Kame goes outside, face still wet from half-heartedly washing off his make-up, to meet the car that's waiting to take him to his next engagement, something inside of him tells him to turn around. He does, and Jin is just looking at him from the doorway, and Kame, or maybe Honoko, can feel his heart break.
Acid is sloshing around in his belly, and he wants this movie, this amazing, wonderful, difficult movie, to be done, so he can get rid of all these confusing character emotions and Kame can fix things with Jin, somehow.
It probably won't be that easy, Kame knows. The acid is melting his insides.
"Is it broken, forever?" he asks Jin, when they are both wrapped in robes over their costumes, the early December air easily cutting through the layers of cotton they both wear. "Are we broken forever?"
Jin frowns, and doesn't answer.
"I'm..."
"I know," Jin says finally, finally, and then he walks away.
There's a famous Japanese folktale that Kame heard when he was a child, about an old man who refused to love. At the end of the tale, he dies alone at the peak of a mountain in the middle of a brutal winter, and no one misses him at all.
It's supposed to be a cautionary tale. Kame can't imagine the top of the mountain being any colder than this.
-
Honoko has never been very good at playing instruments. His hands are short and square, perfect for gripping the hilt of a katana, or for climbing atop a horse.
The Brave Samurai's hands had been gentle and long, masculine and feminine in the same moment. He wrung melodies out of everything he touched.
Honoko wishes he could have said a lot of things, but he had been waiting.
There had been a perfect moment in the rain once, but Honoko had run away. Now there would never be another perfect moment.
-
Honoko and Kame are the same, really. Both of them hide behind masks, and push their hearts down below the soles of their feet. Both of them are so damn afraid to feel. Maybe that's why this is all so hard.
-
Nakamaru is the only one in the lobby when Kame arrives. "Traffic," he says to Kame as they head up to the usual dressing room at Potato, not looking up from his magazine as he walks. "Don't freak out, they're all together and they'll be here as soon as the driver can get them here." Nakamaru sits down on the couch.
"I'm not going to freak out," Kame croaks, and Nakamaru looks up quickly from his magazine at the tone of Kame's voice.
"Are you quite alright, Kame?" Nakamaru is looking at him with his eyebrows pushed together, even more concerned when he catches sight of Kame's appearance, and Kame wonders what he must look like. "You look like you died last month, and your corpse has come for the interview."
"I think I..." Kame pushes his hands into his pockets and feels the tight denim scrape both sides of his hands. "I'm really. Confused. About Jin."
Nakamaru frowns. "What's he done now?"
Kame shakes his head. " Nothing, it's just." Kame doesn't know how to phrase it. "It's hard to separate the movie from real life."
Nakamaru is looking at him like he has three heads, and Kame is really trying to explain it. "Kame, whole thoughts please. I'm not that good at extrapolating."
"In the movie, our characters are sort of... in love with each other." Kame fumbles, and Nakamaru's eyebrows reach for the ceiling.
"Come again?"
"Well, not really, but it's this underlying thing that's not explicit, but totally...and you know how I am about characters..." Nakamaru is the only person Kame has tried to explain it to, this thing he does.
"You feel like you're in love with Jin?" Nakamaru asks, scooting over so that Kame can collapse beside him on the sofa, and curl onto his friend's side.
"No," Kame says. "Well, yes, but I know it's not... But Jin..."
Nakamaru freezes. "Kame, look," Nakamaru says after a minute or so of silence. His voice sounds tense, and nervous. "Whatever you're thinking, it's probably better if you don't try and figure out what Jin--" It's too nervous, Nakamaru's tone. Out of character. Avoidant.
Kame snaps his head up to look into Nakamaru's eyes. "You knew," he says, interrupting whatever Nakamaru was about to say. "That's why Jin still talks to you. He told you, or you figured it out. You knew."
A deep exhale, and Kame can feel the tension flowing out of Nakamaru's body with all the air. "Yeah," Nakamaru says. He cracks his neck, and absently clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth like a snare drum.
"I thought we were friends," Kame tells him, wounded. "Why would you not tell me this?"
"Jin's my friend too," Nakamaru snaps back at him, and Kame guiltily shifts back, before he slouches back into Nakamaru. His face mashes sideways into Nakamaru's ribs, and he mumbles into the soft material of Nakamaru's soft argyle sweater.
"Yeah, I know," Kame sighs. "Just, I don't get it. Jin was my best friend, and then, out of nowhere, he wouldn't even look at me."
Nakamaru closes the magazine, then, and looks down at the cover with an unfocused stare. "I still remember Jin's face, then."
Kame is quiet, and doesn't say anything. He just listens.
"We were preparing for debut, I think, and we were all a little strung out. Jin was sitting alone in the bathroom after a rehearsal. He was sitting on the sink, and his hair was in his face and his back was all curled forward, and it was weird, you know? Because Jin is always cocky and energetic and he just looked so...defeated."
Kame can imagine it in his mind. He thinks defeated might have been the expression on Jin's face when Kame pulled away from him, saying 'no,' when all Jin's ever wanted to hear from him is 'yes.' Kind of lost, kind of broken.
"He told me...he told me it wasn't pretend when he looked at you, when he touched you. Not something to make the girls scream. Not a game." Nakamaru leans toward Kame nudging him with his shoulder affectionately. "I always thought it wasn't one sided, honestly."
Kame quirks his mouth. "It's a character. The person on stage is a character. The person in the movie is a character, too."
Nakamaru is looking at him closely now, eyes narrowed in thought. "What about the person who couldn't sleep if he didn't share a room with Jin in the old days? What about the person who wore matching pinky rings with him? What about the person who lit up whenever Jin entered the room? Linked hands with him under the table?"
Kame thinks back to those times, recalls the smooth skin of Jin's palm against his own. In those days, they could conquer anything, as long as they were together.
Nakamaru grins. "What about the person sitting here right now? Talking to me about Jin because he's all confused? Is that a character, too? Or are you just Kame?"
Kame shifts uncomfortably. He wants to hug himself, but he doesn't do that anymore in front of people, because it draws more attention than it wards off. "I don't know."
"What do you want, Kame?"
Kame wishes he knew. "I said, I don't know!"
The door slams open, and Koki cheerfully sticks his head in the door, and he's followed by a lackadaisical Junno and a grumpy looking Ueda. "Sorry we're late, Kame-chan, but don't freak out, we're here!"
"Why does everyone think I'm going to freak out?" Kame mumbles. "I never freak out." His thoughts are still swimming from his conversation with Nakamaru.
Tatsuya snorts. "You do this thing where you get all quiet and stressed, and you sit all stiffly and you get this weird, vacant look in your eyes, and then you start talking to yourself," he says. "Like some creepy fortune teller who can see the apocalypse in every late arrival."
Junno nods sagely. "Kind of like now, actually."
Kame actively tries to relax his stiff back, and feels a tiny smile tugging at his face. Nakamaru claps him on the back and looks at the others. "Kame's got better things to freak out about than traffic," Nakamaru says. "Let's leave him to get dressed."
Koki bounds out to make-up, and Nakamaru herds everyone out after him. He turns to Kame just as he's about to close the door, and smiles encouragingly. "Figure out what Kame wants," Nakamaru says. "I don't think you've thought about your own desires in a long time. That's not the normal way to live your life, Kame."
"I don't have a life. My life is this," Kame says, gesturing outward at the sets, the costumes and the cameras.
Nakamaru glares at him. "You're entitled to more than that, Kame, and you know it."
When Kame is finally alone, the first thing he does is pull his knees up to his chest, and hug them tight. He can faintly feel Jin sitting down next to him, a shade of a memory, then, arm warm against Kame's.
Kame doesn't know what Kame wants.
He rocks back and forth there, eyes closed and all he can see is Jin but he still doesn't know. "I don't know," he whispers, and no one is there to hear it and it hurts to say it. "I really don't know."
-
"Kame, let's play catch," Jin says, baseball in hand. He's grinning like a kid, and even though he's much older he looks twelve right now.
"Jin, we can't," Kame says patiently. "I have to finish my assignments."
"Kaaaame, don't be a robot, be a young guy!"
"I don't have time to be a young guy," Kame snaps, suddenly angry. "And neither do you."
"Of course I do. Of course you do," Jin says cajolingly. "You love baseball, Kame, come on."
That makes Kame even angrier. He snatches the ball from Jin and winds it up, throwing it out the window. The glass of the window cracks, and chunks fall on Kame's floor and down out onto the street below. Jin looks at him, mouth open in shock, and Kame swallows. "Catch."
"We don't have to play catch if you don't want to," Jin says after a few moments of silence.
Kame does his homework.
Jin leaves, and doesn't visit again.
He doesn't tell anyone about the window for three days. It lets cold air into his room at night, and Kame just pulls another blanket from the hall closet.
He finds the ball on the street a few weeks later. It's heavy in his pocket until he sticks it in the box under his bed with his glove. His ring is in there, and maybe his whole heart is too.
-
Honoko hears Jin's voice before he even realizes he's awake. He thinks it must be a cruel trick of his subconscious, because Jin is dead.
But it's somehow Jin's voice he hears. Jin is laughing with his okiya mother, and Honoko doesn't know that he's ever heard her laugh before.
Honoko wraps himself in a yukata quickly. His hands are shaking, and it can't really be Jin's voice because Jin... Jin is gone, and life isn't fair, and Honoko knows that things don't happen just because you wish for them with every fiber of your being, or because you'd give anything, anything at all, just to...
When she sees him, the mother's mouth sets into a serious line. But Honoko only has eyes for Jin, who stands there, wearing strange Western clothes, hair tied back at his neck. It's like a vision, but Honoko knows it isn't, because Honoko would never imagine Jin in anything but hakama and gi.
His okiya mother speaks.
"Gather your things. Not the kimono, those belong to this okiya. But your gifts, anything else that's yours. Gather those things." Honoko just stares, looking back and forth between Jin and the mother. "He's paid off your debt," she explains. "And wants to take you with him."
Honoko looks at Jin, who is biting his lip anxiously and looking at Honoko with wide, hopeful eyes. Honoko spins on his heel and races back up the wooden staircase.
