Free to Do Anything (PG; Prince of Tennis)
Apr. 2nd, 2009 12:39 pm![[info - personal]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiosilence
Free to Do Anything
It is the summer of your last year in high school when Fuji decides to kidnap you to (of all places) Okinawa, a plot within a plot within a plot in his smile, and you wonder vaguely, afterwards, where he found the money for the plane tickets, though all you wonder at the time is how are you going to get home?
You call your parents, when you get to the hotel, tell them not to worry, tell them you don't know when you'll be home. Tell them no, don't buy you a plane ticket. You know Fuji will have thought of that, will have planned for every inevitability. You know that Fuji will catch you, should you try to escape; know, in any case, that vengeance would not be swift, but agonising, slow, and imbued with the bitterness that is not defeat, but the taste of it at the corners of your mouth.
It is here, amid the sweltering heat and the wash of waves (on the third day, before you become numb, before you lose your sense of reality), that Fuji looks at you with one of his inscrutable smiles and murmurs, "You can't be everything to everyone, Tezuka. Do you know that?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," you reply, irritable in the heat and the humidity and the constant grating enigma that is Fuji, sleeping in the next room with the fan on, saying words that mean nothing, words that don't mean anything to you here.
"I wonder," he says, and turns away.
It is because of this, or partly because of this, that you will remember Okinawa later as a series of individual moments, faded green and windchimes and ocean and the endless heat, and Fuji's smiles, the breadth of his shoulders as he walks away from you.
"You bring this down upon yourself," Fuji says over dinner one night (some kind of seafood, again, and you haven't bothered to ask what it is). "If you could just recognise what you're doing to yourself, Tezuka—"
"I don't—" you begin, but he cuts you off.
"Don't tell me you don't know." His voice is mild, but there is a knife-edge in the glint of his eyes, in the curve of his smile (an expression that you cannot read, that you will never be able to read). "Don't play the martyr for me."
"I wouldn't think it," you snap back, and none of this, none of this, makes any sense at all.
***
The days become a haze, trees and sand and the blue, blue ocean like the impossible blue of Fuji's eyes, and the air tastes like salt and ozone.
Vaguely one night you realise that you have been here for a week and a half, have only called your parents once (upon arrival, with a sharp realisation of the inescapable cage of Fuji’s razor-sharp mind), have contacted no one else at all. This thought connects vaguely to the thought that for a week and a half you have not held a tennis racket; you have not dreamed.
None of this makes any sense. Fuji smiles.
(You would include on your list of revelations of improbability your incomprehensible conversations with Fuji; but Fuji is, after all, Fuji, and makes little sense regardless of time, setting, the force of the years that you have known him.)
***
"What do you want, Tezuka?" he asks you one long afternoon that is indistinguishable from all the afternoons that have preceded it. You don't say "I don't know," even though you both know that that is what you would say, if you were to say anything at all. You don't.
When Fuji kisses you his mouth tastes of salt and oxygen and some kind of tart citrus—mandarin, perhaps, or tangerine—something small and round and utterly contained within itself, as your world has always been—curled over into its own skin. Bitter and breakable and covered in imperfections, in old scars.
You wonder what this means.
***
"We probably should be going home soon," Fuji says the next morning at breakfast. "Why?" you ask, slightly confused. You can't recall how long you have been here in Okinawa with Fuji. You cannot separate out the progression of days.
"School, Tezuka," he says, and his smile widens. "Or are you planning on dropping out? And so close to graduation!"
"No," you say, shake your head. You wonder what it means that you can not remember how long you have been here with Fuji, can not remember that eventually you both will have to return to school. You wonder what you had thought— if you had thought anything at all. Would you have just continued on here with Fuji, forever, an endless cycle of heat and waves and Fuji's incomprehensible questions, hieroglyphic smiles?
Some traitorous part of your mind whispers, would it have been so bad?
Yes, you tell yourself firmly, excuse yourself from the table, walk away.
You are too much of a coward, you think when you have left the room, to have done anything else, anyway.
***
The night before you leave Okinawa you go with Fuji back to the beach you had walked along on the third day, before all of this had started slipping (started slipping? no, it had always been) out of your control. "You know you only have to live for yourself, Tezuka," Fuji says, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking away from you, out to the horizon. "You can't keep trying hold everyone up forever."
You feel your shoulder twinge, old injuries and new injuries and everything you had ever done to yourself and you think vaguely that perhaps Fuji is right. "I chose it," you say, because really what else is there? You chose this life and that's all. There's nothing else.
"Just because you chose it once doesn't mean that you have to keep choosing it forever," he says, turning to look at you, open-eyed and the corners of his mouth turned down. What would you know about that, you want to ask, because Fuji is fickle, because he has never chosen anything, not really, not for long enough to let it touch him.
What you say instead is this: "So what should I do now?"
And Fuji's eyes slip closed and his mouth slips up and he says, "Why, Tezuka, anything you want." You think, perhaps, that you have never wanted to strangle Fuji quite so badly before.
