Work Text:
how can you
be in two places at
once
when you’re not
anywhere at all!
...
Fine. Fuck it. Start over.
“Keats Is Coughing” by Marianne Boruch
i. June 2018, 15:20: Madrid, Spain—
The sun is scalding against the back of his neck, the radiation beating down on him with a sort of cruelty that’s simultaneously concrete and abstract: familiar, because Yuuta knows by now that his heart is a magnet for malice, attracting cruelty the same way the overripe scent of scarlet blood seduces sharks that are starving for flesh—but also foreign, because he’s only ever tasted the frostbitten flavor of an unnamed hatred, frigid like a Siberian nightfall. This cruelty, this heat, is nothing like the tundra’s ill-tempered cold-shoulder—this heat is oppressive, and suffocating, and still somehow comforting: Yuuta has discovered a unique brand of loneliness that comes with dwelling in a land where no one speaks your language; of trying, unsuccessfully, to slip into muted halcyon dreamscapes, his too-big bed a sinking life raft beneath an unrecognizable roof—an unfamiliar night sky. He misses the shape of easy words waltzing across the tip of his tongue; he longs for friendly elbows jabbing his sides, digging into the hollow space just beneath his bottom rib—
—and most of all, he misses rice balls— god, he misses rice balls. The sun stands a little taller, a little prouder, and does not relent: a single bead of sweat escapes the bramble of his hair, carving a meandering riverbed down his temple, his cheekbone, his jawline—and falls, plopping against the blank pre-stamped postcard resting against Yuuta’s thigh. Overhead, the sky is cloudless, blazing azure: it is 3:20 in the afternoon in Madrid, which means it is 11:20 p.m. in Tokyo. Craning his neck backward to glance at the ceilingless sky, Yuuta wonders if there—across the Mediterranean, and the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal, and the Philippine Sea—if he is still awake; if he is gazing at a vacuous sky of stars through the jaundiced haze of a light-polluted nightscape; if he is asleep; if he is dreaming.
He swipes his thumb against the rapidly drying dollop of sweat, smearing some of the off-color ink from the poorly printed picture of the Royal Palace of Madrid. Not that it matters, he thinks to himself, if the postcard is less than pristine: he doesn’t plan on sending it anywhere, anyhow. More sweat pools in the space between his clavicles, in the hollow of his throat—and while the stationary will never wind up in a mailbox, and although no one will be listed as the recipient of the postcard, he doesn’t want to waste it: so he uncaps his cheap ballpoint pen, the ink nearly emptied, the letters habitually fading, and writes.
When the words are etched onto the cheap flimsy cardboard, he stands, walking up the hill and past the post office. In the shade, the sweat collecting in the fabric against the small of his back dries and cools: the sun won’t sink below the spot where the sky meets the earth for several more hours—even once it does, he knows the sky here will be a different one than the one Inumaki is gazing towards back at home.
The weather here is beautiful. I wish that you could see it. Te extraño más de lo que debería. (i miss you more than I should.)
ii. August 2018, 05:24: Istanbul, Turkey—
The uneven metal legs of his nightstand rattle against the hardwood floor as his cell phone vibrates violently against it. Yuuta’s eyes fly open as he instinctively grasps at the katana’s handle beside him—but when he sees the room is empty, he relaxes with a shaky sigh, his eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness that attempts to swallow the too-small room. Slowly, his sightline gravitates towards the vibrant blue light of his phone screen, and the notification on his home screen helpfully informs him that it is raining in Tokyo. His quiet laugh is somehow still too loud in his empty room.
The envelope of warmth beneath his comforter calls out to him, beckons him to fall back into a comfortable dream, but he knows that chasing any spare moments of blissful unconsciousness would be useless. He swings his legs out from beneath the tangle of sheets, bringing the soles of his feet to meet the creaky floorboard panels; even the house itself instinctively knows that the hour is too early for wakefulness, the crawl space beneath his room growling and groaning in tandem with his movements. No light sneaks in through the slats between the blinds of his window: the sky is black and endless—even the moon had bid the night farewell, drowning beneath the junction of the horizon long before Yuuta had awoken.