His heart is going to beat right out of his chest, he fears, as the realization that Jin is downstairs waiting for him makes him fumble and drop things as he tries to pack them into a simple woven bag. He doesn't have much, but that's okay, because material items have never held much weight with him.
When he descends the stairs again, his eyes immediately fixate back on Jin. He has a slight limp, Honoko notices, but he's so achingly alive.
Jin leads Honoko outside, where two sturdy mares are waiting for them. "This horse is yours, Hiko. You're free. You can go wherever you want, be whatever you want."
Honoko runs a hand along the horse's flank, feeling the trembling muscles beneath his hand. "Thank you," he says.
"I'm sorry it took so long for me to come," Jin says, after they've ridden out of the gates and onto the dirt road. Not many dirt roads remain, as the winds of change blow through Kyoto faster than a typhoon, turning everything they touch to electricity and industry. "I had to lie low."
"You're here now," Honoko manages. He looks over at the man, who sits proudly across a horse, his thighs straining against the charcoal colored pants. Jin's eyes are looking forward, into the distance.
"The time of the samurai is over," Jin informs him frankly, his hands gripping the reins white knuckled. "My father...took his own life."
"I'm sorry," is all Honoko can say. Jin squares his shoulders, and the stiff jacket follows along the lines of his narrow waist.
"That makes me, effectively, the head of my family," Jin continues. "And I've withdrawn my family's support from our Daimyo. Normally, that would spell death, only...Lord Kazenori has bigger worries at the moment. Like the collapse of his entire territory, and the encroachment of Americans into the capital. The shogunate is collapsing, just as we’d hoped. I don’t know if the new government is any better, run by power grubbing low-level samurai and merchants, but…"
"So what...can we do?"
"My family's lands to the south remain mostly untouched," Jin says, and he turns to Honoko. "I was thinking of starting a school. Where students practice and cultivate traditional Japanese culture."
Honoko looks away from Jin, up at the sky. Today it is eerily blue. Honoko knows if he looks behind him, he'll see the scarring silhouettes of newly established textile mills, and smoke in huge tunnels lifting into the air and spreading gray poison across Japan's beautiful landscapes. But in front of him, there are only the rising green hills and lush forested lands. "That sounds lovely," Honoko says earnestly, imagining Jin surrounded by children, as he teaches the flute and the tea ceremony. The image is crystal clear, and Honoko wants to hold it close to his heart.
And then Jin is clearing his throat. "You're free to go where you want, Honoko. Class means nothing anymore, really. Day by day it fades. The new government is flooded with corruption, and the merchants seize a little more power every day. Your name doesn't bear a black mark, not anymore." Honoko examines his hands. His nails will never turn translucent again. He will always know what he was. "But."
"But?" Honoko asks softly, his voice barely audible above the footsteps of their mounts.
"But I was hoping you might stay with me." Jin's jaw is tight, and Kazuya can feel the tension rolling off of him in small waves. "My school will need a swordsmanship teacher. Just wooden blades, of course, but... "
"You want me to stay? With you?"
Jin is offering Honoko something he hasn't dared dream about, because Honoko doesn't dream. Jin is making Honoko believe in something he's never believed in, because Honoko doesn't believe in love. "So my love has grown to be, Like the river's quiet depths," Honoko says softly, the poem resounding loudly in his mind and in his heart.
"You might think it's silly, to do this now. But this is what I want."
"I think we all have the right to dream, and to make it come true," Honoko replies. "Even a failed, clumsy, not-so-brave samurai like you."
Jin halts his horse, and Honoko follows suit. Jin pats the horse soothingly on the head when she whinnies, and doesn't look up from her long neck when he speaks again. "Do you feel it, too? The red thread of destiny that connects us. Can you feel it?"
Honoko doesn't have to think. He doesn't answer with words, at first. He just reaches across the distance between them with one strong arm, and covers Jin's hand with his own. Jin has soft hands, like an artist.
Jin swallows, and peeks up through his long, luxuriant lashes at Honoko, eyes shining beneath half-lowered lids.
"Yes," Honoko says. "I suppose I can."
Honoko has maybe always felt that thread, and maybe he's seen it, too, dragging across the sky over a bridge of magpies.
-
Kame dreams again of being up in the stars, and gazing across the Milky Way.
The shadow becomes a figure. Jin is illuminated in starlight.
-
Honoko adjusts the katana and wakazashi at his waist, and straightens his haori over his broad shoulders. Here, no one cares if Honoko still wears his swords, because they are far from the government and the reach of the restoration. It won't find them quite yet. The weight of the two swords sits heavy on his hip, and his left hand fingers his family crest, embroidered carefully with golden threads, that sits over his heart.
When he looks up at the sky, it is cloudless. There will be no rain today. Honoko licks his lips, and he dreams.
-
Like Michinoku prints
Of the tangled leaves of ferns,
It is because of you
That I have become confused;
But my love for you remains.
--Minamoto no Toru, 14
-
When they wrap filming, Kame is relieved. Kame knows it will be a good movie. Jin was amazing, and Kame is not too humble or embarrassed to say he may have just given the performance of his career.
But becoming Honoko has filled Kame with all these strange emotions that aren't his own, that can't be his own. He feels bewildered and full to bursting and he definitely can't look at Jin, because it makes his heart ache in a way that Kame's heart shouldn't ache for Jin. He knows it's Honoko's heart, not his own, that's beating so out of step, and that it's not beating for Jin so much as it's beating for the 'Brave Samurai'. Still, it's difficult to deal with, and Kame just wants it to stop. It's over now. He doesn't have to be Honoko anymore.
It's okay that he can't look at Jin, because Jin won't look at him either. He catches him staring only once, and it makes Kame flush with an uncomfortable pleasure that quickly turns sour when Jin cringes and turns away.
Jin has always been so easy to read. That's why Kame is so surprised Jin is any good as an actor.
-
Kame has a ritual, when he finishes filming. He gathers up all of his character, let's it fill him up to the brim. He pulls it in tightly, making sure he's gotten all of it. After that, he takes a two-hour shower, and lets the character ooze out of his pores and circle down the drain with the water and the make-up and everything, and then he's just Kame again.
When he finally emerges from the bathroom this time, though, and wraps himself in one of his overly expensive fluffy towels, he doesn't feel quite as empty as usual. He figures it's because he's never done a project this big before. It's not the longest thing he's ever filmed, but it's definitely the most intense. It rattled him down to the core. There's also the fact that Honoko isn't so very different from Kame, anyhow, so maybe Kame doesn't feel as empty because there wasn't as much character to let go of.
Kame throws on his pajamas, and when he walks past his phone he sees he has three new messages. The first is from his manager, who tells Kame that he has a read through for his new drama soon, and he'd better get started on leafing through his script.
The second is from Jin.
"Kame. It's me." Silence. "I just wanted to apologize for making things awkward and misinterpreting the situation. For ruining everything again." Another pause. "Yeah. I guess I thought... Well, you're a really good actor, I guess. Better than me, since I wasn't pretending." Jin takes a quick inhale of air, and Kame can hear him shaking even through the phone. "It was...it was nice to work with you again. I miss you. Don't be a stranger." Dial tone.
Kame is holding the phone so tightly in his hand that it feels like it might snap in half. His heart is raging painfully against his ribs, and it hurts, and just hearing Jin's voice is like adding fuel to the fire that's been steadily burning inside of Kame since they started filming together.
The third message is also from Jin. "Fuck, Kame, I'm not actually sorry. And you can't actually think that all of this is acting. You can't, okay? Don't you know how much it hurts to watch you lock your humanity away? I miss everything. I miss you." And then Jin has hung up a second time, and Kame's knees feel weak, for some reason, and it's as if he's shattering all over the floor into a billion pieces far more perfect than the whole.
He tries to gather up all the pieces of Honoko he must still have left inside of him, but there's only Kame. Every single thing he finds when he looks inside himself is just Kame. It's hard to be just Kame. He hasn't had time to be just Kame in a long time. He hasn't known what Kame wanted in a long time. The key to the door of his heart is rusty, and Kame isn't sure if he can still turn it in the lock.
But maybe...
His body is still thrumming with that weird tingling he gets when Honoko thinks about Jin, is near Jin, hears Jin. Only it's Kame who feels all that, and so it's Kame, not Honoko, who is in love with Jin, after all.
-
Color of the flower
Has already faded away,
While in idle thoughts
My life passes vainly by,
As I watch the long rains fall.
--Ono no Komachi, 9
-
The movie gets rave reviews in early screenings, critics hailing it as one of the must-see movies of the spring season.
Kame gets good reviews too, although Koki gives him hell about how feminine he looks on the posters. Kame just flexes his arms and raises an eyebrow, and Koki usually retreats at the sight of Kame's much larger muscles.
It's strange, how raw Kame feels inside, how open and exposed. He feels like people must be able to look at him and know he's aching, know he's miserable, know he's massively confused about what to do, what he can do.
He wants to talk to Jin. He wants to tell Jin a lot of things, but it's as if he can't, as if there's some giant wall he can't climb over between himself and his feelings.
Now that he knows it's Kame doing all the wanting, he can't do anything about it at all.
Kame sees Jin over and over again as they promote the film. Kame sinks into quicksand every time Jin brushes by him, or he smells the soft pine smell of Jin's hair. He sinks, and for just a moment, time seems to contemplate stopping, and then Jin moves away. Kame makes sure to be the perfect idol. Kame just smiles and smiles for the camera.
Jin doesn't smile, but the media doesn't really expect him to, not anymore. Kame thinks that's a damn shame, since Jin has the most beautiful smile he's ever seen.
"What was it like, Kamenashi, working with your former bandmate on the film?" the interviewer pries, and Kame swallows audibly.
"Like riding a bike," he says, and the interviewer laughs.
"You never forget how?" the interviewer asks curiously.
"Like even if you've forgotten, the moment you're doing it again, it makes you remember how free it used to make you feel. How exhilarating it is to feel the wind in your hair and the shift of the wheels underneath you. How wonderful youth is, and how you wish, sometimes, that now was then."