You lean down and kiss him instead, eyes closed and quiet, and think about possibility.
It is the summer of your last year in high school when Fuji decides to kidnap you to (of all places) Okinawa, a plot within a plot within a plot in his smile, and you wonder vaguely, afterwards, where he found the money for the plane tickets, though all you wonder at the time is how are you going to get home?
You call your parents, when you get to the hotel, tell them not to worry, tell them you don't know when you'll be home. Tell them no, don't buy you a plane ticket. You know Fuji will have thought of that, will have planned for every inevitability. You know that Fuji will catch you, should you try to escape; know, in any case, that vengeance would not be swift, but agonising, slow, and imbued with the bitterness that is not defeat, but the taste of it at the corners of your mouth.
It is here, amid the sweltering heat and the wash of waves (on the third day, before you become numb, before you lose your sense of reality), that Fuji looks at you with one of his inscrutable smiles and murmurs, "You can't be everything to everyone, Tezuka. Do you know that?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," you reply, irritable in the heat and the humidity and the constant grating enigma that is Fuji, sleeping in the next room with the fan on, saying words that mean nothing, words that don't mean anything to you here.
"I wonder," he says, and turns away.
It is because of this, or partly because of this, that you will remember Okinawa later as a series of individual moments, faded green and windchimes and ocean and the endless heat, and Fuji's smiles, the breadth of his shoulders as he walks away from you.
"You bring this down upon yourself," Fuji says over dinner one night (some kind of seafood, again, and you haven't bothered to ask what it is). "If you could just recognise what you're doing to yourself, Tezuka—"
"I don't—" you begin, but he cuts you off.
"Don't tell me you don't know." His voice is mild, but there is a knife-edge in the glint of his eyes, in the curve of his smile (an expression that you cannot read, that you will never be able to read). "Don't play the martyr for me."
"I wouldn't think it," you snap back, and none of this, none of this, makes any sense at all.
***
The days become a haze, trees and sand and the blue, blue ocean like the impossible blue of Fuji's eyes, and the air tastes like salt and ozone.
Vaguely one night you realise that you have been here for a week and a half, have only called your parents once (upon arrival, with a sharp realisation of the inescapable cage of Fuji’s razor-sharp mind), have contacted no one else at all. This thought connects vaguely to the thought that for a week and a half you have not held a tennis racket; you have not dreamed.
None of this makes any sense. Fuji smiles.
(You would include on your list of revelations of improbability your incomprehensible conversations with Fuji; but Fuji is, after all, Fuji, and makes little sense regardless of time, setting, the force of the years that you have known him.)
***
"What do you want, Tezuka?" he asks you one long afternoon that is indistinguishable from all the afternoons that have preceded it. You don't say "I don't know," even though you both know that that is what you would say, if you were to say anything at all. You don't.
When Fuji kisses you his mouth tastes of salt and oxygen and some kind of tart citrus—mandarin, perhaps, or tangerine—something small and round and utterly contained within itself, as your world has always been—curled over into its own skin. Bitter and breakable and covered in imperfections, in old scars.
You wonder what this means.
***
"We probably should be going home soon," Fuji says the next morning at breakfast. "Why?" you ask, slightly confused. You can't recall how long you have been here in Okinawa with Fuji. You cannot separate out the progression of days.
"School, Tezuka," he says, and his smile widens. "Or are you planning on dropping out? And so close to graduation!"
"No," you say, shake your head. You wonder what it means that you can not remember how long you have been here with Fuji, can not remember that eventually you both will have to return to school. You wonder what you had thought— if you had thought anything at all. Would you have just continued on here with Fuji, forever, an endless cycle of heat and waves and Fuji's incomprehensible questions, hieroglyphic smiles?
Some traitorous part of your mind whispers, would it have been so bad?
Yes, you tell yourself firmly, excuse yourself from the table, walk away.
You are too much of a coward, you think when you have left the room, to have done anything else, anyway.
***
The night before you leave Okinawa you go with Fuji back to the beach you had walked along on the third day, before all of this had started slipping (started slipping? no, it had always been) out of your control. "You know you only have to live for yourself, Tezuka," Fuji says, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking away from you, out to the horizon. "You can't keep trying hold everyone up forever."
You feel your shoulder twinge, old injuries and new injuries and everything you had ever done to yourself and you think vaguely that perhaps Fuji is right. "I chose it," you say, because really what else is there? You chose this life and that's all. There's nothing else.
"Just because you chose it once doesn't mean that you have to keep choosing it forever," he says, turning to look at you, open-eyed and the corners of his mouth turned down. What would you know about that, you want to ask, because Fuji is fickle, because he has never chosen anything, not really, not for long enough to let it touch him.
What you say instead is this: "So what should I do now?"
And Fuji's eyes slip closed and his mouth slips up and he says, "Why, Tezuka, anything you want." You think, perhaps, that you have never wanted to strangle Fuji quite so badly before.
You lean down and kiss him instead, eyes closed and quiet, and think about possibility.