(And if the moon had still been visible in some corner of the sky, Yuuta thinks he would have liked to ask her if she would be willing to wave hello to Tokyo on her next flyby. But maybe it’s ok that they missed each other, this time: it is raining in Tokyo, after all.)
And as the indigo sky starts bleeding itself dry, paling as the sun jams her insistent fist against the boundary between night and day, Yuuta fumbles around inside the pockets of his backpack for a partially crumpled postcard. The stationery feels feeble beneath the calloused pads of his fingertips, the photograph of the Hagia Sophia reduced to sloppily printed low-resolution pixels.
(He should probably change the settings on his phone: there is no reason to know whether or not it is raining in Tokyo when he is not there.)
The lightbulb of the lamp on his desk is broken—has been since he got here—so he writes in the muted morning light as it slowly spills into the room. His sentences are slanted at an odd, almost perpendicular angle on the surface of the postcard, his hands too shaky and his light source too dim to make the letters appear on the page any more legibly. He supposes it doesn’t matter, though, as he blows gently across the drying ink, sliding the unstamped card back into his bag: no one will read it anyway.
I would tell the moon to whisper to you as she passes by, but I think she’s probably busy. My phone still tells me about the weather in Tokyo. Make sure you take an umbrella today.
Olman gerektiğini düşündüğüm yerde boşluk var. ( there is emptiness where i think you should be.)
iii. November 2018, 21:08: Paris, France—
The City of Love sucks the life out of him: how wretched must we be, he wonders, for the most potent forms of hatred to be borne out of something like love?—something pure, and free, and weightless?
He slices through curses and saves a few lives—watches a few others die. Love is the most twisted curse of all, Gojo had told him, and his hands are slick with blood, a gruesome swirl of reds and purples—and he still can’t bring himself to agree.
The tiny printed photo of the Eiffel Tower is covered in Yuuta’s bloody fingerprints. The urge to love you is dragging my feet back home, and loving you could never be a curse; et t'aimer ne pourra jamais être une malédiction. ( and loving you could never be a curse.)
iv. January 2019, 02:28: Tokyo, Japan
When he gets to Tokyo, he’s two months early, and his phone tells him that it’s raining in Istanbul. He deletes the weather app.
At the bottom of his backpack sit a pile of old, damp postcards, littered with declarations of love in a dozen different languages: but none of the words come to mind when he wrenches open the door to Toge’s room. His body freezes at Toge’s words, his cursed speech commanding him to freeze—and then, just as suddenly, releasing him; ripping the covers away from his sleeping form, clambering out of bed; Yuuta meeting him halfway there, wrapping his fingers around Toge’s wrist and pulling him into his chest, impossibly close, his heart hammering out a message that had gone unspoken for far too long.
He fumbles around for the words in his mouth, looking desperately for something to say—but before he can curse the words that fail him, he finds his lips entangled with Toge’s—and he supposes it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that he couldn’t say the words aloud, or that the postcards had never wound up at the post office, or that he hadn’t had the foresight to tell someone that he would be arriving back home ( home ) at 2:30 in the morning, because he’s been waiting to crane his neck towards the moon and find a familiar night sky: to see stars he knows like the back of his hand; to hold a boy in his arms and never let go of him again.
They lie beneath the covers, and Toge falls back asleep immediately, his fingers still tangled around Yuuta’s like a vice. The moon fills the room with pools of her light: Yuuta thinks she’s happy to be no longer playing messenger, but he’s grateful for her anyway.
I never forgot the sound—the rhythm—of your heartbeat. If love is a curse, I think I’ve doomed us both to damnation. Anata mo watashi ga koishī to tsuki ni iimashita ka? ( did you tell the moon that you missed me, too?)