The interviewer looks at him mouth wide like a trout, before he gathers himself and turns to Jin. "And you Akanishi?"
"It was a reminder of the good things," Jin answers, and his voice is low and steady.
Jin won't look him in the eyes, and Kame feels adrift, but he shoves it down as deep as he can, because what has wanting ever got him?
"Did you get my message?" Jin says to him after, while they sit as far apart as possible in the backseat of the car taking them to a variety show appearance.
"Yes," Kame answers, and he opens his mouth to say more. There's so much he wants to say but it's Stuck.
"Okay," Jin says, and it's not okay. Nothing is okay, it's all broken and Kame wants to fix it. For some reason he can lie lie lie all day to a faceless lens but he can't say a single line of truth to help mend a seemingly endless rift.
Quicksand fills his mouth.
It's not okay.
-
"Saw your interview today," Tatsuya tells him when he walks into the udon shop where he's meeting Tatsuya and Koki for lunch. Koki is looking uncomfortably down at his noodles, toying with the tempura fish that is slowly getting soggy in his bowl.
"Oh?" Kame queries, feeling uncomfortable too.
"Gay," Tatsuya says, and then shoves a big bite of noodles into his mouth. "Really, really gay."
Koki snorts, and Kame orders beef.
-
"Do you feel it, too? The red thread of destiny that connects us. Can you feel it?"
Yes, yes, yes.
And then he's crossing the Milky Way, and Jin is on the other side, surrounded by bulls.
-
"You're being stupid, probably," Ryo says, and Kame looks up at him from his cup of coffee.
"What?"
"You're wearing your 'there's something I want but I don't know how to ask for it or I think it's bad that I want it so I'm going to suffer in silence' face," Ryo informs him, and Kame raises one eyebrow.
"That's a long name for one face," Kame says, and Ryo shrugs.
"You wear it so often it needed a descriptive name," he says, taking a sip of his own coffee, wincing, and adding more sugar.
Kame and Ryo are strange friends. Neither of them are the other's normal type of friend, but there's some solace to be found in their easy appreciation of art and music, and the laid back way that Ryo teases Kame that never feels real at all, despite his famous poison tongue. Kame thinks Ryo feels less like he has to be on, around Kame, like how Kame feels around Maru.
"Oh yeah?" Kame asks, looking at Ryo carefully.
"Yeah," Ryo affirms, shaking his head. "It's not like the world is going to end if you take a chance on something you want, Kame. Whatever it is you're thinking about, just go for it."
Kame looks at Ryo through lowered lashes. "It's not that easy," Kame tells him.
"Why not?" Ryo asks him, and then Ryo pays the check. "Let's go listen to music," Ryo tells him. "My other friends are too busy getting drunk or getting laid to go to guitar shows with me. Except for Jin, who's going through some emo phase. Was he like that on set?"
"No," Kame says. At least not until I messed up, Kame wants to add, but instead, he just follows Ryo out into the evening air.
Kame drinks one too many beers, and it's a good night. But he can't help but wish Jin will be smiling and waiting for him when he gets back to his apartment.
Jin isn't, and his apartment has never felt more lonely.
-
Jin's face in the lantern light, embers of dying coals casting orange and yellow light across his soft features, is all Kame can see when he closes his eyes.
When he's awake, too, sometimes.
He doesn't know why he can't pick up the phone.
It would be easier if he'd never remembered how it felt, to want. Now he's got a baseball sitting in the palm of his hand, and no one is waiting to catch it.
-
Surely there is none
Who will speak a pitying word
About my lost love.
Now my folly's fitting end
Is my own nothingness.
--Fujiwara no Koremasa, 45
-
It's snowing. Night has fallen, or maybe it fell hours ago, Kame isn't sure. The snowflakes are big, the kind that make a fluffy cover on the ground that lasts for days.
Kame remembers how that snow feels pressed against his back, the way it looks in Jin's big, dumb fluffy hair, and something...snaps.
Kame finds himself outside of Jin's apartment before he can even think about it. His index finger has pressed down the doorbell, and he hears the chime echoing in his ears before his mind catches up.
"What the hell? It's three in the morning, assho-- Kame?" Jin's hair is tousled, sticking up strangely on one side of his head, and his right cheek has creases on it from his pillowcase. His full mouth is caught in a frown that's slowly dropping into an 'o' of surprise, and he's not wearing a shirt. Just a low-slung pair of sweatpants with holes in the knees that Jin's probably had since they were kids.
Kame thinks he looks breathtaking.
Jin's eyes are wide, and they just stare at each other for a minute until Jin scratches the back of his head nervously, messing his hair up even worse. "Um, sorry. I thought you were Kusano, he's always...Never mind. Come in?"
Kame steps through the door, and slips off his shoes. He's surprised when Jin shoves a towel into his hands. "What?"
"You're all wet," Jin explains, and then he yawns. "You know, from the snow."
"Oh," Kame says, because he hadn't noticed it was still snowing. He also hadn't noticed he was driving, or that he was leaving his apartment at all, or anything up until the point where he found himself ringing Jin's doorbell.
Jin just keeps staring at him. Kame's throat is so very dry. "What are you doing here, Kame?" Jin asks, and Kame doesn't know the answer, not really.
Except maybe he does. "I have this ritual."
Jin is leaning against the wall in the hallway, his shoulder resting against surprisingly tasteful wood paneling. He's looking at Kame a little vacantly, like he's trying to find the connection between his question and Kame's response. "Um."
Kame wraps his arms around himself, because suddenly he feels a little cold. A little nervous, too. "I always take a really long shower after filming. I stand there and let everything go. Everything about the character and the film and everything gets washed away."
Jin's eyebrows draw together then. "So Honoko is gone then." Jin isn't asking a question, and his eyes shift away from Kame to stare at a photograph of him and Yamashita and Yamashita's sister on the wall. "Is this about my message? You already explained that there wasn't..." Jin gulps, and then clenches his jaw tight, soldiering on. "You already said it was all the character. You didn't have to come over here to tell me that."
Kame looks at Jin, who has his shoulders slightly hunched, now. A piece of tangled hair is obscuring his face. The hallway is mostly dark, and shadows play across his bare neck and chest. He looks fragile, to Kame, like he might break, somehow. But he won't. Jin is strong, like the steel of a blade, thin but inflexible, dangerous yet reliable. "Only, when I got out of the shower, and Honoko was gone...It didn't really change as much as I thought."
Jin slowly lifts his head to stare at Kame. "What do you mean?" Jin says, and there's something in his eyes. Kame thinks is might be hope, because hope is what he feels blossoming in his own chest like plum blossoms in the early spring.
Kame steps closer to Jin, and then closer still. "So right now, I'm just me," Kame whispers, and his lips brush the skin of Jin's jaw as he leans forward. Jin pauses, his breath seeming to stop. "And the things I want now; those are real."
Jin tentatively rests his hands on Kame's biceps, and pushes Kame lightly back. He looks at Kame, his expression serious and intent. There's a dark flush going down his neck and chest, too, that makes Kame want to touch him. "What do you want?" Jin asks, voice husky and dark and smooth, like the whisper of the wind through the trees on an autumn evening, making Kame shudder.
"You," Kame says, and then Kame is pressed against the wall tightly, the wood digging into his back. Jin has one hand curled against the back of his head, fingers caught up and tangled into his sopping hair. Jin's other hand is resting on Kame's hip, and Kame can feel it through the thick, soaking denim of his jeans.
"Thank GOD," Jin says, and then he finds Kame's mouth.
It's not like his dream at all. Jin is eager and clumsy and his mouth is wet. It's not calculated or careful, but it is a little desperate, and Kame thinks this is even better. Jin moans a little, against his lips, and it makes Kame want to pull him even closer, so he does. Jin feels like lava in his arms, and Kame likes it, likes feeling so alive, so vibrant. He'd forgotten what if felt like, to want something so much it hurts. He'd forgotten what it felt like to just be Kame, to want nothing but Jin.
Jin's tongue slips into his mouth, and wraps around Kame's, and Kame feels like this is maybe what he's always wanted from Jin, and maybe he's wanted to feel this close to Jin since the first time Jin's bony adolescent fingers wrapped around Kame's equally thin wrist.
"I love you," Jin says against Kame's lips. "I love you, I love you, I love you," and Kame wants to respond, to tell Jin that Kame's never, ever wanted something so much in his entire life, but he can't because Jin's tongue has stolen its way back between his lips, and Kame would be crazy to pull away to do something as silly as talking. There will be plenty of time for that, later.
Jin's hands roam all along Kame's torso, dancing along his skin and roaming up and down the column of his spine, until Kame can't take it anymore, and he pushes Jin backwards, hard, slamming Jin against the opposite wall and pressing in. "Jin," he mumbles, and Jin laughs, lightly, and then moans again when Kame bites lightly on his neck. Kame soothes the spot with his tongue, and Jin lets out a tiny choked gasp and his nails dig in to Kame's shoulders.
"Kame," Jin pleads, and Kame is happy to oblige, nibbling his way down to Jin's sensitive collarbone and lightly flicking his tongue into the hollow. Jin doesn't shriek, but he makes this hitching noise, like a keening whine, that goes straight to Kame's cock. Jin's hands toy with the waistband of his jeans, tugging him closer by his belt loops, as if it was possible for Kame to be closer, and they both gasp as they rub together, friction delicious. Kame searchingly leans his head up, and Jin brings his head down in the same moment, and their mouths meet again, off center and first, but quickly finding each other, moving together with urgency.
Kame can feel Jin's hard erection against his own, through Jin's sleep pants and Kame's jeans, and he pushes against it, on instinct. Kame thought it would be uncomfortable, to be like this with another guy, but it's not, it just feels like he's supposed to be here, like the heat of Jin against him is like how sex has supposed to have felt all this time-- like boiling summer heat and tense muscles and needy gasps that Kame can't control and doesn't want to control, either. And Jin, everywhere, surrounding him, wrapping around him like the soothing notes of a shamisen played on a summer night amidst the fireflies.
Jin juts his hips forward, too, seeking more pressure, and the friction is better than cake, better than baseball, and Kame wants everything that he can take from Jin, and Jin seems perfectly willing to give.
"Jin," says a familiar voice. "What the fuck is going on out here?" Kame looks over through hazy eyes to see Yamashita, with his hair tied up in a ridiculous band on top of his head, wearing boxers and a tank top, and looking cranky and belligerent. "We agreed, when we got an apartment together, that there would be no shenanigans with women in the hallways if the other was home-- holy shit, is that Kamenashi?!"
Jin has his face buried in the crook of Kame's neck, and he's shuddering a bit, with what Kame is pretty sure is laughter. "Hey Yamashita," Kame says wryly, to cover his embarrassment. "I'm not a... Um, woman, exactly."
Yamashita has this 'deer in the headlights' stare as he looks disbelievingly at the scene in his hallway, before he awkwardly scratches his neck. "Oh. Right," Yamashita says, and then he shuffles backwards blindly. "Well, I'll just be... getting back to bed, then." He coughs lightly. "Right then. Um, goodnight," he mutters, and then the door closes.
Jin is caught between humiliation and mirth, and Kame can feel a smile pulling at his own lips. "Hey," Kame lightly whispers to Jin. "Yamashita's right. The hallway isn't the right place for this." He leans forward and licks a long stripe up Jin's neck, and Jin's pulse quickens under his tongue.
Kame looks up at Jin, whose swollen lips and lowered lids make him look like sin, and Jin isn't laughing anymore. He's pulling Kame by the belt loops back into his room, and Kame can't think of a single reason to protest this time.
It's what he wants, after all.
-
Now Kame has a third cherished memory of Jin, too. It's Jin, eyes closed and lips parted, body tangled up in sky blue sheets as the sun rises, covering him in purple and red rays of morning light.
Jin isn't saying anything at all, but even in sleep, he chooses Kame, fingers searching next to him until they meet Kame's skin, and then sighing and curling closer.
Kame doesn't fight the urge to lose his hand in Jin's hair, and it feels just as soft and wondrous as it always does. Jin sighs, contentedly, as Kame massages his scalp, and nuzzles Kame's forearm with his nose. "I thought I was dreaming."
"You are," Kame murmurs soothingly. "Don't open your eyes."
"Don't go anywhere," Jin mumbles, and throws an arm around Kame, and it lands awkwardly across his thigh and knee.
Kame laughs, and pulls a sleepy, heavy Jin up into his arms.
"Okay," Kame says. "Alright."
"Maybe those words are just fine, after all," Jin says, slipping back into slumber. He feels flawless in Kame's arms, and Kame doesn't want to ever let go. Jin is beautiful in love.
"I love you," he whispers, and feels like an optimistic poet, admiring the perfection of the world as if it were an endless shining sky.
-
Over the wide sea
As I sail and look around,
It appears to me
That the white waves, far away
Are the ever shining sky
--Fujiwara no Tadamichi, 76
-
"Jin," Yamashita says, as Jin and Kame fight over pudding at the kitchen counter, because Jin is being selfish and refusing to share. "You should spend more time with me."
"You're the one who said 'Jin, why are you and your stupid face always sitting on the couch? Go make some more friends,' Pi," Jin responds, squealing with victory when he manages to dodge Kame's tickling fingers and jam the spoon into his mouth. His lips have a thin layer of chocolate on them, and he looks like a little kid, not a twenty-eight-year-old man.
"I didn't mean 'Abandon me completely for your boyfriend,'" Yamashita...Yamapi says, hands on his hips.
"Don't make me punch you in the face, Yamapi," Kame says, relaxing back against the counter as Jin watches them both warily, like there's about to be a brawl.
"Still sensitive about the 'boyfriend' word, I see," Yamapi teases, and Kame grins.
"Not at all," Kame says, "Just letting you know that I won't be losing Jin's attention to you so easily this time."
Yamapi rolls his eyes. "Whatever, dork," he says, "Jin knows where the party's at."
"At Ryo's," Jin replies quickly, and Yamapi feigns a hit at him, and then Jin catches him in a headlock, and Kame just keeps grinning.
"I want to know how you two manage to get anything done, ever," Kame says, and Jin releases Yamapi in favor of walking over and trapping Kame between his arms against the counter. "I also want to know how you don't get noise complaints, like, everyday."
"Want, want, want," Jin says, laughing. "I get you to admit one thing you want, and suddenly you want everything!"
Kame laughs too, and he feels like he's bubbling over with joy. Jin is warm and reassuring in front of him. "Just you," he says. "You're enough."
Kame pretends not to hear Yamapi gagging as Jin leans in and captures his mouth in a kiss. It tastes like pudding.
It's perfect.
-
The sky is clear on Tanabata. Kame crosses the bridge of magpies. Jin is waiting for him with open arms.
In the summer night
The evening still seems present,
But the dawn is here.
To what region of the clouds
Has the wandering moon come home?
--Kiyohara no Fukayabu, 36
Back to Masterpost
It is by its breath
That autumn's leaves of trees and grass
Are wasted and driven.
So they call this mountain wind
The wild one, the destroyer.
--Funya no Yasuhide, 22
-
Jin, over the past few months, had worked his way back into being a constant in Kame's life, and never is that more apparent than now, when suddenly he's gone again. Kame still sees him every day, on set, but mostly they aren't filming together, because Saigou is off having samurai battles and Honoko is giving lifeless dance performances swallowed in grief and misery. It's good they aren't acting opposite each other right now, because Jin won't meet Kame's eyes, and Kame thinks his world feels really dark without Jin's luminous smile brightening it up.
It feels the same as it felt the last time Jin abruptly withdrew from him, physically present but completely emotionally unavailable, only worse, because this time he knows why, and he doesn't know how to make it better.
Kame doesn't want to think about the way his heart leaps into his throat when Jin brushes past him to get to the coffee, as they stand at the edge of the set while Maki films the conclusion to one of the movie's subplots. He also doesn't want to think about the way his heart sinks back down heavily when Jin walks away again without saying a word.
As usual, Kame doesn't know what to do. As usual, Kame doesn't know what he wants.
Kame wants to curl up in the corner now and wrap his arms around his knees and see if Jin will come and sit next to him.
He also wants to run his fingers through Jin's wild dark hair, but he thinks that might be Honoko and not Kame. It's all so confusing.
When Kame goes outside, face still wet from half-heartedly washing off his make-up, to meet the car that's waiting to take him to his next engagement, something inside of him tells him to turn around. He does, and Jin is just looking at him from the doorway, and Kame, or maybe Honoko, can feel his heart break.
Acid is sloshing around in his belly, and he wants this movie, this amazing, wonderful, difficult movie, to be done, so he can get rid of all these confusing character emotions and Kame can fix things with Jin, somehow.
It probably won't be that easy, Kame knows. The acid is melting his insides.
"Is it broken, forever?" he asks Jin, when they are both wrapped in robes over their costumes, the early December air easily cutting through the layers of cotton they both wear. "Are we broken forever?"
Jin frowns, and doesn't answer.
"I'm..."
"I know," Jin says finally, finally, and then he walks away.
There's a famous Japanese folktale that Kame heard when he was a child, about an old man who refused to love. At the end of the tale, he dies alone at the peak of a mountain in the middle of a brutal winter, and no one misses him at all.
It's supposed to be a cautionary tale. Kame can't imagine the top of the mountain being any colder than this.
-
Honoko has never been very good at playing instruments. His hands are short and square, perfect for gripping the hilt of a katana, or for climbing atop a horse.
The Brave Samurai's hands had been gentle and long, masculine and feminine in the same moment. He wrung melodies out of everything he touched.
Honoko wishes he could have said a lot of things, but he had been waiting.
There had been a perfect moment in the rain once, but Honoko had run away. Now there would never be another perfect moment.
-
Honoko and Kame are the same, really. Both of them hide behind masks, and push their hearts down below the soles of their feet. Both of them are so damn afraid to feel. Maybe that's why this is all so hard.
-
Nakamaru is the only one in the lobby when Kame arrives. "Traffic," he says to Kame as they head up to the usual dressing room at Potato, not looking up from his magazine as he walks. "Don't freak out, they're all together and they'll be here as soon as the driver can get them here." Nakamaru sits down on the couch.
"I'm not going to freak out," Kame croaks, and Nakamaru looks up quickly from his magazine at the tone of Kame's voice.
"Are you quite alright, Kame?" Nakamaru is looking at him with his eyebrows pushed together, even more concerned when he catches sight of Kame's appearance, and Kame wonders what he must look like. "You look like you died last month, and your corpse has come for the interview."
"I think I..." Kame pushes his hands into his pockets and feels the tight denim scrape both sides of his hands. "I'm really. Confused. About Jin."
Nakamaru frowns. "What's he done now?"
Kame shakes his head. " Nothing, it's just." Kame doesn't know how to phrase it. "It's hard to separate the movie from real life."
Nakamaru is looking at him like he has three heads, and Kame is really trying to explain it. "Kame, whole thoughts please. I'm not that good at extrapolating."
"In the movie, our characters are sort of... in love with each other." Kame fumbles, and Nakamaru's eyebrows reach for the ceiling.
"Come again?"
"Well, not really, but it's this underlying thing that's not explicit, but totally...and you know how I am about characters..." Nakamaru is the only person Kame has tried to explain it to, this thing he does.
"You feel like you're in love with Jin?" Nakamaru asks, scooting over so that Kame can collapse beside him on the sofa, and curl onto his friend's side.
"No," Kame says. "Well, yes, but I know it's not... But Jin..."
Nakamaru freezes. "Kame, look," Nakamaru says after a minute or so of silence. His voice sounds tense, and nervous. "Whatever you're thinking, it's probably better if you don't try and figure out what Jin--" It's too nervous, Nakamaru's tone. Out of character. Avoidant.
Kame snaps his head up to look into Nakamaru's eyes. "You knew," he says, interrupting whatever Nakamaru was about to say. "That's why Jin still talks to you. He told you, or you figured it out. You knew."
A deep exhale, and Kame can feel the tension flowing out of Nakamaru's body with all the air. "Yeah," Nakamaru says. He cracks his neck, and absently clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth like a snare drum.
"I thought we were friends," Kame tells him, wounded. "Why would you not tell me this?"
"Jin's my friend too," Nakamaru snaps back at him, and Kame guiltily shifts back, before he slouches back into Nakamaru. His face mashes sideways into Nakamaru's ribs, and he mumbles into the soft material of Nakamaru's soft argyle sweater.
"Yeah, I know," Kame sighs. "Just, I don't get it. Jin was my best friend, and then, out of nowhere, he wouldn't even look at me."
Nakamaru closes the magazine, then, and looks down at the cover with an unfocused stare. "I still remember Jin's face, then."
Kame is quiet, and doesn't say anything. He just listens.
"We were preparing for debut, I think, and we were all a little strung out. Jin was sitting alone in the bathroom after a rehearsal. He was sitting on the sink, and his hair was in his face and his back was all curled forward, and it was weird, you know? Because Jin is always cocky and energetic and he just looked so...defeated."
Kame can imagine it in his mind. He thinks defeated might have been the expression on Jin's face when Kame pulled away from him, saying 'no,' when all Jin's ever wanted to hear from him is 'yes.' Kind of lost, kind of broken.
"He told me...he told me it wasn't pretend when he looked at you, when he touched you. Not something to make the girls scream. Not a game." Nakamaru leans toward Kame nudging him with his shoulder affectionately. "I always thought it wasn't one sided, honestly."
Kame quirks his mouth. "It's a character. The person on stage is a character. The person in the movie is a character, too."
Nakamaru is looking at him closely now, eyes narrowed in thought. "What about the person who couldn't sleep if he didn't share a room with Jin in the old days? What about the person who wore matching pinky rings with him? What about the person who lit up whenever Jin entered the room? Linked hands with him under the table?"
Kame thinks back to those times, recalls the smooth skin of Jin's palm against his own. In those days, they could conquer anything, as long as they were together.
Nakamaru grins. "What about the person sitting here right now? Talking to me about Jin because he's all confused? Is that a character, too? Or are you just Kame?"
Kame shifts uncomfortably. He wants to hug himself, but he doesn't do that anymore in front of people, because it draws more attention than it wards off. "I don't know."
"What do you want, Kame?"
Kame wishes he knew. "I said, I don't know!"
The door slams open, and Koki cheerfully sticks his head in the door, and he's followed by a lackadaisical Junno and a grumpy looking Ueda. "Sorry we're late, Kame-chan, but don't freak out, we're here!"
"Why does everyone think I'm going to freak out?" Kame mumbles. "I never freak out." His thoughts are still swimming from his conversation with Nakamaru.
Tatsuya snorts. "You do this thing where you get all quiet and stressed, and you sit all stiffly and you get this weird, vacant look in your eyes, and then you start talking to yourself," he says. "Like some creepy fortune teller who can see the apocalypse in every late arrival."
Junno nods sagely. "Kind of like now, actually."
Kame actively tries to relax his stiff back, and feels a tiny smile tugging at his face. Nakamaru claps him on the back and looks at the others. "Kame's got better things to freak out about than traffic," Nakamaru says. "Let's leave him to get dressed."
Koki bounds out to make-up, and Nakamaru herds everyone out after him. He turns to Kame just as he's about to close the door, and smiles encouragingly. "Figure out what Kame wants," Nakamaru says. "I don't think you've thought about your own desires in a long time. That's not the normal way to live your life, Kame."
"I don't have a life. My life is this," Kame says, gesturing outward at the sets, the costumes and the cameras.
Nakamaru glares at him. "You're entitled to more than that, Kame, and you know it."
When Kame is finally alone, the first thing he does is pull his knees up to his chest, and hug them tight. He can faintly feel Jin sitting down next to him, a shade of a memory, then, arm warm against Kame's.
Kame doesn't know what Kame wants.
He rocks back and forth there, eyes closed and all he can see is Jin but he still doesn't know. "I don't know," he whispers, and no one is there to hear it and it hurts to say it. "I really don't know."
-
"Kame, let's play catch," Jin says, baseball in hand. He's grinning like a kid, and even though he's much older he looks twelve right now.
"Jin, we can't," Kame says patiently. "I have to finish my assignments."
"Kaaaame, don't be a robot, be a young guy!"
"I don't have time to be a young guy," Kame snaps, suddenly angry. "And neither do you."
"Of course I do. Of course you do," Jin says cajolingly. "You love baseball, Kame, come on."
That makes Kame even angrier. He snatches the ball from Jin and winds it up, throwing it out the window. The glass of the window cracks, and chunks fall on Kame's floor and down out onto the street below. Jin looks at him, mouth open in shock, and Kame swallows. "Catch."
"We don't have to play catch if you don't want to," Jin says after a few moments of silence.
Kame does his homework.
Jin leaves, and doesn't visit again.
He doesn't tell anyone about the window for three days. It lets cold air into his room at night, and Kame just pulls another blanket from the hall closet.
He finds the ball on the street a few weeks later. It's heavy in his pocket until he sticks it in the box under his bed with his glove. His ring is in there, and maybe his whole heart is too.
-
Honoko hears Jin's voice before he even realizes he's awake. He thinks it must be a cruel trick of his subconscious, because Jin is dead.
But it's somehow Jin's voice he hears. Jin is laughing with his okiya mother, and Honoko doesn't know that he's ever heard her laugh before.
Honoko wraps himself in a yukata quickly. His hands are shaking, and it can't really be Jin's voice because Jin... Jin is gone, and life isn't fair, and Honoko knows that things don't happen just because you wish for them with every fiber of your being, or because you'd give anything, anything at all, just to...
When she sees him, the mother's mouth sets into a serious line. But Honoko only has eyes for Jin, who stands there, wearing strange Western clothes, hair tied back at his neck. It's like a vision, but Honoko knows it isn't, because Honoko would never imagine Jin in anything but hakama and gi.
His okiya mother speaks.
"Gather your things. Not the kimono, those belong to this okiya. But your gifts, anything else that's yours. Gather those things." Honoko just stares, looking back and forth between Jin and the mother. "He's paid off your debt," she explains. "And wants to take you with him."
Honoko looks at Jin, who is biting his lip anxiously and looking at Honoko with wide, hopeful eyes. Honoko spins on his heel and races back up the wooden staircase.
His heart is going to beat right out of his chest, he fears, as the realization that Jin is downstairs waiting for him makes him fumble and drop things as he tries to pack them into a simple woven bag. He doesn't have much, but that's okay, because material items have never held much weight with him.
When he descends the stairs again, his eyes immediately fixate back on Jin. He has a slight limp, Honoko notices, but he's so achingly alive.
Jin leads Honoko outside, where two sturdy mares are waiting for them. "This horse is yours, Hiko. You're free. You can go wherever you want, be whatever you want."
Honoko runs a hand along the horse's flank, feeling the trembling muscles beneath his hand. "Thank you," he says.
"I'm sorry it took so long for me to come," Jin says, after they've ridden out of the gates and onto the dirt road. Not many dirt roads remain, as the winds of change blow through Kyoto faster than a typhoon, turning everything they touch to electricity and industry. "I had to lie low."
"You're here now," Honoko manages. He looks over at the man, who sits proudly across a horse, his thighs straining against the charcoal colored pants. Jin's eyes are looking forward, into the distance.
"The time of the samurai is over," Jin informs him frankly, his hands gripping the reins white knuckled. "My father...took his own life."
"I'm sorry," is all Honoko can say. Jin squares his shoulders, and the stiff jacket follows along the lines of his narrow waist.
"That makes me, effectively, the head of my family," Jin continues. "And I've withdrawn my family's support from our Daimyo. Normally, that would spell death, only...Lord Kazenori has bigger worries at the moment. Like the collapse of his entire territory, and the encroachment of Americans into the capital. The shogunate is collapsing, just as we’d hoped. I don’t know if the new government is any better, run by power grubbing low-level samurai and merchants, but…"
"So what...can we do?"
"My family's lands to the south remain mostly untouched," Jin says, and he turns to Honoko. "I was thinking of starting a school. Where students practice and cultivate traditional Japanese culture."
Honoko looks away from Jin, up at the sky. Today it is eerily blue. Honoko knows if he looks behind him, he'll see the scarring silhouettes of newly established textile mills, and smoke in huge tunnels lifting into the air and spreading gray poison across Japan's beautiful landscapes. But in front of him, there are only the rising green hills and lush forested lands. "That sounds lovely," Honoko says earnestly, imagining Jin surrounded by children, as he teaches the flute and the tea ceremony. The image is crystal clear, and Honoko wants to hold it close to his heart.
And then Jin is clearing his throat. "You're free to go where you want, Honoko. Class means nothing anymore, really. Day by day it fades. The new government is flooded with corruption, and the merchants seize a little more power every day. Your name doesn't bear a black mark, not anymore." Honoko examines his hands. His nails will never turn translucent again. He will always know what he was. "But."
"But?" Honoko asks softly, his voice barely audible above the footsteps of their mounts.
"But I was hoping you might stay with me." Jin's jaw is tight, and Kazuya can feel the tension rolling off of him in small waves. "My school will need a swordsmanship teacher. Just wooden blades, of course, but... "
"You want me to stay? With you?"
Jin is offering Honoko something he hasn't dared dream about, because Honoko doesn't dream. Jin is making Honoko believe in something he's never believed in, because Honoko doesn't believe in love. "So my love has grown to be, Like the river's quiet depths," Honoko says softly, the poem resounding loudly in his mind and in his heart.
"You might think it's silly, to do this now. But this is what I want."
"I think we all have the right to dream, and to make it come true," Honoko replies. "Even a failed, clumsy, not-so-brave samurai like you."
Jin halts his horse, and Honoko follows suit. Jin pats the horse soothingly on the head when she whinnies, and doesn't look up from her long neck when he speaks again. "Do you feel it, too? The red thread of destiny that connects us. Can you feel it?"
Honoko doesn't have to think. He doesn't answer with words, at first. He just reaches across the distance between them with one strong arm, and covers Jin's hand with his own. Jin has soft hands, like an artist.
Jin swallows, and peeks up through his long, luxuriant lashes at Honoko, eyes shining beneath half-lowered lids.
"Yes," Honoko says. "I suppose I can."
Honoko has maybe always felt that thread, and maybe he's seen it, too, dragging across the sky over a bridge of magpies.
-
Kame dreams again of being up in the stars, and gazing across the Milky Way.
The shadow becomes a figure. Jin is illuminated in starlight.
-
Honoko adjusts the katana and wakazashi at his waist, and straightens his haori over his broad shoulders. Here, no one cares if Honoko still wears his swords, because they are far from the government and the reach of the restoration. It won't find them quite yet. The weight of the two swords sits heavy on his hip, and his left hand fingers his family crest, embroidered carefully with golden threads, that sits over his heart.
When he looks up at the sky, it is cloudless. There will be no rain today. Honoko licks his lips, and he dreams.
-
Like Michinoku prints
Of the tangled leaves of ferns,
It is because of you
That I have become confused;
But my love for you remains.
--Minamoto no Toru, 14
-
When they wrap filming, Kame is relieved. Kame knows it will be a good movie. Jin was amazing, and Kame is not too humble or embarrassed to say he may have just given the performance of his career.
But becoming Honoko has filled Kame with all these strange emotions that aren't his own, that can't be his own. He feels bewildered and full to bursting and he definitely can't look at Jin, because it makes his heart ache in a way that Kame's heart shouldn't ache for Jin. He knows it's Honoko's heart, not his own, that's beating so out of step, and that it's not beating for Jin so much as it's beating for the 'Brave Samurai'. Still, it's difficult to deal with, and Kame just wants it to stop. It's over now. He doesn't have to be Honoko anymore.
It's okay that he can't look at Jin, because Jin won't look at him either. He catches him staring only once, and it makes Kame flush with an uncomfortable pleasure that quickly turns sour when Jin cringes and turns away.
Jin has always been so easy to read. That's why Kame is so surprised Jin is any good as an actor.
-
Kame has a ritual, when he finishes filming. He gathers up all of his character, let's it fill him up to the brim. He pulls it in tightly, making sure he's gotten all of it. After that, he takes a two-hour shower, and lets the character ooze out of his pores and circle down the drain with the water and the make-up and everything, and then he's just Kame again.
When he finally emerges from the bathroom this time, though, and wraps himself in one of his overly expensive fluffy towels, he doesn't feel quite as empty as usual. He figures it's because he's never done a project this big before. It's not the longest thing he's ever filmed, but it's definitely the most intense. It rattled him down to the core. There's also the fact that Honoko isn't so very different from Kame, anyhow, so maybe Kame doesn't feel as empty because there wasn't as much character to let go of.
Kame throws on his pajamas, and when he walks past his phone he sees he has three new messages. The first is from his manager, who tells Kame that he has a read through for his new drama soon, and he'd better get started on leafing through his script.
The second is from Jin.
"Kame. It's me." Silence. "I just wanted to apologize for making things awkward and misinterpreting the situation. For ruining everything again." Another pause. "Yeah. I guess I thought... Well, you're a really good actor, I guess. Better than me, since I wasn't pretending." Jin takes a quick inhale of air, and Kame can hear him shaking even through the phone. "It was...it was nice to work with you again. I miss you. Don't be a stranger." Dial tone.
Kame is holding the phone so tightly in his hand that it feels like it might snap in half. His heart is raging painfully against his ribs, and it hurts, and just hearing Jin's voice is like adding fuel to the fire that's been steadily burning inside of Kame since they started filming together.
The third message is also from Jin. "Fuck, Kame, I'm not actually sorry. And you can't actually think that all of this is acting. You can't, okay? Don't you know how much it hurts to watch you lock your humanity away? I miss everything. I miss you." And then Jin has hung up a second time, and Kame's knees feel weak, for some reason, and it's as if he's shattering all over the floor into a billion pieces far more perfect than the whole.
He tries to gather up all the pieces of Honoko he must still have left inside of him, but there's only Kame. Every single thing he finds when he looks inside himself is just Kame. It's hard to be just Kame. He hasn't had time to be just Kame in a long time. He hasn't known what Kame wanted in a long time. The key to the door of his heart is rusty, and Kame isn't sure if he can still turn it in the lock.
But maybe...
His body is still thrumming with that weird tingling he gets when Honoko thinks about Jin, is near Jin, hears Jin. Only it's Kame who feels all that, and so it's Kame, not Honoko, who is in love with Jin, after all.
-
Color of the flower
Has already faded away,
While in idle thoughts
My life passes vainly by,
As I watch the long rains fall.
--Ono no Komachi, 9
-
The movie gets rave reviews in early screenings, critics hailing it as one of the must-see movies of the spring season.
Kame gets good reviews too, although Koki gives him hell about how feminine he looks on the posters. Kame just flexes his arms and raises an eyebrow, and Koki usually retreats at the sight of Kame's much larger muscles.
It's strange, how raw Kame feels inside, how open and exposed. He feels like people must be able to look at him and know he's aching, know he's miserable, know he's massively confused about what to do, what he can do.
He wants to talk to Jin. He wants to tell Jin a lot of things, but it's as if he can't, as if there's some giant wall he can't climb over between himself and his feelings.
Now that he knows it's Kame doing all the wanting, he can't do anything about it at all.
Kame sees Jin over and over again as they promote the film. Kame sinks into quicksand every time Jin brushes by him, or he smells the soft pine smell of Jin's hair. He sinks, and for just a moment, time seems to contemplate stopping, and then Jin moves away. Kame makes sure to be the perfect idol. Kame just smiles and smiles for the camera.
Jin doesn't smile, but the media doesn't really expect him to, not anymore. Kame thinks that's a damn shame, since Jin has the most beautiful smile he's ever seen.
"What was it like, Kamenashi, working with your former bandmate on the film?" the interviewer pries, and Kame swallows audibly.
"Like riding a bike," he says, and the interviewer laughs.
"You never forget how?" the interviewer asks curiously.
"Like even if you've forgotten, the moment you're doing it again, it makes you remember how free it used to make you feel. How exhilarating it is to feel the wind in your hair and the shift of the wheels underneath you. How wonderful youth is, and how you wish, sometimes, that now was then."
The interviewer looks at him mouth wide like a trout, before he gathers himself and turns to Jin. "And you Akanishi?"
"It was a reminder of the good things," Jin answers, and his voice is low and steady.
Jin won't look him in the eyes, and Kame feels adrift, but he shoves it down as deep as he can, because what has wanting ever got him?
"Did you get my message?" Jin says to him after, while they sit as far apart as possible in the backseat of the car taking them to a variety show appearance.
"Yes," Kame answers, and he opens his mouth to say more. There's so much he wants to say but it's Stuck.
"Okay," Jin says, and it's not okay. Nothing is okay, it's all broken and Kame wants to fix it. For some reason he can lie lie lie all day to a faceless lens but he can't say a single line of truth to help mend a seemingly endless rift.
Quicksand fills his mouth.
It's not okay.
-
"Saw your interview today," Tatsuya tells him when he walks into the udon shop where he's meeting Tatsuya and Koki for lunch. Koki is looking uncomfortably down at his noodles, toying with the tempura fish that is slowly getting soggy in his bowl.
"Oh?" Kame queries, feeling uncomfortable too.
"Gay," Tatsuya says, and then shoves a big bite of noodles into his mouth. "Really, really gay."
Koki snorts, and Kame orders beef.
-
"Do you feel it, too? The red thread of destiny that connects us. Can you feel it?"
Yes, yes, yes.
And then he's crossing the Milky Way, and Jin is on the other side, surrounded by bulls.
-
"You're being stupid, probably," Ryo says, and Kame looks up at him from his cup of coffee.
"What?"
"You're wearing your 'there's something I want but I don't know how to ask for it or I think it's bad that I want it so I'm going to suffer in silence' face," Ryo informs him, and Kame raises one eyebrow.
"That's a long name for one face," Kame says, and Ryo shrugs.
"You wear it so often it needed a descriptive name," he says, taking a sip of his own coffee, wincing, and adding more sugar.
Kame and Ryo are strange friends. Neither of them are the other's normal type of friend, but there's some solace to be found in their easy appreciation of art and music, and the laid back way that Ryo teases Kame that never feels real at all, despite his famous poison tongue. Kame thinks Ryo feels less like he has to be on, around Kame, like how Kame feels around Maru.
"Oh yeah?" Kame asks, looking at Ryo carefully.
"Yeah," Ryo affirms, shaking his head. "It's not like the world is going to end if you take a chance on something you want, Kame. Whatever it is you're thinking about, just go for it."
Kame looks at Ryo through lowered lashes. "It's not that easy," Kame tells him.
"Why not?" Ryo asks him, and then Ryo pays the check. "Let's go listen to music," Ryo tells him. "My other friends are too busy getting drunk or getting laid to go to guitar shows with me. Except for Jin, who's going through some emo phase. Was he like that on set?"
"No," Kame says. At least not until I messed up, Kame wants to add, but instead, he just follows Ryo out into the evening air.
Kame drinks one too many beers, and it's a good night. But he can't help but wish Jin will be smiling and waiting for him when he gets back to his apartment.
Jin isn't, and his apartment has never felt more lonely.
-
Jin's face in the lantern light, embers of dying coals casting orange and yellow light across his soft features, is all Kame can see when he closes his eyes.
When he's awake, too, sometimes.
He doesn't know why he can't pick up the phone.
It would be easier if he'd never remembered how it felt, to want. Now he's got a baseball sitting in the palm of his hand, and no one is waiting to catch it.
-
Surely there is none
Who will speak a pitying word
About my lost love.
Now my folly's fitting end
Is my own nothingness.
--Fujiwara no Koremasa, 45
-
It's snowing. Night has fallen, or maybe it fell hours ago, Kame isn't sure. The snowflakes are big, the kind that make a fluffy cover on the ground that lasts for days.
Kame remembers how that snow feels pressed against his back, the way it looks in Jin's big, dumb fluffy hair, and something...snaps.
Kame finds himself outside of Jin's apartment before he can even think about it. His index finger has pressed down the doorbell, and he hears the chime echoing in his ears before his mind catches up.
"What the hell? It's three in the morning, assho-- Kame?" Jin's hair is tousled, sticking up strangely on one side of his head, and his right cheek has creases on it from his pillowcase. His full mouth is caught in a frown that's slowly dropping into an 'o' of surprise, and he's not wearing a shirt. Just a low-slung pair of sweatpants with holes in the knees that Jin's probably had since they were kids.
Kame thinks he looks breathtaking.
Jin's eyes are wide, and they just stare at each other for a minute until Jin scratches the back of his head nervously, messing his hair up even worse. "Um, sorry. I thought you were Kusano, he's always...Never mind. Come in?"
Kame steps through the door, and slips off his shoes. He's surprised when Jin shoves a towel into his hands. "What?"
"You're all wet," Jin explains, and then he yawns. "You know, from the snow."
"Oh," Kame says, because he hadn't noticed it was still snowing. He also hadn't noticed he was driving, or that he was leaving his apartment at all, or anything up until the point where he found himself ringing Jin's doorbell.
Jin just keeps staring at him. Kame's throat is so very dry. "What are you doing here, Kame?" Jin asks, and Kame doesn't know the answer, not really.
Except maybe he does. "I have this ritual."
Jin is leaning against the wall in the hallway, his shoulder resting against surprisingly tasteful wood paneling. He's looking at Kame a little vacantly, like he's trying to find the connection between his question and Kame's response. "Um."
Kame wraps his arms around himself, because suddenly he feels a little cold. A little nervous, too. "I always take a really long shower after filming. I stand there and let everything go. Everything about the character and the film and everything gets washed away."
Jin's eyebrows draw together then. "So Honoko is gone then." Jin isn't asking a question, and his eyes shift away from Kame to stare at a photograph of him and Yamashita and Yamashita's sister on the wall. "Is this about my message? You already explained that there wasn't..." Jin gulps, and then clenches his jaw tight, soldiering on. "You already said it was all the character. You didn't have to come over here to tell me that."
Kame looks at Jin, who has his shoulders slightly hunched, now. A piece of tangled hair is obscuring his face. The hallway is mostly dark, and shadows play across his bare neck and chest. He looks fragile, to Kame, like he might break, somehow. But he won't. Jin is strong, like the steel of a blade, thin but inflexible, dangerous yet reliable. "Only, when I got out of the shower, and Honoko was gone...It didn't really change as much as I thought."
Jin slowly lifts his head to stare at Kame. "What do you mean?" Jin says, and there's something in his eyes. Kame thinks is might be hope, because hope is what he feels blossoming in his own chest like plum blossoms in the early spring.
Kame steps closer to Jin, and then closer still. "So right now, I'm just me," Kame whispers, and his lips brush the skin of Jin's jaw as he leans forward. Jin pauses, his breath seeming to stop. "And the things I want now; those are real."
Jin tentatively rests his hands on Kame's biceps, and pushes Kame lightly back. He looks at Kame, his expression serious and intent. There's a dark flush going down his neck and chest, too, that makes Kame want to touch him. "What do you want?" Jin asks, voice husky and dark and smooth, like the whisper of the wind through the trees on an autumn evening, making Kame shudder.
"You," Kame says, and then Kame is pressed against the wall tightly, the wood digging into his back. Jin has one hand curled against the back of his head, fingers caught up and tangled into his sopping hair. Jin's other hand is resting on Kame's hip, and Kame can feel it through the thick, soaking denim of his jeans.
"Thank GOD," Jin says, and then he finds Kame's mouth.
It's not like his dream at all. Jin is eager and clumsy and his mouth is wet. It's not calculated or careful, but it is a little desperate, and Kame thinks this is even better. Jin moans a little, against his lips, and it makes Kame want to pull him even closer, so he does. Jin feels like lava in his arms, and Kame likes it, likes feeling so alive, so vibrant. He'd forgotten what if felt like, to want something so much it hurts. He'd forgotten what it felt like to just be Kame, to want nothing but Jin.
Jin's tongue slips into his mouth, and wraps around Kame's, and Kame feels like this is maybe what he's always wanted from Jin, and maybe he's wanted to feel this close to Jin since the first time Jin's bony adolescent fingers wrapped around Kame's equally thin wrist.
"I love you," Jin says against Kame's lips. "I love you, I love you, I love you," and Kame wants to respond, to tell Jin that Kame's never, ever wanted something so much in his entire life, but he can't because Jin's tongue has stolen its way back between his lips, and Kame would be crazy to pull away to do something as silly as talking. There will be plenty of time for that, later.
Jin's hands roam all along Kame's torso, dancing along his skin and roaming up and down the column of his spine, until Kame can't take it anymore, and he pushes Jin backwards, hard, slamming Jin against the opposite wall and pressing in. "Jin," he mumbles, and Jin laughs, lightly, and then moans again when Kame bites lightly on his neck. Kame soothes the spot with his tongue, and Jin lets out a tiny choked gasp and his nails dig in to Kame's shoulders.
"Kame," Jin pleads, and Kame is happy to oblige, nibbling his way down to Jin's sensitive collarbone and lightly flicking his tongue into the hollow. Jin doesn't shriek, but he makes this hitching noise, like a keening whine, that goes straight to Kame's cock. Jin's hands toy with the waistband of his jeans, tugging him closer by his belt loops, as if it was possible for Kame to be closer, and they both gasp as they rub together, friction delicious. Kame searchingly leans his head up, and Jin brings his head down in the same moment, and their mouths meet again, off center and first, but quickly finding each other, moving together with urgency.
Kame can feel Jin's hard erection against his own, through Jin's sleep pants and Kame's jeans, and he pushes against it, on instinct. Kame thought it would be uncomfortable, to be like this with another guy, but it's not, it just feels like he's supposed to be here, like the heat of Jin against him is like how sex has supposed to have felt all this time-- like boiling summer heat and tense muscles and needy gasps that Kame can't control and doesn't want to control, either. And Jin, everywhere, surrounding him, wrapping around him like the soothing notes of a shamisen played on a summer night amidst the fireflies.
Jin juts his hips forward, too, seeking more pressure, and the friction is better than cake, better than baseball, and Kame wants everything that he can take from Jin, and Jin seems perfectly willing to give.
"Jin," says a familiar voice. "What the fuck is going on out here?" Kame looks over through hazy eyes to see Yamashita, with his hair tied up in a ridiculous band on top of his head, wearing boxers and a tank top, and looking cranky and belligerent. "We agreed, when we got an apartment together, that there would be no shenanigans with women in the hallways if the other was home-- holy shit, is that Kamenashi?!"
Jin has his face buried in the crook of Kame's neck, and he's shuddering a bit, with what Kame is pretty sure is laughter. "Hey Yamashita," Kame says wryly, to cover his embarrassment. "I'm not a... Um, woman, exactly."
Yamashita has this 'deer in the headlights' stare as he looks disbelievingly at the scene in his hallway, before he awkwardly scratches his neck. "Oh. Right," Yamashita says, and then he shuffles backwards blindly. "Well, I'll just be... getting back to bed, then." He coughs lightly. "Right then. Um, goodnight," he mutters, and then the door closes.
Jin is caught between humiliation and mirth, and Kame can feel a smile pulling at his own lips. "Hey," Kame lightly whispers to Jin. "Yamashita's right. The hallway isn't the right place for this." He leans forward and licks a long stripe up Jin's neck, and Jin's pulse quickens under his tongue.
Kame looks up at Jin, whose swollen lips and lowered lids make him look like sin, and Jin isn't laughing anymore. He's pulling Kame by the belt loops back into his room, and Kame can't think of a single reason to protest this time.
It's what he wants, after all.
-
Now Kame has a third cherished memory of Jin, too. It's Jin, eyes closed and lips parted, body tangled up in sky blue sheets as the sun rises, covering him in purple and red rays of morning light.
Jin isn't saying anything at all, but even in sleep, he chooses Kame, fingers searching next to him until they meet Kame's skin, and then sighing and curling closer.
Kame doesn't fight the urge to lose his hand in Jin's hair, and it feels just as soft and wondrous as it always does. Jin sighs, contentedly, as Kame massages his scalp, and nuzzles Kame's forearm with his nose. "I thought I was dreaming."
"You are," Kame murmurs soothingly. "Don't open your eyes."
"Don't go anywhere," Jin mumbles, and throws an arm around Kame, and it lands awkwardly across his thigh and knee.
Kame laughs, and pulls a sleepy, heavy Jin up into his arms.
"Okay," Kame says. "Alright."
"Maybe those words are just fine, after all," Jin says, slipping back into slumber. He feels flawless in Kame's arms, and Kame doesn't want to ever let go. Jin is beautiful in love.
"I love you," he whispers, and feels like an optimistic poet, admiring the perfection of the world as if it were an endless shining sky.
-
Over the wide sea
As I sail and look around,
It appears to me
That the white waves, far away
Are the ever shining sky
--Fujiwara no Tadamichi, 76
-
"Jin," Yamashita says, as Jin and Kame fight over pudding at the kitchen counter, because Jin is being selfish and refusing to share. "You should spend more time with me."
"You're the one who said 'Jin, why are you and your stupid face always sitting on the couch? Go make some more friends,' Pi," Jin responds, squealing with victory when he manages to dodge Kame's tickling fingers and jam the spoon into his mouth. His lips have a thin layer of chocolate on them, and he looks like a little kid, not a twenty-eight-year-old man.
"I didn't mean 'Abandon me completely for your boyfriend,'" Yamashita...Yamapi says, hands on his hips.
"Don't make me punch you in the face, Yamapi," Kame says, relaxing back against the counter as Jin watches them both warily, like there's about to be a brawl.
"Still sensitive about the 'boyfriend' word, I see," Yamapi teases, and Kame grins.
"Not at all," Kame says, "Just letting you know that I won't be losing Jin's attention to you so easily this time."
Yamapi rolls his eyes. "Whatever, dork," he says, "Jin knows where the party's at."
"At Ryo's," Jin replies quickly, and Yamapi feigns a hit at him, and then Jin catches him in a headlock, and Kame just keeps grinning.
"I want to know how you two manage to get anything done, ever," Kame says, and Jin releases Yamapi in favor of walking over and trapping Kame between his arms against the counter. "I also want to know how you don't get noise complaints, like, everyday."
"Want, want, want," Jin says, laughing. "I get you to admit one thing you want, and suddenly you want everything!"
Kame laughs too, and he feels like he's bubbling over with joy. Jin is warm and reassuring in front of him. "Just you," he says. "You're enough."
Kame pretends not to hear Yamapi gagging as Jin leans in and captures his mouth in a kiss. It tastes like pudding.
It's perfect.
-
The sky is clear on Tanabata. Kame crosses the bridge of magpies. Jin is waiting for him with open arms.
In the summer night
The evening still seems present,
But the dawn is here.
To what region of the clouds
Has the wandering moon come home?
--Kiyohara no Fukayabu, 36
Back to Masterpost
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 04:29 pm (UTC)I feel like kame's character really came through in the fic. plus jin's character here really left me with a strong impression, though it wasn't exactly his pov. :))
sorry if my comments don't make much sense. ^^; oh and I also loved the music mix you made for this fic~ :))
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 04:37 pm (UTC)I love the mood in this piece, thoughtful but not relaxed, and sort of surreal at times -almost dreamlike, really- and I admit it might have left me feeling a bit on edge -though I'll be damned if I can pinpoint why...
Also pulling on belt loops might just be one of my biggest kinks. *cough*
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 01:51 pm (UTC)The entire concept for this story was the blurring between fiction and reality, between what we're supposed to feel and what we're not supposed to feel. The edge feeling was probably being unsure if Kame was going to crack... <3
(MINE TOO.)
thanks for reading! <3
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 11:03 am (UTC)I can almost feel along Jin and Kame, and see the world they are living it.
Thus go straight in my memories.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 11:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:35 am (UTC)I think Jin is the kind of guy who plays around a lot, but believes, whole-heartedly, in true love, and Kame is the kind of guy with a willpower and self-possession so strong it hurts him... I'm thrilled you enjoyed this-- It's sort of my baby right now :D Thank you for reading!!
<3
Maia
no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:35 am (UTC)Maia
no subject
Date: 2011-09-30 03:10 pm (UTC)your Kame is totally real for me ,))
thank you for sharing ,))
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:36 am (UTC)Maia
no subject
Date: 2011-09-30 05:14 pm (UTC)The story is solid and pure gold (and I must thank
I love how you wrote Kame and Jin. You took the bits and pieces of what is known of them (or the general impression on them) and wove them to make complex characters we can understand and, thus, empathize with.
I adore the push and pull of Kame and Jin as Kame and Jin playing their characters. Kame being Honoko relating to Jin being Takamori and eventually really just Jin makes Kame's inner turmoil all the more compelling.
And that ending there where they kissed and made out in the hallway is absolutely hot because it's about Kame finally knowing what he wants and Jin finally getting what he wants and nothing can be hotter than that.
I can go on and on but all I can say in the end is that when I thought I've read the best of them Akame fics, this...THIS. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH.
Thank you so much for writing it.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:40 am (UTC)Peri (bellmelody) really inspired me-- her fic was adorable, and reminded me that even though I make a living thinking about samurai, I'd never even touched upon the subject.
I think it's not much of a stretch to image Kame as a method actor-- he gives 110 percent to everything, and I think that's one of the things his fans love about him the most-- how even when he is tired and exhausted and thoroughly done, he always has more to give. He's amazing <3
I always try to make characters like real people-- imperfect in so many ways, but still worth loving, right? Still impossible not to love, really.
I'm not going to lie, the hallway scene was my absolute favorite to write!!!
Thank you so much for reading, and for this lovely comment <3
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:41 am (UTC)Maia
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2011-10-26 04:12 am (UTC)Thank you for this beautiful fic *･゜ﾟ･*:.｡..｡.:*･'(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)'･*:.｡. .｡.:*･゜ﾟ･*
Thank you for the great poetry and for your amazing writing.
Thank you for the happy ending... Cause my one and only OTP deserves only happy endings :)
and most of all thank you for a totally worthy sleepless night (*^^*)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-05 03:41 pm (UTC)I'm really happy you liked it! I love all the poetry so I really wanted to write a fic with it <3 <3
I'm glad you thought it was worth losing sleep. <3 Thanks again!!
Love,
Maia
no subject
Date: 2011-11-05 04:12 am (UTC)Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-05 03:37 pm (UTC)Love,
Maia
no subject
Date: 2011-11-05 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-05 05:04 pm (UTC)Ahhhhh!! Thank you for this comment!! <3 I had a lot of fun doing the legwork for this story, and glad you liked my little mousetrap :3
<3 <3 thank you!!
Maia
no subject
Date: 2011-11-06 04:18 pm (UTC)Incidentally, this song played while I was reading. I felt it fit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EuGmHsMy-s
no subject
Date: 2011-11-06 04:43 pm (UTC)Asdfghjkl I'm glad you liked it!!!! I don't know why Akame drags on my inner angst but I just want them to love each otherrrrrrrrr <3
*clicks link*
Thank you!!! For reading and for commenting. I really appreciate the feedback!
<3
Maia
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Date: 2011-11-06 09:18 pm (UTC)Second time. Second time in less than a week that you have made me ignore whatever else was going around me (that time it wasn't sleep) to curl around your fic and just...ok, i just need a little time to breath and then i will come back to this and (again) embarrass myself all over it. maybe in ways even more ridiculous than i did in the other one so, hm, brace yourself, i guess ._____.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-06 10:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
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Date: 2011-11-08 12:37 am (UTC)Thank you. Thank you so much for writing and sharing such a long, beautiful, complicated, inventive story. And thank you so, so much for the happy ending.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-09 05:57 am (UTC)I'm so, so, so happy to see your comment. I'm so glad you liked this story, that it moved you. That's really amazing to hear, and I really appreciate you taking the time to leave me this comment, I really do. <3
I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it, and lots of love<3
Maia
no subject
Date: 2011-11-08 12:45 am (UTC)And now, at the end, I feel like I have to do like Kame does, stand in the shower for hours and just let the feelings wash away - bacause I will never be able to get through tomorrow without looking like a total mental case smiling constantly to myself.
Thank you for sharing this! I will cherish it forever!
no subject
Date: 2011-11-09 05:59 am (UTC)Thank you for taking the time to leave me a comment-- I really appreciate it!! <3 And I'm glad you enjoyed.
Thank you <3
Maia
(no subject)
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Date: 2011-11-08 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-08 04:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:BEAUTIFUL *___*
Date: 2011-11-09 12:03 am (UTC)Re: BEAUTIFUL *___*
Date: 2011-11-10 02:23 pm (UTC)This comment is so... well, it's kind of awesome and amazing to hear your opinion of it. This story was a struggle for me in a lot of ways, because one of the things I find most important is that people are dynamic, and I was hoping... that it came across that way. I'm so happy you liked Kame-- It was an idea I had floating around for a while, so I really enjoyed myself. (and Jin... T___T) Glad you weren't too far away from the Akame fandom to give it a shot! And well, thank you for reading! Making my day :)
<3
Maia
no subject
Date: 2011-11-11 05:22 pm (UTC)i love it right from the start..
the feelings of angst, romance, longing, denial, frustration,sadness, happines really fall into their respective places..
i love it so much..thanx for sharing this beautiful fic..
thank u very much!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 02:41 pm (UTC)I'm so glad you like this-- this fic is really special to me :)
<3 Maia
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Date: 2011-12-06 09:46 am (UTC)I loved everything about it. From Honoko and 'The Brave Samurai' to Nakamaru and Ryo.
I loved the scenes in which Jin was so vulnerable and open and Kame so oblivious. And the ones in which you describe how Kame felt every time he was into a character.
The Tanabata tale and all the small references to the two stories' similarities.
God, I love everything about this. You are awesome. Thanks for such a beautiful fic ♥
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Date: 2011-12-06 02:43 pm (UTC)Poor Jin. I felt bad for making his life so hard, but I knew i had to be done~
I'm really happy you enjoyed this-- This is one of my favorite things, and hearing that someone enjoyed it brings a massive smile to my face <3
Maia
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Date: 2011-12-13 03:08 am (UTC)thank you so much for this wonderful fic! Imma add this to my memories!!
tenchuuu tenchuuu tenchuuu! ♥_♥
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Date: 2011-12-13 05:03 am (UTC)<3,
Maia
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Date: 2012-01-01 06:28 pm (UTC)I liked this fic a lot, the idea was very unique and the way you wrote Kame is just pure magic. I adore the depth you managed to create to him and the way he becomes one with the character he plays. Such good job ♥
And the scene with Kame and Jin making out in the hallway with Pi coming to interrupt them.. I giggled quite a lot XD
So, thank you for writing this! :)
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Date: 2012-01-05 12:23 am (UTC)Thank you for commenting!!! NEVER apologize for commenting late! Comments are so awesome and above the call of duty that authors just love to get them T____T <3
I wanted to write a fic with Kame as a method actor for so sososososo long, but I was afraid I would make it too cheesy or weird, so I held off. Finally, I decided to just go for it, and i don't regret it at all!!! <3
THe make-out scene...Was my favorite scene to write. Ever. Poor Jin just wanted kisses, after years and years of waiting, and Pi is such a cock-blocker, haha!
Thanks again for dropping back by to comment! Means the world ;)
Love,
Maia
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Date: 2012-01-08 02:33 pm (UTC)I'd like you accepting my little request.My friends in Vietnam like this fic ,too.Would you mind if I translating it into Vietnamese? Of course with your acceptance
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Date: 2012-03-03 05:27 pm (UTC)Thanks for the comment <3 <3
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Date: 2012-03-02 03:47 am (UTC)this is gonna be my second favourite fic from you (because satellite hearts is the best)
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Date: 2012-03-03 05:28 pm (UTC)Yay!!! I'm so happy you like it! Hold out for the happy ends <3
(Satellite Hearts is my favorite, too)